Śmierć w "nowych dekoracjach"

Abstract

The change in the place of death in contemporary culture was caused by two interdependent phenomena — the desire to completely rule over life, and a utopian faith in unlimited possibilities of its prolonging. At the deepest level, a widespread disappearance of faith in immortality is the cause of this change. The result of this mass removal is the “privatization” of individual death, its removal from the field of social and cultural visibility, as opposed to the reach and omnipresence of the occurrence in media public space, where the event of death is treated in the category of a show. A meta-commentary to cultural processes is the manner, in which the subject of death is revealed in both art and thanatological thought. The dramas analyzed within this text — Kaprysy Łazarza by S. Grochowiak, Lalek by Z. Herbert, Requiem dla gospodyni by W. Myśliwski, Dobrze by T. Man, and Cicho by M. Bieliński — often turn out to be an artistic exemplification of judgments of philosophers, anthropologists, or culture historians (M. Heidegger, M. Scheler, L. Kołakowski, Z. Bauman, E. Lévinas, J. Baudrillard, Ph. Ariès), and confirm the direction of theoretical thought. The authors of dramas show, on the one hand, the impossibility of communication related to the intimate experience of death (silence as a form of exclusion), on the other — the dawn of old rituals accompanying dying. The older texts — those by Grochowiak and Herbert — can be read as a gesture of revision towards the suppression of fear and death in post-war culture of Poland, a result of the war trauma. The newest works — those by Myśliwski, Man, and Bieliński — as a counter-proposal to a media show, to its passive observation of anonymous death. Regardless of historical references, contemporary drama is a reflective field of art, which attempts to settle anew the subject of death in the public sphere, a significant voice in discussion on its tabooing, and its marginalization in cultural practices.