Poetyka postpamięci i etyka świadka-spadkobiercy Zagłady w polskiej literaturze najnowszej

W rozprawie rozważono problem stawania się polskich twórców świadkami drugiego stopnia, etycznymi czytelnikami świadectw Zagłady i heteropatycznymi podmiotami postpamięci. W pierwszym rozdziale części analitycznej przeanalizowano głównonurtowe utwory literackie ukazujące się w latach osiemdziesiątych XX wieku, które weszły dziś do kanonu polskiej literatury Zagłady. Badania wczesnej recepcji omawianych tekstów wykazały konieczność redefinicji współczesnych rozpoznań. W dalszej części rozprawy rozważono, na ile melancholijny podmiot literatury lat dziewięćdziesiątych XX wieku może przełamać narcystyczną dominantę poprzedniej dekady i pozwolić na zaistnienie etycznego aspektu postpamięci. W ostatnim rozdziale dokonano analizy prozy autobiograficznej polsko-żydowskich twórców drugiego pokolenia, którzy próbują odtworzyć losy swoich rodzin, włączając w nie własną opowieść traumy i przeciwstawiając się tabu, zakazującemu mówienia o Szoa. Metodologia badawcza wypracowana na potrzeby niniejszej rozprawy czerpie z psychoanalitycznego (tu przede wszystkim: Freudowskiego i Lacanowskiego) rozumienia traumy, pamięci i podmiotu, z dwudziestowiecznych koncepcji pamięci rozumianej relacyjnie i społecznie – m.in. Maurice’a Halbwachsa i Pierre’a Nory; w końcu odnosi się do refleksji na temat żałoby, postpamięci i świadkowania, poczynionej m.in. przez Jacques’a Derridę, Nadine Fresco, Marianne Hirsch i Shoshanę Felman.

Poetics of postmemory and the ethics of the Holocaust secondary witnessing in Polish contemporary literature. The dissertation analyses several literary works which were published in Poland in the 1980s and the following decades, and discusses how the story of Polish Jews’ extermination is being incorporated into the collective memory. The critical reflection conveyed by these works has been examined, also with reference to a couple of public debates on Polish-Jewish relations during occupation. In order to present the root causes of contemporary reflection on cultural memory, selected aspects of Sigmund Freud's, Maurice Halbwachs’s as well as Jacques Derrida’s and Pierre Nora's theories have been studied. The said aspects shed light on the difference between the concept of postmemory and reflections on the forbidden (impossible) representation, which are characteristic for the postmodern thought. The possibility to restore communication, suggested by Marianne Hirsch's approach, has been questioned and contrasted with the affirmation of silence, the negation of the ability to witness another person's suffering. The study underlines the relational understanding of postmemory, which is characterised by: delayed, traumatic impact of the past while contacting witnesses-survivors, intergenerational (or cross-cultural) distance, an attitude which is manifested by “distant” empathy – heteropathy, and identification allowing the subject to preserve its individuality, that is allo-identification, as well as affective, creative “investment of imagination”. The poetics of postmemory has been analysed in the thesis using the example of the comic story Maus by Art Spiegelman and the novel Austerlitz written by W.G. Sebald alongside the works of a literary theorist Marianne Hirsch and photography theorists (Susan Sontag, Janina Struk, and Roland Barthes). It has been pointed out that the experience of intersemiotics has considerable significance for the postmemory processing. Until the late 1940s the knowledge about the Holocaust constituted a part of discourse. The events that took place before the eyes of Polish bystanders (as they are referred to in Raul Hilberg’s triad) gained symbolics. Later, the process was stopped and could not be fulfilled until the political system transformation of 1989. This does not mean that in the mainstream literature of a few post-war decades – as well as in other artistic fields – the subject was not present. Yet, a discursive frame which would help to learn the importance of factors evoking the memory of Holocaust and recalling the recently witnessed events, was absent. This study also investigates the problem of “post-traumatism” of Polish culture and confronts comments made by Polish researchers of the Holocaust with works of western trauma studies theorists. The thesis further examines those prose works of the 1980s which presently, and without a doubt, constitute the canon of Polish Holocaust literature, even though two or three decades ago they were not categorised as such by critics and reviewers or even by the authors themselves: novels Początek (in English as ‘The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenmann’) by Andrzej Szczypiorski and Umschlagplatz by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz and the first texts written by young authors who at present constitute the post-war generation: Zagłada (‘Annihilation’) by Piotr Szewc and Weiser Dawidek by Paweł Huelle. The reception of these literary works was different at home and abroad, where – as