Podróż na Atlantydę : o I tomie "Nowej baśni" Teodora Parnickiego

Abstract

The present work is most of all an analysis of volume I of the series of novels by Teodor Parnicki Nowa baśń (A New Fairy Tale), entitled Robotnicy wezwani o jedenastej (Workers Called at Eleven). The scope of the study defines both the work’s merits and its shortcomings. Amongst its advantages can be counted the completeness of the author’s analysis, which results in his work being the very first exhaustive “guidebook” for the novel. On the other hand, the work’s disadvantage is, induced by Parnicki’s text, intricacy of the dissertation, stemming from the novel’s purely historical context. If a reader of the dissertation is not acquainted with the novel in question, the analysis will most certainly seem tedious. Such a meticulous analysis, however, is indispensable for the subsequent interpretations having a two-way course. Firstly, the interpretation follows the thread of the inspiration Ingarden’s or, more broadly, phenomenological thought, had for Parnicki’s writing. Here we deal with the influence on generic transformations of the historical novel as a literary text and the effect the above-mentioned thought had on the way of perceiving, so to speak, historicity itself as a textual/nontextual correlate of the novel. Literaryness is treated by Ingarden himself as a kind of border marking the status of objects and characters appearing in the literary work – and the essence of this border is the suspension of assertion of the judgments said in a text. But, a historical novel seems to be a peculiar case in this scope, where it can be said that the suspension of assertion is the slightest. Parnicki followed this trace and transformed the classical genre of historical novel in order to exceed this suspension to the greatest possible extent. Therefore, the novels by Parnicki should by classified as naturally historical novels. Beings thus appear in these novels in their naturally historical, not simply historical, manner. What results from this is a particular conception of history understood as natural histories to be regained; histories which in their singular occurrence are always primarily nontextual and not yet discussed. Primarily they are biological, not textual. The second group of interpretive operations aims to determine the thematic field of Parnicki’s naturally historical novels as the novels on death. The Parnicki’s text arduously penetrates various European myths and tales considering death, testing if they bring any form of explanation or consolation. The answer to this question is negative. Eventually death remains inconceivable phenomenon, escaping every attempt to explain or understand it. And this is the conviction that Parnicki leaves his reader with. In the last scene of the novel all the text on death silent together with the voice of the narrator – what stays at the stage in the bare life that dies. The principle context of interpretation appears to be the myth of Atlantis that has a triple meaning in the novel. Firstly, its literally meaning is a mythical land that cannot be conquered, even thought the protagonists try to reach its shore. Second, it signifies unconquerable land of “real” history, the land of reliable history, a history-being. Third, the Atlantis becomes a metaphor of death, because only through death we have a brush of experience that cannot be pass on or expressed in words.