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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 XI.
"Prize fighting, though common enough in the early 1890s," writes Charles Musser, "existed outside the law in every state and territory of the Unites States. Fights were generally arranged clandestinely and conducted in out of the way places" (36). As Musser details in his annotated filmography of Edison shorts, early film production in the United States was inspired by popular performance practices of all kinds, from the muscular postures of strong man Eugene Sandow (an inheritor of Ducrow's poses plastiques) to exotic dancers and animal acts. It was a short journey from the burlesque stages of New York City to Edison's studios in West Orange, New Jersey, and thus we possess a rich visual index of turn-of-the-century theatrical tastes, documented through the pathbreaking technology of the kinetograph camera. While live boxing matches between human beings may have been officially prohibited, nonhuman animals were regularly set against one another in the ring. From the entrenched pleasures of cockfighting to the unique experience of boxing cats, live animals performed for human audiences seeking violent spectacle, or, at the very least, its illusion.
One of the very first "films" ever made is titled Monkey and Another, Boxing (1891). Nonhuman primates paved the way for a human entry, Men Boxing, which followed shortly thereafter, also in 1891. By the next year, Edison had made significant improvements to the kinetograph, such that the films he produced now qualified, according to Musser, as "the first modern motion pictures" (73, 75, 80). It is in this way that Boxing (1892) became the very first American movie. More films along these lines appeared in 1894, when Edison opened the Black Maria, the first studio devoted solely to film production. Boxing matches were among the most common film events, and boxers gained a legitimate appeal as cinematic subjects (they were, one might venture, the first American film stars) even as their charismatic presence in actual boxing matches remained illicit.58 Nonhuman animals (primarily felines and primates), however, prevailed at the theater as well as the film studio: In 1894, "Professor Welton's Trained Cats" attracted large crowds at New York's vaudeville houses; the feline pugilists were named after human boxing stars and matched against each other, delivering gloved blows. Similarly, "Alleni's Boxing Monkeys" could be seen for 10 cents at Huber's Museum on 14th Street (Musser 87-123 passim).59
After boxing was legalized in 1896 and could be performed in front of live audiences, Edison soon began to copyright and distribute boxing films, which played to large audiences across the country and around the world, culminating in an 1899 series featuring heavyweight world champion James J. Jeffries (Musser 505-509). In 10 years, boxing had metamorphosed from a back alley activity to become mainstream American entertainment. In the years preceding O'Neill's play, boxing moved from its initial association of masculinity and physical prowess with animality to a new obsession linking all these qualities with race.60 The first African-American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, held his title from 1908-1915, causing outrage among fans looking for the "Great White Hope," a Caucasian boxer who could defeat him. When Johnson once again prevailed against the former champion, Jeffries, on 4 July 1910, race riots broke out across the country. Five years later, after Johnson was finally defeated, he entered the vaudeville circuit and worked as an entertainer for the rest of his life, much of it spent overseas, where his "unforgivable blackness" had forced him into exile.61
Boundaries between actor and athlete (and, at times, animal) were commonly blurred in this era, as stars of sport performed on stage in theatrical venues, as well as in front of the camera. Ronald Adair, the actor who played Tarzan in the ill-fated Broadway premiere of 1921, had boxed in vaudeville sketches as well as championship contests in London for years before he came to the United States to take on the role of the ape-man cum aristocrat.62 The Brooklyn-born Jewish actor Louis Wolheim (according to Bird, newly authorized to represent a "human being" on Broadway, though the role he landed would complicate her claim) played Yank in the Provincetown production of The Hairy Ape and reprised the role on Broadway and in cross-country tours. Wolheim started off his career in performance as a star football player and boxer at Cornell; his broken nose and rough appearance (maintained, in part, through a love of barroom brawls—"once, when Wolheim was fighting, it took four policeman to stop him") won him the lead role in O'Neill's drama, though they belied his academic credentials, which included a degree in math and a facility with languages: "He spoke French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish and had translated several plays" (Shafer, 26, 24, and passim).63
Representations of Wolheim in the role of Yank often emphasized the performative nature of his belligerence as well as his mindfulness, calling attention to both as culturally coded poses (see Fig. 19). This visual iconography linked man and ape to a history of popular American entertainment that figured race and species as differences that could be performed, projected, or deflected by a variety of actors, both human and animal. (Yvonne Shafer reports that one audience member imagined Wolheim had "been caught and tamed in the wilds of Pago-Pago, Samoa and imported especially to play his part" [24].) At the same time, entrenched dualisms of mind and body, intellect and instinct, were complicated by ongoing and highly publicized debates about the validity of evolutionary theory, placing primate kinship and its African origins at the center of humanist anxieties. Brute or Brother? The stakes involved in this false choice were at an all-time high.
XII.
Yank's deliberative answer to this question evolves in visual terms that slowly give way to a vanishing point. Homeless and abandoned, Yank begins to adapt by aestheticizing what was once his natural environment:
Yank's relationship to his labor and its products had begun as an insistent self-affirmation ("I'm steel—steel—steel!" [129]) and metamorphosed into a violent alienation ("Steel! It don't belong, dat's what! [154]). What had once been the core of his being was now the machinery of his oppression; steel was the material with which capitalists manufactured power in the form of "cages, cells, locks, bolts, [and] bars" (154). But near the end of his journey, as Yank looks out at the skyscrapers and oceanliners, he sees past their material substance and social significance to view them in the mode of landscape, where, rather than marring the beauty of sunrise, they enhance it. Moreover, Yank momentarily inserts himself into this modern landscape as figure, with the natural pleasures of sunshine, clear skies, and warm breezes transforming what was once an inhospitable environment to a fully-realized romantic scene.
That Yank works through his newly-mastered ability—only to reject it—in front of the gorilla's cage at the zoo is a pointed choice for O'Neill. As Malamud reminds us, the zoo is a place where "spectators [. . .] regard unimpeded, imperiously, omnivorously, masters of all they survey" (229). Yank concurs that this is "great stuff," and even comes to acknowledge Paddy's point of view as "de right dope," yet while he "gets it" he can't "get in it," he can't "belong." Once he arrives at the zoo, these representative strategies are no longer beneficial to his survival, for under their authority the gorilla (along with Yank himself) risks being framed as a colonial object. As Yank moves between scenes 7 and 8—from morn to midnight, from downtown to uptown, from sunrise in Battery Park to twilight at the Bronx Zoo—he begins to replace the static perspectives of landscape with the mobile and potentially liberating practices of performance, transforming the taxonomic logic and pictorial organization of the zoo into the three-dimensional, intersecting gazes and exchanges of power that operate in a contact zone.
It is within this experimental dynamic that Yank learns the epistemology of the cage, its power to create (or mirror) knowledge through the mechanics of enclosure:
Despite his confusion, Yank's analytical abilities (and the ethical conclusions he draws from them: "It's all wrong, ain't it?") are moving him toward a fully-fledged, adaptive strategy for "belonging." When he witnesses the ideological framing properties of humanism literalized by the zoo, he is able finally to understand the symbolic nature of his own framing; for the first time, Yank is able to view himself from Mildred's perspective, and even to exceed it, making sense of her fear while pointing out its misplaced cause: "She wasn't wise dat I was in a cage, too." Here Yank begins to operate in the contact zone as a mobile, autonomous agent, able to anticipate, manipulate, and perform exchanges of power. He is about to become an actor.
As a scientist, Yerkes was convinced that "both zoological parks and circuses have the great advantage of [. . .] affording abundant opportunities for companionship and display. The great apes," he declared, "have an innate love of acting. They delight in attracting attention and with visitors before them they are at their best" (226). This claim, which offers a conveniently simplistic view of acting, is at odds with MacNeice's more cynical evaluation of zoo animals' relation to the cage/stage: As "professional animals," he writes, "they have been removed from the flux of life, from making their own living in the jungle, into a steady and one-sided existence where their job is merely to be on show. Consequently, like professional actors, they often become very dull" (31).
Ensnared in the contradictions of colonial exhibition, the primates' compulsory (and we must assume, professional) performance enacts a variety of theatrical speciation that fosters the kinds of misrecognition so typical of the "imperialist gaze":
Following this outburst, in which Yank becomes conscious of his own cultural hybridity ("I belong wit 'em—but I don't, see? Dey don't belong with me, dat's what"), he explains to the gorilla that "Tinkin' is hard" as he "passes one hand across his forehead with a painful gesture" (162), a far more conventional index of the vicissitudes of thought than the Rodin posture—one that might, in fact, appear on the naturalist stage.
Here O'Neill overtly changes the way Yank has been represented since his assignation with Mildred; his action, once peripatetic, is now primarily verbal—thinking is translated from formal pose to active discourse in Yank's long, speculative monologue, while the gesture that accompanies it exists within, rather than alongside, the dramatic narrative. In its final appearance on stage, the Rodin posture is merely derivative, "much the same" rather than "exact." Just as audience members and critics had stumbled upon the trap of humanism embedded in the extra-dramatic Thinker pose, Yank must now struggle to recognize and interpret the various poses performed by the gorilla (from his asymptotic Thinker to the "attitudes" of the chest-beating sequence) in the significatory abyss of the laboratory/zoo/circus/theater, where essences give way to roles, animals become actors, and experience is continually reframed as performance.
Remarkably undaunted, Yank "goes on gropingly," developing what Chaudhuri calls "a construction of the animal as fundamentally and blessedly territorial, unalienable, beyond the reach of the debilitating geopathologies of modern human beings" (146).
Yank moves from a fantasy of the gorilla's glorious past as "King of the Jungle," exempt from the corruptions of civilization, to a realization of his own distance from the humanist ideal. His incipient self-image as someone who can only "make a bluff at talkin' and tinkin'" and "a'most git away wit it—a'most!" is reminiscent of a figure known in postcolonial studies as the "mimic man." Bhabha develops the idea of colonial mimicry and the "metonymy of presence" it produces around this very figure, which originates in V.S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967): "We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World" (146). Like the hybrid ape-man, a theatrical type that originated with Caliban, these figures, according to Bhabha, "are the parodists of history" in its official appearance as an authorized text. And like Yank in his final performance, "they inscribe the colonial text erratically, eccentrically across a body politic that refuses to be representative, in a narrative that refuses to be representational" (88).
While linking the "form of difference that is mimicry" with the phrase "almost the same but not quite," Bhabha reapplies this concept to the discourse of race as the amended "almost the same but not white" (89). Here we see the effects of the "colonialist gaze" (in Bhabha's terms) that reifies the distance from white to black, male to female, master to slave, human to nonhuman, while purporting simply to measure it. The uncanny echo of Yank's anguished "a'most!" with Yerkes's "almost human" slogan suggests a related "metonymy of presence" within the forms of difference produced by humanism, especially those that legislate primate kinship: almost the same but not quite human. This is the discursive subtext of the "hairy ape" epithet.
By referring to himself as "de joker," a multivalent term that brings to mind not only the postcolonial "mimic man," but also a number of theatrical antecedents—from early clown and slave figures to the stock characters of harlequin and trickster—Yank announces his entrance onto the stage of humanist subjectivity. As the joker—a "wild card" character who can masquerade as, or mimic, any other card in the deck—Yank embraces the power of impersonation, or camouflage, the instinctual posing that allows for adaptation and survival in a changing environment. The unmediated "brute force" he had previously and unsuccessfully relied upon to protect and define him has now been supplanted by the notion that power—of all kinds—must be performed in order to take effect.
By the end of the drama, Yank understands that performances of self are necessarily partial and, by definition, strategic: "Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask" (Bhabha 88). Only the mask itself is essential.
XIII.
For the rest of the monologue, Yank's primitivist fantasy of the gorilla as "de champ of de woild" (stoker shorthand for "The Heavyweight Champion of the World") structures his plan for revenge. But because he feels excluded from linear paradigms of history that signify "progress" ("I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nothin' dat's comin', on'y what's now"), Yank turns to an episodic model of action, one where it is "always now": performance. Convinced of his pre-rational, pre-literate, jungle-bound "belonging" with the gorilla ("Sure! Yuh get me. It beats it when you try to tink it or talk it—it's way down—deep—behind—you `n' me we feel it. Sure! Bot' members of dis [the "Hairy Apes"] club!"), Yank "laughs" and then continues "in a savage tone":
By transforming the static frame of zoological display into the action-filled arena of the boxing ring, Yank imagines the two primates performing their mute indignation to adoring spectators and great acclaim, as men like Jack Johnson had done. But although Johnson, the child of former slaves, achieved unprecedented celebrity as "the first African American pop culture icon" (Early) the price for economic freedom was a constant restaging of his own exclusion from the humanist ideal. Just when his fame threatened to reverse the racist effects of such performances, Johnson was convicted in 1913 under the Mann Act (also known as the "White Slave Traffic Act") for transporting a woman across state lines for an "immoral purpose," an absurd charge often used to censure miscegenation. Rather then serve jail time, Johnson fled. He returned to the United States in 1920, was imprisoned for ten months, and then released from jail in the summer of 1921, just before O'Neill, a boxing fan and frequent spectator at prizefights, commenced work on The Hairy Ape ("Unforgivable"; Bogard and Bryer 274).
Yank's true opponents in this "agonistic space [of] colonial authority" (Bhabha 121) are those who reinforce the interpellative power of society's steel enclosures, actual and symbolic. By prying open the lock on the gorilla's cage, Yank is defying the totalizing power of steel, a force he once believed he embodied:
In this parody of Johnson's triumphant and well-publicized release from prison ("Jack Johnson Free"), Yank revisits his own fateful stroll down Fifth Avenue with Long, which had ended in frustration, expulsion, and arrest, landing him in prison on Blackwells Island. The impenetrable, masked marionette chorus, who "seem[ed] neither to see nor hear him," had refused to participate in the symbolic exchanges of a "contact zone," repulsing Yank's angry lunges, verbal assaults, and demands for recognition: "Look at me, why don't youse dare? I belong, dat's me!" (148). Experts in the art of posing (like Mildred, only better), the chorus relied on the strategic essentialism produced by their white masks (see Fig. 20), which made them impervious to Yank's destructive rage.
