Malvina, or Spoken and Written Word in the Novel

Ewa Szary-Matywiecka examines Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition, an international success upon its publication in 1816 that is now widely considered to be Poland’s fi rst psychological novel. Applying structuralist methods, Szary-Matywiecka situates Wirtemberska among other literary luminaries of her day, including Rousseau and Goethe, and explores how nineteenth-century salon culture informed the concerns and themes of her novel – especially its motif of twins and Wirtemberska’s innovative narrative style. Ewa Szary-Matywiecka is professor emerita at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Magdalena Ożarska, who translated the book, is associate professor of English at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce. Ewa Szary-Matywiecka | Malvina, or Spoken and Written Word in the Novel Ewa Szary-Matywiecka Malvina, or Spoken and Written Word in the Novel KAROLINUM malvina_mont.indd 1malvina_mont.indd 1 05.07.2022 9:5505.07.2022 9:55 Malvina, or Spoken and Written Word in the Novel Ewa Szary-Matywiecka Translation by Magdalena Ożarska Ewa Szary-Matywiecka is professor emerita at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Magdalena Ożarska is associate professor of English at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce. KAROLINUM PRESS Karolinum Press is a publishing department of Charles University Ovocný trh 560/5, 116 36 Prague 1, Czech Republic www.karolinum.cz © Ewa Szary-Matywiecka © Translation by Magdalena Ożarska, 2022 English revision by Ursula Phillips Illustrations on the cover and inside are from the 1822 edition of Maria Wirtemberska’s Malwina czyli domyślność serca, published in Warsaw by N. Glucksberg. The images appear courtesy of Wikimedia. Set in the Czech Republic by Karolinum Press Cover by Jan Šerých First English edition A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of the Czech Republic. The translation and publication of this book have been financed by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki) under the National Programme for the Development of Humanities (Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki), Grant No. 0205/NPRH4/H3a/83/2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ISBN 978-80-246-4520-9 (pdf) ISBN 978-80-246-4532-2 https://doi.org/10.14712/9788024645209 Charles University Karolinum Press www.karolinum.cz [email protected] Translator’s Acknowledgements The translator wishes to express her heartfelt gratitude to the following persons for their invaluable contribution to the translation of this book: Dr Ursula Phillips for her generous and unswerving support as language consultant. Without her the book would not be as it is. Ms Anna Łojek of the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Jan Kochanowski University Library for her infallible efficiency when it came to procuring the needed books and articles, sometimes verging on the miraculous. Olga Baird and Professor Joanna Nowakowska-Ozdoba for their help with translations from Russian. Dr. Corinne Fournier Kiss for her help with translations from French. Without the support of the Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce and the Polish Ministry of Education and Science, this project would not have been possible. Contents Translator’s Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 9 Part One: In and Beyond the Salon 25 Spoken Word, Written Word and the Novel 25 Spoken and Written Word in the Novel 36 The Novelistic Tale: Written Word as Representation of Spoken Word 43 The Protagonists’ Letters as Images of the Written Word Arising from their Withdrawal from the Sphere of the Spoken Word and Meanings Thereby Conveyed 52 Part Two: Heart and Thoughts 67 Repetition and Continuity 67 The Warsaw Plot 69 Unshaken or Unwavering Constancy? 71 Heart and Thoughts 78 The Letter as Carrier of Suppressed or Publicized Words 84 Ambiguity of the Human World 87 Twins, Affection and Marriage 93 Part Three: Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition 111 The Ubiquitous Twinning 111 The Contrast between and the Irregular Pattern of the Tale and the Letters 115 Sterne and Wirtemberska 120 The Multiplicity of “Twinned” Personal Unities and Dualities 131 The Narrator – Malvina: Closeness, Sympathy, Understanding 134 The Author – (The Narrator) – Malvina: Understanding the Thoughts and Feelings Contained in the Tale, the Letters and the Protagonists’ Speech and Writing 143 Part Four: Malvina and the Salon 151 Reading Aloud: A Form of Literary Reception which Internally Binds the Written Word with the Live Voice 158 Bibiliography 165 Introduction 1. The book that you are holding in your hand is devoted to one of the earliest and most beautiful Polish novels, Malvina, or the Heart’sIntuition [Malwina, czyli domyślność serca] by Maria Wirtemberska. This novel, published in 1816, became an instant success, and continues to amaze readers today. This is thanks to its ingenious plot complications, achieved as aresult of the protagonist’smisidentification of two brothers – both are called Ludomir, but only one is her beloved. The novel thus contains traces of the ancient motif of twin brothers, separated at birth, and subsequently ignorant of each other’sexistence. The way in which Wirtemberska draws on this motif is remarkable. Plot complications in Malvina are determined both literally and metaphorically by twinned phenomena: the twindom of the two Ludomirs, shrouded in mystery, as well as the essentially twinned personal coincidences and oppositions, in which all the characters become involved through their family relationships, affections and social activities. This is what constitutes the gist of these complications. Malvina is confused by the incarnation of the man whom she considers to be asingle Ludomir in two strikingly different individuals. This undermines her inner faith in reciprocated feeling: asymbol of personal unity between two individuals. These two phenomena, in turn, are strictly connected with the theatricality of the drawing-room, which offers opportunities to play with the personal identities of its attendees, the novel’scharacters. Moreover, the reason for this type of plot development in Malvina is the “twinning” of the narrator’stale and the characters’ letters: the simultaneous compatibility and opposition of these two narrative forms highlights the conflicts 16 The eyes fail; mute go the tongues: Ardent love needs no sounds. ‘Tis easy to say “Ithee love” When one has not loved enough. The lovers their heads bend, Put lip to lip, hand to hand, In this tenderest embrace Soul with soul changes place. Can anything under heaven Their sweet raptures even? Ah, kings! Your glories and jewels bright Seem nothing to such delight. (Karpiński 1960, 63–64; trans. M.O.) At the same time, Wirtemberska’snovel portrays the type of lover’s maladjustment to reality that will become the preoccupation of Adam Mickiewicz’scycle of Sonnets ten years later. Moreover, in Wirtemberska’s novel, the person in love experiences the same kind of communication-related pressures and the same kind of affective states of mind, which in the poems by Mickiewicz are signs of love-induced maladjustment. Below is one of these Sonnets, which may be quoted in support of this idea: Italk to myself, with others am confused. My heart throbs fast, beyond control my breath. Ifeel sparks in my eyes, my face is blenched. Some even ask aloud, how is my health, Or, whispering, suspect Iam deranged. When thus fatigued Ifall upon my bed, Hope with amoment’ssleep to ease my pain, My heart sets blazing spectres in my head. Ileap up, run around and memorise Words with which to curse your cruelty, Memorise and forget amillion times. 17 But when Isee you, not aword will come. Quiet again am I, colder than stone, To burn anew – and as of old be dumb. (Sonnet II, Jones Debska 2012, 57) The individual in love, as described in this poem escapes, just like Malvina, into spoken one-sidedness (“Italk to myself”) and thus violates the rules of communicative reciprocity (“with others am confused”). In this emotional upheaval, the subject, just like Malvina, is driven by contradictory impulses (cursing and taking the curses back). In the end, semi-consciously, almost like Malvina, he surrenders to the need to experience the passion of love when appearances seem to testify to the beloved’sabsence: coldness and silence. In fact, there are only two differences in the ways Wirtemberska and Mickiewicz view the situation of an individual in love. One lies in gender: Wirtemberska’ssubject is female, while Mickiewicz’sis male. The other difference is that in Mickiewicz’spoem the loving subject becomes more enigmatic to others than Malvina does, and hence – more “isolated” than she. In order to perceive and appreciate Wirtemberska’sinnovative approach to the novelistic presentation of emotions in the Polish literary culture of the early nineteenth century, it is not enough to contextualise them against the backdrop of contemporary popular romances by Madame de Genlis or Madame Cottin. It is necessary to consider the spiritual climate of this period of transition, sparked in Europe by Rousseau’sand Herder’sphilosophies of emotion, as well as – where needed – the novelistic convention introduced by Laurence Sterne, which Wirtemberska herself indicated as her model. As it happens, Rousseau’sand Herder’s philosophies of feeling, which reflected the overall cultural shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, were both philosophies of language. Maria Renata Mayenowa, when outlining the main strands in the philosophies at issue, makes clear that “language was born out of the need for emotional expression. Emotion drew ascream from the lips of aprimeval human being. More than that, this emotional origin serves to explain how sounds became its means of expression” (1970, 18; trans. M.O.). Let us remember that Rousseau, the philosopher of feeling, was the author of L’Essai sur l’origine des langues and La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of the first major models of the popular sentimental romance, whereas Herder’sphilosophy of feeling, as outlined in his “Treatise on the Origin of Language”, coincides with Johann WolfgangGoethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, another major model of the popular sentimental romance. 18 Hence, if one wishes to properly appreciate and analyse Wirtemberska’sachievement against the background of Polish literary culture, it is impossible not to relate the novel and the emotional life depicted in it to the spiritual climate of the epoch, which was focused on the direct proximity of three spheres of human behaviour: language, feeling and morality. Mere contextualisation of Wirtemberska’snovel linking it to sentimental romances by Madame de Genlis or Madame Cottin will not do justice to the essence of her achievement, not to mention the significance of the linguistic initiatives and activities which originated in her salon. Wirtemberska’swork has actually been juxtaposed with one particular work by Madame Cottin, who used the Ossianic name of Malvina in her title: initially, plot similarities were sought (see Kleiner 1981), and then – much more convincingly – parallels in both texts using the dual narrative forms of atale and letters (see Budzyk 1966a). Ido not mean to say that Cottin’snovel played no part in the creation of Malvina. Ido think, however, that it was not its main inspiration. This can be deduced from, Ibelieve, awhole range of intellectual and literary impulses which simultaneously influenced Malvina and whose traces can easily be found in the novel. Here Imean the inspirations from Rousseau, Sterne, Ossian, Delille and others. My conviction concerning the literary genesis of Malvina owes much to the standpoint expressed by Witold Billip: “The sources of this remarkable text are to be located in almost everything which this violent epoch of forthcoming transition had to offer in terms of novel writing (this was the epoch which produced 12,000 volumes of romances in twenty-four years!): the English pre-romantic gothic romance, the Ossianic longing for the Middle Ages – the days of strong emotions and beautifully strong-minded knights, the passionate effusions of the miserable Saint Preux in La Nouvelle Héloïse or the desperate self-knowledge of Werther. Malvina would not have appeared without all of these literary inspirations, which were imported into Poland from France, England or Germany” (Billip 1978, 28; trans. M.O.). 3. My book devoted to Wirtemberska’sMalvina studies the novel’sspoken and written narration. It covers two classes of problems. On the one hand, there are those resulting from the functioning of Malvina against the backdrop of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century literary salon culture, in which speech and the written word enjoyed acomfortable 19 co-existence. On the other hand, there are the issues related to the oscillation of the novel’snarration between these two modes of utterance. The former associated with the salon-based readings aloud of Malvina are, to me, rather clear, while the latter require more careful discussion. The narration in Malvina relies on the dovetailing of the narrator’stale with the characters’ letters. The tale, although inscribed both by the narrator and the author (Iwill clarify this in due course), has the status of anarratorial utterance. The characters’ letters are, in contrast, unambiguously written documents. Both sets of issues, connected as they are with Malvina’s spoken and written narrations, form the framework for this book, within which Ialso venture to ponder other equally significant, but more specific aspects. One is Malvina’suniting of the narrative transitions from the tale to the letters (or vice versa) with the complexities of the plot. In order to examine this question, Ifocus on Malvina’sWarsaw episode. Characterised by anarrative speed fast enough to ensure that the “running” emplotment of events keeps up with both the tale and the letters in presenting the heroine’semotional dilemma, it offers amethod for interpreting that dilemma. As with the tale and the letters. Another central question Iconsider in order to define my research framework is the interweaving of the major elements in the Warsaw plot, that is the twin duality of Ludomir and the ambivalence of the personalities of the salon regulars, with apaired arrangement of characters who play their parts throughout the novel’sentire plot: two sisters and two brothers. Focusing on this feature of the narrative, Ianalyse the parts played by the (literally and metaphorically) twin personal identities and dualities in the accumulating complexities of the novel’splot. The third and last issue which Idiscuss is the presence of patterns of “twin” personal identity and duality, not only on the chronological plane, but also on the novel’snarrative plane which presents them. These need to be considered on account of the interdependence, as well as separateness of the creative functions fulfilled by Wirtemberska’sown “twin” incarnations: both as the novel’sauthor and as the narrator who tells the tale of Malvina and quotes her letters. While examining all these central and framework-related issues, around which my book is organised, Iwill continue to refer to two sets of phenomena, whose essence is the cross-reference between speech and writing. The first is Malvina’sinterplay between similarities and differences in the nature and functioning of the tale and letters as narrative forms. The tale, which implicitly combines the properties of the written 20 and spoken utterance, is associated with the conspicuous situation-based utterances of the characters spoken aloud, while the letters – as written communications – resonate with the characters’ withdrawal from overt, verbalised, situational contact. The second set of phenomena, on the other hand, are the similarities and differences that Malvina observes between the quality of meaning in the spoken and written utterances made by the two personal incarnations of Ludomir. It is around these issues that my book revolves. Through the the first set of issues, the personal identity and simultaneous duality of Wirtemberska as author and as narrator is manifested. By means of the second set, the personal identity and duality of the main hero are manifested. Thus Iam aiming in my book towards the following conclusion: in Wirtemberska’swork, “twinned” meanings are linked doubly to speech and to writing, thus also pointing to (literally and metaphorically) “twinned” unities and dualities in personality. Likewise, conversely, these latter twin manifestations refer back to those related to the “twinned” qualities of speech and writing as bearers of meaning. Distinguishing speech and writing as the main preoccupations of my book on Wirtemberska is therefore the result of certain basic assumptions. The “twinned” semantic qualities of speech and writing, internally connected to each other, constitute in Malvina the essence of both its spoken and written narrations, as well as its plot which is centred on the motif of twin brothers. The phenomena of speech and writing are moreover the foundation for Wirtemberska’snovel’sfunctioning within the realm of the speech-and-writing culture of seventeenthand eighteenth-century literary salons. There are also further, equally fundamental, reasons that have made me focus on issues of speech and writing. When embarking on adiscussion of the “twinned” correspondences of these phenomena in Wirtemberska’snovel, we cannot help but discuss the problems associated with the narration of any novel, not just the one created by Wirtemberska. Iwould like readers to keep this in mind when reading my book. Novelistic narration, even when not – as in the case of Malvina – so distinctly split into speech and writing, draws on the illusion of oscillation between the presented and the real properties of speech and writing. Novelistic narration is always created by acertain interplay between the properties of the presented utterance (by the narrator) and the properties of the real written word (by the author or the narrator-author). This interplay, manifest in novelistic narration, when viewed from the speech-and-writing perspective of Malvina’snarrative, would appear to 21 be the interplay between the “twinned” interconnections between the properties of the presented spoken-aloud utterance and the real written word. We participate in this interplay both through the process of reading Malvina as we move from the tale sections to the letter sections (or vice versa), and through surrendering to the phenomenon of novelistic speech, like when we read the opening sentence, for example, of Witold Gombrowicz’sCosmos: “But let me tell you about another, even more curious adventure” (1985, 9). My objective in this book, apart from analysing Malvina, is to pinpoint and discuss the problems related to this “twinned”, and hence illusive, nature of any novelistic narration which oscillates between the presented and the real properties of articulated speech and the written word. 4. The methodological backdrop to my book on Malvina may be traced back to the development of structuralism in literary studies, from the pre-war beginnings of this school of thought, stretching back to Russian formalism, to its most recent intertextual incarnations. My study draws on anumber of research procedures based on both past and contemporary structural understandings of literature. At this point, let me simply list those procedures which most broadly define my own approach. Like other structuralists, it is of crucial importance to me to focus on the properties of the links between the emerging ingredients of aliterary work. Ibelieve that understanding the “inside” of aliterary work leads to understanding its meanings. Ialso believe that the knowledge thus obtained is the key to capturing the literary work’srelatedness to tradition, whether in terms of genre or style, as well as its originality, such as its individual generic or stylistic expression. Ishare the opinion of structuralist scholars, who have paved the way since the 1970s, that the constituent elements and factors which make up aliterary work are textually heterogeneous. Ialso believe that they remain in complex relationships with one another, some of the relationships being simultaneous (parallel), but at the same time – ambivalent (dualistic) in terms of meaning. These convictions have enabled me to glimpse “inside” aliterary work as the meeting space of awhole range of diverse “languages”, “discourses” and “utterances”. Ialso agree with Janusz Sławiński that 22 today’srehabilitation of heterogeneity does not mean in the least that our discipline wishes to revert to the level of unlimited and unstructured research material, or abandon awell-defined concept of its own subject matter. Such areversal would be, for one thing, impossible, because it would assume areturn to former methodological unconsciousness under conditions not only of awakened, but also of heightened, awareness. The heterogeneity at issue here pertains indisputably to the subject and not to the material (the material is always heterogeneous). (1975, 51–52). Iam therefore assuming that investigation of the inner workings of aliterary work, which leads to understanding of its meaning, is in fact identical to recreating the inter-text which constitutes it, within the confines of which these meanings reveal their significance. The focus of intertextuality-related issues in my book is an examination of the properties of speech and writing in Malvina’snarration. These issues are linked to my objective of bringing to scholarly attention problems resulting from written expression in novelistic works, alongside my discussion of Malvina’snarrative features. Since before World War II, Polish structuralists have been endeavouring in their study of the novel to outline the variety of narrative forms and utterance types used to present novelistic events. This boils down, in general terms, to adebate about the patterns that emerge from the various narrative and utterance-based constituents of anovel. The direction taken by Polish scholarship in this field has witnessed several studies on “narration”, “characters’ speech”, “dialogue” and “direct speech presentation”. Afundamental role in these studies has been played by the concept of “formal mimetism”, developed by Michał Głowiński, as well by as the concept of personal relations developed by Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska. The concept of formal mimetism revolves around the interplay between the novel and other types of literary utterance contained in it, such as the personal journal (Głowiński 1973c). Okopień-Sławińska’sconcept, in turn, revolves around observation of the complex relationships between diverse narrative and utterance-based forms. Okopień-Sławińska notes that these forms follow the nature of “personal relations.” Some forms adapt to others as speech acts. The interconnections between them trigger an extremely complex network of relationships “whose centre is the sender-recipient I-you relation” (1985, 47; trans. M.O.). My own research project, whose fruit is the present book on Malvina, is meant as acontribution to the discussion on the variety of narrative and utterance-based forms, as well as on the complexity of their interre- 23 lationships, investigated in the above-mentioned and other studies. My aim is to present these problems with reference to the written expression of novelistic works, and Wirtemberska’sMalvina provides auseful model for adiscussion of these very issues. To be sure, if it were not anovel which draws on the twin brother motif, that is, if it did not contain remnants of the ancient double androgyny and doppelgänger symbolism, it would not be able to “enter into the role” of example to illustrate these theoretical issues. And had it not done so, the nature of its narration and composition would not be as remarkable as it is. 25 Part One In and Beyond the Salon Wanda! Ludomir’svoice, which has so much power over my being, those precious tones, which Ihave not heard for so many months, then took control of my senses, and at that moment Iforgot all Ludomir’sfaults and almost said with the sincerity of my former attachment: “Ludomir, surely people are blackening your name saying you no longer love Malvina – Malvina, who will never be able to forget you!”2 Spoken Word, Written Word and the Novel The letters of Maria Wirtemberska, as well as critical biographies and studies of her literary work justify the view that her novel, Malvina, or the Heart’sIntuition, which the author herself labelled aromance, became aconnecting point for two different communicative situations soon after it was first presented to the reading public.3 In 1816 Wirtemberska’sbook was published anonymously and reached wide circles of readers; Wirtemberska, however, wrote Malvina in 1812. In that same year the novel was 2 From Malvina, 57. In order to focus exclusively on the heroine’s utterances, I am including in this footnote two statements, one of which might precede the motto, and the other – follow it. The former comes from J. G. Herder’s 1772 “Treatise on the Origin of Language”: “the sounds do not speak much, but they do so strongly” (2004, 66); the latter comes from Edward Sapir’s 1949 “Speech as a Personality Trait”: “the voice is to a large extent an unconscious symbolisation of one’s general attitude” (1973, 537). 3 In the earliest editions of the novel, the characters’ monologues and dialogues tend to be italicised and thus set off against the body of the narrative into which they are inserted. Contemporary Polish editions have liberated them from this textual narrative framework and subordinated them entirely to the discursive, dramatic logic of their paragraph arrangement in the novel. In this way, the transitory and evolutionary nature of these utterances is eliminated; they become narrativised, but it is clear that they remain monologues and dialogues. 32 readers onto the path that seems to him the most morally advisable and beneficial. Precisely from this follows his appreciation of Malvina’smode of kindling the readers’ interest, neatly distributed and gradated across all the novel’sconstituents. This brings to mind the devices once used by Sterne, “whose chapter titles impress by their singularity but seem utterly disconnected, and yet they keep the secret and happy knot together, as well as maintaining the correct order of things” (Śniadecki 2003, 27; trans. M.O.). There is no doubt that Wirtemberska and Śniadecki concur in their opinion that the romance (but is this just about the romance, or perhaps about literature or art in general?) can only be justified if the text goes beyond the imaginary adventures of imaginary characters or situations invented simply to provoke pointless labours of “imagination and sensibility”. These bear no fruit “in the real world”. In aword, the romance ought not to limit itself to merely transporting readers into unreality, thereby reaffirming their spontaneous but narrow and naive views. It would seem, however, that beyond this point the ideas of the two writers about the romance in general and about Malvina in particular are no longer consistent. This pertains primarily to the issue of how the romance influences its readers as they discover its “prescriptions, truths, lessons” (3). The argument presented in the letter-foreword demonstrates that Wirtemberska saw this influence as awakening her readers to ethical conduct in the real world and sensitising them to what may become the seed of an individual’sconflict with the self or with other people in this world. She did not mean, even though she wrote approvingly of the “prescriptions, truths, lessons, which may be found in aromance beneath the mantle of entertainment” (3), to impose on her readers any concrete rules of conduct, presented through particular content and thus possible to internalise as didactic exhortations or commandments. Naturally, it could be said that one such imposable rule is contained in the already discussed “striving for virtue [being] amore certain way than any other of striving for happiness” (4). It is nonetheless so general that it fails to specify the kind of virtue or meaning of the happiness thus achieved, stressing only their co-dependence and significance for an individual fate. Moreover, it treats the “state of affairs” typical of virtue and happiness as anon-existent “state”, one that belongs with the future, barely feasible. In consequence, the statement might be understood in another way. It is not amaxim formulated with aview to teaching individuals whose “tastes and inclinations”, in need of being corrected along certain lines, are already known to the moralist. The addressee here is every 33 reader of Malvina, “regardless of their tastes and inclinations”.9 This is not apiece of moralising but of ethical teaching: one that pertains to ethics, to be precise. Śniadecki, unlike Wirtemberska, assumes the role of teacher and moralist with respect to readers of romances, and in particular to readers of Malvina. This explains why his remarks are in the first place addressed to his niece, Zosia.10 His whole argument serves to emphasise the specification, clarification and explicit verbalisation of the moral wisdom which he reads into Malvina. This is visible in the very form of the instructive epistle which he chooses for his argument, notwithstanding his conspicuous admiration for Malvina, appreciation of the novel’sclose-knit relationship between the interest-arousing “course of events, properly entangled” (Śniadecki 2003, 27; trans. M.O.), and its elevated message. He recommends Malvina’smoral wisdom to his niece’sattention as aset of guidelines which she may find helpful in order to correctly interpret the events presented in the novel. In this way, he hopes to reinforce the young lady’scompliance with and respect for those moral values and principles which she might possibly be tempted to defy if misled by other romances. The final part of Śniadecki’sepistolary review, following asummary of the plot of Malvina, enumerates the most important lessons found in the novel and contains this statement: Ihave summarised this book for you in order to satisfy your curiosity, too keen on knowing the ending, and to awaken your attention to exploring many aserious thought, to pondering many adanger into which unrestrained sensibility may throw us, and to collecting admonitions which may prove salutary to you. (Śniadecki 2003, 32; trans. M.O.) If we look at the moral teachings contained in Śniadecki’sepistolary review from the standpoint of the letter-foreword to Malvina, it becomes clear that these are not so far removed from the poetics of “dry moral precepts”. It is difficult to correlate the following conclusion of Śniadecki’swith Wirtemberska’sthoughts on happiness as formulated 9 Here Irefer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’snotion of “absolute good, if it is adescribable state of affairs, [...] one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about.” This definition of “absolute good” is preceded by the following general remark: “Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts” (1993, 40). 10 It would seem that Śniadecki’sdidactic goal is also shown in his selection of the addressee’sfirst name, Zosia [Sophie], very popular at the time. 34 in her foreword, or with the fulfilment of her protagonist’shappiness as depicted in the novel – happiness that is equally threatened by untoward external circumstances and by the cognitive confusion which is partly her own fault: Yes, my dear Sophie! True and lasting happiness is almost never occasioned by atransitory fever of the heart, but by gentle stirrings which come from one’scommon sense and are reinforced by one’sexperience. (Śniadecki 2003, 33; trans. M.O.) Naturally, it is not that the virtues of common sense and experience, those two forces which cool the heart, play no part in the protagonist’sattainment of personal happiness. But they do not play the only role in this complex process, either. To achieve personal happiness, Malvina is required to demonstrate not only her common sense, manifested in her cautious and distanced attitude towards Prince Melsztyński, but also her self-loyalty, i.e. continuing to seek reasons to fuel her “fever’d heart” (Śniadecki 2003, 33). Ihope Iam not mistaken in suggesting that Wirtemberska and Śniadecki endorse two different concepts of happiness. Iwill return to this issue later in this book. Everything that enabled Wirtemberska to underpin her own romance writing with her own theory of the genre may be linked to her view of poetics as being inseparable from ethical issues. This is what made her stance on the moral content of romances different from Śniadecki’sviews on Malvina’smoral message, which he narrowed down to aset of guidelines linked to respect for parental and marital values, and his model of the “exemplary, respectable woman” (Śniadecki 2003, 23). The novelty of such an approach rested on Wirtemberska’sintention to introduce romance readers not to moral teachings as such (in the form of “dry moral precepts”), but to the field of ethics, which extended in the real world beyond the romance. Wirtemberska never specified the morphological constituents of the romance, to which she ascribed the possibility of ethical influence on the readers. Based on the indirect characteristics of these constituents, it may be surmised that in fact she meant what is called today the novel’spresented world, and more precisely, the event-related, emotional and moral resonance of that world which might then serve as asource of moral reflection to readers, and facilitate their understanding of their own passions, emotions and errors. In addition, it should be said, based both on previous assumptions and on our current knowledge of the novel genre, that this quality of the presented world 35 both in the former romances and in today’snovels has been achieved thanks to the suggestiveness produced by the combination of two morphological constituents: characters (i.e. representations of human beings) and plot (representations of characters’ actions). Contemporary experts in the terminology shared by classical ethics and poetics stress the fundamental unity between the categories of praxis (action) and ethos (character), and that at its most profound it concerns the attainment of happiness. Paul Ricoeur agrees with James M. Redfield on this subject: Ethics, in effect, deals with happiness in its potential form. It considers its conditions, the virtues. But the connection between these virtues and the circumstances of happiness remains dependent upon contingencies. In constructing their plots, poets give intelligibility to this contingent connection. (1984, I: 241) We may therefore assume that, in Wirtemberska’sopinion, the social impact of the romance lay in the very combination of characters and action. More specifically, this is what the above researchers would call the ethical intelligibility of this combination.11 Wirtemberska openly endorses the view that if the romance had any influence whatsoever, if it could teach its readers anything, then this goal was to be achieved by means far subtler than conspicuous didacticism. She considered the readers’ curiosity to be aprerequisite to understanding, and the readers’ indifference to be aprerequisite to misunderstanding. Today we tend to classify Malvina not as aromance but as anovel. We consider it one of the first Polish realisations of the genre. Whether we are dealing here with aterminological or genric difference is an open question. Stanisław Burkot and Alina Witkowska maintain that contemporary Polish writers, when applying the label of romance to their works, remained in keeping with the then habit of referring to narrative prose works whose plots centred on love and adventure, as romances (Burkot 1968; Witkowska 1971). The term “novel” was still associated with “fantasy and fabulation full of improbable ideas and events” (Witkowska 1971, xv; trans. M.O.). Yet, in the European context, avariety of terms to denote the novel genre were in use, which is why it is difficult to accept the fact that terminological differences boil down to the mere 11 J. M. Redfield, in his discussion of the two Greek notions expressing two aspects of fame: kudos (originating from the grace of the gods, and immediate) and kleos ([passed on] from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation), notes that “[s]torytelling thus rises directly from the need for ethical intelligibility” (1994, 65). 36 giving of new names to the same phenomenon. This conviction of mine is supported by what Ian Watt says in The Rise of the Novel: Dr. Johnson, with the novella in mind, defined a“novel” as a“small tale, generally of love”. When Pamela appeared it was called a“dilated novel”, because its subject was essentially the single amorous episode which previous short novels had usually been concerned with, but its treatment was on ascale much closer to that of aromance. (1965, 164–165) Hence it may make sense to assume, with caution, that regardless of the natural transition from the term “romance” to the term “novel” in Polish literary culture, in European culture it was accompanied by awealth of evolutionary and transformative phenomena. These phenomena, jointly, may have contributed to the emergence of narrative forms which fulfilled the requirements that, customarily and generally, were beginning to be linked with the genre of the novel in nineteenth-century Europe, including Poland. Spoken and Written Word in the Novel By opening my discussion of Malvina with adescription of the separate although successive communicative events, which it inspired and shaped, Iintend to achieve two complementary goals. First, Iwish to consider the distinction between Malvina’s“circulation” and its subsequent reception. The reception of this novel occurred either via the voice of areader-interpreter, or in contrast via the text itself in book form. Let me stress once again that this reception coincided with the novel’stranscending of its author’ssalon, its entry into another literary milieu and its reaching the widest possible audiences of the day, partly or wholly competent when it came to reading literature. Here are the questions concerning the two circulations and receptions of Malvina that interest me most: What were the differences between them? What fuelled them and what reduced them? How did these differences reveal themselves in the various uses made of Malvina’sverbal and semantic material by listeners in Wirtemberska’ssalon and readers outside the salon? To what extent did the differences between dramatic readings aloud of Malvina and individual readings of the book, i.e. between listening to Malvina being read aloud and the actual private reading of Malvina as abook to oneself, reveal incompatible communicative qualities? What constituted 37 the essence of these qualities? Did it come only from the input into the communicative functioning of Malvina’s meaning from its “live” presentation and interpretation, achieved by means of aringing, pulsating voice which disappeared into the listeners’ ears? Or did it come from the silent mode of reception, intended for the readers’ eyes only, relying on the formal arrangement and division of the verbal and semantic material of the book? Or perhaps the communicative qualities brought to life by the functional, expressive and symbolic oppositions between the words of Malvina enriched by the sound of areader’svoice and meant to be heard, and the same words read silently on one’sown, were accompanied by other derivative constituents of meaning? In addition, Iwish to consider another problem: did the differences which informed and disconnected from one another the novel’stwo different reception modes, i.e. the listening and the reading, correspond at all to any phenomena within Malvina itself? This is the central question of this study. Iam inclined to believe that the co-existence of the spoken and written narrative forms (the tale and the letters) in Malvina triggered types of communicative disconnections and co-dependencies parallel to those brought to life by the first public presentations of Malvina. In both cases, the similarities and differences between possible receptions and interpretations via the voice and via the eyes of the novel’srecipients, would have been instrumental. As Iformulate this argument, Ihave in mind the spoken and written duality of Malvina’snarration. This is not an obvious feature. It can only appear within the novel’swritten mode, just like the already discussed dramatic readings aloud of the novel can appear only in the literary salon. The spoken and written narrative duality of Malvina arises from the efforts and actions of a “character”, who – when presenting the events – either recounts them or includes letters written about them by participants in these events. And although this “character” repeatedly refers to herself not only as the narrator, but also as the novelist, her actions centre on the telling of the tale and the including of the letters. Since it is the tale which she tells and the letters which she includes that make up the novel’snarrative units, and not her statements in which she represents herself as the novelist. These statements play aprotective role with regard to the tale which she tells and the letters which she includes by situating them within the illusive framework of anovel. This protective role parallels the equally protective role played with regard to the tale and the letters by the author’sreal novel-writing acts. 38 The events presented in Malvina result, in their entirety, from this dual mode of their relating. They occur once in the tale – via the narrator’sdiscourse, even though the latter is part of both the illusive and real novel-writing acts of the author. Then they occur again in the letters which are inserted into the narrator’stale. Ishall centre my analysis of Malvina, firstly, on this narrative duality with its shifts between the acts of telling and of inclusion of written documents.12 Secondly, my attention will focus on the thereby created co-dependence of these contrasting constituents of the narrative, i.e. the tale and the letters, in the presentation of events. Last but not least, Iwill discuss the already outlined “relationship” between the phenomena related to the readings aloud of Malvina, which reached the ears of listeners in the salon, and those which resulted from the novel’sspoken and written narrative. Within the novel genre, the tale and the letter had both been used for centuries. For adiscussion of their presence in Malvina, however, more important are the more recent, i.e. seventeenthand eighteenth-century stages of this tradition. It was during these centuries that two distinctive, contrasting types of the novel emerged, each separately reaching its apogee. Paul Ricoeur, in summarising the many publications on the novel of this period, labelled one of these types, as practised by Daniel 12 In order to offer adetailed discussion of Malvina’sdual spoken and written narratives, by focusing my attention on formulas which remain in striking opposition, Iwish to stress that we are dealing here with devices used for recounting extremely different events, ones which complement each other yet remain at the same time separate and even contradictory. The tale, after all, refers to the external “world” in which the events occur; the letters are its internal equivalent. Iagree with Gérard Genette that, as readers and as researchers in the novel genre, we do not attach enough importance to the perfect dovetailing of these devices, or perhaps we should say – acts serving to represent (mimetic) events, which remain completely dissimilar in their profoundest essence. In his “Frontiers of Narrative”, Genette aims to “point out the profoundly heterogeneous character of amode of expression to which we are so used that we do not perceive its most sudden changes of register. Plato’s‘mixed’ narrative, that is to say, the most common and universal mode or relation, ‘imitates’ alternatively and in the same register (‘without even seeing the difference,’ as Michaux would say), non-verbal material, which in fact it must represent as best it can, and verbal material that represents itself, and which it is usually content to quote” (1982a, 131). Irepeat this opinion of Genette’sdespite the fact that, as readers and researchers in the novel genre, thanks to the works of Michał Głowiński on formal mimetism, we have been sensitised to the typical, pervasive “tension or even interplay between various utterance types, for example between the novel and the personal journal to which the former refers” (1973c, 64; trans. M.O.). It would seem that for the analysis which Iintend to conduct here, aimed as it is at demonstrating the alternation between the tale and the letters in the presentation of events, both the above representations of novelistic mimesis ought to be considered. One focuses on the internal conditioning of the production of mimesis, while the other – highlights the necessary external conditions. 