The Language of Polish Modernism (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631653425, 9783653045314, 9783631705254, 9783631705261, 3631653425

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: A Few Remarks on the Literary Modernist Formation
Introductory note
Antoni Potocki’s genealogy of the Modernist formation
Points of departure: resolving contradictions, searching for distinctness
Points of arrival: Modernism as an integral part (or inkluz) of Postmodernism
Chapter 2: The Language of Modernism: Experiencing Alienation and Its Effects
The Myth of ‘Young Poland Lingo’
The discovery of language
Circles of alienation
Consequences: Modernist ideas of artistic disalienation
Conclusions
Chapter 3: Tropes of the ‘I’: Concepts of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
Introduction
Symbol
Allegory
Irony
Syllepsis
Recapitulation
Chapter 4: Creating (In)tangible Worlds: Stanisław Brzozowski on the Tasks of Criticism and Art
Stanisław Brzozowski on ‘fundamental seeing’
The rhetoric and poietic of culture
Creating the real
The essay, or philosophy as ‘a type of literary creativity’
Additional words: Criticism as ‘a form of life’
Chapter 5: Inventing the Order: Karol Irzykowski’s Concepts of Criticism and Literature
The concept of literary criticism
Two contexts: Wilde and Bergson
The theory of unclearomania, or: Irzykowski versus Shklovsky
The theory of comprehensibility, or: literature’s communicative destiny
Conclusion: ‘I am a prewar person’
Chapter 6: Literaturology: Looking Back at the History of Modern Literary Theory in Poland
A note on methodology
The origins, development and twilight of modern literary theory in Poland
The tradition as it is today
The directions and tendencies of literary theoretical research today
Episodic theories
Selected Bibliography
Index of Names

Citation preview

49 This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Waclaw Berent, Boleslaw Les´mian, Stanislaw Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers’ linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly selfreflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The author treats Modernist literature itself as a sort of ‘language’ – a distinct entity that emerged through systematic differentiation within the general literary discourse. The book enhances the understanding of the transformations behind this important philosophical and artistic movement.

Ryszard Nycz

The Language of Polish Modernism Ryszard Nycz · The Language of Polish Modernism

Ryszard Nycz is a literary theorist and historian. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Professor at the Jagiellonian University.

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

ISBN 978-3-631-65342-5

LCT 49_265342 Nycz AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1

30.05.17 KW 22 16:06

49 This book debunks the myth of Polish Modernist literature as rooted in rash, immediate expression. The author compares programmatic statements on language by turn-of-the-century writers such as Waclaw Berent, Boleslaw Les´mian, Stanislaw Brzozowski or Karol Irzykowski with notions deduced from their literary works. He demonstrates that these writers’ linguistic self-consciousness informs their implicitly selfreflexive texts and sheds light on their values and characteristic qualities. The author treats Modernist literature itself as a sort of ‘language’ – a distinct entity that emerged through systematic differentiation within the general literary discourse. The book enhances the understanding of the transformations behind this important philosophical and artistic movement.

LCT 49_265342 Nycz AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1

Ryszard Nycz

The Language of Polish Modernism Ryszard Nycz · The Language of Polish Modernism

Ryszard Nycz is a literary theorist and historian. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Professor at the Jagiellonian University.

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

30.05.17 KW 22 16:06

The Language of Polish Modernism

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 49

Ryszard Nycz

The Language of Polish Modernism Translated by Tul’si Bhambry

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress This translation has been funded by the Foundation for Polish Science.

This publication has been financially supported by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-65342-5 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-04531-4 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-70525-4 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-70526-1 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b11339 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2017 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Foreword��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������7 Chapter 1:  A Few Remarks on the Literary Modernist Formation�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������11 Introductory note�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������11 Antoni Potocki’s genealogy of the Modernist formation��������������������������������������18 Points of departure: resolving contradictions, searching for distinctness����������28 Points of arrival: Modernism as an integral part (or inkluz) of Postmodernism�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������36

Chapter 2:  The Language of Modernism: Experiencing Alienation and Its Effects����������������������������������������������������41 The Myth of ‘Young Poland Lingo’���������������������������������������������������������������������������41 The discovery of language�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������43 Circles of alienation����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������55 Consequences: Modernist ideas of artistic disalienation��������������������������������������65 Conclusions�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������72

Chapter 3:  Tropes of the ‘I’: Concepts of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature����������������������������������������������������������77 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������77 Symbol�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������81 Allegory�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������87 Irony�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������92 Syllepsis������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������96 Recapitulation���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 103

5

Chapter 4:  Creating (In)tangible Worlds: Stanisław Brzozowski on the Tasks of Criticism and Art������������������������������������ 105 Stanisław Brzozowski on ‘fundamental seeing’��������������������������������������������������� 105 The rhetoric and poietic of culture������������������������������������������������������������������������ 113 Creating the real������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 119 The essay, or philosophy as ‘a type of literary creativity’������������������������������������ 126 Additional words: Criticism as ‘a form of life’����������������������������������������������������� 130

Chapter 5:  Inventing the Order: Karol Irzykowski’s Concepts of Criticism and Literature������������������������������������������������������ 135 The concept of literary criticism���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 135 Two contexts: Wilde and Bergson������������������������������������������������������������������������� 139 The theory of unclearomania, or: Irzykowski versus Shklovsky����������������������� 144 The theory of comprehensibility, or: literature’s communicative destiny�������� 150 Conclusion: ‘I am a prewar person’����������������������������������������������������������������������� 159

Chapter 6:  Literaturology: Looking Back at the History of Modern Literary Theory in Poland����������������������������������������������������������� 167 A note on methodology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 167 The origins, development and twilight of modern literary theory in Poland������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 170 The tradition as it is today�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 181 The directions and tendencies of literary theoretical research today��������������� 185 Episodic theories����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 188

Selected Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 193 Index of Names��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 197

6

Foreword This book deals with the language of Modernism in more than one way: building on the idea that language shapes our reality, I bring together three basic but complementary perspectives. I begin by exploring the language of Modernism in the primary sense of language, that is to say by examining Modernist writers’ concepts of language as well as the widespread assumptions that influenced how culture was generally understood around the turn of the century. Here I look at the notions of language that the Modernists proclaimed openly as well as the notions that can be deduced from their literary output – especially from their most innovative works. In Chapter Two, each of these notions is discussed in turn, but they also play an important part in the remaining chapters, thus forming the book’s leitmotif. When it comes to identifying the last century’s artistic and intellectual transformations, one idea has long been accepted as canonical, namely that language has played a significant role – a decisive role according to some scholars – both for the Modernists’ literary or generally artistic production, and for the modern humanities as a whole. This idea is well established in Western European academic circles, but it has not yet been verified with respect to Polish literature. This book offers a preliminary inquiry into how valid this idea may be, within literary studies and especially with regards to the early phase of Polish Modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Second, this book centres on the linguistic and literary consciousness of Polish Modernism. Although my main concern is with the sort of consciousness that is formulated in a straightforward discursive mode, I am also interested in selfreflexivity that is occasionally expressed in strictly literary works, and that we must reconstruct indirectly, by way of interpretation. These priorities respond to the current state of research on Modernism. There is no doubt that first-, second-, and even third-rate literary works are much better researched than the history of literary self-consciousness, even if that self-consciousness accompanied the creation of those works. It formed their vernacular context and at the same time became one of their essential components. The relative scarcity of scholarship on this topic accounts for the popular but misguided notion according to which a self-conscious approach to language and literature was uncommon among turn-of-the-century writers in Poland. Although this belief has often been challenged, it is still generally assumed that to examine the self-conscious approach and its intellectual scope would do little to 7

identify, describe and understand the values and specifics of Modernist literature. I hope to debunk this assumption. The following chapters explore linguistic and literary aspects of the Modernists’ artistic mentality. By examining artists’ aesthetics and worldviews, I hope to assemble enough evidence to call into question the enduring stereotype that their artistic expression was immediate and unselfconscious. The prevailing notion that a cult of direct, rash and ‘unthinking’ artistic expression dominated early twentieth-century art, I argue, is a cliché that must be put to rest. Third, this study draws on the secondary meaning of ‘language’. Treating Modernist literature as a distinct artistic entity with a distinct worldview, I foreground the ways in which its changes are ‘system-like’. The unique traits – trends, variants, elements – of Modernist literature developed within a network of reciprocal connections and emerged through systematic opposition and differentiation, rather than through logical consequence, cause-and-effect evolution, or an ‘organic’ development actualizing some built-in potential. In my investigation into the progressive differentiation of Modernist literature I propose six key categories: Modernism, language, the subject, literature, literary criticism, and literary theory. Examining these six sets of problems, it is necessary to respect the subject’s historical singularity. Thus I treat Modernism as an extensive literary formation that is associated with a distinct artistic philosophy and that extends from the late nineteenth century until its stage of exhaustion in the 1960s; I also see Modernism as inextricably linked to the social, cultural and civilizational processes of modernization. In my discussion of linguistic consciousness I draw primarily on the Modernist experience of alienation and on various attempts at overcoming that alienation through the art of literature. I relate Modernist concepts of subjectivity to the tension between the rebirth of individualism on the one hand, and the crisis of the subject on the other. Finally, I give examples for the two most unique, influential and original models of literature and literary criticism, namely Stanisław Brzozowski’s genetic structuralism (avant la lettre) and Karol Irzykowski’s immanent poetics and literary criticism. Literary theoretical ideas, finally, are presented in the context described above, i.e. in relation to linguistic consciousness, critical concepts, and the broadly defined transformations that occurred in modern theory as an autonomous scientific discipline. In this sense, this book serves to historicize the concepts that operated in literary studies during the period under investigation. In this book I reconstruct a basic corpus of concepts and their meanings. Naturally, this provides no more than the initial conditions necessary to tackle the 8

main task, namely to produce a comprehensive literary historical account of the development of Polish Modernist literature. But first we must understand what characterized Polish Modernist literature in the liminal phases of its development. This is why in the following analyses I shift the emphasis to those extreme points, focusing above all on the formative phase around 1910. This is one of the reasons why the four most important writers of that period – Wacław Berent, Bolesław Leśmian, Stanisław Brzozowski and Karol Irzykowski – have come to occupy such a central position in this work. The decline and transitional period of the 1960s and ‘70s are treated much more concisely. To a certain extent at least, the processes and artistic convictions associated with this period already belong to what this book defines as a Postmodern literary sensibility and aesthetic consciousness. The middle phase of Polish Modernist literature is only described in enough detail to allow for an overall image of its development. In this sense this book is in fact one of literary historical prolegomena. My attempt to describe the general traits of Polish Modernism as a closed entity has only been feasible because we can now observe the phenomenon from outside. Our perspective – which can be called a Postmodern one – allows us to see that Modernism has already reached its phase of decline and ossification – the phase that eventually stabilizes and brings into focus the characteristics that have developed throughout the literary historical process. I am convinced that this vantage point allows us to characterize Modernism in its own Modernist terms, even though those terms differ significantly from the categories used until now – categories borrowed from analyses performed ‘from within’ and therefore always fragmentary, hypothetical, and generally short-lived. It is only from this external point of view (which is, of course, also has spatial, temporal and cultural limitations) that the fundamental and deeply system-like traits of the Modernist spirit become tangible: in its superficial manifestations, the Modernist spirit appears as preoccupied with the ceaseless cultivation of what is individual, unique, distinctive, new and radically different. Cracow, November 1995

9

Chapter 1: A Few Remarks on the Literary Modernist Formation Introductory note There is a problem with scholarship on the literature of Young Poland – a stubborn, basic methodological problem that mainly concerns periodization. Perhaps because it is so troublesome, the question of periodization has never been treated properly, even though the difficulty had been pointed out from the outset. To tackle it rigorously would have meant to re-evaluate traditional approaches to the literary history of the Young Poland period. As historical distance made this problem more noticeable, scholars began to engaged with it more frequently. What follows is a simplified and somewhat exaggerated account of the problem.1 First, the general consensus is that Young Poland’s most interesting developments occurred within the first decade of the twentieth century, from about 1902 or 1903 to 1912 or 1913. It is also broadly accepted that the period’s foremost artistic and intellectual achievements are the works of Wacław Berent, Stanisław Brzozowski, Karol Irzykowski and Bolesław Leśmian – to mention only the top four. We must remember, however, that the period’s literary historical construction was based, by and large, on assumptions that mirrored the characteristics of its lead-in phase, the 1890s. This decade was marked by two competing models: Decadent or Symbolist art on the one hand, and neo-Romanticism on the other. The writers of the 1900s reacted critically to those two models and expressed their diverging aesthetic and philosophical positions. The periodization problem explains why the literature of Young Poland is rarely evaluated on the basis of its most outstanding achievements. The key works of the period, with their tendency to unmask and criticize, are commonly situated within the so-called transitional phase. Alternatively, they are passed on to literary historians of the following epoch (as happens with the works of Irzykowski and Leśmian), which does not solve the problem but merely puts 1 I wish to thank Wojciech Gutowski, Tomasz Gryglewicz, Ewa Miodońska-Brookes, Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Jerzy Sosnowski and Marian Stala for an inspiring discussion following the paper that later gave rise to this chapter. Their comments helped me hone many of the arguments presented here. Having completed the present study I read two texts that argue for a rethinking of its periodization of twentieth-century Polish literature: L. Szaruga, ‘Dramat Młodej Polski’ [Drama in Young Poland], Kresy, 19 (1994); J. Sosnowski, ‘Pierwszy upadek Bunga’ [Bung’s First Fall], Kresy, 19 (1994).

11

it off. The literary output that grew out of the Young Poland movement has not yet been assigned a place, or a constructive role, within the coordinate system of the interwar period’s historical, literary and social circumstances. These works continue to be discussed as special cases, as regressive or complementary factors in relation to the period’s dominant tendencies. Second, literary historians are gradually beginning to see the continuities in twentieth-century Polish literature as rooted in the Young Poland period and its lasting legacy. Of course, not all aspects of this tradition are equally significant. In poetry, for instance, Leśmian is considered influential but not Kazimierz Tetmajer; in psychological fiction it is Berent but not Stefan Żeromski, in the sociology of culture it is Brzozowski but not Ludwik Krzywicki, and in literary criticism it is Irzykowski but not Ignacy Matuszewski. Thus the works that are accorded a certain status do not represent a distinct literary historical unit within the framework of Young Poland, and even less within the interwar period. Many well-founded and innovative literary historical and literary critical studies on the interwar period’s artistic and intellectual movements – I would mention in particular Michał Głowiński’s and Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska’s now canonical monographs2 – foreground works that actually seem elusive as a group. As soon as scholars try to capture them in the net of standard periodic classification – which is often a net of their own making – these works disperse and get lost in the margins. This paradoxical situation is already manifest in the works of Kazimierz Wyka, the undisputed founder of modern research on turn-of-the-century Polish literature. Wyka, familiar with Polish scholarship on the literature and art of the first quarter of the twentieth century, was certainly aware that the term ‘Modernism’ tended to be understood rather broadly. And yet, he consciously restricted the term to signify only ‘the preliminary phase of the Young Poland

2 Cf. M. Głowiński, Powieść młodopolska: Studium z poetyki historycznej [The Young Poland Novel: A Study in Historical Poetics], Wrocław 1969, and Zaświat przedstawiony: Szkice o poezji Bolesława Leśmiana [Representing the Beyond: On the Poetry of Bolesław Leśmian], Warsaw 1981; M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Młodopolskie harmonie i dysonanse [The Harmonies and Disharmonies of Young Poland], Warsaw 1969, as well as Symbolizm i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski: Teoria i praktyka [The Symbols and Symbolism in the Poetry of Young Poland: Theory and Practice], Cracow 1975, and Somnambulicy – dekadenci – herosi: Studia i eseje o literaturze Młodej Polski [Somnambulists – Decadents – Heroes: Studies and Essays on Young Poland Literature], Cracow 1985.

12

generation’ (from 1887 to 1903).3 In the remaining – and longer – part of that quarter-century he identified no analogous dominant traits, which is why all subsequent phenomena came to be treated, in Wyka’s work, as deviations from the ‘norm’ he defined. Hoping to foreground the acute sense of change that marked the literature of the turn of the century, Wyka introduced the metaphors of ‘liquidating processes’ and ‘liquidators’. Although these metaphors were striking and immensely persuasive, they were infelicitous on the operational level. It is worth noting that the liquidators he had in mind were not only those of the ‘preliminary’ phase, but of Young Poland as a whole. As a result we get the impression that those liquidators (echoing the poet and literary critic Ludwik Fryde, Wyka adds Boy-Żeleński and Adolf Nowaczyński to the writers listed above) failed to formulate positive and yet strictly Modernist positions. Of course, this impression is contradicted by some of Wyka’s later works, where he presents in-depth analyses of those liquidators. He had a high esteem for them and recognized their influence on the literature of later periods. This is apparent, for instance, when he outlines the key traits of the literature of the years 1905–1914 in ‘Syntheses and Liquidations of Young Poland’ (1961): [I]n many cultural and artistic fields in Poland, distinct prefigurations are beginning to emerge of their role within the independent nation, but also prefigurations of a similarly disposed literature. During World War I, Żeromski himself would express these opinions. It appears that the above-mentioned conductors of liquidation represent similar prefigurations, which explains why each of them would remain influential far into the period of 1918–1939, and why each of them also touches on post-1945 literature in a way that is far less distant than we usually remember.4

Thus historical distance makes it possible to recognize how the same works that appeared to be anti-Modernist reactions from a Young Poland perspective, are in

3 K. Wyka, Młoda Polska [Young Poland], vol. 1, Cracow 1977, p. 29. Wyka’s point of departure, i.e. his terminological concepts, necessarily entails paradoxical and often rather risky attempts at periodization. I discuss these constructs in my earlier works, ‘Gest śmiechu: Z przemian świadomości literackiej początku wieku XX (do pierwszej wojny światowej)’ [The Gesture of Laughter: Literary Consciousness in Transformation (from the Early Twentieth Century Until World War I)], Pamiętnik Literacki, 4 (1977) as well as ‘Homo irrequietus: Nietzscheanizm w twórczości Wacława Berenta’ [Homo irrequietus: Nietzscheanism in Wacław Berent], Pamiętnik Literacki, 2 (1976). Reprints of both texts (in Polish) can be found in the Annex to the original Polish edition of this book. 4 Kazimierz Wyka, Łowy na kryteria [Hunting for Criteria], Warsaw 1965, p. 185.

13

fact the quintessence of the most valuable and long-lasting modern tradition. It is puzzling to me that Wyka consciously described the works he valued most in terms of their artistic, critical and intellectual merits as derivative, unsystematic, and merely ‘parasitic,’ limiting their role within literary history to ‘liquidation’ and ‘prefiguration’. For him, these works rely heavily on the discredited model of their predecessors (Decadent and neo-Romantic literature), as well as on the activities of their successors, who took up and transformed the model of Modernist literature that had crystallized around 1910. Wyka’s periodization had an enduring influence on historians (and readers) of Young Poland’s literature. One scholar who helped establish Wyka’s periodization was Henryk Markiewicz. His classification of the many ‘-isms’ of the turn of the century upheld Wyka’s narrow definition of Modernism as one of the trends of Young Poland – one that ended with Poland’s national independence and the arrival of a new literature born from the new conditions of the interwar period.5 We could even say that this concept became the key premise on which Jerzy Ziomek based his article, ‘Epoki i formacje w dziejach literatury polskiej’ [Epochs and Eras in Polish Literature] – a recent attempts to define distinct periods. Ziomek reaffirms the traditional delimitation of the literature of the turn of the century, ‘recognizing World War I as the epoch’s limit,’ and thus defining ‘Young Poland as a final epoch within the Romantic era’.6 These assumptions are also reflected institutionally, as university departments and research centres tend to subsume Polish literature of this time under the organizational frameworks of nineteenth-century literature. Many literary historians have adopted this narrow definition of Modernism as a self-evident point of departure. This is often the case with studies that looked to the turn of the century to identify precursors of contemporary literature, as well as with studies focused on the Modernist tradition’s continuity into the twentieth century. Here I should mention in particular Czesław Miłosz’s many poetical, essayistic and literary historical remarks,7 the short memoirs by Aleksander Wat and Adam Ważyk, as well as the works of Alina Brodzka, Tomasz Burek, Michał 5 See Henryk Markiewicz, ‘Młoda Polska i „izmy” [Young Poland and ‘-isms’], in Młoda Polska [Young Poland], vol. 1. 6 Jerzy Ziomek, ‘Epoki i formacje w dziejach literatury polskiej’ [Epochs and Eras in Polish Literature], in Pisama ostatnie: Literatura i nauka o literaturze [Final Works: Literature and Literary Scholarship], Warsaw 1994, pp. 50–51. 7 On Miłosz’s lesser-known opinions on this question as expressed in texts that are more difficult to access, see my article “ ‘Nostalgia za nieosiągalnym’: O późnych poematach Czesława Miłosza” [‘Nostalgia for the Unattainable’: Czesław Miłosz’s Late Poems], in

14

Głowiński, Krzysztof Kłosiński, Erazm Kuźma, Andrzej Z. Makowiecki, Jerzy Paszek, Jan Prokop, Ryszard Przybylski, Mirosława Puchalska, Jacek Trznadel, Teresa Walas, Andrzej Werner, Marta Wyka, Roman Zimand, and, perhaps more than any, Jan Józef Lipski. His multifaceted and highly innovative stereometric model of Modernism as a ‘composite current’ has never been seriously discussed, even though it lacks neither detailed evidence nor provocative arguments. In the second volume of his study Twórczości Jana Kasprowicza [The Works of Jan Kasprowicz], Lipski suggests that ‘on Polish land, Modernism began around 1890 and continues until this day’.8 Thus, depending on our initial assumptions, the literature of the turn of the century either marks the end of the nineteenth century, or it inaugurates modern literature, though sometimes it does so at the cost of disrupting traditional classifications. The third and most reasonable alternative portrays this literature as undergoing systematic changes from one phase to the next, in shifting alignments of different trends that blend epigenous and protogeneous characteristics, as is typical of transitional periods. But perhaps the status of Young Poland literature has been unstable and fraught with ambiguity for such a surprisingly long time precisely because those continuities outlined above elude fixed and otherwise well-founded periodical classification. They occur on another level of the literary historical process, or perhaps in another dimension, between and beyond its divisions. They also have their internal, highly varied, stray fields. For instance, I do not see a significant break between the drama of Young Poland and that of the interwar period. In prose, the break is barely discernible; it is only in poetry that it is apparent, though only in the works of the avant-garde, and not that much among the Skamandrites. As Jan Błoński has pointed out, ‘it is difficult to explain why writers such as Brzozowski, Irzykowski, Leśmian, Tadeusz Miciński and Berent (among the older ones), or Witkacy and Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski (among the youngest ones), failed to produce a new artistic crystallization around the year 1910’.9 Indeed, ‘Metafizyczne’ w literaturze polskiej [The ‘Metaphysical’ in Polish Literature], ed. by A. Koss, Lublin 1992. 8 J. J. Lipski, Twórczości Jana Kasprowicza w latach 1891–1906 [The Works of Jan Kasprowicz in the Years 1891–1906], Warsaw 1975, p. 32. On Modernism’s relationship to processes of modernization and to the resulting split between popular and high literature, see R. Zimand, Dekadentyzm warszawski [Varsovian Decadentism], Warsaw 1964, and Trzy studia o Boyu [Three Studies on Boy], Warsaw 1961. 9 J. Błoński, ‘Badania nad literaturą 60-lecia’ [Studying the Literature of the Sixty Years], in Rozwój wiedzy o literaturze polskiej po 1918 roku [The Development of Polish

15

this is baffling. Perhaps the way in which those writers directed their search did not lead them towards a new orientation or trend, one that would enrich the existing repertoire – it only led to clarifying their own positions within a more broadly understood but essentially unchanged Modernist cultural entity. The constellation of literary and philosophical positions that began to emerge around 1890 developed consistently and continuously, until it attained its definite shape around 1910. I propose to define this constellation as the literary Modernist formation. It grew out of changes – consciously initiated changes as well as ones that remained unnoticed – in such basic spheres as the conceptual and linguistic articulation of key problems, or basic structural rules and epistemic assumptions, including axiological and ontological ones. In as far as it results from such changes, the literary Modernist formation can no doubt be seen as a special variation of the intellectual Modernist formation.10 But when it

Literature Studies after 1918], edited and with an introduction by J. Maciejewski, Warsaw 1986, p. 226. 10 See for instance B. Skarga Granice historyczności [The Limits of Historicity], Warsaw 1989, or M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (original: L’archéologie du savoir, 1969). It is beyond the scope of this study to examine all the scholarly traditions that draw on the concept of ‘formation’ (or related concepts) in their description of cultural entities, understood as distinct form other types of discourse, such as history of science, history of ideas, literary or art history. The use of the concept of ‘formation’ deserves a study in its own right. I only wish to note that Brzozowski was certainly the first to refer to concepts of ‘mental formation’ and ‘cultural formation’. He did so for instance in two essays, the second of which presents a brilliant though cursory analysis (see below for details). Among the more recent studies that deal with such cultural entities and their initial or transitional periods it is worth mentioning studies on Romanticism, in particular those that build on T.S. Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm in the history of science. These include works by Żmigrodzka and Janion, as well as Maciejewski’s detailed analysis of the Enlightenment formation (see below). J. Ziomek’s above-mentioned article is also worth mentioning, while K. Wyka also used the term ‘Modernist formation’ in his introduction to the second edition of his monograph Modernizm polski [Polish Modernism]. Historians of aesthetics and art historians constitute a separate group. Of particular note are studies by Morawski and Porębski (see below). Bibliographical details: S. Brzozowski, ‘Kilka uwag o stanie ogólnym literatury europejskiej i o zadaniach krytyki literackiej’ [A Few Remarks on the General State of European Literature and on the Tasks of Literary Criticism] and ‘Z powodu pamiętników SaintSimona’ [In View of Saint-Simon’s Diaries], in Głosy wśród nocy: Studia nad przesileniem romantycznym kultury europejskiej [Voices in the Night: Studies on the Romantic Turning Point in European Culture], Lviv 1912. M. Żmigrodzka, ‘Problemy romantycznego przełomu’ [Problems in the Romantic Turn], in Studia romantyczne [Romantic Studies],

16

characterizes the position of literature (by which I mean especially its models, the way it circulates and communicates, its functions and properties) within the framework of the modern stratification of culture that was emerging at the time, we must see it as a manifestation of the artistic Modernist formation. I do not intend this as a challenge to the broadly accepted periodization of twentieth-century Polish literature. What I have in mind is an entirely different dimension of the literary historical process. The literature of the twentieth century has been ‘sliced up’ into micro-periods of five to seven years, and this operation may seem rational, as it allows us to categorize and explain some of its aspects. But it presumes that historical and political changes determine how literature evolves and mutates. Literature does not change this rapidly of its own accord. But when we consider literary history through the categories of the meandering stages of political changes, we risk losing sight of its unity, as well as its continuity and the essential character and meaning of its transformations. This is, therefore, a myopic perspective; it lacks both a temporal cognitive perspective (nineteenth-century traditions of modernity) and a spatial cognitive perspective (relations to other literatures and other types of cultural discourse). But this naming decision is not simply arbitrary or imposed from outside. For a long time now, research on Young Poland literature and its legacy in the twentieth century has augmented the list of problems and phenomena that elude those narrow periodical schemas. But there is another consideration that demands a broader perspective. This consideration is undeniably rooted in the fascinating problem of Postmodernism, whose ambiguity and polymorphism is generally seen as a consequence of different definitions of its founding concept, i.e. ‘Modernism’. It seems that a growing interest in Postmodernism has caused (and indeed initiated) recent attempts to rethink the key tradition that is Modernism, leading to new and broadly conceived studies. Thus it is no coincidence that in Postmodernist studies, reflections on Modernism are as important as reflections

ed. by M. Żmigrodzka, Wrocław 1973. M. Janion, Gorączka romantyczna [Romantic Fever], Warsaw 1975. J. Maciejewski’s ‘Oświecenie polskie: Początek formacji, jej stratyfikacja i przebieg procesu historycznoliterackiego’ [Polish Enlightenment: The Formation’s Beginnings, its Stratification and the Course of the Literary-Historical Process], in Problemy literatury polskiej okresu Oświecenia [Problems in Polish Literature of the Enlightenment], ed. by Z. Goliński, Wrocław 1977. S. Morawski, ‘Awangarda artystyczna (o dwu formacjach XX wieku)’ [The Artistic Avant-Garde: Two Twentieth-Century Formations], in Na zakręcie: Od sztuki do po-stuki [On the Bend: From Art to Post-Art], Cracow 1985. M. Porębski, ‘Styl epoki’ [The Style of the Epoch], in Sztuka a informacja [Art and Information], Cracow 1986.

17

on the actual subject matter, and that the results of those reflections on Modernism are often more fruitful and less contentious than attempts to define Postmodernity (even if these attempts are openly partial and readily assess works on the basis of their current relevance). Admittedly, the definitions of ‘modernity’ that are at stake – such as cultural modernity, civilizational modernization, artistic and literary Modernism – are at odds more often than they overlap. What is more, they often resist any kind of juxtaposition, being based on incommensurable initial assumptions. Hence we may ask if they can justifiably be applied to the Polish context, which has not yet been described in terms of such massive transperiodical units. This is a difficult and controversial question, no doubt. But it is important enough that we should at least try to answer it. In any case, a project motivated in this threefold way must be worth the effort. It is also possible, in my opinion, to outline the form, dimension and characteristics of the Modernist formation in its early phase by analysing key texts, descriptions and documents that reflect the literary consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Antoni Potocki’s genealogy of the Modernist formation Antoni Potocki’s two-volume study, Polska literatura współczesna [Contemporary Polish Literature], published in 1911–1912, did not meet with a positive reception among contemporary readers or later critics. It was Kazimierz Wyka who saved it from complete oblivion by highlighting Potocki’s succinct theory of generations and showing it to be a precursor in the field of literary historical periodization.11 Potocki suggested that although literary historians certainly ought to take historical events into account, the Uprising of January 1863 and the Revolution of 1905 in Russian Poland had no deciding impact on the internal organization of literature. Interestingly, this opinion met with vehement protest by Potocki’s early commentators, while today it is seen as proof of his insightfulness. The pertinence of this argument was recently upheld by Henryk Markiewicz with regard to the January Uprising,12 and by Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska,

11 See K. Wyka, ‘Polska literatura współczesna Antoniego Potockiego na tle teorii pokoleń’ [Antoni Potocki’s Contemporary Polish Literature against the Backdrop of the Theory of Generations], in Młoda Polska [Young Poland], vol. 2. 12 See H. Markiewicz, ‘Spór o przełom pozytywistyczny’ [The Controversy about the Positivist Turn], in Literatura i historia [Literature and History], Cracow 1994.

18

who convincingly questions the significance of the Revolution.13 Even those critics who had previously portrayed 1905 as an upheaval are now retracting from their former convictions – or at least their radical formulations. Potocki’s book is not free from doubtful statements, risky generalizations and other flaws, which reviewers have been keen to point out. But his work is also full of astute observations that were innovative then and that have lost none of their relevance. One of these is the idea that it is important for literature to break institutionally upheld social, political and aesthetic taboos. He foregrounds Tetmajer’s and Przybyszewski’s ‘undogmatic’ works and their role in freeing ‘the suppressed world of the senses’ (2, 77),14 as well as grotesque and satirical literature (especially Boy’s Słówka [Little Words]), which effectively combats the addictive tendency to plunge into ‘the hiatus of pathos’ (2, 304). In this context Potocki frequently signals the role of censorship. He does not simply describe it as a tool that controls literature’s politically undesirable themes, nor does he dwell on the idea that it favours the formation of a special allegorical code for writers to communicate with their readership. Potocki, much more interestingly, argues that censorship is a factor in the harmful process by which literature becomes hermetic. What is more, it benefits the spreading and consolidation of various unfortunate stylistic modes that ‘infect’ the entire discourse and indirectly influence the mentality of readers and writers alike by maiming their verbal capabilities. Thus censorship ‘forces’ literature to become general, abstract and conventional, but these characteristics are then transposed onto the articulation of issues that have nothing to do with political unorthodoxy. Ideas are presented in a way that is imprecise; descriptions are vague; expressions become banal; there arises what Potocki calls ‘a plague of sentimentalism that pretends to have temperament by being sloppy. Again, it is easier to punctuate the

13 See M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Literatura Młodej Polski [The Literature of Young Poland], Warsaw 1992. 14 A. Potocki, Polska literatura współczesna [Contemporary Polish Literature], Warsaw 1912. (References to this work are presented in the text, listing the volume and page numbers.) See also Potocki’s representative but passionate call in the defence of artistic freedom: ‘What stupendous madness! It is possible to get up every morning thinking about one’s office or increasing rate of interest; it is possible to have a little breakfast somewhere, and black coffee; to spend hours chatting away pleasantly; to attend a concert or a soirée; to fall asleep in the arms of a life-long lover or a momentary one. It is possible to think about getting rich, it is possible to love, to work, to bring children into the world, to have fun, to relax – yes, even to think! Only to take free flight into creativity is impossible, because the nation is in chains’ (2, 153).

19

text with ellipses and exclamation marks than to present your own symbol for the elation that you purport to feel in your heart’. (2, 347). Potocki also highlights the Modernists’ increased consciousness regarding skill and the (broadly defined) role of language. He is the only literary historian of his time to have devoted an entire chapter to the Modernists’ linguistic practices. Like Irzykowski, he recognizes that literary communication had split into two kinds of circulation – one that addresses an elite audience, and one that aims at a popular or mass readership. He discusses the links between Polish and other literatures, and, interestingly, he considers the role of translation (unlike the comparativists of his time). He recognizes the need for thorough sociological research on the changing readership and on the publishing industry, as well as the relationship between publishing and the changes within literature itself. He outlines a sociology of literary forms that is similar to Brzozowski’s concept, and he points out the way in which preferences for certain genres and literary qualities are related to given artistic milieus and literary readership circles. Most importantly, he comes up with the idea of studying the sociology of the Modernist formation (though he does not use this term) – a modern and multifaceted idea that cannot be reduced to the theory of literary generations. The modernity (in both senses) of Potocki’s concept lies, generally speaking, in the way he relates the formations of modern literature and art to what he calls ‘the nation’s becoming a living modern community’ (2, 8). In other words, his main argument concerns the correlation between the Modernist turn and the processes of modernization in Polish society: Meanwhile, Poland was seeing the onset of a phase of strange developments. This comprehensive transformation, across the board, in economic, political, social and even tribal relations, which swept over Poland at the end of the [nineteenth] century must have been accompanied by deep changes in the human material. Urban centres growing, in front of our eyes, to an American scale (Łódź); entire indigenous tribes being discovered at the heart of our own community (the Gorals) – an incredible diversity of types who seek to make their way in life […] – this whole mass mobilization […] being an unavoidable consequence of the community’s transformation from agriculture and village life to industry and urban life; from the nobility and a cast system to democracy and egalitarianism – this entire pandemonium of modernity that took place just like that, everywhere, without warning (2, 60–61).

Poland’s modernization – industrialization, urbanization, democratization, the new stratification and differentiation of social and political life – was gaining momentum. It was a dramatic experience, leading to the fragmentation and disintegration of traditional social ties. To observe this process and its relationship to literary transformations was to call for a caesura around the year 1890. This 20

year seems to mark a shift from Positivist literature (still marked by the Romantic value of service to the nation) to the literature of Young Poland, or, in other words, the shift from ‘the cult of the collective’ to ‘the cult of the individual’. This went hand in hand with the following general comment: In a society that is handicapped and threatened, literature must provide a public service, which elsewhere would be a simple function of the life of the community as a whole. – In this way the solidarity between literature and society is expressed in terms of replacing the former by the latter. In a rich and free society, literature is relieved of this burden and is even supported by the vitality of that society; it gives itself entirely to expressing individual values, clearly becoming a function of the intensified personality. Here, the solidarity between literature and society is expressed through a much more complicated relationship of mutual cooperation. (2, 154)

Following the Romantic period, a phase in which the foundations of independence were laid, Polish society crossed the next important developmental threshold – attaining independence and autonomy – during the anti-Positivist phase: Legal and illegal organizations (who is going to ask about that in Poland today?), institutions, parties and fractions, communal unions and private initiatives, deeds of sacrifice and planned actions, groups, endeavours, new paths and the remodelling of former bounds that were too narrow – from great industry in Łódź to life in harmony with nature in Zakopane, from clandestine teaching to the establishment of the general university, from the tripling of the economic balance in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland to independent self-help institutions to meet the needs of science and art […] – Poland seems to be relearning to express itself, to take heart. (2, 7)

The process of ‘establishing the autonomy of Polish life in all domains’ entails ‘literature’s diminishing servility’ (2, 8). It also entails, crucially, a thorough transformation within ‘that particularly Polish intermediary stratum of society, the socalled intelligentsia, the crucible of change, where some strata are transformed (the nobility), others are formed (the bourgeoisie) and still others (the people) appear momentarily in effigie’ (1, 337). Thus in the previous phase, the intelligentsia fulfilled those different functions, ‘speaking for the people and for the nobility, for the past and for the future – very rarely did it speak and think for itself and of itself ’ (2, 9). As society took on its modern form, Potocki argues, the intelligentsia ceased to play such a representative role. Indeed, modern society does not recognize any power – not even a symbolic one – above itself. It takes care of its business without anyone’s help (or at least it strives to do that), as it desires the greatest possible overlap between concepts of government, state and society. This autonomy of modern society impels almost every group – bourgeoisie and peasants, workers and villagers – to form their own representation from within their own group. So what’s the intelligentsia’s role here? There is no one intelligentsia

21

for all of society, but as many intelligentsias as there are criss-crossing groups and interests in society – this is the new development’s slogan. The old intelligentsia certainly remains a reservoir for those newer ones, but above all, it is evolving into an independent group, for which the function of grasping mankind in its fullness is becoming the raison d’être for the future – not by representing other groups, but out of an organic need. (2, 9–10)

For Potocki, these processes can be related to the concept of literary periodization in the half-century between 1863 and 1910. In his opinion, the advent of new generations, which happens every decade, is not a deciding factor when it comes to the transformations that take place in literature. Although when a new group appears in the literary sphere and is incorporated into social life and intellectual circles, that group also brings a partiality for its own problems, and these are the problems that become the principal ‘forming factors’ in literature, and which therefore determine literature’s relationship to society. Potocki writes: Until now we have always found the forming factors in the very life of Polish society, be they historical factors at the service of politics, be they science and organic work, be they democratism and the people, or be it, finally, the phenomenon of mass mobilization of social forces, most clearly expressed over the last ten years, under the sign of synchronizing the Polish experience with that of the entire West. Four generational groups correspond to these four transformations in the communal psyche. […] Meanwhile, at the beginning of the new century, we seem to be starting off with poetry, not even looking anymore to justify literary phenomena with reference to what happens outside of literature. Are we not passing over the new generational group? […] After all, all the alien groups (Jews), all classes (workers, the common people), as well as women, understood as a disadvantaged group, have now entered literature with all their ideological baggage. What is more […] youth has entered, too, representing another working factor. (2, 163–164)

When we take into account the entire coordinate system, the fundamental break appears to take place in 1890. But the crucial internal break, Potocki suggests, must be dated to the beginning of the century, separating the four decades of literature’s development in reaction to external determinants from the first decade of the twentieth century, when literature begins to develop – for the first time in Poland – according to its own automatic needs and goals, which, however, ultimately emerge from general principles of the division of labour in a modern society. Since the potential of the ‘forming factors’ was exhausted, Potocki argues, the literature of the future (of the twentieth century) must be constructed anew, namely by reckoning with the new determinants of the literature of the first decade, as well as the situation that would arise after Poland would have passed the 22

most important final threshold – national independence. Potocki was convinced that this situation would become real; he predicted it and partially even took it into account in his calculations. His argument is creative and fascinating: [A] Polish writer’s creative freedom – this idea implies faith in triumphant Poland. […] the entire output of contemporary poetry implies that we consider the postulate of Polishness as solved. The attainment of national freedom is and remains only a question of time and material powers, but never one of consciousness and mental powers. This is the substructure on which the individual’s creative freedom in Poland has affirmed itself. The national position was transcended in it – not abandoned. But as the soul resolves Poland’s freedom in itself as a necessity of time – at that moment the soul liberates itself for further works. (2, 155–156)

Seen through the lens of the present study, Potocki’s periodization reveals its distinctly teleological character. In fact, his description of literature’s inner dynamics and development over a half-century serves above all to describe the genealogy of the Modernist formation as actualized in the works of the second and third generation of Young Poland (i.e. the artists born in the 1870s and 1880s). This formation emerges gradually in the 1890s, achieving inner crystallization and self-awareness in the first decade of the twentieth century. The formation did not arise as a result of consecutive generations’ passing or persistence, nor can we attribute it to a sudden onset of scepticism, or to a general discouragement about life and all kinds of activities. On the contrary, it was due to the violent acceleration of modernization. This multifaceted process was judged very critically; it was resisted and experienced painfully if not negatively; it was accepted and it was lived through dramatically. With all this, nonetheless, this process entailed the need to redefine modern literature’s place and task. The Modernist formation took up partitioned Poland’s traditional and yet crucial question: What kind of literary activity can contribute to the cause of Polish independence? But at the same time, it is by finding a new answer to this question that the Modernist formation asserted its difference, its novelty, nay, its very Modernism: literature’s best possible contribution to the task of furthering Poland’s independence would be by first becoming autonomous and independent itself, in order to then ‘infect’ readers as effectively as possible with the force of its own inner freedom. Until then, artistic autonomy had been understood in terms of the contemplative, static and substantial categories of privileged access to the unchanging order of absolute values, as it was for instance in the work of ‘Miriam’ (the pen name of Zenon Przesmycki). Now it began to be considered as a sort of active, subjective discovery of reality’s fundamental dynamics. Thus the new aesthetic dogma of Modernist art was legitimized in two ways: by 23

reference to social modernization and by reference to national independence. It did not only uphold the belief in art at the service of the nation and society – it also reshaped this belief. According to the main dictum of the time, after all, art precedes and prefigures life. Potocki’s understanding of artistic autonomy in Polish Modernism at the beginning of the century found persuasive confirmation in Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama, especially his play Wyzwolenie [Liberation, 1903],15 as well as Wacław Berent’s work, in particular his novel Próchno [Rotten Wood, 1903], which Potocki called ‘the most orchestral composition in the literature of our day’ (2, 270). It came with the motto: ‘Infirmity of the heart is a hundred times worse than infirmity of the body. So let your thinking be healed!’ Potocki’s reading of the novel through this motto confirms his notion of artistic autonomy and the individual’s mental independence as necessary conditions of freedom beyond the mental sphere. Potocki’s contemporaries recognized that his views on art’s status and function were remarkably original, as were the art works that best illustrated his views. The critic Ignacy Matuszewski observed in 1905: ‘The autonomy of poetry and art […] inevitably led us to accept the autonomy of every poet and every artist’. What is more: Let us read Wyspiański’s Liberation, especially the dialogue with the masks; let us read Berent’s Rotten Wood – we will be convinced that these artists were very much aware of the nature and meaning of modern art […]. At that moment poetry and art attain a certain synthesis, one that life is just striving to reach along a thorny path drenched in blood, sweat and tears.16

15 On this subject, see M. Bukowska-Schielmann, ‘Wyspiański: Warianty odbioru’ [Wyspiański: Alternative Readings], in Studia o dramacie i teatrze Stanisława Wyspiańskiego [Studies on the Plays and Theatre of Stanisław Wyspiański], ed. by J. Błoński and J. Popiela, Cracow 1994, as well as E. Miodońska-Brookes, ‘ “Tragedia Edypa” i “tragedia drobnoustrojów”: Dzieło sztuki jako miara rzeczywistości (Glossy do Wyzwolenia Stanisława Wyspiańskiego) [‘The Tragedy of Oedipus’ and ‘The Tragedy of Microorganisms’: The Work of Art as a Measure for Reality (Commentaries on Stanisław Wyspiański’s Liberation)], in Studia o dramacie i teatrze Stanisława Wyspiańskiego [Studies on the Drama and Theatre of Stanisław Wyspiański]. See also: A. Łempicka, ‘Nietzscheanizm Wyspiańskiego’ [Wyspiański’s Nietzscheanism], Pamiętnik Literacki, 3/4 (1958). 16 I. Matuszewski, ‘Literatura, sztuka, życie’ [Literature, Art, Life], in Pisma w czterech tomach: Pism tom pierwszy [Writing in Four Volumes: The First Volume], ed. by I. Matuszewski, Warsaw 1925, pp. 150–152.

24

As the above-mentioned critic Kazimierz Wyka has remarked, Żeromski’s lecture, ‘Literatura a życie polskie’ [Literature and Polish Life, 1915] suggests similar conclusions, even though this writer had previously declined to grant literature such far-reaching influence. It is remarkable to what extent Żeromski retraces Potocki’s argumentation in this lecture.17 But more importantly, for him there is no doubt that literature must be granted its own laws and autonomous tasks, and that literature is finally free from service to society and the nation. For Żeromski, this freedom not only benefits literature – it is also a matter of public interest. What is more, he argues that to acknowledge literature’s autonomy is a necessary condition for essentially original values to form – a process that will determine the rank and significance of this sphere of cultural activity. Given that national independence was immanent, literature ought to pursue the swift attainment of its own independence: If literature was ever to withdraw into its own sphere, then today is its chance to leave behind everyday speech, distant noise, requests, legends, and the inexhaustible multiplicity of events; today literature can forge, from the sources of suffering and pain, its own creation and high language, indescribably enriched by the work of our forefathers. Today it can delve into the secret depths of the human spirit or the spirit of the tribe, escape from the world into the lands of mystery and reverie, or, if it prefers, it can live in the noise of battle and work, in the midst of despair or laughter. Freedom will give it the mark of an art that is independent, individual, characteristic, and therefore national.18

Despite the affinity between Żeromski’s impactful text and Potocki’s abovecited opinions, we must not overlook an important difference. According to Matuszewski, the notion of freeing art from national and social responsibilities constitutes ‘a turning point in Żeromski’s thinking,’ given that until that point, ‘Żeromski, in most of his works, […] had been subject to the curse of slavery’. To account for the writer’s change of mind, Matuszewski suggests that ‘once the 17 See S. Żeromski, ‘Literatura a życie polskie’ [Literature and Polish Life], in Dzieła [Works], vol. 4: Nowele i opowiadania [Novellas and Short Stories], ed. by S. Pigoń, introduction by H. Markiewicz, Warsaw 1957. Compare for instance Żeromski’s description of artistic turns as ‘literary uprisings’ (p. 43), the role of conventional, national and political censorship; ‘the way – at once enforced and voluntary – in which Polish literature abnegates its right to the freedom to create’ (p. 53); Polish literature’s stigma of hermetism and inaccessibility; the way in which Polish literature fulfils the universal role of representing non-existent social and national institutions, leading to the depreciation (if not annihilation) of autonomous cognitive and artistic tasks; the notion that political subjugation has distorted literature’s essential character, and finally Żeromski’s demand for liberation – to recover independence through art. 18 Ibid, p. 60.

25

bloody tempest is over, once we are able to return to work in normal conditions – without restrictions and orders, then perhaps free Polish art will develop in our free country’.19 For Matuszewski, with his positivist upbringing, as well as Żeromski, the place and task of literature were linked to the conditions of its creation and reception. The transformation of those conditions could and should change the role of literature. But literature can only attain independence in an independent Polish state. But the Modernists had a different vision. For Berent and Leśmian, art’s autonomous task was closely related to its function as a spiritual and social precursor. Brzozowski argued against ‘cultivating a Polish Oberammergau’ and proposed his vision of literary and critical engagement as a ‘great anticipation’ of social and cultural transformations. Karol Irzykowski, meanwhile, used a significant part of his programmatic sketch Czyn i słowo [Action and Word] to assert a position that in the 1930s he would come to describe as ivory-towerish: he ostentatiously distanced himself from the imperative of social service, as well as from the renewed demand to view literature as a means to an end. He elaborated on his views in his polemics with Żeromski’s above-mentioned opinions, as well as Żeromski’s advocates and opponents. Here he insisted on the falsity of ‘juxtaposing utilitarian poetry vs. non-utilitarian (pure, artistic) poetry’. He argues: ‘I, too, favour “utilitarianism” in literature, but i see it in a different place than it usually tended to be seen’ – namely ‘art discovers and assimilates for us new fields of life, and this is the only way in which it can be utilitarian. But on first glance these are only “imponderabilia,” “unnecessary” things – since their relationship to our current concerns is difficult to establish.’20 Looking from a more distant perspective, it appears that the aesthetic and philosophical premises on which Potocki based his literary historical conception are rooted not only in Modernist notions of art’s status and tasks, but also in the earliest attempts to sum up the changes of modern literature. The fact that such attempts were being proposed in independent Poland is clear, for instance, from Stanisław Baczyński’s Sztuka walcząca [Committed Art, 1923], whose opening remarks contain the following diagnosis: ‘the transformation in political relations and the associated freedom of national thought and work inexorably lad to 19 I. Matuszewski, ‘Nowa legenda o Żeromskim’ [The New Legend about Żeromski], in I. Matuszewski, O twórczości i twórach: Studia i szkice literackie, ed. by S. Sandler, Warsaw 1965, pp. 333–335. 20 K. Irzykowski, ‘Imponderabilia, czyli rzeczy ‘niepotrzebne’ [Imponderabilia, or ‘Unnecessary’ Things; 1916], in Słoń wśród porcelany: Lżejszy kaliber [An Elephant in a China Shop: A Lighter Calibre], Cracow 1976, p. 235 and p. 237.

26

the liquidation of the literature of Romanticizing snobbism’. Baczyński goes on to polemicize with Żeromski’s Snobizm i postęp [Snobbism and Progress]: Given that the Polish writer aspires to the dignity of a high priest of national mysteries, given that he invests his temperament and imagination in goals and problems where any old state functionary would be wiser and more competent, given the Romantic heritage and the snobbism of literature, it is not only artistic creativity that collapses, but the nation’s culture itself.21

In 1928 Leon Pomirowski evaluated literature’s ‘dependent independence’ in the first decade. Since the notion of poetry as a ‘centre of national and social inspiration’ was completely obsolete, he argued, ‘the only forming factors of the pedagogy of the day were the deepest and most ethically conceived formal values of that literature’. Hence ‘the new generation would be most influenced by the previously mocked creators of “art for art’s sake,” citizens of art, not subjects of life’. In a straightforward manner he adds: ‘the time has come when Berent, Nałkowska and the other “formalists,” who have nurtured the new generation through their constructive prose, are seeing their heirs mature.’22 If Potocki’s criteria and premises were so clearly relevant to the new political and historical conditions, it was mainly because they were ahead of their time. Potocki saw that the idea of independent art prefigured other developments, both in literature itself and in its social and cultural factors that influence it. He even let its innovative flair colour his own style, so that frequent and dense combinations of pronouncements and predictions became the recognizable trait of this critic with a literary historian’s hat. The following statement is a good example, as Potocki skilfully adapts the established metaphors of martyrdom and rebirth to defend literature’s spiritual freedom. Literature had been trying to replace the stigma of hermeticism, which resulted from the nation’s particular fate, with a universal sort of difficulty that arose from artistic innovation. Potocki remarks: We are not ashamed to admit that the entire literature of this long period can only be understood through the psychology of subjugation. That is the case, and Polish literature, ever since the Romantic era, has approached the problem with a truly messianic spirit of sacrifice – often with complete self-awareness. And this sacrifice cannot end in any other way than with the resurrection of creativity once it is taken off the cross. This triumph will be – it is already – a foreshadowing of the nation’s resurrection, its return to life. Poetry, truly, precedes life. (2, 203–204)

21 S. Baczyński, Sztuka walcząca [Committed Art], Lviv 1923, p. 18 and p. 19. 22 L. Pomirowski, Doktryna o twórczości: Rzecz o współczesnej krytyce, najnowszej prozie polskiej i dramacie [The Doctrine of Creativity: Contemporary Criticism and the Latest Polish Prose and Drama], Warsaw 1928, p. 5, p. 74, p. 123 and p. 127.

27

Points of departure: resolving contradictions, searching for distinctness Antoni Potocki’s Polska literatura współczesna [Contemporary Polish Literature] – a literary-intellectual document that is representative of the epoch’s self-awareness – has allowed me to draw out theories that could serve as points of departure for a more detailed account. Let me point out the most important themes for such a project. Literature’s relationship with society, a leitmotiv in Potocki’s book, is essential when it comes to characterizing the Modernist formation. Potocki’s panorama of Polish literature invokes three systems of reference – three major thresholds in the unfolding of historical events. These are the birth of the modern nation, the birth of modern society, and the birth of the state. The first threshold was passed with the Romantic turn, the second became possible with the antiPositivist turn, and the third, a desired object, represents one of Modernist literature’s anticipatory qualities. These thresholds indicate Modernist literature’s main temporal references, i.e. references to the past (tradition), to the present (correlation) and to the future (anticipation). They also indicate the basic dimensions of the broadly defined modernity of the Modernist formation: modernity (in the sense of a historiosophical epoch), modernization (in the civilizational and technological sense) and Modernism (in the literary and artistic sense). Drawing on Stefan Żółkiewski’s differentiation between the type and style of a culture,23 it seems that those universal ‘parameters’ of modernity, which indicate the generally Modernistic type of the literary formation, are rooted in the historical, civilizational and cultural conditions in which this formation developed. Its form is uniquely Polish, as this modernity decidedly follows the Romantic paradigm.24 Social modernization, meanwhile, is an extrapolation; it seems to be deduced from early symptoms, not based on transformations that have already been completed. Meanwhile, Polish Modernism is ahead of its time, and not only because it prefigures political and historical transformations.

23 Cf. S. Żółkiewski, Wiedza o kulturze literackiej [Understanding Literary Culture], Warsaw 1980. 24 See e.g.: M. Janion, ‘Romantyzm a początek świata nowożytnego’ [Romanticism and the Beginning of the Modern World], in Gorączka romantyczna [Romantic Fever], Warsaw 1975. A further analysis would have to examine the role of the Enlightenment and its legacy. See e.g. T. Kostkiewiczowa, Oświecenie: Próg naszej współczesności [The Enlightenment: The Threshold of our Contemporaneity], Warsaw, 1994.

28

Similarly, the formational qualities of this body of literature are uniquely Polish. The legacy of modernity, the great metanarrative of the human spirit’s emancipation, is reduced to the key problem of liberation – first in the sense of regaining national and social self-determination, and then in the sense of affirming individual freedom and artistic liberty; thi liberation within Modernism counters the traditionally Polish pitfalls of playfulness [swawola] and subjugation [niewola] outlined by Potocki (2, 202). From now on, art decidedly takes the side of the individual over the collective. But the confrontation between cultural Modernism and civilizational modernization indicates the deepening process of internal differentiation, of rejecting homogenized form, causal dependencies or abstraction based in ideology – in art as well as in society and culture drive to be different, to express one’s uniqueness, to separation and autonomy, can be said to represent the exclusive feature of modernizing processes.25 In the simplest terms, poetry now tries to become pure poetry, painting – pure painting, and music – pure music. The sciences – especially the humanities – undergo a similar process of differentiation and autonomization: sociology, anthropology and linguistics are among the disciplines that proclaim their independent status, with their own subjects of study and their own methodologies. Poetics also tries to ‘cleanse’ itself, and soon the entire field of literary studies begins to diversify and specialize on similar ‘purifying’ terms, separating in effect into ‘external’ and ‘internal’ methods and trends whose antagonism would determine their developments for a long time to come. In literature, questions of skill and professionalism as well as autonomous goals come to the fore. This leads to heightened self-awareness among writers; at the same time, art becomes more autotelic and self-critical. The differentiation principle that dominated Modernist discourses leads me to believe that formative characteristics arise not with the realization of an already existing potential, such as a nascent set of values, but from a network of oppositions. Among the two most important pairs that emerged more and more clearly throughout the early twentieth century, I should mention the opposition of elite and popular literatures (whereby popular literature marginalizes various forms of mass literature) and the opposition of autonomous and committed literature (whereby committed literature excludes forms of conformist traditionalism). 25 D. W. Fokkema used the concepts of ‘exclusivity’ and ‘inclusivity’ in a slightly different sense in Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism, Amsterdam, Philadelphia 1984. Analysing the relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism, S. Lash makes an interesting use of the concepts of ‘differentiation’ and ‘de-differentiation’ in Sociology of Postmodernism, London 1991.

29

For many decades these two pairs would determine the literary system, i.e. the models of literature, criticism, as well as their circulation and functioning. Moreover, the ways in which these categories can be combined seem to illustrate the differentiation in the models of literature and criticism. The following categories emerged: a) the elite and autonomous model (e.g. Irzykowski’s criticism and high Modernism, including Leśmian, Czechowicz, Witkiewicz, Schulz, Gombrowicz, and the psychological novel); b) the elite and committed model (e.g. Brzozowski’s criticism, the programmatic works of the first and second avant-garde); c) the engaged and popular model (this least well defined model is perhaps best exemplified by Baczyński’s criticism, by the poetic prose of the avant-gardists, or by ‘committed’ but traditional poetry); d) the autonomous and popular model (e.g. in Boy-Żelenski, the works of the Skamandrites and Kaden-Bandrowski, or the popular novel and popular theatre). The first opposition, which is often expressed in slightly different terms (e.g. accessible and inaccessible literature, difficult and easy literature, innovative and conventional literature), suggests a hierarchical or vertical layering of literature’s types and circulation. The second opposition, though it is often seen as identical with the first, is horizontal. Here, art centres on its own world and cognitive values, but it is separate from both everyday practices and from committed art (it distances itself from these). The notion of commitment touches not only on political and ethical conflicts arising from social reality, but also on the experimental approach born of the utopian conviction that in the extremely individualized world of language, perception and the categorization of reality, formal inventions anticipate and even stimulate transformations in self-representation or in society’s values and behaviours. The tasks of Modernist art as defined in these conditions oscillate between two poles. The first is represented by Nietzsche’s ‘instrumentalist’ position (rejecting the old forms of grasping reality and searching for new forms); the second is illustrated by Bergson’s ‘revelation-based’ position (art striving to attain immediate access to reality). In practice, these views harmonize surprisingly well, coming together in the concept of art as invention, where artistic creativity strives to abolish the opposition between creating and discovering, innovation and reminiscence. Thanks to its technical innovativeness, this kind of art links imaginative creativity with cognitive novelty. This makes it possible to create new forms of organizing experience in order to discover previously inaccessible domains of reality. 30

Inventiveness cannot be separated from its concrete realization, as many scholars have shown.26 This is why – compared to the classicistic doctrine of perfection, or the Romantic doctrine of originality – the Modernist concept and practice of art are inextricably linked to a growing consciousness of the medium, the carrier, the material word through which they are realized. In general, the differentiation of the medium can be seen as the measure of any given artistic discipline’s distinctness. Unsurprisingly, Modernist writers describe their work with reference to the possibilities and tradition of verbal art. This leads them to focus on form (or structure), whose nature or essence they try to describe. They also develop a heightened attention to language, and generally to the important role that linguistic experience plays in relation to the epoch’s literary consciousness. The fact that ‘independent’ Modernist art is anticipatory (not only of political developments) might be why its basic assumptions and influence survived even into the era of national independence. More important, however, was the general significance that this anticipatory character had for the prewar Modernists. It expressed literature’s specific inner status as well as its external relationship to reality. Seen in retrospect, it is clear that Modernist art’s anticipatory nature is related to early attempts to identify the conflict between apparently contradictory values. There was a perceived opposition between aesthetics and politics, between creative autonomy and real-life responsibility, between the ivory tower and commitment, between poetics and ethics. For a long time, this notion of conflicting values would determine both the basic choices of writers and the basic assumptions that underlie readers’ preferences and judgements. The network of historical oppositions that shaped the main features of turn-ofthe-century literature is of course wider and more complex. Among the most important and widespread oppositions I should mention the one between expression and construction and the one between the abstract and the concrete. Both illustrate the fundamental differentiation in the field of poetics. The first

26 See for instance I. Stravinsky’s typical reasoning: ‘Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.’ Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, Cambridge, MA 1970, p. 69. On invention as a category of modern art see H. Read, The Origins of Form in Art, London 1965; J. Derrida, ‘From Psyche: Invention of the Other’, in Acts of Literature, ed. by D. Attridge, New York 1992. See below (chapters 4 and 5) on how this concept of art functions in the ‘ivory-towerish’ and the ‘committed’ models of Modernist criticism.

31

signals the symptomatic evolution of poetic ideals at the turn of the century, but it also indicates different concepts of the work of art: art as an organically developing whole (containing traces of its making), and art as a poetic construction, exposing its own unnaturalness, the artificiality of the artistic ‘technology’ of its production. Moreover, this opposition bears witness to the long lasting rivalry between, on the one hand, the principles of personal expression or the cult of authentic, immediate expression, and, on the other hand, an interest in construction and composition, in the indirectness, nay impersonality, of artistic form, as well as the willingness to celebrate ‘the embarrassment of feelings’.27 The opposition between the abstract and the concrete, meanwhile, represents a point of departure for literary Modernism. In this respect, the Modernist formation is born from a fusion of post-naturalist Impressionism and Symbolism – a fusion that is made possible by the two movements’ rejection of older concepts of subjectivity, and the fact that both movements strove to capture the subject’s ‘automatically’ emerging appearances and meanings. This opposition between the abstract and the concrete also represents a system of philosophical inspiration and a Weltanschauung that are compatible with the subject; they exist, to put it as simply as possible, at the intersection of empiriocriticism28 and a broadly conceived philosophy of life. Both these orientations depart from the ideal of

27 Cf. Irzykowski’s two apt observations:‘[the formerly dominant trend] saw inspiration as the source, [but] modern poetry is a craft […]. What old-fashioned critics used to examine as a problem, as an idea, as guidance for the nation, the new critic will examine mainly from the artistic point of view, as a construction of various “meanings”.’ ‘Krytyka’ [Criticism], in Dziesięciolecie Polski Odrodzonej [A Decade of Reborn Poland], Cracow 1928. ‘In 1902 Tadeusz Miciński’s collection of poems W mroku gwiazd [In the Twilight of the Stars] was published. It contained a little poem that was almost already Modernist in its abbreviations. It was considered groundbreaking in terms of of honesty. […] Indeed, with the exception of Tuwim and Wierzyński and Liebert, in the last 15 years or so Polish poetry has not produced works that could be described as “honest”. They are skilful, rich, bold, innovative, excellent, dark, wild, difficult, multilayered etc., but they are not honest or straightforward; on the contrary, indirectness, the greatest possible distance from the source – the author’s soul – has become the rule. ‘Czy wkraczamy do szczerości w poezji’ [Are We Entering into Honesty in Poetry], Kurier Poranny, 86 (1937). 28 See for instance the argument proposed by the philosopher and historian of ideas R. Bouvier:   Before James, Mach proclaimed that the truth of our knowledge, even scientific knowledge, consists in its efficacy in giving a practical account of facts […] and ultimately in its utility for life.

32

rationalizing the world, and both criticize science’s claim to objectivity. This goes hand in hand with a desire to attain ‘natural man’ and concrete experience, as well as with the discovery of the observing subject’s active or constructive role. This opposition manifests itself in a variety of ways and in most of the philosophical and critical discourses of the time, including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Simmel, James, Worringer, as well as Brzozowski, Irzykowski, Rozwadowski and Znaniecki in Poland. According to Leśmian, ‘first, we must always become clear about the difference between direct and indirect life, between abstraction and the force of life [żywioł].29 The opposing categories in which the Modernist formation articulated its specificity and internal antinomies have not yet been identified exhaustively; similarly, the Modernist formation itself still awaits a systematic examination. I am going to outline just a few exemplary oppositions – ones that can basically be reduced to aspects of the more fundamental differentiation as discussed above. Many important phenomena can be described in terms of contrasting subject positions, whereby the subject’s relationship to the world hinges on the two positions of distance and participation. The notion of distance implies a stable, inner position and a receptive stance. Participation, meanwhile, implies understanding ‘from within;’ it implies experiencing uncertainty and entanglement; it implies cognitive activism. As a rule, transformations tend to resolve contradictions. In the case of a participative subjectivity, the result is an activist position, a desire to transcend the self. What we get in practice are various forms

Before Poincaré, he showed that the principles on which our mathematical and natural sciences rest are only conventional hypotheses, which recommend themselves by their convenience. Before […] Bergson, he pointed out that if reality is a constantly moving process of ‘becoming,’ the function of our intelligence is to immobilise it through words and concepts that seize only what is permanent and identical in the flow of phenomena. (La Pensée d’Ernst Mach: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et critique, Paris 1923; quoted in Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, New York 1958, pp. 108–109.)

See also L. Kołakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. by Norbert Guterman, New York 1968, pp. 104 et seq. 29 B. Leśmian, ‘Znaczenie pośrednictwa w metafizyce życia zbiorowego’ [The Meaning of Indirectness in the Metaphysics of Social Life], in B. Leśmian, Szkice literackie [Literary Sketches], ed. and introduction by J. Trznadel, Warsaw 1959, p. 45. Cf. S. Baczyński, Sztuka walcząca [Committed Art], Lviv 1923, p. 126 et seq. On the literary and philosophical variants of this opposition see S. Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought, Princeton 1985.

33

of internalized distance and of experiencing ‘closeness’ and strangeness at the same time.30 Besides this reduced distance we must consider: 1) the social dimension, related to the levelling of previously ritualized social relationships; 2) the psychological dimension, which touches on the difficulty of rationalizing and mastering mental or emotional experience; 3) the aesthetic dimension, which is about transitioning from traditional forms of artistic cognizance and aesthetic contemplation to forms that document the active, formative role of artistic cognizance as well as the audience’s reaction; 4) the poetological or technical and literary dimension, which relates to the transition from traditional, closed forms, from epic distance and narrative omniscience to open or constructionally loose forms, to the personalized narrative and ostensibly dependent speech, to devices of estrangement or alienation from a familiar context. The transition from the traditional intellectual perspective to participant observation and the ‘strategy of the stranger’ entailed a shift in the way entities were understood, and new models emerged to explain them. The traditional causeand-effect model was rejected, i.e. the model of pre-structural or functional and systemic patterns, which was most often articulated as an opposition of surface and depth (see for instance the writings of Znaniecki and Malinowski before the Great War). Broadly speaking, these oppositions premised an inner order concealed behind the opaqueness of observable phenomena. They also constituted an elementary schema describing the connections between observable entities 30 M. Głowiński has addressed this issue many times, e.g. in ‘Intertekstualność w młodopolskiej krytyce literackiej’ [Intertextuality in the Literary Criticism of Young Poland], Pamiętnik literacki, 4 (1989), and ‘Cztery typy fikcji narracyjnej’ [Four Types of Narrative Fiction], in Poetyka i okolice [Poetics and Related Areas], Warsaw 1992. As descriptions of the Modernist consciousness, G. Simmel’s incisive observations are of particular value. He observes the same phenomenon in aesthetic-artistic, scientificintellectual and social-economical spheres: ‘the more the distance in the external world is conquered, the more it increases the distance in the spiritual world’ and ‘a growing distance in genuine inner relationships and a declining distance in more external ones’. G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. by D. Frisby, transl. by T. Bottomore and D. Frisby from a first draft by K. Mengelberg, London and New York 2004, p. 481; cf. Simmel’s observations on closeness and distance, or indifference and engagement, in the experience of ‘strangeness’ in ‘The Stranger’, in Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, vol. 2, transl. and ed. by A. J. Blasi, A. K. Jacobs, and M. Kanjirathinkal, Leiden and Boston 2009. See also D. Bell’s notion of ‘the eclipse of distance’ in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York 1976, as well as Z. Bauman’s detailed analyses in Modernity and Ambivalence, Ithaca 1991.

34

of meaning (textual and cultural), where the dynamic, ambiguous and inconsistent system of elements ‘appealed’ for a unifying explanation within a closed symbolic universe. But these oppositions were also used to describe many other aspects of artistic activity. For instance, they served to capture transformations in literature and aesthetic sensibilities. As Wilam Horzyca wrote in the Skamandrite manifesto, ‘we want to be poets, those strange creatures that find the greatest depths in life’s glimmering surface’.31 Karol Irzykowski proposed a similar diagnosis: ‘Today’s keen return to lyrical poetry is a healthy reaction – it raises the value of life’s “small things,” trusting its undulating surface rather than its treacherous depth.’ What is more, these oppositions represented the simplest model of both grasping personality structure (the surface ‘I’ – the deep ‘I’) and the most varied manifestations of subjectivity in literature. They also represented the simplest model to describe the effects of the interference between the disintegration of the traditional, material understanding of the subject, and the birth of Modernist individuality as a ‘subjectivity without a subject’. From the beginning of the twentieth century, finally, philosophy and literature came to be equally preoccupied with the opposition between creation and process – a preoccupation that was often expressed in terms of substance vs. function, static vs. dynamic, the world as fully made vs. the world in becoming, artistry vs. creativity, or the work vs. the action of producing it. In literary criticism and literary history, the preferred solution, initially, was to interpret the creation in terms of the process. This was mostly based on contemporary psychologism, the theory of expression, or the works of Nietzsche and Bergson. Sometimes this led to the discovery of new literary forms, such as the self-referential novel, in which the process of creating the work of art became the main subject (for Irzykowski, this was about ‘shifting the work’s centre of gravity from the work to the act of its development’), or the Modernist essay (which for Brzozowski depicts ‘the very life

31 Skamander, 1 (1920). The Polish stage director, writer, and critic Wilam Horzyca was the most frequently mentioned writer of this ‘programme’. The contemporary critic J. Stur refers to what ‘Horyca says in the introductory manifesto’ in Na przełomie: O nowej i starej poezji [On the Threshold: New and Old Poetry], Lviv 1921, p. 104. Meanwhile K. Wierzyński remembers that ‘the first number of Skamander, knocked together by Grydzewski, came with an introductory word by Horzyca – something like a declaration of beliefs’ (K. Wierzyński, Pamiętnik poety [A Poet’s Diary], ed. by P. Kądziela, Warsaw 1991, p. 100).

35

process of thought,’ and where according to Lack, ‘the result is a step on the path towards new results’).32 But over time, these categories came to serve to describe two processes above all: the transformations of modern, anti-essentialist concepts of the subject and the text, and the development of trends in literary studies in the twentieth century. This development began with a tendency to study the work as a creative activity; then came the phase of celebrating the work’s autonomy (with the imperative to read it immanently), and finally there came the work’s re-integration into the process – this time, the process of reading-writing practices – inscribed into the intertextual network of cultural (not only artistic) discourses.

Points of arrival: Modernism as an integral part (or inkluz) of Postmodernism This introductory reconnoitring can only have a provisional conclusion. I recalled Potocki’s argument because it testifies to the feasibility of an alternative genealogy as well as an alternative history of Modernist literature. The basic aspects or dimensions of modernity and the opposing categories outlined above are no more than the first in a longer list of historical oppositions that represent the context for the Modernist formation’s development, maturation, and functioning. The solutions formulated within the framework of these oppositions defined – in the literary, essayistic, and critical works of the most outstanding writers around 1910 – a corpus of assumptions and concepts that would for a long time determine the fundamental models of writing and reading literature – regardless of the changing artistic climate, historical turns, political transformations or the anachronistic stylistic costumes in which they appeared at that time. As I indicated before, the greatest contribution, when it comes to laying the foundations of Polish Modernism (in the modernized sense), was made by four ‘founding fathers’. First, there is Wacław Berent with his concept of the modern psychological novel. The inner cohesion of his polyphonic novel is rooted in

32 These quotations come from: K. Irzykowski, Słoń wśród porcelany [An Elephant in a China Shop], p. 240; idem, Pałuba; S. Brzozowski, Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej [Ideas: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Historical Maturity], introduction by A. Walicki, Cracow 1990, p. 258; S. Lack, Wybór pism krytycznych [Selected Critical Writings], introduction and ed. by W. Głowala, Cracow 1980, p. 180. On the opposition between the product and the process in literary criticism and literary history, see M. Głowiński, ‘Juliusza Kleinera młodopolska historia literatury’ [Juliusz Kleiner’s Young Poland History of Literature], in Ruch Literacki, 3 (1988).

36

the constructional and cognitive procedures of the central narrative subjectivity, whereby individual perspectives on a chaotic and fragmentary reality are combined or arranged to make up a closed symbolic (or mythical) universe. Second, there is Bolesław Leśmian’s concept of poetic language, according to which poetry is a language whose laws effectively cut it off from everyday language, ideology and all the unpleasant or banal aspects of reality. Third, Karol Irzykowski conceptualizes an ‘ivory-towerish’ literature that distances itself from popular or mass culture, from life practice, from social and political problems; he also conceptualizes an autonomous, immanent criticism. Finally, Stanisław Brzozowski’s notions of ‘committed’ literature and criticism were never fully crystallized, but they were precursory (e.g. with regard to avant-garde ideologies) and remained influential for a long time, projecting and anticipating social, civilizational and philosophical transformations. These are the most important – though by no means the only – ‘inventions’ that informed the traditions of Young Poland literature in its early or foundational phase. These traditions effectively ensured modern literature’s unity and the continuity of its development through the next fifty years or so. If we accept, finally, that the literary Modernist formation’s distinctive feature lies in the tradition of ‘novelty,’ or in other words, in the recognition of innovativeness as a superior criterion, then we must also agree that a clear signal of the formation’s phase of decline is recognizable in signs of ‘aesthetic fatigue’ and in the questioning of novelty as an important gauge or basis on which to evaluate works of art. In Polish literature, an early but telling testimony to the critical position on novelty is Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, which Jan Białostocki already used in the 1970s to open his insightful and by now canonical study on the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in art. Gombrowicz’s novel, which features a duel between an Argentine erudite and a Polish innovator, would soon be followed by a significant number of Polish expressions of a literature of ‘exhaustion’.33

33 See J. Białostocki, ‘ “Stare” i “nowe” w myśli o sztuce’ [The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ in Notions of Art], in Refleksje i syntezy ze świata sztuki [Reflections and Syntheses from the World of Art], Warsaw 1978. The concept of ‘aesthetic fatigue’ was introduced by G. Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven 1962. Elsewhere I discuss the symptomatic appearances of ‘aesthetic fatigue’ in Polish literature of the 1960s and 70s, the evident exhaustion of the innovative potential, and the statements of those who remained critical of ‘novelty’ as a category; see Sylwy współczesne: Problem konstrukcji tekstu [Modern Silvae Rerum: The Problem of Text Construction], Wrocław 1983, pp. 118–120. Cf. S. Morawski, ‘Perypetie problematyki nowości w dziejach myśli estetycznej: Rys syntetyczny’ [The Perilous Problem of Novelty in the

37

The developments that came to dominate literature in the 1960s can be seen as escalating symptoms of the breakdown in the basic oppositions through which modern literature articulated its difference and inner differentiation. The tendency to separate elite from popular or mass circulation fades away, as does the opposition between autonomous and committed literature. Instead, writers frequently mix high and low forms, strictly literary forms with manifestly non-artistic ones; they harness marginal registers of speech. There arises a marked aspiration to introduce literary works into both networks of circulation, to address highbrow and lowbrow readers at the same time. Qualities previously attributed exclusively to autonomous literature are transposed onto the entire sphere of historical discourses on culture, while the language of literature, which appeared to be purely formal or stylistic, is seen to carry ideological, historical or moral implications. The artistic construction reveals its impurity; it loosens up to show the heterogeneity of its material, its themes, organization and different levels of subjectivity. The opposition between the abstract and the concrete also becomes less important, as writers shift their attention to what is singular, accidental, radically different, and what must remain inexpressible and unrepresentable in language. Thus, in a nutshell, the exclusivity of modern literature is gradually displaced (or perhaps dominated) by the inclusive features of an ever more pronounced Postmodern creativity. The inclusivity of this Postmodern creativity arises not only from its ability to embrace everything and to spread with ease into the boundless realms of the most variegated fields of science and art. More than anything, this inclusivity arises from the unique feature of Postmodern creativity: it incorporates into its remit something that it is not (in particular: the historical dimension and the tradition of ‘novelty’), but that provides the necessary material for another, ‘doubly coded’ creation. The Polish word inkluz has several meanings, which add up to produce a poignant metaphor for Modernism’s relationship to Postmodernism. First, inkluz denotes an ‘incluse,’ i.e. a lifelong anchorite who is voluntarily locked up in a cell, History of Aesthetic Thought: A Synthetic Outline], in Studia Filozoficzne 2/3 (1984). Of course we must remember that the sense of having exhausted artistic possibilities, both verbal and formal, appears periodically in transitional phases of the literary historical process, just as it appeared in the early phase of the Modernist formation. For instance, Irzykowski recalls Tetmajer’s belief that after Słowacki, all motifs in poetry had been exhausted (NB Tetmajer’s career as a poet began with pastiche and parody of Young Poland diction) in ‘Futurystyczny tapir: Przyczynek do sprawy zwyczajów literackich i do sprawy plagiatu’ [A Futuristic Tapir: A Contribution on Literary Customs and Literary Plagiarism], in Ponowa, 5 (1922).

38

receiving food through a little window. A similarly ascetic quality marks the lofty elitism of ‘high’ Modernism as well as the avant-garde’s ‘missionary’ activities in social life. But the ascetic aspect of the Modernist spirit has also been foregrounded – a little too much, perhaps – by advocates of the Postmodern sensibility, who carefully maintain their image of Modernism only to turn their critical and deconstructive operations against it. It appears that Modernism, with its aspiration to be different and separate at any cost, has finally been absorbed by an ‘amorphous’ Postmodernity, while still maintaining its autonomous, modern spirit. The second definition of inkluz refers to the folk belief in a mysterious power, usually but not always benign, that resides within an object. Modernism, like a magic inkluz, cannot be removed; it continues to exist, unperturbed, at the heart of Postmodernism. The third definition of inkluz refers to magic money that always returns to its original owner. Similarly, Modernism is abandoned, spent, returned – to some people’s delight and to the chagrin of others – but it cannot be got rid of, it always returns to its owner.

39

Chapter 2: The Language of Modernism: Experiencing Alienation and Its Effects The Myth of ‘Young Poland Lingo’ The linguistic singularity of Modernist literature has fascinated commentators ever since it first appeared. Readers have reacted – and continue to react – by professing their struggles. Resistance or reluctance mix with some attempts, at least, to understand this literature. Naturally, the stylistic syndrome known as ‘Young Poland lingo’ [młodopolszczyzna] has also attracted the attention of critics and scholars. The secondary literature is replete with literary and linguistic studies on Modernist writers’ language and style.34 But these studies, though detailed 34 See for instance S. Adamczewski, Sztuka pisarska Żeromskiego [Żeromski and the Art of Writing], Cracow 1949; M. Rzeuska, ‘Chłopi’ Reymonta [Reymont’s ‘The Peasants’], Warsaw 1950; Z. Klemensiewicz, ‘Swoiste właściwości języka Wyspiańskiego i jego utworów’ [The Specific Properties of Wyspiański’s Language and Works], Pamiętnik Literacki, 2 (1958); M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska and and J. Kwiatkowski, Magnuszewski – Berent – Kaden [Magnuszewski – Berent – Kaden], in Księga Pamiątkowa ku czci Stanisława Pigonia [Festschrift for Stanisław Pigoń], Cracow 1961; M. Dłuska, ‘Modernistyczny barok Żeromskiego: Studium prozy poetyckiej pisarza’ [Żeromski’s Modernist Baroque: A Study of His Poetic Prose], Pamiętnik Literacki, (1) 1966; P. Hultberg, The Literary Style of Wacław Berent’s Early Works, London 1967; U. Dzióbałtowska-Chciuk, ‘O języku poezji Wacława Rolicz-Liedera’ [The Language of Wacław Rolicz-Lieder’s Poetry], Rocznik Komisji Językowej Łódzkiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, 1  (1970); Z. Goczołowa, Składnia powieści Stanisława Przybyszewskiego [The Syntax of Stanisław Przybyszewski’s Novels], Lublin 1975; M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Symbolizm i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski: Teoria i praktyka [Symbolism in the Poetry of Young Poland: Theory and Practice], Cracow 1975; J. Paszek, Styl powieści Wacława Berenta [The Style of Wacław Berent’s Novels], Katowice 1976; T. Skubalanka, Historyczna stylistyka języka polskiego: Przekroje [Historic Stylistics of the Polish Language: Profiles], Wrocław 1984; D. Bieńkowska, Z problemów stylizacji językowej w twórczości Władysława Reymonta [Language and Style in Władysław Reymont], Częstochowa 1985; U. Kęsikowa, Język poezji Kazimierza Tetmajera [The Language of Kazimierz Tetmajer’s Poetry], Gdańsk 1988; M. Wojtak, O języku i stylu ‘Wesela’ Stanisława Wyspiańskiego [The Language and Style of Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding], Lublin 1988. Studies on Boleslaw Leśmian form a separate group, as they usually deal with his concept of poetic language. Worth mentioning among the many modern works on language are: M. Głowiński, ‘Sztuczne awantury’ [Artificial Outrage], in R. Jaworski, Historie maniaków [Obsessive

41

and accurate, were usually undertaken in the mode of an immanent analysis of a given writer’s works, and they reflect the individual scholar’s focus on one writer without attempting to reconstruct the historical context (here: the Modernist formation’s linguistic consciousness). It is this context, however, that conditioned the scope and character of the writer’s choices, and which determined the historical meaning of this aspect of literary practice. To account for this state of affairs we should recall the widespread belief that to tackle such a broad problem was useless because the writers of Young Poland lacked sophisticated linguistic reflection. Language, it was assumed, was no subject of interest for these writers, nor did they see it as a problem. Thus Young Poland’s rich but seemingly unselfconscious linguistic activity remained mired in clichés about the epoch’s collective style, with only a few outstanding writers’ idioms breaking out, to some extent, as worthy of scholars’ attention. Jan Procop expresses this view clearly and firmly: Young Poland is hardly aware of the problem of the word, replacing it with the problem of the soul. This is remarkable, given that in France Mallarmé was writing at the same time, while in Russia the Symbolists were very attentive to the word in poetry. […] The paucity of this generation’s linguistic consciousness is astounding. […] It is as if Young Poland wanted to reduce speech (langage) to single, individual speaking (parole), excluding language (langage), not taking into account the weight (including the connotational-mythological, ideological weight) of langue. […] The avant-garde discovered that ‘naïve’ parole unconsciously tends towards langue, in other words, the linguistically unselfconscious utterance tends towards the stereotype, the schema; it loses its singularity, becoming instead a reproducible copy. […] Young Poland believed in the ‘naïve’ parole, which is why it landed up in the stereotype of langue. Seeking unity, it usually ended up

Histories], Cracow 1978; E. Kuźma, ‘Oksymoron jako gest semantyczny w twórczości Tadeusza Micińskiego’ [The Oxymoron as a Semantic Gesture in Tadeusz Miciński], in Studia o Tadeuszu Micińskim [Studies on Tadeusz Miciński], ed. by M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Cracow 1979; B. Szymańska, ‘Poeta i nieznane: Poglądy filozoficzne Antoniego Langego’ [The Poet and the Unknown: Antoni Lange’s Philosophical Views], Wrocław 1979; Proza Andrzeja Struga: Studia [Antoni Lange’s Prose: Studies], ed. by T. Bujnicki i S. Gębala, Katowice 1981; S. Borzym, Bergson a przemiany światopoglądowe w Polsce [Bergson and Philosophical Transformations in Poland], Wrocław 1984; M. Puchalska, ‘Bajarz polski i niepolski’ [Polish and Non-Polish Storytellers], in J. Lemański, Ofiara królewny: Powieść fantastyczna [The Queen’s Sacrifice: A Fantasy Novel], Cracow 1985; M. Stala, Metafora w liryce Młodej Polski: Metamorfozy widzenia poetyckiego [The Metaphor in the Poetry of Young Poland: Metamorphoses of Poetic Vision], Warsaw 1988; M. Głowiński, ‘Intertekstualność w młodopolskiej krytyce literackiej’ [Intertextuality in the Literary Criticism of Young Poland], Pamiętnik Literacki, 4 (1989); S. Balbus, Między stylami [Between Styles], Cracow 1993.

42

with reproducible banality. Literature’s important linguistic problem became blurred in the depths of the naked soul.35

Prokop’s texts are remarkably inspiring, but they are usually most fascinating when one is bound to disagree with them. Readers of his Żywioł wyzwolony have challenged his claim, deduced from the above-quoted argument, that there existed ‘a utopia of communication beyond codes, of full understanding between souls, without the alienating mask of words,’ or that Young Poland literature was marked by a ‘longing for absolute transparency, i.e. the liquidation of the code’.36 No one has yet protested, however, against Prokop’s main assumption – the fact that he acknowledged the Modernists’ consciousness of the mechanisms of alienation, while at the same time firmly denying their deeper linguistic self-consciousness. Among the many myths about Young Poland, the myth of its ‘lingo’ is no doubt one of the most deeply rooted. Naturally, this myth also explains why many of the characteristic traits of Modernist literature are now seen as out-ofdate or of historical interest only. I hope to bring to light some literary historical evidence that illustrates the need for a different understanding of the relationship between the Modernists’ linguistic consciousness and the literary practices that betray their aesthetic ideals.

The discovery of language It was at the beginning of the twentieth century that language was first understood as a fundamental tool and universal medium of cultural activity. In Poland and globally, language became a problem of ever growing importance – of prime importance, eventually – for philosophers, anthropologists, as well as scholars in aesthetics and literature. This was the rebirth of ‘the philosophy of speech’ and of modern Polish linguistics. And finally – and this is crucial in the context of this study – this was when general linguistics was quickly developing as an independent discipline, emerging from a shared interest in language (its foundations, origin, specificity and function) among physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and, naturally, philologists as well as literary critics and historians.37 35 J. Prokop, Żywioł wyzwolony: Studium o poezji Tadeusza Micińskiego [Liberated Elements: A Study on Tadeusz Miciński’s Poetry], Cracow 1978, pp. 40–42. 36 Ibid., p. 40 and p. 41. 37 Besides the studies referenced in the footnotes below, I should like to acknowledge the following works among my sources: W. Ołtuszewski, Psychologia oraz filozofia mowy [The Psychology and Philosophy of Speech], Warsaw 1899; A. Brückner, Cywilizacja

43



44

i język: Szkice z dziejów obyczajowości polskiej [Civilization and Language: Essays in the History of Polish Customs], Warsaw 1901; J. Rozwadowski, Język literacki a mowa żywa [Literary Language and Living Speech], Poradnik Językowy 1902; E. Porębowicz, Poezja polska nowego stulecia [Polish Poetry of the New Century], Pamiętnik Literacki 1902; M. Janik, Najnowsza poezja polska: Studium literackie [The Latest Polish Poetry: A Literary Study], Złoczów [1902]; K. F. Wize, W godzinie myśli: O istocie sztuki [In the Hour of Reflection: The Essence of Art], 2nd ed., Cracow 1903; J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay, Szkice językoznawcze [Sketches in Linguistics], vol. 1, Warsaw 1904; B. Bandrowski, O analizie mowy i jej znaczeniu dla filozofii [The Speech Analysis and its Importance for Philosophy], Przegląd Filozoficzny 1906; K. Appel, O mowie dziecka [Child Speech], Warsaw 1907; idem, Język i Sztuka (Lingwistyka i Estetyka) [Language and Art (Linguistics and Aesthetics)], Warsaw 1910; E. Majewski, ‘Co sądzić o niedopasowaniu języka do myśli’ [What to Think about the Mismatch of Language and Thought], Sprawozdania z Posiedzeń TNW, 7 (1910); P. Giles, ‘Ewolucja a językoznawstwo’ [Evolution and Linguistics], in: Darwin a wiedza współczesna [Darwin and Modern Science], Warsaw 1910; W. Rubczyński, ‘O znaczeniu prac niektórych naszych lingwistów dla logiki’ [The Work of Some of our Linguists and its Importance for Logic], Przegląd Filozoficzny 1911; S. Błachowski, ‘Problem myślenia bez słów’ [Thinking Without Words], Przegląd Naukowy i Literacki 1918; Z. Łempicki, ‘Zasadnicze problemy współczesnego językoznawstwa’ [The Fundamental Problems of Contemporary Linguistics], Eos 1919–1920; G. Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, Cambridge 1970; R. Waldrop, Against Language: ‘Dissatisfaction with Language’ as Theme and as Impulse Towards Experiments in Twentieth-Century Poetry, The Hague 1971; A. Janik, S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York 1973; T. Sharadzenidze, Лингвистическая теория И. А. Бодуэна де Куртенэ и ее место в языкознании XIX–XX веков [J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay’s Theory of Language and its Place in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Linguistics], Moscow 1980; J. P. Stern, ‘Words Are Also Deeds: Some Observations on Austrian Language Consciousness’, New Literary History, 3 (1981); T. B. Strong, ‘Language and Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Critique of Epistemology’, in: Language and Politics, ed. by M. Shapiro, Oxford 1984; J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens, Princeton 1985; E. Stankiewicz, Baudouin de Courtenay a podstawy współczesnego językoznawstwa [Baudouin de Courtenay and the Fundaments of Modern Linguistics], Wrocław 1986; Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay a lingwistyka światowa: Materiały z konferencji międzynarodowej Warszawa 4–7 IX 1979 [Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and Global Linguistics: Proceedings of the International Conference, Warsaw 4–7 September 1979], Wrocław 1989; R. Schleifer, Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Theory, Urbana 1990. Besides outlining the linguistic consciousness of the time (esp. its linguistic ‘Modernist functionalism’) this chapter can only suggest how significant these problems are for all descriptions and evaluations of the language of literary Modernism, including the stylistic syndrome of ‘Young Poland lingo’.

As I formulate my argument on ‘the discovery of language’ and ‘the birth of modern Polish linguistics’ in the first decade of the twentieth century, I am of course aware that the groundbreaking discoveries, theories and studies that would eventually popularize these approaches had appeared earlier, i.e. in the 1870s and ‘80s. But it was only in the 1910s that those new ideas entered the bloodstream of science and culture (notably literature), bringing about a significant shift in what people found interesting, and thus allowing language to become an object of general attention. Historians of linguistics have argued that while ‘Polish linguistics barely counted in the world’ around the turn of the century, by the outbreak of the Great War it was treated as the ‘centre of Slavic studies’. Thanks to the intellectual, organizational and writerly activities in the 1910s, this decade is seen as ‘a period where Polish linguistics flourished’. Its crowning achievement is the publication of the two-volume reference work Język polski [The Polish Language] as part of the Encyklopedia Polska compiled at the Polish Academy of Learning.38 Given the simultaneous development of linguistics and Modernist literature, scholars have readily remarked on the links between these two types of work with language. Philologists and linguists have shown a keen interest in the new literature – so much so that without exaggerating too much, we can say that, next to secondary school pupils, philologists and linguists were among its keenest readers. (And this certainly had an influence on the language and atmosphere of Modernist poetry.) In their opinion, the weaknesses of this new literature were not that significant (and inevitable anyway), while its strengths were incontestable and very promising. According to Aleksander Brückner, ‘the future of this literature is great, meaningful, and forever assured;’ he added that ‘it brings an ever increasing significance to language itself ’.39 In later works he claimed: ‘Young Poland’ is not satisfied with the dictionary of the past – it is insufficiently expressive, insufficiently diversified; to render all the frissons, the vertigo and the symbols one looks for new sources. And one finds them mainly among the people, at the springs of the dialects of Podhale and Mazovia. Language itself plays no mean role in their artistic creations; given the significance we attribute to form (and rightly so), we expect from them splendour and glamour, or

38 S. Urbańczyk, Dwieście lat polskiego językoznawstwa (1751–1950) [Two Hundred Years of Polish Linguistics (1751–1950)], Cracow 1993, p. 176, p. 178, p. 138. 39 A. Brückner, Z dziejów języka polskiego: Studia i szkice [From the History of the Polish Language: Studies and Sketches], Lviv 1903, pp. 46–47.

45

sensitivity and delicacy, or horror and shudders in the very words that make up their images. And we can be proud of what they have achieved.40 [Young Poland] has renewed language. The classicists used to scoff at Mickiewicz’s language; they called him a devil and a barbarian. But they only made fools of themselves for all eternity. If the same fate does not befall every Zoilus of ‘Young Poland,’ it is only thanks to the poor memory of our times, so swiftly rushing forward.41

Critics have highlighted Young Poland literature’s general tendency to enrich and renew literary language. Interesting and favourable analyses of its innovative features can be found in Roman Zawiliński’s article ‘Modernizm w Języku’ [Modernism in Language], in Ignacy Stein’s articles ‘O piękności języka’ [On the Beauty of Language] and ‘Porównania i przenośnie: (Ich pojęcie i rola w języku)’ [Comparisons and Metaphors: (Their Meaning and Role in Language)], as well as in other early contributions to the monthly Poradnik Językowy [The Language Guide], founded in 1901. The most noticeable development in the new literature was its tendency to bring old and forgotten words back to life, often by drawing on the archives of written literary language. Writers also reached back to folk sources, using various forms of dialect stylization, quotations, etc. Thus they recognized what Julian Przyboś would describe, just over a decade later, as ‘the invasion of dialect into the language of Young Poland’ that ‘raised the heartbeat of speech’.42 Critics were equally interested in attempts to introduce linguistic innovation – even those attempts that manifested themselves as ‘a breaking, jarring and disharmony of words and forms brought together for the 40 A. Brückner, Dzieje języka polskiego [The History of the Polish Language], Lviv 1906, p. 166 and p. 178. 41 A. Brückner, Dzieje literatury polskiej w zarysie [The History of Polish Literature at a Glance], vol 2, Warsaw 1908, p. 421. 42 J. Przyboś, ‘Styl “mówiony” ’ [‘Spoken’ Style, 1938], in Linia i gwar: Szkice [Line and Sound: Sketches], vol. 1, Cracow 1959, p. 42. Przyboś would return to the problem of ‘Young Poland lingo’ many times. See e.g. his remarks on Maria Dąbrowska’s language: ‘Dąbrowska produced her work after the Young Poland school had unsettled the balance in written language. Reymont, Tetmajer, Wyspiański, Berent, Żeromski – they agitated the neat language of Prus and Asnyk with an onrush of regionalisms, archaisms and neologisms. The literary language of that time strikes us as overly stylized, artificial. Even the things that were supposed to give it a natural appearance – the expressions taken as they are from dialects – sounds to our ears like mimicry and naïve parody, while the neologisms and archaisms offend us with their poetic pompousness. Dąbrowska has restored the unsettled balance: using various kinds of living speech, she weaved it imperceptibly into the neat structure of the Positivists’ language’ (‘W sprawie języka’ [On the Issue of Language’], in Sens poetycki, vol. 1, Cracow 1967, p. 140).

46

first time’.43 And finally, critics remarked on the ever-increasing importance of language itself in the transformations of Modernist literature: accepting the mental evolution that is currently taking place, we should indicate the signs that suggest that language, too, will be affected by these new trends. […] In poetry the boundaries between categories – especially genres – are gradually erased; internal characteristics (rhythm and rhyme) disappear, while all forces are focused on the expressiveness and plasticity of the images – images that often appear contradictory and glaring, but that were deliberately created by the author. Is it possible, therefore, that language should remain unaffected?44

Given the Modernists’ well-known reluctance to comment on their own works, and given their aversion to scholarly treatises on the ‘secrets’ of creative writing in general (Edward Leszczyński’s Harmonia słowa [Harmony of the Word, 1912] is the only contemporary book devoted entirely to the language of literature45), we must turn to these writers’ strictly literary works to illustrate their interest in the problems of language. It is beyond doubt that linguistic consciousness is essential to their works’ immanent poetics. Berent, Brzozowski, Irzykowski, Jaworski, Lange, Lemański, Leśmian, Miciński, Nowaczyński, Przybyszewski, Wyspiański, Żeleński (Boy), Żeromski… – this list is certainly incomplete when it comes to writers for whom language must have been a source of artistic and aesthetic problems in the processes of both writing and reading. Ignacy Matuszewski, in his article ‘Modernizm w języku’ [Modernism in Language] of 1904, remarked on the linguistic passions behind the new art and the literary fascinations of philologists and linguists: The blossoming of fiction and poetry, the introduction of new themes and artistic factors, the far-reaching transformation in technical form – all this was reflected and had to be reflected very strongly in the art’s tools and materials, i.e. language. […] The general readership, accustomed to the old forms of creative writing, is at a loss; it cannot keep

43 I. Stein, ‘O piękności języka’ [On the Beauty of Language], Poradnik Językowy 1903, p. 143. 44 R. Zawiliński, ‘Modernizm w języku’ [Modernism in Language], Poradnik Językowy 1904, p. 69. 45 See E. Leszczyński, Harmonia słowa: Studium o poezji [Harmony of the Word: A Study on Poetry], Cracow 1912; see also Leszczyński’s ‘Symbolika mowy w świetle bergsonizmu’ [The Symbolism of Speech in the Light of Bergsonian Philosophy], Museion, 1/2 (1913). M. Stala discusses Leszczyński’s aesthetics in ‘Uwagi o estetyce Edwarda Leszczyńskiego’ [Remarks on Edward Leszczyński’s Aesthetics], Ruch Literacki, 3/4 (1994).

47

up with this rapid evolution in writing, for which it had not been prepared; readers often see eccentricity where the aesthete’s experienced eye perceives inexorable necessity. For instance, Żeromski’s Ashes and Reymont’s The Peasants, which serious critics rightly recognized as masterpieces, provoked a storm of protest from the aesthetically rather less sophisticated public. Complaints were raised not only against the content of these works, but also against their linguistic form. Readers saw it as an assault against the purity of speech, even though these novels have in fact enriched the treasury of our language with a wealth of words and expressions that are purely Polish but had unjustly been forgotten. This will benefit our banal and colourless everyday speech. […] The younger philologists, who are not caught up in traditional, schoolmasterly routines, have understood the importance of the language’s formal blossoming and are now fervently defending the mocked and subjugated literature of the most recent years.46

A few years later, the gradual increase in linguistic consciousness saw a reaction among professional linguists. Jan Rozwadowski published a series of popular sketches on language, which were issued as a book after World War I. In his opening remarks Rozwadowski did not fail to emphasize Modernist literature’s intensely stimulating effect: ‘Today, all artistic creativity displays much more consciousness than it used to, and so it doesn’t hurt to pay some attention to language, too, as it is the robe of literature.’47 Generally speaking, interest in language was clearly and strongly on the rise, compared to the preceding period. There is abundant evidence for this claim, vague and indirect as it may be. The cases that testify to Young Poland literature’s interest in language are worthy of attention, not only with regard to the international evaluation of Modernist literature, but also on account of the influence that the allegedly naïve writers of Young Poland had on their immediate successors – the avant-garde. Of course, this consciousness evolved gradually, and if an understanding of the role of language slowly turned into the general cultural consciousness of Modernism, this did not happen overnight or in a uniform manner. The process by which linguistic consciousness was attained can be divided into three phases.

46 I. Matuszewski, ‘Modernizm w języku’ [Modernism in Language], Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 27 (1904), p. 527. 47 J. Rozwadowski, O języku polskim [On the Polish Language], Miesięcznik LiterackoArtystyczny, 1 (1911), p. 51; see also Rozwadowski’s ‘O języku, poezji, dziecku i człowieku pierwotnym’ [On Language, Poetry, the Child and Primitive Man], Miesięcznik Literacko-Artystyczny, 3 (1911). The series of articles published in Język Polski in 1913–21 make up the greatest part of Rozwadowski’s book, O zjawiskach i rozwoju języka [On the Phenomena and Development of Language], Cracow 1921.

48

In the first phase – from the beginning of the period until 1902 more or less – the problem of language was often euphemized or trivialized. This was because it was tackled in the traditional frameworks of other disciplines, such as logic, epistemology, psychology, sociology, aesthetics, philology or stylistics. In the second phase, before 1910, language and speech become fashionable. The use of linguistic terminology to describe non-linguistic objects testifies to this increased interest, and metalinguistic paraphrases describing the most varied problems are equally symptomatic. The third phase is marked by the most intense linguistic reflection. Next to the arrival of new inspirations, such as Croce’s and Vossler’s idealistic linguistics, as well as Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s philosophies of language, this phase sees the rebirth of the Humboldtian tradition of approaching nature and the role of language. Thus Prokop’s thesis as described above can reasonably be related to the first phase only, i.e. the initial development of the early Modernists’ linguistic consciousness. There is no reason to stretch it out to cover the entire period, which would mean to overlook the most interesting and mature forms of that consciousness in Modernism. But the main problem still persists: why was language (langue) overlooked, for the benefit of individual speaking (parole)? The critics’ anachronistic terminology itself seems to suggest an answer. After all, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, where the autonomy of the linguistic system was first theorized, was clearly an anti-Modernist manifesto of linguistic rationalism. Language did not exist as a separate object of study, neither for linguists before the Course, nor in the general linguistic consciousness of the time. Where concepts of an organism or system were used at all, in practice they designated either the sum of loosely interconnected elements of a whole, or a statistical average of the features of a given community’s linguistic activity, analysed through individual speech.48 ‘Language, that is to say speech’ (or: thinking with language) is an ‘abstraction,’ ‘a scientific fiction’ – this general assumption identified – or mixed up – what is systemic with what is individual. According to Appel, the only reality in this sphere is ‘what happens within ourselves, in our souls’.49 Hermann Paul, one of the greatest authorities in the field of new or psychologistic linguistics, observed:

48 See e.g. A. Heinz, Dzieje językoznawstwa w zarysie [An Outline of the History of Linguistics], Warsaw 1978, pp. 179–180. 49 K. Appel, Język i społeczeństwo: (Lingwistyka i socyologia) [Language and Society: (Linguistics and Sociology)], Warsaw 1908, pp. 5–6.

49

[I]t would be safer to abandon the term [language], which is often misguiding; better to always speak of persons, as they, and they only, exist.50

If the language philosophy of this time seems somewhat peculiar, it is because the discovery of language and its fundamental role in culture did not entail a separation of language as an autonomous subject – one whose qualities cannot be attributed to anything else. On the contrary, as Appel wrote, ‘there is nothing in language that isn’t non-linguistic’51 – physiological and biological, psychological and social. Linguistics situated itself on the intersection of other disciplines, while language itself was defined as a ‘threefold system of phenomena’: Above all, language is a function of the organism, it is a coordinated system of the organism’s reactions to external and internal stimuli; it is a biological orientation. Next, language is psychic, a system of linguistic and non-linguistic associations. Finally, language is a social phenomenon, a system of linguistic habits, established with the participation of the same factors that determine the development of social mechanisms in general. Therefore, language is a social institution.52

Clearly, the Modernists’ way of thinking about language did not invite the same concerns as if language had been defined as a system of rules and relational structures. The Modernists’ views on language favoured psycho- and sociolinguistic studies (to use current terminology), studies that identified the impact of language on culture, its civilizational role, as well as studies that evaluated how language fulfilled its referential, communicational or expressive functions. In any case, in order to properly reconstruct and evaluate the period’s linguistic experience, we must have a good understanding of its intellectual horizon. We must know what made communication (i.e. the concrete use of language) possible in the first place, what was taken for granted, what was seen as incontestable, common knowledge. The Humboldtian tradition – thinking about nature, values, and above all, the shortcomings of language – was to become most significant for the Modernists’ literary consciousness. There was an ever-growing awareness of being inexorably embroiled in language, which connects us with our inner world as well as the outer world. Language was also seen ever more sharply as an active agent that formed our image of reality, thus affecting the results of cognition. We

50 H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, translated into Polish by A. Szycówna in Nowe Tory, 4 (1906), p. 437; English translation from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry. 51 K. Appel, Stanowisko językoznawstwa pośród innych nauk [The Position of Linguistics among Other Disciplines], Warsaw 1913, p. 16. 52 K. Appel, Język i społeczeństwo [Language and Society], p. 26.

50

find increasingly frequent comments on how language resists the subject’s desire and ability for verbal expression (hence the motifs – highlighted by Prokop and found in Modernist writing across Europe – of the insufficiency of speech, of being lost for words, etc.). This leads to the discovery of the ideological and alienating power of language, which flows from the fact that language is a biased mediator and that it participates in constructing our image of social reality. As the negative effects of language on ideology came to be treated with increased sensitivity, scholars of the most varied – often opposing – orientations also began to show an interest in it. They were fascinated by the notion of language as an obstacle thwarting immediate access to reality and distorting the image of its cognition through words. Elaborating on Gumplowicz’s sociology of language and Wundt’s ethnopsychology of language (in particular his concept of the collective psyche), the anthropologist Erazm Majewski argued that ‘human language lives beyond man. Let us consider this carefully, that it is not language that lives in man, as a unit, but rather man lives in language’. This is why he found a fundamental ‘social connector’ in speech, ‘a necessary condition for humanity, society and civilization’, as well as ‘a necessary form for our cognition and consciousness’.53 For Baudouin, who strongly believed in psychology, ‘objectively, no language exists. There is no human speech at all. There is no Polish language in particular. What exists, as a reality, is individuals, that is to say human subjects […]. Language exists only on a psychological bases, in the individual souls of people.’54 But Majewski’s optimistic conclusions were often based on metaphorical images that undermined his straightforward statements. They conveyed images of the power of language that overwhelms the thinking subject and deprives it of the ability to act as an individual: [T]he silk worm spins the entire thread that surrounds it; man is born in the midst of a ready-made thread, he is already connected by a thousand threads to other people, he only adds his own threads, or rather, the continuation of those threads that have entwined him – into a common cocoon.

53 These quotations are taken from: E. Majewski, Nauka o cywilizacji [The Science of Civilization], vol. 2: Teoria człowieka i cywilizacji [The Theory of Mankind and Civilization], Warsaw 1911, p. 51; idem, Nauka o cywilizacji [The Science of Civilization], Warsaw 1908, pp. 5–6; idem, Nauka o cywilizacji [The Science of Civilization], vol. 2, p. 88. 54 J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay, ‘Charakterystyka psychologiczna języka polskiego’ [Psychological Characteristics of the Polish Language, 1915], in Baudouin de Courtenay, O języku polskim [On the Polish Language], ed. by J. Basara and M. Szymczak, Warsaw 1984, p. 157.

51

[Thought] is the prisoner in the cage of corporeality, the bird that longs for open space while strong bars cut it off from the outside world. But the relationship of this bird-prisoner to its cage is very different than it might seem. The bird-prisoner is entirely the product of that against which it protests.55

Baudouin, meanwhile, acknowledged the individual’s active role and influence on language. This led him to lay bare another, equally important, force dwelling in language, namely that of fiction and mystification. Throughout his career, Baudouin was interested in the formation and functioning of linguistic stereotypes – those cognitive schemata beset with emotions and value judgements, which were a consequence of ‘the influence of verbal thinking on the psyche,’ i.e. on the ideology or philosophy, the mood and so on, of the people speaking a given language’. Two questions preoccupied him: the linguistic source of metaphysical and mythological superstitions about reality, as well as gendered variation and the mental hierarchies and value judgements inscribed in it: Thus for instance all verbal thinking quintessentially tends to substantialize reflections of the non-linguistic world in our psyche and to create language myths. […] All Ario-European verbal thinking (excluding Armenian, in as far as it is at all ArioEuropean) has a quintessential tendency to sexualize linguistic mental images, whereby the image of masculinity predominates. Verbal thinking in Polish gives rise not only to masculinization, but also to virilization. For people with sexualized verbal thinking the gendered characteristics grow onto all substantial mental images (i.e. mental images of nouns), and it is difficult to get rid of them.56

55 E. Majewski, op. cit., p. 308, p. 264, emphasis R. N. 56 J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay, Charakterystyka psychologiczna języka polskiego [Psychological Characteristics of the Polish Language], p. 215, p. 216, p. 219. On Baudoin’s ‘Humboldtism’ from his early works until his Einfluss der Sprache auf Weltanschauung und Stimmung [The Influence of Language on Ideology and Mood, 1929], see the following essays from the volume Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay a lingwistyka światowa [Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and World Linguistics], Wrocław 1989: A. Wierzbicka, ‘Baudouin de Courtenay and the Theory of Linguistic Relativity’; R. Katicic, ‘Baudouin de Courtenay and Linguistic Relativity’; E. Grodziński, ‘Jan Baudouin de Courtenay o wpływie języka na światopogląd’ [Jan Baudouin de Courtenay on the Influence of Language on Ideology]. It is also noteworthy that the ‘feminist’ current in linguistics, which, to simplify a little, Baudouin initiated in Poland, continued in the interwar period, e.g. with S. Szober’s book, Na straży języka: Szkice z zakresu poprawności i kultury języka polskiego [Guarding Language: Sketches on the Correctness and Culture of the Polish Language], Warsaw 1937; or in K. Irzykowski’s sketch ‘Na straży języka’ [Guarding Language] Kurier Poranny 1937, no. 350, where Irzykowski discusses ‘women’s victimization by grammar’.

52

A similar fascination – and a similar use of metaphors – is evident in other Modernists’ pronouncements on language. In Karol Irzykowski’s work, critical reflections on language, especially its deforming influence on the way we see the world, occupy an increasingly prominent position, at least after Pałuba: [W]ords and concepts combine in the brain with new mental images and give rise to a subsequent world of phenomena which we must take seriously. Falsehoods appear as facts, as phenomena that proliferate, with their own ways of crystallizing, and it is extremely hard to detect them. […] In mental life, whole sentences, aphorisms, templates, symmetries, entire patterns of behaviour, roles, problems, theories, sayings and dualisms play almost the same role as words.57

Karol Appel, meanwhile, drew on Fritz Mauthner to argue that ‘our way of thinking depends to a large extent on our way of expressing ourselves, on our turns of phrase, which are suggested or foisted upon us by a given situation’.58 Feliks Młynarski uses metaphors to capture this feeling of being imprisoned in language: ‘Man carries this heavy golden chain […] he can never escape from under the yoke of his language.’59 Stanisław Brzozowski also examined ‘the world as an object of socialized expression,’ and Jan Rozwadowski took up the problem of ‘the tyranny of language’.60 These statements allow us to formulate an initial diagnosis of the intellectual context in which Modernist literature developed its linguistic self-awareness. Positivist linguistics, with its historical and comparative methods, had focused on external linguistic forms. It aimed to explain them by reconstructing the historical development or genealogy of a given fact. But this method overlooked that fact’s functional role in the system of neighbouring unities. The genealogical reconstruction relied on interpretations of a law – a normative law whose universal and exceptionless validity was taken for granted. The historian of linguistics Gerhard Helbig described the result:

57 K. Irzykowski, Pałuba; Sny Marii Dunin [Pałuba; The Dreams of Maria Dunin], Cracow 1976, p. 438, p. 441. 58 K. Appel, Filologia, jej zakres i zadania [The Scope and Tasks of Philology], Warsaw 1915, p. 10. 59 F. Młynarski, Zasady filozofii społecznej [The Principles of Social Philosophy], Warsaw 1919, p. 35 (according to Młynarski’s introduction, the work was completed in the autumn of 1913). 60 S. Brzozowski, Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej [Ideas: Introduction to the Philosophy of Historical Maturity], Cracow 1990, p. 336; J. Rozwadowski, Prawda życia [The Truth of Life], ed. by A. Krokiewicz, Warsaw 1937, p. lxxxviii, p. 103.

53

It is undeniable that the limited horizon – analysing details and focusing on external phenomena of linguistic form – has resulted in a certain isolation of language from mankind, in language being torn off from its user and creator.61

New orientations in linguistics challenged the atomized or ‘dehumanized’ concept of language. Inspired by psychology and neo-idealism, these new trends focused on contemporary language and on ‘living’ speech, thus foregrounding the individual’s active role. Furthermore, they portrayed the synthetic-philosophical and expressive-aesthetic aspects of language as part of the holistic form of expression that existed within any given community with a shared language and spirit. However, this interest in the subject’s contribution to the linguistic construction of our image of the world led to the realization that language is inexorably distortional, and that it cuts the individual off from immediate access to reality, thus forestalling true knowledge about it. Baudouin, among other scholars, argued that to give linguistic form to our experience is to ‘mythologize’ its image. He gave the following reason: We grasp the external world in the light of our own personalities, in the light of our own illusions about ourselves. […] Just as everything that was touched by Midas turned into gold, so everything that is thought of separately, in isolation from the entirety of concrete life, becomes a substance, a noun.62

61 G. Helbig, Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft, Leipzig 1973, p. 17, English translation from German by Tul’si Bhambry. Cf L. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (chapter 2: ‘The Decay of Literature’), Princeton 1986; J. Kuryłowicz, ‘Współczesne językoznawstwo’ [Contemporary Linguistics], in Studia językoznawcze: Wybór prac opublikowanych w języku polskim [Linguistic Studies: A Selection of Papers Published in Polish], Warsaw 1987. 62 J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay, Charakterystyka psychologiczna języka polskiego [Psychological Characteristics of the Polish Language], p. 158. Cf. E. Stankiewicz, op. cit. It is also worth examining the neglected relationship between Baudoin’s criticism of language and Nietzsche’s ideas (which most likely inspired Baudouin). For instance, the quotation above omits the following passage: It seems to us that we act, that our ‘I’ is at work, that it creates. So we project this illusion onto the outside world, we animate the whole world, we make things substantial, we create creatures, substances. Not only animals and plants are alive, but everything breaks up into living units; it is the baptism of language that gives these units a ‘soul’. We distinguish beings everywhere, their properties, their actions; everywhere someone is doing something. But what’s more, these properties, these actions are also specific substances.



Compare this to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: In its origin, language belongs to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we come into the midst of a gross fetish system when we call up into consciousness the fundamental

54

Hence, one group argues that the individual using language does not have a real impact on it, but is subject to its ‘exceptionless’ laws. Meanwhile, the other group contends that the individual not only contributes to the form and function of language, but that active participation determines the anthropomorphic distortion of linguistic cognition. For the first group, the tool indeed exerts power over its user, while for the second group, the tool is, intrinsically, the actual goal. Thus we are either alienated from language, or language alienates us from reality. But perhaps this duality need not be a disjunction? The alienating and alienated nature of language reveals perhaps its Janus-faced power, which cuts the subject off from access to both inner and outer reality. This is how the basic antinomy of Modernist linguistic consciousness was born. This sense of predicament would lead to a crisis in the basic functions of language – expression, presentation and communication, and this crisis, in turn, would shape the field of action of Modernist literature, as well as the directions of its explorations.

Circles of alienation Historians of linguistics attest that until Saussure’s era language was mostly understood in terms of nomenclature.63 According to Searle, a similar approach took centre stage in academic philosophy of language at the time. For logical positivism, for Frege, the early Wittgenstein’s concept of language as nomenclature was related to a recognition that language was running out of basic tasks (i.e. to fulfil the cognitive and communicative aim ‘to represent and communicate

presuppositions of linguistic metaphysics (i.e. the presupposition of ‘reason’). This system sees everywhere actors and action; it believes in will as cause in general; it believes in the ‘ego,’ in the ego as being, in the ego as substance; and it projects this belief in the ego-substance on to everything – it first creates thereby the conception ‘thing’… Being is everywhere thought into, and foisted upon things, as cause; it is only from the conception ‘ego’ that the derivative conception of being follows… At the commencement there is the great bane of error, – that will is something which acts – that will is a faculty… We now know that it is merely a word. (F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by Thomas Common, Dover 2004, p. 16)



Generally speaking, it seems that the practice of examining individual ideas exclusively in the context of a given discipline’s tradition makes it more difficult (if not impossible) to perceive formative links. These formative links point to the intellectual community of a climate, and they determine the possibilities for reconstructing the historical framework (the ‘horizon’ of consciousness) that is shaped by the general and the specific meanings of the concepts in question. 63 See A. Heinz, op. cit.; A. Thiher, Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago 1984 (chapter 3).

55

factual information’).64 Passages in Struve’s handbook make similar claims about the situation in Poland, which became the point of departure for Modernist philosophy.65 The definition of language proposed by Irzykowski corresponds perfectly to the horizon of linguistic consciousness at the time: [T]he material in which the writer is creative – speech – is a social process. By speech I mean not only the dictionary of words, but the dictionary of concepts, ideals, orientations, values, conversations, which circulates at a given time in a given society.66

This horizon included three positions: some tended to see the essence of speech in colloquial speech and in ‘conceptual language’; some drew on the Romantic tradition and understood language in terms of words; and finally, some did not accept the second position but, referring to Nietzsche, Bergson, James or Mauthner, still shared its critical attitude towards the way in which language fulfilled its practical and cognitive tasks. When a definition is formulated in terms of the relationship between content and form, then this formulation deserves to be examined with the same attention as the definition itself. Heidegger demonstrated that to consider the nature of language – and by extension, of the work of art – in terms of the unity of content and form, is to treat language and art as mere products of a manufacturing process, as tools designed to serve a particular purpose. A tool remains invisible as long as it is practical, convenient and reliable; its nature is concealed in the complex of references through which the world reveals and represents itself. The tool’s material character becomes visible only when the tool is inconvenient, when it is worn out or broken, when it begins to conceal the world instead of revealing it, thereby betraying its own material nature. Now its distorting and deforming character comes into full view.67 Heidegger’s argument sheds light on 64 J. Searle, ‘Introduction’, in The Philosophy of Language, London 1971, p. 6. 65 See H. Struve, Wstęp krytyczny do filozofii, czyli rozbiór zasadniczych pojęć o filozofii [A Critical Introduction to Philosophy: Analysing Key Concepts about Philosophy], 3rd ed., Warsaw 1903. 66 K. Irzykowski, ‘Niezrozumialcy’ [Unclearomaniacs], in Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word], p. 480. T. Dąbrowski presents a similar perspective in ‘Literackie schematy’ [Literary Schemata], Widnokręgi, 2 (1910), reprinted in Miscellanea z okresu Młodej Polski [Miscellanea from the Young Poland Period], ed by T. Lewandowski, Warsaw 1995. 67 See M. Heidegger’s Being and Time (chapter 3, § 16) and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, 1st Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, ed. by D. F. Krell, New York 2008, pp. 143–212. Also, cf. K. Michalski, Heidegger i filozofia współczesna [Heidegger and Contemporary Philosophy], Warsaw 1978, p. 57 et seq.; A. Thiher,

56

approaches to language rooted in the linguistic and aesthetic consciousness of the time. These approaches must be particularly susceptible – and sensitive, too – to the processes by which communicational and cognitive tools are autonomized and disfunctionalized; they must be susceptible and sensitive to the fetishization of the means and the transformation of the means into goals, etc., and, in general, they must be susceptible and sensitive to phenomena of aesthetic and linguistic alienation. The basic position that became a point of reference for other opinions was no doubt that of a double reduction: the reduction of language to speech, and the reduction of speech to its cognitive, practical or communicative function – to conceptual language. The mind was to grasp things in concepts that would in turn be made permanent by speech. Linguistic practice focused on the names of things. Philosophers examined concepts, which seemed to have intrinsic and autonomous value; the sign was seen as an inessential addition, and so problems of expression were ignored. Linguists mostly devoted themselves to lexicology and phraseology. As Karol Appel would write in O istocie zjawisk językowych [The Nature of Linguistic Phenomena], ‘constructions, locutions, redundant sentences are the essential, the fundamental linguistic unit’.68 The strengths and weaknesses of this position are made perfectly clear in Schopenhauer’s work: This is my trick: when the happy moment brings a very vivid insight or a very deep feeling, then, suddenly and in the same moment, I douse it with the coldest, most abstract reflexion, in order to freeze and preserve it.69

The philosopher’s world, frozen in conceptual abstraction, is matched in the scientific cognitive sphere by an understanding of the stable names of things as a kind of ‘abbreviated thought symbol’ of sorts, which are not matched by anything as stable in the sphere of reality. On the side of practical reality, a similar character of stability and conventionality was attributed to the social world, through forms of colloquial language that had fossilized through minimal thinking and

‘Martin Heidegger’, in Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago 1984; I. Lorenc, Logos i mit estetyczności [Logos and the Myth of the Aesthetic], Warsaw 1993, p. 105 et seq. 68 K. Appel, O istocie zjawisk językowych [The Nature of Linguistic Phenomena], Warsaw 1909, p. 8. 69 A. Schopenhauer, Neue Paralipomena: Vereinzelte Gedanken über vielerlei Gegenstände [New Paralipomena: Scattered Thoughts on Many Subjects], Leipzig 1893, p. 352, English translation from German by Tul’si Bhambry.

57

the economy of communication. Ernst Mach, one of the greatest intellectual authorities around the turn of the century, took up the same metaphor about the act of linguistic cognition: The most wonderful economy of communication is found in language. Words are comparable to type, which, sparing the repetition of written signs, serve a multitude of purposes; or to the small number of sounds that make up such a multiplicity of words. Language, with its helpmate, conceptual thought, by fixing the essential and rejecting the unessential, constructs its rigid pictures of the fluid world on the plan of a mosaic, at a sacrifice of exactness and fidelity but with a saving of tools and labor.70

The remarks on language, especially those from the first phase of the transformation of linguistic consciousness, the same formulations seem to return over and over again. Matuszewski writes about Liczmany myśli i mowy [Prototypes of Thought and Speech], Kelles-Krauz about Liczmany nauki i polityki [Prototypes of Science and Politics], Irzykowski mentions templates and labels; others write about ‘schemata,’ platitudes, commonplaces, and so on. The entire language of cognition and practical communication seemed to be congealed in unchangeable forms and beginning to disintegrate into ‘fragments,’ i.e. into separate clichés (and the cognitive stereotypes associated with them), which is what those ‘basic units’ – the ‘constructions and turns’ of speech – turned out to be. Baudelaire wrote: I go alone to try my fanciful fencing, Scenting in every corner the chance of a rhyme, Stumbling over words as over paving stones, Colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago.71

As Miriam pointed out, for Baudelaire ‘the time has come in art when all great general feelings, everything that we could call mankind’s sublime commonplaces, turns out to have already been expressed as well as it could be’. This explained the new art’s main characteristics and tendencies, especially its irresistible propensity, ‘in the search for something new, to drive passion to extremes’.72

70 E. Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, translated by Thomas Joseph McCormack (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 192–193; emphasis R. N. 71 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Sun’, in Flowers of Evil, translated by William Aggeler, Fresno 1954. 72 Przesmycki (Miriam), ‘Profile poetów francuskich’ [Profiles of French Poets], in idem, Wybór pism krytycznych [Selected Critical Writings], vol. 1, ed. by E. Korzeniewska, Cracow 1967, pp. 98–99.

58

Friedrich Nietzsche warned his readers: ‘Words lie in our way!’ He took up Baudelaire’s metaphor in the observation that ‘[n]ow with every piece of knowledge one has to stumble over dead, petrified words, and one will sooner break a leg than a word’.73 The new philosophy and art questioned the objectivity of conceptual cognition, which they saw as an abstraction stabilized in speech, fiction or convention – something that was useful in the sphere of practical ‘reality’ but came at the cost of obscuring and distorting actual reality. This questioning provoked a general crisis in the notion of representation – a crisis that did not refer to the forms of unchanging being anymore, but to the historically changeable forms in which experience was organized. Thanks to this perspective it gradually became clear that what had been seen as an objective representation of the real world was in fact a conventional image conditioned by philosophical assumptions inscribed into the seemingly neutral medium of language. According to Nietzsche, language is the agency ‘through which error constantly operates.’ He continues: ‘I fear we do not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar.’74 Emil du Bois-Reymond, another authority on the epoch’s cognitive skepticism, examined the problem in terms of the value of scientific knowledge: ‘thought can never distance itself from reality as much as reality distances itself from itself over time.’75 But when this happens, we begin to see the dead, petrified and alienated face of ‘the ensuing world of phenomena’ (Irzykowski), ‘the finished world’ (Brzozowski), or ‘a second reality’ (Leśmian). Thus the Modernists first discovered language as ‘the carapace of nomenclature,’ as Irzykowski aptly described it. In other words, they discovered it at a time when language was being problematized in the spheres of cognition, communication and expression, when it was becoming an obstacle separating the subject from the real world; when it was becoming a tool of alienation and reification. Bergson polemically takes up the metaphor of the cognitive act used by both Schopenhauer and Mach: ‘Beyond the limits of ideas that have frozen and congealed into speech, we ought to look for the warmth and movement of life.’76 William James, similarly, submits that ‘reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life – it buds and bourgeons, 73 F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1997, p. 32. 74 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pp. 16–17. 75 Quoted in J. Goldstein, Nowe drogi w filozofii współczesnej [New Trends in Contemporary Philosophy]. p. 62, translated from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry. 76 H. Bergson, ‘Le Bon Sens et les études classiques’ [Good Sense and Classical Studies, 1895], translated from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry.

59

changes and creates.’77 Brzozowski took up this metaphor after Bergson and James had redefined its meaning, suggesting that ‘only the illusions of thought impose on us the phantom image of a ready, frozen world’.78 Brzozowski’s reasoning leans on Bergson’s and James’s style of argumentation. This style clearly came to dominate the thinking and imagination of Polish writers in the third phase of the development of linguistic consciousness. In Leśmian’s literary and essayistic works, for instance, ‘the conceptual word’ is defined as ‘a transparent glass coffin’. The Symbolist and pre-Expressionist trends of Modernist literature referred to the competing concept of language as word – a concept that was supposed to remedy the reifying and alienating power of conceptual language. In poetry, the expressive, evocative or magical function displaced the cognitive and communicative function. Language was a medium not in the sense of a neutral means to convey a message, but rather in the spiritist sense of an unforeseeable tool that was supposed to give voice, mysteriously, to an inexpressible meaning. But here, too, ‘the words and phrases of speech’ were the basic unities. As Matuszewski observed, ‘they tended to become true individuals’. For Potocki, meanwhile, ‘they took on a life of their own’.79 Basic linguistic operations were also focused on vocabulary and phraseology, i.e. on the renewal of the lexicon through ‘foreign words’ (neologisms, archaisms, dialect, barbarisms) as well as through a renewal of clichés by persistently creating metaphorical equivalents and imbuing them with the greatest possible emotional charge. From today’s perspective, this last operation turned out to be the most unfortunate and regrettable. But contemporaries saw it as an effective and even a scientifically warranted tool for the ‘rebirth of speech’ and the ‘renewal of language’. Jan Rozwadowski developed the law of the disautomation of language, which occurs through the periodic saturation of language with an ‘emotional element’ of increasing expressive power. For him, a universal, transhistorical perspective on the problem could remedy the sense of crisis that resulted from the Modernist turn and the related experience of language as ‘foreign’ and ‘dead’:

77 W. James, A Pluralistic Universe, Cambridge, MA 1977 [1909], pp. 117–118. 78 S. Brzozowski, Idee [Ideas], p. 270. 79 I. Matuszewski, Słowacki i nowa sztuka (modernizm): Twórczość Słowackiego w świetle poglądów estetyki nowoczesnej: Studium krytyczno-porównawcze [Słowacki and New Art (Modernism): Słowacki’s Work and Modern Aesthetics: A Critical-Comparative Study], 4th ed., ed. by S. Sandler, Warsaw 1965, pp. 238–239; J. Grot (A. Potocki), ‘Antoni Lange’, Głos, 1896, no. 26. See also M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Symbolizm i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski [Symbolism in the Poetry of Young Poland].

60

Every turn, every renaissance, every battle against the outdated routine and fossilized forms that make culture evolve – they are but one great thrust of automation – hyperautomation – disautomation. […] we can identify an equivalence: the reinvigoration of works, their emotional disautomation, is an introduction of new content, a creation of new works; the narrowness of hyperautomation, the narrowness and deadness of forms that had been passed down, is a lack, an atrophy of every element of feeling. In a nutshell: disautomation is life, birth, youth; automation is old age and death; disautomation is the introduction of content, of an emotional element; automation is the establishment of form, the production of an imaginary element. […] Today we are witnessing general disorientation and pessimism, provoked by the great ‘disautomation’ of the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a ‘disautomation’ that in turn results from the ‘automation’ of forms, of works and of religious, social, scientific and artistic slogans. A clear perception and understanding of these phenomena as stable and objectively existing facts of the entire ‘happening’ of culture and life in general can only have a favourable effect.80

Generally speaking, the philosophical, aesthetic and linguistic concepts of the time account for these and many other recurrent stylistic and linguistic operations. Meanwhile, the collective writing style that grew out of them owes its peculiarity to the general tendency to choose the easiest path towards an intended goal. This was also perfectly clear to readers at the time. It is also characteristic that the general evaluation of ‘Young Poland lingo’ as a noun was – according to Irzykowski, Leśmian or Brzozowski – not different from current descriptions, even though the different points of view naturally led to different emphases. For Irzykowski, for instance, the essential trait was the fetishization of the word. The following ironical comment makes this perfectly clear: And I don’t even mention language, because it was always with a shiver of admiration that I dreamed of the magnificent Lake of Young Poland, whose symbolic image – the

80 J. Rozwadowski, ‘Zjawisko dysautomatyzacji i tendencja energii psychicznej’ [The Phenomenon of Disautomation and the Tendency of Mental and Emotional Energy], in Wybór pism [Selected Works], vol. 3: Językoznawstwo ogólne [General Liguistics], Warsaw 1960, p. 115, p. 118. Published in 1922, this sketch was probably written in 1911 (see S. Urbańczyk, Dwieście lat polskiego językoznawstwa [Two Hundred Years of Polish Linguistics], p. 156); in any case the idea dates from 1911, as we can see from Rozwadowski’s lecture ‘O strukturze elementów wyobrażeniowych i uczuciowych w rozwoju językowym’ [The Structure of Imaginative and Emotional Elements in Language Development], in Księga pamiątkowa XI Zjazdu Lekarzy i Przyrodników Polskich w Krakowie, 18–21 lipca 1911 [The Commemorative Book of the 11th Congress of Polish Physicians and Naturalists in Cracow, 18–21 July 1911], Cracow (1912) as well as the abstract of this lecture, published in Ruch Filozoficzny (1911, p. 164). See chapter 5 in this book for a discussion of the relationship between Rozwadowski’s law of ‘disautomation’ with Irzykowski’s and Shklovsky’s literary ‘disautomation’.

61

great language studded with pearls, diamonds, opals, rubies and tassels from old Polish robes as well as shreds of peasants’ linen clothing – it was only by mistake that it was not included in Feldman’s Literature.81

Irzykowski os clearly referring to the hypostasis of the means (and the tool’s domination over its user) in the most literal sense. The means gains an advantage over the goal and the object, and as a result it replaces them under the pretext of emanating mysterious powers. His analysis of ‘the plain fossilized form of the Polish novel of the type produced by Żeromski’82 highlights the domination of the goal by the means as well as the domination of the transmission of content by ‘laboratory’ experiments with a technique that only seemed to serve the goal. He also highlights the growing independence of stylistic effects that sometimes became the object of special and autonomous writers’ tasks. As language became the object of a cult, it took over the initiative and started to dictate its solutions to the uncritical creator – solutions that were ineffective and often unintelligible to the reader. Leśmian, meanwhile, was most disturbed by the renewed petrification of symbolic language, which had not only regressed into conceptual language but also frozen in rather odd allegories. In his letter to Zenon Przesmycki he writes: I am weary of the conceptual and ideological treatment of things that have long ceased to be themselves in our poetry. The flower is not a flower, but the author’s longing for his lover, for example. The oak is not an oak, but let’s say, the striving of the Übermensch towards the sun, and so on. In a word, our poetry has become philosophical. Instead of the world – we have opinions, philosophies.83

A few years later, Osip Mandelstam would also take this position with regard to the first generation of Russian Symbolism: ‘Instead of a forest of symbols what we have is a puppet workshop […]. The rose is a nod at the girl, the girl is a nod at the rose. No one wants to be themselves.’84 Finally for Brzozowski the rhetoric of Young Poland exemplified above all the false consciousness of decadent aestheticism, where the means took the place (or tried to take the place) of the goal, 81 K. Irzykowski, ‘Od autora’ [From the Author], in Wiersze i dramaty [Poems and Plays], Cracow 1977, p. 218. 82 K. Irzykowski, Czyn i słowo [Action and Word], p. 548. 83 B. Leśmian, ‘List do Z. Przesmyckiego’ [Letter to Z. Przesmyck], in idem, Utwory rozproszone: Listy [Scattered Works: Letters], ed. by J. Trznadel, Warsaw 1962. Cf. J. Trznadel, Twórczość Leśmiana: (Próba przekroju) [Leśmian’s Works: (Sketching a Profile)], Warsaw 1964. 84 O. Mandelsztam, Słowo i kultura: Szkice literackie [Word and Culture: Literary Sketches], transl. from Russian into Polish by R. Przybylski, Warsaw 1972, p. 37. English translation from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry.

62

and language took the place of reality; the categories of art replaced the laws and needs of life. Here is a typical statement: [T]his hegemony of the word torn from life, this byzantine anthropomorphism of the rhetoricians, has become our point of departure for the metaphysical and mystical phraseology that has obscured for Young Poland the reality of its own tasks, the true significance of its output.85

While critics portrayed conceptual language as a tool of alienation, the collective exploitation of the expressive and symbolic concept of language cast conceptual language as a reified word. In both cases, language use ultimately resulted in cliché. As Remy de Gourmont observed, ‘language is full of clichés, which were originally bold images, happy discoveries of the metaphorical power’.86 This statement referred above all to the ‘conceptual language’ of practical communication and cognition. But the Modernists experienced for themselves that in this respect their symbolic and emotive language was no better off than conceptual language. ‘In the poetry of the lads from Young Poland, depth is a thoughtless and soulless cliché,’ Ortwin noted. He stressed how rapidly the emphatic symbolism of the Young Poland Style had exhausted its values – refreshed and individual expression – and became automatized and petrified.87 Irzykowski commented on this process from another perspective, suggesting that ‘the world of emotions is like […] a cemetery of different shells and forms, sometimes filled with life’.88 Anton Zijderveld’s sociological concept of the cliché sheds light on the key circumstances surrounding the Modernist syndrome of language petrification. Zijderveld highlights two basic social contexts in cultural history that favoured the formation of clichés – the process of accelerated modernization and the

85 S. Brzozowski, Legenda Młodej Polski: Studya o strukturze duszy kulturalnej [The Legend of Young Poland: Studies on the Structure of its Cultural Soul], Cracow 1983 [Lviv 1910], p. 37. On the general properties of the language of decadent aestheticism see L. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. 86 R. de Gourmont, ‘The Problem of Style’, translated by Richard Aldington, The Fortnightly Review, 5 (2014) < http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/05/problem-style/ >, accessed 21 August 2015. The problem of the cliché reappears multiple times in de Gourmont’s works. See for instance ‘Le Cliché’, in L’Esthétique de la langue française [The Aesthetics of the French Language], Paris 1899, and ‘Le Style ou l’Écriture’, in La Culture des Idées [The Culture of Ideas], Paris 1900. For a discussion see A. France, The Garden of Epicurus, transl. by A. R. Allinson, London 1908. 87 O. Ortwin, ‘Konstrukcja teatru Wyspiańskiego’ [The Construction of Wyspiański’s Drama], Krytyka, 1906, vol. 1, p. 277. 88 K. Irzykowski, Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word], p. 404.

63

dominating magical interpretation of phenomena. Modified by the situation of the time, these two aspects conditioned and helped form the Modernist discourse. In both cases (though for different reasons) we witness the ‘supersedure of meaning by function,’ – Zijderveld’s definition of a cliché – which determines the alienating or alienated nature of language.89 Modernism discovered the dark or ‘demonic’ side of language as well as its deceptive, mystifying and oppressive power. It discovered speech infected with stereotypes and living by an obsession with clichés. It also discovered its own imprisonment in language, having to choose between language as a tool of alienation (‘the carapace of nomenclature’) and alienated language (the fetish word). I believe that understanding this allows us to account for the irritating paradox in the reception of the writers of the time and the effect of their interest in language. At the time they were writing, the Modernists came face to face with the nature and the limits of language, communication and expression, and they tried to solve the problem in their own ways. For later readers, however, the greatest puzzle turned out to be their own language, which – based on what we read and hear everywhere – represents the fundamental difficulty for readers trying to relate to Modernist literature today. Trying to escape the alienating power of practical communication, the Modernists fell into an even more painful sort of alienation, as they found themselves imprisoned in the language they had created themselves in order to express their contact with reality. As the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Hebbel writes in his diary, ‘he who fears evil will encounter evil. The demons punish him for his suspiciousness’.90 Aroused by the Modernists, the demons of language and alienation – of language in the service of alienation and of alienation in the service of language itself – left their mark on Modernist literature more than on any other. In 1913, Jerzy Jankowski described the situation as follows: Our Modernism from ten years ago brought from the West the slogan of freedom in the state of the creative spirit, but it immediately plunged it into enslavement by abstract, empty formalism.

89 A. Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity, London 1979. See also: R. Amossy, E. Rosen, Les Discours du cliché [The Discourse on Cliché], Paris 1982. 90 Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Tagebücher: Vollständige Ausgabe in drei Bänden, ed. by Karl Pörnbacher, Munich 1984; entry written in Vienna on 10 March 1847. English translation from German by Tul’si Bhambry.

64

New trends in philosophy in the West – ‘intuitionism,’ ‘Bergsonism,’ ‘pragmatism’ – have been bubbling up in academic literature and have gradually permeated into art. They have taken up the task of freeing the sphere of human endeavour from the bonds of dead theory and abstraction; they have voiced protest against uniforming life processes, against replacing the concrete objects of our experience with token concepts that correspond to nothing in actual, physical or psychological reality.91

Consequences: Modernist ideas of artistic disalienation Today an interest in language tends to be seen as a natural and ineluctable precondition for the creation of literature. The Modernists, however, experienced their discovery of a troubling necessity as something unexpected. It must have seemed as if writers who in good faith took up the traditional challenges of their vocation (to realize their own, social, aesthetic, cognitive or metaphysical goals) all suddenly began to ‘stumble over words’ (to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase), to ‘lose their trust in words’ (Wasilewsi)92 or to demonstrate ‘the writer’s brute force over language’ (Zaleski),93 aiming for a head-on collision with language in all its complexity and universality. Language had finally absorbed and transformed the problem that had until then been seen as ‘non-linguistic’. Alienation is a well-known phenomenon today. Discussions abound in the broader framework of cultural history, while in the history of art the problem occupies a permanent position.94 But for the Modernists it was a singular, strictly Modernist problem, one of the unique characteristics of their cultural formation. In Poland the first wave of interest in alienation is mainly related to leftist intellectuals such as Ludwik Krzywicki and Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, who approached 91 J. Jankowski, ‘Dzieci protestu’ [The Children of Protest], Złoty Róg, 41 (1913); ‘Rytmy wiosenne’ [Spring Rhythms], Tydzień, 12 (1913). 92 Z. Wasilewski, O sztuce i człowieku wiecznym [On Art and Eternal Man], Lviv 1910, p. 140. 93 Z. L. Zaleski, Dzieło i twórca: (Studya i wrażenia literackie) [The Work of Art and the Artist: (Studies and Impressions in Literature)], Warsaw 1913, p. 159. See chapter 4 for my discussion of the representative case of Brzozowski. 94 See e.g.: H. Read, Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist and Society, London 1967; W. Sypher, Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision, New York 1967; U. Eco, ‘Form As Social Commitment’, in idem, The Open Work, Cambridge, MA 1989; M. Perniola, L’Alienation artistique [Artistic Alienation], Paris 1977; W. J. Ong, ‘Transformation of the Word and Alienation’, in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, Ithaca 1977; A. Heller, ‘Existentialism, Alienation, Postmodernism: Cultural Movements as Vehicles of Change in the Patterns of Everyday Life’, in A Postmodern Reader, ed. by J. Natoli and L. Hutcheon, New York 1993.

65

the problem in the Marxist tradition.95 But the second and definitely more interesting wave was clearly influenced by Georg Simmel’s modified and universalized take on alienation. In The Philosophy of Money, he writes: The superior power of the culture of objects over the culture of individuals is the result of the unity and autonomous self-sufficiency that the objective culture has accomplished in modern times. Production, with its technology and its achievements, seems to be a cosmos with definite and, as it were, logical determinations and developments which confront the individual in the same way as fate confronts the instability and irregularity of our will. This formal autonomy, this inner compulsion, which unifies cultural contents into a mirror-image of the natural context, can be realized only through money. On the one hand, money functions as the system of articulations in this organism, enabling its elements to be shifted, establishing a relationship of mutual dependence of the elements, and transmitting all impulses through the system. On the other hand, money can be compared to the bloodstream whose continuous circulation permeates all the intricacies of the body’s organs and unifies their functions by feeding them all to an equal extent. In some respects, money may be compared to language, which also lends itself to the most divergent directions of thought and feeling. Just as, on the one hand, we have become slaves of the production process, so, on the other, we have become the slaves of the products. That is, what nature offers us by means of technology is now a mastery over the self-reliance and the spiritual centre of life through endless habits, endless distractions and endless superficial needs. Thus, the domination of the means has taken possession not only of specific ends but of the very centre of ends, of the point at which all purposes converge and from which they originate as final purposes. Man has thereby become estranged from himself; an insuperable barrier of media, technical inventions, abilities and enjoyments has been erected between him and his most distinctive and essential being.96

95 See K. Wyka, ‘Młoda Polska jako problem i model kultury’ [Young Poland as a Problem and Cultural Model], in Młoda Polska [Young Poland], vol. 2: Szkice z problematyki epoki [Sketches on the Epoch’s Problems], Cracow 1977; W. Cesarski, ‘L. Krzywicki i K. Kelles-Krauz o alienacji estetycznej’ [Ludwik Krzywicki and Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz on Aesthetic Alienation], Studia Estetyczne [Aesthetic Studies], vol. 5, Warsaw 1968. Polish studies worth mentioning are A. Werner, ‘O pojęciu alienacji w badaniach literackich’ [The Concept of Alienation in Literary Studies], Pamiętnik Literacki, 2 (966); idem, Zwyczajna apokalipsa [An Ordinary Apocalypse], Warsaw 1971; W. Wyskiel, Inna twarz Hioba: Problematyka alienacyjna w dziele Brunona Schulza [Another Face of Job: The Problem of Alienation in the Work of Bruno Schulz], Cracow 1980; Literatura a wyobcowanie [Literature and Alienation], ed. by J. Święch, Lublin 1991. 96 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. by D. Frisby, transl. by T. Bottomore and D. Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mendelberg, p. 469, p. 470 and pp. 483–484, my emphasis. Cf. S. Magala, Simmel, Warsaw 1980; Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence,

66

For Simmel, phenomena such as ‘reification,’ ‘fetishization,’ or the worker’s alienation from the means of production mostly exemplified phenomena that occurred universally in every professional group and in life activities in general. But he also saw these phenomena as concrete manifestations of a much more general, transhistorical tendency, which modern culture only reinforced. This tendency – autonomizing processes – affected all forms of exchange of social and cultural production, broadly understood. Such a sociological or cultural understanding of the mechanisms of alienation, which escalated with the quick pace of technological and civilizational modernization, turned out to be the most popular among contemporary Polish thinkers. Eugeniusz Krasuski, for instance, is one of the many writers who took up this notion in a recognizably Simmelian spirit: The products of our own thought and our own hands are beginning to gain an ever-greater advantage over us. This is the state into which today’s civilization has put us, turning us into our own slaves. The cultural system of our day has mechanized and automatized life as a whole, and it has killed in us the will and the responsibility that a real creator should feel within. Life, instead of being a manifestation of conscious will, has become the victim of fate, destiny’s plaything. Thus all of contemporary culture, all of civilization, is coming to be a real catastrophe for us.97

Simmel influenced many of his contemporaries, not only with his original ideas, but also with the ‘Modernist’ style of his writing (which in this context implies a critical attitude towards systemic constructions, as well as a fragmentary and inconclusive style). His concept of cultural alienation inspired such different writers as Brzozowski and Irzykowski (but also Leśmian).98 Thus we can say that

Ithaca 1991; idem, ‘Freud, Kafka, Simmel: Próba hermeneutyki socjologicznej’ [Freud, Kafka, Simmel: An Attempt at Sociological Hermeneutics], in Pojednanie tożsamości z różnicą? [Reconciling Identity with Difference?], ed. by E. Rewers, Poznań 1995. 97 E. Krasuski, Zagadnienia kultury [Cultural Issues], Warsaw 1913, p. 117. 98 Brzozowski left many comments on Simmel, both positive and negative ones. Of particular interest in this context is an observation from his review of Ignacy Radliński’s Prorocy hebrajscy wobec krytyki i dziejów [Hebrew Prophets on Criticism and History] from 1903: Researchers and contemporary thinkers, especially Simmel, have drawn our attention to a property or law that is apparent in the development of mankind, in the growth of human culture: everything that permeates from the works of single units or entire social groups into our culture will also become objective, external and absolute. (S. Brzozowski, Wczesne prace krytyczne [Early Critical Works], introduction by A. Mencwel, Warsaw 1988, p. 705).



Irzykowski characterizes Simmel’s research profile by emphasizing the importance of alienation in his description of modern man’s situation:

67

it influenced the most ambitious critical and aesthetic notions on overcoming alienation in the individual, language and art. Moreover, cultural consciousness turned to the role of language and alienation at the same time, and it seems that this simultaneity determined what language problems were seen as being of interest; it influenced the notion that the two problems were correlated, and it shaped attempts to describe the relationship between language and alienation. Simplifying somewhat, Irzykowski’s argumentation is an attempt to publicize his critical as well as creative stance. Drawing on Simmel, this stance could be described as the strategy of the stranger, as it reconciles external closeness with internal distance, i.e. a mental perspective that makes it possible to judge. Irzykowski not only publicized this strategy – he also practiced it in his critical writing. He appreciated its direct, uncompromising qualities, as we can see for instance in his short description of the cover of a weekly publication from the Young Poland era: ‘on the title page was Wyspiański’s drawing of a knight spreading his wings – this peculiar Polish aviator! – leaning against Podbipięta’s coat of arms [Zerwikaptur]’.99 To see a ‘Polish aviator’ in the symbol (or, rather, the allegory) of the national strife for independence is to radically shift the context and categories of judgement. The seemingly familiar image of traditional chivalry becomes strange and anachronistic. This promotes a critical take on the model’s up-to-dateness; Romantic clichés and myths of the national imagination

on the one hand, the means of life parasitically obscure its goals and become goals in their own right (e.g. money), but on the other hand, objective cultural creations (knowledge, law, art, religion, technology), which are actually man’s projections onto life, emancipate themselves from his power; they becoming independent and only follow their own factual norms. Thus they not only undermine subjective culture, but they take on such mad momentum that man cannot keep up with them. (K. Irzykowski, ‘Simmel’, Maski, 30 (1918))

Bolesław Leśmian never discussed Simmel directly, but a clear trace of his reading of The Philosophy of Money marks one of his essays from 1910. See ‘Znaczenie pośrednictwa w metafizyce życia zbiorowego’ [The Importance of Mediation in the Metaphysics of Collective Life], in Szkice literackie [Sketches on Literature], ed. by J. Trznadel, Warsaw 1959 (esp. the second part). 99 K. Irzykowski, ‘Dostojny bzik tragiczności’ [The Dignified Eccentricity of Tragedy], in Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word], p. 250. In my article Gest śmiechu: Z przemian świadomości literackiej początku wieku (do I wojny światowej) [The Gesture of Laughter: Transformations in Literary Consciousness at the Beginning of the Century (Until World War I)], Pamiętnik Literacki, 4 (1977) and reprinted in the annex to the Polish original of this book, I discuss this description with a focus on Irzykowski’s broad artistic and aesthetic interests ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’ in the context of the grotesque tendencies of turn-of-the-century literature.

68

now seem to stand between this model and the conditions and challenges of modernity. Irzykowski’s critical analysis reaches ‘behind the scenes’ and into the work’s hidden assumptions and motivations. It either uncovers its ‘fossilization,’ its banality, its dysfunctionality and deformation, or it brings to light the purposefulness of its poetic difficulty and the inventiveness of its artistic form. This analysis, no doubt Irzykowski’s most easily recognizable critical strategy, hinges on bringing together two approaches: the closest possible reading, by which one places oneself within the work’s semantic horizon, and intellectual distance to facilitate unhindered critical evaluation. Soon he would describe his critical position as follows: As far as I am concerned, I always stick to this: be as intuitive and penetrating as possible, but without usurping – through form! – special connoisseurship of the author’s soul, without creeping into that soul of his. Always maintain the gesture of a criticism that is purely external.100

But it is worth noting that Irzykowski identified the same strategy of strangeness in the works of the most innovative artists of his time, who explored the possibilities of language consciously and critically. After all, he writes, these artists know that rather than ‘rendering’ facts, all our speech is actually a collection of judgements, assessments, or ‘reviews;’ it is an apparatus to capture phenomena; [they know] that human speech is nevertheless a work of art, whose artistic nature dawns on us in those exceptional moments when its repertory appears too small or when it suddenly expands.101

It is the Modernists who were to raise the level of consciousness. These writers ceased to be naively at home in ordinary speech, they could not identify automatically as part of a language community. They began to refer to their own everyday linguistic environment with a blend of external closeness and internal distance, thus drawing a firm demarcation line between themselves and ordinary language users. The modern poets are labelled – in both the positive and negative sense – as strangers to ordinary speech. Whatever used to be seen as natural, they framed as odd, strange and incomprehensible. Thus they would either force their readers to focus their critical attention on what they had taken for granted, or they used familiar material to express something other and unknown, or else, they tore up ordinary concepts to reconfigure their constituent parts in new and 100 K. Irzykowski, ‘Pojedynek dwóch duchów’ [The Duel of Two Spirits], Wiadomości Literackie, 51 (1925). 101 K. Irzykowski, ‘Ostatnia powieść Brzozowskiego’ [Brzozowski’s Latest Novels], in Czyn i słowo, pp. 606–607.

69

challenging ways. This allowed things to be resurrected from ‘the grave of banality,’ while the subject could perceive them in a way that was not automatized – as if understanding them for the first time. Irzykowski offered the following advice, warning, or perhaps prophecy: So let the work be incomprehensible or, rather, difficult, in the sense that it should conquer the vastest possible stretches of ground previously unknown to mankind […] let it be too smart rather than too dumb, because in the first case people will catch up one day, but in the second case they will lose sight of it completely.102

But let us consider the fundamental question from this perspective: what is the relationship between language and alienation? And what about the crisis into which the autonomization and specialisation of the mediating sphere plunged modern man, in both intellectual and artistic matters, and even in practical and social life. The most expressive comment on this comes from Stanisław Brzozowski. This is understandable, since both discoveries from that time were influenced by his philosophical development and represented his most central concerns.103 Of course, Brzozowski never developed a closed or unified theory of social development, philosophy of culture or sociology of knowledge. But he did propose the fascinating project of studying the unique rhetoric of culture as a historical process by which subsequent cultural formations emerged and developed. Each of these formations, he argued, appeared and became stable with significant support of rhetorical mechanisms of language, thanks to which ‘in the eyes of man, only the system of concepts can become his environment’.104 This

102 K. Irzykowski, ‘Niezrozumialcy’ [Unclearomaniacs], in Czyn i słowo, pp. 478–479. 103 In Czyn i słowo, Irzykowski argues that the problem of alienation occupies a central position in Brzozowski’s writing: A fundamental notion in his Legendy [Legends] and Idee [Ideas] is that until now mankind has thrown the finished results of his creativity, or even its mere goals, out beyond himself as dogmas, seeing his own work as an alien work or as an external imposition. Brzozowski exposes this process, almost an optical illusion, with many examples, demonstrating that there is not a shred of culture that is not mankind’s own creation, made conscious or not. (p. 489) Man has formed his world himself, but he does not know it or does not believe it. He must recognize his own work in the results and tools of his work, becoming aware that enslavement in him and beyond him is only a stage in his own creativity, unmindful of itself. […] The different ways in which man unwillingly hides his own creativity – the phenomenology of those different ways – this is what preoccupied Brzozowski. (p. 502)

104 S. Brzozowski, Głosy wśród nocy: Studia nad przesileniem romantycznym kultury europejskiej [Voices in the Night: Studies on the Romantic Crisis in European Culture], ed. and introd. by O. Ortwin, Lviv 1912, p. 39.

70

‘environment’ is a discrete worldview whose naturalness and self-evidence in a given epoch turns out, in time, to be a form of alienation, mystified through the deceptive power of language. For Brzozowski, to recognize the alienating power of language and its active role in building culture is an indispensable condition to grasp the real, fundamental function of art. For if language (applied in practical communication, social relationships, science or conventional literature) is a tool of alienation that displaces us into the world of things (things we have created ourselves), into forms of knowledge, feeling or expression – then language under the yoke of art should become a means of regaining self-awareness about our situation and, through the discovery and naturalization of new forms of organizing experience, it should become a tool of liberation from the alienating structure. Brzozowski’s perhaps most interesting definitions of the basic function of art also represent a key testimony of Modernist artistic self-awareness: [T]he limits of a given group’s concepts and images of being very clearly depend on that group’s typical rhetorical abilities; every type, every group, directly considers being to be that which can be expressed, within its circles, without taking recourse to the linguistic inventiveness of art.

There follows a footnote in which Brzozowski adds: These remarks bespeak the great social and philosophical importance of art. By expanding the sphere of what can be expressed in a given environment, art in a sense multiplies that society’s world by certain stable properties: from now on the world that the individual encounters as his society’s foundation will be enriched by the values that, thanks to art, lend themselves to being expressed in this society.105

For Brzozowski, language was the principal tool of life’s reification when it came to communication, the objectification of the social sphere, etc., but its artistic function was to become an instrument of discovery and a tool for self-creation. Potential future forms of organizing experience and cultural activity were to be made present and understandable. Art was a ‘great anticipation’ that in real life released a mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to which culture and social reality are formed. Language, however, contains the possibilities of creation and alienation – it can give rise to a feeling of liberation or enslavement. It is our conscious creative activity that essentially determines our individual experience of the power of language.

105 S. Brzozowski, Idee, p. 336.

71

Brzozowski was reacting to the crisis in the main cognitive and representational function of the language of art. Art was to renounce its dependency on the illusion of a social reality of the past, but without substituting it with the symbolical reality of works of art that evoked an ideal world of unchangeable essence. Instead, art was to ‘call forth’ what Leśmian called ‘a nameless reality’ – one that did not yet exist (for humankind); it was to become a tool to articulate – to reveal and to discover – new forms of reality in its dynamic becoming. Meanwhile, Irzykowski’s strategy of artistic and critical ‘strangeness’ manages to circumnavigate the Scylla of banality and common knowledge as well as the Charybdis of extremely idiolectic incomprehensibility. This is possible thanks to the innovative ideals of challenging form, which expands our capacities of understanding rather than transgressing them. This strategy can be seen as a unique response to the crisis of the expressive function of language – a crisis that unsettled the feeling of being at home in language, promoting instead the collapse of the community of understanding and the disintegration of social and literary mechanisms of communication. Thus both propositions – and we should remember that they are not mutually exclusive but complementary – point to a way out of the trap of alienating and alienated language. And these are indeed the ways that modern literature was to take.

Conclusions The evidence of the Modernists’ linguistic consciousness calls into question our common preconceptions about its paucity, anachronism, and marginal significance when it comes to the development of the Modernists’ artistic worldview. Their reflections on language were in fact rich (though dispersed) and firmly embedded in contemporary debates. If the crisis of language was to have a significant and lasting effect on Modernist literature, these writers indicated innovative and independent ways out of this critical situation. The problem of language was at the heart of Polish Modernism in general, and in particular, it was the traditional understanding of the nature and function of language that was in crisis. Needless to say, these statements are not meant to suggest that Polish literature was different from other literatures affected by ‘the syndrome of modernity’. Quite to the contrary: we should now be more inclined to read the Polish Modernists’ output alongside the broader trends in twentiethcentury Western literature. The problem of language was posed as central to literary Modernism a long time ago, and it has been examined from many different angles. Indeed, it is now seen as one of the most characteristic aspects of Modernist literature. George Steiner, for instance, has helped establish the idea 72

that a new linguistic consciousness was among the crucial developments of the period. In his many publications he presents ever new perspectives on the break with the traditional linguistic ‘contract’ at the end of the nineteenth century. In After Babel he writes: The concept of the ‘lacking word’ marks modern literature. The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a literature essentially housed in language from one for which language has become a prison. compared to this division all preceding historical and stylistic rubrics or movements - Hellenism, the medieval, the Baroque, Neo-classicism, Romanticism are only subgroups or variants. From the beginnings of Western literature until Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Hölderlin and Nerval are decisive but isolated forerunners), poetry and prose were in organic accord with language. […] Because it has become calcified, impermeable to new life, the public crust of language must be riven. Only then shall the subconscious and anarchic core of private man find voice. […] After Mallarmé nearly all poetry which matters, and much of the prose that determines modernism, will move against the current of normal speech. […] When literature seeks to break its public linguistic mould and become idiolect, when it seeks untranslatability, we have entered a new world of feeling.106

Steiner argues that the Modernist crisis and the sense of being ‘imprisoned’ in language represent a more important caesura than the previous (especially the Romantic) developments in linguistic consciousness. This is essentially a histriosophic claim, and its value lies in the radical representation of the relationship between the subject, language, and the world. But I do not cite Steiner to argue; after all, the scope of his study reaches far beyond what the material presented here could corroborate (though I am not convinced that current research on the history of linguistic consciousness warrants his conclusions). My focus is on a narrow, historically and culturally limited part of this problem, namely the state of linguistic consciousness of Polish Modernist literature at the turn of the century and its relationship to cultural modernization and differentiation, expressed in the experience of alienation, autonomization (to use Simmel’s terminology) or rationalization (to use the term proposed by Weber, who was unknown in Poland at the time).

106 G. Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford 1998, pp. 184– 192. Steiner discusses the same concept in Real Presences, Chicago 1989. Cf. e.g. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York 1970; G. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study, New Haven 1974.

73

In this framework I arrive at the following conclusions: first, the different ‘layers’ of language which I discussed with reference to the Modernist formation (i.e. philosophy of language, linguistic theories, straightforward formulations of literary self-consciousness) clearly correlate with notions of language based on the immanent poetics of Modernist works. Second, the Modernists problematized linguistic experience in terms of alienation (even if they did not use this term). This premonition suggests a link between language and modernization. Notably, the changing concept of language as a tool (facilitating individual expression, social communication, or the representation of reality) seems to correspond to the changes that befell everything that had to do with ‘media’ and ‘tools’ in the era of technological and civilizational modernization. (It is telling that when those processes first came to be addressed, they were framed in no other terms than alienation.) Third – and this point deserves particular emphasis – the strictly Modernist type of linguistic self-awareness is not only a reaction to the Positivists’ idea of language (an instrumentalistic, practical concept of language; one that privileges understanding and precludes both individual expression and the influence of the subject). This conventional representation covers only one aspect. In fact, the Modernists’ linguistic consciousness is in equal measure a reaction against idealistic notions of language, i.e. the neo-Romantic, decadent and aesthetic notions that preclude the possibility of representing reality objectively, without subjective deformation. I have tried to show that the first position, that of the Positivists, cuts language off from the subject, while the second, neo-Romantic position cuts it off from the world. The Modernists’ sense of an antinomy in linguistic consciousness, of having to choose between two equally undesirable effects of understanding and using language, gave rise to their preoccupation with the limitations, power and status of language. This preoccupation, which is the unique characteristic of Modernism, was to have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature: it became the point of departure for countless attempts to overcome this antinomy. That said, it seems that it was only around 1910, when the second generation of Young Poland writers took into account the aspects of language highlighted by both positions, that writers were able to appreciate the intrinsic meaning of the linguistic – and therefore literary – medium, as well as the consequences of its ‘double’ autonomy. This perspective suggests that later transformations in modern literature were rooted in the Modernists’ recognition of aesthetic alienation. Discovering the factors behind alienation they came to define the specificity of literary (scilicet poetic) language in opposition to colloquial language. They also came to 74

identify a dichotomy between different models of literature and between different kinds of circulation and communication (high vs. low, elite vs. popular or mass literature). But when it comes to defining the main characteristics of modern literature, there are two dominant basic tendencies, namely the classic Modernist trend (for lack of a better term) and the avant-gardist Modernist trend.107 The first trend represents the search for privileged access to the subject and to the world by limiting one’s own autonomous status. In the sphere of expression, this limiting was pursued through ‘artificiality,’ mediation and depersonalization; in the communicative sphere it was through the ‘exclusive’ character of the poetic code, while in the sphere of representation it was pursued in the sense that the ‘epiphany’ of participation in the reality of everyday life was privileged over representation. The second trend, meanwhile, tried a radical and immediate approach to overcome the alienation of art. It aimed to blur literature’s dichotomous communication and circulation by disempowering literature and aestheticizing everyday life. It also tried to weaken the polarity of colloquial and poetic language by choosing immediate expression, by shaping poetic diction according to the rules of colloquial and spoken language, and by finding substitutes for traditional means of representation. The new ones it proposed used techniques of juxtaposition and montage to reveal meaning and to introduce ‘scraps of reality’ (i.e. fragments of authentic non-elite discourses) into the work of art. Once we regard linguistic alienation (the way it was experienced and overcome) as Modernism’s elementary criterion, we also begin to perceive more general tendencies within the formation as a whole, beyond divisions into separate poetics, movements or periods. Defining the first trend, classic Modernism, we should include not only Leśmian, Czechowicz, or the classicizing movement of twentieth-century Polish poetry, but also the later works of the Skamandrites (esp. Tuwim and Iwaszkiewiecz) and the constructivist movement of the Cracow avant-garde, in particular Julian Przyboś. Concerning the second trend, the Modernistic avant-garde, we must include the futurists, the poets of Nowa Sztuka, the early Skamandrites (esp. Wierzyński), the late Peiper, the spoken style of the second avant-garde, Miłosz’s prosaic diction in Głosy biednych ludzi 107 I discuss these tendencies from another perspective in ‘Literatura Postmodernistyczna a mimesis: (Wstępne rozróżnienia)’ [Postmodern Literature and Mimesis: (Preliminary distinctions)], in Tekstowy świat: Poststrukturalizm a wiedza o literaturze [A Textual World: Poststructuralism and Literary Studies], Warsaw 1993, p. 124 et seq. E. Możejko proposes a similar argument in ‘Modernizm literacki: Niejasność terminu i dychotomia kierunku’ [Literary Modernism: The Vagueness of the Term and the Dichotomy of the Trend], Teksty Drugie, 5/6 (1994).

75

[The Voices of Poor People], and later also Różewicz and Białoszewski, in whose works the oldest and the newest aspects of the avant-garde tradition meet with the highly hermetic organizational principles of poetic diction. There is no doubt that the first trend, which accepted the autonomy of poetic language with both its discomfort and its privileges, occupied a central and dominant position. In this sense we can say that Przyboś’s prediction from 1938 came true: I am convinced that the path of poetic speech leads to a complete separation from the language of prose, and that it does not lead onto the vast terrain of ‘spoken style,’ or into the thickets of declamatory rhetoric. poetry will become more and more ‘incomprehensible,’ i.e. more and more metaphorical, more and more subtle. Perhaps we are approaching such specialization in its language that the same words will convey one meaning in poetry, and another in everyday speech.108

This prediction was true in any case until the 1960s. This decade saw two developments. On the one hand, poetic idiolects rooted in the practice of everyday speech gradually invaded and took on the leading position that classically Modernist poetic diction had occupied until then; on the other hand, a growing familiarity with ‘autonomous’ rules of poetic craft began to find an ever wider field to explore discourses and problems that had until then been seen as non-literary.

108 J. Przyboś, ‘Styl “mówiony” ’ [‘Spoken’ Style], in Linia i gwar: Szkice [Line and Sound: Sketches], vol. 1, Cracow 1959, p. 43. Cf. J. Sławiński, Koncepcja języka poetyckiego awangardy krakowskiej [The Cracow Avant-Garde’s Concept of Poetic Language], Wrocław 1965.

76

Chapter 3: Tropes of the ‘I’: Concepts of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature Introduction109 The history of subjectivity in twentieth-century literature is known to be an essential but tricky field. We must acknowledge the ways in which it is determined by – or at least correlates with – the field of literary theory, as well as other disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology or philosophy. Historical literary representations of subjectivity betray the prevailing concept of the subject – a concept deeply rooted in philosophy and psychology. Moreover, such representations suggest how the role of language is understood, or what strategies are seen to underlie a works’ structuring and semantic construction. (The rejection of the notion of the text as an autonomous, self-regulated organic whole, for instance, appears to be logically consistent with the rejection of the Romantic notion of the subject as a separate, independent and stable ‘I’.) What is more, this correlation between concepts of the subject and concepts of the text seems to go hand in hand with a manifest interdependency between a theoretical recognition of the status of the subject in the literary text and the prevailing method of its reading or interpretation. (This interference is illustrated by Barthes’s statement that ‘once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless’.110) Overall, therefore, any study of this apparently narrow problem must take into consideration the general links between the philosophical premises inherent in poetics and the methodological foundations of literary theory. Both aspects interest me only in as far as they express a common historicity, as a sign of the regularity of the ‘mid-range,’ occurring within given phases of the formation beyond individual disciplines – generally speaking, as tools that will allow me to

109 Translator’s note: A previously published English translation of a shorter version of this chapter has served as a reference point for the present translation. See R. Nycz, ‘Traces of “I”: Concepts of Subjectivity in Polish Literature of the Last Century’, transl. by Alice Nash and Marek Haltof, Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 37 (1995), pp. 373–392. 110 R. Barthes, The Death of the Author, transl. by R. Howard, UbuWeb Papers, < http:// www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf >, p. 5 [accessed 2 September 2015].

77

outline the elementary typology of literary history ‘from the point of view of the subject’ and basically limited to strictly literary material. To achieve this I use the concept of the trope (or tropology) in a broader sense, beyond rhetoric, for three reasons: first, in order to highlight my conviction about the inescapable non-identity of the ‘I’ that is spoken and the speaking ‘I’. Second, the concept of the trope presupposes a chasm between the sign and the content – a two-dimensional meaning, as well as an infringement and a transformation of linguistic norm. My broad use of this concept, therefore, is grounded in my conviction that it represents a very simple but also accurate and handy model of the notion of subjectivity. This notion also assumes a preliminary separation, e.g. between the objective ‘I’ and the subjective ‘I’, between the empirical ‘I’ and the transcendental ‘I’, between the superficial ‘I’ and the deep ‘I’, and therefore also between the textual ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of the writer. This separation underlies the constitution of personality and the development of self-awareness; it creates the inner space of literature and language, and creates opportunities for subjective articulation. The third reason why I use a broader definition of the trope is that I will be talking precisely about tropes of the ‘I’; I shall use four of them as heuristic devices or models which schematically illustrate what I consider to be twentiethcentury Polish literature’s most important variants of the relationship between the subject and the text. Finally, it is necessary to clarify why I refer to ‘concepts of subjectivity’ rather than to ‘concepts of the subject’. ‘Subjectivity’ is used to denote the specificity of twentieth-century literature. Since the late nineteenth century, this literature had been subjected to the twin influence of the rebirth of individualism (as it was called at the time) and the crisis of the subject. The latter must of course be understood as a crisis of traditional concepts of the subject, i.e. of ‘the selfconfident subject,’ as Jean Beaufret called it,111 whose final incarnation was the Romantic notion of the ‘I’.112 Seen from this perspective, such provocative statements as Adorno’s ‘liquidation of the individual,’ Derrida’s ‘ends of man,’ Barthes’s ‘death of the author,’ or Foucault’s ‘death of man’ can be seen as rhetorical 111 J. Beaufret, ‘Heidegger et Nietzsche: Le concept de valeur’ [Heidegger and Nietzsche: The Concept of Value], Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie, 6 (1967). 112 Cf. Candance Lang’s succinct characterization of the Romantic notion of the individual: 1) Each individual possesses a unified, unique, ineffable self. 2) The authentic self, being pre-cultural, is in constant danger of alienation through commerce with the other. This of course presupposes the original integrity of the romantic subject, who, penetrated by a nostalgia for his earlier pure, ‘natural’ state, regards language and other cultural manifestations with the utmost suspicion.

78

formulas that illustrate but extreme versions of the transformations observed and their possible consequences.113 These transformations have guided us from a 3) There is an originary universal human nature, making possible communication among individuals at a pre-cultural level, e.g., through sentiment, which as a truer, more immediate expression of the private individual, is superior to rational discourse. 4) Poetry and art (as opposed to ‘ordinary’ conventional signs) alone express the inexpressible, effecting a fusion of form and content, idea and matter, and so on. 5) Since the self is a pre-linguistic entity, it may dissimulate itself behind linguistic personae which it arbitrarily creates in order to safeguard its purity and maintain its autonomy. This act of dédoublement – which constitutes the self as an object of knowledge – has come to be known as romantic irony. (C. Lang, ‘Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism’, Diacritics, 4 (1982), p. 4.)



Compare also Brzozowski’s characterization of the Romantic Ego in ‘Kilka uwag o stanie ogólnym literatury europejskiej i o zadaniach krytyki literackiej’ [Some Remarks on the General State of European Literature and the Tasks of Literary Criticism], in Głosy wśród nocy: Studya nad przesileniem romantycznym kultury europejskiej [Voices in the Night: Studies on the Romantic Crisis in European Culture], ed. and introd. by O. Ortwin, Lviv 1912. 113 There is rich debate on this topic. See for instance D. Carroll, The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction, Chicago 1982; G. Raulet, ‘Prolegomena zum Postmodernen Subjekt-Objekt: Zur Krise des Subjekts als einer Krise der Vernunft in der Geschichte’ [Prolegomena to the Postmodern Subject-Object: On the Crisis of the Subject as a Crisis of Reason in History], in Gehemmte Zukunft: Zur gegenwärtigen Krise der Emanzipation, Darmstadt/Neuwied 1986; A. Nehamas, ‘Writer, Text, Work, Author’, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. and introd. by A. J. Cascardi, Baltimore 1987; I. Hassan, ‘Quest for the Subject: The Self in Literature’, Contemporary Literature, 3 (1988); G. Canguilhem, ‘The Death of Man, Or: Exhaustion of the Cogito?’, transl. by Catherine Porter, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. by Gary Gutting, Cambridge 2006; D. E. Pease, ‘Author’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. by F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, Chicago 1990; W. Welsch, ‘Ku jakiemu podmiotowi – dla jakiego innego’ [Toward What Subject – For What Other], in Schellinga pojęcie podmiotowości: Idea IV [Schelling’s Concept of Subjectivity: Idea IV], ed. by M. Czarnawska and J. Kopania, Białystok 1991; E. Kuźma, ‘De(kon)strukcja podmiotu we współczesnej literaturze’ [De(con) structing the Subject in Contemporary Literature], Nowa Krytyka, 1 (1991); B. Baran, Postmodernizm [Postmodernism], Cracow 1992; E. Kuźma, ‘Język jako podmiot współczesnej literatury’ [Language as a Subject of Contemporary Literature], in Z problemów podmiotowości w literaturze polskiej XX wieku [Problems of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century Polish literature], ed. by M. Lalak, Szczecin 1993. The crisis of subjectivity also forms the centre of W. Maciąg’s extensive study, Nasz wiek XX: Przewodnie idee literatury polskiej [Our Twentieth Century: Fundamental Concepts in Polish Literature], Wrocław 1992.

