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Memory of Desires in Williams' Vieux Carré

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2010, 23(2), pp.5-31
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Soim Kim 1

1건국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Vieux Carré, the memory play about Williams’ 1938 New Orleans experience, has been criticized for its “incoherent and unfocused” plot and for lacking substantial character development. However, those criticisms are based upon the expectations about traditional realistic drama, from which Williams maintained an artistic distance. Williams, wanting to prove that he was not a “ghost” in the literary world, produced a play that contains many innovative techniques, and stage presentations. These elements mark a departure from the earlier works of his prime. Being a memory play, this play implements the dream-like free associations and grotesque images of painful desires. The play also contains multi perspectives such as the young writer, the old writer, and Williams who has frequently commented about his New Orleans experience. These multiple voices intermingle the unique portraits of various desires that gradually emerge as the key subject matter in this memory play. However, this play reveals the limitations in both the techniques and the representations of desires. Unlike the voices in Beckett’s memory play, Krapp’s Last Tape; the writers’ voices in this play are not balanced. While the young writer, passive and uninvolved, stays in the fringes of the picture, the old writer seems to show off the omnipresent perspectives. The portraits of desires that fall toward the painful resolutions are reminiscent of Williams’ earlier works. Nevertheless, using the discrepancy in the two writers’ perspectives, the play evokes the fundamental questions toward what to do with desires. In the last narration, the writer who discards the house of desires, describes memory as remaining in a shadow and implies the rebirth of desire as the subject of art. Even though this play withdraws from the full confrontation with the issues of homosexuality and free sex, it reveals that Williams is not a “ghost” yet, but rather an artist still very alert regarding the techniques and ideas of the present.

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