Tekst w dwóch kontekstach. Narracja pierwszoosobowa w powieściach Kazimierza Brandysa, 211 s.

Abstract

Text in two contexts First-person narration in novels by Kazimierz Brandys Summary The aim of this book is to characterise first-person narration and describe its main variations with regard to the works of Kazimierz Brandys. The first chapter („Between the author and the speaking voice. A pragmatic look at first-person narration”) contains a theoretical account of first-person narration seen as the form of literary discourse which is particularly exposed to the influence of non-literary discourse. The analysis deploys, apart from the traditional concepts of literary theory, the categories introduced by linguistic pragmatics, speech acts theory, text theory and communication theory. First-person narration is presented here as a literary representation of a fictional communicative event, i.e. verbal interaction between the narrator and his addressee, and as a means of communication between the author and his reader. The positioning of a first-person narration text in two situational contexts and subjecting it to two communicative intentions (of the author and narrator) contributes to its semantic density. Such a text must enable the reader to reconstruct the presented world, including the act of narration with its situational context, and to communicate with the author as if over the narrator’s head. Brandys’ novels present various artistic strategies in this respect. The analysis of his works gives the opportunity to form general conclusions because his usages of first-person narration are diversified and the stages of his literary development are representative to the subsequent stages of the development of Polish postwar literature. The second chapter („The excess of irony”) discusses the early novels of Brandys: Drewniany koń, Miasto niepokonane (both 1946) and Troja miasto otwarte (1949). First-person narration in these novels is clearly conventionalised and the imitation of non-literary forms is superficial and artistically insignificant. In the forties first-person narration was for Brandys a convenient means of exposing the hero a member of the bourgeois intelligentsia. The way the novels are narrated clearly reveals that the literary means deployed serve to illustrate certain theses. Blurring of the narrative distance and identifying the narrator’s point of view with the hero’s allowed Brandys to interpret events and visualise the process of the hero’s acquiring historical consciousness under the influence of the experience of war. The aim was to persuade the reader of the rightness and inevitability of the hero’s, and possibly also author’s, ideological choices (after the war Brandys belonged to the Polish communist party). The third chapter („Self novel: the illusion of new form”) regards Dżoker (1966) and Rynek (1968) described by Brandys as „self novels”. They constituted an attempt to create a new generic form located between fiction and document and incorporating elements of the intimate diary, the essay and the novel about writing a novel. Literary means employed in Dżoker and Rynek create the illusion of „talking to oneself’ and, together with the methods of communicating with the reader, belong to the repertoire of the diary novel. Dżoker and Rynek use these conventions of the diary novel’s paradigm which permit the author to present the dependence between what is said and the circumstances, in consequence the multitude of points of view changing in time and the relativity of formulated judgements. The analysis of these two novels also leads to general discussion about the generic particularity of the first-person novel, its communicative strategies (especially the interplay between author and narrator) and its methods of controlling the reading process. The fourth chapter („The epistolary novel today”) is dedicated to the most interesting of Brandys’ novels — Wariacje pocztowe (1972), which belongs to the genre of epistolary novel, rare in modem literature. In contrast to other epistolary novels Wariacje pocztowe distinguishes itself by stricter imitation of the letter pattern. Here Brandys turns out to possess a deep knowledge of letter structure and the communicative rules of correspondence. At the same time the clarity of ordering the set of letters secures the unity of the text — the novel is a consistent and unambiguous author’s statement regarding humanity, mechanisms of history, national myths, the origins of Polish intelligentsia and the possibilities of human communication. The distinctiveness of the tension between the author’s and narrator’s communicative intentions leads to the discussion of typical dilemmas of first-person narration, such as the conflicts between the narrative and the discursive, coherence and segmentation, communicative and psychological likelihood and the necessity to inform the reader of the presented world. The fifth chapter („Self-intertextuality and first person”) analyses two last novels by Brandys Nierzeczywistość (1977) and Rondo (1982) as an example of a particular type of intertextual relation referring to other works by the author. Nierzeczywistość and Rondo give various accounts of the same events. The narrators of these two novels construct strongly subjective images of reality and attempt to influence the addressees. As a result their accounts are unreliable and the reader cannot reconstruct the „proper” version of events. The distinctive thematic links between the two novels do not allow for unambiguous interpretation. The analysis of those links leads to the revision of the widely acknowledged way of understanding intertextuality as an act that is intentional, knowable and semantically operative. The closing section of the book presents the ways of employing first-person narration in non-fictional works by Brandys. Comparing Listy do pani Z. (1958-1962), Mata księga (1970), Miesiące (1980-1987) and Zapamiętane (1995) with Brandys’ novels reveals the most important characteristics of literary first-person narration and the crucial writing strategies of Brandys. The final „Conclusion” provides a general overview of the development of the first-person narrative forms in Brandys’ works and relates his texts to the changes in postwar prose fiction.