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The plays and screenplays of David Mamet : a critical interpretation.

Price, Steven Trefor

Download date: 15. Mar. 2022

The Plays and Screenplays of David Mamet: A Critical Interpretation

Steven Trefor Price

A thesis presented to the University of London for the degree of Doctor

of Philosophy

King's College, London

1990

- -1-

ABSTRACT OF THESIS

This study provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the work

of David Mamet, including discussion of many plays of this major

contemporary dramatist which have previously received little critical

attention. Chapter 1 suggests that many critical disagreements may be

accounted for by the interaction in his work of absurdist, realist and

postmodernist elements,

Chapter 2 uses speech-act theory to show how power relations

between characters are constructed and undermined through dialogue.

Chapter 3 broadens the focus of the study to consider Kamet's version of

America. Indian and black Americans are presented as mythic Other-

figures for the white American male, whereas recent history is more

relevant to a consideration of Jewish characters. In Mamet's America

commercial and geographical expansion, family life and property, and the

creed of competition and success have all been appropriated in the name

of 'business'.

Chapter 4 shows how this acquisitive culture functions at the level

of narrative, as the pervasive influence in a network of interrelated

structures and themes - elliptical construction, patterns of detection,

mythic paradigms, learning, credit, mysticism, therapy and the confidence

game - which show how the commercial and the spiritual are united in

Mamet's ambivalent presentation of 'business'.

Chapter 5 considers Mamet's facility with various media, showing how

they are exploited in the construction of power relationships. The

thesis concludes that much of the tension and power of Mamet's work

arises from his foregrounding of the necessity for but provisionality of

enabling fictions. An Appendix offers a detailed critical examination of

Mamet's unpublished work.

-2-

CONTENTS

Abstract of thesis 2

Contents 3

Introductory note 6

Acknowledgments 8

Chapter 1. Smothered in Theory: Critical Approaches to lEamet 10

i. Critical reception 10

ii. The playwright and the play 16

iii. The absurd 20

iv. Realism 32

v. Postmodernism 37

Chapter 2. 'Do not break the chain': Speech Acts 49

i. Aristotle vs. Artaud in America 49

ii. Speech acts 52

iii. Talk vs.. action 62

iv. Verbal contracts 67

v. Selection and closure 75

vi. Speech and seduction 83

vii. The power of absence 94

viii. The linguistic construction of character 102

Chapter 3. 'It's a People Business': Namet's America 108

i. The Indian as Other 108

ii. The Black Other 120

iii. Jews and Jewishness 130

--

iv. 'The American Dream' and the Predatory Culture 138

v. The family 144

vi. Property, representation and simulation 156

vii. Business 163

Chapter 4. 'The Past is Past, and This Is How... ': Narrative 169

I. Ellipsis 170

ii, Patterns of detection 183

iii. Aristotle, Campbell, Bettelheim 192

iv. The teacher-pupil relationship 202

v. Cash and credit 207

vi. Mysticism 218

vii. Gambling and the confidence game 225

Chapter 5. 'Go Through Channels': The Medium and the Message 238

i. Writing: 239

ii. Film 242

iii. Stage: A Life in the Theatre 240

iv. Radio: Mr. Happiness 255

v. The Water Engine 266

vi. Telephones on stage 274

vii. 'The Bridge' and Speed-the-Plow 280

Conclusion 290

Appendix I: Xaiiet's Unpublished Vorks 294

i. Lakeboat 294

ii. Smashville 296

-4-

iii. The Water Engine 299

iv. Lon e Canoe; or, The Explorer: Version A 301

v. Lon e Canoe; or, The Explorer: Version B 302

vi. The Postman Always Rings Twice 305

vii. Don ny March 308

viii. The Verdict 312

ix. A Hu dson's Bay Start 317

X. The tobiogra7phy of Malcolm-1 319

xi. Stat e andern 323

xii . Jose ph Dintenfass 323

xiii. A Wa itress in Yellowstone: or, Always Tell the Truth 326

xiv. The Untouchables 328

xv. A Wa sted Weekend 332

Appendix II: Dates of First Performance of Plays Cited 337

Bibliography 339

-5-

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Material omitted in quotations from Mamet's plays and screenplays is

indicated by three dots in square brackets, Material omitted in other

quotations is indicated by three dots, without brackets.

References to Mamet's published works are by abbreviation followed by

page number. The author-date system is used for all other references.

Where it is clear that an immediately following reference is to the same

work, the page number only is given.

AB- American Buffalo .

AMA: All MnareW

A MX: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

11: 'The Bridge'

DJ: The Disappearance of the Jews

jR: Dramatic Sketches and Monologues

DV: The Duck Variations

F.. Edmond

Zp; The Frog Prince

via: Glengarry Glen Ross

IM: House of Games

L: Lakeboat

I,,: Lone Canoe (Version B)

-6-

LT: A Life in the Theatre

KH; Mr. Hai iiness

ATSN: National Theatre Study Notes for Glengarry Glen Rosa

Prairie du Chien

$; Reunion

ME: Revenge of the Space Pandas

b9: The Shawl

: State and Main

EN: The Sanctity of Marriage

UL: Sexual Perversity in Chicago

EE: Some Freaks

: Squirrels

Speed-the-Plow

Short Plays and Monologues

Things Change

The Untouchables

Y: The Verdict

Y-: The Woods

YE: The Water Eng ne

ZY; A Wasted Weekend

-7-

ACKHOWLEDGXEBTS

Of the many people who have given generous assistance in the research

and preparation of this thesis, several deserve especial thanks. I am

grateful to the British Academy for funding the project. My supervisor,

Dr. Paul Kenny, offered invaluable advice at all stages of the work. Dr.

Anne Dean; Lauren Bufferd and the staff of the Special Collections

Division at the Chicago Public Library: and, in particular, John Gersten,

of Rosenstone/Wender in New York, generously gave me access to materials

in their possession. Finally, of course, I would like to thank David

Mamet, for granting me permission to make use of his unpublished

scripts.

-g-

To my parents

-9-

CHAPTER 1. MOTHERED IN THEORY : CRITICAL APPROACHES TO PW(ET

1. Critical reception

When David Mamet's plays first opened on Broadway in 1977, theatre

critics were confused and divided. His work seemed to be an amalgam of

fashionable but disparate trends: social realism clashed with absurdist

non-interaction; the vast panorama of American mythology lurked in the

background, but was expressed awkwardly through an obsession with the

minutiae of realistic dialogue; his plays worked powerfully in the

theatre, yet often when they seemed most akin to cinema, His work cried

out for classification, only for contradictory elements to reveal

themselves as soon as the attempt was made.

Detractors were fairly united in what they perceived as the

weaknesses of Marnet's writing. First, his plays were essentially

undramatic and plotless. Walter Kerr spoke for many in stating that

'Nothing at all happens in American Buffalo, which is what finally but

firmly kills it as a possible event in the theatre' (1977a, 3). In an

interview Mamet mentioned 'One critic in Chicago [whol says I write the

kind of plays where a character wakes up in Act I and finally gets

around to putting on his bathrobe in Act III' (qtd. in Wetzsteon 1976,

101). A second objection made the same point with respect to language:

while Mamet's dialogue was often compared to Pinter's, its stumbling

inarticulacy and persistent obscenity meant that it often seemed to

serve no purpose. Brendan Gill described American Buffalo as a play in

which 'Three characters of low intelligence and alley-cat morals

- 10 -

exchange tiresome small-talk for a couple of hour=_' (1977,54): John

Beaufort observed of the same play that Mamet 'possesses the knack for

accurately recording the scabrous vocabulary, Jerky rhythms, half-

formulated thoughts, and nonsequiturs of his ludicrously inept hoodlums.

But the knack becomes a trick and the trick grows monotonous' (1977,

388); while John Simon, a persistently negative critic of Mamet's work,

felt that in The Woods 'his words stubbornly refuse to reverberate or

hint at disturbed depths' (1979,75). Third, while the plays were

clearly relevant to the social conditions of the time, Mamet did not

seem to know where his observations were heading: in American Buffalo

'Mamet means for the situation to represent America and its capitalistic

system ... It is a point he never gets around to resolving' <Gottfried

1977,365); Edith Oliver found in The Woods an urgency 'that seems quite

unwarranted, as if there were some message, some meaning, that we should

be getting and aren't' (197), 130); and the problem could be exacerbated

by Mamet's idiosyncratic use of parentheses in the printed texts, which

'make the reader wonder whether he is missing some essential meaning'

(Lewis and Browne 1981,66). Finally, there seemed to be no consistent

pattern to Mamet's development: he was producing a large number of

short, sketchy plays, on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles,

which betrayed not so much an impressive versatility as a lack of

resolution. One critic remarked that Mamet 'had decided to write

situations rather than plays' (Barnes 1978,333). Dennis Carroll gives

an accurate summary of early critical reaction;

No sooner was Mamet called a chronicler of shapeless low--life than he appeared to change direction and write in a sparer manner on a wider variety of subjects; no sooner did he seem to espouse more optimistic visions of human contact than he returned to ... more cryptically equivocal attitudes. (1987,2)

- 11 -

At the same time, those who admired Mamet's work were quick to

outline the criteria on which his reputation still rests. Foremost

among his talents was a facility with language. That apparent

verisimilitude of dialogue which finally irritated Beaufort found

approval with others, and the most sympathetic commentators perceived a

certain poetry in the quotidian speech of I(amet's characters. Howard

Kissel, for instance, liked the 'sharp comic poetry' of American Buffalo

(1977,365), and Jack Kroll called Mamet 'a cosmic eavesdropper who's

caught the American aphasia' (1977,366). Precisely what it was in

Mamet's language that was both poetic and life-like was harder to

determine. Second, he was frequently praised for his ability in

dramatizing human relationships, though again there was disagreement as

to what the nature of these relationships in his plays actually was.

Kroll described Sexual Perversity in Chicago as 'a sleazy sonata of

seduction involving two couples' (1977,366); Oliver stated unequivocally

that 'these couples are homosexual' (1975,135); Richard Eder observed of

the same play, and of American Buffalo also, that 'the characters speak

as if calling for help out of a deep well. Each is isolated, without

real identity' (1978b, 42). In some form or other, the question of a

"failure of communication" has been raised in connection with almost

every Mamet play; but as the example of Sexual Perversity in Chicago

shows, the nature of that failure, or whether such a failure even exists,

continues to trouble both supporters and detractors of Mamet's work.

Today, despite these uncertainties, Mamet's status as a playwright of

international repute seems assured. Although he still has his share of

detractors (John Simon and Jonathan Lieherson in particular), he has

converted others: Gill, for instance, now concedes that American Buffalo

is 'a classic American comedy' (1983,149)4 Of several arguments in

- 12 -

favour of placing euch a high valuation on Mamet'_ work, three may be

outlined here. The most evident mark of his status - and, given his

characters' obsession with 'business', a not iri: onsiderable one - is

simply his commercial success. In the early- and mid--1970s, Mamet w33

merely one of a number of playwrights competing for attention Off-

Broadway, featuring in Mel Gussow's list of twenty-three promising young

American dramatists (1977b, 16), of whom only the then already well-

established Sam Shepard has subsequently secured a reputation

comparable to Mamet's. Today Xamet regularly sees his plays premiered

at London's National Theatre and on Broadway, and major international

stars compete for roles in his plays and films. Among many awards, he

has received the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, and an Oscar

nomination for his adaptation of The Verdict. If sheer profile and

public acclaim are anything to go by, Mamet is as central a figure in

the American theatre as Shepard or feil Simon, and he straddles the

boundary between the serious critical attention accorded the former and

the massive popular success of the latter. Moreover, he has produced a

phenomenal amount of work in a comparatively short space of time. He

has written for the stage, radio, television and the cinema; recently he

has turned film-maker, directing his own original screenplays for House

of Games and Things Change, Furthermore, as this study aims to show,

success also informs not only the themes but the structures of his work;

and in this sense he follows in a tradition of American playwrights, for

whom 'the pressure of "success" has dominated over other pressures ..

Themselves so rigorously controlled by success, they often seemed

obsessed by the power, both creative and destructive, of success in the

larger American landscape' (Freedman 1967,112-13).

- 13 -

Second, then, Mamet develops archetypally American themes, images

and values. More obliquely than Shepard's, his plays consider the

effects of a received mythology of financial and sexual on the

relationships between characters. There is in his work something ot he

private sexual tension of the plays of Tennessee Williams and Edward

Albee, but, except in The Woods, without the corresponding sense of

sexuality as a refuge from threatening outside forces; Mamet's characters

seem to have no escape. Their spiritual alienation is intimately bound

up with the practices of 'business', but unlike the characters of Elmer

Rice or Clifford Odets, they do not have the critical detachment to

develop an overtly political reading of their lives. The business

practices which the socialist plays of Odets sought to expose are now

replicated in private relations between characters, so much so that in a

play like Glengarry Glen Ross a distinction between public and private

interest is no longer permissible. Characters then justify their

existence to themselves in terms of an acceptable mythology; and while,

like Eugene O'Neill, Mamet enjoys speculating on the philosophical and

psychological motivation of his characters, he also finds the compulsion

to action or inaction rooted in everyday images of American life: images

drawn from movies, television, and popular myths of opportunity. But

despite the enervating effects of these archetypes, Mamet, in contrast to

Arthur Miller, finds much to admire in the business practices he

exposes. In short, Mamet is a major writer because he takes the

concerns of an American dramatic tradition and develops them in the

light of contemporary life.

Third, Mamet has developed, both in his plays and in his essays, a

distinctive poetics. He does not construct his plays thematically;

rather he allows the pressures on his characters to reveal themselves

- 14 -

through the received preconceptions of their ? ar. s+l- q-. ß ,

frequently opens up an ironic- pace t. _tween their inte .' _ýv an the

effects they achieve. Yet along with this modern view of language as a

ground of uncertain struggles for power is a declared adherence to

classical Aristotelian form, although in truth his work exhibits the

influence of various aesthetic models, absurdist, realist and

postmodernist. C. W. E. Bigsby notes that l! amet's early works 'varied from

absurdist parables to bitter social critiques', and finds in his work a

tension between American and European traditions in the modern theatre,

'combining social satire with metaphysics, a scatalogical language with

lyricism, the disjunctive rhythms of urban life with metic _, Doti ý ýcr_ýer

for form' (1985b, 12,20). These various come: err. - r ýýea1 themselves in

the very settings of the plays and films. If the s ., --t cf American

Buffalo is simultaneously 'a real second hand shop, a massive sculpture,

a garbage-dumped urban landscape and a symbol of the mediocrity, waste

and trivia that lie between materialism and the business that serves-

nurtures materialism' (Gottfried 1977,365), the nightclubs, bars,

offices, law courts and police stations of other works superficially

suggest a concern with social realism, but also gain much of their

symbolic power as places where that realism is expressed not as truth

but as public facade. Behind much of this, apparent realism, then, is a

postmodernist uncertainty as to the distinction between private

experience and its public expression; an uncertainty traditionally the

paradox of the theatre, in which the most ~: uc, cessful performer is the

one who can best counterfeit emotion. Plays sich as ALife in the

Theater, The Water Engine and Speed_ Tbe-PIow expose the mechanics of a

public, institutionalized mythology, in the theatre, on radio and in

Hollywood. In The Water Engine in particular, the spectator becomes

- 15 -

alienated from the storyline as th mechanic= of ý__ . nakir -±

fiction are exposed, It then, ir_ the tensic-n }-etw _e__

rather than in a strict adherence to any one o' them, tl-; =l- of t

interest of Mamet's work lies. This oha, ater aims to delineate these

contradictory urges both within the works themselves and in Mamet's own

comments about them.

ii. The playwright and the play

'I am not here to smother you in theory', remarks Teach in American

Buffalo (AB, 52), but at times M-amet himself has seemed to be doing

precisely that. It is axiomatic that an author's valuation and

interpretation of his own work is not inviolate, but tLer'e are _ever31

reasons why the New Critical separation o± author Ord text iss

problematic in Mame+'s case. F. sb s, t, a--. noted, mu, --h of the yi,? ^s fi= r_

of Mamet's contribution to the theatre lies in hi= emphasis on certain

first principles which could even be said to form the basis of a

theatrical system. While most of these principles derive from Aristotle

and Stanislavsky, among others, it is worth pondering how such a

traditionalist poetics could produce so distinctive a voice as Mamet's,

Second, since he has published these ideas in two books of essays, it is

inevitable that his theory will be compared and contraBted with his

practice. Third, since be is very much alive, it is impossible not to t. e

influenced by his comments on each new play as it appears; this is one

of the conditions of the work's reception.

But fourth, and most interesting, l'Iaznet a= he appears in intervfew

often sounds much like his own characters. '? 7hert in A Life in the

Theatre advises his fellow actor to 'Never take advice r... ] From people

[e,. J Who do not have a vested interest John, in your eventual

- 16 -

(LI., 46). Similarly, in an interview the year before the first

production of this play, )tarnet recalled 'someone once told me never to

listen to advice from anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in your

success' (qtd. in Wetzsteon 1976,103). More generally, Harry DeVries

observed that 'In conversation, the playwright speaks in short, machine--

gun-fire bursts, much like the way his characters speak' (1984,22).

Nor does he shy away from displaying the bullish aggression of so many

of his characters: asked his opinion of critics, Mamet replied: 'Fuck 'em,

in short' (qtd. in Savran 1987,17). All this is interesting not just

because it suggests there is much of Mamet's own personality in the

characters he creates, but because in publicly demonstrating his affinity

with some of their superficially unattractive qualities he expresses an

ambivalence about American values which can be overlooked in view of

the frequency with which he casts himself as a social critic - almost in

the mould of Arthur Miller - and his plays as 'tearing down the icons of

American business, and some of the myths about this country' (qtd. in

Schvey 1988b, 96). But he immediately went on to say 'I don't think I'm

a political playwright' (qtd. in Schvey 1985b, 96), and elsewhere he has

extolled, for instance, 'a very good American value which our liberal

bourgeois culture has rather eschewed, to look at things for what they

are, to decide what you want and to act accordingly' (qtd. in Christy

1983,15).

However, while frequently expressing himself in these bullish terms,

he also converses effortlessly about writers and philosophers as diverse

as Aristotle and Marx, Tolstoy and Freud, Veblen and Stanislavsky. So

readily does he quote these authorities that in an early interview he

expressed the fear that 'this piece is going to make me sound

pretentious' (qtd. in Wetzsteon 1976,101). It does seem, as Carroll

- 17 -

suggests, that 'Mamet has two different personae' which 'have class

overtones':

He can give the impression of being a flinty, street-smart cynic distrustful of easily won communicativeness, the whole peppered with a wacky humour ... But he also appears as well- read and intelligent on his own plays and aims, as a moralist who passionately believes in the theatre's power for communion, as a teacher who inveighs against, the ersatz in art and life. (1987,3)

It appears, then, that in interviews Mamet, like his characters, is

something of a performer, with contradictory personae.

These contradictions are not confined to the personality he puts

across but to the arguments themselves. In 1985, for instance, Mamet

said: 'the only person who can get what he wants is the individual man.

You can't do it as a race; you can't do it as a culture. In the theater

an individual man has to come to terms with what he wants and how

capable he is of getting it' (qtd. in Nuwer 1985,10). Yet three years

later he argued that

the purpose of the theatre is to transcend the individual conscious mind, to put the spectator in a communion with his or her fellows on the stage and also in the audience ... There is a certain learned, habituated, perhaps even genetic cultural need for the rituals of the culture in which you exist any which is your culture. (qtd. in Schvey 1988b, 90)

It is not simply that Mamet changed his mind: Lieberson has little

difficulty in exposing major contradictions and flaws in Writing in

Restaurants, Mamet's collection of essays, and even within individual

essays. 'Stanislavsky's dictum that "the purpose of the play is to bring

to the stage the life of the human soul"', which Mamet is fond of citing,

'sounds authoritative until one asks oneself whose soul is under

discussion, or what "the life of the soul" consists in' (Lieberson 1988,

6). (The answer is to be found in Maiet's interest in the possibility

- 18 -

of a universal human nature and of a collective unconscious expressed a

myth or, to quote the title of one of his essays, 'a national dream-life'.

These matters are discussed later in this study, ) VaguEnes is

compounded by contradiction: while denying the e .i_; ter_ _e of free , 11.1

(M, 115), )tamet believes 'the fit subs ;_c or, d drama' -s one which

'deal[s] with the human capacity for choice' (11R 58). In fact '--Amet

tends to stress the former position, leading to the dangerous fatal-ism

of the essay on 'Decay' ('What can be done about the problems which

beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done' [W1,

1131) which, as Lieberson notes, 'sounds like a caricature of the book on

radiation in deed-the-Plow' (1988,6),

Mamet's fondness for perhaps overly abstract ideas culled from

disparate sources has major disadvantages; on the other hand, it dies

open one's eyes to a wealth of possible approaches to the work, which

are sometimes fruitful in themselves, sometiz e interesting in po nt#n-

to a disparity between theory and practice. F in, =-stance, ,e td to

explain his work in terms of Aristotelian or mythic narrative par--3, t igr s,

which can add unexpected resonance to such superficially real' ti plays

as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, but which on the other

hand may distract attention from the discrete qualities of the

individual plays. An overly-hostile response to Mamet's public

pronouncements can result in an equally reductive interpretation of the

plays. Lieberson's solid logic may expose successfully the weaknesses

of some of Mamet's arguments, but in discussing the plays he is

fastidious and over-literal: of Speed-the-Plow, for example, he

complains: 'Are film projects today really ' reen1ightýd", or e-vrn hr: ),, ht

for discussion before the head of tt ý=+udio ca= ua11 , ,? ' ('1988,4),

Such remarks merely lead to greater

- 19 -

the symbolic, mythic or unconscious design of drama. Maiset, then, is a

fascinating commentator on his own work and on theatre in general, bl_; t

like Tom Stoppard, does not appear worried about inconsisten^ : he

recently joked that 'I don't agree with a lot of my own ideas and seem

powerless to rid myself of them' <SE, 3(), His- st tenier ts need to be

considered carefully and critically if the full measure of his

achievement is to be appreciated.

Having discussed some of Mainet's own idea, about his work, the rest

of this chapter will consider his plays' relation to the three artistic

categories with which they have been most frequently associated:

absurdism, realism and postmodernism.

iii. The absurd

In contrasting the American theatre of the 1960s with that which

followed it, BIgsby makes the general observation that a theatre which

'celebrated propinquity - either in the form of Dionysian rites or

political solidarity' had been replaced by orte in which the real risk is

that the collapse of social me anfing confirms a fundamental absurdity

implicit in the fact of mortality' (1985b, 68). It is a pertinent

argument which informs much of Bigsby's work on Mamet, as well as that

of many other critics, and links the playwright with the 'theatre of the

absurd', of which Martin Esslin's account is the best known.

The connection, however, is problematic, not so much because it is

inappropriate but because the absurd is a somewhat nebulous concept

which creates particular problems for dramatic criticism. Austin E,

Quigley has demonstrated that Esslin's conception of theatre is less

precise than those of (for instance) Brecht ana Artaud, since 'tIe

appropriate metaphoric use of the word "tteatre" is ., au se t ha_ lj nk s

20 -

texture, structure and theme to the mode of performance that is

characteristic of a particular kind of play in a particular kind of

theatrical space' (1985,7). Esslin tends to ignore the individualizing

properties of the plays he examines: inevitably, _, in,: e 'The functior_ of

an empirical generalization is to locate the uniformity that ter' _r lips

variety, and it thus serves to give s -ailarity priority _ Yer differen e'

(Quigley 1985,204). Quigley notes three ob jec;. 1 on, _ to "t , ea+e of Xýý.

the -plays are too diverse, the common ground, when it har. been located, seems not extensive enough or pervasive enough to justify the establishment of categories, and attempts at generalization have too often remained at the level of texture, structure and theme, instead of moving up to include performance space and larger social function. (56)

Esslin soon became aware of these problems. In the preface to the

first edition, which appeared in 1961, he claimed the book was 'an

attempt to define the convention that has come to he known as the

Theatre of the Absurd' (Eselin 1968,14); but by the time of its second

edition in 1968 he was no longer speaking of a 'convention', which

implies a stable and definable form, and had c=, ýeded that 'A term like

Theatre of the Absurd is a working hypothesis, a device to make cert, _, in

fundamental traits which seem to be present in the works -of a number of

dramatists accessible to discussion by tracing the features they have in

common' (10), By Esslin's own account, then, 'the absurd' defines n, --+ a

genre but a variety of features which are likely to occur alongside

other features associated with different genres. This is crucial,

because it means that any reading of a play which concentrates on its

absurdist features runs the risk of overlooking other salient features

which would provoke a different interpretation.

In fact the philosophical assumptions of the absurd are frequently

at odds with the various formal futures Esslin associate= with it. He

- 21

argues that the absurd shifts attention from belief-systems to the

problems confronted by the individual protagonist deprived of the

possibility of belief:

the Theatre of the Absurd expresses the absence of any generally accepted cosmic system of values, Hence ... the Theatre of the Absurd makes no pretence at explaining the ways of God to man, It ,, an merely present, in anxiety 2- with derision, an individual human being's: intuition of the u'timat-` realities as he experiences them; the f r'. aits of one mart's descent into the depths of his person-lity, his dreary fantasies, and nightmares. ! 1968,392

These 'ultimate realities' are 'the relatively few Vndamental patterns of

life and death, isolation and communication' (391-92). Already in this

statement we can see not only the reductive tendencies of this position,

but also a propensity to define the limits of experience as those of the

individual life and death. It is helpful to compare the following

account of the absurd by the Marxist critic Raymond Williams:

The condition of despair, as Camus described it, occurs at the point of recognition of what is called 'the absurd'. This 'absurdity', in Cam us, is, a doctrine titan an experience. It is a recognition of incompatibilities: between the intensity of physical life and the certainty of death: between men's insistent reasoning and the non--rational world he inhabits. These permanent contradictions can be intensified 5y particular circumstances: the decline of spontaneous life into mec--ýhanic, al routines; the awareness of isolation from others and even from ourselves. By whatever channel the recognition may come, the result can be an intense despair': a loss of meaning and value in one's world, one's society, one's own immediate life. (1966, 175)

This has much in common with Esslin's discussion. The two critics

differ, however, insofar as what regularly emerges in Esslin's analysis

as a reductive, enervated condition becomes for Williams a basis for the

exploration of wider possibilities:

It is no solution to collapse the tension between life and death, by merely choosing death, or between ou. insistent reasoning and our non-rational wor d, by _hoosing

-2-

irrationalism. The essential problem is to live in full

recognition of the contradictions and within the tensions they produce, yet the weight is then such that we are always seeking, by open or covert means, to collapse or reduce them. Despair itself, which has been presented as an inevitable conclusion, is in fact merely one of our means of evasion. (Williams 1966,175-76)

Of course, this position, like Esslin's, is ideological- what for E_ Alin

is the end of a process is for Williams the beginning; where Er -tin

proposes a liberal ideal of the supremacy of the individual '_ife,

Williams proposes socialist notions of corn- _l. na1 values. Concepts ýf `he

meaning of death, then, are inescapably related to ideo1o7i-; a1

interpretations of the meaning of life. Williams, in objecting both to

the tendency 'to read back life from the fact of death' and to 'the

current isolation of death' (that is, the emphasis on the death of the

individual) argues that such concerns are 'a theoretical formulation of

liberal tragedy, rather than any kind of universal principle' (56-58).

Esslin and Williams are not describing different kinds of drama;

they are describing different responses to the same drama. That the

same work can provoke both interpretations can be demonstrated with

reference to The Duck. Variations and The Woods, For instance, to

Mamet's vague claim that the latter play marked his movement towards

faith in something or ot"he. 6 ', Bigsby replies ý '? t i� hard to see what

this faith might be except a conviction as to the reed for a human

contact which is equally the source of pain and irony and which ha_

been the theme of virtually all his work' (1985a, 283). These doubts

about the regenerative possibilities of human relationships clearly

emerge for Bigsby in passages such as the following:

They either eat the fish or insects. (Pause, ) We eat fish. The fish eat seaweed. It all dies, the things turn into shells.

Pause.

- 23 -

Or deposits. They wash up. As coral. Maybe they make sand, or special beaches. They decay and wash away.

Pause.

Then they form the islands.

Pause.

Nothing lasts forever.

Pause,

Don't make me go home.

Pause,

I want to live with you. (Y, 69-70)

For Bigsby, Ruth, in the very act of expressing an urge towards intimacy

with Nick, succeeds in alienating him:

Ruth outlines the natural logic which draws her to Nick, a logic as implacable as natural law ... By the same token her act, her self-consciousness, her very femaleness, reminds Nick of this logic and makes him withdraw into a protective solitude. The sex with which he tries to drive out thoughts of death in some way incorporates these thoughts. (Bigsby 1985a, 282)

However, this 'natural' and 'implacable' law is deeply ambiguous. On the

one hand, 'It all dies'; on the other hand, everything that dies is

reconstituted in some other form (like the 'sea-change' of drowned men

in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which offers a similarly ambivalent

consolation in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land), so that the sentence

'Nothing lasts forever' cannot be seen solely as a lament, It is not

clear, either from Ruth's language or from Nick's response to it, that he

does find her language essentially threatening; instead the passage

maintains a tension between two possible readings, between decay and

renewal, and in this sense is a good example of the 'poetry' for which

- 24 -

Mamet aims in his dialogue (as he once put it, 'if it's not poe`-_ on t

stage, forget it' [qtd. in Bigsby 1985b, 141).

A similar ambiguity in The Duck Variations is still more

interesting, because it demonstrates the interrelation of thematic

interpretations and interpretations of language and structure. Esslin

defines the absurdist play in opposition to the well-made or realistic

play, or what he calls the 'good' play:

If a good play must have a cleverly constructed story, these have no story or plot to speak of; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets; if a good play hic to rave

., _9 fully

explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these often have neither a beginning nor an end; if a good play is to hold the mirror up to nature and portray the manners and mannerisms of the age in finely observed sketches, these seem often to be reflections of dreams and nightmares; if a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings. (1968,21-22)

The 'good' play, then, orders experience too carefully and suggests that

action and language have a definable purpose which can be talked about 4

rationally and which will be revealed at the end of the play. By

contrast, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to destroy altogether the idea

of narrative progression. Esslin argues that 'The total action of the

[absurdist7 play, instead of proceeding from point A to point B, as in

other dramatic conventions, gradually builds up the complex -pattern of

poetic Image that the play expres`ses' (406) The aim is. to give the

impression of 'a basic, and static, situation' (393); and one need only

think of Waiting for Godot to see how Esslira intend= this to be

understood.

But an obvious problem with this argument is that live theatre

inescapably has a temporal structure. The temporal progression of a

-25-

play is an essential feature of its form; yet Esslin states that in the

theatre of the absurd

the play's extension in time is purely incidental. Expressing an intuition in depth, it should ideally be apprehended in a single moment, and only because it is physically impossible to present so complex an image in an instant does it have to be spread over a period of time. The formal structure of such a play is, therefore, merely a device to express a complex total image by unfolding it in a sequence of interacting elements. (394)

The claim that the temporal development of a play can ever be 'purely

incidental' is self-contradictory; and it is clear from the above

quotation that Esslin is aware of this. The mistake is to assume that

this presents a problem, or that the formal structure is 'merely a

device'. On the contrary, when the playwright strives to present static

action on the stage, important paradoxes arise which in some ways seem

specifically modern. For instance, Waiting for Godot maintains the

temporal progression of narrative, which actually intensifies the point

that nothing is really changing, giving precise expression to the notion

of life as essentially futile. The attempt to freeze time within the

course of a play is itself an example of a futile action, and futile

actions are at the heart of the Absurd.

This tension between progression and stasis is enacted in

The Duck Variations. Bigsby considers that George and Emil ultimately

fail to find any consolation from the plot they have created around the

ducks, 'since their own logic leads them to recognize both the

inevitability of death and the absurdity implicit in an endlessly

replicated biological process' (1985a, 254). The contrast Bigsby

identifies between termination and continuity focusses attention on the

status of narrative in the play; if we observe continuity we are likely

to observe also a linear narrative, while if the characters are petrified

- 26 -

by fear of death this would imply stasis. This tension throws attention

onto the 'variations' of the title, which might imply a theme either

worked out progressively through variations, or merely repeated

constantly in different forms.

Both possibilities are plausible. Bigsby considers the play 'an

absurdist image' (1985a, 256) -a phrase he also uses in connection with

Lakeboat (1985b, 23). Similarly, Ruby Cohn contends that in The Duck

Variations, 'As in the Theatre of the Absurd, the two men are totally

concentrated in their stage presence' (1982,41). For these critics the

piece is esentially static; and of course it is true that the play lacks

plot in any ordinary sense of the word. But this view still entails a

particular reading of narrative. In both his accounts of The Duck

Variations Bigsby cites Hemingway's dictum that all stories if continued

far enough end in death (1985a, 256; 1985b, 28), holding that the end

result of narrative progression is stasis, a stasis epitomized in death:

'for George, death becomes no more then "getting lost", "stepping down",

"leaving", "something", anything, indeed, but terminating. He seeks

consolation in the assurance of race continuity' (Bigsby 1985b, 29).

This 'consolation', however, is precisely what distinguishes the two

approaches to existential problems already noted in the work of Esslin

and Williams. Interpretations of death and interpretations of narrative

are inseparable, and the play seems equally amenable to both readings.

Indeed, this circular dispute simply repeats that of George and Emil

themselves about the duck leadership:

GEORGE: He will be in charge until ... EMIL: Yes. GEORGE: Just like the other one ... EMIL : There's no shame in that. GEORGE: Just like the previous duck ... EMIL: It happened to him, it's got to happen to him, GEORGE: The time comes to step down. EMIL: He dies.

_27-

GEORGE: He dies, he leaves ... something ... And another duck moves on up.

EMIL: And someday. GEORGE: Yes. EMIL: Someone will take bis place. GEORGE: Until. EMIL: It's boring just to think about it, (1a, 65

Far from being fearful, the endless process of birth and death becomes

simply 'boring', because the individual death and the continuation of the

species are not polar opposites; both are conditions of life, so the

debate is somewhat spurious. Indeed, what preoccupies George and Emil

is not so much the death of the individual as the possible death of the

whole species, a fear evident in their constant harping on environmental

pollution and decay: 'Oil-bearing ducks floating up dead on the beaches.

Beaches closing. No place to swim. The surface of the sea is solid

dying wildlife' (py, 81).

The interpretation of death determines the reading not only of

narrative, but of the language itself. If the characters are perceived

to live in permanent fear of death, their language will be simply an

evasion of their real fears and will lack all semantic and performative

power. If, on the other hand, death is not the end but the beginning of

discourse, the focus of attention will shift to the structure of the

dialogue, both for its semantic force and for what it tells us about the

developing relations between characters. These different possibilities

have indeed been the terms in which debate about The Duck Variations

has been conducted.

Two broad critical approaches to the dialogue of the play can be

distinguished. The first exhibits a humanist faith in the validity of

George and Emil's conversation as an end in itself. For . S=even H, Gale

'the importance of their conversation lies not in occasional

insights but in the fact that they are conversing' (1981,208); Carroll

- 28 -

goes so far as to find in George and Emil's dialogue 'a dynamic bond of

friendship' (1987,76); while William Herman believes that 'What many

people would probably like is to persuade these two that discourse is

trivial. But they seem to know better, and therein lies the touching

element in the play' (1987,139). Bigsby, by contrast, exposes what is

perhaps a false optimism underlying such arguments by restating the

terms: 'The important thing is not to challenge one another, but to show

solidarity. When they do momentarily clash it is because they have

drifted too close to the taboo subject of death' (1985b, 32). According

to this view, The Duck Variations 'is a play about death in which its

inevitability and immediate possibility have to be kept at arm's length'

(Bigsby 1985b, 27). However, what unites all of these critics is the

belief that the dialogue represents an escape from semantics; the

subject-matter is less important than the fact of communication, and

what is at issue is whether this communication is entered into

positively, or merely as a rearguard attempt to fend off the fear of

death. The problem is not that either argument is necessarily wrong but

that both work all too well. If 'the importance of their conversation

lies ... in the fact that they are conversing', the precise words used

have no particular value in themselves. On the other hand, if the

unstated subject of George and Emil's discussion is really death, any

mention of death confirms the subject's centrality to the play, while any

other statement can be reformulated as evasion of this predetermined

theme. The problem with both accounts is that similarity has been given

priority over difference; language's capacity for making distinctions has

been denied.

219 -

However, Bigsby persuasively locates a different crisis, not of

dialogue but of the narrative by which George and Emil try to constru=e

a meaning to their existence:

Their conversations amount to an elaborate series of attempts to make sense out of the apparent pointlessness of their own existence - to place themselves inside a plot that guarantees them status, significance and relief from their fear of death. They merely displace their anxieties on to the stories they elaborate, though a growing hysteria begins to penetrate even these fictions as they try, with increasing desperation, to read meaning into everything. (1985b, 29)

The source of the play's tragicomic ironies is located precisely in this

relation between the ducks and the men: 'The sight of a duck

precipitates a discussion of its life-cycle, an innocent enough

distraction until the simple logic of their own invention leads them to

the very fact of death which they had thought to avoid' (Bigsby 1985b,

39).

Yet the duck is a significant metaphor also because it resists

attempts to anchor it securely to a single meaning; the ambiguity of

death is also a property of metaphor itself. The duck's relation to the

human condition entails both similarity and difference, and much of the

play's humour lies in the ease with which one character can destabilize

the other's attempts to establish binary oppositions and comparisons.

'Like humans, they don't like the cold' (U, 64) ; yet the duck is also

'not like us' because it can fly (69). These obvious preliminary

observations lay the ground for the destabilization of attempts to

establish more complex relations:

GEORGE: I... I the duck, too, is doomed to death ... EMIL: As are we all. GEORGE: But his life prior to that point is so much more

simple. He is born. He learns his trade: to fly. He flies, he eats, he finds a mate, he flies some more, he dies. [ ... 7 On his deathbed what does the duck say if only he could speak?

- 30 -

EMIL: He wants to live some more. GEORGE: Right. But remorse? Guilt? Other bad feelings? No.

No. He is in tune with nature. EMIL- He is a part of nature. He is a duck. GEORGE: Yes, but so is man a part of nature. EMIL: Speak for yourself. GEORGE: I am speaking for myself. EMIL: Then speak to yourself, (74)

George's attempts to establish secure points of difference founder as

swiftly as other attempts to secure points of similarity. What

distresses them at this point is not so much death, but the problems of

creating valid ways of talking about the world through dialogue:

problems which arise firstly because dialogue frequently depends for its

momentum on disagreement (a fact exploited by Vladimir and Estragon in

Waiting for Godot), and secondly because George, in trying to impress

Emil with his superior knowledge, is forced to attempt definitive

statements which become open to question as soon as they are uttered.

Related question= are considered further in the next chapter.

There are, then, several reasons why it is unhelpful to describe

Mamet as an absurdist playwright. First, it follows from Essiin's own

arguments that absurdist elements will co-exist with non-absurdist

elements in the same play, and much of the interest of the work lies in

the resulting tensions and ambiguities. Second, in foregrounding a

particular interpretation of death the theory predetermines a reading

which dissolves these tensions by assimilating anything which might

otherwise serve to establish difference. Third, it is ineffective in

accounting for the structure of dialogue as a situational manouevring

for power among speakers.

- 31 -

iv. Realism

Much American drama might be described as 'realist', though the term iF

problematic, especially as much of the major drama of the century -

particularly that of European playwright-. E., _; ch as Beck tt and Pinter -

aims to show that 'reality' is a negot ab? e 'onoept. John G . s5ner races

the beginnings of realism in the American heat--re to the late r_"neteenth

century by enumerating a number of 'realistic' characteristic= of the

plays of this period: 'local colour, local character types and local

speech', 'some degree of psychological observation', 'social real lit y' and

'social tensions' (Gassner 1967,11-12) In the later, more complex

drama of O'Neill, Miller and Williams the contradictions and tensions of

realism emerged; on the one hand, 'this mode of realism could be

passionately critical, anti-heroic and "debunking"'; on the other hand,

'significant American dramatic realism has manifested various admixtures

of realism and poetry or poetic coloration, some histrionic

imaginativeness, or some tran=ce Bence of descriptiveness and

photographic reduplication of commonplace reality' (; as ner 11.967,25).

However, as noted in the first section of the next chapter, it could be

argued that at the time Gassner was writing even this 'poetic' realism

was coming into conflict with a less verbal theatre derived from Arrtaud.

'Realism', then, is a relative term, useful mainly to distinguish a

play from others which are perceived, equally problematically, to be less

realistic. As Mamet observes, those in the theatre who are 'in thrall to

the idea of realism' are constrained 'to judge their efforts and actions

against an inchoate, which is to say against an unspecified standard of

reality' (W, 130). When in 1978 Richard Eder called Mamet' work "rew

realism", he did so to distinguish it from what he saw as the then

prevailing trend in the theatre:

- ?G

In these past dozen years or so, it has often seemed that serious things cannot be said on the stage unless they are said in terms of the absurd. If it is not the wild absurd of the Beckett and Ionesco tradition, or the

-:: zavage absurd traceable to Genet and Orton, it is the small-toothed absurd fathered by Pinter. And by now the explosive eff&-t of existential or deracinated humour has been used so extensively that it has pretty well worn off. From being a startlem. ent that opened our eyes, it ha= become the expectable clich`- that glazes them over, `1'D78b, 40)

Eder saw Manets signifIcrance as. lying in the creatI on of a "new

realism". For Eder, early plays like Sexual Perversit in Chicago and

American Bu; l still had much in common with the absurd- 'the

characters speak as if calling for help out of a deep well. Each is

isolated, without real identity. They talk to find it - "I speak,

therefore I am" - and the comic and touching involution of their

language is the evidence of their isolation and tracklessness' (1978b,

42). By contrast, more recent plays such as The Woods and The Water

Engine, demonstrated a move towards realism-, 'he has only begun, in Water

Engine, to test his extraordinary command of mood, character and

language - poetic and specific: -- with the real changes and =. t: re es of a

plot and external reality', while even in the early plays the dialogue is

'grotesquely realistic' (Eder 1978b, 47,42, ,

Eder's essay does riot really answer the q ,ý ^±ion as to the pr_r ye

nature of this "new realism". Conventional notions of plot, and the

attempted mimesis of a supposedly stable 'external reality', were

precisely those aspects of naturalism rejected by the early modernists,

Strindberg in particular and, later, Pirandello and Brecht, on the

grounds that this reality was in fact illusory (and, for Brecht at least,

an ideological imposition?; and it is questionable whether Mamet's

alleged return to such norms are grounds on whi^h a new realism could

be distinguished from the old, He himself relegates realism to a

- 33 -

historical phenomenon whose time has come and gone, 'an invention of the

nineteenth century, when The Material seemed to be, and, perhaps, was,

the central aspect of life. Our own time has quite understandably

sickened of The Material, and needs to deal with things of The Spirit'

(SE, 64). This may sound strange coming from a dramatist whose plays

are everywhere permeated with financial and economic pressures; but it

should be stressed that the motivation of plays like American Buffalo

and Glengarry Glen Ross is the promise of a material success which does

not exist on the bare stages on which their action unfold=. The

pressure of the material is felt as an absence, not as the imposing

presence of so many sets of the theatre of realism,

Certainly Mamet'e recent work has confirmed Eder's perception of an

increasing interest in plot; yet it, is at least arguable that the plots

of both Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-The-Plow are in fact circular -

Roma returns to the restaurant, Gould and Fox resume their partnership -

and that earlier plays, such as American Buffalo, retain vestiges of

conventional structure (the increased understanding between Bobby and

Don being indicative of that progression through confusion towards

enlightenment characteristic of realist theatre). Indeed, Mamet has

called American Buffalo 'a classical tragedy' (qtd, in Schvey 1983b, 94).

True or not, one of the central questions about Mamet'= plotting, as

chapter 4 of this study will suggest, is the effect on his work of the

undoubted legacy of Aristotle. Meanwhile, it is interesting that

The Water Engine should be the play most strongly linked by Eder to an

awakening interest in 'external reality', since this play will turn out to

be the one most concerned to expose the implications of its own status

as a fictional construction (a point explored further in chapter 5);

indeed, The Water Engine is the play most akin to the dramatic practice

- 34 -

of Brecht - not a realist in any conventional sense. The confusion

perhaps arises because Eder is simply distinguishing this play from

The Woods, which 'has problems of structure and clarity. The changes

are perhaps too exclusively internal; apart from a rainstorm, nothing

much happens to test or stretch the couple. There is some airlessneccs

there' (1978b, 47). But if this contrast estab1 shý _ The Water Engine as

realistic, it again begs the question of what kinds of re, ali- cý we .re

talking about.

It is universally agreed, however, th ': Mim<et. '- dialogue c-nn 'gave an

extraordinarily powerful effect of verisimilitude, 7?, ~casional-ly euch

critical comments betray a rather crude c or c_eption of mime -. i -- 'Da-v id

Mamet has an eavesdropper's ear for striking idiom and a tape-recorder's

precision in recording it' (Nightingale 1984a, 21); 'People really sneak

as Mamet's characters do' (Ditsky 1980,25?. The same misconception

appears in those critics who have castigated Mamet for not giving such

a noise-free transcript of ordinary language: Lieberson, commenting on a

speech in Lakeboat, complains: 'In view of the clam= of critics that

Mamet's characters speak in an authentic American jargm-:, one _an ask:

Do many people really speak this way? One suspeüts th_a+- if ts-y do,

they are imitating the bard novels that they have read. ' : 19 8, >, euch

remarks are constricting both because any suggest , on that the language

of a play simply records everyday speech - or, indeed, that there is

such a thing as everyday speech to be recorded - is likely to be

illusory; and because, in common with many critics, Lieberson notices

that Mamet's characters' speech is derivative, only to interpret this as

necessarily a fault. As will be argued in the next chapter, it Is both a

deliberate and a central effect in Mamet's work.

- ý5 -

The sources of the extraordinary rhythmic richness of Namet's play;

have in general been satisfactorily established. The compressed syntax

has received considerable critical attention. Anne Dean, in particular,

notes a number of functions and effects: for instance, that 'The dramatic

effect of this very sparse dialogue is entirely due to the contradiction

between the words spoken and the emotional and psychological action

which underlies them' (1987,24), Dean'=s stuic_'Ly provides a wealth of

examples drawn from specific dramatic' 1tuations. in addition, jack V.

Barbera notes that Mamet's dialogue di-plays 'an a. --lbrevia"ion

characteristic of urban pace' (1981,27--)),

But such speech rhythms re-enact, ratter than simply recor' , this

contemporary urban argot. There are powerful arguments against

extending the observation towards a reflexive or mimetic account of

dialogue. First, Mamet's characters, like Pinter's, use words in a

struggle for local dominance, striving to create a world to which their

verbal opponents will eventually submit. To regard speech as simply an

instrument for recording and transmitting information is to miss this

performative quality of dialogue. Second, therefore, language cont-inually

changes and reconstitutes reality, or as Keir Elam puts it, in dramati,

dialogue 'The dialogic exchange .. does not rner ly .. refer, deicti,: a ly

to the dramatic action but directly cons titute: s it -I

<1980, '517), The

l_ý :? e, ýýh aýF next chapter will develop these points with refer =nce to

theory of J. L. Austin, Third, to demand realism is to reveal the same

vulnerability and fear of the unknown which Mamet'L characters

themselves experience, As Bigsby argues, 'His characters may seek to

impose a simple realism on events, resisting disturbing notions of

character or event which fail to correspond to this model, but it is not

a realism which he is willing to endorse' (1985a, 288). Realism and

- 36 -

reality become illusory, contingent and yet inescapable fictions which

characters, audience and author need to impose a structure on experience.

Bigsby consistently stresses this foregrounding both of the necessity

for and the processes of illusion-making in the plays; and it is an

aspect of Mamet's work which places him more firmly in the camp of the

postmodern than his adherence to classical aesthetic theory might

suggest.

v. Postmodernlsm

Postmodernism is a notoriously difficult subject to define, partly

because it is often perceived as a negation of or reaction against

modernism; Fredric Jameson, for instance, argues that 'there will be as

many different forms of postmodernism as there were high modernisms in

place, since the former are at least initially specific and local

reactions against those models' (1985,112). A second problem is that

postmodernism has been more closely associated with other arts -

architecture and the novel in particular - than with the theatre.

Nevertheless, Rodney Simard has outlined some of the features of a

postmodern drama, though his suggestions are at best provisional. His

definition of this drama is again in part the result of a perceived

negation of previous trends - in drama's case, of realism and absurdism:

Contemporary dramatists have recognized the futility of continuing to write in a traditional realistic mode, for the appearance of absurdism clearly indicated the need for a new form of expression in a postmodern world; but at the same time, absurdism theoretically carried the seeds of its own destruction, represented by its logical culmination in Beckett. Therefore, a distinctly postmodern dramatic aesthetic has developed in response to this need for a postmodern form for dramatic expression. (Simard 1984, x)

- 37 -

The result, for Simard, i_. actually a fu--ion, in which 'many young

playwrights' - Mamet among them, he argues - have refined this

'tradition', and 'have grafted absurdist concepts to traditional realism,

incorporating Epic Theater, performance theory, and the varied

possibilities of theatricalism to produce a distinctly postmodern

dramatic theory' (134). While this account is relevant to Mamet's

relations with the realistic and with the absurd, it hardly fulfils 'the

need for an aesthetic' Simard perceives (lx). Simard's observations -

that our society is 'directed toward the future, not shaped by the past',

that postmodern drama is 'essentially tragicomedic' (xiii), that 'shared

reality is a myth and that individual reality is simply a matter of

existential choice' (132), and that 'postmodern drama is most easily

characterized by its insistence on subjectivity and multiplicity' (134) -

are generally interesting in themselves (as well as to an account of

Mamet's writing), but do not constitute a postmodern aesthetic and in

many cases are insufficiently distinguished from modernism.

For this reason it is worth considering the work of some of the

major theorists of postmodernism, and isolating four major developments

relevant to Mamet's work: master narratives; the erosion of distinctions

between art and life; the erosion of distinctions between high and

popular culture; and the historical situation of postmodernism.

An important feature of postmodernism is its 'incredulity towards

metanarratives' or master narratives (Lyotard 1984, xxiv) such as a

monolithic history or myth, or a totalizing political economy, This is

the basis on which many Marxist critics base their mistrust of

postmodernism; Jameson, for instance, argues that this denial of

narrative creates what he terms a 'schizophrenic' experience, 'an

experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers

- 38 -

which fail to link up into a material sequence' (19 °5 ; 11' ), t: is

experience being strongly related to what he sees as 'the disappearance

of a sense of history' in our time (125). On the other hand, Linda

Hutcheon sees this as simply a misreading of postmodernism, which

argues that such (narrative] systems are perhaps even necessary; but this does not less illusory ... those who lament the "loss world or in art are really mourning the fac no longer primarily narrative knowledge of 6)

indeed attractive, make them any the of meaning" in the

t that knowledge is this kind, (1988,

History, then, 'is not being made obsolete: it is, however, being

rethought -- as a human construct' (Hutcheon 1988,16). For Hu+oheon, the

postmodern offers a

general questioning of any totalizing or homogenizing system. Provisionality and heterogeneity contaminate any neat attempts at unifying coherence (formal or thematic-). Historical and narrative continuity and closure are contested, but again, from within ... [there is an] implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith (that is middle-class, male, heterosexual, white, western) we might have assumed. The concept of alienated otherness (based on binary oppositions that conceal hierarchies) gives way ... to that of differences

... And this appears to be happening in spite of - and, I would argue, maybe even because of - the homogenizing impulse of the consumer society of late capitalism: yet another postmodern contradiction. (12)

This statement defines much that is most characteristic of

postmodernism, and also helps to define the ways in which Mamet's work

is ambivalent not only in itself but also in its relation to the

postmodern,

As noted previously, many of his aestheti: iieaý-=. are reactionar Y.

His advocation of Aristotelian narrative suggests a to+alizing system on

the level of form, and he is interested in similarly totalizing aýccount_

of action as myth, dream or human nature, all of which are presented in

his essays as universal, ahistorical paradigms. His poorest plays -

- 39 -

Lone Canoe in particular - tend to accept these paradigms uncritically;

while several more successful plays, such as Edmond, have much in

common with other myths such as those traced by Leslie Fielder, who

details the adventures of the white American male in his simultaneous

fear of and homoerotic attraction to blacks and native Indians (the

'Other'), and who thereby maintains the structure of binary oppositions

challenged by postmodernism. (The similarities between Mamet's work and

Fiedler's are discussed in chapter 3. ) It is also worth noting in this

connection that all five of the adjectives Hutcheon uses to describe the

modern 'homogeneous monolith' - 'middle-class, male, heterosexual, white,

western' - also describe Mamet himself; and that his most recent work -

Speed-the-Plow and his Playboy article - do little to challenge this

dominant paradigm and could even be said to celebrate it.

However, Mamet's use of myth is ambiguous, for in his major work the

interest lies in specifically American myths - of masculine power

(Lakeboat), of the hoodlum (American Buffalo), of the salesman and of

the frontier ethic (Glengarry Glen Ross), of the gambler living on his

wits (House of Gaines), of Hollywood as dream factory (Speed- the- Plow),

of the Mafia (Things Change) - whose local significance is situated and

ironized within the plays and films themselves, The Water Engine is a

particularly complex example, exposing as it does not only the

mechanisms by which fictions are created and disseminated (processes

examined further in chapter 5), but even the construction of national

identity. 'Thy. Water Engine is about the invention of America and the

invention of art' (Bigsby 1985a, 2? 5). 'Russia is a fiction, friend. She

is a bugaboo inventor (sic) to distract you from your troubl? `', says

the Soapbox Speaker (om, 27); and the cumulative implication is that 'The

supreme fiction is perhaps Ameri_a it3elf' (Bigsby 1985a, 277). Yet the

- 40 -

play resists even this consolatory truth - that all is fiction - by

making the Soapbox Speaker a subject of irony (his language is pompous,

he is heckled by the crowd, and he is subject to the dictates of the

Moderator), so that he is undermined in the very act of articulating

what seems to be the play's dominant concern. Such plays demonstrate

an awareness very similar to that expressed in the work of the major

postmodernist theorists, who

seem to imply that any knowledge cannot escape complicity with some meta-narrative, with the fictions that render possible any claim to "truth", however provisional. What they add, however, is that no narrative can be a natural "master" narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct. (Hutcheon 1988,13).

In each of the works mentioned above, the dominant myth either excludes

any counter-discourse or demonstrates its complicity; yet because this

tactical manoeuvre is perceptible to the audience an ironic space is

opened up in which we recognize the creation and propagation of the

dominant narrative as control structure. Narratives are not equal; they

compete with each other for dominance, and in such plays as The Water

Engine and Speed-the-Plow it is clear that the arrangement of the

hierarchy is largely determined by the meta-narrative of American

capitalism.

This method, by which the postmodernist work parti-ipates within a

structure it seeks simultaneously to undermine, leads to the erosion of

several distinctions familiar in humanist literature and criticism:

The familiar humanist separation of art and life (or human imagination and order versus chaos and disorder) no longer holds, Postmodernist contradictory art still installs that

order, but it then uses it to demystify our everyday processes of structuring chaos, of imparting or assigning meaning ... Postmodernism works to show that all repairs are human

constructs, but that, from that very fact, they derive their

value as well as their limitation. All repairs are both

comforting and illusory. Postmodernist interrogations of

- 41 -

humanist certainties live within this kind of contradiction. (Hutcheon 1988,8)

Alinansi offers rather too passive an accour t of Mimet's work in

describing it as 'an entropic world, as postnodernist critic_ are wont

to say, which crumbles down as the remnants of traditional values are

washed away, existential possibilities are crushed, and social

institutions overthrown' (1986,195). As argued previously, the creation

of provisional, fictional meaning is central in Xamet's work, and as the

account of narrative in chapter 4 will suggest, such fiction-making is

far from being a wholly negative activity. Moreover, Mamet's work is

active in the sense of demystifying the structuring of experience in the

manner described by Hutcheon. For instance, Speed-the-Plow begins by

satirizing commercial cinema and ends almost by extolling it as the only

way in which experience can be satisfactorily organized. While Fox's

reductive view of the films he and Gould make `ounds deliberately ironi

- 'Tell it to me .,. Come on. You can't teil it to me ii one sentence,

they can't put it in T. V. Guid=' (=, 72---73) - when he tries to explain

Karen's behaviour to Gould, he can only do so by offering what sounds

suspiciously like a synopsis of one of their own scripts: 'A beautiful

and an ambitious woman comes to town. Why? Why does anyone come here

...? You follow my argument? (Pause. ) Everyone wants power. How do

we get it? Work. How do they get it? Sex. The End' (71). Gould and

Fox are no longer able to maintain a metacritical detachment; their

perception of the world is that of Hollywood schlock, and ultimately

Speed-the-Plow is itself a buddy movie. The play shows its major

characters both creating a metanarrative and then, apparently, believing

it. to be natural ('Nobody's. different' [71]) . But this postscd rnist

master narrative retains within itself olaýr, mod. eraist structures:

- 42 -

anything contrary to Fox's world-view now takes on the role of the

Other in a binary opposition which inscribes a hierarchy: women must be

excluded, as must high culture.

'need-the-Plow, then, is a good e -. TM le .: f 'the erosion twitUn

postmodernism] of the older distinction between between high culture and

so-called mass or popular culture' (Jameson 1985,1122), a= Hal Foster

observes, postmodernist forms 'deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic

realm' (1985, xv). Hutcheon suggests that such works 'parodically use

and abuse the conventions of both popular and elite literature, and do

so in such a way that they can actually use the invasive culture

industry to challenge its own commodification processes from within'

(1988,20). The same is true of the writer's own situation. Mamet's

theatre is 'thoroughly suffused with the assumptions of capitalism,

which he otherwise chooses to see as evidence, if not the cause, of a

destructive alienation. He is, in short, a part of the problem which he

addresses, But, continues Bigsby, 'he is acutely aware of this' (1985b,

65). If plays like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Rose and Speed-the-

E1z., satirize materialistic attitudes, they do so within increasingly

commercial forms. Indeed, in the latter play Gould, whose exploits are

both ironized and celebrated, is not dissimilar to Namet himself, who

has rejected Hollywood by deciding to film his own scripts, while at the

same time unashamedly exploiting it for commercial gain (In a personal

appearance at London's National Theatre in 1989 he declared he would

pocket 'every fucking penny' he received for his work in Hollywood).

This simultaneous rejection and celebration of commercialism is evident

in his aforementioned interest in Aristotelian narrative structure: its

derivation from the Greek philosopher suggests an affinity with 'high'

culture, while at the same time it persist; - jr. debased form - in the

- 43 -

'lowest' kinds of commercial dross, which a radical critic like Augusto

Boal regards as repressive, being 'designed to bridle the individual, to

adjust him to what pre--exists' (979,47).

This erosion is perhaps most eviäent in postmodernism's delight in

parody, or what Jameson evocatively terms 'the ---kyles in the m {nary

museum' (1985,115). Hutoheon claims most post oderni_t works are

'parodic in their intertextual relations to the traditions and

conventions of the genres involved ,,. Parody is a perfect postmodern

form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and

challenges that which it parodies' (1988,11). Of course, not all

parodies are postmodernist. Much of Mamet's A Life in the Theatre

consists of alternating scenes of parody and something approximating a

humanist tragedy; the parodies of outmoded dramatic styles remain

dramatically and semantically distinct from the other scenes, By

contrast, Hutcheon notes 'the subversive potential of irony, parody, and

humor in contesting the universalizing pretentiont-z of "serious" art'

(1988,19), But parody cuts both ways; and, in a postmodernist artwork

which, to borrow Jameson's distinction (1985,112) , no longer "quotes"

popular forms but "incorporates" them, it is a moot point as to whether-

the high form mocks the lower or the lower mocks the higher, which is

how the ending of Speed-the-Flow manages to offer both an Aristotelian

catharsis and a Hollywoodesque happy ending which combines renewed

friendship with material success.

A Baudrillardian postmodernism would go beyond both parody and

incorporation and see distinctions as being not simply eroded but

eradicated by simulation. This movement from parody to simulation

allows. a particularly interesting comparison between Mamet and is

near-contemporary, Sam Shepard, in what i=- pert--7- th= moat cr plex

- 44 -

and interesting of Shepard's plays, The Tooth of Crime, a bizarre battle,

a 'style match' (Shepard 1985,230), can be seen (by Leonard Wilcox, for

instance, in an article [Wilcox 19871 to which the following discussion

of the play is indebted) to dramatize the trans 'ti-n_ from modernism to

postmodernism. Like Ezra Pound or IS, Eliot, Ross wants to preser; 7e or

create 'a sense of tradition' (Shepard 1985,216 `, { go back to 'ýl e

origins' (239) to shore up his Increasingly fragile , Z- ýf hi self as

'an original man' (241). But hi--, opponent, Crow, is tl e inevitable

victor, not only because he represents 'the present' (239), but because

this present appropriates and simulates the 'originality' to which Hoss

futilely clings. Crow, for instance, produces an exact replica of Hoc='s

walk; and Shepard's stage direction stresses 'It's important that he gets

inside the feeling of Hoss's walk and not just the outer form' (228) -a

manoeuvre which startlingly anticipates the current New York dance craze

of "vogueing". Where Hoss expresses hic dislike of being 'Stuck in my

image' (224), Crow sings 'I believe in my mask - The man I made up is

me' (232). For Crow, the mask i non--representational; behind it there

is nothing (in contrast to Hoss'` d, iEtinction between 'or', -, ins' and

'image'). Hose's suicide indioa _e his inability to cope with an

existence in which he is 'pulled and punched around from one image to

another', in which 'Nothing takes a solid form' (243); but perhaps it

indicates also Shepard's own alarm at the defeat of tradition and stable

signifieds. He seems, like Eliot, to fuse an innovatory style with a

modernist desire to create an existence apart from decadence or chaos;

where Eliot takes refuge in the past, Shepard looks to the desert.

Like Hoss in his appeal to 'heart', Teach in American Buffalo wants

to cling to the idea of essences, also by fusing a bodily or spiritual

image with moral absolutes; but now it is Teach 'him_alf who unler-nines

- 45 -

them. An imagined slight causes him to protest, 'There is not one loya?

bone in that bitch's body' (All, 14>; he appeals to The spirit of the

thing' (47), this thing being a burglary. The degraded or eroded

morality implied by such statements are products not only of simulation

but of a Nietzschean ressentlment. As argued in the rie:; t chapter,

Mamet's characters are beset by problem of _e paratirsg 'talk' from

'action'; they try to compensate for their inabil'ty to ac':. by

verbalizing fantasies of action. But reE entiment als:, explains th4-s

curious inversion and simulation of moral values we see in Teach, valuecF.

which are evoked to afford himself a spurious moral s-. _lpýeriority

undermined by his own actions. Like Don, he tries to exact an imaginary

revenge on the 'bunch of fucking thieves' (A$, 18) who have merely

recognized the worth of objects Teach himself would have thrown out

(19) , In a more complex example, Teach tries to straddle both sides of

the battle of urban crime, deploring the 'break down' of 'Social customs'

in which he is himself implicated (88). Yet if Teach confuses the

distinction between criminal and victim -a crucial manoeuvre in Mamet's

work - he retains a secure sense of who his main enemies are, Teach

fears and hates the police and simultaneously models his behavjo,, _. Ir on o

parody of theirs (88), Teach is a ra pstmodernist antihero -- a °rar star

who cannot exempt himself from implication in the cStru = t, ire he

attempts to oppose.

Finally, as its name would suggest, postmodernism should be situated

historically, as a post-war phenomenon which developed out of 'what is

often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer

society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational

capitalism' (Jameson 1985,113):

New types of consumption; planned obsolesce ce; an ever more rapid system of fashion and st-., Brig, chars; ='_,; the penetration

- 46

of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalled degree throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between city and country, center and province, by the suburb and by universal standardization; the growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival of automobile culture - these are some of the features which would seem to mark a radical break with that older prewar society in which high modernism was still an underground force. (Jameson 1985,125)

As this thesis will try to show, these postwar developments are central

to Mamet's work, which raises important questions a out its- relation to

and implication in the world in which it < <. d_ýsernir. ±eý'

For instance, Jameson argues that 'r ostnioderni _m replicates or

reproduces - reinforces - the logic of consumer capitalism', and leaves

open the question of 'whether there is also a way in which it resists

that logic' (1985,125). And yet Hutcheon argues that postmodernism is

'fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably

political' (1988,4). It may be useful here to introduce Foster's

distinction between 'a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism

of reaction' (1985, xii), The latter proposes a "false normativity"

derived from the belief 'that we live under a "total system" without hope

of redress - the very acquiescence that Ernest Mandel calls the

"ideology of late capitalism"' (Foster 1985, xii, xi). It is just 7nuch an

acquiescence which underlies much of Mamet's thought and work. For him,

capitalism is a totalizing system which leaves no room for any counter-

discourse. As he puts it:

We live in very selfish times. Nothing is given away free. Any impulse of creation or whimsy or iconoclasm which achieves general notice is immediately co-opted by risk capital, and its

popularity - which arose from its generosity and freedom of thought - is made to serve the turn of financial extortion. (ZM, 126)

- 47 -

One of the characters in All Men Are Whores argues that 'You cannot step

outside the culture' (AMA, 74). In Edmond, the suggestion that the

protagonist has achieved union with his 'Other'-figure is ironically

undermined: for Edmond has escaped into prison. In Speed-the-Plow, 'The

Bridge', which seems to offer an alternative vision of the world, is

exposed as nonsense. Sexual Perversity in Chicago is 'a play whose

satirical thrust is not untouched by an element of celebration' (Bigsby

1985a, 258). Any resistance is solely at the level of personal insight

or of 'the sentimental nature of the gesture towards reconstructed

relationships that he is tempted to make at the end of hi, = plays'

(Bigsby 1985b, 60), as in The Woods and American Buffalo.. This

sentimentality can highlight Mamet's reluctance to propose any overtly

political alternative to the situations in which his characters find

themselves; what he is interested in is how they work within and exploit

the constraints by which they are bound. Hence Mamet's own fascination

with popular success which led to the supreme irony in Sneed-the--Plow

of having the part of Karen - who at the beginning of the play appears

to offer fresh qualities of naivete, optimism and a lack of interest in

the purely material - played by Madonna, generally characterized by

reference to the title of her No, 1 hit record: 'Material Girl'

This scepticism about the pons'-bility of political opposition - in

the sense of an opposition not implicated within the structures it seeks

to oppose - is central to Mamet's work. The situational constraints on

Mamet's characters inform everything they say and do, and this is never

more true than when they proclaim their autonomy or meditate on the

poe_ibility of 'action', The next chapter develop=, the interrelation of

talk, action and situation in Mamet's dialogue.

- 48 -

CHAPTER 2. 'DO TOT BREAK THE CHAIN': SPEECH ACTS

i. Aristotle vs. Artaud in America

In his essay on Mamet, John Ditsky argues that the playwright belongs

to a tradition of American theatre 'in which problems and pain express

themselves in the inability to speak coherently, memorably, or to

apparent purpose ... a theatre in which the inability to act meaningfully

finds its oral expression in the inability to string words together'

(1980,25). It is an unusual argument, not so much in relation to Manet

but in relation to American drama, which in general seems to display a

greater confidence in the efficacy of rational discourse than does

modern European drama. Certainly, Ditsky's description would seem to

equate Mamet more closely with Beckett or Pinter than with O'Neill,

Miller or Williams.

In fact, Ruby Cohn has put forward an exactly opposite view of

American drama. Writing in 1971, she identified what she saw as a

developing crisis within American drama as it moved increasingly away

from the Aristotelian forms which had sustained it, and towards a

theatre heavily influenced by Artaud. 'After centuries of Aristotelian

dramaturgy, Artaud is the vatic force of today's young theater

scripted dialogue is being replaced by incantation, improvisation,

laboratory, participation, life style. How that may affect future drama

- if there is a future drama - remains an open question' (Cohn 1971,6).

The crisis concerned the status of language in the theatre: 'Aristotle

himself focuses on plot, and he assumes that plot is conveyed mainly

_4g_

through words', while on the other hand 'Artaud scorns the three parts

of Aristotelian dramaturgy, and most particularly thought in its garb of

words' (Cohn 1971,3). This articulates a familiar dichotomy in which

'Aristotle is now often held responsible for any verbal (or over-verbal)

concept of drama - the polar opposite of Artaud' (Kennedy 1983,3). For

Cohn, in rejecting Aristotle the new dramatists were also rejecting the

tradition of mainstream American theatre as it had developed from

Eugene O'Neill through Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to Edward

Albee. These four dramatists were 'the only Americans to write

consistently distinctive dialogue', and the premise of this 'American

dramatic dialogue of the past ... is Aristotelian - that dialogue furthers

plot and reveals character' (Cohn 1971,7,6). Cohn contrasted this with

the work of such groups as the Living Theater whose work was

characterized by shock and spectacle. 'The dialogue of such theater',

she concluded, 'will die with its immediacy', but in so doing this

'debased' dialogue might also destroy the theatre itself (Cohn 1971,

318).

Nearly twenty years on, these fears seem largely unfounded, The new

developments soon fizzled out and in retrospect can be seen as

essentially a Sixties phenomenon, and one not confined to America: Peter

Brook developed a 'theatre of cruelty' in London culminating in his 1966

production jam; Marat/Sade (1966), as the German dramatist Peter Weiss's

play is commonly known, was similarly influenced by Artaud; while at

this time the American director Charles Marovitz, also associated with

Artaudian ideas, was actually working in London. The reputations of

Cohn's four seminal American playwrights have suffered little lasting

damage. The work of Sam Shepard, a dramatist already writing in the

mid-1960s and who became arguably the most important American

_5p_

playwright of the 1970s, encompasses the two poles: he has frequently

experimented with non-verbal theatrical elements - particularly music.

but also sound effects and lighting - in plays as diverse as The Tooth

of Crime (1972) and Savage/Love (1981), and he has always been

particularly interested in exploiting the physical properties of stage

space as a battleground between characters; yet most of his major plays,

such as True West (1980) and Fool For Love (1983) have been essentially

verbal, even if the words question the power of language itself.

Mamet has developed this traditionally American concern with

language and dialogue in drama, which he discusses in terms similar to

Cohn's. His evaluative judgments on contemporary art are heavily

influenced by a dichotomy between the experimental, which he dislikes,

and a classical, Aristotelian pattern of which he approves:

the action in the play means the progress of a character toward a goal on the stage, because that is the convention of the theatre - to reach up and grab a ring to uncover some truth, which usually takes a lot of talk. I have always thought that mixed media and performance art was basically

garbage, very decadent, and the sign of a deep unrest, the sign really of a cultural disease -a turning of one's back on a regenerative cultural institution in favour of novelty ... All of us read Artaud, we're very influenced by Artaud, but finally it does not work. It is like black people trying to be white or white people trying to be black. There is a certain learned, habituated, perhaps even genetic cultural need for the rituals of the culture in which you exist and which is your culture. (qtd. in Schvey 1988b, 90)

As the actor, Robert, puts it in A Life in the Theatre, 'Artistic

experimentation is shit' (LI, 37) (although Robert's confusion is evident

in his statement that 'You start from the beginning and go through the

middle, and wind up at the end' [23] -a parody of Aristotle). Mamet

feels 'it is the sign of a very decayed and decadent society that we no

longer apply ourselves to the old norms to renew ourselves, but have to

find new ones' (qtd. in Schvey 1988b, 91), and he has therefore made a

- 51 -

conscious effort to work within the restrictions of Aristotelian form -

a practice which, he believes, 'makes better plays' (qtd. in Schvey

1988b, 95).

Some of the implications of this purist position are considered in

the discussion of narrative in chapter 4. The present chapter considers

some of Namet's characteristic verbal patterns and aims to show that

they are inseparable not only from narrative but from such dominant

thematic concerns as sexuality and a general demand for instant

gratification. Language is irrevocably implicated in these structures

because it is almost the only weapon the characters have in their search

for fulfilment, and therefore in itself constitutes most of the action of

the plays. Language, that is to say, is performative.

11. Speech acts

Any utterance is performative and illocutionary. The terms are those of

speech-act theory, a philosophy of language popularised by J. L. Austin,

who first distinguished between 'constative' (proposition-bearing)

utterances, and 'performative' utterances in which 'the issuing of the

utterance is the performing of an action' (Austin 1962,6).

There are problems with this distinction. First, constatives appeal

to extra-linguistic or extra-contextual 'facts' which some philosophers

and critics would say do not exist. J. R. Searle proposes a distinction

between 'brute' and 'institutional' facts (1969,50-53), which is

questioned by Stanley Fish on the grounds that all facts are 'discourse

specific ... and that therefore no one can claim for any language a

special relationship to the facts as they "simply are", unmediated by

social or conventional assumptions' (1980,199). But 'I am not claiming

that there are no facts; I am merely raising a question as to their

-- 5? --

status! do they exist outside conventions of discourse (which are then

more or less faithful to them) or do they follow from the assumptions

embedded in those same conventions? ' (Fish 1980,237). Arguments

between characters about 'facts', if unresolved, are likely to be the

result of a struggle for personal domination, in which one ontological

account of facts clashes with another.

It is this perception which enabled Austin E. Quigley to clarify the

action of Pinter's plays, in which apparent contradictions and

uncertainties about facts are really the result of the characters'

attempts 'to negotiate a mutual reality' (Quigley 1975,54). This

insight challenges the referential theory of meaning as regards not only

facts but also "personality", which

is a function of a compromise negotiated in a particular relationship. Because of this his Ca character's] operative identity will not be a single thing but something potentially as multiple as the relationships in which he engages ... Once the absolutist approach of referential meaning is abandoned we must perceive instead that language operates simply by making distinctions. (Quigley 1975,54,58)

For example, the dispute between Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter (1960)

about whether the correct phrase is 'light the gas' or 'light the kettle'

(Pinter 1976,141-42) is really a struggle for power: Ben feels his

authority threatened by Gus's refusal to accept that 'light the kettle' is

an acceptable term, and is forced to bring Gus round by almost violent

means. In The Caretaker (1960) the very different characters of Mick

and Aston provoke Davies into endless self-contradictions and

prevarications as he tries to project a different personality to each.

Mamet extends this contractual model of verbal communication to the

dominant commercial and sexual patterns of the world he explores. Power

relations are regulated by archetypal American business structures: the

- 53 -

hoodlums of American Buffalo resent the wealthier citizens of Chicago

and are also worried about the police; the office of Glengarry Glen Ross

is run according to the most ruthless of capitalist principles; and in

the Hollywood of Speed-the-Plow Fox knows his relationship to Gould

involves 'kissing your ass' (; gyp, 31), while Gould in turn is below

Richard Ross. In all these plays the limits of power are fixed, and the

possibilities of action for the characters are limited accordingly.

Pinter generally develops paradigmatic and relatively decontextualised

situations of verbal struggle, whereas Mamet is more interested in

placing his characters in a context which is specifically American.

There is a similar contrast with Beckett: 'Beckett's plays tend to take

place in some spatial and temporal void where Mamet's are clearly

locatable in an American setting' (Bigsby 1985a, 265).

The familiarity of their world allows Mamet's characters to agree on

the criteria according to which facts "count". More specifically, they

often discuss humorously bizarre topics, their mutual interest in which

gives us an insight into their world-view, which often diverges

comically from common sense, Austin's insistence that performatives are

successful only in 'appropriate circumstances' (1962,6) introduces the

possibility that what is appropriate for one group of speakers may be

quite inappropriate for another. Fish would account for this in terms

of an incompatibility between two "standard stories": to quote him again,

'what may be fiction for the characters in one standard story will be

obvious and commonsense truth for characters in another' (1980,199).

Xamet's characters often engage in debates and arrive at conclusions

which seem ludicrous to the audience, but this is only because their

standard story is different from ours. The 'Jonnie Fast' episode in

Lakeboat (Scene 17) is a case in point. Fred offers this sarcastic

- 54 -

response to Stan's failure to recognise Jonnie Fast's greatness: 'All I

know is, like you say, any guy who fucks all night and drinks a shitload

of champagne and can go out at five the next morning and rob a bank

without a hitch has to be no fucking good. I see your point' (L, 74).

This is a caricature, but only by pushing the claims for Fast's virility

to their extreme can Fred defend his idol against Stan's insistence that

he is no tougher than Shirley Temple. Fred and Stan, then, deny both

ordinary conceptions of laudable behaviour and the very criteria

according to which an argument should be evaluated: for them, a good

argument consists of extreme and unsubstantiated assertion. A second

criterion is directly relevant to the question of brute and institutional

facts. 'You don't know nothing', Fred tells Stan, 'You don't know a

champ when you're fucking looking at him in the movies, for chrissake'

(L, 73). Fred and Stan reject any idea that the movies are in any way

ontologically inferior to some other criterion of "reality". In contrast

to the 'Steve McQueen' monologue (DSN, 93-94), in which a character

describes what the actor was like when he met him in real life, Fred and

Stan imagine what would happen should Jonnie Fast come up against Clint

Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef, eroding the commonsense distinction between

role and actor. It is a beautifully crude illustration of the invasion

of the mind by the mass media -a subject considered further in the

last section of this chapter - and for this reason, their agreement

about what constitute valid criteria for debate is more important than

their disagreement about movie stars.

A further objection to the constative-performative division is that

constatives are themselves performative:

Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act ... It is essential to realize that

- 55 -

'true' and 'false', like 'free' and 'unfree', do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions. (Austin 1962,139,145)

To go further into such matters as 'circumstances' and 'intentions'

Austin seeks to define and give a taxonomy of 'illocutionary acts', an

illocutionary act being the 'performance of an act in saying something

as opposed to performance of an act of saying something' (1962,99-100).

Illocutionary acts include such things as promising, threatening and

betting, which should sufficiently indicate their relevance to a

discussion of Mamet's work.

Different conditions for successful performance obtain in different

communities and between different speakers. An interesting example is

this exchange from American Buffalo:

TEACH (To Bob): How is it out there? BOB: It's okay. TEACH: Is it going to rain? BOB: Today? TEACH: Yeah. BOB: I don't know,

Pause.

TEACH: BOB: TEACH: DON: TEACH: BOB: TEACH:

Well, what do It might . You think so, Teach ... What? I'm na What? I don't think

you think?

huh?

t saying anything.

I'm saying anything here, (AB, 31))

Don is quick to realise that, in this context, 'Is it going to rain? '

almost constitutes a threat. Such displacement of words from their

familiar contexts is doubtless one of the elements which has encouraged

so many commentators to describe Mamet's language as "poetic". Bob

fails to understand Teach's meaning only because he is stupid -a fact

- 56 -

Teach exploits by persisting with his question, to Bob's further

discomfiture. Austin observes that 'very commonly the same sentence is

used on different occasions of utterance in both ways, performative and

constative' (1962,67), and Teach's defence - 'I don't think I'm saying

anything here' - rests on a disingenuous distinction between constative

(state of the weather) and performative (threat to Bob) uses of the same

words. In the draft version Teach elaborates on this defence. He

claims merely to be 'asking Bob about the weather outside'; yet when Bob

claims to know what the pig legspreader is and is then unable to

demonstrate this, Teach continues, 'You see, Don, I don't think I'm saying

anything here' (am, typescript, 1-33,34). That both Teach and Don

understand precisely what Teach means here suggests a high degree of

linguistic understanding between them. The same applies to factua?

knowledge: Don and Teach are able to refer to the Chicago World's Fair

of 1933 as 'the thing', without fear of misunderstanding (&a, 17-18),

Threats, and the response to them, are good examples of what Austin

calls 'perlocutionary' acts and effects. A perlocutionary act is 'what we

bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing,

persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading' (Austin

1962,108). Austin immediately notes an obvious objection: 'clearly any,

or almost any, perlocutionary act is liable to be brought off, in

sufficiently special circumstances, by the issuing, with or without

calculation, of any utterance whatsoever' (109). The effect, therefore,

'amounts to bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the

force of the locution. So the performance of an illocutionary act

involves the securing of uptake' (116). This puts a premium on

intelligibility and conscious intention: 'the ideology of speech-act

theory is meaning' (Fish 1980,243), depending as it does on 'the

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teleological lure of consciousness' (Derrida 1982,327) and the

assumption that the speaker really means what he says - which is why

Plays such as Mamet's, which detail the vulnerability of speech acts to

various forms of deception and also to involuntary associations

(particularly of a bathetically diminished mythology), enforce a

reconsideration of the power relations between speakers. These points

are considered later in this thesis.

Fish provides a further objection to perlocutionary effects.

Illocutionary acts and effects occur because speakers are members of the

same community (that is, they are conventional), but perlocutionary

effects, being contingent, cannot be predicted. 'Speech-act rules ... are

constitutive; they do not regulate behaviour but enumerate the procedures

which define it' (Fish 1980,228), and therefore perlocutionary effects

have no place in speech-act theory. In fact, the objection of which

Austin first took note destroys the possibility of a fully-regulated

contract between speaker and listener. As Fish explains: 'what

illocutionary acts produce is recognition that they have been produced'

(1980,222); there is no other automatic perlocutionary effect. A

response may be enforced by the speaker, but more often the second

party has considerable autonomy and may return a rebuke, a threat, a

contradiction or almost anything else. Not the least important possible

response is silence. As will be argued, much of the tension of Mamet's

dialogue arises from his exploitation of the addressee's autonomy and

the consequent efforts of the speaker to constrain it.

A final critique of Austin needs to be outlined because it is

particularly relevant to theatre, and especially to a drama of verbal

deception such as Namet's. Kennedy observes that the very names given

by Austin and other philosophers to "the speech act" and to

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"performative" utterances points to their relevance to both conversation

and to dramatic/theatrical performance' (1983,9). This i=_ important,

because the possibility of theatrical simulation challenges the very idea

of "successful" performatives which depend for their effect on a

distinction between the genuine and the counterfeit. In fact, Austin's

observation of 'infelicities' acknowledges the possibility of a mimetic,

insincere replication of a speech act; and 'infelicity is an ill to which

all acts are heir which have the general character of a ritual or

ceremonial, all conventional acts' (Austin 1962,18-19). The danger is

that the conventional procedures which constitute the successful

performance of an illocutionary act by themselves eliminate the

possibility of establishing the sincerity of the person who performs

them, and Kennedy is certainly right to argue that "'Sincerity" can

seldom be taken for granted in dramatic dialogue' (1983,23). In an

essay on childhood, Mamet records that the development from innocence

to an adult cynicism occurred 'the day when one discovered it was

possible to swear falsely' (WIR, 6). Elsewhere he states that 'Drama is

basically historically about lies, somebody lying to somebody' (qtd. in

Schvey 1988b, 91); and the point may be extended to encompass the

relationships between playwright, play, character, actor and audience.

In 'Litko', a rather Brechtian 'dramatic monologue', the eponymous figure

comments on the phrase "I sincerely hope" by asking 'whether the said

hope is that of the character (that is to say, the playwright) or of the

actor'; in which latter case there are 'extenuating circumstances' (EM,

62).

Derrida notes that in Austin's book 'the value or risk of being open

to failure ... is not examined as an essential predicate or law' (1982,

324), a law Derrida proceeds to demonstrate:

- 59 -

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new context_ in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called "normal" functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way? (1982,320-21)

What Derrida calls the 'general citationality' or 'general iterability' of

language (1982,325) thereby challenges the realist conception of "human

nature", a relatively stable set of attitudes and responses, and replaces

it with a postmodernist awareness alive to the possibilities of

counterfeit behaviour and language, which thereby undermines the

stability of the subject. These ideas are clearly of major importance to

a consideration of Mamet's work. For instance, the "human nature" of

which he speaks in his essays is contravened by the confidence men of

the plays and films, who depend on the law of 'general iterability' to

practise their deceptions. Confidence games are considered further in

chapter 4; but one example may be given here of a situation in which

their importance emerges with striking clarity. This is the encounter

between Levene and the Nyborgs in Glengarry Glen Ross.

The Nyborgs have no intention of buying; they 'just like talking to

salesmen' (C&$, 62), and Levene's mistake lies in believing he controls

the conversation - we realise retrospectively that it is he who has been

duped into listening to them. Theirs, however, is a very special kind of

talking, since by Levene's own account they said 'Not a word' for twenty-

two minutes (42). The Nyborgs encapsulate several kinds of false

listening. Their silence, which Levene thinks a sign of their utter

defeat, turns out to have quite other connotations: smugness, insanity, a

- 60 -

dumbness brought on because they are deaf to the conventions of

salesmanship; yet they imitate those conventions to the point of

convincing Levene that he has pulled off a great sale. Levene is

destroyed by the successful simulation of his own art.

The exploitation of conventional rules of behaviour is foregrounded

by the exaggerated formality of the sale. Dean describes Levene's

speech as 'almost religious, with ceremonial and liturgical overtones',

while the after-sale drinks resemble 'libations' (1987,331). But in

fact Levene's description of the sequence of events recalls nothing so

much as a murder followed by a funeral and a wake. The Nyborgs 'both

kind of imperceptibly slumped', after which the atmosphere became

'solemn'; the participants formally shook hands, then drank a toast in

silence (ORE, 43). So all concerned participated in a parodic imitation

of funeral rites - surprisingly, this being ostensibly an occasion for

celebration. Yet it is an apt metaphor: Levene thinks it is the

financial ruin of the Hyborgs; in fact it is his own. The deception on

both sides is highly subtle: the Nyborgs recognise that the salesman

must see them as victims, even though he pretends to be pleased for

them, and they accordingly enact a death scene for his benefit; Levene,

purportedly delighted at seeing his clients act wisely, inaugurates the

solemn toast to underscore the importance of the event, while in fact

being delighted at having - apparently - duped them. It is the

ceremonial nature of the events, their ritual quality, which allows these

manifold deceptions to pass unnoticed. The confidence tricks which

permeate Mamet's work at every level are therefore inseparable from the

conventionality of verbal and physical actions.

- 61 -

iii. Talk vs. action

As the phrase 'performative language' implies, there is a sense in which

to speak is always also to act. As Marnet observes, 'in the theatre

words are actions' (qtd. in Ranvaud 1988,232). This general rule of

speech can be foregrounded to a greater or a lesser extent according to

the dramatic situation, whether or not the language sounds superficially

naturalistic. For instance, as Kennedy argues, 'The paradox of Pinter's

dialogue has always been that while it is much nearer to one line of

naturalism (the subtle line from Chekhov) than anything in Beckett, the

overall shaping of the dialogue tends to foreground what sounds non-

natural, what dislocates encounter and verbal exchange' (1983,220). But

if Mamet develops this essentially European dialogic form, equally he

belongs to an American literary tradition which creates archetypal

characters - con-men, storytellers, gamblers, salesmen - deeply rooted

in the history and mythology of opportunity and expansion, who combine

this archetypal significance with a foregrounding of language as

performance. Later chapters will develop these connections further, but

the point needs emphasizing here because many of Mamet's characters

represent a more cynical development, one which mistrusts the efficacy

of language and which therefore attempts a self-contradictory escape

from it into some other form of "action". Salesmen can sell only by

talking; so when Levene says of Moss, 'He talks, he talks a good game,

(but] look at the board, and it's me' (Or. LR, 4), he is contradicting

himself, When Moss attacks the language of salesmanship he implicitly

attacks both salesmanship itself and the system which requires that

there be salesmen in the first place: 'a fuckin' man, worked all his life

has got to I... ] Cower in his boots C ... ] For some fuckin' "Sell ten

thousand and you win the steak knives" [ ... ] Sales promotion' (14). The

- 62 -

irony is that Moss delivers these lines in order to sell Aaronow the

idea of the robbery, just as Roma acknowledges that the Florida deal may

be 'Bullshit' immediately prior to selling it to Lingk (26). There is no

metacritical position which will allow them to perceive or admit the

duplicity of their talk or their job, because in this line of work their

talk is their job and all talk is duplicitous. Paul de Man says any

methodology 'has limitations that are not accessible to its own

analytical tools' (1982, xvii), and this is certainly the case here: the

methodology of salesmanship will not permit a separation of talk and

action because in this enterprise talk is action, and no other kind of

action is available. This is poignantly, if invidiously, illuminated by

Moss as he talks of Jerry Graff Is success in going independent. 'The

hard part is I... ] Just the act' (GGR, 15) : yearning for action, Moss

holds up as representative of this ideal a man who exists in the play

not as a character in his own right but as merely another subject for

discussion, and who in any case has siiply made one more move in the

sales game.

The attempt and failure to separate talk and action is commonplace

in Mamet's plays, as when Don informs Bob that 'Action talks and

bullshit walks' (ß$, 3) only to find himself thwarted in every physical

action he tries to undertake; as with Moss's plans and the 'Jonnie Fast'

episode of Lakeboat, the 'action' of which Don speaks is itself

'bullshit', as the play's conclusion makes clear. Similarly, in a passage

in the draft of Ein omitted from the published version, the ever-

frustrated protagonist tells Glenna 'Our only treasure is to act' (E,

typescript, 59). The characters' need to see themselves as men of

action suggests a certain Nietzschean resentment about their own

impotence, encapsulated in their reduction to mere 'talk'.

- 63 -

In this way Mamet takes to mock-heroic proportions a dichotomy

between talk and action familiar in modern drama and which is

exemplified by the closing moments of Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "'Yes,

let's go. " They do not move' (Beckett 1965,94). 'It is as if a new

"dissociation of sensibility" had set in - tending to disjoin speech and

action. Such a disjunction becomes something like a creative principle

- and the source of several technical innovations in dialogue -- in the

plays of Beckett, Pinter and others' (Kennedy 1975,20). Namet's

characters likewise separate 'talk' and 'action', but it is important to

stress the variety of creative possibilities opened up by this

dichotomy, for Namet's work is far from identical to that of Beckett and

Pinter in this respect.

A provisional contrast, for example, can be made by reference to

John Peter's important distinction between what he terms 'open' and

'closed' plays:

the nature of Aeschylus' and Ibsen's plays implies that between

us and its events there is a dialogue of comprehension ... what we call conventional plays are full of precisely such things (arguments open to question]. To understand them is part of our dialogue with the play. We cannot conduct such a dialogue

with Waiting for Godot, because it has- no such hidden implications ... It is not open to questions. I shall call it a closed play. By contrast, Agamemnon and Ghosta are open plays. (Peter 1987,15-16)

Mamet has often stated his admiration for Beckett and Pinter, and

several commentators have noted resemblances such as that between Godot

and Mitch and Murray -a connection discussed further later in this

chapter. But there is at least one crucial difference: there is no

answer to the question of Godot's identity, whereas it is very clear who

Mitch and Murray are and what is the nature and extent of their control

over the salesmen. If Godot is a closed play, Glengarry Glen Ross is

- 64 -

open, or at least more open. Here again it is important to stress

Xamet's development of an American dramatic tradition as well as his

indebtedness to modern Anglo-European innovations. Only Albee and

Shepard among major American playwrights have written works which

might be called 'closed'; the plays of O'Neill, Miller and Williams are

all distinctly 'open': they are not only situated within but written

about a place and time familiar to the audience. Thee dramatists have,

as it were, a definable constituency, and the same is true of Diamet.

The situational constraints which have such a crippling effect on

language in the plays of Beckett and Pinter recur in Ma net's partly in

connection with the very aspects of his plays which are most 'open'.

For instance, the hierarchical structure of the office in Glengarry Glen

Ross stands metonymically for the similar structures encountered

everywhere in Western business and company life. The salesmen must act

according to rules set in place by Mitch and Murray, and this sets up a

yearning for 'action' which can never be fulfilled except by law-

breaking, a step which paradoxically diminishes their stature by

defining them as rebellious children impotently railing against

authority. (The perversion of the family unit is examined in the next

chapter. )

Because, finally, the characters cannot escape from language into

action, and because, also, they are all too aware of being constrained by

their language as much as by their situation, they ridicule the whole

concept of 'talk' as much as they struggle to master it. The words 'blah

blah blah' are heard often in Mamet's plays, most prominently in qua

Perversity in Chicago. Examples are Bernard's account of Danny's

relationship with Deborah C'the kid asks me "Bernie. Blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, b1ah. The broad this, the broad that, blah

- 65 -

blah blah, " Right? ' tS, 37]); Danny's dismissal of Deborah's argument

during their late night row ('blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah

blah. Jesus' (45]); and this neat variation on the phrase by Bernard;

'Tits and Ass. Tits and Ass. Tits and Ass. Tits and Ass. Blab de

Bloo. Blah de Bloo. Blah de Bloo. Blah de Bloo' (47). The latter is a

perfect exploitation of nonsense by Mamet, for it exposes its double

purpose: first, Bernard's interest in sex has reached saturation point -

we know what he means even by gibberish like this; second, despite his

obsession Bernard literally does not know what he is talking about.

Nonsense, then, can be used to omit both necessary and unnecessary

information, either unconsciously (as here, such ignorance being a

condition of Bernard's frustration) or consciously, as when Moss

deliberately makes his meaning unclear in order to ensnare Aaronow.

Alongside this general suspicion of language is a particular

mistrust of technical jargon. 'Fuck marshalling the leads', Levene tells

Williamson. 'What the fuck talk is that? What the fuck talk is that?

Where did you learn that? In school.,.? (Pause. ) That's "talk", my

friend, that's "talk". Our job is to sell' ($, 5). Such passages show

the influence of Thorstein Veblen, who believed that 'Except where it is

adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a

special slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence

that the occupation in question is substantially make-believe' <Veblen

1953,171) -a passage paraphrased by Mamet in an essay (I., 5). Of

course this 'make-believe', this mere 'talk', performs an essential

function. When Lingk enters unexpectedly in Act Two of Glengarry Glen

Ross, Roma tells his supposed customer, Levene: 'You look when you get

home A-3 through A-14 and 26 through 30' (GGR, 45). Roma creates an

inferiority complex in an outsider unable to understand the language. A

- 66 -

power structure is set up which elevates Roma and Levene over the

uninitiated Lingk, and Roma drives this home by pretending that Levene

is 'tbe Senior Vice-President American Express' (47) and he himself a

member of the board which drafted the statute on which Lingk is

dependent. Technical jargon may be make-believe to those in the know,

but it intimidates those who aren't; and so it cannot be abandoned by

the salesman as it is an important sales technique (but the value we

place on such a practice may be gauged by considering the colloquial

term "bullshitting"). The 'blah blah blah' passages similarly point to a

law of diminishing returns affecting such language - once its meaning

has been grasped it loses its mystique and becomes pimply one more

component in a boundless agglomeration of words,

Of course, this simultaneous dependence on and mistrust of language

is commonplace to the point of cliche in the literature of this century.

What perhaps makes Mamet's work distinctive is the appeal to shared

conventions which, however, merely reproduce in the structure of the

dialogue the very commercial and sexual pressures which tend to isolate

the characters from one another in the first place. These conventions

by which language reproduces other forms of social interaction are the

contract and the seduction.

iv. Verbal contracts

For language to function as Austin suggests demands a minimal level of

co-operation between speakers. In All Men Are Whores Kevin suggests

that 'one can only learn from these encounters if one makes some sort of

compact with the person with whom one is spending time'; and he uses

the word 'contracts' to describe these 'avowals of desire' (AMAH, 78).

'Contracts' is also the term Ross Chambers uses in attempting to define

- 67 -

the agreement a teller and a listener must come to if any value is to be

derived from a story, The authority of the speaker 'is relational, the

result of an act of authorization on the part of those subject to the

power, and hence something to be earned' (Chambers 1984,50). Usually

this agreement between characters is implicit in the situation. On

other occasions characters refer explicitly to a contractual situation,

as in All Men Are Whores, or in The Woods when Ruth states that her

grandmother and her husband were bound by a 'vow' (1,48). At times the

legal or commercial vocabulary applied to emotional ties has a

deliberately ironic, bathetic force - most notably when Roma informs

Lingk 'You have a contract with your wife' (, $, 55), so reducing his

marriage to the level of a financial transaction.

More inherently dramatic, insofar as the construction of

dialogue is foregrounded, are those moments when a verbal contract is

negotiated between characters. The following exchange is a particularly

noticeable example:

AARONOW: I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just ...

MOSS: No, we're just .., AARONOW: We're just 'talking' about it. MOSS : We're just speaking about it. (G R, 18)

Each character is concerned to establish precisely the rules according

to which the discussion is to be conducted (though it soon becomes clear

that Moss is cheating). More so than Pinter's, Mamet's characters are

self-consciously aware of using language to create relationships, in the

literal sense of being particularly interested in defining precisely what

words like 'talking', 'speaking' and 'saying' mean. In the conversation

above it appears that Moss has established a fine linguistic distinction,

in which 'talking' is serious business while 'speaking' is merely idle or

- 68 -

hypothetical banter. But this turns out not to be so at all. Moss

almost immediately reassures Aaronow that 'We're just talking' (CM, 1"D).

thereby setting up an opposition not between 'talking' and 'speaking' but

between 'talking' and 'talking'. It soon transpires that even this

remodelled distinction is of no use to Aaronow, who is startled to

discover that 'we sat down to eat dinner, and here I'm a criminal .. '

(23), even though 'I thought that we were only talking' (22).

What has happened here? It is not quite that 'there Is no

distinction ... but the characters' need to find a distinction must be

fulfilled' (Dean 1987,314); rather it is that Moss has continually

created and remodelled distinctions in such a way as always to be one

step ahead of Aaronow; he uses language coercively, However, Moss has

sidestepped all the conventional procedures that would indicate the

successful completion of an illocutionary act, and has simply informed

Aaronow that such an act has indeed been completed and, moreover, that

it has had the desired perlocutionary effect:

NOSS: Your end's twenty-five. In or out. You tell me, you're out you take the consequences.

AARONOW: I do? MOSS : Yes.

Pause.

AARONOW: And why is that? MOSS: Because you listened. (GGL 23)

This is verbal terrorism, on two fronts. First, Moss exploits the rule-

governed nature of language to confound Aaronow, initially by making up

the rules himself and then by breaking them, Years before writing

Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet noted that 'Law is chimerical. Rules are

anarchistic. Whenever two people have to do something they make up

rules to meet just that situation, rules that will not bind them in

- 69 -

future situations' (qtd. in Gussow 1977a, 11)). Mess, however, has

decided that rules do not bind him even in the situation for whicl he

has just created them. Second, one can never be certain of having

produced a perlocutionary effect, and certainly not when one's own

illocutionary procedures have been as dubious as those of Moss. These

two points indicate, respectively, a strength and a weakness in any

speaker's position. The strength is that he is always free to break

rules and to initiate new ones. The weakness is that his power is

contingent on the listener's response. In trying to eliminate the

flexibility of this response, Moss paradoxically draws attention to his

own weakness. This is a more complex and so more interesting dramatic

situation than those moments of complete verbal domination often found

in Pinter's work - the assault of Goldberg and McCann on Stanley in

The Birthday Party (1958), for instance -a situation which forms the

whole action of his most recent plays, One for the Road (1984) and

Mountain Langure (1988), and has entirely eliminated the possibility of

dramatic interaction.

Dialogue in Mamet's plays, then, is frequently metacritical; it is the

subject of the dialogue itself. Mamet concentrates, to an extraordinary

degree, on what the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson called the 'phatic'

or 'contact' function of verbal communication-,

There are messages serving primarily to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me? "), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention ("Are

you listening? " or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me your ears! " - and on the other end of the wire "Um--hum! "). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski's terms PHATIC function, may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by

entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. (Jakobson 1960,356)

- 70 -

'Do not break the chain', insists the Chainletter in The Water Engine

(y 12), the chain by which it purports to believe that 'All people are

connected' (53) - so voicing abstractly the fear of so many of Mamet's

characters of being cut off from verbal communication with others. A

good example is the dialogue conducted by Teach and Don at the end of

Act One of American Buffalo:

TEACH: [... 1 I'll see you around eleven. DON: O'clock. TEACH: Here. DON: Right. TEACH: And don't worry about anything. DON :I won't. TEACH: I don't want to hear you're worrying about a god-

damned thing. DOA: You won't, Teach. TEACH: You're sure you want Fletch coming with us? DON: Yes. TEACH: All right, then, so long as you're sure. DON: I'm sure, Teach. TEACH: Then I'm going to see you tonight. DON: Goddamn right you are. TEACH: I am seeing you later. DON: I know, TEACH: Good-bye. DON: Good-bye. TEACH: I want to make one thing plain before I go, Don. I

am not mad at you. DON: I know. TEACH: All right, then. DON: You have a good nap. TEACH: I will.

TEACH exits.

DOH: Fuckin' business ... (All, 57-58)

In an early interview Mamet explained why he was particularly proud of

this passage:

Some of my favorite writing is at the end of Act One (of American Buffalo] ,.. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to capture in my plays. Have you ever listened to two

people trying to say good-bye on the telephone? Especially in

a business situation. They jilt cannot say good-bye, And their language is so revealing of their relationship. All those quid pro quos. Who owes what to whom? They can end up saying 'Okay, okay, okay, ' for half an hour. I think I have a

- 71 -

gift for that kind of attenuated scene. (qtd. in Wetzsteon 1976,101)

The parenthetical comment here - 'Especially in a business situation' -

is interesting because it locates the point at which many of the

characteristic features of . Mamet's work intersect. 'Business', 'talk' and

interpersonal relations all appear in the plays as essentially

contractual, and all can be seen as metaphors for one another. The

'business' of American Buffalo, for example, amounts to little more than

talk, but equally talk is what enables their personal relationships to

continue. This consolatory persistence of relationships - particularly

that between Don and Bobby - is reminiscent of much of Beckett's work.

What makes Mamet's consolation highly ambivalent is that if the plays

depend an anything for their momentum and tension it is the knowledge

that contracts can and will be broken, and the speaker who initiates the

contract for personal gain may fall victim to the listener who decides

to get out of it.

To impose their authority on the world, Mamet's speakers present

themselves not as situated by language but as situators of language,

creating both the power structure within which the hearer must see

himself as subordinate, and the context within which the hearer is to

understand the discourse. This is why Roma claims to be a 'member of

the board' which drafted the statute protecting Lingk (Q , 50); in fact

the statute is a constraint on Roma, hence his eagerness to present

himself as its autonomous initiator, not as one situated and restrained

by it. The repeated exhortations to 'listen' are merely the most obvious

tactic by which Magnet's characters attempt to create this authority. As

such it is an instance of what Ross Chambers has termed 'situational

self-reflexivity', this being the 'produc[tion] by textual means [of] a

_? 2_

narrative situation that gives point to the narration' (1984,24,22).

This is in a sense a condition of communication: all verbal transactions

require a contract of some kind. In demanding what is already a

necessity, Mamet's speakers reveal their desperation to communicate; the

impatience to be accepted as an authority in itself undermines that

authority.

Success or failure depends on whether the speaker can persuade his

addressee to listen. On these terms Roma is a good salesman and Levene

a poor one. Roma's philosophical dissertation acts as a preamble to the

revelation of its purpose: 'This is a piece of land. Listen to what I'm

going to tell you now' QM, 26). Lingk's muteness in the scene

testifies to his acquiescence. Levene seems able on occasion to exert a

similarly mesmeric power, as when telling Roma of his sale to the

Ayborgs;

LEVENE: This is now, This is that thing that you've been dreaming of, you're going to find that suitcase on the train, the guy comes in the door, the bag that's full of money. This is it, Harriett... '

RAMA (reflectively). Harriett... (42)

Levene makes two sales: the land to the Nyborgs, the story to Roma. It

must be remembered, however, that Levene's successes with Roma and the

Nyborgs are bogus. The illocutionary act of selling has not been

successfully completed because one of the participants has cheated. The

addressee may subvert the speaker's intention in other ways, and

Levene's incompetence can be seen in his failure to forestall these.

Another example occurs just before he tells Roma the Vyborg story. He

asks Roma and Moss to 'Listen to this', only to have Moss reply that 'I

don't want to hear your fucking war stories', and, as Levene persists,

Moss succeeds in getting him to 'Shut the flack up' (38-40); Moss then

- 73 -

proceeds to argue a different point with Roma, whose deferred agreement

to listen to Levene's story smacks more of sympathy and self-interest

than genuine interest. Levene's weakness becomes evident if we note an

exact parallel with Lingk, who enters shortly afterwards and is

similarly reduced to pleading that 'I've got to talk to you' (45,47)

while, again, two other characters ignore him and pursue a different

conversation. In fact, Levene is only allowed to relate his story on

Roma's say-so and on Roma's terms-,

ROMA (to LEVENE) You were saying? (Pause. ) Come on. Come on, you got them in the kitchen, you got the stats spread out, you're in your shirtsleeves, you can smell it. Huh? Snap out of it, you're eating her crumb cake.

Pause.

LEVENE: I'm eating her crumb cake ... (41)

Like Moss in his encounter with Aaronow, Roma sets the rules and

perimeters of debate; Levene simply follows him. It is Roma who holds

power here. Levene consistently fails to grab and hold a listener's

attention. It happens again in his moment of apparent victory:

LEVENE: I-] I'm talking to you. Do you hear me ...? W ILL IAMSON : Yes. (Pause, ) I hear you. (57)

Williamson's persistent rebuffs to Levene always point to his awareness

of the nuances of words to do with talking:

LEVENE: [... ] We'll talk. WILLIAMSON: What are we going to say? (9)

LEVENE: [,,. 1 I'm talking to you, I'm trying to tell you something.

WILLIAMSON: You are? LEVENE: Yes, I am. WILLIAMSON: What are you trying to tell me? (57)

- 74 -

Given that words are the sole weapons of the salesman, it is indicative

of his failure that Levene is consistently outmanoeuvred by a mere

'company man' (57). Williamson only enters into conversation with

Levene when he knows he has an ace up his sleeve. Levene's problem, in

fact, is that he has lost the art of verbal seduction; he is unable to

impose narratorial authority.

v. Selection and closure

The relationship between storyteller and listener - and, rnetacritically,

between author and reader - is one of conditional authority. Mamet's

plays are full of stories, but the interest is often not so much in the

intrinsic value of the story itself but in its status as a tactical or

strategic move in the relationship between teller and listener. Two

important considerations here are the selective logic of the teller - the

strategies of inclusion and exclusion which constitute narratorial

authority - and closure, the culmination of a discourse which also,

paradoxically, paves the way for its defeat by an interrogative counter-

discourse.

In The Woods, these narratorial strategies are related to the lovers'

verbal and sexual models of communication, which are considered in

greater detail in the next section. The following extract, in which Ruth

is insisting that Rick tell her a story, exemplifies many of the

problems in their relationship:

RUTH: Please. Please. You can. (Pause. ) Please. I know that you know them. When you'd listen to them all those times.

Pause.

Please. NICK: All right. RUTH: Oh, thank you. Good. This is the best.

This is the best thing two people can do.

- 75 -

To live through things together. If they share what they have done before.

NICK prepares to tell story.

NICK: Have you ever fallen from great distances? RUTH: What? NICK: Have you ever fallen from great distances? RUTH: This is the story? (1,23)

The first problem is the generation of the story itself; both Nick and

Ruth demand stories in as crude a fashion as they demand sex. Related

problems arise when a character fails to prepare sufficiently for the

story. On one occasion Ruth simply starts a story by saying 'And she

had a bear here' (1,12); but not only has she given no warning that she

is going to tell a tale, her opening line is so vague as to compel Nick

to interrupt immediately with questions as to who said this, when, and

where. The imposition, then, may come from either an insistent listener

or an insistent teller; and the analogy with the lovers' demands for

attention and sex are clear.

A second problem arises because they are inexperienced listeners.

In the above passage Ruth does not understand that Nick has started

because she is unused to a narrative in which the teller interacts with

his audience. Her own practice is either to begin a tale with no

warning whatever, or to make the narratorial situation explicit and then

proceed. At one point, for instance, she simply tells Nick 'I'm going to

tell a bedtime story' (39). Her failure to understand Nick's

interactional procedure is symptomatic of a semi-autistic mentality

which she frequently displays.

A third problem is that the mutual incompetence of teller and

listener conspire to ensure that no story is satisfactorily completed.

Nick, for instance, begins the story of Herman Waltz, victim of Martian

subterfuge; but Ruth's constant interruptions, as she wonders whether or

- 76 -

not it is true, disrupt the narrative, and the tale fizzles out as Nick,

enervated, declares 'We do not know what goes on' (27). The failure to

close the story satisfactorily is paralleled by the refusal of the play

to end conclusively; it is unclear what the future holds for the lovers,

just as we do not know whether Ruth will find her way to the end of

'Babes in the Wood'.

This phenomenon of the deferred or abandoned story is symptomatic

of the final problem facing Nick and Ruth, which is quite simply that

they do not understand each other, just as they do not understand the

stories they hear. Formerly a tale told by a neighbour, the bear now

reappears to Nick in a nightmare, changed, with 'a huge erection' (97).

An even more interesting thing about this bear is that 'He has thoughts

and feelings, BUT HE CANNOT SPEAK' (97). As Carroll says, 'The bear is

associated both with Nick's inability to verbalise his own feelings and

with threat from a more powerful male who inhibits his self-assurance

and self-realisation' (1987,65). The image therefore captures a

narrative of both absolute power and absolute impotence: powerful,

because now embodied in a nightmare, an unbidden, inescapable,

unchallengeable rape of the mind; impotent, because unable to articulate

its own significance. The bear serves also, then, as an image of Nick's

relationship with Ruth: his desire to have her whenever he chooses ('I

can see your body anytime I want to' [1,85]), and his failure to

rationalize his desires in a form acceptable to her.

Bernie in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is unsuccessful in

relationships because, like the lovers in The Woods or Levene in

Glengarry Glen Ross, he fails to convince his hearers that to enter into

a verbal transaction is worthwhile. This is not because he fails to

secure "uptake", but on the contrary because he is too successful in

_77_

doing so - he reveals too early his purpose in entering into

conversation; he gives away the end too early. In a perfectly ambiguous

phrase, Danny tells Deb that Bernie 'has got some stories you are not

going to believe' (SY. C, 22), and we do not have to wait for the end of

the story to realise this; before Bernie has had the chance even to

introduce himself properly, Joan asks 'Are you making this up? ' (15).

The irony is that she wants to be seduced by him, but initially refuses

him precisely because he has offered her what she wants. Seduction

seems to be a peculiar illocutionary act in that both parties are aware

of the procedures involved but the securing of uptake must take place

not explicitly but, as it were, at one remove. Joan's eventual acceptance

of Bernie in this scene is degrading because she effectively equates

this intricate illocutionary act with more blunt and explicit ones such

as promising or bullying. Danny is only slightly more subtle. His

opening line to Deb - 'I saw you at the Art Institute' - is reasonable

enough, but he cannot maintain this for long and soon blurts out 'Is

someone taking up a lot of your time these days? ' (om, 18).

Such bluntness characterises all the relationships in these plays.

Bernard follows up his question to Danny, 'How are you getting along

with that girl? ', as follows:

DANNY: We're getting on just fine. (Pause. ) BERNARD: That's okay. (Pause. ) You don't want to talk about

it, we won't talk about it.. DANNY: I didn't say I didn't want to talk about it. (Pause, BERNARD: Does she give head? (pý, 28-29)

As in his encounter with Joan, Bernie is too quick to make explicit the

purpose underlying his apparently routine enquiries. And it is this

bluntness which makes others unwilling to 'talk about it'. In spite of

the frankness of some of the play's language, it seems that to speak

- 78 -

demands extended preparations before any really personal communication

can take place.

Therefore a successful narrative speech act is a selection of moves

chosen for their efficacy in a given situation. Once the listener has

worked out the principle on which that selection has been based,

however, he or she can appear to concur simply by allowing the narrative

to proceed according to that principle, inducing a false sense of

security in the speaker. This is what the Nyborgs do to Levene. A more

aggressive approach is to disrupt the narrative by offering a plausible

counter-principle according to which the narrative might have proceeded.

In this way one exposes a certain tyranny involved in storytelling. An

example is the Vermont Sketch 'Deer Dogs', in which Bunchy's attempt to

debate a legal problem about dog control is disrupted by the fictional

story he creates to illustrate it. By insisting on an answer to his

question ('How did Dave's dog get loose? ' [DER, 611), Larry prevents

Bunchy from bringing the fictional narrative to a satisfactory

conclusion at the same time as exposing the weakness of his argument.

A more intricate and elegant example of the same procedure is

provided by Prairie du Chien, Critics found little to say about this

piece when it appeared on a double-bill with The Shawl (in 1985 in New

York and in 1986 in London). It was widely regarded as a curtain-

raiser, even as 'nothing but an incomprehensible tall story' (Barnes

1985,96), and most contented themselves with a brief description of a

play which, apparently, 'relies more on atmosphere than substance'

(Shulman 1986,628). The point, however, is not to impress us with an

'atmospheric' story but to foreground the methods by which this

atmosphere is created in the interests of maintaining narratorial

authority.

- 79 -

The play is constructed around the interplay between two pairs of

characters. The role of the poker players emerges only gradually; at

first they take a back seat to the other pair, a man telling a story and

another who listens to him. The Listener does not know the story; for

him, as for the audience, the narrative is unpredictable. The

Storyteller, on the other hand, is the master of the narrative. His

decisions as to what information to give and what to withhold influence

the way the listener and the audience reconstruct the narrative for

themselves. And it is, in particular, the withholding of vital

information which gives the narrative its impetus and compels the

attention of the Listener.

Initially the Storyteller gives an air of mystery to the tale by

insisting that there are facts about it which cannot be known, 'no one

knew' the husband's past, for instance (Ff,, 27). This introduces an

almost subliminal refrain of privilege and exclusion: the Storyteller is

the sole authority, and the Listener and the audience are outcasts from

knowledge, like the jealous husband who 'always thought that he was

being cheated' (27). The Storyteller has a distinctively melodramatic

style, using adjectives of mood which quite crudely exaggerate the

mystery. Spring is 'disturbing'; there was 'murder in the air' (28). It

becomes plain that the Storyteller is combining a number of familiar

narrative motifs, such as the jealous husband and the woman whose

beauty fades under duress (27). Although the Storyteller wraps himself

in a cloak of exclusivity, then, there is already an air of familiarity

both to the events and to the style in which they are related; and this

may induce some suspicion about what the Storyteller is up to.

The story becomes more vivid as it progresses; but this involves

more than the addition of physical detail. The object of pursuit

- 80 -

becomes progressively less substantial: the living woman is reduced

successively to a dead woman, 'a form', 'it' (31), and finally to a void

of which only the burning clothing remains. And at this point a most

curious thing happens. The void inside the dress is transformed into

the sheriff, and simultaneously a tale which had every appearance of

being a ghost story suddenly turns into a psychological detective

thriller; it appears we must attribute the entire deception to a child-

molesting transvestite ventriloquist. The Storyteller's repetition of

supposedly significant details (33-36) indicates his satisfaction that

he has told a complete, coherent, and moral tale.

The Listener meanwhile has a dual function. For most of the story

his responses are monosyllabic, as he defers to the authority of the

teller. Once the story has reached its closure, however, he is in a

position to adopt a more critical attitude; and his wholly unexpected

question at this point - 'What happened to the animals? ' (33) -

demonstrates that the Storyteller has been deceptively selective in the

interests of improving his story. But the extent of this deception is

only apparent once the Storyteller has given up his authority over the

story by bringing it to a conclusion. Of narrative generally, Chambers

notes that

imparting one's experience incorporates a problem; for to the extent that the act of narration is a process of disclosure, in which the information that forms the source of narrative authority is transmitted to the narratee, the narrator gives up the basis of his or her authority in the very act of exercising it. (1984,50-51)

The Storyteller brought the story into the world; it is now severed from

him (although he is noticeably reluctant to let it go), and it has died;

its hearers are at liberty to perform the autopsy. And the clearest

sign of foul play is that there is a sheriff where the phantom should

- 81 -

be. Far from the sheriff deceiving the narrator, it is the narrator who

has deceived us, by suggesting that he was in pursuit of a spirit,

repeatedly insisting that he 'heard something' or 'saw something'.

At this point the connection between the two groupings on stage

becomes apparent. The Dealer has been creating his own fiction in

bluffing; but he reinforces this role by weaving another fiction around

the cards as pictorial representations (the king becomes a 'cowboy', for

instance [PC., 25]), and trying to impress on his opponent the

superiority of his fiction - 'Take it, 'cause you know you want it' (26).

The Gin Player is for the most part as mute as the Listener. But once

the Dealer has successfully deceived him - once the bluffing appears to

be over - the Gin Player is in a position to question the validity of

the narrative (the bluff) which the Dealer has put over on him,

Not only are there structural parallels between the stories; they

also, unknown to the parties involved, interact with one another. As the

Storyteller elaborates upon the frustrations leading to the farmer's

tragedy, the Dealer intones a similarly macabre commentary on the game:

'Soo-cide jacks, Man with the Axe' (28). And the card-players'

interruptions of the story, asking the porter for the time and then

creating the public uproar, produce desirable dramatic effects: the first

action provides the delay the Storyteller requires in order to increase

audience anticipation; the second, finally ending both the story and the

game, leave both in question, with the former undermined by the

Listener's question and the latter in tatters, there being no longer the

mutual trust required for the card game to proceed.

There is also a third narrative - that of the train journey within

which the other fictions operate. And this narrative too fails to come

_82_

to a satisfactory conclusion: the train, having started at Chicago bound

for Duluth, stops at Prairie du Chien, where the play leaves it.

So we may distinguish a final narrative, which is simply the play

itself. Once it has ended we are certain to attempt retrospectively to

unify and interpret it. But as might be expected, no definitive reading

can be made. For instance, there are suggestions of links between the

train journey and the story to which we listen - in each, one of the

characters is conspicuously black; the sleeping boy and sleeping sheriff

also suggest some kind of structural relation (32). One could perhaps

proceed in this way and produce some sort of algebra to demonstrate

that the train journey is a narrative transformation of the story. But

such procedures are themselves open to criticism. We have suggested

that both the Dealer and the Storyteller are operating deceptions, but

there is no way of proving this; we cannot provide a definitive

reconstruction. There is nothing, even within the story as it stands, to

prove that the interpretation given above is correct; it depends, for

instance, on whether the sheriff was mad at the time of the fire, or

whether he became so because of it. And he is not available for

interview. The play thus provokes attempts to arrive at a formal

closure of narrative or interpretation, while questioning the validity of

any such notion.

vi. Speech and seduction

Narratives and speech acts, then, are always open to interrogation. The

first question that might be asked of a speaker is why he is speaking

in the first place. According to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, We perform

verbal acts ... in order to extend our control over a world that is not

naturally disposed to serve our interests' (1978,85). Roland Barthes

- 83 -

similarly argues that 'language is always a matter of force, to speak is

to exercise a will to power; in the realm of speech there is no

innocence, no safety' (1977,192). We communicate to secure an advantage

for ourselves, and this is true even of apparently altruistic speech

acts. In House of Games Mike finds it easy to persuade a young soldier

to offer him money, Mike explains this 'philosophic principle'; "'Don't

Trust Nobody. Also this: everybody gets something out of every

transaction. What that nice kid gets is the opportunity to feel like a

good man' (Hr, 37). It is true also of the Teach-like figures,

ostensibly interested only in imparting useful information, who people

many of Namet's plays; for if constatives are always also performatives,

questions as to their accuracy or truth are always secondary to the

function they perform in an illocutionary act. For instance, when

Aaronow asks Roma what he should tell the police, Roma replies 'The

truth, George. Always tell the truth' (Q R, 35). But this is not because

an accurate account of the facts might be of use to the investigators;

it is because 'It's the easiest thing to remember' (35), and is therefore

of use primarily to Aaronow himself. Information is important not for

its intrinsic value but because those who control it control the rules

according to which a given speech situation may operate.

However, the success or failure of this 'will to power' is dependent

on the reception the listener accords the speaker. Essentially, then,

communication is an act of seduction, the aim of the speaker being to

secure the consent of a hearer (or 'seducee' [Chambers 1984,141) who

may or may not be disposed to listen. Many commentators have noticed

moments in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, when the verbal seduction

takes on sexual overtones. The encounter between Levene and the Nyborgs

has been called 'a great erotic scene' (Almansi 1986,206); Roma offers

- 84 -

his sales pitch to Lingk 'almost as if he were executing a homosexual

pick-up' (Billington 1983,822); while Jack Shepherd, who played Roma in

the play's first production in 1983, recorded that he found it difficult

to project himself as a convincing salesman 'until the author pointed

out that the process of salesmanship has much more in common with the

act of "getting laid" than it had to do with hustling and fast-talking

and so on. Life is full of surprises' (NTSN, 9). It is a precise

analogy, not only to salesmanship but to speech generally. Mamnet,

commenting on the techniques of playwriting, argues that 'If two people

don't want something from each other, then why are you having the scene?

... Power, that's another way of putting it ... the point is not to speak

the desire but to speak that which is most likely going to bring about

the desire' (qtd. in Savran 1987,16).

This close relation between speech and sex is particularly

illuminating in the three plays explicitly concerned with sexual

relations between men and women: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, All Men

Are Whores and The Voods. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago talking and

sex are so inextricably linked that they become metaphors for each

other. Joan loses her conversational virginity to Bernie:

BERNARD: Cockteaser. JOAN: I beg your pardon? BERNARD: You heard me. JOAN: I have never been called that in my life. BERNARD: Well, you just lost your cherry. (S, 17)

This is not seduction but rape. Joan did not ask to be 'come on to';

Bernie's conversation is an imposition. Seduction, verbal or sexual,

demands at least implicit co-operation between parties. Joan initially

denies Bernie but then wants to accept him, having received in the

interim only abuse. The implication is that Joan realises she is

- 85 -

sexually frustrated and is prepared to respond positively to not just a

crude but a failed attempt at seduction. Similarly, it is indicative of

the immaturity of Nick and Ruth in The Woods that they seem to know of

no other method of seduction than demand. 'Give me a kiss', insists

Nick; 'Do you want to make love? ' asks Ruth (1,5,68).

These sexual attitudes are partly a product of the plays'

construction. The brevity of Sexual Perversity in Chicago and of its

individual scenes both reflect and compel the rapid development of

relationships. The onstage isolation of the characters of All Men Are

Vhores confirms their sexual and emotional isolation. The leisurely

discursiveness of The Woods hints at greater depths, but although some

of the language does achieve the desired poetic effect (for reasons

discussed in chapter 1), finally it is rather empty, despite Cohn's

assertion in 1982 that it was 'Mamet's most searching play to date'

(1982,45) and Mamet's own contention that 'it is a wonderful play, a

very well-written play ... because it has a lot of meaning' (qtd. in

Schvey 1987,95). There are several reasons why its language should be

accounted a comparative failure: the patterns of sexual attraction and

repulsion between the characters are immediately apparent, and the

stylistic dichotomy between Ruth's lyricism and Nick's aggressive

demands merely reinforces this situation instead of questioning and

exploring it; there is an implicit gap between the characters' adolescent

perception of their situation and the audience's, which can lead not to

empathy but to condescension and accusations of banality; and the weight

of language is simply disproportionate to the situation, recalling the

lack of concision and the stylistic overkill which frequently mar

O'Reill's work and are usually refreshingly absent from Kamet's. Sexual

Perversity in Chicago is more successful partly because of its greater

- 86 -

concision but also because it retains an ironic gap not between the

audience's perception and the characters', but between the possibility of

successful sexual interaction and the characters' inability to verbalize

their demands in an acceptable form. There is also great comic

potential in the projection of adolescent fears and misunderstandings

about sex into the mouths of adult characters, All Men Are Whores, on

the other hand, is almost a theoretical piece, a series of monologic

inquiries into sexual relations which are interesting not so much as

drama but as explorations of the relation between verbal and sexual

interaction.

All of these plays retain the ghost of an idealized relationship

against which the failures they detail may be measured. It seems unfair

of Lieberson to condemn Mamet's plays as 'all too often reminiscent of

vaudeville and comic pornography or, at its worst, the coarse world of

Miami Jewish comics and female wrestling' (1988,4), given that one of

the passages he quotes in support is this:

DEBORAH: Ask me if I like the taste of come, DANNY: Do you like the taste of come? DEBORAH: Do I like the taste of come? DANNY: Yes. DEBORAH: Dan, I love the taste of come. It tastes like

everything ... good ... just , .. coming out of your cock

... the Junior Prom ... an Autumn afternoon ... DANNY: It doesn't taste a little bit like Clorox? GM, 31-

32)

It can hardly be pornographic given the comic disparity between

Deborah's playful delight in sex and Danny's nervous insecurity about it.

While it is true that 'The challenge here is to find ways to commune

with each other beyond sex' (Carroll 1987,57), in simply talking about

it they seem already to have embarked on that process.

- 87 -

In All Men Are Whores, Patti also is interested in mutual,

contractual understanding. Here the contact is specifically not

physical; she recognises that her lover's urge to hurt her is a

manifestation of his need for affection:

I want to hit you, he said. No you don't, I said. I do, though, he said. No, you don't I said. You know you don't. I do, though, he said. No, you don't. Come here. Come here. And then I, him, we went, over to the couch and sat down there and I held him a while, we sat there, and I got the blanket later on and put it over us and we went to sleep. (, 76)

Violent male fantasies are presented as either a product or a cause of

the separation between subject and object, and by dissolving this

dichotomy the aggression is dispersed. It is only when a character is

isolated that he explodes into violence. (This is also the case with

verbal violence, as will be argued later. ) At the end of the play, Patti

posits the idea of sex as a conscious act of mutual consolation, in

opposition to a determinist viewpoint:

Should we not, perhaps retrain ourselves to revel in the sexual act not as the consummation of predestined and regenerate desire, but rather as a two-part affirmation of our need for solace in extremis. [... ] In a world where nothing works. [ ... ] In which we render extreme unction with our genitalia. (AN$, 83-84)

The bathetic conclusion recalls Joan's comic over-intellectualization of

relationships in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, but without dissolving the

implications of the argument.

In fact it is the failure to receive such consolation which creates

a pattern of development characteristic of Mamet's plays: failure leads

to frustration which expresses itself in violence and a shift from

dialogue to monologue, which in turn is symptomatic of an almost

- 88 -

autistic sensibility. In Lakeboat the sailors try to compensate for the

absence of women by giving vent to the violent images this frustration

engenders; and it is the implications of this substitution of an

aggressively pornographic language for the act itself which Lieberson

fails to see when he describes as 'sexual sadism and degradation' (1988,

4) such scenes as that in which Fred explains 'THE WAY TO GET LAID IS

TO TREAT THEM LIKE SHIT' (L, 55; the phrase appears also in SEC,, 17).

Alternatively, characters artlessly blurt out their sexual desires,

further alienating the opposite sex. This alienation results in an

extreme separation of speaker and object. Bernie tells Dan, who has

assaulted an elevator, not to 'go looking for affection from inanimate

objects' (S2. C, 43). Danny tries to strike up a conversation with Deborah

while she is asleep (am, 43). 'Can't you hear me? ' pleads Ruth of Nick

as she simultaneously hits him (1,98).

All Men Are Whores again articulates this alienation. Like Pinter's

short plays Landscore. and Silence, the characters are physically

separated onstage, speak what are apparently soliloquies throughout, and

do not name the people with whom they are having their affairs. There

is, then, a visual as well as thematic confirmation of Sam's observation

that 'We are uprooted. / We have no connection' (AH, 82), an

observation specifically directed at sexual relations. Kevin says 'I

swear to God that if I have to spend another Sunday evening by myself I

am going to blow my brains out' <MA, 83). The characters of qua

Perversity in Chicago are similarly separated physically, as they decline

from apparent to real monologue. An ignorance of the partner's body and

sex ('What does it feel like to have a penis? [ ... 1 Do you miss having

tits? ' [SJýC,, 31]) goes hand in hand with a masturbatory preoccupation

with one's own. Deb confesses that 'The last time we made love, I

- 89 -

fantasized about other women'; Danny that 'The last time I masturbated I

kept thinking about my left hand' (STL, 32). As Bigsby says, in this

play 'the idea of masturbation recurs as an image of the hermeticism

which is at the heart of their experiences' (1985a, 260). In The Moods

there is a similar failure even on the level of physical sensation, Ruth

constantly asks Nick how he feels ('Are you lonely? ', 'Are you mad at

me? ', 'Do you want to make love? ', 'You don't have any feelings [... I What

are they? ' [1,66-711); but such questions reveal not so much concern for

Nick's feelings as a semi-autistic obsession with her own. She has a

narcissistic interest in sensory perceptions, all five of which are

enumerated early in the play: 'I held you. Could you feel that? ' (1,2);

'Everything smelled like iodine' (2); she listened to the crickets 'All

night long' (3); '1 saw a raccoon' (6); they talk about the taste of food

(9). The body seems to be regarded as a cherished receptor of

information, and everything outside as merely objects for contemplation.

At the end of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Bernie, watching the women

on the beach, thinks that he 'gaze[s] upon the highest man can wish for'

(; , 50) ; but the polarity between subject and object can only be

dissolved by verbal contact, and when this fails Bernie and Dan can only

explain it in terms of a fault in the girl's faculties:

BERNARD- Hi. DANNY: Hello there. (Pause. She walks by.. ) BERNARD: She's probably deaf, DANNY: She did look deaf, didn't she. BERNARD: Yeah. (Pause-) DANNY: Deaf bitch, (55)

The passage confirms their hostility towards a sex which attracts them

but which they repel, which is regarded as hostile and therefore 'deaf',

and whose inaccessibility fuels their sexual frustrations.

- 90 -

Ruth tells Nick in The Woods, 'You're all inside this thing you're in.

A shell, or something' (1,62), The point is made most emphatically in

the draft version of the speech, in which Ruth goes on to say 'phis is

fascist' (1, typescript, 58). It is fascistic because it reduces others

to objects existing solely for one's own satisfaction. This is the

context in which most of the violence of these three plays takes place.

Ruth tells the story of the Vikings, who 'used to go to sea and rape the

cabin boys' (1,80); and when she discovers Nick developing a similar

attitude towards herself ('I want to fuck you' (861), she accurately.

though bathetically, notes that this means 'You don't like women' (89).

Both All Men are Whores and The Woods suggest the fantasy element in

such male desires. Ruth mocks Nick with the idea that he is developing

'fantasies' of 'some poor babe you get to come here you can stick your

fingers in them' (1,, 86-87). Patti mentions her lover's 'fantasy' of

fighting off her male attacker: 'Because he'd hurt me and this filled him

with such rage the man should not be let to live. Because he thought of

me with great affection still' (AMA, 73), This 'great affection',

however, manifests itself in a fantasy in which Patti is left covered

with bruises while he does 'vile things' to her attacker (73). Kevin has

a similar fantasy, but on a global scale: 'When they drop the atom bomb,

are you going to make me soup???? / I want to see tattoos, and fuck you

with your eyeshadow' (AMAH, 75), which anticipates the fantasy of

Mamet's short story 'The Bridge'.

Bernie's justification for his actions moves towards an account of

the general condition of society. This justification is that Joan is, as

it were, asking for it. At first he wonders if "I don't find you

sexually attractive" is 'some new kind of line'; then he talks about what

'A nice young woman sitting by herself' is likely to be up to; then,

- 91 -

Hamlet to Joan's Ophelia, he tells her 'You don't want to get come on to,

go enroll in a convent'; and finally he reminds her that 'You're living

in a city in 1976' (am, 16). This series of remarks, like Moss's to

Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, aims to remove the autonomy of

response; Bernie tries to protect himself by eliminating language's

capacity to make distinctions, making "I don't find you sexually

attractive" mean "I do find you sexually attractive", in much the same

way as in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw (1969) Dr. Rance, who always

manages to make the facts fit his preconceptions, tells Prentice that

Geraldine 'may mean "Yes" when she says "No". It's elementary feminine

psychology' (Orton 1976,382). Clearly this is a totalitarian conception

of language which reserves the right to determine the meaning of every

statement.

But simultaneously the speaker's power is negated by the poverty of

the language which results from these processes of objectification,

Bigsby writes that 'Just as the theme of pornography is the self's total

command of the other, so its language is designed to facilitate that

command' (1985a, 261) ; yet in fact, in Mamet's plays at least, it

achieves the opposite effect. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago, 'Other

people are transformed into objects because it is as objects that they

can be dealt with, that they become predictable, safe' (Bigsby 1985a,

261), and yet in the process others are repelled; they reject verbal rape

where they might have accepted verbal seduction. Mamet believes that

for men, 'all exchanges with women [are] negotiations' (SE, 22), yet

negotiations are the one thing Bernie is not prepared to enter into.

Manet noted that in Sexual Perversity in Chicago 'men, in both their

language and behavior, regard women as objects of conquest, as beings

who possess what men want, yet refuse to yield it' (qtd. in Wetzsteon

_92_

1976,101). A language saturated with demands for coition both

expresses and perpetuates the lack of it.

Indeed, the obscenity of Mamet's dialogue can be defended on many

grounds. Lewis and Browne object that in American Buffalo 'The

effectiveness of the scatalogical language is diminished by overuse. At

best this language is the song of the alienated, the dispossessed -a

litany of expletives which stems from a real despair over the loss of

civilization, warmth, and humanity' (1981,66-68). But this attenuation

of the language by definition reduces its shock value and instead

encourages a more critical response from the audience, one which should

perceive a discrepancy between the situation and the extreme violence of

the language. This discrepancy - of which the most remarkable example

is Teach's description of Grace as a 'Southern bulidyke asshole ingrate

of a vicious nowhere cunt' for offering him a piece of toast (am,, 10) -

in itself constitutes one of the "poetic" effects of Mamet's language,

which is often enhanced by the facility with which the word 'fucking'

lends itself to iambic rhythm. It is not surprising that Namet has been

called a 'poet of swearwords, artist of invectives, and virtuoso of

obscene expressions' (Almansi 1986,199), For Almansi, such words meet

a kind of existential need; they 'save the character from despair ...

Anything, even the lowest obscenity, is preferable to an objective TK t SC., \ ; for

representation [of their life]' (1986,200). the presence of such

language in the plays are considered later;

but the main point which needs to be established in relation to the

interactive patterns of dialogue is that, in attempting to enforce the tkey

speaker's authority, ' remove it.

93 -

vii. The power of absence

It might seem that the obscene tirades which frequently tumble from the

mouths of Mamet's characters exemplify linguistic power, with the object

of the assault reduced to a 'cunt' or whatever. Lieberson, for example,

argues that Namet 'seems most effective when writing about men settling

scores, seeking to humiliate each other, getting even' (1988,4). But

this is only half-true. Certainly, there are many instances of one

character sadistically seeking to demolish another by force of words,

such as the attacks of Roma and Levene on Williamson in Glengarry Glen

Ross. However, there is little chance of 'getting even' by this method,

because characters who indulge in such outbursts generally do so only

when possibilities of linguistic communication have been exhausted; that

is, when the speaker no longer has any possibility of extracting

anything from a verbal exchange. In other words, in such situations

there is a necessary imbalance: either the speaker or the addressee is

impotent, and in Mamet's plays (unlike Pinter's) it is usually the

speaker. In this situation words serve not as verbal illustrations of

an already evident tyranny but crucially undermine authority in the very

attempt to impose it. As Benedict Nightingale notes, in Glengarry Glen

Ross 'Often the foul-mouthed bravado is only desperate bluster, a

braggadocio show of power by men who know their true powerlessness

only too well' (1984b, 5).

Here, for instance, is what Roma has to say to Williamson after the

latter's untimely intervention has thwarted the deal with Lingk:

You stupid fucking cunt. You, Williamson ... I'm talking to you, shithead. You just cost me six thousand dollars. (Pause. ) Six thousand dollars. And one Cadillac. That's right. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it, asshole. You fucking shit. Where did you learn your trade. You stupid fucking cunt. You idiot. Whoever told you you could work with men? (OB., 56)

- 94 -

This is powerful stuff - at first sight. But the context betrays Roma's

true weakness at this point, a weakness which results from the breaking

of his phatic contact with Lingk. Roma had been trying to take Lingk

outside for a drink (after all, no one's going to know' [GGR, 541); now

the chance of the sale has walked out of the office, and Roma is

resourceless, His outburst against Williamson is weak precisely because

it is one-sided - Roma can retrieve nothing from the situation. This is

the zero degree of communication - such outbursts are almost

soliloquies; with no bargain to be struck, characters have nothing to

lose by venting their true feelings of spite. Herman argues that the

obscenity of Mamet's dialogue 'is constructed in the service of his

characters' deep need for concealment' (1987,130). This is the precise

opposite of the case. The words strike with the force of revelation, but

this is not the revelation of a private guilt, as in the plays of Ibsen

and Miller; instead it is the breaking of a taboo against such naked

demonstrations of hatred, a taboo which loses its force when the

necessity to maintain the social fabric is removed. The real shock is

not that one character harbours such feelings behind a social mask, but

that all of them do in a society in which Xamet sees 'misanthropy all

round' (qtd. in Ranvaud 1988,232).

Glengarry Glen Ross demonstrates the opportunism which motivates

language and language's consequent impotence in the absence of an

adversary. This aspect of Mamet's work is further illustrated by a

powerful incident in House of Games. Mike, trying to absent himself,

rightly informs Margaret that 'You can't bluff someone who's not paying

attention' (Ha, 69). She responds to this by shooting him to death. In

a perverse way this indicates Mike's strength and her weakness, for he

- 95 -

places himself on the other side of a linguistic boundary over which she

cannot pass. Her only response can be to take revenge outside the

confines of language. Mamet is interested not in the ability of language

to tease out meaning but in the limits beyond which it cannot progress;

and when such limits are reached the frustrations of his characters

reveal themselves in outbursts of hatred and violence. If the object of

sales talk is to defeat a perceived adversary, to exploit him or her by

virtue of superior cunning, it follows that such adversaries will

secretly be regarded with contempt. Spite surfaces when all

possibilities for negotiation have been exhausted.

Two exchanges between Williamson and Levene illustrate this well.

At the beginning of the play Levene complains about his leads:

LEVENE: I. ] I'm getting garbage. (Pause. ) You're

giving it to me, and what I'm saying is it's fucked.

WILLIAMSON: You're saying that I'm fucked. LEVENE; Yes, (Pause. ) I am. I'm sorry to antagonize

you. ( $, 5)

This is yet another of Levene's mistakes - revealing his true feelings

about Williamson while negotiations are still in progress is not in his

interests. The second exchange occurs at the end of the play, when

Williamson - considered weak by all the other salesmen - reveals a

mastery of all the important principles of debate. First, he controls

the rules of the conversation: 'If you tell me where the leads are, I

won't turn you in. If you don't, I am going to tell the cop you stole

them' (59). He then goes back on his promise. This is more successful

than Moss's attempt to do something similar to Aaronow, because Moss's

victory is contingent upon Aaronow's response (and as it turns out

Aaronow fails to help him), whereas Williamson makes sure he gets what

he wants from Levene before shopping him. Having done so he then

- 96 -

offers a reason: it is 'Because I don't like you' (63). Like Roma, he

waits until negotiations are closed before venting his spite. Roma lost

and Williamson won, but they are alike in that their feelings are only

made naked once there is no possibility of harm coming to them from

their hate-object.

Williamson is a rare figure in Mamet's work - one who is able to

indulge in verbal annihilation of another character on stage. Far more

common is the situation illustrated earlier by Roma's speech to

Williamson: a character is reduced to impotent obscenity by the absence

or intractability of another figure who would give point to bis life.

Several examples have already been considered in this chapter in

connection with sexual frustration; but this is simply one, albeit

prominent, variation on a structure which recurs constantly in Wamet's

work, in which the absence of a figure of authority creates a situational

constraint on the characters on stage. Bigsby has drawn attention to

'the critical importance of absence' in Mamet's plays (1985b, 20), and it

is an absence which takes many forms: of love, of women, of ultimate

values, of material success. Most notable in relation to the present

discussion is the remarkable number of figures who are repeatedly

referred to yet who never make an appearance on stage: Guigliani in

Lakeboat, Fletcher in American Buffalo, Mitch and Murray in Glengarry

Glen Ross, Richard Ross in Speed-The-Plow. In American Buffalo, for

instance, 'The action takes place within the junkshop, but it is the

motive forces, all unseen, which direct that action' (Ventimiglia 1978,

199). Such situations have often prompted comparison with Waiting for

fit. Bigsby, for instance, argues that in Glengarry Glen Ross 'Each

completed deal merely precipitates another. They [the salesmen] serve

nothing but the system established by the absent owners who set the

_97_

mechanism in motion but who, like Godot, never appear' (19°5b, 122). A

recent study of Waiting for Godot suggests that 'at times Sneed-the-Plow

even plays as if it might be a sly parody of Godot ... (Gould and Fox]

are in hostage to two off-stage figures [Ross and Brown] ... The

discomforting joke at the end is that Godot "comes": Gould and Fox get

their contract' (Graver 1989,107-8).

In Beckett's play the audience knows nothing about Godot, only that

the eternal promise of his arrival is what keeps Vladimir and Estragon

tied down. The Boy is the medium between the tramps and Godot, but his

contradictory reports regarding Godot, and the assurance that he will

come, maintain the tramps' separation from him, In Beckett's minimalist

world, Godot can be seen as a metaphor for whatever prevents the

fulfilment of ambition: he can be seen as representing both passive hope

and authoritarian power.

The absent figures in Mamet's work perform an equally varied number

of functions, though in each play this function is rather more specific

than in Waiting for Godot, Guigliani becomes the empty canvas on which

the sailors of Lakeboat paint their groundless narratives, though he

does finally arrive, albeit offstage, to present a definitive version of

the truth; and Fletcher in American Buffalo is in many ways similar.

What further differentiates these figures from Godot is that in their

speculations about them the characters reveal a specifically American

sensibility, suffused with violent images drawn from Hollywood movies

which in turn, perhaps, reflect the violence of urban American life

itself. What is important in Mamet's plays is not so much the non-

appearance of the off-stage figure, but its effects on the characters and

the various explanations found for it. Ross's absence in Speed-the-Plow

is unusual in that it is explained immediately: 'Ross just got called to

98 -

New York. He's going on the Gulfstream, turn around and come right

back' (Th, 17). His mobility contrasts with Fox and Gould, and it is

also one of the reasons for Gould's continuing failure to contact him.

In fact, the means by which communication between on-stage and off-

stage characters is maintained or withheld is of central importance in

Mamet's plays. This question is discussed in detail in chapter 5.

Mitch and Murray are much the most interesting of these off-stage

figures. Philip C. Kolin observes that 'Mitch and Murray ... never step

foot on stage. Nor does the duo glow in the critical limelight' (1987,

3). This critical negligence is indeed curious, since 'Mitch and Murray

make up the inflexible rules of the contest by which the salesmen live

or die' (Kolin 1987,3). It may be that Mamet `intentionally makes Mitch

and Murray invisible' for reasons of verisimilitude: 'like so many bosses

in America they make themselves hard to get at' (Kohn 19-87,3). J, K.

Galbraith remarked long ago that in general the heads of American

businesses 'do not manage the company and almost no one knows who they

are' (Galbraith 1958,99) - although, more recently, Christopher Lasch

has argued that 'Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity.

The tycoon who lives in personal obscurity, the empire builder who

controls the destinies of nations from behind the scenes, are vanishing

types ... all politics becomes a form of spectacle' (Lasch 1978,60).

What is important, however, is that the absence of Mitch and Murray

imposes the situational constraints within which the action of the play

develops.

Levene's account of his earlier friendship with Mitch and Murray is

an attempt to introduce past performance and contacts as criteria for

preferential treatment; but in the ruthlessly existential world of the

salesman this counts for nothing. There is in Levene something of the

- 99 -

old sports hero who can no longer live up to the standards he has set

himself. Meanwhile, Mitch and Murray have travelled in the opposite

direction; but as with Levene, whatever they used to be is not relevant

to what they now are. They used to have personality; now they are

simply the (absent) embodiment of power, and as such are 'responsible'

for the situation at the office being 'wrong' (GG$, 14). But, while they

administer power, they did not actually create it. As loss says, 'the

guy who got there first [ ... 3 made up those rules' (16), but this person

is neither Mitch nor Murray, who used to work as salesmen. Moreover,

even the embittered Moss does not identify the precise recipients of the

company's huge profits: the 'Ninety per cent' goes to 'the office' (15).

Indeed, there are good reasons for separating Mitch and Murray from

the office itself, and for suspecting that 'Mitch and Murray Inc. ' (Kolin

1987,4) is a misnomer. Kolin thinks, because their salesmen suffer

failures and even resort to robbing the office, that 'Finally, and

fittingly enough, Mitch and Murray suffer the same luckless fate that

their salesmen do. They are all losers' (Kolin 1987,4). But, as

Williamson repeatedly reminds us, 'I'm sure that we're insured' (G R, 31).

Any losses are deferred, passed on to the insurance company and thence,

of course, to the customer. Moreover, while the company is 'completely

insured' (GG$, 56), it is unclear whether the leads are (33) ; and while

negligence on this score might lead Mitch and Murray to 'shit a br... ', or

at least become 'upset' (33) 0 it is the salesmen who will suffer from the

loss of the contracts since, as Roma puts it, 'I got to go out like a

fucking schmuck hat in my hand and reclose' (32).

But there is a more interesting and important reason why being

ripped off would not damage the company. In the first words of Act Two

Aaronow remarks: 'People used to say that there are numbers of such

- 100 -

magnitude that multiplying them by two made no difference' (29), It

seems it is the sight of the newly-ransacked office which provokes this

bizarre remark; and whether Aaronow intends it or not, the implication

must be that there are sums of money so vast that robbery can make no

appreciable dent in them. Aaronow's recollection that he used to hear

this remark 'In school' (29) evokes a child-like sense of wonder at such

wealth. The company is insulated from harm; the customers and the

salesmen suffer the consequences.

So Mitch and Murray should not be seen as characters in any

conventional sense; they reserve for themselves the power of

facelessness. Lest there be any confusion on this point, Mamet at one

point introduces a further "character" who exists only as a proper name.

Roma tells Williamson: 'I'm going to have your job, shithead. I'm going

down-town and talk to Mitch and Murray, and I'm going to Lemkin' (56).

Who is this man? Perhaps he is the head of the company; essentially,

however, Temkin' hints at a higher authority than any to which the play

allows us access. And, as argued, it is the inaccessibility of figures

who might relieve the pressures under which the characters live which

generates their frustrations; these frustrations reveal themselves in

linguistic obscenity which, in turn, reveals the sources from which the

characters draw a vocabulary which manages to be both impoverished and

poetic at the same time. In this way the failure to achieve

communication with another character tends to reveal a great deal about

the speaker, These interrelated aspects of the language of Mamet's

plays are now considered in the final section of this chapter.

- 101 -

viii. The linguistic construction of character

Many critics suggest that Mamet's characters suffer from a "failure of

communication". This idea has sometimes been encouraged by the

playwright himself, who has stated that 'What I write about is what I

think is missing from our society. And that's communication on a basic

level' (qtd. in Lewis and Browne 1981,69). For Almansi, 'Manet' s

characters pretend to speak, to communicate, and to relate to other

people, in a world where everyone is isolated' (1986,196). Kroll

describes 'people yammering at each other and not communicating' (1977,

366). The terms in which Barnes describes American Buffalo suggests

that he sees in the same failure a metaphor for the human condition: 'We

are losing the threads of communication', he writes, and goes on to

suggest that the characters' dialogue 'has no shade of difference' (1983,

143). The terms in which these arguments are presented recalls Esslin's

construction of the absurd, and are vulnerable to the same objections:

Barnes's claim that Mamet's plays privilege similarity over difference is

particularly noticeable in this respect. But as already argued, one of

the things which makes Mamet's dialogue so dynamic on the stage is

precisely the ease with which characters do establish distinctions: the

ability to perceive the exact meaning of a phrase like 'the thing', or

the constative and performative meanings of Teach's description of the

weather in American Buffalo, for instance, or the distinction between

'talking' and 'speaking' in Glangari: y men Ross all suggest characters

and a playwright unusually alert to subtle nuances of meaning in phrases

which only superficially appear bland and inarticulate,

Such critical responses are reminiscent also of early

interpretations of Pinter's work, interpretations Pinter was quick -to

scotch:

- 102 -

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: "Failure of communication, " and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. (Pinter 1962,25)

A similar argument might be made about many of Mamet's early plays;

Bernie's posturing in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, for instance,

communicates precisely that sexual weakness it attempts to conceal. To

the suggestion that the eponymous hero of Edmond, is 'inarticulate',

}tamet replied:

It's definitely the wrong word, because the idea is that the intention of the character is expressly conveyed to you. You

understand exactly what the character is saying. So how can it be inarticulate? ... the two things are very, very different

- the words being unavailing on the one hand, and the words being inarticulate on the other hand. (qtd. in Harriott 1988, 81)

More generally, Mamet . joked: 'No one really says what they mean, but they

always mean what they mean' (qtd. in Savran 1987,15). And as Anne

Dean says, 'abortive attempts at eloquence can paradoxically speak

volumes' (1987,21).

Attempts to conceal meaning, or an inability to explain oneself

rationally, certainly do not indicate a failure of expression. The wider

point, surely, is not that there is such a failure of communication but

that, on the contrary, there is an excess of it: to speak is to generate

meanings beyond the immediate control of the speaker but which are

perceptible to other characters or to the audience. This excess is

precisely what enables the audience to perceive the presence of irony.

The deftness and power of Mamet's control of irony is perhaps seen at

its best in the language of Teach in American Buffalo. Teach is

- 103 -

concerned to present himself as an authority on anything and everything,

yet he is never more wrong than when he argues 'I an the person it's

usually according to when I'm talking' (AB,, 85). This is partly because

of the flagrant contradictions with which he undermines his authority in

seeking to sustain it; but equally it is because, like any speaker, he is

not fully in control of all the inferences of his language.

This follows from an argument Mamet proposed early in his career as

a playwright:

I read Stanislavski. That's when I first learned the correlation between language and action, that words create behavior, which is obviously crucial if you want to become a playwright.

Actually, my main emphasis is on the rhythm of language - the way action and rhythm are identical. Our rhythms describe our actions - no, our rhythms prescribe our actions. I became fascinated -I still am - by the way, the way the language we use, its rhythm, actually determines the way we behave, more than the other way around. (qtd. in Wetzsteon 1976,101)

Mamet claimed the same effect for the semantics of words as well as

their rhythm, and had Sexual Perversity in Chicago in mind in stating

that 'James Bond fucked up my sex life for years. It's the way we

perceive each other. If you say "cunt" or "cockteaser", what you say

influences the way you think, not the other way around' (qtd. in

Wetzsteon 1976,103). As the eponymous hero of Peter Handke's 1967 play

Kaspar discovers, 'When you begin to speak you will begin to think what

you speak even when you want to think something different' (Handke 1972,

56-57). Whereas in Pinter's plays language is tactical - characters use

words to create different personalities to cope with different

circumstances - in Mamet's early work, in particular, the characters are

less autonomous. They do not simply choose language to suit the

occasion; rather language constructs the character, who is then bound by

its limitations.

-104-

This has crucial implications for what is meant by "character"

Robert Storey, in an excellent early essay on Mamet, argues that Bernie

in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is 'a melange of received verbal

gestures':

Bernie cannot really be described as a "character", at least if that word conjures up a creature of psychological motives ... For Bernie does not speak out of a necessity to devise or sustain an identity; his identity has long been determined by his speech - speech that gives him coherence of a clumsy sort, that contains and disciplines his amorphous drives, even while perverting them, (Storey 1979,4)

Sexual Perversity in Chicago is in a sense the drama of the decentring

of Bernie; a character who likes to think of himself at the centre of

the action (in every sense), he becomes marginalized, partly because he

fails to admit that his crude rhetoric of sexual attraction actually

repels the women he lusts after, but also because this failed rhetoric

actually displaces him, pushing him to the edge of his own life. Since

Bernie is a product of received sexual cliches, it is this language, and

not Bernie, which is really the protagonist. Joan takes exception to

Bernie's language - 'I have never been called that in my life' Q EC, 17)

- only to indicate, immediately, a willingness to accept him as a person,

because of a presumed offensiveness in her own speech ('I'm sorry if I

was being rude to you' Cl? ]). Bernie's tragedy is that he finds himself

unable to throw off the language which controls him; it is language

which alienates him from women, progressively displacing him from their

orbit until in final scene he becomes, in an important sense, actually

invisible to the girls on the beach. It is this defeat of a character by

language - an insuperable opponent because it is the very thing which

constitutes the character - which generates the play's powerfully broad

ironies and at the same time establishes it as a genuine modern tragedy.

- 105 -

Paradoxically, then, this linguistic excess is also a limitation: the

speech act has connotations beyond its immediate purpose, but these

connotations also serve to indicate the limitations of the speaker's

experience and to show how his language has been constructed in advance.

Mamet was perhaps only half-joking when he remarked, apropos of Sexual

Perversity in Chicago, that 'My sex life was ruined by the popular media'

(qtd. in Fraser 1976,7). His early work explores this pervasive

influence. One critic objected of American Buffalo's scatalogical

language that 'we have heard more antiseptic versions of it on big and

little screens, where - with a little soap in their mouths - American

Buffalo's trio of charmless deadbeats would be more at home' (Rogoff

1977,37), echoing another commentator's objection that 'the characters

onstage appear to know no more about their squalid means of survival ...

than we in the audience have long since learned from reading the papers

and watching TV' (Gill 1977,54). These arguments are decisively refuted

by Bigsby. They are offered as 'criticism[s] of Mamet's imagination; but

in fact this is precisely Mamet's point, For these characters do,

indeed, inhabit fantasies shaped in part by the media' (Rigsby 1985a,

268). The inability of Rogoff and Gill to construct a critical discourse

devoid of such influences ironically underlines Mamet's point about their

dangerous pervasiveness. Like the characters of Beckett's radio play of

1957, All That Fall, Mamet's characters are 'struggling with a dead

language' (Beckett 1984,34). The sources of that received language in

Mamet's plays are highly revealing, and some of those of The Duck

Variations are enumerated by Storey:

Reader's Digest turgidity ... B-grade adventure-story cliche ... Wild Kingdom platitude ... travel-brochure wit ... hobbled Biblical eloquence ... mixed in with hazy yet reverentially "scientific" exposition, half-remembered newspaper reportage, stupefyingly inapropos catch-phrases, slangy obscenities, and sentimental pieties to concoct attitudes that founder

- 106 -

magnificently in the froth of their own self-exclusions. (1979,3)

The point is even more apparent in Lakeboat, in which, as noted, some of

the characters seem incapable of distinguishing between life and movies,

But if the influence of pornographic movies on Bernie, like that of

Rambo-style action films on Fred and Stan in Lakeboat, is an object of

broad humour, the effects of advertising on a character like Teach in

American Buffalo are more subtle and more disturbing. 'You're taking his

high-speed blender and a Magnavox, you send the kid in, complains Teach

of the planned robbery (All, 35); later he suggests the mark might be

armed with 'a cleaver from one of those magnetic boards t ... l with the

two strips' (87). The over-precision of these references suggests a

mind so overwhelmed by images received from advertising that even

everyday objects can only be described in terms of the hype invested to

differentiate them from similar items. By the time of Glengarry Glen

Ross, such influences have become so pervasive that salesmanship, the

partner of advertising, has entirely consumed any vestigial remnant of

individuality. If the gap between the characters' attempts to assert

their individuality on the one hand, and their obvious indebtedness to

received stereotypes on the other, is wide enough in Mamet's early plays

to permit the audience to laugh at the characters, in American Buffalo it

narrows to an uncomfortable irony, until in Glengarry Glen Rose any

possible ironic space has disappeared, to be replaced by a world in

which the only possibilities of survival lie in absolute acceptance or

absolute rejection of a predetermined code of conduct. The nature of

this world - the America Mamet presents in his plays - is examined in

the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 3. 'IT'S A PEOPLE BUSINESS' : XAXET'S ARIER ICA

As suggested in chapter 1, Mamet's essays and interviews give the

impression of a writer who sees the world in universalizing terms: of

myth, paradigm, archetype, "human nature". As suggested also, however,

the plays themselves tend to resist these terms by challenging them

from within. In particular, Mamet both accepts and challenges the

constraints of American myth: of racial conflict and interaction, which

will always carry resonances of the settling of America and the

oppression of both Indian and black populations; and of the founding

commercial principles of America, the "American Dream" of commercial and

geographical expansion, property ownership and family life, and the

creed of competition and success as expressed in "business".

i. The Indian as Other

Eugene H. Jones, in his recent book Native Americans as Shown an the

Stage. 1753-1916, demonstrates that representations of encounters

between white European settlers and the native Indian population have a

long and undistinguished history on the American stage. Sometimes for

reasons of propaganda, at other times out of sheer ignorance or racism,

playwrights created a series of stereotypes: the exotic, almost extra-

human native; the "Noble Savage"; the idealized, innocent Indian woman

(of whom Pocahontas received the greatest attention, probably because of

her historical significance in converting to Christianity and marrying a

white man); what Jones calls the "'Last Indian" Syndrome' (which

- 108 -

concealed the horrors of displacement and genocide behind a pseudo-

mystical mythic narrative); outright villains; and, finally, attempts at

more naturalistic characterizations, which were at best half-successful.

Jones argues that all the professionally-written plays considered in

his study demonstrate both a 'patronizing attitude toward Native

American abilities', and a 'foregone conclusion that whites could show

Indians the error of their ways and turn them into better people' (Jones

1988,50). But what emerges at least equally clearly is a sporadic but

frequent attempt to turn the Indian into an idealized Other on the stage

at the same time as he was being slowly eliminated in fact. As Jones

comments:

these characterizations apparently masked white people's fear of Indians as obstacles to the fulfillment of their desire to settle in the New World. The desire was complicated by the Europeans' assumption of racial superiority and by fear that the Indian might be equal or even, in some ways, superior. (vii)

The fear of the Indian is expressed in one of Mamet's short sketches,

'In Old Vermont', in which the female character, Maud, fantasizes about

being trapped in a cabin and attacked by Indians: 'The tommyhawk, / The

genitals hacked off. / The cold and roasting flesh. / Your own hands

severed and your eyes like boils' tom, 68), Maud's story subliminally

recalls that of Hannah Duston, the New England mother sworn to avenge

the Indian murder of her offspring. Like those of so many Westerns, it

is the kind of tale designed to legitimize Indian-hating, itself

satirized in a remarkable chapter, 'The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating', in

Melville's novel The Confidence-Ian (1857). By contrast, Mamet's Lene

Cann attempts to argue the moral superiority of the Indian (though this

is to be seen as a spiritual, not social, superiority); yet in so doing

it descends into at best banality and at worst the patronizing attitude

- 109 -

which seems endemic in the genre. In trying to create the figure of the

Indian as idealized Other, Lone Canoe merely reinforces a received

stereotype.

Lone Canoe has been probably Mamet's least successful piece to date,

both critically and commercially. The artistic motives behind it seem

confused. Before the first production in 1979, Gamet announced it would

be about 'Indians and the white people carving out America's economic

destiny in Waukegan' (qtd. in Winer 1979,3), and later added that 'Greg

[Mosher, the director] had this idea of fusing certain elements of 19th-

Century drama with fairy tale and an almost music-hall style. As the

issues got clearer, the show got smaller' (qtd, in Winer 1979,15). Not

small enough, however, to prevent the styles enumerated by Mosher

creating not so much a fusion as confusion. There is a similar mixture

of verse, prose and song in an early Pocahontas play, James Nelson

Barker's The Indian Princess or, La Belle Sauvage (1808); but the

mixture turned it into a 'comic musical piece' in which 'Serious dramatic

moments are few and easily resolved' (Jones 1988,52), and Mamet's play,

minus the comedy, is not dissimilar. The most obvious problem with Lone

Canoe, however, is the "period" feel to the language of the English

explorers, which has the immediate disadvantage of negating Namet's

famed "ear" for contemporary speech rhythms; instead the language is

strained and banal. This language is considered in detail in the

Appendix, but here is one, representative example:

Listen to me, this man is coming back to England for he must come back. This is beyond mere desire -- Fairfax, hear me- now, you have a duty, which predates these bonds. Now we are

going to leave now. Right now fore she warns the tribe, I see it in her. (LC., 34RR).

- 110 -

The speech is a public justification for action, reflecting what Mamet

apparently sees as the moral intransigence of the England from which

Fairfax wishes to escape; but it is unconvincing as dialogue, which

seems to have been constructed merely to reflect these attitudes, instead

of emerging through a credible examination of character or situation.

These problems may result from a working process unusual for Mamet, in

which he wrote the plot before working on the dialogue (Winer 1979,3),

in contrast to his normal practice of deciding what the play is "about"

only after having written a great deal of dialogue (Savran 1987,16).

The moral "themes" of Lone Canoe are obvious, and simplistic.

Fairfax is grateful for VanBrandt's 'friendship' and 'loyalty' (L!:, , 18) ;

both men are greatly concerned with reputation. Chief among these

virtues is 'duty'. Fairfax variously considers his duty to be to the

tribe, to England, and to reputation: 'What is left for me? Duty,

(Pause) Duty is left. I shall return to England. I will clear the

reputation of my men' (LC-, 4CAf J. In Mainet's other plays the characters are

generally motivated by self-interest, and the energy of the dialogue

comes from the need constantly to create and develop fictions in pursuit

of a goal. Any idea of 'duty' disappears in such a world. By contrast

the action of Lone Canoe unfolds in a distant time and place, its values

implicitly contrasting with modern cynicism, though even within the

world of the play Fairfax's values seem faintly ridiculous: to his claim

that the decision to leave England is justified by his happiness with

the tribe, VanBrandt asks 'Doesn't that seem a trifle s niple to you,

John? ' ("ß, t5) with the clear implication that Fairfax is indulging in

escapist hedonism, 'Free of ties to home, to friends, to country,

everything. How wonderfully convenient' In fact the tribe to

which Fairfax has retreated becomes the image of his own

-111-

irresponsibility, elevating him to heroic status as glibly as did the

London society from which he is trying to escape.

These polarized values mean that the testing of the hero -a concept

of great importance in Mamet's plays - is here both too explicit and too

trivial. (There is a similar problem with Mamet 's teleplay A Hudson's

Bay Start, considered in the Appendix. ) Fairfax is asked to find deer

to end a famine which has befallen the tribe, a fortuitous, and so

uninteresting, event. But the shaman, Chungatte, believes 'The task we

gave you was impossible, One cannot find the deer. There are no deer'(6k,

. 3R). Like the confidence games so prevalent in Mamet's work, the test

has no object - there is nothing to be discovered - but does have a

subject, and its purpose is then to allow the tested one to find out

about him- or herself. Fairfax soon realizes that his test is to

overcome his personal pride:

I saw this was my test. That it had not been given me to find the deer, and it would not be. That I must return and stand with you not as a hero, (Pause) Neither in failure, (Pause), But

as a man, who has no power to control what iss outside his

power - (Pause) And then I was beyond the test. I was free of desire. Ct C, ft.. p)

The deer-hunt itself is trivial, although more than once in Mamet's work

such a hunt becomes a powerful image of the last refuge of the lost man.

In The Verdict Morrissey tries to persuade Galvin to accept a moral

compromise: 'We let them buy the case. That's what I took it for. You

let this drop - we'll go up to New Hampshire, kill some fuckin' deer' (1,

29). The Man in Goldberg Street combines reflections on the

rootlessness of the American Jew with an account of deer-killing and

stories about feeling lost in woods. In Mamet's episode of Hill Street

Blues the frustrations of the police officers' deer hunt parallel those

of their job (an example considered in greater detail in the Appendix),

- 112 -

In Lone Canoe the important test is of Fairfax himself. What he

discovers, however, is banal in the extreme - the need to be 'free of

desire' and 'Free from pride' ; jam, 4R), and that 'we are meant to be

happy' -A). In rejecting the banalities of his former life, Fairfax

merely embraces others.

The play's imagery is similiarly simplistic, most notably the tired

equation of geographical exploration with spiritual search. As Fairfax

tells it,

I said I was an explorer. They asked what that meant, I said searching. They said searching for what, I said new ways, new paths, they asked new ways to what, for what purpose, and I did not know. I could not answer them. I'd spent my life in searching and I'd never had the courage or the intellect to ask what I was searching for. (LC

, 1't-)

Elsewhere in Mamet's work, as argued later in this chapter, the frontier

ethic typifies America, and the tendency of 'the [American] dream ... to

start turning in on itself' (qtd. in Lieberson 1988,6). But in this

play Mamet draws no such inferences. Fairfax plainly regards his

former life as not only distasteful but trivial in comparison with the

'happiness' he has found (LC, 15). As with the sailors of Lakeboat,

Fairfax's travels lead to stasis; he has renounced 'the lure of the goal

ahead' Q=11,3190. The difference is that Fairfax regards this as a desirable

solution, since utopias are, almost by definition, static, The powerful

underlying irony of Lakeboat - the cruel parody of progress in the

characters' circular geographical and emotional travels - is here

replaced by complacency. VanBrandt dismisses Chungatte as 'nothing.

Some magician'; Chungatte says VanBrandt is 'not real' (6C, 35AR). This,

absolute separation of two worlds account- for the play's lack of

conflict. Vanbraridt offers movement, while Thom offers Fairfax the

stability of a wife and home. Her statement that 'We were hapr y.

-113-

(Pause) And never looked ahead. (Pause) Or looked back with regret' (! CI

2A+BRR) is a fair indication of the absolute stasis of which he dreams,

but which in other plays is associated with stifling domesticity (the

wife in Edmond) or even with a positive threat to male adventure

(Lingk's wife in Glengarry Glen Ross).

These polarities are also evident in the choices Fairfax is required

to make. The first is between fame and humility. VanBrandt tells

Fairfax that in London 'Your name's become a synonym with pride' (27RR);

later he admits that, on the contrary, 'Your name is synonymous with

sacrifice, with excellence' (LC-; 4t'f). But Fairfax's test has shown him that

this is no distinction at all - what he wants to renounce is heroism in

all its forms, a concept still maintained by London society. Similarly,

the choice Fairfax has to make between two kinds of 'home' is not

difficult, Of London, Fairfax insists 'I was never home [,,, ] When I

returned my body ached to be away. Searching. No, I counted it as

bliss to dream of home. But I was not happy there t... ] This is it.

This is my home' (16). Finally, there are two tests - that set by

Chungatte, and that set by VanBrandt: 'To quit this savage idyll and take

up your yoke again. To take up your responsibilities, (Pause) This is

your test, my friend' (24). The real choice Fairfax must make, then, is

between his 'responsibilities' to England and his personal happiness

with the tribe. But Fairfax has already made his decision, and

VanBrandt's temporary success in changing his mind is a dramatically

unsustained deception, a pale shadow of the complexities of House of

Games or The Shawl.

Consequently one of Fairfax', --- central statements - that 'the power

to choose [ ... ] is what makes us men' (24) - is here simply one more

banality. In other plays the desire for choice is set off against the

- 114 -

exploitation of this desire: the apparent wealth of opportunities in

Edmond, for instance, is regulated by systematic exploitation; the

confidence game, in which the protagonist makes choices predetermined by

the sharps, is the paradigm of this situation. In Sneed-the-Plow Gould,

like Fairfax, must make a choice which affects his reputation: the

apparently idealistic option of filming 'The Bridge', in which case, as

Fox says, 'your name will be a punchline in this town' (Sa, 69) ; or the

pragmatic option of the Douggie Brown film which will see his name

above the title. But both are related to 'reputation' and both are seen

to be pragmatic: Gould must choose in effect between sexual and

commercial success and reputation. The ability to choose between moral

and immoral behaviour is eliminated; such polarities are no longer

viable. In Lone Canoe, however, the choice is all too easy. The play

rings false because it presupposes that possibility of escape which, as

will be argued later, more dynamic plays such as Eond and Glengarry-

Glen Ross provoke only to deny as simplistic and naive. In an excellent

short piece, park Pony, the idealization of the native Indian way of life

is undermined even within the apparently consolatory tale told by the

Father: in this story, the events of which took pl3e: e 'long before the

White Man came' (DE, 37), the Indian Brave, Rain goy, is attacked and

left for dead by unspecified 'enemies' (39),

Such weaknesses in Lone Canoe are particularly surprising because

the theme had already been largely exhausted by earlier writers. The

triangle of two western men and an Indian woman recurs frequently in

the plays Jones discusses, while aspects of these stories are to be

found in the poetry of Longfellow and in Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930).

The most common version is based on Captain John Smith's Generall

Historie of Virginia (1624), which describes how Smith was saved from

- 115 -

execution by natives by the Indian girl, Pocahontas, and in return

facilitated her romance with another Christian, John Rolfe. (The story

is described and discussed in detail in Fiedler 1968,63-83, and Jones

1988,50-59. ) In Mamet's play the distribution of roles is over-

schematic: Fairfax is both lover and explorer, and VanBrandt. and

Chungatte can therefore be little more than representatives of the

polarized values between which he must choose. It is hard not

Lone Canoe as possessing the same flaws of sentiment, naivete and self-

conscious, artificial mythologizing of the early Indian plays, weaknesses

exposed long ago by such spoofs as John Brougham's Po-Ca-Hon-Tas. or,

The Gentle Savage (1857). Indeed, 'What is most remarkable about the

Pocahontas myth, finally, is not the ease with which it is turned into

stereotype ... but the frequency and fury with which it has been exposed'

(Fiedler 1968,80). The myth is weak because it attempts to deny two

much darker developments in American history and literature: the

massacre of the native Indian population, and - according to Fiedler at

least, famously, and with a clear pertinence to [amet - the fundamental

misogyny of the white American male and his homo-erotic attraction to

his Indian or black counterpart.

This attraction is subliminally suggested in a brief sketch, 'The

Power Outage', which ends on the following exchange between the two

characters, 1 and 2:

1. There. In the dark. Indians. Of foraging.

2. We all revert. 1. You think so? 2. Yes. (DER, 23 )

Our dreams of courage, or The

There is a sense here that the Indians perhaps represent the 'Other'

unacceptable, perhaps primitive aspects of life which have been

- 116 -

repressed and projected onto others so that they can be lived with. As

the next section will argue, the idea of the Other is unequivocally at

work in Mamet's presentation of black characters.

But the idea of 'reversion' also suggests the presence of a kind of

collective, atavistic memory, which is another recurrent feature of

Mamet's plays. This aspect of his work, and our understanding of it,

may owe something to Thorstein Veblen, whom Diamet acknowledges 'Lad a

big influence on me' (qtd. in Roudane 1986,75), and who argued in 1899

that:

The situation of to-day shapes the institutions of tomorrow through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past. The institutions - that is to say the habits of thought - under the guidance of which men live are in this way received from an earlier time, more or less remotely earlier, but in any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past. (Veblen 1953,143)

This atavistic trait in society partially accounts both for Mamet's

characters' preference for 'exploit' over 'industry', and for the role

models they consciously or unconsciously follow. In American Buffalo,

for instance, the ancient conflict between cowboys and Indian= is almost

subliminally present, and yet extended by Teach into a semi-coherent

world-view, The Indian head on the coin recalls the -. laughter of the

indigenous population by the settlers, but the mythology of the Wild

West is characteristically ironized by its conversion into a Clint

Eastwood-like caricature; as Don says of Fletcher, 'You take him and you

put him down in some strange town with just a nickel in his pocket, and

by nightfall he'll have that town by the balls. This is not talk, Bob,

this is action' (All, 3). This demythologization of the West, from

history to movie, is taken further in the fate befalling Fletcher, who

- 117-

has apparently been beaten up by, significantly, 'some Mexicans' (90);

evidently Don's spaghetti Western has not gone according to script.

The Mexicans and the police are merged as threatening forces, from

whom Teach defends himself both by arming himself with a gun as

'Protection, deterrence' (88), and by turning the shop into the cowboy's

traditional haven of retreat:

TEACH: You mind the fort, (pause) DON: Here? TEACH: Well, yeah ... this is the fort. (37-38)

Simultaneously he downgrades the defensive capabilities of his enemies'

fort: 'What the fuck they live in Fort Knox? [... ] You break in a window,

worse comes to worse you kick the fucking back door- in. (What do you

think this is, the Middle Ages? )' (79).

These archetypes persist, sporadically, in the outbursts of Moss and

Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross, Levene, for instance, sees himself as a

kind of urban cowboy:

You can't think on your feet you should keep your mouth closed. [... ] You can't learn that in an office, [... ] You have to learn it on the streets. You can't buy that. You have to live it. [ ... ] Your partner ... a man who's your partner depends on you

you have to go with him and for him .., or you're shit, you're shit, you can't exist alone ... ($, 57-58)

Levene here 'evokes the last frontier' (Carroll 1987,45), and this self-

image the salesmen possess adds further resonance to Moss's dislike of

the 'Indians', who can then be seen not just as immigrants but as the

indigenous North American Indians, with the same implications as those

of American Buffalo. There are similar subtextual implications to one of

Roma's assaults on Williamson:

Patel? Fuck you. Fuckin' Shiva handed him a million dollars, told him 'sign the deal', he wouldn't sign. And Vishnu, too. Into the bargain. Fuck that, John. You know your business, I

- 118 -

know mine. Your business is being an asshole, and I find out whose fucking cousin you are, I'm going to go to him and figure out a way to have your ass .... fuck you - I'll wait for the new leads. (GGR, 36)

The lead is worthless because Roma knows in advance that Patel will not

be able to sign. There is a deep irony here. The repressed racial

minorities hold unexpected power over the salesmen; and it is precisely

because they are repressed that they hold this power. They are useless

to the salesmen because they have no money, and this leads to a reverE. al

of the salesman's normal relations with client-, Instead of trying at

all costs to keep a client in conversation, here they must avoid

involvement. Levene discovers this too late to avoid defeat by the

Nyborgs, who are clearly bankrupt ('did you see how they were living? ',

asks Williamson [61]).

Their surname indicates that they are also immigrants; but the

racial overtones are much clearer in some remarks made by Moss earlier

in the play. Poles are a hindrance to him because 'they hold on to

their money' (11). This defaulted power feeds Moss's xenophobia.

Indians 'like to talk to salesmen, (Pause. ) They're lonely, something.

(Pause. ) They like to feel superior, I don't know. Never bought a

fucking thing C... ] a supercilious race' (12). It is this willingness of

the underprivileged to enter into a game they cannot lose which creates

the feelings of envy and spite in the salesmen; but, subliminally, these

characters and situations also recall an American history of violence

between settlers - also interested in land - and a native population who

were also Indians.

One of the things which makes these plays so powerful, then, is that

they examine these situations from the oppressor's point of view and

draw out their rationale - here seen as frustration at the obstinate

-119-

resurfacing of an opposing force, even when those who wield this power

do so from a position of utter passivity. This accounts for Moss's

otherwise inexplicable description of the Indians as 'superior' and

'supercilious'. Humiliation at the hands of such people provides a

strong motive for exterminating them. When Teach says of two women he

thinks have crossed him that 'The only way to teach these people is to

kill them' (All, 11), he underlines the danger of defeat at the hands of

anyone capable of communication, and at the same time draws attention to

a violent history symbolized by the coin of the play's title.

ii. The Black Other

Mamet's unpublished screenplay, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, is the

script which most explicitly deals with the position of the black man in

America, yet it is not Mamet's most interesting piece in relation to the

"race" question, There are two reasons for this: first, Mamet seems to

have been more interested in the technical problems of adaptation (which

he overcomes brilliantly) than in developing the political questions

raised in the book; second, he sacrifices much of the overtly political

analysis and rhetoric of the book and heightens the archetypal

associations of the story, strongly relating it to a mythic paradigm

similar to that of Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand

Fis (1949). These and other aspects of the screenplay are considered

in greater detail in the Appendix.

There is a similar conjunction of realism and myth in EdMond, At

first the play is likely to strike the audience as a realistic slice of

life which details the horrors of urban racial conflict. It is set in

New York, a city Mamet thinks is 'nuts ... It's a society that's lost its

flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart That's my vision of New York.

- 120 -

It's a kind of vision of hell' (qtd. in Shewey 1982,1). It resembles

the New York of James Baldwin's novel Another Country -a useful point

of comparison - 'a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as

human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have

lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves' (Baldwin

1963,305). But if the play's superficial realism and a consequent

demand for credible action are given undue emphasis, the play becomes

entirely unconvincing. Frank Rich, for instance, complained:

even the play's premise doesn't add up. Why is Edmond, a New York resident, such a naive rube that he's shocked or bilked by nearly every stereotypical street hustler he encounters as soon as he leaves his home? Why does he then, without any visible transition, turn from a milque-toast into an avenger as fearless as Charles Bronson in Death Wish? (1982,20)

Walter Kerr's review was even less sympathetic, consisting largely of a

plot summary emphasizing the disconnection between scenes. Kerr felt

the play failed to offer any credible motivation: 'Judging by the

radiance of his countenance [in the final scene], Edmond has also shed

or satisfied whatever spur it was that first drove him onto the streets.

But that's one of the things most wrong with the play. We can't define

his itch to begin with' (1982,3). Another critic felt that 'Edmond

fails as a play because it cannot make us experience and share its

thesis' (Simon 1982,60) - and indeed, there has been virtually no

agreement on what that thesis is, so that, apparently, 'Edmond can, by

the end, mean almost anything you wish' <Rich 1982,20?. There are

three reasons why the play should have provoked such a degree of

incomprehension. First, its realistic trappings encouraged the critics

to demand that it fulfil this promise and provide a credible sequence of

actions in which motivation is both apparent and plausible; but, second,

this urge towards comprehension is thwarted by an extreme compression

- 121 -

(discussed in the next chapter) which allows the audience a greater

freedom of interpretation than usual; and, third, the emotional triangle

has a pointed, if not immediately perceptible, mythic significance.

Harriott notes that the closing tableau of d 'suggests critic

Leslie Fiedler's observation that the passionate center of American

literature is the homoerotic bonding between two men of different race.

Edmond and his cellmate on their bunkbeds are Huck and Jim in a society

gone berserk' (1988,74), Certainly Fiedler's work offers a more

fruitful approach to the play than attempts to reduce it to the terms of

realism, but there are major problems with a Fiedlerian interpretation.

For Fiedler, the black and Indian races represent two things to the

white American: 'nature itself, which is to say the romantic's nature -

the wilderness, anti-civilization, anti-culture; and the impulsive life -

the extra-rational part of the mind' (Fiedler 1964,125). This

significance is heightened by both a history of invasion, repression and

hatred, and the white male's desire for escape from the white female who

represents the Puritan, repressive conscience of the Old World, a

paradigm which Fiedler finds repeated throughout American literature:

Henry and Natty and Rip together constitute the image of the runaway from home and civilization whom we long to be when we are our most authentic selves; Dame Van Winkle and Hannah and Eve add up to the image of his dearest enemy, spokesman for the culture and the European inheritance he flees; Wawatam and Bampico and Chingachook and the Old Serpent himself make up the Good Companion, representative of an alternative past embracing which he can achieve a future available to no European. (Fiedler 1968,118)

Transferred to the realm of human relationships, these archetypal

figures could be seen as the participants in a love triangle such as

that in Edmnnd between Edmond, his wife, and the Prisoner, which does

- 122 -

indeed recall 'the story of that sacred-heathen love between Vhite man

and coloured man in a world without women' (Fiedler 1968,120)

It is important, however, to note a recent critique of Fiedler which

raises important doubts about such an interpretation:

He (Fiedler] recognizes society and history ... only as projections of individual psychology or of collective myth -a framework antithetical to social and historical specificity ... Fiedler's thesis is against the idea of literature as a reflection of external social reality ... the literal level of American literature is reduced to mere evasion, significant only in so far as it alerts the perceptive critic to the deeper level which it distorts. (Reising 1986,132-34)

In other words, a predetermined reading which privileges similarity over

difference (and so recalls the problems of the absurd) facilitates a

wilful avoidance of the political, Mamet has often expressed a similar

lack of interest in 'social and historical specificity', even going so far

as to suggest that 'The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war,

pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problem of a tree

which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling'

(M, 113). This might suggest an indifference bordering on ignorance;

yet elsewhere Mamet has defended more satisfactorily his avoidance of

overtly political writing. Drama, he argues,

is not an attempt to depict something which is real in the

external world but rather an attempt to depict something which is real in an internal world, It's an attempt to deal

symbolically with feelings, with thoughts about the world. .., It's the difference between being a painter and being an illustrator. (qtd, in Bigsby 1985b, 135)

This does point to the possibility of a certain literalism in arguments

such as Reising's (and those of bd's critics), On the other hand,

there is a danger - which Mamet avoids in the above quotation - of

raising such an 'internal world' to the level of a universal archetype.

- 123 -

Xamet, however, works not with myth but with fiction. Fiedler

suggests that 'Two kinds of truth come immediately into conflict, and

the writer is tempted to choose: the truth of history, which iss the truth

of reason; and the truth of myth, which is the truth of madness' (1968,

164). Fiction, however, is synonymous with neither history nor myth,

and an assessment of Mamet's work might exploit a distinction drawn by

Frank Kermode:

Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. (1967,39)

Fiedler's criticism subsumes disparate fictions within a mythic norm;

but Edmond, being a fiction, will possess elements of difference from

other works which would be perceived by Fiedler as similar.

The point may be made by briefly comparing FdzQLd, with Another

qtr. Baldwin's novel has several major characters-, of both ages and

both sexes, and these characters share both homosexual and heterosexual

relationships. The novel erodes the significance attaching to

distinctions of race and sexual orientation; at one point Vivaldo thinks

of himself as being 'in a region where there were no definitions of any

kind, neither of colour, nor of male and female' (Baldwin 1963,291).

Edmond on the other hand, as its title would suggest, is about a single

protagonist, the Prisoner representing both Ednand's polar opposite and

those aspects of himself he has previously denied. Another Country

begins with a multiplicity of characters but expresses the desire for

their union and the erosion of distinctions, which result` in a degree

of sentimentality; Edmond begins with a single identity only to fracture

it into its component parts.

-124-

It could be argued that the ending, which apparently empresses the

final reintegration or recreation of Edrn end' _, personality, is itself a

sentimental gesture. Certainly Xamet sees the play as being es_enti lly

optimistic:

'It's a play about an unintegrated personality ... Throughout the play, people are divided by sex, by sexual position, by monetary position, by race. ' Because Edmond allows himself to express his hatred of blacks and homosexuals, Mr. Mamet said, 'he thinks he's free, that he's faced the truth of himself. Only at the end of the play, after having completely destroyed his personality, does he realize how incredibly destructive and hateful an attitude that is. In fact, he winds up in a homosexual alliance with a black guy. Because of that alliance, because he resolves those basic dichotomies, I think it's a very, very hopeful play. ' (Shewey 1982,1,4)

'Every fear hides a wish', Edmond suggests (E., 68), and the play details

both his fear of and attraction to blacks. In embarking on his journey

into the underworld he displays arg urge for immediate sensual

gratification - that narcissistic, 1970s quality Bigsby observes in him

- as well as that apparent acceptance of a diversity of experience

equally characteristic of the 1960s liberal, together with all the

qualities which make up 'the wild man that lives next to the mild

husband at the heart of all American males' (Fiedler 1968,104). All

these attitudes seem to be held only superficially, however, and after

turning the tables on the pimp, Edmond's true feelings emerge in a

fairly comprehensive catalogue of racist abuse: 'YOU MOTHERFUCKING

NIGGER! [... ] You motherfucking shit ... you jungle bunny [... ] You coon,

you cunt, you cocJsucker' (F,, 45) - yet significantly, he here employs

what another Jewish American writer described as 'the familiar epithet'

he too noted in the black youths who so tormented him in his childhood

(Podhoretz 1964,357).

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Indeed, Podhoretz's essay, entitled 'My Negro Problem - And Ours',

shows that there is nothing particularly new or remarkable about the

situation d describes. Podhoretz admitted that after a childhood

of interracial antagonism and violence in Brooklyn he still harhoý_; red

feelings of hatred towards blacks, but that hatred was mingled with a

fascinated attraction he tried to rationalize:

There is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man. For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street - free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic ... What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were "bad boys. " (1964,363)

Malcolm X in his autobiography recounts numerous stories of how members

of the white middle-class would visit the clubs and bars of Harlem in

the 1940s to give themselves an apparently exotic and slightly

dangerous thrill; in Another Country Vivaldo recognizes that 'in running

the dangers of Harlem he had not been testing his manhood or

heightening his sense of life. He had merely been taking refuge in the

outward adventure in order to avoid the clash and tension of the

adventure proceeding inexorably within' (Baldwin 1963,133). According

to Fiedler, 'white Americans have, from the first, hopelessly confused

the real Negroes and Indians ... with certain projections of their own

deepest minds, aspects of their own psychic life with which precisely

they find it impossible to live' (1964,116-17). Kerr, for whom 'Nothing

in this play seems to be necessary', finds no particular reason why

Edmond should become involved with blacks: 'Finding sex and money

involves him fortuitously with blacks; given their functions, these might

just as well have been whites' (1982,3). But they have to lie blacks if

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the underworld is to retain this lure of exotic danger which attracts

Edmond.

Still more surprisingly, Kerr entirely overlooks the Prisoner's

relation to Edmond as his precise opposite, his Other. Reising argues

that Fiedler suffers from 'the inability to perceive the Other as

anything but a deviation from the white, heterosexual norm' (1986,136),

and a similar norm in Mamet's work ha_ already been discussed. However,

the very possibility of defining a 'white, heterosexual norm' implies

another, white, stereotype which can itself become the subject of irony -

which emerges particularly powerfully in fond when the protagonist

reveals that his surname is Burke (E., 75). Edmond is as representative

of this norm as the Prisoner is of the norm of the Other. Similarly, in

Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians (1975), Gethin Price is able to express

his feelings of class hostility only by stereotyping both himself and

his middle-class enemies,

The scenes in which Edmond encounters other black characters

prepare for this meeting and reversal by showing how he begins to take

on some of the characteristics they possess or he attributes to them.

As noted, for instance, his language changes as the action develops. At

first his speech is clipped and formal to the point of coldness. He

calmly informs his wife that 'you don't interest me spiritually or

sexually' (E, 5), and as late as scene 9 he is capable of a sentence like

'I'd like to have intercourse with you' (23). The first major change is

in the subway scene (scene 13). His attempt at polite conversation -

'My mother had a hat like that' - is rebuffed, and he lapses into an

argot derived from the black card sharps who have just beaten him up -

'I'd like to slash you motherfucking face apart' (39-40).

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Edmond becomes, in fact, an existential hero remarkably similar to

the 'hipster' described in Norman Mailer's essay 'The White Negro':

if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention ... The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one's power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one's energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. (Mailer 1961,283-84)

The hipster was born when 'the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came

face-to-face with the Negro', and 'it was the Negro who brought the

cultural dowry' because he 'could rarely afford the sophisticated

inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of

the primitive, he lived in the enormous present'. The hipster, in

identifying with this kind of awareness, 'could be considered a white

Negro' (Mailer 1961,285). Baldwin, in his essay 'The Black Boy Looks at

the White Boy', objects that Mailer's essay 'malign[s] the sorely menaced

sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man's own sexual

panic' (Baldwin 1961,181). Certainly 'The White Negro' tells us rather

more about such panic than about the American black; and so does

But it does not do so uncritically. Bigsby notes the irony that by

the end of the play Edmond 'has simply reversed the roles of the first

part of the play and is now more absolutely trapped in a smaller room

than the one he had once sought to escape' (1985b, 107). Moreover, this

-128-

final scene deliberately collapses the various tensions which have been

built up throughout the play. Edmond and the Prisoner maintain the

vestiges of their received patterns of speech - 'There is a destiny that

shapes our ends C ... ] Rough-hew them how we may', muses the educated

white man; 'How e'er we motherfucking may', responds the Prisoner (E, 77)

- yet there is also here a mystical tone neither has used previously

which perhaps indicates a transcendence of their polar opposition at the

level of language as well as of race, sexuality and experience. Yet the

vagueness and banality of their ideas in this scene - comparable to

those of 'The Bridge' in Sneed-The-Plow - indicates that this

transcendence is not conceptual; in fact the scene returns us to the

dubious determinism of the Fortune-Teller in scene 1. The ironies of

this urge towards the mystic are examined in the next chapter. Finally,

then, Edmond offers no answers but gains much of its force from the

repetition in a recognisably modern setting of a paradigmatic

confrontation and dream of fusion between archetypal American

characters, a dream which is now the subject of an ironic, even comic,

bathos, We might even see in this closing scene an instance of the

black-white "buddy" relationship of such 1980s films as 48 Hours (1982)

which Mamet parodies in the Douggie Brown film in speed-The-Plow.

Edmond, then, confirms that Mamet works within metanarratives and

archetypes at the same time as he undermines them. The confidence-man,

who is so prevalent in ! amet's plays and indeed throughout American

fiction, embodies many of these ideas, which are considered further in

this and the following chapters. An awareness of working within

fictions is also evident in Mamet's experimentation with a wide range of

forms and media, considered in chapter 5. In short, Namet writes

fictions which exploit archetypal characters and situations with a

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discriminating awareness of their limitations and provisionality. Such

discrimination is perhaps most strongly evident in his presentation of a

third racial group whose story is inevitably focussed not upon

archetypal myth but upon uncomfortably recent history.

iii. Jews and Jewishness

If Mamet's plays about blacks and Indians develop at the level of

archetypal character and action, his Three Jewish Plays dramatise a more

immediately contemporary experience at the level of language. Instead

of opposing two races as figures of the 'Other', they present the

assimilation so prevalent in modern experience. They also, perhaps, have

a more directly personal significance. One of the 'dialectical tensions'

noted by Carroll in Mamet's life is 'his family's Polish-Jewish

background on the one hand, and a desire to assimilate with a larger

sense of being American on the other' (1987,3). However, two recent

essays, 'The Decoration of Jewish Houses' and 'A Plain Brown Wrapper',

express Mamet's anger at what he sees as Jewish embarrassment at their

religion and identity and their 'desire to "pass": to slip unnoticed into

the non-Jewish community, to do nothing which would attract the notice,

and, so, the wrath of mainstream America' (EL, 17-18).

Of equal importance as the question of assimilation, and related to

it, is the Jewish influence on the language of the plays. Mamet feels

that second-generation American Jews have been deprived of language by

their parents, who 'eschewed Yiddish as the slave language of poverty,

and Hebrew as the dead language of meaningless ritual' (EE, 9). On the

other hand, when prompted he did suggest that 'Racially the tradition of

being quick-witted and silver-tongued and rooting and tooting, as it

were, was one which was held up to me as a Jewish kid, or which I held

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up to myself' (qtd. in Harriott 1988,87), and he has since said that

Jewish humour is the funniest humor in the world, fand] it's how I have

made my living all my life' (SE, 13). Certainly, whether or not the

verbal fireworks of Mamet's dialogue are directly attributable to a

Jewish upbringing, his language has much in common with the fast-paced,

witty monologues and exchanges of Woody Allen's films, or of Philip

Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint, or of the stage persona of the stand-

up comedian Jackie Mason, an ex-Rabbi for whose work Mamet has

expressed admiration (Savran 1987,17).

But if this 'tradition of being quick-witted and silver-tongued' is

indeed one side of a Jewish heritage, a darker side is that of the

numbed silence which has fallen on post-war art in the wake of the

Holocaust. 'No poetry after Auschwitz', proclaimed Theodor Adorno (qtd.

in Steiner 1967,72), for reasons made clear by George Steiner: 'it is by

no means certain that rational discourse can cope with these questions,

lying as they do outside the normative syntax of human communication,

in the explicit domain of the bestial' (196? , 189). Whether it is even

possible for the modern writer to address such matters legitimately is

open to question; it is far from clear 'that those who were not

themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies unscathed', and

yet 'Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can

focus on them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the

thing, it has lost the hard edges of possibility, it has stepped outside

the real' (Steiner 1967,189,330). Of course, much has subsequently

been written about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism, in novels by,

among many others, Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night, 1Q61), William Styron

(Sophie's Choice, 1979), and Don DeLillo (White Noise, 1985), and in a

series of works by Arthur Miller, including After the Fall (1964),

- 131 -

Incident at Vichy (1964) and Playing for Time (1980). Indeed, the

contrast between Miller's dialogue and Mamet's could not be better

illustrated than by a comparison of their plays about modern Jewish

experience. For all the sensitivity of the subject, Miller's plays about

the Holocaust are as articulate and discursive as the rest of his work.

By contrast, what is most remarkable about the best of Mamet's Jewish

plays, The Disappearance of the Jews, is the way in which it plays out.

the significance of the Holocaust within the very structure of the

dialogue. Any suggestion of respectful silence is bulldozed aside by

Joey's incessant talk, yet it remains a powerfully ironic absence.

Joey's fantasies amount to an obscene disregard of history, indicating

an unconscious complicity in the perpetuation of the quasi- Nazi

mentality he purports to repudiate; his individualistic conception of

heroism, poised ambivalently between a desire to reassert his Jewish

heritage and a vulgar need to sustain a self-image as comic-book

American hero, makes him blind to the significance of the past.

Allen Guttmann observes that 'the vexed question of the Jewish

apostate's identity has been raised countless tines' (1971,4), but for

Guttmann it is clear that, unlike Christianity, 'Judaism has traditionally

been concerned for ritualized behavior rather than for creeds ... Despite

its name, Orthodox Judaism is a way of life rather than a series of

definitions and beliefs' (5). This way of life is encapsulated in the

Talmud; and although 'the Talmud has lost its centrality ... the concern

with behavior rather than with theory has not vanished' (Guttmann 1971,

6). Superficially, Joey is concerned to preserve this tradition:

I swear to God, the doctors, teachers, everybody, in the law, the writers all the time geschraiying, all those assholes, how they're lost ... of course, they're lost. They should be

studying talmud ... we should be able to come to them and to

say, "What is the truth.,.? " And they should tell us. What the

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talmud says, what this one said, what Hillel said, an i I, I should be working on a forge all day. (L, 14)

Joey's problem is that his Jewish identity is rapidly slipping away as

he becomes assimilated into a secularized American democracy, and 'It

has been the uncertain identity of this new man, this American, which

has made the assimilation of Jews and Catholics relatively easy'

(Guttmann 1971,225). The obvious irony of the passage quoted above is

that Joey is very lax in the observance of Jewish ritual:

Of course we're schlepping all the time with heart attacks, with fat, look at this goddam food I sell ... that stuff will kill you, it killed my dad [... ] it's food to harvest wheat, to forge, to toil, my father's sitting on his ass for forty years driving through Idaho for Gould and Gould, what did he need for nourishment ...? Nothing. CDT, 151

One of the things which makes this play so impressive is its economical

richness of association, The experience of the Holocaust keeps breaking

into Joey's words with terrible irony, as when he remarks 'that stuff

will kill you', or in the hyperbolical reference to a father who ate

nothing. More obviously, Joey betrays his religion and his forebears by

rejecting the kosher food he sells and ought to eat. Betrayal is rife in

almost everything Joey says; betrayal not only of himself but of his

people, as when his frustrated attempts to remember a Jewish girl

progressively eliminate the identity conferred by her name; 'Rosen .., I

don't know ... Rubovitz ... Rogers Park ... what the hell ... (pause) Some

Jew broad ... (pause) Some folk dancer, I don't know , .. the short one,

(na use) Some broad ... ' (9).

In refusing to observe Jewish customs Joey loses the stigma of

persecution but also the stability these customs confer; and in his

desire to create a definable identity for himself he is drawn to the

same kind of caricatured American heroes as those celebrated by the

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sailors in Lakeboat. The Disappearance of the Jews is a more thoughtful

play than Lakeboat, however, because it goes beyond the merely =omit in

developing the implications of this form of hero-worship. In

identifying with such heroes Joey unconsciously rejects those who

represent his former identity, as when he dismisses intellectuals as

'assholes' because they question received wisdom instead of reinforcing

it. This implicit parallel between Joey and the Nazis by whom he knows

he should be appalled is pervasive. In the first scene he and Bobby

remember bullying another boy; 'We tied him to the bed. We put him in

the snow' (5). The episode has a sinister resonance, because it happened

at 'Winter Camp': the combination of 'Camp', 'snow' and torture holds

unmistakeable connotations. Even more damning is that once again they

cannot remember the identity of their victim. Unconsciously but

persistently, Joey in particular exhibits the same cast of mind he

condemns in the 'white shit' of the Nazis and the inhabitants of

Birmingham, Alabama (12-13). Later he confesses to a hatred of

(unspecified) others: 'Sometimes I think, "Well if they were killed ... if

they died ... " and sometimes I think I'll do it myself' (22).

But this almost neo-Nazi mentality goes hand in hand with an

equally persistent desire to debase himself: Joey virtually asks to be

interned in a concentration camp. There is a ghastly irony in his

definition of a 'great man': 'I would have been a great man in Europe -I

was meant to be hauling stones, or setting fenceposts, something' (14) .

Again, it is the combination of debasement in a particularly resonant

setting which is unsettling; as Bobby is quirk to point out, 'I'm sure it

was no picnic there'

BOBBY: Joe: with the Nazis ...? JOEY: Fuck the Nazis. Fuck the Nazis, Bob. I'm saying,

give a guy a chance to stand up ... Give 'em something to stand for.

- 134 -

BOBBY: That's very pretty, and when they stick glass rods in your dick and break them off ... JOEY: ... that was the Japs ... (15)

As Bobby says, this is 'romantic shit' because 'it's profaning what they

(the Jews] went through', a crime Joey takes further with his response 'I

could have [gone through it], too' (16). It is a perversion of what

George Steiner sees as the possibility of a misplaced pride in the

American Jew: 'The relationship of the American Jew to recent history is

subtly and radically different from that of the European. By its very

finality, the holocaust Justified every previous impulse of immigration.

All who had left Europe to establish the new Jewish communities in

America were proved terribly right' (1967,168). Perhaps it is this

kind of ignorance which prompts Joey's father to warn "It will happen

(again] in your lifetime"' (11,13).

Joey adopts an equally pugnacious attitude towards other races.

Indeed, the play articulates precisely that relation between two races,

one supposedly 'supercilious', the other weighed down with feelings of

inferiority, outlined by Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross; only here the

discourse comes from the other side of the fence. Joey, furious at the

depressingly familiar argument voiced by Bobby's Gentile wife that 'If

you [the Jews]'ve been persecuted so long ... you must have brought it on

yourself' (DI, 11), explains her views in the following way:

She feels left out, they got, what have they got, you talk about community, six drole cocksuckers at a lawn party somewhere (... I the reason that the goyin [sic] hate us the whole time, is (sic] addition they were envious, because we wouldn't fight. I .A 'cause we don't fight back they go "Who are those

people...? " (pause) "Hey, let's hit them in the head. " Because

we have our mind on higher things. (pause. ) Because we got something better to do than all day to fuckin' beat the women up and go kill things. (12)

-135-

The speech encapsulates a number of excuses for racial hatred: the

belief that minority groups may belong to a definable, supportive culture

and ethos unavailable to others; their separation from the majority

population; the non sequitur that such races think of themselves as

superior (which Joey seems to believe, but which could be attributed

simply to their difference); their lack of communication with others; and

the consequent need to persecute them, not because their supposed

arrogance is inherently evil but because it frustrates the white's need

to "get at" them (for good or ill, but always for self-interested

reasons), Joey's articulation of these arguments, however, also reveals

his own resentment, since his claim that 'they feel left out' (12) might

more accurately be a comment on Jews themselves. Joey inverts this

relationship: he creates for himself a fiction of heroic individual

resistance, and so implicitly condemns his forebears as collaborators in

their own slaughter; yet, inconsistently, also relegates all other groups

to the status of inferior outsiders. Joey thus creates a self-

contradictory myth which enables him to deal with his own vulnerability

by denying it. He is condemned to inaction, and ultimately to the

repetition in himself of the oppression he proclaims to abhor, because

he can only consider antisemitism in terms of individual acts to be

avenged by heroic deeds of individual strength. Hence his reduction of

the concentration camps to an imaginary testing ground for his

manliness.

All the inversions in this play - of authority, responsibility and

guilt - can be accounted for not only by assimilation, nor by individual

paralysis, but by the need for enabling fictions; and, as usual, Mamet

explores the specifically American aspects of these fictions: here, the

relation of assimilation to antisemitism. While the title of

- 136 -

The Disappearance of the Jews 'seems to suggest not simply the loss of

identity through assimilation, but, more importantly, that erosion of the

self which stems from a denial of history and of the power of the

individual to intervene in his own life' (Rigsby 1985b, 41), 'Kamet's

title also stresses the collective nature of this failure. Racial

identity is here fragmented and unrecuperable; Joey's assimilation has

reached the stage where clear distinctions between himself and members

of other races cannot be made. He attributes to the 'goyim' attitudes he

himself holds, and to himself qualities he lacks (such as having his

mind on 'higher things'),

This American racial intermixture is examined more explicitly in

The Luftmensch. (It is possible that this play is intended as a sequel

to The Disappearance of the Jew=, since the characters in

The Luftmensch, A and B, are described as 'two older men' [LL, 351.

Since there are no other characters than whom they can be older, perhaps

the Three Jewish Play (The Disappearance of the Jews, Goldberg Street

and The Luftmensch) are intended to be performed in sequence, much like

The Sanctity of Marriage, Dark Pony and Reunion. ) In The Luftmensch the

national identities of the European immigrants to America have become

ill-defined, their people now itinerant: 'All of them gone. Uk ... Ukraina

... Boznia, Herz ... all of, what did I? All gypsies to me I... ] All those

tinkers' (LX, 37) ; 'Languages they spoke, They're gone. The States are

gone' (39). But this does not mean that the immigrants have become

assimilated or can regard America as their own country; quite 'the

reverse - 'This is the foreign land' (40), which the character called A

describes as 'The intermediate land of the Lotos Eaters' (43), In this

ambivalent status, of belonging and rot belonging, Mamet seems to be

trying to capture the historical process according to which these

- 137-

characters have to deal with their deracinated lives. And there recurs

in The Luftmensch that tension in The Disappearance of the Jews by

which this historical process blurs apparently secure distinctions

between tyrant and victim: the woodcutter, whose story A recounts, found

that 'his friends were the very people who had over the course of a

thousand years destroyed his race - could you say they were reunited

here? In what? ' (LK, 43).

iv. 'The American Dream' and the Predatory Culture

The archetypal characters in Mamet's work are not confined to the

racial; confidence men, salesmen, cops, criminals, Hollywood moguls,

explorers, the Mafia - all are familiar figures in American fiction and

cinema, Mamet is interested in particular American archetypes not just

because these can be exploited as symbols to which his countrymen refer

in time of need, but because these archetypes fuel acquisitive desires,

desires which drive the American economy and which, in a circular

process, justify themselves by reference to the archetypes which created

them. But if myths have become confused and corrupted in Namet's plays,

equally he is strongly aware of the origins of what America might

regard as its natural morality:

in America we're still suffering from loving a frontier ethic - that is to say, take the land from the Indians and give it to the railroad. Take the money from the blacks and give it to the rich. The ethic was always something for nothing ,.. So, because we've been rather dishonest about our basic desire to

get something for nothing in this country we've always been

enslaved by the myth of the happy capitalist. Familiar American pieties are always linked to criminality. That's why they're familiar American pieties. (qtd, in Bigsby 1985b, 111)

It is not just that an ideal has been debased; the ideal itself has been

constructed to facilitate criminality, so that 'the possession of the

- 138 -

American continent can be seen both as an enabling myth and as an act

of theft validated by rhetoric detached from its moral roots' (Bigsby

1985b, 15-16).

Indeed, the origins and functions of morality are central to the

perpetuation of the world in which Xamet's characters find themselves.

Nietzsche argued in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) that morality is a

product of power relations: 'the protracted and domineering fundamental

total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a

lower order, to a "below" - that is the origin of the antithesis "good"

and "bad"' (1968a, 462). For Nietzsche this origin is admirable, "the

good" being the name given to the actions of "'the good" themselves, that

is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt

and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the

first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and

plebeian' (461-62) ; but for Mamet the definition of "the good" itself,

'the myth of the happy capitalist', is a fiction necessary to justify the

rape of America by the settlers. In American Buffalo Teach's constantly shifting accounts of what is moral and what is not point to this need

to manoeuvre morality into a support to self-interest. So, with a

hyperbolic but important recognition that morality is not ineffable but

a human construct, he proclaims that 'you make your own right and wrong'

(AL 54), and that 'Everything's all right to someone' (21), thus

demonstrating the problems and contradictions of the liberal-democratic

idea of 'Each one to his own opinion' (21). But in this very process of

moulding a morality to suit himself he reveals his own impotence, the

'slave morality' of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, 'The slave revolt in

morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives

birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true

- 139 -

reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary

revenge' (1968a, 472). Such an 'imaginary revenge' constitutes the whole

action of American Buffalo; the difference between Teach and the first

settlers is that the very possibility of exploitation on which American

pieties are based has been taken away from him.

The institutionalized impotence of Mamet's characters is the obverse

of the unrecuperable golden world of 'the American Dream', previously

satirized in a short play of that name by Edward Albee. The Young Man,

identified as 'the American Dream' by Grandma, states openly that he

will 'do almost anything for money' (Albee 1962,46-47), and articulates

the alienation the 'Dream' both creates and conceals: 'while I know I

cannot relate ... I know I must be related to' (51). Mamet believes that

'This capitalistic dream of wealth turns people against each other ... We

are finally reaching a point where there is nothing left to exploit. The

dream has nowhere to go so it bas to start turning in on itself' (qtd.

in Savran 1987,14). Bigsby (1985b, 120) revealingly compares the

apparently enervated spirit of the 'American Dream' in Mamet's salesmen

to that in Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Misfits, in which the

cowboys have been reduced to hunting mustangs for a dogfood company.

In The Water Engine -a play which foregrounds the the construction of

fictions as history - the Soapbox Speaker claims the 'dream' never

existed, at least not in the form it is popularly imagined to have done:

'Where is America? I say it does not exist. And I say that it never

existed. It was all but a myth. A great dream of avarice ... The dream

of a Gentleman Farmer' (1,55).

On the other hand, Lieberson indicts Mamet for perpetuating, while

debunking, a vague and simplistic notion: 'Is there such a thing anymore,

or just one such "dream"? ' (1988,6). But Nainet's point is that the myth

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of the "American Dream", however vague, must still exist, since otherwise

it could not be exploited. The corruption of 'business' necessarily both

erodes and perpetuates this myth, and the following definition by Dennis

Welland helps to explain why it interests Mamet:

It envisages a society in which success through his own efforts is still as available to the ordinary man as it was in the expansive, pioneering days of the last century; looking back nostalgically to the simpler, homely values of those days, it also looks forward to the possibility of graspir_g opportunity with equal vigour in modern circumstances so that sturdy, independent enterprise will be rewarded by a sense of achievement, improved living conditions for the individual and his family, and, in all probability, affluence. (1979,37)

As the rest of this chapter will argue, the ideals of the pioneering

spirit, family life and, by implication, possession of property and land

('homely values') are all ironized in Mamet's plays as ideals which have

become exploited and debased. Yet it is also true that his characters

nevertheless perceive themselves to be situated at precisely the juncture

described by Welland: appealing to the values of the past while

situating their own actions against the promise of future success.

In Mamet's world the 'Dream' has been doubly corrupted: success is

demanded, but the input of effort is resented; and the possibility of

success is not equally available to all, as the catch-22 situation

outlined in the first scene of Glengarry Glen Ross shows:

WILLIAMSON: I'm hired to watch the leads t.. ] anybody falls below a certain mark I'm not permitted to give them the premium leads.

LEVENE: Then how do they come up above that mark? With dreck...? That's nonsense. (GGR, 6)

Later, Moss details a distinction between labouring and leisure classes,

by which Mitch and Murray enrich themselves on the labour of their

employees ('Ninety per cent our sale, we're paying to the office for the

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leads', complains Moss), while the salesmen are 'sitting in the shit'

(GG$, 15). However, Moss is angry not because Mitch and Murray make

fortunes without working, but because the salesmen are 'in thrall' to

them (16). For Moss, Jerry Graff combines the twin ideals of self-

employment and virtually unearned wealth, Significantly, however,

Aaronow has heard a rumour that Graff has failed and is now 'running

cold' (15), casting doubt on the possibility that they will ever be

released from their enslavement to a leisured employer and thus free to

become members of the leisure class themselves.

Terry Eagleton argues that 'We live in a society which on the one

hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and on the

other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population an endless

deferment of fulfilment' (1983,193). American Buffalo and Glengarry

Glen Ross explore not the ennui of individuals sated with ultimately

unsatisfactory pleasures, but the sub-class denied entry to this culture.

However, this does not prevent the sub-class from operating as a

metaphor for the leisure class. Jack V. Barbera argues that the title of

American Buffalo encompasses both the criminal and the business classes.

While 'Don and Teach and Bobby are as antiquated and out-of-it as the

American buffalo', and clearly criminals, simultaneously the title

applies to the characters as representatives of the business

class as well as representatives of a class of urban marginal crooks. For "buffalo" read the slang verb "to intimidate". It is because he does not know anything that Teach must try to buffalo Don. And it is common for businessmen to buffalo the

public. (Barbera 1981,274-75)

Mamet accounted for the lukewarm reception accorded the play on its

first appearance by explaining that the criminal subclass 'was not at

that time a generally accepted metaphor, so that it was difficult for a

lot of people to accept it as a play about ourselves because the

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convention wasn't current' (qtd. in Bigsby 1985b, 85). In fact, the

metaphor works beautifully, for several reasons outlined above: the

tendency of the sub-class to imitate its superiors as a result of both

vicarious excitement and resentment, and, conversely, the criminal

exploitation which created the wealth of the business classes in the

first place.

As the terms of the above argument. indicate, Namet owes much to

Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen outlines two

conditions for the emergence of a leisure class:

(1) the community must be of a predatory habit of life ... that is to say, the men, who constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a routine of labour. (1953,8)

Wamet's characters fulfil the first condition but fall short of the

second. His plays unfold among the detritus of shattered offices and

resale shops, or on the decks of dingy lakeboats. The true leisure

class in his plays consists of characters like Mitch and Murray in

Glengarry Glen Ross or Richard Ross in Speed-The-Plow, characters who

live off the labour of the salesmen or the producers, an--i who never

appear. Consequently the onstage characters envy and resent the

offstage leisure class. Veblen analyses the leisure class itself, but

Mamet concentrates on those outside the leisure class trying to get in.

When the salesmen rip off their clients they are extracting revenge for,

and re-enacting, the exploitation they suffer at the hands of their

superiors.

A class structure, then, is evident in Mamet's plays -a class

structure which, ironically, is so often held to be absent from American

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life (indeed, this itself is part of the "American Dream"), but which

reappears in disguised form in one of America's greatest institutions:

the family.

v. The family

In his book Family. Drama, and American Dreams, Tom Scanlan claims that

'The history of America coincides with the emergence of the modern

family system' (1978,3). He cites Philippe Aries' proposal that the

development of the almost hermetic modern family, which emerged in the

seventeenth century, resulted in a basic incompatibility between

'sociability and the concept of the family' <qtd. in Scanlan 1978,19-

20). This version of the family was reinforced by the Puritanical

origins of American life; but with the development of industrialized

capitalism, 'individuals began to separate themselves from the family'

(Scanlan 1978,26). There arose two views of the family, one which saw

it as a comforting retreat, the other as an oppressive constraint. For

Scanlan, the tensions between these two views of the family have

provoked the development of a distinctive pattern in American drama,

which becomes, for him, an evaluative principle:

What separates playwrights such as O'Neill, Miller, and Williams from products of our mass dreams of family life such as Rip Van Winkle and the soap opera is not the materials dealt with, or even the eloquence of the language, so much as the relentless pursuit of the contradictions which the popular culture imagines as compatible and harmonious. (78)

Certainly, the most powerful plays in what has become the American

dramatic canon tend to support this argument. In O'Neill's masterpiece,

Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), the Tyrones are unable to escape

from their stifling family situation because of their various physical

and psychological addictions and afflictions; this failure to succeed in

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the outside world forces them to turn their energies back inwards to the

family, and in this claustrophobic atmosphere they take out their misery

and frustration on each other. In Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949)

the family whose support Willy needs is also the source of much of his

anxiety - Happy at one point even denies Willy is his father - while

Willy himself becomes more and more like a little boy: 'Willy, when are

you going to grow up? ' asks Charley (Miller 1958,186); Bernard, who

used to be the butt of Willy's scorn as a boy, now calls Willy 'kid'

(189), as does Howard Wagner (180), in an ironic reversal of the

situation when Willy gave the baby Howard his name. In the plays of

Tennessee Williams, the family constrains an urge for freedom evident in

a partially repressed sexuality: the homosexuality of Brick in Cat on a

Hot Tin Roof (1955), for instance, comes into conflict with the

hierarchical structure of the Southern family as soon as Big Daddy

decides that his sons must beget children if they are to share in the

inheritance; while the debasement of the Southern family again appears

in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) in the near-nymphomania of Blanche.

In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) George and

Martha miss the security of a proper family so strongly that they

actually invent a son (which repeats the central conceit of The American

Dream 1196 (1961]). Even Sam Shepard, who in so many ways represents a

departure from the American dramatic tradition, has written a trilogy -

Curse of the Starving Classes (1978), Buried Child (1978) and True West

(1980) - which is archetypal in its presentation of the family and of

the tense relations of its members to each other and to the history and

geography of America.

Given this tradition, one of the most remarkable things about

Mamet's work is that the family - so prevalent thematically in American

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drama as for Scanlan to argue, dubiously, that 'there are no rival

traditions' (1978,214) - is almost entirely missing. The trilogy of

short plays, Reunion, Dark Pony and The Sanctity of Marriage, deals with

the relationships between, respectively, father and grown-up daughter,

father and young daughter, and husband and wife; but Reunion, in

particular, is one of Mamet's most banal and insipid plays. Marriage

has become 'like a habit' ($, 19) in a world in which 'Every kid on the

block's got three sets of parents' and the broken home is 'The most

important institution in America' (24). Self-absorption has led to self-

destruction but also the destruction of the family, a double irony

apparent when Bernie tells Carol 'my life needn't be your life in any

sense of the word' (22). The family has entirely disintegrated,

remaining only as an unsatisfactory dream of escape from the equally

disastrous life the characters lead outside it. But this is hardly an

original dramatic situation, and Mamet fails to develop anything

interesting from it. Because both characters want the same thing - the

reunion of the play's title - the dialogue lacks the interpersonal play

of deception, aggression and reserve of Mamet's best work.

Park Pony and The Sanctity of Marriage are more successful because

there are greater tensions implicit in the language. The story told in

the former 'simultaneously suggests the necessity for and fragility of

consolatory fables' (Bigsby 1985b, 34), while retaining the ironic

resonance of the implied contrast both with Reunion, in which possibly

the same father-daughter relationship has broken down, and with

American history, since 'plainly Dark Pony finally offered no protection

against the depredations of the white man' (Bigsby 1985b, 34-35). In

The Sanctity of Marriage the focus remains the relationship (between

Edward and Jean, apparently a married, but separated, couple), and again

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this relationship is mediated through story. On a trip to England, a

pubkeeper told them the tale of a murder he claims took place in the

same pub. Jean is sceptical, accusing the landlord of making it up;

Edward counters, 'Why not choose to believe? ' (EX, 44). Edward has the

same faith in the story as Jean has in religion, but neither can share

the other's faith. The status of the story is in this way directly

related to the status of marriage; and the word 'sanctity' in the title

implies that both require an act of faith if their validity is to be

maintained, a faith which is maintained by the daughter in Dark Pony, is

disintegrating in The Sanctity of Marriage, and has collapsed in Reunion.

Such a collapse is implicit in the all-male environments of Mamet's

best plays. As Almansi enthusiastically put it, 'Mamet is the poet and

critic, chronicler and parodist, of the stag party and of all social

occasions and situations precluding women ... These comedies grow in a

male-chauvinist conservatory in which only the worst prejudices blossom'

(1986,191-92). Lakeboat, American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross have

not a female between them; both Edmond and Speed-The-Plow conclude with

the final exorcism of the woman by two men. Often, however, women

continue to exert some influence over the action, as is the case with

Grace and Ruthie in American Buffalo, or with Lingk's wife and Levene's

daughter in Glengarry Glen Ross. In Lakeboat women are experienced as a

tangible lack, a deficiency in the sailors' lives. Yet Lakeboat is not

one of Mamet's more original plays; as Bigsby notes (1985a, 252), it is

derived from O'Neill's plays of the sea, and the similarity of the all-

male situation is at least as important as the similarities of theme and

setting. In Bound East for Cardiff (1916), for instance, Yank's dream of

'a wife, and kids to play with at night after supper when your work was

done', and his dying vision of 'A pretty lady dressed in black' (O'Neill

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1923,18,22), is not so very far removed either from Cocky's account of

his sexual adventures with a negress at the beginning of the same play,

or even from Fred's observation in Lakeboat that 'the way to a woman's

cunt is right through her cunt' (L, 56). As Mamet recently put it, in an

argument which is also the premise of Rob Reiner's film When Harry Net

Sally. (1989), 'the true nature of the world, as between men and women, is

sex, and any other relationship between us is either an elaboration, or

an avoidance' (SE, 173). The difference between Bound East for Cardiff

and Lakeboat is in tone and expression - O'Neill's melodramatic emotion,

Mamet's vicious, misogynistic language - yet both idioms are provoked by

the same situation of frustrated masculine sexuality.

There are two principal reasons why family life drops out as a

subject of intrinsic interest in Mamet's major plays. First, it has

become marginalized by business: where an earlier tradition sees the

family and the company in opposition to one another, in Mamet'o world

the company has refused the right of existence to the family, the

possible reappearance of which, however, threatens the company's

stability. This leads, secondly, to the co-opting of the family's

functions by the company, which now organizes itself on familial,

hierarchical lines. And this is only one example of a stifling, mock-

familial structure which Mamet finds to be pervasive at every level of

American society, and which results from his perception that, 'childlike,

we have broadened our definition of authority to include anyone who

controls or directs us at the present moment' (WIR, 82).

For instance, political repression i redefined by Xamet as the

child's idolatry of the parent (SE, 93). Even card-playing 'restate[s]

the mythological hierarchy of Monarchy, of a state which recapitulate-

our infant understanding of the family-as-world' (SE, 174) ; while 1(amet

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uses the metaphor of the unhappy family to de=scribe the structure of the

American theatre, in which 'The actor is manipulated and controlled by

the director, who is similarly in thrall to the producer', creating

relationships which resemble 'that of the parent to the child' (am, 31);

and this structure repeats the commercial structure which is t

spurious justification, those at the bottom being 'subject to the

unreasoned, unloving and frightened whims of those in (financial) power

over them' (WIR, 32). In this situation, as in any 'unhappy tyranny',

Mamet concludes, 'the oppressed must free the oppressor' (WIR, 32-33).

One is reminded of George Orwell's description of England as a family

with the wrong members in control.

Characters in the plays tend to organize themselves along familial

lines, In both Edmond and Speed-The-Plow a male character becomes, in

effect, a surrogate wife, In American Buffalo Don becomes 'father in the

surrogate family he and Bob have formed' <Schlueter and Forsyth 1983,

497), and Mamet himself has described this play as 'a tragedy about life

in the family' (qtd. in Schvey 1988b, 93), As argued below, in Glengarry.

Glen Ross the salesmen organize themselves according to a structure and

terminology which invokes both familial and sexual relations. Meanwhile

the cadillac, the steak knives and the sack function as a system of

rewards and punishments for good and bad behaviour as defined by the

parent; yet the inaccessibility of the parent in this family means that

the salesmen exist in a state of permanent childhood.

harry Glen Ross fuses the denial of the archetypal American

family with an archetypal modern vision - the supersession of man by

mechanization. This is a theme more familiar in science fiction, yet

frequently in twentieth-century American drama, a suspicion of

mechanization has manifested itself in this image. In Elmer Rice's

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The Adding Machine (1923), Zero's fear of the machine in the first scene

turns into dependency on it in the last, as he becomes 'A slave to a

contraption of steel and iron' (Rice 1950,107) ; while, more ambiguously,

Reuben becomes a slave to electricity in O'Neill's Dynamo (1928). In

Death of a Salesman (1949) the relationship has become still more

ambivalent: Wagner's delight at the tape-recorded voice of his daughter

counterpoints Willy's frustration and alienation at being confronted with

a machine instead of a responsive human being. The dates of these

plays are important: fear of outright fusion with or substitution by the

machine in Rice's play is superseded by the tense drama of technology's

capacity for both good and evil, In 'Shelly, the Machine, Levene' (Mi,

37), man and machine are, once more, wholly fused. But the image

belongs to an earlier age, an age struggling to come to terms with the

spiritual crisis of modernity encapsulated in the ambiguous benefits of

developing mechanization. There is something a little old-fashioned

about Levene's nickname, which creates comic mental images when Roma

patronizingly invokes it to defend Levene from Moss's attacks ('Who said

"Fuck the Machine"? ' 1401); and while it apparently accords Levene a

steely hardness, in fact it indicates the obsolescence which haunts him

and which he comes close to conceding in extolling 'The old ways' (41).

Levene's statement that 'A man's his job' (44) might make a suitable

epigraph to the play, but as Renko remarks in Mamet's Hill Street Blues

episode, A Wasted Weekend, 'A Man Who is Only His Job ... what is he? A

machine. Not even a machine. A cog in a machine. We were not put on

this earth just to work' (1,13),

If Levene's obsolescence is evident partly in a dated metaphor, it

emerges also in his contradictory urge towards the protection of his

family, of which the company has now become a cruel parody. Roma, in

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the midst of his diatribe against Williamson, declares: 'I don't care

whose nephew you are, who you know, whose dick you're sucking on' ( R,

56). There is a vestige here of the kind of clearly-defined family

structure in Death of a Salesman, in which Willy is able to remind his

immediate boss, Howard Wagner, that 'I was with the firm when your

father used to carry you in here in his arms' (Miller 1958,179). But

the structure has eroded: the family line is now not from father, but

from uncle, to son; and while Wagner mush be treated with respect,

Williamson has become the whipping-boy for the frustrations of his

colleagues. As Roma tells him, 'What you're hired for is to help us -

does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to fuck us up ... to help

men who are going out there to try to earn a living. You fairy. You

company man' (G-Q$, 57). Noticeably, and inevitably, the worst insults

are those which cast doubt on his sexual capabilities - 'child' and

'fairy'; such creatures being outcasts in this world where the 'men'

celebrate tirelessly the achievements of their 'balls'. In the version in

the National Theatre's files, Levene tells Williamson:

You can't run an office. I don't care. You don't have the blood, John. You don't have the blood ... You haven't been there and you can't go there. Never been out there. You don't have the experience, you don't know what it is, and you don't have the sense, and you don't have the balls. (Q-QR, typescript, 83)

This celebration of 'balls', however, is heavily ironic in view of the

fact that Levene has a daughter, reference to whose existence defines

him as a weakling. Twice, when Williamson has the better of him, Levene

touches on what is evidently a taboo subject. The following exchange

takes place in the play's first scene:

LEVENE : I'm asking you. As a favor to me? (Pause. ) John. (Long pause. ) John: my daughter ...

W ILL IANSON :I can't do it, Shelly. (QU, 10)

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At the end of the play, after Williamson has decided to turn Leverne over

to the police, there occurs a parallel exchange which makes the point

even more forcefully:

LEVENE: WILLIAMSON: LEVENE: W ILL IAMSON : LEVENE: W ILL IAMSON :

Don't .

I'm sorry. Why? Because I don't. mike you. John: John: my daughter Fuck you. (62)

As Anne Dean comments, 'The only time we hear anything other than

sales-talk is when one of the salesmen is either in trouble or working

towards a sales coup' (1987,346-47). If the nature of the company has

altered in the interval between Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen

Ross, it has been at the expense of the family. Levene is reluctant to

mention anything which might detract from his image as a ruthless

salesman; and it is indeed unfortunate, not to say unnatural, that a

Machine has actually produced offspring. But while the motive for

Levene's reticence on this subject is plain, that of his colleagues is

less so. A clue is to be found, however, in the behaviour of Lingk's

wife.

While Roma accuses Williamson of being the 'stupid fucking cunt' who

'just cost me six thousand dollars' (QU, 56), the culprit is really Mrs.

Lingk. Roma gets Lingk to spell this out, forcing him to 'say the words'

which explain why Lingk 'can't negotiate': 'I don't have the power. [... ]

The power to negotiate. C ... ] I can't talk to you, you met my wife C ... ]

She told me not to talk to you' (54). Mrs. Lingk embodies all the

forces which threaten the salesmen. First, she represents the world

outside the office, much as an outside force threatens the inhabitants of

a room in so many of Pinter's plays. Second, she invokes the Attorney

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General, a real-life embodiment of constitutional power. Third, as

loving wife she brings into the office that emotional life which is so

rigorously forbidden the salesmen themselves. Finally, she plainly

understands the power relationships involved in private conversation.

While trying to protect Lingk from Roma - when she tells him not to

talk to Roma, she really means not to listen to him - she herself has

both seduced her husband with words, and made sure, in absenting herself

from the scene, that Roma cannot do the same to her. In some ways,

then, Mrs. Lingk bears a striking resemblance to Mitch and Murray.

The salesmen's fear of the family is evident in the desperate

attempts of Roma and Levene to neutralize Mrs, Lingk's authority before

it has had a chance to emerge. Levene, pretending to be an interested

investor like Lingk, claims his wife told him to 'look into' land in the

same area as that bought by Lingk. The contrast with Lingk's own wife

could not be starker. Roma then tries to reassure Lingk by suggesting

he understands everything about both male and female psychology:

LINGK: My wife said I have to cancel the deal. ROMA: It's a common reaction, Jim. I'll tell you what it is,

and I know that that's why you married her. One of the reasons is prudence. It's a sizeable investment. One thinks twice ... it's also something women have. (48)

Next, Roma tries to manoeuvre himself into the position of authority the

childish Lingk accords his wife. 'She told me not to talk to you', says

Lingk; Roma, both father-figure and boyish co-conspirator, responds 'no-

one's going to know, let's go around the corner and we'll get a drink'

(54). Finally, Roma reduces Lingk's marriage to the level of a financial

transaction about which he can therefore be expected to speak with

greater authority than Lingk himself: 'You have a contract with your

wife. You have certain things you do jointly, you have a bond there'

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(55). The salesmen, then, try to neutralize Lingk's wife by assimilating

her into the structure of the company.

The all-male environments of Mamet's plays tend to imitate not only

the family's structure, but also its distribution of sexual roles. Once

again, Veblen is an important point of reference, because his analysis of

hierarchical power structures is likewise often couched in sexual terms.

Veblen's class distinctions derive from what he sees as an earlier

distinction between manly and womanly employment. 'Virtually the whole

range of industrial employments is an outgrowth of what is classed as

woman's work in the primitive barbarian community' (Veblen 1953,6),

industry being distinguished from exploit, which 'is the conversion (by

the agent] to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other

end by another agent' (11). Exploit is superior to industry to the

extent that 'no acquisition is morally possible to the self-respecting

man at this cultural stage, except such as proceeds on the basis of

prowess - force or fraud' (13). What is particularly interesting about

Mamet's plays in this connection is that while aspiring to predatory

exploits (which appear most obviously in the institutionalized theft of

American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, but also, for instance, in the

exaggerated respect accorded Jonnie Fast and the glamorization of

violence against women in Lakeboat), their actual impotence to carry

them out surfaces, displaced, in the homosexual or 'womanly' overtones of

many of the plays. The most obvious examples are the conversion of

Edmond from aspiring heterosexual stud to the Prisoner's willingly

passive partner, and Gould and Fox in Speed-The-Plow, who are 'Two

Whores' (T, 26), and whose relationship is marked (particularly in

Gregory Mosher's production) by latent homosexuality; and Fox explicitly

-154-

draws this connection between subservience and homosexuality in telling

Gould: 'My job is kissing your ass' (31),

Yet a very different attitude to all-male relationships is presented

in Mamet's recent essay 'In the Company of Men' - first published,

provocatively, in Playboy magazine. Mamet begins by asserting the

fundamental difference of men and women:

try as one may to hew to the Correct Liberal Political line of Equal Rights, and elaborate a moral imperative into a prescriptive psychological view (i. e,, Men and Women are entitled to the same things, therefore, they must want the same things), we know that such a view is not true- (EE, 86)

He then draws a distinction between this and his earlier attitudes:

instead of believing 'that what was required for a happy union was a

man who was, in all things save plumbing, more or less a woman', he now

believes 'that women want men to be men' (86). Other possible readings

of the plays emerge in the light of this essay: that certain activities

are specifically male, and that the men simply create their own of MQn

anxieties by desiring the: presenc or that they actually celebrate thei'r

absence which allows them to give full rein to their

aggression through language which is essentially harmless because

directed at other men.

Yet the male world of the essay is very different from the male

world of the plays. Its good to be in an environment where one is

understood, where one is not judged, where one is not expected to

perform - because there is room in Male Society ... for all who

wholeheartedly endorse the worth of the activity' (EE, 88). Such an

idealized society excludes all those things - struggle, invigilation,

performance - which are not just present in the world of the plays, but

its raison d'etre. In other words, this world in which 'no one will

- 155 -

inquire into your sincerity, your history, or your views, if you do not

choose to share them' (EE, 89) is fundamentally undramatic. It is a

world of escape, like that of Lone Canoe, reminiscent more of Mamet's

script for Hill Street Blues and his pilot episode for another series

called We Will Take You There (both of which are considered in the

Appendix) than of his major plays. That these are both pieces for

television is not coincidental. They, like the essay, celebrate the

outdoor life of hunting and shooting - hard to present in the theatre

which is better suited to the claustrophobic, frustrating atmosphere of

the sales office and the resale shop. A related and more important

point is that the television scripts and essay can get away with

presenting a life which is, as Mamet confesses, 'corny' (EE, 89).

Scanlan's distinctions remain useful: Mamet's less interesting, less

dramatic work uses not just the mythology but the medium of the soap

opera, presenting a world which, for all its apparently ideal combination

of excitement and relaxation, smooths over tensions and contradictions

to present an essentially anaesthetic entertainment. By contrast, the

major plays all expose 'the contradictions which the popular culture

imagines as compatible and harmonious' within the family (Scanlan 1978,

78) - except that the family is now less literal than metaphorical, a

pervasive structure whose superficially attractive organization becomes

the basis for the perpetration and perpetuation of systems of

exploitation.

vi. Property, representation and simulation

The sale of Glen Ross farms is predicated on an American tradition of

the farm as family retreat. Scanlan notes that

Many writers have pointed out the importance of farming in American thought, locating the sources of this habit of mind in

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the eighteenth-century physiocrats and in Jefferson. But the fact that these farms were thought of as family units has not been emphasized. Jefferson's ideal America depends on the family as much as it does on the farm. (Scanlan 1978,28)

Jefferson remarked that 'I feel not that existence is a blessing, but

when something calls my mind to my family or farm' (qtd. in Scanlan

1978,28). The American farm has several kinds of archetypal

significance: it encapsulates the various images of the family already

considered, of refuge but also constraint; it represents the

consolidation of the frontier; and it offers an alternative ethos to that

of the city.

In their book on American literature, Donaldson and Massa claim that

'a substantial majority would still agree with the Jeffersonian sentiment

that life on the farm is indeed healthier and more likely to inculcate

virtuous behaviour than urban existence' (1978,58). True or not, it is

clear that some such sentiment is exploited by the real estate salesmen

in Glengarry garry Glen Ross. Exploited, but not debunked; Mamet's salesmen

depend on the persistence of an ethic without which there could be no

exploitation. Much the same might be said of the farm and desert of

Shepard's trilogy and of the same writer's screenplays for Zabriskie

Pzizt (1969) and Paris, Texas (1984). Shepard's technique is to play off

against each other an urban and suburban civilization on the one hand,

and the bleak, savage yet curiously appealing desert on the other.

For instance, the father of the protagonists of True West, Lee and

Austin, has left to live in the desert. Lee, initially at least, believes

in the desert ethic, while Austin is happy with his career as a

Hollywood screenwriter, arguing that 'There's no such thing as the Vest

anymore' (Shepard 1985,35). Lee believes he too can write a successful

screenplay, 'True-to-life stuff' (15) based on his experiences in the

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desert. The story as Lee tells it is ridiculous; but this is at least

partly because of Lee's inability to construct a story, not because the

ethic itself is necessarily absurd. In addition, one of the play's most

powerful implications is that Lee's story is an effective metaphor for

the brothers' lives:

So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin' down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don't know is that each one of 'em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he's the only one that's afraid. And they keep ridin' like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who's chasin' doesn't know where the other one is taking him. And the one who's being chased doesn't know where he's going. (27)

Austin, whom Lee forces to help with the script, soon wants to take to

the desert himself, and as in so many of Shepard's plays, the characters

start to merge into a composite figure. A typewriter and a golf club,

symbols of Austin's suburban existence, are destroyed, and at the end,

'the figures of the brothers now appear to be caught in a vast desert-

like landscape' (59). While True West presents a complex and

constantly-changing pattern of interactions, then, the possibility that

the desert offers a genuinely alternative lifestyle remains constant, in

that while Lee's tale is constantly undercut by the other characters and

even by himself, it does function as a metaphor both of the desolation

of the characters' experience and of the possibility of regeneration

through detachment from the suburbia responsible for this desolation.

It is clear from this account of True West that it has much in

common with Mamet's Speed-The-Plow. In each case a Hollywood producer

(Saul in Shepard's play) is required to make a choice between two

scripts, and as the result of a bet chooses what appears to be the

inferior script forced on him by a novice. In each case the chosen

script, while subject to irony, appears to offer an alternative to a life

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of stifling routine and cynicism. However, in True West the script

retains validity because of its relation to the characters' lives, even

though the opinion of its chief advocate is severely devalued. (Lee

cannot see, for instance, the manipulation of the audience's sympathies

by a film in which 'Kirk Douglas has died from the death of his horse'

(Shepard 1985,19). Mamet's parody is even grosser: one of the scripts

on Gould's desk is 'The Story of a Horse and the Horse Who Loved Him'

IM, 61 .) In Speed-The-Plow it is harder to make confident assertions

about either 'The Bridge' or its chief defender: Gould rejects not so

much the script, as Karen, whose motives remain ambivalent. This is

symptomatic of a recurrent pattern already noted in Mamet's work: his

characters need to believe in something - archetypes, fictions, promises

of future success - which will validate their lives; and because this

need is real, it can be exploited for profit by unscrupulous characters,

This is an inevitable consequence of what Mamet perceives as the

nature of American business, which leads to the 'co-opting' of desirable

alternatives to a corrupt urban existence by the very forces which

perpetuate this corruption. His most explicit comment on this aspect of

American life is to be found in an essay already quoted in chapter 1:

We live in very selfish times. Nothing is given away free, Any impulse of creation or whimsy or iconoclasm which achieves general notice is immediately co-opted by risk capital, and its

popularity - which arose from its generosity and freedom of thought - is made to serve the turn of financial extortion.

The successful workingman's cafe is franchised nationwide, and the charm of its artlessness wholesaled. The energy and invention of the bohemian quarter is transformed by promoters into the marketability of "Artland. " The privacy of the remote seaside resort conducive to contemplation and renewal is sold

piecemeal to vacationers hungry for retreat who are willing to

pay for a frantic, thronged pilgrimage to a spot where retreat

was once possible. (WIR, 126

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A similar scenario is painted in the more recent essay 'Some Freaks'

(SE, 2). The desire for a 'retreat' from the mundane and philistine

world which Mamet sees as having been created by contemporary

capitalism itself becomes, in turn, a commodity marketable by those same

forces, This despair at the possibility of retreat - even in a

geographical sense - distinguishes his work from Shepard's.

The clearest example is the sale of Glen Ross farms. Throughout the

play several accounts of what makes these farms valuable are proposed.

Roma suggests they are 'an opportunity [.,. I an event [ ... ] What does it

mean? What you want it to mean' (Q R, 25). Later, Roma suggests the

attraction is specifically financial: 'The man next to you, he bought his

lot at forty-two, he phoned to say that he'd already had an offer.., '

(48). But the salesmen never explain wby the farms should represent an

'opportunity', financial or otherwise. The reason, however, is not hard

to find - it lies in their names, Rigsby compares the situation in

Glengarry Glen Ross to that in Mark Twain's The Golden Age, which

centres on financial speculation over 'the Tennessee lands', and the

phony real-estate venture 'Eden' in Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, 'whose

name captures precisely that blend of puritan zeal and fallen man which

characterizes the American dream of instant wealth' (Bigsby 1985b, 112).

But further, each of these names specifically suggests distance. This

makes it difficult for the customers to evaluate the land at first hand;

but more importantly, 'Glengarry Highlands land] Glen Ross Farms' are

'romantic land] Scottish-sounding' names (Kolin 1987,4), and therefore

hold out the promise of a world apart from the claustrophobic business

environment in which Marnet's characters encounter each other. As with

Roslyn's response to Guido's desert house in Arthur Miller's The Misfits

(1961) - 'Its very pointlessness is somehow poetic' (Miller 1981,26) -

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physical distance can seem to lend such places almost a moral

superiority over the commercial values of the city; and this i-= precisely

why the farms can became valuable commercial properties. Where

Shepard's plays offer the desert as an image of detachment, Mamet

emphasizes that it is precisely because such detachment is universally

appealing that salesmen can turn these places into saleable commodities

and thereby reappropriate them into the structure from which they

ostensibly offer an escape.

But in a further twist, this distance, which makes it difficult for

investors to evaluate the quality of the land, allows the salesmen to

speculate not simply in the desert as such, but in a simulation of it.

In Shepard's work, the desert, regardless of whether it can truly be seen

as offering a valid alternative to urban life, is at least a tangible

presence. The action of Fool For Love, for instance, unfolds in a 'Stark,

low-rent motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert' (Shepard 1984,

13); at the end of True West the characters 'appear to be caught in a

vast desert-like landscape' (Shepard 1985,59); in the films Zabriskie

Point and Faris. Texas the desert is as much of a protagonist as the

characters, although it is true that in the latter there is the

considerable irony that one of the most persistent representations of it

is a photograph. The urban setting of Mamet's play not only increases

the desirability of this setting by contrast, but allows the salesmen to

simulate the existence of the farms which, if Ikamet's account of the

autobiographical genesis of the play is to be believed, are simply

'tracts of undeveloped land' (NTSN, 6).

In one sense we are simply in the realm of counterfeit and fakery.

But the matter is more complex, because the salesmen's pitch suggests

that these farms represent an area of escape, whereas this conceals that

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no escape exists. This is not fakery but simulation, as defined by the

French postmodern1st critic Jean Baudrillard, The consequences of this

shift are considerable. 'It is no longer a question of a false

representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the

real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle'

(Baudrillard 1983,25). Unlike films like The Sting (1972), in which the

confidence men counterfeit a real environment (the bookmaker's office),

Mamet's salesmen appeal to a place and an ethic which no longer exist,

precisely in order to save this ethic without which the land would be

unsellable.

Though the salesmen know they are practising a deception, there is

no longer a referential benchmark of truth by which we and they may

measure the degree of their falsehoods. As Anne Dean suggests, citing

the sales tactics of Roma and Levene to Lingk and the Nyburgs, 'It is

necessary for these characters to believe in the worth of what they are

selling, at least whilst they are selling it; for a while, at least, their

hopes and dreams are mingled with those of their clients' (1987,324).

It might be added that the audience too should be drawn into a similarly

active relationship with salesmen, clients and land.

Along similar lines, Almansi develops a subtle and powerful defence

of Mamet's presentation of a misogynistic world by relating it to the

audience's experience of the plays:

A character says "soft things with a hole in the middle, " but

someone somewhere thinks that it is a rather eccentric definition of women ,,. Yet in the ideal production of Lakeboat that I have staged in my mind, Stan's phrase has an apodictic value. For the duration of the play women are "soft things

with a hole in the middle. " We must not only love and need this language: we must pretend that it conveys the truth, in a suspension of disbelief that defiles the audience to the level

of the protagonists ... (1986,194)

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Such a production of Lakeboat is likely to remain 'ideal', since the

sailors' incompetence in the creation of fictions, and the permanent

discrepancy between the violence of their speech and the stasis of their

situation, mean that the audience is likely always to experience an

ironic gap between itself and the characters. This is not the case with

Glengarry Glen Ross, in which the salesmen enter brilliantly into the

worlds they create, and in which, as argued previously, there is no

discrepancy between talk and action. Furthermore, Mamet's plays

indicate a suspicion of any discourse which sets itself up as "truthful";

if the salesmen are liars, it is only because they are perpetuating a

vision of America which has been passed on to them as truth, and from

which they cannot detach themselves. For all of these reasons it can be

argued that Mamet's salesmen enter the realm of true simulation:

to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms. " (Littre) Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he ill or not? He cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not-ill. (Baudrillard 1983,5)

GLlengarry Glen Ross carries out precisely this development from

counterfeit to simulation, It is one of those aspects of Mamet's work

which might legitimately be labelled 'postmodernist', while also

belonging to a tradition of confidence men in American literature which

is considered further in chapter 5.

vii. Business

'The business of America is business', notes Mamet (qtd. in Allen 1984,

40), but such a description does not indicate any aridity in the subject.

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When Woodrow Wilson declared in 1912 that 'Business underlies everything

in our national life, including our spiritual life' (qtd. in Cohen and

Cohen 1980,359), he drew attention to an apparently paradoxical

juxtaposition which also lies at the heart of Mamet's plays.

This interdependence of superficially contrary aspects of American

life is one of the reasons why the plays maintain a tension between

outrage at and admiration of a system which the characters of Glengarry

Glen Ross, for instance, find simultaneously exciting and crippling.

Business and spirituality are inseparable in a play like The Shawl, in

which John dupes his client for profit yet in doing so paradoxically

offers her a spiritual side to her life which she would otherwise lack,

Teach appeals to 'the spirit of the thing' in planning the robbery in

American Buffalo (All, 47). Teach is vaguely aware of the close relations

between the criminal and moral codes; but he points to the fact that

these codes may be simulated, invoked at will to persuade people to do

things they otherwise wouldn't. Marnet, following Tolstoy, argues that

'The code of an institution ratifies us in acting amorally, as any guilt

which might arise out of our acts would be borne not by ourself, but

shared out through the institution' (II$, 109); and the same holds for

institutionalized morality, as Teach recognizes. Further, once a moral

code has been institutionalized it becomes a product; like Glen Ross

farms, attractive because of its apparent purity, and thus absorbed into

the quotidian values of commerce to which it supposedly offers an

alternative. This, essentially, is the manoueuvre performed by all of

Mamet's confidence men, most notably John in The Shawl, as argued in the

next chapter. Teach's failed attempts to separate 'business' and

'friendship' point to this assimilation and destruction of the moral by

the commercial: 'We're talking about money for chrissake, huh? We're

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talking about cards. Friendship - friendship, and a wonderful thing

[ ... 1 But let's Just keep it separate huh, let's just keep the two apart,

and maybe we can deal with each other like some human beings' (L,, 15) ;

later he tells Don, 'don't confuse business with pleasure' (35). But of

course, 'business' has so suffused his mentality that he only appeals to

friendship as a tactical manoeuvre; in fact it becomes hard to conceive

of a gesture of friendship which would not be so tainted (which is why

even such small gestures of altruism as those of Don towards Bobby take

on such an apparently disproportionate resonance).

Mamet has drawn attention to this erosion of ethics in connection

with American Buffalo:

The play is about the American ethic of business .,. About how

we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business. I felt angry about business when I wrote the play ... Businessmen left it muttering vehemently about its inadequacies and pointlessness. But they weren't really mad because the play was pointless ... they were angry because the play was about them. (qtd. in Gottlieb 1978,4)

This statement is perhaps still more pertinent to Glengarry Glen Ross.

In American Buffalo Teach gives an account of 'free enterprise' which

has become justly famous: it is 'The freedom [ ... ] Of the Individual [ ... ]

To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit [ ... 7 In order to secure

his honest chance to make a profit. [ ... 3 The country's founded on this'

(A, 74-75). Despite the naked satire on the free market, it is still

possible to overlook it because of the heavy dramatic ironies, not the

least of which is that in actually trying to embark on his own course

Teach ends up nowhere, while simultaneously discovering that this course

in fact followed the trail of a red herring laid by Bobby. Teach's

account of 'free enterprise' barely conceals that the world of American

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Buffalo is, finally, as closely regulated as that of the later Glengarry-

But if the 'business' of American Buffalo could still be mistaken for

a satire on the elevated pretentious of mere hoodlums, the object of

attack in the later play is unmissable, largely because it focusses on

that most archetypal of American characters, the salesman. In a play

like Death of a Salesman this figure is still capable of embodying the

Protestant work ethic as well as the pioneering frontier spirit

(although the developing ironies of the figure are already apparent in

Miller's play, Willy's desire to work close to home contrasting with

Uncle Ben's success in the 'jungle'). Glengarry Glen Ross develops these

ironies further. The salesman no longer represents the values of

honestly-earned wealth, nor even the need of a character like Willy

Loman to deny his own failure to live up to the Dream, but the

systematic robbery of a nation by the profit motive which brought it

into being. As one critic remarked, Glengarry Glen Ross is 'as scathing

a study of unscrupulous dealing as the American theater has ever

produced' (Nightingale 1984b, 23).

Mamet is interested not only in the debilitating effects of this

system on the people for whom it provides, but on the product itself as

interface between consumer and producer. If the worthless land Mitch

and Murray pass on to their customers resembles the rip-offs

perpetrated in end, and which Don and Teach presume they have fallen

victim to in American Buffalo, conversely The Water Engine reveals the

dangers of the perfect product. Where the inventor in Arnold

Weinstein's Living Theatre play The Red Eye of Love (1962) creates the

producer's dream product - 'a doll that would get sick, run a

temperature, and eventually die so that he can then market a flood of

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medical and funeral toys to sell with the doll' (as described by

Freedman 1967,115) - Lang, like the inventor in the Ealing comedy

The Man in the White Suit (1951), creates the consumer's dream and the

producer's nightmare: in this case, an engine which, if built, would run

solely on water - and therefore destroy the energy business. Lang and

his wife recognize happily that the engine means 'no more factories' tI,

22-23), without realizing that this is incompatible with the interests of

the people to whom Lang tries to sell it. As the Chainletter says, 'The

Terror of the Cities of the Night is Stilled Commerce [... ] we are

characters within a dream of industry' (24). The general threat the

engine poses to capitalism explains why the 'interests' Oberman

represents remain unspecified and why, in his chillingly ambiguous

phrase, they are 'very much concerned with this machine of yours' (29),

which in turn gives a sinister undertone to the slogan of the Century of

Progress Exhibition: 'Much is known and much will yet be known and much

will not be known' (53). Weinstein parodies the planned obsolescence of

the production cycle; Mamet indicts the fundamental contradiction of a

system which prides itself on progress yet would be destroyed were this

progress to come to ultimate fruition. The Hollywoodesque story of

The Water Engine is double-edged, suggesting the popular hope that truth

will always succeed in the end (Bernie receives Lang 's plans in the

mail), and the perpetuation of this dream by mass media which in the

process turn it into a formularized fiction, like the debasement of the

idea of progress into a generalized formula of success in the studios'

need to 'Make the thing everyone made last year' (SIP., 56).

As the example of The Water Engine suggests, while 'business' is

thematically crucial to 1Kamet's work, it appears in a number of

narrative structures; and while Namet's stated views on business are

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nothing short of scathing, the narratives within which it appears help

to explain why it remains such an enduring, exciting and even spiritual

American principle. Often, as in Glengarry Glen Ross, it appeals to the

"homely" values of the past, and therefore to the reassurance of

realistic, analeptic narrative. Simultaneously, however, it appeals to

the dream of future success, mediated by proleptic narratives of

expectation, suspense and surprise. This in turn demands a faith in

luck which borders on the mystical. And in order to exploit such faith

the confidence trickster creates and manipulates deceptive narratives

which arouse expectations only to thwart them. Meanwhile the victim of

such deceptions examines their perpetrator in an attempt to establish

the truth. In short, 'business' in Magnet's work cannot be examined

solely at the level of theme; it is inseparable from narrative form,

which is the subject of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 4. 'THE PAST IS PAST, Aalt THIS IS NOV ...: NARRATIVE

Picking up on Christopher Lasch's contention that 'The new narcissist is

haunted not by guilt but by anxiety' (Lasch 1978, xvi), Bigsby notes

that 'he might almost be making a distinction between Arthur Miller's

characters and those of David Marnet, for the fact is that guilt has

become supererogatory in the world that Mamet describes' (Bigsby 1985b,

101). This is an extremely useful distinction, not, only in relation to

character and theme, but also to narrative structure. Miller has

acknowledged a debt to Ibsen, which is perhaps most apparent in All My

Sons (1947) in which guilt is a central theme and the structure is

consequently analeptic, taking the form of an inquiry into the past in

which a hidden secret is finally brought into the open, Miller's

following, major plays have other forms which are likewise analeptic:

Death of a Salesman (1949) dramatises events from the past in

expressionistic, dream-like scenes; The Crucible (1953) is based on

historical events. In all these cases the past is the subject of the

play and remains a stable referent; a matter, finally, of common

agreement or historical record, The structure of Mamet's plays, by

contrast, is proleptic: if his characters are indeed haunted by anxiety

it is anxiety about their future in a goal-oriented world. Yet for this

very reason the past becomes more, not less interesting, as motivation

becomes problematical and elusive.

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i. Ellipsis

Mamet's plays offer the minimum of exposition. This is most immediately

noticeable in his sparing use of stage directions. 'Good drama has no

stage directions. It is the interaction of the characters' objectives

expressed solely through what they say to each other - not through what

the author says about them' (WIR, 14) - which suggests a confidence in

the recuperability of the author's intention regardless of the fine

points of the production. By contrast, Shaw, O'Neill and, to a lesser

extent, Miller try to overdetermine the conditions of reception of their

plays, which consequently often possess all the flaws of the 'thesis

drama'. As Raymond Williams says of Shaw's work,

In practice this means reforming the drama by making it something else, The 'mere dialogue' will stay as it is, but because it is inadequate, the dramatist will turn his text into a pseudo-novel by supplying descriptions of scenery and characters, and prefaces on the subject of the drama as a whole, within which the 'lines' will be interspersed. The issue, of course, is neither novel nor play, but a thing inferior to both, (1968,246)

Mamet, by contrast, appears entirely confident that the play will, as it

were, speak for itself: 'The audience ... participates at a celebration of

the idea that Intention A begets Result B. The audience imbibes that

lesson as regards the given circumstances of the play, and they also

receive the lesson as regards the standards of production, writing,

acting, design, and direction' (WtR, 26). However, as argued below, in

practice Mamet's omission of stage directions gives readers, directors

and actors more, not less, freedom of interpretation.

Mamet's minimalism also extends to action and motivation: 'the play

should be about only one thing, and ... that thing should be what the

hero is trying to get' (M, 76). The paratactic compression of Mamet's

dialogue results from the characters' need to live in the future; they

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often give the impression of trying to reach the end of sentences almost

before they have begun. Mamet once remarked at his pleasure on hearing

a woman say "Nice weather, aren't we? " (qtd, in Wetzsteon 1976,101), and

comparable constructions are to be found on almost any page of any of

his plays (several examples from American Buffalo are noted in Barbera

1981,272). Further evidence for a concern with verbal compression is

provided by a comparison of the drafts of Mamet's plays with the

published versions, which indicate that much of his energy is expended

in omitting as much dialogue as possible. According to the actor Colin

Stinton, a close friend of the playwright, Mamet 'expects them [the

audience] to fill in the blanks and follow the clues, the very definite

clues, which he provides'; and while Stinton considers this 'ability to

be so precise and terse' a strength, Xamet possibly has 'exaggerated

expectations of our ability to appreciate it' (qtd. in Dean 1987,41).

Stinton pointed out to me (in an interview at the National Theatre on 22

March 1989) that such problems might arise in Speed-The-Plow, a major

theme of which is stated at the very beginning, as Gould declares 'I'm in

the midst of the wilderness' (p, 3); if the audience is not alert the

implications of this remark for Gould's later actions might be missed.

At the beginning of Lone Canoe VanBrandt similarly remarks 'I am lost'

(U., 1), which might also be lost on the audience, since it applies more

obviously to Fairfax.

Different effects are achieved by the omission of expository

material in Glengarry Glen Ross, in which Levene's opening speeches

leave the audience, as Lingk will be later, 'baffled by the arcane

technical references' (Bigsby 1985b, 115) Bigsby compares Goldberg and

McCann's interrogation of Stanley in Pinter's The Birthday Party, but

there are also important differences. Levene and Williamson use jargon

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we will later understand ('the desire to break the code ... sustains

audience interest' (Rigsby 1985b, 1151), while Goldberg and McCann's

words carry no such straightforward semantic weight - indeed, it is

partly the maintenance of confusion which allows them to force the

perlocutionary effects of fear and submission from Stanley.

From a different point of view, gaps are interesting not because, by

answering clues correctly, we arrive at the author's intention; nor

because they provide a narrative stimulus, in which we expect the work

to complete itself for us at a later stage (as happens in the detective

story, and also, to different effect, in the plays of Ibsen and Miller);

but because in filling in the gaps we engage imaginatively in the work,

completing it for ourselves. Whether or not we have recuperated the

author's intention is irrelevant. Mamet has offered a similar argument,

which contrasts with those views noted at the beginning of this chapter:

In this country we only understand plays as dope, whose purpose is anaesthetic, meant to blot out consciousness ... Audiences aren't encouraged to differentiate among different

sorts of response to a play. A play which doesn't soothe or reinforce certain preconceived notions in an audience ... simply baffles them. (qtd. in Gottlieb 1978,4)

According to some Marxist and reception theories, the work 'like any

social product should be completed only in the act of being used'

(Eagleton 1976,70); the weight and meaning with which the spectator

invests the play will determine what kind of narrative he or she takes

it to be, and therefore how it is to be read.

However, words like 'ellipsis' and 'gaps' are problematical. They

imply acceptance of the classical structuralist distinction between

'story' - 'the signified or narrative content' - and 'di-: -, oourse' or

'narrative', that is, 'the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative

text itself' (Genette 1980,27). An ellipsis would then be an element of

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the story omitted in the discourse. But, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith

points out, it is hard to conceive of 'a basic story that is independent

of any of its versions, independent of any surface manifestation or

expression in any material form, mode, or medium - and thus presumably

also independent of any teller or occasion of telling and therefore of

any human purposes, perceptions, actions, or interactions' (Smith 1980,

215-16). She argues that

the best way to conceive of the sets of events that narratives seem to relate is not as specific, historically determinate, or otherwise stable and given phenomena but, rather, as the variable inferences and constructs that narratives characteristically elicit from their audiences or, indeed, as the various processes and activities of inferring, construing, projecting, hypothesizing, imagining, anticipating, and so forth that constitute our characteristic cognitive responses to narratives. (Smith 1980,229)

It is important to bear this argument in mind, because both characters

and critics respond to events in Mamet's plays by constructing perhaps

valid but always interested explanations of them, Edmond, for instance,

provokes such explanations from both the protagonist and the play's

commentators, but all these interpretations imply a stable set of values

to which one may refer in order to fill in apparent gaps in the

experience the play provides.

The explanations provided to account for or redeem these perceived

gaps are therefore the effect of an effect, as a well-known critique of

empiricism in Nietzsche's The Will to Power would suggest:

The fundamental fact of "inner experience" is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place ... The whole of "inner experience" rests upon the fact that a cause for an excitement of the nerve centres is sought and imagined - and that only a cause thus discovered enters consciousness: this

cause in no way corresponds to the real cause - it is a groping on the basis of previous "inner experiences", Le. of memory. But memory also maintains the habit of the old interpretations, i. e. of erroneous causality - so that the

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"inner experience" has to contain within it the consequences of all previous false causal fictions. (Nietzsche 1968b, 265-66)

As one of Mamet's characters says, 'Only the past is susceptible to

change. The future belongs to those who prepare for it. The past, to

everyone' <lq,., 43). Uncertainty about causation pervades the plays at

every level, even that of physical sensations. In Lakeboat, Joe

complains 'My hair hurts' (L, 98); at the end of American Buffalo Teach

informs Bob 'Your ear hurts' (A, 100; my italics). This failure to

understand even physical response points to a wider despair at the

condition of their lives and, beyond this, to the patent absurdities of

their efforts to construct a plausible narrative which would offer some

explanation (indeed, Lakeboat and American Buffalo are the two plays in

which the characters' causal explanations are most demonstrably false),

By foregrounding this confusion Mamet's plays, like Brecht's, encourage

the audience to construct meaning for themselves.

Edmond has the most elliptical narrative of any of Mamet's plays,

and for this reason it is the most cinematic, the sequence of short

scenes resembling a film director's "cutting" from shot to shot. Shewey

records that 'Edmond was completed while Mr. Mamet was writing

The Verdict', and Mamet said 'Writing for the movies is teaching me not

to be so scared about plots. In fond, things actually happen that

cause other things to happen' (qtd. in Shewey 1982,4). The implication

is that the audience will provide connectives to follow the action; and

in this way Mamet seems to be striving for a combination of

Aristotelian narrative progression and the kinds of fragmentation

encountered in more experimental works. In a different context, Mamet

even argued that the experimental will always finally conform to the

Aristotelian:

- 174 -

The curtain goes up, eighteen things happen, and in our mind we invent a connection between those things. And because they happen over a set period of time that we've been told is the theatrical experience, in our mind we search for and will supply an entanglement, a climax, a denouement, and a coda, We will supply these things whether or not they exist, because that's what we perceive. So Aristotle is saying and Stanislavski is saying, "As that's the way we perceive, why don't we write according to that order? " [ ... 1 We connect things which we are told fall into the same frame, whether or not they are connected, even if they are completely random. (qtd, in Harriott 1988,93)

Elsewhere he suggested that 'Everybody wants to hear a story with a

beginning, middle, and end. The only people who don't tell stories that

way are playwrights! ' (qtd. in Roudane 1986,77).

Like Speed-the-Plow, the opening moments of E nnd starkly present

the existential dilemma which will confront its protagonist throughout;

yet unlike the later play, the absence of expository material is not

made good later. Mamet has said that FdMond is

about a man trying to come to grips with his life in a society which he cannot understand and cannot support. It's time to go back, examine his roots, to examine his actions in the past and try to begin to address, legitimately, things over which he has been confused or upset. Or repressed for a number of years. (qtd. in Carroll 1987,97. )

But if we try to recover this pattern from the play the results are far

from convincing. As Bigsby notes, there is a 'terrible hermeticism' to

Edmond's experiences (1985b, 106), and this severing of causal ties is

further elaborated by Carroll, who observes that 'some of the scenes in

Edmond could take place in any order; others are presented as a cause-

and-effect series, but the effects are sometimes frighteningly out of

proportion to the causes, notably in the murder scene' (1987,99).

Bigsby proposes that Edmond takes his cue from the Fortune-Teller's

diagnosis of the individual's problems of situating himself within

contexts of cause and effect; 'It is for precisely this reason that the

-175-

protagonist sets out, like some Raskolnikov, to prove his existence

through extremes of experience' (1985b, 102). However, the Fortune-

Teller is far from coherent, combining the structural functions of the

Doctor and the Journeyman in Büchner's Voyzeck (first performed in

1913), a play which several critics note as a probable influence on

Edmond. The Fortune-Teller conflates a determinist philosophy - 'What

we see reflects (more than what is) what is to be' - with a Nietzschean

inversion of cause and effect ('We say, "I see now that I could not have

done otherwise ... my diet caused me. Or my stars C.... ] or my genes, or

some other thing beyond my control forced me to act as I did... "' [E, 11).

Not surprisingly, she fails either to predict or to explain anything.

Her speech is structurally identical to that of Roma to Lingk in scene 3

of Glengarry Glen Ross: in each case the speaker conflates two

contradictory and half-baked ideas in an apparently portentous but

actually meaningless exposition, and then tells the "mark" what s/he

wants the mark to want to hear. So the Fortune-Teller informs Edmond

that he is 'special' (E, 2), just as in The Shawl John tells Miss A 'you

have some psychic ability' (S-, 6). All three scenes end in mid-sentence

(E, 2; GG$, 26; S-, 11), suggesting that the further course of the

conversation is predictable and therefore that the mark has been

successfully snared.

The questions raised by scene 1 are not the only problems in

assessing Edmond's motives for leaving his wife in scene 2. This 'is

apparently provoked by nothing more than news of a lamp broken by the

family maid, which he takes as final proof of the banality of his life'

(Bigsby 1985b, 103). Again, while this is a perfectly reasonable

assumption, evidence for it is strangely lacking. Edmond tells his wife

that he leaves 'because you don't interest me spiritually or sexually';

-176-

but he cannot answer her question as to why, if he had 'known this for

some time', he did not leave earlier (E., 5-6). It seems that in order to

account for this, we have to refer to an incident that constitutes 'final

proof of the banality of his life'; but we already have two options - the

Fortune-Teller and the broken lamp - each of which, for different

reasons, seems inadequate. We find ourselves with the Nietzschean

problem - highlighted by the Fortune-Teller - of accounting for a c&Jse

when only the effect seems certain. Walter Kerr refused to play the

game: 'Inasmuch as the only thing we know about their life together is

that the maid has broken the lamp, he is apparently unable to continue

living a life in which the maid breaks lamps all the time' (1982,3).

Kerr refuses to see the incident as standing metonymically for 'the

banality of [Edmond's] life', and while his point is offered flippantly,

it does suggest that any sympathetic interpretation depends on certain

assumptions: if Bigsby's explanation is persuasive, this is only because

we share his recognition in the play of certain motifs of Lasch's

"culture of narcissism".

Edmond himself seems not to know why he acts as he does. He is

literally incapable of answering the prison chaplain's question as to

why he killed Glenna. The only moment at which he seriously addresses

causation is in a letter written in prison to the mother of an old

f lame:

Dear Mrs. Brown. You don't remember me. Perhaps you do. Do

you remember Eddie Burke who lived on Euclid? Maybe you do. I took Debbie to the prom. I know that she never found me attractive, and I think, perhaps she was coerced in some way to go with me - though I can't think in what way. It also strikes me as I write that maybe she went of her own free will and I found it important to think that she went unwillingly. (Pause. ) I don't think, however, this is true. (s., 75)

- 177 -

Carroll argues that in this scene Edmond 'deeply examines his past

experience' (1987,103). But not only does Edmond fail to account for

his own actions, he suggests the girl likewise had no idea of why she

acted as she did, and that moreover the events may be unrecuperable in

the mother's memory. Edmond studiously avoids explanations, but this is

not to say that none are available. In introducing the possibility of

coercion Edmond goes beyond the facile notions of cause and effect

proposed by the Fortune-Teller; the point of interest becomes the nature

of this coercive force. The final scene between Edmond and the

Prisoner, examined later in this chapter, may be seen either as a

serious attempt to construct a meaning to their lives, or as an evasion

of meaning; but significantly, Edmond's explanation, while apparently

satisfying himself at least partially, can hardly accord with the

audience's, and therefore the play's commentators are obliged to

construct an alternative narrative which still cannot be definitive,

The characters' causal explanations for the condition of their lives

betray the poverty of their imaginations and their need to find

scapegoats. The man in the bar, for instance, tells Edmond that 'the

niggers have it easy' because 'there are responsibilities they never have

accepted' (E, 10). This need for a scapegoat both deflects attention

from and reinforces the wider structures which contribute to the

conditions in which the characters find themselves, Moss in Glengarry

Glen Ross understands that 'we enslave ourselves E ... J and the guy who

got there first [... 1 made up those rules' (, 16), but simultaneously

he blames his failures on immigrants. He never makes the connection

between 'the guy who made up those rules', the salesmen, and their

impoverished clients.

-178-

Indeed, such constructions of meaning always involve questions of

power. This is so in the creation of scapegoats, and also Moss's

astonishing claim that by listening to his planned break-in Aaronow has

made himself 'an accessory. Before the fact' (am, 22). This remarkable

inversion of 'the law' (GGR, 22) not only indicates the difficulty of

sorting out what constitutes valid evidence, given that evidence will

always be collected after the fact, but shows Moss trying to monopolize

a position of absolute privilege. However, as noted previously, the

point of closure of a narrative is the beginning of its vulnerability; so

Aaronow's knowledge of the plot theoretically gives him a degree of

power over its author, Moss.

One of the means by which speakers try to reinforce their authority

is by giving the addressee the illusion of participating in the

narrative by filling in gaps. This technique is particularly prevalent

in Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Deb uses it to reassure Danny about

his sexuality:

DEBORAH: Ask me if I like the taste of come. DANNY: Do you like the taste of come? DEBORAH: Do I like the taste of come? DANNY: Yes. DEBORAH: Dan, I love the taste of come. It tastes like

everything ... good ... just ... coming out of your cock

... (SPC, 31-32)

Deborah induces an artificial conversation in order to reassure Danny

about his sexuality; under the guise of admiring his manliness and

power, she is the one in control because she initiated the conversation.

This power structure is also noticeable in Bernard's conversations:

BERNARD: Don't tell me that's that guy's joint. Whatever you do don't tell me that. That's not his Joint. Tell me it's not his joint, Dan.

DANNY: It's his joint. BERNARD: I don't want to hear it. DANNY: That's what it is.

- 179 -

BERNARD: I don't want to hear it, so don't tell it to me. Nobody is hung like that. (am, 44)

Bernard insists Danny tell him what he claims not to want to hear.

Danny is given the illusion of power (giving Bernard the opposite of

what he has expressly requested), but he has merely acquiesced in the

provision of a piece of narrative information Bernard requires in order

to proceed with his lecture on pornography. Dialogue in this play is

illusory; what we hear are monologues punctuated by questions induced to

perpetuate it.

There is a similar structure to a conversation between Fred and

Stan in the 1970 version of Lakeboat:

STAN: Know what I'd like now, out of all the things in the world?

FRED: What? STAN: You tell me ... FRED: Tell you what I'd like, or what you'd like? STAN: What I'd like. FRED: How the fuck am I supposed to know what you'd like? STAN: Guess, go on, guess ... FRED: I know what I'd like [ ... ] (L, typescript, 6)

Unlike Danny, Fred refuses his co-operation; but his opportunism in

using Stan's gambit for his own ends again implies a denial of dialogue

as an interpersonal activity.

A more complex example is the 'quiz' played out by Teach and Don in

American Buffalo. Teach asks Don, 'You want to quiz me on some coins? '

(Ajý, 49), only to take the book himself and quiz Don instead. Teach now

has the advantage of quizmaster over contestant, the advantage of

'Knowing what the fuck you're talking about' (50). Thus when Don fails

the test Teach can say condescendingly 'This is what I'm saying, Don,

you got to know what you're talking about' (51), only to refuse to submit

himself to the reversal of roles initiated by Don's questions about the

- 180 -

break-in ('Hey, you didn't warn us we were going to have a quiz' r-521).

Teach prefers conversations in which he can call the shots, in which he

either asks a question already knowing the answer or in which the

answer is called forth by the question; a simplified, binary linguistic

system of question and answer. Baudrillard argues that today,

The entire system of communication has passed from that of a syntactically complicated language structure to a binary sign system of question/answer - of perpetual test. Now tests and referenda are, we know, perfect forms of simulation: the answer is called forth by the question, it is design-ated in advance. The referendum is always an ultimatum, the unilateral nature of the question, that is no longer exactly an interrogation, but the immediate imposition of a sense whereby the cycle is suddenly completed. (1983,117)

This is a rather simplified and impoverished model of communication

which, however, accords very well with the kind of language with which

characters like Teach and Bernie feel comfortable.

The power relations implicit in this use of language are

particularly noticeable in The Shawl, in which Miss A is more obviously

in a position of dependence on John. John first tells Miss A something

and then insists that this was what she wanted to know:

JOHN: t ... ] So we say, what is it that troubles you? And that you probably desire that I inform you. Is this not so? (pause) Yes?

MISS AI don't understand. JOHN: I think you do, (a, 5-6)

Again, the impression is created that the addressee has formulated an

idea which has really been suggested by the speaker. John thereby

creates the illusion that he can, as he tells Miss A, "'read your mind"'

(6), an image which encapsulates the theme of the past as object of

investigation: for John's powers of suggestion are employed not to

predict the future but, first of all, to describe events about which,

-181-

apparently, only Miss A could have known. John's "powers" depend on the

acceptance of a stable and universal set of values and concerns:

JOHN What could trouble one? Anxiety. Or worry. Loss. And so I said, "A tragedy. "

CHARLES: You said, "to you or someone close to you. " JOHN: As who has not. You, you see? Seeming divination.

Only common sense, and the idea of the mystic frees her to expound. (12)

He then takes advantage of her belief in his powers to cause her to

accept the occurrence of events in her life which may never have taken

place or which she did not remember (which recalls the relation of Freud

to some of his patients). From the photograph of Miss A's mother in the

shawl it is a reasonable guess that 'The mother wore it in the room.

The child remembered it' (31) From this it is but a small step to

denying that verification of the past is important at all. To Miss A's

question about the Boston woman John claims is his medium, he replies:

'If you search then what would you find? That it was a story, that

someone made up. That it was true? Then someone could have read it.

That it was not noted, then perhaps it had been overlooked' (33). That

proof of his statements about the past is no longer required shows the

extent to which he now has Miss A in his power.

This manouevre, in which the past is not stable but open to

suggestion, is reminiscent of two converse notions: the Nietzschean

creation of a past to account for present effects, and the Freudian

suppression of the past, the effects of which emerge in the present.

The latter is suggested by John', use of the concept of 'repression' to

account. for Miss A's ignorance of a symptom which is physically

apparent;

A small scar. You were quite young. When you were small then it was large. And it was traumatic, and so you repress it. We repress so much. But it all casts its shadow, and the things

- 182 -

which you would know are all in you and all ... available to you. (9)

The tyrannical impositions that can result are implied by an exchange

between John and Charles:

JOHN: [... ] your question is this: how legitimate is that thing which I do.

CHARLES: Is that my question? JOHN: Yes. It is, Though you don't know it is. (18)

By (apparently) demonstrating that there are aspects of the subject's

mind available only to the investigator/analyst, John can impose his

reading of the symptom's cause onto Miss A and Charles and thus

convince them he has read not just their conscious, but their

unconscious, minds. The Freudian interest in symptoms gives way to a

Nietzschean construction of cause which is fraudulent insofar as it. is

an entirely conscious construction by John.

In many ways John perverts therapy by using it to impose authority,

whereas in theory therapy should offer the patient the opportunity to

question the patterns of authority and repression which have created the

neurosis. A similar point may be made about Margaret in House of Games.

Yet, as will be argued later, such impositions also perform a

regenerative function by providing the patient with belief-systems which

give purpose to their lives. This, in turn, may be related to the

explosion of interest in therapy resulting from the obsession with the

self in Lasch's narcissistic society.

ii. Patterns of detection

Mamet's elliptical style forces the audience, like John, into the role of

detective, hunting for evidence and motivation. This is not the only

-183-

way in which the structures of Mamet's work recall those of detective

fiction, which in their historical development are analogous to the

development of the American Dream considered in the previous chapter.

The detective novel moves from the appeal of security and possession in

the 'classical' form, to the criminalization of society in American 'hard-

boiled' versions, and finally to the disappointment, anguish and soul-

searching provoked by the disappearance of the object of pursuit in

postmodernist variants such as those of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster.

One of the differences between classical and American 'hard-boiled'

fictions is that in the latter 'Prospection takes the place of

retrospection' (Todorov 1976,47), which recalls Bigsby's distinction

between Mamet's work and Miller's, However, in Glengarry Glen Ross the

whodunit is apparently present in almost classical form, in which 'the

planning and unravelling of a crime provide some of the energy and

compulsion of the work' (Bigsby 1985b, 125-26): a detective investigates

a number of suspects, the culprit is not the most obvious, and he is

discovered by an ingenious deduction. Some critics have displayed

dissatisfaction with Namet's awakening interest in more conventional

plot structures, or have suggested that in this play 'conventional "plot"

,.. is a red herring for a more significant underlying structure of

interrelationship between characters' (Carroll 1987,28). However, these

two structures - the detective plot and the character interrelationship

- are very similar: the relation of Baylen (and Williamson) to the

criminal is the same as that of the salesmen to their clients.

According to Mamet, in sales parlance an appointment between salesman

and client 'was called a lead - in the same way that a clue in a

criminal case is called a lead i. e. it may lead to the suspect, the

suspect in this case being a prospect' (NTSN, 6), and as Bigsby says

-184-

'the confusion of realms is clearly deliberate, so that the actual crime

involved in robbing the real-estate office is merely an objectification

of the crimes daily perpetrated it the name of business' (1985b, 114).

The mystery itself is comparatively unimportant; the focus of

attention shifts to the characters' desires, as in the novels of Ross

Macdonald, which use 'an addictive formula to expose an addictive

society of "possessive individualism"' (Nottram 1983,102). In American

Buffalo Teach, eager to commit a burglary, exclaims 'let us go and take

what's ours' (AR, 77), indicating an inversion of moral values continued

in the lines immediately following:

DON: We have a deal with the man. TEACH: With Fletcher. DON: Yes. TEACH: We had a deal with Bobby. DON: What does that mean? TEACH: Nothing. (77)

What it means, of course, is that any pretence of a social contract, of

mutual assistance, has disappeared; such 'deals' are made only to be

broken at convenience. The moral confusions of Mamet's plays, like

those of the American detective novel, arise from the recognition of

complexities glossed over in an earlier tradition.

In the American school moral distinctions are eroded by the

detective's need to employ the same methods as the criminal. Rot

surprisingly, this development is particularly evident in Mamet's

screenplays for The Verdict and The Untouchables, considered in the

Appendix. In these films, however, the hero retains the kind of personal

integrity which we find in, for instance, Chandler's Philip Marlowe. In

the stage plays any such distinction has disappeared, as suspects and

investigators proliferate and merge into a composite identity. In

Glengarry Glen Ross Levene, the play's chief victim, also sees himself as

- 185 -

a killer whose targets 'both kind of imperceptibly slumped' ($, 43).

The most obvious example is Teach in American Buffalo, Paranoid about

the police (who may or may not be investigating him), equally he admires

them for being 'Armed to the hilt. Sticks, Mace, knives ... who knows

what the fuck they got. They have the right idea' (A, 88).

Consequently Teach follows their lead and arms himself against a

hypothetical 'crazed lunatic' with a meat cleaver (87). The erosion of

all distinctions between criminal, victim and police is, on one level, a

powerful comment both on American gun laws and, at a metaphorical

remove, on the propensity of the superpowers for invading sovereign

states in the name of freedom.

But interestingly this same development recurs in one of Mamet's

gentlest plays. In The Shawl, John's explication of his analytical

method harke back to Sherlock Holmes ('Ninety per cent of the right-

handed people in the world have a small scar on their left knee' C,,

317. If John is a detective, Miss A is his primary suspect; according

to John she, like other victims, 'want1s3 to confess' (12). The inversion

of a logical hierarchy, in which the criminal sees himself as saviour

and his victim as criminal, recurs frequently in Mamet's work. Teach

calls the customers Don is eager to rip off 'A bunch of fucking thieves'

(om, 18) ; Don feels the mark 'comes in here like I'm his fucking doorman

I... ] Doing me this favour by just coming in my shop' (32) ; the salesmen

in Glengarry Glen Ross fear their clients, for reasons noted earlier.

In The Shawl this inversion destabilizes the relationship between

John and Miss A. In Act One he appears to have insight into her

problems; in Act Two this is revealed as a sham. However, these two

acts are structurally identical: in each case John is the investigator

and Miss A the object of investigation. While in one sense Scene Two

-186-

demolishes the expectations set up in Scene One, in another it confirms

them; we have confidence in the talents of the investigator, and we

anticipate his defeat of the confirmed suspect. However, this

relationship is also inverted: John is obliged to provide evidence of his.

powers, which, paradoxically, turns on his ability to replicate

information Miss A already knows, instead of uncovering new material.

Consequently, while John generally displays meticulous attention to

detail in explaining his methods to Charles, in his consultations with

Miss A the roles are reversed: it is now he who is frequently vague, she

precise. In effect, he becomes a suspect investigated by her.

However, what each tries to uncover about the other is remarkably

nebulous. As in the detective story, in which 'the initial crime ...

functions as an uninterpretable sign' (Huhn 1988,453), John refers to 'a

hidden order in the world' (ta, 7). Carroll argues that 'the ending does

unveil the "hidden order of the world". More significantly, the "hidden

order" of Miss A's world is uncovered. John's revelation shows his

profound intuition about Miss A' (1987,116), which might be confirmed

by John's acknowledgment of the limits of his deductive capabilities (he

makes 'an educated guess' IS, 151), Many critics have offered similar

interpretations: 'The ending of the play in fact confirms that the

visionary experience of the shawl has been real, not part of the

charlatan's con game' (Schvey 1988a, 78) ; John 'touch[es] unwittingly

upon a fragment of narrative truth' (Coveney 1986,633); 'John becomes

genuinely clairvoyant' (Kane 1986,634). Mamet has concurred with this

view (Schvey 1988b, 94). Such interpretations assume John has

recuperated aspects of Miss A's life which could not be known by other

than mystic means. Carroll, however, does not mention in this context

- 187-

the one 'hidden order' most obviously revealed in the course of the play

- that of the system underlying John's apparently intuitive sensibility.

The play contains 'three effective reversals' (Carroll 198?, 112).

The critics cited above accept the last reversal as final; but

theoretically the reversals can be infinite. It makes no sense to accept

John's final insight as genuine while simultaneously recognizing that

similar happenings in previous scenes were bogus; critics have been

seduced by the detective-story narrative into sharing the characters'

search for a 'hidden order'. As Kolin says,

Mamet attempts to exorcise his audience's need for magic (or illusion) while paradoxically demonstrating their dependence on it ... The more John protests that it is all a trick or stresses his limitations, the more we want and look for a magical explanation ... we risk falling into the trap of being disquieted by the obvious, of looking for a false explanation for the truth when we search for illusions everywhere. (1986, 9-10)

Our confusions result from the play's strategy of encouraging us to

see affiliations with slightly inappropriate narrative paradigms, Both

the characters and the audience have preconceptions, In the case of the

audience, this involves notions about the semantics of particular forms.

Carroll, for instance, considers that 'the play is structurally "well

made"' (1987,112), and so emphasizes that the central seance scene is

the only scene in which all three characters are onstage together; he

therefore foregrounds the emotional triangle. But Charles is almost

redundant in this scene - except as an observer. This is a crucial

point. The audience watches people watching each other; we also know

the stakes involved for all three characters, and this, combined with

the play's apparently classical structure, encourages us to expect a

denouement in which something is revealed, or some ground established.

And this corresponds to the acquisitive desire, that urge to achieve a

-- 188 -

goal, which is a fundamental property both of the characters and of the

forms Mamet employs.

For instance, in Glengarry Glen Ross the imposed time limit of the

sales target drives the characters and creates in the audience also an

intense pressure to achieve resolution. But, crucially, no such limit

applies to The Shawl: minor defeats may be tolerated - in relationships,

in finance, in deception - in order ultimately to gain a greater prize.

This structure - which The Shawl shares with House of Games, in which

the confidence men repeatedly defer the acquisition of smaller sums of

cash in order ultimately to gain a larger one - may continue

indefinitely, and unlike House of Games no protagonist is removed from

the game at the end. There is therefore no need to consider that the

final frame of reference in The Shawl carries greater weight than any

other. The pressure to think that it does arises from that desire for

gratification which the play encourages and then thwarts.

The effect of such an ending is ambivalent. On one hand, it offers

a certain security by holding open at least the possibility of a higher

authority; the significance of this manouevre is considered in the

discussion of mysticism later in this chapter, Simultaneously, however.

the audience is made to feel insecure, because the play fails to provide

a stable closure. Such an ending is highly effective, avoiding both the

absurdities of pure ratiocination in the classical detective story, and

the kind of mystification, and so escapism, which would result from an

unqualified acceptance of John's powers. Two discourses, each offering

to explain the world, intertwine but remain incompatible, plunging us

into unexpected confusion or disappointment which parallels the

characters' experience of these same feelings.

- 189 -

Plays like The Shawl are therefore "plotless" in a special sense.

Geoffrey Hartman notes that 'to solve a crime in detective stories is to

give it an exact location', while on the other hand 'sophisticated art is

closer to being an antimystery rather than a mystery. It limits, even

while expressing, this passion for ocular proof' (1975,204). Hartman

gives a witty definition of such narratives: 'The centre they scan is an

absence; the darkness they illumine has no heart. There is pathos here

but no defined sense of pathos, Instead of a whodunit we get a

whodonut, a story with a hole in it' (206), and he cites Thomas

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1967) as an example. Pynchon's

protagonist, Oedipa Maas, investigates what appears to be a conspiracy

which identifies itself by the symbol of a horn; but as she pursues her

investigations the symbol appears to her everywhere, until the reader is

uncertain whether the conspiracy is universal, non-existent, or simply a

figment of Oedipa's imagination. In this way the novel denies both

Oedipa and the reader the satisfaction of secure resolution.

Both The Shawl and Glengarry Glen Ross demonstrate that a

deliberate attempt to provoke the audience into applying inappropriate

criteria to the material also demonstrates the limits of what a

particular form can encompass, just, as Xamet is also interested in the

peculiar limitations of media (as discussed in the next chapter).

The Shawl is not simply a playful demonstration of the author's ability

to surprise his audience; it is a recognition of the limitations of forms

and of the ideology each produces in its shaping of material. In the

process of investigation both the characters and ourselves discover not

the object of pursuit but the limitations of our investigative

procedures. In a different context - that of a sporting victory - Mamet

remarks that 'most times, on achieving our goal, we find it has changed

-190-

and is no longer that which we pursued - that, indeed, we ourselves have

changed in the pursuit' (SE, 57). As argued previously, the same is true

of the testing of the hero in plays such as Lone Canoe, and it is also

relevant to the discussion of therapy and confidence games continued

later in this chapter. Within the field of dramatic narrative, the point

becomes not the attainment of a goal, but the simultaneous disappearance

of the object and the emergence of the investigator as the object of his

own investigation.

This displacement of the object of pursuit has important

consequences. The simplistic ending of The Water Engine superficially

confirms the optimistic proposition that 'No one can call back what one

man does' (Z E, 53); but this is undermined by its ironically nave

affiliations with formulaic radio fictions. Superficially, the plans are

recovered; intertextually, they disappear into the mists of an incredible

metanarrative of progress demolished by the play itself. Bernie's

recovery of the plans is a merely material gain; in Namet's other plays

material is lost, perhaps to be replaced by spiritual gain or insight.

In Glengarry Glen Ross the salesmen lose their leads and their careers;

Edmond loses everything promised him by marriage, men in bars, pimps,

hookers and sharps; the Listener in Prairie du Chien loses the story he

thought he was hearing, and so on. This pattern of the promise or

contract made and revoked forms an ironic commentary on a society which

encourages acquisitive tendencies and then fails to satisfy them, or

satisfies them only to create others.

If Mamet's proleptic narrative structures provoke desires only to

thwart them, they also disorientate characters and audience by

destabilizing the security of analeptic narrative. The problematization

of the past removes any secure sense of identity. Hartman remarks of

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Alain Robbe-Grillet that 'In his fiction the statement "He has a past" is

equivalent to "He is doomed" or "It is written". So Oedipus, or a Robbe-

Grillet hero, is safe as long as he has no past' (1975,206). It is hard

to pin down the past or the identity of Xamet's characters, like

Pinter's; their enabling fictions tend to dissolve under examination.

The characters of American Buffalo lose the secure identity promised by

a misleadingly stable narrative of criminal success; Miss A speaks of

John's duplicity as a betrayal (E, 28), clearly implying that his

previous fictions have created what for her was stability. Hartman

suggests that, in the 'whodonut', 'Your only hope is not being trapped by

your role into an identity' (1975,216). In Mamet's plays there is a

tension between the necessity to escape such ossification, and the

desirability of accepting established roles for purposes of security; and

it is this tension which permits the proliferation of confidence tricks,

the victims of which must have belief in this stable structure - which

Mamet terms "human nature" - for the deceptions to be successful. In

The Shawl, John's adoption of two masks, neither of which can be proved

or disproved, is indicative of the power of simulation in a society

which rewards fake sincerity. It also recalls the interrelation within

capitalism of the material and the spiritual already mentioned in the

previous chapter, while also being one example of Mamet's exploitation of

the Aristotelian principles of recognition and reversal.

iii. Aristotle, Campbell, Bettelbein

In the Poetics, Aristotle outlines a paradigmatic plot which has 'a

beginning, a middle, and an end' (1968,14), this end being constituted,

in the most satisfactory plots, by reversal - 'the change of fortune in

the action of the play to the opposite state of affairs' (19) - and

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discovery, 'a change from ignorance to knowledge' (19). The play should

cause the audience to experience pity and fear, and so 'achieves, through

the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of

such pitiable and fearful incidents' (11). Aristotle's, then, is

primarily an affective view of theatre, offering a an imitation of

action' (12) recognizable to the audience (Aristotle stresses art should

be 'concerned with the universal' [17], and the playwright should keep to

stories of 'a few families' 1251), who thereby participate in the story

both through recognition and because of the pity and fear the tale

imparts. The left-wing critic Augusto Boal, seeking to give 'the widest

and most clear definition' of what Aristotle really meant, gives the

following summation: 'Tragedy imitates the actions of man's rational

soul, his passions turned into habits, in his search for happiness, which

consists in virtuous behaviour, remote from the extremes, whose supreme

good is justice and whose maximum expression is the Constitution. In

the final analysis', concludes goal, for Aristotle 'happiness consists in

obeying the laws' (1979,23-24).

Boal's political reading of Aristotle is not without pertinence to

Mamet's work. Taken in conjunction with Mamet's interest in ahistorical

accounts of form and "human nature", it might lead to a view of hire as

aesthetically and politically conservative, a view as persuasive in its

own terms as that which would deduce, from plays such as American

Buffalo and from his stated views on business, that he is aesthetically

and politically radical.

Yet the works themselves show that Mamet exploits Aristotle more

critically than some of his own statements might suggest. It is true

that the process of reversal and discovery (which Aristotle notes in

Oedipus Rex, for instance) is present in Mamet's work. In House of

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Games, following Margaret's conversion to confidencze trickster, Mike

insists 'This is what you always wanted t ... ] You sought it out' Qmm., '70);

similarly, Edmond becomes that which he feared. This pattern recurs in

many of Mamet's works, and typifies that development already noted by

which the investigator becomes the subject of his own investigation

(which is precisely what happens to Oedipus also), and also by which

apparently contradictory elements are seen to be transformations or

sublimations of each other. Mamet has elaborated on this point:

What happens at the crucial moment, as Aristotle says, is that the protagonist undergoes both recognition of the situation and a reversal of the situation. And that is what strikes the responsive chord in the audience - that what is revealed to have been the low objective is transmogrified into the high objective. And we realize that the high objective is carried in the low objective all the time. That is how Aristotle says that tragedy works, and that is the essential celebratory element of theatre. <qtd, in Schvey 1988b, ccº

It is this 'celebratory' vision of theatre which leads Mamet to

stress the cathartic process; we should 'identify subconsciously

(noncritically) with the protagonist', so that 'our pleasure (our "cure")

is the release at the end of the story' (1.1K, 13-14). Boal believes that

catharsis is an instrument of political control, whereby antisocial

feelings are rendered harmless; but the author of a recent book on the

subject states that 'catharsis can be reduced to two elements: 1)

emotional arousal that leads to 2) intellectual understanding' (Abdulla

1985,119). In this way the drama can satisfy the need for both

conscious and unconscious interaction with the play. This two-stage

process is essential in Mamet's work. If, as argued previously, the

audience needs to identify with the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross,

this should still lead, subsequently, to the recognition that what has

been identified with is the creation of a fiction. The cathartic effects

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achieved in Mamet's plays do not lead to the kind of passive ubmi==ion

Boal associates with Aristotlian forms, but, on the contrary, to a

critical awareness of the means by which meaning is constructed.

Indeed, in this way Mamet leads this classical paradigm into areas more

commonly associated with the postmodern.

The same critical awareness is present in Mamet's relation to two

further narrative paradigms to which he is indebted, the mythic

archetype of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and Bruno

Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which considers the fairy tale.

(The similarities between Mamet's work and Campbell's are discussed in

Carroll 1987,91-106; the playwright acknowledges Bettelheim in WIE, 13. )

Campbell identifies, in myths which have endured in a variety of

cultures, a persistent narrative: the departure, initiation and return of

the hero. 'A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a

region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and

a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious

adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man' (Campbell

1949,30). Carroll notes the recurrence of this pattern in a number of

Mamet's works, notably The Verdict, Edm and Lone Canoe, in all of

which 'the pattern of the journey of the mythic hero ... is somewhat

apparent' (1987,91). The list could easily be extended: Carroll himself

makes the same identification with respect to The Woods, The Water

Engine and The Frog Prince (1987,29,142-43). But Campbell's work

shares with Fiedler's the digadvantage that the mythic or archetypal

pattern may be too easily applied to any given work, and so become

useless as an analytical tool; significantly, Campbell terms the pattern

he has uncovered 'the monomyth' (1949,30), What is important, however,

is the kind of narrative this pattern entails. 'The mythological hero is

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the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to

be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo' (Campbell

1949,337). The narrative impetus lies not in the redemption of the

past but in the creation of the future, Such a scheme, however, posits a

society which makes available the possibility of independent, autonomous,

heroic action; whereas, in today's world, 'One does not know toward what

one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled' (1949,388).

There is a historical development from certainty to uncertainty; and if

this is an oversimplification, nevertheless the uncertainty of causation

in Mamet's work, and the evaporating object of pursuit, correspond to

Campbell's explication of the contemporary dilemma as contrasted with

the 'mon. omyth'.

There is clearly a relation between Campbell's goal-oriented

narratives and those developed by Xamet. The major difference is that

Manet's characters pursue a debased ideal; no longer able to 'bestow

boons on his fellow man', Namet's protagonist serves only himself; in

place of spiritual satisfactions he toils primarily for material comfort,

though often hinting he is spiritually lost; while even that debased

comfort he seeks disappears from him, leaving him disorientated and

confused.

A pattern closely related to Campbell's monomyth is outlined by

Bruno Bettelheim in his work on the fairy tale, which may have inspired

Mamet's four plays for children. Of these, A Waitress in Yellowstone is

considered in the Appendix; while The Poet and the Rent merits less

attention because it is unfocussed and desultory, and the character of

Aunt Georgie seems to be there primarily to comment on these failings,

as if this somehow redeemed them. Its parody of the bad writer is less

successful than those of Squirrels or A Life in the Theatr-e, in which

- 196 -

the failure becomes a powerful image of the protagonist's lack of

progress; in The Poet and the Rent it is no more than a tired comic

device, because while the poet does not improve his fortune still

changes miraculously. The best of the plays for children, Revenge of

the Space Pandas and The Frog Prince, have a narrative momentum of

departure, initiation and return similar to that proposed by Campbell,

while the latter play in particular certainly belongs within the genre of

the fairy tale, which 'simplifies all situations. Its figures are clearly

drawn; and details, unless very important, are eliminated. All

characters are typical rather than unique' (Bettelheim 1976,8). This

simplified structure helps to give a clear picture of those concerns

Malet considers in greater depth in his more substantial works.

Fairy tales prefigure a future moment of achievement in the child's

life, 'Morality is not the issue in these tales, but rather, assurance

that one can succeed' (Bettelheim 1976,10). The tales themselves are a

part of this preparatory learning process; yet in Mamet's plays both the

process and the function of learning are problematized. The twelve-

year-old Binky's achievement in The Revenge of the Space Pandas in

creating the two-speed clock is the result of patient endeavour. Binky

works alone (the contributions of Bob and Vivian are minimal) ; children

are offered the reassurance that they can emulate adult achievements.

But the ambivalence of this learning process is indicated by an article

in the paper: 'by the year 2000 we will have solved our travel problems

altogether [... I we'll just have these pills, and any time you want to go

some place, all that you do is take a pill [... l And then you don't want

to go there anymore' (&U, 5). The pill parodies both the dream of

instantaneous knowledge and the substitution of narcotics for needs and

desires, just as the pimps, hookers and sharps of Edmond or the

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salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross peddle the dream of instantaneous

gratification. Yet Pandas panders to this ideal of instantaneous

knowledge while retaining vestiges of the ethic of deferred satisfaction.

The two-speed clock encapsulates this fantasy of a dual conception of

time whose disturbing contradictions can be evaded in fantasy.

The Frog prince, on the other hand, questions the value of learning

altogether. The Prince confronts the Peasant Woman with his experience

and demands to know its meaning:

I was about to get married. I ruled the kingdom. I refused a request that you made, at that time I thought that I was within my rights [... ] And I was punished. My love proved false. My kingdom was taken from me. My friends were ruined. My comrade lost his life ... (pause) Don't you think I was unduly punished? (pause) Or was it punishment for some ... for some general arrogance. For my acceptance of the perquisites of rank? (E, 365)

The Prince's synopsis of the play shows how closely it follows the

standard pattern outlined by Bettelheim and Campbell; but the death of

the Servingman lends the piece an unmistakeably darker tone, a tone

strengthened by the lack of reintegration or enlightenment: the Peasant

Woman does not change, again ignoring everything the Prince says and

insisting he give her the flowers, Nothing has been learned; the

Prince's suffering is not redeemed. The Frog Prince is a fairy tale

minus the final act of reintegration; it denies the power of the

monomyth, which no longer fulfils a regenerative function. There is

another example of this sardonically bathetic deflation of the fairy tale

in Things Change: The Ant and the Grasshopper. Once upon a time, eh,

there's an ant, a grasshopper. All summer long the ant, he work hard,

the grasshopper he, he play the violin. He dance, Winter come [.., ] The

ant grow fat, the grasshopper i=_: a-cold C,.. ] The grasshopper, he eat-a

the ant' (TL, 43-44). Here also the promise of reward for patient

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endurance is denied. Kamet's reworkings of fairy tales offer

devastatingly forthright demonstrations of the workings of that

predatory sensibility already considered in relation to American BuffalQ

and Glengarry Glen Ross,

What makes these plays effective is that they undermine the formal

structures within which they operate, The structure of The Revenge of

the Space Pandas is one of abrupt scenic juxtapositions, abolishing

logical connections of time and space, part of the fantasy of time

travel in innumerable tales of science fiction. However, if the omission

of connectives in this play posits the ideal of instantaneous knowledge,

in The Frog Prince the same technique demonstrates the Prince's lack of

progress. The major events - Patricia's defection, the Prince's failure

to woo the Milkmaid, the death of the Servingman - take place offstage

and between scenes; that they have indeed occurred is evident from the

continuation or degeneration of the Prince's state from scene to scene.

As in fairy tales, these ellipses accelerate the narrative while

maintaining the visual representation of the Prince's lengthy ordeal.

Here, however, the bathos at the beginning of each scene, and at the end

of the play, illustrate the end of hope for the future, and so, like

The Water Engine, the play comments ironically on the over-optimistic

presuppositions of its own narrative paradigm.

Both Campbell and Bettelheim see the world of the hero's adventure

as a representation of the reader's or listener's unconscious fears and

desires:

In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events ... The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in his life. (Bettelheim 1976,25)

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The adventure undertaken by the hero is a sublimation of his ordinary

waking state; it is from this sublimation that transcendence comes. In

both The Revenge of the Space Pandas and The Frog Prince this second

world resembles a police state. The planet Crestview (so named, like

Glengarry and Glen Ross farms, because its controllers 'thought it might

attract investors' [ME, 21]) is presided over by George Topax, 'A

Supreme Ruler' (3), to whom the newscasters regularly pay homage.

But the darker forces so reassuringly defeated at the end of

The Revenge of the Space Pandas maintain an iron grip over the kingdom

of The Frog Prince. In some ways this play resembles Webster's

The Duchess of Malfi: an idealized vision of courtly life gives way to a

demonstration of its corruption and a lack of belief in any higher

authority. At the beginning, the Prince believes he moves in a world of

'long lost wisdom' (EP-, 9), 'some atavistic thing' or 'ritual' (10)

betokening spontaneous and natural generosity and love. But the

atavistic world of the Prince and the police state of the fair Patricia

turn out to be figures of each other. He says 'we all know they

(flowers] grow wild. How else would they grow...? It's just, you know,

you get them at the florist's, it's one thing. It's a mercantile

transaction. You pick 'em out here and it's so personal' (8). But the

flowers are still commodities. The Peasant Woman claims they were

picked in 'my part of the forest' (14); equally, the Prince insists the

field is 'part of the boundary of the Royal Wood' (12). This is the real

sense in which the flowers are 'personal' - the Prince thinks he owns

them, The Fair Patricia simply extends the commodity principle to

embrace everything, as the Prince observes on reading a newspaper

article: 'Here's a good one. Woman about five miles from here arrested

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for not paying the Milk Tax. Five years in prison "'What will Happen to

my Babes' Mom says. " Well, that's the Fair Patricia for you' (23).

The Fair Patricia, then, is not so much the Prince's antithesis as a

maximization of the commodity principle to which he adheres. In a way

it is the transition from feudalism to fascism ('Looks like they're gonna

make the trains run on time', says the Prince Cam, 23-241). This

transition comes about not only by maximization but by simulation; she

imitates the perfect princess the Prince wanted her to be by marrying

his cousin. It is therefore fitting that this structure is itself

threatened by bodily simulation: the Prince notes that 'Fair Patricia's

issued a dictum anyone resembling The Late Prince was to be shot on

sight for defamation of my sainted memory' (24). Simulation is both the

way to power and the major threat to its stability. In The Revenge of

the Space Pandas the actor, George Farpis, appears first as a derelict

falsely gaining the trust of Vivian and Bob, and then, as Colonel Lazlo

Drurik of the 58th Space Pandas, inveigles his way into the execution

chamber to release our heroes.

Mamet's plays for children, while inevitably minor in comparison to

his other work, nevertheless demonstrate his facility with developing

and inverting the implications of the forms within which he works.

Ironically, in The Frog Prince in particular, this critical engagement

leads to a questioning of the learning process which children's plays

are generally supposed to encourage. But this is merely one aspect of

Mamet's interest in a subject which is central to many of his most

important plays.

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iv. The teacher-pupil relationship

Both Carroll, in his chapter on 'learning' (198?, 70-90), and Hubert-

Leibler have picked out the teacher-pupil relationship as one of Mamet's

major themes; and many commentators consider that between Don and Bobby

in American Buffalo to be, sporadically at least, genuinely altruistic in

the concern of the older man for the younger. Equally, critics have

noted that the teacher-pupil hierarchy can be inverted, according to

Michel Foucault's law, summarized by Hubert-Leibler, that 'All power

relations, whether founded on consent or force, are by nature unstable'

(Hubert-Leibler 1988,565). In this respect the teacher-pupil

relationship is identical to that between narrator and addressee as

already discussed in relation to Prairie du Chien (and the same point

may be made with regard to the relationship between a film or play and

its audience, narrative being a pattern of expectations and surprises

which are only open to analysis at the end of the piece). Indeed, in

speaking of power relations in narrative, Ross Chambers has recourse to

the same analogy, noting 'the well-known paradox of the teacher, who, to

the extent that he or she is successful in educating the young, thereby

renders them independent of the need for education and hence less likely

to accord their educator the authorization to teach' (1984,51). As

Carroll says, the mentor may be jealous when the protege develops in a

way that surpasses him, or progresses against his values or

expectations' (1987,71), so that 'The character in the teacher's position

thus has to deal with the double threat of creating a rival for himself

and losing his domination over the student' (Hubert-Leibler 1988,565).

These power relations can take on a sexual dimension, From his

interview with the playwright Carroll learned that 'Mamet believes that

there is an element of sexual ambiguity in any relationship that

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involves a mentor and a protege' (1987,82). This element is most

obviously present in the relationship between two writers in Squirrels:

the elder, Arthur, describes their improvisations as 'lovemaking'

7), and confesses he sometimes thinks of himself as a pederast (32-33).

That the younger man, Edmond, is for him an object of sexual desire is

evident both in Arthur's words and in his actions: 'You're very good for

me. You know that we work well, together, you know that. Eh? Eh?

(Pause. ) Suuure. (Pause) Come on now. (Throughout speech, ART has

been trying to wedge a pencil between EDMOND S fingers, He finally

succeeds. ) That's better' (34). Less overt, and so more effective '

dramatically, is the interaction between Robert and John in A Life in

the Theatre: Robert's homosexual attraction to John is barely stated,

emerging as a necessary implication of the power relations involved in

the teacher-pupil relationship, not an overt adjunct to it.

Three conclusions may be drawn from the nature of the teacher-pupil

relationship which are relevant to Mamet's wider concerns. First, its

initial desirability for the pupil turns him or her into a "mark" who

may be exploited by the teacher-figure. Second, the consequent lack of

trust and mutual antagonism turn teacher and pupil into investigators of

each other. Third, the tensions in the learning process are those

between investment and instantaneous gratification.

Many of the detective-criminal relationships already considered

could be redefined in terms of the teacher-pupil relationship. Mamet'=

confidence-men pretend to initiate the "mark" into their profession, this

initiation itself being a confidence-trick, but one which carries the

risk of discovery by the mark who, having recognized the nature of the

teacher, imitates his practices and so turns the tables. This is the

pattern followed, for instance, in and (especially in scene 14, when

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Edmond turns on the pimp); in The Shawl, in which John, by suggesting to

Miss A at the outset that 'you have some psychic ability' (S, 6), holds

out the promise of initiation into the 'profession' (17), only for Miss A

in turn to deceive him with the photograph; by Margaret in House of

Games, in asking to do a 'study' of the confidence game Q La, 33), thus

becoming its object until her moment of insight; by the Nyborgs in

Glengarry Glen Ross, and so on. Significantly, the teacher is often

defeated by his own methods - Margaret and the Nyborgs, for instance,

achieve victory by practising on the confidence men their own tricks.

Thus the moment of reversal in this relationship is enacted by means of

simulation, once again proving the potency of this development in

Mamet's work.

Because simulation destroys trust a pattern of mutual surveillance

arises. As Hubert-Leibier notes, 'the inquisitiveness of Mamet's

teachers vis-ä-vis their students can be regarded as a form of

surveillance' (1988,560), and she gives the example of Robert's

exaggerated interest in John's telephone conversations in A Life in the

Thee. Equally, the pupil who becomes suspicious of her teacher may

also carry out surveillance, the best example again being that of

Margaret in House of Games, This pattern of surveillance is important

in Mamet's work, particularly in relation to his use of media, and as

such is examined further in the next chapter.

The pattern of learning also involves questions of investment and

gratification. Hubert-Leibler considers that the teacher, threatened by

the pupil, tries `to extend the duration of the relationship and preserve

the original balance of power as long as possible', while the pupil 'is

mainly interested in getting fast answers, recipes, magic formulas (like

Charles and Miss A in The Shawl, Edmond in the play of the same name,

- 204 -

or Mr. Happiness's listeners), and he rejects the principle of a long-

term apprenticeship' (1988,565). The observation is true of the

examples she gives (though Charles is hardly a 'student'), but this is

only half the story. Her examples are of strategic relations, that is,

those of power for its own sake, in which the teacher seeks reassurance

in his own authority. But there are also tactical relations, in which

the teacher is interested in simple extortion - like the salesmen in

Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps the most interesting examples are those in

which a tactical aim is achieved via strategic means - that is, in which

the chance for immediate profit is deferred and the teacher gambles on

developing the power relation to secure further profits. Examples here

would be the developing narrative of the exploitation of Margaret in

House of Games, and John's strategy in The Shawl, which contrasts with

the vulgar tactics of Charles. John is a particularly interesting

example because he combines an explicit strategy of exploitation with a

coherent and defensible claim to be aiding his victim. This contrast

between tactics and strategy corresponds to that in finance between

instant profit and long-term investment. The implications of this

financial model in Namet's work are considered in the next section.

The pupil's situation is invariably strategic. Theatre skills, for

instance, 'must be learned firsthand in long practice under the tutelage

of one who learned them firsthand' (I$, 20), a situation which, with

considerable qualifications, is enacted in A Life in the Theatre.

Similarly, in Squirrels Edmond only gains superiority over Arthur after

a lengthy (and tiresome) apprenticeship, Again, however, the value of

this apprenticeship is called into question: Edmond's writing at the end

seems barely superior to Arthur's at the beginning, just as there is

little evidence in A Life in the Theatre that John has developed into a

- 205 -

good actor (Robert's decline is far more noticeable than john's

improvement). These two plays are examples of a favourite device of

Mamet's best seen in Speed-The-Plow: that of the parodying of two

discourses by playing them off against each other, Finally, 'if there

are no longer any fixed values in this corrupt world, there remains

little knowledge to pass on to future generations' (Hubert-Leibler 1988,

568). Yet, although Mamet stated that A Life in the Theatre is 'about

the necessity, the desire, the impossibility of communication' (qtd. in

Schvey 1988b, 94), there remains the possibility that the pupil learns

technologies of power, not from his teacher, but by himself as a result

of this confrontation,

This pattern of the pupil's inevitable defeat of the teacher is

crucial not only to the structure of narrative and of character

interaction but to the structure of the society they inhabit. In

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, Veblen writes: 'An

aggressive country, entering later into the industrialization cycle, is

able to take advantage of newer technologies and other countries'

experiences in plant layout and design, while countries that

industrialized earlier have older and more inefficient plants that are

not fully amortized' (qtd. in Bell 1976,213). This remark helps to

explain why Mamet is drawn to writing about characters who are not only

unscrupulous but second-rate, for it is far more efficient to steal

someone else's idea than to create it in the first place. Lang ina

Water Engine is a victim of this manoeuvre. In this play capital is

parasitic; the winner is the one who finishes not first but second, The

economic efficiency of theft informs }Iamet's work everywhere, from the

influence of Veblen to the pattern of mutual exploitation in teaching,

business and sexual relationships, and all are encapsulated in the

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confidence tricks which provide the narrative momentum of so many of

his works.

v. Cash and credit

Following Benjamin Franklin, the first principle Max Weber makes note of

in attempting to describe 'the spirit of capitalism' is that 'time is

money' (Weber 1930,48). This shows precisely why, on the stage, the

theme of money makes itself felt not only on the characters, but on

narrative structure and temporal progression. Broadly, a distinction

between two strategies for the accumulation of wealth corresponds to a

distinction between two kinds of narrative and language, one frantically

elliptical, the other more leisurely and discursive,

These distinctions are those between capital investment and non-

deferred gratification. Moss laments the passing of a philosophy which

said 'Don't sell a guy one car. Sell him five cars over fifteen years'

(GG$, 13). Consequently Moss dislikes Mitch and Murray and prefers the

methods of Jerry Graff: 'Graff buys a fucking list of nurses, one grand

- if he paid two I'll eat my hat - four, five thousand nurses, and he's

going wild' (14-15). Graff is a crook, but he sticks to the old-

fashioned idea of using a capital investment to start his own business.

By contrast, according to Moss, the modern way is to 'go in and rob

everyone blind and go to Argentina' (13). Ironically, not only do the

salesmen commit this kind of robbery on their customers, it is what

Moss himself does to the office itself and, further, it is precisely the

salesmen's inducement to their customers, combining the appeal of

instantaneous wealth C'the bag that's full of money' E421) with the

chance to enjoy it at leisure in distant climes. The corrupting effects

of this appeal to wealth without investment spreads like a cancer to

-207-

encompass both the man who clearly sees its consequences and those who

become its victims. The play, then, supports Moss's conclusion that

Mitch and Murray's way 'killed the goose' (12).

The same debate is played out between John and Charles in

The Shawl. Charles insists We should take her fortune from her' <s.,

20), and impatiently asks 'how many days will I listen [... ] A month ... a

year? ' (19), forcing John's hand by threatening to leave him unless he

takes Miss A's money immediately. Charles's plan backfires: Miss A

pulls off her coup de grace in showing John the wrong photograph only

because she has not had time to be convinced of his genuineness. In

contrast to Charles's precipitous approach, John speaks of the need to

'give them a mechanism. To allow them to trust you' (15). This

mechanism consists both in fostering the belief that he possesses

psychic powers, and in giving his clients the "confidence" that he is

not simply grabbing money; hence the importance he attaches to returning

Miss A's fifty-dollar bill (13). In every sense, John represents the

spirit of capitalism; and the subtlety of his strategy legitimizes his

claim to be working at 'a profession. The beginnings of a craft' (17).

Like Moss, then, John holds out for the investment of time in the

building of a craft in the face of the urge to make a quick profit; that

both Moss and, to a lesser extent, John are also crooks should not blind

us to this contrast. Indeed, The Shawl and Glengarry Glen Ross resemble

Speed-The-Plow in this structure of two contrasting attitudes, one being

the demand for short-term profit of Fox, Mitch and Murray, and Charles;

and the other, represented by Karen, Moss and John, the atavistic

remainder of investment and the Protestant work ethic.

This tension between investment and impatience is also played out

in the speech rhythms of Mamet's characters. At the start of Glengarry

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Glen Ross, Levene repeatedly insists Williamson 'Wait a second' (GL 3),

even though he is the one doing all the talking and Williamson's

interjections are almost monosyllabic. But this investment of talk is

contradicted by the elliptical nature of the dialogue, which is sometimes

so frantic as almost to suggest that the characters want to be at the

end of a sentence even before it has begun. This linguistic peculiarity

is related to the fondness Mamet's characters display for a kind of

pseudo-prolepsis which appears as prediction or even procognition, and

which unites the mystic and the commercial. Levene's sales pitch to the

Nyborgs is as follows: 'This is now. This is that thing that you've been

dreaming of, you're going to find that suitcase on the train, the guy

comes in the door, the bag that's full of money. This is it, Harriett ... '

(GG$, 43). This kind of temporal foreshortening, suggested by the

sudden transition from a metaphoric future discovery ('you're going to

find that suitcase') to the sudden appearance, right before one's eyes,

as it were, of 'the bag that's full of money', is designed to appeal to

the contemporary obsession with instant gratification, but also

represents a co-opting by the characters of the "omniscient" narrator of

fiction: it is as if they may move, effortlessly and reassuringly, from

the present to the future and back again,

If the syntax of Mamet's dialogue suggests a closure of the interval

between thought and expression, the urge for immediate gratification

demands a similar compression of the space between the recognition of a

desire and its satisfaction. In an encounter with a man in a bar,

Edmond is offered an almost parodic number of possible desires: 'Pussy

.,, Power ... Money [... ] adventure I... ] self--destruction C... ] religion [... I

ratification' (E, 8). Walter Kerr, in his exasperated review, complained:

'I tell you, these people don't know what they want' (1982,3), so putting

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his finger on the very problem the play articulates, for the Man's list

of desires serves as a blueprint for Edmond's actions in the rest of the

play: no sooner is he presented with it than he sets out to achieve all

these possibilities - not surprisingly, since the Man has warned him

that 'life is too short' (E., 9). Interestingly, Edmond is nave enough to

believe he can achieve these things on production of his credit card.

Again, Kerr's sarcastic comment - 'As I see it, fundamentally Edmond

has a credit-card problem' (Kerr 1982,3) - is a more useful insight

than he realises, for credit is of key structural and thematic

importance to Mamet's work. One of the key features the economist J. K.

Galbraith observed in the "affluent society" was 'an inexplicable but

very real retreat from the Puritan canon that required an individual to

save first and enjoy later' (Galbraith 1958,156); and Daniel Bell goes

so far as to say that

The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the instalment plan, or instant credit. Previously one had to save in order to buy. But with credit cards one could indulge in instant gratification ... only the hedonism [of the Protestant ethic] remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethic. (Bell 1976,21)

In Edmond, the Leafleteer provokes Edmond into visiting the Whorehouse;

Edmond then falls for the true but tainted wisdom of the Sharper that

'You can't win if you don't play' (F,, 27). But the creation of wants, by

producers, advertisers and governments, is just the first stage in a

cycle of production: 'The process of persuading people to incur debt, and

the arrangements for them to do so, are as much a part of modern

production as the making of the goods and the nurturing of the wants'

(Galbraith 1958,156). Because 'The legacy of wants, which are

themselves inspired, are the bills which descend like the winter snow on

those who are buying on the instalment plan' (157), Galbraith predicted

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'the gravest results from the way consumer demand is now sustained by

the relentless increase in consumer debt' (161). One of these results,

stressed by Christopher Lasch, is a dramatic increase in the speed of

life:

Advertising undermines the horror of indebtedness, exhorting the consumer to buy now and pay later. As the future becomes menacing and uncertain, only fools put off until tomorrow the fun they can have today. A profound shift in our sense of time has transformed work habits, values, and the definition of success. (Lasch 1978,53)

This cycle of advertising and credit is not just a source of

localized difficulties for Mamet's characters; it is directly analogous to

the structure of many of the plays. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the

customers, forced to part with their cheques immediately, have the

satisfaction of believing they have made an instantaneous profit; but

after their three days' grace heftier payment will come with the

realization that the land is worthless. The salesmen's contractual

obligation to honour the three days' grace, however, exemplifies one of

the play's major paradoxes: that in eagerly promoting deregulated greed

and non-deferred gratification, they are themselves disadvantaged by a

series of regulatory contracts into which they enter. The salesmen 'live

by victimizing others, but the most abject victims of their trade are, of

course, themselves' (Nightingale 1984b, 5). In this sense there has been

no change from Death of a Salesman thirty-five years earlier: the lot of

the salesman still exemplifies this aspect of the Protestant work ethic.

The change has come in the bosses; wealth no longer corresponds to the

input of effort but to the degree of access to privileged systems of

communication and commodity exchange. By contrast the salesmen are

themselves commodities. Similarly, Arthur Miller, when asked what it

was that Willy Loman sold, replied: 'Himself' (qtd. in Welland 1979,46).

-211 -

So it is ironic that Levene takes on the role of 'tbe Senior Vice-

President American Express' (GG$, 47). Designed to impress Lingk,

simultaneously it indicates the awe in which the salesmen themselves

hold the representative of a system to which they are enslaved. The

identification with the bosses of American Express, Roma's claim to have

been 'a member of the board' which drafted the statute that protects

Lingk, and his willingness to copy the confidence game Murray has

conceived (to be 'the President, Just come in, from out of town' (36]),

confirm both a vicarious excitement in the power of figures of authority

and a Nietzschean resentment towards them, the root of which lies in

anxiety about the future vicissitudes to which the bosses are immune;

and it is this anxiety which the salesmen share with Edmond.

A major cause of this anxiety is a bad credit rating. Levene's

previous successes in 'generat[ing] the dollar revenue' to buy leads is

irrelevant; he recently 'blew' his leads (GU, 3), just as one "blows" a

fortune, and so he is no longer creditworthy. As Bigsby notes, 'in the

brutally existential world of the salesman ... he is. not merely what he

has done but more vitally what he is doing now' (1985b, 115). Levene's

problem is summed up in an attitude Teach attributes to Grace and Ruthie

in American Buffalo: "'The Past is Past, and this is Now, and so Fuck

You. "' <Aa, 15>. A similar experience befalls Edmond. After being

mugged, he asks the hotel clerk to 'call up American Express' to prove

his creditworthiness (E, 31); but his attempts to do so himself

evidently fail. Rejection not only by strangers but by his flexible

friends confirms for Edmond a sense of alienation which has an

unexpected autobiographical relevance for Mamet. A reporter recorded as

late as 1978 that 'despite his acclaim, as a person working in the

theater, he (Namet] still can't get a credit card' (Gottlieb 1978,4),

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which Mamet considered symptomatic of the lack of esteem for the

theatre in America. As in John Landis's film Trading Places (1982), the

withdrawal of credit, the modern symbol of respectability, robs Edmond

of the final vestige of self-esteem. His response to this rebuttal is to

buy a 'survival knife' (E., 37). Ironically, the money Edmond uses to buy

the knife is in effect money held in credit, from the pawning of his

ring,

It is also significant that the knife is 'G. I. Issue. World War Two'

(37). Bigsby observes similar undertones in Teach's claim that his

revolver is for 'Protection, deterrence' (An, 88) : 'It is not hard to see

a parallel between this rationalization and that advanced for nuclear

deterrence; seen thus, the spasm of violence with which the play

concludes is not without its exemplary force ... It becomes a comment on

geo-politics' (Bigsby 1985b, 81). The French cultural critic, Paul

Virilio, believes that in future 'We will see the creation of a common

feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the

consumption of protection' (1986,123). Edmond falls for the pawnshop

owner's enthusiasm for 'the best knife that money can buy' (E, 38), while

Teach likewise conflates protection and consumerism as his imagination

dwells on the qualities of his hypothetical attacker's hypothetical

weapon: 'He's got a knife ... a cleaver from one of those magnetic boards

I ... 1 with the two strips' <AB, 87).

The results of this pattern, in which present security is purchased

on credit, with inevitable catastrophe once that credit runs out, recur

frequently in Mamet's plays. In Speed-The-Plow, Fox quotes from 'The

Bridge' :

"It all proliferates. Faster and faster. It begets itself,

until it's time to die. The economy will collapse. The

reactors will explode, because that's what they're meant to do. We will die, because that's what we're meant to do. The

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radiation, which has grown over the years, faster and faster. " (om, 66-67)

The passage parodies a certain pretentious fatalism, yet still suggests

a fear that beyond a certain point such crises are self-generating.

Bigeby notes in Fron 'an element of cataclysm which grows throughout

the play' (1985b, 105). Backed up with a revolver, Teach's observation

that 'Social customs break down, next thing everybody's lying in the

gutter' (AB., 88) is a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as in arming

themselves against future financial difficulties by purchasing credit

now, customers ensure that the future crisis will indeed arise.

Similarly, in American Buffalo Bob is caught in the vicious circle of

drug addiction: deferring the catastrophe of withdrawal, he purchases

more drugs; to purchase the drugs he needs cash he doesn't have;

therefore he steals, but this in turn merely defers the ultimate payment

of jail (police cars circle ominously around the shop).

The credit system undermines an economy of representation.

Increasingly the stock market deals less in identifiable commodities

than in "futures" and in stock the trader does not possess. Money is

exchanged for products which may not exist (as in Glengarry Glen Ross) ;

shares may increase in value on the anticipation of trade figures which

may show that confidence to be misplaced. In capitalist production 'the

signs refer no longer to any nature, but only to the law of exchange,

and come under the commercial law of value' (Baudrillard 1983,86).

'Business' is no longer the trading of goods; it is a self-referential,

self-perpetuating system, 'No longer the law of capital, but the

structural law of value' (Baudrillard 1983,101), Mamet's views on

capitalist value are perhaps closer still to those of Veblen. Inflated

salaries are accounted for not by input but by differential value,

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firstly as incentive (the disparity between the cadillac and the steak

knives in Glengarry Glen Ross is a vicious parody of this) and secondly

as 'invidious pecuniary comparison' (Veblen 1953,79), that is, 'a process

of valuation of persons in respect of worth' (Veblen 1953,40). In this

field of 'pecuniary emulation', wealth and possessions are 'evidence of

the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other individuals

within the community' (Veblen 1953,36). Yet at times even these

remodelled distinctions of value seem inadequate to explain the world of

plays in which capital has gone berserk, in whi-ch 'there are numbers of

such magnitude that multiplying then by two made no difference' (CLGI,

29).

In this context it is interesting that the financial incentive for

action in American Buffalo is provoked by a coin, What formerly had

value as something to be bartered for goods is now itself a commodity

to be bartered for cash. In this way the coin is symbolic of 'business':

a self-generating economy, no longer dependent on the objective worth of

goods for its value, but only on its own "confidence", generating values

which are not representational but differential. Don and Teach's

evaluation of the coin is based not on any definable standard but merely

on the assumption that more could always be asked for it. 'Ninety

dollars for a nickel' exclaims Teach in astonishment (, 31), only for

Don to suggest, with an appropriate reference to gambling, 'I bet it's

worth five times that' (32). Confidence in its market value is created

simply because the coin collector seemed to know what he was talking

about; when Bob tries to sell what may be the very same coin ('it's like

the one you [Don] used to have' [861), his lack of credibility as an

expert reduces its value drastically, Teach offering only a 'fin' for it

(67) ; Don tells Bob the collector was a 'sucker' (63) for paying ninety

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dollars even though he believes a conservative estimate of its worth is

450 dollars.

The coin catalogue merely exacerbates these problems. For one

thing, 'All the values aren't current' (49) ; more importantly, the book

could not be accurate because, as Don realizes, value is differential:

'The book gives us a basis for comparison' (63), and, with a brilliantly

ironic pun which hints again at the criminality of business

transactions, from the book 'You got an idea you can deviate from' (62).

This 'idea', however, is subject to constant change, and is further

destabilised by the connection with the values of art: Bob says he likes

the nickel 'because of the art on it I... ] Because it looks like

something' (66). The representational value of the coin is not that of

commodities but of realist art. Perhaps this hints at the corruption of

art by commerce, but even more interesting is a remark made by Don:

'What's important in a coin t ... l What condition it's in (... ] if you can (I

don't know ...? count the hair on the Indian, something' (62). The coin

comes to symbolize two robberies: prosaically, of the collector by

Teach's gang; metonymically, of the Indians by the settlers (while the

reference to the hair suggests a symbolic scalping).

Teach and Don have no idea of the value of the booty they are after,

and it follows that they have no idea either of the value of the plot

they find themselves in, which is generated by Bob's claim to have seen

the man with the suitcase leaving the house. Kerr objected that the

play 'started out promising to have a plot and then decided against it. '

(1978,3), but the promise and revocation are Bob's. It is his lie -

told presumably so that he can steal the coin for himself - which gives

Don and Teach the idea of the robbery, and his final confession - 'I

missed him' (A, 105) - reveals both the plot and his life to have been

- 216 -

built on credit, and results in violence. But Don and Teach are equally

guilty of allowing this non-plot to continue. Bob, whose word has

counted for little, becomes more interesting to Don once he spins the

yarn about the man leaving his apartment: 'Now you're talking' says Don

excitedly, twice (23). Similarly, Teach unwittingly conspires in the

perpetuation of this lie by insisting to Don 'The kid's not going to lie

to you' (46). The play itself, then, is built on credit: the price it

pays for generating its gangster plot is the catastrophe of having this

plot repossessed by Bob, the man who sold it (as we speak of "selling"

someone a tall story, which is precisely what the salesmen in Glengarry

Glen Ross do also).

Bob's confession does not, however, resolve all the difficulties of

the plot. There remains the question of where Bob got the coin he tries

to sell Don. Under pressure from Teach, Bob at first claims 'I got it

off a guy (... I I met downtown' (93), then that he bought it in a coin

store (102-3). The question remains unresolved (Lewis and Browne go so

far as to say the coin may or may not exist' 11981,661) ; and this

indicates a fundamental distinction between Bob and Teach:

Teach constructs an alternative reality as he braids together

scattered incidents until they form a paranoid narrative which has its own compulsions. Once that narrative has established its authority, it becomes the basis for action ... When that 'story' is undermined by events, he begins to construct another, distancing himself from the consequences of his own actions. (Bigsby 1985b, 80)

Mamet is not 'incapable of devising adequate plots; it is simply that he

has chosen to dramatize a world in which plot itself - in the sense of

an elaborate system of meaning into which individual characters fit - is

no longer credible' (Bigsby 1985b, 83). Despite this, Teach consistently

displays a need for plot. Just as he insists on the value of

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'protection' and 'deterrence', so also he feels the need for a narrative,

even if obviously false; when Bob says he can't remember which hospital

Fletcher is in, Teach insists 'you better make one up, and quick' <AB,

98). In contrast, Bob refuses or is unable to create a narrative which

will adequately explain his actions. 'Shuttl[ing] between the drug world

and Done Junkshop' (Schlueter and Forsyth 1983,497), Bob drags the

murkily violent offstage world into what one critic called the

'sanctuary' of Don's store (Watt 1981,188). Where Teach's fluctuating

narrative reveals a basic insecurity about the absence of direction in

his life, Bob - disappearing into and reappearing from a life outside

the shop of which we know little - confirms that instability Teach

fears. In different ways both characters confirm the repudiation of the

representational values of realism, plot becoming simply a tactical

manoeuvre created by the protagonists for local and relative ends,

vi. Xysticism

The demand for consolatory explanations often takes on a mystical

dimension, Occasionally this is plainly a deliberate deception. In

American Buffalo Don indulges in a little cheap mystification to throw

Bob off the scent: to avoid having to explain why he won't offer Bob a

good price for his coin, Don explains that it cannot be valuable because

valuable coins are 'Freak oddities of nature' (All, 63). There are

similarly ironic overtones to 'The Bridge' in Speed-The-Plow, in which

the 'radiation' - which inevitably conjures up images of nuclear power or

weapons - 'has been sent by God' (=, 48), and is thus detached from

the men who created and maintain it. The general incoherence of The

Bridge' as it appears within the play causes us to treat this argument

with scepticism.

- 218 -

In other plays the preternatural agency is not God but aliens from

outer space. 'From the founding of the American Republic in 1776 to the

present day the American people have been exceptionally prone to

invasion fears' (Nottram 1988,138), and as Mamet explains, one of the

reasons for this is that 'We objectify our insecurity and self-loathing

in the form of outside forces endeavoring to punish us' (YM, 65).

Mamet frequently makes play with the twentieth-century, science-fiction

version of these fears so prevalent in 1950s B-movies such as Don

Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In Squirrels Art jokes

that 'My pal was kidnapped weeks ago by Martians. He is a cunning

imitation sent from Mars to torment and corrupt me' <, 41). In

The Woods and Edmond this idea seems to be accorded greater credibility.

In the former, Nick's story of Herman Waltz, the war veteran who

believed he was kidnapped by Martians, provokes Ruth's speculation that

'They could infiltrate our people [,. J They played upon us. We had been

alone the whole time. We had wanted it for so long that they came and

they knew our desires' (Z, 73-74). The function these fantasy Martians

fulfil for Ruth is ambivalent: frightening as an image of (literally)

alienation, it nevertheless absolves her of responsibility for the

failure of human relationships. (Similarly, for Namet's characters

institutions 'are feared, because they are faceless and impersonal - but

approved, because they can justify acts which individuals would never

wish to claim as their own' [Carroll 1987,20-211. ) Ruth seems to

develop the fantasy as an escape from the unpalatable truth, also

associated with Waltz, that husbands beat their wives (1,45). By

contrast, in Brian Forbes' 1974 film of Ira Levin's novella The Stepfor

Wives, a similar idea is used to epitomize male sexism (the male

scientists murder their wives and create physically perfect and sexually

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compliant plastic substitutes). Martians are figures both of escape and

of the threat of pure simulation. Ruth's evasions, together with her and

Nick's confused and adolescent laying of blame, characterizes their

relationship and limits their chances of understanding it. In d

the discussion between Edmond and the Prisoner is a deliberate attempt

to construct a meaning from the supposed fact that 'You can't control

what you make of your life' (L, 77), and the ultimate construction, as

with Ruth, is that of 'the men from space', who may be 'here to watch

over us. Maybe that's why they're here. Or to observe us. Maybe we're

here to be punished' (82). This is comforting because it satisfies the

demand for explanations, and because like any theology it cannot be

refuted.

Also noticeable is that the last two scenes of Edmond appear to

demand a more leisurely speed of performance than the rest of the play,

as Edmond begins to reflect on his life. Virilio argues that today 'we

no longer have time for reflection. The power of speed is that' (1986,

58)4 Mamet detects 'a growing universal and concerted attempt to limit

the time each of us is alone with his or her thoughts' (M, 113-14),

and argues that 'There has to be time for reflection, introspection, and

a certain amount of awe and wonder' (qtd. in DeVries 1984,22). Until

his incarceration and enforced idleness, Edmond has no time for

reflection, and it is precisely this which makes his search for meaning

important; his bathetic explanation that 'I think I'd just had too much

coffee' (E., 66) points to this process of over-stimulation. Without

duration, patterns of social, political and economic decline take on the

appearance of autonomous powers, a feeling accentuated in Mamet's work

by his fondness for upper-case letters which can seem to endow abstract

ideas with the power of self-determination.

-220-

Mamet's most unambiguously fatalistic expression of these ideas is

to be found in his essay 'Decay: Some Thoughts for Actors'. The

determinism of this essay follows from a crudely organicist hermeneutic:

'what grows must, at some point, cease growing. And, following a period

of maturity, must decay and die' (WI$, 110). But it does not at all

follow that 'a career, a play, a season, an institution, grow and mature

and decay and die according to the same rules which govern the growth

and death of a plant or an animal' (111). This argument possesses a

kind of complacent apathy which offers an apparently rational but

actually mystic account of social processes - mystic, because it denies

the possibility of human intervention and displaces responsibility onto

unaccountable forces - and which, as previously noted, is directly

contradicted by Mamet's contention that drama should present 'the human

capacity for choice' (WIR, 58). Mamet actually limits this capacity by

accepting the inevitability of those very issues ('AIDS, cancer, nuclear

war, pollution' (WIR, 1131) which lie at the heart of contemporary

political debate. In fact, he has conflated two particular objects of

his distaste - works such as disaster movies which try to convince us

that 'We are innocent of wrongdoing ... innocent even of negligence' (WIK,

57), and those which, on the contrary, appeal to 'the political urge,

which is the urge to control the actions of others' (M, 58) - and in

so doing he mystifies the political.

By contrast, the plays tend to ironize the grandiose causal

explanations their characters frequently express. Mamet's fondness for

capital letters is not without ironic undertones; 'it "alienates" in

Brechtian fashion the comic delusions of the character' (Carroll 1987,

35). For instance, Gould speaks of the movie industry as a 'People

Business', only to agree immediately with Fox's plan to 'kick the ass of

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a lot of them fucken' people' CE, 22). The mystique of the 'People

Business' is demythologized: it is a business of struggle between people.

More complex is Teach's climactic outburst in American Buffalo: 'There Is

No Law. / There Is No Right And Wrong. / The World Is Lies. / There Is

No Friendship. / Every Fucking Thing' (AB, 107). Carroll argues that

'The banality of the final line here "alienates" the premises of the

foregoing rhetoric' (1987,35). However, the speech as a whole expresses

very well the world of the play. Such constructions are not to be

wholly accepted or rejected; rather, they invite a critical engagement

with ideas which are both firmly held and open to question. In

The Woods, Ruth's belief in the Martians is thrown into relief by her

suggestibility in picking up on the story of Herman Waltz, and by its

occurrence immediately after her argument with Nick. In this sense the

story is reminiscent of, though darker than, Jimmy and Alison's game of

squirrels and bears in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) (a

comparison also noted by Simon 1979,76), which in opposite fashion

performs the same consolatory function.

Interestingly, Ruth develops her idea at considerably greater length

in the draft version, expanding the relationship between humans and

aliens into a typical domestic drama:

We would meet this man or woman on the street, or in a bookstore, and we'd fall in love with them. The things they did, the way they smelled, you know, we got along with them so well, it seemed like they were made for us. We made love with them and it was so beautiful we had this need to be with them. Because they made us feel good. But there was the possibility that they were only Martians I-] We'd come into the kitchen,

or the back room, we'd come back from fishing, or the office and we'd, you know, we would hang our hat up, and go back, Hi, Babee, how are you, did you have a good day? We'd listen, but there wouldn't be an answer. Everything would get cold. It would be plunged into winter. There was no one there. (1, typescript, 70-71)

- 222 -

The development of the theory into a recognizable narrative genre,

replete with realistic details, suggests that Ruth is hunting for an

unconventional explanation for the commonplace failure of couples to get

along. Where for the child the externalization of fear performs a

therapeutic function (Bettelheim 1976,25), the adult carries out this

same action to evade responsibility. Ruth's elaboration of the story in

the draft version gives the idea a weight lacking in the published

version. A similar point emerges from a comparison of two productions

of Edmond. At the Royal Court in 1985 the final scene was played at a

considerably slower pace than the rest of the play; the resultant

solemnity is in marked contrast to a production at the White Bear

Theatre Club in London in 1989, in which the final scene continued the

play's relentless pace. In the latter production the scene resembled the

streetwise exchanges of the card sharps, and had the same air of

expedient nonsense created on the spur of the moment.

Such tensions are best exploited in The Shawl, which is, in effect,

an extended pun on the ambivalent word "clairvoyant", with its

connotations both of clear-sightedness and mystic obfuscation. The

latter emerges in the seance scene in particular; but more interesting

are John's claims for the value of his 'profession': 'Not that we're

"mystic. " But that we can see. Those very things which are before our

eyes' (E, 18). By wrapping this prosaic quality in the guise of mystic

powers, John actually fulfils Miss A's needs. To her profession of

belief in his powers, he protests she must have 'Not belief, but truth'

(8), but the play shows that truth and belief are inseparable: her faith

in his powers helps her not because they exist but because she thinks

they do. The practice of "magic" 'changes [people's] subjective attitude

to reality, and so indirectly it changes reality ... By asserting the

- 223 -

truth of what you wish to be true, you make it come true' (Thomson 1949,

440,442). John, admitting that Miss A would not be able to find out

whether his Boston medium is genuine or just a product of research,

insists 'it's not divination that concerns you' (s., 33). So, while 'I

suppose we all want "magic"' (16), what matters is that, as John puts it,

her mind has been 'freed by "magic" (. ,, ] By my "clairvoyance"' (15). The

clairvoyant resembles the psychiatrist Margaret Ford in House of Games,

except that Ford initially searches for a clinical, medical explanation

for her patients' troubles instead of offering them faith (or

"confidence"). Unlike John, she seems to pay little attention to her

patients (in the first of her consultations her woman patient screams

'I'm talking to you' [U, 6]), while Billy Hahn tells her 'You can't help,

'cause, babe, you don't know what trouble is' (10). This contrasts with

John, who is convinced a problem is always 'Money, illness, or love' <s.,

15), but takes great pains to find out which. John is actually more

rigorous than the superficially more scientific Margaret, who by the end

of House of Games has relinquished the search for an aridly scientific

truth and has embraced the world of illusion and deception to which she

has been introduced by Mike.

Týh Shawl and House of Games resolve contradictory impulses towards

reason and non-reason in Mamet's essays. On one hand, he argues that

'We live in a world ruined by Reason' (ZM, 80); on the other hand, he

complains that 'We are so ruled by magic. We have ceased to believe in

logic' (ZM, 67). This tension is never satisfactorily resolved in the

essays, although they are full of suggestive qualifications, as when he

argues 'there is a way things are irrespective of the way we say things

are, and if there isn't, we might as well act as if there were' (1IR 68),

which suggests that ultimately there is a need to construct or have

-224-

constructed for us a fiction that makes a claim to truth. This is

precisely the turn so persuasively developed in The Shawl.

vii. Gambling and the confidence game

The mystic side to Mamet's characters is closely related to the interest

in gambling which is so prevalent in his work. 'The chief factor in the

gambling habit is the belief in luck', states Veblen; and this belief 'is

one form of the animistic apprehension of things' (1953,205-6). He

explains this connection as follows:

To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality, They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an unscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism ,.. From this simple animism the belief shades off by insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase ... which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable preternatural agency. (1953,207-8)

There is an example of the animistic sense in a short play, Yes But Go

What, in which a man remembers coming home in a bad mood and finding

that a plate had been smashed. 'What smashed the plate? (pause) My

hostility. I'm not sain that it did. I'm not sain it did not ... But

what I am saying is I Don't Know' (am, 119) . Something similar happens

to Levene after closing the deal with the Nyborgs: 'I point back in the

living-room, back to the sideboard, (Pause. ) I didn't fucking know

there was a sideboard there!! ' <Q$, 43). The air of a religious ritual

with which Levene invests this account underscores the apparently

magical incident of the sideboard. But of course he is mistaken; this is

not magic practised by him but a confidence trick practised on him. His

belief in magical forces contributes to his self-deception,

- 225 -

Mamet seems unsure about whether such 'preternatural agencies' are

at work in poker games. In one essay he explained that an 'essential

error' of bad winners is that 'they have attributed their success to

divine intervention' [5. j$,, 93], only to propose in another that 'The game

is about love, and divine intervention' CSC, 172)). But he does believe

that 'There is such a thing as a run of luck. This is an instructive

insight I have gained from poker - that all things have a rhythm, even

the most seemingly inanimate of statistics' (M, 93-94). Levene makes

the same argument to Williamson: 'Bad luck. That's all it is. I pray in

your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That's what it does,

that's all it's doing. Streaks' (GG$, 4).

'Streaks' are an aspect of 'card sense', the subject of an interesting

discussion in the opening scene of the 1970 version of Lakeboat. In

this scene, entitled 'The mind is a funny thing', Stan and Fred debate

the phenomenon of "Card Sense"; 'Like, for example, you're buying for a

flush and you get it and you say, "I felt that one coming". Well! Maybe

what it is, your mind has been subconsciously counting that suit, hearts,

the last four hands without your knowing it' (L., typescript, 1). Stan

offers the further example of knowing when an opponent is bluffing;

STAY: But what was it that told you to stay? FRED: He was bluffing. STAN: Right, but what was it that told you he was bluffing? FRED: ... card sense. STAN: Right, but don't you see? What is that? That's the

question that I'm raising in bringing up the mind. What exactly is card sense?

FRED: It's ... You develop it. You're born with it. I don't know. That's what the game is all about.

STAN: What I'm trying to tell you is it's the mind calculating. The mind figuring out subconsciously that when this guy bluffs he holds his cards in a certain way, or bets slower, or something. You see what I mean?

FRED: If you ask me, Stan, I gotta tell you it's a lot of bullshit. What you're talking about is nothing but

card sense. Card Sense and simple observation.

-226-

STAB: Fred, Fred, it's that, but it's the mind. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The mind is a funny thing. (2)

Most interesting here is the persistent equivocation between conscious

and unconscious explanations of card sense; it is because this question

appears insoluble that 'The mind is a funny thing'. Fred, however,

raises an interesting possibility about card sense: perhaps 'You develop

It'. In American Buffalo, Don raises the same question about Fletcher's

skill at cards: was he born that way or do you think he had to learn

it? '; and he says Bob is right to answer, 'Learn it' CAl, 5). What the

gambler needs to learn, in fact, ýs how to recognise and exploit human

nature.

In his essay on poker Mamet explicitly notes the belief the gambler

must have in the stability of human nature. He says, with Confucius,

'man cannot hide himself - look what he smiles at, look what he frowns

at. The inability to hide is especially true of men under pressure,

which is to say, gamblers. This is another reason for stoic and correct

play' (WIR, 95). This is a textbook exposition of the "tell",

Unfortunately it contains an obvious paradox - or contradiction. 'Man

cannot hide himself', yet the solution to his problem is to hide himself

(in 'stoic and correct play'). Jacques Derrida, in his essay on Artaud,

comments on this circularity of representation:

Because it has always already begun, representation therefore has no end. But one can conceive the closure of that which is

without end. Closure is the circular limit within which the

repetition of difference infinitely repeats itself. That is to

say, closure is its playing space ... This play is cruelty as the unity of necessity and chance. (1978,250)

This 'circular limit', this 'unity of necessity and chance', is found in

Mamet's work in the replication of human nature and the consequences of

- 227 -

this for the tell, which is effective only in relative terms: it can be

used to deduce criteria about a novice but not about an experienced

card-player. And indeed, once Margaret understands the workings of the

con-game, the "tell" loses its power. Mike was able to use it to guess

Margaret's secrets; yet at the end of the film, facing Margaret's loaded

gun, he is reduced to guesswork, as helpless a mark as she ever was:

FORD: If you walk out that door I'm going to kill you. MIKE: I don't believe you. FORD: What is life without adventure? (JU, 68>

Mike's protestation that 'You can't bluff someone who', not paying

attention' (69) is perfectly correct - she can no longer bluff, but she

can kill, like's words are a gamble that fails.

Some of the questions raised by Mamet's interest in gambling, and

particularly that of human nature, are still more pertinent to the figure

of the confidence man, whose significance is analogous to but more

extensive than that of the gambler. The confidence game develops all

the structures considered in this chapter into a coherent narrative

paradigm. The con man's dependence on simulation demands the

development of sophisticated methods of detection to separate "truth"

from "fiction"; he encourages dreams of success, appealing to the goal-

orientated, materialistic desires of the mark, who, as noted, also

becomes the pupil who must defeat the teacher; finally, a confidence man

like John satisfies a perceived need for faith as mysticism.

The confidence man is a crucial figure in the development of

American literature, and forms the focus of a number of recent studies,

notably those of Gary Lindberg and Warwick Wadlington. Since Lindberg's

book is primarily a historical study, and Wadlington's a psychological

and philosophical analysis, neither offers a detailed account of the

- 228 -

relations between this central character and the narrative structures of

the works in which he appears. This relation, however, is central in

)Iamet's work.

Wadlington notes that 'confidence man and confidence game are

indigenous (American] terms' (1975,14), while Lindberg claims the term

was first applied to a William Thompson, arrested in New York in 1849

for asking strangers to have enough confidence in him to leave him in

charge of their watches for a day. The confidence man, then, is another

American archetype, who 'tells us less about the universal human

condition than he does about the peculiar qualities of American society

that gave rise to him, like the theme of confidence itself' (1982,3,8);

Wadlington even argues that 'Americans have always been, in one sense or

another, confidence men' (1975,9).

The confidence trickster in American literature has surprising

origins, notably in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771-1790), in

which Franklin 'assembled the most influential model in American history

- the do-it-yourself Self' (Lindberg 1982,74). Kenneth Silverman notes

that 'Franklin gave classic expression to three powerful ingredients of

the American Dream: the ideals of material success, of moral

regeneration, and of social progress' (Franklin 1986, ix), Franklin

stressed the morality of truth: 'I grew convinced that Trutb, Sincerity &

Integrity in Dealings between Man & Man, were of the utmost importance

to Felicity of Life' (1986,63). Paradoxically, however, this 'Project for

arriving at moral Perfection' (90) demands falsehood both to the self -

a rigorous suppression of vice in the 'Plan for Self Examination' (98),

which requires the conscious practice of thirteen virtues, in addition to

a 24-hour timetable which Franklin tried to adhere to every day - and

deliberate feigning in dealings with others: 'I cannot boast of much

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Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue [humility]; but I had a

good deal with regard to the Appearance of it' (102).

After Franklin, 'Human nature as pondered by humanists and

theologians yields to another view wherein people's responses are

mechanically predictable and to study human nature is simply to gain

experimental knowledge of the springs of action so as to control them'

<Lindberg 1982,83>; and yet, contradictorily, human nature is also self-

constructed and changeable by force of will. In a fairly recent

interview, Narret repeated his view that 'human nature remains the same',

but appended an interesting qualification: 'human nature is altered by

certain essential aspects of life in a given place, at a given time'

(qtd. in Savran 1987,18). At first glance this is self-contradictory,

but in fact it expresses exactly the paradox through which the

confidence man works: he needs to be able to exploit the "human nature"

of his mark, which means it must exist and appear to others to be

"natural" and eternal; yet he must maintain a critical detachment from it

and change the nature within himself at will.

Herman Melville's novel The Confidence Man (1857) is subtitled 'His

Masquerade', indicating a radical undecidability as to the "true" identity

of its protagonist. Melville slyly leaves us with the words 'Something

further may follow of this Masquerade' (1971,217), indicating the

infinite play of repetitions and differences inherent in the concept.

'Character', indeed, is the subject of one of the novel's many discursive

passages:

the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it - everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows

upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things. (205)

-230-

This 'original character' is a highly ambiguous concept. If at first the

phrase suggests an immutable essence, simultaneously it suggests at

least three alternative readings: the character as creator; the character

who demands faith from others; and the character who is defined in

terms of his perception by others -a character without an essence,

This simultaneous maintenance and destruction by simulation of a concept

like "human nature" is essential to the confidence game, as is soon

apparent in the idea of the "tell".

This idea recalls a situation in Poe's tale 'The Purloined Letter'

(1844) -a prototypical detective story - in which a child puts forward

the following argument:

When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression on my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the impression. (Poe 1966,853)

Poe's Inspector Dupin concludes that the failure of the Prefect and his

cohort to discover the purloined letter can be explained because 'their

own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when

the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their

own, the felon foils them' (853)

But the technique outlined above, and the solution to the mystery of

the letter itself, are both preposterous. Dupin leaves out of account

the possibility of counterfeiting the physical manifestations or signs

of the signified, in this case, guilt. The child's trick 'cannot reach

the first level of theoretical elaboration, namely: intersubjective

- 231 -

alternation, without immediately stumbling on the buttress of its

recurrence' (Lacan 1972,50).

House of Games plays out the drama of this 'intersubjective

alternation', of Margaret's progression from the object upon which the

confidence men practice their deceptions, to a subject competing for

attention in the game; and once she has understood the rules of the game

she and Mike are on a level of equality and the "tell" becomes an empty

construct, since both sides know it may be mimicked. There remains

simply a proliferation of signs which cannot signify anything, The

potentially infinite process of repetitions is ended - pulling the

trigger at the end of House of Games is really Margaret's way of saying,

"I'm bored with this game" - only to start again with her theft of the

cigarette lighter in the final scene. Her transformation into trickster

develops throughout the narrative. In destroying her diplomas Margaret

renounces the signs of her profession and prepares for that limitless

flexibility of response which characterises the confidence trickster, who

is an empty sign <'the confidence man at his purest seems to have

nothing inside' (Lindberg 1982,9]).

The destruction of stable signs of "personality" which the con man

achieves is also the destruction of any possibility of narrative closure;

closure is what the trickster tries to impose on his mark, yet such

closure can be achieved only by maintaining the mark and the audience

in ignorance. The Shawl destabilises narrative closure by maintaining

the audience's uncertainty about John; the confidence man's simulations

of action means that action is always both iterable and open to further

interpretation. There is a similar structure to House of Games: the

story of how Mike lost the money soon becomes the story of how Mike

won the money. Further, the denial of narrative at the level of plot is

-232-

also a denial of 'master narratives' in Lyotard's sense (as discussed in

chapter 1), which are replaced by notions of conscious, individual,

autonomous action:

The illusion that the con man generates and sustains is that the self is not produced by history, class background, economic forces, or the ideological glosses of these but rather that the self deliberately produces itself ... It is the experience of turning social manners, habituated gestures, and badges of appearance back into self-conscious gambits, so that one's very capacity to play roles proves one's detachment. (Lindberg 1982,296)

Two paradoxes emerge: first, the destruction of identity, of personality,

predicates an individual consciousness which performs these acts - 'all

his roles and ideas are merely convenient counters used to express a

powerful psychic energy and at the same time to elicit repeatedly the

confidence in his existence that he needs to exist, to begin again'

(Wadlington 1975,6); second, the denial of 'history, class background,

economic forces' depends for its success on the maintenance of these

forces - it is impossible for the con man to "get outside" the

narratives he simultaneously maintains and subverts.

These narratives are those of American expansion:

To understand the powerful attraction of [the confidence man], one must begin with the set of popular aspirations, habits, and beliefs that seemed for generations to be positively associated with the idea of America. These include the success ethic with its icon of the self-made man; the promissory tradition with its hero, the booster; and the cult of practical ingenuity, as celebrated by the jack-of-all-trades. (Lindberg 1982,73-74)

It is clear that this paradigm of the 'success ethic' and the 'promissory

tradition' encloses figures like the salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross or

John in The Shawl; but as important as these is the 'cult of practical

ingenuity' so apparent in the inventiveness of all of these characters in

achieving their aims. The exciting, creative, imaginative side of the

- 233 -

confidence game accounts in part for the air of celebration which exists

alongside the implicit moral outrage of Mamet's plays; while much of the

humour of American Buffalo arises from the characters' lack of such

ingenuity.

The confidence man 'is radically entangled with the myth of the "New

World. "', which is 'a metaphor for discarding the past, regaining youth

and innocence, encountering a fresh countryside', but also implies a

world of migration and deracination in which 'many Americans have had

to confront each other as mere claimants, who can at best try to

persuade each other who they in fact are', which creates the promissory

tradition and the demand for faith (Lindberg 1982,3-5). Significantly,

the 'New World' is replaced in Glengarry Glen Ross by farms whose names

specifically recall the Old World, the relentless savagery of modern

'business. ' creating the desire for escape into the past.

The confidence man, then, is a highly ambivalent figure, creating

on the one hand, a force of treacherous disorder that outrages and disrupts, and on the other hand, an unanticipated, usually unintentional benevolence in which trickery is at the expense of inimical forces and for the benefit of mankind ... [His]

unaltruistic appetites establish social order and create its

elemental instruments. (Wadlington 1975,15-16)

These qualities are present in varying proportions among the confidence

men of American literature. If Franklin maintains a benevolent air

throughout the Autobiography, the King and the Duke in Mark Twain 's

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are unambiguously corrupt. If

much of the pleasure and complexity of the confidence man comes from

his metafictional quality - aware as he is of character as a fictional

construction - the King and the Duke short-change their victims even at

the level of performance (their 'Royal Nonesuch' presentations fail to

live up to advance billing). In so doing they fail to fulfil their side

-234-

of a business transaction; for at the heart of the confidence game is

the analogy of business as theft, but also the ethic of business as the

provision of a service.

This is implicit in Mike's final remarks in House of Games ('This is

what you always wanted [... ] you sought this out', he tells Margaret [H,

69]>, and explicit in John's attitude to Miss A in The Shawl. He sees

his work as 'a profession' and 'a craft' ($, 17) by which he will have

'helped her [ ... ] to do whatever that is she wants to do' (14) ; this is

'worth money' (12). As Lindberg says, 'one can't comprehend belief from

a posture of distrust. What the confidence man celebrates in American

life is the delight of entering a series of roles and making them work'

(1982,10). In The Shawl, these 'roles' are those of the professional

middle classes; implicitly but pervasively, the play hints that these

'legitimate' professions demand the same kind and degree of faith as

does the confidence game. Mamet speaks of the professions as 'imaginary

friends' (qtd. in Nuwer 1985,13), and John forms a whole coterie on his

own. He says his clients 'want to confess' (E, 12), a statement which

suggests a dual role of priest and detective. He is also a doctor whose

'job is not to guess, but to aid' (16); a politician who will satisfy

Miss A by 'telling her what she wants to know' (18); and a financial

consultant and lawyer on whose advice Miss A decides to contest her

mother's will. Like American Buffalo, The Shawl equates criminal with

professional behaviour, though here Mamet emphasises not the destructive

but the creative, even spiritual benefits of both.

Indeed, even Mike in House of Games is an attractive character in

many ways, and becomes more so in comparison with Margaret. Initially

Margaret sees herself as a disinterested searcher after scientific truth,

accused by her woman patient of thinking herself 'exempt' (i, 3) ; but

- 235 -

soon she becomes worried that 'There's nothing I can do to help her'

(30) and begins to change places not only with the girl (as in her

Freudian slip 'all her life my father tells her she's a whore' 1301), but

with Mike, as her profession appears to her 'a con game' (30), while

Mike sees her as 'a born thief' (62).

The initial contrast between a destructive obsession with truth and

the creativity or relief of illusion associated with Mike recalls Ibsen's

1884 play The Wild Duck. Gregers Werle's idealisation of 'truth' causes

him inadvertently to destroy the marriage of his friend Hjalmar Ekdal;

the contrary position is that of the superficially unpleasant Dr.

Relling, who argues: 'Deprive the average human being of his life-lie,

and you rob him of his happiness' (Ibsen 1980,203) The 'life-lie' of

Ibsen's play is also the 'pipe dream' of the drunks inhabiting Harry

Hope's bar in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1947), which the idealist

Hickey tries to replace with truth, with similarly disastrous results.

The 'life lie' and the 'pipe dream' are methods of survival; they

permit a passive indolence which is preferable to the horrors of truth.

Yet illusion can also be creative and active. In The Birth of Tragedy

(1872) Nietzsche argued that 'Knowledge kills action; action requires the

veils of illusion' (1968a, 60). In The Iceman Cometh Hickey's attempts

to shatter the illusions of the drunks in order to shake them out of

their torpor rebound on him, while by contrast Mamet's confidence men,

by providing their victims with useful illusions, spur them into action:

Miss A contests the will, while Margaret gains a degree of self-

knowledge she had previously lacked. Perhaps even more important is

that, as Mike says, 'we've had fun! You must admit that' (K, 67). The

'fun' lies in the excitement and danger of the game as opposed to the

banality of its ostensible end, the securing of cash. Indeed, the con

- 236 -

game appeals not to the sense of an ending but to that of involvement

in a regenerative process. 'Although such a state of faith is a personal

experience, it can be shared. That is what the word confidence is all

about ... We enjoy such performances even while we doubt the showman's

specific promises, for they refresh the mind and renew the world'

(Lindberg 1982,260). The point should be extended to include the

audience's involvement in the process of narrative, while undoubtedly the

prevalence of the confidence man in literature is in part to be

accounted for by his analogous relation to the author as a creator of

illusions. The seemingly endless patterns of surprise built up in both

House of Games and The Shawl contrast markedly with the longeurs of

The Iceman Cometh; at no time in O'Neill's rather static play is the

audience likely to reflect on its own involvement in the 'pipe dream' of

the work itself, which almost entirely lacks that affective, ludic

teasing of audience expectations with which Mamet makes such great play.

Indeed, one of the most peculiar things about O'Neill's play is that the

'pipe dreams' are so unattractive as to be ineffective in accounting for

the apparent necessity of illusion. By contrast, Mamet successfully

induces participation in and enjoyment of his fictions; as in reading a

detective novel, it is possible to enjoy the feeling of being

manipulated. As The Literary World said shortly after the Thompson case

in 1849: 'It is not the worst thing that can be said of a country that

it gives birth to a confidence man, ... It is a good thing, and speaks

well for human nature, that ... men can be swindled' (qtd. in Lindberg

1982,6).

- 237 -

CHAPTER 5. 'GO THROUGH CHAB! ELS': THE XEDIUIX AHD THE KIESSAGE

Like Pinter, Mamet sets many of his plays within a hermetically sealed

environment. The stereotypical Pinter play is set in a room; Mitch and

Murray's estate agents' office in Glengarry Glen Ross, and Don's resale

shop in American Buffalo, are obvious analogies in Mamet's plays, which

often extend this image of enclosure: the salesmen of Lakeboat are

condemned by geography to a circular existence; the threatening New York

of Edmond apparently offers means of escape only for these to be

revealed as simply products of an inclusive economy. Such images of

enclosure, then, lend themselves to a wider, existential reading. But

there is a fundamental difference between the two writers here. The

enclosed environment of The Room, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and

many other of Pinter's plays is penetrated by an outsider. Often, like

Riley in The Room, he an ambiguous figure bringing either disaster or

potential release; on other occasions, as in The Caretaker, the room's

residents unite to expel the invader. While Pinter's characters fear the

world outside, for Mamet's it offers potential escape. Teach and Don

look forward to plundering the world outside for riches; salesmen see

themselves as cowboys. These are sad parodies of the land of

opportunity. The development from Pinter's plays to Namet's is one from

fear to frustration; and it may not be too fanciful to see in this

distinction between the two playwrights the stereotypical insularity of

the English psyche and the opportunism and desire for expansion of the

American.

-238-

Mamet has been the more ambitious of the two playwrights in

exploring the boundary between the room and the world outside. Always

deceptively prosaic, Pinter focusses attention on the door as interface

between two worlds; Mamet, by contrast, makes great play with technology

and media such as telephones and computers. More generally, he explores

a wide range of media - prose, stage, film, television -- and the

interactions between them. The interest in these various media may be

purely formal, an exploration of the possibilities and constraints of

each, More importantly, as Robert Storey observed as early as 1979,

The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness and A Life in the Theatre are all

'concerned with the ways by which life is given shape by public media -

the radio, the stage - [and] they transpose Namet's preoccupations with

language into a higher, symbolic key' (1979,7). Mamet has continued

this interest in media interactions in Speed-the-Plow. It is this aspect

of his work which is examined in this chapter.

i. vrlting

From the start of his career Mamet has shown considerable sensitivity

to the power and the limitations of different genres and different modes

of writing, aware that the act of writing involves choices and

interpretations of the world which are inextricably bound up with

relations of power. Such relations are beautifully parodied in the

following speech, taken from a scene called 'The Writer' in one of

Mamet's earliest pieces, the 1970 version of Lakehoat. Jerry is telling

Stan about an experience he had in a Chicago bar:

I order a gin and tonic, see. I take a sip and murmer "Superb"

[ ... ] So, anyway, this cat next to me whips out this pad about

like this from under his seat, and a magic marker and writes SUPERB in big block letters in the middle of the page. Green

ink.

- 239 -

I didn't say anything. I drank the gin real fast and said to the bar tender: "I'd like another one of you [sic] superb gin and tonics. " And I turned around real quick. But the guy didn't write anything, AT FIRST. Then, bold as nails he takes out a blue marker and underlines SUPERB and draws a circle around it and writes 3: 45 in the corner on top (which time it was).

So I look at him real non-committally to show I'd appreciate knowing what the fuck is going on. And he clears his throat for about two days and says "Excuse me, I'm a writer. "

"No shit", I say, WHOI! P ! green marker. NO SHIT in block letters. New page. "Seriously", he says, "What do you do? " "Octopus turd", I say. Whomp, green marker .,. but he catches himself and smiles. "I only write actual conversation", he says. "Dog turd", I say. He writes that down. (L, typescript,

10-11)

From this point the writer copies down everything Jerry says and his

own responses as well. 'And the whole thing is getting a trifle complex

by this point so I just indicate to the bartender that my friend is

going to pick up the tab and I'm long gone' (11)

The writer is a parody of a nave realist. The scene indicates that

"realism" is inevitably bound up with aesthetic and ideological judgments

as to what is realistic or even as to the sense in which things can be

said to exist ('I only write actual conversation'), Ostensibly in the

bar merely to record the language of its patrons, the Writer not only

selects but actually determines the language he records by entering into

conversation with Jerry. He comes up against the occupational hazard of

the sociologist (and the detective): his investigation alters the

phenomenon he investigates. Further, the scene demonstrates - crudely

but humorously - the power relations that ensue between the writer and

those about whom he writes. Jerry takes exception to the implication

that he is, in effect, merely a commodity whose existence is defined by

the possibility of being, as it were, captured. What the writer's method

leaves out of account are the interactive possibilities which he is

-240-

forced to concede in entering into conversation with Jerry, but which he

seeks to objectify again by insisting on recording his own responses as

well.

The scene is hardly relevant to the rest of the play, which is

doubtless why it was scrapped when Mamet reworked Lakeboat in 1979

with John Dillon. Morover, while it is funny as a brief sketch, it is

fundamentally undramatic; and Mamet's decision to write a whole play on

the subject looks like a mistake, As noted previously, the main interest

in Squirrels lies in the dramatization of the sexual tensions in the

teacher-pupil relationship; the question of writing, superficially

important, is in fact no more than a metaphor for this relation. The

play essentially consists of variations on two jokes: the untalented

writer, and the perennial possibilities of finding pretentious meanings

in trivial material. Any development lies not in the story but in the

characters' readings of it, and while these are initially amusing, the

device rapidly becomes repetitive. Matters are not helped by the fact

that the third character, the Cleaningwoman, is simply yet another

example of the talentless writer; aside from sex and age, all three

characters are essentially identical.

The flaw Squirrels shares with The Poet and the Rent lies in

regarding these situations as humorous or interesting in themselves. By

contrast, the parodies of A Life i the Theatre are appropriate to the

medium, and work successfully; while the motif of the badly-written book

is better developed in Speed-the-Plow, a far more interesting piece than

Squirrels both because it plays off against each other two texts of

dubious quality, leading to an uncertainty in the audience as to whether

'The Bridge' is to be taken seriously, and because its central situation

demands that Karen be forced to enthuse over the most intractable

-241--

material, Her problem is not ineptitude but impotence, and this question

of power makes the play more effectively dramatic than Squirrels, whose

leisurely development, constant harking on an obviously trivial story,

and lack of outside pressure quickly become tedious.

ii. Fib,

To date, Mamet's writing for and about the screen has been of greater

interest in relation to his work for the stage than for any particularly

new approach to s creenwriting; the influence of Hollywood on the

construction of mod, for instance, has already been noted. At first

this was because in Hollywood he lacked control over his own material,

as the notorious conversion of Sexual Perversity in Chicago into About

Last light proves. Later he was to explain that 'When I was writing for

other people, I simply gave an indication of tone, rhythm and the

general spatial constraints, but I thought it was wrong to go any

further since to conceptualise specific frames is the task and privilege

of the director and his director of photography' (qtd. in Ranvaud 1988,

232). This resulted in a considerable degree of cynicism ("'Film is a

collaborative business: bend over. "' CE, 1341); nevertheless, he did learn

a great deal about screenwriting from the director of The Postman

Always Rings Twice, Bob Rafelson. When he later turned to directing

himself, he worked according to his understanding of the theories of

Eisenstein.

In essays and interviews, Mamet effectively reduces film-making to

., three elements: plot - 'to stick to the story and not to cheat' (M,

77); concision; and the visual presentation of action. In his essay 'A

Playwright in Hollywood' and elsewhere, he used these rules to clarify

his approach to writing for the stage: the first two could be exploited

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to improve the structure of his plays, while the third indicated the

contrast between these media, since for Xamet theatre is primarily

verbal where film is visual.

Therefore Mamet tends to describe the story and structure of film in

much the same way as describes that of drama. Hollywood taught Mamet

that film is a proleptic form - 'The script makes the audience ask what

happens next' (qtd. in Vallely 1980,46) - and he finds the identical

rule at work in the theatre (WIR., 76). Moreover, those paradigms we

have seen at work in his plays are also evident in his films: clearly

House of Games, for instance, possesses a similar structure and

theme to that of the earlier The Shawl, while Things Change follows the

same fabular structure Mamet exploits in several plays:

It's a fable about frustrated ambition ... A fable is a gentle myth that treats common human problems in an elevated way so that we can see them for what they are without being frightened by them. That's very different from a cautionary tale, which usually contains a moral and so doesn't speak to us quite so deeply. (qtd. in Clinch 1989,49)

This account of Things Change demonstrates once again how closely the

narrative adheres to those of Bettelheim and Campbell. It also shows

how the lives of the two major characters are fused at the level of

fable. Jerry, a Mafia underling, experiences the 'frustrated ambition' of

decline within the organization; Gino, the impoverished shoeshine man,

briefly enjoys the celebrity of the top Mafia boss for whom he is

mistaken, and Jerry, as his guard, experiences some reflected glory;

finally, both end up as shoeshine men poor but lucky to be alive.

It is a classic example of the fabular story of departure, initiation

and return; unambitious, but highly successful in these terms. Its

relative lack of ambition is shown also by its remarkable resemblance to

Hal Ashby's film Being There (1979), in which an illiterate gardener is

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mistaken for a brilliant economist and rises to the top of the American

political tree. The theme of mistaken identity allows both films to

indulge in gentle comedy, while the idea of the dim novice succeeding in

a cutthroat world has an undeniable appeal, though the appeal is not

specifically cinematic (Jerzy Kosinski adapted Being There from his own

novel, while, significantly, Shel Silverstein, the co-author of Things

Change, writes children's books).

Similarly, although Mamet stresses the importance of the visual

sense as a distinguishing feature of film, it is still regarded as being

in the service of narrative. 'With a movie, the action has to be

advanced narratively. To advance it through the dialogue is just boring;

its not the proper exploitation of the form. It has to be advanced,

showing the audience what's happening, narrating to them the state of

mind of the protagonist' (qtd. in Vallely 1980,46). He decided to

direct House of Games according to his understanding of Eisenstein, who

worked through montage or what he called the 'act of juxtaposition' (qtd.

in MoLuhan 1964,289). Consequently Mamet saw his task as being, in

effect, 'to reduce the script, a fairly verbal psychological thriller, to

a silent movie' (l, vii).

It should be pointed out, however, that Mamet's adherence to

Eisenstein is tempered by his familiarity with Hollywood. For Mamet,

Eisenstein's art is 'the art of creating an image not on the screen, but

in the mind of the beholder. (The Juxtaposition of image A with image B

creates in the viewer the thought C)' (1E, 160); the viewer deduces

narrative information or the state of the character's mind from the

sequence of images which thereby further the story. This may be

contrasted with, for instance, the purely shock effect of the

juxtaposition of a cloud passing across the moon and a razor slashing

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an eye in Dali and Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928). Nevertheless, the

sequence of images in Eisenstein's films is not there solely to maintain

narrative momentum. In this connection it is useful to compare the

'Odessa Steps' sequence of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

with Brian de Palma's obvious homage to it in his film of Mamet's script

for The Untouchables, Eisenstein juxtaposes succeeding shots of the

descending pram with sudden, shocking images of violence and closeups

of the faces of soldiers and bystanders. Similarly, in de Palma's film

the descent of the pram is the centrepiece of the shootout between

Ness's men and those of the Mafia, Here, however, the scene unfolds in

slow motion. Throughout the scene Ness is acutely aware both of the

gunmen and of the pram, and the sequence closes with Ness and Petri

intercepting the pram and saving the child just in time. The impression

of confusion and ruthlessness created by the rapid juxtaposition of

images in The Battleship Potemkin is replaced in DePalma's film by

secure and reassuring narrative progression: the two main elements, of

the shooting and of the endangered child, are brought together and

happily resolved. While de Palma's directorial style is hardly Mamet's,

both adhere to the linear development of cause-and-effect sequences

characteristic of America's "typographic" culture. Eisenstein's work

does create poetic effects at the level of image, whereas Mamet's films

create such effects at the level of story, as his account of Things

Chime suggests,

The obvious pleasure Mamet takes in reflecting on his craft is also

reflected in the works themselves. Just as his characters often talk

about 'talking', so too he has written a play about plays and a

screenplay about films, State and Main. Hollywood has been a perenially

popular theme for writers in a variety of media, inspiring, among others,

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Kaufman and Hart's play Once in a Lifetime (1930), Nathanael West's

novel The Day of the Locust (1939), films by Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards

and Alan Alda (Sunset Boulevard [1950], S. O. B. [1982] and Sweet Liberty

[19863 respectively) and, most recently, the Comic Strip's television

film Strike! (1987). In many of these works Hollywood takes a

historical situation and reimagines it as simply a variant on a standard

celluloid narrative. Hollywood's vulgarizing tendencies are exposed by

juxtaposing its constructions, implicitly or explicitly, with what the

audience believes to be more credible versions of the truth; but at a

metacritical remove, such works can also emphasize the dramatic, rule-

governed nature of both private and public behaviour.

State and Main is similar in many respects, while its account of the

X.

film-makers' invasion of the town also recalls Local Hero (1933), Bill

Forsyth's account of the fraught relations between a small Scottish town

and an American oil company. 'This town is my set. These people are

my extras', insists the director, Walt QA., 16), telling his location

manager, Bill, 'you got to get me that street for nothing' (10), while the

film's star, Bob's Serafim, sets about deflowering the underage girls of

the neighbourhood. Yet as in Things Change, there is little sense of

moral outrage at exploitation by the rich, powerful and corrupt; in each

case the wisest course seems to be to collude with one's exploiters if

one can make money in doing so. The calculatedly amoral framework

anticipates that of Sneed-the-Plow.

State and Main differs from those works mentioned above in that the

town invaded by the film crew is itself already visualized as a

Hollywood construction, 'This is small-town America' exclaims Bill

delightedly (SAX, 5) ; what he means by this is exemplified by the

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following scene, which convinces the hitherto wavering Walt that Bill is

right:

DOC VILSON, a country doctor, carrying an old style bag, passes a little girl in an old-fashioned dress on her scooter.

GIRL: Mornin' Doc Wilson.., DOC: Mornin' Sally ... How's your Ma...? (The two go about

their ways) WALT: Okay. I see your point. (7-8)

A similar exchange between the Doc and the girl is enough to persuade

Marty Rossen, the producer, of the town's potential. His response to the

scene - 'You're kidding, right? ' (71) - echoes Bill's reaction ('Are you

kidding me? ', (8]) to the quaint manner in which the town's hotel is run.

The film-makers want something not naturally, but unbelievably, typical

of the atmosphere they are looking for; the town astonishes them because

it already conforms to Hollywood's version of the real, suggesting our

perceptions are now so heavily under the influence of Hollywood that its

ideal realism has become ours also. The implications of this

possibility are developed at greater length in Speed-the-Plow, a play

which takes over much of the material jettisoned when State and Main

failed to go into production.

In particular, State and Main anticipates the later play in detailing

the effects of inscribing an ambiguous text within a power struggle

between characters, demonstrating how the same script can appear both

idealistic and pragmatic according to the state of play. At first it

appears the debate is as to whether 'Our Daily Bread' will be a good

film in artistic or in commercial terms. Larry and his girlfriend Ann

apparently stand up for artistic integrity, suggesting Joan's topless

scene can be omitted on the grounds that, since the film is about the

'purity' of Joan's character's affections for Bob's, 'How can we display

- 24? -

her purity by bringing to the audience, what she has saved for him ...

'!! ' (116). Their idealism contrasts with the professionals' cynicism;

but on the other hand, Ann and Larry read significance into the most

banal material. To Bob's suggestion that 'we go right from the beach to

the lake. We drop the Firehouse', Joan objects: 'Wouldn't that be going

from water to water? ' (44), (This exchange, in particular, recalls

Robert's pretentious reading of the "Lifeboat" scene in A Life in the

Theatre. ) Similarly, loan tells Larry 'I knew you were a real' on the

grounds that he has made her character speak such hackneyed lines as:

'"No, I don't have a dream. All I have is my life. It's my life, you can

share it with me though"' (88). Larry's naive idealism bears a striking

resemblance to the homespun wisdom that passes for thought in the most

anaesthetic of Hollywood entertainments, and for that reason

paradoxically ensures he will be a pragmatist within the industry. Sure

enough, his and Ann's alterations are exactly what Walt and Marty need

to get round the problem posed by Joan's demand for $100,000 to bare

her breasts. Walt is delighted at the change in the script because 'the

audience knows what her tits look like, they could draw 'em from Alemory

... we just saved a Hundred Thousand' (120) ; as he told Larry, 'We don't

have the money, we have to write it out' (50). 'Our Daily Bread', then,

changes according to pragmatic demands, either of finance or of the

actors' and actresses' sensitivities (Bob Serafim is concerned to ensure

the film is primarily a star vehicle for himself, just as the main

selling point of the screenplay in Speed-The-Plow is that it is a Doug

Brown film).

The screenplay is partly autobiographical, Larry suffers the same

indignities of collaboration Mamet experienced in Hollywood: he too is

informed that 'Everybody says "Film is a Collaborative Business. What

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that usually means is "Bend Over"' (om, 49). Like Walt, Mamet

emphasizes 'Hollywood's interest in economy' (iIR, 77). Larry's learning

process bears many resemblances to Mamet's own, while Bob's advice to

Larry - 'Tell it with Pictures' (om, 40) - is Mamet's own advice to

aspiring screenwriters. Indeed, Walt and Larry comprise one of the rare

wholly successful teacher-pupil relationships in Mamet's work, perhaps

reflecting the help Mamet received from Rafelson. 'You keep your eyes

open, you learn how to make a movie, cause I think you're going to be a

director someday, cause that's the way you write', says Walt (49) -

accurately predicting Namet's own future career.

iii. Stage: A Life in the Theatre

The title of A Life in the Theatre is ambiguous, referring not just to

the theatrical profession but to the imagined location in which the

action unfolds and, of course, to the place within which the audience

watches the play. Superficially, then, the play contains resonances of

what Lionel Abel has called 'metatheatre':

from a certain modern point of view, only that life which has

acknowledged its inherent theatricality can be made interesting

on the stage. From the same modern point of view, events, when interesting, will have the quality of having been thought,

rather than of having simply occurred. But then the

playwright has the obligation to acknowledge in the very structure of his play that it was his imagination which controlled the event from beginning to end. (Abel 1963,60-61)

In some respects A Life in the Theatre resembles this modernist

development. As in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

(1921), the play's action takes place within the confines of a theatre

building, and juxtaposes onstage and offstage scenes. Beyond this

superficial resemblance, however, the two plays are very different and,

indeed, almost diametrically opposed. Pirandello's work picks up on the

- 249 -

Wildean observation that life follows art, and not the other way around.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Father merges art and life

in arguing that 'I only act, as everyone does, the part in life that he's

chosen for himself, or that others have chosen for him'; by the end of

the play the Producer has become confused to the point of exasperation,

and, 'not caring any more', exclaims: 'Make-believe?! Reality?! Oh, go to

hell the lot of you! ' (Pirandello 1985,95,133). A Life in the Theatre,

by contrast, 'stops short of the kind of ontological enquiry which

concerned Pirandello or, indeed, the metadramatic complexity of Stoppard'

(Bigsby 1985a, 274). It is really something of a footnote to Pirandello

and adopts a contrary position, maintaining a distinction between

theatre and life in three ways: by utilizing stage space and presentation

to differentiate between onstage and offstage scenes; by deflating the

over-familiar metaphor it initially provokes; and by allowing John a

life outside the theatre which contrasts with that within.

Mamet recommends the play be staged along the lines developed by

Gregory Mosher and Michael Merritt for its first production:

They decided that it might be provocative if a second curtain were installed - this one on the upstage portion of the `tage. It is behind this curtain that the audience for the "plays" in

which John and Robert play sits. This curtain is opened when John and Robert are onstage, which is to say, playing in a "play. " Thus we see the actors' backs during the onstage

scenes, and we get a full-face view of them during their

moments backstage. ('Note' in LT., 6)

This arrangement simplifies the staging by clarifying the distinction

between 'onstage' and 'backstage' scenes, and thereby the use of

theatrical space itself maintains a gap between Robert and John'c lives

as actors and their lives as characters, and also distinguishes between

the real audience watching Mamet's play and the fictional audience for

whom Robert and John supposedly perform. By contrast, Pirandello's cast

-250-

of 'actors' and 'characters' share the same stage; while in Tom

Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound there is a deliberate confusion of

real and fictional audiences - the audience sees itself reflected in a

huge upstage mirror, while the space the audience occupies is extended

onto the stage so that the 'critics', Moon and Birdboot, find themselves

inside a play from which they had expected to be detached. Maintaining

rather than eliminating these distinctions between actors, characters

and audience in Life in the Theatre allows the audience to appreciate

the short, hilarious parodies Mamet presents as a series of self-

contained vignettes; but there are two minor drawbacks to this

procedure. First, it creates the temptation to divorce these scenes from

the rest of the play and to consider each on its own merit, thereby

accentuating the episodic nature of the play. Second, several of these

scenes, while funny, gain their laughs by parodying rather soft targets,

and old-fashioned ones at that, as Walter Kerr observes (1977b, 21).

There is more to these scenes than mere parody, however. In a

clever reversal, Mamet exploits every theatrical mishap in the book -

missed cues, forgotten lines, malfunctioning props - and in the process

strips away the pomposity with which Robert protects himself. In

Rix Characters in Search of an Author the Father tells the Producer: you

really must be mad ... to create situations that obviously aren't true

and try to make them seem to be really happening' (Pirandello 1985,77).

But when, in A Life in the Theatre, the vagaries of theatrical

production intervene in the presentation of such situations, something of

the character's true self emerges in his desperate attempts to rescue

the scene. Equally, the characters are most false in the courtesies

which pass for conversation off-stage There is, then, an effective and

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powerful reversal: the characters are most obviously acting (in the

sense of being false) offstage, that is, when there should be no need for

acting; but when their thespian skills are most urgently required - in

rescuing scenes on the point of collapse - they lack the talent to do

so, and consequently they are most obviously themselves when most

desperately trying to be someone else. But this is a reversal, not a

blending of the actor and the character - the play always maintains

this distinction.

Much of the humour and pathos of the play arises from Robert's

inability to keep onstage and offstage lives separate. 'What is "life on

stage" but attitudes? ', he asks rhetorically (am, 40), but the same could

be asked of his life offstage. A pedant concerning theatrical practice,

he also tries to run every aspect of his and John's lives according to

well-defined rules, insisting that 'On the boards, or in society at large.

There must be law, there must be reason, there must be tradition' (40).

He has a 'self-protective need to ritualize relationships' (Carroll 1987,

80); so, for instance, he castigates John for a 'breach of etiquette' (LI,

39). This irritating trait topples over into absurdity in his inability

to separate those aspects of life which demand order from the more

trivial; more even than in his lectures on the significance of the

theatre, his pomposity emerges at such moments as when he insists 'I

must drink now' because 'It is fitting' (45).

Indeed, he seems to be aware of this; but it is his inability to

change his behaviour to fit this insight which, insofar as he finds

himself trapped within a role, suggests something of the metatheatrical

complexity of Pirandello or Stoppard. Mamet remarked, apropos of this

play, that 'a life in the theater need not be an analogue to "life. " It

is li fe' (WIR, 106). Robert's problem is tt_at he holds this view in a

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reductive rather than creative sense, constantly foregrounding the rules

by which he runs his life, and thereby alienating others. He is the man

who 'will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions,

about the laws of the stage'; the man Xamet tells us to ignore (M,

105). Robert's role is confined to the theatre, which gives pathos to

his observation that 'We all must have a an outside life, John. This is

an essential' (24). Starved of the contact which would dilute the

pomposity of his behaviour inside the theatre and moderate his attitude

to those outside, Robert, in that manoueuvre already noted in The Woods

and Edmond, externalizes his misery and insecurity and considers himself

under threat from "them": 'The motherfucking leeches. The sots, (Pause. )

The bloody boors. All of them', he complains; but in response to John's

question 'All of whom? ' he can only repeat 'All of them. Bloody shits

C... ] Why can they not leave us alone? [ ... ] Boring lunatics' (31-32). As

the play develops "their" identity becomes clearer: 'ten-percenters,

sweetheart unions, everybody in the same bed together. Agents' (44). In

scene 22 the focus of the attack narrows to the critics, who have

praised John but, presumably, not Robert; they are 'Fucking leeches' who

will 'praise you for the things you never did and pan you for a split

second of godliness. What do they know? They create nothing. They

come in the front door. They don't even buy a ticket' (45-46),

The play's occasionally unsettling effects arise from this

metatheatrica1 sensation of life as a performance observed by critics

making judgments. In a neat twist, in scene 23 John has to tell Robert

to stop 'looking at me' (49); Robert for a moment becomes one of the

critics he despises, and like him John is distressed. This pattern of

surveillance is directly related to the teacher-pupil relationship

considered in the previous chapter, of which A Life in the Theatre

-25.3-

offers one of the most obvious examples, and which John initiates in

scene 1: eager for the benefit of the older man's company and advice, he

artlessly asks 'What are you up to this evening? ' (16). The pattern goes

into reversal as early as scene 6, where Robert's interest in John's

telephone conversations indicates his need to dominate him, and his

Jealousy at John's possession of the outside contact of which Robert is

starved, this jealousy in turn having a sexual angle. In the powerful

final scene Robert watches sadly as his pupil reveals that he has

surpassed his teacher's abilities. This pattern, by which characters

observe each other while the audience observes them, has obvious

metatheatrical undertones, but these are never taken far. If Robert's

life exists solely in the interplay between onstage and backstage, and

his inability to maintain a proper distinction between them, John's life

has a third dimension of an existence outside the theatre, and it is his

ability to participate in this other life which distinguishes him from

Robert and which, along with Robert's awareness of his own mortality,

gives pathos to the older character. By contrast, one of the things

which makes Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, a much more important

play is the doubt it raises about the value and even the possibility of

a life outside one's public role; the very thing which gives John

security in his life - the people he knows outside - is forbidden in the

later play and defines Levene as a weakling.

Ultimately, A Life in the Theatre has as mach in common with `o

conventional a play as Clifford Odets' The Country Girl (1950) as with

Pirandello or Brecht. Indeed, much of the play's success results from

this very conventionality - its appeal to the audience to identify or at

least sympathize with Robert's troubles, and its reassuring maintenance

of distinctions between theatre and life. It makes no attempt to

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consider the more pressing questions posed by metatheatre: that life can

appear to be a script written in advance, in which not only the

individual's role but the world itself appears as a construction, a

contingent fiction pretending to be natural and immutable, A Life in

the Theatre is an unambitious piece, minor by comparison with much of

Mamet's work, but successful within its self-imposed limitations.

Iv. Radio: Nr_Happiaess

If Mamet's play about the stage fights shy of developing the

implications of its medium, his pieces about radio certainly do not.

Gale strangely considers that Mr. Happiness is 'nothing very deep or

inspiring - merely an entertainment' (1981,215). The inadequacy of

this view becomes clear when the play is contrasted with the work which

is in many ways its source. In Nathanael West's short novel Miss

Lonelyhearts (1933), the eponymous hero's life is shattered and finally

ended by his inability to avoid a personal involvement with one of his

correspondents. Responding to a plea for help from a woman married to

a cripple, Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself drawn into a compromising

relationship with her, thereby arousing the husband's jealousy and

provoking a final, tragic incident which brings about the downfall of

both men.

The differences between this situation and that of Mr. Happiness

arise principally because West exploits two novelistic resources which

Mamet sidesteps: an omniscient narrator, and character interaction. The

novel not only gives us access to the hero's thoughts, but permits

competing points of view which indicate that his perspective is only one

among many. Miss Lonelyhearts at first believes that as far as his

lover Betty is concerned, 'Her world was not the world and could never

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include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power

to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was

significant, while her order was not' (West 1957,79). But this

confidence in the all-inclusiveness of his own experience, which Mr.

Happiness emulates, soon gives way to doubts and revisions. Realizing

his earlier proposal to Betty was a mistake, he finds himself 'amazed at

having been fooled into thinking that such a solution was possible'

(West 1957,80).

Miss Lonelyhearts interacts with the other characters, observing the

effects of his advice on their lives, and comes to recognise that he is

a sham. Ultimately this leads to the rather unsatisfactory melodrama of

the novel's final pages, a solution enforced by the momentum towards

resolution which has been built up by the patterns of character

relationships. Part of this momentum is created simply because the

novel is a typographic medium: West's novel gives us the texts both of

the correspondents and of Miss Lonelyhearts, giving us the opportunity

to judge him to be what J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield would call a

"phoney". Mr. Happiness, on the other hand, guards jealously his

independence from his listeners, The medium of radio assists him in

this, for all correspondence is mediated for us through his voice, which

selects, edits and judges the letters. He removes the originals from

circulation, allowing him to deliver his judgments with an awesome

certainty. For this reason radio would appear to be the perfect medium

through which to present a figure of absolute power, and it is hardly

surprising that it has proved such an effective medium for the

dissemination of propaganda in the twentieth century. Ditsky finds in

- 256 -

Mr. Happiness 'One chillingly disembodied speaking voice, one which

holds power over its listeners because they, like good fascists, have

eagerly handed it over' (1980,31).

Year the end of Miss Lonely Barts the hero forces himself towards

an emotional detachment encapsulated in the image of a rock: 'neither

laughter nor tears could affect the rock. It was oblivious to wind or

rain ... He did not feel guilty. He did not feel. The rock was a

solidification of his feeling, his conscience, his sense of reality, his

self-knowledge. He could have planned anything' (West 1957,137-38. ) It

is this state of detachment, repudiated by the melodramatic ending of

West's novel, which Mamet encapsulates perfectly in the figure of Mr.

Happiness, Indeed, his play could in this sense be regarded as a sequel

to the earlier work: Mr. Happiness is the figure of that ideal distance

Miss Lonelyhearts strives towards but can never attain.

Mr. Happiness repeatedly insists on the value of 'distance'. Our

first reaction will be to equate this with emotional distance, and indeed

he spells this out for us at some length, finally relating it to

friendship: 'We all need a friend, folks, we all need somebody to just

tell our troubles to. Somebody with distance' (KH, 81). Roma touches on

the same idea when he tells Lingk 'Sometimes we need someone from

outside' (G-U, 53), This connection between the two plays is

significant, because Roma puts his finger on the destructive power of

the outsider. Lingk's wife has destroyed the business deal from outside;

reciprocally, Roma would like to intervene in a decision made within

what he refers to as the 'bond' of marriage. Similarly, Mr, Happiness

defines 'distance' as 'The ability to see the facts without becoming

side-tracked by the history' (am, 80): like Roma, he is an outsider

-257-

intervening in the affairs of others; and also like Roma, his primary

concern is to prevent these others altering the status quo.

This underlines the always ideological or interested nature of the

supposed objectivity with which Mamet's Teach-figures try to impress

their listeners. In America Buffalo Teach insists 'A fact stands by

itself. And we must face the facts and act on them' (A, 77), yet

constantly changes the ground rules about what a fact is; he can destroy

Don's supposition that the combination of the safe was not written down

by noting this is 'not based on fact' (An, 81), implying that his own

supposition that it was written down is based on fact. Mr. Happiness is

similarly keen on 'facts', although at first glance he appears confused

as to what they are, He states that 'The facts may be unpleasant, but

they are always the facts' ( f,, 74), only to say within a couple of

minutes that 'Everything is true if you believe it' (75). There is an

Orwellian side to Mr. Happiness which emerges in his ability to hold two

apparently contradictory arguments in play: like Mr. Happiness, Orwell's

character of O'Brien in ifineteen Eighty-Four is able to resolve

apparently contradictory concepts of facts, as empirically verifiable or

as mental constructs, by means of coercion.

Moreover, while Bigsby feels that 'Mr. Happiness offers a mixture of

pieties, popular philosophy and cant mixed in with common sense' (1985a,

278), what he says still amounts to a highly coherent value system. His

advice may be cliched and proverbial; but as Roland Barthes suggested,

an analysis of proverbs (or what he termed the cultural code') might

lead to the possibility of their 'ideological cla sification' (1975,100).

Mr. Happiness's legitimation comes from proverbs, 'the law' (XH, 76), 'the

Master' (74), and the belief that 'People do not change' (75). The

- 258 -

reactionary ideology constituted by such authorities need hardly be

elaborated on.

Mr. Happiness purports to ease his correspondents' despair by

appealing to the same values that led to it in the first place. The man

desperate to escape a loveless marriage is told to remain faithful

because 'Officer ... and I don't care if you don't ever like it .., you've

taken an oath' (7? ). For Mr. Happiness it is the institution which is

important, not the people for whom those institutions legislate. But

while he regards these institutions as affording the 'distant'

perspective from which individual cases may be considered, in fact they

perform the opposite function; for Mr, Happiness is so closely

implicated in the system that he can see no alternative to it, regarding

its institutions as facts. So while Ihr. Happiness is able to keep his

emotional distance from his clients, he has no pretence of adopting a

metacritical ideological detachment the himself concedes the bias

underlying his advice - 'I am old-fashioned' [771). He imposes a

reactionary ideology onto desperate people; and the extent of the

imposition may be gauged by the title of his book: "Twenty-Four Hours a

Day" (82). Bigsby suggets that 'the essence of the play lies less in the

figure of Mr. Happiness than in the orchestrated cries of suffering, the

sense of incompletion, loss, and pain, the desperation that lies behind

the letters' (1985a, 278), but this description applies more accurately

to West's novel; in Mamet's play, the desperation is orchestrated by Mr.

Happiness alone, He it is who decides which letters are read, which

parts of them, the tone in which they are read out and the remedy

offered.

For these reasons one comes increasingly to feel that the 'diýt. anýe'

to which Mr. Happiness subscribes is physical distance. At the end of

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the piece his physical separation from the audience is quite explicit:

following a plug for his book, Mr. Happiness reminds potential buyers to

'include your name and your return address, or we won't know who to send

it to' (RE, 82). The impersonality of the whole business is underlined

by the reciprocal address: 'Box "K", Chelsea Station' (82). He is at

pains to stress this absolute control: 'all correspondence sent to me is

absolutely confidential C... ] My files are locked and are available to no

one but myself' (77). The letters become not the senders' personal

property, but his.

But radio also provides the listener with peculiarly powerful

opportunities for the employment of interpretive strategies which

mitigate against the speaker. Brecht once outlined a possibility of

transcending this authoritarian power of radio:

The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this

principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. (1974,52)

On the surface, the agony aunt's show is a perfect illustration of just

such a communicational model. Mr. Happiness goes further, implying not

only that his show is a forum for his co-respondents, but that, like the

Storyteller in prairie du Chien, they control the dialogue by the quality

of the information they divulge: be frequently emphasises that he cannot

provide perfect answers if the quality of information in the letters is

insufficient. So, in the case of the to-be-hospitalised mother, the

daughter's husband 'may have been sending her money while she lived

with you. We don't know. You didn't tell us' (KH, 73).

-260-

However, Mr. Happiness turns his reliance on the listeners'

information to his advantage. First, he is aware of the situational

pressures responsible for the production of their discourse. He knows

that they write to him in desperate circumstances. Of the woman whose

brother refuses to care for their ageing mother, Mr. Happiness observes:

'If he were prone to take her voluntarily back you wouldn't take the time

to write to me' (72). Consequently, he is powerful, they vulnerable.

Second, his belief that 'People do not change' (75) permits him to make

all kinds of assumptions about his correspondents, After reading three

and a half sentences of a letter from a disaffected husband he is able

to announce that 'We do not actually have to read another word' (75).

This confidence in the immutability of human nature produces an

extreme fondness for banalities, which in turn leads to a further denial

of authority, for he can claim that everything he says is received

wisdom. The clearest exposition of this argument is the following: 'What

do we always say? "Follow the dictates of your Heart, but Use your

Head. " And keep your Two Eyes Open. Dear, it's such sage advice, and it

doesn't originate here. I Just echo it. (Pause, 1 And you know it

yourself' (72), He might almost be echoing Marshall McLuhan as well:

'Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium.

It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is

private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a

subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten

chords' (XcLuhan 1964,302).

Mr. Happiness is never clear about originality. There is obviously

a sense in which the advice is his alone. This supposition is

strengthened for the theatre audience by having him physically present

before us; and by the simple precept of adopting the name 'Mr.

- 261 -

Happiness' he appears to his audience as a 'sage'. Yet the proverbial

nature of his advice indicates that it is already situated in other

discourses, which doubles his impregnability: both Mr. Happiness's person

and his words are invisible and unimpeachable. So his authority is

never open to question; and the occulting of both the sender of the

message and the message itself is facilitated by the medium through

which they speak.

Another potential problem with radio, from the speaker's point of

view, is the autonomy of the visual sense of the listener. Angela Carter

explained that one of the reasons why she was attracted to writing for

the medium was that 'radio always leaves that magical and enigmatic

margin, that space of the invisible, which must be filled in by the

imagination of the listener' (Carter 1985,7). Similarly, Mamet records

that 'Working for radio, I learned the way all great drama works: by

leaving the endowment of characters, place, and especially action up to

the audience' (WIR, 14).

But radio gives Mr. Happiness opportunities to overcome this

autonomy. First, the extent to which the listener will recreate the

speaker as a physical presence is open to question. While this affords

the listener a degree of authority in the discourse, it has the

unsettling effect of ensuring that the listener's perception of the

speaker will always be inadequate. In the case in question this effect

is heightened because 'Mr. Happiness' is the name not of a person but of

a person masquerading as an abstract quality (or of an abstract quality

masquerading as a person).

However, while for his listeners Mr. Happiness's visual identity

remains a secret, the peculiar intimacy afforded by the medium gives him

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a dangerously physical presence as a voice, As Frances Gray writes,

radio

whispers in our ear. Without visual distractions the smallest subtleties of the voice become apparent and seize the imagination

... As soon as we hear a word in a radio play, we are close to the experience it signifies; in fact the sound is literally inside us. To submit to this kind of invasion, to allow another's picture of the universe to enter and undermine our own, is to become vulnerable in a way we do not when we watch a film or a play, where the alien world is demonstrably outside. (Gray 1981,51

This property of auditory media can be exploited in several ways. A

writer once warned listeners to a Bob Dylan tape to 'be aware of the bit

near the end where he gets too near the microphone and sounds eerily as

though he is suddenly in the room with you' (Cable 1980,25). President

Truman made a considerable contribution to the further success of the

then still expanding medium of radio with his "fireside chats".

Simultaneously intimate and distant, radio, more than any other medium,

speaks to a mass audience with an air of confidentiality which is

assiduously maintained.

The unsettling thing about all these examples is that they give the

impression that the voice has become a material presence in the room.

The danger then is that it might become prurient. As a projection of

control by the media this is even more disturbing than the telescreens

in Nineteen Eighty-Four, since the voyeur may now suddenly appear behind

an eyeless object. Mr. Happiness achieves this effect by co-opting the

visual sense, constantly reminding us of the powers of sight, Banally,

he recommends his listeners to 'keep your Two Eyes Open' (AL 72), but

of far greater importance are those moments at which he reminds us of

what he himself sees. 'You know, I say it every week, and I'll say it

again. The situations that I see - your troubles ... (they're my troubles

-263-

too)' (74). In his reply to the unhappily-married policeman, Mr.

Happiness describes scenes he supposes the officer to come across in

his job. Like the Fortune-Teller in Edmond and John in The Shawl, Mr.

Happiness is willing to resort to the emotional low punch. The

comparison of the police officer's situation to that of the stenographer

caught with her hands in the till is calculated to cause maximum

distress. The equation of the very idea of walking out on one's family

with filth - 'Do not defile your home' (77) - is an inessential stylistic

flourish; the object has already been achieved with what is ostensibly

an exact parallel drawn from the officer's own experience. We need only

recall John's lecture to Charles in The Shawl to understand how such

apparently privileged knowledge can be adduced from a few basic rules of

'human nature'. Mr. Happiness's exploitation of an auditory medium, then,

depends for its success on the implication that the speaker is

privileged in matters of visual perception also. This impression is

especially powerful because, while Mr. Happiness seems to know

everything about his correspondents, they can know nothing about this

pseudonymous, invisible, and generally 'distant' entity.

Yet Hr. Happiness is intended for the stage, not the radio. For the

lonely hearts Mr, Happiness is paradoxically both anonymous and a valued

friend. For the audience in the theatre, however, he is rather different.

As Colin Stinton pointed out to me, on stage a faintly ridiculous

impression is created by the fact that these pretentions to intimate

knowledge of human behaviour are uttered by an entirely solitary figure

sitting isolated at his desk, The effect is similar to that in David

Hare's television play Licking Hitler, which similarly inscribes the

auditory medium of radio within a visual one. Hare's play is set in

wartime England, in a centre for the dissemination of propaganda to

-264-

Germany. As the two speakers, Karl and Jungke, broadcast a series of

pure fabrications, Hare indicates that the effect should be of 'two

ludicrous figures pretending to be miles apart' (1978,23). The visual

medium - whether of television or stage - reintroduces the spatial

element which radio denies, and the paradoxical co-existence of distance

and intimacy, so essential to Mr. Happiness's authority, is demolished by

its inscription within a medium which reintroduces spatial co-ordinates.

Much of the power of Mr, Happiness is achieved by this Juxtaposition of

media, allowing us to regard it, within its tiny compass, as both

cautionary tale and satire, and as such to bear comparison with Orwell,

Superficially, Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio, first performed ten years

after Mamet's play, is similar in many respects both to Mr, Happier ness

and to 'Four A. M. ', one of Mamet's contributions to a revue produced in

1983, 'Four A. M. ' is a simple comic sketch in which the radio host

ridicules his caller's plan 'to bring dead people back to life on Jupiter'

(DER, 40), another example of the fascination with bizarre mystical

theories which so interests Mamet. Talk Radio extends the format to

more serious ends. On the pretext of giving ordinary people a worum to

air their views, Bogosian's hero, Barry Champlain, exploits his

privileged position to insult then, distort what they say, or cut them

off altogether; and when he does offer advice it is usually inflammatory,

as when he tells a complete stranger, 'As your friend, I'm giving you

good advice when I tell you to stay away from Judy' (Bogosian 1987,6).

This play, then, appears to explore the nature of power in a similar way

to Mr. Happiness; but there are important differences. Champlain is

manipulated by outside forces and lacks the autonomy of Mr. Happiness:

his performance is judged by his executive producer; there is some

tension between Champlain and his operator, Stu, who deliberately feeds

- 265 -

him troublesome callers; and Champlain is obliged to please his

sponsors. This might appear to give Talk Radio a more realistic edge

than Mr. Happiness, by showing how the presenter is subject to economic

forces.

In fact, the opposite is true. In Bogosian's play Champlain makes

the mistake of inviting a caller, Kent, into the studio; Kent's deranged

talk throws Champlain and his show into confusion. This is the

optimism of a play which has compromised its premise: in attempting to

show that talk shows are manipulative because the presenter turns

dialogue into monologue, the play actually succeeds in arguing the

opposite - the presenter really is vulnerable to his listeners, not

simply because he has been foolish enough to confront one of them in

person, but because he has antagonized them (near the end of the play he

announces, 'I despise each and every one of you' 1151). Bogosian's

interest is not really in the medium of radio itself, but in the

protagonist, as shown in lengthy digressions in which other characters

detail their relationships with Champlain. Mr, Happiness, by contrast,

is not a "character"; he is not subject to but representative of certain

interests, which have no intention of alienating the audience, Mamet

maximizes the implications of the medium; by contrast, Bogosian's play,

like his protagonist's show, finally turns what is apparently a serious,

even subversive format into an example of the entertainment it purports

to challenge.

v. The Vater Engine

The play for which Mr. Happiness was written as an introduction,

The Water Engine, is in many ways the most complex of Mamet's works;

not surprisingly, as it has existed at various times as short story,

- 266 -

screenplay, radio play and stage play. Its various manifestations can

be explained by the richness of its own media interactions: in published

form it is a stage play, the set of which is the interior of a radio

studio in which actors are performing a Hollywood-style story itself

concerned with the interaction of yet further media: newspapers, letters,

telephones and, most intriguingly, the Chainletter.

If Pirandello lurks in the background of A Life in the Theatre,

The Water Engine more obviously owes something to Brecht. Harriott's

caricature of The Water Engine as 'an agreeable little spoof' (1988,69)

wilfully ignores its complexities; her objection that 'while there are

levels of stage business, there aren't levels of meaning' (69) shows that

she has completely missed the point. As Storey explains, ýpresents 'a

fiction that is neither seamless nor chastely nave; and the rents and

stains in its fabric give us glimpses of a patently unmelodramatic

world' (1979,8). Stage, radio and Hollywood conventions work to

alienate each other, and in so doing call into question both the status

of the story itself, and the anaesthetizing effects of the popular media

through which it is filtered and which reinforce the rhetoric of

business, 'a rhetoric that shamelessly legitimizes chicanery' (Storey

1979,8). The familiar and clich6d story allows the audience to focus

its attention on the workings of the media themselves. Mamet's note to

the published version of the play indicates the intended effect:

In Steven Schachter's productions, in Chicago and New York,

many scenes were played on mike, as actors presenting a radio drama, and many scenes were played off mike as in a traditional, realistic play. The result was a third reality, a scenic truth, which dealt with radio not as an electronic

convenience, but as an expression of our need to create and to

communicate and to explain - much like a chainletter. M, 5)

- 267 -

The play received mixed reviews, mainly for two reasons. First,

several critics failed to perceive that the story itself is an object of

satire. Gale described it as 'probably Mamet's weakest full-length

published work, amounting to little more than a 1930s radio melodrama'

(1981,214). The most provocative of the negative critics in this

respect is T. E. Kalem. 'No one would dare tell that story with a

straight face', says Kalem, 'so Mamet has told it with a borrowed voice'

(1978,335). Kalem's objections, however, are not essentially based on

aesthetic criteria:

Mamet, 30, who was unborn at the time he writes about, does not realize that resilience, fortitude and fellow feeling were the sustaining forces of the Depression years, It was the teen-agers of the '30s who forged, fought and won the U. S. victory of World War II. For the flabby, self-centered, alienated lot that Mamet has assembled in his radio studio, that formidable deed would have been a manifest impossibility. (1978,335)

Interestingly, while Kalem dismisses the tale as a 'juvenile mythette', he

himself substitutes equally questionable versions of the past. The

smugly nationalistic disregard of history which enables him to speak

simply of 'the U. S. victory of World War II' is combined with the kind of

simplistic homely fiction - 'resilience, fortitude and fellow-feeling were

the sustaining forces of the Depression years' (Kalem 1978,335) - which

may be contrasted with the ambivalences of perhaps its major theatrical

chronicler, Clifford Odets, Bigsby notes the 'obvious ironies which were

generated by the celebration of a century of progress in the midst of

the Depression' (1985a, 276). Kalem's piece is relevant not for it=-

incidental biases but for its fundamental refusal to interrogate the

past; such an interrogation is, of course, precisely the point of

The Vater Engine. As with all of Mamet's major work, the play re-

examines the American past at the same moment as it shows its own

- 268 -

fictions in the making. By juxtaposing its 1930s setting with its 1970s

performance, the play opens up a critical space which enables the

spectator to observe some of the means by which such fictions come into

being.

It is therefore surprising that some critics managed to see the play

as a failed attempt at realism - this being the second, but related,

blind spot in the play's initial reception. Edwin Wilson objected that

'when the performers walk away from their microphones, their behaviour

is clearly at odds with the play's scrupulous reproduction of actual

broadcast conditions' (1978,334), including a live clock which,

complained John Beaufort, was 'damaging to any suspension of reality'

(1978,336) Similarly Edith Oliver, speaking 'as a veteran of radio',

shows that she has completely failed to engage critically witr the play

in claiming that 'if one doesn't believe in the radio program there is no

show' (Oliver 1978,69). The more poetic words of the play's

sympathetic commentators are more in tune with its resonances: for Jack

Kroll 'the control room emanates an aura of godlike surveillance' (1978,

337), while in the words of Richard Eder, 'It is a radio station all

right, but it is also a kind of cockpit receiving peculiar and

disquieting signals from the universe ... Using a kind of poetic static,

[Mametl sets out a vision of American solitariness, innocence and

alienation'; and a crucial part of this 'static' is 'the carefully

disorientated acting' which so upset Wilson and Oliver (Eder 1978a, 335).

Carroll gives an interesting discus-=ion of the acting and staging

techniques used in Steven Schachter's productions of 1978 and 1985, He

explains how Schachter exploited the interrelation of stage and radio

conventions to show 'that all fables are collusive acts of their time,

and that they are all subject to revisitings and revision - and that we

-269-

may subject contemporary attitudes, and contemporary fables that have

grown out of them, to the same kind of scrutiny'; in these productions,

depending on how these conventions were used, 'the fable itself was

authenticated or parodied at certain points, endorsement or irony

indicated' (Carroll 1987,135-36). The fable, then, is inextricable from

the media which transmit it and from the audience who collude in its

creation:

all the time the audience was aware that it was privileged - it was asked to applaud on cue, to collaborate with the studio creation of a fictive reality, yet it was also reminded that it was part of a wider audience which, through the radio medium, would be seduced into accepting the fable at a simpler level of make-believe. The naive complicity asked for by the hearty narrator (Colin Stinton) in introductory material not printed in the text made the audience aware from the outset of the tonal differences between its own and a less disenchanted age. (Carroll 1987,134)

This captures very well the nature and purpose of the complexity of the

play's presentation, and the relation between actors and audience.

Indeed, Schachter's production provoked such 'revisitings and revision'

so powerfully that Carroll seems to back away from the implications of

his own analysis: having noted the contingent nature of the fable's

meaning and reception, he nevertheless points to 'times of real import,

when a timeless truth breaks through the static of period detail and

media conventions' (Carroll 1987,137).

The example Carroll gives is the Chainletter's claim, quoted by the

Barker, that To one can call back what one man does' (I, 53). But it

is difficult to see how this 'timeless truth' can cut through the '=: t tßc'

of the various mediations Carroll enumerates, especially since the one

example of a timeless truth which Carroll gives is articulated by the

Chainletter, the most interesting and ambiguous of all the media with

which the play deals, and one which Carroll regards as a potentially

-270-

disruptive force in the narrative C'Even the chain-letter narrations,

which suggest superstition masquerading as just fate, were organically

integrated with the play's other formal devices' 11978,135; my italics].

Similar doubts about the integration of the Chainletter are raised in

Wilson 1978,334). The Chainletter conflates the appeal of two

deceptions: instant wealth and mystification, backing up its claims with

stories of fortuitous success not dissimilar to those peddled by the

salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross; there is, for instance, a close

anticipation of Levene's sales pitch to the Nyborgs in the story of 'An

older woman who had been a nurse (who] discovered fifty thousand

dollars in a trunk which she had purchased at a railroad auction' <YR,

34). This mystical development points to the essentially bogus nature

of such projections of instant wealth.

In addition to combining the motifs of instant gratification and

mystification, the Chainletter, uncertain of the efficacy of its argument,

becomes an instrument of coercion' (Bigsby 1985b, 277). By definition,

it depends for its success on the interconnection and trust of all who

come into contact with it. It insists that 'All people are connected'

(YE, 53), yet the possibility of their disconnection is ever-present; the

Barker, for instance, is suspicious of being expected to 'send a dollar

to three people who I've never heard of' (53). Picking up on Namet's

remark about broadcasting being 'an expression of our need to create and

to communicate and to explain', Guido Almansi comments on 'the

importance of the postal system in modern American literature', citing

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as well as The Water Engine (Almansi

1986,195). In provoking the ideal of connection while simultaneously

providing the motive (greed) to untie that connection, the Chainletter

resembles the contract into which Lang laboriously enters with the

- 271 -

aptly-named Gross. In both cases the person trying to enter into the

contract is required to hand over a dollar to someone he does not know;

and Gross's remark that 'if you couldn't trust me what good would your

contract be? ' (14), like the Chainletter's insistence that 'All

civilization stands on trust' (53), indicates the fragility of the bond.

In the screenplay version the Chainletter stresses this fragility even

more strongly: 'From the minutest strand of trust the world hangs' (YE,

typescript, 100). Oberman tells Lang the water engine will 'make great

profits for ourselves and you' (ZE, 29), yet, as noted previously, the

engine is in fact a threat to Oberman. Both the Chainletter and the

water engine posit the defeat of a system by its own success: for just

as the ultimate product destroys production, so chain letters, which

depend for their perpetuation on a rapidly expanding base of new

investors, collapse once this base has become saturated, at which point

all current investors lose out. Because of this flaw in their own logic,

both the businessmen and the Chainletter are compelled to reassert

control by threats and surveillance, The Chainletter praises the efforts

of 'the watchmen of the modern order' (24), who in this play appear as

the characters who make ambiguous threats to Lang in the guise of help:

Gross tells Oberman to 'take good care of him (Lang]' (28); Oberman tells

Lang that, ostensibly for protection, 'I am going to have men assigned.

Around your lab and with you, personally' (37-38) ; Mrs . Varek tells Lang

the police will 'come and get you' (50).

The Chainletter's insistent cry 'Do not break the chain' (12)

indicates its dependence on characters such as Lang, who have power

over it from below (the base of the pyramid). In Poe's story 'The

Purloined Letter' the Minister retains power only so long as he does not

use the weapon which gives him that power; similarly Lang thinks he is

- 272 -

safe as long as he retains the plans. Just as the Chainletter insists

on a connection between all its users, so the plans unite Lang and

Bernie. In this sense Lang's sudden optimism on hearing the

Chainletter's proposal that 'No one can call back what one man does' is

justified: the plans pass to Bernie, clearly a potential Lang himself.

Yet in no sense is this a 'timeless truth', for the story is ironized by

its mediation, contingent on 'tonal differences between its own and a

less disenchanted age' (Carroll 1987,134), differences indicated by the

ending's simultaneous possibilities 'that the battle for good will

continue' and that 'the dream of something for nothing continues' (Bigsby

1985b, 91). These possibilities are differentiated by an age in which

radio could, perhaps, still be seen as offering unmediated

representations of truthful fictions and a more modern realization that

media and fictions have eliminated any simple conception of truth. For

all of these reasons Carroll's understandable desire to extract a

timeless truth from the piece is doomed to failure,

The Vater Engine calls attention not so much to the debasement of

the American Dream (represented by the Century of Progress exhibition),

although this is an important theme, but to the anaesthetising effects

of popular American archetypes (the brilliant inventor fighting off the

monopolizing greed of big business) and of the media which sustain them.

The play devastatingly exploits two pillars of the mythical American way

of life - the dream of sudden prosperity represented by the Chainletter,

and a symbol of technological progress (the radio) - to undermine a

third, the narrative tradition of hermeneutic sequences leading to

success and happiness at the end <the passing of the plans to the boy).

The self-destruction of the American Dream is played out by the

Chainletter, which symbolizes the defeat of an economic structure

- 273 -

by its own success as well as the coercion involved in every appeal to

greed, and the radio, which appropriates the dreams of the small-time

individual, uses these dreams to sustain its own success, and then sells

them back to him as entertainment. Mamet's own work, poised

ambiguously between satire on and admiration of the interrelated

founding principles of American business success and American

corruption, gains much of its power from the sense of danger with which

it flaunts this ambiguous stance. T Water Engine retains the tension

between the creativeness and destructiveness both of these archetypes

and of the media which sustain them. It succeeds in fusing the dramatic

principles of both Brecht and Aristotle without collapsing the tension

between them; if The Threepenny Opera, for instance, insists on the

practical negation of Aristotle, The Water Engine maintains a healthy

uncertainty about whether such a dramatic practice might not also

overlook the creative value of this narrative model.

vi. Telephones on stage

An apparently trivial aspect of Mamet's stage technique which is,

however, central to the construction of many of his works, is the use to

which he puts a standard stage prop - the telephone. There are good

reasons why Mr. Happiness, unlike most radio agony aunts, does not talk

to his correspondents live over the telephone and instead responds only

to letters. To enter into what Marshall McLuhan calls a "cool" medium

would undermine his authority to an unacceptable degree:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone ... A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition"

... Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meagre amount of information

... Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high '_n participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects

- 274 -

on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (1964,22- 23)

By avoiding the cool medium of telephone, Mr. Happiness maintain= his

authority and 'distance'.

The theft of the telephones in Glengarry Glen Ross performs a

similar function. McLuhan argues that 'it is not feasible to exercise

delegated authority by telephone. The pyramidal structure of job-

division and description and delegated powers cannot withstand the

speed of the phone to by-pass all hierarchical arrangements, and to

involve people in depth' (1964,271). Such democratization of the

workplace would be inimical to the interests of Mitch and Murray. The

theft of the telephones - inexplicable in realistic terms - does not

simply inconvenience the salesmen, it renders Mitch and Murray

untouchable, and so increases their authority. Their orders are now

handed down by word of mouth: 'I talked to Mitch and Murray an hour

ago', says Williamson. 'They're coming in, you understand they're a bit

upset' (Q, 43). The theft of the phones reinstates a pyramidal

structure of authority, power being handed down from Mitch and Murray

to Williamson, and thence to the salesmen,

This highly original exploitation of a traditional and convenient

stage prop is typical of Mamet's inventiveness. It is all too easy for a

playwright to use telephones as a convenient means of providing the

audience with essential expository information, a habit parodied in Tom

Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound:

MRS. DRUDGE (into phone) : Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring?

... Hello! - the draw- - Who? Who did you wish to speak to? I'm afraid there is no one of that name here, this is

all very mysterious and I'm sure it's leading up to

something, I hope nothing is amiss for we, that is Lady Muldoon and her houseguests, are here cut off from the

world, including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden 131f-brother

-275-

of her ladyship's husband Lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen again - and all alone, for they had no children. (Stoppard 1970,15)

Many of the telephone conversations in Mamet's plays are, by contrast,

anti-expository. This is particularly noticeable in American Buffalo.

While the prospective customer retains his desire to buy the coin CAB

27-28,66), thus providing a consistent narrative momentum, attempts to

get in touch with Fletcher over the telephone consistently fail; and it

is this which mainly accounts for the non-development of the plot which

so offended some of the critics. Not only is the telephone mute, it

occasionally hands out misleading information, acting as a mirror to the

characters' frustrated inarticulation. Teach's perfectly logical method

of discovering whether the mark is at home by telephoning him backfires

because, typically, he is unable to keep the idea stable in his head, and

rings the wrong number. His inner confusion produces his characteristic

malapropisms ('this is careful operation' (731). He transfers

responsibility for the mistake away from himself, the incident becoming

'bizarre' (73), and soon vents his anger on 'that fucking phone' (75).

The telephone seems almost to have become a character in its own right,

At moments Teach's idiom makes this fusion absolute: the coin collector

is 'The phone guy' (28), just as the speaking clock is 'The phone broad'

(65). By the end of the play the telephone seems almost to be

conspiring in the characters' downfall: the information that Fletcher is

not at Masonic leads to the beating-up of Bob; the confirmation that he

is at Columbus makes both Teach and Don lose face. In each case the

telephone simply offers the characters proof of their own errors, yet

their rigorous denials - 'I never felt quite right on this', says Teach

(100) - almost seem to attribute responsibility to the phone, which thus

-276-

becomes another instance of the 'animistic apprehension of things' noted

by Veblen and which recurs consistently in Namet's plays. In A Life in

the Theatre the intercom in the Lawyers scene, like other props

throughout the play, conspires against Robert in the ruin of his life

and career; in American Buffalo the telephone disrupts audience

expectations of conventional expository narration.

In Speed-The-Plow telephones perform many functions, but as far as

Gould is concerned the provision of helpful information is not among

them. Gould finds himself at the midway point between two absent

discourses. From below, he is plagued by hopeful clients:

That's why we have "channels" i ... ] All these "little" people out there, that we see. Y'unnerstand? Fellow asks "what are they there for? " Well, Charl, We Don't Know. But we think, you give the thing to your boy, gives it to my boy, these people get to eat, they don't have to go beg, and get in everybody's face the airport the whole time. This morning the phone won't stop ringing [... ] N'when I do return my calls, Charl, do you know what I'll tell those people? [ ... l I'm going to tell them "Go through Channels. " (G, 6)

Gould intends to use "channels" as a buffer zone between himself and

troublesome hangers-on. However, "channels" also distance Gould from

his boss, Richard Ross, whom Gould cannot contact without going through

switchboard. Here Karen is crucial, To borrow Teach's term, one of

Karen's roles is that of 'the phone broad'; and her inefficiency with the

console symbolizes Gould's difficulties in dealing with Ross (7-B), while

her difficulties in responding positively to Gould's requests for coffee

further suggest his impotence - relative to Ross - in dealing with his

subordinates. As Gould complains, 'Everyone wants something from me'

(57); and the effect of what they want is the dilution of his influence

with Ross, since Karen nearly destroys Gould's credibility and Fox often

hints that Gould is a competitor who must be beaten: 'I'11 sit up there

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with Bobby Gould ... over him ... you know how we think' (63).

Significantly, Gould allows himself to be influenced by both Karen and

Fox in face-to-face discussion; as argued in chapter 2, 'talking' is the

primary means by which Mamet's characters seek to control one another.

So Fox asks 'what did she do to you? ' (69), to which Gould's reply - 'She

did nothing, we, we talked' - is a classic understatement of the power

of performative language, for Karen does plenty of things to him - with

words, But if Gould is ultimately the passive partner in his verbal

duels with both Karen and Fox, he also fails with technological media of

communication. Ross, like Mitch and Murray, inverts the everyday

function of the telephone and turns it into a means of avoiding the

dangers of direct verbal communication. Karen and the switchboard are

buffers between him and Gould; and while there is no suggestion that

Ross is deliberately evading Gould, these buffers work against Gould's

interests and confirm his passivity.

Indeed, this impression is given from very early in the play by the

operation of the telephone itself. Its constant interruptions of the

conversation between Gould and Fox, and its failure to give Gould what

he wants (an immediate interview with Ross), form an effective comic

refrain, but more importantly heighten the tension, increase the pressure

on Gould, and suggest a man manipulated by outside forces, McLuhan

asks, 'Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension?

Why is that tension so much less for an unanswered phone in a movie

scene? The answer .., is simply that the phone is a participant form

that demands a partner' (McLuhan 1964,268). Its failure in this play

to provide the protagonist with the partner he needs is one more

illustration of a major theme, that Gould is 'lost' <SIp, 3,78-79).

- 278 -

Interestingly, one of the things which makes the hero of the buddy

film so attractive to Fox and Gould is his facility with media: 'his

knowledge of computers I... ] his money I... ] His Links to the Outside'

(13). Similarly, in A Life in the Theatre John's telephone conversations

demonstrate to Robert that John has an 'outside life' which he himself

does not possess; his life is spent, literally, in the theatre. Mamet's

figures of authority retain their power by using media as a semi-

permeable membrane: information flows only one way. Telephones, radio,

computers and cash are both the barriers between the senders of

prescriptions and their addressees, and the means by which these

prescriptions are carried. Douggie Brown's character is a hero because

he has gained access to these media and begun to reverse the flow of

information, breaking free of imprisonment and realizing the dream of

escape of so many of Mamet's characters,

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues:

the computerization of society ... could become the "dream" instrument for controlling and regulating the market system ,.. In that case, it would inevitably involve the use of terror. But it could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by

supplying them with the information they usually lack for

making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for

computerization to take the second of these two paths is, in

principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the

memory and data banks, (1984,67)

This is the path Douggie has followed; yet one of the things which makes

him heroic is that he has somehow managed to step outside any

regulatory structure. To quote a phrase of Linda Hutcheon's already

cited in the discussion of postmodernism in chapter 1, 'any knowledge

cannot escape complicity with some meta-narrative' (Hutcheon 1988,13).

It follows that Mamet himself is also implicated within and structured

by meta-narratives, among the most important of which are the media

-279-

within which he works; and the most interesting example is that of the

commercial and sexual tensions of Speed-the-Plow, a play which raises

questions about the extent to which its governing ethos is celebrated or

satirised.

vii. 'The Bridge' and Speed-the--Plow

The Vater Engine apart, the most complex example of interacting media in

Mamet's work is Speed-The-Plow, a stage play which debates the merits

of two screenplays: one a straight copy of myriad other films, the

other, 'The Bridge', a novel which has no obvious cinematic potential,

and which has much in common with a short story of the same name by

Mamet himself.

The unnamed protagonist of the short story dreams of standing on a

bridge watching a nuclear annihilation; the images of the dream are

similar to those used by the novelist in Speed-The-Plow, As he reflects

on the significance of this dream he imagines what it would be like if

he could be free of the knowledge he thinks it has given him: "'If I were

there upon the bridge and could dream a time of quiet - without

knowledge of our end by nuclear destruction, and it was inside this

room, what would I put here? "' (B, 170). The dream gives way to this

fantasy, in which the protagonist places himself at the centre of an

exciting murder mystery.

The first point to make about this story is that the reader is

distanced from the tale about the holocaust, both because it is a dream

and because the protagonist is not the same as the narrator: told in the

third person, the tale encourages us to draw conclusions about the

protagonist. And the immediate conclusion is that, if he is to be

identified with the author of 'The Bridge' in Speed-The-Plow, then Gould

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is absolutely right - he is 'crazy as a fucken' Tune bug' (, =, 43).

Several things indicate this. First, he pompously assumes his

superiority of consciousness: 'Outside, he thought, out there are people

with no consciousness of themselves I .A "If only, " he thought, "Oh, if

only I were one of them! "' (B., 170); but, second, this is undercut by

certain bathetic effects: 'Suppose it was all predetermined and we were

to perish in a fire. How upsetting that would be' (169). Third, he

constantly changes his fantasy: either to fit his circumstances ("'I'd

leap down from the bed and pull on shorts and run along the beach

outside... " There was no beach outside, and he shifted his reverie of

exercise to fencing with a fencing master on the roof for three-quarters

of an hour' 11711), or because he wishes to avoid unpleasant

consequences for himself,

That she had been all night dead there in the living-room was also unacceptable. The very idea of her presence would destroy the iffy nature of the fantasy. It would be clear and proveable what had occurred, and he could not, then, toy with his own psychological imbalance, which was teasing him with guilt - with memory. (172)

The fantasy is 'iffy' because the protagonist wishes both to imagine

himself as a degenerate hero enacting his violent desires, and to refuse

the very consequences which would make these actions dangerous and

therefore, in one sense, heroic. This fantastic combination of maximum

danger with maximum security is played out in a second dream which

concludes the story, as the holocaust of his first dream is transformed

into a vision of protection: 'He was up on the flight-deck of an aircraft

carrier. He looked and, far away, at the horizon, he saw orange balls

Huge orange balls, evenly spaced. He knew that they were protective

devices, and were linked together - though he could not see the links'

(173), Geo-politics and private neurosis can here be seen as

- 281 -

transformations of each other: the invisible links between the orange

balls function in much the same way as the links between the elements

of the protagonist's fantasy are held uncertainly together by his

desperate imagination. These awkward transformations are found also in

the novel discussed in Speed-The-Plow, the author revealing his self-

indulgence in the very act of striving for cosmic significance.

This is not the only connection between the two works. The short

story can also be read as another tale about Bobby Gould, the

protagonist of Speed-The-Plow and of the forthcoming Bobby Gould in

Hei,, and the secondary character of The Disappearance of the Jew, g. The

connection between these works is violence, as in the development of the

fantasy in 'The Bridge':

After fencing he'd come down and shower, eat, and make love to the girl if he felt moved to do so - or perhaps he would insult her - he would cut her [.,. ] What if: what if he'd killed

someone - what if he'd killed his son? (If he had had a son, and killed him. ) If he could not tell his wife. He'd killed her in his passion when he told her of the accident. When he

confessed. (If he had had a wife she'd surely love his. son. ) Or what if he came home and found her dead? She'd been

terribly mutilated C... ) CB., 171-72)

A similar pattern is found in The Disappearance of the Jews, in which,

as argued in chapter 3, the effect of another kind of holocaust is to

brutalize a character who ought to act in precisely the opposite way,

although this character is not Gould but his friend Joey. In his latest

reincarnation Gould finds himself in hell, being interrogated about the

apparently motiveless mutilation and murder of his girlfriend. That

lack of motivation may be explained by the character's deliberate

efforts to erase his own intelligence: in 'The Bridge' the protagonist

imagines himself in a situation in which 'I would awake this morning

happy. Like a labourer of some sort C... ] I would wake without self-

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consciousness - except the knowledge of my body - feeling like a

bulldog, sleek and powerful' <B., 171) ; Joey in The Disappearance of the

Iews details the same association of manual labour, unselfconsciousness

and mindless violence, with which Gould is also associated on occasion.

Whether or not the protagonist of 'The Bridge' is Gould, it is clear that

he has much in common with that character, who continues to fascinate

Mamet.

The Gould of Speed-The-Plow is different, although he articulates

the kind of existential anguish which seems to motivate his namesakes'

indulgence in escapist fantasy. At the beginning he announces he is 'in

the midst of the wilderness' (om, 3); at the end, after Karen admits she

would not have slept with Gould had he not "greenlighted" the radiation

film, he insists again, 'I'm lost, do you hear me, I'm lost' (7<-)). Again,

this makes him peculiarly susceptible to fantasies which would give some

structure to his life; and the dream of "doing good" offered by Karen is

in some sense simply a transformation of that dream of evil in the

short story, or of superhuman strength in The Disappearance of the Jews.

In all cases the character shores himself up with a fantasy of extreme

action, which recalls the debased fantasies of the characters in

In all his manifestations, then, Gould self-consciously creates roles

for himself: killer, hero, Hollywood mogul, saviour. The hero of 'The

Bridge' sounds like he is directing hi own film: "'When I woke (the

shade flapped in the breeze and woke me, one flap, like a sharp

guncrack) I sat up in the bed. I was alone. The girl came in dressed

in white cotton [ ... 3'll (ß., 171). It is only appropriate, then, that

Speed-The-Plot, a far more complex work, should incorporate 'The Bridge'

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into a world so often characterized as being itself pure fantasy:

Hollywood.

The function and status of 'The Bridge' within Speed-the-Plow is

inseparable from the figure of Karen. In Act One Gould and Fox see

Karen solely as the object of a bet. In this she resembles Margaret in

House of Games, and like Margaret she sustains the narrative by

unexpectedly becoming a player in a manipulative male game. Karen

characterizes herself as 'naive' on no fewer than seven occasions, but

finally admits 'I shouldn't act as though I was naive' (am, 58) ; as

indeed she shouldn't, having just confessed 'I knew what the deal was. I

know you wanted to sleep with me' (57). Her second admission, which

Gould and Fox both recognize to be crucial, is that she would not have

slept with Gould had he not greenlighted her pet project. And her

motive is clear: in taking on the job at Gould's office 'I thought: I

would find something' (49), Just as Roma extols the benefits: of 'doling]

that which today I think will make me secure', and of seizing 'the

moment' and 'opportunity' (QýQR, 24-25), so Karen here seizes her

opportunity to 'find something'; and that this is conscious opportunism

is strongly suggested by her willingness to fall into the idiom which,

as she sees, forges a bond between Gould and Fox : 'No, I thank you' she

says to Gould (am, 49), picking up on the endless rounds of thanks the

men offer each other.

Karen's role shows why 'The Bridge' has to be as much an object of

satire as is the crude commercialism of the Douggie Brown picture. For

Karen its inherent qualities are irrelevant; it is her opportunity, and

she must make the most of it. What makes the play so richly comic is

the absolute intractability of the material with which she is faced. A

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particularly good example is her final plea to Gould in the teeth of

Fox's attack:

Wait, Bob. The things we said last night. You called for help. Bob, you remember? Listen to me. (She picks up the book and starts to read: ) "One bell was 'showers about us': two bells was 'showers across the Lake'; three bells was 'showers across the Ocean'; and four bells was 'showers across the World. ' And he wondered how they had obtained that concession to rehearse the bells for the benefit of this instruction. " No, that's the wrong bit. (80)

The passage is funny not just because of the inherent absurdity of the

extract, but also because of Karen's ineptitude added to the sudden

dislocation of speech rhythms occasioned by the intrusion of the prose.

And this is the effect of each extract we hear: while 'The Bridge'

plainly cannot work as a film, lacking coherent images, dialogue, or any

possibility of a linear narrative, these are equally the reasons why it

jars within the structure of Speed-The-Plow itself. Several critics

denigrated the performances of those actresses playing the part of

Karen, or felt sympathy for their efforts to overcome intractable

material. Howard Kissel's review is a good example. 'No, She Can't Act'

screamed the Daily News headline, Kissel feeling that 'In order to make

us believe she has equal power, Madonna has to have equal energy. She

doesn't' (1988,277). Moreover, 'The lack of firmness in Madonna's

performance adds ambiguity', while a particular fault was that Madonna

'misses the . musicality of Kamet's writing' (277). But Kissel has latched

on to the weakness of her discourse and mistaken this for a weakness in

the play or the production, There is no 'musicality' in 'The Bridge'

This weakness is the whole point: Karen and the story combine to

produce a rogue discourse within the narrative which must be exorcized

precisely because it won't work in the theatre,

-285-

This, however, seems to lead to a greater problem: if we are not

even meant to take 'The Bridge' seriously, how does Karen succeed in

convincing Gould to film it? To argue with this objection in realistic

terms would be idle - Gould's conversion is 'plainly incrediýJle' : Taylor

1989,69>, More interesting is the question of whether the play in any

sense gains from the breakdown in credibility at this point; and to

begin with, our recognition of this jarring dramatic effect should entail

the simultaneous recognitions that neither 'The Bridge', nor Karen's

defence of it, and nor, therefore, Gould's sudden conversion, are remotely

convincing. No-one, however, regards as at all silly Gould's belief that

he can persuade Ross of the merits of the prison film in just four

words: 'Doug Brown, Buddy Film' (am, 17). This is dramatically credible,

for reasons discussed below, while a whole night of Karen's charms seems

an impossibly brief spell in which to convert Gould to the alternative

project. Behind the complaints, then, is the recognition that no amount

of persuasion could convince anyone that 'The Bridge' is Hollywood

material.

Moreover, no amount of material from 'The Bridge' itself can

convince us that it will work; it defeats the best efforts of both Karen

and Gould to summarize it. Gould only splutters and comes to a halt

"We are frightened... (Pause. ) Because the World is Ending. Uh

(Pause. ) A man gives up everything ... wait. (Pause. ) A man, to find

happiness ... (Pause. )' (73). Karen's lengthy quotations from and defence

of the novel are reminiscent of Roma's speech to Lingk <G-Q$, Act 1 Scene

3) and the Fortune-Teller's in Edmond (scene 1), and also Lucky's in

Way lti for Godot: superficially portentous but actually incoherent.

Indeed, the more they discuss the book the less coherent it becomes; and

this is clearly because it is 'artsy' (am, 43) and has no narrative (or

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has an a-linear narrative) which cannot be retold as a story. For this

reason it is unsuitable not just for Hollywood but for Broadway - and

the narrative structure of Sneed-the-Plow - also. And because 'The

Bridge' is always mediated for us by the characters, there is a double

sense in which the play cannot accommodate it: its a-linearity damages

the play's progressive Aristotelian narrative; conversely, the play does

violence to 'The Bridge' itself, cutting it up in the m. arner of a

Burroughs novel or a 'House' record, scattering unconnected and

unconnectable fragments as characters open the book and quote from it

at random. The play takes on a postmodernist aspect, dismembering

possibly coherent wholes and placing the fragments in new contexts to

disrupt meaning or to generate unexpected meanings. The primary effect

is to obliterate any possibility of sense by placing these fragments

within a framework - Mamet's characteristically Aristotelian, unified

narrative - to show that they have no place there. As Fox says, 'I

wouldn't believe this shit if it was true' (73).

In marked contrast, the less Fox says about the Douggie Brown film

the more we know about it. When he mentions that 'These guys, they want

to get him', Gould automatically knows these are 'Black guys' (11). At

one point Gould even starts telling the story himself - 'He teams up

with the guys [... 1 he learns the Prison Ways' (12) - even though he has

never heard it before. Fox manages to convey the essence of the story

to Gould specifically by saying nothing at all:

FOX: They blah blah, so on .., GOULD: Uh huh ... (13)

'Blah blah' tells Gould all he needs to know. Indeed, Gould predicts he

can win Richard Ross's approval for the picture in 'One sentence: "Doug

Brown, Buddy Film"' (17). It is like a competition to write a story

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using the fewest possible words. The reason they can do this is that

'we're in business to C ... ] ]lake the thing everyone made last year' (56).

Gould, Ross and the audience are all able to reconstruct the film's story

from fragments because the story pre-exists this particular

manifestation of it; the Douggie Brown film is a more or less exact copy

of other films. Karen fails because she is forced to try to fake

something unique, and the impossibility of doing so is reason enough for

her failure. As Fox tells her, 'that's why you're stupid, is you made

your move on something wasn't ever going to make a movie' (80).

To answer the question posed earlier: Gould's conversion is

necessarily unconvincing because it thereby indicates the destructive

effect such a discourse has on the narrative structure of the play

itself. If Hollywood cannot accommodate 'The Bridge', neither can

Broadway; the writer is inevitably constrained by the dictates of the

medium within which he chooses to write. The play is not against

innovation (as its parody of Hollywood makes clear), but it does define

an area for drama to which some ideas are alien. For this reason the

theatre must share with Hollywood, to some extent, the constraints of

convention and simulation; as Gould says of the Douggie Brown film, in a

speech which is only slightly parodic, 'it's more than what they [the

public] want. It's what they require' (56). Where Brecht uses

alienation devices to expose the constraints of naturalism and realism,

Mamet, in Speed-The-Plow as in The Water Engine, juxtaposes and

assimilates media to the same end; the humour arises from a parodically

reductive view of these limitations, which paradoxically hints also at

their unfulfilled possibilities.

Xamet is, in the best sense, a popular writer: 'the function of

drama, as Stanislavsky said, is to bring to the stage the life of the

- 288 -

human soul so that the community can participate therein, so we can

celebrate those things which we really know to be true' (qtd. in Schvey

1988b, 91), His willingness to write plays which exploit the same

structures as those he ridicules (as several reviewers noted, Speed-The-

Plow is itself a "buddy movie" of sorts) indicates the collapse of

distinctions between 'high' and 'low' art distinctive of postmodernism.

The same postmodernist awareness is at work in the decision to

undermine form and structure from within: satirising the "buddy movie"

by exploiting its own format, writing an intellectual play which

ridicules intellectual pretention, satirising the commercialised world of

Hollywood while presenting it on the equally commercialised stage of

Broadway, foregrounding the destructive nature of the profit motive

while casting the 'Material Girl' in a play which finally seems to

celebrate it. If Mamet exploits these structures he is also situated by

them and within them; in laying bare a society of commerce, greed,

sexism, racism and violence he - perhaps deliberately - lays himself

open to charges of adopting the same position he professes to attack.

And yet, in the postmodern world in which any oppositional strategy may

be co-opted by capital, attempting to undermine these structures from

within is as valid a course as any other: perhaps it is the only course.

In Mamet's America there is only one game in town, and after all, 'You

can't win if you don't play' (E., 27),

-289-

CONCLUSION

In Sneed-The-Plow, Gould announces his satisfaction that the Doug Brown

movie has 'Action, blood, a social theme' (SIR, 13). The satire is

pointed; while all three elements are present in David Xamet's plays,

they are there only peripherally, as perceptible yet undefined pressures

on the protagonists. The erotic exploits of Sexual Perversity in

Chicago and the robberies in American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross are

either thwarted or are never begun, as if, at the same time as the

characters conform to archetypal modes of behaviour in order to create

the will to action, there is something in these very archetypes which

thwarts that possibility. The violent outbursts in American Buffalo and

Edmond are expressions not of power but of failure; and it is this kind

of existential crisis which troubles Mamet, not the social or political

crises which interest an Odets in America or an Edgar in Britain.

Particularly interesting in this respect are some remarks Mamet has

made about the character of Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross. For Mamet,

Aaronow is

the one who comes closest to being the character of a raisonneur ... The question he's troubled by is whether his inability to succeed in the society in which he's placed is a defect - that is, is he manly or sharp enough? - or if it's, in

effect, a positive attribute, which is to say that his

conscience prohibits him. So Aaronow is left between these two things and he's incapable of choosing. This dilemma is, I think, what many of us are facing in this country right now. (qtd. in Roudan6 1986,75)

-290-

Aaronow's closing line - '0h, god I hate this job' (GGR, 64) - recalls

the closing line of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923) : 'Hell, I'll

tell the world this is a lousy job' (Rice 1950,108); but the declamatory

force of Rice's line is replaced by a tone of mingled insight and

resignation. For Mamet, 'The purpose of the theatre is not to deal with

social issues, it's to deal with spiritual issues ... I don't write plays

to dump on people. I write plays about people whom I love and am

fascinated by' (qtd. in Nuwer 1985,9-10).

Moreover, Mamet finds 'business' and popular myths of success both

repellent and attractive. This attraction has grown steadily throughout

his career: almost non-existent in American Buffalo, it becomes a vital

consolation and rationale in Glengarry Glen Ross, while in Speed-The-

Plot, as one reviewer observed, the action 'veers between ambiguity and

sly celebration' (Riley 1989,68). Certainly, while Mamet has proposed

that 'Part of the American myth is ... that at a certain point vicious

behaviour becomes laudable' (qtd. in Gottlieb 1978,4), such viciousness

is not without its attractions in the absence of any higher morality;

indeed, this might be taken as the moral of the encounter between the

two film scripts in Speed-The-Plow. As he argued in 1978:

In the theatre today were beginning to recognize ourselves as Americans. In the 60's we rejected pride in being American, In the 70's the theatre is saying that being American is

nothing to be ashamed of. But we have to learn how to deal

with it. We need to take a look at certain taboo a=pects of ourselves. (qtd. in Gottlieb 1978,4)

If this involves lifting the liberal taboo on the recognition that the

most destructive qualities of American society - insecurity, greed,

duplicity and success at the expense of others - are the same qualities

which make that society fundamentally attractive, then Mamet is not

afraid of saying so. It is partly this willingness to offend both

-291-

liberal and conservative sensibilities by recognizing this essential

interrelation of destruction and creativity at the heart of American

mythology which makes Mamet, with Sam Shepard (about whom a similar

point might be made), one of the most exciting voices in theatre today.

Another taboo Narret lifts is that on the open discussion of the

pleasures as well as the vulnerabilities of an all-male world. Again,

this has been a developing concern, If Bernie and Danny in Sexual

Perversity in Chicago are excluded from female company by the very

mythology they believe is designed to secure it, in Speed-the-Plow Fox

and Gould consciously expel Karen, in a precise structural analogy to

the expulsion of the father-figure in The Caretaker. But while his

recent essays 'Women' and 'In the Company of Men' are a defence of

masculine pursuits rather than an attack on women, an affirmation of

sexual difference rather than sexual superiority, nevertheless the

frequent and awkward generalizations ('Women ... like to know who's in

charge ... They are legitimately goal-oriented, and their goals, for the

most part, are simple: love, security, money, prestige' (SE, 221) lack the

ambivalences and tensions of the plays. The problem is that the defence

of the masculine is conducted in terms of its opposition to the

feminine; the strategy is again that of creating an Other-figure, with

all the problems this entails. There is a danger that as a result Mamet

will continue to be attacked - unjustly - as a misogynist (an accusation

implicit, for instance, in Jeanette Winterson's debate with him on Clive

James's Talk Show (BBC2,18 February 19901), and that this could obscure

his real achievement.

What distinguishes the plays in this respect is the recognition that

any affirmation is always contingent. They avoid those strategies of

exclusion and opposition which finally make so much 'agit-prop'

- 292 -

simplistic and ineffective. 'We have our fictions', says a character in

one of Mamet's sketches (am, 21), and one of these fictions is that of

the possibility of absolute metacritical detachment. As Mamet says, 'the

ability to perceive the problem doesn't necessarily mean that one is not

part of that problem' (qtd, in Roudan6 1986,81). At times the

characters are vaguely aware that they are situated in this way: 'You

cannot step outside the culture' (AMAH, 74); 'People living in their own

dream don't know that they're in a dream' (D-SX, 9). And yet this

'culture' of 'dreams' and 'fictions' is an enabling as well as a

debilitating culture, one which both provokes the dream and revokes the

possibility of significant action. Consolation lies in the possibility

that ultimately it is the fiction itself, and not the goal towards which

it tends, which is ultimately valuable. In Mamet's unfilmed screenplay

of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm says: 'you do not

differentiate between something to be striven for, and something to be

lived' (A, I. X, 11? ) .

Yet this is a world which has lost its legitimation, in which we

have 'fired the last round' (W$, 37) ;a world of which Mamet has asked,

'What are we trying to succeed in aid of? ' (NTSN, 4). The only dream

his characters inhabit is a dream of success and opportunity, and if it

is a sustaining fiction, it is also precisely the problem which gives

rise to the need for such fictions in the first place. Between this

perception of a crisis and the inability to extricate oneself from it

lies a space of profound and bitter ironies.

- 293 -

APPENDIX I: XAXET'S UJPUBL ISHED VOPKS

This Appendix does not discuss all of Mamet's unpublished work, but

those scripts which, with his permission, were made available to me by

his agency, Rosenstone/Wender, in New York, and by the Special

Collections Division at Chicago Public Library. Drafts which do not

differ sufficiently from published versions to merit independent

comment, but which have been cited in the thesis, are listed in the

bibliography. Unless stated otherwise, page numbers refer to the

unpublished typescript,

1. Lakeboat. 1970.

A play written for performance by Mamet's acting students at Marlboro

College, Vermont, in 1970, Lakeboat was rewritten for its first

professional production in 1979. . The later version in some ways

encapsulates the development from the episodic plays of Mamet's early

career to his more recent interest in plot. In particular, the rewritten

version explains the mystery of Giugliani's disappearance (he had

overslept) -a crucial alteration throwing greater emphasis onto the

quite groundless fictions woven by the sailors to account for it.

Scenes were rearranged to emphasize the development not only of plot but

of character, in particular the role of Dale as the catalyst who

encourages the sailors to talk about their lives.

The 1979 version omitted a considerable amount. of material to

concentrate attention on these developments. Few scenes were ra,, -lica11y

-294-

changed - several were not changed at all - but no fewer than seventeen

scenes were completely scrapped. (One of these scenes, 'Paranoia', in

which Joe complains that 'Everybody's talking about me' 1201, has also

been scored out in the 1970 version, ) Two of the most interesting, 'The

mind is a funny thing' and 'The writer', have already been discussed.

Indeed, that these scenes can be examined independently of the play in

which they appear is indicative of a basic weakness of the earlier

version: some of the scenes are so self-contained that in parts the play

is more like a revue (the form Mamet adopted for his first play, Camel

(1969], written while Mamet was still an undergraduate at Goddard

College (Lewis and Browne 1981,641).

The revue-type aspects of the piece are particularly evident in

those scenes which seem to have been included solely for the punchline.

Into this category fall the short scene in which Jerry tries to convince

the new boy, Dale, to volunteer for a job washing the decks manually:

'So, the next time you see the Mate, tell him you want a hand job' (12) ;

and that in which Fred asks Jerry, who is performing vocal exercises -

carefully pronouncing the names of animals - in the hope of becoming a

radio announcer: 'What happens if you ever have to announce something

other than an animal? C,.. ] You're up shit creek is what' (62),

Other scenes restate themes and situations better expressed

elsewhere in the play; accordingly the 1979 version omits several

episodes which simply confirm the sailors' obsession with sex. However,

another jettisoned scene, in which Stan remembers making up with his

girlfriend after an argument, offers some contrast with the sailors'

relentless misogyny in the published version, Other themes are also

repeated. In 'Out of hand' Joe asks 'Where in a single man's life can

you go and point and say, "Here I had a choice? "' (45), repeating less

- 295 -

interestingly the theme of 'The mind is a funny thing'; while ir_ the same

scene Joe needlessly makes explicit a theme evident from the action of

the play itself: 'You spend being young worried about how not grown up

you are and you spend the rest worried about what happened to being

young' (45) -a speech the apprentice author rightly pencilled out. A

scene in which Joe sounds Jerry out on some possible methods of

committing suicide is unnecessary in view of his conversation with Dale

in the 'Joe's suicide' scene. Extra theories regarding Guigliani are also

omitted.

Some scenes have no apparent point other than to offer an

exhaustive catalogue of the few distractions available to the sailors:

Skippy complains about the installation of a pool table on the boat;

Jerry reports on the Joys of smoking dope, the 'friend of the working

man' (30); Fred and Joe talk about gambling. Still other scenes seem to

be no more than formal exercises in monologue and dialogue: Collins

tells a lengthy tale of a man who suffocated in an air-pocket on a

sunken ship; Fred and Joe have an inconsequential conversation about

abortion. In all cases, then, the decision to omit material is fully

justified.

ii. Smashville. 1978.

Written with Jonathan Katz, Sm ashville is the pilot for a television

series. Neither the pilot nor the series was made. Smashville is a

recording studio in downtown Manhattan. This episode focusses on the

experiences of its new manager, Donny Fields, on his first day at work.

We see something of most of the studio's staff and the nature of its

business, taping sessions of bands, muzak and advertising jingles. A

wide variety of potential clients phone in to book recording time; this-

- 296 -

presumably establishes a wide enough variety of potential customers to

make a series. Smashville therefore has the somewhat desultory,

unfinished look we might expect from a pilot episode the primary

function of which is to introduce us to the characters and situations

around which succeeding episodes will be based. The slender plot of

this episode concerns an escaped otter from Bronx Zoo which finds its

way into the studio.

From the evidence of this script Smashville is unpromising. Its

interest lies primarily in its potential for examining those media -

music, advertising, telecommunications - which as we have seen are

powerful influences on Mamet's writing. For instance, the staccato

conversations carried on over telephones and intercoms offer many

opportunities for humorous examples of the violent compressions and

distortions of syntax so characteristic of Mamet's writing. A

particularly good example of this is the difficulty Heidi, the

receptionist, has in remembering the slogan she is to repeat every time

she answers the phone. 'Smashville Recording ... Uptown's Technology and

Downtown's Sound' (27). Her need to repeat this phrase constantly, and

her inability to get it right, anticipate the role of Karen in Speed-the-

Plow, but in this teleplay are indicative both of the tedious repetition

imposed on those who work in this hive of activity, and of the

impoverished language peddled by all the contemporary media we hear in

this episode (the only contrast to which is provided by the aged Jewish

musicians, one of whom, for instance, describes the otter as 'the mouse

of Death' 140]) . Similarly, the constant repetition of the advertising

jingle being recorded in the studio forms a powerfully ironic refrain:

Your car is more than Just a Tool for Getting Place to Place Your car is You, Your Car is Me It's the Whole Human Race.

-297-

Our Race believes in Motion and to Keep us On the Go, It's Mupco Gas, and Mupco Oil, and we Hope that you know I-] That MUPCO is the Brand for you, Sea, to Shining Sea [ ... 1 America! America! It's There for You and Me. (6-7,9)

As a critique of the enslavement of the individual to the product, this

is almost without equal in Mamet's work: it is now the car whi. _h is 'the

Whole Human Race', its power as a symbol being that 'Our Race believes

in lotion' - to what end, of course, the jingle is silent.

The power of the car is humorously emphasized by Heidi's laborious

attempts to explain to a caller the intricacies of the subway system,

but more important is the status of the advertisement itself. Ben

Bland, the voice-over man, irreverently remarks, 'We is gwine to sell

some good 'ol greasy a'rab Oil this mownin" (10). The quintessentially

American twentieth-century dream - of roaming free across the country

by automobile - is sold to the Americans by Americans acting on behalf

of Arabs. The advertisement therefore carries powerful undertones, not

only of the banalities of consumerism but of the increasing enervation

of American life in a post-industrial age of multinational corporations.

The hint of financial corruption in the contrast between the upbeat

jingle and its cynical producers is made explicit in the two offers of

bribery made by artists to Donny, whose predecessor was corrupt. His

insistence on honesty draws a remarkable response from one of the black

artists, Verne: 'we have taken this too long, my man. We took it back in

Africa, we took it in the Soutb. We fought your wars for you, and

furthermore we wrote the songs' (21) It is as if Donny were in the

wrong to insist on proper payment; and the corollary of this is that

Verne is in the right to refuse it. ('it is a privilege to pay this bill,

not a responsibility' [221). Mamet's fondness for bathos is well

-298-

illustrated by such lines; nevertheless, that such issues break the

surface in a studio whose manager is scrupulously honest and writes love

songs, and whose receptionist cares for animals, suggests that the

blandness of the products marketed by such people is merely wallpaper

covering deeper injustices. Whether the series would have been able to

sustain and develop these possibilities, or whether it would have become

simply slick entertainment, is a moot point. As it stands, however,

Smashville does not look like a commercially viable project, for both

good and bad reasons.

iii. The Water Engine. 1978.

The plot and dialogue of this screenplay differ little from the

published, stage version. The police are more directly implicated in

Lang's murder; but the most interesting difference is that Mr. Happiness,

the play's companion piece on stage and in publication, twice puts in an

appearance. The story of the policeman who no longer loves his wife is

told by Mr. Happiness on the radio while Mr. Wallace tells Bernie the

story of the man who fixed a train with a hammer, thus creating another

of the 'ironic juxtapositions' Bigsby notices throughout the stage

version (1985b, 88). Harder to fathom is that "Mr. Happiness" also

appears as the name of a racehorse, perhaps with the implication that

following Mr. Happiness is a risky business.

Much more important are the differences arising from the change of

medium from film to stage. 'I wrote it as a short story, and it was

rejected by many publications. I wrote it as a movie treatment and it

was rejected by various studios. I threw it in the wastebasket', before

reworking it for radio (M, 13), and then finally for the stage. What

makes the stage version so much more powerful than the screenplay is

- 299 -

that the latter loses the ironic dimensions of the interplay between

media examined in chapter 5. Lacking the metatheatrical alienations of

the stage play, the film is poised awkwardly between the fabular nature

of the plot, and more realistic details (for instance, Lang's family has

had some 'unfortunate experiences with the Courts' [54], thus explaining

why he will not take Oberman and Gross to court). Where the stage

version both distances itself from and impli-ates itself in the fictions

of popular media, the film, lacking this self-critical dimension, can be

little more than an example of the cheap entertainment parodied by the

stage version. For instance, the chase and capture of Lang is not

reported but shown, and the camera dwells on the contents of Lang's

laboratory, both devices familiar from any number of Hollywood films.

The screenplay is too closely bound up with the signifying practices of

such films for any ironic space to open up.

The film frames the action with opening and closing shots of

mementos of the Century of Progress Exposition of 1934, exhibited in an

antiques shop in 1978, but the effect is quite the reverse of the

narrative embeddings of the stage version. In the screenplay, Lang's

story is not ironic but nostalgic. The closing shot shows the envelope

in which Lang sent his plans to Bernie in the shop window. In one

sense this is a more pessimistic telling of the story than the stage

play - the possibility that Lang's ideas will persist through time is

eliminated, the plans figuring among an undifferentiated display of

detritus Ca howdy doody puppet, Batman paraphernalia, old toys' (1211),

like the 'valuable nickel hidden in a pile of shit' in American Buffalo

(All, 47), a play also recalled in the opening shot, in which 'The figures

of several tin cavalrymen are seen in a glass display case. They are

dressed in khakis and are pursuing a tin buffalo' (1), On the other

-300-

hand, the framing device is overtly optimistic, for it does not suggest

that the Lang story is necessarily a fiction; it becomes a privileged

discourse, as the role played by the radio in this screenplay indicates.

Mr. Happiness's show is only one of the ironic juxtapositions created by

the characters' penchant for wireless-listening; another good example is

'Kodiak Prince', a programme for children which repeatedly drops the

name of the Mounties' favourite breakfast cereal. But while such

moments provide ironic or humorous analogies with Lang's situation, they

are merely localized effects; they cannot provide the kind of framework

around the action produced by the radio studio in the stage version, and

so the screenplay retains the dichotomy of privileged narratives and

debased analogies, categories superseded in the stage version.

iv. Lone Canoe; or, The Explorer (Version A). 18 March 1979,

John Fairfax is an explorer from Victorian England. After a calamitous

voyage to the North during which everyone else on the expedition died,

Fairfax settled with a tribe of Indians, one of whom, Thom, he has

married. The tribe has been suffering from a famine, but Fairfax

locates deer. His fellow explorer, Fredrick Vanbrandt, who has been

searching for Fairfax for -years, arrives and attempts to persuade him to

return to London. Fairfax resists until being told that England blames

his pride for the explorers' deaths. He agrees to return and clear his

name, even shooting one of the Indians in his determination to escape

with the wounded VanBrandt. It emerges, however, that VanBrandt has

lied; Fairfax is in fact revered in England. VanBrandt dies, and Fairfax

returns to the tribe. He wants to pay the price of death for his

betrayal. The deer have disappeared; Chungatte, the shaman, banishes

Fairfax from the tribe.

-301-

Some of the play's weaknesses were considered in chapter 3. Another

serious flaw is that the protagonist is a fundamentally undramatic

character. Fairfax explains the famine as divine providence: 'I saw the

hand of god in it [ ... ] It was not for me to choose to be the agent of

deliverance C... ] If we are hungry then there is a reason. And I saw

that it will be assuaged or not' (3). Such speeches eliminate his

capacity for human action - indeed, this seems to be the cause of his

aversion to his former career as an explorer - and Fairfax becomes a

passive, and therefore inadequate, protagonist. By transferring all

agency to an inscrutable God, the play fails to develop its ostensible

theme of the testing of the hero. The second version overcomes some of

these difficulties, while compounding others.

v. Lone Canoe; or, The Explorer (Version B). 27 May 1979.

Version B makes only a few changes to the story. The greatest

improvement is in Fairfax's interpretation of his test. In Version B

Fairfax's explanation is far more interesting: his test is to 'return and

stand with you not as a hero (pause. ), Neither in failure, (pause) But as

a man, who has no power to control what is outside his power' (4R).

Fairfax here defines not the impossibility but the limits of the hero.

Two minor characters are omitted, and the ending is changed,

Chungatte welcoming Fairfax back to the tribe instead of expelling him.

The major alterations, however, concern not the story but its language

and idiom, in three important respects: the dialogue has been expanded

at several key moments; the language is often deliberately archaic; and a

number of songs, with lyrics by Alaric Jans, are inserted.

The quantitative expansion of the dialogue is rarely accompanied by

a qualitative improvement. The greater attention paid the love of

-302-

Fairfax and Thom merely produces such insipid remarks as 'This is a

very good thing' <6RR) and 'You are my whole life. The rest was a

fiction' (7RR), as well as one of Jans's songs. It is, then, a

particularly weak example of the kind of exposition or characterization

Mamet usually avoids. Identical reservations apply to a scene in which

VanBrandt and Fairfax, resolved to return to England, recall previous

triumphs. Their memories of sailing from port to port and receptions at

the Savoy give a crudely stereotypical picture of carefree adventurers

in the service of the Empire, accentuated by the song's celebration of

'the noble quest' (31R). Since the song adds nothing to our knowledge

of the characters or their feelings about England, it also is

superfluous. Indeed, while barely a line of the play remains unaltered

from Version A, the rewritten lines often sound even less fresh. For

example, in Version A, to Fairfax's claim to be 'disgusted' by all London

offered him, Vanbrandt responds: 'So saith one of Fortune's Elect' (9).

