“None of us can help the things life has done to us.” Taking Mary Tyrone’s words in Long Days Journey Into Night as a point of departure, discuss the nature of “tragedy” in modern drama, in relation to O’Neil’s works The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Jou
... central. The auteur theory of art as expression of personal view. There is scarcely a more quintessentially modern idea than this; it governs the psychotics of Hitchcock to the emotional Catharsis of Cézanne. Also absent are the gods, great persons and aristocracies of both Greece and Shakespeare, instead it is a form of tragedy which is preoccupied with the everyday existence of life. Note the colloquial flare of Pearl, Margie and Cora’s N.Y slang; it’s exclamatory tone and rhythm - “da big boob.” This perspective is an expression of the secularisation and democratisation of the 19th/20th centuries, and is characteristic of the shift across the arts, away from institutions and establishment and towards the individual. The very spirit of modernity in art, is in this tragedy! We could also argue O’Neil’s work is less about “modern tragedy” and more the “tragedy of modernity,” what O’Neil calls the “exultance lacking in modern life(7).” We can read his works, as polemic criticisms of certain traits of modern societies. It’s hardships, materialism, vanities and drunker ness. To O’Neil in Modern times “life is struggle,” - “everything comes between you and what you want to be” . Further more he tells us it’s this struggle which “gives life it’s significance.” Materialism is presented as an entirely destructive force, obliterating the harmony of the family unit. To the characters in the “Long Days Journey…,” Tyrone’s “fear of the poor house,” is held to account for nearly all of their domestic problems, at different times, whether it be Edmunds illness, or Mary’s morphine addiction. Mary’s constant assertion that “if only your father hadn’t been so stingy,” punctuates the action . It is also an inwardly destructive materialism presented here.. Tyrone “knows the value of a dollar” but ultimately it has ruined his acting career. We could argue this this pre-empts the post-modern “generation-x,” consumer-satire of Phalnuik and Coupland. This tragedy explored here is inexplicably linked with the tragedy of a nation ; Ireland. The stage directions give the play an Irish flavour; the “ Irish narrowness” of the maids face, the “lilt” of their voices. However the play is not connected to Ireland just for colour, it determines some of it’s most tragic circumstances. The uncertainty of emigration, it’s psychological repercussions and a the idea of a simple Irish peasant family confronted with the whole weight of 20thc American capitalism. Ultimately Tyrone’s father returned to Ireland to die, crushed by its weight! a powerful image and metaphor. Tyrone makes his erratic property purchases from the “flannel-mouth, gold-brick merchant sting(Act2 Scene2, 86)” McGuire. He is a fellow Irish man through implication of his name. It’s a bloated and rotten image of capitalism O’Neil portrays here. It’s that of the peasants turned capitalists. The Irish exploiting the Irish, while screaming at their children “keep your anarchist and communists ideas to yourself.” It’s another absurdly tragic image. To O’Neil these images embody the tragedy of modernity. They pose the question - can we detect the political dissatisfaction of “The Iceman Comeths” Larry here In O‘Neil? In Act 4 scene 1 Tyrone tries to account for his economic insecurity. He suffered a hard childhood where he could never afford to eat. He and his sister” worked their fingers to the bone,” which scarred him eternally with a “peasant like awe(9)” for land. Ultimately he can not un-learn the lesson. It is a nod to the economic determinism of Marx. O’Neil himself once asserted “I’m a philosophical anarchist…. Which means go to it but leave me out of it.(10)” We can almost imagine Larry uttering the same words. However despite his “foolosophies,” Larry has really only resigned to the religion of death. He is embittered with the Nietzschean scorn that “social revolutionaries under the guise of helping the downtrodden, are really exercising their will to overthrow masters so that they themselves may be masters (11).” By God, I hate to believe it if any one of the crowd, if I am through long since with any connection with them. I know they’re damned fools, most of them, as stupidly greedy for power as the worst capitalist they attack….. (pg 579) It is therefore more likely O’Neil’s idea of modern tragedy lies more in the tragedy of human spirit than politics. After all he is a playwright who by his own words is not “concerned with the relation between man and man (O‘Neil)” There is the typically modern desire on behalf off all the characters of Long Day journey characters to rise above the petty realities that governs them. A thirst for their lives to attain a spiritual significance. They want to smash their materialism or drunker ness; the Dionysian/Apollonian desires of “Birth of tragedy“. For Mary there is significance in the religious life at the convent, for Edmund and Tyrone it is in the sacredness of the Arts (theatre and literature); to be “alive in it’s poetry.” For O’Neil the struggle in modern tragedy, is of the soul against the emptiness of modernity. However the vacancy is filled with a tragic vanity, an illusion to conceal the truth of nothingness. The plays are essentially plays about concealing the truth. This manifests itself through symbolistic devices like the fog, alcohol, morphine, and the portrait of Harry’s wife. Emblems of a fog world where truth is un-truth, Edmund isn’t sick, and Harry really did love his “nagging“ wife. The idea also permeates O’Neils notion of psychology. It’s in Hickeys “pipe dream” concept; our failure to neither be ourselves nor realise our dreams. In Iceman Cometh the reliance of the ensemble performance of the collective, is mirrored in the psychology of the characters and their social realationships. The pimp Rocky is convinced he’s not a pimp. The prostitutes are convinced they are not prostitutes, a huge mutually supportive edifice of psychological dishonesty. They too are “fog people.” While their superficial reality, is maintained through a sort of “stammering” which is their “nature” . Rocky warns the “street girls” they’d have to give all their money to “some pimp...