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The Disordering Impulse:Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Anti-Play’ The Stonemason

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2013, 26(3), pp.355-378
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

O’Sullivan, James 1

1University of Sussex

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Rarely performed, dismissed by critics as a ‘minor work’, Cormac McCarthy’s drama The Stonemason (1994) is the white elephant in the author’s critically acclaimed body of work. Part of the problem is the play’s profound structural flaws: the stage directions insist that the main character, Ben, is both in the play as character and outside the action as monologist. That the two Bens are often on the stage at the same time, but unaware of each other, exacerbates the problem. This paper will argue that the structural flaws are for the most part a ploy by the author to create a theatre that structurally comes undone in its simultaneous attempt to create an ordered representation of reality. In short, The Stonemason uses the device of the anti-play to undermine the play’s ‘ordering impulse’. The device of naturalism which is used to describe the decline of ‘authentic’ working practices, as emblemized by the anachronous craft of stonemasonry in the era of late-capitalism, is shown to be out of step with the complex social reality of an America coming adrift from its traditional moorings. This is demonstrated in the way that the Telfair family can no longer live up to the inherited ideals of the American mythos. Thus the shaky structure of the play mirrors the shaky social structure of America in the early 1970s. In this way, the very title of the play becomes a metaphor for both the faulty foundations of the American dream and how theatre needs new forms to represent cracks in the social structure.

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