ARTHUR MILLER’S DEATH OF A

SALESMAN REVISITED

 

D. VENKATESWARULU

 

            In all my plays and books I try to take settings and dramatic situations from life which involve real questions of right and wrong........I don’t see how you can write anything decent without using the question of right and wrong as the basis. (Robert A. Martin. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller).

 

            Why did Willy Loman commit suicide and what are his life’s lessons to America that has gone on and flour­ished / stumbled over for more than four decades after the appearance of Miller’s play? It is a common place ob­servation to say that Willy is caught up in a situation from which he has not found a way out. Times, indeed seem to have changed, as Bob Dylan would have it, and Willy finds himself an outsider, not to be accommodated, not to be acculturated and sadly, not even to be recognized. In other words, he is taken by surprise and deep ter­ror. It was Walter Benjamin who fa­mously noted that there “is no docu­ment of civilization which is not also at the same time a document of barba­rism” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 257). Willy, undoubtedly, is a victim of the barbaric social malady that has little sympathy for a common man.

 

            After more than four decades, what has happened to Willy still haunts us. His peculiar condition in a society, ruthlessly managed by a cor­porate structure, needs to be sys­tematized, humanely re-situated and adequately explained. His life needs an explanation, recognition and honour, to reduce Willy’s life to a study of psychology, maladjustment, guilt and a desperate need for stability is certainly justified but it’s message goes beyond that, and into the territory of a collec­tive morality. The play is a willed crea­tion of a writer (Arthur Miller) whose attempts at journeying through the American heart of darkness need little introduction. His plays generally reflect the crisis of liberal America with its degenerated and degenerating insti­tutional set-up. His critique of America should not be confused with the thir­ties-style-left-wingism because by straitjacketing in this fashion one tends to ignore the issues and the framework of these issues. Death of a Salesman is a case in point.

 

            In the “Requiem” section of the play, Linda, Willy’s wife, is baffled and pained at her husband’s death and struggles unsuccessfully to bring her­self to cry. She confesses: “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry......It seems to me that you’re just on another trip. I keep expecting you......I search and search and search, and I can’t understand it, Willy, I made the last payment on the house today....And there’ll be nobody home......We’re free and clear” (Death of a Salesman, Collected Plays, Vol. 1.222). It appears that Willy is an enigma even to his immediate family as he is to the unsettling American psyche. Linda recognizes his deep quandaries but she does not know how to rationalize his death. His son, Biff, judges him harshly by saying that he has wrong dreams all along “phony” dreams! But none of them ever indicts the system which speaks for their own immature understanding or victims of reification? of a social fabric to which Willy attempts a timid answer, not unfortunately to break from it which must have been a heresy to him, but to get accommodated to it vicariously through the possible suc­cess of his son. His sons are to per­form the job for him although, ironi­cally, it is rather improbable especially in the context of Biff’s priorities. Happy, his other son, is another mat­ter since he accepts the competitive life of the corporate world with its in­genious manipulations and corrup­tion.

 

            Linda cannot cry because, she thinks, it is one of the usual absences of her husband when he is on a tour in New England. Is not Willy a sales­man, after all? If Willy is a salesman, he is a salesman in an old-fashioned way. Character and hardwork were sure signs of eventual success, but apparently not anymore. Now, the per­sonal charm, gift of a gab, and the ability to sell matter. Willy vaguely rec­ognizes this and this is the reason why he cannot understand the reasons for Biffs failure. For Biff is a smart person with handsome personality, initiative and drive. However, Biff, unlike Willy, is not seduced by the American dream of success. For that matter, even Willy, with all his talk about success, does not seem to be entirely enthralled by it. He feels always “temporary”. He craves for his successful brother and needs the stabilizing memory of his fa­ther and brother (family?). He is never to have rest and harsh reality of dog-eat-dog philosophy of corporate ethics does not accommodate him al­though he has spent a lifetime and worked for the growth of the organiza­tion. Willy has grown old in the proc­ess and he can no longer undertake long and strenuous tours to New Eng­land anymore. To be sure, Willy is humane in his own way but, not being an intelligent person, he, like possibly any average American brought up on success-literature available to him through various channels of media and culture industry, is taken in by the enchanting temptations of the American myth of success.

 

            He resolves the crisis of his life in suicide with a hope that the insurance money would give the children a break. But Biff and Linda are per­plexed; Willy remains an antithesis to the corporate world. But the turn of the century American economy, with all its horrors of the newly-arrived immigrants working long hours in the sweetshops for poor wages, had still offered opportunities to grow up and “make it” since it was still an expand­ing economy. But the economic struc­ture after the Wall Street crash in 1929 and after the survival of the Great Depression, thanks mainly to the war, and especially the economic structure of the late Forties and the Fifties till now is the economy that can seldom be conducive to the beginners since they have to compete with the already established corporate sharks. What has happened is a change in business ethos. This is what Noam Chomsky says on this matter in a per­sonal interview: “Since 1930s, of course, there is a lot of growth in the United States, but in a different direc­tion. It is not the kind of growth that could absorb poor people........It’s mostly high technology and services and so on. It’s the kind of thing that basically absorbs the privileged and wealthy......”

 

            This was the scenario in 1949 when the play was first produced. What happened before and the years after its production should make an interesting story, even if it is told repeatedly from different points of view. Interestingly, critics were surprised to see that Arthur Miller made this play, like many others of his, ethnically an­onymous although the play’s eventual translation into Yiddish convinced some that it was essentially Jewish in that it reflected the dilemma and angst of a little man who was powerless to face hostile societal ambiguities. Of course, Miller has since been attacked repeatedly for this lapse in his other plays also. The fact that the play was produced almost immediately after the Holocaust further accentuated the charge against Miller’s refusal to iden­tify Jewishness of his vision.

 

            One could possibly argue that since Miller belongs to the liberal tra­dition and to the philosophy enlighten­ment, he does not place a major em­phasis on ethnic specificity. But it is difficult to convince oneself with such an argumentation. Richard Wagner, great German composer who influ­enced the modem literature signifi­cantly, used to declare that Jews could never produce authentic music be­cause of their rootlessness in Ger­many. However anti-Semitic such comments are – the German intellec­tual presence in the long history of anti-Semitism deserves a more ex­haustive discussion – it is commonly accepted opinion in may literary circles now that the creative process benefits a great deal if it is grounded in the artist’s roots. And thus James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus is deter­mined “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 253). Strangely, Miller’s Liberal values theoretically enriched by the tradition of the Enlightenment, urge him to reach beyond ethnicity for the archetypal issues that beset the man in modem lib­eral democracies.

 

            In actual fact, to come back, to the point I made earlier, Miller uses the tragedy of Willy Loman to suggest the sad demise of the expectations of the humane face of the Enlightenment. The refugee intellectuals, who fled the Hitler’s Nazism, in a notable book entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment pon­der over the American situation:

 

            Here in America there is no dif­ference between man and his economic fate. A man is made by his assets, income, position, and prospects. The economic mark coincides completely with a man’s character. Everyone is worth what he earns and earns what he is worth. He learns what he is through the vicissitudes of his economic existence. He knows nothing else. The materi­alisitc critique of society once ob­jected against idealism that existence determined consciousness and not vice versa, and that the truth about society did not lie in its idealistic conception of itself but in its economy; Contempo­rary men have rejected such idealism. They judge themselves by their market value and learn what they are from what hap­pens to them in the capitalistic economy. (211)

 

            Obviously, liberal democracies do not seem to be doing well certainly the American establishment. The all ­powerful corporate world cares little about the little men in their hierarchy. Willy Loman cannot be accommodated fully because Willy has his own misgivings even if they are not eloquently crystalized in his mind. He has in­stinctive ethical ways but he cannot convince himself definitely that there is a meaningful life beyond what Biff call the “phony dream”. This dichot­omy, in the last analysis, is the most damning indictment on the American system. One is born into Horatio Alger myth or gets indoctrinated by the mass culture and the media hype. Not accepting or nurturing such a myth as a role-model substance is generally perceived to be a failure or weakness or unmanliness. Willy is not strong enough or intelligent enough to articu­late his instinctive perception of personal ethics and sense of justice. He desperately wavers to find a synthesis and to bring his innate humanism and American orientation towards competi­tive jungle together which appears to be impossible anyway. His pathetic suicide is his answer – “synthesis” or indictment of America – depending on one’s point of view.

