Na czym utknąłem? : pokaz bezradnej lektury "Słowa i ciała"

Abstract

The article presents an unsuccessful editorial enterprise: the goal was to prepare such an edition of Teodor Parnicki’s The World And The Flesh, which would facilitate to the maximal extent the reading of this extremely difficult novel. The footnotes were supposed to refer mainly to the intricate plot of the novel, but soon it turned out that almost every word requires a detailed commentary (sometimes even prepositions or conjunctions). The number of footnotes scared the commentator himself - what was planned as facilitation, became a sheer evidence of the difficulty of reading the text, an arduous reconstruction of chains of events and their possible senses, meaning, or, quite often just a disclosure of the interpreter’s perplexity. Thus the article documents the process of understanding The World and The Flesh, or, to be more precise, one stage of that process.