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Trilling tells us in the same essay that one interpretation of the
"The Hairy Ape" is not available. He writes that the play
"is not--as people were once inclined to think because of its
stokehole and I.W.W.--a play about the proletariat" (xii). Trilling
gives no further reason for his judgment that "people" were
wrong about this play. He simply asserts the proposition. The evidence
of my experience tells me that Trilling is wrong about
"people." Not all productions of "The Hairy Ape" make it a play about the proletariat, but
many do. Such an interpretation is available.
Of
Emperor Jones, Trilling
insists that one interpretation of the title role is not available. He
comments that "the 'emperor,' Brutus Jones, does not typify the
Negro. He typifies all men with their raw ignorance and hysterical fear
under the layers of intellect" (xi). Maybe Brutus Jones doesn't
"typify the Negro;" but then, maybe he does. Maybe he seems a
pitiable worm, maybe a raging beast. It is necessary to Trilling's
argument that Brutus Jones be a character who "typifies"
something other than a stage black. But the proof lies not in Trilling's
power to assert, no matter how confidently he does so. He asserts that
which, as a critic, is his duty to demonstrate, a species of circular
reasoning, begging the question. He does so because his phrasing takes
him on a short-cut from the script to the audience without conceding the
necessary mediation of a stage production and those awkward obstacles to
certainty, the players.
The
audience experiences the play through the players. The players may find
Trilling's version of Brutus Jones spot on; or they may not. They may
find it inconvenient, or even irrelevant. The players evoke Brutus Jones
on a stage of a particular size, particular sight-lines, with a
particular budget for costumes, sets, and lighting, in front of an
audience with tastes that the players know something about, in an era
with particular events trumpeted in the press, all of which will
influence the qualities that the players want Brutus Jones to display.
In
turn, none of these limitations completely shapes the way people in an
audience might "read" what they see on the stage. Each person
brings to the auditorium his or her own history, and may find meanings
in the play at variance with those of others seated nearby. None of
these interpretations is "wrong;" the production of the text
makes them all available. For anyone to complain of their variety is
like a fisherman complaining that the fish are always so wet, or a
painter that the paints are so messy. A welter of differing
"readings" in the auditorium is the very medium in which
dramatic art exists.
Langston
Hughes in his autobiography, Big Sea, describes an instructive and apposite episode. He recalls a
production of Emperor Jones
at
the old Lincoln Theater on 135th Street, a theater that had, for all
its noble name, been devoted largely to ribald, but highly
entertaining, vaudeville... The audience didn't know what to make of
Emperor Jones on a stage where "Shake That Thing" was
formerly the rage. And when the Emperor started running naked through
the forest, hearing Little Frightened Fears, naturally they howled
with laughter.
"Them
ain't no ghosts, fool!" the spectators cried from the orchestra.
"Why don't you come on out o' that jungle--back to Harlem where
you belong?"(258)
The
actor in the title role tried to lecture the audience on manners in a
theatre. People in the audience apparently did not see any dignity in
the play, but probably did see the way it patronized them. Trilling in
1937 tried by the force of mere assertion to rescue the play from that
blemish. But assertion will not do it.
I
wish I were merely reciting the obvious here. Alas, I am not. To achieve
the illusion of certainty, not only Trilling, but a train of critics
following his example have too often skipped the messy part and put
themselves, like Trilling, in the position of asserting the very points
they set out to prove. Trilling wrote as if he could command such
estimates because he did not think--about production, about players,
about the fact that he was discussing a play. He seemed to ignore all
that.
The
type of criticism that seemed most prominent in recent years. however,
calling itself formalist or post-structuralist or deconstruction, has
had its roots in the analysis of fiction. Some of this work may in fact
have some use in the analysis of drama. Other methods may not; for
instance, "reader-response" criticism, seems peculiarly mal
apropos to drama. For drama, one may posit no readers at all, or one
may posit an even greater number than reader-response critics do,
readers in the flesh of the director, the players, the audience, in
addition to the manifold layers of "virtual readers" for each
these and the suppositions of each about the reading habits of the
others.
A
small book by Kier Elam, The
Semiotics of the Drama (Methuen, 1980), attempts with some success
the daunting task of bringing to a reader a summary of that kind of
research from the "Prague School" of the late 'thirties, about
the time that Trilling was writing his introduction for the O'Neill
volume, to Elam’s publication date.
Elam
is condemned by his task to give some work more space than it deserves,
and to confine his reference to some of the best work to parenthetical
comments or annotations in his excellent bibliography. His references to
"intertextuality," one of the buzz-words of this recent
criticism, are always brief but always piquant. Elam repeatedly reflects
a nervousness about dealing with the "text" of a play at all,
as some of the research he reports seems to assume that the play's only
"real" text is the very performance of it. Elam goes on to
remind us that even if this insistence on the primacy of performance is
accepted, the "text" for it still exists, and must, too, be
considered. Elam cites one of his Italian confreres, Paolo Gulli
Pugliatti(I segni latenti:
Scrittura come virtualita in King Lear, D'Anna, 1976), to the effect
that the written text depends on the possibility of performance as much
as the performance depends on the written text.
Thus playwrights inevitably anticipate the obligations,
opportunities, and obstacles imposed by performance as they write (209).
Anyone used to reading recent criticism of fiction will realize how this
last observation on drama, rather than simplifying anything, only teases
out the end of one thread from a knot of Gordian complexity.
Admittedly,
this kind of criticism is fun for some, but many, who appeal to
criticism for help in dealing with the works ostensibly analyzed, find
the requirements, for their patience, among other virtues, too intense.
A case in point is Critical
Approaches to O'Neill edited by John H. Stroupe, who collects twelve
essays in honor of O'Neill's centennial, about half of which still treat
scripts as if no actor ever presented them. One, by Joseph J. Moleski,
tosses off a parenthetical comment that takes studies of technique as
"summarizing the whole of a tradition that reduces art to the
status of a mere supplement to
physis"(37). He italicizes supplement
evidently in order to have it be taken as the French for a payment added
to the price for a ticket, say, for a seat on train or in a theatre; and
physis is Greek for
"nature."
Sometimes
studies of technique are indeed studies of a merely decorative addition
to Nature. But techniques exist. Some acknowledgment of their
traditions, and the departures from them, are not irrelevant to the
study of art, but basic preliminaries to such study. For an example of
the consequences of treating "techniques" as mere side issues,
constant readers are referred to Moleski's essays in
Critical Approaches to O'Neill to make their own judgments.
The
following essays attempt to satisfy a need for an approach to plays in
general and O'Neill's work in particular in terms of stage technique.
Specialists in theatre will find these observations in some places to
seem like preaching to the converted. But specialists in other fields of
literature, some of whom are now faced with the necessity of teaching
O'Neill as a part of American literature, have not found them so
obvious, indeed, have written as if utterly innocent of some of the
basic conditions under which and for which plays are written. However,
it is of no use to theorize about how theatrical criticism
"should" be written. The better plan instead is simply to
"do" it.
What
follows is quite modest. No study of plot, theme, or character, except
parenthetically, will emerge. No esoteric levels of refined taste are
required to use the methods exemplified. Hard work alone can duplicate
them. The essays concentrate on matters that call attention to the
freedoms and limitations of all plays, O'Neill's among them.
In
addition to O'Neill's plays I have found it instructive at several
points to compare his technique with that commended by others of his
time, by precept--as in George Pierce Baker's evident rendering of the
sort of things he said in class, in his Dramatic Technique--or by example--as in the work other playwrights
of the 'twenties, when most of the first ideas for all his subsequent
plays were committed to his notebooks.
Rather
than glancing at thirty or so plays by some twenty other writers, I have
tried, for the convenience of readers who may not be at home with this
part of American literature, to confine my comparisons to a small group
of scripts. As it happens, a paperback edition of Famous
Plays of the 1920's, edited by O'Neill's old associate, Kenneth
Macgowan, while not perfect, prints four, that, with a little crushing,
I have been able to use here.
These
essays make no attempt to dress themselves in the standard costumes and
make-up of "scholarly work." The diction is as unpretentious
as I can make it. Allusions to other scholarly work has been kept to a
minimum. None of the essays explicates a particular play; all of them
range across O'Neill's canon. The topics are not complex or difficult,
nor do they offer any refined judgments. On the contrary, they seek to
state the most basic and obvious points possible, usually ones peculiar
to drama. The essays do now and then point out how some techniques seem
peculiar to O'Neill, such as certain qualities of O'Neill's dialogue;
his management of stage movement, of entrances, exits, and
scene-endings; and, to begin with, his sets.
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