Time destroys all traces of human dignity in the dramatic world of Tennessee Williams. It is a world of brief bloom and long decay. The gulf between dreams and reality remains intact because every passing moment worsens the human condition. The protagonists try to maintain their glory but are knocked down by the race of time. Any defiance only exposes their helplessness and the imaginary rose colored world enhances their degeneration. The dilapidated background of this world, in fact, reflects that man is bound to destroy because he is earth-bound. The overwhelming flood of sorrow engulfs all dreams of beauty and better life.
Time is usually regarded as the best healer of the wounds inflicted upon human body and soul. But it is presented in Tennessee Williams’ plays as a destructive force. It is an arch enemy ready to destroy all traces of dignity in human life. Everyone in the world of Williams is vulnerable to its adverse effects. The protagonists search for some permanence in the state of impermanence, as Williams asserts: “Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”1 But the corrupting rush of time destroys all the human hopes, worsens human condition and demands complete surrender to it. Time can be regarded as a judge with an insatiable desire to punish, giving no right of appeal against its verdict. It can be regarded as a doctor who indifferently leaves the patient to worms after operating upon him. Williams says: “Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”2 All the efforts of escape and evasion leave a crippling effect as Chance says that time, “Gnaws away, like a rat gnaws off its own foot caught in a trap, and then, with the foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn’t run, couldn’t go, bled and died.” (Sweet Bird, III, 110) Youth withers to age and life gives way to death before the onslaught of time. It is a reality and asserts itself with full force. The conflict between the real and the ideal in Williams’ plays is usually based on temporal terms. The protagonists, like their creator, create the worlds of fantasy by juxtaposing the present and the past and try to suspend the onward rush of time. That is why we find a constant conflict between body and soul, mortality and immortality, truth and illusion, fact and fiction, fertility and sterility, freedom and entrapment in the plays of Williams.
Williams’ world is a world of transience, a world where there is brief bloom and long decay. Time is not a source of regeneration and growth but it leads to degeneration and decay. Before the onward rush of time, youth is lost, beauty is faded and grandeur is ruined. It erodes all that is young and beautiful, loving and innocent and destroys all dreams and desires of a good life. “Williams’ drama presents human beings as victims of time. The plays are filled with the outcasts of life: the old, the bereft, the mutilated, the tormented, the lovelorn, the homeless and the forgotten.”3 When the constant flux of time encroaches upon the lives of these people, it creates a horrible vacuum between their dreamlike past and their miserable present. Their present stalemate urges them to seek shelter by escaping into their past “merely to depart into life against time’s ravages.”4 Most of his protagonists try to live in the sweetened memories of their past life because they are unable to live with the pressures of the present.
Every passing moment in Williams’ plays worsens the human condition. “Loss in time”5 is the theme which Williams pursues in most of his plays. So, escape from time and search for timelessness makes the structural and thematic center of his plays. In his essay, “The Timeless World of a Play,” which forms the introduction of The Rose Tattoo, Williams argues: “It is this continual rush of time, so violent that it appears to be screaming, that deprives our actual lives of so much dignity and meaning, and it is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives to certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.”6 Most of Williams’ protagonists try to achieve an arrest of time by plunging into the Utopian world of their dreams or the memories of the past. When the aspirations of the Wingfields, in The Glass Menagerie, are defeated by the reality of the present, they seek significance in the memories of their past. Each of them has a fantasy world which is depicted in the form of images on the screen. Amanda was once the most sought after belle in Blue Mountain. This nostalgic daydreaming about her blooming past is depicted in the image of her greeting gentleman callers. She may live in “the limitless world of the dream”7 but the reality exposes her limitations. In her dreams she may be enjoying an aristocratic life by marrying a wealthy planter of the South. But in reality she marries a man who deserts her in an ugly and squalid apartment of St. Louis. She may embellish her memories with jonquils and juleps and try to relive a past of fragrant and delicate beauty. But all her imaginary jonquils vanish into the autumn winds of time. Tom, like his mother, finds himself locked in time. He may desire to forget his home and past life but the memories of the past keep on haunting him all the time. He tries to cease the drabness of his life at home and the warehouse by seeking refuge in the imaginative and adventurous world of the movies. By escaping from his family, he at last reenacts the adventures of the movies in his real life and tries to suspend the forward movement of time. The desertion of the father has already paved a way for him. Tom’s dreams of a wandering but adventurous future are pictured with the image of the sailing vessel with Jolly and Roger. His escape remains incomplete when he says, “Oh, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be.” (Menagerie, vii, 313) But his desire to freeze time does not diminish. He continues to relive his past in the act of narrating. Here, again, he faces a failure. He is expected to display great flights of imagination as he was once regarded as Shakespeare by his friends but his imagination fails to go beyond the memories of his past.
The fragile Laura is too sensitive to face the buffets of time. She tries to forget the passage of time and the pangs of her crippled and lonely life by creating her world of glass menagerie. She creates this inanimate world as a shelter for herself from the constant attack of the changing time. She may not be able to face the gentleman callers but harbors illusory hopes of such callers. Her dream of a gentleman caller is depicted through the image of a young man standing at the door with a beautiful bunch of flowers. When a gentleman caller does appear in her life, he breaks the glass animals of her timeless world. And with that, he wipes out even a semblance of hope from her life. The Wingfields are so lost in a timeless world of their own that they become oblivious to the reality surrounding them. They are entrapped in such an unavoidable mess that their withdrawal from the real world becomes a matter of necessity. By resorting to their specific devices, they try to escape from time that sets them apart from the world of reality. Retreat into a world of illusion is the only defense for them against the ruthless rush of life in time. But they are earthbound and time-bound. So, the realities of life and the forward movement of time mock them at the fragility of their defence.
The male and female protagonists in Williams’ plays fail to maintain their glory with the passage of time. “All significant characters are pathetic victims – of time, of their own passions, of immutable circumstances.”8 Jim was once the school hero expected to touch great heights of glory. His proficiency in basketball, debating and singing brought him to an astonishing spotlight. But at present his situation is no better than a lost youngman. Tom talks about him in the beginning of act III of the play:
He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity. He was shooting with such velocity through his adolescence that you would logically expect him to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty. But Jim apparently ran into more interference after his graduation from Soldan. His speed had definitely slowed. Six years after he left high school he was holding a job that wasn’t much better than mine. (Menagerie, vi, 273)
He is still unsuccessfully running after the mirage of power through knowledge and money. He is knocked down by the race of time and tries to overcome his present regression by the dream of power. He becomes ruthless in his pursuit of controlling time and tramples on the innocent passions of people like Laura. Like Jim, Brick is also the victim of time. Both are the ex-stars of their youth. Brick tries to cease time through alcohol: “For Brick, truth exists in alcohol: it is alcohol which stops the flow of natural time and freezes the moment of experience in metaphysical stasis.” 9 Brick’s dependence on crutch indicates that he is unable to keep pace with the movement of time. Once he was a great footballer with infinite potential. But his skill declines with the passage of time. He tries to revive the potential of his youth by jumping over the hurdles. But he breaks his ankle in this attempt of ceasing time with his past crafts. He is badly defeated in his race with time. Similarly, his desire to recapture his idealized relationship with Skipper by ignoring his present situation leaves him physically as well as morally crippled. Brick is unwilling to accept the passage of time when he admits that “we were scared to grow up.” (Cat, II, 80) He tries to move backward but the onward movement of time asserts its power and exposes his helplessness. “The interval between loss, or more specifically the recognition of loss, and subsequent recovery or its impossibility, is the typical focus of most of Williams’ plays.”10
Like Brick and Jim, Chance is also the victim of the cruel tricks of time. He may believe: “To change is to live… to live is to change, and not to change is to die.” (Sweet Bird, II, 80) But this change brings devastation and corruption in his “clean unashamed youth.” (Sweet Bird, II, 76) He is unable to maintain the glory of his past. His sins of the past are the source of his degeneration. The glory of the school days fades so soon leading him to forgery, blackmailing and shallow exhibitionism. He wants to improve on his memories by marrying his former sweetheart, Heavenly, whom he infects with a venereal disease. All his efforts to regain what is lost in the past end in his castration. He remains defiant to the last moment and resists the repeated warnings of Boss Finley to leave the place. But this defiance remains futile before the burden of reality. At the end of the play, he realizes his helplessness when he addresses the audience, “I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.” (Sweet Bird, III, 111) The wide gulf between the previous glory of the Princess, the aging movie queen, and her present predicament compels her to travel incognito. She may not be able to regain the lost glory of the past and this realization hurts her severely. She resorts to the vehicle of sex, liquor and drugs to forget what her decline as a movie star has done to her. She hires Chance as a gigolo to revive through sexuality. Both of them are defeated by time and their relationship “helps to introduce a thematic motif – the ill effects of time on the individual – which saves the play from total disunity.”11 When the Princess is about to leave him, the clock in the room ticks louder which gives Chance a chance to comment: “It’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to burnt-out pieces…. Time – who could bear it, who could defeat it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes, but not Chance Wayne.” (Sweet Bird, III, 110) When Chance asks us to recognize the eroding impact of time on human life, he, in fact, “invites all men to think, not of the quality of man, but of an enemy.”12
The fading belles in Williams’ plays represent the sad transience of human life. Most of these spinsterish women live in the idyllic past or idealized future. When their dream world shatters before the reality of their being, they are not entirely sane and become neurotic. “The fading belle is a victim of time, longing for a future that will not be and for a past that never really was.”13 The movement of some of these belles is quite suggestive of the eroding effects of time on their lives. Blanche arrives in the Kowalski house in the spring but she departs from there in the autumn. Similarly, Alma, in Summer and Smoke, appears on the stage in the summer but leaves it in the winter. This transition represents the painful onslaught of time which turns the brightness of bloom to darkness of decay. The absence of the brightness of the dawns and the dominance of the darkness of the nights in both the plays reflects the adverse effect of time on human life. Blanche tries to protect herself from the tyranny of time with her costumes and jewellery, summer furs and the paper lantern, and pillows and fans. She tries to wash away the sins of the past and “refresh herself like a brand-new human being” (Streetcar, vii, 192) with the excessive bathing: “Her possessive bathing is elevated to a rite of baptism…. But all her attempts at rebirth and redemption prove futile.”14 Her excessive use of alcohol is another attempt to cope with her present anxiety. But her illusory and fragile attempts are bound to collapse before the inevitable flow of time. She may use the artificial costumes and paper lantern to conceal the eroding effects of time upon her beauty and youth. But the very act represents her “vulnerability and subjugation to time’s decay.”15 She may live in the “lily- white woods. Like an orchard in spring” (Streetcar, iii, 150), as her name means in French, but time has pushed her in the gloomy gales of autumn. She may try to defy the conditions of her mortal existence by pursuing a timeless ideal. But she is bound to perish because she lives in a world in which the realities of time-bound existence impose limitations on the spirit’s capacity to search for the ideal. All her vanities and illusions are exposed and reality asserts itself when Mitch tears her rose-colored lantern. “Mitch not only strips her romantic pretensions of youth, refinement, and virginal innocence, but also symbolically divests her of all her illusions, hopes, and dreams of magically transcending the corrupt past.” 16
Most of Williams’ protagonists stand on the peripheral position as far as the worldly influence is concerned. Their significance is sustained through the force of their resistance to the changes of time by the act of theatricality. Their power lies in their imagination. They utilize this power, like their creator, to arrest time. Williams says:
In a play, time is arrested in the sense of being confined. By a sort of legerdemain, events are made to remain events, rather than being reduced so quickly to mere occurrences. The audience can sit back in a comforting dusk to watch a world flooded with light and in which emotion and action have a dimension and dignity that they would otherwise have in real existence, if only the shattering intrusion of time could be locked out. 17
Laura and Amanda live in the squalid state of affairs but they become significant when they try to arrest time by populating their world with their menageries and Blue Mountains. Blanche is declared as an outcast but her defiance of time raises her to the heroic stature. She utilizes all her faculties to turn her bleak world into a colorful one. Hannah is penniless and companionless but remains the center of attraction because she searches for a life beyond time and space. Poverty-stricken Maggie is not accepted by her husband and his family but she has the power to defeat the real with the imaginary. They may lose their fight and they may be crushed by the onslaught of time, but they have the courage to create a world of their own. Their courage to face the uncontrollable adversary raises them in stature.
The widowed Serafina tries her best to hold time at bay. After the death of her husband she emotionally refuses to accept the passage of time. For about three years she cuts herself off social life. She is unwilling to become the part of the world around her. In search of an idealized love, she locks herself with the ashes of her dead husband. With love gone from her life, time’s passing becomes valueless for her. She tries to stop the flow of time by attaching herself with the sewing machine. The wheel of the machine may move like that of a clock but it does not tell her about the flow of time. She is never ready to accept that time has destroyed her husband and keeps on holding conversation with his ashes “like he was living.” (Five Plays, 151) In this way she attaches herself with a man who himself is the victim of time. But this attitude of negation of reality shows her rapid disintegration. She “enshrines her own body by refusing to participate in the regenerative process of life.” 18 Even the watch, Serafina’s high school graduation gift for her daughter, remains silent till the last moment. The silence of the watch represents her desire to stop the movement of time. But her failure to present her gift to Rosa shows her failure to arrest time. Even she fails to restrict Rosa from the timeless world of love. When, at the end of the play, Serafina has re-entered life through the discovery of new love with Alvaro, “she holds the watch to her ear again. She shakes it a little, then utters a faint, startled laugh.” (Five Plays, 211) Time has been arrested for her again. Serafina, at last, succeeds in attaining the timeless world of love. But she succeeds in doing so by surrendering herself to the flow of time. Serafina’s remarkable capacity for love wins at the end. This shows that a human being can transcend his own pathetic insignificance only by surrendering himself before the reality of time.
The utter despair in which the characters in The Night of the Iguana find themselves is because of the burden of their mortality and the changes which accompany the passage of time. They are to confront time to find their human significance. These earth-bound figures are facing the critical stage of their lives. They mount to the dilapidated, old-fashioned and poorly kept Costa Verde Hotel situated on a hill. The condition of the hotel and its inhabitants reflects the adverse effect of time. These figures strive to come to terms with time which threatens to annihilate them. Memory of the past is central to their thinking. They are tied to their past and like the tied iguana want to free themselves from this entrapment. Shannon is tied to the ghost of his past misdeeds. The guilt of these misdeeds hangs heavily upon his conscience. He is defrocked because of his moral shortcomings and unorthodox sermons. The conflict between his earthly inclinations and heavenly aspirations is the cause of his present emotional breakdown. His overpowering natural instincts blur the ideal in him as he says, “I was the goddamnedest prig in those days that even you could imagine. I said, let’s kneel down together and pray and we did, we knelt down, but all of a sudden the kneeling position turned to a reclining position…” (Iguana, II, 268) Though Maxine is living on the real and practical plane and has no such conflict between the ideal and the real, she is equally broken and lonely because of the recent demise of her husband. Nonno, “the oldest living and practicing poet on the earth,” (Iguana, II, 277) is on the verge of his death. His struggle against death through his creativity is an attempt to escape time. This imminent death threatens to destroy the home which Hannah Jelkes, a forty years old spinster, has been trying to build between the two hearts. She must help the old man through his last crisis and march on the road of a lonely life. Nothing is permanent amid their ever changing lives. Shannon’s breathless expressions at the end of the second act reveal their yearnings to have something permanent. “Shannon lowers his hands from his burning forehead and stretches them out through the rain’s silver sheet as if he were reaching for something outside and beyond himself. Then nothing is visible but these reaching-out hands. A pure white flash of lightning reveals Hannah and Nonno against the wall, behind Shannon.” (Iguana, II, 287)
The mendicants, prostitutes, thieves, petty vendors, prize fighters and the renowned people of the past are put together in a plaza of an unnamed seaport in Camino Real. By presenting their struggle for a separate existence in a place of no specific locality, Williams has tried to portray existence outside of time. “The most serious challenge of this play is its refusal to accept time either as a sequential or as the fundamental common denominator of human affairs. To achieve this immediacy it presents time as discursive, arbitrary, and above all subjective.” 19 The inhabitants of the plaza are rootless, wanderers and displaced people. On the one side of the dried fountain of the plaza is an opulent Siete Mares hotel and on its other side is a flophouse called Ritz Men Only. Torment is the common feature of lives of these people representing various eras of history, legend and literature. The rich and the poor of the both sides of the plaza find themselves in a miserable condition. This misery is represented by the Streetcleaners who lie in wait to cart away the corpses of those who die on the plaza. They cannot resist the inevitable change and dissolution resulting from the forward motion of time. The characteristic gestures of the courtesans and tycoons, poets and prizefighters remain useless before the constant passage of time. Those who were once regarded as the symbol of love, courage, honor etc., are diminished to nothingness by time and circumstances. They are trapped in a strange stagnancy. All the outcasts, the decadents and the idealists of the play find themselves in the arrested depths of the moment. Their retrogression represents the ill effects of time on human existence. The outcasts, especially the bums of the flophouse, cynically accept the things as they are. They try to ignore time by escaping into drugs and alcohol. The satisfaction of appetite remains the main motive of their life. Their “indifference to time, to the world, in effect, breeds disaster, self-destruction.” 20 The romantics try to conquer reality with their idealism, as Casanova stresses at the end of the play, “violets in the mountains can break the rocks if you believe in them and allow them to grow.” (Camino, 97) One way of escape from this misery is possible through a way to Terra Incognita. It is a barren wasteland situated between the plaza and the snow-capped peaks in a distance. Lord Byron, corrupted by success and unable to write the poetry he used to write, ventures out on the Terra Incognita, hoping to regain the pure vision of his youth. His assertion that “there is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go” (Camino) may seem impressive but in reality he is running after a mirage. For Don Quixote the vision of what life should be is far more important than the knowledge of what life is. But he seems to be the victim of his own romantic follies. Kilroy is willing to escape from the Camino Real. He tries to sell his golden gloves aiming to finance this trip. But the corrupting pleasures of flesh prevent him from leaving. He is enslaved by the charms of the gypsy’s daughter. At the end of the play, Kilroy and Don Quixote leave to pursue their dreams because they believe that idealism can conquer the limitations of world and time. While Casanova and Marguerite remain on the Camino Real because they believe that love can make these limitations bearable. So they try to seek what is untouched by time with the help of love and idealism.
In most of Williams’ plays man seems helpless before the irresistible and irrevocable march of time. Time chases and destroys all that is likely to bring some meaning in the life of man. Their mortality is a source of hindrance to their vision and insight. The Glass Menagerie, A Cat on Hot Tin Roof and Camino Real etc. search for what is untouched by time. But in certain plays the forward march of time is not so destructive but, to some extent, a source of meaning. It extends to human beings the opportunity to create anew, to change and to progress. They realize the inadequacy of a life of illusions. They have the courage to seek and find to some extent. They search for their place in time and history even in their acute helplessness and mortality. They courageously try to accept the present reality rather than escaping into an idealized past or into imaginative leaps. Instead of escaping or defying time they try to control it by submerging in it. They try to work with what is imperfect in the world and in human beings. In spite of her recklessness and corruption, Serafina, in The Rose Tattoo, seeks and finds a life partner to avoid her voidness. She embraces the reality of time by breaking the illusions of idealism. In The Iguana and The Milk Train, the loners realize that they need each other. So they seek what they want because they do not resist the inevitable. Shannon, in Iguana, accepts the reality of the present when he quits the ideal world of Hannah and accepts the earthy world of Maxine. The dying Mrs. Goforth, in The Milk Train, faces her predicament with courage realizing and admitting her dependence on someone else.
Although the human beings enjoy free will, in Williams’ plays, they are incapable of changing the course of their destinies in time. They can decide for themselves only within the narrow spheres of their lives. They are either to face reality and the burden of time or to run away from them as long as they can. The wounds inflicted by the troubled experiences of life do not heal up with the passage of time. Rather they lead to death and destruction, eviction and exile, and homelessness and insanity. The time-bound mortals in Williams use the magic of imagination to possess the course of time. But their tricks prove fragile and flimsy before the eternal flow of time. The onward rush of events leads to the loss of innocence, youth and sanity. The artists seek some solace in their creativity but their art brings little consolation for the sorry transience of life. Hannah, in Iguana, tries to reach the ideal level of life and the art of character sketches provides her an opportunity to seek this level. She says to Shannon: “My work, this occupational therapy that I gave myself – painting and doing quick character sketches – made me look out of myself, not in, and gradually, at the far end of the tunnel that I was struggling out of I began to see this faint, very faint gray light – the light of the world outside me – and kept climbing towards it.” (Iguana, III, 310) But this gray light darkens so soon with the death of her only companion in the world. Nonno tries to freeze time by the act of creativity but the very creation, his last poem, is replete with the ravages of time. The troubled and transient experiences of life in time are the big source of crisis for these people.
Time is, indeed, the dominant fact in all his work. The pressure of time prompts the lies and evasions which themselves become the basis of misunderstanding and despair. By the same token the suspension of time in a play, or perhaps its radical foreshortening, permits the writer and his audience to abstract the individual from the obscuring random occurrences of everyday life in order to detect meaning in the heart of chaos and give value to those lives left behind by the rush of history…. Williams emphasizes insidious but invisible effect of time by suspending it. 21
All the happy moments of passing time are flooded with deep sorrow of life. The ruined birthday festivities in Streetcar and Cat represent the negation of birth and life. One leads to insanity and the other to death by cancer. Time does not generate meanings in life. All those who try to stop it through their fictitious weapons are trampled and crushed before its power. Their theatricality leads them to an identity crisis and they fail to recognize their real self. “They lose definition, indeed they fear definition. Laura, her mother asserts, is not a cripple. Blanche is not a sexual tramp. But if these evasions are necessary, they are also destructive, for, without definition, they are without self
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