THE GLASS MENAGERIE

“Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth…. [Unconventional drama] should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are…. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation.” – Tennessee Williams

To give Nabokov a break before diving into the novels, let’s take a look at a couple of Tennessee Williams’ plays, beginning with The Glass Menagerie. Here we are given four Williams’ characters with which he seeks to give “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are” mainly by holing the characters and audience up in a claustrophobic apartment and forcing all of them to listen to the matriarch Amanda.

Amanda is not morally bad or morally good – are any of Williams’ characters so simply defined? She certainly is overbearing, however. For instance, when she discovers that Laura has been skipping school, she enters the room chanting “Deception? Deception?” – the kind of repetition that Williams uses again with “Stella” and “Mendacity” to focus the audience’s attention on something resembling a message. But Laura’s deception is so mild compared to that Tom is planning – he’ll abandon mother and sister to chase his dreams. Is that good? Bad? Who knows. But who would ever ask him to talk with Amanda about it.

Although Williams gives us characters without clearly judging them himself, he certainly expects our judgment. In Menagerie, he uses Jim – good, honest Jim to caution his reader against these judgments he expects: “People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems.” And surely Laura, Tom, and Amanda do have problems. Jim actually seems void of them, but he does kiss Laura – maybe that’s a step too far? He certainly thinks it is.

Perhaps what we get most clearly from Menagerie is a clear statement of the Modern idea (here from D. H. Lawrence’s “Why the Novel Matters”) that “There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.” We see this lack of absolute morality repeated in each of Williams’ plays. Like Philip Roth, Williams seems to find truth in the lived experience of the life of his characters – but that life is actually what he calls transformation. With Amanda or Laura or Tom (or Stanley or Cat), we are given compressed types. The characters virtually explode with all that they contain about the truth of humanity, yet it is like Lawrence suggests: never absolutely true.

But still we must believe in ourselves or we disappear (like Stella). In Menagerie, Jim says, “You know what my strong advice to you is? Think of yourself as superior in some way!... Why, man alive Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people!... Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else’s…. Everybody excels in some one thing…. All you’ve got to do is discover in what!” Again, this is a Williams’ truth highlighted by the artificial compression of a conversation that simply wouldn’t take place. (Like his followers David Mamet or Tony Kushner, Williams has a way of creating false language and making it seem real.)

I think the key to Menagerie is the “closer approach” which Williams uses literally. Here he focuses on his characters with a microscope and, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Streetcar Named Desire, he locks his characters in a single apartment or house and beats them against each other to see what kinds of fires the sparks will start. And they are such fun fires.