Abstract

Er(r)go… ,

…“Who the fuck am I?” asks Nick Cave, and there’s no denying that it is a vital question. To which we could reply, “**** *** ****, Nick, check out your biographies and autobiographies, and you’ll know,” but Adam Zagajewski nullifies our hope: “I is the I of ignorance, the I who understands nothing.” I “is me, and I am it, but it would accept no one, not even me.” (I omitted the ellipses). And yet, in bio-graphies and autobiographies, we keep searching: who is she, who is he, who is this “I” of theirs?

Not an easy question to answer, though, for everywhere there lurk phantom biographies, biographical novels, hypothetical biographies, bio-fictions, (auto)biographies and auto/biographies, female relational auto/biographies, automythographies, autofictions, life-nature-writing, self-portraits, transmedia autobiographies and dispersed autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, hagiographies, biographical monodramas, testimony-monodramas and reconstruction-monodramas, (ordinary) life-writing and LIFE-writing, non-anthropocentric life-writing, anthropodecentred life-writing, relational life-writing, and around all these circulate allobiographical, autopathographical and autothanatographical idioms, biopoetics and (somato/bio)poetics, biographical cover-ups and displacements, let alone auto-fictional discourses and life-scarratives. The “I” doesn’t seem to be doing very well in this jam.

As we can see, language and intellect wouldn’t let us moulder, and so weighty and less weighty questions multiply. Is Biography True? What is the relationship between the life lived and the life written? How does a structuralist love? Can one truly love without hope? Have our souls ever seen the impossible? What is the interpretive value in linking text to life? Who would ever guess from Recherche that Proust had a brother? How does the private and biological body transform into a media body? Are we left but with absurdity and lost hope? Does a biographer need inspiration? Is a biographer a literary vulture? Or perhaps a voyeur?

It is not easy to focus on the answers for a variety of different beings, non-beings, incidents and characters weave themselves into the course of the argument: embryonic being and absolute being, sinister doppelgängers, a nameless guru-god with a red right hand, a wanderer-philosopher, bodies swollen with hunger, damaged memory tissues, assemblages, old cast-iron mangles, a gymnastic goat, women’s shoes, a limbless doll and a sculpture of a woman’s head, blowhard erudites and prejudiced critics, incessant chatter camouflaging silence, a naked female body in a glass cube, ornamental medievalists, identity usurpation and catoptric identity, incest of identification, cyber-taverns, abjectal closeness to someone else’s body, a paranoid eternal now, and – how else – squishing, pinching, plucking, pulling, tearing, stroking, slicing, pressing, bending, shaking. And next to it, four Pulitzer Prize Winners stand by and watch.

It’s impossible to write everything down here, but interesting things happen in this issue’s textual world. Half-naked papa runs about a swampland overgrown with thorny palms with a long knife and a rifle in his hands, Biographers sing long songs, a poet diegetically informs us of the consistent equivalence taking place in his life, and Nabokov, with 29 suitcases, calls a porter in the middle of nowhere. In the same space-time, the flaneuress leaves the city, the hounded mute submerges in the swamp as in amniotic fluid, nine eyes stare at everything with the same intensity, and the humanists – convinced that they were worthless freeloaders – fall into collective depression. And a very disturbing thing: Socrates puts on shoes, Jason has only one sandal, while Eros remains barefoot. At the same time, two life-writers, father and son, engage in a dialogue about life, creativity, and autism, Tsing talks about man through the prism of the Japanese matsutake mushroom, a stranger lunges himself at the narrator with a syringe, someone squeezes pus out of a wound by means of a reference to Plato’s single-bodies, while an actress peels herself away from her role. Barthes deconstructs himself, expresses himself obliquely and leaves traces. KURYLUK speaks through Kuryluk, deceives the reader, camouflages biography and bypasses the opposition of truth and falsehood, the double adheres to the extra-textual authoress, maintaining the dialectic of camouflage and exhibitionism, the subject is afraid of losing their lover, the idiot-savant comments on her own dream, while Eve rejects the Freudian interpretation and is tormented by her tangled tongue. And beware: one lady wants to – just like that – enter someone’s soul through their bowel.

But, as the Sculptor says, “All this should be regarded as pure hypothesis.”

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

P.S. The first – “American” – part of the issue is exceptional and unusual for Er(r)go:
we have gathered voices and conversations of outstanding biographers-practitioners (among them four Pulitzer Prize winners), who share with our Readers their reflections from the inside of the biographical process. This part was realized with sthe support of the grant from the Metropolitan Science and Education Support Fund of the Upper Silesian and Zagłębie Metropolis, application number 2/2021 – project entitled “Metropolis for Metropolis, or the New York Pulitzer Prize winner for Silesia and Zagłębie.”