ABSTRACT
The title of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel about the BBC during the war years, Human Voices (1980), derives from the closing line of T. S. Eliot’s 1915 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (The Complete Poems 7). Although Fitzgerald considered other titles-e.g., 10 Seconds From Now and I Return You to My Colleagues at Broadcasting House-none had the suggestive, haunting character of the Eliot phrase.1 In the Eliot poem, the phrase invokes a religious tradition, now widely imagined as usurped. As Eliot employs the phrase, the implied contrast is with the Divine voice, the voice (which is also, and most notably, Christ) made reference to in the opening of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] In him was life, and the life was the light of the men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1.1-5 Revised Standard Version). However, Eliot’s hero, as he himself acknowledges, is “no prophet,” and the Divine voice, identified with truth, goes unheard, Prufrock coming to be defined by his mortal cravings and anxieties: “And, in short, I was afraid” (The Complete Poems 6).2 His is a life and a world defined by both deafness and darkness, a darkness that meets little resistance as it sets out to overcome the light.
