Theatre as intervention: responsibility/irresponsibility or literature's classical role in democracy and Miller's the crucible

Abstract

As Ernesto Laclau explains, the metaphorical comparison by means of allegory implies an attempt to bring different histories under the heading of one power. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is an upfront political confrontation with the McCarthy Trials in the US during the1950s, claiming its own powers of control. At the same time, however, the two periods are not simply different just as two separate worlds can be different. The periods are also bordering on one another in space and time because of the culture that connects them. Culturally speaking, especially in relation to its fascination with Manichaeism, the opposition of good and evil, the two histories relate in terms of contiguity. Here metonymy is at stake, which Laclau considers in terms of hegemony. In this light, the play is both a confrontation in a battle for power, but it also suggests that there may be another way of organising culture. Or, in other words, that there might conceivably be another organisation of the world.