David Mamet's Old Neighborhood: journey and geography.

A Journey requires a geography: for a process to occur, there must be a site. The journey is both a physical act and an idea of it, as journey; and its geography is not nowhere but involves city, country, ocean, planets, Eden, heaven, hell, paradise--any of which would allow thought of them as "worlds." Among these settings, the journey is constituted both of the movements between worlds, which should, to qualify as journey, form some sort of pattern (if nothing more than getting from A to B), and of possible ideas such as purpose, circumstances, outcome, and design. Odysseus, for instance, is not merely wafted by ocean and breeze on "meanderings." Talk about his wanderings will consider the possible purposes, circumstances, etc., of his journey; and wandering might be considered as an idea opposed to directness, a represented action akin to the indirectness of poetic language as opposed to scientific or philosophical language. In the drama, characters enter and leave the stage--moving between a stage world and some other real or imagined one "on missions and with purposes; they might be entering or exiting to deliver a message or they might be on "A Long Day's Journey" or a trip "Into the Woods."

The journey as object of thought might be imaginative or actual. I shall pursue the idea as image and metaphor and as culturally generated and transmitted-concept. My thinking about a journey is grounded in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, his definition of "intentionality" and his concern for the need to experience "pure essences." Husserl tries to recover experience from the reductive assignment of reality to either the subjective or the objective dimensions, a split that remains in psychologism and science. That essence, Husserl argues, "can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience, data of perception, memory, and so forth, but just as readily also in the mere data of fancy (Phantasie)" (50). The imagination, then, can capably discover what is essential to experience, the eidetic image that reveals itself when presuppositions are put into suspension. The imagination is especially well qualified to perform this task, since it does not posit the image as simply "real" in the world "out there." This phenomenological approach is a ground for the contemporary archetypal thinking of James Hillman, who is attempting to rehabilitate Jungian images for a phenomenological psychoanalysis. Hillman's concern is to deactivate traditional epic stereotypes, the Titanic myth, which "practically keeps us still in the pattern of the heroic ego" (158). In addition to his "polytheistic" psychology's allowing a pantheism of images to come into play, he suggests that a counter-image to the Titan is the Knight Errant, whose "path has been deviant ever since Parmenides decried loose-limbed wandering as the way of error, deceptive opinion, going astray" (161).

My looking toward essential images in Husserl and Hillman aims for the possibility of noticing recurring, persistent patterns and characteristics that appear and transform themselves amidst cultural diversity. I might appeal, too, to the apprehension of ourselves as readers and interpreters in the approaches of intertextual and possible worlds theories. The way I have related Husserl and Hillman might be taken in terms of intertextuality. One definition of intertextuality seems to echo both the Husserlean eidetic and Hiltman's archetype: "as the enlargement of a familiar idea ... intertextuality might be taken as a general term, working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation (for example, by archetypes or popular culture); modes of conception (such as ideas 'in the air'); styles (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer." Under this rubric, my pursuit of the journey image in David Mamet's plays would appear to be, I trust, a productive errancy. Lubomir Dolezel's argument for the possible worlds outlook as opposed to the "One-World Frame," which assumes "that there is only one legitimate universe of discourse (domain of reference), the actual world" (2), pursues a kind of intertextuality in setting up the "Classical" against the "Modern Myth" (185-98). He directs the "basic theoretical concepts of the possible-worlds semantics of fictionality toward a particularly fascinating creation of twentieth-century fiction making: the modern myth" (185). In the "hybrid world" of Franz Kafka's fiction, for instance, "because the boundary that divides the fictional world of the classical myth is dissolved, the hybrid world is a coexistence, in one unified fictional space, of the physically possible and physically impossible fictional entities (persons, events)" (187). Again, I shall be seeking interrelationships among the texts of Clayton and Rothstein, Dolezel, Husserl, Hillman, and other theorists, as well as fictional and dramatic texts that come to play in relationship to the drama of David Mamet, specifically in the consideration of the essential image of the journey.

