Filip Mazurczak

In Herbert’s essays and poems we find not only a wide range of economic problems, but also a real passion with which the author describes the economic fundaments of all civilizations. In the apocrypha The Portrait in Black Flames and poem “Hakeldama,” Herbert creates a great metaphor of the Final Judgment as the Great  Book of accounts. This is nothing unusual, as the poet held a master’s degree in economics from the School of Economics in Krakow, currently the Krakow University of Economics.

(Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert. Biografia, Vol. 1: Niepokój, Vol. 2: Pan Cogito, Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2018, pp. 1920)

The aim of the article is to present the individual and intense experience of sensing the world in religious categories, an account of which can be found in the novel The Salt of the Earth. The term “religious experience” comes from William James. The author of the article first mentions the interpretative difficulties connected with structural irony, which calls into question some of the statements verbalized in the novel. Taking into account this complexity, he points out four elements that justify discussion of a religious experience in The Salt of the Earth. First, he points to the title, which evokes a religious perception of the world, and assumes a response to a calling that comes from God. Second, he refers to the Prologue (deprived of structural irony), which introduces the theme of war as blasphemy. Third, he analyses those passages in which the narrator shortens his distance from Piotr Niewiadomski’s point of view and approvingly accepts the magical interpretation of natural phenomena. Lastly, he refers to the Christian-Orphic-Hutsul theme of the immortality of the soul and contact with the dead.

This article tries to characterize irony in Józef Wittlin’s The Salt of the Earth, also in reference to the author’s other texts. The author refers to the most important twentieth century methodology of the study of irony as well as to the scholars who study Wittlin’s work, including: D.S. Muecke, D. Sperber i D. Wilson, B. Alleman, W. Szturc, P. Łaguna oraz K. Jakowska, Z. Yurieff, and E. Wiegandt.

Here, irony is treated as the attitude of a worldview that formed in part due to the experience of World War I. Thanks to the ironic view of reality (which in the very text of The Salt of the Earth is evident, for example, at the stylistic level) the author succeeds in saving his own world of values, which in this way is subject to Bakhtinian carnivalization.

The author returns to The Salt of the Earth conceived in the mythic-ritual context. She presents characteristic elements of the plot that allow us to interpret the fortunes of the main character through the prism of the initiation ritual. However, what she proposes differs from previous interpretations of the novel. She concludes that by using the poetics of myth and the initiation model the author not only demythologizes war, but also presents a diagnosis of the situation of European civilization on the eve of the cataclysm of World War II. Wittlin also passes judgment on fascination with the primeval myth, as well as on simplistic concepts of the return to a state of unblemished nature, which was supposed to be an antidote to the civilizational threats of the time.

The author also contemplates the meaning of the presentation of the protagonist of the novel, Piotr Niewiadomski, as an innocent simpleton. By using the context of the initiation ritual, we can understand Niewiadomski’s journey as a path to recognizing one’s situation in the world leading to rebellion but culminating in cognition and self-awareness. However, the novel’s protagonist does not fully achieve these aims. He remains a person who is incapable of carrying knowledge about the world and about conscious participation. Therefore, in The Salt of the Earth Wittlin poses a question about the responsibility all of us bear for evil, including that resulting from simplifications and from mythologization. 

The article subjects to analysis selected motifs from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” based on the draft copies of the work that are stored in the poet’s archive. An analysis of the manuscripts, which reveals a different, hidden aspect of the final text, allows for the investigation of what was omitted in the process of creation, such as the motif of Daedal and the reference to the Upanishads, and traces the development of the significant themes of the poem: a concept of identity and the notion of tautology.