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insists that people cannot change. Morphine may, as its name punningly suggests, have transformational qualities, but in this play it becomes symbolic of irreversible transformation-of, perhaps, change itself, the one thing that never changes. A careful reading ofLong Days Journey into Night reveals that the characters insist, over and over again, from the beginning of the play, that change is impossible. Most of these references are either given to Mary or made about her, and by the end of the play it is clear that she represents to all the characters a kind of fatality. If Mary is a "ghost" by act 4, Jamie, Tyrone, and Edmund have been similarly drained of their agency as characters: they play cards "mechanically," succumb to oblivion through whiskey , and seem, in the final stage direction, unable even to move. This close affinity between transformation and the denial of change is suggested through Mary's associations with morphine and fog. She first moves to "the windows at right" on the line, "Thank heavens, the fog is gone" (1 7). Mary is the first to call attention to this metaphor ' and it remains a barometric indicator of her growing need to escape, and later, of her surrender to this need. Already by act 2, scene 2 the metaphor is a shorthand between Tyrone and Mary through which they escape confrontation: TYRONE: (Trying to speak naturally) Yes, I spoke too soon. We're in for another night of fog, I'm afraid. MARY: Oh, well, I won't mind it tonight. TYRONE: No, I don't imagine you will, Mary. MARY: (Flashes a glance at him.... ) [82] But the fog, which enters the dialogue through Mary and becomes itself the language for her illness, is of course associated with all the characters and even with the play itself. The fog, Mary says, makes one feel "that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be" (98). Edmund, like Mary, responds to this transforming power; when he was out in the fog, he tells Tyrone, "Nothing was what it is" (131). These complicated statements, where the fog has a morphine effect of permanent change, both assert and deny referential meaning, subordinating realistic objective logiC to a new logiC of perception. "Don't look at me as if I'd gone nutty," Edmund says. "I'm talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they 36 Long Day's Journey into Night can help it?" (131). But the language Edmund uses to describe his perceptions is still the language of "faithful realism" (154). While he aspires to "poetry" he falls short, and "realism" is the result, faute de mieux, an inadequate, even inarticulate language Edmund calls "stammering": "Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people" (154). Critics who have felt comfortable interpreting this line as an autobiographical reference to O'Neill's own sense of inadequacy as a writer, and so to his return, thus late in his life, to "realistic" form, risk missing the line's criticism of realism, and its claim to "native eloquence." "Fog people" are "drowned," dead; Edmund describes feeling like "a ghost within a ghost," "walking on the bottom of the sea" (131). Fog and sea merge, for Edmund, in a liquid that envelops and dissolves him, and from this union comes a language both stammering and eloquent, inadequate yet "faithful," somehow "native," expressive of his "home." Edmund's "realism" is a language of stuttering imperfection, stumbling over the obvious like an obstacle in the dark. In a similarly contradictory language, the sound of the foghorn in the play is almost always accompanied by the sound of ships' bells, and so each reminder is also a warning, in a kind of endless movement between the past and future, an anticipation outside of time. These alarms bother Mary less once she is transformed by morphine, but they signal a danger in the amorphousness of self-immersion: it isn't complete until the self is lost forever.8 The foghorn, like Tyrone's snoring, wakes the old distinctions , "keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back" (99), interrupting the pull toward stasis, the merging that looks a lot like death. Talk is useless: this point too the play makes repeatedly (44-45, 75, 78, 93, 132, 173), from its first pages, when Mary and Tyrone simulate a "dialogue" that circles politely around concern, resentment , defensiveness, and denial: "We'll have no talk of reducing" (14); "I...

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