Mamet's plays are frequently about the ideas of place and journey as well as the development of character in those circumstances. The action of Things Change culminates in a journey from one world to another, the destination revealing agents of power from the first at its heart. In House of Games, the essential movement is a descent into an underworld. The two characters in The Woods have made a trip into an idyllic place and discover that they have brought with them the destruction of the idyll. Bobby Gould in Hell reveals Bob, too, having been transported into that other place. The schemers in American Buffalo, like another avatar of the questing hero, Indiana Jones, involve themselves in a mythic journey into the forbidden place seeking treasure. In Speed-the-Plow the minor character, Karen, has found her way into the Hollywood inner sanctum and is expelled. Thinking of the ideas in these movements and relationships between worlds, I am invoking the recurrent pattern of journeys that can be characterized as archetypal or Jungian but also as eidetic cultural objects in Husserl's terms. The metaphor might be experienced as phenomenological essence or as hermeneutic pattern relatable to Martin Heidegger's "turnings" in the hermeneutic circle, which bear a quality of uncertainty and openness explicit in Hillman's errancy. (1) Hans-Georg Gadamer characterizes the journey as being both toward the Other and toward the Self, the discovery of the familiar in the alien. (2) Essential to the journey is the traveler's need for integration of the alien with her/himself, the discovery of both alternate selves and other worlds, which can be curative, restorative, renewing. The essential values of the represented journey reflect the essential value in the reader's or audience's letting the metaphor appear in its specificity, in a Heideggerian "readiness" to let appear what is to present itself in a structure more like errancy than Apollonian order.

An audience's difficulties with the perception of Bobby Gould's journey in The Old Neighborhood might result not only from the dislocating of the journey but also from the need for answers to questions about purposes and consequences, about values and interpretation. Bob has returned to his home, a neighborhood in Chicago, after leaving his wife. His reasons for returning, and concomitantly the results of this action and the structure of events, are submerged, perhaps better thought of as fragmented, in the one-act play format. Although the three short plays have been staged as a seamless production, without intermission, they are, arguably, not a play. (3) Considering the oneness of the three raises questions of dramatic unity and effect, of coherence and significance. Bob is the apparent cohesive thread in the three plays, appearing in the first with his old friend Joey in a hotel room, in the second with his sister Jolly and her husband Carl in their home, and in the third with Deeny, a still idealized love of the past, in a restaurant. Observing that Bobby Gould is a character in other Mamet plays would imply an assumption that he is, wherever he appears, the same Bobby Gould. (4) Questioning this assumption might bring into play consideration of the ideas of character, identity, and development that are, of course, ideas of character in imaginative literature that stand in problematical relationship to ideas about real human beings in the real world. The protagonist in Bobby Gould in Hell is not necessarily the same character as the Bobby Gould in Speed-the-Plow and The Old Neighborhood. In Bobby Gould in Hall he complains to the Interrogator that he "has done nothing to warrant my being down here" (11) and insists that he be allowed to "go home." Finding himself transported into another dimension from the world he has known, he is troubled to hear from the Interrogator that his previous life was one of self-indulgence, hedonism, and moral or spiritual degeneracy.

In The Old Neighborhood, imagining with Joey worlds of the past they could have been happy in, Bobby says to Joey, "I would have loved, to go, in the twenties, to be in Hollywood ... I know they had a good time there" (25). Although he seems to be knowledgeable about "this whole industry," he is not necessarily the same Bobby Gould as the protagonist of Speed-the-Plow, an insider in Hollywood. Yet he seems to be demonstrating an insider's knowledge when, discussing the fact that "Fox (of Twentieth Century Fox) is a Jewish name" (26), Joey asks, "Who knew that?" and Bob replies, "Everyone." When Joey says, "What are they doing to you out there? ... You should come back here" (16), the "out there" as opposed to a "back here" suggests a California (like the California of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, alien to a Chicago that "has got to love irony," Mamet writes, "and the progression up from farce toward what we can but hope is a cleansing, if tragic, resolution" (Brash View"). The place "out there" is, in America, the West, and its being the place where they are doing something to you makes it more likely a California than an Idaho or Arizona or Washington. The Bobby Gould who has come back to Chicago from "out there" might be the Bobby Gould who has succumbed momentarily to the alternate vision of Karen, the temporary secretary in Speed-the-Plow.

Points of contact and "understanding" of this composite character Bobby Gould, who is so far as we glimpse him never comfortable in a world, are made up, as with knowledge of apparently whole beings in coherent worlds. The characters on the stage and people in the "real" world come into partial light and elude that understanding, as in The Water Engine. In this play the protagonist, Lang, is caught up in the babble of insistent voices telling versions of truth, and finally his identity is suppressed by the voice of the newspaper, the editor being less concerned with having received Lang's complaint, "they took my engine," than with the discovery of "the mutilated bodies of a man and a woman" (58), seeing no connection between the inventor and the man's body discovered. In the play's final moments the Barker reports, "technological and Ethic masterpieces decay into folktales. Who knows what is true?" (60). That is, character is conceived as made up of language and action, or perhaps of illusions of continuity and endurance; perhaps, on the other hand, it might be read as an element of cosmic design or as an avatar in mythic repetitions or as recurrent literary type. Whether in the knowledge of real character or of dramatized, whether experienced in a series of sharp immediate moments or pieced together from discrete fragments isolated in time, in the perceptions that must be assembled to be read in an act of imagination, character is known as it is interpreted.

The protean nature of Bobby Gould evidences the essentiality of changes in his nature, in the possible understanding of continuity among several plays, in the character that unites the three short plays of The Old Neighborhood, which through that character's continuity might be put together as one play. Bobby's three moments in these plays are generated out of moments of a past whose recovery is at least to some extent Bob's "purpose" in the play. (5) That recovery of the past should aid in effecting a recovery of the self, the implicit purpose in Bob's return: "I came here to get Comfort" (74). His involvements in the first two plays, first with the male friend Joey and then with family, sister Jolly, become a searching of the past, the trip home being for the purpose of both nostalgia and some vague need for "comforting." The distance he has come is both spatial and temporal, and the impetus in all three plays is a movement into the lost or alienated world of the past, both personal and cultural. The literal facts and sites of the encounters with Joey, with Jolly, and in the third play with Deeny are not paramount in the plays' eventfulness. The question is not, for instance, what Bob and Joey are doing in the hotel room and why he meets Deeny in a restaurant- why this place?- but what they do with the time. The action of each play is an imaginative journey into a past whose "facts" are recovered, when accessible at all, not as simple memory but as stories wrenched from memory, their recovery driven by imaginations of possible other worlds, both better and worse.

Mihai Spariosu observes in modern philosophical thought the serious consideration of "the notion of a plurality of worlds," in the "logical and ontological distinction between 'actual' and 'possible' worlds" (54). The "argument is that the actual world is only one possible world among an infinity of possible nonactual worlds or 'pnaws.'" Negotiations between those worlds travel, of course, on the language of retrieval and interpretation, the intertextuality of versions of reality based in the relationships of possible worlds. Those negotiations are, then, to be found in the represented worlds of a text, both the primary text and texts as allusions, memories, accounts; and the accounts are both about the represented journeying and about being a journey. Clayton in his essay "The Alphabet of Suffering" considers similarities in the journeys in four nineteenth-century novels, suggesting that the openness of the journey becomes a consideration of openness in relations between readers and texts: "The intertextual network is 'open' in a way that the relation of influence is not ... the itinerary of the reader, which is shaped by individual interests and experiences, determines the 'direction' of the relation, and that direction can change over time as the reader develops new interests and accumulates further experience" (50). This reader looks very much like the knight errant in Hillman's terms, and might notice her or his being reflected in the errancy of Bobby Gould.

In the evocative dialogue of the three plays, the other places, remembered or imagined and idealized as alternative better worlds, are underlain with a sense of loss and remorse, with an awareness of the discrepancy between dreams and nightmares. In the first play Bobby and Joey lament their failures to realize a happier, more purposeful life. The Hollywood of the past is one version of the happy place, and the shtetl is another. A world, as imagined by Joey, of powerful men realizing their strength and their truth, the shtetl would have been a place for Joey to realize himself as a "great man in Europe" (18). Like Joey, the people of his real world are "lost ... geschraiying ... assholes" (19), who in the other world would have known the truth, "what the talmud says ... what Hillel said"; and people would refer to the properly realized Joey as "Reb Lewis, he's the strongest man in Lodz ... He once picked up an ox." As opposed to Joey's image of his father, who sat "on his ass for forty years driving through Idaho for Green and Green," Joey and Bobby should have been able to "look back" at their family in the community knowing "we are something ... And we've been men" (20). Although Bobby continues to lead Joey in imagining a full and free sexual life in (or outside) the shtetl, Bobby insists that Joey look at the dark underside of that world, which was "no picnic." In reminding Joey that the Nazis (or was it "the Japs"?) "stick glass rods in your dick and break them off," Bobby explains that he is trying to set Joey to see that "that's romantic shit" (21).

