Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol by Judith J. Thompson (review)

Book Reviews 319 Attempting to address the unsettling changes in modern drama represented by Beckett's works, Peter quotes the late director Alan Schneider, discussing Beckett's Happy Days: I accept Winnie's dominating presence in the mound, the literal absence of legs in the first act and of anything below the neck in the second act as I accept Picasso's lady with several faces or Dati's bent watch. (P.264) The need to suspend traditional critical expectations in Beckett's sometimes alien dramaturgy, is central to Peter's notion that the search for modem drama must be open-ended. In dealing specifically with Wailillg for Godor, as well as with Beckett 's other dramatic works, Peter examines Beckett's use of character, symbol, language, staging elements, and the playwright's poetic vision. For Peter, Beckett's works are a sublimely realized culmination of complex and intricate modernist ideas that have been articulated in the last eighty years, and the reason that Waiting for Godot, especially, "speaks to us with such immediacy is that, in this sense, too, it is a work of its time" (p. 355). Peter points out that the relations of ordinary human life have no practical validity here; the ideas of time, and of the passage of time, are meaningless. The past has no bearing on the future. The factuality. the logic, and the morality of life are powerless. There is no willed human action or movement; the characters of such an event can only be certain of moving towards extinction. This is the most closed world of all. (p. 356) Peter addresses the issue of the seemingly endless interpretive problems of the play and concludes by wondering if Waitingfor Godot is a study ofsuffering. a dramatization of anxiety. a religious aJlegory, or a Freudian examination of guilt. But, he fmds, in Beckett's "closed" world the play is ultimately about "the experience of being alone" (p. 357). Vladimir's Carrol is a provocative, sometimes troubling study , profound and Challenging in both its content and implications. Peter is at his best in making complex connections between Waiting for Godot and the seminal works of modem culture and dramatic literature. He stumbles only slightly when he attempts to tie in the theoretical contributions of such theatrical visionaries as Cmig, Meyerhold , Appia, or Artaud. Peter's grasp on their stimulating notions is comparatively weak, and their relevance or impact, if any, on Beckett's recreation of dramatic structure remains unclear. But, minor quibbles aside, Vladimir's CarroL emerges as a superb critical study of the nearly impenetrable cross-currents of modern drama. This book is essential reading. JAMES FISHER, WABASH COLLEGE JUDITH J. THOMPSON. Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth , alld Symbol. New York: Peter Lang 1988. Pp. 253. $46.90. 320 Book Reviews Judith Thompson's monograph makes a welcome addition to the shelf of Williams scholarship iffor no other reason than that it is the first in many years to offer asustained, systematic argument encompassing all ofhis major dramas from the mid-4os to the early 60s (except for Summer and Smoke and Camino Real, which receive only brief treatment in the epilogue). Thompson perceives a "recurrent structural pattern" at work in shaping Williams's plays: the first movement involves narration of a remembered event - eitheran "idyllic," romanticized one or a guilt-haunted "demonic" one - that has been invested with a mythic significance; the second movement then consists in dramatizing that memory in a demythicized, deflated or ironic version. The pattern is thus one of descent, a sense of integration and transcendence succumbing to psychic brokenness and isolation that can be ameliorated, albeit only partially, by a communal sharing of alienation and suffering. Drawing upon classical and Christian mythology, fairy tale motifs, and Freudian psychology, but especially upon Jung's notion of "individuation" and archetypal patterns, Frye's schemata of romance and ironic comedy, as well as existentialist thought, Thompson convincingly charts this pattern through a detailed discussion of eight works, impressively so in chapters central to her thesis on Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana. Along the way, she provides probably the most sensitive discussion available on the issue of homosexuality in...