Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review between literal and figurai language and touches on what the relations between time and narration posited by each writer might mean for "the self," though, like "the reader," this concept is not interrogated as strictly as it could be. She might, for example, have considered more directly the conflict between humanist ideas of the coherent self and the change through time essential to narrative movement. This conflict appears repeatedly in her discussions as a struggle for authorial control of language. However, she is extremely good on the problems of origins, of ends and beginnings, especially in Levi-Strauss, of whose Triste Tropiques she astutely notes that "Those confusions of beginnings and endings, departures and destinations are also Europe and South America, anthropologist and native, science and its object. And Levi-Strauss is above all contemplating the nature of anthropology , asking what significance it might have as he looks to his past" (10). I found the chapter on Triste Tropiques utterly fascinating. It shows Levi-Strauss struggling with his preoccupations with his own aging, his culture 's assumptions about nature and human nature, his discipline's premises about the world (which she designates "the golden age of structuralism ") and his appropriation of the native culture he studies as the field on which this multivalent struggle takes place. It figures in glorious detail the kinds of problems ethnography has posed and continues to pose for a multicultural world. S. KEHDE California State Polytechnic University PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. 257 p. ? hilip C. Kolin's important collection, Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism, includes a wide range of approaches. This variety is the collection's greatest strength. Further, these essays speak to one another: elaborating, connecting, and synthesizing ideas. Especially significant are Laura Morrow and Edward Morrow's "The Ontological Potentialities of Antichaos and Adaptation in A Streetcar Named Desire," William Kelb's "Marginalia: Streetcar, Williams, and Foucault," and Calvin Bedient's "There Are Lives that Desire Does Not Sustain: A Streetcar Named Desire." Although this collection's theorists view Streetcar through various lenses, most still find it necessary to align themselves with either of the dramatic characters, Stanley or Blanche, not with both of them. Kolin writes, "Stanley has in certain critical quarters gained ground on Blanche in love, honesty, and respectability" (5-6). I find it disturbing that some find it necessary to contextualize Stanley and not Blanche and to determine that Stanley is the result of impinging forces while Blanche, as suggested by Book Reviews99 Laura Morrow and Edward Morrow, is read as pure desire and a responder to attractors: "though Blanche comes from a decaying South and is destroyed , that environment neither causes her to be what she is, nor does it determine her fate" (63). Further, most Stanley supporters deal with the rape in a sort of an apologetic addendum. Even though Morrow and Morrow view Streetcar through the lens of Chaos and Antichaos theory and incorporate into their discussion theoretical elements that follow "simple rules" which "give rise to complex behavior" (62) and elements (attractors) that follow a certain set of interior rules, they do so within sexual dichotomies. Stating that Stanley values "truth over illusion , and fixed, quantifiable fact over unfixed, mercurial fiction" (63), Morrow and Morrow ignore the fact that definitions of truth and fact are subjective. Under the guise of a scientific approach, Chaos theory and Antichaos theory attempt to harness Unreason and to keep it within the systematic, categorical structures of a divine hierarchy. William Kleb applies to Streetcar the ideas about repression found in Foucault's History of Sexuality. Blanche is "an object of purely sexual knowledge" (29), the Other, while Stanley is the interrogator, the locus of the Same; consequently, in order to take "control of the Same[,] ... to reconstitute her otherness (her difference) as sameness" (31), Blanche disrupts Stanley's socio-symbolic order. After Stanley rapes her, he hands her "over to a different, newer 'technique of power' . . . the mental institution" (38). Blanche's body becomes the container of that which must be altered...