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In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.

Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed communication and the limits of sympathy among reader, speaker, and subject. From depictions of laughing characters in Prufrock and Other Observations to the merriment in Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot treats laughter itself, rather than the joke provoking it, as a form of communication conveying truths language cannot. Eliot’s laughter comes from doubt. His comedy is both superiority-based and empathic: amusement reminds Eliot of his own failures. Eliot’s self-conscious laughter becomes a unique vehicle for communication between artist and audience, if not between individuals. In The Waste Land, tragicomic moments teach readers to be skeptical of their own satirical impulses, and almost bridge the abysmal distance between subjectivities.

This chapter argues that an oral mode of textual circulation, which T. S. Eliot discovered both in obscene, comic, bawdy folk song and in music hall performance, provided him with a vision of social cohesion that contrasts with the fragmentation that is otherwise central to his work. The ability of these genres to figure an otherwise lost social cohesion, however, reflects the fact that they are spaces where men bonded and created a sense of homosocial community. Eliot’s published comments on obscenity confirm his valuation of the comic or humorous obscene as a mode and index of social health; but the instances where Eliot discovers this cohesion are predicated on the exclusion of women.

If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee Simon wants to believe in his genuineness and the honesty of his autobiographical novel, but he’s too much attracted to the hollow, media-crazed world he abhors to remain committed to his art, which a jilted lover ultimately scatters over the Hudson River. Marion Post of Another Womanknows she must change her life from its philosophical deep freeze, and she finds her transformation depicted in the novel of an ex-lover who characterizes the woman modeled on her as “capable of deep passion.” Both Simon and Post, these movies suggest, are guilty of confounding art and life for the purposes of self-gratification and self-aggrandizement.