O'Neill's Hairy Ape and the Reversal of Hegelian Dialectics

O'Neill's Hairy Ape and the Reversal of Hegelian Dialectics HUBERT ZAPF Dramatic works, apart from everything else they are, are also what I would call intellectual experiments. Certain ideas or philosophical concepts are used and "put to the test" in the medium ofcommunicative action. That way, the abstract nature ofpure philosophical thought and the apparently self-sufficient status of (ideo-)Iogical systems is broken up in the process of their dramatic concretization . In confronting the philosophical with the pragmatic, the logical with the dialogical level, concepts of reason with processes of interaction, dramatic literature can critically explore the validity of abstract thought systems in the light of their relationship to the communicative life-worlds of concrete individuals. I I should like to demonstrate this aspect of a dramatic playas an intellectual experiment in the example of O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1921). When talking of intellectual influences on O'Neill, of course, one thinks first of all of Friedrich Nietzsche and, if less explicitly, of Arthur Schopenhauer2 But although Nietzsche regarded G.W.F. Hegel's systematic and "holistic" approach to philosophy as diametrically opposed to his own attempt at developing a new subjective, fragmentary and, one would say today, deconstructive kind of philosophy, it seems probable that it is the very polarity, the negative co-existence and polemical interdependence between these two philosophies which, more than anything else, has determined the fate of modem philosophical thought - and the shaping ofthe concomitant social and political ideologies. As recent interpretations of Nietzsche have shown, there is an at least implicit awareness of and reference to Hegel's idea of philosophy in Nietzsche's works,3 and one could probably even argue that Nietzsche cannot be adequately understood without this implicit, if negative, reference to the German Idealism which he so severely attacks. But we can assume that O'Neill got some sense of Hegel's philosophical presence not only through the indirect mediation of Nietzsche's anti-idealism but, more immediately, through his early acquaint- HUBERT ZAPF ance with Marxist ideas, which of course go back, in their intellectual conception, to Hegel. Above all, we can presume that he was familiar with the basic conceptual formula ofHegel's - and Marx's - philosophy, the formula of dialectic thought. As I want to show here, the composition of The Hairy Ape can be interpreted, on one level, as a critical exploration of this progressive-dialectic model of the mind (Hegel) and of society (Marx). Much about this expressionistic play, which for some time appeared somewhat outdated, has meanwhile revealed its deeper historical truth: i.e., modem man's loss of any sort of cultural or social identity (the theme of "not belonging"); the anonymous, non-communicative nature of industrial society; the captivity of individuals in circumstances alien to their most fundamental anthropological needs' The world of The Hairy Ape is, historically speaking, the result of social progress - of technological progress as exemplified by the steamship; ofeconomic progress as exemplified by the wealth in New York's Fifth Avenue; of democratic progress as exemplified by the political organization of the working classes (the IWW). Thus the society in The Hairy Ape can in a sense be seen as an objectification of the nineteenth-century concept ofprogress, which formulated as its highest aim that man should become the "subject of his own history." But what O'Neill actually shows us in the play, in the fate of his protagonist Yank, is an ironic disfiguration of that concept, dramatizing not a pattern of progression but of regression. Yank feels somewhat like the "subject of historical progress" at the beginning of the play, making the ship - i.e. "modem society" - move through his work. It's me makes it move! , , . I'm at de bottom, get me! Dere ain't nothin' foither. I'm de end! I'm de start! I start sornep'n and de woild moves!s Man taking the place ofGod and claiming to be able to determine his own fate these are the ideological associations that O'Neill quite clearly employs in his characterization of Yank's attitude. But what O'Neill shows us in the course of the play...