[In the following essay, Quigley contends that Déjàvu offers some insight into why Look Back in Anger is “widely regarded as a very important but not very good play.”]

Forty years after it made its historic appearance on the London stage, Look Back in Anger is widely regarded as a very important but not very good play. A generation of British playwrights, including Brenton, Stoppard, and Hare, have acknowledged its importance to their subsequent careers, but most, including Osborne, who later described it as a “rather old-fashioned play,”¹ now see its weaknesses as clearly as its strengths. Hare's recent praise of the play is characteristically qualified:

I think that all of us, people who write, we all want to write a play after which things will be seen differently. … And most of us are very jealous of Osborne because he pulled it off. … Whether you think it's a good play or a bad play, it was a rallying point.²

This apparent disjunction between the quality of the play and the scope of its impact remains something of a puzzle, but one whose nature becomes clearer in the light of the sequel, Déjàvu, that Osborne wrote in 1991.

Structurally, of course, Look Back in Anger does indeed seem a rather old-fashioned play, tracing the separation and reconciliation of Jimmy Porter and his wife, Alison, through a stagey three-act format that hinges on Alison's pregnancy and Jimmy's wrath. To describe the pattern of events in that way, however, is to draw attention to the fact that Jimmy's wrath has little to do with Alison's pregnancy and that the old-fashioned plot line of separation and reconciliation contributes more to the scaffolding than to the substance of the play. The difficulties that emerge between Jimmy and Alison are symptomatic of much wider problems that are neither fully summarized in nor adequately exemplified by the strains and stresses of that particular relationship. Indeed, one of the oddities of a play that focuses upon a single major relationship is that so many other characters who never appear are, in one way or another, caught up in the action. Besides Cliff, Helena, and Colonel Redfern, who appear in minor roles, the following never appear at all: Jimmy's best friend Hugh and his mother, Mrs. Tanner; Jimmy's ex-girlfriend, Madeline; his dying father and his disapproving mother; Alison's brother, Nigel; their ferocious mother; their outraged family friends; a gay radical; a rabid bishop; and sundry other people who earn a name but not a place in the story. As the action of the play demonstrates, however, neither a name nor a place in the story suffice to gain characters an influential voice, for Jimmy's voice dominates everyone else's throughout, and this serves to make even more visible the disjunction between the scope of the issues raised and the restricted nature of the central relationship within which they are dramatically explored.

The evident imbalance between Jimmy's role and everyone else's is widely regarded as the major structural fault of a play to which many other faults are attributed. The ending, with Jimmy and Alison playing at squirrels and bears, seems to lack the weight of an achieved conclusion; the death of their baby seems conventionally contrived and a fortuitous rather than organic means of reconciling the estranged couple; the readiness of Helena to oscillate between love and hate for Jimmy to suit the movement of the plot seems likewise rather contrived; and the central character, Jimmy himself, exhibits an unappealing mixture of cloying self pity, deep-seated prejudice, radical insensitivity, and rampant inconsistency. So widespread are these faults that it becomes evident why so many find it difficult to reconcile the play's structural limitations with its remarkable historical impact. But if we are to come to terms with the play, it must be by understanding the peculiar power of its odd structure, not by explaining its problems away. Indeed, there are few more remarkable things about this remarkable play than the famous description that Osborne offers in his initial stage directions of the limitations of the character who is, in effect, to carry the action of the whole play:

[Jimmy] is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.³

The “disconcerting mixture” of traits exemplified by the play's central character is thus no accident, and Osborne anticipates the variety of responses Jimmy's behavior will provoke. His final sentence summarizes, in effect, a problem that seems central both to the character and to the play. Jimmy's aggressive rhetoric, which constitutes so much of the play's action, exhibits a savagery so widely deployed that it threatens to rob Jimmy of any clear point and the play of any clear goal.

To begin to make any sense of so peculiarly structured a play we need to come to terms not only with Jimmy's prominence and peculiarities but also with a further dimension of structural and tonal diversity: the one that generates Osborne's recurring insistence on the humor of a play that seems to have little to be humorous about. Jimmy's most famous remark, for example, that “There aren't any good, brave causes left” for his generation, is delivered not bitterly, as many might expect, but “In [Jimmy's] familiar, semiserious mood” (104). Jimmy's humor and the “cheerful malice” that Osborne refers to at the outset are interwoven with his anger and aggressiveness throughout the action, baffling everyone at one time or another, but particularly Helena during their brief romance:

JIMMY
Do I detect a growing, satanic glint in her eyes lately? Do you think it's living in sin with me that does it? (To Helena.) Do you feel very sinful my dear? Well? Do you?
She can hardly believe that this is an attack, and she can only look at him, uncertain of herself.
Do you feel sin crawling out of your ears, like stored up wax or something? Are you wondering whether I'm joking or not? Perhaps I ought to wear a red nose and a funny hat. I'm just curious, that's all.
She is shaken by the sudden coldness in his eyes, but before she has time to fully realise how hurt she is, he is smiling at her, and shouting cheerfully at Cliff.

(97)

These oscillations between humor and seriousness in Jimmy's behavior are exemplified most clearly in the newspaper rituals and music hall routines into which the characters are likely to lapse at any moment, but the humor has larger consequences than that of simply amusing the audience. The humor is characteristically an ironic humor that serves several purposes, not the least of which is that of saving the play from collapsing under the weight of Jimmy's self-pity and self-concern. Ironic humor provides distance, both for the audience from Jimmy and for Jimmy from his obsessive concerns. And this is of major importance in a play that is in many ways about the recurring problem the characters confront of relating their private lives to the urgent social issues Jimmy repeatedly raises. As Helena at one point exclaims in exasperation, “Jimmy, can we have one day, just one day, without tumbling over religion or politics?” (98). Jimmy's humor at his own, as well as everyone else's, expense prevents him from coming across as either an obsessive narcissist or an ideological fanatic. The humor serves, in effect, both to complicate his perspective and to establish a connection between the diverse issues that alternately command his attention. And this process of connecting diversity rather than converting it to uniformity is of both structural and thematic significance to a play that exhibits an innovative approach to some aggressively challenged conventions. But it is the nature of those conventions and the room they leave for establishing alternatives that helps us recognize what Osborne was trying to achieve by mixing rather than merging attitudes, aims, and anxieties.

