We wstecznym lusterku : konstytuowanie podmiotu w prozie Zygmunta Haupta

Abstract

The aim of the article is to trace the process of constituting and understanding “I” in prose works by Zygmunt Haupt. The analysis of the contents and problems included in the cycle of stories-memories about Nietota, disconnected, and fragmentary works being rather disarranged collections of memories evoked in memory and traces of the past than narrations having an established arrangement deriving from the logic of the argument or a linear sequence of events. This method of shaping a novel by Haupt’s narrator is confronted with a method of work of a historian who, using the principle of montage or the conception of a dialectic image, proposed in Pasaże by Walter Benjamin, aims to rouse a collective awareness by the revision of a forgotten being in the present. A similar phenomenon of clashing and overlapping of two realities, the past and the present of returning to it, is presented in Haupt’s prose. The fragments of the past that do not constitute a coherent whole constitute a starting point for narrator’s considerations on the matter and mechanism of memory whose narrative work would allow for constituting and proving the existence of some “I”. The very narration, though, does not lead to self-cognition. Stories about Nietota and memory of it go beyond a traditional (grounded in Kant’s philosophy) thinking of the subject and its temporary identity do not create an illusion of a coherent continuum, a coherent subject, that constitutes itself, looking behind, in the past, finding its confirmation in time, as what exists in the past as well as in memory, is not subject to a final symbolism and inscription into the order of self-narration, and, hence, questions coherence and identity of the one who speaks.