[In the following essay, Stafford argues that “the root cause of the social conditions in Hurlyburly arises from metaphysics, more specifically epistemology and ontology.”]

The worrisome picture of contemporary American society as presented in David Rabe's Hurlyburly has been variously described as “an America suffering from confusion, violence, and an obsession with image making” (Kolin 63), “a market society … carried to extremes” (Klein 5), “a world based on whim and whine” (Coale 131), “a parable about the drug generation” (Klein 65), “the babble of Late Capitalism,” “an era of decadent collapse” (Coale 132-33), and a “disabling tumult” (Klein 65). However one describes it, clearly the surface of the play presents a society devastated by drugs, alcohol abuse, casual sex, meaningless relationships, abandoned children, failed marriages, Hollywood hype, the shallowness of the mass media, the emptiness of friendships, the threat of violence, the uncertain state of the world, the menace of catastrophic extinction, the hollow values of a materialistic society, the bartering of human souls, and, on a personal level, the fragmentation and disintegration of the human psyche.¹

Given the condition of this society, the more important questions become, “what is the cause of this condition” and does the play offer an answer as to “why” this state exists? On this, critics seem to be generally in disagreement. Some see it as a language failure in a world where “language lies, obfuscates, gets in the way” (Coale 133), and as a communication nightmare where everyone “escapes into a linguistic subjectivism” (Brooks 9). Coale, multiplying his reasons, also sees it as an “isolation [which] underscores the whole” and “an alienation that permeates a world” (133). One writer feels that it is because the characters “cannot make contact as human beings,” because “they refuse to accept or give love” (Kolin 67). Another writer blames it on an “industry [Hollywood and the entertainment business] founded on unreality, yet ruthless in its pursuit of riches” (Klein 5).² The flaw in all these analyses lies in the fact that, in attempting to discover the cause, the writers revert to describing the condition and confuse the cause with the effect. The underlying cause is not discovered in the condition itself, in the same way that the symptom is not the disease.

The root cause of the social conditions in Hurlyburly arises from metaphysics, more specifically epistemology and ontology. Epistemologically, Rabe's world is one of uncertain knowledge and untrustworthy information, and the implied questions of the play are: what can be known and what cannot be known, who knows the truth and who does not, who can be believed and who cannot, how does one find answers, and, if found, how can they be validated. Eddie finally says to Mickey, “who knows what anything means?” (156). It is also Eddie who asks the central ontological question of the play, “into whose eyes do we find ourselves staring when we look for Providence” (121), or, in other words, who, or what, controls our lives? The play moves inexorably toward the answer to this question. As Rabe himself says, “the theme [is]—that out of apparent accidents is hewn destiny” (177). Thus, the society of Rabe's play is a product of Rabe's vision, and it is a vision prone to cause despair—despair over the unreliability of knowledge and despair over the fact that our lives are governed by mere accidents. In this way, the drive to know and the attainment of the knowledge that destiny is in the hands of accidents merge into one unified concern. In addition, Rabe's vision of life seems to place him squarely in the tradition of American literary naturalism.

One of the ways in which a person comes to know is through questions; significantly, in Hurlyburly one of the chief characteristics of the language is the interrogative mode.³ While it is true, as critics have pointed out, that language disables the characters, justifying such descriptions of it as “babble” (Coale 132), “empty, stripped of meaning” (Kolin 68), and “used to conceal, not reveal” (Kolin 68), a meaningful pattern does emerge from beneath the surface cacophony. A close analysis shows that the play extensively utilizes the grammar of searching and questing, a language fitted with the task of knowing and understanding. In addition to employing the interrogative mode, the language repeatedly draws upon words of knowing and invokes a number of striking images of mental states and processes. Moreover, the subject of repeated conversations is the nature of thought and knowledge.

Questions form the most consistent verbal activity. A simple counting of question marks reveals that of the 3,954 sentences in the entire play, nine hundred and twenty-three of them end with a question mark (23.82 percent, or nearly one-fourth); nor does this include many sentences which end with a period but have an interrogative intent, such as “I wanna get it straight,” “I thought,” and so on.

