Karol Irzykowski: Apologist of the Inauthentic Art

Abstract

Karol Irzykowski (1873-1944) was one of the key Polish intellectuals of the first half of this century. Hisfin-de-sidcle anti-novel Paluba (The Hag) ironically bared the processes of its own making in a manner anticipating Proust or Gide, and was to be a powerful influence on Gombrowicz in particular. A Germanist by training, his first published book was a monograph on Hebbel's dramatic theory. The most acute Polish literary critic of the inter-war period, he demonstrates the pervasiveness of the German theoretical tradition in Central Europe in the late days and aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian empire. An engagement with German theory seems to have been the necessary precondition of almost all the period's significant work in aesthetics (one thinks, for instance, of Luk~cs or Balkzs writing in German, as Irzykowski himself could well have done). The point is not of course that German culture was superior to the surrounding ones; simply that German was the lingua franca of Central Europe, that now-vanished domain. In the Wagnerian theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, German aesthetics had foreshadowed cinema. The process whereby the theoretical possibility of the Gesamtkunstwerk translated itself into actuality by uniting diverse art-forms can seem almost to have been a metaphor for, and displaced expression of, the simultaneous historical process that synthesized the German-speaking peoples into the unity of a nation-state. If the German nation-state had long been merely a theoretical possibility, the same was to be true of cinema; and may it not be that the Faustian overreachers of early German cinema symbolize a fear of the demonic origin of the magic (among other things, of the technology) that permits one to synthesize diverse states into a single nation-state, varying art-forms into a single super-art? If Irzykowski's engagement with Germanic culture drew him towards theory, it assumes a volatile, provocative and post-Nietzschean form in his book on cinema, X Musa (The Tenth Muse). Although the book's first chapter was written in 1913, it already regrets the imminent possibility that the cine-phone (talking pictures) may replace the cinematograph, jolting one into an awareness of the earliness of the first fears of the de-