The "madness" of Adolf Hitler remains an open question. At the
height of the dictator's power, Harvard psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer prepared a psychological portrait
for the wartime OSS in an effort to predict his likely
reaction in a given scenario; Langer suggested that Hitler was psychologically
impaired due to a genital defect. On the other hand, however, various witnesses
have reported that Hitler often consciously and deliberately flew into
apparently mad rages in order to cow and manipulate others; he was quite
capable, then, of turning his "insanity" on or off at will.
Whether or not Hitler the man was
clinically crazy, his movement is generally perceived as cultural insanity, a reversion to barbarism
from the heart of Western civilization. Historians and literati have presented Hitler as Satan incarnate,
often though without any real attempt to understand his psychological
underpinnings. Psychohistorians who have investigated the subject have often
been unable to assess Hitler's relevance
to our culture.
It is the thesis of this paper that
American playwright Eugene O'Neill, who seems to have been preoccupied with the
Hitler figure as an integral part of his projects during the 1940s,
(despite repeated disclaimers) deliberately grounded his characterization of
the man and his movement upon the insights of Swiss analytic psychologist Carl
Gustav Jung, who had frequently discussed the Hitler phenomenon
during the 1930s. For both of these observers, the Hitler figure transcended the question of mental
health: His real significance was what
he revealed about the nature of the human psyche and society.
In the fall of 1915, a
twenty-six-year-old Austrian soldier at the German front, a loner from the Vienna slums, a ne'er-do-well with
thwarted artistic ambitions, an unknown young man named Adolf Hitler composed a crude, weird
poem which, in retrospect, seems to have captured the essence of the infamous future
dictator more comprehensively than any
historian, biographer, dramatist, novelist, propagandist, or psychologist -- and
certainly better than he himself in his political manifesto, “Mein Kampf” -- subsequently managed to do:
I often go in bitter nights
To Wotan's oak in the quiet glade
With dark powers to weave a union....
The runic letters the moon makes
with its magic spell
And all who are full of impudence
during the day
Are made small by the magic formula!
They draw shining steel ... but instead of going into combat
They solidify into stalagmites.
So the false ones part from the real
ones....
I reach into a nest of woods
And then give to the good and just
With my formula blessings and prosperity.
Some three years later, on October
13, 1918, the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment was struck by a
British mustard-gas attack in Belgium. One of the victims, the corporal who had
written those perversely prophetic lines, was temporarily blinded by the gas
and was taken to a military hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania for treatment.
He recovered his sight there but learned, on November 9, that his beloved
German Reich was being torn apart by revolution. The news caused him to cry for
the first time since his mother's death more than a decade earlier. His blindness
returned.
This time he was treated by a
consulting psychiatrist, Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Nerve Clinic. In Forster's opinion, the
corporal's case was a classic example of hysterical symptoms and he continued
to refer to it in his lectures for many years. Forster's friend, Dr. Ernest
Weiss, fictionalized Forster's wartime experiences in the
novel “The Eyewitness.” The protagonist of that book used hypnosis to alleviate the
hysterical blindness of a soldier identified only as "A.H." We may
speculate, then, that the historical Hitler was to some extent
at least a mental construct created by Edmund Forster; the hypnosis may have
played a pivotal role in transforming the Luftmensch
into the Fuehrer. For, according to Hitler's own account of the incident, he heard
(what may have been hypnotically induced) voices summoning him to save Germany.
As a direct result of this auditory "vision" he suddenly regained his
sight on the night of November 11, the day of the armistice that ended
the war and dismembered Germany. For him, as for Saul of Tarsus almost two millennia before, the
blinding and the calling marked the beginning of his future as a
world-historical figure. The Pasewalk hallucination transformed him into a
perverse twentieth-century Joan of Arc, a nationalist guided by
otherworldy commands. His sensitive, mystical nature combined with the circumstances of the moment to
profoundly affect his psychology. Whether or not Hitler was then or ever genuinely mad, his actions from
that moment marked him as one whose mentality was not fully consonant with that
of his fellows. As he remarked upon his reoccupation of the Rhineland, “I
follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.”
Shortly after recovering his sight
Hitler was released from the hospital and subsequently from the army, though
only after he entered radical politics and began his crusade to save Germany
from the racial and social evils he thought were
threatening to destroy it from within and without. It took him more than a
decade of hard work and uncanny fortune to seize absolute power and begin to actualize
his "crazy" dreams. During most of the period of his ascendance he
was still considered something of a joke, a crank, a schlemiel.
After the hapless "Beer Hall
Putsch" which first catapulted him into the world's headlines,
Edgar Ansell Mowrer could not
believe that "this provincial dandy" could be 'the terrible
rebel" he had heard about: "He seemed for all the world like a
travelling salesman for a clothing firm."'
Even after his political take-over,
to many observers he remained something of a charlatan. As late as December 1937 Dorothy Thompson could still portray
him as “formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man
whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and
voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
But the German mass media machine,
equipped with all the multiform resources of a modern state, transformed him into a superman: in Langer’s
words, “the acme of German honor and purity; the Resurrector of the German
family and home. He is the greatest architect of all time; the greatest military
genius in all history. He has an inexhaustible fount of knowledge. He is a man
of action and the creator of new social values. He
is, indeed, according to the Nazi
propaganda bureau, the paragon of all virtues.” Hitler was portrayed as a man of
tremendous willpower and self-discipline. If he had no known sex life it was
because of his single-minded devotion to the German people and the new Reich he
had created. Despite this sense of mission, however, due to his deep insight
into human nature he was tolerant of the foibles of his countrymen. He was
pictured as the soul of kindliness and generosity, a man with a tremendous
amount of patience who would never spill a drop of human blood if it could
possibly be avoided. Nevertheless, when it came
to improving Germany's position in the world he was absolutely fearless,
tireless, and determined. “Even though he receives serious setbacks and the
situation appears to be hopeless, he never loses faith and
always gets what he goes after. He refuses to be coerced into compromises of
any sort and is always ready to assume the full responsibility for his actions.... Even his refusal to permit ordinary
scruples to get in his way is cited as a sign of his greatness. The fact that
he did not communicate with his family for over ten years becomes a great
virtue since it meant a severe deprivation to the young man who was
determined to make something of himself before he returned home!”
C. G. Jung, who was often mistakenly branded as a
Nazi sympathizer by rival psychoanoalysts who regarded him as a traitor to his
great benefactor Sigmund Freud, was greatly interested in the Hitler phenomenon as a vindication of his own
cultural analyses. Already in 1918
he had noted that "the lower,
darker half" of the Germanic collective unconscious was still in a pre-civilized
phase; as Christianity increasingly lost its authority over modern populations,
the "more menacingly" would the primordial component of the psyche
"be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to
burst out with devastating consequences.”
He came to believe that the
phenomenon of Nazism was the fulfillment of that prophecy; nevertheless, when
he addressed the Institute of Medical Psychology in London in 1935 he
rhetorically professed amazement at the current state of affairs. “Who would
have thought ... that
it would be possible ... for
such things to happen in Germany as are happening today? Would you have
believed that a whole nation of highly intelligent and cultivated people could
be seized by the fascinating power of an archetype?”
A year
later, before the same audience, he further expounded on his theme. In his
view, Germany had been the "first country to
experience the miracles worked by democracy's ghost, the State." In nations
where the state had become all-powerful,
democracy "became its own mirror-image, its own ghost, while the ghost
became appallingly real, an all-embracing mystical presence and
personality." The modern totalitarian state had superceded the medieval Civitas Dei in its
aspirations and was much more brutal and efficient at enforcing those aspirations. “And
a new miracle happened. Out of nowhere certain men came and each of them said like Louis XIV, ‘L'etat
c'est moi.’ They are the new leaders. The State has proved its personal reality by incarnating itself in men
that came from Galilee, inconspicuous nobodies previously, but equipped with
the great spirit voice that cowed the people into soundless obedience.... This process ... is particularly drastic in Hitler's
case. Hitler himself as an ordinary person is a shy and friendly man with
artistic tastes and gifts. As a mere
man he is inoffensive and modest, and has nice eyes. But he comes from Brunau,
a little town that has already produced two famous mediums, the Schneider brothers.... Hitler
is presumably the third and the most
efficient medium from Brunau. When the State-spirit speaks through him, he
sends forth a voice of thunder and his word is so powerful it sweeps together
crowds of millions like fallen leaves.”
(Indeed, Hitler began “Mein Kampf”
with the words, “Today I
consider it my good fortune that
fate designated Brunnau on the Inn as the place of my birth." But the Schneiders probably had less to
do with this declaration than the fact it was there that Napoleon's troops had shot someone named Palm
for daring to print an early nationalist polemic, “In the Hour of Germany's Deepest Humiliation.”)
Jung continued his London address by
comparing Hitler with Christ, the swastika with the cross. But essentially, in his view, National
Socialism was a neo-pagan movement which contained "the most beautiful Wotanistic symbolism,
Indogermanic speculation, and so on."
It was the Odinic (Wotanic)
metaphor, which Hitler himself had invoked in his poetry, that Jung extended later in the year, as Hitler was
extending his own power through the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis. This
time, Jung directly identified Hitler as a reincarnated Wotan, the
"ancient god of storm and frenzy," "a restless wanderer who
creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic."
Wotan, who had originally confined his
influence to the "berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts
of mythical kings," had again
"come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the
blood of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection." But the
most impressive aspect of the phenomenon, as far as Jung was
concerned, was that "one man, who is obviously 'possessed,' has infected a
whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started
rolling on its course towards perdition.’
Just after the Czechoslovak crisis
of 1938, Jung
told journalist H. R.
Knickerbocker that primitive societies had two types of leaders: the physically
powerful chief and the medicine man "who was not strong in himself but was
strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him.... Hitler belongs to the category of the truly
mystic medicine man…. He is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German
soul until they can be heard by the German's conscious ear…. Hitler's power is not political; it is magic…. Hitler's
secret is twofold; first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his
consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be moved by it. He is like
a man who
listens intently to a stream of
suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then acts upon them .... The true leader is always led.”
Jung had
been in Germany the year before and had witnessed Hitler's Berlin reception of his
Axis partner Benito Mussolini. Jung offered Knickerbocker a remarkable
description of the German dictator. He looked like “a sort of scaffolding of
wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a
robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were
in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign. His expression was that of an
inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be
a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding
inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the
mechanism. With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a
medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth.
With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that
man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is
not an individual, but a whole nation.”
Early the following year Jung continued
in a similar vein. He told Howard L.
Philip that Hitler "is like a mask, but there is nothing behind
that mask…. I would not place him as a man, for individually he is quite
uninteresting and unimportant. He is simply a great phenomenon....
Hitler does not even fit into his
clothes! Hitler is all mask.”
After Hitler’s death Jung added a
further comment on his appearance, remembering him as “a psychic scarecrow
(with a broomstick for an outstretched arm) rather than a human being."
It was essentially this Jungian
characterization, albeit without the Wotanistic symbolism, that O'Neill relied upon in his struggles to dramatize the meaning Nazism had for his time.
Many literary critics have gone to
great lengths in attributing O'Neill's insights into the human condition to his reading of the early
psychoanalysts. He went to equally great lengths in denouncing those
critics. "I am no deep student of psychoanalysis," he wrote to
Barrett H. Clark, "of all the books written by Freud, Jung, etc., I have read only four, and Jung is the
only one who interests me. Some of his suggestions I find extraordinarily illuminating....” In reply to queries by Northwestern
University doctoral candidate Martha Carolyn Sparrow, he only admitted to
reading two of Freud's.books, (“Beyond
the Pleasure Principle” and “Totem and Taboo”) and
maintained that, although "fairly familiar" with the tenets of
psychoanalysis, "never consciously was I for a moment influenced to shape
my material along the lines of any psychological theory." He went on to
confess, however, that "the book that interested me the most … is Jung's
'Psychology of the Unconscious'…. If I have been influenced unconsciously it
must have been by this book more than any other psychological work."
Nevertheless, those remarks were at
the very least disengenuous. Much earlier, in 1923, he had told Malcolm Crowley
that the “Disguises of Love” by Freud's first disciple Wilhelm
Stekel contained enough case histories "to furnish plots to all the
playwrights who ever lived." In the
mid-1920s, while he was writing “Lazarus
Laughed,” which, with its elaborate use of
masks and choruses, is ostensibly his most "Jungian" play (according
to Oscar Cargill), he discussed Freud's “Wit
and Its Relation to the Unconscious”
with Manuel Komroff, an editor for the Liveright publishing company which put
out the English translations of Stekel and others. Before 1925 he is known to
have owned Richard Kraftt-Ebing's “Psychopathia
Sexualis,” the same book that had impelled Jung
to specialize in psychiatry. By March 10, 1925, according to his own diary, he
was reading Freud's “Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego,” which included a critique of Gustav
Le Bon's social theories which anticipated many of Jung's own views about collective
human behavior and, in effect, were consciously put into practice through
Hitler's demagogical methods. In addition, O'Neill's wife owned a copy of
Freud's “The Problem of Anxiety.” He is known to have discussed psychoanalytic
theory with his psychiatrist neighbor, Louis Bisch, and in 1923-25 he was treated for various problems
by “Psychoanalytic Review” editor Smith Ely Jelliffe (who had
co-written “Psychoanalysis and the Drama” in 1922). In 1926 he underwent a further
six-week analysis by Gilbert V. Hamilton, an associate of Kenneth
Macgowan.
Macgowan, O'Neill, and stage
designer Robert Edmond Jones comprised a famous theatrical
"triumvirate" in the 1920s. Even before it was formed, in 1921 Macgowan
had written that the role of modern drama was “the illumination of those deep
and vigorous and eternal processes of the human soul which the psychology of
Freud and Jung has given us.” In the same year, although O'Neill had not called
for their use, Jones employed masks in his designs for “The Hairy Ape.” The
following year, in “The Fountain,” O'Neill himself portrayed a masked Death, and
in 1923 he employed a Congo mask in “All God's Chillun
Got Wings” – the same year Macgowan published an analysis of the use of masks
in drama and religion.
The following year the triumvirate was formally launched via a “dramatic arrangement” of
Coleridge's epic poem, “The Ancient Mariner,” and it continued throughout its brief
existence to experiment with the "Jungian" (but also, of course,
Sophoclean) devices of masks and choruses.
It is clear, then, that O'Neill was
much more knowledgeable about psychoanalytic theory and its dramatic
possibilities than he would later let on. This is not to say, however, that he
had not earlier intuitively reached quite Jungian
insights, which were then reinforced and systematized by his later studies. As early as 1922, for example, he had told a
journalist that “our emotions are the result not only of our individual experience
but of the experiences of the whole human race back through the ages. They are
the deep undercurrent, whereas our thoughts are often only the small individual
surface
reactions.”
It would be quite simple to
portray his early (1920, presumably pre-psychoanalytic) play “The Emperor Jones” as an examination of the process of psychic
regression through Brutus Jones' traumatic experiences themselves and beyond
these through those of his race. Or to trace the animal/animus symbolism in Scene
Two, Act Three of” Lazarus Laughed.” Or
to point to the various guises of the Goddess of the State
(Our Mother of Destruction and Death, Our Mother of Gluttony, Our Mother of Bureaucracy
and Fertility, Our Mother of the Holy Face of Insatiable Famine, Our Gentle
Lady of Cannibalism, etc.) in “The Last
Conquest” as gruesome parodies of the Great Mother archetype. Or, indeed, to,
find numerous other overt or covert references to Jungian psychology in his
various works. But, as he told Ms. Sparrow, "the 'unconscious' influence stuff
strikes me as always extremely suspicious!
It is so darned easy to prove!"
It is not my purpose, however, to
demonstrate that O’Neill was a psychoanalytic playwright whether or not he
confessed to the practice. My task is to show that O'Neill’s portrayal of the Hitler figure paralleled that of Jung. This may have been
coincidental, as O'Neill would undoubtedly have maintained. I would only point
out that Jung's remarks about Hitler were all made in an English-language
context and, in the case of his conversation with Knickerbocker, widely
distributed through the popular American press. O'Neill would not have needed to
make any formal search through esoteric German scholarly journals to have
been exposed to Jung's Hitler.
During World War II O'Neill was
intensely concerned about the threat of totalitarianism. In the summer of 1940,
as the German forces occupied all of western Europe and threatened to bomb
England out of the war, he began working on "The Last Conquerer," a
"duality of Man play -- Good-Evil, Christ-Devil -- begins
Temptation on the Mount -- through to
Crucifiction--Devil a modern power realist --- symbolical
spiritual conflict today and in all times." The main focus of the play was a character called variously The
World-Dictator or the Savior of the World: “There is no physical resemblance
between him and any of the dictators of totalitarian nations, like Hitler of
Germany, who has preceded him and whose realistic
wars, although they met temporary material defeat in the end, triumphed
in principle and so ravaged and
maimed and tortured the already sick and faithless souls of men, that they paved the way for final worldwide
spiritual exhaustion and the acceptance of the new Salvation and the Divine
Tyrant Redeemer principle in a Holy and Indivisible World State. The Savior of
the World owes much to these men, whose spiritual
heir He is, but of course He can never admit He owes His power to anything but His own Divine Genius
and He had decreed that no memory of these men must ever be spoken or written.”
The eyes of the World-Dictator are
pale greenish-blue, "still and glassy;" and he "still possesses
a depraved and deprived adolescence, a youthful cruelty, an immature
imperviousness to the sight of sorrow and pain." The character was
foreshadowed by Caligula in “Lazarus Laughed,” who has "large troubled
eyes of a glazed greenish-blue, [which] glare out with a shifty feverish
suspicion at everyone…. His
mouth also is childish, the red lips soft and feminine in outline."
Caligula gives the impression of one who "has long ago become naively
insensitive to any human suffering but [his] own.”
The insistence that there was
"no physical resemblance" with Hitler is, of course, a patent example
of psychological scotoma and denial.
But the World-Dictator/Hitler equation is neatly demonstrated by a remark that O'Neill made in 1943 about a possible revival of “Lazarus
Laughed”: he noted that "Hitler doing his little dance of triumph after
the fall of France [when O'Neill began drafting “The Last Conquest”] is very like my Caligula."
In addition, O'Neill incorporated some discarded Lazarus dialog and staging
ideas into his notes for “The Last Conquest.” The Hitler = Caligula = World-Dictator meme seems secure.
That the Hitler figure was much on
his mind at the time is further evidenced by the fact that O'Neill interrupted
his work on “The Last Conquest” to begin another (also unfinished) play called “Blind
Alley Guy.” The central, though always offstage,
character in this play is a mobster named Walter, whose biography bears a close
resemblance to Hitler's and whose name, which means “ruling the hosts,”
sounds suspiciously like "Hitler." Jung often described Hitler in a
manner that resembled the way a playwright might compose stage directions, but O'Neill
described Walter the way an analyst might jot down his notes for a case history: “frustration
(unconscious), inability to feel, which is driving motive behind criminal,
anti-social career -- hatred for society in which he feels alien, longing for
death sublimated into desire for destruction -- no
real belief in social program -- owe it to own mob -- hatred for Christ, unconscious ambition [to] supplant,
become victor Anti-Christ --reason he hates Jews -- liberty means his liberty alone as supreme master….”
In the context of O'Neill's alleged
Jungianism, it may be useful to note that his early depiction of Caligula's
feminine traits are echoed in Jung's statement that "Hitler's unconscious
seems to be female." It seems clear that, at least in his raw manuscripts,
before he had them worked up into finished products which rather thoroughly
sublimated and subsumed the more obvious borrowings from the psychologist,
O'Neill was deeply indebted to Jung for his conceptualization of Adolf Hitler.
In 1940,
in his first attempts to write “The Last Conquest," O’Neill pointed
out that, above all, the World-Dictator, just like Jung's Hitler, has the
quality of a medium, a hypnotic subject, a fanatic who is empty and lifeless when not possessed by his
fanaticism, an actor who is a starry vehicle for the part he plays.” (He once described Hitler as "a ham
actor," "a dictator who is also a fifth rate ham." )
In a later revision,he returned to
another aspect of the Jungian description of Hitler: the World-Dictator is
"a small man, not over five feet -- mystic egomaniac -- a fanatic hysteric
-- Satan uses him as a perfect instrument for a stronger will." Unlike
earlier dictators who had cynically proclaimed their divinity in order to
manipulate the people, "this one really believed it, believes in myth of
his divine origins." (This particular aspect of Hitler's
character was not analyzed by Jung until after the war, when he diagnosed the
condition as pseudologia phantastica, "that
form of hysteria which is characterized by a
peculiar talent for believing one's own lies." So,
sometimes in their general analyses of the human psyche, O’Neill seems to have
anticipated Jung rather than the other way round.)
Nearly a year after beginning the
play, O'Neill added a prologue. Its scene is "The Hall of Black Mirrors in
the Savior's Palace on a night in the Future -- once upon a time in that spiral
of the past we call the future," a Jungian, ahistoric moment. The World Savior is meeting there with his
twelve-member council, "the Super Elite class of the World State." The councillors "do not
appear to be living men. They are too small, for one thing -- no larger than a
ventriloquist's dummy." They have 'a wooden quality, all the faces carved
imitations of each other -- emotionless faces, coldly intelligent, insensitive,
capable, ruthlessly determined." On the other hand, the Savior "seems
to be a living man, although because of the mystic trance He is now in, it is
difficult to tell. He appears large and powerful, but in reality He is a small
man not over four feet in height.”
Then the Black Magician, an alter ego of the World-Dictator, enters. He
is the thirteenth minister, the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and
Superstitions who, psychoanalyst-like, has been monitoring men's thoughts and
dreams. He outlines his plan to recreate the events that led up to Christ's
crucifiction in order to finally subvert the
doctrines of humility and renunciation.
This recreation, commencing in Scene
One, begins at the Mount of Temptation. The Magician and Christ enter, wearing identical
clothes. After some debate, the Magician, "like an old actor making up for part he has played many
times," changes into his Ministerial uniform and "makes up the
conventional Mephisto face." Then he removes a ventriloquist's dummy -- the
Savior of the World -- from the "box of tricks" he has carried onto
the stage with him: "Caesar again -- but Tiberius had a mind but this
little man has only the cunning I
gave him -- dictator dummy -- the
God Father of his own divinity -- theologians of
Alexandria would have had a great time rationalizing this nut." Then, in a close parallel to the political
analysis Jung had sketched out, the Magician referred to the dummy figure as
the “final perfect expression of the highest low desire in the heart of every
man -- the lust for power -- the fear of liberty -- you
had better beware of this little monster -- he faces men as they are and uses
them accordingly -- he sees they are still beasts if you but scratch their
surfaces.” The dummy then offers Christ "spiritual
leadership of New Order -- work under me -- but don't tell them you are Son of God -- because they think that I--." His
speech is interrupted by the approach of a crowd; there is the sound of a
"goose step up a mountainside" and the dummy does not want to be seen
consorting with a Jew, even if he is only ghost of a dead Jew. Don't let your
being a Jew bother you. I have
had a family tree manufactured for you which shows you are, like me, the son of
an Aryan.” (Throughout Hitler’s political lifetime he had been anxious to
disprove persistent rumors that his own paternal grandfather was Jewish, making
him in actuality Adolf Schicklgruber.) After Christ delivers the Sermon on the Mount to an
unresponsive crowd, the dummy orders them to return to their barracks and
salutes “the New Order! You have nothing to lose but liberty! Forward in the
name of the State! I promise
you that never will there be peace on earth! The future must be destroyed!
There must be nothing left in the spirit but he
desire for death!” At the end of the scene the Magician confides in Christ that
the dummy is not the real ruler but only the symbol of the "modern world
spirit."
Echoing Jung's remarks concerning "democracy's
ghost, the State," O'Neill later added a speech to the Mount of Temptation scene in which
the Magician extolled the “death of democracy -- men grew tired of the responsibility of living free
with no higher law than the criminal code to define the use of freedom -- their
spirits corrupt and fat -- the goddess of Liberty fat woman in a circus -- democracy
with a paunch and a bad heart and impotent. There is
no conflict - no good nor evil -- they are all virtually dead -- a fine thing for me to be -- a fat corpse ruling
the brains of corpses -- I am a pathetic fat man, a gorged physical cannibal
king, who vomits the carrion human flesh, which is all he has left to
eat."
Scene Two is a celebration of
"the New Feast of All Fools." This time the Magician wears the
uniform of the chief of the secret police. Around the dummy's platform and throne
there are “lines of dummy troops -- painted drop rows of spectators, all in
gesture of salute -- bands, flags with sickles, hammers, swastikas, etc.”
In later scenes, the parts
alternately of Judas and Pontius Pilate are played by the Perfect Subject-Citizen
of the State, the Tribune of the
People: “a "hulking, low-browed, submissive, cowed" man with
"huge gorilla-like strength but so completely enslaved doesn't need
manacles any more. His eyes are vacant -- without a hope or dream or thought -- his
great strength always exhausted -- all he seems to desire is sleep." He
has the "dim sure instinct that
Satan is his real God and Slave-Master." Years earlier, O'Neill had
written that,
by using the Jungian device of a
masked mob, "a new type of play may be written in which the Mob as King,
Hero, Villain, or Fool will be the main character -- the Great Democratic
Play!" It seems that “The Last Conquest" was conceived in part as a fulfillment of that goal.
At the end of the play "it is
the unseen (?) man
on the cross who tempts the Devil with all the peace of the spirit of renunciation."
But the dawn comes and the Magician discovers that he is
the figure on the cross, wearing Christ's clothes. The
Magician puts on his own clothes again and begins his “old dictator mob-moving harangue -- in asides,
his disgust with its lies -- his horror that he had begun to believe them
himself -- Christ's words keep breaking through -- his confused remittance –possessed
-- but joy in it, too -- getting rid of self, freedom -- finally, his speech
becomes Sermon on Mount." In response, the marionettes raise their arms
"in hail salute."
Despite his denials it seems clear that O'Neill relied throughout much of
his career on the work of psychoanalysts generally and of Jung, an erstwhile psychoanalyst, in
particular. This was especially so, late in his productive life, in his
treatment of the archetypal Hitler/World-Dictator figure of “The Last Conquest,”
not only in the physical description but also in the
analysis of the social conditions leading to his successes and their essential hollowness. O'Neill,
as an artist, went somewhat further, deliberately blurring the identities of the Black Magician,
Christ, the World Savior/World-Dictator, the council of state and mankind as a whole in a way that
Jung had only hinted at. Part of his reliance on Jung was direct; undoubtedly
some of it was unconscious; and most likely a great deal of it was merely
circumstantial, based on the facts that the two men
lived through the same international crises and socio-technological changes,
that they were of a similar penetrating poetic-prophetic bent, and that they both read deeply some of the same
materials (Friedrich Nietzsche, Eastern mystics, and so forth).
It is true of course that O'Neill
also relied on earlier observations he developed without
benefit of the Freudians; his development of the play “Lazarus Laughed,” for
example, was
of great significance in his
thinking about “The Last Conquest.” Perhaps it could be said fairly of both men that their ideas about the
nature of the human condition were, in O’Neill’s words, “as old as
literature, and the interpretations I suggest
are such as might have occurred to any author in any time with a deep curiosity
about the underlying motives that actuate human relationships.…”
Neither O'Neill nor Jung was overly
concerned with the psychic condition of an individual man named Adolf Hitler. They
both, however, saw the German dictator as symptomatic of a much wider phenomenon. Hitler's madness, if
such it was, seemed to reflect a serious flaw in the psychic condition of
modern man. Science and rationalism, the tools of utopian progress for many
reflective men between 1500 and 1900, had seemingly destroyed religion and
other traditional humanistic attitudes and had created dystopian
totalitarianism in their stead. Hitler, Jung, and O'Neill were all to some extent products of the
times.
Now they are long gone. But the
issues that they raised, separately and from their different standpoints, are
with us still: What is the nature of modern cultural "madness?" To what extent
do we each share in a collective insanity? Is the State the ghost of democracy;
is Christianity merely "the ghost of a dead Jew"? What is the future state of
mankind? The
questions Hitler, Jung, and O'Neill
asked and acted out have not yet been answered by their successors, but their relevance
is still vital.
-- Duane Vorhees