Moreover, the characters often seem obsessed with knowing and meaning. When Mickey tells Eddie that “you don't know what you're saying,” he tries to clarify further with “I know what you think you're saying, but you're not saying it.” Eddie stands his ground with “I know what I'm saying. I don't know what I mean, but I know what I'm saying. Is that what you mean?” When Mickey confirms that that is indeed what he means, Eddie elaborates:

But who knows what anything means, though, huh? It's not like anybody knows that, so at least I know I don't know which is more than most people. They probably think they know what they mean, not just what they think they mean.

(156)

Such semantic haggling is habitual with Eddie, and the phrases “you know” and “I mean” occur with such frequencies that they become litanies to clarification.

Additionally, much of the vocabulary of the play, too extensive to present here, communicates information about mental states and activities. For example, the main verbs of many sentences are synonyms for various kinds of cerebral activities (“get it straight,” “multiprocess,” “calculate,” “understand”), nouns depicting aspects of the mind and mental states, or their by-products, abound (“cognizance,” “judgement,” mental loop,” “train of thought”), and numerous adjectives describe various mental conditions or concepts (“wired beyond my reason,” “blurry,” “ripped,” “demented”). Moreover, while language does sometimes fail the characters, some of the most effective and original usages of language occur when characters attempt to talk about interior landscapes, either their own or someone else's, some of the more vivid ones being, “your thoughts are a goddamn caravan trekking the desert, and then they finally arrive and they are these senseless, you know, beasts, you know, of burden” (46); “I feel like you're drillin' little fuckin' chunks of cottage cheese into my brain” (68); “I feel like my thoughts are just going to burst out of my head and leave me; they're going to pick me up and throw me around the room. … It's a bloodbath this monster I have with my thoughts” (87); “thoughts are like these totally separate, totally self- sustaining phone booths in this vast uninhabited shopping mall in your head” (124).

In addition to the presence of the language of questioning and knowing, much of the action also centers on the pursuit of information and truth, especially as it involves Eddie, whose only action, aside from using drugs, is his effort to know, confront truth, and to force others to confront the truth, either about themselves or their situation.

The very first scene serves as a paradigm for all other scenes involving Eddie. After Phil enters and awakens Eddie by announcing that “it's over” between him and Susie, Eddie immediately begins to fire questions at Phil—“what?” “what everything?” “whata you mean everything?” “what are you talking about?”—until he has asked no less than sixty-nine questions in an eleven-page scene. When Phil tells Eddie that Susie hates him (Eddie) also, Eddie methodically proceeds to gather information until he is finally able to posit a logical response with “it's a goddamn syllogism. Susie hates Phil, Susie hates Eddie. She hates men.” The subject of the discussion then becomes the process itself by which he can arrive at a reliable conclusion: “you go from the general to the particular. I'm talking about a syllogism here,” until finally he realizes,

Oh, my god, do you know what it is? … Science! What goes the other way is science, in which you see all the shit like data and go from it to the law.

(12-13)

When Phil asks Eddie what he intends to do, Eddie, having arrived through intense scrutiny at a satisfactory conclusion, stands ready, as he always does after this kind of questing, to lay it to rest: “now that I understand the situation, the hell with her” (13).

All the scenes involving Eddie have the same pattern. First, somebody tells him something which stirs his interest and then gives him a superficial or mistaken conclusion, which he rejects. He then begins to cross examine, question following question, usually performed with great intensity and energy,⁴ and at times he supplements the questions with other methods of logical discourse, such as entrapment, inference, opinion of authority, or, as seen above, the establishment of a syllogism. Invariably his rigorous investigation results in his reaching a conclusion which leads to his dismissing the subject. Eddie's attitude, viz., that no one tells the truth because no one knows the truth and all one gets are small pieces of it, remains the same throughout, and the point of his intense examinations is to reveal that the truth as presented is not reliable. Any conclusions which he reaches are only for the purpose of pointing out that the original assumption was false, that all knowledge is specious, and that it is the utmost complacency to think one has the truth. The real truth remains unknown.

Examples of this pattern of behavior by Eddie appear everywhere. In an early scene, Eddie, through ceaseless questioning, forces Mickey, who has stolen Darlene away from him, to reveal that all he really wanted was one night of sex with her, and, having achieved his purpose, ends the conversation with, “you wanna let it alone.” When Mickey attempts to defend himself, Eddie dismisses him with, “you think we could handle a dog around here?” (27).

In another scene, Eddie mercilessly confronts Artie with the truth about Hollywood and deals:

EDDIE:
Did they write the check? If they wrote the check, you got a deal.
ARTIE:
So they didn't.
EDDIE:
So you don't.
ARTIE:
Yet. They didn't yet.
EDDIE:
Then you don't yet. If they didn't yet, you don't yet.
ARTIE:
But we're close. We're very close.
EDDIE:
The game in this town is not horseshoes Artie.

(34)

Eddie also destroys Artie's logic about working with Simon by debunking his thinking: “This fucking snake tells you he lies a lot, so you figure you can trust him. That's not clear, Artie. Wake up!” (37). When Artie says that it is because “I gotta work with him,” Eddie presses for clearer logic: “I'm not saying, ‘Don't work with him!’ I'm saying ‘Don't trust him!’” Eddie then shuts off any discussion with “Get some money! Get some bucks!” (38). All the scenes which feature Eddie follow the same pattern.

Thus, Eddie's action when he opens Phil's post-mortem note is consistent behavior. Not having Phil there to cross examine and lacking any other resource to turn to, he opens the dictionary,⁵ whereupon he gets a clearer statement of the note's meaning, which is what he was seeking:

[I]f you die in a happening that is not expected, foreseen or intended, you understand the inevitable or necessary succession of events.

(151)

This is followed by Eddie's characteristic closing of the subject—“It makes sense.” Nor does he necessarily accept Phil's conclusion about things: “we owe him to understand as best we can what he wanted. Nobody has to believe it” (151). Eddie always reserves the privilege of his own truth.

There is, however, a deeper, more puzzling question with which Eddie is concerned, “Exactly how did he get to that point where in his own mind he could do it on purpose? That's what—” (152). Eddie's statement is unfinished, and by play's end the question remains unanswered. But he does come to a conclusion about Phil's death: “She [Phil's wife] was a snake. And … out to absolutely undermine the little faith he had in himself. I saw it coming; she hadda see it coming” (154). Whether Eddie is correct in blaming Susie or not, Eddie's assessment of Phil which follows is his way of laying even the unanswerable question to rest: “for all his toughness, he was made out of thin air, he was a pane of glass, and if you went near him, you knew it” (155).

In the last scene of the play, Eddie achieves certainty of a small kind. The scene begins by extending the epistemological theme of the uncertainty of knowledge with the refrain, “I don't know,” which is repeated twelve times in one brief scene by Eddie and Donna. Then comes the counterpoint. Donna tells Eddie that she “got no further than Oxnard,” to which Eddie responds, “I know where Oxnard is” (166). While doubt and uncertainty may prevail, it is perhaps some consolation to know at least the location of Oxnard.

In addition to Eddie's interrogative habits, he also shows the attitude of the true learner, which is a willingness to admit his lack of knowledge. He never pretends to information he does not have and readily admits it when he does not know, as when he says, “at least I know I don't know which is more than most people” (156). In fact, Eddie consciously and energetically resists easy answers and conclusions about things:

Sure, I can come up with … some clear-cut diagnosis … but I … admit it if I don't know what I'm talking about; or if I'm confused about what I'm feeling, I admit it.

(47)

Those around Eddie also complain openly about his ceaseless desire to understand. Darlene, after suffering through one of his unsettling inquisitions, points out his “enchantment with uncertainty—the way you just prolong it and expect us all to think we ought to try and live in it and it's meaningful. It's shit” (46), and elsewhere she labels his hairsplitting as “semantic insanity” (143). Mickey also tries to confront Eddie with a description of himself:

You want this … explanation of everything by which you uncover the preceding events which determined the following events, but you're not gonna find it.

