Fantazmaty : Grabiński, Prus, Zapolska

Abstract

The book entitled Phantasmata. Grabiński - Prus - Zapolska is composed of three studies focused on the interpretation of the prose works by the above-mentioned writers. The author’s readings of Kochanka Szamoty (Szamota’s Lover), Emancypantki (The Emancipated Women), and Janka concentrate on their phantasmatic “tissue” . The phantasm - being a Freudian construct, the meaning of which has been extended and reinterpreted by Julia Kristeva - is here used for the purpose of a reconstruction of the characters’ various forms of fantasizing. These forms organise and reorganise the narration transforming the traditional generic divisions. The short story by Grabiński is read here not as a fantastic, but rather as a phantasmatic one. Prus’s Emancypantki is being analysed from the perspective of the heroine’s phantasmatic projections, and - having lost its realistic dimension - the book becomes a study in the woman’s humiliation. Zapolska’s Janka bears witness not so much to the mystical tendencies in the prose of the turn of the century, but rather to a confrontation between the masculine phantasm of the woman as the world, and the feminine imagination and the perspective of finding in one’s reading what is truly feminine. Grabihski’s short story makes us read a phantasm, for its narrator creates a representation of a woman whose phantom-like existence stems from a projection of his desire. Fantasizing is the topic and the short story’s governing principle that can be found both inside the text and outside it. The eruption of the hero’s phantasmatic “behaviours” makes us abandon the traditional questions about the “ truth” and “ reality” included in literature. The only certain “fact” is the spinning of the phantasmatic tale (by the writer, and by the protagonist who keeps his diary), or, in other words, the act of enunciation. Emancypantki has been subjected to two different, or even mutually exclusive readings. One of them, empathising with Prus, makes use of various conceptions of gift (J. Derrida, H. Cixous, D. Temple, M. Chabal) in trying to describe the conflict between the economy of exchange and gift, and the externalised conflict (a rumour / Madzia), which is, at the same time, an externalisation of the inner conflict taking place within the protagonist. The other reading develops in spite of Prus, but in keeping with Miss Magdalena’s “logic” of fantasizing. The realistic novel falls into pieces, while becoming a space where the phantasmatic productions of the characters, particularly those of the protagonist, take place. Rumour (one of the forms of fantasizing) and imaginary scenarios become the main “matter” of the symbolical exchange between the characters. Communication undergoes degradation - on the stage of the novel, it is the “mutes” that hold a dialogue guided by their clandestine desires. Miss Magdalena, in her turn, loses, because of the phantasmata’s contents, her charming aspect of a “genius of feeling” , and becomes an allegory of the genius of self-humiliation. Janka is here read from the point of view of the radical otherness inscribed in the novel. The otherness of the daughter in a patriarchal family is not subject to mediation; she is doomed to a radical exclusion, to muteness, to death in life. The meaning of otherness varies according to sex. Man is fascinated with his mission of humanity’s benefactor, he is capable of a phantasmatic acceptance of a generalised abstract identity (misery), but he loses his fight with the specific substance of life. Woman, whom man has rejected, can preserve and implement a part of his “spiritual inheritance” because, among other things, she is open, in her practical activity, to a radical otherness. In the supplement, the reader will find a discussion of two books, by contemporary female critics, concerned with phantasmata.