The Presentness Of The Past

Eugene O'Neill is always associated with Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Freud and Jung, and William Faulkner has been compared to Balzac, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Hardy and the Southwest humorists. However, little work has been done that considers O'Neill and Faulkner together, a situation which was caused perhaps by the critics who are used to separate discussions of novelists and of dramatists. Yet even a cursory review of their writing will reveal a striking affinity, which is hard to be simply considered as a coincidence.What did the South's quintessential spokesman find in the plays of a dramatist who worshipped the sea and declared that man lived on "hopeless hopes"? William Faulkner has praised O'Neill's ability to capture the flavor of dialect and the force of language in his early article, declaring him to be "the one man who is accomplishing anything in American drama". Eugene O'Neill—the most important dramatist in America—has exerted a decisive influence on the Southern novelist.O'Neill's influence on Faulkner can be grouped into two categories, or two degrees: formative and creative. The first, which helps to shape an artist's ideas and techniques as he struggles to find his "voice", is generally a stage of development, as in Faulkner's largely derivative New Orleans tales and sketches of the mid-twenties, with their echoes of O'Neill's Glencairn plays, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. The second, creative influence, leads to integration and development. This kind of influence becomes part of the thought processes and creative expressions of the borrower, is entwined with the works and ideas of that writer, and reappears in changed form. These changes may make it difficult to pinpoint sources, but a close reading of Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! with respectively, All God's Chillun Got Wings and Mourning Becomes Electra shows Faulkner not merely borrowing from O'Neill but using them as raw material that the novelist transformed with his own original vision. Such a transformation also takes place in As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary, in which Faulkner borrowed techniques from O'Neill's expressionist drama, and in The Sound and the Fury, which have the imprint of the stream-of-consciousness technique found in Strange Interlude.Then, I would find the answers for the questions I ask: What can be learned about O'Neill through his influence on Faulkner? Why did Faulkner imitate the particular themes, techniques, or characters he did? In one sense, then, this paper is a reverse influence study, turning the fact of influence back upon the writer whose material was absorbed and asking what such absorption can tell us about him.So, in Chapter One, I talk about firstly about their parallel lives. In this chapter, I refer to three aspects in which we could find many astonishing similarities. O'Neill and Faulkner shared a number of experiences and put them into their works in many of the same motifs—the dissolution of the family, the failure of love, conflict between father and son, bitter competition between brothers, and in many similar character types—the absent mother, the inadequate father, the haunted young man. The first is the unhappy childhood shared by both the dramatist and the novelist. The overwhelming problem O'Neill and Faulkner faced as children involved a parent and a drug: Ella O'Neill's addiction to morphine, and Murry Falkner's alcoholism. They also had the same intellectually and temperamentally incompatible parents, and more specifically, the same absent mothers. Given such situations at home, it is perhaps 110 surprise O'Neill and Faulkner were intensely shy and withdrawn men who had a strong sense of self-hatred and an equal lack of self-confidence. Both turned to liquor as an anesthetic for life's pain and their own inadequacies. So, the second is the writers' own alcohol problem. Then in part three, I turn to Long Day's Journey into Night and The Sound and the Fury, the masterpiece of the present past of O'Neill and Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury and Long Day's Journey into Night Faulkner and O'Neill transformed their personal anguish and haunted memories into art.Chapter Two discusses kindred spirits between O'Neill and Faulkner. There is a coherence of theme and imagery in O'Neill and Faulkner writings. The first is the dramatist's Irishness and the novelist's Southernness. The two regions Ireland and the American South share many of the same characteristics: the great importance of family, raconteurs with drinks in their hands, and the most important, an acute awareness of history, the past and tradition. The second is Faulkner's access to O'Neill. There are a number of ways Faulkner could have become acquainted with O'Neill's work, in America or abroad. They also had mutual friends and acquaintances that could provide another opportunity. Then in part three, I make a list of their similar ideas in their writings.Then, in Chapter Three, I turn to their similar writing techniques. Critics often wonder how could Faulkner suddenly produce the masterpiece The Sound and the Fury which employed the highly innovative stream-of-consciousness technique in 1929 after his two rather unremarkable novels—Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927). O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928) was also extremely inventive in the way of having the characters speak their thoughts aloud. It has been called a "psychological novel in sense" and a "stream-of-consciousness novel". Being an experimenter in artistic form, it is quite likely that he would have been impressed by O'Neill's radical approach to the exploration of man's subconscious. In characterization, too, the writers are very similar. O'Neill's and Faulkner's males are often Romantic dreamers, doomed characters with the fatal flaw of self-consciousness. Often the female is accorded a larger-than-life, almost mythic status by O'Neill and Faulkner.Based on the foregoing discussion and analyses, in Conclusion I present the answers to the questions I ask at the beginning of the paper, and further reason this point by using Mark Spilka's words about the value of a comparative study. The fiction writers have found O'Neill congenial for their own writing because of his innovations and experiments, and many features of O'Neill's plays are more characteristic of a novelist than a modern playwright.