The first work to be expressly referred to as liberature is Oka-leczenie (2000 [roughly translated: ‘Mute-eye-elation’ – a play on the components of the Polish word ‘okaleczenie’ (mutilation) – ‘oko’(eye) and ‘leczenie’ (healing)]) by the couple Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer. The closed book looks inconspicuous; once opened, however, a peculiar form unravels before us. The three volumes are joined by their covers such that the middle one is turned with its back to the others. Each illustrates a different moment of human existence. The impetus for the series was the death of the author’s father and the birth of his son in quick succession. Fajfer wrote:
I wanted the impossible: to render the very moment of death, the moment when one is exactly In-between – when one is not yet dead but no longer alive either […]. I also wanted to render the second impossibility – the moment of birth, the instant when It is still There, but a moment later it will already be Here […]. And then there is the third moment, or rather the first moment of all, when a third body arises from two bodies – the very Beginning of the World.
The triptych begins... with its conclusion, which is a realistic scene of a vigil at the hospital bed of a dying man. Voices can be heard, or rather seen, with their different fonts reflecting the gender, age and tone of voice of the characters. The conversation is about mundane, trivial topics, but there is also no shortage of grand gestures. Death’s approach is also denoted by negative pagination – a countdown. A semicolon is placed at the climax; the full stop and comma are meant to symbolise conception. The birth and first days of a child’s life become a pretext for the inclusion of calligrams in the volume, i.e. words arranged into images.
As a character’s life unfolds, the page numbering increases. Both texts are similarly made up of 642 words (more or less the same number of words appears in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Rzut kośćmi nigdy nie zniesie przypadku [A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance], which also belongs to this strand of literature). The middle volume of the trilogy consists of handwriting that imitates a cardiogram – a more apt sign of life is hard to find.
But the hidden meanings do not end there: the true reading only begins when the reader discovers the ‘invisible’ text, consisting of the first letters of each individual word. From this reading, successive layer upon layer unfolds, leading up to the single lexical unit from which the whole has been created – Fajfer calls this the emanative structure.
Liberature Lane
Archi-texture, tractotractate or streeterature – that is how people refer to Radosław Nowakowski’s work Ulica Sienkiewicza w Kielcach (Sienkiewicza Street in Kielce, 2003). It is among the few books that are converted not into pages but into metres: when folded it has a format of 16 by 30 centimetres, when unfolded, 45 by 1,020 centimetres. A sheet of paper unfolding like an accordion reproduces the longest street in Kielce, which an anonymous person wanders through the way a reader wanders through an unknown work. He finds himself there by chance, passes by strange buildings (depictions of doo-wellings), looks around unhurriedly, listens. The book speaks neither about the street nor about what is happening on it; rather, it is a record of a tourist’s consciousness, a map of his mind. A map drawn up in three languages: Polish, English and Esperanto.