Death of a Salesman
Repeatedly we find that the reasons given for Death of a Salesman not being a tragedy are based on fallacious notions of tragedy; that is, that tragedy requires an "epiphany" whereas in Death of a Salesman the dilemma remains unresolved, 37 that tragedy is somehow exclusive of social realities, 38 and that tragedy is about unshakable faith and the resilience of myth. 39 In other words, the criteria are such that they would eliminate all of the plays of the present study from the canon of tragedy.
Death of a Salesman is, at first glance, very much at the center of our present understanding of tragedy. As Biff Loman tells us in the "Requiem" of the play, Willy Loman "had all the wrong dreams" and "he didn't know who he was" (p. 47). 40 As such, Willy Loman seems an archetype of the tragic hero we have been identifying. Furthermore the lyricism of the play is legendary. The play once bore the tentative title of The Inside of His Head and for the dramaturgy of the play Miller cannibalizes the techniques of German expressionism. 41 In Death of a Salesman , Miller makes a conscious effort to bring about the lyricism which I have been describing as the core of tragedy. In his introduction to his collected plays Miller reveals that in Death of a Salesman he "wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's mind." 42
What Miller describes as the "single most powerful influence" on his way of writing approximates the impetus of tragedy which I have been describing. Miller writes:
It is necessary, if one is to reflect reality, not only to depict why a man does what he does, or why he nearly didn't do it, but why he cannot simply walk away and say to hell with it. To ask this last question of a play is a cruel thing, for evasion is probably the most developed technique most men have, and in truth there is an extraordinary small number of conflicts which we must, at any cost, live out to their conclusions. To ask this question is immediately to impose on oneself not, perhaps, a style of writing but at least a kind of dramatic construction. For I understand the symbolic meaning of a character and his career to consist of the kind of commitment he makes to life or refuses to make, the kind of challenge he accepts and the kind he can pass by. I take it that if one could know enough about a human being one could discover some conflict, some value, some challenge, however minor or major, which he cannot find it in himself to walk away from or turn his back on. . . . . I take it, as well, that the less capable a man is of walking away from the central conflict of the play, the closer he approaches a tragic existence. 43
As I have been arguing, if the issue or conflict creates a double bind which entangles one's sense of self and reality, then there is no possible walking away, to do so would be in effect to cease to exist as a self-conscious individual, and all humans are susceptible to this possible dilemma and are therefore potentially tragic. Miller's approach to Death of a Salesman is a logical extrapolation of what we have observed in the tragedies so far considered.
The play, however, does present certain difficulties for a sustained reading according to our present approach. There is a distinct incongruity in the fact that the play, despite its apparent lyricism, eventually splits into two distinct focuses: one on Willy Loman and the other on his son, Biff.
In one reading, the play is the story of an unsuccessful salesman whose ultimate dreams include being a successful salesman and his son, Biff, achieving some distinction in life. His life and dreams fall apart but in the end he reconciles himself with his estranged son and, with the discovery of the profound love which his son bears him, he martyrs himself to the cause of giving his son a new start in life by committing suicide and bequeathing twenty thousand dollars in life insurance. This reading is encouraged by the fact that at the climax of the drama we, to a degree, lose track of Willy and as we focus on Biff we, like Happy, lose interest in Willy. As our concern for Willy wanes, as we cease to pay close attention to him and to what he is experiencing, his suicide from a disaffected perspective might seem a mitigation of his tragedy, a proof that his illusions were intact to the end. Thus the play seems little tragic because it throws emphasis on Willy's renewed sense of the meaning of his existence and Willy's madness becomes an episode contained in this larger story of redemption. Another possible reading is that Willy's world had fallen apart to such an extent that he was incapable of integrating the salvation which was being offered him and of aborting the madness of his suicide.
In his introduction to his collected plays Miller discusses, at some length, the degree to which Willy is conscious "that the life he had made was without form and inner meaning." 44 Our consciousness of this fact is interfered with because, as Miller describes, "the way of telling the tale, in a sense, is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical." 45 Because Willy is hallucinating from the beginning and the form of the play embraces his madness and his compression of time, we must be particularly attentive in order to detect the sense of decline which the play is presenting to us.
