Modern Drama

The Failure of History: Kushner's Homebody/Kabul and the Apocalyptic Context M. SCOTT PHILLIPS But in Kabul now there is 110 history. IFJor what is the world without Allah in it? Homebody/Kabul (36, 66) Tony Kushner insists that he altered none of the dialogue in Homebody/Kabul (which premiered in December 200r at New York Theatre Workshop) to accommodate the events of September II, 2001. It is, apparently, pure serendipity that the play takes place in Afghanistan and explores some of the more horrific aspects of life under the Taliban regime. In denying any particular prescience concerning the September tragedy, Kushner asserts only that "the broad outline of serious trouble ahead was so abundant and easy of access that even a playwright could avail himself of it" ("In a Strange State" 17). Certainly , when the woman known only as the Homebody refers to "the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known" (10; emphasis in original), it is a painful irony, and when Mahala, an embittered and desperate Afghan woman, angrily denounces the American policy of toleration toward the Afghan regime, it is chillingly prophetic. "You love the Taliban so much," she says to Priscilla Ceiling, whom she mistakenly believes to be American, "bring them to New York! Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York! Americans!" (83). But Homebody is more than an accidental postscript to recent events. It is Kushner's latest exploration of a theme recurring throughout his work, that of cultural and political apocalypse, of a millennial anxiety afflicting a world at the brink of spiritual and moral negation. In Homebody, Kushner posits a binary opposition between a consumer-driven western imperialism and a misogynistic, anti-western theocracy represented by radical Islam. While his resolution of Angels in America's apocalyptic narrative suggests a materialist 's faith in the capacity for progressive human intervention, what Kushner Modem Drama, 47: f (Spring 2004) I 2 M. SCOTT PHILLIPS calls his "complicated kind of optimism" (Harris 148) is sorely tested by Homebody's clash of seeming irreconcilables. The apocalyptic vision in Homebody is linked to the notion that the west has arrived at "the end of history ," an end that results not in a Hegelian dialectical synthesis, but in a postmodem crisis, in which there is no future except in the endless repetition of the past. Before turning to the problematic nature of Homebody (and, to a lesser extent, A Dybbuk), I will unpack both the discourse of apocalypse and Walter Benjamin's image of the Angel of History, mentioned by a number of scholars as the metaphorical basis for Kushner's faith in radical, creative intervention . It is this faith, so frequently and publicly professed by the playwright, that is undermined by the implications of his latest text. To refer to this crisis in Homebody as "postmodem" is problematic, in that "postmodemity" and "postmodemism" are notoriously non-discrete terms. The "postmodem" has engaged a number of slippery and malleable concepts, which have meant different things to different people at different historical moments, "either a radicalization of the self-reflexive moment within modernism , a turning away from narrative and representation, or an explicit return to narrative and representation" (Bertens 5). In "Angels in America: The Millennium and Postmodem Memory," Stanton B. Gamer, Jr., grapples with the connection between millenarianism and postmodemity by suggesting "a discursive , cultural, and ideological field within which we might situate both postmodemism as a movement (or set of movements) and Angels as a Iiterary/ theatrical phenomenon" (174). Drawing on such theorists as Linda Hutcheon, Steven Best, Douglas Kellner, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, Garner 's postmodern sensibility is one that retains a fascination with cataclysm and destruction, even as it rejects any "master narrative of millenarianism, with its totalizing temporal structures and its sense of ultimacy" (175). In Garner 's reading, the postmodem condition is one that pivots on the threat of impending doom, rupture, discontinuity, a leveling of structures - in other words that part of the apocalyptic equation that deals with destruction and collapse - while rejecting the totalizing aspects of apocalypticism that depend upon the teleology of a master narrative (175-76). Much of Kushner...