Rezensionen 129 André Hahn, Family, Frontier and American Dreams. Darstellung und Kritik nationaler Mythen im amerikanischen Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Beiträge zur Anglistik, Band 14). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008. Page Laws National myths are like Gordian knots, storylines curling around some truth just out of sight beneath the next tangle. The problem is that, on being probed, myths start to squirm and even strike back at the earnest hand of the researcher. The truth is that myths often conceal nothing: they are themselves both the lie and the truth, the positive and the negative. You can deconstruct but not destroy them. Myths - compounded as they are of language - share its Protean qualities. Andre Hahn’s earnestly probing study of American myths as embodied in 20 th century drama is admirable in its thoroughness and for deft insights on individual plays. But it also seems misguided in its basic thesis idea: that six American playwrights set out to “destroy” certain American myths because these myths were/ are “falsch, dekadent oder verkommen” (1). The choice of the word “destroys” unnecessarily skews Hahn’s readings from the start, forcing him to ignore or soft-pedal some very valid (but inconvenient) truths his own readings reveal. Even a verb such as “challenge” might have better served for Hahn’s thesis and allowed him more nuanced, less ham-handed observations. Hahn works hard and responsibly to define the concept of “myth,” citing the seminal works of Roland Barthes and Eugen Böhler. He seems at first open to a broad, practical working definition of myth as a shared set of common cultural beliefs, giving a people its sense of common identity (2-3). But he immediately returns to his reductionist bent, couching each target playwright’s intent in negative terms. Edward Albee, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? destroys the “myth of the happy family”; Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch destroys the myth of the “morally intact small town”; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman disillusions us concerning “the American Dream”. Arthur Kopits’ Indians destroys the myth of the Frontier while debunking the “Lebenslüge” of the great American icon Buffalo Bill. David Rabe’s trilogy The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones destroys the myth of the heroic American soldier, revealing soldiers as, instead, cauldrons of “aggression, self-loathing and paranoia.” Finally Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play “ironizes our hero-worship of Founding Fathers by ironizing Lincoln” (3). In actuality Americans generally save the term “Founding Fathers” (or its intentional corruption “Foundling Fathers”) for colonial forebears who guided the country ‘four score and seven’ years before Lincoln’s tenure. That is not a serious error on Hahn’s part, however, and he compensates for it with his wide-ranging knowledge of American drama by the Big Three (Miller, Tennessee Williams and Albee) plus some lesser lights. Unfortunately Hahn sometimes displays his impressive range of reading at inopportune moments, going off on tangents with surprising predictability (at least once per chapter in about the same spot). More puzzling than these tangents are some odd choices of examples drawn from inappropriate contexts. For example, in a study of specifically American literature, Rezensionen 130 Hahn chooses an example from British military history to illustrate how wrong national myths can be. The RAF (Royal Air Force) is celebrated for its bravery because it is widely held to have been outmanned and outgunned by the German attackers of Britain in WW II. Hahn insists that, on the contrary, the RAF was really stronger than their heroic underdog ‘myth’ would have us believe (8). But what an odd time and place to discuss European military history, especially to the detriment of the British and the indirect vindication of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Elsewhere Hahn oddly pontificates against Americans’ “Drogensucht,” using for his evidence the alcoholism of Albee’s George and Martha, and of Tennessee Williams’ Brick (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), plus Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction in O’Neil’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (73). While it’s true that these fictitious characters all have addictions, it hardly seems wise to impugn Americans for the habits of stage creations. Hahn is likewise on dangerous terrain when he suggests an analogy between the American cavalry men who slaughtered Indians and the SS officers who killed “Jews and Communists” in concentration camps (181). Yes, some analogy does exist, but it seems an odd and inappropriate point to make in this essay. Hahn inadvertently implies the SS officers are somehow less guilty because they had deranged American predecessors. Every critic mounts his or her hobbyhorses from time to time, and Hahn is certainly due some limited time in the saddle. His readings of his chosen plays are, all in all, detailed, thorough, and often insightful. At his best, he bucks the negativity his thesis demands, noticing that in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a play supposedly devoted to “destroying” the myth of the American Dream, Charley and Bernard (Willie’s neighbours) are loyal, honest and successful examples of the Dream gone right. Positive counter currents exist in all these negative plays: e.g. evidence of actual love between George and Martha, evidence that Lincoln might have actually done his country some good. That’s the power of myth that won’t come unravelled - and it’s certainly critic-proof. Page Laws Department of English and Foreign Language Norfolk State University