Death of a salesman: Arthur Miller

Every once in a while, occasionally and not very often, there comes to the fore, a piece of work that becomes, almost at once as it is released, that rarity in literature which bears no comparison, not only to any other contemporary work, but also to any piece of work ever published in the annals of world literature. That is true art and all true art have one thing in common, they are all true. Truth is that concern which is always dark, always probing and always above all criticisms that are hurled at it. There can be no doubt that ‘Death of a salesman’ is one such piece of work. It makes you want to cherish that as human beings we have developed a medium of expression called literature which can produce such exhilarating pieces of offerings that go a long way in justifying our existence as a civilization. For my part I can not deny, that to me ‘Death of a salesman’ seems to be one of the greatest works ever penned by the hands of man and most certainly one of the greatest plays ever to have been produced in America.

Miller achieves remarkable consistency of form through the use of his ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. Miller breaks and breaks successfully the physical rules of the stage through the use of permeable walls for flashbacks. The play moves around, like a shade of cloud in the sky, keeping this unique unity of reality and dreams and ultimately develops a form of its own, independent of both the conventional and the surreal. There is something inherently dialectical in the form of this play but ultimately it is this dialectical nature in the form of the play that becomes its most differential and crucial element. Mr. Miller is not a sentimental playwright and flashbacks, which have most often through poor cinema become associated with overflowing and gooey emotions are converted into the fountain of truth in the hands of Mr. Miller. All that is physically true in this play is an act put on by the characters to preserve their idyll notions and all that is surreal is truth, the real life with all its tragedy and starkness. Such is the form of this remarkable play.

Naturally, this play is an expression of scorn against the great American dream as an ideology of life. The dialogues are sharp and rattling, like pieces of glass which shatter down on its hapless victims. Sample for example Miller’s violent caricature of man, who as he says is not a piece of orange which we can throw away once we have eaten up his insides. With little more than five main characters Miller delivers a convincingly natural portrait of an ordinary man swept away by the lure of the great dream. His characters, whatever be their faults, are no more or no less natural than they can realistically ever be.

There is no central idea in the play, it offers no great thesis and no miraculous solution, but then again such is not the aim of the play. The sole aim of the play is to reveal the hollowness of the great American dream, which Miller does with aplomb. ‘Death of a salesman’ has often had to bear, quite unfairly in my opinion, criticism from the normal school of playwrights. The play does not need content in the way of a great personal philosophy. It is enough that the play achieves what it sets out to do, namely to expose the middle class hypocrisy of America. That is its content. It is not just portrayal of the existence of a rotten dream that makes this play a success, but rather the portrayal of the rottenness in such a fashion so as to destroy it at that very identical time.

Realistically, of course this play is an unqualified success. The class dilemmas of the middle class is accurately grasped and painted by Miller. All the hopes, all the disappointments and all the bitterness that can give rise only to tragedy is the strongest realistical achievement of this play. The wandering confusion of its central characters manifested very interestingly by Happy’s refusal to understand the failure of the dream even after experiencing its bitter consequences is typical of the bourgeoisie middle class’ fascination and desire to leave all its insecurities and miseries behind without failing to realize the impossibility of doing so, chained as it is between desperate survival and the mirage of the ruling class’ doctrine.

What makes this work stand out is the self class parodying by Miller. How he achieves that, only he knows, for this is one aspect where even the most artistically gifted have faltered. No one has ever made characters from the same class parody and eventually destroy the central social position of its own class, like Mr. Miller has done here. Even a playwright like Bernard Shaw had to make the protagonists out of the proletarian classes to articulate this central idea .Not even Coetzee, definitely the most truthful of authors and one of the most respected voices of social conscience in the later half of the millennium has ever come close to achieving this. Even he has tried, but failed to replicate what Mr. Miller has achieved here, constrained unconsciously as he is by his own class position. Such an achievement, even while most definitely counting skill as one of its many parameters springs from a strong social and moral conscience. Mr. Miller was the possessor of a proud moral conscience, preferring to be blacklisted rather than name names to the HUAC while under investigation, and it perhaps owes much to this strong unwilting conscience in unison with the rare artistic skills of a truly dazzling playwright which enabled Mr. Miller to produce a work of this enormity.

Today, more than five decades after it was first published, this work still towers above all of modern play without exception, one of the lighthouses of art showing the way for serious connoisseurs and artists amongst the fierce and untamed waves of mediocrity.