T.S. Eliot's etherized patient

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2004 by Anthony Cuda

By the time Eliot publishes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917), his various figures for passivity have crystallized into a conceit that betrays the single most important aspect of Prufrock's haunted psyche. "Let us go then," he famously begins,

         you and I,
       When the evening is spread out against the sky
       Like a patient etherised upon a table (CPP 3)

If the tragedy of the poem consists in Prufrock's fear of and failure to risk vulnerability, these lines configure that fear with a precise correlative for paralysis. For Eliot, the etherized patient is a body whose dulled awareness remains but who cannot move to protect itself. Later in the poem Eliot experiments with other metaphors for helplessness, as Prufrock envisions himself "formulated, sprawling on a pin," or "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (5). In "Portrait of a Lady" (1917) he replaces etherized paralysis with a less menacing "tobacco trance," a drowsed mental state with consequences as meaningless as those that befell the marionettes: "dance, dance / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. / Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance--" (CPP 11). Eliot's training in classical philosophy had taught him that rational consciousness is the faculty that distinguishes humans from animals; his "intolerable" marionettes and chattering apes affirm that when the will is paralyzed and passive, the human becomes animal. Puppets and parrots aside, the paralyzed patient remains Eliot's most succinct correlative to the sensation of helplessness, and he returns to pun on it again in "The Burnt Dancer" when the speaker imagines himself a "patient acolyte of pain, / ... / Caught on those horns that toss and toss" (Inventions 63). Eliot's pun--and his use of other "patients" in the early poems--rests on his knowledge that the word patient both pertains to patience in the modern sense and is also etymologically linked with passivity. In his reading of scholastic theology, he would have found the patient (patiens) differentiated from the agent (agens), as the entity that is acted on differs from the originator of the action. (5) It is the nature of the patient to suffer movement inflicted on it by an agent, but this movement need not always induce fear. For instance, one may be pulled from the path of a moving train or pushed onto its tracks. The emotional turbulence that Eliot's personae experience--their oscillation between relief and terror--arises not necessarily from the nature of the action that the patient suffers but from the vulnerability and helplessness that he endures.

Eliot returns to this ambivalence in "The Death of Saint Narcissus" and "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," both of whose speakers reveal a terror of, but compelling attraction to, passive suffering. However, unlike Eliot's beloved Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio, these early personae demonstrate none of the purgatorial virtues that result from choosing passivity; they fear paralysis, and their fear produces a craving for relief, which results in an ambivalence that only paralyzes them further. In his essay on Eliot, Ted Hughes agrees that Saint Narcissus, with other early personae, "shares that curious neurasthenic self-awareness of himself as a thing, a puppet on strings" (281). But Eliot eventually leaves puppetry behind, grows impatient with his "insufferable" marionettes, and returns to the image of paralysis in an untitled lyric ("Do I know how I feel?"), when the speaker foresees a grotesque scene of his own dismemberment: