SOURCE: Callens, Johan. “When ‘The Center Cannot Hold’ or the Problem of Mediation in Lanford Wilson's The Mound Builders.” In New Essays on American Drama, edited by Gilbert Debusscher and Henry I. Schvey, pp. 201-26. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989.

[In the following essay, Callens cites Wilson's The Mound Builders as an “existentialist inspired portrait of contemporary life.”]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

(W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

The Mound Builders, was first produced by New York's Circle Repertory Company on February 2, 1975, under the guidance of Marshall W. Mason, Lanford Wilson's usual director. It could have been the simple story of how “The signing of an energy bill in Washington transforms rural areas into resorts.” But important archeological discoveries determined it otherwise.¹ In Wilson's play the decision to build the Blue Shoals Dam in Southern Illinois indeed interferes with the excavation of remnants from the Early Mississippian Culture. The ensuing complications are enough to expand a commonplace idea—based on the true though partial destruction of the historical site of Cahokia by encroaching civilization—into an exceptional play, given, of course, the help of a good playwright who has for the occasion sharpened his pen into an etcher's needle.

To Chad Jasker, the landowner's son, the lake created by the dam cannot fill up fast enough, the new highway and interchange should have been there already, together with the hotels, motels, restaurants, tennis courts and golf course, so that the tourists can start to enjoy themselves and the money to pour in. Chad and his father have in fact made agreements with the developers about the percentage they ought to get on every dollar spent. The archeologists, however, Prof. August Howe and his assistant, Dr. Dan Loggins, for a fourth consecutive summer down at the site with their respective wives, Cynthia and Jean, are “racing time” against the lake. It has been a “sopping spring” and the summer rains do not let up, with the result that the water level is rising fast. To make things worse, August is saddled with his ailing sister, Delia, an itinerant writer whom he flew down from a Cleveland hospital where she was stranded, broke, and briefly suffering from amnesia.

Under these conditions work is not easy, but as long as the Jasker Village proves to be typical, the archeological team has grudgingly accepted that its excavation is to be a mere salvage operation. Yet once the grave of a God-King has been discovered—for the first time ever the atmosphere becomes more hectic and desperate. For the lake brooks no resistance, in contrast to the developers whom August had little trouble in warding off by appealing to a state law against public-funded construction defacing Indian monuments: “a brief report, a few pictures, and a phone call” (p. 133) is all it had taken him two years ago to have the legislature reroute the highway to the other side of the lake. The foresighted scientist could not foresee everything, though: through August's intervention, Chad sees his life's dream wiped out in an instant. As a result, the night after the great discovery, he takes off with the few artefacts already unearthed from the tomb, followed by Dan who caught him redhandedly, and runs a bulldozer over the site. The next morning both men have disappeared. Only an oar from Chad's boat is found floating near the center of the lake. Any efforts to find the men, however, remain unsuccessful.

These are the bare facts of a play that is presented as an extended recollection: while from his study in Urbana, Illinois, August is dictating into a tape-recorder comments on the slides from the expedition, past events materialize on stage. They do so intermittently, for every now and then the dramatic action is exchanged again for the illustrated narrative, which has the advantage of permitting jumps in time. The use of a narrator and of slides is no easy attempt on the part of a mainstream dramatist to reinforce one of his plays with Brechtian techniques and to pass it off as a docu-drama or modernist experiment.² The slides certainly enliven the production and instruct the average spectator or layman about the nature of archeological fieldwork in general and about the Early Mississippian Culture in particular. Incidentally, when writing the play Wilson was assisted by Dr. Howard Winter from the Department of Anthropology of New York University. The speed with which the slides follow one another also influences the play's pace and never goes without any emotional impact: now their fast succession expresses August's anger and frustration (p. 28), now the uninterrupted accumulation of shots from the lake charges it with an ominous, symbolic power (p. 29). Yet, none of these is the slides' major function, which is that of leading up to the play's central problem, the mediation of reality. The frame establishes a distance between the present (February) and the layered past (immediate—the previous summer—or remote—the Mound Builders), between the nearby (Urbana) and the far away (Blue Shoals), an exemplary distance which the audience is never allowed to forget throughout the enacted sections of the play.

I say an “exemplary” distance because The Mound Builders is as much an exploration of the psychological tensions that arise when people from different professions and classes, and hence with different outlooks and convictions, are forced to live together under increasing pressures,³ as it is an investigation into the nature of reality and man's relation to it, carried out between the lines of the dialogue and through recurring metaphors. In this respect, archeology stands not just for the attempt to retrieve the past but for the quandary of reaching reality, whether past, present or future. In the highhanded jargon of philosophers, The Mound Builders touches upon the ontological issue (concerning the existence of reality) and the epistemological one (concerning our knowledge of reality). It is to Wilson's credit that he succeeds in translating these elevated issues into ordinary and intelligible terms without falsely and unduly simplifying them.

In Wilson's existentialist inspired portrait of contemporary life, reality is almost but not quite hopelessly fragmented, human existence alienated and devoid of a strong center that holds things together. Time is one culprit here: as soon as it has brought the future within easy reach, it carries it off again into the past. Frustrated as he is by this, man tries to hold on to present reality by reducing it to objects he can—so goes the illusion—rationally know and thus—double illusion—possess. The source of these two false assumptions lies in the early history of philosophy. It was Plato who in his allegory of the cave from the Republic (to which the frame alludes), turned reality into a figment of the human mind rather than something of which we are an integral part. Still, Plato never doubted the existence of the external world. By doubting even that, Descartes outstripped the Greek: his sceptical consciousness was the only thing he could be certain of. The gains of this radical exercise in critical awareness have been considerable in terms of scientific advances and man's manipulative power over the things his rational mind isolates from reality and subjects to scrutiny. Nevertheless, reason has caused a fissure between man and nature through which the essence of things may have slipped and which may have consolidated the limits of rational knowledge. Reality still holds many mysteries despite reason's grandiose claims to unveil them.⁴ Other endowments of which man is so proud are, in Wilson's view, equally problematic mediators of reality: memory is unreliable and the controversy about the relation between human language and reality is still raging. The few mechanical tools man has invented to aid him in the process of grasping or mediating reality also falter: tape-recorders and cameras distort. In the end, art, so often vilified by (abstract) scientists may prove its worth as a more intuitive and integral approach to reality. Art, Wilson is suggesting in and through this play, may help to understand the nature of the problem and offer a solution that is inspired by archeology as an empirical science, the ancient Mound Builders' way of life (as interpreted imaginatively by the playwright), and by existentialist philosophy: a Being rooted within the world. The profound pessimism of The Mound Builders is not due to Wilson's conviction that solutions to the alienation and disintegration of modern life do not exist, rather to his exasperation about man's refusal to see these solutions and put them into practice.

