1Narratology is about stories. The history of narratology also has its stories to tell. One of the most captivating is the founding myth of the discipline. That well-known story is set in Paris in the late 1960s, featuring a group of charismatic protagonists—Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Bremond, Algirdas Greimas—dreaming to unveil the ultimate grammar of literature. They follow the ideas of Vladimir Propp; the belated reception and astonishing career of his ideas is another thrilling story. Their search for universal story patterns is considered a highlight of the structuralist approach to literature.
2The aim of the collection of studies we want to present here is to tell a different story, one that had been so far hardly told in English. The timing is almost the same but the events unfold in Warsaw, Cracow, Poznań and other Polish university cities. It is the story of Polish narratology, also tagged “structuralist”, but based on different assumptions than its French counterpart. The protagonists of this story would not call themselves “narratologists”—at least at the period of their findings—although from today’s point of view their accomplishments have to be considered crucial for the discipline. A great example is Michał Głowiński, probably the most prominent figure of Polish narratology, who coined terms such as “formal mimeticism” or the “uttered monologue”. Głowiński recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s, the notion of “narratology” seemed to be reserved for the French “fabulology,” and was not used by Polish scholars in the field of narrative studies or “theory of the novel” (Głowiński, 2001).
3Today, when classical French narratology is rather considered an undertaking of historical importance but not a vital source of inspiration for new approaches, the boundaries of the domain are seen differently. From the contemporary perspective there is no doubt that the work of Franz Stanzel—to give a well-known example—does belong to the history of the domain, although the Austrian scholar wouldn’t, like Głowiński, call himself a narratologist. Polish narrative studies resemble, to a certain extent, the influential Erzähltheorie developed by German-speaking scholars (with Friedrich Spielhagen as the founding father and Käte Hamburger, Eberhard Lämmert and Stanzel as its most renowned representatives). The main common trait would be the focus on the level of discourse. Although some researchers like David Darby oppose Erzähl|theorie, with its interest in rhetoric and voice, to the “proper” narratology (Darby, 2001: 852), I would argue that the subsequent development of the field and its recent state, with the diversity of the so-called postclassical narratology (with, for example, the case of the rhetorical approach) blur the distinction.
4Over a decade ago, John Pier asked whether there was a French post|classical narratology (Pier, 2011), and proved the distinctiveness and specificity of narrative studies in the country where the domain was born. Although French research did not largely contribute to the renaissance of narratology, dating around the 1990s and labelled “postclassical”, it did conduct studies on narrative, known as the French discourse analysis. In Poland, classical narratology à la française did not find many followers , maybe with the exception of Kazimierz Bartoszyński, tempted by the “engineer’s” approach to literature. Generally, however, “fabulology”, with its focus on narrative structure and story patterns, was considered by many a limited approach. So what did Polish narratology offer instead?
5The answer given in French theory’s language would be: niveau de manifestation, a level mentioned by Roland Barthes in his famous Intro|duction à l’analyse structurale des récits, but clearly subordinated to the level of events.1 For Polish literary studies this linguistic “surface” was the main area of interest; efficient and original analytical tools were developed to examine it. One could argue that it was literature itself that coerced this attitude: the books representing the “poetic model of prose”,2 Witkacy, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz—to name only the great three—could not be reduced to the level of plot. Other reasons behind this approach may be traced back to the 19th century and the philosophy of language, inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder, with the idea of the linguistic structure as a model of human nature. The problem of language as key to the process of cognition was later fundamental for the Warsaw-Lviv School thinkers, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Kazimierz Twardowski. On top of it came the work of Roman Ingarden and the reception of Michail Bachtin’s work. The two generations of narratologists presented in this collection continued a line of thinking represented by their teachers and masters, who published their works in the 1920s and 1930s.
6Modern Polish theoretical thinking on narrative began in the second decade of the 20th century with Kazimierz Wóycicki (1876-1938) who in 1922 published a study on free indirect speech. Departing from Charles Bally’s concepts, he came up with the Polish term mowa pozornie zależna and convincingly showed that the phenomenon can be traced back even to Romanticism. Having thoroughly analysed many contemporary examples, he distinguished two major types of the novel, which he called epic and lyrico-dramatical. Their characteristics seem to anticipate the famous Stanzel’s typology developed in the mid-fifties; they are equivalents of his auctorial and personal novel. A context chronologically closer is of course Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, published only a year before Wóycicki’s study in 1921. It is highly unlikely that the Polish scholar had a chance to read his British counterpart’s book. Their concepts must have been developed simultaneously and were based on different reading experiences: Lubbock’s master was, of course, Henry James (1843-1916); in the preface to the 1954 edition of “The Craft of Fiction” he called him the “foursquare to all our theories of the novelist’s art” (Lubbock, [1921] 1954). For Wóycicki the key figure was Stefan Żeromski3 (1864-1925), a Polish modernist novelist, whose works were eagerly read in times of regained independence.
7Wóycicki’s narrative thought was continued by Kazimierz Budzyk (1911-1964) and Dawid Hopensztand (1904-1943). Budzyk, in Z zagad|nień stylistyki, in a part entitled Struktura językowej prozy powieściowej, projected a new „formal” stylistics, based on the ‘new” linguistics: the analysis of the linguistic level would only be the first step and would lead to the analysis of higher, compositional units. Budzyk called it the morphology of literary genres. It enabled a shift from the traditional analysis of the stylistic devices, textual ornaments, as Budzyk put it, to studies of more complex entities (the narrative, the dialogue, the monologue, the description). The scholar came up with an exhaustive typology of the “linguistic constructs”, as he called them. Dawid Hopensztand, on the other hand, analysed free indirect speech not only as a linguistic, but also a sociological phenomenon which anticipated the direction in which the research area developed after the war.
8The above-mentioned scholars were based in Warsaw and cooperated within the institutional background of the Warsaw Student Circle. Another figure seminal for early Polish narrative studies was Aniela Gruszecka (1884-1976), a novelist and literary theorist from Cracow; Gruszecka was an original researcher working alone. Between 1927 and 1933, she published articles on the point of view technique and ways of rendering consciousness in fiction. Gruszecka, reader of Virginia Woolf, contrary to the opinions prevailing in her times, was enthusiastic about this new “objective” and “direct” method of telling a story. Again, her observations seem parallel to Lubbock’s and, again, they are most probably independent from his findings. Gruszecka’s theoretical interests had an impact on her own novel writing.
9The findings mentioned in this short historical overview can be thought of as a prologue of the story of Polish narratology. The output of the generation of masters is explicitly or non-explicitly traceable in the works presented in our collection. The earliest article, Janusz Sławiński’s The Semantics of Literary Narrative, was published in 1967, the rest—with one exception—date back to the 1970s and 1980s. In those two decades literary theory flourished, mostly within the frames of the structuralist paradigm à la polonaise. It is often labelled the “school of literary communication”; the literary work is perceived as a specific communication act, complicated and refined, but ruled by the same principles as communication in general. One of the landmarks of this approach is the idea of a hierarchy of narrative levels—both on the side of the sender and of the receiver. The first part of our collection, Literary Communication: General Problems, comprises the pivotal study by Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska (born 1932), a scholar, like her husband Janusz Sławiński, based in the famous IBL (Instytut Badań Literackich, Institute for Literary Research). IBL, part of the Polish Academy of Science, was an institution gathering scholars reluctant to fulfil the obligations of Marxist literary theory and preferring to stay within the restricted limits of the inner structure of the work of art. Okopień-Sławińska’s ground-breaking book, “The Semantic of Poetic Utterance” (1985), a collection of studies published in the 1970s and early 1980s , brings a complete and innovative theory of the subject. The starting point is Emile Benveniste’s theory, rooted in the Cartesian concept of self; in Sławińska’s book it is developed and enriched with the notions of the communication theory. The pivotal problem is the relationship between the different dimensions of the “I”: the actual “I” of the writer, the “I” of the subject, and the intratextual “I”. Sławińska shows how the “I” is inevitably objectified in the text, both oral and written.
