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Such a bleak and hopeless view of
life persists in O'Neill's work alongside the playwright's effort to express
the value of that life, to find what is eternal and beautiful even in the
last ditch of Harry's flea-bag hotel. S.K.Winther
believes that O'Neill is talking of himself through the mouth of the character
Loving in Days Without End.
Loving condemns the search for Truth, the determined belief in
one philosophical "ism" after another:
"He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was
true, that there is no truth for men, that human life is unimportant and
meaningless. No.
He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find an excuse for
going on!" (Winther, 284).
I do not propose to search for
O'Neill's motive in carrying on what he saw as a useless search, or even to
ask what might have fuelled his continuing quest for the divine connection
in contemporary drama. But we
can see that his fundamental convictions about the contradictory and
frustrating nature of life come straight out of the ancient world.
The analogies and allusions in O'Neill's plays to Dionysus, the god
of wine and theatre, are plentiful and vivid.
In The Great God Brown
Dion Anthony and Billy Brown are two faces of the god-of-many-names,
with Dion's name making the intended incarnation plain as the proverbial
nose. One can see resemblances
to the divine patterns of the seasonal worship of Dionysus in the cycles of
sacrifice in Strange Interlude;
and the analogy between drunken oblivion and transformation of
identity in The Iceman Cometh. is redolent of the ritual orgy of destruction in The
Bacchae.
And there are deeper analogies.
The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch speaks of Dionysus as the god who
always had to prove his divinity (Deutsch, 27).
Indeed, we see in Euripides' The
Bacchae , in the opening speech, Dionysus' assertion that he has come to
Thebes to refute the slander that his mother, Semele, a mortal, did not
sleep with Zeus. O'Neill himself, constantly trying to find the connection of
human life to the eternal through the theatre, constantly asserting that
connection in the face of the illusion of life (as he saw it), resembles
Dionysus on his eternal mission to assert and defend his own divinity.
While this argument is only by
analogy, it helps us understand the contradiction between O'Neill's
persistence and pessimism: they
are necessary to each other. Without
the pessimism there would be no need for the persistence.
To make stronger use of the
analogy, it is important to take a closer look at the complex character of
Dionysus. Walter F. Otto speaks
of Dionysus as "the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most
enraptured love. But he was
also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all whom he loved,
all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate" (Otto, 49).
As Dionysus was torn apart by the Titans, so his Maenads tear apart
everything they catch in their ecstatic orgies, and themselves are sometimes
their own victims. Dionysus
undergoes this same fate again and again, dying in agony and being reborn in
ecstasy every year. Otto also
speaks of Dionysus, the foreigner (52) who came to Greek soil from Asia
minor, as "The God who Comes."
He actually appears, in body, as he does in The
Bacchae , and disappears again. When
he does come, his appearance is always urgent and compelling.
His followers, in ecstasy, testify to his nearness by his possession
of them (79-85).
Dionysus is many-formed, a god of
many names, and a seat of ambiguity. He
is masculine and feminine. As
Deutsch points out, he was mothered by Zeus who rescued him as an embryo
from the dying Semele. His
father is his mother, while his father's wife, Hera, is a constant, jealous
bane to him. The ambiguity of
his birth is reflected in his hermaphroditism.
Dionysus appears everywhere in ambiguous sexual form (Deutsch, 19). In The Bacchae
he is a pretty blonde boy. His
rites are celebrated solely by women, avatars of the possessed Semele,
burned, consumed, by the passion of Zeus.
Dionysus' pretty face stands in startling contradiction to the
enormity of his power. To
affirm his divinity, Deutsch argues, he destroys his mother's past mortality
by destroying the domestic world that once enslaved her (Deutsch, 27).
Marcel Detienne argues that Dionysus turns into wild animals only
those who resist him, throwing them into more direct contact with the
superhuman (Detienne, 62-3). Like
Pentheus in The Bacchae , if they are caught by Maenads (themselves wild
animals), they will be torn limb from limb.
We should also remember that
Dionysus is the god of comedy as well as tragedy.
The faces he reveals as the comic god are as relevant to O'Neill's
work as the tragic masks. It is
in Aristophanes' The Frogs
that we get the closest look at the comic dimensions of the god.
Lois Spatz points out that in this play Dionysus is also Iachus, god
of mysteries. "It is he
who leads the sacred procession from Athens to Demeter's shrine at
Eleusis." The combination
of the two gods offered to everyone, including women and slaves, "the
opportunity to become initiates into a cult which promised a blessed
afterlife" (Spatz, 120). Demeter,
whose sylvan glades promised the peace of exhaustion after the hunt, whose
own masculine femininity also sought to put to rest, somehow, the tension of
sexual identity, is present in Nina, the hunter-priestess in Strange
Interlude , finding the final peace of the forest in the ancient
clearing which is her father's old study, the place where the play begins. And Iachus is present in Hickey in The Iceman Cometh as he
leads the procession out of the bar into the redeeming forest of the city,
in which pipe dreams will be shed, guilt will drop away, and peace will
descend.
Spatz also points out that in The
Frogs the choice Dionysus must make
between playwrights, between Aeschylus and Euripides, is a choice
between the past and the present (129).
Dionysus, like O'Neill, chooses the past. The values of Athens, in deep trouble in its corruption and
its imminent defeat by Sparta, may not be worth saving. However, The Frogs
remains comic in spirit, and the city itself is seen as immortal,
finding finally a "triumph over death itself."
This, says Spatz, is the "ultimate wish fulfillment for city and
individual alike" (130). Again
the analogy to Hickey's quest is irresistible.
He has chosen to confirm the values of the past in finding rest in
the present. Evelyn's virtue
and her illusions about Hickey are preserved, as is Hickey's sense that he
had some power to preserve them. And
the rotting pipe dreams, eating away at each of the denisons of Harry's bar,
are seen as obstacles to peace. They
are "those dammed tomorrow dreams which keep you from making peace with
yourself" (The Iceman Cometh,
189). The return is to
yesterday. And the city, as
Hickey would walk out into it, "tomorrow dreams" shed forever,
becomes the eternal sylvan glade, the haven of peace.
The tragic face of Hickey's
"line of salvation" (147) is that it seeks peace in the present by
killing the past. Hickey
complains, late in the play:
Can't
you see there is no tomorrow now? You're
rid of it forever! You've
killed it! You don't have to care a damn about anything any more!
You've finally got the game of life licked.
Don't you see that? Then
why the hell don't you get pie-eyed and celebrate?
Why don't you laugh and sing "Sweet Adeline"? (225)
Hickey's
converts, his maenads, are reluctant. The
whiskey does not seem to work. No
one can get drunk, reach ecstasy. Hickey
reveals, almost accidentally, the he has murdered Evelyn to preserve her
illusions, and to rid her of the pipe dream that he could change and be
faithful to her. The
contradiction is too much for his co-celebrants, who have enough of their
sodden minds left to discern that Hickey's sense of charity in preserving
Evelyn's dreams for her is horrifying.
The irony of Hickey's act of murder resembles the irony of Pentheus'
rational attempt to save the city of Thebes by abolishing the sacred orgy.
Hickey's Dionysian power to bring oblivious joy to Harry and his
friends is transmuted into deadly, Penthusian illusion. We see that Hickey hates Evelyn for loving him, for believing
in him, for believing in faith and loyalty, and has covered his murder of
her with his conviction that he has saved her from illusions and pipe
dreams. Hickey is suddenly a
false god, just another nasty drunk. Pentheus
hates Dionysus for inspiring the love of the maenads, and hates the maenads
for obeying Dionysus rather than him. He
rejects them and their orgy as dangers to the city.
Pentheus is ironically swallowed by the violence he rejects, which
otherwise would have passed harmlessly away.
Hickey is swallowed by the irony of his own illusions, rejected by
those he led, thrown back on his own isolation and self-hatred, condemned to
live without peace.
As Dionysus. the stranger god
from Asia, romped into the Peloponese, he brought with him the concreteness
and objective potency of nature that was, according to some, the great power
of classical Greek religion. Curtis
Bennett, a "process" theologian, has extolled what he calls, in
explicit agreement with Nietzsche, a natural philosophy.
No god is responsible for our existence.
God is not removed from humanity, or from nature, but in it.
The Greeks managed to "disclose man's own place in nature, the
nature of his relation to the recurrent given elements in himself, or his
relations to the forces or circumstances outside himself..." (Bennett,
21) This sounds a lot like the
destination of serious drama, and the coincidence should not surprise us.
(It was, after all, the rites of Dionysus which became the models for
all the drama of the last two millennia.)
Bennett notes how in Pindar's works humanity and the gods are created
together. We see ourselves as a
phenomenon of the same nature in which the gods dwell.