It immediately strikes the attention how alienated and divided Wilson's characters are. In this sense The Mound Builders satisfies the dramatist's long-standing attraction to misfits and deviants.⁵ There is, in the first place, Chad Jasker, the landowner's son. On the one hand, he is attracted to the archeologists—to the women to be sure, but also to the men for their education, intelligence and drive. On the other hand, he is repelled by their arrogance and facile breaches of trust. He admires their dedication but also annihilates their achievement. Delia, another outsider in the archeological group, represents an extreme case of modern alienation: she is a divorced woman, like a “nomad” (p. 110) always “in motion” (p. 42), and the author of a novel called Spindrift (p. 63). Her homelessness goes back to that moment when, aged seventeen, she left the parental house. Although that was long before August sold it, the sale is nonetheless symptomatic. In this house with its “Oak floors and old oak furniture” (p. 105) and its rooms full of light Delia must have felt rooted and inspired at the same time, an organic unity before her world-wide traveling and countless misfortunes turned her into a “dissipated” character (p. 16) without any sense of time and place. She ignores, e.g., how long she was kept at the hospital. (p. 17).

Dan is familiar with her feeling of disorientation because of a horrible fit of drunkenness, during which he ended up with his arms wrapped around a fire-alarm box as if it were his mother. This sad and grotesque picture of loneliness ends with the ironic and revelatory message on the fire-alarm box: “You must answer to get help” (p. 68). Had Dan known all the answers he would not have been in such dire straits. Like Delia he does not stand up well to the questions with which modern life confronts him (p. 55). In search of security he retreats from reality into alcohol, joints and an archeologist's dream. Whichever he chooses, alienation is the price he pays. Take the last of the three: a hard day's work on the site leaves Dan “dirty and mildly refractory,” the stage directions read (p. 18), i.e., tired and unresponsive, as well as “falling apart,” so to speak.

The general life-style of the archeologists is indeed conducive to a sense of personal fragmentation. Shuttling back and forth between home and the site, Cynthia has developed a feeling of schizophrenia (p. 39). It remains to be seen, though, whether her philandering with Chad will relieve the feeling, as it leads to her divorce from August. The tensions between the members of the team prevent us from calling it the “sort of cozily, scientific, cenobitic community” as Delia does (p. 20). It is more an “enclave” (p. 139) or “hothouse” (p. 106), an artificial environment breeding violent conflicts, death and disaster. In any case, Delia is right about the isolation in which the archeologists are operating: Jean realizes that conservators of the past are an “anachronism” from the viewpoint of the developers (p. 31) and in retrospect August compares the house at Blue Shoals to an ark tugged loose from its unstable moorings by the water flooding the valley (p. 14). The drama as a whole even appears as a Platonic vision of his “mind's eye,” concocted from the seclusion of his study and projected onto the back wall of the stage. Thus Wilson conveys the emotional, temporal and spatial estrangement of the archeologists' task in a world devoted to progress. Yet, even the play's token devotee of progress suffers from estrangement, which brings us back to the character we started with: Chad is already living on his “island” within the lake, his prospective wealth is a “fantasy” (p. 109) nurturing other, more romantic ones, such as the idea that he can seduce Jean with it. Chad is not just divided but as much as the others wrapped up in dreams, and therefore isolated. The disease of alienation is widespread, a generalized condition of contemporary life.

If we step back but a little from the characters' concrete experience of disjunction and deracination, we also notice the many thematic opposition pairs interwoven into the play and polarizing its substance. The structure, in its alternation of narrative and dramatic action and in the use of separate slides instead of an ongoing film, is also manifestly discontinuous. Nowhere, however, does the play approach the “facile scheme” Stanley Kauffmann claims it to be, “the mere filling-out of a pattern, step by overlong step.”⁶ The numerous secondary oppositions need not simply align themselves with the primary ones of past and present, archeologists and developers, specifying their meaning. It may be the case, as when Delia's childhood comes to stand for rootedness and her present life for alienation. More often, new polarities transpose the terms of the original ones and shift their sense. They may latch onto one of the initial poles, further breaking it down, or draw new configurations that bridge former contrasts. Depending on the viewpoint, then, the dualisms may be apparent or real. For instance, Dan and August are idealists acting for the benefit of Mankind, sacrificing their time and energy to Science and to the promotion of man's historical consciousness, whereas Chad, living in the present, is the materialist and opportunist eager for personal profit. This multi-faceted opposition is echoed in the images of the (greedy) hand and the (disinterested) eye. And yet, Chad generously saves Dan's life twice, whereas the archeologists are not immune to the fame and money which the discovery of a royal tomb can bring them or the Department. In the end, the value scales are reversed, the initial contrasts suffused and mitigated by parallels.

This is no proof of Wilson's inability to keep things distinct, or, as John J. O'Connor argues, of Wilson's reluctance to commit himself and follow through the implications of his material.⁷ The playwright first teases the audience into establishing clear-cut oppositions, then deliberately mixes the lines, mediates the poles. Cynthia, for instance, associates her hometown with a comfortable but cluttered and stifling life in “eleven rooms of memorabilia” (p. 39), the site with a primitive but free and sexually exciting one. So Urbana, Illinois, apparently comes to stand for modern urban civilization and the site for natural existence. However, we have already seen how artificial the situation of the archeologists on that site is. Moreover, Chad, from whom Cynthia derives her image of country life, definitely sides with the developers and urbanizers. It is no use trying the polarity of urban and natural life onto that of the present and past, either. The Mound Builders were farmers tied to their land, who also built the first permanent settlements, the precursors of modern cities. Cahokia, we are told (p. 47), outstripped Paris and London at the time.⁸

Another example of Wilson's working method is provided by the opposition of the religious past and the secular present. The Mound Builders honored the Gods in return for an abundant crop and protection against floods and wild animals. At present, the ancient gods are either dead or no longer worshipped, incapable or unwilling to protect people against floods. Science has superseded religion. Facts for faith, that, Delia insists, is our present condition (p. 54). But despite the decline of religion, there remains according to Dan (p. 22) and to Delia (p. 60) a need to dream and hope. The aspiration clumsily expresses itself in the brutal defacement of the ancient mounds and the erection of new structures such as the Blue Shoals Dam and recreation facilities: shrines to the modern idols of Progress and Leisure. From this it does not follow that Wilson conceives of his Mound Builders as devout innocents in comparison to our present-day vandals and desecrators of tombs (Chad as well as the archeologists). The cycle of destruction and construction must have functioned already in the days of the Early Mississippians, since they supplanted other cultures, as Wilson tells us (p. 53), when they arrived in the region now known as Southern Illinois. To think, therefore, that the shabby present is only a falling-away from the greatness of the past, is to jump to conclusions. The same holds for the reverse but equally simplistic assumption that history is the steady rise from savagery to civilization and culture, a view cherished by the rationalists.

The point of Wilson's hedging, amply illustrated in the foregoing paragraphs, is twofold: to demonstrate the complexity of reality and the ultimate failure of attempts to comprehend it through dualistic thinking. Reality defies regimentation into the straightjacket of binary sets such as idealism/materialism, city/country, religious/secular, progress/decay, or to mention the sets supplied by Delia and Cynthia: “those who hustle and those who don't,” “winners and losers, givers and takers,” “the quick and the dead” (p. 110). These antagonistic categories offer only partial insights—hustling, for instance, is a common and appropriate enough metaphor for our mercenary world—never the whole truth. “Chad tries to be among the quick” but fails, Delia resembles a zombie compared to the ebullient Dan but will survive him (p. 101). Dualistic thinking is in fact a manifestation of the analytical spirit which we inherited from the Greeks through Descartes and which now reigns almost unchallenged. Reason is the supreme God of our age, the computer, its idol whose artificial mind operating with zeroes and ones only, is modeled after human intelligence at its worst. Unless checked and corrected, reason's sifting and searching may lead to total fragmentation and meaninglessness.

August suffers badly from an extreme rationalism. One of his personal notes reads:

Separate personal from professional. Discard personal. Separate separate from separate; separate personal from imaginary, illusion from family, ancient from contemporary, etc., if possible. Organize if possible and separate if possible from impossible. Catalogue what shards remain from the dig; celebrate separation; also, organize (a) brain, (b) photographic material, (c) letter of resignation, (d) health, (e) budget, (f) family, (f-1) family ties, (g) life. Not necessarily in that order.

(pp. 36-37)

This sample of rational thought is rather confusing, to say the least. It confirms that the play's formal discontinuity is partially due to August's chaotic mind. In the absence of interpretative links, taxonomies and lists of loose facts do not add up to a meaningful whole. Your “thinking machine” will tell you as much: “You feed it all into a computer,” Delia tells Jean, “all the facts and fancies the doctors have printed or typed or brushed and the computer would print out NOTHING APPLIES. It doesn't scan” (p. 54). Reason's proper means of unification are deficient. Even the sacrosanct cause-and-effect by which Delia characterizes rational thought, may be, as Hume maintains, a matter of the reported and haphazard concurrence of separate events, rather than, of a logically necessary connection. To a rational mind like August's, reality is a collection of objects (“eleven rooms of memorabilia”) or else appears muddled and uncertain, at times disturbingly so, at times ludicrously: among the eight girls assisting Dan there is one “presumed” male, all of them are “alleged” students and now that Cynthia's sleeping around has been divulged, Kirsten is an “Alleged” daughter (p. 13). Of course, these qualifiers may be simply interpreted as cynical markers of August's spite or embitterment but thematically they go beyond immediate character psychology.

Jean's story of her experience as a twelve-year old spelling bee champion directly correlates excessive analysis and nagging doubts about reality. The contests taught her many new words (quantitative knowledge) and how to spell them (analytical knowledge) but too many of them caused her to have a nervous breakdown. Jean could not stop: every word that was said to her, she spelled in her head. The meaning of sentences dissolved as she reduced them to words, syllables and letters. By the same token, the familiar world rarefied into similar and equally elusive Platonic universals:

there were days when the world and its objects separated, disintegrated into their cellular structure, molecular—worse—into their atomic structure. And nothing held its form. The air was the same as the trees and a table was no more substantial than the lady sitting at it …

(p. 56)

Systematic, frontal attacks on reality such as August's and Jean's, are bound to end in failure. In Spindrift, Delia, too, approached reality the wrong way so that it kept retreating, never yielding its secrets. She set herself, in all reasonableness

a simple problem and tried to solve it. Write a Chinese puzzle box. Write a Russian doll. A box within a box within a box within a box. Every time something was solved, within the solution was another problem, and within the solving of the second riddle another question arose. And when that riddle was unwound there was still a knot. And you know why I failed? For me? Because either a Chinese puzzle box must go on ad infinitum or there must finally be a last box. And when that box is opened, something must finally be in it. Something simple like maybe an answer. Or a fact, since we all seem to be compulsive compilers.

(p. 102)

This is not the only occasion on which Delia vents her frustration about the limits of human knowledge. Earlier she admitted ignoring the answer to most existential problems (p. 55), which explains why she hates the complacent smiles of Indian deities, looking as if they knew all the solutions (p. 86). And during her stay at the hospital she briefly forgot her identity, an occurrence that symbolizes, rather bluntly, modern man's restricted self-knowledge as well as his loss of personality. Actually, Wilson instills in his audience a personal feeling of ignorance and uncertainty while making these explicit as themes. By withholding facts about his characters until late in the play and by the piecemeal giving away of historical information about the Early Mississippian Culture, he is not just keeping his plot lively enough to hold his audience, or lapsing into didacticism. Delia learns only at the end of Act I that Chad saved Dan's life (p. 81). Still later Dan finds out that Delia had started, though never finished, a third novel (p. 103), and both characters are surprised to hear that, around the year 1100, “Parakeets were as common in Illinois as the sparrow is now” (p. 108), which makes Delia conclude that there are “Some things we don't know.” With this very formula Dan had initially reproached Delia for assuming that Chad “had something on him” (p. 81). Without complete knowledge, which we will never attain, judgments, Wilson implies, will always appear somewhat premature, a matter of suppositions that require constant revision. It is only normal then that the play leaves some questions unanswered. Did Dan try to save the excavation and retrieve the artefacts but drown in the attempt? Or was he murdered? Perhaps he caused Chad's death or else Chad killed himself? These are some of the questions that must preoccupy the audience. For Jean, shattered as she is by the immense loss, these questions have been superseded by others, such as:

Why did [Dan] go out? Why didn't someone hear him? Why did the girls stay at the motel? WHY DID HE HAVE TO HEAR NOISES IN THE NIGHT? WHY DID HE TRUST PEOPLE? WHY DID HE BELIEVE IN THINGS?

(p. 146)

All these questions can be summed up into the one and only “Why did it have to happen to my husband?”

Wilson approaches the problem of the elusiveness of truth and reality not only from the angle of reason or rational knowledge but also from that of language. To some extent, this is like begging the question since logic and logos are etymologically related. Man is a being of logic and language, so the shortcomings of the one may be those of the other. Perhaps Wilson has even given us a clue to the parallel in “Loggins,” the family name of Dan and Jean, two scientists, the former an archeologist, the latter a gynecologist. Historically, the claims made for language have certainly been as high as those made for reason. In primitive cultures words are often invested with the power to conjure up reality. The superstition survived the advent of Christianity through the Bible, the Christian God's incarnation on earth. Does not the opening of St. John's Gospel read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God?” For children language has always amounted to ontological proof: the eleven-year old Kirsten considers the presences in her dream real enough—not just the “shadows” August calls them—because they were “talking” (p. 15). Even Wilson's adults believe in the incantatory effect of the language. Delia fears that prophecies and especially evil curses make things happen (p. 59). Although Jean has been pregnant for some time now, she and her husband still have not come up with a name. After Jean's two former miscarriages they refuse to anticipate events (pp. 126-27). Naming the unborn child would be equal to assuming its existence and suffering its eventual loss like the death of a physical presence.

