Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre: Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness 0367519119, 9780367519117

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Eugene O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Eugene O’Neill often characterized himself as a psychologist, asserting that “authors were psychologists…and profound ones, before psychology was invented.” Though many of O’Neill’s plays do reflect insights derived from early psychoanalytic method, contemporary students of psychology might bristle at O’Neil’s characterization of his capacity to observe and describe the human condition. It might be better to characterize the so-called Father of American Tragedy as a kind of arm-chair philosopher, and this book attempts such a task. Through a close reexamination of Eugene O’Neill’s oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O’Neill’s philosophy of tragedy, though a derivative of the larger Western approach to dramatic art, offers a unique account of why tragedy matters in today’s world. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O’Neill’s work, this book argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is a robust description of the value of difficult theatre, with more explanatory scope and power than its historical counterparts. This volume enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O’Neill refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy’s merit, as most Western theorists have. He argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play not in what we learn from it, but rather in its ability to make us feel emotions that are difficult to come by in everyday experience. This book is significant for students and scholars of performance studies, literature, and philosophy. Jeremy Killian is an Instructor in the Doctor of Liberal Studies program at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA.

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Eugene O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness Jeremy Killian

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Jeremy Killian The right of Jeremy Killian to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-51911-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-51920-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05569-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

This book is dedicated to my wife, Sara Rich, without whose belief and deep love it would not have been possible, and whom I cherish beyond words, and to my daughters Zoey and Gwenyth Killian, for whom I am deeply proud.

Contents

Acknowledgment viii Introduction 1 1 Puzzle

9

2 Paradigm

25

3 Passions

47

4 Pity

75

5 Fear

90

6 Forgiveness

108

7 Paradox

127

8 Finis

153

Bibliography Index

165 175

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation entitled “A Paradox of American Tragedy: Long Day’s Journey into Night and the Problem of Negative Emotion in Theatre,” under the direction of Dr. John Gibson at the University of Louisville in 2013. Although this project has grown and changed significantly over the years, I am especially grateful for Dr. Gibson’s insight and guidance through it all. Additionally, Chapter 4 of this text, entitled “Pity,” originally appeared as “Tragedy Beyond Pity: A Nietzschean Appraisal of Exorcism,” in the Eugene O’Neill Review 39:2 (2018). It is used here with permission from the Review’s publisher, Penn State University Press. I am indebted to the editor, Alex Petit, and reviewers of this journal, not only for offering commentary on Chapter 4, but for providing an invaluable resource that has contributed significantly to this volume. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the support and love of my wife, Sara Rich, my daughters, Zoey and Gwenyth, and our beloved pups Keema and Nanook.Without you all I could not have done any of this.

Introduction

The granddaughter of the Pottawatomie “princess” Ho-no-ne-gah1 took the playwright’s hand one evening in December 1927 and offered to tell his fortune. The playwright, 39-year-old Eugene O’Neill, soon to be regarded as the father of modern American theatre, obliged, and he was stunned at the reading. The Palmist was Bio De Casseres, socialite and wife of the prominent journalist Benjamin De Casseres, and she revealed things about O’Neill’s present and future that she should not have been able to know. Though Mrs. De Casseres believed herself gifted in palmistry, even she was shocked at what she later described as an “inner-illumination” she experienced during the reading. She revealed to O’Neill that he would never return to Bermuda, where he had been living with his wife and children for the past two years, and that he had met another woman who he would soon marry. In addition to prophesying that O’Neill would live another 25 years,2 Mrs. De Casseres described that his plays would be successful, telling him that “You are not a poet, you are a psychologist.You explore.You uncover the root of things.”3 O’Neill likely was flattered by De Casseres’ description of his psychological aptitude, as he regarded himself as an “intuitively keen analytical psychologist.”4 O’Neill assumed that in order to be any good, playwrights and novelists have to adopt the mindset of a Freudian analyst to portray rich and interesting characters worthy of an audience’s attention. He once wrote to Barrett Clark that “authors were psychologists, you know, and profound ones, before psychology was invented.”5 Many of O’Neill’s critics certainly appreciate the characterization of O’Neill as a psychoanalyst, and much has been written about O’Neill’s debt to Freudian and Jungian theories of consciousness. However, readers familiar with contemporary psychology would likely bristle at O’Neill’s self-assessment; psychology as a discipline has become a rigorous scientific enterprise, its findings validated by controlled trials and statistical analysis, and playwrighting seems a poor medium through which one might arrive at “truths” about human behavior and motivation. In O’Neill’s day, psychology, at least the sort of psychology with which O’Neill was familiar—that of Jung, Freud, and Bergson, for example—much more closely resembles philosophy than a scientific discipline. It is this insight that animates the analysis that follows in this book. In what follows, I cast O’Neill as a kind of philosopher—a philosopher of the theatre, and of human nature, and I suggest that many of O’Neill’s plays might be regarded as a mode of philosophical writing. To those who know O’Neill’s work, DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-1

2 Introduction such an approach might seem appealing: many have noticed in O’Neill a curiosity about the world befitting a philosopher. However, such an approach is fraught for at least two reasons: first of all, and most broadly, philosophical writing has traditionally been distinguished from writing that might be characterized as literary fiction. Plato, for example, cautions his students against “adopting a new kind of poetry and music, for this endangers the whole system.”6 By system, Plato is referring to a philosophical system, and though many philosophers have moved away from Plato on a variety of points, one need not look far to discover philosophers worrying similarly about characterizing fiction as philosophy. Drawing from the critiques of Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stephen Watson points out that “philosophy is built upon particular classificatory schema and strategies—those regarding the differentiation and exclusion of the false, the imaginary, the fictional,” while the foundation of most artistic literature is the false, the imaginary, and the fictional.7 With these fundamental features a necessary component of literary art, it seems perplexing to describe a play or novel as “philosophical” insofar as that term connotes a disclosure of truth through reasoned analysis. When we refer to a work of fiction as “philosophical,” often all we mean is that it invites the reader to consider big ideas. This sense of the word certainly applies to the work of Eugene O’Neill, as some of his celebrated plays attempt to involve, at least in part, a critique of some fundamental feature of the world. For example, The Hairy Ape appears to be an exploration of how capitalism grinds individuals beneath its cogs; Dynamo, though technically problematic, is a discourse on the effects of technology in a godless universe; Days Without End looks to be a critique of Western atheism. Each of these plays has a theme one might regard as philosophical; however, it is difficult to characterize them as offering a keen analysis of these themes as one might expect from philosophical writing. This exposes the second challenge one might face in regarding O’Neill’s works philosophically. Even those works which appear to examine significant phenomena in the world—phenomena such as religion, consciousness, class struggle, and the limits of reason—do not seem to offer much original insight into these phenomena. Often, in his plays, O’Neill seems to simply vamp on profound ideas in his zeitgeist to which most of the intelligentsia of his day had been exposed. Many—if not most—of his plays offer an exploration of big ideas while rarely producing original insight that might not have been gained more effectively elsewhere. Cyrus Day said that O’Neill may be said to have thought emotionally, or—to put it the other way—to be profoundly moved by ideas. He was an artist and not a philosopher, but he asked himself ultimate questions…and gave them emotional expression in his plays.8 Day’s sentiment affirms the problem with regarding O’Neill as a philosopher, as O’Neill was an “artist.” Running parallel to the line of criticism that claims O’Neill is “not a thinker,” as Barrett Clark puts it, is the claim that O’Neill—though widely hailed as

Introduction 3 America’s preeminent playwright—does not deserve the claims to artistic greatness that have been foisted upon him. Many of O’Neill’s plays struggle both thematically and technically, and many critics have agreed with Clive Barnes that O’Neill is “the world’s worst great playwright.”9 While most critics do hail the magnificence of The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, even these works suffer from technical deficiencies that can render them unwatchable if not in the hands of the right cast and crew. Though I appreciate and largely agree with both these lines of critique, I still have a nagging feeling that there is something seminal in the work of Eugene Gladstone O’Neill. Though I cannot exactly determine how, it seems to me that American drama would not have evolved as it has without his work, and when I watch performances of O’Neill’s works, I have the intuition that I am touching greatness, both intellectually and aesthetically.This book is borne out of the puzzle that emerges as my intellectual study of O’Neill is challenged by my experience of his plays in the theatre.

The research method This book is an examination of O’Neill from an interdisciplinary standpoint. As with most discussions of O’Neill, I draw heavily from insights that theatre history, literary studies, and critical theory have to offer in order to interpret the playwright’s work. Additionally, I integrate frameworks and concepts from contemporary philosophy of literature, emotion, and ethics to shed new light on O’Neill’s work. Consistent with the widespread tradition within philosophical aesthetics, when I utilize philosophical methods, I draw from both the continental and analytic traditions, as I believe both of these approaches are illuminative and constructive for the purposes of such a discussion of O’Neill. Because I hope that this book appeals to scholars from each of the disciplines represented above, I believe it helpful for me to briefly describe these fields of study so that readers from outside the disciplines might appreciate how these fields differ in approach and methodology. Literary studies, as a discipline, is concerned with the analysis of written texts, particularly those texts which are the products of human creativity.Typically, scholars working in literary studies examine the phenomena of the development and examination of creative works of the written word.10 Generally, truth claims are drawn from the texts being analyzed; a statement counts as “true” from a given text if it supported by a close reading of the written word under scrutiny.Textual critics assume that important cultural and social information can be gleaned from the reading of literary texts, and that the job of the interpreter is to derive “meaning” from literature. As a methodology, scholars in this field closely read literary texts noting devices and techniques that inform an overall reading of texts. For the purposes of this project, the sub-discipline of literary studies referred to as Historicism is especially relevant. New Historicism is “a method based upon the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period.” Historicists assume that to best understand a literary work, one must examine other non-literary works of art and culture to inform that reading.11 Historicists assume that “every aspect of culture is textualized,” which means that

4 Introduction it is impossible to read a text outside its socio-cultural context.12 The reason New Historicism is best applied to this research program is that so much of O’Neill’s life experience, particularly the intellectual tradition to which he was exposed, is crucial to appreciating his plays. As with all playwrights, O’Neill was a product of his time, so in this book, I attend to the artifacts from his era that inform his thinking and creative project. There is a significant limitation with respect to literary studies generally, and specifically New Historicism. Because of the nature of the disciplinary practice and the phenomenon it investigates, literary studies cannot make generalized claims about the nature of reality. There is no agreed-upon definition of objective Truth in this discipline, and the examination of texts in the mode of literary analysis is not revelatory with respect to claims about the physical and moral world. Paul Jay points out that literary theorists are becoming more aware of this limitation, and using their tools of study to explore this problem: “For one thing, recent literary theory has been generally preoccupied with examining the nature of literatures referential status—preoccupied, that is, with the asking of hard questions about the relationship between literary representations and the things represented by them.”13 Nevertheless, it is unlikely that, using only the tools offered by the discipline, literary theorists will be able to navigate this divide. In order to make the claims I defend in this text, which are broader than those literary scholars can defend within the confines of their discipline, I must turn toward philosophy. As a discipline, philosophy is concerned with examining the nature of reality through the use of reason and argument. Philosophy examines the phenomena of collected wisdom tested through contemplation and abstract thought. In Western philosophy, two broad approaches are utilized to accomplish the aims of the discipline: rationalism and empiricism. These approaches rely on unique assumptions; the rationalist assumes that the route to knowledge lies in “looking at the scaffolding of our thought and doing conceptual engineering,”14 while empiricists assume that the path to knowledge is achieved through the careful utilization of the five senses, as the natural sciences assume. Since this project relies heavily on the analysis of certain concepts, the approach utilized here will adopt rationalist assumptions about the nature of philosophical work. Regardless the approach, however, philosophers utilize a variety of methods to accomplish their work.They often employ dialectic, syllogism, contemplation, linguistic analysis, argument, and thought experiments.15 Each of these techniques is highly structured and attempts to tease complex concepts and questions. In contemporary philosophy, philosophers in the West typically refer to themselves as operating in one of two traditions apart from the empiricist/rationalist divide. In the early twentieth century, philosophers across Europe and in the Americas began to self-identify as either Analytic or Continental philosophers. This distinction might, in contemporary settings, amount merely to the philosophers a person is inclined to read and refer to, as William Blattner asserts.16 Generally, however, philosophers using these terms refer to a distinction in philosophical methodology utilized by practitioners of each style of the discipline. As the name connotes, analytic philosophers attempt to get at truth by analyzing concepts in abstraction, utilizing the tools of logic, seeking a kind of precision and

Introduction 5 clarity through the use of often pedantic language. Analytic philosophers often see themselves as more allied with the sciences than the arts and humanities, and many analytic philosophers draw heavily on mathematical theory and methodologies (such as Bayesian probability theory) utilized in science. Historically, analytic philosophers saw themselves as dividing the labor with other philosophers (as scientists do) in order to form a coherent philosophical picture of a phenomenon in the world. Continental philosophers, typically drawing from the history of European philosophical thought, often find that the analytic tradition fails to appreciate the historical situatedness of philosophical arguments. They assert that the analytic attempt to go about the practice of philosophy using “pure reason” without any cultural or historical references is naïve; everyone is a product of history, and that history must be accounted for even in philosophical analysis.17 Continental philosophers see themselves as deeply indebted to (particularly European) philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Continental work frequently refers to Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and other philosophers whose claims are large-scale and sweeping. Continental philosophy often priorities human experience over and above science, and this style often sneers at “theoretical” approaches to ethico-politico matters.18 Ethics and politics are the domain of human experience; therefore, any ethic or political theory must begin with the subject. Such an interdisciplinary approach is challenging, in that marrying several modes of inquiry requires one to narrow the focus of the phenomenon she studies. For this reason, the scope of the book is decidedly narrow, utilizing a “case-study” method to examine my hypothesis. Some of O’Neill’s plays will be left unexplored, while others will be explored in great depth. It is my hope that this book will motivate a new way of appreciating O’Neill, and I hope that this text will be merely the beginning of a philosophical examination of his oeuvre. Utilizing these distinct fields of study, I construct an account of O’Neill’s idea of theatre, particularly focused on how O’Neill’s conception of emotional life both comports with and challenges historical conceptions of tragedy. It is my contention that O’Neill’s significance as a playwright is due, in large part, to his eventual understanding and application of a methodology for playwrighting that is not situated in the examination of “great” ideas of traditional tragic significance, but in cultivating a certain set of emotions during the theatrical experience that are unique to the theatrical space. My argument unfolds in several phases, utilizing the above-described disciplinary lenses through which to view O’Neill’s work. In Chapter 1, I briefly survey the development of O’Neill’s literary career, paying special attention to how each of his plays were received by the critics and (where available) audiences alike.Though I acknowledge that O’Neill was widely hailed on the American dramatic scene, much of this chapter is devoted to critics’ concerns about the uneven quality of his work. To be sure, as O’Neill’s skills improved over time, the critical response changed accordingly, however, deeply critical voices persist to this day. It is somewhat strange, then, that O’Neill is still widely regarded as the American Master. In this chapter, I articulate the so-called language problem that dogged O’Neill with his critics, and I describe how this line of criticism leads many to conclude that O’Neill is a poor playwright, not merely because of his struggle with language, but

6 Introduction because most of his plays appear to lack universal and tangible meaning, as Western critics have come to prescribe for theatrical tragedy. In Chapter 2, I inspect the assumptions that undergird O’Neill’s negative reception. Many have regarded O’Neill not as a tragedian, but as a “melodramatist.” In order to appraise this claim, I examine what distinguishes melodrama from tragedy, and why the West has privileged the latter over the former. When one examines this distinction as defined by the critics of O’Neill’s era, one finds a familiar line of attack against all narrative art. The attacks on O’Neill as “not a thinker” are rooted in a Western tradition of criticism that has been described by philosophers of literature as literary cognitivism. In short, many critics (at least as far back as Plato) have assumed that literature (and art more generally) is only valuable in virtue of its capacity to teach. Through this chapter, I discuss the origins of this approach, and I argue that nearly all theorists of tragedy throughout the history of Western literary criticism have held this assumption. I argue that cognitivist approaches to tragedy are insufficient to describe its significance.Tragedy matters, not merely for what we learn from it, but because of how it makes us feel. I assert that O’Neill came to understand this as he experimented throughout his career, and though there may be cognitive benefits to be garnered from his work (especially his later work), its real power lies in cultivating a certain set of feelings that are difficult to experience in daily life. In order to appreciate this argument, one ought to understand how O’Neill conceived of and utilized emotions within his playwrighting. I turn to this in Chapter 3, entitled “Passions.” Through an analysis of many of O’Neill’s early and mid-career works, I situate his view of the nature of emotional life within the context of contemporary philosophical work on feelings. I demonstrate that while O’Neill is no philosopher or psychologist of emotion, he was influenced by several thinkers (namely Freud and Bergson) that shaped his own view of the how emotions are related to cognition. In a reading of the understudied Lazarus Laughed, I argue that O’Neill conceives of emotion as the result of often unconscious drives that can disclose features of the world previously unexplored by the person who experiences the emotion. Chapter 4 is an examination of the concept of pity. Aristotle has famously asserted that tragedy’s telos is the “purgation” of fear and pity, and in this chapter, I tease out O’Neill’s understanding of pity as it manifests itself in the early (and weak) Exorcism. I demonstrate that O’Neill, following his teacher Friedrich Nietzsche, is critical of pity because it is an emotion that is condescending and distancing; however, he does not appear to use his plays as a mechanism to purge pity. Unlike Aristotle, O’Neill does not regard pity as a positive emotion (so long as it is controlled), and much of his work can be read as a critique of pity. In keeping with the Aristotelian conception of tragedy, I next turn my attention to O’Neill’s study of fear as it manifests itself in The Emperor Jones. Many interpreters of the play have fixated on its Post-Colonial features and its problematic relationship to race, but few have appreciated the role that fear (especially a conception of fear drawn from Carl Jung) plays in the impact of the play. I argue that in Emperor, O’Neill discovered something important about the power of horror to encourage an audience not to maintain an interpretive distance from onstage

Introduction 7 action, but instead to mirror the emotions of the characters playing out their fates onstage. This feature of Emperor informs how O’Neill constructs later plays and is particularly relevant to my reading of Long Day’s Journey into Night, as we will later see. O’Neill’s plays, if Cyrus Day is to be believed, thrive in the realm of emotion, and in Chapter 6, I consider the way O’Neill’s view of emotion impacts his understanding of forgiveness. In the preface to Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill asserts that the play was motivated by a sense that he must “face my dead at last… with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for the four haunted Tyrones.”19 This deeply biographical play was the product of O’Neill’s understanding of and desire for forgiveness; however, his final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, is a case study in the nature of forgiveness. In this chapter, I argue that O’Neill’s conception of forgiveness is deeply tied to his view of the centrality of emotion. Once one appreciates O’Neill’s description of forgiveness, she can begin to appreciate that O’Neill’s approach to difficult theatre reflects a desire for interpersonal community that theatre has the capacity to generate. If O’Neill’s greatness lies in a non-cognitive conception of tragedy, then it is important to consider the nature of the tragic effect on our emotions. Chapter 7 describes the so-called Paradox of Tragedy, a problem that has concerned philosophers of art as far back as at least David Hume. How is it that people can enjoy theatrical performances that generate objectionable emotions? What motivates us to pursue art that arouses fear, pity, and disgust, when we spend a good deal of effort attempting to avoid those emotions in our daily lives? If one can understand this phenomenon, I contend that she can appreciate why O’Neill’s plays matter. The final chapter of this book demonstrates that O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night can be read as a discourse on the value of tragedy, as internally it demonstrates a truth about the nature of suffering in the world; suffering unifies us. I also argue that the effect of the play on an audience validates this view of difficult theatre. Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche, I demonstrate that for O’Neill, difficult theatre offers us an opportunity to experience a brief but powerful feeling of solidarity with those who have attended the performance with us, and this is why O’Neill matters. O’Neill’s plays may or may not teach us deep truths about the nature of life and living, but they are designed to cultivate an emotion of solidarity, via the arousal of negative emotional states.The presence of fear and pity in tragedy demonstrates the problem that forgiveness attempts to rectify: isolation. Through his career, O’Neill has stumbled upon a vehicle that also might rectify isolation, albeit briefly: difficult theatre. In a radically isolating world, opportunities to experience even fleeting moments of community are rare, and the crisis of isolation that Modernists worried about at the fin de siècle has, in my estimation, only worsened since the nineteenth century. The decline of both secular and sacred community gatherings and commitments among Westerners certainly contributes to this crisis, and the frenetic and tribal politics prevalent in the twenty-first century appears to be a symptom of an unmet need for community. If I am correct in the claims I make about why theatre matters, particularly the difficult theatre championed by the likes of Eugene O’Neill, perhaps there is a remedy for this malaise.

8 Introduction

Notes 1 Marge Kuehlthau, “Indian Princess Kin Leaves Legacy to UA,” Tucson Daily Citizen, September 6, 1964. 2 Each of these premonitions were true, as it turned out. 3 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper Brothers, 1962), 640. 4 Ibid., 577. 5 Qtd. in Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York: Dover Publications, 1947), 136. 6 Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube, in The Complete Works of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 1056. 7 Stephen Watson, “The Philosopher’s Text,” in Literature as Philosophy/Philosophy as Literature, edited by Donald G. Marshall (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 42. 8 Cyrus Day, “Amor Fati: O’Neill’s Lazarus as Superman and Savior,” Modern Drama 3:3 (Fall 1960), 297. 9 Qtd. In Zander Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2001), 2. 10 Allen Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publishing, 2012), 107. 11 Peter Berry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 166. 12 Ibid., 173. 13 Paul Jay, “What’s the Use? Critical Theory and the Study of Autobiography,” Biography 10:1 (Winter 1987), 44. 14 Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4. 15 Allen Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 137. 16 William Blattner, “Some Thoughts About ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ Philosophy,” Georgetown University Website, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/contanalytic. html. 17 James Chase and Jack Reynolds, Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Method and Value of Philosophy (Montreal: Mogil-Queens University Press, 2014), 3. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).

1 Puzzle

In July of 1956, the opening performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night “exploded like a dazzling skyrocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals.”1 Such superlatives reverberated through the press, with Brooks Atkinson proclaiming that with the release of the previously sealed play, “American theatre acquires size and stature.”2 Though Long Day’s Journey into Night was not the last play Eugene O’Neill wrote during his lifetime, this play, produced for New York audiences three years after his death, seemed his magnum opus, the culminating dramatic work for which all his other plays had prepared the way.The above accolades foisted upon Long Day’s Journey could doubtless be used by many to describe the impact O’Neill’s body of work writ large had on the American theatre. It seems uncontroversial to claim that Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, son of a romantic actor renowned for melodramatic performances of The Count of Monte Cristo, set a new, grand trajectory for American theatre, resisting the temptations of “The Great Trite Way,” instead forging an American tragic voice that altered the course of American—and perhaps global—theatrical history. There is a mythology that has sprung up about O’Neill’s work as America’s premier dramatist, akin to the mythology of the American dream. This myth, described by Michael Wikander in “Eugene O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity,” predicts that with hard work and “sheer force of character,”3 a man can overcome his limitations and achieve greatness. According to many critics, the story of O’Neill’s own greatness follows this pattern, and this myth animates how critics have come to see O’Neill’s many personal and literary failures. O’Neill’s canon is very mixed in terms of quality, with many of his plays derivative and plodding, exhibiting a “clumsiness of language,” and a “reliance upon pop-psychology and resynthesized versions of ancient myth.”4 It appears that within O’Neill’s body of work, his moments of brilliant playwrighting actually serve as the exception and not the rule. Many of his plays verge on hackneyed Romanticism, and even late masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night have significant technical deficiencies. Theatre historian Joseph Wood Krutch observes that “to a very unusual degree, O’Neill exhibits both astonishing virtues and limitations which would be painfully obvious even in a much lesser writer.”5 To be fair, all who experiment, as O’Neill did, with the limits of theatrical performance within their time will likely find failure more often than success, but the reception of O’Neill’s work is remarkable in that critics are willing to overlook so much failure in characterizing him as America’s foremost dramatist. DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-2

10 Puzzle Krutch is an early defender of what one might refer to as the “emergence narrative” of O’Neill’s talent: the narrative that describes O’Neill as realizing his genius through hard work and persistence. Of O’Neill, Krutch remarks that the history of his development is the history of a persistent, sometimes fumbling attempt to objectify his emotions, accompanied by a persistent hope that this or that opening suggested by some intellectual faction would provide the opportunity for which he felt the need.6 Many O’Neill commentators have seen O’Neill’s dramatic experimentation along the lines Krutch suggested, and perhaps this explains why these critics have adopted the emergent narrative, seeing even his weakest plays as stepping stones in the development of his stronger works. To be sure, this charitable approach to interpreting O’Neill has its advantages; however, it does not serve to explain away how O’Neill has come to be regarded as the father of American drama. Perhaps O’Neill’s defenders merely lionize him because his own (albeit limited) successes map onto the conception Americans have of themselves as on the verge of greatness if only for the effort. O’Neill stayed true to himself, the story goes, and in the end, that steadfast sincerity and commitment to the work fashioned his genius. While this may be a favorable way to understand O’Neill’s success, it remains unclear how he ought to be regarded as America’s foremost dramatist. The puzzle deepens when one contrasts O’Neill’s work with the great playwrights America has produced in its brief recorded theatrical history. Since O’Neill began experimenting with dramatic expression in 1916 with the Provincetown Players, American giants have expanded dramatic form in significant and powerful ways.Tony Kushner, Susan Glaspell, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and many others have made significant contributions to the American theatrical experience, yet for some reason O’Neill retains his status as The American Tragedian. Given the uneven quality of O’Neill’s writing throughout his career, the esteem with which he is regarded does seem strange. This phenomenon is not lost on O’Neill’s critics, many of whom seem altogether mystified by his veneration in the American theatrical tradition. One possible explanation for O’Neill’s lasting significance in American theatrical history is simply that he was the first successful American playwright to attempt to write plays of broader impact than Broadway box-office returns. Perhaps the reason O’Neill is so highly regarded has little to do with the quality of his work as compared to those who followed him, but more to do with the fact that he was one of the first American playwrights to attempt to write serious theatrical literature that would rival literature performed on European stages. Such a conception of O’Neill is a bit of a caricature, to be sure, as there were other important American playwrights with similar ambition making important contributions to the stage, but often caricature lies at the heart of myth, and the myth of Eugene O’Neil as America’s foremost playwright is a formidable and lasting one. The purpose of this book is not necessarily to offer a defense of O’Neill’s standing, but this puzzle will animate how we come to understand the true value of O’Neill’s work.

O’Neill and America’s young theatre O’Neill’s legend grew as the American theatre grew, perhaps because he was so closely acquainted with it, as his family history was tied to America’s theatrical

Puzzle 11 industry. O’Neill was deeply familiar with Broadway’s commercial influence upon theatrical art, as his father James had made his name and fortune in what had become an almost entirely commercialistic theatrical industry in the United States. James O’Neill’s personal success preceded the era of Broadway domination, but he profited from its expanding influence throughout his career. The story of “modern” American theatre really begins at the turn of the twentieth century, although its roots can be traced from the late 1800s. In the decades before the Civil War, nearly every major American city had at least one resident stock company,7 but by the end of the 1800s, that system had largely eroded, so that playhouses in the United States almost exclusively hosted traveling shows. These touring groups were referred to as combinations, and they were organized around one or more stars. Combinations had ready access to towns and cities across the country because 130,000 new miles of track had been added by expanding railroad companies between the years of 1860–1880.8 This system is what allowed James O’Neill, the star of the colossally successful theatrical adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, to make a small fortune by performing in only one production throughout most of his career. This system was financed by large monopolies of theatre owners and producers, and “plays that appealed to conventional tastes and were likely to be profitable took precedence over innovation, experimentation, and literary merit.”9 Eugene was born in a New York hotel in 1888, during one of James’ touring seasons, and before he was sent to boarding school and for several seasons as a young adult, he traveled extensively with his mother and father as James performed the lead role in Count. By the time O’Neill began writing plays, the American theatrical scene was almost entirely relegated to New York. Daniel Watermeier remarks, “Indeed, ‘Broadway’ and ‘American theatre’ had become synonymous terms.”10 Because of rising production costs and other factors, the “star” model of touring shows diminished, and most theatre appeared on Broadway. Plays on Broadway were financed in the same way the touring combinations had been funded. The lion’s share of productions that appeared on Broadway during this time were backed by large conglomerates apparently more concerned about profit than artistic integrity. As a result, sentimental and melodramatic plays such as Peg O’ My Heart, Abie’s Irish Rose, and The Count of Monte Cristo dominated the Broadway theatrical scene, making investors a great deal of profit and providing audiences exciting but rarely challenging theatrical experiences. The plays performed were familiar, thrilling, and mostly conventional, and audiences consumed such experiences in great numbers. Though American theatre was dominated by the influence of Broadway’s commercialized approach, there were numerous members of the industry who were concerned about Broadway’s artistic trajectory. Serious actors, critics, and playwrights often spoke out against the cultural trend toward commercial, “popular” entertainment to the detriment of “legitimate” theatrical production, but their voices were largely stymied by the power of the monopolies and audience reception of Broadway’s repertory. William Winter, perhaps the most prominent American theatre critic of his day, mourned that theatre had moved away “from the hands either of Actors who love and honor their art or of men endowed with the temperament of the Actor and acquainted with the art and its needs.”11 While

12 Puzzle serious dramatic artists such as Zoë Atkins, Ethel Barrymore, Clyde Fitch, and Edward Sheldon were represented on Broadway, few of their plays saw significant theatrical success compared to plays such as Abie’s Irish Rose,Tobacco Road, Abraham Lincoln, and The Gold Diggers. In this context, O’Neill began his earliest experiments in 1912 with a naturalistic, “European” theatrical style influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg, a style that sharply contrasted the work of most of his contemporaries in the States. Failing to appreciate the European influence on O’Neill’s style, critic Barrett Clark claimed that O’Neill’s voice was “uniquely American,” and his plays rejected many of the dramatic devices of the era in favor of an authentic and sincere depiction of life as he saw it. When reflecting upon the promise of the young playwright’s second volume of plays, Clark wrote that O’Neill “never seeks to construct an effective vehicle for a star.”12 Most of O’Neill’s earliest plays depicted characters with whom he was familiar because of his time as a merchant seaman: drunks, derelicts, prostitutes, and down-on-their-luck sailors—characters on the fringes of modern society. These characters spoke in the direct, unvarnished, and vulgar language that O’Neill had heard on the high seas and in ports around the Atlantic between 1909 and 1912. The coarse, realistic style of O’Neill’s sea plays was out of step with the melodramatic, Romantic prose that dominated Broadway stages, and had it not been for the experimental and avant-garde group formed by George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915, it is unlikely that O’Neill’s plays would have graced the boards of any American theatre. Aside from a short course of study with George Pierce Baker at Harvard in 1914, O’Neill had no formal training in playwrighting, and part of his experimental style was probably borne out of determining in real time what worked in theatrical performance, and what did not.The Provincetown Players’ theatrical troupe provided the young playwright a venue for his experiments and also a vehicle for “breaking through” in New York, as the Players moved from Massachusetts to Greenwich Village for the fall season of 1916, where they staged several of his plays. These productions began to receive critical attention and raised O’Neill’s profile as an interesting up-and-coming writer, and his earliest plays received largely warm reviews in New York papers. Louis Sherwin claimed in 1918 that no other young playwright working in American theatre had more promise that O’Neill, for O’Neill knew not only how “people of the sea” spoke, but “what they feel and hope and how destiny mocks their pathetic ambitions.”13 As with his one-act plays, O’Neill’s first successful full-length play—a play for which he was awarded the newly founded Pulitzer Prize—was acclaimed for bringing authentic and sincere language to Broadway. One reviewer reported that unlike typical Broadway fare, Beyond the Horizon (staged in 1920 at the Morosco Theatre), did not deal with “saccharinish sentiment” but instead gave voice to a new American tragic style, a display of the wasted lives and dashed hopes of ordinary people with uniquely American ambitions.14 Critics recognized that O’Neill did not employ the theatrical techniques and tricks of his contemporaries, and more than one worried that lack of “lowbrow” audience enthusiasm would cause the play to close without receiving the recognition and veneration it deserved.15 There was a sense among critics that though O’Neill’s work was emotionally difficult and at times vulgar, it

Puzzle 13 was of far greater depth and power than the other plays Broadway had on offer in its Winter 1920 season, with Alexander Woollcott describing it as an “absorbing, significant, and memorable tragedy, so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest meringue.”16 Worries about the public reception of this play were unjustified, as the play ran from February to May of that year. It appeared there was some appetite for serious tragedy, and Beyond the Horizon must have seemed a sharp contrast to farcical plays such as Harbach’s No More Blondes and Feydeu’s Breakfast in Bed, running during the same season as Beyond. O’Neill’s prestige elevated in 1920, with Chris Christopherson, Exorcism, Diff’rent, and most notably The Emperor Jones premiering to mostly strong reviews and audience reception.17 The Emperor Jones was O’Neill’s first real commercial success, running for 204 performances in New York and two subsequent years on tour, driven by the powerful performance of Charles Gilpin. This play was the first major American play to cast an African American in a lead role. Emperor also marked a new direction in O’Neill’s style, away from naturalism toward expressionism; O’Neill began to conceive of the possibility of using theatrical effects and staging to induce unconventional audience responses as we will later see. O’Neill was not the first playwright to incorporate the psychology of the unconscious in American theatre, as Theodore Dreiser had attempted in Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916); however, Emperor Jones deployed Freudian and Jungian concepts in a way not seen on the American stage. The play’s psychological introspection was wed to a violent racial history in the life of a complicated hero, and imaginative staging techniques were deployed to represent the protagonist’s fraying mental state. It was novel and engaging for audiences and critics alike, which led to its marked success. In 1922, O’Neill earned another Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie, a reimagination of the story told in Chris Christopherson. Anna Christie is far less experimental in terms of form than The Emperor Jones, but like Beyond the Horizon, it told an unconventional story compared to other plays produced on Broadway during the ’21 season. In Anna Christie, O’Neill had brought the prostitutes and drunkards first inhabiting his one-acts to the hub of the American theatrical scene, portraying people from the fringes of society with realism, empathy, and interest. Though this play met with some critical resistance because of its more-or-less conventional “happy ending,” it was still regarded as a notable step forward both in American drama and O’Neill’s development as a playwright. Burns Mantle described that “for sheer realism, stripped to its ugly vitals, ‘Anna Christie’ is the finest work Eugene O’Neill has done. Take it or leave it, you will have to admit that.”18 Anna Christie also represented a growing tolerance in American theatrical tastes; previous productions of plays about prostitutes (G.B. Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, for example) had been shut down on obscenity charges, but Anna Christie was warmly received.19 O’Neill would not always be on the friendly side of the censors, however, as later plays such as All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Strange Interlude would incite public and political ire and sometimes outright bans in conservative cities such as Boston. Because of the stories he sought to tell, O’Neill found himself on the cutting edge of American dramatic progress in terms of formal and social innovation, and as is often the case in popular culture, even cries of obscenity from his detractors seemed to elevate his standing.

14 Puzzle Throughout the 1920s, O’Neill not only produced plays that tested the boundaries of naturalism and expressionism but also the boundaries of the forms and content Broadway would bear. His unconventional 1922 hit The Hairy Ape was an exploration of labor politics and the dehumanization of individuals in modernity through the exploited tools of expressionist theatre to achieve its ends. While no notable American playwrights were employing such theatrical tools, O’Neill did not create the style out of whole cloth; instead, he was likely borrowing from German expressionists such as Karel Capek and Elmer Rice to tell a story of the alienation of mechanized, modern society. The Hairy Ape was O’Neill’s first foray into the utilization of theatrical masks for effect, portraying the upper crust of Fifth Avenue as “gaudy marionettes”20 wholly unaware of and absolutely untouched by the plight, or even the existence, of the working class. The play opened at the Playwright’s Theatre in Greenwich but was moved to Broadway because of its success as again O’Neill was hailed as the most imaginative playwright of his time. Woollcott reflected that The Hairy Ape demonstrated that O’Neill stood “towering so conspicuously above the milling, mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all.”21 In addition to exploring classical techniques such as masks in contemporary theatre, O’Neill would explore the possibilities of presenting classical storylines in his works. One success O’Neill saw in bringing a Greek tragedy to life was 1924’s Desire Under the Elms. Desire sets events similar to those one finds in the myths of Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Medea in the context of 1850s New England farm culture.The success of Desire would inform O’Neill’s most significant classical adaptation, 1931’s Mourning Becomes Electra. In Desire, the protagonist Eben Cabot is seduced by his father’s third wife Abbie, and she bears Eben’s son.To prove that she had not merely seduced him as a part of a plan to steal the Eben’s birthright, but that she actually loves him, Abbie murders her child in the horrifying climax of the play. Critics recognized the ancient influences in Desire, but they were not nearly as enthusiastic in their reception as were audiences, whose excitement caused the play to be moved from Greenwich Village to Broadway, where it ran for another seven months after its initial run at the Playwright’s Theatre. Some have seen Desire Under the Elms as representing a shift in O’Neill’s conception of the potential of American theatre. According to this line of interpretation, in this phase of O’Neill’s work, the playwright seeks to restore theatre to its sacred place in Western culture.22 O’Neill would later describe the animating force of his drama during this period as an attempt to recapture the theatrical experience of the Greeks and Elizabethans, seeking a theatre returned to its highest and sole function as a Temple where the religion of a poetical interpretation and symbolic celebration of life is communicated to human beings, starved in spirit by their soul-stifling daily struggle to exist as masks among the masks of living!23 In 1926, The Great God Brown attempted to actualize this goal through a return to theatrical masks, and based upon the success of its initial run, audiences seemed more than willing to accept the bizarre plot and complicated expressionism of

Puzzle 15 the play; it appeared that O’Neill’s version of European expressionism was a challenge Broadway audiences were willing to take up. In a similar expressionist vein, although without masks, Marco Millions (1928), a historical drama focused on Marco Polo, attempted to marry over-the-top theatrical pageantry with “Oriental” philosophical themes. Critics praised the Theatre Guild’s production of Marco but ultimately found the play lacking, and audiences seemed to agree based upon its relatively short run. The demise of Marco Millions did not slow O’Neill’s trajectory in 1928, as premiering on Broadway three weeks after Marco was the more successful Strange Interlude, a challenging nine-act drama that utilizes another technique often associated with theatre of a bygone era to communicate the inner-workings of consciousness. O’Neill employed soliloquy to disclose the motivations of the characters in the play, weaving a tale of forbidden sexual desire that resists hasty moral characterizations. Kenneth MacGowan predicted that other American playwrights would mimic O’Neill’s use of soliloquy in their own plays, asserting that this technique would “broaden and deepen the channels of expression in American theatre.”24 When the play opened at the Theatre Guild Playhouse, critics hailed this drama that defies categorization as “the most important event in the present era of American theatre,”25 and “the most significant play that Eugene O’Neill has written.”26 Because of its popularity, Interlude ran until June of 1928, a staggering response when one considers that during its performance, the curtain opened at 5:15 PM and the play ran until 11:00 PM with an intermission for dinner. Strange Interlude was O’Neill’s third Pulitzer Prize-winning play. O’Neill’s next major effort would not appear until 1931’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Like Desire Under the Elms, Mourning borrows heavily from Greek tragedy, with the latter play drawing upon characters and events that appear in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Like Desire, Mourning Becomes Electra also sets the events of classical tragedy in rural New England, occurring shortly after the end of the Civil War. It follows the destruction of the Mannon family, a nineteenth-century house of Atreus, where the murderous Clytemnestra becomes Christine Eben, Orestes becomes her son Orin, and Electra becomes Lavinia Mannon. Soliloquys and asides are absent from Electra, but in this play O’Neill adopts a forceful and poetic style that evokes (in his words) “the quality of the unreal reality,” a power and drive of language usually associated with Greek tragedy.27 The play’s Greek style is married to a modernist understanding of psychology and human motivation, and the result was, according to Atkinson, O’Neill had “reared up a universal tragedy of tremendous stature—deep, dark, solid, uncompromising, and grim.”28 In addition to having a successful North American run, the play would be produced throughout Europe in the 1930s and would be a key factor in O’Neill’s nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935. Ah, Wilderness! followed Mourning Becomes Electra in 1933, and the sentimental comedy surprised audiences that had come to expect grim tragedy from O’Neill. Although a tremendous box-office success and perhaps one of O’Neill’s most frequently revived plays, Ah,Wilderness! is generally regarded as a digression in O’Neill’s creative trajectory. The critical feeling that O’Neill’s powers as a playwright were diminishing was reinforced with the debut of Days Without End in 1934. Days

16 Puzzle annoyed secular modernist audiences, as the central character of the play, John Loving, returns to the Catholic faith after coming to the end of his journey as an enlightened atheist. After seeing the play, one critic almost gleefully proclaimed that, Some six or seven years ago when Mr. O’Neill was singing an ecstatic paganism in ‘The Fountain,’ I predicted that he would, dramatically anyway, return to the church. But no one could have predicted, except after seeing ‘Dynamo,’ that he would return in such disorder.29 In addition to expressing a seemingly antiquated and superficial spiritual theme, the play was derided for its many confusing technical deficiencies, and audience did not receive it warmly. It would close immediately after it had covered the Theatre Guild’s subscribers. The close of Days Without End would begin a period of great “silence” in O’Neill’s career, as his plays would not appear again on Broadway until the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh. O’Neill was struggling with his health, his relationships with his children and his third wife Carlotta, and he had become disillusioned with Broadway as well as the wider world in the run-up to World War II. During this period, O’Neill would develop his final and most important plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Living quietly with Carlotta in their home Tao House in Northern California, O’Neill battled his worsening tremors (wrongly diagnosed as symptoms of Parkinson’s disease) that made it nearly impossible to write. Though he would work on a massive 11-play cycle that would cover the generations of an American family from the Revolutionary War to the Great Depression, he only completed one play within the cycle, A Touch of the Poet.While developing this cycle, O’Neill would turn again to his own biography for inspiration for his final plays, one a drama set in a saloon akin to the one he had frequented as a young man, and the other two drawing from his time spent in 1912 with his family in their New London, Connecticut home. O’Neill resisted producing The Iceman Cometh, his barroom tragedy, until after the end of World War II, believing the subject matter would be misunderstood in a moment of American patriotism and that American audiences would perceive the play’s central theme as subverting the national effort against global fascism. When Iceman finally did premiere in October of 1946 at the Guild Theatre, many reviewers did not recognize its greatness, panning it as the effort of, in the words of novelist Mary McCarthy, “a playwright…who cannot write.”30 Though this production did draw audiences, Iceman did not bring about an immediate revival of interest in O’Neill; The Iceman Cometh’s significance would not fully be appreciated until José Quintero took up and directed the play at the off-Broadway Circle in the Square in 1956 with Jason Robards as Hickey, three years after O’Neill’s death. A Moon for the Misbegotten would premiere a year after the initial production of Iceman, but it closed out of town and would not appear in New York City until 1957, after Quintero’s Iceman and Long Day’s Journey into Night had stoked the public appetite for the forgotten playwright. Of the final plays O’Neill had written, Long Day’s Journey into Night caused the greatest stir. O’Neill did not live to see the success of Journey by design; he had delivered the play to his publisher in 1945 and asked that it remain

Puzzle 17 unpublished for twenty-five years after his death.Were it not for the legal intervention of O’Neill’s widow, the play would have remained unpublished until 1978, however as O’Neill’s sole heir and executor of his estate, Carlotta wrested the manuscript from the vault at Random House and allowed it to be published by Yale University Press in 1956. It was then performed in Sweden and New York the same year. Journey, like all the plays of O’Neill’s late period, did not utilize the expressionist techniques of its predecessors; however, critics were struck by the direct power of this family drama. John Chapman, the theatre critic for the New York Daily News found that, “In this, his next to last play, O’Neill, who so often yearned beyond his reach, became a poet.”31 Audiences were enthusiastic in their response to the play, as it ran for 390 performances, from November to March of the following year, and it has been revived every year since in theatres around the globe. Two more O’Neill works would premiere in New York after Journey (A Touch of the Poet in 1958 and Hughie in 1964), and they would be warmly received, but they could not surpass the impression that Journey had made upon the American theatrical scene. Many critics regarded the play as the greatest that American theatre had produced, and the view that O’Neill was America’s preeminent dramatist whose works had surpassed all others in the country’s history began to harden in the minds of many. In his review of Long Day’s Journey, Henry Hewes wrote of the play: Written in 1940, it preceded Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman,’ which implied that society and economics were crushing the modern family under indignity. Tennessee Williams ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ’ showed mendacity as the foul glue that keeps a family stuck together. Last seasons, ‘A Hatful of Rain’ by Mike Gazzo, resolved the problem by suggesting that a tough-minded decision is preferable to preserving an illusory family relationship. ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ takes all the arguments of these plays into account but finds a greater realism by refusing to hang them on a suspenseful plot, and by showing up, as did O’Casey in ‘Juno and the Paycock,’ the hopeless feeding of life on old arguments and old defenses.32 While speaking appreciably of the mid-century playwrights, Hewes echoes a view found throughout early O’Neill criticism: though the American playwrights that followed O’Neill were, like the playwrights who succeeded Shakespeare in the 1600s, “free from the awkwardness of the giants, they were not giants.”33 According to this view, O’Neill was America’s giant, and Williams, Miller, and others would aspire to reach to the heights that he summitted, as he set the standard for greatness in the twentieth century. In addition to O’Neill being the first American playwright to sustain commercial and critical success throughout his career, one factor that has probably contributed to the American critical esteem for O’Neill was the fact that O’Neill’s plays were highly regarded abroad. European theatres dedicated to a richer tradition of “high” art than their American counterparts performed even the earliest of his plays. O’Neill plays were performed throughout Europe within O’Neill’s lifetime and have been frequently revived since. In the early 1930s, German critic Julius Bab called O’Neill the most interesting and

18 Puzzle important dramatist in the world, though he seemed somewhat surprised that this title would fall to an American playwright.34 Though critical of O’Neill’s early works, the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann wrote in 1931 that the greatness of O’Neill lay in the fact that he had found an indigenous American voice, an “art that belongs on American soil,” and he agreed with Bab that O’Neill was one of the great modern playwrights of any nationality.35 O’Neill was not well-received in France, as both audiences and critics found most of his plays derivative and unrelatable; nevertheless, Falb points out that “no American playwright found such devoted attention, attention reflecting the high opinion that is still accorded his dramas.”36 The sentiment that O’Neill was one of the leading modern dramatists in the world echoed across the continent, with Swedish audiences particularly receptive to the American because of his work’s resemblance to that of August Strindberg. Interestingly, Swedish audiences have enthusiastically received all of O’Neill’s plays with the exception of the comedy Ah, Wilderness! (though it was a success in North America). O’Neill’s early plays also saw success in Moscow, due to their champion Alexander Tairov at the Kamerny Theatre.37 It is likely that O’Neill’s reputation beyond the States lent an air of legitimacy to his work that American critics might have failed to recognize were it not so lauded from abroad.

Detractors The narrative offered in this chapter thus far is largely one of critics lavishing ebullient praise for O’Neill, however many critics remained skeptical of his work, both during and beyond his career. For instance, some asserted that O’Neill’s attention abroad was not due to merit, but curiosity.Virgil Geddes, generally regarded as the earliest influential O’Neill detractor, claimed as much, writing that the interest the playwright had aroused beyond the United States seemed “to be mostly because of his representativeness—as evidence of what America has.”38 According to Geddes, one should not misconstrue global attention as evidence of greatness; O’Neill was merely the best America had to offer at the time. In his vitriolic pamphlet, The Melodramadness of Eugene O’Neill, Geddes asserts that O’Neill’s radical American individualism undermines his plays. Instead of learning from great playwrights of the Western tradition, O’Neill embodies the prevailing wisdom in the States that all one needs to do in order to achieve greatness as a writer is to “go out in the world and live, get your experience, then settle down and write…Write only from what you yourself have seen or else absolutely from the imagination.”39 The consequence of this sort of regime for a writer, as opposed to a practice of careful reading and apprenticeship, is that the writer falls into the all the traps that his forebears would have shown him how to avoid. Geddes appears mystified that O’Neill would write for the stage at all, as it seems that O’Neill has a deep distrust for actors or faith in the process of staging a play. He observes that in O’Neill’s plays, he writes as though nothing but bad acting was possible on the stage, and that and he fills in the actors part with clumsy explanation. At other times he writes for the reader, as though acting had nothing to do with his plays and had never existed as an art.40

Puzzle 19 This criticism is likely the first mention of O’Neill’s “novelistic” writing style, a subject which has received much critical attention throughout the twentieth century.41 In addition to the problems that emerge when writing for a medium for which one does not respect, Geddes claims that O’Neill has a particular weakness in drawing believable characters. Too often, “the author’s conscious message gets entangled with the principal character’s dialogue.”42 Instead of creating vivid characters who find themselves at odds with the world in a believable way, O’Neill often inserts his thematic ideas into their words and actions, rendering these characters as servants to the playwright’s propaganda instead of believable people caught in dramatic circumstances. Another persistent worry critics have expressed about O’Neill’s work is his use of language. While some critics would praise O’Neill’s early work for the “common” language that his characters employ, some critics see it as a deficit, a deficit that carried throughout O’Neill’s work, even to the latest plays. Francis Ferguson claimed that O’Neill’s grasp of language for the stage undermined the genius of his plays. Ferguson’s problem was not just that O’Neill’s dialogues were laced with profanity (though he seems a bit concerned with this!); instead, Ferguson claims that O’Neill’s characters “seem to be laboring to express the inexpressible.” Certainly informed by psychoanalysis, O’Neill’s choices in dialogue expect the reader to intuit the sorrows and longings of his characters without giving the audience enough information to inform their intuitions. The result, Ferguson claims, is that O’Neill’s characters are flat, and this is a problem that Ferguson notes in the early plays but sees O’Neill as failing to solve even in his later efforts.43 Ten years before Ferguson, Edmund Wilson made a similar complaint of O’Neill’s dialogue, pointing out that when O’Neill writes dialogue for his middle-class characters his prose is heavy and indigestible beyond the needs of naturalism. Characters say the same things to one another over and over again and never succeed in saying them any more effectively than the first time; long speeches shuffle dragging feet, marking time without progressing, for pages.44 Unlike Ferguson, however, Wilson claimed that these deficiencies fell away when O’Neill wrote for characters who spoke in dialect (as in The Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape). Developing a native and novel theatrical language with which to express himself certainly was a concern for O’Neill. Early in his career he wrote in a playbill for the Provincetown Players, that he hoped to create “a new language for the theatre.”45 In “O’Neill’s Search for a ‘Language of the Theatre’,” Robert Whitman traces O’Neill’s quest for such a language, adopting the emergent narrative of O’Neill’s talent. Whitman argues that O’Neill’s expressionism of his middle period in which O’Neill moves away from the “realistic” and “tough” style was an attempt to craft such a language. According to Whitman, O’Neill ultimately abandoned these techniques in favor of realism because the expressionist techniques were “too mechanical, called attention to themselves rather than to what they were intended to reveal, suggested demarcations that were too black and white, or forces too much outside his characters.”46 O’Neill found a language of expression in realistic dialogue, returning to the style with which he began his career because of these limitations because he found a new tool with which to express the underlying psychology of his characters: alcohol. Whitman notes that in the final plays alcohol usage is omnipresent, and he suspects that O’Neill uses this convention to

20 Puzzle allow the audience member access to the inner-lives of the characters, enabling the audience to traverse time and memory.47 Whitman’s claims and method of analysis based in the emergence narrative have proven significant in the discourse about O’Neill, most notably being adopted and expanded upon in Jean Chothia’s Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1979) and Michael Manheim’s bio-linguistical Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship (1982). The renowned theatre historian and critic Eric Bentley acknowledges a methodology in O’Neill’s use of the American, “tough” style of language within much of the dialogue of his plays, but he denies its effectiveness. In Bentley’s review of the 1952 publication of Moon for the Misbegotten, he writes that the rough American style that O’Neill often employs “operates chiefly as a mask for sensitivity.” According to Bentley, the tough language of American drama, “shows the embarrassment at the face of life, that shame in the presence of the spirit, which is the source of the ‘American’ way of talking.”48 Though Bentley appreciates the criticism of O’Neill’s language, describing O’Neill’s plays as “poetry strained rather than achieved,” the problem with O’Neill is deeper than language.49 For Bentley, O’Neill’s chief shortcoming is one of meaning. Bentley sees this problem writ large in The Iceman Cometh, remarking that the central idea of the play is obscure and never really disclosed to either the characters or the audience, even upon the demise of Hickey. What is gained by keeping the audience in the dark, Bentley wonders, “except an added mysteriousness of atmosphere?” Though Iceman is deeply moving, the play is ultimately unsuccessful as a significant work of tragic art, Bentley claims, because “you cannot pass a skeleton off as a man merely by enveloping it in a cloud of emotion.”50 Bentley came to see this weakness as not merely one to be found within Iceman. In his famous essay “Trying to Like O’Neill,” he expresses his exasperation for the lack of intelligibility of O’Neill’s themes. On Bentley’s account, while it certainly seems that O’Neill intends his plays to comment on hard questions of life—questions of identity, politics, and purpose—it is rarely clear the statement he is actually making. Bentley broods over a letter the playwright wrote to Thomas Hobbes Quinn, where the playwright explains that in his plays he is, always trying to interpret life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of characters. I’m always acutely conscious of the Force behind (Fate, God, our biological past confronting our present, whatever one calls it, Mystery certainly) and of the one eternal tragedy of man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. Bentley has the intuition that this is a very rich statement from O’Neill, so he rereads these words, only to discover to his chagrin, we find that we could give them a meaning—but without any assurance that it is O’Neill’s.What is interpreting ‘Life in terms of lives’ and what is so mystical about it? What does it mean to be ‘expressed’ by a Force—or against being an incident in ‘its expression’?51

Puzzle 21 Bentley worries that in a quest for meaning, O’Neill merely comforts himself in obscure, high-sounding language, and that much of his plays are animated by trying to sound profound more than actually being profound. It is possible, Bentley seems to concede, that meaning is obscured in O’Neill because meaning is obscured in reality. In modernity, the veneers of politics, religion, and family are merely categories that overlay the true psychological forces driving the world, and as a somewhat faithful student of psychoanalysis, O’Neill might be attempting to craft characters and plots that disclose the true psychological heart of things, unconscious desires and drives to which humans rarely have direct access. If psychoanalysts are correct (as O’Neill certainly affirmed) and most of human psychology is unconscious, it is unsurprising that the themes of O’Neill’s work are open to interpretation, or perhaps simply inscrutable, as is modern life. Bentley affirms that O’Neill’s plays are thrilling, however because of his failure to sufficiently disclose “the eternal,” the true nature of things, whether that be psychological, political, or divine, O’Neill’s plays may never properly be regarded as tragedies, and are melodramas at best.52 According to Bentley, O’Neill is a playwright in search of a theme, and it is from this search that his challenges with characterization and language stem. Bentley’s claim that in O’Neill, there is no “There there,” is an extreme thesis about the question of meaning in O’Neill, but there is an adjacent theory of O’Neill’s lack of thematic unity within his work. It is possible that O’Neill did not have much in the way of great truth to offer in his plays because he was, as Francis Ferguson indelicately puts it, “not a thinker.”53 As early as 1929, Barrett Clark suggested that this was the case in his assessment of Lazarus Laughed: If O’Neill were a genuinely original thinker or even a brilliant spokesman for the ideas of an original thinker, we might argue as to whether we would be losers if he were to give up writing plays altogether, but his ideas as contribution to contemporary thought are negligible.54 Clark argues that Eugene O’Neill is not a profound mind. Instead, O’Neill is merely echoing the “Big Ideas” of his day. Clark asserts that truly great art shows the viewer something new about the world, and O’Neill’s plays, as a whole, do not disclose much of significance. This line of criticism differs from Bentley’s in that it affirms that O’Neill’s plays were “about something,” however, the “something” was merely a rehashing of the modernist tropes and pseudo- intellectual discourse en vogue during his day.55 Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, O’Neill’s defenders have spent a great deal of time disputing both the weak and strong meaning theses presented here. Those who find O’Neill’s work important dispute the claim that O’Neill’s themes are non-existent or simply not profound, arguing that O’Neill touches the deep concerns of American individualism and inter-subjectivity.These defenders go to great lengths to argue that O’Neill has offered original and powerful insights, and often these defenses take the shape of psychological, philosophical, and political readings that present the plays as complex pastiches with multi-valent and nuanced interpretations, many of which praise his insight, honesty, and most of all sincerity, as the redeeming feature of his work.

22 Puzzle But what if one grants the detractor’s claim that America’s “premier dramatist” does not have much to offer in terms of deep insights into the way the world works? How does one explain his persistence in American theatrical history? Were O’Neill merely the playwright du jour of the American early twentieth century, one would expect that his status would have diminished after critics and audiences came to realize that few enriching rewards are found in his plays. Deep insights into the human condition are what we expect from great tragedians, after all. If one grants that O’Neill is simply not a good playwright in the ways that his detractors describe, why has he not been relegated to a historical footnote as so many of his contemporaries have? This book will not overtly take a position on the debate about whether Eugene O’Neill deserves the status that he has been accorded, but the puzzle of O’Neill’s significance discloses a set of assumptions that ought to be inspected. Behind this question lies a pervasive and questionable assumption about the purpose of theatre (perhaps even the purpose of literature as a whole), and once one can dislodge this assumption about great tragedy, she may gain a new appreciation for the power of theatre as well as a new perspective of O’Neill’s theory of difficult theatre.

Notes 1 John Chapman, “‘LDJIN’ A Drama of Sheer Magnificence,” New York Daily News (November 8, 1956). 2 Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: Tragic Journey,” New York Times (November 9, 1956), 47. 3 Richard Moorton, Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s Century: Centennial Views on America’s Foremost Tragic Dramatist (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), xviii. 4 Matthew H. Wikander, “Eugene O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity,” In The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 217. 5 Joseph Wood Krutch, “O’Neill’s Tragic Sense,” The American Scholar 16:3 (Summer 1947), 284. 6 Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918:An Informal History (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1957), 79. 7 A company of local performers presenting standard repertory from the English/ American repertory. 8 Daniel Watermeier, “O’Neill and the Theatre of his Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34. 9 Ibid., 35. 10 Ibid., 33. 11 “American Stage in Danger, says William Winter,” The Theatre Magazine 7:71 (1907), 268. 12 Barrett Clark, “A Review of The Moon of the Caribbees and Other One Act Plays, 1919,” in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: NYU Press, 1961), 230–231. 13 Louis Sherman, “The Play: New Bill at the Greenwich Village,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser (April 18, 1918), 13. 14 Leo B. Marsh, “‘Beyond Horizon’ Stirring Drama,” NewYork Morning Telegraph (February 4, 1920), 14. 15 Robert Gilbert Welch, “Bitter, Ironic Strength in ‘Beyond the Horizon’,” New York Evening Telegram (February 4, 1920), 9; “Tragedy of Great Power at Morosco,” New York World (February 4, 1920), 15. 16 Alexander Woolcott, “The Play: Eugene O’Neill’s Tragedy,” New York Times (February 4, 1920), 12.

Puzzle 23 17 The latter three premiered in the Playwright’s Theatre in New York, and Chris in Philadelphia. 18 Burns Mantle, “The New Plays: ‘Anna Christie’ Vivid Drama,” New York Evening Mail (November 3, 1921), 13. 19 Robert M. Dowling, Introduction, in Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), xxvi. 20 Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape, in O’Neill: The Complete Plays 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogardb (New York: Library of America, 1988), 147. 21 Alexander Woollcott, “The Play: Eugene O’Neill at Full Tilt,” New York Times (March 10, 1922), 18. 22 James A. Robinson, “The Middle Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, edited by Michael Manheim, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70. 23 Eugene O’Neill, “A Dramatist’s Notebook,” The American Spectator 1:3 (1933), 2. 24 Kenneth MacGowan, “The O’Neill Soliloquy,” in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 453. 25 Dudley Nichols, “The New Play,” New York World (January 31, 1928), 11. 26 Thomas Van Dycke, “9-Act O’Neill Drama Opens,” New York Morning Telegraph (Janaury 31, 1928), 5. 27 Qtd. in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper Brothers, 1962), 744. 28 Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: Strange Images of Death in O’Neill’s Masterpiece,” New York Times (October 22, 1931), 22. 29 John Anderson, “Days Without End,” New York Evening Journal (January 9, 1934), 18. 30 Mary McCarthy, “Eugene O’Neill: Dry Ice,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Iceman Cometh, edited by J.H. Raleigh (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 50. 31 John Chapman, “’Long Day’s Journey into Night’ a Drama of Sheer Magnificence,” New York Daily News (November 8, 1956), 86. 32 Henry Hewes, “Broadway Postscript: O’Neill: 100 Proof—Not a Blend,” Saturday Review 39 (November 24, 1956), 30–31. 33 John Gassner, “Homage to O’Neill,” in O’Neill and his Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 322. 34 Julius Bab, “As Europe Sees America’s Foremost Playwright,” Theatre Guild Magazine 9:2 (November 1931), 13. 35 Qtd. in Ward. B. Louis, “O’Neill and Hauptman: A Study in Mutual Admiration,” Comparative Literature Studies 22:2 (Summer 1985), 237. 36 Lewis B. Falb, “The Critical Reception of Eugene O’Neill on the French Stage,” American Theatre Journal 22:4 (December 1970), 397. This essay teases out the complex relationship of the French with O’Neill. 37 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper Brothers, 1962), 716. 38 Virgil Geddes, The Melodramadness of Eugene O’Neill (Brookfield, CT: Brookfield Players, Inc., 1934), 35. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Ibid., 8–9. 41 For more on this line of interpretation and criticism, the reader might begin with Kurt Eisen’s excellent The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Francis Ferguson, “Eugene O’Neill,” Hound and Horn 3 (January–March 1930), 145. 44 Edmund Wilson, “Eugene O’Neill as a Prose Writer,” Vanity Fair (November 1924), 24. 45 Qtd. in Robert F Whitman, “O’Neill’s Search for a ‘Language of the Theatre’,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 46:2 (Spring 1960), 154. 46 Ibid., “Whitman,” 170. 47 Ibid., 168. 48 Eric Bentley, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pieta,” The New Republic (August 4, 1952), 17.

24 Puzzle 49 Ibid., 18. 50 Bentley, “The Return of Eugene O’Neill,” The Atlantic Monthly (November 1946), 66. 51 Bentley, “Trying to Like O’Neill,” The Kenyon Review 14:3 (Summer 1952), 485–486. 52 Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker, 4th ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 69. 53 Francis Ferguson, “Melodramatist,” in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and Francis Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 277. 54 Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill:The Man and His Plays (New York: Dover Publications, 1947), 119. 55 One of the most forceful defenders of the weaker meaning thesis is Joel Pfister. In Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995), Pfister is very hostile to the claim that O’Neill is a significant thinker. Instead, Pfister argues that O’Neill caters to bourgeois concerns under the guise of hyper-individualized Freudian and Marxist social critique. To support his critique, Pfiser draws from early Leftist critics of O’Neill, who claim that the playwright drew into psychology as means of ignoring problems of the material world. Pfiser, following Postmodern critical theory, argues that “depth” of thought is largely a social construction, and the assertion that O’Neill was a deep thinker was illusory for two reasons: first, “depth” itself is an illusory creation of culture, and secondly, that O’Neill does not produce much in the way of original, deep thinking within his corpus. Instead, O’Neill, sometimes cleverly, sometimes clumsily, employs a pop-psychological sense of universal personhood in order to serve as a veneer with which to cover over the fraught lived-experience of the underprivileged and destitute.

2 Paradigm

In the early criticism of O’Neill, he is often referred to as a “melodramatist” as opposed to a tragedian. Of course, there is a value judgment attached to these characterizations of O’Neill; melodrama is generally regarded as pulp theatre designed to generate revenue, while tragedy is the highest theatrical form. Few would deny that O’Neill’s body of work does contain melodrama; however, a sizable number of critics claimed that O’Neill never transcended the melodramatic to become a tragedian. Perhaps the most vociferous proponent of the claim that O’Neill was merely a melodramatist was H.G. Kemelman, who writes that the intelligentsia has been hoodwinked by O’Neill’s “highbrow melodrama.” O’Neill has succeeded in showing this intelligentsia, a series of thin-skinned poeticules and they hail them as tragic heroes. He paints a picture of a chimerical, daydream world and they shout, ‘it is true reality.’ They mistake ‘purple passages’ for poetry and a maudlin bathos for power. In short, they call that tragedy which is merely violent and unbalanced melodrama.1 For Kemelman, O’Neill’s success is remarkable in that he captured the attention of an audience that might have known better. The elite audiences of Broadway and Europe were not unfamiliar with masters such as Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, yet Kemelman claims that O’Neill’s ability to shroud poorly constructed characters and incongruous plots behind veneers of “classical” and “experimental” theatrical spectacle convinced these audiences that the playwright was more than he was. Because Hemelman, Francis Ferguson, and many others often charged O’Neill with melodramatism, it is worth inspecting what exactly they meant when using this term to describe his work. Often, viewers know melodrama when they see it; however, drawing a strict line to distinguish melodrama from high tragedy is more difficult than one might immediately suspect. In the nineteenth century, the term connoted plays with musical background accompaniment, lavish spectacle, and predictable stock characters. Later, melodrama began to indicate plays with plots of secrecy and intrigue, filled with over-the-top emotional outbursts and revelations of untoward behavior.2 Certainly, at the extremes, these characteristics are easily recognizable as melodramatic; however, one can certainly recall plays that are commonly regarded as high tragedy with many of the characteristics described above. DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-3

26 Paradigm In order for melodrama and tragedy to be regarded as distinct and recognizable categories, it appears that more fine-grained characteristics ought to be teased out of the genres. Alan Reynolds Thompson attempted to offer a specified distinction between tragedy and melodrama in 1928, and his conclusions likely resemble the shared understanding of melodrama and tragedy to which O’Neill’s critics refer in their estimations of the playwright’s work. Thompson argues that the key distinction between tragedy and melodrama lies in the emotions that melodrama seeks to elicit. He writes that melodrama is “a play which arouses merely the identifying emotions of terror, wonder, hatred, sense of power, sentimentality, erotic satisfaction, and the like, but which fails through lack of universality to arouse the reflective emotion of awe.”3 Thompson acknowledges that one of the chief aims of all theatre is to elicit some sort of emotional response, but he argues that some emotions are of a higher order than others. Plays that traffic in lower-order emotions such as terror, hatred, or sentimentality are best characterized as melodramatic, while plays that elicit awe, a higher emotion, might be characterized as tragic. Of course, tragedy can arouse these lower emotional states, but tragedy goes further than melodrama, as tragedy elicits awe. Thompson’s value judgments about what constitutes “higher” and “lower” emotions are ultimately rooted in the objects, characters, and scenarios that arouse those emotional states. For example, “terror,” Thompson claims, is the thrill that accompanies “the contemplation of danger,” but only within certain confines. Melodrama constantly reminds the audience that “it is only a play” through the utilization of over-the-top spectacle and action that avoids realism, and this allows the audience to experience the thrill of fear without identifying an actual threat to themselves.4 Tragedy, on the other hand, elicits real fear because the audience is able to identify with the people represented onstage, and the separation between the protagonist’s fate and the audience member’s is broken down. In Oedipus’ fate, so the argument goes, I see my own, and this excites a fear response in me. The distinction Thompson draws between awe and wonder is an important one, as ultimately awe is the higher-order emotion that tragedy calls out. Thompson draws upon Irving Babbitt’s claim that “the uncultivated human imagination is at all times and places romantic…it hungers for the thrilling and the marvelous and is, in short, incurably melodramatic.”5 Wonder, Thompson argues, is elicited by surprise, and melodrama employs surprise not only by the spectacle, but by plot twists.Though the terms awe and wonder are often interchanged in daily parlance, awe is not aroused by mere surprise. Awe is aroused by “glimpsing at the fundamental mystery of the universe.” The “eternalities” of life, death, and undeserved suffering are placed upon full display in tragedy, and the sophisticated audience member appreciates these universals in his experience of fear and pity. In Thompson’s analysis, very little is said about the qualitative distinction between awe and wonder. The distinctions between these emotional states are not drawn on how they feel for the subject; instead, the higher emotion is distinct from the lower on the basis of the objects these toward which these emotions are directed. Wonder is elicited by surprising turns of events and cheap thrills, while awe is elicited by a recognition of deep truth being represented upon the tragic

Paradigm 27 stage.While Thompson’s analysis begins by sussing out the distinction between the emotional address of tragedy versus melodrama, ultimately his theory is an intellectualist one, in that the feature that elevates tragedy above its dramatic counterparts is tragedy’s ability to draw the attention of sophisticated thinkers to deep truths of human existence.6 Throughout the twentieth century, scholars turned a good deal of critical attention to the distinction between melodrama and tragedy;7 however, unlike Thompson, invariably the distinction they drew between the forms did not reside in the intensity of the emotions that a play arouses (as one might colloquially assume when she considers the term “melodramatic”), but in the sophistication and truth of the intellectual construction of plot and character within the drama. Joseph Wood Krutch argued that melodrama and tragedy can be differentiated in that for melodrama, plot is more important than character, while in tragedy, character is given more weight.8 In one of the earliest prescriptive treatments of melodrama, Robert Heilman asserts that tragedy differs from melodrama in that tragic characters are portrayed as divided within themselves; in melodrama, the hero is at odds with some outside force, but in the tragic, while there may be an outside antagonist, the hero must decide whether to overcome his own limitations, reservations or weaknesses.9 Heilman claims that in tragedy resides ambiguity, which causes the divided nature of the protagonist; people can make wrong choices that cannot be repaired, and regardless of one’s internal character, there are consequences to those choices.10 Melodrama, by contrast, does not display divided identities. Eric Bentley and Michael Booth would both describe melodrama as a “naturalism of the dream life,” criticizing melodrama on the grounds that it did not invite audiences to consider the world as it is, but as it ought to be.11 Peter Brooks has asserted that melodrama has arisen as a byproduct of a post-sacred consciousness, and the tidy plot structures and predictable characters of melodrama are part of a psychic desire to avoid the unmoored nature of reality, the reality that tragedy discloses.12 Though these theories of melodrama and tragedy (as well as most of those offered throughout the scholarship on the subject) differ from one another in terms of specific definitions, they all privilege tragedy because of some sophisticated intellectual reward tragedy purportedly offers, over and above its melodramatic cousin. If the distinction drawn between tragedy and melodrama ultimately amounts to the depth and intellectual richness of a play, it appears that the claim that O’Neill is a “melodramatist” is akin to the claim that O’Neill is not much of a thinker (as Bentley asserts). While O’Neill might imitate the tragic in much of his work, because his plays do not offer a rich story that draws viewers deep into the mystery of human existence—instead settling for fashionable intellectual tropes—he ought not be properly regarded a tragedian. Though most contemporary scholars of theatre would wish to avoid attaching value judgments (i.e., “better” or “worse”) to the estimation of O’Neill as melodramatist or tragedian, O’Neill’s early detractors were not so generous in their estimations of him. Because he never rose above melodrama, they would say that his work should not be accorded the esteem of other great modernist tragedians, those who teach us something rich about ourselves and our world. But does tragedy really teach? Should it?

28 Paradigm

The Cognitive Value of Tragedy Lurking behind the debate about the quality of O’Neill’s canon is a questionable Western assumption about the value of tragedy writ large. This assumption can be traced back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Indeed, in more cases than most contemporary philosophers might like to admit, one discovers the work of Plato defines the discourse, and the discussion of tragedy is one such case. Plato is famously opposed to most of the creative arts, but much of his objection to creativity arises in his own experience of theatrical tragedy. As a fourth-century Athenian, Plato had a first-person experience of the power of the theatre to arouse the emotions and sway the mind, and he was deeply hostile to the idea of tragic theatre in his ideal Republic. One of Plato’s objections to tragedy as a worthwhile human activity appears in his dialogue Gorgias, a discourse on intellectual sophistry, rhetoric, truth, and the power of persuasion. In Gorgias (501c–502d), Plato’s avatar Socrates raises a reasonable complaint regarding tragedy. In a longer discourse on the value of art, Socrates and his friends consider what ultimately motivates a tragedian to present a tragic poem: And what about that majestic, awe-inspiring practice, the composition of tragedy? What is it after? Is the project, the intent of tragic composition merely the gratification of spectators, as you think, or does it also strive valiantly not to say anything that is corrupt, though it may be pleasant and gratifying to them, and to utter in both speech and song anything that might be unpleasant but beneficial, whether the spectators enjoy it or not?13 Socrates’ interlocutors ultimately conclude that the tragedian is primarily motivated to please the audience. Because this is the case, it is likely the poet will be reluctant to discuss hard truths that the audience might find objectionable and discomforting, opting instead to please his audience by telling them what they like to hear. For clarity’s sake, I formalize Socrates’ argument in Gorgias below, so that we might inspect the specific premises that support his hostility to tragedy. The argument runs as follows: 1. Tragedies are written by poets whose aim is to arouse pleasure in spectators. 2. For the tragic poet, the aim of arousing pleasure will trump the aim of cultivating knowledge. 3. Therefore it is unlikely that tragedy cultivates knowledge. 4. Worthwhile human endeavors should cultivate knowledge. 5. Because it is unlikely that tragedy cultivates knowledge, tragedy is not a worthwhile human endeavor. Because the tragedian is trying to present an entertaining experience for the audience, Socrates claims that the poet is unlikely to include challenging or difficult truths in this construction of the tragedy, because this would detract from the

Paradigm 29 overall effect as pleasurable. However, in the pursuit of truth (the highest human activity, of course!) it is precisely those difficult features of the world which one must consider. This leads Socrates to criticize tragic poetry as a mere rhetorical human practice, akin to Gorgias’ sophistry. Moreover, even if the tragedian were concerned with the communication and interrogation of an unflinching view of the world, the nature of artmaking severely handicaps the expression of anything but the vaguest shadow of reality. In Republic X (595a–603d), Plato asserts that the visual artist’s techne involves the imitation of things and people in the world, things and people which are themselves merely approximations of the eidos of those objects. To illustrate this, he asks the reader to consider a realistic painting of a bed. This painting is merely a mimetic representation of a physical bed in the sensible world. The physical bed, constructed by a carpenter, is the carpenter’s best approximation of the ideal Bed, the abstract Form (eidos) “Bedness,” which is how the concept of a bed exists in its highest form.14 This means that the painting of the bed is an imitation not of the ideal, but the imitation of a copy, “a third remove” from the truth (Republic 596b-599a). To borrow a metaphor from communication theory, with each remove from the ideal, more noise is inserted into the signal, and the essence of the bed is further obscured. The painter is only producing a shadow of the truth. Tragedians, like visual artists, are imitators, and their tragedies are at least three steps removed from the essence of reality. People might praise Homer and other tragic poets for their deep insights into virtue and truth, but these people “have been so deceived by them that they don’t realize their works are at a third remove from that which is and are easily produced without knowledge or truth.”15 Though the representations of actions and people displayed in tragedy might be powerful and gripping, Plato chafes at referring to tragedians as “educators of Greece,” as tragic poetry is too far removed from the essence of the world to generate any real insight.To formalize this second argument: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Tragedy is an imitation of real-world entities and activities. Real world entities are approximations of ideal entities. Therefore, tragedy is an imitation of an approximation of ideal entities. Because tragedy is an imitation of an approximation, it does not produce knowledge. 5. Worthwhile human activities should cultivate knowledge. 6. Therefore, tragedy is not a worthwhile human activity. Both the Gorgias “motivation” argument and the Republic “imitation” argument against tragedy assume a teleological view of human nature. The ancient Greeks generally held that all things exist for some purpose or end, and of course, philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle assumed that highest purpose of human life is the pursuit of truth through reason. There are a number of challenges one might mount against the premises of each of the above arguments, and most contemporary theorists of tragedy do not find these arguments terribly powerful, but one feature of these arguments against tragedy appears to remain in even the contemporary discourse on the subject. Premise (3) of the motivation argument and Premise

30 Paradigm (4) of the imitation argument assert that tragedy does not produce knowledge, and historically most theorists have challenged those claims. Though the modern Western world has moved away from a teleological metaphysics, it is notable that in the debate about the value of tragedy, the assumption that undergirds premise (4) and (5) of each of these arguments, that knowledge-generation is what endows a human activity with significance, still holds significant sway. Defenders of the arts throughout Western critical history have pushed back against Plato’s claim that tragedy does not generate knowledge, and these defenders argue that tragedy is important and unique precisely because it does disclose important truths about ourselves and the world.Theorists of tragedy have routinely asserted that tragic theatre is more than just entertainment; it can (and perhaps should) be a knowledge garnering exercise. This assumption seems to lie at the heart of the melodrama/tragedy debate. While most great tragic plays are entertaining, tragedy’s defenders attempt to tell a story about why these plays seem to matter more than for their entertainment value. The accounts these advocates for tragedy make can be characterized as cognitivist in nature, as they locate the value of tragedy in its cognitive address. To fully appreciate this claim, one might consider several rough examples from the history of literary theory. For instance, the Roman philosopher and tragedian Seneca seems to have something to say about why tragedy is valuable, although, to our knowledge, he offered no extended philosophical treatise on the subject.16 In Seneca’s “On Anger,” an analysis on the passions and their reason-thwarting power, he writes that the goal of his philosophy is to reveal the soul “naked,” so that the thinker can perceive it “black and mottled as it would be, boiling, twisted, and swollen.”17 Though the human mind is filled with darkness, the Stoic desires to see it as it is, and in so doing, conquer its evil passions. Seneca vividly depicts this war with the passions in both the Medea and Phaedra as each play’s namesake rejects the power of reason in the sway of deep emotional anguish. As Medea realizes that her husband Jason has been unfaithful to her, the nurse implores her to “stop, suppress your anger, control yourself,” but then despairs when she realizes that “her madness froths over.”18 When Phaedra considers an affair with her stepson, Hippolytus, she brushes aside her conscience by asking “what can reason do? Passion, Passion rules.” Phaedra knows that she should listen to her mind, “but it wanders, yearning for wise advice,” trying “in vain to return.”19 Seneca’s depiction of these “horrible” states of mind present what many have seen as his theory of tragedy: though tragedy might be painful to watch, it matters because it displays the power of our inner-darkness.Tragedy presents a battle of the passions versus Stoic happiness, and by watching the tragic hero inevitably follow those passions, the viewer learns something about his own mind. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, because of the emerging interest in literary criticism as a discrete area of study, tragedy became a chief philosophical interest for enlightened German thinkers. In Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) articulates what would become a standard view for philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and G.W.F. Hegel, that modern tragedy has never achieved the power of ancient Greek tragedy. Like many of his contemporaries, Schelling hoped that the ancient aesthetic of fifth-century Athens would be restored

Paradigm 31 in modern theatre, restoring the Greek spirit in a Christian context.20 Schelling believed that the first task of philosophy is the reconciliation of human freedom, on the one hand, and “fate” or “necessity” on the other. Unfortunately, Schelling asserts, philosophy alone cannot create an account of human freedom, because reason can only grasp things and categories. Since humans are not able to inspect these things and categories from outside their own subjective experiences, they are not able to establish whether these things are as they appear to the subject. As a result, any philosophical account of human freedom is impossible to construct. Since reason and art cover the whole range of human cognitive experience, and reason cannot produce an account of human freedom, it appears that art is the only possible tool one might employ.21 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, Schelling argues that art has the capacity both to illuminate freedom of the will and determinacy; he claims that epic poetry is “objective” in that it displays character and occurrence from the outside, but lyric poetry is “subjective” in that it expresses the lived experience of the poet. Tragic drama represents a marriage of lyric and epic, and as such, offers a harmonization of the apparent contradiction of freedom and determinacy. Tragedy has the capacity to disclose “The Absolute” (Das Unbedigt)22 to audiences by putting on display both the objective and subjective capacities of human experience. For Schelling, though tragedy discloses Das Unbedigt via its interaction with both reason and emotion, the ultimate point is not emotional reverie; the point of tragedy is that it provides the viewer the opportunity to hear the inaudible, as the tragic poet sustains “the hope that we might find ways to say the unsayable, the unsayable being that which cannot be characterized by an objective predicate.”23 One might be tempted to characterize Schelling’s proto-Romantic view of tragedy as non-cognitivist because for him tragedy communicates the ineffable through the vehicle of the emotions. Ultimately, though, such a characterization is inaccurate because it fails to appreciate that for Schelling, the final aim of tragedy is knowledge (this knowledge may transcend linguistic statements, but it is knowledge nonetheless). Roughly a contemporary of Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) offers a cognitivist account of tragedy that is more rooted in the material world than his Romantic counterparts (though Hegel’s theory has its own “spiritual” components), but he shares the conviction that modern tragedy has left its classical moorings. At its base, Hegel’s theory of art is intellectualist in nature, in that he claims “the only important thing in a work of art is to present what corresponds to reason and spiritual truth.”24 At the heart of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is the assertion that the conflicts put on display in tragic theatre are conflicts between powers that rule a person’s choice and action—what Hegel refers to as man’s “ethical substance”—and between the powers of honor and love. These driving forces often exist harmoniously in some forms of art, but in tragedy they collide. In Antigone, for instance, the namesake of the play finds herself conflicted between two sets of “just” choices; she can honor the demands of the polis and leave her brother’s body to rot, exposed to the elements, or she can honor her filial obligations to her brother’s legacy. For Hegel, there is no immoral choice for Antigone; both choices are morally praiseworthy, and this is what makes the conflict of the tragedy so acute. Both Creon and Antigone are in the right, and this brings about the catastrophic ending of the play.

32 Paradigm Hegel’s theory of tragedy is married to his theory of history. He sees history as a process of movement toward the condition of absolute human freedom. He refers to this condition as “spirit” (Geist) and history “is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept.”25 Human conflicts in history often resemble those of tragedy; two competing moral commitments, both with a claim to praiseworthiness, are at odds with one another. The result of the conflict between these forces is a reconciliation in which neither force prevails; instead, a new paradigm is reached that moves history closer to Spirit. In Antigone, the immutable forces of filial obligation and duty to the state ultimately destroy the protagonist, and Creon’s family ultimately dies as well. However, Hegel argues that a sense of resolution emerges at the end of the play because of this conflict. Through the horror of the circumstances, the viewer comes to appreciate that neither set of obligations is absolute, opening the mind to new possibilities of freedom.26 Hegel’s estimation of modern tragedy further illuminates the cognitivist nature of his view of tragic value. Hegel claims that modern tragedy (tragedies of Shakespeare and Marlowe, for example) differs from classical tragedy in that modern tragedy “takes for its proper subject- matter and content the subjective innerlife of the character who is not, as in classical tragedy, merely an individual embodiment of the ethical powers.”27 Hegel argues that because the focus of contemporary tragedy is the individual (i.e. Hamlet, Macbeth, etc.), these plays can only serve to focus our attention on an interesting character and his internal struggle. Modern tragedy fails to offer any sense of reconciliation, as Hegel has conceived it, in that no new ethical understanding is opened at the end of the play.The telos of tragedy on Hegel’s view is the advance of moral reasoning, and though he admits that his theory does not apply to later iterations of the tragic form, it is clear that Hegel’s view of tragic value is one of instruction. Unlike Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) did not view Greek theatre as the pinnacle of tragic expression, as he writes that “the ancients had not yet reached the summit and goal of tragedy”28 which, for Schopenhauer, is a pessimistic worldview. Such a worldview is the result of the realization that behind the veil of everyday life lies “will,” manifested most directly in the “will to live.” This realization produces pessimism when one comes to recognize that in order to will oneself to live, one must perpetually suffer, as she finds herself in a constant state of craving for more and in agonism with the will of others to sustain themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, in World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer proclaims that tragedy is the highest form or art, its purpose being, “the description of the terrible side of life, the unspeakable pain, the wretched misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent.”29 Following Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer believes that through art, humans can experience the “sublime,” a feeling of wonder mixed with fear and dread that ultimately points toward death.30 The sublime differs from the experience of beauty in that objects people find beautiful present themselves to the subject in an obliging way, “without resistance and hence imperceptibly,”31 while the sublime is aroused by objects that induce fear in a subject. The beautiful does not challenge the viewer’s will, but because the sublime elicits a feeling of danger

Paradigm 33 or menace, the viewer finds her will threatened in a way that she is incapable to resist or overcome. One might consider the feeling one might get from gazing at the ocean from a steep cliff. While the view might be aesthetically pleasing, this experience is coupled with the knowledge that if one missteps, she would be unable to survive the fall and/or the crashing waves on the rocks below, regardless of the strength of her will. In addition to fear for herself, the viewer also experiences an exaltation in the knowledge that the fearful element of what she perceives is a “dream.” In the case of the viewer at the edge of the cliff, her fear is produced as a result of the thought of her fall, and the knowledge that the fall is merely a thought in her mind, produces the awareness that the viewer is beyond the dream (including the dream of everyday reality), beyond space and time. The sublime alleviates the viewer’s fear of death.The viewer’s response in the face of the sublime is ultimately one of resignation. In viewing tragedy, Schopenhauer writes that people feel: urged to turn our will away from life, to give up willing and loving life. But precisely in this way we become aware that there is still left in us something different that we cannot possibly know positively, but only negatively as that which does not will life…at the moment of the tragic catastrophe we become convinced more clearly than ever that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake.32 The horrors on display in tragedy are not merely localized events that befall Oedipus or Macbeth but are horrors that face everyone who strives to actualize her will to live against insurmountable odds. The appropriate response to the sublime as viewers experience it in tragedy is the feeling of resignation, and in many tragedies, Schopenhauer argues that audiences are given a model of such resignation in the protagonist. On this point, Schopenhauer is particularly interested in “Christian tragedies” where the martyrs, and Christ himself, face death without worry, with “the giving up the whole will-to-live, the cheerful abandonment of the world in the consciousness of its worthlessness and vanity.”33 Though Greek tragic heroes do not display the kind of resignation to the world of their modern counterparts, Schopenhauer claims that the tragedy produces that feeling in the audience. Through experiencing the sublime in tragedy, an audience member is able to develop her own resignation toward the suffering of the world. Tragedy teaches a kind of “know-how” to an audience, providing them with a cognitive skill set with which to navigate the horror of reality. Again, the payoff of tragedy is what it teaches the viewer, how it teaches people to navigate the world. Even the great Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) appears to offer a cognitivist account of tragedy. Nietzsche is especially relevant to any study of Eugene O’Neill, so an elaborate treatment of his approach is in order. Writing in the 1870s, Nietzsche was, like many of his German counterparts, convinced that nineteenth-century Germany was due for a spiritual revival. In a letter to Richard Wagner accompanying an edition of his first book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche points out why he believes Germany is involved the Franco-Prussian War:

34 Paradigm …if this act of self-collection were to prompt anyone to think of patriotic excitement and aesthetic self-indulgence, or courageous seriousness and serene play as opposites, they would be wrong; indeed, if such people really read the work they might realize, to their astonishment, that the matter with which we are concerned is a grave problem for Germany, a problem which we now place, as vortex and turning point, into the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, these people will take offence at such serious consideration being given to any aesthetic problem at all, particularly if they are incapable of thinking of art as anything more than an amusing sideshow, a readily dispensable jingling of fool’s bells in the face of the ‘gravity of existence’…Let these serious people take note: my conviction that art is the highest task and the true metaphysical activity of this life is based on an understanding which I share with the man and fighter whose sublime lead I follow and to whom I now wish to dedicate this work.34 According to Nietzsche, Germany’s conflict stems from a crisis of art. Art in Nietzsche’s age has become largely “an amusing sideshow,” a mere distraction from the problems of life, instead of a “metaphysical activity” central to living best. In plain terms, one of Nietzsche’s aims in The Birth of Tragedy is to call the reader to art that draws one deep into life—including, and perhaps primarily, the horror of life—instead of distracting her from it. In Nietzsche’s account, such art had last manifested itself in Greek (particularly Aeschylian and Sophoclean) tragedy. Almost as quickly as it had emerged, this “tragic spirit” was killed by the father of Western knowledge, Socrates, who introduced the methodology of abstraction and ideas of cause and effect to ancient Greek thought. On Nietzsche’s understanding, Socrates’ deductive method of inquiry built a veneer over the horror of reality that produced an unfounded optimism, as Egil Törnqvist describes it, “that despicable heritage which enslaves modern man.”35 This optimism assures those who use the Socratic method they will be able to accurately apprehend and ultimately overcome the ways of the world, while in reality, the world is too horrible for human comprehension and too powerful an adversary to be dominated. Nietzsche will, upon later reflection, conclude that the problem he has uncovered is larger than the German inability to appreciate significant tragic art; instead, the problem is “the problem of science itself, science grasped for the first time as something problematic and questionable.”36 The translation of this line into English does not reveal entirely what Nietzsche is driving at here. The German term he uses here is Wissenschaft, which refers to any endeavor of study. The “science” of history, for example, might be referred to in German as Geschictswissenschaft. When Nietzsche refers then to a problem of “science,” he is referring to a problem in the fundamental mode of knowledge Westerners have trusted for two millennia. Nietzsche is not merely questioning the answers Westerners have developed to important life questions; he is questioning the method whereby the entire project of finding such answers has been undertaken. While lecturing on pre-Socratic philosophy in 1870–1871, Nietzsche became interested in what he began to refer to as the “Dionysian world-view.” His insights into this idea materialize into his first work, The Birth of Tragedy. He begins his

Paradigm 35 analysis in Birth of Tragedy by examining Athenian tragedy before Euripides. In Athenian tragedy, Nietzsche detects and identifies two primordial, psychological urges that the Greeks personified as two of their most significant deities, Apollo and Dionysus. In art, Apollo is manifested in the “art of the image maker or sculptor,” while Dionysus produces “the imageless art of music.”37 Though these impulses make themselves most obvious in art, the Apollonian and Dionysiac spirits are fundamental features of the natural world. These powers “erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of any human artist, and in which nature’s drives attain their first, immediate satisfaction.”38 These fundamental elements appeared to Attic Greeks in tragic art, and they are best understood, according to Nietzsche, in terms of analogy. Apollo reveals itself to the mind most readily in the “art-world” of a dream. In a dream, “every human being is fully an artist…and the lovely semblance of dream is the precondition of all the arts of image-making, including, as we shall see, an important half of poetry.”39 Dionysus, however, is best understood in terms of intoxication. When intoxicated, the Dionysiac spirit causes “complete subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting.” In this moment of drunkenness, those under the influence of this spirit “awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are close the origin of things speak in their hymns, or in the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by a lust for life.”40 The Apollonian spirit, conceived as a manifestation of Schopenhauer’s principium individuationis, cultivated in representation, directly manifests itself in works people recognize as illusion. In a dream, for example, one may be drawn powerfully toward some image or conclusion, yet she still “nevertheless retains the sense that it is semblance.”41 Representational art relies on the spirit of Apollo; artists and poets attempt to mirror the “real” world. People enjoy such representations, and part of this enjoyment is derived from the fact that they are somehow being willingly deceived about the nature of the object before them. In pairing Apollo with Schopenhauer’s force of representation, Nietzsche is asserting that the Apollonian spirit reflects a fundamental fact of reality, that though people may conceive of themselves as individuals unique and apart from the world, in truth, they are willingly (and necessarily) deluding themselves, as the will underlies and unifies all things.While Nietzsche will be critical at times of the Apollonian impulse, he does acknowledge its necessity in the lives of those who choose to go on living despite the horror of existence. Nietzsche points out that Apollo was also the god of prophecy, and this feature of the Apollonian urge will be especially relevant to his later critique of the Socratic Method. This Apollonian prophet might be best conceived of in terms of abstraction and pattern recognition, much like the philosophical and scientific tradition that followed Socrates. A prophet recognizes what he believes to be consistent, repeated features of the world (on Nietzsche’s view, such features are Apollonian illusions), and he can abstract from these features to make predictions about future events as a result. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the features of the world the Apollonian prophet relies on are ultimately illusory, and though the prophet’s predictions seem to reflect truth, these truths do not reflect the true nature of the world.

36 Paradigm The phenomenal character of the Apollonian spirit might best be understood as one of repose. Of the image of Apollo, Nietzsche writes that it “should include that measured limitation, that freedom from wider impulses, that wise calm of the image-making god.”42 Apollo represents for humans the capacity to comprehend and control the world, and a human who possesses such an Apollonian spirit will meet the world with a kind of calm confidence, knowing that she will not be overcome by it. Nietzsche invokes an image from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation to communicate this sense of calm: Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of the world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis.43 The Apollonian spirit not only allows one to see herself as an individual, but it also endows her with the ability to traverse the horrors of the world without descending into terror. The other deity manifesting itself in tragic art, the god of wine and fertility Dionysus, defies the principium individuationis. It is best understood in terms of intoxicated ecstasy, because in moments of group hysteria brought on by strong drink, one loses a sense of herself as unique, and experiences the feeling which “arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself.” When one is under the influence of the Dionysiac spirit, he feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled, or merged with his neighbor, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious, primordial unity.44 The knowledge one gains when experiencing Dionysiac ecstasy roughly correlates to the knowledge one gains as a result of the Schopenhauerian sublime. Those in such a state recognize they are one with all things, and for a moment, they are able to forget themselves and experience a basic unity with all existence, unmediated through language or other forms of mental abstraction. In effect, the spirit of wine and fertility endows his followers with the opportunity to appreciate reality at its fundamental level. Nietzsche writes that in tragedy, the feelings aroused by the Dionysiac spirit are experienced as “Titanic” and “barbaric.” Attic Greeks, participating in the festival of Dionysus, felt themselves connected to the greatness of their forbearers.The tragic hero that these Greeks venerated endures bleak and seemingly endless suffering. “Excess revealed itself as the truth; contradiction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature.”45 The Dionysiac spirit unifies all beneath a singular banner of suffering. The unity that one derives from Dionysus is in part a recognition of the horror of life; all that exists does so through pain. For Nietzsche, not only does tragedy convey the knowledge of the horror of life; tragedy also equips the viewer with a kind of skill. In Nietzsche’s later works, he offers a discussion of the appeal of tragedy that clarifies the attitude he believes tragedy

Paradigm 37 cultivates. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that the ancient Greeks enjoyed tragic theatre because they “liked to hear good speech; indeed, they had a greedy craving for it which distinguishes them more than anything else from the non-Greeks.” Nietzsche asserts that ancient Greek audiences demanded that tragic protagonists deliver eloquent speeches even in the face of the most horrifying circumstances. Because of this feature of tragic theatre, Western culture, as the progeny of the Greeks, has developed a need that we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most difficult situations speak well and at length; it delights us now when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and altogether a radiant spirit where life approaches the abyss and a real human being would usually lose his head and certainly his fine language.46 Nietzsche claims that what inspires in tragedy is the power of poetry in the face of the horrors of existence.Tragic heroes open viewers’ minds to the possibility that one can expose oneself to the horrors of existence, learn from them, and live with them. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche makes this claim explicit, asserting that audiences who enjoy tragedy are great and powerful individuals. He writes. From this it appears that, broadly speaking, a preference for questionable and terrifying things is a symptom of strength. While the taste for the pretty and dainty belongs to the weak and delicate. It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty. They are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure…It is a sign of one’s feeling of power and well-being how far one can acknowledge the terrifying and questionable nature of things; and whether one needs some sort of ‘solution’ at the end.47 Tragedy appeals to the strong because of their ability to face the hostility of the world with affirmation. Moreover, tragedy provides the viewer with the opportunity to learn by example; as the tragic hero is able to muster his wits and bear up beneath his suffering without longing for some Divine escape (or even the escape that death offers), the spectator of tragic action is empowered to do the same. Nietzsche scholar Amy Price writes that, for Nietzsche “what we learn when we experience tragic drama is a way to acknowledge misfortune within the boundaries of our human capacities.”48 Though Nietzsche’s account differs from his predecessors in terms of the metaphysical implications he asserts of tragedy, his account resembles theirs in that it affirms that tragedy matters because of its cognitive address. Tragedy teaches us how to face the world with strength and resolve, and that is why it is valuable. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-Socratic visionary, seems to accept Plato’s presumption that in order for tragedy to be valuable, it must teach. Through the twentieth century, tragedy’s defenders have offered theories of accounts that draw their inspiration from many, if not all of, the thinkers described above. Twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller, for example, contra Nietzsche, sees tragedy not as exhibiting a “pessimism of strength,” but instead a “reinforcement

38 Paradigm of the onlooker’s brightest opinion of the human animal.”49 Nevertheless, the great American playwright does believe, like Nietzsche, that tragedy ought to disclose fundamental human capacities for enduring suffering with resolve and courage. In philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, one finds an account of tragedy that is Hegelian in the sense that Nussbaum shares Hegel’s sense that tragedy is worthwhile as an opportunity for ethical evaluation. Even radical thinker Slajov Žižek shares Hegel’s assertion that the telos of tragedy is moral education, though Žižek disagrees that anything resembling reconciliation appears in tragedy, at least not without conflict that escalates into “ethical violence.”50 The list of tragedy’s defenders is too numerous to give a full treatment in this chapter, but what I have offered here is adequate to support my claim about the prevailing view of tragedy’s value. For the past two-and-a-half millennia, those who wish to defend the form against Platonist attacks do so on the battlefield of literary cognitivism. What if, however, Plato’s paradigm is mistaken at its core? What if tragedy is a worthwhile human activity not because of the knowledge that it offers, but because of how it makes the viewer feel? What if there is a “non-cognitivist” account of tragic value? What if the true appeal of a playwright such as Eugene O’Neill lies not in the fact that his plays illuminate the human condition, but that they elicit a certain set of emotional responses that are valuable and increasingly rare in our workaday lives. Put another way, is there a viable non-cognitive account of tragic value?

Aristotle on the Value of Tragedy Astute readers of the preceding discussion of the value of tragedy will notice that a notable figure was omitted in my survey of theorists of tragedy: namely, Plato’s student Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics is a famed philosophical attempt to dispute Plato’s claims about the value of tragic poetry, and one might characterize his view of tragic value as “non-cognitivist.” Like Plato, Aristotle does affirm that reason is man’s highest activity, but at first glance, his defense of tragedy does not appear to emerge from the idea of tragedy as generative of knowledge. It is not clear, however, that Aristotle’s view is fairly characterized this way, as Aristotle does seem to prejudice activities that cultivate knowledge over others. Aristotle traces the genealogy of tragic poetry in Book IV of Poetics. He claims that there are two causes of poetry. “Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.”51 Several points must be made about this passage. First of all, the term imitation is translated from the Greek mimesis (μίμησις), but it might be better-translated representation or portrayal. Stephen Halliwell notes that mimesis can refer to a picture representing a subject, an actor representing a character, or a play representing an action or a story. In all of these cases, the term mimesis can be used, so the careful reader of Book IV must bear the ambiguity of the term in mind in order to accurately interpret it.52 Given the fact that Plato so forcefully disputes the educative value of the mimetic arts, it is striking that Aristotle connects mimetic activity with the essence of humanity. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the life well-lived is one of purposeful rationality, a life in which an individual makes decisions based on proper rational

Paradigm 39 consideration of good virtue in relation to himself and his polis. At first, it seems unclear how mimesis is related to man’s telos, but Aristotle claims that “through mimesis (one) takes his first steps to understanding.” Imitation and representation are key components of rational education. Students learn the rules of grammar and ethics by rote imitation of their teacher, and they are later able to understand and apply these previously imparted rules as they mature. Mimesis is a fundamental component of the process of achieving reason, and therefore mimesis should be explored and encouraged in those who wish to develop excellence. Not only does Aristotle assert that man takes pleasure in acts of mimesis, but he also claims that man takes pleasure in “mimetic objects.” In other words, man intrinsically delights in objects that represent or portray other things. One may wonder how pleasure taken in observing objects fulfills man’s telos; after all, men take pleasure in many things that are not fundamentally rational. However, the philosopher defends this pleasure as an enjoyable response to the act of gaining understanding. He writes that the reason mimetic objects are pleasurable to their audience is one of “gathering the meaning of things, e.g., that the man there is soand-so.”53 Again, mimesis is connected with understanding and the fundamental human activity of reasoning. In the first case, mimetic activity produces understanding, and in the second case the observation of mimetic objects allows the properly rational man an opportunity to utilize his reason and fulfill his function. After describing the evolution of tragedy from the Homeric epic, Aristotle proposes his own view of what the essential nature of tragedy is. He offers a prescriptive definition of tragedy: A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind being brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.54 These lines are perhaps the most debated, interpreted, and reinterpreted lines in all of Poetics. The first five phrases of the definition are more or less easily interpreted (though open to dispute). For Aristotle, a tragedy is a distinct art form in that it is devoted to subject matter that is weighty, with a plot told in beautiful poetic verse that is “complete” in the sense that the events portrayed onstage can stand alone as an isolated story. The story itself is portrayed by actors instead of recalled by a poetic narrative. The controversy over Aristotle’s definition of tragedy arises in the final phrase of this description, where Aristotle defines tragedy as a dramatic work that plays a specific role in the emotional life of the viewer. The tragic play’s function is to “purge” or “burn away” (as the term catharsis suggests) the emotions of pity and fear. In tragedy, the audience member is filled with pity and fear, and as a result, these emotions are somehow mitigated in the psychology of the viewer. There has been much discussion with regard to exactly what “purging” refers. Halliwell points out that most contemporary readers assume that catharsis has a pathological purpose. On this view, catharsis helps the audience member to lay aside “bad” emotions that inhibit her from living a life of happiness. However,

40 Paradigm “those interested in the deep psychology of the tragic experience should turn to other sources than Aristotle for enlightenment.” Halliwell elaborates by claiming that on the Aristotelian view, “fear” and “pity” are not to be considered “morbid” emotions, and it is a mistake for contemporary readers to understand Aristotle as suggesting that these are emotions that should be done away with in healthy individuals. He claims that philosophers like Nietzsche who interpret Aristotle this way ignore the fact that Aristotle connects catharsis with “pleasure.”55 Scholars of Aristotle have historically interpreted Aristotelian catharsis along three lines: medical, ethical, or cognitive. Perhaps the most familiar of these three is the “medical-purgation” theory that finds its origins in an 1857 essay by Jacob Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s uncle by marriage, and Bernays’ approach to catharsis will inform Freud’s. Bernays writes that catharsis is, a designation transferred from the somatic to the mental for the type of treatment given to an oppressed person that does not seek to transform or suppress the element oppressing him, but rather to arouse and drive it into the open, and thereby to bring about the relief of the oppressed person.56 On Bernays’ interpretation, Aristotle saw negative emotions as mental perturbations in need of relief, tragedy enabled the viewer to experience those emotions, and the result was a healthier mental state. Bernays’ view, in addition to having some textual support elsewhere within Aristotle’s work,57 maps onto the commonsense view that most of us hold, the view that we feel better after having a good cry. Freud would adopt and adapt Bernays’ view into a kind of “hydraulic” view of negative emotion, arguing that by identification with the characters portrayed onstage, the audience member is able to experience a relief from these negative emotions in the safety of the theatre.58 Other interpreters of Aristotle, from Neoplatonist Iamblichus, to John Milton, to G.E. Lessing have adopted what might be characterized as an “ethical” interpretation of catharsis. This approach to catharsis sets the phenomenon in the context of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that negative emotions like fear and pity are appropriate responses to events and objects in the world that are fearful or pitiful. The problem, however, with such emotional states, is that they can overwhelm the psyche and inhibit a person from appropriate responses to dangers or other challenges. The virtuous person, then, is a person who has cultivated the capacity to experience these negative emotional states in manageable proportion to the challenges life presents.59 Because tragedy arouses these negative emotions to an extreme degree, it empowers the virtuous to cope with the dangers of life beyond the theatre. Purgation, then, of the emotions is understood as purifying them, as Iamblichus writes: The powers of the human passions, that are in us, when they are entirely restrained, become more vehement; but when they are called forth into energy, gradually and commensurately, they rejoice in being moderately gratified, are satisfied; and from hence, becoming purified, they are rendered tractable, and are vanquished without violence.60

Paradigm 41 Intense negative emotions inhibit a person from living a virtuous life; however, repression only serves to make those emotional states even stronger.Through tragic catharsis, one can learn the skill of managing her emotional states, and this skill enables her to live well. More recently, some Aristotelians have defended a cognitive conception of catharsis to the exclusion of the medical and ethical models. Some have argued that catharsis has nothing to do with emotion at all. In the 1960s, classicist Leon Golden argued that pathêmatôn (παθημάτων), commonly translated “emotion,” in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy ought to be translated “incident.” Golden argues that, instead of translating the passage as tragedy accomplishing, “a catharsis of the emotions through the arousal of pity and fear,” but instead, “through the representation of pitiful and fearful situations the clarification of such incidents.” Golden’s account sees catharsis as a culmination of Aristotle’s description of tragedy within the Poetics; Aristotle has described the origins of tragic poetry in man’s delight in learning, and throughout the book, the philosopher extols the cognitive benefits of the form. Golden takes Aristotle to be suggesting that well-written tragedies clarify general truths out of the particular event portrayed. Golden defines catharsis as, the process of inference described by Aristotle ‘clarifies’ the nature of the individual act by providing, through the medium of art, the means of ascending from the particular event witnessed to an understanding of its universal nature, and thus it permits us to understand the individual act more clearly and distinctly.61 Golden claims that catharsis is the process whereby viewers come to understand something fundamental about the human experience. Golden’s view is a minority interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis, for at least two reasons. Most translators do not agree that pathêmatôn is best translated as he prescribes.62 The strongest objection, however, to this interpretation, is that, if correct, this means that Aristotle is silent on Plato’s most forceful arguments against tragedy. Plato resists tragedy because it traffics in emotions that he believes lead the viewer away from knowledge, and it seems implausible that Aristotle would sidestep his teacher’s objection in Poetics. It is for these reasons, among others, that most interpreters do not fully adopt the cognitive interpretation of catharsis. While cognitivist interpretations of catharsis are not widely held, as Stephen Halliwell points out, there is no consensus as to exactly what Aristotle means within his definition of tragedy63 (or for that matter, if catharsis is even central to the tragic effect64). For the discussion here, it is worth pointing out that only one interpretation of the catharsis passage in Aristotle might be characterized as “non-cognitivist” in that the telos of tragedy is not described in terms of learning or knowledge. Golden’s account, as well as the theories proposed by his defenders, is directly cognitivist, in the sense that on this view tragedy’s function is to instruct viewers about the nature of reality. But even the ethical story of catharsis (which is likely the most widely held), can be characterized as cognitivist because it contends that tragedy helps cultivate the skill of emotional management.The only version of catharsis that might be characterized as “non-cognitivist” is the medical account, as it does not

42 Paradigm suggest that one emerges from the tragic experience more rationally equipped to manage worldly projects. Instead, the medicalized catharsis seems to insist that tragedy somehow contributes to the viewer’s mental health or well-being. Halliwell’s modest interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis resides in his understanding of emotions in Greek culture. He writes that for Plato, pity and fear are “raw, elemental passions” that are detrimental to a healthy human life, but Aristotle sees these emotions as necessary and beneficial to a purposefully rational life. Halliwell’s interpretation seems to be supported by Rhetoric 2.5, where the philosopher asserts that pity entails, that “we too could be exposed to similar sufferings.”(91). So, the emotion of pity is a response to a rational realization of one’s place in the world. Therefore, it may be best to see tragic catharsis not as a destruction of unhealthy urges in the safety of the theatre, but as an emotional response accompanying the realization of one’s tenuous life in the hostile and unforgiving world.

