Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to First Edition
- Preface to Second Edition
- 1 The absent voice: American drama and the critic
- 2 Eugene O'Neill's Endgame
- 3 Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self
- 4 Arthur Miller: the moral imperative
- 5 Edward Albee: journey to apocalypse
- 6 A Broadway interlude
- 7 Sam Shepard: imagining America
- 8 David Mamet: all true stories
- 9 The performing self
- 10 Redefining the centre: politics, race, gender
- 11 Beyond Broadway
- Notes
- Index
8 - David Mamet: all true stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to First Edition
- Preface to Second Edition
- 1 The absent voice: American drama and the critic
- 2 Eugene O'Neill's Endgame
- 3 Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self
- 4 Arthur Miller: the moral imperative
- 5 Edward Albee: journey to apocalypse
- 6 A Broadway interlude
- 7 Sam Shepard: imagining America
- 8 David Mamet: all true stories
- 9 The performing self
- 10 Redefining the centre: politics, race, gender
- 11 Beyond Broadway
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In an essay on ‘Fiction and Reality’ Mario Vargas Llosa spoke of the effect of abolishing the novel in Spanish America for three centuries as those in power set themselves to create ‘a society exonerated from the disease of fiction’. Their failure he ascribed to the fact that the realm of fiction was larger and deeper than the novel. As he explained, they could not
imagine that the appetite for lies – that is, for escaping objective reality through illusions – was so powerful and rooted in the human spirit, that, once the vehicle of the novel was not available to satisfy it, the thirst for fiction would infect – like a plague – all the other disciplines and genres in which the written word could freely flow. Repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give ‘the necessity of lying’ a place in the city, the inquisitors achieved the exact opposite of their intentions: a world without novels, yes, but a world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything.
It was an observation designed simultaneously as an assault on the corruption of the state and as an explanation of the nature of much South American fiction. Magical realism, he implied, was a natural product of societies which ‘still have great difficulty … in differentiating between fiction and reality’. But America, too, is a fiction. More than most societies it existed as idea before being realised as fact, and fact had then to be pulled into line with myth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 , pp. 199 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000