Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays by Doris V. Falk (review)

Abstract

64 MODERN DRAMA May All of this is written in a vigorous style, with powerful descriptive passages whose clarity and force evoke precisely the image the author desires. One is constantly aware that Artaud is a poet. Miss Richard's translation reproduces energetically the color and movement of the original, and occasionally even surpasses it. There are, undoubtedly, weaknesses in Artaud's arguments, and the theater he describes is perhaps an impossible one, but the conception is grandiose. The Theater and Its Double is stimulating and challenging, and will not cause luke wann reactions, for it is the work of a man convinced, who is sometimes overzealous and unfair. Certainly Artaud is right in many respects, and has given an incisive impulse in the right direction when he seeks a return to the magical religious sources of theater. "The true purpose of the theater," he tells us, "is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves." LEONARD C. !>RONKO EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE TRAGIC TENSION: AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY OF THE PLAYS, by Doris V. Falk, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1958, 211 pp. Price-. Perhaps the only dramatic resolution that Eugene O'Neill shaped with complete success was that of his own death, capped by the monosyllabic ego assertion "O'Neill" on his tombstone. For his plays are a series of powerful symbolic skirmishes between the unresolved components of the self. Sometimes one even gets the feeling that a play like Long Day's Journey Into Night is less a family portrait than it is one of those curious mirror studies of a single individual multiplied, or rather, we might say, a study in the refracted ego. The "tragic tension" of Miss Doris Falk's excellent monograph, is that which results from the clash of the various aspects of self, as they have been schematized by Dr. Karin Homey. The "charactology" of Homey, with occasional support from Eric Fromn, is employed in a sensitive, chronological analysis of O'Neill's plays, including a play of such recent release as A Touch of the Poet. Furthermore, the study is Jungian to the extent that O'Neill's characters seem to associate themselves with the universal subconscious, especially in its identification with the sea. While Miss Falk can approve of Dr. Philip Weissmann's diagnosis of the "sublimation of Oedipal drives" in O'Neill, hers is no psychoanalytical approach nor is she disposed to treat playas case history. Miss Falk is a literary critic with enough psychoanalytic equipment to stand her in good stead. She is notably sensible and restrained in her intent. Best of all, she suffers no illusions about O'Neill. She may observe, somewhat portentously, that "his heroes •.. are doomed to assert their humanity by a struggle with ghosts in the dark night of the soul," and yet she is frank to admit that O'Neill had trouble imparting that humanity. She is, I think, the first to touch on the real failure of O"Neill when she remarks, almost off-handedly on her first page, that "irony requires a detachment which he found impossible." It was the absence of irony, in an art form that subsists on it, that marked the failure of Eugene O'Neill. When Miss Falk can find "circles of ironic significance," they radiate from a dramatic situation like the curtain speech of Desire Under the Elms, when the Sheriff remarks "It's a jim-dandy farm, no denyin'." And she finds "the best explanation of the meaning of dramatic tragedy" in Smithers' final comment in Emperor Jones: "Gawd blimey, but yer died in the 'eighth 0' style, any'ow!" Always, the abomination of O'Neill's language, whether it is the crassly American little-boy speech or inept 1959 BOo.K REVIEWS 65 dialect! Even to drama, and perhaps especially to drama, we may apply Mallanne's dictum, "A poem is made, not of ideas, but words." Whatever Miss Falk may reveal about language or dramatic irony, however, is secondary to her business-like concern with the action and reaction of character in...