Abstract
This article analyses the appearance of insects in Polish literature of the mid-socialist period. It will elaborate a post-humanist perspective on the peaking presence of flies, wasps, bugs or worms in literary texts both as a motif and as an aesthetic strategy. The article investigates the way the deployment of insects in and through the text modulates the view of and the perspective on their human fellows, and how these modulations can be traced to the social reality of the socialist 1960s and 1970s.
Highlights
A fly is sitting on the pillar behind a fake entertainer on a Vistula River cruise boat
This article analyses the appearance of insects in Polish literature of the mid-socialist period
The reeling departure and reappearance of the fly on the pillar, the negligent but slightly nervous scraping of the human fingers at the layer of paint on the rail they hold: marginal micro movements on the screen, interactions of living bodies with the space around them that happen almost unnoticed by the viewer of The Cruise (Rejs), a Polish comedy film shot in 1970.2 Both movements are utterly irrelevant to the story, and they become evident only in a mode of heightened attention to the corporeal dynamics in the film
Summary
The year 1968 marks in Poland, as in Western countries like France or the USA, a decisive turning point of post-war society. While there will be a trend for so-called inner migration and philosophising individualism in the cultural production of the later years, the culture of the late 1960s looks stupefied In this context of social resignation, we occasionally encounter attempts at the transgression of the human self – a self that cannot connect with its human fellows any more – towards a non-human world, a material-corporeal world of animals, plants and things, apart from a greater interest in the bodies and body parts of humans themselves. The insects’ oscillation between being objects and abjects of the human attempt at achieving and maintaining biopower shifts the focus of attention of this article towards ‘not so much the state of things but the relations between them.’[14] In a desmological – relationbased – approach as suggested by Michel Serres, I will investigate the appearance and functions of insects in the Polish cultural text of the mid-socialist period as fractures of the material and phantasmal surroundings by which humans feel ‘bugged’ in their everyday practices. That humans installed; maybe other things, other dynamics, other understandings are important, too? These questions emerge on the textual margins in face of the Polish societal crisis of 1968 that almost suffocates the humans themselves
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