Represented world and narration

1[This article tackles the issue of “point of view” and an understanding of the represented world that somehow “confirms” it.]

2[…] The represented world is taken to mean a recipient-concretised fabular content of narrative, that is, a total number of represented objects and their interrelations. Following Henryk Markiewicz’s suggestions, one also needs to highlight a somewhat more general understanding of represented reality (Markiewicz 1966, 87) that would include a personal1 narrator and the act of narrating as a represented object [telling as showing] as well as a projected reader. By a personal narrator we mean both a first-person narrative subject (the experiencing subject within the represented world) and a third-person narrator, provided it signals any personal traits and, especially, assumes a “role”. At the same time we exclude: an anonymous narrator, who comments on events from an extra-personal position of the world maker and, by this token, is identified with the creative subject (the work’s author), and a neutral “reporter” that functions as a non-personal camera-eye or recording tape. Likewise, the projected reader is only the reader represented in a work by means of appropriate apostrophes that evoke a specific “portrait”. An assumed addressee, on the other hand, does not belong to the novel’s reality. It is made present in the work construction on condition that the contact (phatic) function is fulfilled.2

3The relative autonomy of the represented world as a distinct vehicle for communicating information originates in the specific properties of the narration, the foundation of which is established by the convention of quasi-accounts about quasi-events, whose aim is to bring about appear|ances of the autonomy of presented facts. In consequence, besides direct generalisations and judgments, there is the sense of the state of affairs actualised in a given concretization. The character and direction of the concretization is, however, reliant upon the selection of narrative modes of discourse and relations between them.

4The formal autonomy of novel events is guaranteed by a singular “scenic presentation” that brings about the dramatization of the fabular material. The detailed quality of presentation, produced by an approximation of discourse time and story time, facilitates the receptive actualisation of the presented “present”. At the same time, the presentation can complicate consolidating processes producing a relatively univocal combination of particular situational aspects and phases into superordinate entities such as plot, protagonist, represented world, and, first and foremost, a set of cognitive and postulative generalizations (Markiewicz 1966, 82). At this juncture, the autonomy of the represented world implicitly contains a tendency to atomization (“moments”) and ambiguities. This tendency is not always actualised because in specific novels the quantitative dominance of “showing” over “telling” does not determine its role in the semantic structure of a novel. Informative functions, attributed to concrete media and configuration of their mutual relations, play a more significant role. Therefore, the quantitative dominance of “scene” does not necessarily collide with its secondary and exemplifying character with regard to the narrator’s utterances that consolidate the mutual relations and dominant sense of evoked events.

5The recounted events, in turn, acquire some degree of autonomy when the teller does not transcend his informative-reporting function and focuses on facts, not their relations. Hence a successive treatment of events is closer to “reporting” (even if we deal with a so-called “leaping account”) than iterative forms that order the material of the novel. In the latter case, the teller’s interpretive actions can only be repressed by appearances of complete induction (Eile 1983, 82). Usually, however, the account evokes events through synthetic characterisation and, unless definitive conclusions are made directly, they are relatively easy to actualise in the recipient’s consciousness thanks to the technique of summarising renderings of specific progressions of events, characters and settings.

6A special case of the primacy of recounting with regard to the represented world can be found in works in which the act of narrating is foregrounded. This effectively backgrounds the presenting evocation of the represented world. In this situation the mode of presenting events depends on a narrator and his attitude to the narrative object. Also, the narrating becomes an important narrative object itself.

7Despite the fact that the represented world has the primary function of communicating ideological-referential assumptions mainly in the personal novel, in which “showing” reduces “telling”, it has a substantial role also in the authorial novel, especially when the author acquires the appearances of neutrality due to formal dramatization. The separate quality of comments and “shown” facts clearly highlights the lack of harmony or even contra|diction between these two means of communication. This contradiction can be intentional when the exposure of the teller’s unreliability is at stake. In other cases, it is possible to speak about collision between the discourse and story dimensions in the novel and, therefore, about heterogeneous semantic structure pointing, obviously, to an unintentional effect: artistic mistake.

8The role of information communicated through actualisations of concretised states of affairs relies on the autonomy degree of the repre|sented world and the narrator’s comments. Otherwise, even in the case of subordination to directly formulated generalisations, the represented world serves to confirm or develop the generalisations or, less often, to verify utterances deprived of the privilege of absolute reliability (of projected narrator, characters).

9The relation to the narrator’s generalisations fails to completely determine the function of the represented world within the semantic content of a novel. The category of narration exclusively relates to mediation between presented events and reader, that is, the strategy of the narrating and the issue of ideological-referential perspective with regard to the narrated. For this reason, even the most neutral way of narrating does not entail a complete autonomy of the represented world because, by definition, it possesses a relative autonomy as created, although the degree of subordination to authorial worldview can vary significantly. Because the worldview aims for some kind of representativeness of extraliterary reality, this reality must constitute a final point of reference. The signals of superimposed order are decipherable in every novel but the quality and direction of changes (within narration as well as consolidating inter|pretations of the layer of represented objects) can only be gauged in the relation to the broader context [of external reality]. It helps differentiate the formal dramatization, as one tactic towards the reader, from attempts at neutral reporting, ideological and referential scepticism, and assumed ambiguity. In effect, only analyses of both levels of novel as well as proper coordination of points of reference expose an author’s position and helps establish the quality and actual role of the adapted narrative perspective. Beside elucidated generalisations, directly revealed by the teller or the characters, a group of implied generalisations communicated directly by the represented world is revealed.

Semantic levels in the novel: elimination and representation

10In the poetics of the novel, a separation between two types of generalisations, implicit and explicit, refers to basic ways of communicating world knowledge and postulates to a reader. However, this distinction does not determine the novel’s semantic complexity. Practically, a correct sense of a discursive formulation can lie “between words” whilst a proper generalisation of concrete and individual renderings can be a simple logical conclusion or a complex, multistage and questionable operation. Thus, one can claim that a novel’s entire ideological-referential strategy relies, on principle, on a concept of semantic bifurcation or two-levelledness: expressed (discursively or “visually”) and implied (actualised in the reader’s hypothetical presuppositions grounded in the text) meanings. Importantly, a narrator’s perspective and the structure of represented reality tell upon the proportion of both planes.

11The rules of concretisation, conditioned by medium and convention, constitute a general foundation. As Juliusz Kleiner noted, in under|standing a literary artwork, a fundamental role plays the proportion of the implied and the expressed, with the caveat that the latter naturally comes to be organically contained in a work, what “conclusively proves that it [the work] is not just an aggregate of sentences or words” (Kleiner 1967, 310). As a result, the final understanding of a novel is a matter of reception that actualises higher layers of the text. Even when complying with the rules of interpretive correctness, the principle of variable reading abides (see Markiewicz 1966, 77-78).

12Insofar as actualization of meanings in a novel relies essentially on larger semantic units, the ambiguity of particular words or sentences plays only an auxiliary role. The above-mentioned rule of two planes (two-levelledness), consisting of primary (basic) and secondary (deep) meanings, manifests itself in three ways: through an opposition between the narration and the represented world, which characterises only some works; by means of filling up semantically important gaps in the act of narrating; or, finally, as a superstructure of meanings of particular sentences, which comes into being thanks to a semantic character of states of affairs (objects, situations) actualised at the initial stage of concretisation.

13In the first case, the concretisation process leads to the verification of truths and values expressed directly by a narrator. The verification includes the phenomenon of exposing an unreliable teller or a personal inter|mediary of narrative as well as a situation when the discrepancy between a narrator and facts constitutes a specific mode of expression and a particular viewpoint. We exclude relatively straightforward cases of “irony” where the discrepancy mentioned above is only apparent; a narrator’s disapproval is explicit albeit concealed in the utterance construction (satirical novel). One should rather expand on works in which the proper meaning of events manifests itself beyond or even against direct suggestions of a text, although the tensions between the narrated and the narrating, that is, its stylistic tone and actualised value scale, boost the “pure” expression of facts themselves, reliant on a presupposed value scale of the recipient. Some|times we deal with a strong contrast between an easy-going, bantering, or even specifically hilarious tone of an account and a tragic quality of the depicted scenes. A good case in point is Stefan Żeromski’s oeuvre (e.g. Adamczewski 1949, 151-152); tragic events sometimes intermingle with a simple and colloquial narration and, despite the deeper intentions of his work, they seem to undergo toning down or submersion in the everyday. An analogous narration can be found, for example, in Hemingway’s works, Isaak Babel’s stories (Wasilij’s Kordnikov’s Letter addressed to his mother) or Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of short stories from Auschwitz entitled Farewell to Maria [Pożegnanie z Marią].3

14Borowski’s Auschwitz works are a very good case in point. The narrator utilises an identical voice to talk about swindles, prison entertainment, and events on the notorious train platform. In The People Who Walked On [Ludzie, którzy szli] he cursorily mentions the gassing of newly transported people when recounting the building of a pitch and football games. However, this is a far from indifferent report and only superficial reading could explain a critical backlash against him. These instances of dishar|mony between tone and theme, frequently combined because humour serves to blunt the theme, function not only as a reaction against pathos in martyrological literature. This strategy can also have a viewpoint function, seen clearly in the narrator’s considerations in Borowski’s novella Auschwitz, Our Home… [U nas w Auschwitzu]:

But they are really quiet amusing, these civilians. They react to the camp as a wild boar reacts to firearms. Understanding nothing of how it functions, they look upon it as something inexplicable, almost abnormal, something beyond human endurance. […]
Today, having become totally familiar with the inexplicable and the abnormal; […] I look at these civilians with a certain indulgence, the way a scientist regards a layman, or the initiated an outsider.
Try to grasp the essence of this pattern of daily events, discarding your sense of horror and loathing and contempt, and find for it all a philosophic formula. For the gas chambers and the gold stolen from the victims, for the roll-call and for the Puff, for the frightened civilians and for the “old numbers’. (Borowski 1976, 111-112)

15And one more example from The People Who Walked On:

A man has only a limited number of ways in which he ca express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words. (Borowski 1976, 94)

16The extenuating tone does not decrease values, but by evading difficult generalisations it places the “inhuman” in the realm of the hostile yet human world. Thus it makes the reality of evil all the more pronounced and determines the reaction of the receiver, who cares about the fact that „between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death [zagazowano]” (Borowski 1976, 84).

17The system of semantic two-levelledness, relying on discrepancy between a character of narration and a sense of presented facts, is a peculiar phenomenon insofar as writers usually aim for harmony of both planes. The second plane mainly comes into being in the semantic structure of the represented world as another stage of concretisation. Stefania Skwarczyńska lay the groundwork for this phenomenon when she rightly discerned between “understatements”, as obvious results of the schematic construction of any literary work, and “omissions”, introduced deliberately in the semantic structure (Skwarczyńska 1947).

18We can generalise that filling the “understatements” is a feature of a rudimentary stage of concretisation as long as a reader consolidates a narrator’s information into some entities as well as reconstructs images and event sequences, and thus transcends the bounds of text schematas. In like fashion, a cinema viewer reconstructs the elliptical film structure. The system of “understatements” is in principle invisible, conditioned by the properties of a medium and reception possibilities; it makes for a convention routinely adopted by a reader. Although the quantitative proportion between the “filled” and “understated” places pertains to various artistic tendencies and particular writers’ individual qualities, the fact of understating is not intentionally significant because an author omits only those details that he deems unimportant for the entire work. This issue can therefore pertain to the viewpoint concept of a novel provided that we take into account only the selected theme and selection criteria, discussed later.

19Intentional omissions are another issue. They also may have an external character as in cases when allusions or periphrases signal phenomena that a writer willingly refrains from providing or introducing into his/her works because of censorship or public opinion. Omissions are also of external nature when they are simply part of a narrative strategy. The significance of omissions is only revealed by their function within the semantic structure of an entire work, irrespective of the contents of information omitted underway. For this reason, for example, omitting certain fragments from a protagonist’s biography can be either a result of a mere “understatement” or a meaningful gesture, intricately tied in with the worldview concept of the whole, stemming from the limitation of “omniscience”. Therefore, omissions are usually ingredients of a personal novel. A good case in point is The Doll [Lalka, 1972] by Bolesław Prus in which the silence regarding the final stages of Wokulski’s life leads to an open composition of the novel.

20The technique of omissions in combination with the limited reliability of an utterance and the evocativeness of “complete” elements also forms the foundation of monologic and dialogic utterances in contemporary psychological prose. In effect, a limitation of characters’ self-knowledge accompanies the limitations of narratorial omniscience. A good case in point is Sergei G. Bočarov’s juxtaposition of narrative techniques in Turgenev’s and Tolstoj’s novels (Bočarov 1963). Whilst the dialogue of Bazarov and Petrovič in Fathers and Sons directly expresses the mental situation of both characters through a collision of two different positions, in Tolstoy words can miss characters’ condition independently of their intentions, thus they cannot claim to express anything completely.

21In like fashion, a more intimate form of interior monologue has also undergone transformation if one takes into account the difference between the Stendhalian method of naming characters’ feelings and a more modern evocative variety of this technique. An exceptional theme of the contem|porary novel is frequently the issue of interior insincerity or even pers|pectival deformation of a character’s inner life, conditioned by relativity of each introspection and auto-analysis, pressures of the unconscious, and the existence of mental stereotypes to which a person involuntarily subscribes.4 Contemporary writers are in fact more aware than their predecessors of the imperfections of the literary medium that invariably deforms and simplifies the unstable and the unspeakable in the human psyche (Mendilow 1952, 145-146).

22However, the semantic complexity of the represented world best manifests itself in the semantic structure of apparently “complete” elements. Omitted by means of silence, or only partially revealed by the narrator, the superstructure results here from the fact that represented objects and their interrelations not only create a fictional quasi-reality but usually also represent something else. The system of linguistic signs contained in a novel (that is, narrator’s and characters’ utterances) leads to another, secondary system, present in the elements of the represented world.5 Their semiotic function occurs to a varying intensity insofar as introducing characters or situations frequently explains compositional necessities or a recipient’s preferences rather than referential reasons.

23An actualisation of a deeper meaning of the represented world makes for another stage of concretisation and depends on a position acquired by the reader. Although explicit classificatory and typological operations of the narrator often assist in this process […], the very construction of the represented world constitutes an additional semantic dimension. A complete comprehension of a novel requires, therefore, the knowledge of rules utilised with regard to an assumed addressee, that is to say, the knowledge of the conventions in force (see Ossowski 1966, 19-21; 80-82).

24This issue is prone to become a bone of interpretive contention.6 This is not only about a reader that fails to assume a semantic position with regard to the represented world and thus does not go beyond the plot actualisation, a basic concretisation stage. Also critics set on chasing an author’s views tend to make mistakes, especially when a work violates an expected configuration of conventions. For these reasons, even as shrewd a critic as Antoni Lange failed to grasp the metaphorical aspect of the break-up scene between Judym and Joasia,7 and reduced it to the dilemma whether a doctor can marry a woman. One can even hazard a gene|ralisation that most misunderstandings result from overlooking an allusion or from too literal a comprehension of phenomena put in metaphoric or symbolic terms. Sometimes the contrary is the case: when critics seek meaning where there is none. When reduced in concretisation to basic meanings, a work can become describable and comprehensible, but invariably its content becomes effectively poorer. Take Ulysses, when concretised as an image of Dublin and its inhabitants, general human issues will be skipped entirely.

25The notion of representativeness of represented objects and their interrelationships with respect to extraliterary reality plays a fundamental role in giving meaning to a novelistic world irrespective of whether this extraliterary reality is of an empirical, transcendental, or postulated nature. This is to say, without usually losing its ontological autonomy, a singular creation becomes a representative of general phenomena that go beyond a work in question by means of specific creative acts, a narrator’s direct formulations, and traditional reception types. This is possibly what David Daiches meant when he wrote that “a novel is symbolic expression in the sense that the actions and characters described are interesting chiefly because of their ability to stand for kinds of actions and characters larger than themselves” (Daiches 1967, 45). Likewise, in Erich Kahler’s opinion “what seems […] to set the novel apart from all previous narrative is this important feature: that the novel carries in the individual story a more than individual significance; that it shows, by means of an individual story, a general condition of the human being. In other words, what turs a story from a mere anecdote into a novel is its symbolic quality” (Kahler 1955, 122-123).

26These assertions are supported by a three-part relation proffered by Stanisław Ossowski and Mieczysław Wallis (Ossowski 1966, 104-107; 178-181; Wallis 1968, 90) according to whom a representing object (linguistic signs in literature) imposes on us a specific represented object, which in turn usually refers to its “designate”, transcendental with respect to literary reality. Singular facts, factual characters and events, may constitute such a point of reference, although a novel often aims for generalising transformations. However, at stake are categories of real objects (a “genre” rendering [as in genre painting]); sometimes fictional objects with an ontological foundation in collective consciousness (e.g. myths, utopias), or a current literary tradition (patterns of characterisation and situation in stylisation and parody); sometimes specific notions, ideas, or postulates transmitted vicariously by means of certain “visualising”; and finally configurations of relations between specific phenomena or qualities (structural rendering). In effect, representativeness spans between analogy, based on “genre” similarity, and generalisations showed with help of objects and relations between them in a work. Represented objects, in turn, aspire to reproducing or imitating phenomena from the empirical (external or psychic) reality, grounded either in an intersubjective vision of the world, prevalent in a given epoch (“objective” norms) or in individual perception (“subjective” norms) or they have an arbitrary character and thus their relation to their external object is determined by more complex relations. Taking both of these aspects into account, we can adopt Henryk Markiewicz’s claim that representativeness realises itself in the framework of two interpretations: veristic and symbolic, whereas in concrete works numerous intermediary and mixed forms occur (see Markiewicz 1966, 145-148). This issue is a key one with regard to the ideological presuppositions of a novel because thanks to it a fictional reality, created through non-assertoric sentences, becomes a form of a statement about the world.

27Represented objects in the veristic novel aim at relatively analogous imitation of an appropriate class of phenomena. In its traditional variant, the question of socio-characterological typicality was foregrounded and realised by means of arbitrary selection and condensation of features.8 Depending on an intensification of these measures and a narrator’s classificatory generalisations, a reader was able to arrive at a relatively univocal interpretation even when the authorial narrator’s opinions were not directly formulated. Typicality is therefore an analogous device to discursive generalisations in a novel, from which it differs only by “dramatization” (showing) of presupposed theses. An excessive employ|ment of these devices and consequent schematicism occurred only in ideologically charged and satirical novels because writers usually attempted to combine general and individual properties and generalities with “cases”. Yet even then authors often introduced “key” scenes with a special bearing on the interpretation of the entire work in which representative elements significantly dominate over singular elements. A good case in point is Longinus Podbipięta’s journey and death; a knight, hilarious in his naivety, loses characteristic features that stood in the way of an authorial idea of grandiose demise of “a Christian knight”. Likewise, Reymont in The Peasants [Chłopi] imbues the death scene of Maciej Boryna with a grand generalisation, emphasising the peasant’s attitude to the feeding land.

28In the post-Flaubertian era, when the superior rules of ordering phenomena were undermined and the extensification of features supressed intensification, the notion of representativeness acquired another meaning. It ceased to be a matter of selection and condensation, and became a matter of totality that needed to characterise a particular “moment” or “moments” of human life. It must be borne in mind when speaking about the syntheticality of the contemporary novel9 because this very assumption overtly demonstrates how this syntheticality really operates. As Erich Auerbach perceptively wrote with regard to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, “what happens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common” (Auerbach 1953, 552) An interesting combination of an individual’s existential situation with universal ambitions, carried out on a different plane than socio-characterological typicality, is Leopold Bloom from Ulysses. Trying to make him an everyman, James Joyce made him a part of society and an alienated individual, both Irish and Jewish.

29The rejection of the division into the important and the trivial suggests the relativism of norms and relates to a quasi-reporting position of the narrator. Choice seems to be replaced with depth and ideological statements with ambiguity. Beside the typicality representativeness, also “reporting” representativeness occurs in the modern novel, largely deprived of imposed interpretation. In addition, more general cognitive ambitions and a specific concept of representing that lodges in the very claims of new realism are signalled, as noted in the investigations of stream of consciousness, by mythological analogies and symbols.

30We treat the second variety of a novel’s referential construction, the symbolic representativeness, quite broadly and we adapt as its basic indicator a particular relation between sign (an element of represented world) and designate. In contrast to verism, a symbolic object or act does not reproduce its designate because of the fact that its concrete and sensorily imaginable quality belongs to a different phenomenal class from a sensorily non-imaginable designate. As a result, the point of reference is only more or less clearly suggested, dependant on the domination of a simple semantic “replacement” or of the opening of intellectual/emotive perspective on non-concretiseable phenomena (see Ossowski 1966,177-181). These principles served to found the rudimentary distinction between allegory, arbitrarily bound with a notion at hand (see Wallis, 1968, 86-88) and offering a univocal interpretation, and symbol. The latter was supposed not to be subjected to specific meaning but relied on a multi-directional signification expressed by means of mood or complex analogies. In practice, however, this distinction is up to debate due to a large number of temporary phenomena as well as to the fact that in programmatic enunciations of some literary movements it was treated in postulational and axiological terms, frequently incompatible with artistic achievements (see Krzyżanowski 1962).

31As a rule organising the semantic structure of a novel, the symbolic representativeness replaces the reproduction of real objects and their interrelations with relations between ideas. These interrelations, in turn, make for the background of veristic or fantastic surface. From a historical perspective, the symbolic representativeness constitutes a less important trend because of the prevalent mimetic tradition. It pertains to attempts at enriching the poetics of the fictional prose, based on conventions of the bourgeois epic, with other literary propositions, especially of the parable, the symbolic poem, and specific types of indirect poetry.10 Opposite tendencies with regard to the social novel of manners predominantly led to attempts at merging the novel with poetry at many levels: from the stylistic dimension to the construction of the represented world. Romantic prose (e.g. Hoffmann, Novalis, Poe, Melville) essentially laid the groundwork for this opposition, which was continued in fin de siècle poetry, especially by symbolism, and it finally consolidated in the “creative” prose of the twentieth century, mainly in short forms such as the novella, short story, or borderline genres, included in the poetic prose, although those phenomena come to dominate within some novel-long works too.

32The functions of the symbolic representation with respect to the meaning and ideology of a novel significantly differ from one author’s intentions to another’s. A reference to parable, based on the traditions of the Bible and medieval morality plays, can, for example, relate exclusively to its universal tendencies, but it can also signal a direct continuation of allegoricalness and didacticism. This explains, amongst others, the link between works by Franz Kafka on the one hand with the positivist morality parables like “The Naval Legend” by Henryk Sienkiewicz and satirical allegories by Anatol France on the other.11 In like fashion, the method of introducing poetic imaging into fictional prose varied immensely. Some sought escape from everyday clichés, others stressed poetry’s synthetical potential and discovered in the external world, as the symbolists did, “an image of the world of ideas”, and others still drew from this source the principle of a metaphorical allusion, evocation instead of statement, and thus often came closer to referential escapism. Arguably, it is no simplification to claim that in the veristic novel typicality was a means of the authorial interpretation, while simple relating endowed the reader with the privilege of interpretation; on the other hand, in the symbolic representativeness analogous discrepancy exists between a simple replacement of ideas with props and a multifaceted evocation of meanings.

33The distinction of the two fundamental types of representativeness is, however, porous. The categories of phenomena determined by the veristic representativeness have frequently been exploited in illustrations of some general ideas. Yet mutual relationships of sociological description and universalising ideological utterances have been determined in diverse ways and undergone substantial changes in the evolution of the novel over the last century.12 The universalisation of meanings usually relates to a certain extent to limiting the social and environmental typicality and applying the representativeness of viewpoints (Dostoevskij)13 or existential circum|stances (Joyce, Camus, Malraux, and Sartre). When a metaphorical and broad meaning of events becomes overt, critics sometimes use the notion of “grand metaphor” (Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and The Pearl by John Steinbeck).

34The symbolic plane can establish an additional layer that not necessarily collides with the realistic substance of novels. This artistic method allowed writers to extend the semantics in the stream-of-consciousness novels and other works that employ informal or trivial events. A good example is John Updike’s The Centaur where the author made use of mythology and allusively combined modern-day Americans with gods and heroes. In other cases, especially in novels that adhere to the Jungian theory of archetypes, there is a tendency of a “vertical representativeness”: each character becomes a configuration of an indefinite series, moving back and forth along the time axis without simultaneously ceasing to be situated in a specific time and space (see Mendilow 1952, 139-140). In Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann the eponymous character’s life frequently reflects Abraham’s, Isaac’s, and Jacob’s, while at the same time the novel refers to the future, to the history of Jesus Christ. In actuality, Jerzy Cieślikowski’s study of sacral archetypes in Eliza Orzeszkowa’s On the Niemen [Nad Niemnem] (2014) investigated the extreme extent to which the transcendental plane may operate next to the traditional realist novel poetics without causing any disturbances (Cieślikowsk 1969).

35 The generalising tendency is not necessarily tantamount to the resig|nation from individualising and abstract schematas, typical in novels for example by Stanisław Brzozowski. It can serve as a transparent synthesis (“The Battle of Segdemoor” [Bitwa na równinie Sedgemoor] by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and The Stranger by A. Camus) or an “open”, enquiring approach to different issues (Dostoevskij, and the so-called “man’s fate” or “condition humaine”” novel in the twentieth-century French novel). A common feature is the search for a deeper meaning of events even when we deal with an informal subject and a simple, mundane protagonist (a murder of an old money-lender or an episode from the life of an Algerian clerk). Herein would lie the difference between the universalism of the contemporary novel and classical tragedy, showing a “perennial man”. Yet the balance is not always maintained. A decline of social and historical details which embed a novel in its time and space leads to apparent realism. In Polish literature, this phenomenon is quite explicit in the theory and practice of Stanisław Przybyszewski and some novels by Wacław Berent, short of spatiotemporal location (Rotten Wood [Próchno], Living Stones [Żywe kamienie]). This tendency led to allegoric prose by Tadeusz Miciński and, in Przybyszewski’s oeuvre, his expressionist vision of The Cry [Krzyk].

36From amongst novels that try to subjugate the mimetic tendencies of verism to a symbolic evocation of meanings we can differentiate three tendencies. The arbitrariness of narrated events is expressed either through a parabolic pattern of plot, where events and character-puppets illustrate an idea (as in a philosophical tale or satirical allegory) through a condensed, synthesising stylisation, or a favourite device of modern writers: possible yet extraordinary existential events, in which, as Dürrenmat put it, “the fundamental nature of man can still be glimpsed in an ordinary face” (see preface to Dürrenmatt 1960). Importantly, some veristically interpretable works can also be symbolically interpreted although the basis for such an interpretation often remains contentious.14

37 The replacing function of a broadly comprehended symbolic imaging seems to operate mainly in works that violate real-life plausibility, thus, to a certain extent, in the non-mimetic and poetic ones, highlighting the arbitrariness of plot. However, the hyperbolising deformation and science fiction can serve a specific concept of mimeticism because transformed elements of the real world are not “pure fantasy” nor do they constitute arbitrary signs for specific notions or ideas.

38In the fantastically giant mouth of Pantagruel, Alcofribas discovers the society and economic system of France of the time. Here fantasy and mimesis overlap; that is to say, the fictional designates, or the traditional tales about extraordinary adventures and giants, merge with the real-life reality. What serves to combine both realms is the “deep sense” of work: the Rabelaisian pantagruelism, according to Auerbach, is nothing specific but “a grasp of life which comprehends the spiritual and the sensual simultaneously, which allows none of life’s possibilities to escape” (Auerbach 1953, 281). The rules of mimeticism were not negated but extended because the introduction of fantasy eventually serves to “bring the real from the super-real”.

39The mimetic tendency is more explicit when the deformation of the represented world is brought about by hyperbole only. The hyperbolisation of events and characters in Don Quixote does not collide with the social positioning of characters and the reproduction of the everyday life of Spain of the time. The symbolic and universal status of the Mancha knight’s adventures results from interpretive activities of readers of subsequent generations, that is, a specific movement of concretisation that goes beyond the work’s intention: Don Quixote was assumed to be a “highbrow entertainment”, containing no philosophy.15 Such a “sharpened” type of the veristic representativeness occurs, for example, in a satirical novel, which leads to a larger or lesser extent to an imbalance of a common sense of proportion.

40Fantastic setting in novels relating future events (vis. utopia and science fiction) adheres to a particular type of representativeness.16 One variety can become allegorical as in George Orwell and Karel Čapek, although its composition is most often grounded in other principles. The represented objects, in accordance with the veristic fiction, normally refer to the extraliterary reality in compliance with the representativeness principles; for this reason, they do not present ideas by employing allegorical arbitrary signs. Yet the expression of a particular viewpoint, a synthetic interpretation of the essence of issues at hand, and a non-individualised reproduction become leading tendencies and bear on didactic inclinations. Empirical reality becomes typicalised in its own way. In the positive utopia, the condensation and hierarchisation of real world properties, relying on interpretation and cognition, which would be typical for the veristic novel, is replaced by a clustering and highlighting of desired values that express some postulates and at the same time signal in a negative way the current state of affairs. The reproduction by analogy is replaced with an antithetic reference: people or institutions present a perfect model, based more on an opposition to, rather than a continuation of, the existing state of affairs. This is why the idea of “return to nature” is reflected even in concepts of societies of developed material civilisation (H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods). In works that locate utopian elements within a realist image of reality (the Nipu island in The Mikołaj Doświadczyński cases [Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki] by the Enlightenment author Ignacy Krasicki or Bodzanty phalansteries in A History of Sin [Dzieje grzechu] by Stefan Żeromski) or at least a realist frame (Men Like Gods), the antithetic character of reproduction is very visible.

41A different set of rules governs negative utopias (anti-utopias) popular these days. There is no antithesis between the present and the future but a predicted relation, based on a particular vision of developmental tendencies of the modernity. The projected image of the future constitutes a one-sided, often satirical, hyperbolisation of the negative features, discovered in a specific manifestation in the current state of affairs. Such a “predicting” becomes essentially a “distorting mirror” of modernity as in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and his numerous successors in Western literature.

42The principle of prediction binds the negative utopia with science fiction and can lead to a coexistence of both of these genres On the Silver Globe [Na srebrnym globie by Juliusz Żuławski or The Caves of Steel by Isaak Asimov). This variety has its own objectives and regularities. Its dominant feature is the merging of fantasy with science, based on contemporary scientific knowledge. The role of invention at this juncture varies so that in the contemporary prose there are on one hand works with merely technological fantasy in focus and on the other a number of novels stressing mainly the transformations in society, politics, and culture, whilst technological advances become backgrounded (see Amis (1961), quoted in Handke (1969, 61-62)). Anti-utopia is all the rage in the West right now, whereas socialist science fiction offers a modern day positive utopia, which is not an antithetic negation of the current situation but the projecting into the future of apparent positive consequences of some contemporary social and political tendencies (see Handke 1969, 41-42, 57, 62-63). In both cases the image of the future refers to the real circumstances and relies on a particular development of one group of features, one that the author believes to be prevalent and nascent. Therefore, there is a sort of hierarchisation that resembles either an ennobling of the present with its desired values dominant over the current relations (e.g. socialist realism), or the degradation of the present, typical for all overtly critical works.

43Similar psychological ambitions are characteristic in several novels by Stanisław Lem (Solaris, Return from the Stars [Powrót z gwiazd]) insofar as the quarries about the man of tomorrow rely on a specific perspective on the man of today. To put it broadly, every vision of the future is not pure fantasy but inherently pertains to an interpretation and valorisation of the current state of affairs.

44Even so general an overview of capacities to represent the extraliterary reality in works with a smaller or larger degree of mimetic ambitions enables us to claim that the notion of creation, attributed to the non-veristic novel, interfaces with the concept of the symbolic represen|tativeness. The violation of reproduction rules is not tantamount to an arbitrary signification or multifaceted evocation of designates.17 None|theless, the poetics of a fable, legend, or dream constitutes a phenomenon particularly prone to such a modelling of reality that would serve to express additional universal meanings. It can be used in creating the typicality of moral deeds and attitudes, simplified or monumentalised characters and conflicts, frequently standing on the brink of the allegorical (Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf) as well as the symbolic. It can serve as a simple semantic substitution or represent presupposed complexity or the ambiguity of imaging (Mating Life [Gody życia] by Adolf Dygasiński, Attalea princeps by Vsevolod Garšin). In the last case, the construction of the plot moves between a modernised parable of a biblical or mythological theme, usually treated arbitrarily or even pretextually (short stories by Jules Supervielle or Prometheus Illbound by André Gide), and a complex meta|phor where the subtext does not constrain the autonomy of elements of the represented world. In other words, the “imaginable” fails to become the sign of the “non-imaginable” but the final sense is a result of evocative emotive-intellectual properties of the used imaging. To put it differently, the adapting of a semantic position with regard to the represented world is a text-implied search for secondary meanings, actualised in the highest stage of concretisation, and not a necessary condition to comprehend relations in that world. An example of such an interpretation can be E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Golden Pot: the extraordinary effect serves as a metaphoric evocation of the mysteries of nature rather than a symbolic replacement of an idea. In modernist literature, the trend in question is represented by, amongst others, Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops [Sklepy cynamonowe], space stories by Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad, Fables for Robots), or L'Inconnue de la Seine by Jules Supervielle.18

45From this perspective, the referential aspect of Kafka’s oeuvre is impossible to classify. Some speak about “hieroglyphs” [pismo obrazowe], which is neither symbolic nor allegoric (no general element) but rather expresses the protagonist’s existence (see Sockel 1959). Others, on the contrary, employ the notion of parable or even myth (see Garaudy 1963). Seemingly, the key lies in the fact that Kafka created, at least in his famous “trilogy of loneliness” (The Trial, The Castle, America), a personal version of parable (see Walser 1961).19 The vision of the world is not presented “from the outside” and therefore its particular elements fail to express any general truths that would directly reveal the author’s position. Thus Kafka avoided the symbolists’ tendency toward interpretation and synthesis discussed by Marcel Raymond (1933, 54-56).20

46On the other hand, the Kafkian visions go far beyond psychological facts or expressionistic endeavours to reproduce the unconscious, best known in the section of Ulysses called “Nighttown”. In compliance with the personal novel principles, the narrator does not constitute any superior consciousness of work and adapts the protagonist’s perspective, although the entire reality undergoes some kind of modelling, which imbues the characters and events with a universal character. Even though Kafka’s trilogy does not introduce a fantasy parable, familiar from his short stories (the metamorphosis of a man into an animal and vice versa), and particular elements of the represented world are ciphers of socio-historical aspects of the time, the three novels are in fact a deformed image of the empirical reality with numerous situational paradoxes (the employer from the castle does not want to receive his employee; trial and sentence without justification) and grotesque hyperbolisations. The generalisation lies in the transformations that create a specific system of hierarchies and relations. The protagonist’s situation (the accused one in The Trial, the estranged and uninvited in The Castle, the hopeless and helpless in America] establishes some point of reference but it is simultaneously the situation of modern man in general,21 not a particular existential position typical for a “central consciousness” in the classical personal novel. For this reason, Stanzel recognised in Kafka’s oeuvre the forerunner of the depersonalised narrative “medium”, subsequently developed so famously in Robbe-Grillet (Stanzel 1964, 48).

47At the same time the external world is not a poetic projection in which the “internal” merges with the “external”. It possesses an autonomy as a factor determining a protagonist’s situation, even though it manifests itself only from his perspective (Freedman 1963, 261). Particular elements of the represented world can be interpreted as a grotesque reproduction of the general class of phenomena to which they belong, or as a substitute symbolic imaging. However, their meaning lies in the general regularities, consisting in the representativeness of the relation between a protagonist and his environment. Thanks to the depersonalisation of the protagonist, which amounts to making him a generalisation of human existence, the expressionistic vision mingles with the universal ambitions of symbolism.

48Finally, a particular quasi-three-layered set of relation characterises works reliant upon the stylisation of the represented world that reproduces or parodies its own model. An immediate point of reference is not at this juncture the extraliterary reality but its model consolidated in a specific epoch. Nevertheless, grounded in a particular configuration of conven|tions, this model seems to address an attitude to the world as well. Therefore, such a stylisation relates not only to poetics but also to the ideology expressed in its prototype (Berent’s Living Stones); more often than not it attempts at the complete or partial negation of the prototype (Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews).

Alternation of reference system. Non-discursive commentary

49A characteristic feature of the novel is that in the same work there may be various types of representation. This changeability of point of reference is in fact one of the rudimentary reasons for the interpretation mistakes we noted above. This mainly relates to these works, essentially veristic, which additionally employ synthesising interpretations, expressing more general problematics or basic presuppositions of the narrated course of events.

50Herman Meyer argued for the symbolic functions of narrative space, from descriptions with superimposed meaning to allegory (Mayer 1957, 620-630). George Gibiau justified that in Crime and Punishment the indirect expression of ideas relates, amongst others, to symbols such as water, sun, air, earth, etc. (Gibiau 1955). Much has also been written about the role of symbols in Flaubert, a proponent of impersonal narration (Demorest 1931). Zola’s works are also very characteristic in this respect, mainly because of a commonly presumed photographic reproduction of reality in naturalism. However, the description of the everyday pertains for Zola to a manifest hyperbolisation of specific properties. This extends the representativeness of characters or objects by symbolic meanings, which go beyond analogous facts from the empirical reality. When Zola transforms factories or tenement houses into monsters, with a life of their own, he makes them acquire a status of signs expressing tendencies of civilization in his times. Nana, likewise, is not just a prostitute, representative for a class of prostitutes, but an embodiment of destructive power of sex and, in the racehorse scene, of the properties of the Second French Empire (Hemmings 1977, 97-98; 151-155).

51 The transition from recounting the external world to symbolism is typical for writers influenced by impressionism as long as they implied that the reader, endowed with suitable intellectual or emotional cues, can discover under the surface of the particular a more general, universal meaning (Proust, for example) (see Moser 1952, 116-119; 275-278). Sometimes such cues could transform themselves into autonomous fragments, loosely connected with the context. In the poetic apostrophe of Rafał Olbromski (protagonist of Żeromski’s novel Ashes [Popioły] (Żeromski 1928), observing a dreamy horse’s head it becomes an embodiment of rudimentary ontological principles and an eternal natural wheel of dying and living. In contrast, there are instances of superimposed meanings embedded in events pertaining to plots bereft of additional cues. When we are using general meanings to interpret a Frenchwoman’s gesture of covering her child’s eyes at the sight of marching Germans (Ilja Erenburg’s Fall of Paris)22 or Rosashorn’s act of breastfeeding a dying man (John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), we necessarily fall back on traditional and allegorical templates. The lack of explicit cues that could channel our attention to “deep meaning” connects these events to metaphorical interpretations in which the final sense of the represented events is a result of their specific evocative merits. This is why the reasons for Judym’s breaking up with Joasia (in Żeromski’s Homeless People [Ludzie bezdomni) or Baryka’s involvement in a communist demonstration (in his The Coming Spring [Przedwiośnie]) cannot be explained, as some critics did, by means of situational and psychological categories because in both cases there is more to those scenes than simply a portrait of the protagonists’ soul. Possibly, Judym’s deed is likely to illustrate the necessity of ascetics and an inevitably tragic Promethean act, whilst an accidental participation of Baryka in the protest of communists, to whose ideas he was not subscribing, suggests that the absence of “grand ideas” in the new Poland can easily lead the disillusioned generation to a revolution.

52Walter Sockel rightly distinguishes between symbols expressing some general ideas and those that pertain to the ideas of the plot (Sockel 1964). That distinction may be even extended and used to cover scenes with substantial evocative impact (“metaphorical” scenes). However, when analysing particular texts, we can encounter classificatory problems, chiefly connected with the latter kind of symbolisation, in so far as it is hard to differentiate between the two types of ideas. General ideas are usually emplotted and the plot ideas predominantly have some general dimension. Nevertheless, next to cases that mainly constitute a synthesis of plot assumptions and appear to condense a representative character of larger wholes, there are constructions that serve more to enrich rather than express basic viewpoint assumptions of the event progression.23 If a classical example of the latter tendency is the “metaphorical” scene of the breakup between Judym and Joasia, the subordinate function with regard to general plot presuppositions occurs in a double meeting of Krzysztof Cedro with Napoleon [from Ashes by Żeromski] where the question concerning the goal of the hardships endured by Polish soldiers during the war in faraway Spain addressed to the emperor is answered with silence, what summarily reflects doubts concerning the participation of the Poles in the Napoleonic war campaigns. A similar function with regard to plot, albeit more akin to allegory, has a scene from Bolesław Prus’s The Doll when Wokulski is forced to leave Hopfer’s cellar without a ladder.24 A more complex variant of the tendency under discussion would in turn be an introduction of castle ruins in Zasławek in the same novel, which does not relativise the ending of the plot but rather opens a double interpretation of Wokulski’s life. The question is whether the protagonist died, as Szuman says, in the “ruins of feudalism” or the act rather expressed his departure from romantic love and spiritual rebirth (Kleiner 1967, 134-135).

53Finally, in the represented world, there are specific elements that are essentially in possession of no autonomous meaning because in a novel’s reality the signifying or evaluating function of other elements dominates. The role of those elements in the semantic structure is only realised in the relation with points of reference. Therefore, we are dealing here with a non-discursive form of commentary that can be called symbolic because of the arbitrary nature of signs. Due to the fact that, seemingly, it is not on a collision course with the principle of “revealing”, the commentary frequently functions as a vehicle for the author’s concealed interferences also including the issue of determining the representativeness. When the meaning of symbols seems obvious, the novel can acquire an authorial status even if deprived of explicit generalisations expressed by its narrator. A good case in point is an experimental novel by Wacław Berent, Winter Corn [Ozimina]; the reduction of direct generalisations does not intrude upon the synthetic view of society, presented, as in Wyspiański’s The Wedding [Wesele] (1998), by means of some minor event. As a matter of fact, although this goal is achieved mainly due to the advanced typisation of characters, which represents individuals, their deeds and ideas, a crucial role is also played by a symbolic commentary (e.g. a suggestive leitmotif of a Negro’s monument, elucidated in the text as “the god of stagnation” or the metaphors with their classificatory and valorising functions used to desribe particular participants of a reception at the Baroness Nieman). These presuppositions in the first edition of Ozimina had been even more transparent because in the following editions Berent deleted scenes that revealed too much of the tenor of the metaphorical content.25

54The symbolic commentary has also important interpretive functions in the works of Stanisław Przybyszewski. It differs from that of Berent’s, however, in that he avoided direct narrative generalisations. Yet if we discover analogies, as the one from Homo Sapiens by Przybyszewski, between thunder that breaks a tree and Falek who in cold blood breaks Maryt’s heart, the author’s philosophical position is not very difficult to grasp.

55Symbolic commentaries need not clash with the rule of the “author’s departure” when they do not suggest specific conclusions but only point to basic problems in a novel. Very telling is the symbol of rotten wood in Berent’s novel under this very title (Rotten Wood). His contemporaries understood it as the decay of artists and their art, but Berent himself pointed in a letter to the magazine Chimera to other interpretive possibilities: “the rotten wood sometimes becomes fertile muck and helps a spectacular wood grow up”.26 Finally, there are symbols that merely constitute “objective correlative” of character’s emotions, a reflection of incomprehensible inner condition through a concrete image. In the modernist Young Poland prose, natural phenomena often had this very function (the symbol of the pine torn apart in Homeless People).

56Allusions also serve as non-discursive commentary in the sense that they lend to a work an additional point of reference with its specific cognitive and interpretive functions. Rarely does the allusion determine the whole construction of a novel, viz. Ulysses and The Centaur. Most often, it is reflected in general assumptions (Kordian and the Boor [Kordian i cham] by Leon Kruczkowski, Samson by Kazimierz Brandys, Hamlet by Laforgue, Erostratus by Sartre) or particular sections (the polonaise at the end of Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski alludes to Wyspiański’s The Wedding or the battle at Małogoszcz from The Faithful River [Wierna rzeka] by Żeromski (1999) to the battle of Thermopylae). The alluded meanings refer either to general human types recorded in classical mythology, the Bible, history, and literature or to social, philosophical, and religious theories; they may of course also relate to specific contemporary events. In the first case, we deal with the extension of the representa|tiveness that can primarily serve the referential means (Joseph and His Brothers by Mann) or acquire features of a valorising allusion [Samson], or a polemic statement (Kordian and the Boor).

57The allusion, usually suggested in the title, is generally quite overt because it appeals to the recipient’s cultural knowledge.27 When a novel alludes to some contemporary theories, the allusion reduces its meanings and concretises a final set of generalisations contained in those theories. Therefore, a work might seem modern but for subsequent generations of readers it loses this quality. Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy within the semantic structure of Voltaire’s Candid historicises rather than generalises the work’s final meaning. This phenomenon is more transparent in texts that intentionally make reference to authentic events familiar to the contemporaries. The readers of Generał Barcz or Mateusz Bigda by Juliusz Kaden Bandrowski recognised certain characters and episodes from the first years of Polish independence but the function of this kind of allusions weakened with time, replaced by the representativeness coming directly from the text.

The role of emotive qualities

58One of the basic means of a novelistic strategy is regulating a recipient’s emotional reactions. It is frequently more effective than using intellectual arguments. Emotional intensity enhances readerly perception; thanks to it, an author may introduce desired contents even without sufficient and suitable explanations. In this way, he combines specific emotions with specific events and invokes judgments in accordance with the work’s implicit axiology. The judgment can obviously be introduced indirectly into the narrative progression, which would make for one of the most perspicuous indicators of the teller’s interference. Yet we are more interested in the instances when axiology occurs in concretisation as a result of a particular concept of the represented world.

59The selection of appropriate theme is crucial. It must potentially contain possibilities of evoking one emotional reaction or another. Authors of melodramas are very well aware of this fact and therefore they exploit similar sets of motifs. However, as indicated by the now obsolete motif of husband-cuckold, the same theme can be treated tragically and comically. Effectively, the applied mode of representation is decisive. In the construction of the represented world, the strategy of emotional appeal is carried out both by the paradigmatic system of co-existence as well as the temporal system of subsequent elements. In the former case, effects are made thanks to the technique of parallels and contrasts, grounded in either coordinating the background with the characters’ emotions (especially in romantic and neoromantic prose) or in an evaluative arrangement of events and characters. On the other hand, in the plot succession, emotions are brought about by gradual announcements of culmination (anticipatory system) or by contrastive surprise (Wiśniowiecki’s words “Bar is conquered!” in With Fire and Sword (Sienkiewicz 1992).

60However, in the narrative and characters’ speech, the stylistic tone plays a major role in evoking emotions. Even when we dismiss the cases of “high” style in poetic prose and certain types of stylisation, the emotive aspect is one of the fundamental features of the classical novel operating in varying degrees. For this reason, treating the so-called “transparency” as a key property of the traditional realist novel proves a superficial knowledge of the term. In his analyses of Balzac’s style, Auerbach demonstrated how the expressions and metaphors evaluatively determine the represented world; they monumentalise and deform it. On the other hand, the stylistic tone serves to demonise the symptoms considered as dangerous and negative, while at the same time it also serves to elevate the character and situation the narrator explicitly sympathises with.

In the dining-room, with its furniture which, worn and shabby though it be, is perfectly harmless to a reason uninfluenced by imagination, “misfortune oozes, speculation cowers’. In this trivial everyday scene allegorical witches lie hidden, and instead of the plump sloppily dressed widow one momentarily sees a rat appear (Auerbach 1953, 472).
[Balzac] bombastically takes every entanglement as tragic, every urge as a great passion; he is always ready to declare every person in misfortune a hero or a saint; if it is a woman, he compares her to an angel or the Madonna; every energetic scoundrel, and above all every figure who is at all sinister, he converts into a demon; and he calls poor old Goriot ce Christ de la paternité. (Auerbach 1953, 482)

61The emotional colouring of Balzac’s prose is tainted with romanticism but similar features can be discovered, to a lesser degree, in other writers from other epochs. Examples are numerous so suffice to refer to the name-day receptions of Cecylia Kolichowska’s friends from Zofia Nałkowska’s Boundary [Granica]. The description is not far from the Balzacian hyperboles or might be attributed to Kafka (in America), although the latter rightly seems to be in no way related to the essentially traditional novel by Nałkowska:

The watchword for this walking of phantoms would be given by Pani Łucja Posztraska, always the first to come running into the kitchen in order, she said, to offer a little assistance. Soon afterwards Pani Cecylia’s old friends, forgotten relatives, or mere contemporaries would descend en masse […] They were excessively fat or exaggeratedly thin, shrivelled and swollen, silver-haired or balding, attired in dignified black dresses from various epochs trimmed with lace or jet beads, wan and strangely fragrant. Most were poor, but not all. Some wore molting skunk over their shoulders, or yellowing ermine, and in their stretched white earlobes they had old-fashioned diamond studs. But all of them were old.
Large bellies rested on spindly legs like barrels poised on match-sticks, while other legs were thick and straight and spilled beneath rolls of black stocking into tightly-laced brogues. Faces sat heavily on plump double chins, fastened at the throat by garnet brooches, or swayed on elongated necks encircled by velvet chokers, while the play of muscles, veins and sinews, “running up and down” visibly beneath the fine yellowish skin, lent to their misshapen faces and spoken words an air of affected grandiloquence, befitting their Sabbath. (Nałkowska 2016, 14)

62The shifts in the emotive saturation of prose pertained to a general reluctance to a narrator’s interference into the text. For this reason, we need to refer once again to Flaubert who not only pioneered the technique of “points of view” but at the same time he was an advocate of the extreme indifference of the narrator; this for sure reflected his general antipathy to anthropocentrism of art and paeans about unbiased scientific report where the words adhered to denoted things:

Through his level of style, a systematic and objective seriousness, from which things themselves speak and, according to their value, classify themselves before the reader as tragic or comic, or in most cases quite unobtrusively as both, Flaubert overcame the romantic vehemence and uncertainty in the treatment of contemporary subjects; there is clearly something of the earlier positivism in his idea of art, although he sometimes speaks very derogatorily of Comte. (Auerbach 1953, 491)

63The limitation of the narrator’s direct interferences in the post-Flaubertian epoch did not always go hand in hand with the complete realisation of the impassibilité principle. It has been noted that various impulses are important in the process of creating the personal novel. They range from the theories of complete “objectivity” to apparently contradictory principles of the subject’s point of view, theoretically devised against the realist bourgeois novel. In the latter case, the experiencing subject, located within the represented world, frequently relativised emotional saturation of a narrative, but it was not a rule that everyone would consistently abide by. A good case in point is a Young Polish novel; there were sections apparently from a protagonist’s perspective married with descriptions whose sympathising attitude to the characters did not exclude the autonomy of the narrator, who addressed the experiences synthetically and as if from the “outside”; see for example A History of Sin by Stefan Żeromski:

The times of a small violet bouquet have come. There was a small bouquet between both mouths and one on the breasts in which a holy heart beats in perpetuity. It has become a smell of kiss and a smell of naked arms. Its tiny leaves were scattered on the snow-white womb, and blocked a passage of mouth to mouth. The lips were kissing it at the same time, and eyes were gazing at it at the same time (Żeromski 1928, 178-179 [translation mine—BL])

64One can hazard a generalization that a specific feature of our times is a combination of themes such as love, death, or nature with “high” style that monumentalises ordinary events and imbues them with an exceptional status for the recipient. In like fashion function the degrading metaphors of Kaden Bandrowski although their goal is different. The author does not highlight any values but properties of the represented world that in this way comes to be interpreted and evaluated. Let’s put into focus the conduct of peasant Deptuła at the reception at Earl Lachowski’s:

Deptuła enters with shaking jowls. He walks like a country priest celebrating at the altar. Another Deptuła, frightened and obsequious, timid, talking discretely, as if he was feverish; religious, praying and no longer like an old fat chimney thick with accrued soot and fat but like a thin small lamp glass, poor oil lamp with one tiny wick. He follows behind the landowner like a dog, faithful and compliant (Kaden-Bandrowski 1965, 148 [translation mine—BL]).