Thus "man" has a "dramatic grasp of himself as
occurrence, and occurrence as form."
The gods also possess self-expressive power, vastly superior to
humanity's and impinging upon it. But the human apprehension of this divine expressive power is
drastically limited. Our
awareness of this ironic position in natural process, says Bennett, is for
Pindar "his simultaneous expression of the potency for form in his own
right and his spectacular helplessness within the process of his own
enactment" (22-4).
Hickey's failure in Harry's bar
is thus more than a failure of salesmanship.
It is a failure of vision and a failure of form.
Hickey sought the straight way to salvation.
Face your pipe dreams, play them out so you can expose them for what
they are and drop them. Then you won't be hung up in tomorrow, you won't give a damn
any more, and you can rest in peace. But
this, as Larry points out, is the peace of death, not of life (The
Iceman Cometh, 203). It is
the wrong form. Hickey brought
the peace of death to Evelyn and confused that with the peace of life which
Evelyn herself sought in her pipe dream.
If for Hickey that was "the only possible way" (203), it
was because Hickey had to convince himself, after the fact of his murder of
Evelyn, that he had acted out of love rather than hate.
When his confession slips out that he cursed Evelyn after killing
her, he tries to get the boys in the bar to believe that he must have been
insane when he uttered the curse. This
would excuse him because it would not be his fault. It would be like the
god's insanity, the fatal cover-up, like the feminine costume Dionysus puts
on Pentheus. This is the failure of vision, the failure to understand that
the gods, through shrouded in the irony of their mystery, are part of the
same nature that we are. Hickey's
cravenness cannot be their "fault."
It is the ugly, tortured young
man, Parritt, who makes it most clear to everyone what it is that Hickey has
really said about himself. Parritt
is preoccupied with himself. But
his occasional outbursts to Larry gradually reveal that he has managed to
listen carefully enough to Hickey's sermons to learning something from them.
Just before Hickey blurts out his own curse, Parritt is talking about
his anarchist mother and his own betrayal of her by turning her into the
police. Expressing what O'Neill
calls "exhausted relief," he confesses, "There's no use lying
any more. You know, anyway.
I didn't give a damn about the money.
It was because I hated her."
Then comes Hickey's recital of his curse (as O'Neill says in the
stage direction, "as if he couldn't believe he heard what he had just
said"): "Well, you
know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch!"
In the next line Parritt disclaims his own confession, excusing his
action by parroting Hickey's own disclaimer:
"Yes, that's it! Her
and the damned old Movement pipe dream!
Eh, Larry?" (242).
Parritt's desperate plea for
justification makes the falsehood of Hickey's pleading overwhelmingly
obvious. Like Pentheus, a
self-willed savior, Hickey convinces himself he must destroy to save.
He does so, and is himself, echoing the annual agony of the god,
destroyed.
As Hickey is carried away by the
police, the liquor magically recovers its power to produce intoxication, and
the peace of pipe dreams once again settles on the old hotel.
The god is gone. The human Hickey has met his limits. His hubris is unmasked and the limits of his mere humanity,
against the enormity of the gods, are revealed.
The structure of O'Neill's play
reinforces this view from the beginning.
Hickey is at first the object of expectation. When is he going to come?
He will bring the blessed relief ("The connection," as Jack
Gelber was later to frame it) of an alcoholic celebration.
The orgy, like all orgies, will be self-limiting, but, like all
genuine rites, gratifying and fulfilling.
While Hickey's own identity is transformed by the denisons of the
bar, transmuted into the saving god bringing the ecstasy of his periodic
worship, he also transforms others. He begins the process by transmuting each of the regulars
into peaceful beings. He also
transforms himself, selling himself to us as the god incarnate, peace
achieved and life mastered, even including
the final and most impressive of divine qualities--indifference: he won't "give a damn" again. In the meantime, his human qualities are emphasized.
He keeps trying to ingratiate himself with his old friends as he
pushes them to annihilate their pipe dreams.
Like him, they could have "a ton of guilt lifted off" their
minds (241). He is both the
leader of the ritual and bringer of comfort.
Every six months he descends on Harry's place bringing the joy of
celebration, the bliss of inebriation, and the blessing of good fellowship
with repeated ritual storytelling. He
leads the ceremony, a succinctly Dionysian rite, going from joy to
intoxication to exhaustion to oblivion.
There are more resemblances
between Hickey's death rite and Pentheus' entrapment in the orgy of the
Theban women. Pentheus also has
his identity transformed by the hubris of power.
