Modes of Reading Texts, Objects, and Images: Late Poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz by Olga Ponichtera A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Toronto © Copyright by Olga Ponichtera 2015 Modes of Reading Texts, Objects, and Images: Late Poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz Olga Ponichtera Doctor of Philosophy Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation explores the late oeuvre of Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014), a world- renowned Polish poet, dramatist, and prose writer. It focuses primarily on three poetic and multi-genre volumes published after the political turn of 1989, namely: Mother Departs (Matka Odchodzi) (1999), professor’s knife (nożyk profesora) (2001), and Buy a Pig in a Poke: work in progress (Kup kota w worku: work in progress) (2008). The abovementioned works are chosen as exemplars of the writer’s authorial strategies / modes of reading praxis, prescribed by Różewicz for his ideal audience. These strategies simultaneously reveal the poet himself as a reader (of his own texts and the works of other authors). This study defines an author’s late style as a response to the cognitive and aesthetic evaluation of one’s life’s work, artistic legacy, and metaphysical angst of mortality. Różewicz’s late works are characterized by a tension between recognition and reconciliation to closure, and difficulty with it and/or opposition to it. Authorial construction of lyrical subjectivity as a reader, and modes of textual construction are the central questions under analysis. This study examines both, Tadeusz Różewicz as a reader, and the authorial strategies/ modes he creates to guide the reading praxis of the authorial audience. It argues that authorial self-consciousness and re-reading is a distinctive trait of Różewicz’s late style. More importantly, a key recurring motif in this author’s works is a conscious design of his ideal audience’s reading praxis via specific strategies of building readerly response. Reading texts, objects, and images, under the guise of multiplicity of voices and tones, Różewicz anxiously fights for his authorial voice and artistic legacy, but also for an ethical and engaged readerly response. ii iii Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………..……....….. 1 Chapter 1 ………………………………………………………………………..……......…… 28 Trains of Memory: Re-reading and Archiving Private and Public Pasts in Tadeusz Różewicz’s the professor’s knife 1 Archival historical and prosthetic memory: re-reading the “railway”.…………………..…… 28 2 The knife — reading written testimonies and mysteries of an object …………………......…. 35 2.1 Avoiding emotion: the focus on the object 2.2 The knife on the worktable: (un)usual and ordinary contexts 3 Train wagons— public monument versus individual memory ………………………………. 48 3.1 Objects threatened by rust 3.2 The efficiency of the railway and the Auschwitz gate versus the efficiency of memory and disappearing evil 4 Romanticized youth versus the death mask of a photograph – Rose, Satyr, and silence …..... 60 4.1 Conversation and an image 4.2 The Rose, poetic praxis and /or silence 4.3 The Text as an Object Chapter 2 ……………………………………………………………………..…………...….. 88 Memento Mori in Text and Image; or, Whose Story Is It? — Tadeusz Różewicz’s Mother Departs (1999) 1 The archive: text, photograph, and memory ……………………………………………....… 88 1.1 Paradoxes of the silva rerum: Różewicz as reader of the familial archive 1.2 The “now” of the communicative situation 1.3 (Re) reading of intertextual memories 2 The paradox of multi-voiced narratives ………………………..……………………….….. 107 2.1 The mother’s voice 2.2 The focalizer: presenting Mater Dolorosa 2.3 Comprehensive archive: the voice of the father 2.4 The Brothers: Voices of Janusz and Stanisław 3 Intertexts of documents and quasi-documents – how reliable is memory through documentary authentication? ………………………………………………………………………………119 3.1 The writer’s journal: the recording of trauma and perspective on one’s own oeuvre iv 3.2 Calendar / agenda page: a document fails to preserve memory 4 Photography and the death of a parent: Różewicz in dialogue with Barthes ……………… 130 4.1 Death of the camera shutter 4.2 Photography’s power to authenticate the past 4.3 Conversing with the photograph: reading the punctum Chapter 3…………………………………………………………………………………….. 156 The “Kup kota w worku (work in progress)” critique of popular culture as rereading and re-writing: authorial strategies and readerly praxis 1 Challenging the reader or reading against the text …………………………………..….…. 156 1.1 Reckless rhetoric of popular culture versus “eraser of words” 1.2 The construction of the volume 2 The title: ‘Buy a pig in a poke’………………………………………………………..…… 159 2.1 Allusions to Staff and unsettling reader’s expectations 2.2 “Work in progress” and belonging to his generation 3 When the readers are literary critics ………………………………………………….…... 164 3.1 Is the poet multiplying the chaos of contemporary reality? 3.2 Structural disjunction? 4 The tricks and turns of the reading process: the reader, the narrator, and the audience ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 168 4.1 Reading and rereading the female voice rhetorically 4.2 The strategy of multi-voicing 4.3 Values: assessing instabilities and tensions 4.4 Promotion and the literary market 5 Reading and rereading as a process of sharing secrets …………………………………… 180 5.1. The text as a puzzle 5.2 Present past: rereading the newspaper 5.3 The combatant and the combating Różewicz 6 Credo: contemporary “patronage” of the arts and the role of poetry ………….……….… 195 6.1 Marketing photographs and illustrations: blurring the lines between the private and the public 6.2 Cultural competence: seeking truth, seeking gold 6.3 Last words… legacy or what remains v 1 Introduction The initial impetus behind this dissertation emerged from my interest in the late style and works of a generation of Polish writers who came of age during WWII and whose careers were slowly drawing to a close in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Out of this generation, works of one poet in particular captured my attention. He has been called by critics a catastrophist, a nihilist, a collaborator, and an opportunist, even a moralist. However, what drew me to Tadeusz Różewicz’s oeuvre were not the controversies or scandals which periodically accompanied his career, but rather the power of his poetry in contrast to the simplicity of his “unpoetic” language and his atypical short verse. This poet was still fiercely publishing in his late 80s and 90s, remaining current, thoroughly aware of the latest literary and artistic trends, and actively engaged with contemporary issues and problems. Różewicz was also an obsessive reader and re- reader of his own texts and works of other authors. In my opinion, it is his constant returns to and re-reading of certain texts, problems, and motifs that define his late oeuvre. The problem of Różewicz as simultaneously an author and a reader has still not been fully explored in scholarship. This lack of attention is significant because only when we understand this author as a reader (of texts, biographies, objects, images) can we understand how Różewicz programs the reading praxis of his own texts for the audience, and in essence, uncover how he wants to be read. In order to address this problem, my dissertation outlines and examines Różewicz’s main modes of authorial reading and writing in his late oeuvre. Situating this poet on the map of Polish postwar literature is not a simple task. Różewicz stands very much apart from easy classifications, literary groups, and currents. Born in 1921, he belonged to a generation of talented poets that included Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Tadeusz Gajcy, Andrzej Stroiński, all of whom died in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and Andrzej Trzebiński, who died as a result of public execution on the streets of Warsaw in 1943. Other writers of the same generation, such as Tadeusz Borowski and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, survived imprisonment (Borowski in Nazi concentration camps and Grudziński in the Soviet gulags). Both would later be known in the West primarily for the texts they wrote about their traumatic experiences of imprisonment.1 Few others who also survived the war include such 2 great poets as Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, and Wisława Szymborska. This generation, born in independent inter-war Poland and coming of age during World War II, in which Poland lost six million people (approximately one-fifth of its population), is known in Polish letters as “The Generation of the Columbuses.”2 It is the horrors of the experience of this war that define Różewicz’s oeuvre. One Polish literary critic, Kazmierz Wyka, famously labelled this generation of poets as a “generation infected with death.”3 Różewicz contested this view, asserting that, on the contrary, his generation was “infected with life.”4 Yet, Wyka had good reasons for his assertion, given poems like “Survivor,” from Różewicz’s postwar debut volume, Anxiety (Niepokój, 1947), in which he writes: “I am twenty-four / Led to slaughter / I survived. // These words are empty and equivalent: / man and animal / love and hate / foe and friend / dark and light. // (…) I have seen: / truckloads of chopped–up people / who will never be saved.”5 Superficially, these verses are about death, but note that what is being underscored is Różewicz as a survivor, and thus witness. Simultaneously, the poet emphasizes the bankruptcy of language, and of ethics. In “Lament” from the same volume, his lyrical subject asserts: “I am twenty / I am a murderer / I am a tool / as blind as a sword / in the hands of an executioner / I have murdered a man.”6 Here he takes on a position of responsibility and participation, which is famously echoed also by Borowski’s narrator Vorarbeiter Tadek.7 Różewicz’s postwar poetry can be seen as an answer to Adorno’ dictum addressing the (im)/possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz.