by Susan Sontag
Second, Abel considerably oversimplifies, and I think indeed misrepresents, the vision of the world which is necessary for the writing of tragedies. He says: “One cannot create tragedy without accepting some implacable values as true. Now the Western imagination has, on the whole, been liberal and skeptical; it has tended to regard all implacable values as false.” This statement seems to me wrong and, where it is not wrong, superficial. (Abel is here perhaps too much under the influence of Hegel’s analysis of tragedy, and that of Hegel’s popularizers.) What are the implacable values of Homer? Honor, status, personal courage—the values of an aristocratic military class? But this is not what the Iliad is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the Iliad—as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find—is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral values, and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force. If the fate of Oedipus was represented and experienced as tragic, it is not because he, or his audience, believed in “implacable values,” but precisely because a crisis had overtaken those values. It is not the implacability of “values” which is demonstrated by tragedy, but the implacability of the world. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world, the collision of subjective intention with objective fate. After all, in the deepest sense, Oedipus is innocent; he is wronged by the gods, as he himself says in Oedipus at Colonus. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.
It is also untrue that Western culture has been on the whole liberal and skeptical. Post-Christian Western culture, yes. Montaigne, Machiavelli, the Enlightenment, the psychiatric culture of personal autonomy and health of the 20th century, yes. But what of the dominant religious traditions of Western culture? Were Paul, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, and Kierkegaard liberal skeptics? Hardly. Therefore one must ask, why was there no Christian tragedy?—a question Abel does not raise in his book, though Christian tragedy would seem to be inevitable if one stops at the assertion that belief in implacable values is the necessary ingredient for making tragedies.
As everyone knows, there was no Christian tragedy, strictly speaking, because the content of Christian values—for it is a question of what values, however implacably held; not any will do—is inimical to the pessimistic vision of tragedy. Hence, Dante’s theological poem is a “comedy,” as is Milton’s. That is, as Christians, Dante and Milton make sense out of the world. In the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity, there are no free-standing arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just, good, providential deity; every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrection. Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer. This moral adequacy of the world asserted by Christianity is precisely what tragedy denies. Tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world. So one might say that the final optimism of the prevailing religious traditions of the West, their will to see meaning in the world, prevented a rebirth of tragedy under Christian auspices—as, in Nietzsche’s argument, reason, the fundamentally optimistic spirit of Socrates, killed tragedy in ancient Greece. The liberal, skeptical era of metatheater only inherits this will to make sense from Judaism and Christianity. Despite the exhaustion of religious sentiments, the will to make sense and find meaning prevails, although contracted to the idea of an action as the projection of one’s idea of oneself.
The third caveat I would make is to Abel’s treatment of the modern metaplays, those plays which have all too often been thrown together under the patronizing label “theater of the absurd.” Abel is right to point out that these plays are, formally, in an old tradition. Yet the considerations of form which Abel addresses in his essays must not obscure differences in range and tone, which he slights. Shakespeare and Calderón construct metatheatrical jeux d’esprit in the bosom of a world rich in established feelings and a sense of openness. The metatheater of Genet and Beckett reflects the feelings of an era whose greatest artistic pleasure is self-laceration, an era suffocated by the sense of eternal return, an era which experiences innovation as an act of terror. That life is a dream, all the metaplays presuppose. But there are restful dreams, troubled dreams, and nightmares. The modern dream—which the modern metaplays project—is a nightmare, a nightmare of repetition, stalled action, exhausted feeling. There are discontinuities between the modern nightmare and the Renaissance dream which Abel (like, more recently, Jan Kott) neglects, at the price of misreading the texts.
For Brecht, particularly, whom Abel includes among the modern metadramatists, the category is misleading. At times Abel seems to use “naturalistic play” rather than “tragedy” as a foil for meta-theater. Brecht’s plays are anti-naturalistic, didactic. But unless Abel is willing to call The Play of Daniel a metaplay—because it has on-stage musicians, and a narrator who explains everything to the audience, and invites them to see the play as a play, a performance—I cannot see that Brecht fits very well into the category. And much of Abel’s discussion of Brecht is unhappily disfigured by callow Cold War platitudes. Abel argues that Brecht’s plays must be metaplays because to write tragedies one must believe that “individuals are real” and one must “believe in the importance of moral suffering.” (Does Abel mean the moral importance of suffering?) Since Brecht was a Communist, and since Communists do “not believe in the individual or in moral experience” (what does it mean, to “believe” in moral experience? does Abel mean moral principles?), Brecht lacked the essential equipment to write tragedies; therefore, dogmatic as he was, Brecht could only write metatheater—that is, make “all human actions, reactions, and expressions of feeling theatrical.” This is nonsense. There is no more moralizing doctrine abroad today than Communism, no more sturdy exponent of “implacable values.” What else is meant when Western liberals vulgarly call Communism a “secular religion”? And as for the familiar accusation that Communism does not believe in the individual, this is equally nonsense. It is not so much Marxist theory as the sensibility and historic traditions of the countries in which Communism has taken power that do not and never have held the so-called Western idea of the individual, which separates off the “private” from the “public” self, seeing the private self as the true self which only lends itself grudgingly to the activities of public life. Neither did the Greeks, the creators of tragedy, possess a notion of the individual in the modern Western sense. There is a deep confusion in Abel’s argument—his historical generalizations are mostly superficial—when he tries to make the absence of the individual the criterion of metatheater.
Admittedly Brecht was a sly, ambivalent guardian of Communist “morality.” But the secret of his plays is to be sought in his idea of the theater as a moralizing instrument. Hence his use of stage techniques borrowed from the non-naturalistic theater of China and Japan, and his famous theory of stage production and acting—the Alienation Effect—which aims to enforce a detached, intellectual attitude upon the audience. (The Alienation Effect seems to be mainly a method of writing plays and of staging them, non-naturalistically; its effect as a method of acting, from what I have seen of the Berliner Ensemble, is mainly to moderate, to tone down, the naturalistic style of acting—not fundamentally to contradict it.) By assimilating Brecht to the metadramatists, with whom he surely shares something, Abel obscures the difference between Brecht’s didacticism and the studied neutrality—the mutual cancellation of all values—which is represented by the true metadramatists. It is something like the difference between Augustine and Montaigne. Both the Confessions and the Essays are didactic autobiographies; but while the author of the Confessions sees his life as a drama illustrating the linear movement of consciousness from egocentricity to theocentricity, the author of the Essays sees his life as a dispassionate, varied exploration of the innumerable styles of being a self. Brecht has as little in common with Beckett, Genet, and Pi
randello as Augustine’s exercise in self-analysis has with Montaigne’s.
[1963]
Going to theater, etc.
THE theater has a long history as a public art. But, outside the provinces of socialist realism, there are few plays today dealing with social-and-topical problems. The best modern plays are those devoted to raking up private, rather than public, hells. The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.
The most notable example of weak-mindedness around at the moment is Arthur Miller’s new play, After the Fall, which opened the first season of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. Miller’s play stands or falls on the authenticity of its moral seriousness, and on its being about “big” issues. But, unfortunately, Miller chose as the method of his play the garrulous monologue of the psychoanalytic confessional, and falteringly designated the audience as the Great Listener. “The action of the play takes place in the mind and memory of Quentin, a contemporary man.” The Everymanish hero (remember Willy Loman) and the timeless, placeless interior setting give the show away: whatever stirring public issues After the Fall may confront, they are treated as the furniture of a mind. That places an awful burden on Miller’s “Quentin, a contemporary man,” who must literally hold the world in his head. To pull that one off, it has to be a very good head, a very interesting and intelligent one. And the head of Miller’s hero isn’t any of these things. Contemporary man (as Miller represents him) seems stuck in an ungainly project of self-exoneration. Self-exoneration, of course, implies self-exposure; and there is a lot of that in After the Fall. Many people are willing to give Miller a good deal of credit for the daring of his self-exposure—as husband, lover, political man, and artist. But self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. In this play, Miller’s self-exposure is mere self-indulgence.
After the Fall does not present an action, but ideas about action. Its psychological ideas owe more to Franzblau than to Freud. (Quentin’s mother wanted him to have beautiful penmanship, to take revenge through her son upon her successful but virtually illiterate businessman husband.) As for its political ideas, where politics has not yet been softened up by psychiatric charity, Miller still writes on the level of a left-wing newspaper cartoon. To pass muster at all, Quentin’s young German girl friend—this in the mid-1950s—has to turn out to have been a courier for the 20th of July officers’ plot; “they were all hanged.” Quentin’s political bravery is demonstrated by his triumphantly interrupting the harangue of the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to ask, “How many Negroes do you allow to vote in your patriotic district?” This intellectual weak-mindedness of After the Fall leads, as it always does, to moral dishonesty. After the Fall claims to be nothing less than modern man taking inventory of his humanity—asking where he is guilty, where innocent, where responsible. What I find objectionable is not the peculiar conjunction of issues, apparently the exemplary issues of the mid-20th century (Communism, Marilyn Monroe, the Nazi extermination camps), which Quentin, this writer manqué pretending throughout the play to be a lawyer, has recapitulated in his own person. I object to the fact that in After the Fall all these issues are on the same level—not unexpectedly, since they are all in the mind of Quentin. The shapely corpse of Maggie-Marilyn Monroe sprawls on the stage throughout long stretches of the play in which she has no part. In the same spirit a raggedy oblong made of plaster and barbed wire—it represents the concentration camps, I hasten to explain—remains suspended high at the back of the stage, occasionally lit by a spot when Quentin’s monologue swings back to Nazis, etc. After the Fall’s quasi-psychiatric approach to guilt and responsibility elevates personal tragedies, and demeans public ones—to the same dead level. Somehow—staggering impertinence!—it all seems pretty much the same: whether Quentin is responsible for the deterioration and suicide of Maggie, and whether he (modern man) is responsible for the unimaginable atrocities of the concentration camps.
