Unveiling Eugene O’Neill’s Long Journey into Night and John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints: A Comparative Examination through Julia Kristeva’s Concepts of Abjection and Melancholia
Prepared by the researche : Arezki KHELIFA – Associate-Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Letters and Languages, Mouloud MAMMERI University of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria
Democratic Arabic Center
Journal of cultural linguistic and artistic studies : Thirty-fourth Issue – December 2024
A Periodical International Journal published by the “Democratic Arab Center” Germany – Berlin
Journal of cultural linguistic and artistic studies
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Abstract
This article propounds a psychoanalytic reading of J. M Synge’s The Well of the Saints and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with reference to Julia Kristeva’s concepts of Melancholia and Abjection. Subsequent and distinguishable from the works of S. Freud and C. G. Jung, Julia Kristeva’s theory posits that language is, within a large societal and cultural context, requisite to the understanding and insightfulness into the darkest and most tortuous perceptiveness of the human psyche. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic premise is used in this article as key to identifying the invisible, disrupting and individualized force of the ‘other inside’ each character, and to examining how it can either offer opportunity for personality empowerment and identity stability or impel subjective uncertainty and impotence. Through my analysis, I have drawn parallel between Synge’s and O’Neill’s modern personages, who are engaged in comparable identity struggles, yearning for success and transcendence. The paper also articulates that notwithstanding Synge and O’Neill belongingness to two distinct modern literature backgrounds, they devised that the issue of identity predicament is induced by psychic turmoil.
Introduction
The Well of the Saints 1902 – 03, a three-act comedy, narrates the story of two blind mendicants: Martin and Mary Doul, living in a distant area and time in Ireland. Synge set it in remote past in order that he could question and subvert its dominant cultural codes and norms. To impel that subversion, J.M. Synge has used ‘blindness’ as a metaphor to address some major issues of Irish society like identity. A saint has restored sight to Martin and Mary by pouring holly water over their eyes. Unexpectedly, this would bring disruption, bereavement and dispossession to their new life. At the end of the play, Synge makes the Douls show partiality toward a reversion to their previous blindness.
As for Long Day’s Journey into Night, it tells the life story of the Tyrones, a typical Catholic Irish-American family. It may be considered as belonging to modern tragedy because its characters [James Tyrone, Mary and their sons: Jamie and Edmund] have acquired a certain tragic stature while being engaged in the quest for personal dignity and integrity. They have endured great suffering and pain while trying to engage in developing their individual identities that family immediate environment impedes.
In order to understand why Martin and Mary prefer reverting to blindness, why James Tyrone, his wife and Jamie fail to attain identity comfort, and or why Edmund succeeds, an appeal is made to Julia Kristeva theory about subjectivity/identity as here below explained.
Julia Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory is not ensconced within a specific discipline. Her theoritical “Nomadism” (Young, 3: 2005) can be said to have taken roots in old literary criticism that showed its limits because it asserted the principles of value, order, control and identity that had been the premises of bourgeois liberalism, alienating ‘Otherness’ and heading forward to establishing a centralized sameness. It was contested by the Russian Formalism which, for the purpose of showing the literariness of a work of art, precluded to the critic going beyond its content. Thus, Kristeva offered another criticism as a replacement for both the Old Criticism and the Russian Formalism. She underlines the fact that “a whole world of presuppositions of an economic, social, aesthetic and political order intervenes between us and them (the texts) and shapes our response.” (Hawkes, 127: 1977) She also advocates a new kind of subjectivity/identity, which embraces the ‘Other’. In one sense, she has induced the collapse of “the Enlightenment’s dream of discovering one story that can name us all” (Holand, 7: 1999). That dream of one same story to all humanity has crashed to leave space for a multitude of little narratives.
Kristeva endorses the study of the speaking being [subject/character] in relation to his surroundings to see what shapes, grants and generates the various meanings of a literary text. The speaking being is the place from which inner drives are discharged into the language, making it more expressive and revelatory. So, identity/subjectivity combines the perennially disagreeing but reconcilable inner [The Semiotic] and external [The Symbolic] worlds of any personality. Kristeva believes that the spoken words are always regulated by inner and external worlds. Language has significance only when energized by The Semiotic. The subject would come in touch with ‘Otherness’ after experiencing The Thetic Phase that corresponds to Freud’s oedipal stage or to Lacan’s mirror stage. Thereupon, s/he is introduced into the Symbolic realm, to which the Semiotic will remain a permanent and discrepant companion. Being in relation with others, the subject experiences, through the Transference Process, a to and fro of energy, desire and memory that will shape his/her future life and self-understandings. This unusual and uncustomary life often engenders sickly behaviours such as Abjection and Melancholia.
Abjection, whose striking case is the state of rejecting the mother by the child while constructing its identity, is a very difficult process; it helps revealing what Julia Kristeva calls the nocturnal power– the most intimate apocalypses of literary texts (McAfee, 50: 2004). At this point, the subject’s psyche experiences a double minded state [Longing for the narcissistic union with mother and or loathing her for one’s identity enhancement]. In all literature, that Kristeva considers to be mostly tales of sufferings, the characters (subjects) go through Melancholia. The melancholic/narcissistic depressed, for Kristeva in Soleil Noir or Black Sun (1987), is like an orphan in the Symbolic realm, for not having a sense of coherence, distinctness and self- identity. Driven by death drive, the sad, self-destructive and introvert melancholic may be secured to a more comfortable subjective dimension by the Imaginary Father.
Discussion
- Textual Transposition and Abjection in The Well of the Saints
The metaphor of blindness is the aesthetic praxis Synge employed to lay out the plot of The Well of the Saints. Blindness has been prevalent in European literature. In eighteenth century France, it was renown because of the removal of the cataract carried out by William Cheselden in 1728 (c.f. Schor, 90: 1999). This added to the enchantment of the Enlightenment philosophers about “The foreign spectator in an unknown country, and the man born blind restored to sight.” as Foucault remarks in Birth of the Clinic (Ibid. 92). Nonetheless, the ancient tale of Cupid and Psyche idealizes the blind narcissistic gaze of the lover.
Contiguous to Synge, Victor Hugo, in L’homme qui rit (1869), narrates a love story between Gwynplaine, a monstrous and disfigured man, and Déa, a blind woman, at the heart of which is a romantic pairing of opposites, referring to the binary thought of the Western world. In fact, Hugo might be thought to have reinvented the tale of The Beauty and the Beast, first consigned to literature by Gabrielle Susanne Barbot de Villeneuve in her La jeune américaine, et Les contes marins (1740). Gwynplaine, the Beast and Cupid show contrast and disjunction between a melancholic interiority and an exterior goodness. Synge seems to have transposed this in The Well of the Saints. Thus, Cupid’s erotic sensuality, Enlightenment naturalism, Kant’s autonomous free will, Hegelian’s externalization and Nietzsche’s internalization have, over two thousand years, forged the repressible Western character / subject, which both Kristeva and Synge assume that it can be transcended. The result would be the rehabilitation of the body and ecstasy of senses. (Schor, 109: 1999) Kristeva explains that when the forces of the abject break into the narrative via rhythm and obscene words, it is “the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure” (Kristeva, 206: 1982) that forces its way to the outer symbolic world. This corroborates the perpetual discordance between the other inside every subject and the dominant cultural discourse of the western world-the main claim of this article.
Now that the overall picture of the philosophical and cultural terrain is canvassed, it would be more perspicuous to readers to understand Synge’s thought, that endeavours to oppose subjective inwardness to the dominant and oppressing Western discourse. To start with, Act I opens by a very informative discussion between Martin and Mary Doul. It is set outside in an open space. Firstly, the two subjects/characters are blind though they were not born as such. Secondly, Synge makes them live together in order to induct and initiate other definitions to issues like love, gender, beauty and identity. Synge did probably not make the Douls blind at random. He might well have wanted to reject the misogynous love western culture has perpetuated from antiquity unto the modern era.
