Five Easy Pieces^[1]? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose

Eliza Orzeszkowa’s prose and letters have been viewed through various interpretative lenses. Having dominated for years, the literary-historical perspectives that situate her works in the context of cold reason[2] gave way to structuralist views[3] that focused on the poetics of her novels only to be followed by poststructuralist approaches[4] that called into question interpretations that considered realism and mimesis as self-evident. There have also been readings that have focused on motifs connected to nature and history,[5] others that have been inspired by feminist criticism,[6] as well as interpretations offering subtle approaches to selected works by applying unorthodox psychoanalytical perspectives,[7] or those underscoring confrontations with either the canon of religious imaginaries[8] or social sensibilities. An excellent example of setting up a “clash” between Orzeszkowa’s writing and approaches employed by historians of ideas is Maria Żmigrodzka’s now dated but still indispensable monograph.[9]

Our challenge here is to find unclaimed territory among this long list of approaches, enabling us to develop a distinct position. The motivation is not to emulate the discoverers of previously undocumented islands but rather to find a way of pointing to less obvious, overlooked or underappreciated ways of introducing through research extra-textual, contextual and historical knowledge into a novel. There seems to be an obvious answer to the question of how the outside world resonates in literary works: through the complete, authentic, i.e. verified, experience of readers, which refers to social, economic and situational realities.[10] However, it is impossible to get around the fact that fiction, too, plays a part in constructing the real world while the world outside a novel is something that is both spoken about and also presupposed.

Let us start by providing a definition of presuppositions. The most common illustration comes from Bertrand Russell: the King of France is bald. This statement only makes sense if France is a monarchy. A key trait of presuppositions is that they cannot be contradicted. The statement “the King of France is not bald” does not change the conditions for understanding this sentence. It only makes sense for times when France was a monarchy. These intriguing traits of presuppositions have attracted scholars’ attention for a long time already, with the logician Gottlob Frege writing about them in the nineteenth century already, while philosophers including Robin George Collingwood, and British analytical philosophers, such as Frederick Strawson, also turned their attentions to them. The study by Polish the literary theorist Erazm Kuźma produced some interesting findings as he followed up his complaints about the fuzziness of the concept by highlighting two literary scholars who had enjoyed some success in analysing presuppositions.[11] Kuźma referred to the work of the poststructuralist Jonathan Culler,[12] noting his conceptual imprecision, and Umberto Eco, the well-known Italian medievalist, semiotician and novelist. Kuźma argued that they each employed idiosyncratic approaches to the concept of presupposition. For Kuźma, Culler associated it with intertextuality, with presuppositions considered to be deep-lying and indeed still hidden references to other literary texts, ones hidden unintentionally and without demonstrating awareness that a certain motif had evoked an active reaction in the author in the form of an unconscious, silent reference. Eco, meanwhile, in his book Lector in fabula[13] took the idea of presupposition in the direction of textual pragmatics, i.e. reception. He deemed texts to be “presuppositional machines” that force readers to fill in blanks. This interpretation led Kuźma to the interesting yet somewhat under-developed idea that the philosopher and literary theorist Roman Ingarden had employed presupposition, albeit unconsciously, when writing about underdefined points and concretizations conducted on behalf of receivers. This is not quite the case, since for Ingarden, filling in the blanks of underdefined points involved completing details in readers’ imaginations that writers had omitted when creating their protagonists, objects and spaces because no description can, by definition, be complete. It is an act of closing the circle. Instead, highlighting presupposition can open up the horizons that a novel, particularly a realist novel, carries in its “deep” memory in the form of traces of belonging to both the real and fictional worlds. Perhaps it is thanks to this dual affiliation that works of fiction avoid coming into direct conflict with realism since it is immediately subject to the presuppositional horizon that serves to stabilize the novel.