Transfiguring Tragedy: Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche in Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays

In one of the most famous descriptions of a bookshelf’s contents ever put to the page or on stage, James Tyrone in act 4 of Long Day’s Journey Into Night shouts at his son Edmund, “That damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen!” (quoted, 2). Two of those atheists, fools, and madmen have long been associated with the middle and late work of Eugene O’Neill, with Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche regularly figuring in studies of his plays and thought. Although Long Day’s Journey was written from 1939 to 1941 and published in 1956, it takes place in August 1912—meaning that the contents of that bookshelf, already well pored over if the elder Tyrone’s anger is any indication, were part of the playwright’s thinking from his earliest days.The consequences of that insight form the subject of Ryder Thornton’s Transfiguring Tragedy: Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche in Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays. As Thornton ably shows, the thinkers of the book’s title—Nietzsche the intellectual superstar, Schopenhauer the mid-tier metaphysician, and Max Stirner the relative unknown—made up a substantial part of O’Neill’s intellectual firmament even from his student days. In other words, the atheists, fools, and madmen of James Tyrone’s vituperations had always been O’Neill’s philosophical lodestars, together offering a means of unlocking new intellectual depths in his earliest theatrical forays.Much of the strength of Thornton’s account comes from the balancing act that he maintains between intellectual biography and literary analysis. As Thornton recounts, O’Neill came to these thinkers in the context of a double disillusionment that marked his early life: firstly and most profoundly, the loss of his Catholic faith upon his discovery of his mother’s opioid addiction and his own role in its inception, the selfsame subject of much of Long Day’s Journey; and secondly, his scholastic disillusionment with the intellectually and culturally conservative atmosphere at Princeton University, where the titular thinkers were believed unworthy for an Ivy League syllabus, if acknowledged at all. It was instead on the bookshelves of iconoclasts and freethinkers with whom the young O’Neill came into contact that he discovered the philosophers who would shape his newly atheistic worldview. The most central of these was arguably the New York City bookseller Benjamin Tucker, whose Unique Bookshop in Greenwich Village would become a mainstay for O’Neill. There the young writer discovered the potent mixture of anarchism, egoism, and proto-existentialism that marked much of the bohemian worldview of the era, a vortex of ideas in which pieces of thought from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Stirner, and others all swirled.Thornton does a fine job of unpacking for the uninitiated the main philosophical positions of his titular intellectual trio as O’Neill would have encountered and understood them, striking a balance between our own contemporary reception of these figures and the particularities of O’Neill’s engagement with them given the specific translations available to him and the various intellectual currents of the era. (For instance, the proximity of Nietzsche’s thought to the tenets of left-wing political anarchism was taken as almost self-evident at the time, far less so today.) But where Thornton’s work truly shines is in his excavation of O’Neill’s early plays for evidence of this intellectual genealogy. O’Neill’s one-acts from 1913 and 1914 are awash in dualistic confrontations that evoke Schopenhauer’s distinction of will and representation or Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Dionysian and Apollonian, an ever-unfolding struggle between intangible essence and imposed order. The open schematism of many of these plays makes for a relatively easy application: one readily sees such ideation at work, for instance, in the conflict between the Poet and Business Man in Fog (1914), where worldviews as much as survival strategies are at issue for the denizens of a life raft out at sea, the all-pervasive fog of the play’s title evoking the primordial unity in which such distinctions play out in Schopenhauer’s thought. Yet Thornton is just as adept at uncovering traces of a Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean bent in O’Neill’s more social realist works, each marked, in Thornton’s reading, by layers of “suffering and solace” if not necessarily outright philosophizing (10). This propensity for discovering the philosophical in the quotidian comes to the fore in Thornton’s impressive readings of O’Neill’s breakthrough Glencairn plays, the quartet of seafaring one-acts written between 1914 and 1917 that were some of his earliest successes with the Provincetown Players. Gone are the open dichotomies and plain pontification of some of the prior one-acts, yet questions of what Thornton calls “suffering, illusion, and possession” remain at the quartet’s core, with wild nature and the churning sea continuing to evoke Schopenhauer’s primordial will or the wild Dionysian forces of Nietzsche’s thought against the structures, routines, and hierarchies of the Glencairn steamer (45).If Schopenhauer and Nietzsche loom over the one-acts, it is the less well-known Stirner who in Thornton’s estimation lies behind the worldview of O’Neill’s first full-length plays of the 1910s, Beyond the Horizon (1918) most famously but also Bread and Butter (1914) and The Personal Equation (1915). Though he is today largely remembered for his connections to political anarchism, Stirner’s most famous work, The Ego and Its Own (1844, trans. 1907), was central to the era’s understanding of individuation, alienation, and egoism (at the time, a proto-existentialist grappling with self-creation and self-actualization, not to be confused with the term’s later political valences), each of which Thornton traces in O’Neill’s first full-length plays. For Thornton, the co-mingling of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Stirner truly comes to fruition slightly later in O’Neill’s career, with “Anna Christie” (1921). Here Thornton’s knack for discovering the philosophical veins pulsing underneath O’Neill’s realist coverings produces a tour-de-force analysis. Paying detailed attention to the revisions that turned the original draft of the play, then titled Chris Christopherson, into “Anna Christie” in 1920, Thornton finds in this tale of a former prostitute seeking spiritual and material redemption a sublimated story of religious revision, a “philosophical synthesis, in which [O’Neill] combined Christian symbolism, Nietzschean religious critique, his increasing knowledge of Eastern religion, and Stirner’s philosophy of egoism to dramatize the transformation of ‘old forces’ into new ones” (109). In other words, a remarkable encapsulation of the bohemian philosophical currents of the time and the new world and new morality they portended.In many ways, “Anna Christie” marked a high point of O’Neill’s early career, and so too is it arguably the high point of Thornton’s analysis. Less compelling is his reading of The Emperor Jones (1920). Thornton incorporates some of the most important recent work on this complex and problematic play addressing issues of race and indigeneity, and he shows how many of the philosophical concerns and tropes of O’Neill’s earlier works persist, yet it never becomes clear how the latter might meaningfully shape or recast the former. Thornton’s reading of The Hairy Ape (1922), taken as a bridge between the early and middle O’Neill, falls similarly short. Again, O’Neill’s philosophical commitments persist, but here an overt Marxist-materialist element enters into his thinking and stagecraft, none of which Thornton addresses in any depth. There’s a potentially interesting point to be made about the transition from the idealist to the materialist in O’Neill, both philosophically and dramaturgically, but the absence of any examination of Marx in the book means that such an argument never fully emerges.These shortcomings notwithstanding, Thornton offers an unmistakably valuable contribution to our understanding of O’Neill’s earliest philosophical development and its impact on his dramaturgy and stagecraft. If there is an overarching criticism to be made, it is mainly that Thornton’s work is somewhat out of step with other recent currents in O’Neill scholarship. With the exception of the chapter on The Emperor Jones, which is very much in dialogue with recent work, Thornton misses out on what could be fruitful conversations with the more cognate publications on O’Neill and his sources of the past decade-plus: my own work on Nietzsche and O’Neill, Michael Y. Bennett’s and Benjamin Carson’s collection on O’Neill’s one-acts (which contains a number of areas of intellectual overlap with Thornton’s approach), and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s landmark intellectual history American Nietzsche. Thornton’s work is calling for dialogue with these and other recent forays. O’Neill is being rethought as a thinker, and Thornton has made a useful contribution to that rethinking.