That writing clearly comes from thinking clearly

The Polish books I came here to read are all turning out a disappointment. Matywiecki’s book about Tuwim – I was excited to hear about it, it being one Polish Jewish poet writing about another – turns out not to be a personal document; nor to feature much in terms of a psychological insight about being a poet or a Jew in Poland; and to focus instead on much postmodern and otherwise newfangled literary criticism mumbo-jumbo, things like “poets body” and “disembodied words” with much quoting of Barthes and Cioran. If I did not understand those writers, I understand Matywiecki even less. (Did I say Poles did not seem to have their own ideas?)

The point of Legutko’s “Essay on the Polish Soul”, a philosophico-political essay by a noted philosopher and politician, has something to do with what it really means to be a nation and a patriot, but the point is not made; perhaps it lies hidden under the chaotically disorganized and apparently rumbling, pointless text; but if the point is hidden, then it is hidden very well, for I cannot find it. Even if large parts of the book are pleasing to the ear, they are a cloud of confusion gas for the mind. One finishes more confused than he began. A bad sign for Polish politics and Polish philosophy.

Kurczab-Redlichowa’s book on Russia (actually it has two parts, one on Russia the other on the Chechen war) expresses enlightened sentiments with which it is hard not to sympathize (a dirge for the lost hopes of Russian democracy, for the suffering Chechen nation). But it too is presented in the already familiar, chaotic and disorganized fashion which seems to typify Polish books. Facts are presented in a manner which guarantees confusion among readers; and are so liberally interspersed with rhetorical exclamation points as to throw unnecessary doubt on the factual nature of the report.

Marta Wyka’s memoir about her academic-literary family and career contains touching language, and pretty pictures of the house of the professors in Krakow, and old Zakopane, and so forth. (My favorite story is how Bronislaw Malinowski was asked, in 1915, to give up his rooms in Zakopane after he had gifted his landlady, a very starched 19^th century lady, his book on “The Sex life of the Primitive Peoples”). But the book is also impossibly disorganized; perhaps the intention was to create a dream-like state; or reproduce the sort of talk one hears in social gatherings; but the rumbling nature of the text, the story shifting from topic to topic several times within a single paragraph, makes following it nearly impossible. Pleasant, yes, but it could have been a lot more pleasant if one were not so completely confused reading it.

Sroda’s wonderfully titled book on his travels in the Caucasus, one gets the feeling, was made into a literary experiment because the author had managed to gather too little material on his three short trips to the region to make a good travel book. The literary experiment largely fails; it has good parts, even excellent parts, but the overall impression is the same as of the last four books: a shapeless assembly of different ideas hung together for no apparent reason.

Perhaps this disorder is a symptom of something, of the chaotic disorganization in the Polish mind in general? One of the things which irritate Poles in American universities is the American university’s insistence to teach its students how to write a paper. (“Open the paragraph with a statement. Develop with statements supporting the statement. Close with a repetition of the paragraph”). Poles are irritated by it because they are convinced they know how to think and therefore how to write. But they don’t.