(158)

In spite of Mickey's attempt to stay Eddie's efforts, Eddie responds with, “it's been done.” Mickey, who has to live with Eddie, knows first hand the effects of Eddie's way:

You think you're gonna parlay this finely tuned circuitry you have for a brain into some form of major participation in the divine conglomerate, man, but all you're gonna really do is make yourself and everyone around you nuts.

(158)

When Eddie unmercifully confronts Artie, Mickey tells Eddie that “even if you are as smart as you think you are, you have some misconception about what that entitles you to regarding your behavior to other human beings” (104).

The interrogative mode of the play extends beyond syntactical, grammatical, dictional, and structural considerations. Even the characters align themselves according to their relationships to questions and answers, and the poles of the play are composed of two distinct groups of the male characters: those, Eddie and Phil, who seek answers, and those, Mickey and Artie, who think they already have the answers. Over and over, Eddie must prove to Mickey and Artie that they do not know the truth, either about themselves or the world they live in.

Eddie and Phil are constantly aligned with each other, and Rabe himself admits that “it was Eddie's affection for Phil that was, oddly enough, his highest virtue” (172). While others in the play note Eddie's and Phil's closeness, Artie describes it the most graphically when he says that Eddie treats Phil like “you lost a paternity suit and he was the result” (101).

While Phil's mind is not as constantly in the interrogative mode as Eddie's, he is second only to Eddie in the total number of questions asked throughout the play. He is curious about things, he reveals a desire to know, he talks of getting “my thoughts together” (10), he is sometimes overwhelmed by “his big thoughts,” and he likes clarity of thought, for, as he says, murk and innuendo “make me totally demented” (94). But the one subject about which Phil shows the most curiosity, as will be seen later, is the matter of destiny.⁶

The other two men of the play, Mickey and Artie, are linked together. Mickey takes Artie seriously while Eddie and Phil make fun of him, he serves as an apologist for Artie's behavior, leaves with Artie instead of staying with Eddie, and returns with him later. They are bound by a common attitude: the desire to survive in Hollywood, their acceptance of the way things are, and their determination to learn the rules and live in certainty.

Rabe says that he saw Mickey as “a figure apparently settled on the side of convention and reason” (174). He is concerned with the care of the body, is associated with food and the kitchen, and repeatedly cautions Eddie about his increasing use of drugs and his lack of sleep. As the voice of common sense, he smugly, in the face of Phil's suicide note, answers the question “why” with a non-answer answer: “it happens.” Eddie, who has no answers, is clear on one thing:

On a friend's death, you absolutely ransack the archives of your whole thing and come up with, “It happens.” You need some help, Mickey. Common sense needs help.

(154)

Artie, like Mickey, assumes he knows all he needs to know. He is “confident, almost grand” (34), he has a sense of “immense self-importance” (33), he is “aggressive and positive” (145) even on the occasion of Phil's death, he “struts” about the room. When told something, can only “shrug” because he's “heard everything” (35) When his answer disappoints someone, he smugly replies, using the same grammatical convention of the nonanswer answer which Mickey uses about Phil's death, “it happens” (80-81). Artie, who plans to “own Hollywood” someday, must act as though he has all the answers, which is merely another way of revealing that he has no answers.

In addition to the epistemological schematic of those who know that they do not know and those who think that they know but do not know, the ultimate epistemological concern for both groups is ontological. Out of the morass of talk, questions, games, drinking, doping, and meaningless activity, emerges a consistent and weighty theme, developed by means of structural emphasis, plot, character delineation, and final resolution. This theme revolves around the ontological question, “what is the nature of destiny?” And the play moves clearly and resolutely toward the answer, which is, to use Rabe's own words, that “out of apparent accidents is hewn destiny” (177). If human life is controlled by mere “accidents,” wherein is its meaning? One speculates that it is this sense of meaninglessness that is at the root of the disease of the condition of the world of Hurlyburly.

