All My Sons: All My Sins
Arthur Miller and His Naked Social Critique
《我子》: 我罪
Arthur Miller 與他赤裸的社會批判
Tai-Hsien Liang, Professor
Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Shu-Te University
梁台仙*
*樹德科技大學應用外語系 教授
Abstract
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is a protest play that ruthlessly uncovers the social
skeletons/problems/crimes the “authentic American Everyman” has kept in his
closet. The central character Joe Keller works hard for his family; his family is his
conviction and religion, his sole universe and his life because “I’m his father and
he’s my son.” Joe manufactures and knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the
Air Force during the Second World War, which cause the death of innocent
American pilots. While his flyer son Larry commits suicide out of shame and
anger for this, Joe finally also shoots himself dead for his secret crime. Miller
comments that the crime in All My Sons is not about to be committed but has long
since been committed. The problems originate from human selfish greed and
stubborn near-sighted foolishness which find their universal presence in almost any
human society. Miller’s liberalism and his drama show that it is necessary to ride
both the private and the public horse because private and public are finally
inseparable. As Bigsby puts it, “[A] world of self-regarding, self-seeking isolators
must finally also be self-destructive.”
摘 要
Arthur Miller 的《我子》是一部抗議劇，犀利地揭露了平凡的美國人深藏
的社會問題和罪愆。劇中要角 Joe Keller 為了家庭拼命工作賺錢；他的家庭是
他唯一的生命和世界，因為「我是他父親，他是我兒子。」 在二次世界大戰中，
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他製造並知情地販售有瑕疵的飛機零件給軍方，造成美國飛行員的死亡。他的
飛行員兒子 Larry 為此羞憤自殺，而 Joe 自己最後也為此秘密的罪行飲彈身亡。
Miller 認為《我子》呈現的罪惡，並非將要發生，卻是長久以來一直都在發生。
人的自私貪婪、短視愚蠢是問題的根源，它存在於所有的人類社會當中。
《我子》
揭示的是: 公益與私利終不可分，自私自利終將毀人毀己。
Keywords: son, realist-naturalist, social critique, protest play
關鍵詞 : 人子、現實主義-自然主義者、社會批判、抗議劇
Arthur Miller
(October 17, 1915February 10, 2005)
and second wife
Marilyn Monroe
Hayman, R. (1972). Arthur Miller (p. 61).
New York: Frederick Ungar.
[A shot is heard . . . . They stand frozen . . . .]
Chris [almost crying]. Mother, I didn’t mean
to . . . .
Mother. Don’t dear. . . . . Forget now. Live.
[ . . . she begins sobbing . . . .]
(All My Sons, Act Three, p. 288)
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According to Carson (1982), All My Sons (1947), Arthur Miller’s first successful play, reveals
one of “Miller’s ‘archetypal’ interests” (pp. 37-38)—the father-son relationship. As Miller himself
states that it is in this relationship that “the crux of All My Sons . . . was formed; and the roots of
Death of a Salesman were sprouted” (p. 8). The plot of this drama originated from a true incident
told to him by a friend about a family from the Middle West, which was destroyed when the daughter
reported her father to the authorities for selling faulty machinery to the Army.
Miller says that he
visualized the second-act climax to All My Sons almost before the narrator had finished the story.
Nevertheless, the actual writing of the work still took some two years.
Miller began to write plays at college and won awards from the university as well as from the
Theatre Guild.
Miller was an engaged public figure, lecturing, writing, and participating in liberal
movements of the day.
Starting from 1965 Miller was twice elected as the president of International
PEN., the worldwide society of poets and playwrights, essayists and editors, novelists and nonfiction
writers. There can be no doubt in the American literary and theatrical history as to Miller’s position
in it.
Miller’s works cover a wide formal range, and have extended over a long period. He authors
nine plays, a screenplay, numerous short stories and essays, a novel, occasional poems, reportage, and
even a commentary on a trip to the Soviet Union. Death of a Salesman, which won him the Pulitzer
Prize in drama in 1949, has been produced in virtually every one of the world’s capitals, has been
given a classic television production in America, as well as read in book form by several million
people who have never seen it performed—unusual for a play which can still claim to be
contemporary. When asked in what way his plays were related to the events of his life, Miller
replied, “In a sense all my plays are autobiographical.”
Basically a realist-naturalist, Miller concerns himself about society and social problems, the
typical and outwardly normal in American life. He deliberately creates characters who are ordinary
rather than extraordinary.
His work is not highly original in technique, and his style is
straightforward and vernacular. His first three plays are filled with the naturalistic dialogue of the
American middle class. All My Sons was produced in 1947 as Miller’s second Broadway play
bringing him New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a box-office success.
Helterman (1981) introduces that
All My Sons . . . bears the stamp of Ibsen’s influence in its style, its theme,
and even its plot. Miller aimed the play’s realism at a broad-based audience
and deliberately excised all the bookishness of his early drafts. He changed,
for example, the play’s original title, “The Sign of the Archer” (a reference to
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Kate’s interest in astrology), because it was too literary.
He made the
dialogue . . . as plain as possible to fit both the blue-collar Keller household
and nineteenth-century theories of realism.
(p. 89)
Wining the New York Drama Critics Circle Award with All My Sons in 1947, Miller was
established as an important young playwright, particularly since the competition included O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh (1988).
Today the 1947 critics’ choice may seem somewhat off the mark, for
All My Sons is truly a solid piece, but it is not a match for O’Neill’s masterpiece.
Maybe the
audience was pleased to see a fresh and young face with something vernacular and straightforward
for a change.
All My Sons is a three-act play. The plot goes as follows:
Joe Keller, near sixty, a businessman “of stolid mind and build” has two sons. His second son
Larry, a flyer during the Second World War, was reported missing, but Joe’s wife Kate has ever since
nourished an obsessive and neurotic belief that her son will some day come home alive.
Chris, Keller’s elder son, like his father is “a listener,” solidly built and “capable of immense
affection and loyalty” (p. 208). In the War, he commanded and lost an infantry company overseas,
and now works in his father’s plant with a sense of shame and guilt. Chris has long loved Ann
Deever, the former fiancée of Larry and he invites Ann over in order to propose to her. Ann agrees,
but his mother is opposed, claiming that marrying Ann would be an act of betrayal to his brother.
During the War Joe had been in partnership with Ann’s father in a concern that had shipped
defective cylinder heads to the Army Air Corps, causing the death of twenty-one young pilots.
Both
were sent to prison but Joe was exonerated. Now he opens “one of the best shops in the state” and
becomes “a respected man again” (p. 230).
George Deever, Ann’s brother and a lawyer now, after
having visited his father in prison, is coming to visit the Kellers. The Keller parents are greatly
alarmed.
(Act One)
Ann thinks that “People like to do things for the Kellers” (p. 244).
To her surprise, she finds
Doctor Jim Bayliss’s wife, for example, wants her and Chris to “find a place away from here”
because Chris with his idealism “makes people want to be better than it’s possible to be” (p. 245) and
is driving her husband crazy. The doctor’s wife tells her “I resent living next door to the Holy
Family” and “There’s not a person on the block who doesn’t know the truth” about Joe’s guilt (p.
246).
George full of accusation and wrath against Joe comes to take Ann away from Joe’s “grab.”
The Keller parents try to appease George and offer to keep a position for George’s dad and help
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George set up business in the neighborhood. When George gets so moved, Kate carelessly reveals
that Joe had never been sick in the last fifteen years. That stirs George’s suspicion again because
“sick at home with pneumonia” is the excuse Joe cites for not knowing anything about the shipment
of the defective cylinder heads. In her eagerness to send Ann away, Kate even “packed her bag” (p.
271). When Chris gets so angry and says, “[Larry’s] dead, and I’m marrying his girl” (p. 271), Kate
replies in hysterics, “Your brother’s alive . . . because if he’s dead, your father killed him” (p. 272).
Chris finally elicits the truth: Joe had knowingly approved the shipment of the defective parts.
Joe defends that many others did the same thing during the war, that in fact all war procurement was
based on the profit system and was basically selfish, and that he committed the fraud solely to keep
the family business for his sons. (Act Two)
While waiting for the angry Chris to come home in the yard in the early morning, Kate
persuades Joe to tell Chris that he is willing to go to jail, and maybe Chris would forgive him because
to Chris “There’s something bigger than the family” (p. 279).
Joe bursts out, “I’m his father and
he’s my son, and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head” (p. 279).
Ann assures the Kellers that she would pursue the case no further, and privately asks Kate to set
Chris free so that they can get married and go away.
Kate would not let go, so Ann produces a letter
from Larry to prove that Larry, in disgust over news of his father’s fraud, virtually committed suicide
in his own plane and asked Ann not to wait for him.
After Joe reads Larry’s letter he goes inside
and shoots himself dead. (Act Three)
Bigsby (1994) appraises All My Sons lauding that “[i]n all essentials it is a well-made play” (p.
84). Citing his interview with Miller, Bigsby records that Miller means for Joe Keller “to learn that
the ‘consequences of actions are as real as the actions themselves’” (p. 84). He further considers
that Miller “might have found a more native source in Emerson’s conviction that it was necessary to
ride both the private and the public horse, like a circus performer . . . the essence of Miller’s
liberalism and his drama is that private and public are finally inseparable. It is the basis of his social
critique—his sense that a world of self-regarding, self-seeking isolators must finally also be
self-destructive” (p. 81).
Carson praises Miller for discovering “a vein of dramatic source-material which was to prove
almost inexhaustible”－“the father-son relationship” (p. 38). He suggests the play’s “three levels of
significance: the cosmic, the social and the psychological” (p. 40). Though All My Sons is reminiscent
of Ibsen and Chekhov, Carson distinguishes that “[w]hereas Ibsen is primarily concerned with the
consequences of past action, Miller is more interested in the reaction which follows understanding.
In Miller, the moment of awareness is always preparation for a moment of choice” (p. 40)
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All My Sons is commonly held as a “protest play” against the social problems caused with the
prehistory of the big American Game, in which the capitalistic competition discards and disregards
business ethics, ignores human values and judges all by absolute surface material success.
Unfolding in the conflict between the old generation and the young, All My Sons embodies chiefly
two sets of social attitudes. Joe and Kate Keller epitomize the ideology that rationalizes family as
the center of the world and justifies anything done morally or immorally for the wealth and success of
the family.
Joe proudly asserts
You gotta appreciate what was doin’ in that shop in the war. . . . It
was a madhouse. Every half hour the Major callin’ for cylinder heads, they
were whippin’ us with the telephone.
The trucks were hauling them away
hot . . . . . . . try to see it human, see it human.
comes out with a crack.
That happens,
All of a sudden a batch
that's the business.
A fine,
hairline crack. . . . so he’s a little man . . . he takes out his tools and he . . .
covers over the cracks. (p. 232)
Joe assures that “[w]ho worked for nothin’ in that war?
what's clean?
. . . war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes,
Half the goddam country is gotta go [to jail] if I go” (p. 285). He pleads, “Chris, I
did it for you, it was a chance and I took it for you” (p. 274). Amid the ruthless operations of the
family enterprise, Kate has always known everything and she just buries her head in the sand
pretending innocent.
The next generation, Chris, Larry, Ann and George hold their values in a wider scope of world,
the world of justice.
For the Deever brother and sister, George is furiously fervent on digging up the
whole ugly truth, while Ann expels her imprisoned father completely out of her life. For the Keller
brothers, Larry “can’t face anybody” (p. 287), “can’t bear to live any more” (p. 286) with the news of
his Dad being convicted for the death of his fellow pilots, and kills himself. Having lost his totally
unselfish company men who sacrificed and “killed themselves for each other,” Chris comes to realize
the absurdity of war and the “responsibility” of “[m]an for man.” He wants “to be . . . better” for
“the love a man can have for a man” (p. 236).
To his great disappointment and torment, Chris
comes home to find “nobody was changed at all” (p. 236) and in “the land of the great big dogs, you
don’t love a man here, you eat him!
That’s the principle . . . . The world’s that way” (p. 284).
Chris becomes such an idealist that Sue accuses him of making people “want to be better than it’s
possible to be” (p. 245) and is driving her husband crazy. She even asks Ann to take him away from
the neighborhood after the wedding.
As Miller (1988) pronounces, “The crime in All My Sons is not . . .about to be committed but . . .
has long since been committed” (p. 10). The problems it exposes originate from human selfish
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greed as well as stubborn near-sighted foolishness which find their universal presence in almost any
human society.
All My Sons therefore, on a broad scale, addresses humanity problems.
Five-thousand-year old human race has proudly collected an amazingly sizable repertoire of stinking
skeletons in his closet. The question is not how many such crimes man has kept in secret. The
same unsolvable question since Eden is: when, where, whether and how to drag out which and what
skeleton for what purpose and to what extent. When Oedipus is arrogantly confident on his own
innocence and insistent on his pursuit of the absolute truth, he is securely doomed with his depth of
human intrinsic sin, stupidity and blindness.
The trees that grow ever denser over the time in the yard are the Kellers’ accumulated pride and
shielded shame as well as the symbolic demonstration and mystification of the family’s rise to wealth
and power over the locality. Its master Joe Keller repeatedly insists on passing down the family
legacy and merging it with another “accomplishment” of his, his son Chris (p. 250).
The sawing
away of a mere apple tree, Larry’s tree, would give “more light with that thing gone” (p. 241) as Kate
notices. It is in the “closely planted poplars” (p. 201) which both Ann and George marvel to have
“got thick” (pp. 223, 254) in the Kellers’ back yard that the neighbor Frank “through a small space
between the poplars” (p. 202) finds Joe Keller, “A man among men” (p. 202) reading in the morning
sun.
Even if one gets to the relaxed shady privacy of “this man” who seems humble “with the
terrible concentration of the uneducated man” when listening, as well as natural and practical with
“judgements . . . out of experience and a peasant-like common sense” (p. 202), one still does not get
at the truth about man.
On the human tree with its outskirt roots of both good and evil so virtuously as well as viciously
intertwined tightly deep under the ground, one can not behold the truth of its whole existence, nor can
one readily acknowledge, comment and act on the cut-off view and the hidden source of life: which
root leads where and provides what nutrient.
The good root could survive concomitantly on the evil
one while the evil thrives inseparably from the good. When we hail truth as one critical and sublime
element of virtue and value which our existential authenticity feeds on, and when we declare with an
ax in hand the termination of the vicious and the vile, we are permanently cursed with the human
predicament and desperation in which truth must be sought and can not be sought. As Adam (1991)
points out, “Although the audience is asked to share Chris’ ideas—he is the most eloquent figure and
delivers the key lines—their sympathies must necessarily be divided” (p. 53).
All My Sons has drawn disparagement along with credit from readers. For instance, this play
unravels itself on the axis of the recollection and excavation of the past.
Miller carves out distinct
silhouette around the events and his dramatis personae with the exactness and permanence of the
petrified life preserved in amber. Hayman comments that the structure of All My Sons now “looks
old-fashioned” because for Miller “the past does not undergo any chemical change in the memory,”
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and meaningful statements can be made “about causal connections between one event and another”
(p. 112). Beckett’s Vladimir and Estrogon (Waiting for Godot, 1954) can not even remember what
happened yesterday.
Citing Beckett that “[w]e are other, no longer what we were before the
calamity of yesterday,” Hayman questions “the possibility of isolating anything as the cause of
anything else” (p. 112).
Critics have also trumpeted their disapproval of or dissatisfaction with Miller’s rhetorical
practices in All My Sons which very often “crash the reader’s plane.”
Hayman for instance
comments that Miller “felt it deeply and sincerely but the sentiment . . . is not sufficiently
dramatized” (p. 29), “Chris’s passionate retort makes an effective curtain, but the rhetorical language
is something of a letdown” (p. 33), “the situation is far more brilliantly contrived than the speeches”
(p. 34), and “[a]gain the language is too banal and flat to reach the level of intensity required by the
situation” (p. 35).
Harold Bloom acclaims that All My Sons is “admirably constructed,” and that when “properly
staged,” “very effective,” (p. 1) but he grumbles that the drama is “indifferent or even poor writing”
(p. 1) for it is “not adequately expressed” (p. 3) and can not sustain his re-read.
Bloom points out
Joe as the “authentic American Everyman,”
who wants to have good time, who wants his fame never to suffer, and who
lacks any imagination beyond the immediate . . . who does not know enough,
indeed who scarcely knows anything at all.
Nor can he learn anything. (p.
4)
Bloom criticizes that Joe is not very intelligent and is so remote that he can not “represent the
estrangement properly” (p. 4) and does not deserve so much dramatic interest and fondness from the
reader without Miller’s “curious gift” (p. 4).
Joe with his American dream is truly typical of American Everyman, but he is certainly no
ordinary Everyman.
He shows the extraordinary “force of his nature” (p. 267) to stand up where he
stumbled; he refuses to back down at bankruptcy of family finance and business name, nor does he
move his family away from the neighborhood as the Deevers did. He faces his disaster, rebuilds his
“regime,” and makes the laughing and despising neighbors work in his plant and take money from his
hand. Joe is hence a man of great aggressive pride and firm stubbornness who strikes out to build
his empire as well as strikes back against his dishonor. He is a man of resolution and action. With
extreme selfishness and cowardice, he brushes away his conscience, dodges his responsibility and
makes a scapegoat criminal of his partner.
As for suicide, it is at once tragically heroic and
pathetically spineless. Judging from his past deeds and personality traits, Joe is equally eligible for
being both. Bloom regards the character of Joe cannot enjoy so much interest and fondness from
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the reader without Miller’s “curious gift.” This article holds that the problem here is not with the
dramatic prototypal character Joe; the problem could be with Miller’s defective literary parts which
“stall” the reader with their crack.
Bloom feels “[d]rama fails Miller” or “perhaps he fails drama,” the moment Joe learns the truth
of his son’s death and is brought to his moral cognizance, for all Joe can say is “[b]ut I think to him
[Larry] they were all my sons.
And I guess they were, I guess they were” (p. 287).
It seems for
Bloom, this is a mere cat’s “meow,” compared to Chris’ lion’s roar: “There’s a universe of people
outside and you’re responsible to it” (p. 288).
Maybe Miller is not so defective to crash the reader here. Joe once utters words of brutal
weightiness: “I’m his father and he’s my son, and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet
in my head.” (p. 279); he means it with all the vehemence and seriousness of his life. Chris after
learning the truth would have nothing to do with Joe; “pulling violently away” (p. 284) from his
father’s hold, he says “I’ve got nothing to say to you”, and “Don’t do that, Dad. I’m going to hurt
you if you do that” (p. 284). In despair, Joe even offers Chris all the family money he has earned so
hard, prized and prided so much in for him to
throw it away. . . . give it to charity, throw it in the sewer. . . . if it’s dirty
then burn it. It’s your money, that’s not my money.
I’m a dead man, I’m
an old dead man . . . . Well, talk to me!—What do you want to do!
(p.
285)
To this, Chris answers coldly, “It’s not what I want to do. It’s what you want to do” (p. 285). Then
about Larry, the other son, Joe has always felt that “if Larry was alive he wouldn’t act like this. He
understood the way the world is made. He listened to me” (p. 280).
But Larry’s letter curses hell
of death, “if I had him here now I could kill him—” (p. 287). The intensity of theatrical situation
has reached such.
What else or more does Joe have to say?
He is struck speechless!
If he has
anything more to say, he can only speak in action, and he is a resolute “executioner,” a man of action.
So he shoots and explodes himself out of the world with a bang.
Miller says, “A work of art is not handed down from Olympus from a creature with a vision as
wide as the world” and “A play must end, and end with a climax [with] the forces in life . . . of
infinite complexity”, and it “must be made finite and capable of . . . succinct culmination” (p. 6).
Hayman who groans over Miller’s “under-expression” echoes the same idea, “It is always hard to
dramatize a profound inner change in a play” (p. 36).
Althusser’s ideology theory (1999) explains that the individual is a subject enshrouded in a
certain ideology even before he is born and that he chooses with full free consciousness to believe in
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certain ideas and acts accordingly.
Joe says about Chris, “I should’ve put him out when he was ten
like I was put out, and make him earn his keep. Then he’d know how a buck is made in this world”
(p. 279). It is Joe’s ideology through his own bitter life experience that he would not want his sons
to have his bitterness, that he wants his sons to have an affluent family where the Father really
assumes his duty to provide and protect.
His family is his conviction and religion, his sole universe
and his life because “I’m his father and he’s my son” (p. 279). When Chris presses for the truth, he
pulls all the excuses he could have in eloquence, and Chris, his “only accomplishment” (p. 250)
wants “to tear the tongue out” of his mouth (p. 275).
In terms of Foucault’s idea of power relations (1997a), the power situation here has drastically
subverted. Joe has lost his articulation and his power. This is a trauma more than trauma. His
whole being is denied by his “only accomplishment,” his son Chris—he is virtually denied by himself.
His world has tumbled down and this is the end.
Bloom expects much explosive eloquence here
from Joe, but for a man who has “lost his tongue” to his own son (who wants “to tear the tongue out”
of his mouth), his silence is his loudest articulation. By clashing the extreme low (the silent
articulation) against the extreme high (the loud explosion of the gun-shot), Miller with his
“under-expression” actually brilliantly forges an extreme climax, whose tension overwhelms and
sweeps the whole play to a sharp stop.
No matter it is out of shattering shock or stubborn pride or pathetic cowardice, no matter
whether Joe is capable of learning, sensible of shame and remorse and self-disgust or not, is not his
bang hundreds of thousand times louder than words with the power of lightning and thunder?
not his bang shake and stir human beings’ profoundest pain and instruct the meanest meaning?
Does
For
what Lucifer or enemy is it in a man that he has to pull the trigger on himself rather than on the
external foe?
Kate Keller insists “The war is over” (p. 287). The war within humanity and society is never
over. When Joe Keller bangs himself and his destructive immorality and idiocy over “all his sons”
with Chris crying and Kate sobbing, we pain, we sigh, and we weep for our innocently entrapped
tragic fate, for we are—all sons.
77
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New York : Grove Press, 1954.
Modern American drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Literary Classics of