ABSTRACT

RITUALS AND MYTHS: A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE FAMILY CRISES IN SAM SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD AND TRUE WEST

In this thesis, I examine two plays by Sam Shepard, Buried Child and True West, and how the family crises in each culminate in an act of ritual. Applying the framework of Rene Girard, I explore how these two plays express Girard’s theory of the role of ritual sacrifice in communities—specifically, that rituals can be traced back to an ancient act of sacrifice in which a community killed a scapegoated victim to maintain social cohesion and de-escalate the growing antagonism that threatened their society. Writing in the late 70s, Shepard’s work can be seen as a commentary on the Vietnam War. His work at this time reflects an American society that was increasingly aware of the sacrifices deemed necessary to maintain American exceptionalism. Shepard’s plays depict moments of ritual, but also confront the audience with their inherent violence and injustice. He works to deconstruct social myths that conceal this truth, particularly the “social myth” of traditional family roles. Ultimately, Shepard exposes the violence weaved into the social fabric of America, but also confronts the chaos that could erupt if that social fabric were to unravel.

Nicholas Wogan May 2019

RITUALS AND MYTHS: A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE FAMILY CRISES IN SAM SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD AND TRUE WEST

by Nicholas Wogan

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2019 APPROVED For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Nicholas Wogan Thesis Author

William Arce (Chair) English

Steven Adisasmito-Smith English

Melissa Gibson Theatre-Arts

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OF MASTER’S THESIS

X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis was only made possible by the support of my thesis committee. Thank you to William Arcé, my Thesis Chair, who has supported my growth as a scholar and has championed me when I needed it most. I’d also like to thank Melissa Gibson, whose incredible knowledge of Theatre history was immensely helpful, as well as Steve Adisasmito-Smith, who challenged my intellectual abilities but also gave me essential words of encouragement. The writing of a thesis can be a solitary, lonely task; all three members of my committee took my work seriously, and gave their best efforts. Their support gave me crucial perspective. I deeply appreciate the value of what they have given me, and I hope to honor their efforts through my continuing work as a scholar of English. I’d also like to thank my wonderful family, who occasionally endured my long rants on mimesis, post-modern theatre, and a variety of other completely abstract and unrelatable topics. Additionally, I’d like to thank the courageous and talented Lauren Folland for having such a powerful work ethic in her own pursuits that I had to mimetically copy it to get this project done. Thank you to my friends Manraj, Aaron, Steve, Myers, and all the rest. Shout outs to Kevin for the long esoteric talks, and shout outs to the Writing Center for giving me a source of income and the most pleasant job that I’ve ever had. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER 1: THESIS INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 2: INFANTICIDE AND SACRIFICAL VIOLENCE IN SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD ...... 9

Introduction ...... 9

Critical Overview ...... 11

Methodology ...... 15

Collapsing Differentiation of Family Roles ...... 20

Exposing Ritualized Violence ...... 33

Conclusions ...... 39 CHAPTER 3: MIMETIC VIOLENCE AND THE FAILURE OF RITUAL IN SHEPARD’S TRUE WEST ...... 43

Introduction ...... 43

Critical Overview ...... 45

Methodology ...... 48

Mimetic Rivalry in True West ...... 51

When Ritual Fails ...... 57

Conclusions ...... 62

CHAPTER 4: THESIS CONCLUSION ...... 64

CHAPTER 5: CODA ...... 67

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED ...... 70

CHAPTER 1: THESIS INTRODUCTION

One of the essential American myths is that individuals have control over their own destinies. It is an implicit assurance that, for those who wish to start anew, America provides a unique opportunity for self-transformation. This promise, kept or unkept, was essential to the life and art of Sam Shepard. Shepard left the military family in which he was raised to make a living as a big-city playwright. He promised himself never to become his father—this promise freed him to choose his own path. This path led him to the off-off-Broadway theatre scene in New York. Through theatre, Shepard could explore the personalities he encountered growing up, but also take imaginative creative leaps. Writing throughout the 60s and 70s, Shepard’s work resonated with a period of American history in which there were massive cultural changes in civil rights, gender dynamics, and political resistance. These changes led many Americans to challenge social norms that had once been unquestioned, including traditional family values that were often seen as the foundation of American prosperity. Questioning his own connection to family and place of origin, Shepard recognized the elusiveness of these institutionalized sources of meaning. Shepard’s personal history influenced his artistic career, and led him to explore “family” as a socially constructed myth. Shepard’s complicated relationship with his father, Sam Rogers, is well-known to those that have studied Shepard’s career as a playwright (the pen-name of Shepard suggests an intentional distancing from the surname “Rogers”). The biographer John Winters writes that “to his son, Sam Rogers embodied violence: his butch haircut was an emblem of his military life and all that that suggested” (21). After returning from the second World War, Sam Rogers struggled with alcoholism, and was known to become physically violent toward his family. Winters writes that Rogers “took out his life’s disappointments on the people and things around him” and 2 2 even “beat the family pets” (21). The violent presence of Sam Rogers in his son’s early life was assuredly a factor in Shepard’s escape to New York, where he pursued a new start in experimental theatre. In his art, Shepard began to confront the social forces that led so many men, Shepard’s father included, into a horrifically destructive war. Part of this confrontation is Shepard’s emphasis on the contradictions surrounding the romanticized ideal of the American family unit. In American society, family has typically defined the roles and behaviors that are socially acceptable: particularly relevant to Shepard, it defined the roles available to men. At the time of Shepard’s youth World War II had ended, and America’s triumph suggested a legitimization of traditional American values, at least to those back home. Yet many of those who had fought in the war, such as Sam Rogers, struggled to return to domestic life. Many men of the time were failing to find fulfilment in the traditional male role of family patriarch, and American culture provided conflicting messages on the role that men should play in society. The social upheaval of the 70s, and the emergence of the

Vietnam War, were a collapse of the ideal domestic space immortalized in T.V. shows like Father Knows Best (which ran from 1954 to 1960). The horrors of war, now increasingly depicted on television, made old notions of honor and courage seem quaint—America began a period of disillusionment. This disillusionment toward an idealized past led to positive social changes in the realm of civil rights, but also created an increasing distrust of American government, which would culminate in the counter- culture protest years specific to the Vietnam War. Particularly in art, a more cynical perspective toward traditional American values was emerging. Yet Shepard likely grew up on media that depicted old-fashioned views of masculinity—the rugged cowboy or the authoritative and beloved father. However, as an adult he pulled away from these images, and undermined them in his career as a playwright. 3 3

In his plays, Shepard regularly depicted his personal struggle with the roles available to American men. Perhaps the most prevalent example of this is the many occurrences in Shepard’s plays of men resisting, and yet gravitating toward their fathers. Micheal Abbott calls this character “the wanton son” in his criticism, and he describes the character as “a cynical, dissipated man… estranged from society and an alien in his own family” (193). Shepard’s repeated use of this archetype suggests that he too felt estranged and alienated from his father, despite gravitating toward his father as a model of masculinity. He was aware of the despondency of many men living after the horrors of World War II. The father figures in Shepard’s plays are alienated from family life by their experiences, both in war and in a changing cultural landscape. They too are father figures who seek comfort in family even as they question its meaning. For instance, in Curse of the Starving Class the father character Weston explains that, “I couldn’t stand it here. I couldn’t stand the idea that everything would be the same… I couldn’t figure out the jumps. From being born, to growing up, to droppin’ bombs, to having kids” (60).

Their sons become equally torn between the familiarity of family and familial entrapment. Shepard’s plays also capture the crisis young men experience when trying to reconcile rugged individualism with social belonging. Again, Abott writes: “For the wanton son the sense of longing to belong is powerful. But equally strong is his persistent, cynical doubt that such belonging is possible… civilization and community are suspect, yet alluring” (194). There are conflicting societal ideals of masculinity. There’s the cowboy: individualistic, rugged, anti-conformist, and self-reliant. Yet there’s also the family patriarch, who provides for the family and enforces order. Inevitably, the men of Shepard’s families are weakened—pulled in both of these opposing directions. For instance, in the play Buried Child the character Dodge falls victim to old age, and in the play Curse of the Starving Class, Weston’s alcoholism sabotages his role as a father. In 4 4

True West there are more traces of this trope, with two brothers that are immensely conflicted over whether to embrace or reject society.

Family is the site at which men learn these conflicting roles, and is also the site at which individuals internalize their views regarding national identity. Timothy O’Grady writes that family preserves, “an institutionalized memory of our personal origins and growth in the same way that myths embody the lore against which we are called to measure ourselves as a nation” (18). The “lore” mentioned here is likely the pervasive idea of American exceptionalism: America is God’s chosen country. This was the foundation of American unity during the second World War, but the devastating aftermath of that conflict drew attention to the artificiality of this notion. Shepard regularly sets his family dramas in connection with a larger national sense of identity, a decision which emphasized the connection between social ideology and the families that pass it on. Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class is a strong representation of this concept, with its characters suffering under societal pressures that are impossible to escape. One key character, Ella, finally describes it as a curse: “it’s always there… it goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes. To atoms… It’s bigger than government even. It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on” (41). Like a curse, social imperatives span generations; family is the space in which they are reinforced. Shepard returns repeatedly to this theme, as perhaps his own family struggled to shake an idealized and elusive notion of what it meant to be American. Because American social myths are central to Shepard’s work, the term “myth” warrants some contextualization, as it can be used in a variety of contexts. Stephen Bottoms calls the term “one of the most overused and underdefined words of Shepard criticism” and warns against confusing it with “myth as in lie” (7-8). In calling family a myth, my aim is to conceive of it in connection with “myth” in the anthropological sense. Myths may stand apart from reality, but societies rely on them to produce order. In 5 5 ancient societies, myths are quite clearly interwoven with the identity of a specific tribe or people. Yet also, those that study myth can glean from them a deeper understanding of the social order behind their cultural presence. Sam Shepard’s plays can be seen in this light, as suggesting deeper truths about his own society. Bottoms, writing on Shepard’s plays, continues that, “there is also a sense that these stories might contain lingering truths, that the fragments might still resonate” (12). Reading Shepard can often feel like reading ancient myth, in which seemingly bizarre details can convey a great deal under analytical scrutiny. However unlike ancient myth, Shepard works to expose truths rather than mask them. For example, many of Shepard’s plays involve masculine archetypes— cowboys or astronauts. However, rather than legitimizing their presence in American culture, his plays often work to disrupt the assumed meaning that these images convey. Arguably, the plays that most thoroughly express Shepard’s disillusionment with family roles, particularly that of the patriarch, are a group of three plays that critics have termed his “family trilogy”. These are, in sequential order, Curse of the Starving Class

(1978), Buried Child (1979), and True West (1981). All three depict families in states of crisis and collapse. The family, a small and self-contained community, begins to question their given roles, leading to a violent collapse. Starving Class does contain a family crisis, but unlike its predecessors it tends to connect that crisis to identifiable economic changes. The other two, Buried Child and True West, further the emphasis on family, implying that the source of these crises originate from within the family itself. In these two plays in particular, Shepard develops the idea of social ideology as a “curse” that is passed down through family—Shepard no longer needs to involve outside influences, because social pressures already exist at the family level. After studying these two plays, I believe that social myths play a vital role in the cohesion of these families, and that the disintegration of order in these families can be traced back to the failure of social myths. In fact, myth operates in these plays in much 6 6 the same manner that is described by theorist Rene Girard. Also writing in the 70s, Girard examined moments of crisis in ancient communities. His examination of these crises, in which members of a close-knit social group are threatened by internal conflict, resembles the family crises of Shepard’s family trilogy. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that societal myths are connected with acts of violence in a community’s past. He describes sacrificial rituals, in which a communal act of violence brought order to a community in crisis. I realized that this same pattern could be found in Shepard’s family plays. In applying this framework to the plays, I believe a greater critical awareness can be achieved of how acts of ritualized violence persist in our culture and protect hegemonic social values. Just as ancient societies created religious myths to establish order after a crisis, Shepard’s families can be seen to do the same. Another valuable insight that a Girardian perspective offers in terms of analyzing Shepard’s work is a deeper understanding of how Shepard uses myth. This perspective demonstrates the cultural relevance of Shepard’s plays. Shepard’s plays are anti-myths—they purposefully depict moments in which the process of ritual that Girard describes fails to enforce order. In this thesis, I argue that Shepard’s Buried Child and True West contain moments of ritual, through which family communities attempt to restore order. These rituals incorporate acts of sacrifice in order to redirect the violent chaos of their family crisis toward a sacrificial victim. In order to hide from themselves the violent nature of these rituals, the characters create myths, which obscure the truth and re-establish family order. One such myth is that war was a necessary evil which preserved and protected American domestic peace. For Shepard, and for many members of his post-war generation, America’s positive national identity was increasingly seen as reliant on destructive, senseless losses of life. This painful realization was not embraced by all, and some assuredly hoped for a return to an idealized America of the past. Shepard’s works show the failure of this potential regeneration—in the spirit of post-modernism, his plays turn 7 7 toward the chaos and subjectivity that emerge when traditional narratives are undermined or destroyed. It is this focus on the disintegration of traditional roles and beliefs, and the turmoil that arises from this disintegration, that I believe are extremely relevant in the contemporary moment. The first chapter of this thesis examines Buried Child, and argues that the mysterious infanticide in the play is a representation of ritualized sacrifice. In doing so, the family unit can be understood not only psychologically, but in relation to its larger, national function. By applying the ideas of French theorist Rene Girard, I interpret the work as a deconstruction of myths surrounding the American family (and by extension American society as well). Typically, Girard’s work is applied to literature that is anthropologically significant, such as cultural epics. In Violence and the Sacred, he writes on Greek tragedy, which Shepard has repeatedly described as a major influence. Critics have mentioned Shepard’s fascination with Greek tragedy, but often fail to note that his work also depicts similar moments of social collapse, in which ancient acts of violence are invoked to reproduce order. Reading Girard, I sensed several opportunities for fresh insight into Shepard’s work. Specifically, the family roles of Buried Child are observably disrupted, creating a crisis within the family that is incredibly similar to the ancient crises, which can be unraveled using Girard’s theories on myth and ritual. Additionally, the play’s final scene can be interpreted as a sacrificial ritual, which succeeds in restoring order but also reveals to the audience the inherent violence of this social order. In the second chapter I shift the focus to True West, in which other significant assertions can be made about family myths and the violence supporting them: specifically, that the depicted crisis is a mimetic conflict—a process in which two foes mimic each other in an escalating cycle of revenge. In this case, two brothers play out such a conflict, which is rooted in a shared crisis of identity. The allusion to Cain and 8 8

Abel is clear; critics have often noticed the connection between the brothers of True West and this biblical story of sibling rivalry. In True West, the play shifts from a highly realistic style to a mythic style in which reality fades and the brothers start to resemble mythic archetypes. Critical writing of the play often interprets the brothers in an intimate psychological sense, as a split between two sides of one mind. In my scholarship, I do not argue that this interpretation is incorrect, but instead find new conclusions that can be reached when revealing the ancient myths of fraternal conflict that the play evokes. The framework of reciprocal, mimetic conflict allows readers to obtain a deeper understanding of the play’s enigmatic conclusion—specifically, that in our current society ritual has lost its power to create stability and order.

CHAPTER 2: INFANTICIDE AND SACRIFICAL VIOLENCE IN SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD

Introduction Buried Child (1978) is the third play in Shepard’s “family trilogy,” and it was written at the height of Shepard’s career and cultural relevance. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and considerably heightened Shepard’s fame. Unlike Shepard’s experimental early works, the three family plays had a more detailed narrative structure, which was likely a factor in increasing their appeal to a larger audience. However Buried Child, with its emphasis on extreme family dysfunction, seemed to resonate with post- Vietnam War audiences. Perhaps this is due to the play’s focus on the increasingly problematic image of the Midwestern, American farm family—for some this image evoked a lost golden age, but others recognized this image as a fantasy. In this play, Shepard deconstructs this romantic image, which at the time still carried a great deal of ideological weight for many Americans.

Buried Child, in comparison to Shepard’s earlier Starving Class, moves away from a focus on social economics, in order to emphasize the focus on the family unit rather than external forces—this suggests an increased interest by Shepard into sacrificial violence as it relates to family cohesion. In the latter, Shepard depicts the struggle between the rural family and the inexorable tide of modern capitalism; this was a progression toward the themes of Buried Child, but still could be read as a critique of economic changes rather than of family violence that festers in isolation. In Starving Class, Shepard starts what he would later perfect in Buried Child: a family unraveled by social pressures that they are powerless to combat or fully articulate. Starving Class establishes a recurring theme in Shepard’s work: invisible social imperatives work upon families, pushing them toward idealized roles and reinforcing a national identity. Yet in Buried Child, Shepard confronts how these social imperatives are predicated on acts of 10 10 violence. Instead of a social critique, Buried Child gives its audience a family that is cut off from the outside world. The origin of their violence comes not from economic inequality, but from a mysterious and personal violence in their past. Buried Child abandons the capitalist critique to hone in on a family in isolation. This decision is a step forward in Shepard’s continuing focus on family—Shepard conveys that the families of America are deeply influenced by national ideology, but in Buried Child he communicates how alienating many of these pressures truly are. Stephen Bottoms describes that “Buried Child is… tighter and more unified than Curse in its thematic concerns, dispensing almost entirely with the issue of external cultural pressures, so as to make the family’s internal dynamics the play’s central, uncontested subject” (173). For the family of Buried Child, the pressures of social conformity have become so burdensome that the relationship between the family and their society is now severed. Their “internal dynamics” are on full display, and the exact source of the turmoil is unclear. The isolation of the play provides a clear boundary between family insiders, and external characters who come from outside. This contrast reinforces the family’s alienation—their estrangement from a social order that nevertheless influences them. In this chapter, I argue that Buried Child’s family exhibits what Girard calls “collapsing differentiation”—a breakdown of traditional social roles. Additionally, this leads the family to an act of ritual sacrifice through which they attempt to maintain social cohesion. To help unravel the complex family dynamics in Buried Child, I incorporate the ideas of Rene Girard. His book Violence and the Sacred is a crucial tool for this analysis. Girard finds several examples in ancient myth that support his ideas on scapegoating and ritualized persecution—that is, that societies which are experiencing an escalation of violence will divert the violence by murdering an innocent victim. This process is not a conscious choice—it is disguised by social myths that emerge in order to conceal from a society the violence underlying the cohesion of their community. In 11 11 describing this complex process, my aim is not to show that Buried Child perfectly compares to Girard’s ideas. Instead, I believe that this viewpoint leads toward a deeper understanding of Shepard’s views on family crises. Ultimately, a critical focus on the ritualistic elements of the play reveals that Shepard is depicting a ritual event in order to expose its violence. His audience experiences the desperation of the family, the need for renewal, and finally horror at the violence necessary to end the crisis. I emphasize that the murder of the child and Dodge’s death are not separate: they are both part of a ritual by which the family enacts a sacrifice, and then produces myth to conceal their violence. Perversely, these deaths are not a threat to the family, but crucial to their continued existence. The morally corrupt acts of patricide and infanticide are the foundation of the social order on which the family relies to survive.

Critical Overview Sam Shepard’s Buried Child is often credited as a play that greatly increased Shepard’s fame as an American playwright. Its disjointed ending continues to surprise audience members expecting a traditional, “clean” resolution. The play depicts a Midwestern farm inhabited by an unnamed and massively dysfunctional family. Vince and his girlfriend Shelley decide to make a surprise visit to the home of his grandparents, only to be confronted with complete chaos. Dodge and Halie, his grandfather and grandmother, seem to bitterly harass each other. Vince is also surprised to encounter his father Tilden living there, as well as to observe Tilden’s distant, traumatized attitude. His uncle Bradley is also present—a crippled man who lashes out violently at everyone around him. Despite Vince’s childhood memories of the house, the other family members claim to have no memory of Vince’s existence. In fact, they refuse to recognize him as a member of their family. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the play builds to an eruption, as hazy details emerge suggesting a child of incest murdered long ago and buried in the 12 12 nearby fields. In the disorienting final act, a drunken Vince asserts his belonging and claims the farm for himself. His grandfather Dodge dies, his girlfriend Shelley flees, and the corpse of the dead child is carried onto the stage. Scholarly research on Buried Child often works to examine the play in contrast with the older domestic dramas it seems to subvert. At times the play is incorrectly considered a more traditional and realistic piece, but most critics successfully recognize this as a feint. The familiar tropes of Midwestern American life evoke the straightforward theatre of Arthur Miller; however, this familiarity is lost as the play becomes increasingly ambiguous. Critics have noted Shepard’s deconstruction of the predominant genre of theatre—Lyons writes that Shepard “uses those conventions and ironically foregrounds their artifice” (129). Audiences unfamiliar with Shepard who attend a production of Buried Child would likely be surprised to find its domestic archetypes used in a much more unique fashion than what they had come to expect from American theatre. There are several notable critical responses to Buried Child, all of which have positively impacted the discourse surrounding the play. Two scholars who are particularly relevant to my analysis of Buried Child are Stephen Bottoms and Sherill Grace. Perhaps foremost amongst these scholars is Stephen Bottoms, a Professor of Contemporary Theatre and specialist on Shepard. His book States of Crisis characterizes the play as thematically ambiguous yet powerful in its impact on its audience. Bottoms argues that the play ensnares its audience in a struggle for understanding, which matches the struggle experienced by the characters. He also stresses the play’s post-modern abandonment of providing any clear interpretations to its viewers: “the play repeatedly seems to warn that whatever significance they choose to assign to these incidents is their own reading, not the result of decoding some fixed set of meanings or symbols” (175). Ultimately, he seems to view the play as impossible to be “clearly interpreted” (180). Bottoms senses the play’s connection to ancient tragedy, but also describes its many 13 13 symbolic gestures as ineffable—whether they are red herrings or vital clues is up for the reader to interpret.

In contrast to Bottoms’ reading of Buried Child is the perspective given by Sherill Grace. In her article “Lighting Out for the Territory Within: Field Notes on Shepard’s Expressionist Vision,” Grace argues that Shepard is an expressionist writer, and that his plays, in relation to the Expressionist movement, are “an art of protest against the cultural and spiritual bankruptcy of the times” (182). Specifically writing on Buried Child, she interprets the play’s ending as “not an image of resurrection, but of regression to the primordial slime, a grotesque enactment of the desire to return to the womb, and a sign of our destructive illusions” (186). I find her argument convincing in that it identifies the play’s conclusion as a hollow victory, in which the inherent violence of the play’s family overshadows a happy resolution that seems highly unconvincing to its audience. Grace also criticizes the play’s ambiguity, and she expresses doubt over whether Shepard is “prepared to suggest alternate ways of making sense” (189). This is a pressing question that haunts Buried Child—the play’s open-ended conclusion begs the question of whether the emotional response the play gives its audience is an end in itself, and whether Shepard should be expected to deliver a solution to the social problems he represents in the play. Grace’s article includes a call to action for critics of Shepard. She writes of the problem of Shepard’s ambiguity: One response… is to give it up—after all, Shepard’s is not a theatre of ideas but of feelings. Another response is merely to celebrate his language, his characters, his stagecraft… but the best response, surely, is to take the plays seriously enough to grapple with them, to try to understand why it is that they move us and what they make us feel—and think. (180) 14 14

Grace’s view of the discourse suggests a need for criticism that does not surrender to the multitude of interpretations available, and continues to strive toward a deeper understanding of the play’s thematic meaning rather than its stylistic choices. Other critical responses to Buried Child often concern elements of the play outside its potential thematic meanings. Ann Wilson, for example, traces the autobiographical elements of the play in her article “True Stories: Reading the Autobiographical in Cowboy Mouth, ‘True Dylan’ and Buried Child.” Some have delved into the play’s departure from stylistic elements of Realism, such as Charles Lyons and William Demastes. Gabriella Varro and Michael Abbot exemplify the many critics that compare Buried Child to other noteworthy American playwrights such as Edward Albee. Varro also writes about Shepard’s depictions of women, taking a feminist perspective alongside scholars like Florence Falk. These responses have solidified the relevance of Buried Child to the larger discourse surrounding Shepard’s writing career. However, they often tend to downplay the play’s enigmatic plot in order to focus more deeply on these specific aspects. Diverting from the aforementioned strands of analysis, I aim to tease out the play’s connection with acts of ritualized sacrificial violence, in order to offer an interpretation of the play that can perhaps lessen the play’s thematic ambiguity. By applying Girard’s framework of ritualized violence, I believe a new perspective is provided on Buried Child, which interprets the play as an effort to expose the role of violence in maintaining the cohesion of American society. A central aim of this thesis chapter is to grapple with Buried Child at the thematic level, refusing to dismiss the play’s symbols as red herrings and its ending as indecipherable. I believe that as in Greek tragedies like Oedipus and Medea, Buried Child generally concerns mankind’s inability to escape self-destructive acts. Rene Girard goes into great detail on ancient Greek tragedies, suggesting that they are the beginnings of that culture’s increasing awareness 15 15 of the violence woven into their social order. By applying this framework to Buried Child, I believe there is an opportunity to access the play’s meaning in new terms.

Shepard, like Greek tragedians before him, is exposing to his audience the acts of sacrifice that still exist in his society. Yet where many of the ancient tragedies turn away from the truth and cling to social order, Shepard is intent on bringing his catharsis to life on stage with all of its horror. An awareness of this aspect of the play can contribute to the current discourse, and continue the difficult but important task of gleaning new insights from Shepard’s challenging but rewarding work.

Methodology Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, written in 1972, argues that the purpose of ritual in ancient societies is to produce social cohesion and order through an act of sacrificial violence. As previously mentioned, I intend to shape a new perspective of Buried Child—one that puts the violence of the play into the context of its social function. Much of Girard’s argument involves the role of myths in society: myths emerge, in part, to conceal acts of violence and weave them into a new social order. Girard writes that modern society has lost its reliance on sacrificial violence, stating in the later article “Mimesis and Violence” that “in our world, sacrificial means have degenerated more and more as victimage, oppression, and persecution have become predominant issues” (17). The term “degenerated” suggests that ritual still exists, but that we in modern society are better able to identify it as unjust—more specifically, acts of sacrificial violence are no longer interwoven into a hegemonic religion that no member of society can challenge. In Buried Child, the play can be seen as carrying forward this movement toward a deeper awareness of how sacrificial violence still persists in our society. 16 16

Girard’s theory on sacrifice and its function in human societies provides a useful framework for understanding the family crisis of Buried Child. As an anthropological philosopher, Girard studied violence as it appeared at various points in human development. Summarizing his ideas in the article “Mimesis and Violence,” Girard writes of “a theory of conflict based primarily on appropriative mimicry” (“Mimesis and Violence,” 10). He criticizes the traditional view of violence as a vague aggressive tendency within individuals; a vestige of our animal nature that can be removed or suppressed. Instead he proposes mimicry, “common to animals and men” (“Mimesis and Violence,” 10), as a better explanation of how violence escalates. Members of a society perform violent acts in response to the violence of others. Then that violence escalates, with both parties imitating each other. This reciprocity, Girard claims, is essential to ritual practices found in every human society. The family of Buried Child also experiences an escalating crisis, in which mimesis plays a role. A social group’s perceived need for a scapegoat whose sacrifice could end the conflict is related to the mimetic, escalating nature of their crisis. For example, one might think of two enemy tribes, shouting at each other before a battle. Each violent taunt prompts a mimicked retaliation, until finally a rock is thrown and the violence becomes physical. The result of this ever-greater violence is often mutual destruction. Girard explains however that there is another way to end this process—scapegoating. If members of a society can divert their violence toward a scapegoat (ideally a defenseless individual whose death will not prompt revenge), they can end the chaos of violence and restore order. For Girard, this process of sacrificing a scapegoated third party is deeply embedded in ancient societies. This process still occurs today in modern society, but current sensibilities are better able to identify persecution as a violation of human rights. In the past, these sacrificial acts were socially legitimized and their necessity became interwoven in myth. 17 17

Girard states that the reason modern society is unable to immediately perceive the persecution of scapegoats within ancient myth is due to our “sterility as creators of myth”

(“Mimesis and Violence,” 16). The humanistic values of the present day make it difficult for us to imagine such horrible violence and persecution as essential to the survival of ancient groups (or ourselves in some capacity). Girard does admit that “Victimage is still present among us, of course, but in degenerate forms that do not produce the type of mythical reconciliation and ritual practice exemplified by primitive cults” (“Mimesis and Violence,” 16). Now that persecution has become a major human rights issue, we no longer can accept it as entwined with our livelihood. We tend to see the perpetrators of these acts as consciously malicious. Girard suggests that in the minds of the perpetrators, the victim is truly believed to be the source of social unrest, despite a lack of evidence. Looking back at the Salem witch trials for instance, one may struggle to imagine what came over the otherwise practical and moral Puritans who suddenly turned on their neighbors. These victims have characteristics that single them out as strange, vulnerable, or dangerous. Girard writes in The Scapegoat that “The whole range of victim signs can be found in myths, a fact unnoticed because we focus on the victim’s ethnic or religious minority” (32). The modern view of persecution emphasizes minority status but consequently ignores other victim signs. Ancient myths often suggest that these signs are important to the sacrificial process, yet they often go unnoticed by modern readers. Whether it be the lame foot of Oedipus or the odd behavior of a Salem spinster, the victim is easy to identify, outnumbered, and ripe for persecution. The society in crisis recognizes these signs unconsciously, without the critical self-awareness that exists in modern societies. Even as the victim is sacrificed, the perpetrators attach a mythic quality to the victim. Once the escalating conflict that threatens the society is diminished, the society then attributes the restoration of order to the power of the victim. The killing of witches restores order in the 18 18 sense that it unites other members of a community against a common foe. One can imagine how ancient societies brought back from the verge of collapse might attach a supernatural quality to this crisis. The existence of a now-defeated common enemy provides a crucial sense of identity. For example, the removal of Satan’s witches meant for the Puritans that they were again in God’s light. The undifferentiated chaos that blurred friend and foe was replaced by a scapegoat—members of society can return to a peaceful existence. Shepard was certainly aware of the atmosphere of persecution surrounding the Cold War era, which also correlates with Girard’s theory. The impact of McCarthyism in the 1950s, with its scapegoating of groups that threatened the established power, left a strong impact on the United States which continued to ripple through the public discourse in the following decades. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955) also left its mark on American theatre, critiquing the injustice of McCarthyism. This comparison suggests validity to Girard’s claim that persecution continues to be a process by which societies divert violence toward a scapegoat, except that modern society is increasingly aware of this process and its inherent injustice. In Buried Child, the unnamed family is the social group that has performed an act of sacrifice to relieve escalating conflict. The sacrifice of the infant is mutual in the sense that all members of the family are complicit. By applying Girard’s theory, I hope to examine the play not simply as a psychological work but as a ritualistic one. The characters of Buried Child are more archetypal than psychological—Shepard uses them to represent figures like mother, son, or outsider. Unlike with Realism, his work has no need to attempt to depict complex, realistic personalities—rather, he draws attention to archetypal roles, using them in the same way as ancient myth, to capture all that they signify to American society. The archetypal nature of Shepard’s characters makes them particularly useful in examining the presence of violence and ritual in a larger 19 19 community. The narrative structure of Shepard’s plays seems to demonstrate an understanding of the role of the sacrificial process in establishing normalcy, and in generating myth to shroud the presence of violence in that sacrifice. The secrets of the play’s Mid-Western family contain a primordial violence—a murder serves as the perverse solution, and that murder allows the family to re-establish normalcy. In order to show that the family is involved in an escalating mimetic crisis, I’ll examine the concept of eroding differentiation in the play. A collapse of differentiation is a major signifier of the ritual crisis—clear social roles enforce order and prevent internal fighting in a community. The loss of these roles leads the crisis to escalate and contributes to the perceived need for the sacrificial act. In the chaos of violence, boundaries of class, gender, and family are no longer sharply defined. Ritual sacrifices often use intoxication from alcohol or drugs to create a temporary state of chaos which symbolically references this collapse of boundaries. This temporary state makes all members of the society temporarily equal, allowing for them to equally share in the sacrificial act. Undifferentiation precedes sacrifice because the sacrifice must be shared by all members of the community. Once the sacrifice is complete, the traditional roles are restored and strengthened. Juxtaposed against the wild intoxication, the need for these ordered boundaries becomes apparent. With all members of the community complicit in the sacrifice, all feel the need for the social order to be returned. In this way, sacrificial rituals reinforce social roles and remind members of a society of the chaos that these roles protect from. Differentiation also breaks down between opposing groups that, mimetically copying each other, begin to mirror their enemy. Girard writes that “all participants become each other’s conflictual doubles or ‘twins’” (“Mimesis and Violence,” 10). As violence escalates, no one is free of guilt. The cycle of revenge makes it impossible to separate the innocent and the guilty. The differences that constitute society break down, 20 20 and the victim becomes the victimizer and back again. Girard argues that sacrificial rituals are symbolic reenactments of such crises. Sam Shepard explores this “twinning” in his True West, a play in which brothers Lee and Austin perform this blurring of identity. Even as the two brothers attack each other’s way of life, they encounter a distorted version of themselves. Eventually, they switch roles: Lee tries to write a play, and Austin becomes a thief. They attempt to define themselves in opposition to the other, but inevitably sense that they are “one and the same” (True West, 37). Arguably, both of Girard’s concepts—the undifferentiation of a society and the ritual process which follows it—appear in Buried Child. Its dysfunctional family is a perfect representation of a societal group experiencing an escalating crisis of retaliatory violence. For instance, I’ll explore how incest within the family of Buried Child undermines traditional roles. The act of sacrifice re-establishes Dodge as the patriarch of the family and puts an end to the sexual relationship between Tilden and Halie. This example and others indicate how ritualistic sacrifice is not a threat to the function of the family group—instead it is deeply rooted in its survival.

Collapsing Differentiation of Family Roles Within Buried Child there are several instances of a lack of differentiation between various dichotomies that provide order by contrasting two perceived opposites. As a community approaches a new period of crisis, traditional relationships become blurred. Society determines assumed relationships in a family: parent and child, husband and wife, guest and host. When these relationships are lost, the family can no longer function. The cohesion of a society can be measured by the strength of its differentiation—in a differentiated society, the boundaries of power are clear, and violence is able to be seen as legitimate or illegitimate. 21 21

The society experiencing a sacrificial crisis experiences a dangerous collapse of these boundaries. The family of Buried Child follows this pattern, with family roles eroding and social laws broken. For example, the “children” of the family, Tilden and Bradley, are grown men yet they remain in the family home. Halie’s affair with Father Dewis can be seen as a collapse of the social prohibition of adultery. The societally proper attitude toward guests is also collapsed—the family fiercely resists outside influence, yet alternatively they confide in outsiders and bizarrely include them in family affairs. These examples of collapsed boundaries suggest the mimetic crisis that Girard describes, and reproduce for the audience the feeling of chaos that precedes and necessitates an act of ritual sacrifice in a community. The play’s many examples of disrupted social roles are highly suggestive of the undifferentiation that Girard argues precedes a ritual of sacrificial violence. In societies that are undergoing such a crisis, the disruption of the social order leads to contradictory motivations for the participants—there is both a desire to cling to the traditional roles that once produced a stable identity, yet also a desire to claim the hegemonic power that could be used to end the ceaseless reciprocity of the conflict. In Buried Child, family members are torn between adhering to traditional roles, or attacking each other in an attempt to gain control. Only when there is stable leadership can a social consensus be established. This consensus prevents further violence and leads to a new mythic narrative, which contributes to the community’s renewed sense of purpose and identity. Girard’s explanation in “Mimesis and Violence” gives some insight: Mimetic rivalry tends toward reciprocity. The model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other’s path a more and more irritating obstacle and each tries to remove 22 22

the obstacle more and more forcefully. Violence is thus generated… In their dual role of obstacle and model, they both become more and more

fascinated with each other. Beyond a certain level of intensity they are totally absorbed and the disputed object becomes secondary, even irrelevant. (12-13) This passage encapsulates the power struggle that occurs in the play. The reason the characters fight for control is simply because they see each other fighting for control and mimic that behavior. They are each obstacles to each other: Halie sees Dodge as an obstacle to her sexual desires. Bradley is emasculated by his disability and lashes out at his parents, even as he relies on them for support. The intense fascination that Girard describes is clear for the characters of the play—the struggle becomes less about actually claiming the object of desire, Dodge’s patriarchal authority, and more about a growing obsession with one’s antagonist. What would happen to the family farm if Dodge was to die? The family fears this inevitable moment even as they long for it. In their fervor to disrupt each other, their own intentions become blurred. Until Vince’s final entrance, no other family member is able to permanently take power and end the feverish cycle of violence. Vince, perhaps on some level recognizing the paralysis of his family, enacts the ritual event. Yet he does this by signaling to the family that he is claiming power rather than physically dethroning his grandfather—Dodge is not directly murdered, but instead dies on his own. This is not inconsistent with Girard’s framework—in fact, Vince’s symbolic performance of violence is similar to ritual’s function in ancient societies, which often performed a symbolic sacrifice rather than a literal one. Ultimately, the isolation of the family is valuable in understanding both the collapsed differentiation of family roles and the ritualized violence that follows. As the play begins, the audience soon encounters an atmosphere of despair and stagnation. The family is “completely unmoored from society… When Father Dewis, an emissary from 23 23 the outside world, appears… he seems strangely out of place. This is not a family used to receiving guests” (Porter, 117). Halie is the only member of the family that leaves the home to participate in society—the men of the house linger on the farm, without any mention of aspirations that would take them out into society. This isolation emphasizes the boundary between insider and outsider in the play. There is no external force that enters the plot to disrupt the family’s affairs—society, rather than making demands of the family, seems to have forgotten them completely. This choice by Shepard to close off the family, and to have all of the action of the play take place inside the family home, shows that the crisis is internal and self-contained. The family, like the ancient societies referenced by Girard, has its own cultural norms, and thus its own rituals. This internal crisis experienced by the family is of mysterious origin—the family often alludes to a deceased infant buried out in the fields, but the nature of this event is left ambiguous. Theatre scholar David Savran writes, “Although the characters obliquely refer to a specific, dislocating event, the play does not let us know exactly what the crisis is or where its origin lies. The drama's withholding of the origin is not so much the playwright's strategy of willful mystification as it is the mark of a crisis which is itself characterized by its lack of a clearly defined first cause” (59). Savran correctly recognizes that Shepard’s intent is not to create a solvable mystery for the audience to enjoyably unravel, but to emphasize that the details of the inciting event of the crisis have been lost even by the family itself. The buried child is myth-like in the sense that it hints at an ancient crisis that can no longer be remembered. Girard expresses that as the mimetic crisis escalates, the details of the original violence are lost to myth and the violence becomes an end in itself. Shepard frames the play’s crisis in a similar fashion—the characters repeatedly reference the long-past event, suggesting its importance, but they never truly delve into specific details that could help them unravel the conflict that has overtaken them. 24 24

The slim textual details available concerning this event have been interpreted by most critics to suggest a child of incest between Halie and her son Tilden, which was killed and buried outside to preserve the family’s continued social legitimacy. Incest and infanticide are both acts that suggest a collapse of differentiation and a violation of implied social rules. Textual evidence may not confirm the specifics of who committed the murder, but they do heavily imply the presence of these social taboos in the family’s past. Dodge yells at his wife, “My flesh and blood’s out there in the backyard!” After she leaves, Tilden asks, “Why’d you tell her it was your flesh and blood?” perhaps implying that Dodge has purposefully altered details of the event. Dodge, however, states that “everybody knows, everybody’s forgot” (22). The specifics of the event are lost, but the family still senses its importance. This corresponds with the sacrificial ritual as an event that maintains a spiritual importance to a community, despite the details of the original violence having long since been obscured. The first dichotomy that demonstrates the collapse of differentiation in the family is that of parent and child. This can be experienced not only in the potential infanticide that has occurred at some point in the family’s past, but also in how the parents of the play, Dodge and Halie, interact with their living children. A collapse in the boundary between parent and child relates not only to the taboo act of infanticide, but to incest as well. These prohibitions are found in nearly all societies, and the breaking of these prohibitions would signal the breakdown of social cohesion within these societies. Additionally, modern society in particular has certain expectations of normal interaction between parent and child. Many of these expectations are dictated by age—the parent begins as caretaker for the child, but as that child grows, he or she is increasingly called on to respectfully care for their aging parents. The living sons of Buried Child, Tilden and Bradley, can be seen to demonstrate a perversion of these expectations. 25 25

Tilden’s despondent attitude is another of the play’s mysteries, but his presence on stage, a large man who acts like a forlorn child, signals a breakdown of traditional roles. Halie reminds Dodge that, “We have to watch him just like we used to now… He’s still a child” (22). The implication of the preceding dialogue emphasizes that Tilden was not always this way—something has changed to rob him of his agency and make him dependent on his elderly mother and father. Dodge tells him “I never went back to my parents. Never. Never even had the urge. I was independent.” Tilden can only reply “I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t figure anything out” (23). Later, Shelley asks Tilden why he has given up on his old love for adventure and travel. His response gives insight into the source of his decline: “We had a baby. Little baby. Could pick it up in one hand… we had no service. No hymn. Nobody came” (47). Despite the ambiguity of the details, we can sense the outline of an ancient violence, to which Tilden’s current state can be traced back. If the murder of the infant once produced order, perhaps that order has decayed over time, along with Tilden’s mental stability as his guilt increased.

