O "NEAL, Eugene(O "Neill, Eugene) (1888–1953), American playwright, Nobel Prize in Literature 1936. Born October 16, 1888 in New York. From childhood he accompanied his parents-actors on tour, changed several private schools. In 1906 he entered to Princeton University, but a year later he dropped out. For several years, O "Neal changed a number of occupations - he was a gold digger in Honduras, played in his father's troupe, went as a sailor to Buenos Aires and South Africa, worked as a reporter in the Telegraph newspaper. In 1912 he fell ill with tuberculosis, was treated in a sanatorium; enrolled at Harvard University to study drama under J.P. Baker (the famous "Workshop 47").
Two years later, the Provincetown Players staged his one-act plays - East to Cardiff (Bound East for Cardiff, 1916) and moon over the caribbean (The Moon of the Caribbees, 1919), where O'Neill's own impressions of marine life are conveyed in a harsh and at the same time poetic manner. After staging the first multi-act drama Over the horizon (Beyond the Horizon, 1919), which tells about the tragic collapse of hopes, he gained a reputation as a flamboyant playwright. The play brought O "Neil the Pulitzer Prize - this prestigious award will also be awarded Anna Christie (Anna Christie, 1922) and strange interlude (Strange Interlude, 1928). Encouraged, filled with creative daring, O "Neal boldly experiments, multiplying the possibilities of the scene. Emperor Jones (The Emperor Jones, 1921), which explores the phenomenon of animal fear, dramatic tension is greatly enhanced by the continuous beat of drums and new principles of stage lighting; V shaggy monkey (The Hairy Ape, 1922) expressive symbolism is strongly and vividly embodied; V Great God Brown (The Great God Brown, 1926) with the help of masks, the idea of the complexity of the human personality is affirmed; V strange interlude the stream of consciousness of the characters amusingly contrasts with their speech; in a play Lazar laughs (Lazarus Laughed, 1926) uses a form of Greek tragedy with seven masked choirs, and in ice seller (The Iceman Cometh, 1946) all the action comes down to a protracted drinking bout. O "Neil demonstrated excellent command of the traditional dramatic form in a satirical play Marco the millionaire (Marco Millions, 1924) and in comedy Oh youth! (Ah, Wilderness!, 1932). The value of O'Neill's work is far from being exhausted by technical skill - much more important is his desire to break through to the meaning of human existence. In his best plays, especially in the trilogy Mourning - the fate of Elektra (Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931), reminiscent of ancient Greek dramas, there is a tragic image of a man trying to foresee his fate.
The playwright always took an active part in the production of his plays, but in the period from 1934 to 1946 he moved away from the theater, concentrating on a new cycle of plays under the general title The saga of the owners who robbed themselves (A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed). O "Neil destroyed several plays from this dramatic epic, the rest were staged after his death. In 1947, a play that was not included in the cycle was staged Moon for the stepchildren of fate (A Moon for the Misbegotten); in 1950 four early plays were published under the title Lost Plays (Lost Plays). O "Neal died in Boston (Massachusetts) on November 27, 1953.
Written in 1940 based on autobiographical material, the play Long day fades into night (Long Day's Journey into Night) was shown on Broadway in 1956. The soul of a poet (A Touch of the Poet), based on the conflict between an immigrant father from Ireland and a daughter living in New England, was staged in New York in 1967. The processing of an unfinished play did not last long in 1967 on Broadway richer palaces (More Stately Mansions). A book was published in 1981 Eugene O'Neal at work (Eugene O'Neill at Work) with drawings by the playwright for more than 40 performances, it contains about a hundred creative ideas of O "Neill.
Composition
O'Neill became the central figure in US drama in the 1920s. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953) was born into an actor's family. In his youth, he was a sailor, played in the theater, worked as a reporter in a provincial newspaper. In 1913-1914 he wrote his first plays. In 1916, O'Neill joined the Provincetown Actors' Group, the so-called association of actors and playwrights, created in 1915 in Provincetown (Massachusetts) by progressive literary and theatrical figures (including John Reed and Michael Gold). Provincetown actors staged mostly one-act plays. O'Neill's plays were first staged in 1916. O'Neill drew the themes and images of the plays from the events of his life. It is no coincidence that many of the heroes of his first plays were sailors - the writer well remembered the hardships of his sailor life.
In those years, O'Neill was close to the labor movement, he is an associate of John Reed and Michael Gold. Already in the early work of O'Neill, the playwright's tendency to naturalism began to appear, which intensified in the 20s as he fell under the influence of Freudianism. But in the early 1920s, such plays as The Shaggy Monkey (1922), The Negro (1923, Russian translation of the play), and Love Under the Elms (1924) condemned money-grubbing, racism, and capitalist exploitation.
In The Shaggy Monkey, O'Neill strives in every possible way to emphasize the hardships of the life of a working man. The play begins with a scene in the cabin where the stokers live - it resembles, according to the playwright, a cage. Then the action is transferred to the stoker, where the flame escaping from the fireboxes illuminates the stokers - a picture of hell is created. Here, the desire to use symbolism, characteristic of O'Neill's dramatic technique, is revealed: the stoker represents the hell of capitalist exploitation. The next scene takes place on fashionable Fifth Avenue. The setting of this scene is a symbol of paradise for the capitalists. But, trying to convey the idea of the inhumanity of capitalist exploitation,. transforming a man into a beast, O'Neill shifts the focus from the inhuman conditions of the stoker's life to his characterization, demonstrating the mental inferiority of the hero.
The conditions for the stabilization of the United States in the 1920s gave rise to a whole stream of apologetic bourgeois literature that glorified the "prosperity" of bourgeois society. But the inexorably developing general crisis of capitalism gave rise to pessimistic schools, contributed to the wide use by American modernists of the experience of their European associates. First of all, psychoanalysis should be named here. The influence of Freudianism on American literature has taken many forms. Psychoanalytic terms have migrated into the lexicon of many writers, obscuring the real root causes of social phenomena; various works began to repeat psychoanalytic plots and literary clichés based on Oedipal and other Freudian complexes. Freudian. theories contributed to the emergence of new trends in modernist literature, becoming the epistemological basis of the novel "stream of consciousness" and other various schools and schools. The influence of Freudianism was also experienced by the literature of critical realism, even by some writers close to the ideas of socialism, such as O'Neill.
In the 1920s, the spread of Freudian ideas went under the banner of the struggle against the puritanical dogmas of the "exquisite tradition", which imposed prohibitions on the depiction of the intimate aspects of human life. The result of this was an eclectic mix among some writers, who even sharply condemned the bourgeois world order; socialist ideas with admiration for Freud.
Lectures I wrote: American drama - it is completely depressive. EUGENE ABOUT’NIL gives direction (the play "Shaggy monkey"(1922, Russian translation 1925). Mythological plays of American reality, the trilogy "The Fate of Electra" (Eugene O Neil. Trilogy. Mourning - The Fate of Electra). Eugene O Neil was in the hospital and had nothing to do at night reading, became interested and became a playwright. He has a tragic fate (Parkenson's disease when his hands are shaking). He takes a lot from Freud and his psychological analysis.
Eugene O'Neill is his main playLove under the elms! (briefly)
The action takes place in New England on the farm of Effraim Cabot in 1850.
In the spring, old Cabot unexpectedly leaves somewhere, leaving the farm to his sons - the eldest, Simeon and Peter (they are under forty), and Ebin, born in his second marriage (he is about twenty-five). Cabot is a rough, stern man, his sons are afraid and secretly hate him, especially Ebin, who cannot forgive his father that he has exhausted his beloved mother, loading him with overwork.
Father has been missing for two months. A wandering preacher, who came to the village next to the farm, brings the news: old man Cabot got married again. According to rumors, the new wife is young and pretty. The news prompts Simeon and Peter, who have long dreamed of California gold, to leave home. Ebin gives them money for the journey on the condition that they sign a document relinquishing their rights to the farm.
The farm was originally owned by Ebin's late mother, and he always thought of it as his own - in perspective. Now, with the appearance of a young wife in the house, there is a threat that everything will go to her. Abby Patnam is a pretty, full of strength thirty-five-year-old woman, her face betrays the passion and sensuality of nature, as well as stubbornness. She is delighted that she has become the mistress of the land and the house. Abby says "mine" with gusto when talking about it all. She is greatly impressed by Ebin's beauty and youth, she offers the young man friendship, promises to improve his relationship with his father, says that she can understand his feelings: in Ebin's place, she would also be wary of meeting a new person. She had a hard time in life: orphaned, she had to work for strangers. She got married, but her husband turned out to be an alcoholic, and the child died. When her husband also died, Abby even rejoiced, thinking that she had regained her freedom, but soon realized that she was free only to bend her back in other people's houses. Cabot's offer seemed to her a miraculous salvation - now she can work at least in her own house.
Two months have passed. Ebin is deeply in love with Abby, he is painfully drawn to her, but he struggles with the feeling, is rude to his stepmother, insults her. Abby is not offended: she guesses what kind of battle is unfolding in the young man's heart. You resist nature, she tells him, but nature takes its toll, "makes you, like these trees, like these elms, yearn for someone."
The love in Ebin's soul is intertwined with hatred for the intruder who claims the house and farm that he considers his own. The owner in it wins the man.
Cabot, in his old age, flourished, rejuvenated, and even somewhat softened in soul. He is ready to fulfill any request of Abby - even kick her son out of the farm, if she so desires. But Abby wants this least of all, she passionately longs for Ebin, dreams of him. All she needs from Cabot is a guarantee that after her husband's death, the farm will be hers. If they have a son, they will, Cabot promises her and offers to pray for the birth of an heir.
The thought of a son takes root deep in Cabot's soul. It seems to him that not a single person has understood him in his entire life - neither his wife nor his sons. He was not chasing easy money, he was not looking for a sweet life - otherwise why would he stay here, on the rocks, when he could easily settle in black earth meadows. No, God knows, he was not looking for an easy life, and his farm is rightful, and all Ebin's talk about her being his mother's is nonsense, and if Abby gives birth to a son, he will gladly leave everything to him.
Abby sets up a date with Ebin in the room that his mother occupied when she was alive. At first, this seems like blasphemy to the young man, but Abby assures that his mother would only want his happiness. Their love would be revenge on Mother Cabot, who was slowly killing her here on the farm, and in revenge, she would finally be able to rest in peace there in the grave. The lips of lovers merge in a passionate kiss ...
A year passes. There are guests in the Cabot house, they came to the celebration in honor of the birth of their son. Cabot is drunk and does not notice malicious hints and outright ridicule. The peasants suspect that the baby's father is Ebin: since the young stepmother settled in the house, he completely abandoned the village girls. Ebin is not at the party - he crept into the room where the cradle stands, and looks at his son with tenderness.
Cabot has an important conversation with Ebin. Now, his father says, when he and Abby have a son, Ebin needs to think about marriage - so that he has a place to live: the farm will go to his younger brother. He, Cabot, gave Abby his word: if she gives birth to a son, then everything after his death will go to them, and he will drive Ebin away.
Ebin suspects that Abby played a foul game with him and seduced him specifically in order to conceive a child and take away his property. And he, a fool, believed that she really loved him. All this he brings down on Abby, not listening to her explanations and assurances of love. Ebin swears that he will leave here tomorrow morning - to hell with this damned farm, he will get rich anyway and then he will return and take everything from them.
The prospect of losing Ebin terrifies Abby. She is ready for anything, if only Ebin would believe in her love. If the birth of a son killed his feelings, took away her only pure joy, she is ready to hate an innocent baby, despite the fact that she is his mother.
The next morning, Abby tells Ebin that she kept her word and proved that she loves him more than anything. Ebin doesn't have to go anywhere: their son is gone, she killed him. After all, the beloved said that if there had been no child, everything would have remained the same.
Ebin is shocked: he did not want the death of the baby at all. Abby misunderstood him. She is a murderer, sold herself to the devil, and there is no forgiveness for her. He immediately goes to the sheriff and tells everything - let them take her away, let them lock her in a cell. A sobbing Abby reiterates that she committed the crime for Ebin, she cannot live apart from him.
Now there is no point in hiding anything, and Abby tells her awakened husband about the affair with Ebin and how she killed their son. Cabot looks at his wife in horror, he is amazed, although he had previously suspected that something was wrong in the house. It was very cold here, so he was drawn to the barn, to the cows. And Ebin is a weakling, he, Cabot, would never go to inform on his woman ...
Ebin is at the farm before the sheriff - he ran all the way, he is terribly remorseful for his act, in the last hour he realized that he was to blame for everything and also that he was madly in love with Abby. He invites the woman to run, but she only sadly shakes her head: she needs to atone for her sin. Well, Ebin says, then he will go to prison with her - if he shares his punishment with her, he won't feel so alone. The sheriff arrives and takes Abby and Ebin away. Stopping on the threshold, he says that he really likes their farm. Excellent land! ______________________________________ This play is very reminiscent of Tolstoy's "Power of Darkness". Maxim Gorky valued him very highly. Nobel laureate for his work. A film about the works, productions of O. Nile. The content of these dramas showed the real underside of life, ordinary people, the working class.
