< Previous100John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. a day, it was a long conversation we’d had that day between us . . . .I know the difference between loving someone and just sleeping with someone . 42 Maxine’s “pleasures” are like Carol-Cassandra’s jooking, like all the violent distractions Sissy Goforth says people run to until one too many ruins them . Gewinner Pearce had used his blanket-size white scarf for his k/nightly assignations . Then, while escaping in the Ark of Space, Gewinner asks What about this? He touched his white scarf which had made so many festi- vals of nights on the planet Earth, far behind them . Will this be admitted with me? Why certainly, yes, of course, the young navigator assured him . It will be accepted and highly valued as a historical item in our Museum of Sad Enchantments in Galaxies Drifting Away . 43 This is pointed and latest Williams on the misues of sex: not only does the user become more fragmented within himself, but his world also fragments and Drifts Away . The Williams characters are not “mankind” in the sense of classic, neoclassic, roman- tic, or realistic definitions . They are images of a humanity diminished by time and history . They are each characterized by an inner division, by a fragmentation so complete that it has reduced them to partialities . They are “un-beings,” caught in the destructive life-process . They are fragments of debris, thrown up by “time and destroyer .” 44 In One Arm Williams describes the alienated isolate running to Sad Enchantments: He never said to himself, I’m lost . But the speechless self knew it and in submission to its unthinking control the 42 Iguana, pp . 80-81 . 43 Knightly Quest, p . 100 . 44 Jackson, op. cit ., p . 72 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction101 youth had begun as soon as he left the hospital to look about for destruction [as a male prostitute] . 45 Williams intends to tell the truth as his artistic vision sees it; and one writer’s truth is often another man’s violence, especially if the opposing truth points up an audience’s “pleasures and answers” as sad distractions from existential problems . Williams has, therefore, consciously and deliberately provoked his audiences; for the art of his theatre is to violate stock stereotypes of judgment and feeling . Williams’ theatre is itself an act of transgression . This is particularly true as Williams makes religion a part of his theatre in a way similar to that when theatre was a part of religion . He aggresses against his audience through the confusion of opposites; he expresses religion by dramatizing blasphemy, love through use, life through death—in short, he attacks the “being” of his audience by presenting them with characters of “unbeing” who in situations of disintegration expose the dis-integration of the audience . Williams has stated his art theory—which is not non-violent— as an anarchy which upsets organized society . This has always been the province of the theatre where catharsis—the relief following the disturbance of a frightful identification—has always been proper . In the “traditional” theatre the fright-to-catharsis has occurred because of identification with the destroyed protagonist . Ancient audiences identified with mythic heroes who incarnated virtues especially val- ued in the particular theology that occasioned the act of theatre . But today’s situation is much different . As social grouping are less and less defined by religion, traditional mythic forms are in flux, disappearing and being reincarnated . The spec- tators are more and more individuated [aware of isolation] in their relation to [alienation from] the myth as corporate truth or group model . . . .This means that it is much more dif- ficult to elicit the sort of shock needed to get at those psy- chic layers behind the life mask . . . .The equation of personal, individual truth with universal truth . . .is virtually impossible today . [Today what is necessary is] confrontation with myth 45 One Arm, pp . 9-10 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK102John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. rather than identification . In other words, while retaining our private experiences, we can attempt to incarnate myth, putting on its ill-fitting skin to perceive the relativity of our problems, their connection to the “roots,” and the relativity of the “roots” in the light of today’s experience . If the situ- ation is brutal, if we strip ourselves and touch an extraordi- narily intimate layer, exposing it, the life-mask cracks and falls away . 46 In Williams, sex and violence provide the confrontation with the western myths that mask problems of human existence . Williams testifies by outrage and exposé . He employs selective insight to light the fragmentation of modern man . Romantic evolution he sees as dis-integration of the self to isolation and of the other to alienation . He dramatizes this existential corruption to expose it afresh as a new wound; he feels it needs a fresh exposure since the old ways of viewing it have been variously repressed and accepted as normalcy . To the literal-minded, Williams seems oversimply to prescribe the male seed-bearer to cure the hysteria; his metaphor of the reality is an incarnational prescription that an exchange of true love can salve the existential hysteria, rage, and alienation . Williams, whose absurd Gypsy guns people down in the street, extends the violence he sees in man even to his theology . Williams is unsure of God; he has a hope and a view . He hopes in the incarnate God of New Testament love, the bearer of metaphorical seed who will providentially cure humankind’s hysteria; but he has too often viewed the eschatological God of cruelty, the ruler of Dragon Coun- try, who blesses the users . This alienated, calculating God makes Williams’ Gewinner suspicious “that back of the sun and way deep under our feet, at the earth’s center, are not a couple of noble mys- teries but a couple of joke books .” 