The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002; pp. 240 + illus. $32.95 paper.

Extract

The Undiscovered Country is a collection of essays mostly by and for the Tennessee Williams specialist—who else could write with such confidence that Williams's “instinct for finding the humor in his most intimate pain may have sprung from the natural inclinations for self-protection and self-deprecation, long known as personality traits of the playwright” (212) ? Williams's “later plays” (of the sixties and seventies) have been “undiscovered” precisely because the Williams specialist has tended to treat them with well-meaning sympathy, even defensiveness, rather than critical rigor. Each of the fifteen essays here opens with a gloomy recitation of one later play's production history and its miserable reviews, before moving on to describe the work as unfairly denigrated, and to defend Williams as the victim of his early success. Because Williams continues to experiment technically throughout his career, the writers in The Undiscovered Country are in an awkward position. If they want to say that the later plays are new, better, or even different, they have to look to the past—the very history that “traps” him. The need to view the Author as the “past” or source of the works is, as Roland Barthes saw, a modern invention that really seeks to glorify the critic. Barthes celebrated the “Death of the Author” not as an escape from critical responsibility but as a way to ensure it. What would it take to clear away the history of neglect and well-meaning phrases and to read Williams's plays differently?