Eliot's The Cocktail Party: Comic Perspective as Salvation

Eliot's The Cocktail Party: Comic Perspective as Salvation GARY T. DAVENPORT • T. S. ELIOT'S PLAYS, LIKE HIS POETRY, have always inspired critical extremes; few writers have had such loyal disciples or such violent detractors. The Cocktail Party (1949), the first of his post-war comedies, is no exception. Its problematical nature, one feels, is largely the result of Eliot's ambitious attempt to reconcile two seemingly incompatible elements: high moral seriousness and "light" comedy in the Noel Coward idiom. Thus, much of the discussion of the play has rightly centered on its comedy. In his final chapter to the third edition of Matthiessen's book on Eliot, C. L. Barber draws attention to the importance of the comic tone of the final argument between Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne in the consulting room of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, maintaining that it is instrumental in showing the audience the absurdity of the life of pretense, and that it ultimately conveys "the comic sense that life is larger than personalities." 1 But there is another important function of the comedy - an "internal" one - which has not yet been recognized: the all-important "salvation" of such characters as Edward (a salvation usually discussed only in religious terms) depends directly on their ability to develop and sustain a comic overview of life and a sense of their own potential absurdity. As Eliot makes clear in the play, laughter can occur only where there is detachment and objectivity, and detachment from self is the first requisite to salvation - Christian or otherwise. The close relationship between this sort of detachment and laughter is a familiar concept to students of comedy, and particularly if it is approached by way of Henri Bergson's famous essay Laughter (1900). Although Eliot heard Bergson's lectures during his European wanderjahr of 1910-1911, little has been made of his possible indebtedness to the French philosopher. Philip LeBrun, the only critic who has explored this relationship in depth, points 301 302 GARY T. DAVENPORT out that Eliot himself has never acknowledged (or perhaps even realized) such a debt.2 And yet there are undeniable Bergsonian overtones in Reilly's first conversation with Edward. He explains Edward's discomfort at being deserted by his wife in this way: You're suddenly reduced to the status of an object A living object, but no longer a person. It's always happening, because one is an object As well as a person. But we forget about it As quickly as we can. When you've dressed for a party And are going downstairs, with everything about you Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen, Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step There is one more step than your feet expected And you come down with a jolt. Just for a moment You have the experience of being an object At the mercy of a malevolent staircase.3 To the Eliot of The Cocktail Party this speech points in two directions. One immediate implication is the idea of the negation of ego - an idea fully compatible with the Christian meaning of the play. But the sort of objectivity which Reilly is describing has another context: comedy. Bergson makes this point in terms very much like those here formulated by Eliot: "We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing." The comedy of Sancho Panza's being tossed in a blanket results from the fact that he is a person and yet is treated as though he were an object.4 What I wish to maintain is that to Eliot these two implications were simultaneous, and that the comedy of his play is not merely intended to provide "relief' from the more serious theme of salvation, it is an integral part ofit. The audience is never allowed to forget that although Edward is sometimes able to produce cocktail-party wit, he is largely lacking in any fundamental comic sense. His wife laments having spent five years of her life "with a man who has no sense of humour" (p. 90), and rebukes his solemnity over Celia Coplestone's alleged elopement with Peter Quilpe in this...