Postmodernism and Violence in Mamet's Oleanna

Postmodernism and Violence in Mamel's Oleanna THOMAS E. PORTER La deconstruction, c'est l'Amerique. -Jacques Derrida' Among the many surprises in David Mamet's controversial play Oleanna, the most shocking is perhaps the professor's violent attack on his student. This sudden eruption is certainly climactic; the problems it raises, however, seem to leave the audience to "draw its own conclusions," to take sides with either the professor or the student.' Either option turns the play into melodrama, with the professor as hero/victim and the student as villain or the student as feminist heroine and the professor as villain/oppressor. Critical opinion is divided, with a majority of critics and reviewers, even those with feminist credentials, seeing the student as "bitch/witch," representative of a radical and punitive feminist ideology run rampant.' Following Mamel's lead, other critics have suggested that sexual harassment is a vehicle for a broader issue: that Oleanna is a play about "power," or a "tutorial" play with a genre affinity to Ibsen's social-problem dramas.' Most recently, Thomas Goggans attempts to exculpate the Carol persona by pointing to textual suggestions of child abuse in her past. Then, in passing, he attaches blame for her actions to manipulation by her feminist support "Group."5 This effort to redeem her effectively nominates this shadowy collective as the "real" villain. A final option, suggested by John Simon, is to finger the playwright - according to him, the play is simply a jumble, seriously flawed in concept and/or execution.6 Each of these critiques assumes that the play's action is (or should be) unified around a traditional center: a coherent theme, consistent persona-types, a familiar plot structure. Given dramatic tradition and practice and Mamet's own Aristotelian concern for "stick!ing] to the plot," these assumptions seem reasonable, and readings based on them shed considerable light on particular issues.7 None of them, however, can quite dispel a general uneasiness about Modern Drama, 43:1(Spring 2000) 13 14 THOMAS E. PORTER the play. There are features, apparently marginal, that work against the integrity of the whole: the aporias in the dialogue, the surprising transformations and role-reversals of the personae, the presence or absence of power brokers like John's Tenure Committee and Carol's feminist Group. These features surprise the audience by decentering the action in a way that undercuts conventional expectations. I would propose that, if we consider the play in a context broader than sexual harassment or individual power struggles, this decentering produces an escalating continuum of aggression that culminates in John's physical assault on Carol. Thus it exposes and explores, in microcosm, one significant impact of postmodem difference and divisiveness in contemporary American culture. These notions of "decentering" and "difference" characterize postmodemist thought in both its academic and cultural manifestations. While Derrida's aphorism "deconstruction is America" is apparently a joke, a playful explanation of deconstruction's notoriety in American academic circles, it may also mean, as Mark Lilla suggests, "that America has something of the decentered, democratic swirl [DerridaJ tries to reproduce in his own thought."s Over the last two decades or so postmodem notions have migrated from university cloisters into the public forum. Prominent notice in the media has contributed to this cultural "swirl" by calling attention to ideas and programs that threaten to undercut traditional pieties. When liberals advance the causes of multiculturalism , political correctness, social construction, anti-foundationalism, and their attached ideologies (radical feminism, gay liberation, and minority prerogatives ), conservatives of varying stripes counter with appeals to family values , law and order, individual responsibility, various foundational principles, national unity,9 Finding some common ground for consensus on national objectives or policies amid this turbulence seems hopelessly utopian. The barrage of contending ideologies that highlight differences over commonalities and division over unanimity reflects the deconstructive contention that "difference/differance" underlies our engagement with language and our pursuit of knowledge. lO Knowledge, in deconstructive theory, is ultimately bound to the closed system of differences that constitute language. The linguistic network of signifiers does not provide any internal basis for ordering its content. So giving one term priority over another, for example, speaking over writing...