When Alison abandons Jimmy midway through the play, she leaves him a note that concludes with “I shall always have a deep, loving need of you—Alison” (90). The rhetoric of the letter, as much as the decision to leave, makes Jimmy furious, and he denounces its civilized sentimentality as characteristic of a homogenizing way of life and of writing plays for which he has complete contempt. “Deep, loving need! I never thought she was capable of being as phoney as that! [To Helena.] What is that—a line from one of those plays you've been in?” (90). Jimmy would have much preferred, had Alison been intent on leaving, that she emphasize, rather than diminish, their differences by denouncing him as she feels he deserves: “Deep loving need! That makes me puke! … She couldn't say ‘You rotten bastard! I hate your guts, I'm clearing out, and I hope you rot!’ No, she has to make a polite, emotional mess out of it!” (90).

It is, of course, the kind of play that presents “a polite, emotional mess” that Osborne is trying very hard not to write. Both Jimmy's biting savagery and his ironic humor give this play a tonal range, and with it a range of implication, that lies beyond that characteristic of plays, particularly Rattigan's plays, that immediately preceded Osborne's on the London stage. The genteel delicacy and reserved nostalgia of the characters in Rattigan's Separate Tables (1954), for example, provide an illuminating contrast with what Osborne was trying to achieve with his oddly structured play. Whatever the virtues of Rattigan's plays (and there were many that Osborne overlooked), they often depicted characters whose determination to cope in difficult circumstances exemplified the civic virtues characteristic of a widely unified and steadily expanding country in which everyone was expected to do his/her social duty for the greater good of all. However, once English society, after World War II, began to lose both its sense of external destiny and its sense of internal unity, well-mannered acceptance of one's diminished lot seemed, to Jimmy, as to Osborne, a betrayal of social responsibility rather than a salutary example of it. The cheerful malice and savage humor of Jimmy Porter are thus Osborne's ways of widening the range of response of a country in increasing trouble and unable or unwilling to confront it. But this widening of the range of awareness of an increasingly divided society brings with it structural problems, not the least of which are those of focus and direction, that have left their mark on the play in general and upon Jimmy in particular.

One cannot, of course, deal with the structural imbalances of Look Back in Anger without relating them to the widespread acknowledgement that Osborne's plays are often “state of England” plays. While the thematic implications of that concern have been widely recognized, the structural implications have received much less attention. Yet Osborne's determination to grapple with the difficulties of writing a play about England at a time of radical national change is precisely what has precipitated the odd disjunction between the play's historical importance and its apparent structural infelicities. The key difficulty such a play confronts is that of preparing a canvas large enough to deal with the diversity of national themes without thereby losing the dramatic intensity generated by detailed attention to particular characters. The difficulty of reconciling individual and social concerns is thus an awkward issue both for characters seeking to impose some shape on their lives and for the author trying to establish an appropriate shape for the play. And it is only if we recognize the structural complexity of the situation Osborne was exploring that we will be able to make sense of the mixed moods, shifting contexts, and inconsistent arguments of a play that seeks to deal with a national situation by focussing the action primarily upon an idiosyncratic character whose voice is clearly not meant to function as a representative one.

To clarify the peculiar structural role of Jimmy in the play, we might consider again the structure of Rattigan's Separate Tables. In that double bill of one-act plays, Rattigan locates his characters in a state of England context by placing them in a residential hotel in the seaside resort of Bournemouth. The hotel location provides a convenient site of intersection for the lives and experiences of a variety of English people whose current interaction reveals both the diversity of their pasts and the common rules of social exchange that English society has taught them to observe. The key tensions in the two plays are generated directly from the gaps that open between the competing claims of the public and the private, the social and the individual, and the past and the present in a postwar England no longer able to sustain a narrative of national destiny that would serve to bridge its various social divisions.

Within the framework provided by a community rhetoric of “deep, loving need” and a shared set of rules for public decorum, the plays are beautifully structured, and they provide a painfully revealing exploration of the necessity for and inadequacy of self-sacrifice in a world in imminent decline. But, for Osborne, the plays lack the range and intensity of feeling that are needed to deal with an England whose decline should not be sadly recognized and nobly accepted but be angrily resisted with a range and intensity of response commensurate with the impending loss. And the outraged voice of protest is to be a means of registering not just a sense of personal deprivation, but also a sense of what becomes central to the play: intergenerational responsibility and betrayal.

When Jimmy looks back in anger, he is generationally situated as a voice of contemporary youth even as he is personally agonizing over the deaths of his father and his best friend's mother, struggling to come to terms with the hostility of his wife's father and mother, and grappling unsuccessfully with the implications of his and Alison's own imminent and aborted parenthood. To pursue the thematic implications of this generational approach to the state of England issue, we need to recognize how Osborne decided to deal with it structurally. Clearly it would have been possible for Osborne to follow Rattigan (and even Brecht) and widen the social canvas to give more time to opposing points of view and to include characters from a broader range of society. The danger would immediately be that the more characters and the more widely representative the characters the less room there would be for detailed presentation, in-depth exploration, and convincing dramatization of the complex authenticity of any individual character's response to England's changing world. What Osborne does instead, at great risk to the structure of his play, is to establish not one hotel room but one sensibility, that of Jimmy Porter, as the site upon which the generational crosscurrents of declining English society would be tracked. The gains would be the intensity of a detailed and lengthy personal response. The potential losses would be those of balance, representativeness, and persuasiveness. And it is precisely in terms of those apparent strengths and weaknesses that the play has widely been received. But if we are to do the play justice, we need to see clearly what Osborne managed to achieve by establishing a single idiosyncratic sensibility as his site of dramatic engagement with England's assorted and accumulating ills.

As we have noted, we will understand little of Jimmy's erratic and explosive behavior if we do not begin with a recognition that when critiquing the lives of other characters as well as himself, he is engaged as much with a national situation as with personal relationships. But he is no allegorical figure, and the play is not one of abstract analysis or general illustration. Osborne's effort throughout is to make Jimmy's response to the England invoked both idiosyncratically excessive and generally revealing. Jimmy functions in the play not by being balanced, authoritative, and right, but by raising in inflammatory ways questions that remain troubling even when the idiosyncracy of their formulation has been acknowledged. And this is, of course, the source of Jimmy's appeal even to those characters and members of the audience who are likely to find him the most objectionable.

