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Faulkner, O'Neill, and W. H. Wright's Aesthetics

TANAKA Hisao

    That Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was nine years older than William Faulkner (1897-1962) and O'Neill started his career as a playwright in 1914 by publishing Thirst, and Other One-Act Plays--these facts, together with their similar literary sensibility and vision, may fascinatingly invite us to seek for the influences, whether overt or covert, of the former on the latter. This paper, however, against such a fascination, is an attempt to explore the archetypal characteristics of Faulkner's fiction and, as it were, a certain shape of his imagination, and to investigate intertextual resonances between the works of the two authors. It is true that they appear to be poles apart on the surface, because the playwright O'Neill, an Irish Catholic, centered most of his activities in New England and New York, while the novelist Faulkner, what is called a WASP, spent most of his time in Mississippi, a state of the Deep South. Though they did not have the opportunity to make each other's acquaintance, still we can ascertain biographically that they were within an indirect but fairly close literary circle.
    We can know the situation around them from the preceding, reliable studies of the relationship between them by James E. Kibler, Jr. and Judith Bryant Wittenberg1: of great importance is the presence of Stark Young (1881-1963) whose major field was drama criticism, himself a poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist, a versatile Southerner from the same state as Faulkner's, who served as a mediator between Faulkner and O'Neill. Through Phil Stone, a mentor in his apprenticeship, Faulkner made Young's acquaintance in 1914 and went up to New York City at his suggestion to stay temporarily with him and work at a bookstore there. Young, in turn, began associating with O'Neill in 1920 and directed his Welded at his request in 1924; next is Manuel Komroff, O'Neill's editor at Boni and Liveright, who, meeting Faulkner at the firm in 1925, continued his association with the fledging novelist, until as late as 1931, sending him books probably including O'Neill's plays; the third connector is Saxe Commins whom Faulkner met at Random House in 1937 and who met with O'Neill in Greenwich Village and then in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1916, continuing their 35-year productive friendship and later serving as both writers' editor at Random House.
    In addition to their biographical closeness, we can also see both writers' literary common ground in that they attempted poetry2, loved Swinburne's poetry, and that Faulkner created in the manner of the Symbolists a one-act dream play called The Marionettes, employed dramatic forms in such novels as Soldiers' Pay and Pylon, and aimed at genre crossing or hybridization between novel and drama3. O'Neill, on the other hand, was liable to use longer stage directions than other playwrights, as we see from such scenes as the encounter of Yank and Mildred in The Hairy Ape (1923), stage directions of the sort which can be likened in nature to novelistic descriptions.
    This kind of dramatic quality comes close to lesedrama (closet drama). In fact, Hughie, a one-act play with just two characters, the only completed one of the eight one-act plays projected for a cycle to be entitled By Way of Obit, seems to be composed solely for reading, with so radical a neglect of the physical stage performance, that is, with so long a monologue of "Erie" Smith occasionally interspersed with perfunctory dialogue between him and a hotel night clerk that the experimental play can rightfully be considered a postmodern, avant-garde one4. In the same way, the experimental device of spoken thought O'Neill employed in Strange Interlude is close in form and meaning to the interior monologue technique in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
    More important than those formalistic devices are, to enumerate after the manner of Wittenberg who examined the influences of O'Neill upon Faulkner: the sense of affinity both writers felt with Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville; the use of a Joycean stream of consciousness technique and of "Freudian case histories of neurosis and psychopathology"; radical experiments both O'Neill and Faulkner dared to pursue with the deep awareness of the significance of mask5 as a representation of modern man's inner complexity; the introduction into their works of the sense of fatality as embodied in Greek tragedies; the "frank treatment of incest, miscegenation, and infanticide"; and the "portrayal of blacks as fully individualized human beings" (Wittenberg 330-338). As these literary characteristics of their works show, both writers are passionate pioneers in pursuing undeveloped realms, as well as radical innovators of traditional novelistic and dramatic forms. O'Neill stated vehemently in 1921 that "The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle classers" ("Damn" 104), a statement reminiscent of the same spirit as we sense in Faulkner's evaluation of The Sound and the Fury as "the most gallant failure" (LG 180) and his low evaluation of his contemporary Hemingway as a timid experimenter.
