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The Hairy Ape's Humanist Hell: Erika Rundle Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Notes/Works IV.
O'Neill's choice of The Thinker as a model for Yank's predicament is incisive, far transcending the merely illustrative function drama critics have traditionally assigned it. "Reduction of The Thinker to a visual cliché," writes Rodin scholar Albert E. Elsen in 1985, "may have also discouraged consideration of its history. . . . Although the sculpture was considered innovative at its creation, its pose and theme have come to be regarded as banal" (Thinker, 3). This was indeed the opinion of Travis Bogard, who (mis)read The Thinker as an inessential supplement to an already fully developed trope within the drama:
This last claim, in particular, is problematic in light of O'Neill's philosophical target. The concept of "thinking" detached from its overdetermined pose would add little to the playwright's critique of humanism, for it is the social, historical, and theatrical construction of this thinking figure that O'Neill stages, rather than its ideological reification. The origins and history of The Thinker intersect in crucially important ways with both the form and content of O'Neill's play; without this rich intertext the drama would lose much of its critical force. The Hairy Ape, in fact, would have been largely "unthinkable" without the foundation of complex associations carried within Rodin's signature work.
The statue we now know as The Thinker (see Frontispiece) was originally conceived as part of a larger project commissioned by the French government in 1880. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was selected to create a huge, bronze portal for the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, which was then in its initial planning phases. (The museum, it turns out, was never actually built.) Rodin's imposing structure, eventually entitled The Gates of Hell (see Fig. 7), was based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Rodin decided to focus solely on the Inferno section of the epic, the landscape and characters of which he originally sketched as bas relief panels after the Renaissance tradition of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (Elsen, Gates 35). (See Fig. 8.)
Rodin's subsequent architectural models, however, show a change "from literal illustration of episodes from The Inferno to a very personal and modern view of hell," one which sought to "naturalize, or even democratize . . . aristocratic art" (Elsen, Thinker 52, 38). Looking at The Thinker in the context of The Gates of Hell makes it very clear that O'Neill's architectural approach to The Hairy Ape (particularly in the first four scenes) was deeply indebted to Rodin's sculptural treatment of Dante's drama, causing one critic to declare the play "a vision of the poet's Inferno" (Skinner 105).28 In The Gates of Hell and The Hairy Ape, both Rodin and O'Neill were crafting modern responses to their medieval predecessors, while rejecting Christian notions of salvation and sacrifice. Rodin re-envisions Dante's Hell in a particularly continental, Romantic mode, "as a metaphor rather than as dogma" (Elsen, Gates 217), with the thinking individual presiding over the scene in serious contemplation. O'Neill reanimates this Hell in the depths of twentieth-century urban industrialism and American capitalism, where the static authority The Thinker had previously embodied is recontextualized and eventually undermined.
Despite these important differences, the two works nevertheless share certain formal aspects. Elsen's description of Rodin's work as "sculptural drama," which "meant energetic relationships, such as vigorously contrasting axes and movements" (Thinker 12), seems perfectly suited to O'Neill's visual dramaturgy, where, in the original production at least, the vertical and horizontal landscapes of The Hairy Ape feature stark contrasts and striking poses evocative of Rodin's otherworldly portal.29 Close-ups of the tympanum in which The Thinker is placed (see Fig. 9) further stress the depth and theatricality of the scene. From this perspective, the rectangular structure of the limen begins to resemble a proscenium, a pictorial frame in which the contrast of light and dark and the angular, twisted forms evoke expressionist stage pictures such as the tableau vivant in Fig. 6.
