Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco demonstrated that these ethnographic attitudes continued to persist in the popular imagination when they displayed themselves before gullible audiences in the US and Europe as the caged “natives” of a previously undiscovered Caribbean island.59

      2. The Play

      Edward Gordon Craig’s The Theatre Advancing is frequently cited as an aesthetic factor behind the play. Craig advocates a return to dance, pantomime, puppets, and masks to create the “magic” of ancient theater arts.60 The specific use of character masks to denote varying social and psychological selves plays a critical role in O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (1925). A degree of masking, as well as pantomime and human puppetry (discussed below), appears in The Emperor Jones, but O’Neill’s presumed knowledge of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,61 Part One of Strindberg’s Road to Damascus, and experimental German Expressionist plays, such as Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, seems even more consequential.62 Undoubtedly the play’s structure derives from these or similar symbolist or expressionist “journey” plays that take a solitary character from station to station in a linear or circular procession without the traditional supports of well-made dialogue or an organic plot structure. No American examples were available at the time O’Neill wrote the play, but like the paintings on display in the Armory Show, information about European avant-garde theater–especially of Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoscha, Walter Haseclever, Ernest Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Frank Wedekind—began to appear in the US immediately following the Great War. Numerous accounts cite The Emperor Jones as the first example of American Expressionism.

      The play’s first and longest scene consists of static dialogue between the Emperor Brutus Jones and the Cockney trader Smithers. It reveals nothing of Jones’ upbringing or early life, but does provide conventional exposition of the violence of his recent past, his imprisonment and escape, his arrival on the island, and his meteoric rise to emperor. Jones arrived on the run but gains stature by helping with Smithers’ “crooked” and “dirty work.” When the gun of Old Lem, the local leader hired to murder Jones, misfires, the quick-minded Jones creates the myth that only silver bullets can kill him. That clever twist seals his position as emperor. The pearl-handled six-shooter he subsequently carries holds five lead bullets for his enemies and one silver bullet for himself. Thus, should his plan to escape go bad, like those of Christophe and Sam, Jones can turn myth into reality.

      In spite of that romantic stance, Jones is a model of tyranny and corruption. He becomes rich by sucking the local population dry with taxes and bribes, at the same time that he deprecates the people as cowering, stupid, superstitious, “bush” and “woods niggers.” At the first scene’s beginning, he thinks he has six more months before they rebel; by its end, with the stables empty, Jones, in full uniform with a Panama hat cocked on his head, is on his way to the forest to escape by foot while pursued by drumbeats.

      Scene two opens where the plain before the Great Forest ends. Jones, who enters exhausted, is unable to unearth the food and water he has hidden there. He panics and, as the drumbeats intensify, begins to lose grasp of his shaky Baptist Church beliefs. In the growing darkness of the forest’s edge, Little Formless Fears cloud his imagination and mock him. He shoots his first lead bullet to disperse them and regains some confidence before plunging into the forest. The third scene reveals a clearing in the forest in which the figure of the Pullman porter Jeff, who Jones had killed years earlier with a razor, appears to roll a pair of dice. The pace of the drumbeat increases and Jeff’s dice click with each roll as he mechanically repeats his puppet-like action, oblivious to the approach of the now hatless Jones in his torn uniform. Jones asks, “Is you—is you—a ha’nt?,” spends a second lead bullet to make Jeff disappear, and then “plunges wildly into the underbrush.”63 (See p. 79.)

      Station to station, little goes according to Jones’ plan. Scene four discovers a wide road in the forest. Jones enters panting and worn down, his uniform disheveled. He discards his useless spurs and asks his Baptist God to shield him from more “ha’nts.” A chain gang of black prisoners enters and creates a mechanical mime show of swinging picks and shoveling. The white guard carries a rifle and a whip and motions to Jones to join in the gang’s work, which he does. The guard approaches, lashes Jones with his whip, and turns away. Jones attacks the guard with his shovel but quickly finds his hands empty. So he spends his third lead bullet, only to find himself lost again as the forest moves in around him.

      Social reality and personal history dissolve at this point. He now races backward into cultural and racial memory. Scene five opens on a large clearing with a dead tree trunk in the center that resembles an auction block. Jones enters with his shoes and clothes in shreds. He asks the Lord for forgiveness for killing Jeff and the guard and, again, to keep the haunts away. As he jettisons his destroyed shoes, he notices a crowd of Southern planters, an auctioneer, and spectators, as well as a group of enslaved Africans to be sold. In the “dumb show” that ensues, the auctioneer appraises Jones’ physical qualities, reducing him to an enslaved body, inferior and less than human, capable strictly of manual labor and mindless force. The silent bidding begins. Caught in the nightmare of being sold on the block, Jones shoots twice, which leaves only the silver bullet in the chamber of his revolver.

      Scene six, the next step backward toward Africa, is the shortest of the play. The forest has stripped Jones down to torn pants that look like a “breech cloth” and encloses him in a space “like the dark, noisome hold of some ancient vessel.”64 (See p. 86.) Two rows of swaying, shackled bodies become visible. They moan in unison and sway with the roll of the ship at sea. Jones tries to shut out the vision but ultimately takes his place as part of the rocking, wailing chorus. As the light and the voices fade, he struggles to move deeper into the forest, and the drumbeat becomes louder and more persistent.

      The historical and literary treatments of the Middle Passage (from the early sixteenth through the first half of the nineteenth century) create an archive as devastating as the twentieth century’s Holocaust: capture, sale, slave-holding fortresses, diseases, sexual exploitation, torture, purposefully overcrowded transport vessels, the deaths of hundreds of thousands at sea, all leading to arrival in the Americas and the repetition of the same conditions of holding pens, auctions, and death sentences as enslaved laborers on New World plantations. Thus scene six presents a condensed version of more contemporary works, such as Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (staged 1967) while, even in its brevity, providing a glimpse of the impact that Derek Walcott records in the poem “Laventille” (about a Port of Spain favela, published 1965): “Something inside is laid wide like a wound, / some open passage that has cleft the brain, / some deep, amnesiac blow. We left / somewhere a life we never found, / customs and gods that are not born again, / some crib, some grille of light / clanged shut on us in bondage…”65 If a Kurtzian sense of “the horror, the horror” exists, the hold of the slave ship would be its most appropriate location.

      In scene seven, the still wailing and trance-like Jones arrives at the riverbank (presumably the Congo). Instead of the joy of homecoming, fear overcomes him and he again asks the Lord to protect him. The Congo witchdoctor (described earlier) begins his performance and “croon” to the intensifying drumbeats. The mime drama he acts out signifies Jones’ role as the sacrificial victim who must pay for his sins. Terrified, Jones asks for “mercy on dis po’ sinner” as the witchdoctor summons a huge crocodile from the river. Now nearly possessed, Jones “squirms” on the ground toward the beast. The drums reach their most hypnotic intensity, and the witchdoctor shrieks in “furious exultation.” Suddenly Jones again prays to “Lawd Jesus,” awakens from the trance, and fires the silver bullet into the eyes of the crocodile. He is left prostrate on the riverbank with only the sound of the tom-tom.

      The Formless Fears, Jeff, the chain gang, the auction block, the slaver’s hold, and finally, the sacrifice: all are products of Jones’ imagination, his panicked nightmare of slipping from the privilege of American civilization and power which, in spite of his position on the lowest rung of the social ladder, has been ingrained in him. Instead of embracing his racial past, he fears sliding back to the heathen savagery of the Congo origins СКАЧАТЬ