The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Bialoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic

Chapter 2. Something More from Almost Nothing: The Paradoxes of Białoszewski’s Life-Writing

99 Chapter 2 Something More from Almost Nothing: The Paradoxes of Białoszewski’s Life-Writing My heartburn is at its peak and I’m thinking to myself: ”ten o’clock . . . night . . . quiet, I’ll go throw up, put a record on, and write . . . everything . . . all of this . . . all . . . Zgaga sie ˛gła szczytu, a ja se myśle ˛ tak: —dziesia ˛ta . . . noc . . . spokój, pójde ˛ sie ˛ wyrzygać, puszcze ˛ płyte ˛ i be ˛de ˛ pisał . . . wszystko, to wszystko . . . wszystko . . . —Miron Białoszewski, Szumy, zlepy, cia ˛gi (1976) I know very well that I belong to those in the coats, those from the ditches. Like them I am a dug up, half-buried corpse, basically, and I must at all costs pretend to be alive, and more or less fit to use a shovel. I am neither scared nor desperate. Resigned to my fate. The resignation—everything—is long past. Wiedziałem dobrze, że należe ˛ do tych w paltach, tych z rowu. Sam jestem taki wykopany, niedogrzebany, po prostu trup i musze ˛ za wszelka ˛ cene ˛ udawać żywego, jako tako zdolnego do kopania łopata ˛. Nie jestem ani przestraszony ani zrozpaczony. Pogodzony ze swoim losem. Jest dawno po rezygnacji, po wszystkim. —Miron Białoszewski, Szumy, zlepy, cia ˛gi (1976) Chapter 2 100 THE “EVERYTHING” OF THE SMALL NARRATIONS: MAXIMALISTIC MINIMALISM What is this compulsively repeated “all” that we see in this passage from the second volume of the small narrations? Clearly, it does not mean a thematic all-inclusivity—an impossibility in any case—but rather a specific kind of relationship between the narrator and his project of life-writing. The low register of a need for bodily purgation juxtaposed with a diary-like specification of date and time and the maximalist ambition of “all” signals to the reader that Szumy, zlepy, cia ˛gi (1976; Hums, Lumps, Threads) follows the mode of narration of the everyday inaugurated by Donosy rzeczywistości (1973; Reporting Reality). In this mode, the narrator, bearing the name of the author, takes the reader through his quotidian activities, paying attention to countless insignificant events, encounters, and reflections.1 From 1970 until his death in 1983, Białoszewski wrote a series of works for which, for lack of a better word, critics tend to employ the umbrella term “małe narracje” (“small narrations”), introduced in 1973 by Micha ł Głowiński. Although difficult to define generically, thematically these works seem to hide no secrets; they revolve around such quotidian subjects as passersby the narrator observes from his window, daily events in the lives of the narrator and his friends, a hospital stay after a heart attack, bus trips, and flashes of memories from his childhood and wartime youth. Focused on daily life, Białoszewski describes in his works the ordinary, the mundane, and the prosaic—the everyday life of undramatic times. The post-Memoir works also include prose and poetic travel diaries from the writer’s trips to Egypt and the United States as well as from his boat trip along the coast of Europe. Those who look for exoticism in these travel accounts will be disappointed—for the narrator, traveling to Garwolin (a small town in the suburbs of Warsaw) is as stimulating as his journey to New York. Then, there are “transy i transiki” (“trances and little trances”), meditative reveries that arise from observing such everyday objects as the poplar tree in front of his window. This tree becomes a leitmotif—the narrator maintains a close relationship with it, and its seasonal transformations lend themselves to what may be the most visionary passages in all of Białoszewski’s work. The small narrations inaugurate Białoszewski’s preoccupation with the everyday, which differs from his earlier poetry, in which, in the spirit of avant-garde poetics, the everyday (as in the poem about the stove) was (literally) transformed into an exotic construct. Through the names of the genres that Białoszewski invents for his writing, he emphasizes that each of them signifies a particular situation or mental state or, à la Bakhtin, individual types of speech. And so, we find in the small narrations both “spacerownik” (a “walking diary”) for descriptions Something More from Almost Nothing 101 of situations the narrator observes during his daily walks, and “ojcownik” (a “father diary/fatherbook”) that focuses on the narrator’s father. Even more innovative are genres such as “cytaty” (“quotations”), “przecieki” (“leaks”), “frywole” (“frivolities”), “transiki...