Context
Letter from Poland: The Crisis of Modernity: 1989-2005. Polish Prose in the Face of the Great Narratives
by Przemyslaw Czaplinski
The fate of Polish prose after 1989 might
be written in three concise sentences. First, in this new period prose
became the Other in Polish public discourse. Second, this state of
otherness arose from the profound crisis in which social communication
found itself. Third, in the most recent prose one can find responses to
this situation, or better to say the strategies for better
understanding the origins of this crisis. Literature
undergoes a constant “test of belonging” in public discourse. Only when
it passes the test does it enter mainstream public attention, and is
thus endowed with social recognition and included in discourse. But the
center, i.e. the mass media that mediate a society’s discursive life,
is a place with its own peculiarities. Literature that finds its way to
this center—i.e. which becomes the object of general notice, even for a
moment—succumbs to a special kind of media processing, which strips the
literary work of its interpretative strength, its ability to disrupt
the consensus. It serves to strengthen the identity of a media sphere
of communication, in other words the confirmation of an “imagined
identity” (as Benedict Anderson would have it) happens through a given
medium—whether it be a newspaper or television network. Examples
of this unfortunate syndrome are fairly numerous. In 1996, Wisława
Szymborska received the Nobel Prize. In response, the
conservative/right-wing press set up a McCarthyesque public trial for
the poet at which her volumes of poetry written during the Stalinist
era forty years earlier (!) were questioned, whereas the liberal press
tried to link Szymborska’s ironic and subtle verses to the tradition of
Cartesian doubt, tolerance and democratic dialogue. In 1997, Henryk
Grynberg’s volume of short stories Drohobycz, drew anti-Semitic
portraits of ordinary people living just before World War II, and in
its wake the friends of Drohobycz society sent a letter to the most
important newspapers in the country, accusing the writer of having
slandered the good name of Drohobycz and its pre-war residents. In
2000, Jan Tomasz Gross published a book called Neighbors—a
historical-sociological study of the mass murder of 1,300 Jedwabne Jews
committed by Poles (after the eruption of the German-Soviet war and
after the Germans had crossed into the eastern territories of Poland);
in response, a significant part of the press—Catholic, nationalist,
conservative and right-wing—accused the author of lies, slander,
conscious falsification of history and besmirching Poland’s good name;
the liberal-democratic press turned this same book into proof of the
demon of anti-Semitism lingering on in Poles, and an argument for the
spreading of tolerance, the spirit of ecumenism and dialogue. In 2004,
immediately after the death of Czesław Miłosz, one of the most
outstanding Polish poets of the 20th century, and certainly one of
Europe’s finest, some of his admirers suggested that he be laid to rest
at Skałka, the Polish Pantheon; in response the
nationalist/conservative/right-wing community stated that Miłosz had
very frequently criticized Poland (or even that he was anti-Polish),
that he had not been a true Catholic, and that his verses did not
belong to the Polish canon as they were not widely known (I will come
back to this last point). In 2005, the Wierszalin theater performed a
play called The Victim of Wilgefortis (an adaptation of the story of Kummernis from Olga Tokarczuk’s book House of Day, House of Night);
amongst the props was a sculpture of a woman on a cross; the members of
a certain political party (those sitting in the city council, who had
financed the rental of the theater building) came across a photograph
of the sculpture. These councillors admitted that they had neither read
the book nor watched the performance, yet nonetheless accused the
Wierszalin of “blasphemy and offense to religious feelings,” warning
that “in forthcoming tenures this theater will be driven out of
Podlasie with sticks.” In mentioning these adventures in the
literature of the new era, I am not trying to suggest that Poland has
become an intolerant country where books are publicly burned and
authors thrown into prison. In fact, I intend the opposite, namely that
all of these protests are symptoms of the important role that
literature has been designated, and at the same time a testimony to the
conviction that literature has no right to fulfill this role in any way
it pleases. To put it another way: nobody would accuse a literary text
of offending religious feelings if everyone thought that literature was
no more than rows of letters arranged on paper that it was of no
greater consequence than simple entertainment, even entertainment of a
specialized or particularly subtle kind. The crisis derives
from the fact that Polish society applies to literature either a
standard of importance or a standard of liberty. Thus the reception of
prose occurs in one of two ways: we grant art a high status on the
condition that it is seen as important, or we grant art total freedom,
though in this case we are not liable to see it as essentially valuable
for social life. Art endowed with liberty is absorbed into
incapacitating rituals of interpretation, into liberal displays of the
artistry of non-obligatory comprehension. Meanwhile, literature weighed
down with obligations shoulders a societal burden but sacrifices
freedom of speech. This choice is what I understand as the particular
crisis of modernity. New Forms The eruption
of newness in prose—stylistic, formal and conceptual—in this first
period of the crisis was dazzling. Just about every prose-writer’s
debut offered a different language, a different use of narrative, and a
different manner of presenting the world. The apogee of innovation came
in 1995—a year which saw the publication of books as diverse as
Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Andrzej Stasiuk’s White Crow, Stefan Chwin’s Hanemann, Natasza Goerke’s Fractals, Olga Tokarczuk’s E.E., Jacek Baczak’s Notes from the Night Shift, Izabela Filipiak’s Total Amnesia, Jerzy Pilch’s Other Delights, Anna Nasiłowska’s Domino… From
this multiplicity emerged at least two essentially different
propositions. They represented an interesting counter-balance to the
“desire for storyline” that had already been signaled and can not be
overestimated, which was decisive in the extraordinary successes of
popular fiction. It should suffice to mention that the novels of
Ludlum—a writer of standard thrillers—had print-runs in excess of one
hundred thousand copies, and that the translation of one of these was
proposed to one of the most outstanding Shakespeare translators of the
time—Maciej Słomczyński. This was an unusual time of relative balance
between innovation and traditionalism. And though the print-runs in
either sphere were quite varied, it is nonetheless important that the
mass media—the major papers, television and radio stations—were
interested in this difference in character. The transmissions which the
high-exposure media ensured to idiomatically expressed subject matter
gave the floor to heteroglossia. We finally began to gain awareness of
the fact that we were a diverse society. This sprawling,
unregulated and unstable expression could not fit into traditional
narrative structures. Thus at least two interesting writing strategies
emerged in the prose of the 90’s—interesting also when set against a
European backdrop. The first might be called a “non-epic model of
prose,” and the second—the post-modern silva. In the
non-epic model, which had rich pre-war (Bruno Schulz, Witold
Gombrowicz, Stanisław I. Witkiewicz) and post-war (Miron Białoszewski,
Leopold Buczkowski, Janusz Anderman, Donat Kirsch) traditions, and
which has long been part of the European tradition (from the digressive
narratives of Cervantes and Sterne to the long prose poems of
Lautreamont or Gide), the author claims the right to use all the
components of narrative as purveyors of meaning. From single words,
through rhyme and poetic means, to the combination of novel and poetic
forms—everything is possible, nothing is forbidden. This is a novel in
which every element can be extracted from its state of epic
transparency to serve as a foundation for the novel. If the author
chooses action, therefore, its development takes place through the
connections between words, not the succession of events—a connection
based on treating verbal phrases of every kind as narrative
occurrences. If the narrator is constructing, then he/she has the
right, above all, to interrupt the narrative, to stray off the main
path, and to subordinate intrigues and events to commentary and
digressions, or to indulge in associations. These attributes can be
found in the works of Marek Bieńczyk (Terminal, 1994; Tworki, 1999), Natasza Goerke (Fractals, 1994; The Book of Nuisances, 1996), Aleksander Jurewicz (Lida, 1990; God Doesn’t Hear the Deaf, 1995), Zbigniew Kruszyński (Schwedenkrauter, 1995; Historical Sketches, 1996), Jerzy Pilch (Other Delights, 1995; One Thousand Peaceful Cities, 1997), Zyta Rudzka (White Film, 1993; Feasts and Famines, 1995), Grzegorz Strumyk (The Annihilation of the Bean, 1992; Kino-lino, 1995), Tadeusz Komendant (The Mirror and the Stone, 1994), Jakub Szaper (pen name of Jakub Bulanda; The Innards and the Entrails, 1994), Magdalena Tulli (Dreams and Stones, 1995; In Red,
1998). Of course, each of these books has its “plot,” but the energy
normally devoted to spinning a tale is directed towards slowing things
down, the masters of which—each of them finer than Kundera—became Pilch
(retardation), Bieńczyk (digression) and Chwin (description); towards
leading the novel as a whole away from single metaphors (Tulli),
towards revealing literary and linguistic borrowings in the re-creation
of the past (Jurewicz), or finally, towards representing the world as
the sum of languages that we use in the act of naming things
(Kruszyński). The formal tactic of the 90’s that is the most
interesting and most difficult to grasp, and which has enriched the
state of European prose, would appear to be the silva, i.e. the
narrative “medley.” The silva, described to perfection by the critic
Ryszard Nycz in his well-known study The Contemporary Silva (1984), is part of the tradition of unobliged writing, which means that
a work rooted in this school of poetics does not compose an entirety,
be it thematic, generic or aesthetic. The narrative evolves from
situation to situation, driven by associations, recollections, and
above all opportunities, which means that it evolves like an anthology
of possibilities provided by the narrative, arising during the course
of writing and fulfilled in sounding the depths of a form that is not
ready-made, which can accommodate portraits, anecdotes, sketches,
essays, stories, micro-dramas, commentaries, tableaus or notations of
ideas for works. The most well-known works from the 60’s and 70’s
adopted this form (Miron Białoszewski, Kazimierz Brandys, Leopold
Buczkowski, Witold Gombrowicz). The latest works of this type, which
might be defined as “post-modern silvas,” introduce distinct
attributes, despite their traditionalism. In Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Pamphlet on Myself (1995), Manuela Gretkowska’s Parisian Tarot (1993) and Metaphysical Cabaret (1994), Anna Nasińowska’s Domino. A Treatise on Births (1995), Zbigniew Żakiewicz’s Beheld, in a Stopped Time (1996), Czesław Milosz’s Alphabet (1997), Another Alphabet (1998) and Roadside Dog (1997), Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla (1997), Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1998), Krzysztof Rutkowski’s Parisian Landscapes, A Register for the End of the Century, Death in the Water and Paweł Huelle’s Other Stories (1999), the innovation finds a free response within the framework of a
clear structure. The structure is ostentatious, and at the same time
artificial in relation to the narrative; it takes the form of
alphabetical order (Miłosz), a treatise (Stasiuk, Tokarczuk), a chain
(Gretkowska, Metaphysical Cabaret), or a non-literary order (the composition of Parisian Tarot reflects the order of the tarot cards; Huelle numbers the succeeding
fragments of his book, combining some of them in cross-referential
configurations). Thus the post-modern silva plays an interesting role
in literature, showing the arbitrariness behind any structure through
its composition, and reminding the reader that at the close of the 20th
century any kind of totality is impossible—both in the sense of
presenting the world as a whole, and in the sense of a response that
would fulfill the rules of a convention without departing from it in
any way. Its compositional framework turns out to be the result of
abiding by a few structures—often entirely arbitrary and alien to
literature (the Tarot, alphabet, numerical order), but also alien in a
whimsical way. The rule for the older silvas was to present
literature’s many genre options, while it seems more characteristic of
the post-modern silva to show a multiplicity of structures, to test the
compositional combinations available to writing. In this way the silva
comments on and contests structure of any sort—in the world and in
literature. It also shows that there is no understanding outside of
convention, while reminding us that every convention brings with it
some kind of overbearing structure, albeit humorous or arbitrary,
though it may hamper expression or limit communication. Today’s
literature, in light of the silva, does not choose between avant-garde
freedom and popular convention, but between convention and
incomprehensibility. And so even in this free movement of innovation
there lies an unsettling overload of structure. As if even the most
sovereign writers were concerned that the contemporary reader would be
less than thrilled by games played at the limits of language. ___________________________ Translated by Soren Gauger
