SOURCE: Pearce, Howard. “Plato in Hollywood: David Mamet and the Power of Illusions.” Mosaic 32, no. 2 (June 1999): 141-56.

[In the following essay, Pearce examines two female characters—one in House of Games and another in Speed-the-Plow—analyzing their identities as artists and how other characters and audience members relate to them.]

As Aristotle long ago observed, mimesis is a two-way street: as much as humans take pleasure in seeing representations of themselves, so much are they disposed to imitate what they see. As Plato's dialogues suggest, however, dramatic characters can take different forms, just as there are different ways of responding to art or to the dramatic experience: at one extreme there is the Socrates type who evaluates the performance by the standards of “thought, intelligence, memory … right opinion and true reasoning,” while at the other there is the Philebus type who abandons himself to the “mixed pleasures” involved in encountering the characters and events of a play (Philebus 11b, 50e). Contemporary philosophers, of course, continue to believe in the learning experience involved in theater, and indeed Hans-Georg Gadamer devotes a section of Truth and Method to this topic. As he sees it, drama as Erlebnis (“experience”) provides “something of an adventure” and operates by interrupting “the customary course of events. … It ventures out into the uncertain” (69). As he further explains in The Relevance of the Beautiful, for this very reason theater provides “the alien shock that shakes our comfortable bourgeois self-confidence and puts at risk the reality in which we feel secure” (64).

For David Mamet as for Gadamer, the theater challenges our ideas of what is real, engaging us in a “marvelous adventure filled with … risk and danger” (Some Freaks ix-x). Although Mamet is now most widely known as film writer and director (e.g. recent popular films like The Edge and The Spanish Prisoner), his stage career has also earned him recognition as a major playwright. American Buffalo in 1975 was the first of his critically acclaimed plays, followed by other successes such as A Life in the Theatre, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna. In addition, Mamet is known for his critical theorizing which has been dispersed in several volumes of essays, including Writing in Restaurants, The Cabin, and Make-Believe Town; and he has published fiction as well, notably The Village and The Old Religion. The diversity of his accomplishments, finally, also includes film directing, a role he performed in his House of Games. Both this film and the play Speed-the-Plow raise those questions about reality that are central to Mamet's drama, looking from one side and then the other at a woman's entry into a man's world. In House of Games the protagonist, the psychiatrist Dr. Margaret Ford, descends into the underworld to encounter Mike and his con men, whose base of operation is the bar and gambling house, the House of Games. From another perspective, in Speed-the-Plow the audience is engaged in the world of Hollywood entrepreneurs, Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox, who ritualize their treatment of a female interloper, the temporary secretary Karen.

Approaching these two characters, Karen and Maggie, as they encounter alien worlds and reveal themselves, needs to be illuminated by theoretical concerns—not only Plato's but also Mamet's and Gadamer's—about the existence and value of the aesthetic in a world of commerce and “serious” thought. As much as Plato sets up the antithesis of Socrates and Philebus, the philosopher and the aesthete, so much does Mamet undercut the distinction in a defense of the artist. Karen and Maggie must finally be seen in terms of this apologia. As I see it, since the occurrence of art in the world entails appearances—the illusions that Plato objects to in the artist as sleight-of-hand man—Mamet's habitual playing upon illusions must be recognized as a means of probing the reality of both his characters and their worlds. To present my case, after first looking at the two women in terms of theoretical issues I will follow first Maggie and then Karen in their encounters and their development. My moving in this way from the theoretical concerns toward a clearer and fuller view of these two characters is designed to show how they function as variations on the artist figure in themselves and in terms of their relationship to the audience. In observing that relationship with the audience, I will attempt to illustrate how the two women reveal the problematical nature of identity and involvement with others, with a view to suggesting how they represent the ironic role of the artist in the relationship with her world and audience.

