The Banished Prince: Time, Memory, and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Laurin Porter (review)

Book Reviews 449 LAURIN PORTER. The Banished Prince: Time. Memory. alld Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Ann Arbor: UM! Research Press 1988. Pp. 134· $39.95. It may at fIrst seem an odd thing to say, but I believe it true: that we have barely begun to understand O'Neill's plays. They have been with us very briefly compared with other great tragic dramas. We understand fairly well the autobiographical meanings that have preoccupied most O'Neill interpreters. But we have hardly had time to unravel the other intricacies concealed in O'Neill's odd, dense and complex language, in the strange quasi-realistic, quasi-symbolic. quasi-chorie characterizations, in the mysticism, and in the sense of the tragic. One problem that mingles issues of biography and dramatic structure has to do with O'Neill's mysticism, That he had a mystic's temperament and view of the world seems beyond question; he thought so himself, and at the moment I recall no O'Neill scholar who contests the point. Most who have written about the matter assume the mysticism is primarily tragic, Nietzschean, pagan, as O'Neill himself believed. Or is it essentially Christian, as Richard Dana Skinner in the thirties, Virginia Floyd, and now Laurin Porter in this new book, believe? The two forms are fundamentally incompatible, an incompatibility O'Neill dramatized in the character Dian Anthony (in The Great GodBroWfI), whose names mirror the conflicting traditions: Dionysos, Nietzsche's perpetual tragic hero, and St. Anthony, founder (but not father) ofChristian asceticism. Poor Dion Anthony! Bursting with ideas and impulses to create, yet doomed to a hybrid's sterility, all he can paint are inchoate daubings. By sacrificing Dian (in imitation of Zarathustra) O'Neill sets out to liberate the pagan in us aU from its Christian prison. Nevertheless, O'Neill could not be as single-minded in pursuit of Nietzschean ideals as he wished. From time to time in his plays, a pagan dances to a suspiciously Christian-sounding tune. Porter believes that the Christian strains are very important: to her they apparently represent something like an Hegelian transcendence of death and nature. Such transcendence, she believes, constitutes O'Neill's real aim in the celebrated late plays, an aim that remains unattained until the last play, A Moon/or the Misbegotten. Until his last play, Porter argues, the rituals by which O'Neill ~eeks escape from "calendar time" into "mythic time" lead toward individualism and away from cosmogony and community. In Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill appoints Edmund as confessor to the other Tyrones. But the confession has no regenerating consequence because Edmund's nature-mysticism isolates him from the other members of his family. "According to Catholic doctrine," Porter reminds us, "the priest as healer and 'ministering spirit' (Hebrews 1:14) must first belong to the community himself. He can only act for the Christian family as one of its members, equally in need of the ritual's healing process" (p. 89). "Only within ritual," she writes elsewhere, "can time be truly suspended and its eroding powers negated, if only for the moment. That moment, however brief, allows the believing participant to nullify the crushing weight of time and begin again, restored and renewed" (p. 1I) . Because Edmund fails as confessor, and 450 Book Reviews because the Tyroncs can only eternally repeat their past, rather than transforming it into communaJ rites that will create for them a new world, they "remain trapped in time, and the spiral cODtinues downward" (p. 91). For some reason Porter finds that things are different in A Moon/or the Misbegotten. "As in LOllg Day's Journey , O'Neill employes the rite of confession.... In LA Moon], however, the pattern of confession and absolution moves toward a cosmogony, the creation of a new order" (p. roo). Jim Tyrone's confession to Josie Hogan works because "Josie ... becomes, miraculously. at once his mother Mary. the Virgin Mary and Mother Church" (p. I I). Porter believes that confession allows Jim to die and be born again, free from his old sins and his conscience to sleep "the dream1ess sleep of a newborn child" (p...