Tinkin' is hard

The Russian formalist Viktor Shlovsky writes that “the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’”: through strategic “roughening” of language or distortion of forms, the artist creates an object that forces us to confront it afresh: we are removed from the “automatism” of perception that dominates our daily lives.

Shkovsky’s distrust of automation, like O’Neill’s, is partly a response to historical realities.  On the assembly line, men almost literally become “cogs in a machine.” The progressive dream would have these cogs “wake up” and “bust trou” the cages that gird them. But if The Hairy Ape is an evocative record of what can happen when one of those “cogs” struggles to self-consciousness, which one of us might not, if even for a cowardly instant, prefer a state of blissful nescience? “Drink, don’t think”: sound advice, if ignoble? “Tinkin’ and dreamin’, what’ll that get yuh?” By the end of O’Neill’s play, what indeed? What if the “defamiliarized” object remains permanently estranged? 

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born, / With nowhere yet to rest my head, / With these, on earth, I wait forlorn”: one waits, alongside Paddy, as an anachronistic token of discarded meanings: or stumbles, alongside Yank, toward a violent defeat. Many people – according to Yank, the hairy ape itself – can draw upon alternative communities past or to come as a source of solace in an otherwise unlivable present (the past inflection we call a golden age, the future a utopia). But Yank “ain’t got no past to tink in, nor nothin’ dat’s comin’, on’y what’s now – and dat don’t belong.” Paddy’s golden age is the “right dope”: Yank “[gets] it aw right,” but he can’t “get in it.” Yank can’t “get in” Long’s worker’s utopia, either. This distinction between “getting it” and “getting in it” ought to serve as a discouragement (or challenge?) to self-help gurus everywhere: one might very well see the promised land and yet be incapable of entering it. A person can truly measure the worth of an ideal without being able to participate in it. A golden age – or utopia – so perceived only exacerbates the perceiver’s anguish. “Tinkin’ is hard”: “Tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.” Why bother?

Is this a purely cynical play? Should we join the chorus and blow a raspberry at a list of powerless pieties that includes self-reflection itself? Here’s a list of terms that gain a “brazen metallic quality” as though they’d been passed through a “phonograph horn” (that is, a list of consoling abstractions “made strange,” somehow, inhuman: incapable of solving a dilemma): think; love; law; government; God. From the prisoners in Scene VII, the “glorious Constitution of these United States” draws “a perfect storm of hisses, catcalls, boos, and hard laughter.” Democracy’s given “the boid.” 

If, as one critic claims, Yank himself is an “Everyman made strange,” then his choral compatriots, be they shipmates or jailmates, merge into an ominous presence that speaks almost entirely in mockeries. Perhaps it’s this “tone of mockery” itself that incites the ape’s rage and brings about Yank’s death. Even with crushed ribs, Yank is alienated enough turn his own situation into the “comedy” promised by the play’s subtitle: he jokes about kisses and about Zybszko; he stands apart from himself and displays his own crushed body to us, the audience, as if he were  a carnival barker. Yank’s final gesture is an impersonation that mocks itself: the self is an object become permanently estranged. Are we, as an audience, supposed to have woken up from something?