the banality of addiction: arthur miller and complicity...the banality of addiction: arthur miller...

The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity Grant Gosizk

Modern Drama, Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 171-191 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696362

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696362

The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity

GRANT GOSIZK

ABSTRACT: While much has been written on Arthur Miller’s relationshipto the post-war intelligentsia, few critics have explored the influencethat intellectual debates on Holocaust complicity had on the author’s1960s catalogue. Building on the similarities between the theory of the“banality of evil” offered in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusa-lem (1963) and Miller’s Herald Tribune article on the Nazi trials inFrankfurt (1964), this article suggests that the playwright’s interest inemerging theories of complicity became a central concern of After theFall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1964). Strongly influenced byTheodor Adorno’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on aesthetic responsesto post-war guilt, Miller used these plays to dramatize competing re-sponses to the concept of “ubiquitous complicity” for the Holocaust.Using the aesthetic language of addiction spectacle scenes, which astrong tradition of American temperance theatre had popularized,Miller evaluated the mechanics of complicity and offered a dramaticthesis on its importance to anti-fascist activism. I conclude that, inboth plays, the representation of addiction became the primary meansthrough which Miller participated in contemporary critical debates onpost-war guilt.

KEYWORDS: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Incident atVichy, After the Fall, medical humanities, guilt

Although his was a remarkably prolific career, Arthur Miller did not producea single theatrical work between 1956 and 1964. Attributing this hiatus to theauthor’s post-war political activism, the noted Miller biographer ChristopherBigsby suggests that, “[l]ike so many others at this time,” Miller “began toacknowledge the significance of the Holocaust, the shock of which [. . .] ledto a two-decade-long silence” (Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 11). Throughout thisperiod of professional inactivity, Miller travelled extensively, attending sym-posia on anti-Semitism and the Jewish diaspora in France, Austria, and theSoviet Union, all the while re-evaluating the global consequences of theHolocaust and his relationship to them as a writer. These trips, and specifically

© University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.61.2.0860r

a tour of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1962, profoundlyinfluenced the formal and theoretical character of the author’s subsequentwork, with some critics suggesting that “the Miller who returned to the theatrein the mid-1960s was a different man from the one who had written the essay‘On Social Plays’” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 27; see also Bigsby, Review401).

Upon returning to the United States in 1963, Miller produced two plays,both of which were explicitly concerned with the historical contexts and con-sequences of the Holocaust: Incident at Vichy (1964) and After the Fall (1964).Incident at Vichy, a one-act play about racial inspection in Nazi-occupiedFrance, dramatized the interactions of guilt, responsibility, and free willwithin totalitarian regimes. After the Fall, Miller’s psychological drama stagedin the shadows of a German concentration camp, offered a thesis on guilt inthe post-war era: “no one they didn’t kill can be innocent again” (32).1 Thisthematic emphasis on the Holocaust brought with it a number of formal andstylistic departures from the author’s previous work; perhaps the most notableof these was in Miller’s conception of guilt, which resonated with many ofthe critical debates on complicity that followed the publication of HannahArendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

On 16 February 1963, Arendt published the first instalment of a serialreport on the trial of Adolf Eichmann: a former Nazi lieutenant colonel tried –

in the first Nazi trial held in Israel – for “crimes ‘against the Jewish people’”for his role in organizing the transportation of millions of people to ghettosand concentration camps (Arendt, Eichmann 7). While Arendt agreed withthe court’s contention that Eichmann “played a central role in an enterprisewhose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surfaceof the earth” (277), as well as its conclusion that “no one, that is no memberof the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with [him]”(279), she objected to the ethnic specificity of the charges brought againsthim and the potential “partiality of Jewish judges” (259). Given the legal pre-cedent set at the Nuremberg Trials, where organizers of the Final Solutionwere tried for “crimes against the members of various nations” (6), she con-tended that the Israeli insistence upon the Jewishness of the victims and theadjudicators had “ulterior purposes,” albeit “the noblest of ulterior purposes”(253). Citing Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s declaration that theEichmann trial should lead “the nations of the world to know . . . and theyshould be ashamed” (qtd. in Arendt 10) and remind Israelis that “only theestablishment of a Jewish state had enabled the Jews to hit back” (10), Arendtdeclared the prosecution of Eichmann a “show trial” (4): it abstracted the leg-islative imperative for a “trial [of] his deeds” in order to declare publicly thehorrors of the Holocaust and to validate Israeli statehood (5). In short, Arendt

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believed that the crime for which Eichmann was tried had been fabricated inorder to make Eichmann a spectacle, a “scapegoat” for the whole of anti-Semitism, at the expense of the western tradition of criminal justice (286).

The resulting threat, Arendt believed, was not that Eichmann wouldreceive an unjust sentence but that trying him as the “monster responsible”for the Final Solution (8) – when in reality he “had no motives at all,” apartfrom “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advance-ment” (287) – abstracted legal determinations of guilt into evaluations ofcomplicity that fundamentally obstructed justice. Instead, she contended,

The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben-Gurion conceived of it, with itsstress on general issues to the detriment of legal niceties, [. . .] demandedexposure of the complicity of all German offices and authorities in theFinal Solution – of all civil servants in the state ministries, of the regulararmed forces, with their General Staff, of the judiciary, and of the businessworld. (18)

The result was “almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched farbeyond the ranks of [Nazi] Party membership” (18). Drawing a distinctionbetween the legal tradition of a “trial [of] deeds” and judgments of responsi-bility that considered indirect involvement, Arendt suggested that, if the twowere conflated, as in the Eichmann trial, all would be found complicit withthe Final Solution (5). Spatializing the concept, the author claimed that,when considering complicity, “the degree of responsibility increases as wedraw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his ownhands” (247).

