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 shopworn or peculiar occurrences, is laced with images of defective senses and perception, particularly of sess. The muddle of domain and error confounds the main characters, and their attempts to escape drive the plot. Within five lines of the plays arising we are confronted with defective senses You fuddlent been listening, (p. 9) complains Alex to the missed Julia when she asks about the tigers in his story. Julia exhibits an some other confused faculty, that of taste at first she claims Whats that? Potato crisps? No, I simply cant stop them, (p. 15), but later says The potato crisps were really excellent (p. 21). Soon she adds muddle to the list I must have left my glasses here, / And I simply cant tick a thing without them.... / Im afraid I dont cerebrate the colour, / But Id know them, because one lens is missing (p. 33). Even with her glasses, Julias sight will be impai red. And the glasses turn out to have been in her handbag all along. Yet Julias glasses, though often lost, through their really existence allow her to see better. The spectacles whitethorn 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 snip powder in Edwards 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 wraith or a manner of seeing? Do those who retreat from Celias discovery abandon a dream, or an entire sense? Reilly claims the retreat to radiation diagra m 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 journeying blind (p. 141) -- our normal senses fail us, for we need some higher perception. An magic trick 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 illumination (p. 147). Works CitedEliot, T.S.,The Cocktail Party, Faber and Faber, 1950.