Three Tutorial Plays:The Lesson, The Prince of Naples

and Oleanna

CRAIG STEWART WALKER

If the discovery that the tutorial relationship provides a rich field for dramaticconfiict must be ascribed, the credit probably belongs to Jakob Lenz, whoseplay, Der Hofmeister or The Tutor (1774), was a sort of grotesque contempo-rary reworking of the Abelard and Heloise story. Yet despite that early start,the idea seems to belong more typically to the late twentieth century, when theexplosion of information had made the tutorial relation more central to cul-tural continuity. The question of how to think about one's relation to societyhad then become more complex, interwoven as it was with the question ofone's capacity for absorbing the modem diffusion of human projects, and con-sequently the intermediary tutor had become as seemingly indispensable tothe age of information as the priest had been to an earlier age. This paperexamines the degree to which the parallel structures of three late twentieth-century plays featuring students and teachers, Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson,George F. Walker's The Frince of Naples, and David Mamet's Oleanna, areused to dramatize three distinct moments of cultural tension.

Were there any doubt that a play centred on the tutorial relation could pro-vide one of the most intense glimpses of cdntending social interests, thatdoubt should certainly have been dispelled by the furor raised by DavidMamet's Oleanna over the past few years. Yet I would like to argue thatmuch of this furor was actually beside the point. Most of the commentaryon the various productions of the play, whether positive or negative, treatedit as another salvo in what has unfortunately been labelled "the genderwars." To be sure, given the climate of opinion into which the play firstentered, it was perhaps inevitable that the reaction was so starkly polarized.The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings had just taken place in the fallof the previous year, t99i. So there could hardly have been a more incendi-ary issue than sexual harassment for the time, and the play seemed to weighright into the national debate. Indeed, so strong was this connection in the

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minds of many commentators that they assumed, on nothing more than cir-cumstantial evidence, that the play was Mamet's direct response to thehearings.'

According to Mamet himself, however, the timing of the Thomas hearingswas mere coincidence. He claimed he did not follow the hearings at all jmdthat he had actually written the play some time before the hearings but hadput it aside because he was having trouble with the last act. Moreover, heexplained:

I never really saw it as a play about sexual harassment, I think the issue was, to alarge extent, a flag of convenience for a play that's structured as a tragedy. Just likethe issues of race relations and xenophobia are flags of convenience for Othello. ...This play .,, is a tragedy about power. These are two people with a lot to say to eachother, with legitimate affection for each other. But protecting their positionsbecomes more important than pursuing their own best interests. And that leads themdown the slippery slope to a point where, at the end of the play, they tear eachother's throat out. My plays are not political. They're dramatic.̂

Assuming Mamet's opinion on his own play to be worth something - by nomeans the definitive judgement, of course, but at least an informed one - thepossibility emerges that the discussion of what is essential to Oleanna maywell have been as occluded by the preoccupation with "gender wars," as thegrave and well-documented questions raised by Clarence Thomas's moralcharacter, political convictions, and judicial competence were occluded by themuddier issues of sexual harassment £uid racism.^

At any rate, it is my contention that certain aspects of Mamet's play arc bestilluminated by regarding it within a specific dramatic tradition, exemplifiedby the other two plays under discussion. Of course, there is little chance thatMamet was acquainted with Walker's The Prince of Naples when he wroteOleanna - Walker's first play remains obscure even to those who are familiarwith much of his later work - but it is highly likely that both playwrights wereaware of Ionesco's The Lesson, which has become something of a classic ofthe modem repertoire.

Onejof the striking things about these three plays is that they are so neatlyspaced over time. The Lesson was first produced in February 1951; ThePrince of Naples was first produced just over twenty years later, in July 1971;and Oleanna, in tum, was first produced a little over twenty years later again,in May 1992. So each play seems to arise from a new generation and to lookback on a decade of perceived crisis in the cultural heritage. Each uses theteacher-student relationship to address tensions that seem to be assailingthe culture as a whole, the pedagogical relationship standing as a model of theexchange of cultural principles among individuals and social groups. Thedeeper concems involved here, then, have to do with anxieties surrounding

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the paths by which civilization perpetuates itself and with the perceived dis-ruptions, dislocations, or distortions of cultural continuity.

Needless to say, a culture does not continue itself entirely through the delib-erate efforts of teachers. But for dramatic purposes, the teacher-studentrelation serves as an ideal model of that transference for two reasons: first,because the whole relationship depends upon the fluidity of the leaming pro-cess, so the dynamic between the characters - the respective status of each, theconflicts of interest, the tenor of any resolution - naturally maintains anorganic relation with the ideas of the play, a feature which, otherwise, can beoccasionally elusive to the playwright;'' second, because the formal educa-tional system is one of the main official instruments by which a culture main-tains itself, and so it is by implication, if not in fact, indicative of socialconsensus. In this regard, the teacher-student relation functions a little like thecanary in the mineshaft: failures here might well be typical of serious prob-lems within the larger cultural framework.

To that point, the similarities among the three plays are perhaps not soremarkable. In a sense, what we have noticed is a dramatic framework that isrecurrently used to focus on certain kinds of social questions. Essentially, it isa sub-genre of what used to be called the Social Problem Play - we might callit the Tutorial Play, as my title suggests.

But there are more profound resonances among these three plays. It seemsthat in each play, the anxieties cU"e identified in a context that owes somethingto Friedrich Nietzsche, or at least to one of the successive interpretations ofNietzsche. To put this another way, each of the plays appears to address arecent mode of pedagogy which it identifies as errant by means of an argu-ment informed to some extent by the ideas of Nietzsche. That the playsassume quite distinct tones and radically irreconcilable points of view is noimmediate obstacle to this hypothesis, for it seems that every generation rein-vents Nietzsche to suit its own purposes. The cynical view of that phenome-non is expressed by a character in Daniel Maclvor's Never Swim Alone: "Ifbullshit had a brain," he says, "it would quote Nietzsche."' Be that as it may,there is no getting around the historical fact of the tremendous influenceNietzsche's ideas have had on a diverse catalogue of ideologies and, hence,pedagogies.

Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson has three characters: the Young Pupil; the Pro-fessor; and a Maid, who is offstage for most of the play but who interruptstwice to wam the Professor ominously to "remain calm" and that "[pjhilologyleads to calamity!"* The Pupil announces she is preparing for examinationsfor all the arts and science doctorates at once, although she has only threeweeks in which to do this (49). The Professor is mildly surprised but not at allnonplussed, and they settle down to work, quickly going through some geog-raphy and arithmetic - with increasing absurdity - until they come to philol-

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ogy. Here we see what the Maid means by the Professor getting carried away.It also becomes more difficult to describe this part of the play because themounting intensity of rhythms in the Professor's speech is at least as impor-tant as what he is saying. That amounts to some vaguely academic-soundingnonsense, crowned by the declaration that "one single notion is expressed byone and the same word, and its synonyms, in all countries" (66). Meanwhile,the Pupil has developed a toothache but as she complains of this more andmore, the Professor becomes more overbearing. Like a vampire's, his strengthgrows while his victim's diminishes.

The play reaches its climax when, using an imaginary knife (Ionesco speci-fies that all objects in the play be imaginary), the Professor compels the Pupilto repeat the word after him again and again until he finally stabs her to deathin an act of orgasmic violence (75). The Maid comes in and scolds the Profes-sor: this is the fortieth victim. The Professor pleads innocence, claiming hehad not understood the Maid's waming. "Liar," she replies, "An intellectuallike you is not going to make a mistake in the meanings of words" (77). Shesays her lover, the priest, will help them dispose of the bodies, and suggeststhat the Professor wear an armband - which, according to the stage direction,bears "an insignia, the Nazi swastika perhaps" — so that he "won't have any-thing more to be afraid of" "That's good politics," she adds (77-8). The pkyends as it began, with a new pupil arriving at the door.

Because of the historical adoption of some elements of Nietzsche's ideas bythe Nazis, the allusion to fascism in the donning of the swastika armband maysomewhat confuse the attempt to identify Nietzsche's relation to the play. Batapart from an apparent common faith in a "might-makes-right" ethic there islittle that would link Nietzsche, the Nazis, and the Professor together. On thecontrary, the very criticism which Ionesco seems to make by implicitly identi-fying the Professor's behaviour with fascism is itself rooted in Nietzsche'sideas.^ Here I refer to the critique of reason implicit in Ionesco's play. Part ofthis critique may be associated with Ionesco's espousal of pataphysiques,which is basically a school of thought (derived from Alfred Jarry) arguing thatthere are no scientific laws, but that every scientific phenomenon is a unique£ind inexplicable occurrence - a theory best illustrated by his earlier play. TheBald Soprano. However, Ionesco has moved further in this play, to suggestthat the espousal of knowledge, together with the positivist insistence onmeaningfulness, is an arbitrary exertion of authority that leads inexorably tofascism.