EUGENE ABOUT’NILE(1888-1953), American playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1936. Born October 16, 1888 in New York. Born in the family of an actor. Since childhood, he accompanied his parents-actors on tours. In his youth he was a sailor, played in the theater. Eugene ABOUT’Nile- Una's father ABOUT’Nile, in 1943, who became the wife of director and actor Charles Chaplin, and grandfather of actress Geraldine Chaplin ......
Theater between two wars. Pirandello's plays reveal the growth of the irrationalism of intellectual drama in the conditions of the coming to power of fascism and the growth of military danger, the motives for the collapse of the personality and the loss of its stable individuality. At the same time, it is obvious that the game motives are strengthened, which introduce into the plays a sense of uncertainty and doubt about the ability of art to adequately comprehend and express real life. The French intellectual and poetic drama of the interwar period carries the same motives in a peculiar version. In the works of J. Girodou - "There will be no Trojan War", "Electra", J. Anuya - "Savage", "Antigone", "Lark" (the latter go beyond the period under consideration), and then, already in the post-war period, - Zh.P. Sartre - "Flies", "The Dead Without Burial" - a struggle is unfolding between the poetry and prose of bourgeois existence, the lonely romantic rebel and the "solid majority" of the townsfolk, armed with common sense. The work of these playwrights is largely "inspired" by theater masters - directors "Cartel" (Ch. Dullin, L. Jouvet, J. Pitoev, G. Bati) brings existential motifs to the performing arts, helps pave the way to the mass audience and express the anxieties and hopes of their time. It was in the theaters of the "Cartel" in the period between the two wars that the "re-theatricalization of the theater" takes place, creative emancipation and the acquisition of the most wide and sharply expressive stage style, which prepares the most important events, the venue for which will be the post-war stage, take place. During this period, the birth of American national dramaturgy takes place , the founder of which is Yu. O "Neill. Already his first plays, published in the collection Thirst (1914) and staged at the experimental theater Provincetown Players, showed the American audience the harsh underside of life. O" Neil's dramaturgy is characterized by the search for various forms, deep philosophy and life truth. All these qualities manifested themselves later in the plays of the leading American playwrights - T. Williams and A. Miller.
OPERETA AND MUSICAL competed at the time. O. Neil's language is rather heavy. Tennessee Williams(English 1983) - American novelist and playwright - went the path of political theater. “How do we live until the morning” And Yu.O. Nil “How do we live on” raises the question - 2 directions were combined. Influenced by the Great October Revolution and the 1st World War. At the very beginning of the 20th century (representation and experience), the director's theater prevailed, and before that there was exclusively acting.
O'Neill, Eugene (O'Neill, Eugene) (1888-1953), American playwright, Nobel Prize in Literature 1936. Born October 16, 1888 in New York. Since childhood, he accompanied his parents-actors on tours, changed several private schools. In 1906 he entered Princeton University, but dropped out a year later. For several years, O'Neill changed a number of occupations - he was a gold digger in Honduras, played in his father's troupe, went as a sailor to Buenos Aires and South Africa, worked as a reporter for the Telegraph newspaper. In 1912 he fell ill with tuberculosis, was treated in a sanatorium; enrolled at Harvard University to study drama under J.P. Baker (the famous "Workshop 47").
Two years later, the Provincetown Players staged his one-act plays - East to Cardiff (Bound East for Cardiff, 1916) and moon over the caribbean (The Moon of the Caribbees, 1919), where O'Neill's own impressions of marine life are conveyed in a harsh and at the same time poetic manner. After staging the first multi-act drama Over the horizon (Beyond the Horizon, 1919), which tells about the tragic collapse of hopes, he gained a reputation as a flamboyant playwright. The play brought O'Neill the Pulitzer Prize - this prestigious award will also be awarded to Anna Christie (Anna Christie, 1922) and strange interlude (Strange Interlude, 1928). Encouraged, full of creative daring, O'Neill boldly experiments, multiplying the possibilities of the scene. IN Emperor Jones (The Emperor Jones, 1921), which explores the phenomenon of animal fear, dramatic tension is greatly enhanced by the continuous beat of drums and new principles of stage lighting; V shaggy monkey (The Hairy Ape, 1922) expressive symbolism is strongly and vividly embodied; V Great God Brown (The Great God Brown, 1926) with the help of masks, the idea of the complexity of the human personality is affirmed; V strange interlude the stream of consciousness of the characters amusingly contrasts with their speech; in a play Lazar laughs (Lazarus Laughed, 1926) uses a form of Greek tragedy with seven masked choirs, and in ice seller (The Iceman Cometh, 1946) all the action comes down to a protracted drinking bout. O'Neill demonstrated excellent mastery of the traditional dramatic form in a satirical play Marco the millionaire (Marco Millions, 1924) and in comedy Oh youth! (Ah, Wilderness!, 1932). The significance of O'Neill's work is far from exhausted by technical skill - much more important is his desire to break through to the meaning of human existence. In his best plays, especially in the trilogy Mourning - the fate of Elektra (Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931), reminiscent of ancient Greek dramas, there is a tragic image of a man trying to foresee his fate.
The playwright always took an active part in the production of his plays, but in the period from 1934 to 1946 he moved away from the theater, concentrating on a new cycle of plays under the general title The saga of the owners who robbed themselves (A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed). Several plays from this dramatic epic O'Neill destroyed, the rest were staged after his death. In 1947, a play that was not included in the cycle was staged. Moon for the stepchildren of fate (A Moon for the Misbegotten); in 1950 four early plays were published under the title Lost Plays (Lost Plays). O'Neill died in Boston (Massachusetts) November 27, 1953.
Written in 1940 based on autobiographical material, the play Long day fades into night (Long Day's Journey into Night) was shown on Broadway in 1956. The soul of a poet (A Touch of the Poet), based on the conflict between an immigrant father from Ireland and a daughter living in New England, was staged in New York in 1967. The processing of an unfinished play did not last long in 1967 on Broadway richer palaces (More Stately Mansions). A book was published in 1981 Eugene O'Neill at work (Eugene O'Neill at Work) with drawings by the playwright for more than 40 performances, it contains about a hundred of O'Neill's creative ideas.
5.2. HERITAGE OF ROMANTICISM
Romanticism, as you know, has a special role in the development of American culture. In fact, it was the American romantics who were the creators of national literature. While European romanticism was a definite result of the previous development of national literatures, American romantics laid the foundation for Russian fiction and shaped national traditions. Having begun at least a decade earlier than in Europe, romanticism in the United States continues to play a very significant role in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Becoming, as in Europe, fertile ground for the emergence of critical realism, romanticism in America not only paved the way for the development of a new literary movement, but to this day remains a powerful national tradition, which modern artists again and again turn to. As M. N. Bobrova rightly notes in this regard, "there is not a single great (American. - V. Sh.) writer-realist who would not pay tribute to romantic aesthetics."
We find the romantic opposition of bourgeois civilization to patriarchal simplicity and natural life in the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck; the motif of romantic flight is in the works of a new generation of American realists - Kerouac, Capote, Salinger, Rhoads. In the books of these writers, a contrast arises between a society perverted by civilization and the pure and unsophisticated world of a child who has retained a "natural person" in himself.
All this, however, does not mean that one can speak of blind adherence of modern American writers to romanticism. Keeping in mind the historical and literary continuity, one should take into account the complex, bizarre interaction that the romantic tradition enters into with new philosophical and aesthetic concepts, the artistic method of writers, being refracted in new socio-historical conditions. It is in this regard that romantic tendencies in modern US literature are considered in the works of A. N. Nikolyukin, M. Mendelssohn, A. Elistratova, M. N. Bobrova.
The development of American drama was even slower than that of literature. If by the beginning of the 20th century in the United States there already existed a domestic literature that had become not only a national, but also a world heritage, then nothing so significant had yet been created in the field of dramaturgy, not to mention the existence of any specific national dramatic tradition. The formation and development of the national American drama, as is generally recognized, is associated with the name of Eugene O "Neill.
5.2.1. Traditions of romanticism in the dramaturgy of Eugene O'Neill Yu.
O "Neill created a new national theater, deeply comprehending and reworking the literary heritage of the past, in particular the experience of the romantics. A. Anikst is right, who notes in this regard: "The spiritual world and artistic aspirations of O" Neal cannot be understood if Edgar Poe is discounted with his gloomy fantasies, depicting the secrets of evil in human souls, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sharply posed moral problems to his compatriots, especially the theme of guilt and redemption, Herman Melville, whose image of a man who devotes his whole life to the search for a phantom, could not but be close to the great American playwright" .
All this objectively led to the fact that the romantic tradition is clearly traced in the work of the "father of realistic American drama." To a certain extent, some personal circumstances also contributed to this. O "Neill, as you know, was the son of a famous actor who became famous in the United States for playing the role of the Count of Monte Cristo in a romantic drama based on the novel of the same name by A. Dumas. The personality and fate of his father, as noted by most researchers of O" Neil's work, had a great influence on the playwright . This manifested itself, on the one hand, in the novice playwright's desire to break with the world of romantic illusion, on the other hand, in the tribute that O'Neill paid to romanticism in his work.
Y. O "Neill is one of the most complex and controversial artists not only in American but also in world dramaturgy. It is no coincidence that almost no researcher has given a final definition of the playwright's artistic method. As mentioned above, O" Neil himself compared his creative a laboratory with a boiling pot (boiling pot), in which he mixed and "boiled" all known artistic methods, creating his own fusion, which made O'Neill's theater original and unlike anything that was created by his contemporaries. in one of these methods,” he wrote in this regard. “In each of them I discovered advantages that I can use for my own purposes, having melted it in my own method.” An important component of this creative synthesis, in our opinion, was romanticism.
There are many moments in which the influence of romantic aesthetics on the work of the playwright can be traced. This is, first of all, a pronounced anti-bourgeois pathos, a denial of bourgeois civilization, which permeates all of O'Neill's work. At the same time, just like in the work of romantic writers, this protest is primarily of a moral and ethical nature, and the search for an ideal also leads him, as a rule, to the idealization of the patriarchal past, primitive forms of life.
Following the romantics, O'Neill introduces into his arsenal of artistic means a sharply defined dramatic conflict with a mysterious, fatal force that a person is unable to comprehend or overcome. Often these are the dark forces of his own psyche.
The heroes of O'Neil can compete with romantic characters in obsession, the power of feelings, the ability to challenge fate.
Just like the work of romantic writers, O "Neill's dramaturgy is imbued with personal motives: this and his own painful memories, the search for the meaning of life, the search for an answer to the sore questions of his time, embodied in the quest of his heroes, these are numerous episodes from his own biography, transferred to the pages of plays, images of people close to the playwright.
However, in this paragraph, we would like to dwell on one of the most essential principles of O'Neill's dramaturgy, which, in many respects, as it seems to us, determines the poetics of his plays - the principle of contrast, which, as you know, was most fully embodied in artistic work by writers - romantics. The whole world in O'Neill's dramaturgy is built on contrasts, contradictions: this is the opposition of various geographical environments, social strata of society, representatives of different races and different sexes, the opposition of day and night, sunset and dawn, past and present, primitive life and civilization, myth and modernity, dreams and reality, life and death.
It seems possible to conditionally distinguish three main types of contrast, which at the same time do not exist in isolation, but are intertwined and interact with each other. This is a spatial contrast, an internal contrast, or psychological, and philosophical, which largely determines O'Neil's understanding of human destiny, his concept of the tragic.
Let's look briefly at each of these points.
All space in O'Neill's plays is strictly delimited into opposing and often opposing spheres. This is a city and a village ("Love under the Elms"), a world limited by the framework of the house, and a wide world around ("Mourning is the fate of Electra", "A long day is leaving into the night", "The icebreaker is coming"). In some plays, such a spatial opposition is of a social nature: for example, in the play "Wings are given to all children of men" the street presented on the stage is divided by a line into two parts - whites live in one, in the other is black (later this technique will be used by D. Baldwin in his play "Blues for Mr. Charlie"), in the "Shaggy Monkey" the upper deck and the hold are opposed, symbolizing the world of the possessed and the exploited. However, the most characteristic spatial contrast in the plays of O "Neill is the opposition of land and sea, and this opposition is not unambiguous in various plays of the playwright, its meaning is constantly changing.
In the early one-act plays, the sea is the embodiment of a force hostile to man. O'Neil himself, describing these plays, wrote that their protagonist is the "spirit of the sea" (spirit of the sea). The sea is both a scene and a multifaceted symbol - "that ole devil sea" is called by the sailors of "Glencairn" The disturbing noise of the sea, the approaching fog, the dreary whistles of the steamer - all this is the real situation in which the sailors live, and the means of creating a tragic subtext, a mood of doom.
The theme of the sea as a hostile force acquires the most powerful sound in the first multi-act play "Anna Christie", which was a kind of result of earlier one-act sea plays. It is the sea that the old Swede Chris Christophersen blames for the fact that his life did not work out: “The sea is this old shert, it throws vile jokes with people, turns them into crazy ones” ^ 2,268]. All the men in Chris's family were sailors, and all died at sea - "that old demon-sea - sooner or later devoured them all one by one." At the same time, dry land for the sailors of the Glencairn is a promised land where they could find peace ("East of Cardiff", "Moon over the Caribbean", "In the Zone", "Long Way Home"). The dry land is the same for old Chris, who leaves his daughter on the shore so that she does not fall into the clutches of the "old devil".
At the same time, already in this play, the opposition of land and sea acquires a different meaning: for Anna, Chris' daughter, it is land that embodies all the most hated things that made her unhappy. The sea, on the contrary, brings her purification, here she is renewed, gains freedom. The sea appears in a similar function in many other later plays: it embodies the romantic dream, the ideal to which the worker of the earth aspires. The earth, irrigated with sweat and blood, takes all the strength, makes a person its slave. So, already in the play "Beyond the Horizon", written shortly after the sea plays, the hero, who had dreamed of sea voyages all his life, remains to work on a farm, where he is suffocating, as if in a cage. To an even greater extent, this is typical for the play "Love under the Elms", where the earth, the land becomes a symbol of a closed, limited space, which is greatly facilitated by the images of fossils - "solid earth", "stony soil", "hard ground", which are repeatedly repeated on throughout the play. Thus, the circle closes and the author's conclusion is quite clear: on the sea and on land, the same laws, hostile to man, which he cannot comprehend or overcome, operate everywhere. So this spatial contrast helps to clearly understand the playwright's intention.
An equally important role in O'Neill's plays is also played by the internal contrast that determines the psychological world of a person.
A person for O'Neill is a whole world that lives according to its own laws. In earlier plays, the inner world of a person is quite clearly mediated by the outside. The transformation of the objective into the subjective, the social into the psychological is very subtly shown in such plays as "Wings are given to all human children ", "Love under the Elms", "Shaggy Monkey". In later plays, the psychological world of O'Neill's heroes becomes more and more limited. Not being able to understand the important issues of his time, not seeing a way to further transform life, O "Neil closes on a person. The forces that determine the fate of people are transferred inward from the outside. This turning point is already outlined in the play "The Great God Brown", although there is still a place for a higher objective force, by joining which the hero can find a way out of the psychological impasse.The inner world of a person appears even more closed in the play "Strange Interlude", and, finally, in the play "Mourning - the fate of Elektra" rock from the category of objective completely passes into subjective. The person himself becomes the starting and ending point for the playwright: he himself is both a criminal, and a victim, and a judge. In this regard, the statement of J. G. Lawson is interesting, who writes: "His (O" Neal. - V. Sh. ) interest in character is more metaphysical than psychological. He strives for a complete escape from the real world, he tries to break with life, creating an inner "kingdom", spiritually and emotionally independent. " At the same time, this leads to the fact that the inner world of a person becomes more and more contradictory, bifurcated. The thought of the duality of the human personality, the struggle of opposing principles in the soul of the individual occupied the playwright throughout his entire career. Suffice it to recall his statement about "Faust": - "... I would make Mephistopheles wear the Mephistopheles mask of Faust, since almost all of Goethe's revelation consists in the fact that Mephistopheles and Faust are one and the same, Faust himself. And the playwright himself, in some of his plays, resorts to a mask, trying to more clearly express the struggle of opposite principles in the soul of the hero. On this occasion, he wrote: "... the use of masks will help the modern playwright best solve the problem, how to show the effect of the hidden contradictions of the spirit that psychologists continue to reveal to us" ^, 503]. O'Neill himself in various plays shows the complex and far from unambiguous relationship between the individual and his mask.
In the play "Lazarus Laughed" almost all the characters wear masks. The main characters wear half masks, while the visible part of the face and the mask contrast sharply. So here, in a schematic form, a psychological conflict is outlined, which will also be developed in detail with the help of masks in the play "The Great God Brown". Here, masks become the main means of revealing the playwright's intention. The characters wear masks in front of each other and do not recognize each other without masks. The tragedy of the protagonist, Dione Anthony, is that all his life he was forced to hide his sick lonely “I” under a mask, remaining misunderstood even by his own wife. The mask helped the playwright to give a visual embodiment of the psychological conflict: to show the struggle of the creative principle with the life-denying spirit of Christianity in the soul of the hero. Taking a mask helps to achieve the effect of a character's split personality.
In the play "Wings Are Given to All Human Children" masks are not directly used, but still one - a ritual Negro mask - hangs on the wall and, as it were, symbolizes the hidden essence of man. At the same time, the function of a mask here to a certain extent is performed by the color of the skin, which, as it were, suppresses the true essence of the characters, causing a psychological conflict.
Subsequently, O "Neill will abandon this purely conditional device. However, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe duality of the human personality, on the contrary, will deepen. In the Strange Interlude, the playwright uses lines "aside", in which the characters reveal their true selves.
In the play "Days Without End", in order to emphasize the struggle of conflicting impulses in the hero's soul, his double is introduced, with whom he is fighting. The symbolic death of the double at the end of the play signifies the reconciliation of the hero with himself.
In the play "Mourning - the fate of Electra" O "Neill also at first intended to use masks in order to "emphasize the impulses of life and death that move the characters and determine their destinies." However, later the playwright abandons the original plan, at the same time, the inconsistency, splitting of the human personality in this play reaches its climax. This is manifested, first of all, in the image of the main character - Lavinia Mannon. Throughout the play, she painfully struggles with herself, suppressing everything that is considered sinful according to the canons of puritan morality - natural sensuality, the desire to love , enjoy life.
At the same time, in this play, the internal psychological conflict also receives an external embodiment. Lavinia is contrasted with the image of her mother Christina. Christina embodies everything that Lavinia seeks to suppress in herself. In the remark accompanying the appearance of Lavinia, on the one hand, her striking resemblance to her mother is noted, on the other hand, Lavinia's desire to shackle herself, to suppress her femininity, to become as different as possible from Christina, is persistently emphasized. Hence her simple black dress, sharp movements, dry voice, demeanor, "reminiscent of the brave military." As the action develops, it becomes obvious that the conflict between mother and daughter is nothing more than a reflection of the heroine's struggle with herself, a clash of puritanical and natural principles in her own soul, the result of her split personality. This becomes quite clear in the last play of the trilogy, when, after the death of her mother, Lavinia becomes an exact copy of Christina, acts in her role. Such a seemingly unexpected reincarnation once again confirms the idea that Christina embodied everything that Lavinia herself unconsciously aspired to.
This interesting artistic device - the embodiment of internal conflict by juxtaposing contrasting characters - we also meet in other plays by O "Neill: the Mayo brothers in the play "Beyond the Horizon", Edmund and James ("Long day goes into night"), father and son ( "Love under the Elms"), Anthony and Brown ("Great God Brown"), etc.
The use of external and internal contrasts creates a special rhythm in O'Neill's dramaturgy, helps to understand his concept of the world order: clash and confrontation, alternation of contrasting-opposite principles creates movement both in the inner life of the individual and the entire universe. It is no coincidence that Reuben Light is the hero of O'Neill's play "Dynamo" - in search of a deity that has replaced the old god in the modern world, turns to the dynamo - electricity, seeing in it a life-giving force, a source of life, because what, if not electricity, is the most complete embodiment of the confrontation and unity of two opposite began - negative and positive charges.
It seems possible to conditionally define such an understanding of reality in the light of the eternal struggle of opposite principles as a philosophical contrast. This type of contrast is generalizing - it subordinates and organizes other types of contrasts in O'Neill.
Eugene O'Neill never created a universal model of the universe in his work, although he aspired to this. In 1928, he planned to write a cycle of plays under the general title "God is dead! Long live ...?" Although the cycle was never completely written, this title could be attributed to all the plays of the playwright, because throughout his work O "Neill painfully searched for an answer to the question of what replaced God in the modern world, what determines and subjugates human destiny. In search of an answer, O "Neill turns to various philosophical concepts, among which Nietzsche's philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung played the greatest role. At the same time, this does not mean that O" Neill completely accepted these concepts: in these theories he also borrowed what is most consonant with his own worldview - the clash and struggle of opposite principles.
Under the influence of Nietzsche, O "Neill was mainly at an earlier stage of his work. He was fascinated, first of all, by the idea of eternal repetition, based on the alternation of various phases, rhythms of life. It was most fully embodied in the plays "Fountain", "Lazarus laughed", "Great God Brown", written from 1922 to 1926.
The hero of the play "Fountain" - one of Columbus's associates, Juan Ponce de Leon, unsuccessfully tries to find the fountain of Youth, until, finally, he comes to the conclusion that Youth and Old Age - these opposite phases of a person's life - are nothing but the rhythms of Eternal Life, confrontation and the alternation of which creates its movement. "Old age and Youth are one and the same," Juan exclaims in insight, "these are just the rhythms of Eternal Life. There is no more death! I understood: Life is endless!"
The continuation of this thought is the words of the heroine of the play "The Great God Brown" Sibel, completing the last act and summing up the whole play: "Summer and autumn, death and peace, but always Love and birth, and pain, and again Spring, carrying the inescapable cup of Life !"
And, finally, this idea is most fully embodied in the play "Lazarus Laughed", which, in fact, is all constructed as an illustration of this concept. This idea is preached by Lazarus, the hero of the play, freed from the fear of death and cognizant of the highest meaning of existence: "There is eternal life in denial and eternal life in affirmation! Death is the fear between them!" he teaches.
As you can see, at first the idea of struggle and change of opposite principles in the universal cycle is generally optimistic, it is the basis of the playwright's faith in the constant progressive renewal of humanity. However, as the playwright's pessimism deepens, caused primarily by the inability to understand the objectively operating laws of social life and extreme disappointment in bourgeois civilization, the clash of opposite principles becomes more tragic and fatal in his plays. In this regard, psychoanalysis begins to play an increasingly important role in his work.
In the views of psychoanalysts, the playwright is also most attracted by the clash, the struggle of opposite principles - opposite impulses, opposing instincts. It is interpreted by O "Neal as eternal, insoluble, and therefore tragically dooming a person to suffering and death.
In the light of the theory of psychoanalysis, which the playwright is increasingly turning to, O "Neill interprets both the internal and external conflicts of many of his plays. However, at the same time, he does not remain a blind follower of Freud and Jung, as many Western researchers often try to present, but in a peculiar way reworks their ideas in accordance with his own worldview, giving them a generalized philosophical sound. Thus, the struggle of the feminine and masculine begins to play a large role in the artistic world of his plays. This conflict, which was also present in O'Neill's early plays, acquires a philosophical sounding : in the work of O "Neill, the concept of two deities is created - male and female, which are in a state of constant enmity. In order to understand the essence of this conflict, it is necessary to consider what place the image of the mother occupies in the work of O" Neal.
It is easy to see that this is a through image of many plays of the playwright, which allowed the advocates of psychoanalysis to declare the Oedipus complex the most important motive in the work of O'Neill. D. Falk, for example, notes on this occasion: "The Oedipus complex in the plays of O" an important method of motivating the plot, like the Delphic oracle in a Greek tragedy..." She considers all the artist's work to be nothing more than an expression of his own oedipal complex [ibid.]. Indeed, it would seem that many plays provide a basis for such conclusions. The tragic fate of the mother, her untimely death, cannot be forgiven to the father by the hero of his play "Love under the Elms"; mother, like a deity, worships Ruben Light ("Dynamo"); the mother is the subject of intense love and rivalry between the brothers in the play "The Long Day's Gone Into Night"; the feeling of guilt before the mother does not leave the hero of the play "The Moon for the stepsons of fate." And psychoanalysts find especially fertile ground for the analysis of all variants of the Oedipus complex in the play "Mourning - the fate of Electra".
At first glance, the plot, it would seem, gives us the right to talk about the motive of incest as the main theme of the tragedy: Adam Brant in childhood was deeply attached to his mother and hated his father, later he falls in love with a woman who looks like his mother. Lavinia - the heroine of the play, on the contrary, loves her father very much and is at enmity with her mother, while her brother is hostile towards his father, but is affectionately attached to his mother. All this allows individual Western researchers to present "Mourning - the fate of Electra" as an exemplary scheme of psychoanalysis.
In our opinion, these scientists rather use psychoanalysis themselves as a research method, unconditionally applying it to the analysis of O'Neill's dramaturgy, without trying to understand the artist himself. the Freudian meaning that they persistently try to ascribe to it.
