As we know, of course, things turn out very differently. Carol's disconnected, factoidal memory of the transactions of the first act is apparently laid out for her by her "group" into a picture of a different kind. Each of John's utterances will be decontextualized and reassembled, then hurled back at him as accusations. Harassment and assault appear as the perfect postmodern deconstruction: unpredictable, dangerous, in arbitrary context, and the result of conflicting social ideologies and forces. As Carol, now empowered, now in the driver's seat, presses her charges, John makes an effort to explain to her, to admit his condescensions and other minor failings, to philosophically sympathize with her position about what she is supposed to be learning. He only gradually sees that she is instituting not one, but a whole series of prosecutions against him, first to the full extent of university regulations, then to the full extent of the law. As his situation, both in the university and beyond, grows more desperate, he becomes more and more like the demon she believes she is [page 106] prosecuting. Finally, in the end, accused of rape, he knocks her down, stopping just short of smashing her with a chair, screaming that he wouldn't touch her sexually with a ten-foot pole. He has almost become the monster she already sees him as being.

What has happened in this play? The play is, like John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea, a vision of a tidal wave coming to destroy a person, a family. We see it coming. It comes on relentlessly. It arrives and crashes down. It destroys. It is over. It feels like a random event of nature, like the storms in the sea off the Aran Isles, like the natural storm that catches Lear on the heath and the human one that later kills Cordelia. This latter is the "Great thing of us forgot!" by Albany, who, if he had remembered earlier to rescind the warrant on Cordelia's life might have saved her. But the winds will blow until they are exhausted, and some of us will have to pick up the pieces when it is over and begin again. Inside a comic mirror, an amusing vision of two absurdly limited and flawed people, a tragic wind blew. Like Gloucester's blinding in wake of his misapprehension of the characters of his own sons, injury comes suddenly and with striking cruelty. What's left is really painful and hard to bear.

It seems to me, then, that this play is not about whether Carol or John is right or wrong. It is about the horror of what viciousness, stupidity, and blindness wreak when we mistake them for justice, wisdom, and vision. Carol does destroy John's career, and possibly his family life. But his deafness and arrogance, his pompous self-obsession and obtuseness as a teacher are also damaging. The deepest irony in the vision the play presents is that this is a comic set-up, tending toward farce. We have two narrow creatures whose knee-jerk reactions and drastic limitations, given their chosen roles in life, are quite ridiculous. John is almost a clown, a pretentious pedant-expert, much like Oliver Hardy. Carol is the waif, the nincompoop, the blunderer, all concentration and concern--not dissimilar to Stan Laurel. Like all good comic characters, they take themselves seriously. But what is at stake is not, for instance, pride in the face of a petty insult, but something larger: learning, the truth, the obligation of the teacher, the striving of the learner to understand a difficult and frightening world. Try as we might, we are not quite permitted to laugh. The comic world is there, but it has taken a sour turn. While Laurel and Hardy can destroy a whole car or house without significant consequences, here the consequences, in the second act, come thick and fast. As in Synge's Aran Isles, the breath of fate is constantly soughing in the rafters of the house. There is something about the setting in both plays that suggests to us from the beginning, gives us a kind of foreboding, that [page 107] things will not work out well, that the jaws of destruction will open soon and swallow everything that washes into them.

In Synge's play fate seems to seal the inhabitants of the island in the grip of custom and necessity. Everything is horrifyingly inevitable. In Mamet's play, on the other hand, the context is still comic. These are manners, styles, and social institutions that are being examined. They signal the domestic comedy of manners to the audience in an instant. They carry with them a sense of choice, of the changeability of fashion, of the need for tolerance, learning, and accommodation. In short, they are indelibly comic. Perhaps one reason why the play has provoked so much controversy and outrage is not just that it seems to be a rigged case, but that Mamet won't let us have our comedy, won't let us see these people as clowns whose actions may teach us a little something, but after all, don't mean much. Carol behaves like an automaton, a programmed robot, and so she might be another Stan Laurel, an oh-so-predictable character in the farce. But she is not a robot, and as the stages of destruction of John progress, she looks more and more like a monster. Mamet has offered the sacrifice, but it is not acceptable. The play is as humorless as the characters and laughter does not come. He may have slain the comic god (who is, fortunately, easily resurrected), and this is his sin. He has shown us a domestic world that, as if we didn't know, is unsafe. Something profound, after all, has been lost--not only some faith in what it might mean to be student and teacher, to be learner and scholar, but faith in the comic rite, in the coming together of the loose and ragged ends of imperfect individual transactions into the working, acceptable weave of the social fabric. But I predict that as the social fashions change, and the pressure of the issues raised is eased, this play will seem dryer and funnier. Age will make its characters more and more ridiculous, and the play will be more fun.

IV. Joining the Dance

As we look down at comic characters and ridicule them from a distance, laughing at them for what they have to learn (we are much wiser than they are!), part of us cannot forget (and thanks to Mark Pizzato(11) for reminding me) that they are our sacrifice. They are held up [page 108] to us as sacrifices to the household gods, to the gods of survival and security. In the Dionysian mood, without the death of tragic characters, we could not live. And without the humiliations comic characters endure, we could not be assured and confident of our competence and acceptability. The heroes of comedy don't laugh. They are serious. This is the first corollary of the thesis advanced earlier that farce is itself a sacrifice to tragedy, so that comedy can live.

When they are successful, our comedians on the stand-up stage are said to "knock 'em dead." In the tradition of stand-up, the "them" is us, in the audience, laughing at ourselves, at our humorlessness and over-seriousness, at our pretensions, violent customs, and deadly ignorance. Thus the stage-edge, as Pizzato has described it, has nearly disappeared, or works, by mutual agreement, in both directions at once. On the stand-up stage, the threat of comic disgrace disappears when its exemplar, the comedian, takes his bow and exits. On the comic stage, however, the threat is on-going. We need the protection of the comic god to be sure that matters domestic stay that way. The sudden onslaught of disease, war, natural disaster, the depredations of power-seekers, or the hypocritical, murky swamps of political maneuverings, or the welling horror of fear, anger, and violence felt by one individual or one group toward another--all these can rip apart our domestic tranquility not only with a brutal suddenness, but with an equally brutal arbitrariness. If Lear was right about the gods, only comedy can save us, and only then for a while. The sacrifice must be continual, and it must be effective. We must find a way to laugh, for the comic laugh is the expiration of the breath that builds societies. Without that, we spend our time in caves, shrinking in fear.

In the hands of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, or the early Tom Stoppard of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or Enter a Free Man, or the David Mamet of Oleanna, we find the everyday domestic world of comedy, but without its customary wall of protection, its castle-keep separating it from the ultimate truths and ironies, chaos and destruction of tragedy. Here the walls leak, and seeping into the very warp and woof of that social fabric which is supposed to protect us, into the minor details of everyday reality, which, if they go wrong, we should be able to fix like the plumbing, are the seeds of disaster, of humiliation, destruction and chaos. This is particularly clear in plays like Oleanna, The Widow's Blind Date, by Israel Horowitz, The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Joe Egg by Peter Nichols, or Angels in America, by Tony Kushner.

[page 109] It was Dürrenmatt, writing in 1955, in what was published as Problems of the Theatre, who said:

Tragedy presupposes guilt....vision...a sense of responsibility. In the Punch-and-Judy show of our century....there are no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always, 'We couldn't help it'...Everything is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of events....Comedy alone is suitable for us. Our world has led to the grotesque as well as to the atom bomb, and so it is a world like that of Hieronymus Bosch...[T]he grotesque is only a way of expressing...the form of the unformed, the face of a world without face...

But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises.(12)

The sacrifice thus leaps over the stage edge in both directions. As we laugh, our world falls apart, and the victim is us. As comedy melts into chaos, what Dürrenmatt calls the "conceit" of comedy, the imaginative idea which built the confident protected edifice of the domestic world of comedy, dissolves into the horrors of tragedy, with no exaltation, no hint of heroism to compensate us for the loss. As the butts of the comedy we take the boot-heel of tragedy in the neck, as Brecht might have stated it. As Pogo said, with an apologetic little grin, "We have met the enemy and he is us." If Pogo, the embodiment of gentle social optimism, Walt Kelly's animal sacrifice to the gods of civility in politics (a possum in a world of raccoons), sees the irony, maybe we can see it. As Li'l Abner put it, "Any fool can see thet...Ah see it!"

If we are doomed as a species, it may be because we have built self-collapsing gods of this kind, and we will continue to chase them round and round, up the tails of our own pretensions. If we are not doomed, it may be that in the laughter we will find the courage to rebuild that stage edge. By taking advantage of the inherently metaphorical structure of drama, by carrying a new set of meanings from the individual to the society, from the gods to humankind, and back again, we can re-stoke the metaphor of the drama, re-invigorate our [page 110] largest sense of the meaning of human action in our expectations of dramatic action. In recognizing the tragedy, we can re-inform a comedy for our time.

Endnotes

1. The essentials of this view of realism can be found in Northrop Frye's account of the dramatic forms in his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957).
2. Two Tars, 1928.
3. Tit for Tat, 1935.
4. Big Business, 1929.
5. Produced by Hal Roach, directed by Charles Rogers, 1935.
6. Michael Wood. "Perseverance to the Point of Madness." New York Review of Books XLIV:12 (July 17, 1997), 8.
7. Wood, 10.
8. Laurel and Hardy, Big Business, 1929.
9. Wood, 10.
10. It is important to note at this point that contemporary literary theory makes it difficult to discuss this dance. Brian Richardson ("Beyond Postructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory," Modern Drama XL:1 [Spring 97] 86-99) argues that contemporary poststructural literary theory, since it denies representation, cannot give a full account of character in modern drama. "...the presentation of character in modern drama remains not only undertheorized but in principle incomprehensible as long as reigning theoretical constraints are observed (87)." The same might be said for action, plot, and theme (what Artistotle called "thought"), since each, in the poststructuralist mode, is deconstructed to the fragments of hegemonic, or subversive ideologies, or to other fragments of ideas seen to be more crucial than action or character or comedy or tragedy--like gender, race, body, performativity and power. Sandra Tomc points out ("David Mamet's Oleanna and the Way of the Flesh." Essays in Theatre 15:2 [May, 1997], 163-175) that numerous critics have asked whether Mamet has ruined the play by using the first act to tell us what he thinks is "the truth" about who John and Carol are and what happened between them, loading the case for John and against Carol. This assumes, of course, that what is at stake in the play is summed up in the question of what sexual harassment is, whether it really happened in this case, and by extension, whether it happens at all. Could the play be as much about the failure of certain ideas about teaching and knowledge, about study and learning, as it is about sexual harassment and the anti-intellectual depredations of political correctness? Could it be about a connection between the two sets of ideas, each illuminating the other? Could it be about what happens when two people trap themselves in conflicting, stereotypical roles that flow from the institutions and social structures in which they live? One could argue that such a description is useful for understanding hundreds of plays across centuries and cultures. Richardson argues that we need the capacities of poststructuralist analysis, but that it should be combined with elements of humanist and formalist criticism to derive a cogent analysis of the shifting and sometime contradictory representations of character in contemporary drama. In pursuing this analysis, I have used largely the humanist and formalist modes, preferring those traditions that see works of art of art as real entities, and forms as wholes with power to make meaning out of their parts.
11. See Mark Pizzato, "Theaters of Sacrifice: Greek, Aztec, and Postmodern." Ethnologie und Inszenierung: Ansätze zur Theaterethnologie, ed. Bettina E. Schmidt and Mark Münzel (Marburg: Förderverein Völkerkunde, 1998), 137-67.
12. Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Problems of the Theatre and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi. New York: Grove Press, 1966, 31-32.