POWER PLAY: ARTHUR MILLER S THE ARCHBISHOP S CEILING. June Schlueter

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1 POWER PLAY: ARTHUR MILLER S THE ARCHBISHOP S CEILING June Schlueter Nowhere in his forty-year canon does Arthur Miller, elder statesman of American dramatic realism, play with the complexities of truth and fiction with more urgency or more finesse than in The Archbishop s Ceiling. A sophisticated foray into the epistemological nature of reality and of art, the play combines and extends the private illusions of a Joe Keller or a Willy Loman and the public myths that control lives in The Crucible and Incident At Vichy. Miller s measure of truth, which ultimately is incapable of discriminating between the fictive and the real, is the world-stage metaphor, created through the presumed presence of hidden microphones in the Archbishop s ceiling. The former Archbishop s residence, now governmentowned, may or may not be bugged, but the possibility that it is fundamentally affects the behavior and the thinking of at least one of the writers who assemble there. Under the Archbishop s ceiling, Adrian Wallach casts life and fiction in a power struggle that unsettles the writer s assumptions about life and art. Adrian has returned to this Communist-controlled country for a brief visit with Maya, a woman he had spent time with before and who, when Marcus is away, lives in his house, under the Archbishop s ceiling. An established, wealthy American writer, Adrian was attending a conference in Paris when he had a blinding vision of the inside of [Maya s] thigh (8) and made arrangements to fly east. His mission is one of repossession, not only of Maya s body but of Maya, who will be the central character in his novel, and of the feeling of the country, which escapes me the minute I cross the border (17). After spending two years writing such a novel, he had set it aside, unsatisfied. Now, as he speaks with Maya under the Archbishop s ceiling, at first only vaguely aware of the possibility of microphones, he attempts to move out of his American mentality and into that of this paranoid country, in which writers are more often scorned as criminals than celebrated as heroes. Maya and Adrian talk of themselves and of Marcus and Sigmund, who later join them to discuss the crisis created by the government s confiscation of Sigmund s manuscript an event that occurred since the writer had dinner with Adrian the evening before. Each of the characters must cope individually with the constant surveillance of the government, but the American visitor is most disturbed by it and by his growing knowledge that he 134

2 can never have full access to anything he can satisfactorily call truth. It has been two years since Adrian was last in this country; since that time he has talked with Allison Wolfe, who provided him with two pieces of factual or invented information: first, Maya and Marcus imported girls and held orgies for writers, whom they subsequently blackmailed; and, secondly, the ceiling in Marcus house is bugged. Though Adrian knows his source is a gossip, the play begins with the somewhat tentative American alone in the Archbishop s room, lifting the cushions and the lamp, peering into the open piano, and looking searchingly at the cherubim in the ceiling. The microphones become the arbiter of Adrian s behavior as he and the theatre audience test the probability that someone is listening and wonder about Maya and Marcus relationship to the Secret Police that have possessed their private lives. Adrian speaks of an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times attacking their country, but Maya hardly reacts; when he pursues the issue further, she changes the subject: is she underwhelmed by an American writer s liberalism, expressed freely from outside her country s boundaries, or does she wish to protect her friend, who has also been her lover, from the listening ears? If the possible presence of the microphones gives Adrian the feeling that he is counterfeiting his speech and if Maya s possible complicity creates an uncertainty in his trust, so also does a recent crisis in Adrian s personal life contribute to his doubts about human behavior and about art. Ruth, the woman he traveled with last trip and whom everyone always assumed was his wife, returned from this country severely depressed. But a pill reclaimed her, turning her into an active and productive woman, freed from the suicidal urge. Adrian connects the medication with the power of the government, questioning the control any human being ultimately has over his or her own life. And, just as seriously, he questions the validity of art that assumes psychology has something to do with human behavior. Adrian s return to this country, then, is not simply a response to nostalgia or to lust, nor is it wholly an attempt to recreate the feelings he would like to record. It is the life-or-death quest of the artist to connect with a justifying truth that accommodates both his writing and life. As long as Adrian cannot validate the connection between motivation and behavior nor accept a power that neutralizes the human will, he cannot dispute Maya s contention that It is unnecessary to write novels anymore (10). But his experience in this country repeatedly frustrates what he would like to believe about human behavior and, in turn, his faith in the validating power of art. For under the Archbishop s ceiling, he sees fragments of what may be the truth, but he is unable to see anything whole. Adrian s quest brings him in contact not only with Maya and Marcus, who may be government agents, but also with Sigmund, a dissident writer who takes masochistic pleasure in tempting the government to censure him and who will not leave the country even when threatened with imprisonment. 135

