Reimagining Progress
Elements of Political Utopia and Dystopia
in Tony Kushner's Angels in America and
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
Julia Peetz
10392459
julia.peetz@gmail.com
Thesis: Research MA Cultural Analysis
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Jane Lewty
Second Reader: Dr. Murat Aydemir
Go know. As my grandma would say.
Louis Ironson, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, EpilogueIt says Progress not Perfection.
It says Never Perfection.
Contents
Introduction: Two visions of America in the 1990s 1
Part I: Angels in America 7
1. Political themes in Angels in America 9
2. Examples of political dialogue in four scenes 13
3. Key concepts: Progress and change 19
3.1. Progress as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin and Tony Kushner 21 3.2. Change is difficult: How the play's characters develop 27
4. Kushner's leftist utopia 31
Part II: Infinite Jest 33
1. Political themes in Infinite Jest 35
2. The politics of the media and the mediatization of politics 43
2.1. The post-millennial media landscape 46
2.2. Media-savvy politics in a media-saturated United States 51 3. Jean Baudrillard's influence, mediatization and the importance of media
literacy 57
4. Wallace's data-heavy dystopia 65
Conclusion: An idea of progress for the new millennium 67
Introduction: Two visions of America in the 1990s
If one tried to pinpoint what it is that specifically defines America for David Foster Wallace and Tony Kushner, one would have to conclude that Wallace thought of America in terms of entertainment, addiction and despair. In writing his great American novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace says,
I wanted to do something that was very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do both with entertainment and about some kind of weird, addictive, um … wanting to give yourself away to something. (qtd. in Lipsky 82, emphasis in original).
Tony Kushner, on the other hand, seems to define America in terms of its origins. In the very first scene of his magnum opus, Angels in America, Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz asserts to the congregation present at the funeral of Sarah Ironson, "[y]ou do not live in America. No such place exists." He then maps Mrs. Ironson's journey from the Lithuanian steppes to Grand Concourse Avenue in New York and tells the assembled bereaved,
You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles the voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.
From the play's outset America is therefore defined by its migratory roots: America is a journey. The above quotes illustrate that the two writers' ideas about what defines America could hardly have been more different. Yet both of their major literary works were conceived of and written within the late 1980s and early 1990s, published in the mid '90s, and can be seen as genre-defining works of the period. Both Angels in America and Infinite Jest also insist on being recognized as giants of novel- and playwriting, respectively, through their sheer length, breadth and scope. Their unashamed embrace of maximalism is evident in the fact that Angels in
months out of the reading life of anyone intent on getting through the hefty volume. The encyclopedic scope the texts are able to encompass due to their size might, upon detailed examination of their entirety, make it harder to pinpoint what they do not say than what they do.
Yet it is clear that America is a central theme in both works—they share an abiding interest in the state of the nation as well as in what it means to be an American in the mid-1990s and beyond. Nadine Holdsworth, for instance, gives Angels as a clear example of what she means by a state-of-the-nation play in her book Theatre & Nation.1 Wallace also had a deep curiosity for the United States and its discontents, as evidenced in such essays as the much-cited "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", first published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which was seen as central to understanding Infinite Jest in most of the early scholarship on the novel (Burn 21). This conscious embeddedness in their specific national context justifies an analysis of how Angels in America and Infinite Jest engage with the time and place in which they were written.
In this thesis I intend to argue that the results of Kushner's and Wallace's explorations of American discontents and needs in the last decade of the previous millennium can be much more fruitfully compared than the their definitions of America seem to suggest. In fact, I submit that Angels in America and Infinite Jest are invaluable resources in answering the question of how one can evaluate this period of time, its connection to the past and its role in bringing about the future. As the quotes at the beginning of this section indicate, Angels in America has a historical orientation while Infinite Jest exhibits an anxiety about the future. However, this difference can productively be read as providing complementary perspectives on the time in which the texts were written, rather than incompatible ones.
1 In Holdsworth's definition the state-of-the-nation play "deploys representations of personal events, family strcutures
and social or political organisations as a microcosm of the nation-state to comment directly or indirectly on the ills befalling society, on key narratives of nationhood or on the state of the nation as it wrestles with changing circumstances" (39).
As will be seen in the following sections, there is little disagreement among political scientists that the 1990s were a period of significant political polarization in the United States and that polarization is exacerbated by an increasingly splintered and specialized media landscape. Ultimately, however, political science can be limited by its straightforwardly empirical focus, which principally allows for judgments on the state of democracy as defined by the extent to which the political system is able to respond to the will of the electorate. I hope to provide a more nuanced evaluation of the polarized and polarizing political climate of the 1990s by analyzing two literary works of encyclopedic proportions within their historical context alongside the studies provided by political science scholarship.
When analyzed in the historical context of increasing political polarization, Angels in
America and Infinite Jest provide different perspectives through their complementary temporal
orientations. Angels in America looks back from the present of its writing to the Reagan years in the 1980s and connects that administration to the McCarthy era of the 1950s, in order to then recapture a notion of historical progress from Walter Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” and cast a hopeful glance forward towards the new millennium. Infinite Jest, by contrast, is situated in a dystopian near future, by means of which Wallace extrapolates from political and media developments under way during his time of writing and sketches a bleak picture of the coming millennium. As scholars such as Marshall Boswell (17-20) and Tom LeClair (33-6) have observed in some of the earliest critical work on the novel, Infinite Jest champions traditional, even clichéd, values of community and such simple truths as are central to the Alcoholics Anonymous program. The novel thereby engages in a kind of nostalgia for a less heavily mediated past. In the course of the following chapters, I intend to show that Angels
in America looks back in order to look optimistically forward while Infinite Jest looks forward in
order to cast a nostalgic glance back.