39 Defoe, the pseudo-autobiographical novel. The other, as practised by Samuel Richardson, came to be known as the epistolary novel. Both terms remain in keeping with the time-honoured terminology used in studies on the novel genre. Ricoeur’sargument, as well as the studies from which he quotes, demonstrate that the failures of the former type of novel with regard to verisimilitude in the presentation of reality were compensated for by the latter. The pseudo-autobiographical novel met readers’ expectations by presenting “the hero [who] recounted something after the fact”, while the other featured “the hero [who] recounted something [...] directly from the scene” (1985, II: 12). Achange in the understanding of novelistic verisimilitude came about when amaximum proximity was introduced between characters’ feelings and their acts of producing written discourse on the subject of these feelings. In pseudo-autobiographical novels, these acts take the form of memoirs; in epistolary novels – the form of letters. “By having his heroine immediately write things down, the novelist could convey the impression of great closeness between writing and feeling” (Ricoeur 1985, II: 11). Not only was the memory of one’sexperience conducive to the spinning of memoir-like tales, the immediacy of experience, which sprang from the epistolary records, helped convey an essential sense of verisimilitude to readers. Ricoeur tells us: The epistolary genre presupposes, in fact, that it is possible to transfer through writing, with no loss of persuasive power, the force of representation attached to the living voice or theatrical action. (1985, II: 12) Ricoeur believes that the adjustment of both novel types to the requirements of verisimilitude, the former relying on modes of presentation that create the illusion of the infallibility of memory, and the latter – of sincerity of feeling, found an analogy in John Locke’sviews on language. In the late seventeenth century, these views gave way to other linguistic theories which were to proliferate in the eighteenth century. Ricoeur tells us that, for Locke, referentiality was the primary property of language, while imagery and ornamentation were secondary. Ricoeur thus concludes his discussion of the epistolary novel: To the belief, expressed by Locke, in the direct referential value of language stripped of ornaments and figures is added the belief in the authority of the printed word substituted for the absence of the living voice. (1985, II: 12) 40 Ricoeur’sreasoning strengthens my belief that, by seeking to emphasise the correspondences between the listening and reading reception modes of Malvina as well as its dual spoken and written narrative, Iam entering the realm of influences that shaped the European and Polish novel at the turn of the eighteenth century. It would seem that, particularly in the light of the conclusions formulated directly by Ricoeur, and indirectly by Ian Watt upon whom the former draws, that two categories of factors were significant at this stage of the novel’sdevelopment. On the one hand, the printed form of the novel accentuates its secondary mode of reference, as we might say today, one which creates its own system of signs and meanings: aliterary utterance. On the other hand, it imitates the natural forms of speech and writing, from which the literary utterance has become completely disconnected. It seems evident that the tradition closest to the production of Malvina is the culture of French and Polish literary salons. There is similarly no doubt that between the novels discussed by Ricoeur and Malvina, there had appeared prominent figures such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Laurence Sterne. Consequently, when describing the spoken and written duality of Malvina’sreception and narration, we are looking towards afragment of alater stage in the development of the novel, as outlined by Ricoeur. This stage is not marked by the names of Defoe and Richardson, but by those of Rousseau and Sterne; and – which is equally important – it is affected by theories of language, all of which grew out of Locke’sthought, but accentuated at the same time the significance of the imagery-related, figurative properties of language, which Locke himself had underestimated.13 For understandable reasons, at this point, Iam not able to elaborate on these historical and theoretical issues, because this would amount to adiscussion now of what will be explored in the following sections of this study. Iam assuming nevertheless that the spoken and written narrative of Malvina contains two issues that may be investigated by scholars researching the novel genre. One concerns the literary, novelistic, bookish tale. In order to place it at the centre of the presentation of events, and, what is more, to raise it to the rank of aspecific “presented reality”, its imitation of the written utterance will at times approximate to aspoken utterance, and at other times distance itself from it. Simultaneously, its fundamental task is to reflect speech acts: spoken-aloud, audible and situation-based. The letters pose another problem: inserted into the tale, 13 Locke’simpact on eighteenth-century theories of language and the theories themselves are discussed by Zofia Florczak (1978). 41 they contribute to the presentation of the events which the tale recounts, hence – to its reflection of speech acts. Yet, due to their structure of purely written communications, they act as devices by which distance from the meanings carried by the spoken-aloud, audible and situation-based utterances may be achieved.14 Another assumption Iam making is that the essence of interdependence between the tale and the letters in Malvina, and the essence of the spoken-aloud and silent interpretation of Malvina, on which the dramatic and readerly modes of its early reception depended, lies in the relation of the novel to the sound – the most significant property of live speech, in material and symbolic terms. It is afact that live speech, when deprived of sound, simply ceases to be. If this view is applied to Malvina, it becomes clear that the letters enable acertain liberation from the meanings of spoken utterances, communicated through this cardinal feature: the sound. This very liberation contributes to the novel’splot complications and structure. If this line of reasoning is used to consider the dramatic and readerly modes of Malvina’sreception, it is impossible to miss the shifts from the audible to the visual, which, according to Gérard Genette, have accompanied over centuries of literary history the development of the mode of “silent diction” (1982b, 97) on the one hand, as opposed to what may be called “writerly, written texts”, on the other: 14 By choosing to focus, in my discussion of Malvina, on the theoretical importance of analysing the imagery in the novelistic tale of spoken (audible) and written (silent) communications, I am following the path trodden by Polish researchers since the time of the pre-WW2 phenomenological and structuralist turn in literary studies. This turn and its consequences led to exploring the genric variations in narrative forms and characters’ utterances which serve to present events in the novels. This boils down to the study of principles of communication and the hundreds of ways in which various narrative and utterance-based elements of anovel are connected. On the quality of these connections rest the representational and communicative properties of the novels. This has been the direction taken by studies on narrative, characters’ speech, indirect speech and dialogue since before WW2 (cf. Budzyk 1946; Hopensztand 1946; Głowiński 1963; Górny 1966; Głowiński 1973). Michał Głowiński’sconcept of formal mimetism also belongs to this trend. Later, these research interests shifted towards the complex connections between varied narrative and utterance-based forms. It was observed, for instance, that their nature corresponds to that of personal relations. Some forms were found to adapt to others as speech acts. Their interconnections trigger acomplex network of relations “whose centre is the sender-recipient I-you relation” (Okopień-Sławińska 1985, 47; trans. M.O.). This concept of personal relations was later developed into atheory of “sender-recipient set-ups inscribed into narrative texts” (Bartoszyński 1985, 113; trans. M.O.). Iview my own research as acontribution to the discussion begun in these studies. My aim is to do so through the perspective of the spoken and written variation of narrative and utterance-based forms in literary texts (Malvina serves as amodel), and at the same time – in connection with the written expression of these texts. 48 from the outside. These factors include the manner of articulation and intonation, gestures, and any other factors that contribute – through the mediacy of the characters’ senses – to the contextualisation of particular utterances within the “live” diversity of moments and places in which they occur. The tale, with its primary focus on the characters’ utterances that manifest themselves situationally, aloud and audibly, emphasises and identifies these extra-verbal factors, which enable the protagonists to influence each other with meanings that they are not able or willing to express verbally. The tale emphasises these through portraying obvious affective disturbances or highlighting certain features in their speech. It also identifies them by providing additional explanation when the weight of sympathy, which they are meant to inspire, is shifted to bodily postures, facial expressions, gestures, accompanying physical objects, acts attending speech, or anything else that agitates the protagonists mentally in aparticular moment and place. Here, Irefer to the already discussed dialogue between Malvina and Ludomir, in which the sympathy between them springs from the twice repeated epithet “Ungrateful”, and the scene in which Ludomir delivers his monologue (Malvina keeps silent throughout), although in reality she provides affective responses in this non-verbal dialogue which appears to be taking place between the two of them: Hearing her voice he ran to where she was sitting, unobserved by her. But when she stopped singing Ludomir, his heart too full for his reason to maintain the slightest control over it, completely lost his head and fell at Malvina’sfeet, unable to say anything but: “Ihave frightened you, Malvina! Ah! Spare me!... Forgive me... but Iam so unhappy!” Malvina, alarmed, confused, was speechless. (36–37) At this point, some historical and theoretical information must be given in order to elucidate these two conversations between Wirtemberska’sprotagonists. In the most influential eighteenth-century European works on language and human communication through language, which continued to affect the understanding of these phenomena in the early nineteenth century, non-verbal factors were singled out and widely debated as additional means of expression supporting verbal utterances. In his L’Essai sur l’origine des langues, Rousseau drew attention to their paradoxical nature and labelled them “mute eloquence” (1998, 291). He also pointed to the existence of numerous communicative situations, in which 49 these non-verbal factors played adecisive role as sources of information about the content of verbal utterances. Among them, he distinguished those meant to “mov[e] the heart and enflam[e] the passions” (1998, 291). Rousseau’sinterest in non-verbal communication, as well as in the significance of non-verbal (mute) factors in verbal communication mediated through the voice, was by no means exceptional either in the eighteenth century or at the turn of the nineteenth. In discussions of these issues, the science of rhetoric was also useful, particularly in the field of the so-called actio, which standardised “the orator’suse of voice, gesture and facial expression, as appropriate under the circumstances” (Okopień-Sławińska 1988, 433; trans. M.O.), or – to quote another formulation – “corporeal exteriorization of discourse” (Barthes 1998, 66). It should be noted that since Antiquity, the rules codified under the actio pertained equally to rhetorical speech, dramatic performance and recitation (see Aristotle’sRhetoric, Book III). This explains why the above-mentioned work by Ludwik Osiński presents this very view on non-verbal factors in speech, which is surprisingly concurrent with Rousseau’sideas, especially when it comes to accentuating their paradoxical nature. Osiński, after Rousseau, highlights this very feature: The sound of voice, the look in the eye, the expression of the character: do they not portray desire and passion as well as words do? Let us state this clearly: are these silent signs not frequently even more expressive than words? Sometimes one facial expression or eye movement, or one exclamation drawn from the overflowing heart, may have more impact than speech. This language cannot be replaced by the elaborate sound of words, because it is anatural language, an instinctive reflection of human needs and affections, understood equally by all. (1862, 195; trans. M.O.) Let us note that Osiński differentiates between “the sound of voice” and “the elaborate sound of words” (1862, 195). He classifies the former with the “silent signs”, possibly in view of its potential to contribute its own non-verbal meanings to the utterances which are formulated on its basis. It may safely be said that the affective communication as presented by Wirtemberska reflects the merging, or, as we would say today, functional combination of speech, expressive intonation or pauses, and non-verbal communication. I wish to stress this because the study of language at the turn of the nineteenth century, represented by the above-mentioned works, demonstrates that the co-existence of these phenomena in 50 non-rhetorical, colloquial speech was only beginning to attract scholarly attention. The arguments of Zofia Florczak concerning pre-romantic theories of language enable us to conclude that the expansion in scholarly attention to language was enhanced by growing interest in the “sonic aspect of language”, alongside that of “how emotions are expressed in utterances” (Florczak 1978, 63; trans. M.O.). Here we may recall, after Yuri Lotman (1978, 227), Rousseau’sfascination with intonation as aconstituent of utterance, which combines the emotional (i.e. the natural) with the rational (i.e. the conventional). Lotman also points to Rousseau’sparallel fascination with “child paralinguistics”, and draws on this argument presented in apassage of Rousseau’sÉmile: All our languages are works of art. Whether there was alanguage natural and common to all men has long been asubject of research. Doubtless there is such alanguage, and it is the one children speak before knowing how to speak. [...] It is not the sense of the word that children understand but the accent which accompanies it. To the language of the voice is joined that of gesture, no less energetic. This gesture is not in children’sweak hands; it is on their visages. [...] Accentuation is the soul of speech. It gives speech sentiment and truth. Accentuation lies less than the word does. (Rousseau 1979, 65–72) Below is Herder’sargument which likewise reflects afascination with the emotional sound of an utterance and the simultaneous problem of conveying it through writing: When [the sounds] get articulated and get spelled out on paper as interjections, then the most opposed sensations have almost asingle expression. The dull “Ah!” is both asound of melting love and asound of sinking despair; the fiery “Oh!” is both an eruption of sudden joy and an eruption of impetuous fury, both of rising admiration and of welling lamentation. But do these sounds exist in order to be depicted on paper as interjections, then? (2004, 67) What else needs to be said about the tale’sinitial tension between Malvina and Ludomir’sclose proximity, which enables them to feel the spontaneity of their behaviours and responses, and the reliance of both of them on indirectness and ambiguity in demonstrating their reciprocity of feeling? First of all, that manifestations of the absolute psychological reciprocity between Malvina and Ludomir are tainted with indefiniteness, uncertainty and unfulfilment. The narrator’sawareness of this begs the question which she articulates in the moment immediately before 51 both their reciprocal but “indirect” declaration of love, and their explicit declaration. Here is the narrator’squestion: Now that the Reader has read what has transpired so far, Iwonder what you have made of it. Was Ludomir in love with Malvina? Was Malvina in love with Ludomir? (29–30) It must also be said that, when it comes to the essence of the affective relationship between Malvina and Ludomir, the impression of unclarity, uncertainty and indefiniteness is maintained due to yet another factor. The thing that constantly depends on the protagonists’ alternating shifts between the concealment and camouflaging of their affections (i.e. ambivalent declarations) on the one hand, and, on the other, the genuine experience of these affections (i.e. understanding the hidden meanings of symbols, allegories and allusions; grasping the meanings of speech utterances on the basis of situational, and – according to today’scriteria – associated non-verbal psychological factors), is the riddle sensu stricto. The riddle, on the one hand, is the mystery which shrouds Ludomir’sorigins; on the other, it is the fact that Malvina finds herself confronted by that very riddle. At times, the relationship between Malvina and Ludomir borders on a“psychological” riddle; at other times, on a“real-life” one. The ties which bind these two strands together are Ludomir’spleas not to have to reveal his life story and his brief hints, such as the already quoted “but Iam so unhappy!” (37). In this way, the progress of the tale covering the events before Ludomir’sdisappearance from Krzewin, i.e. the initation of the novel’splot through an accumulation of unknowns, forms the basis for the protagonists’ reliance on what they themselves refer to as “imagining” (13). Considering the initial course of events, this cognitive process must be called the “heart’sintuition” of one individual about the other individual’sreciprocity. As the tale unfolds and the Warsaw events are narrated, following another meeting between Malvina and Ludomir, it appears that these “imaginative” and “intuitive” processes are only half the story. At this point, however, my analysis of the tale must be interrupted in order to define what the letters contribute to the tale, what event-related aspects expand the reality presented so far, and finally what meaningful qualities enhance the protagonists’ language acts, since they constitute the most important factor of this very reality. 52 The Protagonists’ Letters as Images of the Written Word Arising from their Withdrawal from the Sphere of the Spoken Word and Meanings Thereby Conveyed The letters, i.e. the material word and accessories to the plot, belong with the settings of the aristocratic country house, the salon and the city, towards which the narrative shifts. They serve to inform readers about what happens in between these spaces and the inner lives (“hearts”) of the protagonists, concealed from their eyesight and hearing. In the tale which follows the situation-based, non-secret and audible speech of the protagonists, the letters – functioning as accessories to the plot, and as an additional means of narrative conveyance of information, carve out enclaves of communicative withdrawal and secrecy, highlighting the protagonists’ privacy and emotional secrets. Three times in the course of the whole plot, from out of the home and family space, as well as out of that of the city and salon, loom the figures of Ludomir and Malvina, entirely absorbed either in the writing of aletter to their one and only reader, or in the reading of aletter from their one and only letter writer. Both activities are visible to nobody but themselves. Ludomir and Malvina are then shown as individuals leading their inner lives, and jealously guarding the exclusivity of their psychological experiences related to the letters being read or written. This is how Ludomir comes to understand the incoherence of acts attending the writing of aletter: Icannot write any more; perhaps in awhile Iwill be calmer and manage to finish my letter, but now it is not in my power to even add one word more. (39) Various forms of inner separation from her family surroundings are planned and undertaken by Malvina in order for her to be able to secretly experience the sensations related to her beloved. She omits to mention having had aletter from him, which results in its content being kept secret. She braces herself for anticipated remarks from those around her on the subject of her beloved’scontemptible behaviour. Finally, she adopts an air of indifference meant to mislead her companions: She felt clearly that to converse frequently about Ludomir, to reveal her inner sorrow and to share it with others were the surest ways of nourishing feelings and thoughts that caution advised her to suppress. This thought affected her 53 mind so powerfully that she undertook immediately to make no mention of Ludomir’sletter. Yet love and not caution was the truer motive for this undertaking, instilling in Malvina’sheart akind of jealousy and adesire that nobody except herself should know his feelings, suffer because of his sufferings, pine for him after he had departed, or know the reason for his departure. Furthermore Malvina was afraid of hearing remarks repeated which might justifiably be made regarding Ludomir’smysterious behaviour and which for her would be intolerable, since they cast an unpleasant shadow over his conduct. And Malvina feared the dark shadow surrounding everything that affected Ludomir. All these reasons taken together meant that Malvina did violence to her own feelings, something that was not easy for her to bear. Managing to hide her grief and the true condition of her heart, and assuming an air of indifference, she went downstairs to the dining-room where her aunt and sister were already waiting for her at the breakfast table. (44–45) Then there is the additional situation in which asmall scrap of aletter received from Ludomir, although not addressed to Malvina, places her in direct contact with amessage written in his hand, at the same time inexplicably denying her access to the letter’scontent: The coins that Ludomir had thrown in the day before also fell out; on the piece of paper in which they were wrapped Malvina recognised his handwriting. We might forgive her for staring at this scrap of paper with curiosity. It was afragment of aletter written in his own hand but unfinished; in many places the words had been erased and awhole chunk of the letter had been torn out. After patiently studying the few confused lines for along time, Malvina was able to decipher: “...unhappy as never before...” [...]