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

Defective Senses in Eliot's The Cocktail Party 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 ... ...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 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). Works Cited: Eliot, T.S.,The Cocktail Party, Faber and Faber, 1950.