Alone Again, At the Wheel: Postmodern Ethics in Paula Vogels How I Learned to Drive Contemporary Drama in English 19,

(2012): 195-209 BARBARA ANTONIAZZI Alone Again, At the Wheel: Postmodern Ethics in Paula Vogels How I Learned to Drive Paula Vogels plays constitute a corpus that probes the moral underbelly of American society. In three decades of creative activity the playwright has dramatized a series of dilemmas combining the personal and the societal: she has dealt with aging and neoliberalism in The Oldest Profession (1981), sexual orientation and parenting in The Baby Makes Seven (1984), AIDS and mourning in The Baltimore Waltz (1989) and The Long Christmas Ride Home (2004), domestic violence and the porn industry in Hot n Throbbing (1993). In this perspective, her Pulitzer-winning play on pedophilia, How I Learned to Drive (1997), can be said to tackle yet another disturbing issue but also to suggest, beyond the subject matter, Vogels general view on the possibilities and limitations of individual ethics in postmodern times, as well as the capacity of the theatre to function as an ethical practice. This article discusses How I learned to Drive as illustrative of a form of ethical thinking which questions dogmatic understandings of morality and resignifies the value of individual regulative ideals, however partial. As Drucilla Cornell contends,
They [regulative ideals] allow us to see differently the history and social relations in which we are immersed and to orient our practice to the possibility of change. Commitment easily dissolves under the weight of the world. A regulative ideal helps us to see what we might yet become, and this different way of seeing can itself take on a force that encourages critique and commitment. In this sense, it concretizes the invitation to remake the world, as well as providing a guide for our own reflection and judgment. (379)

Projected against the Baumanian idea that todays morality rests on the individual, this reflection will guide the analysis of the play. Since, as the author put it in a 2004 interview, everything Vogel has written is a discourse about gender, relationship and power (Raymond), the article will first consider the lessons contained in the play that arrange the three elements according to the awkward didacticism of the characters. Hence, I will unpack the constellation teaching-telling-learning as the methodological motor that sustains the quest for an ethical dimension in a quasi-amoral world. Involved in this triple activity, the audience is co-opted into an exploration that touches the issues of sexuality, self-control and self-destruction. Treading this difficult terrain, the protagonist reconstructs her personal ethos while challenging the audiences capacity for empathy and yet avoiding the mystifications of nostalgia and the temptation of nihilism.

I. Postmodern Moral Landscapes Zygmunt Baumans Postmodern Ethics and his booklet Alone Again discuss the demise of what the Polish sociologists calls the modern ambitions towards a non-ambivalent, non-aporetic morality (Postmodern Ethics 9). Casting the postmodern as the moment in which these utopian ambitions lose sway, Bauman lists the main conceptual consequences of this shift intersecting the intellectual wave which, starting in the late nineties, has been called the turn to ethics (Cf. Garber et al.). If the decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical then Baumans configuration of ethics taps on the tension between the poststructuralist critique of ethics and the ethical critique of poststructuralism (Garber et al. x, ix). In his rendition, in fact, because humans have to live without the comfort of logically coherent ethical codes they are, by definition, morally ambivalent and operate their choices under the pressure of contradictory impulses. Still, although the idea of a universal morality is rejected, so is also moral relativism, in that moral responsibility remains the first reality of the self, a starting point rather than a product of society (13). The individual that finds him/herself alone again, after the end of certainty (Cf. Alone Again) is called to demistify power-assisted ethical codes based on the pretense that society is the guardian of morality (Postmodern Ethics 14) while bravely facing the incurable ambivalence in which this take of responsibility casts the subject. Vogel, for her part, challenges the viewers certainties by pressuring the boundaries of their moral comfort zones. In staging the opposition between institutionalized moral codifications and elemental ethical ambiguities, her plays strike a difficult balance that keeps them equally far from escapism and denunciative moralism. Like many intellectuals, the author seems to perceive a danger in the fact that the ethical is too easily and even usually reabsorbed into the moral (Guillory 41) and recurs to the means of her art to keep the distinction sensible. Thus, How I Learned to Drive is structured around a situation that apparently allows for a clear allocation of moral contempt but follows the dynamics of an exercise in ethical reading where the spectator feels compelled to operate choices and express judgments, while being constantly questioned about their validity. The piece, dark yet humorous, pivots on only two real characters: the female protagonist, Lil Bit, and her uncle-bymarriage, Peck. The two are intensely involved over the course of seven years in a disturbing romantic relationship that teeters on the brink of tragedy. Subtly inspired by Nabokovs Lolita, the narrative commutes between past, present and the future so that Lil Bit is simultaneously a vulnerable child, a willful adolescent, and a jaded woman. As a consequence her story of love and delusion with Peck is parceled through chronological and emotional shifts that make it impossible for the viewer to comfortably isolate guilt and responsibilities, leaving as only imperative the necessity to pierce down through the irreducible duplicity of human relationships to the secrets of self-preservation. And maybe, finally, to the discovery that there is no becoming ethical if not through a certain violence. (Butler 26)

Judging from the innumerable high-school productions that the play has had, the stress on the ambiguity and the humanity of what could be quickly classified as a victim/perpetrator interaction has struck a chord with adolescents sensitivity. Is Lil Bit a prey to her rapacious uncle, is there a mutual attraction among adults, or is there a temptress manipulating a weak and wounded man? Exactly because the play does not exclude any of these implications, it undermines all attempts at endorsing practical reason. Consequently, Vogels performance of ethics can be defined as speculative, rather than assertive or polemic. As David Savran has well observed, to be truthful to the complexity of the real, the author even renounces to construct an exemplary feminist hero; quite on the contrary she unleashes confusion in the hope that this will lead towards an understanding of the confusion, towards making sense of a society gone awry (Savran xii). Borrowing Ulrich Becks term, we may define the small-town context around the story as a risk society. Lil Bits opening monologue is a lyrical description of disheveled suburban Maryland in which the waste of modernity clutters a forlorn rural landscape.
Less than a mile away, the crumbling concrete of the U.S. One wends its way past one-room revival churches, the porno drive-in, and boarded up motels with For Sale signs tumbling down. [...] Here on the land the Department of Agriculture owns, the smell of sleeping animals is think on the air. The smell of clover and hay mix in with the smells of the leather dashboard. (7)

The pastoral marrow has thinned to a ghostly aura that gives broken men the illusion of being the American Adams of their barefoot youth, before the malls took over. In reality, the processes of privatization and individualization have reached beyond the landscape to the heart of the community. Mirroring crumbling concrete of the U.S. that defines the surroundings, communal and familial support has been reduced to debris by all consuming, unbridled desires. Thus, the risk that in Becks framework is industrially produced, has here spilt to pollute the sources of the familial environment. Risk, which by definition is not a fact, but a potential event, a hazard rather than an accident, is spelled as a personal threat nested in everybodys gaze. Always pierced by prying eyes, Lil Bit grows up in an atmosphere of incumbent sexual danger that she laments without full awareness, immersed as she is in a world whose coordinates are confused. Like the proverbial Mary Jane with which she identifies, her body, the perception of her own value, and the perception of danger are in disarray:
Lil Bit: You havent heard the Mary Jane jokes? Okay. Little Mary Jane is walking through the woods. When all of a sudden this man...jumps out, rips open Mary Janes blouse, and plunges his hands on her breasts. And Little Mary Jane just laughed and laughed because she knew her money was in her shoes (Lil Bit laughs; the female Greek Chorus does not)...dont you ever feel self-conscious? Like you are being looked at all the time? (Vogel 55)

For a protagonist who, with hindsight, drops the word pedophilia at the beginning of the play, such confusion could be quickly be ascribed to an obscure sexual trauma that re-emerges under the guise of jokes and obsessions, but the author chooses to keep this part of the story from the public, and deploys many other clues and explanations, all valid. Prominent among them, the pervasive violation of intimacy perpetrated through prying gazes and objectifying language. Since her birth Lil Bit is the object of constant scrutiny within and outside the family circle. In a household in which all nicknames refer to the peculiarities of the family members genitalia, she is, literally, addressed by her lack of a penis Yet, because her sexuality defined as a fragmenta bitshe is the only character that can still grow, and become whole. One the contrary, everyone else is branded by the violence of constant exposure in ways that reinforce the grotesque villains, and deaden the weaker elements. So, while hypervirile grandpa (Big Papa) is a caricature of patriarchal bestiality whose marriage to fourteen-year old grandma is remembered as the rape of the Sabine women, Lill Bits desexualized mother (Titless Wonder) is annihilated by her personal disillusions and juvenile mistakes. Except for the couple of protagonists, all the characters are subsumed in three actors collectively named the Chorus. The Chorus frames the narrative by supplying impersonal lessons as well as personal memories but, taken as a whole, it brings into the play the flattened conventional wisdom against which Lil Bit and Peck pursue an individual quest for the reconstruction of their personal world, sometimes avoiding and sometimes suffering the pitfalls of an emotional wasteland. II. Can you tell the teacher from the lesson? Almost to mask the surrounding moral paucity, the Chorus propounds normative protocols which voice the ethical convictions of obsolete philosophies as well as the dysfunctional pedagogy inherent to impoverished familial relations. Since the capacity for empathy has been lost in the degeneration of the social fabric, all communication is structured through lessons that revolve around arbitrary principles and mainly absolve the adults from the obligation to look out for the young. Lil Bit, the main learner, is thus administered the variations of a largely preposterous defensive ethos: for example, grandmas impositions on sexual etiquette function on the basis of fear: Let her be good and scared! It hurts! You bleed like a stuck pig! And you lay there and say, Why, O Lord, have you forsaken me?!(43). The mothers educational strategy instead involves different dislocations of responsibility. First, she transfers on eleven-year old Lil Bit the liability of her uncles conduct I will feel terrible if something happens...but I warn you: if anything happens I hold you responsible. A couple of years later, when the girl is on the verge of sexual initiation, the mother does away with the idea of risk completely to give in to the saccharine of closeness. Judging contingencies from her desolate solitude, she almost pushes the girl overboard: Dont be scared, it wont hurt youif the man you go to bed with really loves you....I believe in telling my daughter the truth! We have a very close relationship. (43) The

mother-daughter conflict organized around a shifting perception of danger and lack becomes the multigenerational site in which imperfect warnings reveal the impossibility for women to take care of each other, even in the acknowledged presence of a predator. Uncle Peck, who has meekly accepted familial authority for too long, has rather learned to use lessons as instruments of seduction in the only dominant relationships he can entertain: those with children. On the one hand Peck is a textbook pedophile, a soft mannered voyeur, versed in kids psychology and out of place among the adults. On the other hand, he is the product of different unspoken traumas such as shell shock during World War Two (67) and, ostensibly, sexual abuse at an early age (89). Anytime he is around children, his attentions become increasingly empathic and threatening. To young cousin Bob, Peck is the man who teaches him how to fish but who understands his weeping at the fishs sorrows and lets his tears flow in the secrecy of their exclusive company. Could Bob ever refuse the invitation to drink beer with him on the tree house? (35) To barely pubescent Lil Bit, Peck is her chance at having a father(87) and someone who knows an awful lot. Even in retrospective he is less an ogre than a Flying Dutchman, a lost soul desperate to find the maiden who will put an end to his wandering (86). As the only source of sympathy that children thrown in such a world can find, Peck represents the sense of belonging they pursue at the cost of their innocence. The price they willingly pay is the secret that Peck asks them not to share. In this way the house on the tree, and the driver seat in the cartopoi of autonomy coveted by childrenbecome microcosm of misrepresented love and potential soul damage. In spite of the premises, Vogel resists a connotation of experience as sorrowful deception. Whereas lessons per se obviously fail to exhaust the rational and emotional interchange within the fragmented community, Lil Bit manages to distill some of them into the source of a self-preserving ethos. The lessons in defensive driving and deceptive drinking, taught respectively by her uncle and by her mother, apparently fall into the domain of the moral conventions that regulate gendered conduct. Yet, because they are taught under an inverted gender sign, they are abstracted from their contingent meaning and anchored to a deeper human dimension, unmistakable in the simplicity of the wording. Peck, for example, shifts to his father mode and elucidates the gender dynamics of the road:
This is serious business. I will never touch you when you are driving a car. Understand? (49) When you are driving your life is in your two hands. Understand? [...] Youre the nearest to a son Ill ever have [...] I want to teach you to drive like a man [...] Men are taught to drive with confidencewith aggression. The road belongs to them. They drive defensivelyalways looking out for the other guy. Women tend to be politeto hesitate. And that can be fatal. (50)

The mother instead delivers a three-page lecture on social drinking:

