8
PARTISAN REVIEW
truth that the American public as a whole did not like the idea that
existence ever arrived at a conclusion which was not full of lasting
happiness for everyone except the maiden who has not preserved her
virginity for her husband, and the scoundrel who has betrayed every–
one, beginning with his mother.
But something has happened-the explicit beginning was prob–
ably some time during the second World War-and an unhappy
ending has now become a howling success. And it is often also more
than an unhappy ending, it is a catastrophe: the sympathetic char–
acter with whom the audience or the reader should identify himself
concludes in frustration, failure, and whimpering death. This is not at
all like the classic conclusion of tragedy, for the death of the hero
is not heroic, it does not declare a triumph of the nature of existence
over the overweening pride of man, and it is not what Hegel said
tragedy was (thinking probably most of all of the
Antigone),
the
conflict between two rights (in which one or the other must be
violated). The new doom is degrading and disgraceful and humil–
iating. In Tennessee Williams'
A Streetcar Named Desire,
the South–
ern belle, so often until now a blushing bride at the finish, is dragged
away to an insane asylum. In Paul Bowles'
The Sheltering Sky,
the
heroine becomes a nymphomaniac in a harem and also concludes
as a lunatic. Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
is an even more
pertinent instance because in American life salesmen are not supposed
to fail and die, they are supposed to be quite successful, provided,
of course, that they are honest and hard-working. And then there is
the very different example of
T.
S. Eliot's
The Cocktail Party
in
which the only two grim possibilities of existence are a loveless mar–
riage or a martyrdom the very point of which is that the other char–
acters feel that to them it must seem pointless.
That these works should be very successful might be less signifi–
cant-for of course there have been works which ended in tragedy
and were successful- were it not that Hollywood too has sought out
the unhappy ending. In one motion picture two representative and
popular -symbols of the heroic American, Spencer Tracy, for long
the rough and ready mechanic, cab driver, and champion of virtue,
and James Stewart, the incorruptible Princeton man and Arrow–
collar ad, are shot down and die at the end. It is true that they die
for the sake of getting rubber from the Japanese in the midst of the