Alison, Colonel Redfern, and Helena, in turn, acknowledge not that Jimmy is right but that some of his concerns should also be their concerns. In a manner doubtless calculated to outrage an audience, they all acknowledge, grudgingly or otherwise, that they have learnt something from him. Jimmy, however, is neither ideologue nor prophet. His generational claims to attention are that he is English and young, at a time when being young in England had acquired an historical and cultural resonance whose significance becomes clearer with each passing year. What was already evident in the '50s was that the naturally expanding contexts of youth were confronting the rapidly narrowing contexts of a country in decline.⁴ The general tendency for the ambitions of youth to exceed its grasp was thus given particular historical resonance by recurring reminders that, for many members of an earlier generation, England provided a much more advantageous situation in which to grow up. And the odd mixture of sympathy and savagery that characterizes Jimmy's attitude to Alison's father captures an ambivalence about intergenerational perspectives that becomes central to the play:

I hate to admit it, but I think I can understand how her Daddy must have felt when he came back from India, after all those years away. The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All homemade cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms. Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. What a romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still, even I regret it somehow, phoney or not. If you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's. I must be getting sentimental. But I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you're an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans. That's a thought isn't it?

(11)

It is only Jimmy's sustained irony that enables him to share the colonists' sense of loss without sharing their views on colonization, to sustain that sense of loss while suggesting that much of what was lost wasn't real in the first place, and to strike an international chord of disapproval of America's increasing prominence that continues to echo even as the envy generated by an England in decline is openly confessed. But the complex ironies that provide a degree of credibility to his vehement intergenerational judgments also serve to open a gap between Jimmy's passions and his actions that bears directly upon his odd role in the play.

Though Jimmy establishes the note of generational responsibility and generational change by holding his parents' generation responsible for losing its grasp on national destiny, for bequeathing to the next generation no world of its own, he appears to have no clear plans for doing something constructive about it. He is certainly prepared to denounce his own generation for getting too used too readily to a diminished role in the world, and one of his recurring gripes is that “Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm” (10). Indeed, Jimmy's attacks on Alison repeatedly focus on what he perceives as her lethargy, her timidity, and her readiness to accept whatever comes her way: “She's a great one for getting used to things. If she were to die, and wake up in paradise—after the first five minutes, she'd have got used to it” (10). This is a tendency widespread enough for Jimmy to recognize it in himself (33), but Jimmy's denunciations are usually strengthened rather than weakened by his recognition of dangers to which he too is subject. In his recurring bouts of condemnation, Jimmy exhibits more of an enthusiasm for thinking and caring about issues and people than for acting upon any beliefs and convictions that might significantly change people's lives or the historical direction of England. Though Jimmy is outraged when his friend Hugh decides to emigrate, he cannot produce for Hugh, any more than for himself, a promising English alternative. Jimmy's sense of national duty seems to require him to bear outraged witness to an unalterable national decline, but not necessarily to intervene. He has made no attempt to establish a career, join a political group, or become socially involved in any systematic way.

Jimmy's inability to do anything about the problems that concern him diminishes but does not destroy the credibility of his judgments and the persuasiveness of his enthusiasms, but more important is the light it sheds on the dramatic function of a character whose idiosyncratic sensibility provides the site of dramatization rather than the source of solution to the issues the play confronts. In effect, Jimmy serves more as a means of identifying and amplifying national problems than as a likely instrument of their solution. His role in the play is consequently not just that of a character with relationships to other characters on stage but also that of an historical voice seeking to relate events occurring here and now to those that occurred earlier or elsewhere. The large cast of characters who never appear thus serves as one of several means of broadening the implied context of a play whose implications become more extensive as the action progresses.

Across the stage of Jimmy's emotional outrage and rhetorical amplification run the assorted social ills of a difficult moment in English history that Jimmy, in effect, helps both to shape and define. It is a world in which disintegrating empire leaves the country with a sense of decline and guilt; one in which bewildered voters return to power (in 1951) the establishment party in place of the party of social reform; Christians trample upon each other to express their residual spiritual enthusiasms; bishops give speeches to support the manufacture of hydrogen bombs; literary critics squabble over historical trivia rather than cultural substance; and the young subside into resignation, alienation, or emigration. The picture presented is biased, distorted, and exaggerated, but sufficiently true to speak of a generation, though not necessarily for them. But this recognition returns us to one of the vexed problems presented by this putatively historical voice: while generationally engaged, it is not generationally well-situated, for it is neither internally consistent nor externally representative.

To criticize Osborne, however, for appointing the inconsistent Jimmy as the voice of a generation whose views he does not share is not yet to have come to terms with the precarious status of representative voices in a society that is increasingly divided. As a consequence of the discrediting of inherited narratives of national destiny, the world that Jimmy speaks in and for is one whose expectations of consensus foundered early on an increasing recognition of irreconcilable conflicts between people of different ages, classes, genders, education, wealth, religion, and politics. Jimmy himself both exhibits and amplifies some of those conflicts, alternately loving and despising women, attaching himself to Alison while rejecting her social origins, declaring affinity with gay rebels while anticipating that he will be a target of their wrath, trying to overcome the instant dislike Hugh and Alison have for each other, hoping to forge a bond between Alison and Mrs. Tanner, and sympathizing with Alison's father while savagely rejecting her brother:

Have you ever seen her brother? Brother Nigel? The straight-backed, chinless wonder from Sandhurst? … you've never heard so many well-bred commonplaces come from beneath the same bowler hat. The Platitude from Outer Space—that's brother Nigel. He'll end up in the Cabinet one day, make no mistake. But somewhere at the back of that mind is the vague knowledge that he and his pals have been plundering and fooling everybody for generations.

(14)

This is, of course, a very different view of England's military might and political establishment than that exhibited in his response to the career of Colonel Redfern. But Jimmy's inconsistencies are not mere inconsistencies. They are symptomatic of the divided perspectives that characterize both his function as an intergenerational historical voice and his function as a generationally situated character in the play.

