Romantic Struggle with the Word

Abstract

Stanisław Brzozowski defined Polish Romanticism as a “manifestation of the Word”, an appellation that brings out what was one of the essential problems for Romantic literature; the relation between the poetic word and the revealed Word. The “manifestation of the Word” occurred not only in the realm of ideas; it permeated not only the world-view but also the poetics of Romanticism. The manifestation took various forms and often became the pivot of “intraromantic” conflicts. The present article seeks to reconstruct one such conflict, the conflict between Norwid and Slowacki.

The mystical works of Slowacki are the record of a revelation he thought he had been granted. An analysis of the process of announcing the revelation in Genezis z Ducha shows a very profound biblical stylization of the text. Genezis can be placed in the context of the prophetic texts of the Bible. In proclaiming a “new revelation” the subject puts himself next to the prophets as a transmitter of the Other and his obedient tool. The genological structure of the work, which is described in the subtitle as a prayer, may have constituted an alibi for the poet; but its aim was not to maintain a semblance of orthodoxy, but to be communicative: for the prophet to be understood, his language has to conform to the accepted conventions of communicating about the sacred. This conformity of the text with religious tradition is one of the proofs of the truth of the prophecy. The biblical account of the creation is an act of religious cognition that merges into a prayer of thanksgiving, and Slowacki’s piece faithfully reproduces that very pattern of the biblical text. What is more, prayer not only is a means of gaining religious knowledge, but also serves to confirm the prophet is his belief that God has accepted him as His instrument and is proof of his continuous contact with the Most High. Such was the meaning of the prayer of the Old Testament prophets, and that is also how we can interpret the subtitle of Genezis.

At the same time, however, the “subject matter” of the revelation contained in Slowacki’s mystical works goes beyond the scope of the partial revelation formerly given to the prophets and the apostles. The subject speaking in these texts (the Global Spirit, the Interpreter of the Word) reads the whole truth. The truth concerns the same Divine reality that was dealt with in the Scripture, but is a separate new revelation, equally valid as, and explanatory of, the Bible. The truth makes it possible to overcome the dualism of reality; it abolishes the division between spirit and matter by means of an all-encompassing formula: “all things are created by the Spirit and for the Spirit, and no thing exists for a corporeal purpose”. It is furthermore possible to overcome the incompatibility between forms of expression and the content of the revelation - by means of metaphor. The poetic metaphor contains the revelation; in fact, metaphor is revelation, because in identifying forms it brings home the unity of all visible things, a unity that is of course perceived from the vantage point of the “invisible”, i.e. the Spirit. In Slowacki’s mystical writings metaphor becomes a unique tool with which to recreate the unity of the world both in the content of the revelation and in the manner of communicating it. The new “ultimate truth” was to be, not a “revelation recounted”, but a “revelation revealed”. The problem of how to transcend form, one of the crucial problems of Slowacki’s mystical system, is also an aesthetic question. It was to be solved within the postulated ideal form of recording the revelation. The “revealed revelation” was to be a twofold victory, over matter - form in the real world and over literary form in the text. In both, form was envisaged as an instrument of spiritual perfection. This was to be achieved in the world through continual sacrifice of form, through its death, and in the text, by breaking with cohesion and linearity, by laying bare the process of metaphor formation and subordinating it to the revelation.

Slowacki’s mystical works were meant to be the ultimate revelation, explaining all and “removing the veils” from dogmas. It was to be, using the terminology of Ricoeur, a “self-expression” of the sacred, that is, something prior to the Logos and to the hermeneutical “communicating”. The teaching of the author of Król-Duch did not reject the biblical revelation; instead, it was intended as its fulfilment and its definitive formulation, as a new Bible that discovered the “literal” sense of the “old” and superimposed new, metaphorical meanings over the old ones. Yet in fact what Slowacki was doing was interpreting the Scripture, metaphorizing its language and attributing new meanings to it; in short, he was practising the hermeneutics of religious discourse. He did not succeed in transcending literature as such, but remained on the side of hermeneutics, i.e. the side of “communicating”.

