In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

176 Epilogue “Ridiculous Places” and Queering Memory: LifeWriting , History, and How We Do Not Know After the war, no matter how many times I walked through that familiar park, particularly near the walled public bathroom which was badly scarred by bullets, grenades, shell fragments, I would imagine that this ridiculous place was important then, that history had touched it in those days, that for more than one person this bathroom was the last refuge or the last view of his life. Ile razy potem, już po wojnie, przechodziłem przez ten znajomy park, szczególnie koło murowanego wychodka, bardzo poharatanego kulami, granatami, odłamkami pocisków, wyobrażałem sobie, ze to głupie miejsce było wtedy ważne, że potoczyła sie ˛ te ˛dy historia, że dla niejednego ten wychodkowy budyneczek był ostatnia ˛ ucieczka ˛ albo ostatnim widokiem w życiu. —Miron Białoszewski, Pamie ˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego (1970) IT IS PARTICULARLY APT now to ask questions about how our knowledge of Białoszewski’s homosexuality can most productively enter into our interpretation of his work. Białoszewski’s long-awaited secret diary (tajny dziennik), the publication of which was delayed under the terms of his will, just became publically available as of February 2012.1 The diary will, most likely, generate new questions for the reception of Białoszewski’s work. Perhaps it will take us closer to the life of an uncloseted homosexual writer negotiating his public career and personal life in a homophobic Communist culture. Perhaps it will elucidate the dynamics between Białoszewski’s “Ridiculous Places” and Queering Memory 177 early awareness of his sexual orientation and his cultivation of “separateness” (“osobność”). Will “separateness” prove to be a gesture of self-fashioning and self-othering, an aesthetic and lifestyle strategy in response to the restricting rules of the mainstream code of masculinity, or will Białoszewski surprise us with dynamics we have not yet envisioned? What will be his private account of “withdrawal”? It should be elucidating to see how Białoszewski shaped his public image, in which concern for his audience went hand in hand with a seeming disregard for achieving the public recognition and prestige traditionally granted to writers in Poland. One wonders, for instance, about the circumstances of Białoszewski’s greater cultural visibility in the 1970s: how did the authorities reconcile the recognition of Białoszewski as the author of the Memoir with the persecution of the writer in the 1950s? Conversely, what challenges did Białoszewski face as a recognized author during the 1970s stabilization , awarded state distinction for the Memoir and yet with a record of his encounters with the secret police during the Stalinist period? I hope that the diary will help us to learn about the social, political, and material circumstances of Białoszewski’s life and to historically contextualize his work regardless of whether we explore his homosexuality, political views, or travels. In some cases, the lack of such contextualization in Białoszewski’s scholarship is not to be laid at the feet of the literary critics; for instance, as I indicated in chapter 3, the research on sexual minorities in Poland has been undertaken only recently, and it is hard to adequately contextualize Białoszewski ’s life in the history of homosexual subcultures in Poland.2 In other cases, however, our canonical views of Białoszewski as an “outsider” and as the “guardian of the everyday” often bars us from exploring his complexities beyond that, which confirms our initial position. Nevertheless, such research is critical to a deeper understanding of Białoszewski’s phenomenon and its implications, both in the Polish context as well as in the framework of globalized academic vocabulary. Just as we need to be attuned to carefully nuanced shades of self-control in Białoszewski’s writing—it contains many types of silence and exposures—we should also be attuned to the legacy of various pressures (and not only homophobic) on our critical approaches. We created our own epistemic regime, to borrow Foucault’s expression, and either elevated some aspects of Białoszewski’s work or disregarded others; sometimes for the sake of academic taboo, sometimes as a protective gesture toward Białoszewski, and most often because we reserve for him a place of uniqueness , a niche of withdrawal that gave his critics permission to disregard the larger implications of Białoszewski’s aesthetic and existential project. One epistemological hazard that became obvious in connection with...

Share