The social dynamic of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is to be found in the formative community O’Neill gives us – the family. It is not a new thematic setting in literature: writers as diverse as Tolstoy, who in his magnum opus War and Peace concludes that remarkable work with a plea for the social unit of the family as the ideal social community of cohesion; Dostoevsky, who permits even Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment – an otherwise egocentric, individually minded character – to worry over his actions as they relate to his mother and sister; classical works such as Oedipus and Antigone, which speak eloquently to the disruptive influences external forces can have on the webs of family; and contemporary American authors from Louise Erdrich, whose sprawling Native/white intermixing in her reservation sagas from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, to her more recent The Plague of Doves, to Larry Woiwode’s multigenerational family works characterized by Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and Born Brothers, have each located their central theme within the social community of family.

 

It is a social unit whose territories fluctuate, whose boundaries are known only to those within its tightly wound knot, and who, even to those individuals, is often a place of surprising frustration, disappointment, anger, stress, love, and redemption. And we find all of those emotional impetuses and thrusts in O’Neill’s most personal reflection, Long Day’s Journey into Night. From the setting of the play – a single room in the summer home of the Tyrone’s – the family’s residence, to the major players (with the exception of the servant girl), the entire action of Long Day’s Journey into Night is centered within the context of the family.

 

With a surprisingly singular direction to the Director staging the play (and the reader), the opening of the work provides a detailed description of a "small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it," containing works by (among others), Balzac, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, Swinburne, Kipling, and Rosetti (11); (surprising, considering that no one in the audience would be able to see the bookshelf, but certainly offering a philosophically pointed direction for how to read the play). Contrasted with this is "a large glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three sets of Shakespeare […]" (11). Striking contradictions between the two bookshelves – Shakespeare, Hugo, Dumas, even to an extent Balzac we can readily understand, given Tyrone’s professional interests; Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg are slightly more suspect – they all possess, to varying degrees, elements of existentially oriented social dynamic as their subject matter, and certainly the height of that philosophy would be found in Nietzsche and Marx, known more in our collective cultural mindset as destructive forces against the status quo, the traditional order and structure of relationships, than as literature that would be found in more traditional Shakespearean households. Indeed, Tyrone takes a swipe at Edmund for certain portions of this "small bookcase," declaring,

TYRONE.      Thickly.

Where you get your taste in authors – That damned library of

yours!

He indicates the small bookcase at rear.

Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools

and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire,

and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whore-

mongers and degenerates! Pah! When I’ve three good sets of Shakespeare,

there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read. (137-138)

I’d like to suggest that to this list of whoremongers and degenerates we add the work of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose body of writing forms the point of crystallization for existentialism.

 

Kierkegaard is useful, however, beyond merely complementing the Tyrone’s bookshelf; instead, I’d like to suggest that Kierkegaard’s work – especially one of his later signed[2] volumes, Works of Love – is a useful and perceptive methodology for understanding issues of community: the identities that we bring to communities, problems and conflicts that arise in those relationships, and the way that those relationships are structured coequally to permit growth and destruction, love and hate. These are especially apparent in the structure of the family in Long Day’s Journey into Night, from Mary’s endless searching for her "glasses," and morphine addiction (visibly ignored, in earlier moments [until it becomes an inescapable reality] by the other members of the family), to the at times near-hysterical (even, arguably, humorous) back and forth complaints concerning the electric lights, Tyrone’s professed poverty, and the continuous underlying war between individual authority and identity in the relations of sons-and-fathers, the figure of the (emotionally and intellectually) absent mother, love, and the poverty of self which contaminate the essence of the play. In his chapter entitled "Our Duty to Love Those We See," Kierkegaard’s conception of community is made explicit – "All through the ages everyone who has thought deeply over the nature of man has recognized in him this need for community" (153), but more significantly he goes on to clarify this defining characteristic of man’s nature, commenting that "[…] the most important thing, [is] to understand oneself in one’s longing for community" (153). That is a powerful recognition for anyone to recognize, that not only is there an innate, divine command that man seek out others, but that he further recognize that he has a longing to be in community with others. That additional distinction that Kierkegaard offers is deceptively simple, but it carries a tremendous weight: namely, that it is not enough to exist in the social community of others, but, rather, that one must recognize that they desire it in and of itself. There is nothing more defining of Long Day’s Journey into Night than Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of community. The Tyrone’s have a deep need to be with one another, they are inextricably drawn back into each other, over and over, in the course of the day’s journey – and, at times, recognize that deep seated individual longing that they each possess.

TYRONE. Turn that light out before you come in.

            But Edmund doesn’t.

[…]

TYRONE. I’m glad you’ve come, lad. I’ve been damned lonely.

            Then resentfully.

You’re a fine one to run away and leave me to sit alone here all night

when you know –

            With sharp irritation.

I told you to turn out that light! We’re not giving a ball. There’s no

reason to have the house ablaze with electricity at this time of night,

burning up money!

EDMUND. Angrily.

Ablaze with electricity! One bulb! Hell, everyone keeps a light on

in the front hall until they go to bed.

He rubs his knee.

I damned near busted my knee on the hat stand.

TYRONE. The light from here shows in the hall. You could see your way well

enough if you were sober.

EDMUND. If I was sober? I like that! (128)

This is a common theme with variations in the play. The back-and-forth indirect communications which speak to need – from Tyrone’s "I’m glad you’ve come, lad. I’ve been damned lonely," to obscure references to Mary’s addiction and condition, to the stage direction for the transformation to resentfully. Similarly, the structural battle for authority between father and son over the issue of electricity and the number of bulbs used; biographical insofar as Tyrone is of the old world: tight-fisted, wary of poverty, in love – much to his overall financial (in)solvency – with the notion of land. The father’s sense of the son’s unappreciative comprehension of cost, and inherent in that the real-world of work, bills, long hours, the list goes on. It is a classic theme, and speaks to the love, the emotional need for others, that each of the Tyrone’s require through negative affirmation, indirect communication, and isolation within oneself. Kierkegaard warns of the dangers inherent where love is genuine, but the methods by which it is communicated and understood are contaminated by a transactional methodology of finitude. He notes, in response to I John 4.20[3], "How deeply the need for love is grounded in the nature of man!" (153), but Kierkegaard further remarks, "and yet men very often find escapes in order to avoid – this happiness; therefore they manufacture deceptions – in order to deceive themselves or make themselves unhappy […] to grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one’s breast and groan over oneself" (155). In short, it is an escape outside of oneself; an avoidance of existential inwardness, an act of distancing from others. –Edmund does not wish to admit to Tyrone that he isn’t sober, anymore than Tyrone wishes to acknowledge that he too has been hitting the bottle! Neither is capable of seeing into their own selves, their own inability to recognize that not only do they exist as an individual I, but that they have failed to take ownership of that self from which they enter into their particular community; instead, the easier, but unfortunate route is taken: the disruption of self-recognition into an object outside of their self – namely, the other’s drunkenness. And yet, it is exactly this displacement outside of oneself that negates the possibility of love as infinite, as truly loving.

 

Kierkegaard argues that, "When, then, a man with a wrong conception of love goes out into the world, he seeks – according to his way of thinking he seeks – to find the object, but according to his way of thinking, in vain" (160). Those vainly sought after objects are the only thing infinite in their number in Long Day’s Journey into Night – to take as example, Tyrone’s land-lust, drinking buddies, used car, repetitive complaints about electric lights and his repeated allusions to poverty, all of which indicate a pursuit, a worry, a condemnation of self to objects; to object-ideas about life, that negate his own ability to communicate meaningfully with the other members of his family. This is summed up by Edmund who declares:

EDMUND. […] No home except this summer dump in a place she [Mary]

hates and you’ve refused even to spend money to make this look

decent, while you keep buying more property, and playing sucker

for every con man with a gold mine, or a silver mine, or any kind of

get-rich-quick swindle! (144)

And yet is Edmund, even while communicating this directly to Tyrone, in a position to authentically do so? Edmund reveals something more about his own aestheticism with his long speech where, in part, he remarks:

EDMUND. […] Then the moment of ecstatic freedom

came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of be

longing to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and

hopes and dreams! (156)

There is something distinctly Kierkegaardian about this. That moment of "ecstatic freedom," wherein the single individual comes to the internal, inward recognition of his self as a thing infinite when infinitely considered and understood. It is a beautiful meaning, and is the one that Kierkegaard argues we find in a community of others, where we recognize our debt of love to one another.

 

Kierkegaard remarks, "yet love is perhaps best described as an infinite debt: when a man is gripped by love, he feels that this is like being in infinite debt. […] Because he is aware of being gripped by love, he perceives this as being in infinite debt. […] But this is the relationship of infinitude, and love is infinite" (172). Of course, Kierkegaard is producing an exegetical rendering of Romans 13.8[4], "Owe no one anything, except to love one another." Imagine, Kierkegaard says, that that is the predicated necessity of community. That you recognize the longing for others, and that you owe to them nothing but love. –You are, Kierkegaard says, in "infinite debt." Such is the relationship of family, because "children are in love’s debt to their parents, because their parents have loved them first" (172), and similarly, that is the debt owed by the parents to their children. This initial community, the one in which we learn our debts to one another is of course a critical stage of psychosocial development, but more importantly is the point at which two routes can be taken – that of the finite, or of the infinite. Kierkegaard says that in love "an accounting can only take place where there is a finite relationship, because the relationship of the finite to the finite can be calculated. But one who loves cannot calculate" (174). And O’Neill captures the bitterness of the finite, and the repeated return to the accounting done between the Tyrone’s:

TYRONE. I paid a lot of money I couldn’t afford, and there’s the chauffer I

have to board and lodge and pay high wages whether he drives you

or not.

Bitterly.

Waste! The same waste that will land me in the poorhouse in

my old age! What good did it do you? I might as well have thrown

the money out the window.

MARY. With detached calm.

Yes, it was a waste of money, James. You shouldn’t have bought a

secondhand automobile. You were swindled again as you always are,

because you insist on secondhand bargains in everything.

TYRONE. It’s one of the best makes! Everyone says it’s better than any of the

new ones!

MARY. Ignoring this.

It was another waste to hire Smythe, who was only a helper in a

garage and had never been a chauffeur. Oh, I realize his wages are

less than a real chauffeur’s, but he more than makes up for that, I’m

sure, by the graft he gets from the garage on repair bills. Something

is always wrong. Smythe sees to that, I’m afraid. (86-87)

That "something is always wrong," certainly isn’t in dispute. The perpetual transactional communication engaged in by the Tyrone’s is indicative of personal unhappiness, individual to each of them, and reflectively carried out against the other members of the community. That essential sympathy for the other is contaminated by a profound negative inwardness, which sees only the non-dialectical ‘I’ at its center. Kierkegaard anticipates this conflict within a community, arguing that while our debt to each other is love, one nevertheless discovers "the ingratitude of the world, opposition, mockery, and [this] always to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes" (187) – therein Kierkegaard notes the categorical imperative to the individual, namely to be in a debt of love. Nowhere is this more powerfully and individually experienced than in the family, that first debt to others, to one’s original and particular community. When conflicts emerge in such situations they can be psychologically dangerous, as when Freud discusses[5] the egoistic impulses to destroy authority figures (perhaps most visibly dramatic in Civilization and its Discontents with its imagining of the dual psyche of Eros and Thanatos); or the work of R.D. Laing[6], who suggests that conflictual relations in a family between the individual and the collective whole can result in real psychic damage, causing the individual to psychologically divide themselves in perpetual unhappiness – in short, a dual psychology, a dichotomy of either/or, for which one can never discover or be oneself. And it is a particular unhappiness, because it is a family; it has its own debts of love and means of indirect and direct communication[7]. This understanding is reinforced by O’Neill’s insertion of the servant girl Cathleen into the play, who is unable to enter into the psychological imaginations of Mary.

And then, of course, the discussion of Cathleen’s picking up of the morphine for Mary at the drugstore. Cathleen is unable to understand the drug, its effects, or the implications it carries for the family, being merely insulted when "the way the man in the drugstore acted when I took in the prescription for you. […] I’m not used to being treated like a thief" (105). The servant becomes a foil to the psychological condition that afflicts the Tyrone’s community: an ostensibly objective, and obviously disinterested observer, allowing the divide between the everyday (Cathleen, Smythe, etc.) to contrast with the existence mutually imposed by the members of the family within their particular community.

 

Edmund provides greater context for the existentially oriented, aesthetic lamentations of the family, when in his long speech he declares:

EDMUND. […] And several other times in my life, when I was

swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same

experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored

to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like

the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a

second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second

there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone,

lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no

good reason! (156)

That poetic figuring of the finite is the love of the family-community, which exists as aesthetic debt. (Of course, while this speech is Edmund’s it could just as easily be Jamie’s, Tyrone’s, or Mary’s.) What O’Neill gives us, however, is not Kierkegaard’s conditions for community, but instead a visual, psychological, and philosophical rendering of the reality of the destruction that can be wrought within a community where there is a longing for love, but a failure to recognize it, to embody it, and to become it. Instead of seeing what is before their eyes – that is, each other – they see fogs, of varying degrees. As Edmund so powerfully says, "and you are alone, lost in the fog again." Mary finds it. So too do Tyrone and Jamie. In alcohol, drugs, memory, Schopenhauer, and a nihilistic fashioning of existentialism and the place of death, none of them recognize their infinite position of otherness with respect to each other; instead they find only loneliness. And yet none of them wants to be alone, because as we see, when individual members of the family find themselves alone, they beseech the others to stay.

 

O’Neill succeeds in Long Day’s Journey into Night in creating a powerful allegorical ordering of family as community, and in this case a lost community that is so close, and yet as the day progresses into night and day once again, finds itself ever further away from one another. Instead of committing oneself, as Kierkegaard puts it: you "give up your selfish desires and longings, give up your arbitrary plans and purposes so that you in truth work disinterestedly for the good – and submit to being abominated almost as a criminal, scorned and ridiculed for this very reason" (188), the Tyrone’s are able to submit only to their own particular, individual suffering. As a community none of the Tyrone’s can forsake their individual pain, rooted deeply within their inability to fully acknowledge their debt to one another in love, and consequently they permit each other’s destructive submersion into independent miseries and sorrows. Tyrone tells Edmund, "Yes, there’s the makings of a poet in you all right" (157) – and, so much the better. It would be better were this community destroyed, its members set free from one another, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in order to discover their own self within, and ultimately to recognize their debt of love to each other. Much as Tyrone correctly deduces of Edmund’s speech, that "that’s morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death," (157), there nevertheless remains that internal Thanatic impulse within the community of the family, and which reinforces a desire for destruction and death.

 

As previously alluded, this story is not new. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov whose selfishness continues unabated until his potential regeneration through the destitute prostitute Sonya (an individual who completely embodies an understanding of love as debt to others), who grants it to the otherwise nihilistic, selfish, and desperate character of Raskalnikov. Tolstoy, in War and Peace concludes with the family. Indeed, at the point of Prince Andrey’s possible spiritual awakening into an understanding of love and otherness, which his sister Princess Marya knows all-too-well, Tolstoy kills him off, leaving his hero Pierre (and, perhaps in a side-nod to the Aristotelian notion of the just and good life, Nikolay) married, in a spiritual wholeness with wife, children, and life. Contrast these awakenings and communities with the one O’Neill reveals to us, which operates around, as Edmund so aptly puts it, "Then Nietzsche must be right. / He quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. / "God is dead: of His pity for man hath God died" (80)[8].

