After Commitment: An Interview with Arthur Miller Author(s): V. Rajakrishnan and Arthur Miller Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2, (May, 1980), pp. 196-204 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207112 Accessed: 24/04/2008 15:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org V. RAJAKRISHNAN After Commitment: An Interview with Arthur Miller VR: In your later plays there seems to be a marked pull away from social purposes and ideological essences towards concerns which might be described as metaphysical, centering on the irrational levels of human experience. Do you agree? ARTHUR MILLER:Yes, I think that your question, or statement rather, is more or less correct. I would add one important thing, though, and it is that my idea of the metaphysical includes the social. I don't believe that man lives exclusively in either one or the other realm. I am firmly convinced that there is only one realm, not three or four or five, and this is all an articulated whole which the greatest drama, and even then only rarely, has been able to uncover. There are lines of force-economic, political, mythic memories, genetic imprints -many more, and where they intersect in a human situation in which man must make choice-is drama. I have always felt this, even before I was conscious of any attempt to philosophize about it. If there is a question it is one of the degree of em- phasis as to the primacy of social and other causation. My own feeling has been-in the last fifteen years anyway, perhaps even longer than that-that there are certain types and certain situations which are typical of man, and these get repeated end- lessly in different societies and in different social arrangements. But there are, I believe, types of people who reproduce their own kind, apparently, through the millennia. This probably is one of the reasons why it is possible for us to read a book or a play or a poem of an entirely different age, which may be hundreds and hun- dreds years gone by, and still feel at home with it, to some important degree. So when you say that there is a realm which is outside society, I don't think that is the way I would put it. I would simply say that it is one of the elements of the whole social situation. V. Rajakrishnan teaches in the Department of English at the University of Kerala. He conducted this in- terview with Arthur Miller on 17 May 1978 while in the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship. 196 197 / INTERVIEWWITH ARTHURMILLER VR: The silence in your dramatic career from 1955 to 1964 is generally linked with various circumstances in your private and public life. Taking a retrospective look, would you say today that these years were a period of gestation for the somber and interrogative mood which informed the plays that followed? ARTHUR MILLER:Yes, but it was also that the social presuppositions of the pre- World War II world-the Depression, liberalism, radicalism, Marxism etc.-began to dissolve in terms of their force for me. They became emptily repetitive, no longer instructive to me in the mid-50s. This was partly because I saw-what I just referred to-that there were indeed kinds of people who made of any moment in history what it was in them to make of it, and the power of these personalities to nullify even the logic of the social circumstance was so tremendous that I began to despair of ever coming to a useable pattern of understanding of what was happening in the world around me. I saw people who, as long as I had known them, were faithful to certain concepts, and suddenly overnight seemed not even to remember what it was they had spent a whole lifetime being faithful to. It was not simply a question of op- portunism on their part, I think. The atmosphere changed; the air changed. The oxygen went out of the air for these ideas. And I, I certainly went into a period which was quite long, longer than I wished, in which it was not enough for me to see man as a social being, or even as a psychological being. ... It simply didn't satisfy me. It was like being aware of an ache for the immemorial, not only in me but in the world. VR: That in a way accounts for the air of puzzlement that pervades your later works. ARTHUR MILLER:Is it puzzlement, or a wish to rely upon action-in-itself, the what-happens-rather than on generalized historical conclusions? VR: It seems to me that in your early plays evil is mainly seen as external, emanating either from the false dreams of a society or the nihilism of State ambition. But in After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price, evil emerges as an essential fact of human nature. Did this shift in focus have anything to do with the convictions born out of your emotional and intellectual encounters during the years of your absence from the theatre? ARTHUR MILLER:I did feel and I do feel now that there is in people a tendency towards obliterating the murderousness of their own wishes. They simply go into a state of oblivion. They cannot see them and they cannot remember them, like great pain. As a consequence, these murderous episodes are endlessly repeated because the perpetrators continuously re-arrive at yet another state of innocence. It is a false innocence, of course. And still it is true in the sense that most of the time we genu- inely cannot recall any other dimension of life. We simply feel that we are put upon, we are victimized, and that there is no corresponding aggression on our part to ac- count for this at all. So we continually lapse into a state of innocence-which then brings on the next cycle of our murderousness, since the innocent are permitted to defend themselves. And so we rise up and kill whoever is handy, and the new mur- der seems to prove our innocence all over again, for how could we have killed except that we were driven to it from without? 198 / TI, May 1980 VR: Despite some obvious points of contact between you and the hero of After the Fall, you have resisted the autobiographical interpretation of the play. Perhaps you may be able to tell whether, while writing the play, you shared Quentin's agonized feeling that he had lost a world consisting of easy indignations and doctrinaire cer- tainties. ARTHUR MILLER:The reason why I have resisted the autobiographical interpreta- tion of the play, as you have put it, is that After the Fall is not an autobiography in the sense that it was not my aim to personify myself on stage as such; it is a play about a theme if ever such a play existed. All my characters in all my works are autobiographical in the sense that, for me to write them, I have to have felt what these people feel. The autobiographical element in any work is not a question of criticism, in any case, but of gossip. Is a work better or worse because we have managed to locate the originals of the characters? This is only another aspect of reductionism, the nothing- but nonsense, a sort of revenge upon the creative by the literal. For years Willy Loman was nothing-but my own father-who happened to have been a wholly dif- ferent sort of man, and I myself was the fine student next door. In fact, I failed Algebra three times! Another aspect of this kind of "interpretation"and a less per- sonal but equally foolish one, is in Simone Signoret's current autobiography where she states that John and Elizabeth Proctor were so named for their initials, J and E which conform to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg whose story The Crucible is alleged to tell. Of course the Rosenberg case did not even become public until the play was on the stage. And John and Elizabeth were the names of my characters in history. It is perfectly true, though, that one of the essential parts of Quentin is the col- lapse of the symmetry of the world as he understood it before he became aware of his own culpability in it. In other words, before the fall he was struggling, as a man in society in any case, against forces outside of himself, and that gave life a certain symmetry and coherence.