Beauty and the Novel
Przemysław Czapliński
0000-00-00Which novels of the nineties are the most beautiful? The ones that have a story to tell: long, extensive novels, written with verve, born out of epic intentions, and referring to the epic tradition. But there is also something to be said for novels that appeal to the aesthetics of beauty. As the readers of Joyce, Henry Miller, Celine, or Tadeusz Borowski know, not all novels do so. To achieve beauty in novels written after these towering masters of tawdriness, it is necessary to do more than reveal the bare existence of beauty. A floodbarrier must be constructed around the revealed beauty, to protect it against all the the literary means that threaten to turn existence into a travesty. In short, it is necessary to show that even the most painstaking representation of reality contains something that cannot be represented, something inexpressible.
The most beautiful Polish novels of the nineties are Hanemann and Esther by Stefan Chwin, Weiser Dawidek by Pawel Huelle, Sny i kamienie and W czerwieni by Magdalena Tulli, Zaglada and Zmierzchy i poranki by Piotr Szewc, Widnokrag by Wieslaw Mysliwski, Prawiek i inne czasy by Olga Tokarczuk, Opowiesci galicyjskie by Andrzej Stasiuka, and Inne rozkosze by Jerzy Pilch. These novels have something more in common than the fact that they refer to the epic tradition. Beyond that, each of them is concerned with the regional color or local patriotism of what is referred to in Polish as a 'minor homeland.' This is not to say, however, that they hew faithfully to the direction pointed out by the works Milosz, Vincenz, Wittlin, Konwicki, Kusniewicz and others, or that they resemble the novels of Günter Grass, Horst Bieneke, Johannes Bobrowski, or Sigfried Lenz. In works written in the Nineties, there arose a forthright questioning of the key characteristics of the image of the 'little homeland.' The idea was to show that the little homeland, in its earlier form, could no longer exist. There were many reasons for this.
Above all, the regions that writers presented--Stefan Chwin's Warsaw, Pawel Huelle's Gdansk, Marek Jastrzebiec-Mosakowski's East Prussia, or Olga Tokarczuk's village of Prawiek-are just as real as they are independent of geographical and historical maps. Or perhaps they constitute an alternative map. Endowed with their own history and founded on myths of a golden age, they exist sui generis as a kind of proving ground for writers, as a space where authors can work out one of the possible variations on the birth, development, and collapse of a community. Despite the fact that they exist on the margins of history and the edges of the maps, these communities suffer the same things that happen to capitals and heartlands. This essential historical identity, which depends on the fact that it is possible to experience th same things at the edges of the map as in its center, is what leads today's little homelands to question the division between the center and the margin. This is a fundamental change in relation to the previous conventions.
The reality that is most obviously called into question by the literature of the Nineties is the myth of Arcadia. The prose of the Sixties and Seventies maintained a vision of the potential for the continuing existence of a tolerant community that would permit all individuals to be themselves, while at the same time leading those individuals through an inspiring ritual of initiation into an organic culture. It also illustrated the defeat of the community in the confrontation with History that intruded from outside, a history full of divisions between the familiar and the alien, the equal and the more equal, the correct and the incorrect. This History was dominated by mutually exclusive alternatives that were sources of conflicts. It ruled through hatred, violence, and a drive for control-and even by purging the Arcadian regions of everyone who lived there, with the exception of the 'most correct.' In the newest works, history does not intrude from outside, but rather emerges from within, as if it had been existing in a hidden way, waiting for an occasion to reveal its destructive power. It is set in motion by everything associated with hierarchical divisions and discriminatory differences. These books attempt to convince us that this drive for differentiation and domination is not something external to the community or the individual, but rather an inborn trait in each of us. Perhaps the strongest degree of disbelief in the basic myth of local patriotism, the myth of tolerance, is expressed in Chwin's novels Hanemann and Esther, where the author demonstrates that, in a multi-ethnic collective, there are as many hatreds as there are differences. Openness to the Other on one side, and intolerance on the other, are not, therefore, alternative models of society, but rather two co co-existing forces within each person; these forces thus impregnate every human collective. Violence need not necessarily come from outside, since it is always present to begin with. History, conceived of earlier as the enemy of myth, as a separately incarnated variety of life, appears here as an element of the myth itself, as one of the human reactions to diversity.
Nevertheless, the opposite attitude-tolerance, a fundamental trait of contemporary prose-appears as a force endangering the local community that is the object of contemporary local patriotism. The multiplication of differences and multiethnicity, and the accumulation of diversities in a confined space, are seen to be supportive not so much of tolerance, as of indifference. Instead of reinforcing the sense of community, they lead to its breakdown into separate units. Over this sort of atomized society, parcelled off by dozens of nonessential differences, hangs a third force that destroys local communities: standardization. Today's local communities are threatened not by ideology, the expansiveness of the government, or the crushing steamroller of nationalism, but rather by unifying tendencies that extend over the entire culture. That culture is retreating step by step under pressure from the forces of postmodernism. The Arcadia of Wlodzimierz Kowalewski's Powrot do Breitenheide or Stasiuk's communist-era Galicia are not defeated in the duel with History. Rather, they perish in a silent, unnoticed battle with a standardized culture, the culture of The Same Thing: boutiques, newstands full of colorful magazines, McDonald's outlets, supermarkets, identical advertisements, and the obligatory smile. There are no bloody victims in this struggle. Nor is there oppression, violence, or rule by decree. There is no rationing of freedom, no ban on local identity.