47 The violent possibility of such divine duplicity serves essentially in Williams’ plays to confirm the isolation of the alienated and escalate their existential rage; for the 46 Jerzy Grotowski, “Towards the Poor Theatre: The Spectacle as Act of Transgression,” Tulane Drama Review (Spring, 1967), p . 67 . 47 Knightly Quest, p . 22 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction103 creatures remember the Creator as the somehow recalcitrant source of the former order now lost . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKCHAPTER V RELIGION AND THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Tennessee Williams’ theatre is in one sense very like the ancient classical theatre . It is essentially a religious act . Sweet Bird, Cat, Milk Train, and Baby Doll center on alter tables of beds; Eccentricities, Summer and Smoke, and Camino Real revolve around ritual foun- tains of Eternity . 1 Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer are ritual re-enactments of events of salvation and dam- nation . The patio setting of Iguana is sanctuary-like, the characters making entrance from their isolated sacristy cells . Streetcar’s people in a deftly choreographed ritual move from the introit of scene one, played appropriately on the steps of the house, to Stella’s offertory to Blanche, to Blanche’s repetitious ritual cleansings in white tubs of water, to the ritual of The Poker Night played around an altar of a table by men whom Williams’ stage directions place in ritual vestments of primary colors . Blanche, Host-white as a victim should traditionally be, knows Stanley to be her executioner . Her words of consecration are her story to Mitch about her young first husband; she wins Mitch and “there’s God—so quickly .” This story next told by Stella does not convert Stanley who by scene ten vests himself in the ritual silk pajamas of his wedding night and protrudes his tongue between his teeth to rape-consume Host-Blanche in an inverse ritual of communion become cannibalization . The remainder of the play is concerned with cleansing and collecting: Blanche bathes herself, a 1 A truly excellent study of Williams by R . B . Vowles elaborates at great length upon the fluidity of Williams’ plays, their flow of verbal image intermingling with stage setting . Tulane Drama Review, III (1958), 51-56 . Confer also Esslin on the union of ritual with the dramatic, op. cit ., p . 149 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK106John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. used communion dish, and collects her things together, the victim doing the ablutions and straightening proper to the executing priest . Eunice gives Stella a credo to live by (“You’ve got to keep going .”) and Blanche, attended by Doctor and Matron, processes out past a congregation of Williams characters . Williams’ metaphorical translation of the Episcopalian Mass is dark parody of institutionalized religion . With Emerson, Williams feels that prayers and dogma simply mark the height to which religious waters once rose; now, in the new time of the encompassing esthetic, Williams’ translation points up the lack of the old economy . The validity of listening to artists in areas of interpersonal relationships (which includes man’s relation to God) is that historically artists have pre-known and pre-sung for ages the kerygma that the institutions have arrived at only latterly . This is true no more than in the comparison of sensibility between ancient Greek drama and the kerygma of interpersonalism that has only recently come to vogue in twentieth-century theological consciousness . Williams obviously prefers the intuitive esthetic approach to what an institutionalized religious ethic would call the metaphysical interaction of God and man . To show his preference he oftentimes contrapuntally plays the intuitive esthetic against the institutionalized ethic . Many of his “artists” live at least near, if not next-door, to churches of various denominations, indeed if they do not live in parsonages themselves . And if the protagonists do not live near, next, or in, then some representative of the religious institution is likely to intrude upon them—and rarely to good advantage . Williams’ cynical spectrum runs through the mincing minister of You Touched Me, the mercenary Reverend Tooker of Cat, the sexually disturbed Lutheran prison chaplain of “One Arm,” the misunderstanding priest Father de Leo of Rose Tattoo, the concerned-with-appearances Reverend Winemillers of Eccentricities and Summer and Smoke, Mrs . Venable’s hateful references to priests and scriptures of institutions, the minister’s raucous family in “The Yellow Bird,” and the bought- off clerical rivals of The Knightly Quest: the Catholic Father Acheson and the Reverend Doctor Peters of the Methodist Episcopal Church . This contrapuntal association Williams presents nowhere so concisely as in Night of the Iguana where the battle between institutional ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction107 responsibility and personal integrity is waged within the protagonist, the Reverend Lawrence T . Shannon . Accused of “fornication and heresy . . .in the same week,” Shannon is quite rightly more disturbed by the “heresy”; for his shaking preachment of personal belief to a congregation is wider reaching than his one-time sexual act . The next Sunday when I climbed into the pulpit and looked down over all of those smug, disapproving, accusing faces uplifted, I hand an impulse to shake them—so I shook them . . . .Look here, I said, I shouted, I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this . . . angry, petulant old man . I mean he’s represented like a bad- tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man—I mean like the sort of old man in a nursing home that’s putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can’t put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table . Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it—accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent, blaming the world and brutally punishing all he created for his own faults of construction . 2 With a God like this it is small wonder that the Western theologies, the western institutional religions manufacture congregations that Shannon likens to snakes and cockroaches; it is small wonder that he detests the institutional Christianity that in masked violence made of Mexico “a country caught and destroyed in its flesh and corrupted in its spirit by its gold-hungry Conquistadors that bore the flag of the Inquisitions along with the Cross of Christ .” It is small wonder that he hates the congregations who “go home and close . . .windows, all . . . windows and doors, against the truth about God .” Because of the personal tension the Reverend Shannon becomes a dispossessed wanderer . He becomes a guide for Blake Tours . (One 2 Iguana, pp . 54-56 . Henry Popkin, op. cit., p . 62, notes Williams’ heavily anti-insti- tutional bias: “For Williams, religion is a convenient source of symbolism, but [in institutional form] it seems to be without real value in the world of his plays .” ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK108John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. presumes Shannon gives Blake’s customers Tours of Experience when they expected only Tours of Innocence .) I entered my present line—tours of God’s world conducted by a minister of God . . . .Collecting evidence . . .[of] my per- sonal idea of God, not as a senile delinquent, but as a . . . Hannah: Incomplete sentence . 3 Just so for Williams is God Shannon’s sentence seeking a comple- tion . Because of what his religious culture has subjected him to, because of what he has familiar-ly experienced, and because of what he knows, Williams presents to date a highly ambivalent attitude toward God . He does not know as yet which fork in the sentence will end in an accurate completion . Inductively seining his plays’ func- tional religious trappings and overt theological statements against the interpretative biography “written” by his mother, one can con- struct—like Cocteau on “Saint” Genet—the ambivalent theologi- cal stance of Tennessee Williams . It is in this “knightly quest” that Williams promotes the religious act of his theatre; it is the lack of “time for contemplation,” the lack of the necessary “introversion” for which Williams censures America in his latest novella, the off-stage comment of The knightly Quest . 4 It is to offset this lack of time that he gives the timeless world of his plays . Unbelief for Williams is an impossibility; for unbelief is inorganic in the sense that it is an interruption in the development of the whole, created personality . Despite the Freudian fingers popularly pointed at Williams, the playwright’s principle of belief is totally un-Freudian . (Freud, an unbeliever himself, said that “experience of God is reducible and that unbelief represents a higher degree of development, while belief represents retrogression to a lower degree of the sense of realism .” 5 ) Williams nowhere doubts God as a primary cause . In his characters’ heavily felt sense of creaturehood he elaborates his full belief that God is the whole of everything, is the 3 Ibid ., pp . 56-57 . 4 The Knightly Quest, p . 59 . 5 H . C . Rümke, The Psychology of Unbelief: Character and Temperament in Relation to Unbelief (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), p . 20 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction109 cause of everything . It is, however, the nature of this Prime Causality that greatly disturbs the Williams world . Williams and his characters see God in two ways; Shannon’s sentence can be completed by one or the other selections in Williams’ multiple choice . God is perceived either as an Old Testament God of Wrath ruling over a semi-Calvinistic cycle of guilt-submission- atonement-uncertainty or a New Testament God of Love offering a cycle of need-submission-communication-salvation . In either case, however, surrender of the creature is required, and it is here that Williams’ difficulty begins; for the idea of God in man is not a flash occurrence; it is the result of organic growth . From identification with parents, siblings, and others in the domestic environment, the personality develops an ego-ideal which is free of the short-comings of the real ego . A tension develops between egos . “Consciously or unconsciously, the proper ego makes continual comparison with the ideal ego . Conscience, feeling of guilt, self-criticism are the usual expressions of this relationship .” 6 Beyond this ego and super- ego development lies the awakening of the libido on the sensory levels of oral-eroticism, anal-sadistic phase, and the genital stage . The Oedipus complex which arises during the genital stage as a boy fixates on the mother with a concomitant repulsion for the father becomes latent after the genital stage until puberty when it is revived and normally solved . Yet, while still in the genital stage, the child experiences a tense polarity . The idealized mother promotes affection, imagination and intuition . She directs emotional development . . .the inner life, the foundation of morality and opens the way to religious experience . The father—representing the link with the outer world—promotes by identification the sense of observation of the out world and rouses . . .the aggressive instinct . He symbolizes authority, which defends and oppresses . . . .Will power is reinforced and intelligence takes shape; . . .the way 6 Ibid ., p . 52 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >