Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ no one can catch the wily Jones, and Old Lem’s certainty that he will be caught. Lem guarantees that assertion by revealing that he and his followers spent the night molding silver bullets to end Jones’ charmed life. Smithers admits reluctantly that Jones may have lost his way and circled back rather than crossing through the forest. Shots are fired, and the divested body of the ex-Emperor Jones, now no different than those he called “black trash,” is carried onto the stage. Smithers asks, “Where’s yer ‘igh an’ mighty airs now, yer bloomin’ Majesty?,” and the play ends with his last comment, “Silver bullets! Gawd blimey, but yer died in the ‘eighth o’ style, any ‘ow!”66 (See p. 93.)

      Although still compelling, The Emperor Jones can make for awkward contemporary reading: “Lem is a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type, dressed only in a loin cloth”;67 (See p. 90.) Jones “is a tall, powerfully-built, full-blooded negro of middle age. His features are typically negroid, yet there is something decidedly distinctive about his face—an underlying strength of will, a hardy, self-reliant confidence in himself that inspires respect”;68 (See p. 57.) whereas O’Neill describes Smithers as “a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam’s apple, looks like an egg” with yellowish skin, “small sharp features,” and a pointed nose turned red by too much rum.69 (See p. 55.)

      O’Neill established his descriptive ethnographic style even earlier. In Bound East for Cardiff, Cocky describes his undesirable New Guinean sexual partner as a “bloomin’ nigger. Greased all over with coconut oil, she was… Bloody old cow, I says.”70 (See p. 260.) Cocky returns to describing New Guinean “cannibals” in The Moon of the Caribbees while the crew of the Glencairn anchored off an unspecified West Indian island await the arrival of the rum woman—Bella—and three other “West Indian Negresses.”71 (See p. 228.) Instead of the beat of the drum, a “melancholy negro chant, faint and far-off, drifts, crooning over the water.”72 (See p. 229.) Cocky finds Bella “bloomin’ ugly…like a bloody organ-grinder’s monkey,” and when challenged by Paddy, Cocky calls him “A ‘airy ape.”73 (See p. 237.) Two of the women who come onboard for the officers are described by Driscoll as “two swate little slips av things, near as white as you an’ me are.” When the four other women enter, the scene note indicates, “All four are distinct negro types. They wear light-colored, loose-fitting clothes and have bright bandana handkerchiefs on their heads.”74 (See p. 241.) The Dreamy Kid demonstrates similar racialized character descriptions—“negresses” with a wizened (Mammy) or round (Ceely) face or a “young good-looking negress, highly rouged” (Irene), or Dreamy, who is a “well-built, good-looking young negro, light in color.”75 Brutus Jones uses “nigger” both self-referentially and as a pejorative to describe African-Americans such as Jeff or the island “natives” he has duped into making him emperor. Although a slightly up-scaled version, Smithers shares much of the same vocabulary and attitudes about race as Cocky in the sea.

      Even though it sounds better when spoken than when read, the dialectal nature of the language makes the play more difficult to perform in a contemporary context. For that reason, perhaps, Charles Gilpin, the African-American actor who first acted the role in 1920, began to alter some of the lines, over O’Neill’s strong objections. O’Neill may have attempted to transcribe the speech of Adam Scott or other black acquaintances, but Jones’ speech probably also records standard stage language for black-faced white actors on the professional stage and even contains traces of minstrelsy. Scene seven begins: “What–what is I doin’? What is—dis place? Seems like I know dat tree–an’ dem stones—an’ de river. I remember—seems like I been heah befo’. (tremblingly) Oh, Gorry, I’se skeered in dis place! I’se skeered. Oh, Lawd, pertect dis sinner!”76 (See p. 80.) This random sample, less pronounced than other usage in the play, shows the dropped consonants, non-standard vowel substitutions, faulty verb agreements, and particularly the “d” substituted for the voiced “th” of this, that, and them. It creates a sense of a substandard rather than a local or “creolized” variety of English, with its own grammar and morphology. The use of short phrases such as “Gorry, I’se skeered..!” and again “I’se skeered” sounds sing-songy and hieratic, and taken together, these aspects of language create a voice for Brutus Jones that 1920 New York theater audiences found compelling, but one that does not necessarily represent actual speakers. Even O’Neill’s successful efforts to capture authentic speech patterns of others suffer with the passing decades. His sailors, farmers, workers, and Broadway bums, whether Cockney, Swede, Irish, New Englander, etc., sometimes make contemporary audiences wince. Yet in spite of the verbal awkwardness, the structural brilliance, vibrant rhythm and movement, sensuous form, and intensity of focus still distinguish The Emperor Jones, the first artistically significant play of the American theater.

