8 - Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind

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, Proust

We 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.”