Jean Anouilh and Eugene O'Neill: Repetition as Negativity

Jean Anouilh and Eugene O'Neill: Repetition as Negativity Joseph J. Moleski and John H. Stroupe The true and false are both species of repetition. Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy" Orpheus. I hate death. M. Henry (gently). You're unfair. Why should you hate death? She alone can create the proper setting for love. Jean Anouilh, Eurydice Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence, and habit erect on all sides—the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. . . . The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us, and we will be left with nothing but a 'terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.' Saul Bellow, 1976 Nobel Prize Speech Ultimately it is repetition that destroys the characters of Jean Anouilh. Mask and ritual are merely the accessories of a force of displacement as tragic as it is inexorable. Its names are various: society, religion, language. It is a movement never sensed as liberating, never affirmed, and its discovery is the single peripeteia of Anouilh's drama. The self comes to be seen as doubled, exported beyond itself, dispersed; the moment— Orpheus and Eurydice's, for example—is found to be itself a repetition that will be repeated by yet other moments, with a resultant hollowing out and draining away of apparent JOSEPH J. MOLESKI is President of Keller-Moleski Associates, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and author of "Eugene O'Neill and the Cruelty of Theater," which appeared in an earlier issue of this journal. JOHN H. STROUPE, Professor of English at Western Michigan University, is editor of Critical Approaches to O'Neill, to be published by AMS Press late in 1987. 315 316Comparative Drama presence. Self and moment are always "contaminated" by the trace of the others, other times, and other selves: the present is the lovers' hotel room shot through with the comings and goings of others, who inevitably mark it. This face of repetition is that of "life going out of itself beyond return. Death rehearsal . . . . The irreducible excess ... of any self-intimacy of the living, the good, the true."l Repetition is the true antagonist of Anouilh's world, and it is insuperable. In O'Neill's theater of compulsion, repetition's other face dominates. There, symmetrically, repetition is the meaningless source of meaning, not only that which betrays truth, as in Anouilh, but equally that which constitutes it. With no meaning , no self preceding, subtending repetition, existence means succumbing to monotonous, iterative, numbing attempts to accede to some stability, clarity, definition, or identity. These "rituals" finally dominate and subvert what they were meant to produce. O'Neill's repetition is "that without which there would be no truth: the truth of being in the intelligible form of ideality discovers in the eidos that which can be repeated, being the same, the clear, the stable, the identifiable in its equality with itself." Repetition as "death rehearsal" in Anouilh is, in O'Neill, "repetition of life" (Derrida, p. 168). Different as they may seem at first glance, both Anouilh and O'Neill remain steeped in the negativity of repetition, obsessed with tracing the implications of repetition and of strategies that seek to master or eliminate repetition, with equal fatality. Anouilh situates meaning only in the transcendence of a world of hollow, ritualistic exchanges and self-deception, where external social forces mutilate, compromise, and pervert individual integrity, while O'Neill explores a vision of life wherein adherence to the ritual demands instilled by society provides the only meaning to be found. Neither, however, posits any inherent correspondence between meaning and reality . Anouilh's Antigone, Becket, and Orpheus (in Antigone, Becket, and Eurydice), for example, create significance for themselves only by refusing to compromise the self-embraced roles through which they have preserved their personal integrity; yet Becket has never believed in God, Antigone acknowledges to Haemon that she does not know why she is dying, and Orpheus joins Eurydice in death because only there can the perfect love they tried to create have permanence. Yank Smith's quest to belong (The Hairy Ape), Nina Leeds' search for Joseph J. Moleski and John H. Stroupe317 happiness...