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Magical Realism in Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times and House of Day, House of Night
Abstract
This article analyzes the magical realist mode of writing in two novels by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk: Primeval and Other Times (1996) and House of Day, House of Night (1998). While Tokarczuk herself rejects the label “magical realism,” her novels exhibit such key magical realist characteristics as disruption of rationally ordered time and space, the rejection of dominant historical and cultural narratives, an exploration of alternate epistemological forms of inquiry, and literalization of language, metaphor, and imagination. In Primeval, Tokarczuk presents a world that exists at the intersection between cyclical (mythical) and linear times; in House the novel asserts historical order through the dominance of space over time. In both novels, Tokarczuk’s poetics of the Word (Logos) becomes key to establishing a sense of magical realism in the texts. By using these and other magical realist narrative techniques, Tokarczuk deftly questions dominant discourses of Polish history and culture, such as that of the “Recovered Territories” or the power of religious faith. The presence of the magical realist mode in Tokarczuk’s work has important implications for the study of magical realism in general and Polish literary studies in particular.
The article is a review of the recently published by Routledge anthology Olga Tokarczuk. Comparative Perspectives, edited by Lidia Wiśniewska and Jakub Lipski. As the first monograph on Tokarczuk written in English, supported by a concrete methodological proposal, it finds a significant place in the international discourse of the author; in the Polish literary discourse, which has been divided, it also opens new interpretative paths. The authors of the anthology, passing the bound-aries of traditional comparative literature, highlight the epistemological aspect of Tokarczuk’s work, the way of understanding the “bizarness,” as well as the sources of her aesthetics. It turns out that the social dimension of Tokarczuk’s prose, also gains a personal character, and the tender narrator, moving along the comparative path, has a chance to break out of abstraction towards subjectivity.
Das Motiv des Abstiegs in die Unterwelt (katábasis) gehört als kulturübergreifender Topos epischen Sprechens zum konventionellen Motivinventar (Herzog 2006), das sich heuristisch nach folgenden Typen gliedern lässt: die heroisch-epische Zukunftsschau, durch die ein epischer ›Ausnahmeheld‹ Einblick in Teleologie und Auflösung der Erzählung erhält (wie Homers Odysseus; Vergils Aeneas; vgl. Platthaus 2004, 91–124); die epistemologisch-naturphilosophische Initiation, durch die ein nach Erkenntnis Strebender Einblicke in verborgene Wissensbestände erhält (wie Parmenides’ Pythagoras; Vergils Aristaeus); die katabasis als poetologische Reflexionsfigur, mittels derer ein Dichter die ›unverfügbaren Urgründe des eigenen Dichtens‹ problematisiert (wie Vergils Orpheus). Ein Sonderstatus kommt dabei dem Proserpina-Mythos als dem Paradigma literarischer katabaseis zu (Hinz 2008; Moser 2008).
Most Christian and Jewish scholars have been heavily invested in asserting the radical difference and total separation of Christianity from Judaism at a very early period. Thus we find the following view expressed by one of the leading historians of dogma in our time, Basil Studer: From the socio-political point of view Christianity fairly soon broke away from Judaism. Already by about 130 the final break had been effected. This certainly contributed to an even greater openness towards religious and cultural influences from the Greco-Roman environment. Not without reason, then, it is exactly at that time that the rise of antijudaistic and hellenophile gnostic trends is alleged. Christian theology began gradually to draw away from Judaic tendencies. … In the course of separation from the Synagogue and of rapprochement with the pagan world, theology itself became more open towards the thinking of antiquity with its scientific methods. This is particularly evident in the exegesis of Holy Scripture in which the chasm separating it from rabbinic methods broadened and deepened, whereas the ancient art of interpretation as it was exercised especially in Alexandria gained the upper hand. 2