    Utilizing Willard Huntington Wright's aesthetics shown in his The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and the Syntax of Aesthetics (1916) as a catalyst to explore intertextual reverberations between Faulkner and O'Neill beyond their general apparent similarities, however, we can grasp more clearly both writers' artistic sensibilities and the archetypal shape of their imaginations.
    Wright, a literary critic who wrote detective novels under the name of S. S. Van Dine (1888-1939), published What Nietzsche Taught and Modern Painting in 1915 and The Creative Will in the next year. There is no proof of Faulkner's having read the 288-page book of aesthetics, but at least Joseph Blotner affirms and subsequently Frederick Karl confirms that Faulkner was gravely attracted through conversation with Phil Stone to Wright's major ideas presented in the book. Karl summarizes the kernel of those ideas as "its depreciation of simplistic realism, and its emphasis on achieving new forms" (Karl 177), while Blotner considers Wright's main emphasis is put on the production of "work of emotional intensity" and "progressive innovations" (Blotner 321). It should, in fact, be a common experience with most readers to sense emotionally surcharged magnetic atmosphere in the texts of both Faulkner and O'Neill. It may be no exaggeration to say that such an atmosphere is more often than not brought about by overwelming tragic conflicts ultimately leading to violent outbursts. A literary essay Faulkner contributed in 1922 to The Mississippian, an Ole Miss newspaper, "American Drama: Eugene O'Neill," will give us a better clue to an understanding of the propensity of both writers' imagination for forging those tragic conflicts.
    The beginning of the essay--"Someone has said--a Frenchman, probably; they have said everything--that art is preeminently provincial: i.e., it comes directly from a certain age and a certain locality." (EPP 86)--echoes the ideas Hippolyte Taine, an influential French critic in the latter half of the nineteenth century, presented in his introduction to History of English Literature, ideas which take into account internal and external factors to "contribute to produce [man's] elementary moral state--the race, the surroundings, and the epoch" (Taine 607).
    On the other hand, Wright observes in The Creative Will that Taine "received the inspiration for his outlook in the Philosophie de l'Art from what he found in Balzac's method of creating characters" (206-207), an outlook stated, for example, in Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, and quotes from it a passage conveying the view that man should obtain certain things from the environment he is put in, while keeping varied qualities for some centuries that the environment nurtures in him. Furthering the view scientifically, Wright explains Balzac's principle of characterization in a more articulate discursive way: "He built them [characters] up, as nature builds them, first, by establishing all the causes, hereditary and environmental, which went into their making, and then by setting down the events through which they developed. Out of these subjective and objective forces grew the characters, moulded and fashioned by the life without and the blood within" (152-153). The dualistic theory of hereditary and environmental factors as decisive sources to produce individual characters is almost the same as that of nature and nurture I used in parallel with the idea of race and class as determinant binary factors, a theory which I applied in the November 1977 issue of The Rising Generation to an understanding of Southern social particularities in Faulkner's fiction. The strong combination of those hereditary and environmental elements is the essence of two writers' tragic vision, which evokes the kind of intense sense of fatality we feel in Greek tragedies.
    That combination of hereditary and environmental forces can be detected, for example, in O'Neill's essay entitled "DAMN THE OPTIMISTS!," indicting the public and critics who could not fully understand his intention in composing Diff'rent. He insists: "She [Emma] is universal only in the sense that she reacts definitely to a definite sex-suppression, as every woman might. The form her reaction takes is absolutely governed by her environment and her own character" ("Damn" 105). If the playwright emphasizes only the environmental force behind Emma's way of life, then her characterization might fall into a stereotypical woman of naturalistic fiction. His dualistic vision, however, embraces her own character likewise as a force controlling her fate. Similarly, in a letter complaining of being "most neglected" as a poet, he observes that he is "always acutely conscious of the Force behind--Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it--Mystery certainly" ("Neglected" 125). The "Force behind" is, in O'Neill's literature, expressive of the combined controlling factors, hereditary and environmental, caught from a transcendental point of view. The same kind of operation of factors is suggested by Mr. Compson in Absalom, Absalom! who tries to solve the riddle of the Sutpen family: "He was unaware . . . that while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him, Fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager, call him what you will--was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes of the next one" (AA 72-73). Conspicuous in Faulkner's fiction is a similar working of forces as in O'Neill's, forces which in the former are bound by the Southern milieu as revealed in the deep-rooted race relations of black and white. Faulkner was deeply aware that in the Southern milieu human conflicts often stem from the entanglement of "our biological past" of blood embodied in miscegenation and familial (lineage) blood, and O'Neill was, too.
