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.29 By writing againstgenre, against religious doctrine, and against a canonical realistic text,Mamet again asserts himself by performing acts of artistic dissent.Mamet s enormous commercial success in recent years brings a certainpressure to bear on his status as a figure of dissent.While still a relativelyyoung writer, in mid-career, he is also one of the few of his generation tohave sustained his project, to develop a distinct way of working and writingthat meets with consistent acclaim.A recent issue of the Dramatists GuildQuarterly sought to acknowledge this status, though some of Mamet sremarks demonstrate a certain discomfort with his acquired intellectualcredibility.About playwriting in general, for example, he argues: It s a craftwhich has been practiced down through the ages, in the main, by whores likeme; people who didn t know how to do anything else and were wanderingaround in the dark trying to express themselves, who somehow got good atit or got famous at it (perhaps not both) and so perservered.The purpose ofliterature is not to do good, but to delight us.That s why the writer writes it;it delights him or her to express it, or to be rid of it, and in some way delightsthe audience, appealing either to their self-esteem or to their prejudices,creating in them a new, happy understanding of the world. 30 As this 108Michael L.Quinnstatement reflects both on Mamet s talent and on his mission, this publicdeclaration is surely a case of false modesty.Yet such self-deprecation isprecisely what Mamet s public position requires, if he is going to maintain hisstatus as an American writer, unique like others and therefore capable ofcritical self-expression.In the creation of an illusion, whether of reality or of singular selfhood,the primary compositional technique is still to undercut, to construct anexcess which, when pared away, seems to reveal the essential.As Mametsummarizes: The main difference between somebody who wants to be aprofessional writer and somebody who doesn t is that the former knows howto cut.If you don t know how to cut, if you re a product of some school thatdidn t teach you that, you re not serious.If you re unwilling to cut viciously,just on the off chance that the audience might beat you to the punch line, youhaven t been watching the audience.And if you haven t been watching theaudience watching your plays, you re not a playwright. 31 Mamet s remarksare in the context of a public address, in which he was acutely aware of hisaudience as a community of American writers.What Mamet tends to universalize, then, might be more carefullyconsidered as a gesture specific to a particular cultural moment, and anexpression which requires as its background a relatively stable culturalsymbology.From a technical standpoint his primary advances over the old selective realism of the Group Theatre generation would seem to be hisrecognition of performance as a constitutive act, and his ability to dramatizethe moments in peoples lives when their performances seem to come undone,and so I have tried to suggest a working typology of those moments.Viewedthrough the critical lens of a theory of representation, a debunked illusion ismerely one stage in an infinite regression, and reality is always deferred, alwayssubject to a subsequent deconstruction.Yet viewed in the expressivist mode,which is one the deconstructive theorist often inconsistently employs, agesture of undoing takes on the converse quality of having founded somethingsingularly true.In an American culture that values such creative rejections,Mamet s dramas enjoy a remarkable affective power.But since culturesthemselves are far from any security as critical absolutes, estimates of Mamet ssignificance will almost surely continue to change.NOTES1.There are four book-length studies of Mamet s work thus far: one referenceguide, Nesta Wyn Jones, File on Mamet; two general surveys, Dennis Carroll, DavidMamet (New York: St.Martin s Press, 1987), and C.W.E
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