1Kazimierz Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner [Rozmowy z katem, 1977] has been categorized as this special kind of prose that is called “non-fiction literature”. The term refers to documentary records such as diaries, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, narrative inter|views; that is to say, to a type of texts which chose “life” as their subject. Reader do not consider “non-fiction literature” to be literature because literary fiction (what is invented, what can be or what should be) is contrasted with what actually happened. Literary language, in turn, understood as a complex artistic structure, is juxtaposed with a clear, reference-oriented communicative speech.
2 When selecting a non-fiction text, common readers clearly reject “rambling” or—to borrow Moczarski’s term—“literaturizing”. They make a “referential pact” (an example of which is the autobiographical pact) which is based on the identity of the author and narrator and which assumes that the text is to be a source of knowledge about reality (Lejeune 1989).
3 Critics approach the matter differently. They look for literature in “non-fiction literature”. They notice its paradoxical nature: as a document, this kind of utterance contains sentences about reality and serves a cognitive and practical function; as a text (an ordered sequence of signs), it is a result of a work of imagination that frames “life” as a story.
4 The notion of text enables the comparison of two writing practices that appear to be very different: fiction and documentary non-fiction. A documentary record is characterized by a “reality-oriented” approach: authors of documents underline that they write “in the name of truth and truth only”. The influence of a documentary is supposed to be based on its cognitive function; thus, its authors search for an ally in history, not in the art of literature. There are texts whose only intention is to enrich the social image of a certain fact. But there are also those which in a completely deliberate manner reject known truths in the name of a singular and exclusive truth—the one revealed to the reader with deep conviction. This revelation is accompanied by a series of operations that result from a characteristic feature of any kind of record—from the fact that every record is a structuralization of empirical knowledge. These operations overlap with others, much more important rhetorical operations which are supposed to encourage the reader to ignore the intermediary function of the record and to face “life itself”.
5Truth-based operations render the presented reality artifact-like; they connote what is regarded as pure denotation; they construct a semantic superstructure which influences readers beyond their consciousness. They generate various kinds of information noise: the semantics of the communicated message (understood as a sphere of intratextual meanings) frees itself from its reference and so the documentary text, being an account of events, becomes an event itself. The documentary text is an utterance articulated by a specific person under specific circumstances. In extreme cases, the only fact that could be discussed in “non-fiction” is the existence of the author.
6To analyse Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner – a bestselling documentary from 1977—I will refer to the subject and the object of this kind of text. Furthermore, neither the receiver, nor the pragmatic conditions of the medium can be ignored—though both of these, despite their influence on semantic processes in the structure of the text, are secondary issues. I shall also occasionally refer to Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising [Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego] (2015).
7 The speaking subject of a documentary—the superior communicating instance—is unquestionably right—as in the following example: “It was so, because I was there and I saw that” (in some cases “I heard”). To the audience, such a performative statement, defining the stance of the participant and witness (also court witness), is a guarantee of truth: what they read is not a novel, but reality (fact). However, such a guarantee is not always sufficiently powerful; unlike a historian, the author of a documentary does not have to (or even cannot) conceal the fact that what was seen was seen by him himself—by a specific person who experienced something as a human being. Thus his truth is not the truth of a recording camera or some information coming from an archive. Readers—even though they are mainly interested in a “slice of life”, in the story or a memory—have a right to ask: “Who is speaking and on whose behalf?” A history book is not asked such questions at all.
8The speaking “I” is credible as long as it meets certain criteria: morality (how to trust a murderer?), patriotism (we do not believe traitors), education, and writing skills. If any of these are suspicious, we treat the text as a documentary record of something exotic (the personality of a criminal, the mentality of “a folk person”, the rise of treason). The text loses its cognitive value at the expense of its expressive function: it thus becomes the mark of the psyche of the speaking person.
9A narrativized interview, Conversations with an Executioner seems to be designed in a way that is supposed to combine the cognitive and expressive functions. The journalist’s utterances (let’s call them this way), as well as his questions and comments, are an expression of the truth. Utterances of the interviewee—the interlocutor—are an expression of his experiences, beliefs, life and personality.
