Movie With Son Rectifing With Father When His Art Career Takes Off
Fiction
Conversations With Himself: Sam Shepard's Narrator Takes Stock of His Life
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THE 1 INSIDE
Past Sam Shepard
172 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
"You can't go habitation again." Thomas Wolfe's famous phrase has long served as a dictum for writers and analysands, but it needs an annex: Yous can't finish trying. Sam Shepard has acknowledged the coercion — and also the futility — in interviews and dramatized it in plays where protagonists return to the place that's supposed to have yous in, but doesn't. They come home not for comfort but to settle scores, need respect, even elicit an acknowledgment of their existence. Family members in extremis shout and holler, hoping, similar the father in "Cached Child," that the sounds they make volition signal an affirmative reply to the question, "Are we still in the state of the living?"
This question floats over Shepard'southward novella of short-burst imaginings and conversations with himself, as the aging narrator ruefully takes stock. He'due south in the country of the living, just only but, hanging on past his fingernails, his memory, his imagination, his never-ending obsession with his father, his blue thermal socks (nicked from a movie set) and his ongoing arguments with women, including a one-time-girlfriend fifty years his inferior. She's called the Bribery Daughter because she's recording their conversations for a volume that will launch her literary career. Maybe. There'south a wry poetic justice in the spectacle of a writer, that scavenger of others' lives, helplessly furnishing material for another. The voyeur voyeured.
"The One Inside" is less a stand-alone performance than Shepard's curt story collections, but it takes its identify as a satisfying chapter in the autobiographical stream of consciousness that flows through his plays. Masculinity and its perils, the primitive drama of sibling and father-son rivalry, are the wellsprings of Shepard's work. Here the narrator realizes he'southward a year older than his begetter was when he died, but the man still looms over the present. The bomber pilot of World War Ii figures in hallucinatory portraits, vignettes that are the son's way of steer-wrestling him to world. In a scene that reprises Shepard'south hit story "Tiny Human being," the father is non merely dead but shrunken, a minuscule corpse in Saran Wrap. In the presence of the mourners, or mobsters, who've delivered him, the son reveals the onetime man'due south wizened face.
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At times the narrator's own trunk seems to exist disintegrating. In that location are thoughts of suicide even every bit Eros struggles to assert its sway over Thanatos. We are taken back to a central scene, shocking and vivid, when the immature boy walks in on his male parent making love with Felicity, a girl hardly older than he is. While the father lies silent, he hears her "scream like a trapped rabbit." Far from retreating in fear, he is fascinated, even turned on. In the aftermath, Felicity still screaming her pleasure, the boardinghouse landlady wonders if there's a murder existence committed, calls the cops. Felicity winds upward on the sidewalk, clutching a sheet over her voluptuous front, as his begetter is hauled off to jail. They're kicked out of the boardinghouse, marker the boy's expulsion from innocence if not paradise.
In the son's acting out of the Oedipal triangle, he will go on to see Felicity, talk to her, accept noisy sex with her, wonder about his male parent'southward reaction. He will recapitulate the former homo's fondness for young mankind in his coupling with the Blackmail Girl, savour the disapproval of cast and crew when he takes her with him on a gear up.
Non many Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights are also heartthrobs, but one of the things that have fabricated Shepard so bonny on the screen is our sense of his reluctance to be there. He has a natural contempt for the film star life. Here the narrator wrestles with phony parts, dons costumes in an desperation, every bit if they were medieval torture instruments. He seeks authenticity, even as he creates art and bamboozlement every bit a métier. He's a man of the Due west, of feedlots and ramshackle cabins, of a silence punctuated only past the audio of crickets, but a homo of words likewise. He'southward conflicted, the intellectual versus the Marlboro man, or, equally Patti Smith says in her introduction, "he'due south a loner who doesn't desire to be lone, grappling with the incubus."
Past implication, the battle with the begetter comes downwardly to words — or lack of them. Is that neat wall of paternal silence the "real" human being? Is the fancy-pants creative person the wimp? In the end, it's David slinging volleys of words at the mute Goliath, and we know who won that battle.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/books/review/one-inside-sam-shepard.html
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