The polyvalent Jimmy Porter voice that constantly threatens to drown out those of Alison, Cliff, and Helena is the voice of a larger than life character who functions for his own generation not as someone just like them or as someone completely remote from them, but as someone who seems something of a monster in their midst. They share his Englishness, his youth, and his concerns, but not the fury or the fatalism that give the country's problems for him such power, proportion, and preposterousness. But the odd dynamic of the interaction between Jimmy and the other characters, a dynamic described by Osborne as an “uneasy polyphony” (2), is characterized less by disagreements over substance than by disproportion of scale. Though Jimmy rails about politics and religion, he neither addresses nor offers arguments of political or religious scope. And a play that focusses extensively on issues related to empire and equity is also likely at any moment to deal with sweet stalls, tabloid gossip, and jazz bands. These oscillations between events of contrasting scale are partly the consequence of the ironic humor Jimmy adopts throughout the play, but they also prepare the way for a puzzlingly downbeat ending about stuffed squirrels and toy bears. Somewhere in this downbeat ending the concerns of Jimmy as divided historical voice and Jimmy as divided character merge, as personal, national, and cultural reasons for uncertainty and inaction lead inexorably toward issues of diminished scale.

From the outset, issues of historical change, social division, and diminished scale are given visual linkage in a stage setting that situates Jimmy and the other characters in a world of multiple transitions. The scene, we are told, is set in the present with Jimmy and Alison living in “a fairly large attic room, at the top of a large Victorian house” (1). The attic room is full of old furniture, some of it from the Victorian era, and its ceiling slopes down sharply to increase the sense of displacement, confinement, and constraint in an otherwise significant space. As Alison later on recalls the evenings she spent with Jimmy in this room, she describes them as “suspended and rather remote” (109). This constrained attic setting with its substantial Victorian foundations gives visual form to one of the unbridgeable and unacceptable historical divisions in Jimmy's life. Alison's and Helena's clothes, when the two are living with Jimmy, register similarly unbridgeable and unacceptable class divisions. Both wear an odd mixture of their own expensive clothes and Jimmy's more utilitarian ones. The Sunday ritual of reading the newspapers provides more examples of the social divisions that drive Jimmy to distraction, and his rhetorical question, “Why do I do this every Sunday?” (3), gives formal shape to a question generated by the whole set, by Jimmy's biting irony, and by much of the early action: why does Jimmy situate his personal life so insistently in the context of England's social history and social divisions?

It is central to the evolving relationship between Jimmy as intergenerational voice and Jimmy as generational character that we recognize that there are personal and not just historical reasons for Jimmy's insistence, in opposing Hugh's decision to emigrate and elsewhere, upon the importance of living nowhere else but England, even at a time when national issues generate more pain than pleasure. Jimmy has an evident personal need to maintain links with earlier generations of English people, whose strengths and weaknesses provide an inheritance with which he feels obliged to come to terms. And coming to terms with that inheritance involves the constant adjustments of scale that complicate Jimmy's life and the lives of everyone else who is haunted by issues of historical consequence and proportion.

The personal basis for Jimmy's intergenerational concerns can be traced back to the early death of his father, and to attend to that story is to encounter some of the reasons why Jimmy's anger is not matched by his actions, and to understand why the intensity of his concerns might captivate other members of his own generation who, though not sharing his anger, feel compelled to respect it. Jimmy had a father who believed there were still, even after the slaughter of the first World War, causes good enough to fight for and collective actions worthy of individual support. In the 1930s he joined in good faith the International Brigade that set out to rescue Spain from fascist domination. He returned, seriously wounded and defeated, to find that his idealistic efforts were greeted not with gratitude, but with doubt and suspicion. Jimmy then felt the full force of his father's disillusionment and defeat at an age when both were likely to make a large and lasting impression:

For twelve months, I watched my father dying—when I was ten years old. He'd come back from the war in Spain, you see. And certain god-fearing gentlemen there had made such a mess of him, he didn't have long left to live. Everyone knew it—even I knew it. … But … I was the only one who cared. (Turns to the window.) His family were embarrassed by the whole business. Embarrassed and irritated. … All that that feverish failure of a man had to listen to him was a small, frightened boy. I spent hour upon hour in that tiny bedroom. He would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one, lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said. All he could feel was the despair and the bitterness, the sweet, sickly smell of a dying man. (He moves around the chair.) You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. (Sits.) I knew more about—love … betrayal … and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know all your life.

(68-70)

Though Jimmy's recurring self-concern and self-pity are as evident here as elsewhere, they do not suffice to eradicate the impact of his experience on the dramatic situation emerging in the play. Jimmy as an individual character, as distinct from Jimmy as an amplifying voice, has personal as well as historical reasons for doubting the value of radical social intervention. His father's death provides the testimony of experience to oppose any testimony youth might offer that strenuous effort will produce its just reward or be its own reward. But worse than that, what the death of his father exemplifies is what the slaughter of world war had exemplified and would exemplify again: that the scale of the effort needed to produce significant change is not proportionate to the probability of success or to whatever might be conceived as constituting success. The death of Jimmy's father provided an early personal encounter with a widely resisted public recognition of the appalling individual costs involved in national responsibilities or national ambitions of imperial scale. And behind the issue of competing public and personal scales lurk questions both about the value of imperial victories so dearly bought and about the value of less visible achievements more locally situated and enjoyed. If no newly defined England could hope to match the scale of achievement that the efforts of earlier generations had, however ill advisedly, produced, what could or should serve, instead, to satisfy the youthful aspirations and ambitions of succeeding generations?

When Colonel Redfern left England in 1914 and returned in 1947, the dates mark key points in the national transition between counting gains and counting costs for large ambitions in the world. Colonel Redfern returns to an England widely regarded as “going to the dogs” (83) but unable to sustain by moral argument or force of arms the scale of its earlier achievements. It is this problem of historical transition and historical scale that makes the English condition in this moment difficult for the generation growing old to accept, but even more difficult, as we have noted, for the young to deal with.

Jimmy as historically situated character is most fully in tune with his own generation when he addresses the issue of being young in England in the period after the second World War. His early comment that their “youth is slipping away” (8) captures a feeling that all the younger characters, in different ways, share. When Alison tries to explain to Helena why she married Jimmy, she describes the youthful fire that seemed to emanate from him and elevate him beyond his much less historically aware peers:

It had been such a lovely day, and he'd been in the sun. Everything about him seemed to burn, his face, the edges of his hair glistened and seemed to spring off his head, and his eyes were so blue and full of the sun. He looked so young and frail, in spite of the tired line of his mouth. I knew I was taking on more than I was ever likely to be capable of bearing, but there never seemed to be any choice.

(50-51)

Later, alone with Cliff, pregnant, and near despair, she responds to Cliff's argument that she is “too young to start giving up” (26) with a despairing acknowledgement that youth has little purchase in a world of inherited decline:

I keep looking back, as far as I remember, and I can't think what it was to feel young, really young. Jimmy said the same thing to me the other day. I pretended not to be listening—because I knew that would hurt him, I suppose. And—of course—he got savage, like tonight. But I knew just what he meant.

(26)

The larger implications of Alison's “I knew just what he meant” help her understand his savagery and help bind all the younger characters to each other whatever their differences. To be young in an aging country is to lose too early the possibilities that youth might otherwise supply and to encounter too early losses that age more regularly supplies. As Jimmy puts it, “I seem to spend my life saying goodbye” (104). But this is a process Jimmy can neither escape nor accept, and his ill-focussed rage is often an expression of the conflict between acceptance of the necessity for change and intolerance of its implications. Alison first regards Jimmy as someone whose youthful vigor can transcend the problem, and then as someone whose mercurial behavior can at least authentically exhibit it, but eventually she comes to see him, as the action of the play suggests we see him, as someone whose idiosyncratic way of dealing with the problem raises further possibilities. And it is in defining the nature of these further possibilities and their relationship to problems of scale that the action of the play clarifies the representative status of Jimmy's otherwise unrepresentative voice.

Alison admires the rigor but is exhausted by the consequences of Jimmy's determination to resist false narratives of national destiny without opposing them with some new one of his own. Jimmy's “blistering honesty” is the honesty, however intemperate, of someone who refuses either to disguise or dismiss temporal and social divisions but seeks to affirm them and try to live through them. Just as he insists upon Alison denouncing him if she feels justified in leaving him, he wants all his relationships to work through their local complexities, rather than work around them in the false name of historically characterized romance or nationally defined destiny. This determination to confront local differences is not for Jimmy a means of destroying larger patterns, but the only means by which he can sustain the possibility that larger patterns might eventually emerge.

Discussing with Helena the rather visible affection she shares with Cliff, Alison tries to describe the relationship in Jimmy's terms:

It isn't easy to explain. It's what he would call a question of allegiances, and he expects you to be pretty literal about them. Not only about himself and all the things he believes in, his present and his future, but his past as well. All the people he admires and loves, and has loved. The friends he used to know, people I've never even known—and probably wouldn't have liked. His father, who died years ago. Even the other women he's loved.

(46-47)

Though Jimmy's self-concern often borders on the insufferable, it is not without its social implications. Relationships survive for Jimmy not on the basis of traditional rights that disguise differences of opinion and value but on the basis of shared achievements that provide bridges across persisting differences. And here Jimmy's attitude strikes Alison as both timely and persuasive:

Helena—even I gave up believing in the divine rights of marriage long ago. Even before I met Jimmy. They've got something different now—constitutional monarchy. You are where you are by consent.

(109)

Such consent does not constitute a permanent commitment, but a repeatedly renewable one, and the implications of that renewal raise in another context the issue of scale that recurs throughout the action. Jimmy wants relationships to be contingent and contractual, but also to exceed their local origins and endure. As Alison points out, Jimmy wants to hold onto everyone he has ever loved, even as he wants love to be based upon freedom, contingency, and ever-revisable consent. He wants relationships to dictate their own terms but also to achieve a depth of intensity and breadth of scale if they are to be significant to him. And startlingly, this peculiar conjunction of convictions results in Jimmy's wife and Jimmy's lover both characterizing the play's most iconoclastic figure as something of an anachronism:

HELENA
He was born out of his time.
ALISON
Yes. I know.
HELENA
There's no place for people like that any longer—in sex, or politics, or anything. That's why he's so futile. Sometimes, when I listen to him, I feel he thinks he's still in the middle of the French Revolution. And that's where he ought to be, of course. He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going. He'll never do anything, and he'll never amount to anything.
ALISON
I suppose he's what you'd call an Eminent Victorian. Slightly comic—in a way. …

(111)

Slightly comic, of course, not just because of his anachronistic status but also because his concern for historical scale impels him to live his personal life in impossibly public terms, because his uncompromising investment in generational responsibility sustains the very sense of Englishness that he seems otherwise to despise, and because his impossible demands are uttered with the self-deprecating irony of someone who recognizes that his determination to define himself as a lost cause is both a contemporary indulgence and a historical necessity.

Though Jimmy is, indeed, something of an anachronism, he manages not to be a mere anachronism. Somehow, his intergenerational concerns enable him to function simultaneously as a voice of outraged youth, a voice of semi-skeptical modern nostalgia, and a voice of imperious Victorian expectation. The divided voice is divided not just by differing values, but by differing senses of what suffices to constitute value. The differing value judgments of different eras, the differing expectations of what individual action can accomplish, and the differing scales for judging what gives an individual life sufficient shape and sufficient point make Jimmy's attempts to amalgamate them impossible. Such incompatibilities of both substance and scale are amplified by Jimmy's rhetoric and given visual and aural exemplification in the contrast established between the church bells, whose chimes drive Jimmy to distraction every Sunday, and the jazz trumpet that he plays to drown them out. In the differing balance they invoke between convention and innovation and in their significant differences of size and scale, the huge bells and the jazz trumpet offer very different possibilities for individual improvisation and control. And the comic contrast between these competing sounds returns us to the significance of the play's similarly comic ending in which toy squirrels and bears supply a complex context of diminished scale to earlier issues of much larger moment.

Helena is startled when she first encounters the stuffed teddy bear and squirrel in the Porter's flat, and even more startled when she learns that they have an established role in the Alison/Jimmy relationship. Alison explains it at first in terms of sheer escapism:

ALISON
It started during those first months we had alone together—after Hugh went abroad. It was the one way of escaping from everything—a sort of unholy priest-hole of being animals to one another. We could become little furry creatures with little furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other. Playful, careless creatures in their own cosy zoo for two.