The playwright here touches upon the dilemma of the chicken and the egg. Which comes first, language or reality? Are words invented to arbitrarily denote pre-existing realities or do things exist by the grace of language? The evidence in The Mound Builders points in opposite directions. Sometimes reality takes after words/language/literature. Dan is called Pollyandy for his naively optimistic and benevolent character (p. 95), which is a generally forgotten reference to Eleanor Porter's novel Pollyanna (1913). Delia occasionally allows herself “to cause a brawl or pass out in the middle of the ring because [she] knew it was good for the biographer” (p. 112). “The signing of an energy bill in Washington [often enough] transform[s] rural areas into resorts—fieldhands into busboys” (p. 38), though not in this play. Sometimes language flatly ignores reality or truth. August scornfully labels a slide of Cynthia “Horse,” alluding to his comment on the previous slide, bathers at the lake involved in “Horse play” (p. 13). And Delia glibly purports to “know all the answers” but none “of the questions” (pp. 54-55) because it sounds so good. She knows “It's a lie, but it's neat.” Words do seem to have a life and mind of their own. Unfortunately they can be trapped in their proper sphere against their will.

Writing can be a self-generating, autonomous activity of one book leading to the next without much affecting the world for all its efforts. Among intellectuals like Dr. Landau, Dan's American Literature Professor at College, Delia's novel, Spindrift, caused a ripple or two but the “neat, sweet, meek” secretary who typed the manuscript remained very composed when confronted with this chronicle of despair (p. 65). She is unlike the typist in Truffaut's L'homme qui aimait les femmes who staunchly refused to finish the story of the protagonist's debaucheries. At the beginning of The Mound Builders August tests the tape-recorder with the word, “The quick gray fox jumped over” suddenly forgets the remainder of the line used to check the keys of a typewriter, and concludes with “whatever it was that the quick gray fox jumped over” (p. 7). In this particular case the referential value of language is nihil, its circularity total. The same applies, so to speak, to dictionaries, tautological closed systems, in which words refer to other words, without coming to terms with reality. Jean's spelling bees gave her just that, the abstract knowledge of a dictionary (p. 55).

Wilson's preoccupation with the ambivalent status of language with regard to reality explains, to me, the presence of aphorisms within the play and the relevance of establishing their difference from axioms. The dictionary—that flawed but handy tool—tells us an aphorism is either a “concise statement of a principle” or “a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment.” Chad calls it “a saying that tells you how to judge” (p. 70). In other words, it has a practical value to him, derived from experience. According to the aphorism “Beer on whiskey—Mighty risk. Whiskey on beer, never fear” (p. 71) he and Dan need not worry about topping the many beers they have had with a shot of whiskey. Still, Dan is afraid it might kill them because they have already had too many beers. And he is right, the point being that aphorisms convey relative truths as opposed to the absolute truths of axioms. Chad insists that the thing he is looking for is not an axiom (p. 71), i.e. “a maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merits” or “a proposition regarded as a self-evident truth, a postulate,” namely something that foregoes the test of reality. The reason why people use aphorisms is that they provide a sense of superior wisdom and some grip on reality and its unpredictability. Those who do not heed them at all, are clearly in the wrong. The old Chinese proverb—“If you save someone from drowning you're responsible for them for the rest of their life” (p. 86)—should have warned Dan about Chad's prerogatives with regard to him and his life's dream. Strictly speaking aphorisms and proverbs may deceive, yet their practical knowledge at least has the advantage of bearing the stamp of reality as opposed to purely abstract knowledge. Thus, Cynthia parries Delia's reproach of dropping August in favour of Chad—“You're paying the gold of the realm for bazaar merchandise”—with the words “All that glitters … [is not gold]” (p. 111). She happens to know August as a husband from first-hand experience whereas Delia can only presume what he is like as a husband from having known him as a brother.

Archeology is an empirical science facing the problems of man's limited knowledge and of an uncertain, fleeting reality in acute form because it deals with the past. Most of Wilson's plays deal with the past or the passage of time and how one must cope with it in order to make the present bearable and to guarantee a future.⁹ But only in The Mound Builders did the playwright hit upon such a suggestive and eloquent metaphor for this concern, namely archeology. Its activity represents on a grand scale the human condition, characterized as it is by the (futile) attempt to retrieve one's personal past, to possess oneself totally. Indeed, the temporality of human existence is offering the archeologists a life task as well as thwarting it. For this reason only, and not just because the man-made lake is inundating the area and threatening the excavation, The Mound Builders is already enacted under the sign of the “passing” (p. 113) and “unstable” (p. 84) moon, that symbol of transience which is featured on separate slides (p. 69). No wonder life feels like an insubstantial dream. According to August “We do not allow ourselves”—and Time often does not permit us—” to dream of finding what we might find and dream every sweep of a trowel” (p. 113). Human civilizations do tend to disappear. They might not vanish entirely, “without a trace,” corresponding to Delia's pessimistic forebodings, yet they do tend to perish. August's fatalism with regard to his personal past (p. 105) surely influences his attitude towards his archeological endeavours (p. 113) and vice versa. The hope and joy of small discoveries and retrievals—an image or emotion, a bone awl or mask—must constantly jar with the feeling that too much has “vanished without a trace” (p. 106), like “water under the bridge” (p. 105).

So despite the fieldwork and the palpable evidence collected, archeology remains to a large extent a speculative business, as gets illustrated with the golden mask of the God-king. Says Dan, “It's a death mask—we guess. It might have had feathers around it here. We have to guess. We've never seen anything like it before” (p. 121, italics added). Considering all the imponderabilities, some claims sound rather strange, like August's about the bone awl: “We have no clear idea what the bone awl was actually used for, but it was undoubtedly used for something. This is a particularly good one” (p. 108). I suppose “good” means “well-preserved” and not “good at doing whatever it was made for.” Still, the ambiguity remains and elicits a smile. It is a disturbed smile because from August's utilitarian viewpoint, a view which weathered times remarkably well given the primitive belief that the being of a thing lies in its use, the bone awl is a dead and meaningless object. The life and soul has left the sediments of the past when archeologists find them. After the wrecked expedition, August admits with resignation that “A great amount of work has been done on the early cultures of North America and we have found only the periphery of the culture” (p. 113). For all we know, there might no longer be a center, as with the gold-decorated beads of which the wooden core has disintegrated (p. 118). The center may forever elude the archeologists. Somehow we get the feeling that exposing the royal tomb to the light of day and publicity has caused its disappearance. This reminds us of the frescoes in Fellini's Roma. Constant light and atmospheric conditions preserved them in a perfect state for centuries. But their exposure to the sun and fresh air during excavations for the subway has made them fade immediately. The same happens with the pictures Cynthia took of the artefacts. In an act of compassion for Chad, who had been cruelly deceived by Dan and August, she destroys the crucial evidence by exposing the film.

