Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare.
Title: Six Degrees of Separation.
Author: John Guare.
Genre: Literature, fiction, plays, race, class struggle.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1990.
Summary: A tragicomedy of race, class and manners. When a young and effortlessly charismatic black con man claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier himself smiles his way into the sympathetic living rooms of a few of New York City’s white wealthy elite, and tears a swath of disillusionment through their preconceptions and comfortable lives, the thirst for understanding leaves them questioning their sense of selves.
My Rating: 8/10
My Review:
♥ FLAN
When he called it was like a bolt from the blue as I had a deal coming up and was short by
OUISA
two million.
FLAN
The figure is superfluous.
OUISA
I hate when you use the wort "superfluous." I mean, he needed two million and we hadn't seen Geoffrey in a long time and while Geoffrey might not have the price of a dinner he easily might have two million dollars.
FLAN
The currents last night were very churny.
OUISA
We weren't sucking up. We like Geoffrey.
FLAN
It's that awful thing of having truly rich folk for friends.
OUISA
Face it. The money does get in the-
FLAN
Only if you let it. The fact of the money shouldn't get in-
OUISA
Having a rich friend is like drowning and your friend makes life boats. But the friend gets very touchy if you say one word: life boat. Well, that's two words. We were afraid our South African friend might say "You only love me for my life boats?" But we like Geoffrey.
FLAN
It wasn't a life-threatening evening.
OUISA
Rich people can do something for you even if you're not sure what it is you want them to do.
FLAN
Hardly a life boat evening-
OUISA (Sing-sing)
Portentous.
FLAN
But when he called and asked us to take him for dinner, he made a sudden pattern in life's little tea leaves because who wants to go to banks? Geoffrey called and our tempests settled into showers and life was manageable. What more can you want?
♥ FLAN
Geoffrey, you have to move out of South Africa. You'll be killed. Why do you stay in South Africa?
GEOFFREY
One has to stay there to educate the black workers and we'll know we've been successful when they kill us.
♥ GEOFFREY
..I wish you'd come visit.
OUISA
But we'd visit you and sit in your gorgeous house planning trips into the townships demanding to see the poorest of the poor. "Are you sure they're the worst off? I mean, we've come all this way. We don't want to see people just mildly victimized by apartheid. We demand shock." It doesn't seem right sitting on the East Side talking about revolution.
♥ OUISA
How is Harvard?
PAUL
Well, fine. It's just there. Everyone's in a constant state of luxurious despair and constant discovery and paralysis.
♥ PAUL
My day took me to a movie shot in South Africa. The camera moved from this vile rioting in the streets to a villa where people picked at lunch on a terrace, the only riot the flowers and the birds-gorgeous plumage and petals. And I didn't understand.
♥ PAUL
A substitute teacher out on Long Island was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. A few weeks later, the teacher returned to the classroom, shot the student unsuccessfully, held the class hostage and then shot himself. Successfully. This fact caught my eye: last sentence. Times. A neighbor described him as a nice boy. Always reading Catcher in the Rye.
The nitwit-Chapman-who shot John Lennon said he did it because he wanted to draw the attention of the world to The Catcher in the Rye and the reading of that book would be his defense.
And young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said if you want my defense all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye. It seemed to be time to read it again.
FLAN
I haven't read it in years.
(OUISA shushes FLAN)
PAUL
I borrowed a copy from a young friend of mine because I wanted to see what she had underlined and I read this book to find out why this touching, beautiful, sensitive story published in July 1951 had turned into this manifesto of hate.
I started reading. It's exactly as I remembered. Everybody's a phoney. Page two: "My brother's in Hollywood being a prostitute." Page three: "What a phony slob his father was." Page nine: "People never notice anything."
Then on page twenty-two my hair stood up. Remember Holden Caulfield-the definitive sensitive youth-wearing his red hunter's cap. "A deer hunter hat! Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye like I was taking aim at it. This is a people-shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat."
Hmmm, I said. This book is preparing people for bigger moments in their lives than I ever dreamed of. Then on page eighty-nine: "I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw. I hate fist fights... what scares me most is the other guy's face..."
I finished the book. It's a touching story, comic because the boy wants to do so much and can't do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and he is completely self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent.
And what alarms me about the book-not the book so much as the aura about it-is this: The book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can't function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds.
Now there's nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may indeed, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme.
The extraordinary last lines of Waiting For Godot-"Let's go." "Yes, let's go." Stage directions: They do not move.
But the aura around this book of Salinger's-which perhaps should be read by everyone but young men-is this: It mirrors like a fun house mirror and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our time-the death of the imagination.
Because what else is paralysis?
The imagination has been so debased that imagination-being imaginative-rather than being the lunch-pin if our existence now stands as a synonym for something outside ourselves like science fiction or some new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops-what an imaginative summer recipe-and Star Wars! So imaginative! And Star Trek-so imaginative! And Lord of the Rings-all those dwarves-so imaginative-
The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with out inner lives and the world outside that world-this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what's in here doesn't match up with what's out there?
Why has imagination become a synonym for style?
I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world.
I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.
Jung says the greatest sin is to be unconscious.
