Chapter We are all true fabrications

Overview & Synopsis

The term “true fabrications” refers to an idiom “true false” created by a Polish writer Marek Hłasko and used in his late novel Beautiful Twentysomethings. However, it is just an attempt to translate this idiom into English without losing its meaning. “True false” is a literary strategy applied to show the experience of living in Poland ruled for fifty years by communists. From Hłasko’s perspective the communism past was both contrived and fantastic. Nonetheless, it is also a way to create an auto- identity by means of putting on masks taken from books and films to breath life into that fantastic social system which is formed out of true and false. Life has become a story to tell. In another dimension, the article contains autobiographical reflections on Hłasko`s “true fabrication” metaphor as a tool of interpretation with which I contemplate my anthropological career path. The problem here is my perception of culture as a source of fabrications and social world as a reservoir of social masks, stemming from the anthropological rite de passage, to which I was subjected during the disciplinary forming process.