THE POETICS of TRAVEL WRITING Winter/Spring 2018 No
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THE POETICS OF TRAVEL WRITING winter/spring 2018 no. 11–12 Editor in Chief introdution Prof., PhD Tomasz Mizerkiewicz Editorial Board Prof., PhD Tomasz Mizerkiewicz, Prof., PhD Ewa Kraskowska, Prof., PhD Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik, PhD Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, PhD Ewa Rajewska, PhD Paweł Graf, PhD Lucyna Marzec PhD Wojciech Wielopolski, PhD Joanna Krajewska, MA Cezary Rosiński, MA Agata Rosochacka Publishing Editors PhD Joanna Krajewska MA Agata Rosochacka Linguistic Editors MA Cezary Rosiński – Polish version MA Eliza Cushman Rose – English version Scientific Council Prof., PhD Edward Balcerzan (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland) Prof., PhD Andrea Ceccherelli (University of Bologna, Italy) Prof., PhD Adam Dziadek (University of Silesia, Poland) Prof., PhD Mary Gallagher (University College Dublin, Irealnd) Prof., PhD Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University, United States) Prof., PhD Inga Iwasiów (University of Szczecin, Poland) Prof., PhD Anna Łebkowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Prof., PhD Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia, United States) Proofreaders: PhD Joanna Krajewska – Polish version Thomas Anessi – English version Assistant Editor: Gerard Ronge Cover and logos design: Patrycja Łukomska Editorial Office: 61-701 Poznań, ul. Fredry 10 Editor: Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland „Forum Poetyki | Forum of Poetics” winter/spring 2018 (11-12) year III | ISSN 2451-1404 © Copyright by „Forum Poetyki | Forum of Poetics”, Poznań 2018 Editors do not return unused materials, reserve rights to shortening articles and changing proposed titles. [email protected]| fp.amu.edu.pl TABLE OF CONTENT introdution Travel, Condition, Poetics | s. 4 theories Anna Kołos, Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries | s. 6 Tomasz Ewertowski, Scent of the Dragon: On the Poetics of the Senses in Travel Writing on China | s. 24 Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković, Between the Individual and the Collective: The oeticsP of Romantic Croatian Travel Literature Using Antun Nemčić Gostovinski and Stanko Vraz as Case Studies | s. 36 Przemysław Kaliszuk, A Vertical Schema of Experience: Travel Writing from the Himalayas (Jerzy Kukuczka, Adam Bielecki) | s. 50 Arkadiusz Kalin, The Polish School of Fabrication: Literary Travel Reportage. Ziemowit Szczerek’s Journeys from Mordor to the Intermarium | s. 66 Cezary Rosiński, Travel Styles: Ziemowit Szczerek’s Mordor is Coming to Eat Us | s. 90 practices Anna Marta Dworak, “Space Hinges on Time…”: New Modes of Transportation and Non-Places in Travel Writing | s. 104 Mikołaj Paczkowski, Anticolonial Poetics in Tadeusz Dębicki’s Reportage: Moienzi Nzadi. U wrót Konga | s. 118 critics Urszula Kowalska-Nadolna, Between Tradition and Progress: History and Modernity, Land and Sea | s. 126 Wiesław Ratajczak, Reading, Traveling, Conversing | s. 134 polemics Grzegorz Pertek, Prepositions: The Metaphysics of “Closeness” | s. 142 Patryk Szaj, And Yet It’s About… | s. 156 4 winter/spring 2018 no. 11–12 Travel, Condition, Poetics Tomasz Mizerkiewicz In analyses that continue to dominate the field today, travel writing is framed as one of many possible textualizations of the places visited by their authors. These textualizations are suspen-ded in rhetorical tension or conflict with other forms of textual rendering, and the agents behind them tend to retain the status of Roland Barthes’ historical “scriptors.” The growing relevance of travel writing as a subject for philological reflection seems to stem, however, from several other cognitive impulses. Among these, we can set apart the notion of “condition” as a problem of travel writing that we can understand in a number of ways. By confronting new places, the trave-ling subject takes stock of the personal, linguistic and cultural resources she has at her disposal. Together, these resources amount to a “condition” within our first understanding, as a form of inventory: rarely would these authors question the content (quality; volume) of their inventories before travel, and perhaps they never even knew it was possible to ask. To move on to our second understanding of condition, travel is almost always associated with a great (at times extreme) strain that forces the traveling subject to confront the limitations of her capacities and to ultima-tely develop a condition of her own: her ability to take care of