In the first place, Willy's entrapment is illustrated in the minutiae of his life. The Chevrolet is praised and cursed, the country is "the greatest country in the world" and yet Willy feels "they massacred the neighborhood." (Act 1, p. 6) The refrigerator was well advertized but is falling apart. Willy claims both to be admired by his clients and to be laughed at. Willy's first assessment of Biff is "he's lazy, god dammit!" and that "Biff is a lazy bum!" (Act 1. p. 5) Eight lines later Willy describes Biff as "such a hard worker. There's one thing about Biff--he's not lazy."(Act 1. p. 6) Willy cannot escape the contradiction of the American Dream as dreamed and the American Dream as lived, yet, for him, there is no other way to live or dream.
The play offers ample background for Willy's present alienation. Willy lacks the roots of family antecedents. He never knew his parents. His brother Ben, who seems to represent a misguided philosophy of materialism rather than any sense of fraternity, has just died. Willy is now haunted by the ghost of his brother pushing the images of his particular brand of success. Willy is doubly troubled by these images; on the one hand, he has failed to live up to these images and, on the other, to the degree that he has attempted to live by them, these images have failed him. Willy seems to believe the spectre when it tells him that heading south from the United States will bring him to Africa, where he can pull diamonds out of the darkness. Yet, when Willy meets Bernard as an adult he asks him, " . . . what's the secret" (Act 2. p. 32).
Biff's discovery of Willy's adultery sets father and son in a classic double-bind situation. Willy sees in Biff the fruition of all of his dreams of success, but those aspirations are met by Biff's spite. Willy's reactions to Biff remind us of the attraction/aversion behaviour of mothers and their schizophrenic offspring.
BIFF. He's not like this all the time, is he?
LINDA. It's when you come home he's always the worst.
BIFF. When I come home?
LINDA. When you write you're coming, he's all smiles, and talks about the future, and--he's just wonderful. And then the closer you seem to come, the more shaky he gets, and then, by the time you get here, he's arguing, and he seems angry at you. I think it's just that maybe he can't bring himself to--open up to you. Why are you so hateful to each other? Why is that? (Act 1. p. 19)
Biff, to Willy, is more than simply the reminder of past sins. As Linda reiterates, Willy loved his sons "better than his own life," (Act 1. p. 20) and "put his whole life" into them (Act 1. p. 21). Biff's failure is Willy's failure, and Happy's profligacy is Willy's profligacy. Even Willy's pipe dreams of his sales career have become exhausted and dashed. Howard, his boss, first puts him on straight commission and then fires him outright. Charley is Willy's only friend in the world and, as Charley notes, they don't even like each other. Biff's latching on to the American Dream becomes Willy's last hope of asserting his own existence.
Biff realizes that he is Willy's dream made flesh, and his swinging a big deal with Bill Oliver is the moment of Willy's salvation, the act by which Biff could deliver him from damnation. At Oliver's office, Biff suddenly feels the pressure of the absurd situation in which he has been trapped and responds with the gratuitous act of stealing Oliver's pen. At this point the bifurcation in the movement of the play which contradicts the lyrical conventions which the play has established becomes apparent. We have accepted that the play is the exteriorization of Willy's consciousness but, in contradiction to this convention, Biff has become the central protagonist, and it is his dilemma upon which we find ourselves focused.
The play seemingly becomes two plays. The climax of the first play, Willy's play, comes with his breakdown in the restaurant washroom. The end of Willy's reality and the impossibility of his recuperation are signalled to us, not simply through his breakdown, but by the abandonment of his sons and, in particular, by Happy's repudiation of him.
LETTA. Don't you want to tell your father--
HAPPY. No, that's not my father. He's just a guy. Come on, we'll catch Biff, and, honey, we're going to paint this town. (Act 2. p. 39)
Meanwhile in the washroom Willy relives the disgrace of Biff's discovering him with a woman in his hotel room. Willy reaps as he has sown and still his suffering seems beyond retribution.
In effect Willy's story ends here. He meets his destiny, madness. He becomes the ludicrous figure of an old man in bedroom slippers in the middle of the city, planting seeds at midnight with a flashlight, absorbed in conversation with a departed brother. At this point the second play takes hold, one in which Biff gets his final say. It is powerful, climactic drama but, in effect, it only tells us what we must already realize about Willy's false hopes and the self deception he imposed on Biff. Biff challenges Willy's plans of suicide and points them out as futile; he cries out his love but, as Miller has pointed out, Willy is incapable of taking it all to his heart.
