Parafernalia : o rzeczach i marzeniach

Abstract

The book is a collection of studies conducted systematically for thirty years. All of them are devoted to the research on the literary representation of objects and the historical variability in the way they were depicted. The author regards the history of European art as the process of gradual “emancipation” of the object. He is particularly interested in its literary autonomization — the slow release from serving authors and ideologies, completed with the “dehumanization” of the object. The thesis, published in the essay O rzeczach [About Objects] (1993), was confirmed in the humanities a few years later, together with the famous “turn towards objects” (turn to materiality, turn to non-human). The analysis of the artistic output of Skamander — a literary poetic group, which already in 1920s started to discover the value of everyday life — is the reference point to the present study. In its members’ imagination, individual “complexes” related to the environment and the matter may be observed. In Józef Wittlin’s works, it is “a spoon of soup”, saving lives amongst the attrocities of war, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska uses the “aquatic” imaginings, in the poetic pieces of Jan Lechoń, paraphernalia related to the suicidal complex perform that role, whereas in the works of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz the personal objects, which build the author’s autobiography, are being employed. Julian Tuwim turned out to be most sensitive to the civilizational transformations, discerning magical powers in the ordinary things: from the role that the musical instruments play to the status of a murder weapon. Other writers described in the book include: Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who showed the subtleties of everyday existence in the realities of Nazi occupation, and Ewa Graczyk — an essayist, designing an imaginative “Exhibition” of the material emblems of the People’s Republic of Poland. The book ends with the panoramic overview of the Polish lyric poetry after 1956, in which, owing to Miron Białoszewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska and many others, the poetic “phenomenology of the object” could be created — a phenomenon unappreciated in the history of the European literature. Here, also “paraphernalia” — the title concept, expressing the intimate dimension of the human-object relation — has been elucidated.