In itself, the symbol of Mother Earth, Mother Nature is a direct borrowing from ancient mythology. He repeatedly appears in O'Neill's plays. In The Great God Brown, Sibel was the embodiment of Mother Earth. It is she who brings comfort and hope to the heroes of the play, replacing their mother. Nina Leeds, the heroine of Strange Interlude, says that the deity to be feminine, and at the same time she herself, as it were, is its incarnation in the play.In the play "Dynamo", the maternal deity is embodied for the hero in a machine that produces electricity, a life-giving force, to which Ruben returns at the end of the play, having failed to find a haven for himself in the modern world, which symbolizes the return to the mother's womb. In the play "Love under the Elms" mother and earth merge into an inseparable image. And, finally, in the trilogy "Mourning - the fate of Electra" this image-symbol becomes especially important. The image of the mother merges here with the theme of the blessed islands that all the heroes of the play dream of.This is a world of primordial harmony, in which man was an inseparable whole with nature, a lost paradise, to which modern alienated man seeks to return in his attempts to find his place in the universe. Thus, the motif of incest acquires a symbolic meaning: unity with the mother, return to the mother's womb - finding peace, harmony, "one's own place" (belonging).
The mother deity is opposed by the stern God the Father (hard God). He is worshiped by old Cabbot, he is feared by Nina Leeds, the deity of the Puritan Mannons. This is the god of Death - cruel and inexorable. He severely punishes all those who belong to the Mother's world.
So, the confrontation between the paternal and maternal principles develops in the dramaturgy of O "Neill into the confrontation between Life and Death. Mother is a symbol of life, a life-giving principle, a world of love that gives hope, it is a symbol of the harmony that the person of modern society has forever lost, God the Father is the god of the modern alienated individual. From this deity one cannot expect forgiveness, it deprives a person of all hope of renewal and rebirth. The only consolation he can give is death. It is this kind of consolation offered by Hickey ("Icebreaker Comes"), who has become the apostle of this severe deity. And if in the earlier plays of the playwright, faith in the final renewal of mankind in the eternal cycle of life softened even death, then in later plays it is the limit, a line that nothing else follows ("Mourning is the fate of Electra", "The icebreaker is coming"). And if earlier a person resisted her, now he often goes to meet her as the only consolation ("Shaggy Monkey", "Mourning - the fate of Electra", "Moon for the stepsons of fate").
The confrontation between the paternal and maternal principles also penetrates into the inner world of a person, where it is no less tragic. Ultimately, God the Father triumphs at O'Neil, which is a consequence of the playwright's deepest philosophical and social pessimism: he does not believe in the possibility of harmony, both in the external and in the inner world of man. modern man.
We tried to consider one of the basic principles of O'Neill's dramaturgy - the principle of contrast, which, it seems to us, the playwright owes much to the influence of romantic aesthetics. At the same time, this principle is refracted in its own way in the artist's work, combined with many new features of modern American literature, with various philosophical theories that became widespread in the 20th century. This principle largely determines the artistic method of Eugene O'Neill and therefore gives us the right to talk about the significant role of the romantic tradition in his dramaturgy. At the same time, this allows us to conclude that the realistic American drama, the founder of which was O "Neill, was formed not without a tangible influence of romanticism, which can also confirm the study of the work of other significant American playwrights of the 20th century, in particular, the work of his younger contemporary and a follower, Tennessee Williams.
5.2.2. Tennessee Williams Romantic Theater
Tennessee Williams lived and worked in years rife with political and social upheaval: the "stormy" thirties, when he was formed as an artist, World War II, the period of the Cold War and McCarthyism. But, being primarily a poet in his essence, he was much more interested in the fate of man than in the fate of mankind and stood up in defense of the oppressed individual, and not the oppressed class. All his work reflects the destructive influence of society on a sensitive, non-conformist personality, which allows us to define his position as a romantic one.
Starting with The Glass Menagerie, his first successful play, he seeks, by intertwining poetic images generated by his own imagination, with certain social, psychological, religious and philosophical concepts, to give a symbolic embodiment of human existence in the modern world. His favorite theme is the theme of the collision of subtle, sensitive natures with a cruel world. At the same time, the place and time of the action of his plays is extremely specific - this is modern America, against which the fates of little people who have fallen into the "trap of circumstances" develop. Using various artistic means, the author authentically recreates the atmosphere of the described period, the unique color of this or that corner of the USA: these are the poor quarters in St. on the one hand, and frenzied racism - on the other, the intoxicated backyards of New Orleans, the puritanical town and the Italian quarter, etc. Before us passes a whole string of inhabitants of the contemporary playwright America: the powerful "masters of life" and representatives of the bohemia, the inhabitants of the bottom and representatives of the middle estates, immigrants and those who consider themselves 100% Americans. The speech characteristics of these characters are also original. Williams constantly uses melodies and rhythms characteristic of this or that corner of America.
At the same time, the playwright often touches on the burning social problems of the time - the fate of the middle class in America during the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the problems of immigrants, etc. His favorite heroines are Amanda ("Glass Menagerie"), Blanche ("A Streetcar Named Desire ") Carol, ("Orpheus Descends to Hell"), are representatives of the fading southern aristocracy, and their tragedy is inseparable from the history of the American South. The theme of racism and everyday cruelty comes to the fore in the plays "Orpheus Descends" and " Sweet-voiced bird of youth". Williams writes about racism in America, exposes the notorious myth of success, shows the corrupting power of money. It is hard to disagree with the researcher E. M. Jackson, who writes: "I am absolutely sure that the main achievements of Tennessee Williams are connected with the fact that that his drama is directly relevant to the burning issues of our time. "Continuing in this spirit, it is not difficult to imagine Williams as a social, historical and generally realistic artist in the method. But the paradox lies in the fact that, although the living, socio-historical reality constitutes a powerful realistic layer of his dramaturgy, there is no genuine historicism in his work. The rights of M. M. Koreneva, who notes on this occasion that for Williams "<...>the achievement of human happiness is not connected with the resolution of social problems, but lies outside them, "which again brings us back to the romantic confrontation between man and society as two irreconcilable forces. Moreover, this is not so much a particular social system, but the entire material existence of a person. Himself the playwright wrote that he wanted to show in his work “the destructive influence of society on a sensitive nonconformist personality.” In each individual case, Williams’ evil is socially specific, but in general it appears metaphysically as an image of a cruel and merciless material environment that is unchanging in its hostility to man. This gives rise to many poetic images and symbols that have been embodied in the principles of plastic theater, developed by the playwright in the preface to the "Glass Menagerie", which includes the entire set of stage means - rhythm, plasticity of the actors' movements on stage, the intonation of their speech, musical and noise accompaniment. , costumes and scenery - all this has a symbolic meaning in Williams' plays and is, in fact, an audiovisual embodiment of his poetic worldview. So, often quite real furnishings become symbols of an environment hostile to a person; they seem to live their own inner life, pose a hidden threat, portend evil. The trellised heaps of stairs in the Glass Menagerie look ominous; the cleanliness of the dressing gown of the nurse who came to take Blanche to the lunatic asylum seems ominously out of place ("A Streetcar Named Desire"); an artificial palm tree sticks out ominously from the tub in the Torrens' shop ("Orpheus..."); and even in the beauty of the rose bush there is something ominous ("Inedible supper") - sinister - this epithet the playwright uses especially often in stage directions for his plays. Mosquito nets hang down on the veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel (Night of the Iguana) like gigantic nets, in which a person is irretrievably entangled.. Terrible, like a product of a nightmare, ugly kokaluni birds overcome the losing mind Nest and gay Frolaine from the play of the same name.
The playwright also intensively uses sound symbolism: “the wind howls plaintively like a cat”, “rusty hinges creak” (“Inedible Dinner”), the roar of an approaching locomotive becomes a symbol of impending disaster in the plays “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “Orpheus Descends into Hell” Approximately the same function is performed by the sharp whistles of a sea launch in "Gne-diges Froline". Thus, the social-concrete is dissolved in a generalized image of a hostile environment, which ultimately destroys the individual. The images of evil in many of Williams's works are static, as well as negative characters This confirms the idea of the immutable nature of the world, where all the best is doomed to perish, and causes the conflict between the spiritual personality and the cruel, unspiritual world that repeats itself in different variations.
The world of good in Williams' plays also receives its visual and symbolic embodiment. Pastel dresses are worn by Laura, Amanda, Blanche, Alma, Hannah; Val is wearing a snakeskin jacket, symbolizing his rebellious spirit. The lyrical scenes take place in subdued lighting, accompanied by musical accompaniment. The main characters are accompanied by images of the sublime, pure, beautiful. Transparent glass little animals, a mythical unicorn, a blue rose are Laura's attributes; Blanche comes from "Dream" - that was the name of her family estate; she came to New Orleans for her star - Stella, that's her sister's name; the tram "Desire" brings her. Alma is accompanied by Gothic images - a cathedral, a white statue of an angel, personifying Eternity, church singing.
In addition, at the most emotionally intense moments, the characters in Williams' plays begin to speak in an elevated style, reminiscent of blank verse. Suffice it to recall Val's monologue about the blue bird, Alma's monologue about the Gothic cathedral.
The bearer of spirituality, like the Romantics, becomes a poet, an artist who is sensitive, therefore, according to Williams, "the most vulnerable element of our society." Poetry is a defining quality in the characterization of heroes. All of them are poets, musicians, artists. Tom Wingfield ("The Glass Menagerie") is a poet, as is Hannah's grandfather ("The Night of the Iguana") - "the oldest living poet"; Blanche ("A Streetcar Named Desire") - an excellent musician, teacher of literature; Hannah ("Night of the Iguana") and Wee Talbot ("Orpheus Descends to Hell") - artists; Alma ("Summer and Smoke") -singer; Val (" Orpheus descends into hell") - a poet and musician, Sebastian Winable ("Suddenly last summer") - a poet; Laura, Amanda, Carol, not having a direct relation to art, have an artistic perception of the world. And all these heroes are powerless before the world of evil, from which they strive in vain to escape. Therefore, one of the key motifs of Williams' work is the motif of romantic flight. In his poem "Pulse" Williams writes:
and all fox like men,
and all hunted men
we are all like foxes:
both on me and on you -
everyone is being hunted
Subsequently, the artist found a very precise definition of his heroes - fugitive kind - "fugitives" - which is repeatedly found both in poetry and in Williams' prose. The theme of flight and persecution becomes the main one in the poem "Foxes".
I run" - cried the fox, in circles,
Narrower, narrower still
Across the desperate hollow
Skirting the frantic hill.
"And shall till my brush hangs
Flame at hunter's door
Continue this fatal return
To places that failed me before"
Then with his heart breaking
The lonely passionate bark
Of the fugitive fox rank out clearly
As bell in the frosty dark
Across the desperate hollow,
skirting the frantic hill,
Calling the pack to follow
A pray that escaped them still.
"I'm running," shouted the fox, - in circles,
All narrowing them, narrowing,
Through the hollow of despair
Furious passing the hill;
"And I will run like that, bye, by fire
My tail will not lie at the door of the catcher,
Return fatal continue to
That they betrayed me more than once!"
The heart of a fugitive beats with anguish,
Lay of loneliness and passion
The surroundings are so clear
Like bells ringing in the frosty haze -
Through the hollow of despair
Furious passing the hill
The fox calls the whole pack behind him,
Whose victim will he soon become
In dramaturgy, this theme is heard in almost every play. The thirst for romance and the unwillingness to come to terms with the philistine existence are driven from the house of Tom Wingfield ("The Glass Menagerie"), but in his memoirs he repeats again and again this "fatal return to places that have betrayed him more than once". His mother Amanda, sister Laura and Blanche Dubois are trying to escape the ruthless reality by escaping into the world of illusions. The heroes of "Camino Real" are fleeing from the kingdom of darkness into terra incognita. Trying to escape from the hell of the American South Leidy and Val ("Orpheus descends into hell"). Val, like the fox from the poem of the same name, strives to preserve freedom at all costs, but becomes a victim of persecution by the sheriff and his pack. The poetic metaphor gets a literal embodiment here - their entrance to the stage is preceded by a dog barking, and one of the sheriff's deputies is called Dog.
Like the hunted fox and Chana Wayne from Sweet Bird of Youth. After long wanderings, he returns to the places where he was once happy. But this return becomes fatal for him: here a pack of pursuers is also waiting for him, ready to tear the fugitive to pieces. The hero of the play "Night of the Iguana" Shannon, who is trying to hide from the angry old maiden teachers chasing him, and Sebastian Vineble ("Suddenly Last Summer"), who is first pursued and then literally torn to shreds by hungry teenagers, find themselves in a similar position. Thus, most of the heroes of Williams are likened to driven animals, which are being hunted and who are waiting for imminent reprisals.
As for the Romantics, personal experience was for Williams a means of objectifying and universalizing subjective experiences. From his personal experience, familiar environment, he creates a microcosm that crystallizes human experience as such. One of the facts of national history that he took very much to heart was the decline of the old South. He laments the passing of aristocratic culture and its replacement by crude material interests. Amanda, Blanche, Carol, Alma - the last representatives of this dying world - are not able to resist lack of spirituality and cruelty, and therefore are doomed to extinction, like moths, about which Williams writes in his poem "Lament for Moths" In "Lament" the artist creates an image moth as a symbol of everything refined and beautiful, doomed to death in a rough world:
A Plague has stricken the moths
The moths are dying
Their bodies are flakes of bronze
On the carpet lying.
Enemies of the delicate everywhere
Have breathed a pestilent mist
Give them, o, mother of moths and
Strength to enter this heavy world
For delicate were the moths and badly
Here in a world by mammoth
figures haunted
A plague of moths struck
The moths are dying.
Their bodies are flakes of bronze -
They fall on carpets.
The enemies of the refined are everywhere
Filled the air with their deadly
breath.
Oh mother of moths and mother of men, give them
It's hard to return to this world again,
For the moths were tender and so needed
In a world ruled by mammoths
The image of the moth is implicit in many of Williams' plays. All his favorite heroines are fragile and graceful - delicate. He writes about Blanche: "there is something reminiscent of a moth in her fragile beauty, her white suit with frills on her chest." About Alma: "There is some amazing fragile grace and spirituality in her." She is wearing a pale yellow dress. And in her hand is a yellow umbrella. The playwright compares Laura's thin shoulders with wings. Hana looks airy (ethereal) and is also dressed in light colors.
The theme of the collapse of the ideal of fragile, defenseless beauty sounds especially clear in the plays "Glass Menagerie", "Tram" Desire", "Summer and Smoke", "Night of the Iguana". the triumph of cruelty and violence, about the threat to all spiritual values, which lies in brute material force. We find the most striking embodiment of this "mammoth-like" beginning in Stanley Kowalski. A stable association with this image arises already in the characterization given by Stanley Blanche: "He behaves like an animal, he has the habits of an animal! .. There is even something subhuman in him - something that has not yet reached the human level! .. Thousands of years have passed, and here he is Stanley Kowalski - a living fragment of the Stone Age! This is where the moth plague comes in. The mammoths - those who are confident in their right to be strong - Stanley Kowalski, Sheriff Jabe Torrance, Papa Gonzales, Boss Finley, Mrs. Vinable - with methodical cruelty destroy those who refuse to accept their standards of existence. . In the poetic perception of Williams, modern society is dominated by "mammoth-like", which, with their deadly breath, destroy, like a plague, not only fragile moths, but threaten the entire wealth of the spiritual culture of mankind.
The poetic allegory of this terrible world, where the souls of people are buried under the weight of gold and precious stones, is given by the artist in the poem "Orpheus descends into hell":
They say that the gold of
the under kingdom weighs so
that heads cannot lift
beneath the weight of their crowns,
hands cannot lift under jewels,
braceleted arms do not have
the strength to beckon.
How could a girl with
a wounded foot move through it?
that the atmosphere of that
kingdom is suffocatingly
weighed by dust of rubies,
antiquity's dust that comes from
the rubbish together of jewel and
metal, gradual, endless
weight that can never be lifted...
How could a shell with a quiver
Of strings break through it?
They say that in the kingdom of the underworld
gold is so hard
that heads cannot rise
from the weight of the crowns,
hands in bracelets
powerless to sign.
Could the girl with the wounded
walk through there?
that the atmosphere of this kingdom
full of heavy dust of rubies,
the dust of centuries
what comes out
from rubbing precious stones
with metal, gravity,
from which there is no escape...
Could a vessel with fluttering strings
Break through it?
The second part of the poem describes the power of Orpheus's art, which worked miracles, "making gorges and forests respond to sounds, straightening river currents, as they unbend a bent arm at the elbow." But the world of harmony is irretrievably lost by Orpheus, who descended into the underworld, and the poem ends with the recognition of the inevitability of his defeat:
For you must learn
what we have learned
that some things
are marked by their nature
to be completed
but only long for and
sought for a while and abandoned
Now Orpheus crawl
About shamefaced fugitive
back under the crumbling
broken wall of yourself,
for you are not stars,
sky-set in the shape of a lyre,
but the dust of those who have been
dismembered by Fuaies!
'Cause you have to understand
what we all have already comprehended - there are things,
which by its very nature
to be implemented is not given,
you can aspire to, desire,
and finally give them up
So crawl, Orpheus,
oh poor fugitive
crawl back under the rubble
own essence,
for you are not a constellation in heaven
in the form of a lyre,
but only the ashes of those
who were torn to pieces by the Maenads
The whole poem is built on a sharp contrast between the images of gravity, which here are gold and precious stones, their hyperbolic heap, which becomes sinister, does not allow a person to move, breathe, and images of fragility - a girl with a wounded leg, a vessel with fluttering strings. According to the artist, the death of fragile beauty is inevitable, and all his plays confirm this.
It is quite obvious that this poem is most directly related to the play of the same name, in which the declared poetic image is concretized, transferred to a socially concrete soil. At the same time, this poem creates a generalized image of evil, hell, the various hypostases of which we see in other plays of the playwright.
As a romantic, Tennessee Williams failed to find his ideal in real life, therefore, as we have shown above, he connected it with ancient and biblical images. His favorite motifs are the crucifixion of Christ, the Eucharist, self-sacrifice, the battle of angels; favorite images-archetypes - Christ, Saint Sebastian, Virgin Mary, Orpheus, Eurydice. Sometimes he turns to literary archetypes - Don Quixote, Lord Byron, Casanova, Marguerite Gauthier, but they all personify humanism and love.
This is how the romantic concept of the world of Tennessee Williams is built: there is a constant clash of good and Evil, Love and Death, and these categories receive a universal sound - this is the eternal "battle of angels" over people's heads. This image, which gave the name to one of the plays (the first version of "Orpheus"), is first found in poetry in the poem "Legend". It begins with a description of the meeting of lovers, which clearly evokes associations with Adam and Eve in paradise, and ends with these lines:
The crossed blades shifted,
the wind blew south, and forever
the birds, like ashes, lifted
away from that hot center.
But they, being lost,
Could not observe an omen -
The hot, quick arrow of love
While metals clashed
A battle of angels above them,
And thunder and storm.
Crossed blades shifted
the wind blows south and the birds are forever,
rise like ashes,
rushing away from the burning center.
But doomed
They cannot see the signs -
They only feel
Hot and fast arrow of love
While the swords closed:
Above them is the battle of angels,
And thunder and storm.
At the same time, there is a danger here of falling into the other extreme - to present Tennessee Williams as a complete romantic, which would also be wrong. The fact is that the material principle, which his heroes are unable to resist, exists not only in the outside world, but also in themselves. That's why Blanche drops her hands helplessly and stops resisting Stanley when he tells her: "Come on, Blanche, we made this date for each other from the very beginning" - at this moment she realizes that she is fighting not only with Stanley, but also with herself . A similar internal split is present in many other heroes of Williams, who are sometimes torn between the imperative of the spirit and the call of the flesh. This, in turn, allows us to speak of a rather strong influence of naturalism on the work of the playwright.
All of the above makes it possible to conclude that the romantic heritage is strongly felt in the work of the two major representatives of the American drama of the 20th century. It manifests itself both in the form and in the content of their works, at the level of themes, conflicts, figurative system and general attitude. At the same time, romanticism far from exhausts their creative method; bizarrely intertwined with other aesthetic and philosophical trends and the artists' own vision, it contributes to the creation of original art forms.
Of course, Eugene O "Neill and Tennessee Williams are not the only American playwrights who were affected by the influence of romanticism. As we have already noted, romantic tendencies can be clearly seen in the historical plays of Anderson and Sherwood, William Inge was called "Broadway romantic" by Vitaly Wolf; romanticism is also present in the plays Saroyan and some other modern American authors, however, it was in the dramaturgy of O "Neill and Williams that he became a powerful component of the poetics of their plays throughout their work.
Introduction
Chapter I. The philosophy of tragedy by Y. O "Neal 23
Chapter II. The tragic universe of Y. O "Neal
Part 1. Themes of sacrifice and doom: "Emperor Jones", "Wings are given to all the children of God", "Moon for the stepchildren of fate" 55
Part 2. "Hopeless": "Icebreaker Coming" 90
Conclusion 116
Bibliography 124
Introduction to work
The playwriting of Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) played a decisive role in the development of American drama and American theater of the 20th century as a whole. ONil creates a theater that breaks with a purely entertaining, pseudo-romantic tradition, on the one hand, and several provincial plays of national color, on the other. For the first time on the American stage, a high tragedy manifests itself, which has not only a national, dramatic, but also a general literary world sound.
O "Neill is one of the greatest tragedians of the 20th century. Close attention to the tragic in art and modern reality in general (1910s - 1940s) was the reason that the playwright never actually turned to another genre. Tragedy became for his most adequate form of embodiment of artistic and philosophical ideas.At the same time, his stage language is extremely rich: the signs of expressionism coexist in it with the style of the theater of masks, the traditions of poetic theater - with the distinctive features of psychological drama.
One can outline a certain range of problems of interest to O'Neill. A characteristic feature of his plays, not without reason, is the tragic discord between dream and reality. Usually this situation leads to the loss of illusions, the impossibility for a person who keeps faith in a certain ideal to find his place in the surrounding reality O'Neil turns out to be a cast of society
the family is that compressed space where various conflicts rage: between fathers and children, husband and wife, conscious and unconscious, sex and character. Their origins are rooted in the past, with the tragic inevitability of subjugating the present. Former guilt requires atonement, and often the characters in plays are forced to take responsibility for a sin that was not committed by them. Hence the additional dimensions of both the tragic conflict and the philosophy of tragedy he defined about Nilov. The hero is in a struggle with himself, with his calling, nature, God.
The commonality of the problematics indicates that the stylistic richness and diversity of the plays is not accidental. O "Neill is one of the most seeking authors of the theater of the 20th century. His search was accompanied by creative crises and even the threat of failure. Target our dissertation is to prove that O "Neil sees tragedy as a more than once and for all established, "canonical" genre with a certain theme and means of its theatrical embodiment. Modernist tragedy requires fundamental eclecticism from its creator, the ability to creatively comprehend a variety of views on the tragic, for in order to offer a new look at the purpose of this ancient type of drama. This is all the more true in relation to O'Neill: his work really allows us to talk about a completely original philosophy of tragedy. The focus of our attention is not so much tragedy as a genre, but about the "Nil's" version "of the tragedy of a man of the 20th century.
The term "philosophy of tragedy", borrowed by us from Russian thinkers (N. A. Berdyaev, Lev Shestov), allows us to point out those aspects of O "Neill's dramaturgy, which, in our opinion, have not yet been given
enough attention, while they form the core of the artistic
"* world created by an American writer.
In the work of 1902 "On the Philosophy of Tragedy. Maurice Maeterlinck" Berdyaev claims that Maeterlinck understands the innermost essence of human life as a tragedy: "The tragic worldview of Maeterlinck
And »imbued with deep pessimism, he sees no way out and reconciles with life
" "only because "the world can be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon."
Maeterlinck believes neither in the power of the human will, actively recreating life, nor in the power of the human mind, knowing the world and illuminating the path "1. It is important that, speaking of the philosophy of tragedy, Berdyaev focuses on the worldview of not a thinker, but a playwright, for
і" of which philosophizing is not an end in itself, but an organic component
actual artistic pursuits. "Man has gone through a new experience, unprecedented, lost ground, failed, and the philosophy of tragedy must process this experience" 2 - we read in the work "Tragedy and Ordinary" (1905). The emphasis, we think, is made precisely on the artistic processing of experience, and, importantly, the experience of the individual. The playwright must find an adequate form for the embodiment of the tragedy of a particular person, his contemporary.
Shestov draws attention to the connection between the philosophy of tragedy and concrete human destiny in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903). Like Berdyaev, he speaks of an "unprecedented" experience: "There are
1 Berdyaev N. A. To the philosophy of tragedy. Maurice Maeterlinck // Berdyaev N. A. Philosophy of creativity,
culture and arts: In 2 vols. - Vol. 1. - M .: Art, 1994. - S. 206.
2 Berdyaev N. A. Tragedy and everyday life // Ibid. - S. 220.
an area of the human spirit that has not yet seen volunteers: people go there only involuntarily. This is the realm of tragedy. A person who has been there begins to think differently, feel differently, desire differently.<...>He tries to tell people about his new hopes, but everyone looks at him with horror and bewilderment "3. The acquisition of new knowledge about the terrible and mysterious aspects of life comes at a high price, threatens with universal alienation. Nevertheless, it is necessary. Tragedy, according to Shestov , inevitably leads to a "reassessment of all values", which means it does not allow one to be satisfied with ready-made truths, provokes one to search for one's own "truth". Thus, according to Shestov, the "philosophy of tragedy" opposes the "philosophy of everyday life", that is, an uncreative attitude towards life.
