Within the realms of tradition : prose works by Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk in disputes about literature, canon and feminism

The study presented in this book is an insightful reading of the prose works written by two well-known Polish contemporary authors: Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk. The literature (and it’s interpretations) is put in the wider context of certain political and social changes in the last decades of the 20th century in the USA and Poland after 1989, related to the rebirth and evolution of feminism - understood both as a social movement and as a critical, academic discourse. Thanks to this broad, socio-historical perspective, it was possible to make the main object of the inquiry some key-concepts in gender studies (such as "women’s literature", "female literary tradition" and "female author ship"), and thus to ask a crucial question: What is the place of women’s writing in the contemporary Polish canon, if it has a place at all? The aims of this book should be considered on three levels: politics, rhetoric, and poetics of women’s writing. The first chapter, entitled Genealogies of tradition, is an attempt to reconstruct in detail the particular stages of shaping the cultural notion of women’s literary creativity (a Western notion, it should be added, but in Poland also widespread). A thorough analysis of feminist rhetoric of the early 70’s shows clearly that the idea of "tradition" had been subjected to some significant se mantic shifts, before it became a practical tool of regaining "mother’s heritage". The book presents also further academic disputes in the field of social history and the history of literature, related to the process of feminist knowledge production, which revealed the ideological, esthetic and ethical aspects of terms such as: objectivity, truth, or value. As far as literature and academic criticism are concerned, the methodological discussions with Harold’s Bloom theory of poetic influence and intellectual heritage of the New Criticism school of interpretation, were of utmost importance for feminist scholars. Here it turned out essential to also analyze feminist rhetoric of the 70’s and 80’s based on family metaphors, especially related to the "mother figure" (this trope Rebeca Dakin Quinn named a "matrophor") and geo-metaphors (of stolen or discovered land, women’s Atlantis, no man’s land), all-pervasive in Second Wave texts on women’s literary tradition. As seen from a Third Wave perspective, feminists of the next generation decided to abandon this idealistic way of thinking about women’s relations, emphasizing the constructive power of differences and conflicts. In the conclusion of this chapter, it is worth underlining the necessary double-consciousness that should accompany any attempt to grasp the specificity of women’s experience and expression. There is no such thing as an objective truth and - as Donna Haraway puts it - all kinds of knowledge (not only feminist) are somehow positioned. On the other hand, no discourse (including feminist discourses) is completely devoid of the power to marginalize, exclude and possess the truth, even though it may have emancipatory aims. Some of the ideological traps set in early feminist discourse about the past and women’s identity were pointed out by Third Wave activists, critics, and philosophers like Rebeca Walker, Toril Moi, Rosi Braidotti (in the USA) or Agnieszka Graff, Barbara Limanowska or Inga Iwasiów (in Poland). This unique inter-generational polylogue between women in which Olga Tokarczuk and Izabela Filipiak also participated, turns out to be not only one more interesting context for the literature, but a separate and important thread in this book.The second aim of the book - presented in the chapter Genealogies of canons - is to answer the question about the relationship between the Polish national canon and gender. To do it, it was essential to ex amine thoroughly critical responses to the phenomenon of women’s writing in Poland after 1989. This includes a quarrel full of misunderstandings on so-called "menstrual literature", and later discussions on the "prose of the middle" [proza środka]. Also necessary was a brief recapitulation of the theoretical feminist search for the most accurate definition of women’s poetics, for it affected Polish criticism, unin tentionally suggesting the existence of an artistic norm of genuine, authentic female creativity. Her doubts about this normative way of thinking about "truly women’s expression" raises Izabela Filipiak in her study of Maria Komornicka’s life and works. Because both Filipiak and Tokarczuk were involved in critical and theoretical disputes mentioned above - at the beginning they were considered to represent a similar "menstrual" manner of writing which had significantly changed later on – their literary works became the best material to trace different kinds of mechanisms, such as: assimilation and exclusion, that are used by critics to shape the national or feminist canon. The conclusion of this chapter is clear: a discussion about literature is always a matter of not only esthetic and ethical values which a particular community shares, but also certain cultural norms which are historically, geographically, or economically defined. The gender codes, understood not as some literary images of masculinity and femininity, but rather as socially accepted or not - roles for men and women, are deeply inscribed in literary conventions, hierarchies of genres, patterns of authorship, or images of a masterpiece. In the Polish language, there is no female form for the classic, but this lack paradoxically highlights the meaning of the gender question in the literary canon rather than proves it’s irrelevance. Last but not least, the aim of book is to let women authors speak for themselves. Except for Izbalea Filipiak’s extraordinary essay, entitled Monstrous Literature (1999), there are no other written responses to the "menstrual literature debate”, the book presents voices of Tokarczuk and Filipiak on tradition, feminism, the literary canon and women’s heritage, all spread out in non-fiction texts (including essays, interviews, and introductions to others’ writing). This helps to reveal a literary genealogy of both writers, their conscious search for ancestral figures (metaphorical "Mother" or "Father") on the one hand, and their strong need to re-write the inherited tradition, or even to re-invent it, on the other. As described by Michel Foucault in his genealogies, a paradox of "discontinuous continuity" stands behind this strategy of authorship and echoes in Filipiak’s and Tokarczuk’s novels and short stories, where tropes of "belonging"/emplacement and "uprooting"/displacement are merged together, creating the picture of dislocated, temporal women’s identity. Not surprisingly, the nomadic figurations of monster, goddess and machine, well known from the theoretical works of Rosi Braidotti or Donna Haraway, become the reader’s guide into the world of textual genealogies presented in the last interpretative chapter of the book.