Unsurprisingly, Arendt’s report was highly controversial, with criticalthinkers from all over the world debating the mechanics of complicity and itsvalue in conceptualizing guilt for the crimes of the Final Solution.2 Of thesethinkers, most fell into two camps: those who believed that acknowledgingcomplicit responsibility for the Holocaust denied the criminal responsibilityof the perpetrators and blamed victims, on the one hand, and those who be-lieved that complicity with the Final Solution was inevitable and acknowl-edged it as integral to post-war, anti-fascist activism, on the other. WhileMiller sided with Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Bell,and other theorists who advocated the radical potential of acknowledgingcomplicit guilt for the Final Solution, the author remained concerned aboutits value for those resigned to inaction against social injustice. In an article,originally published in the New York Times under the title “Our Guilt for theWorld’s Evil” (1965) – which defended Incident at Vichy against a barrage ofnegative reviews addressing the play’s supposed endorsement of Arendt’swork – he worried that many who accepted their complicity with the injus-tices of World War II would punish themselves with guilt “to keep from

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being punished” (“Guilt” 75).3 Miller believed that, if not “transformed intoresponsibility,” guilt could impinge on the “ethical postulate” that demandedaccountability and counteraction against injustice, “becom[ing] a ‘morality’”in itself (74–75). As Susan C.W. Abbotson suggests, Miller believed that“guilt alone is never the answer because, as a passive reaction, guilt is destruc-tive as opposed to the active reaction of accepting responsibility” (398). Indeed,Miller’s return to the theatre in the 1960s principally concerned these ethicaldebates surrounding complicity: namely, its ability to motivate responsibility orinduce being resigned to inaction.

For Miller, staging the distinctions between these two responses to com-plicity was problematic. Inherently defined by the passivity and inaction ofeveryday life, complicity itself seemed to defy theatrical representation. Whilea particular character’s recognition of complicity could be revealed diegeti-cally, performing responses to it required the superimposition of a trait thathad both ethical and physical dimensions. Recognizing the potential of addic-tion to signify moral and physical decline – a potential mobilized by theAmerican temperance movement with its strong tradition of propagandistictheatre – Miller used addiction to dramatize apathy in After the Fall and Inci-dent at Vichy. By imposing the affliction on characters at pivotal moments ina narrative, during which they grapple with their own guilt for the Holocaust,Miller was able to distinguish theatrically between the positive and negativeconsequences of post-war guilt. In Incident at Vichy, a German army major’sdescent into alcoholic inebriety gives the recognition of his complicity withNazi occupation in France a visually performable character while simulta-neously ethicizing his resignation. Likewise, in After the Fall, a woman’shabitual barbiturate use becomes the visual manifestation of her reluctance toaccept responsibility for historical injustices. In both plays, addiction is inte-gral to dramatizing the ethics of complicity and to articulating Miller’s stancein one of the most controversial debates in twentieth-century American intel-lectual history.

Drawing on contemporary theories of complicity and Miller’s career-long fascination with the relationship between guilt and addiction, I analyseAfter the Fall and Incident at Vichy as Miller’s most concerted attempts to par-ticipate in intellectual debates on post-war guilt. While analyses of the repre-sentations of guilt in these plays are myriad, none has adequately situatedthose representations within the context of post-war debates. Brenda Murphydiscusses Arendt’s theories of guilt but focuses on the archetypes of “forgive-ness” and “promise” discussed in The Human Condition (1958), with onlybrief attention paid to the importance of Eichmann in Jerusalem to Miller’swork. Likewise, Alison Forsyth situates Miller’s work in a long tradition of1960s Shoah theatre, but Miller’s theoretical engagement with post-war guilt

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is not discussed. Even Terry Otten’s The Temptation of Innocence in the Dra-mas of Arthur Miller, which skilfully attributes After the Fall ’s ennui to the ex-istentialist rhetoric of Albert Camus’s The Fall (1956), overlooks the play’sdebt to a contemporary critical debate on complicity, except for a brief dis-cussion of Paul Tillich’s interpretation of the myth of Eden in Existence andthe Christ (1957) (Otten 112).4 Accenting the author’s intellectual dialoguewith Arendt, Adorno, and Sartre not only enables a re-evaluation of some ofMiller’s least appreciated plays but also adds to the growing body of criticalwork noting the author’s affinities with New Left politics.5 Likewise, associat-ing this intellectual tradition with the representation of addiction contributesto research on the representation of the addict in modern American culture.6

In an interview for the Paris Review in 1966, Arthur Miller described hisfirst childhood theatre experience as a low-budget “morality play about takingdope.”7 In that play,

The Chinese were kidnapping beautiful blond, blue-eyed girls who, peoplethought, had lost their bearings morally; they were flappers who drank ginand ran around with boys. And they inevitably ended up in some basementin Chinatown, where they were irretrievably lost by virtue of eating opiumor smoking some pot. (qtd. in Carlisle and Styron 204)

Dramas such as this were immensely popular throughout the early twentiethcentury, with theatre companies as diverse as the Provincetown Players andthe Women’s Christian Temperance Union using addiction as a subject forinquiry and representation. Despite Miller’s facetious description of thisplay’s melodramatic conception of right and wrong, dramas that polarized re-presentations of sobriety and inebriety along a moral spectrum belonged to atradition of temperance theatre that indelibly informed Miller’s aesthetics ofmorality.

