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4. The Glass Menagerie: Loss and Space
- The University of Alabama Press
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Hickey's presence is like a mirror that makes the others suddenly self-conscious, embarrassed, as if they had reached up and found an ass's head. "That's it! Murder each other, you damned loons, with Hickey's blessing!" Larry says as Joe "springs from behind the lunch counter with the bread knife in his hand" (168). "Didn't I tell you he'd brought death with him? (His interruption startles them. They pause to stare at him, their fighting fury suddenly dies out and they appear deflated and sheepish.)" Later Hope turns on them all. "Why don't you get the hell out of here and 'tend to your own business, like Hickey's told you?" (189). Once again, the name inspires a Beckettian reaction: "They look at him reproachfully, their eyes hurt. They fidget as if trying to move." Hickey's ensuing lines about killing pipe dreams obviously make the others want to kill him, "But they remain silent and motionless" (189). When the characters are goaded out of the bar, into the teeth of the pipe dream itself, their "action" is never completed. Hickey has shown them just how "free" they really are. The knowledge that they are not "free," and that the struggle for self-consciousness only results in this knowledge, bleeds the characters of their social mannerisms, and they start to retreat down the evolutionary ladder. They become beasts, then automatons; they no longer want to think or feel. Of course, this undifferentiated, asocial self was a part of their social selves all along, but now it has been cut off from the differentiation, the dissimulation, the mask. There is no ironic distance between the "self" and the "history" of self. And the result is the loss of the dialectical/dialogical imperative-a loss that threatens disclosure with closure: 11 the movement away from the dialogical drama of realism and toward the monologic narrative of epic. Hickey finds himself even more in control of llis imposed "narrative" than he wants to be. He becomes a single voice pitted against a chorus in act 4. The Iceman Cometh and its bar full of has-beens with their fin-desiecle hangovers discounts positive models of history and the possibility of social action. The social and economic strategies represented by its salesmen, gamblers, prostitutes, and anarchists are shown to be self-dramatizations, metaphors for the illusory connection between fact and fiction. The urge to make fiction fact is intoxicating ; it implies power and autonomy. But this unity cannot be re58 The Iceman Cometh alized except in some self-destructive way. The Iceman Cometh's twin and forebear in the O'Neill canon is surely The Hairy Ape, in which Yank, the Neanderthal who dreams that he is power itself, the drive that runs the world, the alpha and the omega ("I'm de end! I'm de start!" Complete Plays 128), finds himself trapped, enslaved, and imprisoned . Yank's rise to consciousness takes the form of episodic encounters in which he loses his faith in himself as the center of the universe. When the center is lost he becomes alien to himself, a Caliban between human and beast, king and slave. Yank is at the bottom of the scale, less than an animal, which after all "belongs" somewhere, and can, Yank imagines, at least dream of a jungle past. "But me-I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nuthin' dat's comin', on'y what's now-and dat don't belong" (162). Yank's Rodin posture becomes harder to assume, his "thinking" isolates him more and more from the civilization of which he thought (correctly , but only in a thankless economic sense) he was the driving force. Like the characters in The Iceman Cometh, the anarchists and petty grafters on the other side of the capitalist system, Yank realizes he is not "free." Coming out of his cave of shadows into the daylight, forced, in the Wobblies' terms, to "wake up," he finds life in "the present" to be a hazy middle ground in which his new consciousness is a kind of prison.12 "I ain't on oith and I ain't in heaven, get me? I'm in de middle tryin' to separate 'em, takin' all de woist punches from bot' of 'em. Maybe dat's what dey call hell, huh?" (162). With the loss of the self as presence, outside his own fiction of power, Yank's play turns desperately...