Putting the story inside Quentin’s head has, in effect, allowed Miller to short-circuit any serious exploration of his material, though he obviously thought this device would “deepen” his story. Real events become the ornaments and intermittent fevers of consciousness. The play is peculiarly loose-jointed, repetitive, indirect. The “scenes” go on and off—jumping back and forth, to and from Quentin’s first marriage, his second marriage (to Maggie), his indecisive courtship of his German wife-to-be, his childhood, the quarrels of his hysterical, oppressive parents, his agonizing decision to defend an ex-Communist law-school teacher and friend against a friend who has “named names.” All “scenes” are fragments, pushed out of Quentin’s mind when they become too painful. Only deaths, inevitably offstage, seem to move Quentin’s life along: the Jews (the word “Jews” is never mentioned) died long ago; his mother dies; Maggie kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates; the law professor throws himself under a subway train. Throughout the play, Quentin seems much more a sufferer than an active agent in his own life—yet this is precisely what Miller never acknowledges, never lets Quentin see as his problem. Instead, he continually exonerates Quentin (and, by implication, the audience) in the most conventional way. For all troubling decisions, and all excruciating memories, Miller issues Quentin the same moral solvent, the same consolation. I (we) am (are) both guilty and innocent, both responsible and not responsible. Maggie was right when she denounced Quentin as cold and unforgiving; but Quentin was justified in giving up on the insatiable, deranged, self-destructive Maggie. The professor who refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee was right; but the colleague who did testify cooperatively had a certain nobility, too. And (choicest of all), as Quentin realizes while touring Dachau with his Good German girl friend, any one of us could have been a victim there; but we could as well have been one of the murderers, too.
The circumstances and production of the play are marked by certain perverse strokes of realism that underscore the bad faith, the have-it-both-ways temper of the play. That vast sloping stage painted slate gray and empty of props, the mind of contemporary man, is so pointedly bare that one can’t help jumping when Quentin, sitting much of the time stage-front on a box-like form and chain smoking, suddenly deposits the ashes in some mysterious pocket ashtray in the abutment. One is jarred again at the sight of Barbara Loden made up like Marilyn Monroe, displaying the mannerisms of Monroe and bearing a certain physical resemblance to Monroe (though lacking the fullness of figure needed to complete the illusion). But perhaps the most appalling combination of reality and play lies in the fact that After the Fall is directed by Elia Kazan, well known to be the model for the colleague who named names before the Committee. As I recalled the story of the turbulent relations between Miller and Kazan, I felt the same queasiness as when I first saw Sunset Boulevard, with its dizzying parody of and daring references to the real career and former relationships of Gloria Swanson, the old movie queen making a comeback, and Erich Von Stroheim, the forgotten great director. Whatever bravery After the Fall possesses is neither intellectual nor moral; it is the bravery of a species of personal perversity. But it is far inferior to Sunset Boulevard: it does not acknowledge its morbidity, its qualities of personal exorcism. After the Fall insists, as it were, to the bitter end, on being serious, on dealing with big social and moral themes; and as such, it must be judged sadly wanting, in both intelligence and moral honesty.
Since it insists on being serious, I suspect that After the Fall will seem just as belabored, trite, and dated in a few years as O’Neill’s Marco Millions, the second play in the Lincoln Center Repertory, does now. Both plays are disfigured by a distressing (though, one imagines, unconscious) complicity with what they profess to attack. The attack which Marco Millions launched upon the philistine values of American business civilization itself reeks of philistinism; After the Fall is a long sermon in favor of being tough with oneself, b
ut the argument is soft as mush. It is indeed difficult to choose between the two plays, or their productions. I don’t know which is more heavy-handed: Marco Polo’s Babbittish exuberance over the wonders of Cathay (“Sure is a nice little palace you got here, Khan”—Americans are crude and materialistic, see?) or the weird declamations, at times archly poetic and stilted, at times WEVD soap opera, of Miller’s hero Quentin (Americans are tormented and complex, see?). I don’t know which I found more monotonous, less ingratiating as an acting performance—Jason Robard Jr.’s depleted, gauche Quentin or Hal Holbrook’s hysterically boyish Marco Polo. I could hardly tell Zohra Lampert when she was the Bronxy chick who keeps running into Quentin’s head to slobber all over him for giving her the courage to have a nose job from Zohra Lampert when she was supposed to be that elegant lovelorn flower of the Orient, Princess Kukachin, in Marco Millions. True, Elia Kazan’s staging of After the Fall was stark and moderne and repetitive, while José Quintero’s staging of Marco Millions was tricky and pretty and had the advantage of Beni Montresor’s lovely costumes, though the stage was so badly lit you couldn’t be sure of what you saw. But the differences in the productions seemed trivial, when you consider that Kazan had toiled over a bad play, and Quintero over a play so juvenile that no production, however good, could redeem it. The Lincoln Center Repertory group (our National Theater?) is a stunning disappointment. It’s hard to believe that all its vaunted freedom from Broadway commercialism has begotten are passably acted productions of this wretched play by Miller, a play by O’Neill so bad it isn’t even of historical interest, and a fatuous comedy by S. N. Behrman that makes After the Fall and Marco Millions look like works of genius.