[In the following essay, Stout compares MacLeish's verse play J. B. and Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” as modern re-compositions of the biblical Book of Job.]

The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ notes. Jude's face changed more: he whispered slowly, his parched lips scarcely moving:

‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’

(‘Hurrah!’)

—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

The Book of Job is one of those monumental texts that evoke allusions in great numbers, so that we seem to encounter them at every turn, from Herman Melville to Neil Simon.¹ Thomas Carlyle pronounced it unsurpassed by anything either in the Bible or outside it. All this might not at first seem surprising, when one considers that Job raises the most profoundly evocative of questions and of necessity leaves them shrouded in mystery, inviting further questioning. Yet, on closer examination, the stature of Job is puzzling. The story of a pious man who loses everything and then, because he hasn't complained, gets it all back—as if that made it all right—would scarcely, in itself, seem likely to evoke the meditations of a Melville or a Hardy. And indeed the Job to which they give the tribute of allusive response is not the patient Job of the familiar fable but the protesting Job of the book's middle chapters, who hurls his suffering back in God's teeth and demands an explanation. Yet these central chapters, powerful and provocative as they are, are also at times turgid and repetitious. It is no more to be supposed that they alone could have secured the place Job occupies in western literature, let alone in popular memory, than to think the much older and rather primitive folk tale which frames them could have achieved such literary eminence.² To be sure, the situation, undeserved suffering, is profoundly troubling and evocative. It is not so much the Job story as a whole as Job's situation that provides the human specificity within which the poetic discourses gain their resonance.

This is not to say, however, that the Book of Job is an easy or comfortable totality. The discourses do not simply resonate within the ancient folk tale, but actually call its assumptions and implications into question. Job might well be called a self-deconstructing text. Furthermore, it is a book in disorder, so cumbered with textual uncertainties that scholars can seldom agree as to the inclusion or exclusion of certain verses, the correct sequence of whole sections, or the attribution of the work to one or more poets, let alone the message or meaning of the whole. Perhaps it is for this reason especially, though it would be natural enough in any event, that one more often encounters passing allusions to Job than extended parallels. In the case of borrowings from Job, the anxiety of influence would appear to be peculiarly heightened by uncertainty.

My concern here is with two revisionary responses to Job, Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” (1945) and Archibald MacLeish's verse drama J. B. (1956), which are unusual in the relative completeness with which they re-present the Biblical situation and ideas. The two are very different in tone, in their degree of closeness to the primary text, and in the particular aspects of Job they stress. Neither is simply a modernized version; each admits the ancient text selectively and with major structural reordering. What they share is an intentionality of re-viewing the Job story and its theological/philosophical implications. Thus we can fairly ask not only how each writer appropriates and responds to the primary text as he develops his revisionary text, but also whether he offers a relatively rich or a relatively reductive version of it. It is this entire revisionary process that I address in these two works.

In J. B., MacLeish writes a Job for modern, Hiroshima-haunted humanity. That is not to say that he merely adapts the Biblical text to modern conditions by updating its terms. Hence critics who have argued that he does, or does not, adequately present the Biblical story have gone astray.³ What he adopts from Job is the concept of undeserved suffering, the confrontational mode, and a tone of high seriousness. He writes an inspirational tragedy suited equally to those parameters and to his time, and signals the fact, but not the nature, of its relation to the Biblical text by using similar names, incidents, and language. In this way he invites us to read J. B. in reference to, and in tension with, Job.

The outlines of J. B. are familiar. It is a play within a play, produced by two circus vendors, Zuss (Zeus?) and Nickles (Old Nick?), who show a profound emotional stake in the production and who also, wearing traditional dramatic masks, assume the roles of God and Satan. One might expect that the circus setting would impart something of a comic or parodic tone, but actually it has the effect of increasing the bitterness of the whole, since it is not the presence but the absence of circus spectacle that is emphasized. The lights are darkened; action occurs in an out-of-the-way corner of the big top; Zuss and Nickles are shabby, broken-down, tired, and obsessed by religious loss; even their popcorn and balloons have failed to attract buyers. Every detail conveys loss, an absence of well-being. The circus setting thus intensifies by contrast the somberness of Zuss and Nickles and the suffering of J. B. It is their isolation from the forced gaiety of the circus, like Job's isolation on the ash-heap, and therefore their greater authenticity, that are emphasized.

Structurally, MacLeish appropriates from the Book of Job both the story line of the frame chapters and its central debate over the meaning of what happens. Furthermore, the play-within-a-play structure, with its duality of levels, recalls the dual levels of the Joban frame story, which occurs on an earthly level and on a transcendent level, in alternation. But the work as a whole does not approximate the structural organization of the primary text. In re-viewing Job, MacLeish restructures it. And the nature of the restructuring is enormously important to our understanding of his work.

