Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
“none of the values of contemporary life can be severed from the Holocaust.” Przemysław Czapliński, “Wirus Auschwitz,” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, Vol. 2, No. 10 (2014), p. 884.
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Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative Reading
Games with Akademia pana Kleksa
Postmodern practices have considerably unsettled the ontological status of the modern fairy tale. Authorial freedom in manipulating tradition, which is expressed in intertextual games, blends of various conventions and amalgams of compositional methods, has been legitimised by the notion that “we have seen it all.”90 Having done its postmodernist homework, the contemporary fairy tale interrogates its own generic boundaries, which amounts to undermining both its own existence and the entrenched canon from which it hails. For the “playful daughter of myth,” as Friedrich von der Leven calls the folktale, can not only precede myth, interlace with or seep into it, giving it a new lustre, but also ask questions about its own being.91 In this sense, the contemporary fairy tale, as opposed to the traditional one, not so much talks about the “eternal praesens, the eternal now that is actualised in individual human lives, in people’s experience of life,”92 as calls into question the universality of the fabular message by continually decontextualising fairy-tale narratives.
Though symptomatic of contemporary texts, these postmodern shifts within the fabular substance certainly did not commence when postmodernism was proclaimed. If we consider the self-referentiality of the fairy tale to be a defining feature of postmodernity, we should date the beginning of revolutionary changes within the genre back to Bolesław Leśmian, an eminent Polish poet of Jewish descent, who wrote in the interwar period but derived inspirations from modernism.
Mise en abyme is one of Leśmian’s favourite teleological contrivances, which forms a richly layered score in Przygody Sindbada Żeglarza [The Adventures of ←45 | 46→Sindbad the Sailor]. At the centre of the textual world, which is woven of multiple writing-related motifs, stands one of the protagonists – uncle Tarabuk, a poet obsessed with the idea of eternally preserving his works, whose body covered in his verses becomes the message in and of itself. The impact of the poetry inscribed on uncle Tarabuk’s skin is limited, which puts an end to the writer’s dream of poetic fame. At the same time however, such an inscription warrants an intimate encounter between a potential reader of Tarabuk’s texts and Tarabuk himself. The commitment to recording and to preserving the record leads thus to a “double” transubstantiation as poetry becomes body and body becomes poetry. Whoever wants to partake of it should join the elitist community of reading during which a reading communion occurs. The seriousness of testifying to literature by means of one’s own body is undercut by Leśmian’s irony. Uncle Tarabuk must eventually acknowledge the superiority of the narrative in which he is himself implanted and submit to the rules of the fairy tale, which dictate that the ending should involve the conquest of a woman. As Tarabuk must get married, the finale of the twists and turns of his manoeuvres with the script leaves no illusions as to his lot, for it turns out that “under his sign-overwritten skin a new story is already being written, one far more effective than his poetry.”93
The storm of self-referentiality also sweeps across the narrative of Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks (Mr Inkblot) trilogy,94 billowing – like in Leśmian’s fairy-tale – with the motifs of script and writing. The interdependence between the motif of writing as part of the plot in the texts about Mr Inkblot and the generic “wobbliness” of the fairy tale has been very insightfully grasped by Papuzińska, who observes that Brzechwa produces a sense of distance between the reader and the world of the text, which dismantles the literary illusion incorporated in the structure of the work. The application of these novel devices in Akademia pana Kleksa [The Academy of Mr Inkblot] is perhaps their first occurrence in the history of the literary fairy tale.95
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The Academy of Mr Inkblot is a modern fairy tale about an oddball who runs an Academy situated in Chocolate Street and accepts only boys whose names start with an “A” as his students. The Academy building is located in a picturesque park neighbouring the fairylands with which Mr Inkblot and his pupils are on cordial terms. Under Mr Inkblot’s tutelage, the boys experience several adventures and take part in blotting lessons. The main child protagonist of the book is Adaś Niezgódka (Adam Stroppy), for whom Mr Inkblot cherishes high hopes and who he views as his successor. Mr Inkblot himself is a scholar, a wizard and an inventor who often chooses to stand on one leg and dispatches his eye into outer space. He is friends with Mateusz, a talking starling, who is in fact a prince who was turned into a bird. Since his transfiguration into a bird, Mateusz has been looking for a button from the magic cap of Doctor Paj-Chi-Wo,96 which will enable him to regain his human form. Mr Inkblot possesses secrets, which he guards cautiously and that is why he forbids the boys to enter his study. The Academy’s idyll is disrupted by the arrival of Alojzy, a mechanical doll constructed by Filip the barber, who asks Mr Inkblot to make it into a real boy. Alojzy rebels and destroys the Academy as Mr Inkblot, overwhelmed by the evil perpetrated by the doll, steadily diminishes, only to eventually shrink into the button for which Mateusz has been searching. When the starling regains his human form, he turns out not to be a young prince, but a forty-year-old man, the author of The Academy, who explains to Adaś that the entire story in which he has been involved is a dream or perhaps a fabrication.
Though Papuzińska’s insights about the book are certainly apt, the reasons behind furnishing the tale with an ending which, like postmodernist narratives, invites at least two different interpretations deserve a more thorough examination. One of the interpretations is indeed convincingly spelled out by Papuzińska, who focuses on the text’s reliance on oneiric conventions to construe the dream as envisaging the fall of civilisation, as the book ends with the boys’ departure from the secure space of the Academy. At the same time, the ending in which Adaś Niezgódka wakes up from the dream of the Academy in the study of the author of The Academy himself, implies that the entire story was just a child’s reverie, while the awakening rationalises the envisioned events, exposing their illogicality. Nevertheless, the oneiric is not the only convention employed by Brzechwa in the story, and its ending can be located in an entirely different context. The demystification of the fairy tale and emptying it of wonder by having magic supplanted with the banality of sleep come across as a cruel experiment ←47 | 48→on the reader, who craves fabulous marvels. Reading in this fashion is difficult for anybody, and it is particularly challenging for a child. The disappointment it occasions may admittedly be attributed to the modernist penchant for playing with conventions, but it is by no means necessary.
Therefore instead of the postmodernist, oneiristically underpinned take on The Academy, I propose to read the adventures of Mr Inkblot “in spite of all.” Of course, the idea of such a reading is mediated, and its primary locus is Georges Didi-Huberman’s seminal book Images in Spite of All. Didi-Huberman studies four photographs taken in Auschwitz and sides with those who do not agree to be silent about the Holocaust even though silence has long been the major mode, or perhaps anti-mode, of representing the Holocaust. As argued by Beata and Tomasz Polak, “the French researcher is in league with those who took those pictures in order to say something through them rather than not saying anything through them.”97 Pondering whether or not “to snatch the image from that hell in spite of all,”98 Didi-Huberman’s answer is a resounding “yes.” He discerns in the photographs not only a form of “aesthetic” representation