Continuing the Conversation
Wheeler, Edward T.
Continuing the Conversation Celia Wren, writing in the January 29 Commonweal, gives a justly favorable review to Wit, a widely praised play about the struggles of a terminally ill cancer...
...they focus on mistaken love, pride, failure to acknowledge the Incarnation's significance...
...There is no resurrection of the body until the Final Curtain...
...If we pass gloriously out of life, we do so in the spirit...
...The play's protagonist, Vivian Bearing, is a professor of English literature and a Donne scholar...
...Death of the body is not irrelevant for Donne...
...Wren especially notes the honesty of the play's language: "Juggling ideas about knowledge and authority, the rift between the sciences and humanities, the power of words, and other weighty matters, [Wit] often resembles a poem by [John] Donne...
...The play uses John Donne's wit to deny such a reductive view of human life...
...The wit of Donne allows Bearing to assert her professional and personal self against dehumanizing technical terms and the empty familiarities of her caregivers...
...tells us that we are dealing not with Wit's preoccupation with the degradation of the body, but with the damnation of the soul...
...Edward T. Wheeler, a frequent contributor, is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...The woman who battled treatment and death so bravely— and so brilliantly conveyed the physical destruction cancer imposes—is transformed and reborn before our eyes...
...Donne's poetry is used as a weapon in her struggle with doctors and with death...
...In the play's final moment, Bearing appears naked and brilliantly lit in a triumph of the body over death...
...She must combat flaccid language if she is to retain her own sense of purpose and identity...
...Surely even a casual reading of part of sonnet 5: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be...
...Still, the force of the dramatic action asserts that Bearing salvages what she is as a human being insofar as she retains the wit of Donne's poems...
...The technical vocabulary and the "clinical" patter of the bedside manner reduce her to an object—the focus of an experiment, the mere recipient of treatment...
...The playwright, Margaret Edson, creates in Bearing a testy literary critic whose familiarity with death is derived chiefly from the poems of Donne in which she specializes...
...To force Dr...
...Unfortunately, this viscerally compelling moment is something of a theatrical lie, a willful separation of thought and feeling...
...The struggle Dr...
...The resurrected body is a spiritual body, nothing as tactile or as familiar as Vivian Bearing's triumphal form on stage...
...At one point in the play, Bearing acts out a lecture she once delivered...
...Wit trades faith for spectacle, sacramental sign for irony...
...Bearing (as she wants herself called) wages against doctors, nurses, and disease is conducted with words...
...Father, part of his double interest Unto thy kingdom, thy Son gives to me, His jointure in the knotty Trinity He keeps, and gives me his death's conquest, (sonnet 12) There is no Christ in Wit, not even a generic God or a plain-wrapper religion...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, the play's resolution is a betrayal of Donne's poetry...
...How are you feeling...
...Rather there is the struggle with words: the words of the secular humanist against the medical researcher...
...In short, as a Christian the poet faces the ultimate frailty of our bodies and faculties, and his own utter reliance on Christ crucified...
...The Holy Sonnets are not about preserving an essentially sentimental belief in human physical incorruptibility...
...But Donne has a profoundly transcendent aim...
...Her death rattle, however, is followed by a dubious physical transfiguration...
...On a screen at the back of the stage is projected the text of Donne's Holy Sonnet no...
...5. The play wryly points out that interpreting poems about death is one thing, facing death is another...
...Bearing to be "Vivian" is to force her to accept the definition of herself as patient...
...Wit is tremendously moving, even as Bearing goes through a morphia-induced escape from terminal pain...
...Continuing the Conversation Celia Wren, writing in the January 29 Commonweal, gives a justly favorable review to Wit, a widely praised play about the struggles of a terminally ill cancer patient...
...Donne wields his wit in a confessional struggle with God and against the forces that would damn him, including all those fallen aspects of his body: Why should intent or reason, born in me, Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous...
...The sonnets, which ask the "three-personed God" to "break, blow, burn, and make me new" (sonnet 10), talk about recalcitrant flesh...
...Death's defeat is spiritual, not crudely physical...
...The powerful language of medical research and treatment is seen as forcing a false identity on the patient...
...As in Donne, the emotion is in the thought...
...Wit misreads Donne's very dark and strange words...
...To accept such a definition is to cease to be human and to become an object...
...it is part of the great mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption...
...is particularly irksome...
...he was, after all, a poet/priest who had his portrait painted showing him cowled in his burial shroud...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
