Polish Prose of the Last Twenty Years
Przemyslaw Czaplinski
0000-00-00There is a strong temptation to divide the last two decades of Polish prose at the date of the change of political systems, 1989, the date of the fall of the symbolic Berlin Wall dividing the literature of the cause -- engaged literature -- from the literature of freedom. Culture, however, refracts the reality of human biographies in a thousand mirrors, and the resulting image is never as black-and-white as in propaganda texts. Politics has left its stamp on the themes and human attitudes embodied in prose, but not to the extent that conditions of political and economic freedom mark a clean break from all the earlier traditions of genres and trends.
Varieties of Engagement
There is no denying that the years 1980-1981 and their political consequences (the "Solidarity" period, the growth of an uncensored press and publishing, the introduction of Martial Law) deprived prose of much of its critical function. The pressure of the historical moment made it impossible to place the blame for the degradation of Polish society solely on "them," the subservient politicians. Some of the blame also fell on "us," the citizens, who have moral obligations as well as patriotic and freedom-loving impulses. The times, however, called for engagement in the cause, and this blunted sensitivity to phenomena that were less than unambiguous.
The clear-cut political situation and the divisions within society cried out to be reflected in prose, in images consonant with a social value system that, during the 1980s, became increasingly black-and-white. Both official and unofficial publications were marked by a tendentious realism that sought to document the truth behind the events and private motivations that had divided the Polish population into two numerically disproportionate but politically distinct components. The documentary genres (journals, notes, and miscellanies) held a privileged position. This realism includes Andrzej Szczypiorski's novel Poczatek (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman), Maria Nurowska's novels, and the officially published novels of Roman Bratny (such as Rok w trumnie [A Year in a Coffin]), with its libelous bent. The most ambitious works - not totally free of tendentiousness, but managing to steer clear of outright political agitation - are those that described the realities of the 1980s by employing various devices that distanced the narrator from the author (monologues by the protagonists, ironic attitudes). Today, people look back with nostalgia on the clandestine procedures necessary to lay their hands on and read books published underground, such as Marek Nowakowski's Raport o stanie wojennym (Report on Martial Law).
Historical novels were also engaged in the cause. They examined troubling aspects of the national past and even dared to take up - in a one-sided presentation, to be sure - the theme of Polish-Russian relations (Wladyslaw Terlecki's Maski [Masks] and Lament; Eustachy Rylski's Stankiewicz. Powrot [Stankiewicz: The Return]). The method used in these novels, developed earlier by Teodor Parnicki in Dary z Kordoby (Gifts from Cordoba) and Sekret trzeciego Izajasza (Secret of the Third Isaiah), relied on seeing history from a perspective in which great events were only a background for human motivations and bonds, and for questions of morals and manners (as in Juliusz Dankowski's Jeniec Europy [The Prisoner of Europe] or Europa nie pozwoli [Europe Forbids]).
And then there was the peasant theme - throughout the years of communist Poland, the subject of upward mobility had been overused to the point of ridicule. Yet the 1980s unexpectedly witnessed a masterpiece in Wieslaw Mysliwski's Kamien na kamieniu (Stone Upon Stone), the epic history of a revolt against the peasant's lot that turned into a revolt against modernity. Mysliwski's novel is a monologue through which the protagonist recounts his past until he arrives at self-knowledge.
Local Heroes
It would be a mistake to think that writers had to wait for a chance to join the European Union before they could become aware of the beauty and significance of their small but beautiful native regions. On the sidelines of the arena where versions of socio-political reality fought against each other, a stream of "nostalgic" writing was being produced throughout the 1980s. Describing the eastern and southern marches of pre-war Poland, writers resurrected the ideals of "time lost" and "the lost home." In doing so, they associated themselves with strong traditions in both domestic and emigré Polish literature (with the domestic group including such writers as Leopold Buczkowski, Tadeusz Konwicki, Julian Stryjkowski, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Andrzej Kusniewicz, Wlodzimierz Odojewski and Piotr Wojciechowski, and the emigrés consisting of Jozef Wittlin, Stanislaw Vincenz, Jerzy Stempowski, and the Czeslaw Milosz of Dolina Issy [The Issa Valley]).
