Chapter Five: The Daedalus Complex
“Minos determined to remove the cause of this opprobrium from his abode, enclosing it within a labyrinth devised and built by Daedalus, the most distinguished of all living architects, who framed confusion and seduced the eye into a maze of wandering passages.”
-Ovid, Metamorphoses
IN “TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT,” T.S. Eliot famously declares that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (31). Eliot then offers a parallel separation between the sources in which a work originates and the aesthetic form into which they are transformed when he distinguishes between the “emotions” that are represented in a particular work and the artistic “feelings” that the writer shapes into the work itself. Thus, he tells us, with respect to Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, that “The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of” (31). A similar insistence on the strict separation between the completed artistic work and the raw experiential materials from which it has been drawn is subsequently reinforced by Eliot’s assertion that “the difference between art and event is always absolute” (3; my emphasis).
E. M. Cioran adds a crucial element to the relationship that Eliot establishes between suffering and creativity when, in his essay on Leo Tolstoy, he maintains that rather than simply “transmuting” the pain of the man who suffers, the artist may actually have taken pleasure in inflicting it: “Cruelty, in literature at least, is a sign of election. The more gifted the writer, the more he devotes himself to confining his characters in hopeless situations; he pursues them, tyrannizes them, forces them to confront every detail of the impasse or the agony into which he has thrust them.” Fernando Pessoa adds yet a further perspective on Eliot’s contention when he suggests that, “the man who suffers” may actually serve as a scapegoat upon whom the author has projected his own suffering: “Another method [for avoiding suffering], this one more subtle and more difficult, is to habituate oneself to embody the pain in a predetermined ideal figure. To create another ‘I’ to be the one responsible for suffering in us, for suffering that we suffer. To create, then, some internal sadism, entirely masochistic, that enjoys the suffering as if it were someone else’s” (Always Astonished 116).
Sigmund Freud called the universal human desire to kill one’s father and to sleep with one’s mother the “Oedipus Complex” because he found the most striking literary representation of it in Sophocles’s Greek tragedy, Oedipus the King. The universal artistic desire that interests us—which impels the artist, first, to displace his suffering upon a surrogate and then to construct a work that transmutes the surrogate’s suffering into his own aesthetic achievement—finds its classic representation in the story of Daedalus as recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. Ovid makes clear that the cause of the “scandal” that has fallen upon the house of Minos is his wife Parsiphaë’s “foul adultery” with Poseidon’s bull, to which we may add Minos’s own transgression in keeping the bull for himself rather than sacrificing it as well as Daedalus’s in fabricating the cow that Parsiphaë used to lure the bull into having intercourse with her. The burden of guilt, however, is displaced upon a surrogate in the form of the Minotaur, whom Minos then designates as the “opprobrium” that must be removed. Unlike the Minotaur, who troubles the eye with his “strange form [ . . . ] half man, half bull,” Daedalus is “the most/distinguished of all living architects,/who framed confusion and seduced the eye/into a maze of wandering passages.” Rather than being punished for the deceitfulness that created the scandal in the first place, he transmutes it into an impressive architectural achievement:
Not otherwise than when Maeander plays
his liquid games in the Phrygian fields
and flowing back and forth uncertainly,
observes its own waves bearing down on it,
and send its doubtful waters on their ways
back to their source or down to the open sea:
so Daedalus provided numberless
confusing corridors and was himself
just barely able to find his way out,
so utterly deceitful was that place. (269)
The fate of entrapment that nearly befalls Daedalus (and which may remind us that he is, in fact, imprisoned on the island of Crete by King Minos) is conveniently transferred to the Minotaur, and the prison in which he will eventually be killed by Theseus will be remembered—thanks to its intricate and deceitful design—as a tribute to Daedalus’s artistry.
A similar relationship between an artist who fails to respect ordinary human limits and a surrogate who suffers in his place reappears in Ovid’s account of the flight from Crete undertaken by Daedalus and Icarus. Recognizing that Minos controls escape routes both by land and sea, Daedalus invents a means of flying, that clearly involves his hubristic theft of a divine privilege. Ovid does, indeed, allude to Daedalus’s hubris in several places, telling us, for example, that he “changed the face of nature,” that he then instructed Icarus in “their transgressive art,” and that the art itself led an astonished plowman to “think them gods.” The punishment due to Daedalus’s hubris is, however, displaced on Icarus, who goes one fatal step further than his father in imagining himself to be a god:
Now on their left, they had already passed
The Isle of Samos, Juno’s favorite,
Delos and Paros too; and on their right,
Lebinthos and Calymne, honey-rich,
when the boy audaciously began to play
and driven by desire for the sky,
deserts his leader and seeks altitude. (272)
Ovid had already prepared us to see Icarus’s tragedy as the consequence of a punishable defect when he described him as a feckless boy who “unaware of any danger in the things he handled . . . got in his father’s way” while Daedalus was crafting the wings that would lead to his demise. Like the Minotaur—whose “strange form” prepares him to be designated as “the cause of this opprobrium”—Icarus bears an incriminating feature that facilitates the sleight-of-hand that will shift the burden of suffering from father to son. Similarly, his fate—drowning in the sea followed by burial in the earth—will both echo the incarceration of the Minotaur in the labyrinth and contrast with Daedalus’s successfully completed return to Athens, an achievement that nicely complements his reputation as “the most distinguished of all living architects.”
The twofold operation that we observe in the Daedalus story—in which suffering is first displaced upon a surrogate and then transformed into a completed work that redounds at the surrogate’s expense to the artist’s glory—reappears in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, in which the role of surrogate—played successively by the Minotaur and Icarus is assigned to Ulysses and in which the opposing implications of the labyrinth and the wings (depending on whether they are viewed from the perspective of the surrogate or the artist) reappear in the form of eloquence, which is the source both of Ulysses’s damnation and Dante’s creative achievement. That Dante identifies with Ulysses is clearly suggested by those passages in which he intimates the nearly irresistible attraction that he feels for the Greek hero, and for the rhetorical gifts for whose misuse he is being punished. We notice, for example, that he prefaces his description of his meeting with Ulysses by reminding himself that he must exercise restraint; should he, otherwise, follow his “natural bent,” he will, like Ulysses, go “Where virtue doesn’t” (ll. 23–4). So drawn is he to the particular transgression for which Ulysses is being punished that he risks falling into the fire that torments him: “and if I didn’t grip/A rock I would have fallen from where I stood/Without a push” (ll. 46–8). A moment later, he pleads with Virgil to allow him to listen to Ulysses:
“Master,” I said, “I earnestly implore,
If they can speak within those sparks of flame—
And pray my prayer be worth a thousand pleas—
Do not forbid my waiting here for them
Until their horned flame makes its way to us;
You see how yearningly it makes me lean.” (ll. 66–71)
Both Ulysses and Dante undertake transgressive journeys: Ulysses to “a world that has no people in it” and Dante into the realm of the dead. From the very beginning of the Inferno, however, Dante establishes a clear distinction between Ulysses’s journey and his own by suggesting that the latter is undertaken as an act of submission rather than, as in the case of Ulysses, the violation of divinely ordained constraints: his journey has been commanded, not by his own imprudent desire to exceed human limits, but by the will of Beatrice; he will, furthermore, be guided by Virgil, to whose authority he dutifully submits.
Along with clearly distinguishing himself from Ulysses, Dante “transmutes” several of the details related to the catastrophe that befalls Ulysses’s into displays of his artistic mastery. For example, he attributes to Ulysses a rhetorically effective speech designed to persuade his men to accompany him on his doomed journey:
‘O brothers who have reached the west,’ I began,
Through a hundred thousand perils, surviving all:
So little in the vigil we see remain
Still for our senses, that you should not choose
To deny it the experience—behind the sun
Leading us onward—of the world which has
No people in it. Consider well your seed:
You were not born to live as a mere brute does,
But for the pursuit of knowledge and the good.’ (ll. 107–15)
The speech itself, which for Ulysses amounts to the signing of his death warrant, is, at the same time, Dante’s artful rewriting of the speech that Virgil had given to Aeneas in which the Trojan hero expresses his fidelity to a project that has been willed by the gods:
“Through diversities
Of luck, and through so many challenges,
We hold our course for Latium, where the Fates
Hold out a settlement and rest for us.
Troy’s kingdom there shall rise again.” (Bk I, ll. 278–82)
Having thus projected the misuse of eloquence (comparable to Icarus’s misuse of his wings) upon Ulysses, Dante then takes the further step of “transmuting” the central event of Ulysses’s narrative—the westward journey that he undertakes to the Gates of Hercules—into an artful rewriting of Icarus’s flight: he has Ulysses say that “We made wings of our oars, in an insane/Flight” (ll. 120–1); like Icarus, whose joy quickly turns to grief, Ulysses describes the emotion provoked by the apparently successful completion of their journey: “We celebrated—but soon began to weep” (l. 129); finally, the actual outcome of their “insane flight”—in which a storm tosses their ship “Until the sea had closed over us” (l. 136) recalls the drowning of Icarus: “Father! He cried, and Father!/Until the blue sea hushed him, the dark water/Men call the Icarian now” (188–9). It may also remind us that—like Daedalus, who almost became trapped in the labyrinth—Dante had compared himself to a swimmer who nearly drowns in “dangerous seas” (l. 18) at the beginning of Canto I, a detail that highlights the role played by Ulysses, who, as Dante’s designated scapegoat, will actually drown.
Looking more closely at the flames that enfold Ulysses (and into which Dante risked falling) we notice that—like the labyrinth, which is a prison for the Minotaur and a demonstration of artistic mastery for Daedalus—they are both a site of punishment for Ulysses and an opportunity for Dante to display his craftsmanship by rewriting two events reported in the bible. First, we have Elijah’s ascent into heaven, to which Dante himself had alluded earlier in Canto XXVI and which is recorded in the Book of Kings: “Now as they [Elijah and Elisha] walked on, talking as they went, a chariot of fire appeared and horses of fire, coming between the two of them; and Elijah went up to heaven in the whirlwind” (2Kings 2:11). The tongues of fire also refer to the descent of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles: “When Pentecost day came around, they had all met in one room, when suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech” (Acts 2:1–4). The whirlwind that is associated in the bible with manifestations of divine favor, is “transmuted,” to be sure, into the storm that Ulysses describes as “whirl[ing] the vessel round, and round again” (132).
If we now turn to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the most prominent form of suffering that we notice is the “unmanly grief” of which Claudius accuses Hamlet and which leads him to contemplate suicide in his first soliloquy. That Shakespeare may have transferred his own personal grief over the loss of his son Hamnet to Hamlet, who mourns the death of his father, is a commonplace of criticism of his most famous play. More recently, Stephen Greenblatt has speculated that Shakespeare may also have been haunted by conversations with his father, who, although still living, feared that he would die without benefit of a proper Catholic funeral, a ceremony that had recently been banned in England. In his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the play, G. R. Hibbard adds further evidence in support of this view when he points to the similarities between Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy and Sonnet 66, which begins “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”, a resemblance “which may well lead one to think at this point in the action Hamlet’s sentiments are very close to Shakespeare’s own” (1). In a remark that will recall Eliot’s distinction between suffering and creativity, however, Hibbard later calls attention to an important difference between Shakespeare and his most famous dramatic character: “Hamlet may question whether life is worth living, and reject love because it leads only to the breeding of sinners, but the play in which he does this bears eloquent witness to its author’s fertility of invention and to his exuberant delight in the sheer variety of human nature” (30).
Hibbard further implies an intriguing application of Eliot’s distinction between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates” as well as between “event” and “art” when he speculates that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet under the thrall of what he calls a “daemon”: “the very length of the tragedy, even in the Folio version, almost invites one to speculate that Shakespeare composed it, at the compulsive urging of his daemon, for his own satisfaction . . . It is almost as though the creative impulse refuses, for once, to heed the practical limitations and demands of the theatre. In the very process of bringing his play to an end Shakespeare expands its reach and significance. He cannot let go of it; and it will not let go of him” (1–2). Unlike the atmosphere of the play—in which corruption, decay, and death hold unremitting sway—there is in the play itself, as Hibbard observes, “a sense of adventure about it all. It conveys the same feeling of excitement at moving into the unknown and the unexplored that Keats experienced “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (30).
Hibbard’s evocation of Shakespeare’s own personal “daemon” and the indifference to practical considerations that he induces in him should remind us of Horatio’s warning to Hamlet as he goes to his meeting with a very different kind of demon in the form of his father’s ghost:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive you of your sovereign reason
And draw you into madness? (I.iv.69–74)
Horatio’s warning to Hamlet regarding the perils of demonic possession and Hibbard’s suggestion that Shakespeare may have been in the grip of a creative daemon of his own reminds us—as with technical skill in the Daedalus story and eloquence in Inferno XXVI—of the two diametrically opposing outcomes to which the same predicament can lead, depending on whether it befalls “the man who suffers” or “the mind which creates.”
The distinction between these two outcomes may be observed in Hamlet’s first soliloquy (I, ii, 129-59), in which Shakespeare calls upon his considerable poetic skill to “transmute” Hamlet’s paralyzing experience of grief into a verbal pattern that produces an effect of aesthetic stasis. Hamlet’s own personal demon has already confined him, even before the meeting with his father, within a tormenting psychological labyrinth from which he can find no escape. Every line in his soliloquy points to a conflict that leads to an impasse: his desire to kill himself is prohibited by the “canon ‘gainst self-slaughter”; he cannot enjoy the pleasures of life because it has, from his despairing perspective, become “an unweeded garden”; hyperbole is once again at work when he contrasts “Hyperion to a satyr,” by which he means, somewhat dubiously, to distinguish between his father and Claudius; his mother’s absolute fidelity to her first husband (“she would hang on him/As if increase of appetite had grown/By what it fed on”) has now swung in the direction of absolute betrayal (“But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two”) and the infidelity itself is equated with the violation of a taboo (“O, most wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”).
Shakespeare’s daemon, in contrast to Hamlet’s, has inspired him to find in the successive impasses to which Hamlet has been led by his despair his own creative occasion, one in which the same words that portend irresolvable conflict for Hamlet are arranged in such a way as to create a chiasm that effectively transmutes conflict into complementarity. The “pivot” of Hamlet’s thirty-one line soliloquy occurs in the already quoted lines 15-17, which refer to the perfect conjugal love shared by Gertrude and King Hamlet: the two fourteen-line passages that appear on either side of it describe in the most dire terms the psychological impact of loss of this ideal on Hamlet, “the man who suffers.” We notice, however, that Shakespeare, “the mind which creates,” reaps an aesthetic benefit from this loss by having the key terms that appear on one side reappear—albeit in an altered form so as to avoid mere repetition—on the other. Thus, the desire that “this too too solid flesh would melt” in the first line returns as “But break, my heart” in the thirty-first. Subsequent reappearances involve: “dew” as “righteous tears”; “self-slaughter” as “incestuous sheets”; “things rank and gross in nature” as “a beast, that wants discourse of reason”; “But two months dead” as ”A little month, or ere those shoes were old”; and, finally, “Hyperion to a satyr” as “Than I to Hercules.”
A similar transmutation of paralysis into aesthetic stasis may be observed in the so-called chapel scene, in which Shakespeare creates a “diptych” out of Claudius’s and Hamlet’s parallel inability to perform an act that each ardently desires. Claudius wants to repent having killed his brother but is not ready to relinquish the rewards:
My fault is past, but, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. (III, iii, 51–5)
Hamlet, for his part, wants to revenge his father’s murder but also to assure that Claudius will be damned:
and am I then revenge’d,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No.
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. (III, iii, 84–8)
The aesthetic stasis that Shakespeare creates here by “transmuting” the paralysis of his characters into a diptych is further reinforced by the mirroring relationship between the beginnings and ends of the two soliloquies that he writes for them: Claudius’s begins “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;” and ends “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Hamlet’s begins “Now might I do it pat, now is a-praying/And now I’ll do’t. And so a goes to heaven”; heaven then returns towards the end of his soliloquy in the line “that his heels may kick at heaven.”
The transformation of paralysis into stasis that we observed in Hamlet’s soliloquy as well as in the chapel scene also applies to the play as a whole, in which the proliferation of obstacles creates a series of actions that, failing to achieve their desired end, produce an effect of incoherence and disarray, as is memorably summarized by Horatio, who tells Fortinbras that the carnage that he observes is the result
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads. (V.ii.396–400)
The absence of a coherent and unifying main plot produces a series of events that are not clearly organized by causal connections. However, these episodic, rather than plot-driven, events of the play are nonetheless shaped, once again, into a static aesthetic design. We notice, in a general way, that Shakespeare creates this effect by using the “Mousetrap,” which he places at the precise midpoint of Hamlet, as a kind of “hinge” that holds together two diptychs: the first consisting of the events leading up to this midpoint, in which our attention is focused on Hamlet’s failure to revenge his father’s death, and those following it, in which attention shifts to Claudius’s failure to deal effectively with the obvious threat that Hamlet presents to him. This overall mirroring between stalled revenge in the first-half of the play and stalled self-defense in the second may also be observed in the chiastic arrangement of scenes throughout the play. Limiting ourselves to the relationship between the first and fifth acts of the play, we notice that the sequence of principal events in the first act is not produced by cause and effect:
A. Platform: Fortinbras menaces the kingdom
B. Court of Denmark: Hamlet and Laertes
C. Conversation between Hamlet and Horatio
B. Polonius’s House
A. Platform: ghost of Hamlet’s father
It does, however, form a chiasm, with the conversation between Hamlet and Horatio serving as a hinge: the scene in Polonius’s house echoes the scene set in the Court of Denmark (Polonius presiding over one, Claudius over the other) and the second scene on the platform echoes the first (Fortinbras’s military threat the focus of attention in one, Claudius’s treachery in the other).
We likewise observe the co-presence of a discontinuous series of events and an underlying chiastic structure in Act V:
A. Corpses in Cemetery
B. Laertes vs. Hamlet with Ophelia as object
C. Conversation between Hamlet and Horatio
B. Duel between Hamlet and Laertes
A. Corpses in room of state
Once again, a conversation between Hamlet and Horatio serves as the pivot, the duel between Hamlet and Laertes echoes their combat in Ophelia’s grave, and the corpse-strewn stage at the end of the play returns us to the gravediggers scene with which Act V began. We may also observe that the relationship between the first and final acts of the play is based more on symmetry than on cause and effect. The play begins with news of Fortinbras’s approach with his army and ends with his inheriting the Kingdom of Denmark; the main action of the second scene, which takes place in the court of Denmark, involves the petitions of Laertes and Hamlet which is echoed toward the end of Act V by their duel; following the central conversation between Hamlet and Horatio that occurs in both Act I and preceding it chiastically in Act V, we have two scenes in which the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is the center of attention; finally the encounter between Hamlet and the ghost of his father at the end of Act I “returns” as his encounter with the skull of Yorick at the beginning of Act V. Recalling Eliot’s distinction between “event” and “art,” we may conclude that the inability to act decisively and effectively that paralyzes all of the principal characters in Hamlet and leads to their collective tragedy on the level of “event,” provides Shakespeare with the opportunity to “transmute” the loss of plot into a theatrical triumph.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written at about the same time as Pessoa was beginning work on The Book, similarly expresses the very different outcomes to which “daemonic possession” may lead. There are no actual demons in “Prufrock,” yet we constantly sense the oppressive influence throughout the poem of what Eliot called “the Eliot way.” He used this term to explain his mother’s inability to decide to visit him in England, describing it as an affliction that makes it “impossible for any of our family to make up their minds.” James Longenbach tells us that “in an uncollected essay about Henry Adams, to whom Eliot was distantly related (Adams having been the great-grandson of the second president), he referred to the Eliot Way more generally as the Boston Doubt, ‘a scepticism which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it.’ ‘This scepticism,’ Eliot went on, ‘is a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism.’ Wherever someone infected with the Eliot Way stepped, ‘the ground did not simply give way, it flew into particles.’ Such people ‘want to do something great,’ said Eliot, but ‘they are predestined failures’” (qtd. in Longenbach 28).
In a remark that will remind us of Eliot’s distinction between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates,” Longenbach then goes on to argue that “Eliot’s first great artistic success grew from the effort to distance himself from the threat of such failure by dramatizing it. Not only the voice but the very linguistic texture of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ embodies the typically Eliotic stalemate between fortitude and inertia” (28; my emphasis). Among the many details that point to Eliot’s displacement of the “Eliot Way” onto Prufrock we notice, even before Prufrock’s soliloquy begins, that Eliot has prefaced it with a passage from Inferno XXVI, in which Guido da Montefeltro faces a potentially paralyzing conflict: on the one hand, he wants to tell the story of his misdeeds to Dante but, on the other, he wants to avoid harming his reputation among the living. No sooner does he raise the spectre of the impasse to which this conflict could potentially lead, however, than he resolves it by reminding himself that no one (including, he wrongly assumes, Dante himself) has “ever returned from this abyss alive” (l. 63).
Prufrock’s situation is—unfortunately for him—a mirror inversion of Guido’s: he begins with a forceful decision (“Let us go then, you and I”) but then runs afoul of the “Eliot Way,” which makes him almost immediately reluctant to pursue the “overwhelming question,” which, given Prufrock’s state of mind, may be “overwhelming” simply because, it is a question. As a result, the “Let us go” with which this paragraph begins returns at the end in the form of a deferral: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit.” A similar pattern may be observed in the paragraph beginning with optimistic announcement that “And indeed there will be time,” but ends with yet another reversal: “And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions,/Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
The “Eliot Way” subsequently emerges to obstruct Prufrock’s journey when he doubts that he has sufficient courage to face other people whom, he is convinced, will surely notice his thinning hair. For Prufrock, this relatively trivial uncertainty leads him to formulate a characteristically rhetorical question that guarantees his inaction: “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” Later in the poem, Prufrock, having by this point clearly decided not to undertake the journey that he had initially proposed, asks himself by way of self-justification, “Would it have been worth it after all,” a phrase that he intones five times and to which he responds implicitly in the negative by invoking a purely hypothetical obstruction in the form of a woman who, “settling a pillow by her head,/Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.’”
As Longenbach observes, however, “the Eliot Way is countermanded by a willed decisiveness, a determination to act that is nurtured so privately that to anyone else it appears irrational” (28). There is, as it were, a second “Eliot Way” that allows Eliot to displace the paralyzing capacity of the first onto Prufrock and then to “transmute” the event of Prufrock’s suffering into a work of art. Among the signs of this second “Eliot Way,” we notice that Eliot writes, in the form of a dramatic monologue, a poem that artfully draws upon, in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways, two of the greatest masterpieces of western literature: Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. From Hamlet, he has borrowed both the content of his poem (Prufrock’s indecision revisits Hamlet’s) and its form (Prufrock’s monologue echoes Hamlet’s soliloquies). We also observe that one of the poem’s most famous lines—“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”—points, not only to Shakespeare’s play but also to the line in Inferno II—“I am no Aeneas or Paul”—in which Dante expresses his reluctance to undertake the journey through the afterlife that Virgil has proposed to him:
Eliot’s adaptations of the Inferno begin, of course, with his using a passage from Canto XXVII as the epigraph to “Prufrock” and concludes with a three-line stanza (an allusion to Dante’s terza rima?) that arguably revisits Ulysses’s drowning at the end of Inferno XXVI:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Additional literary allusions remind us of the distinction between Prufrock, who is describing a lived experience that exemplifies the “Eliot Way,” and T. S. Eliot, who is writing a poem under the very different influence of his literary precursors (rather than his progenitors) that allows him to distance himself from his designated surrogate. When Prufrock assures himself, in a palpably delaying maneuver, that “There will be time,” Eliot is artfully echoing a line from Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress.” His certainty that there will be time for “all the works and days” echoes the title of a poem by Hesiod. His evocation of “a bracelet of bright hair” is a direct borrowing from John Donne’s “The Relic.” His fantasy of his head’s being “brought in upon a platter” revisits the fate of John the Baptist. His wondering “And would it have been worth it, after all . . . to have squeezed the universe into a ball” is yet another rewriting of a famous image from “To His Coy Mistress.”
The two meanings of the term “Eliot Way”—as both obstacle and as path—apply as well to the combination of randomness and orderly design that characterizes the poem as a whole. In a way that may remind us of Hamlet, whose series of individual scenes may seem random, transitions between the disparate verse paragraphs of “Prufrock” often seem abrupt or, at the very least, not governed by a discernible principle. We begin with a journey through “half-deserted streets,” then shift to a couplet describing women who talk about Michelangelo, then to one organized around an extended metaphor comparing the “yellow fog” to a cat that “rubs its back upon the window-panes,” and the “yellow smoke” to a cat that “rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.” Such unpredictable shifts as these continue to reappear throughout the poem.
At the same time, we notice that Eliot “transmutes” the randomness of Prufrock’s wandering journey into strictly controlled formal pattern. The center of his 131-line poem (the number itself suggests the presence of a submerged, but nonetheless conscious design) is the couplet “Is it perfume from a dress/That makes me so digress?”, which itself contains (whether by design or not) 13 syllables; both lines are in trimester verse, the first an irregular combination of two dactyls followed by an anapest, the second a regular sequence of iambs. The tightly controlled formal aspects of these of these two lines as well as their placement at the very center of “Prufrock” contrasts suggestively with the implications of the word “digress.” This same co-presence of aimless wandering and strict formal control applies to the poem as a whole, which, as R. G. Peterson has demonstrated in precise detail, “seems to move outward [from this center], the last half repeating the first in reverse order, in what may be visualized as a series of concentric circles based on clusters of related images and leading backward to the etherization (ll. 1–3) and forward to the awakening and drowning (ll. 124–131)” (25). From beginning to end, Peterson argues, the poem “focuses inward on its numerical center, and that focus is consistent and highly symmetrical, based on the repetition in reverse order of nine thematic groupings of obviously related images.” He then diagrams “Prufrock” as follows:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 X 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 x = ll. 65–66
and then summarizes the content of each of the groups in this way:
1. Change of consciousness
ll. 1–3: Etherization, evening
ll. 124–131: Waking, drowning
2. The self
ll. 4–12: Prufrock and the other (“you”)
ll. 111–123: Prufrock alone
3. The city
ll. 15–25: Evening, cat
ll. 99–110: Sunsets, dooryards, streets
4. The social self—indecision and misunderstanding
ll. 30–34: Toast, tea
ll. 87–98: Cups, marmalade, tea
5. Refinement
ll. 37–44: Bald spot, morning coat, collar
ll. 81–86: Bald head, no prophet
6. The social self—crisis
ll. 49–53: Coffee, music, conversation
ll. 65–80: Tea, cakes, ices
7. Pure sensation
ll. 55–56: Eyes
ll. 73–74: Ragged claws
8. Ineffectuality
ll. 57–60: Pinned insect, butt-ends
70–72: Pipe smoke, lonely men
9. Erotic sensation
ll. 62–64: Arms
l. 67: Arms
x. = The Center
ll. 65–66: Perfume from a dress
The concentric design of the poem—like the labyrinth in the Daedalus story, the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno and the chiastic structure of Hamlet—point ambiguously both to victimage and to mastery. Peterson emphasizes the former when he interprets it as signifying : “the extreme self-centeredness of the ineffectual lover” (25). Yet, to be sure, Eliot’s “deceitful” shaping of Prufrock’s hapless dithering into a modernist labyrinth is equally a tribute to his skill as a literary architect in whose work we discover, in Eliot’s own words, that “the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (“Tradition” 28).
Turning our attention now to The Book of Disquiet, we notice scattered allusions to the two artifacts—the labyrinth and the wings—upon which Daedalus’s reputation as the archetypal artist rests. Soares describes himself, for example, as “lost in tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness” (33) and as “a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am” (115) and when he complains that “everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself” (187). He also refers to the “meandering pages” of his writing (106) and describes his putting his impressions “in vagabond words that desert me as soon as they’re written, wandering on their own over slopes and meadows of images, along avenues of concepts, down footpaths of confusions” (286). Images of flight include his telling us that “I spread my wings without moving, like an imaginary condor” (373), his looking at “the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free with a winged splendor whose fluttering sends a shiver throughout my body” (47) and then “at the lofty, clear sky where I see [ . . . ] an impalpable soft down of a winged and far-away life” (316).
The Daedalus whose display of artistic skill contrasts with the suffering that is displaced upon his surrogate, however, disappears, his once-godlike powers now demoted to the level of a day-dreaming child: “In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up an a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams” (169) or as an interior decorator: “If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can – with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivions on the static surfaces of the walls” (261).
The disappearance in The Book of an artist whose mastery of his medium sets him apart from the protagonist whom he otherwise resembles, has as its principal consequence that Pessoa and Soares are, to adopt one of Soares’s more startling images, “Siamese twins that aren’t attached” (20). François Laye refers to the author of The Book as Pessoa-Soares and has this to say about their relationship: “Soares, like Pessoa himself, wants to remain undefined, wavering, in flight from the gaze of others, and refusing to sacrifice any of his virtualities, any of this possibilities for self-renewal . . . But there is even more to say about this: Bernardo Soares—that is, Fernando Pessoa himself—thinks of himself as a “stranger”: a stranger like any other poet, but to such an unusually extreme degree that includes all of humanity, whose mediocrity he deplores” (45).
There is, to be sure, a close personal resemblance. As Robert Bréchon reminds us, after his mother’s death, Pessoa began leading as life that closely resembled Soares’s: “He went more and more often to the cafés of the Chiado, the Baixa [ . . . ] like Soares, he was increasingly given over to wandering about Lisbon, to ‘flâneries,’ to dreaming, to alcohol, to little joys and great sorrows” (Etrange Etranger 402). Zbigniew Kotowicz adds this the observation that: “Many of Soares’s traits resemble Pessoa himself. Loneliness, immobility, a meaningless office job were all a part of Pessoa’s existence [ . . . ] Stripping Soares of external accidents, through an aesthetics of poverty, abnegation, decadence and insignificance, Pessoa bares himself open. Soares’s voice is sometimes what one imagines Pessoa would sound like in a confessional mood. This is the nearest we get to Pessoa’s pain, to Pessoa at his most intimate” (73–4).
Pessoa himself adds support to this view when he remarks, in his unfinished preface to “Fictions of the Interlude,” that “My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same” (The Book, 474).
We observe Pessoa sounding very much indeed like Soares in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro: “On days of the soul like today I feel, in my awareness of every bodily pore, like the sad child who was beaten up by life. I was put in a corner, from where I can hear everyone else playing. In my hands I can feel the shoddy, broken toy I was given out of some shoddy irony. Today, the fourteenth of March, at ten after nine in the evening, this seems to be all my life is worth.” So close, in fact, is the implied resemblance between author and protagonist, that Pessoa concludes by telling Monteiro that “I’ll take the time to make a typed copy [of this letter] so as to include some of its sentences and grimaces in The Book of Disquiet” (The Book 469).
In exploring this relationship further, we notice that both Pessoa and Soares experience writerly frustration, a circumstance that prevents Pessoa from availing himself of the technical skill that allowed his masterful precursors to distance themselves from their surrogates. Soares clearly presents himself as a “man who suffers” and reveals as well that to all the usual forms of human suffering he has added writing itself (which is no cure): “Writing is like the drug that I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend” (137). Later, he declares: “Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten [ . . . ] the time that I spent doing it earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth doing” (150). The relief from suffering that writing could potentially bring never materializes: “To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy—not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand” (137). He dreams of an accomplishment that is well beyond his means: “Ah, to be able to construct a complete Whole, to compose something that would be like a human body, with perfect harmony among all its parts, and with a life, a life of unity and congruency, uniting the scattered traits of its various parts!” (248).
That Pessoa’s and Soares’s sufferings are nearly identical is further made clear by Pessoa’s remark to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues that “My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on The Book of Disquiet. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments” (473). Robert Bréchon confirms this proximity between the “real” and the “fictional” authors of The Book when he observes that: “As beautiful as they may be, the books that he has bequeathed to us are only disjecta membra; they give us only a faint idea of his potential greatness.” Bréchon continues by arguing that Pessoa was never able to construct the sort of literary monuments achieved by Virgil and Dante because “he was not a builder; rather, like Shakespeare, he was, above all else, a ‘great soul’ a consciousness without limits” (408).
Having abolished the boundary between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates” Pessoa/Soares similarly blurs the distinction between the event and the art into which it is transmuted, producing a work in which, as Richard Zenith observes in his “Preface,” “forme and fond perfectly reflect each other” (xv). One obvious consequence is that The Book’s lack of a coherent shape mirrors Soares’s own lack of a fixed identity. At one point, he says, “I cease being myself and so scattered” (55); at another, he admits that “I don’t have any idea of myself, not even the kind that consists in the lack of an idea of myself. I’m a nomad in my self-awareness. The herds of my inner riches scattered during the first watch” (101). Likewise, he admits that “at a certain point in my written cogitation, I no longer know where the centre of my attention lies—whether in the scattered sensations I attempt to describe like enigmatic tapestries, or in the words which absorb me as I try to describe the act of describing and which, absorbing me, distract me and cause me to see other things” (321). In yet another passage, the non-identity of the protagonist and the work in which he appears uncannily converge: “I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want, I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone else who didn’t know how to complete me” (227; my emphasis).
Zbigniew Kotowicz emphasizes The Book’s indeterminate identity when he notes, regarding the fate of the fragments that Pessoa left behind at the time of his death, that:
Shortly before his death, Pessoa marked an envelope L. do D. (Livro do Desassossego, The Book of Disquiet) and shoved into it various fragments of prose which he had been composing all his literary life. Those were the preparatory stages to hone the work into a publishable form and that was all Pessoa had time to do; he never got around to appointing a literary executor, nor did he leave any precise indications as to how he would arrange the material. Some of the fragments were finished and polished; many others were still in manuscript, sometimes barely legible, sometimes no more than loose notes. To aggravate the situation further, Pessoa’s own selection turned out to be unreliable. Some fragments found in the envelope did not seem to belong in The Book of Disquiet and among the rest of his papers others were found that obviously did. (71-2)
To this, Richard Zenith adds that “what we have here isn’t a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins” (ix).
A further consequence of the blurred distinction between event and art is that the two forms of punishment that appear in the Daedalus story—incarceration and drowning—are, ambiguously, sources of both pain and pleasure in The Book. We notice, on the one hand, that Soares does, at times, associate the labyrinth with disorientation and anxiety:
As my body penetrates the lanes and side streets, my soul loses itself in intricate labyrinths of sensation. All that can disturbingly convey the notion of unreality and feigned existence, all that can demonstrate—not to abstract reason but 
and concretely—how the place occupied by the universe is hollower than hollow; all this objectively unfolds before my detached spirit. I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates—heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal. (191)
At the same time, however, the complexity and indeterminacy of the labyrinth can also be sources of pleasure: “The geography of our consciousness of reality is an endless complexity of irregular coasts, low and high mountains, and myriad lakes [ . . . ] Everything is complex for those who think, and no doubt thought itself takes delight in making things yet more complex” (284).
The same principle applies to enclosed spaces in general. At times they are uncannily conjoined with infinity in a way that produces oppression: “Infinite prison—since you’re infinite there’s no escaping you” (197); “those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell [ . . . ] the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don’t exist; nor can they be revived by the pain of shackles no one has put on us” (316). Conversely, both enclosed spaces and infinity can have positive implications for Soares: “There’s infinity in a cell or a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock” (86); “the silence of the house touches infinity” (34); “fourth-floor room overlooking infinity” (348); “parks of infinity” (431); “avenue of my small room” (31); “But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses down below, it’s true, but with stars up above . . . ” (382).
Like incarceration, drowning is also treated ambiguously in The Book. On the one hand, Soares describes himself as “wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of whose immensity has nothing to do with infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured or named” (192). He compares his soul to “a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a whole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world—houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl” (228).
The sea can also emerge as a source of pleasure, however, as when Soares expresses a desire “To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea, fluidly skirting real shores, on a night in which one really sleeps!” (33). During a walk along the seashore, he likewise describes an experience of the sea that is far removed from the image of it as “a black whirlpool”: “The entire ocean, noisy and cool, rolling in from the depths of the vast night to ripple over the beach, during my nocturnal walk to the seashore.” The “entire ocean” then returns in an even more appealing variant in the concluding line of this text: “How much I feel if I meander this way, bodiless and human, with my heart as still as a beach, and the entire sea of all things beating loud and derisive, then becoming calm, on the night we live, on my eternal nocturnal walk to the seashore” (93). At one point, “the black whirlpool” mutates into a “white whorl” with similarly seductive implications: “There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort—soft and shapeless things, marvels that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and reverberating like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth” (174).
Closely related to the ocean—and sharing its ambiguous associations with both event and art—are abysses and chasms. On the one hand, we find such unnerving descriptions of bottomless space as “On the path to the abstract chasm that lies in the depths of things there are horrors that the world’s men don’t imagine and fears to endure that human experience doesn’t know” (114). In a similar vein, Soares describes life as “a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up” (12). On the other hand, we find such pleasurable images as Soares’s allusion to “the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything” (54) and to the happiness that he finds in observing “the landscape of simple rain falling on the street resurrected from the chasm!” (73).
In his analysis of narrative, the American literary critic Kenneth Burke finds its underlying motive in “its subjection to impulses toward perfection, including the perfection of the victim” (qtd. in C. Carter Allen 29). This “universal narrative desire” discovered by Burke clearly corresponds to that we have called the “Daedalus Complex,” whose twofold operation—involving displacement of suffering upon a surrogate followed by its transmutation into a completed work—we have observed in the work of two of Pessoa’s acknowledged masters as well as in a modernist poem that, like Pessoa’s own work, draws its inspiration from them and, in the person of Prufrock, offers a protagonist who resembles Soares in certain respects. Having Burke’s terms in mind helps us to see more clearly, however, that Pessoa has essentially forged a work that dismantles the “Daedalus Complex” by imperfecting the victim—in the person of a narrator/protagonist who is barely distinguishable, if at all, from his creator and by imperfecting the work in the form of a literary monument that he was never able to build. The artist who had heretofore imitated the craft of Daedalus is now eclipsed by one who identifies with the imprisoned Minotaur and the drowning Icarus; likewise, the labyrinth as well as the sea that he inherited from the Daedalus story become his “sheltering ruins.”