Prufrock's Gestures

Summary

“[B]odily motility is, as Henry Bergson once claimed, the single most important filtering device in the subject's negotiations with the external world.”

Carrie Nolan, Agency and Embodiment

“Paralysed force, gesture without motion;”

T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

A distinctive, and rarely noted, feature of T. S. Eliot's poetry is its gestural dimension. The repertoire of gestures depicted, indicated, invoked, and performed in his poetry is rich and nuanced, reflecting Eliot's profound awareness of poetry's performative potential and specifically its debt, as an art form, to kinesthesia. Kinesthesia refers to our body's awareness of itself as body and is often defined as a “sixth sense” (in addition to taste, sight, smell, hearing, touch) or a kind of bodily knowledge. As such, kinesthesia assumes an important role as one of the ways in which poetry is “charged” with meaning, along with phanopoeia, meloapoeia, and logopoeia, Pound's terms for the manner in which words in poetry accrue potency. For example, Prufrock's desultory reference to “all the works and days of hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate,” besides producing a slightly comical visual image, might also provoke a physiological sensation of lifting and dropping, perhaps one's arms and hands or, as in a gesture of consternation or befuddlement, one's shoulders. Indeed, this kinetic image begins to make sense once we enact it, and feel in our bodies both the lifting and the dropping of shoulders, and perhaps arms and hands. As a result, we might reach a physical understanding of Prufrock's emotional state before we can put such understanding into words, certainly an aesthetic effect that closely corresponds to Eliot's insistence that for a poem to be meaningful the reader has to be “moved.”

Eliot's awareness and judicious use of kinesthesia should not surprise us given the new emphasis on physical movement and “body culture” at the turn of the century; the aesthetic incorporation of movement in the visual arts; the development of moving pictures and technologies of transport that accelerated the speed of modern life. Stock images of Eliot cast him as “farcically fastidious” and stiff, in attitude and comportment;yet, as Robert Crawford tells us in his recent biography of the poet, Eliot loved acting and dance; as a child, he overcame his diffidence through dance: “he danced in his boyhood and teens and grew to love it.”