Rachel Buff’s ethnographic study of festivals in two American im/migrant communities, that of the displaced American Indians populating the area around the Twin Cities and of the ‘self-exiled’ West Indians in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, brings forth new, innovative ways of better understanding the meaning of home and citizenship in the period of the post-World War II American society. Buff backs her ethnographic fieldwork with substantial archival research, in order to demonstrate the historical, cultural and theoretical links existing between the two groups that are rarely thought of as co-habiting in a paradigmatic double bind. What we encounter as readers on the pages of Buff’s extensive work is a rendering of the two distinct cultures’ celebrations as sites for (re)making the meanings behind the groups’ history and their respective survival.

My question that emerges from this exploration is connected with my ever-evolving understanding of contemporary American society and its history of institutionalized citizenship. What is more desirable (wanted, admired, wished for, acknowledged as important), a nationally-bounded ‘citizenship’ or a transnational cultural ‘denizenship’? Could an individual possess both without feeling betrayed or treacherous for that matter? Is such a ‘multi-vocality’ within the framework of a democratic social union welcomed? Should it be?

The theoretical move that really captivated me in Buff’s work is her reading of the two festivals as vital, dynamic sites of inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race and social power. The American Indian powwows of the Minneapolis’ urban milieu and the West Indian American Carnival Day in NYC’s Brooklyn, as seen through Buff’s ethnographic suppositions, demonstrate a history of resistance to colonial oppression, while undergoing constant change as creative responses to the experiences of im/migration and the impact of the global(izing) mass-culture industry. Thus, Buff’s methodology may launch a series of alternative pairings/ juxtapositions/ triple relatedness among (seemingly) various popular culture products, events, such as for example Mardi-Gras in New Orleans and St. Patrick Day’s parade in Boston and New York City, which, in turn, may enhance our scholarly understanding of the different ways im/migrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational/diachronic cultural memory.

The first time I saw Spike Lee’s poignant satire on contemporary American mass-media driven society, Bamboozled, I wasn’t quite certain about the content and the framework of Lee’s piece. Having been exposed to the origins and ideological practices behind America’s infamous mid-nineteenth century dramatic tradition known as blackface minstrelsy, I couldn’t understand why Lee would employ this politically incorrect genre to make his point, so to speak. Why would he choose to tread on such a ‘dangerous ground’? This year, as part of the requirements for this course, I was able to see Lee’s controversial film for the second time; I do not claim to be closer to resolving my initial dilemma, but I also know that Lee’s blatant satire of the entertainment industry and its tactics in portraying African-Americans is worth looking into as we further examine the ideological significance of blackface minstrelsy as one of the ground-breaking mass entertainment features of the ‘American dramatic experience’.

In Bamboozled, we follow the career of Pierre Delacroix (portrayed by Damon Wayans), a Harvard graduate working for a large television network, CNS, as he copes with the pressures of creating and producing a hit show. He decides to put on a show whose audacity and outrageous controversy would get him fired from his fruitless job. Thus, he initiates “Mantan-The New Millennium Minstrel Show”, a modern-day minstrel show set on an Alabama plantation in the early years of slavery, with black actors wearing an even blacker makeup. Incredibly, Delacroix’s spoof turns into a ratings bonanza, a cultural phenomenon that engages both sides of the color/pay-roll/media line.

The practice of blackface minstrelsy was a cultural phenomenon of the antebellum years in nineteenth century American society. As Alexander Saxton points out in his 1975 essay, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology”, performing in blackface “provided a kind of underground theater where the blackface “convention” rendered permissible topics which would have been taboo on the legitimate stage or in the press.”[1] In other words, white performers such as Thomas Rice, Dan Emmett and E.P. Christy used the minstrel show’s format to convey messages of class identity, racial hostility, hidden sexual desire(s), all the while asserting the supremacy of white egalitarianism, since “the meaning did not reside solely in negative or ridiculous portrayals of nonwhites; it resided in the “convention” itself.”[2] 

 If we examine Lee’s work in light of Saxton’s arguments, we can see why some contemporary critics may consider Bamboozled’s content and framework rather appalling. However, if we think more closely about the puppet/puppet-master dichotomy at work within the blackface modus operandi, we can attest to a perhaps (un)intentional parallelism existing between Lee’s direction of his topic and the mass media’s execution of mass-produced cultural forms and/or traditions nowadays. Blackface performers are puppets operated by a white puppet-master; as far as their physical appearance is concerned, they are almost non-human, and yet as Saxton concludes in his piece on the ideological significance of this popular entertainment form, “they could be manipulated not only to mock themselves, but also to act like human beings.”[3]

Lee’s fictionalized blackface performers, Manray, Womack and Delacroix himself, are such puppets, now in the hands of the all-revolving wheels of media production and consumption. The nineteenth century’s appropriation of white supremacy in blackface minstrelsy’s dominance of popular entertainment precedes the late twentieth century’s frenzy for delivering mass- produced cultural products that will reaffirm the already established principles of a cultural hegemony.In lieu of this juxtaposition, I find Eric Lott’s article on the postmodern re-conceptualization of blackface minstrelsy’s cultural complexity rather challenging. Lott sets out to identify and subsequently grasp the way(s) nineteenth-century White America “lived their own whiteness”, as he examines the formations behind blackface minstrelsy, namely the structural formation of the “racial unconscious”.

I often wonder if Lee could/should have used a different content background for his satirical representation of contemporary mass media’s practices; perhaps he could have. Would then his message be as resonant as it is today? Perhaps it would. In a world of some 900 channels, diversity seems to be the unattained ideal. Detrimental depictions of African-Americans, as well as other minority representatives, in contemporary sitcoms, could be viewed as signs of the minstrel show’s continuous influence on the way a cultural hegemony maintains its power balance. In that respect, what better way to demask the commodifying practices of the contemporary economy-driven entertainment industry than by reverting to a once popular culture form whose manifestation depended on the same principles of dominance and supremacy.       

In her attempt to capture the links between The Motown Recording Company, the city of Detroit and ultimately black America, Suzanne S. Smith relies on the words of another cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, since he refused to see art and society as two opposing poles on the cultural continuum. Her case study of Motown’s relationship to Detroit’s African-American community during the 1960s and early 1970s offers contemporary readers, on all sides of the racial, ethnic or religious, or even national divide, a broader way of looking at the historical, social, and political forces engaged behind the cultural formation and production of Motown’s “sound”. After carefully reading Smith’s cultural historiography, I have been thinking about a number of things, which may or may not be explicitly connected to the work she presented. Since I am an outsider to American culture, or American cultures, so to speak, and as such an already displaced observer who has been exposed to American culture products through ‘translation’ or ‘transliteration’, I was wondering about the meaning(s) behind art’s reception.

Can an artistic product from one particular culture, community, be received by those in another one, still carrying across its original meaning? How do we foster such receptions? Do we support them at all?

Also, while I felt drawn to Smith’s articulation of the almost symbiotic relationship between the African-American community in Detroit and their involvement in the cultural production of Motown Records, I was thinking about the social responsibilities that art produced by White America has or renders on that population.

Does art produced by white Americans speak for their share of the American cultural milieu? Does it abide by the same/similar social code as black art does?

The cultural theorist and critic Raymond Williams refused to perceive art and society, in their entire modern and postmodern make-up, as two opposing poles on the cultural continuum. Through his re-conceptualizations of the forces and practices behind/in cultural formation and cultural production, we encounter a rather engaging theoretical approach, which in its turn, opens up the prospects of studying a culture’s identification with certain symbolic representations, such as for example, its folklore, i.e., the narratives of a culture’s existence in time and space; its claim, imprint on that time and space.

August Wilson’s remarkable dramatic endeavor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), the first in a series of much-revered and eagerly awaited “cycle of history plays”, examines, among other things, the relationship between a repressed culture’s living heritage and its reception/appropriation within the confines of the greater socio-industrial apparatus. It poses an important question, namely - can an artistic product, from one particular culture or community (especially when “the product” in question is a primordial example of the culture’s narrative treasure) be received by those in another one, that is the dominant one, while still carrying across its original meaning? How are such receptions fostered by the public? Are they supported, embraced? Are they understood, felt? Are they truthful?

August Wilson’s play offers a rather challenging way of looking more closely at a marginalized culture’s re-insertion within the dominant culture’s script, set against the historical framework of what Sandra Adell calls, in her essay on Wilson’s cultural poetics (titled “Speaking about Ma Rainey/ Talking about the Blues”) “the age of mechanical reproduction [which] reduces everything within the aesthetic domain to a simple matter of supply and demand.” Adell recognizes Wilson’s archaeological project as one deeply invested in the African American blues narrative. The blues paradigm of Mr. Wilson’s work, according to Ms. Adell, is not only there to serve the story’s likeable development into a coherent dramatic narrative; in other words, there is more than meets the eye in the play’s rendition of a two-act dynamics of a Chicago recording studio’s session, involving the larger-than-life personality of the legendary blues singer, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Ms. Adell reads Mr. Wilson’s use of the blues paradigm as “a way of securing for one’s self a temporary reprieve from the forces of oppression with which each of Wilson’s characters must always contend.” While attempting to secure this much needed, desired, provisional reprieve, both Ma Rainey and her four-man band, experience the reality of the everyday reassertion of their marginality, as individuals, as professionals, as members of a subjugated culture. Each of them “handles” the realization in a discreetly singular way (some more successfully than others). We follow the character of Ma Rainey as she single-handedly battles the forcefulness of the recording business, asserting her vital presence in its up-lift even when not physically present on stage. She is well-aware of the managers’ disregard for her, Madame Rainey, as an artist, as a woman, as a subject with agency; at no point in the play does she lose track of her position as an African American performer in a white man’s business, nor does she forget who her true audience and fans are. We also follow the character of the younger trumpet player Levee and his inability to channel his accumulated anger and resentment towards the same institutions and their representatives whom Ma Rainey has successfully combated all her life. Consequently, Levee’s loss of faith in the idea of a Christian God grows into an unbearably difficult weight for a man to carry along, thus guiding his troubled “warrior spirit” towards the wrong end, claiming the life of one of his band members.

So what becomes of the blues tradition in August Wilson’s play? Is Mr. Wilson’s play a part of that tradition, its contemporary counterpart? Or is it an artistically fashioned attempt to finally bring the vestiges of African American life, in all of their being, making, to the cultures of present-day society, both American and abroad? I would like to believe that it is a combination of both. As an outsider to American culture, my vision is already pre-crafted; I encounter cultural objects in their ‘transliterated form’, whether I choose to or not. However, partaking of a work of art such as Mr. Wilson’s play, I am reminded once again that even Americans need a ‘transliteration’ of their culture, an act of artistic re-memberance, if you will. They, as well as myself, need the endurance of Ma Rainey’s blues, for, as Ms. Adell dutifully points out, “the blues is what excited the will-to-power of those beings who would otherwise lack the power to will beyond the narrow and racially defined spheres of their existence.” Since, “in the absence of the God of Christianity, the blues is what em-powers them to seek their truth in a “dimension of happening” that transcends the value-laden realities of the everyday.”

Never more than today do we (as a community) need the guidance and fluidity of the blues heritage. We crave its truthfulness and stoic lyricism, its imbedded tragic voice, to teach us how to breathe again, how to inhale and how to exhale. To take steps, to be responsible for our actions, to think before we act. To respect our differences, to learn from our idiosyncrasies, to remember our past, to know always where we have come from and how we have trespassed. I do not presume, in all of my literary conceitedness, to understand fully the utter significance of the blues tradition to the African American community. I do not ascertain my presumptive ability to comprehend something that I did not grow up with, something which is far removed from my own ancestral tradition. Nonetheless, I feel that by acknowledging the power of socially aware artifacts, such as Mr. Wilson’s works have come to be, we may come closer to an understanding of the importance of art’s precursor, folklore, in the constant re-shaping and re-mapping of our conscious reception of the artfully real. And vice versa.

The decades of the 1880s and the 1890s marked a turning point in American history in regard to both immigration and cultural consumption. For the first time, the bulk of new arrivals to the United States came (originally) from the most impoverished regions of the European mainland, settling particularly in urban areas (such as New York City, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, New Orleans, etc.), rather than resorting to the vastness of the countryside, as was the case with earlier nineteenth-century waves of immigration to the New World. In these closing days of the Victorian Era almost two million Eastern European Jews are said to have left the notoriety of the infamous Pale of Settlement (nearly one quarter of these country-less people fled the deteriorating conditions in Rumania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). After the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the group’s social position changed from a state of uncertainty to one of virtual siege. In his work on the influence of urban Jewish immigrants on the rise of the role of mass consumption within American society in general, titled Adapting to Abundance, the cultural theorist Andrew Heinze notes that the almost institutionalized forms of Anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire, “sustained by the deeply rooted suspicions and animosities among the Russian folk,” allowed “the government…systematically to bar Jews from customary occupations, to limit sharply their enrollment in universities, and to incite pogroms that destroyed millions of dollars worth of Jewish property as well as thousands of Jews.” However, at about the same time, a new cultural phenomenon was born out of the same devastating scarcity and harrowing conditions of the Pale, i.e., the Yiddish Theater, an art form whose full blossoming would be realized in the immigrants’ new home, the mysteriously plentiful United States of America.

This dramatic novelty soon took hold of the immigrant’s life in the Promised Land, and the American Jewish theater exploded onto the American scene as a means of soothing the adjustment to the alien way of life. The “allrightnik” wanted to acculturate, to “green him/herself out” (“oysgrinen zich”), to become more American; nonetheless, the industrial particulars of American nineteenth-century imperialism made the transition a bit more bumpy. So at the end of a long day, the working-class Jewish immigrants, with dreams of grandeur and future prosperity (political, social, material, cultural), went to appease the growing sense of insatiability and discomfort that their American Dream exerted onto their lifestyle, by immersing themselves in the low-brow entertainment of the Yiddish theater. They went to congregate with one another, to hear their own language spoken, to observe their lives – old and new – acted out on stage. The format of this “secular synagogue” encouraged the audience to feel as if they were in their own living room, empathizing with the performers by making loud sounds or even hurling personal items at the actors on stage.

The large, devoted working-class following came mostly to see what was candidly referred to as shund or trash. In her essay on the historical and cultural relevance of the Yiddish theatrical tradition past, present and future, Alisa Solomon looks at the double entendre of the Yiddish theater’s shund-oriented style. Solomon traces the relationship between the incorporation of shund for entertainment purposes and its subsequent devastating effect on the attempt to create a serious, secular form of Yiddish literature. In other words, “the gravest sin of shund…was that it re-feminized the Jewish male, fixing him in a stereotype he had expected to leave behind in the shtetl when he emigrated (internally) to the Enlightenment or (externally) to America.” Although such concerns were voiced repeatedly by purists behind the Maskilim movement, Solomon also points out to the pervasive want of these cultural activists to reach all of the masses encompassing the body politic of the Eastern European Jewry, which led them eventually to forgo their initial dismissal of the cultural value behind the impure “jargon”’ (and its dramatic representation).

Solomon examines this imbedded cultural value of Yiddish theater as she explores the different ways through which Yiddish drama played for and against the need to adhere to Western culture’s continuous push for the emergence of “high-brow” art as a given sign of one’s cultural dominance. Yiddish drama embraced the precepts of the lowest comedy and the thickest schmaltz; it owed much of its formative nature to the distinct styles of late nineteenth-century vaudeville and melodrama, as well as the intricacies of Jewish folklore, to which audiences responded viscerally. However, with the rise of competition from English-language theatres, Yiddish theaters began to stage Broadway and Off-Broadway hits, in translation, outrageously adapted to suit the ego of the star. For example, Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre was the first one of the Yiddish theater houses to proclaim adherence to serious artistic principles by producing the works of Shaw, Ibsen, Strinberg, Schviller, Schnitzler, Wilde (“often before they were played in America’s English-speaking theaters”) , as well as the works of respected Yiddish playwrights such as Jacob Gordin, David Pinski, Leon Korbin, Deretz Hirschbein. Solomon outlines the process of “normalization” of Yiddish drama as she continues to dismantle the submergence of “the excesses and instabilities that gushed out of shund” by something she formulates at the ‘erection of a fourth wall’. That is to say, the lasting plays from the Yiddish drama’s heyday, such as Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance (Got fun Nekome, 1906), “thread issues of sexuality and gender around their existential investigations of what it means to be a Jew.”

The play revolves around a couple whose financial success in running a brothel allows them to ‘buy their way into respectability’, procuring a Torah scroll. This token of a ‘lasting redemption’ is to be kept in the room of their daughter Rivkele, the young waif, who has lived her entire life until now in tight isolation, protected from the indecencies performed in the basement of her parents’ house. She is to marry, a holy man; she is to be exchanged for her parents’ sins, her piety replacing their immorality. But the young ingénue alters her father’s fancies for good, running away with her female lover (a former employee of her father’s) for good. Solomon recognizes the importance of this resilient piece of literature, as she goes through, step by step, the various points on the high standing ‘fourth wall’ that this play erects. Unfortunately, the socio-political climate of the 1922 American cultural milieu did not allow for such a revelation to come full circle, as the production was forcefully closed down, the cast and producers charged with (and later on convicted for) subjecting the audience to immoral and indecent performances.

The question that emerges from Solomon’s meticulously conducted critical work on the development and influence of Yiddish drama in past and present-day American society goes along the lines of the abundant heritage that this dramatic tradition brings forth.

Simply put, how relevant is this multi-faceted heritage as dramatic practices embark on a more experimental plateau of (re)presentation, where Jewishness may or may not be the focal element?

According to Solomon, the Yiddish theatre tradition is the needed touchstone, that link with the past, which fuels the work of contemporary playwrights such as Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner, and/or performance artists like Jennifer Miller and Rachel Rosenthal, “critically reactivating “Jew” as an associated term of inquiry, insight, and ideological insurrection.” Whether or not the work produced makes use of particular “Jewish content”, it creates a platform whose foundation is loaded with rich, bombast Jewish sentiments, and yet, we get the sensation that without it the platform is just another space of barren ground.

Reading Clifford Odets’s first produced play, titled Waiting for Lefty, an agit-prop one-act drama loosely based on the New York City taxi strike of 1934, I have been toying with the following scenario in my post-Cold War consciousness: suppose I find a way to transport myself to New York City in 1935, and suppose that I manage to meet with the then fledgling playwright, and on top of everything, suppose that we actually engage ourselves in an informative discussion. I then proceed (boldly!) to suggest that Mr. Odets’s break-through play, Waiting for Lefty, is a solid example of a self-evident communist propaganda.

Would Mr. Odets be in any way offended, alarmed, by my rather normative description of his work? I would like to believe that he wouldn’t necessarily be insulted by the implicit dismissiveness of my “post-modern” remark. And perhaps the simplest way to approach my openly self-assured standpoint is to look at the time, i.e., the historical specificity of the cultural climate in the 1930s U.S. society, surrounding, and thus influencing the creation of Odets’s play.

In 1935, Odets and his leftist-leaning contemporaries did not necessarily view socialist ideas and cherished American ideals, such as individual freedom and equal opportunity, as two sets of diametrically opposed, largely contradictory concepts; rather, they were looked upon as divergent formulations which had stemmed from the same basic human desires. In other words, as Odets and his contemporaries were embracing Marxist ideas regarding the organization of social structures and social relations, they also sought to find a way to implement these concepts in their work, which in turn, would reflect on the deference of the American Dream by the tyrannical practices of 1930s American imperialism. Thus, Waiting for Lefty could be viewed as a rather odd innovation: an all-American socialist call for civil disobedience.      

(Un)fortunately, most (salt-of-the-earth) contemporaries of Odets did not view Marxist theory as a liberating practice. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union’s communist system was considered antithetical to the fundamental principles governing American democracy. Even though the years of the Great Depression brought more Americans closer to leftist-oriented ideas, the stereotype revolving around the notion of communism as being “un-American” remained in circulation and continued to fuel anti-Communist propaganda. However, if we apply a close textual analysis to Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, we can attest to an artistic attempt to counter this stereotype by depicting revolutionaries whose actions are positively rooted in American mainstream cultural ideas. This way, audience members who saw themselves as ‘through and through American’ may be persuaded to reshuffle their opinions and positions.     

In the opening sequence of the play, Odets introduces us to the character of the arrogant union “boss”, Harry Fatt. As Fatt builds his case against the union’s involvement in a mass action (namely, going on strike), by evoking the traditional stereotype of “reds” taking over the union in case of a strike, he is soon confronted by the character of Joe Mitchell, whose patriotism is beyond question (he defended his country’s ‘way of life’ in the First World War). Joe stands up for what he believes in, and at that moment in their intertwined social lives, he propels the workers’ need to unite in their beliefs and go on strike, an act which will not ruin everything that is good and honest about their lives, but rather make it possible to last. The other men, individual workers we encounter throughout the play’s seven episodes, are made of the same cloth as Joe: they are hard-working family men, standing in for true American values. While they confront the corrupting nature of their exploitative “bosses”, they work to defend the notion that “all men are created equal”, employing ideas that have been previously discarded as “alien”, “foreign”, but at the same time, ubiquitously American.      

While Odets has been often reproached for his crude tactics of oversimplifying social relationships, painting everything in “black and white” terms, Waiting for Lefty gives the audience a panoramic view at the Great Depression Era political milieu and all of its idiosyncrasies. Nonetheless, can our post-everything sensibilities “buy into” Odets’s almost too-idealistic efforts? I suppose it all depends on what we look for in art and its power of representation.

Some contemporary critics have remarked that Odets’s play “lacks depth…as it simplifies, in the most blatant way, both the problem and the solution.”[1] For me personally, Odets’s play in its entirety (structure and content) allows us, postmodern cynics, to see how contrasting and certainly conflicting views of/ about American social thought could be filtered through the same lens, that of art and its role as a culture’s conscience barometer.             

When a colleague of mine got the go-ahead to translate Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel to date, Beloved (1987), into Macedonian, she was immediately faced with one of the most difficult questions a translator faces, the exalted choice of a translated text’s language register. She feared, and still does (despite the incredible work she did produce) that Morrison’s multivocal narrative was about to lose its complexly compelling use of linguistic magic.

            If we think of translation as a visceral act that any self needs to undergo, then we can examine Morrison’s narrative for what it speaks to/for us, as it ‘bears witness’ to those voices that have been robbed of a saying. Looking for a starting point in my own ‘translation’ of Beloved, I found the ideas as outlined by Professor Bernard W. Bell, in his essay titled “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past” equally challenging to the task.[1] Bell proceeds to examine Morrison’s choices as a novelist who does not only “tell a story”, but helps a story which has been known for so many generations “find its voice.” He reads Morrison’s use of figurative language, i.e., her omnipresent narrative voice’s employment of “the metaphors of personal and communal wholeness in the text”, as enlivening “the psychological realism of [the text’s] womanist themes of black kingship, motherhood, sisterhood, and love.”[2] These quintessential themes that have been pushed aside for such a long time in the history of fictional representation come to life in Morrison’s text as she, according to Bell, delivers her “most extraordinary and spellbinding womanist remembrances of things past.”[3] For Bell, Morrison has managed to reverberate the slave narrative genre by writing a ghost story, a postmodern ‘neo-slave narrative’ which “speaks in many compelling voices and on several time levels of the historical rape of black American women and of the resilient spirit of blacks in surviving as people.”[4]

            As I have mentioned before, I do find Professor Bell’s interpretative ideas of Morrison’s ‘womanist text’ both challenging and rewarding, for their equally multivocal perspective. However, I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of the narrative self, especially if the ‘historical self’ has been dismissed of its existence, ‘shoved under the rug’. It seems to me that Beloved asks of us as readers to question persistently where selfhood is indeed located (in an individual, in a community, in a social practice, in a text?); whether language and memory, already dissolved by pain, ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self.

Having taken Professor Graham’s English 770 journey, in the fall semester of 2003, I was exposed to numerous scholarly ways of sizing up the self’s-(re)presentation in a literary format. Needless to say, they have provided compelling leeways into my own quest for an understanding of this evocative process. But I still question the link between language and memory, particularly when an individual’s pain cannot be clearly conveyed.

            I think Morrison’s text allows for us to look at this question either way. On the one hand, pain cannot make us real; if reality (empirically speaking) is a place reserved for memory, pain can, like the acknowledgement of a self’s existence, be revoked at any time. On the other hand, pain does make us fully human, at a large expense to our ‘humanity’. Does it mean that being human is like being ghostly, spectral and substantial, fictional as real, occupying an ever shifting identity?

