Przenajświętsza. Strategie sakralizacji wspólnoty narodowej w literaturze polskiej XXI wieku

This thesis concentrates on an emergent phenomenon present in modern-day Polish literature. Inspired by the manifesto penned by Przemysław Dakowicz (writer, literary scholar and co-creator of the discussed movement) entitled “On Polish Literature in the 21st Century”, I later refer to this appearance as the “contemporary national literature”. The main thesis developed in this work is that in this above-mentioned literary movement one can observe an attempt to sacralize the historical phenomenon of the Polish national community. The crucial questions posed in this dissertation concern the specific of the contemporary national literature movement – especially textual and rhetorical strategies present in writings belonging to this trend. My aim is to analyze the images of the national community created by writers of contemporary national literature. I also consider this issue in the context of the global renaissance of thinking in terms of a strong identity and the vindication of integral nationalistic attitudes (diagnosed, among others, in the works of Francis Fukuyama and Zygmunt Bauman). From the onset of the 21st century, a significant increase in the number of books aiming to defend, restitute, and glorify the Polish national community can be observed. The dynamics of this trend have been further intensified by the catastrophe of 10 April 2010. The turn to matters of a national community founded on cultural (axiological, especially religious) unity of the Polish nation has become an important subject matter for a portion of the Polish literary field. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz (especially with his series of essays constituting the so-called “Polish Tetralogy” and his “political poems”), Jan Polkowski, Wojciech Wencel, and Przemysław Dakowicz are (amongst others) important authors in this literary movement. Works of these writers form the core of the research material – analyzed within my thesis. Writing of the above-mentioned authors includes essays, novels and – first and foremost – poems. Despite obvious differences among them (also genre differences), a number of similarities – besides the common topic of the national community – can be observed. The contemporary national literature movement is deeply rooted in the Polish literary tradition, utilizing the diversity of historical styles and references of which this tradition is composed – with special emphasis on the relevance of the Romantic paradigm. 689 This approach to writing is often used in conjunction with a transformation of the martyrological aspects of Polish history in order to project them onto the 21st-century reality of the country and to create contemporary national myths. The aim of the contemporary national literature is the renewal of the strong Polish identity based on the national monolith. Considering that objective, key categories (persuasively shown as natural but – in fact – subjected to constructivist exertions) include the history of the national community, its tradition, and collective memory. These categories are sublimate by the textual and rhetorical strategies employed in the works of the aforementioned authors. The native collective memory (the fundament of the national identity), according to those writers, has been destroyed as a result of the tragic death toll of World War II, the policy implemented by the socialist, pro-Soviet regime during the Cold War, and the adoption of the postmodern allegedly “nihilistic” paradigm by the Polish intellectual elites after the transformation (after 1989). Rymkiewicz, Wencel, Dakowicz, and Polkowski aspire to restore and – in a way – redefine the national collective memory and, as a result, revive the community ideals. In its striving towards reinvigorated strong national identity based on the national Polish community and its traditions, the movement of contemporary national literature simultaneously contests the atomization of the nowadays Polish society and the supposed „post-communist (and liberal) hegemony” in Poland after 1989. This writing also proclaims it’s involvement in the “cultural war” (the unleashing of which is simultaneously attributed by contemporary national literature writers to the so-called “ideological left”). This attitude indicates the subversive nature of the analyzed movement, closely related to Polish right-wing populist political forces. The first chapter of this dissertation includes the brief reconstruction of the origins of the contemporary modern literature movement. In the following five parts of my work, I analyze the writing of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz (titled poet, essayist, translator, playwright, author of famous manifestos of 20th-century classicism – collected in the volume “Czym jest klasycyzm” [What is the Classicism]. Such privileging of Rymkiewicz’s work is justified, by his reputation, as one of the most significant nowadays Polish writers. Secondly, it is warranted by the inner complication of his (strongly intertextual and erudite) books and their thematic and discursive multi-directionality. Not without significance is the power of influence of Rymkiewicz’s writing. He can reasonably be called the founding father of the above-mentioned movement. The first volumes of his historical essays (so-called “Polish Thetralogy”) paved the way for the literary trend which I refer to as the contemporary national 690 literature. On the other hand – to the most popular works of this trend belongs Rymkiewicz’s poem Do Jarosława Kaczyńskiego – rhymed, political appeal addressed to the leader of the largest right-wing (national-catholic) party in Poland. The next three chapters are dedicated to the writing of Przemysław Dakowicz, Wojciech Wencel, and Jan Polkowski. After the accident near Smoleńsk, the first two authors mentioned took up the topic of martyrological aspects of national history and the Polish fate in a strongly classicizing, mainly verse form. Returning in the first decade of the XXI century, after years of silence, Polkowski – no less than the other writers mentioned above, attached to classical patterns – in his prose and poetry undertook an uncompromising fight with contemporary “destitute times”. He opposes to them the traditional ideals of the bygone the Polish terra felix. In their poems, essays, and novels, contemporary national literature writers thematizing both our native history and the condition of former and hodiernal inhabitants of the Polish people republic, one can observe consistent effort of constructing and proclaiming the specific vision of “Polishness”. In the light of Rymkiewicz, Dakowicz, Wencel, and Polkowski’s works the picture of existence every human life in the nation derives from – mostly martyrological – ideas of Romantic tradition. Simultaneously, the participation in the Polishness assumes – according to the above-mentioned authors – integral membership in the native community, as far as willingness to sacrifice their lives for it. The essentially conceptualized nation itself (its tradition, culture – language), consequently sublimated, appears in the contemporary national literature as a fundament of humanity, as well as the sense-giving element, allowing human individuals to go up against the chaos of reality. It is also vitally important to say that Rymkiewicz, Dakowicz, Wencel, and Polkowski explicitly accentuate the diversity of the Polish nation and its character, trying to prove its incomparability to different, “strange” ways of existence. Whereby – it is necessary to point out that the Polish modern nation in the contemporary national literature definitely does not refer to the majority of our society. This nation is rather presented as a small (truly faithful to the “real” Polish tradition, founded on sacred texts of the national culture: Kochanowski, Mickiewicz, Słowacki’s…) collectivity, inhabiting the country. In this country – according to Rymkiewicz et consortes – this collectivity is a subject to so-called “post-communist and liberal hegemony”. This is the reason why contemporary national literature writers – in their texts – striking post transformative Polish condition, call for and aim at rebirth of the national, strictly traditional, community. In this sense, the works of Rymkiewicz et consortes show performative potential. In the final part, I attempt to summarize my previous investigations and try to prove 691 the main thesis of this dissertation. To verify the thesis, that in the contemporary national literature one can find an attempt to sacralize the Polish national community (and point out the strategies of this particular sacralization) I use a variety of research methods (this choice was dictated by complexity and complication of the studied subject). Starting from recognitions of historians of religion and anthropologists dealing with the problem of the sacrum (Rudolf Otto, Nathan Söderblom, Mircea Eliade, Gerardus van der Leeuw, René Girard, etc.), through Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White’s narratological inquires about historiography; literary studies on the specific of the Polish Romanticism, sociological works of Benedict Anderson, Wojciech Burszta, Krzysztof Jaskułowski, Marcin Napiórkowski, and Pierre Bourdieu, psycho- and schizoanalytic insides proposed by Slavoj Žižek and Klaus Theweleit, finishing with, devoted to the question of fundamental trauma, theories of Dominick LaCapra. I also cull from research strands dedicated to issues of myth, memory, and tradition (mostly from the works of Eliade, Girard, Leszek Kołakowski, Hans Blumenberg, Joseph Campbell, Ernst Cassirer, Roland Barthes, Barbara Szacka, Stanisław Filipowicz, Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Jerzy Szacki and Roman Zimand, etc.). When it comes to connections between the collective memory (the category vitally important for contemporary modern literature writers) and literature, ergo – performative potency of this literary movement, Astrid Erll and Jacques Ranciere’s researches are the most important for me. It’s difficult not to take into consideration my obligation towards the philosophers defining the category of sublimity: especially Schiller and Kant (and their numerous interpreters). Since quoting above-mentioned Otto’s disquisition about holiness: “The most efficient way to represent numinosum in different kinds of art is almost always sublimity”. However, when we want to tackle a problem of representing categories connected with sacrum in different kinds of art: the domain of literature is, which is obvious, language. That is why sublimity contacting with – according to Rudolf Otto – numinosum (and so – the holiness) must be created in literature with the particular uses of language. Hence, the works of Heinrich Lausberg, Kenneth Burke, and other rhetoric theoretics play a considerable role in my dissertation. In the last chapter, I often refer to the texts of Francis Fukuyama, Axel Honneth and Peter Sloterdijk due to the fact that the tendency to sacralize the national community comes, as I prove in this doctoral thesis, into the close relation with – explored by these philosophers – questions of dynamics and economy of “psychopolitical” tensions. In these dynamics – according to the author of End of History… – the thymotical element is crucial. 692 Regarding the sublimation of the national community, carried out in the contemporary national literature movement: its main rhetorical mean is amplification. As Kenneth Burke stated: “it covers a wide range of measures (…) and increases the persuasive power of a given statement”. The number of amplifying techniques themselves, constituted by appropriate combinations of words, addition of terms, negative forms, etc., and figures (personification, accumulation, enumeration, antithesis, grading, with particular emphasis on procedures directly involving the receiver: rhetorical question, apostrophe, exclamation, visualization, prosopopeia) is practically unlimited. Amplifying techniques are divided into four genera amplificationis: incrementum, congeries, comparatio, and ratiotinatio. All of these endeavors are frequently (massively) exploited by contemporary national literature writers, because, as indicated by (for example) Jarosław Płuciennik, rhetoric and – especially – poetics of sublimity are often characterized by an excess of means of expression – used within them. An important field of undertaking amplifying, sublimation techniques are loci communes. They guarantee agreement, and even community, of the speech with its recipient. They once again call, what is known and named, to activate specific attitudes and evoke the emotions associated with them. This amplifying function of topi one can partly connect with the predilection of the contemporary national movement for recalling the legacy of Polish Romanticism – as the one that has been deeply internalized by the native culture. Furthermore, Rymkiewicz, Dakowicz, Polkowski, and Wencel, consistently exploit the subject of trauma in their works. Because trauma is – according to Frank Ankersmit – the psychological equivalent of the aesthetic category of sublimity. All these inquiries, which I outlined in the earlier parts of this summary, also present – apart from the mentioned issues of the sacralization of the nation and its strategy, utilized by Dakowicz, Rymkiewicz, Wencel, and Polkowski – the answer to the questions about the reasons for the uprising and the power of influence of the discussed literary movement, strongly intertwined with the sphere of domestic politics.