Callens - Sam Shepard V8 Pt 3

Johan Callens

Partly an introduction to the present collection, partly an independent essay attempting to stimulate further thought on Shepard, the opening text surveys the playwright's career and evolving critical status over the past three decades, briefly positioning each of the subsequent essays within the larger debate. The paradigm of the margin and the centre as developed by poststructuralists is relied on as a conceptual framework in an attempt to come to terms with some irresolvable tensions pertaining to Shepard's work: those between actor and writer, text and performance, artist and critic. These tensions, deriving from a lingering logocentric impulse and its concomitant suppression of writing, are exemplified primarily in the essay Language, Visualization and the Inner Library, though Cowboys #2 and Action are also discussed at more length, for their ambiguous acknowledgements of the textual inscription of Shepard's performance aesthetics.

KEY WORDS: Anti-intellectualism, Canonization, Conservatism, Female characters, Improvisation, Margin/Centre, Play (indeterminacy).

Editing a collection of essays on Sam Shepard under the title Between the Margin and the Centre is to propose specific, if not always univocal, terms for a complex, critical debate.

Two books which became available only after the Brussels Shepard conference, upon which this collection is based, had taken place and the bulk of this introduction had been composedStratos Constantinidis's Theatre Under Deconstruction? A Question of Approach (1993) and Erik MacDonald's Theater at the Margins: Text and the Post-Structured Stage (1993)explicitly address these terms. Both apply Derrida's textual margin to the theatre and make a point of defending deconstruction and the post-structured stage (a term coined to protest the unifying, mastering assumptions of poststructuralism) against allegations of ahistoricity, political irresponsibility, or ideological neutrality. It is a defence to which my subsequent treatment of Shepard's evolving status indirectly contributes. I could also have had recourse to earlier works, like Michael Vanden Heuvel's Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text (1991), whose first chapter The Avant-Garde Urge and the Margins of Performance pertains to the present discussion (e.g. 5056), but I here limit myself to the aforementioned critics.

In Constantinidis's words the centre and the margin are the two dominant metaphors of traditional Western theatre which have, to a detrimental effect, polarized, hierarchized and fixed the professional landscape. Deconstructive critics proceed first to reverse this hierarchy through a logic of supplementarity, next to displace and dissolve its units. (General titles such as Vanden Heuvel's Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance exemplify and announce the operation of this logic.) The deconstructionists goal is to establish a three-dimensional continuum that permits an abundance of ever-shifting positions for all theatre artists involved, from playwright at one end of the traditional spectrum to the critic/reader at the other (610). Actually, the notion of such a linear, neatly divided spectrum with specialists separate fiefdoms (the play-wright's, the director's, the scenographer's, the actors, the spectators) is exploded in favour of an ever expanding constellation or (con)text wherein meaning becomes relative and liminal: that is, meaning appears and disappears at the seams of interrelated viewpoints. Meaning is equivocal rather than univocal (25). Within such constellation the play-wrights become readers or interpreters of their own, now writerly texts (in Derrida's and Barthes's sense), whose totality (play text, prompt copy, rehearsal text, performance text) the critics equally participate in by creatively reading and (re) writing. The result is the dissemination of interpretation, its loosening from the moorings of any exclusive, separate and transcendental authoritative voice or consciousness.

In MacDonald's related formulation and interpretation the margin, rather than being the edge or inferior position within a hierarchy that produces a static relationship to a center stage [] is a limit at which the text encounters, among other things, its philosophical Other. In this space, doubled understandings (at the intersection of Same/Other) appear as folds in the text, revealing in the process that there is always some degree of play within the text (7). Rejecting the word play in the sense of the free play of the signifier, he holds on to its Derridian sense of