On things that support memory

Abstract

I am confronting two works: an early poem Warkoczyk ("Little Braid", 1948) with a late poem nożyk profesora ("The Professor's Knife", 2001) to show how Różewicz changes in his poetry the way of presenting things from a death camp. He rejects the traditional epistemology for the belief in independent existence of things in the world; he also rejects metaphor, using the story of a knife instead. The new recognition of the being of things undoubtedly has its source in the projects of contemporary anthropologists and sociologists: Igor Kopytoff, Marcel Mauss, Alfred Gell, and others. The poet, however, is not making use of the opportunities offered by the return to things. He remains faithful to the belief in ineffability of the experience of the Holocaust, and consequently the impossibility to reach the essence of man's relationship with things. Using well-known methods: fragmentary structure, understatement, silence, he does not reveal the secret. Therefore, nożyk profesora remains only a poem about memory supported the knife from a death camp.