Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale
[The essay below asserts that Seascape is a fairy tale that treats the problem of the acceptance of death, offering "a message of wisdom and comfort presented in a fanciful style that allows people to sip only as much as they thirst for. "]
Edward Albee's Seascape is obviously not a realistic play. When the two great lizards slide onto the stage, behaving like ordinary married human beings and speaking perfect English, realism is immediately dispelled. Encounters between human beings and talking animals are the stuff of fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, describes a fairy tale as a work of art which teaches about inner problems1 through the language of symbols 2 and, therefore, communicates various depths of meaning to various levels of the personality at various times.3 This is the method of Seascape.
The play's principal concern is the realization of the proximity of death that comes with the passing of middle age. Albee depicts the adjustments that this realization entails, adjustments made difficult in the twentieth century by a tendency to deny mortality. Sigmund Freud spoke of this denial as an inner struggle between Eros and Thanatos which he viewed as the wellspring of all neuroses. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the need for a oneness that would embody the affirmation of death as well as life. More recently, Norman O. Brown has maintained that constructing "a human consciousness" capable of accepting death "is a task for the joint efforts of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art.4Seascape takes up this cause and earns importance because of it.
Symbols are the play's basic medium. Through symbolism the title announces that death is a part of the flux of life. A seascape is a view of the sea whose ever-moving waters are the meeting place between air and ground, heaven and earth, life and death. The waters of the sea are both the source and the goal of life. Returning to the sea is like returning to the birth waters of mother's womb; it is the symbolic equivalent of death.5 The seascape is also vast: its final shore is beyond sight; its horizon is beyond reach. So is the flux of life; man is the product of continuous evolution—unstoppable in its insistent progress. The sea is also deep and dark; beneath its bright ripples are undercurrents, eddies, unseen life, and unplumbed depths. So is man's awareness merely the outer rim of an inner self that seethes with the buried life of the subconscious. Thus, the play intertwines three levels of meaning, ingeniously allowing each to add insight to the other. All three are condensed in the symbol of the lizards who come up from the sea. They concretize the evolution of mankind from water animals, the emergence of the individual embryo from its watery womb, and the return to consciousness of the repressed self.
All these levels of meaning can be communicated simultaneously when the fairy-tale events of the play are interpreted as an initiation rite. Joseph L. Henderson, in Man and His Symbols, explains the rites of passage and their associated symbols which, he says, can relate to the movement from any stage of life to any other—childhood to adolescence to maturity to old age to death. Moreover, the symbols of these rites are known to appear in the unconscious mind of man just as they did in ancient rituals.6 One set of symbols that apply to this final stage of life, Henderson calls "symbols of transcendence" which concern "man's release from … any confining pattern of existence, as he moves toward a superior … stage" of his development. They provide for a union between the conscious and the unconscious contents of the mind.7 The experience is usually presided over by a "feminine (i.e., anima) figure" who fosters a "spirit of com-passion,"8 and it occurs between middle age and old age when people are contemplating ways to spend their retirement—whether to travel or to stay home, to work or to play.9 Often during this time the subject has dreams which incorpo-rate a piece of wood, natural wood which represents primor-dial origins and, thus, links "contemporary existence to the distant origins of human life." Other subjects dream of being in a strange, lonely place "near a body of water." Such places are stops on a continuing journey which symbolizes the need for release.10 The journey usually features an encounter with an animal that can live either on land or in the sea—a water pig, a lizard, a snake, or a fish. The amphibian quality of the animal is the universal symbol of transcendence. "These creatures, figuratively coming from the depths of the ancient