On an Electric Arc

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Dissemination of the English version of the monograph by Maciej Nowak On an
Electric Arc: Andrzej Bobkowski Writing is a task financed within agreement
781/P-DUN/2019 from the funds of the Minister of Science and Higher Education
for the promotion of science.

ISSN 2191-6179

ISBN 978-3-631-81699-8 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83482-4 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83483-1 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83484-8 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b17559

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About the author

The Author
Maciej Nowak, Assistant Professor at the Center for the Study of Religious Literature, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. His work focuses on the relationship of literature and religion, novelist historiosophy, and modern diaristics and epistolography. He also publishes essays on jazz aesthetics and reviews on jazz music albums.

About the book

Maciej Nowak

On an Electric Arc

Maciej Nowak’s book is the first monograph on the writings of Andrzej Bobkowski (1913–1961), a Polish émigré writer from the millieu of Jerzy Giedroyc’s Kultura journal. Bobkowski is famous for his diary Wartime Notebooks: France 1940–1944, translated into many languages, including English. Using current methods of the French school in the study of diaristics and epistolography, Nowak overcomes the limits of aesthetic analysis to reach the anthropological center of Bobkowski’s authorial practices. In this way, Nowak unveils the existential and axiological dimension of Bobkowski’s work. Thus, the book offers a coherent depiction of the rich and diverse writings of Bobkowski, prepared with methods of modern humanities.

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This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

List of Abbreviations of Andrzej Bobkowski’s Works

Introduction: “A Thousand Electric Arcs Appears Between Me and Everything Around Me”

Part I: “I Am Considered a Writer:” On Reception, Works Order, Metareflection, and the Central Position of Wartime Notebooks

Wartime Notebooks in Light of the Wartime Diary Manuscript

Nine Notebooks Versus Two Volumes

Contexts and Directions of the Manuscript’s Transformation

1. Youth, America, Composition

2. Distance, Autobiography, Project

Part II “The Passion for Recording:” About Writing Practices (And Not Only)

The Sphere of Writing

Capturing Everyday Life: Photography and Postcards

“I Send You a Reproduction:” Postcard

Remarks on Epistolography

Stages in a Journey, Stages of Writing: Geographical Determinants

The Personal – the Observed – the Experienced – the Reflected

Transgression: Unorthodox Writings

Between the Diarization of Epistolography and Periodic Diaristics

The Most Important Series of Notes: Diaristics

Writing, Practice, Existence

Narrative Strategies as Means of Dealing with Contingency

A: Memoir from the Time of Dying: Staging, the Anticipation of Death, Sincerity Toward

Memoir from the Time of Dying

B: Final Readings: Bobkowski as a Reader (of Increased Risk)

Part III “I Listen and I Watch. Beauty:” On the Axiological Construction of Writing

1. The Eye: I’m All Eyes

2. The Ear: I Change into an Instrument

3. The Sharpness of a New Gaze, Unspoiled by Habits

Bike – City – Machine: The Experience of Modernity

1. The World of Engineering

2. An Entirely Peculiar Beauty

Chopin, or Culture Is Necessary to Live

1. The Unity of Culture and Forms of Experiencing Culture

2. Bobkowski’s Chopin

Part IV: “The Issue of Religion, Faith, Life and the Soul of a Man:” On Spirituality

It’s at Moments Such as These: On the Conditions of Religious Experience

Gombrowicz’s “I Almost Believed” and Nałkowska’s “Everything in Life”

Can One Love God More

From Visible Beauty to Visible Holiness

Conrad Versus the Catholic Anglo-Saxons

De Profundis: Elements of Imagination and Religious Language

Ending: “It All Happened Under Constant Tension of an Electric Arc”

Bibliography

Index of Names

List of Abbreviations of Andrzej Bobkowski’s Works

BB – Listy do Aleksandra Bobkowskiego 1940–1961, ed. J. Podolska, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2013.

BI – „Tobie zapisuje Europę”. Listy do Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza 1947–1958, ed. J. Zieliński, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2009.

BM – A. Bobkowski, A. Mieczysławska, Listy 1951–1961, ed. A.S. Kowalczyk, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2010.

BT – Listy do Jerzego Turowicza 1947–1960, ed. M. Urbanowski, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2013.

BTT – Listy do Tymona Terleckiego 1956–1961, ed. N. Taylor-Terlecka, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2006.

CdO – “Coco de Oro,” in: A. Bobkowski, Punkt równowagi, ed. K. Ćwikliński, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2008.

CzP – Czarny piasek. Sztuka w 3 aktach, Kultura 11/1959.

GB – Jerzy Giedroyc, Andrzej Bobkowski, Listy 1946–1961, ed. J. Zieliński, Czytelnik, Warszawa 1997.

IiS – „Ikkos i Sotion” oraz inne szkice, ed. P. Kądziela, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2009.

LdM – Listy z Gwatemali do matki, ed. E. Jurczyszyn, Wydawnictwo Książkowe Twój Styl, Warszawa 2008.

LdRA – Listy do różnych adresatów, ed. K. Ćwikliński, Arcana, Kraków 2013.

LzG – “List z Gwatemali,” in: „Ikkos i Sotion” oraz inne szkice, ed. P. Kądziela, Biblioteka „Więzi”, Warszawa 2009.

N – Notatnik 1947–1960, ed. M. Nowak, Wydawnictwo LTW, Łomianki 2013.

NT – “Na tyłach,” in: A. Bobkowski, Coco de Oro. Szkice i opowiadania. Instytut Literacki, Paryż 1970.

PR – “Punkt równowagi,” in: A. Bobkowski, Punkt równowagi, ed. K. Ćwikliński, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2008.

Introduction: “A Thousand Electric Arcs Appears Between Me and Everything Around Me”

It is not easy to set the entry point for a monography of a writer’s whole oeuvre. I understand the introduction as the beginning, the decisive moment, and the observation point from which we grasp the whole image. This choice preliminarily defines the somewhat phantom creation, which has become in our times the “creative output of a writer,” along with the author as the subject of his own biography.¹ I have no illusions that determining this decisive moment is simply a matter of arbitrary choice; not necessarily a fully conscious or – certainly not – the only and exhaustive set of perspectives. In this book, I employ the metaphor of the electric arc as the entry point, which was at least twice noted by Bobkowski at significant moments in his life. Of course, the seductive charm of this metaphor does not determine the idea for my research, neither does it determine the range of methods that I will use nor the preferred type of a monograph. However, I am deeply convinced that even a fragmentary explication of the “electric arc” reveals a set of fundamental qualities of Bobkowski, the author of Wartime Notebooks. I was encouraged to treat this image in such a way by Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the metaphor as an artwork in miniature, which “must be possible equally to extend the same explication to larger entities, such as the entire poem.”² What if the same metaphor returns in crucial statements from different periods of Bobkowski’s life? Does reflection on this metaphor then allow us to explain something more?

Bobkowski used the image of the electric arc in the authentic diary he kept in Paris between 1939 and 1946.³ On May 8, 1943, he notes:

We encounter here the registration of an increased state of self-awareness, in which the subject confirms his identity through the narrative articulation of (self)experience.⁵ It is a critical moment, both because of the “particular” individual content expressed here and because of the event itself, because “knowing who you are means knowing how to predict the elementary moments of your own identity.”⁶ A personal diary is an ideal place for this prediction because its “everyday life” allows for it to be freely expressed and developed.⁷ Bobkowski confirms with this entry the achievement of a new mode of identity, expressed by an increase in awareness of the process to which he is subjected, which can be considered an internal “enlightenment.” It leads to the conclusion in the spirit of Scheler’s crucial element in his anthropology: openness to the world.⁸ On the one hand, this fragment confirms Bobkowski’s philosophical erudition. On the other hand, it shows his particular way of reading such texts, which I call sapiential reading, that is, such that exceeds the horizon of mere accumulation of knowledge and integrates the whole person in the relationship with the world. The effects of this practice are signaled by the beginning of the entry, when Bobkowski writes about the intensification of life and thinking. At the same time, Bobkowski’s significant handwritten typography – the use of majuscule – shifts the emphasis on intellectual and spiritual activity. Moreover, at this point, ←14 | 15→the metaphor of the electric arc appears; indeed an arc multiplied a thousand times! In the content order that I referred above, this image functions as a culmination: it is a figure of a renewed relationship between the “I” and the world. However, it does not only express the intensity of this relationship, clearly understood in the context of creative work. After all, its appearance sheds light also on the cognitively active position in the world, which Bobkowski calls “my environment.” The material trace of this activity was the diary. The authentic manuscript, once lying on the table in the apartment at 33 Boulevard de Reuilly in Paris, and now deposited on the archive shelf at 208 East Street in Manhattan at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA). The manuscript differs in this fragment from the version known from Wartime Notebooks, in which there is simply no such reflection; in fact, the gap in this entry is much more significant, which coincides with the extensive transformation of the official text as a whole, which primarily sought to reduce the thread of self-analysis.

Perhaps the further explanation of the electric arc metaphor – referring to encyclopedic information⁹ – will bring us closer to a better grasp of this cloud of meanings. Let us pay attention to the beneficial effects of this electrical ←15 | 16→synthesis: the arc emits light, it is used to combine pure chemical compounds, in welding it welds separate elements, in furnaces it allows to produce new metal alloys. The arc generates heat. All of this is made possible by its essential feature: the combination of separate elements, which is achieved by the abolishing of oppositions, accompanied by phenomena of light, heat, and the experience of a rapid process. The nature of an electric arc is its abrupt course, a phenomenon of concentrated suddenness. In turn, we may apply suddenness as an aesthetic category¹⁰ to describe the vital qualities of Andrzej Bobkowski’s writing.

A synthesis manifested through writing convinces us that the properly combined elements cease on their way to a seemingly inevitable collision. Furthermore, it is not a phenomenon of simple coincidentia oppositorum – the unity of opposites – since it does not involve the simultaneous continuance of opposite things and phenomena. In Bobkowski’s case, contradictory elements are deprived of their confrontational character: by the writer’s dynamic gesture they are incorporated into a new whole.

As a symptom, the “electric arc” allows us to place this statement in its historical time: in the era in which electricity provided imagination with images that helped to describe the experiences of individuals. This epoch’s boundaries can be established as ca. 1910–1960. Naturally, it is merely a hypothesis based on the observation of literature, music, the applied arts (posters), film, advertising, and technology. However, the image of the arc is also differently motivated by Bobkowski’s biography. A freshman graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics, he found his first employment at the Pokój Steelworks in Nowy Bytom and – as the encyclopedia has it – the electric arc is also utilized in metallurgy. Read in such a way, this entry appears to capture a much larger portion of Bobkowski’s biography than just the wartime period diary.