American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard ed. by Bonnie Marranca (review)

452 Book Reviews inner norms in response to individual vocations, but who must accept responsibility to society at the same time, a society regulated by external norms and values. There can be no absolutely definitive critical work, ofcourse, on any supremely great writer. But Ibelieve that Professor Haakonsenhasgiven us the mostpenetrating study of Ibsen so far. Dare we hope that this beautiful volume. text and pictures. might soon he made available to English-speaking students? It would be a great help to them and might even tempt them to learn the language of the master. CHARLES LELAND. ST. MICHAEL'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO BONNIE MARRANCA, ed. American Dreams: The imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Perfonning Arts lournal Publications 1981. Pp. 223. This collection conrains some of the most significant previously published and new essays, reviews and interviews concerning the playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. As such, it is an important book at this time on a much misunderstood writer who has been producing work of generally high quality for more than fifteen years. Its major flaw is that it contains only one conunentary from outside the United States and therefore inadequately reflects Shepard's international status and experience. Its strengths, however, are that it ranges throughout his career, faces the difficult aesthetic and social issues, and includes perfonnance material as well as criticism. American Dreams is an appropriate title, since it subsumes Shepard's well-known "Americanness," including the idea of the "great American dream," as well as the dreamlike, surrealistic form underlying most of his work. Michael Earley's essay, though inflatedly claiming a "whole new" approach, validly links Shepard's American vision with that of nineteenth-century American literary tradition, notably Whitman. The social mirroring thesis infonning John Lahr's precise examination of Operation Sidewinder is also posited by Michael Bloom. Bloom effectively argues the "apocalyptic " tone of the early plays, but at the same time assumes too socially specific a motivation for some characters, as when he attributes to Stu in Chicago an "existential fear of global disaster." Florence Falk correctly notes that in utilizing American archetypal heroes and situations, Shepard has chosen to preserve in his dramas the subservient roles of women. Bonnie Marranca's brilliant introduction goes a long way toward clarifying some elements in the particular surrealism of Shepard's nonlinear aesthetic. She argues perceptively that Shepard's "open realism," in capturing "a reality that disregards realism's supposition of the rational," stems in part from the playwright's reflecting, more directly than most, the elevation of performance style to identity status as a symptom ofthe society's often noted "fluid concept" ofpersonality. The phenomenon of Shepard's characters as self-conscious perfonners becomes an appropriate motif for much of the collection, and the alphabetical. non-cause-sequential structure of Marranca's essay itself elegantly epitomizes the fonn she is describing. Jack Gelber and Gerald Weales apply the same aesthetic to Shepard's career itself, the former by his now well-known characterization of the playwright as "shaman," the latter by his presentation of Shepard's career in terms rather of "transformations" (itself a favorite Shepardian technique) than of the more academically beloved "development." Book Reviews 453 In a discussion of three of the rock plays, Robert Cae sensitively notes how closely the ambiance and incantatory language of the role-playing-performer characters resemble the atmosphere of rock itself. William Kleb's exploration of the surrealistic, ritualized current beneath the realistic veneer of True West appropriately follows Ben Frutkin' s incisive article on "Paired Existence" in the earlier plays. Frutkin argues that Shepard leads competitive pairs of role-performers into "monstrous" creations. and thus images the inadequacy of role-perfonnance as a concept of self. While it may be doubtful that Shepard's effects have ever been this didactic, Frutkin's thesis that terror-evoking monsters evolve out of paired competitiveness works well with Red Cross and La Turista. And though he has to stretch the term "monstrous" to make it cover two other plays, the term now seems prophetic of what was to occur in The Holy Ghostly, Back Bog Beast Bait, and The Unseen Hand. Elizabeth Hardwick...