One of America’s most interesting and most modernist playwrights, Edward Albee, wrote a drama called The American Dream in which he directs one of his characteristic satirical gazes at the great ideal that he names in his title. Any normal gaze cast on anything by Albee is likely to be quite abnormal, very critical, and very absurdist, promising to hold whatever is being examined up to question. This motivating ideal known as “the American dream” is thus scrutinised by Albee and many other writers. It is a Freudian desire that has driven a people and sustained, perhaps built, a nation for more than a century and continues to pilot them.
Its pull has been so powerful it has also drawn millions of immigrants into its magnetic field, immigrants who have then contributed to the building of that nation and the mythical dangling of that dream. Because of it, America has remained, according to social historians, “the nation of greatest political and social diversity and mobility in the world.” By 1984 (Orwell’s famous but very arbitrary and coincidental date), it was home to almost 20,000,000 foreign-born people, more than 300 languages and dialects and 250 different religious denominations. Among those, by various ‘guestimates,’ are some 600,000 Guyanese with perhaps half that number still in Guyana waiting to join them.
Yet, the writers seem to have agreed by a firm consensus that the dream is at best elusive and at worst a disappointing nightmare for both immigrants and native-born Americans alike. To call it “home” is to utter a concept filled with doubt. They show us that it has consumed many who have been enticed, fooled, deluded, deceived or whatever other like word may apply, and who have been simultaneously destroyed by the dream in its varied manifestations.
One can explore countless examples in the literature. There is a short story with the ironic title The Land of Room Enough, presenting a hollow echo of one of the boasts of America as the land of opportunity and room for all. It is a story about some of the ethnic minorities that it has beckoned, enduring a hope-filled yet hopeless search for the simple need of a room in which to live. A boy of less than 14 goes out on a daily search following leads and broken promises to find a room for the members of his family who wait in an overcrowded place. The pun is glaring, that in the large spacious land of great abundance and room enough for everyone, an ethnic minority could not find a room to exist in. Another story called The Cheerleaders captures the savagery, inhospitable venom and intimidating choruses emanating from groups of racist white women who gathered in threatening packs along the roadside to ‘welcome’ the first set of black children on their way to previously all-white schools when segregation was prohibited.
Yet another story is of a somewhat different kind. A Jewish baker living in New York is somewhat incapacitated by a perpetually nagging backache. His situation is made worse when his wife, who is usually of great help to him, falls ill. As a good religious Jew, he prays. When nothing happens, he prays again, asking God to send him an angel from heaven. A young black man appears at his door claiming to have been sent to help him. He finds it hard to accept that this was the angel despite the fact that the visitor could answer all his test questions and repeat prayers that only devout Jews learnt. The “angel” is obviously disappointed and leaves, telling him, “I cannot help you until you believe that I am an angel from heaven. When you are ready, you can find me in Harlem.”
Nothing improves and in desperation the baker goes to Harlem and after many enquiries finds his “angel” in one of the most run-down districts playing cards in a bar among ghetto dwellers, speaking the local black dialect and hardly recognising him. Overwhelmingly disappointed, he returns home to an aching back and his sick wife. Of course, she gets worse. He couldn’t pray any harder, but another visit to Harlem only convinces him he is misled, until he begins to get strange dreams in which the black cigarette-smoking stranger who drank and played cards in Harlem bars appears in a different light. He looks sad, as if his life and hope are withering away in dejection, just like the baker’s now bed-ridden wife who is falling further in her illness.
In the Jewish baker’s growing desperation, the dreams recur with the despondent black man looking, indeed, like a fallen angel, lost, losing hope and definitely sinking. He finds himself feeling some empathy, that this wreck of an angel needed help. However, whether it is desperation or faith, he realises that this affinity that he feels and the dreams must mean something. He rushes to Harlem but has to search even harder before he finds the “angel” in the worst imaginable ‘den of iniquity.’ He is in a sleazy joint with a drink in his hand, a cigarette stub dangling from his mouth, the juke box is blaring music and the angel from heaven is dancing with a prostitute, ‘wining’ up in a most unholy fashion. But the baker is unfazed, goes up to him and says “I believe you are an angel from heaven.” The ‘angel’ retorts, “You are embarrassing me” and tries to shoo him away. This tests the baker to the limit, but he insists “I believe you are an angel from God.”
The angel is moved almost to tears and takes the baker outside where he explains. It turns out he really is an angel whose wings were taken away as punishment for some misdemeanour he committed in heaven, only to be reinstated if he can find someone on earth who believes in him. The baker returns home feeling satisfied that he has helped his angel. He is greeted in astonishment by the sight of his wife outside, energetically sweeping the steps. Furthermore, she has been up all day working and has already put the neglected house back in order. The Jewish baker is so overjoyed by his wife’s miraculous recovery it is some time before he becomes suddenly aware that his backache has completely gone.
What is different about this story is that, while others deal with the conflicts between America and its immigrant minorities, this one brings two ethnic minorities together in an environment in which they both struggle to find accommodation. Conditioned by the prevailing racial disharmonies, the Jew had to believe in someone whose colour poses an almost instinctive disqualification. The story sets up a situation that forces mutual assistance and acceptance and discourages ethnic stereotyping and prejudice. The hero has to pass the test of faith, not only in a religious context, but also faith in a black man, which made the test even harder for him.
The theatre of Albee also treats ‘otherness’ in quite different settings in which not only ethnic or immigrant minorities but Americans themselves fail to find the dream. Another of his plays focuses on social misfits and outcasts who are certainly not a part of that comfortable bourgeois class for whom the society finds easy and ready accommodation. His absurd drama The Zoo Story suggests that there is not room enough for all Americans in the land of opportunity that leaves ‘others’ concluding that they do not belong. In the play Peter follows his usual unchanging pattern and goes into the park to sit quietly on a bench and read a book. He is approached by Jerry who virtually forces him into a long conversation in which Jerry does almost all the talking, unburdening his life story and the story of others like him, lost and unsettled in the middle of a busy New York City that gets along with its business.
The disturbed Jerry skillfully manoeuvres the complacent, typical American conservative middle-class Peter into becoming the instrument of his suicide. Peter is tricked into holding a knife on which Jerry impales himself. But symbolically, it is fitting that this average well-off, ideal, model American citizen, innocent of the cares and troubles of this world, should hold the instrument of destruction for an unprivileged outcast like Jerry who cannot find the Ame
rican dream.
There are still other approaches in which this wonderful Americanness is celebrated. The successful film The Deer Hunters which carried off Oscar Awards in the 1980s is such an example. The characters chase the ideal which is well within their reach, living the full life of hunting deer in the vast forests, going to war, being loyal to ‘king and country’ and unfaithful in domestic affairs. At an appropriate place in the movie the group gets together for thanksgiving dinner and they sing the patriotic American anthem. It is supposed to be a celebration, but it sounds much like a dirge, heavy with the outer edges of a subtle and profound sadness.
