Niżyńska, Joanna The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 520 between writers; and about values possibly shared by Ukrainian authors (for example, that most aliens in Ukrainian fiction are benign, or that Ukrainian novels foretold solar energy technology). Walter Smyrniw’s book, although invaluable for specialists, over-indulges in a kind of wishful thinking better suited to science fiction than literary criticism. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Niżyńska, Joanna. The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. xiii + 259 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Joanna Niżyńska’s study of the work of Miron Białoszewski (1922–83), one of the most enigmatic authors of the Polish canon, makes two important interventions into the area of Polish literary studies. First of all, as a monograph solely about Białoszewski, it substantially augments the available scholarship on his work, particularly in English — though it is also sorely needed in Polish. Secondly, it provides an incredibly insightful queer analysis of a significant Polish author and his oeuvre, adding to the burgeoning area of queer studies in Polonistics. Niżyńska believes that, after more translation, Białoszewski’s work will be an important addition to the ‘transatlantic canon of Polish literature’ (p. 7), borrowing a term from Bożena Shallcross. I believe Niżyńska’s book is itself a timely contribution to the transatlantic canon of Polish literary studies. Chapters one and two present thorough close readings of Białoszewski’s Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970) and his ‘small narrations’, which he composed from 1970 until his death in 1983. Niżyńska investigates the paradoxical character of these works, illustrating the ways the traumatic and exceptional become marked as common and everyday. She notes the Memoir’s creation of the ‘traumatic quotidian’, when the most mundane tasks turn into life and death situations, and the extraordinary becomes the unremarkable. For Niżyńska, in the uprising as presented by Białoszewski ‘there are no great deeds, but routine activities acquire the status of lifechanging events’ (p. 66). In making visible what is usually hidden, and in making the traumatic mundane, Białoszewski undermines the official historiography of the uprising; the Memoir is a subversive text, refuting the classically Romantic ethos of the ‘beautiful death’, and refusing to venerate the uprising as many other literary treatments have done. It becomes an important ‘counternarrative’ (p. 10) to the martyrological model of the event. In her analysis of Białoszewski’s life writings, such as the ‘small narrations’, Niżyńska sees a continuing influence of the traumatic quotidian from the REVIEWS 521 Memoir. The paradox of these works is revealed in the everyday as being ‘“only” the everyday and yet it is always already “something more”’ (p. 20). The banal in the life writings is constantly punctuated by traumatic traces. Rather than reading the uprising as ‘a self-contained event’ in Białoszewski’s biography, as many critics have, Niżyńska insists that it is ‘a force that continually shaped his writing’ (p. 103). This continuation of the traumatic in the small narrations is best exemplified in the flashbacks that interrupt Białoszewski’s accounts. The ‘quotidian encounters’ of Warsaw post-uprising are transformed into ‘traumatic encounters’ that evoke the trauma of the past (p. 111). InchapterthreeandtheEpilogueNiżyńskamovesherfocustoaqueerreading ofBiałoszewski’slifeandwritings,asking‘howourknowledgeofBiałoszewski’s homosexuality can most productively enter into our interpretation of his work’ (p. 176). She coins the phrase the ‘Lubiewo effect’, referring to the 2005 novel by Michał Witkowski, noting his extensive quotation from one of Białoszewski’s stories. Thanks to the popularity of this unapologetically queer novel we are no longer able to read Białoszewski naively, ‘that is, as if this intervention had not happened and as if the subject of homosexuality were not on the table in Polish cultural criticism’ (p. 135). For Niżyńska the fact of Białoszewski’s sexuality is eminently important to any accurate analysis of the Memoir. Its ‘unapologetic indifference to masculine valor’ (p. 180) is a threat to traditional, normative Polish identity, as has been illustrated in several reviews of his...