The Great Pendulum of Becoming: Images in Modern Drama by Nelvin Vos (review)

Book Reviews 113 reworked. As well, she ventures beyond the American career of the plays. A Moscow Art Theatre production of Sweet Bird o/Youth in 1975 claimed that "the play shows the life of simple, contemporary American people" ! So, too, the photographs include refreshing relief from the familiar images. A German and a Russian Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois quite jar with our habit of Branda and Leigh. The discussions of the plays are effective because Professor Londre deals with small effects as well with the large themes. She prods us to respond to those fine details of staging that have always been important in Williams, such as his early experiments with lighting and his later ones with the structure of dialogue. Students should find a lively model in her remarks upon the meaning of sound effects (e.g., the eat's screech in A Streetcar Named Desire; the croquet sounds in the "vocabulary of gamesmanship" in Cat on a Hot Tin RoofJ. Her close reading demonstrates the value of academic analysis ofa theatrical work (e.g., her explication ofthe motifofnumbers in The Rose Tattoo; her reading of Blanche DuBois's "Belle Reve" as "beautiful shore" forced into the ungrammatical "beautiful dream"). The study is generous throughout. Professor Londr6 allows for the paradoxical nature of Williams's work and the fertility of his continuing concerns and imagery. Her openness makes her discussions of Camino Real and The Two Character Play perhaps the best introductions that these two plays have received. All in all, there is much that is new and everything that is important in this introduction to a conunanding playwright. If anything at all disappoints expectation, it is that Professor Londr~ has not applied her own experience as an actress to the interpretation of Williams's characters. Given the book's riches, though, this is but a cavil; it is an eamest of Professor Londre's success here that one craves such a fuller study. Finally, one might compliment the publishers for the handsomeness of the volume. Style and taste are coming to be a hallmark of the Ungar line. Thejacketdesign and color are especially appropriate for this playwright, who works in the speckled purples of the exposed heart. MAURICE YACOWAR, BROCK UNIVERSITY NELVIN vos. The Great Pendulum oj Becoming: Images in Modern Drama . Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1980. pp. viii, 135. Noting that the dominant tone of modern drama is desperation and despair, Nelvin Vos locates the origin of the modem temperament in the diSintegration of the cosmocentric universe. The anthropocentric modem age, he observes, has left man without a secure sense of place in the hierarchical order between angel and beast. As a substitute for the "static" ladder model of the Great Chain of Being, Vos offers a model permitting three kinds of movement - circular (around man, at the center), vertical (the angel-demon axis), and horizontal (the animal-machine axis) - with a Foucault-like pendulum replacing the chain. In this image of a pendulum, he claims, man as a "creator of process, of becoming" can be metaphorically contained. Vas's model of this triple movement, however, is problematic, at least as a unique expression of modem man. Though differing from the Great Chain of Being, the model is diagrammaticaJly identical to that which embodies medieval man's struggle between the world and the flesh (the horizontal axis) and God and the devil (the vertical axis). And since the circle merely connects points on the two axes, such movement is I 14 Book Reviews theoretically possible even in the medieval model, where man is also at the intersection, or center. Moreover. in what seems both an afterthought and a contradiction of his model, Vas briefly explains that each afthe ends afthe axes is a metaphor for man: "man as machine, man as angel, and so forth" (as opposed to the machine orthe angel itself). If this is the case, then these designations should, logically. rest within the circular movement of his diagram, rather than outside. If Vos's visual image is lacking, though, his measuring of modern man against the inhabitants ofmore orderly classical, medieval, and Renaissance worlds is not. Dividing his discussion into three major...