“Me: a room to display things rewritten”. Miron Białoszewski, or, literature as a form of existence. Cover Image

"Ja: pole do przepisu". Miron Białoszewski, czyl literatura jako forma istnienia
“Me: a room to display things rewritten”. Miron Białoszewski, or, literature as a form of existence.

Author(s): Tomasz Kunz
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Białoszewski; rewriting; Polish poetry

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with attempted reconstruction of a performative variety of literary subjectivity which emerges from the interpretation of a few selected poems by Miron Białoszewski. Particular attention is paid to the ingenuous concept of ‘re-writing’, which for the author of the essay is a sort of interpretative key to understanding the specificity of a relationship between the world, language, and subject in Białoszewski’s output. The author argues that the act of writing (or rather, re-writing) becomes a privileged method of subjective existence, spanning over both the empirical and textual spheres. Białoszewski’s writing strategy is described as a ‘fagic’ one, with a reference to the poet’s extremely unique capability of transforming any forms of experience (particularly, linguistic experience) into his own individual idiom. This peculiar skill contains Białoszewski’s basic self-creative existential formula consisting in a conscious creation of the ‘self’ through it being rewritten in a new linguistic order. This attitude is conditioned by the radically anti-essentialist input concept of existence, the original ontological weakness of the ‘self’, which, in an integrated form filled with a sense, may seemingly manifest itself in a text, owing to the act of writing.

  • Issue Year: 2006
  • Issue No: 5
  • Page Range: 36-54
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Polish