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THE CHARACTER OF JIMMY PORTER: AN APPROACH TO LOOK BACK IN ANGER I I WANT TO SUGGEST SOMETHING about Jimmy Porter, and I want to ground my suggestions in psychoanalysis. This does not mean, however , that I plan to smother the reader in scientific jargon or to create a specialized case history over which the analyst might scratch his chin and ponder. In fact, I plan to deal primarily with the play in an effort to isolate an emotive-imagistic pattern which has hitherto gone unnoticed (or at least unplumbed)! and which may help us to understand just how inseparable are the drama's metaphors and the hero's psychology. Also, I do not intend to hack here at the business of treating a dramatic character as a real person simply because I believe that we are justified in doing this as long as we confine ourselves to the text. If a playwright chooses to talk about a character's childhood, then we are free to talk about it too. If a playwright has isolated (consciously or unconsciously) a number of neurotic character traits and presented his audience with a neurotic character, then we are free to talk about neurotic character traits and a neurotic character. Critics who insist upon looking at plays as "contraptions" and characters as "functions" must not prevent us from looking at the drama as the mirror of life and characters as full, consistent embodiments of real human tendencies . Writes John Wain: What is the nature of imaginative creation? What are we doing when we think of Hamlet? When we see Othello strangle Desdemona on the stage, do we believe he is really strangling her? If not, what do we believe? That we are watching an actor and actress, who will soon be cleaning off the greasepaint and putting on ordinary clothes to take a taxi home? If "a dramatist's characters exist in their scene," if they can be said to exist at all, why should we not have a sense of them as existing in a continuum of experience? Surely anyone who has ever created an imaginary 1 A few discussions do mention Jimmy's sadism and infantilism, but, as far as I can tell, there are no exhaustive psychological examinations. One might see Roy Huss, "John Osborne's Backwards Halfway Look," Modern Drama, VI (1963), 20-25; Barbara Deming, "John Osborne's War against the Philistines," Hudson Review, XI (1958), 411-419; Morris Freedman, The Moral Impulse, Carbondale , Ill., Southern Illinois University Press, 1967, p. 116. 67 68 MODERN DRAMA May character knows that it can only be done by living with that character for long periods, getting the feel of a whole lived life behind the much smaller area in which we show the character actually doing and suffering. The novel, with its flash-backs and leisurely accumulation of detail, can, if the novelist so wishes, supply a great deal of background of the kind postulated by the question, "What was Hamlet doing during those years?" The ~rama canno~. But it is not,. to me, s~lf-evident that the imaginatIve process Involved, for eIther WrIter or spectator, is so very different; or that it is different in kind at all.2 In one sense, then, Jimmy Porter is as real as the man next door, and his "reality" is obviously going to influence the way in which we respond to the playas a whole. The reader who feels differently might well go on to the next paper. II The analytic concept which will stand behind much of what follows is the concept of orality. Let me briefly explain it. Freud came eventually to regard the development of the child as something which occurred in stages, and he called these stages the oral, the anal, and the phallic. The infant, until he is perhaps two, is preoccupied primarily with the breast (or with its substitute) and with activities of the mouth and throat, namely sucking, biting, chewing, licking, swallowing, etc. This stage (oral) is characterized by a unique combination of sadistic and passive tendencies. As he grows, the child begins to focus more and more of his attention upon eliminative functions and...

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