Poem of the Week 2024/32

Theater Impressions

For me the tragedy's most important act is the sixth:

the raising of the dead from the stage's battlegrounds,

the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,

removing knives from stricken breasts,

taking nooses from lifeless necks,

lining up among the living

to face the audience.

The bows, both solo and ensemble –

the pale hand on the wounded heart,

the curtsies of the hapless suicide,

the bobbing of the chopped-off head.

The bows in pairs –

rage extends its arm to meekness,

the victim's eyes smile at the torturer,

the rebel indulgently walks beside the tyrant.

Eternity trampled by the golden slipper's toe.

Redeeming values swept aside with the swish of a wide-brimmed hat.

The unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow.

Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,

in Acts 3 and 4, or between the scenes.

The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace.

The thought that they've been waiting patiently offstage

without taking off their makeup

or their costumes

moves me more than all the tragedy's tirades.

But the curtain's fall is the most uplifting part,

the things you see before it hits the floor:

here one hand quickly reaches for a flower,

there another hand picks up a fallen sword.

Only then, one last, unseen hand

does its duty

and grabs me by the throat.

– Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Theater occupies a strange liminal space, culturally, intellectually, emotionally. It is both popular & elitist, low & high art, respectable & subversive, mocking & empathetic; filled with fakery & with truth; it both imitates & inspires real life, or perhaps that should be "real" life, as there is always the sense that we're playing parts offstage, even if we don't think we are: famously, All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. (At the time Shakespeare wrote those words, women were of course not allowed on the English stage, so Jacques's theory is truly all-encompassing.)

Szymborska, with characteristic lightness & penetration, investigates the selvage of an evening at the theater: not just after the play has ended, but in that more precise in-between space & time in which the players emerge, in costume but out of character, & take their bows, while we applaud our acknowledgement that we've known all along that the action that has absorbed us for several hours didn't, in some sense, really happen. (To quote another of Shakespeare's plays, What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?). She adds an imaginary sixth act to the canonical five of classical tragedy. I've always found the minutes before a play begins a weird blank space of non-time; Szymborska finds, in the moments after the play has ended, a richness & a fruitful ambiguity.

It is a sort of resurrection, as the dead are raised; as in a film run backwards, fatal knives emerge out of the wounds; & deadly enemies clasp hands & bow together. Smaller things happen as well: wigs gone askew during the action get adjusted: that would be distracting in a performance, but the actor wants to look appropriate for the bows. The things that mattered so much during the play – whatever love or treachery or loss made the action tragic – fade in significance. Even "redeeming values", presumably whatever message we're supposed to take from the play, gets swept aside by the elegant gestures of an actor in a fancy hat.

And the unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow: we know, at some level, that what we've been seeing will be repeated, night after night, for the duration of the run, with the words & actions all pretty much the same, over & over. And given that this is probably, given the description of the costumes & actions, a classical tragedy, it may be something we're intimately familiar with on the page, even if we've never seen it brought to life on stage. We may even enjoy the show so much ("enjoy" is such a strange word to use of a tragedy) that we buy a ticket for another performance or two, eager to see again what we've already seen.

As the poem moves on, Szymborska gradually increases the emotions she is expressing during her sixth act. The beginning mostly describes the actions of the actors taking their bows, collecting both precise moments (adjusting a wig or gown, a "dead" performer bowing gratitude for the applause) & ironic juxtapositions that make us question whatever reality we're in: the rebel & tyrant walking out together, the victim & torturer smiling in their theatrical complicity. But then she moves to the actors who weren't in the finale, who have been waiting patiently in full make-up & costume to have their moment of applause: their patient waiting to show themselves to us, hoping for our approval, when for all practical purposes they could have already been home & in bed, she finds moving, more moving that the tragedy's speeches, which she dismisses as "tirades" (obviously the word would be different in Polish, but I believe the translators knew Szymborska & are faithfully conveying her intent here). They are perhaps a figure of the artist, staying in costume even when it's inconvenient, waiting patiently, hoping for their artistry to be noted & appreciated.

But it's at the very last stanza that we are told why she loves her sixth act so much, as Szymborska deftly transitions between amusing & interesting ironies towards an emotional clenching. We begin with another ironic & ambiguous image: the curtain falls, & that's uplifting. Down means up! We are again in the strange world of the theater, both unreal & very real. And a curtain falling is a frequent image of death: the description of life's end as a curtain falling on someone's personal tragedy is an example of how theatrical our lives can be, & how we tend to see our lives as theater. There is a sense of finality, but in those remaining moments, before we really do have to enter whatever world we consider "real" – as we stop applauding & appreciating, & gather our belongings, & trudge towards the restroom & then the subway – we are shown a few, final, very human gestures: someone reaches for a flower, a fragile bit of beauty. Someone else picks up a sword, continuing whatever unending fight had been fought. . . .

A few fleeting moments of beauty, or of longing for recognition, for being seen, before the curtain, literally & metaphorically, descends. The poet describes her reaction to this ultimate ending in vivid physical terms: the emotion grips her by the throat. This unseen hand "does its duty": is this why she has come to the theater? Not for the official show, the classic tragedy (whose purpose, according to Aristotelean authority, is to purge the viewer of pity & terror), but for the strange moment that brings us from dramatic action to our less well arranged world? Here, in the unending attempt to impose order, meaning, significance, & beauty on the chaotic world, & the inevitable confusion & dissolution between the borders of theater & life, is the true source for the poet of the cleansing emotions. At last she is moved, just as she's moving away, a mirror of our own ambiguous relation to the truthful lies of the theater.

I took this poem from Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska.