Zjazd Polonistów
Warsaw 22-25 May 1995
The Second Congress for the Study of Polish Literature
took place on 22-25 May 1995, or 37 years after the First Congress. This
discontinuity&emdash;one of many in Polish history&emdash;assured that
hardly anyone present remembered what happened at the First Congress, which
took place in December 1958. It should also be noted that the Second Congress
was the first such meeting of specialists in Polish literature that deliberated
after the major political change of 1989. One might therefore have expected
that during its deliberations, attempts would be made to deal with 50 years of
Soviet-dominated teaching of Polish literary history, and that the discussions
would abound in reformulations and conceptual recastings of literary problems
under communism, as well as offering speculations about the future developments
of Polish literature and Polish literary study. Naturally, the Congress fell
short of most of these exaggerated expectations. It did however discharge its
role in spelling out the state of Polish studies in 1995.
On day one,
plenary sessions dealt with the central problems in Polish studies. There was
little beating about the bush, and issues were addressed head on. Professor Jan
Prokop spoke about the rebuilding of the Polish literary canon after so many
years of political interference and mendacity. Professor Michal Glowinski
discussed the attempts at scholarly independence in 1950-1989. Professors
Wlodzimierz Bolecki and Ryszard Nycz dealt with the situation in literary
history and theory. Last but not least, Professor Janusz Slawinski took on the
problem of interpretation. At the closing of the Congress, another plenary
session surveyed the teaching of literature in high schools and universities.
Papers in that area were delivered by Professors Bozena Chrzastowska, Zenon
Uryga, and Stefan Sawicki.
The lesser panels
took on the education of specialists in Polish literature; literary history in
the nineteenth century; literary history in the twentieth century; literary
theory and poetics; contexts and contiguities in the study of literature; Old
Polish literature; problems of documentation and editing. The linguists were
the only group not represented at the Congress, and I am not sure that the
decision to exclude them was correct. Needless to say, some of my colleagues in
linguistics share that view.
Beyond this
factual summary, an attempt to render what happened at the Congress will be necessarily
subjective. I assert this subjectivity because, as is the case at most
congresses, one had to decide which panels, occurring at the same time, one
would attend. In addition, some panels met at the University of Warsaw, and
others at the nearby Staszic Palace. The selections were thus motivated not
only by personal choice but also by time constraints.
Here is a
pared-down version of the Polish literary canon: "Bogurodzica,"
Mikolaj Rej, Jan Kochanowski, Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski, Piotr Skarga, Mikolaj
Sep-Szarzynski, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, Jan Chryzostom Pasek, Jedrzej Kitowicz,
Ignacy Krasicki, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Stanislaw Staszic, Adam Mickiewicz,
Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski, Seweryn Goszczynski, Aleksander Fredro,
Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Boleslaw Prus, Henryk
Sienkiewicz, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Stanislaw Wyspianski, Stefan Zeromski, Wladylaw
Reymont, Stanislaw Brzozowski, Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzynki, Stanislaw
Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Krzysztof Kamil Baczynki,
Zbigniew Herbert, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Tadeusz Konwicki.
The most poignant
dilemma which faced the participants was formulated by Professor Edward
Balcerzan, in his paper titled "Polish poetry in the twentieth century."
He asked these questions: are we going to assume that there exists a radical
discontinuity between the Soviet-dominated period and the period of free
Poland, or are we prepared to engage only in an updating of literary studies in
Poland, especially as regards Polish literature? Was the regaining of political
sovereignty of fundamental importance for Polish literary scholarship? And in
that connection, are postmodernism and deconstructionism equivalent to a
revolution, or are they merely names for new configurations of well known and
continuously evolving problems?
The problem of the
political squaring-of-accounts generated lively discussions. Michal Glowinski's
paper, "Polonistyka's road to independence," surveyed the changes
which occurred in Polish studies since the First Congress, paying much
attention to so-called "thaw" of 1956 and its influence on the
situation of humanities in Soviet-dominated Poland:
After
Khrushchev's famous speech at the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party,
the situation in literary studies changed significantly....the totalitarian
system showed its first cracks, although no fundamental political changes were
introduced....However, it has to be said that those who wanted to do so could
conduct their scholarly work in literature as if they were free. In the
Stalinist period, only two alternatives existed: you either followed orders or
had to keep silent. After 1956, these alternatives were dissolved in a sea of
much more ambivalent and complicated choices (2-3).1
Glowinski declined
to dot his i's in regard to scholars in the Stalinist era, limiting himself to
the following opinion about this period which he knew from personal experience:
"I began my career as a literary scholar in the mid-1950s, and therefore
my situation was incomparably more comfortable than that of those colleagues
who began to write and publish a few years earlier." (ibid.) This last
sentence makes it clear that Glowinski has opted for reticence in assessing
those who faced the choices which he was happily spared. However, Glowinski was
much less forgiving in assessing the responsibility of those who remained
lackeys of the regime even when they did not have to, i.e., after 1956. Their
conformism was a matter of choice, of cool calculation of losses and gains.
