Emigracje intymne : o współczesnych polskich narracjach autobiograficznych

Abstract

Intimate emigrations… touch upon various types of emigration, the real ones (deriving from changing the place of living) and the metaphoric ones (internal, timing at reaching hidden reserves of one’s own self and confronting demons engrossed in sub‑ consciousness). The very experiences were shown on the example of writers who went through various biographic experiences: Zygmunt Haupt, Zbigniew Kruszyński, Manuela Gretkowska, Artur Leczycki, Mikołaj Łoziński, Tomasz Piątek, Magdalena Tulli and Michał Witkowski. The choice of the authors, very selective and subjective as usual, was to show various aspects and ways of functionalizing emigrations in the title, which, in its working form, could be divided into four groups, or, more specifically, define four areas covered by them. These would be real, intimate, literary and biographic emigrations. Obviously, it is not the case that particular emigrations exist in isolation. Usually, it is a supplementary overlapping of at least two areas forming a loop resembling tangled mazes. Moving alongside is above all to enable getting to know oneself and allow for an autotherapeutic familiarization with traumatic experiences, such as dealing with the sense of overwhelming strangeness (Haupt, Kruszyński), struggling with one’s own femininity (Gretkowska), a postmodernist loss in a library (Leczycki), unsuccessful attempts of an escape from a habit (Piątek), a compensation of a coming out “way out from a wardrobe” (Witkowski), a difficult escape from the baggage of the past (Łoziński) or acceptance of the past thanks to which it will be possible to live “normally” (Tulli). Contemporary writers, planting and, at the same time, mistaking biographic traces, make a self‑promoting effort (Gretkowska, Leczycki, Piątek, Witkowski). Playing with their own biographies, they balance at the borderline of reality and fiction. In consequence, revealing their own intimacy arouses doubts. However, this peculiar selling out of their own privacy the authors in question undergo, helps in communicating with their own self.