The Agency of the Aesthetic

Intended as an extended afterword to Gerard T. Kapolka's translation of Marek Ławrynowicz's “Nafta” [Kerosene, 2006], this essay aims to situate Ławrynowicz's cryptic text, at once revealing and opaque, within a broader textual environment. While recognizing that a literary text and its context have a complex relationship and that, moreover, context is a notoriously slippery concept since there is always more than one context involved in any given situation, I propose to contextualize “Kerosene” by considering it alongside other plays that deal at least in part with the Jedwabne massacre of 1941. This will entail examining their representational modes and dramaturgical procedures and grappling with the thorny question of their aesthetic agency.