ate any “forms of recognition” (P. Czapliński) for them either, ones that would be intelligible and credible for the next generation. The concepts of the cultural community developed by the social formations and insti-tutions active at the time were anti-modern, collectivistic, ethnocentric, and xenophobic. Secondly, Moja córeczka is about the inevitable defeat of the average individual, the man in the street, who feels at home in the static and seemingly obvious bourgeois world. Such an attitude also proves vulnerable to anomie, grounded as it is in the illusion of social order and the idealized image of the past, both of them merely hiding the martyrological trauma, a consciousness deferred and pushed back into the oneiric realm of nightmares. Kazimierz Wyka concludes that the protagonist in Tarcza z pajęczyny is “mobile” because “the entire realm of human attitudes, personalities, and evaluations he is surrounded by is mobile and contingent”, which, in turn, “triggers longing for stabil-ity, that is striving for values”.325 By contrast, the actual “stability” in Różewicz’s texts is synonymous with the rule of inauthentic models and values, directed against the individual, creating but an illusion of the so-cial meaning of personal experience, memory, and biography.
Memory Problems
Describing relationships between the individual’s identity and Communist Poland’s culture and social communication, the author of Uśmiechy also noted operations carried out on collective memory. Such changes were not neutral – either ideologically or axiologically. The con-struction of memory in that period served, first and foremost, the purpose of temporary emotional integration of the society around shared repre-sentations of the past. Secondly, it was supposed to legitimize the post-war political and territorial status quo of the Polish People’s Republic.
325 K. Wyka, Różewicz parokrotnie, op. cit., p. 97.
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Assuming that official collective memory and historiography functioned in a similar ideological context, one can agree with Rafał Stobiecki that their shared metahistorical framework was established at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. Stobiecki writes: “The regime aimed to create an ideo-logical vision of the past that would legitimize the totalitarian system created by the party-state.”326 Such a meta-narrative presupposed, for ex-ample, the nationalist interpretation of the history of the so-called West-ern Territories or the official evaluation of the interwar years, radically negative in the Stalinist period. The tool for spreading the image of the past thus construed was school education, with its selectively construct-ed canon of national literature and art, museum premises, and popular culture. The result of those operations was sanitized memory, not only free of uncomfortable facts and seditious traditions, but also “infantile”
– closed to a diversity of interpretations, provincial and anachronistic.
The classmates in Różewicz’s Wspomnienia ze “starej budy”, a novella published in Uśmiechy, talking about their teachers and youthful pranks 25 years later, enjoy a perfect rapport with each other thanks to a shared generational memory which stores anecdotes and quotes, memorable characters, and scenes from the past. Despite the passage of time, the basis of their rapport is the experience of generational community, one that was facilitated primarily by school. In order to reactivate the emo-tional bonds it is enough for them to mention an old professor’s name, a facetious remark of a rebellious student, the memory of cutting class, or a particularly bizarre lesson topic. This private dictionary of stock phrases makes the conversation between Kaziu and Wacek not only a perfect example of close rapport, seemingly free of ambiguities, doubts, or uncer-tainties, but also a persuasive-communicative system. A witness to their
326 R. Stobiecki, Historiografia PRL. Ani dobra, ani mądra, ani piękna… ale skomplikowana, Warsza-wa 2007, p. 189.
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dialogue, a student from the next generation younger, is forced to accept the role of an outsider and uninitiated dilettante, humble and full of re-spect for his elders. He has to “heave a sigh” with them over the absurdities of the pre-war education system. The tongue-in-cheek tone of Wspom-nienia makes the characters’ confessions sound nostalgic and innocent.
Their pronouncements, however, construct an antagonistic vision of the past.327 The interwar junior high school is presented as an environment with weak intellectual credentials, restrictive towards any manifestations of individualism, dependent on an institutionalized religious worldview, and excessively commercialized to boot – and thus almost inaccessible to youth from poor families.328 The narrator, reporting the dialogue of his former classmates, does not comment on the ideological message of their memory, focused as it is on a few political-cultural stereotypes about the interwar years, highly emotional and delivered in a clearly prefabricated form, as if “ready-made” (I 308). Needless to say, Kaziu and Wacek do have their own memories – which, incidentally, seem credible enough –
327 A. Erll lists four rhetorical modes of textualized memory: (1) experiential, (2) monumental, (3) antagonistic, and (4) reflective. The experiential mode (1) consists in presenting the past in such a way as to make it resemble a credible report of an eye witness; the monumental mode (2) is typical of narratives in which the past, represented by currently binding meanings, values, allegories, or symbols, assumes the characteristics of relevant tradition and a shared vision of collective history; the antagonistic mode (3) is based on those interpretations of the past that express the norms and identity of particular social or cultural formations in whose interest they strive to affirm or question a particular vision of the past; the reflective mode (4) is present when the text problematizes forms and functions of memory narratives. A. Erll, op. cit., pp. 242–244.
