Contrasted with the garrulous Willy is Charley, whose very existence provides a constant critique of Willy's equation of business success with a certain type of speaking. Described in the stage directions as laconic and slow of speech, Charley seems wholly lacking in the qualities Willy associates with business success; yet it is Charley and not Willy who makes a modest success in business (Miller, 347). Willy even tells Linda, in a moment of self-doubt, that unlike himself, Charley is respected because he is “a man of few words” (Miller, 346). And like Linda, Charley seems to appreciate doing over saying. When Willy shows surprise that Bernard is about to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court and yet “didn’t even mention it” in his conversation with Willy, Charley replies, “He don’t have to [mention it,] he’s gonna do it,” echoing the view of language expressed in Linda’s comment—as that which replaces reality, or that which denotes its absence: one talks instead o/walking (Miller, 363).
Less obvious perhaps than Charley’s easy distinction between talk and action is the fact that his comment about Bernard at the same time inadvertently equates speech (arguing in front of the Supreme Court) with doing. It is an irony lost to most critics of the play that Bernard—the character who would correct Biff’s mistaking of language for action by telling him that writing the words “University of Virginia” on his shoes will not lead to his going there —emerges by the end of the play as one who makes his living by using language to affect reality. In fact the lawyer’s speech shares much with the salesman's: both are meant to persuade; both rely heavily on extra-verbal factors such as appearance, intonation, and body language; both are essentially performative.
Willy's brother Ben complicates the distinction between talk and action even further. Like Charley, Ben seems to label as impotent Willy’s brand of “talk, preferring things of value you can” [l]ay your hand[s] on “over what he seems to view as Willy’s pie-in-the-sky rambling”(Miller, 360).In this sense Ben’s view of language is in accord with Linda's and Charley’s, viewing it as absence, as the opposite of “concrete” reality. But Ben also appreciates (and possibly fears) the power of effective “talk” of the sort Bernard is eventually engaged in as an attorney. Attempting to enlist Willy in his Alaska adventures, Ben clearly recognizes no place in his business enterprises for “talk” of either sort: “You’ve got a new continent at your doorstep, William. Get out of these cities; they’re full of talk and time payments and courts of law. Screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune up there” (Miller, 359). Ben’s aversion to “talk and time payments and courts of law” is unsurprising considering the lawless land-grabs and exploitative labor practices we assume he is pursuing
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in Africa and Alaska. In Ben’s rhetoric, language denotes both power and its absence: the ineffective “talk” of Willy represents a failure to act, while the effective “talk” of courts of law threatens to subject his business practices to ethical and legal analysis.
At the same time, Ben is a sophisticated user of language in his own right. If Ben’s philosophy of “screwing on one’s fists” and fighting for “a fortune” represents in this play the ruthless realities of capitalism, Ben is adept at obfuscating those realities when it suits him. Asked by Willy for the “secret” of his success, Ben replies each time with a carefully edited rags-to-riches narrative: “when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. (He laughs.) And by God I was rich” (Miller, 349). The violence and deceit that, as we learn from his rough play with Biff,' were essential to Ben's acquiring his fortune in “the jungle” are here omitted, with the phrase “by God” hinting at both an explanation of and justification for Ben’s wealth. Ben’s use of “God” to obfuscate the realities of capitalism and justify the acquisition of wealth after the fact has many precedents, from the American concept of “manifest destiny” to J. P. Morgan’s apocryphal remark, in answer to a small child who asked why he had so much money while the child's family did not, that God wanted Morgan to be rich. Ben clearly knows how to weave a narrative that places his own success in the best light, demonstrating that despite his statements to the contrary, “talk” is an essential part of his “action.”
3.2 The Distinction between Abstraction and Reality
Ben’s complicating the talk/action distinction even as he employs it is part of his function in the play as the uncanny manifestation of Willy’s deepest anxieties about the distinction between the real and the imaginary, action and talk—Benn Michaels’ logic of naturalism.
Ben appears in this play as ghost, past memory, and present hallucination at once—a walking example of what Miller wanted to portray in Salesman as “past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop”(Miller, 131) 2.Ben is an ephemeral being who at the same time represents a “hard” value you can “lay your hand on.” A diamond, claims Ben, is “[n]ot like an appointment at all. A diamond is rough and hard to the touch” (Miller, 134). As an operator of mines who alternately encourages and discourages Willy’s turning himself into cash through suicide, Ben at once represents the naturalist obsession with “hard money” and its accompanying fears of an “insubstantial” value. This makes Ben the perfect tormentor of Willy, whose need to believe in a “hard”
2
See Miller, Arthur. Timenbends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987: 131.
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value is equaled by his fear that such value does not exist. Ben confirms both these tendencies: “The jungle is dark,” he tells Willy, playing on his brother's fear of the absence of value in nature, but it is also “full of diamonds” (Miller, 98). The ephemeral twenty thousand dollars Willy thinks (probably mistakenly) that his suicide would bring to his family is, says Ben, “something one can feel with the hand, it is there”. Willy’s response shows the depth of his involvement in the logic of naturalism: “Oh, Ben, that's the whole beauty of it! I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand. Not like—like an appointment!” (Miller, 126)
In convincing Willy to treat his life as an abstraction and money as concrete reality,
just like “something one can feel with the hand” (Miller, 297). Ben personifies one of the earliest noted characteristics of money. A primary trope in Karl Marx’s rendering of money is that of monstrosity. Paul Sheehan explains that for Marx, “Money’s capacity for disfigurement, for warping perception and moral efficacy, makes it capable of turning reality into a grotesque distortion of itself” (Miller, 98). For Marx, this tendency makes money a malevolent force: money leads to “the universal confusion and exchange of all things, an inverted world, the confusion and exchange of all natural and human qualities”.3 This tendency of money to transform our reality into a mere abstraction and itself into the real—a tendency illustrated by our use of the accounting term “the bottom line” as a kind of shorthand for hard reality—is at the very heart of the Marxist critique. Furthermore, for Marx, money(in the form of finance capital)is monstrous in its apparent ability to self-generate, to breed itself from itself and to hide its own origins: capital “appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest—the source of its own increase” with the result that “the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself,” and “in this form[finance capital]no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin” (Capital III, 385).In describing money as monstrous in this way Marx’s texts echo one of the earliest known written descriptions of money, from Aristotle’s Politics I, iii. There Aristotle condemns the practice of usury on the grounds that it “makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it.”
As Ben represents money’s monstrous ability to render the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, so does he represent money’s monstrous ability to seemingly self-generate, to hide “the birthmarks of its own origin” (Miller, 49). For Ben tantalizes the Loman men not only with the secret of success; he is also the family's only link to
3
Ibid, but quoted from the Manuscripts of Miller, 1987: 98.
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Willy’s father and Biff's grandfather, and so to their own origins, to one version of their own “authentic” selves. Yet Ben’s insistence on his own self-making refuses them access to those origins. Willy asks Ben to tell stories about his father so Biff and Happy can “know the kind of stock they spring from” (Miller, 34). Yet in the one encounter between Ben and Biff that we witness, Ben turns violent during apparent play, tripping Biff and stopping just short of stabbing him in the eye with his umbrella, then admonishing his nephew, “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way” (Miller, 49). The alternately warm and violent Ben, both a family member and a stranger, here appears as a monstrous and uncanny manifestation of the Lomans’ deepest anxieties about money and the gulf it opens between appearance and reality, surface and essence.
Biff, like his father, is shown to have reason to be concerned about money. From the earliest moments of the play, Biff seems to be viewed by his father primarily in terms of how much money he is earning. The first fight we learn of between Biff and Willy is about money: “I simply asked him if he was making any money,” explains Willy, who goes on to complain that after ten years of “tramping around,” Biff “has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week” (Miller, 9). Aside from his father’s viewing him as a commodity, Biff is troubled by the existential implications of money, chief among which is what Shell notes as money’s disassociation of appearance from reality, material value from “face” value (Michaels, 1). This manifests itself in the play as Biff's obsession with the authentic (with a “hard” or natural value) and the opposite, his preference for deceptive appearance over the real. Biff repeatedly accuses Willy of having “no character” or being “a fake” or even (redundantly) a “phoney little fake!”(Miller, 40, 42, 88) Biff says he wants to find a woman “with substance” (Miller, 17). Yet when Linda answers his question about her hair suddenly going gray with the explanation that it had been gray for a long time, that she “just stopped dyeing it, Biff seemingly chooses appearance over the real and asks her to[d]ye it again” (Miller, 39). In essence, Biff wants Linda’s physical appearance to match his own timeless, unchanging idea of who she is.
Troubled as he is by the existential implications of money, Biff, like other protagonists in this study, enacts a (failed) strategy of “escape” from the money economy—firstly, in Biff’s case, through his propensity to steal. In his study The Philosophy of Money, the sociologist Georg Simmel notes that both in what he calls “primitive” societies and among contemporary aristocracy, there is often “a distaste for
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exchange,”(Miller, 97) with robbery and gift-giving looked at as the more honorable activities. The reason for this, Simmel hypothesizes, is an anxiety concerning the alienation from nature that characterizes exchange. Unlike the “objectivity” of economic exchange, theft and gift-giving represent “pure subjectivity in the change of ownership”. The stolen or freely given object is not reduced to money, not drained of its individual and irreplaceable qualities. Seen in this light, Biff's frequent stealing (of basketballs (a football, lumber, and finally a pen) represents an attempt to escape the alienating world of economic exchange and thus assuage his anxiety concerning reality and appearances, hard value and soft money.
3.3 The Distinction between Technology and Nature
A second manifestation of Biff's repression of money takes the form of Biff's efforts to escape the technological, commodified city and return to nature. Willy himself in fact repeatedly expresses his own sense of separation from nature: he bemoans the overdevelopment of his Brooklyn neighborhood, complaining to Linda that today, because of the surrounding apartment houses, you “[g]otta break your neck to see a star” (Miller, 350) in their backyard. Willy remembers when “[t]his time of year it was lilac and wisteria,” but now buildings stand where once these flowers grew. While the fact that no seeds will grow in that same yard is surely a metaphor for Willy’s dashed hopes for his sons, in a larger sense it also comments on Willy’s sense of separation from the natural world, a feeling Biff apparently shares. By leaving the city and traveling west to work with horses. Biff is in one sense returning to nature. He tells Happy that in Texas “it’s spring there now” (Miller, 341) and conjures images of mares giving birth to new colts. Biff's life on the farm represents a return to an experience of time as cyclical, one marked by the passage of seasons, which dictate to a certain degree one’s labor. Conversely, the city is the place where time is sensed as linear and progressive: it is where you “build a future,” where Hap slowly works his way up the corporate ladder, where flowers no longer grow in the backyard, where a man must add up to something, not be “ringing up a zero”. This marking of the passage of time by natural events(the blooming of lilac, the birthing of the colts)contrasts sharply with a different sense of time, one embodied in Willy’s remark that in ten years of trying to “find himself,” Biff “has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!” Viewing these two senses of time across many cultures, E. P. Thompson has hypothesized an historical evolution from a preindustrial sense of “natural” time to a more Protestant sense of time as money, the latter either
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