Freedom hooligans. The output of Miron Białoszewski, Andrzej Bobkowski, Zygmunt Haupt, Edward Stachura and a few other 4012-123B

What links the output of Miron Białoszewski, Andrzej Bobkowski, Zygmunt Haupt and Edward Stachura? These writers (despite any differences of biography or generation) are linked by a shared objection: literature cannot keep up with life, but then artistic work is the only thing that can hope to be a match for life. How can one overcome or at least try to cope with the fundamental contradiction that lies at the root of all artistic creativity? How can one shorten the distance between existence and its verbal expression?
Each of the “freedom hooligans” sought an answer on his own account. Miron Białoszewski listened to the “buzzing, blending and stringing” of Warsaw’s yards, streets, squares, ruins, corridors in blocks of flats, he traced the “revolutions of things” - things that were the most ordinary, broken, thrown out or taken in. He allowed the speech of the things themselves to be heard and listened carefully to the voices of things.
Andrzej Bobkowski called himself a “freedom hooligan” and a “Cosmopole”. His output, especially Szkice piórkiem, offers unprecedented testimony to “creating on the move” and cutting the distance between writing and life. Bobkowski insisted many times that he was not a writer, or at least not a man of letters, and his activity had ethical meaning in the old sense of the word ethos as “being in oneself”.
Zygmunt Haupt was engrossed with the relation between things and time, or the phenomenon of memory. His work is tied to things by a network of intimate relations. With Haupt, a journey towards memory, untangling and retying the bonds between being and time is not limited to even the most loftily understood particularisms: to nostalgia for Podolia, for the family home, the lost paradise of childhood etc.
Haupt was fascinated with the constant drama of turning observations into memories, the archaeology of voices coming from the past, the mystery of appearance and disappearance, the tragedy of sliding words that always name things differently than one would like, because they always come late in relation to the current state of things. In this sense, Haupt’s writing is of a “universal character”, as my Latin teacher used to describe Horace’s odes.
Haupt’s short stories constitute living conversation, conversation in the audience’s consciousness. They involve a continual figure-pointing, poking in the ribs, pulling of the arm in haste, impatiently, oh look!, look! because the partner, onlooker and participant is standing near and looking at the same things, and the point is for that partner within arm’s and poke’s and voice’s reach to not miss even one unrepeatable, unique, wonderful, most real opportunity to meet a thing, an event that is happening and will never again be repeated as that particular event.
Words always come too late, not to mention sophisticated phrases, it is all too slow, hence all the gestures, phonic gestures in Haupt’s works. Hence the use of exclamation marks and demonstratives, shifters: “this” and “here”, “well, well”, “oh yeah”, as long as it is faster, more apt, seemingly chaotic but in fact very orderly, though the syntax is riddled with anacolutha, strongly diluted with everyday genres of speech.
Haupt was the first writer, independent of Bobkowski, Stachura and Miron Białoszewski, to give Polish literature previously unknown layers of everyday genres of speech to a degree so decisive that they had to blast the short story as a literary genre apart from the inside.
The tension between the coarseness of sound and the poetic over-organization of text is accompanied - on another level - by Haupt’s next paradox: the curse of the fragment appears as the other side of the temptation of the whole. Zygmunt Haupt would like to describe the entirety of the world, but he is condemned to buzzing, blending and stringing, to fragments and juxtapositions of excerpts, always without a culmination.
Edward Stachura was the most radical in his action against(in)literature. He paid the highest price for “trying the whole”.
1. Language and statements. What is semantics? What is semiotics? What is the logosphere?
2. “The structural pile”. Miron Białoszewski’s memoirs from the Warsaw Uprising.
3. Bump and the woman. Miron Białoszewski’s buzzing, blending and stringing.
Grammar and mysticism. Miron Białoszewski’s separate theatre.
4. “About Mickiewicz as I speak him…” The Romantic tradition in the output of Miron Białoszewski.
5. War and peacefulness. Rapture with existence and sketching with the pen of Andrzej Bobkowski.
6. Ikkos and Sotion. The boundary of Andrzej Bobkowski’s life choices.
7. The modeller. Andrzej Bobkowski’s “life-writing” project.
8. “Like the stone”. Zygmunt Haupt’s artistic techniques for fighting against literary quality.
9. Flesh side and grain side. Magic and rituals in the works of Zygmunt Haupt.
10. The world in all its intensity. Edward Stachura’s poetry project.
11. Attacks on “allness”. Urgeschichte according to Edward Stachura.
13. Edward Stachura’s travel diaries, or writing on the move.
14. Standing at the head and not tasting death. Edward Stachura’s mysticism and terror.
15. On the benefits and threats of “life-writing”.