There is much to recommend a joint analysis of these two works of literature. Both were immediately hailed as groundbreaking works capable of revitalizing the literary traditions out of which they grew and into which they breathed new life. Frank Rich, then New York Times theatre
critic, for example, exalted Angels in America as "a searching and radical rethinking of the whole esthetic of American political drama". Angels was also seen as a play capable of saving the American theatre from a more strictly financial point of view. As a serious play that enjoyed great success on Broadway it was perceived as bridging the gap between the theatrical cash cow of the Broadway musical and the financial liability that serious plays had always been.2 Definite acceptance into the canon of American literature came when Millennium Approaches was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Infinite Jest presents a more self-conscious attempt to infiltrate and revitalize the canon. Many critics lauded Wallace as a savior who tried and, at least in part, succeeded in finding a new direction for the American novel to take. Wallace had previously diagnosed the art of novel-writing of being afflicted with a postmodern condition he considered terminal and self-annihilating.3 Though Wallace was never short-listed for any
national literary award (Franzen 38), Infinite Jest was exuberantly received by many critics, novelists and by amateur literature enthusiasts, out of whose absorption in the book grew the many websites providing detailed facts on and analyses of the novel's numerous plot strands.4
In the following chapters, I will focus on the importance of political polarization for an analysis of more and less successful instances of political dialogue in Angels in America. I will also illuminate how the play engages with and at the same time critiques Walter Benjamin’s criticism of the notion of "progress" as a positive force in history while at the same time putting forth Kushner's own conception of progress. My analysis will show that Hannah Pitt is the key character for understanding the utopian vision of the future laid out in the play's epilogue, even though this character is one who has been largely ignored by the scholarship on the play so far.
2 For more a detailed overview of the reception of Angels in America, see Savran 13-4.
3 Wallace's most extended arguments in favor of moving beyond postmodernist conventions can be found in his essay
"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (especially on pages 171-93) and in Larry McCaffery's interview with Wallace, which accompanied the publication of "E Unibus Pluram" in the Review of Contemporary Fiction (especially on pages 134-48).
4 A solid overview of the remarkable niche popularity Infinite Jest enjoys on the Internet, as well as an overview of the
state Wallace scholarship before and after the author's suicide, can be found in Adam Kelly's essay "The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline".
Then I will clarify the complex entanglement of politics, the media and the advertisement industry as it exists in Infinite Jest’s dystopia. In particular, I will focus on Wallace’s construction of the John Gentle Administration, which is presented to the reader thrice mediated through the narrator’s description of and comments on Mario Incandenza’s video explaining interdependence and Hal Incandenza’s essay on the rise of InterLace TelEntertainment. These more obviously satirical elements of the fictional world Wallace creates have often been neglected and dismissed as mere satire, but they are in fact necessary for an understanding of Wallace's dystopian vision. Additionally, Infinite Jest's political and mass media landscape is crucial for understanding how the novel plays with but also critiques the Baudrillardian concept of the hyperreal while conceptualizing progress as the way out of postmodern nihilism. My analysis is placed in a dialogue with current political theories on how increasing mediation and a growing number of media outlets leads to the radicalization of political opinion and the mis- or underinformation of the public. I will conclude by showing that, despite their different temporal orientations, Angels in America and Infinite Jest perceive many of the same problems within American society and regard it as essential that a new idea of progress is imagined as a way out of the partisan and postmodern deadlock of the 1990s.
Part I:
1. Political themes in Angels in America
In 1987 Angels in America was commissioned by the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, which is devoted to political theatre, and Brechtian epic theatre in particular. The play was subsequently developed at the New York Theatre Workshop, where its first reading was held in 1988, and then the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to which the Eureka Co.'s artistic director Oskar Eustis, whom Kushner cites as having had a great deal of influence on Angels, had relocated. Even though Angels went on to a tremendously large, expensive and successful production at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway in 1993, winning several Tony Awards, including Best Play for both Millennium Approaches in 1993 and Perestroika in 1994, its origins are therefore to be found within a tradition of explicitly political, leftist and socialist theatre, the natural home of which is the non-profit theatre sector (Nielsen 72-3).
Tony Kushner, likewise, grew up with liberal progressive parents. At Columbia University he read Marx, Brecht and Walter Benjamin (Nielsen 8). As a gay, Jewish playwright residing in New York City, he is passionately leftist and an American patriot as well as being committed to political theatre (Klüßendorf 169-70). He has described his own commitment thus:
I am a political theater artist of the left; this means I can't direct plays I find reactionary, even if that means giving up paying work. It means I can't applaud work that seems to me offensive to a group of people fighting for their own liberation. If I am a political theater artist of the left, I am committed to do work that participates as fully as possible in the struggles of the oppressed for power, in the desperate need for economic democracy, for socialism, for feminism, for environmentalism, for an end to bigotry of all kinds, for the building of a better world. Because the world can be much better than it is. ("Notes About Political Theatre" 26)
In Angels in America this political engagement is readily apparent, as the play links the Reagan Administration's failed AIDS policy to the McCarthy era and combines this with meditations on Mormonism, Judaism and race in 1980s and early 1990s America. Its large cast
is a mix of historical and invented characters, the majority of whom are uncannily articulate about their political and metaphysical positions. They all exist in a world in which the realistic is linked to the fantastic in such a way that characters encounter one another in their dreams and hallucinations, and, as if that were not enough, the play also continually undermines its own immersive theatrical magic through the use of meta-theatrical commentary that, in Brechtian fashion, breaks the fourth wall. "I would never be able to say what Angels in America is about", Kushner himself has said ("A TPQ Interview" 50). Because Angels is also very much an ensemble piece, incorporating the points of view and experiences of many different characters, a certain ambivalence, much discussed by Savran (14, 28-9, 32) and Corby (17), is only to be expected.
Yet Kushner is so passionately committed to political theatre, to a critical engagement with the present of his writing in late 1980s and early 1990s America (Klüßendorf 14-5), and to articulating his own vision of a better America, that an interest in the American political landscape runs as an unmistakably central theme through his highly complex play. Ricarda Klüßendorf argues that, "[o]ne of the main aims of Kushner's playwriting seems to be the definition of America in progressive terms" (171), while James Corby concludes an essay subtitled "Locating Kushner's Political Vision in Angels in America" with the observation that the play's open-endedness, its refusal "to ossify into an ideological position or utopian belief", makes it "activist drama of the most thoroughgoing kind" (30). David Savran, by contrast, in his seminal essay "Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation", argues that although "[c]ritics, pundits and producers have placed ...
Angels in America … in the unenviable position of having to rescue the American theatre" (13),
this Brechtian play ultimately falls short of its radical promise because in it "an identity politic
comes to substitute for Marxist analysis" (31, emphasis in original).
I intend to contribute to the unearthing of Angels' political core by looking at the play in the context of the political climate prevalent at the time of its writing. In particular, I will
analyze four scenes, Millennium Approaches 3.2, Perestroika 4.4, 4.6, and 4.8, and ask how these scenes fit into the context of the polarization of American political discourse, which, according to political scientists like David Brady and Hahrie Han, Delia Baldassari and Andrew Gelman as well as Jonathan Ladd has been on the rise since at least the 1970s.
Political polarization in the United States has in recent years increasingly been the subject of academic study. For example, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution jointly released two large volumes on polarization, edited by Pietro Nivola and David Brady, in 2006 and 2008, while monographs on the subject by Markus Prior, Alan Abramowitz and Jonathan Ladd were published by Cambridge University Press, Yale University Press and Princeton University Press in 2007, 2010 and 2012, respectively.
In the first Hoover/Brookings volume Morris Fiorina and Matthew Levendusky argue that there is "a disconnect between the American people and those who purport to represent them" (51-2), because while polarization has increased at the elite level of American politics, this growth is not representative of the views prevalent within the electorate, who have remained much more moderate. The received wisdom that there is "no longer a middle ground in American politics" is therefore contradicted by academic research (51); plausibly since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the gulf between the more polarized political elite and an "increasing number of ordinary Americans [who] appear to be walking away from the conflicts that characterize the party elite" has been widening (55; 69). Delia Baldassari and Andrew Gelman draw a very similar conclusion in a 2008 article, arguing that any "changes in the electorate should be interpreted as an illusory adjustment of citizens to the renovated partisanship of the political elite"—"illusory" because people do not actually change their views but merely adapt the more clearly partisan division between the parties (441).
Alan Abramowitz, by contrast, argues that "while it is indisputable that partisan polarization is greater among political elites than among the American public", there is evidence that the American public, and not just party elites, have become more polarized
("Disconnected" 80). Abramowitz shows that all of the American public except the relatively limited group of nonvoters, who show no interest in politics in any form, is increasingly polarized ("Disconnected" 73-84, The Disappearing Center 111-38). In Abramowitz's view the fact that political engagement in the U.S. "reached its highest level in 2008" is a "direct result of deep divisions within the public over the presidency of George W. Bush", but is also "unlikely to change under a new president" (The Disappearing Center 6). Where Fiorina and Levendusky see a disconnect between a largely non-ideological electorate and an ideologically divided political elite, Abramowitz therefore sees a connection: the American public cannot accurately be described as non-ideological, since "[o]ne of the main reasons Democratic and Republican candidates and officeholders are more deeply divided than they were thirty or forty years ago is because Democratic and Republican voters, opinion leaders, and activists are more deeply divided than they were thirty or forty years ago" ("Disconnected" 77-80).
David Brady and Hahrie Han's analysis highlights a different facet of the polarized American political landscape. Their historical overview of polarization in the United States allows them to distinguish between qualitatively different types of polarization: ideological and economic. When parties are polarized over economic issues, as for example during the New Deal era when it was the parties' goal to put an end to economic depression, they tend to disagree on how to best achieve a common objective. When parties disagree on moral questions like abortion or gay marriage, however, they "do not even agree on what the goal is" (127). Polarization is therefore "most acute when party divisions evince clear ideological disparities and party coalitions behave cohesively around those views", as they did during the Civil War and have been doing increasingly since the mid-1970s (130).5
In the following section, I will analyze four scenes from Angels in America—Millennium
Approaches 3.2, Perestroika 4.4, 4.6 and 4.8—in order to show how the political dialogues staged
5 Brady and Han qualify this by stating that, even though ideological polarization is an increasingly major problem for
the two main US parties, "they are applying their cohesiveness toward bipartisan votes more often than before", which is why a major upheaval, like a second civil war, is unlikely to occur (130-3).
in the scenes reflect back upon these different levels of polarization and therefore shed light on the polarized American political landscape at the time of the play's writing. Subsequently, I will analyze how Angels links political dialogue to the notions of progress and change put forth in the play. Progress and change are two of the most important concepts Kushner's play functions with and through; they have been analyzed most notably by David Savran and Steven Kruger, respectively. Although Angels' notion of progress relies heavily on Walter Benjamin's essay "Über den Begriff der Geschichte", it will be seen that in important ways this notion remains very much Kushner's own. It is central both to understanding Savran's criticism that Kushner's play is not politically radical enough, and, I argue, to an understanding of the stance from which
Angels looks from the present of its writing into the past and future of American politics.
Societal change, likewise, is a concept that is central to an understanding of character development in Angels in America, and, I submit, to an understanding of why Hannah Pitt, a character thus far neglected in scholarly treatments of Angels, breaks the rules which govern the development of all other characters, thereby allowing Angels to envision the American political future as a leftist utopia.
2. Examples of political dialogue in four scenes
Party politics matter in Angels in America, especially to the more politically active characters in the play. The most dramatic moment showcasing the polarization of American party politics comes in Perestroika 4.8, the scene which stages Louis and Joe's violent breakup. Both Joe, who is chief clerk to Justice Wilson in the Federal Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, who voted for Reagan twice and is Roy Cohn's protégé, and Louis, who works as a word processor for the same court, are very political people. Joe can be seen as being part of the political elite, as he works for a highly influential Federal Court of Appeals capable of setting legal precedents. Louis is not in a comparably powerful position, but aside from the play's clear villain Roy Cohn, he is the
most overtly political character in Angels. Louis constantly opens up political discussions throughout the play and brings up other people's politics. Upon meeting Joe, for example, Louis is scandalized by Joe's voting pattern and later, when he admits to Prior that he has been having a fling with Joe, he brings up Joe's Republicanism again (Millennium Approaches 1.6, Perestroika 4.1). Louis does manage to keep up his relationship with Joe for over a month; perhaps in part because, in a way that is similar to Millennium Approaches 2.4, in which he tells a random stranger in a park to go through with their sexual encounter even though the condom broke, he wants to punish and lose himself in meaningless sex.
Ultimately, however, as Klüßendorf argues, "it is … political difference, not personal or sexual incompatibility, which ends their relationship" (220). After Belize tells Louis about Joe's close association with Roy Cohn in Perestroika 4.3, Louis looks into Joe's political background. He then breaks up with Joe in Perestroika 4.8, mainly attacking Joe for the "important bit of legal fag-bashing" that he ghostwrote for Justice Wilson as well as for being Roy's protégé.6 Even
though Joe is less eager than Louis to discuss politics throughout the play, at one point telling Louis, "Let's not discuss politics, OK?" (Millennium Approaches 2.7), there is no indication that he has come to disagree with or regrets writing the decision that Louis characterizes as an "important bit of legal fag-bashing". In fact, Joe responds to Louis's accusations by saying, "I don't believe this. My opinions are being criticized by the guy who changes the coffee filters in the secretaries' lounge!" Even after a month of living as a homosexual with Louis, Joe's Reaganite, conservative politics therefore appear largely unchanged, despite the fact that, at least as far as Louis is concerned, those politics are incompatible with being an uncloseted homosexual.
