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Tennessee Williams' Kind of Theater TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ KIND OF THEATER: SIGNATURE AND BIOGRAPHY By NICHOLAS OSBORNE PAGAN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1 989 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LISRURIffH Copyright 1989 by Nicholas Osborne Pagan ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am greatly indebted to my mother, my two brothers, and Keitha Wakefield because in 1977 they encouraged me to pursue a BA in humanities and provided me with much-needed emotional and financial support. I am also greatly indebted to Stanley Cook, Steve Evans, Stuart Linney, and Hugh Robertson, all of whom taught at the Polytechnic, Huddersfield, where I began to attend English and philosophy classes. Here at the University of Florida several friends, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, have greatly contributed to the development of this dissertation. In particular, I must thank Jesus Mejia, and also William Jernigan and Harvey Molloy. I would also like to thank the members of my supervisory committee: Sidney Homan, John P. Leavey, Jr., Anne Jones, John Seel ye (replaced because of a summer absence by A. Carl Bredahl), and Sheila Dickison. Here Sidney Homan and John Leavey deserve special mention. I am deeply indebted to Sid, my director, because of his boundless enthusiasm for the project and his unflinching faith in my ability to carry it out. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to John who in reading the various drafts, was able to combine a meticulous attention to detail with a concern for i i i the broader issues, forcing me to question my assumptions and be more rigorous. John’s intellectual acumen and genuine concern were particularly gratifying during the times when I was becoming complacent, despondent, or both. TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i i i ABBREVIATIONS vi ABSTRACT vi 1 i INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTERS 1 METADRAMA AND THE PLAY OF SELF-REFERENCE 12 Poker-p 1 ay l ng 22 Magic 39 Glass and Mirrors 49 The Body and Cruising 65 Carnival and the Audience 76 The Playwright’s Signature 83 2 WILLIAMS, ORPHEUS, AND INTERTEXTUALITY 106 Into and Out of Battle of Angels : Allusion is Everywhere 113 Orphic Music: The Blues 124 Blanche Dubois: Conjuring with a Name 140 Blanche, Williams, and Orpheus: The Problem of the Signature 144 3 METALANGUAGE AND THE NAMING OF DESIRE 164 The Beginning of Streetcar : A Metalinguistic Scene 169 Skipping Back to Conjuring with a Name: From Metalanguage to Sexuality 178 "Lies, lies, inside and out, all lies": The Veracity of the Message 195 Filling in the Blank Space: Blanche’s Articulation of Feminine Des i re . 203 bl versus st 222 postscript 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 260 v e ABBREVIATIONS FOR TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ TEXTS 1 AB American Blues: Five Short Plays BA Battle of Angels CAT Cat on a Hot Tin Roof OR Camino Real CS Collected Stories GM The Glass Menagerie FK The Fugitive Kind IWC In The Winter of Cities: Poems MS Memoi rs MW Moise and the World of Reason N I The Night of the Iguana OD Orpheus Descending RT The Rose Tattoo SLS Suddenly Last Summer SND A Streetcar Named Desire SBY Sweet Bird of Youth ’The editions used are those listed in the bibliography. Page numbers for Orpheus Descending correspond to the Signet edition of the play contained in Four Plays . In the dissertation, I follow Tennessee Williams’ predilection for referring to The Glass Menagerie as simply Menager i and A Streetcar Named Desire as Streetcar . vi SS Summer and Smoke 27W 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One Act Plays WL Where I Live: Selected Essays YTM You Touched Me vi i " Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ KIND OF THEATER: SIGNATURE AND BIOGRAPHY By Nicholas Osborne Pagan August, 1989 Chairman: Sidney Homan Major Department: English One day, while packing, Tennessee Williams and his friend Dotson Rader found themselves looking through college textbooks. Finding the names of his plays listed in the indexes, Williams declared gleefully, “They study me in universities all over America." Devastated so many times by merciless critical reviews, he wondered about "a whole new generation . As a member of this "new generation," I decided that I would not try to judge Tennessee Williams’ theater, and I would certainly not attack Tennessee Williams. Instead, I decided that I would ask, what is the theater that the critics attacked? Who is the Tennessee Williams whom the critics attacked? And, above all, what is the relationship between the man and his work? To help me to answer these questions I employ a term popular among the "new generation" of critical theorists, the vi i i signature. In trying to define "Tennessee Williams’ Kind of Theater," at the same time, I attempt to find his signature. In chapter one, I explore various notions of theater that are contained within Williams’ texts. I, then, speculate about the relationship between these notions and Tennessee Willi ams ’ life. In chapter two, I explore the relationship, not only between one Williams’ text and another, but also the relationship between Williams’ texts and the texts of other writers. I suggest that there is an Orphic thread running through Williams’ texts which weaves itself into his life. In chapter three, using a model produced by Keir Elam, I attempt a metalinguistic analysis of the opening scene of Streetcar, before moving on to questions of sexuality and desire. Finally, relying on ideas developed by Jacques Derrida, I suggest that pieces of Williams’ signature may be scattered throughout his work. In considering phonic or graphic signifiers, I find a stylistic signature that explodes across the page. I conclude by saying that the relationship between a writer and his texts is far more intricate than we may usually think. Indeed, the whole question of biography has to be rethought. After he dressed, I helped him pack. He asked me if I wanted the college textbooks with his plays inside. He very proudly showed me the books, opening them to their indexes, reading out the names of his plays. "They study me in universities all over America," he told me, "they do, baby. I don’t think you knew that." I told him I had studied his plays at Columbia. "There, too?" he smiled, pleased. "You see I am not finished yet. The critics can attack me but a whole new ?" generation . He shrugged. — Rader INTRODUCTION [T] he writer writes j_n a language and ±n a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce . — Derr i da Thinking of my dissertation, I once wrote, "My task is not to judge this theater — to say whether it is good or bad- -nor is it to assess the merit of this playwright in comparison to other playwrights. My task is to attempt to examine some of the forces at work that may account for the particular power of Tennessee Williams kind of theater." Before beginning to write the dissertation I began to fear that having completed reading the yet-to-be-written dissertation, readers would ask themselves questions like, "Is Mr. Pagan saying anything about Tennessee Williams particular kind of theater?" or "Couldn’t what he says apply to any theater?" or even, "Is he talking about theater at all?" One reason for these fears was that I had already decided that my focus would be Tennessee Williams written texts, and, 2 s, 3 throughout the dissertation, I would pay as close attention as possible to the language of those texts. The rationale for such an approach could be found in the renewed emphasis on linguistic matters in contemporary theory outside theater studies. Here, I was thinking of the whole philosophical tradition that runs through Nietzsche and Saussure to Derrida, de Man, J. Hi 11 is Miller and others. In the introduction to . i 1 1 i The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens , J H Miller, for example, makes it clear that the "object" he is examining is "made of language" (xix) and he tries to use an art advocated by Nietzsche, an art which involves "connoi sseursh i p of the word," reading slowly, and reading "deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservati ons with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers." Because I thought that I would be studying Tennessee Williams drama— the drama that is written and read — I thought that what I had to say might have nothing to do with what took place in the theater. This fear was based on the supposition that written text and performance text were separate entities. 1 Then, in Keir Elam’s book, The Semiotics of ’The notion that they are not only separate, but that one is superior to the other dates back at least as far as Andr6 Gide who in 1904 argued that "whilst dramatic works live only potentially in books," they "live completely on the stage" ("The Evolution of the Theater" 260). In his article on “Theater" in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics .
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