It is not so certain, though, that the pictures, had they been saved, would have been of much help. After all, they are only reflections of a bygone reality, unsuccessful attempts at fixing it, confirming in their function of mementoes time and reality's passing.” All photographs are memento mori,” says Susan Sontag.¹⁰ The pictures of the tomb should have served as evidence of the discovery but they would only have shown what was no longer attainable. The thousand photographs of Kirsten as a baby could not prevent her from growing up nor can they bring back the baby she used to be (p. 53). The photo of Dan wearing the death mask must be a meagre consolation to his wife. In retrospect that picture may even, metaphorically speaking, have consolidated Dan's death. Remember primitives refuse to have pictures taken of them lest their souls be stolen. Photographs “trans-fix” living reality while reproducing it. The equivocal nature also explains Delia's contempt for the genius of Rank, the British inventor of the copy machine and a movie mogul, though in her eyes a peddler in gross lies and illusions (p. 54). Movies, copies and photographs give man the illusion of an objectified reality that can be appropriated and manipulated. A similar deception is worked by the slides of the expedition. Of course, August's subjectivity adds to the problem with these slides. Through the unreliability of his memory he may accidentally get a few facts wrong or personal feelings may color his comments. Thus objective and subjective comments alternate, at times even fuse, as when August moves from “slides of need” to “slides of spear points” (p. 113). The tape-recorder fails to neutralize the human distortion. On the contrary, it fastens and compounds it by mechanical means. To tell the truth, no matter how trustworthy August is, the dice have been loaded from the start, since the slides were taken by Cynthia. Surely he cannot always fathom the meaning certain shots had for her.

Photographs slides, movies, Xerox-copies, and audio-tapes: all these material products of inventions made by the rational mind function in The Mound Builders as flawed mediators of reality and truth, examples of perfunctory reproduction vastly inferior to creative visions. This is at least the opinion of Delia, the exemplary artist and visionary of Wilson's play. It is an opinion she metaphorically extends to matrimonial affairs. As long as wives are satisfied with being the trapped “reflections” of the men who have assumed the responsibility for a family, Delia believes they will be a “sad old” lot. If she briefly thinks that some “women are wonderful,” we may assume it is because these come closer to Sartre's cruel but more truthful “miroir aux allouettes” than to so-called bona fide mirrors. As for Delia herself, once she had conquered “the anxiety to please” her husband, that “strong, hirsute, sweating, horny cocksman” selling “drilling equipment” (p. 41), she managed to divorce him. As a visionary she could no longer reflect the image he had of himself.

And Delia is a visionary, Cynthia's sight is impaired by a blind spot (p. 37), perhaps because she ignores that August has the government reroute the highway. Dan knows all about archeology but confesses to an “absolute blind spot in folklore” (p. 70), which goes to show how one-sided scientists specialized in one field can be. Only Delia has enough “eyes in [her] head” (p. 41) to carry the honors of being an artist. She is the “Gorgon” whose glare can turn people into stone (p. 40). Her illness has even given her, we are told with sarcasm (p. 59), the haggard outlook of a soothsayer. After the death of her father, a physiologist who had written a book on vision, Delia's inspiration flagged and she stopped reading or writing books. Yet, like a contemporary palmist she kept reading the graffiti on the wall. Like an archeologist of the human mind she kept searching for the truth in “dreams and nightmares” (p. 84), chasing “that graceful, trim, and dangerous leviathan in the cold depths of some uncharted secret currents where the sun has never warmed the shadows” (p. 104). If artistic visions excel artificial duplications it is because they go beneath bland and glossy surfaces to reveal hidden truths, or better to forge them in the smithy of reality with the help of the imagination. Because of this revelatory and (re)creative power, artistic visions possess far more truthfulness and substantiality than mere mechanical reflections.

However, as with the contrasts mentioned earlier, the one between “reflections” and “visions” is not always as radical as might be expected from Delia's remarks. Art photography and art movies are valid forms of artistic expression, too, giving full scope to human creativity and inventiveness. At present artistic experimentation with color copiers has even begun. Incidentally, the invention of such machines requires creativity as well as rational thought. And the representational value of (post)modern art may be larger than supposed, given the fact that it imitates, to some extent, a world which is continuously shifting and recreating itself.¹¹ Although Wilson does not resort to these examples, he nonetheless remains true to his method of reconciling oppositions set up by his characters.

Dan wants Delia to write a “fictionalized” account of the great discovery to prove that it has not been “faked” (p. 120). So long as this account offers to be no more than a servile “reflection,” corroboration or propaganda adding to the archeologists' glory, Delia shows no interest. Once she realizes the opportunities for ingeniously exposing the intrigues behind the entreprise, she rises to the occasion (p. 135). (We have every reason to believe that Wilson took over Delia's project.) Whereas an objective and factual journalistic or photographic report may “cover” the events (in both possible senses), a subjective literary rendition, in other words a more direct falsification may “uncover” the truth beneath them. Art may well be the lie that discloses the truth. The accomplished artist does not jeopardize truth by bluntly exposing it, as the archeologists do with the royal tomb in this play.¹² He or she provides a favorable and fertile environment for deeper truths to inhabit and develop in, whereas (abstract) scientists often scare or impale them with the light of reason. Instead of tackling reality with the orderliness and directness of rational minds, great artists approach it in a stealthy, round-about and more intuitive manner. As Jerry says in Albee's Zoo Story: “Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.” Success is never guaranteed, though, for the artist's vision can become blurred by drugs, like Delia's when she was traveling through the exotic landscapes of “Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Metaxa, Ouzo, Grappa, Cinzano …” (p. 42).

August believes archeology can survive without art lending it a hand (p. 120). No sooner has Delia informed him of her renewed desire to write than he advises her to leave (p. 135). Irony number one: had she, the artist, been around, she could have prevented Chad from stealing the artefacts. Irony number two: many relics of the vaunted God-King are jewels and ornaments, i. e., art objects. They have long survived the person or culture they belonged to. Art, Wilson here suggests, is a substantial form of truth, whatever neo-Platonists may say to the contrary. But he subtly qualifies his claim by picking as pièce de résistance a fragile golden mask, the reflection or shadow of its owner's face. And he further mediates the contrast between archeology and art by having Dan ask that we use our imagination, the artistic faculty par excellence, and picture the death mask surrounded by feathers (p. 122). It is symptomatic that Dan, the one to recognize the role the imagination can play in the sciences, replies to Delia's reproach of scientists for their immoderate analysis and compulsive compilation of loose facts: “Not of themselves—in association. Where are they? Why are they there?” (p. 102), for the imagination is invaluable in tying things up again. It is the faculty with which to reconstruct and interpret the past and to survive the future (p. 107), the divine gift that allows man to defy mortality and restore the continuum of time: “Not marble nor the guilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow'rfull rhyme,” etc …

In any case, with regard to the art objects from the Early Mississippian Culture, August overstates the common attack against aesthetics and the brainless “representatives of the humanities ransacking anthropological collections for pots they find pleasingly shaped and carrying them off to museums, where they lecture without content on form—and without the least anthropological information or understanding” (pp. 112-113). His own utilitarianism has its drawbacks, too, witness the havoc it caused in the history of the West, which includes, ironically, the destruction of large parts of our archeological heritage. The one occasion on which August has recourse to the imagination, he lapses into fancifulness. In his mind's eye “the river's currents swept the house before it as a great brown flood bears off everything in its path.” Reality proves less spectacular: “The lake had risen to half-cover the house. Much of the second level was above the water. The house looked more scuttled than inundated” (p. 146).

As mentioned, the entire play is actually a vision originating from August's mind. Wilson's mediation here borders on confusion when we realize that Delia, the artist, shares her brother's visionary faculty. From her father's “diagrams of the eye with the retina and rods and cones and iris and lens and those lines projected out into space indicating sight,” it appears to Delia “that rather than the eye being a muscle that collects light those beams indicated that the eye projects vision onto the outside” (p. 58). But unlike August, who spends most of his time in the seclusion of his study—the sight of the “august” Professor “with a trowel in his hand” (p. 92) or “up to his ass in the mud” (p. 115) is rather uncommon, we are told—Delia until recently totally immersed herself in life's currents. This contrast between isolation and immersion is seen at its tightest if we compare Delia's father, an erudite man with a hatred for practising physicians, writing theoretical works on medicine in the peace and quiet of his great Victorian house, with Jean who gets her kicks from the hectic work at the university clinic (p. 60). In August and Delia these two extremes of isolation and immersion are associated through the image of vision and with the purpose of stressing how detrimental and alienating both are. August's retreat into his private shell after the wrecked expedition—he divorces Cynthia and resigns from his job—is as bad as Delia's former immersion, for she “went down” (p. 104) into “the liquid world” to the point of “drowning” (p. 43). For both characters the external world loses its foundation and solidity. Neither can tell in the end whether it exists outside or inside their head.

As befits the central thesis of this article, Wilson's solution to the excrescences of total isolation and immersion lies somewhere in between. In this respect the Mound Builders' way of life acquires symbolic significance. I repeat that Wilson nowhere nostalgically idealizes the past, notwithstanding Dan's childish vision of Cochise taming wild animals and of wolves gently muzzling at his thighs (p. 107). From the play we learn that the Mound Builders fought, built fortifications, kept slaves and sacrificed people in honor of deceased Kings. Nevertheless, in some respects the Early Mississippian Culture, as depicted by Wilson, presents a more balanced, less alienated and fragmented life than the one modern man is leading.

We have said earlier that the Early Mississippian Culture was partly agricultural, partly urban. The land as major means of subsistence was still respected, not just possessed and exploited as real estate. The settlements in all likelihood permitted a safer life than present-day New York City (p. 67). For some reason—historical or other—the Mound Builders receive the epithet “muck-a-muck,” muck being “filth, manure” as well as “material removed in excavations.” It is a clear indication of Wilson's intention to convey their rootedness in the earth, which did not prevent them from building mounds out of aspiration for something higher. To Dan these mounds also betray a sense of tradition or rootedness in the past and foresightedness (p. 22), in other words, a sense of continuity which modern man hooked on immediacy and impermanency may have lost. The epithet “muck-a-muck” sounds like a permanent reminder of man's earthly origin and destination, a mark of humility contrasting sharply with today's Faustian striving. The dominant tone in the Early Mississippian Culture must have been set by the anonymous Aztec poem Dan quotes:

Here are our precious flowers and songs
May our friends delight in them,
May the sadness fade out of our hearts.
This earth is only lent to us.
We shall have to leave our fine work.
We shall have to leave our beautiful flowers.
That is why I am sad as I sing for the sun.

(p. 52)

In that remote past art still succeeded in checking blind human pride an untrammeled (scientific) progress. Like life in general art still obeyed “the dictates of nature,” the way Yeats wanted it to, and Wilson, too, as Gautam Dasgupta observed.¹³

The social organization of the Natchez, the last of the Mound Builders, is also instructive. They were an “upward-mobile” matriarchal society in which the highest classes of the “Suns,” “Nobles” and “Honored Men” had to marry into the lowest one of the “Stinkards” (p. 84). Thus the elevated and low were joined. Also, it is to be expected that in a matriarchate the female sex was better off than in our male-dominated modern western society where intelligent women are still considered exceptions to the rule: “We're all freaks—all us bright sisters,” says Delia (p. 56).¹⁴ She is the militant defender of women's rights, including that of making a fool of herself (p. 64), which is always better than to be exploited as a sexual object, like “a virgin to distract the horny unicorn” (p. 67). By referring to the matriarchal organization of the Mound Builders, Wilson is not necessarily advocating a simple power transfer from men to women. Rather, he is making his audience aware of the one-sidedness and restraints of the present, patriarchal situation by confronting it with its opposite, in order to convey the possible diversity of an eventual social organization in which men and women can claim their rights.

Wilson's criticism of contemporary society, as well as the alternative he briefly sketches, partly by imaginatively bringing to life a lost Amerindian culture, seems inspired a great deal by existentialism. Alienation of the self from the roots of Being, the feeling of absurdity overwhelming and paralyzing man, the decline of religion, the lopsided flowering of Rationalism at the expense of more intuitive values, the destructiveness and present-orientedness of modern civilization as opposed to the awareness of human transience and death resulting in a commitment to the continuity of life: all these aspects figure prominently in existentialist analyses of modern life and in The Mound Builders.

With regard to the existentialist influence, Wilson drops several hints, the most obvious one being the reference to Camus' The Plague (p. 40), which is ingeniously transformed into an extra reference to Sartre's The Flies by an apparently innocent realistic touch. When staying at Oran, Algeria, “Camus's model for the locus in quo of The Plague,” Delia was “host to every fly on the Mediterranean” (p. 40). Like Sartre's hero she believes in assuming the responsibility for her own existence. The perspective that her creed—“Nobody owes their life to anybody” (p. 81)—opens up, is severely curtailed, though, by her double assurance that spiritually speaking man “still crawls on its belly like a reptile.” (p. 101) And that he is utterly transient (p. 106). Temporality is the constitutive characteristic of human being which Heidegger has made much of in his monumental Being and Time (1927). In the face of death, which is to say of human finitude, one may easily lose heart, like August. His final attitude is one of total indifference and resignation: whether Dianne, his secretary, types up his comments or goes out to lunch, does not matter (p. 7), for he feels like having wasted all his energy in a senseless “salvage operation from which was salvaged nothing” (p. 113). The word “nothing” is repeated seven times, which reminds us of Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” with its proliferation of “nadas.” Hemingway's answer to Nothingness was a personal code of valor, the thrill and security of ritual action: fishing, hunting, or bull-fighting. Dan and Chad's fishing party—that brief, moonlit moment of male companionship and communion with nature—may well be an allusion to Hemingway, besides being, no doubt, one of the many anticipations of their deaths with which the play is studded and which color it with impending doom. It is also an indication that the play never deteriorates into cheap sentimentality as Edith Oliver claims.¹⁵

Actually, the playwright's view of his subject and of contemporary life is too bleak to permit such lapses. Existentialism has frequently been accused of pessimism, even morbidity,¹⁶ and The Mound Builders seems to suffer from the same defect. There is a real demolition job going on: no dream or illusion is allowed to remain standing, whether it is Chad's dream of riches, the archeologists' hope of contributing to history or Delia's conviction that her father cared for and respected her work (p. 136). Like Delia, Wilson seems to be “checking off the possibilities of the species” (p. 102). Her apocalyptic vision of the future, at the end of Act I, leaves little to be enthusiastic about:

You know how the world ends? You know what the “with a whimper” is? A sad old world of widows: wizened old women, lined up on beaches along all the Southern coastlines looking out over the water and trying to keep warm. (Beat.) Good Lord. That sounds so horribly right I'll bet it's prophetic. The species crawls up out of the warm ocean for a few million years and crawls back to it again to die.

(p. 88)

The prophecy is almost born out at the end of the play when the three women are sitting in the house on the border of the lake, waiting—in vain, Cynthia harshly insists—for the divers to find Chad's and Dan's bodies. And as if this visual image is not nihilistic enough, Wilson crowns it with August's weak appeal to his secretary before becoming speechless, while the tape-recorder continues to turn, and silence, as in Krapp's Last Tape, takes over.

The desolation of this finale is so absolute and devastating that the few positive and future-oriented notes tend to be swallowed by the void. Upon closer inspection the play—like most of Wilson's¹⁷—indeed possesses a comic orientation. It may seem less open-ended than usual but some questions are left dangling. The Biblical connotations of the flood goad us into expecting a new beginning, though persevering pessimists may add that, this time, the water may never retreat to allow for such a beginning.¹⁸ These pessimists may have hit the mark because, according to Maturin Le Petit, the French Jesuit, those Natchez who during their life had violated the laws of the chiefdom, were chastized after death by being cast “upon lands unfruitful and entirely covered with water.”¹⁹ Still, Jean carries Dan's baby and it is due for “December, January” (p. 169), a date that also suggests a rebirth. Again, our pessimist may retort that Jean's “history” of miscarriages augurs ill, together with her feeling of “blinding damnation,” of having “fallen from grace” after she had told Dan about her pregnancy, as if she had “breached a covenant” between her and the baby (p. 50). Still, life continues, even if it takes courage and sacrifices.²⁰ Remarkably enough it is Delia who sets the example, her moral strength and resolve to write another book have revitalized her. The burden of Jean's body now feels like nothing to her (p. 147). There is still hope for the two of them who believe in starting another life, if only one cares enough: Delia has a capacity for “dying” and hence being reborn (p. 10) and Jean doubts that one lives only once (p. 30). Both women are ultimately on the side of the living: Jean as a gynecologist, Delia as a writer not much given to “In Memoriam[s]” (p. 103). Actually, all the women, including the bitterly realistic Cynthia, exemplify the human capacity for endurance and commitment to life. There is a definitely Chekhovian touch when August, returning from his office with Dan, interrupts Cynthia's recollection of the “miracle” of pregnancy with the words, “But that has nothing to do with us” (p. 50), by which Wilson seems to imply that women may be better equipped than men to apprehend the mystery of life. For all his hedging Wilson does not escape the association, pervasive since the Greeks, of the feminine with (passive) nature and of the male with (active) reason.²¹

In The Mound Builders Lanford Wilson set the stakes very high. The reviewers at the time agreed about this, except for Edith Oliver who gave the play short shrift as a “dim and insubstantial piece.”²² These reviewers also agreed about Wilson's relative failure to fulfill the expectations raised by the play.²³ O'Connor called it Wilson's “most ambitious” work to date but “also one of his more disappointing efforts”²⁴. And Kauffmann scathingly reproached Wilson for having remained the “ambitious undergraduate pouring out promising scripts for his professor of playwriting.”²⁵ Clurman diagnosed the main problem as follows: “The play's idea is provocative and unmistakably felt. What weakens it is that many of its details are diffuse and ill-digested. The dialogue is heaped pell-mell with sundry reflections that do not establish their relevance to the whole.”²⁶ Reflections that do not immediately establish their relevance, would have been closer to the truth, since a close reading of the play does reveal an underlying thematic unity. Actually, Clurman charges the playwright with no less than the failure to fuse the disparate elements into an organic whole. This is a serious charge, the more so since it is raised against a play about the problem of mediation: mediation between different views; between past, present and future; between abstract contemplation and sense perception, utilitarianism and aestheticism; Science and Art; between the analytical and differentiating power of Reason and the synthetic and (re)creative power of the Imagination. Truth seems better served, reality more easily apprehended in the twilight zone where these so-called opposites meet.

In this sense Wilson's view approaches the classical ideal of a balance between different faculties. With regard to Foucault's distinction between the organizing principles of thought operating in Western Culture, Wilson seems to favor a partial return to the classical “épistème” in which knowledge is a matter of discovering correspondences, away from the modern Cartesian one in which knowledge equals discrimination and the establishment of differences. By extension the classical ideal also calls for thinking engaged within the world, and not imposed upon a world conceived as separate from the mind. This is in keeping with Wilson's existentialist inclination. An important clue to Wilson's classical world view is his Baroque conviction that life is a text, a dream (p. 58) and that the world is inseparable from the words used to interpret it.²⁷ That also seems to resolve the language issue of the play. If Wilson did not believe in the power of words to affect reality, there would be little use in his writing any further.

When leveling the charge of incoherence against The Mound Builders, critics forget one crucial point: that, as in The Rimers of Eldritch, Wilson may not have wanted to create a harmonious whole without further ado.²⁸ He presents the drama through August's mind, a mind thoroughly disturbed by the wrecked expedition and driven by its consequences into isolation from the sensory world, into reasoning and reminiscing about the past.²⁹ Even before the disaster, August proved, as we saw, an unbalanced character, dwelling in “eleven rooms of memorabilia” and neglecting the empirical side of his profession. The formal discontinuity due to the narrator's intervention is mirrored by the other characters' alienation and by the different views expounded. This double exemplification of fragmentation—that of the play and that within the play—demonstrates the problematic nature of mediation much more convincingly than if Wilson had merely posited it.

The other charges frequently made against The Mound Builders or its author—that of sententiousness, poor characterization, or lack of originality—may equally be accounted for, if not refuted.³⁰ Wilson's love of language occasionally exceeds the boundaries of his realistic mode, despite the fact that, in other plays, the language has often been lyrical. But many a sententious line is uttered by Delia, the writer in residence, and is, therefore, in character. Moreover, the aphoristic quality of the writing is relevant to the opposition between practical and theoretical knowledge. The thematic burden of the play probably explains why less effort went into the characterization. With regard to Wilson's originality or lack of it the name most often dropped is that of Tennessee Williams. It may be useful to recall that Wilson adapted Summer and Smoke and the short story, “One Arm,” for the screen. He even co-authored with Williams the script for The Migrants. Such a collaboration may betray an affinity of both writers' “idea of the theater” but as might be expected in such cases, the lesser figure is bound to be accused of profiting from the greater one. I have no doubt about who the greater playwright is. For any writer working in the same mode as Williams to break away entirely from his pervasive influence on post-war American drama may nearly be impossible. The universality of Wilson's theme in The Mound Builders belittles, however, criticisms about his so-called gift for “Sincere Imitation.”