Joey's romanticizing imagination persists, however, in the denouement to his nightmare of killing his family: escaping into the forests of Canada, he would "feel so free" (31) and would identify himself with "Holy men. Visionaries, scholars, I know they exist ... I know that it's real." In this declaration of faith, Joey tries to obscure the difference between what he sees in his imagination and what "Visionaries" see. Asserting that in their world "we have no connection" (33), Joey argues that there are, in some other place, "people who never have a thought," who "are a dream of their environment," who have "joy," whose "questions are answered with ritual." This affirmation, expressed as belief and vague hope, produces a resolution to the play only in terms of escape: Joey and Bobby retreating to happy memories of childhood, boys playing ball in the freedom of the streets, where the "second manhole" is "a ground rule double" (36.) Literal, personal dreams and nightmares are for Joey and Bobby intermingled with recollections of imaginings of a world, pastor hoped for, that might be an idealized, happy or heroic world, or might be a place of terror and darkness, guilt and dismay. The title of this play, The Disappearance of the Jews, is both a dark historical statement and a grimly humorous commentary on what has happened to Joey and Bobby.

In the second play, Jolly, Bob and Jolly share memories and imaginings of a disappointed childhood, Christmas disillusionments, failed promises, and the manipulations of their mother. This personal exploration is into a troubled past that has not ended, since they have a brother who continues to wield power through family, controlling through possessions and personal comparisons of themselves as family, as parents and individuals. Bobby is brought into the jealousies and conflicts Jolly endures, and together they revisit the past which, as for Bob and Joey, is although a place of pain and torment at moments idyllic and fulfilling. In this world the child is weak and vulnerable, as opposed to the potential heroism in the world evoked by Joey, and the debilitation remains in the present for Jolly and Bob. Trying to get Jolly to understand that "they did not love us" (61), Bobby receives the sting of Jolly's last words in the first scene: "They loved you, Buub" (61). Tormented in her waking life by gratuitous assaults from a driver who informs her she is driving the wrong way on a one way street, Jolly sarcastically observes that such is her "fantasy life" (77), and her nights are troubled by waking up "three times a night" wondering "where am I?" Like Joey, however, Jolly can imagine a happy past: "we could go back" (82). Recalling the "Saturday kiddie shows ... the Chocolate Phosphate," the drugstore smells, and the "South Shore Country Club, where they wouldn't let us in" (82-83) leads to the remembering of anticipated richness, "all those things [that] would be true and that's how we would grow up." The intrusive remembering of unfulfilled dreams leads finally to the negation of hopes, "the old men, who said that they remembered Nana. Back in Poland. And, oh. Fuck it. Oh the hell with it." The remembered dream that emerges in this negation, with Jolly's mother trying sweetly to persuade her to open her door, ends with a horrible vision of her mother's face and the certainty that "she wants to kill me" (84). Bob's futile response, "Thank God it was only a dream," leaves them at the end of the play with the lament that, as Jolly says, they are "being punished," with Bob's joining Jolly in the litany that they must make a "Complete and Contrite Apology" (85). Although Bob and Jolly can invoke a happy other world, their vulnerability in the past remains a sense of entrapment in the present. The dream contributes to the hellish atmosphere, the sense of dismay at being enchained and helpless.

The journey remains a way, a potential movement toward a better place, an excursion or an imaginative exploration implying freedom and, in discovery, possible transformation. Traveling in the plays ranges from the encompassing action of Bob's trip home for solace to imaginative journeys, especially into the past. It involves literal and incidental traveling as well, as in the first play Joey and Bob agree to make a trip to "Waldheim," producing a moment of satisfaction in their anticipating a trip to a remembered pleasurable place. Imaginative explorations of past moments call on personal recollection of actual sites such as neighborhoods, streets, and the architecture of Chicago (for instance, Pratt [28], Marshall Field [37], Jeffrey [83], and the South Shore Country Club). Such allusions provide a sense of actuality and literalness to the place that is in the play an idea of home and a destination in the journey. Other named places--Lodz (9), Poland (23), and Europe (24)--become contributions to the sense of remoteness that casts them into the light of other lost or inaccessible places: Deeny's garden (89), the distant world of the "tribes that mutilate themselves" (96). These imaginative constructs are recognizable elements in the fabric of creation, fictionalizing, and allusion wherein ideas of worlds and realities are interdependent. Such allusion is double-edged in that evoking an echo or image from some historical or literary worlds or figures brings that shared essence into playas participant in these events and on the other hand holds it up as a mirror of comparison to these actions and characters.

Figures like Bobby Gould may appear unheroic, trivial, unaccommodated, or degraded compared to epic heroes and mythic archetypes. He is, of course, in his going home, akin to Odysseus in his wanderings; but to recall Odysseus's heroic confrontation with the suitors and the strong and final closure in ethical, personal, and cultural terms is to recognize the difference in Bobby. In his remembering and in ours, however, there is the contamination of remembered events, events typically falsified as by the glow over Joey's shtetl, which Bobby dismisses as "romantic shit" (21). We adventure along with Bobby toward some fictionalized, metaphorized, or otherwise de-literalized world. Another possible "de-literalizing" I have in mind is that of James Hillman, whose archetypal psychology is a ruthless undermining of the comfortable literalness of our "actualities," especially our heroic or "Titanic" ego. It is important in following Hillman to learn how to take a "process into account without taking it literally"(147-48), without imposing on it a form or idea that determines its nature for us. In his Preface to the 1992 edition of Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman stresses how important it is "not to encourage Titanism, a menace far greater than Narcissism, which presents only a pensive pretty-boy compared with the titanic grandiosity of Self'(xii).

The echoes from the past provide value, contribute to a hermeneutic that particularizes the sense of meaningfulness in the shifting of atmosphere and the sliding of events of seemingly pointless and unproductive contiguity. While we recognize the impossibility of reading Bobby and Jolly as modern counterparts to Orestes and Electra, we might not want to resist the comparison that recognizes the bond they share in being separated and reunited, in their love and despisal of their mother, in the way Jolly complains to her returned brother of her tribulations, in the reliance on him and the comfort she takes in telling her husband Carl at the end of their play that Bob will be with her: "he's the only one who knows ... 'cause he was there ..." Her idealizing and ennoblement of Bob identifies both his possible strengths and his shortcomings. A more imposing presence--I use that word guardedly--from the past, both suggestively like and so different from Bob, is the traveler Dante Alighieri of The Divine Comedy. Bob's intense desire for release or for "comfort" echoes the malaise of Dante, who in the middle of "life's journey" strays and wakes to find himself "alone in a dark wood," which is "so arduous a wilderness"(Inferno 1.1-5). Although echoes of the high seriousness, the theological frame, and the cultural significance of Dante's descent and ascent are not to be found in Bob's journey, Bob has already declared his affinity to Dante in alluding to these lines in the opening of Speed-the-Plow: "I'm in the midst of the wilderness" (Plow 3). The similarities between Bob and Dante's traveler are compelling, I think, but they do not obviate the possibility of imaginative thought about Bob's kinship to John Bunyan's Pilgrim or to the medieval mystery play's Everyman.

The exploiting of an allegorical tradition is easy to see elsewhere in Mamet's plays, notably in Edmond. The significant parallels with The Divine Comedy include, I will suggest, a tripartite structure and an important resolution in the relationship with Deeny in the last play. Bob's declaration in this event that his trip home is a search for "comfort" is, furthermore, a faint and ironic appeal for psychological or spiritual recovery that Dante pursues from this point "midway in our life's journey"(1.1). Dante and Bob both speak for others (their world, the world of the audience) and hope to be heard. Bob's journey is not into some idealized world, some cleansed environment, some pastoral happy place, some heaven, but into the past and the recovery of painful memories. These affinities recognized, the ways both travelers can speak to us in our time- about pain and loss, about error and grief, about need and benefaction- it seems possible to consider the action of Bob's journey in terms of the action of Dante's. The lost soul of our time, so debilitated, uncertain, unsupported, might go through a process not unlike the movement from hell to purgatory to paradise. Mamet's three plays, a tripartite structure admittedly more than contiguous in a production without intermission, indeed seem to be "about" some such process. Bobby's encounter with ghosts of the past, accompanied by Joey, is a revisiting of who they were and of who Bob and Joey themselves were. Howie Greenberg was a "fag"(15), the two girls they dated might have been "dykes"(9), Bob could have become "Reb Gould"(22). Figures in a shtetl, Nazis, the Hollywood world who "had a good time"(23), the builders of that tinsel empire--the "five smart Jew boys from Russia"--all become, like the two recapturing that past, "one for the books"(40). If this meeting of ghosts from the past seems, like Dante's walking tour, a painful recognition of self and others, the encounter with sister and family in the second play deepens the involvement, draws Bob into a more passionate recovery, repudiation, and finally a tacit acceptance. Whether he goes beyond submission of himself to this world is not to be seen, but the outcome, seen in the third play, seems to be an accepting of life as a pilgrimage.

His repeated exchange of "good-bye" with Deeny at the end of her play, entitled "Deeny," is the outcome of going back, going through, and this ending leaves him ostensibly accepting life as a journey, since he goes on in no certain direction. The counterpart of the purposeful journey, with personal, cultural, and religious end and design, becomes, finally, a manifestation of knight-errancy. But the third play seems to recall Dante's Paradise, at least and in the first place that the "guide" becomes a woman. To think of Deeny in the role of Beatrice, or perhaps more loosely as Petrarch's Laura, is to realize the strange and moving lyricism of this short play. The poignancy of this play follows Bob's experiences and memories shared with Joey and then the deeper, more personal kind shared with Jolly. Although Deeny has been referred to in the previous actions, she appears, finally, as another figure from the past but with a difference.

The tone of this play is without the other two plays' bitter, wrenching revelations of characters and self. It is personal and intense; an intimate absorption and transformation of Bob's mind in the leading, or the educative flow, of Deeny's conversation. Her concerns are encyclopedic, ranging from intense personal thoughts and feelings to knowledge of gardening, science, and spirituality. Her ranging knowledge is reflected in her vocabulary: "poignancies ... foreswore ..."(99). Bob's language is quiet in tone, in contrast, and his dialogue is minimal, primarily agreement with or complement to her thought. Under her guidance, the desires in the play turn from the heroic wish in the first play and the need to be happy children in the second to the pleasures of sharing thought, ideas, and "truth." The truth for Deeny emerges from the concrete, from the phenomenological turning to things, Husserl's zu den sachen selbst. Those "things" are sharp manifestations in the seen and the remembered, in the quick and sure connections between the two. The thought of "frost tonight"(89) recovers the "wish" for "a garden." Deeny's memories and knowledge of the past are not false constructs but a clear vision of desires, then and now, of accomplishments and of deferrals. Imagining the particular deeds she would perform as a gardener, "out of love" (90), she knows that she was not and probably will never be a gardener. She knows, however, the idea of the garden: "the most sale and ... most protected of all settings in the world" (92). Her vision is precise, as seeing, and free, as imagining. When she declares "I had a vision" it is of "coffee" (90) and of "a frosty morning" (91). When she talks of being human, commentary ensuing from the mention of human beings in another world, "tribes that mutilate themselves ... [and] get pleasure from it" (96-97), she understands having to undergo pain, the communal demand for the individual's "surrender," and the "pain of giving birth to yourself' (97). She thinks that in our "always ... turning ... toward death" we make choices and we hold on to what seems to be ours, "the treasured pivots of our world"(99).

Recognition of this preservation of self through things, and the poetic expression of them as "treasured pivots of our world," reveals an apprehension of life as fluctuating illusions, tenuous, unheroic, and unfixed. The "truth" of the world stirs in these denials that affirm possibility. She knows that we vacillate between the sacred and the naturalistic: "I think about all the times you think of a thing and vary between thinking that 'it is a mystery,' and 'it is a convenience'" (92). Deeny would, if she could "find it true ... proclaim ... that this world is a shit hole" (100). She cannot, however, arrive at such conclusiveness, and she remains a true, sustaining voice for Bob; a voice who cannot give certainty or solutions but can provide love and solace. Their love is an enduring, if tentative and undemanding, affirmation of possibility. Enduring from the past, it appears as an elevation of the spirit after the complex involvements of the first two plays, and it abides in the exchanged good-byes that end the play: "Good-bye, then, love ... Good-bye, love."

The story about the journey, then, whether told by Dante or generated as fragments and reduced in form and significance, retains the essence of the idea as movement, literal or imaginative, historical or metaphorical, between worlds. Such movement instigates of allows thoughts of purpose, circumstances, outcome, and design. As story, in both the narrative of The Divine Comedy (as well as the stories told within it) and in Mamet's characters' talking about events in the past, constituting them as imaginative journeying, the verbal dimension presents the characters, sites, and events as both presence (what is given, what appears) and as an awareness of what is absent (what withdraws); as consciousness not only of the present world but also of a past, departed world. The adventure is drawn out of the context of knowledge of that withdrawal, the temporality that is inevitably loss, the absence that is death.

The characters in all three of these plays know the loss, the withdrawal, as all things have become the past. Like Dante, the talkers construct and bestow a sense of deprivation as well as possible joy, remembered or anticipated. They also sense things that Deeny presents with the authority and persuasiveness of the poet. Joey knows as well as Deeny that "Everything is a mystery"(33); but as central figure in the culmination of the journey, she comes to represent not only the woman Dante imagines as muse and inspiration, voice of truth and wisdom-as Diotima to Socrates-but also the love who has retreated and who appears in a glowing moment only to disappear again. Her "philosophy" is a compliment to her being, and her consolation to Bob is that through sharing her ideas and joining him in a return to a past, insignificant moment, visualized as a garden, their world is made better. Their momentary intimacy becomes an intellectual and spiritual union, and Bob, though not healed and not representative of the healing of others, is made better by it. Thus, the play gains equanimity in this world of attrition and detritus, in minimal human terms: some small fulfillment, a degree of peace, and harmony in separation and withdrawal.

NOTES

(1.) Heidegger not only pursues he metaphor of the "turning" (Kehre) as he problem if movement in the "hermeneutic circle" and as the appropriate way to following "woodpaths," but his thinking often takes that "turn." For instance, "man does not possess freedom as a property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Da-sein, possesses man" (129).

(2.) Hans-Georg Gadamer finds that in the experience of a work of art, is in the activity of play, "I stand over against myself as an onlooker" (23). In the genuine aesthetic experience then, "whatever may be presented in it [the work of art], humanity encounters itself' (167).

(3.) Weber notes that The Old Neighborhood "consists if three previously written one-acts that have been revised and knitted together into one"(7).

(4.) The question of Bobby Gould's name and identity is problematical. Weber remarks that the "name recurs in Mamet's work"(7), as if perhaps it does not refer to the same person; then he reaches outside the play to identify the character as the author.

(5.) In using the word "purpose" I recall Francis Fergusson's identification of the pattern in tragedy, derived from Kenneth Burke, as a movement from "purpose" to "passion" to "perception."

WORKS CITED

Dante Alighieri. The Portable, Dante Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Clayton, Jay. "The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans. Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrel," Enfluence and Textuality. 37-60.

Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstem, eds. Influence and Textuality in Literary History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

--. "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality" Influence and Textuality. 3-36.

Dolezel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater New York: Doubleday, 1953.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Trans. Nicholas Walker Ed Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge UK 1986.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper, 1977.

Hillman, James Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1992.

Husserl. Edmund Ideas: General Introduction to Pare Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson, 1931 New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1962.

Mamet, David. Bobby Gould in Hell Oh, Hell!: Two One-Act Plays: Bobby Gould in Hell by David Mamet and The Devil and Billy Markham by Shel Silverstien. New York: Samuel French, 1991: 5-13.

--. The Old Neighborhood. Three Plays. The Disappearance of the Jews: Jolly: Deeny. New York: Vintage Random House, 1998.

--. The Water Engine. Two Plays: The Water Engine: An American Fable and Mr. Happiness. New York: Samuel French, 1983.

--. "We Take the Brash View." Time 148.11 (2 Sept, 1996): 42.

Pearce, Howard. Human Shadows Bright as Glass: Drama as Speculation and Transformation. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1997.

--. "A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor." PMLA 93 (1980): 42-57.

Spariosu, Mihai I. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play. Liminality and the Study of Literature. Albany: State U of NewYork P, 1997.

Weber, Bruce. "At 50, a Mellower David Mamet May Be Ready to Tell His Story." (Review, The Old Neighborhood) New York Times, 16 November 1997, Arts & Leisure: 7+.