novel Trzy [Three] deserves to be mentioned at this point since its teenage protagonist – a Jewish girl in hiding – can be viewed as indicating that the text is addressed to adults and adolescents alike.
82 Among its important characters, the Polish national epic poem Master Thaddeus, written by Adam Mickiewicz in 1834, features Jankiel, a Jewish inn-keeper who has been perpetuated in the national imaginary not only as the assimilated Other, but also – primarily in fact – as a patriot whose wisdom and commitment to the cause of national independence make the Polish gentry blush for their own shortcomings. In one symbolic episode, Jankiel plays a cymbal concert whose music recounts the tragic history of Poland.
83 The “Quarter” (Polish: Dzielnica) was the name given to the ghetto which was set up by the Nazis.
84 The two street names symbolise two worlds: Krakowskie Przedmieście epitomises the Polish world while Nalewki stands for the Jewish one.
85 The wall whose construction was ordered by the Germans separated the ghetto from Warsaw’s Aryan-populated area. In 1940, the total length of the wall was eighteen kilometres.
86 Maria Kann, Sprawa honoru (Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia, 1969), p. 167.
87 The next chapter examines three parts of the Mr Inkblot series: Akademia pana Kleksa [The Academy of Mr Inkblot], Podróże pana Kleksa [The Travels of Mr Inkblot] and Tryumf pana Kleksa [The Triumph of Mr Inkblot].
88 I refer here to Marcin Świetlicki’s poem “Dla Jana Polkowskiego” (“For Jan Polkowski”), which urges that grand national themes be discarded and the strategy of privacy be adopted instead.
89 The term is borrowed from Czapliński, who claims that “none of the values of contemporary life can be severed from the Holocaust.” Przemysław Czapliński, “Wirus Auschwitz,” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, Vol. 2, No. 10 (2014), p. 884.
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Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative Reading
Games with Akademia pana Kleksa
Postmodern practices have considerably unsettled the ontological status of the modern fairy tale. Authorial freedom in manipulating tradition, which is expressed in intertextual games, blends of various conventions and amalgams of compositional methods, has been legitimised by the notion that “we have seen it all.”90 Having done its postmodernist homework, the contemporary fairy tale interrogates its own generic boundaries, which amounts to undermining both its own existence and the entrenched canon from which it hails. For the “playful daughter of myth,” as Friedrich von der Leven calls the folktale, can not only precede myth, interlace with or seep into it, giving it a new lustre, but also ask questions about its own being.91 In this sense, the contemporary fairy tale, as opposed to the traditional one, not so much talks about the “eternal praesens, the eternal now that is actualised in individual human lives, in people’s experience of life,”92 as calls into question the universality of the fabular message by continually decontextualising fairy-tale narratives.
Though symptomatic of contemporary texts, these postmodern shifts within the fabular substance certainly did not commence when postmodernism was proclaimed. If we consider the self-referentiality of the fairy tale to be a defining feature of postmodernity, we should date the beginning of revolutionary changes within the genre back to Bolesław Leśmian, an eminent Polish poet of Jewish descent, who wrote in the interwar period but derived inspirations from modernism.
Mise en abyme is one of Leśmian’s favourite teleological contrivances, which forms a richly layered score in Przygody Sindbada Żeglarza [The Adventures of ←45 | 46→Sindbad the Sailor]. At the centre of the textual world, which is woven of multiple writing-related motifs, stands one of the protagonists – uncle Tarabuk, a poet obsessed with the idea of eternally preserving his works, whose body covered in his verses becomes the message in and of itself. The impact of the poetry inscribed on uncle Tarabuk’s skin is limited, which puts an end to the writer’s dream of poetic fame. At the same time however, such an inscription warrants an intimate encounter between a potential reader of Tarabuk’s texts and Tarabuk himself. The commitment to recording and to preserving the record leads thus to a “double” transubstantiation as poetry becomes body and body becomes poetry. Whoever wants to partake of it should join the elitist community of reading during which a reading communion occurs. The seriousness of testifying to literature by means of one’s own body is undercut by Leśmian’s irony. Uncle Tarabuk must eventually acknowledge the superiority of the narrative in which he is himself implanted and submit to the rules of the fairy tale, which dictate that the ending should involve the conquest of a woman. As Tarabuk must get married, the finale of the twists and turns of his manoeuvres with the script leaves no illusions as to his lot, for it turns out that “under his sign-overwritten skin a new story is already being written, one far more effective than his poetry.”93
The storm of self-referentiality also sweeps across the narrative of Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks (Mr Inkblot) trilogy,94 billowing – like in Leśmian’s fairy-tale – with the motifs of script and writing. The interdependence between the motif of writing as part of the plot in the texts about Mr Inkblot and the generic “wobbliness” of the fairy tale has been very insightfully grasped by Papuzińska, who observes that Brzechwa produces a sense of distance between the reader and the world of the text, which dismantles the literary illusion incorporated in the structure of the work. The application of these novel devices in Akademia pana Kleksa [The Academy of Mr Inkblot] is perhaps their first occurrence in the history of the literary fairy tale.95
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The Academy of Mr Inkblot is a modern fairy tale about an oddball who runs an Academy situated in Chocolate Street and accepts only boys whose names start with an “A” as his students. The Academy building is located in a picturesque park neighbouring the fairylands with which Mr Inkblot and his pupils are on cordial terms. Under Mr Inkblot’s tutelage, the boys experience several adventures and take part in blotting lessons. The main child protagonist of the book is Adaś Niezgódka (Adam Stroppy), for whom Mr Inkblot cherishes high hopes and who he views as his successor. Mr Inkblot himself is a scholar, a wizard and an inventor who often chooses to stand on one leg and dispatches his eye into outer space. He is friends with Mateusz, a talking starling, who is in fact a prince who was turned into a bird. Since his transfiguration into a bird, Mateusz has been looking for a button from the magic cap of Doctor Paj-Chi-Wo,96 which will enable him to regain his human form. Mr Inkblot possesses secrets, which he guards cautiously and that is why he forbids the boys to enter his study. The Academy’s idyll is disrupted by the arrival of Alojzy, a mechanical doll constructed by Filip the barber, who asks Mr Inkblot