In Job, in the opening “frame” or prologue (chapters 1 and 2), the righteous Job is introduced; Satan (or more properly the Satan, the divine watchdog or accuser or tester) impugns Job's virtue in conversation with God, implying it is mere prudential self-interest; God gives permission for the testing of Job by affliction; as a result, disasters befall Job in rapid succession. He remains steadfastly pious and does not complain against God. In the closing “frame,” or epilogue (42:10-17), following the lengthy poetic commentary and debate among Job, his three friends, and a young objector, Elihu, Job gets back his health, his possessions, and his family, or at any rate a replacement family.

MacLeish both emulates and drastically re-constitutes these structural divisions. The frame story's scene of the heavenly challenge becomes an extended Prologue between Zuss and Nickles, in which they discuss the necessity of putting on the play, the unceasing recurrence of Job-figures in all times and places, and the nature of God and Satan, as conveyed by the two masks. The rapid Biblical account of Job's disasters appear in the play itself, a series of eleven scenes shifting between J. B.'s earthly life and the commentaries delivered by Zuss and Nickles from a raised platform where they watch the action. This shifting, of course, approximates the Biblical shifting between the earthly and the heavenly plane in chapters 1 and 2—but not the central chapters of the Biblical text, which occur entirely on the human plane. The eleven scenes of the play, then, comprise a re-presentation of materials from both the prose frame of Job and the poetic central chapters, the lament and philosophic dialogues. Significantly, the closing “frame” of Job has no equivalent in J. B.

In a sense, MacLeish reverses the positions of frame and center, narrative and discussion, placing the bulk of the discussion first, in the extended prologue. Portions of the folk-tale frame are shifted to the drama of J. B.—the messages of disaster to Scenes I, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII, and God's granting Satan permission for the torments (1:12 and 2:6) to the end of Scenes II and VII. The substance of the Joban central chapters, the debate, is shifted to Zuss and Nickles's disputes in the Prologue and in Scenes II, V, VII, VIII, and X. Personages representing J. B.'s social context, including three intellectuals called by the Biblical names Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, add their comments in Scenes VIII and IX. We can see, then, that W. D. White, an early critic of J. B. who faulted the work for not being a closer emulation of the original, is incorrect in asserting that most of the play is based on only the prologue and epilogue (or frame story) of Job and that only Scene IX “specifically draws upon” the poetic part.⁴ Both parts of Job are appropriated, but action and meditation/discussion are not so clearly severed as in the Bible. Because of the play-within-a-play structure, action itself becomes, in a sense, part of the discussion.

The stage action in J. B. does not occur within conventions of verisimilitude. In the Biblical narrative, when we are told that such and such events happened to Job as a result of the conversation between God and Satan, we are expected to regard those events with some degree of credence. In J. B., that kind of credence is forestalled by the Prologue, which establishes an immediate and ongoing sense that the dramatic scenes are being staged by Zuss and Nickles, in cooperation with an outside power, as an example of some greater and more widespread principle which is explicitly identified with the Book of Job. The Biblical text is not only a model or source but a live issue. That issue is seen and felt more keenly by Nickles, who identifies with Job in his suffering and his defiance, than by Zuss. The God whom Zuss will play, Zuss says, is the God who “challenges” Job with the spectacle of His vast creativity when Job has been so “ridiculous” as to demand justice.⁵ In the Biblical account, Job's response to that spectacle is to cover his mouth and confess his inadequacy:

Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?
          I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
          twice, but I will proceed no further.

(40:4-5)

Nickles, however, insists that Job covers his mouth, not because he is “abashed,” but because he is hiding a laugh.⁶ He does not explain why Job laughed, but apparently believes that Job saw God's exhibit as a vast, transparent evasion of the real issue, which is not power, after all, but fairness. As Nickles puts the problem in his mocking jingle, “If God is God He is not good, / If God is good He is not God” (p. 11). It is the old problem of reconciling omnipotence with benevolence: the two would not appear to be compatible, yet both, to an infinite degree, have traditionally been attributed to the Judeo-Christian God.

Nickles, with his acute sense of the conflict, has at first assumed that he is to play Job. But Zuss insists that there are plenty of actors for that part: “Job is everywhere we go, / His children dead, his work for nothing, / Counting his losses, scraping his boils” (p. 13). Indeed, Job is to be seen not only in individuals but in mankind as a whole, suffering collective calamities:

Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated
.....Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less.

(p. 12)

The collective aspect of the Job problem will be picked up again in Scenes VI, VIII, and IX, in references to nuclear destruction.⁷ Instead of playing Job, Nickles will of course play Satan. The role is not a pleasant one; putting on the Satan mask is an ordeal. Wearing the Satan mask, with its tormented grin, Nickles sees even more clearly than before the sadness and trouble of human life. In contrast, the God mask worn by Zuss is smooth and blank, impervious to hurt, with “closed eyes” (p. 16).

