Writer’s “Task” and Talent’s Play

Abstract

In his lectures at the Jagiellonian University in the late 1960s, the eminent Polish literary scholar Kazimierz Wyka used the term horizon of the unachieved. It implied a chronology: a line and a goal which writers try to approach but never can reach. Similarly, the division of the even number twenty by six is never completed. In much the same mechanical manner, this kind of thinking about national literature persisted for a long time in Polish literary criticism. This line of critical thought started with Jan Kochanowski and continued uninterrupted throughout the entire history of Polish literature until the appearance of the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. The sky was the limit, everything else was below it. This position became the basis of the research method of many critics and historians of literature. Literature was conceptualized as a logical and forward-- moving process, one among the other processes of the national spirit and national history, within which an artist participates in accordance to the context of time and the parameters of his or her talent. A writer may be a genius but nevertheless, he or she is nothing but a producer who expresses that national spirit and evolution of its history. The positivistic stance of many researchers has always looked for the writer's national task. For them the metaphor of the horizon of the unachieved formulated by Wyka was the gap between what was achieved and what had to be achieved. The greatest gift of a critic's mind is the ability to find order in the pulp of the artistic cosmos, and his or her greatest shortcoming is that he or she turns this order into a regularity, a law or, in some cases, into the statute of artistic behavour. This idea of a law or code is what is hidden behind the familiar mythologizing of the past and the programming of the future. One of the aspects of such mythologizing is the substitution of chance by the regularity of law, and as far as programming is concerned it means a multiplication of artistic experience and the wish to predetermine the forms of aesthetic consciousness. It would be the same if we approached historico-literary matter not as a teleological process but as a change of its genres; in such a case our definition would not be easier and the danger of schematism would not be less distinct. A relatively young literature usually does not create its own genres because it starts by imitating existing models. In that sense, it adopts genres by licence or, at best, adapts them to the specific shape of the emerging local art. It may sound strange, but the only Polish author in the past who examined the national literature through the perspective of genres was the preromantic poet Kazimierz Brodzinski. His literary gift can be characterized as pragmatic. He wrote the poem Wiestaw, but he obviously felt that the model was not sufficiently understandable on its own. Thus Brodzinski supplemented his poem with a precedent-setting article On the Classical and the Romantic. In it he identified the idyll as the national genre of Polish literature. He did not mean the Polish imitations of Hesiod and Virgil. The Polish for idyll is sielanka, that is, a song about the village. This does not intend to idealize the village laborer but mythologizes the Polish peasant in general. This has been the case since the Piesn Swietojanska o Sobotce (Song of St. John's Eve) of Jan Kochanowski and the Sielanki of Szymoan Szymonovic. The mixture of national sentiment, Slavic colouring and post-Rousseauan nostalgia for the primitive-which seventy years later produced the movement known as chtopomania--could also be interpreted as a peculiar search for social territory in which to draw comparisons and contrasts with the great literatures. Be it as it may, the genre in this case is a characteristic form of the spirit and not of historically accomplished artistic structure. Naturally, it is naive to seek this kind of understanding in a pre-romantic poet like Brodzinski. …