In a sense, Morrison text constantly reevaluates our definition of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. It teaches us that a self remade in kindness is no more real than a self made in violence, as we seem to forget how easily a self is made and unmade, willingly or not. Morrison’s narrator teaches us how to “reconstruct and reconsider the unspeakable human cost of American slavery, racism, and sexism, then and now – to whites as well as blacks, to men as well as women - , and to sympathize with Sethe, black mothers, and black families in their struggle against white male hegemony to affirm their self-worth as a racial group.”[5] It taught my translator friend how to read the slave narratives of our people (transmitted orally from generation to generation, only to be written down/acknowledged after years of torment and guilt), how to appreciate their silences, how to uncover their univocal structure, how to speak as translators of a resounding text. It enabled them to give life to Morrison’s auto-ethnography, to find it a shape and a meaning in a strange Slavic language of memory past and memory present, as it taught them the truth of the complex nature of double consciousness of Morrison’s selves, and of those belonging to the men and women of our culture’s bound history. It taught me to begin to understand without passing on my essentialist 20^th century logic on everything I have found cruel and repulsive in my cultural existence. It taught me to read and to listen.

Arthur Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama”

An avid commentator on social perturbations, Arthur Miller (1915-2006) tends to foreground his theatrical statements within the larger context of modern life-relations.

Where does man live? Where does man come from? Whom do his loyalties belong to? His family, his country, himself? How does man make home within or out of the outside world? What is “sacrificed” in the on-going process of social adaptation? How does man make peace with the world? Does man make peace with the world?

Often dismissed by the majority of the critical public as his most Ibsenian play, Miller’s All My Sons (1947) addresses all of these hopelessly intertwining issues about our choice-driven social existence, amidst a chaotic panorama of outside influences, such as a war for example.

In the “Introduction to the Collected Plays”, Miller discusses at great length his initial intention regarding the play’s form and content. He claims to have wanted to write a play for a “prophetic theater” (even though the theatre group he had in mind, namely the Group Theatre, had disbanded several years before). Such a play, he continues, “is meant for people of common sense, and relevant to both their domestic lives and their daily work, but an experience which widens their awareness of connection – the filaments to the past and the future which lie concealed in ‘life’.” In other words, Miller attempted to mold a dramatic reality out of painfully real objective facts , which may or may not resonate with contemporary audiences the way they did in the late forties and early fifties. Yet we cannot help but wonder about the extent of our own present-day relatedness to the suspended ‘normality’ of the play’s breadth. (In the same Introduction, Miller gives the details of his original inspiration for the play’s storyline. He states: “During an idle chat in my living room, a pious lady from the Middle West told of a family in her neighborhood which had been destroyed when the daughter turned the father into the authorities on discovering that he had been selling faulty machinery to the Army. The war was then in full blast. By the time she had finished the tale I had transformed the daughter into a son and the climax of the second act was full and clear in my mind.” (129))

Thematically, the play explores the cruel reality of misguided innocence, either as an effect of prolonged self-denial or as a stamp of sheltered ignorance. We enter the fortified world of the Keller family as they are about to delve into a long-awaited confrontation with the past. Within the sheltered confines of their back yard, we accompany the Kellers as they face the ‘whereabouts’ of their choices. Structurally, Miller’s commitment to the stylistic principles of Ibsen’s Realism (we might say even Naturalism, to an extent) palpably ‘brings to life’ the characters’ dilemmas as they struggle to confront or deny them. The manly prose of his characters’ dialogue functions as a crude filter through which the audience enters the universal singularity of the Keller household. However, the imagery accompanying the all-too-American middle-class setting allows for the presence of certain poetic renditions of a more symbolic nature, such as the fallen tree and the gust of wind that took it down. Thus, we also enter the mythological parameters of Eve and Adam’s Garden of Eden, slightly after the Fall, in this case, signifying the demise of the American Dream, moreover, its innately treacherous offering.

At the opening of Act I, we are introduced to the head of the Keller household, Mr. Joe Keller, whose seemingly laid-back posture and disengaging conversation with his neighbor, the local physician Jim Bayliss, and later on with his son Chris, attests to a not-so-well-hidden sense of culpability. For example, how is he going to tell his wife Kate about the fallen tree? The tree in question had been planted in honor of their younger son Larry, who had been reported as missing in action for over three years. His other son, Chris, informs him that there is no need to break the news to Kate since she beheld the event herself. We can’t help but feel for both Kate and Joe, at this stage in the play, especially after bearing witness to his genuine concern for his wife’s state of mind. At the same time, there is a lurking sensation that Joe’s concern for his family’s, particularly for his wife’s well-being, acts as a screen, a canvas deflecting the true nature of his inner guilt. If he confronts Kate with the reality of Larry’s death (as much as he knows of it at this point in the plot’s development), this would not only destroy her means of coping with their family circumstances but would also seal his own fate, in front of those he ‘lives for’, his wife and his other son, Chris. So when Chris asks for Joe’s approval and support as he plans to marry his younger brother’s fiancé, Ann Deever, Joe once again faces the irreversibility of his past actions, trying to ‘reason’ with his son’s firm decision by pointing towards its potentially devastating effect on Kate’s life.

