Теория языка | Филологический аспект №1 (33) Январь, 2018

Драматургия и корпоративный мир

Крылова Надежда Владимировна
канд. филол. наук, доцент кафедры английского языка Петрозаводского государственного университета

Аннотация: Anyone’s success in a hierarchical or economic institution depends on the ability to solve various types of problems and deal with unforeseen situations. Students need to develop the ability to confront ambiguous, ill-defined situations and interpret what they know creatively. Thus a background in the humanities can complement business education proper. This is particularly true of language and literature. The analysis of the two female characters from two major plays by Tennessee Williams – Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – is hoped to prove that modern corporation, however powerful as an institution, cannot develop its paradigm without the values of high culture.
Ключевые слова: Tennessee Williams; dramatic discourse; problem-solving skills; financial success

Krylova N.V.
PhD, Associate Professor of English, Institute of Foreign Languages, Petrozavodsk State University

1. INTRODUCTION. LITERATURE AS A TOOL TO IMPROVE PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS.

The current paper continues our previous research related to the study of Tennessee Williams’s dramatic works and their relevance to contemporary moral, social, economic, cultural and aesthetic values [6, 7]. Contemporary society is an increasingly rationalized one, the plurality of modern life resulting in a conflict of traditional and modern values, the crisis of faith, strengthening of individualism as ideology. By the same token, contemporary life causes more interest in integration of different areas of knowledge, thus trying to overcome the restrictions of a limited point of view, to bridge the gap between the theoretical framework of science and humanities. In other words, between clearly-defined, well-structured problems and vague, shadowy and ill-defined ones.

In reality, managers are seldom confronted with neat, well-structured problems. This might bring to light the importance of problem solving skills in business education. Focusing on content only within narrow discipline boundaries limits potential learning. Students need to develop the ability to confront ambiguous, ill-defined situations and make sense of them. The information required to manage and solve a problem is seldom packaged and provided to the student. During the process of confronting and processing the ill-structured information, students are required to interpret what they know creatively.

In his essay The Corporation’s Role in Today’s Crisis of Cultural Incoherence    Morse Peckham  describes the concept of “meta-directional level”,  which explains why corporations have become increasingly interested in liberal arts: “The processing and innovation of meta-directions require problem exposure and solution postponement, and these in turn require situations in which decisions can be postponed until theoretical manipulation is exhausted and information is processed, sifted, and integrated into theory” [9:277]. He explains in detail how high-corporation policy making benefitted from humanistic education as the key to success as corporation executives. The success of the individual in a hierarchical or economic institution depends on his ability to handle various situations and tensions. Thus a background in the humanities happens to be very good preparation for business, perhaps even better than a technical or business education. It is particularly true for education in literature and language. Language is the universal code providing us with a great variety of directions. The universal characteristic of language is polysemy, or multitude meanings of the same word. Effective communication is essential for success in business. Literature presents simultaneously the most complex mode of linguistic behavior and the most difficult and complex problems of encoding and interpretation [9:279].

Tennessee Williams, one of the best American dramatists, was well-known for the depiction of the danger of illusion. The social dimension of Williams’s plays has been given thorough consideration in the 20^th  and 21^st century research [5, 6, 10].  The current research continues to explore aspects of the relationship between the individual and the society [7].  To what degree do corporations have a relationship, one that goes beyond business, to people? If consumer culture is such that the relationship between a business entity and a consumer is limited to mechanical, scripted interaction, then the role of outside influences on business decisions and transactions is minimal. In short, literature has nothing to offer. If on the other hand, the relationship between business enterprise and consumer is viewed as an interpersonal relationship, then the kind of spirituality that is expressed in literature and other arts becomes really important.

1. Streetcar Named Desire. “I DON’T WANT REALISM, I WANT MAGIC! …”

There are hardly two more strikingly different female characters in Tennessee Williams’s dramatic works than Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It is a conflict between illusion and reality, between romanticism and pragmatism. While Maggie is striving for material success and is fully capable of confronting truths, Blanche hides behind a façade of illusion.

Streetcar is full of its own oppositions. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley propels the plot of the play and reflects the playwright’s message to the contemporary society, his profound existential despair. The character of Blanche represents a cry against the oppressors of the human spirit and asserts the right to be weak in the realm of American dream – the real of financial and social success.

The play has been scrutinized up and down as a psychological complex which shows the dominant male and female roles in the American culture. It embodies Williams’s visual and verbal language, his thematic preoccupations, symbolic and imagistic oppositions.

