Shepard's rationalization of violence within his plays and within the American family, albeit unintentionally, echoes Walter Benjamin's peculiarly nostalgic essay "The Storyteller." Benjamin argues that as a result of the soldiers' inability to come to terms with their helplessness among the mass destruction of WWI and their inability to reconcile that they took part in this destruction, these soldiers "returned from the battlefield grown silent -- not richer, but poorer in communicable experience" (84). Similarly, Shepard's destructive male characters, like those men of his father's generation, have been displaced by war. Leaving their rural farming and ranching communities to play their part in the Second World War, these men found themselves destroying entire communities, and along the way lost the capacity to communicate this horror and the trauma resulting from it. Shepard's men, unable to escape the nightmares of war, and disillusioned with post-war America and their families' inability to cope with their trauma, express their frustration through rage. These characters, like mines, are ready to explode destroying the family and home, and like the bombs that scarred Europe they leave the family in ruins and its sons fighting an internal war -- one of the mind.

My closer examination will begin with States of Shock, as it is a direct response to the first Gulf War, and throughout I will draw links to A Lie of the Mind and The Late Henry Moss. Although States is a protest against the Gulf War, I will not recreate a historical reading of this play. Rather, I will examine the way in which this play depicts war's destructive legacy on the family. This play, more than any of Shepard's previous or subsequent plays, reveals the emotional gulf between a father and son created by a culture of war.

The play opens with the Colonel and a wounded war veteran Stubbs entering a restaurant to commemorate the death of the Colonel's son. As the play unfolds, doubt is shed on whether the Colonel's son is actually dead. Several times, Stubbs says that he can remember the moment the Colonel invented his death; in effect, the Colonel creates two sons, one heroic son who died in battle and the other a failure who strived to save his son (161). Shepard's works question the very definition of heroism. His characters repeatedly claim that war heroes always die in battle. Lorraine tells Jake in Lie that his father "was no hero" (46) because rather than die in battle, he was run over by a truck in Mexico. However, his heroism is contested when Jake puts on his father's pilot jacket and medals to become the hero of his own family tragedy. Yet doubt, too, is thrown on Jake's heroism as he becomes Mike's prisoner of war, dragged onto the porch and forced to apologize to the family. Shepard is not concerned with the men who lost their lives in battle. Instead, he puts the spotlight on the heroic men who had the good fortune to return from battle alive, but consequently faced the greater battle of trying to fit into the American dream -- a battle which left many, like Jake's father, alienated in failure.

The Colonel in States invents his son's heroic death to distance himself from his wounded and impotent son Stubbs. Yet, despite the Colonel's attempts to reject his son by pretending to be "a friend of the family" (182), he reveals his own parental bond when he admits to having "nursed" Stubbs (161). In addition, when Stubbs disobeys him he threatens to "spank" him (165). Both the invention of Stubbs's death and the thrashings that the Colonel gives Stubbs are bound up in a culture of war. What the Colonel neglects to see is that he also is wounded. His own involvement in war has so fully absorbed him that he has become the embodiment of war. His costume, as critics have pointed out, suggests that he is an amalgamation of all wars (See, for example, Bottoms 1998, 246 and Wade 2002, 262). Furthermore, each time the Colonel losses his temper and strikes out verbally or physically at Stubbs, his violence is accompanied by "an explosion" heard off-stage, and "the cyclorama [is] lit up with the fireworks of war" (152, 158, 166). Here, Shepard has drawn a parallel between the war outside the diner and the war inside the Colonel.

The Colonel, however, is only one of Shepard's afflicted men. While it is unclear whether Mike's father was a military man, Jake's was in the Air Force, and his father's trauma is transposed onto him. Jake's sister Sally reveals that sometimes Jake gets "that creepy thing in [his] voice" just like his father (69). Shepard's afflicted men are terrified of becoming their fathers. Both Jake in Lie and Earl in Henry Moss vehemently yet futilely refute their legacy. Jake tells Sally: "I don't sound anything like him. I never sounded like him. I've made a point not to" (69). Nevertheless, we believe Sally. Jake has inherited more than just that creepy animal sound in his voice, he has inherited his father's fury. Likewise, Earl angrily tells Esteban, Henry's Mexican neighbor: "I am nothing like the old man! Get that into your fry-brain little mind! We're as different as chalk and cheese! I am nothing like the old man!" (83, Shepard's itals.). Yet, Earl does resemble his father, particularly when he attacks his younger brother Ray at the end of Act I. And, in Act III, we discover that he had Esteban take him on a bar crawl to all his father's old haunts.

The violence that erupts from these men in part stems from a fear of being usurped by a greater power. They see all situations as a possible struggle for power and survival just as if they were battling an enemy on some foreign shore. In States there is the real threat of a greater military power -- the manager of the restaurant is dead (160) and the cook is wounded (163) -- whereas in Lie this fear has been transposed onto a domestic setting. Jake's fear of being usurped by an imaginary love affair he believes Beth is having results in his near fatal beating of her. Throughout the play there is a fear of the "outsider" that echoes the Colonel's toasts to the enemy in States. However, while the Colonel willfully shapes his identity on the enemy, "WITHOUT THE ENEMY WE'RE NOTHING" (153), in Lie the "outsider," "stranger," "traitor," or "enemy" poses a threat to masculinity. 

Continually in Lie, family wars erupt out of a fear of invasion. As Savas Patsalidis notes, "Disturbed by the intrusion of the 'other,' the 'outside,' the more powerful members of each family undertake the task of protecting their territory and community" (247). When Mike encounters Frankie at his family home, Mike becomes the over-protective brother, shadowing Jake's behavior as the over-protective husband. Despite Mike's suspicions, Frankie's motives are simple. He merely wants to see how Beth is doing. Beth, fully aware of her brother's rage, accuses him of making a war: "You make a war. You make an enemy. In me. In me! An enemy. You. You. You think me. You think you know. You think. You have a big idea" (51). Beth goes on to reveal that the wars men wage are out of "pride" (52). It is interesting to note that Beth's speech, these short fragments, echoes Wesley's opening monologue in Curse as he recalls being afraid of his father's "invasion." The technique is suggestive of short bullets keeping the enemy, in this case Mike, at bay. Being attacked by her brother who transforms her into an enemy by his pride, his big lie, she fights back using words of "truth."

In Henry Moss, Ray and Earl must confront the family's violent past after their father has mysteriously died. Ray, the younger brother, is the first to recall the explosion that shattered the family. He says: "I remember it was like a war or something. An invasion" (9). Throughout the play, Earl denies running after seeing their father lash out at their mother. Nonetheless, he and Ray have clearly taken on their father's wrath. At the end of Act I, Earl attacks Ray, and this act of violence is repeated in Act III. However, this time Ray is the abuser who "turns himself into [the] drunken Henry" (98) and who accompanies the abuse with a story of their father's last attack before he left their mother. Ray's reconstruction of his mother's beating reveals that despite being so "full of terror" (99) he has inherited his father's anger -- a rage that possibly stemmed from Henry's involvement in the Second World War.

Henry, in the taxi driver's flashback, reveals he has received "World War II blood money! Guess how many dead Japs that cost? Take a guess" (60). Later Henry, trying to combat Conchalla's death pronouncement, says: "I've led an honorable life for the most part. I've served my country. I've dropped bombs on total strangers!" (79). Along with having worked his ass off and paid his taxes (79), he includes his service record as part of an honorable life. Although in itself there is nothing strange about this, his formulation of dropping bombs on strangers is. He is tormented by his part in WWII and tortured by the bombs he has dropped on his own family.

For Shepard the cultural consciousness of war in the American mind goes back as far as the frontier days. In States the Colonel, justifying the loss of his son, claims that the American people are the "bravest stock. The Pioneer. The Mountain Man. The Plainsman. The Texas Ranger. The Lone Ranger. My son" (162). Shepard does much more than criticize America's involvement in Iraq. He draws a direct line from the frontier to the soldier of modern warfare, and thereby suggests that the minimal resistance to the Gulf War is related to a culture of war -- a lie that turns expansion into heroism.

Stephen Bottoms argues that Shepard in Lie sets out to "demystify the dual American fantasizing of frontier and female" (229). There are two significant references to the frontier in this play -- both are closely aligned with Lorraine. First siding with Jake, whose beating has left Beth brain-damaged, and attempting to get rid of her unsympathetic daughter Sally, Lorraine tells her daughter to make a new beginning like her heroic "granddaddy [who] started a town on a mesquite stump. He just hung his hat on it and a whole town sprang up" (73).

Believing in the frontier lie that new beginnings are possible, Lorraine later makes her own break from her son and the legacy left behind by the men in the family. She has reconciled with Sally and has decided to go to Ireland after burning down the house. Sally, sorting through some photographs, finds one of her mother in a "big ‘Frontier Days' blowout" which took place "Right around the end of the war" (122). Again, Shepard brings together the frontier and war, this time the Second World War. Whereas Lorraine is prepared to burn the picture along with all the other junk in the house, Sally, still believing in the American dream and family, asks: "Okay if I keep it?" (123). By keeping the photograph, Sally robs her mother of a new beginning. On the one hand, Shepard hints at a happy ending in Lorraine's dream of Ireland; on the other he taints this new beginning by suggesting the past cannot be burned out of the mind like a house on fire.

Unlike the Colonel or Lorraine, Stubbs uses the cultural memory of the frontier to survive the brutality of war. The way to pull through war is to "Fix a picture in your mind" (176). The picture that Stubbs paints for us, however, is not one of "glorious unending expansion" (176). Embedded in his simple memories of home are references to the frontier and the Second World War. For Shepard, war plays a crucial part in the making of America, and in the process the American male is sacrificed. The image on-stage of the impotent war veteran, Stubbs, who says while "staggering badly", that the soldier must "Lock onto an image or you'll be blown to KINGDOM COME!!" (176) reveals a man who has been shattered by this legacy of war.

Like Stubbs, the taxi driver in Henry Moss also fixes his mind on images of the frontier to survive Ray's meanness. When Ray accuses Taxi of not being from Texas, Taxi asserts: "My great-great grandmother was slaughtered by Comanches. I guess that makes me from Texas, all right" (67). However, Ray immediately tags the story "A fabrication, passed down from one generation to another. Sounds like that kind of a story. A prideful story" (67). Although correct, we later discover that he gives Taxi the album of photographs to perpetuate his lie. Through his lie, he strives to create a dream of heroic survival. Ray, who has lived through a domestic war, can no longer believe in this dream and as such the photos no longer hold meaning for him.

All three plays tease their audiences with possible happy endings. Despite Stubbs in States regaining his manhood -- "My thing is coming back" (180) -- and with it his memory when rolling across the floor with the waitress Glory Bee, he is unable to become a hero. Instead, he has taken on the Colonel's violence when he takes up his sword. The final image in the play of Stubbs raising "the sword in one quick and decisive movement, as though to decapitate the COLONEL" (184) is itself an image of violence. In attempting to end this war with his father, he perpetuates it within himself. It is, after all, the Colonel in a moment of elucidation who speaks the plays most crucial line: "How could we be so victorious and still suffer this terrible loss?" (167). Moreover, in this final image, it is his face that looks out at us, helpless, unguarded by the gasmask and sitting in Stubbs's wheelchair. Shepard has transformed another victory, Stubbs's victory over his father, into a terrible loss. As Susanne Willadt rightly points out, Stubbs is "caught up in an ‘endless cycle' of male family relations which forces him to repeat the old patters of typically male behavior" (161).

Likewise, both Lie and Henry Moss end in a perpetual cycle. In Lie Jake is victorious by making it cross-country in his boxer shorts, an American flag and his father's pilot jacket. However, like Travis in Paris, Texas, he is unable to reunite with his wife. Instead, he unites two couples -- Meg and Baylor and Beth and Frankie. Jake's flag becomes the vehicle to bring together Beth's parents but their marriage is anything but ideal, and thus we are left to ponder whether it is right to keep this marital union alive.

When Jake finally addresses Beth, he has adopted her speech pattern, and as such Shepard suggests that now he is the speaker of "truth." However, when he says "You stay with him. He's my brother" (135), he hands Beth over like a piece of property; she, Frankie reminds him, "belongs to you!" (135). Consequently, the union between Beth and Frankie is doomed. Frankie is not pleased with the suggestion that he has betrayed his brother. Moreover, he is injured -- shot in the thigh -- an obvious symbol of impotence. In short, Beth is condemned to live out her new life with Frankie, the physically rather than mentally wounded man. The final miraculous image of the "fire in the snow" (137), too, does not offer hope as some critics have suggested (Patsalidis 252, Bottoms 241); rather it reflects the impossible desires that keep these characters isolated. Each is burning with love and rage in their own unapproachable territory.

All three works bring together two important symbols for Shepard -- food and sex -- but neither food nor sex can offer a new beginning. In States the action takes place in a restaurant and Stubbs regains his memory, movement and manhood through sexual contact with Glory Bee. In Lie Lorraine tries to rejuvenate Jake by feeding him soup. In Henry Moss, more so than the other two works, food and sex play crucial roles in the development of the drama. We discover that throughout the years Henry was nurtured by Esteban who brought him soup. Esteban's cooking, though, cannot save Henry or his sons from their destructive behavior. "Dead men," Conchalla points out, "can't eat soup" (79).

Conchalla, Henry's sensual, sexual and mysterious girlfriend, embodies life and death. She is able to bring to life Henry's fish by putting it between her thighs and squeezing; however, she devours the same fish just as readily destroying its life. And, although she torments Henry with her death pronouncement, the wild Conchalla is the only character that can give Henry peace. As she pours tequila down his throat, he remembers "The day [he] died" (111):

This confession is hard to forgive. After all, Henry admits to beating his wife with a viciousness unknown to many of us. What is intriguing, however, is that Shepard has taken the position of the battering spouse in an attempt to comprehend the violence and flight of Henry and men like him. By constructing this memory in the present tense, Shepard reveals that Henry lives the past; he is haunted by his wife's love and the violence he has acted out towards her. What Henry sees and cannot face, despite his attempt to destroy it, is his wife's love. She may not have understood her husband's trauma, but she did grieve for him. The legacy Henry passes on to Earl is guilt -- a guilt that wages a war inside him: "You coulda stopped me but you didn't" (113), says Henry. When first reading the play I failed to understand why Ray and Henry blamed Earl for not stopping the violent attack on his mother. After hearing Henry's account of the kitchen war waged against the mother, one sympathizes with the petrified sons. However, Shepard, here, is critical of non-action as he is in States. Surprised at the lack of protest against the Gulf War, Shepard told one critic that he "could not believe the systematic kind of insensitivity of it ... the notion of this being a heroic event" (Wade 2002, 263). For Shepard, Earl is part to blame because he did nothing. Like the silent viewers witnessing the attacks on Iraq, by merely witnessing the attack Earl becomes complicit in it. As such this play, too, ends without resolution. Although Henry is finally laid to rest, Earl and Ray fall into the same pattern of denial and violence. The play ends with the beginning lines, only this time the brothers have switched roles. While Shepard is guilty of creating male centered dramas, he does so in the hope of coming to terms with masculine rage. The battle cries, the rage exploding from his male characters and their tormented nightmarish lives are all symptoms of a culture of war. Infested by the cultural memory of war, the American male, according to Shepard, is crippled emotionally as he is unable to communicate and commune with others. Rather than sharing their pain, they wage a war against the family as it embodies the lie within the American mind -- a lie that see sees expansion and war as heroic, and the American way of life as ideal.

Endnotes

[1] In 1985, Shepard told Samuel G. Freedman of the New York Times: "You spend a lot of time trying to piece these things together and it still doesn't make sense" (Kane 2002, 151). However, Shepard's almost obsessive reference to his past in this and other interviews, and his continual return to this topic in his plays and short stories suggest that he has not come to terms with explosive masculinity. As the narrator in "Days of Blackouts" says: "I'm born/ Without a clue" (Cruising Paradise 20), and although Shepard is a little less clueless now he still has not put all the pieces together (Kane 2002, 151).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Bottoms, Stephen J., The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Kane, Leslie, "Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind, The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 139-153.

Patsalidis, Savas, "Power Games in Shepard's Prison House: A Lie of the Mind", Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Litteratures and Civilasations du Monde Anglophone 2 (1992): 245-252.

Roudané, Matthew, "Shepard on Shepard: an interview", The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 64-80.

Shepard, Sam, Three Plays: The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World was Green, New York: Vintage, 2002.

---, Plays: 3 A Lie of the Mind, States of Shock, Simpatico, London: Methuen, 1996.

---, Cruising Paradise, New York: Vintage, 1996.

Wade, Leslie A., "States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela: Sam Shepard's plays of the 1990s", The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 257-278.

Willadt, Susanne, "States of War in Sam Shepard's States of Shock", Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 147-166.