10The author of the second article, Kazimierz Bartoszyński (1921-2015), was also part of the IBL for almost thirty years. “The Problem of Literary Communication in Narrative” seems to be close to the ideal of structuralist methodological standards: it is extremely dense, precise, objective, “scientific” in the common sense of the word. Bartoszyński attempts to adapt the assumptions, aims, and methods of the communicative approach to the realm of narrative. Rather than on the actual relations between the sender and the receivers in concrete historical circumstances, he focuses on universal patterns of these interconnections inscribed in the text’s structure. It is the “spectacle of literary communication” at stake here with equal attention paid to all of its actors.
11The second part of our collection comprises texts on the problem of the receiver, one of the most crucial issues in Polish narratology. The founding father of this approach is, of course, Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), who thirty years before had come up with a full-blown original theory of reception. His precursory idea of the ineffaceable presence of the reader in the ontological structure of the work of art was formulated in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art [O poznawaniu dzieła literackiego] (1937). Ingarden introduced the notions of “places of indeterminacy”, “potential moments”, and appearance schemes that require the recipient’s activity in the process of concretisation. This is undoubtedly the ultimate source of Polish reader-response theory, even if three decades later structuralist researchers often preferred to quote Iser or Jauss.
12We decided to present four studies chosen among many others worth reminding. Michał Głowiński’s study is a chapter from one of his most cited books, Style odbioru: szkice o komunikacji literackiej. It comes up with a typology of seven basic styles of reception: mythical, allegorical, symbolic, instrumental, mimetic, expressive, and aestheticizing, understood as “bundles of tendencies, which guide the processes of reading”. Głowiński’s approach merges the tools of narrative studies and historical poetics; he is interested in the literary-historical situation and the circumstances that enable certain styles of reception to occur and enter into connections with each other or, on the contrary, exclude each other. This diachronic perspective and special interest in the historical circumstances that shape the development of literature is a crucial feature of the Polish approach. It is well observable in a study that follows Głowiński’s article: Sławiński’s Reception and the Receiver in the Literary-Historical Process. The shift of paradigm—the receiver’s triumphant entrance to literary criticism—is seen as a change of the literary work’s status: it becomes independent from the original “genetic” context and capable of functioning beyond it, revealing more unexpected meanings. Rethinking literary history in order to include the receivers’ perspective raises many questions, most of them still valid nowadays: how does one collect plausible evidence of reception, if the majority of it comes from professional, not ordinary, readers (those who write about their reading)? Narratology today copes with the same problems, trying to get objective, methodologically well- considered insight into the receivers’ cognitive and emotional reactions.
13Some contemporarily discussed matters are to be found also in Kazimierz Bartoszyński’s study The Issue of Multiple Reading, which discusses a phenomenon that had not received much attention before: conditions and expectations linked with repeated contact with a work of art. Bartoszyński reflects on textual features that predestine certain texts to be prone to re-reading, as well as on the reader’s needs and expectations—for example, the assumption of coherence. An interesting methodological move is the merge of reader-response inspirations with the hermeneutical perspective.
14“The Reader Paradox” by the Poznań-based theorist, poet, and translator Edward Balcerzan (born 1937) differs from the other texts in terms of approach, composition, and style.
15In a vivid, essayistic, polemical manner it tackles the aspects of reception rather marginalized by mainstream reader-response theory. The part about “scandalous reading” elaborates on impetuous acts of dismissal of a work of art by outraged readers or viewers. Balcerzan tries to understand mechanisms behind approval or rejection, reflecting on possible cognitive and affective profiles of projected and actual readers, and going beyond the opposition of the spontaneous amateurs and skilled professionals. The text ends up with a thought-provoking notion of the author’s biography, understood as the “entirety of an individual’s experiences”, both factual and imaginary. It seems a way to escape the problem of the relation between “real life” and fiction.
