David Mamet's Conception Of Community In His Works

The male world in Mamet's works represents his vision of human community.Although his male groups are to some extent eroded by sexism,they convey Mamet's ethical ideas on how human beings can live together.There is an apparent discrepancy,however,between his plays that depict a callous world filled with betrayals and his essays that praise the meaning and value of community.Critics hold various views on the inconsistency.Some maintain that Mamet highlights the value of community by revealing its absence,and others may indeed detect some hope in his plays,which,however,cannot yet bridge the seeming gap between the playwright's dramatic writing and artistic vision.When it comes to his new revival of Jewishness and conversion to conservative,Mamet's recent works are regarded as losing edge that his masterpieces have ever held.Critics' apprehension is unnecessary because it arises only when the critics tend to anchor Mamet's male world to gender in order to communicate some concern on gender issues,and if we go beyond and notice his construction of meaning and value beneath social criticism,there would be no such an evident fissure in his works.The study focuses on his dramas and one screenplay,namely Duck Variations,Lakeboat,A Life in the Theatre,American Buffalo,Glengarry Glen Ross,The Disappearance of Jews,Faustus and Homicide:Besides,Mamet's essays on theater and social issues are also taken into account.It reveals that by delineating human endeavor to explore the proper bond in his male world,Mamet's plays explicate an idea of constructive community situated in the dynamics between individual independence and collective belonging,which take forms of male community,market community and Jewish community respectively in three dimensions of gender,society and religion.Chapter one explores the idea of community bred in male-only world in Mamet's early major plays,namely Duck Variations,Lakeboat and A Life in the Theatre by resorting to the notion of male bonding developed by Eve Sedgwick and Lionel Tiger,which need to be reconsidered in Simone de Beauvoir's vision on gender,to demonstrate that the construction of male bonding aims at the combination of men's understanding on universality and particularity.Male bonding in these plays reflects the desirability of universal connection.Although it may be tainted by gender stereotypes,the hope to reconnect lies in the male characters' understanding of human existence.Male bonding in The Duck Variations is represented first as a communal consciousness with a view to mortality.The inevitability of death draws all the lives into a living community.To alleviate the anxiety of death,individuals understand the significance of making free-will choices.Moreover,the individuals propelled by free will need to appeal to friendship to realize inter-personal relationships.Lakeboat reveals that a male group in reality,however,cannot be completely immune from sexism that causes occasional disruptions and one-upmanship competitions.To recover the connection with each other,men resort to artistic imagination,though quite limited,to tell a story collectively.In A Life in the Theatre,the healing power of oral art is greatly illustrated in the theatre as a community both in literal and symbolic sense.With performance extending from the stage to life,actors symbolizing human beings seeking truth,theatre bears a symbol of community in presenting common sense in accordance with human conscience.Presence and transience,as the feature of theatre,is abstracted and sublimated as the essence of life that gives birth to meaning.Male bonding that is constructed through performance roots in social customs on the one hand and is open to change on the other.Chapter two depicts the male groups in Mamet's masterpieces,American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross to argue for the possibility of constructing community in social interaction.Beneath the fierce criticism the two plays hold to contemporary society,lies Mamet's sympathy with individual freedom which is temporarily distorted into jungle fights.By employing the notion of market community originated in Max Weber's depiction,explicated in Friedrich August Hayek's advocacy for market economy in multi-disciplinary perspectives and reconsidered in Zigmunt Bauman's calling for individual ethic responsibility in community,the chapter reveals male groups' efforts in exploring social mechanism.In Mamet's critique confirms the market community based on individual freedom and social contract that differ from pre-modern community based on the intimacy of common ancestry and locality.Anyhow,the values represented by market should be confined in case it destroys personal life.On the other hand,how to achieve meaningful connection for people who have enjoyed freedom safeguarded by market community is brought into spotlights.American Buffalo questions private intimate relationship.It is problematized when it is used to formulate social bond.In this sense,Mamet's depiction of the failure of three-man "family" in American Buffalo as a miniature of society,besides criticizing the derogatory American dream consuming interpersonal relationship as many critics have pointed out,reflects that the closeness of family the men desired from others proves to be misleading in building extensive social bond.Through the lens of personal intimacy,the society would recede to insulated groups circumscribed by personal favors.Mamet's salesmen's admiration for performance illuminates people who attempt to detach themselves from personal views.Performance for the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross,cannot be simply regarded as the equivalent of deception although they indeed perform to deceive on certain occasions.Instead,they gain dignity in performing.Their performance means a lot in undertaking personal responsibility in indeterminacy and it directs to form a market community in social interaction with a focus on public world instead of an emotional union.Chapter three focuses on Mamet's recent plays,namely,The Disappearance of Jews,Homicide and Faustus,which clearly mark his revival of Jewish consciousness.His conversion to Judaism paints his thought of community with religious touches.Through analyzing these recent plays,the chapter demonstrates that Mamet upholds the spiritual essence of Jewish community.That is,by rejecting any form of idol including collective embodiment or self-worship,Jewish people can construct Jewish community.The Disappearance first takes identity issues into consideration.In the background of Jews having been greatly integrated into society in America,Jewish community attempts to maintain a delicate balance between complete assimilation and absolute traditional values by constant adjustment and creation.Reflection on Holocaust is drawn into building a sense of common destiny for Jews.Besides,communal bond highlighted in Jewish tradition is invoked to emphasize a meaningful interpersonal relationship in the society that is unbundled by technological rationality.What is more important,where it would easily slide into a bigoted tribalism when people relate identity with community,since identity is more than often regarded as a surrogate of community by drawing lines and limits,then in Homicide,Mamet holds that Jewish community should not confine itself in a racial enclosure.The essence of Jewish community is,instead of adhering to ethnic authenticity,to oppose idolatry as required by the Second Commandment in Judaism.To oppose idolatry means to defy the idol of collective entity and self-worship.By refraining from collective idols,individuals avoid oppositional dualism between abstract good and evil,fulfill personal agency in distinguishing good from evil in concrete contexts and construct meaningful personal relationship.In Faustus,Mamet reveals that as for individuals,even as learned as Faustus,they cannot reveal all mysteries of the world,not to mention the fundamental one.Although human beings have earned great dignity via rationality,they should not worship themselves as gods.Through the lens of Judaism,community is expressed as being against herding symptom and personal arrogance.Jewish community hence does not only provide a living space for Jews but also inspires the construction of a living community for human beings in the modern world.Male world in Mamet's works demonstrates that community is far from being a realized union of solidarity.Therefore,the lack of warmth and harmony can be justified in Mamet's male world.The playwright's conception of community points to a utopia that can never be realized but can provide inspiration in reality.His conception of constructive community begins with regarding the theatre itself as a community literally and metaphorically,goes to uphold the value of social interaction in public sphere,and finally roots in Judaist ethics of opposition to idolatry.It actually reveals the dynamics of community.At its center lie individuality that summons personal responsibility and human conscience cultivated in the development of human civilization.The emphasis on individuality leads Mamet to identify with the United States.The life and innovation of Mamet's community can sustain in imagination when it forgoes any embodiment.In this sense,once the country is represented as an ideal community in reality,Mamet's idea of community would lose intellectual vitality.