It was this that enabled Norwid to find in Słowacki a literary tradition for himself. In his commentaries O Słowackim he carried out an interpretation of the latter’s mystical texts in the broad context of the development and transformations of religious discourse; he found them to be an expression of a struggle with a “paganized” form that led to the destruction of “Christian discourse” and saw them as an attempt to reconstruct religious discourse. Norwid approached the texts, which were intended as a revelation, as works of literature. Metaphor, which had been both a source of revelation and a means of expressing it in Slowacki’s case, offered Norwid a way to save Slowacki’s works; owing to metaphor, Norwid was able to enter into a cultural dialogue with them by locating their meaning within the greater, all-encompassing meaning of the Word of God.

Norwid never tried to give his own mystical experiences (traces of which can be found in his letters) a literary shape. He did not want to interpret them, because he was not sure whether he understood their meaning correctly. He did not accept the tendency, so characteristic of his predecessors, to identify the poetic word with the Revealed Word, which had resulted in the “self-deification” of literature and the establishment of the poetic world as the only reality. Still, this is not to say that he ruled out the possibility of contact with the Mystery or of manifestation of the sacred in literature. His poem Modlitwa is no less than a request by a man who has “embraced” God’s perfection, who has been granted the truth („Twojego w piersiach mam i czczę anioła” “your angel I worship and have in my breast”); yet it is a request, not for a revelation to confirm that truth, but for “voice”, for an ability to express it in language, in literature.

Norwid thus accepted the direction of Slowacki’s searchings and shared his desire to transcend the limitations of Romantic “literariness”, but he rejected the result, i.e. the negation of all form and speaking about the revelation directly. He would not repeat the Romantic error of seeking to transcend the bounds of human existence and all material form, including literary form. What he wanted was to discover the sacred in its earthly, material manifestations and to speak about it by means of a form that would show that “beyond our words there is yet the life of the Word”. Since the sacred also manifests itself through matter, and God acts in history through man, the human reality is the only perspective from which we can speak about Truth. This is not to strip poets of their historical (as Norwid said) prophetic function. What changes is only the way in which that function is discharged: the task of the poets living after Christ is not the announcement but the hermeneutics of the Revelation, and the perfection of the religious language which serves it.

Revealed Truth lies beyond the possibilities of human perception. What man has been given is the ability to see its signs, its realization in the material reality. The intellectual effort of discovering truth must be supplemented by its profession (“verification”) in daily life. Truth is not to be regarded as a theoretical construct, but has to be professed in actions that accord with it. Just as it was realized and fulfilled in the coming and passion of Christ, it ought to be realized in the life of a man who has accepted it. That is why it is impossible to grasp truth in terms of any theoretical system; the only way to know it, albeit admitting of unclarity and incompleteness, is by approximation, by extrasystemic, parabolical thinking. These assumptions of course had their effect on Norwid’s postulated and practised poetics. The discovery of truth by approximation eliminates the temptation to verbalize what cannot be expressed in human language. The Mystery which cannot be put into words can be attained in silence, which isolates man from the din of words. Silence enables one to listen to the “unceasing monologue in the harmonies of creation, eternal” and to discover that monologue in an act of intuitive cognition. This non-intellectual apprehension of the Mystery, an act of mystical cognition, cannot be described or expressed directly, because it exceeds the possibilities of language and cannot be rendered by a conceptual system. What is extrasystemic can only be verbalized parabolically. In Norwid’s opinion, parabole can express the supernatural sense of reality and of human existence without the falsehood associated with the limitations of language. In this way Norwid solved the problem of form which the Romantics had never dealt with successfully; without having to transcend human nature or abandon the “earthly perspective”, literature gained an instrument to make sense of both history and reality; it was thus able to show the sacral dimension of reality without falsifying either. The biblical parable became for Norwid a way of speaking about the present; literature was regaining its lost character as religious discourse.