In the dedication for Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), Eugene O’Neill thanks his wife, Carlotta Monterey, for helping him “to face [his] dead at last and write this play . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” As he conjured up an assembly of memories for the Tyrones, some of which have a compelling resemblance to those of his own family history, O’Neill reveals remarkable insight into the character of memory itself, its processes and purposes. Approaching Long Day’s Journey into Night as a play about memory brings into relief O’Neill’s prescient insight into mind matters. While in Long Day’s Journey into Night O’Neill no longer makes use of the experimental theatrical devices—masks, asides, soliloquies—that make thought and feeling transparent in earlier plays such as Strange Interlude (1928), he reveals very effectively in his late masterpiece what he understands of how “self comes to mind,” as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes the origins of consciousness (Self 288).
Juxtaposing some of the findings of contemporary neuroscience research with elements of Long Day’s Journey into Night that seem to anticipate them makes it possible to trace some intriguing parallels. There is already an expanding context for such an undertaking. In his provocatively titled book Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), Jonah Lehrer, a journalist who has worked in a neuroscience lab and often writes on related issues, makes the bold but persuasive claim that there have been
artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. . . . writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind—real, tangible truths—that science is only now rediscovering. Their imaginations foretold the facts of the future. (ix)
A number of scholars are finding that considering literary texts in relation torecent findings in neuroscience affords unanticipated opportunities for new perspectives. By now there are several distinct approaches in this growing field. Suzanne Nalbantian, for example, in her groundbreaking book Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (2004), says: “The literature of memory can provide a rich and complex array of data that is tantamount to field studies for capturing episodes of memory” (2–3). She looks at works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner for what they might indicate about specific mechanisms of recall. Lisa Zunshine introduces cognitive science into her analysis of readers’ anticipations and experiences of literature. In her work on writers from Woolf to Dashiel Hammet, she attempts to demonstrate that the research of cognitive psychologists into “the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind . . . can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts” (4). A range of possibilities opens alongside traditional and theoretical understanding of readers and texts, as well as of theater performance, as William W. Demaste’s book, Staging Consciousness (2002), demonstrates.
Literature exists as a record of human consciousness and can therefore be tapped as a resource for new cognitive understandings. Study of the richly detailed inner lives of fictional and dramatic characters can complement laboratory work, such as imaging, that goes into mapping the mind. The artist, an eloquent reporter on the life within, gives us a sense of what the neuroscientists call “qualia,” the “experiential states” that a brain scan cannot provide (Dennett 17). The scholar Michael Holquist says that those in the humanities “might individually be bolder in reaching out to potential allies in brain science” (5). One advantage of responding to this clarion call is new interpretive possibility. The very recent innovative research and generative speculations of cognitive studies are increasingly accessible to scholars, making possible new convergences between the humanities and science. The neuroscientist David Eagleman acknowledges that “Laboratories all over the world are working to figure out how to understand the relationship between physical matter and subjective experience, but it’s far from a solved problem” (220). Neuroscience does not yet have any overarching theory to apply to literary and dramatic analysis. What it does offer, at this stage, are its own rapidly developing insights, which can heighten awareness of what the artist has achieved.
The kaleidoscopic elements of a work such as Long Day’s Journey into Night shift once more under new critical scrutiny A leading researcher in the field of memory studies, Daniel Schacter, provides a starting point for a reentry into examining the play. Schacter says:
We tend to think of memories as snapshots from family albums that, if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away. But we now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. . . . We extract key elements from our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained from the experience. (9)
Similarly, the memories that emerge in the course of the exchanges in O’Neill’s late masterpiece have the kind of dynamic and mutable qualities that are now being studied by cognitive scientists. O’Neill understood, as did Proust, that “the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were” (Lehrer 95). In his discussion of neuroscience research on memory, journalist Steven Johnson explains:
Memories transform our perception of the present, but the process is even more nuanced and layered than that: reactivating memories in a new context changes the . . . memory itself. . . . Some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they’re activated. . . . Instead of just recalling a memory that had been forged . . . the brain forges the memory all over again, in a new associative context. (46)
A cascade of memories central to the Tyrone family’s often anguished past is prominent in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Carlotta’s description of the period when O’Neill was writing the play suggests that his own profound remembering influences the play. O’Neill “would come out of his study looking gaunt, his eyes red from weeping. Sometimes he looked ten years older than when he went in in the morning” (Gelb 8). O’Neill’s memories undoubtedly inform the play in compelling ways, as scholars of O’Neill’s oeuvre have convincingly shown through the years. Nonetheless, it is important, as Doris Alexander insists, to separate art from autobiography. In this approach to the drama, it is the fictive memories with which O’Neill invests his protagonists that take center stage.
Edmund Tyrone’s illness serves as the catalyst for invoking and re-forging memories of the living room of James Tyrone’s summer house in 1912. After the light banter between Mary and James Tyrone that opens the first scene of the play, it becomes apparent that anxiety is building about what Mary prefers to call her younger son’s “bad summer cold” (Long 16). Linking Edmund’s faltering and her beloved father’s long-ago death from consumption, Mary is, after two months of being in recovery, on the verge of a full relapse into morphine addiction. Like their father, Edmund and Jamie Tyrone, who have recently returned for the summer, watch her apprehensively. All is set into motion.
The Tyrones are presented as an ensemble, and during the course of the play, all are engaged in acts of memory. Brenda Murphy reminds us in her discussion of stage productions of the drama, that “There is truly no protagonist in this play ‘of old sorrow,’ but four characters interacting in a form that is like a piece of classical music with a number of intricately interwoven motifs” (54). Inevitably, however, interpretive approaches often tend to claim attention, however temporarily, for one or the other of the Tyrones. Focusing a critical lens on O’Neill’s twenty-three-year-old persona in relation to the science of the mind realigns the elements of the play in significant ways around Edmund. To take a phrase of Jamie’s out of context, from the perspective of cognitive science, the drama that unfolds over the long night is “the Kid’s story” (22).
In developing the character of Edmund, who is described in the stage directions as “plainly in bad health” (20), O’Neill returned to a character he introduced in The Straw (1921), which Travis Bogard characterized as his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In The Straw O’Neill shaped a portrait of a young man, Stephen Murray, finding his vocation as a writer, much as O’Neill himself had, during a period of recovery in a tuberculosis sanatorium. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Edmund has returned to the family home just before a stay in a sanatorium. O’Neill directly linked his own mild case of tuberculosis and his stay in the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium with his decision to become an artist. Travis Bogard opens Contour in Time (1972) with a recounting of this genesis of the dramatist:
In 1913 in a Connecticut tuberculosis sanatorium, Eugene O’Neill came to an end of protracted adolescence. His illness was never disastrously severe, yet his encounter with tuberculosis was sufficiently fearful to cause him to fight for the first time against the drift of his life. The period at the sanatorium was one of self-assessment, of spiritual restoration, and of crucial decision. His recovery of health brought with it the idea of a destiny to which, during the forty years before him, he remained entirely faithful. (6)
O’Neill himself made it clear that a representation of Stephen’s illness was not incidental to his vision in The Straw. When The Straw was produced, O’Neill had to counter criticism about how vividly he had depicted illness through his descriptions of coughing and spitting; he was pleased with the scenes and would not alter them. O’Neill was very perceptive about the issues that swirled around “the white plague”—biological, social, political, spiritual, aesthetic, familial, and personal—and he enlisted all he had come to understand from his experience to shape the dramatic myths of the young and ailing artist’s conflicts and aspirations in these plays. A narrative of illness is vital to the structure of both the play written by the young dramatist, looking back in 1918 and 1919 to his bout with tuberculosis five years earlier, and the great work of O’Neill’s mature years.
The resemblance of the young protagonist of The Straw to Edmund Tyrone is striking. Stephen Murray is described as
thirty years old—a tall, slender, rather unusual looking fellow with a pale face, sunken under high cheek bones, lined about the eyes and mouth, jaded and worn for one still so young. His intelligent, large hazel eyes have a tired, dispirited expression in repose, but can quicken instantly with a concealment mechanism of mocking, careless humor whenever his inner privacy is threatened. . . . His manner, as revealed by his speech—nervous, inquisitive, alert—seems more an acquired quality than any part of his real nature. (54)
Edmund, like the earlier nascent artist, is tall, slender, intense: “It is in the quality of extreme nervous sensibility that the likeness of Edmund to his mother is most marked. . . . Much thinner than he should be, his eyes appear feverish and his cheeks are sunken”(19–20). Interestingly, the symptoms of Edmund Tyrone’s illness are muted compared with those of Stephen Murray. While Edmund does say to his brother Jamie at one point, “The fever and chills I get at night are no joke” (55), and he does noticeably cough at times throughout the play, there are no graphic indications of the consumption that is creating increasing tension for the Tyrones as the play proceeds. The earlier play, however, with its more clinical description of a young man struggling with a potentially fatal illness, has its echoes in Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Edmund senses how ill he is even before the diagnosis, and his feelings are appropriate to his circumstances. Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience research indicates that feelings are linked to an ongoing process of body monitoring. Damasio’s description has explanatory power for a consideration of how Edmund’s illness, as O’Neill intuitively conceived of it, influences his unconscious inner perception, as well as his outward behavior. Damasio says,
Feelings . . . can be mental sensors of the organism’s interior, witnesses of life on the fly. They can be our sentinels as well. They let our fleeting and narrow conscious self know about the current state of life in the organism for a brief period. (Looking 139)
Damasio’s research reveals the interconnectedness of body and mind, emotion and thought. He has demonstrated that internal self-monitoring and self-regulation are linked to emotions. Moreover, emotions are indispensable for what are thought of as rational decision making and behavior. Damasio’s model inspires an inquiry into whether Edmund’s intensity on that particular long day and night has a genesis and purpose beyond his own awareness. Edmund can be seen in his precarious state, beset with inner turmoil, unconsciously acting on his own behalf to restore equilibrium. He makes an implicit demand on mother, father, and brother that is stronger than anything he openly asks of them, and they respond in their various ways to the evident need that he is driven to make known to them. As Damasio suggests, “Feelings are not superfluous. All that gossip from within turns out to be quite useful” (Spinoza 179). Edmund’s insistence secures him some essential provisions. Memory itself, and all the complexity with which O’Neill invests it, becomes the primary response of the Tyrone family to the urgency of Edmund’s predicament.
Michel Foucault describes the role of the family in illness:
The natural locus of disease is the natural locus of life—the family: gentle, spontaneous care, expressive of love and a common desire for a cure, assists nature in its struggle against the illness, and allows the illness itself to attain its own truth. (17)
The Tyrone family cannot offer such an uncomplicated supportive environment for Edmund, but he seems to measure what is available against just such a standard and stake his claim, for example, desperately seeking Mary’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of his symptoms. Edmund’s needs are great enough that they ultimately have their impact on Mary and Tyrone and Jamie. Notes that O’Neill made for a new play in 1937 that would show the hero’s “attempt to go on free of past” might anticipate O’Neill’s work on Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1939 (Alexander 67). Locating the play in a context of studies of the mind makes it more apparent that confronting family memory frees Edmund for the possibility of a restorative convalescence.
Interestingly, Long Day’s Journey into Night does not depend for its dramatic impact on the slow revelation of key moments of the past, as does, for example, another play focused on memory, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Rather, the critical family memories are linked to what Steven F. Bloom sees as a repetitive pattern of feelings such as guilt, denial, blame, and forgiveness (153). Accusations, apologies, outbursts, reassurances, and confessions swirl around the recollection of a constellation of emotionally charged episodes, an intensity of exchanges in what Michael Manheim characterizes as this family’s “language of kinship.” Most vivid in the repertoire are the traumatic memories. Neuroscientists have by now begun to trace the physiological differences, neurological and hormonal, in the storage of the characteristically intrusive and persistent memories of traumatic events. As Johnson says, “The trouble with emotional memories is that they can be fiendishly difficult to eradicate. The brain seems to be wired to prevent the deliberate overriding of fear responses” (64).
In Long Day’s Journey into Night the death of a baby, Eugene, the second son, while Mary was traveling with Tyrone on one of his frequent acting tours, was a devastating family experience that is never far from their thoughts. Mary looks back with bitterness. She blames Tyrone for having persuaded her to accompany him on the trip, and she cannot forgive Jamie, who was then seven years old and suffering from measles, for having entered the baby’s room though he had been warned of the risk of infection. Edmund was conceived after the loss of the child, and Mary’s feelings for him would always be complicated by her memory of Eugene. She says, “I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby, and that God would punish me if I did” (88). Moreover, the pain associated with Edmund’s birth led to Mary’s morphine addiction. One of the strongest accusations against James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night is that, after Edmund’s birth, he had called in a quack physician—a hotel doctor—who prescribed the morphine to which Mary became addicted. Much that troubles the Tyrones in the present is traceable to the loss. The past haunts the present. As Mary says:
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever. (61)
All too vivid memories merge with current anxieties about Mary’s addiction and Edmund’s faltering. What is less apparent until later in the drama is that the memories that surface and are reconfigured in the family narrative serve a vital purpose for Edmund as he faces his daunting illness.
Memories of events connected with Mary’s dependence on morphine, which are rehearsed at various junctures throughout the day and evening, seem indelible. While the men in her life worry about what it means that she has slept in the spare room and is beginning to seem more than usually agitated, Mary accuses them of not trusting her. Tyrone and his sons are invested in their separate ways in her possibility for recovery. Like the death of Eugene, Mary’s chemical dependency connects with a great deal in family memory. A key scene lodged in the consciousness of the Tyrones is that of Mary, in a nightdress, desperate for her drug and suicidal, rushing out toward a dock. It was this harrowing event that led Tyrone and Jamie, closely familiar with the details of her addiction for ten years, to disclose the truth about Mary’s condition to then fourteen-year-old Edmund. Edmund says, “I remember all right . . . God, it made everything in life seem rotten” (118). J. Chris Westgate comments on when this crucial information, which he says influences all that follows, is first introduced: “Tyrone’s memory of this incident enters the play during the second act, not long after Edmund’s tuberculosis has been diagnosed . . . and when Tyrone, suddenly confronted by reality cannot help but recognize the signs of Mary’s addiction having returned” (26). Mary cries out: “James! You mustn’t remember! You mustn’t humiliate me so!”(86). Tyrone’s having just consulted Dr. Hardy about Edmund’s illness is particularly troubling to Mary because it brings back painful memories:
Oh, we all realize why you like him, James! Because he’s cheap! . . . I know all about Doctor Hardy. Heaven knows I ought to after all these years. He’s an ignorant fool! There ought to be a law to keep men like him from practicing. . . . And yet it was exactly the same type of cheap quack who first gave you the medicine—and you never knew what until it was too late! (74)
Edmund is fearful that Tyrone, having failed to secure the best care for Mary, will send him to the “state farm” rather than a private sanatorium where he would be more likely to recover. Here memory serves to alert him to present danger which he attempts to avert.
Edmund is not always present when memories are being recalled. Important exchanges take place when he is not on the scene. Mary is alone with the maid, Cathleen, for example, when she reminisces about her youthful longing to be a musician or a nun, before she developed romantic feelings for James Tyrone. Similarly, Edmund does not witness Jamie’s crucial outburst at Tyrone for his reluctance to seek out the best treatment for Edmund. However, Mary’s conversation is a significant prelude to the fuller retreat into her past that Edmund will later witness, and the quarrel of Jamie and Tyrone prepares the way for a transformative conversation Edmund will have with his father. Edmund is ultimately heir to all the key family revelations offered in Long Day’s Journey into Night. They are invoked in relation to the crisis that Edmund’s illness triggers, and ultimately make a visible difference in the family’s treatment of him.
Memory’s significance is often overtly noted in the play, usually with anxiety or despair. Mary says, “That’s what makes it so hard—for all of us. We can’t forget” (48). She later laments: “The past is the present, isn’t it It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us” (87). At one point she apologizes for “remembering aloud” (114). Tyrone worries about Mary’s “raking up the past” (142). He also cautions Edmund about the unreliability of her memories: “As I’ve told you before, you must take her memories with a grain of salt. Her wonderful home was ordinary enough. Her father wasn’t the great, generous, noble Irish gentleman she makes out” (137). However, Edmund insists in a conversation with his mother: “It’s bad for you to forget. The right way is to remember” (45). His faith in the potentially therapeutic aspect of memory has a Freudian resonance. For some neuroscientists there is no radical disjunction between a Freudian vision and a neuroscientific view of the mind. A researcher like Erik Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize for his biological studies of memory at the cellular level, is far from dismissive of the psychoanalytic approach. Kandel says:
Biology may be able to delineate the physical basis of several mental processes that lie at the heart of psychoanalysis—namely, unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism, . . . the role of the unconscious in psychopathology, . . . and the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis itself. (367)
Throughout, there are clues that a memory-laden family narrative is being enhanced and modulated in vital ways. At one point, Mary complains about having waited in hotel rooms early in their marriage until Tyrone was brought home drunk. Edmund looks at Tyrone angrily and says, “Christ! No wonder—!” (113). If the story does not alter his perception radically, he is nonetheless particularly sensitive to the accretion of details about the past that deepen his understanding of each of the other Tyrones at various moments. Roger Schank, who works in the field of artificial intelligence, says that “one of the most interesting aspects of the way stories are used in memory is the effect they have on understanding” and that “understanding, for a listener, means mapping the speaker’s stories onto the listener’s stories” (375). The impact of remembering aloud is nowhere more apparent than in the scene where Edmund gets to talk to his father alone after the diagnosis of consumption has been confirmed. Tyrone contrasts what he sees as Edmund’s life of privilege compared with the difficult circumstances of his own youth, but Edmund reminds him that the rigors of his own experience had led to a suicide attempt. Edmund, unable to engage Mary’s attention fully as she relapses into her morphine addiction, does battle with his father to avoid being sent to the state farm: “to think when it’s a question of your son having consumption, you can show yourself up before the whole town as such a stinking old tightwad!” (145).
Edmund blames the doctors his father sought out for destroying Mary’s capacity for mothering and for threatening his own possible recovery. An insistence on their contrasting perspectives on themselves and on each other begins to give way to an exchange that is different in tenor from all the others in the play. Both dialogue and stage directions confirm the distinction. Tyrone tells what must be an often repeated story of his impoverished childhood effectively enough this time that Edmund is described in the stage directions as “moved” (148). The old story retold is now more potent for him in this recollection and retelling. A moment of communion, brief but definitive, leads to Tyrone’s offer to send Edmund to a sanatorium considered better than the state farm. Tyrone says, “You can choose any place you like! Never mind what it costs! Any place I can afford. Any place you like—within reason” (148). The stage directions indicate a significant shift: “At this qualification, a grin twitches Edmund’s lips. His resentment has gone” (149). Tyrone’s phrase, “within reason,” both caveat and wry acknowledgment of the validity of Edmund’s criticism, goes far to dispel the tensions that have been building.
Inspired by the moment’s intimacy, Tyrone says,
I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of any easy fortune. (149)
After this speech of his father’s, the stage directions again reveal the impact that recast memory has in the drama: “Moved, stares at his father with understanding—slowly”; he says “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now” (151). The exchange could be characterized as a bequeathal—permission to be the artist his father might have become.
Edmund is affected enough by Tyrone’s confession that he says: “You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine They’re all connected with the sea” (153). Edmund then reveals to his father the deepest spiritual experience he has had: “I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself” (153). Edmund’s brooding here gives way to invoking moments of ecstasy. Memory has begun to emerge in the service of a deepened connection of father and son as Edmund speaks in his most lyrical voice:
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death! (153–54)
Tyrone is impressed and acknowledges, “Yes, there’s the makings of a poet in you all right” (154). While Edmund’s future is still cloudy, he has succeeded in securing a paternal blessing and repositioning himself in his familial world. As Damasio says, “think of how many lives have been saved by fear and anger in the right circumstances” (Looking 40). Even the darker emotions can ultimately prove beneficial if they move one toward repair and restoration.
A fraternal gift of memory increases the sense of hopefulness in an atmosphere that is relentlessly bleak. When Jamie confesses to Edmund that though he has loved him, he has also been jealous of him, he relieves himself of his own guilt-ridden memories: “Only don’t forget me. Remember I warned you—for your sake” (167). In his attempt to liberate Edmund from his pernicious influence, he moves his younger brother further toward a life that, albeit marred by the family darkness, nonetheless has its promise. Mary makes no conscious healing gesture on behalf of her son. Nonetheless, her retreat into her own world is a remarkable embodiment of memory that might satisfy a critical need of Edmund to understand fully what has brought her to this impasse. Once Mary becomes “a ghost haunting the past” (152), she lays bare everything else Edmund might need to know about his mother’s early dreams and their place in his troubling family history. What Jamie calls “The Mad Scene” is an enactment of all that led to Mary’s inability to respond to Edmund’s urgent plea, “Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption!” (174). Mary remains oblivious to Edmund and immersed in her own distant past. She “passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain—vaguely” and invokes her final memory of the play: “Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” (176).
The conclusion is a tableau: “She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless” (176). O’Neill commented a year into writing the play on the conclusion: “At the final curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the past, each guilty and . . . understanding, and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget” (Gelb 10). Interestingly, it was later that O’Neill added what the Gelbs call the “revelatory speech for James Tyrone in Act IV” (11), the reflection on his life in the theater that affects Edmund so profoundly. As O’Neill completed his play, he shifted a delicate balance enough that even the stasis of the last scene does not obscure the vivid impression of the plenitude of memory recovered and reconfigured for Edmund. These long hours have made it possible for Edmund to survey fully, in the words of poet Adrienne Rich, “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail” (lines 55–56). O’Neill concludes the drama with a compelling paradox. All is fully suspended and the scene has a tragic aura that is definitive. Yet Edmund has done crucial work toward recovery during these hours in the summer home. The full and evocative representation of the sedimented layers of the Tyrone experience, their collective memories retrieved and shared with such intensity, ultimately signify possibility.
Damasio says, “It is the two gifts combined, consciousness and memory, along with their abundance, that result in the human drama and confer upon that drama a tragic status” (271). They also make possible the examined life. O’Neill vouchsafed for his young hero something of the hard-won wisdom he himself arrived at in the arduous effort to write this play “of old sorrow.” It might stand Edmund in good stead.