Sip your drink slowly [...] step away from ladies drinks...avoid anything with sugar, or anything with an umbrella: believe me, they are lethal [...] I think you were conceived after one of those. Drink, instead, like a man: straight up or on the rocks with plenty of water in between (24)

In both cases, the engagement in an activity that is equally elating and dangerous needs to be performed in masculine terms while the feminine connotation of passivity someone who performs just for you and gives you what you ask for (51) is reserved, humorously, for the car. Learning to disobey the behavioral conventions of her gender, Lil Bit avoids becoming an expendable subject. The masculine protocol of survival is predicated on the unflagging repetitions of disciplined mechanical acts as if the body might become the primary learner of spiritual and intellectual control. In this perspective, acquired rituals of behavior have the power to keep consciousness afloat when the risk threshold gets higherlike in the event of rape dates or car accidents. Ironically, in a State in which the road regulations oblige the driver to abide by Implied Consent (66), Lil Bit acquires man-like autonomy in governing bodily boundaries, technology and the environment, so that her volition can instead be exerted only after accurate consideration. In the economy of the story, Lil Bit is the learner and the disciple, yet, in the economy of the play, she becomes, quite on the contrary, the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded (41), and addresses the audience as such. III. Teaching-Telling-Learning Lil Bit opens the play in her late-thirties incarnation announcing: Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson (7). As a pupil, she has been provided with moral codes of infallible behavior; as a teacher she does the opposite: instead of precepts, the audience is given questions, doubts and dilemmas that instigate unrelenting speculation and a constant reassessment of events. The plays title and inception immediately foreground the constellation teaching-telling-learning as a deep structure that certainly pertains to issues of representation and plot, but which becomes particularly significant when considering the privileged relationship that the theatre entertains with the spectator. Lil Bit-theteacher presents the audience with an ethical challenge: how will they bear witness to disturbing truths without dismissing any of their human implications? The authors choice is to present all human implications first. Being Lil Bit an omniscient but disjunctive narrator, she refuses to produce the content of memory with the clarity that hindsight could ideally provide because abiding to a linear if reversed chronology would undermine her lesson. Only after the lesson has been assimilated, does she trust the audience with her secret. Thus, all the facets of the story of passion and denial with Peck are delicately laid out with troubling pathos: Lil Bits adolescent desire for her uncle is honest, her dismissal of the man is ruthless, and his premature self-destruction after she exits his life is as clich as heart-rending. Only after receiving the account of a romantic parable taking place between a man and a woman, are we shown the abusive scene between the man and the child. This is the only scene in which

Peck and Lill Bit touch sexually, the woman sitting into the mans lap, the man slipping his hands under her blouse with a moan. But Lil Bits dialogue is spoken by the youngest girl in the Chorus, as if the body were already dissociated from its owner, and adult Lil Bit, in fact, recalls the event as the last day which she lived in her body: I retreated above the neck, and Ive lived inside the fire in my head ever since (90). The viewers capacity for empathy, first weakened at the developments of the story, is suddenly co-opted again, but shorn of all sentimentalism in virtue of this quasi-Brechtian alienation effect that points at the critical core of the play, a core extending beyond the materiality of abuse. As Ann Pellegrini has brilliantly argued in an essay that situates the play in a discussion of feminism and sexual trauma, How I learned to Drive does not shrink from showing Lil Bits woundedness, but, no less significantly, it neither assigns her wounding to anyone event not makes injury the hole of her story, the hole in her self (416). The will to disengage the moral balance of the story from the traumatic event is in keeping with Vogels recommendation to cast a young woman who is of legal age who can look as close to eleven as possible. If the actor is too young, she adds, the audience may feel uncomfortable (4), or maybe, I argue, the audience would recast all the play in the perspective of sexual violence. If placed at the beginning, the scene would have condemned Lil Bit to be only defined by her violability. Instead, in this non-linear psychic time, in which womens bodies and childrens voices coexist, we witness Lil Bits life as whole and endowed with agency, in spite of her vulnerability. After all, Adriana Cavarero reminds us, the human being is vulnerable as a singular body exposed to wounding. There is not, however, anything necessary about the vulnus (wound) only the potential for a wound, to occur at any time in contingent circumstances. (30). So the audience is sheltered from the shock of the authentic because it could crystallize critical thinking, that is, it is sheltered from the temptation to oversimplify the nuanced moral exploration that constitutes Lil Bits lesson. The wound, in fact, has remained largely potential instead of bringing about the complete devastation of the girls psyche. The fragmented temporality of the story told mimics two neuropsychological dynamics: the workings of memory in the wake of psychic injury, as investigated by Pellegrini, but also the non-linear mechanisms of apprehension and embodied cognition that continue, in spite of trauma. Telling is remembering, but the remembrance is not, as adult Lil Bit wants us to think, only in the fire of the brain. Not by chance, How I Learned to Drive is part of a dyptic called The Mammary Plays, a title whose phonetic double, the Memory plays, is directly addressed in the text. Like the names in the dysfunctional family, memory (mammary) is spelled on the body, not as a disfiguring mark though, but as a bodily metaphor of the risks, but also of the credentials (Vogel 17) and the possibilities of genderin short of the messy ambiguities of lived embodiment (Pellegrini 427). Whereas we are told that body and head have been severed forever, we are also shown, on the contrary, that Lil Bits body has learned. What has it learned exactly? Early in the play Lil Bit confesses that, because of a drinking problem, she has been kicked out of college in 1970, that is, right after she