Difficult Theatre and the Failure of Cognitivism There are several lessons that might be gleaned from this chapter’s discussion of melodrama, tragedy, and cognitivism about aesthetic value in the context of evaluating Eugene O’Neill’s work. The first lesson one might glean from this discussion is that attempts to describe him as a melodramatist as opposed to a tragedian are problematic, because there seems to be no clear, unified, and agreed-upon definition of either tragedy or melodrama. Perhaps attempting to refer to O’Neill as a tragedian is not very useful. O’Neill’s plays do typically traffic in negative emotions, and they are rarely resolved with “happy” endings, so in the most colloquial sense, they might be called tragic; however, O’Neill does not appear, in most cases, to construct plays that utilize familiar tragic conventions (i.e. protagonists of high or noble status, elevated language, the revelation of hamartia to the protagonist, deux ex machina, etc.), so in the strictest sense, for the most part O’Neill is not a tragedian. Some might quarrel with this claim, offering a definition of tragedy that encompasses O’Neill’s modernist approach to the form, and while there are promising arguments for such a move, reorienting the nature of tragedy to accommodate O’Neill’s project is beyond the scope of this book. The definition of tragedy, as with many definitions when examined closely, open a number of puzzles that may be irreconcilable. If one merely believes that tragedy refers to works of art that, on the whole, elicit negative emotional states, then of course O’Neill’s plays fit neatly into the category. This is the idea that animates how I use the term in this study; when this book uses the term and characterizes O’Neill as a “tragedian,” I have in mind a definition that resembles the definition of “difficult art” contemporary philosophers of art have employed. By difficult art, philosophers refer to artworks that require a good deal of time and energy to appreciate, works that defend positions that challenge our deepest moral beliefs, or works that expose us “to deeply unsettling issues or compel us to face distressing truths.”65 While this definition certainly encompasses much art that one may find difficult, it misses art that simply makes us feel badly. Much difficult art might be perceived as such simply because it arouses negative emotions, and this is the notion to which I appeal when I refer

Paradigm 43 to O’Neill’s plays as “difficult theatre.” Most of O’Neill’s plays attempt to call out negative emotions from the audience, and instead of characterizing his work as tragedy or melodrama (terms which inevitably invite value judgments about each form), I find it more fruitful to characterize his works as difficult theatre. Hereafter, in this book, I will use the term tragedy and difficult theatre interchangeably. The second lesson one might glean from this chapter is that cognitivism about the value of tragedy is an inadequate story to tell about why tragedy matters. First, cognitivists assume that most worthwhile activities must be cognitively fruitful, and few of theorists of tragedy (save perhaps Nietzsche) have inspected this assumption at all. Why must art teach for it to be important? What if, tragic entertainment, is, in and of itself, important for human flourishing? What if tragedy offers a particular sort of pleasure that is valuable whether or not I learn something from what I witness in the theatre? This is not necessarily an argument against cognitivist views; however, it should arouse suspicions. Secondly, and more directly, cognitivist accounts of tragic value seem to admit too many exceptions. Consider, for example, how coherently and forcefully Hegel’s account of tragic action maps onto Antigone, but how strained and effete such an account becomes when examining the significance of A Streetcar Named Desire. What new synthesis is reached through the conflict between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski? The same might be said of Schopenhauerian accounts and their relationship to Shakespeare. If one examines each of the cognitivist approaches described above, she discovers that each account offers a convincing story about why particular tragic plays matter, while ignoring the plays that do not seem to fit within their framework. Lastly, cognitivist accounts of tragic value suggest that there are important insights to be gained in tragedy, not because of the negative emotional effect of the play, but aside from or in spite of it. This seems a strange way to defend a difficult art form. The cognitivist will suggest that audiences should put themselves through the emotionally taxing experience of tragedy because there will be some important intellectual payoff. Could such knowledge not be delivered at a lower emotional cost; why is tragedy the vehicle for these rewards? The cognitivist fails to appreciate that people attend tragedy not to learn something, but because the experience is unique and (I want to assert), valuable beyond its potential to add to an individual’s knowledge base. A cognitivist might assert that the difficult emotional experience serves to amplify certain truths, but even then, this assertion fails to take seriously that the power of tragedy arises from how it makes us feel. It is my claim that Eugene O’Neill, through experimentation and instinct more than skill, came to a non-cognitivist understanding of the value of difficult theatre, and to demonstrate this claim, I will utilize a framework that draws from the only theory of tragedy we have explored that can be potentially characterized as “noncognitive:” Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. Aristotle emphasizes the role of pity and fear in the tragic experience, and although there is little evidence in O’Neill’s canon of a deep engagement with Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy, if one examines O’Neill’s plays closely, one can find some Aristotelian concepts just beneath the surface. In order to make this case, though, one must first turn to Reason’s socalled opponent, Emotion.

44 Paradigm

Notes 1 H.G. Kemelman, “Eugene O’Neill and the Highbrow Melodrama,” The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life 75:5 (September 1932), 491. 2 Michael Manheim, “O’Neill’s Transcendence of Melodrama in A Touch of a Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Comparative Drama 16:3 (Fall 1982), 238. 3 Alan Reynolds Thompson, “Tragedy and Melodrama,” PMLA 43:3 (September 1928), 834. 4 Ibid., 814. 5 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton and Mifflin, 1919), 4. 6 There is much to criticize in Thompson’s argument, most forcefully that it is circular. Thompson argues that emotions of terror, wonder, and hatred are lower emotions than awe or the “appropriate” Aristotelian fear and pity. His reasoning for this claim is that these emotions are those that are immediately accessible to the unsophisticated and uneducated audience member, and aside from being snobbish, the circularity is obvious. He is claiming that melodrama is lowbrow art because it appeals to lowbrow audiences. It is clear that these audiences are “lowbrow” because they find lowbrow art appealing. 7 Most notably Robert Heilman in Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), and The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973). 8 Joseph Wood Krutch, “What is Melodrama?” The Nation 138 (May 9, 1932), 544, 546. 9 This insight into the nature of tragedy and melodrama is not wholly of Heilman’s own making, as earlier critics have recognized the divided nature of tragedy. In his Introduction to Dramatic Theory (London: G.G. Harrap and Company, 1923), Allardyce Nicoll claims that tragedy consists of both and “inner” and “outer” tragedy. He writes, The outer tragedy is laid down on the lines of the utmost sensationalism, dealing with murder and torture and bloodshed; the inner tragedy is quieter and more poignant, involving usually a struggle between emotion and intellect, or between habits and custom (127). 10 Robert Heilman, The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent, 34. 11 Eric Bentley, Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 205; and Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), 13–14. 12 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 13 Gorgias, translated by Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 846. 14 To many readers, this might sound fanciful, but in developing his metaphysics, Plato was grappling with how it is we can recognize distinct things in the world as the same kinds of things. His conclusion that though trees and tables and people differ from one another, the reason we can recognize them as kinds is that they are copies of some essence that exists non- physically, and can be perceived by the mind. 15 Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube, in Plato: The Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 1203. 16 The interpretation offered here is drawn from Gregory Staley, Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17 “On Anger,” in Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, edited by John Cooper and J. P. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 74. 18 Seneca, Medea, in Six Tragedies, translated by Emily Wilson (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2010), 83. 19 Seneca, Phaedra, in Six Tragedies, translated by Emily Wilson (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2010), 8. 20 For more on this, the reader might consult Chapter 4 of Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 106–132.

Paradigm 45 21 Julian Young, The Philosophy of Tragedy: From Plato to Žižek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74. 22 “In place of Kant’s ‘thing in itself,’ he speaks of ‘The Absolute,’ – Das Unbedingt. The usual meaning of Unbedignt is ‘unconditioned,’ but since Ding is the word for ‘thing,’ Schelling is able to put the point in terms of a pun: whereas to know reality of freedom, philosophy would have to have access to the ‘un-thinged,’ all we (reason and philosophy) actually have access to, all we can grasp in discursive thought and language, is the ‘thinged’.” Julian Young, 74. 23 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 54. 24 Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art,Volume 2, translated by T.M. Knox (Glasgow: Clarenden Press, 1975), 1197. 25 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, translated by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 62. 26 For an excellent and brief summary of Hegel’s views, one should start with A.C. Bradley, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” Oxford Lectures on Poetry (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1999), 69–92. 27 Hegel, Aesthetics,Volume II, 1223. 28 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,Volume II, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 434–435. 29 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,Volume 1, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 253. 30 Though Schopenhauer utilizes a reading of Kant (and to a lesser degree, Burke) to construct his view of the sublime, there are some important distinctions that should be drawn between the two. For a detailed discussion of this, the reader might consult Dylan Trigg, “Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy,” Philosophy and Literature 28:1 (April 2004), 165–179. 31 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,Volume 1, 202. 32 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,Volume II, 43. 33 Ibid., 434. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Forward to Richard Wagner,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Guess and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13–14. 35 Egil Törnqvist, “Nietzsche and O’Neill: A Study in Affinity,” Orbis Litteratum 23:2 (June 1968) 101. 36 Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in The Birth of Tragedy, edited by Raymond Guess and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 37 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 14. 38 Ibid., 19. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Ibid., 17. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 16. 43 Qtd. in Ibid., 16–17. 44 Ibid., 18. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Josephine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79–80. 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York:Vintage Books, 1967), 450. 48 Amy Price, “Nietzsche and the Paradox of Tragedy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 38:4 (October 1998), 392. 49 Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (New York:Viking Press, 1978), 3–7.

46 Paradigm 50 Slavoj Žizek, “A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Bible and Critical Theory (Melbourne: Monash University EPress, 2004), 1–15. 51 The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, translated by Ingram Bywater (New York: The Modern Library, 1984), 226. 52 Stephen Halliwell. The Poetics of Aristotle. translated by Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 71. 53 The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, 227. 54 Ibid., 230. 55 The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by Stephen Halliwell, 90. 56 Jacob Bernays, “On Catharsis from Fundamentals of Aristotle’s Lost Essay on the ‘Effect of Tragedy’,” translated by Peter Rudnytsky, American Imago 61:3 (Fall 2004), 329. 57 In Aristotle’s Politics, For any emotion that strongly affects people’s souls (for example, pity, fear, or inspiration) is present in everyone, although to a greater or lesser degree. For there are some who are prone to become possessed by this motion. But under the influence of sacred melodies (when they make use of the ones that induce frenzy in their souls), we see they calm down, as if they had received some medical treatment and a purifying purgation. The same thing, then, must be experienced by those who are prone to pity and fear, by those who are generally emotional, and by others to the extent that they share in these emotions: they all undergo a kind of purification and get a pleasant feeling of relief. Translated by C.D.C Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 240. 58 Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathetic Characters on the Stage,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), 305–311. 59 Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 41. 60 Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, translated by Thomas Taylor (London: Bertram Dobell, 1821), 54. 61 Golden, Leon, “Catharsis,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93 (1962), 57. 62 Gregory Michael Sifakis, Aristotle on the Function of Tragic Poetry (Heracleion: Crete University Press, 2001), 102. 63 For Halliwell’s excellent survey of the competing views of catharsis, see Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 89–91. 64 As G.F. Else puts it in his own commentary on Poetics,

We have grown used to feeling— again vaguely—that serious literature is hardly

respectable unless it performs some ‘catharsis.’ Catharsis has become, for reasons that are not entirely clear, to be one of the biggest ‘big’ ideas in the field of aesthetics and criticism, the Mt. Everest or Kilimanjaro that looms on all literary horizons. But all this may be nothing but a self-propagating mirage. Aristotle does not tell us that catharsis is so important, that it is the ‘biggest’ idea about tragedy. If it were, we should expect it be at least mentioned again by name somewhere in the discussion of tragedy. As it is, pity and fear are mentioned repeatedly, and the tragic pleasure three times; catharsis never appears again, by name, after its sudden appearance in Chapter 6. Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 443–444. 65 Antony Aumann, “A Moral Problem for Difficult Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74:4 (Fall 2016), 383.

3 Passions

In 1922, Mary Mullett spoke with Eugene O’Neill about the uncanny effect of Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape on Broadway audiences. Mullett found herself surprised at how positively audiences had received these plays, given that both Anna and The Ape are “grim pictures of grim life, a rough slap in the face to people accustomed to the conventions of society and the traditions of the theatre.” Despite the metaphorical slap in the face, audiences applauded these plays wildly, but Mullett recognized that their enthusiasm was not merely some masochistic response to the controversial ideas that these plays might arouse. She writes that “it wasn’t the slap itself that got this reaction. It was the thing, the force itself, the meaning behind the blow.” O’Neill agreed with Mullett’s estimation of audience’s response with glee, pointing out that “the audiences sat there and listened to ideas absolutely opposed to their ordinary habits of thought—and applauded those ideas.” Somehow, O’Neill’s artistry had broken down bourgeois New Yorkers’ resistance to radical ideas and compelled them to relish in depictions of plights of the underprivileged. Mullett asked O’Neill how he had achieved this effect, he replied that the secret to this success with these audiences was as follows: because they had been appealed to through their emotions…and our emotions are a better guide than our thoughts. Our emotions are instinctive. They are the result not only of our individual experiences but of the experiences of the whole human race, back through all the ages.They are the deep undercurrent, whereas our thoughts are often only the small individual surface reactions. Truth usually goes deep. So it reaches you through the emotions.1 Upon close reading, one might conclude, as Bentley did elsewhere in trying to interpret O’Neill,2 that perhaps the playwright is speaking the language of profundity without much substance actually behind the words. After all, how does one come to understand the “Truth” that runs deep without having thoughts? How does emotional appeal disclose Truth? Though O’Neill was no stranger to inexplicably profound but inscrutable personal declarations, such a judgment about O’Neill’s statement here is too hasty. Within this statement, one can see the beginnings of O’Neill’s theory of emotion. Here, there is an assumption that reason and emotion are at odds within our minds, an assumption that emotions have DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-4

48 Passions a function that has evolved over time, and an assumption that emotions serve a revelatory purpose to our rational faculties. Readers familiar with Darwin, Freud, and Jung’s views on emotion might find elements of their philosophies within O’Neill’s statement in this interview; however, O’Neill’s theory of emotion is not merely static and derivative of others’ views. In a close reading of O’Neill’s work, informed by contemporary discussions of the philosophy and psychology of emotion, one finds an important key that unlocks a component of the playwright’s philosophy of difficult theatre.3

Emotion vs. Reason Baked into O’Neill’s theory of emotion is an all-too-typically Western understanding of the “passions” as distinct from higher rational faculties. The idea that emotions and reason are divisible is at least as old as Plato (though probably older). In Book IV of The Republic, Socrates describes the soul as a unity with three divisions; put another way, there are three sorts of psychological forces at work within each soul.The reason Socrates concludes that the soul must contain these divisions has to do with the fact that one often finds herself doing things based upon conflicting desires (for example, taking a drink though one is committed to sobriety, having an affair while being committed to marriage, etc.). Socrates contends that the soul consists of Reason, Spirited, and Appetitive parts, each of which is connected to a certain set of desires to be fulfilled. The spirited and appetitive parts of the soul are connected to “lower” desire fulfillment; the spirited part of the soul being committed to courage and honor, and the appetitive part is committed to sexual satisfaction and nourishment. The rational part of the soul, of course, desires to pursue the good, true, and beautiful, and in a “well-ordered” individual, the rational governs the passionate parts of the soul, keeping their desires in check in the interest of virtue.4 The idea that passion and reason are distinct, and that the well-regulated individual lives according to reason while keeping unruly emotions at bay is pervasive in Western culture. Westerners routinely privilege “reason,” often dismissing “appeals to emotion” in discourse because emotion is highly subjective and seemingly transitory and malleable. However, recent research programs into the nature of emotional life demonstrate that reason and emotion are not as easily divided as folk psychology insists.Though O’Neill likely had little knowledge of research into the philosophy and psychology of emotion (as much of it has only been advanced in the last three decades, long after O’Neill’s death), a brief survey of the field will offer this study important terminological tools with which to describe O’Neill’s own view of emotional life. When philosophers think about the fundamental ontology of something in the world, they often begin with two basic metaphysical questions: What is it, and How does one explain change? In the case of emotion, the answers to these questions seem ready until one deliberates about them for any length of time. Almost immediately, many questions spring to mind: How does one define “emotion?” How do emotions differ from other physical sensations? Are emotions something that occur in the brain, or elsewhere in the body? How do they differ from other modes of

Passions 49 cognition? Are emotions related to action? Are emotions universal, or are they culturally constructed? How do emotions change? Is it really possible to experience “mixed emotions?” These and many other questions have been at the forefront of the recent research paradigms in psychology and philosophy of emotion, and though there are many widespread disagreements about the answers to these problems (and even how one might arrive at such answers), contemporary research in this area has become rich and revelatory. A good starting point in a definition of emotion is to rule out what emotions are not. Initially, one might be tempted to describe emotions as “feelings.” Emotions certainly have a qualia; that is, there it is something it is like to be angry, sad, or joyful, and it seems coherent to align those feelings with emotion. The trouble with this approach arises, however, when one cones to recognize that many feelings do not count as emotions, at least not in any conventional sense. Many physical, and even psychological sensations, such as itching, soreness, hunger pangs, or sexual desire do not seem to be rightly called emotion. Additionally, as philosopher Jenefer Robinson points out, “it just seems wrong to reduce a lofty emotion such as love to an inner feeling such as butterflies in the tummy.”5 Love, like many emotions, is much more than a sensation, and a simple feeling theory fails to account for this fact. The intuition that emotions are not identical to bodily sensation has given rise to a dominant view in philosophy of emotion, a cognitive theory of emotion.6 Those who defend this view describe an emotion as a psychophysical process that is initiated by a “cognitive component,” a belief, judgment, appraisal, or construal of one’s perception of the world or oneself which gives rise to “feeling component,” a phenomenological experience often accompanied by some bodily change or sensation. In other words, emotions are a kind of thought that produce physical responses. The cognitive view of emotion offers a great deal in terms of explanatory scope and power that the feeling view of emotion does not. For example, cognitive accounts of emotion can help distinguish between two emotional states where feeling accounts cannot. One can certainly appreciate that the qualitative experience of love (heightened heart rate, rush of dopamine to pleasure centers of the brain) might be difficult to distinguish from the euphoria that often follows strenuous exercise, and in order to distinguish the two experiences, the feeling theorist has to resort to cognitive categories. Another important advantage of cognitivist views of emotion over other candidate theories is that cognitivism emphasizes the intentionality of emotions. By intentionality, I refer to the “property of being directed at or toward something.”7 Philosophers of emotion point out that emotions are “about” something; that is, emotions are directed at some object or proposition in one’s field of experience. Intentionality explains how emotions differ from feelings, as feelings are not directed at anything.8 If one finds herself, for instance, afraid of a snake in her path, the snake would be referred to as the “intentional object” of that emotional response. In addition to the intentional object, an emotion also seems to possess a “formal object;” Antony Kenny points out that emotions are about something which one has perceived under certain conditions of belief, and these beliefs are referred to as the formal object of the emotion.9 The one who fears the snake in

50 Passions her path does so because she believes the snake looks dangerous and might be poisonous, but were she a trained herpetologist who immediately recognized the snake as harmless, her resulting emotional state would not be one of fear, as the formal object of her emotion would not be the result of beliefs of danger or threat. Though significant advances in our descriptions of emotional life resulted from the cognitive turn of the late twentieth century, strong cognitivist theories have given way to other theories of emotion that are both the result of philosophical analysis as well as empirical research. This sea change has been initiated by a look backward, a re-consideration of the “feeling” theory of emotion as independently developed by American philosopher William James and Danish physician Carl Lange in 1884 and 1885, respectively. In his famous essay “What is an Emotion?” James outlines a theory of emotion that differs significantly from cognitivist approaches. He writes: Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this later state of mind gives rise to bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly from the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion…the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.10 Unlike the cognitivist approach, which insists that the causal chain of emotional expression begins with some sort of evaluative judgment about an object, James’ theory asserts that emotion begins with the body’s perception of some “exciting fact,” some stimulus that provokes a bodily response. The changes that the body undergoes as a result of this perception constitute the qualia of the emotion one experiences. James characterizes emotions as epiphenomena, byproducts of bodily responses. James asserts (rightly, as it turns out) that objects excite bodily changes via “preorganized mechanism,”11 physical structures that evolved to operate prior to the conscious mind and respond before cognition registers and evaluates the situation.The conscious perception of these bodily changes is the emotion that one experiences. James’ approach to emotion does seem to explain emotional life in ways that cognitivist theories do not. For instance, cognitivist theories of emotion construe emotions as consisting of value judgments (i.e., I fear the snake because I judge it to be dangerous). However, one might judge something dangerous, but without physical changes that one can identify as fear, one cannot sensibly describe that person as fearful. James writes, What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of a quickened heartbeat nor of shallow breathing, nor of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh, nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think.12 If all the physical responses of fear in this example are stripped away from the emotion, it does not seem apparent that one would describe herself in a state of fear.

Passions 51 Additionally, cognitivist understandings of emotion are often criticized because they fail to account for the emotional life of “babies and beasts.” If evaluative processes are a key constituent of emotions, it appears that sentient beings lacking the linguistic capacity to make those evaluations would be incapable of experiencing emotions. It appears quite evident that infants and non-human animals without language experience emotions, and by adopting a Jamesian view of emotional life, one can easily account for that. If emotions are perceptions of physical change, and many physical changes are the result of preorganized evolutionary physiology, it is sensible that sentient creatures would experience such states, regardless of their linguistic development. It does appear that empirical evidence suggests that cognition does not precede affect, or that cognition is necessary for affect. For example, famous behaviorist John Watson performed experiments on newborn babies in the early twentieth century, finding that by restraining a baby’s head he could initiate rage, a sudden loss of support (so that the baby felt she was falling) could induce fear, and that gently touching a baby would elicit pleasure.13 More recent studies have more or less confirmed Watson’s findings, using much more ethical methods.14 If such emotional states required cognitive judgment, it is unclear how these very young children could have experienced such states. James’ account, on the other hand, seems to more directly make sense of the evidence from these studies. In adults, perhaps no researcher has been more prolific in his attempt to demonstrate that cognition is not necessary for affect than Robert Zajonic. Among many famous experiments that Zajonic has constructed to disprove cognitivist theories of emotion, one striking example is the Chinese ideograph experiment. Participants in the experiment are shown images of Chinese ideographs with which they are unfamiliar. Preceding the image is another image of an angry or happy face, displayed so quickly that the viewer cannot consciously discern they have seen anything other than the ideograph, yet participants report a preference for the ideographs following the happy faces to the ones following the angry ones. When Zajonic slows down the process so that the participants are consciously aware of the images of the faces, the effect vanishes. In addition to demonstrating that certain emotional states can be aroused without conscious cognition, Zajonic has demonstrated that in some cases, cognition actually thwarts the expression of emotion.15 As one might expect, cognitivists have offered alternative accounts to describe the empirical data mentioned here, and defenders of neo-Jamesian approaches have responded; cognitivists have offered counter-responses, and alternative hybrid theories have been proposed to harmonize the data with philosophical insights. Such is the academic enterprise. It is not my purpose here to take a position on an exact definition of emotion; rather, the task here is to suss O’Neill’s theory of emotion, and to bring that theory to bear in his approach to tragedy. That said, what twentieth-century research into emotion has disclosed is that the distinction between Reason and Emotion as distinct categories rests on shaky ground. Whether one adopts a cognitivist or non-cognitivist view of emotion (or some variant of the two), contemporary philosophy of emotion has disclosed that there is a “logic” to emotional expression that one might refer to as rational (though frequently

52 Passions mistaken!).16 Additionally, an understanding of the frameworks offered in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory of emotion provides the terminological toolkit with which to assess O’Neill’s approach to emotional life.

O’Neill and the Passions In order to elucidate O’Neill’s approach to emotion, one place to start would be to examine the psychological theories with which he was (at least somewhat) familiar. Much has been made of O’Neill’s relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis, though O’Neill himself attempted to downplay Freud’s influence on his writing. In a letter to Barrett Clark, O’Neill wrote, “I am no deep student of psychoanalysis. As far as I can remember, of all the books written by Freud, Jung, etc., I have read only four, and Jung is the only one of the lot who interests me.”17 O’Neill claimed that of Freud’s works, he had only read Totem and Taboo and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and he underwent occasional and cursory psychoanalysis with Smith Elly Jeliffe, a prominent New York psychiatrist.18 He later briefly pursued psychoanalysis in 1926 to address his alcoholism, and given the prevalence of psychoanalytic concepts in the American modernist scene during O’Neill’s time in New York, it is clear that he had a strong grasp of Freudian psychological principles.19 In O’Neill’s plays themselves, critics have recognized the deep undercurrent of Freudian psychoanalytic theory throughout the playwright’s body of work.20 As with many American Modernist writers, it seems a natural assumption that O’Neill’s view of emotion might be influenced by Freudian approaches. The trouble with such an assertion is that Freud’s concept of emotion is somewhat inscrutable, and some have suggested that Freud does not have a discrete theory of emotion at all, instead relying on folk conceptions of fear, anger, and the like within his schema.21 In certain passages, Freud seems to suggest that emotions are feelings, while in others, he appears to adopt a more-or-less judgmentalist approach. For instance, in his 1915 essay, “The Unconscious,” Freud writes that “affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings.”22 Here, he appears to be suggesting that the hallmark of an emotion is that one experiences a feeling one can perceive consciously as sensations within the body. One might assume, based upon this, that Freud had adopted a Jamesian, somatic view of the emotions. However, there is also evidence that Freud thinks of emotions as cognitions, whether or not they produce discernible affect. As a result of his study on “hysteria” in female patients with hypno-therapist Joseph Breuer, Freud famously concluded that, as opposed to having some physiological component, “hysteria behaves as if anatomy does not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it.”23 Such a statement leads one to believe that Freud does have a more cognitivist approach to emotions than does James. John Deigh has argued that for Freud, emotions are not identical to feelings; instead, feelings are a component of emotional states (it appears that Deigh’s view currently represents the majority view among Freudian interpreters).24 The expression of such feelings could be inhibited consciously or unconsciously, as in cases of repression, but this is not identical with repressing emotion, as an emotion is a state of which one may not even be aware. Instead of regarding emotions as mere

Passions 53 epiphenomena, as James had, Freud recognizes and holds in high regard the intentionality of emotions, as his therapeutic approach was often focused on identifying the objects of “aberrant” emotional states and helping his patients re-orient their perceptions of those objects of emotions, whether those objects were tangible (parents, past traumas, etc.) or the products of people’s fantasies.25 Because of Freud’s insistence that emotions are mental states directed toward intentional objects, it is reasonable for cognitivists to claim Freud as one of their own. Deigh claims that Freud actually inspired the cognitive theory of emotion of the late twentieth century, though most cognitivist philosophers of emotion are unaware of his contribution to the development of concepts and arguments that enliven this discussion.26 Throughout O’Neill’s work, one is not hard pressed to find Freudian motifs and depictions of Freudian conditions, and in many cases, Freud’s theory of emotion appears to accompany these depictions. For instance, some critics consider 1920’s Diff’rent O’Neill’s earliest overt experiment with Freudian psychology.The protagonist of the play, Emma Crosby, abruptly ends her engagement with Caleb Williams, a sea captain who she suspects of a having an affair with a young native woman in the South Sea Islands. Freudian critics have argued that Emma is suffering from “reaction-formation,” an outward disgust with sex that masks a powerful unconscious preoccupation with sex.27 This line of interpretation suggests that the reason Emma breaks off her engagement with Caleb is to avoid a sexual relationship with him. The audience becomes aware of Emma’s emotional conflict toward sex in the first act, as she opens the play apparently attempting to convince herself that her suitor is “diff ’rent” than other men, that he is more faithful and better able to control his sexual impulses than her father and brother. This illusion is shattered by her brother Jack’s suggestion that something untoward had occurred on Caleb’s recent voyage, where he had a liaison with the native woman. Emma insists on knowing all the details of Caleb’s affair, even “letting an involuntary exclamation escape her” at hearing the lurid tale.28 She appears both repulsed and intrigued by the descriptions of “naked brown women” of the islands, and though she ends her relationship with Caleb because of his behavior, she claims that she does not “judge” him, recognizing that Caleb’s nature is consistent with that of any man. She resolves to be an old maid. Act II takes place 30 years after the events of the first act, and the audience discovers that Emma has never married. Caleb has remained a bachelor and has returned year after year to seek Emma’s hand in marriage; she has never conceded. The sexual desire Emma has repressed over the years has manifested itself in her appearance, which O’Neill vividly describes as “something revoltingly incongruous about her, a pitiable sham, a too-apparent effort to cheat the years by appearances.”29 Despite her age, Emma wears a frilly, youthful dress with silk stockings and high-heeled pumps. She is heavily made-up, with poorly dyed hair, her whole appearance a “mockery of undignified age snatching greedily at the empty simulacra of youth.”30 She has become infatuated with Caleb’s nephew, Benny Rogers, a man half her age. Emma flirts shamelessly with the young man, who is playing her for a fool in exchange for money, and as in Act I, she betrays her fascination with sex by insisting Benny give her all the lurid details of his exploits with Parisian women during the war. As Benny teases and evades her queries, Emma “continually wets her lips and pushes back her hair from behind her flushed face as if it were

54 Passions stifling her.”31 As part of a ruse to swindle money from Caleb, Benny proposes marriage to Emma; however, she soon discovers that she has been deceived, leading her to suicide as the play closes. Putting aside the overt misogyny of the play (no small task, to be sure),32 as well as the improbability of the plot and the inexplicability of both Emma and Caleb’s motivations, one can see evidence for a Freudian conception of emotion embedded within the play. Mixed emotions of the sort that Emma evinces in Diff’rent are difficult to account for on a “feeling” theory of emotion; if emotions are merely epiphenomenal perceptions of bodily changes, it is a difficult task to describe how she can experience disgust and desire simultaneously, as it seems many of the physical sensations that putatively produce those emotions would overlap and perhaps cancel one another, or at least render those emotions unintelligible. Additionally, it appears that emotional responses of disgust and attraction are central to understanding why Diff’rent’s cast of characters behave as they do. If a Jamesian conception of emotions as epiphenomenal states is the best explanation of human affect, it is tempting to regard Emma as absurdly superficial, allowing accidents of her physiology to direct her life outcomes. This is not likely an interpretation O’Neill would appreciate, as in writing about Diff’rent, O’Neill claimed that: We are all more or less ‘Emmas,’—the more or less depending upon our talent for compromise. Either we try in desperation to clutch our dream at the last by deluding ourselves with some tawdry substitute; or having waited the best part of our lives, we find the substitute time mocks us with too shabby to accept. In either case we are tragic figures and also fit subjects for the highest comedy, were one sufficiently detached to write it.33 This characterization of Emma hardly squares with one who ought to be regarded as emotionally frivolous. For O’Neill, we are all Emma; that is, there is something of Emma in everyone who is faced with reality that does not line up with expectations. If one adopts a Freudian conception of emotion, Emma’s behavior is the manifestation of two conflicting cognitions of which she may or may not be aware. Emma has a (perhaps unconscious) emotional state directed toward the object of sexual gratification. She also expresses revulsion for such acts, consistent with her moralistic upbringing in New England, and there is a great deal of textual evidence that suggests she is not merely playing the role of the prude; she truly sees herself as above sexual desire and is repulsed by it. Though these cognitions are at odds with one another, it is not uncommon for one to hold two contradictory views simultaneously. Similarly, one might hold two conflicting emotions simultaneously. Moreover, a Freudian approach makes sense of the fact that much of the action of the play is caused by Emma’s emotional states. Because emotions are not mental registries of physiological states, they can stand in causal relations with actions and events, as can other mental cognitions. It is reasonable to believe that Emma’s emotions cause the central conflict of the play, as opposed to merely being byproducts of the unfolding action. It appears O’Neill, whether by directly reading Freud’s work on this subject, or by absorbing “such psychological commonplaces,” of

Passions 55 modernist intellectualist society (as Engel puts it), has put into practice dramatic action that actualizes Freudian ideas about emotion.34 Mixed feelings play an important role in 1924’s Welded, a domestic drama depicting the marital conflicts between Michael Cape, a playwright, and his actress wife Eleanor. It is widely assumed that O’Neill was using as source material conflicts from his own marriage with Agnes Bolton to inform the plot of this play. O’Neill wrote of Welded that he wanted to write a truly “realistic” play, in the sense that “it deals with what might be called the soul of the character.”35 Since O’Neill intended this play a close study of the interior lives of the Capes, it illustrates his commitment to a certain view of emotion. In this play, the key conflict lies in the fact that both partners feel simultaneously a deep, passionate love toward one another and are deeply burdened by the weight placed upon each of them by the other. They find themselves, as O’Neill describes, like “two persons of different races, deeply in love, but separated by a barrier of language.”36 Years of attempting to express love to each other and feeling isolated finally lead to the first act’s conflict, as Michael accuses Eleanor of infidelity. This occurs at the opening of the play, as Michael attempts to take his wife upstairs to make love to her. The doorbell rings, and despite Michael’s protests, Eleanor answers the door as a means to evade her husband’s advances. She admits her longtime friend John into the home, and Michael is suspicious. In the ensuing argument, both Capes confess their jealousy toward one another; Michael is jealous of John, and Eleanor is jealous of the passion Michael puts into his work. These jealousies are too much for both to bear, and they both throw themselves into the arms of another: Michael to a prostitute, and Eleanor to John. As Eleanor visits John’s home and attempts to go up to his bedroom, she freezes on the stairs as if she has seen an apparition. She explains to John “I swear I saw him—standing at the head of the stairs waiting for me—just as he was standing when you knocked at our door, remember?”37 Michael experiences a similar vision as he attempts to kiss the prostitute. Neither Eleanor nor Michael can bring themselves to consummate their infidelity, recognizing that they are “welded” together in a Divine bond, they both rush home to find one another. Barrett Clark attributes the failure of Welded to its overuse of “analytical language, philosophical disquisition,” and writes that he felt unmoved by the plight of the couple because it seemed that O’Neill was merely using the play to speculate about the nature or marital life.38 Clark is certainly correct about the overall effect of Welded, but perhaps the problem with the dialogue that he sensed is a limitation of language.The conflict of the play has arisen in two sets of irreconcilable mixed-emotional states; Michael and Eleanor are both drawn to and apart from the object of their love, and no amount of rational argument can solve this dilemma.The best they can do is come to terms with the conflict and accept it, as they seem to do in the final act.

Emotions as ignition for conflict As O’Neill’s style developed over his career, a noticeable quality within his tragedies began to emerge in fits and starts. Increasingly, O’Neill’s plays contained conflicts that directly result from the emotional dispositions of characters within

56 Passions the plays, and perhaps this is a key contrast one might draw to distinguish O’Neill’s tragic approach from “classical” tragedy, where a play’s action is rooted in someone’s set of ideals or beliefs at odds with the world. For instance, in classical tragedy, Oedipus brings about his own destruction with his decision to untangle the mystery of the Theban plague. In Antigone, Creon is committed to rigid set of ideals about the sanctity of the polis. Hamlet pursues justice for his father’s death, and Macbeth is motivated by a belief that he is the rightful heir to the throne. It is too hasty to assert that emotion plays no role in what drives these so-called tragic heroes; however, the point is that tragic protagonists have typically been portrayed as motivated by some belief or judgment that can be analyzed apart from affect. Though this is a feature more obvious in O’Neill’s middle and late career work, some of his early work also depicts emotion as a key motivator for conflict. For example, Gold, a play that expands upon the plot of the earlier one-act play Where the Cross is Made, displays the impact that the emotion of guilt might have not only on the guilty person, but on those around him. Captain Bartlett is driven mad by guilt over murders that he permitted in order to protect a Chinese “treasure.” Though he “spoke no word”39 to order the death of the two men, Bartlett knows he is responsible, and not only does his guilt result in nightmares, this guilt actually manifests itself in self-deception; he has convinced himself that the “treasure” he had uncovered contained more than the worthless trinkets it actually held. Bartlett’s guilt has also dramatically affected his son Nat’s mental health, so that in Act III Nat is almost convinced he can see a non-existent ship returning to the dock with the treasure. It is only after Bartlett is compelled to confess the truth to his son that Nat snaps out of his delusion, and Bartlett is able to die in peace. Bartlett’s daughter has convinced her father to tell the truth by invoking another emotion, that of love (as Doris Falk puts it), “the only value life has for him outside himself—the love of his son.”40 Love motivates the closing action of the play as guilt enlivened the previous acts. It must be acknowledged that not all conflict within O’Neill’s work can be directly attributed to the emotional lives of his characters. Many plays operate under a more classical paradigm than others, with characters driven by ideas and beliefs as opposed to emotions. For example, the unsuccessful and relatively early The First Man depicts a brilliant anthropologist, Curtis Jayson, who is so committed to his work that when he discovers his wife’s pregnancy, he insists that he will not love the child because it has spoiled his life’s work. After Jason’s wife dies in childbirth, Curtis refuses to see his son, ultimately leaving the child with an aunt so that he can return to field work. Curtis is hopelessly committed to an ideal, the belief in the value of his work beyond the attachments and distractions of middle-class Connecticut life. In the end, he refuses to allow emotional commitments to be a distraction to what he believes to be his calling. At the end of Act II, as Curtis and his wife Martha argue about her refusal to accompany him on his field work, he remarks that she talks as if “love were an intellectual process!”41 Clearly, Curtis sees his emotions at odds with his life’s project, but unlike Gold, the conflict of the play is not as rooted in Curtis’ emotional disposition as it is in his self-understanding. O’Neill’s first major success, Beyond the Horizon seems to straddle the line between a plot driven by ideas versus one driven by emotion. The play opens with

Passions 57 a depiction of two brothers with very distinct goals and self-conceptions. Robert Mayo aspires to be a world- traveler and a writer, while his brother Andrew is a man of the earth who has only dreamed of running the family farm. Both in love with the same girl, Andrew takes Robert’s place on a merchant sea voyage after he discovers that she has designs for his brother. Robert chooses to stay behind and deny his desires for the sake of love, leading to his failure as a farmer and relapse into tuberculosis, while Andrew will go into the world and make a fortune for himself. While Robert never seems to assume that he will be much of a farmer, there is a great deal of textual evidence that he is not much of a poet, either. Though he might regard himself as too intellectual for meager subsistence living on the farm and wants “to write, or something of the sort,”42 as a career, critics have long pointed out that Robert is a poor poet, and he does not seem to spend much time reading or writing in order to improve his craft.43 Even Robert’s taste in poetry is superficial, and the audience likely shares Andrew’s disgust at the poetry of Arthur Symons, with whom Robert is enamored. Robert is in love with the idea of writing and poetry, but this idea does not seem to translate into actual effort. A central source of conflict for Robert is the fact that he does not know himself, and this is one reason that he is never able to go “beyond the horizon.”Though he has designs to be more than a “touch of a poet,” Robert cannot conceptualize what this even means. Seen through this lens, it does appear that O’Neill’s inspiration for this play lies in a classical understanding of tragedy, tragedy that is motivated by some lack of knowledge or mistake that the protagonist might make to motivate the action. These analyses seem to miss the impetus for Robert finding himself in the most tragic set of his circumstances to begin with; he has decided to stay on the farm because he is in love with Ruth. Interestingly, his love for Ruth contributes to his mistaken view about himself, and this makes for a more nuanced play than Horizon might have otherwise been. It is possible that Robert’s ruin and ultimate consumptive demise would likely have resulted even had he left the farm to sail, but it does appear that his fate is intimately connected to that initial choice. Moreover, the text suggests that Robert’s consumption is closely tied to the heartbreak he had experienced at the hands of Ruth. In Act II of the play, Ruth declares that she does not love Robert because he is no good for farm work with his head always in books. Further, she has married the wrong brother. When Andrew returns five years later to find his brother consumptive and learns of Ruth and Robert’s dispute, he attributes Robert’s condition to Ruth’s cruelty: “What kind of woman are you? Did you have to torture him? No wonder he’s dying!”44 Andrew’s diagnosis of Robert’s condition is deeply Freudian; because Robert has silently borne his heartbreak with no release, this complex has manifested itself in his physiological condition. In the final scene of the play, Robert has summoned his remaining strength to make his way outdoors to watch the sunrise, and he is finally able to recognize true beauty. Presumably, Robert has been reading poetry all his life to find it, and as he gazes at the hills, he is able to finally experience freedom. It as if the emotion of wonder has shown him his place in the world. In awe at his final sunrise, he sees that he is finally going to be able to voyage beyond those hills; he is finally free. In this morning moment, his emotional burden has been lifted, and he is able to finally see the

58 Passions truth of his relationship to the world. As we will see in the rest of this book, akin to Beyond the Horizon, O’Neill’s finest work is driven by the emotional dispositions of the characters as opposed conflicts about ideals. It must be acknowledged that though O’Neill’s plays do reflect a conception of emotion that is contemporary to views emerging during his day, it is not clear that he has a fully coherent or consistent view of exactly what emotions are. Nevertheless, O’Neill intuits, fairly early in his career, that emotions play an important and unique role in human efforts to understand the world. Though O’Neill will, from time to time (especially at the early stages of his career),45 deliberately attempt to utilize emotion to manipulate his audience’s perception, by the end of his career, O’Neill comes to a deep appreciation of the power of emotion to focus attention and disclose reality in a way that mere “reason” might not. In order to appreciate this shift in O’Neill’s development, one might turn to an odd case study in emotion, Lazarus Laughed.

A theory of laughter Perhaps none of O’Neill’s plays are as revelatory of his view of emotion as Lazarus Laughed. Written in 1925 and wildly ambitious, this pageant traces the life and martyrdom of the Biblical character Lazarus, whose experience with death has transformed his whole way of being in the world. The title of the play, as well as one of its key features, was derived as a counterpoint to the “Jesus wept” portion of the miracle.46 Upon resurrection, Lazarus is characterized with an uncontrollable laughter that changes everyone who hears it. This play, though massive in scale and inventive in approach, is unwieldly, tedious to many audiences, and has never appeared on Broadway. It utilizes classical techniques such as choruses and a detailed mask system that designates social roles and character qualities. These features, though fascinating, and perhaps possible to portray on film, have proven too ambitious for most theatres interested in O’Neill’s repertoire. In preparation for this play, O’Neill read widely about Greco-Roman and church history, and he also read Freud and Henri Bergson on the “spirit of humor.” Because laughter is a central device in Lazarus, O’Neill was attempting to understand its origins and utility in human psychology. Manuel Komroff, one of O’Neill’s colleagues, records that he and O’Neill had lengthy discussions along these lines: We discussed the foundations of laughter sometime later. We agreed that we weren’t satisfied with the ideas in Freud’s Wit and the Unconscious or Bergson’s Laughter. Gene and I talked about the salty underneath part of laughter, which neither of these theories covered; Freud’s theories were erotic, related to sex, and Bergson’s were based on laughter as mainly mechanistic. Gene and I agreed that laughter was a kind of uncontrollable emotional overflow that we were unable to explain.47 O’Neill clearly found both psychologists’ theories inadequate, and he and Komroff clearly opted to simply accept its mystery as opposed to attempt to explain why people laugh.

Passions 59 Laughter is one of those features of human existence that is routinely taken for granted but nearly inexplicable when one thinks about its nature at any length. Why do human beings regard things humorous at all? On an evolutionary account, why is anything funny? Why would humans have evolved not merely to rationally assess circumstances, but sometimes to find them amusing? Moreover, why do humans mark these amusing circumstances with the physiological responses of chuckles, chortles, snickers, and guffaws? What utility does any of this serve? Both Freud and Bergson attempt to explain these phenomena in their work, and in order to appreciate the utility of laughter in Lazarus Laughed, it is important to understand how O’Neill’s theory of laughter compares and contrasts with theirs. In Freud’s Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud expresses puzzlement that until his day, little psychological or philosophical attention had been accorded to humor and joking as mental phenomena. As humor plays such an important role in people’s mental and social lives, Freud offers an analysis and theory to describe the psychological mechanisms that drive this mode of discourse and cognition. Freud’s theory of humor is among the first modern psychological approaches to the question, and his contribution to this area of philosophy is still recognized in contemporary discourses. Contemporary critics frequently characterize Freud’s theory of humor as a “Relief ” theory. Emerging at least as early as 1709,48 relief theories are founded upon a hydraulic conception of psychology. Roughly, relief theories of humor argue that laughter is a release valve for the mind and/or the body, enabling a person to discharge a build-up of psychic or physical, “nervous” energy. Freud’s contribution to relief theories emerges as he analyzes three types of wit: joking, the comic, and humor. In each of these cases, psychological energy has been allocated in the brain toward a particular task; however, if a situation ultimately does not demand that energy, it is released in the form of laughter. In the case of joking, which Freud defines as the telling of humorous stories or similar forms of verbal repartee, laughter becomes a substitute for the typical repression of emotional desire. For instance, people often repress emotions of hostility toward others, because “higher personal civilization teaches us later that it is undignified to use abusive language;” however, this hostility often results in jokes at another’s expense. Since it is uncouth to physically attack others with whom we disapprove, Freud asserts that we have developed a mechanism to release that hostility and enlist others in our attack by way of laughter.49 The “comic” captures situations, events, and displays that people witness and regard as funny. In analyzing a taxonomy of the comic, Freud argues that the psychological energy of evaluation is built up and released in laughter. One might consider the example of impersonation to appreciate what Freud means. Skillful impersonators build up their audience’s mental energy by compelling the audience to think about who the impersonator is mimicking, then they will deliver a punch line in the impersonated manner which the person who is being impersonated would not likely say, and the mental energy the audience has accrued for the task of identification and comparison is released in laughter.50 Humor, Freud’s third category of wit, emerges “if we are in a situation which tempts us to liberate painful affects according to our habits, and motives then urge

60 Passions us to suppress these affects statu nascendi.”51 To illustrate the effect of this category, Freud offers an example from Mark Twain and describes its effect on the listener: When he tells us about the life of his brother, how, as an employee in a large road- building enterprise, he was hurled into the air through a premature explosion of a blast, far from the place where he was working, feelings of sympathy are invariably aroused in us. We should like to inquire whether he sustained no injury in this accident; but the continuation of the story that the brother lost a half-day’s pay for being away from the place he worked diverts us entirely from sympathy and makes us almost as hard-hearted as that employer, and just as indifferent to the possible injury to the victim’s health.52 The psychic energy that is built in the story because of the pity one might feel for the brother is released in the form of laughter when the absurd suggestion that the brother lost compensation on the basis of absenteeism interrupts the normal expression of pity. In each of these circumstances, Freud argues that the function of laughter is the release of unexpended energy. To be sure, Freud’s account does make intuitive sense, as laughter does often seem to serve this purpose, especially in the case of nervous laughter. However, much of the force of Freud’s examples rely upon a somewhat antiquated conception of the build-up and necessary expenditure of physiological energy as a result on unconscious processes. Additionally, as O’Neill and Komroff seem to surmise, Freud’s theory is too reductive, and fails to capture why humor seems to matter so much in people’s day-to-day lives. Henri Bergson was a contemporary of Freud’s, and he is often regarded as the most important French philosopher of the twentieth century. Bergson’s approach to philosophy is largely phenomenological, which means that he starts by examining human sense perception as opposed to extra-human entities to construct frameworks for understanding the world. His book Laughter, first published in 1900, is a collection of three essays that first appeared in Revue de Paris, which aim to address both the nature of humor, and to a lesser degree, the physiology of laughter. Bergson claims that in addition to humor being an interesting feature of human experience, wondering “Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not have something of its own to tell us about art and life?”53 Unlike Freud, Bergson’s theory of laughter is not necessarily one of release. Instead, Bergson offers a kind of social-constructivist approach to the phenomenon. Bergson’s account begins with several assertions. First, he asserts that humor is an intrinsically human quality; it appears that humans are the only “animal that laughs,” and when humans find anything funny, they are either laughing at another human’s foibles or are anthropomorphizing some non-human animal or thing in the world as the object of their amusement. Secondly, Bergson claims that humor is only produced at a certain emotional distance, which he refers to as an “absence of feeling.”54 People who are emotionally involved in an event will likely not find that event funny. Laughter requires a kind of disinterest that other emotions

Passions 61 undermine. For instance, if one sees a stranger fall on the street she might be amused, but if it were her grandmother, her deep care and concern for the older woman’s health would render the event anything but amusing. Lastly, “laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,” or put another way, laughter only emerges from the community of others.55 Society determines what people find funny, and this is why humor from one culture frequently fails to transfer to another culture. This is also the reason that humor is so difficult to define. These three assertions, though certainly questionable respectively, ground Bergson’s theory. Because humor arises in the context of social interaction, in order to understand why it exists, one needs to understand the social function of laughter. Bergson asserts that laughter is a “social gesture,” in that it has a teleological function within human culture. He writes that “laughter, then, does not belong to the province of esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement.”56 His line of reasoning begins with the claim that “what life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of a present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.”57 Survival requires that people be vigilant for threats, but in society people are required to be flexible, or “elastic,” in order to adapt to the ever-changing demands of shared life and space. Since society requires people to be malleable, inflexibility emerges as a vice. People who are inflexible, even if only in minor ways, come to be regarded as eccentric, and eventually comic. Laughter has evolved as a corrective to inflexibility, a social cue whose purpose is to ensure social cohesion in the face of a changing world. When one laughs at another, Bergson asserts that the former recognizes an inflexibility in the latter. Though most of this takes place in society at an unconscious level, society’s humor has evolved to support ever-changing social norms, and to suppress radical individuality through mockery. Both Freud and Bergson offer what O’Neill referred to as “mechanistic” depictions of the role of laughter, describing laughter as an effect resulting from internal and external causes. By contrast, we shall see that in Lazarus Laughed, the protagonist’s laughter is not the result of internal processes. Moreover, it is not aroused or connected to anything that is particularly funny. Instead, laughter is a first-order response that imparts wisdom upon Lazarus and motivates action in those with whom he comes into contact. While most scholarly commentary on Lazarus Laughed has examined the play through the lens of Nietzsche and Jung, it is notable that fewer commentators have considered how Freudian and Bergsonian theories of humor might inform an interpretation of the play. A close inspection of the play informed by those theories of humor bears this out.

