Mirona Białoszewskiego "pamiętnik gadany" - spory wokół gatunku

Abstract

The subject of our considerations here is the genological aspect of The Diary of the Warsaw Uprising by Miron Białoszewski. The genre of the work, revealed in its title, could not have been treated as a certainty, because it concerned an artist who was distinctly against all literary conventions. Therefore a question if his book was a diary indeed seemed not unjustified. A close reading of Białoszewski's work let us distinguish such structural elements which clearly placed it within the limits of the genre form accepted in the beginning: the approach of an eyewitness taking part in the events presented, the identity of the narrator, the author and the main character, the constant stress on the time distance (and the retrospective narration connected with it), or the chronological order of facts and experiences. But simultaneously many arguments proved that the author broke numerous diary conventions on purposs. The genological complexity of this prose was often underlined by scholars, hence the extremely rich "repertoire”" of genre relations, such as the quasi-diary, a degraded rhapsody, an intimate journal, a "stream of consciousness” novel, a historical chronicle, "story telling"... Białoszewski mostly surprised his readers with a different, original form of his retrospective story. The artistically unusual shape of his Diary was defined by its oral stylization, every- day, colloquial speech. It was reflected in the characteristic narration of the work in question: the ragged tone of elliptical sentences, anacoluthons, common speech, mispronounciations, idioms, neologisms, onomathopeias etc. This is how the writer created an interesting variation of the "bragging diary”, an extremely important work in Polish literature, and possivly the most important work in Białoszewski's career.