It is curious that one of the first works of Miller Place in the Great Tenochtitlan, the Aztec empire center. Entitled The Golden Years and was written around 1939, when the author had only 24 years. I proposed to the Group Theatre and spent almost 50 years in a dead file sleeping the sleep of the just. The text reborn until the eighties, perhaps more curious to be the work of a living than for its intrinsic quality classic. But when he reappeared, The Golden Years provided a key able to confirm the meaning of a lifetime devoted to playwriting.
A similar fate befell the first work of Miller, The man who had all the luck . Only four functions premiered in 1944 without any -hard luck in theaters at a time and a country where theater criticism and said no negative was so cosmic shooting any reputation- tatters. It required a hardening of steel and much conviction in his own voice to resist something. It is interesting to think that his friend of old age, Harold Pinter, whom Miller undertook various moral crusades of political activism in the decades of the eighties and nineties of the last century, also had a hit and misunderstood as home. So hard was the disaster that both changed temporarily gender. Pinter wrote Dwarves and Miller, Focus (1945), his only novel, which explores the individual’s responsibility towards others that are apparently unrelated.
Looking back over sixty years of playwriting, the first texts of Arthur Miller attract your attention, as they have many similarities with the past and realize the characteristic that unites all his work: the moral and social dimension drama, conflicts that arise “when we are at the crossroads of choosing between right and wrong.”
Moctezuma freezes against the general destruction unleashed by a handful of conquerors. Background, our history served to Miller to make a metaphor about fascism and the inability to respond to infamy. “We are paralyzed. We know exactly what is wrong and can not move, “Miller would say many years later about Bosnia. The moral and existential background, belief in the historical burden and the duties of the individual to society, Miller identified the European theater of tragic imprint: the wound of Philoctetes is not a physical and personal injury; It affects, however, the whole universe. As a good moralist, Miller begins with acts of self-accusation -in this route you walk through works like After the fall and Mountain Fall Morgan , for example, but the playwright is widening circles to the family, society and ultimately the human race.
“This is a question both interesting and mysterious time, or so I find it” reflected Miller when they had awarded the Prince of Asturias Award. “I wonder if the kind of feeling we can call tragic currently has no place in our vocabulary. I do not have very clear. Maybe because we’ve killed too many people. I think you have not thought about how it influences the history of the last thirty, forty, fifty years … in the consciousness of the people; in the sense that a human being does not have much value, which can be easily stripped and easily forgotten … and, consequently, the tragic notion that involves human beings are not very clear. “
Unlike the tradition of his birth in the tables that O’Neill, followed by Tennessee Williams, Wilder, and other great American realism, Arthur Miller had no stories or rather, the story served as a vehicle for build buildings competing ideas. The psychological character study, anecdotal wealth or taste for the adventure or complexly portrait of American characters are sort of hook to exert a theater whose approach is thematic in nature. Miller always discussed ideas. The world is, as in the time of fulfillment of the tragic drama, a dispute start beliefs about the world. But unlike the tragic consciousness, Miller’s heroes are not spared from its social and historical circumstances.
All My Sons (1947) finds his family tragedy equivalent in the social tragedy of a whole nation weeping for her dead children in war preamble of an America with an endless arms race. View from the Bridge (1955), migrants make personal tragedy the story of a nation that expelled her children and tearing. Miller has built and endearing characters, but also tells cools the scene, looking from the bridge, and above all, looks critically at his company.
And yet emblematic feature of the work of Miller , social analysis always plays in big emotions, thoughts imperfect creatures of flesh and blood. Willy Loman, one of the most beloved characters of the theater in the United States, led to the final consecration to its author in 1949. Like no other text, Death of a Salesman is the portrait of the great crisis the so-called “American dream”. In 1988, Miller stated about it: “I never imagined it would acquire the proportions it has had. It was a literal play about a seller, but later became a myth, not only here but in many other parts of the world. “
The theme and novel way that The death of a Salesman was carrying, with its encrypted simultaneity with its casual games and the juxtaposition of realities halfway between truth and subjectivity of the protagonist, he found echoes in all theatrical traditions structure. In Mexico, to name two examples, The signs of the zodiac , Sergio Magana, evoked the structure of the work of Miller and the speed of their simultaneous situations, while Happiness , Emilio Carballido, recalled the economic catastrophe of a consecrated life in order Abruptly misguided and ultimately, punished by the obedience of a mortgaged to the economic and social crisis always life.
