Hidden traces of distance, irony and disintegration

Overt and hidden mottos

“Read and let yours be read, […] True virtue is not afraid of critics” – these words from Song VI of Ignacy Krasicki’s Monachomachia could be the motto of one of Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early novels – Cnotliwi (The Virtuous) – the fifth in her literary output (not counting, according to genre guidelines, the unfinished prose idyll Beata and Z życia realisty [From the Life of a Realist]). But the aspiring writer draws the motto for this novel from a fragment of Molière’s Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur (Tartuffe), a classic drama well-known in European culture and well-established in the 18th and 19th centuries, exposing false piety and virtuousness for show, revealing the pharisaic nature of people’s behaviour towards others and conscious self-deception. It shapes the most important plot axis and thematic thread.

Ignacy Krasicki was cited here for a reason. Although he does not appear by name in the novel, he is credited as the author of the fable Czapla, ryby i rak (Heron, Fish, and Crayfish) which is referenced in a text recited by one of the characters. Krasicki becomes a needed figure of authority.

It’s a kind of intertextual dialogue and a keystone between a well-understood tradition and the present, which demands an appropriate moral, ethical, and religious commentary on current events and human behaviour. The young writer’s goal here isn’t simply to refer to this specific intertext, but to explore ways of diagnosing the world through the mask of irony. Orzeszkowa’s goal wasn’t so much to, like the master of Enlightenment Aesopian speech, assess norms of conduct and the world of human values and anti-values in poetry, but to point to the tradition of this naming – the mask and language, that is, the level of diegeticity of expression. Incorporating a reference to one of the fables (with added verse variants) into the novel allowed for a connection between the young positivist – whose worldview of rationality and distance from the universe and its laws, as well as humanity’s obligations to the world on both micro- and macro-scale, had been shaped by reading contemporary thinkers – and Krasicki. The prince of poets ruthlessly exposed immoral and unethical behaviour. He did this using language that was understandable on at least two levels: literal (the level of situations and genre scenes, often masked as animalistic, diagnosing the laws of the contemporary struggle for existence) and metaphoric (understood through the internalization of abstract concepts defining modes of behaviour and evaluation). It should be remembered that Krasicki was also a Church hierarch. In the context of the critique in Cnotliwi of various devotional practices and forms drawn from Catholic particularism, as well as those characteristic of the Judaic tradition (since Jews are referred to ironically at the beginning of the novel, and this is perhaps the only such powerful reference in Orzeszkowa’s work), the cited Krasicki’s authority is not surprising – a nonconformist writer who condemned the manifestation of religious feelings. Orzeszkowa, like Krasicki, abhorred devotion.

From the beginning of her creative work, Orzeszkowa has consistently tried to moralize and diagnose the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the salon circles of small-town society. She explores tricks of rhetorical and parable representation, with references to interwoven narratives from Japanese-Chinese culture. She uses the Aesopian convention of concealing real actions to reveal the true morality of people living for show, masking themselves with behaviours adopted for the benefit of others. All this aims to point out the similarities between the real-life figures of the small-town community and the figures of the parable (universalizing reprehensible traits of behaviour), similarities in their lifestyles, their presentation on the stage of the municipal theatre, the characters’ appearance and language, their choices, and above all, the mechanisms that govern their behaviour. Therefore, Krasicki, a master of double-coding meanings, a fabulist and satirist condemning immorality and falsehood, and exposing the tragedy of human attitudes, becomes a hidden figure of dialogue in this novel. He is the depository of cultural diagnosis, the legislator of mockery and irony in the way of naming (and not just presenting) human attitudes, and a master of artistic camouflage. However, Orzeszkowa – perhaps unconsciously wanting to be Krasicki’s younger sister – with her Cnotliwi does not measure up artistically to the author of Bajki nowe. The novel’s concept seems apt, but its execution is much weaker. But the well-thought-out and coherent strategy of concealing from the outset any traces of irony, distance, and the disintegration of the constructed world is astonishing and demonstrates the intelligence of the writer trained in the art of epic and thesis.

Orzeszkowa tries to show reality with all of its cracks, veils, understatements, drama and the difficulties of the choices that the characters have to make, and is undoubtedly close to the spirit of irony patronizing the master Krasicki, but also his great successors – poets of the German (mainly Jena) and Polish Romantic periods – whom she read and appreciated. In this sense, the novel, conceived and written (with great “care” – as she reported to her publisher Józef Sikorski while creating it) in 1869, the last year of a decade that is difficult to diagnose, dynamically developing and testing numerous artistic, literary, cultural, social and historical phenomena, heterogeneous and therefore difficult to assess synthetically, becomes at the same time a dialogue with classicism (also in the broad sense, hence Molière), with romanticism in its varieties, and also a reckoning with Biedermeier (the experience of salon life and the images of a seemingly peaceful family life in the novel’s finale).

Cnotliwi is, however, an artistic endeavour, not very successful both in terms of composition and thematic content, as well as linguistics and characterology. It constitutes a literary struggle to show disagreement with the world and distance from its anti-values, which best defines this novel. Neither the writer herself (due to her consistent refusal to allow reprints of this novel), nor the (very sparse) literary criticism of the early 1870s, nor the essays or later synthetic studies, nor twentieth-century literary studies saw potential in Cnotliwi, devoted no attention to them, or dismissed them with one-sentence assessments.

My invocation of Krasicki’s instructional formula, with its distinct appeal and judgemental, admonitory function, embedded in the address to readers, connects with the writer’s motto from her reflections on the form, duty, and purpose of writing a novel, which – according to the suggestion of the writer and critic assessing the developmental trends in the Polish and European novel in the 1850s and 1860s – is easy to acquire, read, and understand. As a project of propaedeutics for readers, this declaration undoubtedly fits Cnotliwi – a work with a simple plot, easy to read, not to mention disappointing in its meticulous interpretation of hidden meanings and the assignment of figures to characters, characters to behaviours, behaviours to patterns or types characterizing ways of understanding humanity and the typology of human attitudes. But this is only the surface of the plot’s level of mimeticism. The author’s strategies reveal a completely different side.