Let us dwell for a
while on the word conformism. Glowinski did not speak of those scholars who
were tools of the party and openly marched to orders, but rather of those who
remained Marxists after 1956. The issue here is whether remaining a Marxist was
a sign of servility to the regime, or whether it was an independent choice.
Glowinski espoused the second view and argued that as time went on, scholars
using Marxist methodology did not necessarily display total political dependency
on the regime:
In the 1960s
and '70s, divisions among literary scholars were formed in ways that perhaps
are not altogether self-evident. The demarcation line ran not between Marxists
and non-Marxists, but rather between those who openly served the regime and
those who did not. There appeared a group of independent Marxists, related to
what was then called Marxist revisionism, whose interests lay in the area of
historicism and social specificity of literature....This kind of Marxism
resembled one practiced in the West and was to a large extent freely chosen by
the practitioners (p. 6)
It is worth noting
that this opinion runs counter to the view, common among Polish literary
scholars, that any kind of Marxism was, in conditions of Soviet-dominated Poland,
a sign of subservience to the regime. It was clear that Glowinski did not share
that view. It is also interesting to note that the ensuing discussion avoided
that issue.
Where, then, was
the demarcation line between those who facilitated the work of the Soviet-run
government of Poland, and those who did not? According to Glowinski , the key
question was not methodology (there were many methodologies then, from
structuralism to the traditional methods, looking back toward
nineteenth-century philology) but attitude: "At the beginning of one's
work, one had to impose upon oneself what I would call an assumption of
authenticity. It consists in saying to oneself that in any situation, however
complex, I shall remain myself, that I shall help only in those developments
which I consider righteous and honest." (p. 17) On the other side of the
barricade there remained those who, in Glowinski 's words, pursued "the
effortless way" of dealing with humanities: "talentless
mediocrities" who treated Marxist ideology as a shield behind which they
hid their banalities and their pitiful contributions to "cultural
politics." When political sovereignty was regained in 1989, these people
lost their standing in the scholarly community, "not because they were
forced out, but because they had nothing to contribute to the life of the mind,
no talent, no assiduity, no intelligence." (p. 18)
The
trans-national literary canon might consist of Sophocles' Antigone, St.
Augustine's Confessions, Tristan and Isolde, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Montaigne,
Pascal's Pensées, Voltaire's Candide, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Madame Bovary,
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Possessed, Conrad's Lord Jim,
Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, Eliot's Waste Land and The Four Quartets,
Anne Frank's Diary, Orwell's Animal Farm, Camus' The Plague, Solzhenitsyn's The
Gulag Archipelago.2
Did Polish
humanities experience a shock similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall? Glowinski
believes that the changes have been colossal, but the comparison with the
Berlin Wall is inappropriate. Polish literary studies ""have never
been totally enslaved, they have never been forced into a situation where they
could not fulfill their tasks to some extent at least....they do not need to
'return to Europe' because they never left it....contacts with world
scholarship have never been broken, even though they assumed unorthodox forms.
Therefore, one should speak of continuity rather than of radical
transformation." (pp. 18-19)
These edifying
words sounded hollow however when applied to the problem that generated perhaps
the liveliest discussions and polemics during the Congress: the problem of the
literary canon and its relation to school textbooks and social life. These
discussions were prompted by Jan Prokop's paper "The literary canon and
historical memory: postulates and dilemmas."
The problems
Prokop raised are difficult to summarize for an audience lacking an existential
experience of Soviet communism. While every scholarly milieu suffers
ideological pressures upon the canon it promotes, the situation in
Soviet-occupied Poland was hardly comparable to such pressures as experienced
and imagined in the West. It is in this context that one should perceive
Prokop's thesis that the literary canon, as taught in Polish schools, should
express and promote those features of Polish national identity which have been
under attack by the communists and which have been challenged by "the
modern tower of Babel, its mutually incomprehensible cultural languages, and its
incipient cultural anarchy." (p. 2) The author emphasized, however, that
he was not advocating a sacralization of the national canon, nor was he
proposing the stifling of the discussion about it. His goal was not to close
the door to foreign influence either: "Seeing the difference between one's
identity and that of another does not mean that the Other becomes automatically
an enemy. The Other may also be a guest, newcomer, messenger, friend, partner
in a dialog, someone we meet." (p. 3) In the discussion about "re-entering
Europe" (the discussion which sometimes assumed grotesque forms, as if the
issue had to do with the ways in which one should dress for a party, as if many
centuries of Polish tradition could be simply adjusted to current fashions in
Paris or London), Prokop echoed Herder's notion about the human symphony which
consists of the voices of nations;2 thus "the defense of one's identity is
really a defense of the diversity and variety of the culturally distinct
members of the human family." (p. 5) In my opinion, it would be hard to
find counter-arguments to that, and one might have expected that the
discussants would follow up on Prokop's notion of the literary canon and would
vigorously argue about the details of it.3
But this did not
happen. Instead, the discussants began to position themselves in one of the two
camps: "Europeans" and "patriots" or, to use the language
of the "patriots," "cosmopolites" and
"provincials." The first group protested loudly against the charges
of de-nationalizing Polish culture by promoting only those elements of it that
were generalist, or "European," while suppressing those elements
which were specifically Polish and, therefore, were not instantly
comprehensible to outside interpreters. "Europeans" accused the
"provincials" of suppressing modern trends and promoting things that
are specifically Polish. Characteristically, the "Europeans" also
suggested that the "provincials" wished to control the society's
access to various cultural choices, thus displaying their anti-democratic
tendencies. While some arguments on both sides sounded plausible, neither side
was willing to compromise. The dispute remained unresolved.
It appears that at
least among the older generation of humanistic scholars in Poland, the
awareness of a political chasm between those who accommodated themselves to the
communist regime, and those who did not, remains as prominent as ever. My own
view is that among the younger generation of scholars, these divisions are not
viewed with such strong emotions even though we represent a variety of
political standpoints. We seem to be able to find a common language in
discussing literary matters while remaining aware that they are not unrelated
to politics. However, the younger generation has not yet fully found its own
voice. On balance, one has to agree with Prokop's final remark: "We are
trying to walk a narrow path. On one side of this path lies the loss of
historical memory and identity, the temptation of anarchy and of postmodernist
nihilism. The cultural heritage is not a gigantic supermarket where we may or
may not choose to shop, where we may enjoy ourselves according to our whims,
disregarding the tradition to which we owe our cultural being. On the other
side lies the totalitarian jihad and the threat of other holy wars in the name
of national, religious or racial hatreds." (p. 13) This strong statement
mirrors the equally strong and unyielding rhetoric which prevailed during the
discussions. Both camps felt besieged by one another, and neither sought
rhetorical compromise.
Again, to us
younger scholars it appears that the tensions which arose during these
discussions had to arise, and the positions had to be clearly stated. It is
from these formulations that the compromise will develop in the future. Such a
compromise is crucial because Polish schools badly need new guidelines
concerning the teaching of literature, the guidelines that have finally been
freed of the burden of ideologies of the past. It should be remembered that
unless those competent to sketch out such guidelines agree to compromise,
bureaucrats in the ministry of education will replace them. In such a case,
both sides would be losers.
I will abstain
from going into details of these educational problems because theorizing about
education is invariably sterile. The last day of the Congress was the least
interesting precisely because it mostly consisted of theoretical discussions on
how to run literature programs in schools. It was like the people without
cannons discussing ballistics. Schools in Poland require fundamental reforms,
their physical plants and teacher compensation have to come first, and only
after these are taken care of can one speak of the specific subjects and how to
enhance their presence in schools. No satisfactory program of teaching
literature can be implemented before certain organizational problems have been
solved. That the participants knew this was reflected in poor attendance and
unsubstantial discussions concerning these final subjects of deliberation.
The third topic of
major concern was the methodologies of literary study. Some papers concentrated
on detailed descriptions of various fashionable methodologies, e.g., Stanislaw
Balbus' "Intertextuality in the text and in the literary process."