Earth Mother, are symbolic denizens of the collective unconscious."11 The full power of transcendence also incorporates symbols of flight. Thus, the "lower transcendence from the underworld snake-consciousness" passes "through the medium of earthly reality" and into the "superhuman or transpersonal reality" of winged flight.12 In archaic patterns, the symbols of this final transcendence may havebeen winged horses or dragons or even wild birds. But Henderson says that today they can be jet planes or space rockets which also represent freedom from gravity. He notes that this final initiation begins in submission and moves through containment to further liberation. He warns, how-ever, that the opportunity to experience these rites is not automatic; it must be understood and grasped. The individual who does "reconciles the conflicting elements of his personality" and strikes "a balance that makes him truly human, and truly master of himself."13
Other writers concur with Henderson and elaborate his statements. Joseph Campbell, in Hero With A Thousand Faces, calls this opportunity to be initiated "the call to adventure." He tells a fairy tale in which a frog heralds the call—to life, death, adventure, or self-realization. Regardless of the "stage or grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration—a rite, or moment of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth."14 Julius Heuscher, in his psychiatric approach to fairy tales, cites the story of the beautiful Czechoslovakian princess Zlatovlaska, who is won by a lowly cook, Yirik. This fairy tale introduces the "three realms of the physical world: earth, water, and air" which Yirik must befriend to gain his end, and it points out that death must be accepted as well as life if a true "spiritual awakening" is to occur, if a "wedding of the spirit or animus with the soul or anima" is to take place.15 A third relevant comment comes from Carl Jung: "In myths and fairy tales, as in dreams, the psyche tells its own story, and the interplay of the archetype is revealed in its natural setting as 'formation, transformation/ the eternal Mind's eternal recreation.' "16
Familiarity with the archetype of initiation and the symbols of transcendence facilitates their recognition in the events of Seascape. Albee's play begins on a deserted sand dune in the bright sun.17 The barrenness of the sand dune seems to suggest the absence of fertility at life's end. Traditionally, sand also represents time and life's journey. In this context, Albee's characters have travelled to the edge of the sands of time—the sea, home of the waters of life and death. The bright sunlight is associated with rebirth. According to J. E. Cirlot, the Moon becomes fragmented in its cycles, but the Sun can cross the heavens and descend without dissolving. "Hence, the death of the Sun necessarily implies the idea of resurrection and actually comes to be regarded as a death which is not a true death."18
Within this setting are Charlie and Nancy, whose names, perhaps by accident, identify them as representatives of the masculine and feminine spirits: the name Charlie implies manliness, strength and vigor; Nancy, a variation of Anne, suggests grace and mercy. The conversation of Charlie and Nancy tells of their presence in the retirement years. They speak of the long way they have come—the children, the sharing of much time, the prospects of settling in "old folks' cities" (p. 10). Nancy even verbalizes their awareness of approaching death. Twice she reminds Charlie that they "are not going to live forever" (p. 11). Their attitudes display a wish to stop their journey through time. Nancy wants to become a "seaside nomad" (p. 5), to "go around the world and never leave the beach" (p. 6). Charlie, on the other hand, wants to do "nothing" (p. 8); he feels he has earned "a little rest" (p. 10). Each in his own way, therefore, rejects continuing. She wants to treadmill it on the shores of life, and he wants to halt where he is. Their reluctance to continue is demonstrated symbolically as well. At the opening of the play, the deafening roar of a jet plane is heard passing overhead. Nancy complains of the noise, and Charlie declares that someday those jets will crash into the dunes. He fails to see "what good they do" (p. 3). If the planes are accepted as the symbols of winged transcendence, Nancy and Charlie's negative responses show their dread of this next higher plane of development. At the close of this scene, which sets up their present stage in life's journey, the jet planes fly over again. Charlie and Nancy repeat the same reactions and the same words, creating a refrain such as marks a stanza's end.
When conversation resumes, a new stanza presents another phase of their lives—their past. Charlie and Nancy review their progress through the earlier developmental stages. Charlie has always been slow to move forward into a new stage. When he was a little boy, his friends had wanted to soar on wings, like Icarus, but Charlie had wanted to be a fish and live under the sea (p. 13). His delight was to submerge himself and sit on the bottom. Until he was twelve or thirteen, he had enjoyed this symbolic regression to his beginnings in the womb. Finally, at seventeen he had begun his manhood and thereafter had been satisfied on earth's firm ground. Despite Nancy's entreaties that he recapture his youth by submerging again, Charlie refuses to retrench. He insists on remaining where he is. He had, however, had a seven-month decline before moving from maturity to middle age. Nancy was thirty when Charlie had had his "thing," his "melancholia" (p. 20). Then, as now, the deeper his inertia had gone, the more alive she had felt (p. 21). Finally, however, he had come back, but life had been quieter, more full of accommodations (p. 24). Now the time has come to progress from middle age to old age with its proximity to death. But Charlie wants to rest, to remain on familiar ground, to give in to inertia again. He fears "the crags" and "the glaciers" (p. 38). And the imagery of his words reveals his feelings about the next stage. He sees the future life as jagged and rough, like steep rocks rising above the surrounding rock mass. He sees the future life as cold and bleak, like a large mass of ice, rising where snow can accumulate faster than it melts. Like the jet plane, which Charlie figures will someday crash into the sandy earth, the glacier, when it does melt, slides down the mountain into the valley below. Charlie feels unequal to such a "scary" new life. He wants the comfort of "settling in"—where he is (pp. 38-39).
The backward look at Nancy's life reveals the differing role of woman. While he has accepted the traditionally active roles of manhood—wooer, sire, breadwinner, sturdy shoulder (pp. 29-30)—she has accepted the traditionally passive roles of womanhood. She has acquiesced to her husband's needs, accepted his way and place of life, reared their children, and waited out his inertia even at the height of her own sexuality. Nancy, therefore, feels she has earned "a little life" (p. 37). She is piqued by Charlie's use of the past tense with regard to her life. She compares her feelings about his phrase "You've had a good life" (p. 32) to his experience of being stung by a bee. He can still remember his swollen cheek and his half-closed eye (p. 33), and she can still remember all the ill-considered and near-impossible demands upon her ingenuity and her energy. Once he had called for "Mud!" and there was none; so he had insisted, "Well, make some." But she had felt helpless to make mud: she lacked a recipe, the right pan (pp. 32-33). She can remember staying neat and busy, not prying, during his "seven-month decline" (p. 21), wondering if he had found another girl, realizing their "rough and tumble in the sheets" was over, and considering a divorce as an entree into a more daring life (pp. 21-23). But she had passed through this difficult period by recognizing the mutuality of loneliness——even at the climax of love, "Le petit mort" (p. 24). Then he had come back, and she was "halfway there, halfway to compassion" (p. 24). Now they look back on the pyramid of children they have built together. She sees it as an individual, private effort—a precarious and difficult feat of engineering—which their children will now begin. He says, "It's all one" (pp. 14-15).
Each in his own way, then, has arrived at this new plateau——retirement age. Henderson says that those who have experienced adventure and change usually seek "a settled life" at this time, while those who have adhered to a pattern seek a "liberating change."19 And he seems to be describing the contrast between Charlie and Nancy as they pause on the brink of a new transcendence.
The moment is appropriate, therefore, for the entrance of the lizards. Earlier Nancy had sensed their presence or spotted them in the distance during her recollections of Charlie's love of submerging (p. 14). Later they reenter her vision as she makes her final plea to him to descend into the sea again—bare (pp. 27-28). These references to excursions into the underworld make the lizards' ascent into the upper world somehow less astonishing, a foreshadowing in reverse. The lizards, thus linked to Charlie's past, appear now as heralds, callers to a new adventure. Joseph Campbell says that the herald is a "representative of the repressed fecundity" within man; this description is certainly fitting to the present aridity of the man who once behaved like a fish. Campbell also describes the herald as "dark, loathly, or terrifying."20 and indeed the lizards do frighten Charlie. They arouse his deepest animal instincts, for he assumes a position on all fours. He also returns to his old habits and orders Nancy to get him a stick. Nancy reacts as though he had been stung by a bee again; she can see no sticks. Eventually, however, she does find him a thin, smallish one (p. 44). Perhaps this is the piece of wood symbolic of primordial origins. At any rate, she too takes to all fours as she crawls toward Charlie with the stick between her teeth (p. 44). Charlie's protective instincts are to the fore. When Leslie's throat-clearing assumes the character of a growl, "Charlie gathers Nancy to him," and he brandishes his stick in a pathetic attempt to "go down fighting" (p. 45). Nancy seems more fascinated than fearful. She is filled with wonder at the lizards' beauty (p. 45). But as Leslie threatens them by waving his own stout, four-foot stick, Charlie and Nancy remember to exchange, "I love you" (p. 46). They are prepared for crisis! Leslie and Sarah approach! Then the jet planes fly overhead again, frightening the lizards into a retreat toward the water. The refrain repeats its twofold function: symbolically it shows the creature-fear of unknown heights, and technically it marks the end of another stanza, so to speak.
The remainder of Act One gives Charlie and Nancy their moment to recover. Charlie intuitively recognizes that the lizards are the "glaciers and the crags" (p. 47). He even imagines he and Nancy are already dead—poisoned by Nancy's liver paste (p. 50). But when Leslie and Sarah approach again, Charlie and Nancy know by their fright that they are still alive. Nancy, with her feminine instinct, suggests they assume the animal posture of submission—on their backs, legs drawn up, hands curled like paws, "smiling broadly" (p. 51). Thus begins the rite of submission, the first step in answering the call, the prelude to the process of initiation.
The third stanza of Albee's poetic fairy tale is devoted to what Joseph Campbell has called the outgrowing of "old concepts and emotional patterns."21 At this point, Leslie and Sarah, representing the unconscious selves and the evolutionary predecessors of Charlie and Nancy, provoke for their conscious, modern counterparts a new and instructive look at the familiar. Consequently, old behavior patterns give rise to new self-realizations. The submissive females turn out to be more adventuresome and less fearful than the supposedly aggressive males, for Nancy and Sarah prod their men into friendly contact. Charlie and Nancy are forced to recognize that they are members of a dangerous species who kill other living things and eat all but their own kind. Both the lizards and the human beings discover in their own responses that the different and the unknown cause fears which spur defensive hostility. Leslie brandishes his stick out of fright just as Charlie does. The lizards reveal themselves to be as bigoted against fish as men are against other races. In his own defense, Leslie asks what frightens Charlie, what makes him panic. Charlie answers the question for himself as well as Leslie: "Oh … deep space? Mortality? Nancy … not being with me? Great … green … creatures coming up from the sea." Leslie is able to sum it all up, "what we don't know" (p. 73). And his words occasion in the dramatic imagination a greater Consciousness beyond earthly comprehension.
In that spirit the lizards and the human beings consider the enormous differences that time has made between them. Man's simplest everyday customs, like shaking hands, are strange to the lizards, and Charlie and Nancy recall earlier forms of human greeting which are now strange to modern man. The lizards are puzzled by clothes, and Charlie and Nancy grope to explain them. Leslie and Sarah have never seen a woman's breasts. Nancy's willingness to show hers to both Sarah and Leslie causes Charlie to reassess his feelings of jealousy and of love for Nancy's body. The most startling revelation, however, is of the enormity of the changes wrought by evolution. Leslie and Sarah are not even mammals. Their reproductive patterns are entirely different. Sarah has laid perhaps seven thousand eggs, many of which floated away or were eaten (pp. 82-83). Bearing one child at a time and lovingly nurturing him for eighteen to twenty years take on the aspect of a wondrous gift. This insight leads to the discovery that Leslie and Sarah do not know the emotions of love and loss. To borrow Carl Jung's phrase, they have not yet "blundered into consciousness"; consequently, they "have a share" in both the "daemonically superhuman" and the "bestially subhuman."22
While contemplating their differences, the animals and the human beings exhibit some similarities also; these reinforce the notion that Leslie and Sarah are counterparts, in this instance more subhuman than superhuman, to Nancy and Charlie. Sarah, like Nancy, submits willingly to her mate's decisions (p. 100); like Nancy, Sarah is fascinated by new experiences (p. 103). Both males, on the other hand, feel in-adequate at being unable to explain and understand, so they vent their feelings in anger at each other. Sarah is fascinated by the birds, but they activate Leslie's instinct to seek an escape route. Nancy is delighted to have been here "when Sarah saw it all" (p. 102), but Charlie, she chides, "has decided that the wonders do not occur; that what we have not known does not exist; that what we cannot fathom cannot be…" (p. 105). As a final similarity, both couples react negatively to the recurring sound of the jet planes overhead. Leslie and Sarah rush back over the dunes, and Charlie and Nancy repeat their refrain.
