Witkacowskie raje
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Date
2010
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Publisher
Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM w Poznaniu
Title alternative
Witkacy’s Paradises
Abstract
The studies on Witkacy’s oeuvre Narcotics (Narkotyki, 1932) exist without any specific status, as if
reduced to a research element ancillary to other “more serious” creative areas of its author. The
above is especially astonishing since they belong to a specific literary genre which was started with
De Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821) and became really successful in the 19th and 20th
centuries, with Baudelaire, Cocteau, Artaud, Huxley and many others. Witkacy was the first Polish
writer who addressed the issue of drug addiction and wrote explicitly on the role of narcotics in
artistic creation. He experimented with cocaine, mescaline, peyotl and discovered “the magic
peyotl” in the same years as A. Artaud and W. Benjamin, and many years before Huxley. He was
also one of the few writers who, after having experimented with drugs, began to deal with the theory
of narcotics.
The use of opium, cocaine, dawamesk also became a sort of caricatural form in many of his works
from Cuttlefish (Mątwa) up to the novel The Only Way Out (Jedyne wyjście). The aim of my work
is to try to answer several questions: In what way does the author’s interest in the addiction of
Unwashed Souls (Niemyte dusze) fit into the 19th and 20th century debate between doctors, writers
and European artists? Can Witkacy’s literary and dramatic work demonstrate that he was familiar
with publications on pharmacology (published in Germany and France in the 20s) and also with
the authors who were writing about drugs in the 19th and 20th century? How does his prohibitionist
point of view fit with his historiosophy? Can Narcotics be considered a literary work? I have
also tried to determine the anonymous sources quoted by Witkacy and co-authors of Narcotics,
B. Filipowski and S. Glass (pen name of Dezydery Prokopowicz).
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Citation
Przestrzenie Teorii, nr 14, 2010, str. 85-105
Seria
ISBN
978-83-232-2210-1
ISSN
1644-6763