Mamet's collection of essays Some Freaks begins with speculations on the artist as “freak,” including his view of himself as “one of those freaks privileged to live in the world of the Arts” (5), and concludes with his speculations on the significance of the Superman character. As he sees it, it is Superman's embarrassment at his own duplicity—his “two false fronts: one of impotence [Clark Kent], and the other of benevolence [Superman]”—that keeps him in “constant hiding” and implies his having “relinquished any hope of sexual manhood, of intimacy, of peace” (179-80). According to Mamet, Superman's apologia might read: “I do good but take no pleasure. … I pray that my false-self attracts no notice: forget about me.” Placed in a Platonic context, one might say that Superman's persona of benevolence and the power to see and safeguard the good, allies him with Socrates, just as Clark Kent's persona of impotence identifies him with Philebus, who in Plato's dialogue both intrudes and is summoned into the discussion several times, but is silenced by Protarchus, who tells Philebus that he is “no longer in a position to agree with Socrates or to disagree” (12a). A freak disqualified from entering the philosophical pursuit, Philebus is also like the artist, Socrates's Ion or David Mamet. His doubleness in the drama of this dialogue is an ambivalent withdrawal and assertion of his identity, grounded in his insistence that to be human is to be allowed to range from pleasure to serious thought.

This being human in a world in which identity and place are interdependent can also be thought of in terms of Heidegger's dasein wherein the activity of discovery involves moods and feelings as well as thought, and wherein being human demands a readiness to see afresh, to discover the alien in the commonplace and the familiar in the unheimlich, the “uncanny” (Heidegger, Being and Time 233). In House of Games and Speed-the-Plow Mamet presents situations in which attentive and empathetic response to character might uncover a sense of the sincere in an apparently cynical, game-driven world. In the deceiving worlds of these plays, the two women, Maggie and Karen, appear, whose identities emerge and change, and who are regarded by others as freaks and aliens. They themselves, however, journey toward an integration of the self as a realization of wholeness, and to a receptive audience they can be seen as offering the fullness of experience that ranges from Idea to sensual gratification, from philosophy to titillation, a journey toward the “mystic Conjunction of Opposites” (Freaks ix).

Socrates's world of flux is a condition wherein the serious and rigorous pursuit of knowledge is imperative but made difficult by the diversity and instability of what can be experienced. It is expected, however, that pursuit of the good and what is entailed in the good—the beauty of oneness, truth, changelessness—can attain that enduring and knowable idea. In Mamet's world, the possibilities of being are grounded in a perhaps inescapable uncertainty and illusion, which are more pervasive and intimidating than in Socrates's. Time and change disturb and disappoint the convictions that plot a sure journey toward discovery and understanding.

The versatility requisite in the worlds of Mamet's plays is not a matter of gaining power to build a rigid identity in an assured, fixed structure. Whereas the assurances of a protected structure speak the consolation of the familiar, keeping the identity secure and immobile, the call of adventure, even of the frivolous or the perverse, is an invitation into the strange otherness of a world not yet known, whose shadowy depths might reveal that what is to be discovered might not conform to what is expected according to ordinary understanding in a known world. This adventure toward discovery of identity and of other worlds is a “mixed pleasure,” mimetic in Aristotle's sense of the way that “the habit of imitating is congenital” and that man “learns his first lessons through imitation” (Poetics 20). The negotiations with others, interpreting them as they interpret us, are matters of both self-creation and discovery of others. Moving into the openness beyond familiar structures might allow pleasure as well as knowledge.

To the extent that openness to another dimension of reality throws the familiar world and self into suspension, it invokes the metaphor of the theatrum mundi. In this light, it is possible to find something invigorating in Socrates's conclusion that “in laments and tragedies and comedies—and not only in those of the stage but in the whole tragicomedy of life—as well as on countless other occasions, pains are mixed with pleasures” (Philebus 50b). There is also something encouraging about Edmund Husserl's observation that the inseparability of the experience and intentional objects of experience “leaves open the possibility that what is given, despite the persistent consciousness of its bodily self-presence, does not exist. … It was, we afterwards say, mere illusion, hallucination, merely a coherent dream. … Everything which is there for me in the world of things is on grounds of principle only a presumptive reality” (Ideas 131).

