T.S. Eliot's etherized patient

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2004 by Anthony Cuda

Parts 2 and 3 sketch two contrasting versions of surrender. First, Eliot looks to his literal and literary ancestors, the "quiet-voiced elders" whose example initially seems to offer the "autumnal serenity" that ought to result from the mind's surrender of its anxious sovereignty (124). Will surrender bring, as the "wisdom of age" promises, the "long looked forward to / Long hoped for calm" (125)? For a brief moment, the narrator finds that such calm offers him a satisfactory analogue to his own dulled mental state. But he soon suspects this serenity to be merely the product of a surrender to routine and habit, what he calls a "deliberate hebetude" that is ultimately useless in the darkness of the absolute "into which they peered" or (he reconsiders) "from which they turned their eyes." The serenity of the elders only assumes the semblance of spiritual surrender; its true source is instead a surrender to fear, "fear of possession, / Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God" (125-26). In part 2, the narrator concludes that this surrender produces merely the illusion of self-control and self-possession. Refusing to dismiss the threatening, dangerous aspects of spiritual passivity in favor of an easier path, a more "secure foothold," he circles around to begin again in the ether-like shade of the sunken lane: "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark" (126).

The narrator of part 3 revisits the state of the hypnotized traveler from the opening stanzas, following his dulled, darkened mind into the parallel darkness of the landscape, "the vacant into the vacant," and searching for analogies that will make the disorienting, trance-like experience meaningful (CPP 126):

       I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
       Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
       The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
       With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on
         darkness,

       Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long
         between stations
       And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
       And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
       Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
       Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of
         nothing--
       I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope (126).

Eliot's personae have attempted in vain to follow this path "into silence" before: "Prufrock's Pervigilium" abruptly ends when the Madness opens his mouth and the world falls apart; Prufrock himself ends his "Love Song" with the silence of the sea chambers being interrupted by human voices; the narrator of "Do I know how I feel?" averts his imagination from an identical impending darkness ("I do not know what, after, and I do not care either"). They have all, like the fearful elders of part 2, "turned their eyes" from the darkness and have become prime examples of what Eliot calls "the human soul in the process of forgetting itself" ("Whether Rostrand"). This time, however, the narrator watches from within the darkened theater of the mind as the distracting illusions of self-control and mastery roll away with the scenery. In his formulations in part 3, Eliot deliberately recalls images from his earlier poems to both evoke and revise the emotional resonance they have acquired. He first returns to Prufrock's theater of the mind, but now no magic lantern casts "the nerves in patterns on a screen" (CPP 6), and no grotesque details of "pearls that were his eyes" (41) or "[d]affodil bulbs ... / from the sockets of the eyes" (32) (as in The Waste Land and "Whispers of Immortality") divert the speaker's attention from the faces around him, behind which the spiritual vacuity deepens. In distinct contrast to the conclusion of Ash-Wednesday (1930), this narrator has blinded the eye that "creates / The empty forms between the ivory gates" (CPP 66), the fearful mental activity that deceives us with its seductive illusions: "monsters," "fancy lights," and "enchantment" (125). When he finally arrives at the familiar etherized patient, he is prepared to accept the darkness of paralysis as an analogue for "the darkness of God," and he is willing to follow the imaginative scenario through to its conclusion. Only now, after he has grappled with deep ambivalence about paralysis and surrender, does Eliot turn to the famous lines from the Ascent of Mount Carmel to invest his personal and emotional conclusions with the weight of the mystical tradition.