Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism

by Anne Fleche

Overview

Mimetic Disillusion reevaluates the history of modern U.S. drama, showing that at mid-century it turned in the direction of a poststructuralist "disillusionment with mimesis" or mimicry.

This volume focuses on two major writers of the 1930s and 1940s—Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams—one whose writing career was just ending and the other whose career was just beginning. In new readings of their major works from this period, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire, Fleche develops connections to the writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others, and discusses poststructuralism in the light of modern writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Walter Benjamin. Fleche also extends this discussion to the work of two contemporary playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy and Tony Kushner. The aim of Mimetic Disillusion is not to reject "mimetic" and "realistic" readings but to explore the rich complexities of these two ideas and the fruit of their ongoing relevance to U.S. theatre.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817308384
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	01/30/1997
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anne Fleche is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College.

Read an Excerpt

Mimetic Disillusion

Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism

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By Anne Fleche

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1997 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-0838-4

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Theory, 1935-1947

Shannon: Yeah, well, you know we—live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really....

Hannah: I would say both, Mr. Shannon.

Shannon: But when you live on the fantastic level as I have lately but have got to operate on the realistic level, that's when you're spooked, that's the spook.

This exchange, from The Night of the Iguana (1961), by boldly undercutting its own illusionism as dialogue, imitates the very problem it appears to discuss. The disillusionment of Shannon, a former minister reduced to giving guided tours, presents him with the dilemma of the real/fantastic, which Hannah, the spiritual ("female") artist, represents as a false distinction: "I would say both." The "spook," or ghost or "double," of the real is inseparable from the scene of the real, and Hannah's answer, with its "both/and," offers no consoling duplicity.

Tennessee Williams's plays persistently question the relation of "art" to "reality," the problem of formal constraints in the theater, and the violence and destructiveness of closure, of establishing limits and defining moments. His plays create a language for these representational concepts: "real/fantastic," "fugitive," "deception," "transparent," "mendacity"; and visually he plays magic tricks that call attention to the theatrical illusion: he turns the set inside out and puts a Chinese lantern over the lightbulb. Perhaps it is this obsessive worrying over representation itself that makes Williams's dramas seem particularly unconcerned with getting anywhere and gives them their strong sense of undecidability and dislocation. Shannon's philosophical question to the muselike Miss Jelkes is not a real question any more than her reply is a real answer. But the question really does ask something, and it is something the play really cannot answer. The measure of Williams's inventiveness as a playwright is his ability to think continually of new ways to reinvent the question.

"Metatheatre" might have been an answer, and in fact Williams's allegorical writing could have accommodated this theory of a theater-about-theater, thus sidestepping its relation to "reality" or at least putting it off But Williams doesn't opt for it. He is still interested in what art has to do with "the real," even though, or perhaps because, as the similarly named Hannah and Shannon demonstrate, the distinction itself is part of the illusion. The presence of real people in the theater, responding to real systems of signification, however they interpret them, makes mimesis the crucial issue for anyone concerned with dramatic theory. A troubled term with various meanings—"copy," "imitation," "representation," "resemblance," "mimicry," etc., "mimesis" first acquires prominence in Greek philosophy with Plato, as Mihai Spariosu has shown (Spariosu III). Plato emphasizes the dangers of mimesis as fantastic rather than real in his plan to educate wise, reasonable philosopher kings for The Republic. Mimesis as it first developed theoretically, then, is specifically identified with political ends and not with "pleasure" (also a complicated term for the Greeks). The connection between drama and politics in the United States in the 1930s, which I will be discussing later in this chapter, is a particular moment in a long conceptual history. Aristotle is usually the classical model in this history of dramatic theory, and Brecht's influence is perhaps a good enough reason for this emphasis, but I want to begin by reexamining Plato's writings, since the Aristotle-Brecht connection gets much of the attention later on.

For Plato, dramatic poetry is especially dangerous because its form is so reliant upon multiplicity, mutability, and change—and judgments based on what changes are false. What Plato calls "representation" (mimesis) in drama, in fact, is role-playing: speeches in which one actually pretends to be somebody else. This mimesis he opposes to narration, a univocal or "lyric" mode. ("Epic," as with Brecht, employs both methods. See The Republic, 392cff.) The capacity for taking on different points of view is art's greatest danger and its chief limitation. Anyone who claims knowledge of many things (e.g., a playwright, who represents different kinds of people, good and bad) is for Plato really "a charlatan, whose apparent omniscience is due entirely to his own inability to distinguish knowledge, ignorance, and representation" (598d). The multiplicity of the point of view, and not "narration" (substituting pretense for authenticity), is the issue, as Plato has to admit, since he is narrating Socrates.

In the famous distinction between reality and illusion in book 10 of The Republic, the artist is said to imitate what the craftsman manufactures, the useful thing that is already at one remove from the higher reality of form. Furthermore, the artist can only imitate the particular thing from a particular point of view: "What I mean is this. If you look at a bed, or anything else, sideways or endways or from some other angle, does it make any difference to the bed? Isn't it merely that it looks different, without being different?" (598a). Indeed "all ... representative artists" exploit optical effects contradictory to reason, placing art "in a fond liaison" with the less rational parts of the mind (603b). Painting, drama, and magic are for Plato equivalent activities: they go to bed with our instincts and dally with our perceptions.

