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Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” takes the form of an investigation into the forces which give rise to incomplete and destructive human relationships. The play’s protagonist, Quentin, in whose mind the play’s set pieces take place, subscribes to the simple rule: “You tell the truth, even against yourself.” The play is fabricated as a trial or, more fittingly, an inquest. Here the moralist (and retired attorney) Quentin sits in judgment upon his own conscience, his own values, his own actions:
“You know . . . more and more I see that for many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you are young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful, or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That one moved not in a dry circle but on an upward path toward some elevation, where . . . God knows what . . . I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict, anyway.”
Quentin zeroes in on distorted emotions, marital complexities, and other intimate struggles. As a result, “After the Fall” becomes a big, demanding drama (when staged, the play usually occupies a full three and a half hours), doggedly exposing Quentin’s “pointless litigation of existence” in order to find not only whether his has been a life “lived in good faith,” but whether he can move beyond self-condemnation to some measure of hope. His tortured process of self-discovery fights against an unwillingness, an innate fear of unearthing what Miller calls “the seeds of his own destruction.” It is the fundamental need to know that serves as the backbone of what is otherwise a loosely structured play. And, whether you are a reader or are in the audience, you will likely be engrossed, since this is your journey too.
At the same time we are learning of events in Quentin’s life, a universal drama unfolds. Miller’s intent is for “After the Fall” to be a broader study of mankind’s terrible predisposition to cruelty, his evasions of responsibility and remorse. In the “present time” of the play, Quentin is considering marrying a German woman who fled the Holocaust, and whose experiences led her to accept human blindness and failures. She helps him universalize his own understanding, in a scene in which he pauses before an imagined concentration camp tower rising above him:
“And I am not alone, and no man live who would not rather be the sole survivor of this plan than all its finest victims? What is the cure? Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls? I tell you what I know! My brothers died here . . . but my brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these stones! And what’s the cure!”
Miller is striving to enter into a dialog with other essential pieces of twentieth-century literature. T.S. Eliot in the poem “Gerontion” (1920) asks: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” At the close of “After the Fall,” Quentin, responds:
“I wake each morning like a boy — even now, even now! I swear to you, there’s something in me that could dare to love this world again! . . . Is the knowing all? To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax and fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love — as to an idiot in the house — forgive it; again and again . . . forever?”
Again and again: There was something in Miller’s plea that reminded me of similar words uttered impromptu just four years after the opening of “After the Fall.” Before a stunned audience in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the evening in 1968 when the world heard the news of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy spoke. Without notes, at first haltingly but then with earned authority, Kennedy said:
“We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, to go beyond these rather difficult times . . . Aeschylus once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of god.’ What we need . . . is not division . . . not hatred . . . not violence and lawlessness . . . but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice . . . . ”
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