When the two put on their masks and begin to speak lines from the Bible, they are taken over by forces outside themselves, and voices from outside the stage setting begin to speak and to react to stage action. When White says that J. B. includes “no reality beyond the human situation,”⁸ he seems to ignore this unspecified but certainly transcendent dimension that impinges on the play at several points. As Elizabeth Bieman observes, the Distant Voice allows the possibility of “profound mystery.”⁹ The fact that this mystery or implied transcendent dimension is not located on the raised platform occupied by Nickles and Zuss, but instead impinges on the entire drama from somewhere outside, conveys very precisely the nature of MacLeish's humanistic vision. He allows for the possibility of the Distant Voice, but cannot vouch for it by locating it on his stage. His two dimensions, the lower level where J. B. and his family appear and the platform, are both earthly. The heavenly dimension included in the Joban folk tale is displaced to the undefined Beyond.

At the God-mask's (Zuss's) intoning of the Biblical phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job,” the scene shifts to J. B.'s family Thanksgiving at some pre-War time. It is immediately clear that J. B. differs from the Biblical Job in being more a glad pagan than a pious servant. The cautious quality of Job's piety (he offers weekly sacrifices just in case one of his sons has unintentionally sinned) is deflected onto J. B.'s wife Sarah, who fears that if everyone doesn't pay a debt of proper gratitude, God will “forget. Forever. In everything” (p. 30). J. B., however, believes in a kind of natural piety, an innate gladness in the unmerited bounty God sends. Unlike the Biblical Job, who knows he has not deserved the enormity of ill he gets, J. B. is certain he has not deserved the good that has come to him and equally certain that deserving is not necessary. Sarah voices the barter theory of virtue and reward, attributed in the Bible to Job's advisers and Job's own cautious sacrifices. J. B. voices a belief that we do not have to buy God's favors with our good behavior and also a sense of the astounding richness of creation—attitudes toward which Job's thinking seems to be tending in the later chapters of the Biblical discourses, but which are not directly expressed there. At the start of the play, J. B. blesses all of life, without differentiation: “To be, become, and end are beautiful” (p. 43). But he can do that because he has no real sense of adversity.

Nickles finds J. B.'s happy piety “insufferable” and pronounces it “bought and paid for” (p. 46). Like the Biblical Satan, he is convinced that if J. B. should lose his rich blessings “he'd sing / Another canticle to different music.” Zuss is equally certain that

Nothing this good man might suffer,
Nothing at all, would make him yelp
As you do. He'd praise God no matter.

(p. 48)

Out of this conflict comes the wager or test that issues in Job's/J. B.'s sufferings.

It is this aspect of a wager that has made the Biblical story so theologically unacceptable to many readers, including, apparently, the poet or poets of the central chapters. It is unacceptable as well to Nickles, despite the fact that he continues to play his part. In response to Zuss's confident assertion that nothing would make J. B. “yelp,” he asks, in a whisper that catches Zuss off guard, “Why must he suffer then?” What is the point of putting him through it all if Zuss, the God-mask, really knows in advance how he will behave? Zuss has no answer except to assert that it ought to be that way to prove that it ought to—a circular response which Nickles summarizes, “And so he suffers to see God: / Sees God because he suffers” (p. 50). Scene II ends with the Distant Voice reminding Zuss to state the Biblical limitation, “Only / Upon himself / Put not forth thy hand!” (p. 52).

In Scenes III through VI, J. B. and Sarah are informed by messengers that their children are all destroyed and their wealth is wiped out. Like Job's wife in the Bible, Sarah in effect calls God a murderer while J. B., like the patient Job, clings to his faith and continues to bless the name of the Lord. The pace of these scenes of disaster is considerably different from that of the Biblical story, where each messenger of doom arrives virtually on the heels of the one before. MacLeish allows time for his characters' human reactions and for the commentary of the observing Zuss and Nickles. Yet the reports are scarcely, as some critics have said, drawn out. The difference is largely a matter of narrative convention. In Biblical narrative, as Robert Alter has demonstrated, all details except the most salient are totally suppressed, and action is typically reported in dialogue.¹⁰ In modern narrative or dramatic representation we expect both verisimilitude of background detail and a developed fullness of psychological exploration. Given this difference, and considering the absence of any scenes in the interim to show periods of recovery, the disasters of J. B. come with rapidity.

After the last loss comes a scene given both to dispute over J. B.'s continuing praise of the Lord and to the second phase of the wager, bodily affliction. This scene serves the function, then, partly of the Biblical folk tale of the wager in heaven and partly of the theological disputes between Job and his friends. Zuss comfortably calls J. B.'s expression of acceptance and praise an “affirmation,” a “great / Yea-saying” (p. 92), and predicts that he will continue to accept the grand necessity of things as they are. Nickles, voicing Job's accusation of divine injustice, argues that J. B.'s needless affliction “stinks” and the “white, calm, unconcerned” God-mask, or God's merciless behavior itself, “isn't decent! / It isn't moral even! It's disgusting!” (p. 93).

In Scene IX, when J. B. appears blighted with sores, his suffering is generalized to that of the victims of nuclear holocaust. Here MacLeish's work becomes indeed the Job of a post-World War II era that sees all of society as victim. As Nickles puts it, accusing God,

Count on you to make a mess of it!
Every blessed blundering time
You hit at one man you blast thousands.
Think of that flood of yours—a massacre!
Now you've fumbled it again:
Tumbled a whole city down
To blister one man's skin with agony.

