Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  Poland as a post-colonial country

  The most inspiring claim in Janion’s disquisition is the portrayal of Poland as a country that is, in a sense, postcolonial. Inspired by Said’s Orientalism, Janion presents Poland as a country of dual entanglement: colonized but at the same time colonizing (in Kresy, i.e. Borderlands, its ‘eastern marches’, an empire that once stretched across what is now Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia). This duality and lack of statehood brought about the lack of a coherent identity. The subject is present in Witold Gombrowicz’s prose, where the eternal Polish complexes go hand in hand with a lordly contempt for the otherness of the East. In Janion, colonialism intertwines with gender questions: Poland’s masculine arrogance, brimming with a sense of superiority, juxtaposed against the image of it as a degraded female. It would be hard not to notice this gender moment; as in its iconography, Poland the Brave is always a woman. This “Logo Polonia” in manacles is heroic or melancholic as the Black Madonna, suffering and unhappy in ‘Melancholia’, the famous painting by Jacek Malczewski, in other iconic paintings chained to a rock, bound with a chain or put into stocks. A woman passes the test as a symbol due to her indefiniteness and lack of a permanent place in culture. In a natural way, the womanhood of Polonia also symbolizes her frailty.

  What identity, after all, can we talk about here if the tradition of this state, besides Poles, is claimed also by Ukrainians, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Karaims, and Tatars? The most tragic dimension of this lack of communication between the nations is naturally present in the Jewish community. Even such national heroes as the revolutionary nationalist Tadeusz Kościuszko hailed from Orthodox Ruthenian gentry. Mickiewicz’s family had similar roots. It is interesting that in diagnosing our tendency to mythologize defeat, and falling into melancholia, we hardly ever notice how the Polish experience as mediator between the East and the West has been accompanied by a mysterious self-destructiveness. Our identity took shape in the no man’s lands between a suppressed Slavic spirit and an assimilated Westernness, between rationality and “barbarianism”, betraying later all the symptoms of the experienced trauma. Poland’s ostentatious turning towards the past and the inability to live “in the present”, which is always in this or that way unsatisfactory, has also made it impossible to get even with what has been suppressed. To hide away, to ham it up – this is “our” way of coping with trauma that every now and then come to the surface. It seems that the Polish tendency to fantasize themselves as ‘Sarmatians’ the ancient Iranian tribe that allegedly came to Poland and whose myth endures in the Polish aristocracy, the fantastic projects that sprang up from the minds of Polish writers and artists, took their source from a certain cultural deficiency We endlessly play up our funerary ceremonies, traumatically repeating our defeats.

  (A tragic-absurd epilogue to this was written on the April 10th, 2010, when 93 Polish politicians, writers, heroes and dignitaries died in a plane crash over Smolensk, en route to the site of Polish martyrology, the Katyń forest, where thousands of Polish officers were killed by the Red Army in 1940. Accordingly, Smolensk has become a founding myth of the new far right in Poland. I say new, but it is actually very old. Mentally, this formation is precisely the un-dead of a Polish right-wing Catholic/Russophobe/anti-Semitic/homophobe formation, that haunted Poland since the regaining of independence in 1918. therefore the huge wave of reaction which is de facto a restoration of the interwar, chauvinistic Poland.).

  No deeper analysis is needed here for the superficial symptoms of ‘returning to the roots’, as in for example the “peasant mania” of Young Poland (the Polish Art Nouveau movement) at the turn of the century, or the Zakopane Highland aesthetics in decorative arts. The true romantic mysticism, as in Król-Duch (King– Spirit) by the Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, or Konrad’s nihilism in the third part of Mickiewicz’s play Dziady (The Forefathers’ Eve) - a character, who in order to fight for Poland, has to change his identity into an evil one - finds a culmination in the decadent polymathic painter/poet/playwright Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele (The Wedding), where it becomes stripped of any illusions. The mad Straw Man’s dance, for a century a symbol of political and mental Polish futility, there is laid bare as a ‘Sarmatian’ melancholia, feigning the consciousness of defeat lodged somewhere deep in us. This image of melancholy, known from the iconic painted representations by Malczewski and Wyspiański, makes use of the uncanny and imagination for the a deliberate hiding of the rift between intention and action, typical for the melancholic Polish nature that is always – following the oft-repeated saying by Witold Gombrowicz – half-baked.

