Kaligrafie widma: Schulz – Wat – Różewicz

• Authors: Śliwiński Piotr

Title variants

Phantom Calligraphies: Schulz – Wat – Różewicz

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The article concerns the application of the ”calligraphy” motif in the writings of Bruno Schulz, Aleksander Wat, and Tadeusz Różewicz. All three men of letters – belonging to “the nation chosen for the Holocaust” – share the secondary, the incidental, and the indigenous, which, however, do not anchor and obliterate the awareness of a deprivation of values offering support. At the same time, the authors in question belong to the “category of observant participants”, who due to their presence in time and place open up spaces of stirring and terrifying conjectures, although, at the same time, they are witnesses and victims of the grim literal quality of history. All these features are concentrated in the motif of calligraphy (the calligraphy quality, line, contour, outline, relief, shadow), which appears in important fragments of works by Schulz, Wat, and Różewicz. The particular prominence of “calligraphy” is indicated by Bruno Schulz’s Wiosna (Spring). Here, the concept refers to the expressiveness of the image and, simultaneously, to the uncertain ontology of the presented phenomenon. Calligraphic perception, therefore, strives towards capturing the distinctive contour and the mysterious essence of things – it is a description of existence based on metaphysical intuition. The author of the article is interested in the copresence of the calligraphy quality and illegibility (elusiveness, undesirability) as well as in calligraphy taming the spontaneity of writing, imposing a form, granting shape and, at the same time, indicating that writing always possesses some sort of a dark side, inaccessible to the eye. In this manner, calligraphy accentuates the incompleteness of cognition and the inexpressibility of experience, while simultaneously suggesting that the calligraphic form – by storing within the intimacy of the act of writing – indicates the presence of something that guides the hand engaged in writing (this, in turn, implies the possibility of the existence of a metaphysical source and evokes that the search for truth does not have to be treated as a futile effort). Śliwiński interpreted selected fragments of prose by Schulz and poetry by Różewicz and Wat, and indicated in close-ups that the calligraphic image of works by these authors is not merely a con tour of experience and cognition, and does not only touch directly “the night of existence”, but also enters into a relation with the problem of the presentation and creation of the world prior to and after a catastrophe (including: before and after the Holocaust); the passage (outlined in the article) concerning the intuition and strategy of three writers resorting to calligraphy runs a course spanning from the premonition that “the blood of mystery”, whose “dark fluid” originates from the “night of existence”, circulates in an artwork (Schulz), followed by the pursuit of literature, which consists of listening closely to the silent “night of the world and experience” (Wat), all the way to the writer’s recognition of the paradoxical void inhabited by death (Różewicz). A comparison of fragments of Schulzian prose and poems by Wat and Różewicz thus serves not exclusively a demonstration of the vitality of certain motifs (writing, contour, chiaroscuro), but, first and foremost, is to disclose the process of filling the “other side” with increasingly dark content: unconceivable sense (Schulz), endless pain (Wat), and omnipresent death (Różewicz).

Keywords

PL

Bruno Schulz; Drohobycz

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Konteksty - Polska Sztuka Ludowa
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 73
• Issue: 1-2 (324-325)
• Pages: 68-74

Contributors

author

Śliwiński Piotr