The Value of Literature
Keith Windschuttle
Introduction to Dead White Males, by David Williamson, Currency Press, Sydney 1995

 

Anyone with the slightest interest in the theoretical issues dominating the faculties of arts and humanities today will find Dead White Males compelling. It is not only a very funny and revealing drama about personal relations at an Australian university, it is also a direct intervention in an intellectual debate. In many ways, it is the most daring play Williamson has ever written

In the past, Williamson has often drawn on the academic scene for a number of his characters and dramas. He has set two previous works on the campus itself. The 1974 play The Department laid bare the academic politics of one of the former colleges of advanced education. The film Petersen explored sexual liberation in the early 1970s university while making some acid observations about the elitism of English literary critics.

Dead White Males is also about literary critics but goes much further than departmental politics. It is a play about the value of literature itself and of the attempts by some people within the university system to destroy it.

The three central characters are Angela Judd, a young female student of English literature at 'New West University', Dr Grant Swain, her lecturer in literary theory, and William Shakespeare himself who comes back to life via Angela's imagination.

As you would expect from a Williamson play, it is located within an up-to-the-minute contemporary Australian setting with a cast of characters and a range of social issues that many of the audience will find excruciatingly identifiable. It is also a bitter satire on many of today's familiar poses of sexual and political rectitude.

Williamson's central concern is the purported "Copernican revolution" that has taken place in the past decade within the humanities. This is the notion that French poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory have toppled the old certainties of Western culture. The canon of great works of the Western intellectual and literary tradition is no longer regarded as the expression of universal values but simply the out-of-date ideology of the dead white males of the Eurocentric capitalist patriarchy.

Williamson tackles this so-called "paradigm shift" head-on through the works of Shakespeare, the penultimate author of the Western canon. He pits the wit of the bard against the literary theory of Grant Swain as the latter tries to indoctrinate and coerce his hapless students into accepting his own worldview.

From Swain's mouth streams forth all the theoreticist dogma that today's B.A. students are required to accept as gospel: there are no absolute truths; there is no fixed human nature; what we think of as reality is only an artifice; there are as many realities as there are ideologies or discourses which construct them; words don't simply mirror reality, they manufacture it.

Williamson portrays the current academic fashions with deadly accuracy. Swain regurgitates the lines of many of the leading gurus of theory. Quoting Michel Foucault, he argues that knowledge is always an effect of power and that liberal humanism is the principal ideology of the patriarchal corporate state. Echoing Edward Said, Swain claims the "masterpieces" of Western literature have been complicit in enslaving blacks and people in the Third World. Following Roland Barthes, he tries to introduce his students to the notion of "jouissance", a form of sexual enrapture unpolluted by the politics of gender.

This play will be especially revealing to all those students taking seminars this year on what is now the hottest topic in the humanities, "the body". While making a big show of his lofty non-sexist ideals, Swain reveals his interest in "jouissance" and the bodies of his female students is much more than theoretical.

The funniest scene of the play comes from its assault on the pretensions of academic feminism. The Parisian theorist Helene Cixious has claimed women need a new language if they are to break out of an irretrievably male framework of thought. Williamson presents one female student attempting to pass her literary theory course through a hilarious Cixious-inspired attempt to subvert the dominant phallocentric discourse.

In the contest between Shakespeare and the odious Swain for Angela's mind, Williamson does load the dice in the bard's favour. He is a genuinely modest and delightful character who is most surprised to find his plays are still performed in the late 20th century.

In opposition to literary theory, Shakespeare argues there are some things that must be constant to human nature -- the demons of love, grief, guilt, anger, fear, scorn, loyalty and hate. Moreover, he attempts to convince the audience that the two sexes have natures that differ in ways that go far deeper than ideology: they are born different.

Williamson weaves into his play some of the great scenes from Shakespeare's work including the wedding in the Forest of Arden that closes As You Like It. To incorporate extracts of Shakespeare into your own play is to take a huge theatrical risk. Handled badly, it could fall flat or, worse, look totally pretentious. Williamson, however, brings it off brilliantly. He does this partly because the scenes from Shakespeare fit so well into the movement of his own play but also because some of the Shakespearean scenes reverberate within the main sub-plot of his drama.

As well as a contest between Shakespeare and French theory, Dead White Males has a sub-plot about the impact of feminism on a typical suburban middle class family. Here again, Williamson taps into the reality of Australian life as it is being lived now.

Angela's father is one of the thousands of middle-aged male middle-management personnel who have been retrenched thanks to the recession we had to have. He knows he will never get another job. Her mother, on the other hand, is a successful corporate executive whose prospects have never been better.

Williamson's most moving treatment is reserved for Col Judd, the grandfather, a 77-year-old former building worker. The first time we meet him he sits impassively while his wife and three daughters berate him for being the authoritarian male chauvinist so familiar to readers of feminist analyses of the patriarchal family. Later, in a speech of great eloquence and power, Col tells the story of his life and defends himself from the charges earlier levelled at him.

When Shakespeare's characters come on stage to combat the literary theorists, Col appears as King Lear. This is a stunning moment for those who recall Col's previous two scenes and recognise what Williamson has accomplished. He has given the old Australian working class male -- so reviled for the last twenty years by a younger generation of playwrights, comedians, and trendy theorists of all varieties -- a theatrical apotheosis in the tragic figure of Lear.

For my money this is Williamson's most powerful play yet and also his most courageous. He is attacking a number of large, sacred cows including some, such as academic feminism, which are still revered by many among his long-faithful audience. Moreover, he is sticking his neck out and inviting the critics he is savaging to retaliate from the safety of their tenured chairs and lectureships.

At one stage in the play, Shakespeare tells the audience that he laid down his quill before he turned fifty and spent the last years of his life in deep melancholy. Williamson's fans will be glad that he has not followed the example. Dead White Males shows that, more than ever, he has the ability to identify important social and cultural issues and to say things about them that are both spot on and long overdue.

Dead White Males by David Williamson, was staged by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, March 9 - May 6 1995.