That is how I read Tadeusz Różewicz’s texts. I do not regard his works as repetitions of identity narratives already existing in art and literature, let alone as simple reflections of mental processes or structures, or as philosophical models, but as his personal work. Unique and self-created identity is modern man’s artwork, so it can be evaluated in accordance with modern culture criteria. One may well ask whether it is internally consistent, self-reflexive, subjective, and critical of pre-existing forms of thinking and collective life, but also whether it is connected with tradi-tion and identificatradi-tion patterns. What does it look like in Różewicz’s texts? The author of Death Amid Old Set Designs refers to diverse identity narratives, often subjecting them to revisions. As a result, the narratives are re-told, the retellings being inspired by his personal experience, by artistic projects, or by his reflections on man’s experience in the 20th cen-tury. This kind of revision usually consists of a rethinking of pre-existing identity models and their transformation through the critical dialogue that Różewicz engages in with modernist writers and philosophers. For this reason, Różewicz’s debate on modern culture smacks of late-modern sensibility, one that is intellectually and morally more mature than the project of modernity emerging out of their works. One of this book’s themes is the relationship between the modern Różewicz and the late-modern version.
Tadeusz Różewicz and Modernity
Creating one’s own self-image consists in one’s participation in cul-ture; personal self-expression entails engaging in dialogue with others. In my view, the idea of the individual’s identity in Różewicz’s work fulfils that criterion. In his texts, man not only expresses himself in a cultural environment but also establishes connections, mediated through that en-vironment, between diverse representations of the world and the social codes of its comprehension. But, first and foremost, he attempts to
inter-22 | Tadeusz Różewicz’s Narratives and Modern Identity (an Introduction)
pret culture as a legacy (canon), as a communicative community, and as a symbolic language. Man’s identity, his self-image, emerges in relation to himself and the available interpretations of reality. The individual’s self-creation, then, amounts to one’s personal way of understanding what is collective and generic in personal experience. Identity in Różewicz’s texts is an interpretation of personal patterns, a description of the relationship between old and new images of man in culture, an attempt to consolidate personal experience with historical memory and the traditions present in modernity. This, in short, is my book’s major premise.
Because of the timing of Różewicz’s debut, and the time the texts I discuss here were written, I am primarily interested in the three decades following the year 1944. That period in Poland’s political history, cul-ture, and social life makes up the historical background for the modern identity described in this book. Andrzej Mencwel has noticed that “in the face of fundamental historical changes” there clearly emerges a need to rearrange “the entire pre-existing system of memory and tradition”.20 Changes on such an unprecedented scale took place in Poland during World War Two and in the subsequent decades. What translated into the collective experience of those days were – apart from the political antagonisms – such revolutionary social and cultural phenomena as the replacement of the elites and the reinterpretation of their grand narratives (or their symbolic universe), the ultimate “enfranchisement” of the Polish gentry traditions and national history to the masses, the spread of urban lifestyles and the expansion of popular culture, industrialization and the emergence of the ethnically-monolithic state (continuously existing for decades) relinquishing the policy of domination over its Eastern neigh-bours and oriented towards settlement and development of the so-called
20 A. Mencwel, Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy, Kraków 2009, p. 39.
Tadeusz Różewicz and Modernity | 23
Western and Northern Territories.21 Różewicz’s work referred, both in in-tellectual and biographical terms, to those processes and historic events.
Mencwel, comparing Juliusz Mieroszewski’s political journalism with Ta-deusz Różewicz’s work, emphasizes their peculiar affinity. Both of them wrote as if they had “indeed already experienced the end of the world.”22 Karl Dedecius in his afterword to the German anthology of Różewicz’s texts wrote about “Stunde Null” (“Zero Hour”) as a starting experience for his entire work.23 This experience prompted attempts at new self-defi-nition, in collective and national, as well as individual terms, attempts to search for new ways of thinking and writing about humanity.
The idea of “the world’s end” and the beginning of new history is not unique in Polish literature. The reference point, for example, for Ste-fan Żeromski’s fiction – inspirational for Różewicz’s literary debut – “is invariably the time of defeat and the search for ways of overcoming it”.24
21 Andrzej Leder writes: “Revolution means not only a change of the political system and [replace-ment] of the powers-that-be – for such transformations the term ‘coup’ [or ‘upheaval’] would suffice – but also a rapid and fundamental unravelling of the social fabric, a change of economic and cultural hierarchies, a mass breakdown of prior property relations. This is usually facilitated by violence on a large-scale. It is precisely this type of revolution that took place in Poland between 1939 and 1956.” Leder points out that the key acts of this drama included: (1) the annihilation of the Jews, replaced by the Polish middle class; (2) the loss of Eastern territories, important for Polish culture, and the attendant migration and relocation of millions of people to post-German lands;
(3) the destruction of traditional gentry-based rural social structures and their mental forms. The revolution, Leder adds, since it materialized “as something external, [something] that one partici-pated in passively, bereft of decision-making powers”, resulted in the emergence of an ambiguous, not fully internalized, Polish collective identity. A. Leder, Kto nam zabrał tę rewolucję?, “Krytyka Polityczna” 2011, no. 29, pp. 32–36. Consequently, it is more appropriate to talk about the “revo-lutionary results” of the period’s changes in Marcin Król’s phrase, rather than a revolution as such.