Throughout the American temperance movement, discrete sobriety orga-nizations used popular media to promote their particular ideological stanceson intoxicating substances. Whether promoting moderate drinking practices,abstinence from all intoxicating substances, or legislative prohibition, theseorganizations used songs, dramas, poems, novels, lectures, and paintings toconvey the negative physiological and moral effects of narcotic and alcoholicinebriety. The emerging American tradition of theatrical melodrama provedto be particularly well suited to temperance ideology, in that, as Bruce Mc-Conachie suggests, melodrama presented its subject with a “didactic univer-sality which dr[ove] out all contradiction and ambiguity by excluding thehistorically specific and the psychologically complex” (189). Indeed, the genre



of melodrama, as Peter Brooks contends, depended upon the reduction ofcharacter and conflict to “clearly identified antagonists” that compete until“the expulsion of one of them” (17) and the “total articulation of the moralproblems” (56). In their application to temperance politics, these aestheticmaxims were manifested in dramas that pitted moral, middle-class temper-ance advocates against criminal inebriates in didactic theatrical spectacles ofrecovery or pre-determined decline. Thus, these dramas presented “a universein which there existed a hierarchy of truths that were to be accepted abso-lutely” (Frick 57): intemperance was immoral; sobriety, the foundation ofmiddle-class sociability. And melodrama thus came to be viewed as a “pro-gressive genre for a progressive ideology” (61).

While using a standardized model of melodramatic conflict, perfor-mances of addiction throughout the nineteenth century differed significantlyaccording to their specific temperance ideology. Addressing a one-hundred-per-cent increase in per capita alcohol consumption in the years between1790 and 1830, the first wave of organized temperance ideology emerged froma Federalist political scene that viewed “[i]ncreased drinking [as] symbolic ofdecline in the power and prestige of the old aristocracy” founded upon Chris-tian and class-marked ideals of self-discipline, and thus it promoted moderatedrinking practices to preserve the established social conditions (Gusfield 39;see also White 4, 26–27). Corresponding to this political agenda, contempo-rary theatrical depictions of addiction emphasized the negative effects of animmoral, inebriate, and upwardly mobile working class upon the mercantileelite and presented temperance values as a means of preserving the moral andsocial status quo. Conversely, the individualist reform tradition of temperancepropaganda that proceeded from Federalist discourse became closely asso-ciated with the politics of the antebellum Whig Party that came to powerbetween 1840 and 1850 in the wake of the Second Great Awakening. Con-cerned with how moral values “signified something about a person’s socialposition or expected social position in an evolving class society” (Wilentz 50;emphasis added), these organizations promoted the reformation of inebrietyas part of a moral transformation that was synonymous with middle-classascendency. As such, dramatic propaganda from this period followed a“generic structure” that “takes the shape of an inverted arc”: “the young fam-ily man (always a mechanic, clerk or merchant) takes to drink and slides intocomplete moral and financial degradation before renouncing alcohol and ful-filling his destiny as he rises on the ladder of economic success and social pres-tige” (Mason 98). Likewise, temperance reform throughout the postbellumperiod was predominantly informed by a prohibitionist discourse that promotedlegislative intervention to support the nativist politics of late-nineteenth-centurypopulism. Shifting its political focus from the “conservative and progressive

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reforms” of previous decades to “[p]opulism and radical social Christianity,”prohibitionism perceived alcohol and narcotics as tempters that affectednot only native-born Americans but also immigrants, whose ethnic drink-ing cultures and moral capabilities were continually called into question(Gusfield 94; see also Musto 65–66). John W. Frick suggests that the dra-matic propaganda of this period transferred the blame of intemperance to“external causes and shade[d] the late-nineteenth-century temperance dramatoward alcohol’s inherent qualities and capacity to enslave the drinker” byemphasizing the addict’s irreformability and making a spectacle of his or herviolent inebriety (169).

Despite the party politics that dramatically altered the structure and imag-ery of temperance theatre over the nineteenth century, all of these depictionsshared a moral and aesthetic logic in which inebriety was viewed as a physicalmanifestation of immorality. Whether associated with ethnic alterity, secularity,or class inferiority (according to the discrete political agendas of the dominanttemperance society), addiction remained the antagonist in temperance melo-drama’s representations of a moral binary. If more complex than the genderedand racialized archetypes of the temperance theatre that began Miller’s theatri-cal career, the author’s own portrayals of addiction continued in the traditionof temperance theatre by mobilizing this affliction as a moral signifier.

In one of his first theatrical works, The Great Disobedience (1938) – an un-published prison play about corporate influence within state penal systems –Miller uses the representation of morphine addiction to challenge the simplebinary of guilt and innocence afforded by the logic of penitentiaries.8 One ofthe play’s central narratives concerns a prison psychiatrist’s attempt to cure aninmate’s narcotic addiction as a prison-wide drug smuggling network undercutshis efforts. Given its circumstances, this narrative gives rise to serious questionsabout agency and intention in guilt. Emphasizing the unequal power dynamicsbetween guards and prisoners as well as between the sober and the inebriated,Barrington, the prison addict, describes being manipulated by jail staff into par-ticipating in an illicit market of contraband: “I didn’t want it . . . I didn’t wantit. They shove it between the bars . . . I can’t keep away when they do that”(36). Undermining the Manichaean logic of the prison system, within whichguards are innocent and convicts are guilty, Miller presents the addict–subjectas neither innocent nor wholly guilty; rather, he is complicit in his imprison-ment. It is through the archetype of the addict that Miller undermines thebinary opposition between guilt and innocence and imagines more nuancedconceptions.

