Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Characters in the Prose Works of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz

2014; Index Copernicus International S.A.; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5604/01.3001.0013.6120

2299-9906

Kinga Siatkowska-Callebat,

Language and Culture

Literary characters in the works of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz lets us discern several typical features of their writing. Most importantly, we may observe a pioneering approach to character. It differs from the reading habits of the inter-war period. This is confirmed by the reviewers who invariably criticized the constructions of characters and interpreted them as a sign of writer’s block or the writers’ inclination towards sickness and weirdness. The fi rst readers of these texts rarely considered such construction of characters to be a deliberate choice. The innovation of these three Polish authors in terms of character creation was only discovered and appreciated by scholars after World War II. In the light of texts belonging to various theoretical movements such as psychology and psychoanalysis, gender studies, theory of the grotesque, and contemporary anthropology, and considering the signifi cance of corporeality in the works of these three authors, we can now accurately read their goals in the creation of characters. The openly fi ctional status of characters, common to all the three writers but realized by them in an individual way, is quite striking. We will not fi nd attempts to construct psychologically believable “real people” in any of them. Deformation, fragmentariness, lack of consistence and of individualisation serve to demonstrate the problems that the subject faced in Modernism, looking for his/her own elusive identity. If we assume that the characters created by all the three authors, characterized by a marked fi ctional existence (from Witkacy to Gombrowicz to Schulz), constitute a wider metaliterary refl ection, we should add that these constructions are not limited to a game with conventions, and rather constitute an “indirect form of existential and anthropological refl ection through poetics and style – they articulate [...] individual and collective realizations and experiences”.