(p. 99)

In misery, J. B. wishes to die. Even now, however, he does not lash out with the bitterness of his wife. Sarah is clear that God Himself has “set the dark alight / With horror” (p. 108). But J. B. wonders why. Unlike Job, who insists upon his innocence even in the face of his friends' urging to repentance, J. B. can only believe that God is “just” and “will not punish without cause” (p. 109). Rather than insisting that he is adequately innocent because he knows of no real guilt, J. B. insists that he is guilty because he does not know he is innocent. Thoroughly post-Freudian and post-Hitlerian, he is attuned to possibilities of subconscious complicity and is desperately certain that only such guilt can possibly make acceptable sense of the enormities of the world. “We have no choice but to be guilty,” he declares. “God is unthinkable if we are innocent” (p. 111). But Sarah clings to her knowledge of her own children:

                                                                                                    They are
Dead and they were innocent: I will not
Let you sacrifice their deaths
To make injustice justice and God good!

(p. 110)

Urging J. B. to “curse God and die,” as Job's wife had urged him, she leaves. Thus J. B. reaches the same condition of alienation as Job, though he has come to it by a different way.

In Scene X, after a chorus of old women huddling together in the rubble have voiced society's view of J. B.'s afflictions, the three Biblically named comforters enter to scoff at him for thinking that God in His “Unconsciousness,” “Necessity,” “Mystery,” and “Mindlessness” has time to respond to one man's cries (p. 119). In the Bible, the friends told Job he was wrong to demand God's answer; here, they tell J. B. he is foolish. Bildad, jeering at J. B.'s concern with innocence and guilt, offers the rationale of Marxist collectivism, and Eliphaz argues a Freudian theory of human beings as “victims” of the subconscious and of ingrained psychological patterns (pp. 121-23). J. B. rejects both systems, even though they would allow him to escape any sense of guilt, on grounds that they drain life of meaning by denying individual responsibility. The third of the false comforters, Zophar, at first seems to resemble the comforters of Job in that he seeks to convict J. B. not of innocence but of guilt. Speaking for neo-fundamentalism, he argues that of course J. B. is guilty; everyone is guilty; no one is or can be innocent. Even the most trivial adolescent sin is still sin and deserves whatever misery God may send. To J. B., this is the “cruelest comfort” of all in that it too deprives life of ethical meaning by dissolving all distinctions of magnitude into a universal smuttiness.

Having rejected, then, three major strands of mid-twentieth-century thought, J. B. cries out, in the language of the Bible itself (Job 23:3-4, 8), “Oh that I knew where I might find him …”—to which the Distant Voice that has been heard intermittently throughout the play responds with lines from God's speech out of the whirlwind, overwhelming Job/J. B. with the spectacle of His mighty creation. J. B., again using the words of Job, is humbled and repents. But the question remains, as it does in the Bible, of what does he repent? After all, God will later say that his servant Job has spoken correctly. MacLeish does not resolve this question, but does provide comments on it and a response to it.

First, in Scene X we see that neither Nickles nor Zuss is satisfied with Job's repentance. Nickles has hoped that this time Job might persevere in his defiance, and Zuss has hoped to see the Almighty not only acknowledged but embraced. True, the Distant Voice demands and gets J. B.'s acknowledgment of his own inferiority in power and understanding, but Zuss feels humiliated in the exchange. God, he says, “stood stooping there to show him” and J. B. “gentled” the divine rage by giving his admission and “forgave” it (pp. 138-39). As Zuss sees it, J. B. in effect comes off as the superior. He repents, but perhaps he repents only the effort to find a nonexistent justice or reasonableness in the Ultimate. Instead, justice has to be made or built by J. B.'s own efforts and his own persistence in living.

The play ends with J. B. rewarded, not with gifts from above, but by discovering within himself the strength to go on trying to make a life. Whether the capacity to find that inner strength is a part of the creative vitality displayed to him by the Distant Voice is a point MacLeish leaves moot. Sarah returns, bringing as an emblem of persistent renewal a blooming forsythia branch she has picked out of the ash-heap of general destruction. Together she and J. B. decide that even if God does not love, they, miraculously, do. That is their basis for hope. The “light” they need to see by will not shine from above but from within. The conclusion is indeed, as it has often been called, humanistic, but at the same time it incorporates, in a rather evanescent way, a sense of religious wonder. The “talisman” of the “persistence of natural life in the face of atomic destruction,” as Bieman puts it, the forsythia branch, both demonstrates a larger natural dimension—the very dimension God Himself puts on exhibit in his message out of the whirlwind—and recalls, as Bieman incisively points out, a whole series of Biblical life-in-death images ranging from Abraham's Sarah as a “bloom from a barren branch” to Calvary's tree.¹¹ The message, then, takes on a different emphasis from that of the Biblical text, but its humanism is combined with a kind of residual religious urge. The play, then, ends very much as do the dialogues of Job, excluding the closing frame story, on a note of elevated seriousness but in uncertainty of final truths. Given the questions, we can scarcely imagine more definitive answers. For this reason, the ending, though it lacks philosophical closure, is satisfying.

