Dominance and Anguish: The Teacher-Student Relationship in the Plays of David Mamet

Dominance and Anguish: The Teacher-Student Relationship in the Plays of David Mamet PASCALE HUBERT-LEIBLER Although at first sight Marne!'s urban microcosm - inhabited by rugged, unsophisticated, often inarticulate men - and the school world would seem to be poles apart, relationships of the teacher-student type appear in most of his plays. A Life in the Theatre, Squirrels, and American Buffalo for instance, are built around a master-disciple paradigm; the protagonist of Mr. Happiness is presented as an expert in psychology who dispenses guidance and words of wisdom to his eager listeners. In Lakeboat, young ordinary seaman Dale elicits a "teaching reflex" from several of the older crewmen, who take it upon themselves to teach him his job and initiate him into adult life (see scenes 10 and 21). The importance of the pedagogical relationship is also reflected thematically by the frequent occurrence of words like "learn," "show," "teach," "know," "lesson," or "school." Some details make direct references to institutionalized education: for instance, we learn that Dale is a college student and that he may go on to teach English; Joan in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a kindergarten teacher. We also find little vignettes that vividly conjure up the world of the school re -enactments of typical classroom scenes farniliar to all of us former students. American Buffalo is particularly rich in such echoes. I First of all, the two older characters - the owner ofajunk-shop and his "friend and associate" - are called Don,2 and Teacher (or Teach). Both act as insttuctors of Bobby, who is Don's gopher and protege, but the relationship between Don and Teach is frequently patterned after the same teacher-student model too. In Act I, as the two older men are planning the theft ofa coin collection, Teach asks for "[a] crash course. What to look for. What to take" (p. 45), and later wants Don "to quiz me on some coins" (p. 47). A moment later, Don expresses doubt about Teach's competence as a burglar and starts bombarding him with questions on how he plans to break into their intended victim's house (pp. 49- 50); and Teach then sounds very much like a pupil who, having come to class unprepared, tries to 558 PASCALE HUBERT-LEIBLER cover up for his ignorance with self-assurance. He finally endeavours to break the cycle of questions with a cry of protest coming directly from school memories: "Hey, you didn't warn us we were going to have a quiz" (p. 50). Having failed Dan's test Teach will have to accept that a third, more efficient man, Aetch, join theirleam ofrobbers. Later, at the beginning ofAct 2, Don is waiting for his two accomplices who were supposed to meet at the shop at eleven, before the burglary. When Teach arrives around eleven-thirty, he gets told off like a child late for class, and comes up with the hackneyed excuse that his watch broke. He then complains of Dan's favouritism towards Fletcher in a passage where Don is cast as the partial teacher, Fletch as the teacher's pet, and Teach himself as the victim of glaring injustice (p. 68) . These evocations of the school world are not simply picturesque and comical; they also serve to throw into relief several essential aspects of the teacher-student relationship. For example, the scenes mentioned above emphasize questions such as competence and pretense, fairness and injustice. But certainly the most striking aspect of the relationship they underscore is that the character assuming the role of the teacher exercises the prerogatives of questioning, testing, and punishing, while the student has to submit to his probing and accept his decisions. In other words, it becomes apparent that the teacher-student relationship is first and foremost a power relation. The work of Michel Foucault can furnish us with useful tools towards the analysis ofthe teacher-student paradigm as a mechanism ofpower. In his article "The Subject and Power,"3 Foucault examines the very same pedagogical relationship as an example of the tight power structures he calls "block!s] of capacity-communication-power" (p. 426). The first constituent of the block, variously called "capacity," "objective capacities...