10The author perfectly satisfies the reader’s expectations concerning credibility. A lawyer, a journalist, a Home Army soldier, a prisoner from Mokotów, who spent eleven months in a cell with a high-ranking SS officer, imprisoned and sentenced to death for his political choices—Moczarski seems to be somebody who has been finally allowed to speak. And even if the subject of the book is not his personal fate, but the fate of another, still we unquestionably believe the author. The situation of the narrator from A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising is different. An average inhabitant of Warsaw, Białoszewski contradicts in his account the values connected with the heroic ethos of a war effort. His speech seems to be unnecessary: he either talks about what everybody who was in Warsaw in August and September 1944 knows all too well, or destroys the pictures of heroism known from fiction, poetry and memoir prose by presenting a rather unnerving picture of the struggle for survival. It is as if Białoszewski wanted to force his way through those literary meanings to the empirical knowledge itself. In Conversations with an Executioner we can observe a contrary process. Here it is speech, as much as dialogue and the exchange of beliefs and convictions, that constitutes the empirical dimension. Speech has its significant referents: facts and events. By consciously organizing the structure of the book, the author invests the words (and the worlds these words imply) with meaning.
11The process involves many stages and levels. It equally concerns the contents and the ways of expression. As for the first level, what matters is the choice of the theme of this documentary narrative. In a documentary, the reader mainly looks for great themes, although he might sometimes be satisfied with what is rare or “curious”. As the object of the story, Jürgen Stroop lives up to two types of expectations: he is a great murderer as well as a Nazi. Moczarski hardly explains his choice, even if it was coincidental (none of them chose to be in one cell). Similarly, the Warsaw uprising is a great theme, but Białoszewski—against readers’ expectations—makes this theme “low”, commonplace, and unbearably trivial with its everyday detail.
12What is also important is the evaluation of the subject of the story. Although the author of the documentary message would like to stick to facts (understood, as in Positivism, in accordance with Ranke’s “Wie es eigentlich gewesen”), he is, as every individual, also entitled to judge. Conversations with an Executioner—could there be anything more evocative? The judgment strikes the reader already in the title: the author has positioned himself as a judge in the very first words of the text even though in the message he wants to be only a recorder or a thinking interlocutor. This attitude is reflected in the narration: the book is split into chapters whose titles are ironic commentaries on the stories Stroop tells.
13In the document under discussion, judgment outstrip interpretation against the rules dictated by the objectivist teaching of history. This order reflects the attitude of readers of non-fiction literature: they not only demand clear references to data, but also seek explanation. If these are not provided, the narrator will be called a primitive recorder or a submissive chatterbox. Miron seems to be precisely this sort of a chatterbox when he perceives stories on the level of direct bonds, not judging or signalling political perspectives that might have decided about the uprising. These perspectives would be noticed by a lawyer or a journalist: in his text, Moczarski seems to hesitate between psychological (Stroop is a born “officer”) and historical interpretations (fascism transforms people into crime machines). Both motivations coexist on the pages of the book and perhaps this fact—alarming from the perspective of a historian—decided about the success of Conversations with an Executioner. Details from Stroop’s personal life play a special role here; they spice up the text in the way every reader of a biography expects: on the level of popular psychology the machine turns out to be human, too. Such a dose of exoticism decides about all sensational documentaries.
14The process of investing meaning finds its continuation in narrative techniques. Moczarski’s text is a record of an interview and includes a biography and two autobiographies. Biography here is concerned with Stroop’s life as it is reconstructed by the narrator. The first autobiography is Stroop’s account of his own life. The second autobiography—legible even despite its concealments—is the narrator’s life. These complex, sometimes even merging threads are shown in the imitations of what the conversation the author had with his character might have looked like. Moczarski writes the book in dialogues, rarely interrupted with narration. The choice of this literary form magnifies credibility of the book: the reader knows that “sheer life” speaks with the mouths of both author and character.
15However, this is only an impression. After all, we do not witness the real dialogue, but only read the text of the book. We see words in an order that is significantly different from the one we would hear from a tape. The author is constrained by writing; in his comment he refers to them as to constraints of memory. The constraints transform the empirical content into a greatly shaped biographical novel.
16The subject of this account are long, often chaotic conversations. We do not know what associations led to the discovery of new facts. Most often these were questions which the author asked the interlocutor, but sometimes Stroop’s confessions were provoked by the weather, sounds of kitchen dishes, a tree seen behind the window. These talks engendered a plot that constituted itself around the life line (spanning the distance between birth and death). Although Moczarski chose monologue or dialogue to be his form, he ordered facts disclosed throughout the conversation with an iron logic.