As instances of the movement toward the possibilities of discovery and change, Karen and Maggie, of course, reveal something of the tentativeness and uncertainty that oversee any such event. Each bears in herself the ideas of the incompleteness of knowledge and the radical letting go that are vital to encounters in a world that might fragment and scatter the convictions brought into it. This destabilizing of assumptions helps in turn to account for the qualifications to which critics frequently resort in their interpretations of Mamet's plays. Ann C. Hall, for example, in interpreting Maggie's interest in Maria's cigarette lighter, extends a Freudian reading to suggest that “this action may hint at lesbian desires or Ford's fear of such feelings” (142). Yet, although her feminist psychoanalytical concern with the essentiality of conflict between the sexes avoids questions of another essence in relationships—i.e. love-union-reunion—she recognizes that in the end Maggie has eluded her: “she remains the sphinx. Her gesture is mysterious, and we are the inquisitors” (148). Citing Luce Irigaray, Hall concludes, of both Games and Plow, not only that “the females are enigmatic” but also that “such subtle disruptions” have in the real world “profound consequences” (158).

Maggie appears at the center of House of Games as protagonist. If her identity was in the beginning a secret perhaps kept from herself as well as from others, her apparent recognition and reversal have to do with her journeying from her world into the alien underworld of the con men; she is driven toward it perhaps by a curiosity that must be sublimated into care, perhaps by the crass desire to practice her own con in writing another book, perhaps by the need for love or the need to make connections with and participate in the game or the drama that includes others “as storytellers or as listeners” (Writing in Restaurants 107). These “perhaps” argue that if we cannot make the (liberated) Maggie of the final scene conform to a single logic known to convince in our world, then it may be because she has from the beginning contained mystery. Her freedom in the end is not only an apparent freedom from the rigid persona of the beginning, the erected and therefore in some way counterfeit structure of self, but also a freedom from those who would find themselves resolved in her and bring her into another counterfeit structure of understanding.

As Maggie moves deeper into that underworld (the metaphor of descent is operative in both plays), any reading of her bildung should take into account her movement through dimensions, from one reality into another: from one game whose lessons learned do not necessarily serve in the next; from one dimension of reality, the play's illusion, into another dramatized dimension; from one dimension that casts brackets around another dimension's certainties suspending but not necessarily refuting those certainties. As Gadamer explains, bildung should be understood as an acculturation, as a process of formation and development that nevertheless does not transcend and dispense with the Bild, the root of the idea that retains the concrete image or picture. Nor is the process merely away from the self: “What constitutes the essence of Bildung is clearly not alienation as such, but the return to oneself—which presupposes alienation, to be sure” (Truth and Method 14). The loss or withdrawal of self is a forgetting. The recovery is not of that secure identical self but of a self made possible by “keeping oneself open to what is other … as the viewpoints of possible others. Thus the cultivated consciousness has in fact more the character of a sense. … It embraces its sphere, remains open to a particular field … is active in all directions” (17).

Maggie's mobility is the expression of a need to experience or to become something more than the successful role she has created, a need that is provoked by three questions. The first is from the Woman Patient (a murderess), who cites a mentor as having said that “we all try to run from experience … but that it will seek us out” (6). She challenges Maggie with the question, “Do you think that you're exempt … ?” (Mamet's ellipses). The second is from Billy Hahn, another patient Maggie is trying to help: “What do you think this is? Some ‘dream’? Maan, you're living in the dream, your ‘questions,’ 'cause there. is. a. real. world” (10; punctuation as in original). And the third comes from Maggie's mentor Maria Littauer, who has earlier advised her to “Give yourself all those rewards you would like to have” (8): “What gives you satisfaction? … you have something to do that brings you joy?” (30, 31). The questions are about who and what she is, and they challenge her to discover herself, to change, to find pleasure. They urge her to recognize that the world she thinks is real could be a dream and that she is not autonomous, that “experience” will “seek” her “out.” What she sees and what she becomes is a matter of seeking experience by moving from her secure professional world into that world of the con men who, after an opening gambit, invite her to join them and begin teaching her tricks.

It is only after she has insisted on deeper involvement in their game, which is set up to include major crime (grand theft and murder), that she moves into a third dimension within the underworld, discovering that the game has been an elaborate sham. That third dimension is the world in which she has been engaged but now seen from backstage, the vantage point of the audience when it sees through the illusion of the stage, and from that new position, sees the trappings of the performance. Wishing herself, as she says to Maria, out of the dream—“What would I not give if this was a dream, and …” (55; Mamet's ellipses)—Maggie comes to see that her participation in the events has been as in a theatrum mundi, that the world of the con men, who have been forthcoming in revealing their reality to her, has indeed been an elaborate orchestration for her. Discovering that Billy Hahn is driving the “vintage red Cadillac” (60) that they had “stolen” for their getaway, she goes to Charlie's Tavern at night, evidently to learn the full truth about their deception and/or to confront Mike.

“Sneaking into Charlie's through the back,” she witnesses the actors who had roles in the drama they staged, for her as participant and audience, being paid for their performances and discussing the details of how well they performed. The “businessman/policeman” asks, “How come I always got to play the straight guy … ?” (Mamet's ellipses). Like a disoriented audience, from backstage she sees actors appraising the roles they played, in a drama directed by Mike for her as an audience, and now interpreting her, the naïve participant. The relationship is a structure whose possibilities Mamet had found attractive for A Life in the Theatre, a play wherein the actors might perform for an audience that is, for the real audience, backstage: “Thus we see the actors' backs during their onstage scenes, and a full view of them during the backstage scenes—in effect, a true view from backstage” (A Life 9). As Maggie becomes the backstage audience, “Shielded by a stack of beer cases” (61), she watches and listens to the men; and she stands looking at them through the open woodwork of a booth, in effect a stage curtain or a visual frame that sets the other world apart.

This appearance of a reality behind the performance prepares her for the next-to-last scene, in which she casts, directs, and plays a role in a drama or con game that she devises for Mike. Her self-justification to Mike—“You raped me. … You took me under false pretenses. … You used me” (68)—elicits his counter-interpretation: “And you learned some things about yourself that you'd rather not know.” His self-justification—“I never hurt anybody. I never shot anybody” (69)—and his naming her a “whore” (70) raise the same questions about identity that the Woman Patient had earlier proposed (29): whether someone can be made a whore and is not responsible for what he/she becomes, or whether, in becoming a whore, the becoming is what she already was. Mike's and Maggie's self-justifications are uses of language that, rather than resolving questions of motive, action, and reality, direct attention toward the unknown. The questions hover irresolutely over the final scene, where Maggie's stealing the cigarette lighter is an action that presents, before the audience's eyes, her withdrawal from their understanding and freedom from their judgments. In adopting Maria's words—“forgive yourself”—in autographing a copy of her book, has she gained new insight and a new lesson for life or is she merely providing a new rationalization allowed by her old Freudian psychology?

An audience trying to understand Maggie, to appreciate her, to identify with her, or to make use of her in a mimetic act of justifying the self or an understanding of the world, cannot bring her and her world of illusions to full interpretation and Aristotelean resolution of form. Attending her in her journey into and out of the underworld remains a “marvelous adventure filled with … risk and danger” as well as pleasure. The world of the film is a “mixed pleasure” that is not like the figures that can be made “straight, or round … which a lathe, or a carpenter's rule and square, produces” (Philebus 51c). That “mixed” experience involves “the pleasures of scratching” in which we might, like Philebus or Mamet's freaks, indulge ourselves. In the assumed innocence of simply enjoying the play or film, we share Maggie's desire to experience what can bring her and us an immediate if fleeting “joy.”

These pleasures might lead us, however (we being like Maggie instinctive and irrepressible interpreters), to enter the world of ideas and, like Philebus, intrude ourselves into thoughtful debate about plays, about ideas, about reality; we might be encouraged to engage in both the aesthetic and in “philosophical” thought about “truth.” Even though the ephemerality of the events seen on screen would mark them as Platonic eidolons, the aesthetic justifies itself in the retention of bild in bildung. Maria's cigarette lighter is early in the play such an image for Maggie, and it embodies ideas not only of experiencing momentary beauty but also of the enduring value that “will seek us out,” that is bestowed and taken to oneself: “It's so beautiful. It's old and it's heavy, and it looks like someone gave it to you” (8). Like the beauty of the two cigarette lighters, so is Maggie's made a focus, a center of attention. Initially, when she picks up Maria's lighter, the image we are to see is: “Angle—Insert. Ford, holding the gold lighter, lights her cigarette.” The play's final image is “Angle”—Maggie lighting a cigarette with the stolen lighter and smiling (72). She has found the “good things in life,” including tobacco, that give pleasure. She is like Philebus, silent about what has been her self-realization, while she remains for the world to which she returns, as professional psychiatrist, the wise and caring Socrates, whose benevolence and knowledge are presented in a new book (that remains for the audience undefined).

While “Dr. Margaret Ford” is protagonist in her play, Karen in Speed-the-Plow is on the periphery: neither she nor Charlie Fox but rather Bobby Gould is the protagonist and who in the opening scene performs histrionically so that, like Willy Loman, attention will be paid to him. In a world of male conquest and caste, Karen is the woman; in the unassailable structure of Hollywood business she is a temporary secretary who needs instruction about the chain of command, about providing coffee, using the telephone, making reservations at a restaurant. Karen comes from an indeterminate outside, appears in this world uninitiated and unsponsored, and is drawn into a game of sexual conquest grounded in the calculated deceptions of life fabricated and played as a game. Ostensibly she is more “naïve” than Maggie; indeed she uses that word to apologize for her actions: “it was naïve of me” (39) and later she reflects upon the attribute: “I don't think it's attractive, and I don't think it's right. To be naïve” (56). Karen, however, might also be interpreted as using language to create a false image of herself, especially since she later confesses to Gould that she knew “what the deal was,” that she knew he “wanted to sleep with” her (57) when he assigned her the task of giving the book he has been asked to consider a “‘courtesy read’” (42).

Karen, moreover, sees through the superficial deceptions of Gould's game to read his character. She seems to have perceived something in him worthy of risking the venture in filming the book; accordingly, she is willing to give herself, perhaps to serve only by making coffee (52), to an improbable filming of the book's world in decay, in extremis, which she believes might not be appreciated but is needed by its audience. Gould seems to validate that perception of him not only in his own naïveté, his belief that she might, possibly, love “me for myself” (36), but also in his vulnerability to the book that she gives more than a “courtesy read.” Reading it as the play opens and Fox enters excited about the “Buddy picture” (11), Gould blocks him five times by reacting to and reading from the book and asking Fox to read. Confronted by this thing that is “not quite ‘Art’ and … not quite ‘Entertainment’” (3), Gould characterizes himself as already fascinated by the book that does not meet Hollywood expectations; and he invokes tragic or heroic images from the past, from Euripides and Dante: “When the gods would make us mad, they answer our prayers. … I'm in the midst of the wilderness. … I have inherited a monster” (3).

Karen and Gould can be regarded as agreeing with Mamet in their naïve belief that this work about a world in decay by an “Eastern Sissy Writer” (23) would be good for a world that thinks it wants the buddy film with “Action, blood, a social theme” (13). Like them, Mamet thinks his world does not know itself or its needs, and he represents himself as sharing the world's ambivalent nature, as having both Philebus's genuine aesthetic instincts and Hollywood's crass love of entertainment and money. In Writing in Restaurants, on the one hand, he declares that “to work in the true theater … is a great job in this time of final decay” (116); that, since “all plays are about decay … the theater exposes us to the notion of decay, to the necessity of change” (111). On the other hand, in The Cabin he explains his attendance at the Cannes film festival in terms of “whore that I am” (144).

Karen and Gould, then, reflect that ambivalence of the playwright, inclining, on the one hand, toward Philebus and Clark Kent while reflecting, on the other, the attractiveness of Socrates and Superman. And they know, if not the truth, at least some questions about Art and Love, questions that turn and accuse Gould when he chooses a bad angel Fox, and abandons his good angel Karen. When in the play's last moment Gould has regained his status of power with Fox by the rules of their game, the Euripidean question re-emerges: if Gould “wanted to do good … but … became foolish” (81), was not his naïve “foolishness” with Karen a kind of madness by Hollywood standards, and was that madness perhaps a prelude to the moral or spiritual destruction that is evidenced by his abandonment of Karen and the “arty” novel for the commodity of entertainment? Perhaps what is considered “madness” in the real world's (Hollywood's) estimation is a true sanity and is the “purity” that Gould prayed for (43). Gould repudiates Karen and the question of art because he has found himself again, and he re-establishes himself in a cynical world by the restrictive definitions of reality and value that keep him safe with a sense of power in that world, which is a time of “final decay” that masks itself in illusions of personal power and control.

The convictions by which Gould interprets life are those of the Hollywood establishment, and he confirms its values. A naïve Karen enters it as a disturbing voice questioning Gould's certainties and his values and embodying in her character the ideas of uncertainty and possibility. Trying to fix her in the structure of their world's thinking, Fox defines her as either a “floozy” who would sleep with Gould for no “good” reason or an ambitious type who “would schtup you just to get ahead” (35). In anger and frustration he finally asks, “What is she, a witch?” (69), tacitly admitting that his crafty understanding has been unavailing. When in Act One she answered his question of whether this is “a good place to work” with a polite “I'm sure that it is,” he mockingly replied, “How wonderful to be so sure … to have such certainty in this wonderful world” (28). Her essential uncertainty is evident in her actions, however, as well as in the words she speaks. Asked by Gould to do merely a “courtesy read,” she reacts instinctively, “But what if there is something in the book?” (42); when Gould declares that “this job corrupts you … and everything becomes a task,” she asks, “Does it have to be that?” (43).

The “purity” that she offers him is the acceptance of the world and the self as they are. People in this world are not gods or angels; as she teaches Gould at the end of Act Two, they might best be described in terms of the words she has found in the book, “weak … depraved … frightened … lost” (58), and their need for “companionship” affirms both animal pleasure and the need that can be called “love,” that possible uniting with another. She understands Gould's fear and dishonesty, she knows their affinity, and she knows that if they, having come so near to death in a dying world, are open to change, there is reason for hope in that “sometimes it reaches for us.” The idea of letting experience come to us, which must be learned by Maggie and is affirmed here by Karen, also echoes that interdependence that characterizes Heidegger's dasein, being-in-a-world. The “it” that “reaches for us” might look like the “monster” that Gould says he “inherited”; the world might be, as Gould defines Hollywood/reality, a “sinkhole of slime and depravity … garbage” (28-29). But Karen's question—“why is it garbage … ?” (Mamet's ellipses)—confirms not a contradictory understanding of reality as immaculate benevolence but a readiness to see and become what is possible, to entertain the possibility that can arise only if things and people can change. Karen's development of a fervent belief in the message of the freakish book—that everything “has been sent” to us “to change us” (48)—attests to the book's having reached out to her in calling for a “return to the self” (58).

The “return to the self” is a truth revealed in a book that, coming from an alien voice far off in the East, postulates a world far different from the world of sham and illusion that Fox and Gould make cozy for themselves. But that book's language, so poetic—that is, metaphorical and “arty”—can cause both Hollywood and the world of the play's audience to read the book with contempt. Ruby Cohn, for instance, twice labels the book's language “maudlin, mawkish, and quasi-mystic” (117), but she also seems to be tacitly responsive to a “pure” element in the language when she takes from the book the simple question that is the title of her essay, “How Are Things Made Round?” Christopher Hudgins feels that there is significance and truth in the ideas of the book but that these can be discovered only in spite of its language: “though the language is overblown, the idea of the line is a fine testimony to” the book's genuine value (221). A prejudice against the language of the book might be based in a manifold of subjective, social, and aesthetic presuppositions. We might in our time still be rather embarrassed about the exuberance of Romantic expression, or suspicious of what seems too free in traces of the Longinian sublime; but we might also be disdainful of the language of Freudian psychology, in which Maggie places her trust as she sets out on an adventure in the underworld, the bar and gambling house “House of Games.”