The other essential information of this opening discussion communes with jealousy, which, by reasonable assumption, can be the hidden side of the Douls’ love story. Unlike the western literature lovers whose lives are ruined by separation, Mary and Martin seem unable to assist one another out in that harsh peasant world of Ireland. This central jealous sentiment would provide guidance to our quest for bringing to surface either the abject or the melancholic others inside Mary and Martin.
At the beginning of the play, Martin has mentioned with high regard the name of Molly Byrne before his own wife. He even takes Molly’s defence when he says, “If it’s she does be telling she’s a sweet, beautiful voice you’d never tire to be hearing, if it was only the pig she’d be calling, or crying out in the long grass, maybe, after her hens” and adds in a very pensive way “It should be a fine, soft, rounded woman, I’m thinking, would have a voice the like of that.” (Act I) On the one side, these words may refer to the fact that Martin does not believe his wife, who unceasingly says she is more beautiful than Molly, and that she deserves to receive his entire attention. On the other side, it can be thought that Martin is longing for some unidentified lost object, which causes his subjective uneasiness. The gentle and delicious voice of Molly Byrne might evoke something to the ‘other inside’ Martin, whereas the queer cracked voice of his wife is repulsive to him. In order to come to an awareness of the ‘others inside’ the Douls, their obscure past, of which Synge did not write, should be explored.
During his childhood, Martin grew up receiving into his Chora the values and psychical marks from his family and his immediate environment before experiencing the Thetic phase and entering the Symbolic realm, wherein he would gain full identity recognition and separate from his abject mother. He observes that, “for the time I was a young lad, and had fine sight, it was the ones with sweet voices were the best in face.” (Act I) He had known the main traits of beauty before he became blind at twelve or more. The unfortunate result had been that blindness came in some abrupt way to disrupt the process of Martin’s identity construction by suspending his entrance into the Symbolic world. He cannot be on the borderline of the Semiotic and the Symbolic, for the first dominates; he would fail to enjoy a joyous life.
As a consequence, he has to regenerate another identity taking into account his new handicap, blindness. Because he could not to this despondent situation, he left his family wandering in the seven counties of the east. On the roads, Martin tramps, looking for another identity, and always bearing inner indulgence and love toward his family, his land and his mother. This abjected mother is never banished from his inner world. He is “like an orphan whose love for a lost mother swallows.” (Kristeva, 46: 1991, my trans) This memory prompts altogether suffering, melancholy, exaltation and force inside him. He is a treacherous, brave and melancholic subject in process. He chooses eloping, carrying within himself his inner frustrations. On the roads, he might have met with Mary and married her. She is like him and has probably gone through the same experiences, for she informs us,“– and I a dark woman since the seventh of my age?” (Act I) Both of them have become strangers, disavowing their origins to become citizens of the world, cosmopolitans whose voices are used by Synge to subvert and implode the main cultural discourse in Ireland.
Mary brings some relief to Martin, but she also reflects his dark and misunderstood Semiotic realm. All the inconveniencies and anxieties inside him are transferred into Mary. Therefore, she may now stand for his abject mother. Although she is his wife, he oftentimes rejects her, makes fun of her and does not believe her talk about her physical beauty. She represents the hated body of the abject mother, which he must get free from in order to achieve identity comfort. For her part, Mary also sees him as the representative of the oppressing father. As a result, their relation is more and more tumultuous and turbulent.
Both of them would adopt different attitudes toward their sight recovery. Martin feels an inner fear while Mary proves to be very enthusiastic. A short while before the arrival of the saint, Martin’s excitement is being turned into a misunderstood hesitancy and uncertainty, wrought by the ‘other inside’ him. In this regard and with discontent, he confesses, “It’d be a long terrible way to be walking ourselves, and I’m thinking that’s a wonder will bring small joy to us all.” (Ibid) Contrary to him, Mary gropes up to Timmy imploring him, “You’re not huffy with myself, and let you tell me the whole story and don’t be fooling me more… Is it yourself has brought us the water?” (Ibid) Either Martin’s fear or Mary’s enthusiasm are generated by their Semiotic realms. Something inside them turned Martin from the state of excitement to that of doubt, and Mary’s tranquillity to agitation and extreme enthusiasm.
The sight recovery has occurred and pushed outwardly Martin’s and Mary’s inner frustrations. Martin has become delirious and raving and been vehemently destabilized by the inner feelings. He is now driven by his inner frustrations as if his old body is being disintegrated and replaced by another one. He is becoming vulgar for nothing is forbidden to the ‘other inside’ him, that now comes to outer life. Ruthless, he calls people around him “pitiful beasts”. The ‘other inside’ himself forces out those hidden obscenities and sexual frenzies. Martin does not know that he is not conforming to the social taboos about the issue of sexuality; all restraints and codes are being trampled by him.
The same would also happen to Mary though the ‘other inside’ her is not driven by sexual desires but by an inner image of a father who would help her to move onto another dimension of faith and happiness. Very similar to Martin, she has hated her blind husband because he could not secure her to this dimension, or assist her identity fulfilment. According to Kristeva, the return of the repressed – due to the sight recovery – makes the cosmopolitan subject in process either sexually perverted or ill. The subject in process is caught between deep-rooted interiorized parental prohibitions and the exterior pressions pent up inside itself. (Kristeva, 47 – 49: 1991, my trans) Both the pervert Martin and the sick Mary witness unfathomable disillusionment, and separate because of their altercation at the end of Act I.
From the moment Mary declares to her husband that, “I wouldn’t rear a crumpled whelp the like of you” (Ibid), Synge makes her invisible till the end of Act II. She is ill, for she is lonely, sad and introverted into her inner Semiotic world which cannot provoke eulogistic identity transformation. She refuses to bear a crumpled whelp – a child – to Martin, for she is now a psychotic, completely governed by her Semiotic. Her ugly Martin has not crystallized the image of the Imaginary Father who would help her understand the Symbolic, the external oppressing cultural world and be delighted on the borderline of both realms.
By contrast, Martin has set his frenzy and hysteria about sex and language free. He is a sexual pervert. His inner sexual desires are released. He calculatedly goes to work in Timmy’s forge because the fiancée, Molly Byrne, reflects the body he desires. Onetime he has diverted Timmy, whom he compares to an old scarecrow stuck down upon the road, and rushes toward Molly Byrne near the well. Disrespectful to all morals, he announces to her, “It’d be little wonder if a man near the like of you would be losing his mind. Put down your can now, and come along with myself, for I’m seeing you this day, seeing you, maybe, the way no man has seen you in the world. Let you come on now, I’m saying…” (Act II) Not minding what others would say, he has attempted to rape her for he takes her by the arm and trys [sic] to pull her away softly to the right. His words are generated by the Semiotic. He has waited a long time for seeing her. He has repeated the word “seeing” at least three times because it is the ‘other sexually pervert inside’ him who speaks now.
As to the comparison of Timmy to a scarecrow, it is “an unusual liberation of language” (Kristeva, 48: 1991, my trans). After his sight recovery, Martin very often speaks erotic, obscene and bizarre words. To Julia Kristeva, the ‘other sexually pervert inside’ Martin does not hear what it says. Therefore, these utterances do not horrify Martin nor make him feel remorseful (c.f. Ibid. 49).
Martin’s abusive use of his freedom would turn to a curse because Molly Byrne has declined his offer. Martin has sought to go back to Mary at the beginning of Act III. Just as Mary who has failed to grow onto a new joyous person, Martin, who is always bearing that narcissistic wound, needs to sink deeper into his psyche to attain identity comfort. For a time, he has believed himself to be a strong subject, but now things are reversed. He, in a firm manner, refuses to recover his sight a second time, an illustrating example of body destruction. When the saint starts to cure Mary, Martin strikes the can from the Saint’s hand and sends it rocketing across stage and defiantly says “… keep off now, and let you not be afeard; for we’re going on the two of us to the towns of the south… [sic]” (Act III) Martin and Mary might well be drowned and die for they have to cross deep rivers with floods in them. Despite this danger, they need to continue seeking a never-reached identity easiness; they know inside themselves that death only would put an end to their suffering. Thus, Martin and Mary have failed to resist the mainstream cultural discourse and sunk into a darker psychic insanity, a shelter against the dominant society. (Chase, 4: 1999)
Hence, the cosmopolitan who, for Kristeva, has “no father, no mother, no God and no master” (Kristeva, 35: 1991, my trans), can sum up the whole metaphoric message which is meant by Synge in The Well of the Saints. To subvert the mainstream Irish culture and identity, he combined blindness with vagrancy. By liberating the Douls from morality restrictions of the family, the playwright displayed the polymorphic identity representation he devised for his country. Thus, those wanderings and intensive freedom are used to set in motion some of the author’s new identity ideals. Being under the ecstasy of extreme pleasure and or foolishness, Martin and Mary are opposed to Timmy, the smith, and to the Saint, both of whom are powerful representatives of the millenary patriarchal system of the society.
Therefore, the ‘other sexually perverted inside’ Martin and the ‘other psychotic inside’ Mary are doomed to endure indifference, repugnance and misunderstanding from the external world. Their search for a new subjectivity/identity remains bound to the hidden but never forgotten parents. Though the Douls continue distancing from them, they idealize them. Martin hates and loves his abject mother. Mary is seeking her imaginary father to secure her to a more comfortable identity state. Both of them have not succeeded. Thus, they come back to where they started their identity quest. Synge reunites Martin and Mary at the end of the play, making them help each other before ineluctable death. Finally, it would be noteworthy to take note of Martin’s renewed sympathy toward Mary as an augury and contribution to the progress of feminist activism in the coming decades either in Ireland or in the Western world in general.
- Melancholia and Revolt in Long Day’s Journey into Night
This four act- play, posthumously published in 1956, is considered as an autobiographical text; Frederick Wilkins writes that “Granted, O’Neill is an autobiographical writer, perhaps more than any other” (Wilkins, 1: 1982). Eugene O’Neill has set the play in the Tyrones’ holiday house on August 1912. The whole story takes place the same day, from eight and a half in the morning till midnight. Analogous to O’Neill’s life, the play starts with an innocuous mood before ending in a severe awful one. The house has two distinguishable libraries. The sons’ contains books by Nietzsche, Zola, Stendhal, Schopenhauer, Marx, Engels, Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde and all the modern authors. The father’s one contains the works of Dumas, Hugo, Charles Lever and Shakespeare. O’Neill may hint to some intellectual and incompatible drives, opposing father Tyrone to his sons. O’Neill’s aesthetic image has always viewed the American family as being a source to great disappointment, not always meeting the expectations of its members.
While introducing the parents in Act I, O’Neill points to the Irish typical beauty of Mary, the mother. Her soft and sugary voice reveals a profound natal innocence seemingly preserved from the undesirable influence of the outer world. This may disclose Mary’s oppressive loneliness, as shown by her incapacity to control her long fingers. She feels humiliated and nervous toward this physical handicap. As for James Tyrone, the father, he is described as being simple, miser, slow, placid and serene. James’s personality seems to incarnate the Irish psychic heritage. O’Neill uses James’s erstwhile mind to challenge America’s mainstream discourse, corresponding to Jamie and Edmund.
Subsequently, uncovering the ‘others inside’ the Tyrones may help understand most of the family tergiversations and identity turmoil. The breakfast conversation between James and his wife builds up the reader’s mind about the two characters. For example, it shows that James Tyrone is voracious, suspicious about his sons, and distrustful to making bank bargains; he prefers to buy plots of land instead. As far as Mary is concerned, it informs that she hardly recovers from an illness. When the sons are introduced on stage, Jamie, the elder brother, shows a precocious decrepitude and health impairment though he resembles his strong father. The younger Edmund has inherited his mother’s personality traits; and like her but to a lesser degree, his hands reveal a nervous psychic state because of his tuberculosis. From the outset, O’Neill puts forth mutual accusations and guides the audience to the general mood of nervosas and suspicion which prevails throughout the whole play. The more the story moves forward, the more things grow complicated for each character.
To start with, the ‘other inside’ James Tyrone may have urged him to act in unusual ways with his wife and sons whom he displaced from hotel to another while he was tripping around the United States for his theatrical representations. In fact, James has made his family live in a very miserable way, for he has never thought of buying a house where the Tyrones would settle. This would perhaps have helped them to make friends and get neighbours; a fact which would have changed the course of their lives. He has also enough money, but never agrees to spend it inadvertently. Unlike middle class American citizen, he does not own a house so as to enjoy a sociable life and integrate main stream cultural structures. Moreover, he does not to trust the American economic capitalist model, for he prefers buying land instead of making bank bargains. Thus, his doubtful point of view toward mainstream social and economic discourse engenders a deep psychological trouble inside him. The genuine reality of James seems to be that he is condemned to be a miser and live in a nomadic way, touring over the United States of America as demonstrated below.
In Act IV, James Tyrone remembers his mother and family. This souvenir may explain his emotional distress. He narrates the story of his father who decided to go back to Ireland to die. It was up for him, a boy of ten, and his mother to secure family survival in America. He also affirms that encountering another person braver or kinder than his mother would be impossible. However, he also talks about her nervous dread, “…Her one fear was she’d get old and sick and have to die in the poor house…” (Act IV). According to Kristeva’s theory, James’s identity is shaped by his mother’s influence through the Transference Process which has transmitted a to and fro of energy, desire and memory into him. Like his mother, James Tyrone is a miser. His gluttony is due to the fact of desiring, like his mother, to preserve his health because he fears to be sent to the poor house. At ten, he would have started the process of founding his own identity by renouncing his identification to his abject mother. But, his father, who could have helped him achieving it, quitted home long ago. The result is that James has never succeeded to free himself from the influence of his adored but abjected mother. An ‘other melancholic inside’ himself is longing eternally for a narcissistic union with his mother. As adult, he continues to be that boy of ten whose subjectivity/identity is attuned to his mother’s; that is why he is unable of gauging the importance for a family to own a house, and for a father to be generous and lovable to his ill wife and sons. The ‘other narcissistic melancholic inside’ James would accompany him during his all life-time, always causing him trouble at home. According to Kristeva, James is, “The rooted, who is deaf to the disagreement,[sic] and the wanderer, whose disagreement imprisons,[sic] camp each in front of the other.” (Kristeva, 30: 1991, my trans) As a result, James would never succeed to offer emotional enthralment and love to his wife and sons.
For her part, Mary seems to be closer to her father than to her jealous mother who argued against her marriage with James, the actor. Her father loved her very much. She had been enjoying a quiet and stable identity state, which is to be spoiled by her husband. For Kristeva, Mary is considered as a subject in process on the borderline between the two realms of semiotic and symbolic before marriage, since she had succeeded to free herself from her mother’s first love and be secured to the Symbolic world by her father. Nonetheless, difficulties began to appear after her departure with James Tyrone. In fact, her nervosas started a short while before Edmund’s birth. Although she affirms, “I was so healthy before Edmund was born…” (Act II, ii), she has not been well as inferred. She has suffered from solitude because she was straggled from a hotel to another by her husband. In other words, Mary associates the claim of owning a real house to her father, the archetype of her identity stability. Whereas, she relates the wanderings- source to all family problems- to her husband.
Her life in the hotels, characterized by communication deficiency, has plunged her more into seclusion and lonesomeness. She is closed off and very solitary. According to Kristeva, an identity disaster is actually operating since the Semiotic world is becoming more prominent than the Symbolic one. The result is that Mary has been bearing a ‘psychotic other within’ her. In order to rehabilitate her identity stability, the ‘other psychotic inside’ Mary has to revolt against the Symbolic. This is why she recalls without interruption her dead father. She longs for him, for he at one time secured her to the symbolic and helped her live happy on the borderline between the two realms, the Semiotic and the Symbolic. Mary has also sought to bear children and be a mother. According to Kristeva’s theory, Mothering would help Mary to reconcile with Symbolic world.
