Piotr Bogalecki

Blessings of Avant-Garde. “The Scribe of (Un)Holy Scriptures” Miron Białoszewski

It can be observed that the hitherto prevailing tendencies of reading Miron Białoszewski’s works – saturated with religious references used in an idiomatic or profane way – have been either metaphysical (A. and T. Sobolewski, M. Stala, A. Zagajewski) or linguistic (J. Sławiński, E. Balcerzan, S. Barańczak). These two extremities produce a gap that can be bridged by a reading which combines the postsecular perspective, understood in an institutional way, with neo-avant-garde (in H. Foster’s interpretation). Just as the avant-garde is a critique of the obligatory art institution (P. Bürger), so can postsecularism be understood as a critique of the current institution of religion. The article presents readings of Kalejdoskop (Kaleidoscope) and of poems written in the 1950s and 1960s, and shows Białoszewski’s poetry as neo-avant-garde and postsecular at the same time, depicting the writer as the first postwar postsecular Polish poet.

The Rejected Stone? Postsecularism as a Perspective for Interpreting Polish Literature and Culture

In comparison to other theoretical orientations of recent years, postsecularism does not seem to offer favourable conditions for studying Polish culture. The possibility of transferring postsecular literature studies (J. McClure) to the field of Polish literature may seem disputable; the hitherto taken attempts, briefly presented in the article, show that as a potential “cornerstone” of new readings in Polish literature, postsecularism has been rejected. Presenting potential benefits which could be yielded by adopting postsecularism as a foundation for an alternative history of selected phenomena within modern Polish culture (chiefly literature, but also cinematography, visual arts and music), the author points at research problems whose complexity and importance can be revealed only by a failure which threatens each attempt at formulating a holistic history of literature and culture. Those research problems include: the intrinsically non-religious uses of religious language in literature; the diversity of poetics of profanity and blasphemy, the role of Communism in literary texts using the language of religion, the performative and political character of literary theologies of the Communist Poland; and secularization of the West as the topic and context of Polish-language literary texts.
 

Transformation is Not a Return. A Reading of a Poem by Witold Wirpsza (and of All Other Polish Postsecular Poems)

While challenging the common view which sees postsecularism as a return to religion, this paper is an attempt to apply the main tenets of the postsecular thought to the literary criticism accompanying the Polish literature. After a brief presentation of  several Polish poets whose works meet the proposed criteria of postsecularism (T. Karpowicz, K. Miłobędzka, S. Barańczak and W. Wirpsza), the author sets forth the argument that it is the linguistic aspect of the poems that lets us read them as postsecular. The main part of the paper is a critical reading of Witold Wirpsza’s 1971 poem “Powrót w zamęcie” (“A Return in Confusion”) which is interpreted as, on the one hand, an illustration of the idea of the society being forced into secularisation and, on the other hand, an effect of an intertextual play with Jan Kochanowski’s “Hymn.” Both aspects are crucial in identifying the postsecular rhetoric of the poem as they involve an unorthodox rendering of theological motifs and structures (making it possible to approach them from the perspectives of animal studies and animal theology), the idea of the artistic potential of blasphemy, and the proposition of the vital role of the “linguistic moment” (J. Hillis Miller) in the extra-linguistic interpretation of poetic texts.