Camusian Existentialism in Arthur Miller's After the Fall

Camusian Existentialism in Arthur Miller's After the Fall DEREK PARKER ROYAL An existentialist ethic penneates the fabric of Arthur Miller's drama. Perhaps more than any other American playwright of his time, he constructs situations that not only highlight a particular historical circumstance but also translate themselves into the larger ontological conundrums facing individuals in the last half of the twentieth century. His protagonists are faced with the inescapable project of defining themselves through a series of Promethean choices. Biff, in Death of a Salesman, realizes that Willy "never knew who he was" and refuses to follow him into a similar life of bad faith.' In The Crucible, a morc direct expression of dramatic existentialism, Jbhn Proctor denies the right of the church and the state to define his actions by choosing death over a false confession, asking the profound question, "How may [ live without my name?'" Incident at Vichy, a play coming on the heels of After the Fall and continuing the latter's themes, broaches the subject of individual complicity and culpability in the light of an abstract condemnation, especially in the figure of LeDuc, who ha. to wrestle with his own guilt in accepting his freedom while those around him are doomed. He asserts that "there is nothing and will be nothing - until you face your own complicity with this ... your own humanity ,"3 In all cases, the individuals assert themselves by creating the terms under which they are to live, heroically or otherwise, thereby assuring themselves an accurate inscription of their names on the tablet of history. Those critics who have read Miller as an existentialist writer have usually done so in tenns of Sartrean philosophy, perhaps the single most representalive expression of existentialism.4 The protagonists in Miller's dramas, according to these critics, are often working against a sense of mauvaise/oi, or bad faith, an investment in a predetennined notion of being that precludes any possibility for a true subjective assertion of identity. They see a moral obligation to take responsibility for their own existence and make it completely their own, which means that they must progress from an ontological state of beingModern Drama. 43:2 (Summer 2000) 192 After the Fall [93 for-others - feeling alienation, guilt, or shame because the individual is perceived as an object or a category - to one of being-for-itself - the subject knowing what he is by knowing what he is not, as well as defining himself . through his actions. While this can be a useful way of reading Miller's plays, it nonetheless has its limitations. Sartrean existentialism, for all its humanistic potential, ultimately allows for little in the way of true intersubjectivity, the interpenetration of consciousnesses loosely defined as love, friendship, or empathy. In the fight to assert themselves, individual subjects always end up objectifying others, making of human relations a constant "tug of war" between consciousnesses. Similarly. Sartre's focus on subjective possibility, especially if taken to its extremes, tends to lead to a rampant individualism that privileges the subject over everything else. There is little room for mediation between personal and collective values. (Later in his career Sartre would espouse a more Marxist approach to allow for a more collective focus, but he would do so at the expense of his earlier philosophy as developed in Being and Nothingness.) The heroes in Sartre's fiction and drama tend to be lone individuals working against foreign or hostile surroundings that demonstrate no possibility for any form of interconnectedness.s Perhaps a more appropriate way to read Miller's drama existentially is through the works of Albert Camus. Most of the French writer's works are concerned with the possibility of tempering individual action with an overarching sense of solidarity. This he calls a "philosophy of limits," an understanding of the individual that takes into account not only the necessity for self-definition, but also an awareness of the dangerous potential of that expression in its extreme - an abstracted justice usually exemplified, for him, in the concentration camp and the gUlag.6 As Camus states in his postwar manifesto The Rebel, Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is...