In turning to Frost's “A Masque of Reason,” we take up a very different kind of work. MacLeish's concern is with the Book of Job; Frost's is with Job himself. His poem is not so much an interpretive retelling of the forty-two-chapter Biblical text as a comment on it, in the form of a sequel. What, Frost wryly asks, would the principals of the ancient encounter have had to say to each other later, much later? And so he brings them together in a kind of fantasy no-place, at some undefined no-time. His approach is more emphatically demythologizing even than MacLeish's. If MacLeish displaces the divine dimension to a voice coming from outside the two-level dramatic arena, Frost displaces it absolutely by bringing the deity himself down to the “human” arena, on the “human” level. To be sure, that level is not even as realistic as the world of J. B., itself an expressionistic drama; it is not the human level as we know it. But that is a matter of aesthetic tact: if one proposes to depict God physically, one can scarcely assert that the scene is set in the everyday world.

“A Masque of Reason,” then, is both more fantastic than J. B. and, in a sense, more radically secular. God and Satan, whom MacLeish shows as human projections having no supernal dimensions (except the unexplained voice), are here introduced as visible realities. But they are realities brought down to the same level, in their actions and discourse, as humans. They are debunked. The colloquial directness of the language helps to place these eternal beings as surely as the uni-level stage; it undercuts ideas of transcendent goodness, wisdom, and foreordination as surely as it undercuts the primary text's tone of elevated seriousness, which MacLeish had re-created.

If the marked dissimilarity between “A Masque of Reason” and J. B. is largely a matter of focus and of the degree to which the writer entertains, by way of structure and language, the idea of a transcendent dimension, it is also a matter of literary genre. The generic approach, generally taken by critics favorable to the work, emphasizes its fulfillment of the conventions of the masque, a didactic form of satire operating through light fantasy and spectacle. Such an argument is appealing, particularly when it is refined to a consideration specifically of anti-masque, as it is, for example, by Heyward Brock and by Reuben Brower.¹² The problem with such a reading, however, is that it does not allow the work to stand on its own. “A Masque of Reason” as anti-masque must be read in conjunction with “A Masque of Mercy” as masque proper.¹³ Yet the two were published as separate works and, it seems to me, must validate themselves separately, if at all, even though additional resonance may be gained when they are paired.

In Frost's sequel to the Biblical drama, only the four chief characters appear: Job, his wife Thyatira (named in allusion to Revelation 2:20), God, and Satan. The three friends and Elihu, for whom MacLeish substitutes spokesmen of twentieth-century ideologies, have been omitted altogether. Frost's God dismisses them from notice with the comment, “Your comforters were wrong” (paralleling Job 42:7) and then goes on to complain about committees in general.¹⁴ But eliminating the comforters, or any representatives of their role, also eliminates the possibility for philosophical discourse. As Job finds out, you can't argue an issue with God; he isn't reasonable.

As the masque opens, Job and his wife are discovered lounging at ease in a desert oasis, their ordeals long past. Action begins with the arrival of God, who emerges from a Christmas tree/burning bush where he has been “caught in the branches”—trapped, one might say, in the misconceptions perpetrated by religious tradition. Immediately upon arrival he “pitches throne” (pp. 587-88), setting up a hinged plywood model he carries around with him. These details, together with the offhand quality of Job's and Thyatira's remarks, which Reuben Brower describes as “broad parody or burlesque,”¹⁵ quickly establish the de-mythologizing tone. Frost will not regard the ancient story with awe, but with a kind of reductive mockery, a full-scale expansion of the device of the comic drop.¹⁶ It is not that the issues of human suffering and the human need to understand are not taken seriously. Job still asks for justice, or at least for a just estimate of himself:

                                                            … this is Judgment Day.
I trust it is. Here's where I lay aside
My varying opinion of myself
And come to rest in an official verdict.

(p. 588)

But the serious question is posed in a direct, everyday mode that reduces the rhetorical grandeur of the Bible to a friendly chat, just as the intensity of Job's physical torment is reduced to a “reminiscent twinge of rheumatism” (p. 589). Job talks to God as to an equal—if that. It is in this atmosphere of lowered intensity and lowered expectation, an atmosphere utterly unlike the solemn ironies of MacLeish's moral drama under the big top, that God explains, or doesn't explain, Himself. MacLeish expects us to feel the pain that makes of all humankind a Job. His work is designed as a real play for real production, and a play in the tragic mode at that, and as such it seizes its audience's emotions. Frost's closet drama, never seriously conceived as a work for the stage, operates through the intellect, reductively, in detachment.

The God of “A Masque of Reason” is not God Almighty. Not only does He have to struggle free of the bush at the outset, but His throne tends to fall down when difficult questions are raised¹⁷ and He has trouble finding the right words. It is almost in the voice of a human character, then, that He addresses Job, thanking him for his help in establishing the irrationality of things and freeing Him, God, from the need to follow a predictable system of rewards and punishments:

I've had you on my mind a thousand years
To thank you someday for the way you helped me
Establish once for all the principle
There's no connection man can reason out
Between his just deserts and what he gets.
Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed.

(p. 589)

In addition, God apologizes for “the apparently unmeaning sorrow / You were afflicted with in those old days” (p. 589). But God's apology, conveyed as it is in Frost's colloquial blank verse, with its almost casual air, is too easy. He seems to feel no deep compassion, but remarks of Job's extraordinary suffering only that it “came out all right”—as if the suffering itself did not matter. Similarly, when pressed by Thyatira in the matter of women prophets, He reveals blandly that the burning of the Witch of Endor is not on record in his Note Book. Pain, it seems, is not a major issue with God.

Besides His statement that Job's affliction provided a valuable demonstration of theological principle, which Job calls a “justifying expost-facto” excuse, not a real reason, God offers a general explanation of injustice, simply, “That's the way it is” (p. 592). But Job presses for more. Though he gives tacit agreement to his wife's statement that “in the abstract high singular / There isn't any universal reason,” he would like to have some “scraps of palliative reason” (p. 593). He asks, specifically, “Why did you hurt me so?” Cornered at last, God gives an answer, but one scarcely calculated to satisfy: “I was just showing off to the Devil, Job, / As is set forth in Chapters One and Two” (p. 600). Small wonder Job is confounded! “I expected more / Than I could understand,” he says, “and what I get / Is almost less than I can understand.”¹⁸

It is at this point that Satan appears, in a “diaphanous” wasp-like form (p. 605). With a brief comment on the foolishness of men's attempting to find high-flown reasons for their own torments—which, one must suppose by now, they do because God's reasons are inadequate for them—he starts to move off again on a curious piece of stage machinery, something like a moving sidewalk, which Job identifies as a “tendency.” Tendency toward what, the reader is not told. Apparently, it is the very tendency toward Protestant liberalism that has reduced Satan to a mere “shadow of himself” (p. 603) by underplaying the concept of Satanic evil. In response to Thyatira's invitation, however, he alights once more to pose for a snapshot with God and Job. And so the three are grouped, as enigmatically as ever. It is Job's wife who has the last word: “Now if you three have settled anything”—but plainly they have not—“you'd as well smile as frown on the occasion” (p. 606).

Smiling on the occasion is precisely what the “Masque” does. Thyatira's practical, irreverent attitude pervades the work, making it what might almost be called a feminist undermining of the solemn patriarchal myth. Thyatira's attitude is not fully equivalent to the author's; his comic vision includes her, while she is unable to see herself as plainly as she sees the rather pompous males she has had to deal with. Frost regards the plight of all of us creatures of a fallible God, including Thyatira, with a rueful grin. It is that grin, that element of joking or burlesque, that makes the work so startling and creates such problems of interpretation.

On the whole, readers have tended to find the “Masque” essentially trivializing and flat. Anna Juhnke is perhaps typical in commenting that at the end it “dribbles out into an idle futility.”¹⁹ Arguing the contrary, that the masque is appropriately “unreasonable and inconclusive” because it “demonstrates the inability of unaided human reason to comprehend divine reason,” Heyward Brock comes up against the problem of imitative form, that when one reads a work that shows unreason by being unreasonable, or shows foolishness by being foolish, one finds very little ground for deciding what is seriously meant.²⁰ It is not enough to assume, as Brock seems to do, that God must be right and man wrong. Within the terms of the text itself, it is by no means clear that this is true. Frost's God says that he was “just showing off”—that is, that he was behaving in a manner both reasonless and contemptible. There is no clear evidence in the text that the statement is facetious. And to dismiss unsympathetic critics by calling them people who “cannot understand how comedy … can heighten the sense of high tragedy in Job's affliction”²¹ merely begs the question.

The problem of relating the comedy in “A Masque of Reason” to some coherent or ultimately serious point is perhaps not fully resolvable. It may help us put the question of the comic treatment in perspective, however, to point out that Frost does not create the comic view out of whole cloth.²² Certain aspects of the Biblical text itself have clear comic potential: the impossible excess of the afflictions; the pompousness of Elihu's attempt to give a definitive explanation of God's proceedings; and the pervasive disparity between God's supposed all-sufficiency and His need to shore Himself up by proving His follower's devotion; indeed, the disparity between mankind's need for reason and the fact of unreason. These are the disparities that in J. B. are projected in the jarring incongruity of a tragedy set in a circus tent. MacLeish emphasizes the tragic element, the pain and grief; Frost distances the pain to emphasize the incongruity. Or again, the Biblical text allows the possibility of regarding God as a morally questionable being. He makes wagers on human life and suffering, and His response to Job's heartfelt cry for understanding can be seen as a strong-arm display. To be sure, that is not the only possible interpretation, but it is one possibility. MacLeish, for instance, takes that view in stressing God's divine impassivity—from the human perspective, a deficiency indeed. The issue is taken seriously. In “A Masque of Reason,” it is taken as a joke. The idea of the wager, objectionable enough at best, is further downgraded to mere “showing off.” Job responds tolerantly, but not happily, ‘“Twas human of you”—a concession as disparaging of humanity as it is of the Deity.

