Ocalenie czy oblężenie? Pod naporem pamięci

Abstract

The issue of vividness and painterly qualities of prose by Zygmunt Haupt fuses the article’s two underlying issues. The first one involves the hitherto reception of his works — on the one hand, it saves them from oblivion, on the other — it imprisons them in an interpretative cliché, emphasizing its “painterliness”. The other issue involves the questions of the mnemonic experience and its significance in Haupt’s prose. The author of the article poses a thesis that a flood of visual reminiscences is experienced by Haupt’s Self not as a chance to save the past and its own identity, but as besetment and pressure — of both the memories themselves and the cultural patterns of their emergence. For him, the literary articulation of the mnemonic experience is thusly not a strategy to save from non-existence, but rather — this non-existence’s corroboration.