Piotr Śliwiński

Paradoxes of idiom
The poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz – a prophecy of its own (and general) incapability and impossibility in the world where ‘poets are dead’ – starts to resemble prose. It is a poetry after the death of poetry, it is written in the world after the death of the world. Różewicz – with all his details, described episodes, references to various “life’s” situations, quotes of factual events – being an angry moralist, at the level of a general diagnosis of reality, seems to be, despite all hesitations, a writer resigned, even a nihilist. The key question of this text is as follows: how it was possible to form own poet’s language, his own idiom, how it was possible within the radical consciousness of the end? The answer: the paradox of Różewicz is constituted on the fact that he has to – in the same moment – construct and to ruin his own poetic singularity. On the one hand, this singularity is to be found among the most important marks that enable us to identify poetry, on the other, its desire transforms the very same singularity into a dwelling of vanity, lightness, triviality, a sick ambition of all writers, a fetish. To be and not to be a poet, that is the Różewicz’s dilemma.

In recent years, involvement has become almost the main topic of literary life; this is due largely to the fact that, firstly, there has emerged a group of authors who manifest not only their political views, but also their obligations; secondly due to the fact that some critics appeal for a „political turnaround” in literature and thirdly, due to the popularization of the thought of several world philosophers, with Jacques Rancier at the helm, who try to extract the political out of the aesthetic, and fourthly, as a consequence of the reactivation of old languages – Marxist one on the left side and conservative-identity one on the right.
The resistance which these tendencies have aroused in some milieus is associated with the conviction that the discovery of the political possibilities of literature and its interpretation leads (or will lead) to its literariness, utilitarization, subordination to the languages that dominate on the public scene. The author of the article shares the above fears; he is of the opinion that literature should rather be an instrument for undermining instruments, pragmatism and sociologism by means of a language that does not belong to the territory of defined discourse; whereas the most interesting aspect of its political nature consists in its ability to resist politics.