The term "philosophy of tragedy" is also convenient because it does not exclude paradoxicality, ambiguity in understanding the tragic. For O "Neill, in the first place, of course, is not the strict systemic nature of his conclusions, but artistic truth. His statements about tragedy may seem contradictory at first glance. But, dressing his ideas in images, he brings them to the fore through stage symbols called not to postulate the truth, but only to anticipate it.
The style of the term, it seems to us, corresponds not only to the specifics of Nil’s worldview, which is essentially post-romantic, post-Nitzschean, but also to the general movement of Western culture at the turn of the century - from symbolist sophistication (aesthetics of reticence) to art more personalistically accentuated. After all, the philosophy of tragedy "-
Shestov L. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Philosophy of tragedy. - P.: Ymca-Press, 1971. - S. 16.
a phenomenon closely associated with the neo-romantic idea of a person who creates his own code of conduct, his religion and mythology in order to free himself from the power of everyday life. It is all the more appropriate to study the "philosophy of tragedy" of the playwright, whose artistic searches, organically growing out of the culture of the turn of the century, are connected with the most important question posed by the new century - the question of the existential nature of man, the possibility of realizing his freedom. This cultural continuity is indicated by the Russian researcher V. M. Tolmachev: “The neo-romantic idea of personality in the 20th century is most consistently represented in philosophy (M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre) and existentialist literature (E. Hemingway, A. Camus), where the value of a personal act, albeit negatively expressed, is given against the background of the "death of the gods", a collision with the elements, "nothing", "absurdity"" 4 .
So, the scientific novelty of the dissertation is determined by the fact that the work of the American playwright is viewed through the prism of the "philosophy of tragedy". Accordingly, the genre features of the tragedy are beyond our attention. Rather, the canons of the genre are interesting to us only to the extent that they allowed O "Neill to realize his ideas as a philosophizing artist. O" Neil is a tragedian who independently creates the laws according to which his artistic universe exists.
The most authoritative researchers of O "Neill's dramaturgy (J. Raleigh, O. Cargill, E. Tornquist, T. Bogard) traditionally divide his work into three periods. The first (mid-1910s - early 1920s) includes early
4 TolmachSv V. M. Neo-romanticism and English literature of the early 20th century // Foreign literature of the late 19th - early 20th century / Ed. V. M. TolmachSva. - M: Ed. Center "Academy", 2003. - S.
one-act, so-called "sea" plays: the collection "Thirst and Other One-Act Plays" (Thirst and Other One-Act Plays, 1914), the collection "Course East, to Cardiff and Other Plays" (Bound East for Cardiff and Other Plays, 1916). This should also include plays: "Beyond the Horizon" (Beyond the Horizon, 1920), in which for the first time the opposition of reality - the dream is embodied in the opposition of settled life on a farm to travel to distant countries; "Gold" (Gold, 1921) with a central theme of possessiveness; "Unlike" (Diffrent, 1921), "Anna Christie" (Anna Christie, 1922), where the paradoxes of the modern soul are seen through the prism of women's destinies; "Emperor Jones" (The Emperor Jones, 1920) and "Shaggy Monkey" (The Hairy Are, 1922), influenced by expressionism; "Soldered" (Welded, 1924) and "Wings are given to all the children of God" (All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924), developing Strindberg's motives of "love-hate" between the sexes.
The second period of creativity (mid-1920s - 1930s) is more associated with formal experimentation: "The Great God Brown" (The Great God Brown, 1926), where the mask is the main element of expressiveness; "Lazarus Laughed" (Lazarus Laughed, 1927) with its unusual musical and laughter "score"; "Marco Millionshchik" (Marco Millions, 1927), fitting into the tradition of poetic theater; "Dynamo" (Dynamo, 1929), where the modern "god" is electricity. "Catholic" dramaturgy ("Days Without End", Days Without End, 1934) coexists with the original neo-paganism ("Mourning is the fate of Electra", Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931), which allows using the ancient myth to create a modern tragedy. Interest in the tragic conflict between the conscious and the unconscious is fully reflected in the imagery of "Strange Interlude" (Strange Interlude, 1928).
The late period of the playwright's work falls on the 1940s, following several years of "silence" (the end of the 1930s). Outwardly close to the genre of psychological drama, the plays "Long Day" s Journey into Night, 1940), "The Iceman Cometh" (The Iceman Cometh, 1940; post. 1946), "Moon for the stepsons of fate" ( A Moon for the Misbegotten, 1945; post. 1947), "The Soul of the Poet" (A Touch of the Poet, 1946) give beloved about "Nil's themes (lost illusions, the power of the past over the present) a symbolic dimension, elevate the contradictions of modernity to the rank of true tragic.
In the study of O "Neill's work, several stages can be distinguished 5. The first (1920s - mid-40s) is associated with the interpretation of his early plays. Four works deserve the most attention, since, in our opinion, they outline the main areas of research on the next thirty years.
The first is the monograph by E. Mickle "Six Plays of Eugene O" Neill (1929). The critic pays attention to the plays "Anna Christie" (Anna Christie, 1922), "The Hairy Monkey" (The Hairy Are, 1922), "The Great God Brown" (The Great God Brown, 1926), "The Fountain" (The Fountain, 1926) , "Marco Millions" (Marco Millions, 1927), "Strange Interlude" (Strange Interlude, 1928). Mikl highly appreciates these plays, comparing O "Neill with Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goethe. He is one of the first to notice characteristic
Miller J. Y. Eugene O "Neill and the American Critic: A Summary and Bibliographical Checklist. - L .: Archon books, 1962. - VIII, 513 p .; Atkinson J. Eugene O" Neill: A Descriptive Bibliography. - Pittsburgh (Pa.): Pittsburgh UP, 1974. - XXIII, 410 p.; Eugene O "Neill: Research Opportunities and Dissertation Abstracts / Ed. by T. Hayashi. - Jefferson (N. C), L .: McFarland, 1983. - X, 155 p .; Friedstein Yu. G. Eugene O" Neill: Bibliographic index / Comp. and ed. enter, Art. Yu. G. Fridshtein. - M.: Book, 1982. - 105 p.
traits of tragedy, high drama: "The man who went forth to face the daily domestic round is suddenly shown face to face with the tremendous, unconquerable, elemental forces against which is spent all the vital energy of man. The great human dramatists use exactly the same methods" 6 . Thus, Mikl draws attention to a certain plot model that underlies the Nile plays. In one of the passages, he gives her an additional characteristic: "The characters never lose touch with the real, but are never out of touch with the beyond- real" 7 .
Opposite interpretations were not long in coming. In the work of V. Geddes "The Melodramaticity of Eugene O" Neill "(The Melodramadness of Eugene O" Neill, 1934), tragedy in the Neil interpretation is reduced to the level of melodrama, which, moreover, refuses theatricality ("In the world of theater ...O "Neill is not at home" 8). In fact, this work is extremely perceptive in noticing the “weaknesses” really inherent in the O’Neill theater of the 1920s and 1930s. One can agree with Geddes’s opinion regarding the play Days Without End (Days Without End, 1934: “Drama and philosophy in his plays do not harmonize in a smooth convincing rhythm" 9. The researcher notices that preponderance towards philosophical conclusions, which will continue to negatively affect the artistic integrity of the plays.
Mickle A. D. Six Plays of Eugene O "Neill. - L .: Cape, 1929. - P. 19. 7 Ibid-P. 52.
8 Geddes V. The Melodramadness of Eugene O "Neill. - Brookfield (Mo.): The Brookficld Players, 1934. - P.
8.
9 Ibid-P. 12-13.
An interesting difference in the interpretation of the "Nilovsky" tongue-tied
* eloquence" in subsequent researchers and in the work of Geddes: "Not is an
example of a man at war with art. Expression with him is something he does not love
to do; it is too much like a confession, an embarrassment of the heart wrung from him
against his will" 10. As for the melodrama, the use
- (Shilom cliche (spectacular appearance of the protagonist, soliloquy, aparte,
catchy sound and pictorial images) will be consistently considered by J. Raleigh in the monograph "The Plays of Eugene O" Neill "(The Plays of Eugene O" Neill, 1965). played by the playwright's father.
*
The third study of interest to us belongs to R. Skinner:
"Eugene ONil: poetic quest" (Eugene O "Neill: A Poet" s Quest, 1935).
The playwright is perceived by the critic as a Catholic poet (the presence of a kind
O'Neill's Catholic worldview is undeniable; like many English
American modernists' attitude towards faith and the Catholic tradition
dual, woven from love-hate), embodied in plays
contradictions of his spiritual world. This poet is compared by Skinner with
saints, and the poetic ability of understanding the other Self, as well as
the possibilities of many selves inherent in the poet are compared with the temptations
("temptations") that appear before the saint: "... it is precisely because the poet
reacts as he does to his own potential weaknesses that he is able to create the objective
material for his work of art. Like the saints, he, above most other men, understand the
10 Ibid. - P. 7.
sinner and fears the sin" 11. Such an approach allows the researcher
“to formulate a certain lyrical property of O'Neill's dramaturgy: "...the
quality of continuous poetic progression, linking them all together by a sort of
inner bond. They have a curious way of melting into one another, as if each play were
merely a chapter in the interior romance of a poet"s imagination" .
* Another area of research is the consideration of dramaturgy
O "Neill in the light of the ideas of psychoanalysis. The first work of this kind belongs to V. Khan:" The Plays of Eugene O "Neill: a psychological analysis" (The Plays of Eugene O "Neill: A Psychological Analysis, 1939).
It should be noted that a surge of interest in the work of the playwright came
for the 1950s, when two literary biographies appeared, in particular: "Part
"Long Story" (A Part of a Long Story, 1958), owned by Agnes Boulton,
O'Neill's second wife, and The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O'Neill, 1959) by K. Bowen, written jointly with O'Neil's son, Sheen. At the same time, appear two monographs, in assessing the work of O "Neill, adhering to the interpretation outlined by E. Mickl. The first is E. Angela, "The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O" Neill (1953). The second belongs to D. Fall to - "Eugene O" Neill and the tragic contradictions "(Eugene O" Neill and the Tragic Tensions, 1958). The researcher compares the heroes of O "Neil with the characters of E. Poe, G. Melville and F. M. Dostoevsky, revealing in them the features of a certain archetype (Oedipus - Macbeth - Faust - Ahab). D. Faulk draws attention to the similarities
11 Skinner, Richard D. Eugene O'Neill: A Poet's Quest. - N. Y. (N. Y.): Russel & Russel, 1964. - P. 29.
12 Ibid.- P. IX.
views of C. G. Jung (who had a great influence on the American playwright) and O "Neill in relation to the "eternally existing" contradiction between the conscious and the unconscious: "Men must find self-knowledge and a middle way which reconciles the unconscious needs with those of the conscious ego. This means that life inevitably involves conflict and tension, but that the significance of this pain is the growth which Jung calls "individuation" - the gradual realization of the inner, complete personality through constant change, struggle and process" 13. Precisely because of this circumstances, the characters of "Nil's dramaturgy are doomed to fight with themselves again and again.
In the 1960s and 1970s, several meaningful biographies of the playwright appeared. These are the works of D Alexander "The Formation of Eugene O" Neill "(The Tempering of Eugene O" Neill, 1962); Arthur and Barbara Gelb - "O" Neil "(O" Neill, 1962); L. Schaeffer - "O" Neill: Son and Playwright "(O" Neill: Son and Playwright, 1968), "O" Neill: Son and Artist "(O" Neill: Son and Artist, 1973).
In 1965, the already mentioned monograph by D. Raleigh "The Plays of Eugene O'Neill" was published, which became in many ways a classic. The researcher examines both the content and the formal aspects of O'Neill's dramaturgy. He begins with an analysis of the special cosmology of plays and comes to an idea similar to that of D. Faulk. At the heart of O'Neill's artistic universe is the principle of polarity, the tension between opposite poles, which are both incompatible and inseparable from each other. Raleigh approaches this issue less abstractly than Faulk, and considers the O'Neal universe in its divided sea and land, countryside and
13 Falk, Doris V. Eugene O "Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays. - New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers UP, 1958. - P. 7.
city, day and night. With this polarity in mind, Raleigh talks about the main themes of dramaturgy (Shila, about how God, history, humanity appear before us. In his analysis of historical plays, the researcher comes to the conclusion that O'Neil is close to the Victorian approach to transmission historical realities in literature. He quotes the words of the playwright himself: "I do not think that you can write anything of value or understanding about the present. You can only write about life if it is far enough in the past. The present is too much mixed up with superficial values; you can "t know which thing is important and which is not" 14. Past and present are also kind of poles.
