Soothing the Wounds

In accordance with the saussurean principle of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign the word rana has manifold senses in the languages of the world. From among numerous examples the author pays special attention to the Romance rana ‘frog’ and the Slavonic (in particular Polish) rana ‘wound’. The discussion concerns the earliest attestations of the word in Old Polish, modern phrases and collocations, cross­‍‑linguistic literary and cultural associations and homonyms.

The article is an attempt to present the importance of the category of trauma in the titular concept of Kaja Silverman’s "Male Subjectivity at the Margins" published in 1992. Her theoretical work appeared at the same time as other important gender and queer theories developed by Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Pierre Bourdieu (also R.W. Connell’s seminal work on masculinity published a little bit later in 1995). Silverman’s work has similar scope as the remaining mentioned works, but it has never reached their level of popularity and its position within the field of gender studies is constantly underestimated. This article focuses on possibilities offered by Silverman’s approach for gender research.

The literary work of Stanisław I. Witkiewicz (Witkacy), whose world career began in the 1950s, is treated today in many aspects as a precursory in relation to postmodernism. In his dramas and novels, this is manifested in the creation of characters who are internally broken up, act like human machines full of glitches and are unable to control their own drives. These motifs are also reflected in the writer’s broken identity, which is torn apart by contradictions (“knots”) and constantly doubles itself. In my article I demonstrate to what extent this obsession with his own double is rooted in the instrumental treatment of Witkacy by his father, who wanted to see in him a perfect artistic embodiment of himself. The whole of Witkacy’s work, considered from this perspective, is a rebellion against his father, expressed in the (futile) desperate attempts to break away from being his better copy, his double.

The main aim of the article is to examine the ways in which traces of traumatic experiences manifest themselves in Leopold Buczkowski’s texts. As
I argue, the sphere of their manifestation is first of all the graphic dimension of these books, which I call “traumatographies”. In later stages of his work, the author of a novel Czarny potok [Black Current] would develop an original concept of pausing the language as the only form of adequate testimony about wartime events. Buczkowski, a witness of the Nazi extermination of Jews from Podole, would not only be one of the first European writers to pose a question about the feasibility of creating literature after the Holocaust, but would also provide one of the most radical answers, one that demands a complete redefinition of the very concept of literature.

The article deals with the similarities between aphasia and trauma with reference to the work of Polish writer, Leo Lipski. In the first, theoretical part the author refers to Israeli scholar Ilit Ferber’s argument proving the existence of clear analogies between Freud’s description of aphasia (to some extent consistent with the contemporary approaches in medicine) and his definition of trauma, which was introduced later. In the second, analytical part of the article the author tackles the problem how Lipski’s aphasic disorders are reflected in the formal structure of his texts and how they became a subject of his fiction. With the foregoing theoretical assumptions, the author argues that while there is no equality between aphasia and trauma, one can find structural similarities in depicting both the latter as well as the former in the text. And so three characteristics of Lipski’s work, determining its uniqueness, have been distinguished, all being specific to both aphasia and trauma. The author refers to them as a) the perseveration, b) the misalignment of language, and c) the blockings of language, and subsequently describes each of them based on the examples of Lipski’s texts.

The author describes the phenomenon of the sense of grievance deeply rooted in the Upper Silesian community. The starting point of the essay is a sociological diagnosis by Marian Gerlich, which dates the genesis of this phenomenon back to the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. The author of the article finds examples of historical and structural trauma (according to the distinction drawn by Dominick LaCapra) in the fortunes of some literary characters featured in the texts by Wilhelm Szewczyk, Szczepan Twardoch, Wojciech Kuczok, Stanisław Bieniasz and Leszek Libera. He observes the dynamics of the development of this trauma by referring it to the essay of Julia Kristeva (Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia). The title metaphor (le soleil noir) is the reverse side of the narration of Upper Silesia, standing in opposition to the official story (the obverse), monopolised by accounts of a successful symbiosis between a Silesian and his geographical and geopolitical environment. The author has focused on the fortunes of characters excluded from a large ethnic community, usually illegitimate or abandoned children – fortunes which – on
a symbolic level – illustrate the relationship between “Homeland” and “Small Homeland”. The expression “black sunset” is related to the tendencies, observed in the current discourse, to replace the “black” narration (glorifying exploitation) with the “green” narration and to diverge from images showing ethnic orphan hood to images depicting an autonomous community, conscious of its purposes.

This article is an attempt to describe the ways in which the past – the especially Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa – PRL) – performs in the memory of the protagonists of Dorota Terakowska’s novel Ono. Teresa, Jan and Irena vary in both perceiving those realities and passing these memories on to their descendants. After discussing different types of the memory of PRL and describing them using the concept of trauma the author focuses on Ewa – the main protagonist of the book in question. She has to deal with her own trauma, which is a consequence of rape. Shedding light on this motif enables one to see that Terakowska used fictional situations to voice some serious observations concerning the real problem of sexual assault and its social perception. Those remarks are supplemented with autobiographical
element provided by parallel reading of Ono and Guma do żucia (Terakowska’s autobiographical quasi­‍‑political text).

This article aims to provide a preliminary interpretation of Zyta Rudzka’s novel entitled Krótka wymiana ognia (A Short Exchange of Fire). It is analysed through the lens of interdisciplinary Memory and Trauma Studies as well as Maria Török and Nicolas Abraham’s psychoanalytical thought – special attention is paid to the concept of transgenerational transmission of trauma. The author presents three main series of events (which occur not only in reality but also in the phantasmatic order) which affect the complicated relationship between women from three generations of the same family. Shreds of memory that circulate between them gradually lose an unambiguous affiliation and become a part of a somatic and sensual traumatic palimpsest.

Fr Jan Twardowski advises: “Let us hurry to love people” before they leave behind “only their shoes and silence on the phone.” The poets use the motif of overdue phone calls to people who are no longer with us, but – in spite of the diagnosis from another of Twardowski’s work, Potem, that the dead do not call us – the trauma of the death comes back also in the form of the telephone calls from the dead person (e.g. Słuchawka by Wisława Szymborska). These (nomen omen) signals of trauma – trauma connected with Holocaust, war, individual loss – seem to be the expression of helplessness of the people who survived, but also the attempt to rescue the memory of the dead (Spis abonentów sieci telefonów miasta stołecznego Warszawy na rok 1938/39 by Jerzy Ficowski, Notes by Antoni Słonimski). The vision of telephonic understanding with the dead can help to work through the trauma, allow to have the conversation impossible ever before (Telefon by Zbigniew Herbert), and support people in comprehending their own mortality (Telefon by Mieczysław Jastrun). What seems the most interesting are the functions this “contacts” perform and the metaphors characteristic for the mentioned poems (or similar, like Telefon by Władysław Szlengel). In the centre of this article is the contemporary Polish poetry, however as a context foreign (Telephone Call by Donell Dempsey) and prosaic (Szum by Magdalena Tulli, Duchy w maszynach by Anna Kańtoch, Maigret en Vichy by Georges Simenon) works are also used.

The book, Agata Stankowska’s Ikona i trauma. Pytania o „obraz prawdziwy” w liryce i sztuce polskiej drugiej połowy XX wieku is one of the key dissertations examining representations of border experiences. The author analyzes the poems and art of artists belonging to different generational formations (Ewa Kuryluk, Tadeusz Różewicz, Stanisław Czycz, Jerzy Nowosielski and Tadeusz Kantor) in a very innovative way, using terminology used in art history. Stankowska’s idea is based on the assumption that traumatic experience (such as separation from a loved one or death in a war) requires presence in the form of acheiropoietoi, which is an image created in a miraculous way, without human intervention. The researcher proposes to treat this term as one of the traveling concepts of the humanities. Due to the concept, which involves the need for
somatic contact with a character portrayed unintentionally, the researcher particularly emphasizes the moment of bodily hypersensitivity (Czycz) and the phenomenon of flowering of life (Różewicz), which can be appreciated at the moment of realizing the epistemological potential of suffering. According to the reviewer, the publication’s biggest asset is showing another, up until now overlooked side of modernist art, whose representatives decide to preserve the image of human traumatic experiences in the 20th century. The issue of aesthetic development is not a priority issue in Stankowska’s branch of modernism. The artists selected by the researcher are connected by duties, desires and experiences that orbit around the concept of the “real image”. The reader of Stankowska’s book should appreciate the particularly interdisciplinary nature of the dissertation and the idea that causes the narrative of twentieth­‍‑century art to go beyond the boundaries set in textbooks on art history and literary studies. The reviewed dissertation owes a lot to Georges Didi­‍‑Huberman’s formula ‘images despite everything’, thanks to which the recurring desire to present experiences of various levels of traumatogenity is associated with imagination, not memory. This transition from remembering to imagining determines the choice of artists and allows solidarity with the murdered and suffering within a group larger than family.

The article discusses a collection of essays by Grzegorz Jankowicz entitled Blizny [Scars]. Jankowicz’s attainments are what constitutes the main focus for the author of the article – not only those relating to literary criticism, but also the untypical ones that belong to the sphere of “literary activism.” In the text, there is conducted a close analysis of the essayist’s self­‍‑presentation considered in a context of the societal games of prestige and significance. Furthermore, a more general situation in the intellectual domain known as literary essayistic writing is outlined. Apart from the foregoing, the author ponders the issue of an emergence of the literary form in question, namely, the collection of texts – once dispersed and written in various circumstances, prompted by variegated impulses, and then consolidated, ordered to achieve a convincing monographic effect.