"The Way of Illumination:"
Images of Defective Senses in
T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party
- "You and I don't know the process by which the human is
Transhumanized: what do we know
Of the kind of suffering they must undergo
On the way of illumination?" (p. 147)
"The way of illumination" -- a path leads to light, out of
darkness. T.S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party, among all its
banal or peculiar occurrences, is laced with images of defective senses
and perception, particularly of sight. The muddle of reality and illusion
confounds the main characters, and their attempts to escape drive the
plot.
Within five lines of the play's beginning we are confronted with
defective senses: "You haven't been listening," (p. 9) complains
Alex to the confused Julia when she asks about the tigers in his story.
Julia exhibits another confused faculty, that of taste: at first she
claims "What's that? Potato crisps? No, I simply can't endure
them," (p. 15), but later says "The potato crisps were really
excellent" (p. 21). Soon she adds sight to the list: "I must
have left my glasses here, / And I simply can't see a thing without
them.... / I'm afraid I don't remember the colour, / But I'd know them,
because one lens is missing" (p. 33). Even with her glasses,
Julia's sight will be impaired. And the glasses turn out to have been in
her handbag all along. Yet Julia's glasses, though often lost, through
their very existence allow her to see better. The spectacles may indeed
be a symbol for the play's theme of blindness, but for Julia they provide
an excuse to "see" more -- to spy on her companions, as she
admits when she says "Left anything? Oh, you mean my spectacles. /
No, they're here. Besides, they're no use to me. / I'm not coming back
again this evening" (p. 86).
The other characters of Eliot's play all exhibit their own failings
of perception. Alex finds no mangoes or curry powder in Edward's kitchen,
only eggs -- no exotic or intense tastes, only the bland and prosaic.
Alex says of his egg concoction that "of all my triumphs / This is
the greatest" (p. 48), but Julia later dismisses it with the warning
that "anything that Alex makes is absolutely deadly" (p. 57). His
tastes, presumably, do not agree with the majority of his friends -- they
are "defective."
Julia, in turn, opens a champagne bottle (the stage directions specifically
mention "a popping noise... heard from the kitchen" (p.58)), and
then claims "I found some champagne -- / Only a half bottle, to be
sure, / And of course it isn't chilled" (p. 58). Neither Edward nor
Celia take any notice of the noise or of Julia's actions: they do not hear
or connect reality with her lie. Edward's hearing also fails when he
forgets Julia is waiting on the telephone (p. 69), and three times asks
his "Unidentified Guest" if he wants whiskey, only to be told
to get gin (pp. 23, 25, 30). And Harcourt-Reilly himself, of course,
belts out his drinking song about badly-sighted "One-Eyed Riley"
(p. 34).
Edward and Lavinia's first meeting in the play is full of mis-sensings.
Edward does at last remember Harcourt-Reilly's gin and
water (p. 70), only to be rebuffed. Lavinia refuses to listen to Celia,
clouding the issue with diplomatic niceties, until Celia corrals her with
"Don't put me off" (p. 82). And Edward and Lavinia's opening spat
concerns their conflicting images of each other, mis-hearings and mis-seeings.
Edward, at least, has learned from his talk with Celia about "seeing
oneself through the eyes of other people" (p. 95). And he no longer uses
"the gramaphone... [as] only your escape / From talking to [Lavinia]
when we had to be alone" -- their fight is out in the open, with no
distracting music to prevent listening to each other.
The cinema is a major image in The Cocktail Party, both
because of the leisurely, intellectual life of the characters and because
of Peter and Celia's mutual interest in it (p. 38). And what is the
cinema but falseness caused by inadequate sight? Our eyes are not quick
enough to detect the individual frames of film, so a series of still
images create the illusion of motion. That illusion is exactly what
afflicts the characters of Eliot's play: they live static, unfulfilled
lives, though in seeing each other only infrequently, after many
"frames," they seem to be out doing new and remarkable things.
Their life is a facade, like the reconstructed Boltwell Castle that Peter
plans to build in California (p. 169) -- a creation without substance.
"Hell is oneself, / Hell is alone, the other figures in it / Merely
projections" (p. 98), shadow-puppets of idealized personality.
Indeed, in Peter's world, the absent Celia "has simply faded -- into
some other picture -- / Like a film effect" (p. 45).
Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly's object is to remove these illusions and
repair these faulty senses. Edward has long since stopped seeing
his wife as she is, for within a day after her departure, he says, "I
no longer remember what my wife is like. / I am not quite sure that I
could describe her / If I had to ask the police to search for her. / I'm
sure I don't know what she was wearing / When I saw her last.... And what
is the use of all your analysis / If I am to remain always lost in the
dark?" (p. 32). And Harcourt-Reilly's rhetoric only reminds Edward
that he has "often used these terms in examining witnesses" (p.
27) -- but "examining" all too easily takes on a non-legal
meaning with a doctor in attendance and a maelstrom of other visual terms
swirling about the drama. Edward rejects Harcourt-Reilly's probes, any
speculation about Lavinia, or even about Reilly's own identity: metaphorically,
he closes his eyes in the hope that no-one else will see him. But Reilly
persists in "finding out / What you really are. What you really
feel." (p. 30).
And Reilly's efforts succeed. His initial setup, with his "usual
foresight" (p. 105), separates his three patients (Edward, Lavinia,
and Celia) until he can reveal the feuding husband and wife to each other.
Reilly sees, and senses, their genuine problems instead of the self-involved
twaddle most of his patients believe they see: Edward
complains "I would have thought a doctor could see for himself....
Two people advised me recently.... If they saw it / I should have thought
that a doctor could see it." (pp. 109-10), and Reilly's calm ripostes
convince us that he does see, and much more clearly than
poor Edward. Edward complains "I wonder / If you have understood a
word of what I have been saying" (p. 113) but Reilly learns by
closely observing and listening, especially by "taking note of what
you do not say" (p. 113) -- a deeper vision. Edward never noticed
his wife's "breakdown" -- "You wouldn't notice anything.
You never noticed me" (p. 123) she retorts -- for he
has only &strong;the shadow of desires of desires" (p. 125). Like
one of Plato's prisoners before the cave, he sees only vague flickerings,
shadows and illusions, but never the real substance -- only the fakery of
Peter's cinema effects.
Edward responds to treatment: his sense, and senses, improve.
Harcourt-Reilly worries that Edward and Lavinia will end up as nothing but
"mirror to mirror, reflecting vanity," but Julia assures him
"I shall keep an eye on them" (p. 146). And in
Act III, two years later, their "vision" seems much improved.
Lavinia, as we might expect, is meticulous in arranging the house for the
upcoming party (she "looks about the room critically and moves a bowl
of flowers" (p. 153)). But she and Edward also take the time to ask
after each other, to ensure that the other is neither "worrying"
nor "tired" (p. 154), and work together to straighten a picture
on the wall. Edward even compliments Lavinia's dress, a triumph of vision
and perception! And the two of them help to reconcile Peter to Celia's
death, pointing out to the young cinematographer that "what you've
been living on is an image of Celia" (p. 178).
Indeed, Celia best represents Eliot's ideas of human blindness. Even
by Act I, Scene 2, we see her vision clarify, when she sees Edward as a
dessicated mummy, hears him as a lonely droning insect -- "I see
another person, / I see you as a person whom I never saw before. / The man
I saw before, he was only a projection... [of] something that I
desperately wanted to exist." (p. 67). Celia, troubled, visits
Reilly, and claims "I don't hear any voices, I have no delusions -- /
Except that the world I live in seems all a delusion!" (p. 132). She
has seen through the senseless and sense-less facade of the world, for she
sees that people "make noises, and think they are talking to each
other; / They make faces, and think they understand each other, / And I'm
sure that they don't." (p. 134).
Reilly warns Celia that those who are "cured" back into
innocent obliviousness "may remember the vision they have had"
(p. 139) -- but is "vision" here an apparition or a way of
seeing? Do those who retreat from Celia's discovery abandon a dream, or an
entire sense? Reilly claims the retreat to normal life "I could
describe in familiar terms / Because you have seen it, as we all have seen
it" (p. 141), but, if Celia presses on, "the destination cannot
be described.... You will journey blind" (p. 141) -- our normal
senses fail us, for we need some higher perception. An illusion or mirage
is a failure of vision, so what of vision and mortal existence, whose
illusion Celia has pierced? Such higher senses, perhaps, belong to the
Guardians of Eliot's half-hidden mythos. True sight may be granted only
through travel "on the way of illumination" (p. 147).