In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Beckettian O'Neill NORMAND BERLIN My title, "The Beckettian O'Neill," points directly to my thesis, but at the outset I must say that I do not wish to push this thesis so far that it seems "absurd." I recognize that there is something oxymoronic about the phrase, "The Beckettian O'Neill." Eugene O'Neill seems to thrive on expansiveness, a maximalist who wrote not only full-length plays but marathon plays, allowing for dinner breaks, and relying on the patience of his audience if not the fleshiness of their backsides. Robert Benchley, commenting on the notorious Strange Interlude, jokingly wondered what everyone was getting excited about; after all, it's "just an ordinary nine-act play."! And a reviewer of the massive Mourning Becomes Electra captioned his piece, "Evening Becomes Intolerable."2 Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, thrives on minimalism, and with the passing years he offers less and less by way ofstage time, reducing and simplifying, hardly giving his audience a chance to settle in before the play is over. Beckett told Peter Hall that "all true grace is economical,"3 and he dedicatedly practices that belief. To my knowledge, no one writing or talking about O'Neill ever used the words "grace" or "economical." Other basic differences come easily to mind. O'Neill's plays often seem old-fashioned, conventional, melodramatic. even somewhat crude at times. A realist, his stage settings usually offer what is recognizably found in real life. His characters are usually developed, and they belong to a particular time and place. His plots are traditional, and he has stories to tell. Beckett, called a post-realist, provides stage settings that are generalized, unlocalized, often bare. His characters are not full or round; they cannot be placed firmly in a specific time or place. He offers no plots, although he does have stories to tell. And if these differences are not enough to qualify such a phrase as "the Beckettian O'Neill", then there is one big difference that clearly separates the two giants of drama - their language. Beckett's stage speech, when he offers speech, is spare, poetic, memorable. Always aware of the shortcomings of The Beckettian O'Neill 29 language, the basic inability of words to express the inexpressible, he pares his stage speech down, reaching for elemental and concrete things by a process of deverbalization, stripping. He seems to wish to escape from what Nietzsche called "the prison-house of language." O'Neill's stage speech overflows the measure, and his characters usually come close to saying exactly what they mean. He offers few memorable lines orphrases. He too believed that language is a prison-house, that words are unable to touch what one really means, but instead of trying to escape from the prison, instead of stripping down, O'Neill attempts to manipulate more and more words either to make his point or to release the desired emotion in his audience. He laments not the shortcomings of language, but his own shortcomings in using language. Nowhere is this shortcoming better stated - and here we do have some memorable 0'Neill lines - than in Edmund's words to his father, James Tyrone, after his father gives him a rare compliment by saying that Edmund has "the makings of a poet." The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn'teven got the makings. He's got only the habit. Icouldn't touch what I tried to teU you just now. ] just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, Imean, if llive. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people' In this particular context, O'Neill, I believe, has Shakespeare in mind when he refers to a poet. !fO'Neill had known Beckett's work, Beckett too would have qualified as a poet who does not stammer. But O'Neill comes before Beckett - not much before, but before - and perhaps this makes the phrase "the Beckettian O'Neill" even harder to accept. We have no trouble talking about the Beckettian Pinteror Stoppard or Fugard or Shepard...

pdf

Share