Pictures in Our Heads

The analysis of cultural texts, especially in the context of Polish stereotypes, is a fascinating research endeavor, which was undertaken by Małgorzata Karwatowska and Leszek Tymiakin in their book Wśród stereotypów i tekstów kultury. Studia lingwistyczne [Amidst stereotypes and texts of culture. Linguistic studies]. Both authors are renowned linguistic scholars in Poland from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, and for years they have been researching the issues raised in the book.The book consists of two major parts: “Reflections on the stereotypes perpetuated in jokes” and “Sketches on cultural texts.” Although the authors address two seemingly disparate topics, cultural texts, that is, any products of culture that carry cultural meanings, are the unifying thread that weaves throughout the entire book.The first part of the book, written by Małgorzata Karwatowska, is a discussion of stereotypes that are most apparent in Polish jokes. The study of jokes that are ridden with stereotypes is not only a captivating research task, but it can be treated as a kind of attempt to decipher encrypted meanings that need to be explained and properly interpreted. A joke reflects a certain collective wisdom; it embodies shared norms and beliefs, thus creating a community of laughter.1 This community, on the one hand, binds a given group together, and on the other hand, it can exclude, perpetuating prejudice and hatred within the entrenched dichotomy of “Self/Other.”2 This dual nature of a joke was aptly described by Tomasz Titkow, who concluded that “in truth a joke is a clown, but its other face is, in fact [. . .] a trickster playing a refined and enthralling game, being a master of ciphers and indirect language.”3We find an explanation of the linguistic arcana and meanderings of this intriguing game, in relation to stereotypes, in the introductory chapter of the book. Karwatowska, in an in-depth and well-grounded discussion, elucidates the dual structure of a joke, as well as the polysemantic nature of stereotypes and the multiple ways of defining the term. Moreover, this section of the book provides an excellent theoretical foundation for further analysis. She reviews several types of stereotypes conditioned by social environment, and these are: educational stereotypes (teacher and student); medical stereotypes (doctor and patient); and family stereotypes (wife and father). In short, what emerges from these analyses are specific “pictures in our heads,” as Walter Lippmann defined the concept of a stereotype.Karwatowska bases her analysis of stereotypes perpetuated in jokes on rich empirical materials drawn both from Internet sources (250 jokes derived from each of the above-mentioned categories of stereotypes), as well as on a survey conducted among 100 students from Lublin.This raises the question: what “pictures” emerge from the examples of jokes which were analyzed? Educational jokes are dominated by specific targeted aspects of the teacher's personality, such as often being in conflict with students, lacking teaching skills, and being disliked by students.When it comes to the student, he is often portrayed as being “next to a lazybones who avoids hard work at all costs, we can also find (though sporadically) a nerd or even a ‘martyr’ devastated by the excessive pursuit of knowledge” (p. 8), and a poor, malnourished and alcohol-abusing student.One of the important conclusions that the author draws from the portrayals of teachers in jokes is worth emphasizing. She states that “these types of caricatured pictures in the analyzed texts have, however, an important therapeutic function, which could mean that in some way the anecdotes compensate for the humiliation and helplessness experienced by the students at the hands of their teacher” (p. 8). Thus, they serve as a kind of catharsis, providing a sense of balance and calm, while also serving as a defense mechanism. As such, “laughter and smiles are anti-aggressive and anti-hierarchical behaviors,” (p. 7) triggering through a “domino” effect positive feelings in other people.The tensions resulting from hierarchical relationships present in Polish educational stereotypes also apply to the next analyzed category, namely medical stereotypes in the doctor-patient relationship. Polish family stereotypes are also interesting, and the image of a wife that emerges from them is distinct from conventional cultural images that salience a servile and submissive role of a woman. In Internet jokes, she dominates her husband, resorts to physical violence against him, cheats on him, and takes on a despotic reign over the household. Also, the image of the father is far from the positively valued stereotype of a loving, fair father. The father is described in two ways: as a parent/child and as the mother's husband. He is characterized as being unreasonably strict, clumsy, nervous, and vulgar, but most of all ignorant and stupid, with an excessive tendency to drink alcohol.4The main question Karwatowska seeks to answer here is the congruence or incongruence between the stereotypical image of the aforementioned figures and their depictions in jokes. When understood as socially shared knowledge, views, or expectations, stereotypes are characterized by emotional saturation, simplification and gross generalization. These are also the features that emerge from Karwatowska's analysis of jokes. They are a kind of mirror, in which we can look at ourselves in a standardized, but also censored/auto-censored version. This rendition of stereotypes brings to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's famous phrase: “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”Karwatowska has demonstrated that the stereotypes present in jokes are characterized by simplistic over-generalizations that are readily available to the recipient. The analysis also reveals the most essential features of a stereotype, that is, its social origin in Polish society, value judgments and negative or positive emotions, as well as “persistence, inflexibility and resistance to change.”5 It is not without reason that the Greek derivation of the word stereotype is connected with the concept stereós (στɛρɛός) “firm,” “solid.” Interestingly, Walter Lippmann begins his famous book by quoting the Allegory of the Cave presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic.It is worth adding that stereotypes have important adaptive functions that are also evident in analyses of jokes: they facilitate coping with the informational complexity of the social world and give an individual a sense of cognitive control over the situation by providing social knowledge that makes it easier to navigate the world.From Karwatowska's point of view, stereotypes provide an immense source of knowledge about our own qualities—vices and virtues; they are an indispensable element of culture, present above all in language, but also outside of it (e.g., in caricatures): “all people see the world through language and through stereotypes which are present in it, although most of us are not aware of that fact.”6 Therefore, it is worthwhile to undertake this challenge, together with Karwatowska, and delve into a theoretical reflection on stereotypes embedded in jokes.The second part of the book is the contribution by Leszek Tymiakin and is also devoted to cultural texts. This time, however, the selection of the examined cases seems at first glance rather surprising, since he chooses to discuss very diverse texts of Polish culture. In the first chapter he analyzes religious texts, including apocrypha and Christmas carols.The first of the texts analyzed here is the fifteenth-century key example of apocryphal literature known as Rozmyślanie przemyskie [The Przemyśl meditation], in which the author focuses on so-called prosopopoeia (fictio personae), that is fictional dialogue. This figure of speech involves attributing words or utterances to dead or absent persons, or bestowing human characteristics on an animal or object. Prosopopoeia is characterized by emotionality, has a valorizing and persuasive function, and its author does not have to take responsibility for the words spoken.In the next set of texts, namely Christmas carols, we enter the domain of the sacred, where Tymiakin finds so-called congeries (disorderly collections) frequently used in Polish Christmas songs. This section of the chapter on Christmas carols will certainly be of interest to all those who have a passion for the Polish Christmas carols. They are an essential element of intangible Polish cultural heritage, for in Christmas carols a significant part of “Polish spiritual legacy, native customs, including a specific Slavic and national sensitivity” is manifested (p. 124).Also very interesting is the section discussing the language of the Jewish comic skits (szmonceses), defined, variously as “monologue, dialogue, song on Jewish themes, drawing patterns from Jewish humor,”7 which were strongly part of the cabaret presentations of the Polish interwar period and were a multi-purpose instrument of conceptualizing the world. As Tymiakin points out, szmonces “full of self-irony do not spare anyone or anything. They touch both important and trivial matters, revealing at the same time the specificity of the Jewish perspective and sensitivity” (p. 151). In addition to explaining such terms as szmonces, humor, comism or a story, in the text we will also find a list of over 30 linguistic features of the sub-code that distinguishes the general Polish language from the speech of the first generation assimilated Jews. In addition, the reader can learn about the existence of an academic discipline, that is, “humorology,” and a somewhat forgotten book on this subject, Komizm [Comedy] (1968) by Jan Stanisław Bystroń, who is more broadly known for his concept of national megalomania.A radically different and tragic version of texts addressed to the Jewish community are formal announcements used in the Warsaw Ghetto, which were being written in the fewer than three years of the Ghetto's functioning (1940–1943). They regulated communication between institutions and the Jewish community. Tymiakin describes typical features of selected types of administrative and office notices. The material for the analyses presented in this part of the book comes from the Ringelblum Archives. An extremely important element of this case study is the placement of the texts in the dramatic socio-cultural context in which the Ghetto was functioning. On the basis of the analyzed texts, Tymiakin comes to the conclusion that “in spite of the extremely different historical conditions from those of today—the set of common features characterizing the genres of official language does not change, and these are: directness, impersonality and lack of any emotionality, precision and comprehensibility, and textual standardization” (p. 169).The final example of cultural texts analyzed is the popular song. After identifying the frequent motifs of love and death that occur in popular songs, Tymiakin illustrates the ways in which periphrasis, a rhetorical figure, is used to amplify the description of a particular situation. Songwriters use this procedure to escape literalism and to express their subject matter in a fresh, original and revealing way. Conversely, the recipient of a song has two choices—interpretation, requiring additional linguistic and cultural competence or reception in a superficial and uncomplicated manner. The author thoroughly analyzes both of these methods, treating song as one of the more subtle communication games. It is worth noting here that the song, as a typical product of popular culture, which has been long depreciated, now appears as an important subject of both linguistic and cultural studies. And perhaps Jan Poprawa was right when he wrote: “here in our sober minds, the song—for years a bastard of the art world, a mongrel in which literature, music, and acting blend into a syncretic whole—has become the most powerful of the cultural phenomena of the twentieth century.”8 Hence, the song certainly deserves an in-depth, scholarly analysis, which the author has undertaken.The theoretically well-grounded introductions mentioned earlier provide a kind of “road map” through the analyzed cultural texts and can be used for one's own analyses, for example, of commonly known jokes or Christmas carols. The authors have provided selected methods of analysis of such cultural texts, which readers can make use of on their own. What is more, the rich research material can also encourage cross-cultural comparisons, as, for example, comparing the stereotype of the teacher or father in jokes that are commonly used in Poland and the United States, or comparing the stereotype of the doctor-patient in different cultural contexts.The book will certainly be of interest to researchers in various fields of culture. It will be an important source of knowledge for linguists and literary specialists, but also for scholars of culture and society, who study the problem of stereotypes following their own methods. In fact, the book is a fresh exploration of the study of stereotypes, and this is particularly significant nearly one hundred years after the term was introduced into scientific parlance by Walter Lippmann. Thanks to the great variety of analyzed research cases, everyone will find some interesting aspect in this monograph, and the spectrum of research opportunities is extremely large, stretching from jokes through apocrypha, Christmas carols, szmonceses, official writings and songs. What they have in common, however, is that they are examples of “cultural texts.”In conclusion, among the main merits of the reviewed book Amidst Stereotypes and Texts of Culture. Linguistic Studies, we can include: the usefulness of the study of the cultural texts referred to in the book; the solid methodological background and the high quality of the analysis of the texts; the scope of the linguistic, cultural, stylistic, and rhetorical analyses; the time span of the analyzed texts from the fifteenth century to modern times; the presentation of the wealth of stereotypes, with their sources and functions illustrated by apt exemplifications and, last but not least, the variety of the genres of the analyzed texts. The book ends with an index of authors and extensive summaries in English and French.