Fantazmat ojca w twórczości Schulza, Rudnickiego i Napierskiego
Date
2017Metadata
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The father’s phantasm of Schulz, Rudnicki and Napierski
Stefan Napierski (1899–1940), Adolf Rudnicki (1909–1990), Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), and Adam Tarn (1902–1975) debuted as prose authors in the 1930s. In their works all of them have taken a complex theme of the father’s image,. They used an internal monologue, extracted dreams, fantasies and phantasms of their protagonists. Inter-war literary critics included their debuts into avant-garde literature, which was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theory and James Joyce’s novel. Psychologism spotted [which appeared] in Napierski’s Rozmowa z cieniem (Conversation with the shadow), Rudnicki’s Szczury (Rats), Schulz’s stories, and Tarn’s Obraz ojca w czterech ramach (Father in four frames) was criticized at that time. Today, the interpretation of these avant-garde prose projects allows us to discern their general idea.
Phantasm is a kind of scenario, which, as wrote Maria Janion, the precursor of fantasy criticism in Poland - is played in the imagination and is associated with craving, with desire. According to Janion, the romanticism, which freed the word phantasm from the medical, „pathological” meaning, had a big impact on the dissemination of the meaning of the word. It was then that imaginative writing, fantasies, and dreams were appreciated. In Freudian terms, the phantasm exists on a blurry boundary of reality and imagination. These theories served the dissertation author to reconstruct the “literary” character of the father’s phantasm. In the most general way, it can be described as a special imaginary scenario, which is implemented by the sons, and the father plays the main role in it. Very often the boundary between where “the father ends, and where the son starts” is blurring. According to the Freudian interpretation, the father fulfils here an ambivalent function here, being at the same time an object of love and hate. Frequently, it is the „absent” father who designates important dynamics of this phantasm, and who turns out to be of great importance in the imaginarium of the son.
This paper discusses literary avant-garde projects which have confirmed how the fears and desires of the sons overlap the father’s phantasm. The symbols - the rats and the shadow - are strictly connected with each other and extract the fear that accompanies the figure of the father. Conversation with the shadow is actually a conversation with the father. The hero of Napierski’s novel ties the pater familias image with the tradition, limitations which are imposed on the artist by the legacy of the “degenerate race.” For Napierski, the conversation with the father’s shadow is in the end the ultimate one - with loneliness. In the case of Rudnicki the rats take on the importance of an animal archetype of shadow, something dark, sinful, bringing fear and assuming the form of the father’s face. The motif of the Akedah was very important in Rudnicki’s writing and was present in his post-war stories. The motif was discussed in relation to the two editions of his debut novel. In Schulz’s Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) Joseph sets out to meet his father in a place out of time. The shadow is named directly - it is the “shadow of death” which falls on the father. Tarn’s novel, which has been incorporated into the work as yet another very expressive example of avant-garde prose focusing around the father’s figure, is an epilogue of all the ways of picturing the phantasm. For Tarn, the timeless theme of fatherhood took on an unexpected character in relation to his predispositions for dramatic writing and to his relationship with Sławomir Mrożek, for whom Tarn became the protector - like a symbolic father.
To summarize Napierski, Rudnicki, Schulz and Tarn, using innovative language and narrative forms which were to be influenced by psychoanalysis and Joyce’s novel, asked important questions which were part of the father’s phantasm: The importance of tradition, legacy, imitation, and the sphere of freedom and independence in the life of father and son.