“Clarity is a Fiction Made of the Fabric of Chaos”: Irzykowski Nonunderstandableness

Abstract

The paper deals with a famous critical controversy of Poland’s interbellum period, the polemic about what Karol Irzykowski called “nonunderstandableness,” stirred up by his article Niezrozumialstwo (1924). Begun on the pages of the weekly “Wiadomości Literackie”, the controversy continued in other periodicals in essays by eminent writers and critics of the time (including T. Peiper, J. Przyboś, S. I. Witkiewicz, J. Ujejski, J.N. Miller, J. Hulewicz and J. Brzękowski) until the outbreak of the World War II. Its importance in the history of the nation’s literary criticism between the wars consists not only in that it promoted the category of “nonunderstandableness”, which has since then become an essential “figure of the reading” of the literary texts of that period (W. Bolecki), but also in Irzykowski’s penetrating campaign employing this category, which diagnosed and exposed the recondite affinity of the literary aesthetic principles and strategies of Young Poland and the later avant-garde. The aim of the paper is to explain Irzykowski’s attitude within this controversy: (1) to identify the personal and abstract, explicitly and implicitly named targets of his attack; (2) to place the category of “nonunderstandableness” within the system of the writer’s opinions from the area of literary criticism; and (3) to interpret the paradoxical manner in which he conducted his critical dispute.