Observation as System in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh

Observation as System in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh YVONNE VERA Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh' lends itself to an analysis of power relations, spatial presence, and punishment. [n Foucault, panopticism, a system of observation and control, functions in the examination of derelicts, orphans, prisoners. and armies: "a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker, a schoolboy." The space of the individual is identified as a "small theatre " in which "every actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.'" Likewise, O'Neill depicts Harry Hope's bar as a prison, and the occupants as prisoners whom Larry calls "fellow inmates," or "the misbegotten ." Rocky calls the pub part of his "ward." The place is referred to variously as a jail, a madhouse, an asylum, and -an orphanage. Larry, who functions as the first "observer" of the inmates, is referred to as "Old Cemetery." Always, he is waiting for death, which is his pipe dream: "What's before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep" (10). In Harry Hope's pub, O'Neill offers a theatrical space which is worse than a dungeon; it is a place of death. Sleep is everywhere. In the opening act, all inmates sleep but Larry and Rocky. The pub is closed in, closing off, preserving its insideness. The pub is the theatre of a slow sleep, of persecution, of death. Within the enclosed segmented space, the past and the future merge in the present: the pub is the concrete manifestation of memory and forgetting. In Harry Hope's bar, each subject emerges as a body, a disease, a death: "the dump is like de morgue wid all dese bums passed out" (13). Hickey calls the pub dwellers "a lot of stiffs cheating the undertaker" (225). What unfolds as a wait or watch for Hickey transforms into a "funeral wake." Hickey consecrates this motif when he arrives as the allegorical figure of death. The cops, observing from outside, think the dump is "as harmless as a graveyard" (25). Harry, unconscious throughout most of the opening act, is described as "a bag of bones" (7). He wears a brass watch-chain not connected to a watch; for Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 448 Observation as System in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh 449 Harry, time is what happens outside the pub, until Hickey purchases a watch for his birthday in an attempt to invert and invent realities. Harry's Bar becomes, therefore, a theatre and a catacomb. Visibility and observation are interlinked. With his ironic rejoinder of the opening act, Rocky supplies the first warning to watch Larry: "De old Foolosopher like Hickey calls you, ain't yuh? I s'pose you don't fall for no pipe death?" (10). The spectator is now conscious of Hickey watching Larry and Rocky watching Hickey watching Larry: the observer observed. We are conscious of Larry watching everybody else from his "grandstand." His elaborate objective philosophical phrases claim for him status as observer. Larry watches what he calls the "circus" of life: "All things are the same meaningless joke to me, for they grin at me from the one skull of death" (128). Larry is acutely aware of being watched. His pronouncements on being on the grandstand are part of his watching himself watching himself: a meta-reflection. On the grandstand, he is an observer with a vantage point. The observer observed - Rocky is the first to respond aggressively to being watched. He feels Hugo's drunken innuendo and overreacts. Conscious of being silently and continuously observed, he resorts to defensive argument: Hell. yuh'd link I wuz a pimp or sornethin'. Everybody knows me knows lain't. A pimp don't hold no job. I'm a bartender. Dem tarts, Margie and Poil, dey're just a sideline to pick up some extra dough. Strictly business. Like dey was fighters and I was their manager, see? (12) The spectators form an outer limit of the periphery of observations. They observe Rocky listen to his own monologue and attempt to convince himself of its truth. Rocky and Larry, in tum, watch the sleepers. They watch Willie Oban as he...