CC BY
16
УДК 82:792(811.111)
А. Шереш
«ЗДЕСЬ НЕТ ЛУНЫ, ЛУНА ЗАШЛА». СЕГМЕНТИРОВАННЫЙ ТЕАТР ЭДВАРДА ОЛБИ
В настоящей статье оспаривается традицио-нальный подход, согласно которому драмы Эдварда Олби можно характеризовать как «драмы абсурда». Те произведения писателя, которые принято считать наиболее абсурдными - например, «Американская мечта» - построены на фрагментации, на умолчании ключей, облегчающих
интерпретации, и в этом отношении они ближе к языку постмодернистского театра и драмы. В статье путьем анализа «Американской мечты» изучаются элементы, ссылающие к постмодерну.
Ключевые слова: Эдвард Олби, «Американская мечта», американская драма, постмодерн.
A. Sheresh
"THERE IS NO MOON; THE MOON WENT DOWN". THE FRAGMENTED THEATRE OF EDWARD ALBEE
This paper is about to argue against a commonly accepted discourse according to which the plays of Edward Albee can be labelled as "absurdist". The works of the American playwright, such as the American Dream, are characterized by a certain fragmentation; that is, the lack of any narrative that could narrow the range of the interpretations - therefore these
plays distance themselves from the modernist Absurd, and come closer to the prostmodernist dramatical language. The aim of this paper is to highlight the postmodern characteristics in the American Dream.
Key words: Edward Albee, the American dream, American drama, postmodern.
In her book, American Drama: The Bastard Art (1997) Susan Harris Smith draws a dark-perhaps exaggeratedly dark-picture about the situation of American drama. She states no less than that the genre is "grabbing for air" and this phenomenon shows that something is wrong in the educational and academic system of the United States [12, p. 19]. According to Smith, American drama does not receive enough attention, therefore it seems as if critics and literary historians treated the genre as a bastard compared with other forms of literature.
In spite of Smith's suggestive and eloquent argument, supported by appropriate examples, one can see that regarding the reception of the American drama of the 1950s and 1960s, this pessimism cannot be verified. Not only do her fellow scholars devoted to the history of drama publish regularly on the dramatical works of this period (for instance C.W.E Bigsby, Matthew Roudane, etc.), but also various theoretical schools have developed a special focus on this area. David Savran, a prominent representative of gender and queer studies deserves mentioning here, whose monograph was the first to examine the effects the McCarthy-area had on American theatre. Furthermore, not long
after the publication of the Bastard Art, a new school of thinking about drama appeared; in his book, the American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War Bruce McConachie introduced cognitive theories into the field of Theatre Studies [9].
Empty Boys, spies and the "all seeing eye"
The theoretical background of McConachie's work is provided by George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's book, Metaphors We Live By. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor "is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words," rather, "human thought processes are largely metaphorical" so "the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system" [8, p. 6, 5-7]. This means that we understand abstract phenomena through concrete experiences. For example, we describe argument as a kind of war, when we say "your claims are indefinable," or "I demolished his argument," etc. Moreover, the schema of containment can be observed in various expressions, for instance when we describe ourselves being in something (mood, love, trouble etc.) [8, p. 30].
According to Bruce McConachie, the very schema of containment and the metaphors that are built on it, played a salient role in the political/social discourse of the Cold War period. In his book, The Body in The Mind Mark Johnson sets out five characteristics of the containment schema, and McConachie argues that all five can be found in the National Security Act, which was brought to life in 1947. The nation container metaphor characterizes the warrant on a rudimentary level [9, p. 11].