  The Polish Uncanny

  Yet not all is lost. The suppressed demanded disclosure, and it was the (post)-Romantic literature and art that were most often haunted by the suppressed Slavic identity. It is not a coincidence that the blossoming of phantasms combining Polish identity with the Messianic mission took place in Romanticism, much like the interest in the Slavic. The theory of culture that emerges from the Polish Romantics’ arguments from before 1830, a period when the Polish state was ruthlessly dismembered and oppressed by its neighbors, vests the perfection of the spiritual state only in the past. The past “was as if a natural state of poetry, clairvoyance, and unity with nature.” (Janion) The romantic severance from the rule of Logos, the ideological dispute between the Romantics and the Classicists, was in Poland an additional battle for the definition of Polishness. The Polish Romantics were aware of the Slavs’ past but, as Janion notices, romantic art continues to portray “this state of dolorous oblivion or non-recognition.” The Slavic character returned in literature as a suppressed non-Latin inheritance. It would crop up in the forms of the secret rite (Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve), a drama about the chthonic powers of nature, interfering with the human world (Słowacki’s Balladyna), a ‘philosophy of genesis’ and the fascination with the cruelty of the mythical rulers (by Słowacki, in Król-Duch (The Spirit King) and Genesis z Ducha (Genesis from the Spirit)). The uncanniness and horror inscribed into that heritage find their culmination in modernist authors: Wyspiański and Witkacy. Even the research into the “savage” conducted by Bronisław Malinowski can be a derivative of this.

  Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve is the work of key importance for Polish culture, presenting its continuity as a “misconducted” Zaduszki (a Polish All Soul’s Day ritual), which one cannot become liberated from. The connection between the living and the dead was severed, as a variety of skeletons are stuck in the closet, and the mourning work has either not been performed or held back. The fear of enlivening something considered dead is one of the most primary features of the uncanny in Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich. Freud’s aesthetics, e.g. his considerations on jokes, prove that his notion of the unconsciousness, the phantasmic, and the uncanny have their roots in romantic irrationality. Especially “the phantasm” - fantasy as defined by Freud-signifies the very core of “psychological reality”, which is not the transparent self-knowledge of the subject but rather alienation from reality. The uncanny is manifested when what comes to light are the contents that, though hidden away from us, are not entirely alien to us. The condition for uncanniness is its previous “canniness” – what is familiar but pushed away into the realm of the unconscious. “The prefix un is a symptom of suppression.”

  The uncanny, for Freud, boils down to brushing with various forms of death. And the greatest anxiety of the living is that death does not occur fully. The Polish Romantics’ predilection for the occult and the return to Slavic beliefs were like discovering a fissure: a crack in the image of the world that cannot be filled. The misburied dead drive the Polish Romantics to madness.

  The chimeras of Sarmatian melancholia

  In her earlier book Wampir: Biografia Symboliczna (Vampire – A Symbolic Biography), Maria Janion followed the figure of the vampire, which may embody the displaced Slavic character and be the alternative self, a lost component of humanity. The popularity o
f the vampire as a protagonist of the literary canon is intriguing. It is enough to quote, besides Forefathers’ Eve, Wladislaw Reymont’s Wampir (Vampire), and Witkacy’s Matka (Mother) making an allusion to sentencing the contemporary to vampirism and the loss of the prophetic gift. Janion mentions also the theme of vampirism in the field of art, sucking the life forces from the artist. This was a well-known subject for the decadents of Young Poland, connecting in a peculiar manner with the Polish sense of impotence. In Malczewski’s painting ‘Zatrute studnie’ (Poisoned Wells), the numerous Chimeras and other creatures haunting the artist’s imagination and rendering creation impossible are a personification of Polish ills. The figures in his famous ‘Melancholia’ appear as if they were lastingly detached from all reality, suspended in their passive comings and goings. Here, the space of the painting holds any potential movement at bay. This predominant passivity limits man even in open space: the limitless space of mountains brings no consolation to Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, the author of The Tales of the Tatras, who rather writes about pensiveness and melancholic ‘osmętnice’ – a neologism for the mythical ‘sprites of sadness’ of Polish mythology, who lingered in cemeteries, and killed men and women by kissing them.

  3.4 Me, or not me. Spectral Witkacy, 1915.

  The iconography of melancholics usually presents male figures, while Malczewski portrays a woman’s form, dark and veiled. Nothing would portray the withdrawal, so characteristic for the melancholic state, better than this veil of black. “The nothing that hurts”, as literary critic and novelist Marek Bieńczyk put it in his book Melancholia. On Those Who’ll Never Regain the Loss. What is unknowable, this deficiency, disrupts the cognitive process. A parallel, invisible, and hidden world is growing, defined in one of Malczewski’s paintings as the ‘Polski Hamlet’. Melancholia is born from the deficiency that, from its very essence, may not be satisfied. It is not a momentary disposition: one simply is a melancholic. Freud in Mourning and Melancholia describes it as the result of a turning away from reality, leading to the appearance of an attitude based on holding doggedly to the object. Melancholia is a pathological mourning: “in the case of mourning, it is the world that is desolate; in the case of melancholia – it was the very ‘self’ that became pauperised and desolate.” Moreover, the state of melancholia is defined as a “withdrawal” into the depths of the self and the contemplation of the “self”. Of key importance for the melancholic is the moment when the liberated libido (here perhaps the love of the fatherland) loses the object of anchoring and becomes withdrawn back to the “self” - a classic “Hamletism” of attitudes of Polish heroes. Possibly the most famous presentation of Polonia is contained in Malczewski, a portrait which provides a clearer allegory of Polish Hamletism, torn between the young and a revolution in manacles, symbolizing military defeats, returning to the subject of Polonia’s eternal womanhood with persistence verging on obsession. There is in Malczewski’s oeuvre an image of Polonia as a totally naked winged woman who shows the future with an energetic gesture of her hand - a unique, triumphant Polonia. Yet the Polish Hamlet in his own manner seems uninterested in any of these versions of history, and his eyes are melancholically turned to the contemplation of its own interior.

