[A series
AmericanStudying some important and impressive moments and works in the history
of American drama. I’d love to hear your responses to these posts and/or other
dramatic works, authors, and trends you’d highlight!]
On how literary
ambition transcends success or failure.
One of the more interesting literary
debates entails whether the true masterpieces are (to cite one significant
dichotomy) those texts that work with a relatively tight focus and purpose and
do everything perfectly or those that are much more ambitious in their aims and
don’t entirely succeed. A particularly good case study for this is William
Faulkner: Faulkner’s close-to-perfect novel is unquestionably The
Sound and the Fury (1929), one of the most tightly structured and
written texts in American literary history; but his most ambitious is (I
believe) just as unquestionably Absalom,
Absalom! (1936), a book that grapples with many of the most significant
American themes and events and issues, including (among other focal points) two
centuries of Southern history, the legacies and mythologies and realities of
race and slavery and miscegenation and the Civil War, the Haitian revolution,
fathers and sons, the American Dream, storytelling and history, and both
individual and communal self-awareness and –deception. Every word in Sound works, but it’s not impossible to
argue that it adds up to mostly just its own stylistic perfection; most every
word in Absalom infuriates, but it’s
not impossible to argue that it’s America’s most morally powerful novel. Your
mileage may vary—hence the debate—but I suppose it’s already clear that I’m an
ambitious failure type.
Somewhat similar to Faulkner, at
least in terms of having set a number of different texts within one
geographically defined community (and including some of the same characters and
families across those texts), but representing an even more complicated version
of this question, is one of America’s greatest playwrights: August
Wilson (1945-2005). Ten of the sixteen plays that Wilson finished before
his tragically early death comprised one of the most ambitious dramatic and
literary undertakings in American history: the Pittsburgh Cycle,
ten plays that would cover African American life and experiences and identities
in all ten decades of the 20th century. What makes Wilson’s case so
complicated is that, by almost any measure, three or four of the first five
Cycle plays (all published within a six-year period) are genuine
masterpieces—I’m thinking especially about Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
(1984), Fences (1987), and The Piano Lesson
(1990), the latter two of which won the Pulitzer Prize; but Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
(1988) is likewise a great play in its own right—while the subsequent five
(spread out over the remaining fifteen years of Wilson’s life) are much less
consistently strong. Does that make the Cycle as a whole an ambitious failure?
Does it diminish the astonishing successes—on their own individual terms, and
as starting points for the Cycle—of the earlier ones? Or is the problem instead
that Wilson’s early works simply raised expectations too high, and thus that we
should recognize the greatness of his talents and career as a whole and not let
the inevitable distinctions between individual works cloud that impressive
whole?
These are not, of course,
questions for which I have any definitive answers, and without getting too
LeVar Burton on you, the most important answer I can give is that you should
try to read (or, if you can, see—as these various links illustrate, YouTube has
some great starting points for these works) Wilson’s plays and decide for
yourself. But I do think that the very question of success or failure—a
question, of course, that is especially prominent for playwrights, since their
works are the most dependent on audience response of any authors—can elide two other
and (to this AmericanStudier) particularly meaningful ways of analyzing and
even judging works like Wilson’s. Both are related to history, on two distinct but
interconnected levels: one of the most impressive elements of Wilson’s work in an individual play like Fences (for example) is the way in
which, writing in the late 1980s, he populates a late 1950s world with
characters who feel at once deeply tied to that historical moment and yet
profoundly human and relevant to his own era and audience (and, I can say with
authority having taught the play, our early 21st century moment as
well); and similarly, one of the most unique and important qualities of the
Cycle as a whole is its ability to conjure the sweep of a century, to consider
both the continuities and the changes in a neighborhood, a city, a race, and a
nation (among other communities) over those hundred years, without losing sight
of the intimate identities and exchanges and events that are at the heart of
any drama.
Like Faulkner, and Toni
Morrison, and perhaps one or two other American authors, Wilson set out at
an early point in his career to both critique and reinvigorate American
mythologies, to grapple with some of the most defining national issues, across
many decades of history and story, while creating powerful and impressive works
of art in his chosen medium. The national and historical goals are not by any
means required of a dramatic work (or any other literary text), but they can,
whether in perfect or in partial success, help American audiences engage with
and challenge and ultimately understand who and where and what we’ve been and
are, and few projects are as ambitious or important as that one. Next drama
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other works, authors, or moments you’d highlight?
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