M. Król, Inny kraj, “Res Publica” 1987, no. 1, p. 20.
22 A. Mencwel, Przedwiośnie czy potop. Studium postaw polskich w XX wieku, Warszawa 1997, p. 351.
23 K. Dedecius, Nachwort, in: T. Różewicz, Gedichte und Stücke, trans. K. Dedecius, I. Boll, München 1983, p. 298.
24 H. Janaszek-Ivaničková, Świat jako zadanie inteligencji. Studium o Stefanie Żeromskim, War-szawa 1971, p. 122.
24 | Tadeusz Różewicz’s Narratives and Modern Identity (an Introduction)
Similarly, for the early 20th-century literary avant-garde the “zero point”
in history was, as Marci Shore tells us, the historic moment when all the pre-existing ideas of order had suddenly become radically questioned, which, in turn, called for an equally radical antidote.25 That, in turn, meant a rejection of the existing principles and patterns of Art, Beauty, Truth, and Morality, followed by a construction of the “new order of things” (in Hans Arp’s phrase), one based on elementary values – exis-tential, material, corporal, quotidian. Mencwel finds a similar concept of time in the idea of the beginning of history (the division into pre-history and history which is “truly human”) present in Cyprian K. Norwid’s and Stanisław Brzozowski’s thought – a polar opposite of Hegel’s and Marx’s idea of the end of history, which assumed the possibility of realizing the vision of a perfect order in historical time (history – posthistory).26 One could argue that Różewicz confronted both historiosophies, concluding that all meanings and values are historical, but, at the same time, history at the “zero point” of the Holocaust lost the humanist meaning projected onto it before. That meaning, according to Theodor Adorno, can be re-constructed in culture only by beginning with the experience of life and death in their primordial, biological sense.27
Alexander Fiut, agreeing with the obvious claim that World War Two, occupation, and the Communist system “shook the Poles’ sense of identity”, pointed out that the “identity-shaking” took place at several levels simultaneously:
25 See M. Shore, Kawior i popiół. Życie i śmierć pokolenia oczarowanych i rozczarowanych mark-sizmem, trans. M. Szuster, Warszawa 2008, p. 66.
26 A. Mencwel, Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy, op. cit., p. 28.
27 Cf. T. Żukowski, Skatologiczny Chrystus. Wokół Różewiczowskiej epifanii, “Pamiętnik Literacki”
1999, no. 1, pp. 122–123.
Tadeusz Różewicz and Modernity | 25
At the geographic level – through border shifts and the usually en-forced “mass migration” to the East, and then to the West, to the territories seized from the Germans. At the social level – as a result of the destruction of the old class hierarchies, the upward mobility of the lowest social stratum, and the establishment of a newly privi-leged class. At the political level – as a result of the destruction of the democratic system replaced by the mono-party one. Finally, at the cultural level – as a result of the questioning of the national culture’s traditional values replaced by values originating in a culture based on Marxist ideology in its Soviet version. […] The socio-political earth-quake was accompanied by tectonic shifts in the axiological sphere.
Coming under threat, some ideals, beliefs, or behavioural patterns, otherwise deemed definitely passé, were now, all of a sudden, gaining importance or becoming dangerously petrified. Other values – both in public and in private – were being given new meanings, different from the pre-existing ones. Under the circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the need for self-definition became desperate and acute.28
This “identity-shaking” process covered various foundations of self-identity – from the state’s geographic location and the nation’s core ideo-logical or cultural traditions to everyday customs and lifestyles. Andrzej Walicki has dubbed this phenomenon “post-catastrophic catastrophism”, explaining that “once the catastrophe is complete, the catastrophist who acknowledges its inevitability has to start thinking about a ‘new begin-ning’, about his own place in the new order of things”.29 Similarly, Hanna Gosk believes that the situation was “conducive to self-definitions, en-forced by the necessity to settle into the new geographic, social,
ideo-28 A. Fiut, Pytanie o tożsamość, Kraków 1995, p. 10.
29 A. Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach, Warszawa 1993, p. 30.
26 | Tadeusz Różewicz’s Narratives and Modern Identity (an Introduction)
logical, and axiological space”.30 Significantly, the need to redefine the meaning of identity, resulting from one’s experience of a major existential divide, was not exclusive to post-war artistic or political elites. For one thing, the sweeping social change with the attendant (unprecedented) democratization of access to national culture made it part of the “aver-age person’s” experience – someone who did not fully belong either to the intelligentsia, or to the middle class, the peasantry, or the proletariat, sometimes combining, or representing, several identities simultaneously.
I describe this type of identity in subsequent chapters. At this point, suffice it to say that besides such writers as Tadeusz Borowski, Marek Hłasko, or Miron Białoszewski it was Tadeusz Różewicz who made the
“Polish Everyman” a central figure in his work.31 Therefore I intend to discuss modern individual identity in Poland in its two personal varieties – that of a cultivated individual with intellectual and patriotic traditions and that of an average, “transitory” and “mediated” person, or – in other words – the “new” man (both as an institutionally projected model from national and social projects and as a specific “grassroots” phenomenon).
As has already been mentioned, the temporal boundaries of mo-dernity are debatable – or blurred, one could say. Teresa Walas points out that the post-war political, social, and civilizational changes not only
“democratized” culture, changing it from “elitist and distributed along the lines of the recipient’s social status to commonly accessible, from hi-erarchical to flattened”, but also, “for the first time in Poland’s history, gave rise to a broad social base for the emergence of modern culture”, one which, in contrast to its Western counterpart manifesting “its belief that their ideas had been utterly defeated” was, as Walas argues, an “archaic
30 H. Gosk, Bohater swoich czasów. Postać literacka w powojennej prozie polskiej o tematyce współczesnej, Izabelin 2002, p. 39.
31 See T. Drewnowski, Polski everyman, – idem, Porachunki z XX wiekiem. Szkice i rozprawy liter-ackie, Kraków 2006, pp. 236–242.
Tadeusz Różewicz and Modernity | 27
version of modernism, with its typical historical optimism, scientistic utopia, belief in technological and social progress, with its humanism, now referred to as socialist humanism”.32 Arguably, whereas the caesura of World War Two separated the elitist phase of modernity from that of its popularization within the framework of Communist ideology and the real socialist state, the division was not equally marked when it came to modernism as a period in Polish culture. The post-modern tenden-cies – with their scepticism towards modernity’s social and philosophical project – appeared in the literature of the Polish People’s Republic (PPR) later than in the West. Różewicz’s modernity was thus untimely – both late (self-critical) and belated (already undermined and revised in philo-sophical and ethical terms).
It is equally difficult to locate the moment of the twilight of mo-dernity in PPR and its attendant formulas of modernism in culture. The 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed not only the debates and emergence of neo-avant-garde (e.g. conceptualism) but also theoretical reflection on the crisis of the modern paradigm in art, constituted a transition period.
German Ritz claims that the new “general culture project”, one referring to traditional models of Polish national identity, emerged together with the Solidarity movement at the beginning of the 1980s.33 The literature of those days was, according to Aleksander Fiut, “a testimony to the for-mation of a new national mythology, one that, under new [historical] cir-cumstances, referred – both indirectly and directly – to the repertory of traditional symbols and stereotypes”.34 The process, according to Andrzej Werner, in fact began in the mid-1970s, when “demythologizing tenden-cies and critical approaches to the collective consciousness, attacking the
32 In. Walas, op. cit., pp. 39–45.
33 G. Ritz, Nić w labiryncie pożądania. Gender i płeć w literaturze polskiej od romantyzmu do post-modernizmu, Warszawa 2002, p. 235.
34 A. Fiut, op. cit., p. 171.
28 | Tadeusz Różewicz’s Narratives and Modern Identity (an Introduction)
formulaic and petrified collective beliefs, searching for new foundations of the Poles’ identity and revising the vision of national history stored (partly through literature) in [the nation’s] collective memory, gave way to a “new alliance of the creative class and society, an alliance directed against the common enemy”.35 The critic, following Adam Zagajewski, called this phenomenon a transformation of “negative spirituality” into
“positive spirituality”.36 Andrzej Walicki offers a slightly different take on the late 1970s’ breakthrough, arguing that it was then that the long process of “nationalization” of Poland’s Communist system – initiated in 1956 and based on the “programme of the system’s and the nation’s mutual adaptation” – collapsed under the weight of strong political an-tagonisms that changed the existing social polarization.37 In short, the standard juxtaposition – the emotionally detached intelligentsia, “deri-sive” towards national identity, vs the tradition-bound society (simulta-neously affirmed and manipulated by such institutions as the state and the church) – was transformed into another one: an authoritarian regime that was an oppositional community of the intelligentsia and the people, with the increasing importance of the church as a mediator and partner for both sides of the social conflict. The new juxtaposition put an end to the isolation of the “jeerers” and their critical function in culture.38
At this point, I skip over other arguments for the twilight of (that phase of) modernity at the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s because I
dis-35 A. Werner, Krew i a atrament, Warszawa 1997, p. 35.
36 Ibid., p. 34.
37 A. Walicki, op. cit., pp. 266–267, 297. The “nationalization” of the PPR can be understood as an ethnic and cultural legitimization of the system, one compensating for the lack of political legitimization.
38 The historian of ideas believes that in the period between the late 1970s and 1989 a certain
“regression to the year 1944” took place in Polish national consciousness, which might be conducive to a “deletion of some links from [the chain of] historical self-awareness”. Ibid., pp. 298–301.