Poza ramy i kadry, czyli literatura jako świadectwo. Wokół mowy noblowskiej Olgi Tokarczuk ‘Czuły narrator’
Beyond All Frames, or Literature as Testimony

Summary/Abstract: This essay is an impression inspired by the Nobel Prize speech given by Olga Tokarczuk and her conception of the tender narrator. The writer is of the opinion that the way in which we describe the world, i.e. in which we testify about it, is of enormous importance. In opposition to official certificates: identifiers, proofs of identity, all those ”sealed documents” claiming the right to knowledge and power, reducing reality to frameworks, formulas, and catalogues but also in opposition to a failed attempt at overcoming this official standard, i.e. first-person narratives on the internet (social portals, blogs, photo reports), Tokarczuk points to literature as the best testifying medium. If evidence is to be empowering then it calls for more profound perception - careful, sensitive and ethical, whose condition is the withdrawal of the cognitive subject/narator in order to create space, to hand it over to those about whom one speaks. The author of the article juxtaposes contextually the postulates and intentions of the Nobel Prize winner with a fragment of Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann, William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, and Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna (Pepper Forgers. Family History) by Monika Sznajderman. Upon those examples she demonstrates the might of the tender, cautious narration, concentrated on the Other, one that saves and overcomes both official documents and internet egocentrism.

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