In thinking himself strong and pure, he not only passes himself off
as a woman (the effeminacy and dishonesty of the disguise being a disgrace),
but also becomes a spy. Hickey
passes himself off as a friend and fellow traveler who will purge Harry's
patrons of their guilt, lighten their load, and bring them the Truth, the
peace of indifference. Pentheus
seeks to restore the Truth of the gods, to return his city to the sensible,
peaceful worship of the Olympians. In
neither case is the conversion welcomed.
And in both cases the conversions are deceptions.
In the case of Pentheus, the deception appears at first to be the
god's. Dionysus, disguised in
the likeness of a swish young boy, convinces Pentheus it would be a good
idea to disguise himself as a woman and spy on the Maenads.
Pentheus agrees. Ironically,
Pentheus in disguise, with his wig of blonde curls, looks a lot like
Dionysus (The Bacchae , 233).
Then Dionysus tells us that Pentheus would never do this if he were
sane (l. 850 ff.), just as Hickey would have us believe about himself.
Could it be that O'Neill, unlike the regulars at Harry's, really
believes Hickey? If so, is the
insanity the agency of a god? If
not, what is the life that brought Hickey to this pass?
Is it only meaningless and sad beyond words, or is it the substance
of tragedy, the seat of those choices that bring us most pain, that destroy
our lives.
Near the end of The Bacchae , after he has declared that "Justly--too, too
justly, has lord Bromius, this god of our own blood, destroyed us all, every
one" (l. 1250), Cadmus is able to see only the bleakest of futures,
hemmed in by Dionysus' own prophesy of what fate has decreed will happen:
"Never shall my sufferings end; not even over Acheron shall I
have peace" (l. 1360-1). It
is Cadmus, looking absurd in fawn-skin and thrysus, the very man who tried
in vain to show his son Pentheus that Dionysus was the way, whose task it
now is to bring Pentheus' mother Agave around to sanity, and show her the
horrible thing she has done in tearing to bits her own son.
One senses in the never-to-be-seen Evelyn the ghost of Agave, under
permanent illusion of the virtue of her own behavior.
The change O'Neill seems to have wrought from ancient times to now is
the absence of the horrible revelation, that Cadmus and Agave were granted.
The "god of our own blood" is now simply our own blood.
Illusion, for O'Neill, is now not only permanent but necessary. If the god is gone, the best we can do is pathetically invent
him. The greatness of the
horrible fate which the Greeks could mourn is mourned in O'Neill for its
absence. An embittered life is
condemned to continue the unspeakably endless search for value in the
wasteland, a kind of hell on earth.
In The
Bacchae , Dionysus causes an earthquake to warn Pentheus, and even
escapes from it through disappearance, as if by magic, to show Pentheus that
he just might not be an ordinary person.
But Pentheus will not see the nose before his face and is destroyed.
In O'Neill's world, the earthquake, like Nina's passion for Gordon,
like Hickey's murder of Evelyn, is in the past.
We live now not with the love but only with the condemnation of the
god, to be compelled to find tragedy where there is only pathos.
Perhaps O'Neill took as his largest subject the death of the
possibility of tragedy that others, like George Steiner, were later to
document. If, on the other
hand, this is largely an elaboration of O'Neill's personality turned out
onto the stage, that need not be seen as an excuse or an explanation for his
dramaturgy, but perhaps a way to sympathize with it and savor the richness
of his compulsively fruitless search for significance.
Works Cited
Bennett, Curits.
God as Form. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1976.
Detienne, Marcel.
Dionysus Slain, tr. Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner.
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979.
Deutsch, Helene.
A Psychoanalytic Study of the
Myth of Dionysus and Apollo.
New York, International Universities Press, 1969.
Euripides.
The Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press (Phoenix Books), 1970 (first published 1959).
Otto, Walter F.
Dionysus:
Myth and Cult (tr. Robert B. Palmer).
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1965 (originally published in
1934).
O'Neill, Eugene.
The Iceman Cometh.
New York, Random House (Vintage Books),
1962 (copyright by Eugene O'Neill, 1946).
Spatz, Lois.
Aristophanes.
Boston, Twayne Publications, 1978.
Steiner, George. The
Death of Tragedy. London,
Faber and Faber, 1961.
Törnqvist, Egil.
A Drama of Souls.
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969.
Winther, Sophus
Keith. O'Neill,
A Critical Study. New York,
Random House, 1934.
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