'A Minor Role' - U A Fanthorpe

Title

‘A Minor Role’ → polysemic, meaning both a minor role in a play or a minor role in real life

instability of the language represents the instability between these 2 roles

“I’m best observed on stage”

“observed” - feels a little clinical → not performing!

careful scrutiny

“Propping a spear or making endless / Exits and entrances with my servant’s patter”

“All the men and women merely players / they have their exits and their entrances”

As You Like It → using a line taken from performance to depict performance → metatextual recognition?!

“Yes sir. O no, sir”.

Graphology → separates the speaker’s outside voice from their inner voice → inner thoughts are very different from the way they try and present themself → expectations v realities!

epistrophe → repetition of “sir”, ending each clause to represent how at the end of the day the speaker feels they are inferior to the people they wait on

“the monstrous fabric / shrinks to unwanted sniggers”

“monstrous fabric” → like a curtain → theatre? societal fabrication? feels overwhelming

“unwanted sniggers” → humiliation

“But my heart’s in the unobtrusive / the waiting room roles:”

“But” → conjunction, as readers witness the truer self of the performer/carer

“unobtrusive” → the non-spectacle?!

“roles” → again, performance!

“driving at hospitals, / parking at hospitals”

epistrophic “hospitals” → monotony of clinical care?! repetitive cycle of endless care!

Caesura → lack of order to the endless tasks

DACTLYS → STRESSED FIRST BEAT !

PARALLELISM OF ‘ING’ VERBS !

“Holding hands under / Veteran magazines”

shame of emotion?

“making sense / Of consultants’ monologues”

“monologues” → makes the healthcare process sound like an archaic performance?

What happens to the caesurae in stanza 2?

it shifts to different places on the line → instability of rest + breaks / cycles?

“asking pointed / questions politely; checking dosages, / Dates; getting on terms with receptionists”

dental consonance → sharpness

the clauses get shorter and shorter in length → monotony becomes unbearable + impatient?

“Sustaining the background music of civility”

once more using the metaphor of performance for caring

possibly first inkling towards this being a Greek chorus?

“background music” → unnoticeable but does have an effect

endstop!

“At home in the street you may se mee / Walking fast in case anyone stops:”

“At home” → constant geographical dislocation → instability!

“O, getting on, getting better”

Written in the same graphology as spoken lines of a play → these are rehearsed lines!

anaphoric asyndeton → “getting” → speaker is always progressing rather than being at the end-goal of satisfaction

“

“my formula / for well-meant intrusiveness”

“formula” → this performance is a scientific + precise art?

“At home, / Thinking ahead: Bed? A Good idea!”

between “intrusiveness” and “At home” → together they make a whole line → the speaker feels fractured, especially surrounding where “home” really is!

“Bed? A Good Ideas!” → direct diction, exhaustion

“(Bed solves a lot); answer the phone, / Be wary what I say to it”

parenthetical aside → the speaker finds space in the poem to make jokes away from claustrophobic everyday?

“Contrive meals for a hunger-striker, track down / whimsical soft-centred happy-all-the-way-though novels”

hunger striker → hyperbolic?

multiple hyphenated phrase feels verbose, adding to a sense of wry humour?!

“Find the cat (mysteriously reassuring)”

speaker is relieved of the homelife mundanity!

“Cancel things, tidy things; pretend all’s well / admit it’s not”

epistrophe → cycle → there is a cycle of epistrophe → repetition within repetition!

“pretend all’s well” ENJAMB “admit it’s not” → line break representing the line of facade…?

“Learn to conjugate all the genres of misery: / tears, torpor, boredom, lassitude, yearnings”

caring as having a specific lexis? could look at how this enables a facade to take place, with language becoming repetitive and futile!?

***

delay in the pome → forces the speaker to enact the waiting of time before action can take place?!

“Enduring ceremonial delays. Being referred / somewhere else”

circumnavigating actual healing + care?

caesura enacts this delay

“Saying Thank you / For anything to everyone”

“anything to everyone” → vagueness + anonymity → speaker loses sense of identity + self

The asyndetic list turned into sentence fragments → normative grammar goes a bit out the window

“ // Not the star part. / And who would want it?”

truncated line → feels pushed aside, literally

Speaker forces the guilt of not wanting to be a carer, while not wanting to be a patient co-exist!

“I jettison the spear, / The servant’s tray, the terrible drone of Chorus”

Speaker tracks the ‘serving’ role of theatrical history → from the Greek chorus to the possibly Renaissance ‘servant’s tray’ → back to Shakespeare at the beginning

the carer = a timeless role.

“Yet to my thinking this act was ill-advised / It would have been better to die”

Oedipus Rex → plague in Thebes direct result of the murder of king Laius → LINES SPOKEN BY THE CHORSUS !!

“No it wouldn’t / I am here to make you believe in life”

poem becomes deceptively carpe diem → ironic exhaustion