Applied HERBERTology
The latest issue of “Kwartalnik Artystyczny” (“Artistic Quarterly” – 2/2008) consists of over 330 pages of text divided into two parts. The first part – a regular edition of “Quarterly” – contains new poems, prose, sketches and reviews, whereas part two is an over one-hundred-page special feature dedicated to Zbigniew Herbert1. I will mostly discuss here the contents that, as far as I am concerned, deserve reading, and the rest will be treated simply as an afterthought.
Hypocrisy of Intelligentsia
The reading of the supplement dedicated to Herbert can be started from its very first pages, that is, from reacquainting ourselves with the author’s five poems (those poems came out in “Quarterly” no. 1/1998 and then appeared in Epilog burzy / The Epilogue of a Tempest) like Pan Cogito. Ars longa (“Pompous manifestoes / civil wars / decisive battles / campaigns / filled Mr.Cogito with / boredom”) or Telefon / Telephone (“I am a poor / guardian of emptiness / never in my life / have I managed / to create / a decent abstraction”). But it was just a few pages later, when the article opening the Głosy i glosy w 10. rocznicę śmierci Zbigniewa Herberta (Voices and Glosses on the 10th Anniversary of Zbigniew Herbert`s Death) section brings pure joy to the reader. The piece I am talking about is Złote runo Zbigniewa Herberta (Zbigniew Herbert’s Golden Fleece) by Stefan Chwin, whom I have already praised to the skies in “Showcase” for his other essay (an article on the future of Polish national culture which appeared in “Tygodnik Powszechny”). The situation is repeating itself – I absolutely agree with the Żona prezydenta (The President`s Wife) author`s every single sentence. Honestly and mercilessly does Chwin write about the hypocrisy of Polish intelligentsia, who identified with Mr. Cogito spiritually, yet never took this character and his attitude towards life seriously. Chwin also devotes some writing space to Herbert himself and his poetry, moral imperatives and, as represented by him, patriotism of death (“Which led to a dangerous conclusion that the one who died was better off than those who stayed alive just because of the fact (s)he died. Those who survived are worse than the living only because they are survivors. There were the tones of moral blackmail from which, let`s not delude ourselves, Mr. Cogito`s message is not free”), anti-communism (according to Chwin, as far as Herbert is concerned, it was “a moral phobia” rather than “cognition”) and “some strange things” that the poet was up to towards the end of his life.
Justice and Law
Złote runo Zbigniewa Herberta (Zbigniew Herbert`s Golden Fleece) is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a piece that is well-written, wise, needed but first and foremost bold and, to me, it is not incidental that it came out in “Artistic Quarterly”; the magazine has already developed its own canon a long time ago, its own, established at the top, hierarchy of reputable names for which there will always be a place in its pages. I guess, however, that the quarterly`s editor-in-chief does not regard Herbert as an especially prominent poet. In Krzysztof Myszkowski`s Herbert – strefa mroku, strefa światła (Herbert – A Zone of Gloom, A Zone of Light) one can find a brief enumeration of what, according to the author, is truly valuable in Herbert`s work and makes an impression until this day, the whole was summed up with a telling phrase: “That`s all”. An equally critical essay, about let`s say Szymborska, Miłosz or Samuel Beckett, would never appear in “Artistic Quarterly”. And that`s a pity! I do regret it not solely because, as far as I am concerned, every, even the greatest literary genius produced in his entire life works or, at the very least, fragments deserving criticism, but also because reading a cultural magazine which, in every issue contains a succession of mawkish, pretentious, wearisome and irritating puffed up pieces, is no pleasure at all. Compared to this, Chwin`s text (the atmosphere of the first sentence is perceptible throughout the whole article: “Herbert having been read by the Polish intelligentsia in the era of communism – especially during the martial law – was a real festival of hypocrisy”.) appears as a real refreshment. A refreshment all the more precious, because presented to the public during The Year Of Herbert, when Herbert was being spoiled with compliments. Once again, in reference to Chwin`s essay, let me quote two excerpts from his text: “We were not Mister Cogitos but citing those famous Herbert`s phrases, we could say about ourselves that we could become them at any time, even if it was just an exalted, hollow promise”; “And it was not just by accident that those knights of Justice and Law2 [quite meaningful inversion? – note: GW] with clenched teeth and a vertical wrinkle on their foreheads, carefully scrutinizing human poverty and shaking human conscience like a dirty rag which ought to be disinfected with chlorine of moral reform, took to him like flies to honey. That would not have pleased him at all, however, he couldn’t help it, in his poems for many years he had been producing the ideological fuel for their patriotic and moral enthusiasm.”
Linguistic Jugglery
Other “voices and glosses” in the supplement are less intriguing, and certainly not as brave and surprising as Chwin`s essay, however still worth taking a peek at. As Mirosław Dzień rationally remarks, the anniversary of Herbert`s death “provokes reflections” (“Nieprzeniknione życie kamyka – Zbigniew Herbert dziś” – “The Inscrutable Life of a Pebble – Zbigniew Herbert Today”). Dzień, the author of Światło w szklance wody (Light in a Glass of Water) for instance (the undersigned did read that volume and does not rate that intellectual adventure as remarkably exciting), was also provoked to reflections and the result is as follows: “We do really live in strange times when simultaneously with loosing faith in objective values we start to cherish, all the more passionately, havoc and mediocrity. Departing from deliberations on the nature of things we lose ourselves in word games; much to our surprise we dazzle with vulgarity and linguistic jugglery as if the words alone, despite their obvious absurdity, were to make us experience an artistic revelation”. I have a feeling that by writing this Mr. Dzień managed to insult Andrzej Sosnowski, the Warsaw neolinguists, Jacek Dehnel and Jaś Kapela at one go. The only survivors were probably Wojciech Wencel and Wojciech Kudyba. Oh, and Szymon Babuchowski! And Dzień himself – in order to check it, I referred once more to Światło w szklance… – does not lose himself in the havoc and word games since “he shows his surprise”. And precisely because of that we can read in the volume about rubbing the stone of silence, the hollow of non-existence, about that we “know nothing about death” (which is probably because – as it could be read in another poem – “it is different than it might seem”), that “the Earth`s layer is peeling off” and to those who still want more quotations I highly recommend the reading of, say, Przypowieść o pyłku (A Parable of a Speck of Dust).
The Aborigine In Me
Since we are talking about poetical matters, I would like to invite you to poetry corner, which involves momentarily leaving the supplement on Herbert and a jump to the “main body” of the quarterly from Toruń. At the very beginning we come across new poems by Julia Hartwig and Tadeusz Różewicz, but I cannot find in them anything that I have not read in these authors' works previously, hence there is nothing to talk about. However, I was not disappointed with Janusz Styczeń and his latest set of poems. In Skamieniała ukochana (The Hardened Beloved) we deal with a naked couple lying on an already made bed “after an amorous night”: “duvet is smooth, leveled, as if after a storm of passion / everything has been perfectly smoothed”, the boy is still bursting with energy and could start all over again but the girl, exhausted, unfortunately, has fallen asleep and she looks like a sculpture: “Psyche is sleeping, the boy whispers, / nobody knows to whom he whispers”. In another poem of his, Styczeń writes about breaths creating “a spirit of the very first kiss”, and in Zamek rozstania / A Break-up Castle (sic!) he writes at length about a man, who… has stopped distinguishing the shadow of a woman and the shadow of her house. But the two that amused me most were, however, the new poems by Jacek Napiórkowski: in Bodypainting, Soul Painting he depicts, among other things, a situation repeated each night when he wakes up, goes to the bathroom and in the mirror he gives “the Aborigine who lives in me” a minute of life; in Gonitwa poetów i zwierzątek (A Chase of Poets and Animals) I have just fallen in love with the punchline: “it is you who is the best lover/ mole”.
The Generations of Polkowski
Let`s go back to the supplement about Herbert. What we can find in here is also the reminiscence of Henryk Grynberg (Tylko ocean / The Ocean Only), Julia Hartwig`s sketch (Dwaj poeci / The Two Poets) devoted mainly to the relationship and arguments between Herbert and Miłosz, Maria Kalota-Szymańska`s Spotkania z Herbertem / The Meetings With Herbert (there is not a lot of those meetings with the poet over here, actually), Bogusław Kierc's Herbert or Krzysztof Lisowski's Znak muratora (The Builder's Sign). In several articles (Ligęza, Lisowski, Łukaszewicz, Mackiewicz, Myszkowski) I would like to point out unnecessary repetitions, namely – the enumeration of conferences, scientific texts, publishing initiatives and collections of critical sketches on Zbigniew Herbert – a suitable bibliography of texts and a chronicle of events connected with Herbert could have been added and these full-of-details paragraphs in the above-mentioned authors' pieces – skipped. Paweł Mackiewicz (in his article Herbert – w czyśćcu czy przed czyśćcem? / Herbert – In or Before Purgatory?) notices accurately, that Herbert's works had constituted the point of reference for some poets “from the generations of Polkowski” [from how many generations is Jan Polkowski? – note: GW], but “for the majority of those born in the 60's, not to mention the younger ones, Herbert is not the point of reference any longer”. At least several valuable fragments did I find in Anna Nasiłowska's Herbert po latach / Herbert After Years (“the worst that could happen to Herbert's poetry – would be to bronze it and watch while the monument is being restored”) as well as in a spacious, somewhat too meticulous, getting lost in the details, academic discussion about Herbert's last volume, conducted with Aleksander Fiut by Mateusz Antoniuk and Tomasz Cieślak-Sokołowski (“Nienapisane wiersze Zbigniewa Herberta” / “Unwritten Poems” of Zbigniew Herbert). Except this, we also receive several photos of Herbert in Rotterdam taken by Ryszard Krynicki, as well as, attention!, a picture of a tree under which Herbert sat, on June 25th 1988. I wish it was a joke on my part – some time ago in “Wakat” (“Vacancy”) I have laughed at the photos of Czesław Miłosz`s staircase... In the supplement there were several of Herbert's letters to Julia Hartwig and Artur Międzyrzecki (Herbert wrote “na pewno” 3 as one word), three poems of Herbert's three masters (Kawafis, Eliot, Yeats), three poems by Beckett translated and provided with a commentary by Antoni Libera, and not a very absorbing sketch by Joanna Zach – Norwid i Herbert: świadkowie kultur i cywilizacji (Norwid And Herbert: The Witnesses of Cultures And The Civilization).