 

And yet, in Kierkegaardian opposition to Edmund and Nietzsche’s sentiment: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" Matthew 22.39[9]; and Kierkegaard clarifies, "In this way one’s neighbor is as close to the life of self-love as possible. If there are only two people, the other person is the neighbor. If there are millions, everyone of these is one’s neighbor" (38). And nowhere should this be more readily practiced or understood than in the family. When the debt becomes destructive, through secrets, acts of hate, and a dearth of forgiveness, such is the depth of sorrow that the community can descend into. As Kierkegaard puts it, "Your friend, your beloved, your child, or whoever is the object of your love, has a claim upon its expression also in words when it really moves you inwardly. The emotion is not your possession but the other’s" (29). Such claims are foreclosed upon by the individuals in Long Day’s Journey into Night: where they might have awareness and recognition they choose fog; where direct communication might exist, they have games of an indirect nature, replete with misdirections, without direction. The consequences are more than tragic, they are almost inhuman, and yet they are – to steal mercilessly from Nietzsche – all-too-human. Instead of opening horizons with which to deal seriously and honestly in direct love and communication with each other, they choose as Mary so poetically puts it: "I’m going upstairs for a moment, if you’ll excuse me. I have to fix / my hair. / She adds smilingly. / That is if I can find my glasses" (77). She doesn’t want to find her glasses, nor do any of the other characters in the play. Instead they depart from each other and the community to return to poetic, aesthetic, egoistically inward behaviors, imputing their emotions into an imagined, displaced past; a return to objects. And O’Neill mercilessly hurdles the audience and reader toward the harrowing conclusion of the play, with drinking, quotations from Swinburne, and the terrifying scene of Mary descending with her wedding gown with a speech of imagined purity – "I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth" (178) – a painful paean for the lives we live and witness, and a longing for those moments of love when we were "so happy for a time" (179). A poetic figuring of lost time and life. And therein lies the misunderstanding! Love is not a pledge, a moment of ecstatic surrender that presents its demand only once or twice in a lifetime; it is not to be found in secrets, or in harboring the truth from others – love is something that we become, that becomes our ‘I,’ that we carry with us everywhere. It is not to be found in memory, as the ageing dress that the ageing Mary limply clings to[10], or in the Swinburne that Jamie recites; rather, it is something inseparable from our individual being, and manifests itself within our community.

 

What O’Neill so brilliantly provides us is a significant work that reveals why community is so important, and why the family is a subject for further study and critique, especially in an age dominated by the fractured self of postmodernism, diffused into multiple dualities, politics, and spectral deconstructive qualities. Those are useful, but nowhere near as fundamental as recognizing what O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night provides – lives in a community so real we can all relate, and the potential for those who are not revenants haunting, but who are instead revenants waiting to live in debts of love. Those haunting debts exist in Long Day’s Journey into Night; damaged, destroyed by pain, memory, anger, hate, and unforgiven sins, perpetrated by the living and dead against each other, these debts have enabled individual identities to grow as aesthetically, inward oriented psychologies[11] regarding the community as something which supports life, instead of being life. A community whose love has become sufficient for life, but incapable of love’s fundamental quality: healing, and infinite love.

 

In an appropriate response to the title of O’Neill’s remarkable play, Romans 13.12 states, "The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light." Not so for the haunted Tyrone’s, locked within the finitudes of dreams, longings, and the relish of destruction and death. The outlook of Long Day’s Journey into Night is clear – it is a destination of permanent night; a place where love works ironically[12], as sustenance for destruction. It is a terrible existence, though a poetic one, and gives artistic beauty to something that Kierkegaard begins Works of Love with, that "to cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity" (23-24). And at the conclusion of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Kierkegaard’s statement effectively and evocatively conveys the thrust of the play, and tragically so.

 

WORKS CITED

 

The Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985.

 

Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong. New

York: Harper and Row, 1962.

 

Laing, R.D. and A. Esterson. Sanity, Madness, and the Family. Penguin:

Baltimore, 1971.

 

O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.