Desire beyond the Château d'If
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.2.0167
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoIn 1883, after playing the lead for the first time in Monte Cristo, Charles Fechter's version of Dumas's novel, James O'Neill bought all the rights of the adaptation, then tuned it in his own style of performance.1 He continued in the role for, by some accounts, about 4,000 performances, to the detriment of his formidable stage talents as he believed. Tyrone, James's extended character in his son's Long Day's Journey Into Night, refers to the “big money-maker” that gradually misled him from his path toward stage glory, though “it was a great romantic part,” which he knew he “could play better than anyone.” The regret of a paradise lost (“I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I'd kept on. I know that!”) induces in him the desire for a second paradoxical dispossession, which would reinstate him magically in his original role: “I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.”2 Such an anomaly of stage success and failure, liberation and pain, could not but have had its psychological repercussion on Eugene, who was suffering already in the pre–world war years from tuberculosis and alienation. Eugene would not only react strongly to the genre of French melodrama that Monte Cristo represented, but would inherit its deeper anxieties and literary contradictions within the larger context of his alienation from Catholicism. The story foregrounded the unjust trial of an innocent man in the modern terms of the American stage. O'Neill would replay this tragic theme of “possessors self-dispossessed” in his one-act plays and then throughout his tenure as America‘s pioneering playwright.Discovering a redeeming hidden treasure beyond a passage of tribulations and pain is a parable that features in various religions and beliefs, as the story of Job may testify in the Judeo-Christian context. The main character's life swings between the extremes of misfortune and fortune, dispossession on the one side and his final possession of the treasures of Monte Cristo, his wife and son, and his reclaimed dignity on the other. A dialectic emerges between the two extremities of pain and pleasure. It is the betrayal of Edmond Dantès by his detractors that ironically triggers a chain of cause and effect, leading through his unjust incarceration in the Château d'If, his befriending the Abbé Faria, his accession to the treasure, and finally his squaring of accounts with the evil three who had willed his absolute extinction. Indeed, at a fundamental level of mid-nineteenth-century European fiction, the journey of Edmond Dantès can be seen in the symbolic light of the initiation mysteries that entail the hero's descent into the Underworld in order to acquire the necessary knowledge about the final course of life from an elderly, somewhat stoical, living or “dead” father-figure, followed by a return to terra firma to manifest that knowledge in conscious and serious action.3 Odysseus, Aeneas, Coleridge's ill-fated Wedding Guest, Edmond Dantès himself, even, in a way, Edmund Tyrone, “descend” necessarily to an Underworld of revelatory truths to confront mythic mentors—Teiresias, Anchises, the Ancient Mariner, the ghost of Hamlet's father, and the Abbé Faria.Edmond's unjustified incarceration in the Château d'If, his gradual acquaintance with the old priest who sees him as his own son, his miraculous escape in the disguise of Death in a body-bag, and his return to civil society to fulfill his revenge recall the labyrinthine route that mythic heroes often traverse. After Faria's death the distraught Dantès uses the imagery of a Virgilian quest; he considers it perhaps suitable for him “to go and ask God to explain the enigma of life, even at the risk of passing through the dark gates of suffering” (196), as Aeneas had done in the company of the Sybil in Book VI of The Aeneid. The symbolic trajectory of his exit through the elements during his unforeseen burial in the watery graveyard of the sea is no less outstanding than that of most mythic heroes: “At this moment, Dantès felt himself being thrown into a huge void, flying through the air like a wounded bird, then falling, falling, in a terrifying descent that froze his heart … it seemed to him that the fall lasted a century.”4 This introversion, this “plunging into the depths, to gain knowledge and power over self and destiny” symbolizes Dantès' mythic journey through a cycle of life.5Dantès' grimly unceremonious trial seems almost to anticipate that of Franz Kafka's Joseph K., who wakes up one morning to be placed under arrest for an unstated cause by a faceless, impersonal authority. Of course, Joseph K. never will escape the ordeal. Dantès' revenge on the trio of villains who wrecked his life serves as the thematic framework of his rebirth as an “epic” hero who must redefine the meaning of dignity and happiness by being able to return from the dead in the first place. Similarly, O'Neill's delineation of the hero's journey of reconstruction is complex and does not measure the idea of the hidden treasure in merely its homiletic Christian sense of reaping the final rewards for endurance and faith. He problematizes, even in his early one-act plays, the distinction between the two dimensions of peace and despair as he introduces his own romantic view regarding the question of the hero's tragic dispossession.Paradoxically, a hidden treasure can only become palpable and real when it dissolves in the inner self-realization of the hero. The storyline of Monte Cristo anticipates the central anxiety in O'Neill's oeuvre regarding the idea of dispossession from a privileged position of power followed by a new sense of fulfillment beyond antagonistic lines. The postponement, through trial and exile, of a life he rightfully deserves in the present—like Odysseus, Aeneas, Prospero—places Dantès and subsequently the paradigmatic O'Neillian protagonist in a mythic tradition of epic narrative on a new frontier. O'Neill lays the groundwork of this traumatized but metamorphic idea in seed form in his one-act plays during the period of the First World War.The prison where hope must be forfeited, the Château d'If, is a Dantesque Inferno and Purgatorio rolled into one for the hero. Here he learns his lessons for effective survival in society, lessons he will rely on in his resurrected life. The prison's isolation and dreadful history seem to announce the idea of irrevocable exile. The humanistic lesson of the château comes from an inversion of the cruelty endured by the Abbé Faria, who is able to objectify his experiences and hopes in another victim of injustice, Dantès. Thus the priest becomes the necessary agency between the Inferno of the prison and the potential hero who will literally undergo a symbolic rebirth from the womb of the sea. Dantès' transformation into a free man fulfills Faria's desire to be the father of an heroic son earning his freedom: “You are my son, Dantès! You are the child of my captivity!”6 The buried treasure of Monte Cristo, which had been for long “the object of the Abbé's meditations,” accordingly becomes less of an abstraction as it will enable the happiness of a second, politically victimized citizen of France. But what is the basis and rationale of that happiness?Dumas's novel contains a contradiction that deeply concerns O'Neill's response to the moral of the story. Initially, Dantès distinguishes—as Faria also does for lack of a choice—the metaphorical treasures of knowledge and wisdom from the material treasures of Monte Cristo. He is grateful for the priest's “presence” and the gifts he has initially received from him: the “rays of understanding you have shone into my brain and the languages that you have implanted into my memory … the many sciences that you have brought in my grasp … this is worth to me more than tons of gold.”7 Dantès' awakened desire for knowledge echoes the fate of Goethe's Faust. He is more than satisfied with such a bounty of enlightenment in the darkness of his predicament in the Château d'If. It is this acknowledgment of a resource that is the rejuvenating, humanist factor in Dantès' life, “re-tempering (his) soul” and making his “whole being capable of great and awe inspiring deeds.”8Yet, such a liberal conception of noble action stands in sharp distinction from the objective of using a material fortune for destroying one's enemies, as Faria envisions and sanctions, and as Dantès effectively executes. The teleology of revenge is thus manifested vicariously through the imagination of a brilliant though frustrated priest and actually through his younger and equally victimized protégé. They use each other to justify personal revenge and to express it in terms of a larger, questionable humanism.9 It is this contradiction in Dumas's melodrama that Eugene O'Neill, with the image of his father famously exclaiming, “Mine, the treasures of Monte Cristo! The world is mine!” reacts to and finally rejects in his own perception of life, by showing his preference for the abstract to the material nature of “hidden treasures.”10The relationship between a seasoned survivor like the imprisoned priest Faria and a younger initiate serves as a model for a number of O'Neill's father-son relationships, as in his very first play, the one-act A Wife for a Life (1913). The Old Man who owns the Yvette gold mine sacrifices his claim of wealth to a younger man who had rescued him from drowning many years ago. The visage of the Old Man recalls that of Dumas's old priest: “his face is the face of one who has wandered far, lived hard, seen life in the rough and is a little weary of it all.” His clothes show evidence of “long wear and tear.” The gold mine becomes the central metaphor of the human treasure—his wife—whom he ultimately believes the younger man can better appreciate and grow with, rather than with himself in his state of alienation. In both cases, the disparity of