Arthur Miller's Incident At Vichy: A Sartrean Interpretation

Arthur Miller's Incident At Vichy: A Sartrean Interpretation LAWRENCE D. LOWENTHAL IN 1944, JUST AFTER PARIS was liberated from the Nazi occupation, Jean Paul Sartre sat at the Cafe de Flore on the Left Bank and wrote Anti Semite and Jew (Reflexions sur fa Question Juive), a fascinating and controversial analysis of Europe's most terrifying problem. Twenty years later, America's leading dramatist, Arthur Miller, wrote a long, one-act play about the holocaust, called Incident at Vichy. Although Ronald Hayman, an English critic, recently suggested that "a good case could be made for calling Arthur Miller the most Sartrean of living playwrights,"l no critic has yet pointed out that Vichy is an explicit dramatic rendition ofSartre's treatise on Jews, as well as a clear structural example ofSartre's definition of the existential "theatre of situation." This affinity between Sartre and Miller is understandable when one considers the existential development of Miller's later plays. Beginning with The Misfits, Miller's works begin to shift the tragic perspective from man's remediable alienation from society to man's hopeless alienation from the universe and from himself. After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price are all organized around "absurdist" themes of metaphysical anxiety, personal solitude, and moral ambivalence. Quite clearly, one presumes, the accumulated impact ofinternational and personal tragedies has strained Miller's faith in man's ability to overcome social and spiritual diseases. Miller no longer has any illusion about a "Grand Design" whose revelation will enable man to live harmoniously as a social being. His characters now grope alone for values to sustain their dissipating lives and each value, once discovered, slips again into ambiguity. Most frightening of all is the realization that human corruption, once attributed to conscious deviation from recognizable moral norms, is now seen as an 29 30 LAWRENCE D. LOWENTHAL irresistable impulse in the heart of man. The theme of universal guilt becomes increasingly and despairingly affirmed. But Miller's belief in original sin in a world without God does not preclude the possibility of personal redemption, for Miller shares Sartre's insistence on free will and the possibility of "transcendence" or the re-creation of self through a succession of choices. Miller's existential concerns are clearly delineated in Vichy, a play that reminds us immediately of Sartre's "The Wall" and The Victors. In all these works a fUIidamental Sartrean thesis is dramatized: "A man's secret, the very frontier of his freedom is his power ofresistance to torture and death."2 Structurally, Vichy answers Sartre's call for "situational drama" which, he hoped, would replace the outmoded drama of "character" so prevalent in the contemporary bourgeois theatre. In a famous article, "Forgers of Myth," written in 1946, Sartre described situational drama as "short and violent, sometimes reduced to the dimensions of a single long act":3 "A single set, a few entrances, a few exits, intense arguments among the characters who defend their individual rights with passion.... 4 Each character is displayed as a free being, entirely indeterminate, who must choose his own being when confronted with certain necessities ."5 Men do not have "ready made" natures, consistent throughout alternating circumstances - a primary assumption in the theatre of character - but are rather naked wills, pure, free choices whose passion unites with action. The characters in Vichy are not simply "types" or "public speakers with a symbolic role" as one critic maintains;6 on the contrary they are dynamic, fluid, undetermined beings, "freedoms caught in a trap," to use a Sartrean phrase. We know nothing about them, aside from their professions , until they reveal themselves through their choices of behavior, and their choices often prove to be surprising. They are all faced with undeniable limits to these choices, but within these limits they are always free to act. The Jew can resist or submit; the German can murder or rebel. The structural movement of the play is existential in that individual possibilities for evading choice are methodically decreased. As each Jew is taken into the dreaded office, the option to revolt becomes more difficult . The traditional palliatives of reason, civilization, political ideology, and culture which ordinarily stand...