17Conversations which gave background to the plot are only a means of sharing the information, and at times they even confuse the message (as in the case of Stroops’s concealments—some of which were revealed by another German living in the cell, and some waited to be completed many years later during the author’s archival research after he left the prison). The chronological order the material is presented in greatly facilitates the process of reading.
18One of the reasons for the popularity of non-fiction is that its authors use traditional narrative techniques, ignoring modern writers who—like Białoszewski—would like to reject those techniques in the name of recording pure empirical knowledge. Although the author of A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising follows chronological order, he completely renounces to follow cause-and-effect logic. Twaddle dominates the plot, nobody explains anything and nobody looks for motivations. Białoszewski’s narration resembles a chaotic tape record.
19Transforming empirical knowledge into a plot involves certain stylistic procedures. Narrative parts of Conversations with an Executioner are written in beautiful literary Polish. Moczarski cites poets. Language is yet another guarantor of credibility: we read a story told by an educated man, a natural account whose aim is cognition. Stroop’s long monologues only confirm their natural character. By imitating the German’s speech, the writer seems to repeat: this is him, not me, these are his actions and values, this is his way of speaking which I am objectively recording. It occurs, however, that some features of the text blur the difference between the two speaking entities: the author himself and the one he imitates.
20The first necessary transformation is translation—the conversations were in German. Here we can talk about constraints connected with the future reader, but they are not consistent. Moczarski constantly begins his address with “Herr General...”. The most interesting element, however, is the narration joining the dialogues: it is more of a synopsis of the character’s life, especially his youth and it includes little reported speech. This is an example of a purely historical account. However, in some sections of Stroop’s story we can find single German expressions: “Mutti”, “Ordnung”, “Bauerstand”, “Eichenlaub”, “Kirche”, “Küchen und Kinder”, “Kernland”. They function as signals of alien speech and their role is to familiarize the reader with the character. They operate in a special way: the style creates a stereotype of a German well-known to Polish people; features such as sentimentalism or attachment to home are merged with cruelty and the cult of power. On the level of events, Moczarski equipped the books with a lot of factual information, but on the level of signs he confirmed the prejudices of public opinion. Stereotype as a communicative substratum played a great role in the success of the book (see Bartoszyński 1971; Mitosek 1974).
21The author’s interventions are revealed in the general’s speech. This case is unlike the one described above: there it is Moczarski who speaks, in his narrative he quotes expressions typical of a German; here Stroop speaks and the narrator comments on the speech. He does it in a subtle, “artistic” way. Namely, he uses quotation marks for certain expressions used by the general, e.g. “great adventures in Eastern Europe”, “he comfortably ‘worked’ in Lviv”, “undermen”, “‘bright figure’ of Prutzmann”. We can speak of double-voiced references here. The speech comes from Stroop, but the quotation marks from the one who quotes it. This sign of distance is like winking at the reader: Stroop called certain events this way, but we—his readers—know what it exactly looked like, e.g. the military “merits” of the general in Warsaw (here Grossaktion) for which he received the Iron Cross.
22In some cases, this graphic device—the quotation mark—signals parody. As we mentioned above, Stroop’s biography is split into 24 parts, each of which is a singular fabular entity. Chapter titles perfectly exemplify double-voice expressions. For instance, writing about electoral manipulations in the general’s home country, Moczarski says “Lieppe ‘expresses’ the will of the people’”. Commenting on the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, he quotes the words of Stroop’s superior addressed to him: “Aber guter Mann”, and talking about the latter’s administrative successes, he paraphrases: “In German seventh heaven”.
23In the style, sharp irony is evident: the protagonist is also sentenced on this, so to say, the neutral level. What the quotation marks show, no record would expose. One needs to write to cross and split voices, to make two antagonistic positions merge into one utterance, to use open criticism under the cover of a quotation.
24Moczarski does not conceal his right to comment. He does not try to deliberately deepen the characteristics of his protagonist: his image perfectly fits the reader’s expectations. As Aristotle would say, all that goes in accordance with public opinion is probable. The Mokotów prisoner turns out to be an excellent writer, though: he uses words and images so well that disgrace becomes Stroop’s auto-disgrace. The style provides the semantic structure of the text with a depth independent of the storyline.
