Dead White Males

David Williamson

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781925004519
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Drama

Postmodernism versus liberal humanism—can an older male academic convert a young female student to a post-structural, post-patriarchal view of literature and seduce her at the same time?

ACT ONE

ANGELA’S ROOM

ANGELA JUDD, an engaging young woman with a sharp mind, sits reading a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. She looks up. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE materialises, looking around him, puzzled at the modernity of the furnishings. ANGELA walks up to him nervously.

ANGELA: Mr Shakespeare?

SHAKESPEARE looks up and smiles.

I hope I’m not interrupting, but I just felt I had to say—how much I admire your work.

SHAKEspeare: I thank you.

ANGELA: How is it that you know—so much about us?

SHAKESPEARE is just about to answer when a MAN in his thirties, dressed in fashionable casual clothes, appears behind him.

MAN: He doesn’t, you know.

The MAN pulls out a pistol and shoots SHAKESPEARE dead. ANGELA looks at the MAN, horrified.

MAN: [smiling] Hi.

ANGELA: Why did you do that?

MAN: These are exciting times Angela. Dangerous and exciting times. You must know your enemies.

The MAN leaves. ANGELA is left staring at the body of SHAKESPEARE.

LECTURE THEATRE—NEW WEST UNIVERSITY

The MAN who just shot SHAKESPEARE stands at a lectern smiling at us. He is charismatic, articulate and animated by the intense certainty that he has a supremely important message to communicate and that he is enormously well equipped to deliver it.

SWAIN: My name is Dr Grant Swain. Welcome to the English and Cultural Studies Department and to my course, Literary Theory 1A. Most of you have always assumed that there are certain eternal ‘truths’ about ‘human nature’, that perceptive writers reveal to us. This course will show you that there are no absolute ‘truths’, that there is no fixed ‘human nature’ and that what we think of as ‘reality’ is always and only a manufactured reality. There are in fact as many ‘realities’ out there as there are ideologies which construct them. Christian ideology constructs a ‘reality’ which includes a gentleman called God ticking off your good deeds and your bad. Conservative ideology constructs a ‘reality’ which includes the belief that most humans are inherently dishonest and lazy. As a prerequisite to entry to this course I asked you to write a short paragraph on what you regard as the essential ‘thinking’ you. I have selected one of these to read to you.

SWAIN takes a sheet of paper in his hands and reads.

‘I am sceptical of all ideologies, and try to weigh all the available evidence in order to make informed choices.’ Would you indicate if you wrote that passage or wrote something that contained significant elements of that passage?

SWAIN notes the hands.

A lot of you. That statement, in fact, was written by me. It sounds as if it is a credo that warns against ideology, but in fact it is the defining statement of liberal humanism, one of the most powerful ideologies to have ever appeared in Western thought, liberal humanism. Liberal humanism, pictures you, the individual, as rational and free. Free to make your own choices. Free to control your lives.

But the fact is none of us are free, or can ever be, free of ideology. All of us are conditioned by inbuilt and often unconscious mind sets to act in certain predictable ways. Our life scripts, in fact, are written for us. By whom?

SWAIN looks closely at his audience.

Largely by legions of well paid ‘experts’—economists, politicians, journalists and so on, who tell us the ‘Truth’ about ‘The World’, but it’s not really ‘Truth’ we’re being given, it’s a series of ideological assertions. And the vast bulk of these assertions support the aims of the Western world’s dominant ideology, the patriarchal corporate state. The project of patriarchal corporate ideology is simple. Keep corporate profi...