The chapter "Humankind" (Mankind) - one of the best in the book - Raleigh devotes to the racial problem in O "Neill (Negroes and whites, Irish and Yankees), the theme of masculine and feminine principles, as well as the concept of personality. Considering the dramatic structure ("dramatic structure or organization") about "Nil's plays, as well as the function of remarks and dialogue in them, Raleigh appeals to the thought of M. Proust, according to which every great artist snatched from an endless stream of experience a certain picture ("basic picture"), which became for him a metaphor for everything human existence. The concept of such a picture-metaphor is extremely appropriate when analyzing a dramatic work. Raleigh believes that the main picture-metaphor of O'Neil's work is a grieving woman.
Two works published in the late 1960s are specially devoted to O'Neill's technique: E. Tornquist's monograph "Drama of Souls" (A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Supernaturalistic Techniques, 1968), as well as T. Tiusanen's study "Scenic images of O" Neil "(O" Neill "s Scenic Images, 1968). Author of the first
14 Raleigh, John H. The Plays of Eugene O "Neill. - Carbondale-Edwardsville (11.): Southern Illinois UP, 1965. - P. 36.
The work cites the words of the playwright, uttered by him in an interview in 1924: "I hardly ever go to the theater, although I read all the plays I can get. I don't go to the theater because I can always do a better production in my mind than the one on the stage..." taking care of their staging. Indeed, continuing his reasoning, Thornquist notes that O "Neill paid no less attention to extensive remarks in his plays than to dialogue, which endows them with the properties of epic works. According to the researcher, the playwright tried to prove that a play not staged is valuable Nevertheless, Thornquist takes into account the possibility of a stage interpretation of the play and sees his task in determining the semantic significance of its own dramatic structure: "In agreement with O" Neill "s own usage of the term as I understand it, "supematuralism "» thus be employed in a wide sense. Any play element or dramatic device - characterization, stage business, scenery, lighting, sound effects, dialogue, nomenclature, use of parallelism - will be considered supernaturalistic if it is dealt with in such a way by the dramatist, that it transcends (deepens, intensifies, stylizes or openly breaks with) realism in the attempt to project what O"Neill terms "behind-life"" values to the reader or spectator" 16 .
The attempt to consider ONeel's plays as works of dramatic art was successful for the author of only the second of the mentioned monographs. Tiusanen specifically mentions the fundamental principle of reading the play: "... the stage
15 Tomqvist, Egil. A Ehrama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique. - New Haven (CT):
Yale UP, 1969. - P. 23.
is, or should be, ever present in our imagination as readers - as it has been in the
*
playwright"s mind" . In his work, he pays attention to four of the six
components of the tragedy, indicated in the Aristotelian "Poetics": 1)
"plot" 18 or the structure of the play (plot or structure), insofar as they
influence stage expressive means; 2) "verbal
expression "^i (Liop); 3) "musical composition" ("the Lyrical or Musical
element provided by the Chorus"); 4) "stage setting" ("the Spectacular").
Tiusanen pays special attention to the fact that the playwright achieves his goal
not only through language, dialogue, but also through lighting, music,
scenography.
To the works devoted to the consideration of dramatic skill
"ONila, also include two monographs published in the 1970s. This is -
the work of T. Bogard "The contours of time: the plays of Eugene O" Neill "(Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O" Neill, 1972) and L. Chebrow's study "Ritual and pathos - theater O" Neil "(Ritual and Pathos - The Theater of O "Neill, 1976). Chebrow's work most convincingly proves the connection between the playwright's formal search and ancient Greek tragedy.
A rather unconventional monograph for researchers of O "Neill belongs to J. Robinson: "Eugene O'Neal and the thought of the East. Double vision "(" Eugene O "Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision, 1982). It analyzes the influence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism on the themes and imagery of O" Neill's plays. However, Robinson comes to the conclusion that the playwright is not
17 Tiusanen, Timo. O'Neill's Scenic Images. - Princeton (N.J.), Princeton UP, 1968. - P. 3.
18 Russian-language terms are given in the translation of VG Appelrot // Aristotle. On the art of poetry.
M: Artist. lit., 1957. - S. 58.
could renounce the dualistic Western worldview that underlies his tragic vision.
In recent years, interest has increased in the study of the playwright's work from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, which is confirmed by the works of B. Voglino - ""Upset Mind": O"Neill's Struggle with Closure" ("Perverse Mind": Eugene O"Neill"s Struggle with Closure, 1999 ), as well as S. Black - "Eugene O" Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy "(Eugene O" Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, 1999). Black's monograph is the first experience of a consistent psychoanalytic biography of the playwright. Black's main idea is that O'Neill consciously used writing as a means of subjecting himself to psychoanalysis. Paying considerable attention to the Neil's perception of tragedy, Black aims to show how the movement from the awareness of the tragedy of being through a long period of introspection to ideas that are outside the tragic worldview took place.
In the book "Modern Drama Theories: Selected Articles on Drama and Theatre, 1840 - 1990" (1998), edited by G. W. Brand, Nilov's idea of the tasks of theatrical art is considered as an example of "anti-naturalism" ("anti-naturalism ") and fits into the same tradition with the French surrealists (G. Apollinaire), Italian futurists (F. T. Marinetti), such prominent figures of the European theater as A. Appia, G. Craig, A. Artaud.
The works of the German K. Müller "Reality embodied on the stage" (Inszenierte Wirklichkeiten: Die Erfahrung der Moderne im Leben und Werk Eugene O "Neills, 1993) and the American researcher 3. Britske "The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O "Neill, 2001)
combines interest in the playwright's formal search, in his desire to find
modern stage language to embody the main themes of his work.
Of the Russian-language works, mention should be made of the book by A. S. Romm "American Dramaturgy of the First Half of the 20th Century" (1978), in which one of the chapters is devoted to creativity (Shila, as well as the monograph by M. M. Koreneva
- "The work of Y. O" Neil and the ways of American drama "(1990), which illuminates the indicated problems in a multifaceted way. The researcher not only analyzes the work of O" Neal, but also places his dramaturgy in the context of the development of the American theater as a whole. Koreneva considers two types of tragedies in O'Neill - the "tragedy of the individual", built around one central character, and the "universal tragedy", where the conflict is "scattered", not
is exhausted by a direct collision of the protagonist with the antagonist. M. M. Koreneva insists on the socio-political causes of "the deep tragedy of modern man, alienated from his true essence, a man whose dignity is violated by various forms of institutionalized inequality, whose spiritual aspirations are trampled by a society that has submitted to grossly material goals" 19 . In our opinion, the absolutization of the role of the "environment" in O "Nil's plays distorts his tragic vision. In this sense, the Russian researcher S. M. Pinaev, author of the monograph "The Poetics of the Tragic in American Literature. Dramaturgy of O" Nile ", formulated a more insightful understanding of the tragic O" Nile. (1988): "By "today's disease" he meant "the death of the old God and the inability of science and materialism to put forward a new one that satisfies the primitive natural instinct of finding the meaning of life and getting rid of the fear of death." WITH
19 Koreneva M. M. The work of Yu. O "Neal and the ways of American drama. - M .: Nauka, 1990. - P. 11.
great skill displaying the symptoms of the "disease" of the soul and consciousness
"Modern man, he searched in vain for the causes that caused this disease."
But this remark also needs, in our opinion, some correction. Tragedy for O "Neill is not a means to point out the "diseases" of the century, he does not classify social ailments. Appeal specifically to tragedy
“dictated by the nature of his talent, the nature of the artistic
temperament, literary inclinations. To be seen in
American reality needed material to create a tragedy
a special kind of artist. Admirer of Wilde and Baudelaire, Strindberg and Nietzsche,
personality with an extraordinary fate, O "Neil" was looking for "an adequate form for
realization of their own ideas. Pointing out the critical focus
1 O "Neill's playwriting, researchers forget about the deeply optimistic
the playwright's interpretation of the very essence of tragedy (see Chapter I), which became for him a path to understanding the modern soul.
So, the main goal of this dissertation is to analyze the philosophy of O'Neill's tragedy, around which the entire artistic world of the playwright is built.
To solve this problem, we have chosen the plays "Emperor Jones", "Wings are given to all the children of God", "The icebreaker is coming", "Moon for the stepsons of fate". On the one hand, they allow us to trace the transformation of traditional tragic themes (fatal curse, sacrifice) in the theater of one of the most original playwrights of the 20th century. On the other hand, it is these plays that convincingly prove that O "Neill created a tragic universe,
20 Pinasv S. M. The era of upstarts or the second discovery of the continent // American literary renaissance of the XX century / Comp. S. M. Pinasv. - M: Azbukovnik, 2002. - S. 42.
existing according to its own, unique laws. "Emperor Jones" and
"Wings are given to all the children of God" are vivid examples of plastic theater, making it possible to point out the stage expressiveness of the "Nilov tragedy." Later plays reveal other aspects of the playwright's artistic world.
scrupulous psychological development of characters is inseparable from their symbolic interpretation. Therefore, the selected plays allow us to present the philosophy of O'Neill's tragedy in its dynamics.
Exploring the work of the American playwright, we relied on general works on the theory and history of tragedy. Among them are monographs that have become classics in their own way: "The Hidden God" (Le Dieu Cache, 1959) by L. Goldman,
* "Tragic Vision" (The Tragic Vision, 1960) M. Krieger, "Death of Tragedy"
(The Death of Tragedy, 1961) J. Steiner, Tragedy and Drama Theory (Tragedy
and the Theory of Drama, 1961) by E. Olson. Description of the main features
tragic vision leads the authors to the analysis of specific philosophical and
literary works. Directly to the tragedy of O "Neill is given
attention in the work of E. Olson, as well as in the monographs of R. B. Heilman
"The Iceman, the Pyro, and the Suffering Protagonist" (The Iceman, the
Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage,
1973), P. B. Sewell "The Vision of Tragedy" (The Vision of Tragedy, 1980), J. Oppa
"Tragic Drama and Modern Society" (Tragic Drama and Modern Society,
1989). For this dissertation, it was fruitful to distinguish
"tragic", "tragedy" and "tragic vision", formulated, in
in particular, the American researcher W. Storm in the book "After Dionysus"
(After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, 1998): "Whereas vision and tragedy are
man-made, the tragic is not; it is, rather, a law of nature, a specific relationship of being and cosmos" 21 .
It should be especially said why we chose these works. They present two fundamentally different approaches. The goal of some researchers (Olson, Heilman) is to determine the conformity or inconsistency of O'Neill's tragedies with the hypothetical laws of the genre, which, in our opinion, distorts the writer's unique artistic world. It is more appropriate to try to see a non-canonical tragedian in the playwright. It is from these positions that Sewell addresses his work in "The Vision of Tragedy". He argues that in the 19th century, the "relay" of Shakespearean tragedy was picked up not by the theater, but by the novel (N. Hawthorne, X. Melville, F. M. Dostoevsky). Only with the advent of X. Ibsen and Y. O The Nile Theater has regained its original tragedians. Consequently, "tragedy" is understood by the researcher broadly, not as a genre, but as the quintessence of a special worldview. In this, Sewell follows Krieger, who believes that modern tragedy should not be approached formally, but thematically.
When analyzing specific texts, we relied on the methodology
"careful reading", proposed by the American "new criticism", in
in particular, C. Brooks and R. B. Heilman in "Understanding Drama" (Understanding
The first chapter of this study is devoted to the consideration of the philosophy of the tragedy of O "Neill on the material of letters, articles, interviews of the playwright. It analyzes the influence of M. Stirner, A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche on the O" Nile understanding of tragedy and its artistic embodiment.
21 Storm W. After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic. - Ithaca: Cornell U.P. 1998. -P. 18.
Second chapter consists of two sections, in which, in the light of this problem, O'Neill's plays are considered in detail: "Emperor Jones", "Wings are given to all the children of God", "The moon for the stepsons of fate", "The icebreaker is coming".
In custody the results of the study are summed up. The philosophy of O'Neill's tragedy fits into the context of the literary and general cultural searches of the interwar era.
The philosophy of tragedy Y. O "Neal
O Neil repeatedly compared his understanding of the idea of the tragic with the ideas of the Greeks and Elizabethans about it. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Nilov's understanding of tragedy goes back not so much to the Greeks ("Poetics" of Aristotle), but to the ideas of the tragic in art and the tragedy of human existence, widespread in the second half of the 19th century (A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche).
Already in an interview in the 1920s, O Neil speaks of his special understanding of the laws of the genre. He consciously dissociates himself from the everyday, everyday understanding of the tragic: "People talk of the "tragedy" in them, and call it "sordid", "depressing", "pessimistic"..." \ Tragedy has nothing to do with pessimism:
"... tragedy, I think, has the meaning the Greeks gave it. To them it brought exaltation, an urge toward life and ever more life. It roused them to deeper spiritual understandings and released them from the petty greeds of everyday existence. When they saw a tragedy on the stage they felt their own hopeless hopes ennobled in art"2.
