A Different Look at the Shoah in Polish Fantasy Works. Paweł Paliński and Cezary Zbierzchowski
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/NoZ.2020.06.17Keywords:
extermination, Paweł Paliński, Cezary Zbierzchowski, Polish fantasy, polaroidAbstract
The author of the article carries out an analysis of texts by two writers who present the Shoah from different perspectives. At the onset he points out two layers of looking at the
Holocaust in fantasy writing. The first one results from the said theme filtering through into the genre directly, the second is an intermediary one, namely, through the popular after the Second World War post-apocalyptic narratives where the Shoah is thematised as, for instance, the annihilation of the human race resulting from nuclear conflict or the spread of a deadly virus. The article analyses both mentioned layers using particular examples.
Polaroidy z Zagłady [The Shoah/Annihilation Polaroids] by Paweł Paliński is a tale of an individual Shoah. What constitutes the analytical framework here are the titular pictures, which translate into a genre, nowadays rarely practised, called the literary picture. In the course of reading one recognises the triangle of attitudes: victim – witness – torturer. Even if the said triangle has been criticized by historians, it nonetheless decisively appears in the text owing to its layout.
Requiem dla lalek [Requiem for Dolls] and Holocaust F written by Cezary Zbierzchowski are, respectively, a short-story collection and a novel, set in the fictitious world of Ramm. It is known from the very beginning that the world is doomed to be annihilated, the harbinger of which is God’s departure. In the short stories other signs of extinction are, among other things, euthanasia, the problem of immigration etc. The plains of annihilation recognized in the course of interpretation: metaphysical, social, and personal, compose a part of philosophical reflection on consequences of catastrophes being one of the spheres of the analysis undertaken. What also arrests our attention, and thereby is reflected upon, is the highly intertextual background of Zbierzchowski’s oeuvre. A prominent place is given to the analysis of the novel’s final chapter entitled Heart of Darkness, both referring to the famous novella written by Joseph Conrad and more than sufficiently justified by the text composition itself.
The article’s conclusions both position the texts in relation to other works of Polish fantasy genre and indicate their role as examples of various absorption by popular culture (here fantasy) of the Shoah-related issues.
References
Biedrzycki B.: Kompleks 7215. Lublin 2015.
Butler J.: Ramy wojny. Kiedy życie godne jest opłakiwania? Przeł. A. Czarnacka. Warszawa 2011.
Card O.S.: Gra Endera. Przeł. P. Cholewa. Warszawa 2011.
Danak R.: Sotnie Łysego Iwanki. Stawiguda 2018.
Dick Ph.K.: Człowiek z Wysokiego Zamku. Przeł. L. Jęczmyk. Warszawa 2012.
Dick Ph.K.: Czy androidy śnią o elektrycznych owcach? Przeł. S. Kędzierski. Warszawa 1995.
Didi-Huberman G.: Obrazy mimo wszystko. Przeł. M. Kubiak Ho-Chi. Kraków 2012.
Egan G.: Diaspora. Przeł. M. Jakuszewski. Warszawa 2015.
Freud S.: Objaśnianie marzeń sennych. Przeł. R. Reszke. Warszawa 1996.
Gajewska A.: Zagłada i gwiazdy. Przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema. Poznań 2017.
Głowacka D.: Po tamtej stronie: świadectwo, afekt, wyobraźnia. Warszawa 2016.
Gołuński M.: Stalker jako męska retro fantazja na nowe czasy (uniwersum Kompleks 7215). „Czas Kultury” 2019, nr 1, s. 54–60.
Hicks H.J.: The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Modernity beyond Salvage. New York 2016.
Illouz E.: Hardkorowy romans. „Pięćdziesiąt twarzy Greya”, bestsellery i społeczeństwo. Przeł. J. Konieczny. Warszawa 2015.
Kermode F.: Znaczenie końca. Przeł. O. i W. Kubińscy. Gdańsk 2010.
Konopnicka M.: Nowele i opowiadania. Warszawa 2008.
Nijakowski L.M.: Świat po apokalipsie. Społeczeństwo w świetle postapokaliptycznych tekstów kultury popularnej. Warszawa 2018.
Nycz R.: Intertekstualność i jej zakresy: teksty, gatunki, światy. „Pamiętnik Literacki” 1990, z. 2, s. 95–116.
Olchowy A.: Czarownica znad kałuży. Bydgoszcz 2017.
Paliński P.: Polaroidy z Zagłady. Warszawa 2014.
Rosenfeld G.D.: The Nazi World Never Made. Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Cambridge 2005.
Shut N.: Ostatni brzeg. Przeł. Z. Kierszys. Warszawa 1979.
Ślady Holocaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej. Red. J. Kowalska-Leder, P. Dobrosielski, I. Kurz, M. Szpakowska. Warszawa 2017.
Theweleit K.: Męskie fantazje. Przeł. M. Falkowski, M. Herer. Warszawa 2015.
Tomczok M.: Czyja dzisiaj jest Zagłada? Retoryka – ideologia – popkultura. Warszawa 2017.
Ubertowska A.: Świadectwo – trauma – głos. Literackie reprezentacje Holocaustu. Kraków 2007.
Zbierzchowski C.: Holocaust F. Warszawa 2013.
Zbierzchowski C.: Requiem dla lalek. Warszawa 2008.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
