"Daddy Spoke to Me!": Gods Lost and Found in Long Day's Journey Into Night and Through a Glass Darkly

Abstract

"Daddy Spoke to Me!": Gods Lost and Found in Long Day's Journey Into Night and Through a GL·ss Darkly Thomas P. Adler "In our family we stammer unless, half mad, we come to speech at last." William Carlos Williams, "To Daphne and Virginia" Stockholm's Dramatiska Teatern has indeed been a very congenial stage away from home for America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist, mounting not just the premiere of Long Day's Journey Into Night in 1956, but also the first productions of A Touch of the Poet (1957), of "Hughie" (1958), and of More Stately Mansions (1962). Although Ingmar Bergman , Sweden's leading filmmaker as well as a theatre director of some renown, has never yet directed an O'Neill work for either stage or screen, he has "often quoted"—and therefore apparently values—the playwright's belief that "drama that doesn't deal with man's relation to God is worthless." As Bergman goes on to explain in a 1969 interview, "Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes down to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes. That's what O'Neill meant."l As Paisley Livingston comments, "In Bergman's reading of the O'Neill dictum, man's relation to God passes through man's relation to man."2 No one, however, has begun to explore fully the possible relationships (over and above their common indebtedness to Strindberg) THOMAS P. ADLER is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Purdue University, where he teaches dramatic literature and film. His next book, Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama, will be published early in 1987. 341 342Comparative Drama between O'Neill's plays and Bergman's films, although Michael Manheim does suggest in passing that Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978) "may well have been influenced by O'Neill's later plays, given their well-known popularity and availability in contemporary Sweden."3 Along with establishing some connections between O'Neill's Long Day's Journey and Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly which might particularize Manheim's general intuition that O'Neill be seen as influential on Bergman's art, an intertextual perspective, the later work seen as re-interpreting the earlier, can help audiences resee the play from the vantage point of its focus upon faith—losing faith, searching for and, perhaps, finding faith. Each work, Long Day's Journey and Through a Glass Darkly, is a play of four figures: three men, one of them father to the other two, and one of those two considerably younger than the other; and a woman, who is wife and either mother or daughter/sister. Both works are set by the sea. The young man in each—an incipient artist—has an inordinately close attachment to the woman (mother or sister), while the old man is a popularly successful but failed artist of a sort. In both, too, there is inherited illness or the threat of it: Edmund's consumption from his maternal grandfather and his tendency towards suicide from his paternal; Karin's mental instability through her mother. Of greater concern here, and ultimately what this essay works towards, are the links between the two women, which are underscored by certain physical and psychological symptoms : the nervous gestures; the over-sensitivity to sounds; the retreat to the upstairs room; the guilty turning away from others into the self; the living in two worlds. In previous discussions of both works, but maybe more especially so with Long Day's Journey, the centrality of the female character and of her faith (or crisis of faith) experience has been downplayed, perhaps in part because of the presence of an autobiographical and/or authorial figure who commands attention. If Karin's near continuous presence and her climactic vision, because of its disturbingly late placement in the film, help to confirm Bergman's focus upon her, Mary's virtual absence from the long last act of Journey—she comes on stage only in the ineffably beautiful yet unsettling coda—might tend...