Necessary confession

Before I begin, I am obliged to make a confession. The present monograph is the fruit of miscegenation between a scholar and a creative writer, and its subject – the eponymous liberature – is the product of a similar trespass. Beside my academic publications, I am the co-author of two books: Oka-leczenie [Mute-Eye-Late] and (O)patrzenie [Ga(u)ze], written jointly with Zenon Fajfer. The concept of liberature, featuring in the title of my book, was in fact first proposed by this poet and my artistic collaborator, in an article with the provocative title “Liberature. Appendix to a Dictionary of Literary Terms” (Fajfer 1999). In his essay, which combined the zest of an artistic manifesto with some theoretical reflection, Fajfer suggested a new and distinct literary genre. It would denote a kind of creative writing that fuses text with its physical form into an inseparable whole in the space of the book. The name of the postulated category, in which he fused Latin liber (the book) with “literature,” also hints at writers’ liberty to use their material as freely as necessary. Linguistically, his coinage was a hybrid word, just as works he described or envisaged could be seen as combinations of different arts, but – as he has always stressed – with the unquestioned dominance of the literary component.

So my hybrid position corresponds well with the hybridity of my subject. I admit that I am speaking here both as a creative writer and a literary scholar, a theorist of the genre to which I have contributed. Such a situation, though not so rare in the academic world, is nevertheless an uncomfortable one. In my defence I should perhaps quote Christine Brooke-Rose, my more eminent predecessor in this practice, who in her preface to Stories, Theories and Things offers the following disclaimer: