Spiritual Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading is the story of the rich man and Lazarus receiving their afterlife rewards in, respectively, Hell and Heaven. I am reposting an essay, slightly amended, that I wrote six years ago about T.S. Eliot’s use of the parable in Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. As I note in the piece, for years I had the wrong Lazarus in mind when I read the poem. The allusion made more sense once I got it right.
Reposted from Sept. 24, 2016
I’ve have only just realized that the “Lazarus” mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is not Mary and Martha’s brother, the man whom Jesus brings back from the dead. Rather, he is the Lazarus mentioned in today’s Gospel reading about the rich man in hell.
This is not news to Eliot scholars, but it certainly has me looking at Prufrock in a slightly different light. I now regard the speaker as even more hopeless than I did before. Here’s the passage from Luke (16: 19-31):
Jesus said, “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, `Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, `Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house– for I have five brothers– that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, `They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, `No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, `If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock is frustrated that his upper-class society cannot see its emptiness. As someone who experiences this emptiness only too keenly, he imagines himself returning—as the rich man wants Lazarus to return—to wake these rich people up. Here’s the relevant stanza:
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worthwhile,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
Note that Prufrock is already talking himself out of causing a scene. The Biblical passage gives him an excuse for his inactivity. After all, Abraham tells the rich man that a Lazarus visit wouldn’t do any good anyway. “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
The idea of squeezing “the universe into a ball/To roll it towards some overwhelming question,” incidentally, is an allusion to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” In that poem, written in the vein of such carpé diem poems as Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make the Most of Time,” the speaker is assuring his mistress that, “if there were world enough and time,” then of course he would be content to court her slowly. But because time is flying by—because “always at my back I hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”—they need to get down to immediate business. Or as the speaker puts it,
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Prufrock, however, is not the type to tear his pleasures with rough strife or, as he says elsewhere, force a moment to its crisis. In fact, he will go on to compare himself, not to Prince Hamlet (who after initial hesitation swings into action) but to the “easy tool” Polonius. So he’s certainly not going to put himself up there with Moses and the prophets.
Prufrock’s very decision to quote this Biblical passage means that he has already decided that his words won’t do any good. That’s why he can so easily imagine the woman putting him down. He has given up before he’s even started.
In his later Christian poetry, Eliot will focus on leaving the society of the rich man and attaining the faith of Lazarus. It’s as though, through poems like Prufrock, “The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion,” and The Waste Land, he is coming face to face with the sterility of a world without faith. Once he realizes that there is nothing to be gained from such a world, he turns his eyes towards Lazarus with the angels.
Further note: Having just taught Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage (from The Brothers Karamazov) in my “Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami” seminar, I can’t help but hear the Inquisitor responding to Jesus with the critique, “You can’t ask people to follow Your hard road without providing them with miracles to help them. Lazarus coming back from the dead would be a miracle and would aid those who are not as strong as You. Instead, you demand that they rely only on faith, just as you will later say to Doubting Thomas, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ You may appear to be kind and caring, Jesus, but your program is too harsh for humanity.”
As someone who is optimistic about human potential, I want to counter that Jesus was right to have faith in us and that we are indeed capable of rising to the occasion. After all, hasn’t Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit as an advocate with the Father to help us. Ivan Karamazov, however, forces me to question whether this is just an article of faith. Can I back it up with empirical evidence?
Correction: Reader William McKeachie sent in a slight correction. Jesus told his disciples that he would be their advocate with the Father in heaven and would communicate with them through the Holy Spirit. In other words, they are not as dependent on their own resources as Ivan claims. Ivan is operating through a secular humanist model and discounting the power of divine love. When we open ourselves to God’s love, much that seemed hard becomes suddenly easy.
The brilliance of Brothers Karamazov lies partly in the Ivan-Alyosha debate. By telling the story at one point about the suffering undergone by various children, Ivan serves as a corrective to facile faith. The novel ends, however, with the beauty and strength of Alyosha’s vision. Ivan, meanwhile, goes mad.
