The Birth of Tragedy and The Great God Brown

Abstract

The Birth of Tragedy and The Great God Brown MICHAEL HINDEN • EUGENE O'NEILL'S DEBT to the philosophy of Nietzsche, particularly his enthusiasm for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by now is a matter of record.! O'Neill discovered Nietzsche's writings in the spring of 1907.2 Later, in a letter to Benjamin De Casseres dated June 22, 1927, he wrote: '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 tan into it, through the bookshop of Benjamin Tucker, the old philosophical anarchist, when I was eighteen and I've always possessed a copy since then and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book.3 A copious note-taker, O'Neill eventually copied passages from some fifty of the book's eighty chapters;4 at Harvard in 1914 he even,struggled through a copy in the original German with the help of a German grammar and a dictionary.5 O'Neill's acknowledgement of Nietzsche's influence continued throughout his life. In his 1936 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he paid homage to Nietzsche as his mentor, acknowledging the importance of his influence as well as that of Sweden's own son, Strindberg: "For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains, in his sphere, the master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader.,,6 But if O'Neill's debt to Zarathustra is well known, the specific influence of The Birth of Tragedy on his plays has not yet been adequately studied. It is to be said first that documentation of O'Neill's earliest encounter with Nietzsche's exegesis on the origin of tragedy is rather difficult to assemble. Cyrus Day believes that O'Neill read the book along with Zarathustra during his New London days before the first world war,7 a perfectly reasonable 129 130 MICHAEL HINDEN assumption. Oscar Cargill, on the other hand, feels that O'Neill did not "adequately digest" The Birth of Tragedy until after he had written The Great God Brown. 8 Yet this view apparently is contradicted by Barrett Clark's account of meeting O'Neill at the Hotel Lafayette in New York in 1926 and watching him stuff "a worn copy of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy into his pocket" before hurrying over to the Greenwich Village Theater to watch a rehearsal of that very play.9 One thing certain is that in the playbill of The Great God Brown, produced later that year, there were two considerable quotations from The Birth of Tragedy.lO The remaining question, it would seem, concerns the year in which O'Neill first read the book or when it was that he first read it carefully. As noted earlier, specific evidence for the date of a first reading is unavailable. Yet it is difficult to believe that the young O'Neill, a confirmed Nietzsche enthusiast and already determined in 1914 to become "an artist or nothing,"U would wait more than a decade before consulting his favorite philosopher on the subject of tragedy and art. It now seems clear that what most fascinated O'Neill in The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche's view of the origin and symbolic meaning of Greek tragedy which Nietzsche associated with a spirit of irrational ecstasy growing out of the performance of a chorus of satyrs celebrating the ritual destruction and reunification of their god, Dionysus. To Nietzsche the Dionysian rituals of the Greeks symbolized an intuitive apprehension of what Schopenhauer had described as the eternal struggle of the suffering "world will." The tragic art created by the Greeks, argued Nietzsche, succeeded in imposing Apollinian form upon the tumultuous struggle of the will in its perpetual cycle of fragmentation and return to unity, the Dionysian hero representing a personal embodiment of this struggle - an individual powerfully striving for self-realization who unconsciously is driven to reveal the true nature of his identity as the embodiment of an irrational force. "In light of...