Staging Authorship: Pinter's No Man's Land and Shepard's True West

Abstract

STAGING AUTHORSHIP: PINTER'S NO MAN'S LAND AND SHEPARD'S TRUE WEST Nicholas Crawford Modern dramatists have long questioned whether language use is a manifestation ofagency and individuality or a capitulation to preexisting cultural capital, a surrender to the great homogenizer, the marker of the way we are all alike. Speech can either inure to presence or mark an absence of selfhood. This issue is taken up as early as August Strindberg's 77ie Stronger (1890), where the action suggests that Miss. Y. is stronger than Mrs. X. even though Mrs. X. speaks incessantly and Miss Y. says not a word. Similarly, the mechanical predictability ofcharacters' speech in Elmer Rice's expressionist play The Adding Machine (1923) reveals the language of social intercourse to be little more than a reproducible cookie-cutter artifact like any other from the assembly-line age. Language in absurdist plays also often signals a lack of selfhood, as in the parodies ofIonesco, where speech is much like a conditioned involuntary reflex, a force ofRhinoceros-like power. Far more recently, Maria Irene Fornes's play The Danube (1984) imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which survivors take comfort in the stock phrases of a lost civilization. Here the conventionality of language is valorized; even clichés are dear. But they are cherished precisely because they do not originate with the speaker, because they are all that is left of what was lost. The most striking example ofsuspicion toward language as individuating and originary , as the best tool to express personal uniqueness, is certainly Peter Handke's Kaspar (1968), which depicts a boy's exposure to language as an act of violence designed to enforce conformity to a preset way of thinking and to a prefabricated set of values. As Jeanette Malkin notes, "Kaspar carries within him a 'trace' from the past: his one 'original' sentence—? want to be a person like somebody else was once"' (185). The user of language becomes like somebody else was before instead of becoming himself as he is or might be. Becoming like somebody else was before is, in short, submitting to a dead presence that precedes one, the notjust someone but everyone who has come before, the deadening conformity of a communal code that precludes uniqueness by its nature as a something shared in thought, a something that constitutes consciousness . If modern dramatists have been preoccupied with interrogating the agency and originality of their characters' speech, they evince an equal absorption in the autonomy and provenance of their own authorship. Harold Pinter's No Man's Land and Sam Shepard's True West offer a special case for comparative study of these issues, since not only do these dramas echo one another but they feature authors as protagonists, thus conflating the question of linguistic agency and authorial originality . I will show that these plays dramatize the struggle to maintain belief in the sanctity and cohesion of personal voice against evidence that its public nature persistently intervenes. To the degree that the authorVcH . 27 (2003): 138 THE COMPAKATIST characters in these plays sense their thought and speech as exterior, as possibly deriving from others or from the past, they suffer a diminishing sense ofthemselves and oftheir creative ability and control. They can no longer easily distinguish what they create from what they experience, or, put more materially, what they produce from what they consume. And although these plays can draw no absolute boundaries between the individual 's voice and the language from which it derives, or between private images and the spectacle ofculture, they do sketch provisional ones. The author, the actor, the character all at the very least mediate these transactions ; they negotiate between the selfs limitations and the forces of history and culture which language and image bear forth. In a limited but strict sense, they translate. I also wish to show how these plays' ambiguous stance toward authorship, origination, and linguistic agency balances them precariously between modern and postmodern, between faith and doubt in the powers of speech, and between several distinct traditions ofinternational twentieth-century drama. I most particularly want to claim that all of these consequences and implications issue from the specific manner in which...