The Cocktail Party and the Illusion of Autonomy

THE COCKTAIL PARTY AND THE ILLUSION OF AUTONOMY T. S. ELIOT'S CONCERN WITH ESTABLISHING a defining language in his verse plays extended to the end of his career. Although Eliot wondered after writing The Cocktail Party "whether there is any poetry in the play at all,"l The Cocktail Party and the plays that followed reveal a continuing interest in the nuances of language, if not in the highly imaged, poetic language of the earlier plays and poetry. The verse, while becoming less dense, placed a greater reliance upon the movement of the verse line than ever before. What The Cocktail Party lost in textured poetry it gained in modulation and inflection. Eliot reaches for the right or "valid" word, the turn of thought or phrase reflected in an increasingly stylized verse. Words give the impression of being self-creating, spoken by characters in search of a more precise speech. In The Cocktail Party Harcourt-Reilly, psychiatrist-priest, and Edward , a lawyer, bear the burden of excessive consciousness-of personal responsibility and of language as language. Their business is words. Along with the other characters, Harcourt-Reilly and Edward are excellent logicians, too excellent in fact. They understand so well that they risk understanding, or having others understand, nothing at all. Edward's awareness of the therapeutic suggestiveness of language threatens to make him unfit for both help and action. As the characters mercilessly layout recurrent "if ... then" alternatives, Eliot anticipates the extreme logic of The Elder Statesman~ his last play: I began to say: when I say 'trust' I use the term as experience has taught me. It's nonsense to talk of trusting people In general. What does that mean? One trusts a man Or a woman-in this respect or that. A won't let me down in this relationship, B won't let me down in some other connection.2 Against the sense that everything is tentative and uncertain, Eliot suggests that events are controlled by what approaches ventriloquism or automatic speech. Behind the seemingly self-generating speech lies a fearful symmetry that is as much moral as it is rhetorical. Like The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman, The Cocktail Party employs an engaging speech guyed by a verse line that defines and corrects whatever is heard. Words are refined and modified from the very opening of the play: 1 T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, 1951), p. 39. 2 T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman, Collected Plays (London, 1962), p. 307. 187 188 MODERN DRAMA September ALEX: You've missed the point completely, Julia: There were no tigers. That was the point.s In these first two lines Eliot alerts an audience to conversation that it cannot afford simply to hear. The movement of the arguments, if appearing at times to lag, is subtle and fast. There are an exchange of repartee and a laying out of possibilities that demand more than the usual attention which a playwright might expect from his audience. Eliot gives the impression in The Cocktail Party that everything about the play is "finished" and controlled by powers beyond. But there is an equally strong impression that nothing is completed or certain at all. The number of interruptions in the play is exceptionally large as tales are left half-told and conversations unaccountably stop. As we recurrently wonder where Eliot is, in his own words in the play, "taking" or "leading" us, we are alternately frustrated and exhausted . The experience of the last plays is like that of Marie In the first part of The Waste Land: And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.4 Like Marie, we are asked to "hold on tight" as the verse leads us through thematic variations and shifting turns of argument. Eliot refuses to simplify or to reduce any of the last plays to less than "a total situation," and he demands from his audience an awareness of the most shaded meanings of words. In wishing to relinquish none of the complications or complexities...