79

substantial to a functional concept of the subject, as well as from a vision of the author as the originator, source, and authoritative guarantor of the text’s meaning to an understanding of the author as a certain role – as a construct. But these transformations had already been amply observed and discussed, though certainly in less apocalyptic terms. The turning point can be found at intersection between empiriocriticism and philosophy of life. As Leszek Kołakowski observed, what was characteristic of the time was the radical attempt ‘to do away with subjectivity’: [T]he subject or ‘self ’ now comes to be regarded as a construct without counterpart in reality, something added to the content of experience either illegitimately or purely for convenience. The primary aim of this subjectivism without a subject was to formulate the idea of ‘pure’ experience. For this purpose it was necessary to track down those elements in the current scientific image of the world that had been ‘thought into’ it – not necessarily, nor even primarily, in order to reject them entirely, but in order to demystify them, to grasp their origin, and to assign them their proper place.114

It turned out that both the search for essential, non-civilizational aspects of the human situation and the ‘active’ orientation that exposed the operational and formative character of the human position were shared by very different thinkers, such as Mach and Nietzsche, Avenarius and Bergson. The particularity of the new situation is clearly expressed – this is the locus classicus of the problem – in a statement by Nietzsche himself. On the one hand, he claims that ‘My writings speak only of my overcomings: ‘I’ am in them […] ego ipsissimus, indeed, if a yet prouder expression be permitted, ego ipsissimum,’ while on the other hand he writes that ‘the “subject” is only a fiction: the ego of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist at all’.115 The problem turned out to have a lasting effect, as we can see, for instance, in Witold Gombrowicz’s polemical observations, proposed over half a century later: Yes, man disappears, but only for him, Foucault, only within the strictly defined limits of his theory. […] Without the ‘I’ it won’t work.116

114 L. Kołakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, transl. by Norbert Guterman, New York, 1968, p. 104, my emphasis. 115 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, transl. by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1986, p. 209; The Will to Power, transl. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. by W. Kaufmann, New York, 1968, p. 199. 116 W. Gombrowicz, ‘J’étais structuraliste avant tout le monde’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 5 (1967), 228–232 (230–231). English translation from French by Tul’si Bhambry.

80

Pierre Sanavio recalls his discussion with the writer in Vence, where Gombrowicz said: People used to believe in some definite model of man, and they saw that model as a true and sufficient foundation to indicate what we should do and how we should act. Today this factor, this certainty, doesn’t exist anymore.117

When it comes to the up-to-dateness of this problem, we only need to look at contemporary Polish poetry and prose, including that of the youngest generation, to be convinced of its lasting relevance.

Symbol The rebirth of individualism and the disintegration of the substantially defined subject have also jointly informed the specificity of turn-of-the-century Polish Modernism. This is one of the reasons why in our quest to understand the situation of the subject at the end of the nineteenth century – including the different concepts that were proposed to define it – we must paint a broader picture of the situation at the time. In 1895 Henryk Monat wrote: For a long time we deluded ourselves that naturalism, describing and ordering facts, will suffice to meet our aesthetic needs; today we see this whole method as impossible and false, because as long as the subject selects and orders, so long will his work show the traces of his exclusive preferences.118

117 P. Sanavio, ‘Gombrowicz: forma i rytuał’ [Gombrowicz: Form and Ritual], in Gombrowicz filozof [Gombrowicz the Philosopher], p. 43, transl. from Italian into Polish by Katarzyna Bielas and Frencesco M. Cataluccio. English translation from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry. 118 H. Monat, ‘Z literatury współczesnej’ [On Contemporary Literature], Świat, 9 (1895). A good example of the turn that took place at the time – privileging individual speech and treating it as a means of a unique personality’s immediate expression – can be found in the young Stanisław Przybyszewski’s letter to Paulina Pajzderska, dated 12 September 1889: Why should written speech be different from its spoken version? For me, the only style of value is that which has an individual mark etched into it. What’s the use of all those beautiful stylized scribbles, all much of a muchness? Instead, I value highly the kind of writing that is teeming with life, where a person speaks the way he is used to express himself. That’s why I prefer a hundred times over the plain letter of a peasant to the most beautiful monologue from a tragedy by Schiller. You know, Madam, such a natural way of writing, in contrast to the mannered one that we call style, thrives on lively straightforwardness – how I enjoyed seeing you the way you are in virtually every word, when you are cross, when you laugh – quick, energetic, as always! (S. Przybyszewski, Listy [Letters], vol. 1, ed. by Helsztyński, Warsaw 1937, p. 45).

81

However, those tropes of the ‘I’ that the average critic of the time saw as a sign of immediate causal knowledge and faithful verbal manifestation of the subject’s unique disposition, struck more subtle critics as a confirmation of a more enigmatic relationship that resulted from the tropological nature of language. As Zygmunt Wasilewski wrote: For this poor human language […] expresses only what suggests itself to Thinking, and yet Thinking is but a fragment of Life and Man. Man does not live on thinking and formulaic expression alone – he lives on all of being […]. Why, we say something to ourselves in order to be saying something, we say what fragmentary consciousness suggests to us […]. Speech is allegorical by nature, it relies on images, but if we do not also reach into our souls – I do not say for complete consciousness, as this is impossible, but for some symbol of experience, as the great poets do, […] then we will get stuck with our slight vocabulary in any old literary wordplay.119

If reality cannot be grasped in separation from the subject that perceives and describes it, then so-called objective descriptions of the external world are false and do not represent reality. Hence, Wasilewski writes elsewhere: [T]he modern novel evolves not right in front of the reader’s eyes, but under the psychological prism of some subject with a capricious and unusual individuality. The modern author would be ashamed of the immediacy of recent naturalistic realism. The only real truth is the human soul, and the only interesting thing is what is refracted through it, or rather how it is refracted […].

And later: [T]he author renounces the rights of his own subjectivity for the benefit of his protagonist, who becomes that prism of refraction. The author hands his own psyche over to the protagonist, who leads the novel or play in such a way that the reader or spectator sees everything through his eyes.120

Wasilewski’s perceptive observations – which presage the key role of the new ‘technical’ device that would later come to be known as ‘free indirect speech’ – clearly indicate that the critic was trying to characterize the most distinct among



On Przybyszewski’s later observations on this subject see footnotes 24 and 25 in chapter 5 in the present volume. 119 Z. Wasilewski, O sztuce i człowieku wiecznym [On Art and Eternal Man], Lviv 1910, pp. 140–141. 120 Z. Wasilewski, ‘Artyści w negliżu powieściowym’ [Artists in Fictional Négligée], in Od Romantyków do Kasprowicza: Studja i szkice literackie [From the Romantics to Kasprowicz: Studies and Literary Essays], Lviv 1907, pp. 256–257. Cf. K. D. Uitti, The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel, The Hague 1961.

82

the expressive and symbolic models of literary communication. This model can be described as the ‘three-fold loneliness’ of the author, the protagonist (or lyrical hero), and the reader – a loneliness that is based on their converging points of view as well as on their interdependent activities, knowledge and subjective experience. The realistic variant inherits Romantic assumptions about the empirical subject as a character marked by stable, centralized and hierarchized properties, which the subject, understood as a universal source of values and guarantor of meaning, can control and legitimize from outside. This realistic variant is displaced by the symbolic variant, according to which the subject is split into a fragmentary surface ‘I’ and a non-verbalized deep ‘I’ that uses symbolic ties with an unchangeable essence to unify dispersed manifestations of subjectivity. To present a causal explanation of experiences and behaviours, accordingly, is to suppress their psychological grounds, i.e. the associative medium of the problem’s real nature. This also explains, at least in part, why the linguistic organization of many of the works of the time was so singular – why there was a systematic stylistic deformation of artistic expression. We can understand this deformation as a quest – a quest for a radically idiolectic language that would be subjective and individual, as well as a quest for an artistic way of seeing things that would be particularly privileged in terms of cognition. Just as the Modernist concept of man emerged from an antagonistic association between empiriocriticism and the philosophy of life, so, generally speaking, the starting concept of the Modernist protagonist was informed by an intersection of the techniques of post-naturalistic impressionism and symbolism – techniques that were in many ways opposed to each other. Matuszewski’s descriptions of the concept of the protagonist in Stefan Żeromski’s novels Popioły [Ashes] and Dzieje grzechu [History of Sin] illustrate this exceedingly well: Żeromski does not paint his characters in broad strokes of the brush at all; he does not present an image of a complete, closed, uniform character, but builds it gradually, accumulating a great number of characteristics that can be called ‘infinitely tiny,’ but which add up to a whole that pulsates with life. The episodes that make up the novel’s plot have a dual nature. On the one hand, they are images of life that speak to us through their own factual content, vividness and movement; on the other hand they function as ideograms, signs that visualize the author’s inner state of feeling. […] This symbolism is not doctrinarian or ‘literary,’ but unselfconscious. A very detailed and subtle investigation of the inner workings of the human ego must lead to the creation of rich and complicated figures that cannot be fully grasped at first glance. These are no types, no individuals, but rather amalgams of several spiritual unities combined into an organic whole […]. In any case, this kind of treatment of characters,

83

which artistic stylization has until now tended to submit to synthetic simplification […], is the hallmark of modern art.121

This fusion of the two different techniques must have been made possible by the fact that both had developed as reactions to the Realist stereotype of a stable, unified personality. What is more, both techniques strove towards the same goal: freedom from older cultural notions of the object – notions that mediated, simplified and deformed the object’s true nature. Both techniques aspired to present the object’s authentic form as it came into being with the spontaneous emergence and fusion of the object’s shapes and meanings. But while the Impressionist technique mainly appealed for active and constructive cognitive activity on the reader’s part, the Symbolist technique stipulated a search for a unifying principle in the deeply hidden foundations of the authorial point of view. In both cases, however, the integrating factor was placed beyond the work – either in the reader or in the author. Similarly, in the represented universe the vis movens of the character was usually placed outside of it. The subject itself, marked by passivity and disintegration, did not find the source of his own actions within himself; rather, he experienced himself as dependent on internal forces that were at the same time beyond his control, as well as external influences, rooted in what Leśmian called ‘interhuman life’. Modern man, as Simmel argued, ‘had distanced himself from himself ’. Bergson, meanwhile, observed: The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into homogenous space. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we “are acted” rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of ourself, and to get back into pure duration.122

As a result, the textual ‘I’ taking shape in such conditions came to symbolize the creative subject – not the actual creator, however, but the deep and unconscious creative persona. This persona can be understood either statically or substantially. Przybyszewski, for instance, postulated ‘a reproduction of essentiality, i.e. the soul,’ understanding the symbol of subjective experience in the neo-Romantic spirit as a

121 I. Matuszewski, ‘Dzieje grzechu’ [The History of Sin], in O twórczości i twórcach: Studia i szkice literackie [On Creativity and Creations: Literary Studies and Sketches], ed. by Sandler, Warsaw 1965, p. 298; idem, ‘Popioły’ [Ashes], in O twórczości i twórcach, pp. 263–264; idem, ‘Dzieje grzechu’, p. 310 (footnote). 122 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, transl. by F. L. Pogson, Dover 2001 [London 1913], pp. 231–232.

84

suggestion of the eternal in the temporal, of the infinite in the finite, or of the unconscious in the conscious. ‘Beyond the narrow circle of the conscious states of the “I,” ’ Przybyszewski writes, ‘there is an inner ocean, a sea of secrets and puzzles’.123 But the creative persona can also be understood anti-essentially and dynamically, as Brzozowski did, for instance. Acknowledging that ‘the detested and despised “I” begins to demand the all-powerful rights that are its prerogative,’ he insisted that ‘the ego is a rather questionable entity,’ and that ‘to be a subject is nothing like a stable quality’.124 Both ways of understanding the creative persona appear to be rooted in the Modernist concept of symbolical expression, which aimed to fuse form and content, expression and intention, the phenomenon and the essence, as well as to grasp ‘the elusive “I” ’ in a momentary manifestation of identity. In both cases it is impossible to separate the medium from the message. After all, whatever manifests itself can only be grasped or recognized through the unique form of its manifestation. This justifies the work’s autotelic nature, as well as the privileged status of poetic language.125 And yet, in the first way of understanding the creative persona, the one which can be called neo-Romantic, highlights the possibility to express something that is otherwise inexpressible, but whose prior existence and continuity are otherwise beyond doubt. This can be about deep meaning, essential things, or spiritual reality. Frequently it concerns above all the inner nature of the creative subject – the artist. ‘The symbol has its own life,’ the young Berent argues. ‘It is the immediate incarnation and visualization of the artist’s own thoughts.’126 The second variant, meanwhile, accentuates the specific nature of expression itself. Expression, understood as a manifestation of something in a given medium, need not assume the previous formation of the thing to be expressed. On the

123 S. Przybyszewski, ‘O “nową” sztukę’ [About ‘New’ Art], in Programy i dyskusje literackie okresu Młodej Polski [Literary Programs and Debates in the Young Poland Era], ed. by M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Wrocław 1977, p. 401. 124 S. Brzozowski, Wczesne prace krytyczne [Early Critical Works], introd. by A. Mencwel, Warsaw 1988, p. 82, p. 162, p. 219. 125 On the symbolist concept of poetic expression see M. Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Symbolizm i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski: Teoria i praktyka [Symbolism in the Poetry of Young Poland: Theory and Practice], Cracow 1975; C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA 1989, p. 374 et seq. 126 W. Berent, in Friedrich Nietzsche, F. Nietzsche, ‘Z psychologii sztuki’ [Fragments on the Psychology of Art], transl. by W. Berent, in W. Berent, Pisma rozproszone: Listy [Scattered Works: Letters], ed. by R. Nycz and W. Bolecki, Cracow 1992, p. 123.

85

contrary, we can assume that expression is both the formation of something that is chaotic or only partially determined. As Leśmian argues, the poet can only create under the influence of opposing stimuli that confer a host of values onto his work: he either ‘writes because he already knows – or he writes with the aim of learning, in this very moment, something new, something unknown, about the whole world and himself, and about his poem.’127 In the second case, when the poet writes in order to learn something new, and not to express what was already known, when the language of artistic expression turns out to be a privileged creative medium of innovative cognition, then we enter the modern understanding of the symbolism of the work of art. Its meaning resists dependency on references to reality or authorial intention, and then even upturns this dependency: it is not thanks to an empathic plunging into the author’s ‘soul’ that we recognize the original value of the work of art, but on the contrary: only thanks to artistic expression can we recognize the ‘new content’ and the author’s current position. Thus we can say that the inner laws of symbolic expression play the role of principal causative agent, determining whether countenance and meaning will be bestowed on a hitherto ‘nameless reality’. Thus they become a means of realization, a way of calling into life that discovers and creates a specific shape of existing things. ‘You should become who you are,’ Nietzsche urged.128 And yet, given the symbolic principles of expression, the subject forms and determines itself as it finds 127 B. Leśmian, ‘Z rozmyślań o poezji’ [Reflections on Poetry], in Szkice literackie [Literary Sketches], ed. by J. Trznadel, Warsaw 1959, p. 87. 128 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. by Bernard Williams, transl. by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge 2001, book 3, § 270, p. 152. Cf. Irzykowski’s reflection on this ideal: But there is another, rather peculiar, ideal, namely: one’s own ‘I,’ one’s own individuality […]. In Polish literature, Romuald Minkiewicz expressed this ideal before the war, in his short text O pełni życia i komunie duchowej [On the Fullness of Life and the Spiritual Community] (Cracow 1907) […] everyone should strive to uncover their being, their exclusivity, their ‘otherness,’ their ‘selfness,’ to find their own ‘basic axis,’ the basic ‘logarithm of their spiritual equations’. […] [This idea] is among the main, ever recurrent ideas in Brzozowski’s Legenda [The Legend of Young Poland]; I find it among the most recent thinkers, such as in Jasper’s book Die geistige Situation der Zeit [The Spiritual Crisis of our Times] maintains a distinction between the real Selbstsein from the lesser and false Dasein. […] So even if it were possible to discover one’s own ‘I,’ why would one choose to imitate it, to develop it, to turn it into a role for the rest of one’s life? […] Finally, the slogan ‘You should become who you are’ points at another intention of the ideal of ‘selfness’. […] People are themselves, but clumsily, they must be encouraged, so that they become themselves in a way that is not only conscious but also intensified.’ K. Irzykowski, ‘Z zagadnień charakterologii (Rozdziały z większej całości)’ [Problems in Characterology (Chapters from a larger Whole)], Marchołt, 1 (1937).

86

expression in the work of art (or even in the work of life, broadly conceived). The subject fulfils its nature by following an inner voice, by following the force of life, or an unconscious impulse that has neither a fixed form nor a clear direction before it is articulated. In this situation, expression comes to actualize potential, while the symbolic textual ‘I’ becomes a sort of creative intervention in the subject’s self-realization and self-discovery – an active and necessary completion of the possibilities that would otherwise not attain realization or awareness. It is this active variant of the symbolic relationship between the subject and the text that turned out to be much more productive and long-lasting than the first one. The symbolist trends in the works of Berent, Leśmian, Czechowicz, Przyboś or Miłosz provide the best evidence of its possibilities and significance. And the evidence is eloquent even if it is only partial and takes different shapes.

Allegory Wacław Berent writes: The symbol does not entail a cool and reflective or synthetizing activity leading from a phenomenon’s sensory side straight into abstraction. Rather, this is achieved by allegory, which, in the hands of an artist, is always cool, imposed onto the work of art from outside, and appealing almost exclusively to memory and erudition. Where there is a lack of common conventions, either plastic or spiritual ones, allegory turns into a cold dead body.129

While the symbol hinges on the inexorable unity of form and content, on the fusion of what can be apprehended through the senses and what is spiritual, allegory introduces distance and distinction, as well as a consciousness of these elements’ independence, their distinctness, and even their division. The allegorical point of view sensitizes us to the fact that the relationship between form and content is conventional and arbitrary (and therefore prone to manipulation and change). Thus it usually leads to the creation of a closed ‘artificial’ universe of meaning, and hence also to isolation within a circle of cultural meaning and intellectual systems that often lack recognizable references to reality. This view on art’s imaginative and cognitive values was traditionally opposed to allegory, but it represents a starting point for Modernist art. It is clearly illustrated by Leśmian’s commentary on the artistic consequences of Leopold

129 W. Berent, Pisma rozproszone: Listy, p. 123. For an outline of the relationship between allegory and symbol similar to Berent’s see Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska’s compendium Symbol i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski: Teoria i praktyka [Symbolism in the Poetry of Young Poland], Cracow, 1975.

87

Staff ’s strife towards simplicity in his collection of poems W cieniu miecza [In the Shadow of a Sword, 1911]: It is becoming ever more difficult for him to distinguish himself and to make new discoveries, to find new things and themes. So he consciously lets himself be possessed by subjective creativity, by a conceptual analysis of former specifics […]. Instead of the world, the poet must be satisfied with a worldview… Even words such as sun, love, heart, body, or muscles sound in his mouth like sweet-toned allegories […]. In his soul the man of today or of the recent past is being repentant […], for him objects have transformed into concepts detached from nature, taking on the ease of various juxtapositions into sentences of this or that kind, thus presenting a beautiful spectacle, an endless shuffling of cabbalistically colourful cards, a dream about nature, which we know from hearing and from the legends that circulate in the world…130

Allegory is associated with such attributes as abstractness, a ‘detachment’ from the world, as well as an arbitrary order governing subject and text, i.e. a lack of motivation from the observer’s point of view. Once these attributes were appreciated as adequate expressions of humankind’s new situation in the modern world, however, the perceived weakness of the allegorical imagination came to represent its very vitality and power. The writers of the symbolist variant had rendered the traditional monistic and substantial concept of the subject more multi-layered and dynamic, but without subverting it. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in the 1900s the experience of disintegration of traditional subjectivity began to find literary expression in what we could call the allegorical variant. This consciousness of disintegration was mainly expressed in terms of a sense of loss of identity, as the individual, deprived of integrality, became a function of anonymous and antagonistic forces, namely the social mechanism and natural impulses. As Nietzsche said, ‘every surface is a cloak’.131 In Poland, it was Irzykowski who, following the maxim of the fashionable philosopher, unmasked his protagonist by taking him apart into ‘the carapace of nomenclature’ and the ‘garments of the soul’ – a soul that was, true to the empirio-critical spirit, deprived of all essential qualities. ‘For there is no “soul,” there are only psychic phenomena (let’s propose the maxim: there is no such thing as a noun – there

130 B. Leśmian, ‘Na drogach prostoty’ [On the Paths of Simplicity], in Szkice literackie [Literary Sketches], p. 333. 131 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, introd. by M. Tanner, London etc. 2003 place year, section 230, p. 161.

88

are only verbs), i.e. elements of sorts.’132 A few years later Stanisław Brzozowski would comment on Meredith’s portrayal of the protagonist in The Egoist: In Meredith’s novels […] nothing happens in fact, but doubt arises in a given individual or around it, in the reader-spectator: what is it in fact that that individual has in mind when referring to himself as ‘I,’ why are we or others supposed to treated him or her as some kind of independent centre? Misgivings emerge about a curious absurdity: when this individual treats him- or herself as such a centre and when we treat him or her in this way, then omniscient thinking must experience this as a ludicrous spectacle. Because that which we consider to be a human is not in fact a human. the strange creation, partly a mask of social templates and partly the work of semi-humanized impulses, has taken the place of the human. what appears as consciousness is not consciousness anymore, or has not yet been and shall never be consciousness.133

Brzozowski’s observation, representative of Modernist self-consciousness, also has broader implications as an exemplary survey: subsequent diagnoses of our contemporary subject’s ‘affliction’ are most often rooted in descriptions of this initial situation. An awareness of disintegration is expressed here in the sense of a double loss: of individual identity as well as of a universal centre – both in the sense of man’s central position and in the sense of man’s ties to the transcendental ‘I’. The subject that for Brzozowski emerged onto the scene of twentieth-century literature loses its autonomy and self-sufficiency; it is split and disinherited. This is Gottfried Benn’s ‘lost I’ and T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow man’. In this basic understanding, Brzozowski’s statement maintains a certain ambiguity, depending on whether we emphasize the opposition between biology and socialization, or that between historicity and transcendence. Be that as it may, both possibilities have played a role in shaping later literature.

132 K. Irzykowski, Pałuba; Sny Marii Dunin [Pałuba; The Dreams of Maria Dunin], Cracow 1976, p. 501. Irzykowski would long remain faithful to Ernst Mach’s critique of the traditional concept of subjectivity. In a diary entry from 1916 he quotes Mach’s famous adage, ‘das Ich ist unrettbar’ [the Ego cannot be saved]. See K. Irzykowski, Notatki z życia, obserwacje i motywy [Notes from Life, Observations and Themes], ed. by A. Dobosz, introd. by S. Kisielewski, Warsaw 1964, p. 189. S. Napierski also frequently quotes Mach (see e.g. Próby [Essays], Warsaw 1937, p. 12, p. 68). 133 S. Brzozowski, Głosy wśród nocy [Voices in the Night], pp. 74–75 (emphasis added). Remarkably, Brzozowski’s high esteem for Meredith’s novel was later mirrored by Anglo-American scholars, who came to acknowledge this ‘last Victorian’ as a precursor of the modern novel. Cf. G. Handwerk, ‘The Irony of the Ego: Meredith’s Novels’, in Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan, New Haven 1985 (see esp. the bibliography).

89

This is clearly visible for instance in the experimental psychological novel by writers such as Zofia Nałkowska, Tadeusz Breza, Michał Choromański or Adam Tarn. They drew their inspiration from the two dominant but opposing trends in psychology – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – to account for the disintegration of the subject. Individuals’ activities are not rooted in their own conscious and autonomous choices but from an environmental system of interactive dependencies (this position is described as the functioning of the social structure) or from psychogenetic patterns, understood in a deterministic sense. Thus the art of fiction relied on the demarcation of two planes: on the one hand, the plane of acting characters, who in principle remain unaware of what their experiences and behaviour actually mean and on what their actions and decisions are based; and on the other hand, the metatextual plane of narrative inquiry, where one tries to determine the meaning and hidden motivation for the characters’ action. Whether or not these interpretive efforts have been successful, the indisputable achievement of Meredith’s novel (indisputable because within the framework of the psychological novel it cannot be questioned) was the elaboration of a method of reading the phenomena presented. The role of the matrix or code of this method was often played by certain adapted psychological regularities. At the same time, sequences of cause and effect were not explored to account for a given phenomenon – the explanation hinged on uncovering some general law of which the phenomenon presented was a manifestation selected ‘in laboratory conditions’. The psychological laws of perception played a similar role in the so-called perceptive trend of interwar prose (Aniela Gruszecka, Zbigniew Grabowski, Debora Vogel), while Gestalt psychology and associationism influenced the poetry of the constructivist avant-garde. This variant of the avant-garde text is, for artistic and cognitive reasons, a specially coded message whose meaning, though qualified in very different ways (as a simplistic declaration or illustration of one single theory, or on the contrary, as too complex to bear unequivocal deciphering) should by definition be cognizable (as a representation of an additional system of visual meanings) as well as autonomous (since it is self-explanatory within the framework of a certain immanence, of closed allegorical universes). Reflections within this trend acknowledge, as their point of departure, the collapse of the Old Code, which had used the language of traditional literature to explain both the subjective interior and the external world. Thus, to put it as broadly as possible, it appears that the avant-garde aims either to elaborate a new code or to renew the old one. The acting and experiencing subject sometimes personifies abstract and formal properties of the psychic infrastructure. At other times it illustrates its 90

afflictions. The creative subject, meanwhile, becomes an allegory of a constructive, ‘engineering’ activity (Tadeusz Peiper). This creative subject executes his or her work according to a previously established plan, and reduces his or her status to the general roles played within the framework of this activity and to a relational and functional way of being. Another time, however, as was the case with Nowa Sztuka, it begins like the bricoleur, through a kind of dialogue with the empirical material (things, fragments of memories and images, clichés of the imagination, the subconscious, mass culture and the entire rubble of tradition), mounting a whole that according to traditional criteria would be deemed inconsistent and non-uniform, since it links different (and sometimes incompatible) components of visual specifics into indeterminate evocations of ‘another’ dimension of meaning – like those ‘images in disarray’ that ‘return / as if there was something more in them than there was’ (Ważyk).134 The allegorical structures of twentieth-century literature owe their longevity and prevalence, and even their expansion, not only to the avant-garde’s cognitive optimism, but also – and perhaps even more – to the melancholy experience of losing contact with the hidden order and a sense of its disintegration. According to Walter Benjamin, ‘allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’.135 Thus modern literature’s allegorical language is above all a language of fleetingness and historicity; it feeds on scraps, fragments, souvenirs kept alive. Like Kafka’s allegories, this literature ‘expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. It is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen; […]. Each sentence says “interpret me,” and none will permit it.’136 134 A. Ważyk, ‘Labirynt’ [Labyrinth] and ‘Obrazy wracają’ [Images Return], in Wiersze wybrane [Collected Poems], Warsaw 1978, p. 207 and p. 170. G. L. Ulmer discusses the appearance of the ‘horizontal’ variant of allegory in avant-garde montage film, reading it as an equivalent of Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ (i.e. as ‘an expression externally added to another expression’) in ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. by H. Foster, London 1987, p. 95. On the poetics of Ważyk, Brzękowski and the poets of the monthly Nowa Sztuka, see B. Carpenter, The Poetic Avant-Garde in Poland 1918–1939, Seattle 1983; S. Jaworski, Odnajdywanie świata [Rediscovering the World], Cracow 1984; W. Krzysztoszek, Mit niespójności: Twórczość Adama Ważyka w okresie międzywojennym [The Myth of Inconsistency: Adam Ważyk’s Interwar Works], Warsaw 1985. 135 W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, introd. by G. Steiner, transl. by J. Osborne, London 1990, p. 242. 136 Theodor Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka,’ in Franz Kafka, ed. Harold Bloom, New York 1986, p. 96.

91

In place of the deep or vertical variant of allegorical meaning, whose traditional model is the allegorical schema, here we often find the horizontal form of ‘narrative allegory’137 – a specific, secularized and modernized version of the typological or figurative allegory, which develops ‘in the long range’ out of the literal meanings on the surface level and which cannot be ‘aeschatologically’ or retrospectively framed. Sometimes it creates a network that is purely arbitrary and idiosyncratic (and therefore almost unreadable), without any relationship to any developed allegorical code whatsoever; much more often, however, it establishes fragmentary and enigmatic links, as if mysteriously to hint at remains of prior allegorical wholes. This, I believe, describes the apocryphal ‘I’ in Herbert’s poems, where irony never undermines certain unshakable convictions, which have survived from the traditional system of values. Herbert’s Mr. Cogito – like the Angelus Novus from Paul Klee’s drawing (in Benjamin’s interpretation) – is carried by the winds of history, inexorably speeding towards the future even though his eyes cannot let go of the past: from what is fleeting and unrepeatable, subject to disintegration because it is concrete, and prone to destruction because it is individual. It seems that allegory owes its attractiveness and success in the twentieth century to this melancholy variant.

Irony It is plain to see that the ‘strange creation’ from Brzozowski’s above-quoted description has populated the worlds of the Modernist ‘solemn grotesque’ (as Roman Jaworski called it). And yet, ‘the curious absurdity’ that arises here in reaction to the drastic incongruence between expression and intention, reality and ideal, occurrence and essence, has also accompanied many other manifestations of irony in literature. The reception of Tadeusz Miciński’s work can testify to this. His poetics and his concept of the subject can be seen as early manifestations of Modernist irony. Contemporary critics approached his work from different perspectives, and hence they pronounced opinions that were symptomatically (or ‘ironically,’ if you will) divergent. Leon Choromański, for instance wrote: I see Miciński himself as a victim of his own pompousness, poisoning himself with the opium of long and grandiose sentences.

137 Cf. M. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre, Ithaca 1979. For an overview of contemporary theories of allegory see L. Hunter, Modern Allegory and Fantasy: Rhetorical Stances of Contemporary Writing, London 1989.

92

As Miciński walks the earth, his gait is unsteady, but he feels power in his limbs and thunder in the temple of his breast.138

Zygmunt Kisielewski replied to this: The poet is working hard to put into words states that are difficult to express – flickers and inner flashes, matters for which the Polish language (and perhaps human language in general?) has not yet developed concepts – and this is why sometimes he moves in a circle, describing one thing several times, trying to express through a multiplicity of images that which was invisible until now.139

The ironical figure of speech postulates a traditional, expressive concept of language as conveying thought and feeling, of representing ideas, but at the same time it testifies to the impossibility of conveying them with absolute faithfulness. It also postulates a previously existing stable and autonomous subject, but at the same time it expresses the impossibility of grasping this subject. According to Paul de Man, The reflective disjunction not only occurs by means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language - a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and selfdefinition.140

The reflexive linguistic ‘I’ is characterized by relative superiority compared to the empirical ‘I,’ mired in inauthenticity. And yet, independently of multiplying degrees of self-reflexivity, the reflexive linguistic ‘I’ is subject to the same conditioning as the empirical ‘I’ and does not reach the level of Meta. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world. (Ibid., p. 222)

For if language is always the language of the Other – an Other that deforms, disintegrates or incapacitates the subject, then true freedom, as well as authenticity and complete expression, can only be attained beyond language. In literature, 138 L. Choromański, ‘Wzniosłość i retoryka’ [On Loftiness and Rhetoric], Widnokrąg, 13 (1914), p. 11, as well as Widnokrąg, 14 (1914), p. 9. 139 Z. Kisielewski, ‘Twórca i krytyk’ [The Artist and the Critic], Widnokrąg, 16 (1914), p. 10. 140 P. de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporarity’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis 1983, p. 213.

93

this leads to a revival of the myth of immediate communication, as well as to a nostalgic pursuit of something unattainable that would link the desire to possess with the frustration caused by the feeling of unfulfilment or irrevocable loss. According to Brzozowski, Your concept of the world is based on your knowledge of the world. But your knowledge is still you, whereas the world only begins with the unknown. So who am I? I know when I was born, but I believe that time and everything that exists in time is part of my knowledge, whereas the world only begins at the point where my knowledge ends. So I am a questioning darkness, and nothing more.141

Different variations of this position can easily be found in the central works of modern literature – in Leśmian, Schulz, Czechowicz, and also Miłosz. In his early work, for instance, Miłosz describes the motif of waiting ‘for the moment of recognition, for the sudden flash of revelation that would uncover meaning, the meaning, forever lost, of the world and of our life on earth.’142 In this trend, the ironical gap between what is said directly and what is actually being conveyed has deep implications: the discrepancy, the incommensurability of word and thought, of phenomenon and essence, the tragic inadequacy of the word – these appear to be stable. They come to be seen as a mark of the limited possibilities of human understanding in general. In The Theory of the Novel, György Lukács points out that the figure of irony, in all its generality, is representative of the central modern artistic and philosophical stance: The writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god. It is an attitude of dicta ignorant towards meaning […] a refusal to comprehend more than the mere fact of these workings; and in it there is the deep certainty, expressible only by form-giving, that through not-desiring-to-know and not-being-able-to-know he has truly encountered, glimpsed and grasped the ultimate, true substance, the present, nonexistent God.143

141 S. Brzozowski, ‘Głębokie noce: (Z teki pośmiertnej)’ [Deep Nights: (From the Posthumous Portfolio)], Narodowy Dodatek Literacko-Artystyczny, 2 (1920), p. 1. 142 C. Miłosz, ‘O milczeniu’ [On Silence], Ateneum, 2 (1938). 143 G. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, transl. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge MA 1971, p. 90. Of course, Lukács refers to Kierkegaard’s concept of Socratic irony as ‘infinite absolute negativity’: ‘the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.’ (S. Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. by H. V. Hong and

94

In twentieth-century literature, the traditional (‘normative’) variant of irony known as antiphrasis was first displaced by a narrow, disjunctive understanding of irony, which either called for an alternative choice or linked antinomic elements in an unsolvable paradox. The ‘disjunctive’ variant of irony, however, was in turn superseded by a broad understanding of irony that hinged on a conjunction between the disjunctive elements. This ‘restrained irony’ or ‘ethical irony’144 maintained a state of indecisiveness and uncertainty, undermining the idea that contradictions could be solved, suspending trust in the ability of language to achieve truth and certain knowledge, in authentic expression of subjectivity, in adequate representation of reality. The subtlety of this modern ironic stance depends on whether it accentuates the positive aspect of the strife for the elusive and unattainable, or if it rather foregrounds the negative aspect, i.e. the experience of inauthenticity, disintegration and dispossession from the word, from one’s own speech. In the latter case it sanctions ambiguity as well as essential ambivalence of meaning, inconsistency, antinomy, fragmentation and even any lack of positive attitude or unifying principles. The conventional signs of the articulation of subjectivity, the masks of styles and roles, come to attest to an exclusively negative identification of the ironic subject. In a sense we can even say that the subject renounces the traditional attributes of authorship, since the realized expression fails to convey the intended meaning and cannot be recognized as one’s own words. Having succumbed to the power of speech, to the influence of its anonymous and antagonistic forces, the author is neither fully the originator nor the source or guarantor of its meaning. The realm of ironical communication reveals the temporary, fragmentary and intersubjective nature of the individual subject. The subject’s presence, moreover, depends on the presence of the other and on the experience of temporality, always referring to that which is beyond the present. This model of subjectivity assumes

E. H. Hong, Princeton 1989, p. 262). Cf. W. Szturc, Ironia romantyczna [Romantic Irony], Warsaw 1991. 144 The concept of the ‘normative function’ of irony was introduced by W. Booth in A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago 1974. On the distinction between disjunctive irony and irony as a disjunctive conjunctive see S. Rimmon-Kenan, The Concept of Ambiguity – The Example of James, Chicago 1977, and ‘Ambiguity and Narrative Levels’, Poetics Today, 3.1 (1982). A. Wilde introduces the concept of ‘suspensive irony’ in Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination, Baltimore 1981, while G. T. Handwerk writes about ‘ethical irony’ in Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan, New Haven 1985. C. D. Lang presents a helpful discussion of recent theories of irony in Irony / Humor: Critical Paradigms, Baltimore 1988.

95

an inexorable (and permanent) gap between the apparent, inauthentic subject of the utterance on the one hand, and the postulated utopian Metasubject, which is mostly hidden in negation and therefore not entirely subject to this negation, on the other hand. It is this model of subjectivity that is implied by contemporary – especially post-avant-garde – literature, by radical neo-Structuralist concepts of ‘the death of the author,’ and by notions of the text as a field of free play of signs and limitless semiosis. This is, for instance, the subject of Beckett’s narration, but also in the nouveau roman, with its anonymous, unstable and dispersed ‘I’. This is the ‘deserter I’ of Leopold Buczkowski’s prose, and this is the subjectivity of Karpowicz’s or Różewicz’s poetry, with their protagonists, torn by contradictions, uncertainty, inner disintegration and instability, Różewicz’s ‘hero without a face,’ who is only a ‘place,’ ‘moving,’ ‘without support from within / without support from the outside’.145

Syllepsis Syllepsis is a figure of speech in which the same word is understood homonymously in two different ways – literally and figuratively – at the same time. It rose from a marginal position in the hierarchy of traditional rhetoric to become a figure of speech on the ‘meta’ level, used to define the nature of art and literature. This outstanding career is mostly due to Michel Riffaterre’s inventiveness and commitment. Building his model of the artistic text, the critic recognized syllepsis as a perfect sign of literature, thus broadening (and simplifying) its definition to signify an expression understood in two different ways at the same time – this is to say, as contextual and intertextual meaning, as meaning and as significance, and finally, as mimesis and semiosis.146 But here I would like to use this figure of speech in a much narrower sense and for specific goals, namely to point at the striking quality of the ‘sylleptic’ concept of subjectivity, which differentiates this variant from the ones discussed before. The sylleptic ‘I’ – to put it in the simplest possible terms – is an ‘I’ that must be understood in two different ways at the same time: as a real and as an invented ‘I,’ as an empirical and as a textual ‘I,’ as an authentic and as a fictional or novelistic ‘I’. The most characteristic sign pointing at the uniqueness of this group of texts is surely the identity of the work’s author (the name), as well as that 145 T. Różewicz, Poezje zebrane [Collected Poems], Wrocław 1971, p. 421, p. 616; idem, Proza, Wrocław 1973, p. 201; idem, Poezje zebrane [Collected Poems], p. 324. 146 Cf. M. Riffaterre, ‘Syllepsis’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1980); idem, Fictional Truth, foreword by S. G. Nichols, Baltimore 1990.

96

of the protagonist or narrator, which seems to entail the author’s bold entry into the text in the guise of a protagonist of a story that will henceforth not be entirely fictional anymore. In twentieth-century Polish literature, the earliest occurrence of this ploy is in Aleksander Wat’s programmatic prose poem ‘JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka’ [Me from One Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove], which straddles the Young Poland era and the avant-garde. Later examples are found in the avant-garde prose of Kurek and Witkiewicz. Full maturity is reached in Gombrowicz’s work, after which, in the 1960s, it multiplies into countless forms and functions, e.g. in the works of Rafał Wojaczek, Halina Poświatowska, Edward Stachura, Kazimierz Brandys, Tadeusz Konwicki, Wiktor Woroszylski, Miron Białoszewski and even younger writers. Here the concept of the subject, though used without such ostentatious signals, often constitutes the framework for the subject’s self-awareness and activity. Perhaps it is worth noting that this is also a characteristic ploy in Western, especially Anglo-American Postmodernism – in Steve Katz, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick and John Barth. There is, for instance, a striking similarity in the way this ploy is used by Wat and Brandys: I, Aleksander Wat […] Studiobus philosophiae Niecała Street 8, flat 31, tel. 282–42147 So, do not hide that invention, do not authenticate that illusion, it is me who is writing at my desk at Nowowiejska Street 5148

This intriguing similarity, I suggest, is more than a local intertextual link. It points to a noteworthy change in assumptions about significant general convictions, such as the relationship between subject and text. For it is not only about the collapse of clear classifications that distinguish fictional texts from referential or documentary ones; it is not only about linking the autobiographical to the self-referential strategy, or about creating that ‘aura of ambiguity, the real I, the literary I, the exhibitionist I, camouflage’.149

147 A. Wat, ‘JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka’ [Me from One Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove], in idem, Bezrobotny Lucyfer i inne opowieści [Lucifer Unemployed and Other Stories], ed. by W. Bolecki and J. Zieliński, introd. by W. Bolecki, Warsaw 1993, p. 39. 148 K. Brandys, Rynek: Wspomnienia z teraźniejszości [The Marketplace: Memories from the Present], 2nd ed., Warsaw 1972, p. 155. 149 W. Woroszylski, Literatura: Powieść [Literature: The Novel], Paris 1977, p. 10.

97

First of all, the relationship between the empirical ‘I’ and the textual ‘I’ changes in this variant. The subject here does not exist at first ‘within itself,’ only to exteriorize – to express or not to be able to express – itself in speech, in the language of the Other. The thing is, to put it bluntly, that besides that relationship to the Other, a true concept of the subject becomes difficult to grasp or even to accept. As usual, it is Białoszewski who articulates this most succinctly: rzecz the thing w tym is że that w środku inside a w koło siebie and around oneself pisze(ę) się one (I) write(s)150

Second, the nature of the relationship between subject and text changes. As Białoszewski observes: ‘The thing that is between reality and me, that is the text. I am in the middle of this, and that’s that.’ Literature, he argues, is a part of life, or, more precisely, ‘a part that goes through the whole’.151 In place of a relationship that is causative or one-directional, we have interference or feedback; the literary word loses its autonomy, or rather its isolation when it is treated, as Gombrowicz has it, as ‘a tool for our becoming in the world, something tightly joined to life and to other people’.152 Third, there arises a different type of subjective identity. The old model, which is by definition hierarchical and vertical, based on the opposition of surface and depth, is superseded by a horizontal model. This model is interactive and interferential; the real ‘I’ and the literary ‘I’ mutually affect one another and exchange their characteristics, and the subject embraces its own fragmentation. As Barthes wrote, ‘I am not contradictory, I am dispersed’.153 The subject also embraces the intersubjective and ‘artificial’ nature of its own identity. Brandys quips: ‘I, that is to say an ever-improving pastiche’.154

150 M. Białoszewski, Obierzyny (3); Szumię (dwa), in Utwory zebrane [Collected Works], vol. 1, Warsaw 1987, p. 163, p. 301. 151 ‘Szacunek dla każdego drobiazgu – rozmowa z Mironem Białoszewskim’ [Respect for Every Little Thing – An Interview with Miron Białoszewski], in Z. Taranienko, Rozmowy z pisarzami [Interviews with Writers], Warsaw 1986, pp. 422–423. 152 W. Gombrowicz, Wędrówki po Argentynie, in idem, Wspomnienia polskie. Wędrówki po Argentynie, Paris 1977, p. 254. English translation by Tul’si Bhambry. 153 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, transl. R. Howard, New York 1977, p. 143. 154 K. Brandys, Rynek: Wspomnienia z teraźniejszości, p. 37.

98

‘I write with myself, from myself. But isn’t my thicket joined in secret passage with the thicket of the nation,’ asks Gombrowicz in his Diary.155 And indeed, twenty years later Woroszylski would write: [T]he idea is in the air, and of all possible ideas, it is the simplest, namely that the book is the person who tore himself out of himself and entered it, who became it; we don’t write with ideas – we write with ourselves; no two persons are identical.156

This formulation – we write with ourselves – can be seen as the simplest take on the sylleptic concept of subjectivity. As with the figures discussed above, here too we ought to distinguish two variants – the ludic and the existential in this case. The ludic variant foregrounds the fictitiousness and artificiality of the reality represented, while the existential variant highlights the complex (rather than deep) relationship between art and the order (and disorder) of life. The tropes of the ‘I’ presented in the text gradually combine to form a topological net, in which everyone has a chance to (re)discover their own identity – even if this opportunity comes at a price – that of having to acknowledge the real power of fiction and the fictional dimension of reality. A variety of arguments support this characteristic – from the Lacanian theory of the subject to the philosophically-psychological constructivism of Nelson Goodman and Jerome Bruner. Norman Holland refers to the first in his description of the contemporary model of subjective identity. The model of a stable and integrated subject, he argues, is replaced by a new, Postmodern concept of identity as ‘a theme with variations’ which ‘decanters the individual in a distinctly Postmodern, metafictional way’: You are ficted, and I am ficted, like characters in a Postmodern novel. The most personal, central thing I have, my identity, is not in me but in your interaction with me or in a divided me. We are always in relation. We are among. Whereas psychoanalysis began as a science of human individuality within each human skin, Postmodern psychoanalysis is the study of human individuality as it exists between human skins.157

This description, which incidentally provides an accurate though perhaps somewhat superficial description of Gombrowicz’s concept of the subject, can in principle also be applied to many related approaches – approaches that aim to raise consciousness about the fictional aspects of our existence, and approaches that 155 W. Gombrowicz, Diary, transl. from Polish by Lillian Vallee, ed. by Jan Kott, New Haven 2012, p. 487. 156 W. Woroszylski, Literatura: Powieść [Literature: The Novel], p. 112. 157 N. Holland, ‘Postmodern Psychoanalysis’, in Innovation / Renovation, ed. by I. Hassan and S. Hassan, Madison 1983, pp. 304–305.

99

highlight the fact that our consciousness is ‘belletristic,’ or, as Brandys puts it, that ‘man’s relationship with another man is always fictionalized,’ while ‘history is but the belletrism of Time’.158 This literary, fictional-constructivist mode is supported by Jerome Bruner, a pioneer of cognitive science and now a classic of the constructivist trend in cognitive psychology: I am by long persuasion […] a constructivist, and just as I believe that we construct or constitute the world, I believe too that Self is a construction, a result of action and symbolisation. Like Clifford Geertz and Michelle Rosaldo, I think of Self as a text about how one is situated with respect to others and toward the world – a canonical text about powers and skills and dispositions that change as one’s situation changes from young to old, from one kind of setting to another. The interpretation of this text in situ by an individual is his sense of self in that situation.159

However contemporary this sylleptic model of subjectivity might seem, and however shocking and up-to-date its characteristics might sound, we cannot but notice the fact that the concept itself had its (partial) artistic forerunners in the Futurists and the poets of Nowa Sztuka, while philosophical and linguistic forerunners can be found in Brzozowski’s original reception of Nietzsche, Simmel, James and Bergson from around 1910 as well as in the sociological and anthropological writings of Erazm Majewski: Without the expression of human speech there would be no human thought in us, nor the kind of consciousness that we possess. […] When every human individual has drawn more or less on that store [of humanity’s experience and knowledge] through speech, the individual somehow becomes for himself an independently thinking entity, he becomes ‘a person’ who thinks on his own about anything he wants. Then it could seem that such an individual needs speech only to express an emotional content that already existed within the individual. Then it appears that words are there only to express thoughts that are inherent in the individual. Then it appears, to the superficial researcher, that first came thought and then speech. […] the phenomenon of the human ‘psyche’ is so strictly social that without speech it would not exist at all. […]

158 K. Brandys, Rynek, p. 151; idem, Dżoker: Wspomnienia z teraźniejszości [Joker: Memories from the Present], Warsaw 1967, p. 199; idem, Pomysł [Idea], Warsaw 1974, p. 66. 159 J. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge MA 1986, p. 130.

100

We are humans through the ‘interpsyche,’ which is first of all a work of language and social environment.160

Thus Postmodernist concepts call forth distant echoes from early Modernist quests. The fact that those early statements often sound immensely modern speaks for the durability of the formative antagonisms, which influenced the development of the concepts of subjectivity discussed here. Very early on, the modernists experienced for themselves the dramatic force of the fundamental conflict described by Simmel – the conflict between a desire for individuation and the pressure of alienating forms of socialization, which, incidentally, has lost none of its relevance, as all modern human beings seeking to define their identity continue to face the same conflict. Various forms of sociological determinism presented extreme versions of alternative solutions at the time. Outlining the social constitution of the subject’s identity, Majewski suggests that by belonging to a linguistic community, the subject is able to express only that which can be communicated; what is more, his subject is reconciled with the roles attributed by society, and is well adjusted to the self-image projected by society. With this somewhat naïve and optimistic vision he decidedly represented an isolated position among his contemporaries. Bolesław Leśmian’s position seems more representative of the Modernists’ choices. They also testify to the great powers of orientation and perceptiveness offered by a poetic perspective on social reality. Describing the rules of the game on the stage of social life, Leśmian decidedly takes the side of the concrete human being, the ‘random person’ as opposed to the social dummy of the ‘average man’ who tends to walk ‘not on human paths but on interhuman ones where it is not individuals who exist but their relationships.’ The favoured model is always the self-reliant individual, rather than the one who seeks to lean on identifying with others; it is the individual who decidedly distances himself from the ‘interhuman world,’ or even the one who alienates himself from it entirely in order to form ‘a private, isolated world;’ it is the individual who chooses self-realization according to its own inner nature, even at the price of a chronic irreconcilability with the rules of social reality: Individuals for whom these interhuman paths, this familiarity with relationships remain forever strange and inaccessible can never enter ‘real life,’ they can never appear, be born again on earth as in a secondary reality, taking up a so-called position

160 E. Majewski, Nauka o cywilizacji [The Science of Civilization], vol. 2: Teoria człowieka i cywilizacji [The Theory of Mankind and Civilization], Warsaw 1911, p. 88, p. 92, p. 168, pp. 281–282.

101

there […]. Their face would then lose its own expression, acquiring instead the expression that is imparted by the values created by average man. This latter one knows perfectly what by facial expression he should distinguish himself among individuals who are loosely connected or who exist separately – the causally determined and well-connected banker, lawyer, president of some association, nightwatchman, or editor of some readable newspaper.161

As we can see, the rules of the game on the stage of ‘interhuman life’ were first discovered by the Modernists, and these rules still hold today. What has radically changed, however, are the strategic models of forming subjectivity – these have come to take into account modernity’s alienating mechanisms and their consequences. It is unsurprising, therefore, that a quarter-century after Leśmian’s creative individual had voluntarily left the stage (or withdrawn into solitude), Gombrowicz’s man entered, convinced that he must embrace the artificiality of the human world (‘I discovered man’s reality in this unreality to which he is condemned,’ Gombrowicz wrote in the late 1960s162), as well as out of a need to be reconciled with the alienating conditions of contemporary life (The Marriage shows dramatically that people are ‘created by that which they have created’163). Gombrowicz’s man enters the interhuman stage not in order to accept the status of ‘the average man’ or to make peace with an imposed role or image. To the contrary: it is in order to engage in a battle for his own individuality. He implements the strategy of the stranger (‘Be foreign forever!’ Gombrowicz writes in his Diary164), a politics of ‘loosened’ forms, and an ingenious arrangement of the crooked mirrors of language and other forms of socialization, so that his face should finally gain in them ‘its own expression’ – an aim that was also dear to Leśmian.

161 B. Leśmian, ‘Znaczenie pośrednictwa w metafizyce życia zbiorowego’ [The Importance of Mediation in the Metaphysics of Collective Life], in Szkice literackie [Literary Sketches], p. 61, p. 62 (emphasis added). 162 W. Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament, transl. from French by Alistair Hamilton, London 1973, p. 63. 163 W. Gombrowicz, ‘Idea dramatu’ [The Idea of Drama], in Teatr, Paris 1971, p. 63, English translation by Tul’si Bhambry. 164 W. Gombrowicz, Diary, p. 153. Cf. A Kind of Testament: ‘Alienation? No, let us try to admit that this alienation is not so bad, that we have it in our fingers as pianists say – in our disciplined, technical fingers’ (A Kind of Testament, p. 87).

102

Recapitulation Naturally, the figures of speech used here as heuristic models are tropes (or rather metatropes, as each of them attains the rank of a Sign of Literature) that have a broader meaning. But here they have served above all to isolate the fundamental differentiable concepts of subjectivity as related to the understanding of language and the tasks of literature, i.e. the literary consciousness, of the twentieth century. These models are not mutually exclusive; their identification and interpretation largely depends on the chosen system of references. Clearly, they can coexist within particular works or poetics (this is especially the case with the processional variants of the first three tropes, which in many ways are close to the fourth model). What is more, they are marked by an inner dynamic, which in my opinion clearly and invariably points to their general evolution in one direction: from static and essential variants to dynamic and functional ones. This evolution is also – and this is no less important – one from depth to surface. This direction, veiled in the first three models, becomes apparent as a criterion to differentiate entirely vertical models of the relationship between subject and text, sign and meaning, from the entirely horizontal sylleptic model, which is situated entirely beyond an expressive framing of those relationships in terms of ‘externalizing what is internal,’ ‘the man beyond the work,’ or the pre-linguistic status of the subject. This is also why in my opinion the distinctness of that last, sylleptic model of subjectivity deserves particular attention: it can function as the basis to define one of the criteria that will allow us to distinguish the Modernist formation from the Postmodern one, as well as from its antecedents and traditions. This distinctness seems to be inscribed into the meaning and situation of syllepsis as a rhetorical phenomenon. Syllepsis is indicated by an unstable place, by its particular in-between position in classifications of rhetorical figure – between lexical and syntactic operations, between trope and figure of speech. While the notion of the trope – to use a traditional description – implies a relationship between an expression that is currently used and another expression in absentia, the notion of the figure of speech implies only relationships between expressions in praesentia. Referring to the concept of subjectivity, this means that the subjective relationship is not created by the relationship between the ‘I’ of the expression with the intangible speaking ‘I,’ or the superficial ‘I’ with the deep, hidden ‘I,’ but by the interference of two equally ‘present’ subjects of the expression. We could say therefore that the sylleptic subject is not as much linguistically replaced, tropologically represented in the text, as it is figuralized, that is to say, the sylleptic subject figures in it, submits to the processes of figuration and 103

disfiguration, and finally becomes a figure: an individual of unique appearance. The simplest and best definition of this concept of the subject – its relationship to the text as well as the general usefulness of dealing with literature in this spirit – was offered by Antoni Potocki a long time ago, in the style of the Young Poland era: ‘creativity organizes the soul – we should really get our heads around that once and for all’.165 In the 1930s, Witold Gombrowicz took up this idea in circumstances and categories that were entirely different. It is worth recalling it here: ‘art is a person who puts himself into order’.166

165 A. Potocki, Polska literatura współczesna [Contemporary Polish Literature], part 2: Kult jednostki 1890–1910 [Cult of Personality 1890–1910], Warsaw 1912, p. 396. 166 W. Gombrowicz, ‘Grube nieporozumienie’ [A Grave Misunderstanding], in Varia, Paris 1973, p. 103. English translation by Tul’si Bhambry.

104

Chapter 4: Creating (In)tangible Worlds: Stanisław Brzozowski on the Tasks of Criticism and Art Stanisław Brzozowski on ‘fundamental seeing’ Although this study is written from a purely literary historical angle, we must at least take a brief look at Stanisław Brzozowski’s critical and philosophical output in its entirety, and take a stance on it. First of all, Brzozowski’s concepts of criticism and art appear to be based on the entirety of his philosophical investigations, but he did not live to develop them fully and unambiguously. Secondly, we cannot proceed straight to the details because scholars are still working to understand his ideas. Readers who are unfamiliar with the basics cannot be referred to existing research. This seems to be the main reason why Polish readers struggle with Brzozowski, and why his reception in Poland is so uneven. This confusion about Brzozowski’s changing ideas, which future scholars will have to unravel in their historical context, also explains why readers of Brzozowski’s first editions focused on the most striking aspect of his writing: his chaotic and rapacious interests as a critic, and his tendency to present all his interests in equally extreme terms. Brzozowski himself noted that his writing combined ‘a lyrical element’ with ‘a dogmatic one’ (P 146),167 that is to say emotional exaltation with a doctrinairism that precluded discussion. Over time, one notion came to

167 In this chapter I abbreviate Brzozowski’s titles as follows: ‘Au petit’ ‘Au petit bonheur de la fatalité’, Twórczość, 6 (1966) G  Głosy wśród nocy: Studya nad przesileniem romantyczny kultury europejskiej [Voices in the Night: Studies on the Romantic Crisis in European Culture], ed. and introd. by O. Ortwin O. Ortwin, Lviv 1912 I  Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej [Ideas: Introduction to the Philosophy of Historical Maturity], ed. and introd. by A. Walicki, Cracow 1990, in Dzieła, ed. by M. Sroka KiŻ  Kultura i życie: Zagadnienia sztuki i twórczości w walce o światopogląd, introd. by A. Walicki, Warsaw 1973, in Dzieła, ed. by M. Sroka L  Legenda Młodej Polski: Studya o strukturze duszy kulturalnej [The Legend of Young Poland: Studies on the Structure of its Cultural Soul], Cracow, Wrocław 1983 [Lviv 1910] P  Pamiętnik [Diary], published by A. Brzozowska, ed. and commentary by O. Ortwin, Cracow, Wrocław 1985 [Lviv 1913]

105

dominate his reception, namely that besides the changeability of his ideas, Brzozowski developed one problem consistently, and that this enduring concern is what makes his work so noteworthy.168 This notion is well founded. Nonetheless, I believe that the monumental edition of Brzozowski’s works – an edition that allows us to discover his writings almost in their entirety, and to appreciate how the scope of his legacy developed step by step – paints a different image of the inner dynamics of his work. Reading Brzozowski I do not consider his texts to be controlled eruptions of a reader’s divagations, nor do I feel that they evolved – even in an unconventional way – from some consciously chosen beliefs. Rather, they bring to mind a nonlinear accretion achieved by his persistent attempts to express one idea about one problem. There is an almost obsessive monotony in his writing, though his philosophical language keeps changing. And while his expression becomes clearer over time, the meaning of his key image and of the philosophical experience that he tries to explain – to himself and to others – remains somewhat vague. In his diary he presents, in passing, what is perhaps the most apt characterization of his intellectual work: ‘my central ideas are on the perimeter and have centrifugal tendencies only’ (P 13).

WPK  Wczesne prace krytyczne [Early Critical works], introd. by A. Mencwel, Warsaw 1988, in Dzieła, ed. by M. Sroka WPiK  Współczesna powieść i krytyka. Współczesna powieść polska. Współczesna krytyka literacka w Polsce. Stanisław Wyspiański. Artykuły literackie [The Contemporary Novel and Criticism. The Contemporary Polish Novel. Contemporary Literary Criticism in Poland. Stanisław Wyspiański. Literary Articles], introd. by T. Burek, Cracow, Wrocław 1984, Dzieła ed. by M. Sroka. 168 See e.g.: C. Miłosz, ‘Człowiek wśród skorpionów’ [A Man among Scorpions], in Studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim [A Study on Stanisław Brzozowski], Paris 1962; B. Baczko, ‘Brzozowski – filozofia czynu i pracy’ [Brzozowski: A Philosophy of Action and Work], in Problemy literatury polskiej lat 1890–1939 [Problems in Polish Literature 1890–1939], Wrocław 1972; Wokół myśli Stanisława Brzozowskiego [On the Ideas of Stanisław Brzozowski], ed. by A. Walicki and R. Zimand, Cracow 1974; A. Mencwel, Stanisław Brzozowski: Kształtowanie myśli krytycznej [Stanisław Brzozowski: The Formation of Critical Thought], Warsaw 1976; A. Walicki, Stanisław Brzozowski – drogi myśli [Stanisław Brzozowski: The Paths of His Thought], Warsaw 1977; H. Markiewicz, ‘Wstęp’ [Introduction] in S. Brzozowski, Eseje i studia o literaturze [Essays and Studies in Literature], vol. 1, ed. and introd. by H. Markiewicz, Biblioteka Narodowa 1, no. 258, Wrocław 1990.

106

As soon as he identified his key philosophical problem, Brzozowski committed himself to communicating the essence of his convictions, and to persuade others about the truth he had discovered. He did this, sometimes several times over, in almost all of his articles, putting much effort into using a broad repertoire of (rhetorically) powerful arguments.169 His stated goal might have been to account for the crisis in Russian literature, the use of humour in English literature, or illusions in Polish literature, or it might have been to tackle sentimentalism, rationalism or Romanticism by discussing Miriam (the pen name of Zenon Przesmycki), Józef Feldman or Józefa Kodisowa. Whatever it was, Brzozowski invariably felt compelled to remind his readers – just in case, briefly, over two or three pages – how the world really worked and what humans were doing in it. He never seemed to care to elaborate on his own metanarration. His usual approach was to outline the naïve or objectivist stance, then one of the subjectivist (or, in his terms, ‘Romantic’) worldviews, then to point out that both models were false, and finally to conclude by firmly favouring the active and anthropocentric position which in his eyes characterized not only his own work but also the entire ‘contemporary crisis’ (L 418). It is exceedingly clear that Brzozowski treated his ‘history’ as a superior scheme that explained all sorts of facts and justified him in ascribing values and 169 For instance, sometimes he apparently wanted to seduce us with a sublime image of life as ‘a never-ending creation that tries to maintain itself ’ (I 446), or to impress us with a vision of a self-fulfilling prophesy: ‘a dream traverses the human heart – a dream that makes itself come true, creativity, which carries its own weight thanks to the ideal’ (G 92). Then again he invokes what he sees as an inborn sort of human pride: ‘Our foundation and our vaults reside only in us’ (L 25), or a feeling of freedom and self-determination, endowed with a free will that ‘carries its own weight out of nothingness and by the image alone creates itself ’ (L 322). Yet another time he appeals directly to ambition and cold calculation: ‘life is nothing but this: there is no ready-made world; we must create our own existence, maintain ourselves, endure, triumph’ (I 205); or he employs the language of pragmatism, action, or physical labour: ‘Humanity is driving pales into the bottom or the bottomless depths of a non-human chaos, the cosmos’ (I 203). At times he rouses his readers with pathos: ‘By its own force humanity is maintaining itself above the abyss’ (W 495) – or even with ecstasy: ‘in this very effort – in suspending the whole world above nothingness – lies the highest truth. Man is nothing but this: the fighting will’ (I 405). Finally, it happens that he tries to frighten his readers: ‘Let us remember that we have no nonhuman ground’ (I 238) – or even to take advantage of Polish readers’ susceptibility to martyrological symbols in order to oblige them to maintain their efforts in the realm of culture: ‘We are still walking on the same ground. This ground is built over an abyss and out of the will and sacrifice of the dead’ (I 234).

107

meanings to those facts. As a result, in his critical practice it often happens that theoretical positions and their artistic realizations are evaluated positively on account of their proximity to his representations – his image of how things are. For instance, his discovery of lyrical ‘myths’ in the poetry of Leopold Staff results in a ranking that is surprisingly high, considering that this poet’s work fails to meet many other criteria valued by Brzozowski. Similarly, identifying an ‘atrophy of will,’ i.e. a lack of conscious direction, in Stefan Żeromski’s artistic work, Brzozowski rated it very low, even though Żeromski fulfilled many of the critic’s basic requirements. Not aiming to transform his metanarration into a fully developed worldview, Brzozowski’s intensive search for an adequate language for it focused on the epoch’s most important philosophical styles. This was an important motivation behind his interest in individual philosophers; it also explains why he tended to confront, in one piece of writing, different philosophers’ abilities to express the issues that were key to him. The highest achievement in this art of ‘switching codes’ is no doubt to be found in his Prolegomena do filozofii pracy [Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Work], where he argues that empiriocriticism, historical materialism, pragmatism as well as the philosophies of Nietzsche, Bergson and Sorel (I am only listing the most important ones) are moving in a similar direction and towards a similar goal, namely to express the same truth about the active nature of things, which he also tried to communicate in his own articles. ‘A philosopher worthy of the name,’ Bergson writes, ‘has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said.’170 According to this definition, Brzozowski certainly deserves to be called a philosopher. Keen to communicate the truth he discovered – namely that ‘the world is not, but becomes’ (KiŻ 82), to quote an early formulation – he tried to express the essential message of the worldview implied by that intuition, using ever new philosophical languages, as he was never satisfied. It is apparent that besides this search, Brzozowski had always had at his disposal something like a spontaneous philosophical dictionary. It consisted of a repertory of recognizable, characteristic terms and definitions belonging to one semantic field: centre, base, basis, foundation, foothold, the focal point, focus, source, spring; and their negative counterparts – no centre, no focus, the absolute lack of foundation, source of sickness, etc.

170 Henri Bergson, ‘Philosophical Intuition’, in The Creative Mind, trans. by Mabelle L. Andison, New York 1968, p. 132.

108

Brzozowski, we can say with confidence, cared about things that were central, also in the literal sense. But this seemingly neutral, colloquial and natural vocabulary turned out to be an extremely inconvenient and cumbersome set of cognitive and linguistic tools. As Brzozowski said himself, on another occasion, ‘there is nothing more retrograde than our phraseological preferences’ (I 487). The difficulty was that that vocabulary was the natural language of the substance, of essentialist philosophy. Brzozowski, meanwhile, wanted to use it to convince his readers that that which they took to be substance was in fact function, and that which they took to be a final product was in fact a mere phase in the incessant course of an autotelic process. ‘We must continuously create a new language,’ he wrote with melancholy about that force of resistance of language that ‘spontaneously’ substantialized phenomena, ‘when we want to describe our point of view’ (I 269). This sometimes led Brzozowski to risk real conceptual acrobatics in order to convince us for instance that work, being our basic ‘relationship’ to the universe, represents the ‘Archimedean fulcrum point’ (I 172), or that ‘the ultimate reality,’ reality’s ‘central point,’ is ‘striving, our active position’ (I 120).171 171 Without going into details, I wish to point out three aspects of Brzozowski’s notion of work (known to be one of his most important themes and subject of a rich secondary literature). First, the discovery that Brzozowski considered to be his most important was that of the most general principles in work; on those principles, he believed, ‘a worldview [could be] founded’; what’s more, he indicated that ‘this time philosophy in Poland is actually making a step forward’ (I 224). But he was soon forced to abandon his initial view of work as the primary concept, i.e. one that would be both simple and final. On the one hand it turned out that it was not simple. By describing work as ‘a goal-oriented activity’ he introduced an intellectual (or para-intellectual) component into it, which he had previously considered to be derivative. It formed a necessary component of ‘work,’ representing something like an action plan, ‘an active vision of life’ (I 218) that he described in various ways, from ‘idea’ and ‘theory’ through ‘inner gesture’ and ‘active disposition’ or ‘active image’ and ‘myth’. On the other hand, the concept of ‘a goal-oriented activity’ assumed prior knowledge of the anticipated result, which did not apply to the case that most interested Brzozowski, namely innovative activity, where ‘we find absolute definiteness by groping in the dark’ (I 214), i.e. where the rational component is displaced by the creative component; the ‘project’ that had to be ‘invented, created’ (I 216). He noted that ‘when it is really undertaken for the first time, the work has no point toward which it strives, the work emerges from creativity as its happy form’ (I 221). As a result, as Walicki and others have observed, the concept of ‘work’ underwent significant broadening; ‘this term began to signify for Brzozowski any kind of effort that enhances the power of man’ (I 40).

109

But most often he simply tried to take terms traditionally used to express what was essential, permanent and unchangeable, and imbue them with an active,

This is why in his later texts the term is used interchangeably with or replaced by ‘creativity’. Secondly, the limit of the concept of work is questionable. Brzozowski writes in a letter: I beg you to consider the notion of work. 1. Work is change in the external world. 2. This is pretence, as the ext. world is always the result of work. 3. Ergo, we cannot think of work in these terms. 4. So what is work, effort, let’s say: a gesture, a sign. 5. When we make that sign, there follows a consequence beyond us. 6. What does it mean to make a sign – it means once and for all [unreadable word] a certain moment of life. (Letter written in September 1909, in Letters, vol. 2, ed. by M. Sroka, Cracow, p. 217)





Compare also later descriptions of work as ‘the only speech,’ ‘language,’ and a world that ‘writes [work] into itself,’ etc. I would venture to suggest that when language enters through the window of metaphor into the circle of Brzozowski’s key problem, we are faced with the first stage of an actual interest; this interest appears while language is still treated marginally, in the context of trivial linguistic questions, but eventually most problems would be reformulated in terms of language. Thirdly, taking into account the dynamics of Brzozowski’s philosophical thinking, it seems that the key role of the notion of work does not at all arise from its status as a primary, initial concept, but from the fact that it resulted from a ‘central’ conviction at the heart of Brzozowski’s philosophy, namely the notion that the function has primacy over the product. This is why I believe that Brzozowski’s concept of work should be understood above all in the light of his anti-essential philosophical option (and not the other way around), as well as in the light of the general ‘epistemological crisis’ of the turn of the century, which formed the backdrop for his notion of work. This context also does a lot to explain the particular character of that category: it was overly general (apart from a short phase of reducing work to ‘muscle work’) and synthetic, as it encompassed the entire sphere of the work of the human spirit; it was also philosophically imprecise, placed as if on the intersection of various traditions and currents of thought in which the notion of work was used for similar reasons, e.g. in the anti-Kantian philosophy of Bergson and Sorel as well as in the Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism. Many years later, Cassirer proposed the following summary of his views, which had been formed at the same time as Brzozowski’s: The philosophy of symbolic forms starts from the position that, if there is any definition of the nature or ‘essence’ of man, this definition can only be understood as a functional, not a substantial one. […] Man’s outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or physical nature – but his work. It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines and determines the circle of ‘humanity’. Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are the constituents, the various sectors of this circle. (Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, New Haven 1945, pp. 67–68)

110

processual, ‘energetic’ meaning. For instance, he wrote about the ‘radiating source,’ ‘the springs of creative power’ etc. Generally speaking, he was forced to make the same kind of distortions in his own vocabulary as had been made, in his view, in the field of cognition, which tries to describe that active, dynamic reality. In one of his later essays he unexpectedly confesses, in the middle of a philosophical debate: I am searching for a way to express ideas that are not only new, but also difficult and complicated to the highest degree, overcoming in myself the resistance of former habits. No one knows what philosophical work means unless they understand the effort of gradually extracting ideas; unless they understand that fundamental seeing must live for years, must strive for years to be expressed, before it finally works out an organ of its own existence. (I 305, my emphasis)

Of course, from a historical perspective it is clear that this ‘fundamental seeing’ was a result of the general anti-Positivist crisis – a well-studied experience that marked the entire generation of the Modernist formation. We should only note that the syndrome of the anti-Positivist turn usually combines two crises in worldview, and these crises are distinct in their sources, characteristics and consequences. First, there is the theological crisis, which reaches far back into the nineteenth century, which ends in wide-ranging expressions of the fall of the ‘Biblical God’ and ‘the God of the philosophers,’ that is to say in the conviction that there is no transcendental dimension or authoritative standard for absolute goodness, truth or beauty. In literature, the resulting sense of homelessness, of having nothing to lean on, is most often expressed through metaphors related to ‘the abyss’. Secondly, there is the teleological crisis, which is in part a consequence of the first, but mostly results from questioning the idea of progress, the fall of historicism and of related beliefs in an unchangeable and rational inner law of development. The feeling of loss of continuity, direction, the sense that fragments of history are randomly torn off and tied together, was most often expressed through metaphors of fragmentation, chaotic dispersal and life’s directionlessness. These crises overlapped rather neatly with the two-stage development of Brzozowski’s philosophy: first, his turn from objectivism to individualism (which he always considered to be embodied in Przybyszewski), and second, from individualism to anti-essentialism.172 In all his work Brzozowski made frequent use of

172 There are several positive references to anti-Semitism in Brzozowski’s work (cf. e.g. I 84, 346); see also Walicki’s remarks in his Introduction to Brzozowski’s Idee [Ideas] (I 22). In the introduction to his book Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger,

111

both above-mentioned types of metaphors related to world-view, and sometimes he even combined them to complete the image and to enhance its suggestiveness. Thus he wrote, for instance: ‘this fire that rages and disintegrates into ashes and nastiness, this continuous action, this fathomlessness, restlessness, this eternal disorder and struggle with debris – that is man’ (P 72). Everything suggests that it was only the anti-essentialist option that made it possible for Brzozowski to identify his own key issues and to avoid the seemingly impossible choice between ‘either the impossible static ideal, or directionlessness (P 101). The first stage undoubtedly connected the entire generation of Modernists, while the second stage was shared by only a few individuals. And yet, it was this theoretical-cognitive turn – from thinking in terms of substance to thinking in terms of function – that would mark the entire twentieth century. In Poland this small group included the young Florian Znaniecki, who, addressing a broader readership in 1912, presented the changing meaning of ‘the mind’ as follows: Given those new, ever expanding horizons, we must say today that ‘rationality/the mind’ as we have understood it until now does not exist at all. There are certain characteristics of thought and creativity that we could call ‘intelligence’: but these characteristics do not allow us to understand human thought as one power, or to understand its discoveries and accomplishments as a harmonious system.173

The understanding of the centre as the foundation was based on its status as a primary principle of identity, which preceded or was external to any articulation. But when the centre is seen as a function, that is to say a principle that differentiates, that is dynamic, that creates meaning, then it becomes impossible to ignore language and the major (though ambivalent) role that it plays in cognition. For it turns out that once language is taken into account, it cannot be limited to a single ‘inherent’ domain; it immediately engulfs and transforms all formerly extra-linguistic categories. Brzozowski, as was his habit, formulated this new idea in extreme terms, using sarcasm and irony when referring to the traditional positions which he opposed: Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley 1985, A. Megill discusses how worldview crises affected the European consciousness in the era of the anti-Positivist turn. 173 F. Znaniecki, ‘Pojęcie “Rozumu” w filozofii współczesnej’ [The Notion of ‘the Mind’ in Contemporary Philosophy], Tygodnik Polski, 32 (1912). See also Wocial’s remarks on the close relationship between Brzozowski’s and Znaniecki’s philosophical quests in his introduction to F. Znaniecki, Pisma filozoficzne [Philosophical Writings], vol. 1, ed. and introd. by J. Wocial, Warsaw 1987 (this edition does not contain the text quoted here).

112

From the beginning, the world has existed only as logical content, understood in one way or another: – in the beginning was the word – that’s mysticism, but in the beginning was the atom, the ion, chaos, panpsychism – that’s sobriety. For these things exist beyond the realm of the human word – the concrete word. In the beginning was the word – that’s almost a philosophical self-discovery. Nothing is more fruitless than thinking about the beginning, playing with words, always already mere rhetoric, literature, poetry, a spell. (I 430)

The rhetoric and poietic of culture Brzozowski questioned substance-based categories and reformulated almost every problem in the language of the processes of the ‘creativity’ of life, ‘work,’ ‘will’ etc. In this process he finally came to face the problem of language, especially the functions of language that appeared to be cognitive and representational, but were essentially performative and rhetorical. For some reason, this part of Brzozowski’s philosophy is generally overlooked or, at best, trivialized.174 This seems unjustified, both in the light of the consistency of his philosophy and for purely literary historical reasons. (After all, linguistic consciousness is an important component of Modernist aesthetics. Only by acknowledging this can we properly formulate the problem of the status and tasks of verbal art – literature as well as criticism – as a ‘philosophical method’. Whatever stimulating role Bergson and Sorel (as well as Nietzsche, much earlier) might have played for Brzozowski, the discovery of the epistemological and ontological function of language also marked his own philosophical experience.  ‘Our heads spin,’ he wrote, ‘at the idea that the spaciousness of the world, uniform time, matter, energy – are properties of social life determined by speech. With their help we explain and translate society’ (I 264). This discovery complements Brzozowski’s philosophy in one important way: it suggests how to avoid the fundamental difficulty of explaining how, on the one hand, the active, dynamic character of human reality is familiar in the history of philosophy but remains invisible in everyday experience, and how on the other hand, the tangible, ‘unchanging’ world incessantly changes and broadens to include ever new areas of the unknown:

174 To my knowledge, the only work that explores Brzozowski’s views on language in some depth (though in a different context) is A. Chmielecki’s thought-provoking book Teoria wiedzy Stanisława Brzozowskiego [Stanisław Brzozowski’s Theory of Knowledge], Warsaw 1985.

113

Speech makes permanent, transforms all fixed forms of action that our society, humanity, has developed. Speech is what we encounter when we begin to live. Analysing our experiences, we search for and recognize those qualities that have been made permanent through speech, and thus we create, as a presence that surrounds us, the past, concealed in the word, of the tribe and of the species, thus we grow into a certain external world. […] The external world, and therefore also the internal world, is, more broadly speaking, a world that is created, a reality that is created by us, it is to create, still more broadly, reality that has been created and fixed in speech and reality as the act of creating. (I 263–264)175

Brzozowski rejects both alternative versions of the essentialist worldview: as a world that is ‘represented,’ i.e. the naively empiricist belief that the world exists objectively in the fullness of its permanent qualities, preceding human activity and independent of it; as well as of the ‘substitute’ world, referring to the Romantic or idealist notion that the subject’s power is sufficient to constitute and legitimize the existence of a world projected by that subject – their ‘own’ world. By refusing to think about the world in the opposing categories of object-subject, Brzozowski comes up against another notion. It is by delving deeper into it that he defines his own key problem – the opposition between the product and the process, between the ‘finished world’ and life. And he does not want to dismiss this opposition, but seeks to develop it, to neutralize or master it. Considering the changes in his argumentation, it appears that the phase in which Brzozowski first developed his philosophical and critical concepts was characterized by thinking in terms of ‘either–or,’ pitching the represented world against the substituted world (‘either the impossible static ideal, or directionlessness’). The turning point, at which he rejects this alternative as an artificial one, 175 To highlight the ‘Humboldtian’ intellectual horizon in which Brzozowski’s notion of the status and function of language should be understood, let me cite the classic formulation by Edward Sapir, the founder of American structuralist linguistics: Language is a guide to social reality. […] Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. […] We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.



114

E. Sapir, ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’ [1929], in David Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, Berkeley 1949, p. 162.

is expressed in the negative forms of ‘neither nor’ (‘there is neither a subject nor an object, but subject and object are becoming’ WPK 222). Meanwhile, the key task of his philosophical project boils down to the following two questions: how to express the problem that arises in the space defined by the more general opposition of two aspects of reality (‘reality that has been created and fixed in speech and reality as the act of creating’), and how to grasp that problem within the mental categories of ‘this as well as that’ or ‘both this and that,’ which is to say how to express it in a way that will render the accuracy of both its irreducible aspects. There is no space here to examine the linguistic aspect of Brzozowski’s philosophical project in detail, but this is what doubtless strikes today’s readers as most interesting and thought provoking. This also goes for readers well versed in the ‘extremism’ (if I may say so) of deconstructionist and Postmodernist styles of thinking. In short, when Brzozowski recognized that our interaction with the world is ineluctably mediatized (‘man never experiences anything superhuman’ WPiK 381), his interest turned to studying the networks of socially consolidated symbolic and linguistic systems of meaning in our culture’s discourses; after all, they not only mediate but also participate in shaping our cognition of the only form in which reality is accessible to us – ‘the world as an object of socialized expression’ (I 336). From this point of view, the construct we call ‘culture’ presented itself as the result of representation, and not as its source; at the same time, the image of an unchangeable reality was interpreted as the effect of a referential illusion produced by its linguistic representation (see e.g. L 106–107). In Głosy wśród nocy [Voices in the Night] he wrote: Perhaps the central truth of all theoretical and cognitive discussions should be the conviction that what we feel to be the world, reality, is that which we can express – without recourse to individual linguistic or generally artistic creativity – in our normal social environment, about the experiences, the adventures of a typical member of the class, circle, etc., to which we belong. I am convinced that by using this analytical formula we can produce better and more systematic layouts of plans and perspectives of the psychology of other epochs and mental formations that we only know by proxy. (G 34)

When the centre turns out to be a function, then the limits of the world come to overlap with the limits of language and everything becomes discourse, in the sense that there is a ‘permanence in the conviction that there exists, as a possible expression, one world that is obligatory for all’ (I 459). No doubt, Brzozowski meant that ‘we should not acknowledge the properties of language, speech, to be properties of being’ (I 485), and that we must overcome the habit of ‘identifying the rhetorical process with the cognitive process’ (I 487). But he also knew full 115

well that those ‘revolts against rhetoric only create new forms of rhetoric’ (L 364). For language is not so much a tool of transmitting information or truth as it is ‘a medium of social coordination,’ ‘an organ on human cohabitation’ (L107), creating understanding, commonly shared beliefs, or general agreement. By referring to the external world, language reveals its object and modifies it at the same time: ‘[language] presents, it enhances, and at the same time it naturally excludes, simplifies, falsifies’ (P 148). Language is also a decidedly conservative factor (as it allows to communicate that which is already known), and it distorts the actual state of things (for it evokes an illusion of stability and objectivity). But when language is used in an individual and creative manner, it can become ‘the beginning of action’ (WPiK 187); the tool that makes it possible to master new realms of experience; as if calling forth into existence previously unknown forms of realness. In a sense language can even offer a glimpse into that deeper, dynamic aspect of reality – as the centre of its ‘self-knowledge,’ as an image in which life recognizes itself (and to which it sometimes adapts itself): ‘what appeared to us as the deepest reality was life as creation; when life recognizes itself, it finds characteristics determined by speech’ (I 264). Brzozowski perceived a similar coexistence of two aspects and reciprocal influence in speech understood as ‘the medium of socializing our psychological states,’ in the relationships between word and thought, language and the psyche, where ‘1. The word expresses content present in the psyche, 2. The word generates content present in the psyche’ (Au petit 33). Gradually Brzozowski appears to conclude that the limitations and possibilities created by linguistic experience define the boundaries of all conscious human activity. Perhaps this is why a mediation on language in his diary concludes as follows: ‘Only man has this. The word has no absolute, non-historical meanings. It is always a defective and limited creation of life: defective and limited even when we consider it to be the work of the entire human race, but its only work’ (P 65). By projecting the range of influence of language onto the entire field of experienced and knowable reality, Brzozowski strove to outline his main critical project: to examine the rhetoric and poietic of culture. On the one hand, this means examining systems of representation that transform history into nature, presenting subjective projects as discoveries within a reality that is allegedly independent of humankind. On the other hand, this means to study processes of innovation that allow to realize moments or forms of life creativity that had previously been unattainable because they are irrational and inexpressible. The interpretive procedure that Brzozowski devised for literary works saw him reproducing the conditioning of a given creative process, or empathically delving 116

into the signs of creativity to deduce radical conclusions from them and to confront them with the cognitive ‘matrix’ of his own metanovel. He then took this procedure and applied it broadly to all the cultural phenomena that interested him. He focused his attention mainly on critiquing the ideological, mystifying power of language. In Legenda Młodej Polski [The Legend of Young Poland] he summarized his reflections as follows: ‘the word, a creation of history, conceals history from us, becoming the source of all dogmatism’ (L viii). Brzozowski’s concept of rhetoric is almost always negative, as ‘there is no life-engendering rhetoric’ (G 49; for an exception see I 478). This concept of rhetoric now comes to encompass those above-mentioned deceptive ‘effects of realness,’ unshakeable ‘foundations,’ immutable ‘substances,’ and ‘all these are hypostases of concrete coordinations of human coexistence, achieved by the entering of speech’ (L 107). Rhetoric in the classical sense is the art of representing the actual state of affairs in a convincing manner, and, as Cicero claimed, a decorative expression of truth. The real world’s prior existence is unquestioned here. This is why Brzozowski claims that ‘rhetoric assumes a metaphysics of life, there is a certain unchangeable world that can be closed’ (I 479). But when the existence of that truth is questioned, as according to Plato it was in the case of the sophists, all of rhetoric is condemned as a source of deprivation and an amoral means of deceiving people and manipulating their beliefs. Brzozowski retains this odium and condemnation, but on significantly different grounds: for him, contamination by rhetoric brings about all the manifestations of faith in unchangeable substance and the independent objectivity of the world. But his critical attention (in this Brzozowski follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps) is attracted by the anthropological aspect of rhetoric – rhetoric understood not in terms of its relationship with epistemology or in terms of its relationship with narrowly defined aesthetics, but in relation to the broad sphere of practical, cultural and mental human activity, which essentially occurs in situations marked by a lack of fundamental order or sufficient rational justification.176 In this context, rhetoric is the general pragmatic skill of elaborating (imposing, 176 On the anthropological understanding of rhetoric (as seen in Brzozowski) and its significance for twentieth-century thought see H. Blumenberg, ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric’, in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. by K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy, Cambridge, MA and London 1991, esp. pp. 432–433. On the rhetoric of Brzozowski’s own discourse see M. Głowiński, ‘Wielka parataksa: O budowie dyskursu w “Legendzie Młodej Polski” Stanisława Brzozowskiego’ [The Great Parataxis: The Construction of Discourse in Stanisław Brzozowski’s ‘Legend of Young Poland’], Pamiętnik Literacki, 4 (1991).

117

instructing, insinuating,…) consensus about what is true and real; what is ‘infected’ by its effects are also types of discourse that seem to be purely cognitive, as well as forms of intellectual activity that are most remote from actual practice. It is in this light that I would read Brzozowski’s well-known description of his critical strategy: ‘my criticism grows out of philosophy, it is above all and more than anything else a philosophical method’ (P 115). This criticism (also in the sense of ‘literary criticism’) could be seen as a ‘philosophical method’ mainly because when everything became discourse, for Brzozowski this meant that to a certain extent everything became literature: ‘Whatever we are able to say about the world, it will always be the result of a certain history, a result expressed in the vocabulary of a certain literature (understood as linguistic creativity)’ (P 98; cf. I 459). Thus everything deserved an analysis of the poetics of its discursive manifestations. This meant above all that the pronouncements of philosophers – pronouncements that aspired to reveal truth (in the classical sense of correspondence) – could be examined in terms of their construction and their rhetorical and figurative qualities; they could be examined as linguistic utterances, which, in a nutshell, led to the pragmatistic reinterpretation of those claims to truth.177 Generally speaking, this allowed Brzozowski to reveal the existence and power of systems of representation, which not only reflect the order of roles and social relationships but above all endow them with meaning and value, giving sense to a given society. The task of genealogical or ‘paleontological’ criticism, as Brzozowski called it (G 4–5), was not limited to examining already established representations and worldviews, in the form of mimetic reproduction or subjective projection (though Brzozowski left fascinating outlines of the classical and Romantic episteme). Nor did this task boil down to the art of retreating out of (or retreating before) any such creations in order to gain, through the act of pure intuition, some unmediated access to creative life (although Brzozowski consistently ascribed a

177 Brzozowski’s definitions of the notions of truth are undoubtedly related to pragmatism, but it is well known that he was not entirely satisfied with his definition, as we can see e.g. in his interest in the philosophy of Catholic modernism as well as certain remarks in his Pamiętnik [Diary]. Generally speaking, Kołakowski is certainly correct reconstructing Brzozowski’s key question, ‘how can man give an absolute meaning to that which he himself creates?’: He appears to have decided that this absolute meaning, on which depends also man’s faith in his own absolute dignity, can only come from the belief that our endeavours are capable of reaching the divine, timeless foundations of all being. (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution, transl. by Paul Stephen Falla, Oxford 1978, vol. 2, p. 223).

118

great maieutic role to critical intuition or empathy). Above all, the task was to try and understand those creations by referring to the emerging basic principle; to grasp and analyse the general strategy of cultural production, processes of the world’s ‘textualization’ or semiotization – to study that reverse side of the mirror, the logic of simultaneous creation and recreation that I call poetics (a term that echoes sapienza poetica, which is proper to humans according to Vica, whom Brzozowski first ‘discovered’) or cultural rhetoric. According to Brzozowski, this kind of criticism seems to be about two basic mechanism or rules of action. The poietics of culture is ruled, we could say, by a mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy. The creative process could attain its realization only thanks to the invention of some ‘myth’ or ‘active image’ that was shaped by an unconscious process of creation and imbued with a sort of ‘plan of action’ thanks to which ‘what one desires to create becomes a force that creates itself ’ (L 253). The rhetoric of culture, meanwhile, depends on a mechanism of alienation, which causes ‘everything that emerges from the creativity of individual parts or of entire social groups to penetrate that culture, to become in turn something object-like, external and absolute’ (WPK 705).178 From this point of view the crucial task of criticism is neither to evaluate artistic concepts that have already been realized, nor to replace the creator in his calling, as the Modernist notion of the critic as artist would have it. The task of criticism was to recognize the mechanisms that generate culture – the mechanisms that define the shape of artistic and intellectual formations of the past as well as those that determine the unique atmosphere of their time. If art, as Brzozowski wrote, is a ‘great anticipation,’ then criticism should not only analyse substantial illusions, but it should also anticipate that anticipation. For by formulating a given vision of culture, criticism can make us conscious of that which is still potential, thus stimulating the direction in which art will develop. This is how I understand Brzozowski’s famous formula that ‘the true critic is an organizer of the mental life of his day’ (WPK 312).

Creating the real Over the course of his career Brzozowski seems to have devoted less and less space to aesthetic reflections on art. This does not mean, however, that he ranked it less highly in the hierarchy of meaningful human activities: ‘The universe is commensurate with our work – this is our deepest philosophical expression, but let us not forget that we are entitled to believe that the universe is commensurate 178 As Brzozowski points out in the same passage, he first encountered the concept of alienation in Georg Simmel’s writings.

119

with our aesthetic and religious emotions, that they can have a place in it’ (I 18). Of course Brzozowski’s definitions of art, carefully developed but thrown in at random, are known to be manifold and not too consistent, at least at first sight.179 They are often contradictory, and usually they are not ‘commensurate’ with one another, making it difficult to bring them to one common denominator. And yet, it seems that by examining Brzozowski’s way of thinking we can gain useful clues. There is no doubt that he rejects (though not at the same time) both the traditional Positivist concept of literature as a reflection of existing reality and the Modernist concept of art for art’s sake. ‘Art does not reflect existence, but creates it’ (KiŻ 96), he says in response to the first concept. This sentence can be read as an apology in support of autonomous creativity, a separate world of art and the artist. But he soon rescinds his approval of literature as ‘a domain that is independent of life’ and ‘that exists in itself and for itself ’ (L 363). The following passage suggests possible motives for this development in his attitude: [Art] was supposed to be new, individual and condensed, it was not supposed to reflect reality but only states of the soul, which it was supposed to express either directly, or through visions and symbols supersaturated with them; finally, it was supposed to have a metaphysical background. Above all, however, it was supposed to take the place of life, it was supposed to create such strong intoxication that reality, or so-called reality, as we were wont to say then, was impossible to observe. (WPK 186, my emphasis).

To render art absolute, to present it as a substitute for reality, is seen as an expression of resignation, of powerlessness when it comes to its essential culture-forming tasks. Brzozowski aptly deduces this concept, which gained sway around the turn of the century, from Romantic notions of artistic expression, which in their 179 See e.g. M. Kridl, ‘O krytyce bezpośredniej’ [On Immediate Criticism], in Krytyka i krytycy [Criticism and Critics], Warsaw 1923, pp. 80–91; J. Spytkowski, Stanisław Brzozowski: Estetyk-krytyk [Stanisław Brzozowski: An Aesthete and Critic], Cracow 1939; B. Łagowski, ‘Etyczna interpretacja sztuki u Stanisława Brzozowskiego’ [Ethical Interpretation of Art in Stanisław Brzozowski], in Studia z dziejów estetyki polskiej 1890–1918 [Studies in the History of Polish Aesthetics 1890–1918], Warsaw 1972; M. Wyka, ‘Wstęp’ [Introduction], in S. Brzozowski, Sam wśród ludzi [Alone among People], Biblioteka Narodowa, series 1, no. 228, Wrocław 1979; T. Burek, ‘Wiedźmy historii i kształt swobody: Idee estetyczne a krytyka literacka w pismach Stanisława Brzozowskiego’ [Witches of History and the Shape of Freedom: Aesthetic Ideas and Literary Criticism in the Writings of Stanisław Brzozowski], WPiK; A. Mencwel, ‘Między “nową sztuką” a “społecznym ideałem”: Krytyczna młodość Brzozowskiego’ [Between ‘New Art’ and ‘the Social Ideal’: Stanisław Brzozowski as a Young Critic], WPK; H. Markiewicz, ‘Wstęp’ [Introduction].

120

extreme form led to the cult of pure expression whose goal was being, not meaning (G 66). By rejecting the static and substantial understanding of art (art as a reflection of or substitute for reality) Brzozowski approaches a definition of art in terms of artistic activity – the process of creating form and value. But here (just as in the cases discussed above) he encounters the antinomy of product and process, which in this case takes the form of an antinomy of artistry and creativity. Artistry was understood as an art work’s unquestionable value, and for Brzozowski it also meant perfection, complete realization, the full finalization of a goal-oriented process initiated and controlled by the artist’s superior consciousness: ‘artistry demands such a perspective on life that it represents something unchangeable, so that everything that happens in this life is encompassed by those unchangeabilities’ (J 411). But this understanding of artistry seemed to exclude authentic creativity, which cannot be fully conscious and predictable, since ‘in order to think about creating, one must think in terms of the non-existent, and transform that thinking about the non-existent into a force that will lead to its creation’ (L 253). The antinomy seems ineluctable, for the finished work of art excludes creativity, as it sees creativity as an already accomplished, finished, goal-oriented process (WPiK 402). Authentic creativity, meanwhile, forecloses the achievement of perfect works of art, since it is an infinite activity that cannot be replaced by any finished work: ‘creativity is creativity for no other reason than the fact that it could not be replaced by anything else: the deepest meaning of poetry is always poetry itself ’ (G 120). Brzozowski was not alone in being caught up in this antinomy, which was a general and characteristic trait of the Modernists’ aesthetic sensibility, expressed, for instance, in the syndrome of the ‘unproductive’ artist with no work, and the dream about the absolute work, the myth of the Book. It is worth noting that besides the many discussions on this issue (for instance by Irzykowski), Young Poland did actually produce its own Book. One of Young Poland’s forgotten legends centres on the neglected poet Jan Wroczyński, who is said to have sent the true Book to Miriam before committing suicide. This Book, it seems, presented not so much the perfection of the absolute but its infinity; it was an attempt to revive and rouse the order of words – which is normally unchangeable and stable. Consisting of loose, unnumbered sheets of paper that the reader could reshuffle again and again, this Book could be read in countless different ways, releasing ever different meanings through new combinations of the textual order.180 180 See T. Niesiołowski, Wspomnienia [Memoirs], Warsaw 1963, p. 57.

121

The antinomy could have been insurmountable if not for the fact that for Brzozowski, the category of the ‘non-existing’ was a purely negative one. As a sharp reader of Bergson (as well as Leibniz, we may presume), he wrote in a draft version of the ‘Table of Contents’ in Idee [Ideas]: [N]othing authorizes us to think that being is one or that it is something closed; we can think of it as […] the infinity of processes and creative endeavours, each of which, if it were realized, would create its own world – a world entirely incommensurate with those that would be created in the same manner by different efforts. (I 469)181

Contrary to the claims of creationist aestheticians, we may conclude that the task of creativity is therefore not to think up something entirely novel as freely as possible, but to finalize, i.e. to realize some of the processes that without this intervention would perhaps never come into their own. Many other of Brzozowski’s remarks on art lead to similar conclusions. This is clearly a theory of art that can be described as ‘productive,’ to distinguish it from the creationist theory, the mimetic concept (in the narrower sense) as well as the expressive theory, with which it has often been identified. Brzozowski’s theory, in this version, is not about presenting the appearance of something previously existing, nor about some kind of internalization of the principle of reproducing former ‘states of the soul’ (as the expressive concept, popular in the Modernist era, had it). If I mention mimesis in this context, it is in the Democritean sense of emulating nature’s ways – essentially in the sense of representing the unrepresentable that is unrepresentable because it never existed in reality. And if I mention expression, it is in the sense of expressing the inexpressible, i.e. in the sense of presenting something that did not exist in such a form before it came to be articulated; it is therefore thanks to this articulation that it was completed, and for that reason it is something that cannot be separated from its externalization. This variant of the expressive theory has rightly been associated with Romanticism; but it is much older and more enduring, for it is also popular in twentieth-century art theory and practice. Searching for origins we must of course turn to the main source, that is to say Aristotle. However, we must turn not to his Poetics but to the no less illustrious and yet less popular and also less lapidary Physics. First Aristotle tells us that generally speaking, art imitates nature, but soon he elaborates on that generally 181 In Anty-Engels [Anti-Engels], Brzozowski made a similar remark in passing: ‘Personally I believe that our lives stagnate as a result of a certain understanding between our creativity and the creativity or creativities that are beyond man. But I do not mean to impose my metaphysical or religious beliefs’ (I 331).

122

mimetic relationship: ‘the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further than Nature can, or they imitate Nature’.182 Seen from this perspective, there are at least two aspects or kinds of mimesis: the limited kind (mimesis of the product), which is about reproducing somehow that which is given, made by nature; and the general kind (mimesis of the process), which, given that it does not reproduce anything given, cannot be said to reproduce anything at all; it is about filling a certain gap in nature and about finalizing that which cannot attain its realization through the powers of nature alone. Hence, this is productive mimesis, as it imitates the productive power of nature – nature as poiesis. Plotinus referred to this Democritean fragment in Aristotle’s work on productive mimesis, or mimesis of process: ‘The arts do not simply imitate what they see, but they run back up to the forming principles from which nature derives.’183 Dante also highlighted this passage:   If you read your Physics carefully, then you   will find, not many pages from the start,  that art follows nature, as well as it can do,   like a pupil with his master. It may be said   that your art is God’s grandchild.184

Later this passage was taken up by writers of the Renaissance and the Neo-Platonists, as well as the Romantics, of course. In Poland it was Mochnacki, who, building on Schelling, wrote about imitating nature as a productive force:

182 Aristotle, The Loeb Classical Library, ed. by E. H. Warmington et al.: Aristotle iv: The Physics vol. i, trans. by Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornfor, Cambridge, MA 1929, p. 173. Cf. W. Tatarkiewicz, Dzieje sześciu pojęć [The History of Six Concepts], Warsaw 1976, passim. Nota bene, Tatarkiewicz aptly observes that out of the four meanings of mimesis that emerged in antiquity, the two oldest ones are most vivid in the twentieth century, namely the ritualized one, i.e. mimesis as expression, and the Democritean, which is about emulating nature’s course of action and being guided by its laws (op. cit., p. 339). 183 Plotinus, Enneads, Loeb Classical Library, ed. by Jeffrey Anderson et al., Plotinus vol. i, transl. by A. H. Armstrong, Cambridge, MA, 1966, revised edition (1987), Book V, chapter 8.1, p. 239. 184 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, A New Verse Translation by Michael Parma, New York and London 2002, Canto 11, v. 101–105 (p. 121)

123

[W]anting to produce identical things through art, it does not suffice to imitate their external forms, but we must imitate the way in which nature created those things. Only by imitating the production can we obtain the same product.185

Among the Modernists, Leśmian developed this concept in his own way, opting to reproduce natura naturans, rather than natura naturata. But most importantly, it was Stanisław Lack who wrote (clearly with Aristotle’s passage in mind): Much has been said about imitating nature, but perhaps we have not realized that he who said it had in mind nature’s work. Nature in this sense carefully conceals that work. […] Thus nature does not produce results, but perhaps that which in terms of construction seems to be a result, is actually constantly moving on.186

In the twentieth century mimesis of the process was one of the most influential aesthetic concepts to clarify the status of avant-garde art. ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible,’ wrote Paul Klee;187 Picasso is quoted saying: ‘We always had the idea that we were realists, but in the sense of the Chinese who said, “I don’t imitate nature; I work like her”.’188 The concept also played an important role in deconstructionist and Postmodernist aesthetics; Derrida, for instance, discussing the phenomenon of ‘mimetic economy,’ considers its key form to be none other than the imitation of natura naturans.189 This brief summary of this concept’s history is meant to clarify the context of Brzozowski’s aesthetic philosophy and the idea around which it revolves. At the very beginning of his career he wrote: Art begins at the point that represents the end of the isolated schematizing word as a form of expression; it begins at the point that represents the end of the possibility of defining, of mutual understanding through anything other than complete revelation, disclosure, the awakening of content that is absolutely individual in its entirety. (WPK 381)

185 M. Mochnacki, ‘Czy sztuka winna naśladować naturę?’ [Should Art Emulate Nature?], in Poezja i czyn: Wybór pism [Poetry and Action: Selected Writings], ed. and introd. by S. Pieróg, Warsaw 1987, pp. 175–176, footnote. 186 S. Lack, ‘O doktrynerach’ [On Doctrinaires], in Wybór pism krytycznych [Selected Critical Writings], ed. and introd. by W. Głowala, Cracow 1980, p. 385. 187 P. Klee, ‘Creative Credo’ [1920], transl. by Norbert Guterman, The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee, New York 1959, pp. 5–10. 188 F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, Toronto, London 1964, p. 77. 189 J. Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, in Mimesis des Articulations, ed. by S. Agacinski et al., Paris 1975, p. 67.

124

At the end of his life he wrote: Art broadens the orbit of that which in a given social environment can be expressed, in a way it multiplies the world of that society by certain permanent values: from now on the world that the individual encounters as the foundation of his society will be enriched by those values that can be expressed in that environment thanks to art. (I 336)

From this point of view there is no contradiction between treating art as the ‘great anticipation’ (KiŻ 92), and recognizing that art ‘never goes before the creativity of life’ (WPiK 371). For it is an anticipation in relation to the finished world of everyday experience, as ‘a realm in which the spirit performs its works, for which there is no space in so-called real life’ (KiŻ 92). But art can be anticipation only to the extent to which – by imitating the work of life (Brzozowski’s variant of ‘the work of nature’) – it undertakes to reveal still unfulfilled creative possibilities, thus helping to bring about their realization: ‘Literature […] can be the consciousness of narrative life, when a new and viable type of existence expresses itself through it’ (WPiK 372). And in this sense poetry, understood as poiesis, can reasonably represent ‘the creative self-definition of man’ (PIO 11). Brzozowski’s reflections on art, dispersed across his work, seem to revolve around the idea of creating reality through art. This idea informs the logic of the oppositions between the word as hypostasis and the word understood as ‘the beginning of action’; between the word-legend and the word-myth, between the reproductive and ornamental image and ‘the active image’ in which ‘we get to know […] the reality that creates itself ’ (L 237). This idea determines the rank of artistic phenomena, even if their artistry is otherwise marked by imperfection, as for instance in the case of Żeromski’s work, which ‘does not reproduce the things we can see today. He is in the field where life, not bound to anything, penetrates itself, reflects, judges. His books are no ‘image’ of reality to us – they belong to an altogether different category’ (L 488). For in this case art, by expressing what does not exist, completes or complements life and at the same time realizes it. In effect, the medium cannot be separated from the message, the organ of perception cannot be separated from its content, or the method, as Brzozowski argued, from the results of cognition. Here, for a moment, two realities are united: the one that is made permanent in speech and the one that is absolutely different, not to be grasped and not to be expressed in words. For on the one hand, life, creative reality, recognizes itself, or ‘self-knows itself ’ as Brzozowski had it, in this kind of utterance; but on the other hand, the source images of art lead to the realization of their prototypes, if we may say so; and in this way they render present, knowable and sayable a world that had previously been non-existent to us.

125

The essay, or philosophy as ‘a type of literary creativity’ Throughout his short but uncommonly intense intellectual career, Brzozowski was essentially preoccupied with the issues that struck him as most important and central – in human life generally, but during the Modernist turn in particular. These issues appeared literally in the vocabulary and epistemological metaphors of his own discourse. By discussing this in terms of the non-existent – that is to say in terms of the loss of a centre and of the process of the centre’s realization – the expression of the non-existent effectively came to be the hallmark of his essayistic style. Brzozowski was among the first Polish writers consciously to use the word ‘essay’ as a literary term.190 Yet he did not immediately approve of it as an adequate description of his own writing. First, he was suspicious of what he called ‘essayistic stylization’ (WPiK 196) and ‘the blasé souls of essayism’ (WPiK 320). Second, he was unable – as we saw above – to reconcile evaluations in terms of both product and process. In the sphere of art this led to the opposition of artistry and creativity. In the sphere of the essay it was expressed as a conflict between understanding the essay as a genre and understanding it as a certain active, experimental cognitive stance – a stance one would risk especially when turning one’s attention to some ‘unfinished’ object that was still emerging into consciousness and realizing itself in the course of intellectual escapades into the expanses of thought that have not yet been systematically penetrated by rationality: I believe that the artistically perfect essay can only come into being when the object has already been studied in depth, when marginal issues have been solved, and I believe that it is better suited to closed thought processes and issues than to those that are still bolting and coming to a standstill at any moment. (WPK 232)

With time Brzozowski came to recognize that those ‘thought processes,’ rather than ‘essayistic skill’ (WPiK 241), were the more important embodiment of the spirit of the modern essay, and he recognized this form as his own (I 72, I 133; G 24). This development is rooted in the entirety of his reflections on the possibilities of engaging in philosophy and on its essential tasks. If we are to take his 190 H. Markiewicz points this out in Wstęp [Introduction]. Cf. M. Głowiński’s analysis of Brzozowski’s critical distance in ‘Próba opisu tekstu krytycznego’ [An Attempt at Describing the Critical Text], in Badania nad krytyką literacką [Research on Literary Criticism], series 2, Wrocław 1984; M. Wyka, ‘O niektórych terminach krytycznych “Legendy Młodej Polski”’ [Some Critical Terms of the ‘Young Poland Legend’], in Prace ofiarowane Henrykowi Markiewiczowi [Works Dedicated to Henry Markiewicz], ed. by T. Weiss, Cracow 1984.

126

autobiographical statement at face value, this motif already appears at the outset of his work as a philosopher, while he still subscribed in the traditional standards of academic philosophy: My criticism was a rebellion that was still lacking or searching for organs of thought, and in this lack it fought with organs that were still weighed down by their belonging to the ahistorical, abstract philosophical stance – the very stance I was fighting (I 71–72, my emphasis).

As a new discursive convention, the processual form of the modern philosophical essay legitimizes the quest to articulate the gradual realization of ideas through words, through language as action. Hence, Brzozowski readily admits that it was Przybyszewski who inspired his conviction ‘that it is possible to live on mental attitudes dictated by our inner feeling of truth, even when we have in our thought no means of subsisting on them’ (I 72, my emphasis); but at the same time, Brzozowski continues, it was thanks to Nietzsche that he saw philosophy as a kind of writing that did not require a fully elaborated systematic point of view, a unique and positive position. The unsystematic and inconclusive aspect of Brzozowski’s discourse was not (or not only) coincidental, a result of life necessity or of inconsistency; it represented an essential, inherent quality of his notion of philosophical writing. Leszek Kołakowski’s characterization of Sorel’s essayistic style as being ‘reminiscent of Bergson’s “creative evolution,” developing in obedience to a governing tendency but without a predetermined goal,’ applies equally well to Brzozowski.191 Meanwhile, Michał Głowiński argues in his excellent analysis of Brzozowski’s critical discourse: [H]e consistently worked towards a discourse that would match the ideas developed through it, that would by its very structure express the worldview that emerged in it. […] The great parataxis, the openness of the work, the movability of limits – these are

191 L. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, p. 153. This is an apt remark, also in the way it suggests the influence that Bergson’s philosophy must have had on Brzozowski’s discourse. Compare Bergson’s letter (dated 3 December 1911) to Znaniecki, who translated his Creative Evolution; here he emphasizes the importance of the ‘image’ – hence tropological language in general – in the development of his philosophical discourse: in this book I try to bring the reader to a certain way of thinking that goes beyond ‘concepts’ and isolated expressions and can only be rend.ered in images: the image is not an ornament here, it is the only means of expression that is suitable to thought. (H. Bergson, Ewolucja twórcza [Creative Evolution], trans. from French into Polish by F. Znaniecki, Warsaw 1913, p. vii, English translation from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry).

127

the consequences of that striving towards a dynamic and ‘fluid’ discourse that is changeable in its forms. A discourse that is in a sense mimetic with regards to the combination of ideas that are presented in it. Yes, mimetic, for it is supposed to ‘imitate’ the ideas expressed in it and their qualities, and not to boil them down to a state that is permanent, finished, closed. It is supposed to be like them: uncrystallized and non-schematic; it is supposed to be movement.192

But the mimetism of Brzozowski’s essayistic discourse must be understood in the ‘productive’ sense outlined above. Expression refers not only to the articulation of a previously defined idea, but also to its formation or crystallization (which is often repeated, renewed in different works or gradually developed in the course of writing). We might even risk the generalizing statement that the shift in emphasis – from ‘stiff ’ concepts towards ‘flexible’ ones that are animated by the power of the metaphor, and from philosophical (and linguistic) ‘findings’ towards philosophical (and linguistic) ‘explorations’ – explains both the emergence of the Polish Modernist essay and its (relative) deviation from traditional models. It is well known that the masters of the Modernist essay – Nietzsche, Bergson, Simmel and Sorel – played a significant role in awakening and directing these interests. We can even say (though this is a simplification) that their example gave rise to two tendencies in the form of the Modernist essay: 1. Literature’s figurative language is not an ornamental addition but an experimental cognitive tool to search for new relationships between ideas and phenomena; 2. the value of a given intellectual discourse lies not so much in what came to be seen as an illusory belief in the objective certainty of previously defined results of cognition, but in the unique and innovative aspects of the process of inquiry – an inquiry that is stimulated by the rhetorical qualities of the chosen discursive style. The first type tends to display the characteristics of a genre with relatively stable rules of textual construction. It is exemplified by Antoni Lange’s ‘Amor i Faun’ [Amor and the Faun], Michał Sobeski’s ‘Wyspa Cytera’ [The Island Kythira], Leśmian’s ‘Artysta i model’ [The Artist and the Model], as well as Brzozowski’s ‘Jacht “Mistyka”’ [The Yacht ‘Mystery’]. In this variant, metaphor, symbol, and generally, the rules of poetic, figurative language are used not only in their epistemological function but also in their constructive function, as principles by which intellectual discourse is organized. The second type, meanwhile, is better characterized in the modal categories of the essayistic stance, rather than as a genre. It emphasizes the processual aspect, the incompleteness and fragmentary nature of the expression developed in it. We might say that it is not about presenting the

192 M. Głowiński, Wielka parataksa.

128

results of cognition but about narrating the act of thinking – the adventures of the searching mind. Examples include Wyspiański’s essayistic texts (e.g. ‘Studium o “Hamlecie”’ [A Study on Hamlet]), or those by Żuławski (e.g. ‘Umarłe miasta’ [Dead Cities]), as well as many texts by Brzozowski and Irzykowski. Many differentiated and complex solutions emerged around that time, though they remain relatively unknown, and they exceed far beyond the dichotomy presented above. This is why I can only point at the discursive context that influenced Brzozowski and his writing. In any case, language is not a neutral medium of presentation, nor a retrograde technical means of registering ideas. But the ideas articulated in those essays are not just more popular or more evocative copies of their originals as defined in philosophical discourse. And finally, the specificity of the Modernist essay does not lie in an ornamental, stylistically pleasing presentation of intellectual findings that are rooted in some philosophical or aesthetic system – not even when the author seems to assume the existence (at least as a potential) of that systematic philosophical whole. György Lukács saw the essence of the modern essay in the peculiar, ironical nature of its relationship with the system. Understood as a parergon, the essay presupposes the system mainly in the sense that it precedes and anticipates it: The Parerga written before the system create their preconditions from within themselves, create the whole world out of their longing for the system, so that – it seems – they can give an example, a hint; immanently and inexpressibly, they contain the system and its connection with lived life. Therefore they must always occur before the system; even if the system had already been created, they would not be a mere application but always a new creation, a coming-alive in real experience. This ‘application’ creates both that which judges and that which is judged, it encompasses a whole world in order to raise to eternity, in all its uniqueness, something that was once there. The essay is a judgement, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging.193

193 Georg Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’, in Soul and Form, transl. Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA 1974, pp. 17–18. Cf. another remark on the essayist’s deeply ironical stance: And the irony I mean consists in the critic always speaking about the ultimate problems of life, but in a tone which implies that he is only discussing pictures and books, only the inessential and pretty ornaments of real life – and even then not their innermost substance but only their beautiful but useless surface. […] The essayist dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes led him to believe that he has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than explanations of the poems of others, or at best of his own ideas. But he ironically adapts himself to this smallness – the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in face of life – and even emphasizes it with ironic modesty. (pp. 9–10)

129

Brzozowski’s essayistic parerga were not destined to transform into a systematic presentation of a final dogma. Their author’s critical and searching mind ensured that they had to remain forever ‘before the system,’ and Brzozowski himself eventually came to realize this. Towards the end of his life he wrote in a letter: ‘it is out of question that our position as it is today could be developed into any kind of dogmatic system […] everywhere, rather than justifying our position, one would have to present the image of reality as one sees it’ (G xxiii). As a result, his works preserved what he valued most in others: ‘the process of thinking itself ’ (WPiK 268; I 258), and not its results. This might have been one of the reasons why they continue to be ‘a system of intellectual challenges and stimulation’(G 8), rather than a dusty monument to obsolete intellectual achievements. The questions that preoccupied Brzozowski continue to be central today, as we are still looking for the solutions that he was unable to find. Reflecting on how future readers would evaluate ‘today’s epistemological turning point’ (G 68) and the period in which he lived and worked, Brzozowski made a remark that presents an adequate description of his own writing: ‘Perhaps over time “philosophy” and “scientific synthesis” will be recognized as a type of literary creativity, a type in which our epoch created the most interesting and most characteristic things’ (I 391).

Additional words: Criticism as ‘a form of life’ Although Brzozowski’s intellectual and artistic activity takes shape through a great variety of genres – from professional philosophical writing through popularizing and journalistic texts, through drama, poetry and the novel – it is still beyond doubt that his key form was critical writing. It is generally agreed that Brzozowski consistently saw critical work as being very important; in his view, critical writing in general, and his own critical style in particular, played a much more important function than just being one of many kinds of intellectual discourse. Criticism must unify the entirety of active cultural production – including both creative and intellectual or philosophical competence. But its outstanding position was not due to its broad scope; it hinged on something as narrowly understood as the specificity of its method and investigative procedures. Brzozowski’s critical writing, evaluated from this point of view, does not stand out as particularly uniform. It is easy to detect both conscious and unconscious traces of various – often contradictory – analytical methods: Romantic or empathic as well as Positivist or genetic techniques; impression-based (and Impressionist) takes as well as ones that bring to mind Expressionist aesthetics; descriptions that seem strikingly phenomenological at first sight, as well as orthodox deterministic applications of ‘historical materialism’. In this vast repertory of randomly 130

or experimentally tested perspectives there is, however, an easily detectable selection of techniques that appear more often than others, that are systematically defined and introduced with ever greater (methodological) awareness. It seems that they were best suited to the demands that Brzozowski put before criticism. For Brzozowski, the art of criticism was mainly about noticing ‘independent and connected tendencies’ thanks to which ‘ever new domains of cultural life organize themselves before our eyes based on those connections (G 2–3). Here the Positivist type of cause-and-effect explanations was displaced by a new model, one that the critic most often described, more or less directly, in terms of surface and depth. To put it simply, this new model allowed him to discover, ‘beyond apparent dispersion […] an internal unity (WPiK 527). In accordance with this principal tenet, Brzozowski’s critical practice contains two phases. These can be presented schematically: 1. The phase of discovering in the examined phenomenon a construction that is subject to certain inner laws, and 2. the phase of revealing a network of connections and interdependencies that exist between phenomena. First, he claimed, we should therefore work to grasp the sudden manifestation of regularity and its uniform intensity, where at first everything still seemed to be a monotonous and featureless desert of indifferent things. It is a unique emotion to find organization in what at first seemed to be at best a puzzling aspect in a novel case. (G 4, my emphasis)

Next, having managed to ‘translate the first signs encountered on the mental shore into the language of internal laws,’ it is necessary to search for a way that would allow ‘in turn, to consider the very diversity of those living creations as a sign, to consider the very individualities as expressions of something like an unknown language’ (G 4–5, my emphasis). As Brzozowski’s critical method took shape, language increasingly came to signify a model. There are, I believe, three main reasons for this: 1. The inner workings of language were treated as a model for the construction of other cultural entities. 2. The relationship between culture and nature (‘life’s work,’ creativity) was conceptualized in terms of ‘coding’ in language. 3. The construction of social and cultural reality was seen as a process of linguistic articulation, classification and codification. Brzozowski was fascinated with the discovery of organization and regularity in phenomena that seemed random and unique at first sight; then he was fascinated with tracing the emergence of those structures and their transformational abilities. Thus he built his method in a way that was ‘unselfconscious’ and ‘intuitive,’ but also, certainly, marked by a structural genetic spirit. There are three ways to account for the structurality of this method. First, Brzozowski recognized that the true nature of phenomena does not lie in themselves 131

but in their mutual relationships, and that the meaning discovered in an object depends as much on the arrangement of its parts as it does on its connections with other objects and its position in the entirety of the reconstructed system of reference. Second, the structurality was a result of the belief that the studied entities were not only structured but also structuring, that is to say that they had the ability to transform and assimilate new material. Third, it was an effect of seeing cultural entities as self-steering – as referring, in the process of transformation, to nothing outside their own laws.194 With these qualities, structures were guaranteed permanence, expansion and self-sufficiency. In other words, as Brzozowski demonstrated with reference to classical and Romantic formations, these qualities result in the closing, ossification and immobilization of life into forms that are already alienated, dead and unchangeable. It seems that the genetic aspect of Brzozowski’s critical method was meant to take us beyond the closed circle of cultural automatisms by taking into account the ‘source’ processes of innovative activities which in turn stimulated the continuous and ‘discrete’ processes that transformed one type of formative structure into another. Sometimes this geneticism led to forms of cultural life being recognized as simple ‘reflections’ of transformations in the material and economic sphere, but more often it was expressed by pointing to a ‘central’ law or a founding principle of ‘that same tendency’ (G 4) that made it possible to identify and explain ‘the unexpected connection between a writer and some epoch’ (G 239), and that facilitated, above all, the transition from one epoch into another and the emergence of new cultural facts.195 Like the voice of one calling in the wilderness, Brzozowski continuously tried to make his contemporaries aware of this process, which was taking place during 194 I draw on Piaget’s traditional definition of structure. See Jean Piaget, Structuralism, New York, 1970. In the vast secondary literature on structuralist methodology see e.g. the concise and inspiring definition of structuralism as an analytical method in Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, transl. by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding, Cambridge 1980, as well as Terence Hawkes’s Structuralism & Semiotics, Berkeley 1977. 195 The structural and genetic signs of Brzozowski’s method (albeit the term ‘structural’ was not used) must have been readable for contemporaries. This is suggested by Karol Irzykowski’s very perceptive critical remarks in his collection of essays, Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word]. (The following quotations are taken from the Cracow 1980 edition of Czyn i słowo, which contains the essays ‘Czyn i słowo’ [Deed and Word], ‘Fryderyk Hebbel jako poeta konieczności’ [Friedrich Hebbel as a Poet of Necessity], ‘Lemiesz i szpada przed sądem publicznym’ [The Ploughshare and the Spade before a Public Court] and ‘Prolegomena do charakterologii’ [Prolegomena to Characterology].)

132

the transformation of the entire previous cultural formation. For instance, he reminded them: ‘You must know that great things are at stake: the entire nineteenth century is changing its significance, transforming, growing into something new’ (G 12). Brzozowski’s deep interest in phenomena of ‘crisis’ and ‘turning points’ – in cultural (and literary historical) transformations – suggests that generally his understanding of the structure was not static (as an arrangement of related parts) but dynamic, as a ‘plan of action’ (L 143) and a process of never-ending transformations. Hence the qualities that are usually portrayed as aberrations from the norm, ‘spin-offs’ or transitional phases, were in his view nothing less than inherent, most basic determinants of the structural activity proper to humankind. By highlighting that transformational factor, Brzozowski both obscured the structural qualities of that style of investigation and endowed it with originality – mostly, it seems, thanks to the potential for a relatively harmonious relationship between that style and the existential, anti-essentialist aspects that marked his philosophical reflection.196 This must be one of the reasons behind the enduring Stefan Brzozowski again represents recognition for the purposes of the system. All our contemporary literature presents itself to him as an uncompleted drama, one over which he has perfect control, in which he has assigned to each author a suitable role. (p. 344). In his gloriously aggressive vivisection he presents his opponents not as human beings with mental systems that are equal to those of all other humans, but as ‘expression,’ embodiments of some philosophical schemes forged in heaven, as problems that are posed to us by the gods who guard the world. […] but on the other hand, ‘the tragedy of the viewer,’ i.e. a description not of Chekhov but rather of some… Chekhovianness, is a philosophical tale rather than an engaging one’ (pp. 374–375). Overusing Marx’s formula that thought reflects in itself the economic structure, he always avoids confronting uncomfortable views on the basis of merit and deals with them superficially: you are just a form, an exponent, a reflection of something beyond you, unconscious illusion. Brzozowski does not happily grant autonomy to any matters of the spirit. (p. 495). Although he formally recognized the ‘unicity,’ i.e. the autonomy of individual literary phenomena, in practice the work and the author were for him mere signs, symptoms of some deep events or social and cultural shifts. Nothing exists for him, for itself and by itself, […] everything is but a reflection for him, a shadow of some distant and mysterious changes, an opportunity to seek out matters of principle. He was preoccupied with examining, but not with that which he examined. (pp. 497–498). He presents by reviewing. It’s just that critical tools become his tools for sculpting. Because the facts that he reviews or analyzes, he must first create them through his own fantasy, before reviewing them […]. Create them, that is to say posit them through critical analysis. Here, analysis is the medium in which crystallized facts are deposited (p. 606).

196 Of course, when I expose structural analysis as Brzozowski’s critical tool and highlight its coexistence with existentialist thought, I am following K. Wyka’s classic treatise. See

133

vitality of his notion of an ‘engaged’ criticism – engaged mostly in imagining, making conscious, and forming the future shape of literature and culture. This specificity is clearly visible in Brzozowski’s following description of his method of analysing contemporary culture – a method he compared to palaeontology: A palaeontologist can read the bones of extinct animals to learn about the climate and soil of past epochs; we must build a country, a climate, an earth for creatures that are not as much as they announce their future possible nature. (G 5, my emphasis)

As a critic, Brzozowski was sensitive to the ‘future nature’ of the world he created. This ‘future nature’ could not yet be fully grasped, and yet his sensitivity to it is evident, as he explored it in his essays. From his own point of view, his creation of the world and his sensitivity were the best hallmarks of his literary and critical work. Brzozowski often emphasized the innovative and critical aspect of literary creativity: Thus the artist expresses his environment, his epoch, not by copying them but by solving and making conscious those problems that represent the true content of that epoch’s life. (WPiK 265)

In his work as a critic, meanwhile, he tended to stress the innovative and creative aspect: The critic – and this is his creative role – can extract a more or less complete synthesis; he can deepen the psychological line of the creative work, until these two meet and merge into a new work: into a living thing at the given historical level. (L 322)

Discovering the future and creating the past – it is such paradoxically transformed aspects of critical invention that clearly contribute to the fundamental, anthropological meaning with which Brzozowski eventually endowed his concept. He left a formula that might have been presented thoughtlessly, but that nevertheless condenses the basic motifs of his critical position (while the pathos and passion in this formula suggest it might represent the very raison d’être of his critical position): I could find no shape, no form, no means of action or expression that would stand up to even the most remote comparison with criticism. I believe that criticism is in fact one of the forms of life most worthy of man, of his tragic being, full of meaning. (G 16–17, my emphasis)

K. Wyka, ‘Problem i pojęcie struktury u Stanisława Brzozowskiego’ [The Problem and Concept of Structure in Stanisław Brzozowski], in Młoda Polska [Young Poland], vol. 2: Szkice z problematyki epoki [Sketches on the Epoch’s Problems], Cracow 1977.

134

Chapter 5: Inventing the Order: Karol Irzykowski’s Concepts of Criticism and Literature The concept of literary criticism If I were to name the main general characteristic that marked the style of criticism in Young Poland, it would be inventiveness. The privileged position of inventiveness accounts for the specificity of the ‘syntax’ and ‘vocabulary’ (terminology) of the epoch’s critical discourses, as well as for their basic programmatic goals. Where syntax is concerned, the idea of inventiveness sanctions the non-systematic and discontinuous, fragmentary and variegated discourses of the epoch. It clarifies why explanations tend to be digressive and selective, and it explains the impressionistic technique of the paraphrase, which finds critical equivalents of the work’s texture, as well as the method of momentary insights that purport to reveal, in the act of critical intuition, both the soul of the author and the essence of the work. Meanwhile, in the field of vocabulary, inventiveness legitimizes the ‘unscientific’ nature of the critic’s terminological apparatus. It throws light on the cognitive instability, loose invention and changeability of critical terms. Critics tended to search for disposable tools that would serve the individuality of a work and the unique point of view from which it is read, rather than trying to develop a systemic repertoire of objective procedures and taxonomies that would guarantee the scientific status of some general method of reading. When it comes to the key tasks of criticism, finally, inventiveness serves above all to legitimize the characteristic incompleteness of the critical presentation of a work’s semantics. For if criticism’s goal is empathically to ‘reproduce the state of the soul’ of the creator,197 to capture the author’s position, to disclose the mysterious core of creativity and so on, then the critic’s attainment of that goal through the gift of revelatory insight and the method of synthetic intuition has two effects: first, it makes factual analysis redundant, along with any further detailed critical investigations of the work under consideration, and second, it leads to a radical differentiation of those few elements of the work that seem to have value as carriers of the critic’s revelation.

197 Cf. e.g. S. Przybyszewski, Na drogach duszy [On the Paths of the Soul], 2nd edn, Cracow 1902, p. 22 et seq.

135

Read in this context, Irzykowski’s critical strategy certainly bares the mark of this sort of inventiveness, but at the same time – and this is equally evident – it stands in opposition to its typical ‘simplified’ or superficial forms. It contains the most interesting and thought-through concept of ‘inventiveness’198 of critical discourse – a concept that is accounted for by the inventive style of Modernist criticism while also allowing us to account for that style. This is because it allows us to explain what the understanding of criticism as invention, i.e. as a discovery and/or creation of the conditions that make literature possible is essentially about. Not unlike his contemporaries, Irzykowski does not value (or is unable to attain) a systematic, immanent and logical order in which his own discourse could unfold. He proceeds in a manner that could be described as polemical digression, which, to be sure, results in part from the specificity of his own critical temperament (‘But here I shall not digress into my reserves; instead I polemically continue to develop my ideas’ C 460199), but is also rooted in his loyalty towards the individual works’ (at least potential) singularity, to which he fundamentally grants the right to verify all critical dogmas, thus forcing critics to change their perspective (‘With every new work, the critic discovers anew what criticism is, and attributes ever new mental states to that notion’ C 588). The reasons behind the changeability of Irzykowski’s critical formulations also explain his terminological inventiveness and his hostility to a stable terminological apparatus; they made him aware that that apparatus only seemed to be stable by obscuring the

198 I am referring to K. L. Koniński’s perspicacious observations in ‘Etyzm w krytyce literackiej: O poglądach krytyckich Karola Irzykowskiego (1935)’ [Ethics in Literary Criticism: On the Views of Karol Irzykowski], in Polska krytyka literacka (1919– 1939): Materiały [Polish Literary Criticism (1919–1939): Materials], Warsaw 1966. 199 Abbreviated references to Irzykowski’s works refer to the following editions: C – Czyn i słowo oraz Fryderyk Hebbel jako poeta konieczności: Lemiesz i szpada przed sądem publicznym: Prolegomena do charakterologii [Deed and Word and Friedrich Hebbel as a Poet of Necessity: The Ploughshare and the Spade before a Public Court: Prolegomena to Characterology], Cracow 1980 D–  Dziesiąta muza oraz Pomniejsze pisma filmowe [The Tenth Muse and Lesser Writings on Film], Cracow 1982 N – Nowele [Novellas], Cracow 1979 P – Pałuba: Sny Marii Dunin [Pałuba], Cracow 1976 S – Słoń wśród porcelany: Lżejszy kaliber [An Elephant in a China Shop: A Lighter Calibre], Cracow 1976 WB – Walka o treść: Beniaminek [Grappling for Content: Little Benjamin], Cracow 1976 WD – Wiersze – Dramaty [Poems – Drama], Cracow 1977.

136

actual vagueness and lability of its concepts; they also explain Irzykowski’s preference for a terminology that was fluid (and could be adapted to a given context) as well as temporary (as it was guaranteed to be applicable only in a concrete and specific situation). But beyond the level of changeability in Irzykowski’s critical strategy, there is, I believe, another level – one that distinguishes his strategy from the critical ‘improvisations’ that predominated at that time. This is a level of continuance, coherence and fundamental stability in both his thinking and his critical style. The mythical ‘reserves’ to which he often made casual references did exist in reality, as a corpus of opinions on the tasks of literature and criticism that were formulated quite early and underwent only slight modification. As we can see from the perspective of Irzykowski’s entire output, his technique of the digressive gloss, which at first sight bespeaks careless changeability, has in fact facilitated (or in any case it has not prevented) a continuity in his considerations, despite the fact that he tackled a considerable variety of works. This tactic came to light especially when Irzykowski was forced to justify himself, such as his parenthetical remark at the end of ‘Próba krytyki Dziejów grzechu’ [An Attempted Critique of ‘History of Sin’ (a novel by Stefan Żeromski)]: ‘Some of the remarks that I intended to make here about Żeromski slipped into the review of Nałkowska’s Rówieśnice [Contemporaries] and of Kaden’s work’ (C 591, my emphasis). His terminological invention, too, however free and non-scientific it was supposed to be, was not coincidental, and it did appear more than once. Irzykowski’s attachment, throughout his career, to the terms of his own invention certainly had something to do with his distinctive and idiosyncratic sense of ownership. There is no doubt, however, that they were equally rooted in his belief in their real value as literary critical inventions of new analytical tools. When one colleague unceremoniously and unthinkingly used one of his terms (‘the falsification of interior monologue’), he wrote: ‘I am appalled at the lack of respect for that expression as an invention’ (S 39). On another occasion he wrote half-jokingly about one of his casual writerly concepts: ‘I reserve the patent for this invention’ (S 136). Yet another term of his (‘the wardrobe of the soul’) is characterized as ‘a discovery or rather invention, as the term itself is in these matters a tool (WB 445, my emphasis). The relationship between changeability and continuation in Irzykowski’s syntax and vocabulary has its analogy in his general concept of criticism. Sure enough, as we saw above, ‘with every new work, the critic discovers anew what criticism is’. But by doing this, the critic is only confirmed in his conviction about the fundamental stability of criticism’s essential tasks. Polemicizing with the dominant 137

Modernist tendency of ‘synthetic criticism,’ which, neglecting analysis, strives only to turn critical discourse into a synthetic equivalent of the semantics of the work, Irzykowski argues that analysis properly understood ought to be the basis, and perhaps even the mask or the announcement of both critical evaluation and synthesis. For the goal of criticism is to reiterate creative composition through decomposition (cf. C 635), a procedure that allows to uncover a literary historical field of possibility and to reconstruct the authorial decision-making process. This reconstruction explains how a given work is made and on what, ‘technically’ speaking, its effectiveness is based: ‘literary analysis, that is to say the reversal of the entire creative process […] we stare at the author’s fingers: how does he make it move us?’ (C 590). By uncovering the principles of construction and their probable justifications, ‘decomposition’ allows to evaluate the aptness or a solution chosen by the author (or to unmask it as a cardboard cut-out). But they also make it possible to formulate other, unused possibilities and ‘new combinations’ that might have been more interesting, allowing us to consider ‘where and how the author could have developed the thing differently, or that here and there a worse idea might have come to the author’s mind, a more banal solution, but that the author showed his skills here, etc.’ (C 636). However, by actualizing unfulfilled possibilities, by presenting ‘other diagnoses’ (C 637), by projecting ‘unwritten works,’ criticism becomes a new recomposition of the repertoire of the work’s elements. In his later writings Irzykowski was to remain faithful to this early strategy of his own critical discourse, as we can see for instance from his acknowledgement in Benjaminek [Little Benjamin]: ‘My ideal is to reiterate the act of composition through decomposition or a specific recomposition’ (WB 345). This kind of criticism takes on the characteristics of creativity, or rather, it discovers a creative dimension in itself. Hence we can say that for Irzykowski the task of criticism is, in a nutshell, not so much to pronounce value judgements about the work but to discover analytically the conditions of its creation. But of course, the task of criticism cannot be defined independently of elementary notions about the criticized object. It even seems that the definition of the task of criticism must correlate with a concept of literature that is commensurate with that criticism. In any case, we must admit that it is not so much a given concept of criticism that sanctions a certain understanding of literature (though that can happen, too); instead, it is usually the concept of literature (a general perspective on its tasks, goals, status and organization) that legitimizes the notion of criticism, lending it credibility. Such is the case with Irzykowski. 138

Two contexts: Wilde and Bergson ‘Poetry […] is only also art, and not only art’ (G 147), writes Irzykowski in the chapter on ‘statics and dynamics’ in his book on Hebbel. He polemicizes with Young Poland’s cult of pure art, thought to embody the essence of poetry (or literature as we understand it today). To put it simply, Irzykowski opposed the reductionism of that perspective, which frequently presented literature’s means as its essential goal; he also opposed Young Poland writers’ ‘mania’ for always seeking out essence – a mania that made them render static what was dynamic, substantial what was functional. As Irzykowski would remark later: [U]nder the guise of ‘art for art’s sake’ – and under other slogans – there always emerged the drive to annex certain unfathomed areas and types of content – not necessarily ‘forbidden’ ones, after all some of them were merely indifferent, little known or simply imaginary – it was a flight from an ever expanding banality (WB 283)

So what is literature, beyond – or perhaps rather thanks to – the fact that it is art? Irzykowski had been looking for an answer to this question from the beginning of his career, as his programmatic text ‘Czym jest Horla?’ [What is Horla?, in Nowele (1906)] suggests. Of course he found many different solutions, which depended on his current preoccupations as much as on his point of view or his chosen critical idiom. The most representative solution – perhaps because it ties together the different threads of his thinking – was formulated in passing in the sketch ‘Walka z mechanizmem’ [Struggling with Mechanism, in Czyn i słowo (1913)]: The poet organizes chaos, but disorganizes the template, puts new question marks to old answers and brings new issues to new answers – he goes down to the sources from which theories are born. (C 430, my emphasis)

The key formulation is found in the first part of the sentence, while the second part merely paraphrases and elaborates it. The first part, it seems, can be understood in three ways at least, depending on which of three common notions of the goal of art or literature we use as an explanatory context. (It is worth noting that at different stages of his career, Irzykowski supported each of these three notions to some degree.) Here I have the following concepts in mind: the aesthetic, the expressive-symbolic, as well as the formalistic (to which I will return later). In the poetic endeavour these concepts correspond, respectively, to an activity that is disinterestedly artistic, demiurgically mediumistic, or specifically technical. But in each case the object of that activity must first be established: what do that ‘chaos’ ‘template’ refer to? Without a clarifying context, such general notions can mean different 139

things, though there is no doubt that they basically describe the two main ways in which literature refers to reality: in the way of ‘subsequent world events’ and ‘palubian reality’ [rzeczywistość pałubiczna] (to use the terminology Irzykowski presented in his novel Pałuba), or ‘template-like’ practical reality as well as the ‘chaos’ the hidden face of the world (to use the terminology from ‘Niezrozumialcy’ [Unclearomaniacs]). As we know, each literary epoch has its own way of defining reality. Thus, for instance, the world of everyday living in which the Realists saw the true world was for the Modernists a paragon of stereotyping and inauthenticity that obscured its actual shape, i.e. the chaos and changeability that artists of that period usually tried to describe in the style of Nietzsche, Bergson or of empiriocriticism. Irzykowski’s aesthetic concept of literature represents the immediate context for the formula analysed here. Polemicizing with Grzegorz Glass and Stefan Brzozowski’s ‘Marxist’ views of artistic ideology as an expression or reflection of the economic conditions of the writer’s social class, Irzykowski poses the following question: Is it really the case that a certain level of economic being produces certain ideals and theories, or does it rather only attract them, pick and choose from them, while they themselves are born from the spirit’s independent creativity and form a repertoire from which certain classes and groups then take the slogans that suit them best? (C 430)

In this sense, we could say, Irzykowski agreed with Oscar Wilde’s idea: Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life […]. […] the basis of life […] is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them […].200

The stylistics of Wilde’s paradox appear quaint today, but we must appreciate the rational, even precursory nature of his idea – an idea that David Lodge described as ‘structuralist avant la lettre’201 – namely that the mental forms or structures thanks to which we perceive reality are products of culture, and that their renewal or transformation, when they become used or mechanical, is not only one of the benefits of art, but the very task of art. This is also the way in which Irzykowski understood Wilde, whom he quoted on different occasions. He had a particular predilection for one variant, perhaps the most famous one, as Irzykowski describes in Czyn i słowo:

200 Oscar Wilde, Intentions, Amherst 2004, pp. 39–40. 201 See D. Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, London 1977, p. 70.

140

Someone suggested that Poles have learned the current form of enthusiasm from Mickiewicz. Wilde said something similar, too, claiming that it was the artist who taught people to look at nature, and that before Turner’s paintings there was no fog in London. (C 281)

Discussing the role of art in war on the eve of the Great War, Irzykowski drew on Wilde’s comparison again: Departing from this sort of observation, Oscar Wilde ventured to propose the paradox that it is not poetry that imitates reality, but the other way around: reality imitates poetry. And he has in mind not only people, but nature as a whole, and he says, e.g. that there was no fog in London before Turner’s paintings. It wasn’t there – this obviously means: previously it had gone unnoticed. In artistic categories Wilde basically said the same thing that Kant proposed back in the day, when he answered the question ‘how is nature possible?’ by deciding that our spirit creates that nature as its own mental image, and that the general laws of nature are nothing but forms of our spirit.202

Polemicizing with proponents of the new art after the war, Irzykowski would again reach for ‘the argument from Wilde’ – for instance when he attributed it to Leon Chwistek (‘The author, drawing on Wilde’s famous aphorism that reality changes under the influence of art […]’ – S 123) or in his polemics with Witkiewicz, where he made the following remark: But some (Wilde) point out that if scientific discoveries broaden the reach of physical reality, so discoveries in art multiply mental reality, or that the results of ‘rendering’ radiate back onto the thing rendered. (WB 17)

Finally, it is possible that Wilde’s aphorism also inspired one of Irzykowski’s later maxims: ‘The work of art imitates something – but not only something past or present, but also something yet to come’ (S 558). I pass over other, lesser threads of Irzykowski’s aesthetic thought, but it should be clear now that this is the context in which we must understand his dictum that ‘the poet organizes chaos, but disorganizes the template’. If Irzykowski shared some of the Expressionists’ or Symbolists’ views, it was mostly in the earliest stage of his career; later references are always marked by ambivalence. Thus in ‘Czym jest Horla?’ he writes that ‘the world’s goal is to return to the miracle, poetry illustrates that goal by attaining it at the same time, in this way, for a moment’ (N 84), though, as he would stress in his introduction to the book publication, this did not correspond to his ‘literary views as they are today’ (‘Od autora’ [From the Author], N 124). Quite early on, he already 202 K. Irzykowski, ‘Czynnik sztuki w wojnie’ [The Factor of Art in War], Nowa Reforma, 1914, no. 339.

141

described Stanisław Przybyszewski’s work in this field as both historic and historical.203 It is telling that when he commented on the Expressionists’ programme in 1918, he emphasized those characteristics that linked it to concepts of art in Modernist literature: [Benedetto Croce] and Przybyszewski and Kazimierz Edschmid admit that all good art is Expressionist. Previously they used to say: Symbolist. The evolution of art works in such a way as if it were an analysis of the creative act itself, it moves the accent to ever new moments. Expressionism is art’s own matter, not a cultural matter – only figuratively, I suppose.204

Irzykowski was also the first to translate Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous prose work, The Letter of Lord Chandos (1902), which suggests no doubt how much he valued this text. Remarkably, however, only six years after it was written, Irzykowski already sees it as representing the consciousness of an epoch that was already past and ‘finally overcome, as today we do not take the position of dualism, and so we don’t need those monistic longings. Hofmannsthal only stylizes his hero in the spirit of the epoch, reconstructing those premonitions that have now been dealt with’.205 (Nota bene, the theory that had solved all problems in Irzykowski’s eyes was probably empiriocriticism.) Nonetheless, the ‘Lord Chandos motif ’ that Irzykowski assessed so critically at the outset would later return in his reflections as an important sign of the difference of the Modernist sensibility206 and as a model of the new strategy of representation: ‘After all, it is also a feeling of the strangeness of existence – to walk the earth as if an unknown planet. That’s realism as a form’ (WB 178). It seems that Lord Chandos’s worries and hopes have an equivalent in an equally important passage of Irzykowski’s novel Pałuba,* a paradoxical programme of 203 On Przybyszewski see esp. the following sketches by Irzykowski: ‘Spojrzenie wstecz ku “Przyczynkowi do etyki płci” S. Przybyszewskiego’ [Looking Back at S. Przybyszewski’s ‘Przyczynek do etyki płci [‘Contribution to the Ethics of Sex’]], Nasz Kraj, 1908, vol. 6, no. 10; ‘Dwie rewolucje’ [Two Revolutions], in C; ‘Pierwszy bilans Przybyszewskiego i jego autorehabilitacja’ [Przybyszewski’s First Balance and His Self-Rehabilitation], Wiadomości Literackie, 1926, no. 6. 204 K. Irzykowski, ‘Bahr o ekspresjonizmie’ [Bahr on Expressionism], Maski, 19/20 (1918). 205 Irzykowski, ‘Spojrzenie wstecz ku “Listowi” Hofmannsthala’ [Looking Back at Hoffmansthal’s A Letter], Nasz Kraj (1908), vol. 7, no. 12/13, p. 43. 206 See Irzykowski, ‘Cudowność jako materiał poetycki’ [The Marvellous as Poetic Material], Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1921, no. 41. * Translator’s remark: Czesław Miłosz renders this title as ‘The Hag,’ but recent Englishlanguage publications use the Polish original or the anglicized ‘Paluba’.

142

searching for techniques of immediate contact with reality, of searching for flexible and fluid concepts to ‘derive the verbal apparatus in such a way as to make it possible […] to indicate whole chunks of the soul’ (P 446). Announcing the ‘bankruptcy of words,’ the writer hoped to make his work an epiphany of truth, imagining that he was ‘tearing from the world the carapace of nomenclature […] and returning to stains […] the original meaning of stains, while the physical and mental gaze is already swaying on the sea of shapelessness’ (P 449). But in this Pałuba this programme was rejected for two reasons. First, it was abandoned because Irzykowski had abandoned the theory of ‘indifference’ [wszystkojedność], according to which the material was irrelevant, since everything could become a vessel for revelation. The second reason was his belief that immediacy in the poetic vision of reality was an illusion. Such immediacy was to him ‘a utopia of a paradise lost,’ an illusory projection derived from philosophical premises (in the text of Pałuba this was a stylized vision modelled on Nietzsche’s The Will to Power) and not an expression of actual experience and perception: ‘that’s not how I see reality at all’ (P 449). Among the different versions of Expressionist and Symbolist concepts of art there were, however, also more up-to-date ones, such as the one formulated by Bergson: [Art] has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.207

Except the contentious question of immediacy (after all, Bergson soon added that art is not a complete but only ‘a more direct vision of reality’) – we should be able to accept this formulation as consonant with Irzykowski’s views, especially since he remarked, echoing Wilde, Hofmannsthal and Bergson, that the poet, ‘in the moment of creation, knows nothing from the outset, and looks at the world as if for the first time’: Of course, this later changes and breaks in the form, but the mysterious moment when the poet draws from the source is free from prejudice. This is why it often happens that later on the world’s moral views […] are rectified according to the poet’s new concepts. (WB 238)

And if we take into account the fact that the article ‘Walka z mechanizmem’ [Struggling with Mechanism] begins by discussing no other text than Bergson’s

207 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, authorised translation by Cloudesely Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Rockville 2008, p. 75.

143

Laughter, then the sentence in that article, ‘the poet organizes chaos, but disorganizes the template’ must surely also be read in this indirectly evoked Bergsonian context.

The theory of unclearomania, or: Irzykowski versus Shklovsky In July 1908, three months after the publication of ‘Walka z mechanizmem,’ Irzykowski published another article titled ‘Niezrozumialcy: Teoria niezrozumiałości o ile można zrozumiale wyłożona’ [Unclearomaniacs: The Theory of Unclearomania Expounded as Clearly as Possible]. In the first edition the author clearly takes up his reflections from his earlier text, referring to a book by Glass already discussed in ‘Walka z mechanizmem’. But the new article also develops those ideas in a more general manner and from a different perspective. The concept of literature presented here is extremely original, though the critic would later develop it in other articles, such as ‘Zdobnictwo w poezji’ [Ornamentation in Poetry], ‘W kształt linii spiralnej’ [Like a Spiral], ‘Ze szkoły Żeromskiego’ [From the School of Żeromski]. To illustrate this originality, it is perhaps best to juxtapose it with Victor Shklovsky’s early Formalist concept, formulated a few years later. This juxtaposition also seems warranted by the fact that both concepts – Shklovsky’s formalism and Irzykowski’s ‘meritorism’ (i.e. his belief in the essential value of art and literature from a cognitive and existential point of view) – were formed in essentially the same intellectual framework, which consisted of such points of reference as German aesthetics and psychology of language, empiriocriticism, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Bergson, the aesthetics of Broder Christiansen and contemporary Modernist linguistic functionalism (e.g. the works of Baudouin de Courtenay, Hermann Paul, Jan Rozwadowski and Lew W. Szczerba).208 We could say that this was the last period of the twentieth century in which scholars across the humanities would draw on more or less the same canon of secondary sources. Similar resources of knowledge, trends, intellectual fashions and concepts marked the field of their inspirations, stimulating various individual interests, and leading to independent discoveries and separate formulations of related ideas. The article ‘Niezrozumialcy’ demands an introductory explanation especially because of its ‘deconstructionist’ argumentation. This particular logic accounts for the many misunderstandings among critics, and their frequent difficulties in 208 See Z. Saloni, ‘Jan Baudouin de Courtenay a poetyka formalistów’ [Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the Formalists’ Poetics], Pamiętnik Literacki, 1 (1971). See also chapter 2 in this book.

144

following Irzykowski’s views. His point of departure here is the familiar opposition between understandability and lack of understandability, where understandability is valued positively and treated as fundamental (‘that which is understood in and of itself ’), whereas lack of understandability is seen as negative (hence the titular ‘unclearomaniacs’ or niezrozumialcy). The second concept is seen as parasitic and deviant in relation to the first, as it departs from the norm of understandability. But in the course of Irzykowski’s argument it turns out that the ‘lack of understandability,’ taken in its general and unfamiliar sense, is an irreducible dimension of how humans relate to the world. Thus it lies at the foundation of what is understandable (obvious, clear, certain), and of what we call unfathomable (mysterious, difficult, nonsensical). Characterizing this dimension of cognition, Irzykowski’s style and philosophical perspective recall Nietzsche, but he also uses this occasion to paraphrase his own formulation from ‘Walka z mechanizmem’: For the lack of understandability is our everyday environment; the world that surrounds us on all parts is a chaos that we organize again and again, and if we don’t drown in it, it is only because through our inheritance, tradition and upbringing we have created a system of tools and signs that help us grasp or ‘understand’ that chaos. […] The average person usually has no idea how many hieroglyphs and philosophical crumbs there are in the language that he uses every day […]. Do we understand them at all? There’s only an agreement, a conspiracy against chaos, that such and such a stretch of chaos has been studied, exhausted, fathomed, and does no longer raise any doubts. […] ‘Understanding’ is therefore only a state of calm, of comfort. […] Hence, only old things are understandable, while we cannot understand new things, or those that are difficult to integrate into what we’ve acquired so far. (C 475–476)209

209 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. by W. Kaufmann, New York 1968, p. 278: ‘Not “to know” but to schematise – to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.’ See also: One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws […] as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible: we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc. for us. This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason – by simplification, coarsening, emphasising, and elaborating, upon which all ‘recognition,’ all ability to make oneself intelligible rests. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the ‘same apparent world’ always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of reality. (p. 282)



See also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge 1999.

145

Similarly, in literature: [E]very work of value, that is to say every work that contributes something new, must contain an element of incomprehensibility, must pose difficulties either to the head, when it comes to accepting new thoughts, or to the heart, when it’s about a new way of feeling […]. (C 477)

Thus we can say, with only slight overstatement, that if every work of value – hence every literary work of art – must necessarily be ‘difficult’ or ‘incomprehensible’ to some extent, then by the same token a work that is fully comprehensible cannot be a work of art. Having thus undermined the common perspective on the initial opposition, Irzykowski then reintroduces it by drawing on different meanings of the forms of incomprehensibility. He discusses many of its variants, which boil down to two basic forms: necessary incomprehensibility (also referred to as ‘difficulty’) and ‘stylized’ incomprehensibility (which he also calls ‘obscurity’; in later texts on the subject he sometimes refers to ‘unreadability,’ though that implies another, additional meaning).210 To illustrate this opposition, Irzykowski mentions the technique – innovative at the time – that the German poet and dramatist Arno Holz developed to describe ‘the cinematography of the soul’ – a technique that contemporary readers experienced as extremely difficult: [W]ith some experience, having worked out the particular kind of relationship that develops here, one can read those works with great pleasure. That ‘incomprehensibility’ has a strange refreshing effect, it becomes something of a new form through which the world around us and in us comes to life, is resurrected from the grave of banality and becomes understandable again […]. (C 466–467, my emphasis)

But Holz’s successors only saw those ‘incomprehensibilities’ as a new effect: [H]aving lost the feeling for the sources and aims of Holz’s technique, they applied it only as an ornament; their incomprehensibility was not rooted in the difficulty of formulating new apparitions, ones that had not yet been described, that were only emerging from chaos – it was only stylized. (C 467, my emphasis)

In the first case, the work’s difficult form disorganizes the patterns of perception. It becomes a tool that renews our way of seeing the world, adding a new form or organizing our chaotic reality. But in the second case, the prize paid for

210 Compare W. Bolecki’s alternative interpretation in ‘O pojęciu “niezrozumialstwa”’ [On the Notion of ‘Unclearomania’], in Poetycki model prozy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym [The Poetic Prose Model in Poland 1918–1939], Wrocław 1982, esp. pp. 253–257.

146

understanding brings no cognitive gain; the incomprehensible presentation does not enrich our conventional knowledge of the subject. ‘Let the quality of the goal be reflected in the means’ (C 293), the critic urged, recognizing a certain kind of incomprehensibility as necessary for forms, techniques and artistic devices to become tools with which to discover and ‘gain as much terrain unknown to humans as possible’ (C 478). In the second case, meanwhile, the application of ‘incomprehensible’ tools appears to be the only objective behind the expression. This practice, as Irzykowski already pointed out in his book on Hebbel, is rooted in a typical mistake that allows ‘the statics of a phenomenon to be identified with its dynamics or to replace them’ (C 141). This has the following result: [A] certain quality [here: incomprehensibility] that a posteriori turns out to be indispensable, inexorable, is thought to be the most important one, too – even though in reality if a quality is indispensable then it must also be minor, incidental. (C 144)

In general it seems that the literary practice that Irzykowski encountered allowed him to observe two distinct uses of this artistic technique. When it was used in accordance with its basic function, it was a way to make discoveries. But when it was applied in a dysfunctional manner, ‘gratuitously’ (as an end in itself), it became a mere ornament, an effect. Over time, he remarked, discoveries become common; ‘crystallizations’ become ‘fossilized,’ and technical innovations turn into conventional effects. The task of literature, however, is to step outside current norms of what is considered to be artistic. In this sense, those who deny the existence of progress in art are mistaken, for there is no eternal return to the same models. (For Irzykowski, any return modifies the model in some way. He proposed the notion of ‘transformative creativity’ [twórczość przetwórcza] to describe works created by transforming or adapting other works). There is no such thing as an eternal discovery that literary history would not eventually absorb. When it comes to the tasks of the art of literature, it is easy to notice similarities between Irzykowski’s views and Shklovsky’s.211 Both recognized literature’s automatism, and both thought its specificity was in the particular difficulty of recognizing and grasping its form. Irzykowski’s technical incomprehensibility

211 Naturally, the link between Irzykowski’s concepts and those of the Russian Formalists was noticed and discussed early. See W. Głowala, Sentymentalizm i pedanteria: O systemie estetycznym Karola Irzykowskiego [Sentimentalism and Pedantry: Karol Irzykowski’s Aesthetic System], Wrocław 1972, p. 218; H. Markiewicz, ‘Polskie dyskusje o formie i treści’ [Polish Discussions on Form and Content], in Świadomość literatury: Rozprawy i szkice [The Consciousness of Literature: Discussions and Sketches], Warsaw 1985, pp. 102–103.

147

and ‘necessary difficulty’ correspond more or less to Shklovsky’s devices of ‘defamiliarization’ and ‘mak[ing] forms difficult’.212 Irzykowski believed that ‘the poet organizes chaos, but disorganizes the template,’ while for Shklovsky, art ‘restore[s] to man sensation of the world’213 and ‘removes objects from the automatism of perception’214. In Pałuba Irzykowski proposes ‘to do that which in the physical world would be equivalent to seeing one’s own eyes’ (P 450). In Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Technique,’ meanwhile, we read: And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. (p. 12)

According to Irzykowski, ‘it is poetry itself that is that visionary who is supposed to see things as if in their pre-substantive state’ – a state that tears apart our ‘everyday practical imagination back into its constituent elements’ (C 585). For Shklovsky, meanwhile, ‘art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important’ (p. 12). Finally, both suggested that critical analysis ought to concern itself mainly with the artistic technique of creativity (‘how is the work made’ being the Formalists’ favourite question), and both viewed the theory of art as entwined with the theory of perception. But there are also important differences. Shklovsky’s concept of the device in question gave it substance by making it an essential quality of literature, by endowing it with the ontological status of an autonomous, elementary entity of being ‘artistic’.215 Irzykowski, by contrast, was always violently opposed to ‘rendering static what was dynamic’ and to transform means into ends.216 Shklovsky was convinced that ‘the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself ’ and that in art, ‘the object is not important’ (p. 12). Irzykowski, meanwhile, might have agreed with Viktor Zhirmunsky that ‘a device for the sake of a device – that’s not 212 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. by L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, Lincoln 1965, p. 13 and p. 12 respectively. 213 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Resurrection of the Word (1914)’, transl. by Richard Sherwood, in Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. by Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, Edinburgh 1973, p. 46. 214 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, p. 13. The following quotations from Shklovsky are based on this text. 215 See P. Steiner, ‘Three Metaphors of Russian Formalism,’ Poetics Today, 2 (1980/1981), No. 1b. 216 In this aspect Irzykowski brings to mind Tynyanov, who also studies literary phenomena in terms of their being ‘static and dynamic’. Compare also V. Erlich’s remarks in his classic study Russian Formalism: History Doctrine (3rd edn, The Hague 1969).

148

an artistic device but a trick’.217 Irzykowski did indeed make the following remark about such practices to invent suitable equivalents for such phenomena in order to preserve them like jam – this can morph into a maniacal sport, into virtuosity, completely losing the proportion of factors that are actually important in an individual’s life. (C 570)

Irzykowski also understood the value of a certain notion of art – one that was much appreciated by Shklovsky, though Irzykowski believed it had been invented by the journalist and translator Emil Gross; this notion was about ‘reactivating the visibility of objects that in everyday life had ceased to concern us,’ as well as the related concept of poetry that ‘teaches us to commune with events of an external nature, pointing out things that surround us every day but from which we have perhaps failed to extract as much joy and sadness as we could have’ (C 586).218 But Irzykowski always endowed this concept, and the corresponding artistic technique, with the same doubt: [T]o reactivate those issues that we have learned to avoid in life – is that really a cultural achievement? does it enrich us, rather than diverting our attention from more valuable issues? (C 586) [T]his is a passive, descriptive psychology, one that is searching for equivalents, rather than fighting, searching for explanations and discoveries’ (C 579)

Such doubts and questions are at any rate not so much about disqualifying those artistic endeavours, but rather about determining the fundamental hierarchy in the tasks of art – a hierarchy of importance in which Irzykowski attributed the highest position to the continuous invention of forms that ‘broaden the content’ of artistic cognition. As he admitted in the important article ‘Imponderabilia’ in 1916: ‘I would declare myself to be on the side of form, not as an opposition to content or its opposite pole, but as a broadened content’ (S 238). Such a vision of literature, bringing together related threads from various positions that surfaced into the epoch’s consciousness (such as Wilde, Bergson, Shklovsky, as well as thinkers whom I did not discuss individually, though they are no less important: 217 Viktor Zhirmunsky, ‘Introduction to Poetics,’ translated from Russian into Polish by J. Kulczycka i F. Siedlecki, English translation from Polish by Tul’si Bhambry. For the Polish source see W. M. Żyrmunski, ‘Wstęp do poetyki’ in Teoria badań literackich za granicą [Theory of Literary Studies Abroad], vol. 2, part 3, p. 71. 218 This brings to mind Shklovsky’s remark that ‘we have lost our awareness of the world’ and that ‘only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism’. See Victor Shklovsky, ‘The Resurrection of the Word,’ p. 46.

149

Nietzsche, Simmel, Brzozowski), indicates in the end a focal point where the diverging critical discourses of the Modernist formation intersect. This is also evident in another one of Irzykowski’s formulations of his key idea: Poetry not only makes use of ready-made emotional relationships but also posits new relationships by shattering old ones. Thus I return to my ceterum censeo, that poetry is not only art, but also something more. And that’s how in the past it always used to be understood. (C 412)

The theory of comprehensibility, or: literature’s communicative destiny Irzykowski’s work (in particular his article ‘Niezrozumialcy’ [Unclearomaniacs]) contains not only a theory of necessary incomprehensibility of the artistic work. There is also a second theory, which on first sight appears to be opposed to the first, but in fact complements it. This is the theory of the literary work’s inevitable comprehensibility. As I have already argued, Irzykowski showed that every work of value must to some extent be incomprehensible – to the extent that it is different and innovative, to the extent that it modifies and transgresses our expectations, our knowledge, our forms of understanding and feeling. But for these very same reasons (which his concept of literature lays out), every literary work of value must be understandable, at least minimally readable and fit for acts of sensitive reading. According to Irzykowski, the impossibility of a works’ absolute incomprehensibility is rooted the nature of the literary material itself. He urged the unclearomaniacs who emulated the means of difficult literature without understanding their function: Whenever you’re purposely trying to be incomprehensible, you just cannot be quite as absolutely incomprehensible as that […]. That impossibility is due to the fact that the material in which the writer is being creative – language – is a social process. By language I mean not only vocabulary but also the ensemble of concepts, ideals, orientations, values and conversations that circulate in a given period and society. In this material the artist looks for new values, sourcing his form, his style […]. (C 479–480)

This important viewpoint requires some commentary. For Irzykowski, neither images nor feelings represent the material of literature. According to the two leading aesthetic theories at the turn of the century, poetry was ‘the language of images’ or ‘the language of feelings’ (‘language’ being used metaphorically). Irzykowski did not agree, nor did he see the material of literature as equivalent to the abstract ‘system of language’ in the sense developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (whose work Irzykowski could not have read). For him, the material of literature was ‘language’ 150

understood as the ensemble of communicational linguistic practices (discourses) in their historical, functional and normative layering and differentiation. (These views, which bring to mind Bakhtin’s work, should be understood in the context of the Modernist period’s linguistic functionalism, philosophy, psycho-sociology and anthropology of language). Every literary work of value – and even every literary work of no value – is situated in this primary context of expression. On the one hand, the work owes its creation and ability to be understood to this context. But on the other hand, the innovative work also enhances its context by allowing for the discovery of new possibilities of linguistic articulation. After the war, this notion of the internal rationality of language that guarantees a minimum of readability became the main slogan in Irzykowski’s campaign against the ‘unclearomania’ of avant-garde literature, in particular the branch that had evolved into an ‘unreadability’ that went drastically beyond the limits of language as a communication tool and of the special rules of literary communication. In his article ‘Futuryzm a szachy’ [Futurism and Chess] he wrote: You can only be a linguistic innovator up to a certain point, as long as the contrasting background of language as we know it continues to work; after that, following a few attempts at nonsensolalia, even the most left-leaning Dadaist will turn back, hungry and bored. For it is impossible to utter completely meaningless things – they will always be fragments or ruins of previous meanings. […] Language is a social bond; he who loosens it without uttering, without establishing new conventions, is automatically punished by incomprehensibility […]. (S 101–102)

Thus the rights and obligations resulting from the use of artistically organized language are added to the elementary dimension of participation in social practices of communication. Generally speaking, the study of the literary work of art in terms of readability / unreadability allows us to identify a fundamental problem – fundamental both for Irzykowski and for the mainstream of modern literary scholarship – namely in how far the literary work’s ontological status actually depends on being embedded in the process of literary communication that takes place between writers and their audiences. In Pałuba, Irzykowski writes: Officially poets don’t care about the reader, but in fact they depend on him in terms of content, for their poem only becomes a poem when it attains its destiny, when it goes through the head of a reader. (P 579)

In his note ‘Od autora’ [From the Author] in Wiersze i dramaty [Poems and Drama], meanwhile, he writes: [N]o literary work is so absolutely awe-inspiring that it would make the reader fall to his knees before it against his will, if between the author and the reader there is not a

151

certain unspoken agreement of a momentary community of aesthetic principles about the choice of theme and form. (WD 208)

Finally, in ‘Niezrozumialcy’ he makes the following observation: [W]anting to have an impact on anyone, even on an imaginary reader, the artist must take into consideration his ‘language,’ i.e. the alphabet of his words and views. (C 480)

It must be stressed that Irzykowski was aware of the autonomous laws of literary fiction and of the work’s differentiated communicational levels; he clearly knew the difference between the real author and the author inscribed into the work, as well as the difference between the ‘imagined reader’ (as a correlation of the writer’s strategy as realized in the text) and the real audience. The crucial role of the reader in Irzykowski’s views on literature, beginning with his programmatic ‘Czym jest Horla?,’ has been pointed out many times.219 However, I wish to point out the position of the reader in the ‘elemental’ communicative understanding of literature that represents the actual backdrop of Irzykowski’s critical strategy, even though he did not directly present it as such. For Irzykowski, the status and value of the literary work are determined by the work’s communicative destiny. The work’s double embeddedness in the social dimension and in the dimension of literary communication guarantees its basic readability. It ensures that it will always be understandable somehow – better or worse, depending on the competences of the reader, and above all, on the author’s desire and ability to ‘reach a compromise with the template’ (C 471). Irzykowski’s statements on literature imply a number of different positions on the relationship between the writer and the reader and various strategies regarding the work. He presents these positions often and in alteration. They include two traditional and fundamental ones as well as a third one, which is supplementary, new and ‘eccentric’. The first position describes communication patterns in banal literature, i.e. the patterns found in formulaic writing and easy reading: [A]lthough [the writer] pretends to be creating in a disinterested and lonely manner, in fact he’s writing […] while secretly thinking about the reader, about what impression it will make on him […]. With an enthusiasm that would be worthy of something better, the poet delves into the psychology of the reader, taking care to keep him in a state of continuous tension, at the same time pounding his head with a hammer and calculating silly little things. (P 578)

219 Cf. e.g. W. Głowala, Sentymentalizm i pedanteria; E. Szary-Matywiecka, Książka – powieść – autotematyzm: (Od ‘Pałuby’ do ‘Jedynego wyjścia’) [Book – Novel – SelfReflexivity: (From Pałuba to Jedyne wyjście [The Only Way Out]], Wrocław 1979.

152

In general, the poet ‘doesn’t want to destroy the reader’s illusion, since he wants to be transported into an enchanted land’ (ibid.) This type of work is conceived in such a way as to stay within the bounds of the reader’s knowledge and possibilities of comprehension and feeling. Thus it fulfils his likely typical expectations, leading to no cognitive gain but only to the pleasure of recognizing something already known. On the reader’s part this corresponds to the ‘reduction to banality’ (S 83) of the more difficult parts of the text or even of entire works. The second model, which has become independent as a result of the ‘classification of incomprehensibility into the difficult and the unreadable’ (S 82), comprises communication patterns that occur in difficult literature – literature that aims to make artistic and cognitive discoveries, generally paying no heed to the abilities and habits of the reader, who is left to his own devices when it comes to working out the inner order and logic of the artistic form. This model also includes patterns of reception that are geared towards uncovering deep and complex meaning (the best example is perhaps the ‘complicationism’ propagated by Irzykowski). Here the writer rejects the notion of reaching ‘compromises with the template’: [T]he poet, if he wants to satisfy himself completely, must sometimes, in some passages of his work, give up on the reader’s cooperation from the outset […]. (W/D 223) [H]e violates the agreement, so to say, about the amount of effort that we’ll demand of the reader […]. (C 473)

Thus a work is created that ‘discovers and assimilates new strata of life’ (S 237). But cognitive and formal gain comes at the cost of understandability, and often the work leans dangerously far beyond the norms of readability and the horizons of literary understanding. This third and extreme model of incomprehensible and unreadable creativity seems to have been initiated – consciously and with purpose – by Stanisław Przybyszewski, who wrote in a letter to his friend and editor Richard Dehmel in 1893: Feel free to correct anything you want, apart from this: there are a few images that are all but incomprehensible – on purpose – in the pursuit of an idea five, ten, figurative meanings are piled on top of one another, grafted onto one another – and then a few words are repeated – you understand, a maniacal element. There’s a symbolism that forces the brain to reproduce the same tone over and over again.220

220 S. Przybyszewski, Listy [Letters], vol. 1, ed. and introd. by S. Helsztyński, Warsaw 1937, p. 80. E. Kuźma discusses this passage from Przybyszewski’s letter in the context of the expressionist theory of language. See Z problemów świadomości literackiej i

153

A quarter of a century later, however, Przybyszewski gave the following advice to young followers of the new art, i.e. Expressionism: Create however you want and with whatever means – because all of them are good, as long as they are able to express what is essential and what you feel honestly and most deeply in your soul.221

To such a manifesto of completely unrestrained creativity the seasoned reader can respond with an analogous proclamation of his own freedom, as Jerzy Żuławski does: What do I care what he felt, what he suffered, this fleeting human being who wrote this, when I see in this the soul of Man, what man is in his essence in all places and for all time? What do I care what he meant to say with this, when I find in it what I want to hear? If anything can be a symbol, it is one already.222

But only few readers are capable of choosing such an approach. The majority, as Irzykowski notes, react in a very different manner compared to the early Modernist connoisseur: Today’s reader is so used to authors’ moral drilling and boring that even obvious typographical errors see him bending his head in humility and contemplation. The silent battle that in these parts has begun ten years ago between the author and the reader has ended in the defeat of the reader […]. He takes revenge silently – by not reading, and still praising. (C 482)

It is only on the surface that this situation benefits the writer, for if the poem ‘only becomes a poem […] when it goes through the head of a reader,’ then the breakartystycznej ekspresjonizmu w Polsce [Problems of Literary and Artistic Consciousness in Polish Expressionism], Wrocław 1976, p. 164 et seq. 221 S. Przybyszewski, ‘Poeta a świat: Twórca i “on”: W odpowiedzi na list otwarty W. Gomulickiego’ [The Poet and the World: The Creator and ‘He’: In Response to W. Gomulicki’s Open Letter], Zdrój, 1918, vol. 2, no. 5. Przybyszewski’s concepts of literary creativity should of course be contextualized with his broader views, e.g. on the role of language. Compare e.g. his two statements on this topic, which show that he was well aware of the significance of this problem and that his views on the relationship between speech and thought underwent a deep transformation (Przybyszewski, Listy [Letters], vol. 1, p. 47, p. 181). 222 J. Żuławski, Prolegomena: Uwagi i szkice [Prolegomena: Remarks and Sketches], Lviv 1902, p. 108. Nota bene in the statements by Przybyszewski and Żuławski quoted here it is apparent that in the realm of Expressionist and Symbolist poetry, arbitrariness and motivatedness are intertwined and compete with one another, or rather, note how subjectivisation, ‘private’ symbolism and arbitrary choice legitimate themselves by uncovering that which is essential, universal and necessary.

154

up of that link essentially deprives literature of its raison d’être, and creative activity itself becomes a bizarre, self-contradictory enterprise. After all, as the Roman poet Martial already remarked in the first century, ‘he writes nothing, who is never read’.223 This danger, according to Irzykowski, was even more imminent in the case of avant-garde literature, which, however conspicuously it differed from Young Poland’s, was similarly ‘asocial, incomprehensible, idiosyncratic’ (S 102). Thus it is not surprising that diagnosing the new situation Irzykowski echoes what he had said before the war, with the added benefit of information about the short-lived but intensely developing tradition of incomprehensible literature: A silent battle is being waged between the writing side and the reading side. Despite the frequent harassment of poets by the press, despite the boycott of obscure books, the battle has long since ended with the defeat of the reader and the critic. The writers have been supported by four general authorities: Wyspiański and Brzozowski, Miciński and Norwid, creators of fog and obscurity, who have produced an atmosphere of tolerance for all the conceited incomprehensibles. The terror then got its finishing touches with the latest aesthetic doctrines. (S 68)

Irzykowski’s critical engagement, the frequency of his polemics and commentaries, shows that he appreciated the problem’s importance. He clearly tried to avoid wholesale criticism in his evaluations, finding credit in works (most often by the poet Julian Przyboś) that were ‘incomprehensible but readable’ (S 73), that is to say works that respond favourably to efforts to produce a discerning – though certainly difficult – reading: [T]he point is not to replace the poetic image with a non-poetic sentence, but to return, after the operation of comprehending it, that is to say after its translation, to the original and then to savour it.224

But a significant proportion of avant-garde works did not comply with this criterion (e.g. Tuwim, Iwaszkiewicz, Wat, Rytard, Witkiewicz, Brzękowski, Hulewicz, almost all of whom were at that time still under the influence of Rimbaud). For Irzykowski these works, which were ‘inaccessible’ (S 73) to such operations of understanding, represented a third trend: unreadable literature, in the narrower sense of the word. 223 Martial, Epigrams, Book III. Epigram 9, transl. by Hodgson, Bohn’s Classical Library: The Epigrams of Martial, London 1860, p. 135. 224 K. Irzykowski, ‘Niezrozumialstwo metafory i kto nie będzie rozstrzelany: (Wycieczki w lirykę VII) [The Unclearomania of the Metaphor and Who is not Going to Be Executed: (Excursions into Lyricism VII)], Pion 1935, no. 52.

155

Irzykowski’s polemics paint a thorough picture of that kind of writing. Its identifying mark is the lack (or elusiveness) of a basic object of reference, resulting from the fact that ‘it is impossible to simply understand what it is all about’ (S 80). Several factors cause this situation: the loosening and disintegration of the syntax (S 156–157), the eliding of mental premises (WB 11), the privacy and arbitrariness of semantic associations (which replace relationships of logic or cause and effect – WB 79), and generally the lack (or elusiveness) of a specific context that usually determines the meaning of an utterance. Interestingly, Irzykowski initiated his campaign against unclearomania by assuming a sceptical view on common-sense as a sort of ‘contract, conspiracy against chaos’ imposed by the limitations of human intelligence. With philosophical resignation he expresses this in a poetical-mathematical metaphor: We are maintaining our boats on the ocean’s surface, using one unknown to explain another unknown, and that’s called understanding. (C 476)

But later his melancholy tolerance of similar artistic constructs would diminish. In a polemic with Witkacy he wrote: It’s possible to use one unknown in a sentence, but not several, because they neutralize one another. (WB 242)

A few years later, in a discussion with Peiper and Przyboś, he would reuse the same mathematical metaphor: [B]ut there’s no context with you. […] There is none, or it feels like there is none, because it’s incomprehensible, inaccessible, it’s impossible to extract or use it. […] Those poems are like equations with several variables, x refers to y, y to z, and so on. We know that equations like that can have several solutions.225

225 Irzykowski, ‘Noli jurare, domine Przyboś, in verba Peiperi: (Wycieczki w lirykę IV)’ [Noli Jurare, Domine Przyboś, in Verba Peiperi: (Excursions into Lyricism IV)], Pion 1935, no. 5. Listing the characteristics of this type of literature based on the state of research today we arrive at surprisingly similar conclusions as Irzykowski in his casual account. In this context it cannot be entirely coincidental that Todorov used the same mathematical metaphor to describe the peculiar semantic organization of Rimbaud’s works, which inaugurated the ‘indeterminate’ trend of modern literature (a trend that Irzykowski would rather call ‘unreadable’) in T. Todorov, Symbolisme et interprétation, Paris 1978. I discuss this issue in my book, Tekstowy świat: Poststrukturalizm a wiedza o literaturze [A Textual World: Poststructuralism and Literary Studies], Warsaw 1993 (esp. the chapter ‘Teoria interpretacji: problem pluralizmu’ [Theory of Interpretation: The Problem of Pluralism], see in particular pp. 116–118).

156

The lack of textual premises, which makes it impossible to settle on an appropriate context, precludes the reader’s grasping a referent, rendering the work’s ambiguity peculiar and extreme and forcing the reader to apply special procedures. Those procedures typically take one of two alternative forms: the reader reaches beyond the work into a repertoire of traditions and conventions (assuming that the work is ‘parasitic’ or intertextual, that it draws its meaning from ‘the work of conjecture’ and ‘readerly associations’), or the reader reaches beyond the work onto the metalinguistic level, only to search the text for the perceived rules (assuming that the work is metaliterary or self-referential).226 In each case, to accept the text as a work of literary art, the reader must be able to place it in the context of the current state of knowledge and aesthetic experience. Using the typical style of his prewar texts, Irzykowski wrote: [T]he condition of all art – not its essence – is the echo, the reserve of tracks or ruts that have already been formed in the soul, which facilitates sudden mental associations, short circuits of feeling across distant spaces […]. (S 96)

When the text is not able to evoke such a resonance of meaning (or when the text effectively opposes it), it falls out of communicative and artistic circulation, risking to be reclassified in a variety of ways – as a sound object, for instance, as a grammatical example or stylistic exercise. In any case it loses its raison d’être as a work of literature. For in such a case, art goes dangerously astray, and the more it fascinates the philosopher, the more the reader and lover of art must be concerned about it. (S 102)

Thus Irzykowski’s critical work as a whole can be seen as a reaction against the repercussions, in the sphere of art, of the general epistemological crisis that he had observed and diagnosed from the beginning of the century. Literature loses its traditional status, its cognitive value and internal unity, splitting into two 226 ‘You can’t read them in a way that’s honest, naïve, so to say; only when you see through some of their tricks and spurts do you begin to understand; but then the production comes to be of more interest than the poetry’ (Irzykowski, ‘Niczego nie rozumieć – wszystko przebaczyć? (Wycieczki w lirykę II) [To Understand Nothing – To Forgive Everything? (Excursions into Lyricism II)], Pion 1934, no. 41). Thanks to Irzykowski, this aspect of critical argumentation – which is directed against both the hermeticism and the experimentalism of Modernist (i.e. modern) poetry – has been appearing and reappearing since the early twentieth century. Incidentally, it is worth noting that this argument has found its crowning in Czesław Miłosz’s literary historical and metapoetical reflections, such as his sketch ‘Przeciw poezji niezrozumiałej: Postscriptum’ [Against Incomprehensible Poetry: A Postscript].

157

kinds: entertaining activity that safeguards the reader from intellectual effort, and hermetic creativity that disregards the norms of readability. These two kinds have common symptoms, namely the crisis of understanding literature and the questioning of the traditional pact between the artist and the audience. Irzykowski’s criteria of incomprehensibility versus comprehensibility and of readability versus unreadability problematized such simplified oppositions as that between high culture and low culture, or between mass culture and experimental or elite culture. In other words, the critic questioned the rationale of what he saw as an unnecessary and harmful dichotomy in cultural systems of circulation – a dichotomy between norms of writing and reading that was emerging at the time and that is only now beginning to blur.227 Naturally, for Irzykowski those oppositional models, new at the time, were not limited in their function to replaceable objects of ever-new polemical performances. After all, those models represented a situational rationale and a basic frame of reference that served to promote both difficult (innovative and exploratory) literature and Irzykowski’s own project of a new contract of communication between writers and their public. This contract was to be based on a critical evaluation of actual conditions rooted in literature’s status as a tool of communication; it would also take into account the consequences of actual relationships between the author and the reader. In this project literature appears as ‘a token of future interhuman relationships’ (C 481) – an essentially hermeneutic activity that helps us understand the world and other people. Thus it seems that Irzykowski developed his communicative notions on the language of literature as a reaction against the crisis in mimetic and expressive theories of art. The mimetic theory (to draw on its stereotypical version) was predominant in the more banal sort of literature: [I]f we screw up our faces at some author because he simply copies reality, it would be better and more precise to say that he copies certain hackneyed formulas of representing reality.228

Meanwhile, the expressive theory of art, opposed to common, everyday language, looked for its chance in the radical individualization of poetic speech,

227 On the Modernist dichotomy of elite versus mass/popular culture see R. Zimand, Dekadentyzm warszawski [The Decadent Movement in Warsaw], Warsaw 1964, passim; T. Walas, Ku otchłani: (Dekadentyzm w literaturze polskiej 1890–1905) [Towards the Abyss: (Decadence in Polish Literature 1890–1905)], Cracow 1986, p. 241 et seq. 228 Irzykowski, ‘Zagadnienia z historiozofii literatury’ [Problems in Literary History], Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1921, no. 28, my emphasis.

158

and as a consequence it often got bogged down in incomprehensible ‘private language’.229 Taking up the argument from the preceding chapter I would argue that both Brzozowski and Irzykowski departed from the essentialist understanding of art prevalent in the widespread mimetic and expressive theories. For Brzozowski, this departure led to his developing a structural and genetic theory of artistic creativity and reception. For Irzykowski, meanwhile, this departure was related to the communicative nature and tasks of artistic language. He arrived at the idea of artistic inventiveness of expression, which was key to defining and forming – i.e. to giving form to – the object of the utterance. Whatever a work of art is about, it cannot be understood, encountered, or evaluated independently of the shape developed through the given linguistic medium. Art offers a special kind of cognition that cannot be compared to anything else, and accordingly, the only binding and privileged access to the truth of art can be obtained through immanent criticism, which respects and reconstructs the autonomous laws of the artistic form. Thus it is perhaps not too much of a simplification to suggest that for Irzykowski literature was above all a discovery of order. The first element – ‘discovery’ – signifies creating and revealing new forms of organizing experience, and it opposes the reproduction of petrified models in ‘simplified’ literature. The second element – ‘order’ – indicates not only the will artistically to work out chaotic reality, but also an opposition to elusive rules of understanding in individual idiolects that are unreadable. This element demands that all manifestations of artistic freedom respect a minimum of communicative rationality and that even the most radical formal experiments in elite literature should show regard for vital artistic and cognitive purposefulness. Taken together, the two elements describe a regulative ideal which, I believe, Irzykowski used to evaluate literature itself as well as the critical activities – not only his own – that accompany it.

Conclusion: ‘I am a prewar person’ Karol Irzykowski’s textbook image is a fixed one: he appears as a leading literary critic of the interwar period. While the amount of criticism he produced certainly warrants this image, it is not actually accurate when we take into account the quality of his writing. His concept of literature and his concept of criticism both took their final shape in the first decade of the twentieth century and

229 See Irzykowski, C 481–482, WB 242–255; idem, ‘Bahr o ekspresjonizmie’.

159

basically remained unchanged.230 As the author of Pałuba he endowed Polish literature with an awareness of its subconsciousness and its superconsciousness, setting a high standard for self-reflexivity and difficult modern literature.231 As the author of Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word], he created the foundations for modern Polish literary criticism of the ergocentric variety that played a key role in twentieth-century literary theory. Besides Stanisław Brzozowski, whose work had a strong and continuous impact throughout the interwar period, Irzykowski is definitely the most outstanding Polish Modernist critic, where Modernism is defined (following Irzykowski) in the broad sense that encompasses all of modern literature, including the avant-garde.232 230 T. Burek points out the significance of the prewar period for the formation of Irzykowski’s critical views in ‘Cztery dyskusje Karola Irzykowskiego: Prolegomena’ [Four Discussions by Karol Irzykowski: Prolegomena], in Problemy literatury polskiej lat 1890–1939 [Problems in Polish Literature 1890–1939], ed. by H. Kirchner, Z. Żabicki, M. R. Pragłowska, Wrocław 1972; as well as in A. Lam, Wstęp [Introduction], in K. Irzykowski, C 8. B. Rogatko emphasizes the fundamental continuity of his ideas in ‘Program estetyczny Karola Irzykowskiego a Młoda Polska’ [Karol Irzykowski’s Aesthetic Programme in the Context of Young Poland], in Studia z dziejów estetyki polskiej 1890–1918 [Studies in the History of Polish Aesthetics 1890– 1918], Warsaw 1972. Rogatko’s claim that the foundations of Irzykowski’s aesthetics were already laid in his earliest phase seems somewhat overstated; the enigmatic metaphorical formulations in the sketch ‘Czym jest Horla?’ do not in fact contain the concept of literature and criticism that Irzykowski formulated around 1910 and to which he referred in later years. 231 Among the rich secondary literature on Pałuba I wish to point out only one Englishlanguage example that places the novel in a comparative perspective: W. Krysinski, ‘Matafictional Structures in Slavic Literatures: Towards an Archeology of Metafiction’, in Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas, ed. by T. D’haen and H. Bertens, Amsterdam 1988. 232 For Irzykowski’s use of the words ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ in this broader sense, see the following examples (NB Irzykowski was no exception in this): ‘e.g. the word “modernist,” at the moment merely a new shade of the word “modish” has given life to a few concepts that are still completely unknown’ (‘O perfidii: Monografia psychologiczno-społeczna’ [On Perfidy: A Psychological and Social Monograph], Skamander 1923, no. 31–33, reprinted after Myśl Polska, 1914, no. 1/2) ‘[A. Stern] is something like the minister of foreign affairs in Polish modernism […]. Our modernists do in fact admit that they are formists, futurists, expressionists, etc.’ (‘Futurystyczny tapir: Przyczynek do sprawy zwyczajów literackich i do sprawy plagiatu’ [A Futuristic Tapir: Contribution on Literary Customs and the Problem of Plagiarism], Ponowa, 1922, no. 5) ‘today in the era of modernist music’ (‘Naokoło czynu’ [Around the Deed], Pion 1934, no. 44)

160

I have tried to indicate that Irzykowski’s literary critical and literary theoretical ideas, as they crystallized around 1910, had qualities that allow us to evaluate not only their significance for modern literary criticism in Poland, but also to identify them as representative in the context of his output as a whole. I believe that there are at least five such basic qualities. First: there is consistency, despite the great diversity of Irzykowski’s intellectual and aesthetic inspirations, despite his changeability of styles and points of view, despite his passion for polemics, his weakness for never-ending digressions, his tendency to formulate principles, to make general statements about literature in the most unlikely places, in texts that are often casual or occasional. The main qualities of his style of writing are: polemical digressiveness, fragmented analyses, and an episodic and multi-dimensional presentation of his general views on literature, criticism, the place and role of the intellectual in the modern world – views that result from an enduring and conscious irritation and suspiciousness with regard to systematic thinking, which is susceptible to dogmatism and abuse of power. As with Brzozowski, Irzykowski’s choice of such qualities was inspired by the critical authority of Nietzsche, whose philosophical writing played a key role not only in both critics’ intellectual maturation, but also in the history of the entire anti-essentialist movement in modern philosophy. Brzozowski sometimes preferred to name Bergson and Sorel as the closer patrons of his critical and philosophical style; similarly, he would develop a different ideal of intellectual innovation, as we can glean from his infrequent but always admiring references to Georg Simmel. It is in Simmel’s essays that Irzykowski, too, found the qualities he valued most, namely the style of ‘experimental’ and explorative thinking that avoided banality, even at the price of never obtaining final results: This deeply original thinker did not build his own philosophical system, as he preferred to render the very process of thought. Departing from the most common and superficial everyday phenomena he liked to reveal the density of unexpected strands of ideas, and along the channels thus revealed to proceed to the most dangerous backwoods of metaphysics.233

‘In 1902 there appeared a small collection of Tadeusz Miciński’s poems, W mroku gwiazd [In the Twilight of the Stars] and in it a little poem that is almost modernist in its abbreviations’ (‘Czy wkraczamy do szczerości w poezji’ [Are We Entering Honesty in Poetry], Kurier Poranny, 1937, no. 86).

233 Irzykowski, ‘Simmel’, Maski, 1918, no. 30, my emphasis. On the fascination with a style that would ‘render the very process of thinking’ see chapters 1 and 4 in this book. Compare also the concise outline of the analytical critic’s views and style

161

Contrary to appearances, Irzykowski’s unsystematic consistency also manifested itself in his main polemical campaigns in the interwar period. These included his campaigns against the Skamandrites’ programmophobia; against the plagiarism of the ‘revolution’ of new art; against the ‘unclearomania’ of avant-garde poetry; his polemic about content and form (against Witkiewicz’s doctrine and practice); his opposition to sociologism in literary criticism, esp. the sort that endlessly harps on Marxist slogans; his critique of the banalization and trivialization of high culture (against Boy-Żeleński’s ‘simplified life’); and finally, his opposition to the harmful moral-intellectual ‘blackmail’ that came with the trend for superficial progressiveness and political correctness (e.g. Antoni Słomiński). Admittedly, he frequently chose the wrong person as the main target of his attacks (and would later come to regret some of his accusations).234 His overall judgement was often influenced by private aversions, and he rarely did justice to positions that were, more often than not, rather complex. However, such reservations do not apply to the broader goals of his critical campaigns. These campaigns all depart from opinions that Irzykowski had elaborated and proclaimed before the war. Furthermore, the same logic that Irzykowski used in defence of Brzozowski’s polemic against Miriam also applies to his own attacks on other critics: We can consider this proof to have missed its target, as it often happened with Brzozowski, but a fruitful thing has resulted from this, namely the liquidation of certain prejudices and fossilizations that have not recurred since.235

Perhaps this consistency or enduring nature of Irzykowski’s beliefs, the stability of his critical idiolect, is best encapsulated in a casual and careless description of poetry that nevertheless recurs throughout his career. I have already cited it as it appears in his book on Hebbel; it also appears in Czyn i słowo (‘Poetry is something broader than art,’ WB 228), then also finds its way into ‘Walka o treść’ [Grappling for Content] as well as ‘Literatura od wewnątrz’ [Literature from Within], a late article that was published posthumously. Here Irzykowski

in J. Sławiński’s entry ‘Karol Irzykowski’ in the reference work Filozofia w Polsce: Słownik pisarzy [Philosophers in Poland: A Compendium], Wrocław 1971. 234 Cf. Adam Galis’s comment about his discussion with the critic: ‘Irzykowski regrets in particular one accusation, the accusation of plagiarism that he levelled against young literature’ (‘Nieudany wywiad: List do Karola Irzykowskiego’ [A Failed Interview: Letter to Karol Irzykowski], Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1933, no. 45). 235 Irzykowski, ‘Projekt Akademii Literackiej w Polsce’ [The Project of the Literary Academy in Poland], Maski, 1918, no. 15, no. 17.

162

describes poetry using the same simple and unchangeable form of his critical discourse: ‘It is also art, but essentially something more’.236 Second: internal cohesion, as suggested by the clear and conscious correlation between Irzykowski’s concepts of criticism and literature. Let us recall that in his view, the task of criticism was to repeat the creative process by breaking up the work into its constituents and then recomposing it in such a way as to render its inner organization clear and understandable. To distinguish this kind of analysis from various external, mainly sociological, perspectives and methods, he sometimes described it as ‘immanent – that is to say internal, that is to say literary. This is the one [analysis] we propose, and it is the more important one.’237 The fundamental task of literature, meanwhile, boils down to the process of finding order, of disorganizing old forms of organizing experience and creating and/or discovering new ones. This cohesion indicates how enduring his position was – a position whose beginnings he considered to be justified in Czyn i słowo and in his prewar journalism, though in the interwar period he would describe it as clerical. Irzykowski made a point of his independent decisions and judgements. He took no heed of the political context (‘What do I care who I do a good turn to!’), and consistently opposed all forms of ideological engagement (‘I want to reduce to absurdity the division into fronts, where literary matters are concerned’).238 This independence was no doubt intended as a measure (a fragile and risky measure, but the only available one in practical terms) to preserve the autonomy of the world of ideas, that is to say the autonomy of literature, of its critical judgement, as well as (more generally speaking) of the intellectual’s position at a time when culture

236 Irzykowski, ‘Literatura od wewnątrz’ [Literature from Within], Twórczość, 1946, no. 1. In his introduction to Irzykowski’s Czyn i słowo [Deed and Word], Lam proposes a similar argument, suggesting that Irzykowski cast the concept contained in the formula ‘the poet organizes chaos and disorganizes the template’ (and other formulations) as ‘the main idea for many future critical campaigns’ (C 12). 237 Irzykowski, ‘Analiza powodzenia’ [An Analysis of Success], Wiadomości Literackie, 1931, no. 35. 238 Irzykowski, ‘Klecha liberalizmu’ [The Clergy of Liberalism], Robotnik, 1933, no. 46 and ‘Pod kuratelą’ [Under Tutelage], Robotnik, 1933, no. 382. See also Irzykowski’s, ‘Paszportyzm: (Odpowiedź J. E. Skiwskiemu na artykuł ‘Polska choroba’ w nr 41 Pionu)’ [Passportism: (A Response to J. E. Skiwinski’s Article ‘A Polish Affliction’ in Pion, no. 41], Pion, 1934, no. 43.

163

was becoming increasingly politicized and ideological. As he would write later, during World War II: ‘Clericalness is nothing but intellectual alertness itself.’239 Third: a certain closeness in his own theoretical thinking. The status and value of both criticism and literature do not depend on theories that were mainstream at the time, but on an original and independent understanding of their communicative nature. This ‘unselfconscious’ communicative concept of literature (which was also beginning to come across in younger critics, such as Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Leon Choromański) should be acknowledged as an important new critical discourse. Besides this structural-communicative concept, other discourses emerging during the Modernist period (in the broad sense, reaching at least into the 1960s) include the hermeneutic concept of literary criticism as well as the structural-genetic method of analysing social and cultural formations, as in Brzozowski’s embryonic but conscious and independent descriptions. Those years also saw the appearance of the first signs of an interest in phenomenology as well as the first phenomenological literary research projects. In Feliks Młynarski’s work this interest was half involuntary, or in any case rather loose; with the critic Ada Werner-Silberstein, however, it was fully conscious. In fact, in her case we should simply speak of the first deliberate call in Poland for a phenomenological aesthetics (and by extension: for phenomenological literary scholarship) based on Edmund Husserl’s philosophy.240 Fourth: the modernity of Irzykowski’s key ideas – a modernity he achieved through thought experiments, by extrapolating, and by drawing extreme conclusions from the tendencies and phenomena he observed, but which hardly presented sound foundations for the concepts he developed. This ensured, however, that 239 Irzykowski, ‘Metaliteratura’ [Metaliterature], in H. M. Dąbrowolska, O Karolu Irzykowskim: Wspomnienie biograficzne i komentarze do dzieł oraz Karola Irzykowskiego część niewydanych rękopisów [On Karol Irzykowski: A Biographical Recollections and Commentaries on His Works as well as Parts of Karol Irzykowski’s Unpublished Manuscripts], Łódź [1947]. 240 On Young Poland’s ‘unselfconscious’ hermeneutics see M. Głowiński, ‘Intertekstualność w młodopolskiej krytyce literackiej’ [Intertextuality in Young Poland’s Literary Criticism], Pamiętnik Literacki, 4 (1989). See also my remarks in ‘Homo irrequietus: Nietzscheanizm w twórczości Wacława Berenta’ [Homo irrequietus: Nietzscheanism in the Works of Wacław Berent] (in the Annex to the Polish version of this book) as well as in the introduction to W. Berent, Pisma rozproszone: Listy [Dispersed Writings: Letters], ed. and intro. by R. Nycz and W. Bolecki, Cracow 1992. On the beginnings of modern aesthetics and literary studies in those years see chapter 6 in this volume. Cf. also W. Głowala, Młodopolska wyobraźnia metakrytyczna [The Metacritical Imagination of Young Poland], Wrocław 1985.

164

they would also remain operationally valuable in relation to literary programmes and phenomena yet to come. This is why I believe that in the introduction to his monograph on film Dziesiąta Muza [The Tenth Muse, 1924], Irzykowski not only gives voice to his notorious sense of primacy, but also expresses an accurate evaluation of his own achievements: My previous books (Czyn i słowo and Fryderyk Hebbel jako poeta konieczności), whose ideas should have had an impact especially in the current turn of events in literature, have fallen like a seed on rocky ground, so that today that work must be started all over. (D 9)

Similarly, Irzykowski was right, in 1930, to express his belief in the value of his essay ‘Zdobnictwo w poezji’ [Ornamentation in Poetry]: ‘Already in that discussion, written in 1913, the later ‘grappling for content’ [walka o treść] is taking shape’ (S 243). Most generally speaking, the corpus of theories that Irzykowski had worked out before the war would undergo only slight modification, while the work of ‘starting all over’ was undertaken in his following books of criticism, Walka o treść [Grappling for Content], Słoń wśród porcelany [An Elephant in a China Shop], and Cięższy i lżejszy kaliber [A Heavier and a Lighter Calibre]. Fifth and last: the inopportune timing of his critical thought. By which I absolutely do not mean to suggest that Irzykowski’s work should be relevant to us today. Quite to the contrary: he seems to have never been fully relevant; in some way he always missed his timing. Describing his loneliness during the Young Poland period he painted himself as ‘busy spinning my yarn, but not engaged in the opinion-forming apparatus in Poland,’241 while to his contemporaries from the interwar period he confessed: ‘I am a prewar man’.242 This situation resulted in Irzykowski’s particular ability to merge his cult of novelty with a passion for systematization; to merge his sensitivity to the present moment with a loyalty towards tradition; closeness with distance, a precursory element with anachronism. This merging of opposites is clearly evident in the eternal untimeliness of his ideas, his fate of being incomprehensible and notoriously misunderstood, the comedies of errors that constantly appeared in various

241 Irzykowski, ‘Część indeksu’ [Part of the Index], in H. M. Dąbrowolska, O Karolu Irzykowskim [On Karol Irzykowski]. 242 ‘Szukam ludzi bez przekonań: Rozmowa z Karolem Irzykowskim’ [Looking for People with no Convictions: An Interview with Karol Irzykowski’], Pion, 1934, no. 16.

165

polemics as well as in the inextricable otherness and incompatibility of his critical languages.243 Nonetheless, these characteristics ensure the unique intellectual climate that his readers know so well. They are a source of abiding mental tension and they contribute to the unsettling sensation that readers have of the peculiar vitality of Irzykowski’s critical style. One might wonder if this sensation is not the reverse side of another distinctive pleasure, the one appreciated by lovers of old newspapers, announcements and dispatches from long ago: Irzykowski never achieved the melancholy taste of past actuality, even though, as we know, he was trying very hard. And this is probably why his voice – urgent, impatient, insatiable – reaches us so vividly from across his writings.

243 See S. Dąbrowski, ‘Sprawa Irzykowskiego: Przegląd i polemika’ [The Question of Irzykowski: Overview and Polemics], Pamiętnik Literacki, 1 (1989).

166

Chapter 6: Literaturology: Looking Back at the History of Modern Literary Theory in Poland A note on methodology Literary theory’s place or significance within literary studies depends largely on the latter’s general position, as well as pragmatic and institutional aspects pertaining to the field as a whole. A certain regularity can be observed here: in phases when a new paradigm emerges, theory tends to be recognized as independent, as the best in its discipline. There is no doubt that it comes to dominate, for it takes over the power and the most important functions, such as describing the subject and defining the scope of research, conceptualizing the model and methods of understanding, etc. In phases of normal and stable development, by contrast, theory sticks to its predefined limits. Theoretical investigations do not encroach on the research areas of neighbouring sub-disciplines. They do, however, venture to perform ‘in-depth’ investigations, thus going beyond the level of knowledge that is generally accessible in the field. Theory then develops towards greater specialization, as well as towards a certain ‘esotericism’ or hermeticism in its intellectual explorations. Meanwhile, in phases when critical values are redefined, when an older model is taken apart, theory usually acquires the worst possible reputation. This concerns not only the branch of theory criticised at that moment, but also every other kind – theory as such. It is then accused of being useless and even harmful, and the failures of other sub-disciplines also tend to be blamed on theory. This sort of criticism comes above all from specialists in literary history, who then proclaim the need to ‘get back to the point,’ to a given discipline’s subject matter, and to let go of those ‘futile’ theoretical investigations. Finally, during phases of paradigmatic ‘interregnum,’ transitional phases in the development of the discipline, theory again becomes more significant, though for different reasons. When self-awareness is on the rise, when researchers become more sensitive to the conditioning of their own (and each other’s) work, two things happen. On the one hand, theoretical discourse comes to function as a handy tool of critical self-reflexivity for individual researchers; on the other hand, the problematics of theory often represents the only generally acceptable common field, where proponents of different fields and representatives of other related disciplines can reach a common understanding and support one another. 167

Our situation today is singular mostly because a ‘free market’ of ideas has substituted the previous dominant paradigm, but no serious candidate has yet emerged to monopolize power.244 New research projects, undertaken from a variety of perspectives, continue to present innovative and valuable findings, but all too often these findings are fragmentary. As a result, they fail to integrate with the larger theoretical concepts that have universal application. This way of understanding pluralism in research does not advance our understanding, nor does it contribute to the construction of a new theory. If anything, it breaks up the older – and rather coherent – model of scholarship, undermining or eliminating many of its elements in the process. Generally speaking, the development of literary theory (which is also subject to the general regularities of the development of all disciplines) does not resemble a linear, harmonious and cumulative expansion of learning, nor does it proceed gradually and consistently to cover the entire discipline in more and more depth. Instead, the dominant scholarly paradigm defines (or redefines, to some extent) the entire subject field; it determines (according to its own assumptions and limitations) the main points of interest, the hierarchy and the stratification of the area of learning. This frequently results in a preference for a given sub-discipline, for a type of a genre of literature, or for a period or trend in literary history. The edifice of learning (built according to the obligatory standards mentioned above) appears to have been designed with purpose; it appears to accommodate a great variety of problems. This is due to the theoretical ‘construction’ – the rhetorical effectiveness of the model that imposes the ideal of a single legitimate method along with the object and scope of study. But in transitional phases, the discipline’s lucid form and image starts to blur and falter: the hegemony of one model is supplanted by a pluralisation of research positions; whatever used to be rejected or marginalized, now returns as an unsolved but fully fledged problem, and notions of the subject and method(s) of study gradually begin to shift. The trends that dominated theoretical scholarship in Poland in the 1990s revolve around material and literary historical research as well as an interest in its 244 Note: the Polish original of this book was first published in 1997. For a more recent discussion on literary and cultural scholarship, see my book Poetyka doświadczenia: Teoria – nowoczesność – literature [Poetics of Experience: Theory – Modernity – Literature] Warsaw 2012; I also discuss contemporary transformations in the humanities in my essay ‘Humanistyka wczoraj i dziś’ [The Humanities Then and Now] in Kultura afektu – afekty w kulturze: Humanistyka po zwrocie afektywnym [Culture of Affect – Affect in Culture: The Humanities after the Affective Turn], ed. by R. Nycz, A. Łebowska, A. Dauksza, Warsaw 2015.

168

own history. This literary historical phase is not only related to the symptoms of an inner-theoretical crisis, but it has much to do with the demands of the moment: with the onset of democracy and free speech, there arose a need to integrate those branches of literary production whose study and publication had previously been hampered by political and administrative decrees: émigré literature and unorthodox works produced in Poland but also works that were utterly orthodox but that came to be of interest when scholars turned to examine both the reasons and the consequences of their orthodoxy. When we consider previously overlooked areas, with the aim of completing our understanding of literary writing as a whole, we must revise our old picture. This revision, however, requires intense theoretical reflection, especially where literary history is concerned (i.e. the principles of periodization, the repertory of different trends, their dynamics and connections, etc.). This is why the current phase seems to play a strategic role among the most urgent research questions; what is more, it receives an additional stimulus from researchers’ interest in the history of doctrines, scholarly traditions and in philosophy and culture (an interest inspired by Postmodernism and its spin-offs). Generally speaking, the current state of research suggests a departure from searching for fundamental and unchanging or essential qualities, from universally applicable models, and a tendency towards a broad historicization of both theoretical and methodological problems. In Poland as well as globally, literary scholarship is in a transitional phase, or in a phase of transforming the paradigms not only of literary theory but also of the theory of literary scholarship (i.e. methodology, the theorization of sets of beliefs in literary scholarship). The very distinction of literary theory vs. theory of literary scholarship – a distinction that takes different subjects and kinds of learning for granted – is becoming particularly difficult to uphold. There are several reasons for this. First, literary theories are usually worked out on the basis of assumptions rooted in other fields, which is why they usually lead to methods that correspond to those other fields. Secondly, the theories of literary scholarship require us to accept a certain literary theory, or at the very least they see the construction of a literary theory (or the modification of its current form) as an essential result of their metatheoretical work. The crossing of both fields also favours a general sharpening in researchers’ self-awareness, as well as a theoretical and methodological interest in the conditions of literary scholarship and its results, which, no doubt, have lately reached their greatest intensification. To be sure, the distinction between literary theory and the methods of studying it often appears as a standard opposition between, on the one hand, the theory that accounts for the entirely of literary phenomena at the price of methodological 169

eclecticism, and, on the other hand, trends in research that attain methodological uniqueness at the cost of their findings being partial and subjective. That said, the notion of methodological eclecticism remains significant only with regard to commonly shared models of the object of study and of scientific conduct. Given the absence of such commonly shared models today, and given the crisis in the paradigmatic principles that are meant to ensure the discipline’s unity and autonomy, theoretical and methodological work takes on a different shape. The eclectic approach, in the framework of the discipline’s unified image of the subject of study, selects various methods to examine different phenomena, the assumption being that the results obtained through those methods add up productively. But literary research today is not characterized so much by eclecticism as much as it is characterized by episodic theoretical work. Today, theoretical endeavours tend to be local (because they are limited to a particular level or dimension), inconsistent (because they do not sum up what we know about the subject) and heterogeneous (because they are frequently based on inappropriate assumptions). It seems that the specificity of current literary theoretical research, as well as its general significance, only becomes readable when we look at them in the context of traditional ways of understanding and practicing the discipline.

The origins, development and twilight of modern literary theory in Poland It is neither particularly original nor particularly contentious to claim that the emergence of modern literary scholarship (including literary theory) as an autonomous discipline is rooted in at least three basic criteria of scientific legitimacy: a) objectivity about the existence of the object of study (whose essential qualities must be independent of the creative receiving subject as well as of any contextual conditioning); b) the neutrality of the scholarly metalanguage (i.e. the special system of assertions, methods and high-level research tools, which must not be influenced by the language of the object or affect the researcher’s results); c) the universality of the scope and explanatory power of theory (the results must be recognized as generally valid regardless of historical change and cultural diversity). Theory had been confronted with these criteria since the beginning of the twentieth century. But it is now becoming clear that they were only fulfilled from the early 1930s, while in the late 60s and early 70s they were gradually eroded as a result of the methodological criticism levelled against those criteria from various quarters.

170

These phases are of course most apparent when we look at modern theory’s development from a global perspective: the beginnings can be mapped onto the anti-Positivist turn; the 1930s see the maturation of related concepts (phenomenology, structuralism, new criticism), while the twilight sets in around the late 1960s, with the emergence of many new orientations (broadly described as ‘poststructuralist’). In the first phase, critics such as Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Dilthey questioned the unity of learning based on the natural sciences. The humanities, which were initially supported by the findings of psychology, split off as a result (first as an entity, then individually). Similarly, literary scholarship gradually became more autonomous by relying on several other disciplines, which it presented as more fundamental; first, it was psychology, then aesthetics, and finally structural linguistics. Thanks to Karl Vossler, ‘literaturology’ soon began to be internally differentiated, giving rise to: idiographic history, theory or poetics that were inherently nomothetic, as well as methods of external and internal, exo- and ergocentric orientation. This dichotomy shaped the discipline until the late 1960s. Exocentric orientations – which were often in competition with one another – had a preference for external methods (psychology and psychoanalysis; sociology, often influenced by Marxist thought; the history of ideas and culture as well as critical theory) – methods that aimed to reveal literature’s significance for higher values or for more fundamental domains of human activity. But these orientations did not determine the dynamics and development of literary scholarship, or the status of the newly autonomous discipline. These were decided by much more homogenous ergocentric orientations, which respected literature’s autonomy and which explored literature’s specific qualities with the help of a separate set of procedures and analytical tools (while fulfilling, as it seemed, all three criteria of scientific legitimacy). In the framework of these metaorientations, the median trend is represented by the traditions of normative poetics, phenomenology, structuralism and semiotics. These traditions (with the exception of phenomenology) focus on the language of literature as their main object of study; their own analytical methods become their theoretical metalanguage; structural linguistics becomes the model science for poetics (which should be to literature what linguistics is to language); the work, meanwhile, is first understood to be a closed organic whole, and later comes to be seen as a dynamic functional structure whose objective form and meaning are founded in its position in the semiotic systems of the network of culture. The beginnings of modern Polish literary scholarship as an autonomous discipline can be traced to the years immediately before and the years immediately 171

after World War I.245 The transformation was augured by a new terminology that gradually entered common usage, though the meaning of those new terms shifted significantly before arriving at the definitions that are seen as standard today. Thus, for instance, nauka literatury [literary science] was the common term in those days (see Tadeusz Grabowski, Juliusz Kleiner), while nauka o literaturze [science of literature] (see Kazimierz Wóycicki) was not understood as an overriding term for all professional learning on literature; it only represented a methodological basis for literary history, formerly subsumed under the heading of ‘methods’ or ‘introduction to literary science’.246 A similar case is that of ‘literary theory’: at the turn of the twentieth century, these words often appeared on the title pages of school textbooks; in practice ‘literary theory’ initially signified a methodical 245 See H. Markiewicz, Polska nauka o literaturze: Zarys rozwoju [Polish Literary Studies: An Outline of Its Development], Warsaw 1985. Different possibilities of studying the changing paradigms in the history of literary theory are discussed in H. R. Jauss, ‘Paradigmawechsel in der Literaturwissenschaft’ [A Paradigm Shift in Literary Studies], Linguistische Berichte, 3 (1969). A full documentation of this question would be beyond the scope of this chapter. I restrict bibliographical references to a minimum, except where the earliest phase is concerned; the period when literary scholarship first became institutionalized and literary theory emerged as a separate discipline is the least known but most crucial for the present study. 246 See T. Grabowski’s remark from 1927: ‘Literary scholarship, like scholarship on political history, has its own theory, formerly called methods and known today simply as introduction to literary scholarship’ (T. Grabowski, Wstęp do nauki literatury ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem literatury polskiej [Introduction to Literary Scholarship with Particular Regard to Polish Literature], Lviv 1927, p. 1). Cf. Grabowski, ‘Metodyka historii literatury ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem historii literatury polskiej’ [Methods in Literary History with Particular Regard to the History of Polish Literature], in Sprawozdanie Dyrekcji c. k. I Wyższej Szkoły Realnej w Krakowie za rok 1907 [The Rectorate’s Report of the Imperial-Royal General Higher Secondary School in Cracow for the year 1907]; Grabowski, Czy historia literatury jest nauką? Szkic o metodzie w badaniach historyczno-literackich ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem historii literatury polskiej [Is Literary History a Science? A Short Article on Methods in Literary-Historical Research with Particular Regard to the History of Polish Literature], Cracow 1910. J. Kleiner wrote in his influential study ‘Charakter i przedmiot badań literackich’ [The Character and Subject of Literary Studies]: [T]here is a general assumption today that literary scholarship is the same as literary history. Because of this one-sided stance, literary studies become strange and indifferent to society […] besides literary history there exists in general consciousness a certain literary system, cut off from historical cognition – literary scholarship must therefore find a way to account for this system, and even offer a history of changing literary systems. (Biblioteka Warszawska, 1913, vol. 1, p. 453)

172

discussion of normative poetics (the principles of proper and artistically valuable speaking and writing), with rare (and vague) references to philosophical foundations and a rather inconsistently defined sphere of application.247 This didactic context is important for two reasons. First, it indicates the turn that took place thanks to the most outstanding scholars of this generation – Kleiner, Wóycicki, Zygmunt Łempicki (and others). They worked out and effectively disseminated modern literary scholarship as well as new models and methods of education.248 Besides, this context allows us to become aware of the fact that in the

Finally, K. Wóycicki, in what is no doubt the most important work to inaugurate modern theoretical thought in Poland, pointed out a distinction that had previously been taken for granted: Polish literary scholarship today can proudly list a few serious historical syntheses and a rich store of literary-historical monographs, while questions of literary theory, i.e. poetics beyond secondary school textbooks, are lying completely fallow, representing not even one hundredth of the scope of histories. (Historia literatury i poetyka [The History of Literature and Poetics], Warsaw 1914, p. 1)

247 Cf. A few symptomatic statements:

Literary theory is a part of philosophy and should be based on it. (B. Grabowski, Teoria literatury (stylu, prozy, poezji) do użytku szkolnego i nauki domowej [Theory of Literature (of Style, Prose, Poetry) for School and Home Education], Warsaw 1901, p. vii) Literary theory encompasses not only the external aspect, i.e. the language and style of works that express human thought through words, speech – oral or written – but also the internal aspect, i.e. their content […], literary theory consists of three parts: 1. Theory of style, 2. Theory of prose, and 3. Theory of poetry, i.e. poetics. (W. Kokowski, Teoria literatury polskiej [Theory of Polish Literature], Warsaw 1902) The analysis of the different kinds of works of prose and poetry is the task of literary theory. Literary theory is the science that extracts principles of literary creativity […]. This is why stylistics and literary theory complement one another: the first discusses the external aspect of literary works, i.e. their linguistic attire, their style; literary theory, meanwhile, is about the internal aspect of creativity – the content, the relationship of individual parts to the whole, their organization, the author’s stance on the subject represented, the role of the author’s individual mental powers (thinking, imagination, emotions, etc.) in the creative work. (H. Galle, Stylistyka i teoria literatury: Wykład systematyczny oraz wypisy i ćwiczenia stylistyczne [Stylistics and Theory of Literature: A Systematic Explanation with Extracts and Stylistic Exercises], 3rd edn, Warsaw 1908, p. 25).

248 The greatest contribution here was made by Wóycicki, even though his method of heuresis and his model solutions, routinely applied in didactic practice, soon took on a ludicrous form of ritualized questions and answers. Witold Gombrowicz famously immortalized these routines in his novel Ferdydurke (1937), though they had also been criticized before. See e.g. Z. Łempicki, ‘Nauka literatury w szkole średniej a uniwersytet’ [Literary Studies in Secondary School and the University],

173

nineteenth century, literary theoretical ideas had been an intrinsic part of literary history at school and university level; they still determined the methods and tasks of literary history at the turn of the century, but from the 1910s onwards, they took on their modern form and boldly started to emancipate themselves. As a consequence, in the 1930s literary theory decidedly began to seek independence from its ties with didactics as well as from any other immediately practical applications in interpretation and literary history. Thus it emerged as a separate field within its own autonomous discipline.249 Generally speaking, the growing independence of literary history as a field of study was a consequence of its differentiation – in a way that was increasingly firm in terms of methodology – from the neighbouring disciplines of philology, literary criticism, cultural history, psychology or sociology of art. Similarly, the growing independence of literary theory was rooted in its differentiation from literary history, aesthetics, philosophy as well as many other exocentric ways of dealing with and understanding literature. Without entering into overly detailed considerations, the emergence of modern literary theory in Poland can be described most concisely by pointing out how its essential qualities were perceived and how its criteria were respected at the time: the objectivity of its object of study, the neutrality of its method, the universal applicability of its results. It is in Pamiętnik i Ogólnopolskiego Zjazdu Polonistów w Warszawie [Chronicle of the 1st General Polish Conference of Polish Language and Literature Specialists in Warsaw], Lviv 1925; K. Irzykowski, ‘Dyskusja w Akademii Literatury o programach nauki języka polskiego’ [Discussion at the Literature Academy on Polish Language Teaching Programs ], Pion 1934, no. 2; W. Sawrycki, Współtwórcy szkolnej polonistyki dwudziestolecia międzywojennego: Kazimierz Wóycicki, Konstanty Wojciechowski, Juliusz Kleiner, Konrad Górski [The Creators of Interwar Polish Studies for Schools: Kazimierz Wóycicki, Konstanty Wojciechowski, Juliusz Kleiner, Konrad Górski], Warsaw 1984. 249 See e.g. Łempicki’s marginal statement in his review of Ingarden’s book: It cannot be denied that the results of those inquiries into the essence of the literary work can be of significant value for literary studies. But if someone were associate knowledge of literary theory thus understood with any practical hopes in the sense of it helping with this or that kind of work, he would no doubt be disappointed. Books like the one discussed here enrich the mind, and, being themselves the result of deep thought, they make you think. But they do not bring the sort of ad hoc benefit that you get from trivial treatises on the literary work, such as the ones by E. Ermatinger, or textbooks of a similar format. (Z. Łempicki, ‘O poznawaniu dzieła literackiego Romana Ingardena’ [Understanding Roman Ingarden’s Literary Work; 1938], in Wybór pism [Selected Writings], ed. by H. Markiewicz, vol. 2: Studia z teorii literatury [Studies in Literary Theory], preface by R. Ingarden, Warsaw 1966, p. 331). Cf. W. Sawrycki, Współtwórcy szkolnej polonistyki, pp. 84–85 as well as Irzykowski’s statements as quoted below.

174

telling that the most eminent Polish scholars of that period relied on extremely different methodological assumptions to justify which qualities should determine the discipline’s new status. Thus, for instance, Kleiner’s work during this early phase emphasizes psychology as fundamental for literary scholarship. He intended his research to legitimize literary history only, while literary theory, poetics and aesthetics all lay outside his sphere of interest.250 Kleiner gives the following definition: ‘the object of study for literary scholarship, that is to say the object of knowledge about literature [wiedza o literaturze] is the content of texts as a separate sphere of human reality’; he distinguishes studies in which ‘a text is meaningful in and of itself ’ from other domains of scholarship, where ‘the text is only a means, a tool, a source’. Thus the first type of study is granted ‘legitimacy as an independent field of learning’. Kleiner defines the sphere of literature above all in terms of the uniqueness of research methods, ‘the stance in relation to the object of study,’ rather than in terms of the unique category of the object itself (for ‘every work

250 Let me take this opportunity to correct a minor but recurring (and sometimes farreaching) editorial or historical error: in the last five sentences of his article ‘Charakter i przedmiot badań literackich’ [The Character and Subject of Literary Studies] Kleiner differentiates not only literary history but also the system and theory of literature. These five sentences, which are quoted frequently, do not appear in the first edition, but only in the version printed in the volume Studia z zakresu literatury i filozofii [Studies in Literature and Philosophy], Warsaw 1925 (as Kleiner states on p. 252). The fact that this is a later addition tends to be overlooked, which has resulted in an overly high appraisal of Kleiner’s text. Stefania Skwarczyńska, for instance, writes that the preceding argument fails to justify the conclusion: ‘We must notice that the introduction – though it is merely appended to the discussion – of literary theory into literary scholarship represents literary theory’s inauguration, at least in Poland’ (S. Skwarczyńska, ‘Juliusz Kleiner jako metodolog i teoretyk literatury’ [Juliusz Kleiner as a Methodologist and Theoretician of Literature], in Wokół teatru i literatury (Studia i szkice) [On Theatre and Literature (Studies and Sketches)], Warsaw 1970, p. 293). This error also appears in the reprint of Kleiner’s article in Teoria badań literackich w Polsce: Wypisy [Theory of Literary Studies in Poland: Extracts], vol. 1, ed. by H. Markiewicz, Cracow 1960, where the 1925 version is dated 1914. In retrospect, there are two striking aspects about Kleiner’s article: first, its literary historical aspect, i.e. the unusual prominence of Freudian psychoanalysis (p. 464), and second, the theoretical aspect, i.e. his identification (in passing) of fictionality as a criterion for literature (p. 458).

175

taken from this position belongs to literature’). This could only lead to a historical relativization of his results.251 Kleiner also demands that ‘the instrument of observation ought to be precise and independent of subjective modification,’ thus acknowledging the impossibility of fulfilling the criterion of neutrality, given that ‘the curse of subjectivity can be curtailed, but not eliminated’. Finally, accepting the criterion of unambivalent authorial intention in the text, he concluded that in that case ‘there should exist only one system of meaning, one that would essentially comply with it [that criterion]’; but at the same time he recognized, with a hint of regret, that full, complete and correct interpretation was hampered by the fact that ‘absoluteness cannot be guaranteed’.252 This type of literary theoretical innovation that emerged at that time relied on compromise; perhaps we should say that it was moderate and sensitive to the problems that were key to the discipline, while at the same time being unwilling to study these problems outside of literary history. It appears that this type of innovation characterized Kleiner’s position throughout his career. Meanwhile, for Wóycicki the fundamental science was aesthetics. As far as literary scholarship is concerned, the principles of aesthetics were expressed in a twofold poetics: an external (psychological) poetics, which focused on the creative process, as well as an internal, objective, poetics that analysed the work of art itself, and which Wóycicki describes as follows: [I]t sees a separate field of research in the characteristics of the object, independently of the individual who created it and of the effect that that object produces. The scholar, as if shut inside the work of art, considers its construction as a whole and in its details, trying to grasp its essence. The specific artistic means, composition, principal forms are elements of the organism that cognitive thought sets apart, but which ought to be understood along with the organic relationships.253

Wóycicki’s neo-Romantic metaphor of the organism and organic relationships (which was taken up by Kleiner, Łempicki and other scholars) would soon be displaced by notions of structure and of functional relationships. Whether research results were neutral and objective was determined by the new structural method that Wóyicki promoted as ‘an exact method’ of analysis – one that was subject to scientific control. The results’ universal applicability, meanwhile, was 251 All quotations refer to J. Kleiner, Charakter i przedmiot badań literackich [The Character and Subject of Literary Studies], pp. 456–457. 252 Subsequent quotations refer to J. Kleiner, ‘Analiza dzieła’ [Analysis of the Work], in Studia z zakresu literatury i filozofii, p. 158, p. 158, p. 152, p. 158. 253 K. Wóycicki, Historia literatury i poetyka [The History of Literature and Poetics], p. 61.

176

verified through literary theory’s nomological and generalizing character (given the ideographic and individualizing character of literary historical methods).254 Łempicki, finally, was the most forceful of the three scholars in contextualizing literary scholarship within the antihumanist turn in the humanities. For him, ‘the end of the nineteenth century brought the end of psychologism and a return to idealism. We have ceased to ask how something was created, but what it is, what is its essence.’255 For him, the theory of art was founded in a phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic object. He postulated a ‘pure poetics’ as an autonomous discipline. He distanced this ‘pure poetics’ from aesthetics (since it was an ‘anatomical’ analysis of an artistic object, not an aesthetic one) as well as from the psychological poetics of the creative process (since it was exclusively an analysis of the ‘creations’ of art, i.e. ‘an examination of the inner structure of those creations as such, independently of haphazard acts of creation’256). The neutrally objective validity of this research method resulted from the uncovering of objectively existing essential values, not from their subjective projection; it was rooted in Łempicki’s belief that ‘we do not create them but we find them’.257 Finally, the universal validity of research results was founded in the ‘eidological’ character of that pure poetics, which strove to work out ‘a general “canon” of describing literary works’; that canon was to produce a sort of generally applicable ‘system of categories to describe literary works’.258

254 See Wóycicki, ‘Jedność stylowa utworu poetyckiego’ [Stylistic Unity in a Poetic Work; 1914], in Teoria badań literackich w Polsce [Theory of Literary Studies in Poland], vol. 1, p. 250, as well as Wóycicki, Historia literatury i poetyka, p. 38, p. 65. On the importance of Wóycicki’s work see e.g. M. Kridl, ‘Przedmowa’ [Preface], in Prace ofiarowane Kazimierzowi Wóycickiemu [Works Dedicated to Kazimierz Wóycicki], Vilnius 1937; K. Budzyk, ‘Zarys dziejów stylistyki teoretycznej w Polsce’ [An Outline of the History of Theoretical Stylistics in Poland], in Stylistyka teoretyczna w Polsce [Theoretical Stylistics in Poland], ed. by K. Budzyk, Warsaw 1946. 255 Z. Łempicki, ‘Zasadnicze problemy współczesnego językoznawstwa’ [Key Problems in Contemporary Language Science], Eos, 1919–1920, vol. 24, pp. 81–82. 256 Łempicki, ‘W sprawie uzasadnienia poetyki czystej’ [To Justify Pure Poetics; 1921], in Studia z teorii literatury, p. 128. 257 Łempicki, ‘Spór o pogląd na świat i odrodzenie idealizmu’ [Dispute over Weltanschauung and the Rebirth of Idealism], Gazeta Lwowska, 1912, no. 196, p. 5. 258 Łempicki, ‘W sprawie uzasadnienia poetyki czystej’, p. 131. On the significance of Łempicki’s literary theoretical concepts see e.g. R. Ingarden, Przedmowa [Preface], in Łempicki, Studia z teorii literatury; Z. Mitosek, ‘Zygmunt Łempicki – status teorii wobec praktyki artystycznej’ [Zygmunt Łempicki – The Status of Theory Vis-à-Vis Artistic Practice], in Problemy literatury polskiej lat 1890–1939 [Problems of Polish

177

In broad strokes, this is how the autonomous status of ‘literaturology’ was developed along with the modern model of practicing literary theory in its basic forms: traditional (as a propedeutics to literary historical research), formal structuralist and neo-idealist259 or phenomenological and hermeneutical. At the same time, the process of internal differentiation develops, leading to the identification of basic areas: the theory of the literary work, the study of verse, stylistics and genealogy (which developed last), as well as the methodological structure that was constructed to cover them. It goes without saying that many other scholars actively participated in this theoretical and methodological movement, which would shape the new discipline for decades to come. I will only mention the contributions of two now forgotten researchers: Ada Werner-Silberstein, who in her Wstęp do estetyki nowoczesnej [Introduction to Modern Aesthetics] outlined the foundations of an objectivist phenomenological aesthetics and called for the separation of autonomous studies on art, as well as Jakub Segał, whose Estetyka form literackich [The Aesthetics of Literary Forms] represents the first modern literary stylistics based on Bally’s linguistic stylistics in Poland.260 Literature 1890–1939], ed. by H. Kirchner, Z. Żabicki and M. R. Pragłowska, Wrocław 1972; K. Sauerland, ‘Poetyka czysta (Zygmunt Łempicki)’ [Pure Poetics (Zygmunt Łempicki)], in Od Diltheya do Adorna: Studia z estetyki niemieckiej [From Dilthey to Adorno: Studies in German Aesthetics], Warsaw 1986. 259 See D. Ulicka, ‘Orientacja neoidealistyczna w literaturoznawstwie polskim okresu dwudziestolecia międzywojennego’ [The Neo-Idealistic Trend in Interwar Polish Literary Studies], in Z dziejów polskiej nauki o literaturze: Materiały sesji naukowej zorganizowanej przez Instytut Filologii Polskiej w 200 rocznicę powstania Katedry Literatury w Szkole Głównej Koronnej (22–24 listopada 1982) [From the History of Polish Literary Studies: Materials from the Conference Organized by the Institute of Polish Philology to Mark the 200th Anniversary of the Faculty of Literature at the Main Crown School (22–24 November 1982)], vol. 1, ed. by H. Markiewicz and G. Matuszek, Cracow 1987. 260 A. Werner-Silberstein, Wstęp do estetyki nowoczesnej [Introduction to Modern Aesthetics], part 1, Warsaw 1911; J. Segał, ‘Estetyka form literackich: Skrypt r. ak. 1918/1919’ [The Aesthetics of Literary Forms: A Script from the academic year 1918/1919] (Free Polish University, Warsaw; reproduced typescript). In retrospect, Werner-Silberstein’s work is valuable above all because of its call to develop phenomenological studies on the work of art, i.e. its initiation of the ‘Ingardenian’ line of thought in aesthetics and literary scholarship. Segał, though anticipated by prewar scholars such as L. Komarnicki, S. Wędkiewicz and K. Wóycicki, offers the first detailed outline of literary stylistics based on what were then ‘modern’ methodologies and research tools (introducing for instance – before Wóycicki – Bally’s notion of le

178

Wóycicki’s dichotomy of internal and external methods, meanwhile, can best be grasped in the framework of theoretically innovative literary criticism. The internal method is represented by Irzykowski’s original critical concept, which we can describe as a sort of ‘substantive’ immanent poetics of artistic inventiveness. The external method is best embodied in Brzozowski’s extremely ambitious project of philosophical criticism, which clearly outlines the foundations for an innovative method of sociological and structural analysis of discursive formations. In Poland, the phase of institutionalizing modern theory began in the mid1930s, with the now classic publications by Roman Ingarden, Manfred Kridl, Zygmunt Łempicki, Franciszek Siedlecki and others. It is Karol Irzykowski who astutely identified the moment when literary scholarship gained its new status, when it gained not only a separate object and method of study, but also became ‘self-sufficient’ in terms of its problems. It was this self-sufficiency that directly led to the emergence of an autonomous theoretical discourse and the spread of ‘self-referential’ methodological investigations. Commenting on the discussion of the Zjazd Naukowy im. I. Krasickiego (the Ignacy Krasicki scholarly conference in Lviv) in 1935, Irzykowski remarked that the situation at the time was striking for the ‘multitude of directions in literaturology,’ which led him to make the following generalization: We live in times of planism, in times of inventiveness in the field of plans, methods, theories. Not everything can or must prove its applicability, as this is a special kind of creativity, or quasi-creativity perhaps, but certainly something self-sufficient, something about which we can talk, argue, even passionately as we have seen, and about which we can dream without examples to verify. The literary scholar’s pride with respect to the artist is method, the lever, the feat through which he can congenially reveal and amplify the poet’s feat.261

The mature self-knowledge that Polish literary scholars developed in the late 1930s is eloquently documented in Łempicki’s study ‘Pozytywizm, idealizm i neopozytywizm w historii literatury’ [Positivism, Idealism and Neo-Positivism in the History of Literature], which presents remarkably accurate observations and a clear systematization. For him, the systemic and institutional (structural and pragmatistic) approach to the language, object and task of poetics harboured a style indirect libre – translated into English as ‘free indirect speech’ and into Polish as ‘mowa zależna swobodna’). On Werner-Silberstein’s book see Łempicki’s review (Przegląd Filozoficzny 1912, no. 3) and his remarks in ‘Spór o pogląd na świat’. 261 K. Irzykowski, ‘Monachomachia humanistyczna II’ [Humanistic Monachomachia II], Pion 1935, no. 26/27, my emphasis.

179

decidedly anti-individualistic cutting edge, which he saw as rooted in four basic ‘breakthrough’ tendencies: 1) the object of study is the work itself (rather than the subject, which is consciously avoided); 2) the researcher’s task is to describe the appearance of that work (rather than the process of its creation), taking into account links with related works that form a systematic whole of a higher order; 3) the description concerns structural characteristics (ignoring the process of development) seen in the framework of a certain literary (or cultural or ideological) system; 4) the meaning of the work is objective (it is independent of the psychic act, and not determined by subjective intention), but is read against the backdrop of the system in which it is realized.262 In retrospect it is easy to see that Łempicki’s insightful and far-sighted observations have remained valid in relation to the key developments of the ergocentric trend of the following three decades (in Poland these are represented by Stefania Skwarczyńska, Maria Dłuska, Kazimierz Budzyk, Maria Renata Mayenowa). From the perspective of the history of modern theory, I would treat this period as one of rebuilding (following the war and the six years of Socialist Realism) and of developing the crucial tradition that would be taken up in the earliest works of the next generation, while the older generation would continue to cultivate and to enrich it. The modern theoretical paradigm declines in the late 1960s and early 70s, which shows in two ways. On the one hand, literary theory’s dichotomy and twotier evolution as well as its basic assumption gradually disintegrate (this applies especially to essential qualities, but also to structural and systemic qualities of the individual work and of literature as a whole). On the other hand, there is an inflation of methodological research, which is supported not so much by ‘hard’ literary empiricism and its needs, but rather by an illusory sense of security that flows from its very positioning outside of practice. In 1978, Janusz Sławiński presented a groundbreaking and insightful analysis of the situation. His now canonical article ‘Zwłoki metodologiczne’ [Our Late Methodology] makes the claim that ‘the basic problems that this discipline lives on have emerged back in the interwar period,’ while the overproduction of research tools is presented as symptomatic of the barrenness of this sort of literary scholarship. Discussions on scholarly language are more and more independent of what we need to know about the object of study. […] The more we can say about them, the more they grip

262 See Z. Łempicki, ‘Pozytywizm, idealizm i neopozytywizm w historii literatury’ [Positivism, Idealism and Neo-Positivism in the History of Literature], in Studia z teorii literatury, p. 71.

180

our attention. […] The process of piling up assertions about tools and procedures has no limits – theoretically speaking. It can continue to develop forever. In this way methodology begins to live a life of its own: it is not obliged to take heed of its rootedness in the object of study – it generates its own problematics, which is arduous enough. It is not service to scholarship that constitutes its raison d’être, but self-service more than anything.263

The ‘self-sufficiency’ of methodological research used to be a new and exciting field (as Irzykowski testifies). But for Sławiński, who looks at it from the perspective of forty years of development, it has finally exhausted its possibilities, while its further development (automatic as before) risks rendering the discipline completely marginal and dysfunctional. In the 1970s and 1980s, the autonomization of literary scholarship was reversed to some extent, and previously neglected questions that legitimately fell into the remit of literary theory were brought into focus. A great variety of trends were part of this (methodologically) critical and self-critical project. These trends revolved around the role of the reader in constructing the meaning of the text (French poetics of reading, Polish theories of literary communication, German reception theory, Anglo-American reader response theories); they also included a renewed hermeneutics and history of ideas (Maria Janion in Poland), a sociology of culture (Stefan Żółkiewski in Poland), the theory of intertextuality (developed from Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and dialogic speech) as well as poststructuralism, Postmodernism and feminist criticism, not to mention many other influential but more short-lived and limited movements (such as discourse analysis, the theory of speech acts or of possible worlds). Clearly, not all of them have had as great an impact in Poland as they have elsewhere, nor did they necessarily peak at the same time. But it is precisely on account of these differences that over the last two decades of the twentieth century (at least), Polish theory began to develop independently. This independent development conditions its current state and set of problems.

The tradition as it is today There are three important reasons why I discussed these obvious things at some length. First, I did it to highlight the fact that the most generally conceived style of theoretical investigations, related to a modern understanding of scientific research, has become before our eyes a historical style in both senses of the word, i.e. both obsolete (as it does not belong anymore to the living languages that define 263 J. Sławiński, ‘Zwłoki metodologiczne’ [Our Late Methodology], in Teksty i teksty [Texts and Texts], Warsaw 1990, p. 42, pp. 39–40.

181

the discipline’s tasks) and deserving of a comprehensive, detailed and systematic analysis of its historic form and significance. Second, I hoped to emphasize that the key historical context of our present situation in Polish literary theory is the entire twenty-year period at the end of the twentieth-century (and not just the 1990s), which was essentially dominated by the theory of literary communication. Third, it is important to point out that the three movements that were most influential in the recent past (though they were somewhat amorphous) – namely poststructuralism, Postmodernism and feminist criticism (along with its spinoffs) – become more understandable, and their pars destruens acquires a clearer target, when they are seen as a criticism of the entire model of modern literary theory as an autonomous discipline. I have already discussed the first issue, so now I shall turn to the second and third. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Polish literary scholarship witnessed remarkable achievements, most of which can be attributed to individuals who shared the general assumptions, analytical techniques and conceptual repertoire of the communicative orientation in their discipline. Among the many scholars who brought about this development I would like to mention in particular Janusz Sławiński, Michał Głowiński, Edward Balcerzan, Aleksandra OkopieńSławińska, Kazimierz Bartoszyński, Stanisław Balbus, Jerzy Ziomek, Janusz Lalewicz, Ryszard Handke, Lucylla Pszczołowska and Teresa Dobrzyńska. The concepts and methodological positions proposed by these scholars conferred scientific legitimacy upon literary scholarship, which in turn ensured that literary theory acquired a privileged place within its discipline (here we should also acknowledge the fact that its proponents were involved in programmatic and organizational activities); another effect was that literary theory soon became widely accepted as an authoritative approach, which facilitated its expansion into terrains that had never been examined with tools developed by literary scholars. Many of these new discoveries had a long-lasting effect. They seem to have permanently entered our intellectual bloodstream, becoming a self-evident part of manifold research projects as well as an effective teaching tool at university level. This applies in particular to systemic or functional analysis and the literary theoretical areas related to that method, such as the theory of the work and of poetic (scil. literary) language, verse theory, genealogy (including genre tradition, the semantics of poetic and narrative utterances, structural analysis of the narration and of plot formations) as well as stylistics focused on linguistics (esp. sociolinguistics), textual theory (esp. studies on coherence and delimitation), the theory of the literary historical process (such as synchronic and diachronic aspects, the role of norms and conventions, problems of reception and the reader), 182

translation theory and multilingualism in literature, as well as research in the field of communication and literary culture (incl. in particular the ‘communicational’ movement in historical poetics). In Poland, the communicational movement in literary scholarship was always characterized by openness and flexibility. This is because belonging to this movement was not determined through any doctrine or through the study’s content, but rather through the way in which it was conducted and through a more or less consistent view on the tasks of literary scholarship. What counted in this ‘family relationship of scholarly positions’ was not a stiff corpus of doctrines, but a shared specialist language or idiom as well as a generally applicable research method that scholars continued to develop together. This development was facilitated by a number of monumental projects – undertaken individually or in teams – aimed at publishing dictionaries and encyclopaedias as well as monographs. These volumes, which formed every Polish literature scholar’s reference library, included: Słownik terminów literackich [A Dictionary of Literary Terms]264 as well as other dictionaries of the literature and literary criticism of particular epochs, such as M. R. Mayenowa’s  Poetyka teoretyczna: Zagadnienia języka [Theoretical Poetics: Problems of Language], J. Ziomek’s Retoryka opisowa [Descriptive Rhetoric], E. Sarnowska-Temeriusz’s, Zarys dziejów poetyki: Od starożytności do konca XVII wieku [An Outline of the History of Poetics: From Antiquity to the End of the 17th Century], as well as the studies that were part of the series ‘Poetyka: Zarys encyklopedyczny’ [Poetics: An Encyclopaedic Outline], which M. R. Mayenowa and L. Pszczołowska edited from 1956 until the 1990s.265 These works constitute the first modern compendium on this scale ever published in Poland, and even on the international market there are few resources that match their scope and ambition. The works are relatively uniform as far as the method of presentation and the language of description are concerned, and they draw on a coherent conceptual and terminological apparatus.

264 Słownik terminów literackich [A Dictionary of Literary Terms], ed. by M. Głowiński, T. Kostkiewiczowa, A. Okopień-Sławińska, J. Sławiński, 3rd expanded and improved edn by J. Sławiński, Wrocław 1998. 265 M. R. Mayenowa, Poetyka teoretyczna: Zagadnienia języka [Theoretical Poetics: Problems of Language], Wrocław 1974; J. Ziomek, Retoryka opisowa [Descriptive Rhetoric], Wrocław 1990; E. Sarnowska-Temeriusz, Zarys dziejów poetyki: Od starożytności do końca XVII wieku [An Outline of the History of Poetics: From Antiquity to the End of the 17th Century], Warsaw 1985; ‘Poetyka: Zarys encyklopedyczny’ [Poetics: An Encyclopaedic Outline], series ed. by M. R. Mayenowa and L. Pszczołowska, Wroclaw, 1956-.

183

The openness and flexibility of the communicational movement made it possible for its proponents to enter into dialogue with other methods, and to respond to emerging problems and new intellectual tasks by assimilating new ideas and by broadening or modifying their theoretical interests. The theory of literary communication, contained in nuce in the structural and semiotic traditions of the prewar period and enriched by information theory in the early 1960s, began to gain momentum in the early 1970s. Several new developments facilitated the flourishing of literary communication theory; these included the phenomenological concept of concretization, reception theory and the poetics of reception, as well as the theory of interpretation and the sociology of culture. It goes without saying that Polish scholars were inspired by international trends in research (above all these were Bakhtin’s works, speech act theory, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, besides the trends already mentioned). But homegrown scholarship was crucial from the outset. It was independent, original and even precursory enough to be called a Polish specialty, while the theory of literary communication can be described as a Polish variant of the late structuralist movement (given its roots) or the poststructuralist movement (on account of its consequences) in literary scholarship. In a nutshell: the communicational perspective allows us to step outside the dichotomy of ergo- and exocentric methods. It also allows us to connect the work’s internal specificity with its external functions, references and conditioning. What is more, it allows us to make this link in each of the two fundamental systems of reference, i.e. the world of literature (tradition in both the systemic and individual aspects) as well as the world of culture and everyday life (from the repertoire of cultural discourses to the practices of colloquial speech).266 Given that it occurs in this form, the theory of literary communication is a theoretical research position that has been developed in a modern way and that is continuously fruitful. It still thrives today, covering ever-new domains outside of literary communication and culture. This is evident in the groundbreaking analyses that have been proposed, since the 1980s, in areas that had previously been inaccessible on account of political and ideological restrictions on research. I have in mind especially analyses of the language of power, in particular what we call newspeak; the institutions regulating social discursive practices such as censorship; ideologized authoritarian

266 See M. Głowiński, ‘Od metod zewnętrznych i wewnętrznych do komunikacji literackiej’ [From External and Internal Methods to Literary Communication], in Poetyka i okolice [Poetics and Around Poetics], Warsaw 1992.

184

forms of literary culture such as Socialist Realism; the techniques of linguistic manipulation and of systems of control, as well as literary forms of linguistic ‘self-defence’ applied to counter those systems of control; and finally, literature’s circulation (official and unofficial or alternative) as well as its position and functioning in the realm of social life or culture as a whole.

The directions and tendencies of literary theoretical research today The theory of literary communication is, for all intents and purposes, the only critical branch of contemporary literary studies to continue to perpetuate the structuralist tradition. A variety of methodological approaches are competing with it in today’s pluralistic context. Concepts that had been in the shadows in the heyday of structuralist methodology are now taking centre stage. Crucially, however, these concepts cannot be reconciled to form one new meta-theory in the humanities. Each of them entails different methods – from hermeneutics and the history of ideas, through psychoanalysis and the sociology of culture, to cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics and theories of artificial intelligence. The structuralists privileged their own single theory and expressed their concern about the uniformity of their method and about the precise definition of the scope of that method. By contrast, the most striking characteristic of literary scholarship today – in Poland just as much as abroad – is a pluralism of positions. Different methods are used episodically. What is more, their validity is no more than historical and liable to change. Three clusters seem to be the most influential and most distinct among those positions, namely poststructuralism, Postmodernism and feminist criticism, whereby feminist criticism has expanded to give rise to something we could call the poetics of cultural difference. The most important cluster seems to be poststructuralism, which incorporates many different themes and inspirations. In Poland its development extends across the longest period. The fundamental impulse behind poststructuralism (in a broad sense) is often seen as a critique of structuralism’s essentialist assumptions and of its scientific language, which sought to assume the status of a metalanguage. If we accept this definition, then the beginnings of poststructuralism in Poland can be said to reach back to the 1970s. A critical debate emerged at that time. It focused on examining methodological instruments, questioning the validity of theoretical assumptions and asking what impact one’s scholarly position had on the objectivity of one’s description of a given object. This debate was taken up by the structural and communicational movement, whose transformation was speeded up as a consequence, while many 185

researchers ended up being situated outside the boundaries of the theory of literary communication and in the sphere of poststructuralist thought. However, poststructuralism in the narrow sense refers mainly to two fundamental variants of theory and philosophy (internalizing, one could say, the old dichotomy of internal and external methods): the ‘textual’ variant initiated by Jacques Derrida, and the ‘worldly’ variant (in Edward Said’s sense267) inspired mostly by Michel Foucault, i.e. deconstruction and new historicism. Crucially, the lability syndrome of the operational remit in each of these cases signifies something else. Deconstruction, announced as an idiosyncratic analytical technique (that must be adjusted to each object of study), also attained the status of a radical philosophical method of universal significance. New historicism, meanwhile, was based on three things: a) Foucault’s notion of conflicting tensions (between the powers of discourse and the linguistic and historical subject) – tensions that played out within discursive formations as a whole, b) methodological research on the principles of historiographical narration, and c) research on the history of mentality. Hence, new historicism was treated as a method to analyse concrete phenomena, trends or types or statement. According to some scholars, it also developed into a major programme to study entire historical cultural formations, in which case it was sometimes referred to simply as cultural poetics. As for Postmodernism, it is sometimes limited to an ensemble of aesthetic characteristics that mark art at a certain period of its development; it is also studied as a cultural and civilizational epoch, or as a way of life in post-industrial societies. Feminist criticism, finally, sometimes takes on the humble form of one among many types of thematic criticism. It is also practiced as a separate theory of literature and culture (in the form of gender criticism), or linked with various other related schools of thought that focus on internal cultural differentiation (issues surrounding minorities, heterogeneities, non-identities, difference, etc.) Characteristically, many of the literary theoretical categories that circulate today share a similar operational lability. A good example is intertextuality. In extreme cases it is defined as a stylistic phenomenon (or even as a subcategory of stylistics: stylization) or as a universal dimension of literature (and by extension: of any text). In the latter case it is seen to imply a certain understanding of the construction of the subject, its provenance, significance, relationship to the immediate and the broader context, as well as a certain view of the entirety of 267 See e.g. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge MA 1983, p. 35: ‘texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society - in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’.

186

culture and mechanisms of its transformation. A similar fate befalls many other concepts and categories in the realm of deconstruction, new historicism, Postmodernism or feminism. Many Polish scholars have applied those methods independently, and it seems likely that a significant increase in studies inspired by those trends is forthcoming. This is particularly the case with Postmodernism and feminist criticism, whose achievements are ever more noteworthy.268 And yet, we must admit that among scholars of literature and literary theory only intertextuality has managed to stir considerable interest (giving rise to a variety of studies, from microanalyses of individual texts to general characterizations of the literary historical process).269 This is understandable, especially since intertextuality is rooted in many familiar trends – theoretical, interpretive and comparative – that Polish scholars have practiced for a long time. Intertextuality functions as a ‘mediator,’ a common tool in contemporary literary studies; to adapt it is to assimilate – and to make use of – new theories and methods that are in many ways much more radical than the ones that had previously been available. But a comprehensive inventory of theoretical and methodological trends today must also account for many other movements, not only the most influential ones as listed above. The basic difficulty here lies in the fact that those most recent theories have already completed their most dynamic development; they have defined their programmes and they have delineated their spheres of reference. Changes in their character or their principal critical or constructive qualities seem unlikely. Generally speaking, they have brought about a strong critique of the paradigmatic qualities of theory until the given point (including in particular systematic or descriptive poetics) as well as a remarkable broadening regarding the tasks of historical poetics.

268 Cf. e.g.: B. Baran, Postmodernizm [Postmodernism], Cracow 1992; Postmodernizm a filozofia [Postmodernism and Philosophy], ed. by S. Czerniak and A. Szahaj, Warsaw 1996; Postmodernizm: Antologia przekładów [Postmodernism: An Anthology of Translations], ed. and introd. by R. Nycz, Cracow 1997. On feminist criticism see e.g. the special issues of Teksty Drugie, 4–6 (1993), 3/4 (1995). 269 Cf. W. Bolecki, Pre-teksty i teksty: Z zagadnień związków międzytekstowych w literaturze polskiej XX wieku [Pre-Texts and Texts: Studies in Intertextuality of 20th-Century Polish Literature], Warsaw 1991; Między tekstami: Intertekstualność jako problem poetyki historycznej [Between Texts: Intertextuality as a Problem in Historical Poetics], ed. by J. Ziomek, J. Sławiński, W. Bolecki, Warsaw 1992; S. Balbus, Między stylami [Between Styles], Cracow 1993.

187

Poststructuralist scholars have directed their sharpest criticism against scientistic claims to scholarly neutrality, supposedly warranted by the metalinguistic status of theoretical discourse. The main objects of the Postmodernists’ criticism, meanwhile, were essentialist beliefs that bestowed universal validity upon theoretical judgments. Feminist criticism, finally, focused on objectivist pronouncements concerning the homogeneity, integrity and independence of the objects of study, where feminist critics began to observe a suppressed heterogeneity, the influence of subjective limitations, conflicts of interest as well as cultural (political, social, biological) conditioning. This concentrated criticism consequently led to the discipline’s deautomatization. The discipline lost its privileged status as a science with a specific subject, but it gained the historical world of culture as a sphere to expand into – a sphere of unpredictable, irregular and ambivalent forms that were uncertain, fragmentary and subject to change.

Episodic theories If theory is a systematized cluster of general statements (on literature’s essence, variations and structure or evolution) aiming to produce a comprehensive and scientifically objective description, a classification and explanation of literary phenomena that has universal application in the discipline, then the crisis of modern theory is best documented in the production of monographs and handbooks. It would be hard to find a better example of the heroic effort to systematize the chaotic history of literary studies than Henryk Markiewicz’s Główne problemy wiedzy o literaturze [The Main Problems in Literary Studies].270 First published in 1965, expanded in five subsequent editions over the following three decades and complemented by separate volumes in the 1980s, this work testifies to the growing difficulty of creating a coherent narrative – even a very complex one. This growing difficulty affects the following areas: to present a unified cognitive action rooted in the historical diversity of methodological motives and points of view; to render the general significance of concepts that are often contingent and singular; to identify logical or causal relationships in research projects that can be scattered far and wide; to recognize probability or necessity in the episodic, unpredictable and inconsequential development of literary theory.

270 See H. Markiewicz, Główne problemy wiedzy o literaturze [The Main Problems in Literary Studies], Cracow 1965 [1st edn]; 6th edn published as vol. 3 of Prace wybrane [Selected Works], Cracow 1996.

188

In 1989, Markiewicz gave up trying to compose a great theoretical narrative.271 Given the difficulty, nay, the impossibility of formulating a single history of the intellectual adventure of understanding literature, scholars have explored other approaches: Zofia Mitosek has successfully narrated several histories of separate (but internally coherent) methodological quests, hoping that her multiple perspectives would be balanced out by the unity of the subject, while the changing point of view would allow her to discover and to describe its objective appearance.272 But it is apparent that the closer we come to the present day, the more difficult it becomes to connect those studies into an integrated portrayal of the subject, and the more often it turns out that these accounts concern various heterogeneous disciplines where literature only appears in the background. Some of the reasons why modern literary theory has lost its model image become clear when we examine the areas that are of key interest in literary theory today. These areas situate themselves – with apparent deliberateness – outside of the centre of the discipline’s problems, i.e. outside of systematic or descriptive poetics. To make things as simple as possible: a notable feature of poststructuralism is the fact that in theoretical practice it connects the interpretation of specific works (or parts of works) with a critical analysis of the methodological foundations of literary scholarship; thus it performs – under the heading of theory – those branches of it which in the standard model are considered to be infra- or metatheoretical.273

271 See Markiewicz, ‘Przedmowa’ [Preface], in Literaturoznawstwo i jego sąsiedztwa [Literary Studies and Their Environs], Warsaw 1989. 272 See Z. Mitosek, Teorie badań literackich: Przegląd historyczny [Theories of Literary Research: A Historical Overview], Warsaw 1983 [1st edn]; 3rd expanded edn: Warsaw 1995. 273 It is worth noting that this tendency brings poststructuralism – especially deconstruction – remarkably close to hermeneutics. Aside from rare exceptions (E. Staiger, P. Szondi), hermeneutics has avoided the problems of poetics that were key for modern theory. Instead, hermeneutics developed in the infra- and metatheoretical realm (interpretation, philosophy of literature and, to some extent, methodology). This explains perhaps the rapprochement and mutual influence of the two positions (which has recently been emphasized) as well as the hermeneutic motifs (though they are merely hinted at) in the present text, which sketches out the current state literary theory along with its modern genealogy. A more detailed overview of contemporary scholarship, esp. the poststructuralist orientation, can be found in my book, Tekstowy świat: Poststrukturalizm a wiedza o literaturze [A Textual World: Poststructuralism and Literary Studies], Warsaw 1993. Cf. also Po strukturalizmie: Współczesne badania teoretycznoliterackie [After Structuralism: Contemporary Literary Theoretical

189

Postmodernist thought avoids the central questions in a similar way. Its concerns are largely related to theorizing the literary historical process, and it has two main goals: first, to question the typical evolutionary mechanism (where one movement or trend strives to achieve hegemony and to impose its categories onto the other movements or trends, thus homogenizing the image of works produced during a given period); and second, to point out that mechanism’s more complex, dynamic and heterogeneous nature. Feminist criticism, finally, is a movement that decidedly ranks as high as the ones mentioned above – not so much on account of its achievements, but because the significance of its general set of problems, which represents something like ‘anti-structuralist comparative scholarship’. As we know, the structural method (which is of course essentially comparative) strives to uncover sameness in that which is different or apparently incomparable; it strives to uncover a shared order (not elements but arrangements; not concepts but their relationships) – a certain isomorphism that is best proven by the examined structure itself. The poetics of cultural difference – at whose centre is feminist criticism – seems to strive in the exact opposite direction: it reveals inextricable heterogeneity in that which appears uniform; it uncovers interwoven antinomies in that which appears identical and integrated; in that which seems similar it uncovers difference. Summing up, the recent turn in scholarly interests has generally resulted in questioning modern theory’s claims to scientific objectivity, universal applicability, truthfulness and the essentialist reasons to support the validity of its claims. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote: But the essence of our epoch is ambiguity and uncertainty. It can rest only on what is unstable, and it knows that it is unstable, whereas other generations have believed in things that were firm. A mild, chronic dizziness vibrates within it.274

This statement attests not only to a certain connectedness between the cognitive situation and weltanschauung in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But it also suggests that the rationalist model of the humanities (including ‘literaturology’) – the construction of learning according to the criteria of a fundamental though hidden order – was based not so much on overconfidence, naivety, or cognitive limitations, but in a conscious opposition to what was chaotic, formless, Research], ed. by R. Nycz, Wrocław 1992; Poetyka bez granic [Poetics Without Limits], ed. by W. Bolecki and W. Tomasik, Warsaw 1995. 274 H. von Hofmannsthal, ‘The Poet and Our Time: A Lecture’, in Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927, transl. and ed. by David S. Luft, p. 37.

190

genre-bending. These things had to be removed from the field of vision, and thus condemned to a purely negative existence. The sense of crisis that prevails today, the departure of scholarly practice from its scientific model and the departure of literary practice from conformity to systematic poetics – all these can be seen as results of admitting that multiform ‘otherness’ into public view and of giving it a voice. Many years ago, Konrad Górski gave a paper titled ‘Przegląd stanowisk metodologicznych w polskiej historii literatury do 1939 roku’ [An Outline of Methodological Positions in Polish Literary History until 1939] at the Zjazd Polonistów Polish Studies conference. Evaluating the achievements of literary scholarship, he made the following nostalgic remark: ‘[W]hen it comes to the purpose of the work of literature, [literary scholarship] has always been late by at least one generation in relation to what people in literature were searching for and expecting of it.’275 Górski then proceeded to call for increased efforts to minimize that distance. It would be hard to ascertain if his goal has been achieved, or if a certain delay is unavoidable. After all, one often hears, for example, that poststructuralism refers to the model of literature developed by the Modernist avant-garde. Here it is definitely worth keeping in mind the striking convergence, in the highly innovative era of the 1960s, between the ideas proposed by the outstanding literary scholar Bakhtin (whose works were being published at that time and remain extremely influential today) and the ideas of Beckett, perhaps the most important writer of late modernity. Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque, of heteroglossia and of the dialogism of the cultural world is naturally different in many ways from Beckett’s general, intuitive notions. He saw an opportunity for literature in discovering an infinite and unstructured form – a form that would respect the peculiarity of the chaotic experience of modernity, or in other words, a form that would acknowledge the fact that this experience of modernity eludes representation. From today’s perspective it becomes clear that despite certain important differences, these two positions have much in common. It is these shared aspects that have announced and stimulated later transformations, in both scholarship and literature. Phenomena that were hybrid, peculiar, incomprehensible, inexpressible, that had not been represented, that were insignificant, non-literary or non-aesthetic – these phenomena had usually been negated or perceived as negative on account 275 K. Górski, ‘Przegląd stanowisk metodologicznych w polskiej historii literatury do 1939 roku’ [An Outline of Methodological Positions in Polish Literary History before 1939], in Rozważania teoretyczne: Literatura – muzyka – teatr [Theoretical Considerations: Literature – Music – Theatre], Lublin 1984, p. 153.

191

of their difference. But once their real existence and positive qualities had been noticed, scholars stopped searching for a permanent foundation and hierarchical order, and began instead to accept the idea of an indivisible and unlimited wholeness of cultural experience. The relations between literature and theory – or perhaps we should better say: the relations between literature and historical cultural poetics – that emerged in these circumstances take on the form of mutual connections. Those connections reveal their kinship – their equally multiform and heterogeneous nature, which lacks all specificity and which is permeated with the influence of the discursive universe of culture. To conclude: when contemporary theory is labelled pluralistic, labile, fragmentary and relative (i.e. only locally valid), its field of application broadens to include the discourses of other disciplines in the humanities as well as the realms of semiotically inspired practices of social life and culture. To renounce the universal or essentialist claims – in the sense of general and permanent value – of theoretical statements entails two things: first, a proliferation of ‘medium-range’ theories (which are limited to a specific movement, period, poetics or type of discourse), and second, the agility of episodic theories (generally concerned with micro-structures, selected aspects or dimensions of literary phenomena), which conjointly spread much farther, beyond the strictly literary sphere of theory as previously understood, though this spread occurs in a manner that is disparate, haphazard and individual. Perhaps it is still too early to think about constructing a new and integrated literary theory, given that ‘tectonic movements’ in the humanities as a whole have been noticed more and more frequently in recent years. On the one hand, the humanities seem to be undergoing a transformation that is analogous to the processes described above. But on the other hand, the consideration of neighbouring disciplines – the qualities of their scientific language, their techniques and analytical procedures – leads to the observation that those cognitive tools carry figurative qualities; it also leads to the uncovering of their literary (or paraliterary) provenance. This often results in a tendency to draw on literary scholarly instruments and methodologies, as well as a gradual acceptance of the ‘literary’ qualities of one’s own philosophical or scholarly discourse, or even acquiescence when it comes to revealing and thematizing one’s own subjectivity as a scholar as well as one’s own preferences and cognitive conditioning. These symptoms indicate that the very positioning of literary scholarship within the humanities is changing (or could change), and, by extension, that literary theory’s status, function and reach are also liable to change. For apparent reasons, this may determine its preferred structure and desired operational qualities. 192

Selected Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Sztuka i sztuki, Wybór esejów, przeł. K. Krzemień-Ojak, red. K. Sauerland, Warszawa 1990 Barthes, Roland, The Rustle of Language, transl by R. Howard, Oxford 1986 Baudoin de Courteney, J.N., O języku polskim, oprac. J. Basara, M. Szymczak, Warszawa 1984 Bauman, Zygmunt, Wieloznaczność nowoczesna, nowoczesność wieloznaczna, przeł. J. Bauman, Warszawa 1995 Bell, Daniel, Kulturowe sprzeczności kapitalizmu, przeł. S. Amsterdamski, Warszawa 1994 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl by J. Osborne, with an Introd. By G. Steiner, London 1990 Berent, Wacław, Pisma rozproszone. Listy, red. W. Bolecki, R. Nycz, Kraków 1992 Bergson, Henri, Ewolucja twórcza, przeł. F. Znaniecki, Warszawa 1913 Bergson Henri, Myśl i ruch. Dusza i ciało, przeł. P. Beylin, K. Błeszyński, Warszawa 1963 Bruner, James, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, Mass, 1986 Bruns, Gerald, Modern Poetry and Idea of Language. A Critical and Historical Study, New Haven 1974 Brzozowski, Stanisław, Dzieła t. 1–3, pod red. M. Sroki, Warszawa 1973–1988; tenże, Idee. Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej, Lwów 1910, tenże, Legenda Młodej Polski. Studia o strukturze duszy kulturalnej, Lwów 1910, tenże, Głosy wśród nocy. Studia nad przesileniem romantycznym kultury europejskiej, Lwów 1912 Carroll, David, The Subject in Question. The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction, Chicago 1982 De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis 1983 Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, New York 1992 Fokkema, DouweW, Historia literatury. Modernizm i postmodernizm, przeł. H. Janaszek-Ivanickova, Warszawa 1994 Głowiński, Michał, Powieść młodopolska. Studium z poetyki historycznej, Wrocław 1969 Głowiński, Michał, Poetyka i okolice, Warszawa 1992 Gombrowicz, Witold, Varia, Paryż 1973 193

Irzykowski, Karol, Pisma, t. 1– 7, pod red. A. Lama, Kraków 1976–1982 Janik, A. Toulmin Stephen, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York 1973 Kleiner, Studia z zakresu literatury i filozofii, Warszawa 1925 Kubler, Georg, Kształt czasu. Uwagi o historii rzeczy, przeł. J. Hołówka, warszawa 1970 Leśmian, Bolesław, Szkice literackie, oprac. J. Trznadel, Warszawa 1959 Lipski, Jan Józej, Twórczość Jana Kasprowicza w latach 1891–1906, Warszawa 1975 Lodge, David, Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, London 1977 Lukacs, Gyorgy, Teoria powieści. Esej historyczno-filozoficzny o wielkich formach epiki, przeł. J. Goślicki, posłowie A. Brodzka, warszawa 1968 Łempicki, Zygmunt, Wybór pism, t. 2: Studia z teorii literatury, pod red. H. Markiewicza, Warszawa 1966 Mach, Ernst, Odczyty popularno-naukowe, przeł. S. Kramsztyk, Łódź 1899 Majewski, Erazm, Nauka o cywilizacji t. 1–2, Warszawa 1911 Markiewicz, Henryk, Polska nauka o literaturze. Zarys rozwoju, Warszawa 1985 Markiewicz, Henryk, Świadomość literatury. Rozprawy i szkice, Warszawa 1985 Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley 1985 Możejko, Edward, Modernizm literacki: niejasność terminu i dychotomia kierunku, „Teksty Drugie” 1994 no 5/6 Nietzsche, Fryderyk, Dzieła t. 1–13, tłum W. Berent i inni, Warszawa 1905–1913 Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Maria, Symbolizm i symbolika w poezji Młodej Polski. Teoria i praktyka, Kraków 1975 Pomirowski, Leon, Doktryna a twórczość. Rzecz o współczesnej krytyce, najnowszej prozie i dramacie, Warszawa 1928 Potocki, Antoni, Polska literatura współczesna, Warszawa 1912 Przyboś, Julian, Linia i gwar. Szkice t. 1–2, Kraków1959 Riffaterre, Syllepsis, “Critical Inquiery” vo. 6 no 4 1980 Rozwadowski, Jan, Wybór pism, t. 1–3, Warszawa 1960 Schleifer, R., Rhetoric and Death, The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Theory, Urbana 1990 Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism. Pound, Eliot, and Early 20th-century Thought, Princeton 1985 Simmel, Georg, Filozofia pieniądza, przeł. L. Belmont, Warszawa 1904 194

Sławiński, Janusz, Teksty i teksty, Warszawa 1990 Stankiewicz, Edward, Baudoin de Courteney a podstawy współczesnego językoznawstwa, Wrocław 1986 Steiner, George, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation, London 1975 Steiner, George, Real Presences, Chicago 1989 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass. 1989 Thiher, Allen, Words in Reflection. Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago 1984 Wyka, Kazimierz, Młoda Polska t. 1–2, Kraków 1977 Zijderveld, Anton, On Cliches. The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity, London 1979 Ziomek, Jerzy, Pisma ostatnie. Literatura i nauka o literaturze, Warszawa 1994 Znaniecki, Florian, Pojęcie „rozumu” w filozofii współczesnej, „Tygodnik Polski” 1912 nr 32

195

Index of Names A Adamczewski Stanisław  41 Adorno Theodor W.  78, 91, 178, 193 Agacinski Silviane  124 Amossy Ruth  64 Amsterdamski Stefan  193 Appel Karol  44, 49, 50, 53, 57 Aristotle 122–124 Asnyk Adam  46 Attridge Derek  31, 193 Avenarius Richard  80 B Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich  151, 181, 184, 191 Baczko Bronisław  106 Baczyński Stanisław  26, 27, 30, 33 Balbus Stanisław  42, 182, 187 Balcerzan Edward  182 Bally Charles  178 Bandrowski Bronisław  44 Baran Bogdan  79, 187 Barth John  97 Barthes Roland  77, 78, 98, 193 Bartoszyński Kazimierz  182 Basara Jan  51, 193 Baudelaire Charles  58, 59 Baudouin de Courtenay Jan  44, 51, 52, 54, 144 Bauman Zygmunt  34, 66, 193 Baynes Kenneth  117 Beaufret Jan  78 Beckett Samuel  96, 191 Bell Daniel  34, 193 Belmont Leo  194 Benjamin Walter  91, 92, 193 Benn Gottfrid  89

Berent Wacław  9, 11–13, 15, 24, 26, 27, 36, 41, 46, 47, 85, 87, 164, 193, 194 Bergson Henri  30, 33, 35, 42, 47, 49, 56, 59, 60, 80, 84, 100, 108, 110, 113, 122, 127,128, 139, 140, 143, 144, 149, 161, 193 Bertens Hans  160 Beylin Paweł  193 Białostocki Jan  37 Białoszewski Miron  76, 97, 98 Bieńkowska Danuta  41 Blumenberg Hans  117 Błachowski Stefan  44 Błeszyński Kazimierz Jan  193 Bohman James  117 Bolecki Włodzimierz  85, 97, 146, 164, 187, 190, 193 Booth Wayne  95 Borzym Stanisław  42 Bouvier R.  32 Boy-Żeleński Tadeusz see Żeleński Tadeusz  Brandys Kazimierz  97, 98, 100 Breza Tadeusz  90 Brodzka Alina  14, 194 Brückner Aleksander  43, 45, 46 Bruner Jerome  99, 100, 193 Bruns Gerald  73, 193 Brzękowski Jan  91, 155 Brzozowska Antonina  105 Brzozowski Stanisław  8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 26, 30, 33, 35–37, 47, 53, 59–63, 65, 67, 69–72, 79, 85, 86, 89, 92, 94, 100, 105–122, 124–134, 140, 150, 155, 159–162, 164, 179, 193 Buczkowski Leopold  96

197

Budzyk Kazimierz  177, 180 Bujnicki Tadeusz  42 Bukowska-Schielmann Miłosława  24 Burek Tomasz  14, 106, 120, 160 C Carpenter Bogdana  91 Carroll David  79, 193 Cascardi Anthony J.  79 Cassirer Ernst  110 Cataluccio Francesco M.  81 Cesarski Wojciech  66 Chmielecki Andrzej  113 Choromański Leon  90, 92, 93, 164 Christiansen Broader  144 Chwat Aleksander (Aleksander Wat)  14, 97, 155 Chwistek Leon  141 Croce Benedetto  49, 142 Cicero see Marcus Tullius Cicero Czarnawska Mirosława  79 Chekhov Anton  133 Czechowicz Józef  30, 75, 87, 94 D Dante Alighieri  123 Dąbrowolska Hanna M.  164, 165 Dąbrowska Maria  46 Dąbrowski Stanisław  166 Dąbrowski Tadeusz  56, 164 Deleuze Gilles  197 Derrida Jacques  31, 78, 91, 112, 124, 186, 193, 194 Descombes Vincent  132 D’haen Théo  160 Dilthey Wilhelm  171, 178 Dłuska Maria  41, 180 Dobosz Andrzej  89 Dobrzyńska Teresa  182 Dowling Linda  54, 63 Du Bois Reymond Émile  59 Dzióbałtowska-Chciuk Urszula  41 198

E Eco Umberto  65 Edschmid Kazimierz  142 Eiger Stefan Marek (Stefan Napierski)  89 Eliot Thomas Stearns  33, 89, 194 Erlich Victor  148 Ermatinger Emiel  174 F Federman Raymond  97 Feingold Hersz (Jan Stur)  35 Feldman Józef  62, 107 Fokkema Donwe W.  29, 193 Foster Hal  91 Foucault Michel  16, 73, 78–80, 112, 186, 194 France Anatol see Thiboult François Anatole  Frege Friedrich L. G.  55 Freud Sigmund  67, 198 Fryde Ludwik  13 G Galle Henryk  173 Gałecki Tadeusz (Andrzej Strug)  42 Gębala Stanislaw  42 Giles P.  44 Gilot François  124 Glass Grzegorz  140, 144 Głowacki Aleksander (Bolesław Prus)  46 Głowala Wojciech  36, 124, 147, 152, 164 Głowiński Michał  12, 15, 34, 36, 41, 42, 117, 126–128, 164, 182–184, 193 Goczołowa Zofia  41 Goldstein Julius  59 Goliński Zbigniew  17 Gombrowicz Witold  30, 37, 80, 91, 97–99, 102, 104, 173, 193, 198 Gomulicki Wiktor  154

Goodman Nelson  99 Goślicki Janusz  194 Górski Konrad  174, 191 Grabowski Bronisław  173 Grabowski Tadeusz  172 Grabowski Zbigniew  90 Grodziński Eugeniusz  52 Gross Emil  149 Grot Jerzy see Potocki Antoni  Gruszecka Aniela  90 Grydzewski Mieczysław  35 Gryglewicz Tomasz  11 Grzymała-Siedlecki Adam (Ludwik Gumplowicz, Quis)  51 Gumplowicz Ludwi see GrzymałaSiedlecki Adam  H Handke Ryszard  182 Handwerk Gary T.  89, 95 Hassan Ihab  79, 99 Hassan Sally  99 Hawkes Terence  132 Hebbel Friedrich Ch.  64, 132, 136, 139, 147, 162, 165 Helbig Gerhard  53, 54 Heidegger Martin  56, 57, 78, 111, 194 Heinz Adam  49, 55 Heller Agnes  65 Helsztyński Stanisław  81, 153 Herbert Zbigniew  92 Hofmannsthal Hugo von  142, 143, 190 Hölderlin Friedrich  73 Holland Norman  99 Holz Arno  146 Hołówka Jacek  194 Horzyca Wilam  35 Howard Richard  77, 98, 193 Hughes H. Stuart  33 Hugo Victor  142, 190 Hulewicz Bohdan  155

Hultberg Peer  41 Hunter Lynette  92 Husserl Edmund  164 Hutcheon Linda  65 I Ingarden Roman  174, 177, 179 Irzykowski Karol  8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 20, 26, 30, 32, 33, 35–38, 47, 52, 53, 56, 58, 61–63, 67–70, 72, 86, 88, 89, 121, 129, 132, 135–166, 174, 179, 181, 194 Iwaszkiewicz Jarosław  155 J James William  32, 33, 56, 59, 60, 100 Janaszek-Ivanicková Halina  193 Janik Michał  44, 194 Janion Maria  16, 17, 28, 181 Jankowski Jerzy  64, 65 Jauss Hans Robert  172 Jaworski Roman  41, 47, 92 Jaworski Stanisław  91 K Kaden-Bandrowski Juliusz  15, 30, 41, 137 Kafka Franz  67, 91 Kant Immanuel  141 Karpowicz Tymoteusz  96 Kasprowicz Jan  15, 82, 194 Katicic Radosław  52 Katz Steve  97 Katzenellenbogen Oskar (Ostap Ortwin)  63, 70, 79, 105 Kelles-Krauz Kazimierz  58, 65, 66 Kęsikowa Urszula  41 Kierkegaard Søren  33, 94 Kirchner Hanna  160, 178 Kisielewski Stefan  89 Kisielewski Zygmunt  93 Klee Paul  92, 124 199

Kleiner Juliusz  36, 172–176, 194 Klemensiewicz Zenon  41 Kłosiński Krzysztof  15 Kodisowa Józefa  107 Kołakowski Leszek  33, 80, 118, 127 Komarnicki Lucjusz  178 Koniński Karol Ludwik  136 Konwicki Tadeusz  97 Kopania Jerzy  79 Korzeniewska Ewa  58 Koss Agata  15 Kostkiewiczowa Teresa  28, 183 Kozłowski Mieczysław (Mieczysław Jerzy Rytard)  155 Kramsztyk Stanisław  194 Krasicki Ignacy  179 Krasuski Eugeniusz  67 Kridl Manfred  120, 177, 179 Krokiewicz Adam  53 Krysiński Wladymir  160 Krzemień-Ojak Krystyna  193 Krzysztoszek Wiesław  91 Krzywicki Ludwik  12, 65, 66 Kubler Georg  37, 194 Kuhn Thomas  16 Kuryłowicz Jerzy  54 Kulczycka Jadwiga  149 Kurek Jalu  97 Kuźma Erazm  15, 42, 79, 153 Kwiatkowska Maria  11, 12, 18, 19, 41, 42, 60, 85, 87, 194 Kwiatkowski Jerzy  41 L Labrunie Gérard (Gérard Nerval)  73 Lacan Jacques  89, 95, 198 Lack Stanisław  36, 124 Łagowski Bronisław  120 Lake Carlton  124 Lalak Mirosław  79 Lalewicz Janusz  182 Lam Andrzej  160, 163, 194 200

Lang Candance D.  78, 79, 95 Lange Antoni  42, 47, 60, 128 Lash Scott  29 Le Bon Gustavé  59 Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm  122 Lemański Jan  42, 47 Łempicka Aniela  24 Łempicki Zygmunt  44, 173, 174, 176–180, 194 Lentricchia Frank  79 Leśmian Bolesław  9, 11, 12, 15, 26, 30, 33, 37, 41, 47, 59–62, 67, 68, 72, 75, 84, 86–88, 94, 101, 102, 124, 128, 194 Leszczyński Edward  47 Lewandowski Tomasz  56 Liebert Jerzy  32 Lipski Jan Józef  15, 194 Lodge David  140, 194 Lorenc Iwona  57 Lukács György  94, 129, 194 M Mach Ernst  32, 33, 58, 59, 80, 89, 194 Maciąg Włodzimierz  79 Maciejewski Janusz  16, 17 Magala Sławomir  66 Magnuszewski Dominik  41 Majewski Erazm  44, 51, 52, 100, 101, 194 Makowiecki Andrzej Z.  15 Malinowski Bronisław  34 Mallarmé Stéphane  42, 73 Man Paul de  93, 193 Mandelsztam Osip  62 Marcus Tulliusz Cicero (Cicero)  117 Markiewicz Henryk  14, 18, 25, 106, 120, 126, 147, 172, 174, 175, 178, 188, 189, 194 Marx Karl  133 Matuszek Gabriela  178

Matuszewski Ignacy  12, 24–26, 47, 48, 58, 60, 83, 84 Mauthner Fritz  44, 53, 56 Mayenowa Maria Renata  180, 183 McCarthy Thomas  117 McLaughlin Thomas  79 Megill Allan  112, 194 Mencwel Andrzej  67, 85, 106, 120 Meredith George  89, 90 Michalski Krzysztof  56 Miciński Tadeusz  15, 32, 42, 43, 47, 92, 93, 155, 161 Mickiewicz Adam  46, 141 Miller James Hillis  44 Miłosz Czesław  14, 75, 87, 94, 106, 142, 157 Minkiewicz Romuald  86 Miodońska-Brookes Ewa  11, 24 Miriam see Przesmycki Zenon  Mitosek Zofia  177, 189 Młynarski Feliks  53, 164 Mochnacki Maurycy  123, 124 Monat Henryk  81 Morawski Stefan  16, 17, 37 Możejko Edward  75, 194 N Nałkowska Zofia  27, 90, 137 Napierski Stefan see Stefan Marek Eiger  Natoli Joseph  65 Nehamas Alexander  79 Nerval Gérard de see Gérard Labrunie  Nichols Stephen G.  96 Niesiołowski Tymon  121 Nietzsche Friedrich  30, 33, 35, 44, 49, 54–56, 59, 65, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88, 100, 108, 111, 113, 117, 127, 128, 140, 143, 145, 150, 161, 164, 194, 197 Norwid Cyprian  155 Nowaczyński Adolf  13, 47

Nycz Ryszard  77, 85, 164, 168, 187, 190, 193, 198, 199 O Okopień-Sławińska Aleksandra  182, 183 Ołtuszewski Władysław  43 Ong Walter J.  65 Ortwin Ostap see Katzenellenbogen Oskar  Osborne John  91, 193 P Pajzderska Paulina  81 Paszek Jerzy  15, 41 Paul Hermann  49, 50, 144 Pease Donald E.  79 Peiper Tadeusz  75, 91, 156 Perniola Mario  65 Piaget Jean  132 Picasso Pablo  124 Pieróg Stanisław  124 Pigoń Stanisław  25, 41 Plato 177 Plotinus 123 Podraza-Kwiatkowska Maria  11, 12, 18, 19, 41, 42, 60, 85, 87, 194 Poincaré Henri  33 Pomirowski Leon  27, 194 Popiel Jacek  24 Porębowicz Edward  44 Porębski Mieczysław  16, 17 Poświatowska Halina  97 Potocki Antoni (Jerzy Grot)  18–29, 36, 60, 104, 194 Pound Ezra  33, 194 Pragłowska Maria Renata  160, 178 Prokop Jan  15, 43, 49, 51 Prus Bolesław see Głowacki Aleksander Przesmycki Zenon (Miriam)  23, 58, 62, 107, 121, 162 201

Przyboś Julian  46, 75, 76, 87, 155, 156, 194 Przybylski Ryszard  15, 62 Przybyszewski Stanisław  19, 41, 47, 81, 82, 84, 85, 111, 127, 135, 142, 153, 154 Pszczołowska Lucylla  182, 183 Puchalska Mirosława  15, 42 Q Quilligan Maureen  92 Quis see Grzymała-Siedlecki Adam  R Radliński Ignacy  67 Raulet Gerard  79 Read Herbert  31, 65 Rewers Ewa  67, 197 Reymont Władysław  41, 46, 48 Rickert Heinrich  171 Riffaterre Michel  96, 194 Rimbaud Jean Arthur  73, 155, 156 Rimmon-Kenan Shlonith  95 Rogatko Bogdan  160 Rolicz-Lieder Wacław  41 Rosaldo Michelle  100 Rosen Elisheva  64 Rozwadowski Jan  33, 44, 48, 53, 60, 61, 144, 194 Różewicz Tadeusz  76, 96 Rubczyński Witold  44 Rytard Jerzy Mieczysław see Kozłowski Mieczysław  Rzeuska Maria  41 S Saint-Simon Claude Henri de  16 Saloni Zygmunt  144 Sanavio Piero  81 Sandler Samuel  26, 60, 84 Sapir Edward  114 Sauerland Karol  178, 193 202

Saussure Ferdinand de  49, 55, 150 Sawrycki Władysław  174 Schelling Friedrich W. J.  79, 123 Schlegel Friedrich  89, 95 Schleifer Ronald  44, 194 Schopenhauer Arthur  57, 59 Schulz Bruno  30, 66, 94 Schwartz Stanford  33, 194 Searle John  55, 56 Segał Jakub  178 Shapiro Meyer  44 Siedlecki Franciszek  149, 179 Simmel Georg  33, 34, 66–68, 73, 84, 100, 101, 119, 128, 150, 161, 194 Skarga Barbara  16 Skiwski Jan Emil  163 Skubalanka Teresa  41 Skwarczyńska Stefania  175, 180 Sławinski Janusz  76, 162, 180–183, 187, 195 Słowacki Juliusz  38, 60 Sobeski Michał  128 Socrates 94 Sorel Georges  108, 110, 113, 127, 128, 161 Sosnowski Jerzy  11 Spytkowski Józef  120 Sroka Mieczysław  105, 106, 110 Stachura Edward  97 Staff Leopold  88, 108 Staiger Emil  189 Stankiewicz Edward  44, 54, 195 Stein Ignacy  46, 47 Steiner George  72, 73, 91, 193, 195 Steiner Peter  148 Stern Anatol  160 Stern Josef Peter  44 Strong Trący B.  44 Strug Andrzej see Gałecki Tadeusz Struve Henryk  56 Stuart Hughes H.  33 Stur Jan see Feingold Hersz

Sukenick Ronald  97 Sypher Wylie  65 Szaruga Leszek  11 Szary-Matywiecka Ewa  152 Szczerba Lew W.  144 Szober Stanisław  52 Szondi Peter  189 Szturc Włodzimierz  95 Szycówna Aniela  50 Szymańska Beata  42 Szymczak Mieczysław  51, 193 T Taranienko Zbigniew  98 Tarn Adam  90 Tatarkiewicz Władysław  123 Taylor Charles  85, 195 Tetmajer Kazimierz  12, 19, 38, 41, 46 Thiboult François Anatole (Anatol France)  63 Thiher Allen  55, 56, 195 Todorov Tzvetan  156 Tomasik Wojciech  190 Toulmin Stephen  44, 194 Trznadel Jacek Ryszard  15, 33, 62, 68, 86, 194 Turner William  141 Tuwim Julian  32, 75, 155 U Uitti Karl D.  82 Ulicka Danuta  178 Ulmer Gregory L.  91 Urbańczyk Stanisław  45, 61 V Vogel Debora  90 Vossler Karl  49, 171 W Walas Teresa  15, 158 Waldrop Rosemarie  44

Walicki Andrzej  36, 105, 106, 109, 111 Wasilewski Zygmunt  65, 82 Wat Aleksander see Chwat Aleksander  Ważyk Adam  14, 91 Weber Max  73 Weiler Gershon  44 Weiss Tomasz  126 Welsch Wolfgang  79 Werner Andrzej  15, 66 Werner-Silberstein Ada  164, 178, 179 Wędkiewicz Stanisław  178 Wierzbicka Anna  52 Wierzyński Kazimierz  32, 35, 75 Wilde Allen  95 Wilde Oscar  139–141, 143, 149 Windelband Wilhelm  171 Witkacy zob. Witkiewicz Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Stanisław Ignacy (Witkacy)  15, 30, 97, 141, 155, 156, 162 Wittgenstein Ludwig  44, 55, 194 Wize Kazimierz Filip  44 Wocial Jerzy  112 Wojaczek Rafał  97 Wojciechowski Konstanty  174 Wojtak Maria  41 Woroszylski Wiktor  97, 99 Worringer Wilhelm  33 Wóycicki Kazimierz  172–174, 176–179 Wroczyński Jan  121 Wundt Wilhelm  51 Wyka Kazimierz  12, 13, 16, 18, 25, 66, 133, 134, 195 Wyka Marta  14, 120, 126 Wyskiel Wojciech  66 Wyspiański Stanisław  24, 41, 46, 47, 63, 68, 106, 129, 155 203

Z Żabicki Zbigniew  160, 178 Zaleski Zygmunt Lubicz  65 Zawiliński Roman  46, 47 Żeleński Tadeusz (Tadeusz BoyŻeleński)  13, 30, 47, 162 Żeromski Stefan  12, 13, 25–27, 41, 46–48, 62, 83, 108, 125, 137, 144 Zieliński Jan  97 Zijderveld Anton  63, 64, 195

204

Zimand Roman  15, 106, 158 Ziomek Jerzy  14, 16, 182, 183, 187, 195 Żmigrodzka Maria  16, 17 Znaniecki Florian  33, 34, 112, 127, 193, 195 Żółkiewski Stefan  28, 181 Żuławski Jerzy  129, 154 Żyrmunski Wiktor M.  149

Literary and Cultural Theory General editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga Vol. 1

Wojciech H. Kalaga: Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject. 1997.

Vol. 2

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Memory – Remembering – Forget­ ting. 1999.

Vol. 3

Piotr Fast: Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History. Socialist Realism and its Others. 1999.

Vol. 4

Ewa Rewers: Language and Space: The Poststructuralist Turn in the Philosophy of Culture. 1999.

Vol.

Floyd Merrell: Tasking Textuality. 2000.

5

Vol. 6

Tadeusz Rachwał / Tadeusz Slawek (eds.): Organs, Organisms, Organisations. Organic Form in 19th-Century Discourse. 2000.

Vol. 7

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał: Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real. 2000.

Vol. 8

Tadeusz Rachwal: Labours of the Mind. Labour in the Culture of Production. 2001.

Vol. 9

Rita Wilson / Carlotta von Maltzan (eds.): Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Litera­ ture and Culture in Africa and Beyond. 2001.

Vol. 10 Leszek Drong: Masks and Icons. Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography. 2001. Vol. 11 Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Exile. Displacements and Mis­ placements. 2001. Vol. 12 Marta Zajac: The Feminine of Difference. Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and Contempora-ry Critique of the Marquis de Sade. 2002. Vol. 13 Zbigniew Bialas / Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (eds.): Alchemization of the Mind. Literature and Dissociation. 2003. Vol. 14 Tadeusz Slawek: Revelations of Gloucester. Charles Olsen, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Writing of the Place. 2003. Vol. 15 Carlotta von Maltzan (ed.): Africa and Europe: En/Countering Myths. Essays on Literature and Cultural Politics. 2003. Vol. 16 Marzena Kubisz: Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture. 2003. Vol. 17 Ewa Rychter: (Un)Saying the Other. Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language. 2004. Vol. 18 Ewa Borkowska: At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Oth­ er(ness). 2005. Vol. 19 Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite. 2005. Vol. 20 Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere. 2005.

Vol. 21 Katarzyna Ancuta: Where Angels Fear to Hover. Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror. 2005. Vol. 22 Piotr Wilczek: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication. 2005. Vol. 23 Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Glebae Adscripti. Troping Place, Region and Nature in America. 2005. Vol. 24 Zbigniew Białas: The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. 2006. Vol. 25 Katarzyna Nowak: Melancholic Travelers. Autonomy, Hybridity and the Mater­ nal. 2007. Vol. 26 Leszek Drong: Disciplining the New Pragmatism. Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. 2007. Vol. 27 Katarzyna Smyczyńska: The World According to Bridget Jones. Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions. 2007. Vol. 28 Wojciech H. Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Multicultural Dilemmas. Identity, Difference, Otherness. 2008. Vol. 29 Maria Plochocki: Body, Letter, and Voice. Construction Knowledge in Detective Fiction. 2010. Vol. 30 Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis: Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 2009. Vol.

31 Sonia Front: Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. 2009.

Vol. 32 Wojciech Kalaga / Jacek Mydla / Katarzyna Ancuta (eds.): Political Correctness. Mouth Wide Shut? 2009. Vol. 33 Paweł Marcinkiewicz: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Am­ mons. 2009. Vol. 34 Wojciech Małecki: Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. 2010. Vol. 35 Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Cartographies of Culture. Memory, Space, Representation. 2010. Vol. 36 Bożena Shallcross / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): The Effect of Pamplisest. Culture, Litera­ ture, History. 2011. Vol. 37 Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz / Jacek Mydla (eds.): A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture? 2011. Vol.

38 Anna Chromik: Disruptive Fluidity. The Poetics of the Pop Cogito. 2012.

Vol.

39 Paweł Wojtas: Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics. 2014.

Vol.

40 Marcin Mazurek: A Sense of Apocalypse. Technology, Textuality, Identity. 2014.

Vol. 41 Charles Russell / Arne Melberg / Jarosław Płuciennik / Michał Wróblewski (eds.): Critical Theory and Critical Genres. Contemporary Perspectives from Poland. 2014. Vol. 42 Marzena Kubisz: Resistance in the Deceleration Lane. Velocentrism, Slow Culture and Everyday Practice. 2014. Vol.

43 Bohumil Fořt: An Introduction to Fictional Worlds Theory. 2016.

Vol. 44 Agata Wilczek: Beyond the Limits of Language. Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse. 2016. Vol. 45 Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse I. Origines, Iberia, Slavia et Europa Media. 2016. Vol. 46 Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse II. Britannia, Germania et Scandinavia. 2016. Vol. 47 Julia Szołtysek: A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual. 2016. Vol. 48 Manyaka Toko Djockoua: Cross-Cultural Affinities. Emersonian Transcendental­ ism and Senghorian Negritude. 2016. Vol. 49 Ryszard Nycz: The Language of Polish Modernism. Translated by Tul’si Bhambry. 2017. www.peterlang.com