Eliot and Kierkegaard: "The Meaning of Happening" in The Cocktail Party

ELIOT AND KIERKEGAARD: "THE MEANING OF HAPPENING" IN THE COCKTAIL PARTY«All that I could hope to make you understand Is only events: not what has happened. And people to whom nothing has ever happened Cannot understand the unimportance of events." Harry, The Family Reunion (The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 234). SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED to Harry; it has brought him back to Wishwood, and it has made him passionate, reiterative, and inscrutable . He would like to tell his story, but does not yet know it fully himself. Agatha knows what the story is not and what in general Harry will do: "What we have written is not a story of detection,/Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation" (p. 275). The chorus intones its own complaint at the end of the play: "\Ve do not know what we are doing" and "We do not know much about thinking" (p. 291). We ask with them, we whose lives like Gcralrl's are "a continual impact of external events" (p. 234), "What is the meaning of happening?" (p. 291). Violet appeals to Amy, "What has happened ?" (p. 286). Everyone wants to know: some realize the 'unimportance of events,' some do not; but those who know 'what has happened ,' like Harry, apparently cannot reveal it, and pass in and out of the lives of others mysteriously, without regard for event or consequence . Are they about their Father's business? The Family Reunion was T. S. Eliot's first effort to write for the popular stage, and it bears the signs of his inexperience as well as of the urgency he felt to define his kind of action in the distinction between happening and event. In one adjuration after another Han-y instructs his family, his friends, and presumably the audience. But his effect is minor, for we all want to know a little more of what happened to Harry, and 'what is the meaning of happening.' With Charles we feel that we "could understand, if [we] were told it" (p. 288), and Eliot himself, it appears, was dissatisfied with The Family Reunion. Like any old 'possum, he knew more than what he was telling, hut like most playwrights he preferred an audience which understood him. 'We had the experience but missed the meaning." The Cocktail Party is the next in a progressively more 'theatrical' series of plays; that is, it has more of the obvious and less of the 52 1960 ELIOT AND K1E.RKEGAARD 53 mysterious, more of the familiar and less of the esoteric. There are no murders, deaths, furies, or choruses. Unfortunately, if sympathetic and serious critics are any indication, there has been no great increase in the comprehension of Elioes audiences. This conversion of the conventional practices of the modem stage has been judged a failure for the wrong reasons, drawn praise for the wrong things, and has been analyzed by the very standards Eliot discards. We have to know what happens in this, the best of Elioes plays, since it is clear that it is not what seems to be happening. Neither drawing-room nor bedroom encloses this action. We can begin, then, by the radical-and, one hopes, not by the merely ingenious or fashionable-step of going to the man who more than any other has stimulated contemporary religious speculation, S¢ren Kierkegaard. His description of despairof moral and spiritual acts-will establish, if not a conventional locale, then the specifying terms for what happens in The Cocktail Party. The formula for all despair, Kierkegaard says in The Sickness Unto Death, is to despair over oneself, which is the despair to will to be rid of oneself. There are two forms of despair and one counterfeit form which properly speaking is not despair at all. Thus1 improperly speaking , one is in despair at not willing to be a self. A man may be happy, secure, respected. His despair, improperly so called because it is unconscious, is the measure of his spirituality; he is as though dead, unaware-not dying the death, knowing death, but as though dead, not knowing death, a whited sepulchre. The formula for despairthe despair to will to be rid...