McConachie draws the conclusion that the schema of the CONTAINER has become privileged in the United States during the period of the Cold War. The number one objective of the dominant politics was to protect the values inside the nation/container from an outside enemy, and to strengthen the walls; during this process, the smaller components of the nation, like the family or even the individual human being, also emerges as a container. Reference? Because of the threat that the enemy can "leak in" and endanger the American family and citizens, the closing of borders and the protection of the values became an objective for the individual also, and theatre had an important role to remind her/him of it. Therefore, as McConachie argues, the successful plays on Broadway were influenced by the containment metaphor and schema. Two hero-types became popular in the 1950s; the Empty Boy and his opposite, the Fragmented Hero. The first is an undoubtedly positive figure who is able to receive the audience's full sympathy. The emptiness in this case does not refer to the lack of values, on the contrary, it means innocence and purity. These characters, although adults, have managed to preserve something from their childhood naivety, honesty, etc. Emptiness means a certain capability of "filled up" with proper features and values. The Empty Boy's counterpart, the Fragmented Hero is an individual who, due to a wound or trauma, can no longer contain what is expected from him; hence he is fragmented, counting as a "broken container." According to McConachie's theory, the popular theatrical productions of the area were staging both hero-types; and these works had become successful due to the fact that the audience could recognize the containment-metaphor in the protagonists.
McConachie's argumentations are by no means innovative, although due to the narrow angle of cognitive theory, other possibilities provided by the idea of the Fragmented Hero and the Empty Boy remain unmentioned. The difference between the two figures can be observed from the problem of transparency-since the most attractive character-
istic of the Empty Boy is that he is "opened up?" for an observing eye. He is transparent in the sense that he has no hidden motivations and thoughts. The figure does not hide anything, therefore his actions leave no questions unanswered; like an X-ray, the gaze of the audience goes through him and maps his whole character. The figure of the Empty Boy therefore provides the audience with the sensational experience of being able to see and know everything (the protagonist thoughts, emotions, motivations, secrets etc.)
All this is important, because observation of others bears an important role in the culture of the US during the Cold War. In The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American Character, David Riesman examines the appearance of the other-directed character. According to Riesman, although the inner-directed person is concerned with her/his reputation, and "keeps up with the Joneses," these conformities however were primarily external, typified in such details as clothes, curtains, and Bank credit. [...] In contrast with this pattern, the other-directed person, though he has his eye very much on the Joneses, aims to keep with them not much in external details as in the quality of his (sic) inner experience [10, p. 241 ].
The argument stresses, that an individual constantly observes those who live around him/her to learn what kind of experiences s/he should also gain and hows/he can interpret them Her/his gaze does not stop at the surface of the Joneses' lives, but slips into the inner, mental region as well to learn the "inner experiences".
While surveillance plays an important role on a personal level, it can be found between the relationship of the citizens and the state. According to McConachie's interpretation, the National Security Act speaks about a certain shady, secretive personnel, whose objectives are to keep an eye on the walls of the nation/container, and to eliminate the enemy, in case he/she attempt to break inside. It is important to notice, however, that the presence of these agents is not at all threatening for the average citizen; on the contrary, the fact that power- using these individuals as a conduit-can invade everywhere, and observe everything, leads to a sense of security. In his book, the Citizen Spy Michael Kackman shows that the spy, who is nearly omnipotent because of being able to cross any line and learn any secret, becomes a symbol of masculinity [6, p. 40]. The nation/container, no matter how meticulously closed, can be penetrated, and it is the spy whose constant voyeurism can defend the lives of the American people. Therefore the good citizen is transparent, that is "empty" in the sense that he/she is open for
an observing eye because in her/his life there is nothing suspicious to be found.
As a result, the spy becomes one of the most popular hero-types of the era, appearing in several TV shows, where he guides the viewer's glance into every region of everyday life. A good example of this would be the TV serial titled the World of Giants; here, the protagonist shrinks radically as a result of a nuclear incident. His condition, however, helps him to become a fenomenal spy, since he is able to reach mystical and secret places where no one had ever been before (e.g a women's purse). As Hugo Münstenberg argues in his essay on film, the new medium (the film) is able to achieve what the theatre cannot: it can provide the audience the illusion of being omnipotent. The montage makes it possible to observe several places during a short period of time (Münstenberg's example is that we see the banker, who tells his wife that he is on a meeting, while having fun in a bar with a secretary, while she also had told lies, since she promised her parents to arrive home early. The cinema pops up all the three pictures, thus creating the illusion as if the audience were present everywhere) [10, p. 45]. The spy-stories of the 1950s and the 1960s not only exploit the possibilities offered by the medium, but strengthen these illusions; the camera, as the secret agent's eye shows every aspect of everyday life, the viewer can peep into the lives of others, can read letters, eavesdrop on conversations etc. It is important to emphasize though, that this kind of voyeurism and the thought of being watched do not cause frustration, since the viewers are aware that "control over the everyday domestic world is once again equated directly with the containment of Communism" [10, p. 68].
The popularity of the Empty Boy figure therefore lies in his capability of fulfilling the audience's desire to see and know everything. This kind of emptiness creates its own theatrical form; for the "empty theatre" (which, of course differs from Brook's empty stage completely) Arthur Miller's classical work, the Death of a Salesman serves a good example. Here, the audience's view can reach every corner of the world created by the play; we see the protagonist's home and its surroundings from a bird's eye view, and from this distance we get closer to Loman's house, while later we find ourselves inside the character's head. The audience sees the character both from inside and outside, therefore it would be a mistake to interpret Miller's work as a mind-play (despite the fact, that this would probably fit the author's intention, since the original title would have been In His Head). Miller's work focuses on the chasm between the main protagonist's thoughts and de-
sires, and the reality postulated by the play. We know exactly what Willy thinks about himself and his sons, but at the same time, we are aware of the truth. Hence the audience/receiver is everywhere and sees everything; there are no questions left without an answer, searching (spying) the memories reveals all the secrets (Biff is angry with his father because he discovers his adultery, Wiily is disappointed by Linda because he couldn't follow Ben as a result of her objections, etc.)
The Fragmented Theatre
In the Cold War area, however, it became more and more clear, that the state of transparency and emptiness is an illusion; the scandals that followed Alfred Kinsey's reports on human sexuality serve as a good example here; the work of the so-cio-psychologist had revealed that American citizens hold disturbing secrets, so instead of being clean Empty Boys, American women and men appeared rather "fragmented." [See: 10]. Therefore it is not accidental that in the 1960s, the opposite of the transparent theater emerges; the works of Edward Albee construct fragmented, secretive characters and attempt the blurring of the audiences view. This tendency can be clearly observed in his first work, The Zoo Story: if the audience could find out what had happened to Jerry in the zoo, he/she would easily decipher the character; it is, however, this very story that the play keeps away from the viewer/receiver. The same can be observed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf; in Act Three Martha and George are arguing about the Moon being up or not:
MARTHA: There is no moon. I saw it go down from the bedroom.
GEORGE: (...) From the bedroom! (...) Well there was a moon.
MARTHA: (...) There couldn't have been a moon.
GEORGE: Well, there was. There is.
MARTHA: There is no moon; the moon went down.
GEORGE: There is a moon; the moon is up [1 (a), p. 282].
Albee's play is filled with such dialogs, which makes its obvious that at least one of the characters tells lies. The purpose of the game played by Martha and George is to confuse Nick and Honey, who do not know throughout the play, whose story they should believe. Because the text never refers to the world outside the stage - that is, the status of the moon - here the viewer/receiver has no more information than the characters: he/she (use this always in the same way) is not able to decide which figure is telling the truth. Now, being able to figure out this, could serve as a sample for the
interpretation, with the help of which the audience could reconstruct the true story from the dialogs. The "key" or the "primal story", which could explain all the actions and motives remains hidden in Albee's work, thus his theater refuses to prove the position for the viewer to be able to see and know everything.
By the above method the plays of Edward Al-bee multiply the number of possible interpretations. There can be, and there have been several analyses of Jerry's character, or of Martha's and George's son, though every interpretation has to face the fact that there will always remain certain contradictions, unanswered questions, therefore the play can never have a closure. Though this phenomena characterizes The Zoo and the Wolf on a basic level, the best example would be The American Dream where fragmentation occurs in the plot, the dramaturgy and the language as well.
The Fragmented Dream
The American Dream starts with a superficial conversation of Mommy and Daddy, later Grandma appears on the stage; it is obvious from the beginning, that Mom wants to get rid of the elderly lady, who does not object to her rude treatment: she appears on stage with packed boxes like someone who is ready for departure. Their quarrel is interrupted by Mrs. Barker, a representative of the By-By Adopting Agency; she is the one whom Grandma tells the story about the child Mommy and Daddy once adopted, and mutilated, because the baby "refused" to behave as it was expected of him.
GRANDMA: (...) But then, it began to develop an interest in its you-know-what.
MRS. BARKER: In its you-know-what! Well! I hope they cut its hands off at the wrists!
GRANDMA: Well, yes, they did that eventually. But first, they cut off its you-know-what.
MRS. BARKER: A much better idea!
GRANDMA: That's what they thought. But after they cut off its you-know-what, it still put its hands under covers, looking for its you-know-what. So, finally, thay had to cut off its hands at the wrists.
MRS. BARKER: Naturally!
GRAMDMA: (...) Why, one day it called its Mommy a dirty name.
MRS. BARKER: Well, I hope they cut its tongue out.
GRANDMA: Of course (...) [1 (b), p. 128].
Later, the Young Man whom Grandma calls the American Dream arrives. From the character's life story it would seem that the Young Man is the twin sibling of the boy adopted by Mommy and Daddy-as a result of his brother's physical mutilation, he has lost mental and emotional abilities. After Grandma's manipulations, the beautiful but shal-
low Young Man meets Mommy and Daddy, who finally adopt him and thus the play closes with an ironic happy ending.
Albee's give title divides critics and theater historians still the present day; C. W. E. Bigsby calls it "insignificant," [3, p. 129]while according to Martin Esslin it is "brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd." [4 p. 319]. The result is that one interpretation rejects the play for the same reason for which the other praises it, and that is the presence of traces of the European absurdist tradition in the text. Both of the above theatrologists mention lonesco, but while Bigsby considers The Dream a simple copy of the Bold Soprano, Esslin glorifies its language and dramaturgy by comparing it to the French author's work. I am not about to judge any of these opinions but to point out that placing Albee's text in the horizon of the absurd tradition seems obvious. The main reason for this lies in the language; the dialogs are fragmented, and most of the characters react with a certain automatism that characterizes him or her (Mommy is despotic, Daddy always comes to heels, Mrs. Barker is enthusiastic about everything etc.). The dialogs are often without any sense and unreal; we can observe this in Grandma's soliloquy, when she is lamenting the social situation of elderly people.
GRAMDMA: While we're at it, there's been a run on old people, too. The Department of Agriculture, or maybe it wasn't the Department of Agriculture - anyway, it was some department that's run by a girl - put out figures showing that ninety per cent of the adult population of the country is over eighty years old...or eighty per cent is over ninety years old [1 (b), p 122].
This part of the text supports Esslin's and Bigs-by's opinion about lonesco's significant impact on The Dream; that is, although the words and sentences are organized according to the rules of English grammar, what the characters say makes no sense.
In spite of an approach from the absurdist tradition seems to be plausible, the character of Grandma makes a different range of interpretations possible. For instance, towards the end of the play she unexpectedly steps out from the frames of the plot; it is not the border between the actor and the character that disappears here, Grandma steps into a space where only the audience can see her. Only at the end of the play does it become it clear why she is capable of doing so; she is the narrator. She is the one who, interrupting Mommy by addressing the audience, closes the last scene.
GRANDMA: Well, I guess that just about wraps it u p. I mean, for better or worse, this is a com-
edy, and I don't think we'd better go any further. No, definitely not. So, let's leave things as they are right now.. .while everybody's happy.. .while everybody's got what he wants...or everybody's got what he thinks he wants. Good night, clears [1 (b), p. 143].
The character therefore is the narrator of the story she plays a role in. The curtain falls right in the middle of a conversation and Grandma mentions that the play is far from being over, but the audience want a happy ending, so the figure provides it. Similarly to The Zoo Story and to the Wolf, the viewer cannot learn the whole story because an important element - in this case, the ending -is missing. Whether the Young Man finds a family, or Mammy and Daddy mutilate him just like their other son, one will not know; neither can one decide that the American Dream - no matter how shallow and empty it is - could come to reality. The play rejects to provide the omnicient position from the audience by inserting an omnipotent narrator into the plot.
This interpretation of Grandma as an omnipotent narrator distances Albee's work from the absurdist tradition; Mommy and Daddy could be her projections, and certain situations are unreal because in the world Grandma created she has unlimited power; and she uses it (for example she can hide the television and confuse the dialogs). In this regard, the play has more in common with Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie than with The Bald Soprano, since in Williams' play the main protagonist, Tom Wingfield, is also the omnipotent narrator of the plot. Therefore, both Grandma and Tom show the other characters from their own perspective, and transform them according to their own will. Thus, it would be plausible to say, that in The American Dream it is the perspective of the narrator-character which is absurd, but not the whole dramaturgy.
It is most important to notice, that Grandma is not only the omnipotent narrator of the story, but also an unreliable one. We can find several occasions where the character is not aware of her situation; for example she needs to be reminded that she is not the mother of Daddy but Mommy. She makes statements about her life, which hardly seem to be true; for example that she could have been a singer, or she has won a cake-baking competition with an alias of "uncle Harry," etc. This is important because Grandma is the one who tells the story of Mommy's and Daddy's adoption, by constantly emphasizing that the husband and wife she is talking about are not her daughter and son-in-law, but two individuals who look just like them. According to her, the man and the woman went to a lady who looked just like Mrs. Barker. All this can
question the truth ofthe story of the adopted child, or, more precisely, this story can be interpreted as a product of Grandma's imagination.
In this context it is possible to reinterpret the figure ofthe Young Man, who, as he tells Grandma, was parted from his twin sibling and suffered different losses after that:
YOUNG MAN: (...) Once...it was as if all at once my heart...became numb...almost as though I...almost as though...just like that...it had been wrenched from my body...and from that time I have been unable to love. Once ...I was asleep at the time...I awoke, and my eyes were burning. And since that time I have been unable to see anything, anything, with pity, with affection... with anything but....cool disinterest. And my groin...even there...since one time...one specific agony...since then I have not been able to love anyone with my body. And even my hands...I cannot touch another person and feel love. And there is more...there are more losses, but it all comes down to this: I no longer have the capacity to feel anything [1 (b), p. 138- 139].
The traditional interpretations of Albee's play take it for granted that the boy Mommy and Daddy adopted was the brother of the Young Man -therefore the physical mutilation appears on a mental-spiritual level in his case (as one boy loses a part of his body, the other loses certain properties of the soul). The fact that the character mentions the same organs as Grandma in the mutilation-story might support the interpretation according to which by torturing their own child, Mommy and Daddy cause harm to the Young Man as well.
The parallelism between the stories, however, is not at all that clean-cut; certain parts of the Young Man's narrative can deconstruct the interpretation that links the characters mental/spiritual state to the mutilation committed by Mommy and Daddy. Namely, the Young Man talks about losing one specific emotion; he states that his heart became numb because he is unable to feel love. Either he is speaking about his eyes or his hands, it is not the organ-specific capability he loses (the sense of touching, seeing), the deficit is the same in the case of all the organs, and that is the incapacity for feeling emotions. So it is not the mutilation that caused the Young Man's condition but the fact that he was parted from his twin brother.
To summarize the above, I claim that the play provides two possible interpretations upon the American Dream. (It is important to observe though, that the Young Man is not the embodiment ofthe American Dream, as it is suggested by many, including Martin Esslin. The character is not the
subject who was created by the myth that cultivates physical beauty. Instead, it is in Grandma's narration that he is the American Dream, he is the allegorical representation of it. Therefore, in one possible interpretation Mommy and Daddy are responsible for destroying the myth: the American Dream could have existed, but the snobbish and consumerist behavior of the society mutilates it. Hence - again, in this interpretation - it is not the myth of the American Dream that Albee's work criticizes, rather the society that is incapable of fulfilling it. In this regard, Albee belongs to the artist, who, according to Harold Bloom, are members of what he calls the Emersonian Party of Hope. The literary historian thinks that these writers (Emerson, Whitman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller etc.) believed that although society struggles with many problems, "it must be possible to have a nation in which all of us are free to develop our singularities into health, prosperity, and some measure of happiness in self-development and personal achievement" [6, xv].
However, viewing from another angle, Albee can be placed into another party which Bloom calls "The American Nightmare" (in the company of Poe, Melville, Faulkner, McCarthy, etc.). In this interpretation the Young Man's condition does not depend on the alleged actions of Mommy and Daddy, since his emotional disability started right after the loss of his brother. However, the very character of the Young Man emerges from a kind of trauma; it is the splitting the unity with his identical sibling creates the Young Man. Therefore the American Dream exists because of a splitting, its essence is loss - which makes it successful and adaptable, possible to fit in everywhere and fulfill every role. As a dream-myth it exists not in spite of its incompleteness, but due to incompleteness.
The American Dream operates with and in the experience of a constant deficit, always referring to what is missing, without which it always remains incomplete. Happiness reached by the development of a character is therefore an illusion; the American Dream constantly confronts the subject with the deficit s/he has to achieve, without which s/he is not complete.
Albee's play seems to promise an explanation of the American dream, but in the end, it provides us with many conflicting explanations. Albee's work demonstrates the failure of an interpretation strategy that uses the title as a point of origin. The figure of the American Dream is created by an unreliable narrator, the Grandma, since she is the one who addresses the Young Man by that name; on the other hand, the Young Man himself is also unreliable, since after his soliloquy he warns Grandma that she should not believe anything, for he is known to be a liar. Therefore, based upon Albee's text the following can be said about the America Dream: its existence is uncertain, but if it exists, it is beautiful, people can either believe it, or not.
I agree with Erwin Beck's argument, according to which "lonesco's title - like all titles, an authorial comment on the text - rightly says that the play lacks meaning; Albee's says that it refers to a lot of meanings?" [2]. All this means that Albee's work could be and should be distanced from the absurdist tradition, since his plays are not about delineating the world that lacks any sense, but create the possibility of constant re-readings. For the audience desiring to perceive and know everything about the characters, Albee's theatre seems to be fragmented; this fragmentation however opens up the texts and forces us to re-interpret the American dramatist's works.
References
1. Albee, Edward (a): Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf in. The Collected Plays of Edward Albee New York and London, Overlook Duckworth 2007.
1. (b) The Zoo Story in. The Collected Plays of Edward Albee New York and London, Overlook Duckworth 2007.
2. Beck Ervin. Allegory in Edward Albee's. The American Dream URL: http://www.goshen.edu/academics/english/ervinb/ allegory. (Accessed: 10.06.2017).
3. Bigsby C. W. E. Modern American Drama 1945-2000. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 465 p.
4. Esslin Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Vintage Books, New York, 2004. 480 p.
5. G. Reumann Miriam. American Sexual Character Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports., Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. 365 p.
6. Harold Bloom Harold. Introduction In.: Harold Bloom (szerk.). New York: The American Dream Infabose Publishing, 2009. 233 p.
7. Kackman Michael. Cizizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 278 p.
8. Lakoff George and Johnson Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 274 p.
9. McConachie, Bruce: American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War - producing and contesting containment , 19471962, Iowa: University of Iowa Press City, 2003. 347 p.
10. Munsterberg Hugo. The Film a Psychological Study. New York: Dover, 1970. 254 p.
11. Riesman David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1969). Yale Universiti Press, 2001. 24 p.
12. Smith Susan Harris. American Drama: The Bastard Art Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. 248 p.
