Abstrakt: | This dissertation attempts to interpret Stanisław Dygat’s novels
with regard to the manner in which he inscribes the category of l a c k
in his oeuvre. Lack – understood herein as a figure of mind, and not
merely a rhetoric one – manifests itself on the pages of Dygat’s writings
as a capacitor of desires.
This thesis is divided into three chapters: Economics and Lack,
Desire and Lack, Time, War and Lack.
The first one reads Dygat’s subsequent novels, with an emphasis
placed on lack as a framework of thinking of love. Precisely, it turns
out that the romantic decisions made by the protagonists depicted are
governed by the principles of economics. Rational calculations, as well
as assessments of incomes and expenditures of engaging in relationships,
happen to be the most common reasons for sacrificing love.
The second chapter – Desire and Lack – endeavours to provide
an answer on why lack remains vital in the structure of a novel. In
Dygat’s prose, the heroes construct their subjectivities through desire,
which is inevitably founded on lack. The constant oscillation around
fulfilment and non-fulfilment constitutes a subjectivity rooted in
shortfall. Lack stimulates it in order to discover new desires, whereas
the subject’s approaching and distancing from the object of its desire
establish a convenient position for arousing and depriving Dygat’s
protagonists of pleasure.
The third chapter – Time, War and Lack – supplements the considerations
undertaken in the first two chapters with a new understanding
of lack, associating it with nostalgia. This new conceptualisation
allows one to re-think memory as a burning sense of emptiness
induced by loss. In Dygat’s oeuvre, this case redirects us to not only the experience of World War II, but also the social changes that have
occurred during it and in its aftermath.
In my dissertation, I have not strived for reaching the fixed
answers responding to the problems posed. Still, I am convinced
that the possibility of embracing Stanisław Dygat’s prose should be
embedded in the affirmation of a multiplicity of interpretative decisions.
They provide one with an opportunity of including the writer
in the particular group of authors, and, simultaneously, they draw
him out from it.
Figures of Lack, aside of its placement within the contemporary
criticism and literary history, endeavours concurrently to read Dygat’s
works through the apparatus of the economy of literature. Hitherto,
such a confrontation has been either peripheral or not taken. |