3 Adrian never learns whether he can trust Maya and Marcus, whether Sigmund is courageous or foolish, or whether, as an American, he is capable of understanding what motivates any of them if indeed even they can understand. He had left the pompous Parisian symposium on the contemporary novel and come to this country, where he could sit down again with writers who had actual troubles (7). But at the end of his stay, he can only repeat his original epistemological question: Whether it matters anymore, what anyone feels... about anything. Whether we re not just some sort of whatever power there is (73). Coming to terms with that power, whatever it may be, is fundamental to Adrian s quest. Ruth had not had the psychic energy to pull her stockings up, but now she does fifty laps a day in the swimming pool. The pill plugged her into some... some power. And she lit up. But her interior landscape has not changed. What has changed is her reaction to power (9-10). Hearing Adrian s response to Ruth s experience, Maya retorts, in calamitous understatement: So you have a problem. Adrian is a writer, and he knows that a writer has to write (9). Here in this country, where power is very sharply defined (11), he may learn something about the compatibility or incompatibility of power and will. But even before he begins, Maya questions the purity of artistic expression, observing that she never met a writer who did not wish to be praised, and successful... and even powerful (11). As Adrian remarks to Maya, it s hard for anyone to know what to believe in this country (16). But in such a country he can test connections between motive and behavior and he can measure the capacity of art to validate truth. The fictional center of Adrian s abandoned novel is Maya, whom Adrian made a secret agent, operating in a country in which freedom is an illusion. Maya will also be the fictional center of the rewrite he plans, though in this version she and Marcus may well be underground champions of the literary world. Adrian pleads with Maya to cooperate, to expose herself freely in the next few days so that he may possess her in art. But Adrian finds no certainty in his life model and realizes during their interview that the fictional version of Maya he has created may indeed endorse life: she may be a secret agent after all. When Adrian observes that Sigmund isn t permitted to write his books.... Maya can only respond, My God don t you understand anything? (18). Adrian s simplistic vision of life and of art has led him to question both and to discard his latest artistic effort in frustration. Sigmund s paradox that lying is our only freedom is an eloquent defense of fiction and a sober acknowledgement that literature and life are both lies. But if life 136

4 is a lie and fiction reflects it, then fiction is truth and is worth defending. The Archbishop s ceiling becomes a powerful world-stage metaphor, transforming all human action into performance and endorsing the false even as it precludes the possibility that anything but the false can exist. But within the world prescribed by the microphoned canopy, each of the characters creates, interprets, and revisions the truth, lying or not lying in order to shape an accommodating and an effective reality. The visitors do not know for certain whether the room is bugged or not, and the two residents Maya and Marcus claim that they do not know for sure either. Yet Marcus operates confidently beneath the cherubed plaster, using his power, which rests either in knowledge or in naivete, to orchestrate action. In the corridor outside the Archbishop s room, Marcus tells Adrian that he has always warned writers about the microphones; Adrian, not knowing whether or not to trust Marcus, challenges him to repeat this comment within the room. Later in the play, when word comes that the government is returning Sigmund s manuscript, Adrian is only further confused. He does not know whether this is part of a plan to get Sigmund to leave, whether Marcus is director of that plan, or whether his own threat to expose the government was indeed overheard and made a difference. Adrian needs to know what the gesture means, but Maya explains it is nothing.... They have the power to take it and the power to give it back (78). If truths regarding others are elusive on this foreign turf, truths about himself are equally so, and Adrian s quest necessarily leads to a selfevaluation that is fundamental to his identity. Each time he questions the motives of the government or of Marcus or Sigmund, Maya dismisses his inquiry as naive, convinced no American can understand what being a part of such a country is like. Even Sigmund is out of patience with Adrian, accusing him of pretending engagement when he is merely a scientist observing specimens. For despite his efforts at participation, Adrian is finally only an observer, secure in his reputation, his wealth, and his smugness. But it is Marcus who asks the critical question that demands that Adrian separate his personal self from his artistic self. In the early stages of their conversation, Adrian speaks openly of how he would react to the destruction of Sigmund s manuscript. Encouraged by Marcus gestures to continue, he promises to go on national television and to bring the matter to the attention of the United States Congress. However sincere his original intention, though, his threats and promises sound hollow as the microphones become not merely a presence but Adrian s audience: Adrian is performing for the government, participating in a power play directed by the authorities. And if he cannot be anything but a contrived self under the Archbishop s ceiling, can he be any more real even in the corridor? Marcus suggests that Adrian s concern for Sigmund s manuscript is really a concern for the story he is recording and creating: New York Times feature on Socialist decadence.... To whom 137

5 am I talking, Adrian the New York Times, or your novel, or you? (71) Adrian does not know the answer. But the charge contains an acknowledgement of the theatricality that seems to be the only form of behavior possible in this arena, where rooms may or may not be bugged, where friends may or may not be trusted, and where writers may or may not be capable of living lives as something other than clinicians. Sigmund sums up the action in a comment that endorses Adrian s earlier reservation and makes authenticity impossible: Is like some sort of theatre, no? Very bad theatre your emotions have no connection with the event (79). The play s setting a room with a four-hundred-year-old ceiling, styled in early Baroque, with the Four Winds blowing through puffed-up cheeks and angels and cherubim holding up the plaster adds a special contemporary irony to Adrian s efforts at understanding power. In this country, God has yielded to the Secret Police, figures of angels concealing the omniscient microphones that represent absolute power. In such a world, it may well be unnecessary to write novels anymore or at least to write traditional novels that imitate life. For the contemporary novelist, whose theorists bored Adrian at the Paris conference, the coherent, affirming form of mimetic literature may no longer connect with the real. But, in such a world, where life itself is artificial, where the microphoned ceiling prescribes human action, art asserts itself as creative, not recreative, power. The novelists who assemble under the Archbishop s ceiling approach their artistic commitments in special ways. Marcus continues to write in the realistic mode, but as Maya observes, he can t write anymore; it left him... it left him! (75). Sigmund insists on exposing the government, involving himself in literature as an expression of political discontent, but he is ineffective. It is Adrian, unsettled by the power of the microphones to reorder reality, who sees contemporary literature as a fictive construction no more or less valid than life. For, as Christopher Bigsby points out, in the Archbishop s palace, which becomes, metaphorically, both literature and life, there are no certainties; there is no touchstone of veracity, no proof of sincerity and authenticity (95). Under the Archbishop s ceiling, the world is a stage. WORK CITED Miller, Arthur. The Archbishop s Ceiling (London: M ethuen, 1984). 138