Certainly, this conclusion is supported by his constant trips outside, as if searching for the burial site. Regardless of the origin of his behavior, his presence is an unsettling reminder to the audience that the family’s dysfunction has reduced Tilden to a shell of what he once was, and has led to his return to a child-like state. The other son, Bradley, is also a man who seems far too old to remain tied to his family home. As with Tilden, Bradley’s age emphasizes the fractured parent/child relationship, and his character is also torn between child and adult behavior. As differentiation is lost, there is a struggle for control. The clear boundary of power between parent and child is undermined, and Bradley’s aggression can be interpreted as another symptom of this boundary’s erosion. Halie expresses a fear of her son Bradley, suggesting that her power as parent has become inadequate in restraining her son’s violent tendencies. She warns, “You better get this cleaned up before Bradley sees it… 26 26

He doesn’t like to see the house in disarray… You know how he gets” (20). Bradley’s initial entrance upends the perceived balance of power. His menacing physicality is described in stage direction: “He moves with an exaggerated, almost mechanical limp. The squeaking sounds of leather accompany his walk… his arms and shoulders are extremely powerful and muscular due to a lifetime of dependency on the upper torso doing all the work for the legs” (26). Just as the audience thinks they understand how the family operates, Bradley’s entrance brings forth another chaotic element. Whereas Tilden’s mental disability prevents him from taking over the farm, Bradley’s physical disability also keeps him from power. Bradley is torn between the child and adult role— he is dependent on his family, yet acts out, perhaps in an attempt to assert his masculinity. Bradley’s power struggle with other members of the family is characteristic of a community experiencing a sacrificial crisis, and also demonstrates how old age undermines the roles of his parents and makes them a target for retaliatory violence. His first action is to take a razor to his father’s hair as he sleeps. Upon waking, Dodge is shamed and emasculated. The dialogue implies that this is not the first time Dodge has unwillingly had his head shaven. Bradley seems to take a grim satisfaction in taking advantage of a patriarch who is no longer able to exert his dominance over him as man of the house. In old age Dodge has become infantile, which is another disruption of his role as patriarchal authority. This violent act projects Bradley’s own feelings of impotence— neither he nor his father are “man enough” to work the farm. The connection between the two can be interpreted as mimetic “twinning”: in punishing Dodge for his weakness, Bradley is drawing attention to his own lack of masculine agency. Unable to find purpose within the family community, Bradley’s aggression toward Dodge can be seen as an attempt to escape the child role by claiming the patriarchal power that Dodge represents. 27 27

Bradley’s aggression also pushes other members of the family to retaliate and force him back into a submissive child role—this oscillation of power corresponds with the sacrificial crisis, in which a lack of differentiation disrupts the balance of power. It’s worth noting the connection to the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, who also had a physical injury that identified him for potential victimhood. Girard expresses the importance of physical deformities that single individuals out for violence, and like Oedipus, Bradley alternates between victim and victimizer. Early in the play, he thrusts his fingers into Shelley’s mouth in a potentially sexual manner, as if testing his power. Tilden is also victimized by Bradley, who taunts, “You’re gonna run now. Run like a scalded dog!” (49) causing his older brother to flee in fear. Although he’s the younger of the two, he dominates Tilden, the eldest and physically largest. Power oscillates in a sacrificial crisis, and in these early scenes Bradley is a tyrannical and threatening presence. However, the nature of power in a community experiencing a mimetic crisis is that no one person holds it for long. Bradley struggles with Shelly, who increasingly refuses to be dominated.

Toward the end of the play, Bradley reverts back to the child role, with Halie admonishing him: “Bradley! Did you put your hand in this girl’s mouth? You have no idea what kind of diseases she might be carrying” to which Bradley complains “She’s lying through her teeth… I never touched her! She propositioned me and I turned her down. I turned her down flat!” (62-63). This devolves into a tantrum, in which Shelley grabs Bradley’s leg and completes his transformation from sexual aggressor to impotent child. This imbalance indicates the instability of social order that occurs in a mimetic crisis—the collapse of established authority leads certain parties to struggle for dominance, and these attempts must be answered. For example, Bradley’s attempts to establish his own authority demand a response from Shelley, drawing her in as a participant in the crisis. 28 28

Outside of the parent/child dichotomy, the undermined relationship between husband and wife in the play also exemplifies the undifferentiation that precedes a ritual crisis. In the patriarchal, agrarian America that Shepard evokes in this play, the assumption is that the man of the house works the fields, and that the wife submissively cares for the children. Buried Child depicts a household in which these social rules of normalcy have been strained or abandoned completely. Halie, rather than caring for the home, is constantly leaving and returning. Her affair with Father Dewis undermines the expectation of her loyalty to Dodge, and her inability to control her adult children draws attention to the inadequacy of her maternal role. Dodge is also ineffectual—anchored to his chair, Dodge can only yell at his family to obey his will, despite his complete dependency on them. These examples and others demonstrate that the authoritative roles that give order to the family unit have collapsed. The mother of the traditional American family often has, amongst other duties, the duty of preserving the emotional well-being of the other family members. Halie fails in this regard, and she chooses to invent mythic narratives that mask the truth of her family’s dysfunction rather than take any action to heal their emotional wounds. Halie’s obsession with pills—a distraction from pain—is emblematic of her character. She “sees nothing wrong” (8) with distractions, and her constant white lies can be seen in this light. She writes off Dodge’s disturbing coughs as “Just the rain” (8) and then spins a tale of an old ex-lover. Much of the humor in Halie’s character relates to her creative imaginings, most of which fall apart under scrutiny. Her ex-lover is from “Florida. Or California! One of those two” to which Dodge remarks “Can I take my pick?” (10). Later, her lies grow more extravagant. Praising her dead son Ansel, she heaps on imagined achievements. Tilden repeats “Ansel was a hero?” (20), his earnestness a contrast to Halie’s manipulative and insincere fables. When Dodge yells “My flesh and blood’s out there in the back yard!” (21) she counters by glossing over the statement and returning to her 29 29 fantasy of Ansel: “I’m going to have lunch with Father Dewis. I’m going to ask him about a monument for Ansel. A statue. At least a plaque” (21). Halie’s constant justifications play an obvious role in the family’s collaborative denial of past events. When Tilden or Dodge attempt to bring up the buried child, perhaps in an attempt to expose and confront the violence at the heart of the current crisis, Halie consistently works to suppress the truth. Yet underneath her attempts at weaving new family myth, Halie is abandoning the submissive mother role and vying for power—another sign of collapsing differentiation. If the titular buried child was the result of her infidelity, Halie has repeated her infidelity by taking a new lover in Father Dewis. Infidelity, in the context of a sacrificial crisis, is a breakdown of the mother role and a reversion to the sexual independence of an unmarried woman. As with Bradley who is split between two roles, Halie is also torn between her duties to her family and her desire for independence (and the power that independence represents). Ironically, her affair could be seen not as any real desire for escape, but as a failed attempt to mask her failure as a mother and caretaker. Helpless to fulfill her maternal obligation of managing the home, she can only mask its rot. Upon bringing in roses, she remarks to Dewis: “They almost cover the stench of sin in this house. Hanky- panky. Just magnificent! The smell” (59). Whether the “hanky-panky” refers to her own history of incest is ambiguous, but this line signifies her tendency to hide from the truth, and also from the disruption of her societal role. Dodge also lies between two opposing roles: authoritative patriarch and elderly invalid. His oscillation between these two roles is another example of the undifferentiated chaos threatening the family’s survival. The play’s first moment is Dodge in a coughing fit, and his sickness becomes more apparent as the play progresses. Dodge’s language suggests the rugged individualism that signals masculine power in a patriarchal society, but his weakness is regularly exposed. For this reason, Dodge is completely dependent on 30 30 his family but also unable to accept the humiliation of this fact. Even after verbally berating and insulting Shelley, the arrival of Halie and Dewis leads Dodge to beg Shelley for support: “I need somebody here with me. Tilden’s gone now and I need someone. Don’t leave me! Promise!” (56). The following scene is even more pathetic for the audience to witness, with Dodge scrambling to hide under his blanket to avoid Halie taunting him with her affair. Dodge’s physical weakness undermines his established role, which motivates other members of the family to claim the power that could free them from the escalating ambiguity and re-establish a cohesive family identity. The only thing holding the family together is adherence to certain governing roles of father, mother, and child. Yet Dodge’s approaching death contributes to the distortion of these roles. The roles become ineffectual, hollow rituals that must nevertheless be preserved—much like the act of sacrifice in the family’s past. The final dichotomy in my analysis is that of guest and host—the collapse of this boundary further escalates the crisis by drawing in outsiders. This escalation prevents any outside force from interfering, and heightens the chaos that leads to a sacrifice. In a functional society, there are clear social rules surrounding the private and the public— certain behaviors are permissible privately, but must be concealed in the presence of guests. One of the most basic societal expectations is that guests will be greeted and made welcome by the host. The arrival of a guest is an opportunity for the family to demonstrate their social health, and even to put forth greater effort than usual into maintaining proper behavior and cleanliness. For guests, there are also clear boundaries—unstated but strict social laws govern the appropriateness of certain topics of discussion, and guests are usually prohibited from becoming involved in internal family affairs. In Buried Child the family demonstrates an abandonment of their host duties, and this point shouldn’t require any exemplification—throughout the play there’s a clear abandonment of any attempt by the family to welcome outsiders. Arguably more relevant 31 31 to the topic of undifferentiation are the guests, who are swept up in the mimetic crisis and at times find themselves participating in the reciprocal violence. The guests, particularly

Vince and Dewis, also find their personal identities disrupted as they are exposed to the crisis. Vince’s character demonstrates the ambiguity of the guest/host dichotomy in the play, particularly in his transition from a confused outsider to violent usurper, whose need to be accepted by his family leads him to adopt their violence and take control by force. Vince, returning to a house he only remembers from his early childhood, is expecting his surprise visit to thrill his relatives and reignite a sense of familial connection. However, the refusal of his family to acknowledge Vince in any capacity disrupts his expectations, and also his personal identity. Vince, in his last monologue, narrates the event that shaped his decision to return to the farm and take power: I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face. Studied everything about it as though I was looking at another man. As

though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy’s face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time… His face became his father’s face… And his father’s face became his grandfather’s face. And it went on like that… I followed my family clear into Iowa… Straight into the corn belt and further… Then it all dissolved. Everything dissolved. Just like that. (71-72) This monologue reinforces the disruption of Vince’s sense of personal identity— contextual evidence seems to imply that Vince’s trip was motivated by a desire to reconnect with his family heritage and give him a meaningful role that could structure his life. Valuing family heritage is a social imperative that is integral to traditional American society. When his family fails to even recognize him, it shatters his worldview and introduces him to the undifferentiated chaos that has consumed them. Girard argues that 32 32 the reciprocal conflict escalates and pulls in other members of the community, disrupting roles and heightening the chaos that precedes an act of ritualized violence. Vince seems to be infected by this reciprocity, and he has his revenge by casting aside his relationship with Shelley and committing himself to definitively claiming the authority for which the other family members have fought. His insistence that there is a deeper, “mythic” meaning to his genetic connection with his family, which have treated him like a stranger, shows both the power of this social myth, and the collapse of social order that occurs when that myth is disrupted. Father Dewis also experiences a disruption of his traditional role—that of the spiritual leader of the community. In the patriarchal America that this play evokes, the local pastor is a source of potential intervention. His role as pastor is to mediate crises such as the one the family of Buried Child is experiencing. However, Dewis also realizes that his role is a mere performance. As Vince brings a new wave of upheaval into the home, Father Dewis meekly stands by as the family devolves into anarchy. He says to

Halie, “maybe we should go upstairs until this blows over” (69), suggesting the pair ignore the crisis and escape upstairs. Even as violence breaks out on stage, Dewis potentially has his mind set on consummating his date with Halie. At least personally, Dewis seems to have no problem ignoring the irony of his position as both adulterer and spiritual authority. Religion, which Dewis represents, allows a society to recontextualize their own sins, interpreting those sins in a manner that fits the social order. Just as the family ignores the buried child in order to maintain order, religion maintains order on a larger scale by establishing a mythic foundation. Dewis tells Shelley that “There’s nothing to be afraid of. These are all good people. All righteous souls” (64). As a church authority, his job isn’t to solve problems; it is to mask them. His own action of adultery with Halie is equally accounted for by his religion, because his position gives him enough to power to avoid consequences. Rather than reach to the root cause of the family’s 33 33 dysfunction, religion can only operate in the realm of superficial appearances. The exposure of this reality undermines Dewis’s role; although he may be adept at ignoring his own hypocrisy, Dewis’s fractured social role leads to his failure to produce any remedy to the crisis. The collapse of Dewis’s traditional role is particularly relevant to the argument that the family of Buried Child is experiencing a sacrificial crisis. Religion, and its role in the life of American families, can be seen as a safeguard against the threat of escalating mimetic violence. Girard writes that, “religious prohibitions make a good deal of sense when interpreted as efforts to prevent mimetic rivalry from spreading throughout human communities” (“Mimesis and Violence,” 10). Girard implies that the preeminent purpose of religion is to enforce a social consensus, in which members of a community all participate in a shared narrative that prevents unrest and lawlessness. Halie exemplifies the loyal religious follower, who adopts this practice at the personal level. Through the lens of a Girardian theory of reciprocal conflict, Dewis and Halie are actively attempting to maintain social cohesion by relying on a mythic reimagining of events that can obscure the truth of the community’s inherent violence. Yet their efforts fail, leading to a heightening of the conflict that culminates in another act of ritual sacrifice.

Exposing Ritualized Violence In Buried Child, the deaths of both Dodge and the buried child are acts of ritualized violence, in which the death of a sacrificial victim leads to newly established social cohesion. The two victims are linked by the ritual process, as well as by symbolic imagery. The sacrificed individual is the victim of acts of violence but also “more importantly, the mysterious instigator” (The Scapegoat, 44). The victim is not truthfully responsible for the chaos—instead, the community comes to believe this is so, and afterward myths are created to conceal the community’s violence from themselves. The 34 34 child of incest, central to the plot of Buried Child, is one example of a common victim of ritualized violence; the child is a locus for potent and contrary emotions. The parent cares for the child instinctually, but also dreads him or her as a symbol of their own sin. The child is seen by the community as the instigator of violence in that its very existence threatens the natural order. Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred that “infanticide has its place among ritualistic practices; the practice is too well documented in too many cultures (including the Jewish and the ancient Greek) for us to exclude it from consideration” (10). Infants, particularly those that are unwanted, are likely targets for scapegoating. Buried Child contains several textual details that indicate that the buried child’s death is a shared secret in the family—the purging of the child’s unwanted presence was perhaps felt to be a necessary sacrifice. At the end of the play, Dodge now takes on the role of helpless victim. He too becomes the site of contradictory emotions for other members of the family: fear and respect of his patriarchal power, yet also resentment and hate at his continued existence, which keeps the family in a state of permanent unrest and crisis. The child of incest is an obstacle to the family of Buried Child’s continued function, yet in death it is the only thing binding that family together. The murder of the child is seen as both a sinful act and one that restores order and normalcy. The “sickness” is cured—the child is erased from the family’s history and yet it unites them in secrecy, and reinforces the need for the family to maintain their given roles. The unforgivable act of child murder is creatively justified by the family, who have convinced themselves of the act’s necessity. Dodge seems to confess this view in his dialogue: “We couldn’t allow that to grow up right in the middle of our lives. It made everything we’d accomplished look like it was nothin’” (66). He then admits to drowning the child and burying it in the yard, although the audience can never be sure of his honesty. Bradley, trying to stop Dodge from confessing, yells “We made a pact!” (66), implying that the family have 35 35 communally joined together to conceal the truth. Even if the other members of the family did not physically take part in the murder, they seem to have decided to keep the secret, making them complicit. The idea that the buried child is ritualistically linked to the current crisis in the family is reinforced by the reoccurring mention of the child throughout the text, particularly as the crisis reaches a climax. Although Shelley does attempt to investigate the family’s history, there’s no logical reason why Dodge suddenly confesses to a decades-old infanticide. There is no reckoning for the family’s past sin; at least not in terms of an external mandate. Instead, the family returns to this idea of the buried child having importance just as they enter a new period of crisis. Tilden, the potential father, perhaps feels a more immediate connection to the mythic relevance of the child, and he digs up the corpse at the end of the play. No one commands him, and yet the action seems an inevitable response to the violent upheaval of the play’s conclusion. At this pivotal moment, Tilden is drawn to the burial site—to a corpse that is ritually connected with

Dodge’s death and Vince’s rise to power. Rituals are repeated by a community, in order to replicate the power of an ancient sacrifice that successfully ended a mimetic crisis. Yet the details of this ancient origin of communal violence are usually obscured by myth. Buried Child indicates toward an important ancient sacrifice, yet myth makes the specific details unknowable, even to the internal members of the community. When Shelley questions Dodge about the family photos, she glimpses only a possible version of the truth. “There’s a picture of a farm. A big farm. A bull. Wheat. Corn… All the kids… waving these big straw hats. One of them doesn’t have a hat… there’s a baby. A baby in a woman’s arms. She looks lost standing out there” (54). Dodge’s response suggests that the woman is Halie: “I told her a hundred times it wasn’t gunna be the city. I gave her plenty of warning… You got some funny ideas, sister… you think just because people propagate they have to love their offspring? 36 36

You never seen a bitch eat her puppies?” (55). This line implies that perhaps Halie was the one who objected to keeping the child or even asked for the murder to occur; there’s no way to know whether Dodge’s confession later in the play is an effort to intentionally cover for her, or if he has convinced himself that the murder was his decision alone. Like all myths, the story becomes distorted over time. What the reader can visualize in the family’s past is a lost period of prosperity. The bull and the children suggest virility; the farm is full of crops. Later in the same conversation, Dodge expresses “You know how many kids I’ve spawned? Not to mention grandkids and great-grandkids?” (55). Despite denying Vince as his grandson, Dodge contradicts himself and exaggerates the size of his family as if to minimize the sin of infanticide. Dodge, like Halie, has creatively altered events to support his desired view and mask the truth. After Vince returns, Dodge becomes the sacrificial victim whose death can restore order. Dodge’s death also contains elements of ritual, including symbolic links between him and the long-dead child. In the final pages, Vince is described in stage direction as smelling roses no less than seven times. Finally, as he gazes down at Dodge’s corpse, he places the roses on his chest. With the blanket, corn husks, and now roses, Dodge is buried on stage—an apparent symbolic link between him and the buried child. As Girard describes, the victim is the cause of the unrest, but is also perversely seen as its cure—the community paradoxically honors the victim even as they sacrifice him or her. The roses, which Halie identified as a means to mask the stench of sin, now cover Dodge’s corpse. They are a fitting image for the role of myth is masking the violence of the community. Vince’s drunken violence also connects him with Dodge, as well as with a genetic history of alcoholic and violent men. If the infanticide is being reproduced, Vince has also reproduced Dodge in himself by mimicking Dodge’s role in the original infanticide. Only by copying the circumstances of the original sacrifice can the ritual succeed, and it can be 37 37 interpreted that Vince takes on his grandfather’s part as murderer in order to recreate those circumstances.

A potential flaw in applying the framework of ritual to Buried Child is that Dodge is not directly murdered by Vince. However, the dialogue surrounding Dodge’s death shows that Vince has sacrificed him symbolically if not literally. One potential image of sacrifice and ritual is the knife between Vince’s teeth. Once he enters, Dodge seems to sense his intent and begins speaking out his last will and testament. His words reveal an awareness of his approaching death, and a strange legitimization of Vince’s authority: “The house goes to my grandson Vincent. That’s fair and square” (70). Later he imagines for himself another symbol of ritual—the sacrificial pyre: “when the blaze is at its highest… my body is to be pitched into the middle of it and burned til’ nothing remains but ash” (71). Finally, Shepard notes in stage direction that Dodge’s on-stage death should occur when no one is paying attention (73). Although in a literal sense Dodge has died of old age, his death is consistent with the ritual framework: rituals attempt to symbolically reenact an original sacrificial violence, in order to capture its power to restore order. Here, the original violence is the murder of the unwanted child. Vince’s performance of the patriarchal role, which once belonged to his grandfather Dodge, is followed by Dodge’s performance of the sacrificed child. Both men work together to enact the ritual which is seen as necessary for the family’s transition into a new period of order and prosperity. The play’s final moments are particularly relevant to the interpretation of Dodge and the child’s deaths as linked to ritual sacrifice. Halie’s final monologue indicates both the rejuvenation following the ritual sacrifice, and also the constant work of myth to hide the role of violence in this rejuvenation. Halie delivers a monologue from upstairs as she stares out at the burgeoning crops that have gone unnoticed for months by everyone except Tilden. She calls out: “Dodge? Is that you Dodge? Tilden was right about the corn 38 38 you know… Have you taken a look at it lately? Dazzling. Tall as a man already… maybe the rain did something. Maybe it was the rain” (73). Despite the ridiculous notion that one night of rain could suddenly grow an entire field of corn, Halie chooses to embrace this myth rather than confront the truth of her previous ignorance of the outside world, which was possibly due to her obsession with the family crisis. As she speaks, Tilden enters the house from outside, covered in mud and holding the unburied corpse of the child. He slowly walks to the stairs, ignored by Vince. Halie continues to speak: Good hard rain. Take everything straight down deep to the roots. The rest takes care of itself. You can’t force a thing to grow. You can’t interfere with it. It’s all hidden. Unseen. You just gotta wait ‘til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong though. Strong enough to crack the earth even. It’s a miracle, Dodge. I’ve never seen a crop like this my whole life. Maybe it’s the sun. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the sun. (73)

This passage has a variety of acceptable interpretations, yet choosing to view it from the perspective of ritual sacrifice leads to a deeper understanding of how myth is used to conceal truths that threaten the social order. The sun can be seen as connected to the “son”—potentially the buried child. The words “hairy and fragile” suggest an infant, as well as the “tiny little shoot”. Girard theorizes that after a victim is sacrificed, order is restored, and the community attributes that unexplainable restoration to the power of the victim. This insight unlocks a fascinating interpretation of this final scene, in which a “miracle” for the family is perhaps understood by the audience as predicated on the sin of infanticide. Whether the ritual is truly successful is left ambiguous—Vince’s promise to revitalize the farm and buy new farming equipment opens the possibility for rebirth, but Tilden’s entrance with the bones of the buried child also threaten to expose the violence 39 39 and hold the new social order accountable. Tilden’s approach foreshadows Halie’s terror at seeing the corpse of a child she had devoted herself to forgetting. The audience is left to imagine whether she will be able to endure the impending trauma. Her constant attempts at rewriting history suggest that she has not only personally repressed her memories of the child’s murder but has also worked to socially “bury” its existence. The horror the audience might feel at seeing the decayed corpse brought onto the stage suggests the horror Halie will likely feel when she sees it for herself. Whether the family will endure through such a revelation is unknown. The audience must decide for themselves whether any rebirth that involves such violence and self-deception is acceptable.

Conclusions The collapse of the family’s differentiation in Buried Child leads to a crisis that is consistent with Girard’s theory, and the death of Dodge can be interpreted as a ritual that recreates the circumstances of a previous sacrifice: the murder of the unwanted child.

Approaching the play from this perspective provides a new reading, one that helps to understand the play as an effort to expose the horrific violence that is interwoven in the social order. Critics have noted the ambiguity of the play’s crisis; yet as I have argued, the family crisis can be seen not only as a general collapse of traditional American family values, but also as a sacrificial ritual. The play’s ending suggests a traditional mythic narrative of fall and rebirth, but the ending ultimately subverts this expectation and exposes its flaws. Vince ends the immediate problem of escalating violence, but his actions only reinforce the status quo. Following the Judeo-Christian narrative structure, Vince can be seen as the savior, who ends the crisis and restores normalcy to the community. Like Oedipus when he bests the sphinx, Vince has ended the rule of a bad leader and has claimed patriarchal power over 40 40 the community. Yet the Greek tragedians worked to confront the cyclical nature of this process. The community will eventually return to a state of crisis, and the ritual will have to be repeated. Vince, who claims not only the power of his grandfather but his cruelty, hints at the potential repetition of the crisis somewhere in the family’s future. The audience is confronted with the child’s corpse, just after Vince symbolically puts on Dodge’s hat (a crown-like symbol of his patriarchal power). The juxtaposition of these two images deconstructs the play’s potential happy ending, and emphasizes that both Dodge’s death and the child’s death have, rather than threatened the family’s security, assured its continuation. However, the value of a family predicated on sacrificial violence is left open to interpretation. I do not argue that Shepard’s intent is to denounce the family’s reliance on the sacrificial process. Unlike with the theatre of Realism, Buried Child presents no clear alternative or desired outcome. A traditional ending would present a solution to the problem—a change through which the established hegemonic power can adapt and maintain its position. Realism operated in this way, diagnosing social flaws and helping them enter the public discourse. In this way, a realistic play’s conclusion transmits “meaning”. However, Buried Child has no direct meaning that speaks to hegemonic sensibility. Vince seeks to re-establish traditional values, but realizes the violence necessary to maintain them. His victory is a hollow one for the audience—the ancient murder of the child is neither condoned nor condemned. Instead it is exposed. The bones of the child trigger complex emotions for the audience, and forces them to question the validity of a way of life founded on such an action. The disturbing catharsis experienced by the audience of Buried Child potentially enables them to realize their own society’s inherent violence, as well as the possibility that this violence is not a threat to the established power but crucial to its continuation. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Shepard’s America was grappling with the increasingly 41 41 exposed pattern of violence interwoven in its history. The buried child can be interpreted as a metaphor for the death of innocent lives; the family of Buried Child as an American society still caught in a painful cycle of ritualized violence. The play avoids making a definitive statement on this cycle, but the parallels are striking. Halie’s creation of myth at the end of the play works to justify all that has occurred, which evokes an older generation of Americans who creatively recontextualized the events of the Vietnam War as justified. The farm in the play will potentially have a new age of prosperity, echoing the promise of economic prosperity in America after a period of war. Yet Halie’s fantasy of an idealized American farm family, an ideal shared by many of Shepard’s time, must contend with the physical proof of its injustice. As society develops, it becomes more difficult to conceal the ugly truth of sacrificial violence’s role in maintaining social order. Exposure to this truth leads members of modern society to cope with this unbearable reality through various means. The play’s characters suggest the many ways that members of a society involved in sacrificial violence typically respond when they are unable to have faith in the myths that protect them from the truth. Dodge nihilistically abandons any faith in family or his own goodness. Tilden, a man in his forties, acts like a traumatized child. Halie creates myths—stories that protect from self-knowledge and make space for inconsistencies (like her own affair with Father Dewis). Then there’s Vince, who completes the ritual and allows the farm to flourish once again. Vince, like many of Shepard’s “wanton son” characters, seek meaning in the very institutions that he once sought to abandon. Fearing the collapse of his identity outside the hegemonic framework he was born into, he decides to reinforce that framework, despite its violent nature. Applying Girard’s theory on ritual sacrifice to Buried Child not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the presence of ritual in the narrative, but also gives potential insight into Girard and Shepard’s shared suspicion with the fate of modern 42 42 society. Girard warns in Violence and the Sacred of a potential future in which societal myths become ineffective at maintaining order. The problem of exposing societal violence is that it threatens the hegemonic order that provides meaning and identity. Vince faces a similar problem in Buried Child—when Shelley asks him to simply leave the house with her and flee, he cryptically responds “we’d never make it… We’d think we were getting farther and farther away. That’s what we’d think” (69). Vince perhaps recognizes that the current order isn’t worth saving, but he seems to admit that he can never escape the ideology of his society. Perhaps he decides that even a society which relies on sacrificial violence is preferable to a complete collapse of meaning. The play acts as a deconstruction of an American social order that relies on violence to continue. In interpreting the family’s violence as sacrificial violence, the family’s crisis can be better understood. Specifically, the family’s dysfunction is a collapse of differentiation, in which family roles are disrupted. Additionally, the play’s symbolic connection between Dodge and the buried child becomes clearer when approached from this perspective—rituals repeat the circumstances of a previous sacrifice in order to replicate the restoration of order. I believe these insights strengthen the existing discourse by developing an appreciation of the play’s specific efforts to produce a catharsis in its audience. I interpret that the play is more than an expression of futility; rather, it confronts the audience with the presence of sacrificial violence that still persists in their society. CHAPTER 3: MIMETIC VIOLENCE AND THE FAILURE OF RITUAL IN SHEPARD’S TRUE WEST

