Authors

Discussion

My proposed paper examines strategies of constructing spaces of freedom using the palimpsest of the Polish provincial past as background and various displacements and potentialities enabled by post-socialist transition as vector, in several works from the oeuvre of Andrzej Stasiuk and Olga Tokarczuk. The primary settings in those chosen works are par excellence provincial: the low Carpathians near the Slovak border in the case of Stasiuk, and the Silesian hill town of Nowa Ruda in Tokarczuk. Both sites present a locus classicus for investigations of spaces of freedom in the new post-transitional moment, with the legacy of state socialism as an extirpated, but not yet dispensed with, layer of tumorous tissue. The strategies for dealing with the fraught past are quite dissimilar, however. Where Stasiuk, in late 1990s and early 2000s texts like Tales of Galicia and Fado sought to describe the contemporary post-Sovietized society in profound transition, a setting which saw many individuals “fall out” of a consensus-based reality when “the system” collapsed, especially those inhabiting “Poland B” of small towns and villages, and instead engage in “pathological cosmopolitanism” of consumption and self-expression alike, Tokarczuk establishes a kind of subterranean connection to the Polish borderland provinces and cultural practices of the moment prior to the Second World War. I attend closely to her strategies of establishing a figurative and a real home in the new European borderlands. In her breakthrough novel House of Day, House of Night (1998), in particular, this province is reimagined and re-membered as multicultural and multiethnic. I argue that her writings form a necessary feminine/feminist countersign to the essentially masculinist construction of the Polish home(-land) and the poetics – as use and reterritorialization – of space (cf. Gaston Bachelard) configured within it, and thus can be read as a counterpoint to the system inscribed in Stasiuk (and his acolytes). A recent major text of hers, Flights, 2018, will thus be examined as a mode of aleatory being that pulls together different textures and temporalities of European (but really, global) consciousness, ca. 2010. In this sense the work builds on the writings of earlier Polish modernists like Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, articulating an argument for a postmodern, post-socialist provincial narrativity. The subject position enacted, I argue, is one of flux and freedom of the gaze: it is a phenomenon of a special temporality and agglutination of objects that “attach” to one’s gaze as one travels through the cultural archive of Central European (but really, global) culture, post-1989, in search of a utopian anti-system that can accommodate postmodern difference.