On the other hand, we also encounter Joe’s almost perverse fetishism of playing ‘cops and robbers’ with the neighborhood children, something that Kate strongly objects to, and cannot fully comprehend, living as she has with her own sense of concealed complacency and shame. With the first act drawing to an end, we continue to grow more aware of Joe Keller’s submerged moral and legal liability. He did walk with his head high the day he was acquitted for the crime which led twenty-one young men to their premature deaths; he did show them, his neighbors, that he still had his dignity and pride, but does this courageous act prove his non-involvement with the shipping off of the faulty parts, does his display of certainty at a time of great disbelief assert his innocence? In his view of his world, it seems that he has been exonerated; nonetheless, the lines of ‘his world’ are being constantly blurred, by Chris’s wish to marry Ann Deever, the former fiancé of his long-departed but never given-up-on son Larry and also the daughter of the little man who took the final blame for his war-time decision, his partner Steve Deever, by Kate’s stubborn dismissal of Larry’s death, and ultimately by his perturbed conscience.

In that respect, the question of the crime(s) in the play is no longer a simple matter of who did it or why it was done in the first place. With the arrival in Act II, the arrival of Ann’s brother George and the subsequent verbal confrontation between him and Chris on the one hand, and between Joe and Chris on the other, the trouble(s) caused by Joe Keller’s protracted self-denial come full circle. We are faced with a man who can tell right from wrong, but refuses to take any responsibility for his participation in morally challenging social involvements. Thus, Miller remarks Joe Keller “is not a partner in society, but an incorporated member, so to speak, and you cannot sue personally the officers of a corporation.” Moreover, this assumption opens up another area of interest when examining the impact of varied innocence in a larger social frame. If Joe Keller is taken to be ‘living outside’ acknowledged social morality, due to certain choices he has made along his path, to what extent is he a product of the deviant nature of socio-economic rules and regulations, particularity at a strife-filled time of financial depression and its warring aftermath, and to what extent is he a making of his own, ‘independent’ decisions? One way of approaching this rather expansive scholarly pursuit is to examine more closely the Ibsenian method at work in Miller’s play.

Throughout his theatrical essays and in a large section of his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, Miller openly acknowledges the outstanding influence Henrik Ibsen’s work has had on his writing, particularly to earlier plays such as All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), while having searched for a way to create a play based on factual occurrences. Miller recognizes Ibsen’s skill when dealing with the hard facts of modern life, since “a situation in [Ibsen’s] plays is never stated but revealed in terms of hard actions, irrevocable deeds; and sentiment is never confused with the action it conceals.” What better way to depict the hidden nature of the Keller household’s (dis)-engagement with the futile past than by resorting to Ibsen’s slowly-evolving exposition. We do feel the burdened prolonged duration of Act I; we almost dismiss it as being too slow. Then again, for the past to creep upon the present, time is of the essence.

Miller is fully aware of the strenuous effect of such a technique on the patience of modern audiences. He recognizes our impatience with trite matters of characters sitting down, leisurely, and discussing events which had preceded the immediate circumstances of the play, since “in “life” they would be busy with the present.” However, when dealing with time, in all of its continuity, as a relevant factor in the questioning of the moral implications of truth and innocence behind an individual’s action or a society’s involvement, the Ibsenian method of presentation makes a useful tool.

Miller’s homage to Ibsen’s Realism in All My Sons is not only present in the dialogue exchange of Act I; we journey with his presence at hand all throughout the play. Kate’s assertion of Joe’s innocence is directly tied to her astrological beliefs (Miller had initially called the play The Sign of the Archer). After the trial and Joe’s arrest, she has carved out a space within the perturbed nature of her life with Joe based on the mystic precepts of astrology; she lives her life in Joe’s world by believing in the genuine power of mysticism since the alternative is not only murderous but debilitating to her further existence. We tend to wonder throughout the play, particularly in Act II, when she tries to disarm George’s anger and send Ann away from Chris, about how much she actually knows regarding Joe’s involvement in Larry’s untimely death. Nevertheless, her acute sense of mysticism is not far from Ibsen’s use of realism, which is simply to say that life as we experience it contains “mysteries…which no amount of analyzing will reduce to reason,” and yet “it is perfectly realistic to admit and even proclaim that hiatus as a truth.”

Dialectics aside, Kate’s commitment to the safe haven of astrological beliefs only reaffirms her and Joe’s determination to keep the past at an arm’s length. She desperately needs to believe that Ann must remain faithful to Larry’s promise; if Chris and Ann eventually get married, her sense of sheltered innocence will be irreversibly contaminated. Then, she would be forced to face retribution for her act of collaboration in the death of her dear son Larry. As a character, Kate does not grow with her tragic awareness, she is left struggling with the prospects of avoiding final judgement. In a way, she is similar to the character of her older son, Chris, who is one step away from emerging as a tragic figure. The relationship between Chris and Joe marks the crux of the play’s examination of submerged innocence, in all of its misguided futility. He remains the play’s idealist even after the truth of his father’s past actions comes inevitably out in the open; in a sense, Chris’s character lends the play its much needed, even if somewhat deluded, moral center.

In other words, we might say that the play’s central conflict lies not within the relationship Chris has with his father, with his parents, but rather with himself.

Who is he? His father’s son? A man scarred by the atrocities of war? A lover? A responsible adult?

His exit at the end of Act II does not help solve the dilemma of his existence within the pseudo-parameters of Joe Keller’s world. We see him as the ultimate idealist, passing on the viability of core moral truths, and yet lacking the capacity to view his own susceptibility and self-imposed innocent ignorance. He tends to transfer his impassivity as a man onto his father’s denial of the evil nature of his fraudulent action, coming of as a Christ figure. Whether this trait of Chris’s character was purposefully developed by Miller or not, at times, as an audience we learn to suspect the over-the-top moralistic character of his final speeches, since his stern idealism subverts the moral essence behind his statements. This delving into a rather duplicitous solipsism only enhances the foundational thematic exploration of Miller’s play – that of misconstrued and misused innocence.

In light of this assertion, we come to question again the spiritus movens of Joe Keller’s crime. Was he just an extended arm of the duplicitous nature of a morally corrupt post-industrialist society in a time of economic crisis, or is he a self-made man, carving out his path as he sees fit? The realist framework of Miller’s play does not allow for such a clear-cut division. Man is a social animal, to Miller’s understanding, and as such he is as much the product of his environment as it is a result of his free will. Therefore, the decrepit nature of Joe Keller’s crime is not merely a singular action of an individual’s corrupt psyche. It is a socially-driven fallacy in a time when the normality of human choices is no longer a binary supposition, when villains demonstrate a deep commitment to family values and a strive to keep their seemingly marginal social role afloat. (When men and women look for comfort and surety by stepping over other people’s corpses, patching up a morally grounded existence with the diabolical threads of dissembling innocence, making a home out of what the world has to offer them.)

Ibsen’s method of realist representation calls for a drama of higher consciousness. When the audience is about to exit the theatre, they should not only carry with them a sense of implicit or transferred guilt, but also a sense of partaking upon a valid causation as the past and present become parts of the same time continuum. Nevertheless, this method of socially-active dramaturgy can be a rather too-assertive, presumptuously preaching activity. And yet, it is precisely Miller’s overly didactic quality of realism in All My Sons that forces us, as a disengaged post-modern audience, to grasp the intricate nature of our responsibility towards society, in all of society’s idealistic presumptive grandeur and misconstrued sense of moral values.

One of the things that I have always admired in a Tennessee Williams’ play is the playwright’s ability to carry through a plausible dramatic situation, while simultaneously delving into a second level of meaning, that of symbolic significance. Williams’ investment as an author in the symbolic rather than the literal side of his characters, their actions and their words, has always struck me as a laudable way to create a functional distance between the realist framework of one’s work and the metaphorical fluidity of its message. This quality is particularly striking within the poetic texture of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), a memory play whose structure is organized around the narrator’s (Tom’s) re-memberance of the past that he can’t seem to shed off. He is haunted by the imagery of these events that grow stronger and stronger with time, trying to make sense of them by plunging into memory and its healing power.

Rarely does a staging of The Glass Menagerie focus intensely around Tom’s predicament both as the narrator and an active participant of the play’s central dramatic conflict, mostly due to the remarkable craftsmanship and authorial focus on Amanda and Laura (Tom’s mother and sister, respectively); as the two anchoring characters of Williams’ exploration into memory, they lend the play its poignant resonance with the role illusion and disappointment perform in ordinary people’s lives. However, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje’s re-casting of The Glass Menagerie (through the Friday night showings of Akademska Scena) offered a new reading of Tom’s play with memory, concentrating more closely on the cumbersome relationship Tom has with his past whilst he attempts to live out a freer present. The final effect: a looser interpretation of Williams’ drama, which brought into focus the otherwise neglected, ‘swept under the rug’, sexual orientation of the play’s narrator, Tom, modeled after a younger Tennessee Williams.

No matter how successful this staging may have turned out to be, I came out of the performance feeing a little bit disillusioned. The reason(s) for my own conflicting relationship with this production of The Glass Menagerie is/are tied to Williams’ stylistic choices, which I felt that the production failed to encompass. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, one which operates on several discursive levels. There is the literal and the symbolic, the social and the imaginary, the palpable and the elusive. One does not function without the other. The poetic textuality of Williams’ play is possible only when set against the social and the spiritual catastrophe of the 1930s. By taking out, even unwittingly, this social background from the play’s contextuality, what we are left with are traces of a once great experiment in expressionist drama.

With the exception of the brief mentioning of Guernica at the play’s beginning, the FDA’s production of The Glass Menagerie confines the world of illusion to the Wingfield household alone, ‘liberating’ the play from its vital social message, i.e., appropriating the lives of Tom, Amanda and Laura so that they may fit the outlines of a/any family in crises. Such a re-shifting/re-shaping of the play’s focus robbed the FDA’s production of Williams’ memory play off its grounding center: the ability to understand the confounding mixture of resilience and sensitivity existing in individuals confronted by unfortunate circumstances, whether they may be of historical (Great Depression, Second World War) or mystifying nature (namely, the futile pursuit for the American Dream). Without this seemingly obsolete modus operandi, The Glass Menagerie turns into just another play about men and women ‘not getting along’.