Hidden traces of distance, irony and disintegration

Exponents of irony – disintegration of the world and narrative suspicion

At various levels of textuality, irony becomes an exponent of naming and establishing meanings and evaluations. In this short novel, the noun “irony” (in its various uses) appears 23 times, the adjective “ironic” four times, and the adverb “ironically” once. When someone looks ironically or smiles ironically, it most often only superficially refers to the character’s appearance and behaviour, because in fact, it indicates that the narrator attributes to the characters the ability to perceive double meanings and assess situations differently than their appearance would suggest. An ironic smile (ironic smiles), a flash of irony, a subtle irony, an ironic glance, and ironic smiles reveal a reaction of incongruity with reality, of the incompatibility of some element within it. The frequency of the word’s “irony” and “ironic” (in various forms) is significant, becoming an important sign for the reader of the text. Orzeszkowa here plays on the concept of irony, simultaneously demonstrating the multifunctionality of its use, as it touches on various levels of literariness and evokes various contexts.

Even if irony expressed in the linguistic image of the world (the narrator uses it to evaluate the characters’ behaviours and attribute to them characteristics of such a profiled worldview) belongs to the vocabulary of characters’ behaviours, gestures, and reactions at the mimetic level (reacting to this world), rather than the diegetic level (the characters themselves speaking and concealing various traces of irony in their language, not the narrator’s—because he uses it to assess the situation), it is a significant mechanism because it also serves to diagnose the novel’s world. Thus, not only as a defence mechanism demanding a halt to the unfolding of created situations in the world, but also as an aesthetic category defining the rules of this world, it marks its fractures, necessitating a shift in perception and suspicion of the practices employed within it. Irony as an aesthetic category allows us to show, first of all (and this is a classic representation of the definition, as irony was understood by the Jena Romantics and the Polish Romantic School) the disintegration of the world, the cracks in its structure, it reveals the incompatibility of its components and the heterogeneity of reality, as well as the difficulty of functioning within it due to the clash of irreconcilable reasons. 

In Cnotliwi various characters are addressed with terms intended to indicate that they act ironically, look ironically, or smile ironically. The narrator’s ironic attitude toward the characters he constructs is most interestingly visible in the physiognomy of the characters reacting to a sequence of events. The novel’s inability to name the phenomena and behaviours observed is evident, which serves to indicate not so much a lack of competence in sketching the characters’ appearance and behaviours, but rather the need to observe with suspicion how these traits are described (“The most expert physiognomist could not have guessed” – chapter XV). In the characters’ physiognomy, a contradiction is evident as a tangible sign of textual irony. This is the case, for example, with Anastazja, whose body is diseased, yet her inner self is also depicted as flawed. She is a disabled woman, sexually unsatisfied, yet intensely passionate. Suffering and physical pain have not deprived her of her youthful zeal. Not without significance from the perspective of her fiery desire, betraying compulsive-sadomasochistic experiences, is the threefold gesture of tugging at her dress in her husband’s presence. This is accompanied by a feverish glint in her fiery eyes. Interestingly, August kisses not his wife, but her dress, transferring his marital obligations (not true feelings) to the thing she wears, to her attribute, as if the living (though stony, because paralyzed from the waist down) body was not a site of sensuality. August’s touch allows one to “experience the materiality of the object” in its full literalness – the object hidden behind the dress is no longer touched, only occasionally kissed on the forehead, like a child or a family member. Despite dying alive, Anastazja is determined (she calls herself “wifey” – chapter XIX, humiliating herself with this disparaging term) to fight for the right to be loved and desired, but as a consequence, she gives up the fight for life. The unsatisfied passions are revealed through jealousy and August’s manipulation. The paralyzed woman in this stony reality (where other heroines wear precious stones) can be compared to a stone, but her hardness and anger change course when she starves, and in conversations with her husband, her wrinkles “scream[ing] in conflict with the expression of her gaze” (chapter XIX). Orzeszkowa depicts the gradual transformation of the suffering woman, a psychological (not religious) transformation revealing resignation.

