Literatura a rzeczywistość. Kilka uwag o powieści i o doświadczeniu z nią związanym

Abstract

On June 1, 2022, at the invitation of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Bialystok, Professor Piotr Biłos (Inalco, Paris) delivered a lecture entitled Literature and Reality in the series Lectures of the Masters. The lecture in the Faculty auditorium gathered a large audience: researchers, students, teachers, and high school students. Professor Biłos heads the Polish Studies Department at Paris Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco), where he was co-responsible for the chair of translational studies, and where he teaches literary theory (2017 marked the centennial of the Polish Studies class at Inalco). Holder of Master’s degree in French and comparative literature, Sorbonne, former Professor “agrégé”; he earned his doctorate (preparing it, he spent a year in Cracow at the Jagiellonian University) and his habilitation at Inalco. He created a Polish section within the LEA (applied languages) at Lyon III Jean Moulin University. He also taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, and is currently head of that University’s Polish language selection committee. In France, the renowned publishing house Classiques Garnier has published his books promoting the world dimension of Polish literature: Exil et modernité: vers une littérature conçue à l’échelle du monde (Paris 2012; Exile and modernity, towards literature on a world scale) and Les jeux du “je”, construction et déconstruction du récit romanesque chez Wiesław Myśliwski (Paris 2016; Games with the “I”, construction and deconstruction of novelistic expression in Wiesław Myśliwski). In Poland, his monograph Novelistic Worlds of Wieslaw Myśliwski was published by Znak in Cracow in 2017. He has also written a history of Poland for a French-speaking audience: La Pologne, Précis d’histoire. Fantaisie-Impromptu, Le prix de la République, Varsovie, Editions Spotkania, 2018. The author presents in this volume the theses of his master lecture, which can be formulated as follows: It is not easy for the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of realist literature to comprehend that this literature represented a real revolution in its time, that is, in a particular period of historical development. Generally speaking, if we assume that literature is inextricably linked to the formal enterprise realized through language, it is impossible not to ponder the paradox of realism, that is, literature claiming the right to represent reality, to represent in the strongest sense of the word, that is, to make it present, to reflect it, to transmit it, even if it were to be contraband. We will first look for the antecedents of realism occurring at a time when the paradigm of idealistic sublimity was in force, to then address the civilizational conditions that accompanied the turn to realism, but also the formal means it preferred. In the second stage, we will examine the principles by which literary theory, in conjunction with certain linguistic concepts, engaged in undermining realism. Thus, in Socratic fashion, we will question the thesis according to which lang­uage is parallel to reality, and the perception of the latter (reality) is necessarily a function of the changing ways in which the elements of the former (language) are arranged. In this way, we will highlight the limits of the two antagonistic concepts: realism and metaphysical nominalism. Perhaps it will then seem more reasonable to try to recognize, first, that the relationship between reality and language is a kind of mystery that escapes a strictly rational framework of thought, and second, that literature is not carried by a purely cognitive search for what is already present, what is already there, and based solely on reason, but that it presupposes a practice, intertwined with the choice of a particular life, a destiny in which what falls under reality and what falls under language intermingle through the writer? To shed light on this concept, we will refer to Orhan Pamuk’s essays, in which the Turkish novelist shows how he himself wanted to combine two seemingly opposite attitudes, the conceptualization of which he borrows from Friedrich Schiller, namely the attitude of the “naive novelist” and the “sentimental novelist.” In the last chapter, we will introduce the concept of “narrative disposition” that we have created, which is on a different level from the traditional division into different types of narrators. By this term we mean the various procedures by means of which novelists combine into a single narrative several perspectives of perception of reality, which manifests itself not only in the fusion of outlooks, and views but also in their decli­nation according to the axis of past-present, youth-old age.