Świat jako Ty : poezja polska wobec adresata w drugiej połowie XX wieku

Abstract

The book’s topic is the place of the addressee in the poetics of a lyrical text seen in the perspective of three branches of knowledge: the theory of communication, history of poetry, and poetics. The statement and typologies belonging to poetics are verified by means of an interpretation of selected texts. The present dissertation has been divided into four parts. Chapter One: Who are You? Concerning the Problems of the Poetics o f the Lyrical Addressee starts with a discussion of the conclusions reached by academic research with respect to the relationship between the addresser, the addressee, and the reader. The main strand of thought leads to the distinction of the “virtual addressee” and “reader” as opposed to the “represented addressee”, who is represented in the text and directly projected in the apostrophe. The appearance of You in the text constitutes, however, a relationship that cannot be identified with thematisation (that is with the discourse about the addresser) and the addresser often remains an “undefined being”. In connection with this, the author of the book has put forward the conception of the “possible addresser”, and of the understanding of poetry in terms of a “possible communication”. Further on, the author analyses the effect of an act of speech on poetical communication (the perspective of intertextuality, possible worlds, mimesis) and places the poet’s turning to the addressee in a thematic and generic perspective. The author deals here with offered texts, poems addressing natural objects and phenomena, allotropes attacking the static ekphrasis, and with prayer compositions. A separate discussion is devoted to the ode and apostrophe analysed from the point of view of their rhetorical origin. Eventually, the chapter in question strives to combine the statements pertaining to poetics with the perspective of the so-called philosophy of dialogue. In Chapter II entitled Figury przemocy (Figures o f Violence), the reader will find some examples of literary texts in which the addressee is an object of various forms of pressure coming from the external world, and particularly from the faceless institutions (such as history, politics, language). What we observe is the shaping of the addressee in the space of a rhetoric which forces him or her constantly to say either yes or no. Analysis of the instrumental treatment of the lyrical “you” is conducted in the light of two important Polish after-war poems representing the so called civil tendency, and constituting its two models. The first one is Czesław Milosz’s Dziecię Europy (Europe's Child) interpreted from the perspective of Milosz’s Zniewolony umysl (The Captive Mind) and its poetical supplements, such as: Ernest BrylTs poems, the poetry of the Generation 68, the poetry by Jan Polkowski, Tadeusz Nowak’s Ósmy pacierz azjatycki (The Eighth Asian Paternoster), and Kazimierz Wierzyński’s Przykazania (Commandments). Zbigniew Herbert’s Przesianie Pana Cogito (The Envoy o f Mr Cogito) determines the other model of the poetical persuasive discourse. This poem, read — among other things — from the perspective of Henryk Elzenberg’s views, and Leszek Kolakowski’s essay Kaplan i blazen (The Priest and the Jester), reveals the motif of the pressure on the addressee. The same motif can be found in the poetical diction of the Generation 68 (Barańczak, Karasek, Komhauser), in the Martial Law poetry (Bronislaw Maj, Urszula Kozioł), and in the texts by Ewa Lipska and Dominik Opolski. Chapter III entitled Słowa miłości (The Words of Love) is composed of two parts. The part called Glos Orfeusza (Orpheus’s Voice) contains apostrophes directed at the dead. The poetical summoning of the dead (their being kept alive) is described as putting oneself in front of another person, as seeking true faces in the relations established by a given poem. As examples of the poems looking for a contact with a dead person are provided, among other things, the texts by Zbigniew Herbert, Antoni Słonimski, and Władysław Broniewski. A separate section is devoted to an interpretation of the collection by Anna Kamieńska called Biały rękopis (White Manuscript) from the perspective of an Orphic myth — the suspension of death by means of lyrical poetry. The poetical action is read here as using “Orpheus’s Voice”, which is also exemplified by, among other things, the elegiac poems by Adam Zagajewski and Czesław Miłosz. In the second part of the discussed chapter various figures of the poetical “discourse of love” are described and arranged in groups determined by the appropriate quotations from the Biblical Canticle of Canticles. The love poems are read here in the context of the pragmatic relationship that holds them together. “The addressee of confession”, “the addressee of expectation”, “the addressee of desire", and “the addressee of adoration” appear in the world of the poems by Halina Poświatowska, Stanisław Grochowiak, Ryszard Krynicki, Jacek Bierezin. The forms of the addressee who is, at the same time, a partner in an act of love are examined first of all on the basis of the achievements by Poświatowska, Bierezin, and Rafał Wojaczek (“The ‘you’ of the love transgression”). In Chapter IV entitled Próby rozumienia (Attempts at Understanding), the author analyses various variants, based on the You figure, of encountering the Other in modern poetry. The apostrophic structure intensifies the experience of a poem for the perspective of Celan’s “mystery of encounter” . In the part entitles Sobowtór tv fałszywym lustrze (A Doppelganger in a Distorting Mirror), the author discusses the auto-reflective situations which, in an attempt to mirror oneself in another, make the subject take a position in front of a mirror. The poems by Tadeusz Różewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Brzękowski, Julian Przyboś, read against the backdrop the “autobiographical discourse” reveal “the doppelganger’s drama” which is well anchored in the tradition. The relation of identity and non-identity organises the second person variety of the “lyric of the masque”, and the type of the addressee which the author of the book calls “The ‘you’ of speculation”. In the second part of the chapter, an attempt has been made to distinguish a model of lyric communication that would be heading for a “face to face” vision, which is never fully accessible in a poem. “The ‘you’ of an epiphany”, and Levinas’s “revelation of the Other”, emerge from the poems by Bronislaw Maj, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Stanisław Barańczak. In the book’s final part, the author analyses the situation of the subject that can be called “returns to oneself through You” confronted with an attempt to discern in the poems a “reader” that would determine the field for a “sylleptic addressee”. The book ends with and analysis of the poem that symbolically concludes the 20th c.: namely, Adam Zagajewski’s Spróbuj opiewać okaleczony świat (Try to Praise the Mutilated World). The evidence concerning the poem’s reception is supposed to confirm the sense, ascribed by Pawelec to the appellative poetry, of what has been called “possible communication”, and the “possible addressee”.