Like J. B., and like Job itself, “A Masque of Reason” is indeterminate, but more radically so, in that it fails to reach adequate definition of its own issues.²³ In part, this is a function of Frost's choice of the perspective of the sequel, the forty-third chapter. Just as “A Masque of Reason” cannot be read as anti-masque without “A Masque of Mercy,” so it cannot be read as sequel without Job itself. As Peter Stanlis comments, “no one can understand his masque without a complete knowledge of the Book of Job.”²⁴ But even with that knowledge, the “Masque” can scarcely stand alone. Frost's expectation that both the story of Job and its theological issues will be implicit in his addendum through the reader's prior knowledge is not borne out. The issues need to be directly and explicitly dealt with if they are to become aesthetically operative in the work. Since they are not, the work never establishes a sense either of pain or of urgency in the search for adequate conceptions of deity. Both of these are fully present in the Biblical text and, it seems to me, in MacLeish's play.

The point here is not that emulation of the Bible produces literary merit. Given, however, that both works invite consideration as re-visions of either the Book of Job or the figure of Job, the fullness of the re-vision becomes a pertinent question. J. B. more nearly conveys the full Joban situation and its related issues, both the folk story and the poetic accusation of God. The interplay of its dual levels builds a tension similar to that of the interplay between the Biblical frame story and the poetic debates. The drama as a whole conveys an urgent sense that both the author and the reader have a stake in the outcome of the trials and the questioning. Frost's masque, operating in a generically appropriate cerebral mode, disavows any stake in the issue. But pain, indeed a grand immensity of pain, is not a concept that lends itself to detachment or to satire. The reader's prior knowledge of the prototype, with its immensity of pain and the grandeur of its truth-seeking, overwhelms and in a sense disallows Frost's revisionary undercutting.

My interest here has been not only in the two works themselves and the ways in which they appropriate the Book of Job, but also in the more elusive question of why the ancient Biblical text should continue to evoke emulation, comment, and re-vision. One fairly obvious reason is that the Biblical text asks some of the hardest questions that can be asked. The problem of suffering and its relation, if any, to justice, even without the problematic role of an active deity in that complex, has scarcely been resolved today any more than it had been in the sixth century b.c. (or whenever the Job poet worked). Sy Kahn criticizes J. B. because its questions “outreach the answers that the work provides.”²⁵ But the same could be said of the Biblical text itself. It, too, is radically indeterminate. It cannot provide answers to its own questions, only an appeal to divine authority. MacLeish appeals instead to human integrity and persistence. But neither resolves the question of the ultimate reasons for things. The very fact that the Book of Job betrays multiple hands, that it is a text in some ways divided against itself, invites the response of re-vision. As a source text, Job accommodates enormously varying responses, and can do so precisely because its own inconsistencies and uncertainties forestall closure.

Notes

1. On the extent and nature of Melville's engagement with Job, see my article “Herman Melville's Use of the Book of Job,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 162-74.

2. Most Biblical scholars now agree that the Book of Job as canonized is a combination of one great poet's work (or one great poet's and one or more lesser poets') with an ancient folk tale used as a “frame,” or a prologue and epilogue. See, for instance, Samuel Terrien and Paul Scherer's Introduction, Exposition, and Exegesis of The Book of Job in The Interpreter's Bible, Volume III of Twelve (New York: Abingdon Press, 1954), pp. 877-1198, and Robert Gordis' commentary in The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965). Elizabeth Bieman, in “Faithful to the Bible in Its Fashion: MacLeish's J. B.,” Studies in Religion: A Canadian Journal, 4 (1974), 25-30, apparently feels no need to argue the point when she refers to the “Biblical folk narrative.” However, H. H. Rowley, editor of Job in The Century Bible: New Series (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1970), argues that the book is entirely a product of its author, not a compendium, and that to regard the frame as extraneous or a “blot” on the whole is “completely to misunderstand” (pp. 10-11). Rowley's Century Bible edition will be cited in this paper.

3. John H. Stroupe, in “The Masks of MacLeish's J. B.,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 15 (1970), 75, was correct in complaining that “far too much attention” had been given to the “Biblical source” of J. B. at the expense of critical attention to the work itself. Early reactions were taken up almost entirely with questions of content, whether MacLeish represented the Book of Job with theological correctness, adequate grandeur, etc. It is undeniable, however, that the Biblical source asserts its presence in MacLeish's text very insistently. The present study will consider the source, but will emphasize the formal evidences of the revisionary process.

4. W. D. White, “MacLeish's J. B.—Is It a Modern Job?” Mosaic, 4 (1970), 14. Similarly, Horace M. Kallen, The Book of Job As a Greek Tragedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1959), p. xi.