Readiness for Conversion
I found, however, something even worse than the already mentioned photo of a tree – extensive pieces of prose (fragments of novels) of Krzysztof Myszkowski (Mohl) and Marek Kędzierski (Mademoiselle), also published in the latest issue of “Artistic Quarterly”. While reading those excerpts one might get an impression that both of them had been written by one and the very same person – they are so much alike: numerous repetitions, obsessively reappearing fragments of text, fragmented plot, characters practically invisible though unceasingly speaking, psychology deceptively deep but completely unclear, chaotic and tangled to such a degree that in the course of reading, I did not forget what my name was. Not until I reached Myszkowski`s journal (put in the Varia section) did I find out that Mohl is a tale “about Mohl and his mission”, and its main subject is “Mohl`s conversion, readiness for conversion”. I will quote another fragment from that journal: “To write in a way which makes what was written become embedded in the readers` memory and possibly often concerning ordinary, every-day life matters” – it shows clearly that Myszkowski promises in his personal notes one thing, and what he produces when he sits down to write is something completely different.
A Penis With Fingers
However, the most irritating in Mohl are: detailed and repetitious descriptions of the exact location of Mohl`s flat, views stretched beyond every single window of his flat, measurements of his flat, the position of all the objects (listed one after the other!) kept in his home, etc. I have burning desire to cite a couple of such paragraphs in order to quickly check the temperature a reader can be brought by reading these completely unnecessary fragments but, unfortunately, I do not have a dozen or so pages to use. Yet, I would like to present another paragraph from Myszkowski`s prose: “This scene during the stroll existed in its own light. It was, for sure, in a different light for Thorn and in a different light for Mohl, and surely – different for someone else, and for other people it existed in their own light, namely, in a different light for some people and in another for others and, who knows, whether or not it was in yet a different one for yet different people. For some people it was in a similar light, for others – not, and for yet other people – completely not, that is to say: in a light similar for all of them but similar in a different way for each of these groups and that should be clear.” So – everything clear, right? Somewhat less avant-garde (a synonym of “pointless”?) and closer to the reality seems to be Kędzierski`s Mademoiselle. Just a few exceptions: “Unlike me? May be but, first and foremost for me, different from myself and that is to say: not me – I thought”; “the faces of ours were so close that our wide-opened eyes did not see the eyes in front but just a glint, sparks poured into them or opalescent flames of candles reflected in those eyes”; “She used to come to my place or I to hers, and I suppose I don’t have to add when I say – or I write – she used to come, then to come does not mean to come only but, in general, to spend night, what I mean is spending the night, spending the night together”. Can you imagine that I waded through about 50 pages of such quasi-content! And yet, I forgot to mention about a body called a flesh howling to the sky, about bodies tangled up with an iron hoop or a totally disarming scene when the protagonist goes to the bathroom after »the intercourse« “and standing in the bathroom in front of the toilet I looked down: if he could tell me just what he had to do with it, if he could explain what happened last night… but he kept silent.”
***
It seems, that the strongest part of “Artistic Quarterly” is the section of reviews and notes on books in which, fortunately, I did not find any exceptional aberrations or absurdities. One might be, however, surprised, by the reviews of albums with the photographs of John Paul II and Benedict XVI published in a literary magazine, as well as the judgment passed on account of Stanisław Wyspiański's Hamlet – that the renowned contemporary directors creating non-religious theatre will soon vanish without a trace. It is also a pity that, obviously, according to the editorial staff of “Artistic Quarterly” young people, in their thirties, do not possess any writing skills and, somehow, they still do not find their own space in the pages of the magazine from Toruń.
Grzegorz Wysocki
Translated by Magdalena Kazimierska
Discussed journals: Kwartalnik Artystyczny