Arthur Miller and the Meaning of Tragedy

ARTHUR MILLER AND THE MEANING OF TRAGEDY (Interview by Robert A. Martin) R.M. In earlier essays and statements you have said that tragedy reflects certain qualities, and I take it that when you wrote All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, tragedy was a definable quality to you. For example, "Tragedy makes us aware of what the character might have been"; "Tragedy is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly"; and later, in the "Preface" to the Collected Plays, you said, "The less capable a man is of walking away from the central conflict of a play, the closer he approaches the tragic existence." Since you wrote those lines, there have been three more plays, and I am wondering if you feel that tragedy is still basically the same, or, in the light of After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price, has it become something else? A.M. Well, those elements you just mentioned and which I have written about, are qualities which I see in the tragic character and tragic situation. But I have the feeling as time goes by that since what we're talking about really is maybe a function of lnan which goes back into the Bible and into the earliest Western literature, like the Greek drama, it is unlikely, to say the least, that since so many other kinds of human consciousness have changed that this would remain unchanged. But we are at the mercy of certain texts in discussing the whole thing, basically Aristotle, and we have taken, I think, those pronouncements out of context so that now one never knows whether someone is talking about a contemporary tragic possibility or the historical one. For example, I don't think a Greek could have discussed the whole problem without the idea in the back of his head of God. It would have been of the first order of importance because what it is, is the relation not of man to man, but of man to God. The relation of man to man is a psychological problem, or a social problem. But this is a religious problem, and it would undoubtedly have been a religious problem to the Greeks. And to us, you see, we never mention this at all, and it probably is like talking about religion in our times, in a way, as opposed to the way religion would have been talked about before Christianity became what it is today. "Before God died," as they say. 34 1970 ARTHUR MILLER AND TRAGEDY 35 I think that what I'm dealing with most of the time is an attempt by myself probably, more than by what I call a character, to reach out beyond the real world toward some humanistic call which I wish or believe to be working on the history of man, working on human situations. I'll be more specific about it. I think that people, for example , we all, violate our natures in the course of life, and what we're trying to do all the time is to get back to the structure which is human. By one compromise or another, by one mistake or another, or by one ambition or another, we end up where we're no longer ourselves . We're empty, or we feel that we have no possibility of some kind of reconciliation with existence, and there are various intensities with which we pursue that reconciliation. Now some people, the majority probably, learn how to put off the problem. It's really basically one or another kind of procrastination. R.M. In this letter you said that you had "not ceased to arraign society, but that society had moved into the play."'*' Are you saying that you're writing equally about man's relationship to his Gods, whatever they might be, and that the Gods themselves have moved into society? A.M. Right. Now if we're going to talk about tragedy at all, it seems to me that we've got to find some equivalent to that superhuman schema that had its names in the past, whatever they...