“I’d always wanted to write a book about light,” Stasiuk tells us in Dukla. And in fact that is precisely what he has done. In achingly beautiful prose, he takes on the quixotic task of rendering in language the experiences we receive through our eyes. At one level, this is how to read Dukla—as an extended series of attempts to put into words the different effects of light, and a meditation on what this undertaking entails.
At the same time, of course, a book about light also has to be a book about darkness. Dukla is filled with the constant presence of dark, shadows, blackness, night—Stasiuk strains the resources of language to breaking point in striving to convey the absence of light as well as its presence. His goal of “describing light” recalls Claude Monet’s desire to paint light in his series paintings, though the intense play of light and shade in Dukla is reminiscent of nothing so much as Caravaggio’s thunderous chiaroscuro.
Yet, extraordinary as this goal is, and however remarkable its results, Dukla is also much more than a book about light. In Poland it is widely regarded as Stasiuk’s most brilliant achievement and as one of the landmark texts of the postcommunist period. What is it that makes the book so unusual and memorable?
Part of the answer lies in the sheer originality of form. By making light his central organizing principle, Stasiuk is able to play merry havoc with genre. Quite consciously and deliberately, he intertwines memoir, travelogue, and nature writing, together with an admixture of reportage and latter-day ethnography, all subordinated to the wistful discipline of a languid prose poem. Part of the delight of reading Dukla is the reader’s constant struggle to figure out what exactly it is he or she is reading: what kind of text is this, and how is it to be categorized and thus understood? As in the case of much great literature, with Dukla this question has no simple answer, but the multiple resonances of the various genres mentioned above have the effect of weaving the text into the complex fabric of literature itself.
It is also striking that Stasiuk dwells on things and places no one else thinks worthy of writing about. Polish literature has preponderantly been urban in character; writing set in the countryside has traditionally involved country estates, and has concerned above all the life of the gentry. What goes on in the small towns and villages has, with a few notable exceptions (like Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone upon Stone), been overlooked. Stasiuk goes looking for his poetry, his light and its effects, in precisely those seemingly banal and uninteresting places that others have ignored. One of the gifts this book offers is a new way of looking at the everyday, and learning how to let it captivate us. Even during the papal visit described in Part III of the novella-length “Dukla,” what interests Stasiuk is not the pontiff himself so much as the people who come to see him and hear him—the little old lady to whom “the world has suddenly come,” or the farmers who have to leave early because, presumably, their cows need milking.
As he enters imaginatively into the lives of these overlooked others and their habitations, Stasiuk displays stunning powers of observation. He is the poet of the concrete; eschewing the general (because “everything that’s general ends up on the trash heap”), he is interested in things, objects, tangible items, confident that if he renders them with sufficient clarity and respect they themselves will reveal their meaning. He is a shining vindication of Flaubert’s dictum that “anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” The brilliant depiction of a rural home in Part II of “Dukla,” for instance, is at once a carefully observed catalog of possessions, and a detailed portrait of a moral habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. It tells us what people are like, what their values and tastes are, through an exquisite presentation of the apparently banal objects they gather around them.
It might be more accurate to say that Dukla is about light remembered, and in this sense it is also a book about memory. Stasiuk has said elsewhere, in Fado, that he is not interested in the future (which he dismisses as “the refuge of fools”), only in the past, which “treats us with seriousness.” In Dukla he mines his own past, giving us among other things a plaintive evocation of childhood summers spent with his grandparents, and an equally poignant narrative of his erotic awakening as a teenager. And as with every other facet of the book, these recollections are shot through with qualities of light that help transfix them in memory.
In almost every paragraph of this book, Stasiuk displays his extraordinary talent for metaphor and imagery. A man sitting motionless in a bar is like “one of those people who resemble mineral matter”; motorcycles converted into farming vehicles move across a field “like docile beasts of a newly domesticated species”; a dead stork in a meadow looks “like an overturned plaything.” Such examples spill from his pen, and are put at the service of a mind that sees things in strikingly original ways. Stasiuk’s originality extends to the very language he uses: a couple of years ago, in a workshop in Poland, I showed a group of young people an anonymous passage from an as-yet unpublished novel; within a sentence or two the majority of those present had identified it correctly as being by Andrzej Stasiuk. Part of the joy of reading Dukla is knowing that you are listening to a distinct, unmistakable, compelling voice.
Everyone I know who has read Dukla has a favorite passage. One friend remembers best the astonishing image of the teenage protagonist entering the skin of the dancing woman he is watching, pushing his hands into her fingertips like putting on a glove. Another recalls the little girl whose swinging feet in a country bus shelter are the only moving thing in sight, till her mother says “Sit still” and the entire scene becomes motionless. Like the exploratory mine shaft that the Polish word “dukla” refers to, Dukla the book bores into the surface of our lives and perceptions; it reveals wondrous prospects and resources whose very existence was unsuspected, and sheds dazzling new light on lives and landscapes that each reader will respond to in different and unique ways. This, too, is the pleasure of reading Dukla.
BILL JOHNSTON