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Completeness and Closure in the Plays of Sam Shepard

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Completeness and Closure in the Plays of Sam Shepard ABSTRACT Title of Document: ENDING AND “COPPING OUT”: COMPLETENESS AND CLOSURE IN THE PLAYS OF SAM SHEPARD Joseph Dennis Couch, Ph.D., 2006 Directed By: Professor Brian Richardson and Professor Peter Mallios, Department of English Th is dissertation analyzes the interpretive dilemmas arising from treatments of completeness and closure in Sam Shepard’s plays, an undertaking that raises two key questions about its own academic exigence. Shepard’s plays expand the discourse on closure by providing dramatic texts to which the terms “the open work,” “the sense of ending,” “anti -closure,” and the reading of texts in socio -political contexts can apply. More significantly, Shepard’s theory of closure as a “cop-out” to resolution complicates the previous discourse on closure with texts that complementarily deny formal and thematic closure in ways that previous critics do not explore. The “unloosened ends,” specifically, that each ending does not resolve not only draw attention to the unresolved status of an American socio -political theme but actually implicate the audience in the larger and false cultural assumption that the theme was closed before the start of the play and now need the audience’s help offstage and therefore outside the boundar ies of the text to resolve the issue. In terms of categories within the context of closure in drama, Shepard’s endings combine Schmidt’s categories of “unmediated” and “ironic” as a reflection of their thematic implication of the collective American audie nce’s “cop-out” regarding the assumed closed discourse on a socio -political issue. Additionally, the endings “frustrate” the audience’s expectations for closure thematically and formally even when they provide a moment of “cessation” in Schlueter’s terms. The reason lies in the fact that the “consensus” required from the audience, as Schmidt claims, relies on the audience to close the work by closing the discourse on the issue that the endings suggest that the audience should recognize as open and unresolved. The issues of fate, home, family, and memory cannot truly reach a moment of cessation, Shepard’s interrogations of closure reveal, until the audience makes the discourse cease by not “copping-out” to the false sense of closure that America’s conventional society, both on and offstage, provides. ENDING AND “COPPING OUT”: COMPLETENESS AND CLOSURE IN THE PLAYS OF SAM SHEPARD By Joseph Dennis Couch Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor Brian Richardson, Chair Professor Peter Mallios Professor Jackson Bryer Professor Do n Kleine Professor Heather Nathans © Copyright by Joseph Dennis Couch 2006 Preface This dissertation analyzes the interpretive dilemmas arising from treatments of completeness and closure in Sam Shepard’s plays, an undertaking that raises two key questions about its own academic exigence. One question concerns the import of a study of closure, which already has a rich critical discourse, and the closely related term, completeness. In addition, this study r aises the question as to why the plays of Sam Shepard, who has drawn significant critical attention, should provide the primary texts in a study of closure. To answer these questions, a review of the discourse on closure, including the emergence of dramat ic literature in it, and of the significance of Shepard’s plays reveals Shepard to be the ideal author to advance the critical discourse. Contemporary criticism of closure begins with Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (1962; first published in English in 1989) and Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), two works with broad theoretical scopes that focus largely on implications for the novel. Eco focuses on what he terms “a work in movement” with an incomplete endin g that chance and, more often, the reader must close and complete (12). Centered on the recurring cultural theme of fin de siècle , Kermode argues that modern literature shares the sense of the Apocalypse that pervades works from earlier periods but “in te rms of crisis rather than temporal ends.” Therefore, for Kermode, “the End itself,” so often the place where works provide a sense of closure, “in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic -and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent” (30). ii In essence, Kermode argues that a sense of closure in modern literature, if any, arises from an “immanent” or subjective reading of a narrative rather than a temporal - reliant progression towards an objective finality. In these two seminal studies, then, Eco and Kermode focus on the reader’s interpretive strategies for works that deny a sense of closure, an approach that lays the groundwork for all future studies of closure, albeit indirect ly in relation to closure and Shepard. Without focus on the dramatic text, Eco and Kermode can only provide a starting point in the discourse for this dissertation. Similarly, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (1968) begins some key interrogations of closure that lay the foundations of the critical discourse. Herrnstein Smith takes a text -based approach to examine the strategies for closure in lyrical poetry. Two important sets of terms from Herrnstein Smith’s work are paratactic/non-paratactic structures and anti -closure and “the click.” The former refers to a poem whose coherence and sense of closure do not arise from “the sequential arrangement of its major thematic units” (99). By contrast, non-paratactic struct ure defines a work in which “the dislocation of or omission of any element will tend to make the sequence as a whole incomprehensible, or will radically change its effect” (99). With this distinction between poetic structures that relies either on formal or thematic elements to achieve a sense of closure, Herrnstein Smith analyzes poems that fail to achieve closure and poems that achieve “anti -closure.” That is, these poems “reflect a general preference for, and deliberate cultivation of, the expressive qualities of weak closure” (237; emphasis in original). Thus “even when the poem is firmly closed, it is not entirely slammed shut—the lock may be secure, but the ‘click’ has been muffled” iii (237). For Herrnstein Smith, the “click” metaphorically represents an ending that provides a moment of cessation and closes the potential for a poem’s progression. Particularly found in modern poetry, Herrnstein Smith identifies anti- closure as often occurring “where structural features that mark the work as a verbal artifact —rather than a direct transcription of personal utterance —are avoided” (238). Anti -closure occurs in poems that rely on a mimesis of “personal utterance” rather than poetic form so as a not to provide the “click” or formally recognizable ending to a poem because such a device does not exist in non-poetic, personal speech. This emphasis on problematically “open” works continues Eco’s and Kermode’s interrogations of closure. In addition, the work’s focus on lyric poetry that relies on (most often) a single speaker rather than a narrative for form makes the work seminal to the critical discourse on closure but tangential to this study. In terms of both critical approach and literary genre, Herrnstein Smith’s study contrasts starkly with David H. Richter’s Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction (1974). Richter analyzes idea - or thesis -driven works with a clear distinction between the terms “completeness” and “closure.” For Richter, “completeness” occurs “in the sense of recounting a completed process of change, either in external circumstances or internal consciousness, taking place in the protagonists” (vii). To define the “mutually related” term closure, Richter paraphrases Kermode and defines closure as a moment when a text signals a sense of an ending after which continuation is either irrelevant or begins a sequel to the text (viii). Due to the clarity and conciseness of Richter’s terms “completeness” and “closure,” they provide the working iv terms for this study here, albeit in a text -based approach without entering into reader - response theory and the discourse on the open -work debate. 1 Specifically, “completeness” in this dissertation, as in Richter’s study, means the completion of change either within characters or thei r circumstances —a distinction between character - or plot -based completeness although the two also remain inextricable. Also as in Richter, “closure” in this study refers to a textual signal that continuation is either irrelevant or begins a new text, albeit two key differences exist here. The first difference involves the prioritizing of the terms completeness and closure. For Richter, closure remains secondary to completeness in his study because his focus is on the novel, rather than Hernstein Smith’s focus on poetry (ix). By contrast, this dissertation complementarily uses both terms because plays rely on the formalities of narrative and speech. Another distinction lies in how a play thematically and formally signals closure differently from a novel, which means that the devices for closure interrogated here often formally differ from Richter’s study. Thus Richter’s terms provide a concise starting point but require this reworking and shifting of focus in order to apply to a study of closure in drama . Mariana Torgovnick’s Closure in the Novel(1981) represents another important work that interrogates the role of endings in a narrative that provide or do not provide a sense of closure. Torgovnick catalogs a whole series of narrative strategies such as circularity, parallelism, incompletion, and linkage, all of which lead to one of two “viewpoints” at the novel’s end. One such ending provides an overview, often with a 1 See Ricther’s first chapter, “Open Form and the Fable,” where he interrogates the “’open form,’ which is typical of much of twentieth -century fiction […] has as its principal characteristic the ‘open end’” (1).
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