In terms of his character, he has achieved a very powerful piece of knowledge, which is that he is loved by his son and been embraced by him and forgiven. In this he is given his existence, so to speak--his fatherhood, for which he has always striven and which until now he could not achieve. That he is unable to take this victory thoroughly to his heart, that it closes the circle for him and propels him to his death, is the wage of his sin, which is to have committed himself so completely to the counterfeits of dignity and the false coinage embodied in his idea of success that he can prove his existence only by bestowing "power" on his posterity, a power deriving from his last asset, himself, for the price of his insurance policy. 46
Willy has already faced the contradiction of everything he has hoped for and believed in. As Miller describes Willy’s destiny: “The previously assumed and believed-in results of ordinary and accepted actions, and their abrupt and unforeseen--but apparently logical--effects, form the basic collision in this play, and, I suppose, its ultimate irony.” 47
Willy's madness is the symbolization of this irony. My conclusion, then, is that Biff's offered redemption cannot penetrate the madness which the failure of Willy's life has wrought. The plan of a self-glorifying suicide has lingered in Willy's mind since at least the occasion of his visit to Charley's office after he had been fired. In their final scene together Biff takes out the rubber hose which Willy had attached to the gas heater, lays it on the table, and denounces Willy's final and most desperate grasp at the myth of success. "What's this supposed to do, make a hero out of you? This supposed to make me sorry for you?" (Act 2. p. 45).
Biff's honesty confirms what Willy cannot allow himself to know; that Lomans are "a dime a dozen," (Act 2. p. 45) and that he, Biff--Willy's dream, Willy's life--is "nothing" (Act 2. p. 46). Willy cannot be nothing, he howls in desperation: "I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!" (Act 2. p. 45). The hollowness of his outburst at this point makes it all the more resonant. Willy must intuit that his American Dream has betrayed and ruined him--attention will not be paid him, Biff is not going to "make it" and the marvelous funeral Willy has dreamed of will not take place--but his mind, per force, has abandoned such realities and in the end takes absolute direction from his hallucinations of his brother, Ben. Biff's truth and love are wasted except to exalt the tragic futility of Willy Loman's existence.
Notes
34. Dennis Welland, in Miller: The Playwright (New York: Metheun, 1979) quotes negative reviews by Eric Bentley ( Theatre Arts , November, 1949) and Eleanor Clark ( Partisan Review , February, 1949) (p. 39) and a review by J.C. Trewin ( Drama , Winter, 1949) in which he describes the play as "tangled, pretentious and dull" (37). Critical Essays on Arthur Miller , ed. J. J. Maritine (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979) includes a review by Frederick Morgan, "Notes on the Theatre," The Hudson Review , 2 (1949) in which he describes the play as "completely without merit," "trite and clumsy," full of "unrelieved vulgarity" proceeding "from cliche to stereotype," in language that "is entirely undistinguished" and he concludes that the play "is not a tragedy" (23).
35. A. Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man," Tragedy: Vision and Form , ed. R.W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 148. Miller's comments about "personal dignity" are from an interview with the New York Times quoted in D. Welland's Arthur Miller (New York: Grove, 1961), p. 52.
36. Arthur Miller , p. 52.
37. T.E. Porter "Acres of Diamonds," Critical Essays on Arthur Miller , ed. J.J. Martine (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979), p.41.
38. see Welland's discussion in Miller: The Playwright , p. 40. Also, M.W. Steinberg, "Arthur Miller and the Idea of Modern Tragedy," Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. R.W. Corrigan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 87.
39. Porter, p. 40
40. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman , all quotations of the play are from Best American Plays , Third Series, 1945 to 1951, ed. J. Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, 1952).
41. Arthur Miller, "Introduction," Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (New York, Viking, 1957) p. 23 and p. 29.
42. Ibid, pp. 23-4.
43. Ibid, p. 7.
44. Ibid, p. 35.
45. Ibid, p. 26.
46. Ibid, p. 34.
47. Ibid, p. 26.
No comments:
Post a Comment