La voix et le regard : les régimes visuels des concours d’autobiographies polonais, 1930-1984

Abstract

The narratives produced in the framework of Polish memoir-writing competitions before and after World War II offers a point of entry for studying what Martin Jay has termed the “tacit cultural rules of different scopic regimes”. In both periods, memoirs participated in political projects that went beyond the simple collection of first person accounts and sought to validate new ways of seeing. At first glance, these projects and their efforts to intervene in the realm of visuality appear very different: interwar peasant and worker movement, contesting cultural assumptions about the “dark” or “benighted” lower classes, claimed authority for subaltern ways of seeing based on worker/ peasant biographical experience. Postwar communism posited the uniquely visionary abilities of politically conscious individuals to see beyond present realities to future, revolutionary possibilities. In practice, however, competition memoirs only partly conformed to these scripts. They thus often demonstrated the limits of these two visionary projects, rendering “countervisuality” a common denominator of autobiographical narratives across the two periods. ■