Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

DAVID A. ZIMMERMAN Six Degrees of Distinction: Connection, Contagion, and the Aesthetics of Anything Ifmone^i is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds! Can it not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation7. It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the dnemical power of society. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody 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. Ouisa Kittredge in Six Degrees ofSeparation introduction: distinction, desire, and democracy John guare's Six Degrees of Separation is about the ways difference is everywhere compromised by connection, the ways distinction is everywhere unsettled by identification. In the play, a young, black, penniless , gay prostitute enters the home of Manhattan sophisticates and successfully passes as a native of the cultured class. His imitation of them threatens their difference from him—from all a young, black, penniless gay prostitute might represent to them. Yet the play makes it clear from Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 io8David A. Zimmerman the start that their difference from him depends on their likeness to him. Even before they are taken in by the young man's desperate and mercenary bluff, they find themselves executing a confidence game as desperate and mercenary as his. Although they possess all the signs and tokens of membership in the cultured class, Flan and Ouisa Kittredge are on the verge ofbankruptcy, and without financial assets to back up their abundant cultural capital, they are for the moment merely acting as if they belong to the moneyed class. Such a gamble is required to become solvent again since they must convince a wealthy South African visitor to lend them money—two million dollars—which Flan, an art dealer, urgently needs to complete a deal. The Kittredges nervously recognize that only by acting their class roles perfectly can they win the millionaire's money. As alike as they are, the performances of the young man, Paul, and the Kittredges end quite differently. With seeming inevitability, the Kittredges get the money they need and make the symbols of their class distinction fungible once again, whereas Paul, discovered in theit daughter 's bedroom having sex with a white, male prostitute, is exposed as a fraud, an outsider who is consigned, violently in the end, to prison. It is not incidental that the difference between the black, male prostitute and the urbane couple is exposed and ultimately secured by his being discovered having sex with a white man. Intercourse between men in the play is at once the assertion of sameness and the contamination of difference. Paul's mimetic project begins specifically as a product of his sex with Trent, the high-school friend of the Kittredge children who singlehandedly oversees Paul's transformation into an agent and object of leisure class fascination. Furthermore, racial miscegenation—all of Paul's sexual encounters are with white men—not only serves as a general metaphor for the breakdown of other kinds of difference in the play, but also calls attention to this breakdown's racial codings. We might read the play as a discourse on the end of American apartheid. Paul's passing is a prevision of this democratization, this collapse of difference, taken to its logical, or pathological, extreme. In such a reading, Paul represents every Sowetan who enters the homes of the rich and white, sleeps in the beds of theit daughters, consumes their fine art and food, and, newly armed with the privileged dispositions and competencies of the ruling class, competes for cultural authority. Indeed , apartheid explicitly looms behind the...