The Realism of Arthur Miller

principle, but in terms of personal needs and relationships, which compose a reality that directly enforces the truth. If Keller's son had not wanted to marry the convicted man's daughter (and they had been childhood friends; it was. that neighbourhood which Keller's act disrupted); if his wife, partly in reaction to her knowledge of his guilt, had not maintained the superstition that their son killed in the war was still alive; if the action had been between strangers or business acquaintances, rather than between neighbours and neighbouring families, the truth would never have come out. Thus we see a true social reality, which includes both social relationships and absolute personal needs, enforcing a social fact—that of responsibility and consequence. This is still the method of Ibsen in the period named, and the device of climax— a concealed letter from Keller's dead son, who had known of his father's guilt—is again directly in Ibsen's terms. The elements of theatrical contrivance in Ibsen's plays of this kind, and in All My Sons, are now sufficiently clear. Yet the total effect of such a play is undoubtedly powerful if its experience truly corresponds to its conventions. In historical terms, this is a bourgeois form, with that curious combination of a demonstrated public morality and an intervening fate, evident in the early 18-century domestic drama, and reaching its maturity in Ibsen. To a considerable extent, All My Sons is a successful late example of this form, but a point is reached, in Miller's handling of the experience, where its limits are touched. For, as he rightly sees it, the social reality is more than a mechanism of honesty and right dealing, more than Ibsen's definition— The spirits of Truth and Freedom, these are the pillars of Society. Miller reaches out to a deeper conception of relationships which he emphasises in his title. This is something more than honesty and uprightness: it is the quite different social conception of human brotherhood— I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were. Moreover, Miller sees this in a social context, as he explains in the Introduction: Joe Keller's trouble . . . is not that he cannot tell right from wrong but that his cast of mind cannot admit that he, personally, has any viable connection with his world, his universe, or his society. He is not a partner in society, but an incorporated member, so to speak, and you cannot sue personally the officers of a corporation. I hasten to make clear that I am not merely speaking of a literal corporation but the concept of a man's becoming a function of production or distribution to the point where his personality becomes divorced from the actions it propels. (19) This concept, though Miller does not use the term, is the classical Marxist concept of alienation, and it is with alienation embodied both in a social action and in a personality that Miller is ultimately concerned. The true social reality —the needs and destinies of other persons—is meant to break down this alienated consciousness, and restore the fact of consequence, of significant and continuing relationships, in this man and in his society. But then it is at this point, as I see it, that the limits of the form are damaging. The words I have quoted, expressing Keller's realisation of a different kind of consciousness, have to stand on their own, because, unlike the demonstration of ordinary social responsibility, they have no action to support them. Moreover, as words they are limited to the conversational resources so adequate elsewhere in the play, but wholly inadequate here — to express so deep and substantial a personal discovery (and if it is not this it is little more than a maxim, a "sentiment"). It is at this point that we see the naturalist form—even a principled naturalism, as in Ibsen and Miller and so rarely in others, even when substantially and powerfully done—breaking down as it has so often broken down: partly for the reasons I argued in Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (the inadequacy of conversational writing in any deep crisis); partly, I would now add, because the consciousness which the form was designed to express is in any serious terms obsolete, and was already being reached beyond by Miller himself.