In a world of larger-than-life advertising billboards and catchy monosyllabic jingles, language is everything but an instrument of communication. Yet amidst this pervasive sense of decay, language continues to exert its power over the production of discourse, over the formation of identity. No matter how inarticulate or broken-up the language of present-day identity may appear to be, it continues to carry within its patchwork unity the modus vivendi behind contemporary social relations and their crumbling essence. David Mamet’s 1992 play Oleanna examines this innate causality existing between language and social action, as it questions the rhetoric of ‘political correctness’ within the language of the academy.
Set as an ‘artifact’ within the ‘metadrama’ of the debate over political correctness (which has left its indelible imprint on the last decade of American life), David Mamet’s Oleanna tends to read as a character study situated within the context of this debate that fails to address the debate itself. Along those lines, Mamet’s two protagonists, John and Carol, come off as two-dimensional character sketches lacking astute psychological realism. However, Mamet’s treatment of language as a source of power and powerlessness, while exploring the phenomenon of political correctness, overrides this initial, formulaic simplification of the piece. In an essay titled “The Devil’s Advocate: David Mamet’s Oleanna and Political Correctness”, the critic Alain Piette looks more closely at Mamet’s investment in language as a dramatic act of (dis)empowerment, particularly when the rhetoric of political correctness is as stake.
Mr. Piette views Mamet’s interest, as a playwright, in the phenomenology of political correctness as an example of an author’s coming to terms with the corrosive nature of a controlling practice. According to Piette, “at the bottom of the notion of political correctness lies the very Mametian belief that, by altering and correcting mechanisms that help perpetuate the discriminatory linguistic patterns, we will end up altering and correcting the corresponding discriminatory behavioral patterns, thus eradicating from the structures of both our language and our society the inequalities that threaten the social consensus with extinction.” Therefore, the world of Mamet’s Oleanna cannot but dismiss an idealized representation of “a harmonious multi-cultural society where most political, social, racial, and gender tensions have been resolved,” optioning for the only viable alternative, that of “a nightmarish world picture in which these tensions have been exacerbated because of a too fanatic application of the precepts of political correctness.”
Within this sanitized world, we encounter John and Carol taking turns at finding/exerting their identity (personal power over each other) through language.
The first act of their verbal game belongs to John; his language, i.e., the language of higher education, is complete, articulate, overpowering. Carol who seems to be at odds with her identity, since the language of her environment is out of her reach, sounds incomplete, inarticulate, subjugated. As the play progresses, their respective situations change; John slowly loses his identity as a teacher, which manifests itself through his lack of coherence in speech, while Carol’s former linguistic inaptitude is replaced by a fairly articulate command of a complete language, namely that of her “Group”. Both John and Carol have been conditioned by the language of their seemingly disparate social groups, thus rendering their immediate struggle to be one of exerting domination rather than consoling communication.
This re-casting of language as a weapon of absolute dominance within the intellectual community has confined David Mamet’s Oleanna inside the realm of offensive art. Both critics and theatergoers have felt revolted/ repulsed by Mamet’s purposely disengaging ‘linguistic play’ with such volatile social issues as sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, freedom of speech/ expression.
Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet take a stand? Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet speak against the vile nature of derisive social practices, openly, directly, up to the point? Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet understand the need for ‘political correctness’, now more than ever?
I do not presume to speak for the playwright when I say that as an artist his choices of addressing perplexing issues may not coincide with our way of ‘speaking about’ their threatening effect on civilized life; however, as an artist, and a conscious social being, Mr. Mamet does address these same instances of social unrest, by reminding us, through the stylized incongruity of his play’s language, of the blighting “institutionalization of modern American society into a myriad of self-proclaimed minorities elbowing for power amidst the crumbling debris of the social consensus and demanding immediate gratification.” With that in mind, Mamet’s Oleanna is the quintessential grammar book of the day.
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