Defective Senses in Eliots The Cocktail Party Essay -- Eliot The Cock

Defective Senses in Eliots The Cocktail Party T.S. Eliots play The Cocktail Party, among all its banal or peculiar occurrences, is fastened with images of defective finds and perception, particularly of sight. The muddle of reality and antic confounds the main characters, and their attempts to escape drive the plot. Within five lines of the plays beginning we are confronted with defective senses You havent been listening, (p. 9) complains Alex to the confused Julia when she asks just about the tigers in his story. Julia exhibits a nonher confused faculty, that of taste at first she claims Whats that? Potato crisps? No, I simply cant endure them, (p. 15), entirely later says The potato crisps were really sharp (p. 21). Soon she adds sight to the list I must have left my glasses here, / And I simply cant see a thing without them.... / Im afraid I dont remember the colour, / But Id know them, because one lens is missing (p. 33). Even with her glasses, Julias sight willing be imp aired. And the glasses turn out to have been in her handbag all along. Yet Julias glasses, though often lost, through their very existence allow her to see better. The spectacles may indeed be a symbol for the plays 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, theyre here. Besides, theyre no use to me. / Im not coming back again this evening (p. 86). The other characters of Eliots play all exhibit their own failings of perception. Alex finds no mangoes or curry powder in Edwards kitchen, altogether eggs -- no exotic or intense tastes, only the bland and prosaic. Alex says of his egg concoction that ... ...cent 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 Celias 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 Eliots half-hidden mythos. True sight may be granted only through travel on the way of brightness (p. 147). Works CitedEliot, T.S.,The Cocktail Party, Faber and Faber, 1950.