The “Other” is a slippery concept, yet one that has seemed necessary in literary studies which attempt to take into account social and political aspects of identity.  It is dialectical by definition—in opposition to “Self”: Self and Other, me and not-me.  These are ideas familiar to us from nineteenth-century philosophy, like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which describes consciousness as an unfolding of antitheses.  According to Hegel's famous analysis of the master-slave relationship, it is through the ordeal of Otherness that consciousness and culture grow, whether as a result of the slave's endurance of physical toil or the paradoxical helplessness of a “master” like Marcus Aurelius.  In Hegel's account, both master and slave have the opportunity to discover a new truth—Stoicism at this juncture in Hegel's analysis.

 

Most contemporary theorists of the Other owe a debt to Hegel even if they approach the concept by way of Derrida, Bakhtin or Lacan.  I would like to mention four books which are helpful in exploring the presence of the Other in modern literature in general and in O'Neill's drama in particular.  The first is Giles Gunn's The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion and the American Imagination (1979).  This book reminds us that before ethnic studies took up the theme, “alterity” was often discussed in a religious context.  For Kierkegaard, God was the wholly Other, as He was also for Karl Barth and other new-orthodox contributors to a theology of crisis.  Yet Gunn emphasizes ethical opportunity as did Hegel, with a certain logical inevitability.  The nearest we may be able to come to God is that other Other, our neighbor, with art mediating differences as it questions established values.  Gunn quotes John Dewey: “the moral function of art ... is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, [and] perfect the power to perceive.”  Gunn also quotes Benjamin Demott, who worries about America's unwillingness “to grasp another being's difference from within.”  For Gunn, religion and literature face a common challenge in America—to reach beyond the Self, whether through faith or imagination.

 

The second book well worth mentioning is Werner Sollors' Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986).  Here “descent”—d-e-s-c-e-n-t—means hereditary lineage or blood relations; descent is in dialectical tension with consent or willing association by law or marriage, as in “consent of the governed,” “the age of consent,” or “consenting adults.”  Sollors traces the ways various ethnicities are constructed against the background of a generalized American ideal of the extended national family, as seen in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and in Israel Zangwill's play, The Melting Pot (1908).  Writers, Sollors tells us, often express their quest for a personal identity as a conversion experience, either toward assimilation (Edward Steiner, From Alien to Citizen, 1914) or away from it (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965).  According to Sollors, since the 1960s the sacred side of such antithesis has been the ethnic one, yet contradictions of the middle can be fascinating, as in Hunger of Memory (1982), where Richard Rogriguez, caught between his Mexican working-class home and his scholarship education, argues against affirmative action and bilingual education.  Sollors mentions O'Neill, along with Nathaniel West and Vladimir Nabokov, as writers whose fame and accomplishment establish them as mainstream.  We do not remember O'Neill as our premier Irish-American playwright.

 

Another work, of great pedagogical usefulness, is René Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1961).  For Girard, the Other occupies the god-like position of mediator between the Self and its various objects of desire.  Influenced by Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, Girard sees desire in modern times as a form of imitation resulting in endless misery for all concerned.  The Mephistophelean Other, master of Mephistophelean disguise, capitalist of desire, is not “a class oppressor as in Marxist alienation; he is the neighbor on the other side of the fence, the school friend, the professional rival.”  The Other is not really a person but a metaphysical position within modern dialectics of conspicuous consumption.  Girard holds the modern novel in high esteem because, in his opinion, the novelist is the hero cured of metaphysical desire.  Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust exhibit true intellectual freedom, achieved through the renunciation of desire and the unmasking of the Other.

 

Kurt Eisen has made good use of Girard in his profound study, The Inner Strength of Opposites: O'Neill's Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination.  In the postmelodramatic plays of O'Neill, the border between Self and Other must be broken down.  In fact, the Other is discovered right beside the Self—inside the same house, so to speak.  O'Neill describes his vision for a new drama in “Memoranda on Masks”: “A comprehensive expression is demanded here, a chance for eloquent presentation, a new form of drama projected from a fresh insight into the inner forces motivating the actions and reactions of men and women (a new and truer characterization in other words)—a drama of souls, and the adventures of _free wills,' with the masks that govern them and constitute their fates.”  Eisen proposes that O'Neill transformed the melodramatic and sentimental American theatre of his day by infusing it with the novelistic internal alienation of the Self characteristic of the modern novel.  One sees this most clearly, perhaps, in the play of O'Neill's that reads most like a novel, Strange Interlude, in which Charlie Marsden fulfills at the end of the play Girard's requirement of a novelistic hero—that he finally triumph over metaphysical desire in a tragic conclusion and thus become capable of writing the novel.  In this sense, Marsden achieves through his frustrating life and its tortured memories the novel he never had the courage to write.  The last of the play's many soliloquies belongs to him: “God bless dear old Charlie ... who, passed beyond desire, has all the luck at last!”

 

Of course, the character whose fate it is to behold life without consoling illusions is a trademark of O'Neill's drama—from the Donkeyman in “Moon of the Caribbees” through Charlie Marsden in Strange Interlude to the fullest realization of this role in Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh.  In the later plays, interestingly, women seem to occupy this position as they are forced to observe the destruction of their men.  Nora in A Touch of the Poet and Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten are obvious examples.  But I wonder if Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey might not also be played with some of this curse of all-seeing powerlessness, like other great women-seers like Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman and Hannah Jelkes in Night of the Iguana.  Although Charlie Marsden resembles such prototypes of the “unlived life” as Henry James' John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” and T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, O'Neill's observers have all lived—if anything, a bit too much.  They are not dry; they are saturated.  Exhausted by life and ready to die, they are nevertheless still spellbound by the recurring seductions of others within pipe-dreams of maya.  What they see, the essential futility of lives lived but never full grasped, even in retrospect, gives the characters of O'Neill's late plays their terrifying humanity; while the irony and detachment of these observers, even in their darkest hours, witness to social and historical processes which play, playwright and audience are powerless to explain.

 

The mystery at the heart of these processes might well be called the Other, although it is equally, of course, the Self.  O'Neill chronicles the philosophical difficulties of being oneself while exposing his characters at the same time to ever increasing threats to their social prestige and autonomy from the outside.  The Other is the essential yet unrepresentable element in this scenario.  O'Neill's characters struggle futilely against being marginalized within categories that imply inferiority, while they give unquestioning respect—one is tempted to say too generous respect—to the very forces that judge and condemn them.  And ultimately the power that has configured their fates is represented as an absent person or even an empty space.

 

The sailors in O'Neill's S.S. Glencairn plays do not see themselves as pawns of capitalism so much as proud, unlucky prodigals of the human family—in one sense unable to find their way home and in another sense very much at home already as orphans of a common mother, the sea.  Who is to blame for their fate?  “The ole davil sea,” Chris Christopherson reiterates throughout Anna Christie.  The sea is simply their absence from wherever they might belong.  And it is all that is absent which they might long for.  Werner Sollors speaks of a common culture as what separates members of various ethnic groups in America.  The sea, then, is O'Neill's melting pot, which does not, however, blend and unite, as Crèvecoeur and Zangwill said it would; rather, like Melville's sea, it promises, deceives and destroys.  Furthermore, not only do these sailors refuse to complain about their fate; it is a point of honor that they glory in.  The sea is for them, as it is for Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey, the one encounter in their lives commensurate with their despair, their sense of possibility fulfilled or not, and their confusion.

 

One sees the sheer power of the Other in The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones.  Seeing himself reflected in the eyes of Mildred, daughter of the shipping magnate, Yank senses for the first time the unbreachable distance between himself and the reigning arbiters of taste, while participating in exactly the same arbitration process in his own world.  “Steel, dat stands for de whole ting!  And I'm steel—steel—steel!”  He lives out the Don Quixote-like pattern identified by Girard as the hero's self-defeating pursuit of metaphysical autonomy.  And believing what de Rougemont calls the superstition of modern times—that what is most base is most true—Yank allows himself to be absorbed when he drunkenly opens the cage of the ape—imitator and trickster par excellence.  O'Neill was to explore this theme throughout his career, most powerfully in A Touch of the Poet— of how nearly impossible it is to resist internalizing the contempt of the oppressor, destroying oneself with shame for the wrong reasons.  Brutus Jones, like Yank Smith a typical American, also attempts to validate himself through the eyes of his audience—but in a way he knows all along is false.  It is as if the very unreality of the Emperor charade might one day, he hopelessly hopes, serve his purposes in disappearing, taking some money with him.  But, of course, “you can't take it with you,” and so the play becomes a brilliant tour de force about a desperate action and simultaneously a reflection on the internal contradictions of democratic freedom, and perhaps a bitter account of the profession of acting.  The same audience required to applaud one's performance will eventually see through it.