The last stanza brings the grasping of the opportunity offered by the initiation rites and the final understanding. It begins in Nancy's compassion for the lizards' fear of the jets: "Oh, Charlie; they're frightened. They're so frightened!" Charlie picks up her feelings: "They are" (p. 111); and both offer the comfort of explanations. Thus, they grasp their opportunity to consolidate the results of this encounter with the representatives of the unconscious, private and collective. The experiences which follow provide intuitive enlightenment to both the lizards and the human beings, and they also offer thematic statements to the student of Albee's Play
Overall the clear message is that individual human growth is analogous to the evolution of mankind. Authoritative testimony reinforces Albee's statement. Heuscher says a study of the "best known Grimms' tales" led repeatedly to the realization that "the growth of the individual is closely interrelated Charlie began with the historical fate of the human race."23 Charlie began in his mother's watery womb, and after his birth he liked to retire to its symbolic equivalent, but eventu-ally he moved on to adolescence and then adulthood and middle age. Now he is ready for the final step of life on this intermediate stage of earth. In the same way, mankind began in the "primordial soup." There was a "heartbreaking second" when "the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets" all came together, and creatures began "crawling around, and swimming and carrying on" down mere (p. 118). In the eons that followed, they dropped tails and changed spots——they mutated (p. 123), until one day a "slimy creature poked his head out of the muck" and decided to stay up on land (p. 124). Thus, Charlie verbalizes one level of the symbolism of Leslie and Sarah. The implication is that Charlie and Nancy are the present product of the mutations that earlier Leslies and Sarahs have undergone. And now, as human beings, they must move on to the third level of life, symbolized by air.
Within this overall pattern are meaningful individual thematic statements. The first of these is that discontent is the springboard of growth. Henderson supports Albee's intuitive accuracy. He states that a "spirit of divine discon-tent … forces all free men to face some new discovery or to live their lives in a new way."24 Charlie no longer wishes to submerge himself in the sea. He knows he could not find satisfaction now in this twelve-year-old's game: "it wasn't … finding out" (p. 115). Leslie and Sarah have come up from the sea because they no longer felt they belonged there (p. 116). The fish in the "glop" became dissatisfied and "sprouted things—tails, spots, fins, feathers" (p. 121).
