"It's only a paper moon": The Paper Ontologies in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

"It's only a paper moon": The Paper Ontologies in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named DesireI PHILIP C. KOLIN Paper, as product and inscription, is a proleptic dramatic force, Blanche's as well as Stanley's signifier, and Williams's own signature in A Streetcar Named Desire. Speaking of Belle Reve, Blanche DuBois immediately conjures up papers: "There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years....'" One gets the same impression of an endless stream of papers underlying the convoluted histories comprising the Streetcar script. Perhaps no other Williams play is so implicated in the physicality, temporality , and psychology Of paper as Streetcar. Some of the papers are legal documents , visible and objective; others are invisible yet no less empirical, evidentiary and binding; and still others are occluded, imprisoned within the play. Almost every major signifier in Streetcar is (de)constructed out of paper - mortgages, foreclosures, directions, letters, poems, telegrams, newspapers, appraisals, songs. even moons. And these papers exist in various stages of (de)composition and in various colors. There are love letters "yellowing with antiquity," poems, a book of "colored comics," legal papers pressed into an envelope, a flimsy "colored paper lantern," an even more insubstantial "Kleenex" billet-doux, a "red stained" swatch of butcher's paper, Blanche's dialect notebook, and assorted slips and scraps of paper, some of them no larger than a bus ticket and others more ominous than a lettre de cachet. Ultimately , Streetcar itself, which incorporates all these documents, is a paper script (or series of scripts) seeking ownership.' Paper was Williams's metier, the sign of a compulsory jouissance. In Something Cloudy, Something Clear (t981) - "one of the most personal essays I've ever written," according to Williams4 - he recounts the events of the summer of 1940, just before he launched his profeSSional career. The playwright, August - Williams's name in the play - confesses that "I don 't own anything Model'll Drama, 40 (1997) 454 "It's only a paper moon...." 455 here but the typewriter and the paper."5 As the play opens, August is seated before a "secondhand portable typewriter," and then at the appropriate entrance cue "snatches up some papers." Disliking what he has composed, "He crumples it and tosses it fiercely away ... and then inserts a clean sheet of paper in the typewriter, but does not profane it with a typed wordfor a considerable pause" (1). ·ln Williams's own words, paper, when properly inscribed, can be sacred, yet when it is subjected to corrupt or untruthful imprints it is "profane[dJ," contaminated. Paper magically represented pain and power, script and Scripture for Williams. In Something Cloudy, paper was the playwright 's signature, his emblem, linked inextricably to the discourse of his dramaturgy . In a postmodem analysis of Williams's life, Nicholas Pagan aptly observes: "Foucault argues that we can never complete the task of putting Ollf sex, 'a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends,' into words. This is precisely the task in which Blanche.and Williams are engagedit is the reason why she cannot stop speaking, and perhaps to some extent why Williams cannot stop writing.,,6 Williams compulsively sexualized/textualized himself by emphasizing his mission as scribe, the signatory in, of, and through paper on which he could write and be read. Streetcar is inscribed with Williams's papers; collectively they may be regarded as one large inscription itself. Paper, then, becomes the reality that the text (re)presents. But, as I hope to show, paper is the vestigium of a realism sacrificed for the sake of a theatricality that revels in uncertainty. No less for Williams than for his characters, paper acquires overarching cultural and sexual signification..Scribes - writers and their papers - are everywhere in Streetcar. A character's power or instability is tracked in paper, the medium through which logos or chaos, history or hysteria, determinacy or indetenninacy are expressed. Paper becomes the paradigm of performance in Streetcar, helping to create and destabilize fictions. Williams's characters fashion their rhetorical identities and construct their appropriate scripts in paper. Paper prepares a way to proliferate and to evaluate a character in his/ her flight from or toward fictionality...