CLASSICS REVISITED
Beyond all that jazz
By Ravi Vyas
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"A Streetcar Named Desire", Tennessee Williams, published and performed, 1947. Several editions are now available in different formats. Also Consulted: The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, edited by Matthew C. Roudané, special Indian price, £15.99. Paris Review Interviews, Writers at Work Series, Sixth Series.
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And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither it hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
Epigraph to `A Streetcar Named Desire' by Tennessee Williams, taken from Hart Crane's 1932 poem,
`The Broken Tower'.
YOU didn't have to witness the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to know that the American South is another country where the black and poor live under terrible indignities, humiliations and privations and where "blind hope, delicate moths in a world of mammoth figures, fly from reality". Blues was the answer to this dead-end world where hope dried up like a raisin in the sun. But jazz evoked a kind of lost paradise that invested the South with a kind of lyricism to attenuate the atmosphere of decay, smothering poverty, violence and squalor in "its sweet, moist embrace".
Telling it as it is
Tennessee Williams' classic play, "A Streetcar Named Desire", tells it all through memorable characters who are psychically wounded or otherwise marginalised by mainstream society: characters seeking lost purity, or escape from the ravages of time, or refuge from the harshness of an uncomprehending world, or simple human contact.
"Streetcar" is divided into 11 scenes — there are no act divisions — with Blanche as the main protagonist; that is, the character who faces obstacles in pursuit of a goal, the one who makes things happen while holding the interest and sympathy of the reader or audience, the one whose crucial choice (or crisis) determines the outcome of the action. It is Blanche who might be said to have entered "the broken world" when her young husband died many years before the action of the play begins. It was the "brief visionary company of love", the loss of which — and the desire to recapture it — leads her to make many desperate choices.
"Streetcar" is a complex play — the first four scenes are comedy; the next two, elegy, mood, romance; the last five, tragedy. To get a hang of the play and its subtext, which is its essence, it is necessary to take it scene-by-scene.
From the opening moment in Scene 1, the atmosphere is evoked by a tinny "blue piano" being played in a bar-room around the corner. Colour and scent also underline the poverty, decay and quaint charm of the New Orleans street named Elysian Fields. Its lively multi-ethnicity is established by the two women, "one white and one coloured", chatting and joking on the steps of a building where Stanley and Stella Kowalski occupy the ground floor flat.
Blanche, a delicate figure in white, appears. Eunice the (white) landlady who lives upstairs asks if she is "lost" — a metaphor that becomes clear as the play progresses. Blanche's first line, a reference to the streetcar that brought her there, suggests she had gone beyond physical needs to ineffable matters of the spirit: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to the one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields." As the play develops, we find that the physical "desire" that caused Blanche to lose her job as a schoolteacher transformed to a mere "desire" for "rest", to a burial of her hope for redemption, to her going mad which could be taken as a crossing over to a "paradise" beyond responsibility.
The real Blanche
Blanche is dubious about the arrangements for her visit: the bed is, like Blanche herself, "one of those collapsible things", and the absence of a door between two rooms of the flat can be taken metaphorically as the absence of space between herself and Stanley, her brother-in-law. But she can't break away from her sister: "I want to be near you, got to be with somebody, I can't be alone!" announces her basic motive — the need for refuge and desire for human contact. This is the real Blanche, looking for "protection", which, in the tradition of the American south, "must be through another person".
The kernel of Blanche's outburst in Scene 1 is to announce that the family estate, Belle Reve, was lost. What had been a solid shore to come home to was but an evanescent dream of lost splendour. Blanche blames the loss of the estate on the expense of "all that sickness and dying", the long series of family deaths she was forced to witness: "the struggle for breath and bleeding. You didn't dream, but I saw! Saw, Saw." The stress on seeing something is what shatters the ideal or an illusion that will be echoed throughout the play. "Í saw! I know." At the beginning of Scene 10, Blanche's romantic fantasy is cut short by a brutal glimpse of herself in a hand mirror, which she then smashes. But the brutal realities of death and desire inflicted on her by those she loved have left their mark on her and colours her outlook on life.
There is constant tension in the air, "duets" between Stella and Stanley, followed by one between Stanley and Blanche. Learning that Belle Reve had to be "sacrificed or something", Stanley believes that Stella must have been swindled out of her share of the property, and "when you are swindled under the Napoleonic code, I'm swindled too." So, he rummages through Blanche's trunk, pulling out clothes and jewellery that to him represent a fortune whereas to Stella they are mere costume pieces. The social class distinctions that these violent scenes reveal are pithily acknowledged by Stanley: "The Kowalskis and DuBoises have different notions."
Across the boundary
But it is Blanche's slow slide into insanity that grips the play from Scene 6 onwards. An irrational fear grips her as reality becomes distorted by Blanche's subjective view of it. Lurid reflections and grotesque shadows appear on the walls around her while "the night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in a jungle." While she telephones helplessly for help, the walls become transparent, so that the sordid life on the street (an encounter between a prostitute and a drunk) is seen simultaneously.
With no friends, nowhere to turn to for help, Blanche goes mad in the end. Just as the boundary between illusion and reality constantly fluctuated for Blanche, so is the line between sanity and madness a tenuous one. But it isn't Blanche who has flipped; Stella too is on the verge as she cries out, blaming herself: "Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?"
Life on the stage for Tennessee Williams was an image of the human condition, not simply a chronicle of individual experience. If he saw more of life in the American south as ugly (that does not mean that he lost faith in the redemptive power of beauty, exemplified by jazz), it was because he saw how the brash energy of a lower social order obliterated the genteel way of life. Life was not simply a walk across a field.
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