Dramatic construction of faces in Tadeusz Różewicz’s selected poems

The purpose of this article is to present Tadeusz Różewicz as a poetic portraitist. Faces very often appear in the poet’s works and they play a special role there. The methods that are used to construct them can be grouped into four main categories: 1) a face as a performing subject, 2) a face as an object, 3) a face as a static construct, and finally 4) a face as an element, or metonymy, of human existence and entanglement with reality. In Różewicz’s poetry the human face is material and a mirror, but also a universal symbol of the human condition. These faces are usually distorted, decaying, and blurred. They symbolize the disintegration of the world in which human beings have to live. For Różewicz a face is the most condensed image of humanity and an equivalent of a substance in which every external stimulus leaves its mark. The way of using faces as a material and the process of disintegration that is described in detail constitute a dramatic and performative action which implements the objectives of fluid aesthetics, thus showing the moments of transition from meaning to nothingness and the process of erasing meaning.211451659Przestrzenie Teori