I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. At first glance, it is a play that seems to have little to do with the rise and fall of kings and kingdoms, with the rampant violence that typically graces the pages I study.
But then I got to thinking.
It's been a long time since I read the play. But I remember, vividly, the experience of reading it, if not the play itself.
I remember the way it looked in my head, dusty and drab and dry. Curtains made of wallpaper fabric with yellow fade-marks from too much sun and grease. A wooden floor that hadn't seen wax for years. Doilies made by someone's grandmother once upon a time. An olive-green stove that had made birthday cakes and Christmas cookies, spaghetti from a jar, Betty Crocker cake mix, Jello, and pot roast with little pearl onions and carrots.
I think of Willy Loman as the king of a failing kingdom, surrounded by successful neighbors, with subjects who recognized in his rule faded glory and wished they could still respect the king in his tattered robes. His sons are filled with regret, but they know their father - like King Lear - is no longer fit to rule his house. They are the Cerrex and Porrex to Loman's Gorboduc, Edgar and a legitimate Edmund whose success should be measured in something other than what it is, following their blinded Gloucester-father as he stumbles his way toward the edge of a cliff.
All this leads me to wonder whether or not the American Dream is all that different from any country's dream, from Shakespeare's "Wherefore base?" and the countless tales of upward social mobility all across early modern Europe. After all, Aristotle defined Comedy as the rise in status or fortunes of one who began low.
Tragedy, however, was the fall of one from a height of status or fortune. The decline of the high school football hero to the fat, middle-aged and miserable man who sits morosely in his foam-and-steel cubicle and stares at the blank grey fabric where a window should be.
All this comes back to a point I have made - one that Shakespeare made many-a-time - that our lives are played out as on a stage. We have our exits and our entrances, and we, in our time, will play many parts.
Learn from Willy Loman. Decide, now, that yours will be a Comedy. Decide that, whatever your fortunes may be, you will make yourself rise, if not in wealth or status, then in contentment. Make content your crown, and crown your life in content before you play your final age in mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
2 comments:
FYI, your definition of comedy/tragedy DEFINITELY doesn't fit into all of ancient Greece. In fact, I wouldn't extend it much beyond Aristotle himself (who didn't write till about a generation after Greece's "greatest" comedians and tragedians had stopped writing). Which is not to say that he's completely off base; Aristotle's a compiler, he makes up definitions that fit the data that he looks at. That said, he sometimes limits his field of vision severly to make the definitions come out as he wants them too.
Not that that's all that important to any of what you said, but just sayin' Aristotle also said that women were simply imperfectly formed men, that asians and africans were made by nature to be slaves and followers, and lots of other similar things. He was an intelligent man, no doubt, and he knew a lot about ancient drama, no doubt. That doesn't make him right though, and it certainly doesn't make him represent anything resembling a consensus.
Fixed that, then. At the time, I couldn't remember for sure whether or not that was Aristotle. It says it now. :)
Post a Comment