The Role of Nemesis in the Structure of Selected Plays by Eugene O'Neill by Chester Clayton Long (review)

108 MODERN DRAMA May admirable book for small libraries and, although its heft may prove a bit chestcrushing , even for the ordinary bedside browser. Mr. Atkinson's introduction offers nothing new either factually or critically, but it is a warm-hearted and sympathetic summary of the usual facts and opinions. A somewhat provocative point does, however, arise from the editor's choices. Certain items inevitably appear, for a volume without Juno or The Plough or Cock-a-Doodle Dandy would be unthinkable. Nevertheless, I would have liked a fuller representation of the short plays, of the polemical criticism, and of the fantastic element in the autobiographies. Very probably the choices of other O'Casey critics, such as Krause, Ayling, Cowasjee, Fallon, Ronald Rollins or Denis Johnston, would differ from mine and from Atkinson's and from each other. This fact suggests to me not that anyone man's preferences are especially sound, but that the O'Casey canon is richer, more various, and less uneven than has generally been thought. ROBERT HOGAN University of California, Davis THE ROLE OF NEMESIS IN THE STRUCTURE OF SELECTED PLAYS BY EUGENE O'NEILL, by Chester Clayton Long, Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague, 1968, 231 pp. 28 Dutch Guilders. This book has a respectable purpose. It sets out to discover how nemesis (defined as "justice in action") operates in some plays of Eugene O'Neill. Something might have come of this: a revelation of O'Neill's values, a clarification of the moral and social ideas directing his design of justice. But nothing of this, or of anything else, has come. The plays are not selected according to a logical standard directed to the purpose, but arbitrarily, according to chronology for one, to type for another, to length for a third. For instance, the author tells us he discusses Thirst because it is the "title" play of the collection in which it first appeared, Abortion because it is one of the "earliest" plays, The Hairy Ape because it is the "most structurally successful" expressionistic play, Mourning Becomes Electra because it is the most successful of the "longer" plays, and so on. Mr. Long begins his discussion of each play with a lengthy retelling of it. Apparently out of a desire to stick to the "facts," he excludes all deeper levels of meaning. Inadvertently, he excludes much of the surface meaning as well. No overall view determines what facts he puts into his summaries or leaves out. In Desire Under the Elms, for instance, he tells us that Eben "spits on the ground" at one point, and that Abbie "shuts the window" at another, but forgets to inform us of a major event, Abbie's open sexual advances to Eben at the beginning of Part Two. The result is absurdity. O'Neill's plays are reduced to nothing. This nothingness takes up about a third of the book. In the remainder of it, the author applies to the plays four questions about form that he has derived from R. S. Crane's The Language of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. One, for instance, asks what is the "mode of representation" of a work. Mr. Long asks what is the mode of each O'Neill drama and comes up with the answer that it is "the dramatic mode." This discovery that a play is a play typifies his findings. But they are not presented with the simplicity such obviousness deserves. Take, for instance, a part of his conclusions on Mourning Becomes Electra: 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 109 Looking at this trilogy as a whole, now that its three component parts have been described, it is possible to synthesize a description of its overall form. It has a tripartite structure unified into one form. This consists of consecutive imitations of action, passion, and character. These involve, progressively , external actions symbolic of the internal action of the characters; defective passions stemming from the insubordination of the will of the family members to a just pattern of familial behavior; and, finally, a double reversal of character: Orin, from fatherly inhibition to motherly indulgence; Lavinia, from motherly indulgence to fatherly attempt to balance indulgence and inhibition by exercising control. All of...