Unshaven, with "the black smudge of coal dust" that "still sticks like make-up" (144) penetrating the skin around their eyes, Yank and Long appeared in stark contrast to the churchgoers and shoppers (in the stage directions, at least), whose capitalist camouflage granted them a "detached, mechanical unawareness" (147).64 This manufactured stance dissolves to ecstasy, however, when a woman notices a $2,000 item for sale in a storefront window, and, "with a gasp of delight," cries out "Monkey fur!" As with the earlier, pointed refrains of suspect terms, the "whole crowd of men and women chorus after her in the same tone of affected delight: Monkey fur!" (149). Ghoulishly stolen from the dead bodies of "poor, 'armless animals" (146) as Long explains to Yank, and "bathed in a downpour of artificial light" (144) from the furrier's window display, the animal hide is objectified by the marketplace diorama, where it is commodified as a "rich fur," obscuring the "social interactions among people and other animals" through which it is "recomposed," while "produc[ing] a story that is reticent, even mute, about Africa" (Haraway 27), the assumed provenance of the silent, slaughtered monkey.
While the denizens of Fifth Avenue had refused the symbolic, reciprocal exchanges Yank yearned for, the pleasure derived from their mere contemplation of commercial luxury goods adds to the "relentless horror" (147) O'Neill finds in their Frankensteinian appetite for acquiring body parts with which they can "keep their bleedin' noses warm!" (146). In Yank's fantasy revenge plot, however, the empty primate hide, stolen from its proper place and reappropriated as a colonialist object, is replaced by a living creature whose hirsute exterior cannot be separated so easily from his sui generis ability to signify. Like Johnson before him, Yank wants to perform his way out of the cage and onto the avenues of wealth and privilege, where he will be free to determine his own worth.
When Yank releases the gorilla, calling him "Brother," the animal "scrambles gingerly out of his cage" (162-63) and then
Able to look at a human being without the interceding view of the bars, presumably the first time the gorilla had done so since the moment he caught sight of his captor (all the gorillas who lived in the United States—there were very few of them at that time—had been captured in Africa, usually as juveniles, and transported overseas), the gorilla—who, when caged, seemed "as if he understood" (161)—must now make sense of Yank's quickly proffered hand and mocking tone of voice, which signify as non-verbal gestures of aggression, matching up with the direct and sustained eye-contact by which a challenge for dominance is initiated (see Fig. 21).
The ritual of the handshake, commonly understood to have evolved as a gesture revealing friendly intent, proof of the lack of a concealed weapon, is here bereft of its human meaning, and the word "brother," which suggests a relationship based on biological as well as racial, political, and spiritual kinship, gets lost in the mocking tones with which it is delivered. Yank's ability to talk, or at least make a bluff at it, is now his downfall. Like the term "brother," the word "order" is shared between the social and scientific realms, used in both the "secret grip" of homosocial organization and the hierarchies of animal taxonomy: humans and gorillas both "belong" to the Order Primate. But because the epistemology of the cage enforced a view of mimicry as a one-way street in which "savages and monkeys with no other strategies for relating to more sophisticated beings" were reduced to the techniques of "aping" (Goodall 132), Yank imagined the gorilla would "monkey" his own gestures, repeating them at least, even if he could not reproduce them.
Yank's assignation with the gorilla is a strangely literalized and reversed version of Paddy and Long's analysis of Mildred's interpellation. The one real opportunity Yank had to evolve was lost along with Mildred, who fainted before the prospect, thinking, according to Paddy, "she'd seen a great hairy ape escaped from the Zoo!" (141). The only physical embrace that occurs in the drama—a "murderous hug"—takes place between Yank and the gorilla, and its latent sexual connotations are fully acknowledged by the former, whose earnest if bellicose demeanor has, by the final scene, plunged to the unremitting depths of bald mockery, the linguistic equivalent of travesty: "Hey, I didn't say, kiss me."
While Mildred's interpellation of Yank as a "filthy beast" signaled his entrance into the symbolic order of humanism, Yank's interpellation of the gorilla frees the latter from that same order. While Yank once believed that his blackness, animality, and masculinity placed him at the apex of the industrialized world, only to discover that he was, in fact, its substrate, these same qualities, when reattributed to the gorilla by Yank, remove the stoker to a position that is ultimately feminized, with brotherly handshake turning instead to an imagined "kiss." A pallid Yank falls to the ground, just as Mildred did when she saw him for the first time; Yank, too, is now a poseur, and like Mildred, his pose collapses.
This series of transitive deflections—beginning with the seaman Cocky who calls Paddy an "'airy ape" in The Moon of the Caribbees, and moving through Mildred, Yank, and the gorilla—structures a "process of classificatory confusion" that Bhabha calls "the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse" (91). At the end of the line, the audience members must decide whether to maintain the pose or relinquish it, acknowledging themselves as "hairy apes" or leaving the theater convinced that Yank had failed in his attempt to become human.
