and silva-rerum style essays from the 1960s and 1970s are so many at-tempts to solve the riddle of personal identity by means of a narrative rather than a strictly ideological or cultural definition. Admittedly, the ideologist is a relational identity, linked to various traditions and public discourses. One can catalogue and discuss them. But ideological identity is not a simple sum total of social or political inspirations and loyalties in the individual’s life because it is only their coordination with personal, re-flexive experience that generates an identity narrative. Summing up their moral significance, the Różewicz narrator-agent simultaneously cites and discusses textual traces of the reconstructed character left in newspapers, journals, letters, and prosaic notes. The ideologist thus construed is a re-cipient of ideological contents and their interpreter, an authentic person reconstructed in the text and a fictitious character created there. Thus the textual identity of the Różewicz man is situated at the borderline between quotation and commentary, description and creation, historical discourse and anecdotal biography. So as not to disturb the fictitious-documentary environment of such a narrative, this being the central assumption be-hind any identity tale, the writer-narrator keeps his protagonist in the ambiguous “in between” position till the end of the reconstruction. The end-result of such a reconstruction is an identity which is openly nar-rative, or – in Głowiński’s terms – textually democratized, referring to numerous metanarratives of the past.
The End of a Certain “Covenant”
Andrzej Werner argues that in the second half of the 20th century the Polish intellectual’s attitude to collective consciousness and the nation’s cultural traditions – combining intellectual obligations with a subjective,
his fate also the phenomenon of blaming the individual for the guilt of the entire community which projects onto him its frustration and culpabilty for participating in the act of collective violence and hatred.
130 | The adventures of an ideologist
critical distance – was the most important determinant of his/her person-al identity.214 This does not hold equally true for the entire half a century of Communist rule in Poland. The critic focuses on the crisis of the sec-ond half of the 1970s, tracing back to that time the rebirth of “a covenant between artists and the collective images, with the attendant cultivation of those myths that channel collective consciousness towards realization of superior [national] goals”.215 The author of the book Polskie, arcypolskie
… came to the conclusion, however, that some writers and artists did not subscribe to this moral and symbolic covenant with their local public.
Analysing Różewicz’s post-1956 writing, Werner took note of
A radical rejection of culture’s traditional obligations, of all the roots:
nothing induces us any more to choose or continue a particular way [of doing things] just because it is present or not in our culture. It is neither the emotional nor rational factors [that matter]; neither the mythological reasons nor those resultant from our assessment of social obligations towards the community.216
This repudiation of obligations, accompanied by a naive or hypocriti-cal belief in normalcy after the October breakthrough, seemed dangerous to the critic. A national consensus around culture and values, “reached in the hour of rebellion, in the time of fight”, Werner argued, having in mind both history and contemporaneous times, should not be under-mined, even if it yielded dubious artistic results, because “a private war
214 A. Werner, Krew i atrament, op. cit., p. 17.
215 Ibid., p. 38.
216 A. Werner, Polskie, arcypolskie…, op. cit., p. 121. Werner’s charges were refuted by Marcin Rychlewski, who analysed Różewicz’s poem Spadanie in the context of the Nietzschean diag-nosis of disintegration of the metaphysical “centre” of ethics. Rychlewski argues that the critic’s political charges missed the point because the poet’s nihilism was, in fact, a form of philosophi-cal reflection. M. Rychlewski, Różewicz – nihilista? O Spadaniu, “Polonistyka” 2003, no. 7.
The End of a Certain “Covenant” | 131
of several writers against ideas which they consider stupid, ridiculous, or obsolete” means, in fact, perpetuating the “loudly and incessantly pro-claimed certitude that we are living not only in a free but also in the most equitable of worlds”.217 Such an “angelic” vision of the human existence in literature, he added after Milan Kundera, is made possible by one’s ability to notice “only what one wants to see”.218 It was exactly this type of representation of reality – partial and isolated from social facts – that Różewicz allegedly created. The same charges, to repeat, were brought against the poet by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, though he eventually withdrew his ironic allegation that Różewicz’s conscience was clear but selective. Needless to say, there is no doubt as to what world Werner was writing about, but, to be on the safe side, he still warned at the end of his essay that “the devil can make a pact even with angels. Or he fools them.”219 The density and ambiguity of the critic’s argument makes it impossible to decide whether this is still only a warning or already an accusation of indifference and conformity. If the essay was meant as an accusation, it misses the point because Różewicz’s attitude to Polish cul-ture and Romantic traditions is a long-standing and thought-provoking dialogue. What is more, Werner seems to have crossed all-too-easily the borderline between a political evaluation of the writer’s stand and the problems of the characters he has created in his texts, or the borderline between narrowly conceived public morality and morality in art.
