The Myth-Killer: Krystian Bala Runs Amok

Last year, Polish writer and intellectual Krystian Bala was convicted of the gruesome murder of a businessman who was found years before tortured and drowned in a river. The primary evidence was Bala's novel "Amok," written two years after the murder, in which a group of Polish intellectuals grow bored with modernity and turn to drugs, sex, and eventually murder, including explicitly detailed descriptions of the crime that apparently could only have been known by the police, or the killer. Other evidence has since surfaced, such as Bala's possession of the victim's cell phone, and the businessman's friendship with Bala's ex-wife.



This may be somewhat old news, but the New Yorker just printed an in-depth article on the case, which goes beyond the details of the murder and trial into Bala's philosophical and creative influences, as well as includes dialogue from an interview conducted by the reporter with Bala in prison. According to this article, Bala leaned on the nihilistic writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as well as the postmodernism of Derrida and Wittgenstein's idea that truth can never ultimately be known. "Bala cast himself as an enfant terrible who sought out what Foucault had called a 'limit-experience': he wanted to push the boundaries of language and human existence, to break free of what he deemed to be the hypocritical and oppressive 'truths' of Western society, including taboos on sex and drugs." Similarly, the interview paints Bala as sadistic and un-remorseful (though the novel is full of guilt and apologies for his sins), and leads the reader to suspect that Bala is much more interested in the narrative surrounding his case than in being innocent.

I want to put aside for a moment the question of whether the truth of Bala's guilt can ever been known, and discuss what that might mean. If Bala were innocent, and his depiction of the murder merely based on faithfully rendered news reports as he argued in his defense, then this whole story ends as a Kafkaesque irony. However, the article suggests that Bala was obsessed with what he called "mytho-creativity," the act of telling stories about oneself that become truth. In this light, the act of killing someone and then writing a novel about it later has the potential to become a legendary questioning of the boundaries between art and "real life." I am also somewhat fascinated by this power of language to shape reality, whether in creating stories of how we want to live our own lives (cf. the hypersigils of Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles"), or how we want others to perceive our lives (cf. the discussion on Proust in Roland Barthe's "Death of the Author"), and the question raised for me is at what point is art just art: a piece of work that can be detached from its creator and moment/method of creation? Can we really write our myths into reality? Of course, the act of killing a man, as art, is perhaps the most perverse and inhuman use of this kind of question, and if Bala had admitted to this crime it would have been little more than a horrendous piece of performance art taken too far. That he refuses to admit guilt suggests to me that he either didn't think he would get caught, is really a sick and twisted man, or actually thinks his work has the potential of raising such startling questions as his philosophy aims at.

Despite Bala's arrest making "Amok" an overnight bestseller in Poland, the final irony may be that any legendary or mythic historicity to be had by the piece relies on whether or not it is actually artistically crafted. Is "Amok" a work of literary importance, or is it merely the savage and shocking hack-job the media is portraying it as, which can only add to the spectacle of postmodern culture? As the book has not yet (if it will ever be) translated into English, I must refrain from likewise making this judgment, but the case is interesting enough that if it was translated I would probably have to read it, at least to see how someone else chose to weave their mythic escape from the "real world." Personally, I'm glad that my own dissatisfaction with postmodernity is tempered by a spiritual upbringing that finds recourse in dreams and the attempt to transcend one's condition, instead of in an abject philosophy that only reaffirms what is most base in life.