herself, reckon with hardships, and concentrate on the very “here and now” of travel that ends up shaping the subject. This leads to our third understanding of condition, for the Latin conditio indicates not only an inventory and by analogy, a sense of lack, but the creative act as well. Today, the poetics of travel writing seem to rely less and less on intertextual play between a series of related narratives. More and more, they seem to consolidate certain conditional strategies. They can offer a method for taking stock of collective balances and individual inventories, or for identifying fundamental deficiencies, li-mitations, impossibilities and impasses. Finally, they allude to, or perhaps replicate, the work of developing new conditional possibilities and the formation of new skills, new forms of attention and focus, and new techniques of preservation. This final and unusually pragmatic aspect shifts the emphasis from the intertextual relationship to the relationship between text and gesture, text and worldview, or perhaps text and the creative act under strictly circumscribed conditions. introduction | Tomasz Mizerkiewicz, Travel, Condition, Poetics 5 In this issue of “Forum of Poetics”, we map out, for example, the conditional dilemmas of historical European authors chronicling their encounters with China (Anna Kołos, Tomasz Ewertowski). Briefly taking stock of the Western inventory, we do not always turn up enco-uraging results. We also see how travel was at times linked to such a vulnerable sense of one’s “condition” that travelers were compelled to develop a mythology around an imagined inventory (Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković’s article speaks to this issue in the context of travel texts by Croatian romantics). At other times, travel leads to a complex game with the forces of colonial domination (Anna Snaith describes such a process in her important article on women’s travels in London, translated for this issue). In an analogous scenario, a forgotten Polish interwar reporter denounces allegiance to colonial mythologies, exposing the cruelty of white colonists in the Congo (Mikołaj Paczkowski’s article on Tadeusz Dębicki). Using the correspondence of late romantics, Anna Marta Dworak explores the development of skills necessary for coping with the conditions of a new form of travel: the train. Przemysław Ka-liszuk describes portrayals of the conditions needed for travel in his analysis of the poetics of books by two renowned Polish climbers who took on the Himalayas, Jerzy Kukuczka and Adam Bielecki. We also encounter the special gonzo state of the contemporary, individualized traveling subject; through his extraordinary conditions, he is able to forge a radically new method for recording his encounters with the space. Arkadiusz Kalin and Cezary Rosiński discuss these themes using the case study of reportage by Ziemowit Szczerek. Urszula Ko-walska-Nadolna and Wiesław Ratajczak’s reviews of books by Robert Burden and Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech complement these reflections. The reviews meticulously discuss travel accounts as symptoms of the “condition of crisis” of modern subjectivity. Themes of condition are approached from yet another angle (this time outside the domain of travel) in two pole-mics by Grzegorz Pertek and Patryk Szaj, who explore motifs of the contemporary conditions of deconstruction and hermeneutics. We might therefore posit that today, poetological travel writing requires new “conditional” strategies, and that the poetics of the analyzed text participate in developing these strategies more or less directly. 6 winter/spring 2018 no. 11–12 Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Anna Kołos This article was developed under the auspices of a grant from the National Center for the Sciences, project no. 2014/15/D/HS2/00801. As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philolo- gists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical.1 This vast range includes Herodotus, Marco Polo, the alleged Mandeville, Columbus, More, Benyovszky, Swift, Sterne and Krasicki, to name just a few. Those who did indeed travel find themselves in the company of those who mystify or simulate travel, as well as those who experiment with the conventions of travel writing. Yet even if we were to try to impose some order on Sławiński’s semantic chaos and claim that on the level of textual ontology, writing that describes a factual journey should be differentiated from tales of fabricated voyages, the problematic categories of authenticity and literariness still prevent us from reducing