Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[alice wellintown]

Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

 Yes, Mucho is an excellent example. Mucho is a character in Lot49,
P's first California work--a work in which drugs and CIA conspiracy
are employed by the author to exactly the same end. Mucho takes LSD.
Mucho is an excellent compare/contrast character to help us understand
Doc. Like young Doc the repo-man who threatens poor people with a
syringe, Mucho, a used car salesman who winces at the sight of sawdust
and honey, is a "thin-skinned unscrupulous salesman, who sells cars to
the American disinherited--"Negro, Mexican, cracker." As a DJ, Mucho
spews sex over the air to an adolescent audience and has affairs with
them off the air. He takes LSD, not to reach Nirvana, but as a habit,
disintegrates into multiple personalities and goes groping "like a
child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the
elaborate candy house of himself." Mucho is made of fool of. He is
satirized. Like it or not, it is not a CIA big shot who exploits the
poor, but a car salesman. A car salesman with big dreams who hopes to
make money and fame and settles for disguises and jailbait. Like so
many of P's California characters, trapped in mundane day or night
jobs, Mucho hates his life and so he finds method to escape it. But
there is no exit. There is no way out. No one is saved. Romantic
escapism only leads to death or annihilation or solipsism. Young Larry
has much in common with Mucho. When he gives up tracing down poor
deadbeats, he takes on work from women and children who have lost
their husbands to the machinery of markets black and white and red all
over, and from ex-cons, blacks, asians, crackers, disenfranchised and
disinherited preterite. But Doc dreams of escape too. He models
himself, as do all these California figures, after characters on the
tube and in detective fictions. Who or what is he is working for and
why becomes clearer as the work unfolds. Larry works for Larry. He no
longer threatens people with a syringe, he kills them. That's what the
guys he models himself after do. They kill people. Smoking a joint or
having an LSD trip that opens his mind doesn't stop him from killing.
Do we admire him? This is the question. Or do we admire the art only.

The following analysis of The Playboy of the Western World was
originally published in The British and American Drama of Today.
Barrett H. Clark. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. pp. 194-7.



On the west coast of County Mayo[2] Christy Mahon stumbles into
Flaherty's tavern. There he claims that he is on the run because he
killed his own father by driving a spade into his head. Flaherty
praises Christy for his boldness, and Flaherty's daughter (and the
barmaid), Pegeen, falls in love with Christy, to the dismay of her
betrothed, Shawn. Because of the novelty of Christy's exploits and the
skill with which he tells his own story, he becomes something of a
town hero. Many other women also become attracted to him, including
the Widow Quin, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Christy at Shawn's
behest. Christy also impresses the village women by his victory in a
donkey race, using the slowest beast.

Eventually Christy's father, Mahon, who was only wounded, tracks him
to the tavern. When the townsfolk realize that Christy's father is
alive, everyone (including Pegeen) shuns him as a liar and a coward.
In order to regain Pegeen's love and the respect of the town, Christy
attacks his father a second time. This time it seems that Old Mahon
really is dead, but instead of praising Christy, the townspeople, led
by Pegeen, bind and prepare to hang him to avoid being implicated as
accessories to his crime. Christy's life is saved when his father,
beaten and bloodied, crawls back onto the scene, having improbably
survived his son's second attack. As Christy and his father leave to
wander the world, Shawn suggests he and Pegeen get married soon, but
she spurns him. Pegeen then laments betraying and losing Christy, The
Playboy of the Western World.

In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington
Synge wrote: "... in countries where the imagination of the people,
and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a
writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time give
the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and
natural form." This play is the living embodiment of Synge's ideas on
the combination of reality and poetry in the drama. The Playboy of the
Western World -- indeed, all of Synge's plays -- is outside the realm
of literary "movements" and coteries; his plays are not plays of
ideas. Theses and problems die. Ideas are for a generation, or for a
few generations. Again the dramatist expounds (in the preface to The
Tinker's Wedding): "The drama is made serious -- in the French sense
of the word -- not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems
that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives
the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations
live.... The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove
anything...."

In his travel-book, The Aran Islands, we find the following passage:
"... He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father
with a blow of a spade when he was in a passion, and then fled to this
island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives.... They
hid him in a hole ... and kept him safe for weeks, though the police
came and searched for him, and he could hear their boots grinding on
the stones over his head. In spite of a reward which was offered, the
island was incorruptible, and after much trouble the man was safely
shipped to America.

"This impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It
seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated
English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling of
these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime,
that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a
passion which is as irresistible as a storm on the sea. If a man has
killed his father, and is already sick and broken with remorse, they
can see no reason why he should be dragged away and killed by the law.

"Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if
you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, 'Would
any one kill his father if he was able to help it?'"

Out of his sympathy and enthusiasm for life, its humor, its bite, its
contradictions, its exhilaration, Synge wrote this play. The
dramatist's end was "reality" and "joy." He was little concerned with
technique, he had no purpose but that of allowing his living creatures
to revel in life, to revel in rich idioms. Still, this apparently
spontaneous comedy was the result of arduous labor: George Moore
relates that the last act was rewritten thirteen times.

Many plays, of all ages and periods, have contained first acts with
very little in them but the exposition of a few facts and the creation
of the environment or milieu. The opening of The Playboy of the
Western World is full of atmosphere, and strikes the keynote of the
action which is to follow; but there is no such conscious preparation
as there is in the expository act of Pinero's Thunderbolt. Pegeen
Mike, in Synge's play, opens the act with: "Six yards of stuff for to
make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them
and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb.
To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart
on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty.
With the best compliments of this season. Margaret Flaherty." Compare
this simple paragraph with the elaborate preparatory openings of The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray and Iris.

Throughout the play the development of the plot, such as it is, goes
hand in hand with the development of Christy's character. Beginning
with Christy's "I had it in my mind it was a different word and
bigger" (just after his entrance in the first act), trace, by
reference to his speeches, how, in his own estimation and in that of
his audience, he grows from "a slight young man ... very tired and
frightened and dirty" to a "likely gaffer in the end of all." There is
a certain similarity between the growth of Hamlet's character and
Christy's.




>
>> . . .how do you account for the fact that the
>> characters who chase down these CIA projects and/or complain that the
>> government has taken LSD off the free market because it fears a
>> population that will gain new insights into government corruption, are
>> made fools of in the P-texts?
>
> Well, like the Dude says—Not OUR Dude, the other Dude—"Yeah, well, you know,
> that's just, like, your opinion, man." You say they're—I guess you're
> talking about Mucho Maas and El Espinero—made fools of and I'm sure in the
> voluble outpourings of your essentially Puritan mindset*, you'll find a way
> to track it all back to Hawthorne in the process. You know—you're no more
> impervious to projection than anyone else here. But I don't see how to get
> around the fact that these folks [in TRP's books] did have insights, that
> the forensic info gathered by Frank in fact was on the mark. But hey—it's
> your bummer, you're entitled to get what you need out of it. I don't think
> the insights gained by Doc during his Acid trips make him a fool, though
> what he's learning indicates what fools we've all been while pursuing
> mindless pleasures of our very own.
>
>> Darker than Dark. IV is ugly and Dark. And, P seems pissed off.
>> I suspect that AGTD took  a lot out of him.
>
> Can't say I'd disagree with you on that one. Of course "The Long Goodbye"
> ain't exactly no Swiss Picnic either.
>
> *Always thought Glenn Gould was the Last Puritan.
>
>