6 This "important bit of legal fag-bashing" was a (fictional) legal decision. According to Louis it was discriminatory
because it changed the reason for why an army officer who was dishonorably discharged was able to get his pension back after suing the army. It was first ruled that homosexuals were a legitimate minority that was entitled to special protection under the law, but the second decision, the one Joe ghostwrote, changed this. It ruled that the former officer would get his pension back only because he had already told the army that he was gay when he enlisted, and not because homosexuals are in fact a legitimate minority.
Louis and Joe's breakup scene stands in contrast to another heated political exchange, the much-analyzed Millennium Approaches 3.2, in which Louis and Belize meet in a coffee house.7 Louis rather grandly opens the conversation by asking "Why has democracy succeeded
in America?" and proceeds with a long spiel on how America unlike "any European country" is not defined by race but by politics, which means that democracy in America is plagued by "really just a collection of small problems", which will be resolved "when the race thing gets taken care of". Belize, who is black, predictably takes offense at this, and the conversation devolves into mutual accusations, with Louis saying "I do think most black people are anti-Semitic", Belize preparing to retort with "And I think most Jews…" Louis finally accusing "You hate me because I'm a Jew", and Belize countering "You hate me because you hate black people" (emphasis in original). Although a sense that their identities are more complex than this is evoked in the following lines, this notion is really brought into the conversation only to continue, rather than resolve, this one-upmanship. Thus Louis opines, "I just think when you are discussing lines of oppression it gets very complicated", to which Belize retorts, "Oh is that a fact? You know, we black drag-queens have a rather intimate knowledge of the complexity of lines of … "
Nevertheless, this belligerent back and forth eventually turns out to be fuelled by Louis's crushing guilt about having left Prior because he could not stand to see his lover suffering from AIDS. In this scene Kushner lets Louis and Belize entrench themselves in their respective Jewish and black identities, forget what they have in common as gay men and friends of Prior's, and run ineffectually through a number of (stereotypical) factional accusations, only to expose the whole debate as being for the most part a smokescreen for Louis's personal guilt. In fact, Belize knows very well that this is what is going on: "I know you, Louis, and I know the guilt fueling this particular tirade is obviously already swollen bigger than your hemorrhoids," he says at one point. The point is that the characters here make a kind of parody of a critique that sees identity politics as parochial and exclusionary: While Louis and Belize have some genuine grievances
with each other, Louis deliberately adopts a position that appears as the polar opposite of Belize's in an attempt to avoid talking about what is really on his mind, since to do so would expose all his vulnerability and guilt. Belize knows this and, though he is offended, takes what he calls Louis's "racist bullshit" only half-seriously and opts to engage in the conversation on Louis's terms. If parody is "an act of duplication where the original is placed ‘beside itself’" in order to show its copy's constructedness by highlighting the critical distance between copy and original (Kenny 222), then Louis and Belize here parodically copy the gulf that is presumed to exist between their identity-political positions, while the scene shows that their disagreement is actually a smokescreen for something else.
This interpretation is in line with Klüßendorf's observation that "Kushner strongly deplores the lack of solidarity among different [identity] groups" (231). For all their political argumentation, Louis and Belize's exchange is on a different level from Louis and Joe's breakup scene, and it is party politics—the characters' party political affiliations in particular—which makes the difference. Louis and Belize, both liberals, remain on friendly terms by the play's epilogue. Joe, on the other hand, is not included in Angels' final scene—this absence is something he shares with Roy Cohn, who is the only character the play actually condemns to death.
While Joe is strikingly absent from the play's epilogue, the inclusion of his mother, Hannah, among the group of friends who get together to celebrate Prior's birthday at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is no less remarkable. It is remarkable because there is nothing about Hannah's first appearance in Millennium Approaches 2.9 to suggest that she is not just as much a Republican as her son is. At that point she is a Mormon woman living in Salt Lake City, Utah, who flies into a rage when Joe calls her at two o'clock in the morning to confess that he is gay, tells him that drinking is a sin and to go home to his wife. Prior, on the other hand, is obviously a leftist, liberal homosexual, who moves in the same social circles as his best friend Belize and his lover Louis. Unlike Joe and Louis, however, Hannah and Prior are not particularly politically
active characters. Neither holds a politically significant job or displays Louis's predilection for starting political discussions. Compared to Joe and Louis, Hannah and Prior show much less overt interest in party politics and may therefore be regarded as more indicative of the kinds of ordinary Americans, who, according to Fiorina and Levendusky, are turning their backs on a supposed "culture war" that is really being fought out among the party elites (69). While Louis and Joe are deeply polarized by their respective conservative and liberal politics and ideologies, Hannah and Prior are able to enter into an amicable dialogue much more easily.
Hannah first encounters Prior in Perestroika 4.4 and 4.6, and the initial conversations between the two characters constitute a shedding of the prejudicial baggage with which they instinctually regard one another. In Scene 4, after Prior has mentioned his ex-boyfriend, Hannah, who has just moved to New York City, asks him "Are you a … a homosexual?" and if he would say he is a "typical … homosexual", to which he replies, "Oh I'm stereotypical" (emphasis in original). In Scene 6, after she talks about her Mormon religion, Prior opines, "I'm sorry but it's repellent to me, so much of what you believe",8 and when he presumes to know that Hannah
despises him for being homosexual, she exclaims, "No you can't. Imagine. The things in my head. You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you." Having thus defended her individuality—and Prior's!—as something that is not strictly defined by whatever collectivities they belong to or whatever political affiliations they have, a rapport that later develops into friendship is established between them. Much like Louis does in his exchange with Belize in Millennium Approaches 3.2, Prior here first uses his identity and its received incompatibility with Hannah's defensively. He is afraid of the Angel, afraid of losing his mind, afraid of dying, and therefore dismisses Hannah's religious belief in angels and visions in order to shield himself from what he fears. Once a rapport has been established, however, he
8 This is actually a more strongly worded reiteration of the same prejudice Prior gives voice to in an earlier exchange
(in Millennium Approaches 1.7) with Harper, where he counters her exclamation "Oh! In my church we don't believe in homosexuals" sarcastically with, "In my church we don't believe in Mormons".
wryly comments, "I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough" (Perestroika 4.6).