Our boy Holden says "What scares me most is the other guy's face-it wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded-most of the time the faces we face are not the other guys' but our own faces. And it's the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself..."
To face ourselves.
That's the hard thing.
The imagination.
That's God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.
♥ PAUL/SIDNEY
..But the world has been too heavy with all the right-to-lifers. Protect the lives of the unborn. Constitutional amendments. Marches! When does life begin? Or the converse. The end of life. The right to die. Why is life at this point in the twentieth century so focused on the very beginning of life and the very end of life? What about the eighty years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?
♥FLAN (to us)
This is what I dreamt. I didn't dream so much as realize this. I felt so close to the paintings. I wasn't just selling them like pieces of meat. I remember why I loved paintings in the first place-what had dot me into this-and I thought-dreamed-remembered-how easy it is fore a painter to lose a painting. He can paint and paint-work on a canvas for months and one day he loses it-just loses the structure-loses the sense of it-you lose the painting.
When the kids were little, we went to a parents' meeting at their school and I asked the teacher why all her students were geniuses in the second grade? Look at the first grade. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second grade-your grade. Matisses everyone. You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into second grade! What is your secret? And this is what she said: "Secret? I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them."
I dreamt of color. I dreamt of our son's pink shirt. I dreamt of pinks and yellows and the new van Gogh that MOMA got and the "Irises" that sold for 53.9 million and, wishing a van Gogh was mine, I looked at my English hand-lasted shoes and thought of van Gogh's tragic shoes. I remembered me as I was. A painter losing a painting. But a South African awaiting revolution came to dinner. We were safe.
♥ FLAN
Tess, when you see your little sister, don't tell her that he and the, uh, hustler, used her bed.
TESS
You put him in that bed. I'm not going to get involved with any conspiracy.
FLAN
It's not a conspiracy. It's a family.
♥ PAUL
The imagination. That's our out. Our imagination teaches us our limits and then how to grow beyond those limits. The imagination says Listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 AM voice, I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril. The imagination is the noon voice that sees clearly and says yes, this is what I want for my life. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to reform the nightmare into dreams that become your bedrock. If we don't listen to that voice, it dies. It shrivels. It vanishes.
The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.
♥ WOODY
..I can't believe it. I hate it here. I hate this house. I hate you.
DOUG
You never do anything for me.
TESS
You've never done anything but tried to block me.
BEN
I'm only this pathetic extension of your eight-rate personality.
DOUG
Social Darwinism pushed beyond all limits.
WOODY
You gave away my pink shirt?
TESS
You want me to be everything you weren't.
DOUG
You said drugs and looked at me.
♥ PAUL
Are these all rich people?
TRENT
No. Hand to mouth on a higher plateau.
♥ OUISA (to us)
..I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Sex degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names. I find that A] tremendously comforting that we're so close and B] like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names. It's anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people.
♥ PAUL
..You shouldn't be waiting tables. You're going to wake up one day and the temporary job you picked up to stay alive is going to be your full-time life.
♥ RICK (to us)
..How am I going to face Elizabeth? What have I done? What did I let him do to me? I wanted experience. I came here to have experience. But I didn't come here to do this or lose that or be this or do this to Elizabeth. I didn't come here to be this. My father said I was a fool and I can't have him be right. What have I done?
♥ PAUL
You let me use all the parts of myself that night-
OUISA
It was magical. That Salinger stuff-
PAUL
Graduation speech at Groton two years ago.
OUISA
Your cooking-
PAUL
Other people's recipes. Did you see Donald Barthelme's obituary? He said collage was the art form of the twentieth century.
OUISA
Everything is somebody else's.
PAUL
Not your children. Not your life.
OUISA
Yes, You got me there. That is mine. It is no one else's.
PAUL
You don't sound happy.
OUISA
There's so much you don't know. You are so smart and so stupid-
♥ OUISA
Go to the police.
PAUL
Will you take me?
OUISA
I'll give you the name, of the detective to see-
PAUL
I'll be treated with care if you take me to the police. If they don't know you're special, they kill you.
OUISA
I don't think they kill you.
PAUL
Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I am black.
♥ FLAN
Why does it mean so much to you?
OUISA
He wanted to be us. Everything we are in the world, this paltry thing-our life-he wanted it. He stabbed himself to get in here. He envied us. We're not enough to be envied.
♥ OUISA
You were attracted to him-
FLAN
Cut me out of that pathology! You are on your own-
OUISA
Attracted by youth and his talent and the embarrassing prospect of being in the movie version of Cats. Did you put that in your Times piece? And we turn him into an anecdote to dine out on. Or dine in on. But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we fit what happened to us into life without turning it into an anecdote with no teeth and a punch line you'll mouth over and over for years to come. "Tell the story about the imposter who came into our lives-" "That reminds me of the time this boy-." And we become these human juke boxes spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?
FLAN (To us)
That's why I love paintings. Cezanne. YThe problems he brought up are the problems painters are still dealing with. Color. Structure. Those are problems.
OUISA
There is color in my life, but I'm not aware of any structure.
FLAN (To us)
Cezanne would leave blank spaces in his canvasses if he couldn't account for the brush stroke, give a reason for the color.
OUISA
Then I am a collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes. I am all random. God, Flan, how much of your life can you account for?