| Critics have long acknowledged the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy on Eugene O'Neill. With few exceptions, however, they have examined it as a theme in many of O'Neill's plays. Numerous studies have been written about the presence of the Apollonian-Dionysian opposition, the eternal recurrence, and the overman in O'Neill's dramas. By focusing on the thematic importance of Nietzsche's writings, however, critics have paid little attention to the formal implications of his influence on O'Neill. Although O'Neill was interested in philosophy, he was first and foremost a dramatist; if he subscribed to a philosophical theory, it affected the form of his plays. Further, since Nietzsche's existential and aesthetic theories were inextricably connected, his ontological contentions had an artistic concomitant. And, both Nietzsche and O'Neill were interested in resurrecting tragedy in the twentieth century, although they acknowledged the difficulty in doing so. Finally, Nietzsche's philosophy was particularly well-suited to drama; in one of his two works that greatly influenced O'Neill, The Birth of Tragedy, he suggested the formal means of presenting a tragic vision of life on the stage.; From his early plays about the sea, through The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, to The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill considered the relationship of tragic form and vision. Similar to Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian forces, O'Neill's aesthetic opposition acknowledged thematically modern man's inability to accept the paradox, ambivalence, and randomness at the core of existence. At the same time it argued formally against the despair resulting from this philosophical acknowledgement. Since this opposition couldn't be resolved in the world outside the play, it couldn't be synthesized inside it. Recognizing that society had denied modern man a non-rational appreciation of the vitality and fecundity at the heart of existence, O'Neill set many of his early dramas away from civilization. By placing his characters at sea or in the jungle as he did in the SS Glencairn plays and The Emperor Jones, O'Neill could suggest primitive man's intimate relationship to the ebb and flow of life. And, in addition to demonstrating modern man's increasing estrangement from a tragic vision of existence as he did most noticeably in The Hairy Ape and The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill also identified the formal remnants of primitive man's intimacy with his universe. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI... |