Just as "thematically and compositionally The Thinker was to represent the center" of The Gates and become its "most crucial figure" (Elsen, Gates 71), Yank's relationship to the stokers "represents . . . the very last word in what they are, their most highly developed individual" (121). Fittingly, both O'Neill and Rodin position their physically imposing males in contradistinction to a chorus of tortured souls, from which they emerge as protagonist, mirroring the historical emergence of the actor himself from the classical Greek chorus and further developing the metaphor of cage and stage. Also visible at this level is the row of sculptural heads on the cornice, which early commentators read as "tragic masks" of "Rodin's passionate drama" (qtd. in Elsen, Gates 123, 125, 155),30 furthering a theatrical understanding of The Gates that prevailed when "statues were still reviewed as if they were actual human beings or characters in a play" (Elsen, Thinker 89).31
Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell throughout the 1880s, and although the entire structure was assembled only after his death (and the door itself never mounted as a functional element of any building), certain figures and groups, such as The Kiss, Ugolino and His Children, and The Shades, were enlarged and recast to stand on their own. It is in this way that The Thinker was fragmented from its original context and exhibited alone, beginning in 1888—the year Eugene O'Neill was born.32 A group of Rodin's friends and supporters, including many of Paris's leading artists and intellectuals, raised money to commission a bronze casting that would later become a public statue, erected on an engraved pedestal in front of the Pantheon in 1906 (see Fig. 10). Upon Rodin's death in 1917 (the year O'Neill began his short story "The Hairy Ape") another casting of the statue was brought to Rodin's home in Meudon, where it became his gravestone, and the new caption on the pedestal read simply, "Rodin."33 (See Fig. 11.)
Once The Thinker morphed from sculptural detail to public statue, it generated as much critical controversy and interpretive activity as perform-ances of The Hairy Ape would nearly two decades later, and for many of the same reasons. In the early years of the twentieth century, France underwent a labor crisis that resulted in violence and instability caused by increasingly large strikes and public protests. "The timing of the inauguration of Rodin's Thinker," writes Elsen, "came at the very crest of national social and political upheaval, and it is not hard to understand why the conservatives were generally opposed to The Thinker and the Socialists supportive" (Thinker 108), seeing in Rodin's art a refusal to distinguish between physical and mental labor.
Rather than "the intellectual impoverished by exhausted heredity," wrote the Socialist Deputy Pierre Baudin in 1904, The Thinker "is a strong man, muscled, balanced and calm, who is afraid neither of solitude nor of his annihilation. . . . He thinks to be resolved, to will and to act" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 129). This view of thinking as a physical action was supported by "the impression that the man is figuratively putting his back into the process of thought" (Elsen, Thinker 4). The problems many early commentators had with the statue purportedly revolved around its pronounced nakedness, as well as its intervention in an entrenched class struggle where the very definition of labor was at stake. But underlying the aesthetic and political critiques were categorical exceptions to the representation of rationality in the context of a virile body, where it risked being read as instinctual rather than divine, animal rather than human: "Go before this thinker, and first look at the face: it is a brute, a sort of gorilla; he will represent a worker in all that is vile and gross; this could be an effigy of Caliban" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 134).
The very same conflations of class and species that O'Neill critiques in The Hairy Ape are here mobilized by a loyalist critic in service to the French empire. If The Thinker is a theatrical descendent of Caliban, his suppression would require a performance of sacrifice to secure the dominance of the Enlightenment subject over and above the evolving primate. If "the modern sculptor, beginning with Rodin, enacts rather than depicts," and the "noble mission" of public sculpture, like that of the theater, is "to educate, elevate, and delight" (Elsen, Thinker 116), The Thinker's transubstantiation from statue to effigy was inevitable, at least in the context of the Pantheon. Clearly, the presence of the figure at the center of this charged symbolic space defied accepted views of history as well as neoclassical decorum; The Thinker's ascendance was, for some, the equivalent of a coup d'état, if not a coup de théâtre. "When the author of pithecanthropus dishonors the portico of the Pantheon," wrote a Municipal Councilman in 1908, we "do not hesitate again to dupe the public" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 130).
Indeed, what relationship to the Pantheon, the architectural crown of the French Enlightenment, could this "primitive man, the image of a cave man . . . more like an animal than a human being" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 130) possibly have? It was one thing for The Thinker to watch over the grave of his iconoclastic creator, but the Pantheon, the crypt upon which France's national glory rested, could provide no appropriate context for a Thinker late of Hell; the statue was repeatedly attacked in the press and literally hacked apart by an axe-wielding madman, who resented its "mimicking gesture" (Elsen, Thinker 100). In 1922, the year The Hairy Ape premiered in New York, the French government removed the statue "under the pretext that [it] disturbed the deployment of official ceremonies" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 137).
While The Thinker's intersection with a discourse of species in the streets of Paris is perhaps not as explicit as it would become when transposed into O'Neill's play, reactions to Darwin's theories were as vehement in France as they had been in England; his influence extended far beyond the world of science to include the realms of art and performance. "Partly because of Darwin," writes Elsen, "atavistic themes were popular in sculpture," and thus "The Thinker was seen as representing prehistoric man" (Thinker 130, 129). At stake in the controversy over the statue's meaning was nothing less than the sovereignty of humanism in a world grappling with the exigencies of modern life and the competing historical worldview offered by evolutionary theory. The presence of Rodin's Thinker at the center of the Pantheon, the city's most public neoclassical stage, upheld the decorum of the French Enlightenment with, as one commentator put it, all "the glory of Michelangelo of the gorillas" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 135).34
V.
Despite the controversies that surrounded the statue's origins and early history, numerous casts of The Thinker were disseminated around the world to various museums and universities. Rodin's sculpture quickly became one of the most recognized—and parodied—images in the canon of Western art.35 Once removed from its freighted context in the Pantheon, the statue's most obvious identifying markers were its gender and species, which made it especially susceptible to the claims of humanism, where the naked male body acted as a universal placeholder for all of humankind. (Recall Fig. 1.) As the art critic Camille Mauclair wrote in 1898, referring to The Thinker, "Freed of clothing that would have made it slave to a fixed time, it is nothing more [. . .] than the image of the reflection of man on things human" (Elsen, Thinker 62-63), a figure whose race and ethnicity (differences O'Neill stresses in his own characters) have disappeared under the impenetrable surfaces of bronze. Universalizing claims such as Mauclair's were supported by Gustave Geffroy's earlier, authoritative assertion in 1889 that The Gates signified "a collection of the unchanging aspects of the humanity of all countries and all times" (Elsen, Gates 154).
Concurrent with this powerful humanist rhetoric, which ultimately overshadowed other interpretations as the century progressed, was the residual effect of the portal's theatricality—especially as it intersected with nineteenth-century pictorialism and its attendant techniques—which caused the critic Roger-Milès, writing about The Gates at the same time as Geffroy, to combine (one must assume, unwittingly) the universals of humanism with the contingencies of performance, creating a cognitive dissonance that reflected the sculpture's phenomenological instability: "the episodes are timeless; the actors have cast off their costumes" (Elsen, Gates 154). As the central character in this humanist cosmology, The Thinker continued to betray traces of a beastly theatricality, ones O'Neill was quick to identify and exploit.
Similar to The Thinker's mobility beyond the Gates of Hell, Yank's departure from the vertical hierarchy of the ocean liner allows him to traverse a number of horizontal landscapes, where O'Neill repositions him in the posture of Rodin's statue. The significance of this pose contrasts markedly with Yank's behavior in the very first scene of The Hairy Ape, where the concept of "thinking"—and its binary, "drinking"—are first introduced, without any reference at all to The Thinker. Yank signals both his initial suspicion and nascent interest in this activity with a "cynical grin": "Can't youse see I'm tryin' to t'ink?" The chorus of stokers echoes this sentiment, "repeating the word after him as one with the same cynical amused mockery." The stage directions further indicate that the "chorused word [Think!] has a brazen metallic quality as if [the stokers'] throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a general uproar of hard, barking laughter," after which the stokers launch into the chanted mantra "Drink, don't think!" Yank capitulates "good-naturedly" with "a gulp from his bottle" (124).