Autobiographical nostalgia characterizes Wieslaw Mysliwski's latest novel, Widnokrag (Horizon), which won the prestigious Nike prize in 1997. Other novels (Aleksander Jurewicz's Lida and Pan Bog nie slyszy gluchych [The Lord Does Not Hear the Deaf] and Stanislaw Srokowski's Duchy dziecinstwa [Spirit of Childhood] and Repatrianci [The Repatriated]) attest to an awareness that the experience of "uprootedness" and "the lost homeland" also occurred after the Second World War, in the biographies of people who were deported and in the history of social groups that were persecuted (Erwin Kruk's Kronika z Mazur [Mazurian Chronicles]), as well as in the biography of each person who regards his or her childhood as indissolubly linked to the setting in which it was lived (Roman Gren, Krajobraz z dzieckiem [Landscape with a Child] and Kazimierz Orlos, Niebieski szklarz [The Blue Glazier]).
This obvious truth goes hand in hand with a second, generational impulse that is manifest in first novels by writers born after the Second World War. They describe not the lost Polish marches, but rather the settings in which they grew up in communist Poland. As a result, the "nostalgic map of Poland" has been enriched in the late 1980s and early 1990s by regions that previously boasted no literary presence: Gdansk (Pawel Huelle, Weiser Dawidek and Stefan Chwin, Krotka historia pewnego zartu [The Brief History of a Certain Jest]), Wroclaw (Olga Tokarczuk, E.E. and A. Zawada, Breslaw), Cieszyn Silesia (Jerzy Pilch, Inne rozkosze [Other Delights]), Gliwice (Julian Kornhauser, Dom, sen i gry dzieciece [A House, a Dream, and Childhood Games]), Kaszubia (Zbigniew Zakiewicz, Ujrzane, w czasie zatrzymane [Seen in Suspended Time]), and Szczecin (F. Netz, Urodzony w Swieto Zmarlych [Born on All Souls' Day]). Nostalgic narration offers opportunities for idealization, and thus for invention.
The 1990s have brought a range of works referring polemically to the Proustian tradition. Their fabular dynamism rests on a desire to overcome nostalgia and reconcile its exaltedness with the presentation of the present day (Izabela Filipiak, Niebieska menazeria [The Blue Menagerie]; Jerzy Pilch, Tysiac spokojnych miast [A Thousand Peaceful Cities]; Daniel Karpinski, I jak inni [And Like the Others]; Witold Zalewski, Zaciemnienie [Darkening]; Stefan Chwin, Hanemann; Andrzej Stasiuk, Przez rzeke [Through the River]). An attachment to the primal location of a human life is therefore a theme that goes to make up the continuity of post-war Polish literature. Previously, this theme inevitably grappled with the historical problem of freedom. Now, in a changed historical context, it has become more universal.
A Choice of Idioms
The so-called "linguistic" trend that emerged suddenly in the mid-1970s in the writing of Janusz Anderman, Julian Kornhauser, and Adam Zagajewski seemed to spring from experiments with the "new novel" as carried out in various countries in the 1950s and 1960s. The world depicted here is the world of language, or rather the variety of social and literary idioms that the protagonist tries on and discards one after the other. This protagonist is frequently uprooted and possesses neither his own childhood language nor the language of a "hometown." Narration in anachronistic or powerless idioms reflects a lack of comprehension and the disintegration of society in the novels of the 1980s, such as Janusz Andermann's Kraj swiata (A Country of the World) or Brak tchu (Breathless). Something similar occurs in the confrontation of mutually incomprehensible private and public idioms (Tadeusz Siejak, Oficer [The Officer] and Pustynia [The Wilderness]).
In recent years, it is Zbigniew Kruszynski who has made the most radical use of "linguism," in Schwedenkrauter and Szkice historyczne (Historical Sketches). Kruszynski tries out almost every social and linguistic variety of language in the effort to depict the world of Poland in the 1980s. Also worth noting is Magdalena Tulli's micro-masterpiece, Sny i kamienie (Dreams and Stones). At the heart of this fable about the creation of a city lies a conviction about the unity of language and existence. The city symbolizes Warsaw, but it could equally well apply to every city rebuilt after the war, or more broadly to every social utopia. The dream of the Ideal City is expressed in metaphors expressive of perfection. It turns out that it is language that calls being into existence; Sny i kamienie is thus both the story of a city and a treatise on language.
New Foundations or No Foundations?
The end of the 1980s saw a change in the position of literature, which recovered the right to pass critical judgement on its own society. Satirical works appeared attacking the myth of the noble political opposition (Janusz Anderman, Choroba wiezienna [Prison Sickness]) or the myth of emigration as either a mission or a justifiable way of earning money (Edward Redlinski, Szczuropolacy [Rat-Poles]; Janusz Rudnicki, Cholerny swiat [Damned World]; Jacek Kaczmarski, Autoportret z kanalia [Self-Portrait with Son of a Bitch]). Tadeusz Konwicki's Czytadlo [Page-Turner] is a portrait of a society incapable of making rational use of democracy. Piotr Wojciechowski's Szkola wdzieku i przetrwania (Charm and Survival School) shows that same society as capable, on the other hand, of superficial participation - on the basis of chicanery and slyness - in the creation of a new history.
Freedom from the struggle for freedom and from the seriousness of personal choices bore fruit in a series of works that revive the tradition of the grotesque (Manuela Gretkowska, My zdies` emigranty [We Are Russian Emigrés]; Natasza Goerke, Fractale [Fractals]; Izabela Filipiak, Absolutna amnezja [Absolute Amnesia]; Zyta Rudzka, Palac Cezarow [Palace of the Emperors] and Andrzej Stasiuk, Bialy kruk [White Raven]). These works are hybrid mixtures of fable and essay that often present the fate of Poles living abroad while making fun of the emigré "ethos" and emigré bellyaching. They demonstrate a profound assimilation of the state of rootlessness, or freedom from birthplace, tradition, religion and manners. This lack of foundations is seen as a thrilling and ecstatic experience that offers an opportunity for the autonomous definition of identity, starting from scratch. Indeed, it is this completely private issue of identity that occupies the foreground.
Some other novels of initiation are more autobiographical and highlight a long-term process of maturation (Huelle, Jurewicz, Chwin, Kornhauser). Still others rely on fictiveness and, in accord with the post-modern spirit of the times, overlay the classic novel of education with elements of the thriller, detective story, or New Age metaphysics (Tomek Tryzna, Panna Nikt [Miss Nobody]; Manuela Gretkowska, Kabaret metafizyczny [Metaphysical Cabaret]; Olga Tokarczuk, Podroz ludzi Ksiegi [The Journey of the People of the Book]; Andrzej Stasiuk, Przez rzeke [Through the River]; Grzegorz Strumyk, Zaglada fasoli [The Annihilation of the Bean]). The message of these books is essentially anti-educational: the family, social, and school-related imperative to maturity causes the loss of the positive values associated with childhood and youth, while offering in return nothing aside from an empty and boring adulthood.
New Forms in Prose
The experientially richest and formally most interesting novels of the early 1990s resist facile generic classification. Their composition out of an arbitrary mixture of genres seems to exhibit only an ad hoc coherence. Characteristically, however, these miscellanies are disciplined in both educational and compositional terms, as can be seen in Andrzej Stasiuk's recent "wandering" para-philosophical treatise, Dukla.
As part of a larger trend in the literature of the end of the century, many of the latest Polish novels also signal the return to classical fables and genres. The innovative accent comes from the use of these conventions to pose significant existential questions. so it is in the metaphysical crime stories of Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Goracy oddech pustyni (The Hot Breath of the Desert) and Don Ildebrando. So it is, too, in Olga Tokarczuk's epic novel Prawiek i inne czasy (Prawiek and Other Times), which has been referred to as the saga of a "Polish Macondo."
In Search of Identity
Polish prose seems to have been engaged since 1989 in an accelerated search for its own identity. Thus its rapid summoning up and rejection of novelistic traditions, its returns to hallowed conventions, and its bold experimentation. The impulse to identity, however, signifies not only a re-examination of tradition, but also a search for an answers to questions about why prose exists in the first place: To describe the world? To lay bare some concealed sense - mythical, perhaps? To uncover a narration that is latent in the world and express it through the language that the world speaks? Or finally, perhaps, to instill a distance towards all conventions?
The impossibility of reconciling all these tasks, combined with the fact that all these goals are undeniably worthy, means that this prose seeks above all to create forms with the capacity to include autobiographical ruminations and ostentatious inventiveness, erudite essays and classical narratives. The real objective, then, is to create a form that transcends fiction, reflecting the multiple orders of the world while remaining as fictive as our present fictionally created reality.
Przemysław Czapliński
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