Aleksander Wat’s Notes from Kaiser Hospital: Fragments of a Heterotopical Autobiography

The article’s purpose is to present Aleksander Wat’s essay written after his stay in Kaiser Hospital in Oakland in 1964, kept in the writer’s archive in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New Haven. This essay seems to be relevant for several reasons: it is a commentary to Wat’s Dziennik bez samogłosek [DiaryWithoutVowels] and, above all, it is one of the poet’s pathographic texts devoted almost entirely to an analysis of the hospital space. Using the categories of heterotopia, total institution, and infirmary, an attempt is made to describe the phenomenon of an “autobiography of the state of imprisonment” (the notes from Kaiser Hospital are treated as part of a never-written memoir My Prisons – My Hospitals) and reconstruct the poetics of a heterotopical text created from the perspective of an inhabitant of the “counter-site.”