SF-THAT'S ME
Whatever Matylda was, she definitely was not a snob. Well, maybe on that particular day (Wednesday) under the counter at which she earned her living selling meats did keep a copy of Finnegans Wake and Gender Trouble and she did spend her breaks for a cigarette on reading The City of God. However all that bore no signs of coercion but all of pleasure. Anyway, even if she had wanted to impress anybody there was no proper audience for anything like that. The real men coming to the shop with their female servants (whom they – husbands deeply believing in doubling their own mental powers – called, as if caressingly, 'my better half') were not in the know. Matylda's father Stach had a hazy idea about the matter and according to her nothing good came out of that as he somehow had smelled a rat and decided that Matylda's copy of Writing and Difference would be used best as kindling in his hearth. To add to this pile of misfortunes, on that particular day Tilda, an uptown woman, came to Matylda's shop. With her voice of you-dirty-ship-girl kind she asked for a half a pound of Mazdamer and ten slices of ham and out she went. But not quite. Unaware, she dropped something blue from her bag (something like a magazine, rather thick), the fact which Matylda did not want to make public. She lifted this blue-something from the floor. It turned out to be an issue of Teksty Drugie (5/2005), a periodical published by the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It hurt her that such a titbity issue of Teksty, unavailable at any newsstand in the neighborhood, was as incredible to find way to her hands as the existence of a whole in Tilda's bag. Still, she bravely swallowed the bitterness of that. Outside Wednesday was passing, from that moment on a day of Teksty Drugie for Matylda.
She deliberately prolonged the anticipation, starting her feast on the articles from Teksty on the next of its days – that is the next Wednesday. That day she got out of bed on the wrong, postmodernist side. Her deconstructive and altogether mean mood discovered a delicious pendant in the article entitled “N/P”. In his “S/Z” Roland Barthes celebrates and disseminates a certain short story by Balzac; in “N/P” with one well-aimed Barthesque hook Adam Poprawa deals with a certain press review. The review was written by Robert Ostaszewski, as far as Matylda knew, a contributor to Witryna Czasopism. Poprawa waged war not only against Ostaszewski but against a collective subject: 'apparently, it is magazines' sore that things there are written not only with two hands at a time but even more'. “Robert is such a nice lad, and this Poprawa with some hideous intent or because of a tooth sore or a sleepless night jumps up with such an affront. Then, mockingly, she read aloud the dispatching conclusion of Poprawa's dissertation: “Text in a magazine supposedly about literature is not about literature. It is about the being of text in a magazine.” “And who says that?!” she cut it short (to shed some light on Matylda's irritation, the narrator will modestly add what follows: Poprawa conscientiously attempted to prove that what Ostaszewski really did was not writing about the book he reviewed but just writing for the writing's sake. Matylda believes Poprawa is right, moreover, he is so devoted to this being right of his that he does exactly the same thing he accuses Ostaszewski of; he just writes, but about what – that he does not write).
When Matylda noticed that Poprawa's article was closer to the end than to the beginning of her issue of Teksty, it crossed her mind that it was this starting from the wrong end that made her end up reading something good but irritating. For a change she moved some pages back and came across an article by Michał Paweł Markowski Antropologia, humanizm, interpretacja (Anthropology, Humanism, Interpretation). The practices of Markowski caused not only people in Matylda's small town to frown. The point was that he read much (much too much), and as a result he wrote much (much too much). “In the latest superstructure of his work, a splinter of which Teksty Drugie included, Markowski approaches some ideas of William James (from that Jameses, Henry's brother) for the sake of the anthropology of literature” whispered Matylda to herself. She took Markowski's 'pragmatic' (James means pragmatics after all) vision of interpretation to heart as it seemed to derive from his personal experience. Trying to explain his vision to a customer buying soda, Matylda put it in simple words: 'Not valid interpretation is such an interpretation that is not backed by personal experience of the person who does the interpreting'. She wouldn't have been herself if hadn't added a metaphoric conclusion: “Such an interpretation is like a check that bounced; it may impress only by marking its own worthlessness.” Matylda saw in her mind's eye how she would, if she was to write it, give her MA thesis a motto from Antropologia, humanizm, interpretacja: “the pragmatic conception of interpretation .. seems to me not only completely possible, but also most sensible among all others.” She went through Markowski's article several times, earnestly and with preserving repetitiveness. That is why, for her own good, she forced herself to tear it out of Teksty and burnt it to ashes (what proved to be only symbolic, as she already knew the text by heart and kept going through it every time she went to sleep).
”Is there a Stanley Fish in Teksty Drugie?” Matylda asked herself, making a parallel to a book by Fish entitled Is There A Text in This Class?. “Yes, there is” she answered. “Or there is, but as if there is not.” Katarzyna Rosner devoted to him a concise but nutritious article, however with a longish and clumsy title: Stanley Fish, czyli pozorny radykalizm konstruktywistycznej teorii interpretacji (Stanley Fish, or the Apparent Radicalism of the Constructivist Interpretation Theory). Sorrowful, Rosner was eager to save Fish's thought from being accused of “anarchistic latitude” and “sterile subversiveness”. “Well, it would be enough to get rid of the adjectives: 'anarchistic' and 'sterile' and we would get a cute scientific picture” thought Matylda. Yet, in this country, in the Vistula estuary, Fish was somebody to be afraid of and preferably to be banished, even in Teksty Drugie he was present by not exactly being present (let's say, by means of a limited presence). Rosner certainly did not want to do any harm – poor she, in her attempt to exculpate him, she in fact lost him! Matylda always sided with the harmed and the humiliated, so because of this she decided to buy a demonstrative T-shirt from the “Niech no tylko zobaczą” (Just Let Them See) series, on which she placed nine letters into a following inscription, for Teksty Drugie's readers easy to decode: SF-THAT'S ME.
Maciej Stroiński
Translated by Anna Skrajna
Discussed journals: Teksty Drugie