Writing Wrongs

Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn, by W.D. King. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. ISBN 1566395178

Afterthoughts

W. Davies King contacted me a while ago and graciously took exception to several of my remarks. He made some good points, but I'll leave the piece as it is, with a few clarifications:

• The "Balducci's" metaphor was indeed used by Shawn to refer to his early plays, which he says "just sort of happened." I still think King makes slightly too much of this, although when I used the word "undergraduate" it wasn't to say that he writes like one; rather, I think there's a natural impulse to lean on that kind of device, and the only critical writing I've ever done (besides this) happened to be in college.

• By "seriously engaged with the mainstream" I did not mean that Shawn's work is non-fringe or tourist-friendly; as King reminded me, "It's hard to imagine his picture hanging in Sardi's." But I think by now it's safe to call O'Neill, Beckett, et al. part of the mainstream as writers see it, if not for the general public. My point was just that Shawn is both widely read and versatile, and does not stand apart from all dramatic traditions as King seemed to assert.

• On My Dinner with Andre: "I think you miss about 60% of the irony of that work, while I myself miss only 40%". This is certainly possible, and I know Shawn is playing Wally in the movie, not literally himself. I doubt he was being ironic in his introduction to the book, though.

• On The Designated Mourner, King feels I am "wrong to be so sure of the political alignments in a work that is meant to be more ambiguous." I agree that there's ambiguity galore in the play—and I think it says something about our national assumptions that, when given such a fragmented account of events, what King (and many other critics) saw between the lines was a communist coup. That is what the narrator describes in The Fever, so maybe the critics were still stuck on that play. But in Mourner, one of the few things Jack tells us clearly is that people are being locked up and killed for having been dissidents in the past, not for being elitists or enemies of a new regime; in Howard's case it's because he wrote sympathetically about the rebels. It's worth repeating that the inquisition in Fever takes place in a paranoid dream—Shawn is not literally saying that communists are seizing power and abusing a middle-class tourist and that they have the story of his life in a little book; but the narrator has convinced himself that that's the only possible alternative to things as they are. Having been so focused on that kind of psychology and its political consequences in Fever and Aunt Dan, it would be very odd if, in Mourner, Shawn were suddenly more interested in writing a cautionary tale about Stalin.

This is a fascinating and essential book for anyone who cares about Wallace Shawn's plays. It's also a frustrating showcase of the kind of criticism that makes me break out in hives.

As a partial biography, not so much of the writer as an individual but of his self-created voice (his family, other personal relationships and non-theater work are only briefly touched on), the book is vivid and perceptive. The early works that are now unavailable to most readers are described in loving detail, often with a hilarious contrast between the scabrous material being described and King's poker-faced style. In the later plays that I'm familiar with, the critic's summaries and his choice of key points are fairly astute (with one major exception, The Designated Mourner: see below). But the commentary by Shawn and his past collaborators and critics is what really shines, making it clear that these radical plays did not fall out of the sky but were hammered together by a restless mind looking for an identity as a writer—and reminding us that playwrights and directors don't just float around in an intellectual haze, but actually put things on stage for audiences and learn from each other. The sections on Shawn's translation of Machiavelli's The Mandrake and on the first production of Marie and Bruce are particularly illuminating in this way, discussing how the experience of the productions fed back into the writing, and suggesting some real-life parallels to Shawn's work in the lives of Andre Gregory and Machiavelli himself.

But when King steps away from the events and the people, and speaks on his own to tell us what it all means, he often falls into a habit that's very familiar to me, because I did it every time I tried to write like an academic as an undergraduate: throw a lot of metaphors against the wall and see what sticks—and if it sticks pretty well the first time, keep it as a controlling metaphor and come back to it at every opportunity. The first of these is an admittedly great New Yorker cartoon called "Falling Over"; King combines this with a Shawn remark about someone slipping on the street while walking to Balducci's (as an example of an inconsequential event), and "falling down on the way to Balducci's" becomes a recurring image in the book. The culture of New York gentry is certainly a large presence in Shawn's work, but it's not clear what this image means for King, besides an association of spiritual distress and material comfort that could be applied to any number of other writers.

The second metaphor to be overworked, if not tortured, is in the title. For those familiar with Shawn's political concerns, you might think King is talking about social wrongs, but he's after a slippier fish: describing one of Shawn's early, unfocused pieces, he says that "By the inherited rules of a certain dramaturgy... [it] is written wrong.... it writes wrongs. It is the inscription of what should not be a play..." And although he admits that the play in question has little in common with Shawn's later work, King continues to describe the rest as "anti-theater"—which seems careless to me, suggesting and not addressing questions like what King thinks theater is, what Shawn actually thinks about "the inherited rules", and what distinguishes him from or places him with other avant-garde writers.

Early in the first chapter, King acknowledges Shawn's obvious roots in Absurdism and other movements in 20th century drama; but then he dismisses this connection rather arbitrarily by saying that unlike "O'Neill and the others", Shawn "continually defuses the affect" and "approaches a negation of the theater itself". To get the full silliness of this statement, you have to look earlier in the paragraph to see who are the "others" that King is lumping in with Eugene O'Neill: they include Chekhov, Beckett, Ionesco, and Kafka! Only a critic with very narrow interests could say that these are all similar (apparently because they're all "modernists"); and King seems more or less oblivious to any experimental theater after 1960, while Shawn has been seriously engaged—as actor, writer, and translator—with both the mainstream and the fringe throughout his career. To set him apart from all influences as a messianic rebel is not helpful.

The widespread tendency to praise an artist for simply "interrogating" or "exploring" something, especially if that something is the art form itself—rather than for the particular insights obtained—is a special pet peeve or allergen for me, so I may be overreacting; but I can't help seeing this kind of criticism as a desire to have it both ways, to take all your favorite moments from a long and constantly evolving career and say they were all part of a master plan, even when they contradict each other. Thus, when Andre in My Dinner with Andre confronts Shawn with a harsh critique of his early plays, suggesting that an enactment of distilled emotional violence might just be "helping to deaden the audience"—and when Shawn, in his own introduction, describes his own desire to escape from aspects of his previous work—King calls this an "interrogation" of the writer's "textual assumptions", and thus a sign that Shawn knew what he was doing all along and has always avoided the danger of "deadening". In other words, to the critic, it is inconceivable (sorry) that Shawn has ever had reason to change his approach deliberately, even if the man himself has said so. (King isn't always that obtuse; later, in Chapter 5, he acknowledges that young and passionate writers may have a few things to learn.)

The last chapter is a discussion of The Designated Mourner. King had only recently read the play, which was still unproduced at that time, and it shows. The analysis mostly just emphasizes points that are already made clearly in the play, and—more irritating to me, although many critics have done this—the plot summary gets the actual events of the play wrong in a way that seriously changes the meaning: King thinks that the murderous oppressors are part of "the people's revolution against the estate holders". I hate to have to spell this out, but this play is not about a Communist revolution gone wrong; it's about the kind of thing that happened (for instance) throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, where an authoritarian capitalist regime turned even worse while trying to stamp out the greatly exaggerated threat of a Communist uprising. The main character doesn't quite understand the difference, but he's an idiot and half insane; the critics have less of an excuse.

Fortunately, the book doesn't end on that note: the appendix reprints a fine interview by Mark Strand from 1989, and the endnotes are meaty and worthwhile. I recommend it, along with some critical antihistamines.