Introduction Premiering on the stage in 1980, True West seemed to continue the realistic style and domestic atmosphere of 1979’s Buried Child. Shepard explicitly laid out instructions that the staging contain no special concept that would “only serve to confuse the evolution of the characters' situation, which is the most important focus of the play” (True West, 1). Early critical responses latched on to the idea that this choice made True West the writer’s most traditional piece. Once the dust settled, however, many came away with a different idea—just as in Buried Child, the realistic elements are only established to be torn down in the final act. Although True West is considered one of the three family plays, the depicted family is scattered, with the sibling relationship between Lee and Austin as the primary focus. This shift can be seen as a heightened emphasis by Shepard on the construction of masculinity in American society after the Vietnam War. In her book on this topic, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, Susan Jeffords describes how the war led to a cultural shift in American men toward a results-oriented view of the world rather than focusing on means. Even for men who did not fight in the war, this mentality that “the ends justify the means” was pervasive—the following decade would be defined by corpocracy, as well as an ambivalence toward moral behavior by those in the business world. Economic success and masculinity were increasingly seen as intertwined, and this often meant that personal success was valued over family connections. Although their destitute father never appears on stage his shadow looms over Austin and Lee, who both seem to view him as a shameful example of male failure. The mother appears for one short scene, but her appearance is so ineffectual that her character only emphasizes the isolation of the two brothers. The family roles of Buried 44 44

Child are whittled down; if in Buried Child it can be said that Shepard pushes social influences away to emphasize family, then in True West the mother and father are also largely absent. Just as external social forces influenced the characters of Buried Child despite their isolation, the father and mother of True West also influence their sons without being a significant presence in the play. For the most part, Shepard focuses closely on two men, whose isolation puts into focus their shared need for personal meaning. Moving from the family of Buried Child to True West, Shepard brings into focus that even between two individuals there is a tendency to seek out external meaning rather than to seek it in oneself. This thesis chapter argues that the brothers of True West participate in a mimetic conflict, and that they engage in a ritual to redirect their violence in order to end the conflict. To defend this point, I analyze Shepard’s use of the “warring brothers” archetype, which is a mythic archetype that suggests both mimetic conflict and the loss of differentiated boundaries that arises from this conflict. Additionally, I examine the moment of ritual in the play, which ultimately fails to re-establish social cohesion in True West’s family, which has been reduced to a single pair. Unlike Shepard’s other family plays, True West has the parents absent, either physically or emotionally. Without that stabilizing influence, the brothers can only look to each other to inform their sense of purpose. They desire the greater being they perceive in each other: both sense in the other some truer sense of self they lack, and which would lead them toward fulfilment. This concept relates to the mythic archetype of the two brothers. Cain and Abel, Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus—myth has many stories in which two brothers become rivals, and True West holds many of the same elements. Additionally, the two brothers clearly experience undifferentiation, losing their distinctions and becoming increasingly indistinguishable from each other as the conflict escalates. This escalation leads to a ritual, in which the brothers attempt to reproduce a myth—in this case a tale of the Old 45 45

West—to re-establish familial order. The ritual fails, and the audience is forced to confront the inadequacy of social myths to enforce order in society.

Critical Overview True West depicts two brothers, Lee and Austin, who begin the play in stark opposition. Austin is responsible, modest, and well-adjusted to modern life. Lee, in contrast, is a thief who is uneducated, aggressive, and in bad need of a shave. The play begins with Austin writing a screenplay, although the implication is that his “deal” with his Hollywood friend Saul is to make something marketable rather than truly inspired. At first Austin is firmly in control, and Lee’s jealous remarks are merely a distracting nuisance. Yet Lee’s street-wise charisma manages to win over Saul with an idea of his own. This begins an escalation of violence between the two, in which the brothers start to increasingly resemble each other’s behavior. Austin reveals his own jealousy of Lee, whose rugged independence seems to mock his brother’s reliance on a modern life that has only made Austin feel alienated. As the play continues, the stage is filled with stolen toasters from nearby homes; Austin has adopted Lee’s thievery in an attempt to prove himself. The increasing hostility between the brothers leads to an inebriated and sleep- deprived attempt to write out Lee’s script. The effort is a failure, and the house is now a wasteland of empty beer cans and crumpled paper. When the mother of the two appears, they initially respond like misbehaving teenagers. However, their mother is ironically an inconsequential figure, who leaves them to their struggles, offering to stay in a motel. The play ends with the two brothers in a “vast, desert-like landscape” (59), poised as if to continue an endless, futile battle. Critics writing on True West often interpret its image of duality as a representation of the split between conscious and unconscious desire. A common interpretation is that Lee and Austin represent one person, and that Lee symbolizes 46 46

Austin’s repressed desires. Critics have also described the ways in which True West expresses a societal frustration with the mundanity of suburban life. Lee and Austin can be seen as representing two sides of an ongoing cultural debate on masculinity in American society after the Vietnam War. Lee’s fierce independence and social detachment perhaps suggest a Vietnam Vet, especially considering his bitterness and jealousy toward a modern society that disdains him. Austin takes the role of the complacent everyman living under the thumb of American capitalism. The play’s endless conflict indicates that neither side holds much promise for a meaningful existence. Generally, scholarly writing on True West has fallen into two loose categories: writings that emphasize the play’s deconstruction of opposing social myths, and writings that delve into the play as a meta-commentary on the creative act. An example of the first group is James Riemer, who in his “Integrating the Psyche of the American Male: Conflicting Ideals of Manhood in Shepard’s True West,” characterizes the two brothers as dueling notions of masculinity in American society. The second group is exemplified by

William Kleb, who in “Worse Than Being Homeless: True West and the Divided Self” Will interprets the split between the brothers as a potentially autobiographical account of Shepard’s writing experience, with Lee the creative instinct and Austin the disciplined technique. One scholar whose work on True West applies well to my thesis is Tucker Orbison, whose article “Mythic Levels in Shepard’s True West” explores the mythic symbols that appear in the play. Orbison, and Tarancon as well, have mapped out the ways in which the play moves past realism to expose the failure of myth to provide meaning. This can be seen as an extension of critical writing on True West that interprets the play as a deconstruction of social myths. Orbison writes that “Though perhaps less obvious in True West than in his earlier work, the myths are there, sometimes helping to create conscious thematic material on what might be called the sociohistorical and artistic 47 47 levels, always working on a third, a psychological level” (506). Specifically, Orbison writes of Jungian myths and identifies Lee as the “shadow figure” who represents the hidden psychic forces with which Austin, the ego, must grapple. Orbison also writes on a popular topic of True West criticism—the myth of the artist. The play complicates the creative process of writing; whether it is a spontaneous act based in real experience or a formulaic process. Generally, Orbison notes that the play’s realistic elements disguise a heavy use of mythic symbols, which suggest that the ritualistic aspects of the preceding Buried Child continue to be explored by Shepard in True West—the characters, rather than finding a straightforward solution as in Realism, participate in a self-destructive ritual act that they believe will restore meaning. Juan Tarancon also focuses on social myths as they appear in True West. He describes that Shepard’s play challenges a society that “considers itself postmythical” (9). Tarancon argues against readings of the play that leap to the conclusion that the play’s central focus is the divided self. He argues that the play is also about “the exhaustion of myth and about its immediate consequences… the play suggests that the erosion of myth–and of myth’s communal context–entails the attenuation of community” (10). This insight is shared by this thesis, however Tarancon does not specifically argue, as I do, that the “attenuation of community,” or the weakening of myth’s power to hold together a social group, is related to the failure of ritual as well. This thesis chapter examines True West’s focus on myth’s role in society, continuing Tarancon’s line of thought by including the role of ritual. In its use of the ancient mythic archetype of opposing brothers, the play suggests the mimetic nature of the crisis shared by the brothers, and by extension of modern American society. They convincingly interpret the play as containing post-modern elements: the play exposes the failure of American social myths, and it also suggests that finding personal identity outside of these social myths may be impossible. I build upon the existing discourse by 48 48 locating the presence of ritual in True West, and the relationship between ritual and the social purpose of myth. It’s possible to observe in Lee and Austin an episode of escalating reciprocal violence. A kind of ritual emerges from this conflict, and myth works to conceal this ritualistic behavior. In approaching True West in this way, I connect the play to its predecessor: Buried Child. Behind Shepard’s deconstruction of the modern American family in both plays, there is a tragic narrative similar to those of the ancient Greeks. As in Greek tragedy, ritual is enacted in order to impose order on a process of escalating violence. Unlike in Buried Child, the pseudo-ritual in True West fails. The brothers, unable to use their script to connect with a mythic past, fall into a cycle of escalating violence. Ultimately, they are unable to hold on to the distinctions that gave meaning to their lives.

Methodology Building upon the argument of the previous chapter, the theoretical framework Girard describes in his Violence and the Sacred is useful in understanding the conflict in

True West. What has already been described is how conflict leads to undifferentiation, in which boundaries are collapsed. Additionally, ritual sacrifice has been shown to be a means by which societies attempt to avoid escalating violence by redirecting it to an external victim. These ideas apply to True West, and it can be said that Shepard’s family trilogy embodies the same elements. There are specific concepts in Girard’s Violence and the Sacred that are particularly useful tools in analyzing True West—the mimetic nature of desire is one, as well as Girard’s thoughts on why current societies are unable to produce myths that can successfully produce meaning. These ideas are an untapped means by which one can better understand the arc of the play, and its depiction of an escalating crisis that ritual fails to assuage. 49 49

Girard has a unique view on the origin of human violence, in which violence can be defined as a conflict between a subject, a rival, and their shared object of desire. More specifically, violence does not happen without cause. There must be two enemy parties (a subject and a rival) who both share a desire for one “object” (whether it be a physical object, a territory, or status). Girard’s claim is that violence is inherently mimetic—it arises from the imitation of another’s desire. Girard writes: Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires. (144-55) The relevance of this quote to True West is clear once one considers the visceral rivalry between the two brothers. Lee’s jealousy of Austin’s scriptwriting career can be seen as the seed of the escalating conflict—his desire is an imitation of Austin’s desire for the script to be successful, as well as for the legitimacy and status that its success would offer. However, Shepard dramatizes how both brothers are subject and rival—neither are characterized as legitimately “in the right” by Shepard. In this chapter’s critical analysis, I use the mimetic nature of violence to trace the building of conflict. In their efforts to outdo each other, each brother mimics the tactics of the other. As described, their conflict is hardly a “fortuitous convergence” on the desired object of the script. Instead, the motivation of each brother is inspired by the desire of the other. Girard, like Shepard in Buried Child or True West, also examines the horrible violence that occurs when rituals (and the myths that arise to conceal them) become ineffective at maintaining social order. He prophesizes a future in which “there are no longer any terms by which to define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it 50 50 among the multitude of illicit forms. The definition of legitimate and illegitimate forms then becomes a matter of mere opinion” (25). His words reflect a significant fear in a post-Vietnam War America—that counter-culture protests could permanently destabilize the status quo and lead to the unravelling of the social order. Girard continues that “demystification leads to constantly increasing violence, a violence perhaps less ‘hypocritical’ than the violence it seeks to expose, but more energetic, more virulent, and the harbinger of something far worse—a violence that knows no bounds” (25). Girard’s discourse on violence resonates with Shepard’s typical endings, in which characters seek to escape the hypocrisy of society only to find a more chaotic violence outside it. Shepard’s work seems to linger on this paradox in which individuals must choose between an inherently unjust society or a perhaps equally problematic anarchy outside that framework. Girard’s world without absolutes which he found so fearful is the reality of our present-day: a time in which old truths are increasingly recognized as socially legitimized myths. This relevance makes it a useful framework for addressing True West and its continuing impact on American culture. Shepard’s confrontation with the inherent violence of society leads to the difficult question of whether there is any future outside of it. Yet identifying the role of mimesis in this struggle is perhaps an end in itself— audiences witnessing the on-stage struggle for meaning can realize its futility. Greek tragedies also identified the cyclical pattern of violence their societies used to establish myth. When myths are deconstructed, members of a society must confront that their desires are largely the product of mimesis. Like the brothers of True West, those living in a de-mythologized society quickly recognize that they are merely performing social roles in the hopes that these roles will confer some sense of purpose. This realization could lead to a total social collapse. Shepard incorporates the mythic archetype of the warring brothers, yet also reconfigures this myth to apply to American social myths, and 51 51 deconstruct them. In doing so, Shepard is perhaps walking the same path as Greek tragedians, drawing attention to the sacrifices that society makes to enforce order.

Mimetic Rivalry in True West True West’s conflict emerges out of what appears to be a stable social order, in which a realistic setting create a false sense of familiarity for the audience. As in his previous family plays, Shepard uses the image of a family home to suggest a traditional America. However, unlike in Buried Child, the house is suburban and modernized. Nevertheless, by the end of the play the original image of a tidy home is juxtaposed against a trashed ruin. Historically, binary oppositions are the dominant means by which human cultures create meaning and True West begins with a wide range of such oppositions—we have, at the beginning, two brothers who could not be more dissimilar. Austin appears to be the composed everyman, whose career as a writer promises economic and creative fulfillment. Housesitting for his mother, Austin is shown to be responsible; in his first interactions with Lee, he shows a great deal of patience and even kindness. He goes so far as to invite his dangerous criminal of a brother to his family home. If the play is initially approached by audiences as traditional Realism, it can be said that Austin is the good-natured protagonist and that Lee is the aggressor who creates the problem of the play. True West, however, quickly complicates these familiar patterns and introduces the mimetic conflict between the two brothers, which can be said to arise from the hidden inadequacies of this order. Austin’s scripts are exposed as shallow attempts at money. His “love-story” is clearly less a true expression of his unique artistic voice than it is an emotionless appeal to Hollywood sensibilities. Saul, the Hollywood producer looking to buy Austin’s script, hints at the real nature of the work: “I am absolutely convinced we can get this thing off the ground. I mean we’ll have to make a sale to television and that 52 52 means getting a major star. Somebody bankable. But I think we can do it. I really do” (15). The ease at which Lee convinces Saul to try out Lee’s own script idea is an assault on not only Austin’s career but his identity. Austin’s pride at making a living through his writing is revealed to be a shallow attempt to hide from the truth. Tucker Orbison writes that “Austin's persona has so fully taken over his life that he is devoid of human feelings: he has not seen his brother Lee for five years; he has rejected his father; he lets his business take him away from his family” (508). Like many of Shepard’s characters, Austin has tried to define himself away from family connections. Yet Lee’s return suggests that Austin’s life is only an escape from his shared familial connection with the comparably impoverished life of Lee and their mutual father. American society suggests the social myth that an artistic career can allow anyone to escape their social status through their own creative merit. When Lee convinces Saul to choose Lee’s own script idea over Austin’s, this myth is shattered. Austin abandons his kindness—or rather, his performance of kindness.

Mimetically, he copies his brother who now seems to hold social legitimacy (through Saul’s approval of Lee’s script idea). This creates an escalating conflict between the two. Both brothers clearly see in each other the object of reciprocal desire; that is, the promise of what Girard refers to as “being.” Specifically, Girard writes that “Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess” (Violence and the Sacred, 155). Rather than the physical manifestation of Austin’s mind, Lee is a fully-realized character with his own intentions and his own desire to claim social legitimacy and power. Both see in the other a truer “being”—Lee desires his brother’s social legitimacy and suburban comfort, and Austin comes to envy Lee’s life out in the desert, which Austin sees as a truer existence. 53 53

As the brothers fight, they lose the distinctions of their personalities and experience a blending of identity. Girard’s statements on Greek tragedy apply equally well to the brothers of True West: The characters in tragedy are ultimately indistinguishable. The words used to describe any one of them in psychological, sociological, moral, or even religious terms—for example, “hot-tempered,” “tyrannical,” “hubristic”— are all equally applicable and equally inadequate. If the commentators have failed to remark that these traits are the common property of all the characters in the play, it is because they are not all affected by them at the same time. (Violence and the Sacred, 158) When conflict escalates, distinctions are undermined. Critics can call Lee “hot-tempered” and Austin “composed” only in the first scenes. Neither can it be said that the brothers switch roles and remain that way. Rather, there is an oscillation—the stability of character is lost completely and all descriptors can be attached to all participants. Girard continues that, “There is always one character who is angry; but while one of the enemy brothers rants and rages, the other may temporarily regain his composure” (158). Austin is brash and taunting, only to become pathetic and docile. A memorable scene involves such a shift in power: Lee suddenly explodes at Austin, who scrambles to pick up bits of toast scattered on the kitchen floor. Power does not simply change hands, because for this to happen would be for the social system to be stable and effective. Rather, the nature of the feud between brothers is that neither is able to permanently succeed over the other. Each violent act only prompts a mimicked retaliation. Mimetic violence appears in numerous myths, including the biblical myth of Cain and Abel. Critics often allude to this story when writing on True West but few deeply examine how both relate to mimetic violence and ritual sacrifice. As stated in the previous chapter, ritual sacrifice is a means by which ancient societies attempt to divert 54 54 reciprocal violence. Girard writes that “Cain is a tiller of the soil who gives the fruits of his labor to God, whereas Abel is a shepherd who regularly sacrifices the first-born of his herds. One of the brothers kills the other, and the murderer is the one who does not have the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice at his disposal” (Violence and the Sacred, 4). The myth portrays animal sacrifice as the legitimate way to divert violent impulses. Cain’s evil, rather than arising from some personal characteristic, is the result of external social forces. Abel’s preference in the eyes of God makes Cain the outsider in comparison. Cain’s violence comes from a building of resentment—Cain’s envy of Abel’s sacrificial outlet, his superior being, drives Cain to attack. Embedded in this myth is the connection between mimetic violence and sacrificial ritual. An important feature of this biblical myth is that it suggests that mimetic conflict leads to the unravelling of perceived personal differences. God represents social legitimacy, and the deconstruction of that social legitimacy reveals that Cain and Abel are effectively the same once social influences are removed. Girard reminds his reader that

Cain has “one characteristic trait: his lack of a sacrificial outlet” (4). Before the immoral act of fratricide, Cain is indistinguishable from Abel. Yet when social approval, in this case represented by God, chooses one brother as legitimate, the other must therefore be seen as illegitimate. This leads the illegitimate brother toward violence—Cain’s murder is prompted by his desire for the object of God’s love and approval, which has become epitomized in his brother. There are strong similarities between Cain and Abel’s sibling rivalry and that of True West’s brothers. Lee and Austin also form an opposition that is rooted in one brother’s envy of the perceived legitimacy of the other. Initially, Lee is the Cain-figure, and Austin is like Abel—Austin has the approval of Saul, and Abel the approval of God. In True West the brothers also oscillate between doubles and opposites, as in the myth of Cain and Abel. Lee, originally characterized as crass and uneducated, reveals a skillful 55 55 charisma in his ability to win over Saul. Austin, who in the first scene is sober and studious, mimics his brothers drinking and becomes aggressive, almost to the point of parody. In True West, God does not represent social legitimacy—rather, that role is taken by Saul, the Hollywood producer. Shepard seems to imply that in America, Hollywood determines the good guys and bad guys. For both brothers, their identities are rooted in socially perpetuated stereotypes, which hide the truth of their underlying similarity. Polyneices and Eteocles are a second relevant example of warring brothers in myth, and their story conveys how mimetic conflict escalates continuously. In Phoenician Women, Euripides describes the battle between the two brothers. Girard writes of the description: Polyneices loses his spear in the fight, and so does Eteocles. Both are wounded. Each blow upsets the equilibrium, threatening to decide the outcome then and there. It is immediately followed by a new blow that not only redresses the balance but creates a symmetrical disequilibrium that is

itself, naturally enough, of short duration. (Violence and the Sacred, 47) Perpetually, the battle continues. One brother gains power and threatens to end the conflict, but inevitably the other responds with perfect symmetry. Even at their death, the conflict fails to stop its escalation—instead it infects the community. Finally, it culminates in Antigone: Kreon’s refusal to grant burial rights to Polyneices (the brother who is not granted legitimacy by society) leads to Antigone’s rebellious act. After burying her brother, she must be executed. No side can win—the tragedy is not that one side commits injustice, but that no side can attain lasting power. The violence is doomed to continue. True West also exemplifies a crisis in which neither brother can gain enough lasting power to decisively end the conflict. In their attempts at retaliation they only erode social order, which in True West is represented by the destruction of their mother’s 56 56 home (in a sense, this action reveals that modern life is a façade and that the “true West” is a wasteland). Only at the play’s open can Austin be seen as legitimate. He is clearly the protagonist and by extension, the character that the audience empathizes with the most. Yet as circumstances change, Austin mimics his brother and repeats the very actions that, previously, made himself a victim. Austin taunts Lee: “I’m gonna’ go outside and I’m gonna’ steal a toaster. I’m gonna’ steal some other stuff too. I might even commit bigger crimes. Bigger than you ever dreamed of. Crimes beyond the imagination!” (39). Austin’s lines mirror Lee’s earlier threat to rob the neighborhood. However, unlike his brother Austin’s robbery is purposeless—an imitation that is pathetically humorous in its obvious futility. The balance of power shifts back and forth between the two, but each attack is inspired by a previous one, and the origin of these retaliations is lost. Near the end of the play when Austin is strangling Lee, he remarks that he is unable to actually kill him. This scene exemplifies the ceaselessness of mimetic conflict. It is important to consider why so many societies have created myths that involve two opposed brothers. Girard writes that “all victims, even the animal ones, bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace; otherwise the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied” (12). Substitution is central to rituals, which are rooted in sacrifice. Brothers hold a special resemblance, and that resemblance makes it easier for substitution to occur. In True West, Lee and Austin are, by their closeness as brothers, better able to weigh their own worth in relation to the other. Their resemblance suggests competition, and implies ritualized violence. On some level, both brothers perhaps sense that to achieve the personal meaning they crave, the other must die—one brother’s success only draws attention to the perceived inadequacy of the other. Unless one side of the conflict is eradicated, the pattern of competitive retaliation seems doomed to continue. Lee even argues that this tendency for family members to target each other for this kind of violence 57 57 is common: “You go down to the L.A. Police Department there and ask them what kinda’ people kill each other the most… Family people. Brothers” (24).

Shepard’s use of the mythic archetype of the warring brothers operates much the same as in ancient myths mentioned by Girard. However, critical responses to True West rarely seem to identify this connection, in which mimesis plays an essential part. If the brothers are like two rival groups in a cycle of revenge, it would follow that they might attempt a ritual to divert that violence. This ritual would be connected to the past—a mythic story of violence would surround it, and its success would re-establish order and meaning on a chaotic and disordered world.

When Ritual Fails One way to interpret True West is that its conflict builds into a moment of ritual, in which a sacrifice is symbolically suggested. This ritual takes place between scenes, and the audience must gather what insight they can from the scenes before and after it. This event also suggests the creation of myth, which is intended to conceal both the violence and fragile subjectivity of the social order. However, the play’s ritual fails, and American social myths are proven to be ineffectual at asserting order. True West’s ritual begins toward the end of the play at a point in which the constant back-and-forth of taunts and insults between the brothers threatens to erupt into physical violence. Shepard writes in stage direction: “LEE suddenly explodes and knocks the plate out of AUSTIN's hand, toast goes flying, long frozen moment where it appears LEE might go all the way this time… LEE begins to circle AUSTIN in a slow, predatory way… no words for a while, AUSTIN keeps gathering toast, even the crushed pieces” (49). In this moment that precedes the ritual, it seems that Lee will assault Austin, but instead he suggests one last attempt at displacing their mutual antagonism. Lee’s idea is to have Austin write Lee’s script while Lee dictates, and to spend all night crafting a script which can save both 58 58 brothers from impending failure. In return, Lee will take Austin to the desert, where he can supposedly live a truer existence outside of suburban America. The following scene takes place after the ritual event, and the audience observes the aftermath of a night-long vigil. Shepard describes the set: “the stage is ravaged; bottles, toasters, smashed typewriter, ripped out telephone, etc. All the debris from the previous scene is now starkly visible in intense yellow light, the effect should be like a desert junkyard at high noon, the coolness of the preceding scenes is totally obliterated” (50). Austin and Lee are continuing to write, and it seems that progress has been slow. Austin is writing by hand as Lee struggles to improvise a plot. Both brothers are drunk and covered in sweat; Lee is pouring beer on his exposed arms and chest to stay cool. The impression left on the audience is that the shared act of writing is the only thing keeping the brothers going. To relent would be to fall back into their earlier pattern of violence and antagonism. The brothers have participated in what Girard would call a mimetic crisis, and their attempt to write a movie script is the moment of ritual through which they might divert their violence. Yet unlike in Buried Child, this ritual does not reference an actual human sacrifice. Both brothers suddenly cease their efforts to outdo each other and direct their violent actions toward a scapegoat: in this case, the movie script. The script is not so much the sacrificed victim as it as a symbol that references the “ancient violence” of the old American West. A crucial point is that as the ritual process developed in various human cultures, the need to sacrifice a human life was diminished. Animal sacrifice can be seen as emerging from human sacrifice, and eventually this too was abandoned in favor of more symbolic sacrifices such as the burning of a ceremonial cloth. Acts like fasting, communal intoxication, or long periods without sleep can be interpreted as attempts by a community to recreate the circumstances of an original sacrifice. In True West, both brothers participate in a drunken vigil in which an act of violence is symbolically reenacted (in the form of a movie script) but not taken to the stage of 59 59 physical violence. The script, depicting a chase between two cowboys, is a mythic narrative that dramatizes the male conflict both brothers are currently experiencing. In doing so, it gives weight and purpose to a conflict that on some level, they know is meaningless. The effort by the brothers to translate their conflict into a script can be seen as an attempt to recover a lost past that holds the power to neutralize the current crisis. Lee’s story is a return to an idealized notion of the Old West: two cowboys chase each other across the desert. Lee describes that “What they don't know is that each one of ‘em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he’s the only one that's afraid. And they keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who's chasin’ doesn't know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn't know where he's going” (27). Lee’s story evokes a rugged individualism, in which the cowboy emerges as the paragon of masculinity and self-reliance. The conflict between the two cowboys, mirroring the battle between Austin and Lee, is a mythic imagining of their conflict. As Girard describes, myths produce order for ancient societies by taking senseless conflict and giving it ideological purpose. Girard writes that “the mythical narrative sometimes takes the form of a contest or game, a quasi-sportive or pugilistic event that evokes the rivalries inherent in the sacrificial crisis. Behind all these themes one can detect the outline of reciprocal violence” (Violence and the Sacred, 99). The chase between the two men of Lee’s story reflects the conflict between Austin and himself, but neutralizes it. In the context of the idealized West, their futile battle is given meaning—the brothers seem to reach for an end result (the success of their script) that could justify the means of their internal fighting. For them, the ritual, itself an act of creation, promises to create a new narrative for their lives that can end the ceaseless chaos of their current struggle. However, as with the ancient Greek tragedians, the 60 60 creative process makes them subliminally aware of the fabricated and arbitrary nature of the myth, even as they produce it.

