The CEA Forum
Winter/Spring 2005: 34.1
___________________________________________
__________________________
THE PLAY'S THE THING:
USING TONY KUSHNER'S ANGELS IN AMERICA
AS A CRITICAL THINKING AND THEORY TEACHING TOOL
_______________________
How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.
~~ Lascelles Abercrombie
The methods developed in this article derive from my own teaching experience as assistant professor of English at Louisiana Tech University. I have taught American literature at Tech for six years, and I have taught Angels in America by Tony Kushner for three of those years. I teach Angels in a senior-level American literature seminar entitled “American Literature from 1865 to the Present.” Since Louisiana Tech is on the quarter system but gives semester credit for courses, this course usually meets twice a week for one hour and fifty minutes or three times a week for one hour and fifteen minutes. For those unfamiliar with the quarter system, a quarter lasts about eleven weeks.
“American Literature from 1865 to the Present” is required for English education majors. It usually has 10-25 students, and most of them are English education majors. It also often draws a few English majors and some students from majors such as business or engineering. One general purpose of this course is to give students a more in-depth look at American literature than their sophomore survey course did. I also try, in this course, to introduce (or reacquaint) students to literary theory, prepare students for the GRE, MFAT, and PRAXIS, present students some teaching methods for literature and composition, prepare students for graduate school in English or education, and continue developing critical thinking skills.
To meet these goals, I begin the course with Henry James, comparing his ideas in “The Art of Fiction” to his own writing in Daisy Miller. Then I move on to Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson. In Puddn'head Wilson we discuss the history of the work, allegories and symbolism. We analyze the work structurally and then move on to discuss cultural criticism and the cultural studies concept of essentialism. We then discuss regionalism and realism, comparing Twain to Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett. This course also stresses literary history, and we discuss the Moderns, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Southern Renaissance including the New Critics. It is at this point that I discuss structuralism again and compare it with poststructuralist movements. I also discuss modernism again and compare it to postmodernism. Then we read Pynchon's Entropy. I would like to point out here that I am not championing one movement or theory over another but rather giving students tools to use to interpret literature, or perhaps even names for the ways they already think about and interpret literature.
In defining postmodernism, I use Frederic Jameson's definition and description. Jameson's statement that “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces” (70) to help students begin to distinguish postmodernism from modernism. “[W]aning of effect” (72), “pastiche” (73), “historicism” (74), “nostalgia” (76), “simulacrum” (76) and “hyperspace” (80) are terms I present and define as characterizing postmodernism. Hyperspace, in particular, is a characteristic that students recognize from science fiction, and I use that familiarity to explain Jameson's idea of the “cognitive mapping” (92) of postmodern “hyperspace” (80). In Jameson's analysis, postmodern hyperspace is a space that can be navigated, but that is so different from modernist space (navigable with symbols, images, similes, etc.), that it seems to make no sense. We simply don't always come with the right tools to make meaning out of postmodern hyperspace. I compare postmodern hyperspace more to Babylon 5's idea of hyperspace than to Star Trek's warp drive or Star Wars' hyperspace.
In Babylon 5, hyperspace is the quickest way to travel, but it must be entered from “normal” space at jumpgates. Once in hyperspace, a ship can reach in days places it would take weeks or years to reach in normal space. However, hyperspace is impossible to navigate. It confuses all traditional means of navigation. Therefore, beacons have been set at each jumpgate. Ships must travel from jumpgate to jumpgate by targeting the beacons. To lose the beacon in hyperspace means to be lost forever, drifting in hyperspace. There's also the idea that too much time in hyperspace can make one insane. Entropy by Pynchon seems to operate with literary “jumpgates” at the beginnings of paragraphs. While there is a lot of unnavigable text there, it is made navigable by points Pynchon places in the story to make it somewhat coherent. The reader has to put a lot of work in to staying “on the beacon,” to continue the metaphor, but the student can see the mix of modernist structure and postmodernist structure.
To help explain what Jameson means when he discusses “cognitive mapping,” I like to use an example from a particular episode of Crusade (a short-lived Babylon 5 spin-off). In the episode entitled “The Well of Forever,” the eighth episode of the series, the technomage Galen convinces the spaceship captain that they can safely travel further into hyperspace than Captain Gideon thinks is safe. While deep in hyperspace, the crew sees what look like space animals in hyperspace. They marvel that these creatures survive in this vast red space of sameness. The viewer can logically assume that the animals have been there so long that they have adapted. Perhaps they can navigate hyperspace in a way that humans cannot. I tell students that perhaps they can navigate postmodern texts in ways that their professors cannot. Perhaps their children will have no problem reading Entropy because they will have adapted to postmodern hyperspace. They will have adapted and gained the ability, as Jameson calls it, to cognitively map postmodern hyperspace.