In contrast to the scene between Louis and Belize, where two characters who have known each other for a while use more polarized notions of identity than necessary to shroud their vulnerability, here two characters that do not know each other first have to cut through their received prejudices about each other before they can genuinely converse. Nevertheless, Hannah in particular appears to be able to shed her previous conservatism remarkably easily. I will discuss the way Hannah develops as a character in the following section as part of my analysis of how the notions of change and progress apply to Angels in America on a more conceptual level.
Millennium Approaches 3.2 and Perestroika 4.4 and 4.6 can be read as a parody of
contentious identity politics. In the exchange between Louis and Belize, their political debate is exposed as a smokescreen for Louis's guilt and vulnerability. In the exchange between Hannah and Prior, Prior tends to make defensive snap judgments about what he has been told about Hannah's faith, only to have them forcefully rebuffed by Hannah. While I agree with Steven Kruger that "Angels in America is at least in part the product of gay identity politics" (152), especially because, as Framji Minwalla observes, "Kushner examines AIDS … as if it were a racial category itself" (113), I also agree with Minwalla that "[d]emonstrating how Kushner uses categories defined by race and gender to move beyond a politics of identity to a politics of citizenship is … a more fruitful approach to his work" (105).
Prior's comment about Hannah's expected demographic profile in particular is significant. It shows that Prior's antagonism and defensiveness are not based on anything he perceives in her directly or anything she expresses so much as they are based on what he has been taught to think of her, through his (undoubtedly heavily mediated) experience of what Mormons are supposed to be like. Taking the context of political polarization into account, this scene allows audiences to see that perceived differences between two positions, one presumed
to be that of a "typical" conservative, Middle-American, middle-aged, religious woman and the other of a "typical" gay man living in a major coastal metropolis, are not as extreme as one might believe. It is possible for Prior and Hannah to become friends to the extent that Hannah is included in Prior's birthday party in the epilogue, but only once they have realized that the gulf between their positions is not as big as they have been told by the polarized rhetoric of party politics and the media. The opposite is true of Louis and Joe, who, after an initial attraction cannot move beyond their strong political convictions, the clash of which brings about their violent breakup.
If the scenarios here analyzed say anything about the polarization of the American political landscape, it is that the more politically involved people are—like Louis and Joe—the harder it is for them to bridge the gulf created by polarization. While the less politically interested can—like Hannah and Prior—attain a level of mutual political dialogue that goes beyond party rhetoric, to be an active political thinker in the United States in the late 1980s and early '90s, when "the party platforms had settled into the polarized paradigms that have persisted [since then]" (Galson and Nivola 20), is to be partisan. The scenes from Angels in
America show that, on a political level, the play is firmly embedded in its time: in the United
States under Reagan a "period of increasingly sharp differentiation between the two parties at the elite level" had begun (Fiorina and Levendusky 55), thus making it difficult for those who closely identified with one party or another to bridge the gap between their respective ideologies.
3. Key concepts: Progress and change
In contrast to some the scenes analyzed in the last section, Angels in America ends on a decidedly hopeful note. In the epilogue Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah meet at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park for Prior's birthday in 1990, four years after the main action of the play. While Prior
addresses the audience directly, Hannah, Louis and Belize discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev's perestroika, the importance of theory as well as Zionism and Israel/Palestine.
In scholarly treatments of Angels there is some debate over the import of the epilogue. Savran (31) and Reinelt (236) perceive the fact that the characters disagree in their spirited political discussion as evidence that nothing has changed between Louis and Belize: the characters simply continue to fight. In striking contrast to this assessment, Minwalla argues that this amicable meeting between four friends constitutes the realization of Belize's socialist vision of Heaven as a place where "[r]ace, taste and history [are] finally overcome" (Perestroika 3.6; Minwalla 115-6).
Neither interpretation seems to me to quite capture the meaning of the scene. The characters do disagree, and they do so sometimes out of a conviction born from their religious (or other) identity, as when Louis, who is Jewish, talks about importance of Israel's right to exist. Yet while they disagree, they also discuss, civilly, the important political issues of the day, sometimes while finishing each other's sentences and without any longer using politics as shields to hide behind and attack one another.
It therefore seems more plausible that an example of positive progress is being set up here: this is a utopian vision in which spirited yet amiable political dialogue has been restored in an American future post Reagan. Two concepts are essential to understanding Kushner's hopeful construction of the future: progress and change. In this section I investigate how progress functions as an inevitable but not necessarily positive force, guided by human agency, in Angels in America, and how Kushner's play insists on personal change as a difficult, painful but ultimately worthwhile endeavor.
3.1. Progress as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin and Tony Kushner
As will be seen, progress is one of the most important concepts for Angels in America. Yet Kushner's most important source is Walter Benjamin's "Über den Begriff der Geschichte", a text which emphatically rejects the modern notion of progress. Scholars like David Savran therefore judge Angels in America harshly for apparently embracing a notion of progress that Benjamin, in the very text that informs much of Angels' philosophy, rejects. Savran contends that "Angels unabashedly champions rationalism and progress", meaning that with the play Kushner devotes himself "to rescuing Enlightenment epistemologies at a time when they are, to say the least, extremely unfashionable" (21). According to Savran, the play best makes its point in favor of progress when Prior Walter, toward the play's end, proclaims before the angelic Council of Principalities:
It's just … it's just … we can't just stop. We're not rocks – progress, migration, motion is … modernity. It's animate. It's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for. Even if we go faster than we should. We can't wait. And wait for what? God… (Perestroika 5.5, emphasis in original)
Prior here appears to champion a notion of progress that the prior Walter whom his name explicitly channels emphatically rejected. In thesis XIII in his essay "Über den Begriff der Geschichte", Walter Benjamin states:
Die sozialdemokratische Theorie, und noch mehr die Praxis, wurde von einem Fortschrittsbegriff bestimmt, der sich nicht an die Wirklichkeit hielt, sondern einen dogmatischen Anspruch hatte. Der Fortschritt, wie er sich in den Köpfen der Sozialdemokraten malte, war, einmal, ein Fortschritt der Menschheit selbst (nicht nur ihrer Fertigkeiten und Kenntnisse). Er war, zweitens, ein unabschließbarer (einer unendlichen
Perfektibilität der Menschheit entsprechender). Er galt, drittens, als ein
wesentlich unaufhaltsamer (als ein selbsttätig eine grade oder spiralförmige Bahn durchlaufender). Jedes dieser Prädikate ist
wenn es hart auf hart kommt, hinter all diese Prädikate zurückgehen und sich auf etwas richten, was ihnen gemeinsam ist. Die Vorstellung eines Fortschritts des Menschengeschlechts in der Geschichte ist von der Vorstellung ihres eine homogene und leere Zeit durchlaufenden Fortgangs nicht abzulösen. Die Kritik an der Vorstellung dieses Fortgangs muß die Grundlage der Kritik an der Vorstellung des
Fortschritts überhaupt bilden. (136, my emphasis)
Here, Benjamin appears to criticize progress in general ("Fortschritt überhaupt"), while Prior seems to champion not just any kind of progress, but, by equating progress with modernity, the modern notion of progress towards ever-greater perfection in particular. It is precisely this modern idea of progress that Benjamin most despises, as it presupposes that historical progress is the inevitable ("unaufhaltsam"), positive ("einer unendlichen Perfektibilität der Menschheit entsprechend") progress of humanity at large ("der Menschheit selbst"). For Benjamin this modern vision of progress is dogmatic rather than descriptive of reality.
