Polityczność areny cyrkowej: na marginesie noweli "Sachem" Henryka Sienkiewicza

"The article analyzes the political nature of the circus arena on the example of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novella Sachem (1899), which is the result of the writer's trip to America in the years 1876-78, i.e. at the beginning of the so-called golden era of the American circus. The theme of the piece is the performance of the last surviving member of the Black Snake tribe who, years later, returns to his hometown as a circus athlete and in the audience confronts the perpetrators of the massacre, German settlers who have taken the place of the victims and built their own city on the ruins. Entering the circus imaginarium allows Sienkiewicz to bring to life characters who are so- called symbolic types (Don Handelman), expressing perfect praxis. The reality projected by the symbolic type temporarily becomes the world experienced by others: one can reject this world (as the project of a madman) or accept it, changing one's own, in which case the symbolic type is the embodiment of the savior) - I assume that Sienkiewicz chooses the latter role for Sachem. A look at how the circus arena defines the depicted reality, positioning the roles of "spectator" and "actor" in Sienkiewicz's novella is an impulse to look at the possibilities of the circus as a space of communication. Following Erving Goffman, I use the notion of "frame", understood as a way of organizing rules defining social situations and producing interpretation schemes of everyday interactions. In the case of circus performance, there is a temporal blurring of these clear divisions, whereby the circus opens up a communicative space that suspends the divisions between the "frame of play" and the frame of reality" through the use of the medium of the body, which simultaneously "plays" and "performs"."