Antropologia literatury : teksty, konteksty, interpretacje

Abstract

The anthropological interpretation of a literary text is not an easy challenge. Its assumptions can be relatively easily objected to. Its carrying out always casts doubt; starting from the choice of the text, through pointing to the plots leading for the analysis and interpretation, then through the wide areas of meanings left out of the way of research until the very way of carrying out the undertaken task. Knowledge about culture seems to be something obvious for a humanist, something essential for a philologist, indispensable for a linguist. Culture is a natural context of a work, referring to it are essential and inalienable. But the variety in understanding the notion of culture should warn against the danger of connecting freely — on the interpretation plane — the work with cultural context since this context is not necessarily the obvious environment for the artistically shaped language product. This context governs itself with its own rights, slowly recognized by the relatively young discipline. Approaching in the recent years the epistemological option conditioned by the linguistic discoveries, anthropology paradoxically moves away from the primary subject of its own research: it is less interested in foreign cultural systems, more in the native ways of noticing and describing the strangeness. Polarizing interests understood in such a way leads to separating in anthropology the empirical and interpretative trends. Combining each of them with a literary material must bear different fruit. Opinions and reflections presented in this book aim at introductory ordering of such a wide field of potential research. The suggested interpretations of the selected texts are still another attempt at bringing closer by the author the hermeneutical consequences of the marriage of cultural anthropology and theory of literature. Anthropological point of view covers in them the selected profiles of the history of Polish culture situated in the context of neighbouring cultures. Cultural memory feeding on myths always refers to the sources and beginnings since this is where the oldest traces of invariants are to found. Thus, in the anthropological considerations one cannot omit the traces of the oldest textual transmissions. Social memory, live and protecting important cultural information for several generations authorizes to look at literary works of the last two hundred years as the texts containing pieces of information verifiable through not always verbalized out-of-text knowledge. What is more, they are the subject of the analysis directed towards reconstructing the embroiling of an individual in the ancient laws of nature and long worked out, socially verified cultural rules. Instead of Dziennik Franciszki Krasińskiej, Ulana and Pani z pieskiem, instead of Mistrz z Cremony, Martin Eden and Przypadek Klary other texts could be surely analysed, one could trigger off other problems with their help. Making such and not other choices the author wanted to show the cultural consequences of the contextually realized invariants of love (marriage, misalliance, adventure) and talent. Both emotional fascination and unusual talents are to a small extent dependent on human will. Similarly as the historically changeable attitude to work and idleness. However for each cultural formation they are a challenge with which the culture has to cope — preserving, on the one hand, respect for the laws and rules worked out by itself, on the other hand, however, taking into account the uniqueness of needs, possibilities and expectations of each individual. Cultural homeostasis, sometimes treated as a synonym of boredom and conservatism, ensures a man the feeling of security guaranteed by the repeatedness of rules. These rules are a multigeneration achievement, verified and tested in the social practice. Every new generation tries to contéstate it with a smaller or larger success. The descending generations easier notice the advantages of compromises contained in them. Literature with greater or smaller nonchalance, directly or metaphorically, documents this process, possible, as it seems, to be decoded by anthropological methods. Knowledge about historical compromises, about culturally tested solutions may be an obstacle in the untamed creativity of a contemporary man. But it can also help him in the individual choice of optimal options which take into account the force of “social inertia” once called cultural tradition.