Wobec odmienności. Lubiewo Michała Witkowskiego

Abstract

The article deals with the category of sexual diversity and presents gay literature from this perspective. The author differentiates between gay literary creation (gay and lesbian literature) and the inherent homoerotism of the text. The article concentrates on the novel by Michał Witkowski entitled “Lubiewo”, which is regarded as a milestone in the Polish literature dealing with diversity. For the first time the camp aesthetics is so clearly and completely incorporated into the poetics of a text. Up till now, Polish literature, as it is visible in texts by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz or Julian Stryjkowski, has been permeated with sublimation and rarely talked about sexual issues clearly and openly. The article also discusses the question of disgust and repulsion that can be evoked by literature which shocks with the obscenity and perverse behaviour. It is shown that examining even the most aberrant cases of human behaviour can only enrich the synthetic image of the truth about man. In the novel, the presentation of the subject suggests that it should be placed in the sphere of the “abject” – Julia Kristeva’a “pomiot” – of the subjectivity, which contains what is socially unacceptable: impurity, wickedness, and hideousness; which evokes both abomination and fascination.