. It is not hard to imagine Malvina’samazement when she read these words. She surmised that the draft letter had not been sent and had been used, no doubt inadvertently, as wrapping paper. But to whom had the letter been written? Who was this beloved mother, to whom Ludomir addressed expressions of tender feeling as well as an outpouring of all his woes with such total, as far as Malvina could ascertain, trust and confidence? What were these woes? The whole thing seems impossible to understand or comprehend. (104–105) Taken jointly, the letters present in the tale as accessories to the plot and as narrative means for pushing it forward, are to be viewed primarily as manifestations of the protagonists’ withdrawal from situation-based, non-secret and spoken-aloud communication, i.e. from familiar, or con- 54 versational and affective, or conversational and salon-based, speech. Conversely, it could be stated that they provide evidence of the speakers’ shift towards individuated communication, mainly personal, but also confidential and secret, which occurs via the written word addressed to their closest or most trusted individuals. At this juncture, it must also be said that contemporary aestheticians also remarked on the equivalent yet antithetical relationship between conversation and letters. In 1786, Franciszek Bohomolec pointed out that these two forms of communication could be viewed in identical terms although they were meant for different recipients, the present and the absent respectively: “For the letter is nothing but the same speech addressed to an absent person which might be delivered to them if present” (1967, 223; trans. M.O.). In his 1826 definitions of the letter, Euzebiusz Słowacki aimed to demonstrate the parallels and simultaneous distinctiveness of both these forms: “Aletter, to be precise, is aconversation between persons who are separated by distance. It is written word in place of spoken word, necessary for reasons of friendship, confidence, politeness or other interpersonal relations” (1826, 21; trans. M.O.). Iaccept that, as suggested by the novel itself – as well as by the above discussions, that the moments when the letters enter the tale, i.e. at certain points in the plot, as well as their content, are first and foremost determined by the letters’ being the result of their authors’ defiance of the situational objectification of the spoken word. The letters are aspecial form of dialogic exchange between the protagonists, which, due to the exclusion of the voice feature of speech, do not have to be complemented by censoring situational gestures. As aresult, they can contain material – externalised, verbalised or even expressed reflectively, and thus made more profound – which was not able, or would not have been able, to become part of spoken utterance due to the said censorship. For these reasons, to their authors, the letters function as sites for pondering past conversations, both those in which the characters participated through real speech and those in which they were merely listeners. In other words, the letters are sites for re-living the memories of psychological experiences or emotional states, which had previously provided the rationale for active co-participation in language acts, or conversely – for lack of such participation. The presence of the letters allows both the original acts and states, and memories of them, to be revealed in connection with particular events and situations. It is only the letters therefore that enable us to observe how, importantly, the protagonists’ spoken utterances are absorbed into their mem- 55 ory. After being internally experienced, such utterances are pondered in letters, together with awhole range of minor details which remain hidden from everyone but themselves. This is due to the spoken-aloud, hence audible, quality of the protagonists’ speech. These are the properties which form the basis for the situational objectification of these utterances (alongside the feelings expressed via this medium).15 This fact informs the protagonists’ (Ludomir’sand, more importantly, Malvina’s) affective experiences, language acts and behaviours hidden from others. The letters written by the two main characters and, more precisely, the declarations contained in them validate the existence of this concealed sphere of emotions which is thereby created between the protagonists, at the same time expressing those very emotions. Ishall now endeavour to analyse arepresentative case of one unrevealed thought of Malvina’s. The thought is expressed and discussed by the heroine in aletter to her sister, which is where it can be cited from. But in the main dialogue, reproduced in the letter, or to be precise, in the epistolary dialogue, it never sees the light of day. It emerges spontaneously, from Malvina’sbeing enchanted by the sound of Ludomir’svoice, and then comes to be expressed in affectively dramatised words. Amoment before being voiced, the thought is censored, questioned and internalised by the heroine. As aresult, it never reaches Ludomir, although it was originally intended for him and addressed to him. With this thought, Malvina dismisses, against the prevailing opinion of others, any possible change in Ludomir’sfeelings for her and in hers for him. If spoken out loud by Malvina, it would have made an absolutely open declaration of the kind Malvina had never made to Ludomir. He had made one to her, although not aloud – but in aletter. Thus restrained and internalised, to Malvina, the thought becomes the first symptom of the loss of their complete sympathy, which to her had justified the declaration she had intended to make. From this point of view, quoting this very thought in aletter to her sister, and retelling – at atemporal distance – the event which had made the thought emerge, while she prevents it from seeing the light of day, must be viewed as another symptom of Malvina’ssense of loss of complete sympathy. It is this sympathy which she had meant to convey in reality and whose confirmation she had hoped to see in the other person. Ihave taken as the motto to this chapter of my study 15 Cf. this fragment from Malvina’sletter: “Wanda, Iam abusing your patience describing the tiniest details of yesterday evening. But alas! Tiny details sometimes mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness. Afriendly glance, acold stare – sometimes contain within themselves absolute heaven or absolute despair” (58–59). 56 the very thought in question quoted in the letter, confirming the fact that the thought is never revealed by Malvina in any other way. Here, Isee it as aconstituent part of the novel’splot, which complicates (working against the heroine) all the previous events, at the same time determining their further course, advantageous to her. After all, the thought arises in Malvina at the very moment when affective stimulation disrupts her cognitive capacity, to the extent that she makes adesired but essentially mistaken (something she does not know at the time) identification of two separate (in fact twin) persons, Prince Melsztyński and Ludomir. The thought is suppressed by the heroine in the very next moment, as she awakens to asense of difference in two separate motivational subtexts ruling the thoughts and speech of Ludomir in the past – and now, in the present. As this thought takes shape, so does her cognitive failure concerning the person of Prince Melsztyński. Yet when the thought is suppressed, the cognitive truth concerning the inclination of Malvina’sown heart is rediscovered despite her mistake. The further course of events abounds with the interweaving of these two processes: Malvina’scontinuing to be mistaken and her attempts to learn the truth. Moreover, in this thought, and in particular in the transition she makes from aconversational salon dialogue to the epistolary and the personal, Isee amajor justification for the conclusions Ishall draw. Hence, in order to be able to discuss it at length, let me quote the passage in acontext broader than before: “Allow me to present to Lady S***,” the Sheriff said to me, “young Prince Melsztyński, who desires most earnestly to make her acquaintance.” “Provided fate and circumstance don’t conspire against it,” the Prince interrupted, “Iam sure Iwill not be the last of those competing to worship the new deity, of which Warsaw has recently taken possession.” Wanda! Ludomir’svoice, which has so much power over my being, those precious tones, which Ihave not heard for so many months, then took control of my senses, and at that moment Iforgot all Ludomir’sfaults and almost said with the sincerity of my former attachment: “Ludomir, surely people are blackening your name saying you no longer love Malvina – Malvina, who will never be able to forget you!” But, Wanda, Prince Melsztyński’selegant compliment was so unlike Ludomir’sdelicate silence at Krzewin, so unlike his expressions which breathed the most ardent love. That compliment, Itell you, made me tremble, and the words Iwas about to utter froze on my lips. (57–58) 57 None of the Krzewin scenes of the meetings and conversations between Malvina and Ludomir, presented by the narrator, and none of my interpretations of these scenes, demonstrates better where the genuine expression of their reciprocal affections was (literally) hidden and what spheres of personal and spoken expression it included. Malvina’sdual reaction, i.e. her inner response to Prince Melsztyński’svoice and simultaneous rejection of his words, draws aclear dividing line between two aesthetic systems. One of them renders Malvina sensitive to the mere sound of the well-known voice, despite the fact that it carries no verbal content or form. The other is its exact opposite: it makes her completely insensitive to the conventional (in words and content) comparison of herself to “the new deity, of which Warsaw has recently taken possession” (57). The fact that Prince Melsztyński’svoice exerts irresistible control over Malvina has its origin in individually and personally construed manifestations of the love which Ludomir had cherished for her. The representation of this affection accompanies the stifling of the declaration formulated by her. Its overpowering strength flows towards Malvina out of silence and voice-nuanced speech, or more precisely – from the wealth of its natural affective constituents. It could be said that Malvina negates the aesthetics of the compliment in as much as she herself is in love, animated by the aesthetics of the words and the voice, if we can put it that way. This means that Ludomir’swords, spoken aloud and modulated, were to her more complete sources of information about his affection than their purely verbal matter. It also means that the presence of non-verbal elements in Ludomir’sdeclarations and their impact on the truthfulness of his words reinforces Malvina’sacceptance of his overall psychological and emotional stance. The compliment which she receives from Prince Melsztyński becomes to her asign of the loss of that affection, and consequently – of that stance as well. In the above-quoted fragment from Malvina’s letter, we are dealing – significantly – with acase of the retelling of an event related to an unmade declaration, and not with acase of the restraint and internalisation of the affective language act itself. This may be because, in this supplementary epistolary account of the event by the heroine, the primary and secondary affective elements (the heroine’sdirect experiences of the sound of avoice and, conversely, the obsessive sensations brought on by the memory of this sound) and the intellectual elements (the heroine’smental and written references to the sensations provoked by the sound of the voice) are inseparable. Delineated by the epistolary account of the declaration’ssecrecy, the heroine’sinner boundary between the 64 love, as demonstrated to her by Prince Melsztyński-Ludomir, and his mental and moral attitude, as she remembered it and which, used to validate his affection, are shown as acognitive process invisible to the salon company, one that occurs within the heroine yet demands that she continue to participate in situations arranged by that company. The object of cognition here is the emotion locked in the heroine’sheart. Let us note that the more forceful her opposition to the salon company and its social life, to the mental and moral stance of Ludomir Prince Melsztyński, typified by his disregard for the ideas which she herself embraces as well as his emotional inconstancy (Doryda, Florynka), the more actively she tries to discover what makes him persist in his affection for her. This is made possible by the skills which Malvina acquires when shifting from conversations to acts of letter writing. Conversations, manifestations of speech, and letters, manifestations of writing, are both specific cognitive paths which promote feeling and thinking. Let us note that the position in which the heroine finds herself makes her, as Ihave tried to demonstrate, accept one person’sheart’sintuition about another’sheart’sreciprocity as the basis of aone-sided problem, namely one person’sstriving to intuit the causes of her own heart’sstirrings. It seems that the cognitive process which the heroine followed within, as Ihave argued above, pertains to her very shift from one to the other category of intuition. It also seems that the two meanings of the word “intuition”, which the writer most likely had in mind when creating the eponymous metaphor of “the heart’sintuition”, need to be taken into account here. It is interesting that the association of the heart as asymbol of feeling with intuition as asymbol of amental act was aconcept to which Jan Śniadecki actually objected: The author wished to refer to the heart’sstruggle with appearance and sense by subtitling the book “The Heart’sIntuition”. But “intuition” is not aPolish word, and the Polish equivalent, “domysł” [“imagining”] pertains to an act of reasoning, not feeling. The heart sighs, warms to another, burns, feels, but it does not intuit. Better would be, it seems to me, to call this the inspiration, accuracy, complexity, or foreknowledge of the heart. Having shown so much beauty and power of language, the author ought not to offend it with aforeign word, one that defies accuracy and precision of thought. (Śniadecki 2003, 28; trans. M.O.) 67 Part Two Heart and Thoughts There are steps there at the edge of the waves, Where for the first time we admitted with our lips That we had long loved with our hearts. – Juliusz Słowacki, “In Switzerland” Repetition and Continuity The time has come to view the tale and the letters, Malvina’stwo contrasting and interweaving narrative forms, jointly rather than – as before – in isolation. It is time to take amore careful look at the dual presentation of events and at the events themselves. It is time to take up those hitherto undeveloped threads in my analysis that highlight the roles of the tale and the letters other than those Ihave already outlined. Ihave so far viewed the tale as aform of communication designed to present the story of the protagonists’ amorous relationship and focused on their behaviours, punctuated with spoken-aloud, situation-based, conspicuous utterances. At the same time, the tale is acommunication which shares with the heroine’sletters (i.e. with her unspoken, non-situational, inconspicuous communications) the function of informing the reader about the emotional dilemma which she has gone through, i.e. about only apart of that tale. But its telling is not limited to the representational and communicative acts which it performs. The starting point to the interpretative acts performed by it are the narrator’sreflections on affection and happiness. The generally accepted opinions on these topics clash with the wisdom that the narrator has acquired from the vicissitudes of life as experienced by her characters. Her reflections on affection and happiness as an interpretative code, as we would put it today, accentuate 68 the ethical dimension of the dilemma which needs to be solved by the heroine, and at the same time of the baffling events in which the dilemma has its source. Ihave analysed the letters, particularly those written by the heroine, as messages which complement the tale with content located cryptically within the course of events. Ihave highlighted the fact that although the letters function within the tale as messages that make the content visible, they also work within the plot as consequences of hidden epistolary acts. Ihave linked their occurrence to the protagonists’ withdrawal from spoken-aloud, conspicuous communications, in which their utterances are censored and brought to the attention of third persons. And hence to their withdrawal from the communicative space dominated by spoken-aloud situation-based utterances, thus removing any features of spontaneity. Ihave offered adetailed analysis of one of Malvina’sletters, in which she recounts the moment of suppressing her own affective thought when confronted by her interlocutor’sutterance under particular circumstances. In consequence, the thought is subject to virtual “remoulding” and ultimately loses all its vividness and directness. The letters have so far been, to me, asymptom of the protagonists’ deliberate construction of individuated communicative acts which may counterbalance those that are spoken-aloud, situation-based and conspicuous. Ihave demonstrated that, just as Malvina forgoes expressing her thought but does not forgo thinking it, in the same way she forgoes certain spoken-aloud utterances in favour of epistolary ones, but she does not forgo her reliving of the spoken-aloud utterances in the epistolary ones. Ihave drawn attention to the fact that, in the letters, the protagonists’ emotions and thoughts, although turned into monologues and thus muted, are nevertheless revealed. Yet in analysing the letters as utterances that function cryptically, Ihave not yet considered those moments in the plot when letters appear directly, as objects owned by one of the protagonists, arousing other characters’ interest due to the otherwise unrevealed content they contain. This is precisely the kind of thing that brings us closer to solving the riddle which informs the course of events. Let me now give this issue my undivided attention. In this part of my study, Ihope to outline more precisely than before the role of the spoken and written narrative duality of Malvina in visualising the rift on the level of events between the external, i.e. subject to spoken-aloud utterances, and the internal, subject to those silent and cryptic utterances. Ialso hope to decode the symbolic intentions contained in the spoken and written aspects of the narrative and in the 69 narrator’s reflections on affection and happiness. It seems that these symbolic intentions, since they correspond to the same type of intentions signalled in the chapter titles and in the title of the entire novel, introduce asense of balance or even stability to the presented reality of inconstant affections, beliefs and utterances: this is what constitutes their ethical quality. The Warsaw Plot My analysis will enable an insight into the hitherto undiscussed Warsaw section of the Malvina plot. As in the rest of the plot, its event-related tension springs from the dual narrative mode of the novel. It is clear that neither the main nor the minor characters, in their mutual interactions, speak to or affect one another straightforwardly. After all, the interweaving of the tale and the letters invariably brings into focus the conflict between the two planes of the characters’ lives: the visible (hence accessible to the eyesight and hearing of those around them) and the concealed (accessible only to the correspondents’ eyes). The complications of the Warsaw plot are also triggered by issues which loom large between the protagonists but are never articulated aloud. One of these is veiled by the protagonists’ written conversation, while another takes the form of areading aloud of aletter concerning the protagonists. Significantly, the former touches on the crux of the mystery central to the entire plot, while the latter serves to facilitate the resolution of the mystery. It is also significant that the ultimate denouement is achieved through aloosening of the characters’ tongues, which allows them to gain an understanding of Ludomir’schildhood and parentage. As current events serve to elucidate the preceding ones, the running plot includes accounts of times past, such as letters which change hands, or family yarns. Let us note that the interweaving of the tale and the letters is what propels the plot according to a“rhythm” in which the protagonists shift from speaking aloud to muted speech, and vice versa. The purpose is either to conceal the intended meaning of utterances from others, or conversely – to reveal some hitherto concealed events or mysteries. Here Ipoint to one of Malvina’smost conspicuous distinctive features, derived from its narrative division into spoken and written word. From this observation follow important implications for this study – and for any study of Malvina, for that matter. One is that any analysis of this 70 novel should include the narrated courses of events; another, less obvious, is that it ought to investigate what lies at very core of these courses. In terms of structure, the Warsaw plot section is amasterpiece. It opens with the first Warsaw encounter between Malvina and Ludomir. This is when she simultaneously recognises and fails to recognise him as her beloved, and decides to suppress aconfession meant for his ears. This part of the plot has it climax in the hitherto undiscussed encounter between Malvina and the two persons of her one beloved, when she breaks off in the middle of asentence containing apromise. Here, the entire plot focuses on events which are as ambiguous as they are inexplicable. To begin with, these transformations are manifested in Malvina’sbeloved’smental attributes and actions, which confuse the heroine (for instance, there is the sequence of events centred around the charity collection: at first, Ludomir embodies frivolity; next, sensibility; and then – recklessness or “neglect”, 94). Furthermore, the subsequent events bring to Malvina’sattention the inexplicable dualities in her beloved’sphysical being. For example, during the chivalric tournament, Ludomir is represented by two figures, communicated to Malvina by the mottos on their shields. Both mottos bear affective meaning which she recognises easily – hence both function as emblems of Ludomir. The plot complications reach aclimax when, during adark but moonlit night, Malvina confronts Ludomir’sduality: two physically identical yet different persons (this brings to mind Apollo confronting the Androgynes, the four-armed and four-legged offspring of the Moon, split in half by Zeus, as Plato recounts in his Symposium [2008, 23–24]). At the same time, the encounter causes Malvina to stop short of finishing her promise of love, likewise splitting it into two parts, the uttered and the unuttered: All these things taken together overwhelmed her soul and compelled her – Iam able to say – to raise her eyes, give the Prince her hand and declare: “Return safely, Prince, and when the war is over…” But her words were cut short by an horrendous shriek as the most extraordinary apparition confounded her senses. In the dense thicket of the hedge, clearly illuminated by the moonlight, Malvina saw standing opposite her asecond image of Ludomir. (131–132) “Return safely, Prince, and when the war is over…” – were the words with which Ianswered Ludomir and to which Imeant to add, “…and when the war is over, you will receive my hand.” But Iwas unable to conclude these final words. My words were interrupted, interrupted perhaps forever, by 71 an appalling scream and by asupernatural apparition, whose appearance dumbfounded my senses at the time, and whose memory has thrown me into aterrified panic ever since. Isuddenly saw Ludomir’simage reproduced behind him; despair and death were written on his face; he was lit up by the moonlight and seemed to emerge out of the darkness of the night. (136–137) The Warsaw plot develops along these lines: the clearer the manifestations of Ludomir’schangeability are felt by Malvina as apersonal duality, the more keenly she perceives this inexplicable phenomenon as the loss of what she remembers as Ludomir’sstable moral and mental constancy, fully embodied in his affections and fully informing his behaviour and speech even at the time when he shrouded both in secrecy. Such is the structural principle of the Warsaw plot. Sensing the difference in personality-related subtexts which propel Ludomir’schanging spiritual stance, and pondering this very difference, becomes for Malvina acognitive sign in its own right. It makes her uphold the imperative of psychological and moral constancy, alongside perfection, as foundations for emotional reciprocity. At the same time, it makes her ignore the affection which runs counter to this very imperative. This results from Malvina’sdifferentiation between the essence of revealing the affections and the essence of the affections themselves. It is precisely against this background that the discrepancy, which she cannot not perceive, between the previous and current forms of Ludomir’saffections makes her interpret them as mere salon insincerity. Inow wish to take acloser look at the structure of the Warsaw plot, and then explore the complications in the drama of the heroine’sdesired identification of the two different individuals, and her growing disappointment when their identity is gradually disproved. Iam bound to do this, having expressed my belief that the spoken and written turns of Malvina’snarration are interwoven with the events of the entire, and in particular – the Warsaw, plot. Likewise, Ishall pursue my declared intention to discuss the symbolic purposes included in the twists and turns of the plot, as well as in the events themselves. Unshaken or Unwavering Constancy? The most important factor that makes Malvina experience the “division” into two of Ludomir is the changing affective and communicative ambience in which their meetings take place. This is what makes her respond 72 either in arestrained manner: when she feels his absence despite his constant presence, or in an impulsive manner: when she feels his presence despite their scanty interaction. The Warsaw salon eliminates from Malvina’sand Prince Melsztyński-Ludomir’sbehaviour the lively responsiveness which at Krzewin made their relationship genuinely spontaneous. In consequence, lost are the charm and appeal (Malvina calls them “attraction”, 52) which used to resonate in their previous conversations through symbols, allusions or irony gently turned against the beloved (such as the label “Ungrateful”), as well as in the modulated voice and intonation of their exchanges. The Warsaw salon invites echoes of those former affective and communicative qualities, now largely weakened due to convention and derailed through trivial, familiar acts of propriety and politeness. The salon speech of the protagonists is tainted by Ludomir’spublic displays of affection for his intended, at the same time slighting her with his inconsiderate behaviour and moral precepts, and by Malvina’semotional restraint as aresponse to this affective “licentiousness”. Malvina’sletters, in which she begins to understand what binds her to Ludomir (affection and her promise not to insist on solving the mystery) and what separates her from him (i.e. his psychological transformation) provide insights into the obscure aspects of her responses. During their meetings and conversations, she tends to suppress these aspects rather than allowing for their constant operation in all their suggestiveness and truth, thereby experiencing repeated failure. In contrast, the meeting of the protagonists during the charity collection restores between them what Malvina has already considered lost: their sympathy expressed at once by means of situational details, half-broken exclamations, meaningful glances, and – more than anything else – the voice: “His gaze burned with the tenderest love, and in his voice Malvina could distinguish surprise, joy, emotion, as well as aslight hint of reproach” (88). Changed beyond recognition, Ludomir counters Malvina’simpression that he is amember of the salon community, like Lissowski or Doryda, and that he plays the familiar role of aman of the world and aladies’ man. He dumbfounds Malvina with his transformation and puzzles her as an individual compelled to undergo regular personal transformations, thus strengthening her sense of an unfathomable mystery. An external picture of Malvina’sbehaviour and responses at the salon is provided by the letters of Major Lissowski, one of Malvina’sadmirers. The letters express his admiration for her skilful ways of preserving 73 her independence in amilieu which forces its participants to meet not only the requirements of propriety and familiarity, but also to engage in backbiting, the components of socially accepted standards of behaviour: I[…] am sometimes so impressed by Malvina’scold civility that Inever allow myself in her company to use any of those expressions which severity would call “bad tone” but which we would call priceless elegance, or to indulge in any backbiting or unrestrained ranting or, in other words, to carry on any part of our normal mode of existence. (60) The Warsaw plot develops in away so ambiguous that Malvina’sgrowing sense of Ludomir’s“split self” is accompanied by what she rationally perceives as evidence of his personal identity. The moment of collision between the dilemma she faces and the manifestations of Ludomir’stwo different personalities is depicted in the scene in which they both communicate by means of coded speech and writing, exchanged while dancing and playing word-games in the salon. Let me now analyse the major structural and content-related components of the scene. Thanks to amirror, the eyes of Malvina and Ludomir meet unexpectedly. This breeds afeeling of intimacy between them, which was not there before. The glances and stirrings normally adjusted to the requirements of the circumstances are transformed into spontaneous responses. Malvina’squestion and Ludomir’sanswer, conveyed through their eyes as much as through their voices, contain coded messages. This is suggested by the narrator’sexplanation: Resting her chin in her hand, she stared into the mirror without thinking what she was doing; but then she caught sight not only of her own face but that of Ludomir, which she had not noticed before. His eyes were fixed upon her with almost that same expression of sensitivity and sadness, which had so captivated her at Krzewin and which she had sought in vain on the fickle countenance of Prince Melsztyński in Warsaw. She shuddered involuntarily and for the first time since her arrival in the city she addressed him first: “How come, Prince, you are not dancing this evening? You, who are usually in such high spirits, seem pensive?” “Iwanted to dance, Iwould gladly have given half my life to dance, but nobody wanted me and nothing brings me luck.” “Nobody” stood for Malvina; “nothing brings me luck” meant that she could not dance with him: thus the customary language of lovers, who encapsulate the whole world in the object of their love. (69–70) 80 Is it Ludomir’sheart which does not manifest itself in his speech, or is it her own thoughts which fail to detect his heart in his speech? Her heart checks the cognitive acts of her thoughts, and vice versa. Malvina’seyes, which glance at Ludomir and then at the text of his sentential utterance, illustrate these criss-crossing actions. According to Rousseau, among the phenomena that from time immemorial have shaped human relationships, writing is distinctly different from speech, even though it is the visual equivalent of speech and provides additional cognitive values to those provided by speech. In Rousseau’sview, writing is considered atool with which to discipline human linguistic expression into intellectual accuracy. In contrast, speech is atool which gives emotional intensity to that expression. Rousseau sees the distinctive features of writing in the exchange of thoughts, and distinctive features of speech in the exchange of emotions. The merits of writing and written communications are not viewed by Rousseau as natural. He assesses them through the loss which they inflict on the merits of human speech, but also through what differentiates these two kinds of merit. Here is what Rousseau himself says on the subject: Writing, which seems as if it should fix language, is precisely what alters it; it changes not its words but its genius; it substitutes precision for expressiveness. Feelings are conveyed when one speaks and ideas when one writes. In writing, one is forced to take all the words according to common acceptation; but he who speaks varies the meanings by the tone of his voice, he determines them as he pleases; less constrained to be clear, he grants more to forcefulness, and it is not possible for alanguage one writes to keep for long the liveliness of one that is only spoken. Words are written and not sounds: now, in an accented language it is the sounds, the accents, the inflections of every sort that constitute the greatest energy of the language; and that make aturn of phrase, even acommon one, belong only in the place it is found. (1998, 300) In order for the written exchange between Malvina and Ludomir’ssentential questions and answers to recreate the liveliness and fullness of understanding experienced in their past conversations, it would have to bring joy to their hearts and fill their thoughts at the same time. In other words, it would have to be perceived by the interlocutors as eagerly awaited, fitting and accurate in every word and every sense, while concealing its intended message. This would mean that asilent game of writing and speech had taken place within the exchange, enabling the emergence of the questions and answers as agenuinely informal and secret dialogue, 81 “belong[ing] only in the place it is found” (Rousseau 1998, 300). This would then mean that the very properties of written questions and answers, complemented and secured with punctuation, had successfully entered the role of the voice signs that had earlier nuanced their former conversations, the “sounds, the accents, the inflections of every sort” (Rousseau 1998, 300). Meanwhile, as Ihave shown, this possibility has been squandered. The written exchange of sentential messages “paralyses” the protagonists. The inconstancy of Ludomir’sspeech (from Malvina’sviewpoint) and Malvina’sunfriendly message (from Ludomir’sviewpoint) contradict not only the thoughts, but also the hearts of the protagonists. Rousseau’sstance on the differences between speech and writing, which highlights apreference for thoughts rather than feelings in writing, has its origins in his high regard for the voice and feeling as the material and psychological foundations of language communication. In his view, it is not needs but feelings that stimulate humans to influence one another by means of language. By “feelings”, he means inner experiences which cannot remain unexpressed, and which open up or close certain individuals to others, creating either sympathy or estrangement between them. All this is expressed by speech. It is speech, and not writing, according to Rousseau, that takes precedence in this task. This is because natural components, such as voice-modulated sounds, stresses and intonations, are present in speech signs. In the voice, viewed as potential sign matter, without carrying any specific utterance, Rousseau sees an instrument capable of effecting closeness between people. When comparing the most commonly used kinds of communicative sign matter, he declares: “Colors are the finery of inanimate beings; all matter is colored; but sounds proclaim movement, the voice proclaims asensitive being” (Rousseau 1998, 325). It is no coincidence then that in the intonation which he describes as the voiced modulation of the meaning of an utterance, he sees an instrument capable of reflecting either the speakers’ moral integrity or their departures from it. According to Rousseau, conventional graphic signs are capable, as he puts it, of stressing the paradoxical aspect of this, of “depict[ing] sounds and speak[ing] to the eyes” (Rousseau 1998, 297). In the development of historical forms of writing, in the transformations of the “manners of writing” until “alphabetic writing” emerged, he sees agradual reduction of this natural, object-based factor in favour of the conventional and sign-based. The process, he tells us, has comprised three key stages: “The first manner of writing is not to depict sounds but the objects themselves, whether directly as the Mexicans did, or by allegorical figures as the 82 Egyptians did of old” (Rousseau 1998, 297); “to represent words and propositions by conventional characters” (Rousseau 1998, 297), which was typical of Chinese writing; or to “break down the speaking voice into acertain number of elementary parts, whether vowels or articulations, with which one could form all imaginable words and syllables” (Rousseau 1998, 297), the latter being the source of origin of our alphabetic writing. The essence of relations which began to connect speech and alphabetic writing is thus epitomised by Rousseau: “This is not precisely to depict speech, it is to analyze it” (1998, 297). Let me once again return to Malvina’s dilemma. I would like to consider some related questions, alongside those reflected in Rousseau’sviews on intonation, from the vantage point of later formulations by J. L. Austin, which have drawn the attention of linguists to the utterance as aspeech act.21 They would seem to be concurrent. Naturally, this concerns only the concurrence of the types of questions and issues, and not their particular formulations. This concurrence matters, on the one hand, because the questions expressing the essence of Malvina’sdilemma are linked to the issue of “truthfulness” of speech as carrier of feeling, hence – to the “interpretation” of speech. On the other hand, Austin – when trying to pinpoint the way in which speech carries meaning, moves around aset of notions that relate to the physical (voice-related), conventional (meaning-related), spiritual and moral (ethical) components of speech. It is impossible not to see Austin’sdilemma as identical to that of Rousseau, and of Malvina: But we are apt to have afeeling that [the words] being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but ashort step to go on to believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is adescription, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance. The classic expression of this idea is to be found in the Hippolytus (l. 612), where Hippolytus says: “my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not”. Thus “Ipromise to…” obliges me – puts on record my spiritual assumption of aspiritual shackle. It is gratifying to observe in this very example how excess of profundity, or rather solemnity, at once paves the way for immortality. For one who says 21 While drawing on J. L. Austin’sHow to do Things with Words, Ido not intend to present, much less interpret, Austin’stheory. Ionly refer to one of its threads, touching upon its major issue: the representation of an utterance as an illocutionary act. 83 “promising is not merely amatter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!” is apt to appear as asolid moralist standing out against ageneration of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of aspecialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus with alet-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “Ido” and the welsher with adefence for his “Ibet”. Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond. (Austin 1962, 9–10; italics original) In this passage, Austin’sarguments are polemical. He defends the assumption that the words with which we promise or bet “inasmuch as” in “the depths of ethical space” (Austin 1962, 10) conceal our moral obligation. At the same time, while opposing “solid moralists”, Austin also stresses the significance of the psychological and moral components of aspoken utterance (1962, 10). This is why his arguments help us to understand that Malvina’sdilemma consists in eliminating the uncertainties surrounding the discrepancy between the two aspects of Ludomir’sutterance, the verbal and that contained in “the invisible depths of ethical space” (Austin 1962, 10). They also help us to see Malvina’sdilemma as areading, by the heart and by the thoughts, of the heart’s“pledge” and of the signs of the spoken utterance. These findings bring me to the following reflections. It is the task of those who depict the “feelings”, “errors” or “passions” of Hippolytus or Malvina to expose the invisible conflicts resulting from these characters’ attitudes towards the non-transparency of utterances, whether their own or other people’s. This writerly task involves another. It is the task of philosophers and theoreticians of language to stress that the utterance, whether of Hippolytus, Malvina or anyone else, because of its non-transparent sign-related nature, cannot be reduced either to aspiritual act (an inner, spiritual, fictional whole, which could only be manifested in words), or to aphonetic act (the physical minimum). In aword, it is their task to demonstrate that the most distinctive feature of an utterance is that the utterance itself is an act of creating meaning, i.e. of performing through speech and accentuating the ways in which the words should be understood at any given moment. This distinctive feature of an utterance, whose “other side” is revealed by writers, and whose essence – by philosophers and theoreticians of language, imposes on Hippolytus, Malvina and anyone else the fixed role of originators and interpreters of the non-transparency of utterances. 84 The arguments of both Rousseau and Austin have convinced me that Malvina’sdilemma has been, and still is, no trivial issue. As afactor which complicates the Warsaw plot, it contributes to the development of atypical Enlightenment motif: the “ambiguity” of the human world (Barthes 1990, 15). At the same time, it carries typically romantic content, i.e. the ambiguity is invaded by utterances that have been individually formulated, emotionally or indeed subconsciously experienced, both spoken-aloud (externalised) and unspoken (not allowed to be externalised). The Letter as Carrier of Suppressed or Publicized Words22 As the Warsaw plot unfolds, the protagonists’ mental, emotional and utterance-related disconnection is gradually clarified. Malvina’sturning again towards the discrepancies between the contradictory or doppelgängerincarnations of Ludomir arranges the meanings potentially hidden within his sentential reply to her sentential question into layers. In other words, the final phase of the Warsaw plot, the clarification of earlier events after later ones have occurred, including Malvina’salready mentioned experience of Ludomir’spersonal non-identity in an atmosphere typical of the use of the doppelgänger motif, all suggest that the exchange of sentential messages could have combined the meanings related to the two different spheres of the protagonists’ experiences. In short, the essence of Ludomir’sreply might have misleadingly corresponded to the essence of Malvina’squestion, and thus erroneously confirmed his personal identity. Let us note that the presentation of the episodes in the mirrored conversation and the game of secrétaire as misleading in the riddle-solving process has its origin in the ending of both episodes. After all, Ludomir’sreply is so disorientating that Malvina cannot be certain that the essence of her question was, for him, concealed in the place name “Krzewin”: Did not last summer, did not last August leave any lasting impression? […] 22 Here Idraw on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’sidea that aletter is a“carrier” of words (1996, 137). 85 The impression, unfortunately, will never ever be erased. But merciful kindness should perhaps not remind me of it. (71) From Malvina’sviewpoint, the expressive quality of “unfortunately” is too ambiguous to be interpreted as reinforcing the sense of unwavering constancy, which could have sounded to Malvina like aconfession, or more likely – astatement of failure, related to aconfusing sense of unwavering constancy. Last but not least, the questioning quality of his reply in fact erases its declarative message, which might have confirmed the expectation contained in Malvina’squestion. Consequently, it is not the further course of events but the very finales of both amorous episodes that makes Malvina realise the existence not of one shared experience but of two disparate spheres of events, in which the two of them have located their secret experiences. Acomplete division into layers, and the resulting separation of meanings linked by the question-and-answer exchange, occurs in the sequence of events centred around Alfred’sletter, read aloud by Lissowski in the salon. The key scene in this sequence is areversal of the preceding one, which features the conversation and game of secrétaire. In the latter, the written messages turn other characters into mutes, as the questions and answers are read only by participants in the game. Now, in Lissowski’sreading, the written message can be heard by all those present. In the former, written messages express the lovers’ quintessential secrets. Now, they serve to publicize these secrets. It is the powerful contrast between, on the one hand, the events recounted by Alfred in his letter and the use Lissowski makes of them, and on the other – the affection itself and the idea of affection which Malvina cherishes and upholds, that ultimately separate the meanings of the lovers’ exchanges in the game. Hence Ludomir’sstatement turns into amessage which results from his temporary expiation for having embraced the “inferior”, “licentious” aspect of relationships, in which two people are not bound by the imperative of fidelity. It does not result from any intention to assure Malvina of his unwavering support for the “superior”, ideal aspect of arelationship. Ishall now point to the main structural and thematic motifs in the scene depicting the response of the audience to Lissowski’sreading aloud of Alfred’sletter. The letter itself has already been quoted in full. Lissowski, following his plan to introduce discord between Malvina and Ludomir, skilfully kindles the salon community’sinterest in the letter which is in his possession. First, when the conversation turns to Ludomir’sdeparture, Lissowski “mention[s] Alfred’sletter” (110); next, when 86 the interest intensifies, he “produc[es] the letter from his pocket” (110), saying that Alfred “has seen Ludomir and even brings me an amusing anecdote about him” (110); and finally, on the audience’srequest that he “show” the letter (111), he begins to read the letter aloud. Malvina’sdiscomposure (the tea spilling incident), visible to the company and occasioned by Lissowski’sactions, precedes the disappointment which she experiences inwardly (“distress” and “adismal impression”, 111) because of the events of which she learns as the letter is read aloud. Lissowski’sact testifies to his in-depth understanding of the practices and conventions used to circulate publicly half-confidential and half-gossipy information. After all, Alfred’sletter is ameans of circulating opinions about people and events (“Perhaps you will be able to piece together from this story anice bit of tittle-tattle that will assist you in your courtship of the angelic Malvina, blackening Ludomir alittle in her eyes”, 110). The use that Lissowski makes of the letter is aimed at showing Ludomir in an ambiguous light. Malvina’s anxiety, in turn, implies afear of making public that part of her life in which Ludomir’sambiguity features as an issue in its own right, one which Malvina only reveals in letters. That is why she almost becomes the heroine of a“scene” which “might have attracted all eyes towards Malvina” (111). After all, Alfred’sletter discusses with piquancy and cynicism the events which link Ludomir to ayoung woman called Florynka, emphasising the love affair and the yet inexplicable “telling” details. Lissowski’sinitiative acts as afoil to Malvina’sinner love life. And the letter which he reads is afoil to the secrecy of her epistolary communications. This is suggested by the heroine’sinner experiences, as the narrator tells us. The most important part in them is played by her disillusioned recollections. Her acknowledgement of Ludomir’sunfaithfulness to her after the Krzewin days replaces the imagery of perfect love and human virtue, so far symbolised to her by this locality: She recalled with tearful wretchedness the previous summer and the happy days at Krzewin, when she would have been unable to conceive of Ludomir ever being fond of anyone but herself. Alas! Almost every passing day (since Malvina had made her entry into high society) bore away with it one of the thousands of delusions which, in her lonely youth, she had imagined to be so entrancing and which at Krzewin had seemed to have come true in Ludomir’sheart. (111) 87 Ambiguity of the Human World The masterly co-ordination of the spoken and written turns in the narrative with the complications in the Warsaw plot enables Wirtemberska to reflect in it awhole range of inter-related issues. Put in the most general terms, it can be said that the Warsaw plot demonstrates Ludomir’sdual personality against abackdrop of the more general ambiguity of human personalities, faces, deeds and utterances (the mystery of Ludomir and the theatricality of the salon). If we wish, however, to capture the essence of this issue, it should be stated that the Warsaw plot demonstrates both the excellent adjustment by some characters to the dictates of ambiguity and the experience of ambiguity as torment (Lissowski and Doryda openly parade their preference for theatrical “polite hypocrisy”; Malvina shows “cold politeness” towards theatrical behaviours outwardly, but inwardly they make her feel confused and helpless). Below are passages from letters by Lissowski and by Malvina, written roughly at the same time: Lissowski: “We are beginning to play out acomedy in which Ludomir, Malvina, Doryda and your humble servant will be playing the principal roles. Confidants and soubrettes are to be found for the asking! (the Sheriff is already aready-made confidant). Who will be the best actor and how the drama’splot will unravel, we will learn shortly”. (61) Malvina: “My Wanda! Now Iknow who he is, this strange, this mysterious Ludomir... or rather Idon’t know, Idon’t understand, Icannot comprehend anything that touches upon his fate or his conduct!” (59)23 That is not all: the Warsaw plot enables us to perceive that experiencing the duality of what is seen and what is heard as something unbearable that we might wish to control, implies the unending differentiation, separation and selection for ourselves of the possible meanings of the faces, characters, deeds, and primarily – utterances that we encounter. This is shown in the unspoken disapproval of Ludomir’scharacter, formulated by Malvina in her thoughts and letters, thereby making him a representative of theatrical “polite hypocrisy”. Moreover, the plot suggests that in this way the meanings of certain phenomena are given ethical preference over others. This may be seen in those situations where 23 The theatre, and more precisely – acting, is one of the most common metaphors used to signify the ambiguity of the human world. 88 Malvina’smental and epistolary acknowledgment of Ludomir’spositive traits is accompanied by her conviction that theirs is aperfect love, an idealisation ascribed by one of the partners to the other, which sustains the affective commitment. It is thus impossible not to view Malvina as anovel which combines two broad topics running through the culture of the European Enlightenment. One is the non-transparency of the human world: the appearance of “masks, veils and paint” (Barthes 1990, 15) on faces, in characters, in their deeds and utterances, when the values or intentions indicated by means of such phenomena are lacking, or when others make themselves known. The other is the non-transparency of speech: its ambiguities which keep the speakers in astate of uncertainty and can lead either to complete comprehension, or to errors and misunderstandings.24 The fact that in Malvina both topics come to interact in the Warsaw plot, set in the salon and around it, corroborates aprofound cultural pattern. The tradition of French seventeenthand eighteenth-century salons, and in particular – the forms of social life which they cultivated and which gave inspiration to Wirtemberska’sWarsaw salon, centred around their interaction. The former topic was, however, essentially located within the domain of literature, while the latter – within philosophical reflection on language. In order to demonstrate how far the salon combines these two large topics, the moral and the linguistic, let me recall two scholars and their considerations. On the one hand, there is the argument of Roland Barthes that the question of “How to read man?” (1990, 15) ran through the works of Racine and La Rochefoucauld as much as it did through the texts produced by salon attendees. On the other hand, it should be noted, following Zofia Florczak, that the essence of contemporary reflection on language consisted in judgments about the meaning of words, particularly those connoting moral notions, “which could not be specified by pointing to atangible correlative” (1978, 30; trans. M.O.). When reading the longish passage by Barthes about La Rochefoucauld’sMaxims (further below), let us keep in mind the fragment from Leibniz’smeditation on moral reasons, which in his view constitute, coincidentally, one of the formal criteria for the origin of the meanings of words: Iknow that the Scholastics and everyone else are given to saying that the significations of words are arbitrary (ex insituto), and it is true that they are 24 The major aspects of this issue are discussed by Teresa Kostkiewiczowa (1990). not settled by natural necessity, but they are settled by reasons – sometimes natural ones in which chance plays some part, sometimes moral ones which involve choice. (1990, 279) These statements from Leibniz come from his polemic with John Locke on the then topical debate on the nature of linguistic signs, and form an inseparable component of theories of language developed by Rousseau, Herder, and others. Florczak writes: Both Locke and Leibniz raised as very important the problem of “names”, i.e. word meanings. They were interested in the origins of names, their semantic transformations (from the concrete, perceived by the senses, to the general and abstract), the possibilities for defining names or elucidating their meanings, and consequently, in the issue of word unambiguity. (1978, 108; trans. M.O.) The categories which Leibniz uses to describe the origins of word meanings are developed by Barthes as he elaborates on La Rochefoucauld’sMaxims. The Maxims reflect the sarcasm of asalon frequenter who derives no self-assurance from moral notions that require demystifying specifications of “how many” and “what kind of” properties define their essence. The Maxims first and foremost attack concepts of virtues based on popular meanings of moral notions, typically conceived of and applied without reflection. The maxims give names to the less noble aspects of deeds, qualities and values, usually concealed behind their nobler sides, such as vanity, weakness, amour propre, laziness and, primarily, self-love. Let us remember that self-love (“vanity” in the English translation) is the subject of the very first sentence of Wirtemberska’spreface to Malvina. Let us also remember that both in her preface and novel itself, virtues are viewed as unattainable ideals which have the power nevertheless to channel human activity and sensibility. It is interesting that Barthes’sreconstructive depiction of the maxim includes an analysis of its mythical context, updated in the combination of linguistic and moral issues in the maxim and in its home environment, i.e. the salon: The maxim is a two-faced being, here tragic, there bourgeois; despite its austere stamp, its stinging and pure writing, it is essentially an ambiguous discourse, located on the frontier of two worlds. Which ones? We can say, that of death and that of play. On death’sside, we have the tragic question par excellence, addressed by man to the silent god: Who am I? This is the question 89 not settled by natural necessity, but they are settled by reasons – sometimes natural ones in which chance plays some part, sometimes moral ones which involve choice. (1990, 279) These statements from Leibniz come from his polemic with John Locke on the then topical debate on the nature of linguistic signs, and form an inseparable component of theories of language developed by Rousseau, Herder, and others. Florczak writes: Both Locke and Leibniz raised as very important the problem of “names”, i.e. word meanings. They were interested in the origins of names, their semantic transformations (from the concrete, perceived by the senses, to the general and abstract), the possibilities for defining names or elucidating their meanings, and consequently, in the issue of word unambiguity. (1978, 108; trans. M.O.) The categories which Leibniz uses to describe the origins of word meanings are developed by Barthes as he elaborates on La Rochefoucauld’sMaxims. The Maxims reflect the sarcasm of asalon frequenter who derives no self-assurance from moral notions that require demystifying specifications of “how many” and “what kind of” properties define their essence. The Maxims first and foremost attack concepts of virtues based on popular meanings of moral notions, typically conceived of and applied without reflection. The maxims give names to the less noble aspects of deeds, qualities and values, usually concealed behind their nobler sides, such as vanity, weakness, amour propre, laziness and, primarily, self-love. Let us remember that self-love (“vanity” in the English translation) is the subject of the very first sentence of Wirtemberska’spreface to Malvina. Let us also remember that both in her preface and novel itself, virtues are viewed as unattainable ideals which have the power nevertheless to channel human activity and sensibility. It is interesting that Barthes’sreconstructive depiction of the maxim includes an analysis of its mythical context, updated in the combination of linguistic and moral issues in the maxim and in its home environment, i.e. the salon: The maxim is a two-faced being, here tragic, there bourgeois; despite its austere stamp, its stinging and pure writing, it is essentially an ambiguous discourse, located on the frontier of two worlds. Which ones? We can say, that of death and that of play. On death’sside, we have the tragic question par excellence, addressed by man to the silent god: Who am I? This is the question 96 of this equilibrium that terminates it. Aconsequence of this situation is, initially, the personal unity of Malvina and Ludomir represented by Krzewin, followed by the internal split in Malvina as aperson that happens in Warsaw, which parallels the split in Ludomir as aperson. The very same symmetry underlies the riddle and the phenomena which its solution reveals. It appears that everything that disturbed the “twinned” unity in the relationship between Malvina and Ludomir was actually areversal of the ideal “twinned” unity which had joined the parents of the Melsztyński brothers in the previous generation. The novel’sclose is preceded not only by the solution to the riddle, but also by a resumption of harmony in Malvina and Ludomir’s relationship (which parallels that between the parents of the Melsztyński brothers). In the novel’sfinal section, two marriages: of Malvina to Ludomir and of Wanda to not-Ludomir, are the beginning of two new incarnations of the “twinned” co-existence between personal unity and duality, but in the next generation. One cannot resist the impression that Wirtemberska took twindom as her fundamental ludic and cognitive perspective. Ihave demonstrated that, while twindom constitutes the prime mover of the riddle, it is also the originator of the conflicts in the world in which the riddle reveals itself as ariddle. In this connection between the cognitive and ludic planes, with reference to twindom, an important cultural pattern should be noted. And we also see important evidence of Wirtemberska’sown views on how novels affect their readers. Wirtemberska believed that ludic components created an appropriate mood in anovel for the final point to be able to be accepted by readers: “prescriptions, truths, lessons, which may be found in aromance under the mantle of entertainment” (3). This takes me back to an issue previously outlined in this study. The ancient origin of the symbolism of twins is well known. This symbolism draws on types and fundamental components of imagery that have come down to us from the mythologies of primal peoples. These include twins known from folklore, such as the Slavic Lel and Polel; from ancient writings, such as Romulus and Remus; or from Biblical texts, such as Cain and Abel. The ancient world abounded in divine twins, while human twins feature heavily in the ancient and modern Christian world. In the ancient world, the symbolic function of twins as independent yet utterly similar beings focused on the “unification of opposites”. As Vyacheslav Ivanov has pointed out, in ancient and archaic myths, twins symbolise “transitional links” between such primary cultural opposites as, for instance, odd and even, left and right, masculine 97 and feminine (1978; 1987, 174–176; cf. Tokarev 358–359). In discussing both types of myth concerned directly with divine twins, Ivanov stresses that these creatures frequently became founders of whole families; in their actions and activities, “they often duplicated one another”; they embodied the interlocking of two family genealogies, “two beginnings” (1987, 174). Another issue raised by Ivanov is that in several archaic and ancient myths, dual supernatural creatures played simultaneously the part of twins and of Androgynes. In other words, they were cast in the role of two creatures representing one, and in the role of one creature representing two (1987, 174). Twin-related motifs abound in literary texts from Antiquity until the present day. Yet the sources of their meaningful content tend to vary in different texts. They may relate to the already mentioned mythical, archaic and ancient symbolisms, folklore or Christian symbolism. Likewise, typical ways of using these motifs in literature tend to vary. There is no single tradition. Ivanov’sideas are again germane on this point. He claims that, in literature, in twin-related motifs, the archaic, dual symbolism merges with the problem of “ahuman doppelgänger (ahuman shadow)” (Ivanov 1987, 174). This seems to be confirmed both by the complex way in which Wirtemberska uses the twin brother motif and by the cultural context of the transitional period in which she realized her project. Wirtemberska’sludic use of the twin brother motif, in order to produce amysterious plot, one which abounds in misconstrued actions by the protagonists and situational complications, is typical. It resonates with solutions used over the centuries (for example, in Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors). The additional, cognitive use which she makes of twindom as acentral motif, casting it in the role of antecedent to her novel’sconflicts, also situates itself within the time-honoured convention. This may explain why it was so accurately represented and interpreted by the novel’sillustrator. The essence of plot-related complications in Malvina, as Ihave shown, is the interweaving of parallels between the protagonists. On the one hand, this affects, explicitly, both siblings (Malvina and Wanda) and the two individuals in love (Malvina and Ludomir). On the other hand, less explicitly, it is about the relationships between parents and children, that is the grandparents and parents of the Ludomir brothers, and between the twins themselves. These numerous interconnections between the characters form the foundation for the “twinned” intermingling of the parallel and non-parallel personality traits, actions, and sometimes 98 even utterances of the protagonists. This is one of the factors creating the impression of the multiple game of unity and unambiguity with duality and ambiguity, which Ihave already outlined. In the Malvina-Ludomir couple, the “twinned” parallel between personality traits, actions, and – in their case particularly – utterances, is broken. Ihave referred several times to the consequences of this shift. As we remember, the opposition of Ludomir and Ludomir, and consequently – of Malvina and Malvina, gives an explicit doppelgänger touch to the couple’spast relationship. Malvina with respect to Ludomir, and Ludomir with respect to Malvina, both play their simultaneous parts on two opposing planes: the Warsaw plane and the Krzewin plane. To each other, they become split persons: at those moments when the Warsaw Ludomir comes across as the Krzewin Ludomir, Malvina finds him puzzling and inaccessible; when Malvina meets the Warsaw Ludomir, she in turn becomes puzzling and inaccessible to him. The split in the person of Ludomir within the “twin” Malvina-Ludomir couple is one of the explicit components of the plot, while the split in the person of Malvina is one of the less explicit. The episode which recapitulates all the previous manifestations of this doppelgänger game, and simultaneously highlights the circumstances which explain its origin, is the finale of the Warsaw plot. As in the entire novel, so too in this episode, the events and Malvina’sresulting experiences are recounted both in the narrator’stale and in the heroine’sletter. Malvina’sprivate conversation with one Ludomir is disrupted by ascream from the other Ludomir, an alter ego of the former. The scream becomes an integral component of the utterance which Malvina formulates, marked by agenuine turn to the Ludomir with whom she was actually conversing. Her utterance was to have communicated her emotional commitment, but is instead disrupted and followed by the heroine’sloss of consciousness: Rais[ing] her eyes, [she gave] the Prince her hand and declare[d]: “Return safely, Prince, and when the war is over…” But her words were cut short by an horrendous shriek as the most extraordinary apparition confounded her senses. In the dense thicket of the hedge, clearly illuminated by the moonlight, Malvina saw standing opposite her asecond image of Ludomir. (132) The letter in which the heroine quotes the unuttered part of her promise demonstrates that her simultaneous hearing and seeing of the two Ludomirs was, to her, equivalent to facing that which divided and 99 split herself – having divided and split the person of the Ludomir she had encountered in Warsaw: Imeant to add, “…and when the war is over, you will receive my hand.” But Iwas unable to conclude these final words. My words were interrupted, interrupted perhaps forever, by an appalling scream and by asupernatural apparition, whose appearance dumbfounded my senses at the time, and whose memory has thrown me into aterrified panic ever since. Isuddenly saw Ludomir’simage reproduced behind him; despair and death were written on his face; he was lit up by the moonlight and seemed to emerge out of the darkness of the night. (136–137) Malvina’sletter allows me to conclude that this very incident forced her to face the duality of the Warsaw Ludomir as aproblem of one and the same person, and of two different persons at the same time. Malvina depicts the other Ludomir as “asupernatural apparition” (136), and yet – as in the split second when she sees him, she denies the reality of that impression by refusing to accept the sighting of the other Ludomir as “hallucination”, and not “all too real” (138). In the process, she resorts to self-accusation: the more she accepts the thought of the other Ludomir’sreal existence, the more she blames herself for having made apromise to the first: Agh, Wanda, that loathsome ghost returned to me along with my memory and has made such adeep impression on my mind that, even if Iwere to lose my memory, Iwould never shake it off. Wanda! Believe me, it was no hallucination. Wanda, it could have been an unhappy omen for Ludomir... an omen perhaps for Malvina, as well as an early punishment for the fact that her lips were about to utter something other than what her soul felt, and that she was about to give her hand to Prince Melsztyński when she was no longer able to give him her heart! (137) The setting of the incident recalled by the heroine resembles the circumstances in which the mythological offspring of the Moon, the four-armed and four-legged Androgynes, who combined masculine with feminine traits, were cut in two by Zeus, assisted by Apollo. This mythological incident is thus narrated by Aristophanes in Plato’sSymposium: [Zeus] proceeded to cut everyone in two, just as people cut up sorb-apples for preserving or slice eggs with ahair. As he divided them he told Apollo 100 to take each separated half and turn round the face and half neck to the cut side, so that each person by contemplating its own cut surface might behave more moderately. (2008, 23) Roland Barthes elucidates that it was Zeus’ intention to force the divided, two-armed and two-legged Androgynes to be continually reminded of their inner division. In Zeus’ order, Barthes sees the prototypical inner imperative which insists that humans try to mentally control all that divides and splits them: “Understand your madness: that was Zeus’ command when he ordered Apollo to turn the faces of the divided Androgynes (like an egg, aberry) toward the place where they had been cut apart (the belly)” (2001, 60; italics original). Ipoint here to the mythical and problematic context of the incident recalled by the heroine, because components analogous to the mythological ones may be found in Malvina. Moreover, aviolent change should be noted in Malvina’sattitude towards the object of her affections: ariddle involving not one but two different individuals. It shows that she understands where she might have erred: she was guilty not of misconstruing the doppelgänger inconstancy of the Ludomir whom she encountered in Warsaw, but of misconstruing his identity. This is how the final scene of the Warsaw plot endorses Ivanov’sargument concerning the merging of archaic twin symbolism with the motif of the human doppelgänger in contemporary literature. The scene also endorses his belief that one component of this both ancient and modern problem is the inner co-existence of the duality of twins (two persons to represent one) and the androgynous duality (one person to represent two). At this point let me draw attention to one more problematic complication of the motif of twins in Wirtemberska’snovel. Interesting and important as it is, its content is associated with the twin motif popular during Classicism, which developed subsequently during the Enlightenment. In Wirtemberska’snovel, as in Molière’scomedy Amphitryon, this complication depends on the connection between twins and doppelgängers, i.e. on agame of personal unity and duality, as well as symptoms of crisis in the institution of marriage. Jacques Lacan was the first to note and discuss these issues in relation to Molière’splay (Lacan 1991). In Lacan’sview, in the eighteenth century, the essence of the parallel between twindom and marriage lay in the latter’sfailure to engage with the ethical categories of “love”, “constancy”, or “commitment”. In other words, in society’sview, this bred the clash between strict moral require- 101 ments related to marriage and the more relaxed requirements related to concubinage. In Malvina, problems related to marriage are