However, Mothering alone is not sufficient for ensuring identity stability to a woman. Mary has to be of body and mind -begetting children and having a career. Her husband has not offered her suchlike possibility. Added to this, her second child, Eugene, died from an illness which Jamie had perhaps transmitted to him. These two events have impeded the success of her psychic revolt. As a consequence, the ‘other psychotic inside’ assails her, forcing her to take drugs. Thus, she endures a real regression, wishing to die. She confesses that “I hope, sometime, without meaning it, I will take an overdose. I never could do it deliberately. The blessed Virgin would never forgive me, then” (Act III). Even religion would not save her. So, her mental state deteriorates more and more. Despite her family philanthropy, Mary has failed to attain a sense of coherence and self-confidence which would help her merging into the Symbolic realm and be happy. Mary is driven to self-annihilation by the Death Drive. She confesses, “Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was happy for a time.” (Act IV) A short time after meeting James, she began to experience identity predicament, making her have a reclusive desire for death. She feels indifference toward life like Meursault, Camus’ estranged character. Like Meursault, Mary has known death through her father. The ‘other psychotic inside’ her is withal not shocked by Edmund’s illness for “Shocks are for consciousness” says Julia Kristeva (41: 1991, my trans). Mary is condemned to die, since “The murderous and irreconcilable singularity which inhabits inside subjects” like her “would not permit them to found a new world” (Ibid. 45, my trans). Resolute, Mary continues destroying herself, for the Symbolic dominant world rejects her. Her husband cannot save her from self-annihilation.
As to Jamie’s case, his health impairment informs about a destabilised psychic state due to an identity disaster; though, full family support has benefited him. He is portrayed by O’Neill as having his father’s physical gauge. He was sent to a university and could have played theatre roles. But, he has managed to mishandle everything. At the age of thirty three, Jamie remains a jobless drunkard actor who is coiling around family home. Actually, he experiences a psychological distress which first appeared when Edmund was born. Edmund’s birth coincided with Jamie’s renouncement to identifying to his abject mother, and it ruined when the whole process. The new born brother riveted all of Mary’s attention. At this same moment, Jamie entered into a double minded state. Toward his mother, he developed a natural longing for a narcissistic union and hatred. When a new identity is not fulfilled, Jamie has started to feel jealousy, hatred and resentment towards his mother and Edmund.
Jamie is angered and unfriendly; he did not want to join the university. In point of fact, Jamie throws what is impure within him over his mother and brother, aiming to create a singular and unified identity. For example, he does not marry because women reflect for him the image of his abject mother. In addition, he often hinders Edmund’s plans of pursuing university studies although he loves him, too. He is as misogynous as Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. Like her, Jamie wants to drive his brother and mother to death. Inwardly tortured, he confesses, “Got to take revenge. On everyone else. Especially you. Oscar Wilde’s “Reading Gaol” has the dope twisted. The man was dead and so he had to kill the thing he loved. That’s what it ought to be. The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well. Maybe he’s even glad the game has got Mama again. He wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house!” (Act IV) Corresponding to the revelation of a text’s nocturnal powers throughout abjection, Jamie endures tales of sufferings like Oscar Wilde’s character cited in the above excerpt. The ‘other melancholic inside’ Jamie seeks to destroy himself and others around him-Edmund and Mary. The only person able to get Jamie out of this psychic depression is an Imaginary Father. Unfortunately, Mr Tyrone cannot meet his son’s needs for two reasons. The first is that he suffers from the same psychic precariousness, due to grandfather’s return to Ireland. The second is that father Tyrone cannot help himself ignoring Jamie’s suffering because of being himself a melancholic; he may desire within to annihilate his son at his turn. To conclude, both James Tyrone and his son Jamie are condemned to suffering.
As far as Edmund is concerned, he declares to his father that, “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who doesn’t really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” (Act IV) Edmund knows that he can never belong to this patriarchal repressive mainstream discourse. So, he prefers instead to be a sea-gull, a fish and or die. When O’Neill informs about the danger of his illness in Act II, he has, with detachment, ignored it, not willing to experience a regression akin to his mother’s. Contrary to his elder brother Jamie, Edmund is ready to combat life’s odds and difficulties.
In Act III, Edmund desired his mother’s indulgency, for Doctor Hardy confirmed his tuberculosis. As a consequence to her affectionate coldness, he distances himself from her, refusing to have dinner with. So now, Edmund seems to have acquired a necessary inner force to thrive and evolve alone in life. For Julia Kristeva, he is a subject in process who has been able to live on the borderline of the Semiotic and the Symbolic despite multiple impediments. He has made a lot of journeys around the world that have, time and again, brought him back home unfulfilled, but he is always more determined to seek identity stability. Just as Christy Mahon in The Play Boy of the Western World, Edmund, “Is ready to flee away. No obstacle can stop him, and all the sufferings, the invectives or the rejections he experienced appear to be of no importance for him before his quest for the invisible and promised country he dreams of, and which must be called death.” (Kristeva, 14: 1991, my trans)
At home, Edmund has often shown symptoms of an ‘other psychotic inside’ himself. He retires to his room and reads a lot. He is keen on being alone and closed off. However, he has always operated a more or less successful revolt against the external world. The ‘other psychotic inside’ Edmund is secured to a dimension of permanent faith and identity stability by the Imaginary Father whom he reconciles with as shown in the discussion which opens Act IV, wherein Edmund reprimands his father because of the family-undergone privation and austerity. Nonetheless, Mr Tyrone has provided cogent arguments for his defence and Edmund feels unequivocal comprehensiveness toward his father. For Kristeva, the father has now helped his son reaching a self-understanding via the Transference Process.
Even though Long Day’s Journey into Night has thematic richness and meaning ingeniousness, O’Neill’s portrayal of his family seems to be the main literary mark in it. He represented his parents’ unsuccessful social integration in America as illustrated by his father’s distrustfulness of America’s institutions, and his mother’s tragic destiny. Mary might well represent the image of the unredeemable loss Irish cultural heritage in the host country. Jamie also falls short in satisfying the expectations of his family and society as a whole; he has not been able to grow onto an autonomous happy person. Incomparable to his parents and brother, Edmund succeeds to achieve extraordinary identity stability because he has relied on himself as a self made-man. He could reconcile what is inside himself with the outer cultural norms of society, the key for success.
Conclusion
In Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Well of the Saints, O’Neill and Synge introduced unfamiliar artistic suggestions while addressing the issue of identity issue in Ireland and America. They focused on the inner fights of common characters struggling to gain full recognition and happiness. Concerning J.M Synge, whose fictional drama coincided with a period of social, cultural and economic instability political parties, institutions and cultural leagues gave spirit to, he showed interest into psychic marks of the identity fights engaged by Martin and Mary Doul. For his part, O’Neill discovered that the American family world offered an authentic life experience to the social and cultural forces at work in the United States of America. He was sublimated by the conflicts between members of a family, as seen with James Tyrone, his wife Mary and their sons Edmund and Jamie.
This unfamiliar aesthetic approach in Synge and O’Neill are in agreement with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory. Considering most of the challenges and struggles, each subject/character has had an inner zone inside itself, empowering it to revolt against cultural ascendancy of society. Despite the miscellaneous and inevitable failures, the characters appear to have aroused onto an incessant state of revolt, aiming at establishing new ethics and morality. Both playwrights put great emphasis on the psychic uniqueness of each character, for their identity is regulated by the Semiotic world, housing inner drives and psychic marks, and by the Symbolic world, imposing laws, codes and moral values. Though Synge and O’Neill wrote at distinct places and times, one may claim, as demonstrated here above, that they referred to the same identity predicament.
References
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- MC AFEE Noelle, (2004), Julia Kristeva. London, Routledge.
- O’NEILL Eugene, (1989), Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stuttgart, Philipp Reclam Jun, GmbH and Co.
- SYNGE John Millington, (1911), The Well of the Saints: A Comedy in Three Acts. Boston, John W. Luce and Company.
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- CHESELDEN William, (1999). “Blindness as Metaphor”, in, Schor, Naomi. Differences, 11, pp. 89–113.
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- CHASE Yoko Onizuka, (1999), “Eugene O’Neill’s Poetics of Dionysus through his Presentation of Xenoi, Metoikoi and Barbaroi”, in, Harley Zimmerman, Volume 0. 1999, pp. 1–8.
- WILKINS Frederick, (1982). “Introduction: The Director’s Perspective”, in, Boston, Suffolk University. VI (n°3), pp. 1–22.
