Literature, Biographism and the Communion of Saints: The Case of Jan Józef Lipski

Abstract

This article examines the theological underpinnings of one twentieth century argument over the legitimacy of biographical interpretation in literary studies. The argument was offered by the Polish scholar and critic Jan Jozef Lipski. He can be interpreted as claiming that the impulse to read literary works as expressive of an individual personality, otherwise inaccessible to the reader, was motivated by the same sort of disappointment with ordinary human contact which underlay a particular version of the doctrine of the communion of saints. A discussion of Lipski's view of the biographical method is followed by a detailed commentary on the alleged analogy between literary communication and the Christian dogma in question. Debates about the place of the author's biography in an interpretation of his or her literary writing have clearly lost the urgency they used to have in theoretical reflection on literature during much of the last century. The particularity of the author as a person is now more welcome in sophisticated readings of literature, and inferences from what we otherwise know about his or her life are no longer forbidden or treated with suspicion as introducing impurity into a suitably aesthetic appreciation of his or her art. In a historical account of these quarrels, it is easy to pass over their theological presuppositions, the ostensible use within them of theological analogies, and their emphasis on the way in which certain assumptions about literary authorship are allegedly motivated by religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are no longer alive among those party to such disagreements. Roland Barthes's celebrated essay on the death of the author is a good case in point. It does not just announce the death of the author as a literary phenomenon, but also presents it as a consequence of the death of God in European culture, and Literature & Theology © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org I The Author 2006. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:17:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WOJCIECH JAJDELSKI 141 interprets our resistance to fully liberating the reader in terms of an inert residue of religious faith. For Barthes, then, a certain undesirable view of literary authorship can be usefully elucidated on the analogy of the classical picture of divine creation, but it is also sustained among secular readers and critics as a belief about literature because of its causal connection with Christianity. The fame of Barthes' essay obscures other attempts in a similar vein, however, and tends to project the unjust impression that such uses of theology were generally antithetical to religion. In this article, I take up and examine a curious argument by the Polish critic and theorist Jan Jozef Lipski, in which he draws a comprehensive analogy between literary communication and the communion of saints. In the light of this analogy, literature emerges as the expression of, and seemingly a mode of overcoming, a profound disappoint ment with the limitations of ordinary human contact which might also be said to underlie the doctrine of the communion of saints in one of its variants. In the first part of this essay, I shall examine Lipski's work on the biographical in literary studies, and in the second, I shall spell out the implications of his reference to 'the communion of saints' as the literary historian's private dogma. Jan Jozef Lipski (1926—91) combines a forceful critique of biographical interpretation as a misguided method of reading with an equally resolute acknowledgement of biography's inevitable appeal to students and ordinary readers of literature. Based at the Institute of Literary Studies in Warsaw, Lipski's main domain of historical expertise was Polish modemist literature, with special emphasis on the Polish variety of expressionism and the work of the poet and translator Jan Kasprowicz (1860-1926).3 A side interest in the connections between literature and nationalism, chiefly in the Polish and German contexts, ran through much of his later work and culminated in three separate books on the subject.4 In literary theory, Lipski was broadly sympathetic to stmcturalism, maintained a friendly relationship with such representatives of the movement in Poland as Michal Glowinski and Janusz Slawiriski,5 and regarded it as the most scientific version of literary studies on offer. Lipski's early training in logical positivism, with its distmst of nonempirical claims, helped him to become an acute internal commentator on the structuralist enterprise: someone whose agenda was to expound and develop the structuralist doctrine in the best possible light, removing obfuscations and striving for consistency in its philosophical commitments. His work on 'biographism'—his term for a style of literary interpretation which casts the author's life as the primary and essential context for his or her work—assumes with the structuralists that it is an irredeemable fallacy. At the same time, Lipski's writings continue to be informed throughout by a concern with traces in the literary work of its individual creator, considered This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:17:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 142 THE CASE OF JAN JOZEF LIPSKI as more than a mere textual construct, which in tum puts him somewhat at a distance from the movement's more impersonal tenets. During the 1970s and 1980s Lipski was increasingly involved in dissident activity as a member of the Workers' Defence Committee. The group came into being in 1976 and its primary purpose was to assist workers dismissed from employment for political reasons. It is also fair, however, to describe the committee as the most advanced form of organised opposition to Communism in Poland before the emergence of Solidarity in 1980. Lipski chronicled the work of the committee in a sizeable volume (his only book ever to be translated into English6), and his long-lasting engagement in politics was crowned with Lipski's winning a seat in the Polish Senate in the momentous, though still only partially free, parliamentary election of 1989. Some of his scattered essays on postwar Polish poetry were published in 1987,7 and 1996 saw the publication of a posthumous volume of tributes from friends and associates, both in the academic world and in politics.8 Up until the end Lipski continued to be an agnostic, but was nevertheless positively disposed towards Christianity and Roman Catholicism in particular, respecting a religious commitment he felt unable to share. Lipski's work as a literary historian has not been superseded, but the fact that his main subject has become less of a centre-stage presence in the Polish canon in recent decades accounts for Lipski's diminished influence on the discipline as a whole. His essays on literature and nationalism have provided a starting point for recent work on Catholic nationalist writing, and on the ascendancy of religious nationalism in Polish politics after the end of Communist mle. When it comes to an overall assessment of his contribution as a literary scholar, however, it is clear that Lipski remains at his best and most original in his theoretical work on biographical reading, and on the related but different question of the literary text as a human creation expressive of its maker. It is also in the course of summing up his reflections on these themes at the end of his last major essay, putting forward a retrospective intellectual creed, as it were, that Lipski draws the analogy between literary reception and the communion of saints which I shall focus on in considerable detail later on in