Pankʼs Not Dead: A 20th-Century Writer in the Presence of the Canon

This article offers a synthetic description of the problem of the canon in the prose works of Marian Pankowski. The canon, which is understood in the text as a set of principles determining those articulations that are permitted in a given culture, appears to be a permanent frame of reference of the writerʼs works. The author singles out three subsequent options that have been developed by Pankowski. The first one – from Matuga (1955) until the story ‘Kozak’ (‘The Cossack’, 1965) – concerned an attack on the canon with counterofficial contents; in this period the writer acted as an inhabitant and advocate of the margins, which require to be culturally represented. The second, subversive approach (Rudolf, Putto, Z Auszwicu do Belsen [From Auszwic to Belsen], 1980–2000) was realized through the staging of conflicts between official and forbidden contents; here the writer took on the role of a naïve representative of official culture who gradually turns into a subversive while transforming the canon into a source of erotic phantasms. The third option (W stronę miłości [Towards Love], 2001; Bal wdów i wdowców [The Widowsʼ and Widowersʼ Ball], 2006; Ostatni zlot aniołów [The Last Convention of Angels], 2007) entails the restitution of the principle of the canon – understood as an individually established set of principles; here Pankowski puts into question the distinction between an official and a counterofficial culture, as he situates his hero-narrator in an indefinite realm – a realm that can only be organized by the individual production of norms.