In the end, of course, the gorilla achieves what Yank could not: he eludes the spectator's demands and quits the stage altogether, leaving Yank to perform the role of "hairy ape" in his place, a move Malamud describes as "the transposition of their situations" (142) that "appears to be a zero-sum enterprise: for the animal to go free, a man has to replace it in its cage" (140).
An exchange such as this has power enough within the dramatic narrative, but as a comment on the politics of spectatorship, O'Neill's message is clear: the "imperialist gaze" was as active in the "legitimate theater" as it was in the fairgrounds, and given the chance, the "monkey man" would just as soon exit "menacingly into the darkness" offstage—where his blackness would function as camouflage—as occupy a well-lit cage at the center of the action, where he would surely perish by play's end.
XIV.
The world champion Polish wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko (1881-1967), writes Graham Noble,
Zbyszko's protest for athleticism over "acting" made sense in the 1950s and '60s, when televised professional wrestling embraced lowbrow spectacle and featured outlandish personalities who lacked the classical training and well-rounded education enjoyed by early-twentieth-century Eastern wrestlers, who dominated the sport until World War I. But Zbyszko's international fame was the result of just such showmanship, often involving ethnically inflected, fixed matches that theatricalized wrestlers of all nationalities, from Turks to Scots (Noble, "Lion—Part II"). After winning the Greco-Roman world championship in Paris, Zbyszko moved to London in 1906, where he was under contract with the renowned British theatrical agent and producer Charles B. Cochran, who claims, in his autobiography Secrets of a Showman (1925), that Zbyszko—who "was of good family, well-educated—even cultured" (124)—was also "a splendid showman, and gave the public exactly what they wanted" (117).
The wrestler performed in music halls and other theatrical venues, including the London Pavilion, where he "had a standing challenge to meet all comers" (Cochran 118). Cochran hired various amateurs to take him on; of course, they all lost. In a well-publicized and sold-out match with the professional Russian wrestler Ivan Padoubny, Zbyszko won by default after his disqualified opponent played "a series of foul tricks, all the time growling out barbaric Cossack terms of abuse" (Cochran 122). Public response to this fight claimed it had been staged, and a later match with Turkish wrestler Kara Suliman in 1908 also came under accusation, investigations proving that this "wrestling farce" was a mere publicity stunt, a product of Zbyszko's "fake proclivities," though it was clearly Cochran who had masterminded the money-making scheme in which "two foreign wrestlers hoax[ed] the British public as it has not been hoaxed for many a long day" (Noble, "Lion—Part II").
When Zbyszko visited the United States, he encountered the Iowan Frank Gotch, who played in the modern "catch-as-catch-can" style that Zbyszko and other wrestlers of his era deplored. Graham recounts one particularly memorable match between the two, "held at the Chicago Coliseum on June 1, 1910":
The resemblance to O'Neill's scene is undeniable: the naïve Yank "holds out his hand" (163) only to be sprung upon by the ape, who is clearly playing by a different set of rules. Yank is down for the count in a matter of seconds.
It is possible that O'Neill had read about this contest in the newspapers at the time, as the press covered Zbyszko's American career with zeal. If not, the wrestler was obviously on O'Neill's radar years later, while writing The Hairy Ape. Zbyszko had returned to the United States in 1920 after being imprisoned in Russia as a spy during World War I; he worked to get himself back in shape, began to play matches in New York City, and by 1921 was again the world champion (Noble, "Lion—Part IV"). Articles on Zybszko's fights appeared almost weekly in the New York Times, and on 15 May 1921 he was featured on the front page, with the enlarged headline "Champion at 42 Years" (Rice 1). More articles arrived in late November and early December, as Zybszko defended his title against Ed "The Strangler" Lewis, performing "before a crowd of about 7,000 at Madison Square Garden" ("Zbyszko Retains Wrestling Title" 23).
On 1 January 1922, just as O'Neill was finishing his first draft of The Hairy Ape, an illustrated feature on Zybszko, "There Was No Faking When Zbyszko Wrestled for his Life," appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune with the following analysis of the Gotch fiasco:
A claim that O'Neill had consciously worked the Zbyszko detail (with all its attendant meanings and nuances) into the play is supported by the language nationally-syndicated sports writer and cartoonist Robert Edgren used to describe the wrestler. Reminiscent of O'Neill's descriptions of the stokers in scene 1, Edgren's Tribune article envisioned Zybszko as "a throwback to the time of the cave men. Only 5 feet 9 inches tall, he is gigantic in breadth and thickness, long armed, enormously muscled. In strength he is more like a gorilla than an ordinary man" (A3).
