Arthur Miller's Collected Essays

I read voraciously and I read for a number of reasons.

Of course I read to be entertained, to pass time pleasurably.  The mind of another person, on paper, can entertain me, can make me laugh, can help me pass the time.  But I also read because the way a thing is said often makes me understand something better.

Arthur Miller is a great playwright.  We all know several of his plays: Death of A Salesman, The Crucible.  Arthur Miller is also a great essayist and in a book of his collected essays I came across some wonderful lines about why we read, why we go to plays.  What he says is not new, but he says it brilliantly.

He is talking about audiences who go see plays but it applies to movie  going audiences as well: “The majority of the audience is still essentially a party-going, amusement-seeking throng.  Confronted with anything that is not directly linked to some aspect of sexuality it cannot be deeply engaged by a serious work excepting in extremely rare instances.”

He is so right -- and it applies to newspaper audiences as well: “confronted with anything that is not directly linked to some aspect of sexuality it cannot be deeply engaged.”  Basically we are all a party-going, amusement-seeking throng.

As he says in another essay: ours is a “culture of entertainment that absorbs whatever is dropped on it like a sponge, mixing everything into a general dampness beyond all definition....none of it seems able to resist the public’s transformation of all information...into something like a good time.”  Again, how well said: all information in our culture is transformed into something like a good time.  We want a good time.  We want sex.  We don’t want serious information, serious theatre, serious movies, serious books.

To better understand what Arthur Miller really wants we must go to another part of the essay: “The very idea of ‘writer’ has less to do with the entertainer (which he has fundamentally become) and everything to do with remaking humanity in one way or another.”

That’s the nub; that’s the crux.  Writers should seek to remake humanity; writers should seek to make people think.

I do not say, nor would Arthur Miller say, that entertaining the reader, entertaining the viewer, is wrong.  It is only by entertaining that one can educate.  If the writer is boring, no one will read anything he writes, but more & more the public transforms all information into something like a good time.

 

Copyright © 2004   Henry Morgenstein

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