Irony, as a reaction to the world, as an attitude of distance and a defence mechanism, is shown by the narrator, as he reveals the fractured world and his distance from events. The characters don’t laugh naturally (but only cynically), they don’t know how to laugh, and their smiles are inauthentic. Orzeszkowa draws a lesson from Molière’s Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur (the passage cited as the novel’s motto is significant for its detached and grimacing observation of the world), but also from the maxim of Bishop Krasicki of Warmia from Canto V of Monachomachia: “And laughter can sometimes be a lesson, when one mocks vices, not persons.” Although this quote doesn’t appear in the novel, it patronizes Cnotliwi, who reveal a bitter (not to say terrifying) lesson: if a society can’t laugh, it is suspect, characterized by fanaticism and a commitment to enforcing its own perception of reality, which is deceitful and dangerous. Although the novel has some flaws and it is difficult to consider it an example of the highest artistic craftsmanship, one cannot deny the carrying power of the young writer’s reflections. Orzeszkowa is acutely aware that the greatest dangers for small, local communities lie in slander, in constructing a picture of reality and drawing conclusions about its laws based on fiction, and in projecting a world other than the actual one. Power-knowledge, which is intrigue over others, causes the social colossus of mutual exchange of services to waver, and the narrator’s irony repeatedly leaps out of the frame, consequently encapsulating this created world in quotation marks.

The narrator’s status, condition, and knowledge of the world are uneven and ambiguous, showing ambivalence and can be read as protean constructs, and the novel itself as a work containing numerous paradoxes, contradictions, and a blatantly anti-dogmatic text, since one of its overarching messages is to never trust the virtue of those who are cruel. The narrator is unable to find his proper and unambiguous place in this world. He is the possessor of knowledge of at least two kinds: sometimes he seems naive, sometimes too wise. There is no doubt that clichés appear in the construction of the presented world in this early novel by Orzeszkowa. These clichés raise the question of whether they were consciously introduced, or whether the writer was unsure how to write and defended herself with these structural and visual clichés, demonstrating the insufficiency of rules and the helplessness of her writing situation in the face of the subject matter.

The textual reality thus seems mysterious and extraordinary. One could say that the narrator himself is destroying the world he created and the strange notion of virtue operating within it by exposing its mechanisms, revealing its deceptions, and siding with those who are wronged. He does this to avoid identifying with the reality he constructs. He maintains a profound distance from it, and from the very outset, he teaches this distance to the suspicious reader. From the very beginning of the text, the world is said to be in motion (mainly referring to the din of Jewish speech and the waving arms of Jews strolling the streets), but the narrator merely laconically states this fact, not showing any action. The reader is supposed to be presented with the illusion of movement and cramped conditions: the streets are too narrow, there are many people, the gardens resemble small plots, Antiphon does visit people, but mainly to sit and seek fodder for her gossipy narratives. As a result, Cnotliwi is a novel about stagnation, slow disintegration, about sitting and pondering over how to slander others in ingenious ways. In this sense, it presents a salon landscape of a stale and immobile society, undifferentiated (because it’s hard to say that the colours of dresses or any other characteristic of clothing or behaviour distinguish people from one another). It’s a mass of talking heads, whose primary activity is the movement of their lips. The vast majority of the characters are almost identical, which is why one interprets them as a homogenous mass, uniformly dressed mannequins. Diversity favours the authentic characters who passionately yearn for happiness (Wanda, August, Stasia, Starowolska, the children) and nature, because nature changes and within it (like music) resides a considerable power. But nature, which has its own laws, is hybrid. It is therefore not without significance for the hidden meanings of the novel that the most important and most frequently appearing types of flowers: rosa thea and rosa centifolia, are hybrids, species of suspicious taxonomy, heterogeneous, which do not fit the norm. 

Hidden traces of irony also mean that some of the novel’s themes can be considered modern and psychological. In fact, the only Molièrean character is Antyfona, a devotee who neglects her five children. The caricatures in this novel are often distinctive, often with features that betray the deepest psychological tragedies. Teresa Rokowiczowa – the mother of Aniela, whom she abandoned – suffers because she cannot bear to meet her daughter. She, in turn, experiences the strangeness of existence through a dreamlike situation (to which the writer condemns her heroine, following the example of Calderón and Shakespeare, the Gothic novel, the mystery novel, and the 19th-century convention of making a dream one of the ways of understanding reality). In her dream (the canvas of the mystery), the girl sees her mother but not her father, because she wakes up and refers to Teresa as her mother, and this becomes a significant element of uncertainty and ambiguity. Teresa is also a character who is suspect. She embellishes her husband – as we would say in the language of the erotic code of that time – and demonstratively melodramatises her gestures towards him: she sits “with her arm romantically around his neck, with her head melancholy hanging on his shoulder” (chapter V), his hand “she cradled in her hands” (chapter VII).

The nomenclature of Apolonia Kuderska is also questionable. Apolonia Kuderska is referred to as Antyfona, but this is not so much a caricatured reference to the verse that begins or ends a prayer in the Christian liturgy (an alternating utterance), but rather a reference to the etymology of this name. It signifies a counter voice – a breeding ground – a fact the characters who call her by this name are unaware of, as only the source can possess such knowledge. From the outset, this reveals the reader’s distance from this character. Olimpia Rostowiecka – a beauty romancing a friend of the house, Spirydion, from whom she receives valuables – also appears compromised in the eyes of the reader through her behaviour toward her husband. The positive characters have canaries (and this will be a constant feature of Orzeszkowa’s other novels) that sing on their behalf, but the negative characters lack parrots and peacocks. They are unnecessary, since the characters’ behaviour, mannerisms, and utterances reveal the nature of these birds.

The inherent irony in the title polarizes the audience and forces the reader to trace forms of irony, as if by design. Young Orzeszkowa, from the onset, commands suspicion in this matter, and the reader’s eye, sensitive to nuance, should perfectly recognize the purpose of this tendency in shaping the worldview, reinforced by retardation, treatises, parables, jumps, and incongruous textual signals. A clear sign of the disjunction between tendency and narrative is visible in the Chinese-Japanese story, when Gaczycki, recounting the story of Kyang, invokes the supposed author of the story. Adopting the mask of the narrator, and thus entering into another language, is an important signal to the reader that they should place everything said in quotation marks. Orzeszkowa may not be the most accomplished writer here, employing highly artistic methods to portray this situation, which defines the speaker’s status, but she adopts a very interesting strategy of bracketing what will happen next. She creates a state of suspension of the narrative and the credibility of the judgments, as the recounted story cannot be verified:

At this point, the author from whom I draw this story interrupts himself and addresses his readers with these words: – For the sake of the innocent eyes of young virgins and immaculate women who will fall on the pages of my book, I will refrain, my dear readers, from introducing you more deeply into the secrets of Mrs. Fu’s noble pride and haughty virtue (chapter XXVI).

Self-irony is revealed in the author’s opposition to the conventionality of the world. The accumulation of anadiplosis best reflects the author’s distance from the created reality, as it highlights exaggerations and suspicions regarding the concept of virtue: 

Having said this, the virtuous man rose, filled with indignation: he paid a virtuous bow to the company and, as befitted a man carrying the burden of public morality on his shoulders, with a serious and measured step went to his virtuous home, into the virtuous embrace of his virtuous wife, who spent the time of his absence virtuously looking out of the window, hoping she would not see something wicked in the street that she could share with her virtuous friends (chapter XXI).

Numerous hyperboles, poetics of the sublime, and kitsch serve to make reality strange and distort its contours: “At this thought, all the devils of despair, the vipers of the pangs of conscience, bit and tore at him, and terrible thoughts arose in his head” (chapter XXIII). Parables in the narrative counterbalance this type of utterance, revealing the universalization of experiences. They have the character of an aphoristic, generalizing commentary: 

There are people on earth for whom this happiness and peace are but a page in life; a page that, torn from the book of existence, does little to dent it. Such people are great men of deeds and ideas, or light butterflies in human form, without reason or deeper feelings, chasing after frivolous and pointless amusements (chapter XX). 

Pseudo-religious figures are characterized by the specific language of Gaczycki’s tales: “long-eared storks,” “hidden sins will crawl out like reptiles,” “the mask of hypocrisy will fall from their faces and reveal leprosy,” “such virtuous people are locusts,” “there must have been many such virtuous people in sinful Sodom, because without them Sodom would not have become Sodom,” “they peck, nibble, pinch, sting, hurt,” “they listen through keyholes, they look through the cracks of the windows” (chapter XXVI). In reference to positive heroes, Gaczycki uses terms from a completely different register: “the graceful song of a nightingale or the flight of an eagle,” “eagles […] will soar freely into the clouds and bathe in the sun’s rays; nightingales […] will sing their graceful song throughout the world,” “the Creator sent them into the world for his essential glory, the benefit of humanity, and the triumph of truth and beauty” (chapter XXVI). Truly virtuous people are characterized by simplicity and forgiveness – ethical and evangelical virtues, as Stanisław Fita and Beata Obsulewicz-Niewińska would say, diagnosing the phenomenon of religious and ethical imagination and the attitudes of writers of the Polish positivist generation.

Irony, as an aesthetic category intended to reveal the complexity of reality and its inherent contradictions, manifested in language as a deconstructive mechanism, revealing the fractured structure of imagery and naming, becomes Orzeszkowa’s strategy for developing a diagnosis of the world. Irony is all the more necessary because it sanctions the impossibility of more effective naming, better evaluation, and rational construction of the ecosystem of urban micro-communities living on the stage of a provincial “vanity fair.” The formula from William Makepeace Thackeray’s famous novel Vanity Fair. A Novel without A Hero (1847) is invoked here for a reason. It seems that the main and hidden protagonist in the narrative of Cnotliwi is urban society, which, of course, has certain facets and performs specific functions in the social stratification of morals, but remains essentially faceless, a collective hero (whose components define its already enigmatic essence). The subtitle of the English novel speaks volumes about the reader being asked to pay attention not so much to specific characters, but to their behaviours and mechanisms. And this is also true for young Orzeszkowa – she values the English novel (especially Dickens, whom she adores), reads it in translation (not in the original), and uses its various plot devices and compositional solutions in her artistic transformation. The caricatures of some characters in Cnotliwi (but not the characters’ language) may have their provenance in The Pickwick Papers, because both novels are undoubtedly united by their approach to irony as an exponent of a reaction to a constructed and changing world. While irony in Dickens’s novel undoubtedly sides with the characters (funny, charming, wise in their knowledge of the world), in Cnotliwi it only sides with the narrative and the storyteller of this world. In turn, in the voluminous (1,400-page) Pustkowie/Samotnia, which Orzeszkowa valued, the writer could certainly have been interested in one of the most important diagnoses of the world, delivered by Mrs. Jellyby, who tries to “study the horizon through a telescope” in search of people. And Antyfona is undoubtedly based on this character. The plot motifs taken from Pustkowie/Samotnia are paraphrased: three daughters with their corresponding names (the first blue-eyed one – Piękno (Beauty), the second – Romantyczność (Romance), the third – Humor (Humour) and frequent looking at a sky chart and stargazing.

Despite the completely different realities of the vanity fair in Dickens and Orzeszkowa’s work, the characters in both are mechanisms, reflections, and modes of action that expose human baseness and immorality. Perhaps this is why the message of Orzeszkowa’s novel is so vague and more abstract. We should ask about the centre of the world of Cnotliwi and who the novel’s protagonist is. Could it be Gaczycki, who, like Austen’s wealthy Mr. Darcy, solved problems behind the scenes and operated like the mechanism of ancient tragedies offstage? It seems not. The greatest, and therefore most interesting psychological transformations occur in other characters – in Wanda, August, Anastazja, Anielka, perhaps even in the Rumiańskis. However, despite the appearance of such thinking, they do not occur in the “virtuous” masses, nor in Gaczycki or Starowolska, who is consistently good.

The reader’s introduction to the world of literariness from the very first scenes evoke conventions: fairy tales and, above all, treatise. The degree and type of convention play a significant role here, deciphering ways of understanding the world, allowing the reader to feel the clarification of meanings that are seemingly mysterious or obscure, to search for equivalents of behaviour and label them appropriately, preventing the development of imagination. But when one steps beyond these stereotypical and simplistic frameworks, one can see the direction in which young Orzeszkowa’s thinking and writing are heading. How she tests the limits of her own technique, what she refers to, what she tries to combat, how she broadens her cognitive horizons and how she builds tension in order to – achieving effects of perhaps not fully conscious sublimity – discuss the tradition of Enlightenment and Romantic irony, the facets of aestheticism, elements of the inter-uprising novel from the school of Narcyza Żmichowska, the conventions of the Polish salon and bourgeois novel, issues present in the Polish Biedermeier novel, and the cultural phenomena defining the specificity of conceptualizing culture and the philosophy of being and the experience of everyday life. Of course, it’s not easy to unequivocally state that Orzeszkowa drew on these elements of cultural and literary traditions entirely intentionally. However, it’s important to identify connections that define the possibilities for dialogue with tradition, and to note that Cnotliwi (a novel superior in its craft and language than its plot) contains the seeds of ideas that, once developed, will be extracted in a more decisive and artistically refined manner in later works or discursive critical texts that constitute a diagnosis of reality.

One of the first critics of this novel, Dionizy Henkiel, rightly pointed out the lack of novelistic vectors and signposts aimed at organizing the characters in space:

Anyone who has ever travelled in an unfamiliar place full of obstacles, where there are no permanent roads or signs pointing in a certain direction, knows how difficult it is to stay on a course, despite obstacles that block progress. Here, an hopeless quagmire stops the traveller, there, steep mountains and precipices force us to turn right, left, west, north, even if the pilgrimage ends in the south or east.

This criticism is also important for another reason. In one passage, Henkiel convincingly demonstrates the disconnect between the authorial intention and the effect achieved by the protagonist’s statement. It is in Gaczycki’s short story that he sees the inconsistency and double meaning of the situation in question. However, the critic does not point to irony as an exponent of this scene and the depiction of reality. It is also difficult to say that Orzeszkowa consciously used the incoherence of the plan of expression that does not fit the protagonist, suggesting the pathos of this statement. But it seems that, just as 17 years later in Nad Niemnem, the writer was revealing the duality of life’s course (which Grażyna Borkowska astutely pointed out when she showed the components of order and disintegration of the novel’s centre of the world). The author’s hidden irony makes it clear to the discerning reader how to interpret the protagonist’s message. Anna Martuszewska’s opinion, which supports my thesis about the fractured nature of the created reality, is crucial for my considerations. She notes that “the structure of Orzeszkowa’s tendentious novels is built on internal contradictions,” as exemplified by the opposition between the narrator’s knowledge and ignorance. 

While the researcher doesn’t address the narrator’s intentionality, the purposefulness of his actions, or his misleading the reader, it’s possible to infer such a thesis about his dispositions. Undoubtedly, Orzeszkowa exercises this right and makes it her privilege to name the mechanisms in the world she constructs. Already at this stage, she develops persistent themes, modes of representation, artifacts, and issues that animate her subsequent spatial, aesthetic, cultural, moral, ethical, and religious imagination.