In the heightened language of the book, the metaphor of roundness is spoken as a question: “How are things made round? Was there one thing which, originally, was round … ?” (3; Mamet's ellipses). Echoing the metaphor, Fox and Gould play upon the idea of the circle, as when Fox observes about their careers: “Yes, but the Wheel Came Around. And here we are. Two Whores” (26). Fox's and Gould's appeal to the notion of roundness is derived from a past world, the conceptions of the Wheel of Fortune and the Fall of Princes. If the “Two Whores” have risen because “the Wheel Came Around,” then their world-business is to speed the plow, to make profit and prestige for themselves while they move upward on the wheel. Fox and Gould, in their industriousness and their commitment to art as commodity, echo, as Tony Stafford shows, the worthy farmer of Thomas Morton's Speed the Plough, a play Mamet ironically echoes in his title, since Morton's play treats seriously the substance and value of his characters' accomplishments. In keeping with Matthew Roudané's suggestion that there are traces of Emersonian thought in Mamet's work, we might also suggest that Fox and Gould inherit the illusion of Emerson's farmers, who thought that they “Possessed the land”: “Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; / Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet / Clear of the grave” (“Hamatreya” 9.35). For Fox and Gould, the answer to the question of how things are made round involves believing in the certainty of knowledge about the game and the predictability of actions in it: “It's a business, with its own unchanging rules” (29). In a world of circumstance and accident, however, the rise is not assured, and Gould's being afraid encompasses this awareness.

What he discovers through Karen and the book is that if we are in “the same state of decay as the world,” then the world as he has trusted it is “a dream, and delusion” (68). In the book's world of purpose and design beyond our grasp, being brought down to “that lonely place, the low place … under the bridge” (47), is a movement into deprivation and extremity that makes possible the reunification of self and the reunion of self with God and with another. Gould's glib allusion to Dante's wilderness in the play's opening and his impassioned echoing of the idea in Act Three—“I'm lost, do you hear me, I'm lost” (79)—imply that he is, in the book's interpretation of his life, at that low point, even if or indeed insofar as he has just been “promoted” in his real world, Hollywood. The structure of reality conceived in the book is Platonic; it directs an escape from the “gross infection rampant in the world” toward transcendent beauty: “silver is more powerful than gold; and the circle than the square or the triangle. He [evidently the protagonist in the book] thought of architecture” (73). This appeal to cosmic design in terms of architecture and geometry recalls the classical shape of the Ptolemaic system. In the Platonic view, Socrates's metaphors of ascent, like his images of pure form, involve a cleansing, a transcendence of the senses, in the rise toward knowledge on the journey up and out of the cave. Plato's answer to the question of how things are made round is to train the intellect for apprehension of beauty, truth, goodness, and the changeless roundness of the One.

The ascent toward perfect love and beauty in the Symposium is, however, a rise from the hiccuping, sneezing, and “silly jokes” of Aristophanes, and from his compelling image of “the real nature of man” (189a-b, d). The Aristophanic myth of human origins is another answer to the question about roundness. This “thing” for the Aristophanes of this dialogue is the being that was “globular” (189e), “whirling round and round like a clown turning cartwheels” (190a); having been split in half by Zeus, each partial being instinctively seeks its other half. As a definition of the human condition, this “clown” or “freak” suggests that in essence human beings require reunion, one with another, that the “innate love” that can “bridge the gulf between one human being and another” (191d) is of a sexual kind. Aristophanes's story voices Karen's belief, perhaps drawn from the book, that two human beings finding each other, whether their intercourse is named sex or love, is just such a minimal and essential action.