(54)

And it is in just these terms that we see Jimmy and Alison playing this game with each other early in the play. The localizing of context and concern is indeed a temporary means of escape from the brawling over large scale issues of politics and religion. When Jimmy and Alison return to the game at the play's conclusion, however, it is in the generational context of their lost child and recent separation. No longer a means of escaping their problems, the game becomes a means of renewing a relationship whose complexities have become more apparent to them both. The game is no longer a mere escape from the past or an avoidance of the present but a means of engaging the future through a painful but pleasurable “comic emphasis” (119) on the value of the divided perspectives that they both now ruefully acknowledge. Their mutual sympathy and individual differences are exhibited in the remarks “Poor squirrels” and “Poor bears” (119). Their reconciliation is one that takes as its point of departure a “mocking, tender irony” (119) that is less negative than Jimmy's earlier savage irony and more authentic than the simplistic platitudes of Nigel and his like. In its tender acknowledgement of difference, the reconciliation offers a means of accommodating without equating differing scales of value, expectation, and duration, of coping with local situations saturated with larger generational concerns, of resisting false optimism and premature despair, of deciding to build, with whatever difficulty, from here.

Whether we think that this registers for Jimmy a significant defeat or a significant victory depends on how we evaluate the anger and aggressiveness he was earlier seeking to validate. To be young and English in the 1950s was for him to be trapped, as the Victorian attic setting suggests, in the debris of a dying civilization that not only restricted one's present but nurtured and contaminated one's roots. To live in any way, it was necessary, as Jimmy intermittently recognized, to die in some way. And the transition Jimmy and Alison undergo in the play is one of lowering the scale of imperial expectations in order to sustain any expectations at all. Their adjustment is indeed to one of reconciliation with the smaller world to which Jimmy is initially so opposed, but what is at issue is the nature of the reconciliation that Jimmy had so far steadfastly resisted. For it is the assumption that reduction in scale must imply a reduction in substance that has made Jimmy so frantically determined to affirm both local authenticity and larger significance, with or without an accompanying irony. The most famous lines of the play address directly the shift of national scale and its personal implications, but as we noted earlier, they are spoken in Jimmy's “familiar, semi-serious mood”:

There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.

(104-05)

The challenge for the Jimmy/Alison generation as it succeeded that of its parents is to find some point to a world no longer glorious, to find a way beyond demanding or denouncing glory on an imperial scale, to find some means of measuring value that does not reduce to triviality, or worse, whatever is available in contexts of diminished scale.

Jimmy's “semi-serious” speech on good, brave causes is, in fact, precipitated by his acknowledgement that he would be prepared to sacrifice his friendship with Cliff to any woman whose romantic potential might provide in the personal realm a scale of experience that earlier generations enjoyed in the public realm. Jimmy, in characteristic fashion, both affirms and denies the possibility:

It's a funny thing. You've been loyal, generous and a good friend. But I'm quite prepared to see you wander off, find a new home, and make out on your own. And all because of something I want from that girl downstairs, something I know in my heart she's incapable of giving. You're worth a half a dozen Helenas to me or to anyone. And, if you were in my place, you'd do the same thing. … Why, why, why, why do we let these women bleed us to death? … I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. (In his familiar, semi-serious mood.) There aren't any good, brave causes left … there's nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.

(104-05)

Jimmy's characteristic irony both elevates and deflates what romance so conceived has to offer, and his actions are likewise inconsistent. Within minutes he is planning to make a new start to his life with Helena (107), later accepting her departure with resignation, then trying to reestablish his relationship with Alison through the squirrel and bear routine. But there is much to suggest that both Jimmy and Alison have learned something in the process. The reconciliation is, in effect, one that takes as given what the squirrel and bear game suggests: the smaller scale, more local context, and less grandiose expectations of a life in which personal relationships are not to be measured primarily on an imperial scale of public achievement. But this adjustment to the smaller scale is no longer treated as a matter of temporary escapism or long-term defeat. This context is treated more as a point of departure than as a necessary destination. The shared irony at the end neither precludes nor predicts significant depth, devotion, or duration, but it clearly suggests that matters of personal scale need be dominated neither by the national narratives of earlier generations nor by the diminished contexts of this. Furthermore, in establishing the issue of diminished scale as central to the play's conclusion, Osborne made the personal concerns of Jimmy and the national concerns of England resonate with larger cultural concerns whose implications have become clearer with the passing of time, but particularly with the performance and publication of his final play, Déjàvu.

Dealing with life in intergenerational terms gives the Jimmy of 1956 many problems, not the least of which is an uncertainty over the scale of the picture he needs to draw to make sense of his own life. His efforts to think intergenerationally put him at odds with his own generation and its inclination to narrow its concerns to what it can actually control. Jimmy's idiosyncratic voice achieves a larger resonance by resisting, initially, the retreat to smaller pictures and smaller values and, subsequently, the equation of smaller pictures with smaller values. Look Back in Anger achieved its initial impact in part because the depiction of historically situated and idiosyncratically articulated youthful alienation was able to speak beyond its historical moment by being so thoroughly situated in its historical moment. The role of Jimmy as amplifying voice increased the impact of Jimmy the historically situated character by relating it to and giving it implications for other youthful moments. But Osborne had his finger on the pulse of history in more ways than one. In recognizing that the issue of changing scale was as important to Jimmy as any issue of substance (Jimmy juxtaposes “pointless and inglorious”), he was tracing a larger cultural shift from the large ambitions of both Victorians and modernists toward those lower-scale ambitions of the postmodernists that were to come. Jimmy, a threshold character, was caught in a dilemma that we are only now beginning to be able to articulate, but which we can see much more clearly because of Osborne's 1991 sequel to the play, Déjàvu.

Much of the discussion of postmodernism as a cultural category or historical moment has hinged upon a disagreement over the implications of the term itself. As many have pointed out, the sense of a new era is conveyed by the term “post,” but to describe the new era as “post” the one before is to anchor it to what it appears to transcend. This ambiguity in the term is further exacerbated by a famous argument from Jean-François Lyotard that postmodernism is not something that succeeds modernism but is, in fact, a recurring aspect of it.⁵ Whether postmodernism precedes, accompanies, or succeeds a modernism itself very difficult to define has thus become a major bone of contention, one that puts at particular risk those who seek to discuss postmodernism primarily in terms of documents with some new kind of style that have appeared only in recent years.

To avoid that limiting presupposition and to consider postmodernism continually in its relationship to modernism is to adopt precisely the kind of inter-era/intergenerational perspective that makes Jimmy Porter's voice so powerful, so inconsistent, and so surprisingly authentic in Look Back in Anger. Indeed, one of the early theorists of postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, argued, in a famous essay, both that postmodernism marks a decisive break with modernism and that, in spite of the radical nature of period transitions, we are all something of Victorians, modernists, and postmodernists at once.⁶

To take such a view is to recognize that the divided perspective and intergenerational concerns of Jimmy Porter capture not just something of the youth of a particular character or of a moment in the decline of a particular nation but also something of a moment of cultural transition, one that has resonance for everyone concerned with what comes after modernism as a cultural movement and with what should happen to the modernist social values that accompanied it. Osborne's peculiarly structured play, with its insistent focus upon the divided sensibility of a central character, achieved and retains its historical importance because of the resonance it establishes between personal, political, and cultural issues at a moment of triple transition. In each of the three spheres, relationships between successive generations, competing values, and shifting scales are of central importance. Indeed, the issue of contrasting scales, so evident in the play's concluding images of squirrels and bears, marks a key difference between the Victorian/modernism transition, where it was a less important issue, and the modernism/postmodernism transition where it becomes an obsessive concern. Much of Lyotard's famous argument hinges upon the lost credibility of large unifying community narratives and upon their replacement by local group commitments of limited scope and durability. Cultural change, so conceived, intersects with the trajectory of post-imperial England's social change to generate Jimmy's persistent anger about the (often unwitting) betrayal by the previous generation and about his own generation's acquiescence, timidity, and general lack of aggression and enthusiasm. In Déjàvu, written thirty-five years later, Osborne voices his worst fears of where things might be headed, rather than the qualified hopes exemplified in the final pages of Look Back in Anger.

In Déjàvu (1991) Jimmy Porter is thirty years older and has found a way of surviving, even of thriving, but in a characteristically idiosyncratic fashion, rather than one he might recommend to anyone else. Still a determinedly unrepresentative figure, he is, he argues, “a spokesman for no one but myself.”⁷ Jimmy's marriage to Alison has ended in divorce, and much of the action of the play is devoted to Jimmy directing at the children of his second marriage the same scathing, but not always unsympathetic, irony that he once inflicted upon his parent's generation. The toy bear, which had once suggested the positive possibilities of life at a reduced scale, now exhibits only the negative possibilities of narrowness, conformity, political correctness, and stunted growth. Though seriously interested in such things as “meaningful relationships” (11), Teddy has been encouraged to avoid unusual “forms of self-expression” (86), to indulge only in “safe sex” (12), to consider himself a likely victim of oppression (74), to seek redress in a “European Court of Teddy Rights” (85), to degenerate into a “cuddly conformist” (63), to aspire no higher than “mediocrity” (101), and, in effect, to exemplify what J.P. regards as the worst of the post-Jimmy generation:

CLIFF
Damn it, J.P., he's only human—
J.P.
Damn you, that's just what he's not. It's what he's been told.

(85)

The usual layers of irony confirm that, from Jimmy's point of view, the possibility of building from the local something larger has collapsed into a collective myopia that diminishes both the scale and substance of the next generation's concerns. Oblivious to the potential virtues of the intergenerational perspective that has characterized, divided, and tormented his own life, the next generation deals with generational change, social diversity, and cultural transition by developing fashionable and fleeting means of unifying the otherwise un-unifiable. To Jimmy, the new generation seems determined to compromise its way into consensus, to become “unconnected to the past” (64) in general, and even to “erase the past” (83) whenever it suggests reasons for dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.

The self-congratulatory disruption that Jimmy sought to impose upon his own quietly divided generation has little purchase on the next generation, which, to Jimmy's mind, has abandoned self-determination and individual responsibility for collective counselling, “sloppy fads” (57), mass opinion, “mob philanthropy” (75), and unearned European solidarity. The unifying imperial narrative of English destiny that pressured individuals to elevate their concerns to the rhetorical levels of the few born to lead have given way to random narratives that briefly unify otherwise disparate groups by appealing to the lowest common denominator, to the life of least disruption, to the path of least resistance. Jimmy's summarizing image is of mass attendance at a pop concert at which the audience members engage in a collective wave motion to exhibit the coherence and comfort of a “wave new world” (34). As church bells once more ring out in the background, Jimmy's critique of the succeeding generation echoes the one he had earlier made of the preceding generation: “against the noise and clamour of those who would impose their certainties upon us. God rot their certainties” (101).

Jimmy's daughter, Alison, spends much of the play at the ironing board once occupied by his first wife; she wears the ubiquitous earphones of a generation turned largely within rather than without, but attending within only to what has been collectively affirmed without. Jimmy's savage images of this generation, like his savage images of the preceding generation, are not without their justification, but, as the earphones suggest, his ability to attract attention has, like much else in the world, diminished sharply. To Alison, Jimmy is someone who has devoted himself to “a lifetime of useless snarling” (39), and it is evident in this play, as in Look Back in Anger, that Jimmy's function is to focus and amplify generational issues rather than to resolve them. And as in Look Back in Anger, Jimmy's idiosyncracy, inconsistency, and excess serve more to extend the play's range of awareness than to provide a model for others to follow.

