Amor Fati: O'Neill's Lazarus as Superman and Savior

AMOR FATI: O'NEILL'S LAZARUS AS SUPERMAN AND SAVIOR "YE mGHER MEN, LEARN, 1PRAY YOU-TO LAUGH!" -Thus Spake Zarathustra 1 O'NEILL may be said to have thought emotionally, or-to put it the other way-to have been profoundly moved by ideas. He was an artist and not a philosopher, but he asked himself ultimate questions, brooded over them, sought answers to them in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Lao-tze, and gave them emotional expression in his plays. Thus Schopenhauer's dictum that tragic heroes, when they are defeated, atone for the crime of existence itself rather than for their own individual sins,l is the source of the following remark by the illiterate stoker, Yank Smith: POLICEMAN. "'-hat you been doin'? YANK. Enuf to gimme life forI 1 was born, see? Sure, dat's de charge. Write it in de blotter. 1was born, get me? Schopenhauer's pessimism in the idiom of the Brooklyn waterfront is an engaging, even a moving, anomaly. The point to be noted here, however , is that a metaphysical abstraction had become so familiar a strand in O'Neill's way of thinking-or better, perhaps, in his way of feelingthat he was able to weave it without self-conscious effort into the emotional fabric of The Hairy Ape. Modem man, we are constantly being reminded, is in desperate need of the spiritual comfort provided by religious certainty, but the acids of modernism have dissolved all but the last vestiges of his faith in transcendence . O'Neill dramatizes this dilemma in The Great God Brown. As the curtain rises on the first act, Dion Anthony is sitting at a table, staring into space, his mask hanging on his breast. Suddenly he picks up a copy of the New Testament, opens it at random, and reads aloud: "Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and 1 will give you rest." His face lights up from within. "I will come," he whispers, "but where are you, Savior?" A door is heard shutting: someone has entered the house. Dion claps on his mask, ashamed of his credulity, and tosses the Testament aside. 1. The W01"ld CI8 Will and Idea, IT, 51. Schopenhauer cites Calderon, who expresses a similar thought: "Pues el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido." 297 298 MODERN DRAMA December "Blah!" he sneers. "Fixation on old Mama Christianity! You infant blubbering in the dark!" He laughs in bitter self-contempt; Here, and in The Great God Brown as a whole, the metaphysical conflict between Christianity and naturalism is given emotional expression in terms of the psychological conflict that splits the protagonist's ego and eventually destroys him. In other words, The Great God Brown is a play about a human being's reaction to a metaphysical dilemma. It is not, strictly speaking, about the dilemma itself, for it is a work of dramatic literature and not a theological tract. The duality implicit in The Great God Brown is resolved in the last act when Brown, Dion's successor, dies with the prayer "Our Father Who Art" on his lips. The omission of the words "in Heaven," and the fact that the prayer is taught him by the Earth Mother, signify that Brown believes in a God, but not in the God of Christianity,and not in the immortality of the individual soul. By way of compensation he finds the justification of life in the biological cycle, eternally repeated, of birth, suffering, and death. 'Who art! Who art!" he cries exultantly. BROWN. I know! I have found Him! I hear Him speak! "Blessed are they that weep, for they shall laugh!" Only he that has wept can laugh! The laughter of Heaven sows earth with a rain of tears, and out of Earth's transfigured birth-pain the laughter of Man returns to bless and play again in innumerable dancing gales of flame upon the knees of God! (He dies.) CYBEL. Always spring comes again bearing life! Always again! Always, always forever againl-Spring again!-life again!-summer and fall and death and peace again!-but always, always, love and conception and birth and pain again!-bearing the glorious, blazing crown...