 

            Has America changed over the years? If Willy were alive, how would he respond to the changes on the American scene? One could certainly conjecture some views in this connec­tion. Since Willy is Miller’s voice and creation reflecting his views of society, Miller’s response to the America dec­ades after the play’s first production in the Forties, can also be grafted on Willy’s context atleast whatever ex­tent possible. The story of the Fifties “the plague years” also infamously known as the McCarthy era thor­oughly bamboozled the liberal mind. Worse still, it proved how vulnerable a man can be, and how even decent people can be harassed and pushed to a corner by the demagogic and state department vandals. Miller’s After the Fall, though told in personal terms with explicit autobiographical over­tones, is a condemnation of this political and institutionalized violence that breaks savagely into the lives of the people no matter how resistant they are quite often forcing them into complacency or making them unwilling accomplices. All of this is done in the name of democracy or freedom of expression. Perhaps this is the fall-out of the so-called “containment” policy and the cold war fever that lasted as long as it could.

 

            The civil rights movement, the Bay of Pigs, the New Left, Vietnam war, the U.S. response to the contin­ual Latin American crises and the Middle East affairs emerge as a defining framework for the American post­war era. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1961), William Whyte’s Or­ganisation Man (1956), Michael Har­rington’s The other America (1962) with its sequel The New American Poverty (1984) sum up some of the significant chapters in the American life not to speak about any number of books on Vietnam war and the black experience. America has many issues to deal with taking on various roles from a belliger­ent big bully to the preserver of demo­cratic temper and peace in the world. Of course, the big business and what William Jame called “the bitch-god­dess success” have become powerful myths as ever. The big business espe­cially has become more powerful over the years than it is in the past with frequent no-holds-barred presence of the corporate raiders as they are fa­mously called.

 

            Frankly, Willy has gone to the eternal rest with a fond hope that his sons would find themselves and they would “make it”. The neurotic side of the American dream can be perceived in the response of his children which is a variance with their father’s hope. Inevitably, America has changed a great deal and it is in the nature of the American psyche to change. Willy, it appears, would still suffer the same anxieties if he were to live today. More than a decade of the Republican con­servatism has policies catering to the upper crust of the country. The poor white or non-white and the salaried sections still have ever-haunting situations like housing, steady income and a sense of peace and stability in per­sonal relationships.

 

            Willy is also a victim of the con­sumer society hire purchase facility, paying every month premiums on the house and things like refrigerator which generally cause them moments of anxiety and insecurity. More to the point perhaps is the need for an indi­vidual to have the dignity of maintain­ing himself and his family honourably. Willy somehow feels that the individ­ual does not count in the complicated hierarchies of the corporate world. They are respected and listened to as long as they are useful to the survival and growth of the business. Willy would not, and could not, get the con­sideration from his bosses though, having slaved all his life for the com­pany, he thinks he should now be ac­commodated.

 

            As we are told, the present boss’s father seems to have promised him to find a place in New York for him since in his advanced age he would not be able to withstand the long and strenuous tours to the New England stages. But with the new boss, a new set of priorities come into focus and, as can be expected, the past commitments and loyalties can be conveniently erased to suit the dictates of a new environment. Predictably, Willy senses sadly that he is out of step with the times and reflects peculiarly on the trivial matters like he is not dressing to his advantage although the new salesman culture indeed seems to demand the need for person­ality culture in order to be successful as a salesman. One has to charm the  customers with their personality which is pathetically different from the Franklinesque emphasis on character and industry as the foundation for American success. Things indeed seem to have changed and Willy is left be­hind. He longs for peace that is avail­able for him when he remembers his brother, Ben, and his father, and des­perately longs for the agrarian vision of the Edenic America. But the machine and the machine-like institutions have shrivelled the puritanic vision of Amer­ica as the Garden of Eden with near­ satanic revenge.

 

            However, Willy’s pshyche is more complicated and more ambiguous than that. He attempts to perspectivise the society and its institutions in the best way possible for him. While recog­nizing the demise of the agrarian vi­sion, he is also overwhelmed by the contingencies of the life and the life of his family i.e., his children and his wife, therefore, he makes his own choices, hopefully remedial and sup­posedly self-sustaining. It is all very well to state that Willy paid the price for his wrong dreams as if he is living in a caring society or, as Walter Lippman used to call, “the good soci­ety”. What the life of Willy Loman points to is the need for irreducible justice both on personal and collective level and the over-reaching compas­sion of the institutional structure. Any philosophy of progress that does not sufficiently declare its allegiance to these would be suspect and, on that account alone, can be dubious. If the past four decades of the American journey, both in foreign and domestic affairs, have any pointers, they do not necessarily show the humane frame­work as the key principle for societal infrastructure of which corporate power structure is a part: and without which Willy Loman cannot find himself fully accommodated or vindicated.

 

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