To help with my examples, by sheer luck, the English building at Tech is a good example of postmodern hyperspace because it is hard to navigate. No matter what door you enter, everything looks the same. Professors get lost going to offices, and students wander aimlessly. It's a wonderful example of how the sameness of the building impedes the ability to navigate. We discuss how our children may be like the hyperspace monsters, but for us, we still need modernist or structuralist markers to navigate postmodern works.
To practice again, we read the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and explore the postmodern and modernist elements in it. We also read Alice Walker's “In Search of Our Mother's Gardens” in the book by the same name. We discuss how postmodernism also says that there is room for many truths, no longer just one TRUTH. This idea opened up space for minority writers like Walker to be heard.
In our next novel, we tackle blends of surrealism and modernism/postmodernism with Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. After The Invisible Man, we discuss deconstruction. Ellison does a fantastic job of providing examples for students to practice deconstructing, especially along the lines of black and white.
To help students understand deconstruction as I explain it to them, I distribute a handout for students using excerpts from Terry Eagleton's classic Literary Theory: An Introduction and Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory . That handout includes Selden's introduction to Derrida's ideas that
People desire a centre because it guarantees being as presence . . . . if we try to undo the centering concept of ‘consciousness' by asserting the disruptive counterforce of the ‘unconscious', we are in danger of introducing a new centre, because we cannot choose but enter the conceptual system (conscious/unconscious) we are trying to dislodge. (87-8)
I explain “logocentrism” and “phonocentrism” and use the example of speech/writing to explain the idea of how the secondary term “contaminates” the primary term (88-9). I also use Selden's explanation of Derrida's thought and his description of “violent hierarchy” and his deconstruction of the binary nature/civilization as an additional example (89). Selden also deconstructions good/evil using Milton's Paradise Lost and ends his explanation with the declaration, “Deconstruction can begin when we locate the moment when a text transgresses the laws it appears to set up for itself. At this point texts go to pieces, so to speak” (89-90).
Finally, I turn to Eagleton's extremely clear example of deconstruction wherein he deconstructs male/female. “'Deconstruction,'” Eagleton explains, “is the name given to the critical operation by which [binary] opposition can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning” (132). Eagleton then relates deconstruction to ideology: “Deconstruction tries to show how [binary] oppositions, in order to hold themselves in place, are sometimes betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves . . . .” Eagleton explains, “Derrida's own typical habit of reading is to seize on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work . . .and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a whole” (133).
After we go over the handout together and practice deconstructing binaries on the board (full/empty, black/white, male/female, nature/civilization), then we discuss how every time one element of the binary is mentioned, one must also by necessity bring up its opposite. I draw a glass of water on the board and mark it half full. We discuss how we have no term for the middle. Half full means halfway between full and empty. Between means between full and empty. Always the middle is delineated in reference to the binary terms. But the middle exists, we simply have no language for designating it except in relation to the binaries. Deconstruction points to that lack. We discuss how deconstruction takes things apart, but it provides no direction for putting things back together, which makes it objectionable to many. Finally, we talk about how deconstruction demonstrates to many that everything is not paired off into binaries, but is really part of a larger whole. For example, earth and sky are seen as opposites, but they are really parts of a larger whole. When I believe students have the rationale and theory down, we break it into steps on the board. It usually goes something like this:
Step 1: Recognize the binary. For example, male/female
Step 2: Identify the primary term and the secondary term. Male, assumed to be first, is the primary term. Female, assumed to be a second-comer and weaker element, is the secondary term.
Step 3: Identify how the primary term is in danger of contamination from the less pure, secondary term. For example, men who do not prove their “manliness” every day may be insulted by being called female or perhaps even reduced socially to the status of female.
Step 4: Show how the term is in violent hierarchy. For example, men come from women and are, therefore, a part of a woman's body for at least part of their lives. This makes female the primary term. One must then show how the terms, even switched in importance, are in violent hierarchy. Woman cannot exist without man because it takes both to procreate.
Step 5: Recognize these “opposites” really aren't opposites at all, but are part of a larger whole (humanity) and cannot signify without each other. Woman is not the opposite of man, but is necessary to man, as man is necessary to woman. One will not exist without the other.
When students have grasped these concepts, we are ready to discuss Kushner. I pose the question at the end of the handout: Angels in America never seems to signify anything enough to allow us to construct meaning within the modern sense. Yet it's signifying something. It seems to have deconstructed itself before it was written and was written after the center was removed and betrayed as a fraud. How do you read that and come away with anything more than confusion? And I promise the students that Kushner is up to more than just confusing them. I also challenge them to find the beacons with which to cognitively map this postmodern hyperspace.
At this point in the quarter, the class will have worked for six weeks on tools with which to tackle Kushner. We will have three hours and 45 minutes of class time for discussion of Kushner. Despite the time crunch, I still begin slowly by assigning the first act and giving a reading quiz. For the first day of class, we walk through a close reading and discussion. I begin by asking about the title. The subtitle is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” I ask what a fantasia is. We discuss the Disney movie Fantasia . Then I ask what a national theme is. Answers include freedom, patriotism, or even safety. Then I ask what a fantasia on national themes would be like. The imagined blend of Disney-like elements and national themes usually provokes laughter. Finally, I suggest they throw the word “gay” into the mix. Usually, the class comes to the conclusion that a gay fantasia on national themes would probably look something like Angels in America.
Sometimes students want to simplify the play into a trite, “Gays are good people.” However, I push students away from that reduction because it impedes a lot of beneficial critical thinking that needs to be done. It must not be missed that the arch villain of the entire play, excluding the AIDS virus, is Roy Cohn. If this play were simply a song and dance about the goodness of gay people, it certainly should have omitted Roy Cohn, or at least hidden or changed his sexuality.
Beginning with the first scene, the Rabbi discusses America and pronounces, “No such place exists” (10). I ask the class what he means by that. I point out the ideas he uses to lead up to his statement. For example, Sarah Ironson brought the past to the present. The past is all there is. And when we become nostalgic for a simpler, slower past, it is probably not for the one Ironson lived in. Her life was probably difficult and full of sacrifices. This is one example of the postmodern idea of nostalgia.
In the next scene, Roy describes his vision of the universe to Joe. This is the first of many images throughout the play that describes things falling apart. “I see the universe, Joe, as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity, but instead of grains of sand it's shards and splinters of glass” (13). In postmodernism, the self becomes fragments of identity. Although Joe and Roy see the world in binaries, with order on one side and chaos on the other, and although they wish to restore (their) order to the world, images of chaos and fragmentation seem to rule the mood of the play. For example, in scene three Harper begins the scene with a description of fragmentation: “old fixed orders spiraling apart . . . . But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way” (16-17). Related imagery of motion recurs throughout the play, as well. Mr. Lies' first appearance brings a catalogue of movement: “We mobilize the globe, we set people adrift, we stir the populace and send nomads eddying across the planet. We are adepts of motion, acolytes of the flux” (17).
An example of postmodernist waning of effect occurs at the end of scene three. All students perceive that the romantic expressions of Harper and Joe's marriage are completely unromantic. In their romance, they point to how unromantic a couple they are. There are no deep feelings in this marriage, or at least not deep feelings of love and affection. In their conversations throughout they play they are merely surfaces to each other. The romance deconstructs itself immediately.
In the middle of scene five, Joe describes to Harper how Reagan is going to restore “truth” and “[l]aw” (26). But in a postmodern world with room for more than one truth, it is hard to understand exactly how truth will be restored. Indeed, in the conversation that follows with Joe and Harper, Joe attempts to create meaning by setting up binaries, and Harper repeatedly disregards or deconstructs those binaries.
In scene six there appears an interesting chance to frolic with the binaries again. As Joe and Louis tease each other, Louis says he is upset because he has a “[r]un in [his] nylons” (30). This is, of course, a good example of camp. Louis immediately pushes a stereotype—that gay men are women—to the limit. After all, the average woman would not cry if she had a run in her hose (assuming the average woman wears stockings anymore). And Louis isn't wearing hose. But through camp he is using the stereotype of female vanity and hysteria to signify his gayness. Louis is “over the top” from the beginning.
It may be hard for students to understand initially all that is going on in this scene. I try to explain that homophobia is related to the struggle some men feel that they face at defending themselves from the label “woman.” (The Eagleton example also helps in this discussion.) After all, as most male students will tell you, the worst insult to most ninth grade boys is that of “sissy.” And the defense of manhood goes on daily. The boy who wins the wrestling match on Monday must be able to defend his title on Tuesday so as to keep his manhood. However, for women, being the “second comers” in the gender game, at least in a male-dominated society, there is nothing to defend. Therefore, in general, women display homophobia less than men. And penetration is something that happens to women, not men. For a man to be penetrated unmans him. So here we have Louis, discussing his imaginary nylons and introducing himself as Louise, ironically, in the “men's room.” Kushner seems to be opening up a wider space for the label “men.” This is when I pose the question, is Kushner opening the label “men” up so wide that the label is meaningless? And how would that then relate to other events going on in the play? Can one be a gay Mormon? What happens if we break down the binaries? Can we live in postmodern hyperspace? And is that what Kushner is pointing at? Is that the challenge? Why might Kushner want to move into postmodern hyperspace? I like to continue reminding students of our focusing questions, but I want them to come up with some solid, supportable answers themselves before our discussion of Kushner is over.
We continue the close reading with Harper's scene with Prior. Harper seems to hit on Jameson's idea of pastiche when she tells Prior, “Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions” (32). She then moves on to nostalgia when she proclaims,
So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing? (32)
Harper is beginning to see the flaws in the binaries, but she cannot navigate without them, so the world appears in chaos to her. Prior chimes in, “It's something you learn after your second theme party: It's All Been Done Before” (33). Jameson pronounces, “[T]he producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture” (74). In Jameson's postmodernism, it has all been done before.
In a final stab at the binaries, Roy pronounces that he has liver cancer because he cannot be a homosexual. He does not deny that he has sex with men. However, for Roy, one with as much power as he has cannot be on the “second comer” side of the binary. If “heterosexual” is the primary term, and Roy is a primary man, then no matter what evidence to the contrary, Roy is siding with the primary terms. The question is posed at the end of Act One, can Roy out-binary AIDS? Can the disease be convinced that it is a plague of the powerless and, therefore, cannot kill Roy? We know the answer. Roy will die. What is the significance, then, of his decision to reject the disease because he has power? Before ending the first class period, I ask students if they have any questions. Because northern Louisiana is predominantly Southern Baptist with a very small Mormon and Jewish population, many times students want to know how accurate the portayal of Mormons and Jews is; if homosexuals, Mormons, or Jews are offended by the stereotypes; and what the eighties were really like. We discuss the realism of the play regarding time period and attitudes, and I ask students to finish the play for the next period.
For the second class period, students are asked to finish reading the play, and they are given a quiz on their reading. While we have spent much time discussing postmodernism and deconstruction, it is in structuralist readings that students have spent the most time and feel the most comfortable. I know that they want to make sense of Angels in America . They want to find a theme. And perhaps they are even thinking, “There is no theme here!” However, I don't want to sidestep a critical thinking opportunity by continuing the close reading and handing them a pat answer or interpretation, especially when I feel that in relation to this play, there are so many different interpretations that can (and have) been made and supported. For the next stage of the discussion, then, I hand out discussion questions and resource folders. I put students in groups of five and give them a set time period (30-45 minutes) to answer the questions and write a one-page collaborative paper interpreting Angels in America .
The four discussion questions are
1. What did we mean when we said we come to the play to find it already deconstructed?
2. List some of the postmodern elements of the play or postmodern references in character dialogue. Can you “add them up” in a modernist or structuralist way to create meaning? (Are there enough so that they start to “signify” in a modernist or structuralist way even though they are postmodern?)
3. Here is a reader review from Amazon.com. The reader gave the play one star out of five.
This ain't no angel, it's a turkey!, May 30, 1999
Reviewer: A reader from New York, NY, at the moment
If you were one of not a few people who sat through the stage production of Angels in America trying to squelch the little voice that kept crying out, "But the emperor is butt nekkid!," let it be silent no longer. This book is irrefutable evidence that it is so. Shorn of the splashy production gimmicks and bereft of actors who can rise above the banal material, this play is revealed as a sophmoric [sic], sentimental and slipshod piece of politically correct feel-goodism. Both the dialogue and the handling of the plot are embarrassingly awkward. The play reads as an exercise in adolescent hysteria masquerading as theatre. Despite my own experiences and attitudes regarding AIDS, I have to say that this bloated and pretentious vehicle would never have seen the light of day if it hadn't been about AIDS. (A Reader)
What do you think of the reviewer's ideas? Is the acclaim Angels has received actually a case of the emperor has no clothes?
4. Divide into groups of 4 or 5. Take one of the resource folders, and write a one-page, collaborative paper interpreting this play for today. You will decide whether or not it has a theme. If it does have a theme, you will explain what it is. If it does not have a theme, then you will explain the significance of that absence. You will share your paper with the class. Everyone will speak during the presentation.
The resource folders contain the entries on camp, postmodernism, and pages 207-208 from the entry on drama in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage ; pages 42-45 and 380-7 from Marjorie Garber's Vice Versa ; pages 16-24 of the introduction and the entry on the Recording Angel from Dictionary of Angels; the entries on Mormons, AIDS, McCarthy Era, Cross-Dressing, Tony Kushner, and Judaism from Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia ; John 11:1-45 and Genesis 32: 1-30 in The Layman's Parallel Bible( Zondervan Bible Publishers); pages 68-73 from “The Gay Absence” in Leo Bersani's Homos; and the entries on Postmodern, Postmodernist Period in English Literature, 1965-, and "Poststructuralism" in Harmon's A Handbook to Literature. I make sure a copy of the introduction and the entry on the Recording Angel in Dictionary of Angels are in each folder. The rest of the selections I divide up evenly into the number of folders I will need for each class.
I believe that any eclectic collection of information on various elements of the play would be good material for the resource materials for this activity. I do recommend The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia as a helpful source on religions for this activity because the entries are brief, give an overview of the religion, and then discuss the religion's dominant views regarding homosexuality; such information is helpful in understanding many of the characters in the play. I also prefer to use The Layman's Parallel Bible for this activity because students can see four versions of the relevant material (The King James, The Modern Language, the Living Bible, and the Revised Standard Version). Especially in the Genesis account of Jacob wrestling the angel, each version presents a slightly different picture of the account. Each version brings a different aspect to Joe's memory of the verse in Act Two, scene two.
The students have only a short amount of time to sift through the folders. They must delegate reading tasks and then report to their groups what they found that might be relevant. To speed this task, I highlight key sentences or mark important paragraphs in each selection as I put the folders together.
After 30 or 45 minutes, depending upon how much time we have left in the class period, students present their papers. I take notes on key ideas that recur, or interesting points of departure for discussion. Then, as a class, we continue discussing the play in depth. The direction of that discussion is always different, as each class sees the play in different ways. To conclude the discussion, we return to our focusing question: can we cognitively map the postmodern hyperspace of this play? And if we can, what do we find? In leading this discussion, I like to put everyone's ideas on the board. However, ideas that cannot be supported by the text or critical thinking and reasoning cannot go up on the board. For example, one idea that usually surfaces from the students is that Kushner is trying to find a world where everyone belongs and has equal rights and opportunities; however, such a world would be so radically different from our present world that it would be hard for us to understand that world or function in it. Therefore, if Kushner's play is trying to show us that world, it would probably be confusing to us. An example of a statement that I would ask a student to support, clarify, or discard might be “Kushner objects to drag.” There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence in the play regarding political ideas about drag. Louis and Belize mention it, and Louis states “I think it's sexist” (94). However, if we look at the rest of that particular conversation, it is clear that Louis is not making reasonable statements in this discussion. He seems, in fact, to be picking a fight with Belize to take his own mind off Prior's illness. Therefore, the potential for any of Louis' statements in this section to be themes of the play must be weighed carefully and considered in relation to such ideas' recurrence in other sections of the play.
At the end of our final discussion, I believe students have made their own minds up about theme and purpose in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. I know that they have practiced their close reading, literary analysis, and critical thinking skills. And I have given them an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of postmodernism and deconstruction. Many of the students go on to read Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and critical analyses of Angels , and to write their final research papers on their ideas of the theme in the play.
If this course were a play, Angels in America would be the climax. The course moves on to a viewing of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and comparison and contrast of The Crucible and Angels in America . I bring up W.E.B. Dubois' idea that all art is propaganda, and we use that discussion starter to link the two plays. The course's dénouement includes a selection of contemporary poetry and a short story by Sherman Alexie. At the end of the quarter, the curtain goes up, and I hope the audience walks away not with a memory of what the professor said the play meant, but improved skills to interpret and teach others to do the same.
Works Cited
A Reader. “This ain't no angel, it's a turkey.” Amazon.com. May 30, 1999. February 15, 2003. Available online: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/1559360615/customer-reviews/2/ref=cm_rev_next/102-8832905-6745749?show=-submittime.
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
Davidson, Gustav. Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels. Carmichael, CA: Touchstone Books, 1994.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Harmon, William et al ., A Handbook to Literature. 9th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Hogan, Steve and Hudson, Lee. Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia . New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. James Docherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 62-92.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches. New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1993.
Selden, Raman. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 2nd edition. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Summers, Claude J., ed. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
__________________________
Tamara Powell is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana Tech University. She has published on Shakespeare and James Wheldon Johnson.
Return to Table of Contents