      The play’s most vital aesthetic counterpart is The Hairy Ape. In it the seaman Yank, reconfigured from earlier plays, becomes ungrounded, confused, and ultimately defeated in an unfamiliar urban forest of the real and imaginary demons that pursue him. In a dialectical sense, the issues of The Emperor Jones relate principally to race oppression and racialized cultural identity, whereas The Hairy Ape focuses on class, economic status, and weak identity formation as a result of the lopsided accumulation of wealth and power by the very few. Yet the plays can be viewed as nearly matching bookends: how a system reduces a black character, on the one hand, and a white character, on the other hand, to a strictly corporeal condition as disposable human excess. Yank’s “heart of darkness” is not the hold of a slave ship but the stokehole–once part of his illusion of power—of a steamer that turns him into a human machine. A vision of whiteness in the form of the ultra-rich Mildred Douglas unhinges Yank’s sense of self-worth and sends him on a journey to recapture his humanity. Unlike Jones, who refuses to embrace his “West Indian” brothers as equals, Yank meets his death in the arms of a caged gorilla that he imagines as his next of kin.

      Both plays are curiously reflected in both form and content in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), which also examines race, power, colonialism, and cultural identity. The working out of the differences between the African-Caribbean Makak (meaning monkey), who comes from the forest of Monkey Mountain, and the in-town colonial authority of the mulatto Corporal Lestrade parallels some of the differences between the Africanized Old Lem and the Americanized Brutus Jones. Inside a Strindberg-like “dream play” structure, the poor charcoal vender Makak rises to become the prophet of his race. Jailed because his seizure in Alcindor’s bar resembles drunkenness, he escapes through his dreams to an imagined Africa and eventually beheads the White Witch (or goddess) that pursues him. Yet what he executes is not a person, but whiteness as a Western, European-American construction that requires its obverse but equally artificial construction of blackness in order to guarantee its economic and political domination and its false sense of racial, moral, and cultural superiority. When released from his cell at the play’s end, Makak returns to his mountain home content with being himself and no longer plagued by the mask of whiteness.

      O’Neill cannot go so far. For him, all humans can be stripped of the patina of supposed civilization and superiority, but it is easier to strip Brutus Jones (or Yank) because the patina is thinner and the character closer to his “primitive” roots. Thus in theory, whether it is Old Lem and his soldiers in loin cloths, the Mannons of Mourning Becomes Electra, or the Tyrones of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, all correspond to a common humanity: “O’Neill was not trying to demonstrate that the American black is only a short step from his African ancestors; he was suggesting something more universal—that an apprehensive primitive being lurks just below the surface of all of us.”77 The same argument applies to Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, at least until Chinua Achebe deconstructed it as a racist Eurocentric text.78 In his poem “The Fortunate Traveller” (1981), Derek Walcott redefines the phrase “heart of darkness”:

      Through Kurtz’s teeth, white skull in elephant grass, the imperial fiction sings. Sunday wrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darkness. The heart of darkness is not Africa. The heart of darkness is the core fire in the white center of the holocaust. The heart of darkness is the rubber claw

      selecting a scalpel СКАЧАТЬ