age between the Abbé Faria/Old Man and the younger prototype underscores a natural law of maturation in the enjoyment of treasures so far hidden from sight. The protégé better deserves to achieve the dream of his precursor. The desert (“this land God forgot”), like the Château d'If, has drawn out the maximum potential of the older man in his struggle for survival, and this can now be passed on to the younger man.11O'Neill keeps the Old Man's sacrifice regarding the ‘treasure’ a secret, unlike the Dumas story, as we learn from his internal monologue: So I have found him after all these years and I cannot even hate him. What tricks Fate plays with us. When he told me his name that first day I noticed that it was the same as the man's I was looking for. But he seemed such a boy to me and my heart went out to him so strongly that I never for an instant harbored the idea that he would be the John Sloan I was after. Of course he never knew my right name. I wonder what he would say if he knew. I've half a mind to tell him. But what's the use? Why should I mar his happiness? In this affair I am alone to blame and I must pay…. Oh, what a fool I have been. She was true to me in spite of what I was. God bless him for telling me so. God grant they both be happy—the only two beings I ever loved. And I must keep wandering on.12 And so the Young Man gets the benefit of the Old Man's final silence about Yvette's identity, because the former believes that his love of her is pristine, untouched by shadows of the past. Thus, instead of being a final means of revenge, the hidden treasure is passed on to fulfill the cause of love.In Ile, O'Neill establishes a number of ideas and images pertaining to the consequences of appropriating the hidden treasures of life. The play shows the conflict between an elderly monomaniac captain of a whaling ship, Keeney, and his distraught wife, Annie, over his self-destructive impulse to fulfill at all costs his goal of killing whales for their “ile.” A tenuous link between Captain Keeney and Melville's Captain Ahab may be ascertained in his single-minded determination to fulfill what he set out to do, even at the price of self-destruction.13For Captain Keeney, the hidden treasure is the oil that he believed himself destined to find in the whales of the North Sea. Only a devout believer of Puritan faith should deserve to gain such immense wealth after severe perseverance and labor. But profiting from the venture, either in monetary or emotional terms, is an illusion that Captain Keeney will only register after the play has reached the extreme point of dramatic conflict between himself and his wife. He believes in his mission of finding the whales and thus will not compromise or give up before doing so, whereas she has been totally opposed to the search so far and finally reaches the point of giving an ultimatum if he does not return to a normal and healthy course of life. Keeney relents when the going becomes so impossible that the sailors contemplate mutiny. So a distinction is made between material and metaphorical hidden treasures. Keeney's extreme, self-vindicating search leads to the madness of his wife at the end of the play. She, unlike Lady Macbeth, does not at all prompt her husband to usurp nature and yet pays the price for his transgressions.The image of imprisonment shifts from one form to another: from the icebound sea (recalling Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner) to the metaphorical forms of imprisonment, madness, self-delusion, and death. Unlike in Dumas's tale, there is no legacy of knowledge being passed on; actually it is the opposite—a sense of total annihilation. The only direction that attracts the captain is the icebound North Sea and not the clear waters that would facilitate the ship reaching home, the (hidden) treasure of whale oil being the only objective within a physical and mental framework of imprisonment: “He won't look nowhere but no'th'ard where's there is only ice to see. He don't want to see no clear water. All he thinks on is gettin' the ile.”14A search for buried treasure proverbially implies, as in myth, a conscious (or subconscious) journey of sacrifice and tribulations that the captain is forcing the sailors to acknowledge. This is a variation on the condition of Edmond Dantès being forced to endure a bleak incarceration in the Château d'If in order to arrive eventually at the knowledge of the treasure that is buried on the island of Monte Cristo. In Monte Cristo, insanity and death are closely associated with the idea of hidden treasures. Dantès' descent into the hell of arbitrary incarceration takes him close to madness and then to the emblematic death of replacing the corpse of the Abbé Faria in the latter's body-bag, which, in its disposal into the sea, becomes the singular means of escape for him. He “becomes” the corpse in the way an epic hero like Aeneas identifies with the dead in the Underworld. He cuts his way out of the bag and rises from the waves