25As I have already written, most of Conversations with an Executioner is either a dialogue between the narrator and the character or Stroop’s monologues. Therefore, we have two types of events: historical facts which constitute the storyline are presented through the prism of a singular event—the conversation itself. The author witnesses not only the particular behaviours of the general, but also his confessions, which are already an interpretation of these behaviours. Imitating Stroop’s utterances, he aims at fidelity: alien speech (German expressions, ideological forms) is supposed to be a touchstone of authenticity. Yet the speech put in quotation marks becomes a sign of distance: when quoting, the narrator judges. In this way Moczarski offers an interpretation of interpretation. What is supposed to present Stroop better and show him as a living person leads to the opposite effect: the close-up constitutes an enlarged, expanded presentation. Instead of a person, we observe a thing objectified through his speech; Stroop can be an object of thought and criticism. This game of close-up and distance was described by Bertolt Brecht.
26Consequently, the Nazi viewpoint becomes the theme of the account—watched not as a theory or propaganda, but as the living event of an utterance. It disgraces the speaking general the way the general disgraces his whole ideology. In Conversations with an Executioner neither the character nor his beliefs have anything to do with the metaphorical demonic features that writers such as Thomas Mann or Andrzej Kuśniewicz would be inclined to ascribe to fascists.
27As I mentioned at the beginning, narrativized interview combines two functions: cognitive and expressive. By way of analogy, in such a text it is possible to see two truths. First, being a consequence of the work of a biographer (not only of an interlocutor, but also of an archivist), it tells us what happened to the man (even if he was only a cog in the machine of power). The other is the truth of “spoken” autobiography. We have no chances of reaching it in its direct, uttered form; in a text it becomes the recorded truth. By imitating the autobiography and using specific stylistic devices, the recording narrator-author makes the speech become a spectacle.
28In his book, Moczarski uses classical novelistic devices. He invests the empirical knowledge with meaning in accordance with writing conventions that have been in use for ages; he creates a peculiar Bildungsroman, disgracing the Nazi version of Bildung. Even though the author repeatedly states that he only reflected what had really happened in the cell, at a certain point the opposition of truth and fiction is no longer important. Moczarski tells the story by imitation: choosing his kind of presentation, he does not bother about the truth in his account, but about its credibility and evocativeness. Nevertheless, the fact that in this documentary purely communicative speech turns out to be a complicated artistic structure does not undermine the cognitive value of Conversations with an Executioner. The pleasure of cognition is joined with the pleasure of reading, and what decides about the value of the documentary is both the presented facts and the way of their presentation. The process of writing eliminates the distinction between the literary and the authentic.
29One of the essential problems of contemporary literary culture is the contamination of literature by the documentary. This phenomenon is called formal mimetism (see Głowiński 1997; Lalewicz 1979). Writers such as Kazimierz Brandys write fictional interviews (incidentally Brandys brilliantly foresaw Moczarski’s book in his Interview with Ballmeyer in 1959), or fictional reviews of non-existent books (Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem). Literary historians point out that literature that imitates forms of everyday verbal exchanges is an old artistic device utilized for example in epistolary novels, or fictional novels imitating chronicles or diaries.
30In fact, it works both ways: we should ask if the documentary is not infected by literature, too. The question does not mean that we accept the dominance of fiction over an authentic message. Also, it has nothing to do with the ideology of literary culture which regulates social norms of expression. It is a matter of borders or of “the essence” of the authentic. Writing about feedback, I touch this sensitive point where the truth and fiction, documentary and literature meet: all of these are about telling and imitating, about the process of recording.
31My reader will perhaps ask if there is no method of reaching pure truth, whether every possible narration has to be contaminated with cultural connotations. I have so far been discussing a text which in principle intends to imitate alien speech. It appears that the connotating factor is imitation itself, no matter if its object is real or fictitious. The same constraints and stylistic transformations are at work. The autobiographical text is undoubtedly more authentic. It does not mean it is closer to truth. It can function as an expression or record of exoticism. The moment we try to treat it as information about events, its truth immediately becomes discursive.1
32Therefore, the only “genuinely” authentic material would be interviews recorded on an audio cassette or a video tape, but only under two conditions: the material could not be arranged by the reporter (otherwise this would be a case similar to Conversations with an Executioner); what is more, the journalist would have to be fully objective, not steering the answers by means of questions. On the whole, it is impossible. And yet, the work of a tape recorder or of a camera definitely objectifies the message. It frees the author from the effort connected with imitation; instead of the image, we have a copy. However, such unstructured interviews are rarely readable: on the level of popular reception, what is real becomes improbable (“boring”, “pointless”, “monotonous”).2
33What remains is psychotic discourse—the chaotic monologue of a sick person who has lost awareness of all conventions, who does not imitate anything although he or she can impersonate the other and fictionalize them. His truth is sick—it testifies to the imagination of the speaking “I”. It is particularly valuable when it comes to cognition: to a doctor, psychologist or sociologist psychotic discourse becomes a testing material. It is especially useful: this is not literature, even if it is a message—it is a call for help. Some literary ideologies have a tendency to associate artistry with madness. The writing artist is, however, a madman from the past: the one who consciously tells the reader about his madness, such as Gérard de Nerval in Aurelia (2004).3 Nothing of this kind appears in a form of spoken expression such as psychotic discourse.
34One more paradox: fiction, as if tired of the conventions of probability, programmatically signalling its ability to reconstruct reality (truth), more and more often uses material provided by the “confused” imagination. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury one of the parts is narrated from the perspective of a mentally challenged boy. In a novel by Claude Simon, mental disorder neither expresses anything itself nor is talked about: the author presents reality the way it emerges out of subconscious connotations, chaotic twaddle, and accumulating memories. An impatient reader will call it madman’s writing. In 1973, Maspero published Emma Santos’s The Ill-Castrated Woman —the diary of a mad woman who regains self-awareness through writing. It is as if literature was looking for yet another way to reach the authentic. In this case it is not about imitating forms of everyday communication, but about reconstructing “non-communication”—as speech which does not belong to any constituted mode of expression. Let us not forget, however, that in this kind of literature it is not expression that is important, but its institutionalized form, such as, for instance, internal monologue. Again we find ourselves in a vicious circle: everywhere recording transforms “life” into culture. Fiction or beauty ceased to be the writers’ aim a long time ago. Their works have become a laboratory trying out all codes of speech. Also the one that stops being a code and as a consequence of a disease becomes “non-communication”.
35Obviously non-fiction is very distant from such literature. For the time being it stays in a safe asylum of literary conventions guaranteeing success. That is the reason why A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising seems so shocking—it is the first and deliberate attempt at liberating a documentary from the influence of these conventions.
Addendum
36In Moczarski’s book I found a fragment which illustrates his theses about the pragmatic determinants of truth. Jürgen Stroop says:
I haven’t yet decided what position I’ll take in court. Were I to tell the truth
about the Ghetto fighting, I’d have to admit that the Jews and their Polish
allies were heroes. As a reward for saying so publicly, I’d bargain to get my
sentence changed from death to life imprisonment. But if it looks like I’m done
for regardless, I may simply lie. Why not state that the Jewish resistance was a
sham, that the Haluzzenbewegung girls were maniacs, and that the Poles stood by
with indifference and sometimes even approval while we liquidated the Jews?
Again, despite my reluctance to interrupt Stroop’s confessions, my emotions got
the best of me. “Don’t you think, Herr General”, I shouted, “that if you decide
to lie, history will reveal your distortions?” (Moczarski 1981, 169–170)
- 1 Jean Starobinski writes: “The double address of the discourse—to God and to the human auditor—makes the truth discursive and the discourse true” (Starobinski 2014, 77).
- 2 We can refer here to the film Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994), in which the main character, a film operator, dreaming of the absolute objectivism of his documentary, puts the camera on his back and rides his bicycle in the city. The believer of relativism will say, however, that although the operator did not choose images, he did chose the route of his trips.
- 3 Writing about psychotic discourse, I mean schizophrenics speaking in a moment of crisis. See Todorov (1978). The speech of a paranoiac looks completely different: it is well organized and consistent, and the difficulty lies in inability to tell the difference between the level of imagination and reality. This case is described in Jerzy Krzysztoń’s Insanity [Obłęd]. On the relationship between disease and art see, among others, Kępiński (1972), and Felman (1978). Authors of both books, despite their evident fascination with psychotic imagination, defend the thesis that art is not an articulation of a disease, but its conscious artistic transformation.