Notes

1. Lanford Wilson, The Mound Builders (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 35. Subsequent references are to this edition.

2. Narrators presenting and commenting upon the dramatic action are a staple in Wilson's plays, take Lemon Sky, The Sand Castle, The Family Continues, Talley and Son, and Talley's Folly. In the latter, the actor playing Matt Friedman even surveys in a very Brechtian way the theater's technical facilities before getting on with the play. By emphasizing the fiction, Wilson not only expresses his love for the theater, for “play as playfulness,” as Arthur Sainor argues in Contemporary Dramatists, ed. James Vinson (London: St. James Press; N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 832, but he also invites his audience to be critical about it. In The Mound Builders, however, the narrator does not pierce the dramatic illusion, though the play still attests to Wilson's belief in the essential similarity between theater or art and life. See my conclusion and Gautam Dasgupta, “Lanford Wilson” in Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, American Playwrights. A Critical Survey, I (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981), pp. 30,35. The fictitiousness of reality obviously fits Wilson's larger ontological concern in this play.

3. Because of its heterogeneous cast of characters assembled in one location, a microcosm of American society, John Steven Paul labels The Hot l Baltimore—and he could have added The Mound Builders, 5th of July, Angels Fall, etc.—a “melting pot” play (“Who Are You? Who Are We? Two Questions Raised in Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly,” Cresset, 43 (Sept. 1980), pp. 26-27). The term minimalizes the dramatic conflict on which the play(s) thrive(s) and conveys too much the false impression that a harmonious intercourse or mediation is achieved.

4. My historical presentation of the problems Wilson deals with owes a lot to William Barrett, Irrational Man. A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1962 & 1958), especially pp. 216-18, 230-32.

5. It is a mystery to me why Ruby Cohn omitted The Mound Builders from her survey in American Dramatists: 1960-1980 (New York: Grove Press, 1982), pp. 22-26, since she makes so much of Wilson's sympathy for misfits. That the ones in TMB demonstrate more commitment than she grants those in other plays, that Chad resorts to violence or that Dan, as the “Last of the Mound Builders,” carries a mythic burden like many of Tennessee Williams's characters, should have added to the little credit Wilson gets from her.

6. Stanley Kauffmann, “On Theater,” New Republic, 1 March 1975, p. 22.

7. John J. O'Connor, “Lanford Wilson's Mound Builders Is an Ambitious and Puzzling Play,” New York Times, 11 February 1976, p. 90.

8. John Pfeiffer's “America's First City,” Horizon, XVI (Spring 1974), pp. 58-63, provides a fascinating glimpse into a past that Wilson has imaginatively recreated while sticking pretty close to the historical facts. This very article may have inspired Wilson since the play uses some ideas. The comment that Cahokia is “one of those sites that kills you. You can spend years working on a single mound” (p. 59), anticipates Dan's “It's a man's life work here” (p. 130). Even crucial phrases are echoed: “vanished without a trace,” (p. 59) and repeated in the play (p. 106). Additional information on the Mound Builders—including a bibliography—can be found in Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization. The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 163-173, 233-38.

9. Dasgupta, pp. 27-28 and Henry Schvey, “Images of the Past in the Plays of Lanford Wilson,” in Essays on Contemporary American Drama, ed. Hedwig Book and Albert Wertheim (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1981), pp. 227, 241.

10. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1977), p. 15. This collection of essays contains countless insights into the nature, possibilities and uses of photography.

11. The Nice Conference on Postmodern Fiction, held in April 1982, was entirely devoted to this problem; see the Proceedings, Representation and Performance in Postmodern Fiction, ed. Maurice Couturier (Montpellier: Delta, 1983).

12. Cynthia's polaroids of the tomb do not show much because they were taken when it was already getting dark, which elicits from August the quip that “Burials have a way of turning up just as the light goes” (p. 91). Indeed, they shun the light.

13. Dasgupta, p. 31. The ideal of a simple, traditional life-style in close harmony with nature, visibly preoccupies Wilson: in The Rimers of Eldritch it is pierced only to be reaffirmed in 5th of July as a condition of human survival. See, respectively, Helmut Winter, “Lanford Wilson: The Rimers of Eldritch,” in Das amerikanische Drama der Gegenwart, ed. Herbert Grabes (Kronberg: Athenaeum Verlag, 1976), p. 126 and Barry B. Witham, “Images of America: Wilson, Weller and Horovitz,” Theatre Journal, XXXIV (May 1982), pp. 225-26.

14. In The Man of Reason. “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984) Genevieve Lloyd traces the history of the gender bias of the ideal of Reason, together with its concomitant value implications.

15. Edith Oliver, “On the Mounds,” New Yorker, 17 February 1975, p. 85. The reference to Salinger (p. 66) who has persistently been taken to task for his sentimentality, possibly betokens Wilson's critical attitude towards Dan's naivety and idealism. In addition, it obliquely re-affirms Delia, who claims to be familiar with the character of Seymour (See-More) Glass, as a visionary writer. See Ihab Hassan's study of the existentialist inspired post-war American novel, Radical Innocence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 284.

16. John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972), pp. 281-82.

17. Dasgupta, p. 28.

18. Balm in Gilead alludes through its title to the Bible and The Rimers of Eldritch has an epigraph from Jeremiah, and, of course, Angels Fall is loaded with references to the Bible.

19. Farb, p. 169.

20. Dasgupta, p. 28: “The repetitive cycle of comedy is, at times, tinged with sadness, but life always continues in Wilson's plays.”

21. Lloyd, pp. 1-3.

22. Oliver, p. 84.

23. The only critic to give the play its due within the brief space allotted him was Mel Gussow, “Wilson's Mound Builders,” New York Times, 3 February 1975, p. 35

24. O'Connor, p. 90.

25. Kauffmann, p. 22.

26. Harold Clurman, “Theater,” Nation, 15 March 1975, p. 315.

27. C. Christopher Soufas, Jr., “Thinking in La vida es sueño,” PMLA, 100 (1985), pp. 287-99 thus explains Calderon's play. See also for the references to Foucault and Reiss, who expanded the former's distinction.

28. Helmut Winter, p. 125, speaks of “die vorsätzlich Dissoziierung der Handlung, die Fragmentierung einer Zeitspanne in Einzelszenen.”

29. Memory is considered by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas a rational faculty. See Soufas, p. 290.

30. Clurman, p. 316, Schvey, p. 233, Kauffmann, “A Tale Told,” in Theater Criticisms (N.Y.: P.A.J. Publications, 1983), pp. 137-39.