Lazarus and the power of laughter The play opens at Lazarus’ home in Bethany, following Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus. A crowd of onlookers, masked, gazes in awe at the resurrected man, a man who had answered Jesus’ call after four days in the tomb. Lazarus is the only character in the play who is unmasked, which is meant to indicate that he is “freed now from the fear of death.”58 In appearance, Lazarus resembles a statue of

62 Passions an ancient Greek god, his death and resurrection having transformed his complexion from pale to “as brown as one who has labored in the earth all day in a vineyard beneath the vines!”59 Like a saint in a Medieval depiction, Lazarus’ head is haloed with a ring of light. Lazarus’ spectators marvel at the account of his resurrection. From the outset of the play, it is clear that Lazarus is an other-worldly figure, not merely in appearance, and some have rightly argued that his whole character is so bizarre that he can no longer be considered human, rendering him unrelatable to an audience. Cyrus Day diagnoses this problem by pointing out that “Lazarus suffers from a curious and unique handicap: he has already fought the battle with himself that tragic heroes are constantly obligated to fight, and he has already achieved inner-peace and died.”60 Lazarus also appears beyond humanity because O’Neill has crafted him not as a man, but a pastiche of at least two deities: Christ and Dionysus.61 Lazarus is an embodiment of Christ’s claim that “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”62 O’Neill is explicit in his Dionysian description of Lazarus, describing Lazarus countenance as “that of the positive, masculine Dionysus, closest to the soul of Grecian Gods, a Son of Man, born of a mortal.”63 O’Neill seeks to harmonize these deities in the syncretistic figure of Lazarus to drive O’Neill’s attempt at a gospel of life and living. For most of the first scene, Lazarus sits quietly smiling as others describe what they have seen and heard of his resurrection. A feast is prepared, and finally Lazarus’ father coaxes speech from his son by proposing a toast to Lazarus, who a “blessed miracle has brought back from death!” Lazarus softly laughs for the first time in the play and responds to his father in an other-worldly voice, proclaiming that “there is no death!”64 The crowd of guests surrounding the table respond with astonishment, asking Lazarus what he means by this claim and what lies beyond this life. He responds by describing his experience of resurrection, proclaiming: There is only life! I heard the heart of Jesus laughing in my heart; “There is Eternal Life in No,” it said, “and there is the same eternal Life in Yes! Death is the fear between!” And my heart reborn to love of life cried “Yes!” and I laughed in the laughter of God.65 Depicted in this scene is laughter that defies both Freudian and Bergsonian descriptions. This laughter is not born of humor at all, and it is not simply an outpouring of joyous energy. Instead, it is a sympathetic response to the laughter of another, the Divine. As Lazarus recounts his story to the chorus of onlookers, his audience is captured by his laughter, and they begin to self-consciously smile and chant: Lazarus Laughs! Our hearts grow happy! Laughter like music! The wind laughs! The sea laughs! Spring laughs from the earth! Summer laughs in the air! Lazarus laughs!66

Passions 63 Lazarus is not satisfied with his audience’s mere recognition of his joy; he encourages them to laugh for themselves. Inherent in his admonition to the people is the recognition that his revelation occurred through laughter. It is only through laughter that the Gospel is disclosed, the Gospel of death’s demise. As one might expect, a great deal has been written about the Gospel that drives Lazarus’ death-denial. Much of O’Neill’s inspiration for Lazarus came from his familiarity with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and it is easy to see Zarathustra’s philosophy emerging from the mouth of Lazarus.67 When Lazarus proclaims that “death is dead!” he is likely not asserting a familiar Christian theology of the eternality of soul. Instead, Lazarus affirms that while life ends for the individual, Life carries on, or as Lazarus will proclaim later in the play, “Believe in the healthy god called Man in you…men are unimportant! Men pass!…Man remains!”68 Such a sentiment is drawn from the pages of Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which the title character affirms life in the face of so-called “Preachers of Death.”69 Death is not a “thing” to be feared, as it is merely absence of life; fearing death is akin to fearing the contents of an empty hole. Zarathustra, and Lazarus, recognize the doctrine of Eternal Life as a symptom of hatred for earthly mortality, and by proclaiming that there is no death, Lazarus is affirming his life. Like his predecessor’s, Lazarus’ radical movement is offensive to both Jews and Gentiles, and even followers of Jesus find Lazarus’ life-affirming message anathema to the Christ’s teachings. His teachings divide his own family, and Lazarus’ father condemns his son as a devil. In the ensuing battle between Lazarus’ followers, the Jews, and the Roman centurions, Lazarus’ family is killed, and instead of reacting with grief—even after hearing the news that Jesus has been crucified--Lazarus affirms his new teaching once again with hearty and infectious laughter, insisting that “all death is man’s invention.”70 As the first act closes, Lazarus is to be taken away by the Roman centurions, and his wife Miriam pleads with him to consider the fate of his followers. Lazarus insists that his absence will be a great test for them, and he leaves with the Romans. As Lazarus leaves the stage, his disciples’ laughter and chants of joy turn dark: Oh, Lazarus, laugh! Do not forsake us! We forget! Where is thy love fled? Give back thy laughter, Thy fearless laughter! We forget! Death slinks out Of his grave in the heart! Ghosts of fear Creep back in the brain! We remember fear! We remember death!71 Lazarus’ devotees, robbed of his presence, cannot sustain his joy, and old fears and anxieties return to their perceptions. In this moment, one becomes aware of the Bergsonian conception of laughter as a unifying practice. In laughter, Bergson suggests, community membership is upheld, and Lazarus’ followers had been unified in their mirth, but as their leader departs, the laughter dissipates, and old patterns of being “creep back in the brain.”

64 Passions In this final moment of the act, in addition to becoming aware of O’Neill’s appropriation of Bergsonian notions of laughter, the audience also begins to catch a glimpse of O’Neill’s view of emotion. In the chant of the chorus, O’Neill divides the heart from the brain, presumably suggesting some differentiation between reason and emotion, but interestingly, he locates fear in the brain, suggesting a moreor-less Freudian approach to emotion. Notably, though, is the temporal order with which the chorus’ fear creeps into the mind. If the chorus is reliably describing their experience, one might consider O’Neill as loosely describing emotion in a Jamesian way, as the heart is stimulated, producing the experience of fear in the mind. Regardless of whether the fear was the byproduct of physical change or the origin of it, fear has caused Lazarus’ followers to almost immediately reject his teachings. As the curtain closes, the chorus of followers proclaim that: Life is a fearing, A long dying. From birth to death! God is a slayer! Life is death!72 Robbed of Lazarus’ laughter, the chorus can no longer affirm the truth of his teachings. They descend into a perversion of their master’s teachings. Instead of affirming life, they now deny it, becoming Nietzschean Preachers of Death. When Lazarus appears in Athens, Caligula learns of the strange power his laughter seems to have on all those who hear it. One of the Greek citizens describes Lazarus’ effect: One look in his eyes while his laughter is in your ears and you forget sorrow! You dance! You laugh! It is as if a heavy weight you had been carrying all your life without knowing it suddenly were lifted!73 Again, the laughter that Lazarus offers his followers precedes the understanding that his laughter delivers. Moreover, Lazarus’ laughter inverts the Bergsonian quality of “distance” as a necessary condition for laughter; Lazarus followers achieve “disinterest” in the goings-on of society after they laugh. Instead of emotional disinterest preceding laughter, as Bergson insists, the concerns of the world only melt away after Lazarus’ followers experience his laughter. As in Bethany, Lazarus enters Athens at a moment of insurrection, when the Greek mob takes up arms against the Roman legions. Caligula orders his soldiers to put down the revolt, and as he and his men approach the poorly armed rabble, he is ecstatic with bloodlust. He dances wildly, proclaiming to his adversaries that death is a deliverer. The citizen-army echo back Caligula’s calls for death, and just as the soldiers are poised to strike, the voice of Lazarus rings out, announcing his familiar refrain “There is no death!” The soldiers freeze for a moment, and the sound of Lazarus’ laughter causes all involved in the skirmish to withdraw. “Their heads hang, their arms sink to their sides.” Caligula is even captured by Lazarus’ spell. Though he resists more than the others, Caligula is intrigued by Lazarus and asks

Passions 65 to hear more about Lazarus’ claims. In Lazarus’ description of death and resurrection, O’Neill again reiterates the power of laughter to disclose Truth. Describing himself in the third person, Lazarus recalls: He lay dreaming to the croon of silence, feeling as the flow of blood in his own veins the past reenter the heart of God to be renewed by faith into the future. He thought: “man call this death”—for he had been dead only a little while and he still remembered. Then, of a sudden, a strange gay laughter trembled from his heart as though his life, so long repressed in him by fear, had found at last its voice and a song for singing. “Men call this death,” it sang, “men call life death and fear it. They hide from it in horror. Their lives are spent in hiding. Their fear becomes their living. They worship life as death!”74 As in Act I, when Lazarus recounts his experience of death, he recalls that laughter preceded his revelation and resurrection. Again, contra Bergson and Freud, laughter is something other than a relief of energy or social control mechanism. Lazarus’ laughter is a higher form of human laughter, as he (seemingly decrying Freudian and Bergsonian conceptions of laughter) explains that “so far man has only learned to snicker meanly at his neighbor!” Instead of a physiological or humanitarian approach to laughter, Lazarus’ laughter teaches people to forget themselves. Lazarus is taken to Rome because Tiberius has heard of him and wishes to discover the secret to Lazarus’ resurrection. In Rome, Lazarus’ presence is as disruptive as it has been in Israel and Greece. His influence has spread, as even Roman soldiers have begun to proclaim that death is dead, and that Lazarus should be hailed as Caesar. Lazarus is to be given an audience with Tiberius, but he must promise that he will not laugh when in Tiberius’ presence. Because of the affect that Lazarus’ laugh has had on everyone he has encountered, Tiberius worries that if he hears it, he will fall under the sorcery of the resurrected one, and he will lose his throne to a usurper. The ultimate test Lazarus faces is not his death at the Roman stake, but at the death of Miriam, his wife.Throughout the play, though Miriam is closest to Lazarus, she has not been moved to laughter as others have. She is quiet and sullen, and though Lazarus seems to be growing younger and younger throughout the play, Miriam grows more and more aged. Egil Törnqvist argues that while Lazarus is a Christological figure, Miriam takes on features of the Virgin Mary. Miriam and Lazarus not only resemble the Holy Family, they also resemble Dionysus and Demeter, as Doris Alexander writes, The two of them make for a timeless tableaux of Dionysus and Demeter: Dionysus the triumphant symbol of eternal life and eternal oneness, and Demeter the subordinate symbol of change, pain, and individual dying within the endless renewal of life.75 Törnqvist points out that O’Neill describes Miriam as oblivious to the outside world, perpetually gazing in her mind’s eye at the son she had lost as an infant.76 As the play progresses, Miriam grows more matronly to Lazarus, as if Lazarus and the

66 Passions son she had lost have become one and the same.The emperor’s concubine Pompeia offers Miriam a poisoned peach, and Tiberius, riled by the crowd, demands that she take it.This is a test for Lazarus; if he can truly laugh, even in the death of his beloved wife, the Romans will regard his Gospel as truth and not a charlatan’s sophistry. As Miriam dies, the crowd examines Lazarus for signs of sorrow, and they are not disappointed. Lazarus releases a sound “very like a sob,” and then cries out, “I am lonely!” As the Romans mock Lazarus and prepare to beat him, Miriam summons her final strength to proclaim that Lazarus has been right all along, “There is only life!”77 With her dying breath, she laughs, sending a shudder through the whole room. Lazarus collects Miriam’s body and places her on the table as on a bier, proclaiming: Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life! Lonely no more! Millions of laughing stars are there around me! And laughing dust, born once of women of this earth, now freed to dance! New stars are born of dust eternally! The old, grown mellow with God, burst into flaming seed! The fields of infinite space are sown—and grass for sheep springs up on the hills of the earth! Bud there is no death, nor fear, nor loneliness! There is only God’s Eternal Laughter! His Laughter flows into the lonely heart!78 Again, Lazarus Laughed seems to be operating on a unique paradigm with respect to laughter. In this play, laughter is a mystical gift, not a gift that emerges from humor, but from the energy of the universe itself. More importantly, laughter precedes cognitive understanding; laughter teaches Lazarus and his followers about reality. The opening of the final act, though unwieldy and likely difficult to direct, unveils the troubles at the heart of both Tiberius’ and Caligula’s resistance to Lazarus’ doctrine, revealing a rather sophisticated approach to cognition and emotion. Though some have argued that both character’s corruption originates in a false self-conception,79 such an approach is incomplete. Seen through the lens of theory of mind and emotion, a finer-grained analysis is possible.Tiberius’ resistance to Lazarus is largely “emotional,” while Caligula’s is largely “rational.”80 In both cases, the solution is not mere counterargument or emotional venting; Caesar and his heir will only be redeemed from their corruptible state through the action of laughter. In a lengthy conversation with the Roman emperor, Lazarus discovers the root of his discontent and resistance to the affirmation of life. The scene opens with a lovely stage picture; Miriam’s body lies on its makeshift funeral bier. Lazarus sits gazing at the corpse of his wife, and Tiberius sits “facing front, his elbows on his knees, his large hands with bloated veins hanging loosely.”81 Pompeii sits on the stairs below Lazarus gazing up at him, and Caligula crouches down with his hands on his temples, deeply troubled. Tiberius is glum, disappointed that Lazarus was able to muster laughter even in the face of his wife’s death. He had hoped that Miriam’s demise would have shaken Lazarus’ conviction, but it has not. Tiberius had hoped that Lazarus would have a cure for death, and now he is eager to further test Lazarus’ conviction, this time with threat of Lazarus’ own demise.Tiberius confesses to Lazarus that what drives him is fear of death, but only

Passions 67 because he is uncertain about what death holds. He confesses: “If I were sure of eternal sleep beyond there, deep rest and forgetfulness of all I have ever seen or hear or hated or loved on earth, I would gladly die! But surely, Lazarus, nothing is sure.”82 Tiberius fears that there is no rest beyond the grave, and that he will be forever haunted by dark memories of guilt and remorse for things he has done during his life. Fear is not the emotion that ultimately motivates Tiberius’ desire to avoid death. As he talks with Lazarus, he reveals that he is moved by guilt and shame for his past lechery and debauchery, admitting that his faithful servants depict him in “pictures of an old buck goat…and they are just.”83 Tiberius wishes to regain his youth, not so that he can relive his debauched past, but because he longs for purity. At this point in their conversation, Lazarus takes on the role of a therapist to Tiberius, affirming that he believes the emperor’s confession, and encourages Tiberius to continue, seemingly recognizing that Tiberius is plumbing the depth of his emotional discontent and will discover its true origin for himself. In a predictably Freudian moment, Tiberius discloses the source of his animosity. Because of machinations to make Tiberius Caesar, Tiberius’ mother manipulated him into divorcing his beloved wife Agrippina so that he could marry Caesar’s daughter. Although her plan worked, Tiberius had loved his first wife and never forgave her for this. Tiberius takes revenge upon his mother by starving her to death, and from that point on, he began “to take pleasure in vengeance upon men.” Because Tiberius also recognized his own complicity in his loss of Agrippina, he admits to also taking pleasure in vengeance upon himself.84 Tiberius’ experience has convinced him that all men are evil, including himself, and he has become an enemy of life and living. Upon hearing Tiberius’ recollection of his life’s trajectory, Lazarus has come to understand that root of his problem. Tiberius’ problem is not a hatred for life, or a desire for youth;Tiberius’ fundamental need is for real, deep, and meaningful companionship; he is lonely.Tiberius’ corruption and pain is grounded in an emotional need, not in a conflict of ideals. He wishes to return to his youth to recapture that companionship that he had felt with Agrippina, and Lazarus has helped him to see this. As Tiberius storms away upon Lazarus’ diagnosis, the audience becomes aware of the root of Caligula’s discontent by contrast to Tiberius. Caligula’s corruption is rooted in a cerebral conflict; Caligula’s idea of himself stands at odds with reality, and in becoming Caesar, he hopes to bend reality to his self-conception. Caligula regards himself as full of cruelty and hatred, and he loathes himself and believes that because of his dissipation, he is uniquely suited to the role of Caesar. He wishes to exert an iron hand in order to make his subjects as miserable as he is. Lazarus’ diagnosis of Caligula differs from his diagnosis of Tiberius. He recognizes that Caligula’s problem is not an unmet emotional need, but a mistaken belief about himself, and ultimately the world. Lazarus probes Caligula’s idea of himself, offering a critique of one of the fundamental assumptions of Caligula’s worldview: You are so proud of being evil! What if there is no evil? What if there is only health and sickness? Believe in the healthy god called Man in you! Laugh at Caligula, the funny clown who beats the backside of his shadow with a bladder

68 Passions and thereby thinks he is Evil, the Enemy of God! Believe! What if you are a man and men are despicable? Men are also unimportant! Men pass! Like rain into the sea! The sea remains! Man remains! Man slowly arises from the past of the race of men that was his tomb of death! For man, death is not! Man, Son of God’s laughter, is. Is, Caligula! Believe in the laughing God within you!85 Upon hearing Lazarus’ speech, Caligula bursts into a fit of laughter “like a visionary,” and he is able to see the truth of Lazarus’ words. It is remarkable that the portrayal of Caligula and Tiberius stands in stark contrast to their inner conflict. When Caligula is introduced in the second act of the play, the stage directions describe him as “bony and angular, almost malformed, with wide, powerful shoulders and long arms and hands.”86 His overall appearance is apelike, and throughout the play he moves around the stage as an animal would, sitting on his haunches. Tiberius, on the other hand, is described as one might an ancient, regal philosopher. Elements of Tiberius’ appearance resemble Raphael’s depiction of Plato in The School of Athens; he is dressed in deep purple, fringed and ornamented with crimson and gold. An old man of seventy-six, tall, broad, corpulent, but of great muscular strength still despite his age, his shiny white cranium rises like a polished shell above his half-masked face.87 Given Tiberius and Caligula’s respective visages, it is ironic that Caligula’s innerconflict is a cerebral one and Tiberius is born of emotional unrest, as one might expect the roles would be reversed based upon appearances. Though Tiberius’ and Caligula’s disposal toward the world have different origins--one in heart and the other in the head, the cure for their conditions is the same: Lazarus’ laughter. In the final scene of the play, as Lazarus is being burned at the stake, Tiberius finally accepts Lazarus’ gift of laughter, and he discovers that he is no longer lonely. In his mirth, Tiberius has come to recognize that he is not alone; he recognizes the absurdity of the title Caesar and admonishes all those in attendance to “Seek man in the brotherhood of the dust!”88 In place of the loneliness of rule, Tiberius feels solidarity with all men, and this feeling enables the Caesar to welcome death. At this moment of enlightenment, Caligula enters, and misunderstanding what has happened to Tiberius and Lazarus, chokes Tiberius to death. Caligula, driven mad with exhilaration at the murder, finishes Lazarus with a spear. He expects that he will be received with open arms by the Roman citizens, having ended the reign of Tiberius and mortally wounded the Daemon Lazarus, but as he turns away from his kill and surveys the room around him, he finds himself alone on an empty stage. Caligula sees for the first time that Caesar’s mantle comes at a high cost. The throne is accompanied by fear, fear of death and loneliness. Caligula is unable to laugh with the joy that Lazarus had imparted; instead, he cackles bitterly at his success. As the play closes, Caligula proclaims that Lazarus must have been wrong, because he has proven that death is real. Immediately, however, he recognizes his own condition. As the curtain closes, Caligula castigates

Passions 69 himself, bemoaning the fact that men forget.Though Lazarus’ laughter had opened Caligula’s perspective, the lesson it taught him was ultimately transitory and fleeting. Throughout Lazarus Laughed, laughter is something much different than Bergson or Freud describe. Though Komroff claims that O’Neill viewed laughter as an overflow of emotion, which suggests a Freudian approach, characters caught up in Lazarus’ holy laughter do not appear to be dispelling some sort of pent-up psychic energy as Freud theorizes; to the contrary, laughter is enlivening to them, empowering them to live beyond their mundane lives as Lazarus has. Moreover, Lazarus’ laughter originates beyond the body, and is always sympathetic. Neither has laughter contributed to social cohesion, as Bergson suggests. If Lazarus’ laughter is anything, it is divisive, driving those that laugh outside social norms and into a radical recasting of their worldview. One might wonder if O’Neill is offering his own definition of laughter by contrast; however, this does not appear to be the case. At the end of the play, no clear theory of humor and laughter seems to emerge. Nevertheless, a feature of Lazarus’ laughter seems very consistent with O’Neill’s overall approach to emotion. In the play, laughter precedes not just joy, but understanding. The truth of Lazarus’ words can only be apprehended through laughter.

The revelatory power of emotion It appears, then, that with Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill is portraying the centrality of emotional experience to get at truth, as he suggested in his interview with Mary Mullett. Cyrus Day once characterized O’Neill as one who “thought emotionally,” and though O’Neill’s plays were concerned with significant questions of life and living, ultimately his artist’s temperament could do no more than give “emotional expression” to these questions.89 Lazarus Laughed, while perhaps not ultimately refuting Day’s conception of the playwright, is a powerful example of why O’Neill wrote the way that he did, not because he was only thinking emotionally, but because O’Neill intuited that emotions are the vehicle through which important truths can be grasped. O’Neill also recognized that emotion may actually impede one’s ability to see the truth, in that emotions often disclose only certain elements of the world to those experiencing them. This is because emotions function as a tool of focus. Noël Carroll, a significant contemporary philosopher of art, describes that while there is much controversy surrounding the precise definition of emotion, one function of emotion is apparent; emotions are organizers of sense perception. He writes that when emotions are aroused, whether those emotions are pleasant or unpleasant, they “focus our attention. They make certain features of situations salient, and they cast those features in a certain phenomenological light. The emotions ‘gestalt’ situations, we might say. They organize them.”90 Emotions highlight relevant features of the world to the one experiencing them and help disregard others. For instance, in the emotional state of fear, one is very attentive to the features of the world that are very dangerous while entirely ignoring features of the world that might contribute to other aspects of a person’s well-being.

70 Passions O’Neill offers an example of the discursive and sometimes deceptive power of emotion explicitly in The Great God Brown, one of his experimental mask plays. The play depicts two close friends, Dion Anthony and Billy Brown, the latter a successful architect and the former a failed painter. Anthony has married Margaret, whom Brown loves deeply, but both men frequent the apartment of Cybil, a local prostitute. The audience sees Cybil both masked and unmasked, depending upon which of the men that she is entertaining. Cybil and Dion have a deep friendship, and through his relationship with Cybil, Dion is able to “achieve friendship with the earth and profound life-instincts.”91 In her private moments with Dion, both characters are unmasked, and they are able to see each other as they truly exist. However, when Billy interacts with Dion, she is always masked. Billy cannot see the true Cybil, because, as she describes it, “he’s too guilty.”92 Brown’s shame because of his morally unacceptable relationship with Cybil only allows him to see her mask, with its “rouge and eye-blackened countenance of a hardened prostitute.”93 He can see only an aspect of Cybil’s character, and as a result he cannot glimpse who she really is. If Brown had a more positive emotional disposition toward sex work, perhaps he could see what Dion does in Cybil. Given the evidence offered above, it is unclear if O’Neill operates upon a fully coherent and grounded theory of emotion. More often than not, he seems to assume a Freudian, proto- cognitivist view of emotions as initiated in the mind, but in Lazarus Laughed, he does appropriate some Jamesian features into his conception of emotion. The physiology of laughter seems to precede the characters’ joy, and were it not for laughter, they would not experience Lazarus’ mirth. Though conflicting theories of emotion are utilized throughout his plays, O’Neill does recognize that they offer unique opportunities to view the world, as they are tools of focus. In the previous chapter, we discovered that Aristotle is unique in his discussion of tragedy because his theory begins with the assumption that whatever tragedy’s value, any story one can tell about it must begin with its emotional impact upon an audience. In this chapter, we have seen that O’Neill’s own approach to playwrighting seems to originate in a similar starting point. Given O’Neill’s familiarity with and appropriation of Freudian views of the passions, it is likely that he was sympathetic to the purgatory power of theatre to the emotions, but O’Neill, as we will see, does not necessarily see emotions as troublesome perturbations that need to be purged away. Instead, emotions can be discursive, particularly the emotions with which Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is concerned: pity and fear.

Notes 1 Mary B. Mullett, “The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O’Neill,” American Magazine 94 (November 1922), 34. 2 See page 20 of this volume. 3 O’Neill and his contemporaries during the Provincetown years seem to share a desire to get the bottom of emotional expression. Edwin Engel records that Kenneth Macgowan, one of O’Neill’s collaborators during the Provincetown years, claimed that the theatre of tomorrow

Passions 71 will attempt to transfer to dramatic art the illumination of those deep and vigorous and eternal processes of the human soul which the psychology of Freud and Jung had given us through the study of the unconscious, striking to the heart of emotion and linking our life today with the emulations of the primitive racial mind. in The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 34–35. Here Macgowan seems to suggest that a new theatrical form for the Modern era must be based upon a new and sophisticated understanding of what emotion is and how it works in our lives. 4 See Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube, in Plato: The Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 1067–1074. 5 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 6 In the previous chapter, I discussed the use of the term cognitivism in a different context, that of the literary arts, and though this may be perplexing to the reader, this same term is used to describe a particular approach to emotional life. For the most part, in this book, cognitivism refers to literary cognitivism as described in Chapter 2, with the exception of this chapter. 7 John Deigh, “Cognitivism and the Theory of Emotions,” Ethics 104:4 (July 1994), 826. 8 Deigh offers several clarifying examples, when he contrasts feelings with emotions, “bodily sensations of pleasure and pain, the comforting feeling of a warm bath, say, or the aching feeling of sore muscles, are not directed at or toward anyone or anything. They are not intentional states.” (Ibid.). 9 Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge Publishing, 1963), 132–135. 10 William James, “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9:34 (April 1884), 189–190. 11 William James, Principles of Psychology,Volume II (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 450. 12 William James, “What is an Emotion?” 193ff. 13 John Watson, Psychology, from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1924), 229–231. 14 One might consult some representative examples of such research, such as Andrew M. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (1977), 74–78; Tiffany Field et al., “Discrimination and Imitation of Facial Expression by Neonates,” Science 218 (1982), 179–181; Andrew M. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Imitation in Newborn Infants: Exploring the Range of Gestures Imitated and the Underlying Mechanisms,” Developmental Psychology 25:6 (1989), 954– 962; Andrew M. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology,” in The Body and the Self, edited by Jose Luis Bermudez, Naomi Ellen, and Anthony Marcel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 43–69. 15 Shelia T. Murphy and Robert Zajonic, “Affect, Cognition, and Awareness: Affective Priming with Optimal and Suboptimal Stimulus Exposures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64:5 (June 1993), 723–739. 16 One might argue, of course, that Jamesian views of emotion preserve the Reason/ Emotion division, as in the most radical version of this account (the one James himself seems to endorse), emotions are mere byproducts of bodily activity and therefore not properly part of “rational” cognition. However, Jamesian accounts still accept that emotions have a logic to them. Even in James’ scheme, emotions are directed toward objects. Though the brain does not directly perceive those objects in conscious experience, it appears that there are still formal conditions whereby the body changes in response to them. Moreover, neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have convincingly demonstrated that emotion is a critical component in “rational” choice; without emotion, Damasio argues that rational deliberation continues indefinitely because emotion provides a desire-oriented push in one direction or another. See Antiono Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

72 Passions 17 Qtd. in Wieder David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama (New York: Hermitage House, 1955), 97. 18 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill, 565. 19 Ibid., 595. 20 An excellent history of early critical work along these lines can be found in Arthur D. Nethercot, “The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O’Neill,” Modern Drama 3:4 (Winter 1960), 357–372. 21 Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 143. 22 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Collier Books, 2008), 119. 23 Sigmund Freud, “Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume I, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), 160–172. 24 John Deigh, Emotions,Values, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4–12. 25 John Deigh, “Concepts of Emotions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24. 26 Ibid., 25. 27 Wieder David Sievers, 101. 28 Eugene O’Neill, Diff’rent, in O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: The Library of America, 1988), 12. 29 Ibid., 27. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 Misogyny is certainly a trait that Freud and O’Neill seem to share. 33 Qtd. in Oscar Cargill, O’Neill and his Plays (London: Peter Owen, 1964), 104. 34 Edwin Engel, 117. 35 Qtd. in Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 184. 36 Eugene O’Neill, Welded, in O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920–1931 (New York: Library of America, 1988), 268. 37 Eugene O’Neill, Welded, 255–256. 38 Barrett Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and his Plays (New York: Dover Publications, 1947), 93. 39 Eugene O’Neill, Gold in O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 905. 40 Doris Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 63. 41 Eugene O’Neill, The First Man, in O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 89.9 42 Eugene O’Neill, Beyond the Horizon, in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 635. 43 For more on this, one might consult St. John Ervine, “Counsels of Despair” in Eugene O’Neill’s Critics: Voices from Abroad, edited by Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 79–90; and Alexander Petit, “A Touch of the Wrong Poet: Arthur Symons and Ironizing of Tragedy in Beyond the Horizon,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34:1 (2013), 87–105. 44 Eugene O’Neill, Beyond the Horizon, 649. 45 See Chapter Four’s discussion of The Emperor Jones for a discussion of how O’Neill manipulates the audience emotionally. 46 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill, 599. 47 Ibid., 600. 48 See Anthony Ashley Cooper, “Sensuis Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times, edited by Anthony E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–69.

Passions 73 49 Sigmund Freud, With and its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Routledge, 2013), 150. 50 Ibid., 321–322. 51 Ibid., 371. 52 Ibid., 374–375. 53 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014), 2–3. 54 Ibid., 4. 55 Ibid., 6. 56 Ibid., 20. 57 Ibid., 18. 58 Eugene O’Neill, Lazarus Laughed, in O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 542. 59 Ibid., 544. 60 Cyrus Day, “Amor Fati: O’Neill’s Lazarus as Superman and Savior,” Modern Drama 3:3 (Fall 1960), 305. 61 And, as Doris Alexander has argued, the Buddha. See “Lazarus Laughed and Buddha,” Modern Language Quarterly 17:4 (December 1946), 357–365. 62 John 11:25. 63 Eugene O’Neill, Lazarus Laughed, 570. 64 Ibid., 546. 65 Ibid., 547. 66 Ibid. 67 O’Neill openly acknowledged Zarathustra’s influence in his development of Lazarus Laughed. In a letter to Benjamin de Casseres, he wrote, What you say of ‘Lazarus Laughed’ deeply pleases me – particularly that you found something like ‘Zarathustra’ in it. ‘Zarathustra,’ although my work may appear like a pitiable contradiction to this statement and my life add an exclamation point to this contradiction, has influenced me more than any other book I’ve ever read. I ran into it, through the bookshop of Benjamin Tucker, the old philosophical anarchist, when I was eighteen, and I’ve always possessed a copy and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book. (That is, never disappointed in it as a work of art. Spots of its teaching I no longer concede.) Qtd. in Egil Törqvuist “Nietzsche and O’Neill: A Study in Affinity,” Orbis Literatum, 23: 2(June 1968), 97. 68 Ibid., 617. 69 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–32. 70 Eugene O’Neill, Lazarus Laughed, 559. 71 Ibid., 561. 72 Ibid., 562. 73 Ibid., 564. 74 Ibid., 573. 75 Doris Alexandar, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade: 1924–1933 (University College, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 84. 76 Egil Törnqvist, “O’Neill’s Lazarus, Dionysus and Christ,” American Literature 41:4 (January 1970), 551. 77 Eugene O’Neill, Lazarus Laughed, 606. 78 Ibid., 607. 79 Doris Alexander, 360. 80 Of course, as I have already pointed out, these distinctions are problematic, and they have only been used here as shorthand hermeneutic devices. 81 Eugene O’Neill, Lazarus Laughed, 609.

74 Passions 82 Ibid., 611. 83 Ibid., 613. 84 Ibid., 615. 85 Ibid., 617–618. 86 Ibid., 563. 87 Ibid., 596. 88 Ibid., 626. 89 Cyrus Day, “Amor Fati: O’Neill’s Lazarus as Superman and Savior,” 397. 90 Noël Carroll, “Art, Narrative, and Emotion,” in Emotion and the Arts, edited by Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 198. 91 Doris Alexander, O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 67. 92 Eugene O’Neill, The Great God Brown, in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays, 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 498. 93 Ibid., 493.

4 Pity1

The brief run of Exorcism during the Provincetown Players’ 1920 season was met with mixed critical response. Alexander Woollcott praised the play as “uncommonly good,” acknowledging the young O’Neill’s capacity for creating surprisingly compelling secondary characters in such a brief play.2 A reviewer from Variety was not as impressed as Woollcott, however, describing the one-­act as a tragedy, “a most depressing affair, devoid of an uplift.”3 After reading the recently discovered edition of Exorcism, one might certainly conclude that though the Variety reviewer might have been mistaken about the quality of the play, he fairly characterized Exorcism’s overall impact when he described it as a tragedy. Such a claim, at first glance, seems uncontroversial. The play focuses on the suicide attempt of grim young Ned Malloy, a character who seems weary and embittered with the world. Set in a dingy flophouse, the action portrayed by derelicts and ne’er-­do-­wells, with an uneven and pessimistic tone, the play does elicit feelings of gloom and hopelessness often associated with theatrical tragedy. However, a puzzle seems to emerge; exactly how is Exorcism tragic? What about the play makes it so deeply depressing? Despite the overall setting and initial tone set by the characters, why no “uplift?” After all, Ned Malloy’s suicide attempt fails, and he emerges from the darkness that had motivated his attempt at self-­destruction with a newfound hope for the future and a perceived deliverance from his demons. The title Exorcism seems to point to a rescue from bondage, so why is the overall effect of the play one that the audience member does not positively appraise? O’Neill wrote Exorcism in 1919, and it was performed as part of the Provincetown Players’ fifth bill of the 1920 season. After the play’s two-­week run, O’Neill obtained all the copies he could find and had them destroyed. There has been a good deal of biographical speculation regarding why he tried to destroy this particular play. The events depicted in Exorcism are based upon O’Neill’s own attempted suicide in 1911, and the subject matter of the play appears deeply personal. Many have asserted that because of O’Neill’s closeness to the subject matter, he wished to erase Exorcism from his body of work. Notably, Sheaffer has suggested that Exorcism is “too revealing about the bleakest period in his life,”4 and the Gelbs assert that O’Neill destroyed the play because he worried about the physical and psychological harm performances of it might visit upon his ailing father.5 Though these hypotheses likely contain some elements of truth, given O’Neill’s reflection to Frank Shay that “the sooner all memory of it [Exorcism] DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-5

76 Pity dies, the better pleased I’ll be,”6 I find Edward Albee’s hypothesis far more likely. In Albee’s foreword to the play, he asserts that O’Neill destroyed Exorcism because of its technical deficiencies. If O’Neill’s regrets about the autobiographical content of the play or a worry about the implications for his family ultimately motivated his destruction of Exorcism, his remark to Shay seems a strange way to characterize his relief at being rid of it. Because of the uneven quality of the writing in Exorcism, it appears O’Neill is expressing a dramatist’s disgust with a failed theatrical experiment. Of course, all who experiment with dramatic form are bound to encounter such failures, and though Exorcism does not emerge from O’Neill’s most adventurous period, it still seems to reflect the playwright’s early experimentations with tragedy. At a technical level, it is something of a mistake to refer to Exorcism as a “tragedy,” as any comparison with Aristotelian, Hegelian, or other conceptions of tragic theatre would likely be forced or fall flat entirely.This one-­act play does not adhere to familiar conventions that one associates with the tragic form, most obviously because it contains a “happy” ending. During this period of O’Neill’s creative career, the playwright seems to attempt to write plays that arouse tragic emotions without the typical “tragic” ending. Anna Christie, written roughly the same time as Exorcism is one such example; many critics panned it because the final marriage agreement between the title character and Mat Burke undermines the tragic sentiment of the play, rendering the play “a-­comedy-­in-­spite-­of-­itself.”7 Similarly, The Straw (1919) also seems to be an attempt to craft an unconventional tragedy, one with a both a “happy” and “unhappy” ending, as Stephen Murray expresses his true love for Eileen Carmody though he recognizes that she will almost certainly die of consumption. Many critics have asserted that these plays represent the early O’Neill’s inability to escape the allure of romanticism, but perhaps they are a manifestation of O’Neill’s attempts to craft a new form of tragedy. Whether it is possible for tragedy to exist without a profoundly bleak ending remains to be seen, but it does appear that during the time period O’Neill wrote Exorcism, he believed that such a feat was possible. I contend that Exorcism is one such attempt. Though Ned Malloy’s botched suicide seems to give him a renewed hope for what the future holds as the curtain falls, on the whole there is still something tragic about the action portrayed within the boarding room above Jimmy the Priest’s saloon. To decode this problem, this essay will attempt to address the question of Exorcism’s tragic action through the lens of O’Neill’s favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.8 Much ink has been spilled regarding O’Neill’s relationship to the worldview of the (in)famous German philologist, and a careful reader with an eye for Nietzschean themes, particularly Nietzsche’s views on pity, will appreciate the self-­induced plight of Ned Malloy.9 Seen from a Nietzschean point of view, Ned’s suicide attempt and survival represent wasted potential, a life on the verge of greatness waylaid by conventional conceptions of the self. Instead of taking an opportunity to authentically embrace the brute reality of human being, Ned attempts to escape the weight of existence first by suicide and then by the re-­ adoption of an inauthentic persona devoid of the nobility of the Übermensch. What makes Exorcism resonate as tragic is the vision of such failure.

Pity 77

On pity When considering the emotional impact of Exorcism, I notice that the play does not seem to call forth an emotion often associated with the tragic form, namely the affect commonly referred to as pity. The pity a play arouses for the fate of the protagonist is putatively a central feature by which one recognizes a play as tragic. Ned Malloy might be a compelling figure, but probably not because the audience feels much pity for his fate. Ned seems to be a self-­absorbed sort of man, cruel to his friends and family, and it is not clear that he is this way because of some undeserved trauma. The audience might feel a number of emotions toward Ned, but pity is likely not one of them. If Exorcism is a tragedy, how can one account for its failure to evoke pity? In order to explore the puzzle of pity that the play presents, it seems helpful to examine the concept of pity generally, as a proper description of the emotional state the term pity connotes can help one suss out the problem that Exorcism presents for the critic. It is remarkable that few discussions of contemporary tragedy can avoid the ancient prescriptions set out two and a half millennia ago in Poetics, which place the emotions of fear and pity at the center of the tragic experience. Aristotle’s treatise on tragedy describes tragedy’s psychological impact and aim, asserting that tragedy works on the spectator’s psyche “through the arousal of pity and fear effecting the katharsis of such emotions.”10 It should be acknowledged that Aristotle’s conception of pity might differ subtly from contemporary understandings of the emotion. Aristotle defines pity (ἔλεος) in Rhetoric as a feeling of pain by the sight of some painful or destructive evil, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon.11 Broadly speaking, it appears that for ancient Greeks, while pity has unpleasant qualia, it is nevertheless a morally praiseworthy emotion, “virtually indistinguishable from compassion, sympathy, and fellow-­feeling.”12 However, the concept of pity may be more morally fraught than Aristotle’s contemporaries conceived. One might wonder if pity is an emotion that ought to be praised, because pity is often accompanied by “condescension and distancing, sometimes even revulsion (e.g. toward hideously deformed beggars).”13 Lawrence Blum, a contemporary philosopher of emotion, has argued that compassion is morally superior to pity, because “compassion involves a sense of shared humanity, of regarding the other as a fellow human being,” while in pity “one holds oneself apart from the afflicted person and from their suffering thinking of it as something that defines a person as fundamentally different from oneself.”14 Friedrich Nietzsche is especially concerned with pity as a morally suspect and psychically harmful emotion. In a private correspondence, Nietzsche muses, This is a mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition ‘My greatest dangers lie in pity’ has been confirmed again and

78 Pity again…It is enough that I am stimulated by the bad experiences that I have had through pity to develop a very interesting theoretical evaluation of pity.15 Pity is a recurring theme throughout Nietzsche’s middle and late period, and the recognition of pity as a poor character quality is so poignant that Nietzsche depicts Zarathustra’s battle with this emotion as his “last sin,” a temptation from which he is delivered after emerging from the cave, “glowing and strong,” in the final scene of Thus Spake Zarathustra.16 This seems especially relevant for Eugene O’Neill scholars, as Zarathustra was likely O’Neill’s favorite work. For clarification of Nietzsche’s position on pity, one must turn to several of his later works. In Daybreak, he writes that, “Pity, insofar as it really causes suffering – and this is here our only point of view – is a weakness, like every losing of oneself through harmful effect.”17 According to Nietzsche, pity is not a morally praiseworthy emotion for at least two reasons: First of all, pity is a pathogen, a transmission of pain from one person to another, which expands the amount of pain in the world. David Cartwright observes that on this point, Nietzsche draws from Kant’s critique of pity, where Kant observes that: …if another person suffers and I let myself, (through my imagination) also become infected by his pain, which I still cannot remedy, then two people suffer, although the evil (in nature) affects only the one. But it cannot possibly be a duty to increase the evils of the world or, therefore to do good from pity…18 Under no medical circumstance would we morally require a person to expose herself to a pain-­inducing illness that such exposure would not remedy. If pity is an emotional pathogen as Nietzsche and Kant describe, then it cannot be a moral requirement to take pity on others. Nietzsche emphasizes that pity “increases the amount of suffering in world… supposing it was dominant even for a single day, mankind would immediately perish of it.”19 The destructive force pity exerts on the psyche is so powerful Zarathustra claims this emotion is what brought about the death of God.20 Nietzsche also rejects pity because of the bidirectional inauthenticity involved in the relationship of the pitier to the pitied. In pity, Nietzsche seems to claim that an individual adopts another’s suffering without being compelled to actually alleviate that suffering, and this gives the pitier a false sense of moral superiority. At best, when the pitier suffers with the pitied, the person pitying experiences an inner sense of self-­congratulation for being the sort of person who is able to take on the burden of others, and she “discovers a source of pleasure in it.”21 This impulse is even more directly diagnosed in Zarathustra, where Nietzsche remarks, “when a great human being cries out – in a flash the little ones come running, and their tongues hang out with lasciviousness. But they call it their ‘pity’.”22 There is a perverse joy pity brings to those who feel this way regarding the plight of the unfortunate and weak. Conversely, pity can be utilized by the weak to manipulate the mighty. The pitier is manipulated and robbed of autonomy by the pitied. Nietzsche encourages the reader to investigate this phenomenon in human interactions:

Pity 79 Observe children who weep and wail in order that they should be pitied, and therefore wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed; live among invalids and the mentally afflicted and ask yourself whether their eloquent moaning and complaining, their displaying of misfortune, does not fundamentally have the objective of hurting those who are with them: the pity which these then express is a consolation for the weak and suffering, inasmuch as it shows them that, all their weakness notwithstanding, they possess at any rate one power, the power to hurt.23 When they seek out pity, the weak and disabled are exercising a unique ability to control those who find them pitiable. In this way, the strong are robbed of their self-­ mastery through clever psychological manipulation. Given Nietzsche’s commitment to the self as ultimate locus of moral value, such a manipulation is unacceptable. In considering Nietzsche’s critique of pity, one should appreciate that Nietzsche draws no distinction between pity and compassion, as do contemporary philosophers such as Blum and Kimball. The German term mitleid Nietzsche uses can be translated as either word. It is fair to assert that Nietzsche is as hostile to compassion as he is to pity. It does seem, however, that there is a significant, appreciable distinction between the two concepts, a distinction that O’Neill himself appears to acknowledge late in his playwriting career. O’Neill improves upon his master’s doctrine in The Iceman Cometh by distinguishing between kinds of pity. In Act II of Iceman, Hickey articulates a kind of informal analysis of pity, as he tells Larry Slade that he now perceives a distinction between a kind of pity “that lets itself off easy by encouraging some poor guy to go on kidding himself with a lie,” and a pity that forces the pitied to face himself in the “mirror with the old false whiskers off.”24 Though O’Neill does not articulate the conceptual distinction between pity and compassion in as fine-­g rained way as I have attempted above, it does appear that in delineating between kinds of pity, he is really referring to two distinct attitudes: the former “pity” is a feeling of sympathy that maintains a distance from the one being pitied, while the latter “pity” is a feeling of sympathy that closes the gap between the pitier and the object of that pity and motivates an attempt to help through tough love. If the key distinction between pity and compassion is the space between the subject and the object of those feelings, perhaps the second sort of pity Hickey describes might better be characterized as compassion. Hickey finds himself freed from “pipe-­dreams,” and because he has compassion for his friends at Harry Hope’s saloon, he attempts to liberate them from their own unfounded hopes for the future. If his attitude toward his fellow men were merely pity, he would not feel compelled to show them the truth of their situation. Unlike contemporary philosophers of emotion, Iceman does not make clear which attitude is preferable; it is likely that Hickey’s compassion made his friends worse off than before. In this way, Iceman’s representation of pity and compassion is consistent with Nietzsche’s hostility toward both attitudes, but it is noteworthy that O’Neill intuited a difference between pity and compassion that Nietzsche does not articulate. This analysis of pity in Iceman is much more sophisticated than anything O’Neill offers in Exorcism, but in what follows, this essay will show how O’Neill’s ideas about these emotions are in an early stage of development within the one-­act play.

80 Pity In summary, Nietzsche defines pity as a feeling of sympathy accompanied by an inappropriate transferal of pain from the sufferer to the one who pities, and it is psychically damaging to both parties. As a result, pity expands the amount of pain in the world. Moreover, pity is borne from inauthenticity that disempowers the mighty and emboldens the weak. Ultimately, pity is an attack on intrinsic human will, and it is an enemy to those who wish to affirm their existence.

The “pity” of Exorcism According to the Gelbs’ account, O’Neill discovered Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1907, and his discovery of the German philologist’s thinking had a profound effect upon his playwrighting. Törnqvist asserts that “it is doubtful that any other major American writer has embraced Nietzsche with quite the same ardor as did O’Neill.”25 During O’Neill’s middle period, his fascination with staging Nietzsche’s ideas became most overt, with plays such as Lazarus Laughed, The Great God Brown, and The Fountain taking up conspicuously Nietzschean themes, but even in O’Neill’s writing contemporary to Exorcism, one has but to skim the surface of the plays to find sentiments drawn from Nietzsche. For example, Gold dramatizes the reluctance of a weak sea captain, Isaiah Bartlett, to set aside illusions of reality and face the brute fact of a world at odds with human life. The Straw, with a title likely drawn from an aphorism in Thus Spake Zarathustra (I:9), is a particularly pertinent example for the purposes of the analysis offered here, as the plot is concerned with Stephen Murray’s movement from pity to genuine compassion for Eileen Carmody. Though Stephen is able to bridge the gap of condescension and distancing between the two, he remains powerless to thwart Eileen’s fate, which seems consistent with both Nietzsche’s critique of pity as well as Nietzsche’s larger view of the cruelty of existence. With Nietzsche’s conception of and prohibition against pity in mind, one discovers the significance of this concept within Exorcism. Above, I have asserted that the play fails to elicit a “tragic pity” in the audience—at least the sort of pity Aristotle conceives—for the fate of the protagonist. Nevertheless, pity does play a role in the internal dynamics of the play, and the Nietzschean reader versed in the pathology of pity will find that O’Neill’s discarded play echoes Nietzsche’s thinking on this emotion. Ned Malloy is introduced to the audience as a young man at odds with life, whose lips are “twisted by a bitter, self-­mocking irony,”26 and in his earliest interaction with Jimmy, Ned’s drunken roommate, Ned’s lack of pity is evident. Early in the play, Jimmy considers visiting an old friend in Brooklyn, in the hopes that his friend would give him ten dollars, because “We used to be pals in the old days—years ago—when I was on easy street and he wasn’t. I’ve helped him many a time and never reminded him of it.”27 Jimmy had intended to play upon the pity of his acquaintance, assuming that such an appeal will yield drinking money. Here, Ned’s assessment of this situation resounds with Nietzsche’s disdain for pity. Ned points out that Jimmy’s friend will “only take delight in seeing you down and out—and helping to keep you there.”28 Ned elaborates by claiming that Jimmy’s friend will (at best) provide Jimmy moral advice—which he secretly hopes Jimmy

Pity 81 will not take—presumably because the friend enjoys his moral superiority in this situation. Malloy’s words echo those of Nietzsche’s in Daybreak, acknowledging the pleasure the pitier would derive from Jimmy’s humiliation. Jimmy denies Ned’s estimation of human nature, but there is a truth in Ned’s claims which both characters seem to acknowledge. The Ned Malloy that appears early in Exorcism is conspicuously Nietzschean, in that he seems bluntly unafraid to call the world as he sees it. His perspective, though gloomy, might be characterized by Nietzsche as a “pessimism of strength,” an authentic attitude of affirmation toward the suffering of life.29 One of Nietzsche’s central teachings is that man does not live in a world designed for human life, nor a world indifferent to human life; Nietzsche depicts a world hostile to human existence. The strong are able to affirm such a world, boldly bearing up under its weight. Ned does not flinch at the “muck under foot and the muck overhead,” because “God is giving us the honest truth today.”30 After Ned berates his companion for a sentimental attachment to springtime and to past memories, Jimmy rebukes him for his self-­r ighteousness, to which Ned replies: I? I’m no good and I know it. I make no excuses. I’m here because I belong here, but I’m not happy about it. Besides, what is the meaning of the word ‘good’? To be what we are and face it—that’s good.31 Ned has rejected conventional moral concepts such as hope and has redefined “good” to refer to a sort of courageous, unflinching authenticity. Thus, he tells the unfettered truth, freed from optimistic moral constraints. Interestingly, this is an attitude that Ned struggles to sustain, for after his direct appraisal of Jimmy’s optimism offends his roommate, he apologizes and relents—presumably out of pity for the harm that his comments have caused Jimmy. Nevertheless, it appears that Ned’s impulse is not to abide sentimentality, and he is reluctant to cede pity to his companion’s hard luck stories. Apparently, Ned’s eyes were opened to the brute reality of existence after an encounter with a prostitute earlier that day. Though Ned claims to have had many such trysts, this experience was different for him. He describes: When I awoke, the room was strange to me. It wasn’t dawn, it was mid-­day, but it appeared like dawn, with faint streaks of light shedding from the edges of the green shades and the whole room in a sort of dead half-­darkness with a close smell of powder and perfume—and Lysol. Gradually I remembered, lying there without moving, the night before. I felt suddenly cold-­sober and I grew conscious of soft breathing, of the warmth of that other body. I was afraid to look. Why? The whole thing was no new experience— but I was afraid. Then I forced myself to turn—She was pretty, but she looked—there were all the weak sins of the world in her face—she looked like a painted clown with the black on her eyes and the greasy rouge on her lips—like a clown, you understand, a pitiable clown—and yet loathsome—oh unutterably! And then, if she was that—what was I? And all of a sudden she turned over on her back and began to snore—more gross than a pig! And it seemed to me that

82 Pity suddenly everything I had ever done my whole life—All life—had become too rotten! My head had been pushed under, I was drowning and a thick slime of loathing poured down my throat—strangling me!32 Ned’s realization of the falsehood of his sexual experience becomes a recognition of the false reality that he has been living. In the strange light of the midday, Ned perceives all the facades people erect to avoid the true nature of the world. As the prostitute attempts to cover up the decay within her life with disinfectant, perfume, and make-­up, so has Ned been attempting to cover up the decay in all of life with false visions of beauty and hope. Ned has come face-­to-­face with reality as Nietzsche describes it, but he finds himself unable to bear the weight of his new awareness of the world. In this way, Ned differs from Zarathustra, who is able to affirm his suffering and face his existence with a relish for life in its most raw form. It is significant that Ned recalls being “stone-­cold” sober in this moment, as according to Thus Spake Zarathustra, drunkenness is a powerful tool people use to hide from the cruelty of living.33 Zarathustra remarks,“it is drunken joy to the suffering one to look away from one’s suffering and to lose oneself.”34 However, Zarathustra the Übermensch does not shrink from the truth revealed in sobriety. Instead of retreating from the world via suicide as Ned does, or choosing to live in drunken denial as Jimmy does, Zarathustra forges a different trajectory: “to want the path that human beings have travelled blindly, to pronounce it good and no longer sneak to the side of it like the sick and the dying-­out.”35 For Nietzsche, Zarathustra is a paradigm of the life well-­ lived, because he embraces the reality of which Ned has been made aware in the brothel. Unlike Zarathustra, Ned cannot—or will not—embrace such a world, which allows the audience to begin to grasp how his failed suicide attempt is tragic. One who embraces Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-­affirmation might be tempted to admire Ned’s decision to leave the world on his own terms. Ned has refused to accept his father’s antiquated, Christian morality regarding suicide, and has chosen “a step which amounts to a crime”36 in order to leave life on his own terms, and this act might be perceived as notably Nietzschean. In opposition to Christian moral claims, Zarathustra appears critical of the self-­denying nature of the Catholic view of suicide, claiming that the best death is not “one that creeps up like a thief and yet comes as a master,” but a death “that comes to me because I want,”37 and one might praise Ned for taking ownership of his end instead of leaving his fate to the capriciousness of disease or old age. Such a reading of Ned’s suicide attempt lacks sophistication, however, because it fails to account for Ned’s reason for taking his life. As I have shown above, in his experience at the brothel, Ned has glimpsed the true nature of reality, that “all life—had become too rotten.” Ned recognizes that life is brutal and ugly suffering, where “all beauty is gone out of the world.”This knowledge produces a self-­pity that motivates Ned’s attempted escape from life via the pill-­bottle. Suicide (in this case) is the outworking of pity, and pity is a deceptive emotion because it regards suffering as evil. Since life, at its essential core is suffering, “viewing suffering as evil is to view life itself as evil.”38 Though Ned has taken ownership of his death, he has not taken ownership of his life by acknowledging and affirming his own suffering; instead, he attempts to opt-­out of the world so that he may escape the truth.

Pity 83 After Ned’s friends discover his suicide attempt, they phone his father. Edward Malloy arranges for medical treatment and comes to see his son, and in the Malloys’ interaction, the distinction between pity and compassion is quite clear. The stage directions indicate that the elder Malloy is “as emotionally moved as it is possible for him to be” at the sight of Ned. Clearly, Malloy has sympathetic feelings for his son; however, his disposition and his language indicate he distances himself from Ned. Though Malloy insists that bygones will be bygones, he begins to chide Ned by invoking the grief Ned’s actions would have caused to his dead mother. Edward does not compassionately reach out to determine the root cause of Ned’s distress. He instead encourages his son to go away to a “rest cure institution” to “build up body and mind.”39 This suggestion is undoubtedly motivated by pity and is self-­aggrandizing for Malloy; he can maintain moral superiority while helping his wayward son find the path to redemption. There is a noticeable distance in the entire interaction between Ned and Edward. What father who, upon hearing of his son’s suicide attempt, forestalls his visit until the son is in recovery? Moreover, after their brief conversation, Edward leaves Ned, not wanting to disturb him any longer, a move clearly indicating how removed the two are from one another. It is deeply unlikely that Malloy feels compassion toward Ned; his disposition toward Ned is likely best characterized as pity. During Ned’s conversation with his father, the audience discovers that Ned’s estranged wife finds his condition sympathetic as well. Unlike Malloy, Margaret seems to evidence real compassion toward Ned. Edward tells his son that Margaret is beside herself with grief. She believes that Ned’s suicide attempt was motivated by sorrow over the loss of their marriage, and now she hopes for restoration. Apparently, Margaret feels more than pity for Ned, as her attempts to come visit him indicate that she regards Ned worthy of redemption. Ned does not know how to respond to this sort of compassion; initially he scoffs at it, and then he expresses stunned disbelief that Margaret is waiting for him at the Malloy home. Despite all that Ned has done to her, Margaret regards him compassionately, and this is a puzzle to him. Ned’s brief scene with Edward appears to be a forerunner of a much richer conversation between father and son that appears in Long Day’s Journey into Night. In at least one instance in the late play, O’Neill seems to appreciate the value of compassion over pity. The conversation between Edmund and James Tyrone (O’Neill’s mature incarnations of Ned and Edward Malloy) in Act IV of Journey covers some of the same material as the Malloy’s conversation within Exorcism, however there is sharp distinction in the attitude father and son display toward one another in each instance. In the earlier play, because Edward Malloy’s attitude toward Ned is one of pity, Edward is eager to let “bygones be bygones,” refusing to discuss the significance of his son’s choice and opting to attempt to fix the problem as hastily as possible by sending his son to a sanitarium. Conversely, in Journey, both father and son make a concerted effort to understand one another, closing the gap between them. The drunken conversation between the Tyrones in Journey is filled with much more conflict than the superficial discussion within Exorcism, but this conflict occurs because Edmund and Tyrone are attempting to bridge the divide that

84 Pity separates them. After Tyrone discloses his regrets about wasting his artistic potential for an easy living, Edmund “stares at his father with understanding,” expressing that he now feels he knows Tyrone much better than he had previously.40 Both Tyrone and Edmund evidence genuine compassion for the other’s plight, with the father offering to pay for the best care Edmund can receive (“within reason”), and the son coming to know and appreciate Tyrone’s frugality in a new light. In Exorcism, Ned and Edward come to no such mutual understanding, and though Edward is sympathetic toward his son, he only expresses a galling sort of pity. As Edward leaves the scene, Ned responds to his father’s pity and his wife’s compassion in a particularly Zarathustrian way—he bursts into a fit of “hearty, mocking laughter.”41 Throughout Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra advocates laughter in response to life’s “gravity.” He describes the spirit of gravity, the urge to take oneself seriously, as an archenemy. Zarathustra advocates that in the face of the harsh reality of existence, the greatest response is mirth, and at this moment in Exorcism, it appears Ned has grasped this. This attitude is short-­lived, however, as a few moments later, Ned’s response to the situation mirrors a transformation recorded in the denouement of Zarathustra. In the final book of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra has led his disciples into a cave with his animal followers, and as a result of his teaching, these “higher men” have begun to howl with laughter. Zarathustra believes that he has awakened new desires in them—manly desires devoid of childishness and femininity. “All their stupid shame runs away,” observes Zarathustra, “they are pouring themselves out.”42 As it turns out, this is an attitude that neither the higher men, nor Ned Malloy, can sustain. In Zarathustra’s narrative, the cave that had been filled with the sound of uproarious laughter suddenly falls silent, and to Zarathustra’s dismay, he discovers that his followers have “gone pious again.”43 The men are praying; they are worshipping the donkey.44 Zarathustra has misunderstood the joy of the men. Their laughter had not been the self-­directed laughter of men destroying gravity. Their laughter was evidence of an attitude of childishness. Becoming like little children, these men embrace superstitious religious beliefs, absurdly adopting the practice of ass-­ worship. According to Zarathustra, this is tragic, because children seek to inherit the kingdom of heaven, while men want the kingdom of the earth. Ned’s near-­death-­experience has evoked a similar attitude. Like the higher men in Zarathustra, Ned retreats to superstition to find meaning in his survival. He boldly proclaims to his drunken friends: “I’ve had a bath! I’ve been to confession! My sins are forgiven me! God judges by our intentions they say, and my intentions last night were of the best.”45 Ned sees redemption and purpose in his existence, and he attributes Divine agency to his salvation. Herein lies the tragedy of Ned’s situation. From a Nietzschean standpoint, instead of recognizing the hostility of the world and embracing his place in that world, Ned has retreated to religious notions of purpose and meaning. He refuses to acknowledge that his suicide attempt was motivated by cowardly self-­pity, asserting that he was attempting to make the world better by leaving it. Ned Malloy is no Zarathustra, and while he (unlike most people) has had the opportunity to see the world laid bare, he has shielded himself from that vision in the interest of an inauthentic myth about who he is and his purpose on earth.

Pity 85

“Praise the demon as a god” Given the analysis offered above, perhaps the title of the play is more significant than it first appears. The term exorcism has obvious religious connotations, and in one sense, Ned’s new lease on life might be seen as a deliverance from the demons that had plagued him. However, on a Nietzschean reading of the text, it seems likely that Ned’s “exorcism” is not a positive event in his life—in fact, Ned’s deliverance from “demonic” influence is tragic. To appreciate this claim, one might consider the appearance of a famous “demon” in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. In an aphorism entitled “The Greatest Weight,” Nietzsche asks the reader to reflect on what she would do if: …some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and this moment, and I myself.’46 This passage is Nietzsche’s first expression of the doctrine of Eternal Return, the notion that the universe and all life in it recur infinitely, a doctrine prevalent in Zarathustra. In this account, the demon tells the reader that the life she lives has repeated and will continue to repeat itself over and over for all eternity, and Nietzsche asks the reader how she would respond to such a claim. Upon hearing such a revelation, would the reader curse the messenger who shares this truth, or would she “praise the demon as a god?” Though there are a variety of interpretations of Nietzsche’s exhortation to the reader,47 it seems that the reader’s response to the demon’s doctrine is a kind of psychological litmus test: is the reader the sort of person who can affirm and bear up beneath eternal suffering, or does knowledge of the Return resonate to her as a Sisyphean hell, a fate worse than death? The best response, according to Nietzsche, is to embrace the demon’s message and to affirm one’s existence, even in the face of infinite, identical lifetimes of suffering. He invites the reader to interrogate her response to the demon, asking her, “how well disposed would you have to become to your life to long for nothing more fervently than to this ultimate confirmation and seal?”48 It is reasonable to assume that most readers would respond negatively to the demon, and that they would do so out of some sort of self-­pity.The knowledge that there is no escape from this life’s suffering (even through death!) is deeply terrifying, and a natural response to this reality would be feeling sorry for oneself. Of course, on Nietzsche’s account, this feeling of self-­pity is a sign of weakness, a weakness that leads most people to adopt facades of meaning to mask the true nature of reality. In the context of Exorcism, self-­pity has been Ned’s problem, and it has led him away from greatness.Though Ned has the potential to adopt an attitude of affirmation toward his life and the suffering it contains, he has adopted a convenient falsehood to explain why he attempted to end his life and to account for the failure of that attempt.

86 Pity Ned’s newfound optimism about the future is an embodiment of his rejection of the knowledge Nietzsche’s “demon” would have imparted him. On a Nietzschean account, one should not seek to be delivered from the demon, but to praise that demon as Divine. If one accepts that the demon is a metaphor for Nietzsche’s vision of the world, it becomes clear how Ned’s disposition toward life and his “exorcism” are tragic. Instead of embracing the demon, he has rejected an authentic existence in favor of a more comfortable and less personally challenging narrative.

Is there hope for Ned Malloy? While there are good reasons to conceive of the action portrayed in Exorcism as tragic—at least in a colloquial sense of the word—and that Ned’s unwillingness to authentically affirm his life is a waste. In what follows, I would like to offer something of a rejoinder to these claims and to suggest that there is reason to be optimistic about Ned’s prospects for life-­affirmation. Perhaps Ned can still actualize his potential for Zarathustrian greatness. There is some evidence in the resolution of the play that suggests Ned may yet adopt a Nietzschean attitude as several of his final actions are notably absent of pity. As the play closes, there are two instances that suggest Ned has not fallen prey to the peril of pity. This is first made evident when Ned corrects the drunken Major’s recollection of his lost relationship with his daughter and sarcastically evaluates the Major’s war wound. Ned refuses to be fooled by his companion’s appeal to pity, believing that such pity is undeserved. The second significant moment occurs as the play comes to an end. Ned toasts to the hope promised by the new spring, and Jimmy replies, “Spring—did you say, Ned? If you have been through— all I have—in better years—in spring.”49 Presumably, Jimmy is about to begin his familiar sentimental refrain, reminiscing about the good old days, but Ned will have none of it. Ned raises his voice in a refrain of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in order to drown out Jimmy’s nostalgia, and Nordstrom aids his effort with a rendition of “Oh You Beautiful Doll.” Jimmy, obviously intoxicated, “weeps brokenheartedly at the heartlessness of his fellow men”50 as the curtain falls. Perhaps Ned’s cruelty in each of these moments is an indication that he has not fallen prey to the personal weakness that produces pity after all. Unlike his treatment of Jimmy at the outset of the play, Ned offers no apology for disregarding his roommate’s reminiscence, and he has no patience for the self-­deception of the Major. Might Ned have emerged from his near-­death-­experience, as Zarathustra emerges from the cave, victorious over pity? Though Ned accounts for his salvation in theological terms, is it possible that he is exhibiting personality traits that suggest an authentic, affirmative disposition toward a Nietzschean worldview?51 It is possible that the Bildungsroman O’Neill has crafted is incomplete and that Ned’s religious story of deliverance is a momentary misinterpretation of the significance of his existence. So, there may yet be hope for Ned Malloy. Of course, Ned’s journey does not end with the closing of Exorcism. He will be reimagined and reappear in several characters throughout O’Neill’s work, but it is not clear whether Ned Malloy, Stephen Murray, or Edmund Tyrone (all doppelgangers of Eugene) are ever able to affirm their suffering as Nietzsche prescribes. It is

Pity 87 significant that those plays which most closely track O’Neill’s own biography, plays such as The Straw,The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, manifest some version of Nietzsche’s critique of pity within their portrayals of O’Neill’s attempts to come to terms with his own identity. The most direct descendant of Exorcism, Long Day’s Journey into Night, contains many Nietzschean themes, but it is notable that the only direct quotation from Nietzsche within the Journey is Zarathustra’s claim that “of pity for man hath God died.”52 Perhaps the analysis offered in this analysis sheds a new light on O’Neill’s letter of dedication for Journey, where he expresses an attitude of “deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” If O’Neill’s attitude toward pity has been shaped by Nietzsche’s critique of it, might he be admitting some personal failure instead of affirming the suffering that forged his artistic genius? It appears that in the context of writing about his own life, O’Neill was concerned with how one ought to deal with pity. Though I remain skeptical of claims that personal discomfort with the subject matter of Exorcism ultimately motivated O’Neill to destroy it, perhaps one reason he sought to eliminate the play was that he sensed the act of dramatizing his own suicide attempt was an act of weakness; though the play does not elicit much pity from the audience member, perhaps O’Neill judged the play a manifestation of his own self-­pity. If the analysis here is correct, then one benefit of the discovery of Exorcism is that it offers a window into O’Neill’s embryonic engagement with Nietzschean views on pity and compassion. Pity offers a helpful window into the tragic nature of the narrative and the trajectory of O’Neill’s biographical plays and theory of theatre more generally. If Exorcism is a tragedy, perhaps it strives to be a tragedy beyond pity.

Notes 1 This chapter was previously published as “Tragedy Beyond Pity: A Nietzschean Appraisal of Exorcism,” Eugene O’Neill Review 39:2 (2018), 250-269, and is used with permission. 2 Qtd. in Barbara and Walter Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 422. 3 Jolo. “Provincetown Players,” Variety (April 2, 1920), 15, in Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Robert Dowling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 110. 4 Louis Shaeffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), 214. 5 Jeff Kennedy, “Exorcism: The Context, the Critics, the Creation and Rediscovery,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34:1 (2013), 33. 6 Qtd. in Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), 12. 7 Travis Bogard, Contour in Time:The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 164. 8 For better acquaintance with O’Neill’s relationship to Nietzsche, the reader might begin with Egil Törnqvist, “Nietzsche and O’Neill: A Study in Affinity,” Orbis Litteratum 23:2 (June 1968), 97–126. 9 I do think it wise to acknowledge an important point that Eric Levin raises in an essay on Nietzsche and Marco Millions. Levin writes, It is impossible to know O’Neill’s critical understanding of Nietzsche’s ideas as he did not share his views directly. O’Neill did not read Nietzsche as an intellectual exercise. O’Neill read the book multiple times, reporting new experiences and deeper understanding with every reading.

88 Pity With this in mind, Levin’s analysis of Marco is similar to my own analysis of Exorcism, in that I am attempting to draw out Nietzschean concepts as they manifest themselves in the play, even if those concepts are not deliberately referenced with philosophical sophistication in the piece. My approach is sympathetic to Levin’s, as the reader can ascertain in “Touch of the Postmodern: Marco Millions and Nietzschean Perspectivism,” Eugene O’Neill Review 33:1 (2012), 14–23. 10 The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 37. 11 The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, translated by W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (New York: The Modern Library, 1984), 113. 12 Robert Kimball, “Moral and Logical Perspectives on Appealing to Pity,” Argumentation 15 (2001), 335. 13 Ibid. 14 Lawrence Blum, “Compassion,” Explaining Emotions, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 511–512. 15 Qtd. in David E. Cartwright, “The Last Temptation of Zarathustra,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31:1 (January 1993), 51. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 264. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 85. 18 Qtd. In David E. Cartwright, “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45:1 (January-­March 1984), 84. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 85. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 69. This sentiment was not lost on O’Neill, as Edmund Tyrone refers specifically to this quote in Act II of Long Day’s Journey into Night. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 86. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 176. 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38–39. 24 Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1954), 641. 25 Egil Törnqvist, “Nietzsche and O’Neill: A Study in Affinity,” 99. 26 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 Ibid., 7. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-­Criticism,” The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. 30 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism, 8. 31 Ibid., 19. 32 Ibid., 31–32. 33 It should be noted that this is a contrary characterization of drunkenness to Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysiac quality of drunkenness in The Birth of Tragedy. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 20. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism, 45. 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 53. 38 David E. Cartwright, “The Last Temptation of Zarathustra,” 65. 39 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism, 49. 40 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 151. 41 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism, 51.

Pity 89 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 253. 43 Ibid., 254. 44 There is a helpful discussion of the significance of this event in Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), 211–229. According to Higgins, Nietzsche’s usage of the “ass-­worship” device is an appropriation of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. Her commentary on this point is insightful, but likely beyond the scope of this essay. 45 Eugene O’Neill, 55. 46 Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Translated by Josefine Naukhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 194. 47 For a concise—and excellent—summary of these interpretations, the reader should again consult Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 161–163. 48 Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 195. 49 Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism, 56. 50 Ibid., 57. 51 Additionally, there may be Nietzschean significance to the use of music to silence Jimmy’s complaints. When considering the use of popular music in this final moment of the play, one might consult the second section of “The Convalescent” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Zarathustra’s animals transform the doctrine of Eternal Return to “hurdy-­gurdy” songs. 52 Qtd. in Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 78.

5 Fear

As Brutus Jones stumbles through the jungle, fleeing in terror from the sound of tribal drums, he pauses to send a prayer heavenward, requesting that God deliver him from his pursuers. “Lawd Jesus hear my prayer,” he pleads, “Forgive me, Lawd! Forgive dis’ po’ sinner! And keep dem away Lawd!…I ain’t skeered o’ real men. Let dem come. But dem odders—.”1 Depicted in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), Brutus, a deposed “Emperor” of a West Indian island, flees not only from his former subjects, but from the power of fear itself. Throughout the play, Brutus encounters phantasms and flashbacks from his life and previous lives that ultimately drive him mad and lead to his death. In the promotional blurb for The Emperor Jones publication as part of the Stewart Kidd Collection of Modern Plays, Emperor is described as “a study in the psychology of fear and of race superstition.”2 The emotion of fear is a powerful mechanism in Emperor, as it discloses much about Brutus Jones’ biography and heritage. Moreover, the play is designed to directly elicit fear within the audience themselves through the utilization of innovative lighting, staging, and casting techniques. Ghostly characters, meant to symbolize abstract entities such as “Formless fears,” adorn the stage alongside actors portraying the “Crocodile God” and a Congo Witch Doctor. Much of what Jones sees in his journey through the forest is illusory, and through Jones’ encounters in the jungle, the audience comes to know him and his backstory.3 In utilizing and attempting to arouse fear in his audience, O’Neill certainly finds himself operating within a classical tragic framework; however, a close reading of Emperor Jones and several other later plays reveals that O’Neill seeks to improve upon the Aristotelian mechanism of fear as a response to tragedy. Fear, as other emotions, has a discursive capacity, both in audiences’ evaluation of a play and their evaluation of themselves.

Defining fear Fear (Φόβος) is the primary emotion Aristotle claims is purged away as a result of tragic catharsis, so a discussion of fear in the context of tragedy should begin with what Aristotle understood fear to be. Aristotle does not offer a definition of fear in Poetics; however, he does offer a working definition of the term in Rhetoric: DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-6

Fear 91 Fear may be defined as a pain or a disturbance due to a mental picture of destructive or painful evil in the future. Of destructive or painful evils only; for there are some evils, such as wickedness or stupidity, the prospect of which does not frighten us: I mean only such as amount to great pains or losses. And even those only if they appear not remote so near as to be imminent…from this definition it will follow that fear is caused by whatever we feel has great power of destroying us, or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain.4 While many contemporary philosophers and psychologists of emotion assume that fear is a “basic” or “primitive” emotion, in that fear does not seem to require significant cognitive content, it is noteworthy that Aristotle’s view of fear is more cerebral than one might expect. To appreciate the contrast, one must have a grasp of the nature of the so-called “basic” emotions. Philosopher Paul Griffiths describes basic emotions as “shortterm, stereotypical responses involving facial expression, autonomic nervous system arousal, and other elements.”5 Since at least the 1970s, theorists such as Paul Ekman have asserted that there are six such emotions: sadness, anger, fear, joy, disgust, and surprise. Such emotions (often referred to as affect programs) are, according to Griffiths, universal, evolved physiological responses and are more primitive in terms of evolutionary development than emotions such as envy, shame, and pity. Basic emotions are automatic tools that have evolved to perpetuate the health of the individual; in times of extreme danger or risk, mental deliberation about that danger would take much too long and result in harm to the individual. As a result, evolution has selected for individuals with the capacity to make “quick and dirty judgements,” emotional responses of attraction or repulsion that bypass the cognitive processes. Higher order emotions such as pity and shame require a more sophisticated degree of reflection and cognition than do basic emotions, and one might convincingly argue that these higher emotions are actually the result of learned attitudes and behaviors, while the basic emotions are intuitive responses to the stimuli offered in the world. In recent years, the theory of basic emotions has received a great deal of support from empirical studies of fear and the brain. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues discovered that there is a circuit in the brain designed specifically to register danger to an individual before that individual is consciously aware of it. LeDoux conditioned rats to fear the sound of a buzzer that was followed by an electric shock. He was able to demonstrate that when these rats heard the sound of the buzzer, the auditory thalamus is activated. The thalamus directs signals to different areas of the cortex, and in the case of these fear-ridden rats, the signal was directed not only to areas of the brain devoted to cognitive processing of auditory signals, but simultaneously to the amygdala, which controls fear responses such as freezing and other physiological responses such as the release of stress-hormones into the bloodstream. All of this occurs before these signals traverse the route to the auditory cortex. Because of this evidence, LaDoux concludes that much of what people characterize as fear is the result of non-cognitive processes.6 Evidence such as this has led many researchers to regard fear as a primitive emotion, one that can certainly be altered through cognition, but that operates outside and often before cognition occurs.

92 Fear Aristotle conceptualizes fear differently than theorists of emotion such as Griffiths, LeDoux, and Ekman in that he insists that fear is not merely registry of some harmful object in one’s field of experience. He argues that one who is fearful is so because of a judgment that some evil or harm will befall that person in the near future. Temporal and/or spatial proximity to the evil or harm is what determines the degree to which someone fears that harm or evil; to illustrate, people realize that their death will occur someday; however, most are not fearful of it, because it seems a long time off. In order to perceive this proximity to the danger, one must utilize a cognitive apparatus. Additionally, Aristotle insists that people are not fearful of all evils, but only those that will result in pain or harm. Fear, then, relies on what appear to be fairly sophisticated mental processes, and this conception of fear is far more elaborate than the picture painted by Griffiths and others who characterize it as part of a primitive affect program. Classicist David Konstan points out that Aristotle’s conception of fear shares many features with his view of pity, as “both emotions are described as pain caused by the proximity of something destructive or harmful.” However, fear differs from pity in at least two respects. Unlike pity, fear is not experienced by way of inference about another’s experience. Additionally, fear does not account for merit or desert in its response.7 One might not have pity for someone who she judged deserving the fate that has befallen the sufferer. Fear, however, does not depend on a judgment of desert, as even admitted murders fear the death penalty while they might judge themselves deserving of such a fate. So, while Aristotle insists on a more cognitive conception of fear than do contemporary researchers in the field, even on Aristotle’s account, fear is a less sophisticated emotion in that moral judgment is not a condition for its expression. In his discussion of fear, Aristotle is almost wholly uninterested in those events and occasions that might arouse an immediate fear response that appears pre-cognitive.8 Instead, he focuses on how rationality might inform fear, and the educative effect fear can have for an individual. In Rhetoric, he lays out a number of scenarios that illustrate how fear relies on judgments. For example, one might fear a powerful individual who is angry at her, because the powerful person has both the will and the capacity to harm her. One might fear one who she has done wrong because she understands the nature of retaliation. Often, one even fears those who merely possess the power to do her wrong, because it is frequently that the case that those with the capacity to cause harm “do wrong to others whenever they have the power to do it.”9 In each of these cases, it appears that the person who is afraid has made complex evaluations of the object of her fear, and she is fearful as a result of that cognitive estimation. In each of these cases, as well as many others, one has to learn to fear as a result of observing the complexities of social interaction. Not only is fear cultivated through education, but it also teaches people to examine the particulars of their situation, or as Aristotle describes it, “fear sets us thinking what can be done.”10 Richard Fortenbaugh offers an example of how emotion compels one to utilize logos to both learn and deliberate with others. Fortenbaugh writes of a soldier who sees the smoke from a far-off opposing army’s fire. After surveilling the situation, he concludes that the smoke is indeed from an opposing army, an army that he knows is able to do him and his people harm.

Fear 93 Fortenbaugh writes that “making these connections is the work of logos [reason]…it also sets the stage for further exercise of logos.” Because the soldier realizes that he is in danger, he is eager to deliberate with his comrades about the best way to defend against the impending harm.11 In this case, a case very consistent with Aristotle’s description of fear, fear is actually initiating the learning process. The demands of the situation necessitate the precise and careful use of reason. Because fear is often an aid to reason—likely more often than it impedes reason—Aristotle does not endorse the view that fear must be eradicated in order for one to be courageous. To the contrary, Aristotle asserts that the courageous person is one who “stands firm against the right things and fears the right things, for the right end, in the right way, at the right time, and is correspondingly confident.”12 A person who is courageous is certainly fearful of things that might cause harm; because Aristotle conceives of fear as an estimation of something to cause harm, it would be irrational not to feel fear in the face of it. For Aristotle, a courageous person is appropriately rational, fearing things that ought to be feared, but possessing the capacity to resist those fearful things. Aristotle’s conception of fear is quite cerebral, and one might complain that he does not adequately account for the fact that fear is a feeling. One might have the same deliberative responses Aristotle describes in dangerous situations—recognizing danger in one’s close proximity—without actually being afraid. Of course, this is a complaint one might level at many cognitive approaches to emotion. Though Aristotle’s account does demonstrate that many fear responses are actually the result of learning, his depiction of fear falls short because it contains little discussion of the qualia of fear. For this reason, one might find his discourse on the subject incomplete. One might also point out that Aristotle does not appreciate that the term fear (even in classical Greek) is too fuzzy, as it covers a wide spectrum of conditions beneath its umbrella. People can be anxious, terrified, in a state of fright, etc., and it seems that each of these conditions, though fairly categorized as “fearful” differ from each other in more than intensity. Jack Panksepp, a key figure of the “Affective Neuroscience” program of study, has argued that while both anxiety and panic are colloquially characterized as forms of fear, these states actually emerge from neuronal and physiological systems unique from one another.13 Utilizing conceptual analysis, philosopher Richard Lazarus draws a distinction between anxiety and fright, claiming that anxiety chiefly differs from fright in that the former is a state of fear that corresponds to an uncertain, existential threat, while the occurs when one is facing “immediate, concrete, and overwhelming physical danger.”14 Drawing from experiments in animals, Jesse Prinz has claimed that most fears fall into one of two categories, anxiety and panic (or fright). Prinz points out that anxiety is usually accompanied with the subject freezing and it can be caused by a neutral stimulus, such as a bell ringing. Panic, on the other hand, is initiated by a painful stimulus, and results in flight or fight (if it is not possible to flee).15 So, while Aristotle’s theory might have some purchase on states of fear that fall somewhere on both of these spectra, any sophisticated examination of literature from the standpoint of fear should appreciate that fear appears to indicate at least two categories with distinct objects, manifestations, and qualitative experience.

94 Fear Aside from the problem of qualia and fuzziness in Aristotle’s account, a deeper puzzle emerges when one considers Aristotle’s assertion that tragedy purges fear through catharsis. Aristotle largely speaks in favorable terms regarding fear, so why locate the value of tragedy in its ability to purge it away? While this is certainly not a closed question insofar as the scholarship on Aristotelian tragedy is concerned, it is important to note that too often, purgation is understood in the homeopathic or medical view described earlier in this text. If one adopts the medicalized view of catharsis articulated by Bernays, Freud, and Nietzsche, the contradiction is very acute, as on this account, tragedy flushes fear and pity from the system. This would imply that these emotions are negative, a view Aristotle does not seem to endorse. However, if one interprets catharsis in ethical terms—as the effect of tragedy restoring balance to the viewer—a harmonization of his view of fear is easier to navigate. On the ethical account, the over-the-top emotions that are elicited by a play serve to train the viewer. As Humphrey House puts it, a tragedy rouses the emotions from potentiality to activity by worthy and adequate stimuli; it controls them by directing them to the right objects in the right way; and it exercises them, within the limits of the play, as the emotions of a good man would be exercised.16 This view asserts that tragedy is worthwhile because it trains people to manage their emotions proportionately. On the educative view, tragedy is not a tool for the eradication of unpleasant emotions; rather, it is a tool that enables viewers to learn how to better be courageous in the face of real fear and pity in the world, which seems to harmonize nicely with Aristotle’s mostly positive appraisal of fear. For the purposes of this analysis, fear will be bifurcated into the more specific categories of terror and anxiety, the former initiating fight, flight, or freeze response, while if the latter initiates these responses, it does so at a lesser degree. Another important feature of fear that will be discussed is its discursive power. If Aristotle’s conception of fear is at least partially correct, then it can disclose certain features of the world, and as we will see, fear manifested in the context of aesthetic horror serves a powerful force within an audience.

An Emperor’s fear The Emperor Jones premiered in New York in 1920, roughly 10 months after the premiere of O’Neill’s first major success in Beyond the Horizon. The play was both a critical and box office success. Travis Bogard writes that “what Beyond the Horizon had suggested—that an ordinary American could become the subject of pathetic concern and on occasion could rise to the height of a tragic figure—was abundantly demonstrated in the rise and fall of Brutus Jones.”17 For his portrayal of Brutus Jones, a so-called Emperor of a small West Indian island, O’Neill had claimed inspiration in the figures of Henri Cristophe and President Sam of Haiti. O’Neill also drew from his 1909 expedition to Honduras for source material.

Fear 95 With Emperor, O’Neill seems to be dabbling in the form of modernism sometimes referred to as “negrophilia.” Emperor is not O’Neill’s only play that might be characterized this way, as The Dreamy Kid and All God’s Chillun Got Wings bear certain elements of negrophilia. A subset of the larger “primitivist” trend, the movement originated with (among other influences) Pablo Picasso’s use of African masks in his 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and made celebrities of black expatriates such as Jean Toomer, Aimee Césaire, and Josephine Baker. While this movement did expand exposure of minority voices on the European (and later, American) continent in the avant-garde scene, for the most part, it appears that the animating force behind negrophilia was a fetishization of “primitive” peoples as opposed to an expanding cultural palette. White negrophilic artists and thinkers believed that Western culture had become decadent and depraved—a fact illustrated by the Great War—and they embraced what they “perceived as a ‘savage’ vitality of the ‘primitive’ black world.”18 Negrophiles such as journalist William Seabrook wished to “escape modernity through initiation into blackness.”19 Many Modernists assumed that black cultures had not been consumed by the cultural rot of Western society, and deep exposure to those cultures could bring an individual back to an authentic way of being. Emperor’s success is one illustration of the power of negrophilia even within the United States, as one reviewer pointed out that the playhouse where it premiered was turning away dozens. People squat on their coats on the hard and not immaculate floors, or sit cheerfully on radiators, or stand patiently for two hours while the tragedy of fear of a Negro porter and ex-convict, turned primitive man again, unfolds itself before the fascinated imagination.20 This success motivated the Players to relocate the production from the playhouse on MacDougal Street to Broadway. Further re-enforcing the hypothesis that The Emperor Jones is a form of modernist primitivism is its close connection to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Of Freud’s works, the reader will recall that O’Neill had only claimed to have closely read Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo, and critics familiar with the latter can certainly appreciate its influence upon the storyline of The Emperor Jones. In a 1929 letter to Martha Carolyn Sparrow, a graduate student who was working on a thesis, O’Neill specifically denied that his knowledge of psychology had any influence upon Emperor, indicating “I was writing plays a long time before I knew anything of psychoanalysis!”21 Nevertheless, O’Neill’s plot runs parallel to the story Freud tells about “primitive” societies and the origin of contemporary religious belief. Freud claims that similar to “hordes” of primates, early societies were governed by a single dominant male who forbad his sons to take sexual partners.22 Because such an existence was unbearable to the sons, they rose up and killed their father, in what Freud triumphantly describes as “resulting from the conditions of the Oedipus complex.”23 In The Emperor Jones, the audience bears witness to just such an uprising.Though there is little suggestion that Jones has demanded sexual exclusivity from his female subjects, he is referred to as the “Great Father” early in the play,24 suggesting his

96 Fear subjects’ desire to depose him might be on fratricidal grounds. The Emperor Jones does not tell an identical story to Freud’s with respect to totemic practices emerging from the original fratricide; however, the play’s similarity to the plot of Totem and Taboo does illustrate the prevalence of Modernist conceptions of “savage” cultural practice in O’Neill’s day. In the years following The Emperor Jones’ premiere, much of the criticism of the play has been directed toward the racial elements of the play, and rightly so, as Emperor is groundbreaking not only in that it is the first play to cast an African American on Broadway, but also in that it is a complex and perplexing foray into negrophilic and progressive ideology in the early 1900s. The dominant understanding of the play is that it pits two discourses at odds with one another—the “white” discourse, associated with Western civilization, technology, and Christianity, and the “black discourse,” associated with atavism, superstition, and/or primitive religion. Many critics attribute Brutus Jones’ demise to the fact that he is unable to effectively embody the “white” values of Western civilization (as he himself comes from a violent and savage line of people), and therefore is unable to truly dominate the West Indian natives that pursue him. Other critics are more generous to Jones, arguing that Jones is a symbol of Western “white” civilization itself, and his failure to escape his fate is symbolic of Western civilization’s “inability to understand itself fully and to acknowledge its own hidden compulsions.”25 Much might be said in endorsement of each of these interpretations;26 however, it is notable that most of the criticism of The Emperor Jones has sidestepped the other driving force of the play, the psychology of fear.

O’Neill’s expressionism Because Emperor is expressionist in style, any analysis of it should pay special attention to not only what is said within the play, but also in how it is said.To be sure, this dictum applies to analysis of any work of performance art, however all too often, plays are treated as discourses on themes, and too little attention is paid to what is actually happening before an audience, or the author’s intended effect on the viewer. With Emperor, much of its power lies in spectacle, and so a mere analysis of the plot and character is inadequate to address it in its entirety.The staging, lighting, and sound effects prescribed in the script are designed to disclose the inner life of Brutus Jones, as Patrick J. Nolan has asserted, “O’Neill seldom exploited stage business so fully, allowing it such primary importance in carrying the play’s meaning.”27 A rich analysis of the play must take these expressionist conventions seriously. One way of understanding the fundamental distinction between expressionist drama and conventional, realist drama is that expressionism starts with the subject as its object of inquiry. To appreciate this starting point, one must draw a contrast with realism. Literary realism proceeds from the “(perhaps implicit) assumption that the objective world exists independently of consciousness.”28 At the end of the nineteenth century, expressionist writers portrayed the philosophy that the conscious subject is indivisible from reality to the degree that the will creates reality. In expressionist literature, the author not only displays the internal life of the subject she portrays, she allows that internal life to manifest itself in “non-realistic” manipulations of reality.

Fear 97 Shifts in time and space, (and in the case of theatre, bizarre theatrical conventions) are common in this style, as in these narratives, the world is created and bent to the artist’s volition. Commentators are quick to suggest that The Emperor Jones is O’Neill’s take on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and these comparisons are apt; however, Emperor is perhaps more closely related to the work of European expressionist plays than any other work of literature. Oscar Cargill has argued that Emperor is modeled after Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, pointing out that both plays focus on protagonists running from their old lives in search of salvation, and in both plays the terror each hero experiences opens the door self-discovery.29 O’Neill scholars have also made comparisons between The Emperor Jones and Georg Kaiser’s From Morning To Midnight.30 In Kaiser’s play, the Teller is a fugitive like Brutus, and he encounters supernatural figures that give the audience glimpses into his unconscious motivations and drives.31

Brutus’ descent into terror The Emperor Jones opens in a conventional, realistic style. The audience is able to observe the opening scene as third-person spectators, not yet tied to any particular character’s arc. The setting is the “emperor’s” throne room, and the trader Smithers enters to discover Brutus Jones’ court have abandoned their monarch. Even as Smithers warns Jones of the coming insurrection, there is something deeply courageous about the Emperor’s demeanor. Jones has foreseen this day coming from the outset of his reign, and he has put systems into place to avoid the fate that inevitably befalls a deposed dictator. He has placed all the money he has swindled from the islanders in an offshore bank account, and he has plotted an escape route through the forest. Most importantly, he has built a myth in the minds of the people about his invincibility.Through luck and opportunism, Jones has convinced his subjects that he can only be killed by a silver bullet. In the character of Brutus Jones, one is immediately struck by his admirable display of a kind of Aristotelian courage. Brutus has no illusions about how tendentious his rule is over the islanders. He “ain’t no fool,” recognizing that “‘Dis Emperor’s time is sho’t.”32 Since the day Jones has begun his reign, he has been aware of how fragile his place in the kingdom is, and he trusts his wits to play his subjects until the very last moment, bilking them for all that he can, and then escaping through his route in the forest. Utilizing the tools of reason, Jones has recognized the danger to which he is adjacent, but instead of abandoning his plan in the face of this risk (thus displaying cowardice), he has determined to operate in close proximity to peril for material reward. While Jones would certainly miss many of the marks Aristotelian ethics prescribe for a just individual, his courage is laudatory. On several occasions throughout the first scene, Smithers is truly awed at Jones’ resolve, remarking with real admiration that he is “a cool bird, and no mistake.”33 In Jones’ initial interaction with Smithers, the audience comes to understand that Jones’ courage is the result of a number of past brushes with danger. Before coming to the island, Jones had worked as a Pullman car operator until he was convicted for murdering another black man and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

98 Fear After an altercation with a prison guard on the chain gang, Brutus escaped his sentence and fled overseas where he, through ingenuity and luck, installed himself as the monarch of the island. Jones has learned through each of these experiences, and he is neither recklessly standing to fight the native uprising, nor pleading for mercy like a coward. Instead, he will use his wits to evade their wrath. He proclaims, “I kin outguess, outrun, outfight an’ outplay the whole lot o’ ‘dem all ovah de board any time o’ de day er night!”34 Jones’ proclamation is the cue for one of the most powerful conventions in the play, the native drumbeat. O’Neill indicates that the drum pulse should continue through the duration of the play, indicating the initial tempo of the percussion, “at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat—72 per minute.”35 O’Neill is undoubtedly attempting to utilize this drumbeat as a technique to increase the intensity of the onstage action. The rate of the tempo will gradually accelerate as the play continues, providing a powerful mechanism to increase the audience’s level of fear. In a 1924 interview with Charles Sweeney, O’Neill’s makes explicit that this is the effect he intended to achieve: One day I was reading of the religious feasts in the Congo and the uses to which the drum is put there: how it starts at a normal pulse beat and is slowly intensified until the heartbeat of everyone present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drums.There was an idea and an experiment. How would this sort of thing work on an audience in a theatre?36 For a moment, Jones himself is alarmed at the sound, recognizing that it is evidence of a primitive religious ceremony in which, as Smithers puts it, the natives “are ‘avin a war dance, getting their courage worked up b’fore they starts after you.”37 Still, Jones trusts his ability to evade those pursuing him, and while he shows some evidence of fear, he leaves his palace through the front door, declaring that no Emperor should skulk out the back as a coward. The next six scenes of the play recount Jones’ journey into the darkness of the jungle.At the opening of the second scene, the audience begins to glimpse his descent from anxiety into panic. Initially, Jones is surprised at how jumpy he is, attributing his fear to the fact that he is hungry, and in the lengthy monologue of scene two, he performs as one would expect of a courageous man in peril. He attempts to still his worries through reason, but his plans have failed, and the food and supplies he had hidden in the wilderness are no longer where he had placed them. Here, terror begins to take hold, as “while his back is turned, the Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest.”38 The Fears are portrayed by actors completely dressed in black, with only their glittering eyes visible. The audience sees these figures moving noiselessly behind Jones before he discovers them and vainly wastes one of his bullets in an attempt to kill them. No explanation is ever offered as to who or what these Fears are, whether they are demons summoned by the native drums or figments of Jones’ imagination, heightening both he and the audience’s terror. Brenda Murphy has suggested that O’Neill’s depiction of the Formless Fears was inspired by a passage in Frank Norris’ McTeague. She points out that though the book was originally published in 1899, it had been reprinted in a Modern Library

Fear 99 edition at roughly the time when Emperor was conceived. In the novel, McTeague flees into the desert where he descends into a primitive state, at one point having a nightmare about formless black creatures “crawling from bush to bush…converging upon him…were closing in upon him, were within the touch of his hand, were at his feet—were at his throat.”39 In both works of literature, these creatures, whether real or imagined, drive the protagonist deeper into the wilderness and into fear. In the scenes that follow, Jones’ growing terror (or perhaps the magic of the natives?) moves him back in time, first to a reenactment of the murder of a Pullman car driver that Jones had committed, then to the incident with the prison guard that had granted Jones his freedom. In each of these vignettes, Jones’ irrational terror compels him to waste another round of ammunition from his gun, and also alerts those pursuing him as to his whereabouts. In each of these instances, it appears that Jones’ growing fear is operating to disclose his past to the audience, revealing the fraught and cruel story that has made and shaped this Emperor. After reenacting the murder of prison guard, Brutus Jones is fully terrified, and he seeks Divine salvation from his former subjects and presumably, from his past sin. Jones recalls his former Baptist faith, praying to God for redemption and escape from the punishment of which he regards himself deserving. The religiosity of Brutus Jones in the face of the power of primitive religious ritual is a particularly noteworthy component of Emperor. As Murphy points out, at the outset of the play, Jones’ Christianity has been superseded by his belief in capitalism…in one sense, the play is a study of the poverty of the Christian belief system as it has been filtered for Jones through the social Darwinism that was one of the really vital mythologies for American culture in the 1920s.40 However, in his moment of peril, Jones finds his dormant faith the last line of defense against the wiles of the forest magic. Jones prayer rings somewhat hallow, however; instead of true repentance, Jones seeks forgiveness while offering qualifications to justify his past wrongs. In his acknowledgement of the murder of Jeff, Brutus points out that he was overcome by anger at the discovery of Jeff ’s loaded dice. Likewise, while accepting some responsibility, he blames his self-exaltation and grifting of the islanders on the fact that they raised him “up to the seat o’ the almighty.”41 Still, Jones is convinced that his prayer has delivered him from the powers of the magic of the forest, and he is able to steel himself somewhat, asserting that the only real threat is now the natives who pursue him, but he “ain’t skeered o’ real men.”42 But Jones has not been delivered from the horrors of the forest. His next vision takes him back in time, to an American slave auction, where he discovers himself up for sale on the auction block. In his vision, he sees Southern plantation owners with their belles, scrutinizing Jones’ body for fitness to their needs. All of this action takes place noiselessly; presumably the only audible sound is the relentless beating of the native drums. When Jones realizes what is happening, he reacts with rage, spending two more bullets on his auctioneer and the man who has purchased him, proclaiming that “I shows you I’se a free nigger, damn yo’ souls!”43 It is ironic that

100 Fear Jones proclaims himself a freeman, as he finds himself increasingly trapped within the fearful illusions projected upon him in the forest. It is also ironic that O’Neill places this scene immediately following Brutus’ repentance and plea for salvation from the Baptist God. In the nineteenth century, American Baptists were notoriously divided over the issue of slavery, with the Southern Baptist Convention famously seceding from the northern denomination in 1845 because of its anti-abolitionist views. Especially ironic in the Gospel preached by the “born-again” Baptists of Jones’ Day is its promise of “freedom.” In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his followers that if “The Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” This language of freedom is not typically understood in terms of physical freedom; in recent American Christianity this freedom refers to deliverance from Hell or Death. While Jones’ penitent prayer may have delivered him from eternal damnation, it is clear that he will find no freedom in a physical sense in his journey deeper into his past and the past of his ancestors. Jones’ Christian commitments seem unable to withstand the power of the primitive magic at which he finds himself at odds. After a brief vision aboard a slave ship, Jones is escorted further back in time and space to the Congo, where he falls before a witch doctor.The witch doctor begins a dance in rhythm with the beating of the drums, and, gradually his dance becomes clearly one of a narrative in pantomime, his croon is an incantation, a charm to allay the fierceness of some implacable deity demanding sacrifice. He flees, he is pursued by devils, he hides, he flees again. Even wilder and wilder becomes his flight, nearer and nearer draws the pursuing evil, more and more the spirit of terror gains possession of him.44 Jones, perhaps in sympathy to the terror of the witch doctor, is drawn into the magician’s movements and begins to dance with him.The mood of the pantomime begins to change, from one of despair to one of hope. The meaning conveyed in the dance is that the gods will offer forgiveness in exchange for a sacrifice, and immediately Jones is offered as that sacrifice to an ancient deity in the form of a crocodile. Doris Falk ties the sacrifice scene not only to ancient religious blood-ritual, but to Brutus’ own sense of guilt over his sin. She asserts that for Brutus, “evil has been his god, and he has sacrificed all other values to it; now it demands his life.” Brutus recalls the silver bullet and shoots the crocodile, which disappears as the other “h’ants” have. On Falk’s interpretation, because Brutus uses the silver bullet to slay the crocodile apparition, “we know that the evil of the crocodile is the evil of the self, that in killing it Jones has killed himself—at least that distorted image of the self which was his life motivation.”45 For Falk, justice demanded that the Emperor Jones strip himself of his inauthentic way of being (also symbolized by the fact that Jones’ is systematically disrobed throughout the play), and in this final scene, his last pretenses are eliminated. Though this will ultimately cost him his life, Falk asserts that Jones is a tragic figure because he dies with the grandeur that he has lived.This coupled with the fact that Jones has come to a deeper knowledge of himself through his ordeal enforces a classically tragic interpretation of the play.

Fear 101 Patrick Nolan has argued that Falk’s interpretation of The Emperor Jones is incomplete. While Nolan agrees with elements of Falk’s reading, he asserts that she does not make enough of the Crocodile God’s religious and ancestral significance to Jones, and while Falk acknowledges Emperor’s homage to Jungian ideas of Collective Unconscious, Nolan asserts that her analysis does not foreground Jones’ fright in light of Jung’s theory. Nolan argues that “the Emperor Jones is about both the black man and white man’s attempts to satisfy the surviving religious instinct.”46 Jung asserts that in Modernity, humans find themselves alienated from their ancestors, yet the unconscious desires and drives of modern man have been programmed by way of ancestral experience. In contemporary society, people are unable to express ancient archetypal instincts for which millennia of human existence has programmed them. Deep anxiety and alienation from oneself is the result of this inability to exhaust those primal energies. For modern society, the primal religious urge is often unexpressed, but its energy does not dissipate. As Jung writes, the archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose, even when the conscious mind ignores it…Any who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close to hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human.47 In the case of the white culture portrayed in The Emperor Jones, because of the putative “Death of God,” religious belief manifests itself in another cultural superstition: the faith in the Invisible Hand of the capitalist market. At the outset of the play, Brutus has attempted to occupy the white world, pushing aside his religious belief in favor of a reverence for the redemptive possibilities of market forces. However, his journey into the woods and into his past strips away his modernist faith in himself and his shrewdness, then his faith in the Baptist God, finally returning him to his most basic religious impulses. With this in mind, Nolan argues that Brutus Jones “fails to satisfy his need to quell fear due to the religious ritual being superstitious in nature.”48 This stripping away of the façade Jones has been wearing throughout the play is not only symbolized by the physical stripping away of his clothing as the play progresses, but also by the weapon that ultimately kills him. Through Jones’ final night, the natives, convinced that their Emperor could only be killed through the magic of a silver bullet, have melted down currency and refashioned it into ammunition. His faith in the power of the coin is misplaced, as his subjects, rejecting the power of this fortune to remake their world in a materialist sense, choose to reduce the currency to a tool for which they can appease their deity and release themselves from the oppressor. In a classical sense, Jones is destroyed by the god who he most venerated: material wealth. Both senses of fear previously described (anxiety and panic) are portrayed by Brutus Jones, and his descent from anxiety to terror likely matches the audience’s own experience of the play. O’Neill has offered a number of directions that might serve as guides to the kind of emotional audience responses he intends and a thorough reading of the play ought to consider that. During this period of his career,

102 Fear O’Neill was especially interested in experimenting with the sorts of responses he might elicit from an audience through a combination of narrative and staging techniques. For instance, in Where the Cross is Made, O’Neill casts three actors to portray ghosts at the finale of the play.The audience and two characters can see the ghosts, but they are not visible to anyone else in the scene. O’Neill shared with his colleagues at Provincetown that he had made this dramatic choice to determine “whether or not an audience could be made to believe itself insane.”49 It is reasonable to assume that O’Neill saw Emperor as a similar sort of experiment, in this instance attempting to determine if he could move an audience to terror. To this end, O’Neill employs several techniques mentioned above. The slowly increasing tempo of the drums, the use of sharp contrasts of dark and light, and the final scene with the witch doctor building to the feverish emergence of the crocodile are all visual and audible techniques designed to cultivate terror. In fact, there is good reason to believe that these techniques sans the narrative have enough physiological effect to generate feelings of fear in those who witnessed them. If theories of fear proposed by LeDoux are correct, then the physiological effects of fear are often generated before the subject is aware of its presence in her perception. Foreboding (and to O’Neill’s initial audiences, novel) uses of these staging, sound, and lighting techniques would at least serve to prime the audience to be afraid, and upon watching the Emperor Jones’ flight deeper into the forest, they would likely experience the horror of his fate. One might wonder then if O’Neill’s purpose is merely to horrify. Is The Emperor Jones merely an experiment in horror? The rich subject matter of the play, coupled with the brilliant performance demanded by its protagonist, suggests otherwise. Earlier in this text, I have asserted, following Nöel Carrol, that one of the primary functions of emotion is to focus attention, to foreground certain features of the world while diminishing others. If this is the case, one might ask what relevant features does the audience’s fear draw them to as they see the fate of Jones unfold onstage before them? The last moment the audience sees of Jones alive he “lies with his face to the ground, his arms outstretched, whimpering with fear as the throb of the tomtom fills the silence around him with a somber pulsation, a baffled but revengeful power.”50 Images of this production show this moment in silhouette, so that the audience can only make out the shape of Jones’ body. Because Jones’ is displayed with most of his distinguishing features washed out by the contrast of light and darkness, perhaps the audience member might see themselves in the fate of Jones.

The Emperor Jones and horror The insight that O’Neill wishes the audience to identify with Jones is heightened if one considers that The Emperor Jones is not merely a case study in fear, but a work of art horror. Noël Carroll has argued that horror can be distinguished as a unique genre of art by virtue of the fact that works in this genre are constructed to arouse an affective state unique to them. This emotional response such works call out is a composite of two emotional states: fear and disgust. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, Harker recoils from the vampire’s touch with a shudder, and he describes that a “horrible feeling of nausea came over me.”51 It is not enough for Stoker to

Fear 103 describe the Count as terrifying, but also as nauseating. Not only is Dracula “physically threatening,” in Stoker’s fictional world (and thereby worthy of fear), but he also has “the property of being impure” (inducing disgust).52 Following Mary Douglas, Carroll argues that our sense of a monster as impure arises as a violation of conventional categories that humans have developed to make sense of the world. In order for a work of fiction to count as horror, and not merely suspenseful, it should contain some dangerous figure that violates what the reader might expect from a conventional character. Carroll’s account has many detractors, as his depiction of horror seems to require the existence of some extra-natural “monster” within a narrative.53 With no monster that arouses both fear and disgust, many works of art and literature we describe using the term “horror” are ruled out. For instance, art critics frequently refer to the paintings of Francis Bacon as art-horror, but these paintings do not typically portray supernatural monsters (perhaps monstrous humans?) that would meet the standard Carroll sets with his disgust criterion. Either Carroll is mistaken, or many of the artworks commonly described as part of the genre horror are not properly characterized. Though Carroll’s definition of horror might be questionable, in the case of The Emperor Jones, this descriptor seems apt. Brutus Jones witnesses supernatural events that both inspire fear as well as elicit the sense of impurity. Though some of the figures that appear to Jones merely appear physically threatening (i.e., the slave auctioneer), many of the creatures he encounters also defy clear categorization and strike both he and the audience member with the feeling of impurity and disgust. Characterizing Emperor Jones as a work of art horror also reveals something deeper about the work itself that distinguishes it from conventional tragedy. Carroll points out that when one watches Oedipus and is moved by the play, it is not expected that the viewer doubles Oedipus’ emotional state. Instead, in tragedy, the viewer feels sorrow for Oedipus, but not her own personal disgust at Oedipus’ impious marriage to his mother. Similarly, in comedy, one is not expected to feel the same as a character who has clumsily fallen down and injured himself; instead, the viewer is to feel amused. However, in horror, the viewer is expected to double the emotional state of the characters created in the narrative.The magic of the horror genre is that horror is only as effective as an audience member’s mirroring of the fear and disgust of the fictional protagonists.

Thinking aloud Though O’Neill would eventually abandon the kind of expressionist storytelling utilized in The Emperor Jones, the work taught him a lesson about playmaking and its effect upon an audience. While this was perhaps a lesson of which he was not wholly conscious, O’Neill’s plays after Emperor rely heavily on a similar kind of audience identification with the characters he had created. Following Emperor, O’Neill would not employ the techniques of horror per se to achieve audience identification; however, he would utilize a technique exploited with Emperor that attempts to synchronize the audience’s emotional state with that of the characters he develops.This technique is what Törnqvist refers to as O’Neill’s use of “thought

104 Fear asides,”54 bits of dialogue that are not directed at other characters, but instead reveal the interior thoughts of the character.Törnqvist sees the development of this technique as a result of O’Neill’s interest in psychoanalysis, pointing to O’Neill’s personal experience with analysts and to his famous “Memorandum on Masks,” where O’Neill asserts that the contemporary playwright must attempt to communicate the inner-life of people, as one of the most “significant, spiritual impulses” of his time.55 Törnqvist is certainly correct in part, in his estimation of the development of this technique in O’Neill’s work, however Törnqvist fails to adequately appreciate that O’Neill is also attempting to bridge a gap between player and audience through this technique. O’Neill utilizes this technique in The Emperor Jones, but he does not exploit it overtly until the marriage drama Welded. Perhaps the most developed version of O’Neill’s thought aside technique appears in Strange Interlude, which is traditionally staged so that when characters are delivering dialogue that reveals their inner thoughts, the rest of the players freeze in place, indicating to the audience that they are privy to the workings of the mind. In O’Neill’s 1921–1931 notebooks, he describes that these thought asides should consist of the most drastic logic and economy and simplicity of words (Thought perhaps, always naturally expressing itself to us—thinking itself—or being thought by us—always in terms of an adolescent level of vocabulary, as if we thereby eternally tried to educate to mature self-understanding, the child in us).56 While the dialogue directed at other characters contains the sophisticated linguistic style of adults discoursing with one another, the thought asides are more direct and primal. For instance, in Act V of Strange Interlude, Nina Leeds attempts to conceal her interest and jealousy in her estranged lover Ned Darrell’s new romantic relationship. In response to Doctor Marsden’s news of Ned, she responds, “I don’t believe it! I mean, Ned was always so serious-minded it’s hard to imagine him messed up in this sort of thing!” This is a sharp contrast with her internal monologue, “my lover!…oh, pain again!…why?… I don’t love him now…be careful!… Charlie’s staring at me…”57 Nina’s conversation with Marsden contains a level of sophistication that her thoughts do not; this directness and simplicity lends itself to an immediate emotional response from the spectator, while the conversation between the characters is less evocative in that it provokes interpretation. Were the interior monologue absent from the script, the reader would be left to speculate about Nina’s internal sorrow, allowing much more room for interpretation, and varied emotional response to her as a result. However, because the viewer is privy to her mind, the audience can closely track with her own experience and affectively respond in kind. O’Neill would also explicitly utilize the technique of audible thinking in Dynamo, though it is perhaps less effective than in Interlude (perhaps because Dynamo as a whole is a less successful effort). Nevertheless, important emotional disclosures are made through the auditory thinking of the Light family. For instance, Reverend and Mrs. Light only express their doubts about their faith tradition in the mental monologues they deliver, and Reuben Light’s doubts begin in his own

Fear 105 inner monologue before manifesting themselves in his performative life. Again, these disclosures seem intended, among other things, to allow the audience to track more closely with the affective state of the characters than they would have otherwise. After Dynamo, O’Neill would abandon his thoughts-out-loud methodology, regarding it as only suitable for a certain sort of play. As he developed Mourning Becomes Electra, he wrote that the asides of Strange Interlude served to decelerate the drama of each scene, and he began to explore methods whereby he might achieve similar effects without compelling his characters to think aloud.58 In Electra, one reason he deliberately avoids thought asides is tied to the reasons behind masking characters, writing that “what I want from this mask concept is a dramatic, arresting, visual symbol of separateness, the fated isolation from this family, the mark of their fates which makes them dramatically distinct from the rest of the world.”59 Here, O’Neill seems to acknowledge that the thought aside technique situates the audience too near the characters, and in eliminating this technique from the trilogy, the audience finds itself an interpreter of the action instead of a participant. Though Mourning Becomes Electra marked a turn away from the thought aside technique in O’Neill’s work,60 he had come to understand that in order to elicit emotional states in the spectator akin to those within the dramatic action attention must be paid to disclosing the inner voices of his characters. In O’Neill’s final works, in order to realistically convey this inner voice, O’Neill utilized the convention of drunkenness, as the inebriated are often quick to disclose their internal, unmediated states because alcohol has broken down the barrier of social propriety. In The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten the central figures of each of these works will say much more than they should, disclosing their interior subconscious desires and drives. In so doing, the viewer is able to identify with them immediately, and in this way part of the power of art horror is made manifest in those works that do not directly traffic in fear.

Notes 1 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: University of America Press, 1988), 1053. 2 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones (Cincinnati, OH: Steward Kidd Publishing Company, 1921). 3 It should be acknowledged that The Emperor Jones is deeply problematic in its portrayal of non-white, colonized African cultures. O’Neill often relies on hackneyed and prejudiced views of “primitive savages,” though at the time the play was considered quite progressive for being the first American play to stage an African American in a lead role, the extraordinary Charles Gilpin. 4 The Rhetoric and The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by W. Rhys Waters and Ingram Bywater (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 105. 5 Paul Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 8. 6 For a fuller description of this system as well as LeDoux’s experiments in this area, one should consult his The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 163–165; and Joseph LeDoux, “CognitiveEmotional Interactions in the Brain,” Cognition and Emotion 3 (1989), 267–289. 7 David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Toronto: University of Torornto Press, 2007), 131.

106 Fear 8 Aristotle does not appear to deny that there are reflexes that one might, following LeDoux, characterize as fear, however Aristotle does not classify such responses as fear, for in order for fear to count as an emotion on Aristotle’s account, one must have judged the object exciting the fear response as actually harmful. For instance, a startle reaction at the sight of what appears to be a snake only counts as fear on Aristotle’s account if one recognizes that it is indeed a dangerous viper. 9 The Rhetoric and The Poetics of Aristotle, 104. 10 Ibid., 105. 11 William Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (London: Gerald Duckworth and Company, 2002), 103. 12 Nichomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 41. 13 Jack Panksepp, “Emotions as Natural Kind Within the Mammalian Brain,” in Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis and Jeanette Haviland Jones (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 147–149. 14 Richard Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122. 15 Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 152–153. 16 Humphrey House, Aristotle’s Poetics: A Series of Eight Lectures (London: Madeline House, 1956), 109. 17 Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 134. 18 Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 24. 19 Susan Zeigler, “The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working Dead,” Modernism/Modernity 19:4 (2013), 744. 20 Qtd. in Ann Folino-White, “In the Service of Man: Women and Male Racial Mobility in The Emperor Jones,” American Drama 13:2 (Summer 2004), 98. 21 Qtd. in Arthur H. Nethercott,“The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O’Neill,” Modern Drama 3:3 (Fall 1960), 248. 22 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, translated by A. A. Brill (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1919), 208. 23 Ibid., 220. 24 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1032. 25 Gabriele Poole, “Blarsted Niggers! The Emperor Jones and Modernism’s Encounter with Africa,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 18:1/2 (Spring/Fall 1994), 22. 26 For full explication of the position that Jones is unable to embody the best of white civilization, one should consult Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134–144; Clifford Leech, O’Neill (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963) 34–47; John R. Cooley, “The Emperor Jones and the Harlem Renaissance,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7:2 (1974), 73–83. The view that Jones is Western civilization itself is articulated in Leonard Chabrowe, Ritual and Pathos: The Theatre of O’Neill (London: Bucknell University Press 1976), 122–123; Egil Törnqvist, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Supernaturalist Technique (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969) page number here. Poole offers an excellent summary and critique of these interpretations in her essay, mentioned in endnote 18. 27 Patrick J. Nolan, “The Emperor Jones: A Jungian View of the Fear in the Black Race,” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 4:1–2 (September 1980), 6. 28 György M. Vada, “Outline of the Philosophic Backgrounds of Expressionism,” in Expression as an International Literary Phenomenon:Twenty One Essays and a Bibliography, edited by Ulrich Wiesstein (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 57. 29 Oscar Cargill, Contour in Time, 136. 30 It is worth noting that O’Neill claimed that From Morning till Midnight had little influence upon the writing of The Emperor Jones, as he wrote to Barrett Clark in 1927 that

Fear 107 The first expressionist play I ever saw…was Kaiser’s From Morn To Midnight produced in New York in 1922, after I had written both The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. I read From Morn To Midnight before The Hairy Ape was written, but not before the idea for it was planted…As a matter of fact, I did not think much of Morn to Midnight, and still don’t. It is too easy. It would not have influenced me. (Barrett Clark, Eugene O’Neill:The Man and his Plays, 72) It is difficult to know how seriously to take O’Neill’s claims on this point, as he was prone to deny many outside influences to his work, while in many cases, the themes and styles of his works bear such similarity to other literature that these similarities are difficult to ignore. 31 MardiValgemae,“Expressionism in the American Theatre,” in Expression as an International Literary Phenomenon: Twenty One Essays and a Bibliography, edited by Ulrich Wiesstein (Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2011), 192. 32 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1037. 33 Ibid., 1039. 34 Ibid., 1041. 35 Ibid. 36 Charles Sweeney, “Back to the Source of Plays Written by Eugene O’Neill,” New York World 9 (November 1924), 5. 37 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1041. 38 Ibid., 1045. 39 Qtd. in Brenda Murphy,“McTeague’s Dream and The Emperor Jones: O’Neill’s Move from Naturalism to Modernism,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 17:1/2 (Spring/Fall 1993), 27. 40 Brenda Murphy, “McTeague’s Dream and The Emperor Jones,” 21. 41 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1052. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 1054. 44 Ibid., 1058. 45 Doris Falk, Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension, 69. 46 Patrick Nolan, “The Emperor Jones: A Jungian View of the Origin of Fear in the Black Race,” 7. 47 Carl Jung, “Archetypes of the Collected Unconscious,” in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume I, Part 9, translated by R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 63. 48 Patrick Nolan, 8. 49 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill, 381. 50 Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1059. 51 Qtd. in Noel Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46:1 (Autumn 1987), 52. 52 Ibid., 54. 53 For such counter-examples, one might consult works such as Susan Feagin, “Monsters, Disgust, and Fascination,” Philosophical Studies 65 (1992), 75–84; and Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). 54 Egil Törnqvist, Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, Inc., 2004), 153. 55 Eugene O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks,” The American Spectator (November 1932), 3. 56 Qtd. in Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays, edited by Virginia Floyd (New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing Company, 1981), 74. 57 Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude, in Eugene O’Neill: The Complete Plays 1920–1931, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 737. 58 Qtd. in Eugene O’Neill at Work, 206. 59 Ibid. 60 There are a few exceptions to this: i.e. Ah, Wilderness! Act IV, Scene 2, has Richard Miller delivering his thoughts aloud, and in More Stately Mansions II.3 this technique is employed. Hughie also contains something resembling the thought aside style, as the stage directions contain the Night Manager’s interior monologue.

6 Forgiveness

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Josie Hogan has seen her beloved James Tyrone for what she knows will be the last time, and as she returns to her daily duties on the Hogan farm, she realizes that the night she had spent with Jim, deeply personal and revelatory, will likely not give him the peace he seeks. As she gazes down the road after Jim, she pityingly acknowledges his tragic fate, hoping that somehow he will find peace from past demons, saying “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.”1 After her night as Jim’s drunken confidante, Josie has come to understand the source of his self-loathing, and she has served as a surrogate for his deceased mother by offering him forgiveness. Forgiveness is a fundamental virtue for most of Western society. Perhaps because of the pervasive influence of the Christian tradition, most Westerners hail forgiveness as morally superior to revenge, and these values have been upheld both in private interactions and public forums.2 However, like many putative virtues upheld in society, the concept of forgiveness is far too fuzzy. What does the practice of forgiveness actually entail? Because of the fuzziness of this concept, some have asserted that forgiveness is not a scrutable concept at all, while others have argued that even if one might offer a unique account of forgiveness, it may not always be a virtue to forgive.The puzzle of forgiveness looms large in the work of O’Neill, and given that so much of his work seems to lead to a particular account of forgiveness situated in the nature of emotional life, it is worth examining several philosophical accounts of the concept in order to suss O’Neill’s own understanding of the topic.

Puzzles of forgiveness Some have pointed out that forgiveness is a fundamentally paradoxical concept. For instance, the esteemed deconstructionist Jacques Derrida has written that in order to understand the idea of forgiveness, Logic and commonsense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary… to begin with the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is that not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? … One cannot, or should not, forgive: there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable.That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-7

Forgiveness 109 Though perhaps Derrida has slipped into hyperbole here, he is pointing out what at first look appears to be an internal incoherence within the concept of forgiveness. Derrida’s view is perhaps too extreme, however, because he insists that forgiveness is only possible in cases of so- called unforgivable wrongs.4 However, even if one moderates her view of forgiveness, assuming that there might be cases in which forgiveness is warranted, as in the case of the wrongdoer’s repentance and apology, it still appears that forgiveness loses its coherence because somehow the wrongdoer’s wrong is justified.5 Oliver Hallich articulates the Paradox of Forgiveness in several steps: 1. Forgiveness requires that the forgiver “foreswear resentment, and it is done for a reason.” 2. The reasons one forgives are “the response to considerations that lead us to think we ought to forgive a wrongdoer.” 3. If we ought to forgive a wrongdoer, then this implies that the wrongdoer is not at fault. 4. Because the wrongdoer is not at fault, there is nothing to forgive. 5. Therefore, the wrongdoer does not need to be forgiven.6 Hallich grounds (1) in the claim that forgiveness is intentional; it is unlike forgetting in that it requires us to actively do something in response to a perpetrator’s wrongdoing.The common understanding of forgiveness is that it involves deliberate change.Were one to fall and hit her head and eliminate either her beliefs or feelings of resentment toward a perpetrator, it would be strange to describe her as having a forgiving attitude toward the offender. Instead, forgiveness seems to require, as we shall see in what follows, an intentional change of belief, or an intentional change of attitude, or an intentional promise given on the part of the forgiver. Forgiveness is not accidental. As this is the case, the concept of forgiveness seems inscrutable. Hallich points out the problem with the deliberate nature of forgiveness. If we are behaving deliberately, then it follows that we are behaving based upon reasons to forgive. The so-called paradox arises out of the fact that if these reasons justify forgiveness, then the wrongdoing seems to dissolve, and there is no longer an affront to be dealt with. Based upon this formulation, one might conclude that forgiveness is internally contradictory, and therefore it is irrational. Philosophers have considered this problem, for if forgiveness is genuinely incoherent, it seems that one of our most fundamental moral virtues must be called into question. One way one might come to a coherent understanding of forgiveness, and perhaps dissolve its paradox, is by way of contrast; perhaps a definition of the term might emerge by examining what forgiveness is not. Such an exercise is especially helpful because often forgiveness is conflated with other comparable phenomena. For example, forgiveness is sometimes mistaken for justification. One might imagine an exchange with someone who has wronged me; however, in our conversation about the offense, I discover some previously unknown justifying reason for my offender’s behavior. I might regard the offense less harshly because I was unaware of this reason. I might also consider my behavior in your circumstances, and decide that were I in your shoes, with your reasons, I might have done the same thing.This

110 Forgiveness is forgiveness in none of these cases, because if there are justifying reasons for a person’s actions, there is no offense to forgive. One might also mistake forgiveness for excusing an offense. Friedrich Nietzsche offers insight into this distinction. He writes of Christ’s statement on the cross: “How can one forgive them at all, if they know not what they do?”7 If one is ignorant of an offense, it is unfair to hold the offense against them, as they have violated a standard of which they are unaware. Excusing an offense is admitting that the person who committed the offense is not responsible for the action that caused the offense. If a person has a condition such as Tourette’s Syndrome, and she curses at me, I am unlikely to be offended by this behavior because she is incapable of controlling her language. However, while I might colloquially describe my disposition toward her as forgiving, this seems strange because she is not able to do otherwise, and therefore not morally culpable.8 One might also construe forgiveness as acceptance. If I am wronged, it might be that I merely decide to move on from the resentment that I feel, and I might simply put my feelings aside about the wrong in order to make life more palatable. It is certainly possible to accept an offense without forgiving the offender. Were I to lie to a friend, it may be that my friend simply accepts and chooses to live with the fact that I am a liar instead of actually forgiving me for my deceit. Upon consideration, it appears that forgiveness is more than accepting an offense and moving on; forgiveness entails some allocation and amelioration of responsibility for a caused harm. Each of these mischaracterizations of forgiveness help to clarify some of the conditions necessary in order for forgiveness to occur. Akin to excusing and accepting, forgiving refers to ceasing to blame someone and hold them in resentment because of a harm. Unlike justifying and excusing, forgiveness entails maintaining that actual harm was caused. In the cases of justifying and excusing, additional information demonstrates that the harm caused was the result of other, qualifying reasons that remove the responsibility from the one causing harm, therefore there is nothing to forgive. Acceptance acknowledges that the person who caused the harm is indeed blameworthy; however, it differs from forgiveness in that in the latter state, the one who is resentful chooses to cease her resentment without forgiving. With these conditions in mind, one should turn her attention to the process of forgiveness. What does forgiveness actually require of a forgiver? Is forgiveness sensible as a concept, distinguished from justification, excuse, and acceptance? How can one simultaneously hold a wrongdoer accountable while ceasing to blame her for that offense? Moreover, even if forgiveness is coherent and possible, is it even virtuous to do so if someone has caused legitimate harm? Philosophers, particularly those of religious persuasions, have offered accounts of forgiveness intended to demonstrate the concept’s coherence and virtue.

Forgiveness and a change of mind/heart One way to construe forgiveness is that it is a phenomenon that entails changing one’s beliefs about the offender. For instance, Jeffrey Murphy and Jean Hampton have argued that forgiveness means that one who forgives judges that the offender

Forgiveness 111 is a good person overall, and thus ceases to hold the offender accountable for the particular wrong she has done.9 Similarly, Charles Griswold claims that forgiveness occurs when “whether in fact, or as imaginatively reconstructed by the victim,” the offender has taken, “minimal steps to qualify for forgiveness.”10 In this case, the victim has judged that the one who caused the harm has actually apologized, or would apologize if given the chance to do so, thus she can forgive. If forgiveness entails belief change, the paradox of forgiveness is resolved not because the offender has nothing to be forgiven for, but by virtue of the fact that overriding considerations have warranted the restoration of the relationship through forgiveness. Such conceptions of forgiveness seem disputable, however, because it seems conceptually possible to forgive someone who is not repentant or a good person.11 The belief-oriented conception of forgiveness also seems problematic because if forgiveness is simply a matter of change of belief, it appears that the concept comes too conceptually close to condonation, justification, or excuse, because the reasons that support belief in the validity of forgiveness warrant such a move. These problems with belief-oriented theories have motivated many philosophers to think about forgiveness as the process of altering how one feels about a person, instead of what one believes. Contemporary emotion-oriented theories of forgiveness can be traced back to the sermons of Bishop Joseph Butler, eighteenthcentury Anglican Bishop of Bristol. In a well-known sermon on the subject, Bishop Butler points out that it is natural for one to feel anger at injustice.12 Butler refers to this sort of anger as resentment, a term that is frequently used in contemporary discussions of forgiveness. Those philosophers who argue for emotionbased accounts focus on resentment, because a common view is that forgiveness has occurred when one no longer feels resentment toward the perpetrator. Resentment is usually understood as what philosopher P.F. Strawson refers to as a reactive attitude, an attitude dependent upon another’s goodwill or lack thereof toward a person.13 Guilt, contempt, and gratitude are other examples of reactive attitudes. Typically, those who offer emotion-oriented accounts of forgiveness assert that in forgiveness, one is able to moderate or eliminate hostile reactive attitudes toward the offender. Lucy Allais, for example, has argued that the analogy “wiping the slate clean” is an effective way to describe this process. Her account seems to possess a strong appeal over belief centered theories because emotional approaches to forgiveness are able to sustain the fact that in order to forgive, one must still be able to regard the harm as an act of legitimate wrongdoing.14 If forgiveness involves altering one’s affective attitude toward a wrongdoer, then the paradoxical nature of forgiveness dissolves because the one offering forgiveness is not compelled to sustain two seemingly conflicting beliefs. Instead, a victim who was harmed by a perpetrator can still judge herself legitimately wronged, but no longer holds resentment toward the perpetrator of that wrongdoing. One might rightly claim that emotion-directed theories of forgiveness have more work to do in describing the process of forgiveness. How does one change her feelings toward someone? Just as it is strange advice to tell someone that she should “feel differently,” given the circumstances, it is an odd, and perhaps impossible, requirement to place on oneself. It is not easy to talk oneself out of negative feelings, and unfortunately,

112 Forgiveness theorists have offered very little specific discussion that is helpful in describing the process. It is worth noting that theorists differ on how this occurs. Some have asserted that forgiveness is overcoming of resentment, while others have described it as forbearance, withdrawal, or letting go,15 but direction about how this process works or why one would be motivated to perform such an act is slim in the philosophical literature.

Forgiveness as change of behavior There have been some disputes mounted against both the belief and emotion approaches to forgiveness on the grounds of these theories seeming incompleteness, because they disregard the behavior associated with forgiveness. One common way of thinking about forgiveness is that it changes the way the victim behaves toward the wrongdoer. It seems that forgiveness is incompatible with negative behaviors such as complaining, rebuking, ostracizing, or seeking revenge. Some philosophers argue that forgiveness only occurs when a victim no longer punishes a perpetrator. Pamela Hieronymi asserts that, “with forgiveness, the offended agrees to bear in her own person the cost of the wrongdoing and to incorporate the injury into her own life without further protest or demand for retribution.”16 Similarly, Leo Zaibert argues that in forgiveness the victim determines that the world would be worse off if she continued to punish the offender. Instead, the forgiver chooses to cease such behaviors; forgiveness only occurs when she enacts that choice.17 This seems to be a very high standard for forgiveness; in some cases, it appears unjust to let the offender completely off the hook,18 and in an intuitive sense, it does not seem that forgiveness and rescue from negative consequence are part and parcel of each other. Though Heironymi and Zaibert offer coherent accounts of forgiveness, one might complain that the approach they assert is too demanding, requiring a standard that in many cases might actually result in more harm than the restoration it brings about. One might also conceive of forgiveness as a kind of communicative promise. When one says, “I forgive you,” perhaps she is communicating that the perpetrator is no longer is obligated to make amends, and that the victim will cease believing, feeling, and/or acting as if she has been wronged.19 Such a view does have intuitive appeal; in folk wisdom, forgiveness seems to be associated with both an action and an affirmative statement that is binding. If I were to bring up a past wrong to someone I have forgiven, she might rightly claim that I am out of line. She would likely complain that either I am reneging on my promise to her, or I have never truly forgiven her in the first place. While this promise-based conception of forgiveness does seem to capture an element of the process of forgiveness, if this theory encapsulates all of the process, it would appear that it is impossible to forgive the dead or someone who was wronged me but with whom I no longer have contact.

Assessing theories of forgiveness Each of the accounts of forgiveness described above seem to have at least some intuitive appeal, but do any of them actually resolve the Paradox of Forgiveness (PoF)? In examining each in turn, one notices that belief-oriented accounts attempt to solve

Forgiveness 113 the problem by asserting that when one forgives, she does so because she has come to new or overriding beliefs about the wrongdoer. However, if this is a fair description of what occurs in forgiveness, it appears that the paradox remains intact; the wrongdoer is not a wrongdoer, and so it seems strange to assert that she is in need of forgiveness. Behavior-oriented accounts (including “communicative promise” accounts) are more promising, because by asserting that forgiveness relates to a set of behaviors, it is easier to maintain the belief that the wrongdoer is in fact culpable, but that the victim changes her behavior toward the perpetrator. Still, these sorts of theories seem to miss that there is a qualitative experience in genuine forgiveness.There is something that it is like to forgive, and one could imagine merely changing her behavior without that set of internal experiences; this would not seem to be genuine forgiveness. Given the framing of the PoF, perhaps the most successful sort of theories that dissolve the paradox are those that focus on forgiveness as an emotional act. Accounts that insist that forgiveness entails a change of emotional disposition toward the perpetrator most strongly affirm that the wrongdoer is deserving of resentment because of the actual harm that was caused.The source of tension arises in how the victim feels about the wrongdoer, not in what she knows about the offender. In contrast with justifying, excusing, or accepting, emotional models of forgiveness place the violation at the center of the process, for without the violation, there would be no hard feelings, and forgiveness would be unnecessary. As Peter Benn points out, “forgiveness depends, for its very intelligibility, upon the prima facie legitimacy of certain reactive attitudes.”20 Forgiveness says,“you deserve my approbation, and resentment, but I will put those feelings away as we move forward.” While emotion-oriented approaches to forgiveness often offer poor description of how this process occurs, they have the virtue of making the concept intelligible in a way that their competitors do not. Emotion-based accounts also have a great deal of explanatory scope and power in their ability to describe so-called “self-forgiveness.” One might regard oneself as at fault for a wrong behavior, living in shame and guilt as a result, and in this case, it might be advisable to forgive oneself of this past wrong. In recent years, the idea of self-forgiveness has received scrutiny, and there is a good deal of controversy regarding whether it is a coherent concept. Some have argued that if forgiveness is the cessation of resentment, then such a move is impossible when one is both the victim and the perpetrator of the wrong committed. Resentment, some have argued, is necessarily an other-directed emotion.21 This complaint is only powerful if one adopts an overly restrictive view of resentment, arguing that by definition resentment is others-directed. Those who argue that resentment cannot be self-directed hold that in resentment, one registers that the wrongdoer is a moral agent, and the victim is a moral agent whose standing has been violated by the offender. It is strange to see oneself as both the perpetrator and victim, because it means regarding oneself as simultaneously the subject and object of a reactive attitude. Intuitively, however, it appears familiar to resent oneself for a past action, though perhaps resentment is not easily distinguishable from guilt, shame, or similar reactive attitudes. If one expands the scope of resentment to include those reactive attitudes often associated with the perception of guilt, an account of self-forgiveness seems reasonable.

114 Forgiveness Emotion-centered theories of forgiveness provide a direct story about how such forgiveness is possible. If I have wronged myself and am suffering guilt and shame as a result, I am able to forgive, not by changing my beliefs about the content of my past choices, but by altering how I feel about myself. While emotion-based accounts do little to describe the process of forbearance or letting go of my negative self-regarding affective attitudes, such theories do explain how one can both hold that she has violated a person’s moral standing and yet forgive herself through an alteration of feeling. Behavior and belief accounts do not offer ready depictions of how self-forgiveness is possible. How might one behave differently toward oneself, indicating forgiveness? What beliefs about oneself does the self-forgiver need to adopt in order to forgive? By contrast, emotional theories suggest that forgiveness lies in overcoming ill- feelings toward oneself, which seems a more direct explanation than those offered by competing approaches.

Misbegotten forgiveness In the final stages of his career, O’Neill as a writer seems consumed with the necessity of forgiveness. Famously, in the dedication to the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, he had proclaimed forgiveness for all the “four haunted Tyrones,” an allusion not only to his forgiveness of his family who are portrayed in the play, but also of his forgiveness of himself. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, the playwright’s final complete play, O’Neill appears to locate his own desires for self-forgiveness into a fictional portrayal of his brother James’ final act. Shortly following the death of O’Neill’s mother, O’Neill’s older brother suffered an alcohol induced stroke that would cost him his life. James’ namesake in Misbegotten is likely headed down the same path, as he cannot forgive himself for the way that he took his mother’s death, and his pain has only worsened his life of dissolution and drunkenness. In the discussion on pity found in chapter four of this text, I pointed out that there is a puzzle in characterizing Exorcism as a tragedy, as it has a happy ending.Yet I showed that it is best understood in tragic terms, as are many of O’Neill’s plays. A Moon for the Misbegotten is a similar case, in that the play does not end horribly; at the end of the play, Jim Tyrone is able to release his demons and seemingly forge a path toward a completed life. However, if one focuses her attention on the most completing character, Josie Hogan, it does appear that the play is truly tragic. Josie is a such a singular character in O’Neill’s canon that some have (rightly, I think) argued that Misbegotten is really her play, as opposed to Jamie’s.Throughout the play, she demonstrates the capacity for change, and if the play is to be characterized as a tragedy, she is the protagonist in that, like Oedipus (who comes to punish himself for believing himself more powerful than fate), “accepts the humiliation of being an ordinary person, a humiliation that, paradoxically, accompanies growth toward autonomy.”22 It is uncontroversial to claim that Josie is a central (and perhaps most interesting) figure in the play; however, Jamie’s struggle with guilt and desire for forgiveness are features of Misbegotten that are deeply captivating and indicative of O’Neill’s tragic sensibility. The title of the play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, only emerged in late drafts of the play. As O’Neill began work on Misbegotten in 1941, he had tentatively called the

Forgiveness 115 play The Moon Bore Twins. In its original conception, O’Neill envisioned a kinship between Josie and Jim that might best described as more filial than romantic; Virginia Floyd has suggested that Josie was a surrogate for Eugene himself, offering his forgiveness to Jim’s namesake, Eugene’s brother James Jr.23 As O’Neill developed that play, Josie’s character transformed from what might be described as a loving confidant to a forgiving mother figure, though some have been so bold as to describe Misbegotten as O’Neill’s first love story since Anna Christie.24 Like so many of O’Neill’s leading men, though Jim is a genetically gifted, handsome, and winsome character, because of a life of dissipation and debauchery, he is now soft and “soggy,” and his “face is still good looking despite its unhealthy puffiness and bags beneath the eyes.”The stage directions describe Jim as “Mephistophelian,” a man who seems to be sneering and mocking all good appearances in the world.25 Josie’s appearance is also shaped by pronounced genetic gifts.Though she is described in the stage directions as so “oversize she is almost a freak,” she is reportedly “more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labor of two ordinary men.” Despite her size and power, she is not masculine in the least, described as “all woman.”26 Throughout the play, Josie will struggle with her unrequited feelings of love for Jim, finally coming to understand that Jim needs something that she is ultimately unable to provide: redemption. In the opening scene of the play, the audience is given a glimpse into the source of Jim’s malaise, though it is initially unclear from where it emerges. Jim shares a jocular account of his expulsion from university with his tenant, Josie’s father. In his senior year at university, Jim made a bet with one of his friends that he could convince the Jesuit college administrators to show a prostitute around the campus, as he paid her to pretend to be his sister. Apparently, this prank was inspired by the real-life shenanigans of O’Neill’s older brother, for which he was expelled from Fordham.27 Though Josie’s father and Jim have a good laugh at this anecdote, this story actually presages the culminating event that has brought Jim so deeply into despair. Jim’s life has been a series of blasphemies through which he punished his family, and this recounted incident will set the stage for later revelations of his impious violation of (in particular) his mother’s love for him as well as the church. In Act Three, Jim’s guilt will be fully disclosed, as he will confess to Josie the depth of his depravity. Jim recounts that after the death of his father, he had “been on the wagon for nearly two years.” Apparently, a large source of Jim’s inner-conflict had been with the late James Tyrone, and with Senior out of the way and Jim’s brother married, Jim found escape from his addictions. All of this had crumbled when Jim’s mother had a stroke during one of their visits out to California. Jim recounts: And one day she suddenly became ill. Got rapidly worse. Went into a coma. Brain tumor. The docs said, no hope. Might never come out of coma. I went crazy. Couldn’t face losing her. The old booze yen got me. I got drunk and stayed drunk. And I began hoping she’d never come out of the coma, and see I was drinking again. That was my excuse, too—that she’d never know. And she never did…Kidding myself again. I know damned well just before she died she recognized me. She saw I was drunk. Then she closed her eyes so she couldn’t see, and was glad to die!

116 Forgiveness Jim’s offense does not end at his mother’s death. He is stricken with grief, and he cannot face the trip to New England with his mother’s body. He sinks even lower: I had to bring her body back East to be buried beside the Old Man. I took a drawing room and hid in it with a case of booze. She was in her coffin in the baggage car. No matter how drunk I got, I couldn’t forget that for a minute. I found I couldn’t stay alone in that drawing room. It became haunted. I was going crazy. I had to go out and wander up and down the train looking for company…I’d spotted one passenger who was used to drunks and could pretend to like them, if there was enough dough in it. She had parlor house written all over her—a blonde pig who looked more like a whore than twenty-five whores, with a face like an overgrown doll’s and a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear’s feet. I bribed the porter to take a message to her and that night she sneaked into my drawing room. She was bound for New York too. So every night—for fifty bucks a night—28 Jim deals with the loss of his mother by drunkenly cavorting with a prostitute throughout his journey home. Even he cannot figure out exactly what motivated him to behave this way; though he has come to suspect that this act, akin to the prank with the prostitute while at University, was an effort to enact revenge upon his family. To ward off the ghosts of Jim’s past, he spends his days in a drunken stupor, and his inebriated personality takes one of two forms: either he “has one of those sneering, bitter drunks on and talks like a Broadway crook himself, saying money is the only thing in the world, and everything and anything can be bought if the price is big enough,” or “without any reason you can see, he’ll suddenly turn strange, and look sad, and stare at nothing as though he was mourning over some ghost inside him.” Josie sees through both of these personas, recognizing that Jim pretends to be hard and shameless to “get back at life when it’s tormenting him.”29 From the outset of the play, though Josie has romantic designs toward Jim, it is clear that she regards him with a kind of matronly compassion that will eventually supersede her desires for him. Jim’s guilt and shame are consuming him, and his need for forgiveness cannot be externally requited, as the one who he has harmed is deceased. Edward Shaughnessy points out that a desire for forgiveness drives many of O’Neill’s characters, however in A Moon for the Misbegotten, the relationship between Jim and Josie is strange in that “neither party has ever injured the other, or wished to. Thus, the Josie-Jim exchange is uncluttered by a history of injuries that degrades nearly all relationships: grudges, animosities, envy, and resentment.”30 In Shaughnessy’s estimation, Jim will ultimately regard Josie as a mediatrix, one who stands in the place of Mrs. Tyrone and who offers him forgiveness on her behalf.31

Standing to forgive One of the philosophical questions the play poses is whether such forgiveness is possible. Is it possible to forgive someone on behalf of another person? The question of a person’s standing to forgive is a fraught one in the philosophical

Forgiveness 117 literature on forgiveness. To draw out why this might be problematic, one might consider the following scenario: Imagine that Tina watches a story on the nightly news about a violent sexual assault perpetrated against a victim about whom she knows virtually nothing. After watching this story, imagine that Tina feels anger toward the perpetrator, but the next day when she calmly reflects on the matter, she says, “That was a serious assault, and it was definitely wrong, but I have forgiven the perpetrator for what he did.”32 One would find Tina’s attitude strange; after all, who is she to forgive the perpetrator of a crime of which she had no connection? Tina has no place, no standing to offer forgiveness to this person, and were the victim to discover Tina’s “forgiveness,” she would likely be offended by Tina’s attitude. Many philosophers, following the intuitions of Robin Downie, Ariel Kolnai, Simon Weisenthal, and others,33 argue that one can only forgive an offense that was perpetrated upon them. While one might punish someone for a crime committed against another person, publicly shame the offender, or welcome the offender back into the community, it intuitively appears that forgiveness is an act that must be performed by the individual who was violated by the trespasser. Glen Pettigrew points out that philosophers often restrict forgiveness to the victim of a slight because they rely on conceptions of forgiveness that require the victim be at the center of the process.34 Often, for example, forgiveness is conceived of as debt-cancellation, or as restoring a relationship, and in these conceptions, it seems strange to assert that forgiveness is something a third party can perform. When one commits harm to another, some have asserted that she puts herself in a situation “somewhat like the legal situation of a debtor who owes money,”35 and it appears the only way she might escape that debt is to repay the one to whom the debt is owed, unless the one who holds the debt forgives it. It seems strange to think of a third party having the capacity to forgive a debt to which she is not owed. Similarly, if forgiveness entails the restoration of previous relationships between parties A and B, it seems impossible for party C to offer forgiveness because the relationship between A and C is not the one in need of repair. Even if one conceives of forgiveness as the elimination of resentment (as promising emotion-centered theories suggest) it still initially appears that only the victim possesses the capacity to deal with her resentment toward the culprit. It appears that in the case of Jim Tyrone, he is doomed to flail in guilt, shame, and remorse, because it is impossible for him to be forgiven by those whom he has wronged, as they are no longer a part of his life. If relief is possible in Jim’s case, it is only by way of his mediatrix Josie, or through self-forgiveness. Much of what O’Neill offers in Misbegotten is a test of these possibilities.

Forgiveness as motif In the explication of the play, the audience is made more aware of Phil Hogan’s need for a kind of Biblical forgiveness (at least in the sense of debt-forgiveness)

118 Forgiveness than Jim Tyrone’s. Phil, apparently unable to make much of his “rockpile, miscalled a farm,”36 with a son who has recently made off with his savings, finds himself very delinquent in paying his rent to Jim. Hogan’s indebtedness to Jim has resulted in hostility to Tyrone, and when Phil comes to believe that Tyrone is willing to sell the farm to Phil’s sworn enemy T. Stedman Harder, instead of humbling himself and seeking relief from his debts, Phil concocts a hair-brained scheme to manipulate Jim into marriage with Josie. Hogan appears to understand the world not in terms of indebtedness, repentance, and forgiveness, but in terms of constant battle against those who have the upper hand against him. This is illustrated in Phil’s conflict with Harder regarding the fact that Phil’s pigs constantly swim in and spoil Harder’s ice-pond. When the wealthy young millionaire attempts to confront Phil about it, Phil sets him on his heels in a hilarious fashion, asserting that Harder is to blame for removing the fence on their shared property lines. Hogan refuses to acknowledge his indebtedness, much less appeal for leniency, mercy, or forgiveness. Like her father, Josie has also donned a persona in order to ensure she always has the upper hand. Though she is still a virgin, Josie pretends to be profoundly promiscuous, claiming to have cavorted with any willing man in the community. Josie has so deeply inhabited this persona that even her father and brothers believe it of her. Like her father, Josie displays no desire of repentance, assuming the worst possible narrative in order to steel herself against the world. Also like her father, she expects no relief or redemption, though she extends such an escape to her brother Mike in the opening of the play. If one conceives of A Moon for the Misbegotten as a play designed to work out the mechanics of forgiveness, interesting features of the play become salient. For example, after initially raging to Josie about Jim’s supposed betrayal in Act II, Phil Hogan momentarily adopts an unexpected tone regarding Jim. Hogan remarks, “with one foot in the grave from whiskey. Maybe we shouldn’t blame him…how do I know what I wouldn’t do for five thousand cash, and how do you know what you wouldn’t do?”37 Josie berates her father for failing to hold Tyrone accountable, pointing out that there is no excuse for his betrayal. In this exchange, the audience can appreciate the distinction between forgiveness and excuse. Had Phil maintained that Tyrone was wrong, while choosing to forego his resentment of Jim, Josie would have appraised his response differently (although she probably would not have felt similarly). In Act II, Josie is also upset with Jim for apparently missing their date. Jim had promised to come back to the Hogan home to spend the evening with Josie after he went into town to have a drink at the inn; however, he fails to appear until after Josie has been appraised of his betrayal of her family’s trust. When Jim finally turns up, he apologies for his tardiness, initially acknowledging that he has no excuse, as he “can’t think up a lie.”38 In fact, the audience has come to learn that Jim had indented to stay away from Josie, sensing that despite all her bluster, she was a virgin, and if he had kept the date, he would have likely taken advantage of her virtue. Josie is aware of Jim’s belief in her chastity, so when she claims to forgive him for his absence, she is not really forgiving him at all; instead, she is justifying his actions on the basis of her knowledge of his sense of honor.

Forgiveness 119 Until Act III in the play, O’Neill has demonstrated what forgiveness is not, and in the moonlight, Josie and Jim will explore at length the possibility for both legitimate interpersonal forgiveness as well as self-forgiveness. In this lengthy act, Jim becomes increasingly inebriated and loose-lipped about the culmination of his degeneracy toward his mother, the source of his guilt. In a moment of stark honesty, Jim tells Josie about his mother’s death, his drunken wake spent with a prostitute, and his failure to attend Mary’s funeral. Many critics have written about the nature of Jim and Josie’s relationship in this act, as his confession is precipitated by a drunken rape attempt. Almost immediately following Jim’s confession of his love to Josie, he attempts to force himself upon her, an act which she narrowly avoids as he comes to his senses. Given what follows, Travis Bogard and Louis Shaeffer have taken this sexually aggressive act as Jim’s repressed sexual desire for his mother.39 Further reinforcing this interpretation is Moon for the Misbegotten’s similarity to Desire Under the Elms. In the earlier play, Eben Cabot turns to his stepmother Abbie as a stand-in for his dead mother and as an act of retaliation against his father, and their relationship is consummated in the birth of a baby girl.40 It appears that, at least for a moment, Jim evinces similar desires toward Josie, seeing her as matronly, and he wishes to consummate that relationship. According to his account, when Jim saw his mother’s corpse prepared by the morticians, he “barely recognized her,” and he found that he knew “he should be heartbroken,” but he “couldn’t feel anything.” He knew he should be upset, but he felt dead inside. Despite this, he knew that the people around him expected him to display some grief, so he “flopped down on my knees and hid my face in my hands and faked some sobs and cried.”41 At this revelation, Josie attempts to excuse his actions, pointing out that he was drunk at the time, and he should not punish himself for this. But this is only the beginning of Jim’s tale of guilt, and a mere excuse will not allow him relief. Jim then discloses his darkest violations of his mother to Josie, and she is deeply shocked and repulsed when she learns of his drunken bender with the “fat pig.” Josie is deeply repulsed when she hears of his sin, and Jim reveals that he wishes he “could believe in that spiritualist bunk. If I could tell her it was because I missed her so much and couldn’t forgive her for leaving me.”42 He feels certain that his mother would forgive him were she alive, but in her absence he is left with nothing but unrelenting guilt. One might wonder, however, if Jim is really seeking forgiveness at all, at least in the philosophical sense. Here he attempts to side-step his responsibility for his actions by suggesting that he was so bereft that he lost his way. However real, genuine forgiveness, as we have seen earlier, must affirm the perpetrator’s responsibility while releasing him from the guilt that he deserves. Jim seeks justification for his past bad deeds, not forgiveness. In this moment, Josie comes to understand what Jim needs from her, and it is not romantic love. Instead, she will stand in for his mother, offering him absolution in Mary’s absence. Many of the stage pictures the pair create in this scene are reminiscent of a pieta, as Mary will hold Jim’s drunken body much like the Virgin holds the slain Christ in Renaissance depictions. Josie becomes both a blessed Virgin and an embodiment of Jim’s mother Mary as she assures Jim he is forgiven, saying:

120 Forgiveness Do what you came for my darling. It isn’t drunken laughter in a speakeasy want to hear at all, but the sound of yourself crying your heart’s repentance against her breast…She hears. I feel her in the moonlight, her soul wrapped in it like a silver mantel, and I know she understands and forgives me, too, and her blessing lies on me. Here, Josie is standing in to forgive Jim on behalf of someone else, and her ultimate hope is that he might forgive himself. Josie promises Jim freedom from the guilt and sorrow he has suffered, feeling as though she is channeling Jim’s mother in the moonlight. She promises to give him “one night that’ll be different from all the others, with a dawn that won’t creep over dirty windowpanes but will wake in the sky like a promise of God’s peace in the soul’s dark sadness.”43 Though it seems impossible, Josie has somehow transcended her own relationship to Jim, taken upon not only the soul of his mother, but also the Blessed Virgin, and Jesus Christ. She has expiated his sins. Though Josie has firsthand experience of this miracle, she finds herself at a loss to explain how it was possible, telling her father that there had been nothing for anyone to witness the night before,“Nothing at all…except a great miracle they’d never believe, or you neither.”44 When James wakes to the dawn in Josie’s arms, he remarks that for the first time in quite a while he had been able to sleep without nightmares. Gone is his “usual morning-after stuff—the damned sick remorse that makes you wish you’d died in your sleep so you wouldn’t have to face the rotten things you’re afraid you said and did the night before.”45 Jim has found peace in Josie’s love, and the play closes as she gazes down the road after him, bestowing upon him a blessing: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.”46

Has Jim really been forgiven? Given the overtly Catholic images and dialogue in the third and fourth act of the play, one might suspect that O’Neill regards forgiveness as a fundamentally sacred miracle, and it might be tempting to argue that his theory of forgiveness (as often happens in theology) simply embraces the paradox of forgiveness instead of attempting to dissolve it. It is still unclear how Josie can sensibly offer forgiveness on Mary’s behalf. There are three possible explanations for Jim’s sense of expiation: (1) Jim and Josie were merely playing a game in their evening conversation. Jim has not actually been forgiven for anything; instead, he merely feels better for getting things off his chest. (2) Through some sort of Holy miracle, Josie was able to channel Mary’s resentment and put it aside to forgive her son, or (3) Josie can offer Jim forgiveness on the basis of her own resentment on behalf of Mary. The play neither confirms nor disconfirms (1). Jim’s relief from guilt might merely be in his head. However, it seems unlikely that Misbegotten should be interpreted as bleakly as this reading would prescribe. In many of O’Neill’s final plays, the playwright seems intent on demonstrating human need of and capacity for forgiveness (one might consider Days Without End as the most obvious example). This, coupled with the fact that O’Neill is writing about the final days of his own brother’s life makes the hypothesis that Jim is merely deluded an unlikely

Forgiveness 121 interpretation. By his own admission, O’Neill is writing with great forgiveness toward his late family at this point in his career, and this does not seem to square with a cynical view of Tyrone’s fate. There is little evidence that (2) is the best interpretation of Act III. Though O’Neill incorporates a good deal of religious imagery and dialogue in the moonlit conversation between Josie and Tyrone, the play does not seem to suggest that the miraculous has occurred. Unlike John Loving in O’Neill’s “miracle play” Days Without End, Jim Tyrone does not seem to suffer from a conflicted relationship to the Christian God, and he is not interested in Divine forgiveness. Instead, Tyrone seeks forgiveness from his family—particularly from his mother, who he has no illusions about meeting again in the afterlife.Though Josie metaphorically takes on the mantle of Jim’s mother and the Blessed Virgin, she is not doing so in any literal sense. If Josie is not Jim’s mediatrix, then it is unclear how she is able to offer Mary’s forgiveness to him. If Josie is, in fact, offering Jim forgiveness on behalf of someone else, as the plainest reading of the play suggests, one might wonder how such a feat has been accomplished. As mentioned earlier, Josie does not resent Jim for the crimes for which he feels guilty, so it seems strange for her to absolve him of those crimes.The answer lies first in the fact that Jim is not seeking forgiveness from Mary for the particular crimes he has confessed to Josie; instead, Jim seeks forgiveness for the sort of person he is. Jim seeks an escape from himself, an escape that he has, until now, found impossible. He tells Josie that neither of them can “escape ourselves no matter where we run away…Whether it’s from the bottom of a bottle, or a South Sea Island, we’d find our own ghosts waiting there to greet us.”47 Though Jim is riddled with guilt about how he handled his mother’s death, particularly with respect to the prostitute on the train, this incident is merely a token of his overall condition. If forgiveness is the deliverance from resentment through altering one’s affective disposition toward another, in order for Josie to offer Jim forgiveness, she must have real resentment toward him. Perhaps this is the reason that O’Neill included Jim’s rape attempt within the plot of Act III. Instead of merely hearing about what a terrible person Jim could be, Josie had to witness it firsthand. Josie sees Jim, drunken and stumbling, attempting to have his way with her, as he had with the “blonde pig” on the train, and she is truly horrified. Once Jim comes to his senses, Josie momentarily seems to excuse Jim’s actions toward her (and later when she discovers his dishonor of his mother) on the basis of his drunkenness, asserting that there is “nothing to forgive,”48 however, excuse is not what Jim seeks, and ultimately, it is not what Josie gives. As has been shown above, unlike excuse or justification, forgiveness entails maintaining that the perpetrator has actually committed a violation without attempting to explain that violation away. Jim is not faultless, and he cannot merely blame his actions on being “misbegotten.” By contrast, in the earlier play Days Without End, John Loving also stands in need of forgiveness; however, O’Neill has not quite developed his theory of forgiveness as fully as he will in Moon for the Misbegotten. Both Loving and Tyrone are riddled with guilt over their past mistakes, particularly their sexual sins. There are some interesting similarities between the

122 Forgiveness two protagonists, especially in terms of their sexual violations. In Days, Lucy Hillman describes her liaison with John Loving in a narrative the prefigures Jim’s attack upon Josie: I got him in my bedroom on some excuse. But he pushed me away as if her were disgusted with himself and me. But I wouldn’t let him go. And then came the strange part of it. Suddenly, I don’t know how to explain it, you’ll think I’m crazy, or being funny, but it was as if he were no longer there. It was another man, a stranger whose eyes were hateful and frightening. He seemed to look through me at some one else, and I seemed to be watching some hidden place in his mind where there was something as evil and revengeful as I was.49 Similarly, when Jim forces himself upon Josie, “a strange look comes over his face. He looks at her now with a sneering cynical lust. He speaks thickly as if he was suddenly very drunk.”50 Like Loving, Jim’s wickedness seems to emerge beyond himself. Though both Loving and Tyrone appear moved by a force other than their own volition in their respective moments of moral failure, it is significant that Tyrone refuses to delude himself about the crime he was about to commit: “Nuts! Cut out the faking! I knew what I was doing.”51 John Loving, however, never quite owns his indiscretion, instead creating a psychological doppelganger upon which he casts the blame for his sin.This doppelganger, referred to in the script of Days as Loving, is ultimately destroyed in the end by John’s plea for God’s pity. Loving is annihilated at the foot of the Cross, and John Loving, who before “had only been John,” receives God’s mercy and forgiveness.52 This pseudo-Catholic conception of forgiveness that entails “putting away the old man” while letting the weak man with a good heart off the hook seems to be what is so galling to Theodore Hickman in The Iceman Cometh. Hickey describes himself as a serial philanderer, consistently returning home to his wife Evelyn and begging his forgiveness for multiple affairs, even an affair that results in both contracting a sexually transmitted infection. Yet, at every turn, Evelyn would, in Hickey’s words “kiss me and say she knew I didn’t mean and it and wouldn’t do it again…No, sir, you couldn’t stop Evelyn. Nothing on earth could shake her faith in me. Even I couldn’t.”53 Hickey found her forgiveness anything but restorative, filling him with such guilt that it made him despise her. The trouble with Evelyn’s forgiveness is that it failed to acknowledge the brute fact of the matter, a fact that Hickey can clearly see: Hickey himself was not some misguided gem with a good heart; he was a drunken adulterer for which punishment was merited. Hickey detected that Evelyn, guided by a strict Methodist upbringing that prescribed unconditional forgiveness, was not offering forgiveness at all, because she refused to see Hickey for who he really was. Each time Hickey confessed his affairs to her, or returned home from weeks of dissipation, he could “see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love.”54 Evelyn should have been disgusted with him, and if she were being honest with herself, she would have. Perhaps then, genuine forgiveness might have been possible. Instead, Evelyn chose to adopt a “pipe dream” that

Forgiveness 123 Hickey really loved her and did not mean to behave as he had. Ultimately, her choice to excuse his actions instead of dealing with them head-on will bring about her death. Forgiveness of the sort that Evelyn (and perhaps Christ) offers only seems to serve to humiliate and enrage, instead of producing restoration and comity. With Moon for the Misbegotten, perhaps O’Neill has, like his forerunner Nietzsche, detected the inadequacies inherent to the religious view of forgiveness often articulated within Catholic teaching. Genuine forgiveness, including forgiveness of oneself, is not a process of doing away with some aspect of oneself that might have caused the wrong, but in facing up to the reality that the perpetrator is worthy of resentment. Jim comes to understand, through his interaction with Josie, that it is he who has done the wrong, and he deserves the guilt from which he has been hiding. Through Josie’s love, he can face his crimes and experience deliverance from their penalty. Jim will not survive for much longer, but he has been released from the relentless guilt of his life, and he can rest in death.

Jim Tyrone’s forgiveness In a well-known essay that caused a contentious but friendly dialogue between he and Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden argues that forgiveness is an internal state that is undermined by any attempt to portray it onstage.55 Asserting that “forgiveness requires manifestation in action.” Auden argues that the best that can be displayed in theatrical performance is “an act of pardon” as opposed to relinquishing of resentment.56 The audience member does not have access to the internal reactive attitudes57 of onstage characters, Auden claims, and therefore forgiveness is an action inaccessible to theatrical display. Arendt opposes this conception of forgiveness, arguing that forgiveness is performative, involving reversal of actions and cessation of punishment, which certainly lies in the domain of theatrical presentation.58 Though O’Neill would likely have agreed with Auden’s claim that forgiveness entails release of negative emotional attitudes toward the perpetrator of a wrong, it appears that O’Neill saw theatre as a venue whereby forgiveness might be portrayed and even experienced. To appreciate this claim in the context of A Moon for the Misbegotten, one should step back from an internal analysis of the relationship between Josie and Jim and consider the audience member’s relationship to Jim Tyrone. Presuming that the viewer is at all emotionally invested in the play, she likely experiences many reactive attitudes toward the characters’ onstage actions. She has witnessed Jim’s near rape of Josie, and she has heard his firsthand account of his behavior on the train. It is no stretch to assume that the audience member finds Jim worthy of her ire, perhaps even resentment. If this is the case, is the viewer not in the position to offer Jim Tyrone a kind of imaginative forgiveness? On O’Neill’s understanding, forgiveness is an emotional act, an act which requires brutal honesty, but it is possible. O’Neill famously indicated that Long Day’s Journey into Night was an exercise in forgiveness for his family, and it appears that his last completed play was a similar effort. Eugene’s brother James is perhaps the most tragic figure of O’Neill’s immediate family, wasting much of his life in the ways that O’Neill

124 Forgiveness describes in his autobiographical plays. Though O’Neill could not offer James Divine absolution, perhaps in his own way, he offers James an opportunity for forgiveness via an audience in the venue Eugene knew best, the theatre.

Notes 1 Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, in Eugene O’Neill:The Complete Plays 1932– 1943, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of American 1988), 946. 2 I.e. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. 3 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), 32–33. 4 As Zaibert points out, Derrida’s language is somewhat deceptive here. If he literally meant “unforgiveable,” it would be logically impossible for forgive a person who committed such an act. What Derrida seems to mean here by unforgiveable, is “an act would should not forgive.” Leo Zaibert, “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009), 368. 5 Aural Kolnai, “Forgiveness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973), 91. 6 Oliver Hallich, “Can the Paradox of Forgiveness be Resolved?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16:5 (November 2013), 1000–1001. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 326. 8 A number of philosophers have defended the claim that forgiveness necessitates that wrongdoer must be in a class of people expected not to do certain things. For a full treatment of this argument, one might turn to Pamela Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62:3 (May 2001), 529–555. 9 Jeffrey Murphy and Jean Hampton, Mercy and Forgiveness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 83. 10 Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115. 11 Eve Garrard offers some interesting examples that suggest this possibility in “Forgiveness and the Holocaust,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5:2 (June 2002), 149–152. 12 Joseph Butler, “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,” in The Works of Bishop Butler, edited by David E. White (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 96. 13 Peter Frederick Strawson,“Freedom and Resentment,” reprinted in Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Pamela Hieronymi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 112–113. 14 Lucy Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36:1 (Winter 2008), 33–68. 15 On forgiveness as overcoming, see Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even and its Limits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16; on forbearance, see Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics 99:1 (1988), 184; on withdrawal, see Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 72; on letting go, see Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 40. 16 Pamela Heironymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” 551. 17 Leo Zaibert, 387. 18 Luke Russell has offered a convincing argument for this case in “Forgiving While Punishing,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94:4 (2016), 704–718. 19 The most plausible argument for this view likely appears in Christopher Bennett, “The Alteration Thesis: The Normative Power of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 46:2 (March 2018), 207–233. 20 Peter Benn, “Forgiveness and Loyalty,” Philosophy 71 (1996), 369. 21 See Jeffrie Murphy, “Forgiveness and Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7 (1982), 503–516.

Forgiveness 125 22 See Stephen A. Black, “Letting the Dead be Dead: A Reinterpretation of A Moon for the Misbegotten,” Modern Drama 29:4 (Winter 1986), 544. 23 O’Neill at Work, edited by Virginia Floyd (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1981), 381. 24 Edward L. Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O’Neill’s Catholic Sensibility (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 180. 25 Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, 875. 26 Ibid., 857. 27 Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Ella, James, and Jamie O’Neill: My Name is Might-HaveBeen,” Eugene O’Neill Review 15:2 (Fall 1991), 60. 28 Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, 930–931. 29 Ibid., 872–873. 30 Edward Shaughnessy, Down the Days and Nights, 179. 31 Ibid., 180. 32 Luke Russell, “The Who, the What, and the How of Forgiveness,” Philosophy Compass 15:3 (2020), 2. 33 See Robin S. Downie,“Forgiveness,” Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1965), 128–130; Simon Weisenthal, The Sunflower (New York: Schocken, 1997), 65; Aurel Kolnai, “Forgiveness,” 93. For further reading in this area, one might also consult the following sources (compiled by Glen Pettigrew in “The Standing to Forgive,” The Monist 92:4 (2009), 583): H.J.N. Horsburgh, “Forgiveness,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4:2 (1974), 341; Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, 21; Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 184; Joram Haber, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Study (Landham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 1991), 33; Margaret Holmgren, “Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30:1 (1993), 341; Berel Lang, “Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 31:2 (1994), 107; Paul Hughes, “Moral Anger, Forgiving, and Condoning,” Journal of Social Philosophy 26:3 (1995), 107–108; Robert Roberts, “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32:4 (1995), 291; Piers Benn, “Forgiveness and Loyalty,” Philosophy 71 (1996), 374–375; David Novitz,“Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58:2 (1998), 302; Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its Limits (2003), 14; Glen Pettigrove,“The Forgiveness We Speak,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 42:3 (2004), 376–377; Angelo Corlett, “Forgiveness, Apology, and Retributive Punishment,” American Philosophical Quarterly 43:1 (2006), 28; Roman David and Susan Choi, “Forgiveness and Transitional Justice in the Czech Republic,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50:3 (2006), 340–341. 34 Glen Pettigrew, “The Standing to Forgive,” 583. 35 Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 74. 36 Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, 876. 37 Ibid., 900. 38 Ibid., 908. 39 Louis Schaeffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston, MA: Little and Brown, 1973) 126;Travis Bogard, A Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 450. 40 The connection between Desire and Misbegotten was first remarked upon by reviewer Mary McCarthy in 1946 (see O’Neill and His Plays, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 209–211), but the most full explication of the relationship between these plays appears in Michael Hinden, “Desire and Forgiveness: O’Neill’s Diptych,” Comparative Drama 14:3 (Fall 1980), 240–250. 41 Ibid., 931. 42 Ibid., 932. 43 Ibid., 933. 44 Ibid., 936.

126 Forgiveness 45 Ibid., 942. 46 Ibid., 946. 47 Ibid., 923. 48 Ibid., 927. 49 Eugene O’Neill, Days Without End, in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943, edited by Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1998), 140. 50 Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, 925. 51 Ibid. 52 Eugene O’Neill, Days Without End, 180. 53 Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, 694. 54 Ibid., 698. 55 Winston Hugh Auden, “The Fallen City: Some Reflections of Henry IV,” Encounter 13:5 (1959), 28. 56 Ibid., 29. 57 “Reactive attitudes” is likely not a term that Auden would have used, to be clear. 58 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 235.

7 Paradox

In 1956, when John Chapman of the New York Daily News described the opening of the Long Day’s Journey into Night as exploding “like a dazzling skyrocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals, he was expressing a widespread view of the previously unpublished play.”1 With few exceptions, the critical response to the play was overwhelmingly positive, with critics asserting that with Long Day’s Journey was O’Neill’s greatest work. When Journey premiered in Paris, despite the fact that the theatre was without air-conditioning in July and the play ran from 8 PM until 1 AM, the Herald Tribune reported that “there was a five-minute ovation, marking the most enthusiastic reception ever accorded an American play in France.”2 When one considers the nature of the play, a philosophical problem emerges. The overwhelming response to O’Neill’s masterpiece was—and continues to be in contemporary performance—expressed in terms of pleasure. There is nothing apparently contradictory in an audience member stating, “I really enjoyed Long Day’s Journey,” but how can this be the case? The play depicts the terribly dysfunctional relationships of the members of the Tyrone family, each of whom struggles with some form of addiction and malady, each of whom is at once oppressed and the oppressor of the other four members of the family. When one interrogates her emotional response to the play, she is likely to recognize that she experiences socalled “negative” emotions as a result of the events depicted. If she feels empathy toward these characters,3 she finds herself experiencing anger, despair, and pity, emotions whose qualia are typically unpleasant and those we wish to avoid in our daily lives. Through the course of the play, the audience member receives little relief from these emotions. The philosophical problem, then, is how to understand what goes on when one characterizes the experience of Journey as one of enjoyment. Moreover, why would an audience member willingly subject herself to the negative emotions aroused by Long Day’s Journey into Night when she would not likely subject herself to such negative emotions in real life? In chapter two of this book, we examined a number of so-called “cognitivist” accounts of tragedy, and we discovered that one weakness cognitivist accounts seem to share is that they side-step the question of how tragedy affects the emotions. The negative feelings aroused by a play are a chief indicator of its genre; however, most theorists who have speculated about why tragedy has value all but ignore this feature. In order to build an account then, about why tragedy matters, one must delve deeply into the problem posed by negative emotions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-8

128 Paradox

The paradox of tragedy Students of David Hume’s aesthetics will recognize this problem as a localized version of what has come to be called “The Paradox of Tragedy,” Hume describes the phenomenon of tragic enjoyment in his essay “Of Tragedy:” It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle…the whole art of the poet is employed in rousing and supporting the compassion and indignation, the anxiety and resentment, of his audience.They are pleased in proportion as they are affected, and never so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swollen with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.4 The appeal of tragedy seems to lie in the fact that those who view it are often most thrilled by the horror it depicts. It is a strange phenomenon that generally welladjusted and moral people seem to enjoy the representation of human suffering at its extremity when it is placed before them in an artistic context. This question transcends mere theatrical tragedy and seems to have far- reaching implications. Much art represents, at least in part, elements of the world that are morally repugnant. If one finds these elements of the world displeasing and seeks to avoid them, why does she seem to enjoy their representation in an aesthetic context? Hume’s formulation of the Paradox of Tragedy might be expressed as follows: 1. People avoid circumstances that cause pain and pursue circumstances that cause pleasure. 2. People experience pain in response to tragedy. 3. People pursue tragedy. While Hume has observed a puzzling feature of human behavior, further analysis shows that this is not really a paradox per se. Hume’s formulation of the paradox relies on his own theory of human motivational psychology, a psychology so rigid that it cannot admit exceptions. Hume is a strong defender of what one might refer to as The Pleasure Principle. According to his Treatise on Human Nature, the “chief spring and actuating principle of the human mind is pleasure and pain.”5 On Hume’s account, every choice a person makes is motivated by a desire to either avoid pain or pursue pleasure. Provided that Hume’s account of motivation is correct, it is indeed paradoxical that people would pursue tragedy. Philosopher Alex Neill points out that human motivation is more complicated than simple hedonism. He argues that one might find tragedies (and many other objects of her motivation) valuable though she receives no discernable hedonic reward from them.6 Human motivation cannot be directly reduced to simple hedonism, as humans are motivated toward a myriad of objects for a myriad of reasons. If one rejects the hedonist’s account of motivation, it appears that the paradox loses much of its force; however, the problem does not altogether dissolve.

Paradox 129 Contemporary psychology does affirm that hedonism is a good general approach to describing human motivations, provided that one understands “pain” in terms of “negative emotions” (i.e., fear, sadness, and anger), and “pleasure” in terms of “positive emotions.”7 While there are numerous exceptions, to be sure, all things being equal, people generally pursue objects that elicit positive emotions and avoid things that might cause negative emotions.8 Because this reconstrued version of hedonism is generally a good predictor of human behavior, the following better expresses a weaker version of the PoT: 1. People generally pursue situations that arouse positive emotions and avoid things that arouse negative emotions. 2. People experience negative emotions in response to tragedy. 3. People pursue tragedy. Both (1) and (3) appear more likely true than false, so philosophers attempting to resolve this paradox have typically taken aim at (2). Contemporary philosophers have asserted that (2) needs modification, as it fails to articulate relevant features of the tragic experience. As with most philosophical problems, there is no universal consensus as to how (2) should be modified.

Is tragedy all that painful? One way to resolve the paradox might be to deny that tragedy elicits particularly strong negative emotional responses. Such resolutions are driven by the intuition that the sort of feelings one might experience when watching a play such as Long Day’s Journey into Night are significantly different than those one would experience in response to similar stimuli from real- world experience. There is a family of theories that resolve the paradox of tragedy by asserting that tragedy does not really make audiences feel all that bad. One might argue, perhaps inspired by ancient Stoic philosophy, that people actually enjoy seeing others suffer. Aaron Smuts points to an all-too-familiar phenomenon from daily life, one of the obvious drawbacks of living in a commuter city is the inevitable traffic jams that result from rubbernecking—drivers slowing down to get a good look at an accident, hoping to catch a glimpse of a gruesome scene.9 It is a macabre reality that people are strangely attracted to scenes of horrific violence, and one might construe this attraction in terms of delight. The ancient philosopher Lucretius claims that people do this “not because it is joy or delight that anyone should be storm-tossed, but because it is a pleasure to observe what troubles you yourself are free.”10 Perhaps Lucretius gives humans too much credit; perhaps beneath the veneer of contemporary culture, people enjoy tragedy because they enjoy watching others suffer out of some sort of secret, sadistic impulse. This analysis of human behavior would lead one to deny that audiences experience negative emotion in their response to tragedy. When one watches Long Day’s

130 Paradox Journey into Night, for example, she ultimately does not feel pity or despair for the Tyrone family, but instead experiences pleasure as she watches them suffer, perhaps because she believes that they have each done something to deserve it. This approach to the nature of tragic emotions would require the following re-formulation of (2): 2. Because people enjoy watching the suffering of others, they experience positive emotional states when viewing tragedy. The paradox has been resolved here, rendering human behavior entirely coherent, though disturbing. If this reformulation has captured the central force motivating audiences to consume tragedy, an interesting ethical question appears. If tragedy emerges from a desire to observe the pain of others for an audience’s delight, should the form be venerated in Western culture, or should it be viewed with derision, as Westerners have largely come to view cockfighting? That said, just because a view has ugly ethical implications, it does not follow that such a view is incorrect. Ultimately, the formulation of (2) presented above fails not on ethical grounds, but because it cannot account for the fact that audiences tend to feel a great deal of sympathy toward the characters suffering on the tragic stage. A viewer does not enjoy watching Oedipus suffer because “he got what was coming to him.” Instead, the power of Oedipus Rex lies in the fact that the audience recognizes the injustice of Oedipus’ fate, and they feel sympathy for him. It seems that in tragedy, the viewer suffers with the protagonist, and it would be strangely masochistic to claim that one enjoys her own suffering in tragedy. Some empirical evidence suggests that the aesthetic presentation of suffering actually heightens a viewer’s ability to experience empathy. In a study conducted at the University of Alberta, participants classified as typically “low empathizers” (young male adults) were presented with several narratives that portrayed melodramatic situations designed to elicit an empathetic response. When these participants were informed the narratives, they were reading were reporting actual events, these low empathizers reported very little emotional response to the characters within the stories. When, however, the participants were informed that the events and characters depicted within the narratives were the product of an author’s creativity, this group of young men reported significantly higher emotional responses— responses such as sadness and pity—because they felt freer to do so (likely because of gender stereotypes such as “big boys don’t cry”) than they would have if they were responding to a real-world scenario.11 Because of the perceived artificiality of the narrative, men felt stronger feelings of empathy toward the characters portrayed than they would have if they perceived the account as factual. While one study does not provide exhaustive empirical evidence that fictional accounts elicit more empathetic responses than real world situations, this study does suggest that the Stoic intuition about people deriving pleasure from other’s pain does not apply to the emotions one experiences when she views tragedy, much less Long Day’s Journey into Night, because even if this intuition is correct about people’s experiences in the real world, the aesthetic nature of the emotional encounter one has with the play produces more empathy and pity than real life stimulus.

Paradox 131 In order to sustain the Stoic approach as a resolution to the Paradox of Tragedy, one would have to deny the reality of pity, empathy, and similar emotions elicited by aesthetic narratives.When a viewer says, “I really felt sorry for Edmund Tyrone,” the Stoic reply would be to claim that the viewer is inaccurately reporting her feelings. This denial flies in the face of the plainest experience of tragedy and renders such statements about empathetic emotions elicited by tragedy absurd. Since viewers do experience real attachments to the characters who suffer in tragedy (hence the viewer’s continued engagement with the narrative), the Stoic position cannot be a viable solution to the problem of negative emotions in tragedy.

Hume and conversion Another route one might take to deny the standard formulation of (2) is one charted by David Hume himself. In “Of Tragedy,” after Hume describes the problem of tragic emotions, he begins his analysis by examining a solution to the problem credited to French philosopher Jean- Baptiste Dubos. Dubos, according to Hume, asserts that “nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as a languid, listless state of indolence into which it falls upon the removal of all passion and occupation.”12 If this is the case, then any emotional state is more pleasant than dull boredom. If one is moved to tears by the viewing of a dark tragedy, she has found a cure to the malaise of day-to-day life, and the resulting emotion will be welcome to the viewer. Though Hume thinks that Dubos’ theory possesses some explanatory force, ultimately this solution does not provide a robust enough account for his taste. He points out that there is a significant difference between the stimulation one receives from fictional portrayals of negative events and similar negative events experienced in the actual world. No matter how bored one may be, it is unlikely that a normal human being would wish to witness egregious suffering in the real world. No decent person would choose to observe a violent murder, for example, as a cure for boredom. However, such an event portrayed fictionally can bring intense pleasure to the viewer. Dubos’ solution does not explain the different responses one might experience given the fictionality or reality of the situation. Laying aside Dubos’ proposed solution, Hume next considers the solution offered by Bernard Le Bouyer Fontenelle. Fontenelle asserts that pleasure and pain do not differ so much in their causes. Pleasure and pain are very closely related, so that “sorrow soft and agreeable” might be called a mild form of pleasure. In the case of theatrical tragedy, though we are moved toward the fate of the tragic hero, we are constantly aware that we are watching a play, and in this context, we can experience the enjoyment of watching the play, further heightened by our sorrow for the fate of the tragic hero. Hume critiques this solution because it fails to account for the enjoyment one might take from the description of actual horrific events. As an example of this, Hume discusses Cicero’s narrative of the Sicilian captains by the Verres. Apparently, though this account is quite graphic and describes actual events that occurred in the real world, the listener is able to immensely enjoy the retelling of this story. Were Fontenelle correct, the listener could not get pleasure from this retelling, because the listener would realize these grave events actually occurred in real life.

132 Paradox From this objection, Hume is able to draw his solution to the paradox of tragedy. He writes: this extraordinary effect proceeds from that very eloquence with which the melancholy scene is represented. The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment displayed in disposing them: the exercise, I say, of these noble talents, together with the force of expression and beauty of oratorial numbers …diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience, and excite the most delightful movements.13 Here, Hume claims that the viewer obtains pleasure not from the negative events that are portrayed on the tragic stage, but that her pleasure comes from the aesthetic quality of the portrayal of such events. It is the eloquence with which the author expresses the painful circumstances of tragic events that pleases the viewer. Elisa Galgut explains that Hume’s theory of tragic conversion relies on his understanding of the emotions that one finds in his Treatise on Human Nature. She writes that “for Hume, an emotion is comprised of three distinct entities: an ideational content (which consists of a propositional attitude directed toward an intentional object), an affect, and a quantity of energy.”14 To illustrate, Galgut provides a Biblical example. On a Humean account, “Adam feels pleasure of a certain degree in relation to the object of his affection, that is, Eve.”15 Adam’s propositional attitude toward Eve is love, the affect of this emotion (the phenomenological experience of the emotion) is pleasure, and the quantity of the emotion is the degree of intensity with which he feels this emotion toward her. The eloquence of a well-written tragedy transforms the subordinate emotion (sorrow or pity) into a predominant experience of joy.The propositional attitude and intentional object of the audience’s attention shifts away from the horror of the play to the beauty with which it is written, and the degree of intensity with which one felt the original horror and pity is now redirected powerfully toward this beauty.16 Hume provides no description of how this conversion occurs, however, and the narrative here reads more like a supposition than a formula (more will be said on this below). He does offer some evidence that seems to support his claim, however. This support is presented indirectly, in that he provides examples in which passions aroused by lesser emotions rouse the predominant emotions. For example, Hume points out that “novelty” is generally considered an “agreeable” experience, but if one experiences an emotional state brought on by some new negative experience, the pain of that experience is heightened by the newness of it. In this way, the lesser passion is “converted” to the greater passion. Similarly, Hume points out that if a storyteller wishes to increase the dramatic impact of an event, she often can utilize suspense or “delay” to heighten the audience’s response to that event. In Othello Act 3. Sceme 3, Othello’s jealousy is accentuated by the emotion of impatience. The greater passion (jealousy) is heightened by the lesser one (impatience). Hume continues to provide examples of the greater passion being somehow supported and transformed by the subordinate. He writes that parents are often most affectionately tied to the child who gives them the most grief. He also notes

Paradox 133 that there is no single factor that endears one to her friend than that friend’s death. Hume then points out that jealousy is an emotion that provides a great deal of support for the dominant emotion love. Hume’s final piece of evidence to support the claim that subordinate emotions might be converted into dominant ones is drawn from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, in which Pliny notes that the greatest works of art are often unfinished. If one discovers that a sculptor has died before completing a sculpture, somehow that sculpture is more aesthetically compelling than other works. Pliny writes,“our very grief for that curious hand, which had been stopped by death, is an addition increase (sic) to our pleasure.”17 Pliny here seems to validate Hume’s assertion; the sorrow one might experience in relation to the loss of the artist somehow brings further delight to her appreciation of the unfinished work. Hume believes that these examples confirm the essential element of his argument, particularly that subordinate emotions provide additional intensity for the dominant emotional state. He writes, the force of imagination, the energy of expression, the power of numbers, the charms of imitation; all these are naturally, of themselves, delightful to the mind: and when the object presented lays hold of some affection, the pleasure still rises upon us, by the conversion of the subordinate movement into that which is predominant.The passion, though perhaps, naturally, and when excited by the simple appearance of the real object, it may be painful; yet is so smoothed, softened, and mollified, when raised by the finer arts, that if affords the highest entertainment.18 In the case of the paradox of tragedy, though the scenario presented to the viewer outside an aesthetic context might be painful to the viewer, within the realm of theatrical performance, for example, the viewer’s dominating pleasure in imitation is reinforced by the intensity of the painful emotions elicited by tragic events unfolding onstage.To support this claim, Hume offers an additional counterexample. He writes of a parent who has lost his child. In this scenario, the parent’s dominant emotion is one of pain, and were one to “exaggerate, with all the force of elocution, the irreparable loss,”19 that parent’s despair would be significantly heightened by the use of the imagination. In this scenario, the intensity of the subordinate emotion, pleasure in imitation, has added to the intensity of the dominant emotional state: grief. Certainly, something about Hume’s argument rings familiar, but does he provide a coherent narrative that explains a viewer’s engagement with a dark play like Long Day’s Journey into Night? In order to put his view to the test, one might formulate Hume’s revision of (2) as follows: Because of the aesthetic beauty of tragedy, the energy of people’s negative emotional responses to the performances of the play are converted to a powerful positive emotional response to the play. Though Hume’s conversion theory possesses an intuitive appeal, there are two objections that it fails to overcome. First of all, he offers no account of the mechanism through which this conversion occurs. Susan Feagin writes:

134 Paradox it is not clear how the ‘dominance’ of imagination and expression is to be achieved…More puzzling, however, is the process of ‘conversion’ which imagination performs on the unpleasant feelings (and which those feelings, when dominant perform on the natural pleasantness of the imagination). Pains are not merely mitigated by the pleasure but converted or transformed into something different. The mechanics of this conversion are never explained.20 Hume makes a compelling assertion about this so-called conversion process; however, he does not provide a description of how this process occurs. Another shortcoming of Hume’s theory emerges from a shaky assumption upon which it rests, namely that it is impossible to experience mixed feelings directed toward the same intentional object. Hume appears to assume that one can only experience one emotional state at a time, and this is not the case. Flint Schier notices this, pointing out that Hume was right to suggest that tragedy involves a duplex experience, as of attending to the tragic hero and to how the actor plays him; he was wrong, I think in supposing that these two experiences become fused…in the theatre we simultaneously feel emotions of distinct hedonic change and intensity and there is no need to suppose that these emotions lose their identities in the alchemy of association.21 Schier’s objection is underscored by extensive empirical evidence drawn from the field of psychology of emotion. There is a strong empirical case that people have the capacity to feel tangible and conflicting feelings in response to aesthetic stimuli simultaneously.22 Hume’s attempt to consolidate both emotional states into a single, unified, intense feeling of pain- pleasure, fails because it relies on a faulty assumption, that people cannot experience positive and negative emotional states at the same time. However, people frequently are able to experience multiple emotional states which they can readily describe in terms of both affective and propositional difference. As this is the case, Hume’s account becomes superfluous because it adds an unnecessary complexity to a description of tragic emotional experience. Even if the above objections are ultimately unsuccessful in invalidating Humean conversion theory, one might point out that Hume himself offers a significant caveat that undermines his approach as a whole. He offers an account that describes how disagreeableness of the scenario presented onstage might be so graphic that the pleasure one receives from the tragedy might be overcome by the horror and disgust the viewer experiences in relation to the onstage action. Hume cites Nicholas Rowe’s The Ambitious Stepmother as an instance of such a graphic depiction. In the play, a “venerable old man, raised to the height of fury and despair, rushes against a pillar, and striking his head upon it, besmears it all over with mingled brains and gore.”23 In this case, it would seem that the aesthetic artistry employed by Rowe has taken a back-seat to the crudeness of the event depicted. As a result, the viewer cannot take pleasure in the play, but only be disgusted and horrified by it. This passage provides an unresolved problem for Hume’s theory, given the fact that Rowe’s play was enjoyed by many theatregoers of Hume’s day.24 If Hume

Paradox 135 intends to provide an account for how one might enjoy negative events in an aesthetic setting, his inclusion of this example is counter productive. Here, it seems as if his theory is slipping from an explanation of how one enjoys tragedy to how one ought to enjoy tragedy. Hume seems to be saying that there are things that ought to horrify moral people, even presented in an aesthetic context. He does not, however, provide any sort of account for the fact that audiences (though perhaps uneducated in matters of taste) took tremendous delight from the besmearing of the venerable old man’s head upon the pillar. As the essay concludes it becomes apparent that Hume is not presenting a robust account of tragic pleasure, but instead a limited and perhaps snobbish normative account that saves the “good” tragedies and ignores the bad ones. He seems to intend to use this example as a starting point for a sort of “poetic method” of incorporating negative emotions into artistic works. He concludes the essay by advocating a kind of poetic self-control with the portrayal of objects that might elicit negative response. The responsible tragedian tempers these negative objects with selective detail and artful delivery, so that the primary emotion of pleasure can be heightened by the conversion of the intensity of the painful emotion. This final point is a serious problem for the theory as Hume presents it, and a contemporary defender of his view would likely have to jettison this value-laden component in order to offer conversion theory as a viable depiction of people’s negative emotional response to art.Were she to do this, she still would have to offer a coherent account of how this conversion occurs as well as show that the within the context of tragedy, one experiences only one emotional state as opposed to a “mixed” emotional state, that of a heightened pleasure brought about by way of aesthetic beauty in the context of painful events. For these reasons, Hume’s conversion theory fails as a plausible account for what goes on when one views and seems to enjoy harrowing plays such as Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Control theories A family of theories that deny that the experience of tragedy is significantly painful relies on the intuition that there is pleasure in the control one has over certain kinds of negative experiences. People often find bungee jumping or riding a roller coaster thrilling because they are able to experience the “rush” of the experience without ever finding themselves in any real danger. If, for example, a bungee jumper realized that the bungee cord had snapped and that she was no longer in a controlled fall, the experience would quickly slip from exhilarating to terrifying. Similarly, if one were able to survive a rollercoaster that flew off the track and crashed, it is unlikely that she would characterize her experience in terms of enjoyment. It is more likely that a normal, well-adjusted human being would acknowledge that she was terrified by such an event.The difference in bungee jumping and roller coaster riding and experiences that genuinely cause one to fear for her life seems to be the degree of control she has over the events that she is facing. Contemporary philosophers John Morreall and Marcia Eaton have built “control” based resolutions the paradox of tragedy based upon this intuition. Control theories assert that tragedy is appealing because in the context of viewing a play

136 Paradox that aroused negative emotions, people are able to walk away at any time if the experience becomes too harrowing.This approach differs from the others described above because it does allow for the fact that tragedy might elicit some pain, but that this pain is negligible when compared to the pleasure one draws from her control over the experience. Aaron Smuts acknowledges that there is some empirical data that confirms this: Recent experiments on pain thresholds seem to support this conjecture.When subjects are able to say when the pressure on their finger should stop, they can take far more pressure and pain than if the experimenter does not give them the option. Subjects also report feeling greater amounts of pain when they are unable to control the experiment.25 Furthermore, experiments conducted at the University of California at Berkeley seem to confirm a similar hypothesis—a hypothesis more directly related to aesthetic stimulations of negative emotional states than those Smuts references. Students averse to horror films were asked to watch clips from Salem’s Lot and The Exorcist and using computer software based upon the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule,26 asked to evaluate their positive and negative emotional responses to the clips. Students who did not enjoy horror films initially reported that they experienced little enjoyment of the clips. These students were then shown clips from a horror film in a window on a computer screen that was framed by information about the film (images and short bios of the actors playing the roles in the given clips as well as other items of trivia regarding the film), and they were asked to report their responses again. In the second experiment, students typically averse to horror films report a marked improvement in their enjoyment and a decline in their displeasure toward the horror films they viewed. It appears that one of the key components of these students’ positive response to the film was a degree of controlled distance the viewer is able to maintain from the suspenseful and horrific images displayed. The “reference frame” surrounding the clip became a buffer that not only helped the horror-averse student cope with fright and suspense but also improved her enjoyment of the clip.27 A control theorist would likely point to such experiments as validation for her claim that people enjoy putatively painful art only when the negative emotional impact can be properly managed and seems appropriately distant as a result. John Morreal’s resolution to the paradox of tragedy draws upon the fact that many real- life emotional experiences are manageable to the degree that one believes herself in control of those experiences.28 On this basis, he claims that tragedy is not painful, but instead is pleasurable, because in her experience of aesthetic tragedy, the viewer is at some aesthetic distance from the events of the tragedy (it holds no “practical consequence” for her), she is able always able to start, stop, and direct her experience (she can walk out of the play if it is too intense, for example), and the negative emotional address of the tragedy is not too strong.29 In good tragedy, these criteria are met, and as a result, the viewer characterizes her experience as enjoyable. One might formalize the control theorist’s resolution to the PoT as follows:

Paradox 137 Because people are in control of their relationship and emotional response to performances of Long Day’s Journey into Night, on the whole, they do not experience significant negative emotional states as a result of viewing the play. Since the viewer is able to manage her experience, she ultimately comes away from the experience with a positive emotional appraisal of the event. Though the control theory is promising, it is unsuccessful in resolving the paradox in two respects. Robert Yanal argues that the “no practical consequence” criterion cannot withstand some counter examples. One might observe a situation of no practical consequence to her while still experiencing powerful negative emotional states in response to it.30 In no palpable, practical sense can I intervene in the lives of those starving in contemporary Somalia, however I do find myself moved by the fate of Somalian children suffering under famine and civil war. It is difficult to see how I am out of control of my emotional disposition in the real-world example, while I am in control of my disposition toward the fate of King Lear. Next,Yanal criticizes Morreall’s claim that the ability to stop and start the experience is what allows us to feel in control of the fictional situation, as Morreal is quick to point out that at times we put down a book precisely because it elicits too strong an emotion. How can this be, however, if in this situation, we have been in control the entire time? Morreall’s theory cannot account for how this is possible. Additionally, Morreall claims that a third criterion of “weakly felt emotion” is a condition of control, but in order for this to be true it seems to follow that all emotions elicited by tragic art must be weakly felt, and this is plainly false, as powerful emotions can be aroused by fictional tragedy. Though Morreall’s conception of control is fraught with intractable difficulty, it is possible that he and other theorists who defend a control-based framework are generally describing what happens in people’s response to negative art. Perhaps all that is needed is a modification of the existing criteria that supposedly constitute control. After all, as pointed out above, there is some empirical data that supports such the hypothesis that in certain contexts, controlled negative emotional states might be characterized as pleasant. Unfortunately however, regardless of one’s conception of control, this family of approaches to the paradox of tragedy ultimately fails in several key respects. One critique Yanal offers of all control theories is that there often is intense pleasure to be had from losing control of one’s emotions. Control is often associated with a kind of miserable restraint. For example, I may have a tremendous problem with my boss, but instead of airing my grievances, I—for the sake of my job—grit my teeth and clench my fists every time he enters the room. It is often very satisfying to lose control and rage unabated or cry without restraint, and perhaps this is what occurs when a person views tragedy.31 Control based theories do not have much explanatory power with respect to this phenomenon, as this is the opposite of what they predict. Aaron Smuts offers a similar critique of control-based theories. He points out that “our emotional responses to fiction are not completely, or even to a high degree, controllable.”32 If one is deeply saddened by her viewing of a play or film, that sadness does not always end at the close of the curtain or as the credits appear

138 Paradox on the screen. Often, the most poignant works of art are marked by the emotional power they exercise over people after they are finished, and it is certainly familiar to describe oneself as being “moved for days” by some powerful tragedy. Many empirical studies confirm this claim. Clark McCauley, utilizing the available empirical research on negative emotional states and film, shows that strong negative emotional states elicited by narrative art typically amplify pre-existing negative emotional states instead of mollifying it. Aggressive young men, for example, who watch a violent film tend to report feeling more aggressive after the film ends.33 Though the empirical data cited earlier (Andrade and Cohen) supports the idea that people who are predisposed away from certain negative emotional states gain more enjoyment from negative aesthetic stimuli when that stimuli is presented to them in a controlled frame, it does not falsify the fact that people still feel significant negative emotional states as a result of such stimuli. In light of the abundant evidence McCauley cites, it is wise to conclude that control theories have misrepresented the significance of the negative emotions one experiences in response to “painful” art. Since control theories have little to say about this phenomenon, at best they are incomplete. Even if control-based theories can answer the objections posed above, there is still a deep problem with this explanation, as it does not answer what Smuts’ refers to as the “motivational question.” The reader will recall that the central problem expressed by the Paradox of Tragedy is the question of what motivates people to expose themselves to negative emotions in tragedy when they endeavor to avoid them in their real-world lives? Even in the control theory presents a plausible account of the nature of tragic emotion, it does not explain why people choose to subject themselves to tragedy in the first place. Even if people experience positive emotional states as a result of being able to control their negative affections toward art, why not pursue art designed only to evoke cheerful emotional states? Any satisfactory restatement of (2) ought to at least suggest what motivates audiences to pursue performances of works of art such as Long Day’s Journey, but control theories (even if successful) do not provide even a glimpse at why this is the case.

Tragedy really hurts, but it’s worth it In addition to our own immediate experience of how harrowing tragedy can be, resolutions to the paradox of tragedy that deny the powerful negative emotional impact of the artform do not sustain careful scrutiny. It appears then, that any coherent resolution to tragedy’s paradox should affirm that tragedy elicits powerful negative emotion. Some theorists do acknowledge that tragic theatre can be deeply “painful” but attempt to resolve the paradox by suggesting that the experience compensates its audience with some reward unique to the form. In what follows, we examine two prominent approaches. While one might acknowledge that she finds the experience of plays like Oedipus and Hamlet deeply painful, she might examine her responses to tragedy and recognize that perhaps she is mistaken when she characterizes her experience of a play like Long Day’s Journey into Night as “enjoyable.” At the heart of the Paradox of Tragedy is the strangeness of such a characterization. Alex Neill, taking

Paradox 139 seriously this recognition, approaches the paradox of tragedy by denying that consumers of painful art experience pleasurable responses at all. Instead, Neill proposes what some have referred to as a “rich experience” theory. Neill believes that the force of the paradox of tragedy lies in a misconception about what we derive from tragedy. He writes: denying that the responses in question are characteristically pleasurable seems to me to be a very plausible way of addressing the paradox of tragedy; the idea that we commonly enjoy or take pleasure in seeing Oedipus or Gloucester stumbling around with their eyes out is after all somewhat peculiar.34 According to Neill, people do not derive positive emotional affect from the consumption of tragedy, but they do value such experiences as important.When someone claims to “enjoy” Long Day’s Journey into Night, she is expressing the fact that she thinks the experience valuable, not that she experiences a pleasant emotional state when watching it. If one were to try to appropriate such an approach in this context as a formulation of (2), such a formulation would appear as follows: 2. Though people experience significant negative emotions in response to performances of Long Day’s Journey into Night, they experience such emotions as part of a “rich experience,” an experience they value as significant and meaningful. In the context of the problem at hand, this statement of (2) offers a potentially powerful and plausible reconciliation. After all, it does seem somewhat strange for me to say that I actually enjoy watching Mary’s intoxicated trance or the fact that the Tyrones constantly harangue one another in the cruelest manner possible. Perhaps I am mistaken then, when I characterize my experience of watching the play in terms of positive feelings. The fact that I value the experience of watching Long Day’s Journey into Night need not be characterized in simple, Humean, hedonic terms.When I say, “I enjoyed that performance of Journey,” on Neill’s view, I am saying that I found the performance meaningful, not that I actually experience anything resembling joy or hope (on the whole) as a result of my consumption of the play. Neill’s theory does appear to possess broader explanatory scope than other theories presented thus far. His approach is built upon the reality of powerful negative emotional responses to tragedy, and if one uses his theory to describe audience response to Long Day’s Journey into Night, she is able to easily account for such responses. Unlike “control” or “conversion” theories, the rich-experience theory affirms our immediate intuitions about our reception to the play: tragedy often makes us feel badly—perhaps very badly—and the rich experience theory does not compel us to deny those feelings. Additionally, Neill accepts, perhaps prima facie, that viewers can care deeply about the characters within a tragedy, and this is precisely why negative emotional states are aroused when we observe the struggles the protagonist faces.35 Nothing in Neill’s iteration of (2) complicates the reality of our negative emotional responses to the play, as he affirms their existence and accepts

140 Paradox their significant power over the viewer’s experience of tragedy. Appropriated for our purposes, this component of Neill’s theory makes his approach the most likely candidate we have thus far encountered as a solution to the problem. Neill’s view of whether or not viewers experience simultaneous emotions of opposing valences in their response to tragedy is unclear at best, but it is likely that he does not believe these mixed emotional states are possible.36 For example, Neill asserts that “it would be odd coming out a particularly harrowing performance of Death of a Salesman or King Lear to hear one’s companion exclaim ‘I really enjoyed that!’ or ‘that was fun!’,” apparently denying that anything resembling positive emotional states occur in the viewer’s response to Miller’s tragedy or King Lear.37 To complicate this position, though, in his discussion of the Paradox of Horror (a slightly different, but related problem) Neill does seem to admit that he feels mixed emotions when viewing tragedy. He writes, I wouldn’t take much pleasure in a performance of Lear (or of Schubert) that didn’t evoke these so-called ‘negative’ responses in me; at least part, and a central part, of the pleasure they give seems to be intrinsically related to the fact that they do evoke such responses.38 Contextually, however, he writes this to present the paradox as forcefully as possible, merely reflecting our intuitions on the subject, but not his final position. By the end of “On a Paradox of the Heart,” Neill has rejected the notion that tragedy is pleasurable at all, thus resolving the paradox. It seems fair to characterize Neill’s theory of tragic emotions as constrained by the belief that viewers of tragedy only experience one emotional state at a time, and that on the whole, these emotional states are negative. This denial would seem to count against the rich experience theory as a candidate reformulation of (2), as I have established in my criticism of Humean conversion theory that mixed emotional states are possible and likely responses to the events and characters in tragic plays. This is not a damning feature of the theory, however, for one who holds to the rich experience theory could easily nuance the view espoused by Neill, accepting the possibility of mixed emotional affective states, while denying that these states occur when audiences view tragic performances. The rich experience theorist might rightly point out that none of the cognitive science that suggests that people can experience mixed emotions in reference to aesthetic stimuli have demonstrated that this occurs when one watches theatrical tragedy. The rich experience theory does not explicitly deny that mixed emotions are possible, just that this is not what is going on when one views tragedy. The rich experience theorist is only claiming that people are using inaccurate language when they claim to “enjoy” Long Day’s Journey; people are merely expressing that they value the experience of watching the play, not that they derive positive affect from it. On its face, the rich experience theory provides an easy answer to why audiences might be motivated to pursue the negative emotional states that are aroused by difficult theatre: people watch the play because it gives them an experience they value as significant and meaningful. Again, to be precise, this theory asserts

Paradox 141 that when we claim to “enjoy” Journey, we are informally expressing that we find the experience desirable. It is a mistake to claim that we derive positive affect from the play. One might complain, however, that the “rich experience” I have been describing is an ill- defined term, and it is to this concern I now turn.The rich experience theory, at least in Neill’s iteration of it, seems to assert that something unique is gained from the consumption of tragedy, something that one cannot gain from other experiences in life. What exactly is the “rich experience” to which Neill refers? Why is it unique to tragedy? Though his theory has many positive features, he fails to explain the compensation tragedy offers for all its trouble. Aaron Smuts, sensing this incompleteness, describes his own conception of “rich experience” as follows: I argue that the motive for seeking out painful art is complex, but what we desire from such art is to have experiences on the cheap—not life experience on the cheap, as one theory puts it, but experiences of strong emotional reactions. Art safely provides us the opportunity to have rich emotional experiences that are either impossible, or far too risky to have in our daily lives. We can feel fear without risking our lives, pity without seeing our loved ones suffer, thrills without risk of going to jail, and a variety of other experiences that come with unwelcome pitfalls. Outside of art, it is almost impossible to have many of these kinds of experiences without completely wrecking our lives—murdering our loved ones, destroying our relationships, being sent to jail, or suffering fatal injuries.39 This seems compelling on its face, but the reader might wonder how putatively negative art is able to accomplish in a way that other “thrill seeking” activities do not. What is the difference between one’s experience of negative emotional states while watching evening news reports that elicit strong negative affective states and those one experiences when she watches Long Day’s Journey? Cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom offers a potentially helpful distinction between “real world” thrills and those one obtains when she views tragedy. He suggests that there are three features of narrative art that compel attention more forcefully than narratives of actual events. He asserts that fictional characters are generally more interesting than those in the real world, and “their adventures are usually much more interesting.” Secondly, in the words of Clive James, “fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” In other words, the events depicted in fiction are intensified because in the real world, “there are long spans where nothing much happens.” However, in fictional worlds, these boring bits are consolidated, so that each event is full of energy. Bloom’s last assertion is that in narrative, the technology utilized by the artist allows the audience to connect with the characters portrayed in ways more intimate than those available in real life. In the case of a play like Long Day’s Journey into Night, the reader is able to glimpse into the minds of those characters portrayed (for example, through Mary’s soliloquy at the end of Act III) and understand the characters’ motivation and desires clearly; in the real world one rarely obtains such a glimpse of others’ mental lives.40

142 Paradox Bloom’s criteria suggest why people find narrative art compelling, and he uses this backdrop to defend a motivational account for the consumption of tragedy similar to Smuts. When considering the paradox of tragedy, Bloom asks the reader to consider why people “play fight.” He asks, Why do children get pleasure41 from grappling and punching and knocking each other down? It’s not just the desire to exercise one’s muscles; if it were, they would do push-ups or sit-ups instead. It’s not sadism or masochism. The pleasure is in the fighting, not the hurting and being hurt.42 Bloom continues by answering that play is “safe practice.” In the real world, when one involves herself in combat, she is bound to be injured, perhaps seriously.When one engages in such play, she is able to practice her combat skills without the negative consequences—namely injury or death. Bloom argues that people pursue negative emotional states elicited by works of art because it allows them to cultivate coping skills for the negative emotional states they will likely experience in the real world. On Bloom’s view, people are interested by tragedy because it enables them to fully explore and experience emotional states that can be otherwise messy in the real world. Because of the clarity offered in tragedy through the careful construction of plot, character, setting, etc., the viewer can cultivate psychic fortitude, and he asserts that tragedy is an evolutionary product similar to the wrestling performed by young homo sapiens and lion cubs alike. Though Bloom’s account might be somewhat problematic for the “rich experience” theorist because Bloom seems to assert that tragedy gives pleasure (and thereby offering no help with the paradox of tragedy), a rich experience advocate could likely adopt an account like Bloom’s to explain what motivates people to view a play like Journey though they may not “enjoy” the experience. Though many features of rich experience theory are interesting and compelling, such solutions come at too high a price. People often characterize their experience of negative religious art and literature in terms of enjoyment, but Neill simply claims they are just wrong about their experience. Further complicating such a solution is a well-established tenet of behavioral psychology. In the essay, “Choice and the Relative Pleasure of Consequences,” Barbara Mellers concludes her survey of the scientific literature on hedonism’s role in motivation by arguing that anticipated pleasure is the critical determinant of choice as it has stronger predictive power than standard utility constructs.43 According to behavioral psychologists, potential pleasure and pain, though not the only motivators, are the best indicators of what choice we will make in our daily lives.This is further heightened in the context of the consumption of tragedy, particularly performances of plays such as Long Day’s Journey into Night, as we are under no obligation to consume such performances at all. If a choice does not provide us with potential positive emotional reward, we are unlikely to pursue it. For Neill’s solution to work, he would have to offer an account of why our motivation toward “rich experience” of tragedy is different than other choices we make in our lives, and how this motivation would supersede our general desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Even in his discussion of the paradox of tragedy, Neill seems to do little more than appeal

Paradox 143 to intuition on this point, and he does not address the almost overwhelming evidence from the science of human behavior that calls his approach into question. We choose whether or not to view art, and the positive emotion that we will receive from that viewing is an important component of our choice. One should not hastily deny the pleasures of tragedy.

Meta-response Unlike Alex Neill’s approach, Susan Feagin’s “meta-response” theory affirms both the positive and negative address of tragic art. Unlike rich experience theory, Feagin’s “meta-response” theory affirms the reality of positive affective states in response to tragedy. Feagin argues that when we experience negative emotions as a result of art, we are compensated with a “meta-response” that we might label as positive. Initially, as we observe the suffering of the tragic hero, we experience negative emotional states—fear, pity, and the like—but we also experience a metaresponse, an emotional response to our direct response. To put Feagin’s theory into the vernacular of philosophy of emotion, when exposed to negative art, one experiences negative emotional states directed intentionally at the horror depicted, but the viewer experiences a second-order response directed toward the direct response. This “meta-response” has positive qualia. She claims that viewers enjoy tragedy because they recognize that they are the kinds of people who are shocked by such suffering, and this realization is pleasing. Thus, audiences are motivated to pursue that pleasure. As evidence that such mixed emotional experiences are possible, she points to accessibly similar experiences in everyday life: For example, the remains of a spectacular car crash may titillate our curiosity, and we may feel disgusted with ourselves for being so morbid. On the other hand, we may enjoy the enticements of hawkers outside of seamy strip joints, and be pleased with ourselves for having overcome our puritanical upbringing… It should be noted that in ordinary as well as aesthetic contexts the two kinds of responses cannot be distinguished merely by what words we use to describe them. ‘Pleasure,’ ‘shock,’ ‘melancholy,’ and ‘delight’ may all describe direct or meta-responses, and the two are not always clearly distinguishable from each other. A blush of embarrassment may be intensified by embarrassment over the blush.The two things being distinguished cannot be infallibly distinguished, and that there are unclear cases of how and even whether the two are distinguishable, does not necessarily undermine the utility of the distinction.44 Though these emotional states may seem difficult to parse through experience and introspection alone, Feagin (writing during the height of the popularity of cognitivism of emotion) believes that these emotional states can be rationally examined and described utilizing the methods of analytic philosophy of emotion. Feagin argues that though second order meta-responses occur all the time in daily life, she insists that there is a unique emotional response available in the experience of negative art. She writes,

144 Paradox The pleasure from giving vent to one’s pent-up feelings of anger, frustration, or sadness is different from the pleasure of being aware of the fact that you are the kind of person who feels those emotions in response to particular situations as represented in tragic works of art.45 Because the negative emotional states aroused in tragedy do not have real-world consequence, the viewer is in a unique position to appreciate her capacity for being horrified or saddened, and this vantage point is what provides the occasion for the second-order, pleasant emotional response. To sum up, according to Feagin, the initial response to the suffering depicted in art is shock and horror, but the viewer experiences a pleasure in the fact that she feels compassion and sympathy for the sufferer. The worse things get for the sufferer, the more the viewer is horrified initially and gratified by her negative response to the horror. Feagin argues that people who enjoy tragedy in art find pleasant the fact that they are horrified by things that should, morally, horrify them. When we observe painful aesthetic representation, our shock reminds us that we “care for the welfare of human beings and that we deplore the immoral forces that defeat them.”46 The meta-response is a kind of self-congratulation of a viewer’s own moral sensibilities, and this self-congratulatory “pleasure” is what she pursues when she views putatively painful art. This framework navigates the paradox by appealing to a moral sense that the horrors of tragedy arouse, and it seems to provide a plausible solution to this problem. In the current context Feagin’s framework offers a revision of (2) as follows: 2. Though people experience negative emotions in response to Long Day’s Journey into Night, they receive a compensatory “meta-response” of self-congratulation that is pleasurable. The meta-response theory that Feagin has proposed does not even get off the ground if one denies that tragedy produces significant negative affective states.This is because one cannot obtain a positive meta-response without first experiencing a direct negative emotional response. On Feagin’s solution, the meta-response of self-congratulation can only conceivably occur if the subject first experiences the appropriate negative emotional states in response to the play for which she can congratulate herself. Because negative emotional reaction to tragedy figures so prominently in the meta-response theory, this theory should be a serious candidate for a resolution to the paradox of tragedy. The meta-response theory is appealing in that it not only allows for the possibility of mixed emotional states, but it is also built upon the reality of such affective responses. Feagin does not attempt to deny that one can experience both “pleasure” and “pain” simultaneously, and she even identifies the objects of such states. Negative direct responses have the negative portrayal of action as their objects, while the positive meta-responses are intentionally directed at these negative responses within the context of the play. Feagin admits that these emotional states may be difficult to separate, but this does not count against their divisibility. A powerful method for rendering the paradox of tragedy intelligible to is to accept the

Paradox 145 intuition that one experiences both positive and negative emotional states in response to tragedy, and as in its description of the negative address of the play, the metaresponse theory does not hedge its bets on the reality of such experiences. Instead, meta- response is predicated on such a reality. The rich experience theory suggested that there was something unique to be gained by pursuing tragedy, and the meta-response theory agrees with such a claim. Feagin’s discussion of the uniqueness of tragic experience provides an important insight into why people pursue such experiences in art but avoid those experiences in the real world. In actual, real-world scenarios involving the witness of events that arouse negative emotion, the subject does not have the opportunity to evaluate her response and congratulate herself for possessing the moral sensibilities appropriate to the harrowing circumstances she witnesses. It would seem strange for one to witness a fatal car accident and afterward praise herself for the negative emotional response she displayed as a result of the event. Tragedy, on the other hand, puts one in the position to evaluate the propriety of such responses, and Feagin would argue that this affirmative evaluation provides a unique positive emotional response that audiences are justified to pursue.

Long day’s journey into… Long Day’s Journey into Night serves as a powerful test case for any resolution to the Paradox of Tragedy because the plot of the play does not resolve in a way that an audience might easily justify the negative feelings the play arouses. In many conventional tragedies, though the protagonist suffers and likely dies as the result of the conflict, when that final fate unfolds, the audience is gratified by a restoration of order that fate produces. For instance, upon Oedipus’ demise, Thebes is freed from the plague, and the Montague and Capulet feud ends after the star- crossed lovers’ suicide.This is not the case in Journey, as the audience is given no indication that there is reason to hope for the Tyrones. No restoration will occur; it seems that the cycle of suffering portrayed in Journey will continue unabated without relief. In writing his most significant and final plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill abandoned most of the theatrical experimentation that had marked much of his career. Sophoclean choruses, masks, and cyclical repetition have been left behind in favor of serious, albeit more theatrically conventional, dialogue and action. No longer is O’Neill attempting to pair Greek tragedy with American modernity as he did in plays such as Morning Becomes Electra. Travis Bogard describes Long Day’s Journey into Night as “a return to four boards and a passion—to in other words, a confident reliance on his actors.”47 The form of the play is, as Edmund Tyrone might describe it, “a faithful realism.”48 Given this turn in O’Neill’s writing, one might naturally assume he has set aside his hopes for remaking society through theatrical tragedy as Nietzsche describes in his early work, and such assumptions are well-founded. A notable characteristic of O’Neill’s final plays is what some have regarded as an absence of plot.49 When critics complain of this deficit, Törnqvist points out, they are really complaining about the lack of outward action unfolding onstage.50 The plot in these plays is almost wholly internal, relying on the imagination of the

146 Paradox audience to render it. For instance, in The Iceman Cometh, the audience comes to learn of the fate of Hickey’s wife without ever meeting her in the play. The power of the climactic moment of Iceman occurs in the spectator’s mind’s eye. In service to this technique is O’Neill’s later mastery is the use of powerful stage pictures. Harold Bloom is vexed by the play. O’Neill, on Bloom’s view, is America’s greatest playwright, and Journey is obviously O’Neill’s masterpiece. It stands to reason, then, that Long Day’s Journey into Night should be read in the company of The Scarlett Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and As I Lay Dying, but when one reads the text of O’Neill’s play, she finds that “perhaps no major dramatist has been so lacking in rhetorical exuberance.” O’Neill, according to Bloom, is incredibly limited in his ability to construct powerful dramatic language, and he adds that, it is embarrassing when O’Neill exegetes attempt to expound his ideas whether about his country, his own work, or the human condition. When one of them speaks of ‘two kinds of nonverbal, tangential poetry in Long Day’s Journey into Night,’ as the characters’ longing for ‘a mystical union of sorts,’ and the influence of the setting, I am compelled to reflect that insofar as O’Neill’s art is nonverbal, it must also be nonexistent.51 Despite his reservations, Bloom concludes that the power of Long Day’s Journey is not contained in the force of the language O’Neill employs in dialogue, but instead this power comes from a “drive-toward-staging he learned from Strindberg.”52 When Bloom reflects upon performances of the play that have significantly moved him, he does not recall Mary’s “petulant outbursts” or the languid speeches of Edmund about the sea; instead, what he finds moving are the powerful stage pictures O’Neill creates through meticulous stage directions. Of the closing of act one when Edmund pleads with his mother not to return to morphine, Bloom writes, “That grim ballet of looks, followed by the terrible, compulsive drumming of her long fingers, has a lyric force that only the verse quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and others in O’Neill’s text are able to match.”53 According to Bloom, then, it is clear that the emotional force of the play is largely derived from the staging of the action, more so than the eloquence of dialogue O’Neill has written. Perhaps the most powerful of the stage pictures in Long Day’s Journey into Night is the image that closes the play. In a morphine-induced stupor, Mary Tyrone, the matriarch of her family, has descended the stairs carrying her wedding dress. At this point in the evening, the three Tyrone men, James,Tyrone, and Edmund sit huddled around a bottle of bonded bourbon. After a moment of conflict with her husband and son, Mary moves to the edge of the nearby sofa to deliver her final monologue, and the play closes with the men looking on as Mary recounts how she fell in love with James Tyrone, and “was so happy for a time.”54 The image of the entire Tyrone family gathered together, with the men gazing upon the horrible state of their mother and wife, suggests that the Tyrones have found a solution to isolation, though it has come in the fellowship of their suffering. As we will see, herein lies O’Neill’s solution to the paradox of tragedy. In order to appreciate such a claim, one must turn once again to Friedrich Nietzsche, O’Neill’s favorite philosopher, as O’Neill’s story of theatrical suffering

Paradox 147 and pleasure tracks closely with the radical Nietzsche. Nietzsche, according to some commentators, believed that the pleasure tragedy offers lies in the fact that tragedy empowers the viewer to face the horrors of life. Amy Price interprets Nietzsche as contending for a cognitivist story of tragedy, claiming that tragedy offers an occasion to look at difficult truths and learn to live with them.55 However well Price’s reading of Nietzsche jibes with his completed canon of work, Price seems to avoid much discussion as to the philologist’s understanding of tragic effect. Though Nietzsche offers few specifics on the nature of the tragic emotions, there is something in The Birth of Tragedy that might prove revelatory in this regard. In Birth 17, Nietzsche writes that during the tragic event, we are really for brief moments primordial being itself, and feel its unbounded greed and lust for being and joy in existence…in spite of fear and pity, we are happily alive, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we are blended.56 In this brief statement, it appears that Nietzsche acknowledges the reality of the tragic paradox and also offers a solution to the problem. During a tragic play, viewers experience fear and pity, but they are compensated with a hedonic emotional state whose intentional object is the “oneness” of all living things. In a moment (that only tragedy can adequately provide), individuality is stripped away, those participating find themselves in connection with others around them, and this experience is pleasurable. Obviously, the early Nietzsche’s conception of the “oneness” of all living beings is metaphysically loaded. Nietzsche, absorbing a variety of influences from Schopenhauer to Ralph Waldo Emerson, likely means much when he uses this term. However, when one reflects on her experience of difficult theatre, there is a way in which it might seem Nietzsche is communicating something about the experience that is familiar. To explore the idea of “oneness” Nietzsche describes, perhaps it would be valuable to examine the phenomenon of theatrical performance generally. After all, when one leaves a performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night claiming to have enjoyed it, she does not seem to be claiming to have enjoyed all the negative depictions that likely aroused negative emotional states. Instead, she claims to have enjoyed the event of the performance. The object of her positive affective state is the performance—the event itself. This assertion does not seem to resolve the problem, but only perhaps moves back one level. How can one enjoy performances of negative acts? One might characterize a public hanging as a sort of performance, but such an event ought not be “enjoyable.” How then can a theatrical performance that elicits similar emotional responses be sensibly regarded as such? The key, of course, is the distinction one ought to draw between the concepts “theatrical performance” and other sorts of “performance.” David Osipovich has teased out this difference very effectively for our purposes, though much of his discussion of what counts as theatrical performance is intended to undermine definitions of theatrical performance that argue it is merely an interpretation of a play. Osipovich defends the following definition of theatrical performance:

148 Paradox A theatrical performance is a particular kind of interaction between performers and observers (actors and audience members) in a shared physical space. A necessary component of this interaction is that the performers pretend that the interaction is something other than what it actually is and that the observers are aware of this pretense.57 What makes Osipovich’s definition unique among others (for example, the definition Woodruff defends in The Necessity of Theatre) is the priority Osipovich places upon the imaginative component of the performance. It is vital on Osipovich’s definition that the audience recognizes the element of make-believe within the performance. This make-believe can be seen as a collaborative effort with the actors to suspend disbelief and allow oneself to be affected by the actions portrayed onstage.Additionally, in theatrical performance “audiences and performers have to contend with each other in a way not available to audiences and performers in either film or live television. Each affects the other and is affected by the other.”58 This unique collaborative element of theatrical performance helps bolster the account of tragic enjoyment that presented here. Perhaps the “oneness” Nietzsche speaks of as the object of a positive feeling in his discussion of the paradox of tragedy might be understood in terms of contention. This contention is present in all theatrical performance, so what makes “tragic contention” unique? When an audience member is negatively moved by Othello or Macbeth, she is responding to the actors portraying the negative events imaginatively, collaboratively allowing herself to be affected, and this response to the negative events portrayed in the context of communal effort between performers and the audience produces positive emotional states. The pleasure of tragedy is not, as Feagin argued, derived from a sense of one’s capacity for correct moral evaluation; instead, perhaps she better characterizes this experience when she writes that tragedy “reduces one’s sense of aloneness in the world, and sooths, psychologically, the pain of solipsism.”59 Such language seems to directly refer to the Nietzschean sense of “oneness,” but again, this need not be viewed as some sort of metaphysical contention. Instead, it is a fair characterization, provided that Osipovich’s definition of theatrical performance reflects the reality of the concept, to assert that people take pleasure in operating collaboratively with others in the tragic event. When one considers the ways in which audiences contend with one another in tragedy, one finds a powerful clue as to its appeal. For example, were one to attend a performance of Othello and find herself sitting next to a stranger who is moved to tears by the murder of Desdemona, she would respond differently to that stranger than she would someone experiencing the same visible emotional state out on a park bench in the street. The occasion of tragedy provides a safe space for viewers to experience negative emotions with little fear of judgment or other reprisal, because it is likely that others at the event are feeling similarly. When one claims to have enjoyed tragedy, then, perhaps it is fair to say that she enjoyed the feeling of solidarity and interdependence that she experienced during the play, and as Feagin asserts, because of the negative emotional states that she experiences with others in the room, she feels less alone than in the real world. It does appear that some experimental evidence lends weight to the hypothesis I have proposed here. A 2016 study performed at the university of Oxford and

Paradox 149 published by the Royal Society of Open Science sought to test the hypothesis that dramatic portrayals that arouse negative emotional states increase social bonding and pain thresholds in those who view them.The researchers performing this study theorize that storytelling that elicits negative emotions increases endorphins in the brain, and endorphins contribute to social bonding as well as individuals’ ability to endure physical pain. To test this hypothesis, participants were shown a made-for-TV film entitled Stuart: A Life Backwards that tells a bleak story of a disabled youth whose life circumstances lead him to poverty, prison, and ultimately suicide. Before the viewing, each participant completed three types of psychological tests meant to assess certain psychological traits: a positive and negative affect schedule (designed to assess the overall valence of the participant’s emotional state), an inclusion of self and others survey (designed to assess how connected the participant feels with the rest of the group of test subjects), and a pain threshold assessment. A control group watched films that were not obviously designed to elicit negative emotional states. The results of this experiment were that those participants who were emotionally moved by the Stuart reported statistically significant feelings of social bonding and were able to withstand physical discomfort longer than participants who were emotionally unmoved by the program.60 This study lends experimental credence to this interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of tragic experience and its value. Though one should point out that this study is describing the affect produced by tragic film, it seems likely that such affects might be similar if one were to test a performance of theatrical tragedy as well. A key component of our experience of putatively negative art is the way in which that art produces a sense of solidarity with those who have shared that experience, and perhaps O’Neill shares Nietzsche’s sense of the power of tragedy.

Notes 1 Qtd. in Jordan Miller, Playwright’s Progress: O’Neill and his Critics (Chicago, IL: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1965), 133. 2 Ibid., 48. 3 It is important to note that not all viewers experience such empathy toward the characters in the play.Thomas R. Dash, a reviewer of the play for Women’s Wear Daily, writes that For the cognoscenti and for devotees of O’Neill, these flagellations and psychological penetrations into the pitiful ruins of a family may prove stimulating. But for the neutral and dispassionate observer and for the rank and file of theatregoers, ‘A Long Day’s Journey into Night’ may prove a long night’s journey without too much daylight. (Qtd. in Jordan Miller, Playwright’s Progress: O’Neill and the Critics (Chicago, IL: Scott Foresman, 1965, 136). Here it is not necessary for me to defend that all people experience negative emotions with respect to the representation of the Tyrone family; instead, I am attempting to resolve the problem of how anyone may experience a positive response despite—and perhaps because of—the negative emotions she experiences toward the Tyrones and the world of Journey. 4 David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Hume: Selected Essays, edited by S. Copley and A. Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 126.

150 Paradox 5 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, edited by L.A. Shelby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 574. 6 Alex Neill,“Hume’s Singular Phenomenon,” British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (April 1999), 121. 7 To be clear, the value judgements positive and negative refer to the qualia of these emotional states. Positive emotions are those we seem to enjoy in our daily lives, while negative emotions are unpleasant and are often referred to in terms of pain. From an evolutionary standpoint, of course, one might characterize all emotions as “positive,” as they are evolved patterns of attraction and repulsion that contribute to survival. 8 For a good overview of the literature regarding this assertion, one might consult Eduardo Andrade and Joel B. Cohen, “On the Consumption of Negative Feelings,” Journal of Consumer Research 34:3 (March 2007), 284. 9 Aaron Smuts,“The Paradox of Painful Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 41:3 (Fall 2007), 63. 10 The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1, translated by Anthony Long and David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 119–120. 11 Jennifer J. Argo, Riu Zhu, and Darren W. Dahl, “Fact or Fiction: an Investigation of Empathy Differences in Response to Emotional Melodramatic Entertainment,” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (February 2008), 614–623. 12 David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” 217. 13 Ibid., 219–220. 14 Elisa Galgut, “The Poetry and Pity: Hume’s Account of Tragic Pleasure,” British Journal of Aesthetics 41:4 (October 2001), 413. 15 Ibid., 414. 16 This is the dominant interpretation of Hume’s theory, but Robert Yanal, in “Hume and Others on the Paradox of Tragedy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49:1 (Winter 1991), 75–76, argues against this interpretation. He claims that Hume’s view is rather that our experience of tragedy is made pleasurable overall through the infusion of pleasure from the aesthetic qualities of the work, even though some portions of the overall experience are painful. The sorrow is not made pleasant, though our overall experience of tragedy may be. While Yanal does offer a reasonable argument for this claim, his view is certainly a minority interpretation of Hume and defies the fact that Hume explicitly claims that sorrow is transformed into pleasure. 17 Ibid., 223. 18 Ibid., 223. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20:1 (January 1983), 95. 21 Flint Schier, “The Claims of Tragedy,” Philosophical Papers 18:1 (1989), 18. 22 On this point, the reader can consult Jeff T. Larson, et al., “Can People feel Happy and Sad at the Same Time?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81:4 (October 2001), 684–696; Ulrich Schimmack, “Pleasure, Displeasure, and Mixed Feelings? Are Semantic Opposites Mutually Exclusive?” Cognition and Emotion 15:1 (2001), 81–97; David Watson, et al., “Development and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect:The PANAS Scale,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:6 (June 1998), 1063–1070; Patti Williams and Jennifer Aaker, “Can Mixed Emotions Peacefully Co-Exist?” Journal of Consumer Research 28 (March 2002), 636–649. 23 Ibid., 224. 24 Alex Neill, “Hume’s ‘Singular Phenomenon’,” 115. 25 Aaron Smuts, “The Paradox of Painful Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 41:3 (Fall 2007), 65. 26 David Watson, Lee Anna Clark, and Auke Tellegen, “Developments and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect: the PANAS scale,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (June 1988), 1063–1070.

Paradox 151 27 Eduardo Andrade and Joel B. Cohen, “On the Consumption of Negative Feelings,” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (October 2007), 283–300. 28 John Morreall, “Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 9:1 (April 1985), 96. 29 Here, Morreall seems to assert that some fictional events might be portrayed with overthe-top techniques that would render the play beyond the viewer’s control. 30 Robert Yanal, Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 147. 31 Robert Yanal, Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction, 148. 32 Aaron Smuts, “Art and Negative Affect,” Philosophy Compass 4:1 (2009), 46. 33 Clark McCauley, “When Screen Violence is not Attractive,” in Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment, edited by Jeffrey Goldstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 147–149. 34 Alex Neill, “A Paradox of the Heart,” Philosophical Studies 65 (1992), 61. 35 For Neill’s take on how one might experience such feelings, the reader might consult his “Fear, Fiction and Make-Believe,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49:1 (1991), 47–56, where in his discussion of Walton’s resolution to the Paradox of Horror, he affirms that Charles genuinely fears the slime in the horror movie. 36 It is worth noting that Neill has defended a cognitivist view of the emotions in his discussion of the Paradox of Fiction, but perhaps his views on the nature of emotions have changed. For more on this, the reader should see, “Fiction and the Emotions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30:1 (January 1993), 1–13. It makes a great deal of sense that a cognitivist should have a significant interest in resolving problems of fiction and emotion, as on a cognitivist model, these problems are most acute. 37 Alex Neill, “On a Paradox of the Heart,” 62. 38 Ibid., 57. 39 Aaron Smuts, “The Paradox of Painful Art,” Journal of Aesthetics Education 41:3 (Fall 2007), 74. 40 Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works:The New Science of why We Like what We Like (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010), 175–176. 41 It is interesting that he uses the term “pleasure” here, and Bloom is obviously not as careful with his usage of terms that denote positive emotional states as Smuts and Neill (who hail from an analytic tradition). Based upon his discussion, Bloom seems to see no trouble in asserting that tragedy is pleasurable, so invoking Bloom might prove problematic for the rich experience theorist. This conflict seems to be somewhat beside the point, however, as I am using Bloom here to clarify what Neill and others mean when they describe “rich experience.” 42 Ibid., 192–193. 43 Barbara Mellers, “Choice and the Relative Pleasure of Consequences,” Psychological Bulletin 126:6 (2000), 910–924. 44 Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20:1 (January 1983), 97. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Ibid. 47 Travis Bogard, “The Door and the Mirror,” in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 62. 48 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press), 154. 49 See Clifford Leech, Eugene O’Neill (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 108; and Timo Tiusanen, O’Neill’s Scenic Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 303. 50 Egil Törnqvist, Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 177–178. 51 Harold Bloom, Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009), 1–2. 52 Ibid., 2. 53 Ibid., 5.

152 Paradox 54 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 176. 55 Amy Price, “Nietzsche and the Paradox of Tragedy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 34:8 (October 1998), 392. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 81. 57 David Osipovich, “What is a Theatrical Performance?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:4 (Fall 2006), 461. 58 Ibid., 466. 59 Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” 98. 60 Robin Ian Dunbar, et al., “Emotional Arousal when Watching Drama Increases Pain Threshold and Social Bonding,” Royal Society of Open Science 3 (June 2016), 1–11.

8 Finis

The strongest indication that O’Neill’s view of difficult theatre mirrors his mentor Nietzsche’s appears in Long Day’s Journey into Night. One might read the play (in part) as a discourse on the paradox of tragedy.Tony Kushner has observed that Long Day’s Journey into Night is a play about theatre, as the play is about actors, about the theatre, it is a theatrical manifesto as much as it is a gravestone or a resurrection or the definitive family drama or an indictment of the marketplace or a definitive drama of American immigrant life.1 Following Kushner’s intuition, Kurt Eisen points out that each of the figures of the Tyrone family have their dramatic moments to shine throughout the play.2 Both James and Jamie are professional actors, and Mary and Edmund have inhabited the theatrical world for so long that they are well-versed in living as a performance. Given this is the case, it seems reasonable to assert that O’Neill is not merely working through a painful autobiography with this play; instead, Long Day’s Journey is (at least in part) a comment on theatre itself. More powerfully, Journey represents an example of how difficult theatre works on an audience, not by teaching that audience some lesson about the nature of existence, but by stimulating a unique emotion, an emotion related to community and interdependence. To grasp these claims, one must appreciate evidence not merely from the dialogue or overt action of the play, but from the stage pictures O’Neill develops patiently and methodically throughout this piece. Typical of O’Neill, as the stage directions open by describing the Tyrone’s home, few details are left unexplored, and from the beginning, a critic steeped in Nietzschean dramatic theory finds much to appreciate. On stage right, between two entrances O’Neill describes, a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Sterner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry of Swinburne, Rosetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling etc.… Farther back is a large, glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three sets of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s History of England, Thiers’ History of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-9

154 Finis Consulate and Empire, Smollett’s history of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of old plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread.3 As the audience member gazes for the first time at the set, she—provided she had the ability to read the titles of the books on each shelf4—is able to sense the tension between the Dionysiac and Apollonian. Beneath a looming image of Shakespeare, the viewer discovers what is undoubtedly Edmund’s library. These works certainly reflect O’Neill’s autobiographical impulse, representing the philosophy and literature he was reading in 1912 before entering a tuberculosis sanitarium, however from a Nietzschean vantage point, perhaps such works represent a mode of knowing the world that might be loosely characterized as Dionysian. The thinkers listed represent radical lines of divergence—not simply in content, but in epistemological method—from those represented in the glassed-in bookshelf farther back, presumably the library of James Tyrone. On the one hand, Edmund is absorbed in the work of egoists, nihilists, radicals, and anarchists, while James reads and rereads received historical accounts detailing the standard story of Western evolution. Hume and Gibbon’s empirical approaches to past events stand in stark contrast to the assertions found in Nietzsche, Marx, and Engels that Western culture is fundamentally warped and must be remade. The creative and dramatic literature represented on each of these bookcases represents a similar divergence. The works of Dumas, Hugo, and Lever typically portray heroic figures that, despite intense struggle, rise above their world and conquer their opposition. Such works clearly represent a “Socratic optimism,” as Nietzsche might describe it, about man’s ability to overcome the universe in the face of hardship. The Apollonian character of such works informs James’ illusion of the world, and in the final act of the play, he will acknowledge how his adherence to creating such an illusion in the form of a single, Romantic theatrical role has robbed him of the ability to personify his true talent as an actor. By contrast, the novels of the Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal appearing on Edmund’s shelves contain naturalistic and often bleak portrayals of the world. These French writers embody an unflinching look at reality, regardless of the loss of the centeredness or optimism that might result from such an act. Paired with these naturalists, it seems hardly a stretch to suggest that the decadent, self-indulgent poetry of Swinburne and Wilde, full of reckless sexual experimentation, are included to refer to Dionysian revelry which is certainly Nietzschean in spirit. These books, embedded almost invisibly within the set, are a literary manifestation of the contest which will take place on this day—the contest between Apollonian illusion and Dionysiac intoxication.

The fog In contrast to the visual symbolism O’Neill has utilized to represent the Nietzschean dichotomy bound up in the Tyrone home, O’Neill also develops non-visual symbols that do similar work. One of the most developed symbols throughout the play is the continual reference to the fog that rolls off the sea into New London

Finis 155 each day. While the earlier O’Neill might have insisted upon some technology to represent the fog to the audience, the presence of this image merely exists within the audience’s mind, as both Mary and Edmund describe its effect upon them. As the play opens just after breakfast, Mary complains that the sound of the foghorn kept her awake throughout the night, and James empathizes, though it is fairly clear that he slept soundly through the noise. On the surface, the fog, steadily increasing throughout the day, frames the descent into intoxication which will occur as the day progresses. Beneath the surface, Falk claims that the fog “O’Neill’s first and last symbol of man’s inability to know himself.”5 Here Falk undoubtedly refers to one of O’Neill’s earliest one-act plays The Fog. Through the entirety of the play, when Mary refers to the return of the fog, it is an indication that she is descending into a morphine-induced state. She remarks, I really love fog…It hides from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything is changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find you or touch you any more…It’s the foghorn that I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.6 Though Edmund shares his mother’s love for the fog, he does not describe its effects in terms of escape; instead, the fog draws him into the interconnectedness of all living things. In the final act of the play, after reciting Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis,” Edmund recalls the fog’s effect on him as he returned home this evening: The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land.The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost…Don’t look at me as if I’d gone nutty. I’m talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It’s the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it’s Pan. You see him and you die— that is, inside you—and you have to go on living as a ghost.7 A hasty reading of this moment might render Edmund in the same condition as his mother, unwilling to face reality and seeking escape. James Orr describes Edmund’s walk in the fog as his experience of alienation from the world, drawing from Edmund’s rhetorical question, “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?”8 However, if one considers the extent to which O’Neill has developed themes drawn from Birth of Tragedy within Journey, she understands that Edmund is not describing alienation at all, but unity with all that exists. When Edmund suggests that one would not want to see life as it is, he is referring to the Apollonian illusion of life instead of life at its most basic. This is confirmed when he identifies such a

156 Finis life as the “three Gorgons” who “turn one to stone,” a reproduction of the image of oneself. In the fog, one loses her individuality, and according to a Nietzschean reading, comes to terms with all existence. Edmund loses his sense of location and instead experiences the unity of all that is. Edmund’s view of the fog is anything but consistent through the play, however. On his walk up to the house, the fog might represent ultimate reality. By contrast, in his recounting of his experience as a merchant seaman, the fog is as Orr describes, as an agent of alienation: When I was on the Squarehead trigger rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades.The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was so free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within your life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout in the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Behind the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble toward nowhere, for no good reason.9 Esther Olsen points out that this speech is very reminiscent of two passages in Thus Spake Zarathustra (Z III §15, IV §19), in which “he affirmed the joy of life in the moment and enunciated the doctrine of eternal recurrence.”10 Edmund claims to have briefly found meaning in those moments when he has lost himself in the rhythm of the sea. He describes this state as one of drunkenness, beyond “men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams.” Each of these pejoratives readily describes man’s Apollonian impulses, and in moments when Edmund loses himself in the sea, he sees his connection with all that exists; he realizes the illusion of individuation, and this realization provides momentary peace. At the end of the speech, he remarks that he cannot sustain such peace, because of the power

Finis 157 of the Apollonian world in his life, “As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.”11 Edmund here describes the isolation that has resulted from Socratic optimism and false Apollonian calm. In moments of Dionysian ecstasy, Edmund feels authentic inter-connectedness with the world; however, in his daily life, that kinship is taken from him through the false coping mechanisms culture has developed to avoid the horror of reality.12 Throughout the play, the fog and intoxication are intertwined. It is notable that O’Neill seems to draw a distinction between Mary’s intoxication, and the extreme inebriation of the Tyrone men. Mary’s intoxicated state draws her deep into a fog of isolation, while the rest of the family is drawn into the kinship that often accompanies strong drink. As the effects of the morphine fade, Mary will return to her family for brief moments, but she will inevitably shrink back into a self-absorbed daze that alienates her from those who she loves through either physical or mental absence or caustic attacks on the Tyrone men. Though Edmund’s intoxication might draw him closer to his male family members, like Mary, he can sense the escape drunkenness might offer one weary of the world, evidenced by the fact that he quotes Baudelaire’s prose poem commonly referred to as “Be Drunk,” Be always drunken, Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will’.13 Though Edmund longs for the intoxicating state offered by the fog and cheap bourbon, unlike his mother, he does not find in them isolation and solipsism, but something else entirely.

The horror of existence As the Tyrones descend throughout the day into increasing inebriation, the veneer of their wealthy, New England lives is stripped away, and they, as well as the audience, gaze upon what Nietzsche might refer to as the “horror of existence,” or the brutal nature of reality. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche recalls the parable of Dionysus and Silenus. In the myth, the king asks the god of wine and fertility, “what is the best and most excellent thing for human beings?” The god replies,

158 Finis Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second-best thing for you is: to die soon.14 Nietzsche, deeply schooled in the pessimism of Schopenhauer, recognizes that the myth of the unity of creation with man at its center, first perpetuated through the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, and later through the orderly predictions of the natural sciences, is an insidious fable. However, Nietzsche does not merely assert that people find themselves adrift in a world that is indifferent to their flourishing, as the rational world of science might predict. Instead, the “horror of existence” is that people find themselves in a world that is deeply hostile to them, actively seeking their destruction and suffering. It is this depiction of reality that comes to the fore as the day descends into night in Long Day’s Journey. For each of the Tyrones, this horror manifests itself in personal suffering. While it seems that their station in the world should have immunized them from such suffering, throughout the play the audience discovers that even upper-class New Englanders cannot escape the horror of existence. James Tyrone must live not only with the guilt of failing to live up to his creative potential, but the knowledge that his wife’s morphine addiction is due to his own personal failings. Jamie suffers from the guilt of his brother Eugene’s death. Edmund suffers, not only of tuberculosis, but of the knowledge that his very existence is a cause of his mother’s addiction. Mary suffers from the guilt that accompanies relapse and failure to the ones she holds most dear. In each of these cases, the family members can find no relief from their pains, as much of their suffering is brought on by forces beyond their control. A delicate balance is struck in the presentation of the characters as suffering the consequences of their actions and suffering based upon no fault of their own. This is a deliberate balance that O’Neill strikes, as in a 1940 letter to George Jean Nathan, he writes that as the final curtain falls, the audience sees all the Tyrones as “guilty and at the same time innocent.”15 Many have interpreted this portrayal as echoing the fatalism of the Modernist worldview: at the close of the play, the Tyrones find themselves in a world of horror without end—unlike tragic characters of the past, the Tyrones are doomed forever to suffer many more long journeys into night, and they suffer their respective fates alone. During O’Neill’s composition of Mourning Becomes Electra, he wrote in his work diaries that the play must remain a “modern psychological play” in that fate is “springing out of the family.”16 In other words, though the Mannons of Electra find themselves doomed, they are not doomed because of some otherworldly force that has it out for them. Instead, their suffering is caused by the actions and attitudes of their forebearers. By contrast, with Journey, O’Neill seems to be adopting a more mixed approach to fatalism; though there is certainly more than enough blame to go around, there is a good deal of bad luck that has contributed to the Tyrone family’s suffering. That said, Journey is still “modern” in the sense that there is no redemption in sight, as God is dead, and mankind is doomed.17 This line of interpretation sees O’Neill’s late plays as an attempt to remake the tragic form in light of the idea of horror of existence that Nietzsche bequeaths to modernity.

Finis 159

Figures in isolation Through most of the play, the action takes place in ensemble performances; it is rare that characters find themselves alone onstage, so stage pictures in which an actor stands alone onstage seem to hold special significance. There are several such moments with James and Edmund; however, it is notable that Mary is the only character that O’Neill chooses to isolate for any significant amount of time. The first of these scenes occurs at the end of Act II. As the men leave to head into town, Mary finds herself alone, fidgeting with her hair. She speaks to herself, saying “it’s so lonely here…You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone… Then, Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely?”18 Before James returns in Act III, Mary continues her soliloquy after the maid Cathleen leaves to perform her duties. The foghorn sounds in the background as Mary remarks about how she cannot find her lost faith, and resolves to take more morphine, presumably to dull her sense of loss.These moments of isolation underscore the modern problem of isolation that accompanies the dissolution of the American/European religious identity that had offered meaning and community to generations. Edmund is alone onstage once in the play, at beginning of the second scene of Act II. In this scene, he sits, reading a book, but unable to concentrate. He is preoccupied, of course, with what he believes is going on upstairs; however, it may be that Edmund’s nervous manner bears more significance than mere worry about his mother. Like Edmund, the elder Tyrone appears alone onstage once as well, at the beginning of Act IV. Tyrone is “drunk, and shows it by the owlish, deliberate manner… But despite all the whiskey in him, he has not escaped, and he looks…a sad, defeated old man, possessed by hopeless resignation.”19 In contrast to Mary, neither Edmund nor James speaks in these moments of isolation, however, like Mary, they both seek escape from the horror of their reality. Edmund seeks this escape through literature, and James through alcohol. Interestingly, Jamie is never alone onstage, and one might speculate that he is not, as his family members are, seeking to escape the horror of reality, having given himself over to it.20 None of the Tyrones can escape the truth of their situation, though at least two of them continue to try.

Pity, fear, and forgiveness Throughout this study, I have asserted that the emotions of fear and pity, coupled with an emotion-based conception to forgiveness, hold a key to one aspect of O’Neill’s significance, and the inspiration for such a view emerges from a powerful expository moment in Act III of Journey. In this scene, Mary has become more intoxicated, and as a result, increasingly forthright regarding her feelings toward her family. She admits that Jamie is beyond hope, that he “has been lost to us for a long time.”21 She also confesses that she fears Jamie will fully corrupt his brother; this is a fear that Tyrone admits as well. Mary’s fear of Jamie’s influence on Edmund is only part of her larger fear for her sons. In reflecting upon the fact that Edmund had nightmares as a child, she blames her own fear, because when she was pregnant, she was afraid to bring him into the

160 Finis world. In this case, as in the case of Brutus Jones, Mary’s fear (even for someone else’s wellbeing) yields a kind of solipsism. Michael Manheim points out that Mary’s life experience is riddled with fears, in addition to her fear for Edmund’s health, she fears “that she is constantly being watched,” and that she will be “left alone with her drug.”22 Though fear may be well-founded regarding some perceived threat in the world, its result is isolation. After acknowledging her fears, Mary turns her ire toward her husband, recalling the numerous times James had left her alone in an “ugly hotel room” while he caroused until he had to be dragged home and left outside his door. James is deeply hurt by his wife’s recollection of this event, and he asks her why she cannot forget. Mary replies “with detached pity,” that she cannot forget, but “I forgive. I always forgive you. So don’t look so guilty. I’m sorry I remembered out loud. I don’t want to be sad, or to make you sad.”23 It is abundantly clear, however, that Mary cannot forgive. In the space of three pages, O’Neill has presented what he sees as the barrier to true forgiveness; fear and pity. In fear, regardless of whether it is wellfounded, one is drawn into themselves. In pity, the result is the same. By distancing oneself from the object of her pity (her husband), Mary finds herself further isolated, and she is unable to offer forgiveness to a man who she has kept at armslength. As forgiveness is impossible in light of Mary’s fear and pity, she will remain alone, and her family members each find themselves in a similar predicament. Richard Sewall has observed that the mood of the final scene of Journey might be described as “pity touched with awe.”24 Presumably, Sewell finds the Tyrones worthy of pity, but he is struck by the fact that each of the members of the family remain in the home. They have a sort of courage in the face of the horrors of their reality that Sewell finds awe-inspiring.While Sewell’s intuition that the there is something admirable about the Tyrone’s is insightful, perhaps he is too hasty when he characterizes the mood of this scene. In the discussion of pity found in chapter four of this volume, I argued that O’Neill is hostile to the traditional conception of pity because of the distancing and condescension that accompanies the emotion. That said, perhaps the kind of pity O’Neill intends to elicit in this act is the kind of pity, as Iceman’s Hickey describes it, “that will really save the poor guy, and make him quit battling himself, and find peace for the rest of his life.”25 In short, instead of stoking pity in Mary’s mad scene, perhaps O’Neill intends to arouse compassion for the Tyrones. There are good reasons to believe O’Neill aims for compassion in this scene. Throughout Act IV, O’Neill has painstakingly crafted opportunities for the audience to see the inward parts of each of the Tyrone men’s psyche. James shares the truth of his upbringing, that he had sacrificed his talent in the interest of financial security, revealing the depth to which his impoverished upbringing has affected him. Edmund shares his experiences at sea, revealing his disappointment at only having the “makings of a poet.” Amongst his violent outbursts and obscene attacks, Jamie recounts his “Christian act” in staying with Fat Violet, an overweight prostitute for which he felt compassion, “the one act of completely selfless giving in the play.”26 Because each of these accounts are delivered in long monologues instead of portrayed by action on the stage, the audience must engage with these tales imaginatively, drawing the audience closer to the mental states of these characters in terms of identification.

Finis 161 In this volume’s analysis of The Emperor Jones, I claimed that O’Neill had discovered that part of the power of horror as a genre is its ability to increase an audience’s identification with characters’ emotional states and mirror those states with their own emotions. This seems to be a technique O’Neill uses in this final scene. Before Mary appears in the parlor, the men have all but fallen asleep. Suddenly, the audience is jarred by Mary’s presence as Edmund hears a sound in the house and “jerks nervously forward in his chair, staring through the front parlor to the hall,” and all five of the bulbs in the chamber are suddenly switched on. To heighten the eeriness of the scene, the audience hears a badly played Chopin piano waltz without being able to see who is playing the piano. Only then does Mary enter, carrying her wedding dress, “her face is paler than ever. Her eyes look enormous. They glisten like polished black jewels.”27 Her whole visage, O’Neill describes, is as a “marble mask of girlish innocence.”28 Dragging her wedding dress like a gown of gossamer, Mary has the visage of a ghost, and her detached speeches heighten this impression. For audiences seeing this scene for the first time, the whole effect must be nearly terrifying. In this moment, it seems likely that the audience’s emotional state would closely track with the emotions portrayed by the Tyrone men. As Mary delivers the final speeches of the play, the men stare at her from the table, and “they slowly lower their drinks, forgetting them.”29 James, Jamie, and Edmund stare helplessly as Mary reflects upon her time in the convent. Though these men have certainly had enough liquor throughout the evening to render them unconscious, each of them appears stone sober, gazing upon the apparition that the matriarch of the family has become. There is no pity and awe generated here; instead, the mood of this moment might fairly be characterized as mildly horrifying. As the Tyrone men behold Mary, so do the audience members. Unified, and imaginatively contending with one another, the audience and players are experiencing the horror of existence. There is a byproduct of this experience, however, and this byproduct is both represented onstage, and an effect that is produced by the play itself. Because the Tyrone men behold Mary in her terrifying, ghost-like state, in their horror, they have found a solution to their individual isolation. The stage picture O’Neill prescribes, with the men at the table gazing at Mary, emphasizes this connectedness. This picture stands in stark contrast to the few moments when characters are alone onstage. It is difficult to imagine that James, Jamie, or Edmund would describe themselves as lonely during these final moments, and bizarre as it may seem, perhaps the horrible events of the long day’s journey have offered a release from solipsism. If one conceives of Long Day’s Journey as Kushner has, as a play about the theatre, perhaps O’Neill is modeling his own solution to the Paradox of Tragedy. Perhaps the power of difficult theatre lies in its ability to generate a feeling of Nietzschean “oneness” in those who have the courage to gaze upon the harrowing events portrayed upon the boards.When one claims to have “enjoyed” an emotionally difficult play such as Long Day’s Journey, perhaps the pleasure that she derives is a delight in the occasional community generated in the performance. In the previous chapter, I asserted that the early Nietzsche may have been onto something when he described tragedy’s effect. Describing Nietzsche’s resolution to the Paradox of Tragedy in terms of a sort of meta-response has the virtue of

162 Finis explanatory power where other resolutions to the problem fall short. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill has both represented a Nietzschean sort of solution to the problem posed by tragedy’s appeal and has offered an instance of tragic enjoyment. Utilizing the technique of setting most of the play’s action in the audience’s mind through monologue as well as setting the final act to heighten the experience of horror in the audience enable those watching the tragic action to share an emotional state not only with the fictional Tyrones, but also with the other audience members who have been similarly moved. It is sensible then, for me to say that I was both genuinely negatively moved by the play, but that I also have enjoyed the experience.

Closing the curtain This study has been the result of two nagging questions regarding the work of Eugene O’Neill: (1) With so many dramatic failures, why does O’Neill still hold such esteem in American dramatic history? And (2) Is O’Neill, at least in part, writing philosophical theatre? In exploring the first of these questions, a basic assumption regarding the value of difficult theatre bubbled to the surface.This assumption claimed that tragedy matters because of its capacity to offer knowledge that would be difficult to obtain otherwise. We have seen that while many valiant cognitivist attempts to vindicate tragedy on these grounds offer a part of the story of its value, there is something missing in this family of theories, namely the discussion of how tragedy moves us. One might object to my characterization of the plays analyzed in this volume. There is a rich tradition in O’Neill criticism to demonstrate that his plays were, in fact, about something. There are viable and multi-faceted interpretations of most of O’Neill’s major works, and I certainly do not claim that there is no knowledge to be gained in such endeavors. In this volume, I have treated many of his works here as offering something resembling serious philosophical thinking. There are many moments within O’Neill’s canon that can rightly be characterized as adding to our understanding of the world. My claim, however, is that the knowledge O’Neill imparts is not what makes his works great; in many cases, he was intellectual dilletante that lacked a great deal of the psychological insight attributed to him. A careful examination of the phenomenon expressed in the paradox of tragedy discloses why tragedy matters, at least why O’Neill matters, with his misfires and all. The strangeness of the negative emotions generated by tragedy paired with our enjoyment of it offer a unique occasion to experience community for a moment in our lives of increasing isolation. Through the horror displayed onstage in many of O’Neill’s plays is deeply unsettling, it appears that he recognized (perhaps unconsciously) that difficult theatre offers a fleeting opportunity for community— community with strangers seated around us in a dark theatre, but community nonetheless. O’Neill once characterized the modern theatre as the new church, claiming that he hoped to usher in an era where aesthetic experience in theatrical performances could fill the void of secular society. It is remarkable then, that in his penultimate work, Long Day’s Journey into Night, he created an opportunity for an almost Christian communal experience, akin to the “fellowship of suffering” described in the Pauline epistle.

Finis 163 The understanding of the value of O’Neill’s plays has emerged from an examination of the traditional emotions associated with tragedy, fear and pity, as well as an examination of the emotions involved in the phenomenon of forgiveness. One might wonder what each of these things share.The two emotions are isolating; pity places us at arms-length to others as does fear. Forgiveness, as a social phenomenon is a solution to separation from another; however, if my analysis has demonstrated anything it has certainly demonstrated that even with the best understanding of forgiveness, it is difficult to grant and perhaps more difficult to receive. Perhaps what O’Neill demonstrates for us is that unity with others is possible, though difficult, even in the face of the isolation offered by the world.

Notes 1 Tony Kushner, “The Genius of O’Neill,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004), 256. 2 Kurt Eisen, The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 144. 3 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 11. 4 I admit that it is unlikely the audience member would be aware of the titles of the texts on the shelves. However, throughout the play, O’Neill heavily prescribes such details about the way the set should look, lighting and sound cues, and even how lines are to be delivered by the actors. Though some of these features may go unappreciated by the audience, it does seem clear that O’Neill places such “Easter eggs” within the text to create an atmosphere where his thematic message might be made evident. 5 Doris Falk, “Long Day’s Journey,” in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 11. 6 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 98–99. 7 Ibid., 132. 8 John Orr, “Eugene O’Neill: The Life Remembered,” in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 122. 9 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 153. 10 Esther Olsen,“An Analysis of the Nietzschean Elements in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” PhD diss. (University of Minnesota, 1957), 575. 11 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 153–154. 12 I should point out that there is another argument to be made regarding Edmund’s experience here.Vivian Casper has argued that the “veil” metaphor Edmund employs to describe his mystical experience is drawn from O’Neill’s reading of 19th century British poetry, particularly the poetry of Shelley. Casper interprets Edmund’s experience not in Nietzschean terms, but in Neoplatonic terms. For more on this point, the reader should consult Vivian Casper, “The ‘Veil,’ Neoplatonism, and Genre in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 29 (2007), 73–110. These views are not mutually exclusive; both the Neoplatonist and the Nietzschean agree that the world before our senses is illusory—the difference lies in the nature of the “real.” Platonists assert that true realty is the ultimate beauty of the Forms, while Nietzsche believed the real world too horrible for human perception to bear. 13 Qtd. in Long Day’s Journey into Night, 132. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23. 15 Eugene O’Neill, Letter to George Jean Nathan, in Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson Bryer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 506. 16 Qtd. In Miriam M. Chirico, “Moving Fate into Family: Tragedy Redefined in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24:1–2 (Spring/Fall 2000), 84.

164 Finis 17 See, for instance, J. Chris Westgate, “Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008), 21–36. 18 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 95. 19 Ibid., 125. 20 Such an interpretation is complicated by the fact that Jamie confesses to his father that he had hoped his mother would recover (see Act II). What is hope, if not resistance to the horrors offered by the world? Nevertheless, Jamie has learned, perhaps better than the rest, that hope is a fool’s errand insofar as his mother’s addiction is concerned. 21 Ibid., 109. 22 Michael Manheim, “The Stature of Long Day’s Journey into Night,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, edited by Michael Manheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 208. 23 Ibid., 114. 24 Richard Sewell, “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Crosscurrents 29:4 (Winter 1979–1980), 454. 25 Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, in The Complete Plays of Eugene O’Neill 1932– 1943, edited by Travis Bogard, 1988, 629. 26 Michael Manheim, “The Stature of Long Day’s Journey into Night,” 215. 27 This description of Mary’s eyes is reminiscent of the appearance of the dead sailors in Where the Cross is Made, as O’Neill describes the apparitions’ eyes as wide, staring “frightfully at nothing.” 28 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 170. 29 Ibid., 175.

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Index

Page numbers in N indicate Note. Alexander, Doris 65 Apollo 35–36, 154–157 Aristotle 29, 38–42, 70, 77, 80, 90–94, 106n8 Bentley, Eric 20–21, 27, 47 Bergson, Henri 58–65, 69 Bloom, Harold 146 Bogard, Travis 94, 145 Carroll, Noël 69, 102–103 catharsis 39–43, 90, 94 Christianity 31, 33, 63, 82, 96, 99–100, 108, 121, 158, 160, 162 Clark, Barrett 12, 21–22, 52, 55 cognitivism, literary 28, 30–33, 37–38, 42–43, 71n6, 127, 162 colonialism 105n3 community 61, 63, 117–118, 153, 159, 161–162 Darwin, Charles 48, 99 Deigh, John 52–53 Derrida, Jacques 108–109 difficult theatre 42–43, 140, 147, 154, 161–162 Dionysus 35–36, 62, 65 emotion: cognitivism 43, 49–53, 91, 93, 151n36; feeling theory 49–51; and knowledge 48–52, 58, 63, 65, 69, 90, 94 expressionism 13–15, 17, 19, 96–97, 103, 106n30

Falk, Doris 56, 100–101, 155 Freud, Sigmund 13, 24n55, 40, 46, 52–55, 57–62, 64–65, 67–70, 94–96 Gelb, Arthur and Barbara 75, 80 guilt 56, 67, 70, 100, 111, 113–123, 158, 160 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 30–32, 38, 43, 76 hope 10, 12, 17, 31, 34, 75–76, 79, 82, 86–87, 100, 120, 139, 145, 156 horror 32–37, 65, 94, 102–105, 128, 132, 134, 136, 140, 143–144, 147, 157–162 Hume, David 128, 131–135, 139–140, 153–154 humor 58–62, 66, 69 Ibsen, Henrik 12, 25, 97, 153 intoxication 35–36, 48, 86, 105, 139, 154–155, 157, 159 isolation 105, 146, 157, 159–163 James, William 50–54, 64, 70–71 Jung, Carl 13, 48, 52, 61, 70n3 Manheim, Michael 20, 160 melodrama 11–12, 18, 21, 26–27, 30, 42–43 Miller, Arthur 17, 37 Neal, Alex 128, 138, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 33–38, 40, 61, 64, 76–87, 94, 110, 123, 145–149, 153–154, 156–158, 161–162; Birth of Tragedy 33–35, 147, 155, 157; Gay Science,The 37, 85; Thus Spake Zarathustra 63, 78, 80, 82, 84, 89n50; Will to Power,The 37

176 Index O’Neill plays: Ah,Wilderness! 15, 18, 107n60; All God’s Chillun Got Wings 13, 95; Anna Christie 13, 47, 76; Chris Christopherson 13; Days Without End 15–16, 120–121; Desire Under the Elms 14–15, 119; Diff’rent 53–55; Dynamo 16, 104–105; Emperor Jones, The 13, 19, 90, 94–103, 161; Exorcism 13, 75–87, 114; First Man,The 56; Fog 154–159; Gold 56, 80; Great God Brown,The 14, 70, 80; Hairy Ape, The 14, 19, 47; Beyond the Horizon 12–13, 56–58, 94; Hughie 17, 107n60; Iceman Cometh,The 9, 16, 20, 79, 87, 105, 122, 145–146, 160; Lazarus Laughed 21, 58–59, 61–70, 80; Long Day’s Journey into Night 9, 16–17, 83, 87, 105, 114, 123, 128–130, 133, 135, 137–139, 141–142, 145–149, 153–162; Marco Millions 15, 87n8; Moon for the Misbegotten, A 16, 20, 105, 108, 114–124, 145; Mourning Becomes Electra 14–15, 105, 145, 158; Strange Interlude 13, 15, 104–105; Straw,The

76, 80, 87; Touch of the Poet, A 17; Where the Cross is Made 56, 102 performance, concept of 12, 96, 123, 136, 140, 142, 147–149, 153, 159, 161–162 Plato 28–30, 37–38, 40–42, 48, 68 Provincetown Players 10, 12, 19, 75, 102 psychoanalysis 19, 21, 52, 95, 104 psychology 9, 13, 15, 19, 39–40, 48–49, 53, 58–59, 90, 95–96, 128–129, 134, 142 realism 12–13, 17, 19, 28, 55, 96–97, 145 Schelling, Friedrich 30–31 Schopenhauer, Arthur 32–34, 36, 43, 147, 153, 158 Seneca 30 Socrates 28–29, 34–35, 48 Strindberg, August 12, 18, 146, 153 Törnqvist, Egil 34, 65, 80, 103–104, 145