Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose
W klatce is preceded by a short comment that resembles Fredric Jameson’s comments on Bolesław Prus’s Lalka.[32]
But I do not event want to claim, as Lukács will in various places, that the love-passion is the substitute for a political fashion that was not fulfilled: that love is the second-best after the historical defeat, that it is something like the culture of the world-historical experience of defeat. Defeat is no doubt a more noble word than success, but I am inclined to see these two Absoluted – revolution and Wokulski’s passion – as somehow profoundly interrelated, by way of subterranean “vases communicants.” What we take to be the inhuman center of Wokulski’s subjectivity and the impersonal nature of his obsession, the primal void around which the more seemingly human and psychological traits of this personality seek inconsistently to reunite themselves, is rather that deeper interrelationship of the absolutes, that unconscious or event metaphysical unity of individual and collective that makes Wokulski over into a vehicle for these unidentifiable and indeed untheorizable drives. The Doll is thus, all appearances to the contrary, a great political novel, a narrative whose absent center is a primordial political impulse that is never mentioned and that is everywhere present in its absence.[33]
In a situation where it is impossible to engage with big ideas, when the possibility of redirecting internal tensions in other directions is absent, a passionate love, particularly when it remains unrequited, sets in motion a self-destructive mechanism and leads to disaster. In Orzeszkowa’s novel, the defeat is total. The small-town doctor Lucjan Dolewski dies having experienced not only disappointment in his love for Klotylda Warska but also disloyalty and inconsistency.
It is worth noting that this initial political impulse, as described by Jameson, “that is never mentioned and that is everywhere present in its absence,” constitutes, in other words, the presupposed content. Jameson prefers to write about unidentified desires and then similarity of the two Absolutes (love and political actions), ascribing them to the protagonists’ psychological realm without ruling out “unity of individual and collective.” It seems, however, that speaking of presupposed contents is more appropriate, offering a better positioned reservoir of unverbalized literary content than what can be revealed through the psychoanalysis of a protagonist experiencing repressed desires. Establishing presuppositions does not account for cases of individual encryptions or unconscious repression of desires, even though they might play a role in creating unverbalized tensions. Instead, establishing presuppositions relates to the generally understood complex of social-historical necessities that cannot be effaced from Realist novels.