Of course, the film they attempt to write could only ever be a distraction from the inconsistencies of modern American life—in modern American society, ritual has lost its power to impose meaning. Lee and Austin fail to finish their script, and Lee’s idea is revealed to be a meager cliché. In ancient societies, ritual led to the creation of myths, and these myths offered personal meaning to members of the society. Yet Shepard seems to imply here that the modern equivalent is cinema, which has become too formulaic and calculated to ever produce real meaning. After the ritual, the light of day shines over the wreckage of the home. The brothers, hungover and sleep-deprived, must inevitably confront that the failure of their script will inevitably result in the return of their conflict with each other. One can argue that Mom’s arrival in the final scene, and the embarrassed reaction of her sons, presents the possibility that she could settle the dispute, however she fails to do so. Girard argues that our society has no need to rely on ritual due to our justice system. He writes: “There is no difference of principle between private and public vengeance; but on the social level, the difference is enormous. Under the public system, an act of vengeance is no longer avenged; the process is terminated, the danger of escalation averted” (16). A functioning judicial system removes the threat of reciprocal violence by having a third-party arbitrate disputes. The unbiased nature of the judicial system makes revenge impossible. Mom potentially signals the arrival of a judicial force that could intervene. However, her character is “an archetype and a parody, a kind of satiric deus ex machina without the will or power to restore order to her world” (Kleb, 121). Shepard twists the expectation that order will be re-established. In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the arrival of a third party that could establish meaning never comes. In True West, Mom arrives physically, but is emotionally detached, 61 61 responding to the apparent ruin of her home and her family with nothing more than a noncommittal sigh. Her ramblings imply that her own feelings of alienation make it impossible for her to act as judge. Before her exit, we catch a glimpse of her personal failure to find purpose, which has made her so ineffective as arbiter of the dispute: “It was the worst feeling being up there. In Alaska. Staring out a window. I never felt so desperate before.” Austin asks her to stay. “This is your home.” She responds, “I don’t recognize it at all” (59). Without any stability of her own, she is incapable of exerting authority over her sons. Although the details of her voyage to Alaska are unclear, the audience can still sense that she has also failed to draw meaning from modern life. The failure of American social myths directly leads to the failure of True West’s ritual. That is, the characters of True West are unable to draw any substantial meaning from the myths they attempt to evoke because those myths only rise to the level of mere clichés. Lee’s script collapses, and his ideas only end up as echoes of what Austin calls “fantasies of a long lost boyhood” (40). This detachment is emblematic of society as a whole—films, rather than serving as shared myths that could unite a community, have become commercialized entertainment. Austin’s life, Lee’s life—the script fails to impose any spiritual structure that could make meaning out of either. As for Mom, she has returned home in order to attend a Picasso exhibit, where she believes she can meet the man himself. Yet her sons uncomfortably remind her that Picasso is dead. This strange mention of Picasso is possibly Shepard’s own reflection on the lost ability of art to create meaning in an increasingly detached and barren American culture. In the final lines of direction, Shepard writes of “a vast desert-like landscape” (59). A coyote can be heard howling in the distance. The desert serves as a fitting symbol—the conflict between the brothers is empty, and equally empty is myth’s power to conceal American society’s failure to prevent the spiritual and emotional disintegration of True West’s family. 62 62 Conclusions This chapter provides a reading of True West in which the play’s central conflict is understood as a mimetic conflict within two brothers, a family and, by extension, an entire society. Through the lens of Girard’s ideas concerning mimetic conflict, we can perceive of the play’s connection with ancient tragedies and also its role in untangling myth’s connection to social cohesion. Arguably, psychological conflict should not be separated from the social conflict that frames it. The battle between the two brothers is more than a battle between two warring parts of one self—it also extends outward to the society that produced this conflict. Their conflict oscillates back and forth—that instability becomes representative of a society that has lost its ability to provide its citizens with meaningful roles. Using this perspective, the purpose of the failed script- writing scene becomes much clearer. Myth in True West is shown to have become completely sterile. Americans may realize that the past has no answers—that societal myths, such as the rugged individualism of the Old West, are now only useful in making films for cheap entertainment. Shepard seems to propose that as Americans recognize the emptiness of these myths, no ritual will be able to succeed in holding society together. Throughout True West, both brothers cling to opposing myths that have also become indistinguishable in their futility. This perhaps represents an ongoing crisis in the 70s over the fate of American culture. Austin fails to gain any sense of purpose from his American dream: his family, his job, or his money. He screams at Saul: “I drive on the freeway every day. I swallow the smog. I watch the news in color. I shop in the Safeway. I’m the one who’s in touch!” (35). For Austin, the price of being “in touch” seems to be a heavy alienation, given the sterility of American social myths. Yet escape from his middle-class, suburban lifestyle only leads to a different kind of desert. Perhaps Shepard’s audience could relate to this catch-22—modern American life may be alienating, but outside of it is the lonely life embodied in Lee, whose own idealized view 63 63 of the suburbs is that it is “Like a paradise. Kinda’ place that sorta’ kills ya’ inside” (12). Both brothers can never successfully claim purpose and meaning, because they seek it in tired social myths. Ultimately, the masculine fantasy of a more spiritually fulfilling life in the Old West is collapsed and shown to be just as futile as life in the suburban new West. Recognizing this fact is not deliverance from the problem of collapsed meaning, and Shepard implies that he himself cannot perceive of a solution. A deeper understanding of the presence of ritual and myth in True West uncovers new readings of the play that detail its relevance to a post-modern future. Myths of family and myths of independence from family—both are shown to be ineffectual at asserting order. Girard’s own fears were of a coming age in which “legitimacy as a principle no longer exists” (Violence and the Sacred, 25). True West shares this grim fascination with the chaos that emerges when agreed-upon truths are exposed as subjective. The events of the Vietnam War increased public awareness in Shepard’s time of the American government’s role in unnecessary acts of violence, all in the name of maintaining an increasingly alienated society. Yet True West identifies the flaws in both the current status quo, and in the family violence that often emerge when social myths are undermined. Today, it can be argued that this uncomfortable public awareness has only increased since the Vietnam War. American citizens often seem able to identify the hypocrisies and injustices woven into the fabric of their society, but may deem these sacrifices necessary for their society to thrive. Perhaps any ideological framework will suffice, as long as it is perceived to hold back the “vast, desert-like landscape” of post- modern uncertainty. CHAPTER 4: THESIS CONCLUSION

The two plays that I’ve examined, Buried Child and its successor True West, have long been understood to disrupt the myths that permeate American culture. However, as I have demonstrated, this is not the extent of their impact. They also work to confront the violence behind these myths. Through the lens of ritual, we can recognize that Shepard’s plays contain moments of violence that, rather than disrupt social cohesion, attempt to solidify it. In these moments, characters reach to the past for answers. What they find is only more proof of the violence necessary to preserve order. In my analysis of the rituals that occur in both plays, I conveyed that True West has a failed ritual, whereas Buried Child’s ritual is initially a success. Of course, neither play offers a satisfying resolution for the audience. The child in Buried Child, whose existence was clouded in myth, suddenly is brought onto the stage. The audience is shocked into an appreciation of the acts of sacrifice that are often deemed necessary to preserve normalcy. Although these plays are often characterized as ambiguous, interpreting the plays from the ritualistic perspective suggests that Shepard’s family plays are increasingly focused on the cycles of violence that are interwoven with society’s function. In grappling with this problem, his plays both reflect the anxieties of the late 70s and also push his audience to encounter the same dilemma in the world around them. Although Shepard’s work is often labeled “ritualistic,” the method by which ritual functions in these two plays has not been fully described in past criticism. Shepard most likely was not aware of Girard’s work, and yet sacrifice and its connection with the American family seems to be one of the major focal points of Shepard’s artistic career. Shepard’s plays are not only about ritual; they are ritualistic in themselves. To be more precise, they are similar to rituals in that both replicate the circumstances of a violent crisis. Literature often offers a safe way to interact with uncomfortable themes and ideas. 65 65

It is all too easy to forget that these are works of theatre, to be performed on the stage. Greek tragedies were cathartic experiences for the audience, in which they could strive to confront the truth of social violence not just intellectually but emotionally. Shepard’s plays work in a similar way. Through the visceral experience of attending a Shepard production, audiences can vicariously observe both the escalating crisis and the rituals that aim to diffuse them. Although these plays are works of fiction, the theatrical experience they offer was important to Shepard’s time. Audiences living in a period of social disillusionment could confront the realities of violence hiding behind increasingly hollow social ideals. Shepard may not be able to conceive of a world free from the cyclical pattern of violence, but his work can still be seen as an attempt to confront it with the hope of overcoming it. Art often works as myth—stories we tell ourselves to construct a sense of identity. In ancient societies, art was crucial to social cohesion. It made unities out of contradictions, and masked uncomfortable truths. Shepard’s plays can be seen as anti- myths: they depict a concealed violence that becomes unwound and is ultimately exposed. Rather than moving from conflict to hegemonic normalcy, his plays move in the other direction. Instead of reaffirming social identity, his plays unravel it. The audience may realize that the crises of Shepard’s plays are not mere entertainment—they reference a real human process of violence, and a lived experience of intense disillusionment. In both plays, Shepard’s endings leave the question of the future open, although his vision of it is darkly foreboding. The “vast, desert-like landscape” at True West’s end suggests that the writer himself sees no clear future. Just as the characters are locked in conflict, Shepard himself seems locked in a personal struggle between the chaos that emerges when social cohesion collapses, and the social cohesion itself which is predicated on sacrifice. This is also a struggle for personal identity—Shepard, ever the rebellious artist, found himself returning again and again to the social myths he once 66 66 sought to escape, searching for answers. Commonly dressing as a cowboy, Shepard seemed to cling to his past, even with its flaws. Possibly, Shepard recognized the problematic nature of the meaning-making structures on which he grew up, yet felt powerless to let them go. Today, the dilemma of Buried Child and True West certainly persists in American society. Various injustices may appear increasingly inseparable from the continued cohesion of modern society—human rights abuses, persecutions, unnecessary wars. Shepard’s continued influence on American cultural thought lies in his questioning of the assumption that these injustices are a sacrifice worth making.

CHAPTER 5: CODA

The initial spark to my thesis was Sam Shepard’s recent death (July, 2017). Shepard had been a favorite playwright of mine since high school—I performed in his A Lie of the Mind as a teenager, and the play impacted me heavily with its intense, powerful images. In a graduate class on ancient myth, I couldn’t help but remember Shepard and his recurring use of mythic elements in his work. His last play A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) had just been performed by CSU Fresno’s theatre department in 2017. After watching it, I realized that Greek tragedy had been a strong influence on Shepard’s career—perhaps more so than critics of Shepard often described. In the class on myth, we studied Rene Girard and I was captivated by his arguments related to myth. I saw a connection, and decided to investigate how Shepard seemed to follow the path of Greek tragedians. It seemed to me that just as the ancient Greek writers were beginning to deconstruct the dominant myths of their society, Shepard was attempting to do the same. This was the most extensive research process of my academic career. Scholarly writing is often extremely diverse, even when focusing on one author. I found plenty that was interesting, but many articles were only loosely related to the play’s thematic connection with family roles or myth. I ultimately found some dusty compilations of literary criticism on Shepard’s work in the library archives on campus, and those were extremely helpful. I could easily look to the table of contents, and find the writings that were specifically related to Buried Child and True West. However, by the end of the process I was familiar with the books cover-to-cover. A comment by one of my thesis committee members stands out to me: “Working on a thesis, you have to do a lot of reading and most of it won’t end up being used in the final product”. I have realized how crucial it is to be a constant reader if one intends to be a strong scholar. Even writings that are indirectly related to your topic provide essential context. 68 68

In terms of my writing process, I had to adjust to the unique expectations of a thesis project. Although I had come to feel confident with the lengthy term papers I had been writing throughout the graduate program, this project was an entirely new genre in many ways. Specifically, I had to describe the critical discourse for two separate plays. Another challenge was uniting the two distinct chapters—contextualizing them both with the thesis introduction, yet also differentiating them enough so that they functioned individually. This led to many rewrites—however, I’m satisfied with the result. I believe the thesis shows the shared connection between the two plays in regard to ritual sacrifice, but also uses different tactics to achieve this. Writing the True West chapter, I enjoyed being able to take a different approach and to bring in comparisons to specific myths. I feel more prepared for further research, in which I will assuredly have to continue uniting diverse works and authors into a whole. Looking ahead, I feel that my writing has become sharper, and that I’m more prepared for the rigorous demands of achieving a doctorate degree. Critical writing at the highest academic level is not simply a matter of being a capable writer—it requires practice with a genre of writing that the vast majority of students have never experienced. Aspects of the thesis process were painful to be sure, but I realize now that there is no other way to learn a new genre of writing than to allow oneself to make mistakes and learn from them. Also, the support of my committee was crucial to my success. Although the analytical aspect of the project came naturally to me, I was completely directionless and adrift without the guiding light of their experience and wisdom. One of the hardest parts of the writing process was realizing that after sinking countless hours into my work, the project was largely unread up to that point. I wondered if any of it would make sense to an outside reader—unlike with shorter projects, no one outside of my committee had the context or wherewithal to give me any meaningful response. I dreaded the possibility 69 69 that my committee would unanimously agree that my work was simply the ramblings of the insane. However, this was thankfully not the case.

I believe that the research I’ve done is unique and significant to existing scholarship on Shepard. There is still more work that could be done to examine how Shepard’s plays deconstruct social myths and convey the struggle for meaning in a post- modern society. Ritualized persecution is just one piece of a larger puzzle—Shepard’s plays present identity as a fascinating tangle of influences. One’s nation, community, family, and personal experiences all weave together to form a person’s sense of self. Untangling this knot of meanings could be essential to American society, as it confronts the uncomfortable truth of its own past injustices and its continuing hypocrisies. I would like to continue with this line of thought in future research—to personally confront my own prejudices and assumptions, and to encourage those around me to do the same.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED

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