Jimmy's mode of self-justification has, however, progressed one step further. The difficulty he encountered in the earlier play of affirming both the integrity of local events and the importance of imperial scale has been transformed from a baffling inconsistency into a paradoxical affirmation. In the face of a new generation's debilitating readiness to conform to fashionable narratives of many kinds, whether based upon nationality, class, gender, race, religion, or anything else, Jimmy preaches the virtues of the very inconsistency his intergenerational perspectives have repeatedly exhibited. Refusing to become anything so assimilable as “a member of the public” (9), the erstwhile jazz player argues in exasperation that “coherence isn't all,” that “coherence … conceals as much as is revealed to the lost like me who contemplate the wreckage” (51). Jimmy revels in the “mess” of “muddled enthusiasm” (94), in the “rowdy passion” that once typified English life, and in that splendidly “English virtue” of “irony” (81), an irony that multiplies perspectives so rapidly and unceasingly that any affirmation of it is itself rendered irreducibly and comically ironic:

(Very crisply, like battle commands.) Endow us with the courage of uncertainty. Accept an unruly but contrite heart. And in that frailty of disbelief we cannot overcome let us seek remedy from within ourselves and offer mercy that the world cannot give among the perils etcetera, etcetera.

(101)

Jimmy's contingent affirmation of contingency parodies the style and conviction of the fashionable preacher, “the Rev. Ron” who has joined the successor to the former play's Bishop of Bromley in establishing a “liturgical leisure centre” and “liturgical café” at which various kinds of “pop chat” reassure the masses that the responsibility for aberrant behavior lies not with the individual but the state (98, 45, 76). Jimmy supplements his own characteristically modernist irony with a characteristically postmodern investment in parody to challenge both the “dumb pieties” (63) of the next generation (34-36) and whatever platitudes he feels himself inclined to offer as a substitute (49-51). To Cliff's plea for “No more questions,” Jimmy retorts, “No more answers” (83), seeking always to situate himself intergenerationally between competing worlds. And to see Jimmy's divided sensibility as an exemplification of generational supplementation as opposed to generational supplantation is to recognize what Osborne was seeking to achieve by exploring cultural and national issues through the shifting sensibilities of an idiosyncratic and unrepresentative character. Strangely enough, it is Jimmy's very refusal to restrict his views to that of a single era, to unify his convictions into a single world view, or to align his actions with his assertions, that makes him serve as an unexpectedly successful site of dramatic engagement with the idiosyncratic shape of individual lives, the multilinear history of an evolving nation, and the contested development of a cultural process in a period of major transition.

Jimmy's inconsistency and excess mark him not as someone whose views we are expected to share, any more than the other characters share them, but as someone who provides, in spite of his many faults, a powerful and varied means of measuring those worlds that seek to exclude him. His excess, like Falstaff's in another era, prevents him from representing a world that any collectivity could occupy, but the vitality that accompanies it both measures and is measured by whatever seeks to oppose or ignore it. The “rowdy passion” that Jimmy both exemplifies and extols invokes a tradition of English irreverence that was already well established in the drama and poetry of medieval England and has persisted ever since.

Jimmy's divided sensibility provides a canvas wide enough to accommodate conflicting personal, national, and cultural issues. It shows how these issues can be mapped without being unified, can be related without being equated, can be measured without being standardized. Jimmy's determinedly intergenerational perspective exhibits inconsistencies whose virtues are clarified by an implied contrast with the costs—personal, social, and cultural—of any unified perspective, whether it be that of a generation, an era, a nation, a religion, a political philosophy, a cultural moment, or an aesthetic theory. What happens when a generation rejects too readily the voices of generations that have preceded or are succeeding it and settles for something currently fashionable is that the social divisions that generate future change are disguised rather than demolished, and a personal, national, and cultural resource is squandered. Jimmy, inconsistent and excessive, self-absorbed and generationally obsessed, seeks to be true to his own time by relating it continually and contentiously to the voices of other times. As inconsiderate of the pieties of one generation as of another, and of his own, Jimmy does, indeed, indulge in relentless “snarling,” but its value depends upon its capacity to persuade us of the falseness of the hope that peace can be born of coherence, consistency, or consensus.

Osborne, by ruthlessly cataloging Jimmy Porter's faults before the action of Look Back in Anger begins, challenges himself to find the means of making a disagreeable voice theatrically viable and an idiosyncratic personal voice nationally and culturally functional. The revolutionary play he was soon to describe as “rather old fashioned” mixed old and new in ways that captured a pivotal moment in the history of England and a pivotal moment in the development of modernism. The theatrical function of the main character is not to provide the audience with an example for admiration or emulation but to supply an idiosyncratic site of exploration for the issues that bind and divide citizens of a nation in flux. Like the jazz trumpet that selects from and recombines a history of possibility, Jimmy Porter finds his way beyond the homogenizing imperatives and linear expectations of imperial or post-imperial scale. His extravagant irony might indeed reduce his life to one of “useless snarling,” but his persistent search is for a “snatch of harmony” (51) that might, like the rhythms of the jazz trumpet and the games with squirrels and bears, resonate both at some smaller scale and at some larger level of social and cultural development, thereby suggesting larger human bonds and more complex historical patterns than any he can ever hope to summarize, circumscribe, or define:

J.P.
(Softly.) … Anger is not hatred, which is what I see in all your faces. Anger is slow, gentle, not vindictive or full of spite. Also, it comes into the world in grief not grievance. … (Still softly.) “What's he angry about?” they used to ask. Anger is not about … It is mourning the unknown, the loss of what went before without you, it's the love another time but not this might have sprung on you, and greatest loss of all, the deprivation of what, even as a child, seemed to be irrevocably your own, your country, your birthplace, that, at least, is as tangible as death.
(ALISON “waves” defiantly. Deliberately, J.P. removes her headphones, picks up the attached instrument, drops it to the floor and steps on it. It crackles and breaks.)
ALISON
(Presently.) Oh—well done, J.P.
J.P.
I do try not to behave like the people I most despise.

(36-37)

Notes

1. John Osborne, “That Awful Museum,” Twentieth Century 169 (1961): 216.

2. David Hare, cited in “Introduction,” Hersh Zeifman and Cynthia Zimmerman, eds., Contemporary British Drama 1970-1990, (London: Macmillan, 1993) 2-3. See also Zeifman's accompanying discussion.

3. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, (New York: Bantam, 1971) 2. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

4. See, in particular, Jimmy's remark, “Our youth is slipping away” (8), and Alison's, “I can't think what it was to feel young, really young” (26).

5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1984) 79-82.

6. Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1982) 259-71.

7. John Osborne, Déjàvu, (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) 97. Subsequent page references are to this edition.