Text as Agent in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class

Text as Agent in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class Charles R. Lyons One of the assumptions that dominates aesthetic theory today is the problematic nature of the idea of the subject.1 Since the 1960's, the influence of structural linguistics and anthropology has informed literary theory by questioning the following traditional notions: (1) the uniqueness and integrity of the author as the originating center of a work; and (2) the representational function of art and literature; that is, the possibility of a correspondence between a fictional character and a hypothesized counterpart in the objective world. Poststructuralist theory replaces these assumptions with a series of radically new tenets: (1) culture, particularly ideologies of authority and subservience, inscribes itself into language, and that inscription determines the ways in which texts organize themselves; (2) the institutionalizings of authorship, publication , distribution, and reading of texts are, in themselves, processes that articulate and sustain dominant cultural paradigms; and (3) the function of criticism is to identify the systems that voice themselves in the various languages of fiction, drama, and art. Criticism fulfills these tenets by implementing the premise that the text cannot represent a real object external to it but, rather, represents only itself as an aesthetic activity. Consequently , criticism today rarely focuses on interpretation—what a work of art means. Instead, critical studies address the technical processes in which a literary text functions, either as a formal structure, an instrument of aesthetic technology, or as an interactive agent in a cultural exchange. Increasingly, criticism deals with the ways in which this CHARLES R. LYONS is Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Stanford University. His previous publications include books on Ibsen, Brecht, Beckett, and Shakespeare. 24 Charles R. Lyons25 formal structure is contingent to its moment in history. Consequently , recent works in criticism emphasize the processes of reading or viewing rather using a work to speculate about the processes of aesthetic creation as the work of a specific subject. Even though critics recognize that reading is shaped by the same cultural paradigms as writing, current practice in literary studies attempts to free the text from ideas of authorial intention and describes the text as a kind of template whose substance is realized only in the act of reading. Consequently, when we use the word text we don't talk about the text but, rather, the plurality of texts that exist in layers. These layers are generated as each moment in history re-writes the original in specific analyses that are themselves historically contingent. The literary text becomes a field in which the reader plays rather than an object that reading discovers. How does this theoretical context impact the application of psychonanalytic paradigms to works of art? Poststructuralist analysis would locate the source of the Freudian archetypes in the structural schemes implemented by the reader rather than in the latent substructure of the text. As the arguments of the more recent New Historicism develop we will undoubtedly see literary studies that isolate the Freudian archetypes as complicit instruments in an underlying cultural project that attempted to sustain the dominant patriarchal political ideology of Western Europe and, at the same time, attempted to support the liberal rejection of the religious base of the Judeo-Christian ethic. That is, we will examine the application of psychoanalytic theory to literary texts as a culturally determined phenomenon. Problems arise when psychoanalytic theory is applied to works of art. The principal problem, of course, is where to locate the data of the text. What is the subject of our analysis? Psychoanalytic theory itself has contributed to poststructural questioning of the originating subject by diminishing the importance of authorial intention, shifting the impetus of the aesthetic work from consciousness to the unconscious. But, in the face of new aesthetic theory, psychoanalytic approaches to art tend to maintain the image of a subject—a psyche to analyze—although positioning that subject becomes problematic. For example, do we see the literary text as the data we use in a hypothetical analysis of the writer? Do we use texts, like Jean-Paul Sartre did in the case of Flaubert, to write a speculative psychic biography of their author...