Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama.

MITCHELL, RICHARD W.

David Mamet. Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. The Columbia House Lectures on American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pp. 96. $19.95.

As one might expect from a book written by popular playwright and occasional agent provocateur of theater, David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama is, at various times, thought-provoking, irreverent, contentious, and conventional. Like many of Mamet's plays, this book offers some innovative approaches to its subject matter, although much of the volume embraces convention, especially when Mamet champions "true" dramatic structure, which includes a single hero pursuing a single goal through three clearly delineated acts. Although Mamet's promotion of traditional form may not hold up under the gaze of many contemporary scholars and artists or, for that matter, the modernist artist from a century earlier, the book maintains a significant amount of credibility by virtue of its author having managed to do what has eluded most late twentieth century American dramatists: make a substantial living as a critically acclaimed playwright. Thus, in spite of--or perhaps because of--the book's conservative approach to aesthetics, its three loosely organized chapters offer potentially useful advice for crafting a crowd pleasing drama. These same chapters, however, display an intolerant attitude towards drama and art that is formally innovative and/or socially engaged while, ironically, implying that such biases may have something to do with being a commercially successful playwright in the United States.

Mamet begins the small volume by explaining that people naturally dramatize everyday occurrences, and that such dramatizations adhere to a particular form. "Our survival mechanism orders the world into cause-effect-conclusion" (8) and "a three-act structure" (9). Echoing a well-worn theme, Mamet writes that life itself is inherently theatrical--"It is difficult, finally, not to see our lives as a play with ourselves the hero" (12)--and that the ways in which we dramatize our everyday experiences are not far removed from what he calls "true" drama, particularly tragedy, which--along with myth and religion--creates awe within the audience while avowing the individual's helplessness. Tragedy, myth, and religion "do not deny our powerlessness" Mamet declares, "but through its avowal they free us of the burden of its repression" (15). That is, by making the spectator realize that she is powerless to affect the "natural order" "true" drama enables the spectator to achieve "peace."

Such statements bring to mind the very different dramaturgy of Brecht, whose work--emphasizing that the "natural order" is merely an illusion--encourages the spectator to intervene in the world in order to make it more equitable. Only with society's gross inequities altered, Brecht suggests, can the subject ever attain "peace" In spite of Mamet's impatience with political drama, however, he approves of Brecht's plays because they "are extraordinarily charming and beautiful and lyrical and upsetting. Coincidentally, they happen to be on social issues" (47). But Mamet opposes Brecht's often radical essays, which "bear little relationship to his plays" (47), as well as the work of numerous other dramatists which critiques the dominant ideologies. The "problem play," according to Mamet, is "false drama" in which "we [the audience and playwright] indulge a desire to feel superior to events, to history, in short, to the natural order" (15). Unwilling to acknowledge that human agency, and not nature, creates social hierarchies, Mamet--utilizing the specious reasoning of Social Darwinism--suggests that "true" drama must always uphold the "natural order. To support this assertion, Mamet paraphrases Aristotle and several neoclassical theorists--"the purpose of art is not to change but to delight" (26)--and goes on to say that art which purports to teach (unlike art that supports contemporary social hierarchies, the "natural order") is actually totalitarian and results in "oppression" of the audience.

Mamet believes that drama should not have didactic tendencies because "true" art cannot appeal, primarily, to rational thought: "the good play will not concern itself with cares ... that can be dealt with rationally" (25). Artistic forms which appeal "to the conscious mind do not satisfy ... the conscious mind cannot create art" (46, 49). As Mamet suggests, art that reaches beyond conscious perception can be quite powerful, which is why artists have been consciously trying to represent the unconscious since, at least, Freud and the Symbolists. Yet the fairly rigid Aristotelian form that Mamet calls for must be consciously constructed, unless this form has become so commonplace through over-use, or instinct, that it has become second nature to those who write drama. Indeed, Mamet suggests the latter, writing that the structure of drama "is not an arbitrary--or even a conscious--invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information" (73). In spite of his Social Darwinist beliefs, however, Mamet implies that our "organic codification" of dramatic form has not evolved since the time of the ancient Greek dramatists, or at least not since Aristotle.

There are, of course, widely divergent and differently structured artistic genres and movements (as well as individual narratives of the everyday) that veer from the "human mechanism's" tendency to organize the world in Aristotelian form, but Mamet believes that such genres and movements, including avant-garde, performance, and video art; Happenings; and experimental theater, "are rather meaningless as art" (54). Traditional theater, especially tragedy, on the other hand, provides meaningful art since, "like magic, like religion" its purpose "is to inspire cleansing awe" (68) as the hero's tragic fate suggests to the spectator that she is powerless in the face of forces that cannot be rationalized. Thus, "the cleansing lesson of drama is, at its highest, the worthlessness of reason" (70). Suggesting the "worthlessness of reason" however, is exactly what much of the art that Mamet disparages does as it breaks down conventional form and meaning. Yet according to Mamet, art that is plotless, that lacks a single hero pursuing a single goal, cannot possibly work because humans "do not perceive randomness" (74), although these same humans are "inspired" and "cleansed" by plays of classical dramatic form that demonstrate the uselessness of reason.

Although Mamet embraces traditional dramatic form, he also critiques the simplistic formulas of television and the movies, which are not art but, at best, "entertainment" or "information" whose purpose "is not to share the truth but to immobilize and enervate the mind" (57). The information age" according to Mamet, "is the creation, by the body politic, through the collective unconscious, of a mechanism of repression, a mechanism that offers us a diversion from our knowledge of our own worthlessness" (53). Information, which has a numbing affect on those who constantly consume it, is "an intellectual hibernation, the mass equivalent of an antipsychotic drug, the exercise wheel in the hamster cage--a self-administered anesthesia" (56). Here, as in several other parts of the volume, Mamet's observations are perceptive, but they are never quite new. And that seems to be the main problem of this book, which continually rehashes Aristotle, the neoclassicists, the world-as-stage metaphors, while summarily dismissing much artistic innovation.

The allure of this book, and the reason it was published, can be found in the celebrity name on the colorful jacket, David Mamet, which takes up substantially more space than the book's twelve word title. As the most successful American dramatist of the last two decades, Mamet has earned a soapbox from which to pound home his notions of "good" and "bad" dramatic form, although he's so much against speaking from soapboxes. He's earned a right to critique drama that lacks catharsis, a single hero, or the three act structure, although much of his own drama lacks the very form that he considers so central to "true" drama. Indeed, Mamet has earned the right to publish any sort of book or essay he pleases, and many will read his words closely because the author has shown time and again that he knows what it takes to succeed as a dramatist.

While some of Mamet s reasoning, especially regarding form, is suspect, it may also have some validity, at least for commercial playwriting, which is, after all, what Mamet knows best. Despite his numerous statements that invite criticism, or that don't quite add up, Mamet's concept of "good" drama may, perhaps, suggest direction for the dramatist seeking to build a larger audience. Although the artist should not limit herself to a particular, proscribed aesthetic form, studying this book--or at least parts of it--may help the playwright to gain insight into what types of plays many producers, directors, and audiences of mainstream American theater might be most likely to embrace. Perhaps even adding a sprinkling of Mamet's ideas to a radically non-Aristotelian play could help the play to gain a wider audience. Or perhaps many of Mamet's ideas should be ignored, and creators of innovative American drama should, rather than looking to the distant past through Mamet's most recent book for an aesthetic model, strive to create theater that speaks to and springs from the conflicts and contradictions of late twentieth-century America. Just as Mamet has done in many of his plays.

RICHARD W. MITCHELL California State University, Northridge