Second, these developmental stages are gradual but inevitable. Creatures and men come to believe they have always been as they are. Leslie says he has "always had a tail" (p. 122). Sarah says that their discomfort under the sea was "a growing thing, nothing abrupt"; it was a "sense of having changed" (p. 116). Charlie calls it "flux" (p. 124). And it is ultimately unstoppable. Before each new transition, creatures, as well as men, have the urge to turn back. Leslie and Sarah epitomize this wish to retreat at the very end of the play. Leslie states sadly that he is ready to "go back down," and Sarah concurs (p. 132). But Nancy overrules them with her insistence that they will have to come back eventually. They have no choice, she says (p. 134). Charlie agrees, "You've got to do it—sooner or later" (p. 135). Heuscher also concludes that individually and culturally, "growth appears as a neverending process." He places this thought in an optimistic framework which parallels the bright future he says is always present in fairy tales. He explains that the adult person who knows the challenge of continuing devel opment "finds himself wedded to the goddess of eternal youth."25
The play's third statement is the most meaningful: knowledge of one's own mortality is the key to being truly alive and human. Martin Grotjahn, in The Voice of the Symbol, confirms the importance of understanding finiteness. He explains that in old age man is given one last chance to understand himself and his world, and that chance "is created by the recognition that human life is terminable." Integrating the meaning of mortality and accepting it "without narcissistic delusion" accomplishes, he says, "the transition from maturation to wisdom."26 Nancy sees this awareness as evidence of true progress in evolution; she thinks men are more interesting than animals because they "use tools, … make art" and know death (p. 125). Charlie, whose great fear is separation from Nancy in death, intuitively forces Sarah to face this same possibility. He asks her what she would do if she knew Leslie "was never coming back" (p. 129). Once they have absorbed Charlie's question, Leslie and Sarah have learned what emotion is. They know their love for each other; they know the fear of loss. Sarah says she would cry her eyes out if she lost Leslie. Leslie almost kills Charlie for making Sarah cry (p. 131). Both lizards wish to return to the sea where, in Charlie's parlance, the brute beasts are "free from it all" (p. 128). But the whole experience has deepened the human beings' compassion and the lizards' trust. The constructive feminine spirit of man, Nancy, points out the inevitability of growth, and her other half holds out his hand in their mutual offer of help. Leslie straightens as he accepts, "All right. Begin" (p. 135).
The full meaning of "Begin" is contained in the play's central analogy. Both couples are ready now to begin the death of the old life and the birth of the new. Leslie and Sarah will die as lizards to be reborn as men; by gaining consciousness they have moved their home from the under-world of the sea to the middle ground of earth. Charlie and Nancy will die as men and be reborn to a higher plane of existence symbolized by winged flight in the upper world of air. Albee's analogy spares him the necessity of prophesying the nature of this new plane of existence, but its prelude seems to be ego-integration. On another level, "Begin" suggests the start of total reconciliation of all conflicting elements of the self—the past with the present, the subconscious with the conscious, and even the animus with the anima. Charles and Nancy join hands with Leslie and Sarah to begin the attainment of oneness. Thus, through the language of symbols, Albee speaks his major theme—acceptance of death is transcendence.
Seascape offers a message of wisdom and comfort presented in a fanciful style that allows people to sip only as much as they thirst for. But Albee's intent is clear in his choice of form. Bettelheim has verbalized it: "If there is a central theme to the wide variety of fairy tales, it is that of rebirth to a higher plane."27
Notes
1Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York, 1976), p. 5.
2Ibid., p. 62.
3Ibid., p. 12.
4Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn., 1959), p. 108.
5J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1962), p. 268.
6Joseph L. Henderson, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," in Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung and M. L. von Franz (New York, 1968), p. 100.
7Ibid., p. 146.
8Ibid., p. 150.
9Ibid., p. 151.
10Ibid., p. 152.
11Ibid., p. 153.
12Ibid., p. 155.
13Ibid., p. 156.
14Joseph Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces (Cleveland and New York, 1956), p. 51.
15Julius Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales (Springfield, Ill., 1974), p. 193.
16Carl G. Jung, Four Archetypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London, 1972), p. 95.
17Edward Albee, Seascape (New York, 1975), p. 3. (Subsequent references to this play will appear in the body of the text.)
18Cirlot, p. 303.
19Henderson, p. 151.
20Campbell, p. 53.
2121Ibid. , p.51.
22Jung, p. 108.
23Heuscher, p. 189.
24Henderson, p. 151.
25Heuscher, p. 189.
26Martin Grotjahn, The Voice of the Symbol (New York, 1973), p. 45.
27Bettelheim, p. 179.
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