Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study by Clark Branson (review)

Reviews 147 drama. It is this fluidity of character which helps him to revitalize the realistic form when he turns to it in his later plays. Hart devotes a complete section to the study of five full-length plays— Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. They are plays about family relationships, relationships between generations, between parents and children, and between lovers. But they are not projected in conventional terms; they are psychological (and metaphori­ cal) explorations of the human mind. The realism of these plays is laced with experimentation and Shepard moves freely between different forms. Shepard, in Hart’s words, uses a “myriad of theatrical techniques and forms that he borrows from nearly every major movement in contemporary theatre.” This slim volume is a welcome addition to the body of criticism on Shepard’swork for several reasons. Not cluttered with an examination of every play, it provides a clear focus. It also has two appendices, one providing a career chronology, and the other listing his published works and premiere pro­ ductions. And finally it helps set the perspective right by drawing attention to a dramatic tradition outside the bounds of geography. JASBIR JAIN University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study. By Clark Branson. (Santa Barbara: Garland-Clark Editions/Capra Press, 1987. 332 pages, $10.95.) Clark Branson’s Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study is an oversimplified, jargon-ridden, badly written and poorly proofread book that attempts to find elements of Jungian psychology in Howard Hawks’s films. Branson, who describes himself as a self-taught Jungian, discusses six “basic psychological categories” in Hawks’s films: the Quarternity (spelled “quanternity” in the Table of Contents) and the Extravertive Sensation Function, the Shadow, the Anima, the Self and Transcendent Function, the Collective Unconscious and Miscellaneous, and Rites of Passage. During the first part of the book, in which Branson sets forth his theore­ tical framework, he writes such convoluted language as this: “[T]he Hawksian fixation at the shadow level of male-adolescent passage, replete with archetypal irruption, would seem to involve the aforementioned imminent danger of slipping back from the needful egotization process—i.e., needing to proceed beyond the shadow and into anima development (and her part in greater and mature society, inclusive of the parental side of home and family).” The second part of the book is a pedestrian application of Jungian psy­ chology to the films. In a few rare cases, Branson’s approach provides interest­ ing insights into the films, but those occasions are so rare and the language so ponderous that they are probably not worth the effort. MARK BUSBY Texas A&M University ...