Dramatic Representation of a Culture of Violence in Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss
Dramatic Representation of a Culture of Violence in Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss

Summary/Abstract: I propose an intertextual reading of Sam Shepard’s 2000 The Late Henry Moss focusing on the play’s ritual structure and the different interwoven levels and modes of discourse and narrative that grow out of each other and multiply the non-linear tapestry of the dramatic text. The aim of this “repetition compulsion”—to borrow a Freudian term—of the Moss brothers to retell and re-evoke their father’s last days and the quarter-of-a-century earlier family fall-out is to render personal and implicitly cultural traumas into a conceivable and coherent narrative of their past, a form of knowledge and understanding that would permit breaking away and turning towards the future. I argue that the liminal sphere created within the play constitutes a flexible and fluid zone of experimentation for its characters where the remembering and/or (re)enactment of past experiences becomes not only possible, but a necessity. The painful and distorted ways in which the brothers attempt to lay the body/ghost of their father—story-telling, role-play, re-enactment in the form of flashbacks—do not result in mourning and working through the past and its traumatic events, but merely in digging it up and re-enacting it in all its violence. Thus the play becomes a “defamiliarizing” representation of family violence and war trauma that in today’s multimedia-image dominated culture have become void of significance.

• Details
• Contents