Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML]
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despite appearances to the contrary. O'Neill shows this by sounding it. In doing so, he utterly cashiers the "realist" assumptions that many ascribe to him—after all, the dramaturgy itself does not seem revolutionary—by crafting a theatrical language to show how utterly saturated and infiltrated we are with one another. Living in a family reconceives the scream that goes through the house, refracts this plaint into a chorus of blood-related voices, each filled with the other, each extending back over time, each woven by O'Neill's genius into a dramatic tapestry that is unsurpassed in pathos and gathering power.
Let me close my discussion of O'Neill by again acknowledging the sepia, perhaps dated aura of the play. This story of two older adults and two grown-up children living and breaking bread together in the same house hardly seems a story for our time of vacated nests and hustling professionals. Likewise, it is a wonder that the text is not simply banned from the curriculum because of its humongous alcohol consumption, given today's culture of chemical dependency warnings (what would O'Neill have thought of this term?) and drinking disorders, given how acutely medicalized our vision of older social rituals has become. All this gave me considerable pause when I put this text in my university course on Literature and Medicine, but the result was not what I anticipated. My students had no trouble at all negotiating O'Neill's version of damaged families and problems of addiction. Moreover, several pointed out the (unaccented) gender dimensions of the play, especially concern-
ing the bereftness of Mary—lonely figure without "home," without friends, without resources, obliged to beg the servant girl to keep her company as she waits for the fog to set in—as contrasted with the drinking and carousing male figures, bathed in a kind of camaraderie that O'Neill simply took for granted, able to go to bars or brothels or clubs, reassembled at play's end to share their grief and solace with one another as Mary departs from their midst.
Above all, these students were attuned to the familial melody that plays throughout the piece, the ways in which each person's pain was an integral part of another's life. It seems to me that that is perhaps O'Neill's ultimate gift: to make us actually hear the plaint of our loved ones, to make it real at last. At one juncture in the play, Mary (who has the most comprehensive, and therefore forgiving, view of anyone in the play) rehearses for Edmund the sad fact that his father had to go to work in a machine shop when he was only ten years old, at which Edmund grouses, "Oh, for Pete's sake, Mama, I've heard Papa tell that machine shop story ten thousand times." Mary's reply is undemonstrative but it cuts to the bone: "Yes, dear, you've had to listen, but I don't think you've ever tried to understand" (117).
This line—and this play—made me think back to my own family, especially to my dead father, about whom the equally cliched story was that he had had to go to work at the age of six. Six. I too have heard this story ten thousand times, and, now, twenty years after his death, I could wish that my mother had told me what Mary told Edmund: you've had to listen, but have you ever understood? I don't think I ever did. I know I didn't. Other than in that halfway measure of all lazy conceptualizing, by which the key facts of our lives are there, all right, but there as dead letters, as inert data, never opened up as language of the heart, as indeed one of the keys to my father's life. Long Day's Journey into Night stirred me in just this way, caused me to grasp something of the deafness and thickness that wall us off from one another, a kind of perceptual and moral plaque that fills up our emotional arteries and veins, preventing the flow of blood and sympathy, occluding those passageways that
could link us together. O'Neill has opened them up, so that the flow of sentience goes through them,
Let me close my discussion of O'Neill by again acknowledging the sepia, perhaps dated aura of the play. This story of two older adults and two grown-up children living and breaking bread together in the same house hardly seems a story for our time of vacated nests and hustling professionals. Likewise, it is a wonder that the text is not simply banned from the curriculum because of its humongous alcohol consumption, given today's culture of chemical dependency warnings (what would O'Neill have thought of this term?) and drinking disorders, given how acutely medicalized our vision of older social rituals has become. All this gave me considerable pause when I put this text in my university course on Literature and Medicine, but the result was not what I anticipated. My students had no trouble at all negotiating O'Neill's version of damaged families and problems of addiction. Moreover, several pointed out the (unaccented) gender dimensions of the play, especially concern-
ing the bereftness of Mary—lonely figure without "home," without friends, without resources, obliged to beg the servant girl to keep her company as she waits for the fog to set in—as contrasted with the drinking and carousing male figures, bathed in a kind of camaraderie that O'Neill simply took for granted, able to go to bars or brothels or clubs, reassembled at play's end to share their grief and solace with one another as Mary departs from their midst.
Above all, these students were attuned to the familial melody that plays throughout the piece, the ways in which each person's pain was an integral part of another's life. It seems to me that that is perhaps O'Neill's ultimate gift: to make us actually hear the plaint of our loved ones, to make it real at last. At one juncture in the play, Mary (who has the most comprehensive, and therefore forgiving, view of anyone in the play) rehearses for Edmund the sad fact that his father had to go to work in a machine shop when he was only ten years old, at which Edmund grouses, "Oh, for Pete's sake, Mama, I've heard Papa tell that machine shop story ten thousand times." Mary's reply is undemonstrative but it cuts to the bone: "Yes, dear, you've had to listen, but I don't think you've ever tried to understand" (117).
This line—and this play—made me think back to my own family, especially to my dead father, about whom the equally cliched story was that he had had to go to work at the age of six. Six. I too have heard this story ten thousand times, and, now, twenty years after his death, I could wish that my mother had told me what Mary told Edmund: you've had to listen, but have you ever understood? I don't think I ever did. I know I didn't. Other than in that halfway measure of all lazy conceptualizing, by which the key facts of our lives are there, all right, but there as dead letters, as inert data, never opened up as language of the heart, as indeed one of the keys to my father's life. Long Day's Journey into Night stirred me in just this way, caused me to grasp something of the deafness and thickness that wall us off from one another, a kind of perceptual and moral plaque that fills up our emotional arteries and veins, preventing the flow of blood and sympathy, occluding those passageways that
could link us together. O'Neill has opened them up, so that the flow of sentience goes through them,
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