Rytm i podmiot w liryce Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza i Aleksandra Wata

Abstract

The basic criteria adopted in the present dissertation to describe Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Aleksander Wat poetical oeuvre are the notions of rhythm and subject. The introductory parts of the dissertation provide a lot of information on the etymology and history of these ideas — particularly from the point of view of literary theory. The problem of subject has been in recent years addressed in a great number of theoretical studies. The purpose of the present study is to refer to the already known research proposals and to present some new methods of searching for the subject in the literary text. The employed method of describing poetical works has been drawn on the works by such French scholars as Henri Meschonnic (particularly on his fundamental work Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage) and Julia Kristeva (mainly on her La révolution du langage poétique) whose theories of rhythm and subject make it possible to connect those two notions and bring out the relations existing between them. The main thesis of the present dissertation concerns the way the subject manifests itself through the rhythm of a given text. The basis for the detailed “microanalyses” of selected poems by Iwaszkiewicz and Wat is H. Meschonnic’s associational conception of literature which opens out encouraging creative perspectives for the reader of poetical texts. This style of reading is completed by J. Kristeva’s concept of reading, stemming from Saussure’s theory of anagrams, which allows us to notice in the analysed texts an unusual opalescence of senses and to put forward hitherto unknown and unimagined interpretative strategies in the reading of the two above mentioned poets whose works are involved in a complex network of intertextual relations. One of the most important problems touched upon in the present dissertation is a clear cut distinction between rhythm and meter. Those two notions are often, as is witnessed by many dictionary definitions, identified with each other on the basis of some shared features such as iterability, regularity, and equivalence, but in reality rhythm is not predictable, while meter is. Besides, rhythm is one of the most important signifying, as has been shown by the analyses of the particular texts carried out in the present dissertation. Rhythm is also an individual, unique factor characterising every poet, or various works of the same author. It is precisely the rhythm of the literary text that determines its subjectivity. The textual readings suggested in the dissertation do not exclude analyses made from the point of view of literary history, and they broaden the range of the interpretation of particular works. The author’s analyses concern above all the last volume of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s poetry Muzyka wieczorem (Music in the evening) — formal similarities make it necessary for the author to refer back to Oktostychy (Octastichs) from 1919 and some selected late Aleksander Wat’s poems that used to be described as „somatic poems” — following the title of one of the poems of the author of Ciemne swiecidlo (Dark light). The analyses concern then the output of two poets who made their debut as poets in 1919. Those two debut volumes are extremely different from each other, but at the same time they are both firmly anchored in the Modernist literature: in Iwaszkiewicz’s early lyrics we can observe the influence of Symbolism and Pamassianism, while Wat’s Piecyk (Little oven) bears witness to the author’s fascination with Micinski’s poetry and Art Nouveau, which in Wat’s interpretation undergo a kind of deconstruction. Ultimately, however, Iwaszkiewicz and Wat’s works have a lot in common, which is only superficially surprising, especially on the thematic plane (the subject of the body), as is cleariy manifested in their sensualism and somatism. It has to be borne in mind at the same time that these features result from different ways of perceiving the world, which the author has attempted to show in his analyses, and these differences yield two distinct types of self-expression. The object of the author’s particular interest in this dissertation is the state of mind in which the intentional structure of constructing, of „producing” the subject in a literary text ceases to be possible and a type of the subject comes to the fore which is hard to grasp by means of the traditional tools of literary analysis. It is a subject that may emerge in the rhythm of a given poem, bringing about a specific signifying effect (signifiance), or evoking the „significant” textual space.