Structurally, the discussion of destiny occurs in three strategic places, at the beginning, the middle, and the end. Moreover, the central event of the play is Phil's death, which results directly from the conversations regarding destiny.

In Act I, Phil raises with Eddie the question of whether he and his wife should have a baby; he admits that what bothers him the most is the thought that someone's very existence and destiny are in his hands. Their discussion (61-68) is sprinkled with words denoting the factor of chance in things, such as “gamble” (repeated), “odds,” “luck,” and “happen.” Eventually, Eddie reminds Phil of his power over another human life by telling him, “there is involved here an innocent helpless person totally dependent on your good will.” Phil concludes that the “thing in its entirety is on the basis of what has got to be called a coin toss,” which clearly makes the baby's destiny a matter of chance, and then he attempts to express his thoughts on the nature of destiny: “we're in the hands of something, it could kill us now or later, it don't care. Who is this guy that makes us just—you know—.” While Phil cannot at this point define it, the question of the relationship of destiny to chance has been raised, and Phil continues to struggle with it until he reaches his final conclusion.

In the exact center of the play in a major scene, with all four men present, the destiny motif appears again (75-87). Artie tells Phil that he has a “violent karma” and Phil debunks the thought. Mickey jokes with Phil's attitude by saying “that's right: fuck destiny, fate and all metaphysical stuff” (76). Phil, not to belie his interest, casually seeks more information with “so, Artie, you got any inside dope on this karma thing, or you just ranting?” (76). When Artie gives Phil illusive answers, Phil continues with “you said it, do you know it?” Even though the conversation goes on to other subjects, Phil, at the risk of being mocked for pursuing a serious subject amidst their mood of frivolity, takes the chance:

What I'm wondering here is, you got any particularly useful, I mean, hard data on this karma stuff, you know, the procedures by which this cosmic shit comes down.

(79-80)

Phil tells Mickey that he is asking Artie about this subject because Artie is Jewish and “he might know somebody.” Phil repeats his question “about the cosmos,” and when Artie explains it in terms of past lives and debits and credits, Phil tells him that he makes it sound like the cosmos is “this loan shark” and finds his answer “disappointing” and lets the subject drop. But later comic by-play re-introduces the subject when Mickey jokes with Artie about Eddie's apparent affection for Phil as well as parodies Phil's style of talking:

Could this be destiny in fact at work, Artie, and we are witnessing it—the pattern of randomness, … from this apparent mess, two guys fall in love.

(87)

Later, Mickey kids Phil with “is this the hand of destiny again emerging just enough from, you know, all the muck and shit, so that, you know we get a glimpse of it” (98). It is possible that Phil's note later is addressed to Mickey's sarcasm here as much as it is to Eddie's sincere concern.

In the last scene of Act II, Eddie reveals in a confessional speech (121) that at the root of his depression is the thought of the neutron bomb, a physical object which destroys all life and spares physical objects, the ultimate triumph of a materialistic universe. Eddie admires the “Ancients” who at least had a “divine on-looker” who, even if he was “a trifle unpredictable and wrathful,” was “nevertheless UP THERE.” Then comes the question of the play that sums up the destiny motif: “Into whose eyes do we find ourselves staring when we look for Providence?” And Eddie's answer is: “we have emptied out the heavens and put oblivion in the hands of a bunch of aging insurance salesmen.” The “insurance” reference echoes the “accident” motif in the sense that insurance companies are institutionalized odds-makers who deal with accidents, chance, and actuarial tables (their official odds-maker charts). Phil, who is listening to all this, restates the same idea, but more succinctly, in his posthumous message.

In Act III, after Phil's funeral and with the discovery of his note, the destiny motif comes to completion (147-56). Phil has struggled to understand the nature of destiny and finds to his own satisfaction what it is: “the guy who dies in an accident understands the nature of destiny.” Phil's death represents the climactic action of the play and his note is the denouement. While it is true, as Mickey points out, that if “he did it on purpose, … it was no goddamn accident,” it is equally true that as long as he did not purposely drive the car off the road and tried to handle the car properly, even if it was at a fatally high rate of speed, it would still be an accident. Phil personally experiences and demonstrates the nature of destiny.

Rabe tells the story of how he had written much of the play, up to the beginning of the last scene, the return from Phil's funeral, when “suddenly the dialogue pertaining to the note and anagram began to show up” (170). He remembers being “baffled and thrilled” and that the note “was in no way preplanned.” After this, the play “took on an entrancing addition” (171). Rabe also recalls how several days later he came across a passage in Jung which stated:

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.

(172)

Jung's words reaffirmed Rabe's thoughts and served as a “correlation and validation for the apparently contradictory claims of Phil's note” (173). Rabe accepts this idea as the operative idea of the play. He elaborates at some length on the fact that the “essential core of the thing is in ‘accidents’ and ‘destiny’ and the idea that in some way they are the same thing” (176). He says unequivocally that the theme is “that out of apparent accidents is hewn destiny” (177).

In looking back at Rabe's other plays, one can see that this view of destiny is present and perhaps even fundamental. In Streamers, an accidentally unopened parachute symbolizes a paratrooper's lack of control over his destiny as he falls through space, and in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Hummel longs to become a real soldier and, if necessary, die like a hero on the field of battle, but instead dies accidentally when a handgrenade is tossed into a Saigon whorehouse. Added to these patterns is the fact that Rabe, by his own admission, when he started to write Hurlyburly, intended to write a “so-called ‘realistic’ or ‘well-made’ play” (170), or, more precisely, “naturalistic,” and we have a playwright who becomes aligned with other literary naturalists of the American tradition, writers such as Crane, London, Norris, and Dreiser, and writers, especially the latter two, who also examined contemporary social conditions.

Notes

1. It is a complex play, probably unnecessarily so. It is diffuse, languid, and turgid, and certainly open to criticism. But it is the psychic energy of the playwright, not unlike in the case with O'Neill, that imbues the play, in spite of its weaknesses, with power and meaning.

2. Rabe himself says that “the Hollywood connection has been over-emphasized” (Rabe, 171).

3. Kolin has recognized that the characters “ask questions,” but, he notes, their questions “cannot create a useful reality” (67). The reason they cannot, he asserts, is “because of the drug haze engulfing them” and “because they cannot make contact as human beings” (67). There are numerous times, of course, when the characters are not drugged and there are questions which have nothing to do with their making contact as human beings. Kolin's explanation does not address the far more epistemologically complex situation.

4. So intense is Eddie at times that at one point Phil is led to ask Eddie “Are you mad at me?” Eddie reassures him that “I'm just excited. Sometimes I get like I'm angry when I get excited.” In fact, Rabe uses Eddie's intense interrogations as one kind of dramatic tension.

5. One scholar has criticized Eddie for “using a banal dictionary, [which] … demonstrates once again his characteristically shallow approach to existence” (Kolin 77). This comment is difficult to understand since Eddie's most persistent activity throughout the play is struggling to learn everything he can. Of course Eddie makes no pretense of being an intellectual, but the relevant question here is, to what source would this critic have Eddie turn: what reference work or philosophical treatise gives an insight into a personal note? All that Eddie has are the words on a page, and so he turns to a word book, which is also what Rabe himself did (which, according to the above logic, makes Rabe “shallow” also).

6. Because Phil's questions are often of a metaphysical and philosophical nature, one wonders if his name has any connection with PHILosophy (and not discounting the significance of the Greek root, “philos.”)

Works Cited

Brooks, Tom. “Blah-blah-blah.” Humanities Booklet # 3, Providence, RI: Trinity Repertory Company, Rhode Island Commission on the Humanities, 1987.

Coale, Sam. “Theatre Reviews: Hurlyburly.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 2 (1987): 131-33.

Kolin, Philip C. “Staging Hurlyburly: David Rabe's Parable for the 1980's.” The Theatre Annual, 41 (1986): 63-789.

Rabe, David. “Afterword.” Hurlyburly. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985.