Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:History of the USA Literature. Study aid
.pdf
111
PART VII. UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS
IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Utopian and dystopian writing sits at the crossroads of literature and other
academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, psychology, politics, and sociology.
It serves as a useful tool to discuss our present condition and future prospects — to
imagine a better tomorrow and warn of dangerous possibilities. To examine the future
of mankind through fascinating stories that highlight our anxieties in adventurous,
thought-provoking ways. From Thomas More’s foundational text “Utopia” published
in 1516 to the XXI century phenomenon of The Hunger Games, these stories seek to
find the best — and the worst — in humanity, with the hope of better understanding
ourselves and the world.
Let’s look at utopia, the earlier of the two genres. Utopia, both as a word and a
concept, is a paradox. The word “utopia” means “no place,” but it is also a homonym
for eutopia — a good or perfect place. This contradiction is the foundation on which
the genre is built and why it provides such rich opportunities for exploration. Can we
invent a perfect place if it is also no place?
The book credited as the beginning of the utopian genre is Thomas More’s
book with the same title. “Utopia” was written in 1516. The term was coined for this
very book. The fiction is set on an imaginary ideal island.
The term “dystopia” is the opposite of utopia. If Utopia is an idealized version
of society, dystopia would be its nightmare alternative.
Dystopia is a genre in literature that depicts a frightening society or
community. The society can be frightening for many reasons, and generally has one
or more of the following problems: a corrupt and/or totalitarian government,
dehumanization due to technological advances, environmental disasters, and
eradication of the family, cultish religions, limited resources, and unchecked
violence.
One of the dominant tones of dystopian fiction in the XX century is irony.
Irony reflects the sadness or humor resulting from the gap between life as it is
idealized, and life as it really is. In dystopias irony is used to criticize some aspect of
society or to reveal the silliness of people’s behavior.
Ray Bradbury is a prolific author, most well-known for his controversial
dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, a novel that focuses on a perfect society that lives in the
bliss of ignorance. Mass media manipulates public consciousness and considers
people who wish to learn criminals. This is a theme that carries over in many of
Bradbury’s novels and stories, the idea of a perfect paradise not being exactly what it
112
seems. In many works of his, Ray Bradbury portrays utopia and dystopia, making the
reader rethink the world he lives in.
Fahrenheit 451 is Bradbury's most famous written work of social criticism. It
deals with serious problems of control of masses by media, banning of books, and
suppression of the mind with censorship. Fahrenheit 451 is the inspiration for
rebellion; for promoting free thinking and individual decision, breaking away from
the majority.
In a few days, the protagonist, Guy Montag, is transformed from a narrowminded and prejudiced conformist into a dynamic individual committed to social
change and to a life of saving books rather than destroying them.
At the very least, Clarisse, Montag’s neighbor, awakens in him a love and
desire to enjoy the simple and innocent things in life. She speaks to him about her
delight in letting the rain fall upon her face and into her mouth. Later, Montag, too,
turns his head upward into the early November rain in order to catch a mouthful of
the cool liquid. In effect, Clarisse, in a very few meetings, exerts a powerful influence
on Montag, and he is never able to find happiness in his former life again.
Captain Beatty, Montag's boss, intuitively senses Montag's growing discontent
with his life and job. Beatty is an intelligent but ultimately cynical man. He is,
paradoxically, well-read and is even willing to allow Montag to have some slight
curiosity about what the books contain. However, Beatty, as a defender of the state
(one who has compromised his morality for social stability), believes that all
intellectual curiosity and hunger for knowledge must be quelled for the good of the
state — for conformity. Beatty can tolerate curiosity about books as long as it doesn't
affect one's actions. When the curiosity for books begins to affect an individual's
conduct and a person's ability to conform — as it does Montag's — the curiosity must
be severely punished.
Notice that Beatty repeatedly displays great knowledge of books. Obviously,
he is using his knowledge to combat the doubts that Montag is experiencing. In fact,
Beatty points out that books are meaningless, because man as a creature is satisfied as
long as he is entertained. Books create too much confusion because they lack
definitive clarity.
Another interesting point discussed by Beatty in this section is how people
view death. Beatty introduces the idea that death isn't something that people mourn at
this time.
The major themes of the novel are: danger of censorship, ignorance vs
knowledge, life vs death, importance of nature, the potential threat of
technology, the blurred concept of “truth”.
113
Danger of censorship. In Fahrenheit 451, owning and reading books is illegal.
If books are found, they are burned and their owner is arrested. People with interests
outside technology and entertainment are viewed as possible threats.
In the book, Bradbury doesn't give a clear explanation of why censorship has
become so great in this futuristic society. Bradbury gives the reader a brief
description of how society slowly lost interest in books, first condensing them, then
relying simply on titles, and finally forgetting about them all together.
Ignorance vs knowledge. Throughout the novel, the reader is presented with a
conflict between knowledge and ignorance. What does true happiness consist of? Is
ignorance bliss, or do knowledge and learning provide true happiness? Montag, in his
belief that knowledge reigns, fights against a society that embraces and celebrates
ignorance.
The fireman's responsibility is to burn books and therefore destroy knowledge.
Through these actions, the firemen promote ignorance to maintain the sameness of
society. After befriending Clarisse, Montag starts to believe life is more complete and
satisfying when knowledge is welcomed into it. After making this discovery, Montag
fights against ignorance, trying to help others welcome knowledge into their lives.
When his wife's friends come over, he forces them to listen to poetry acquainting
them with true emotion and knowledge.
Life vs death. Montag's interest in knowledge and dedication to a new and
better society saved him from dying together with his wife and colleagues in the
destroyed city. Thus, Bradbury seems to suggest that life is dependent on knowledge
and awareness. If we become idle and complacent, we might as well be dead.
Importance of nature. In the opening paragraph, the burning book pages are
compared to birds trying to fly away. When Millie attempts suicide, Montag
compares the tool used to save her to a snake. The Mechanical Hound is a dominant
presence throughout the novel. The image of the salamander is dominant as well, as a
symbol of the fireman. This animal imagery expresses the importance of nature in
life. The lack of nature, or the manipulation of nature (i.e. the development of the
Mechanical Hound), causes death and destruction. The only time animal imagery is
positive in the entire novel is when Montag gets out of the river and encounters a
deer. At first he thinks it is a Hound, but then realizes his mistake. The deer is
peaceful, beautiful, and an expression of nature. This image welcomes Montag into
his new life.
The potential threat of technology. Technology in Bradbury's 24th century is
highly advanced. Television screens take up entire parlor room walls and characters
can speak directly to the listener, addressing him or her by name. Small seashell
114
radios broadcast into people's ears throughout the day. People rely on their
inventions, such as the Mechanical Hound and the snake-like tool. Technology
dominates society. When Montag finally escapes his old life, the city is destroyed by
atomic bombs — another example of negative technology. Bradbury is commenting
on the negative influence of technological development in this world and the
destructive potential of technology in our society.
The blurred concept of “truth”. The paradox exists in the concept of "truth"
portrayed in the novel. Beatty's "truth" is a fabrication and manipulation of history.
Actual truth is hidden from society, or to be exact, burned. Many people in Montag's
life, including his wife, believe they live in reality when in fact they live in a
superficial world dominated by television, government oppression and the media.
Society is blind to the truth. Montag's discovery of the truth and his dedication the
truth save him from the ultimate destruction bombs bring to the city.
115
PART VIII. AMERICAN DRAMA
In the United States of America, Drama lagged behind other branches of
literature; it took a longer time to mature. In the XIX century, the American public
was seeking for entertainment rather than art through the American theatre. That is
why the most common theatre genre was the melodrama, sentimental, inspiring
excitement. With the beginning of modernization, the taste was rapidly changing.
With O’Neill, came the much-needed breaking away from tradition.
Expressionist playwrights dared to show their own soul, their inner self on the
stage. That is, they were interested in the subjective reality.
The expressionists’ interest in subjectivity forced them to create specific
techniques in drama that distorted reality and formed a world of dream images.
Therefore, the main intention of an expressionist drama is to reveal the innermost
soul of man.
Essential characteristics and techniques of expressionist drama:
1) First, the atmosphere is dreamlike and nightmarish. It is achieved through
shadowy, unrealistic lighting and visual distortions in the set.
2) The dream effect is also created by placing pauses or silence of unusual
length in the middle of dialogues or monologues.
3) Settings are not shown in a detailed way. Minimalistic style of setting is
emphasized. Simplification is pointed out, and images have a symbolical character.
4) Furthermore, the structure of the play is split into episodic scenes.
Nevertheless, its unity is retained through the dream construct.
5) Characters lose their individuality and are reduced to types or caricatures.
Characters represent social groups rather than particular people and are depicted in an
unreal, exaggerated way.
6) The dialogue is written in an abbreviated style or is made up of short
phrases. It can also appear in the form of long monologues sometimes ironical, poetic
or lyrical. The dialogue is replaced by sound effects or music in order to support
certain moods.
7) The player overacts and tries to adopt the mechanical and broad movements
of a puppet.
In the development of modern American drama Eugene O’Neill was standing
in the front line.
116
8.1. PRE-WAR AMERICAN DRAMA.
EUGENE O’NEILL’S EXPRESSIONISM
Eugene O’ Neill [juʹdʒi:n ɔʹni:l] (1888–1953)
O’Neill took the themes from the ancient Greek time and mixed them with
Freudian psychoanalysis.
‒ Eugene O’ Neill, an American dramatist, got the Noble prize in 1936.
‒ He is remembered for realist, naturalist and expressionist drama.
‒ Expressionists wanted to show the inner reality of a person’s mind or his
psychological condition through symbols.
‒ There was a movement away from comedy to social or socialistic tragedy.
O’Neill’s earliest dramas concern the working class and poor; later works
explore subjective realms, and underscore his reading in Freud and his anguished
attempt to come to terms with his dead mother, father, and brother. His work is the
most impressive study of the tragic aspects of American reality.
O’Neill was born into the theatre. His father was a successful touring actor in
the last quarter of the XIX century. His mother, Ella, accompanied her husband
across the country, settling down only briefly for the birth of her sons.
Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel rooms, on
trains, and backstage. He later blamed the insecurity of his early years on his father.
His childhood was like a nightmare. The result of such a life was his mother’s drug
addiction — Eugene had the theatre in his blood.
At the age of 24, he held a job as a reporter but soon came down with
tuberculosis. Confined to the Sanitarium for six months, he began to write plays.
O’Neill’s first appearance as a playwright came in 1916, in the quiet fishing
village in Massachusetts, where a group of young writers and painters had launched
an experimental theatre. In their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf they
produced O’Neill’s one-act plays. The talent inherent in the plays was immediately
evident to the group and the audience. Later they formed the Playwrights’ Theater.
By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on
Broadway, 1920, the young playwright had already had a small reputation. Beyond
the Horizon and the plays following it were defined by American critics as
“naturalistic” because of the detailed depiction of the dark sides of reality. Failed life
destinies, personalities, broken by circumstances, appear in the play Beyond the
Horizon in the images of two brothers, one of whom is a dreamer, the other a
practitioner, and both suffer the collapse of hopes.
117
The period of major works
O’Neill’s capacity for and commitment to work were amazing. Within 23 years
he completed 20 long plays and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote
many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisfied. His mostdistinguished plays include Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage
Home, and The Moon of the; The Emperor Jones; and The Hairy Ape.
O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, his
tragic view on life derived from his family’s tragic relationships — his mother and
father, who loved and tormented each other; his elder brother, who loved and
corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O’Neill himself, torn
between love for and rage at all three. He mostly wrote tragedies.
The first full-length play was Desire Under the Elms (1924). The story:
‒ reflects his own family’s conflicts;
‒ disregards the conventions of the contemporary Broadway theatre;
‒ avoids melodrama;
‒ shows total honesty of emotion.
In Desire Under the Elms, the thirst for possession — land, money, a beloved
being — leads to a dark family tragedy. The intensity of the action in this play is
achieved by deep and acute conflicts arising from the fact that the characters do not
follow morality, but powerful passions.
His later plays include the acknowledged masterpieces The Iceman Cometh
(1946), a stark work on the theme of death, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night
(1956) — a powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own
family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course
of one night.
In the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), the family history of
a Southern general Mannon, returning from the Civil War, is dramatized in the spirit
of ancient tragedies in direct parallel with the myth of Agamemnon. The author
defined this work as the embodiment of the Greek concept of fate, which the modern
public can perceive and at the same time experience excitement.
His masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night was produced posthumously in
1956. It can be described as:
– a play about human responsibility and love-hate within a family;
‒ an autobiographical play;
‒ straightforward in style;
‒ shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations: the mother is a drug
addict, the father is a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father,
118
the older son is an alcoholic, and the younger son is a tubercular youth with a slender
chance for physical and spiritual survival.
O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed
for his death, waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a
nurse, and his third wife.
O’Neill’s tragic view of life was reflected in his relationships with the three
women he married and with his three children. His elder son committed suicide at 40,
while his younger son drifted into a life of emotional instability. His daughter was cut
out of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was
O’Neill’s age.
O’Neill’s final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed
for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor,
a nurse, and his third wife. O’Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as the
characters he had created for the stage.
8.2. POST-WAR AMERICAN DRAMA. EXISTENTIALISM
AND NATURALISM IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ PLAYS
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller dominated the post-war dramatic scene.
Both were against life ruled by dollar interest. Both criticized the illnesses of
American system — economic, social and political.
Their main theme is frustration and desperation. Miller and Williams express
the same themes through different techniques. Williams is sensuous, funny and
verbally luxuriant. Miller is tragic.
What links them is their love for the bruised vulnerable individual and his
desperation, the agony of his soul.
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was brought up in the South. The element of
the southern literary tradition is obvious in his work: complicated feelings about time
and the past. The past is usually looked up on with sadness, guilt or fear. He describes
his society as a hell of brutality and race hatred. His work focused on disturbed
emotions within southern families.
He was known for a weird gothic settings and Freudian exploration of emotion.
Tennessee Williams tries to express internal reality. He reached his peak early in
his career, with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
None of the works that followed reached the level of success of those two
pieces. Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of them
autobiographical. Williams revealed the pain and suffering inside his characters, their
119
desperation and the agony of their souls. He explored the internal hurt, which is
opposite to the external behavior.
Tennessee Williams revealed the pain and suffering inside the heart of his
characters. He tries to explore the internal hurt, which is opposite to the external
behavior.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Characters:
‒ Blanche DuBois (in her thirties well-educated, with no money, with nowhere
else to go);
‒ Stella, her younger sister;
‒ Stanley Kowalski, Stella’s husband;
‒ Mitch, Stanley’s friend.
After the loss of her family home to creditors, Blanche DuBois arrives in New
Orleans to live with her married sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
Blanche tells Stella that she has taken a leave of absence from her English-teaching
position because of her nerves (which is later revealed to be a lie). Blanche finds
Stanley loud and rough, refers to him as “common”. Stanley, in return, dislikes
Blanche’s presence.
Blanche meets Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker player buddies. His courteous
manner sets him apart from the other men. Blanche easily charms him.
As the weeks pass, the friction between Blanche and Stanley continues to
grow. Stanley has gathered gossip on Blanche, revealing that she was fired from her
teaching job for involvement with an under-aged student. As a result, Mitch refuses
to marry Blanche.
While Stella is in hospital, giving birth to a baby, Stanley rapes Blanche,
resulting in her complete mental breakdown. Blanche is to be committed to a mental
hospital.
The 1960s were a difficult time for Williams. His work received poor reviews
and the playwright turned to alcohol and drugs. Surrounded by bottles of wine and
pills, Williams died in a New York City hotel room in 1983.
8.3. TRAGIC ELEMENTS IN ARTHUR MILLER’S PLAYS
Born in 1915, Arthur Miller (1915–2005) is one of the top most American
playwrights. Miller’s work belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. Miller
was a leftist and he started his dramatic career with the propaganda plays, in which he
120
overthrew capitalism and advocated for the establishment of socialism. Miller was
influenced by Marxism. His propaganda plays were not published until the
publication of Death of a Salesman in 1949. Miller was called before the House of
Representatives in 1956 and asked to provide the names of persons who might have
Communist sympathies. Because of his refusal to do so, Miller was charged with
contempt of Congress, a charge that was overturned on appeal.
Miller’s major works are: All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949),
The Crucible, A View from the Bridge; The Misfits.
Death of a Salesman is the best modern tragedy. It shows man’s search for
merit and worth in life and the realization that failure invariably looms. Set within the
family of Willy Loman, the play focuses on the uneven relationships of father and
sons, husband and wife.
It is a combination of realism and naturalism. It insists on the value of the
individual, despite failure and error.
Death of a Salesman is a hymn to the common man — to whom “attention
must be paid.” Miller experiments with the concept of a tragic hero, pronounced by
Aristotle. According to Aristotle the tragic hero should be of noble birth, intelligent.
However, Willy Loman is a very simple man from a simple family.
Miller claimed that the common man as a subject was as important for tragedy
as kings were. An ordinary protagonist may rise to the status of a tragic hero because
of his zeal and fervour and commitment to his goal.
Setting
Much of the play’s action takes place in Willy’s home. When Willy and Linda
purchased it, it represented Willy’s hopes for the future. Now, however, the house is
hemmed in by apartment buildings on all sides, and sunlight barely reaches their
yard.
Just as the house is besieged by apartment buildings, Willy’s ego is besieged
by doubts and evidence that he will never experience the fame and fortune promised
by the American Dream.
Death of a Salesman is about the failure of the American Dream. The successdriven society makes people corrupt. When the desire for money is not fulfilled, they
end up having a disaster. Willy believes in the promise of the American Dream —
that a “well liked” and “personally attractive” man in business will deservedly
acquire the material comforts. He focuses on the superficial qualities of attractiveness
and likeability, whereas the Puritan concept of the American Dream identifies hard
work as the key to success.
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]