The status of the local homeland has changed so raadically that the existence of the objects of local patriotism has been called into doubt. This is a result of the changes introduced by the prose of the Nineties into the complex relationships among the national and local, the private and collective homelands. The protagonist in contemporary Polish prose owes his identity to his hometown or native region, but he does not define himself in regard to his larger homeland. Nor does he perceive his local homeland within a broader context. With increasing frequency, he escapes into domains that are inherited, chosen, or invented-each of which depends more on memory than on historical knowledge, each of which exists more permanently in spiritual than in real space, and each of which can be shaped in accordance with dreams and desires. In today's literature, the homeland is perceived as a spiritual space that remains in a loose relationship with its geographical location, and in a far closer relationship with the protagonist's feelings. In order to be a homeland, it must be subject to desire and choice. If the homeland therefore hangs in a creative background and its only points of reference are the writer's solitary memory and consciousness, then its identity turns out to be a bundle of characteristics that can be negotiated with reality, that can be shaped, analyzed, and selected. In the literature of the Nineties, therefore, the myth of homelands great and small has, like the theme of identity, become diffuse in the highest degree. Before our eyes, the integral perception of the homeland and the great narratives that speak to a whole society are breaking down. In the process of the reprivatization of history, each person aspires to create a past, a genealogy, and a homeland of his own. As a result, the individual protagonist more and more rarely recovers his identity by including his biography in a collective narrative. The archaeology of individual memory is replacing sociology; the palimpsest is replacing unambiguous historical knowledge, and the myth of the self-sufficient particle is replacing the long-dominant myth of the fragment seeking the whole.
In the light of all this questioning, is the continued existence of the literature of local patriotism possible? Yes, but in another form. Each of the little homelands invented in Nineties prose turns out to be, above all, a palimpsest, and also a blank page: it emerges as a challenge to the skill of reading and the skill of writing. Literature therefore becomes the guarantee of its durability. Realms of childhood, provinces of spiritual autonomy, dreamed-of domains of 'natural sublimity,' and metaphysical geographies arise thanks to literature. All of them exist only in literature: reading reveals successive strata of the past, and writing transforms ambiguous signs into multithematic stories.
The written word awakens them from their suspended narrative animation, but this does not mean that the written word annihilates them. We would be wrong in thinking that these are invented, unreal, or paper homelands. On the contrary, it is precisely through narration that they take on reality, and it is as stories that they recover their role as the foundation of our identity, since they can have meaning only when we read them, when we discover the multilayered significance, on which time has etched a succession of traces, in each of them. In other words, space can be a homeland only on the condition that it say something, and it can speak only as a text, plot, or narrative. The resident of space who desires to possess a homeland, and who knows that a homeland is always a mission (today: a narrative mission), must regard himself as a reader. The trivial-sounding term 'reader' should not be taken lightly. In today's world, being a resident of some space means making oneself aware that we exist on the pages of a palimpsest-we tread upon the tracks of those who lived here before us, we write our novel on top of their novels, we rub out the signs of their existence, and add our themes to their themes. The reader, therefore, turns out to be the resident who reveals the greatest degree of humility. He is open to what space says, inclined to ask questions and listen to the answers, aware of the incompleteness of his own readings, and therefore wealthier by the readiness to spin another tale. The resident-reader grows into his homeland with roots of stories, drawing patterns of readings from literary memory-and drawing plot material, on the other hand, from historical memory. This also allows us to understand why grand narration is disappearing: space can reveal itself as a story only to those who manage to read its narrative as a whole. Since individual narratives are always small narratives, leading to little homelands, then the homeland as a 'collective responsibility,' as 'universal history'--the grand narrative, the 'homeland of all Poles'--is an unfamiliar narrative in which there is no room for the individual identity.
The prose of local patriotism laid the groundwork long ago for the privatization of the bond between man and space. Our decade, on the other hand, has seen the transition from 'patriotic narration' to 'narrative patriotism.' This does not mean that the textual nature of these homelands prevents them from lasting any longer than the narrative, or that they crumble into dust at the end of a plot line, when all the ideas about the biographies of the characters have been used up, or when the story comes to an end. We cannot hear the particular rustling sound of an Arcadia dropping into a paper abyss, since those Arcadias persist as stories in our memory. The homeland turns out to be one thing, and one thing only: narration. It is in such narration that we create our identity, our roots, and our links with space and the past. As our identity, so our map. As our map, so our literature.
The particular sort of cartography carried out in the prose of the Nineties also makes it possible to elucidate the mystery of the aesthetic. The beauty comes from the fact that this prose shows us a homeland that is at once open and inaccessible. It is open because there are books-they lead to a world whose beauty can be read. That means that they reveal themselves as an experience that we learn thanks to our familiarity with literature. The key to the homeland turns out to be the key to the library. However, a homeland that can be possessed only in the act of reading is physically inaccessible. Its inaccessibility is the ultimate constructive element of the sublime beauty.
Przemysław Czapliński
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