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“The Dead Are Dancing with the Dead”: Ghosting in the Haunted Drama of Eugene O’Neill

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“The Dead Are Dancing with the Dead”: Ghosting in the Haunted Drama of Eugene O’Neill “The dead are dancing with the dead”: Ghosting in the Haunted Drama of Eugene O’Neill BY JOEL IWASKIEWICZ Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1954) are conspicuously ghost-free plays. Yet these two career-defining works by “our most important American dramatist,” Eugene O’Neill, have garnered distinctly haunted reputations.1 In an essay on Journey, Marxist critic Raymond Williams observes, “the play has a haunting effect . like a ghost walking.”2 Similarly, Suzanne Burr claims, “invisible ghosts are made visible [in O’Neill’s plays] either through haunting images voiced by the living or through the transformation of memories into ghostly characters.”3 Regarding Electra as “O’Neill’s death play”4 and Journey as one of the dramatist’s “ghost plays,” Normand Berlin argues, “O’Neill’s ghosts haunt his mind” and inspire for the playwright a drama “obsessed with death and with O’Neill’s memories of his past life.”5 The playwright himself might actually be said to engender the ghostly discourse surrounding his body of work by titling the Electra trilogy’s final installment The Haunted, and later, dedicating Journey, his autobiographical penultimate play, to “the four haunted Tyrones.” The fact remains, however, that not a single ghost appears in what critics herald two of the most haunted works by our great American tragedian. 1 Normand Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past: O’Neill and Hamlet,” The Massachusetts Review 20.2 (1979): 313. 2 Raymond Williams, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: Eugene O’Neill,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 35. 3 Suzanne Burr, “Ghosts in modern drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill and their legacy,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1987). 4 Normand Berlin, O’Neill’s Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 108. 5 Berlin, “Ghosts of the Past,” 315–16. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 1 While Electra and Journey dwell on the pains of memory, grief, and guilt, neither play exhibits haunting in the traditional style of Hamlet, for example, which theatre scholar Marvin Carlson flags as “the most haunted of all Western dramas.”6 As Carlson’s The Haunted Stage implies, however, the elements responsible for the central ghostliness in Hamlet may ultimately result from more than the slain Dane’s apparitional visitations. Recalling the words of Herbert Blau, Carlson writes, “one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return.”7 “All theatre,” he asserts, “is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition,” thus shifting our focus from literal ghosts to things historical, cultural, and, as this paper highlights, structural in nature.8 In t ur n , my exploration of dramatic haunting emphasizes the “cyclical repetition [that] serves as a major structuring device in all of O’Neill’s best plays,” among which Electra and Journey are notably haunted inclusions.9 By investigating s tr uc t ur e s —particularly textual layers of meaning—upon which O’Neill erects his themes, I advocate an intrinsic relationship between the playwright’s ghostly motifs and the repetitions through which he articulates, complicates, and, ultimately, enriches his haunted central themes. Looking to O’Neill’s “techniques” and “pervasive tendencies” (such as his textual repetitions and the complex ambiguities they produce), I hope to highlight the “tensions [and] conflict between the very elements that make up [O’Neill’s] drama.”10 Rather than arbitrarily engaging the playwright’s broad theme of haunting (one which Erich Auerbach might consider “an unsurveyable mass of various material that defies order”), I have selected a pair of O’Neill’s 6 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 4. 7 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 1. 8 Ibid., 11. 9 Zander Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structures in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), 130. 10 Ibid., 25–6. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 2 most prominent keywords as my own “point of departure . by which the subject [of haunting] can be seized” and in which to ground my thematic analysis.11 Humanist scholar Edward Said, a critic heavily influenced by Auerbach, offers a promising preface for what he might term a “true philological reading” of O’Neill’s ghostly themes—one that: [i]nvolves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself.12 Ultimately, I believe the individual linguistic units of O’Neill’s themes provide the key to unlocking the mystery behind the true haunting within Electra and Journey. A thorough survey of the plays at hand reveals the following among O’Neill’s recurring words: “shade,” “disappear,” “resemble,” “remember,” “forget,” “rotten,” and “damned”— terms that evoke, not coincidentally, concepts of memory, repetition, ghostliness, and death. The two keywords central to my project—“haunt” and “dead”—illuminate the unsettling congruency between O’Neill’s dramatic themes and his diction, so much so that I consider these words “an organic inner part of [O’Neill’s] theme itself.”13 To quote Williams from the introduction to his seminal Keywords, “haunt” and “dead” posit themselves at the core of an “active vocabulary” functioning within Electra and Journey.14 By charting the different usages of these words over the course of two plays, I hope to explore in my analysis what Williams considers “the vitality of language”: the “extension[s], variation[s] and transfer[s]” in meaning 11 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 13–15. 12 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 59. 13 Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur, 16. 14 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 15. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 3 that emerge, in our case, with each repetition of O’Neill’s keywords.15 Within Electra and Journey, I believe the vitality of the playwright’s language manifests itself as a “complex web of reception” composed of overlapping meanings and richly ambiguous thematic resonances.16 Yet the haunting O’Neill enacts by repeating his ghostly keywords produces more than an exhilarating parallel between form and theme; what the playwright ultimately illuminates within his own ghost stories is a universal tale of haunting inherent in drama itself. When O’Neill’s readers first encounter the title of the Electra trilogy’s concluding play— presumably in the table of contents—the playwright’s reference to The Haunted lacks context entirely. Similarly, O’Neill introduces “the four haunted Tyrones” before the action of Journey can inform his choice of the adjective “haunted.” For a member of either play’s theatrical audience, neither Electra’s individual titles nor Journey’s epigraph would stand out so prominently as they might to a reader directly encountering O’Neill’s text;17 thus, in a way, these written facets of O’Neill’s work that do not necessarily manifest themselves onstage produce additional appeal for O’Neill’s readers and draw particular attention to the purposefulness of his language.18 In A Playwright’s Theatre, scholar Egil Törnqvist emphasizes “the fact that O’Neill’s frequent and comprehensive stage directions far surpass practical production demands,” and furthermore, Törnqvist even contemplates “whether [the dramatist] wrote his plays primarily for the reader or for the spectator.”19 Although O’Neill composed much work directly for stage interpretation, I also believe he crafted his dramas (particularly those like Journey, which were intended for posthumous publication) for the linguistically- 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 144. 17 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 33. 18 Ibid., 52. 19 Egil Törnqvist, A Playwright’s Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 26. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 4 minded reader to extrapolate meaning from written elements such as the stage notes no director could faithfully transfer to the stage. If indeed “O’Neill considered the written drama as he wrote it superior to the theatrical production,” then we are wise to maintain a particularly close watch on his linguistic motifs.20 Despite a reader’s inclinations as to what O’Neill intended in distinguishing the protagonists of Electra and Journey as “haunted,” this term remains ambiguous as a result of its initial, uncontextualized usages in one play’s table of contents and the other’s epigraph; indeed, the playwright “gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” in both instances.21 As a result of the “multiple, concurrent senses” of haunting O’Neill draws upon (whether intentionally or not) with each employment of the words “haunt” and “dead,”22 a complex and fascinating tension springs up, “not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.”23 While exploring “the variations of use” of O’Neill’s keywords, I, like Williams, have found the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be an invaluable resource and consult it regularly for explication in regard to the possible connotations of “haunt” and “dead.”24 Even a brief first glance at the OED’s citations for “haunted” reveals the word’s potential for varied readings and implications, a feature Alan Durant defines as “polysemy.”25 The most commonly cited definition for “haunted” during the first half of the twentieth ce n t ur y —the period during which O’Neill composed Electra and Journey—describes a person, 20 Brietzke, Aesthetics of Failure, 28.
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