My self-centered ponderings on why I study literature
It seems inevitable in every literature major’s educational career, after innumerable questions of “what are you going to do with an English degree,” to question, what is the reason to read, study, teach, or even write literature? This is obviously a broad question, too broad to truly answer here, but the clearest marker of impact is that of large scale effect. The seemingly obvious answer is that literature can work to begin dialogue and reach for social or political change. Within American literature, no literature could be seen to be striving so to bring freedom to the oppressed than the American protest novel. In a 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin explores the hypocrisies of the genre, specifically looking at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baldwin suggests that, “The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene… Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.” Baldwin rejects the protest novel as overly categorical and lacking in an examination of the complexities of human life, as well as overly sentimental, which “is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel… the mask of cruelty.” If even the so called “protest novel” cannot effectively sow a desire for change, what can?
This question becomes even more potent within the realm of tragedy. Often, in my phone calls with my mother, she asks some version of “why study something so sad?” This is, indeed, a question I have to ask myself every day. Working on Eugene O’Neill, especially his play The Iceman Cometh, I feel my academic work encroaching upon my own mentality.
The Iceman Cometh is a work deeply concerned with the delusions of humankind. For those who do not know the play, it takes place in 1912 in New York City in Harry Hope’s bar, which is inhabited by a motley array of sixteen lovely and nearly continuously drunk leeches. Only sober when they do not have the money for their poison, these drunkards lounge around continually talking about how they will get their old lives back together… tomorrow. Traveling salesman and their long-time friend, Hickey, comes twice a year, and the play’s chorus is patiently awaiting his arrival for Harry Hope’s birthday party. Hickey comes but is uncharacteristically sober. Pronouncing his desire to convert the roomers from the “religion of tomorrow” and rid them of their pipe-dreams, Hickey is unsettling and often irritates the other characters. Long story short, Hickey has gone insane, having killed his wife, which was, in his mind, a mercy killing in order to rid her of her pipe-dream that he will stop cheating on her. In his speeches, Hickey confesses and attempts to terms with his guilt. Before arriving, Hickey has called the police and told them to come to Hope’s to pick him up in the early hours of the morning. The police enter quietly in the midst of Hickey’s soliloquy’s (in performance often lasting fifteen minutes) and hear him detail his murder. After a bit of shocked reactions from the other characters Hickey claims he has gone insane and lets the police lead him away. Parritt, a recent arrival and former anarchist (who worked with Larry and Hugo, another anarchist), has sold out the movement resulting in the imprisonment and figurative death of his mother. He hears in Hickey’s story his own and, at the prompting of Larry Slade, the old foolosopher, jumps of the fire escape to his death. The derelicts of Hope’s bar turn back to their pipe-dreams and drink. Only Larry possibly has changed. Having condemned Parritt to death, Larry sits alone staring at the floor, as if a long-lost faith has returned to him.
This line has baffled critics. Many existentialist critics read Larry as Nietzsche’s Übermensch and as the true tragic hero and protagonist of the play. Their argument centers on Larry’s condemnation of Parritt, suggesting that it is an act that transcends morals and is only an act that an Übermensch could perform. Larry in a sense acts as judge, jury, and executioner. In doing so, he is the only character able to cast off their pipe-dream and illusion (his is that he has entered the “grandstand of life” and does not pity or have compassion for the other inhabitants of the bar). Their argument is that The Iceman Cometh is truly an optimistic play depicting the possibility of the Übermensch to overcome traditional morality and the illusions and dreams of the world that hold us back from acting as an “overman” should.
In my opinion, and that of another set of critics, Larry actually operates as the chorus leader and pseudo-narrator as he introduces each of the characters and their own particular dreams. Hickey is instead the protagonist and tragic figure. Larry’s act at the end of the play reads a bit less of a transcending of morals and more of a reaction of pity. Parritt clearly wants his own death and views it as the only possible punishment for his betrayal of his mother. Larry simply pities the man he sees as the closest thing to his son. Larry does not actually cast off his illusions; he acts out of pity and compassion. He ends the play rather sadly, alone, away from his friends dealing, having seen two of his friends die. Hickey, likewise, does not rid himself of his illusions, despite his claims to have done so. He casts off the illusion that he can reform and be a good husband, but he simply takes up new illusions, like his own role as savior and eventually his insanity. O’Neill is pointing out humankind’s need for illusions to actually live in life.
This is the position that has been challenging to me. O’Neill appears to be about as pessimistic as one can be. He points to our sad need for illusions and our inability to truly face ourself in the mirror and make real, fruitful change in our lives. It has affected my own thoughts as I attempt to address my own illusions and reconcile with my inability to cast them away. As I face a life working with literature, I have to ask myself, “am I deluding myself in hoping that literature matters?”
O’Neill himself, at the end of his life, worried about this. He wrote the third act of Iceman as German invaded Poland and many of his work-diary entries are littered with war news. O’Neill wrote in a letter on July 17, 1940, “For the past few months I’ve been so demoralized by the world debacle that I haven’t worked or paid much attention to anything. The theatre has seemed to me about the most unimportant doll’s house on earth, and playwrighting a silly futile business.” The work he completed before the end of the war, his most critically acclaimed, was the last work he ever produced despite living ten years longer. He never got “back to a sense of writing being worthwhile” (interview from 1946, before the opening of Iceman). He concluded that statement suggesting, “In fact, I’d have to pretend.”
O’Neill’s rather sad conclusions about his writing are hard to deal with for me. In fact, I tried to write this for the first issue of the Grail, but for various reasons didn’t finish. Having worked with O’Neill this entire semester I’m somewhere else, though I know not entirely where. O’Neill’s most important biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb insist upon his celebration of life, quoting him as saying, “I love life… But I don’t love life because it is pretty. Prettiness is only clothes-deep. I am a truer lover than that. I love it naked. There is beauty to me even in its ugliness. In fact, I deny the ugliness entirely, for its vices are often nobler than its virtues, and nearly always closer to a revelation.” If we are to believe him, O’Neill’s work in pointing out the illusions necessary to everyone is actually a celebration of life. It is not a condemnation of our pipe-dreams. It is a fact and he is celebrating the people he has known in his long life inhabiting bars and similar joints. This seems to be evident in the comedy of the play. Its comedy is cut and overcome with the tragedy, but that seems to be the case with most histories of the world.
I am no closer to an answer. I hope I have learned something about what it means to be human through O’Neill. I don’t think that literature can cause wide spread change in the ways I thought it could my freshman year. It can take positions on politics and art, but above all its subject is life, all of it. At pains of sounding like the critics I hate, who ignore the political and social, I may have to agree with Baldwin that art takes an aesthetic distance from politics and is not the most effective way of bringing about change. If artists ignore the political, social, and all other realms, they cannot portray the depths and dirt of life. There is, I hope, something to learn from an investigation of life. I just haven’t figured that out fully yet. All I know is that I cannot cast off my pipe-dreams, but I must live with them and have compassion for others and their illusions.
2018 revival of The Iceman Cometh featuring Denzel Washington as Hickey courtesty of Critics at Large