The Language of Hysteria: Pathos, Claustrophobia and Mass Memory
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The Language of Hysteria: Pathos, Claustrophobia and Mass Memory in the Writing of Dorota Masłowska Aleksandra Marta Rychlicka UCL PhD 1 I, Aleksandra Marta Rychlicka, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the literary constructions of memory, history and suffering in the writing of an iconic Polish author of the new generation, Dorota Masłowska (b. 1983). I read Masłowska’s work as an intervention to the way that Polish writers have been negotiating the past. No longer obliged to archive the collective memory, Masłowska’s writing creates a literary language that most poignantly reflects the evolution of Polish collective remembrance. Marked by the ‘suffering of surviving,’ this experience has led to a memory model corresponding to hysteria: a distinct form of suffering which I conceptualise in opposition to the dominant model of trauma theory. Drawing on the work of Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński, I claim that it is neither any single traumatic event nor an accumulation of identifiable historical tragedies that torments the Polish nation, but rather the intangible mental suffering which results from being unable to specify the cause of pain. This thesis moves away from the symbolism of ‘bloodlands’, (Timothy Snyder’s influential term for the region) to the symbolism of cultural ‘graves’, articulated in the writing of Masłowska. The thesis then investigates the most vulnerable and revealing element of culture: its language. Masłowska’s signature blend of official jargons, media noise, slang and slogans explodes with emotions but conveys no meaning. Her writing captures the sound of cultural hysteria, which I read in terms of aggression but also suffering, failed pathos and isolation. Masłowska’s language of hysteria becomes an incubator for ‘mass memory’, my concept to describe collective memory in post-1989 Poland. Drawing on Kępiński’s theory of information metabolism, the thesis explores how earlier symbols have lost their connection with the present and became ‘empty signs,’ unable either to inform or unite people. 3 Impact Statement My thesis offers a new reading of the works of an acclaimed Polish writer, Dorota Masłowska. It aims to contribute to the literary research on Masłowska's writing, as well as to expand the interpretation and application of her works. In my thesis, I examine Masłowska's texts against a wider cultural background of Polish culture. As such, my research offers a new approach to the concepts of memory and suffering. It argues that distinct histories of collective remembrance produce particular value systems that shape how groups perceive and articulate pain. Poland presents a privileged case of the dynamic I explore because, unlike Western European countries, it has never left the stage of memory development in which memory is identified with history. There are two distinct aspects of my research that have a broader relevance for a non-academic public. Firstly, my project explores the changes in the structures of collective remembering that occur when a culture becomes uprooted and loses its former points of reference. The research examines how earlier symbols lose their connection with the present and thus become ‘empty signs,’ which neither inform nor have a power to bind a group. The research on how the past is negotiated in such conditions becomes particularly relevant in the light of the growing migration, which is predicted to become a defining experience of the twenty-first century. Traditionally, a variety of different groups that a person belonged to – nations, cultural institutions, religious communities – did most of those negotiations on our behalf. My thesis analyses how individuals, once they are uprooted from their past and lose their old points of reference, relate to collective remembrance. Secondly, I research the correlation between the concepts of suffering and distinct value systems that groups develop. My project emphasises the socio-cultural relativity of both the experience and the recognition of suffering. It demonstrates the urgency of letting cultures define pain in their own language without fearing that their suffering will pass unrecognised. Drawing on the work of Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński, I discuss how technological development heightens the significance of emotions in contemporary discourses. In a world of limitless access to information without stable points of reference, it is the emotional approach to one's environment that determines which information we select. 4 Table of Contents Chapter 1 Poles without the Past? The Struggle with Memory in the Works of Dorota Masłowska..6 Chapter 2 Not All Wounds Bleed: Pathos versus Trauma...............................................................48 Chapter 3 Claustrophobia: Masłowska’s Essays.............................................................................93 Chapter 4 The Language of Hysteria: Masłowska’s Fiction..........................................................119 Chapter 5 Mass Memory: Masłowska’s Drama.............................................................................194 Conclusion...........................................................................................................249 Bibliography........................................................................................................259 5 Chapter 1 Poles without the Past? The Struggle with Memory in the Works of Dorota Masłowska 1. Whose memory is it? Introduction In the opening pages of his landmark work Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur explains that his phenomenology of memory revolves around two questions: “Of what are there memories?” and “Whose memory is it?”1. This basic distinction between “what” and “who” separates memories from their recollection – the passive nature of memories that pop into our mind from the active search for a particular memory2. It is this distinction that becomes crucial while analysing the work of the Polish writer Dorota Masłowska (b. 1983) and the ambivalent status of collective memory in her literary world. In Masłowska’s writing, characters recall memories of events that they did not live through, but claim to remember. The distinction between ‘of what are there memories’ and ‘whose memory is it’ becomes more and more blurry. 1 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, London : University of Chicago Press , 2004), p. 3. 2 ibid, p. 4. 6 In the period 2002 -2009 that my dissertation focuses on, the notion of memory undergoes a progression in Masłowska’s body of work, gradually gaining more relevance. It begins on an implicit level, encoded in the broken language that carries unrecognizable traces of the past, such as in Masłowska’s debut novel Wojna polsko- ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną [White and Red, 2000], and ends in a literal explosion in her second drama, Między nami dobrze jest [No Matter How Hard We Tried, 2008]. All of the works, however, explore a severe crisis of collective memory that Masłowska’s characters suffer from in the literary world of her fiction. The historical legacy of Poland cannot be changed, no matter how hard we tried. The way we approach the past, however, is a matter of on-going discussions carried from the position of the present and thus reflects the current situation more so than it describes the preceding events. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who introduced the notion of collective memory, stressed its communicative nature within ‘social frameworks’, such as families, schools, nations, cultures etc. Participation in collective memory proceeds and preconditions the individual: ‘it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection’3. Consequently, memory is never fixed. The values and claims held in the present determine how we negotiate the memory of the past. Halbwachs argued that ‘in reality the past does not recur as such, that everything seems to indicate that the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present’4. Another seminal figure of memory studies, the German literary scholar Aleida Assmann, responded to the confusion regarding 3 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 38. 4 ibid, pp. 39–40. 7 broad use of the term ‘collective memory’ by stressing that ‘institutions and larger social groups [...] do not “have” a memory – they make one for themselves with the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places, and monuments’5. In Masłowska’s writing, the struggle with such ‘memory-making’ that A. Assmann describes is not a matter of interest but urgency; a vital component of her signature language. The literary world that the writer creates is tainted with traces of the past. Tainted, because the historical traces in her fiction turn into relics that lose their communicative function. Instead of serving as bridges between the past and the present, these remnants become metaphorical bumps on the road, upon which one stumbles whenever trying to move towards the future. 2. Floating figures of memory While Halbwachs emphasised the ever-changing nature of collective memory, Jan Assmann discerned and explored ‘cultural