16The next section of our anthology opens with The Semantics of the Narrative Utterance in which Janusz Sławiński develops one of the most original concepts in Polish theory. The article starts with an observation that narrative studies are marked by an inclination to treat the narrated matter as an extraverbal reality, activated by an utterance, but independent from the linguistic layer. This leads to a persisting dualism, that the level of language is considered separate from the level of events. The aim of Sławiński’s theory is to overcome this polarity; he introduced the idea of great semantic figures (characters, objects, actions) as clusters of meaning which do not require referring to layers other than the linguistic. Although the divide Sławiński attempted to challenge is present until today, his idea cleared a new path and still resonates in Polish theory.
17Michał Głowiński’s Four Types of Narrative Fiction seems to share, to a certain extent, Sławiński’s postulate to integrate the levels of story and discourse: fiction is understood not as a quality of the represented world, but as an element of the narrative structure (Austin’s speech act theory is an important context here). Głowiński emphasizes the communicative aspect of fiction and introduces the category of distance, understood as a cognitive, moral, and ideological attitude to narrative fiction, both on the sender’s and receiver’s part. In those methodological frames a typology of narrative fiction is proposed, consisting of mythic, parabolic, mimetic, and grotesque (with hybrid forms possible).
18Wincenty Grajewski’s (born 1942) Expulsion from Eden comes from his book Jak czytać utwory fabularne? (1980) which was the debut of the Warsaw-based scholar. As the title promised, it consisted of seven innovative and captivating interpretations of well-known short stories, from Poe to Schulz. The author focuses on the relationship between knowledge and imagination, the rational and the uncanny; his sources of inspiration include Propp and Barthes, as well as psychoanalysis. It is worth mentioning that Grajewski was one of the first Polish readers and commentators of the French theory.
19Stanisław Eile, the author of the last study in this section, was a professor in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College in London. Not based in Poland, he maintained relations with Polish research centres, which can be seen in his references. His article The World Represented and the Semantic Complexity of the Novel is a chapter from his book Światopogląd powieści, written in Polish and published in Wrocław in 1973. The monograph brings a truly innovative continuation of Stanzel’s approach to the novel, refining and complicating his analytical tools, especially those associated with the point of view and personal novel (the idea of the quasi-personal novel, powieść pozornie personalna, and “neutral” novel). Like Wóycicki a century ago, Eile often turns to Żeromski. In the translated chapter, the notion of the “represented world” is worth emphasizing: it is very common in Polish narratology and rather rare elsewhere.
20The final part of our collection is devoted to what we consider the distinctive feature of Polish narrative studies: their exceptional interest in non-fiction long before it became an issue.4 It dates back to the 1930s, when Stefania Skwarczyńska developed her concept of “applied literature” (literatura stosowana) covering genres that were not considered literary at that time, and Konstanty Troczyński came up with a theory of the reportage. After 1945, countless war testimonies and documentaries were published and received scholarly attention, resulting in case studies and attempts to adopt suitable methodological devices. Today seems like a good moment to remind those achievements as many efforts are made recently to include (at last) non-fictional texts into the realm of narratological studies.5
21Again, Michał Głowiński is represented in this section with his two crucial studies: “The Literature and the Truth” and “The Document as Novel”. They are twelve years apart and prove not only the consistency, but also the evolution of the scholar’s thinking and the impact of the historical circumstances on his writing. The first article, written in 1969, deals with a problem posed already by Aristotle and unresolved ever since—the truth in the epic. Głowiński puts aside Ingarden’s theory of quasi-statements and adopts a sociological approach: he claims that the issue requires turning to collective consciousness and common assumptions about the society and individual behaviour—a set of truths that are shared at a certain moment of time. The truth in the novel is also a function of the genre and literary conventions; it is not a simple reference to “the world” out there, but to statements uttered about this world, narrative ways of describing it. As Danuta Ulicka points out in her commentary to Głowiński’s article, it has also an underlying political aspect: when Głowiński writes about the conformist “truth” and the critical, polemical “avant-garde” approach, he seems close to Roland Barthes’s idea of demystification formulated in “Mythologies” (Ulicka, 2020). “The Literature and the Truth” can serve as a theoretical frame for Głowiński’s essays devoted to the language of propaganda collected in the volume Totalitarian Speech (Głowiński, 2014).