 

In O'Neill's later plays the futile struggle against becoming an Other is explored with great compassion and a sort of artistic ruthlessness.  Critics have described O'Neill's feeling for the delicate balance between monologue and dialogue with great accuracy, especially in relation to Hughie.  Kurt Eisen quotes Peter Szondi on Hebbel to the effect that dialogue is continually reborn in bourgeois tragedy when characters are unable to escape each other spatially.  Their monologues become dialogues instead of soliloquies when they exchange the roles of performer and audience.  Even O'Neill's allegedly flat language becomes powerful in a theatrical space where the border between speaker and listener is always dissolving.  Numerous examples come to mind.  At the end of Act Two of The Iceman Cometh, Hickey has been abusing his friends, bullying them into becoming the audience of converts he needs.  And they have polarized themselves absolutely against him, refusing to play object to his subject while seeking some means of objectifying him with the old iceman joke.  But when Hickey speaks those terrifying words, “my dearly beloved wife is dead,” there is an immediate outpouring of concern for him accompanied by shame and “bewildered, incredulous confusion.”  In Act Three of A Moon for the Misbegotten, Josie Hogan directs her whole battery of tricks and wiles at Jim Tyrone, who she thinks has humiliated her, only to find someone already defeated and rapidly dying.  Her conclusion?  “Love is a wonderful mad inspiration.”  Irony and understanding.  In Act Three of Long Day's Journey Into Night, the audience is brought to its knees by Mary Tyrone's simple declaration to her husband, “And I love you, dear, in spite of everything.”

 

These great moments in O'Neill of comeuppance and epiphany would not have the lyric intensity they do if the scene or character were not imbued in some way with absence.  We must qualify Hebbel by noting this element of infinity or limitlessness in the constraining space he speaks of where isolation becomes communication.  All of O'Neill's absences seem to point back to the dead child, of course, “Eugene Tyrone” of Long Day's Journey Into Night.  There are numerous avatars—the murdered infant of Desire Under the Elms, martyred All American Boy and War Hero Gordon Shaw of Strange Interlude, Anna Christie, Jamie Tyrone, Con Melody, and many others whose old selves are dead.  And it is worth noting how many contemporary playwrights use this same configuration of absence to suggest the mysterious indwelling of the Other.  Joe Keller's dead son in Arthur Miller's All My Sons establishes his father's unbearable responsibility to all sons.  George and Martha's “little bugger” whom George “kills” in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? so that he and Martha will have to acknowledge the depth of their love and need for each other, Sam Shepard's Buried Child—whatever will not be disowned in the American psyche—all these and many more reminders of absence or intrusions of presence have the effect of requiring that living characters, to use Benjamen Demott's phrase, “grasp another being's difference from within.”  The theme of childlessness or abandonment occurs in a dizzying array of works by Lanford Wilson, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, Christopher Durang, Marsha Norman, Wallace Shawn, Terence McNally, Craig Lucas and John Guare, to name a few, with a tonality of religious sacrifice.  René Girard reminds us of the Biblical story in which Christ exorcises the unclean spirit from the man who lives alone among tombs.  The spirit's name is Legion; it is both unique and many.  It begs to be allowed to take refuge in swine.  When this permission is granted, the swine hurl themselves into the sea and drown.

 

Sometimes the Other exists simply as a space—like the spare room where Mary has begun to sleep again in Long Day's Journey, a kind of tomb for her dead baby, whose room this would have been.  And there is the dead mother's parlor in Desire Under the Elms, where another baby destined to die is perhaps conceived.  The home that Mary Tyrone complains is not a home, the tomb-like edifice of the Mannons in Mourning Becomes Electra, Chris Christopherson's coal barge between land and sea, Con Melody's inn, a temple to his defeat, and Deborah Harford's little temple of liberty in her garden.

 

O'Neill's mise en scène is a metaphysical arena for a battle of angels.  And we can trace his tendency to localize the energy of Otherness through various contemporary works.  The set of Death of a Salesman with all its old-fashioned modern appliances not quite paid for, the living room of  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the garden of Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer, A. R. Gurney's dining rooms, the grim back rooms of David Mamet, the anonymous public spaces that attract violence in Edward Albee's Zoo Story and Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx—one could go on and on.  A powerful open secret of modern playwriting is to engage the spirit of place so that the characters' struggles take on universal meaning in some way.  Plays about marginal groups like the gay men of Boys in the Band become plays about some of the ways we live in a world where everyone has secrets.  Self-consciously ethnic works sometimes cast the audience in the role of the Other or invert tragic symbols for positive meanings.  At the end of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, Heidi has a baby, but no husband.  Universal meaning doesn't mean the same meaning for everyone.  It means that everyone struggles with meaning.  This point of empathy is important in drama.

 

But it is really a point of understanding I have been trying to emphasize.  Given a chance, prejudice does truly abate.  It is amazing, not that there is so much prejudice, but that there isn't more.  Having grown up in the deep South, I have been able to experience in my lifetime the lessening of racial self-consciousness, something I once would not even have been able to imagine except in absurdly sentimental forms.  Modern American drama, which mirrors the painful but necessary discovery of the Other within, has played a role in overcoming prejudice, although it is difficult to assess progress in this area with certainty.  O'Neill never addresses issues of prejudice in sentimental or sensational ways, yet he has pointed the way.  The characters in Long Day's Journey Into Night have lost their true selves forever, yet they still care what the neighbors think.  There's hope in that.