Arthur Miller: Between Pathos and Tragedy

ARTHUR MILLER: BETWEEN PATHOS AND TRAGEDY No ONE IN THE AMERICAN THEATER TODAY speaks as passionately and as idealistically about the possibilities of drama as Arthur Miller: There lies within the dramatic form the ultimate possibility of raising the truth-consciousness of mankind to a level of such intensity as to transform those who observe it.! wrote Miller in 1956. While he was still an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1930's, he dedicated himself to the task of creating such a drama: With the greatest of presumption, (he wrote about his earliest ambitions), I conceived that the great writer was the destroyer of chaos, a man privy to the council of the hidden gods who administer the hidden laws that bind us all and destroy us all if we do not know them.2 What might be called Miller's commitment to greatness is important to recognize at the outset because it is this that has made him so harshly critical of the modern theater, has driven him to use his talents only for the production of what he considers the highest in dramatic art, and it is this, finally, that has brought him the extraordinary mixture of critical praise and scorn that he has received. Miller's primary criticism of the American theater is that it has separated the individual from his society and in doing so has merely dramatized man's alienation from the world in which he lives: Since 1920, (he wrote in 1953), American drama has been a steady year by year documentation of the frustration of man. I do not believe in this.... That is not our fate.s More recently Miller added: The fifties became an era of gauze. Tennessee Williams is responsible for this in the main. One of my own feet stands in this stream. It is a cruel, romantic neuroticism, a translation of cur1 Arthur Miller, "The Family in Modern Drama," Atlantic Monthly, ~97 (April, 1956), 36. 2 Arthu~ Mil~er, "T~e Shadows of the. Gods," Harper's, 217 (August, 1958), 37. 3 "Arthur Miller Discusses The CruCIble," as told to John and Alice Griffin, Theatre Arts, 37 (October, 1953), 33. 221 222 MODERN DRAMA December rent life into the war within the self. All conflict tends to be transformed into sexual conflict. . . . It is a theatre with the blues.... The drama will have to re-address itself to the world beyond the senses, to fate.4 In spite of what he says about his own participation in such a theater , Miller has from the beginning addressed himself to the world beyond the senses. All of his plays depict characters who struggle against fate, though in the earlier plays "fate" means the economic, political, and social forces of their times. Because of Miller's acknowledgement of Ibsen as his earliest master (he wrote an adaptation of An En@my O'f the People in 1951), and because his original concern was to depict man in conflict with his society, it is not surprising that he has been most often thought of as a writer of problem plays, a latter day Ibsen, whose messages cease to excite with the passing of the problem with which they deal. But such a judgment is as unfair to Miller as it is to Ibsen; and to Miller, at least, it reflects the anti-intellectual bias of the times. Of this bias Miller has spoken continually and vehemently. Answering a criticism of Peter Ustinov, Miller wrote in 1960: I am not calling for more ideology, as Ustinov implies. I am simply asking for a theatre in which an adult who wants to live can find plays that will heighten his awareness of what living in our time involves. I am tired of a theatre of sensation, that's all. I am tired of seeing man as merely a bundle of nerves. That way lies pathology, and we have pretty much arrived.5 Having in mind his own attempts in The Crucible, Miller wrote of the difficulties involved in depicting the thinking man on the stage: In our drama the man with convictions has in the past been a comic figure. I...