Alternate Tracks

In 1998, when rock musician Bruce Springsteen released his boxed set, Tracks, he offered up the previously unreleased songs and recorded materials as “an alternate route to some of the destinations” his career as an artist had taken him. Springsteen's words remind one that as an artist amasses a body of work and acquires a lasting artistic identity, critics and the public may view him in an increasingly narrow light. Consequently, the artist sometimes steers, or is perceived as steering, a straighter and straighter course, ceasing to explore the side roads, the alternate tracks, of his personal and artistic interests. As the character Hoss says in Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime: the artist becomes “stuck in [his] image” and can no longer, as Crow says in that same play, “[run] flat out to a new course.”

Gathering together some of the marginalia of playwright Sam Shepard’s career, the material that has been pushed to the perimeter of his public image to make way for “the Shepard myth,” there arises an alternate route through that career which has all but disappeared from critical perceptions of Shepard’s work as a playwright. That route includes an accomplished body of music plays and musical experimentation which, for many other dramatists, might have been a satisfying life’s work.

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the dramatic works of Sam Shepard that he believes that “all good writing comes out of aloneness.” His plays are peopled with loners, renegades, and the pathologically independent. It might, however, cause some alarm to learn that he does a good deal of his writing while driving alone: “It's a good discipline because sometimes you can only write two or three words at a time before you have to look back at the road, so those three words have to count. The problem is whether you can read the damn thing by the time you reach your destination.” There are, of course, other problems, and the highway patrol would probably be very interested in Shepard's plate number, but the image of Shepard frantically writing while maneuvering the US Interstates is a fitting one for his three collections of nondramatic works, Hawk Moon (1981), Motel Chronicles (1982), and Cruising Paradise (1996). Many of the short stories, monologues, poems, and rantings, for lack of a better word, contain roadway imagery: characters hit the highway to leave or to return home, to lose or to find a job, or to drift. The focus on automotive imagery has led Robert Brustein to note, “Shepard may be the most inveterate chronicler of motel culture since Nabokov made Humbert Humbert chase Lolita through the backlots of America. (Both writers recognize that nothing better suggests the bleak rootlessness of American life than a rented room.)”And both recognize that nothing suggests the American ethos quite so well either - the frontier, the restlessness, the quest, and the fierce independence. As in his stage plays, the characters who inhabit these anthologies are dynamically desultory, sometimes searching for specific answers, and sometimes shifting identities as frequently as a truck driver shifts gears along the hills of Pennsylvania in the desperate hope to find a new persona that will result in understanding.

We are not merely more weary / because of yesterday, we are other, no / longer what were we before the calamity of yesterday. / Samuel Beckett, ProustAs 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.”

Few great playwrights are as inextricably bound to film as Sam Shepard. Personally, he has possessed a “star” quality since his earliest days as a would-be actor, musician, writer, and amateur playwright. Handsome enough to be a male model, Shepard's face had an even stronger impact on his public than his talent as a writer. It seems that he first wrote plays almost as a compensation for his not being a top-notch musician. As a boy he imagined himself as a film star, often Gary Cooper, and would act out scenes from favorite films as he did his chores, often to the astonishment of onlookers. Almost incidentally he was commissioned by Antonioni to write the screenplay for the Italian director's Zabriskie Point (1970) a few years after Antonioni had gained international recognition with his acclaimed movie, Blow-Up (1966). Antonioni was drawn to Shepard for his alienated but dangerously appealing manner, the very American nasal twang of his southwestern accent, and his irreverent and inchoate early plays, often performed in coffee houses or totally noncommercial venues. Somehow he perceived that Shepard stood for all disenchanted young Americans who could capture the loathing for contemporary capitalistic decadence while at the same time projecting oldfashioned, anarchistic longing for the carefree American individual of an earlier century. Shepard's first encounter with a movie production was something of a debacle. Although the playwright has claimed authorship of the Zabriskie Point screenplay, he abandoned the project before the movie was ever completed and Antonioni chose Fred Gardner to rewrite most of the script. Few of Shepard's lines of dialogue or artistic imaginings remain in the completed work. Yet Zabriskie Point had a traceable influence on Shepard's Operation Sidewinder (1970), which he completed after his resignation from the Antonioni film. In fact many of Shepard's best stage plays have been enriched by his primarily negative reaction to contact with mainline Hollywood films.

Our conversation took place on 5 May 2000, in St. Paul, Minnesota, a city not far from where Shepard lives on a horse farm with Jessica Lange and their children. Exactly on time, casually dressed, and eager to get to business, Shepard exuded a quiet and slightly restless presence. He was ready, so we sat down and immediately launched into an afternoon's talk. Unpretentious and charismatic, clearly aware of and yet slightly uncomfortable with his celebrity status, Shepard enjoyed discussing some of the key issues that have longed engaged his imagination. Like so many of his own characters, Shepard is a storyteller. What is probably not so apparent in reading this interview, though, is the energy, the voice, the animated quality of Shepard's talk. He would sometimes stare right in my eyes, big hands moving, while commenting on his plays and American culture. His humor seemed genuine, self-effacing, or ironic, depending on the point he was emphasizing. Shepard, who granted the interview exclusively for this Companion, was enormously helpful. Afterwards he even sent me a working copy of his latest play, though it was still several months before its premiere. Throughout he was thoughtful and carefully selected his words, often laughing at himself when recounting the private or professional situations he has found himself in over a four-decade career in the theatre, and implicitly acknowledging that his life as a playwright, film star, director, and musician has been a chaotically amazing journey.

Sam Shepard's last work of the twentieth century, The Late Henry Moss, returns to the first subjects that long ago shaped the playwright's moral imagination. The play, Shepard says, “concerns another predicament between brothers and fathers and it's mainly the same material I've been working over for thirty years or something, but for me it never gets old.”The familiar material, of course, negotiates the problematic condition of the American family and its wayward inhabitants. As seen in so many Shepard plays, questions of heredity, legacy, and legitimacy animate the stage, as do the status of the real and the ways in which the individual subjectivizes his or her own version of reality. Competing versions of reality, conflicting accounts of what precisely happened to Henry Moss and others who came within his orbit in the days preceding his demise fill the stage. The drama raises debates about individual, familial, and cultural identity and memory, as it does about the relationship between abstract and concrete experience, fiction and reality, and, ultimately, about coming to terms with death itself. Shepard layers such debates with additional complexity and ambiguity by presenting the play's lead character as a ghost. As Shepard explains, The Late Henry Moss concerns “the father, who is dead in the play and comes back, who's revisiting the past. He's a ghost - which has always fascinated me.”This is a play about a dead man walking. It is equally a play about a family afflicted by the inevitability of their lamentable biological and spiritual fate. Whereas in the earlier Pulitzer Prize play the buried child never had a chance to live, the about-to-be buried father in The Late Henry Moss lived for nearly seven decades, though his phantasmic presence redefines antiheroism.

Critical studies of Sam Shepard's plays frequently acknowledge the importance of the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s in providing the context and the impetus for Shepard to begin his career as a playwright. This semi-underground theatre scene, which found its home in the cafés, churches, lofts, and basements of New York's Greenwich Village and East Village districts, was an intrinsic part of the counter-cultural mood of the period. These alternative venues operated by a kind of do-it-yourself spirit of invention and improvisation, and initially their only funding source for plays was the money collected by passing a hat around the audience at the end of each show. The free admission policy maintained by all the key venues until the turn of the decade meant that playwrights and directors were relieved of commercial pressures and conventions: thus, for many in the movement, there was a conscious rejection of existing theatrical forms and an attempt to forge an alternative theatre which was at once more community-based and more genuinely experimental.

It was in this context that Shepard first developed as a playwright. In 1964, his first two plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, premiered at Theatre Genesis, an Off-Off-Broadway venue based at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, an episcopalian church in the East Village at 2nd Avenue and 10th Street. He continued to be based there until 1971, when Shepard and his young family left New York to start a new life in England ( just as Off-Off-Broadway itself, in changing economic circumstances, was mutating into something less spontaneous and more institutionalized, simply in order to survive).

Goethe created poetic and complex female and male characters in his key works. But because he viewed his works as 'fragments of a great confession' (HA ix, 283), biographical accounts of Goethe's relationship with women coloured the readings of his works for almost two centuries; moreover, they were often marked by a condescending attitude towards the women in Goethe's life, an exclusive focus on and a naive adoration of the poet as a great man. Goethe's Faust and his concept of the 'Eternal Feminine' were seen as the loftiest ideal of modern German man, and the poet's biography was constructed along a string of ever-fascinating sexual experiences with women. In recent decades, such hagiography has given way to spirited studies of Goethe's relationship to women, who are seen as personalities in their own right with contributions to literary culture. Feminist and gender studies have produced new readings of his female (and male) characters in their gender roles and relationships. They have started a lively debate about Goethe's representations of gender dichotomy, his sophisticated gender discourse, his negotiations of femininity, masculinity, androgyny, homoeroticism and male bonding in the patriarchal setting of his age.

By the time of Goethe's death in 1832, many of the characteristics of the modern age were evident: revolution, parliamentary democracy, political parties and human rights. However, the political world in which Goethe grew up and matured was essentially premodern; the eighteenth century saw only the first stirrings of the modern national state and its political institutions. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had cemented the status quo, in which hundreds of sovereign states sought increasing autonomy under the loose umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire – which, as the joke went, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, but rather a weak federation, approximately coextensive with German-speaking territories. Because the Empire was an impediment of sorts to the rise of the national state, it was seen as a political dinosaur by Prussophile nationalist historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed by many thinkers in the eighteenth. However, more recent historians, critical of this nationalist heritage, have begun to valorize the Empire as the protector of rights, diversity and regionalism, as opposed to the faceless centralism and bureaucratization that characterized larger national states like France. There is certainly some truth to this view, which sees the Empire as a sort of model for European union today.

Goethe was Director of the Weimar Court Theatre from 1791 to 1817 and steered it from comparative insignificance to national importance, as a theatre where a repertoire of literary merit was combined with a style of playing predicated on a classical aesthetic. This style, in its decisive departure from the realistic tendencies of the contemporary German stage, aroused controversy and dissent, both in Goethe's day and after. Whether a rare flowering or a theatrical dead end, the Weimar theatre under Goethe, particularly during the years of collaboration with Schiller (1798-1805), was at the very least a highly significant experiment that raised the national level of debate about theatrical performance. Goethe's major plays were not, on the whole, written with the stage in mind, nor did he take on the directorship of the theatre in order to put them on the stage, for they formed only a tiny part of the repertoire. His concern was, within the constraints imposed by the means at his disposal, to bring to audiences the great plays of world literature in a vivid yet elevated style and thus take German theatre out of its provinciality.

German theatrical life underwent huge changes in the course of the eighteenth century. For the first half the commercial theatre with dedicated buildings hardly existed. Theatrical life was divided between the courts and the non-aristocratic sector. The former was served largely by French theatre companies and Italian opera companies, and there was only limited access for members of the bourgeoisie.

Goethe's relationship with Schiller is a rare phenomenon in literature, an alliance of equals that stimulates the work of both but also transcends it in a common cause. The individualism inherent in creative writing is turned, in an extraordinary act of mutual tolerance, into understanding and cooperation. Each offers the other constructive criticism and practical example, they consult and collaborate. Their aim is not just to fulfil their own potential, but to establish new standards for German literary culture. Through theory and practice, and sometimes through satire and polemic, they create what came to be known as Weimar Classicism.

The contrast with earlier classicisms – this is the last one Europe would see – is striking. The French grand siècle, the Spanish siglo de oro, the Elizabethan and Augustan ages of English literature were all prolonged developments, rooted in a stable national society, concentrated in capitals and major cities, and in each case the work of several great names. The German version was created in just one decade within the borders of a small and insignificant duchy in a politically fragmented Germany that was not yet even a nation; and it was the doing of just two writers, whose contemporaries contributed little of significance or, often, actually opposed them.

Throughout Goethe's childhood and adolescence – as he tells us in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) – the main focus of his religious awareness was the Bible, which he learned to read not only in Luther's translation but also in its original languages (HA ix, 124-8). He derived early poetic inspiration from it (HA ix, 140-3) and later described it as the main source of his moral education (HA ix, 274). His father's copy of the Vulgate stood on his desk throughout his later years (HA12ix, 731). Although he therefore had little sympathy with those who, like Voltaire, ridiculed the Bible as a tissue of absurdity and superstition (HA ix, 274-5 and 510), his own reading of it was by no means uncritical. After his encounter with Herder in 1770, he came to regard the Old Testament not only as a rich repository of ancient poetry – both he and Herder produced their own translations of the Song of Songs – but also as a historical and anthropological document affording valuable insights into primitive oriental society (HA ix, 129-35 and 511). It followed from this that the Old Testament and its doctrines were of limited relevance to other ages and cultures, including that of modern Europe: their religious significance remained primarily local and Judaic.

Approaching Goethe’s poetry

If we associate hexameter with Homer and Virgil, distichs with the Latin elegiac and satirical poets, terza rima, ottava rima, and the sonnet with Dante and the Italian Renaissance poets, the sonnet and iambic pentameter with Shakespeare, the alexandrine with Victor Hugo and even Baudelaire, there is no particular poetic form we can immediately associate with Goethe; he wrote in all these forms and many, many more. Indeed, Goethe's supreme gift is that of convincing the reader that his chosen lyrical form, and no other, is the appropriate one for the expression of a particular poetic statement. His historical situation at a vibrant stage in the development of German language and literature, a time when the culture was becoming self-consciously German and yet was also highly receptive to foreign influences, his position at the threshold of European Romanticism, which he did much to shape and further, determined the scope and variety of his eclectic lyrical output – allied with an outstanding gift of poetic articulation, a quasi-magical command of language that suggests, no doubt misleadingly, that he was someone to whom poetic expression came as easily and as naturally as eating or breathing. Poetic language and expression informs and characterizes the whole range of Goethe's writing, quite particularly his verse dramas, but also much of his prose fiction, his private correspondence, and even some of his scientific work, the results of which were frequently expressed in lyrical form, in verse epigrams, or in longer didactic poems.

Goethe's views on the systematic investigation of nature were informed by his belief that science once developed out of poetry, and that one day these two human faculties might well meet again to their mutual advantage (cf.HA XIII, 107). Against the background of this belief, his own contributions to the study of organic form and transformation (morphology), to optics and the science of colour, to geology and mineralogy, and to meteorology must be seen as an attempt to maintain the unity of human knowledge and experience, and the unity of humankind and nature. He differed from the more speculative of the Romantics through his insistence on empirical evidence and demonstration, and from the positivist tendency of the emerging natural sciences through a highly developed consciousness of theoretical issues. This chapter portrays the specific nature of Goethe's natural investigations, concentrating on morphology and the theory of colour as the most important areas of his activities. It will argue that, ultimately, the relevance to us of Goethe's scientific activities lies in methodological issues rather than individual results. His balancing of analytical and synthetic procedure makes it possible to extract elements from the totality of nature without losing sight of its unity. Goethe insists on a continuous dialogue between experience and theoretical abstraction, and on the phenomena themselves providing the true teachings of nature. This is a necessary corrective to the idea that scientific theories are the expression of something more fundamental than the phenomena themselves. The indivisible association of knowledge and respect for the object of knowledge is at the heart of Goethe’s approach.

The visual arts were for Goethe a subject of intense interest and concern. His work on them is not restricted to the writings on art and art theory collected in the five relevant volumes of the Frankfurt edition (FA i, vols. xviii-xxii); it also includes drawings, sketches, colour plates, copper engravings, illustrations to his theatre productions, portraits and scientific illustrations. Over his lifetime he produced an enormous body of texts on visual art, architecture, sculpture and painting. He knew personally many of the most talented artists of his time and had an intimate knowledge of much western and later also oriental art history. As a result of his travels in Italy and throughout Europe, he became acquainted with numerous prominent art experts, and through his initiatives as publisher, art critic and administrator he tried to promote certain artistic ideals and to influence the content and spectrum of ongoing artistic endeavours. He recommended travel to Greece, to the ruins of Paestum in Italy, and across Sicily in order that people might participate in his insights into the aesthetics of classicism, yet he also drew attention to the importance of local history as documented in both high art and popular culture, and his own literary work liberally mixes colourful scenes from the carnival and the marketplace, local history and everyday life.

In many ways Goethe does not strike one as a born storyteller. There is little in his prose fiction of that teeming materiality we have come to expect from the great European novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the narrative mode evidently meant a great deal to him because he wrote prose fiction throughout his long creative life. And he was a remarkably sophisticated witness to the emergence of the various forms of modern narrativity, particularly the novel.

Admittedly the tradition of German novel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which he helps to inaugurate does not figure in the pantheon of established European ‘classics’. Within the broad compass of narrative realism, with its wholehearted acknowledgement of the omnipresence of social life, German fiction tends to figure as at best a marginal presence. But all the same it has valuable insights to offer; most particularly, German writing of this period sustains and is sustained by an urgent dimension of reflectivity, one which invests the narrative process with an unmistakable intensity of theoretical self-commentary. Three of Goethe’s theoretical comments on fiction can serve to focus the particular contribution he makes to this tradition.

Goethe occupied a position that often placed him closer to historical events than he might have liked and forced him to come to terms with them, not only personally, but above all for the sake of Duke Carl August (1757-1828) and the small German state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach that Goethe served throughout his adult life. Thus Goethe was not just a man of letters, but also a man of affairs; he was acquainted with, met - not least through his regular sojourns at the Bohemian spas - or had dealings with an impressive number of the leading players of his age ranging from Prussian kings and statesmen to Napoleon Bonaparte, Czar Alexander I of Russia and Prince Metternich, the architect of Restoration Europe.