Building on the liminal figuring of the addict’s guilt in The Great Dis-obedience, Death of a Salesman (1949) uses the performance of drunkenness tomanifest complicity theatrically. Halfway through the second act, Willy, Biff,



and Happy Loman find themselves at a dinner they can’t afford, lying to oneanother about their jobs and prospects, with nothing to do except “get a loadon” (83). The scene is predicated on a confession: Biff, who had a job inter-view earlier that morning, not only failed to get the position but also stole themanager’s pen, and he must confess to his family. He divulges the secret tohis brother, but the two argue about whether to tell their father – for Willyhas spent his entire life fostering delusions of grandeur, and as financial mis-steps challenge these projections, he has become increasingly depressed.Finally recognizing that his reluctance to intervene in his father’s delusionsdirectly contributes to Willy’s suicidal tendencies, Biff, “high” and “slightlyalcoholic,” decides to admit that he has never been a successful businessman,was not offered the job, and has no financial prospects (84). While Biff ulti-mately loses his resolution and lies to his father yet again, the scene’s majorcontribution to the play is its representation of complicity, with Biff ’s guiltover his inaction performed by means of his physiological transformationfrom sobriety to inebriety.

Even in regards to casting, Miller saw a correlation between addiction andguilt. In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller admits that Ed Begley was se-lected to play Keller in the original production of All My Sons (1947) “becausehe was a reformed alcoholic and still carried the alcoholic’s guilt” (133). Likeboth Barrington and Biff Loman, Keller is a character whose guilt expressesitself not through direct action but through compliance and passivity: he knewthe war planes he helped to manufacture were faulty, but he failed to intervene.Also like them, Keller is described as “a guilty man” whose “traits could bematched” with the alcoholic’s even though “their causes were completely unre-lated” (133). While Miller’s choice of Begley to play Keller was based on the ad-dict’s subliminal and persistent association with guilt rather than on inebriety’sinnately performable character, the choice spoke to the addict’s unique poten-tial to suggest a complex sense of guilt.

Miller’s interest in this potential increased after Arendt published Eich-mann in Jerusalem, a work the Partisan Review described as a complete redis-tribution of “political and moral responsibility” in the post-war era (“Editor’sNote”). Not only did Miller closely follow the criticism of Arendt’s workthroughout this period; one of the most popular of the myriad responses washis own “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart,” published in the NewYork Herald Tribune in March of 1964. Less a critique of Arendt’s reportthan an application of her theories, Miller’s article reported on the FrankfurtAuschwitz Trials held in December 1963, the first of their kind in West Ger-many. There, Miller witnessed the same phenomenon that struck Arendt: the“terribly and terrifyingly normal” character of the accused (Arendt, Eichmann276). While the contextual similarities with Arendt’s report are uncanny,

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unlike her strict methodological commitment to the “trial [of] deeds,” Mill-er’s report implored readers to consider their own complicity with the FinalSolution. In the same article, he stated,

So the question in the Frankfurt courtroom spreads out beyond thedefendants and spirals around the world and into the heart of every man. Itis his own complicity with murder, even the murders he did not performhimself with his own hands. The murders, however, from which heprofited if only by having survived. (“Nazi Trials” 67–68)

Expanding Arendt’s conception of complicity, Miller claimed that all whosurvived the Holocaust owned a portion of its responsibility. This sentimentstood in direct contrast to Arendt’s, who sceptically regarded “organized” or“universal” guilt as dissipating responsibility to the detriment of individualculpability. Instead, Miller conceived of life after World War II as perpetuallyand inevitably engaged in the injustices of the Final Solution. While distinctfrom the responsibility attributed to those convicted of crimes against human-ity, Miller’s conception of complicity consigned post-Holocaust life to a senseof perennial guilt, rooted in the impossibility of innocence in the post-war era.Nor was Miller alone in this proposition, which participated in a wave of intel-lectual debates about complicity that had been steadily gaining critical attentionsince the war’s end.

Among the most noted of these critical responses was Theodor Adorno’sPrisms (1955), with its famous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz isbarbaric” (34). While primarily concerned with “the extent to which the criticis implicated in the culture he or she examines,” as Naomi Mandel suggests(65; emphasis in original), Adorno’s emphasis on the state of this relationship“assign[ed] culture a quality of complicity with the horrors of the Holocaust”(68). Modifying his statements eleven years later in Negative Dialectics,Adorno reaffirmed this position:

it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longerwrite poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whetherafter Auschwitz you can go on living [. . .]. [M]ere survival calls for thecoldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which therecould have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who wasspared. (362–63)

Rather than emphasize a critic’s complicity with her subject, Adorno, likeMiller, clearly demarcated a relationship between Holocaust guilt and post-war life that was both inevitable and irrevocable.

The same was true of Sartre, who significantly influenced Miller’s 1960scatalogue in both content and form.9 Sartre suggested that the one unifyingcharacteristic of the world was its complicity with the Final Solution: “people



of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events,who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in theirmouth; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses amongthem” (What Is Literature? 50). While Sartre acknowledged that “we havelived in shame because of our involuntary complicity with the anti-Semites,who have made hangmen of us all,” he shared Arendt’s hope that recognitionof this disposition could instigate radical intervention (Anti-Semite 151). Sartrebelieved that, united by shared guilt, “perhaps we shall begin to understandthat we must fight for the Jew, no more and no less than for ourselves,” andthus he held futurity to be complicit (151).

