Ironia fabularna w powieści Jána Hrušovskiego Człowiek z protezą i w wybranych nowelach Stefana Grabińskiego

Abstract

We interpret the transformation of Seeborn, a character in Ján Hrušovský’s novel Muž s protézou (The Man with a Prosthesis) (1925) from a seemingly autonomous subject (“the winner”) to a subordinate one that is left at the mercy of the dark forces and must fulfil the predetermined fate of self-movement of Schopenhauerian will (to accumulate power even at the cost of individual’s self-destruction) as a modernist version of “irony of fate,” i.e. as irony at a narrative level. Seeborn’s destructive tendency, his absolute subordination to the death drive confirms Hayden White’s assertion that irony in its most extreme form “heads towards the absurdist world view.” The force that has control over Seeborn is denoted as “the devil stinking of nirvana”, and thus all Seeborn’s actions are covertly controlled by the death drive. If, at a discourse level (the level of utterance), irony turns an utterance into something exactly opposite of its literal meaning, then such a literary technique can serve as its equivalent at a narrative structure level which consists in the character’s playing, in fact, exactly the opposite role to the one he assumed to play. The character is someone totally different from who he originally thought himself to be. From the narratological point of view, for instance, in Stefan Grabiński’s short story “Na tropie” (“Following”) (1922), in the denouement sequence, which constitutes the point, the acting subject and anti-subject will prove to be identical: an amateur investigator who is “following” a mysterious murderer of a woman proves to be the culprit in the unravelling. Likewise, in the novel entitled Cień Bafometa (Shadow of Baphomet) (1926), at the end of his own investigation, in an attempt to find the murderer of his foe, the protagonist Pomian concludes that the main culprit is his own subconscious. Here again, the narrative irony based on the identification of the investigator with the murderer is combined with the literary construction of the modernist non-autonomous subject and with the doppelgänger theme.