When Karen embraces the ideas in the book, it is not because of a belief that she has miraculously transcended her mortality but an acceptance of debility and need. She and Gould are “in the world. Dying” (59); her reading of the book merely for “courtesy” engendered hope that they might become better, “in spite of our transgressions,” that Gould might “make stories people need to see” (59-60); their uniting is a beginning of possibility: “you prayed to be pure,” she reminds Gould, “What if your prayers were answered?” Karen's answer to the question, her proposal that they “do something” that would “bring us alive,” is silenced by Gould's decision to bring things round within the confines of his little world; and when he repudiates her she goes out—into the indefiniteness, the irresolution of a future. If the book has in fact been for her a discovery or confirmation of values, her return to her world is a return, like Maggie's, to a self transformed. Although she is not necessarily deprived of the assurances she found in the book, she is deprived of reliance on the text; unable to find in it the words to which she could give voice, she becomes again the dependent naif, fearing that she is being “punished for my wickedness” (80). Repeating the words spoken earlier by both Fox and Gould—“I don't understand” (59, 64, 79)—she knows that she does not “belong here,” and her last words are “I hope” (80, 81).

Karen, like Maggie, seeks reality and truth in a world that must be read as text, as a constructed and already interpreted structure. Maggie, at the center of a world she has interpreted in her own text, discovers an alien world whose words are both true and false and whose actions direct her through illusion toward perception; her final performance is a wordless demonstration that leaves interpretation—of her new dress, of her stealing the cigarette lighter, indeed of who she now is—open. Karen, despite succumbing to the machinations of powerful men like Fox in the world of Hollywood, is left no less than Maggie with a privacy, a withdrawal from the audience's desire to know and interpret, and her failed attempt to retrieve the words of the book is an ambiguous performance no less than Maggie's final actions. What she tries to retain could be meretricious to the degree that the book's language is exalted and antithetical to the business language of Hollywood—where for Fox reading “coverage” reveals the truth and is preferable to reading a “talky piece of puke” (62). Yet howsoever improbably, the book might be able to reveal things brought round in a “vision of infinity” (58) that echoes the childlike vision of Thomas Traherne's poetry. Karen's retreat with an ostensible belief in a transcendent vision is like Maggie's return to her world of the professional psychiatrist: Maggie's assured and reassuring advice to “forgive yourself” and Karen's tremulous “I hope,” pointing in opposite directions, reveal the characters' retreats from an audience's full understanding of how they might be interpreted.

Maggie and Karen might appear to be fragments of the whole human being, “two false fronts”: Maggie representing the benevolence of Superman, and Karen the impotence of Clark Kent. They might, however, also be perceived as artists who, like Philebus and Ion and other freaks, never come fully and complacently into the circle of the theatrum mundi defined by the real world. Each seems to have found a satisfying or at least serviceable version of truth for herself. Like Philebus, they could tell more. Maggie with silent eloquence shows that she has moved toward an appreciation of Philebus's argument for pleasure. Rebuffed and silenced, like Philebus, Karen has shown what Philebus has been unable to argue, that the idea of sensual pleasure might be transmuted into the artist's pleasure and the satisfaction of making “stories people need to see,” just as the pleasure of sex might be transmuted into love.

Mamet's artist, like Philebus, is a freak on the periphery of a world of commerce, a world built on an illusion of power that is generated out of a simple and self-assured reality. Such voices speak, equivocally, to a world that would disdain or condescend to the artist's aesthetic. The artist as freak or expatriate asks the indulgence by which the pleasure of art is not repudiated as being what Socrates contemns, the pleasure of scratching. This voice can express a hope in art for the idea of a “Place Where Three Roads Meet, the mystic Conjunction of Opposites into the Whole, the possibility of True Love” (Freaks ix). This voice can offer speculation about possibilities in free mobility and the hope for growth in change, about the need for readiness on the part of artist and audience to be, like a character in a play, astonished.

Works Cited

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