Granice nowoczesności : proza polska i wyczerpanie modernizmu

Abstract

The work concentrates on the mechanism determinig changes and developments of the modern literature (modernistic literature). It is a dialectics of attempts to emphasise the autonomy of the literature, and ways of going beyond this autonomy. However, due to the fact that the two attempts present themselves with a different level of intensity within the scope of the artistic work or broader literary phenomena, we can speak of two different tendencies in the modern literature. They are concerned with sustaining and exposing autonomy, e.g. classifying programmes, mythography, or the attempts to cross it, e.g. the phenomena belonging to a widely-understood avantgarde, as well as the so-called literature engaged. The dialectics described seems to be greatly responsible for developmental dynamics of Modernism. It brought about the abundance of programmes or artistic phenomena because the mutually exclusive attempts forced subsequent corrections and alterations of the previous aesthetic and programme assumptions, and their radicalisation. In consequence, the progress of Modernism started to distinguish oneself as an increasing diversity of the artistic works. A crisis of this logics appeared in line with the level of internal diversity which did not allow to perceive it as a homogeneous system. It happened in Poland in 1960s and 1970s. However, socio-political factors, forcing a momentary return to a traditional mode of thinking within the scope of the concept of “independent literature”, postponed the processes being the result of the “exhaustion” of developmental logics of Modernism. In the analytical part of the book selected phenomena and works were discussed, with a special emphasis on the meaning of dialectics between a “literacy quality”, understood as a specific selected language mode, and an absorbed other-kind element, referring to historical or extratextual reality (e.g. a novel by H. Malewska Przemija postać świata - the second essay), as well as a “quatation from reality” and the attempts to phonematisation of the literary language found in the works of late Avantgarde Period (e.g. prose by L. Buczkowski, M. Białoszewski, R. Schubert - the fifth essay). The writers of late Modernism did not see the possibility of establishing a visible border between the spheres of the “literary” and “extraliterary”. As a result, the literary text was no longer perceived as the area of a dialectic game between heterogeneous elements, but as a “borderline case” of the literature, a spatialised demarcation line, the “frame” in a position of the “interior”. A heterogeneous text was replaced with a formula of a plural text, which took the floor in prose at the turn of 1960s and 1970s. A variety of plural text types was discussed in the third and fourth essay, on the basis of the works by W. Gombrowicz, J. Andrzejewski, S. Różewicz, T. Parnicki, and others. In the sixth essay as well as in the Closing Part, it is a literary awareness after 1989 that is the subject matter. The formula of the prose cultivating a mythography tradition, referring in a nostalgic manner to the lost authority of the late, that is the latest, literature, at the same time searching for an agreement with a relatively broad circle of the reading public (the so-called medium literature) has gained the widest recognition for the last 15 years. The literary life, therefore, was in favour of a peculiar Modernism after Modernism, which was imperceptibly relegated into historical ways of understanding literature. The reason for this kind of writing is the identity myth, a reference to fiction as the way to satisfy the need of possessing one’s own story. However, treating a modern mythography as an admired but already historical pattern, and elevating fiction, the prose of the last few years has much of the visible characteristics of Postmodernism.