The meta-language used in this paper made it opaque to those listeners who did
not share the author's focus. No wonder Henryk Markiewicz, a veteran of
literary studies in Poland, jokingly commented that advances in the theory of
literary communication are inversely proportional to the communicability of
that theory. Call it a "Markiewicz theorem," he quipped. One could
also put it this way: it is in this area that the lack of originality of Polish
literary scholars becomes most apparent. While the discussion between "provincials"
and "Europeans" had specifically Polish overtones, and while problems
of education were discussed with Polish identity in mind, in methodological
studies Polish voices trailed behind those voices which had formulated these
methodological problems a while ago, and in other countries and languages. Yet,
in this area truly excellent minds competed for attention. "Contemporary
literary theory: areas of interest" by Professor Ryszard Nycz and
"Author-literary work-reader in contemporary literary theories," by
Professor Erazm Kuema stand out as two most sophisticated and articulate
papers. Kuema has actually attempted to formulate a Polish version of the most
recent literary theories. In the course of discussions, a consensus emerged
that the epoch of major and overwhelming methodological trends is over, and
that it has been replaced by an epoch of pluralism, diversification and
impermanence of methodological positions. To make that point, Nycz cited Hugo
von Hofmannsthal: "Multiplicity of meanings and indefiniteness are
characteristic of our epoch. It tends to rest on moving sands, and it knows the
sands are moving. Earlier generations believed in firm foundations. Our epoch
experiences dizziness incessantly if not overwhelmingly." (p. 14)
It is characteristic
of this Congress for the Study of Polish Literature that the situation of
theoretical impermanency did not receive a firm assessment in any of the papers
presented. Instead, in papers such as that of Kuema one saw statements to the
effect that "for those who seek unambiguous rules of behavior," our
epoch does not seem acceptable, whereas those who "seek the freedom to
make mistakes" welcome it. (29) One felt a mood of serene resignation in
this, rather than enthusiastic acceptance. Scholars distanced themselves from
the driving forces of present day literary trends, and this I believe was not
only an offshoot of scholarly propriety but also of the practical situation in
Polish literary studies, where the number of poststructuralist theoretical
works is far greater than the number of applications of postmodernist trends to
the reading of specific literary works. So far, "the flood of
deconstruction" has not touched the Polish literary canon (possibly, this
is still ahead of us). Scholars are still jostling with the theoretical
postulates of postmodernism rather than trying to apply them to specific
literary works.
Professors Henryk
Markiewicz's and Janusz Slawinski's papers conveyed very little of that spirit
of resignation, however. These two scholars addressed themselves to the
problems of interpretation. Markiewicz's "On falsification of literary
interpretations" adopted Karl Popper's strategy: if it is impossible to
demonstrate "truthfulness" or "objectivity" of an interpretation,
one has to concentrate on formulating the conditions of its falsity, thus
counterbalancing hermeneutical anarchy which operates under the slogan of
"If there is no author, everything is permitted" or "Never mind
the literary work, as long as the interpretation remains interesting." (p.
1) Markiewicz formulated 13 such conditions allowing the interpreter to
demonstrate that another interpretation is "false." None of
Markiewicz's examples of "false" interpretations concerned
deconstructionist works, although all of them were works by Polish scholars.
This again demonstrates the low hermeneutical activity of Polish
poststructuralist scholars.
In Slawinski's
"The role of interpretation," the author pondered the following
paradox: "In spite of the frequency of depressing and exciting comments
about a crisis in literary studies, those of us who teach perform these daily
duties without assuming Hamletic poses. We write articles about the
inevitability of Roman Ingarden's "fifth layer" in the literary work,
we explain to students who the real subject of Slowacki's poem
"Parting" is, we opine on the quality of a dissertation about the
narrative methods in Zeromski's novels"" (3) Slawinski suggested that
in spite of their theoretical agonizing, literary scholars routinely interpret
in a rather traditional way, and that they cannot stop so interpreting no
matter what their theoretical views on the impossibility of interpretation have
been. Those literary scholars who believe that interpretation is an
appropriation of someone else's thought, still routinely engage in such
interpretation in their professional lives. Therefore, "fables about the
noble interpreters who completely renounce the imperialist attitude and
proclaim their subservience to the power of the text" are mere hypocrisy.
This is obvious in deconstructionist hermeneutics in particular, "based as
it is on the thesis about the illusory quality of the text's objectivity and of
ontological independence of meaning, while at the same time full of
hypocritical declarations about respect for the text's “otherness” (frequent
especially in Jacques Derrida's writings), about 'humility vis-à-vis the text'
(Paul de Man) and about the moral codes necessary to reading (J. Hillis
Miller's 'the ethics of reading')." (p. 13)
Slawinski
suggested that instead of making such specious declarations, the interpreters
should consciously adopt the initial attitude of "confusion vis-à-vis the
text, an assumed inability to understand it, readiness for the cognitive
dissonance." (19) Such an attitude is fundamentally opposed to the
dogmatic and self-righteous interpretations which uncover in the works of
literature only the interpreter's ideological assumptions. Since
poststructuralist scholars promote the idea that earlier interpretations were
useless fictions, one can consider Slawinski's proposal to be a polemic with
these postmodernist generalizations.
Slawinski thus
proposed using an interpretative key that could be defined as a lack of
methodological rigidity, a readiness to admit that theory should not play a
hegemonic role but rather an instrumental one: "Assumptions and theories
should not play a role; only their heuristic fruitfulness should count. Thus
theories of literature should not be treated as intellectual constructs that need
to be reinforced by practice. They should become tools which might or might not
be used, depending on need." (p. 21)
It is clear
however that present day rigid adherence to theory of those who have assumed
(usurped?) the role of the leading literary interpreters does not favor
Slawinski's solutions. However, Slawinski maintains that such a pragmatic
attitude can bear good fruit among the traditionally-minded scholars who are
often capable of transcending their apparently dogmatic assumptions and demonstrating
their predilection for the freedom of literary enquiry. Outside this initially
traditionalist context, this attitude tends to become anarchy. (p. 22)
Slawinski
emphasized that interpretation can, indeed it must, play a significant role in
literary studies. It can do so however only when it can move freely among the
"dogmatic" theories of literature, which should be open to
destabilization by individual interpreters. In the 1990s, it is impossible to
predict whether a return to such a situation is possible. Slawinski suggests
that such a return is necessary and inevitable, if literary works are to be
read and enjoyed in society. His answer to the initial dilemma—crisis or
continuation — is crisis, but in the sense that the state of literary theory
today is in crisis: "[One observes today] a crisis of self-assurance and
perseverance in the defense of attitudes toward literature which one considers
correct but for which one is not prepared to suffer. This crisis also produced
a crisis of productivity in literary scholarship." This is why there have
been so few memorable literary interpretations in recent years.
It remains an open question whether literary studies worldwide have entered a qualitatively new period, a period which precludes a return to the haven of the precisely articulated literary theories. At the Congress, one sensed fatigue and impatience with the present indefiniteness of theoretical foundations of literary study. Perhaps this fatigue portends future changes? Edward Balcerzan said in his paper: "The formulations which are most passionately discussed today may appear embarrasingly marginal, not to say ridiculous, tomorrow. Perhaps those who will succeed us will again be well groomed, well balanced emotionally, and somewhat caustic in their traditional attitudes? I have to say that this would not be a bad solution after all." (p. 25) In conjunction with Slawinski's suggestions, these words indicate that so far as polonistyka is concerned, the days of the deconstructionists are perhaps numbered.
1. Page numbers of papers which I consulted are given
at the end of each quotation. AM.
2. Thus the trans-national literary canon I propose
might consist of Sophocles' Antigone,
St. Augustine's Confessions, Tristan
and Isolde, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Montaigne, Pascal's Pensées, Voltair'e Candide, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Madame Bovary,
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Possessed, Conrad's Lord Jim, Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, Eliot's Waste
Land and The Four Quartets, Anne Frank's Diary, Orwell's Animal Farm, Camus' The Plague, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
3. Here is a rock-bottom list, incomplete to be sure,
but one that cannot be pared down any further: "Bogurodzica," Mikolaj
Rej, Jan Kochanowski, Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski, Piotr Skarga, Mikolaj
Sep-Szarzyski, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, Jan Chryzostom Pasek, Jedrzej Kitowicz,
Ignacy Krasicki, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Stanislaw Staszic, Adam Mickiewicz,
Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski, Seweryn Goszczyski, Aleksander Fredro,
Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Bolesaw Prus, Henryk
Sienkiewicz, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Stanislaw Wyspianski, Stefan Zeromski, Wladylaw
Reymont, Stanislaw Brzozowski, Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzynski, Stanislaw
Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Krzysztof Kamil
Baczynski, Zbigniew Herbert, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Tadeusz Konwicki.
Adam Makowski, M.A., works as a researcher at
the Institute for Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His
PhD dissertation on literary theory, written under Professor Michal Glowinski's
direction, is about to be completed.