著者

佐伯 惠子

出版者

県立広島大学

雑誌

県立広島大学人間文化学部紀要 (ISSN:13467816)

巻号頁・発行日

no.6, pp.143-156[含 英語文要旨], 2011

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Resurrection Blues is Arthur Miller's penultimate play. It is an extreme satirical farce about modern politics, faith and contemporary media-obsessed society. The story is set in an unnamed Latin American country that is a so-called banana republic. A Christ-like man was arrested. He is said to be able to perform miracles and has achieved popularity among the impoverished citizens. The military dictator of the country, Felix, has sentenced him to be crucified and comes up with an idea of selling the rights to broadcast the crucifixion to an American television production team, which would offer big money to him and his country to help the national economy. There are many conflicts among people who urge the crucifixion or try to prevent it. At the end of the play, the Christ-like man disappears without giving any message. Critics have criticized this playas feeble, week. lumbering, rambling or unfinished. Certainly we needn't compare this play with Death of the Salesman or The Crucible. But is this "the great man's Swan song"? Even if it is, this swan is angry against the commercialism of opportunistic media, the venality of politicians, a media-obsessed society, blood-thirsty common people, obsessive religion, and art which takes people's eyes away from the actual reality. This is an imaginary story of an imaginary country, but by writing this play Miller is directing his attention to actual societies, especially the U.S.A. In fact, his characters say, for example, "after they kicked Nixon out of the White House he had one of the biggest funerals since Abraham Lincoln. … nobody clearly remembers anything" or "it's now a quite certain the attack [by a Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin] never happened. This was a fiction, a poem," or "people are shot on television every ten minutes; bang-bang, and they go down like dolls, it's meaningless." Resurrection Blues makes us recognize our actual worlds - for example, the American media that accompanied by bids to carry the execution of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy James McVeigh live on the internet, or countries rushing to war under false pretenses after 9/11, or common people concerned about money more than a life or moral. It seems obvious that Miller was conscious of The Crucible when writing Resurrection Blues. Both plays center on religious folks and crushing governors, an injudicious witch-hunt and the planned execution of a seemingly God-like prisoner, as one critic writes. Furthermore, Miller is writing Resurrection Blues in the context of his contemporary worlds, as he was writing The Crucible in the face of McCarthyism. This play gives us a question, "what would happen if Christ were to appear in the world today?" After the Christ-like man disappeared without showing himself and giving any message, a character, who has professed to be his disciple, says, "the actual improvements would just have to be up to us." This satirical farce is Miller's rebuke to the contemporary society and a serious warning to us all. He wants all of us bear responsibility for our future.