Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West

Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West MEGAN WILLIAMS He appears from nowhere. Kicking up dust on the edge of some border or frontier, he walks out of the desert with a long, bowlegged stride. Or he drives into a neon motel parking lot with a pickup truck and a gooseneck trailer. It doesn't particularly matter where he comes from. Odds are he will disappear again. His name is Travis. or Eddie. or Lee, or Sam, and he walks into the late twentieth century as Sam Shepard's recreation of the American Cowboy. For thirty years, critics have attempted to attach meaning to Shepard's plays and films. They have tried to place this man, this matinee idol who describes winning the Pulitzer Prize as being "like news of a terminal illness ... something to get through so you can move on,'" in literary and dramatic history. Some critics, like Herbert Blau, have seen Shepard as a recorder of a lost American Dream and of the "deficiencies of our [national] theater.'" Others, like David Savran, have found in Shepard "a critique of fundamental dramatic relationships ."3 Any critic who approaches Shepard's body of work is immediately confronted with the difficulty of disentangling Shepard's characters from Sam Shepard the actor and writer. In his biography, David DeRose defines Shepard as a "self-made myth" at the same time that he states that "Shepard's film career has no place in this study.'" DeRose's convenient omission of Shepard the director and actor erases any similarity between the characters Shepard creates and the roles he chooses to play. From Chuck Yeager who "pushes the envelope" in The Right Stuff to Travis and Lee who come to Paris, Texas and True West from the Mojave Desert, Shepard's roles, plays, and screenplays are linked by a series of nowhere-men who have willingly abandoned a sense of time, place, and history. While the scope of this paper makes it impossible for me to examine all the dramatic and cinematic works Shepard has participated in, I would like to suggest that True West constructs a present that appears in Shepard's work as a whole. Like the theories of the postmodModem Drama, 40 (1997) 57 58 MEGAN WILLIAMS em experience that have been articulated by critics such as Fredric Jameson, in Shepard's depiction of our late twentieth-century cultural moment, man realizes that he has lost a stable sense of identity and of history. This paper contends that Shepard's work as a whole engages and illustrates theories of the postmodem, while the character of Lee in True West challenges the precept behind postmodem theory which assumes that contemporary man'5 loss of subjectivity and history must necessarily be a negative experience. The endless doubling of Austin and Lee allegorizes two ways modem man attempts to solve his feelings of placelessness and alienation. As Austin clings to the image of living in the desert with his brother, he reveals contemporary man's lingering nostalgia for a family connection that inscribes his identity in time. In contrast to Austin's final inability to leave his brother, Lee stands as a self-declared "free agent."s He registers a potentially positive sense of freedom which accompanies man when he loses his nostalgia for history and realizes that identity and the past are only myths to be performed and manipulated. In "Postmodemism and Consumer Society," Fredric Jameson outlines a present that is strikingly similar to the one Shepard depicts in his interviews and plays.6 Jameson describes: the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contef!:lporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve . Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and. even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very...