22In the opening paragraph of the second article, published in 1982, Głowiński alludes to his concept of the novel as “sociology performed with literary tools”, but directs his attention to documents structured in literary ways. The case study is Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1961), a book in which a true story is told based on the recorded monologues. Głowiński pinpoints the idea behind Lewis’s undertaking: the use of literary devices to provide plausible, verifiable biographical data of general, sociological importance. The novel and its conventions are the reference point here. Głowiński introduces two very useful terms: “belletrisation” (beletryzacja) and novelisation (upowieściowanie). The first one signifies occasional, unsystematic use of literary techniques in a documentary text; the latter describes consequent, global shaping of the text “in the image and likeness of a novel”.
23Those issues are also developed by Zofia Mitosek (born 1943), a scholar based at the University of Warsaw, and an author of pivotal studies on the problem of mimesis. She shares with Głowiński the assumption that non-fiction texts should be examined using the tools of poetics, hitherto perfected on the novel. In her analysis of Kazimierz Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner, she focuses on the problematic status of dialogue. The reportage is written in the form of an narrativized interview with a Nazi criminal, Jurgen Stroop, with whom the author spent years in the same prison cell. Principals for Mitosek are the means of the “structuralization of the empirical”: in literature facts are also subordinated to conventionalized ways of telling a story.
24Our collection is concluded with a study by Anna Łebkowska, a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, who represents the next generation of scholars: those who struggled to pass—or overtake—the elephant standing on the road, as Sławiński once called the structuralist paradigm. Her article Biographical Narrative in Fiction examines the borderline: the presence of narratives about lives of other people—real or imaginary—in literary fiction. Łebkowska, drawing examples from contemporary literature, shows various mechanisms of fictionalizing authentic life stories which lead to renegotiating the referential pact with the reader and the ontological status of the protagonists. She analyzes counterfactual—one could say autofictional—versions of well-known biographies leading to alternative life scenarios, and shows how placing biographical narratives in a fictional embedding enables to reconsider the possibilities and the limits of the genre.
25Many other texts await translation. The story of Polish narratology is part of a multithreaded story of Polish theory which, for various reasons, had not been fully told abroad and is still a subject of controversy among the researchers of Polish intellectual history. It is also a part of global literary studies, encompassing a plethora of storylines and perspectives. There were some bits and pieces existing in the international circulation of thought, but the uniqueness and complexity of those findings still wait to be recognized. We hope that this issue offers an attractive supplement to the dominant discourse of the discipline that so far has been considering only the achievement of a few prestigious traditions (Russian, French, Anglo-American.)
- 1 Katarzyna Rosner who elaborated on the French theory defines it as “the external aspect of the story, its surface, the final product of the process of producing the narrative text” (Rosner, 1999: 10, my translation).
- 2 I allude to the title Włodzimierz Bolecki’s book, Poetycki model prozy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (Bolecki, 1982).
- 3 Stefan Żeromski’s works translated into English are: Ashes [Popioły], trans. Helen Stankiewicz Zand, The Faithful River [Wierna rzeka], trans. Stephen Garry and again by Bill Johnston (1999), The Crows [Rozdzióbią nas kruki, wrony], trans. Olga Scherer-Virski, Temptation [Dzieje grzechu], trans. Else C.M. Benecke. The Coming Spring [Przedwiośnie], trans. Bill Johnston.
- 4 For a more detailed account see: Jeziorska-Haładyj (2017).
- 5 A good example is Narrative Factuality: A Handbook (2019), edited by Monika Fludernik and Marie-Laure Ryan.