Class struggle was replaced by racial struggle and this in turn has been replaced by the battle of the sexes as the main issue in North American life. Those who criticized President Clinton for beginning his term of office by opening up a debate with his decision to lift the restrictions on homosexuals serving in the armed forces were wrong to imply that this is a marginal issue. It was up to a few years ago; now it is the most hotly discussed issue in North American public opinion, something which in many different guises appears daily in court cases, administrative disputes, religious campaigns and political actions, and is generating a copious literature, both academic and journalistic.
In the small world of university life which I have been inhabiting for the past few months, first in Harvard and now in Princeton, I see it everywhere: the ‘sexual minorities’ of gays and lesbians present their demands in official publications and panels, they have offices and assessors provided by the university and, within the academic community, this leads to a hypersensibility laced with fear which ethnic minorities used to cause the last time that I came to teach in this country. Then the worst suspicion that could be levelled at a professor was to be racist; now it is to be sexist.
All this seems to me to be highly civilized, a praiseworthy effort to combat the discrimination suffered in all societies of the world by women and those who do not practice sexual orthodoxy. (The scale of these prejudices could be seen recently in Peru, when President Fujimori threw out on to the street, by a stroke of his pen, one third of the diplomatic service, accusing them of being ‘homosexuals’, and instead of provoking a storm of criticism, this evil action increased his popularity.) Like economic exploitation or racial discrimination, machismo is the source of innumerable and insidious injustices, legitimated by culture, committed by the strong against the weak — behaviour which Hayek, at the end of his life, argued was the Achilles’ heel of democracy: the power of the majority which is detrimental to the minority.
But since, in this case, the origin of the ill is in the warp and weft of
culture itself and is part of the nature of that body of ideas, practices, manners, ethical projects, myths and codes that dictates our behaviour, the real remedy for the problem will only come about through profound cultural changes. Administrative provisions and judicial action can lessen its impact, compensate some victims, correct the most flagrant excesses, but it will be difficult to root out. Until there is a deep-rooted reform in the way we understand sex and encourage understanding between the sexes in the world in which we live, prejudice will continue to cause harm and run like quicksilver between those superficial barriers.
And there is also the risk that by striking too often at just one of the enemy’s flanks or by seeing enemies where there are none, the fight against sexism is distorted and becomes ridiculous or else causes injustices which are equivalent to those that it seeks to outlaw. This is the theme, an explosive mix of fire and ice, of the most recent play written and directed by David Mamet, Oleanna, which opened in Boston a few months ago and has now come to New York.
In a private university, Carol, a student with problems, goes to the office of a professor to discuss her grades. He is just about to buy a house and obtain tenure. John likes to teach and has heterodox ideas which he has expounded in a book in which, for example, he challenges the idolatry of higher education as a universal right and argues that university classes often alienate the minds of the young. He is sure of himself and slightly arrogant. But he seems to be an understanding and responsible teacher because when he sees the insecurity and anguish of the young woman, he offers to help her: he’ll forget the grades, allow her to pass the course and he tells her to come to his office to discuss what she does not understand in the classes. He sees her out with an affectionate pat on the back.
This dialogue in the first act, banal in the extreme, then hangs like a magic object which becomes metamorphosed and unimaginably poisoning in the second and third acts when we discover that, deconstructed and reconstructed by Carol (who is now active in a feminist group), everything that John said — all those words that sounded so obvious and insipid — form the basis of an accusation of sexual harassment which will jeopardize the tenure and end up destroying the career of the professor.
The real characters of the play are the words themselves, shifting sands that can swallow up the best intentions at each step, sinister
traps which, in an unguarded moment, can ensnare the hunter. For in fact, everything that John said on that occasion could also make him appear abusive and exploitative, someone overreaching his power and taking advantage of his masculine condition. But for this interpretation to become possible, one would have to have listened to, copied down, twisted and adjusted the remarks of John with the sick sensibility of Carol and have imbued his gestures and silences with a significance that only the light of religion or an ideology could have given them.
The ceremony that takes place in the anonymous college of Oleanna refers to a contemporary problem and contributes to a lively debate in the United States but, in fact, it reproduces, in modern garb, a very old conflict: between intolerance and its victims, between fanaticism and its devastating effects. It is the old story of the inquisitor delving into the innermost reaches of an inoffensive person to detect heresy and of the commissar who invents dissidents and conspirators to reinforce orthodoxy.
The real tragedy of John, the pernicious consequences of Carol’s action, will only begin to be assessed after the curtain has fallen. Because, even if he finds another post, will this purged professor ever trust words again, will he express himself, when he gives his classes, advises his students or writes his books, with the spontaneity and conviction that he had before he discovered, thanks to Carol, how dangerous and destructive words could be? In future he will always have a secret censor crouching at the back of his consciousness, alerting him and restraining him. And although he lives in a society whose laws and rules guarantee freedom, when he comes to think, write and teach, John will never again be a free man.
The benefit to Carol of adopting an ideology is quite clear. What were once inhibitions and complexes with regard to others have become certainties; and the violence within her has been given shape and direction, transforming into a belligerence against men that selfdestructive feeling that had previously prevented her from studying, or rather, from learning. But that feminism which she took to sectarian and grotesque extremes is not a mere product of neurosis, an entirely fictional construction. The spectators discover this suddenly, in the final chilling minutes of the drama, when John, beside himself, pounces on the woman, hits and insults her, using the whole range of
macho scatology. They discover that, despite all, the dragon in skirts was to some extent right.
This work by David Mamet, like others by him, has a biting vitality because, apart from being constructed with the skill of a consummate craftsman, it is a polemical commentary on a contemporary problem. Does it signal the return of ‘committed’ theatre, which seemed to have been buried under many layers of happenings, absurd works or terrible musical comedies like Evita or Les Misérables? In any event, this is real theatre and although it is full of ideas and thought-provoking moments, it is no less imaginative and daring than this other type of theatre I have mentioned, which has a contempt for history and reality and strives for pure fiction, mere spectacle. And the public is responding very well to it, to judge by the interminable queues at the Orpheum Theatre and the prices of the ticket touts.
Some feminists accuse David Mamet of having made Carol a caricature, of having accentuated her defects out of all reality. I think, however, that Oleanna gives quite an accurate, and perhaps even understated, description of the excesses in the fight against machismo in certain university campuses in the United States. I have been astonished at the number of cases that I have come to hear about of professors reprimanded, moved or relieved of their posts for supposed misdeeds of this nature. So much so that, exaggerating somewhat but not much, I would venture to say that a spectre is running through the departments of Romance languages in the universities of the United States: sexual harassment. The most nervous are, naturally enough, my Italian colleagues. What most worries them is the so-called ‘visual contact’, which in some quarters is now accepted as a grave error, something that a student has the right to consider an offence, a sexist attempt at degrading her feminine condition. How to prevent one’s expression from taking on unconsciously, at the most unexpected moment, a lustful sheen or sinful glow? By killing libido with doses of bromide, so it seems, or for those enemies of chemicals like me, by always staring at the ceiling, at the wall.
Princeton, NJ, February 1993