Ponowoczesność a "odkrywanie świata" w prozie Stanisława Czycza

Abstract

Stanisław Czycz, a little known Polish writer, made his debut in prose in 1961 with a short story entitled And. The fear of a trap into a literary form is combined with distrust towards dehumanising rituals of the non- literary world. Considerations about the true nature of literature and the status of the man in the civilisation of the 20th century initiated in And were developed by Czycz in a prose volume entitled Ajol (1967). An original narrative technique is caused by distrustful and yet penetrating examination of the world. It assumes deconstructing of everything that is offered by the real world and the literary world, which is inextricably connected with it. Deconstructed fragments of both worlds are examined in relation to their artistic usefulness. The reader witnesses the selection of those fragments, and thus the writer manifests his presence in the created literary reality. Received fragments of both worlds, which are transposed in a literary way, acquire new meanings, provoke unexpected tensions, growing or softened by streams of apparently distant associations. The presence of the writer-creator is confirmed in Ajol by recorded circumstances of the act of artistic creation, associated doubts, undertaken, realised or abandoned intentions. What is also important and what requires literary analysis is what attracts attention while writing. Czycz clearly searched for a way to overcome barriers between the experienced and artistically transformed and the just-being-recorded; so from the ontological point of view right now being experienced and at the same time artistically transformed. Based on the propositions formulated by Brian McHale, it can be concluded that Ajol is a work whose dominant characteristic is of ontological nature. It testifies not so much to the post-modernist origin of Czycz as to the awareness of literature which is rare in Polish prose of the mid sixties recorded by him.