The article discusses the breakdown of Polish cemetery culture based on the literature of the last quarter century. The cause of the “breakdown” is a model of narcissistic cemetery formed after World War II; it mainly includes the dead worthy of commemoration, or the Poles who died acceptable death, and it excludes the ethnic strangers and unworthy form of death. However, the actions taken after 1989 for the sanctification of the dead Jews proved that death with dignity may also exist outside the narcissistic cemetery. In response, the Polish funerary community creates hysterical cemetery. In this cemetery, the society incorporates odious aspects of death into the mourning culture. The “abominable” content gives the basis for the establishment of the impure cemetery, which may include the death of the excluded, but is extended to the entire living space.
The article is devoted to the origin and development (differentiation during develop-ment) of the independent publishing circulation in Poland from the second half of the seventies. Its context is the economy, the politics and the culture – wide interpretation of the organised opposition’s formation history. In author's opinion, the creation of communication underground is connected also with the characteristic of postmodernity communication's emancipation, forming the alternative independent culture reality.
The article deals with representations of Scandinavia in Polish literature from the 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century. The basic claim of the article is that a shift in the Polish imagination from the West to the North has occurred through literature and growing public interest. This shift began with efforts to transform the initial stereotype of Scandinavia as a land of prosperity. In subsequent stages, the imaginary was expanded by literature to include the themes of equality, social trust and self-correcting modernity. Complicating the image of Scandinavia made it into a viable alternative to Western modernity.
Holocaust as impurityThe study concerns the category of “purification” and contradictory meanings attributed to it in an essay by Błoński titled Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto) (1987). The first sense, for the author the only possible, refers to the Christian penitential order (complicity of Poles for the Holocaust – guilty conscience – religion – gaining forgiveness – purification). The two other senses come into conflict with the above characteristics. One of them is associated with social system of purity, which in the post-war Polish culture has appointed the status of dirty matter to the Holocaust. The last refers to the Polish affects that treat the Holocaust as what is disgusting. Three varieties of impurities (fault – dirt – disgust) imply three different ways of purification.
The main statement of the article is that Polish-Jewish and Jewish-Polish biographies have an ambiguous ontological status. The status, which the article describes as spectral, is traced in Polish literature over the last twenty four years (from mid-80s till now). Three conventions have been identified, which, because of their openness to ontologically incomplete beings, are good expressions of complications of biography and identity. The conventions are romance, genealogy, and horror. The writers who use these conventions aim at representing a concrete Polish-Jewish or Jewish-Polish biography, but the phantasmatic quality of combination of what is Polish with what is Jewish leads to unreality of all elements of a novel. Consequently, not only Jewish characters and Jewish identity, but also Poles and Polish identity become phantasmatic.
The principal notion of the article–a “backward catastrophe”– stands for a catastrophe which occurs unseen until it becomes recognized and which broadens its destructive activity until it has been recognized. This concept in the article has been referred to the Shoah. The main thesis is that the recognition of the actual influence of the Holocaust began in Polish culture in the mid-1980s (largely it started with the film by Claude Lanzmann Shoah and the essay by Jan Błoński Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto [“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”]), that is when the question: “What happened to the Jews”, assumes the form: “Did the things that happened to the Jews, also happened to the Poles?”. Cognitive and ethical reorientation leads to the revealing of the hidden consequences of the Holocaust reaching as far as the present day and undermining the foundations of collective identity. In order to understand this situation (and adopt potentially preventive actions) Polish society should be recognized as a postcatastrophic one.
Artykuł stanowi propozycję potraktowania literatury jako matrycy wyobraźni zbiorowej. Podstawą omówienia jest proza polska okresu 1986–2016, a teza główna mówi, że kultura polska dotarła do krańców wyobraźni geograficznej. Jest to rezultatem wyprowadzki z dotychczasowych większych całości, do których Polska należała bądź do których dążyła (osłabienie obecności w Unii Europejskiej, zniknięcie Europy Środkowej, zahamowanie procesu orientowania się na skandynawski model państwa i kultury obywatelskiej, kryzys w stosunkach z Litwą, Białorusią i Ukrainą). Osłabianie bądź zrywanie więzi z państwami sąsiedzkimi prowadzi do czterostronnej izolacji – czyli wspomnianych krańców wyobraźni geograficznej. Wyjście z impasu byłoby możliwe pod warunkiem wypracowania nowych narracji łączących Polskę z kulturami sąsiedzkimi i osadzających nasz kraj na europejskiej mapie.
EN
This article proposes to treat literature as a template of the collective imagination. The basis for discussion is Polish prose from 1986–2016, with the main thesis being that Polish culture has reached the limits of geographical imagination. This is the result of Poland withdrawing from the larger structures to which it once belonged or to which it aspired (its diminishing presence in the European Union, the disappearance of Central Europe, delayed efforts to pursue the Scandinavian model of the state and civic culture, the destruction of relations with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine). Weakening or breaking ties with neighboring countries has led to isolation from all four sides. In order to get out of this impasse, it is necessary to develop new narratives that would link Poland with the neighboring cultures and would once again put our country back on the European map.