The Fall and After—: Arthur Miller's Confession

THE FALL AND AFTERARTHUR MILLER'S CONFESSION* After the Fall probes deeper than Miller has attempted before in an attempt to penetrate to the very nature of man. In All My Sons and Death of a Salesman he was concerned with a society which had inverted its values and placed the importance of success in economic and social spheres above the necessity to establish real contact between human beings. In After the Fall he sees a concern with success as being merely one aspect of man's egotism-an egotism which leads him on to cruelty and in the name of innocence and truth to a dissociation from fellow man which is itself a source of guilt. Its theme is an extension of Biff's statement in Death of a Salesman~ ''I'm just what I am that's all." This statement of amoral existence is expressed here in terms which tend to remind one of Steinbeck's naturalism, "... is there no treason but only man, unblameable as trees or cats or clouds?"! The "truth" which the play's protagonist, Quentin, discovers is the need to accept the inconsistency and violence of man and yet to renew love constantly in the face of this knowledge. He learns in the course of the play to accept the world he inhabits as a world seen after the Fall. Happiness, in so far as it is not the neutral happiness of non-involvement , derives, he discovers, purely from this knowledge. "Is the knowing all? To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. Is the knowing all?" (p. 127) In this knowledge, to Miller, is implicit the end of fear and the beginning of new life. In After the Fall Miller is attempting to come to terms with the fact of violence. That he is doing this in what has been called "the·When After the Fall was first produced at the Lincoln Centre, The Saturday Evening Post published the complete play in what it described as a pioneering effort for magazine publishing. When the final version of the play appeared in 'hard-back,' it became evident that several changes had been made. These changes are small in number but all serve to make the play less explicit. Thus it is interesting to note that in writing this paper several of the quotations which I considered central to the theme which Miller was developing in The Saturday Evening Post edition I found to be omitted in the final published version. Where this is true I have noted the fact in footnotes but have otherwise limited myself to the Seeker and Warburg edition (London, 1965). 1Arthur Miller, After the Fall, The Saturday Evening Post (Feb. 1, 1964), 44. This is omitted in the final published edition. 124 1967 THE FALL AND AFTER 125 age of violence" is but a further indication of his sensitivity to contemporary problems which in themselves offer an entree into the more basic study of man and the survival of the race. This he claims must always be the true subject of the committed dramatist. It has been hailed as a play stemming so directly from his personal experience as to constitute an affront both to good taste and to the generalized validity which he clearly claims for his drama. While it is true that a critic in full knowledge of the personal parallels might find it difficult to view the play with the requisite objectivity, it is also true to say that the difficulty is no greater than that which awaits the critic of a Hemingway or even a Lawrence. If After the Fall fails, then its failure does not lie in the intrusion of the personal , any more than it did in Strindberg's The Father) but rather in Miller's failure to transmute the personal into art. The form of the play constitutes a return to the technique of Death of a Salesman-a technique which Miller has identified as that of a confession. After the Fall represents not merely the confession of an...