Dissolving Boundaries, Exposing Webs

Abstract

Like Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, the examples to be discussed in this chapter, Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America and John Sayles’s film Lone Star, undermine boundaries in order to expose a network of linked connections. All three expose a different way of seeing or thinking, though their preoccupations are different. Coetzee underscores the interconnection of art and life, fiction and nonfiction, and exposes an ethical web of connections between people, in which all affect all. Lone Star and Angels in America, by contrast, treat unanticipated connections between diverse types of people that defy the categories of identity politics, suggesting a different way of thinking about social change. Angels in America goes even further, breaching the boundaries between our presumed ontological and psychic divisions as well. The effect in both cases is to call into question our habitual categories.