`Perverse Mind': Eugene O'Neill's Struggle with Closure.

`Perverse Mind': Eugene O'Neill's Struggle with Closure. By Barbara Voglino. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1999. 166 pp. 26 [pounds sterling].

In 1998 Donald Gallup published Eugene O'Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle. `A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed' (New Haven: Yale University Press), a detailed chronological study of the playwright's abortive attempts to wrestle his epic, ever-expanding American chronicle into workable dramatic form. Assembled from innumerable textual fragments, facsimiles, diary entries, and other records of O'Neill's increasingly desperate search for structure, Gallup's book is an unforgettable insight into what appears in retrospect a self-constructed myth of Sisyphus, a testament to how O'Neill saw in his life and art the necessary, potentially exhilarating failure of a Nietzschean struggle against insurmountable odds.

This Beckettian side to O'Neill's drama is not lost on Barbara Voglino, who traces many continuities between his work and some of the plays of the `absurd'. Her highly promising premise, that a philosophy denying the possibility of successful closure generates paradoxical tensions when presented in dramatic form, is not, however, quite matched by the reading of O'Neill that it produces here. Voglino suggests that for much of O'Neill's career his `perverse mind' (his term) led him to create endings marked by implausible violence or rhetorical excess, before he finally discovered more satisfying forms of closure in the late plays. Few would disagree, and this is part of the problem: instead of exploring fully the conflict in O'Neill between an artistic desire for closure and a philosophical resistance to it, Voglino tends simply to restate standard evaluations of the relative merits of O'Neill's achievements at different stages of his career. Despite the biographical elements of the book, which mention the anxieties Gallup has now exposed to full glare, closure comes to be seen not as a process but as textual stuff to be unpacked by analysis.

At times Voglino pursues a more reader-oriented approach in citing Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, among others, but this is a cursory gesture at best: Fish, for example, is quoted at three different points, yet each time the quotation is the same, with the effect that a complex literary theory is reduced to the level of a soundbite. Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) is used to better effect, as are some of O'Neill's own comments on his work, but one senses that the theoretical veneer is merely a hangover from the doctoral dissertation from which the book appears to derive. Instead, Voglino, a practising playwright, seems more interested in the technical problems of closure faced by dramatists in general. For example, she notes that some of O'Neill's difficulties disappeared when he decided to construct a play by working backwards from the ending, and observes that one reason for the superiority of the later plays `is the greatly improved endings, which, in contrast to the artificially imposed endings of his earlier plays, seem to grow naturally out of the plot and characters' (p. 23). These are uncontroversial remarks, but a properly theoretical approach would at least wish to explore `character' as a construct, whereas Voglino's approach is akin to that of the naive reader who wishes to relate to the figures on the stage as real people. At such moments this short book reads more like a self-help manual for aspiring dramatists than a critical study, and is blighted by the timidity of a project that falls between two stools. A study of O'Neill's problems with closure that made broader reference to theoretical issues in creativity would have both complemented recent scholarship on the playwright's uncompleted projects, and addressed the timely issue of the relation between theory, textual analysis, and creative writing in the academy. `Perverse Mind ` is not that book, but it gestures in the right direction.

STEVEN PRICE
UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR