Genealogy and Prophecy
We today live at a point equidistant to the heralded turning of the third millenium as the characters of Kushner’s epic Angels in America. The particulars of our crisis and the media through which we encounter them are quite different—truly, culture has shifted far beyond recognition in this past quarter century as it has made the leap into the age of information—but the rhythm of the conversation remains fundamentally the same. The cultural conversation it trapped in what seems a recursive loop of tension between stasis and progress, between liberation and repression, between ‘us,’ and ‘them.’ Just as Foucault forged his dialogical sword to cleave these binaries in The History of Sexuality, Kushner’s mythic unspooling grants us the lenses to see how, even in the midst of plague and politics, love remains.
Everyone we meet in Act One of Angels is, despite the societal roles they occupy, lives a life of fundamental, cosmic isolation. The sham marriage and secret fantasies of Joe and Harper Pitt; the fair-weather love between Louis and Prior; Roy Cohn with his desperate wall of phone lines and gravy train of lackeys; Hannah in her lonesome house before the canyons and the salty lake; even beautiful Belize, moving through a world of trauma to which he feel no connection– Each of them has studied the shapes and contours of their own, personal Other, and live confident in their knowledge of what they are not. But as the Threshold of Revelation approaches, these illusions melt away (as illusions tend to do in the searing light of reality). Each is forced to confront their own reflection, and the roles they come to embody are no easier, no more comprehensible, not even any more pleasurable than before. They come to be because they must, because they are real. In the creation of a new mythology, every foible, every refusal, every subversion has its place alongside the heroics and chiming bells of revelation. “Revision to the Text,” announces the Angel Americanus when Prior cannot leave the bed, “The Angel did assist him to unearth [the Text], for he was weak of body but not of will.”
This is the magic of Angels, and the magic of Foucault as well: they invoke a different kind of language that breaks through the false dichotomies and facilitates honest encounter with reality. Foucault makes use of ‘genealogy’ — a patient reconstruction of the forces and relations at play that gave birth to modern sexuality and its many hang-ups. He places the reader at the end of a historical progression, and grants us legible mapping of what came before. In Kushner’s cosmos, on the other hand, all points forward. In lieu of genealogy he gives us prophecy, a promise that the whirling top of thought and death is divinely due to stop. This futurity, this angelic decree of transformation, is enough to enact it in his characters’ cosmoses. It, like Foucault, points neither to the future nor the past; prophecy is a mirror that reflects only the now.
For my scene, I would like to recite Prelapsarianov’s monologue that commences Perestroika. I would also be happy to team up with anyone on whatever scene they desire.