Essentially, this is the Nietzschean denial that the notion of truth has anymeaning outside a given order of power.^ The point is made throughout theplay in that the Professor's authority seems steadily to grow as the absurdityof what he is teaching increases and also by the contrast of the Pupil's undeni-ably corporeal toothache with the Professor's unreal abstractions. But themost trenchant assertion of the idea lies in the shocking murder of the Pupil.

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Here, to put it simply, Ionesco seems to suggest that, in the absence of mean-ing, language becomes merely one more object, effectively a weapon in thehands of those who have sufficient power. In these terms, the very act ofinsisting on the identity of the signifier, "knife," with its signified becomestantamount to actually knifing someone because the authoritative assertion ofmeaning is a violent assertion of power that virtually robs others of their lives.

From one point of view, then, Ionesco might be interpreted to be reprovingthe assumptions of epistemological certitude which had led to fascism. Cer-tainly, this was an association he made elsewhere. Speaking of his own educa-tional experience under fascism in Rumania, Ionesco once said: "When you'retwenty years old and you have teachers who offer you scientific or pseudosci-entific theories and explanations, when you have newspapers, when you havea whole atmosphere, doctrines, a whole movement against you, it's really veryhard to resist, hard not to let yourself be convinced."^ So, while the donning ofthe swastika armband perhaps seems a rather cmde symbol from any dis-tance,'" when we refiect how close in time Ionesco still was to a fascist educa-tion, the choice seems somewhat more natural. Indeed, if such a biographicaland political context encourages us to look for the elements of allegory, theyare there to be found. For example, that the Maid, who is clearly meant to belower class, offers the help of the priest to the Professor perhaps symbolizesthe collusion of the masses, the church, and the secular authorities. Togetherthey conspire to achieve the domination, deception and — at least in Ionesco'sabsurd context, where there is no real distinction to be made between hyper-bole and reality - the rape of their society.

From another point of view, however, Ionesco's allusion to fascism seemsto escape specific associations and become merely one more part of a whole-sale assault on reason. There have certainly always been some who have criti-cized Ionesco on those grounds. Walter Kerr, in his review of the 1958 NewYork production, deplored the "defiant mindlessness that is the 'answer'"offered by Ionesco's play;" and Susan Sontag argued more bluntly, that "Dis-gust with the human condition is perfectly valid material for art. But disgustfor ideas, expressed by a man with little talent for ideas, is another matter.'"^And yet, the assault on reason was also to find a fairly sympathetic resonanceover the next two decades and even some highly articulate apologists.

The Prince of Naples seems to be written with a view to just that context. Herethe roles of professor and student are given a slight twist in that the instructor,Sayer, is a young radical in his twenties, while the student. Oak, is a more con-servative man in his fifties.'^ It seems that their course was initially to consistof an enormous reading list of the classics of Westem literature. However,Sayer becomes much more interested in dislodging Oak from his attachmentto and veneration for the humanist tradition, attempting to lead him insteadinto a state of vague anti-establishment radicalism. By the end of the play.

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Oak seems to have embraced Sayer's view, and he prepares to lecture to agroup of students, who seem, from the sound of it, to be converging by thethousands, just outside. Suddenly fearful of approaching the mob armed onlywith his ecstatic radicalism, he recants, once again avowing his love for thehumanist tradition. Sayer then appears with the tape recorder which had beenemitting the sound of the approaching crowd. He prepares to begin the processonce again: that was only the second time, he says to Oak; it may take as manyas four times to achieve the full transformation (59-60).

The play certainly bears a few resemblances to The Lesson: the rhythmicuse of language and the nonsensical reasoning are two obvious examples. Andthere is another feature which Walker seems to have more or less sustainedthroughout his work: the entire dramatic personae is absurd (admittedly, thereare only two characters in this case, but the point still holds). Walker neverseems to allow for what MoliSre would have called a raisonneur, or honnetehomme, to provide a rooted perspective for the audience. Instead they are pre-sented with a relativistic universe, in which some characters emerge into gccdsense now and again, but can't be relied upon to maintain anything like objec-tive rationality for very long. Lately, Walker's work has begun to move into aslightly more romantic mode, in which certain characters end up forming analliance of partial perspectives that results in something like a communal pointof view; but in the earlier work his resolutions are ironic.

It is easy to see why this is so if, as it seems. The Frince of Naples dramatizes Walker's own ambivalence towards his patrimony as a Canadian "wasp"male, an ambivalence which seems to underlie the surface of nearly all hiswork.''' On the one hand, he appears to share something of Sayer's bellicositytowards cultural tradition; on the other, this is not enough to uproot Oalc'sunprincipled but intuitive allegiance to humanist ideals. (Once one has noticedthe symbolism of the characters' names, it becomes difficult to escape pun-ning upon it.)

Of course, in such a battle of traditional versus revolutionary values. Oak isbadly disadvantaged as the student. But, given that Walker's sympathies usu-ally rest with the underdog, this certainly indicates less about Walker's per-sonal desires than about his sense of the state of the world. And here the termsof understanding are once again derived from Nietzsche. Indeed, the title of theplay is itself a reference to Nietzsche. In the third scene, Sayer comes upon Oskreading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the chapter on "Voluntary Death." Has Oskever tried it, Sayer asks, then consoles Oak on his evident failure (14-19). Inany case, he opines, "all of Nietzsche's works are worthless up until the time hestarted signing his correspondence - The King of Naples" (18). In other words,Nietzsche's thought became worthwhile only sometime after he had goneinsane. Lest we should dismiss this as mere rhetoric. Walker has Oak comment:"It's the word insane that troubles me. The word insane has always meant...insane, to me. But the way you use it, you seem to imply something else" (21).

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Sayer replies that "the word insane has been reapproached by the wide-eyedarmies of time and given a new meaning. The word has been dragged out of thedampness of our mental basements and placed on the clouds of our conscious-ness" (21). This sends him into a rhapsodic "ecstasy" about "the great awaken-ing which occurred in the sixth decade of this century ... [W]hat had beencoming about slowly until then suddenly burst upon the scene as fresh and hon-est as a hollering new-bom baby. The madman became a prophet!" (24).Finally he leads Oak in a chant of "Glory to the sixties!" (25). The title, then,suggests that Sayer is heir to the late, mad Nietzsche.

In attributing the cults of Dionysos, which arose during the sixties, back toNietzsche's influence, Sayer is probably on fairly solid ground. Indeed, hisremarks about insanity seem to echo one of Nietzsche's most famous inter-preters of the fifties and sixties, Georges Bataille. In his writings, Bataillealways seems happiest with the extremes of Nietzsche's thought. Although hewas a Marxist, he was fascinated and even somewhat enthused by fascist vio-lence, because he believed that violence, death, evil, insanity could eruptthrough social taboos to create the opportunity for totality or sovereignty inhuman beings. Hence, Nietzsche is praised as a "philosopher of evil" whosethought offers a "signal dissolution in totality ... '... an unmotivated feast'; itcelebrates, in every sense of the word, a laughter, a dance, an orgy whichknows no subordination, a sacrifice heedless of purpose, material or moral.'"^It appears that it is just such an unmotivated feast that O£ik is supposed to bepreparing for at the end of The Prince of Naples. But as the mob - so Oak sup-poses - approaches, he shrinks from the implications of the teachings he hasembraced and reaffirms his faith in the humanist tradition. Nevertheless, thesuggestion that they will go through the tutorial again and again until Oak'stransformation is successful implies that the overthrow of reason by chaoscannot be postponed indefinitely.

In moving on to Oleanna, at last, we notice that we have tumed once again toa more realistic style. Certainly, this shift has less to do with the span of timeseparating the three plays than it does with the native styles of the three play-wrights. But I would argue that the choice of style is in itself some indicationof where these playwrights stand on the question of reason. In other words,Mamet is probably the most realistic of the three playwrights because he hasthe greatest faith in the role of reason. The correlation seems to hold in thecase of Walker, whose style lies somewhere between the other two, and whoseown inclinations, as I have suggested, seem to lie somewhere between Oakand Sayer. That is to say, it is likely that, to some degree. Walker wouldaccept Sayer's statement that "[t]he rational approach is inadequate" (20), butthis would express his scepticism about the claims of reason to universalityrather than anything as fully nihilistic as Ionesco's outlook.

In any case, Mamet's style does suggest the possibility of ascribing dramatic

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form to some vague sense of scientific reason. For, while it would by no meansbe accurate to call Mamet a naturalist, it is certainly true that in most of hiswork the dynamic among the characters is heavily affected by the ethos of theirenvironment. In Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, the competitive environ-ment of the real-estate office is thoroughly absorbed by the characters in theirrelations with one another (so, for example, their incessant use of the word"fuck" indicates the barely concealed primal sexual basis of their attempts toestablish themselves at the head of the pack as defmed by their environment).There is something similar in the behaviour of the men in American Buffalo,where the junk-shop setting seems to have determined the configurations oftheir personalities, as they trade fragments of barely useful information andattempt to deceptively "sell" one another on their shoddy ideas.

This is a useful idea to have in mind when approaching Oleanna, where thecharacters are attempting to negotiate their ways through an environment thatis rife with paradox. John, the professor in his forties, is fairly confident abouthis skill in this respect, initially; Carol, the student in her twenties, only findsher bearings over the course of the play. In the first scene of Oleanna, Carolhas come to John's office to ask for help with his course, which she is failing.She tries to explain her problems in the course, but seems to understand so lit-tle of what is going on that this is extremely difficult - all the more so becauseJohn is distracted by a series of phone calls about the house he is buying inexpectation of receiving tenure within the next few days. However, John Calcessome time to try to sympathize with Carol and to offer some encouragement.He tells her about his own struggles, he offers to give her an A in the courecand to tutor her privately, and when she seems to be distraught, he puts hisarm around her.

In the next scene, we discover that Carol has charged John with sexualharassment, and the tenure committee is investigating the charge. Carolexplains how she and her "group" believe John to have misused his position.John attempts to dissuade Carol from proceeding with the charges, and at theend of the scene, attempting to continue the conversation, obstructs her pas-sage. In the third scene, John, about to be discharged, makes a last attempt toreason the disagreement out. Carol is adamant in her position, lectures Johnabout his behaviour, and offers a list of demands for John to accede to as wellas a list of books - including his - which she and her group wish to haveremoved from the curriculum. Finally, it is revealed that John is being chargedwith rape on the basis of the altercation at the end of the previous scene. In thefinal moments, as she is leaving his office, and John is speaking to his wife onthe phone, Carol says to him: "Don't call your wife baby.'"^ John erupts inviolence, beating Carol, and actually coming to the brink of hitting her with achair before finally subsiding. "Yes. That's right," says Carol (80).

Those who have criticized the play as a polemic have generally foundedtheir criticisms on what they see as the presentation of Carol as a perpetrator

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of unmotivated evil. In the words of Deborah Tannen, for example, it is a play

about the fear of witches: a woman lures a man by seeming helpless and feminine,then, after he becomes vulnerable by trying to help her, she destroys him.

There is no other way to understand the student Carol's unexplained transforma-tion from the first half of 'Oleanna' to the second."'

Pace Tannen, I think there is another way to understand Carol's transforma-tion and I think it is important to consider once again Mamet's commentsabout how the play is intended to work as a tragedy. Dismissing the idea of theplay being a polemic about gender written from the male point of view,Mamet has said that

the points [Carol] makes about power and privilege - I believe them all. If I didn'tbelieve them, the play wouldn't work as well. It is a play about two people, and eachperson's point of view is correct. Yet they end up destroying each other.'*

Certainly, in all the discussion of Oleanna, there has not been much talk abouthow "John destroys Carol," so Mamet's comment may come as a slight shock.And yet I believe that the play does indeed provide support for this argument,beginning with its two epigraphs.

The first epigraph comes from Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh:

The want of fresh air does not seem much to affect the happiness of children in aLondon alley: the greater part of them sing and play as though they were on a moorin Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly recog-nized by children who have never known it. Young people have a marvelous facultyof either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy -very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding itout, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

The second epigraph is from a folk song which was made famous in the sixtiesby Peter Seeger, "Oleanna." This is the source of the play's title, of course,which is nowhere mentioned in the dialogue:

Oh, to be in Oleanna,That's where I would rather be.Than be bound in NorwayAnd drag the chains of slavery.

The significance of the Butler epigraph is related, I think, to the point aboutthe role of environment in Mamet's plays that I made eadier. Specifically, itpertains to Carol's confession: "I walk around. From moming 'til night: with

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this one thought in my head. I'm stupid" (12). In the context of the quotationfrom Butler, the implication must be that the fault lies not with Carol but withthe circumstances in which she finds herself. As for the second epigraph, it isimportant to know something about the provenance of the folk song. Oleannawas a colony set up by Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist and national hero, inPennsylvania in 1852. This was just one of the many visionary communitiesthat have been founded in North America, and like most of them, it eventuallyfailed.'^ In this case, the reason for the failure was that the ground, which theNorwegians had purchased with the intention of fanning, was far too stony togrow anything. The settlers were starving, so they retumed to Norway. Hence,the song has an ironic edge to it: were the singer to be freed of the bonds ofslavery in Norway, he would find his visionary Utopia was a dystopia, becauseit had been founded on unfertile ground.

In calling the play Oleanna, then, Mamet has identified the world of theplay as a Utopia gone bad. And putting this notion together with the reading ofthe first epigraph, it would seem that what has gone wrong is the pedagogy,which is essentially providing an unpromising and unreceptive environmentfor students like Carol. To extend the metaphor a little, where The Prince ofNaples dealt with the question of whether Oak could be uprooted from his cul-ture or not, Carol has never been able to find any nourishment in her culture.She is the proverbial child who asks for bread and is given a stone. All thislends a special significance to the first line of the play, John's: "And whatabout the land.... The land. And what about the land?"

Now, this interpretation may seem unduly harsh towards John, given that hedoes, after all, make some attempt, however ham-fisted, to help Carol with herstudies. But good intentions never helped Oedipus, and given that this is atragedy, we should not be surprised that it is some element that has alwaysbeen present, though perhaps unforeseen by the characters, which seems toinevitably bring about the downfall. This is where Nietzsche's thought comesinto play once again. In the case of Oleanna, the Nietzsche influence is per-haps less direct than in the other two plays but its effects are no less trenchant.The central concept here is similar to The Lesson's Nietzschean refusal oftruth as having any meaning outside of a given order of power. Here we havethe related Nietzschean idea that there is no order or essential human naturethat one can appeal to in order to make moral judgements.^" There is only thewill to power imposed upon chaos. But the observation seems to be given amore contemporary spin, so that we are encountering the concept in an inter-pretation which would be most closely associated with the work of anotherfamous interpreter of Nietzsche, Michel Foucault.

The evidence of this pattem of thought becomes most obvious in the lattertwo acts of the play, when Carol is explaining her position, but! would arguethat what she is saying is already implicit to some degree in what we know ofJohn's teaching and the manner in which he teaches. If this suggestion has not

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been raised by previous critics - and I am not aware that it has - this perhapsindicates the degree to which many of these concepts have become part of theordinary fumiture of the university environment. Of course, this retums us tothe point about the characters' absorption of their environment. Furthermore,it pertains to the criticism about the inconsistency in Carol's character. For thedegree to which Carol's behaviour is an extension or projection of John'sthought becomes evident if we imagine the play to be occurring entirely inJohn's imagination, like a nightmare. That exercise actually offers a reason-ably coherent reading of the play, while imagining the play as taking place inCarol's imagination seems pointless. I am not saying, by any means, that thisis Mamet's intention for the play, but merely that Carol's behaviour makesmost sense if it is regarded within the context of the ideology which Johnapparently espouses.

Given space constraints, I can offer no more than a brief sketch of what tmean here. At the most general level, John's exposition of the structure of theuniversity is Foucauldian in so far as he assumes its authority proceedsentirely from its material domination of the students. To be sure, his phrasesabout the "warehousing of the young" and "prolong[ed] adolescence" (11)owe something to the economist Thorstein Veblen, but these are placed withinan anti-establishment outlook that suggests a more contemporary kind ofcynicism than anything Veblen espoused. John argues that evaluation is"nonsense"; he calls tests "garbage" (23); and suggests that the universityconstitutes an arbitrary system of control, a cruel trial forced upon students - a"regime of truth" as Foucault would have it^' - and that the intemalization ofthe university's standards is a dehumanizing imposition of external power.

