Memories of The Sea in Shepard's Illinois

Memories of The Sea in Shepard's Illinois JOHAN CALLENS Truly landlocked people know theyare. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake ofUtah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are cqmfused by their place onthe country's edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people ofthe lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. (Toni Morrison, Song ofSolomon) Buried Child is often described, together with Curse ofthe Starving Class and True West, as belonging to Shepard's "realistic family plays." This critical simplification fails to take into account the play's underlying symbolism. The misfortunes ofShepard's midwestern family proclaim the demise as well as the endurance of the American Dream, which entailed both independence of mind and action and, what is usually forgotten, an organic bond with nature. The Dream's rich and ambivalent contents were well apprehended and expressed by Emerson. His famous essay, "Self-Reliance," has often been equated with an outright defense of untrammelled individualism and of the spirit behind the conquest of the North American continent. The self-reliant soul is indeed, in Emerson's view, active and full of potential. "Life only avails," he says, "not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant ofrepose; it resides in the moment oftransition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim ... Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.,,1 But Emerson did not advocate territorial 404 JOHAN CALLENS possessiveness nor did he excuse an excessive dependence upon private property.2 And there was no need to, because the self-reliant man "takes place of the whole creation,,,3 he is an independent world, sharing in the larger cosmos. Whoever trusts his Intuition, his aboriginal self, is at one with himself and the universe: "In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.,,4 This cause, this timeless and spaceless Whole, Emerson called the Over-Soul. Whenever man is in touch with it, there is "an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges ofthe sea oflife,,5 which "new date and new create the whole.,,6 Buried Child reminds us of this original, mythical state of One-ness, a feminine and organic bond between man and nature, through water and fertility symbols. The play also illustrates the ideal's deterioration in the course of colonization, through incest, infanticide, and regression of the male characters into irresponsible, childish behaviour, all connected with the underlying water symbolism. Nevertheless, incest also represents an attempt, however misguided , to make the holistic Dream come true by re-establishing the union between mother and child. Moreover, the ritualistic revelation of the family's crimes functions as exorcism and guarantees survival and continuity. Commentators have so far neglected this mythic-symbolic dimension of Buried Child, thus also overlooking the positive part of Shepard's female characters in it. In 1979 Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize...