Abstract
From the beginning, Sam Shepard’s work has provoked debate and elicited strong response. His plays are challenging, intense experiences, usually very violent and always ambiguous, and critics have generally agreed that it is as difficult to say exactly what he means as it is to classify how he writes. One response to this dilemma is to give it up — after all, Shepard’s is not a theatre of ideas but of feelings. Another response is merely to celebrate his language, his characters, his stagecraft and to describe what happens on a Shepard stage, thereby adding to the already substantial cult status of the man. But the best response, surely, is to take the plays seriously enough to grapple with them, to try to understand why it is that they move us and what they make us feel — and think. If Shepard is to be called great or major or central, then it behooves us to know why.
I feel like there are territories within us that are totally unknown. Huge, mysterious and dangerous territories.
Sam Shepard
The quotations that begin each part of this discussion are taken from the following sources:‘Rhythms and Truths’, interview with Amy Lippman, American Theatre 1, no. 1 (April 1984), 12; Fool for Love in Fool for Love and Other Plays (Toronto: Bantarn, 1984), p. 19; ‘Language, Visualisation and the Inner Library’ in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), p.215.
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Notes
I will not try to list here all the attempts to classify Shepard’s work as ‘realist’ or ‘surrealist’, and so on. Some critics, however, run into particular trouble with terminology. In her article ‘Alphabetical Shepard’, in her book American Dreams, Bonnie Marranca calls his work ‘realism’ (and is obliged to stretch the meaning of the term beyond recognition) and ‘melodrama’. She also describes it as ‘based on an expressionist view of character’ (p. 15), but she does not develop the point. In ‘Worse Than Being Homeless’, American Dreams, pp. 117–25, William Kleb describes Shepard’s plays as a mixture of ‘the real and the surreal’, yet he goes on to mention several features peculiar to Expressionism. Throughout Inner Landscapes: The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), Ron Mottram notes Shepard’s use of characters which are ‘projections of his own imagination’ (p. 14) and are forced ‘to externalize inner states’ (p. 153), and comments upon Shepard’s predilection for apocalyptic endings and his ‘expressive tendencies’ (p. 164), but he still insists on thinking of the plays as realistic.
I have discussed German Expressionism and its manifestations in North American writing in Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), and in that book I argued that a vital component of American modernism and postmodernism can be traced to expressionist influences. Sam Shepard stands, I think, in a direct line with other expressionist writers in the United States such as Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (in Camino Real), Ralph Ellison, Djuna Barnes, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell and others stretching back to Whitman.
I have borrowed the term ‘expressive fallacy’ from Hal Foster who also sees this ‘metaphysics of presence’ as central to Expressionism: ‘Such is the pathos of the expressionist self: alienated, it would be made whole through expression, only to find there another sign of its alienation ... for even as expressionism insists on the primary, originary, interior self, it reveals that this self is never anterior to its traces, its gestures, its “body”’. See Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 62.
The opposing tendencies of abstraction and empathy were first described and theorized by Wilhelm Worringer in Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908); see Regression and Apocalypse, pp. 30–34.
Pinthus’ remark from his 1918 ‘Speech addressed to young writers’ is quoted in John Willett, Expressionism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 117 and
Soergel’s is quoted in Armin Arnold, Prosa des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1972), p. 12 (my translation).
The original debate over the ideology of German Expressionism is set forth in Ernst Bloch’s ‘Diskussionen über Expressionismus’, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962), translated as ‘Discussing Expressionism’ by Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: NLB, 1977).
See also Stephen Eric Bronner’s thorough reconsideration of the debate in ‘Expressionism and Marxism: Towards an Aesthetic of Emancipation’, Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 411–53;
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), and
Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October 16 (1981), 39–68.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Grace, S. (1993). Lighting Out for the Territory Within: Field Notes on Shepard’s Expressionist Vision. In: Wilcox, L. (eds) Rereading Shepard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22509-5_12
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