The Action and Its Significance: Arthur Miller's Struggle with Dramatic Form

The Action and Its Significance: Arthur Miller's Struggle with Dramatic Form ORM bVERLAND • ''THERE ARE TWO QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF over and over when I'm working ," Arthur Miller has remarked. "What do I mean? What am I trying to say?"! The questions do not cease when a play is completed but continue to trouble him. In the "Introduction" to his Collected Plays Miller is constantly asking of each play: "What did I mean? What was I trying to say?" These questions and the playwright's attempts to answer them are directly related to his account of how he planned and wrote his next play. The process of playwriting is given a peculiar wavelike rhythm in Miller's own story of his efforts to realize his intentions from one play to the other. Troughs of dejection on being exposed to unexpected critical and audience responses to a newly completed play are followed by swells of creativity informed by the 4ramatist's determination to make himself more clearly understood in the next one.2 This wavelike rhythm of challenge and response is the underlying structural principle of Miller's "Introduction" to his Collected Plays. Behind it one may suspect the workings of a radical distrust of his chosen medium. The present essay will consider some of the effects both of this distrust of the theater as a means ofcommunication and of Miller's theories of dramatic form on his career as a dramatist. Arthur Miller is not alone in asking what he is trying to say in his plays, nor in being concerned that they may evoke other responses than those the playwright thought he had aimed at. From the early reviews of Death ofa Salesman critics have observed that a central problem in the evaluation of Miller's work is a conflict of themes, real or apparent, within each play. 1 2 ORM OVERLAND The case for the prosecution has been well put by Eric Bentley: Mr. Miller says he is attempting a synthesis of the social and the psychological , and, though one may not see any synthesis, one certainly sees the thesis and the antithesis. In fact, one never knows what a Miller play is about: politics or sex. If Death of a Salesman is political, the key scene is the one with the tape recorder; if it's sexual, the key scene is the one in the Boston hotel. You may say of The Crucible that it isn't about McCarthy, it's about love in the seventeenth century. And you may say ofA View from the Bridge that it isn't about informing, it's about incest and homosexuality .3 John Mander points to the same conflict in his analysis of Death of a Salesman in his The Writer and Commitment: If we take the "psychological" motivation as primary, the "social" documentation seems gratuitous, if we take the "social" documentation as primary, the "psychological" motivation seems gratuitous. And we have, I am convinced, to choose which kind of motivation must have the priority; we cannot have both at once.4 Mr. Mander's own image of this conflict of themes within Arthur Miller's play is the house divided and its two incompatible masters are Freud and Marx. More sympathetic critics find that the plays successfully embody the author's intentions of dramatizing a synthesis of the two kinds of motivation . Edward Murray, for instance, has made the same observation as have Bentley and Mander, but in his view the difficulty of branding Miller either a "social" or a "psychological" dramatist points to a strength rather than to a flaw in his work: "At his best, Miller has avoided the extremes of clinical psychiatric case studies on the one hand and mere sociological reports on the other. ... he has indicated ... how the dramatist might maintain in delicate balance both personal and social motivation ."5 Miller himself has often spoken of modern drama in general and his own in particular in terms of a split between the private and the social. In the 1956 essay, ''The Family in Modern Drama," he claims that the various forms ofmodern drama "express human relationships ofa particular kind, each of them...