This whole episode is repeated in scene 4, directly after Yank's first appearance in the "exact attitude" of The Thinker, while he is still on the ship and surrounded by the stokers, who once again mock him. Yank retorts, this time "resentfully," "Lemme alone. Can't youse see I'm tryin' to tink?" (138). The word "think" is then repeated by the chorus, with "a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns." This time, however, Yank, "springing to his feet and glaring at them belligerently," affirms his claim: "Yes, tink! Tink, dat's what I said! What about it?" After this outburst, O'Neill's stage directions indicate that he "sits down again in the same attitude of `The Thinker'" (139).36 As soon as Yank assumes the "attitude" of intellectual labor, he—and it—are mocked, not only by the animalized "pack," but by the mechanized, mass-produced voice of industry itself.37
While Yank moves toward the seductive promise of a particularly Western, rational conception of homo sapiens, the stokers' familiar voices, once so distinctive in their emotional speeches and songs, disappear into the melting-pot of mechanical reproduction—a sonic image of disembodied ratiocination. The simian stature of these "barking" choruses is now supplemented by their mechanized speech, suggesting that in addition to being caged and enslaved, the chorus is also automated, embodying the concept of the soulless "animal_machine" put forth originally by Descartes and taken up with enterprising facility in the age of Enlightenment, when the first mechanical animals were fashioned as entertaining devices that could be made to work without wages.38
Throughout the play, in fact, O`Neill shows the communicative properties of human speech transforming into the instinctual cries of animals or the functional drone of machines. By staging the insistence of nonhuman expression over and against the abstraction of the linguistic sign, which was at that time the gold standard of human difference, O'Neill not only protests the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism, but reminds us that signification itself transcends the realm of the human. Moreover, the chorus's repeated tableaux, whose theatrical illusionism was the "equivalent to the cinematic stop-frame" (Roach, Player's 73), also supported a mechanistic vision of the human body to counter the Romantic immanence of The Thinker.
In scene 6, set in a prison on Blackwells Island, the impossibility of Yank's project begins to emerge. When the scene opens, Yank is still "crouched [. . .] in the attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker,'" but now his "face is spotted with black and blue bruises" and a "blood-stained bandage is wrapped around his head" (150) the result of his Fifth Avenue encounter with the police. (See Fig. 12.) The resonance of these bodily markings with O'Neill's previous signs of racial and cultural degradation is only too clear. In addition to their symbolic status, Yank's "spots" are now actual wounds; the masking function of the coal dust has been trumped by the vivid expressions of the suffering human body, which contrast with the sedimentary aspect of the statue.
Likewise, the figurative cage in which Yank has heretofore existed is replaced by an actual prison cell, where this transgressive body is disciplined, contained, and framed. Yank's first lines in this scene reflect these connections, and introduce the problem of speech that will be elaborated in the following scene:
With this last question, which one may imagine rhetorically redirected to Broadway theatergoers still offended by their familial proximity to the chimpanzee, O'Neill broadens the reach of his evolutionary argument to include the audience. Metaphorically, however, the ensuing dialogue between Yank and the prisoner-apes contains repeated allusions to their status as animals caged in by the dual constraints of capitalism and Christianity, which render them both inhuman and enslaved.
When Yank relates his humiliation at the hands of a "skoit," his fellow prisoners recognize Mildred Douglas's name, and explain to Yank that her father is "the president of the Steel Trust." One of the prisoners suggests Yank "join the Wobblies" (152) and proceeds to read from an editorial written by a Senator in the Sunday Times, condemning the IWW as "that devil's brew" (152) who
O'Neill again addresses audiences who would be familiar with such arguments, as intense debates over the evolution/creation controversy had been raging in the press for years. The fundamentalist preacher William B. Riley's book The Menace of Modernism (1917) had activated a whole new generation of fierce anti-Darwinists, who connected evolution with anarchy and intellectuals, and claimed it was corrupting schoolchildren.39 In his many tours across the United States, Riley, along with William Jennings Bryan, turned evolution into a political touchstone. O'Neill's invented editorial was written with the rhetorical vehemence common to orators such as Riley and Bryan, who would later become the lead prosecutor in the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925.
To Yank, however, these ideas constituted real news, and even though he "can't read much," he "sits, the paper in the hand at his side, in the attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker.'" Moments later he "jumps to his feet with a furious groan as if some appalling thought had crashed on him . . ." (154). As if evidence of the pose's power, Yank is able suddenly to parse the conflicting philosophies behind the Senator's words and see his own place in the structural realities of humanism, in which the tenets of evolutionary movement are once again manipulated into a social context where the powerful ironically retain their status as "God's masterpiece." This revelation defuses Yank's anger against the comparatively inconsequential Mildred and refocuses it onto the institutional power of the capitalist. If Mildred's father is the symbolic patriarch of a hypocritical society that scorns the worker at the same time it benefits from his animal strength, Yank can use that strength against his oppressor. He now embraces the designation "hairy ape" and begins to bend open the bars of his cage. Soon "his position is parallel to the floor like a monkey's" and, as the curtain begins to fall, the "bar bends like a licorice stick under his tremendous strength" (154).
Under the false impression that the IWW is a clandestine terrorist organization, Yank pays a visit to their "cheap, banal, commonplace, and unmysterious" (155) headquarters, "convinced" that its ordinary appearance "is all camouflage" (156). Hoping to interest the members in his scheme to "blow it offen de oith—steel—all de cages—all de factories, steamers, buildings, jails—de Steel Trust and all dat makes it go" and then "tell [Mildred] de hairy ape done it" (158), Yank presents himself as being "wise to de game": "Can't youse see I belong? Sure! I'm reg'lar. . . . Aw, forget it! I belong, see?" (157). Mistaking Yank's newfound identity as a "hairy ape" for the flimsy disguise of an undercover agent, the mocking chorus of bureaucratic functionaries throws him out on the street at the command of their Secretary, who extends Mildred's dehumanizing insult from the realm of the body ("filthy" and "hairy" refer mostly to Yank's physical appearance) to that of the mind, suggesting Yank's definitive exclusion from the realm of discourse: "Oh hell, what's the use of talking? You're a brainless ape" (159).
After Yank's rejection by the Wobblies, O'Neill places him one last time in the Thinker pose, but the foundations of the humanist ideal it represents (grounded as they are in language) begin to crumble under the pressure of his angry growl. This soon turns to primate "gibbering" and nostalgia for a lost reality in which man and machine were undifferentiated:
When the violent strength Yank associated with his primate self fails to help him achieve a sense of belonging, we find him once again absorbed in thought, but this time O'Neill lets Yank approximate the Thinker pose only briefly, amending the statue's contemplative stance to gibber, ape-like, at the moon, thereby destroying any illusions of humanist propriety still ascribed to the pose.41
In Bogard's critique of the Rodin trope, he assumes The Thinker's "evolutionary significance" inheres in the representation of "mind triumphing over brute force," thus reifying the concept of "mind" while animalizing the figure's powerful body under the mythical sign of the brute:
Bogard's references to evolutionary movement are typical of humanist misunderstandings that conflate biological descent with ideas of social progress, and substitute linear schemes (the ladder metaphor) for rhizomatic models. The fact that Yank doesn't seem to fit squarely into any one of the pose's layered iterations—sculptural, theatrical, human, or animal—suggests that O'Neill reads identity as an always incomplete and fragmented process, a function of continuous, open-ended evolution rather than a series of fixed increments along a line of pre-established ontological positions.
Furthermore, when Bogard asserts that "Rodin's bronze [. . .] is far from pessimistic, and considering the course Yank is to follow, questions may be raised as to the appropriateness of its ironic use" (246-247) he implies that it is Yank's "failed" search for transcendence, rather than the myth of humanism motivating it, that warrants pessimism. This persistence of the humanist ideology—its conflation with the "real"—allows Bogard not just to overlook, but to dismiss entirely an essential underpinning of O'Neill's argument. It is the reader's, viewer's, or even critic's insistence on clinging to this ideological pose, despite its ill fit, that results in primitivist misreadings such as Bogard's, for what O'Neill stages in the final scene of The Hairy Ape is nothing less than the death of the humanist ideal itself.
The fleeting (and soon corrupted) image of The Thinker is, in fact, the only remaining vestige of this ideal in the entire play, and its waning performativity is matched by Yank's relinquished simulation—if not the statue's own history. In the modern world of The Hairy Ape the human subject is already extinct; New York is now the home of animals and automatons, actors and effigies, whose histories might be forged through a "new language of kinship," as O'Neill himself once imagined.
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