Yet on the level of Kushner's whole play, rather than in the mouth of a single character, progress is not thought of as being nearly as positive as Prior makes it sound in the monologue quoted above. In Perestroika 5.5, Prior's speech is immediately countered by the Angel, which character is, according to Savran "clearly derived from Benjamin's text" (17). Kushner's Angel seems to have been taken directly from the angel Benjamin sees in Paul Klee's 1920 painting
Angelus Novus, insofar as both come from a paradise that has been wrecked by the established
course of human history.9 In both texts, the destruction is ongoing and the angels, despite being
supernatural beings, are powerless against it. In Benjamin's thesis IX, his angel is inexorably driven forward into the future by a storm—the very storm which we call "progress"—which he cannot stop and which has been creating a heap of ruins that keeps growing toward the sky (133). In Angels, the seven angelic Continental Principalities try to arrest the destructive force
9 There is some confusion about whether Kushner's Angel is indeed Benjamin's: Savran (17) and Nielsen (50) believe
that this is so, while Corby claims that "Benjamin’s Angel is not, of course, Kushner’s Angel" (26), though he does not expand on this point.
called human "progress" by making Prior a prophet and giving him a prophecy of immobility. It is this prophecy that Prior refuses with his speech in Perestroika 5.5. Significantly, the Angel counters Prior's refusal with a speech of her own that sounds, in its pessimism about human "progress", entirely Benjaminian:
You have not seen what is to come: We have:
What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?
That you or any being should wish to endure them?
Death more plenteous than all Heaven has tears to mourn it, The slow dissolving of the Great Design,
The spiraling apart of the Work of Eternity, The World and its beautiful particle logic All collapsed. All dead, forever,
In starless, moonlorn onyx night. (emphasis in original)
Prior then asks for more life regardless of this grim vision, saying that humans "live past hope", and that despite the fact that a life that does not get better is "so much not enough, so inadequate", his resolve to keep on living is unbroken.
It seems to me, then, that Angels in America, even in these more hopeful moments, is highly ambivalent on the nature of progress. Prior does not disagree with the Angel's Benjaminian vision of progress as "eine einzige Katastrophe" (Benjamin 133). There is also an earlier exchange in Perestroika 2.1 between Prior and Belize, in which Prior appears more tempted to accept the Angel's prophecy. Belize then cautions: "But that's not how the world works, Prior. It only spins forward", which Prior rebuffs pessimistically with, "Yeah but forward into what?" (emphasis in original). In this same scene Belize also takes offense at the idea of stopping progress, not because progress is here conceived of as inherently positive, but because the very idea of stopping it is "malevolent": Referring to the history of the American slave trade Belize nevertheless calls the idea of arresting progress "worse than nuts, it's … don't migrate,
don't mingle, that's … malevolent, some of us didn't exactly choose to migrate, know what I'm saying … " (emphasis in original). That Prior later, in the epilogue, echoes Belize's earlier words while addressing the audience and affirms that "[t]he world only spins forward", hardly negates the fact that "progress" is here set up by Belize not only not as inherently positive or as leading towards ever-greater human perfection, but as highly ambiguous and as something that often has consequences of disastrous proportions, the history of American slavery being one of them. What "progress", or onward movement to phrase it more neutrally, does seem to be in Angels in
America, however, is an inevitable feature of life: to stop moving is to die.10
The notion of "progress" as a not normatively marked onward movement, in turn, dovetails with Benjamin's idea of history. For Benjamin, the revolutionary potential that exists in the present depends on the "schwache messianische Kraft" that every generation has been endowed with, simply on account of the fact this generation was "expected" by the past, and so is a result of the past (130, emphasis in original). As David Ferris explains, "weak messianic power" entails an important distinction: "It is weak, because it cannot proclaim the end of history, only the Messiah can do this … the difference between the messianic and the Messiah is that the former can only arrest time in the form of an interruption" (134).11 In this
interruption, it is possible "das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen" (Benjamin 138). The continuous course of history, perceived as having taken the form of a destructive catastrophe, can be blasted open and redirected so that "history is redeemed from the ideological forces that have distorted it" (Ferris 134). Redemption of the past, therefore, entails a momentary arrest of time in which the course of history can be blasted open and, consequently, redirected (in the sense of a wrong being righted).
10 Hence Prior's plea to the angels for "more life" when he returns the prophecy in Perestroika 5.5. This plea is inspired
by Harold Bloom's translation of the Hebrew word for "blessing" as "more life" ("Playwright's Notes" 144).
11 Graeme Gilloch reasons similarly that "[r]evolutionary transformation is an interruption of history, rather than its
Ferris reasons that Benjamin, in not relying on the capital-M Messiah, "refuses a theological solution to history because it would have neither political nor historical meaning"; thus, "[w]here redemption of the past occurs, it must occur within history to have political significance" (134, my emphasis). Though it is informed by his religious consciousness, Benjamin conceives of this kind of redemption as fundamentally a human phenomenon. It must, like humans, exist within the onward movement of time. This seems far from incompatible with the inevitability of onward movement proposed in Angels in America, for surely Benjamin's redemption within history entails that, after the revolutionary moment of arrest, history keeps moving on.12 Conceiving of change as a human phenomenon is further
important for Angels in America, because, as the Angel tells Prior in Perestroika 2.1, the destruction in paradise began after God left because He was so intrigued by human "progress" that He went to live among humans as a human. In Perestroika 5.5 Prior tells the angels that God isn't coming back and that everyone will have to move on without him.
Benjamin, writing of the "'Jetztzeit' in welcher Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind", conceives of the weak messianic power that is functional to the blasting open of the continuum of history as something that exists as scattered splinters in the now (139). His constant reference to class struggle notwithstanding, he elsewhere conceives of the redemption of the past rather more modestly in terms of "a small fissure in a continuous catastrophe" (qtd. in Ferris 134). The messianic potential is therefore sprinkled throughout the present rather than being concentrated in it, and the redemption that this weak messianic power makes possible constitutes merely "a small fissure in a continuous catastrophe". In light of this, I am not convinced that it is fruitful to read Benjamin, as Savran does, only in the context of an all-encompassing Marxist/socialist revolution that wholly upends the current capitalistic order. Especially because Benjamin explicitly attributes the notion of progress he rejects to
12 Benjamin's distinction between "Fortschritt" and "Fortgang" in Thesis XIII also implies this (136): While
"Fortschritt" entails an orderly taking of steps ("Schritte") towards a pre-defined goal, "Fortgang" is a much more loosely defined motion, entailing simply continuous movement.
democrats (136), it is not necessary to stretch Benjamin's meaning far to plausibly apply his idea of redemption also to other, smaller and more limited struggles than the one against global capitalism.
Given that the redemption of the past that Benjamin theorizes takes the form of the "rescue of a small fissure from a history that threatens to overpower it" (Ferris 134), it strikes me as unproductive to accuse Kushner's play of failing to measure up to Benjamin's level of thought. From a theoretical point of view, there appears to be little reason to condemn Angels for not proposing a Marxist analysis, as Savran does when he faults the play because "[a]mid all the political disputation there is no talk of social class" (31). There is still less basis for accusing the play of not accomplishing the even more Herculean task of re-envisioning a Marxist revolution—which Savran implies when he claims that "Revolution, in the Marxist sense, is rendered virtually unthinkable" by the play (31). That Kushner does not re-envision a Marxist revolution may be less due to Kushner's own failure and more due to the fact that Marxist revolution was simply unthinkable at the time of Kushner's writing; while the American political landscape was and is increasingly ideologically polarized, the political concerns of the time and of Kushner's play are of a different (and undeniably smaller) order. Although this limits what is at stake for the political in Angels in America, I submit that this smaller order is more in line with the possibilities afforded by the institution of American non-profit political theatre today.13 It is also more anchored to the political context in which Kushner's play was and
is performed, a context in which political polarization and partisan splintering are central concerns. Since Benjamin's blasting open of history, as a premeditated human action, relies on human agency, it only makes sense for Kushner's play, in drawing on Benjamin, to propose a change that is graspable from within the play's concrete political context.
13 Non-profit political theatre frequently exists in a paradoxical situation since it, on the one hand, seeks to criticize or
even subvert the established political and capitalist system, but is, on the other hand, financially supported by that very system. Theatre scholar Dani Snyder-Young explores this paradox and exposes as unrealistic the expectation that successful, middle class theatre artists, who work within the institutional theatre system, call for what would amount to bloody and destabilizing revolutionary change in their work (134-5). Performance scholar Richard Schechner likewise submits that "artists are reformers not revolutionaries" (Martin and Schechner 232).
Due to this reliance on human agency, progress in Angels in America is necessarily linked to the way people change and choose to act. In the following subsection, I will examine how
Angels conceptualizes change and how this concept of change determines the way character
development works in the play. In the conclusion to this chapter, I discuss how change and progress work together to produce the hopeful political vision we see in the epilogue. I will also, with particular reference to Hannah's development, discuss in what ways this vision is utopian in the sense of being ideal but also rather impractical.
3.2. Change is difficult: How the play's characters develop
According to Kushner's Roy Cohn, "AIDS", "homosexual", "gay" and "lesbian" are labels that "like all labels … tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, the pecking order. Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout" (Millennium Approaches 1.9). This is the reason why Roy, although he admits to having sex with men, refuses to be labeled a homosexual and threatens to sue his doctor if he so much as utters the h-word. According to Roy, the label "homosexual" has little to do with sexuality, and everything to do with the recognition problems homosexuals face: "homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council" (Millennium Approaches 1.9). It is from their lack of clout, or positive recognition, that all the other problems homosexuals face stem.
The well-known political philosopher Nancy Fraser controversially argues that while it is in reality impossible to disentangle injustices of recognition from injustices of distribution, an analytical distinction between the two can be usefully made and, allowing for some measure of abstraction, homosexuals can be seen as a collectivity "rooted wholly in culture, as opposed to in political economy", because they "are distributed throughout the entire class structure of capitalist society, occupy no distinctive position in the division of labour, and do not constitute
an exploited class" (76-7). Roy's definition of homosexuals takes abstraction one step further: It is not the mere fact of sleeping with members of the same sex that brings with it recognition problems at all, but the self-identification as a member of the group that calls itself "homosexuals", and the taking part in their identity politics. As in Fraser's abstraction, the distributive discrimination against members of this group is a result of their being members of this group. However, in Roy's further abstraction, one's belonging to this group is not based on one's actual sexual conduct, but on the (ill-advised and unnecessary) choice to consider oneself part of the group in the first place. Change, in Roy's mind, is therefore simply a matter of deciding what and who to be.
But of course, Roy is the play's villain and his idea of identity politics being a simple matter of pick-and-choose is thoroughly disproved throughout the play. Steven Kruger's enlightening analysis of Joe's failed attempts to rid himself either of his inner (gay) core or of the old skin that is made up of his personal history and conservative, Republican political beliefs, shows that identity is empathically not envisioned as an matter of simply choosing in Kushner's play. Fittingly, it is on Roy's own protégé that Roy's notion of identity as disposable is being proven wrong. Kruger concludes that, contra Roy, Angels has "a strong sense of the depth and stability of identity":
If [as the analysis of Joe's journey through the play shows] the self is not constituted by some simple, unconflicted claiming of identity, if, as well, it is not formed in isolation from others, but, rather, responds to a whole variety of (political) pressures, it is also not so easily changed or reshaped. (155)
Due to the depth, stability and basis in politics of identities in Angels in America, change is hard and character development, for the most part, has to be painfully earned. The concept of change that Angels is built around is explicitly summarized in Perestroika 3.6. The Mormon Mother, who is actually a dummy from the Mormon Visitor Center's Diorama Room and who, in
a bit of theatrical magic, has escaped from the Center with Harper, answers Harper's question "How do people change?" She says:
Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge, filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. (emphasis in original)
Prior's character development of regaining hope and wanting to continue living after a period of deep, existential despair certainly matches this idea of change, as Angels in America follows Prior's difficult journey from the first outbreak of AIDS until he is eventually able to conquer his fears and affirm his will to live.
Joe, too, finds personal change deeply painful, and, in contrast to Klüßendorf's contention that his pain is ultimately exposed as self-created and unnecessary (216), I would argue that Joe's painful experience of personal change is perfectly congruent with the concept of change that governs the entire play. Klüßendorf's argument that Joe is "responsible for his own dilemma" rests on the assumption that Hannah's development demonstrates that "people need not allow themselves to be trapped by ideology" (215). In fact, however, as I showed in the previous section, Joe is a politically interested and active character, whose professional position exerts a good deal of political influence. As Kruger's analysis shows, Joe's homosexuality and his deep-seated political convictions are not easily shaken, nor does Joe find a way to successfully reconcile them within the space of the play. In the end, his wife Harper leaves him, and as she departs she hands him two Valium pills and says, "Sometimes maybe lost is best" (Perestroika 5.8). This indicates that Joe's personal journey has only just begun. To acknowledge his own sexuality and to be confronted about his political beliefs by someone who does not share them is very new to him. Rather than giving Joe a particularly raw deal, as Klüßendorf suggests, Joe's
character development is in line with the way change works in the play as a whole and his journey is left open-ended, though it admittedly lacks the hopeful twist that most of the other principal characters are treated to.
Kushner's admits that he tried, in writing Joe, to create a Republican character he actually liked, but that he "didn't finally succeed" (qtd. in Nielsen 43). This limit to his imagination is more applicable to a critical analysis of Hannah than of Joe. While the stakes in changing a character's politics are much lower in Hannah's case than in Joe's, it would still be difficult to argue that Hannah's development has been entirely earned. When Hannah first appears in Millennium Approaches 2.9, she is a devout Mormon conservative in Utah; by
Perestroika's epilogue she has been transformed into a New York Times-reading New Yorker and
is surrounded by a group of gay friends. Even though I agree with Klüßendorf (215) that Hannah shows an initial openness toward Prior in Perestroika 4.4 and 4.6, it must be noted that most of Hannah's transformation into a progressive happens offstage.14 If that transformation was really
as easy as Klüßendorf believes—that "Hannah smoothly adapts her norms to the life she witnesses from her newly found friends" (216)—, then this is at odds with the way people change in the world of the play i.e., painfully. It is, in fact, more similar to the way Roy Cohn falsely envisions personal change as a matter of simply picking and choosing. If Hannah's transformation was not as easy as Klüßendorf suggests—and for all we know it might not have been—it still has not been earned in the play because it is never staged.
Rather than being yet another example of how people change or even a negative mirror that condemns Joe for his close-mindedness, Hannah's change should be read as an element that is crucial for Kushner's creation of a hopeful political vision in the epilogue. Even though Hannah articulates conservative doctrine when she first appears in the play, her politics are
14 The offstage transformation is problematic because there is no way for the play to earn it. A novel might smooth
over a character's sudden transformation by giving the reader access to that character's or other characters' thoughts or even a narratorial explanation of the character's change. A play, however, has to work through the visual appearance of its characters, their dialogue and its onstage real-time action alone, all of which makes it much more difficult for audiences to believe in a character's personal transformation when it has not been gradually staged.
kept vague enough that her transformation into a liberal does not appear entirely outlandish (as a similar transformation of Joe would have done). The positive progress that is achieved by the play's end thus depends not only on the restoration of healthy political dialogue, but just as much on conservatives like Hannah becoming more liberal. It is, in short, not a vision of bipartisanship and mutual respect, but a return of political dialogue on Kushner's own political,
decidedly leftist terms.
4. Kushner's leftist utopia
Angels in America is historical in the sense that the play looks back from the time of its writing to
the mid-1980s and to the McCarthy era as a terrible time when the extreme left was under fire. While the historical angle demonizes the Reagan Administration by linking it to the McCarthy era through the character of Roy Cohn, Kushner dares to envision the future in a more hopeful way. Angels' epilogue stresses that it is possible to return a healthy political dialogue, while several scenes in the play demonstrate how political dialogue can break down or be used to mask other, more pressingly personal issues.
The play uses what it portrays as a rather dreadful past in order to recuperate a sense of agency. This agency, Angels posits, can bring about a kind of progress that, if humans try hard enough, can be positive. But Angels is America also remains a product of Kushner's own time in the early 1990s and of Kushner's politics. While Kushner's vision of the future, as staged in the epilogue, shows how political dialogue can be healthy, productive and amicable, this situation depends on the somewhat utopian notion that conservatives will, in the future, have shifted towards the left. The play cannot entirely overcome its distaste of Republicans. The character of Hannah therefore has to perform the tightrope walk of being, through her conservative-to-liberal transformation, functional to Kushner's utopian vision, while also remaining vague and
undeveloped enough during the main action of the play not to disrupt the painful way in which
Angels insists people change.
One crucial aspect of political polarization that I have not explicitly focused on thus far is the role the mass media and mediatization in general play in bringing about and exacerbating polarization. An at least subliminal awareness of the mass media's influence shines through in the first exchanges between Hannah and Prior in Perestroika 4.4 and 4.6. They each appear to react to the other according to how they imagine the whole group of people the other person belongs to—homosexuals or Mormons in this case—think and behave. The received views they have of one another cloud the immediacy of their reactions to each other. This means that Prior and Hannah first have to cut through their own prejudicial baggage before they can respond to the empirical evidence of the present and genuinely interact with each other.
Angels in America therefore seems to embed an understanding of how polarization can
increase when people's life experience is largely mediated and influenced by the output of various mass media outlets, but the play gives no explicit media criticism of its own. The following chapter focuses on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Since the role of the media is one of Infinite Jest's major themes, this chapter explores the way political polarization is influenced by the mass media and mediatization in much greater detail.
