T.S. Eliot's etherized patient

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2004 by Anthony Cuda

       There will be a smell of creolin and the sound of something that
           drips
       A black bag with a pointed beard and tobacco on his breath
       With chemicals and a knife
       Will investigate the cause of death that was also the cause of
           the life--
       Would there be a little whisper in the brain
       A new assertion of the ancient pain
       Or would this other touch the secret which I cannot find?

       There will be a blinding light and a little laughter
       And the sinking blackness of ether
       I do not know what, after, and I do not care either
       (Inventions 80)

Eliot imagines the Mephistophelean surgeon's approach with metonymic swiftness; in his panic, the speaker notes only a few salient, threatening details--black bag, chemicals, knife--before hurrying on toward an overwhelming question: would this operation only confirm his fears by bringing the shameful evidence of his internal corruption and decay ("the ancient pain") into the light? Or might the seemingly horrific experience have some other, self-revelatory effect? Not unlike Prufrock, the speaker proves unable to follow the question through to an answer. The poem dramatizes his fear by dismissing the scenario at the moment of the malevolent surgeon's approach, refusing to entertain the outcome of the imagined operation. (6) This version of the etherized patient evokes the same fear of helplessness that was embodied less poignantly in the marionettes, a fear that remains central to Eliot's sensibility even into The Waste Land, when the thunder diagnoses the soul's disorder as a fear of submission, as having resisted the "awful daring of a moment's surrender" (CPP 49). These early personae can only tremble at the thought of such "daring," and their attraction to passive suffering results not from a desire for self-transcendence but from a yearning for their own dissolution. They exemplify what Eliot would later call the "tendency to collapse, the recurring human desire to escape the burden of life and thought" ("Literature" 288).

Eliot's ambivalence toward control and surrender repeatedly drew him to other thinkers who sought to uncover moral and spiritual meaning in vulnerability, paralysis, and human suffering. Studying the work of William James as a philosophy student at Harvard, he found accounts of ether-induced states of altered consciousness, or "anesthetic revelations," and what one of James's acquaintances (who had experienced an anesthetic revelation) calls "the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving" (qtd. in James 309). (7) Eliot also turned to Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considered another master of suffering and vulnerability. Rereading Poe in preparation for a review of Hervey Allen's Israfel in 1927 would have led him back to "The Premature Burial," in which Poe's narrator intensely fears the possibility of his own mistaken interment, especially because he is afflicted with a nervous condition called "catalepsy," which leaves its victim in a paralyzed state that bears a striking resemblance to the scenes from Eliot's own early poetry. The sufferer of a cataleptic swoon, the narrator describes, remains in a state of "semi-syncope, or half swoon ... without pain, without ability to stir, or, strictly speaking, to think, but with a dull lethargic consciousness of life and of the presence of those who surrounded my bed" (2: 268). (8) Poe's narrator suggests that such dark fantasies of helplessness give our world "the semblance of a Hell" (2: 278), but for Eliot, the hell that the etherized patient must endure is neither a mere semblance nor a passing torment but a revelation of a fundamental aspect of the human soul, of something permanent within its inscrutable depths that remains always "simple, terrible and unknown" ("Beyle" 393). When he wrote the introduction for Christopher Isherwood's translation of Baudelaire's journals in 1930, Eliot applauded another master of pain and affliction for cultivating an "immense passive strength" to endure suffering, and he must have been intrigued to read Baudelaire's description of love as "an application of torture or a surgical operation ... in which one of the players must forfeit possession of himself" (23-24). (9) Beneath Baudelaire's distinctive analogy and his insistent scrutiny of suffering, Eliot claims, is "the possibility of a positive state of beatitude" (SE 423). His sustained tutelage under James, Baudelaire, Poe, and their paralytic and tortured protagonists taught him to cultivate an imaginative capacity for the kind of weakness and suffering that not only reveals something about the soul's permanent condition but also offers a mode of spiritual transformation.