5. Archibald MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958), p. 9. Page references for further citations will be provided in the text of my essay.

6. It is perhaps gratuitous to point out that Nickles's interpretation of the response to God's first speech out of the whirlwind is unparalleled among Biblical commentators. The standard interpretation is that Job is simply overwhelmed by God's display of inscrutable power. Some scholars, however, find that Job is comforted by God's act of making Himself present, as Job had asked, even though the nature of the response is so overwhelming. Gordis offers the distinctive and very interesting view that Job is awed not by the display of power, which he had acknowledged all along, but by the array of creatures, in the first speech, of no use to man and even, in the second speech, positively odious to man, which are nevertheless treasured by God. Gordis would thus resolve both the problem of Job's abasement and the problem of the second speech out of the whirlwind, the Behemoth and Leviathan speech, which some commentators have rejected on grounds of redundancy or a lower pitch of poetic achievement.

7. It is worth stressing that MacLeish's sense of what we must call the human condition is informed by an awareness of World War II atrocities and the atomic bomb. As to the universalizing of Job, Thornton Wilder earlier universalized Job in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)—if indeed that play of Adam or Everyman can properly be considered a play on Job—but in so doing he discarded the idea of extraordinary suffering. The exact wording of Wilder's allusive title is significant: in Job 19:20 the phrase is “the skin of my teeth.”

8. White, p. 20.

9. Beiman, p. 27. Going further, Donna Gerstenberger explicitly labels the Voice “the voice of God.” See “Three Verse Playwrights and the American Fifties,” in Modern American Drama: Essays in Criticism, ed. William E. Taylor (De Land, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1968), p. 124.

10. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

11. Bieman, p. 29. In contrast, Sy Kahn calls the forsythia branch a symbol of “her own future fecundity, we might suppose, or life's.” See “The Games God Plays with Man: A Discussion of J. B.,” The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, ed. Warren French (De Land, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1970), pp. 249-59.

12. Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963). Heyward Brock, “Robert Frost's Masques Reconsidererd,” Renascence, 30 (1978), 137-51.

13. In a variant of the generic argument, Noam Flinker finds that “A Masque of Mercy” operates as both anti-masque and masque and judges “A Masque of Reason” to be inferior because it does not similarly encompass both qualities. For Flinker, the work fails because it is essentially an anti-masque without a masque. See “Robert Frost's Masques: The Genre and the Poems,” Papers on Language and Literature, 15 (1979), 59-72.

14. Robert Frost, “A Masque of Reason,” in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1949), pp. 587-608; here p. 602. Page references for further citations will be provided in the text of my essay.

15. Brower, p. 211.

16. Brock (p. 141) terms Frost's overall strategy in the work “a type of reductio ad absurdum.” This is a considerably different view from my own, however, in that Brock finds the target of the satire to be people who fail to take a correct attitude of reverent awe toward God. That is, he finds Frost's comedy directed at itself (hence a reductio ad absurdum) rather than at its apparent target, the behavior of God in the Job story and the religious framework of unquestioning belief that shaped the story.

17. Specifically, the plywood throne collapses when Thyatira asks why female prophets have generally been burned as witches while male prophets have been honored. It is unclear why Peter Stanlis calls this question, which would appear to be both legitimate and seriously disturbing, “ludicrous” and goes on to assert that she thereby provides “the comic equivalent of Job's serious case against God.” Stanlis' entire treatment of the character of Thyatira betrays sexist preconceptions. See “Robert Frost's Masques and the Classic American Tradition,” in Frost Centennial Essays, ed. Jac L. Tharpe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1974), pp. 441-68.

18. Brock, however, comments (p. 142) that “Job never really understands why God let him suffer,” as if he should or could.

19. Anna K. Juhnke, “Religion in Robert Frost's Poetry: The Play for Self-Possession,” American Literature, 36 (1964), 161.

20. Brock, p. 142.

21. Stanlis, p. 447.

22. Neil Simon's God's Favorite (1976) is another comic rendering of the Book of Job, which capitalizes on the unreasonableness of God's afflicting Job because He loves him so much. Simon's play otherwise leaves the central philosophical issues untouched. Robert K. Johnson, Neil Simon (Boston: Twayne, 1983), p. 87, calls it “the poorest play Simon has written.”

23. To illustrate the extreme variance in interpretation to which the work leaves itself open, Stanlis concludes that Frost appeals to “supernatural faith” (p. 459), while the abstract of a recent doctoral dissertation summarizes the message of “A Masque of Reason” as, “man must seek out his own salvation in a world that requires tremendous courage to act because the ‘odds’ are stacked against him”—in other words, a thoroughly humanistic conception. Linda L. Labin, “The Whale and the Ash-Heap: Transfigurations of Jonah and Job in Modern American Literature: Frost, MacLeish, and Vonnegut,” Dissertation Abstracts International, 41 (1981): 4713A.

24. Stanlis, p. 445.

25. Kahn, p. 255.