In one sense he is reiterating Samuel Butler's point. But there is a differ-ence: Butler was talking about an inherently negative environment, a cityslum; John is speaking about the university at which he is employed as a pro-fessor. His argument begs the question of where his values actually lie; and asconfused as Carol is, this particular paradox is not lost on her: "How can yousay in ... a college class, that college education is prejudice?" (31); "how do[students] feel? Being told they are wasting their time? ... [that] education [is]'prolonged and systematic hazing'[?]" (35). Moreover, John seems to makegood much of what he says about the education system by his failure to reallylisten to Carol or to respect the specific nature of her difficulties. He is so cer-tain that the problem is systemic, he continually interrupts her, anticipatingher objections and, in his attempts to sympathize, ends up telling her what herfeelings about her education should be. Finally, in a genuine effort to sympa-thize with Carol's distress, but having totally discredited the validity of thecontext in which they are supposed to be relating, and having established him-self as holding an arbitrary form of power over her life, John puts a patemalarm around Carol. But in the context which John himself has sketched, thevalue of such a gesture is suspect.

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Of course, as important as what John says are his omissions. At no pointdoes he acknowledge any authority for his teaching beyond the power whichthe system bestows. At no point does he indicate that any of the forms of self-discipline inherent to education are anything beyond a systemic exertion ofpower. And at no point does John allow of anything self-elected about Carol'sparticipation in the university or suggest the ways in which her attempts atself-discipline might be seen uncynically as part of an intelligible and worth-while community project. (Again, this is not to damn John's approach utterlybut merely to point out its philosophical tendencies.)

So, it seems appropriate to the logic of the play so far - if not entirely real-istic in terms of probable character development - that the things Carol under-stands when she comes back-in the next two acts are: (a) that the meaning ofwhat she has experienced is to be determined, not on some communicativebasis of shared values, but in the context of the assertion of one kind of poweror another; and (b) that there is no source outside of the systems of materialpower by which the moral sense of action can be measured. Certainly in theseterms, there is nothing reproachable in her central speech:

Why do you hate me? Because you think me wrong? No, Because I have, you think,power over you. Listen to me. Listen to me, Professor. {Pause) It is the power Ihatyou hate. So deeply that, that any atmosphere of free discussion is impossible. It'snot "unlikely." It's impossible. Isn't it? ... Now. The thing which you find so cruel isthe selfsame process of selection I, and my group, go through every day of our lives.In admittance to school. In our tests, in our class rankings .... (68-9)

In any case there would be some truth to what Carol is saying here; but rela-tive to the philosophical context which has been sketched in the first act, whatother truth could there be? Within the terms of reference, this is strictly rea-sonable - not unlike the way Ionesco's wildest absurdities usually make sensefrom a pataphysical standpoint.

We notice too, that, where The Lesson begins with a confident and self-possessed student and a timid professor, then shockingly inverts their statusrelationship, Oleanna achieves a similar effect, using the reverse process (alittle like Shaw's Pygmalion). But the two plays share something else in com-mon; for in a sense, Carol's charge that John's obstruction of her passage fromthe room was an act of rape suggests that we have come full circle to the worldof The Lesson, with the difference that what was part of the dramaturgicalethos in the earlier play is part of the setting's ethos in the later play - thoughthis difference may be no more than a matter of viewing the same theme fromtwo different perspectives. Both come down to the idea that, in an absurdworld, where meaning has become completely detached from words andactions, then truly, the only difference between an assertion of will and a sex-ual assault lies in the context of power we bring to its interpretation.

Three Tutorial Plays 161

From the perspective of that idea, returning to the notion of Oleanna beinga dual tragedy, we might say that the tragedy for Carol is that her mind hasbeen closed to everything but her own will. For John, the tragedy is less, Ithink, his loss of position, than his final alienation from his moral principles,which is most apparent in his violence at the close of the play.

These three plays, then, are joined not only by their parallel structures but bythe related kinds of anxieties upon which they are based - anxieties whichhave attached themselves to the activity of learning in the late twentieth cen-tury. Of course Nietzsche is not responsible for these anxieties. He was merelythe most influential of those who identified them. And as earlier remarked,Nietzsche has provided inspiration for ideologies of radically different types -a point made evident in the differing authorial points of view, as we have seen.In the end, I would suggest that, taken together, the clearest single lesson wecan take from these three tutorial plays is that an uncritical attachment to anideology of any stripe signifies a kind of death for learning.

NOTES

1 The editors of a recent anthology state flatly in their introduction to the play that "itis... the first of his plays to build directly on a specific contemporary event... theconfirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas (Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, andBradford S. Field, Jr., eds.. Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theater,3rd ed. (New York, 1995), 1308.

2 Geoffrey Norman and John Rezek, "Playboy Interview: David Mamet: A CandidConversation with America's Foremost Dramatist about Tough Talk, TV Violence,Women and Why Govemment Shouldn't Fund the Arts," Playboy 42:4 (April1995). 52.

3 See Gary Wills, "Thomas's Confirmation: The True Story," New York Review ofBooks, 42.2 (2 February 1995), 36-43.

4 Hence the persistence of the teacher-student relation in plays of ideas, even whereno formal classroom situation is involved: consider A Doll's House, Saint Joan, orGalileo; or, to go back to perhaps the earliest para-tutorial example. The Bacchae,in which the tensions of social reform are focused when Dionysus become anexacting tutor to Pentheus.

5 Daniel Maclvor, Never Swim Alone, in Two Plays: Never Swim Alone and This Is aPlay (Toronto, t993).

6 Eugfene Ionesco, The Lesson, in Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York,1958), 50, 60. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically inthe text.

7 Of course this is not a paradox which is exclusive to lonesco's play, by any means,for it has been often observed, especially following Walter Kaufmann's study, thatany comprehensive reading of Nietzsche shows that he would have loathed far

162 CRAIG STEWART WALKER

more than Nazism about he ever could have admired. To some degree the associ-ation of Nietzsche and Nazism has more to do with the proclivities of his sister,Elisabeth, than with the weight of his ideas, for it was she who was primarilyresponsible for fostering the connection; but there remains the fact that certain ofhis remarks were there to be taken up and interpreted in such horrendous ways. SeeWalter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed,(Princeton, N.J,, 1974); and Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Ger-many 1890-1990 (Berkeley, 1992).

8 For example, "The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling ofpower," Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (1901; reprint. New York, 1968), 290.

9 Ionesco, quoted in Klaus, Gilbert, and Field, 958. See note i.10 Cf. Susan Sontag, "Ionesco," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (\g66;

reprint, Toronto, 1990) 120. First published in New York Review of Books, 1964,

11 Walter Kerr, review (in New York Herald Tribune) of The Lesson at the PhoenixTheatre, New York, 1958; in Klaus, Gilbert and Field, 975, First published in NewYork Herald Tribune. See note i.

12 Sontag, 122. See note 10.13 George F. Walker, The Prince of Naples: A Cerebral Farce in One Act (Toronto,

1972), 18. Subsequent references to the play appear parenthetically in the text.14 In the later plays, this ambivalence assumes all of Linda Hutcheon's hallmarks of

postmodemism: the "tend[ency] to use but also abuse, install but also subvert, con-ventions," to "usually negotiate these contradictions through irony," and to "chal-lenge the fixing of boundaries ... between genres, between art forms,,.. betweenhigh art and mass-media culture" (Linda Hutcheon, "Postmodemism," in Encyclo-pedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R, Makaryk [Toronto, 1993],612. In The Prince of Naples, the structure is somewhat simpler, basically consist-ing of a face-off between two points of view. As an entertainment, it is perhapscomparable to the Timothy Leary-Gordon Liddy debates, although the politics areless left-leaning versus right-leaning than left-leaning versus inert,

15 Georges Bataille, "On Nietzsche: The Will to Chance," October 36 (Spring 1986),50, 56. First pub, in 1949,

16 David Mamet, Oieanna (New York, 1993), 79. Subsequent references appear par-enthetically in the text.

17 Deborah Tannen, commentary on Oleanna as performed at the Orpheum Theatre,New York, 1992; in Klaus, Gilbert and Field, 1331. See note i,

18 Mamet, Interview, 52-3, See note 2,19 For a broader discussion of the tradition of visionary communities in America, see

Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill (New York, 1986).20 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauf-

mann (1886; reprint, Toronto, 1966).21 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,

1972-1977, ed, Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham,and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 131.

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