stops seeing her uncle. She does not go back home and does her best to go through a Nixon recession:
What I did, most nights, was cruise the Beltway and the back roads of Maryland. Racing in a 1965 Mustangand as long as I had gasoline for my car and whiskey for me, the night would pass. Fully tanked, I would speed past the churches and the trees on the bend, thinking just one notch of the steering wheel would be all it would take, and yet some...reflex took over. My hands on the wheel in the nine and three oclock positionI never so much as got a ticket. He taught me well. (21)

The embodied knowledge of the moral practices achieved through her mothers and uncles inflexible protocols anchor her to a reflex that guarantees survival. In the juncture of self-control and self-destruction, when the brain is taken over by darkness, the body remembers the lesson and does not surrender either to alcoholic unconsciousness or willful disaster. Lil Bit drinks like a man, and as Peck foretold, she does not die in a car. In the difficult re-piecing of intellectual cognition and corporeal dimension, the subject behaves according to a regulative ideal that supersedes institutional permissionsto marry at fourteen, to drink at sixteen, to love at eighteen. An ideal surreptitiously born out of the interdependence of lesson and threat. If the Postmodern is the territory where the wrecks of modernitys grand ambitions coexist with the awareness of the moral vacuum threatening individual life, then this play dramatizes the interaction between residual preposterous codes and the attempt to develop, despite circumstances, ethics as a care of the self. Adapting John Guillorys proposition that reading belongs to the field of the ethical because it is a practice of the self, (39) it can be argued that, in this case particularly, the stage provides a communal version of such practice, amplified and complicated by the resonances that living bodies and shared spaces involve. For the audience and for the characters alike, the staged play corresponds to a play of the ethical mind that sifts out hollow prescriptions to re-discover, unexpectedly, an ethical value such as mercy. The invocation of Shakespeare frames the play with a passing reference to The Merchant of Venice: the quality of mercy, like the quality of responsible consent, is not strained. (18) Because it is voluntary, mercy mitigates the compulsion of revenge and of self-righteousness, thus the lessons of memory, instead of overwhelming Lil Bit, provides her with the license to navigate society and its risks.

Works Cited Primary Literature Vogel, Paula. "How I Learned to Drive." In The Mammary Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. Secondary Literature Bauman, Zygmunt. Alone Again: Ethics after Certainty. London: Demos, 1996. ---. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Dehli: Sage, (1986)1992. Butler, Judith. "Ethic Ambivalence." The Turn to Ethics. Eds. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia, 2009. Cornell, Drucilla. "Toward a Modern/Postmodern Reconstruction of Ethics." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133.2 (1985): 291-380. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz. "Introduction." The Turn to Ethics. Eds. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 2000. Guillory, John. "The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading." The Turn to Ethics. Eds. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz. New York: Routledge, 2000. Pellegrini, Ann. "Staging Sexual Injury." Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Raymond, Gerard. "Paula Vogel: The Signature Season". 2004. 31.05.2011. <http://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/news/10-2004/paula-vogel-the-signatureseason_5219.html>. Savran, David. "Loose Screw: An Introduction." Paula Vogel The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996.