Justify the title Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
The title Look Back in Anger predicates a definite touch of ambiguity. The title may be taken as an imperative on the part of the speaker (author), the audience or purposely among the characters set in the framework of a play, which could be nothing but a miniature for the world against the age in question.
Whatever be the intent, the play demands a looking glass analysis of the circumstances and the characters vis-Ã -vis a charged currents and under-currents of conflicts that seem to run through the socio- economic, socio-psychological and historical swathes criss-crossed by political discontent of the times.
A closer look at the title would elicit an objective division of two themes embodied in it—‘to look back’ and ‘anger’. It is very likely that Osborne is of the view that to put an age in retrospect needs an emotion and there can be simply nothing more appropriate than ‘Anger’, when things come to rest on history of an age that governs the lot of an ill fated generation.
Despite its intellectual inconsistencies, the myth of anger helped place all who believed in it as it gives them a better reach into numerous areas of personal and public life hitherto inexplicable but stand accessible to emotion.
As Jeff Nuttall puts it, ‘Not one of us had any serious political preoccupation, but all had a crackling certainty of now.’ In the aftermath of post war austerity, the idea of anger came with the excitement of risk encompassing the new heaven of consumer pleasure and the looming paranoia of atomic warfare. English angst envisaged both fear and anger. Of the two, anger helped established identity—it made people take sides.
Anger thus was not only directed towards class resentment but also towards its ‘phoney’ values.
Writing for the New Statesman, T.C. Worsely commended the play for its ‘authentic new tone of the Nineteen Fifties....’ Though he acknowledged many of its weaknesses, he went on to urge the readers not to miss the play, ‘If you are young, it will speak for you. If you are middle aged, it will tell you, what the young are feeling.’
Jimmy’s anger: the fundamental character of a generation.
The cause why Jimmy is angry is to a great extent rooted in his background. The character Jimmy runs a close analogy with, ‘Lucky Jim’ a novel by Kingsley Amis published in 1954 spearheading a mocking, irreverent view of the social pretensions, cultural snobbery and authoritarianism of middle-class academics. The educated, working-class protagonist (Hero), Jim Dixon, instantly became a cult figure in the make of an aggressive, young rebel.
But why is Jimmy angry? Embittered at the betrayal of the promise of the Brave New World, Jimmy fights a lone battle against the sham and hypocrisy of the world around him. But why does he fight albeit a losing battle?
Jimmy Porter is a character who doesn’t have much of a future and he is aware of that. From his attic room Jimmy can only fulminate against the outside world that he looks upon as responsible for his present situation. On a deeper level his lot is in a constant state of dilemma regarding the voice they are to support—the voice of the political icons and that of the glaring reality; for they too need the assurance of a future, an upward mobility. But they cannot make up to be in league with either and thus begins the contours of an uncertain and bleak world ahead, wrought in fear and insecurity with no place for respite. His attitudes and behaviour strongly reflect the social conflict of the working class.
Another aspect of his persona reveals a track that demands a ‘look back’ into his childhood.
Jimmy was sympathetic to his dying father, a character that exercised great influence on the emotional patterns of Jimmy as a child. In his words—
“But you see, I was the only one who cared. His family was embarrassed by the whole business. Embarrassed and irritated...we all waited him to die................You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about—love...betrayal...and death........................................”
Thus the suffering of his father warped the fine balance between his juvenile idealism and the way he looked upon the world, i.e. perception and acceptance of reality.
Thus his past experience and inability to reconcile with the rest, especially his mother, in regard to his father engendered deep rooted mistrust aimed especially at his mother and inadvertently at the entire womankind. This psychological conflict of gender of childhood forms the basis of misogyny in his persona. It won’t be wrong to say that in his predicament the character of his dying father super-imposed on him and roused in him an indomitable urge for justice. Failing it quickly morphed into wrath which he couldn’t direct at anyone in particular and so consequently it developed inferiority complex and schizophrenic disposition with which he threads through kindness, cruelty, praise and attack.
Unable to resolve his tension and contradiction with the larger social world, his anger turns against the others, who are also, like himself—victims of their environment. So what begins as a drama of social criticism comes across as a drama of social despair, and even as many critics have pointed out, an apology for cruelty and misogyny.
Thus it is the duality of an inconsistent mind which seems to seek space for the manifestation of all the desires, fears or memories which the conscious mind suppresses when awake.
Jimmy as an antagonist to himself or Jimmy’s anger towards to himself.
Jimmy’s anger may also be directed towards his persona though he may not be aware of it.
In the words of George Wellwarth—‘It is the psychological paradox caused by Jimmy’s need for unquestioning love on the one hand, and his inability to get along with anyone, on the other, that cause him to inflict pain on others and thereby on himself.’
M.D. Faber bases his analysis on the Freudian concept of ‘orality’ which leads to ‘sadistic and cannibalistic tendencies and a compulsive need for ingestion of food’. Faber further argues that on close reading one can find that Jimmy is an orally fixated neurotic who projects his own psychological shortcomings onto the external environment.
The helpless, hopeless, ignominy and death of his father act as slew of triggers that jabbed his paranoid mind rousing fear of the uncertainty around. His failure on the social platform and his position among the hopeless rung of the society make up his outwardly grotesque behaviour.
On a subtle level the anger is also towards his persona because Jimmy is also a part of the social decadence and he even embodies it. The pain is that he can’t stand up to it.
Jimmy’s marriage with Alison.
The portrayal of Jimmy and Alison in wedlock represents the zenith of class-conflict at one end and the culmination of love-hate relationship men have with their mother figure encompassing dependence and resentment of such dependence and a desire to destroy, on the other.
Jimmy’s anguish is expressed through the secondary castigation of a ruling class which has left him nothing to fight for, and a woman is a threat and has to be destroyed metaphorically.
Presence of Alison is somewhat cathartic to Jimmy’s enormous anguish. For Alison there are only two ways open –continuous victimisation or walk out on Jimmy as their conflict is not only theirs, it is a metaphor for social and personal conflict that has no easy solutions.
Institution of marriage is both a trap and a refuge for Jimmy and Alison, both being more or less necessary evil to one another.
Sex is no solution.
True there is a strong factor of sex that works between them but is not a solution. Sex binds them together for mutual coexistence and catharsis, above which the game of bear and squirrel that is the victor and the vanquished underplays. It is another matter that the victor may himself be the vanquished at some other plane of reality.
Look back in Anger is thus a painful portrayal of suffering and survival in a world that offers no hope; in a world that plays on through the cycles of remembering and forgetting.
Posts