In Version B, this pithy remark is expanded: 'Listen to yourself, man,

you're lying. It was your dope. It was your addiction. To be Fortune's

Chosen. To be Fairfax' (1C). The additional words merely dilute the

power of the retort. Indeed, in comparing the two scripts it is

surprising how often the earlier version reads like a revision of the

later.

One of the consistent changes made in the second version is the

stress placed on an archaic idiom. Sometimes Mamet abbreviates words

in the fashion of bad turn-of-the-century verse: 'Of course you're coming

back. And soon, 'fore winter sticks us here' (14). In similar vein are

the frequent inversions of word order. There is a rather pompous tone

throughout the dialogue. 'The hue and cry at home was scarce to be

believed', intones VanBrandt (11) ; and Namet's substitution of 'passion'

-303-

for 'hue and cry' improves matters only slightly. The awkwardness is

compounded by Mamet's sporadic return to his more usual colloquially

elliptical idiom: 'Married to that savage by a waving wand, some

rhythmical incantation, some theatrical and that's what binds you here? '

(18). The irregular injections of life Mamet provides in speeches like

these merely highlight the affectation of others, and suggest that Mamet

may have experienced considerable uncertainty as to the wisdom of his

own experiment.

While there are obvious dangers in discussing the song lyrics

independently of the music, they do seem to compound rather than relieve

the faults of the play, although some are interesting as individual

poems. The first, sung by Chungatte and Thom, offers neat images of

potentiality ('The night holds the daylight / folded inside it'), but in

context merely accentuates the fatalism with which characters view

events: 'So trust in the seasons: / in time will their secrets / be

understood' (2-CR). Significantly, a version of the same song concludes

the play. The songs rarely further the plot or add to our understanding

of character, instead reiterating already evident relations between

characters. Stylistically, they contain some of the play's most stilted

archaisms, 'fore'er I'll cleave to thee' (? RR) being a notable example.

The songs, then, heighten the rather naive simplicities of the play's

conception and push it in the direction of the less successful kind of

Broadway musical, with its sudden outbursts of feeling and tendency

towards stereotyping. Yet in other respects Lone Canoe offers

singularly unpromising material for such a venture. The rather

declamatory nature of the dialogue is at odds with the intensely private

song shared by Fairfax and Thom; while the banality of the lyrics

further weakens any claim the play might have to moral profundity.

-304-

Although Mamet has stated his intention to work on Lone Canoe further

(Carroll 1987,106), it is difficult to see what he can make of a play

whose only virtue is extreme simplicity.

vi. The Postman Always Rings Twice. September 1979.

Mamet's first filmed screenplay is the most recent of three screen

versions of James M. Cain's novel of 1934, the story of the murder of

the Greek owner of a run-down restaurant, Nick Papadakis, by his wife

Cora and her lover, the drifter Frank Chambers, who dress up the murder

as a motoring accident. They are acquitted thanks to some legal and

financial skulduggery by their lawyer, Katz, who plays off two insurance

companies against each other to ensure they will not testify against his

clients. Later Frank and Cora marry, but Cora is killed in a car crash.

The film gives Mamet the chance to write about some of his favourite

subjects, but there is little embellishment of the original story.

Nevertheless, there are some important changes. First, Xamet makes

no attempt to reproduce the novel's first-person narration by Frank.

This requires some changes to the story: Frank's elaborate strategy of

lies is simplified, presumably because without access to his thoughts

the deliberate errors he gives in his evidence (to avoid making his

story too pat) would be confusing. The most important change in this

respect, however, is to the end of the story. The last chapters of the

novel reveal a double irony: Cora, unlike Nick, dies in a real car

accident; and Frank reveals that the novel is an account written by him

in prison as he awaits execution for her murder. Because the film

concentrates less on Frank than on his relationship with Cora it omits

this final twist, closing with him by the roadside grieving over her

- 305 -

body: he escapes the law (presumably), retribution is essentially

fortuitous, and the novel's ironies are weakened.

The other major kind of change Mamet makes is in the conflation of

some events and the expansion of others. Early in the novel Frank and

Cora plan to elope: Cora changes her mind and returns, Frank leaves on

his own, wins money gambling, loses it, and bumps into Nick who

persuades him to return. In Namet's version Frank and Cora reach the

bus station where Frank gambles with Cora's money and the bus tickets;

he wins, only to find that Cora has left; he returns to the restaurant of

his own volition. Namet's version improves on Cain's in several ways:

it compresses the story; Cora is provided with a stronger motive for

leaving Frank; the argument over his gambling adds to the tensions in

their relationship; and his decision to return to Cora despite his

gambling success increases the sense of the powerful attraction the

couple have to each other (significantly, the Italian film version of the

story is called Ossessione). All of these points indicate that Xamet's

concern is with the relationship, and not just with the character of

Frank. Moreover, Mamet alters the chronology: in the book Frank and

Cora only think of eloping after the failed attempt to kill Nick in the

bath; Manet, more plausibly, reverses this order of events.

A particularly important addition to the story is the creation of a

party scene in which the Greek community holds an evening of ethnic

entertainment and Nick Papadakis celebrates his survival of the

"accident". Frank, necessarily an outsider here, 'surreptitiously' in=fists

to Cora that 'I have to talk to you' (48); partly because they have

serious business to discuss, but also because she is literally the only

person he can talk to at this event. His feelings of exclusion heighten

when, in response to his question as to 'What are you doin' with these

-306-

spies, for chrissake? ', Cora, 'outraged', replies 'The man's my husband. I

can't do it anymore. [ ... ] I'm sorry, Frank, it's all done' (48).

But this opposition between Frank and Cora is false, and almost

immediately there is a realignment, the final opposition being once more

between Greek and English speakers. Namet's directions indicate that

Nick's friends invariably speak in Greek; and Nick, albeit benevolently,

conspires in the confusion of Frank and Cora by his decisions as to

what to translate. So, for instance, while he informs Frank that 'I tell

'em how you save my life' (50), he does not tell Cora - 'who is smiling

good-naturedly, (as people will when a foreign language they do not

understand is being spoken)' (50) - of a far more important decision,

which could not affect her more directly, which he arrives at in

collaboration with the other Greeks:

GEORGIOU (in Greek): Now that's the God 's truth, if you have children, you have a future and there is no possibility of Depression. (N. B. He says the last word in English. )

NICK (in Greek; lifting glass, as if for a toast): Absolutely. To your family, and to mine.

GEORG IOU (in Greek): When?. NICK (in Greek): Soon. Tomorrow. Nine months from now!

Helena shreiks with delight, claps her hands. Nick and Georgiou start drinking and clapping each other on the back. Helena takes her baby and brings it over to Cora.

Cora and Frank have been standing, baffled through this whole interchange. Helena hands her baby to Cora.

Helena, Nick and Georgiou clap their hands rhythmically in time to a Greek CHANT of "May She Be Very Fertile, And Bring Forth A Child A Year. " After which they laugh. (50-51)

The sole English word spoken by a Greek character other than Nick Is

'Depression', which gives no clue to the nature of the conversation -

suggesting its opposite, in fact. Beneath this linguistic veil they are

planning what almost amounts to a rape: the exploitation of the woman's

body for ends from which she is (initially, at least) excluded. This is

- 307 -

similar to the relationship between Margaret and Mike in House of Games,

in which the relations between rape and the deceptions of language are

equally clear. Independently the various elements of this scene - the

celebration of fertility, the language barrier, and the withholding of

information - are innocent enough; in combination they produce a most

uncomfortable situation which captures the racial tensions expressed

graphically throughout Cain's novel in an excellent dramatic scene. The

party guests' overt bonhomie merely emphasises the fact that Frank

cannot talk to them, and so this paradoxical situation is a fine example

of Namet's talent for creating situations in which linguistic isolation

produces anger and frustration in a character.

Other episodes are expanded for comic effect, Cain mentions a group

of scouts visiting the diner when Frank is alone; Mamet develops this

situation into a comic crisis as Frank plies thirty boys with revolting

food. Likewise, Mamet dwells on Frank's absurd sexual exploits in

Mexico with Madge Allen. Generally, however, the script differs little

from Cain's story, and for this reason The Postman Always Rings Twice

has a minor place in Namet's career. The real value of the project is

that his collaboration with the director, Bob Rafelson, taught him the

basic cinematic techniques which would allow him to make his own films,

and which also influence much of his later work for the stage, Ednnnd in

particular.

vii. Donny larch. March 1981.

A full-length, three-act play with three characters: Donny, 'a woman in

her middle thirties'; Del, a friend since childhood; and John, Donny's

son. In Act One Donny slowly comes to realize that her husband, Robert,

has left her. In Act Two, a month later, John has become mildly

- 308 -

delirious with fever, Donny's problems increasing when Del confesses he

allowed Robert to use his room to seduce other women, Donny orders Del

to leave. In Act Three, six months later, she feels a further betrayal

when John pulls out of an arrangement to spend the weekend with her in

order to visit his father. Some consolation is offered, however, by a

reconciliation with Del.

The presence of several marginal comments in pen suggests that much

work remained to be done; certainly as it stands the play is

unconvincing. It is untypical in that its characters invest a great deal

of time discussing the past, and, perhaps partly as a consequence, they

share with those of Lone Canoe a disastrous tendency towards explicit

and frequently banal moral sermonizing. Near the end of the play, for

example, Del remarks: 'Sometimes I think the highest good is just to do o Olt

no harm' (110); but this is simply an evasion of'. f Mamet has pointed out

elsewhere, that 'We are the problem' (M, 114), as Del perhaps suggests

in thinking 'It's a mistake to do good' (6). A hand-written addition

compounds the error by making too explicit the theme of the test (Del

says he would like to be 'tested [ ... ] by doing nothing' 121). There are

moments at which Donny larch displays an uneasy self-awareness of its

problems; Del thinks 'we can't deal with [ ... ] Abstraction' (66), yet the

play offers little else.

However, one result of this somewhat diffuse construction is that

the play touches on a wide range of issues of interest in other plays.

Donny's plea to John to spend the weekend with her because 'we have an

appointment' (115) recalls the degeneration of human relationships into

commercial-bureaucratic negotiations in American Buffalo and Glengarry

Glen Ross; while Del's argument that 'our physical demeanour is just

always an expression of the things we think' (81) is an early and rather

- 309 -

crude exposition of the "tell". Other parallels are more pervasive. The

following exchange, for instance, is reminiscent of the debate about

conscious and unconscious motivation in the 1970 version of Lakeboat:

DEL: The conscious impulse 'I've got too much staff' is just...

DONNY: ... its an expression DEL : Of, the unconscious... DONNY : Of the desire... DEL: For... DONNY: .., for security. DEL: ... to count it (... ] although, I think there must be

cases where you just have too much stuff. (21-22)

This recalls the principle of reversibility noted by Deborah in mal

Perversity in Chicago: 'What is a sublimation of what? (Pause. ) What

signifies what? ' Q BC, 47).

Donny March develops the disjointed syntax of American Buffalo

towards the even more dislocated rhythms of Edmond and Glengarry Glen

Ross. Edmond, in particular, is called to mind in such passages as this,

in which Del responds to Donny's suggestion that people are afraid to be

ordinary: 'I don't know. Yes. I don't know. Yes. I think we are. I

don't know. What do you think? Yes, I think we are, (pause) I don't

know C ... ] I ... I ... I ... I ... you know what I don't know ...? We all

have these perceptions; but we can't be kind ... ' (68). Indeed, in various

Ways Donny March anticipates all three major plays of the eighties,

fond, Glengarry Glen Ross and Sneed-The-Plow. The strongest

affinities are with the first and last scenes of Emd. Del suggests

that in analysing the past we discover a 'pattern' to our behaviour (20),

like the 'signs' mentioned by the Fortune-Teller, who argues that 'When

we look back - as we look back - we see that we could never have done

otherwise than as we did' (E, 1), just as Donny thinks in retrospect it

is so obvious we're bound [ ... J to act as we did' (35) ; while Donny's

- 310 -

claim that 'every wish hides a fear' (38) is simply the obverse of

Edmond's crucial formulation. The closest parallels are between the

plays' final scenes, the following exchange in particular anticipating

the ruminations of Edmond and the Prisoner:

DEL: I was thinking perhaps there's a place where we all do good. And .,. (pause. ) I know that it's not here, or answers, that there are answers to things. Perhaps after we die. I thought that in the library. But I don't know. Do you think there's some place we go after we die?

DONNY: I think there is. DEL: I think so too. Because our troubles here are pitiful

DONNY: I think there is a place we go after we die. DEL: Perhaps it's heaven. DONNY: Yes. Perhaps it is. (120-21)

The anticipations of Gle ngarry Glen Ross and Speed-The-Pl ow are as

much structural as verbal. Levene's unmasking by Williamson in the

former has much in common with Del's inability to hide the secret of

Robert's betrayal from Donny; in this case, Del foolishly claims to have

received a knife from Robert, yet the knife is still in Donny's house.

But whereas the "classical" plot of Glengarry Glen Ross is appropriate

to that play's theme of the pursuit of gratification, and makes for a

satisfying if deliberately ambivalent climax, Dells unmasking is merely a

local ruse, its location in the central act of the play making for an

unnecessarily uneven structure. More successful is the circular plot

(John's refusal to go with his mother is an extension of Robert's

repeated failures to go on excursions with his family), a circularity

repeated in Glengarry Glen Ross.

The parallels with Speed-the-Plow are more distant, though the

device of having characters speak apparently portentous prose from a

novel is anticipated here in "Jane of Trent", a childhood favourite of

Donny's, whose words - "'My blessing on your house [ ... l And mine on

- 311 -

yours I... ] Until the Whale shall speak (... I Until the moon shall weep"'

(74-75) provoke her tearful assertion, 'This is an evil world' (75). But

the episode has far less dramatic power than those revolving around

Karen in Speed-The-Plow because the general lack of any cynicism in the

characters, as contrasted with the later play, suggests that the novel,

and Donny's response to it, can only be taken "straight", so inviting the

same charges of banality levelled at Lone Canoe.

viii. The Verdict. 18 January 1982.

The Verdict is an adaptation of Barry Reed's novel of the same name.

The major changes to the source material are outlined by Carroll (1987,

92,96). Joe Galvin is an 'ambulance chaser' lawyer whose successful

career was ruined by the machinations of his former employers. He is

given the chance to resurrect himself by taking on the case of a woman

reduced to a vegetable after receiving the wrong anaesthetic in hospital.

Galvin turns down an out-of-court settlement, but soon comes to regret

his decision: the woman's family wanted him to take the money; the judge

is unsympathetic and possibly corrupt; and the powerful defence lawyers

play dirty, buying off his star witness, coaching the accused doctors,

and even snaring Galvin with a spy who shares his office and bed. All

Galvin can offer is an impassioned speech reminding the jury that 'you

are the law' (120); yet the jury sides with Galvin and finds against the

doctors.

Carroll links The Verdict with Rd-mpnd, both having Campbellian

stories: they 'had strong thematic similarities and focused on a single

character's passage through a blighted, morally ambivalent world to

enlightenment' (1987,14). Carroll is right to give the balanced view

that 'The chief identifiable villains in Mamet's eyes are the

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professional classes ... Mamet suggests as well that corruption goes

beyond specific social sources, that it includes an almost metaphysical

element' (1987,93-94), such as the description of the doctors' lawyer,

Concannon, as 'the Prince of Fuckin' Darkness' (30), and the 'threatening

browns and reds' of the cinematography (Carroll 1987,94).

While these comparisons and analyses are certainly valid, they must

be re-examined after the recent appearance of Speed-The-Plow, the

structure and imagery of which are anticipated by The Verdict. Gould

and Galvin both risk selling their souls for money: Galvin says of the

proposed out-of-court settlement that 'If I take that money I'm lost'

(28), just as Gould is 'in the midst of the wilderness' (Tp, 3). Mary

Rooney, the nurse whom Galvin eventually persuades to give evidence

against the doctors, accuses lawyers of being 'a bunch of whores' (70),

the same word Gould and Fox repeatedly use to describe themselves. Both

Gould and Galvin, then, partially or even wholly recognize their

complicity with a corrupt system whose sole value is money. Each is

presented with an opportunity to redeem himself. In The Ver dict, Dr.

Thompson's advice - 'sometimes people can surprise you. Sometimes they

have a great capacity to hear the truth' (89) - is triumphantly

vindicated by the verdict itself; meanwhile, Laura enacts the role of the

duplicitous helper. Speed-the-Plow more economically fuses the

opportunity (the novel) and the helper in the figure of Karen. Each

concludes with the rejection of the woman saviour-figure, the release she

offered being revealed as complicitous with that from which the

protagonist sought escape. The difference between these works is that

whereas Gould seems to re-embrace fully the values he had wanted to

reject, Galvin does appear changed in some sense, because the rejection

of the false helper does not entail the rejection of the opportunity.

- 313 -

The question then is: what is the nature of Galvin's insight? In

one respect it is no different from Gould's: that his actions are

necessarily complicit in the system he would oppose. It is a consistent

feature of Mamet's work that those who try consciously to 'do good' fail.

In Speed-the-Plow Gould concedes 'I wanted to do Good ... but I became

foolish' (81). In The Untouchables Elliot Ness, about to launch a raid,

exclaims 'Let's do some good! ' (IL, 26), only for the raid to fail

miserably. 'Let's do some good! ' immediately becomes the caption of a

cartoon ridiculing Ness for his naivete (U, 30), which contrasts with

the ruthlessness of Malone, who more fully embodies the ethos of the

film. In The Verdict, Galvin asks his star witness, Dr. Gruber, why he

is prepared to help him. 'To do right. Isn't that why you're doing it? ',

replies Gruber (21). But Gruber has already revealed that 'I have an

interest in that Hospital; and I don't want those bozos working in the

same hospital as me' (19), and he is easily bought off by Concannon.

Galvin is clearly working for self-interest; and he at least partially

follows the methods of his corrupt opponents, often, like Laura,

pretending to be someone he is not in order to gain a witness's trust,

and even using emotional blackmail to bully people into giving him

information over the phone by inventing a case history similar to his

own client's: 'tell them you're Dr, Somebody ... you have to find this

nurse [ ... ] you need some old forms that she had ... somebody's dying'

(96). Doneghy, one of the crippled woman's relatives, draws an explicit

connection between Galvin and the doctors:

You guys, you Hospital, you screw up it's

sorry ... ' And

of our lives.

guys, you're all

... it's 'What I'm 'We did the best

people like me ii (48)

the same. The Doctors at the going to do for you'; but you that we could. I'm dreadfully

. ve with your mistakes the rest

- 314 -

But it would of course be wrong to see no distinction between

Galvin's methods and those of Concannon. Mamet dwells on the vast

resources at Concannon's disposal, which contrast starkly with Galvin's

meagre facilities. The contrast indicates a distinction not only between

the lawyers but between their respective clients: the Hospital and

doctors can afford the best, the woman's lower-class relatives only the

worst. And this casts ironic doubt on the tired and cliched

reassurances Galvin initially offers his clients: 'Our only protection is

the law [ ... ] under the law we're all equal' (23). His subsequent

experiences show him that in practice this is not so, and he is reduced

to pleading for 'an even shake' in court (84).

But Galvin's account of the theory of law - the principles according

to which the jury should make their decision - suggests that Carroll is

overstating the case in arguing that 'the verdict itself, which involves

a financial award greater than what was asked for ... makes Galvin and

his cause look greedy' (1987,96). On the contrary, it is the jury which

decides on the award; it has nothing to do with Galvin, and this is

precisely why it is so significant, for it reaffirms in the most

positive fashion Galvin's reminder to the jury that 'you are the law'

(120). This contrasts with Mamet's belief stated elsewhere that 'The

code of an institution ratifies us in acting amorally, as any guilt which

might arise out of our acts would be borne not by ourself, but shared

out through the institution' (, 109). The Verdict offers instead the

liberal affirmation that people acting individually and collectively not

only may change institutions but already constitute them.

In these connections it is important that Galvin is outside the

legal establishment. On one level, he is a typical Hollywood hero,

taking on the system single-handedly and winning. He is rigorously

-315-

excluded from the corporate structure of the legal system. 'You're Mr.

Independent [ ... ] I've got no sympathy for you', says the judge (55).

Legal institutions have become ossified, their legitimation as defenders

of individual rights and freedoms lost. Galvin is an outsider because,

in effect, he was dismissed by his former company for being honest.

The screenwriter William Goldman offers an interesting account of

what happened to The Verdict after Sidney Lumet was hired as director:

Lumet explained what was wrong and easily fixable with the Manet script ... Mamet had been less interested in the subject of medical malpractice than with the character. So what he had done was written The Verdict and ended it before the verdict. The trial's outcome was not included. He cared about the guy, not the courtroom conclusion.

Lumet and Mamet went to work, an ending was written. (Goldman 1983,67)

The script as we have it, then, is not Mamet's preferred version. In its

original form it would clearly have placed greater weight on the

Campbellian mythic pattern. This tampering with his intentions may well

be one reason why his satire on Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow, bears such a

striking resenblance to The Verdict.

But it is also interesting to speculate, finally, on the effect the

original version would have had on the audience. It would leave them

with the closing image of Galvin's appeal, thus achieving Mamet's hoped-

for effect of placing the emphasis on the protagonist. Moreover, faced

themselves with speculating on the outcome of the trial, they, like the

jury, would have had to balance the weight of evidence (which favours

Concannon) against the emotional power of Galvin's final speech. The

responsibility the audience would then feel in coming to its own

decision would offer a practical demonstration of whether they would

participate in reclaiming for themselves the institutions the film has

insistently suggested works against their interests. There would be a

-316-

shift from the assertion of popular power to participation within it. It

may be objected that this would turn the film into an episode of the

popular American series The People's Court; but in provocatively stacking

the evidence against Galvin, the film would ask its audience actually to

overthrow the procedures of the court and the strict rule of law and to

place faith in their own judgment regardless of legal technicalities; and

this is precisely what Galvin believes a Jury should do; 'every one of

them it's written on their face, "This is a sham. There is no

justice,.. " but in their heart they're saying [... ] Maybe I can do

something right' (39).

ix. A Hudson's Bay Smart. 1983.

The pilot for a projected television series to be called "We Will Take

You There". Neither the pilot nor the series was made. Two old friends,

Anderton and Esposito, unite on a venture 'like a taxi service to the

wilds': 'Hunting, fishing, camping, exploration. U. S, : North and South

America, and abroad. If a truck can go there we will take you there'

(3). Their services are engaged by a Professor Scholtz for an excursion

into woods near a Northern lake, the purpose of which he refuses to

divulge. During the night there is a fire at one of the tents in their

camp. Scholtz's map blows away; he pursues it into the woods and gets

lost. Anderton sets out to search for him, leaving Esposito and Mrs.

Scholtz at camp. Esposito spurns her advances. Anderton finally

locates the Professor and leads him back to camp. Scholtz reveals the

true purpose of the expedition: to hunt for Bigfoot, the American version

of the Abominable Snowman. The episode ends with the reconciliation of

Professor and Mrs. Scholtz and with the party renewing their search.

- 317 -

At first sight A H"dson's Bay Start is unsatisfactory. The series

depends for its appeal on escapist adventure, much of it at the boy

scout level. No fewer than twelve pages (43-54) of a 62-page script are

devoted to such things as how to build a shelter and a fire in the

forest and how to find one's bearings using the moss on trees and the

sun. 'You got to leave the city behind', says Esposito; 'the answer to

the problems of the world' is 'quiet' (20). The teleplay appears to hold

out the romantic-nostalgic promise of an uncorrupted world, with all the

problems we have seen this entails.

But Anderton and Esposito are businessmen; the woods are not an

escape but a financial opportunity. Taken at a literal level, the story

is trivial; metaphorically, it shares the same situation noted in

numerous other of Mamet's plays, that of being 'lost', of which The Woods

(which itself owes much to the fairy tale 'Babes in the Woods' [Carroll

1987,63]), is the closest analogue. Being lost in the woods is a

metaphor for being spiritually lost. In response to Mrs. Scholtz's

question 'Have you ever been lost? ', Esposito responds 'As Daniel Boone

said, they asked him if he'd ever been lost, he said, no, he'd never been

lost, but once he was a tad bewildered for five days' (139-40). It is at

this point that Anderton discovers Scholtz, as the directions tell us,

'disorientated' (41). The connection between physical and emotional

alienation is established. Scholtz's claim to be searching for moss is

ironically inverted: Anderton forces him to work out for himself that

moss grows on the side of a tree with the least sun, which enables them

to find their bearings. Instead of searching for moss, the moss enables

Scholtz to find himself (he returns to camp to be reunited with his

wife; on seeing this Esposito remarks, 'There is a guy with his

-318-

priorities right' [59]). The episode once again calls Joseph Campbell to

mind:

And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. (Campbell 1949, 25)

But if the piece is more sophisticated than the antithesis of city

and forest might initially suggest, it maintains other, equally

questionable polarities, Esposito informs Mrs. Schoitz that 'the nice

thing about [fantasies] is you don't have to act on them' (36). In

Wamet's best pieces, however, this distinction evaporates. The

delinquents of American Buffalo live for an action which does not exist;

the actions of the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross are fuelled by the

fantasy of the frontier ethic. Finally, A Hudson's Bay Start remains an

adventure story dependent on acceptance of the archetype of the explorer

or the hunter, with his practical ingenuity, physical toughness, and

fabled intuition. That Anderton and Esposito are also ordinary men who

adopt the role of explorers as a business proposition simply adds to the

fantasy, It seems unlikely that any television series-. along these lines

could be anything other than straightforward entertainment.

x. The Autobiography of Xalcolm X. November 1983.

Malcolm X, the Harlem hoodlum converted in jail to the black Muslim

movement of Elijah Muhammad, from which he split to form his own,

radical Organization of Afro-American Unity, was was assassinated in

1965. The raw material of his autobiography could hardly be better

suited to dramatization, The story of the man who devoted himself to a

movement only to become an outcast from it and eventually killed with

- 319 -

the approval of the remaining leadership has quite astonishingly close

parallels with George Orwell's Animal Farm, itself based on Trotsky's

role in the Russian Revolution. In addition to the power of this almost

mythic narrative pattern, Mamet exploits the recurrence in Malcolm X's

life of events in the life of Malcolm's father, the Rev, Earl Little,

which Malcolm experienced as a small boy: both men had strong religious

convictions, both lost houses to arson attacks, both suffered violent

deaths. In the screenplay, flashbacks stress these parallels.

But Mamet's interest in the story must also have been prompted by

its relation to a number of his recurrent concerns, Orwell's is not the

only mythic pattern to surface in this story; Joseph Campbell's is never

long out of sight either. The Harlem of Malcolm's youth, and the jail to

which he is sent in consequence of his activities there, have much in

common, respectively, with Campbell's enchanted place and heroic test;

but more interesting are two moments in the screenplay at which Mamet

increases the allegorical undertones of scenes in the book involving

helpers. In the first, Malcolm's meeting with Bimbi (the black prisoner

who opened Malcolm's eyes to books), Mamet invents an accident which

renders Malcolm partially blind, which not only has familiar symbolic

associations but allows Bambi to tell Malcolm, you can will that

irritation in your eye away by knowing what it is. What can you dn-

with your life , ..? ' (63), Mamet also lingers on the symbolism of doors ,

guards, helpers and keys in the scene in which Bimbi introduces Malcolm

to the library (65). Second, Mamet condenses the influence on Malcolm

of his pilgrimage to Mecca into the figure of a Pilgrim who tells him

'you must become that wise man that you have wished to encounter' (130).

Mamet connects this episode with Malcolm's past and future by inserting

a shot in which the Pilgrim's face is that of his own father, and by

-320-

another, showing Malcolm with a group of pilgrims, which 'exactly

recapitulates the Arabs in the storybook which Malcolm had at the

beginning of the film. In this shot, the place which was occupied in

the book by the Lion is now occupied by him' (131). This storybook is

another of Marnet's inventions -a present to his father, which 'shows a

lion, on a hill beyond the oasis, looking at the Arabs. The lettering

reads: "And here is the LION - The King of Beasts"' (4). These scenes,

besides emphasizing the mythic significance of Malcolm's story, are good

examples of Mamet's sensitivity to parallelism and contrast, as well as

of the economical richness of the screenplay's symbolism, which

contrasts favourably with his earlier, comparatively pedestrian

adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

But as well as representing an impressive technical advance on his

earlier screenwriting, The Autobiograf of Malcolm X also holds

important implications for Mamet's recurrent concerns. In his

autobiography, Malcolm X contrasts the genuinely altruistic friendship

he received from 'white' Muslims with his earlier life, when 'My

instincts automatically examined the reasons, the motives, of anyone who

did anything they didn't have to do for me. Always in my life, if it

was any white person, I could see a selfish motive' (1965,446). Harnet

has similarly expressed the belief that 'we have come to doubt that it

is possible to act in the public: interest' (WJE, 1,56), and this doubt

certainly permeates all of Namet's work. In Malcolm X'E: conversion to

orthodox Islam Mamet perhaps saw a parallel with his own concern with

the relation between the material and the spiritual, the individual and

the communal.

Edmond is the play of Mamet's which is most directly comparable to

this screenplay. Both Malcolm and Edmond find themselves held at

- 321 -

knifepoint by a New York hoodlum; and each finds reasons for

proclaiming a lack of fear. Malcolm tells Scarface:

Bullshit I ain't going to turn around. Bullshit, man, you see what I'm tellin' you? I ain't afraid to die, so you do what you have to do. I don't have no money. (Throws leaflets on the ground. ) That's all I have in the world. I'm out here trine to give it to you, you don't have to take it with a gun. It's got money. (Beat. ) Man, it's got dope, (Beat. ) It's a relig ion for the black man, and I'm out here g"ivin' it to you. ( 99)

Malcolm here resembles both the Leaf leteer who tempts Edmond, and

Edmond in his claims to fearlessness: 'in that moment ... when I spoke,

you understand, 'cause that was more important than the knife, when I

spoke back to him, I DIDN'T FUCKING WANT TO UNDERSTAND .., let him

understand me' (F, 49). The difference, of course, is that Edmond

refuses others where Malcolm embraces them. The two works are also the

most obvious examples of Mamet's interest in the 'race' question.

The project, then, is a less surprising one for Mamet than at first

appears, and his adaptation is remarkably successful on many levels: as

a feat of condensation and organization, as a fusion of Malcolm X's

ideas and life story, and as a powerfully dramatic narrative in its own

right, Indeed, on all of these counts it might have made a better film

than Richard Attenborough's Gandhi or Cry Freedom, which are likewise

dramatizations by a white film-maker of the lives of key figures in

black movements. Indeed, in the end perhaps the most surprising thing

about Mamet's screenplay is that it has never been filmed. One reporter

stated in 1982 that Sidney Lumet was to be the director (Shewey 1982,

4), but if so it seems the project was shelved.

-322-

xi. State and Rain. June 1984.

The story of the invasion and corruption of a small Vermont town by the

money, power and dubious morality of a Hollywood film crew. Pre-empted

by the appearance of the Alan Alda film Sweet Liberty (1986), which

dealt with a similar theme, Mamet's screenplay was never filmed, though

he returned to the subject of Hollywood in Speed-The-Plow. There are

many verbal resemblances between State and Main and other works: it

shares with Speed-The-Plow the figure of 'Pancho the Dead whale' as a

symbol of failure (56,84; , =, 29), while Walt's attempt to cajole his

star actress into honouring her contract by baring her breast-: ('Forget

the Contract, Joanie, What is it? ' [63]) recalls Roma's attempts to

prevent Lingk walking out on their deal: 'Forget the deal, you've got

something on your mind, Jim, what is it? ' Cam, 54), Walt and Roma both

know that the contract is the problem and is uppermost in the

addressee's mind, and hence encourage them to forget it.

The script's relations to Mamet's career in Hollywood, and to works

by him and others, are discussed in chapter 5.

xii. Joseph ntenfass. 1984.

A dialogue between Joseph, a middle-aged man, and his daughter-in-law,

Claire. While similar to some of Mamet's sketches, in that it sacrifices

action to abstract argument, it also pursues its argument in some depth,

while being short enough to avoid the diffusion of a play like Donny

MarSh,

At its simplest the play is a parodic example of the teacher-pupil

relationship. Claire wants Joseph to tell her 'everything' (23). This

desire for noise-free truth lies behind her 'longing for frankness' (25).

She has a dangerously nave conception of how ideas are disseminated:

- 323 -

an impulse comes and we - it comes into our head from somewhere and we act on it, however we do, and. (pause) In some way it affects those around us. (pause) And then... (pause) And then it is in them. Beyond them - in their mind. (pause) In their understanding of the way things are, (12)

In view of this her willingness to submit to Joseph's teaching suggests

a masochistic submission to male domination, As well as embodying this

male aspect of power, Joseph describes his hobby of collecting as a

'lust' for things (9); while this desire for clear structures of authority

and stability emerges in both characters' peculiar love of trademarks,

an interest Claire developed because 'they made me feel things would

continue' (13).

This need for stability is heightened by the fragility of language.

Claire recalls what seems to be a childhood experience with language in

which there was a straightforward relation between words and things:

I stayed in a hotel once with linen sheets. When I laid down I said "These are the finest sheets ... they're coarse. " I didn't know what they were ... (pause) When you learn a word, you don't know what it is ... you have a meaning for it [ ... 1 Later

when you learn the true words, then they're not as good [ ... J they never felt the same. "Oh, linen feels like starch. " And

so we insulate ourselves about a new experience; and when I

used to learn a word I said it was a treasure. Later I said "A

new word for something which exists. " Sex was like that, of course, and learning ... (15)

In this passage Claire details a development from a unity of self, object

and word to the dislocation of words from objects in which words

function in a system of differences and so, by implication, does the

self, While Claire regards this as an undesirable change, at the end of

the play Joseph rejects her attempt to reunite sign and referent:

Here is a story: she came to see me; a bowl, she brought a bowl

of cherries, one fell on the book. She wrote: here is the stain of an ice-cold cherry. Later when I had a book I filled in a spot. To be what? What does that mean? What Does That Mean to You? And when we die what will they say about us? What

will they say? That he lived well in a terrible time, That I

- 324 -

was such and such a man - and then

mean? What could it possibly mean? sign. " He sends a sign. You say (pause)

"Pigeons on the lawn The flight of birds A taste of copper in the mouth" is hear? (pause) [ ... 7 "Here is the stair (31-32)

they die. What could it C .. ,3 You say "send me a that it is inconclusive.

that what you wanted to of an ice-cold cherry. "

Joseph claims that in visiting him Claire is really saying "'send me a

sign"' (31), but throughout this play signs become detached from

referents in several ways. Claire says she values 'A sense of style',

yet admits that 'It may be an illusion [ ... ) I don't think Michael sees

it, even' (22). More worryingly, people have 'hidden [... I . ifotives' (24),

impenetrable truths behind deceptive signs, leading to the recognition

that 'there are people that you use' (24); as she says, 'None of us is

pure' (24). Consequently, the search for truth itself becomes less

admirable than at first appears - it could be 'prying' (25). Unwilling

to face this consequence, Claire redefines 'prying' as 'our longing for

frankness', and she apparently sees nothing wrong in inquiring about

'What goes on in people's bedrooms' (25),

The most important feature of the play is its development of the

nuances and implications of this relation between truth, knowledge and

power more fully and yet more obliquely than elsewhere in Mamet's work.

Claire's concern for truth leads to the desire to 'confess' to Joseph,

recalling John's composite role in The Shawl. The play's crucial insight

is that this relation of power is all that is produced by the search for

a denotative truth. 'What can anyone confess? ' , asks Claire. 'That

they're bad. It means nothing' (25), to which Joseph responds,

devastatingly, 'It means that we put ourselves in the hands of someone

more powerful [ ... J We elect them to control us for a time. And if we're

blessed, or if we're touched with consciousness, that consciousness is

-325-

also the price that we pay' (26). The play, then, touches in interesting

ways on sexuality, power and truth; but Mamet's reluctance to have the

piece performed is probably a recognition that in this form, at least, it

is rather undramatic.

xiii. A Vaitress in YellowstonaiDr, Always Tell the Truth. 1984.

This short play tells the story of Winnie, a waitress, who calls the

police when her tip is stolen by a customer, who turns out to be a

congressman. The judge at the trial does not believe her story and

rather than apologize to the congressman she goes to jail for slander.

She escapes in a break-out planned by other prisoners, thereby

attracting further suspicion to herself. She and her son Doug head for

Yellowstone National Park, where they had been planning to go on

holiday. Lost in the woods, they call at the hut of Ralph Blum the

Magic Woodsman, who grants them two wishes: to make everything the way

it was before the congressman entered the restaurant, and to spirit them

to Yellowstone Park. The play ends with the enactment of these wishes,

Winnie does not challenge the congressman, and all the characters are

transported to Yellowstone for a holiday.

The text is evidently a draft for a piece which Mamet appears not

to have developed further, and is plainly unfinished. There are brief

descriptions of songs, but very few of the actual words. It is

indicated that Winnie's testimony to the court is sung, but the speech

has not been rewritten accordingly. Moreover, the role of the Ranger

who acts as narrator seems largely superfluous. While his opening

speech gives a choric significance to the action to follow ('a bad

situation generally grows worse. Things which can get no worse improve'

Cl)), many of his remarks read more like stage directions ( 'They walked

- 326 -

in the forest to a little hut made out of wood. A sign over the door

said "Ralph Blum"' [28]>. Such narrative transpositions would be obvious

from the staging itself; there is no need for a narrator to comment on

them, and Mamet presumably intended to rectify this.

The unfinished state of the text, and the probability that the p1oe

is meant for children, make evaluation problematic. For instance, it is

unclear how one is to take Mamet's description of Winnie's and Doug's

song about the equipment necessary for a camping expedition:

This gear includes: waxed matches in a waterproof container (several containers secreted in various parts of the clothing and generally high up to keep them dry should one fall into waist high water) I... ] steelwool, which, though it is not generally known, is, in its superfine variety, great tinder and can just be rung out when wet C... ] (8)

The parenthetical elaborations clearly have a comic effect, parodying the

pedantry of the preparations; but it is unclear whether they are are

ideas for the words of the song (in which case the Joke will be at the

expense of Winnie and Doug) or whether Gamet is having fun with the

tendency of so many playwrights to write over-elaborate stage

directions. In either case Mamet appears here to be lampooning that

obsession with trivial details and processes which destroys A Hudson's

The major weakness of the play is in its structure, which resembles

that of The Poet And The Rent in its frantic scene changes, silly songs,

and deliberately crude narrative reversals. Before granting Winnie and

Doug their wishes, Ralph tells them they must guess his name correctly.

Unfortunately he is rather deaf, and mishears their answer. Winnie and

Doug spend the night in despair, until in the morning Ralph bursts in:

'Did you say "Ralph BI um"? [.,. ]I thought you said "Brown"' (37-35).

While these sudden reversals work to good comic effect, they also

- 327 -

highlight the arbitrariness of the action. Another comic children's

play, The Frog Prince, avoids these weaknesses: here, there is a coherent

action of betrayal, and Mamet's reworking of the Grimms' tale in a

popular idiom and towards a different conclusion pushes the work

towards an altogether darker significance precisely through an

elimination of the arbitrary. By comparison, A Waitress in Yellowstone

is flimsy.

xlv. The Untouchables. January 1986.

The Untouchables is based on a 1960s American television series of the

same name. The series in turn was loosely based on the exploits of a

number of police and crime prevention officers in the prohibition battle

against Al Capone in 1920s Chicago. Mamet's script retells the story of

Elliott less, a treasury officer who, lacking the approval of his

superiors, engages the help of a disaffected cop, Malone, a raw police

recruit <Vlachek>, and an accountant (Wallace) in the fight against

Capone. Lacking evidence to indict Capone for bootlegging, Wallace

realizes he may be vulnerable to charges of tax evasion, In the course

of their investigations both Malone and Wallace are killed. However,

Ness manages to collect enough evidence to bring Capone to trial, and

ensures a "clean" jury by threatening to expose the payments the judge

has received from the mob.

The film as released differs in a number of ways from this draft

version of the script. In the draft, Wallace and the mobster he has

been assigned to protect are simply shot in a basement garage. In the

film this episode is punchier: Wallace is murdered in a lift and the

word 'touchable' scrawled on the wall in his own blood, refuting the

premise of the film's title while keeping intact the premise that the

- 328 -

heroes are morally untouchable. Other changes reflect the predilections

of the film's director, Brian de Palma: he rather dwells on the shooting

of Malone, while the famous scene of the pram falling down the staircase

is de Palma's cinematic homage to (but also parody of) Sergei

Eisenstein's The Battleship otern i, (However, John Gersten, Mamet's

agent, told me that all episodes in the film were written by Mamet,

these later additions being made after consultations with de Palma. )

The film is essentially an entertainment. Battle lines between good

and evil are, for the most part, clearly drawn. Chicago's pervasive

corruption is constantly reiterated, Malone warns Ness 'You can trust

nobody' (45B); the Alderman who tries to bribe Ness on Capone's behalf

insists 'everybody can be gotten to' (66). Mamet humorously exploits

this in a twist to the courtroom scene, in which Ness persuades the

Judge to change the jury on the grounds that a ledger has been

discovered listing payments to each member on it:

PROSECUTOR: What did you tell him? NESS: I told him his name was in the ledger, too, PROSECUTOR: But his name . isn't in the ledger. AESS: The Evil Flee where no man Pursueth, (182A)

Lacking allies, the Untouchables are required to depend on their own

intuitions and judgments. Mamet clearly enjoys playing the hackneyed

figure of the lone fighter for justice for all it is worth. Ness

remarks, 'It would appear there's no one here but me' (39A) . (This is a

significant modification of what Manet originally wrote on this page,

which included another cop in the sentiment: 'It would appear there's no

one home but us' [393. ) Ness's motivation for staying in a job he was

about to quit is provided by a minor character: 'It was my little girl

they killed with that bomb. (beat) You see, because I know that you

have children, too. And this is real to you. That these men cause us

- 329 -

tragedy. (beat. She nods) And i know you will put a stop to them'

(38). The sentiment introduces a reduction characteristic of the

commercial film. To borrow Brecht's terms, the treatment is dramatic,

not epic,

Thrown back on their own resources, the Untouchables develop a

paranoid mentality embodied by Malone, the most interesting character.

Malone rejects all principle save the imitation and exaggeration of the

Mob's methods:

MALONE: You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. C.. ) What are you prepared to do?

MESS: Everything within the law. MALONE : And then what are you prepared to do...? [ ... ] You want

to get Capone, here's how you get him: He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. That's how you get Capone, (44-45)

It becomes difficult to distinguish, morally, between Malone and the Mob.

Later, there is a humorous twist on this idea. Vlachek and Walter Payne,

the criminal he has been assigned to guard, ensure their security from

the Mob by disguising themselves as police officers, on the grounds, as

Ness puts it, that 'Nobody looks at a policeman' (166). Even Ness is in

some ways identified with Capone, who told him: 'I'm Nobody .,. The

People want to drink ... Just happened i was there when the wheel went

around' (164) After his success in jailing Capone, a reporter asks Ness

for his story. 'I just happened to be there when the wheel went around'

(189). Again, comparisons between cop and criminal are provoked, though

clearly Ness intends the line as an indication of his final defeat of

his opponent. At the end less declares: 'I have become what I beheld,

and I am content that I have done right' (179). The absolute

contradiction - that he has become evil, yet is still good - is endemic

-330-

in American crime fiction, though Ness's line would perhaps be more

appropriate as a description of Malone.

Malone embodies the a-rationality of the whole operation, He

believes in the power of blood oaths, and his racial prejudice is

combined with an animistic belief in luck: he relies for protection on

his 'Lucky Piece' medallion (50), Interestingly, the medallion, by

falling through a grate, leads the Untouchables to their first major

seizure of liquor. Malone - who regards himself as one of 'the Heathen'

(52A) - says the medallion represents St. Jude, 'the Patron of Lost

Causes and Policemen' (52A) The investigation moves into an arena of

mysterious - indeed, supernatural - guidance; doubt is cast on the belief

that rational progress can by itself triumph over violence. The lone

violent hero supported by divine sanction again suggests that this film

should be regarded primarily as an entertainment. Significantly, Malone

is the intellectual mentor of the Untouchables. From his first meeting

with less he adopts the tone of a sage C'Here endeth the lesson' 1341).

He adopts the role of 'tutor' to Ness (86). Ness begins to follow

Malone's habits of non-critical faith in abstract powers. 'Nothing is

impossible to Perseverance', he remarks (52B).

The Untouchables hovers uncertainly between satire and escapism.

Its conclusion makes clear that nothing has changed or could have

changed. The reporter asks Ness, 'They say they're going to repeal

Prohibition. What will you do then,..? '. Ness replies, 'I think I'll have

a drink' (189). The closing shot is of the title card, which reminds us

that even after prohibition 'the organized crime and the disrespect for

law that are its legacy are with us to this day' (190). That this is

not quite so narrowly moralistic as at first appears is evident from the

treatment of law in the film. On the one hand, the law is held in

-331 -

contempt for failing to match the courage of the Untouchables: the

District Attorney is concerned that 'if we take Mr. Capone to court for

"not paying his taxes... " and we lose, then we are going to be a

laughingstock' (105). On the other hand, the Untouchables unstintingly

support a law which is itself absurd, simply strengthening organized

crime while increasing the corruptibility of public officials.

Prohibition, indeed, looks rather like a crime committed by officials

against the people; as Capone says, the people want to drink. But this

moral confusion, and the outward-spreading web of corruption, are

characteristic of the genre, and any satirical intent is sufficiently

straightforward as not to detract from the film's real aim of providing

slick entertainment to generate considerable profits. On these terms

The Untouchables was undoubtedly a success.

xv. A Wasted Veekend. March 1986.

An episode of the television series Hill Street Blues. Three police

officers, Renko, Hill and Jablonski, spend their weekend off hunting

deer. A fourth, Goldblume, is delayed by a series of misfortunes: he has

to give a lecture to some schoolchildren on 'Law Enforcement as a

Career'; he is required to rebut a preposterous accusation of rape; he

runs out of money and makes a detour to a currency exchange, where he

is kidnapped by a robber for whom the police have been searching.

Goldblume negotiates his release in return for his silence; at the end,

however, he confesses the truth to his boss. Meanwhile, Goldblume';

three officer friends have had an equally unsuccessful weekend. They

are detained for questioning by a second group of officers; they arrive

at their hut to find it locked, break in, and subsequently realize they

have entered the wrong cabin; one of the party injures himself,

- 332 -

necessitating hospitalization and bringing the hunt to a premature end.

A Wasted Weekend thus comprises two plot strands which barely interact.

Despite this somewhat desultory narrative, the script remains

thematically coherent; rather like Michael Cimino's film The Deer Hunter

(1978), it is an interacting sequence of statements about hunter and

hunted, The piece resonates around Goldblume's central statement in his

lecture concerning the police officer's 'duty'. The exploration of this

theme is much more satisfactory here than in Lone Canoe, 'Where does

the pride come from? Where does the feeling of accomplishment come

from? From duty' (22). Goldblume's lecture suggests no complications:

'We are here to enforce the law. To serve and protect a populace in

need of service and protection [,. ,1 It is their will, the will of the

people, expressed in the laws of the city, and the regulations of the

department, that controls our life' (23). But a whole network of actions

casts ironic doubt on this assertion. Most obviously, a female officer

finds the males' extracurricular activities abhorrent, and discussions on

the subject are hardly reassuring:

BATES: ... the Lieutenant and several of your colleagues are going out to kill Bambi. They are going hunting. They are going out to slaughter poor defenceless

creatures ... BUNTZ: ... if you can eat it, you can kill it. BATES: Officer Buntz can keep the details of his personal

life to himself ... (5)

What is interesting is not so much Bates' objection to hunting (the

character called Hunter ridicules her 'Personification of Animals, as

done by Walt Disney' (101), nor even her more telling point that it is

'just a bunch of manly nonsense' (56), but the suggestion that hunting

and killing are inseparable from the officers' private lives. The hunt

suggests that the men who in their daily lives wear police uniforms do

- 333 -

so not for the protection of the public but as an extension of dangerous

private obsessions. The distinction between public and private action

disintegrates, and with it the very idea of public duty. Buntz,

referring to deer, encourages Goldblume to 'shoot 'em, Lieutenant, cause

they'd do the same to you! ! !' (26).

There is a parallel erosion of the antithesis between policeman and

criminal. The hunting expedition in the country, supposedly an escape

from all that police duty entails, itself comes under police surveillance:

off-duty, the officers are 'not Cops, but Ken' (13), themselves questioned

by a group of state troopers for looking 'a tad "suspicious"' (20). The

strange air of guilt around the hunting party grows stronger as they

accidentally break into someone else's cabin, Mamet handles such

episodes with skillful understatement, playing them for comedy and

ascribing the break-in to simple error by the officers; but slightly

sinister connotations remain in the casual, accidental crimes they

commit in their spare time.

The Young Woman's groundless accusation of rape against Goldblume

again has the effect of attaching an apparently inexplicable guilt to the

police. Significantly, she speaks in Mamet's characteristically broken

rhythms as she details a life of despair:

YOUNG WOMAN: Many people are struck by the, uh, by the, by what happens in the cities, you, you think it

will not affect you. You, people cannot stand the stress, and you look at people around you, and you see what happens to them and you say it

won't happen to you , .. that ... that ... GOLDBLUME: And what is your specific ... ? YOUNG WOMAN: My, my, my boyfriend won't make love to me ...

(18)

Bigsby notes in Mr. HHappiness 'the orchestrated cries of suffering, the

sense of incompletion, loss, and pain, the desperation that lies behind

- 334 -

the letters' (1985a, 278). The Young Woman performs the same functicn

here, and the subsequent accusation of rape against Goldblume, though

groundless, again lays the blame at the door of those who purport to

protect us from misery.

A Wasted Weekend is not without its weaknesses. A number of

elements seem extraneous both to the narrative actions (already

disparate) and to thematic cohesion. Hunter insists on talking to

Goldblume about 'an unfortunate aspect of our society' - namely 'the

absence of alternative means of establishing status' (16) The

construction of social hierarchies is a familiar subject in Mamet'

plays, but in this script the idea remains undeveloped. Jablonski's

story about the war - he and his companions were forced to kill a young

German guard to escape imprisonment - is of greater relevance to the

major theme explored in the teleplay, namely guilt; but unlike the rape

accusation, the deer hunt, and the kidnapping of Goldblume, it is

extraneous to both of the major narrative strands, and Mamet risks

piling up too many instances of the confusion of hunter and hunted for

the piece to retain dramatic coherence.

In fact, in the broadcast version a third storyline develops the

same theme once more. A female police officer, Catherine MacBride, has

killed a gunman in the course of her police duties, and gets drunk with

Buntz to overcome her fear of prosecution. Again, there is no dramatic

interaction with the other plot lines, and the situation merely repeats

in different form the dilemma faced by Jablonski in his story (how to

live with having killed even in a just cause). The relationship between

Buntz and XacBride does, however, give Mainet the chance to outline

humorously the relationship between fear and excitement in American

culture, represented here in XacBride's killing of the criminal:

- 335 -

BUNTZ: I've been there, kid. I've been where you've been. And the guilty secret is: it is the

greatest exhilaration that is possible to know [... ] You say: Norm, I liked it. Go on, say it, 'cause you know it's true.

XacBRIDE: Norm, I liked it. BUATZ: That's what you think, you dumb fool. You were

scared crazy, and you're lucky you're alive.

The part of MacBride was played by Mamet's wife, Lindsay Crouse, and

Mamet wrote part of a later script to follow up the storyline.

- 336 -

APPEHI}IX II: DATES OF FIRST PERFORMANCE OF PLAYS CITED

1970 Lakeboat. Marlboro College, Vermont.

1971 The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Goddard

College, Vermont.

1972 'Litko: A Dramatic Monologue. ' Body Politic, Chicago.

1974 Squirrels. St. Nicholas Theatre Company, Chicago. October.

1975 The Poet and the Rent. St. Nicholas Theatre Company, Chicago.

June.

American Buffalo. Goodman Theatre, Chicago. 23 November.

1976 Reunion. St. Nicholas Theatre Company, Chicago. 9 January.

19?? A Life in the Theatre. Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 3 February.

All Men Are Whores, Yale Cabaret Theatre, February.

The Water Engine. St. Nicholas Theatre Company, Chicago. 11

May.

The Revenge of the Space Pandas. St. Clements State Company.

June.

Dark Pony. Yale Repertory Company, New Haven. 14 October.

The Woods. St. Nicholas Theater Company, Chicago. 11

November.

1978 Mr. Happiness. Plymouth Theatre, New York. 6 March.

1979 The Sanctity of Marries. Circle in the Square, New York.

May.

Lone Canoe, Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 24 May,

-337-

1980 Lakeboat (revised version), Milwaukee Repertory Theatre,

Milwaukee. 24 April.

1982 The Frog Prince. Goodman Theatre, Chicago. 17 May.

Edmond. Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 4 June.

1983 The Disappearance of the Jews. Goodman Theatre, Chicago. May.

'Four A. M. ' (with 'The Dog' and 'Film Crew'). Jason's Park

Royal, New York. July.

Glengarry Glen Ross, National Theatre, London. 21 September.

1984 Vermont Sketches ('Pint's a Pound the World Around', 'Deer

Dogs', 'Conversations with the Spirit World', 'Dowsing').

Ensemble Theatre, New York. May.

1985 The Shawl. Goodman Theatre, Chicago. 19 April.

Prairie du Chien. Lincoln Center, New York. 24 December.

1988 Speed-the-Plow. Lincoln Center, New York. 3 May.

- 338 -

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Abbreviations: LT$ - London Theatre Review; YYTCR - New York Theatre

Critics Reviews; UP - University Press.

i. Published works by David Xamet

American Buffalo. 1984, Methuen. (First published 1977. New York:

Grove Press. )

Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations. 1977. New York:

Samuel French.

A Life in the Theatre. 1977. New York: Samuel French.

The Revenge of the S ace Pandas; or, Binky Radich and the Two-Speed

eck. 1978. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company.

The Water Engine: An American Fable, and Mr_Hap iA ness. 1983. New

York: Samuel French. (First published 1978. New York: Grove

Press. )

The Woods. 1979. New York: Grove . Press.

Lakeboat. 1981. New York: Grove Press.

The Poet and the nt. 1981. New York: Samuel French.

Short Plays and Monolog. 1981. New York: Dramatists Play Service.

All J en Are Whores. 1981. In Short Plays and Monologues.

Prairie du Chien. 1981. In Short Plays and Monologues,

-339-

Reunion, Dark Pony and The Sanctity of Marriage,. 1982. New York:

Samuel French. (Reunion and Dark Pony first published 1979. New

York: Grove Press. )

Squirrels. 1982. New York: Samuel French.

Edmond. 1986. Methuen. (First published 1983. New York: Grove Press. )

The Frog Prince. 1983. New York: Samuel French.

Glengarry Glen Ross. 1984, Methuen,

'The Bridge'. 1985, Granta 1E3,167-73.

The Shawl. 1985, New York: Samuel French.

A Collection of Dramatic Sketches and Monologues. 1985. New York:

Samuel French,

Writing in Restaurants. 1988. Faber. (First published 1986. New York:

Viking Penguin. )

Three Jewish Plays (The Disappearance of the Jews, Goldberg Street and

The Luftmensch). 1987. New York: Samuel French.

Ouse of Games. 1988, Methuen.

Speed-the-Plow. 1988. Methuen.

Things Change, 1988, New York: Grove Press.

Some Freaks. 1990. Faber. (First published 1990, New York- Vik ng

Penguin. )

ii. Unpublished works by David Xamet

Lakeboat. Typescript, 1970. Chicago Public Library.

American Buffalo. Typescript, 1975. Chicago Public Library.

The Woods. Typescript, 17 August 1976. Chicago Public Library.

Smashvi11e. Typescript, 1978, Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

The Water Engine. Typescript, 1978. Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

- 340 -

Lone Canoe; or, The Explorer (Version A). Typescript, 18 March 1979.

Rosenstone/Wender, New York,

Tone Canoe or., The Explorer (Version B). Typescript, 27 May 1979.

Rosenstone /Wender, 27 May 1979.

The Postman Always Rink Twice. Typescript, September 1979.

Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

Donny March. Typescript, March 1981. Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

Ethnond. Typescript, undated, Chicago Public Library.

The Verdict. Typescript, 18 January 1982. Rost_nst. orie/Wender, New York.

Glengarry Glen Ross. Typescript, July 1983. National Theatre, London.

The A, obi ography of Malcolm X. Typescript, November 1983 .

Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

A Hudson's Bay Start, Typescript, 1983. Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

State and Main. Typescript, June 1984. Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

Joseph Dintenfass. Typescript, 1984. Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

A Waitress in Yellowstone; or. Always Tell the Truth. Typescript, 1984.

Rosenstone/Wender, New York.

The Untouchables. Typescript, January 1986. Rosenstore /Wender, New

York.

A Wasted Weekend. Typescript, ? march 1986. Rosenstone/Wänder, N--"w

York.

iii. Books, articles and reviews concerning Xamet

Allen, Jennifer. 1984, 'David Mamet's Hard Sell: A Driven Playwright

Gives America the Business. ' New York 9 Apr.: 38-41.

Almansi, Guido. 1986. 'David Harnet, A Virtuoso of Invective, ' in

European Views of Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Marc

Chenetier. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. 191-207.

-341-

Barbera, Jack V. 1981. 'Ethical Perversity in America: Some

Observations on David Mamet's American Buffalo. ' Modern Drama 24:

270-75.

Barnes, Clive. 1978. Rev. of The Water Engine. New York Post 7 Mar.

NIYTCR 39: 333-34.

---. 1983, Rev. of American Buffalo. New York Post 27 Oct. NYTCR 44:

143-44.

---. 1985. Rev. of prairie du Chicen and The Shawl. Daily News 24 Dec.

XYTCR 46: 95-96.

Beaufort, John. 1977. Rev, of American Putffalo. Christian Science

Kanitor 23 Feb. NYTCR 38: 368.

Bigsby, C. W. E. 1985a. 'David Mainet, ' in Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 of

A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. 3

vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 251-90.

1985b. David Mamet. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen.

Billington, Michael. 1983. Rev. of Glengarry Glen Ross. Guardian. LTR

3: 822.

Carroll, Dennis. 1987. David Magnet. Modern Dramatists. London:

Macmillan.

Chri-+y, Desmond. 1983, 'A ? _ýn gor t ýe Forgot n Frontier, ' aar-d a

15 Sept.: 15.

Clinch, Minty. 1989, 'Maziet Plot= his Reverie. ' Qerver Maoaz1re 22

Ja- n.: 46-50.

Cohn, Ruby. 1982. New American Drama 1960-1980. Modern Dramatists.

London: Macmillan, 41-46.

- 342 -

Davis, J. Madison, and John Coleman. 1986. 'David Mamet: A Classified

Bibliography. ' Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 1: 83-101.

Dean, Anne Margaret. 1987. 'Language as Dramatic Action: A Study of

Five Plays by David Mamet. ' Diss. London University.

DeVries, Harry. 1984. 'In David Mamet's Hands a Pen Becomes a Whip. '

Christian Science Monitor 21 Mar, - 21-22.

Ditsky, John. 1980. "'He Lets You See the Thought There". The Theatre

of David Mamet. ' Kansas Quarterly- 12: 25-34.

Eder, Richard. 1978a. Rev. oll" Shp, Water Engine. New York Times 7 K,;. r.

Ný 39: 335.

---. 1978b. 'David Mamet's New Realism. ' eF; cJ i es ge 12

Mar.: 40-47.

Fraser, C. Gerald. 1976. 'Mamet's Plays Shed Maeculinity Myth. ' New

York Times 5 July, sec. 1; 7.

Gale, Steven H. 1981. 'David Manet; The Plays, 1972-1980, ' in Essays on

Contempor ary American Drama. Eds. Hedwig Bock and Albert .

Wertheim. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag. 207-23.

Gill, Brendan. 1977. Rev, of e ý: ar_ Buffalo, New Yorker 28 Feb.: 54.

1983. Rev. of American Buffalo. New Yorke 7 Nov.: 1-49-50.

Gottfried, Martin. 1977. Rev. of Adan_Buffalo. haw York Post 17

Feb. 1R 38: 365.

Gottlieb, Richard. 1978. 'The "Engine" That Drives Playwright David

Mamet. ' New York Times 15 Jan., sec. 2: 1+.

Gussow, Mel. 1977a. 'The Daring Visions of Four New, Young

Playwrights. ' New York Times 13 Feb., sec. 2: 1+.

-343-

1977b. 'A Rich Crop of Writing Talent Brings New Life to the

American Theater. ' New York Times 21 Aug., sec, 2: 1+.

'Real Estate World a Model for Mamet: His New Play Draws on Li_f- '

New York Times 28 Mar., sec. C; 19.

Harriott, Esther. 1988. American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights

In Essays and Interview', Jefferson, N. Carolina: McFarland.

Herman, William. 1987, 'Theatrical Diversity from Chicago: David Mamet, '

in Understanding ContemD racy American Drama. Columbia: S.

Carolina UP, 125-60.

Hiley, Jim. 1989. Rev. of c, eed-the-Plow. Listener 2 Feb. LIE. 9: 68.

Hubert-Liebler, Pascale. 1988. 'Dominance and Angui_h: The Teacher-

Student Relationship in the Plays of David Mainiet. ' Modern Drama

31: 557-570.

K_a1em, T. E. 1978. Rev. of The Water Engine. Time 20 Mar. NYTCR 39: -,

335.

Kane, Leslie, 1986. Book rev, of Two Plays: The Shawl and Prairie du

Chien. 1d Literature Today 60: 634.

Kerr, Walter. 1977a. Rev, of American Buffalo. Lew York Times 6 liar.,

se-C. 2: 3.

---, 197 ? b. Rec. of A Life in the Th r. kw York Times 30 Oct.,

sec, 2 : 5+.

1978. Rev. of The Water . nom. New York Times 19 Feb., se o ,2: 3.

1982. Rev. of Mond , New York Times 7 Nov., sec, 2: 3.

Kissel, Howard. 1977, Rev r* A rlcan Buffalo. Women's Wear Daily 17

Feb. NYTCR 33: 364-65.

-344-

---. 197°. Rev, of The Water Engine. Women'-. Wear Daily 6 Jan. Tý

39: 336.

Rev, of Sneed-the-Plow. Daily News 4 May. NYT49: Zý2

Kolin, Philip C. 1986. 'Revealing Illusions in David Mamet's The Shawl. '

Notes on Contemporary Literature 16 (2): 9-10.

---. 1988, 'Mitch and Murray in David Mamet's engarry Glen Ross. '

Notes on Contemporary Literature 18 (2) : 3-5.

Kroll, Jack. 1977. 'The Muzak Man. ' Newsweek 28 Feb. NYTCR 38: 366.

1978. Rev. of The Water Engine. Newsweek 10 Jan. NYTCR 39: 337.

Lewis, Patricia, and Terry Browne. 11981. 'David Mam_t. ' Dictionary of

Literary Eiogra 7: 53-70.

Lieberson, Jonathan. 1988. 'The Prop., --' et of Broadway. ' . l`Tew York Rev_ w

of Books 35 (12); 3-6.

National Theatre Study Notes for Glengarry Glen Ross. 1983.

Nightingale, Benedict. 1983. Rev. of American Buffalo. New York Times

6 Nov,, sec. 2: H3.

---, 1984a, 'Shaping a Distinctive Dramatic Style. ' New York Times 23

Feb., sec. C: 21,

1984b. Rev. of Glengarry Glen Ross. New York Times 1 Apr., £ec. 2:

5+.

Nuwer, Hank. 1985. 'Two Gentlemen of Chicago: David Narret arid Stuart

Gordon. ' South Carolina v'aw 17: 9-20.

Oliver, Edith. 1975. Rev. of Sexual Perversity in Chicago. New Yorker

10 Nov.: 135-36.

---, 1978, Rev. of The Water Engine. New Yorker 16 Jan.: 69-70.

- 345 -

---. 1979. Rev. of The Woods, New Yorker 7 May: 130-31.

Ranvaud, Don. 1988. 'Things Change. ' Sight and Sound 57: 231-32,

Rich, Frank, 1982. Rev. of Edmond. New York Times 28 Oct., sec. C: 20.

Rogoff, Gordon. 1977. Rev. of American Buffalo. Saturday Review 2

Apr. -. 36-37,

Roudane, Matthew C. 1986. 'An Interview with David Mamet. ' Studies in

American Drama 1: 72-81.

Savran, David. 1987. 'Trading in the American Dream. ' American Theatre

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