  Where does this conviction about our weakness come from? We return to the cracked identity, limiting the Slavic character to the dimension of tedious sentimentalism, which easily turns into a certain ‘Sarmatian’ melancholia. ‘Sarmatism’ is our awkward imitation of power, shame displaced into the subconscious. One of the results of the mythicization of our defeats may be atmospheric art, immersed in symbolism. A similar threat was noticed by Wyspiański and it was also well seen by the early twentieth-century novelist and unorthodox Marxist philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski. We are aware that we neglected something, that we lost something never to regain it again. The internalized melancholia merges into a unity with the vaguely perceived “Slavic soul”. Thus the Polish artist claims to communicate directly with the demons of the past. The grotesque ruled the imagination of Polish painters like Malczewski and Witkacy, as the symptom of a world that was falling apart before their very eyes.

  The development of Polish art progressed nearly parallel to the acquisition of nationalism; hence it is inseparable from discussions on the shape of the national style, continuing especially during the two decades between the World Wars. The regaining of Polish independence in 1918 was followed by numerous initiatives to form social and artistic life anew. Literary life was flourishing, and a peculiar euphoria ruled. On the other hand, the programmes of “returning to nature” increasingly often became a part of state ideology.

  It is worth remembering here one of the most bewildering Polish artists as a symptom of the unconscious background to those events. Stach z Warty Szukalski (1893– 1987) has to this day remained an inconvenient person, hard to be dismissed with regular ideological criticism. Szukalski ostentatiously contested the ideals of the newly enlightened and modern Poland, and all the milieux contemporary to him. This son of a Polish blacksmith who spent his youth in the US, was a self-made ideologist playing a Renaissance artist, putting forth his vision of Sarmatism, allegedly undistorted by outside influences. According to his so-called Zermatism, predecessors of Poles hailed from Easter Island, via the isles of Lachia and Sarmatia, they travelled via the summit of Matterhorn and moved to Poland from the town of Zermatt. Analysing rock art (possibly the most ancient representation of man’s artistic activity), he arrived at the conclusion that Poland was the first land to emerge from the Flood, and all the languages of the world took their origin from the primordial Polish vernacular. Much like Nietzsche, he delved into pre-Socratic Hellenism, believing that it is only by re-approaching the Greeks’ tragic period that we shall discover something “of our own truth”. Szukalski believed that Polish culture found itself in a state of collapse, with an alien element not only having taken away our statehood but also dictating cultural standards. He perceived traces of cultural purity in the pre-Slavic. Worried about the fate of all of Europe, he perceived an opportunity for its salvation in the establishment of an alternative, totalitarian vision of the continent, “Neurope”, with the participation of all the states – apart from those spreading the worst corruption or immorality, namely, France, Germany, and England – under the aegis of a new reborn Poland. This Poland would profess its ancient and freshly invented mythologies and heroes. The Wawel castle in Krakow and Duchtynia (neologism for Temple of the Spirit), designed by Szukalski, would be its spiritual center, something akin to the Germanic Valhalla, with Marshal Jozef Piłsudski, the de facto dictator of Poland from 1925 to 1935, being the incarnation of the King– Spirit, his mythical creation ‘Politwarus’. It was to be a monument to the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’, when Polish forces defeated the Red Army just outside Warsaw in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, described by the author thus: “the linkage of three national emblems of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia, as the Nation and its Youth fought and died for our common geographic-historic Freedom”.

  Interestingly, despite being obsessed with the Slavic, Szukalski’s iconography draws strongly from pan-German aesthetics - possibly the place where he unconsciously located the source of power. But by combining this with elements from Native American folklore, his work is strikingly harmonious with the notion of Polish post-colonialism. Szukalski’s chauvinistic ideology is too ambiguous to be entirely dismissed. He dared to reach deeper than the woolly mountain mythologies that dominated interwar Poland. What he arrived at, however, was not a gentle vision of the Slavic but blood-spattered clashes of power and a struggle for domination, anarchy, and anti-Christianity. This sounds familiar when juxtaposed against Poland’s history of ‘noble anarchy’, and the self-destruction of its nobility.

  3.5 Portrait Company of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz at your service. A Mr and Ms Nawroccy in the full paraphernalia.