Logician, Heal Thy Self: Poetry and Drama in Eliot's The Cocktail Party

Logician, Heal Thy Self: Poetry and Drama in Eliot's The Cocktail Party MICHAEL SELMON That's horrible. Can we only love Something created in OUf own imagination? Celia, The Cocktail Parry, Act 2 In his 1951 essay "Poetry and Drama" T.S. Eliot presented a utilitarian approach to verse in the theater. "No poet has begun to master dramatic verse until he can write lines which ... are transparent," he claimed, lines which permit the auditor to attend "not to the poetry, but to the meaning ofthe poetry": [N]o play should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate. And from this it follows, again, that the audience, its attention held by dramatic action . .. should be too intent upon the play to be wholly conscious of the medium,l Note the distance between Eliot's criticism and his creations. While the playwright asserts the need for subtlety in dramatic language, his plays insist the opposite. Consider, for instance, The Cocktail Party of '949, the play which preceded "Poetry and Drama." Rather than permitting the passive acceptance of verse, time and again this work asserts the primacy of language. As we will see, Jinguistic concerns structure the drama. Its first act exploits the contradictions of language in order to explore communication's limits. Act 2 resolves these contradictions only to restate them; Act 3 gives a final solution. Moreover, language structures even the lowest levels of the play. Sound and semantics, patterning and parody: in The Cocktail Party, each device emphasises language, and each prefigures the eventual resolution of the drama. The Cocktail Party, in short, renders language not transparent but opaque. Where Eliot promises a passive blend of poetry and drama, he produces a vital encounter between genres, an encounter pivoting on the self-reference which MICHAEL SELMON both "Poetry and Drama" and The Cocktail Party decry. This essay demonstrates how Eliot's drama systematically explores language which refers to language itself. Starting with low level phonology, it moves through semantic and textual levels until finally confronting the question of genre; at each level Eliot presents the self-reference typical of poetic achievement as symptomatic of a logical - or rather, a psychological - disorder. His cure, epitomized by Celia's martyrdom, is to use the drama to heal this symptom of the self. Eliot begins his focus on language with The Cocktail Party's first lines. "You've missed the point completely, Julia," Alex intones, "There were no tigers. That was the point...·Consider the meter of this verse. As I note below, Eliot cannot completely control the perfonnance ofhis dialogue. Nevertheless, his written text restricts the spoken, both fixing diction and through phonological rules constraining phonetic enunciation. Eliot uses this control to embed an almost hypnotic rhythm. In the early 1950S A.L. Pattison noted the effect: At curtain-rise we plunge into a painfully unsuccessful pany.... [The] highly mannered , overemphatic speech, helped in the second line by a couple of italicized words, starts to hammer ametre into our heads ... three heavy stresses are persistently there, and soon the omission or increase of one would cause us as much disquiet as a sudden irregularity of our heart-beat.2 "Highly mannered, overemphatic speech": this dialogue is hardly transparent. Instead, it differentiates itself from nonnal speech, using rhythm to remind its audience that they are listening to verse. Like all verse patterns, such rhythm undercuts the nannal, unconscious identification of sound with meaning.3 The sounds of The Cocktail Party, colored by their participation in a metric grouping, are no longer transparent signifiers. These sounds demand attention as sounds. Or rather, as written Eliot's sounds demand attention; the perfonnance ofhis verse, filtered as it is by actors' interpretations, need not so foreground language. Keir Elam, discussing the relationship between written and perfonnance texts, has stated the problem most clearly: ... certain written texts attempt to foreground themselves as composed or quasi-literary artifacts. The written text, that is, may endeavour to impose constraints 50 powerful upon the performance that the primary signified of every performance wiH be the connoted "writtenness" of the play. Its success is, of course, dependent on the compliance of the performers.4 Can meter...