So, O Neil sees his very conditional "allies" in the Greeks. Tragedy brought with it exaltation, a high note. She urged to life, but her Dionysian power was so great that she involuntarily beckoned to go beyond
1 O Neill E. Eugene O Neill: Comments on the Drama and the Theatre. - Tubingen: Narr., 1987. - P 25.
2 Ibid. P. 25-26. everyday life. It gave an ideal dimension to earthly existence. Freeing from petty everyday worries, it led to spiritual insights.
For Nilov's perception of tragedy, the opposition between ordinary and transcendental experience is extremely important. In his artistic world, two poles clearly declare themselves - everyday life and dream. Immersed in everyday life, a person feels his inferiority. For the hero O Neil - an idealist and a dreamer - exactly what he considers to be a true value turns out to be inaccessible. Everyday life suppresses a person, if only because he is too weak to challenge it. Often the burden of everyday life is embodied in the image of a settled life - a farm ("Beyond the Horizon"; "Passion under the Elms", Desire under the Elms, 1924; "Moon for the stepsons of fate"), with which the dreamer is bound hand and foot. The dream rules over the Nilovsky character because idealism is an innate, natural property of his character. However, she constantly slips away. The sphere of the ideal, like everyday life, is inherent in a certain inferiority.
Therefore, in the previously cited words of the playwright, the image of "hopeless hope" ("a hopeless hope") appears - one of the central ones in Nilov's philosophy of tragedy. The playwright explains its presence in human life as follows:
"... any victory we may win is never the one we dreamed of winning! Achievement, in the narrow sense of possession, is a stale finale. The dreams that can be completely realized are not worth dreaming. The higher the dream, the more impossible it is to realize it fully. But you would not say, since this is true, that we should dream only of easily attained ideals" 3.
So, any achievement, any "victory" will never satisfy the Nilovian dreamer, it will never coincide with the ideal that exists in his imagination. Thus, "hopeless hope" is a pipe dream. This is a distant point, a "guiding star", which a person creates for himself in time or space. The more inaccessible it is, the more preferable it is, the more it attracts about the Nilovsky hero. The idealist's failure is natural for those who understand success and achievement "narrowly" ("achievement, in the narrow sense of possession"). In fact, the reason for the defeat is the ultimate inferiority of the dream.
Here is one example. There is nothing unusual or tragic in the choice of what we have called the "guiding star". It is human nature to make plans and strive to achieve the goal. Such a person looks to the future. And where is the look of the Nilovsky character? Where is his "guiding star"? Cornelius Melody ("The Soul of a Poet", The Touch of the Poet, 1946) strives to match the image of a gentleman, created by his imagination in his youth. Jamie Tyrone ("Moon for the stepsons of fate") wants the girl he loves to be capable of such understanding and forgiveness, which he did not meet from the late mother. Mary Tyrone (Long Day's Journey into Night, 1940) takes drugs, trying to forget most of her life (marriage, the birth of sons) and return to the days of her youth when she was brought up in a convent.
All these dreams turn out to be a priori unrealizable: the goal is in the irretrievable past. And the point is not only that you cannot bring back the past, but that the hero is trying in vain to cling to his own illusion. As he imagines it, the "past" has never been. Sometimes these aspirations are brought to the point of absurdity. The logic of the play "The Shaggy Monkey" suggests that Yank Smith, refusing to belong to the species Homo Sapiens, is trying to reverse evolution and dies in the gorilla's cage.
Speaking about the tragedy, ONil argues that only the unrealizable is worth dreaming of. The dream is unattainable, but the path that a person goes through in his desire to realize it is important. This thesis may seem quite arbitrary, since the plays of the playwright sometimes demonstrate the collapse of life. On the one hand, it is. On the other hand, for SSHIL it is important that not getting what he dreamed of, a person in the struggle for his dream becomes himself, "different" ("diffrent"):
"The individual life is made significant just by the struggle, and the acceptance and assertion of that individual, making him what he is, and not, always in the past, making him something not himself.
It is on this path that the character of the Nilov tragedy wins the main victory: he remains true to himself. "Long journey" for an unattainable dream shapes the human personality. The path traveled by the hero turns out to be only "his own", but perhaps it is not necessary to talk about a personal choice of the path. About the Nilovsky character is in many ways a fatalist.
"A man wills his own defeat when he pursues the unattainable," we read in O Neil. A person striving for the unattainable, as if turning his
life in a long sacrifice. The dream of the impossible, in Nilov's interpretation, turns out to be a thirst for defeat, a kind of attraction to death. The hero who dares to dream is a victim, must inevitably perish. What is the meaning of this symbolic sacrifice? A person who sets high goals for himself, striving to break beyond the limits of what is available to the layman, helps, according to the playwright, to discover in life that high meaning that is latent in it.
"Not an example of spiritual significance which life attains when it aims high enough, when the individual fights all the hostile forces within and without himself to achieve the future of nobler values."
In this statement, one can catch the echoes of a kind of Nietzscheism. You should also pay attention to the fact that the struggle waged by the character of O Nil is, first of all, not a struggle with external forces, but a struggle with oneself, with one's own nature, obsessive memories, illusions. The conflict is rooted in the inner world of the character, even if it is shown very theatrically, with an expression characteristic of the European theater of the 1920s ("Emperor Jones", "Lazarus Laughed").
Themes of sacrifice and doom: "Emperor Jones", "Wings are given to all the children of God", "Moon for the stepchildren of fate"
This chapter discusses the question of on what material and by what means of artistic language O Neil builds modern tragedy.
The themes of sacrifice and sacrifice, the fatal struggle with fate, which are always latently present in Nil's dramas, are presented with particular expressiveness in the play "Emperor Jones". The characters of late dramaturgy feel like victims of the past and fate, sometimes of each other. In "Emperor Jones" the sacrifice is theatricalized, brought to the forefront as a bewitching ritual in which the protagonist is involved. A shaman, a jungle, a god in the form of a crocodile are fully justified attributes of the grotesque universe created by Sneel in this tragedy.
"Emperor Jones" is distinguished by plot dynamism and a kind of phantasmagoric. Exaggeration, lack of measure both in crime and in redemption - this is a meaningful dominant. In Jones' lines, one can hear echoes of what is traditionally associated with the American dream: "From stowaway to Emperor in two years!" (118)1. But in Nilov's interpretation, the cliche about career growth turns into a grotesque. Fled from
prisons, a negro who crossed the ocean on a steamer as a stowaway comes from the very bottom of society. He is not even on the lowest rung of the social ladder, but beyond it, he is an absolute outsider. Declaring himself emperor, he not only rises to the highest level, but again finds himself outside the roles available to a person in the modern world. Покинув Америку ради джунглей предков, Джонс, "цивилизованный негр" и одновременно гагой цивилизации, становится императором "лесных негров" ("woods niggers"). Only in this way can he realize his dream of greatness. The transformation of a former prisoner into an emperor proves that Jones knows no measure in his claims.
В то же время он понимает, что его императорское правление - это "цирковое представление" ("de big circus show") для туземцев, которых он презрительно называет "bush niggers". Jones himself is interested in his personal enrichment: "Dey wants de big circus show for deir money. I gives it to em and I gits de money" (118). The imperial title is an invention, a kind of ingenious trick, which succeeded because of the ignorance of the natives. Jones robbed his subjects, forcing them to pay high taxes, and at the same time enchanted them, presenting himself in the form of a strong ruler, "immortal", who, according to a legend invented by himself, can only die from a "silver bullet" ("silver bullet") .
It was the legend of the silver bullet that ensured Jones' success. This fiction found a response in the mythological consciousness of the Negroes. Jones, a cynic and a poet, unmistakably guessed how one could both touch the strings of the soul of the barbarians and instill fear in the subjects:
"And dere All Dem Fool, Bush Niggges Was Kneelin Down and Bumpin Deir Heads on De Ground Like I Was a Miracle Out OT Bible. OH Lawd, from Dat Time on I Had Dem All Eatin Ow MYY HAND . I Cracks de Whip and dey jumps through" (119).
Jones' words suggest that he sees himself not so much as an emperor, but as a god, an idol of the pagans. Kneeling natives fall on their faces before him, as if before a miracle. Moreover, in the minds of Jones, pagan ideas are inseparable from Christian ones. Although it is obvious that in Christianity the greatest persuasiveness for the emperor is "miraculous" ("a miracle out about de Bible"). But these miracles have a very indirect relation to the Christian shrine. Jones is more familiar with fairground, farce "miracles" and circus tricks. Thus, the motif of the circus performance again turns out to be significant. For the emperor, the natives are a kind of wild beasts, and he himself is a trainer who holds a treat in one hand and a whip in the other (“I cracks de whip and dey jumps through”).
The motif of the circus, the farce is an element of the "low genre" in tragedy, which, nevertheless, enhances the overall tragic tone. It can be assumed that O Neil follows the German expressionists in this, in which the aesthetics of the booth is often associated not with entertainment, but with tragedy: the play by E. Toller "Eugen the Unfortunate" (Hinkemann, 1922), the film by R. Wiene "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920), A. Berg's opera "Lulu" (Lulu, 1937). So in "Emperor Jones" the motif of the circus, as if intended to illustrate the dexterity of the protagonist, turns into an exposure, alienation.
Jones' ideas about his own cynicism and prudence are overturned: the subjects left the emperor and are preparing to kill him. Moreover, the plan of salvation developed by Jones shows that his mind is in many ways arranged in the same way as the mind of superstitious natives. That is why he ordered to cast one silver bullet in order to commit suicide if the pursuers caught up with him.
Hopeless Hope": "Icebreaker Coming"
The play "The Icebreaker Comes", referring to the late period of O Neil's work, makes it possible to understand what seems to the playwright to be the quintessence of the tragic.
The opposition between illusion and reality, dream and reality, characteristic of O Nile, takes on a new dimension. Dreamers and "realists" argue in the play about truth and lies, compassion and cruelty, guilt and its redemption. New facets about Nilov's philosophy of tragedy are revealed. On the one hand, ethical issues come to the fore. On the other hand, the playwright offers an alternative to the tragic worldview. But it only exacerbates the general tone of absurdity and "hopelessness of hope" (the image of "a hopeless hope", see Chapter I).
Ice Breaker has four acts. The action takes place in the summer of 1912 and lasts a day and a half. In a New York saloon, to celebrate the birthday of its owner, the city's "outcasts" gather. All of them are dreamers who are not able to soberly assess themselves and those around them. They are joined by a successful salesman who preaches the abandonment of illusions as the path to peace and happiness. In an effort to expose his friends, he hides the truth about the crime he committed - the murder of his wife.
The composition of the actors is very indicative. The characters of the play are the inhabitants of the city bottom. They could appear before the viewer in the form of a kind of gang, a gathering of people united by petty crimes, forced to hide from law enforcement officers. But about Nilovsky characters are connected by a common way of life, mood, worldview. The murderer, the pimp, the prostitutes, the saloonkeeper, the ruined gambling house owner are "inseparable" because of the similarity of their illusions and fears. They all cling to the last hope, succumb to self-deception and fear death.
The guests at Harry Hope's saloon are people of about the same age. The oldest - Larry and Harry himself - are sixty years old. The younger generation is represented by bartenders and prostitutes - they are not yet thirty. The youngest of all is Don Parritt, an eighteen-year-old youth who commits suicide in the last act of the play.
They belong to different nationalities. This was already characteristic of the early "sea" plays of OHil. Among the sailors of the British freighter Tlenkern" ("Course East, to Cardiff and Other Plays", Bound East for Cardiff and Other Plays, 1916) - Irish, American, English, Norwegian, Russian. The New York saloon has the same mixture nations and races in a sailor's quarters.There are not so many Americans here (Harry Hope, Hickey, Willie Ouben), but there are many emigrants who feel their alienation to the environment (the remark refers to Larry's Irish appearance, Jimmy's Scottish speech traits; both bartenders and "Pearl" are Italians; McCloin's surname indicates Welsh ancestors.) Mulatto Joe Mot is a stranger among the white lodgers.
The inhabitants of the saloon once belonged to professional "guilds" that left their imprint on them in various ways. Of the two former anarchists, one, Hugo, looks like a newspaper caricature of an anarchist, and the other, Irishman Larry, resembles a mournful, weary priest. Former officers, Boer Pete
Vetjoven and the Englishman Cecil Lewis, who took part in the Boer War ten years ago, have not ceased to be at enmity, although Vetjoven looks more like a peaceful Dutch farmer than a "general". One thing unites everyone: they were someone in the past, and now in front of the viewer is a former captain, a former policeman (McLloin), a former circus performer (Mosher).
Differences in the origin, upbringing, occupation of the characters turn the verbal fabric of the play into a kind of "melting pot"10. So. voices that sound quite independent due to differences in intonational accents and pronunciations become part of a choir singing about the same thing: about what could have been and what never was.