65Even the most impersonal narration does not exclude stirring up evaluative emotions. As noted above, the very theme and the way of arranging motifs entertain the function of provoking feelings. Therefore, a colloquial and non-emotional style does not necessarily negate the principle of causing author-desired feelings but even enhances them in particular respects. The contemporary prose is a good case in point as it avoids pathos and goes against the grain of usual, extra-literary ways in which readers experience emotions. By this principle, Pilar’s story about lynching in a small Spanish town is shocking because of the facts and involved contrasts: the teller’s tone is predominantly matter-of-fact and factual; she saw too much to feel anything anymore (For Whom the Bell Tolls, chapter 10). Hence Joyce, who aimed at absolute indifference in Ulysses, made one more step. According to Daiches, the categories of the sublime or the comic simply cease to exist. They would necessarily entail some consciousness of the differentiating, but such a consciousness is inexistent in Ulysses. The qualities in objects become merely modes of observation (Daiches 1948, 115).

66The innovative quality of the novel is mainly the fact that Joyce tries to forestall a reader’s evaluative emotions even when they straightforwardly result from the concretisation of represented events. Daiches adduces the scene at Barney Kiernan’s “pub” where Bloom shows his better side thinking selflessly about Dignan’s widow and faces anti-Semite digs made by the citizen with a stiff upper lip. In fact, Joyce couches the whole episode in comic terms and thus deprives Bloom of heroic qualities, effectively suppressing any value judgments (Daiches 1948, 117-118).

Notes

• 1 In a non-Stanzelian sense [ed.]
• 2 In this article, we do not discuss the issue of the projected reader.
• 3 The sublating role of mode of narrating can be explicit in specific forms of stylisation. At stake is a reconstruction of another point of view, based on dissimilarities in value scale. However, the discrepancy between facts and the narration of the facts, observed by the recipient, does not seem to constitute an intentional form of expression. If the narrator in The Peasants enumerates trivial everyday occurrences and deaths, the “sublating” simply reflects an everyday course of events in a village community.
• 4 Karol Irzykowski was interested in these issues in Pałuba yet he exposed and explained the faults of consciousness in the commentary. Possibly, the first successful attempt at the device of internal insincerity and relativity of judgements about oneself was Rotten Wood by Wacław Berent, with the character of Jelsky as a good case in point.
• 5 Katarzyna Rosner, who analysed in detail various stances with regard to cognitive function of literary artwork, avers: “In contradiction to a painting or sculpture literary artwork seems to be a two-layered system of signs: linguistic, because it is made with language, and iconic [italics in original], because modifications of the medium lead to, among other things, equipping it with the function of creating signs that present [funkcja kreowania znaków o charakterze prezentacyjnym] (Rosner 1970, 107).
• 6 The conditions of representing particles in an artwork are closely analysed by Wallis (1963, 95-99)
• 7 From a 1899 novel by Stefan Żeromski, Homeless People. [Translator’s note]
• 8 Typicality as a means of creating represented world stands for making characters and events typical for a specific class of phenomena. “Type’, in Kleiner’s words, “encompasses representing function as condensation of group features” (Kleiner 1967, 311). With regard to the act of narration typicality acquires broader sense insofar as it determines positions of singular phenomena in relation to a usually accepted model (Kleiner 1967, 71).
• 9 This is a thesis of, for example, Kahler (1955)
• 10 In Polish literary theory “indirect poetry” [liryka pośrednia] is commonly defined as expressing poet’s emotions indirectly by, say, encoding them in elements of the presented world, for example landscape and the like. [Translator’s note]
• 11 We cannot agree with Kahler’s thesis that allegory constitutes a final stage in evolution of the novel (Kahler 1955, 237). His contention does not only ignore the actual history of the genre, but also the role of ambiguity and axiological relativity in the twentieth century novel.
• 12 The significance of philosophical and moral problematics in contemporary novels has been extensively analysed by Albérès (1959), but unfortunately he falls into sectarianism in his evaluation of the literary output of the 19th century and the 20s and 30s
• 13 Arguably, Leonid Grossman has moved too far in arguing for allegoric embodiment of abstract virtues and vices in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevskij (Grossman 1974).
• 14 A good case in point is the reception of Powieść o Udałym Walgierzu by Stefan Żeromski.
• 15 See Auerbach’s chapter on Don Quixote (Auerbach 1953).
• 16 In what follows we copiously draw from the studies by Trzynadlowski (1963) and Handke (1969).
• 17 We can add further examples to the ones already quoted. In fact, the arbitrary usage of fantasy directed exclusively at the act of creation and deprived of ideological ambitions, including symbols, does not play any major role in fabular prose; there is fantasy with no “deeper meanings”. Works in that vein introduce us into the world of legends and fables only to evoke a specific mood (the so called “horror fiction” and its somewhat highbrow versions such as J. Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript and W. Łoziński’s Enchanted Mansion) or present an extensive view of a community (Roch’s stories in The Peasants by Reymont). Finally, we deal with constructions based on individual visions, hallucinations, or dreams which seems not to violate the generally conceptualized psychological realism (some stories from Hallucinations by L.S. Liciński).
• 18 Jerzy Kwiatkowski called this type of fiction as “metaphysical fantasy” (see Kwiatkowski 1967, 196).
• 19 Apparently, the structure of some of Kafka’s stories is a different matter. Apart from “personal” Metamorphosis, there are works whose organising principle seems to be the relation between ideas. See a detailed analysis of allegory in In the Penal Colony in Brooks & Penn (1959, 389-393).
• 20 [The editors have decided to omit at this point a long quote from Raymond’s essay].
• 21 We deal with some kind of temporal limbo that A. A. Mendilow suggests terming “ideal time” (Mendilow 1952, 139).
• 22 An example quoted by Skwarczyńska (1950, 304).
• 23 Similar distinctions have been proposed by Brown (1957, 52-53) who underlines the difference in the function of symbols in Howard’s End by E.M. Forster. They closely relate with the plot’s progression and additionally highlight the general truth. Also, the function of Vinteuil’s music in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time serves to express authorial opinions about the role of art in human life.
• 24 Here we are dealing with a variant of allegory based on analogy, called “similarity” by Kleiner (1967, 313).
• 25 For example Nina’s vision and her conversation with Wanda; see a critical appendix to the Czytelnik Publishing House edition of Ozimina (Berent 1958, 261-262).
• 26 Quoted in an appendix to Berent’s Próchno (Berent 1956, 326).
• 27 A good case in point is the mythological index at the end of Updike’s Centaur.