opposed to what happened in Poland – the Jewish and the Holocaust themes included in the novels were widely commented. It was questioned whether the extermination of Jews, the presence of which did not have symbolic legitimisation in Polish war literature, could become the subject of cultural mourning and critical reflection. Polish readers, as well as authors, proved to be unprepared for the challenge posed to the “generation after” witnesses. Subsequently, the dissertation investigates how witnessing the Holocaust is expressed in the prose of the 1990s. The Imaginary dominant (in the sense proposed by Lacan), which caused the literary texts of 1980s to surrender to the subject’s nostalgic moi (‘me’) too strongly, was broken by “the return of the Real”, most evidently expressed in the works of Izabela Filipiak. Her prose is comprised of the first postmemory works in which, due to heteropathic allo-identification and melancholic construction of the subject, the narcissistic dominant present in the Polish texts about the Second World War is broken. Her texts also depict the drama of post-traumatic symptoms – which result from the experience of concentration camps – amidst the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The study also analyses the Holocaust motives present in Olga Tokarczuk’s Prawiek i inne czasy (‘Primeval and Other Times’), which novel to a certain degree duplicates Szczypiorski and Szewc’s pretransformational discourse. Another topic discussed in the dissertation is the blockade of postmemory communication function, symbolised by a post-traumatic syndrome (paralysis and aphasia) experienced by those who witnessed the Holocaust. The novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk is recognised as an intertextual, yet historically credible treaty on the challenge, which the inherited Holocaust memories pose to contemporary authors. The study refers to Jacques Derrida’s contemplation of aporia of mournful silence/speach and faithfulness/unfaithfulness to those who passed away and the concept of the three-element communication network proposed in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that in his novel Tworki, Bieńczyk contrasts the post-modern lack of faith in communication by means of language with affective involvement and repeated effort of witnessing. The dissertation also concentrates on the works created by the second generation of the Holocaust survivors, among others on the book Kamień (‘Border Markers’) by Piotr Matywiecki, a poet who was born in 1943 in a hiding place on ‘the Aryan side’ shortly after his parents had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto. The author’s collection of texts documenting the Holocaust constitutes a part of the book, which, as it is stipulated in the dissertation, can be seen as a postulate of new, affective managing of documents about Shoah and responsible, ethical reading of personal documents. The postulate harmonizes with the new understanding of a testimony – a concept proposed by such researchers as Shoshana Felman, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer or Dori Laub. The works of authors: Eva Hoffman, Ewa Kuryluk, Agata Tuszyńska and Bożena Keff are also analysed in the thesis. The authors, who either grew up in the Polish culture and identify themselves with it, discover their Jewish ancestry after years. They confront the inherited memories of the Holocaust and take a journey in the footsteps of their ancestors in order to collect the missing elements of their families’ stories. The autobiographical prose of the second generation also expresses the drama of silence and entanglement in post-traumatic symptoms, which the Shoah victims were doomed to experience in post-war Europe. The thesis also studies the poetics of these literary works, in which the postmemory processing is often based on a creative repetition. In the prose of Ewa Kuryluk the family idiom covering the taboo Jewish theme served as the linguistic body of the novel. In Eva Hoffman’s book Lost in Translation: a Life in a New Language the grief resulting from the loss of language and the slow learning to use English, lead to the conclusion that the inner voice of the narrator shall always meet obstacles. The author identifies them with the beginning: her parents’ experience of the Holocaust, the loss of the shtetl – the place where the other members of her family were rooted and died. Moreover, the witness-listener relation was analysed, pointing to those aspects of the second-generation writers’ works, in which – as a result of the creative processing and retelling the witnesses’ words by the “generation after” witnesses – the obscure voice of the trauma may serve as a testimony (as the sine qua non condition of its existence is the engagement of the listener-addressee). It has been underlined that the studied literary works of the second-generation authors also pose a challenge to the readers, who (along with the narrator of the text) have to become responsible recipients of the survivors’ testimonies.