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NATURE OF EXPERIMENTATION
O'Neill also attracted attention with two styles of theatre rather than one, being equally adept in the styles of realism and expressionism, and with two radically disproportionate types of drama, since he was equally effective in one-act plays and in cyclopean dramas twice the normal of modem plays. His search for expressive form, in his case a combination of private compulsions and public ambitions to incorporate modem ideas and notions about life and dramatic art, led to undertake numerous experiments with symbolic figures, masks, interior monologues, split personalities, choruses, science effects, rhythms, and schematizations. In O’Neill’s work there is a veritable summa of the modem theatre’s aspirations and achievements as well as it more inevitable limitations and failures. It is largely this multifarious engagement with the possibilities of dramatic art, combined with an endeavor to apply them to significant as well as very personally felt subject matter that made O'Neill a playwright of international importance. (John Gassner)
O’NEILL’S PESSIMISM
His pessimism is of men in this world in which he must live and justify himself in life is to have a meaning. His pessimism is born of man, not of God or the universe. It is a pessimism that has in it some gleamed of hope. For it holds that man's greatest tragedies are of his making, and thus it is a fair presumption to hope that man may unmake them. Not that O'Neill says that he will do so; he may recognize the persistence of man's hopeless hope but even granting all that, there is a still a vast difference between the position of O'Neill and that of Schopenhauer”. (S.K.Winther)
EXPRESSIONISM: CHANGE IN DIALOGUE
"This substitution of symbolic types for individual human beings has caused a change in dialogue. The expressionist does not attempt realistic conversation. Sometimes his characters are rhetorical. They burst into song or speak verse. They break into a chanting repetition of a single phrase so as to convey the idea of the monotony or dreariness of life. It is often very effective. It is a new technique. There is seldom much form about an expressionistic piece. It consists usually of a senes shot scenes with a stylized or symbolical setting intended to reveal the inner significance of the play". (N. Scarlyn Wilson)
PROCESS OF DEHUMANISATION
"Existence is a process of dehumanization. To read O'Neill may be a salutary and bracing experience, for he is a corrective, a bitter herb, a perpetual north-east wind, and he brings us squarely face to face with one aspect of life which, though we may think it partial, we recognize as true; but we soon begin to long for a more nourishing imaginative diet - we cannot live long at a time in a world so fatal to life l as his. Such re the qualities of the experience he offers us, of the world he has imagined". (T.K.Whipple)
TRAGEDIES OF AWARENESS
"O'Neill’s plays are more ostensibly tragedies of awareness than of the unconscious. The conflict of his characters is post-Freudian in that it rests on a center of consciousness in which the ego is where the id was. The will to life becomes far more significant in their scheme of than things than the libido. The suffering is less due to sexual repression than to an intense life-aversion. They are modem men in search of a soul which might help them regain their lost ability to cross from the known into the unknown, without surrendering their basic vitalistic urge". (D.V.K. Raghavacharyulu)
RELEVANCE OF PAIN
"O'Neill was impelled by his own deep-seated needs to justify pain, and these needs were the greatest threat to the philosophy which grew out of them. Indeed, within O'Neill's thesis lurked its anti-thesis. While he affirmed disintegration as the price of life and pain as the penality for creativity, there was always the terrible possibility that life and art might not be worth the struggle. Perhaps the price was too high. Perhaps the constant need to establish reality in a world of relative values, to determine one's identity amid opposite of self-images, are the sources of a torment as stultifying as it is creative. O’Neill's plays are a consistent chronological record of this torment, charting as clearly, perhaps, as historical biography the direction of his growth as man and artist". (Doris V. Falk)
ART OF SEEKING
"O’Neill's plays are crosses. Follow the road he travels and you will often hear the sound of flagellation. Look and you will often see that the whip is brought down by a tormented soul on his back. But flowers grow on this desert track and the mountains and the sunset laid Beyond the Horizon. The very imperfection which connects the author with his play also connects the author with his audience....He offers us the art of seeking". (Francis Fergusson)
SOCIAL CRITICISM
"Ultimately, Eugene O'Neill's social criticism cancels itself out, for he not only condemns all of society as is, he rejects all solutions for making it something better. He accepts no answer to life, hut death". (Doris M. Alexander)
TWO CONCEPTS OF REALITIES
"Between illusion and reality a man might choose, but O'Neill’s two realities are not open to choice, they are related to each other in a fashion so tortuous as to elude consciousness. A man feels and believes the very opposite of what he thinks and he feels and believes. And the reason for this is that the understandable necessity to live has imposed on him a habit of unconscious lying; he reiterates a faith in his will, in the great capacity and need of love which animates his life, whereby actually his desire is to die and the motivating force of his life is not love but hate. In short, the two realities which inform man’s existence are so profoundly contradictory that consciousness must either pass by them, or deal with them in falsehoods, or obliterate itself. Man is, by definition, a deluded being”. (Helen Muchnic)
THE HAIRY APE AS A TRAGEDY OF A SOUL AT WAR WITH ITSELF
Taken by itself The Hairy Ape is a play of sheer terror of life covered with a mask of mocking pride. But like all other of O’Neill’s plays it can not be taken alone. It catches the raw horror of a mood, and gives vent to that horror with a brutality almost unparalleled in dramatic literature. But even in its worst moments, it never wholly loses sight of things outside. (R. D. Skinner)
THE STRUCTURE OF THE HAIRY APE
The play is organized into eight scenes, as was The Emperor Jones, but here the structure is more symmetrical: the first four scenes are set on an ocean liner, above and below deck, and the second four take place in New York City. (David Krasner)
SUBJECT OF THE HAIRY APE
"The subject here is same ancient one that always was and always will be the one subject for drama, and that is man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself his own past, his attempt "to belong." (O'Neill)
CHARACTER OF YANK IN THE HAIRY APE
"Yank sees himself as the others see him-his self-conception is all of theirs and more. Nothing troubles him, no considerations of beauty, of home, of love, of his relation to society - the yearnings of other men expressed in the drunken reminiscences of the old Irishman, Paddy. All that, according to Yank, belongs in past, is dead; Yank is alive; he is the power behind the ship-behind the modem world. (Doris V. Falk)
CRITICISM OF AMERICAN SOCIETY IN THE HAIRY APE
"Our 'lousy' American democracy was not for him, because he envisioned an ideal democracy. For this impossible unreality he denied both the democratic actual and also the democratic possible. With present American reality, he rejected future American possibility. Both were 'unrealistic' and ugly". (Frederic I. Carpenter)
CRITICISM OF CAPITALISM MATERIALISM IN THE HAIRY APE
The Hairy Ape" presents and extremely negative view of the state of mechanized America. Where the workers best adjusted to the system is a 'hairy ape', and where the 'capitalist class' is even more terribly dehumanized, for it has lost connection with life, is simply a procession of gaudy marionettes". (Doris Alexander)