The kind of relation between the artist and the community that the critic called for was typical, for example, of the 19th-century bourgeois novel, becoming there a model for ethical agreement. Michał Głowiński, calling the realistic novel the work of ideal rapport, concluded that the
“firm moral and political beliefs” (H. Balzac) materialized in it, or
pre-217 Ibid., p. 122.
218 Ibid., p. 123.
219 Ibid.
132 | The adventures of an ideologist
sent there only potentially, “made it clear what was good or bad, worthy or unworthy, what belonged to the kingdom of virtue and what – to the dark domain of vice […], neither the writer nor the reader had a problem deciding which of the characters should be marked with a negative sign, and which one with a plus”.220 The “moralistic realism” pact was termi-nated by Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, the forerunners of modern literature, who stopped referring to “the same meanings – which was a foregone conclusion – that the public could give to every element of the novel”.221 The modern pact between the writer and the reader consisted, among other things, in rejecting the text’s ethical and cognitive authority, now replaced with a negative or even subversive agreement based on a con-stant and conscious violation of the aesthetic and ideological pact with the reader. The crisis of such a modern understanding between the artist and the public manifested itself in Communist Poland most clearly in the late 1970s and 1980s.
When Małgorzata Dziewulska wrote in 1982 about the twilight of the modern rapport between the author and the (theatrical) audience, she ex-pected, in a way, a return to “moralistic realism” on the artists’ part. “[Peo-ple – W.B.] want something else. In the past they would let themselves be terrorized by modernity, then they started to rebel and, finally, they will say it straight to our face: ‘We couldn’t care less!’ […] Our theatre today is way behind the sensibility of the intellectual, the worker, the professor, or the cloakroom attendant.”222 “We have no repertoire for them,” she ex-plained earlier in her book, “because the Polish repertoire at its best […] is thoroughly intellectualized and, to be honest, fully comprehensible almost only to intellectuals”.223 The charge was aimed also at Różewicz. The author
220 M. Głowiński, Dzieło wobec odbiorcy. Szkice z komunikacji literackiej, Kraków 1998, p. 219.
221 Ibid., pp. 231–232.
222 M. Dziewulska, Teatr zdradzonego przymierza, Warszawa 1985, pp. 146–149.
223 Ibid., p. 92.
The End of a Certain “Covenant” | 133
of the essay Różewicz, czyli walka z aniołem [Różewicz, or A Fight with an Angel] charged him with deviating from a tradition which used to pro-vide both the author and the audience with “a sense of community within human culture”, the culture grounded in the spiritual, or even religious, concept of humankind.224 The logic of that deviation proceeded from “de-spair”, through “possession”, to “laughing stock”. Soon enough Dziewulska raised her strictly ideological stakes, this time her charge against Różewicz being that in his works “It is the prisoners, not the prison’s administration, that are the object of observation.”225 Not sparing the writer her numerous aesthetic rebukes (“This is hopelessly primitive […] all too easy and very boring indeed”), the essay’s author openly admitted to applying moral cat-egories to Różewicz’s writing.226
Dziewulska’s essay Różewicz, czyli walka z aniołem was, in fact, per-fectly representative of the Polish intellectuals’ state of awareness in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though largely isolated from specific literary issues (which the author herself readily admits), the essay nevertheless ends up with a short analysis of the Waluś character, the protagonist of Do piachu. It is a well-known fact that the play generated a heated debate, which at some points came close to a political dispute over the writer’s attitude to tradition and national community. Elżbieta Morawiec wrote, on the poet’s 60th birthday, that “Apart from the criterion of seasonal snobbery other valuation patterns have begun to circulate among our cultural audience”, generated by the “mechanisms of gregarious, embat-tled thinking”.227 This type of dominant interpretation style was later
224 M. Dziewulska, Różewicz, czyli walka z aniołem, “Dialog” 1975, no. 3, p. 128.
225 M. Dziewulska, Teatr zdradzonego przymierza, op. cit., p. 53.
226 Ibid., pp. 50, 53.
227 E. Morawiec, op. cit., p. 5. Referring to Różewicz’s situation and his public image (as function-ing in literary circles) in the late 1970s, Zbigniew Kubikowski demonstrated “how easily a ste-reotype is popularized in social circles that, at least in theory, should not be that susceptible to stereotyping. Meanwhile, petrified social myths thrive precisely there, contrary to obvious facts
134 | The adventures of an ideologist
referred to by Andrzej Werner as the “interpretive hammer”. As Werner explained, the process of simplification of the text’s reception consisted in the “ordering and appraisal of literary, cultural, and artistic facts in terms of binary oppositions: art – politics, journalism, ideology, trend”.228 True, but the problem with Różewicz did not boil down to thinking in accord-ance with the tertium-non-datur formula, which dismisses the possibil-ity of unequivocal connections between art and politics in a moment of social conflict. Dziewulska’s and Werner’s charges pertained not only to ethical and ideological contents of the relation between artist and audi-ence but also to fundamental principles of such a relation. The point was not that the writer keeps silent or speaks unclearly but that when he takes a stand on national issues he uses the “wrong” language.
Maria Janion, in a conversation with Sławomir Buryła, summing up the debate over Do piachu in the context of the war themes in 20th -century Polish literature, recalled Janusz Majcherek’s diagnosis published in 1990 in “Teatr”. Majcherek contextualized the history of drama as
so many stages of the struggle of the typically Polish perspective on things for the belief that “what matters is not what is and how it is but what should be”, the belief that presupposes the superiority – in art – of ethics over aesthetics, imposing “stereotypes and myths aspiring to the status of the norm, although in reality they are mere projections of the collective consciousness” enamoured of the national heroism ideal.229
Janion also added that in the argument between “Romantics”
and “lampoonists” the literary texts that proved most noticeable were
and easily verifiable realities, and they keep growing fast and out of proportion.” Z. Kubikowski, Krytycy i plotkarze, “Dialog” 1979, no. 4, p. 141.
228 A. Werner, Krew i atrament, op. cit., p. 25.
229 M. Janion, Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie, Warszawa 1998, p. 328.
The End of a Certain “Covenant” | 135
the short stories of Tadeusz Borowski, Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, Sławomir Mrożek’s plays, Miron Białoszewski’s Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego, and finally – in terms of the order of pub-lication– Różewicz’s Do piachu. The canon of texts relevant for that particular theme in Polish literary history can be composed in vari-ous ways; the real problem, however, is altogether elsewhere. Mod-ern culture, including that created after 1944 by the above-mentioned writers, among others, was often reduced to dilemmas pertaining to national awareness, which was essentially Romantic. Critics who re-jected the modern, subversive rapport in art believed it was possible for the Romantic idiom to cover the entire experience and identity of modern man.
Marta Piwińska, pondering in the 1970s the status of Romanticism in modern Polish culture, concluded that “despite its constant metamor-phoses and denials, it remained till this day a major culture-making fac-tor” in the sense that it still constitutes “a certain type of rapport between author and reader, or between artist and the supraliterary audience”.230 This rapport is by no means open to all other types of content, however.
According to Piwińska, Romanticism is such a well-entrenched system of signs that any attempt to speak through its agency brings back to life the Romantic myth of the national community. Through the agency of the Romantic metalanguage,
Any Pole can enter the community realm and communicate with an-other Pole – on condition, however, that s/he fulfils the demands ar-ticulated in this language as information. Which means that s/he will shape his/her own image in the image of the Romantic signs.231
230 M. Piwińska, op. cit., p. 36.
231 Ibid., p. 37.
136 | The adventures of an ideologist
Thus any use of the Romantic idiom, not necessarily intended as an act of self-definition, raises the issue of one’s attitude to national identity.
That is why Różewicz’s “mockeries”, exposing Romanticism as a “shad-ow”, that is an illusory description of modern experience, breached the agreement postulated by critics after 1976 and pertaining to a collective – reproduced, for example, in the arts – image of the world in which society perceives itself as an integral community that individuals are sup-posed to exclusively identify with.
As Piwińska argues, Różewicz freed himself from Romanticism without terminating the agreement based on the Romantic code of iden-tity. The Romantic tradition, e.g. in the drama Wyszedł z domu, was to function as a “shadow” cast upon the void. The play’s gravediggers “are supposed to exhume the body of someone who changes his political vis-age (posthumously) on an hourly basis, because they take orders from a regime whose members cannot make up their minds what political visage to assume”.232 The scholar assumes that in the shadow of the Ro-manticism in question there is only void. The playwright – if I interpret her intentions correctly – has not rejected the covenant still binding in the Romantic community of sense, but he has annihilated, turned to
“nothing”, the object projected by the Romantic metalanguage, namely the “political ideal” of man. Thus he has created a situation in which the covenant as such between the collective and the individual still exists as a system of signs, but one of the contracting parties is gone, namely the bearer of national identity, obligated to “serve” the nation, the citizen, the intellectual, the ideal patriot, the ideologist, etc. He has been replaced with a non-person evading any identity whatsoever.
The scholar’s point, though apt, seems overgeneralized because Różewicz does not solve the problem of ideological tradition with the
232 Ibid., p. 375.
The End of a Certain “Covenant” | 137
“void” only; it is also too reductionist as the problem itself is irreduc-ible only to Romanticism. Admittedly, ideological identity in the 20th century was, in accordance with Polish conditions, particularly tied to Romanticism, especially at times of “national crises” (S. Stroński). It was also, however, potentially linkable to, for example, a religious, modern-liberal, Marxist, or nationalist worldview, both its Romantic and realistic variants. Just as Różewicz’s literary forms are “impure”, so the identity of his protagonists is ambiguous, ranging from Sarmatism to plebeianism, from materialism to bourgeois lifestyle, from the political intellectual’s involvement to the “clerk’s” detachment from collective interests and mythologies. Likewise, it is hard to agree with Piwińska that Różewicz would expose a “hollow” man to the influences of political arguments.
As Błoński points out, Polish literature, ever since the 1950s, has been increasingly reluctant to present unequivocal, flat characters with clear-ly defined social identities (apart from, of course, satirical and parodic texts), preferring more ambiguous protagonists instead. This trend, with some exceptions, pertained also to Różewicz’s writing, particularly his prose. Indeterminate, however, does not mean “hollow”.
Różewicz supplanted the ideologist with a character who, rather than being nondescript, or stripped of distinct character traits, is “unfin-ished” instead. Such a character spans diverse identities, embodying the identification-in-the-making process rather than complete identification or ideological loyalties that the text’s metalanguage implies. It is not as if Różewicz attempted to strip his characters of roles enabling them to define, understand, and valuate themselves, or to compare themselves with others. He does, however, deprive them of any trust in those roles, before they get a chance to become internalized. This is evident in the stories from the Opadły liście z drzew and Przerwany egzamin collections, in the reportage interview with Prusek, in the novellas from Uśmiechy, and in later humoresques. The protagonists’ identity there is as a rule
138 | The adventures of an ideologist
entangled within an ideological metalanguage which – though eventually exposed as mere pose and thus disintegrates in the course of the narra-tive – does not melt into a void because the exposed ideology is immedi-ately replaced by other self-definitions and worldviews. This transience of the Różewicz protagonists is sometimes their only permanent and com-monly held characteristic. By contrast, in the (auto)biographical sketches collected in Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego, and in the volumes Tarcza z pajęczyny, Próba rekonstrukcji, Nasz starszy brat, Mother Departs, and Margines, ale…, the reconstruction of the protagonists is evidently a textual manoeuvre, the process of compiling the narrative with quotes and commentaries being accompanied by a deconstruction of those iden-tities of the protagonist that begin as blanket attempts to make his story complete. Also in this case, the ideological meta-narrative, degraded to the role of a textual component of a new narrative, is harnessed for the identification project, thus demonstrating that what has been left of the ideologist is not a void but an entire symbolic universe that does not constitute, however, a stable and credible identification. The fact that the modern individual lives among the shadows of Romanticism and other ideologies does not necessarily imply that the experience of transient identity is yet another shadow. Różewicz treated this experience with the utmost seriousness.
The covenant metaphor, used by Dziewulska and Werner in a hard-hitting fashion, facilitates posing a positive question as well. If Różewicz’s works did not observe the rules of the “covenant” between writer and
The covenant metaphor, used by Dziewulska and Werner in a hard-hitting fashion, facilitates posing a positive question as well. If Różewicz’s works did not observe the rules of the “covenant” between writer and