    American Puritan society is sensitive to the color line, and Southern society in particular, cursed with the sin of the slavery, has been tortured by the colorphobia inseparably linked with the fear of miscegenation, a phobia which was strengthened by the fanatic 'one-drop rule.' The fear of miscegenation lies at the center of Henry Sutepn's tragedy in Absalom, Absalom!, and in the same manner, the issue of miscegenation creates a tragedy for Jim and Ella who used to love each other against social prejudices in O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings. Indeed, there is a difference in emphasis between the two works: Faulkner's masterpiece regards the miscegenation as the root of a social and historical sickness, while O'Neill's drama utilizes the race problem for psychological afflictions a white woman has to confront in her married life with her black, though intellectual, husband. Yet, both writers are eager to produce in the text the drive to develop the story in the heated psychological, socio-cultural tensions which are presented as a result of the combination of both the hereditary force of blood inherent in human beings and the einvironmental, social system or framework of marriage.6
    Familial blood or lineage, entangled with hereditary and environmental factors, also serves to create dramatic tensions in the course of the story. As for Faulkner, we can easily recall, for instance, the death of Bayard Sartoris, a returnee from World War I, as if he were martyred by the legendary masculine blood of the Sartoris clan; the family feud, overt and covert, between the Compsons and the Bascombs in The Sound and the Fury; or the deterioration of the McCaslin family, originated by the past moral sin of the family founder Carothers. Likewise, the heroine in Anna Christie accepts as her irresistible fate running in the family the lonesome household in which she is left by her newly-married husband and her father, both males returning to"ole davil sea" (210); in Diff'rent Harriet, when admonishing her prodigal Benny Rogers, unwittingly betrays her pride in her good family blood, by stressing "the meanness and filth that's the Rogers part of you" and "the honesty and decency that's the Williams part" (190); Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night laments his son's consumption as a misfortune that "doesn't come from mhisnside of the family"(79), and his wife Mary frequently complains of her miserable fate which she obstinately believes results from her husband's stinginess as well as his neglect of the cozy home she had dreamed of, the complaint instigated by her sly disdain that "His people were the most ignorant kind of poverty-stricken Irish" (111); in Mourning Becomes Electra, as for Lavinia and Orin, sister and brother of the Mannon family, the resemblance of their Mannon faces to a mask is incessantly referred to in the text (719, 824, 858, etc), and Captain Adam Brant bears the cursed past of his father being rejected from the familial bond merely because he married a French-Canadian nurse, a marriage considered a stigma by the decent Puritan family of good fame and prestigious blood in New England.
    In addition, we cannot disregard the issue of the blood of insanity commonly found in both writers' fiction, such as the one revealed in Popeye's legacy of venereal disease left by his parents and his grandmother's obsession with arson in Sanctuary, or the townsmen's memory of "how old lady Wyatt, her [Emily Grierson's] great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last" (CS 123) in "A Rose for Emily," or the blood of insanity reported in O'Neill's Strange Interlude to run through the Evans family whose Sam is to marry Nina. This motif of insanity not only brings a shadow of anxiety and fear to the story, producing a historical family background, but also creates a twist to provoke its dramatic development. The motif, if entangled with the issue of eugenics7, can mirror the characteristics of the age or the society in which the story is placed.
    How profoundly both writers are conscious of family blood as an important literary tool may suggest a sense of clannishness deeply rooted in their socio-cultural sensibilities. John Henry Raleigh's essay, written from a consideration of ethnic blood, might aid such a suggestion. He argues: "More important, he [O'Neill's father] was a member of a vast group of immigrants who did not so much leave Ireland as bring Ireland to America. In New England, in particular, partly because of their intense clannishness, partly because they were 'outsiders,' partly because they found themselves 'ruled' by a Protestant Anglophile culture--it was Ireland all over again with the hostile 'strangers' in control--the Irish remained 'Irish' and did not get assimilated for several generations, sometimes for a half century or more . . ." (576). Raleigh's essay further emphasizes the Irish people's fierce sense of clannishness by introducing Sean O'Faolain's metaphoric explanation of Irish character, ". . . the basic family unit was symbolized by the hand: 'The limits of the sacred nexus were symbolized by the hand. The palm was the common ancestor; the joints of the finger were his descendents into his grand-children; the finger-nails were his great grand-children'" (576). If we take "a Protestant Anglophile culture" for American culture dominated by the North, and Irish people for Southerners, then Raleigh's analysis can easily be applied to the doomed mentality of those Southerners who would not assimilate themselves to Northern culture for a half century or more after the surrender in the Civil War.
    It is natural that both Irish families and Southern families should have tried to hold together and defend themselves against historically hostile cultures, a defensiveness which without doubt served to strengthen their patriarchal character. Natural also is that the patriarchal character, if introduced into the story, should bring about the conflicts of father and son, incestuous familial feelings, Oedipus complex and Electra complex. Those conflicts are embodied in such masterpieces as The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, or Strange Interlude. As we know well from these works, most of the tragedies of both authors involve familial conflicts. The reason is, more than the biological fact that they had somewhat antipathetic feelings toward their fathers, that they have so keen, tragic an insight as to regard the family as an emotional hotbed symbolic of deep human conflicts and agonies.
    So far we have explored the characteristics of both writers' creative vision which appear through the representation of the interrelationship of environmental and hereditary factors. To make further exploration, we would like to return to W. H. Wright's The Creative Will. This monumental work of aesthetics, as we can surmise from his other works such as What Nietzsche Taught and Modern Painting, is based on his Nietzschean understanding of music and sculpture. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music Friedrich Nietzsche presented the idea of "the Apollonian and Dionysian duality" (167): "the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-plastic, Dionysian, art of music" (167). Thus, adapting this dualistic idea to the interpretation of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche explained: "According to this view, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, disburdening itself again and again in an Apollonian image-world. . . . And so the drama becomes the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian perceptions and influences . . . " (216).
    It cannot be ascertained whether Faulkner had ever read Nietzsche or not, but it is highly possible, if he knew Wright's The Creative Will, that he had some information about Nietzsche's dualistic interpretative idea of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This idea must have been familiar to O'Neill, who admired Nietzsche all through his life. In fact, commonly acknowledged in O'Neill criticism is the fact that "By the time of The Great God Brown, O'Neill is more firmly under the influence of Nietzsche, particularly The Birth of Tragedy and its opposition of Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life" (Ranald 365). In a similar way Lionel Trilling more boldly asserts: "Life and death, good and evil, spirit and flesh, male and female, the all and the one, Anthony and Dionysius--O'Neill's is a world of these antithetical absolutes such as religion rather than philosophy conceives, a world of pluses and minuses; and his literary effort is an algebraic attempt to solve the equations" (Trilling 104). This kind of antithetical presentation is almost the same as the dichotomous understanding of human and natural matters peculiar to Faulkner's artistic strategy referred to in an earlier part of this essay. The antithetical ideas of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is nearly exchangeable with the Freudian psychological ideas of Eros and Thanatos or of the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Characterization and the arrangement of characters on these oppositional ideas are not only the fundamental shape of imagination but the structural principle common to both Faulkner and O'Neill.
    Faulkner's statement in his essay, "American Drama: Eugene O'Neill"-- "Shakespeare ruthlessly took what he needed from his predecessors and contemporaries" (87)8--sounds like a manifesto of his own determination to dare to do high-level plagialism in his literary endeavor. Thus, Faulkner naturally must have sympathized with Wright's observation in his The Creative Will that "Every man of genius has at some early period played the plagiarist to more than one master" (195), with deep awareness of O'Neill's appropriation of his great philosophical as well as literary predecessors. If we can regard hereditory factors as the Dionysian, and environmental factors like family or community as the Apollonian, then Taine, Nietzsche, and O'Neill come much closer to each other. Most probably Faulkner seems to have detected the variations of those factors in O'Neill's adherence to the sea in his early plays, when the young embryonic novelist mentioned with wonder that "The most unusual factor about O'Neill is that a modern American should write plays about the sea" (EPP 87).
    In Anna Christie, for example, the naturally formless and changeable sea, which is used in contrast to the certainty the land or home symbolically presents, is a free, wild space full of perilous wonder for men of romantic proclivity who feel as if they were prisoned by life on the land. And just as the second son Edmund in Long Day's Journey into Night takes the world wrapped in the fog to be "another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself" (131), the fog which makes everything opaque functions as a metaphor not merely for tender embrace but for the chaos replete with the malice of enticing men into an illusory world: that is, the land or home is the Apollonian, while the sea or fog the Dionysian. The same contrast is employed in Beyond the Horizon, and its variation in The Great God Brown. As the latter play dramatically expresses by the experimental use of masks the subject of double or Doppelganger, the opposition between the romantic Dion, a man of a touch of the poet, and the practical Brown, a businessman of worldly wisdom and success, is similarly though with a slight variation used in the contrast between Quentin and Jason in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. This kind of antithetical conflict between the dreamy and the practical is found in the one between the Christian and the non-Christian, what is called the pagan: the world where sexuality tends to be suppressed as an evil root of the human fall and the one which accepts sexuality as natural. Such an opposition is dramatically presented, for instance, in Mourning Becomes Electra and Light in August. As Cybel in The Great God Brown and Lena Grove in Light in August indicate, both O'Neill and Faulkner give to these women a stereotypically positive evaluation in the eye of gender criticism, the type of woman symbolic of the female principle of motherhood and sexuality as against the modern civilization of rigidity and distortion controlled and promoted by the male principle.
    That both O'Neill and Faulkner wrote poems showing their fondness for Swinburne--the fact itself, which I mentioned in the earlier part of this essay, suggests their romantic inclination to look down on worldly success and materialism. More than Faulkner, whose "hatred of 'modernism' . . .arises because he sees it as the enemy of the human, as abstraction, as mechanism, as irresponsible power, as the ciper on the ledger or the curve on a graph" (Warren 79), O'Neill vehemently indicted modern civilization --"The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it--the death of the Old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new One for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with" ("On Man and God" 115). This indictment of the fundamental sickness of modern civilization shows O'Neill's ability to view the whole of human experience from a historical perspective. This sense of history that Faulkner shared with the playwright, a keen awareness of the chasm between the present and the past, helped them make a grand chronicle respectively in New England and the Deep South.
    In fact, O'Neill himself, as if to compete with Faulkner's chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County, tried to create his "Eleven-Play Cycle" under the title of A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed in 1935-1939. Since the only extant works of the cycle, almost unknown except among O'Neill scholars, are its third play, A Touch of the Poet published posthumously in its original shape, and the play's sequel, More Stately Mansions, shortened for publication from the author's partly revised script, we have to rely for information about the entire cycle project on Eugene O'Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle (1998) by Donald C. Gallup who was curator of O'Neill Collection at Yale for thirty-three years. We know from it that the vast cyle was intended by the playwright to trace the history of an American family in New England for several generations from the middle of the eighteenth-century through the early part of the twentieth-century as "a prophetic epitome for the course of American destiny"(5), a history to be revealed psychologically in the form of the malevolent influence of possessiveness and materialism on possessors. In a similar, small way, Faulkner once attempted a series of sketches set in New Orleans under the title of Mirrors of Chartre Street, while O'Neill likewise tried to bundle a series of one-act plays as the Glencairn cycle or a cycle of eight one-acts with the overall title By Way of Obit we referred to earlier.
    Both Faulkner and O'Neill were aware of the effects of the polyphonic intertextual resonances which could be produced by the composite body of many works assembled in the form of a chronicle or a cycle. Those polyphonic resonances in each author's literary world in turn would occasion intertextual reverberations with texts in the outer world, or we should say the reader is expected to detect those reverberations, which the two great authors wished to create through their great chronicle or cycle.


NOTES

1 James E. Kibler, Jr., "William Faulkner and Provincetown Drama, 1920-1922," Mississippi Quarterly 22 (summer 1969). Wittenberg's paper listed below in "Works Cited" serves as a supplementary essay to Kibler's article.
2 Faulkner's period of poetry writing is approximately 10 years from 1916 through 1925, while O'Neill's is much longer, from 1912 through 1944 (Ranald 757).
3Malcolm Cowley points out the dramatic elements in Pylon: "The story moves in two directions as in a tragedy by Racine--that is toward a future catastrophe and also toward a fuller understanding of the past." In addition, Cowley considers the novel closer to the nature of the play in that it employs the repetitions of the characters' descriptions by which we can easily identify them, descriptions of such characteristics as dressing, walking, and hair style, or in that "There is even a Greek chorus of newspaper men to comment on Shumann's death." The Literary Record, Part 2 of Think Back on Us . . . : A Contemporary Chronicle of the 1930s. Ed. Henry Dan Piper (London and Amsterdam: Feffer and Simons, Inc., 1967), 269.
4 To my knowledge, at least two scholars consider Hughie has a quality much closer to that of a novel: Virginia Floyd in her The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment (New York: Angar, 1985), 555, as well as Ranald, 606.
5 O'Neill's essay, "Memoranda on Masks," is an explanation of masks as a means to "express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us," that is, an eager attempt to convey "the idea of mask as a symbol of inner reality" (116, 117). In such plays as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed, a real mask is used on the stage, while Faulkner metaphorically utilizes varied masks as his persona not only in his real life but in his fiction, as Lothar Honnighausen explores in his Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1977).
6 Though I am not blind to the fact that it can be an anachronistic fallacy of essentialism to regard a person's ethnic blood as a hereditory factor for creating his/her character in contemporary criticism in which blood is considered a cultural product, I think it would be more fruitful first to see the two writers' vision and artistic rendering within the frame of ideas controlled by their own time.
7 One of the splendid articles on eugenics published in Japan is TOMIYAMA Takao's "Who is Popeye?: Faulkner and Eugenics," in Literature, America, and Capitalism, ed. ORISHIMA Masashi, HIRAISHI Takaki, WATANABE Shinji (Nan'undo, 1993) 135-160.
8 Faulkner's speaking in support of advanced plagialism is reminiscent of and resonant with his audacious manifesto that "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate"(LG 239), or the paradoxical aphorism of T. S. Eliot Faulkner secretly reveres that "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different"("Philip Massinger," Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode [London: Faber and Faber, 1975] 153).


WORKS CITED

Blotner, Joseph L. Faulkner: A Biography. 2vols. New York: Random House, 1974.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House, 1964.
------. "American Drama: Eugene O'Neill." Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry. Comp. Carvel Collins. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.
------. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1950.
------. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962. Ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968.
Gallup, Donald C. Eugene O'Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle: "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed." New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
Karl, Frederick R. William Faulkner: American Writer. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Clifton P. Fadiman. The Philosophy of Nietzsche. With Introduction by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: The Modern Library, 1925.
O'Neill, Eugene. "Damn the Optimists!" O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. New York UP, 1961.
------. Diff'rent, Wilderness Edition, VII. Kyoto: Rinsen Book Co., 1976.
------. The Hairy Ape. Anna Christie. The First Man. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
------. Long Day's Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955.
------. "Memoranda on Masks." O'Neill and His Plays.
------. Mourning Becomes Electra. Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill.