From Folklore to Mythology: Paul Green's 'Roll Sweet Chariot'
Recognized as a present writer of the outdoor pageant play (in his words, "symphonic drama") and a past writer of regional, "folk," and experimental drama, Paul Green is another of those dramatists such as T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams who have turned to myth in search of universal meanings…. Green's plays written between 1920 (The Last of the Lowries) and 1934 (Roll Sweet Chariot) show a progress from folk materials and realistic manner toward a blend of folk-mythic matter and symbolic, anti-realistic technique. Green recapitulates, then, an historical development from the superficial American regionalism of the late nineteenth century to the search for deeper reality through myth, symbol and experimental form. (p. 62)
[It] is impossible not to see that from the very beginning Green was a most literary writer, both in exploring the areas of dramatic technique and in turning to literature as a source for idea and image. (p. 64)
[Green] is not an unsophisticated provincial. He is highly conscious of various traditions of thought and literary modes. His methodical search of folklore likewise reveals a conscious craftsman. Assiduously he combed the materials of his region and his nation's history for inspiration and subject matter. (p. 65)
All Green's intense endeavor led him in a search toward the highest fulfillment of his art. Not a man of easy faith, he was yet eager to explore any path which might lead to the ultimate enrichment or perfection of his craft. (p. 66)
It was during the late 1920's and early 1930's that Green's individual plays became most heterogeneous as a result of his febrile quest for new forms. Blue Thunder, written in 1928, remains an enigmatic and provocative play. Tread the Green Grass was written in the same year, and Shroud My Body Down was written in the early 1930's. Potter's Field was begun in 1929 and Roll Sweet Chariot, its ultimate form, completed in 1934. The Lost Colony in 1937 marked the end of his quest for new form, for with it he had arrived at a plateau. He had taken the drama outdoors, had placed it on a panoramic stage, and had integrated pantomime, song, and dance, in an elevated and ceremonial style, with the materials of American history, achieving the noble ends of art.
Unfortunately, like the Marxian Utopia, this ultimate achievement of a dialectical progress, which must be produced through the thrust and counterthrust of forces, is as static and as dull as any paradise would be. I do not mean to condemn the symphonic plays outright. There is much that is good in them. But one feels in reading them (and they are not meant to be read, but seen in all their embellishments) that the old challenge for Green, the fire of discovery, has been lost. And that burning quest suffuses the plays of discovery, those experimental plays of the years between the mid-1920's and the mid-1930's, those plays which may often fail but do so with intensity and flourish, with power and sensitivity. (p. 67)
This quest for a higher art led Green through territories which lay in opposite directions. The continued refinement of dramatic technique which led him ultimately to a symphonic drama is actually opposite to that of a folk drama, which is by nature elemental, simple, and limited. His journey through the fields of conscious art, through sophistication of form and technique, through a refined and international exchange of ideas, led him away from the simplicity of folk style. He ultimately found in the stylization of the Japanese theater the closest approach to the ideal that he had ever seen: "The Kabuki theatre is the true representational [sic] theatre art as I've yearned to see it."… Here is a Green talking for whom direct message, didacticism, is a step below the etherealized pure art of the Japanese theatre. By such a criterion, it would seem that a few of the plays from the period of greatest experiment rose higher than both the thesis-studded earlier plays and the overtly nationalistic drama of the symphonic period.
There is implicit, however, a single goal in the opposite extremes through which Green worked. Both his sophisticated drama and his folk drama are aimed at baring the essential rhythms of life, the ceremonies by which all men live a common existence, the very essence of human nature which is the same whether abstracted through the refinement of art or perceived directly in the naked, unaccommodated form of elemental man.
It would seem then that Green, by the clarity of his vision of man's soul, worked toward the center of human experience, no matter on what diverging paths his travels seemed to take him.
Although firmly rooted in a more realistic world and peopled with characters of a more fully realized individuality than those of Blue Thunder, Shroud My Body Down, and Tread the Green Grass, Roll Sweet Chariot like those plays grows upward into an atmosphere of poetic rarefaction. It ostensibly moves from a Chekhovian flux of isolated souls touching and withdrawing from one another to a last-scene fusion of the individuals into a communal spirit. The resultant shift in style from the apparent slice of reality in Scene One to the ode on suffering and salvation in the final scene has been considered one of the play's major weaknesses. Similarly, the transformation of the folk hero John Henry from a confidence man into a spiritual leader has distressed those who require a conventional, realistic treatment of character. Yet, taken in the play's own terms, such seeming shifts result in the total harmony for which Green reached. The atmosphere of Roll Sweet Chariot, from beginning to end, is imbued with a poetic intensity which boils from the passionate love, fear, and hate; the reckless joy and impertinence; and the instinctive malice and selfishness of the folk themselves. Musical pattern and poetic image hold together what might indeed be, without them, unassimilated and drifting fragments. (pp. 68-9)
[From statements Green has made about Roll Sweet Chariot, it seems evident] that, although the ostensible theme of the play is justice, the conclusion does not result in an establishment of justice. If such is the case, so is it in Green's other major plays: In Abraham's Bosom, The Field God, Tread the Green Grass, The House of Connelly. Each of these plays contains as an important theme the problem of justice, but in none of them is justice precisely worked out in the end. In the last two mentioned there is an explicit denial of simple, earthly justice in the ritual sacrifices of the Young Reverend (or Tina) and Patsy Tate.
Roll Sweet Chariot, too, is about justice, but it concludes with the assurance that man can endure in spite of its earthly perversion, that he can grow toward a fulfillment of his potential regardless of a prevailing power of vengeance. The community, like the individual, is both innocent and guilty. (p. 76)
Although Roll Sweet Chariot, like the other plays of Green's experimental period, does not conform to a single tradition, it stands as one of Green's most exalted efforts, perhaps his best, to make a dramatic form carry his vision of mankind. In these plays his experiment in dramatic traditions and his synthesis of adopted ideas and images, patterns and language, found completion. Regardless of imperfections, plays like Tread the Green Grass and Roll Sweet Chariot deserve greater recognition than they have generally received. (p. 78)
Howard D. Pearce, "From Folklore to Mythology: Paul Green's 'Roll Sweet Chariot'," in The Southern Literary Journal (copyright 1971 by the Department of English. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Vol. III, No. 2, Spring, 1971, pp. 62-78.
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