J. Alfred Prufrock and Blonde

J. Alfred Prufrock and Blonde

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” offers a narrative of anxieties of a modern world. The speaker offers readers their thoughts on love, women and the ennui which underlines the emerging societal experience of the early 20th century. The realities of western culture of the past few hundreds of years have shifted. All of a sudden identities have been lost and everyone, especially the youth, is spiraling to find some ground to settle on. These feelings, of unease and anxiety, are equally expressed in Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde. Though Ocean is not writing in the wake of a devastating war, he writes Blonde as a response to the violence of his teenage years, exploring the same themes of anxiety, ennui and, love which Eliot writes of as well in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“The Love Song…” opens as the narrator offers a hand to both their friend and the reader on this journey through the evening, a journey driven under the haze of drugs, “Like a patient etherized upon a table; / Let us go” (3-4). As the narrator opens the poem drugs are made an important element in dealing with life in contemporary society. Under the haze of drugs is the only way to deal with the yellow haze of the late London. Similarly, in Blonde Frank Ocean makes dozens of references to drug use as a result of various means, but more often than not as a form of coping of anxieties of modern living. This is most aptly heard in “Solo”. In the opening line, Ocean sings, “Hand me a towel, I’m dirty dancing by myself / Gone off tabs, of that acid” (Ocean). Further, in the song, we also get, “I brought trees to blow through, but it's just me and no you /

Stayed up 'til my phone died, smoking big, rolling solo” (Ocean). Drugs in both “The Love Song…” and Blonde have a dual force to both the narrator of the poem and for the younger version of Frank Ocean which the narrative of the album is told through. Drugs serve both the numb and to inspire, as the dramatic dullness of contemporary society inspires nothing. Thus we read the narrator of the poem describe the drab night in London, “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” (4-6).

At the center of both works is the topic of love. Both works focus on the darker, less inspiring nature of love, the side of which provokes neurosis and insecurity. Throughout the poem, the narrator’s subconscious communicated to the reader of the insecurities of our aging subject:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–– (37-40).

Through this drug-induced paranoia driven night, the speaker is fixed on the topic of love and the topic of rejection. Self-questioning and doubt plague our speaker as further noted when the speaker states, “If one, settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; / That is not what I meant, at all’” (96-98).

Anxieties induced by miscommunication fuel both the narratives in the poem and in Blonde. The track “Self-Control” in blonde communicate this greatly in the lines, “Wish I was there, wish we'd grown up on the same advice / And our time was right” (Ocean). The same feelings of misunderstandings in Eliot’s poem are echoed in Ocean’s, “Self-Control”. While love is ever so hard to find, the loss of it hits even harder.

There is a sentiment of intense heart-ache in both works, as our authors explore their feelings of heartbreak and growth within a world of growing complexities. While Eliot was grasping with an emerging capitalist world in the post WWI era, Ocean deals with a technological driven, ever connected and disconnected world. In each case, an element of fantasy is used in order to properly convey the absurd in both author’s lives. Eliot uses the mermaids in “The Love Song…”, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By the sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (129-131) and Ocean narrative breaking interludes and skits in the album which serve to break the narrative of the album with snippets of reality. While Eliot ends the poem with the death of the narrator as a result of awakening, Ocean ends Blonde with the question, “How far is a lightyear?”. Eliot concludes his feelings of ennui with a death. Of what, however, we are not sure. Ocean, on the other hand, imparts his final feelings of ennui in a technology world with the invocation of the cosmic. Perhaps beyond our own feelings of ennui and anxiety, there is something greater, some kind of relief. Be that religion or something else it is out there, but just how far is it?