This emphasis upon the progressive potential inherent in the acknowl-edgement of complicity echoed Arendt’s earlier work on the subject in “Orga-nized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945). Despite being better knownfor its stance against considerations of complicity when formulating statesanctions for the crimes of World War II, Arendt’s essay also suggested thatcomplicity played a productive role in activism. Concluding with a plea for therecognition of complicity in considerations of future anti-fascist crusades,Arendt claimed that it was “[u]pon them and only upon them, who are filledwith a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, that there canbe any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, every-where against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about”(132).

Discussions of the role of complicity in anti-fascist activism were not re-stricted to intellectual treatises, as Miller’s two plays After the Fall and Inci-dent at Vichy directly discuss the subject of complicity and its political value.Premiering only months after his Tribune article “The Nazi Trials and theGerman Heart,” Incident at Vichy was popularly received as a response to theAuschwitz trials, according to Gene A. Plunka (157). Principally concernedwith the ethics of inaction for those involved in and subjected to the racialinspection processes in Nazi-occupied France, the play, like Arendt’s Eich-mann, was popularly rebuked for supposedly suggesting that guilt for theHolocaust was collectively shared and thus diminishing individual responsi-bility for the Final Solution. Plunka summarizes:

Coming on the heels of Hannah Arendt’s treatise on the banality of evil inEichmann in Jerusalem, critics challenged Miller’s premise that if all of usare complicit with Nazi crimes, then none of us can be held responsible; inshort, Miller, like Arendt, was accused of removing the Germans from theburden of their Holocaust crimes. (158)

On the contrary, both plays serve to clarify the author’s stance on compli-city’s value beyond an Arendtian conception of “organized guilt.” After all,

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After the Fall and Incident at Vichy deploy the archetypes of a long traditionof American temperance theatre that associated inebriety with immoralityand inevitable decline in order to shade distinctions between two differingconsequences of complicity. Throughout the temperance movement, sobrietyorganizations used an established aesthetic lexicon for their dramatic propa-ganda, which made a spectacle of the addict’s violent criminality and determi-nistic fate in order to reinforce didactically a moral imperative for temperancevalues. These aesthetic devices were later used by discrete temperance organi-zations with adjacent social reform interests, such as evangelism, suffragism,abolitionism, and populism, to attach a similarly binary morality to theirrespective political interests. Just as some temperance supporters emphasizedthe “callous disregard for humanity” that both slaveholders and liquor sales-men seemed to share in order to associate abolition with the moral value (andpolitical leverage) of the temperance movement, so too did others use thespectacles of drunken domestic violence to advocate for women’s hygiene,suffrage, and children’s welfare programs; and so too did Miller use depic-tions of addiction to ethicize conceptions of complicity (see Zieger 63). Onthe one hand, Miller bemoaned the complacency that might emerge inresponse to a widespread sense of complicity; on the other, he drew inspira-tion from Arendt’s suggestion that the acknowledgement of complicity couldlead one to “fight fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incal-culable evil that men are capable of bringing about” (“Organized Guilt” 132).

In Incident at Vichy, these two potential results of a sense of complicityare dramatized through the opposing narratives of its two main characters:Von Berg and an unnamed Wehrmacht Major. The former, a dethronedAustrian prince wrongfully detained by Nazi authorities, struggles with asense of guilt derived from his knowledge that he will be released withoutconsequence while other prisoners face deportation and certain death; the lat-ter evaluates his personal guilt for the racial inspection of detainees, despitehis personal objections to the process. Each character responds to his sense ofcomplicity in a markedly different way, with the distinction made visiblethrough the representation of inebriety.

Inspired by a fellow prisoner’s declaration that it is “not your guilt Iwant, [but] your responsibility” (289), Von Berg’s recognition of his owncomplicity becomes the impetus for his radical intervention. Offering hisidentification documents to one of his fellow prisoners and ensuring theman’s safety at the expense of his own, Von Berg makes a concerted effort touse his personal influence to undermine Nazi eugenics. While the effective-ness of this act is undercut by the play’s final scene – which features the trans-portation of new Jewish prisoners to the deportation centre – Von Berg’sactions nonetheless testify to the value for anti-fascist activism of recognizing



one’s complicity. Decades later, Mandel would claim that “complicity pre-cedes the charge of collaboration or the conclusion of culpability” and “is, infact, the condition of possibility for the articulation of these charges” (22;emphasis in original). Similarly, Von Berg articulates his own complicity witha fascist authority he innately opposes by recognizing his own responsibilityfor the crimes from which he profits, if only in survival. And thus he createsan opportunity to act against this fascist authority.

The Wehrmacht Major’s recognition of his complicity with the racialinspection processes of the Nazi detention centre inspires very different results.Like Von Berg, the Major is disgusted by the facility and by his role, howeverdetached, in its deportation tactics; this disgust leads to a period of profoundspeculation on the ethics of inaction, during which he absents himself from itsproceedings. Yet when he returns, “‘high’ – with drink and a flow of emotion”(280), the recognition of his complicity and, more importantly, the ubiquity ofcomplicity in fascist occupation become a justification for his inaction. In aconversation with one of the prisoners, Leduc, he asks,

MAJOR: It means nothing to you that I have feelings about this?LEDUC: Nothing whatever, unless you get us out of here. [. . .] I will love you as

long as I live.[. . .]MAJOR: It’s amazing; you don’t understand anything. Nothing of that kind is

left, don’t you understand that yet? [. . .] There are no personsanymore, don’t you see that? There will never be persons again. [. . .]I have you at the end of this revolver – (indicates the Professor) – he hasme – and somebody has him – and somebody has somebody else.(280–81)

If Von Berg’s recognition of complicity incites a radical gesture, the Major’sguilt functions only as leverage in an emotional transaction, one that en-courages self-preservation and the abdication of responsibility for social injus-tice on the grounds that evil has become banal.