like the reborn Fisher King of the Grail legend. The parturient sea is an image that O'Neill develops in his “Glencairn Plays” and throughout his career.In Ile, O'Neill is cynical about the consequences of the treasure hunt, which leads to madness rather than liberation, to melodrama rather than tragedy, as Keeney, hell-bent on his agenda of “ile,” plunges further north after the sighted whales. The deluded heroism of Keeney does not uplift the spirit of his wife. He, in fact, falls in her estimation of his mythic potential: “I guess I was dreaming about the old Vikings in the story books and I thought you were one of them,” she says. Mrs. Keeney's fantasy about her husband being a great path-breaking explorer breaks down when she realizes the inhumanity of his quest for treasure. It is an imposition, a trap, a forced imprisonment like that of Edmond Dantès, which she unwillingly faces: “I won't stand it—I can't stand it pent up by these walls like a prison…. I'll go mad!” These and the following lines echo not only the initial outrage of Dantès against his sudden and unreal incarceration in the Château d'If, but also the predicament of Ella O'Neill in the context of her husband James's boasting as an acclaimed and talented actor. Annie exclaims about her husband's penchant for appearances in society: “You have to live up to your silly reputation even if you have to beat and starve men and drive me mad to do it.”15However, Keeney makes a distinction about the nonmaterialistic nature of his desire (“It ain't the money I'm thinking of”). He asserts his honor is the cause, referring to his reputation of always coming back with “a full ship.” For his wife, the barrenness and impersonality of her husband's search is supplemented by an acute sense of having not borne a child: “I sometimes think if we could only have a child.” Keeney relents momentarily to his wife's pleas for a return. But he reverts to his original passion once the whales are sighted, leaving her mind to crack in the wake of his veiled indifference, as shown by her wild crescendo on the piano. Mrs. Keeney's final disrupted condition recalls Edmund's anger at his father's lapses regarding his mother, who paid with her sanity for her husband's weakness for the big “money-maker” of a play and the “great romantic part” he had in it: KEENEY:I know you're foolin' me, Annie. You ain't out of your mind—(anxiously) be you? I'll get the ile now right enough—just a little while longer, Annie—then we'll turn right enough—just a little while longer, Annie—then we'll turn hom'ward. I can't turn back now, you see that, don't ye? I've got to git the ile. (In sudden terror) Answer me! You ain't mad, be you?16 Keeney's plea reflects James Tyrone's guilt regarding the cause of his wife Mary's alienation. In that equivocal guilt of a man regarding his role in the annihilation of the woman he loved, the conclusion anticipates, in different degrees, that of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Annie's withdrawal into a lonely, twilight world that finally overwhelms her mind finds echoes in Mary Tyrone's concluding, Ophelia-like monologue. Mary's last recollection in the play, expressed with “a look of growing uneasiness,” significantly refers to her initial, critical encounter with the charismatic actor James Tyrone with whom he fell in love, and then the gradual eclipsing of a romantic past as reality dawned upon her: “Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes I remember I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (italics mine).The qualification is quite pointed and is rounded off with the tableau that follows: Mary staring into space in a “sad dream,” Tyrone “stirs” self-consciously in his chair; Edmund and Jamie “remain motionless.”17Keeney's anxiety for his wife's mental well-being appears to be secondary to his greedy urge to accomplish his goal of gaining the treasure he has set out for. After interminable waiting for the whales, the moment he makes contact with them—ironically at the cliff-edge of Annie's tolerance—he plunges ahead without any other consideration. He believes he has struck success in locating the hidden treasure, but ironically his success proves to be his nemesis, recalling Yank in The Hairy Ape (1921) making his fatal contact with the gorilla in the zoo. Yank's realization that at last he “belongs” concludes in his total extinction in the crushing grip of the gorilla. For Keeney, his euphoric vindication of his quest for “ile” measures the course of his own and his wife's annihilation.Michel Foucault's theories of madness and corresponding incarceration in prisons—like the Bastille or the Château d'If—by sovereigns who wish to control and discipline the “wrongdoer” through a severe system of panoptic surveillance, acquire significance in the extended discourse of Edmond Dantès over the span of a century.18 Foucault talks of madness being purposely confined in a “neutral region” and seen as “a blank page where the real life of the city was suspended”; “here order no longer freely confronted disorder, reason no longer tried to make its own way among all that might evade or seek to deny it.” The rationale of prisons like the Château d'If was to contain the human resources of its inmates, to transform and control them on its own terms, which implied an antithesis to preservation. The artistic expression that the subject of madness had gained in the Renaissance in works like King Lear and Don Quixote was, according to Foucault, “sequestered within the fortress of confinement, bound to Reason, to the rules of morality and to their monotonous nights.”19In Dumas's novel, the Abbé Faria, from the beginning of his confinement in the wake of Napoleon's deportation, is seen as the ineffectual, mad dreamer of buried treasures, similar to the mad Captain Bartlett in O'Neill's Where the Cross Is Made (1918) and Gold (1920). Aware of his current reputation, Faria refutes its substance to Edmond: “No, have no fear, I am not mad. This treasure exists, Dantès, and if I'm unable to possess it, you shall.”20 He sees no point in sharing his knowledge with anyone belonging to the system that has nullified his allegedly subversive role in the state. He is not interested in communication as an end in itself and therefore maintains his silence, the strategic “antic disposition” of Hamlet. His purpose is ironically once more subversive, against the dominant powers, but gladly nurturing an ally whom he has miraculously found at his very doorstep.Faria's selective humanism, induced by his friendship with Edmond, has made him apparently forgive the world that betrayed him (“Out of love for you I have forgiven the world”).21 But has he? As a mark of his love and gratitude he wishes Edmond to possess the treasure he, Faria, could not, and this treasure, unlike the one in Where the Cross Is Made, is not a figment of the imagination of a mad captain who summons his phantom companions from the past onto the stage to draw the conclusions of unfinished stories. Edmond too is stripped of power by the fraudulent use of the penal machinery (“an apparatus for transforming individuals”) in order to negate his credible claim to happiness. But his education under Faria's tutelage, his escape, inheritance of wealth, and sweet revenge, invert the rationale of the prison system that had sought to enervate and re-form him.22 Inadvertently, the same order, in an instance of poetic justice, provides the ground of his superior empowerment. Has the brutalization and indifference of the panoptic state ironically engendered its own kind in a stronger form for a new generation?23Dumas qualifies Faria's humanized metamorphosis with a streak of Machiavellian expediency. Faria not only turns the tables on the repressive and unjust state by imbuing a desire for money and power in Edmond, but also points to that power as an agency of revenge against Edmond's enemies: “He considered how much, nowadays, with a fortune of thirteen or fourteen million, a man could do in the way of harm to his enemies.”24 Indeed, to Dantès the material treasure is seen initially as secondary to the intellectual, emotional, metaphorical, and spiritual treasures that Faria has represented for him. But the latter relinquishes his own agenda of political action against his enemies in giving his life savings to his successor with whom he has emotionally identified. Beyond the liberation of mind and body, the power-seizing impulse in Edmond, implanted by his mentor, is fulfilled in his successful elimination of the three principal enemies who had been responsible for incarcerating him in the Château d'If. In O'Neill this path to revenge, using the acquired powers of hidden treasures, is forsaken to the extent that “possessors” become “self-dispossessed” in a play like The Rope.In Madness and Civilization Foucault says that he has tried to write not a history but the archeology of the “silence” of madness, which to him constitutes the “dungeon” period of the inarticulation of Reason.25 Implicit in this image is the expectation of a new, regenerative voice, that of a successor, a son and heir, who will restore Reason. Dumas moves toward this goal through the nurturing of a new order in the masquerade of the marginalized. The hero ultimately prevails. O'Neill combines this progress with a sense of the tragic—a life of value lost through sacrifice, dispossession, and death. Foucault's viewpoint on madness and imprisonment, set in the mid-nineteenth century, is romanticized by Dumas, Charles Fechter, and James O'Neill through the depiction of hidden treasures, that is, wealth, as the generator of change/revenge and the restorer of Reason. Eugene O'Neill consistently reacts adversely to this presumption of his father's theater. Yet, paradoxically “this noted exponent of twentieth century drama,” observes Louis Sheaffer, “had his roots in nineteenth-century theater, particularly as embodied in Monte Cristo,” so much so that Edmond Dantès had become “virtually a fifth member of the O'Neill family.”26In The Rope (1918), O'Neill demonstrates a similar antimaterialist, yet romantic viewpoint as in his late plays—Long Day's Journey, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Hughie. In these plays we discover a purging process of the conflicts arising out of Desire. The coveted objectives are often in the form of gold or land, whose worth can be finally realized more through the transcendence of those treasures than by their immediate and ephemeral possession. The Rope gives an early version of this theme and vision in a succinct poetic vignette about what Virginia Floyd called “man's dual conflicting materialistic and spiritual longings” that can be located in O'Neill's extended response to the discourse of The Count of Monte Cristo.27The Rope begins with the venerable, scripture-spouting, and disoriented Abraham Bentley waiting to square accounts with his son Luke who had five years earlier stolen a hundred dollars of his and run away. According to his daughter Anne from an earlier marriage, Abe drove her mother to death and got married again to a whorish woman who before long left him for other men. At one side of the barn Abe has fixed a rope with an open running noose. It appears to be a retributive execution device by which, oddly enough, he expects his wayward son Luke to hang himself if and when he returns home from his wanderings. During Luke's absence, the farm has not prospered, and Anne and her husband, Sweeney, have taken care of things with the hope of possessing the place themselves. They pray that “the young thing is dead and won't come back” to make his claim at the end of the day and simultaneously look forward to Abe's imminent madness with which he will lose his rights to the farm. Abe and Luke, being possessors (or potential possessors) of wealth, arouse hostility and envy and an excuse to dispossess them on the basis of insanity or unworthiness. One is deemed a madman, the other a thief and wastrel. Edmond Dantès had been the target of an evil eye of envy and hatred, with Danglars and Fernand fabricating reasons to justify their steps of burying him alive. A prison or asylum quarantines the problematic and unwanted individual for the benefit of vested interests. Unfair deprivation of a person's rights and property by a dominant power, using madness or crime as an excuse, is a recurrent concern in modern literature and drama, addressed by Foucault in Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish. We see traces of this theme in O'Neill's work as well.Paradoxically, agency in The Rope comes from marginal characters who gravitate to the center, especially the elfin ten-year-old Mary who parallels her Uncle Luke's aversion to discipline. From the beginning of the play, the setting of Bentley's farmhouse, perched on the top of a cliff, presents the silent emblem of capital punishment, the noose, which in Foucault's terms refers to the definitive reality of the scaffold that seeks to correct past domestic violations committed by the son, who is expected to be brought to justice some day. Ultimately, O'Neill sublimates the notions of culpability and justice into a poetic dimension at the end of his cryptic play.Abe's brokenly articulated animosity toward his black sheep of a son, strangely enough, counterpoints the fact that his formal will has designated Luke as his heir if he gets back to the farm within seven years of his disappearance. Only two years till that deadline remain at the beginning of the play. Though the scheming couple would desire Luke's absence to become permanent for their own advantage, the maverick suddenly reappears (“back after years of bumming around the rotten earth”). Abe seems as overjoyed at the return of the prodigal as the biblical father was in a similar circumstance. But O'Neill gives a black-comedy twist by attributing the old man's happiness to the possibility that Luke will at last be hanged by the noose that had been kept ready for him all these years. A mystery, kept in suspense till the end, revolves around the noose. Connected to the question of who will inherit the farm, a second issue crops up, pertaining to the recovery of an alleged treasure of gold, a thousand dollars, belonging to Abe. Anne and Sweeney have heard this story but are not sure about it. They plan to fool Luke to reveal its whereabouts, and he plays along, hinting he knows all about it.Initially Luke sees the rope as a bad joke, which it is! Supposing from the grotesque, inarticulate instructions of his father that he is meant to hang himself, he lashes back at the morbidly gothic humor of the old man. In this way Luke fails Abe's test of his penitence and ironically loses his reward in the shape of the bag of gold attached to the noose, which he would discover only by subjecting himself to hanging! Far from being contrite about his past misdeeds, Luke, in collusion with the avaricious and craft
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