The dramatic tension occurs between Blanche Dubois, a faded southern belle and Stanley Kowalski, a working class labourer of Polish descent. Blanche is destitute but refuses to admit that. Her aristocratic background is useless, her family plantation had been taken by creditors, she is left with no independent income or marketable skill. Blanche is not self-sufficient to survive in the capitalist world. She has no realistic idea how to rescue herself. She finds the least appropriate way to escape from her problems: she creates her own reality where she attempts to rejuvenate her own life. Behind her polished exterior is an insecure woman who hides the truth about her suffering with lies.

Even the setting of the play is an environmental antagonist to Blanche: there are no doors between the rooms, she is forced to dress and undress in view of the others. The walls are flimsy, the windows are always open, and thus the Kowalski and the Hubbels are never free from each other. Nothing is safe from another person’s criticism in such a place. Blanche’s trunk is in the high traffic area, and it is kicked open by Stanley. Blanche’s bed is the least private place- it is in the kitchen where Stanley and his friends play poker. Every space in this setting is impure and lacks privacy and quiet. The set is very flexible, allowing the street to be seen and heard. The characters enter and leave the place throughout the play often bringing with them the problems they encounter in the world at large.

Even though Blanche was not meant to fit into the Kowalski household, she does a very meaningful job for the survival of her sister’s family. She embodies Stella’s past and a threat to her family and to her unborn child. To protect from the unhealthy past, Stella has to reject Blanche and reunite with her husband.  Blanche, conversely, puts her fate in the hands of others, retreating into her private fantasies. Her insanity is an escape, almost by choice, into the liberating world of illusion. She manages to adapt reality to fit her delusions.  Even though reality triumphs over fantasy, we cannot say that Williams’s dreamy characters are defeated. With all their fragility, they have immense spiritual importance. Blanche’s final scene proves that fantasy, after all, can be a powerful force to redeem reality. While watching Blanche’s mental frailty in all its pathos, Stanley and Stella believe that they have done nothing wrong: he is unbuttoning her blouse, resorting to the only means of conviction and reconciliation he knows. The radio blares, people flirt and gamble, as though nothing has happened.

III. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. THE CONCEPT OF COMMERCIAL SUCCESS.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  proved to be one of the most commercially successful of Tennessee Williams’s plays despite the controversy over the subject of homosexuality in it. George W. Crandell singles out a few central themes in the play: a story about an empty marriage (Maggie and Brick), a father and son’s inability to communicate (Big Daddy and Brick), a possibly homosexual relationship or an idealized friendship (Brick and Skipper), and a family squabble over inheritance (Brick and Maggie/Gooper and Mae) [4: 117]. Most certainly, the fight between the two rival sons for Big Daddy’s money and estate is the play’s central force bringing all the diverse elements of the plot together. All the characters revolve around the issue of the family fortune. Brick, the favorite son of a rich plantation owner, takes to drinking, unable to forget his infatuation with his college roommate. Brick struggles to define himself as either heterosexual or homosexual. Brick is an ex-athlete, still attractive and well-figured, but already showing signs of exhaustion and surrender. His elder brother Gooper, a dreary, talentless married man, has been busy producing heirs to his father’s fortune. Maggie competes against Gooper and his wife Mae for an inheritance and independence that promise economic security in a materialistic society indifferent to the needs of the poor. She is childless and desperate to escape any memory or reminder of her past, full of poverty and deprivations. Maggie seems obsessed with inheritance issues: she had been left without a cent after her rich Aunt Cornelia had died, and she has been hating her for that ever since. She would not give Brick a divorce, nor is she willing to have a lover (even though her husband encourages her to do so), only not to let the family money slip through her fingers : “..I am not going to give you any excuse to divorce me for being unfaithful or anything else …” Maggie’s key word is money (“You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it”). In the end she is ready to have a child by the man who is in love with liquor because her loathing of her brother and sister-in-law is stronger than her contempt for her spineless drinking husband. This may be why she sincerely appreciates Big Daddy – they are both fighters, both materialistic.

Big Daddy  is a self-made, strong-willed man, with titanic patience, who worked himself up from nothing to millions and now wonders if it was all worth it. The pivotal point is the news about Big Daddy’s health – it changes everything twice during the play. The first time is when he is relieved to know he does not have cancer, or rather deceived into believing it. His worst instincts come to life. He makes explicit what has been suppressed for many years – his dislike of his wife, of his elder son and his family, of the atmosphere of mendacity and hypocrisy that always accompanies big money. His language comes right from the barnyard. Big Daddy’s language is the one of commerce, trade, and money – the only realm in which he feels at ease and in which he succeeds. He speaks of a human being as of  “…a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!” (my italics). He makes the saddest confession to his son about the only loves in his life: “You and being a success as a planter is all I ever had any devotion to in my whole life!” Yet even in that last attempt to reach his son, he cannot help resorting to the only means he is best equipped with: “I’ll make a bargain with you. You tell me why you drink and I’ll hand you one” (my italics).

Big Daddy deemed materialism to be almost the sum total of life. Ironically it is he who eventually admits, before he leaves at the end of Act II, on the doorstep of death, that “a man can’t buy his life with it, he can’t buy back his life when his life is finished …” (my italics). Ultimately the family patriarch is left with only one question: “Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?” As he faces the stage in Act II, he comes up with the answer to his own question: “One thing you can grow on a place more important than cotton! – is tolerance! – I grown it”. Thus Williams gives the play a more positive ending, transforming the man’s rage into wisdom and reconciliation.

In play after play, characters must balance the demands of the everyday familiar world of work and commerce with the less familiar, less comfortable, and oftentimes suppressed needs stemming from their psychological interactions with that real world. Williams succeeds in creating a tragedy of mundane life on the level of a classical tragedy. While most modern economic, social and other conflicts tend to be resolved in court, Williams shows another path, more pains-taking but eventually more resultative,  for conflict resolution: the one of compassion and understanding of “the otherness”.

III. CONCLUSION. THE PLACE OF LITERATURE IN THE BUSINESS SCHOOL.

So what is the place of literature in the business school? How can literature, with the depth and complexity, caused by many factors including ambiguity, affect the business world? Literature cannot be expected to provide  maxims that then become prescriptions for business decisions. However, one of the main vehicles of decision-making pedagogy, the business case, takes its format from neither the dry composition of, say, stock reports, nor the breathless telegraphic scripts of advertising, but rather from a literary genre – the short story. Like all other experiences of life, literature informs our behavior in a variety of spheres. In short, it humanizes. Literature packs psychological conflict and issues of ethics into a small space between two covers of a book. The author’s retelling of weeks, months, and years of conflict is compacted into a few hours of reading. Literature leads us to the examined life – an integral part of a full participation in modern society. It would be hard to prove that business decisions made by people with a broader experience in literature and the arts display a higher level of ethical considerations or come about in the spirit of highly enlightened self interest. But imagine an educational system that took eighteen-year-olds and placed them directly into business curricula with no exposure to any additional “irrelevant” topics. Is that a bet we as a society would be willing to take? If we are not willing to take that bet, then we must ask ourselves at what point in the business curriculum do we stop considering the wider world?

Williams’s romantic characters are often in conflict with the harsh material world, which brings about a collapse of culture and its myths. Yet their tragic sensibilities are humane and even creative. In terms of business education, this means that though the modern corporation is a powerful social institution, it cannot achieve its potentiality without interaction with the humanities (9:283). In the light of interdisciplinary educational approach, we all agree that each discipline only benefits from the paradigm and experience of others. Peter A. Coclanis proposed a similar concept for business education: “I’d like to propose the creation of a new position called CIAO, or chief intellectual-arbitrage officer: Someone …not only to generate new ideas but also to ask new questions, identify new trends, explore new niches, expand geocultural boundaries, project forward and remember the past. The CIAO would not necessarily have a science/tech or business background – in fact, such a background might detract from his or her effectiveness. Rather, I visualize the perfect CIAO as a liberal-arts type, someone who reads broadly and voraciously, is articulate, knows how to do research, can count a little, has backbone, and likes to argue” [11].

Finally, look at how illusion affects and even creates reality: the Desire streetcar line gained widespread acclaim when Tennessee Williams’ play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” had been published in 1947.  The service was interrupted in 2005 after the Katrina hurricane and resumed in 2006. As much as the city influenced Tennessee Williams’s  writing, particularly the settings of his plays, the effect of his writing was just as profound. After all, the illusions may have power. Fantasy may have a liberating and a constructive magic to transform the world as Williams’s great dramatic works demonstrate. What world famous drama can bring into successful entrepreneur is questioning ideas, establishing connections, ability to deal with ill-defined, shadowy situations and making them work.

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11. The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 18, 2012, Accessed January 12th, 2018 .