Literary Work as a Process. On the Coherence of Texts by Tadeusz Różewicz

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse works by Tadeusz Różewicz in terms of text coherence. Różewicz’s writings seem to be open in the sense that they do not close within one form which could be recognised as the final form. Instead, they keep evolving, published in consecutive volumes or two simultaneous printed versions – handwritten and seemingly final. In his output, Różewicz goes beyond the framework of literary genres and artistic style, and also beyond the sphere of text which could be identified by his voice, as he creatively uses ready-made functional forms. This makes it possible to show two dominant text-generating strategies in his works: exhibiting the processuality of creation and literary recycling, which are both based on the experimental processing of non-artistic language. Różewicz’s works – seemingly open, labile and undurable – do form, in fact, a holistic and coherent conception of literariness, which is difficult to perceive through the analysis of a single work or even the whole collection of poems, but is revealed upon a holistic look at his literary output. In his works, meanings are not formed within a single text, but between its various variants, and thus, both texts and the relationships between them are crucial here. Opening the composition of his works, Różewicz projects multidirectional reading, contextualised, simultaneous and joining all dispersed versions of any given work into one complex unity. This is how he also legitimises his open technique of working on text as a metaliterary issue, an object of representation and, at the same time, an integral constituent of a literary work, and the work itself he treats as a dynamic process and not a structure closed within the forms that integrate the work. The theoretical point of reference for my studies is the concept of genre substitute coined by Kazimierz Wyka, the conception of text cohesion by Maria Renata Mayenowa and Włodzimierz Bolecki, and assumptions of genetic criticism.