Election Section

Upon the death of Arthur Miller the American media began a steady repetition of the theme that has always been utilized to define and eviscerate the significance of Miller’s work: As the San Francisco Chronicle typically intoned in prose designed both to eulogize and pacify the power of Miller’s work, he “exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream.” A great many writers have condemned the American dream and it is not completely false to hold that Miller also exposed its pathology. But it is, nevertheless, extremely misleading. 

It is much like noting that a particular individual suffers a distorted sense of reality. The judgment may well be valid, but we do not understand the illusion until we learn how and why it was produced. What Miller exposed was not the dream as such, but the underlying social system that required the dream in order to obscure the true nature of that society and to make life within it bearable. That underlying system is, of course, American society, which must redefine itself so that it may appear human and decent to its members, lest they grasp its reality and succumb in terror and defeat. And in the early plays at least, at the heart of that American society is the structure of capitalism, driven by a virulent competitiveness and an invidious structure of power, masked by the verneer of the dream and its credo that the height of human fulfillment is monetary acquisition and that those who fail in this task are lost through their own personal failure.  

Anyone who have never seen Death of a Salesman on the stage has never really experienced the play. Both the film and the TV version are bound to fail, for the only device they can utilize to reveal the nature of time in the lives of the characters is the flashback, which unfortunately loses the anguished tension between the dream world of the Loman family at the time of Biff’s and Happy’s adolescence and Willie’s earlier forays into the jungle of salesmanship in the towns of New England, on the one hand, and the reality of the life that imposes itself on Willie, and drives him on to suicide, on the other. Willie’s being is stretched between two dimensions: his youth when the dream of success was alive and still possessed credibility, and present existence in which he can only legitimate his life by exchanging it for the value of the insurance policy that he believes he can realize with his suicide. 

The play is redolent with the contradictions of Willie’s mind between capitalist reality and liberal ideology: Biff is hardworking, but he is lazy; Willie is well liked, but they make fun of him; he is “vital in New England,” but he is no longer necessary; he will open the windshield of the car, but the Studebaker window doesn’t open; Biff’s stealing shows initiative, but Willie gives him hell for it; the refrigerator has the biggest ads, but it breaks down just when you have paid for it; “Business is bad, it’s murderous. But not for me of course.” These are the contradictions of Willie’s mind because they are the contradictions of Willie’s society, the contradictions between “murderous” reality and Willie’s fantasy that he will escape this destruction, that he will “come out on top.” 

Illusion alone did not defeat Willie; it was the reality of the real contradiction in himself that he imparted to Biff and Happy and the brutal and changing reality of American economic life, symbolized in the technical transformation of Howard’s new tape recorder that indicates the obsolescence of Willie’s once personalized form of salesmanship, useful though fragile, now on the verge of mechanization and complete human extinction 

In short, Willie’s illusion and growing hallucination is the story he must tell himself to keep from paralysis and despair. In the last climactic scene Biff, who alone is concerned to discover the reality that is destroying them, confronts Willie: “...you’re going to hear the truth-what you are and what I am!” And what is that truth? Simply, Biff declares: “Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you.” Some will succeed in this system—Bernard seems to be one —but the great majority of those who accept the fantasy of competitive achievement, will lie, at the end, broken in quiet desperation.  

In the introduction to his collected plays, Miller wrote of the character Joe Keller in All My Sons: 

He is not a partner in society, but an incorporated member, I am not merely speaking... of a literal corporation but the concept of a man’s becoming a function of production or distribution to the point where his personality becomes divorced from the actions it propels. 

This fits quite well Marx’s theory of alienation. 

One hundred and fifty years before Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, at the beginning of development of capitalism, Marx wrote: 

The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. 

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. 

The task of the writer is to shred the imaginary flower so that the chain can be destroyed and the living flower culled. 

Richard Lichtman is a distinguished scholar at the Wright Institute, previously professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, and currently developing a degree program in critical theory. ›