Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
This novel features fewer examples of bookkeeping than in Pan Graba yet everything here is also accounted for and values are treated as goods. They are subject to the law of exchange: feelings in exchange for a lucrative position or comfortable life.[25] Furthermore, such exchanges are viewed positively by Gaczycki’s mentor as the actions of a “wise and mature person” (C, chapter XVIII). In this arrangement, values such as sexual attraction or marital love become equal signs in equations built on the logic of an exchange of gifts: he “pours the power and content of his spirit into the woman” (C, chapter W sześć lat potem [Six years later]), while she gives herself to him. But this exchange does not involve equal subjects. As Luce Irigaray has noted, the guiding principles that put women on the market do not foresee their agency.[26] The precondition for the stability of the system of values and exchange is a man, the head of the family, or a man of providence. Wanda speaks of Gaczycki precisely according to such conventions, expressing admiration and a sense of the natural order of things. She speaks more as a daughter (or apprentice) than as a wife.
Within the structure of Orzeszkowa’s novel, Gaczycki fulfils a role that is rather unusual in the development of the genre. Right up until the epilogue, where he appears as Wanda’s husband and as a father to their son, he draws on his rather exceptional knowledge of the town of X. It is not entirely clear, how he secured these insights. Still, he is present as the most dynamic figure among the protagonists, the only person who is not bound to a homogeneous social space. Even Orzeszkowa’s notable predilection for broad strokes, applying tropes drawn from physiognomics, does not function successfully here. He remains poker-faced, seemingly indifferent, and slightly ironic. He is reminiscent of Graba, albeit à rebours.
Usually, it was servants, sometimes troublemakers and rascals, who in older novels performed the role of the dynamic busybody. Bakhtin writes that the “servant is that distinctive, embodied point of view on the world of private life without which a literature treating private life could not manage.”[27] Gaczycki is not a servant, while his dynamism and modes of behaviour resemble to a greater extent the figure of the trickster, one stemming from fairytales and archetypes, who plays out their role according to their own rules, introducing chaos and a new order, giving rise to difficult situations while also turning them on their heads. The trickster can be considered in terms of a divine messenger, a cheat, a manipulator or, sometimes, someone doing good. The complexity of such a figure is noted by one of the female protagonists, who says that “Mr Gaczycki is not how you think he is” (C, chapter X). Bakhtin brings his study of time and space (chronotopes) in Ancient Greek stories into the nineteenth century, with this broader argument stemming from the need to provide a brief overview of the longer-term transformations of the genre of the novel. His work focuses on the Classical origins of the form. Does referring to his study here suggest that the old traditions of novel played a part in the way Cnotliwi is structured? That does indeed seem to be the case.