While both active and apathetic responses to complicity are given equalrepresentation, Miller’s emphasis on the Major’s inebriety creates a legible moraldifference between the two. Conforming with the monster-metamorphosismotif popularized in temperance discourse – in which substance abuse facilitatesa marked physical or emotional transformation – the Major’s transition fromanti-fascist German soldier into Nazi accomplice is explicitly marked by hisdrunkenness. In the prohibitionist discourse of temperance media, the moralconnotations of addiction were visualized through spectacular physical transfor-mations into monsters and inhumanly violent villains. This motif was famouslydepicted in Robert Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),

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for example, and in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), each of whichethicizes its protagonist’s transition from sobriety into inebriety by pairing itwith a supernatural transformation. In the former, the moral consequences ofDr. Jekyll’s thinly veiled alcoholic indulgence are conveyed through not onlythe criminal acts he commits while intoxicated but also the transformation thathe undergoes into the brutish, racialized, and class-marked Mr. Hyde. Like-wise, in Poe’s story, the narrator’s transition from sobriety to inebriety is ethi-cized not only through his spectacular assault upon the cat but also throughthe haunting that occurs thereafter. Speaking generally on the device, SusanZieger has suggested that the monster-metamorphosis motif in temperance lit-erature correlated “[t]he horror of realizing that one has become the detestedOther” with “the dramas of self-transformation by which middle-class profes-sional men ruined themselves through drink” (185).

Like Dr. Jekyll’s transformation into Mr. Hyde, the Major’s transitioninto complacent complicity is superimposed upon a typical temperance narra-tive of moral inevitability. This superimposition imbues his decisions regard-ing his complicity with the same connotations of immorality as would haveattached to his alcoholism in a temperance discourse. Von Berg’s response, atonce sober and the reverse of complacent, is ethicized inversely. The superim-posed motifs that condemn the Major vindicate Von Berg: because he doesnot drink, none of the moral opprobrium implicit in temperance imageryattaches to his response to his complicity. Moreover, the play’s tableau con-clusion reinforces his being the moral opposite of the Wehrmacht Major.They stand looking into each other’s eyes during a chaotic search for an es-caped prisoner: “They stand there, forever incomprehensible to one another, look-ing into each other’s eyes” and “staring at each other so strangely” (291).

This approach to ethicizing the distinctions between differing responses tocomplicity also appears in After the Fall, with its similar debt to Eichmann in Jer-usalem. Echoing Arendt’s famous critique of “collective guilt” – that, “where allare guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged” (“Organized Guilt” 126) –Leslie Epstein has described After the Fall as representing a “world of guilt” inwhich personal and social injustices “dissolved into the sins of the world, so[that] the guilt of the Nazis fade[d] into the general culpability of mankind”(171). Bigsby, also drawing on Arendt’s work, suggests the opposite – that theplay contests this axiom – and concludes that “the desire to insist on innocenceis itself at the very root of human cruelty” (Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 50). Millerhimself suggested that the negative reviews of After the Fall reminded him of the“righteous indignation which greeted Hannah Arendt’s controversial book,Eichmann in Jerusalem” (“With Respect” 66). However, unlike in Incident, inwhich the representation of drunkenness is used to distinguish between thepositive and negative consequences of accepting Holocaust complicity, the



addiction imagery in After the Fall is used to demonstrate an untenable insis-tence on innocence in the post-war era.

Primarily concerned with one man’s investigation of the boundarybetween guilt and innocence, After the Fall re-enacts the memories of its pro-tagonist, Quentin, as he reflects on his ethical relationship to the major eventsof his life. Throughout the play, characters emerge whose respective deedsand relationships to the protagonist serve to call into question the nature ofcomplicity. The most formidable of these is Quentin’s wife, Maggie, whosetragic drug overdose at the play’s conclusion represents a response to the rec-ognition of complicity and becomes the impetus for Quentin’s own acknowl-edgement that complicity can have a productive end. Throughout the firsthalf of the play, Maggie is characterized by a naïve honesty that often revealsher own cooperation with those who manipulate and exploit her. Plagued byhallucinations in which the ghost of her mother criticizes her ethics, Maggiedescribes being born into the sins of her parents:

QUENTIN: Well – possibly you felt she didn’t want you to call me.MAGGIE: (astounded ) How’d you know that?QUENTIN: You said she was so moral. And here you’re calling a married man.MAGGIE: Yes! She tried to kill me once with a pillow on my face ’cause I would

turn out bad because of – like her sin. (86)

Associating her mother’s abuse with morality, Maggie shows a fundamentalcharacteristic of her self-conception: that she not only feels responsible forthe immoral behaviour in which she actively participates – subliminally ac-knowledging, as Quentin suggests, her role in instigating a romance with amarried man – but also understands her own existence as a manifestation ofher mother’s wrongdoings. Taking this perspective on complicity as a lens forviewing Maggie’s personal life, Quentin describes Maggie’s sexual liaisons –with a “long line of grinning men” who “chewed and spat [her] out” (95) – asacts that fulfilled her unconscious desire to give “to those in need” (92–93).He goes as far as to suggest that she cooperated in the unjust business deal-ings that plagued her early in her career because she “seem[ed] to think” thatshe “owe[d] people whatever they demand[ed]” (96).

It is Maggie’s acknowledgement of her complicity that Quentin first ad-mires, calling her ability to “tell the truth, even against yourself” (87), “proof,somehow, that people can win” (101), which is to say that they can outlive thesins of their past. Extrapolating this idea into a more general comment on thenature of guilt in the post-war era, Quentin applauds Maggie’s recognition ofher complicity as the apex of morality: “You’re a very moral girl, Maggie. [. . .]You’re not pretending to be [. . .] – innocent!” (87). Having declared theimmorality of pretending innocence in the post-war landscape, Quentin

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decides to confront his own “terror of complicity” (95) and thereby condemnthe “whole high administration of fake innocence!” (96–97). He accordinglyturns toward the concentration camp wall that overlooks the stage and asks,“Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?” (127).

However, Maggie’s understanding of complicity quickly changes. Afterdiscovering an excerpt of Quentin’s journal in which he questions his ability tolove and admits to contemplating suicide, Maggie begins indulging in intoxi-cants and renounces all responsibility for the injustices of her life. ThroughoutAct Two, Quentin challenges this renunciation, imploring Maggie to recognizethat, in their marriage, they “used one another” (120) – “you’ve got to start tolook at what you’re doing” (116; emphasis in original) – only to be met with herpersistent objections. Like Incident at Vichy, which used the performance ofinebriety to address the complacency that complicity can beget, After the Falluses a representation of addiction in order to demonize an equally untenableresponse to complicity: an insistence on innocence in a post-war climate inwhich merely to exist is to be complicit in the injustices of the past. CitingMaggie’s habitual barbiturate use as a way of renouncing guilt and indefensiblymaintaining innocence, Quentin extols upon the ways in which Maggie’saddiction has altered her understanding of complicity:

You eat those pills to blind yourself, but if you could only say, “I have beencruel,” this frightening room would open. If you could say, “I havebeen kicked around, but I have been just as inexcusably vicious to others,called my husband idiot in public, I have been utterly selfish despite mygenerosity, I have been hurt by a long line of men but I have cooperatedwith my persecutors –” [. . .] But no pill can make us innocent. Throwthem in the sea, throw death in the sea and all your innocence. Do thehardest thing of all – see your own hatred and live! (121)

Asserting that recovery from addiction and the recognition of complicity areintegral parts of the same process of “see[ing] your own hatred and liv[ing],”Quentin makes abundantly clear the relationship between addiction and theinsistence on innocence.

Drawing on the language of temperance spectacle, which physicalizedthe moral degeneration of addiction through the performance of the addictedbody, Miller ethicizes the insistence on innocence (and the corollary denial ofcomplicity) in a way that makes the ethical breach visually legible. Much likethe antebellum temperance “sensation scenes” that appealed to a “spectator’sunderstanding of purity and sanctity” by playing to concerns that were“closely tied to and expressed by the body” (Hughes 84), Miller ethicized thepost-war insistence upon innocence by emphasizing its association with thenegative corporeal experiences of addiction. As Amy Hughes suggests,



Antebellum temperance discourse and iconography tended to spectacularizenormalcy and deviance, setting them side by side. The pure and sober manensured economic, professional, and familial stability; whereas the impuredrunkard, his mind pickled with liquor, lost all. Horrifying and grotesque,the DTs [delirium tremens] served as sensational evidence of a man’sabjection, his deplorable failure to stay within the boundaries of middle-classnormalcy. (84)

Performances of the addicted body were popular throughout the temperancemovement, with many of the most famous temperance dramas, includingW.H. Smith’s The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) and Elliot McBride’sUnder The Curse (1881), presenting visceral performances of alcoholic overdose.In Smith’s The Drunkard, the spectacular scene of protagonist Edward Middle-ton’s delirium tremens – including spasms and hallucinations – presents theaddict–subject as the embodiment of immorality in a didactic gesture towardthe morality of sobriety that emphasizes his physical exceptionality:

(on ground in delirium) Here, here, friend, take it off, will you? – thesesnakes, how they coil round me. Oh, how strong they are! there, don’t killit, no, no, don’t kill it! give it brandy, poison it with rum, that will be ajudicious punishment, that would be justice, ha, ha! justice! ha! ha! (33)

Similarly, Miller ethicizes Maggie’s response to the recognition of complicityby emphasizing the physical exceptionality that her addiction creates.

By manifesting Maggie’s approach to guilt through the performance ofaddiction, Miller provides a contrast against which Quentin’s sober recogni-tion of complicity can be presented. Questioning his complicity with Mag-gie’s overdose in his famous catechism, “In whose name do you ever turnyour back – (he looks out at the audience) – but in your own? [. . .] Always inyour own blood-covered name,” Quentin quickly turns his attention “towardthe tower” of the concentration camp, questioning if he, like the rest ofhumanity, is not also complicit in its atrocities: “I know how to kill? . . . Iknow, I know – [. . .] And I am not alone, and no man lives who would notrather be the sole survivor of this place than all its finest victims! [. . .] [B]utmy brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these stones!” (126–27).

Quentin suggests that, when one acknowledges one’s complicity withthe world’s evil, the opportunity “not to be afraid” of life presents itself:

To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden ofwax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, aftermany, many deaths. Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed,but with some gift of courage one may look into his face when it appears,and with some stroke of love – [. . .] forgive it; again and again . . . forever?[. . .] No, it’s not certainty, I don’t feel that. But it does seem feasible . . .not to be afraid. Perhaps it’s all one has. (127–28)

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While negating the possibility of innocence in the post-war landscape throughhis allusions to Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian banishment, Quentin’s mono-logue suggests that the ongoing recognition of individual complicity with his-torical and personal injustices is integral to preventing their recurrence. Thisidea shares its thesis with Arendt’s famous maxim that, “[u]pon them and onlyupon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of thehuman race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, un-compromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capableof bringing about” (“Organized Guilt” 132). This conclusion is further rein-forced by the play’s denouement, which presents in tableau Quentin’s mis-deeds even as it preserves the possibility of futurity: “He moves away with her[a new lover] as a loud whispering comes up from all his people, who follow behind,endlessly alive” (128). Quentin’s recognition of his complicity with his failed ro-mances, his family’s disintegration, his colleague’s death, and the Holocaustitself ensures that these memories will not be forgotten; it also forestalls theirrecurrence and thus presents the only way for Quentin to conceive of “risk[ing]it again” by continuing to live (76). Therefore, for Quentin, guilt – and partic-ularly the recognition of an insidiously passive complicity – is not only indis-pensable in accounting for past injustices but also crucial to conceptualizingthe possibilities of life after World War II.

In After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, the two works in which ArthurMiller most directly addressed contemporaneous theories of post-war guilt,the representation of addiction works dramatically to theatricalize unethicalresponses to the concept of ubiquitous complicity. While addiction is useddifferently in each text, both plays emphasize the addict’s transformativepotential. In Incident at Vichy, Miller presents the Major’s transformationfrom sobriety to alcoholic inebriety as a physical manifestation of his transi-tion from innocence to complicit collaboration, an act that not only physi-cally marks his moral culpability but also distinguishes between a recognitionof complicity that justifies injustice and one that mobilizes counter action.Similarly, After the Fall presents Maggie’s transition from sobriety to addic-tion as a moral emblem of her untenable insistence on innocence in the post-war era. Thus, it is in these dramas that the author made his most concertedcontributions to contemporary theories of complicity and post-war guilt.Directly addressing noted theorists such as Arendt, Adorno, and Sartre,Miller presented the recognition of universal complicity as the first steptoward the possibility of ethical survival in the post-war world. Mandel re-cently suggested that “complicity is the condition of possibility for account-ability” and that “accountability without complicity is not accountability atall” (217). So too did Miller reveal recognition of complicity as the first steptoward grappling ethically with the atrocities of the past, precisely by



mobilizing tropes of addiction influenced by temperance discourse. After theFall and Incident at Vichy therefore help us to re-evaluate the political Miller,who until recently had been under significant fire, and to understand how hisrepresentations of addiction contributed to theories of complicity in the 1960s.

NOTES1. The edition of After the Fall cited here is Secker and Warburg’s first Brit-

ish edition of the “revised final stage version” of the play (1965) – origi-nally printed in the United States by Viking Press in 1964. Because thearguments made in this article are predominantly historical and thus aimto best represent the author’s thoughts on the contemporary historicaland cultural context, I have used the original published edition, despitesubsequent editions that have “restored” the text to its original form.

2. Suggesting that no book of the past decade had “provoked as much con-troversy,” between 1963 and 1965 the Partisan Review reserved a lengthysection of each issue for public responses to Arendt’s Eichmann (“Editor’sNote”). Contributors included Mary McCarthy, Daniel Bell, LionelAbel, and many others.

3. This article was later retitled “Guilt and Incident at Vichy” and was pub-lished in the author’s collected essays.

4. For more on Miller’s relationship to Camus’s The Fall, see Campo; Kop-penhaver; Royal.

5. Alan M. Wald’s recent suggestion that Miller was a “struggling Marxistplaywright since the late 1930s” is just one example (182).

6. For more on the representation of addiction in modern American culture,see Banco; Borst; Cannon; Frick; and Zieger.

7. While the play that Miller saw is unknown, the timeline implicit in thearticle would suggest that it was produced around 1925.

8. The Great Disobedience was submitted as an assignment for one of Miller’sfirst writing courses at the University of Michigan. It remains unpublishedbut was most likely performed by the university’s performance collectivewhile Miller was a student.

9. Despite never meeting Sartre, Miller had numerous professional liaisonswith the existentialist philosopher. In 1957, Sartre adapted Miller’s TheCrucible into a French film widely circulated in East Germany; in the late1940s, Miller visited Paris’s Montana Bar (a popular existentialist haunt)and heard Sartre speak; and the friendship of Miller’s third wife, IngeMorath, with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir certainly meant that theplaywright was familiar with their work (see Bigsby, Miller: 1915–1962254, 304, 305, 313; Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 2, 258, 260). Severalcritics have noted similarities between Miller’s 1960s output and Sartre’s

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“drama of situation” – a style of radical playwriting that emphasized acharacter’s exercise of free will (see, e.g., Lowenthal).

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ABOUT THE AUTHORgrant gosizk is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the Centre forAmerican Studies and the School of English at the University of Kent. Hisdissertation, “Acting Addicts: The Theatre between the Wars on Drugs,”explores the legacies of temperance aesthetics in post-Prohibition Americantheatre.



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