Phono-chrono-graphia: Miron Białoszewski’s Sound Archives

Abstract

In her article, Agnieszka Karpowicz analyses the archival recordings of Miron Białoszewski found in the Józef Czechowicz Literary Museum in Lublin and stored in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. She pays particular attention to the non-verbal sound layer of the recordings. She is mainly interested in various background noises and other impurities on the cassette tapes, i.e., sounds which usually disappear or are minimized when recordings are digitized and processed before they are make available to the audience. The analysis is the starting point of reflections on the authenticity and originality of archival phonographic materials in the context of the relationship of the recording to time and place: the event, the recording of it, the storing of tapes. Karpowicz’s considerations take into account the chronotopicity of the digitized versions made available to the public by museums. The noise that can be heard on the recordings is related to technical issues (the quality of the recording, the features of the magnetic tape, and others); this, in turn, is related to the idea of temporality: tape recording is perceived as time recording chronography), which allows Karpowicz to place it in the context of recording as a feature of Białoszewski’s literary practice. All kinds of impurities, including the poet’s way of spoking and his corporeality as well as the spatial context of recording, have been treated here as full-fledged sense-forming elements, having both archival and interpretative value.