Objects and representations of objects cannot lead us to truth; they are a dead end. To arrive at truth we must rely solely on reason (dialectic, discussion, philosophy), breaking down assumptions until we reach the forms, which are single and unified. Truth cannot be multiple, because it is the principle shared by two (or more) things (597c). It is what makes multiple things resemble each other. For Plato, then, reality is a mimetic circle of resemblances: everything reflects something else, since all ultimately reflect the forms. Passages from his late writings, such as The Laws and The Timaeus, reflect more directly upon The Republic's rather implicit dependence on this notion, perhaps because these books are specifically about the processes of organization and creation (respectively).

For example, in The Laws, Plato suggests that representation (mimesis) is the law that replicates itself throughout human endeavor—in fact it is the law that specifically links art and the state. What is most important in art is accuracy, the correct reproduction of the model (668); similarly, the state is "a 'representation' of the finest and noblest life—the very thing we maintain is most genuinely a tragedy. So we are poets like yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone has the natural power to 'produce' to perfection (of that we're quite confident)" (817). In The Laws Plato's awareness of the dialogue's self-reflexivity is underscored, as it is in the passage above, again and again. "An Athenian Stranger," for example, takes the usual place of Socrates as teacher/narrator, and he makes explicit references to the textuality of his speeches, aware that he is producing a literary work to be used as instruction (and even in The Republic Plato had argued that some literature could be instructive).

You see, when I look back now over this discussion of ours, ... well, it's come to look, to my eyes, just like a literary composition. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was overcome by a feeling of immense satisfaction at the sight of my "collected works," so to speak, because, of all the addresses I have ever learned or listened to, whether in verse or in this kind of free prose style I've been using, it's these that have impressed me as being the most eminently acceptable and the most entirely appropriate for the ears of the younger generation. [The Laws 811]

In setting down The Laws, the model to be copied, then, Plato recognizes the "stranger" in himself, the uncanniness of the writer, who opens the door into the very realm of repetition from which he flees. The disguise of literary composition enables him to speak, but from a position Plato humorously undercuts as suspect, presumptuous, unconvincing. He likens his writing to tragedy (because both are morally serious) in self-deprecating terms. And he seems wittily aware of his reliance on language and metaphor. As long as we are in a world of images—visual or verbal—we are inside a perfect mimetic model, playing with a complete set of perfectly mimetic figures or copies that cannot move beyond their self-reflexivity. (Partly, the reason is that the copies are contained in space, which is the position or receptacle of reality. Space must always be the same because it is capable of receiving anything—see, e.g., The Timaeus 29-53.)

When Plato is on the verge of describing the antithesis of mimesis, namely truth itself, he stops: "because what you'd see would no longer be an image of what we are talking about but the truth itself, that is, as I see it; one ought not at this point to claim certainty, though one can claim that there is something of the kind to see, don't you think?" (The Republic 533a). The pervasiveness of images, of language and of what Aristotle, speaking of drama, calls "thought" ("all the effects that have to be produced by means of language"—On the Art of Poetry 57-58), is something Plato faces head-on, and its why he thinks we should just control art (the poet is out of control—cf. The Laws 719). Yet on the other hand, as his addition of "space" to the Form/Copy dyad in The Timaeus seems to suggest, for Plato art orders the mess and chaos of life. It names and locates. So, as Oscar Wilde said, life imitates art, tries to shape and organize and possess itself. This notion isn't the reverse of censorship but its obverse; Wilde's aestheticism isn't abandonment but another version of mimetic control. And beneath both ideas, Plato's and Wilde's, lies a perception or perhaps even a fear of chaos and a desire to close the mimetic circle against it. Thus for Plato as well as Aristotle, mimesis is fundamental, a tautology.

In The Timaeus there is at least the theoretical possibility that language could be true and not metaphorical, but only relatively, "as irrefutable and uncontrovertible as a description in words can be"; but "both I and you ... are merely human, and should not look for anything more than a likely story in such matters" (29). As long as it is about change (the world, the universe, human life), language will be inaccurate, stuck in the holding pattern of meaning, "a likely story."

For Aristotle, change could be positive—it was no longer, as it was for Plato, the very model of falseness. Aristotle's idea was that change needn't result in endless replication but could represent an evolutionary motion toward an end. We can learn from mistakes and contingencies as well as from virtue—"real" or "imitated." The limitation of art, its point of view, is exactly Aristotle's point of departure for the mimetic theory with which he has been credited; in Aristotle we find the seeds of Plato. The mighty influence of Platonic philosophy on Western artistic theory has perhaps all along been mediated by Aristotle's mimetic glass, and there has been something suspicious in our reliance on Plato as a source for the truth/illusion binary. (This binary is inherent, in fact, in the Greek language, since "Aletheia," the Greek word for "truth," means "'what is revealed,' 'what is brought out from concealment'" [Nussbaum 241].) Brecht seems to suggest something about Aristotle's primary influence, for Aristotle, the sometime villain of Brechtian theater, is really much more useful to Brecht than that implies. Brecht consciously writes Aristotle into new being, as a collaborator in modern theater's critical confrontation with representational principles. Aristotle writes the other half of Brecht's "antimimetic" theory—or rather, Brecht (very platonically) narrates Aristotle, pretending, half of the time, to be Aristotle.

But there is yet another possible use for "mimesis," a less familiar one, because it is less explicitly connected to politics and morality. Mihai Spariosu has developed a notion of pre-Platonic "mimetic" "play" that is presentational rather than representational, though both are related, he says, to a "power principle lying at the foundation of Western civilization" (III). This "nonmimetic" or "Dionysian" play Spariosu describes as a "turn[ing] away from history, without taking refuge in the eternal," "the end of Western civilization as we know it at present" (101). Spariosu criticizes the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his play with mimesis, which subverts the unifying principle at the heart of Plato's philosophy while retaining its play of surfaces, because Derrida continues to discuss play in relation to metaphysics (78-79). "There should no longer be a question of displacing or overcoming, but rather one of turning away, of 'digressing' without 'transgressing'" (79). Derrida, Spariosu argues, leaves the "power-principle" intact, as his appropriation by certain colonial academies would suggest: "This is particularly evident in American academia, where poststructuralism has taken the form of an ideology, replacing New Criticism and approaching what Edward Said calls a 'new orthodoxy'" (79).

While I don't want to minimize the role of the academy in power relations, of various kinds and degrees, it seems to me that Spariosu's notion of power is disingenuous. After all, academia is often attacked as a source of political hegemony, as a kind of referent or substitute for political administrations, whose control of rhetoric and media is, one would think, more clearly demonstrable. And language and interpretation continue to be the language and interpretation of power, whether they refer to history (i.e., for Spariosu, the history of Western civilization, hence metaphysics) or "turn away from it." The notion of "turning," or "digressing," does not avoid defining history by seeking to avoid it.

More important, Elin Diamond, among others, has argued that relations of power are inherent in the mimetic sign-referent exchange. And so we cannot speak of power, or even identify what it is we want to avoid about it, outside the play of referents. Moreover, Diamond, who as a feminist is perhaps more conscious of the important symbolic power of taking a position than is Spariosu, recognizes (like Plato) that in writing her essay she assumes a certain relation to the truth, "however provisional":

Feminists, in our different constituencies, with our different objects of analysis, seek to intervene in the symbolic systems—linguistic, theatrical, political, psychological—and intervention requires assuming a subject position, however provisional, and making truth claims, however flexible, concerning one's own representations.

The classical Western tradition has tied up its dramatic criticism in the struggle between politics and art. (Sometimes politics is also called "morality" or "usefulness," and similarly art, when it is not politically or morally "good," is called something else—"pornography," "propaganda," "popular culture.") "There is," as Plato remarks in The Republic, "an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (607b). And artistic changes do in fact seem to indicate shifts in the social/political atmosphere: an alteration in style presupposes an alteration in the way the audience is perceived. It is probably naive to think that we can think of art apart from politics. And this is especially true of the drama, where, as in film, a large collaborative effort is required for production.

There has been renewed interest in the problem of mimesis, at least since World War II, occasioned perhaps as much by political changes as anything else. At least, the debate has, as Diamond's remarks suggest, seemed to create antagonisms over political questions of activism and social efficacy. The question asked by Harry Levin in 1951, "What Is Realism?" was a timely one, given the recent works of realistic investigation by O'Neill and Williams that I explore in the following chapters, and it is still a central question in literary—and especially dramatic—theory. At the time Levin did not see realism as an unmixed form, nor did he think its formal assumptions durable. Identifying the perception of realism with its practice, Levin saw it as a bourgeois art that couldn't sustain its assumptions. Partly, Levin was right: realism, as its name implies, inevitably falls short of its goal, pointing to a fullness beyond itself that is representation's seductive power and its limitation. And Levin was hardly speaking of some "naive" realism that couldn't envision change; on the contrary, the mix of "convention" and "realism" he saw in the writing of that time Levin described as itself "transitional": realistic art contains the means for liberation from its own conventional rigidity, because realists tend to |transcend their own class, to criticize the bourgeoisie" (199).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
1. Introduction: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Theory, 1935-1947,
2. Long Days Journey into Night: The Seen and the Unseen,
3. The Iceman Cometh: Buying Time,
4. The Glass Menagerie: Loss and Space,
5. A Streetcar Named Desire: Spatial Violation and Sexual Violence,
Afterword,
Notes,
References,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

"Anne Fleche imaginatively broadens and enriches the critical debate on dramatic theory, but, more significantly, she restores O'Neill and Williams to a central role within it. Readings of individual plays are wonderfully original and contemporary, clarified throughout by Fleche's wide-ranging knowledge of dramatic literature and, especially, by her witty, lucid prose."
—Mark W. Estrin, Rhode Island College

From the Publisher