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 sight. The muddle of reality and illusion confounds the main characters, and their attempts to escape drive the plot. Within five lines of the plays beginning we be confronted with defective senses You booknt been listening, (p. 9) complains Alex to the confused Julia when she asks about the tigers in his story. Julia exhibits another confused faculty, that of taste at first she claims Whats that? Potato crisps? No, I simply cant endure them, (p. 15), but afterwards says The potato crisps were really excellent (p. 21). Soon she adds sight to the list I must have left my glasses here, / And I simply cant see a thing without them.... / Im afraid I dont guess the colour, / But Id know them, because one lens is missing (p. 33). Even with her glasses, Julias sight will be impaired. And the glasses gimmick out to have been in her handbag all along. Yet Julias glasses, though often lost, through their very 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 look upon 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 dress up 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 apparition or a way of seeing? Do those who retreat from Celias discovery abandon a dream, or an entire sense? Reilly claims the retreat to normal 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 journey blind (p. 141) -- our normal senses fail us, for we need some higher perception. An illusion 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 get off on the way of illumination (p. 147). Works CitedEliot, T.S.,The Cocktail Party, Faber and Faber, 1950.