Przetworzenie to jeszcze nie powrót. O jednym wierszu Witolda Wirpszy (i wszystkich innych polskich wierszach postsekularnych)
Transformation is Not a Return. A Reading of a Poem by Witold Wirpsza (and of All Other Polish Postsecular Poems)

Summary/Abstract: While challenging the common view which sees postsecularism as a return to religion, this paper is an attempt to apply the main tenets of the postsecular thought to the literary criticism accompanying the Polish literature. After a brief presentation of several Polish poets whose works meet the proposed criteria of postsecularism (T. Karpowicz, K. Miłobędzka, S. Barańczak and W. Wirpsza), the author sets forth the argument that it is the linguistic aspect of the poems that lets us read them as postsecular. The main part of the paper is a critical reading of Witold Wirpsza’s 1971 poem “Powrót w zamęcie” (“A Return in Confusion”) which is interpreted as, on the one hand, an illustration of the idea of the society being forced into secularisation and, on the other hand, an effect of an intertextual play with Jan Kochanowski’s “Hymn.” Both aspects are crucial in identifying the postsecular rhetoric of the poem as they involve an unorthodox rendering of theological motifs and structures (making it possible to approach them from the perspectives of animal studies and animal theology), the idea of the artistic potential of blasphemy, and the proposition of the vital role of the “linguistic moment” (J. Hillis Miller) in the extra-linguistic interpretation of poetic texts.

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