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Literary Review
The crucible of conscience
RAVI VYAS
Crucible: A place or situation in which concentrated forces interact or influence change or development.
ARTHUR MILLER has said somewhere that "there are really no characters in a play; there are relationship." Basically, there are three relationships, and only three, that from Aristotle onward decreed to make a play dramatic rather than narrative in concept and execution, separating drama from what we understand as literature. First, the hero or the main protagonist's relationship with his own true self; second, his relationship with his fellow-artists and together to the audiences; third, his commitment (on non-commitment) to the society in which he lives and where it is not possible to dismiss a crucial crisis and live his own private life, ignoring events transpiring all around him.
And it was the nature of the questions asked and answered, rather than the language used — whether verse, ordinary slang, or colourless prose — that determined whether the play had established a relationship and hence whether it was realistic or not. To reflect this reality it was necessary to depict why a man does what he does, or why he nearly did not do it, or "why he simply cannot walk away and say `to hell with it.'" To put it another way, a play must have a social context, some kind of a commitment the main character makes to life, or refuses to make, the kind of challenge he accepts and the kind he can walk away from or turn his back on. The idea in the play lies in the discovery and clarification of the conflict between the hero and the world in which he lives — the less capable the man is of walking away from the central conflict of the play, the more tragic his existence. And vice-versa. Hence, no conflict, no drama. For instance, take Arthur Miller's "The Crucible".
But first, the genesis and the play itself. As Arthur Miller says in an extended essay "The Crucible in History", published last year, it would probably not have occurred to him to write this play had he not witnessed the post-war climate of suspicion and paranoia in the 1940s and early 1950s during Senator McCarthy's famous anti-Communist crusade. Lives and reputations of American intellectuals were sacrificed to political hysteria much like what happened in the Salem witch-trials three centuries ago in 1692.
The kind of people targeted by the McCarthyites were left-inclined men and women of the 1930s who had witnessed the Great Crash, Depression and chronic unemployment, the cruelty of unfettered capitalism "red in tooth and claw" and the rise of Nazism, especially threatening to Jews like Miller. "It was an ideological war, like guerrilla war, since the enemy was first of all an idea whose proponents were not in uniform but disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people to death."
"The Crucible", based on the records of the witch-hunts, is part-allegory. "The Salem tragedy," Miller says in an overture to the play, "developed from a paradox. It is a paradox in whose grip we still live, and there is no prospect that we will discover its resolution. Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies. It was forged for a necessary purpose and accomplished that purpose. But all organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space."
But this small community was stirred to madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in violent changes, mindless persecutions based on the terrifying power of false accusations that every second person was a witch and out to destroy the established order of things. "Long-held hatreds of neighbours were now openly expressed and vengeance taken; land-lust which had been expressed before by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds, were now elevated to the arena of morality; one could cry witch against one's neighbour and feel perfectly justified in the bargain."
In any such mass phenomenon, the number of characters of vital, if not decisive importance, is so great as to make the dramatic problem excessively difficult. One way to understand Salem's guilt was to approach the town impressionistically, through a mosaic of seemingly disconnected scenes, gradually to form a context of cause and effect. This has been done but, as Miller says in the introduction to his Collected Plays, "the central impulse for writing was not the social context but the interior psychological question, which was the question of guilt residing in Salem which the hysteria unleashed, but did not create."
Consequently, the structure of the play reveals this understanding and it centres on three central characters; John Proctor, a local member of the Church who had opposed Reverend Parris, mainly responsible for the belief in witches; Elizabeth Proctor, his wife who had discovered that her husband had committed adultery with Abigall Williams; and Abigall Williams, Reverend Parris' 17-year-old niece, who leads other children in the accusations. There are judges too; Governor Danforth who is dedicated to removing all witches and who will not allow any one to tamper with his authority; Judge Hathorne, who examines people accused of being witches; the informers and hatchet men who provide the infrastructure for the mechanism of terror.
Who does what to whom, and who betrays whom or how they turn turtle is not as important as the message that there was no conflict of principle or interest that the witch hunters could not find a way to rationalise. Conspiracy was the name of all opposition. And the reformation of the accused, quite logically, could only be believed when he gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Only the ritual of humiliation, the breaking-up of pride and independence, could finally win the accused re-admission into the community. Whether the repentance was wholly or partially sincere, wholly or partially cynical, was another question. Whatever the case, the accused had to betray to survive. Nothing new in this. Like the Soviet purges, Inquisitional Spain, Revolutionary France, the "names" were known; only now the accused had to corroborate the information.
What was new however was the modus operandi; men had before them the calendar of their deaths (call it civic death in the McCarthy era) to which was introduced the mechanism of minimal hope. "You can go on living if you do this or that to our satisfaction." But the doing almost invariably involved a betrayal of friends so hideous, so degrading that it further diminished the humanity of those who made it. To live was to choose to be less human.
"The Crucible", then, straddles two different worlds — the Salem witch-hunts and the McCarthy era — to make them one. But in the usual sense of the word it is not history; it is a moral, political and psychological constant that floats on the hidden emotions of the two eras. (Parallels could be extended to several other worlds too.)
The big question that emerges is what happens with the handing over of one's conscience to another, be it a woman, the state, or a terror and the realisation that with conscience goes the person, the soul immortal and the "name". Miller provides no clear-cut answer: each has to come to terms with the betrayal on his or her terms. None of us are saints because there is a potential inhumanity latent in all of us, perhaps because of a perversion of frustrated love. Besides, there are people (and will always be), perfectly agreeable and normal — at least on the face of it — who are dedicated to evil, not mistaking it for good and look at it as evil in the world, and without their perverse example, we should not know the good. We have to conceive, in fact, of Iago in all of us.
The Crucible, Arthur Miller, first published 1953, Penguin Modern Classics, Special Indian Price, £4.50.
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