The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity Grant Gosizk

The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity Grant Gosizk Modern Drama, Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 171-191 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696362 Access provided by Carthage College (6 Sep 2018 17:42 GMT) The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity GRANT GOSIZK ABSTRACT: While much has been written on Arthur Miller’s relationship to the post-war intelligentsia, few critics have explored the influence that intellectual debates on Holocaust complicity had on the author’s 1960s catalogue. Building on the similarities between the theory of the “banality of evil” offered in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusa- lem (1963) and Miller’s Herald Tribune article on the Nazi trials in Frankfurt (1964), this article suggests that the playwright’s interest in emerging theories of complicity became a central concern of After the Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1964). Strongly influenced by Theodor Adorno’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on aesthetic responses to post-war guilt, Miller used these plays to dramatize competing responses to the concept of “ubiquitous complicity” for the Holocaust. Using the aesthetic language of addiction spectacle scenes, which a strong tradition of American temperance theatre had popularized, Miller evaluated the mechanics of complicity and offered a dramatic thesis on its importance to anti-fascist activism. I conclude that, in both plays, the representation of addiction became the primary means through which Miller participated in contemporary critical debates on post-war guilt. KEYWORDS: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Incident at Vichy, After the Fall, medical humanities, guilt Although his was a remarkably prolific career, Arthur Miller did not produce a single theatrical work between 1956 and 1964. Attributing this hiatus to the author’s post-war political activism, the noted Miller biographer Christopher Bigsby suggests that, “[l]ike so many others at this time,” Miller “began to acknowledge the significance of the Holocaust, the shock of which [. .] led to a two-decade-long silence” (Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 11). Throughout this period of professional inactivity, Miller travelled extensively, attending sym- posia on anti-Semitism and the Jewish diaspora in France, Austria, and the Soviet Union, all the while re-evaluating the global consequences of the Holocaust and his relationship to them as a writer. These trips, and specifically © University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.61.2.0860r GRANT GOSIZK a tour of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1962, profoundly influenced the formal and theoretical character of the author’ssubsequent work, with some critics suggesting that “the Miller who returned to the theatre in the mid-1960s was a different man from the one who had written the essay ‘On Social Plays’” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 27; see also Bigsby, Review 401). Upon returning to the United States in 1963, Miller produced two plays, both of which were explicitly concerned with the historical contexts and consequences of the Holocaust: Incident at Vichy (1964) and After the Fall (1964). Incident at Vichy, a one-act play about racial inspection in Nazi-occupied France, dramatized the interactions of guilt, responsibility, and free will within totalitarian regimes. After the Fall, Miller’s psychological drama staged in the shadows of a German concentration camp, offered a thesis on guilt in the post-war era: “no one they didn’t kill can be innocent again” (32).1 This thematic emphasis on the Holocaust brought with it a number of formal and stylistic departures from the author’s previous work; perhaps the most notable of these was in Miller’s conception of guilt, which resonated with many of the critical debates on complicity that followed the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). On 16 February 1963, Arendt published the first instalment of a serial report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann: a former Nazi lieutenant colonel tried – in the first Nazi trial held in Israel – for “crimes ‘against the Jewish people’” for his role in organizing the transportation of millions of people to ghettos and concentration camps (Arendt, Eichmann 7). While Arendt agreed with the court’s contention that Eichmann “played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth” (277), as well as its conclusion that “no one, that is no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with [him]” (279), she objected to the ethnic specificity of the charges brought against him and the potential “partiality of Jewish judges” (259). Given the legal pre- cedent set at the Nuremberg Trials, where organizers of the Final Solution were tried for “crimes against the members of various nations” (6), she contended that the Israeli insistence upon the Jewishness of the victims and the adjudicators had “ulterior purposes,” albeit “the noblest of ulterior purposes” (253). Citing Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s declaration that the Eichmann trial should lead “the nations of the world to know . and they should be ashamed” (qtd. in Arendt 10) and remind Israelis that “only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled the Jews to hit back” (10), Arendt declared the prosecution of Eichmann a “show trial” (4): it abstracted the leg- islative imperative for a “trial [of] his deeds” in order to declare publicly the horrors of the Holocaust and to validate Israeli statehood (5). In short, Arendt 172 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction believed that the crime for which Eichmann was tried had been fabricated in order to make Eichmann a spectacle, a “scapegoat” for the whole of anti- Semitism, at the expense of the western tradition of criminal justice (286). The resulting threat, Arendt believed, was not that Eichmann would receive an unjust sentence but that trying him as the “monster responsible” for the Final Solution (8) – when in reality he “had no motives at all,” apart from “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advance- ment” (287) – abstracted legal determinations of guilt into evaluations of complicity that fundamentally obstructed justice. Instead, she contended, The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben-Gurion conceived of it, with its stress on general issues to the detriment of legal niceties, [. .] demanded exposure of the complicity of all German offices and authorities in the Final Solution – of all civil servants in the state ministries, of the regular armed forces, with their General Staff, of the judiciary, and of the business world. (18) The result was “almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of [Nazi] Party membership” (18). Drawing a distinction between the legal tradition of a “trial [of] deeds” and judgments of responsibility that considered indirect involvement, Arendt suggested that, if the two were conflated, as in the Eichmann trial, all would be found complicit with the Final Solution (5). Spatializing the concept, the author claimed that, when considering complicity, “the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands” (247). Unsurprisingly, Arendt’s report was highly controversial, with critical thinkers from all over the world debating the mechanics of complicity and its value in conceptualizing guilt for the crimes of the Final Solution.2 Of these thinkers, most fell into two camps: those who believed that acknowledging complicit responsibility for the Holocaust denied the criminal responsibility of the perpetrators and blamed victims, on the one hand, and those who believed that complicity with the Final Solution was inevitable and acknowl- edged it as integral to post-war, anti-fascist activism, on the other. While Miller sided with Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Bell, and other theorists who advocated the radical potential of acknowledging complicit guilt for the Final Solution, the author remained concerned about its value for those resigned to inaction against social injustice. In an article, originally published in the New York Times under the title “Our Guilt for the World’s Evil” (1965) – which defended Incident at Vichy against a barrage of negative reviews addressing the play’s supposed endorsement of Arendt’s work – he worried that many who accepted their complicity with the injus- tices of World War II would punish themselves with guilt “to keep from Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 173 GRANT GOSIZK being punished” (“Guilt” 75).3 Miller believed that, if not “transformed into responsibility,” guilt could impinge on the “ethical postulate” that demanded accountability and counteraction against injustice, “becom[ing] a ‘morality’” in itself (74–75). As Susan C.W. Abbotson suggests, Miller believed that “guilt alone is never the answer because, as a passive reaction, guilt is destruc- tive as opposed to the active reaction of accepting responsibility” (398). Indeed, Miller’sreturntothetheatreinthe1960s principally concerned these ethical debates surrounding complicity: namely, its ability to motivate responsibility or induce being resigned to inaction. For Miller, staging the distinctions between these two responses to complicity was problematic. Inherently defined by the passivity and inaction of everyday life, complicity itself seemed

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