328 The story is partly autobiographical; the characters of the school principal and the teachers, as well as the school’s financial and organizational principles, are reminiscent of Radom’s Feliks Fabiani Junior High School attended by Janusz and Tadeusz Różewicz in the late 1930s. As their Polish teacher Feliks Przyłubski recalls, in his school paper entitled “I co ty na to, szary człowieku?” [“And What Do You Say to That, Man in the Street?”] Janusz Różewicz came up with “a fiery philippic in defence of his classmates painstakingly striving to get an education, but given the cold shoulder by the heartless school administration”. The paper – regarded as an instance of “Communist agitation” by the school principal – “played a role in refusing [Janusz]
Różewicz permission to take his final exams” in 1937. See F. Przyłubski, Wspomnienie o Januszu Różewiczu (N 192–195).
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but their narrative about the past proceeds within the framework of sensus communis, a socially acceptable vision of reality, constructed immediately after the war on the basis of a democratized school system and rational education.329 Reading Różewicz’s novella, one cannot but ask about the agency of the characters’ memory rather than its truth value. The author managed to render what is stereotyped and communal through a private, spontaneous conversation about the past. Wspomnienia ze “starej budy” is primarily about the consciousness of forty-year-olds in the late 1940s and early 1950s, about the collective memory narratives accessible to them and endowing their generational experience and personal stand on Com-munist Poland with a meaning. It is a text about the two antagonistic vi-sions of the interwar years emerging at that time – the nostalgic-arcadian and the propagandistic-critical one.
The connections between diverse memory narratives are also visible in Wycieczka do muzeum [A Trip to the Museum], a short story written in 1959.330 Here, the memories of a former prisoner of a Nazi death camp are overinterpreted, as it were, by the very context, functioning within the framework of a tour guide’s story who taps the ideological collec-tive memory – anti-German and Polonocentric – “as if it was a book”
(I 171). At the same time, though, those memories are underinterpreted, so to speak, because both the guide’s and the Holocaust witness’ accounts are addressed to listeners whose comments prove that their
communi-329 In those days it was B. Suchodolski, among others, who wrote about the new concepts of youth education in his article Przewrót w wychowaniu, “Nowiny Literackie” 1947, no. 36;
S. Helsztyński, in turn, wrote about the pre-war “reactionary” and “pseudopatriotic” junior high school subject to the private owner’s interests (Podzwonne prywatnej szkole średniej, “Nowiny Literackie” 1947, no. 24).
330 The narrative format of Wycieczka do muzeum was analysed by Mieczysław Czajko in his article Sytuacja narracyjna w “Wycieczce do muzeum” Tadeusza Różewicza, “Zesz. Nauk. Wyższej Szkoły Nauczycielskiej w Szczecinie” 1974, no. 10. I write more about the story in the chapter “The Anatomy of Experience”.
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cative memory does not comprehend the experience itself but only its simplified “school book” version. The social and rhetorical framework that would make the witness’ recollections intelligible enough and thus interpretable as a monumental supranational memory of Nazi crimes re-mains beyond the confines of the “rapport” featured in the Różewicz story. Instead, we are given the antagonistic forms of the Polish national memory of the Gomułka days, justified and visualized with references to stereotyped images of the tallith-donning Jew and the Teutonic-Knight German.331 This story by Różewicz, viewed as a constellation of memory
331 This fundamental misunderstanding results not only from the ideological appropriation of mem-ory by Communist propaganda and the Polonocentric historiography, but also, as Włodzimierz Mich explains, from the fact that for those who visit Oświęcim and other Polish locations of for-mer German Nazi death camps those places are, first and foremost, the sites of memory, or “death sites”, whereas for the Poles they are also “life sites”. W. Mach, Problem pamięci Zagłady, in: Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936–2009, vol. III, ed. A. Michnik, Kraków 2010, p. 516. The problem of regarding World War Two as belonging more to “the plane of Polish history rather than that of the global one” is discussed by Marek Zaleski, who argues that the perspective resulted both from the heritage of Romantic historiosophy and the enforced Marxist interpretation. M. Zaleski, Formy pamięci. O przedstawianiu przeszłości w polskiej literaturze współczesnej, Warszawa 1996, p. 158.
Marek Kapralski writes more extensively on the subject, claiming that in the interpretation of Auschwitz in the days of “suppressed memory” (Michael C. Steinlauf) in Communist Poland, that is in the years 1948–1968, the Communist interpretation of that memory site harmonized with national tradition and individual memory as far as the ways of representing history in general and Polish-German relations in particular were concerned. The interpretation emphasized the post-partition mythology of the besieged and persecuted Polish nation, the mythology itself, Kapral-ski argues, eventually becoming “the cornerstone of Polish identity”. S. KapralKapral-ski, Od milczenia do “trudnej pamięci”. Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau i jego rola w dyskursie publicznym, in: Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, eds F. Tych, M. Adamczyk-Garbowska, Lublin 2011, pp. 533–534. Feliks Tych writes that the Poles’ awareness of the Holocaust was in the post-war days shaped primarily by the popular media, i.e. by film, radio, television, journalistic texts popularizing historical knowledge, encyclopedic publications, school curricula, museum exhibits, and tour guides that would paint a much-reduced and Polonocentric picture of the past. Accord-ing to Tych, the shortcomAccord-ings of historical and cultural awareness implied the Poles’ indifference towards the annihilation of their Jewish fellow citizens, or – as Alina Cała adds – even their resent-ment towards them caused by a repressed sense of guilt. F. Tych, Obraz zagłady Żydów w potocznej świadomości historycznej w Polsce, in: Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936–2009, op. cit., pp. 122–123;
A. Cała, Kształtowanie się polskiej i żydowskiej wizji martyrologicznej po II wojnie światowej, in:
Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936-2009, op. cit., p. 248.
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narratives, implies also their reception via the reflective mode because all the accounts of the past, so juxtaposed, prove biased, trivial, secondary, or relative; a description of the past is thus possible only as a reflection on the mechanisms of its representation.
The problem of memory rendition is presented in still another way in the stories Tolerancja (Przerwany egzamin) and Ta stara cholera (Wyciec-zka do muzeum), written in the same period. The confessions of anony-mous women featured in the stories, addressed to the narrator-agent – an accidentally encountered stranger – smack of an “autobiography” in which personal story blends with episodically evoked history (the domi-nant experiential mode with elements of the monumental one). Far from facilitating any understanding between characters, the narrative of col-lective memory in Tolerancja in fact reduces it. Likewise, the mediation of martyrological codes, imposing meaning on individual recollections, stands in the way of dialogue. The identity of the story’s female protago-nist is internally split because her identification with the nation’s World War Two history under the German occupation (the death camp, the Warsaw Uprising) conflicts with her post-war experience that excludes her from the Polish religious-cultural community.332 The narrator does not blur this contradiction. The conversation in the Tolerancja and Ta stara cholera stories does not become entirely subordinated either to the discourses of collective memory or to the existential narrative. The articu-lation of memory remains problematic because it is either stereotyped, that is detached from individual experience, or subjective, that is relevant and comprehensible only within the framework of personal experience. It is, then, either communicative or credible. The protagonists of the stories
332 A. Cała points out that the post-war Polonocentric martyrology in Poland, shared by both its leftwing and nationalist right-wing proponents, functioned as “building blocks of national iden-tity” because, emphasizing the heroism and martyrology of “almost” the entire nation, it was aimed against the Other – the traitors and/or the Jews. See A. Cała, op. cit.
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do not attempt to interpret the accounts they listen to, limiting their reception to the attitude of a friendly and patient witness. The situation reduces the social framework of memory to the direct relation between two individuals, mutually anonymous, liberating the chaotic and inho-mogeneous tale from the authority of meta-narrative (both historical and existential), one that delineates the stylistic mode, value, and relevance of the past narrative.
Tadeusz Różewicz, looking at the narrative representations of the past in the 1950s and 1960s, focused on the speaking individual: talking, reporting, explaining, and interpreting. He viewed memory narratives as ways of defining oneself (self-creation) or communication between peo-ple rather than a record of past events. Analysing representations of the past, he reconstructed not so much the past itself as the symbolic and semiotic space of the “prosaic” individual and his “prosthetic memory”
(A. Landsberg), that is the realm wherein individual consciousness and experience come into contact with the sensus communis. The official dis-course of collective memory in Communist Poland was, essentially, an agglomerate of revolutionary, martyrological, military, and moderniza-tion myths and stereotypes, mystified history of the working-class move-ments, the anniversary symbolism of national uprisings, and images of the medieval/Piast origins of the Polish state and other turning points in Poland’s history, especially those of World War Two and the German occupation.333 Różewicz would, of course, refer only to some of those
333 Arguably, the acceptable contents of that memory were defined by the topics of nationwide his-torical conferences. “At the first conference in Wrocław [in 1948 – WB] it was the history of the so-called Reclaimed Territories and the Revolution of 1848. In Kraków [in 1956 – WB], despite the creation of nine thematic panels, at the centre of attention were the 19th-century ideologi-cal stands of the Polish society, with a particular emphasis on the insurgent tradition. In 1963 in Warsaw the discussions revolved around medieval culture, the January Uprising, and the history of the Polish People’s Republic. In 1969 in Lublin the thematic focus was the national consciousness and its relation to civic consciousness. Sometimes the choice of the thematic focus
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narratives (to me, though, the more important question is not about the choice of the narratives but about the manner in which they are evoked).
Turning them into a social and cultural framework of the average man’s memory, the writer did not search for the truth in the historiographic sense. He would not counter the historical reductionisms and manipula-tions with a “dissident” perspective, as antagonistic or monumental, in rhetorical terms, as the official stance. The novellas and sketches from Przerwany egzamin, Wycieczka do muzeum, and Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorksiego are rather attempts to capture “at work” the typical, colloquial forms of memory, referring both to the past and to real-life experience in Communist Poland with the attendant ways of thinking, communicat-ing, describcommunicat-ing, and evaluating one’s immediate environment practised by individuals living in those times.