Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Born injured
- 2 Shepard and Off-Off-Broadway
- 3 Shepard on Shepard
- 4 A note on Sam Shepard
- 5 Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard in collaboration
- 6 Repetition and regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child
- 7 Shepard writes about writing
- 8 Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind
- 9 Patriarchal pathology from The Holy Ghostly to Silent Tongue
- 10 The classic Western and Sam Shepard’s family sagas
- 11 European textures
- 12 Sam Shepard and the cinema
- 13 Sam Shepard as musical experimenter
- 14 Sam Shepard’s nondramatic works
- 15 States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela
- 16 Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss
- 17 Sam Shepard
- Select bibliography
- Index
8 - Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Born injured
- 2 Shepard and Off-Off-Broadway
- 3 Shepard on Shepard
- 4 A note on Sam Shepard
- 5 Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard in collaboration
- 6 Repetition and regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child
- 7 Shepard writes about writing
- 8 Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind
- 9 Patriarchal pathology from The Holy Ghostly to Silent Tongue
- 10 The classic Western and Sam Shepard’s family sagas
- 11 European textures
- 12 Sam Shepard and the cinema
- 13 Sam Shepard as musical experimenter
- 14 Sam Shepard’s nondramatic works
- 15 States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela
- 16 Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss
- 17 Sam Shepard
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
We are not merely more weary
because of yesterday, we are other, no
longer what were we before the calamity of yesterday.
samuel beckett, ProustWe are not merely more weary / because of yesterday, we are other, no / longer what were we before the calamity of yesterday. / Samuel Beckett, Proust As James Knowlson and John Pilling observe in Frescoes of the Skull, “the past will not be treated as if it were a butterfly to be caught in a net . . . For once the attempt has been made to capture it in words, the memory of 'that time' simply melts away, or changes its shape and its nature, or again is transformed by another and rather different 'that time.'” Two Sam Shepard family-themed plays written in the 1980s, True West (1980) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), in particular, are flooded with references to the past which characters attempt to capture but which “changes its shape and its nature,” eluding individual or collaborative efforts to recall and fix familial and cultural history.
Shepard’s recent fascination with the past reflects not only the influence of Samuel Beckett, whose work is similarly colored by memory, but also the impact of the playwright’s personal experience, loss, and middle age. Speaking with Stephanie Coen he remarked, “The past is a memory. I mean, what is the past? Of course, as you grow older, the past looms a lot larger . . . [N]ow it becomes important to me to understand the way my stuff is interconnected, the way it’s the result of the past. I’m beginning to understand that I’m the direct product of something that’s wild and woolly.”
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard , pp. 139 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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