In this sweeping introduction to O’Neill’s work as an American dramatist, Dr. White argues the relevance and even necessity of understanding literature, history, and Catholicism in order to appreciate the significance of O’Neill’s play. Explaining that O’Neill was the creator of a genuine American drama, White also suggests that he could not have done so without his Catholicism, nor, the doctor provocatively maintains, without losing it. This introduction to O’Neill is consequently a tour de force review of the history of the interaction between Americanism, Modernism, and Catholicism on the cultural, literary, and artistic battlefields of the beleaguered nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Following upon his introduction to O’Neill in his first lecture, Dr. White examines the nature of O’Neill’s play and discusses both its elements and O’Neill’s approach from a number of angles. As an American with a Catholic sense but, in effect, without the Catholic faith, O’Neill’s essentially auto-biographical play reveals all the contradictions, conflicts, and essential despair characteristic of O’Neill’s personal life and his existence as an American. On the plus side, he knows renaissance drama and the “unities” – one setting, one action, one day’s time – are apparent in his work. At the same time, his play partakes of the inherent tragedy of American political and religious life. Hounded by the Faith, O’Neill spends his life running from it. In an interesting sideline, Dr. White discusses the famous American Catholic Dorothy Day and her understanding of O’Neill: “He portrayed more than any other what life with God is like.” Though he knew from memory, and could recite with energy and drama, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, he never let God’s pursuit come to fruition. As always, Dr. White’s explication of this particular work of literature carries with it many insightful aphorisms gleaned from his sweeping and expansive knowledge of the panorama of American and Western literature as a whole. “Dead children haunt American drama”; O’Neill’s work, like so many other American productions, is full of people almost literally dying to go to confession; America, as revealed by her greatest artists, is a failed nation that compromised with materialism, as did many of the artists themselves. Still, the Catholic sense seeps through, such that, to cite just one example, O’Neill’s work is obsessed with the past, and in this respect is eminently traditional rather than modern or progressive.
The Western tradition of theater comes from the Greek tradition of theater, where art is directly connected to the worship of the gods. From the fifth century B.C., the Greeks used theater as public worship. These were grand performances, solemn, larger than life. The theaters would seat 15,000. The art was perfected at the annual spring festivals devoted to Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine. A competition was held, and three playwrights were invited to write a tragedy in three one-act plays, followed by a single act comedy. For three successive days during the festival, each playwright’s plays were performed and ten judges selected the best work. There was no higher honor than to win this competition. Sophocles won this competition several times. Aristotle praises Oedipus Rex as a model of what tragedy should be. Greek theater died with the end of the empire and there would not be another golden age of theater until the beginning of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, up to the glory of Shakespeare. The Mass inspired the revival of this tradition of theater. The medieval Corpus Christi plays are an example of this inspiration. Once again, theater is used as worship.
After the fall of Greek theater, the great philosophers began to talk about it to understand it, what it was, what it should be. Plato was suspicious of the arts. It was imitation twice removed, it was not real. Aristotle found value in theater. Art is a craft and can be learned and improved upon. Poetry has rules that must be followed for it to be art. Poetry sharpens our view of reality. The emotional life is part of human reality; it teaches what is there. Poetry also is more philosophical than history. History deals with actions. Poetry universalized truths. Finally, poetry encourages the emotions for the sake of catharsis. A plot well put together will arouse the proper emotions from which we can learn and purify. Implicit in this idea is that actions or stories that are badly put together and badly done are dangerous. There is a bad way of telling a story. There is good art and bad art. There are good stories and bad stories. The effect of the good is to enlighten and elevate; the effect of bad art is to shock and revolt, and descends into dirtiness. Aristotle tells us there is moral order to art.
Tragedy is a drama between a hero and metaphysical forces. Through a tragic flaw in their character they make a fatal mistake from which they never recover. They are destroyed, they are crushed. The hero is always someone of authority, of power. Part of the fear in watching their fall is that if they can fall, we all can fall. The mistake is suffered by many. When one falls, many fall. Oedipus is the first murder mystery. He is both the protagonist and the antagonist. He is the murder, the detective, the judge, the jury and the executioner. He wants the truth; he does not want the truth. He rejects the truth when he first learns of it and then slowly accepts it, until he has to make the final decision to mete out justice. He killed his father the king and married his mother and had children with her. He has broken natural law. Aristotle said that Oedipus Rex is the highest form of tragedy because it is so well constructed and so intelligently designed. The fact that it is sill produced on modern stages is testament to its durability, to its timeliness. It was first performed n 427 BC!
In general remarks about T. S. Eliot and the factors that inspired him to write The Wasteland, Dr. White draws some comparisons to his (White’s) American education, which he considered his own “wasteland” in many regards, and likens it to the barren culture described in Eliot’s epic poem. Though White fondly recalls the teacher that he credits with being responsible for his becoming a Shakespearian scholar and authority, he laments that only an American –– in this case Eliot –– could have written The Wasteland, discarded elements of which Eliot later used to write The Hollow Men.