The thematic associations with O'Neill's play even transcend Edgren's fortuitous invocation of the gorilla: The real focus of the feature was the story of Zbyszko's match against the Russian Alex Aberg while the former was imprisoned on suspicion of spying during World War I. Removed from his cell in the internment camp, Zbyszko was transported to a stage in Petrograd where he was forced to "prove his quality." If he "lost the match, he should be executed immediately." Despite the fact that Aberg filled the audience with "several hundred soldiers" whom he had paid "to root for him," Zbyszko prevailed, and "running to his corner [he] tore open a bag containing a thousand rubles and threw the money into the crowd. While the soldiers scrambled for it Zbyszko made his escape" (A3).
With "typing and revising still to be done" on the play, as O'Neill wrote to George Jean Nathan on January 2, it seems likely that the many discourses surrounding the Zbyszko phenomenon—chief among them the ambiguous and potentially subversive quality of performance itself—found their way into The Hairy Ape, helping to structure the looming questions posed by the final scene. "I have not hesitated to use everything I could find in the theatre or life which could heighten or drive home the underlying idea," O'Neill wrote, explaining to Nathan that the play was "a large experimental departure from the form of all my previous work" (Bogard and Bryer 161).
XV.
While The Hairy Ape's last scene unites the recurring structural rhymes of prison and zoo so central to O'Neill's expressionist stage picture, the tropes give way, in the drama's final moments, to yet another symbolic pairing: the deceptively euphonious cage and stage. These sites find their common ground in Yank's ambiguous "demise," performed under a steel proscenium, and behind steel bars, as a play-within-a-play, titled, according to the zoological signage, "Gorilla." The melodramatic performance begins "with sudden passionate despair," as Yank laments,
Yank's command performance participates in a popular nineteenth-century tradition Jane R. Goodall calls "savage pantomime": "The savage was a paradigm in search of supporting evidence," she explains, "and those imported to provide it were being co-opted into an already defined role in which behavior had to be repeated to order, so that the slide from exhibition to performance to fully fledged pantomime was almost inevitable" (82). It is no surprise, of course, when we discover that Yank's "savage" transformation into "a queerer kind of baboon than ever you'd find in darkest Africy" (140), was not, as various critics have claimed, political, existential, or psychological, but, in fact, utterly theatrical.
As a performative "zoo story," The Hairy Ape ironically "situates itself against the zoo—resisting it, subverting it, deconstructing it." Malamud's paradigm, within which O'Neill's play may be placed, "does not posit a voice the zoo could claim as its own: rather, it displaces and replaces the zoo in one motion. The zoo story exists instead of going to the zoo" (55). In Yank's seemingly debased performance, "mediated by the dynamics and aftereffects of imperial development," the beleaguered stoker has finally realized (and thus exposed) the kind of amusement demanded by the "legitimate theater" audience's "omnivorous spectatorial gaze" (Malamud 57).
If, in the typical zoo story Malamud analyzes, "the denouement is death" (56), and "the very fabric of representation itself [. . .] embodies and ensures the exclusive voice of the dominant system out of which it emerges" (58), O'Neill undermines that exclusiveness in the literal and figurative expression of Yank's last sentence ("Ladies and gents, step forward and take a slant at de one and only—one and original—Hairy Ape from de wilds of—" [163]), where the "metonymy of presence" so characteristic of colonial mimicry produces its dizzyingly layered "substitutive chain" (Bhabha 89, 91).
While Yank speaks "in the strident tones of a circus barker" (impersonating Paddy's earlier impersonation of the Second Engineer, whom he imagines has taken on the role of a circus barker advertising Yank's feral performance in the stokehole), he also plays the advertised ape, whose authenticity is announced in sideshow terms that undercut its pretense to authority. "The desire to emerge as `authentic' through mimicry," Bhabha claims, "is the final irony of partial representation" (88). This double-casting is heightened by the citational nature of Yank's speech, delivered behind a sign that proclaims he is a gorilla: Is the circus barker himself the "savage pantomime" artist, and the ape his subaltern, or is the primate his own double, performing across the imagined divide between human and nonhuman? The "metonymies of presence" that structure this moment occur at the boundaries of identity and essence; this is where the hybrid ape-man—who is always already an actor—operates.
The culminating dash that (dis)closes this representation, visible only to the reader, indicates an interruption—a conventional dynamic of written dialogue—but because Yank's monologue is punctuated, ultimately, by death (or, intriguingly, its performance), O'Neill deconstructs the very idea of linguistic interruption, positing instead the kind of rupture with signification that "achieves an interplay between presence and absence" (Norris 21). For the spectator, however, the (un)voiced dash opens up a perspective where the semiotics of the theater—its substitutive, if not sacrificial, logic—intersects with the history of colonialist performance to produce a spectral présence Africaine.68 Figured by the hegemonic power of the zoo and its various analogues, this condemning trace, eerily sensed throughout the drama though lingering at the threshold of visibility, ultimately emerges from a text that, in the words of Margot Norris, "force[s] us to read ourselves [. . .] to listen to the voice of our own beast" (21).
"The menace of mimicry," writes Bhabha, "is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority" (88). Is Yank dead, or just posing, like the "caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed" (Norris 53)? Will he, too, once the lights go down, "shuffle off menacingly into the darkness," "free to moider" Mildred, or better yet, her father? Or is Yank now Mildred's true "match," a poseur par excellence? Are the "dialectics of immolation" (Haraway 31) that take place between Yank and the gorilla the aforementioned "star bout dat'll knock `em [the theater audience] offen deir seats," with Yank unwittingly felled by his mockingly civil handshake? Or have the primates actually colluded to give the contest its sensational appearance, splitting the box office as Zbyszko and Padoubny had done when they fleeced a British public hungry for "savage pantomime"? Does the "hairy ape" at last "belong" because he has learned, once and for all, to adapt and survive in the dissimulating environment of the stage?
The metatheatricality of the zoo scene frustrates closure, refusing to provide an answer. The whole play, in fact, is theatricalized to such a degree, and is so deeply allusive, that it constantly verges on metatheatricality. By highlighting the fungible nature of man and ape on the carnival stages of humanism, O'Neill demonstrates how the interrelated generic and ontological instabilities generated by "primate dramas" plot their own form of revenge on the theater audience.
XVI.
For Yank, and the modern subjects he represents, primate kinship constituted an overdetermined and ongoing méconaissance that many insisted was tragic. In Almost Human, Yerkes (soon to be considered the world's foremost expert on primate behavior) declared, "the history of the gibbon, the orang-utan, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla in traveling shows [. . .] has been a series of tragedies" (222), but perhaps "most tragic of all is the history of the gorilla's relations to man" (223).
Historically, drama critics have tried to understand The Hairy Ape, too, as a modern tragedy, in line with O'Neill's attempts to bring classical form into dialogue with twentieth-century American concerns. From its very first reviews—Startk Young finds "pathos, confusion, and tragedy" in the final scene, and a "tragic unity" in Yank's "body, mind and soul" (43)—to the most recent scholarship in all its diversity, the consensus that the play is tragic continues to hold.69 In 1946, The Hairy Ape was included in an anthology of world drama under the category "Expressionistic Tragedy" (W. Clark 1007) and by 1960 it was featured in another anthology titled Tragedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism (Levin) where it was listed alongside Sophocles Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Othello, and Ibsen's Ghosts. This view of the play survives despite its subtitle, "A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes," which is often omitted (as it was when the play was included in the Concise Anthology of American Literature [McMichael and Leonard]), overlooked, or understood solely—like the Rodin pose—as ironic.
The sensationalist descriptor "ancient and modern" was used commonly in nineteenth-century advertising for circuses and sideshows, as well as in the titles of "educational" texts, including scientific and historical tracts. It also featured in museum exhibits, such as those offered by P.T. Barnum at his American Museum in New York, which operated from 1841 to 1865. Barnum's weekly column for the New York Mercury, "Ancient and Modern Humbugs of the World," which ran from 1864-65, promised an "insider's look" at the frauds of nineteenth-century American culture, and complemented articles on other "suspect activities," such as "blackface and boxing" (Cook, back cover, 10). This idiomatic phrase signals The Hairy Ape's performative interventions in natural history at the same time that it places "ancient and modern" in dialogue within the realm of dramatic genre. This is particularly relevant for O'Neill, whose dramaturgy couples ancient and modern forms—the productive action of the "comedy of ancient and modern life" to which he refers—while critiquing both through the play's persistent interrogation of fraudulent binaries.
Of course, it is easy to see why the play would be viewed as tragic. Yank, the presumed protagonist, embarks on a heroic, self-revelatory journey, moving through a series of reversals that lead inexorably (or so we are meant to believe) to a final scene of recognition and suffering that ends in death. The stokers chant together as would a Greek chorus, and, later in the play, the chorus of prisoners reflects the concerns of a disgruntled populace critical of the abuse of power. In the classical choral exodus, however, man recalls his proper place in the universe and returns to it. His privileged position in this world is maintained through the exclusion of "nonhuman" others (primarily women and slaves) who do not qualify as citizens.
Through his use of the animalized chorus, O'Neill subsumes the stokers' ethnic differences within a powerful "sort of unity" (121) signaling at the play's outset his interest in subverting humanist paradigms. Identifying the number of dehumanized choral entities that populate the play—apes, slaves, robots, marionettes, monsters, and monkeys—brings O'Neill's critique of humanism into high relief, especially when viewed against the authoritative ground of the Greek standard. We are not surprised, therefore, when survival, extinction, and particularly adaptation—the analogous site of (meta)theatricality for O'Neill—emerge as structuring forces within the play.
O'Neill's revisions to tragic form culminate in the play's final scene, but unlike traditional tragedy, where violence and death occur offstage, Yank performs his spectacular, melodramatic death on the platform of the gorilla's cage/stage, which acts as a "portal" of sorts (reminiscent of Rodin's liminal Gates of Hell) through which Yank exits the social hierarchy of New York and enters the theatrical economy of species performance, the only site through which his "death" can properly be read.
We must also acknowledge the connection with previous animal choruses, such as Aristophanes, which begins to shed light on O'Neill's subtitle, where a play that poses as tragedy mysteriously promises comedy. Both unions (Mildred/Yank and Yank/Gorilla), however, fail to produce their desired (if delusional) bond of kinship, and fail as well to reproduce themselves through the biological processes of sexual selection. The socially productive pleasures of procreation so essential to classical comedy are translated here from their ritual efficacy to the hackneyed stages of "savage pantomime," where those whose bodies (or minds) fall too far from the humanist ideal must stage their own exclusion.
The purpose of both classical forms is, arguably, to uphold the conflation of identity and essence as the basis of human being. Comedy separates the terms through (mis)recognition but usually manages to restore them in seamless harmony; tragedy stages the rupture of identity and essence, also through (mis)recognition, but frames it as anomalous and in need of communal purgation in order to restore order to society. The metatheatricality of the final scene, in particular, insists not only upon the sustained analysis of these terms, rather than their comic or tragic synthesis, but replaces the humanist ideologies of recognition with the mutually constitutive action of interpellation, interrupting the conservative circularity of classical form to reveal a rhizomatic field of shifting and intersecting subject positions.
O'Neill, therefore, challenges the received views of primate kinship as either tragic (as Yerkes would have it) or comic (as most already believed), producing instead a "primate drama" organized around the imitative politics of the "almost human," its destabilizing doubleness and menacing theatricality enhanced by its refusal to resolve itself under the auspices of humanism. It is here that the productive pairings of comedy and the sacrificial substitutions of tragedy are ironized: In this Darwinian, as opposed to Divine, "Comedy," the primate actor has supplanted the classical protagonist (who need no longer be human) as well as the sacrificial animal from which tragedy takes its name. "Since Darwin," concludes Egil Törnqvist, in his illuminating study of O'Neill's "super-naturalism," "the ape is a more meaningful symbol than the goat" (144).
Finally, by situating his characters in a series of modern, metaphorical hells, O'Neill removes us from the classical world as well as the modernist stylistics of expressionism and transports us into the medieval cosmology of the mystery play, a processional drama framed by a fiery "hell-mouth," as is The Hairy Ape. By juxtaposing these dramatic forms and their attendant worldviews, O'Neill manages his usual critique of Christianity and capitalism while simultaneously skewering the humanist assumptions of both classical and modern forms, and by the end of the play has asserted the alternative model of the Darwinian "primate drama." Taking what he wants from classical, medieval, and modern traditions, O'Neill expands his domain of inquiry toward a more radical conception of what it means to be human, and to evolve.
XVII.
By comprehending the extent to which nineteenth-century representational practices are critiqued in O'Neill's play, we gain a window into the important links between evolution and performance that undergird much of the drama's political content. Indeed, O'Neill seems to figure (theatrical) modernism as the quotient of these interlocking values. Accordingly, he looks to performance as a mode of knowing and being in and of itself, where questions of ontology become politicized through their very enactment. Performance also emerges here as a model of history, but one in which the humanist mechanisms of inheritance have been interrupted by posthuman visions of kinship. "What emerges between mimesis and mimicry," writes Bhabha, is "a mode of representation that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model" (87). The mocking tones with which Yank executes his final performance seem to suggest that the play's prescribed, and strangely abstract, setting ("time—The Modern") is an era in which "the great tradition of European humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself" (Bhabha 87).70
In light of all the above, I suggest we reconsider not just the subtitle of O'Neill's play, but its title as well. In the tradition of naming plays after their protagonists, received knowledge would submit that the eponymous ape is Yank himself. Even critics like Malamud have conflated the Hairy Ape with Yank, who is then "pejoratively characterized with the titular metaphor" (135). Taking the evolutionary theme and hybrid form of the drama into account, however, suggests something quite different. Might it be possible that O'Neill's multivalent title refers not only to Yank, but to all the great apes represented or invoked by the drama, both human and nonhuman? If so, O'Neill deconstructs the oppositional pairing of protagonist and antagonist to reveal another fraudulent binary supporting the humanist agony Yank calls hell. In perhaps the most subversive gesture of the play, O'Neill joins together the stoker, zoo animal, and theater audience as members of the same club, the Hairy Apes, a group to which they may all, at last, "belong."
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