Two recent monographs in “important authors” series from Twayne and Continuum are scholastically useful surveys of Sam Shepard’s career – the sort of books you like to have handy on the shelf for brushing up on half-forgotten plots, tracking down errant quotations or noshing on a biographical snack. These books are headed for college libraries, where they’ll bail out many an ill-prepared student from 11th-hour pre-seminar emergencies by diligently documenting a crucial American playwright and his work. And, with Shepard Neglect all the rage these days, it’s encouraging to find that at least these two publishers acknowledge his worth.
David J. DeRose characterizes Shepard’s life and writing as a constant adventure in “re-inventing” the self and assigns chapters according to perceived phases in this persistent metamorphosis. He wisely avoids any attempt to enclose such a maverick and many-faced writer’s career in a single all-containing thesis, but offers instead the potentially liberating thought that Shepard’s plays demonstrate a preoccupation with heightened or “critical” states of consciousness.
Unfortunately, DeRose strays from his non-pedagogical road. He succumbs to the temptation of assigning “meaning” to plays, as if they were a clever code he’s managed to crack. He sometimes becomes disturbingly judgmental and dismissive of certain “pop pastiche” plays whose social-commentary messages seem disappointingly clear to him. Too bad, because an uncompromising exploration of states of consciousness – those dramatized and those induced by the dramatization – could be exciting if it weren’t required to bear the burden of finding equivalencies between stage and reality. Such connections actually distance the two realms by setting one apart as merely representative or emblematic of the other, rather than considering their common ground, the experience of the play, for what it is. DeRose is clearly aware of the hazard as he issues strong warnings against meaning-mining the early plays – but he fails to apply this caveat consistently to his own discussion, and so distracts from a compelling approach. He speaks alluringly of the “emotional landscape” of the plays, then all too often retreats to the relatively safe terrain of telling us what a given play is “about.” The impression he can give is that Shepard, seeking to make a certain point or convey a specific effect, goes to his workbench, selects the appropriate tool and applies it – or that style itself is a kind of clothing, an external thing.
Hunting for clues
Martin Tucker also offers a promising premise for his study: While looking for a one-to-one correspondence between events in the playwright’s life and events in his work is nonsense, there’s a case to be made, he says, that Shepard’s plays create a “world view,” which Tucker tantalizingly calls “humanistic irony.” His book treats the plays as happenings in the chronological-narrative progress of Shepard’s life. Along this relentlessly linear path, chapters divide the career by groups of years, except for one thematicanalytical section on “Illusion” and a collection of chiefly biographical tidbits called “Notes on Shepard and His Friends.” Tucker moves from play to play in sequence, somewhat ruthlessly discarding the explained pieces as yesterday’s news once they’ve yielded up their secrets to his scalpel. We get a hybrid biographical-critical story that, despite its protest to the contrary, hunts for “clues,” seeks methodically to solve the “Problem of Shepard and His Plays,” of what it all really means, of who, in the end, Shepard is. There’s something a little ungainly about the method; it reminds me of the awkward and incongruous tags and collars attached to unwitting wildlife by conservationists tracking their behavior.
Both books suffer from their own comprehensiveness, proving their points by attrition, exhausting every last special case rather than using the occasional inductive strategy that suggestively savors a few special cases so that we might then do some exploring on our own and assess for ourselves the wider truth of a specifically valid insight.
Passions unspent
Both critics make their often reasonable arguments in cool, distanced language, a voice of authoritative remove: DeRose writes with grim determination as he completes his task, while Tucker speaks like an academic bus-tour guide. It’s obvious just from the physical size of these projects that both these dedicated critics feel passion for the playwright, yet they pretend to be emotionally disengaged. Consequently, the stories of these love affairs feel more like property contracts conceived in cool calculation by the light of boardroom lamps than the complex and breathing offspring of joined imaginations, born in some secret chamber of the heart.
But the two series to which these volumes belong aren’t so much about feelings as they’re about data, encouraging these books to “cover” the subject (though covering can suffocate). A lot of educators must be held accountable, too, for placing a premium on answers, on explanation rather than evocation. Poetry in criticism is so rare.
And these two books on Sam Shepard do offer considerable resources: Both provide excellent bibliographies, especially DeRose’s, which is annotated. DeRose also makes use of previously unstudied archival materials, such as a number of “lost” plays and a fascinating interview with musical collaborator Catherine Stone. Both supply ample biographical information and make a number of intelligent points about plausible authorial intent and recurrent dramaturgical methods. They’re especially good at cataloguing images. The books are thoroughly indexed, so that selective, need-specific reading is easy. And that’s probably the best way to use them – as readily-accessible reference works.
