Uwięziony w podróży donikąd. Opowieści idiotyczne Andrzeja Stasiuka
Imprisoned on a Journey to Nowhere. Idiotic Stories by Andrzej Stasiuk

Summary/Abstract: The Slavonic “on the road” by Andrzej Stasiuk does not end in Babadag or some forgotten but desired “elsewhere”, while chaotic wanderings confront the protagonist with the incomprehensible and the unpredictable, and the text does not aim at any sort of a legible finale; more, it remains imprisoned, just like its subject, on a journey to nowhere, a nonsensical roving, an incessant va-et-vient from signifiant to signifié (and back again), an eternal “between”, on the road. It does not seduce with invisible excess but disturbs with a visible lack. The titular On the road instantly reveals the pornographic and not hermeneutic character of the travelogue, and right way – and after the dispersion of the grand narratives this appears to be totally comprehensible – prefers the Road, the Process, and Motion to Destination, Realisation and the Finale, and thus intimate reading to programmed deciphering, geography to work performed by memory, and memory as such to the construction of history, the haphazard and non-continuous event to a fact associated with others and, finally, life to existence. In the case of Stasiuk’s On the road one cannot actually get anywhere, while the narration runs a course of monotonous enumeration and boring repetition rather than following some sort of a closed, exceptional and definite route, since “the same” is more interesting than any sort of a “difference”. I regard such a travelogue to be an idiotic story.

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