Miller He had reported in All My Sons the arms capitalism. Death of a Salesman , the personal tragedy of the market economy, and resurrected the notion of “worker” in two Mondays Remembrance . A purpose of this web of family passions within the economic crisis ever, Miller also say: “Work one lifetime to buy a home, and when, at last, the house is one already … no who live in it. ” In the forties, Willy Loman anecdote narrated the story of capitalism. In the eighties, Miller talk about the great tragedy of the common man, nameless even anonymously failed, in works like The Last Yankee.
Only someone of his temple, all a collection of anecdotes through three marriages-the second with Marilyn Monroe and confesses to 89 have held a multi-year relationship with Agnes Barley, a painter of 34 who apparently was the inspiration for one of the characters of Finishing the Picture , the last text, could question with such honesty and bravery the myth of innocence, the cult of optimism and material success, so typical of his country and confront the American dream with a sense of failure and the breakdown of the notion of progress. The moral and double, in fact any fold stranger to individual morality and truth were the mortal enemies of our great American playwright. William Styron, his neighbor and friend, said of Miller: “It’s kind of Abraham Jewish Lincoln, if something like a Jewish Lincoln could dress soon with the rudeness of a gentle farmer”
. Numerous texts Miller carried scene again and again. But in these times of confrontation between the West and Islam, when it was relocated to the Devil in the center of the political rhetoric, The Crucible ( The Crucible , 1953) I think one of their texts more relevant.
Gospel of Mark (5, 1-20), Jesus is to be “unclean” a Gerasene possessed by Satan who is agitated and howls with great pomp. His torments are innumerable, the contradiction of his soul puts it on the rack of the spirit. And Christ asks, “What is your name?” And the Gerasene replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Enclosing one another. The voices that torment within, shadows and passions that plague the conscience make us a battlefield, the great theme of Miller. Defenders of dogma, true religions, the absolute concepts and mysteries but we believe we can not prove, are terrified face of ambiguity, contradiction and multiplicity, positions that have been attributed, since time immemorial, the representation of wrong.
Arthur Miller, with visionary encouragement, explored a case of mass hysteria provoked in seventeenth century New England a destructive persecution. The Crucible is a classic not only to interpret the bipolar politics from the fifties and the portrait of McCarthyism, but to get into the social mechanisms to pursue the other, the different, which goes the unity of the State, the Church, the Family Ideology, Race … Not only that, the strength of the work requires us to take the step from the public to the private. Awareness, Miller seems to tell us, he dreads the other we have inside. Demons and passions, expressed, are able to take heaven by assault. Marlowe summed up better than anyone that fierce struggle between unity and diversity. “In our consciousness,” says the learned Elizabethan in Hell, “can make a heaven of hell and hell of heaven”
2002 Prince of Asturias Award was won by a living classic. By then, Miller had lived too long and written everything. Our language recognizing the work of a remarkable American dramatist endorsing an idea for others intrinsic to the honoree: the alien’s own. At the end of Returns the time , the memoir of Miller, we find the following endorsing extreme unity of the individual to the whole: “I do not know who these fields are mine. Coyotes look me in the night. I wonder. All things in the universe are asking for each other. Even the trees “.
One hundred years ago, on October 17, 1915 to be precise, Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, the son of an Austrian Jewish immigrant. The mixture of factors and personal history is telling. He grew up in Manhattan. His family came to prosper economically and yarn factory his father had in 1928 with 400 employees. But the great economic collapse of 1929 laid the family destination by land and Miller went to work doing everything. He learned, in the marrow of their bones, the great tragedies associated with having or not having. It is one of the greats of the past century and death overtook the Feb. 10, 2005 -Date 56th anniversary of the premiere of Death of a Salesman -., at 89 years of age
For those winter days, suffering from cancer, pneumonia and heart disease, Miller still planned to marry Agnes Barley. Half a century of love with Marilyn Monroe and had been able to write: “Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to conjure up the smell of roses in a cellar. You could see the rose, but never the perfume. And that’s the truth of things, their perfume “. But Miller was, above all, a great realist, landed inevitable, one of those who thought everyone likes them a funny guy, but nobody would lend money. So we also bequeathed this portrait of Marilyn in her lucid and raw autobiography: “To survive would have had to be more cynical or have been further from the truth. Marilyn, on the other hand, was a street poet who had wanted to recite his verses to an avid crowd rip her clothes off. ”
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