presented, as in Amphitryon, in the same context of the twin and doppelgänger interplay of personal unity and duality, which demonstrates that we are indeed dealing here with arange of issues and symbols that loomed large to people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lacan claims that, following Molière’s Amphitryon, an adaptation of Plautus, European thought became permeated with the idea of viewing marriage in two contradictory ways. One was to see it as a“verbal pact”, solemnised during the wedding ceremony; the other – as the cause of most human conflicts. Lacan believes that this way of viewing marriage was encouraged by the mythological plot of Molière’sAmphitryon, which revolves around the doppelgänger rivalry between gods and humans, just as in the play by Plautus and the ancient myth of Amphitryon. Jupiter incarnated as Amphitryon, Alcmene’shusband, fulfils the latter’smarital obligations. Mercury, Jupiter’ssupporter, in turn, becomes a doppelgänger of Sosie, Amphitryon’s servant and the husband of Cleanthis, Alcmene’sservant. Unexpectedly, the basis of the marriages between Alcmene and Amphitryon, as well as between Cleanthis and Sosie, becomes, Lacan tells us, the “mirroring” of constancy and inconstancy. Out of dual love for Amphitryon, Alcmene bears “adouble fruit” (1991, 270), i.e. twins. Lacan believes that the whirlpool of doppelgängers, which in Molière’splay sucks the married couples in, is amodel for the doppelgänger interplay of desires and fulfilments. In real life, this is an inseparable part of the spouses’ subconscious, and consequently it exposes them to conflicts with the essence of the marriages in which they continue to live. In defining the essence of marriage as a“symbolic pact” (1991, 261), with all its implications, Lacan claims: But there is aconflict between this symbolic pactand the imaginary relations which proliferate spontaneously [...] This conflict subtends, one might say, the great majority of the conflicts in that milieu within which the vicissitude of the bourgeois destiny is unravelled, since it occurs within the humanist perspective ofthe realisation ofthe ego,and as aconsequencewithin the alienation properto the ego. (1991, 261) In Lacan’sview, Molière’sAmphitryon plot – through areversal of the role of Jupiter, “the sovereign of the Gods”, who competes with earthly married couples – paradoxically highlights the role of the deity as sanctifier of marriage. Lacan says: “For the couple to keep to the hu- 102 man level, there has to beagod there” (1991, 263). The final speech of Molière’sJupiter, made in the presence of Sosie, addressed to Amphitryon, full of deceit and ambiguity, but also highlighting events of the past, corroborates Lacan’sopinion. Let me quote apassage from that speech as Wirtemberska must have been familiar with both the original version of Molière’s comedy and its superb Polish translation by Franciszek Zabłocki (1783): Ashare with Jupiter has nothing that in the least dishonours, for doubtless, it can be but glorious to find one’sself the rival of the sovereign of the Gods. Ido not see any reason why your love should murmur; it is I, God as Iam, who ought to be jealous in this affair. Alcmene is wholly yours, whatever means one may employ; it must be gratifying to your passion to see that there is no other way of pleasing her than to appear as her husband. Even Jupiter, clothed in his immortal glory, could not by himself undermine her fidelity; what he has received from her was granted by her ardent heart only to you (Molière 1904). In Wirtemberska’snovel, the entire complex cognitive process, in which Malvina becomes involved as aresult of the doppelgänger inconstancy of Ludomir’scharacter, takes place between her first and second marriages – between an unhappy and ahappy one. Malvina is awidow when she first meets Ludomir and when she finally marries him after many tribulations. Ihave intentionally played down these opening and concluding elements of the plot because Ibelieve that only now can their proper significance be grasped – once we know how far the essence of the novel’smysterious plot complications oscillates between idealisation and trivialisation of the emotional bond between the protagonists. What depends on their lively mutual acceptance in this dual relationship, appears to be acertain compensation for the failure of the heroine’sfirst marriage. What in their relationship depends on the salon lovers’ game, conversely, warns of another potential similar failure. The heroine’sfirst marriage, arranged by her parents, was acomplete failure of the ideal of reciprocal marital love when confronted by reality. This consisted in, as the narrator puts it, “inept attempts at love” (19), and this flawed relationship was accepted by both parties. Hence the heroine’sachievement of happiness in her second marriage, of which the narrator informs the reader at the novel’sclose, is avictory for the ideal dear to the heroine, for alove which continues to be alive and fulfilled. The salon type of love, strikingly common, and the emotional void of Malvina’sfirst marriage, hidden from the world, are the losers: 103 Neither time nor the years, however, altered that powerful, exclusive love for Ludomir, which had so taken root in Malvina’sheart since the day she first set eyes on him; she was likewise loved by him to the end of her days with that all-embracing love whose magic fills our lives, the world, every day, every hour with bewitching happiness, but which usually never lasts too long... (201) The narrator states quite clearly that the relationship between Malvina and Ludomir relies on the perfect complementation of their affections, without any reservations. One cannot help thinking that, as the narrator closes her description of this love in two perfectly balanced clauses, she means to say that the protagonists have created for themselves astate of constant emotional fulfilment, which – in her view – tends not to last in marriage. One cannot help thinking too that the narrator wishes to declare that it is in this very fulfilment that the personal unity of the married protagonists reveals itself. (Let us note in passing that the Polish language has aname for this kind of psychological situation: jednia małżeńska [conjugal unity]). After all, the perfect complementation of both protagonists brings to mind the image of the Androgynes before they were cut in two by Zeus, as well as the image of the uncut fruit, to which they are compared in Plato. It is striking that the narrator ends her tale of the protagonists’ conjugal happiness with an account of an incident, which – even if momentarily, yet unequivocally – disturbs the harmony between them. Here Imean Ludomir’ssilent complaint against Malvina, grounded in her alleged interest in Ludomir’sdoppelgänger, Prince Melsztyński (201). Both the space allocated to the episode in the narrator’stale and the fact that it centres around the word “ungrateful”, which as we remember carries dual and heavily loaded emotional meaning for both protagonists, reveal that the issues commented on in Lacan’sdiscussion of Moliere’scomedy are also pertinent here: Engrossed in these pranks and amused by his frivolity, Malvina seemed to Ludomir more absorbed with Prince Melsztyński than usual, and this affected him acutely. Malvina did not pay any attention to this immediately; but when she glanced at her husband she saw an expression of sadness on his face. It was the first moment since their marriage that she had noticed such an expression on his face; this dismayed her all the more. Malvina’sheart at once understood Ludomir’sheart; sincerely moved, she seized his hand: “Ungrateful!” she said quietly with tears in her eyes. That word, which had already passed sentence on his life twice before, now for the third time – and forever after – was to have the power to reassure his 104 heart completely, filling it with the truest happiness which nothing further could extinguish. (201) One more detail related to the Warsaw part of the plot of Malvina should be stressed here in order to supplement my discussion of its milestones. The beginning and middle points of the Warsaw plot are those moments in which amajor role is played by Malvina’sresponse to the qualities of Ludomir’sspeech (at the beginning) and then by the mutual responses of them both to the written qualities of the shared aphorisms (in the middle). In the final section of the Warsaw plot, discussed above, the centre of attention is again Malvina’sresponse to audible utterances by the two Ludomirs, afragment of the marriage proposal and the scream. Let us note that the scream contains no hint, unlike the marriage proposal, that it is meant for Malvina; it could as well be aimed at any possible audience, including the screamer. Yet Malvina’sresponse to it is much stronger than her response to the utterance which carries aclear confession, which shows that she recognises the screamer and the appeal made to her in the scream, despite the incident’s“supernatural” quality. Let us also note that Malvina, when inclined to believe that there are two Ludomirs, is driven by impressions similar to those by which she was driven when assessing two doppelgänger incarnations of one Ludomir. This time, however, she appears more sensitive to the mental experience manifested in the intense directness of the spoken-aloud aspect of verbal utterance, the facial expression, gestures and body language, than to merely verbal content. This is why the Ludomir who screams, and not the one who proposes to her, comes across to her as asentient being, experiencing genuine emotional agitation. The most interesting aspect of the structure of Malvina’s Warsaw plot is precisely the fact that, at all its milestones, amajor role is played by the qualities of the utterances or messages formulated by the protagonists. The course of events unfolds in such away that despite the appearance of the protagonists’ mutual understanding, their verbal communications are aconstant source of emotional, moral and aesthetic conflict. That is why at the various milestones in the Warsaw plot, their attention turns directly to the very qualities of utterances and messages, whether spoken or written, verbal or non-verbal. The final scene of the Warsaw plot only confirms this structural principle. Let us note that the extraordinary quality of Malvina’sexperience results not only from her encounter with the apparition, but also from her 105 encounter with the message which the apparition expresses through the scream, and she – by falling silent, all within the marriage proposal scene. We now know that the apparition scene anticipates the complete solution to the riddle, and consequently the resolution of the novel’splot. From this point of view, another structural characteristic should be noted: in this scene, Malvina – before anyone else around her, and based only on her own conflicting impressions – discovers that there are two Ludomirs. Other characters learn this only after the witnesses to the Melsztyński brothers’ birth come forward, and after the visible proof of their personal separateness the birthmark which one of the brothers has and the other does not is produced. When Wirtemberska presents the scream and the following silence in the final episode of the Warsaw plot – as when she presents the exchange of aphorisms and small talk in the preceding episodes – she stays within the range of problems raised by pre-romantic theoreticians of language, particularly Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder. To Rousseau, the scream was an absolutely primeval mode of linguistic communication. Maria Renata Mayenowa, when discussing this opinion of his, writes: The emotion drew ascream from the breast of primeval man. Moreover, this emotional characteristic of language helps explain that the sound is its actual matter. Ahuman being can influence other human beings through movement and through the voice. The movement is the touch and the gesture. But the touch is limited by the length of the arm. This leaves us with the gesture and the voice as the natural material of human expression, or more strictly speaking, with visual and acoustic signs. (1970, 18; trans. M.O.) Jacques Derrida, when referring to the same idea of Rousseau, takes asimilar stand. He claims that, in human interaction through language, Rousseau saw first and foremost the complementarity of gesture and word: “the visible gesture, more natural and more expressive, can join itself as asupplement to speech, which is itself asubstitute for gesture” (1997, 235). It combines, in Derrida’sview, the process of perfecting the language with the reinforcement of the communicative complementarity of gesture and word: “it separates gesture and speech primitively united in the mythic purity, absolutely immediate and therefore natural, of the cry” (Derrida 1997, 235). Rousseau was therefore convinced, Iclaim following Derrida and Mayenowa, that in the endless multiplicity of communicative situations made possible by the use of language, the ex- 112 complications surrounding the twin couple of male protagonists and the “twinned” interlocking of personal correspondences and opposites within the familial, emotional and social connections between the characters, has been given careful attention in the previous part of this book. Let me now recapitulate the essence of these complications. The incarnation of one Ludomir Melsztyński into two completely different persons, which confuses Malvina, is closely connected with her unshakeable faith in the reciprocity of feelings which is, to her, asymbol of personal unity between two individuals. These two phenomena, in turn, are closely connected with the theatricality of the salon milieu, whose aim is to play with the personal unity of its participants, of both primary and secondary characters. This “twinned” interlocking of personal unity and duality in the narrative and composition of Malvina is demonstrated by the role played on this formal plane of the novel by the dual identity of Maria Wirtemberska herself, split into the authorial persona and the narrator. Let me stress once again that on the plane of events, acrucial role is played in the novel by the dual identity of the male protagonist, split into the twins of Ludomir Prince Melsztyński and Ludomir “Little Flame”. Let me begin by describing the manifestations of this dual identity, in other words – the “twinned duality”, of Maria Wirtemberska. Maria Wirtemberska’screative act is the writing of her novel. The results of this act, i.e. the novel entitled Malvina, or the Heart’sIntuition, are discussed in her preface, which takes the form of aletter addressed To My Brother. The narrator’screative act, in turn, is the telling of events related to complexities in the lives of three characters: Malvina and the Melsztyński twin brothers, drawing on their own letters and letters written by other characters. The narrator repeatedly informs the reader that when relating these events, she is performing in fact anovelistic act par excellence. She wishes to be recognised not only as the narrator of the events that she knows about, but also as the creator of the form in which they function in the novel: as somebody who consciously juxtaposes what she has to say about the events with what the participants in these events have said about the events in their own letters – apersona whose reflections, remarks and opinions derive from the reflections, remarks and opinions contained in these letters. The narrator’screative invention would seem to cover the majority of novelistic acts, from the shaping of multiple turns in the plot within both the tale and the letters, through collating passages from the letters as well as entire letters, to the arrangement of the novel’schapters. 113 Let me quote afew utterances by the novel’snarrator, in which she reports on the forms assumed by the narrative selected and composed by herself. The first of these utterances, inserted between two letter fragments, shapes the arrangement of these letter fragments and of the novel’schapters; the second determines the turn of the narrative from the tale to the letter; the third determines the ordering of the chapters; while the fourth, occurring at the beginning of achapter, influences the form of the tale contained within it. It is significant that in all these passages, as in other similar passages, the narrator refers to both the protagonists and the readers at the same time. Here is the first example: “But enough of all that, which has grieved you much too much; far better to listen to my account of yesterday, opportune for myself, since on that day Iwas able to make myself useful.” Here Ludomir described what the Reader knows from the previous chapter about how he met Malvina for the first time. He went on: “In the dazzling glare of the fire, amongst the smoke and collapsed beams...” (15) The second example: In order to better understand the curious and contradictory thoughts and emotions that Malvina was undergoing in such circumstances, Ishall extract aportion of her letter to Wanda. Not wishing to overstretch the Reader’spatience, Ishall not transcribe the whole. Extract from Malvina’sletter to her Sister “Oh, Wanda! How little real happiness is contained in this fashionable world which we imagined so prepossessing!” (64) The third: She anticipated Ludomir’swarmth and gratitude with inexpressible happiness. Exhausted by the trials of the day she finally fell asleep, bathed in these happy thoughts. And since my Malvina is taking arest, Itoo will pause for awhile before Ibegin my next chapter. (90) 114 The fourth: Chapter Twenty-Eight: “The End” Maybe to some of my Readers Ludomir’sconversation with Malvina appears too long; but, alas, few such happy hours occur in life! Let us therefore not begrudge our lovers the happy hour they spent so contentedly together; it may have been too long for the Reader, but for them it flew past like lightning. And as for myself, Ishall make up for their fault by attempting to describe as succinctly as Ican the remaining twists that fate has since then wrought upon the lives of Ludomir, Malvina, and all the other characters mentioned in the course of my novel. (195) In utterances such as the above, the narrator styles herself as the novelist. The narrative and epistolary discourse is thereby situated within Wirtemberska’soriginal discourse. This shows, internally, what is happening within the primary source from which the novel with its heterogeneous narrative discourse originates. This is because Wirtemberska, when writing her novel – that is, transforming written discourse into her story-telling and epistolary discourse, styles herself as the narrator. It is within these references, which demonstrate an active interdependence, rather than amerely passive coexistence, of the discourses realised by Wirtemberska and the narrator, that the essence of the novel’sessential “twindom” is to be found. Put in more literal terms, it could be said that these two discourses appear homologous and analogous at the same time. The connections formed between them, regardless of whether we view them through the novel’smetaphor of twindom, or through the logical notions of homology and analogy, accentuate the perfect interlocking of these discourses, given their apparent sameness.27 Even when 27 The notions of homology and analogy, taken from logic and used here to depict the interrelations between the authorial and narratorial discourses, are frequently called upon in language and culture studies. They are especially useful when it is necessary to determine particularly complex correspondences between certain phenomena. Here Imean correspondences which, while allowing for the occurrence of similarities and differences within features or manifestations of particular phenomena, deny the sameness of these phenomena themselves. In structural studies of languages and cultures, considering the nature of such complex correspondences is essential. Hence the propositions put forward by Sergej Karcevskij, apioneer of structural linguistics, seem viable: “Opposition pure and simple necessarily leads to chaos and cannot serve as the basis of asystem. True differentiation presupposes asimultaneous resemblance and difference. Concepts form aseries founded on acommon element and are opposed only within this series” (1982, 51). Regardless of the distinctiveness of major twentieth-century structural studies in language and culture, the notions of analogy and homology are used consistently to discuss similarities, on the one hand, and on the other – equivalent properties 115 the narrator’sdiscourse imitates the original written discourse, it merely reflects the original. At the same time, it upholds its status as secondary discourse, derivative of the original, thereby confirming with its narrative and epistolary structure the purely written form of the other. The original discourse, which determines the form of the narratorial discourse, is the material and semantic element that enables the creative roles of the narrator and the author to co-exist, along with the former’sacts of representation and interpretation, and the latter’sparallel acts. In addition, on the basis of this original discourse, this co-existence pertains, firstly, to the broadly conceived identity of the narrator (awoman, aPole, acompetent storyteller and amoralist) as the origin of her creative activity; and secondly, to the hidden figure of the author, Maria Wirtemberska, as the intellectual source of the novel. The Contrast between and the Irregular Pattern of the Tale and the Letters The most conspicuous and general manifestation of the above is the fundamental compositional property of Malvina, expressed through the irregular, abruptly changing pattern of “shifts” from one narrative form to the other, i.e. from the tale to the letters (or vice versa). For the sake of brevity, Iwill refer to this particular feature as the oscillating pattern of the tale and the letters. This is punctuated by discrepancies between the arrangement of the novel’schapters and the ordering of the contrastive juxtapositions of the two narrative forms. Only at the novel’sbeginning do the chapters come together with an alternating succession of tale episodes and letters. In later chapters, this kind of symmetry is no longer found. The subsequent chapters, in particular their beginnings and endings, apportion segments of irregularly mixed sections of the tale and the letters, thereby forming an irregular, abruptly changing pattern of shifts between the two narrative forms. Without the chapter frames, the contrastive juxtapositions of the tale and the letters would not have taken their characteristic form, although they would have had the potential to arrange and interpret their content according to the principle of oppoor manifestations of the phenomena at issue. In speaking of apparently analogous discourses, Ifollow Ferdinand de Saussure’sterminology, as recalled by Roland Barthes. As to issues related to the unmotivated meaning of language signs, Barthes points out that in the special case of onomatopoeia we deal with a“partly unmotivated” meaning, which de Saussure called “arelative analogy” (Barthes 1964, 111). 116 sites. In this way, the production of the novel Malvina, by allowing both the chapters and the contrastive turns of the plot to be simultaneously realized, lays the material and semantic foundations for the irregular pattern of alternating tale and letters to emerge. On closer scrutiny, the irregular, oscillating pattern of tale and letters appears to be clearly delineated by certain interpretative manoeuvres, focused on the events portrayed. These manoeuvres connect doubly with both the author and the narrator, thereby affecting the portrayed events from the novel’stwo interlocking subjective and semantic standpoints. On the one hand, they are contained within the division of the narrative and the events into chapters, which are numbered and titled. On the other hand, they manifest themselves through the contrastive juxtapositions of the tale and the letters. The two types of interpretative manoeuvres are dualistic in essence. Let us note that one of these types, expressed through the division into numbered and titled chapters, which on the face of it remains within the competence of the narrator (as her discourse suggests), interlocks with the external events which she presents and interprets, thereby showing their connection not with one but with two novel-creating entities: the author and the narrator. The other type, i.e. the contrastive juxtapositions of the tale and the letters (seemingly used by the narrator as her own tool for the interpretation of the tales which she tells), does not exist outside the framework of these chapters, which contain an external interpretation of events within the competence of the author.28 The “twindom” of the connections between the personally and functionally disparate creative acts of the author and narrator constitutes for these interpretative manoeuvres anecessary point of reference. It lies neither in any particular storytelling act on the part of the narrator, based on the letters of the participants in the events, nor in the author’snov28 One might ask why Icall these manoeuvres “interpretative”. This notion, after all, seems better suited to purely critical rather than novelistic purposes. This stretching of the term, however, appears pertinent here as it highlights the “twinned” acts of the author and of the narrator, which resemble the methods of interpreting literary texts used in literary criticism. They rely on explication of the meaning of aliterary work or its elements, formulated in metalanguage, that is the language superimposed on the language of the interpreted literary text. In Malvina, like in other novels, the authorial and narratorial interpretative manoeuvres constitute elements of the events to which they pertain, which makes them elements of the novelistic representation of these events. While these authorial and narratorial interpretations may not have the same metalanguage status as critical-literary explications of the events, they are formulated in the “languages” of composition and narration, higher on the “meta” level than the language of the events to which they pertain. 117 el-writing act, which yields that narrative and epistolary discourse. The point of reference is the very “twinned” co-existence and simultaneous disjointedness of these two acts, whose syntax and semantics are reflected in the crisscrossing of the contrastive juxtapositions of the tale and the letters with the sequence of titled chapters. This is why Iassume that the main compositional principle which organises and interprets the events in Malvina is the oscillating, repeated and irregular crisscrossing of the opposing semantic values of the tale and the letters, rather than their contrast itself. It should be remembered, however, that this principle of irregular switching is used in place of the principle of contrast in Malvina. This is due to the “twinned” complementariness of the author’sand the narrator’sinterpretative manoeuvres, related to the portrayed events and consequently becoming inseparable elements of the presentation of those events. The primary, privileged field where this co-existence occurs is the appropriate sequence of events, which enables them to become the venue for the riddle to be resolved as well as providing symbolic content for its “subject matter” and “explanation”. Let me also recall that, in order to shape Malvina’scompositional principle of the oscillating tale and letters, the disjointedness of the author’sand the narrator’sinterpretative manoeuvres, expressed through the different ways in which they operate, is as important as their interlocking as they complement each other. Although it is impossible to specify precisely where in the novel the influence of the former ends and that of the latter begins, their symptoms can however be identified. The author’sinterpretative manoeuvres manifest themselves through the written quality of the novelistic discourse. The narrator’s, in turn, emerge from the spoken and written properties of the discourse delivered by the narrator and the reflections, opinions and remarks which she verbalises expressis verbis. The author’sinterpretative manoeuvres are more scattered than the narrator’swhich is the result of their spatial distribution, beginning with the novel’stitle, preface and motto, down to the division of the narrative and event-related material into titled chapters. Both types of manoeuvre focus on verbal and non-verbal constituent parts. The author’smanoeuvres centre around the constituent parts of the entire novel, separated according to events and spatial locations, such as the title, the preface, the motto, and above all – the chapters. The narrator’smanoeuvres centre around the utterance-based and spatial turns between the spoken and written narrative forms. Undoubtedly, where the poetics informing these narrative turns meets the poetics informing 118 the novel’schapters, there occurs arather intangible interlocking of the author’sand the narrator’sinterpretative manoeuvres. The author’sinterpretative manoeuvres, encoded in the novel’stitle, preface and motto, serve to generalise the meanings behind the presented events prior to the spoken and written narrative discourse, which features purely utterance-based acts of event interpretation presented as reflections, remarks and opinions. Asimilar role to these previously striking generalisations with regard to successive stages of events, is played by the chapter headings. At this point, acomparison of the meaning and symbolism of the separate interpretative manoeuvres must be made. The essence of the author’smanoeuvres is her impatient and demonstrative drawing of conclusions by means of the chapter-heading formulas, the preface and the motto, the participation of the protagonists in the mystifying events, equivalent to the calling into being of the novel as awhole. The essence of the narrator’sinterpretative manoeuvres lies, in contrast, in her patient and detailed commentary, which springs from meticulous observation of the participants in the mystifying events, corroborated by what they write in their letters. This is how, schematically, the irregular pattern of shifts between the tale and the letters is delineated – by the essentially twinned influences of the author’sand the narrator’sinterpretative manoeuvres, focused on the one hand on the division into chapters, and on the contrastive twists of the narrative, on the other. It must be added that in this schematic overview, the role of the chapter boundaries necessarily obscures the role of their titles. Similarly, the role which falls to the novel’snarrative shifts – from tale to letters (or vice versa) – obscures the role of the reflections, opinions and remarks contained expressis verbis in these two kinds of narrative utterance.29 At the start of the novel, in the initial Krzewin-based section of the plot, the boundaries of the chapters alternate and coincide with some sections of the narrator’stale and with some sections of the protagonists’ letters. This is why the pattern delineated by the shifts between these two narrative forms appears initially regular. Indirectly, this is also shown in the chapter headings, which in an alternating manner, either do or do not include the word “letter”. Although the connections between the 29 Up to apoint, these irregularities may be eliminated by insertion of acontents page, which would list the chapters and their titles. This may be helpful in following my discussion of the irregular oscillating pattern of the tale and letters. The 1822 edition of Malvina has no contents page, unlike twentieth-century editions of the novel (for instance, Witold Billip’s1978 edition and the 2012 English translation, which used Billip’sedition). 119 overt and the implied aspects of the plot emerge in these early stages, this does not yet cause any event-related tension (Chapters One to Eight). The earliest sign of tension is the shift from the tale to the letter and back within one chapter (Chapter Nine). Similar shifts occur regularly as the narrative speed accelerates, and more and more metamorphoses of the male protagonist appear as plot complicating factors (Chapters Ten to Twenty-Two, especially Chapters Twelve, Thirteen and Seventeen). After that, the pattern delineated by the shifts between successive sections of the tale and successive letter fragments is subject to irregular break-ups and fragmentation. The chapters making up Volume One, which cover the rapid Warsaw-based section of the plot, feature respectively the tale; ajuxtaposition of three letters; the tale complemented by aletter; the tale and aletter; and finally, the tale (Chapters Ten to Fourteen). The chapters of Volume Two pertaining to the same plot section contain, respectively, the tale complemented by adistinct spoken account and aletter; the tale and aletter; aletter complemented by the tale; the tale and aletter; aletter complemented by the tale; the tale; the tale once again; the tale again; aletter within the tale frame; and finally – the tale. Significantly, the titles of these chapters – unlike in the initial stage of the plot – do not reflect these continuing yet irregular shifts between the two narrative forms. The title of achapter which contains three letters, does not contain the word “letter” at all (Chapter Eleven). In this group of chapters, the word “letter” occurs only once. Significantly, the chapter title which does contain it refers to an extraordinary letter: one which at the same time carries information and functions as an accessory to the plot in progress. In both these capacities, this letter contributes to the explanation of the male protagonist’sinexplicable metamorphoses and resulting complexities (Chapter Eighteen). In the closing plot section, which allows the reader to understand the essence of these complexities, the chapters contain – apart from the narrator’stale and the protagonists’ letters – acombination of separate spoken accounts and letters by secondary characters, who possess hitherto hidden knowledge about the male protagonist’schildhood and parentage (Chapters Twenty-Two to Twenty-Eight). The first retrospective section of this type, which precedes the occurrence of events instrumental in the resolution of the plot complexities, is contained as early as Chapter Fifteen. Where does this schematic outline lead us? It is not difficult to see that without the course of the shifting pattern delineated by the narrator’stale and the protagonists’ letters there would be no plot fragmentation. Neither would there be any conflict between the explicit and hidden actions 120 of the protagonists, or the repeated shifts experienced by the female protagonist during the plot’smost rapid stage, between her perception of the appearances concerning the person of Ludomir and her intuition of the concealed reality. The pattern of irregular shifts between the tale and the letters ensures endurance of the riddle and its resolution at alater point: this is the compositional backbone of the riddle. It is no coincidence that it is adapted to suit the event-related lacunae which gradually become filled, and the intuition which defines the female protagonist’s inner life. It is more difficult to perceive that the irregular shifting between the tale and the letters functions as the novel’scompositional backbone. Indeed, this conclusion ought to be as clear as the first: because the unquestionable relevance of the event-based riddle, as well as the cogent connections between the interpretative functions of the chapters, on the one hand, and the shifts between the narrative forms, on the other, are what actually make up the external and internal aspects of one novel, Malvina. The shifting pattern is determined both by the mystifying reality and by the consciousness of the eponymous heroine, who is trying to grasp it. But that is not all: the pattern is additionally determined by the novel’snarrative forms, used to represent these aspects. The ultimate interdependence of these three aspects, impossible to render schematically, is revealed by the novel itself. Sterne and Wirtemberska The poetics of the novel’sdivision into chapters and chapter structure are among the major themes of the digressions which abound in the tale told by the protagonist of Lawrence Sterne’sLife and Opinions of Mr. Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. This superficially simple statement refers to avery complex issue, since the novel features an eccentric arrangement of chapters and aremarkable chapter structure. The digressions about the chapters, made by Sterne’sprotagonist who regards himself, in the act of writing his life and opinions, as the novel’sprotagonist, narrator and author, problematize major features of the text. On the face of it, Tristram Shandy appears to be made up of contradictory compositional elements. Each of the countless digressions draws the protagonist’sautobiographical account into acourse of events of its own, multiplying the number of temporal planes covered, the subjects discussed and the characters recalled in the novel. This multiplication of digressions interfering with 121 the autobiographical account is governed by Tristram’strain of thought. Let us remember that to him, his autobiography is anovelistic act, which is why he situates himself as its protagonist, narrator and author. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt thus summarises the effects of Tristram’sproject: “the more he [Tristram] writes and the more we read, the more our common objective recedes” (1965, 292). The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky believes that the key to understanding Tristram Shandy’sparody of contemporary novelistic techniques, is this very poetics of chapters, manifested both in the novel’sform and the subject of the novel’sdigressions. Shklovsky sees it in the following way: as the division of the narrative and event-based material into chapters is amere pretext for digressiveness on avariety of subjects, this explains why the chapters themselves are subject to ongoing digression. Let me now briefly explain the most striking eccentricities which bind together the two dimensions of the literary work: the form and the digression, according to Shklovsky (1991, 148–154). In Tristram Shandy, some chapters are left out, abandoned or misplaced (this is also true of the preface and the dedication). Volume IV has no Chapter XXIV, and Chapter XXIII is followed directly by Chapter XXV. In that chapter, Tristram views these irregularities as positive: No doubt, Sir – there is awhole chapter wanting here – and achasm of ten pages made in the book by it – but the book-binder is neither afool, or aknave, or apuppy – nor is the book ajot more imperfect, (at least upon that score) – but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as Ishall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner. (2005, 282) In the novel’sfinal volume, Volume IX, Chapters XVIII and XIX do not follow Chapter XVII, but Chapter XXV instead. The length of the chapters varies greatly: some go on for several pages, while others contain only one or acouple of sentences at most. The chapters tend to be structurally complex, particularly when it comes to their beginnings and endings. For example, Chapter XXIII of Book Iopens with this multi-layered statement from Tristram: Ihave astrong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and Iwill not balk my fancy. – Accordingly Iset off thus. If the fixture of Momus’sglass, in the human breast... (2005, 64–65) 128 ness” was purposefully concealed in order for the “the aim of ‘representing’ the reality of life” to come to the fore, with the aim of portraying “the familiar, the ordinary, the everyday”. These conventions used “simple and direct language” and were commonly used in the “pseudo-autobiographical” and “epistolary novel” (Ricoeur 1985, 12–13). Ricoeur says: Hence to render the texture of daily life as closely as possible was taken to be an accessible and, finally, not problematic task. […] Everything happened as though only ever more complex conventions could approach what was natural and true (1985, 12–13). Sterne was the author who combined awareness of tradition at its sharpest, as well as the arbitrariness of the novelistic convention, with his own authorial innovations when it came to the techniques that he himself employed. As aresult, readers’ experience, conditioned by traditional means of expression, which created an illusion of “natural[ness] and tru[th]” of the presented world (Ricoeur 1985, 13), was complemented by purposefully provoked reader responses, based on revealing the conventionality of the presented world. Ricoeur thus summarises the solutions used in the poetics of the novel which indicate the gap between Sterne and his great predecessors: It is no small paradox that it was reflection on the highly conventional character of such novelistic discourse that finally led to the reflection on the formal conditions of this very illusion of proximity and, thereby, led to the recognition of the basically fictive status of the novel itself. (1985, 12) Ricoeur’smore recent discussion of “the metamorphoses of the plot” in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century English novel corroborates the validity of the interpretative conclusions formulated earlier by the Formalist Shklovsky. Several times Shklovsky problematized issues related to the transformation, in Sterne’snovels, of narrative forms typical of the earlier novels by Defoe, Fielding and Richardson.32 Like Ricoeur, he considers the core of Sterne’sart of novel writing to be the art of presentation, which “makes it possible to sense the differences between the things which cannot be sensed” (Shklovsky 1964, 80; trans. from the Polish trans. M.O.). Most probably Shklovsky would have approved of 32 Shklovsky did this while the Russian Formalist School flourished, and after its dissolution, in his “Evgenii Onegin” and “The Novel as Parody”. 129 the above statement of Ricoeur’sthat the previous conventions, which were the subject of Sterne’spolemic, achieved the status of “natural[ness] and tru[th]” (Ricoeur 1985, 13). The work by Shklovsky and Ricoeur proves beyond doubt that Sterne succeeded in restating the conventions of novelistic narrative by restoring to them the formal significance of convention. It is indeed appropriate that the leading motif in Shklovsky’sdiscussions of Sterne’snovels is the issue of chapters. In his view, Sterne treated chapters as the core of the novelistic convention. The opposite extreme are those novels where the division into chapters goes barely noticed by readers. In Sterne’snovels, the division into chapters was, Shklovsky tells us, amethod for analysing life’svicissitudes, and at the same time amethod for bringing forward the differences between life and art which can no longer be sensed and yet still exist in reality. The narrative division actually aims to create such distinct differences, as well as allows for choosing individual elements out of awhole sequence of events. (1964, 55–56; trans. from the Polish M.O.) Marian Hobson’sconclusions about Sterne’snovels are similar to those of Shklovsky and Ricoeur. She discusses the characteristic forms of illusion found in eighteenth-century French art and literature, that is the contemporary ways of situating the presented reality in between fantasy and fake authenticity in the visual and verbal arts. One of the issues Hobson considers is the parallel between Denis Diderot’sJacques the Fatalist and Sterne’sTristram Shandy. According to Hobson, the contemporary French novel shaped two forms of illusion. “In both forms the relay of appearance is there, but one form attempts to stabilise it, the other plays with it” (Hobson 1982, 305). Those novels which wanted to demonstrate that they were not novels relying on aform of illusion, aimed at overt elimination of illusion. They used narrative devices designed to achieve verisimilitude, such as letters for instance, in order to present their plots as feasible. This is the case with Rousseau’sJulie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. At the opposite end of the spectrum were those novels which openly challenged the illusion. At some points, they paraded themselves as novels; at others, they flatly denied this very possibility. In this way, they left their readers in doubt, on which Hobson comments: “If it is not anovel, is it true?” (Hobson 1982, 129). In Hobson’sview, the form of illusion shaped by the latter type of novel ought to be labelled “oscillating” (Hobson 1982, 129). The 130 game played within these novels was aided by the “author-figure” (Hobson 1982, 130). The very presence of this figure made it possible to manipulate the fictional verisimilitude which successfully parades as truth, along with the entire cognitive ambivalence of this situation: “Fictional material is allowed to coalesce, only to be interrupted” (Hobson 1982, 129). Jacques the Fatalist and the earlier Tristram Shandy are cases in point. Hobson’s explorations, formulated through terminology different from that of Shklovsky and Ricoeur, are adifferent take on the novelistic conventions of illusion and disillusion, indicated by the other two scholars. In Hobson’sterminology, illusion is the problem of “balancing” the interplay between fiction and simulated authenticity. In Shklovsky’sand Ricoeur’sterminology, it is the problem of the interplay between the apparently natural and the actually formal significance of novelistic conventions. What matters to us most is that Shklovsky, Ricoeur and Hobson all link the emergence of the disturbed illusion in the eighteenth-century English and French novel with the clever inclusion into the novels’ plots of the real authors themselves, as is the case with Sterne or Diderot – by making fictional authors the protagonists of these plots. Studies by these three researchers offer one common conclusion. In Sterne’sand Diderot’snovels, the inclusion of the author figures into the plot converts these very novels into unique manifestations of novelistic story-telling affecting the events described in them. Hobson’sobservations as she summarises the qualities which differentiate Rousseau’snovel from Diderot’s(and Sterne’s) novel pertain precisely to this shift from illusion conceived as aproperty of events situated within the novel to illusion which transcends this inner space, questioned on the plane of its novelistic creation: Rousseau’sLa Nouvelle Héloïse takes the relations of “illusion” and “reality” as atheme, and bends the relay of appearance into acircle within the confines of the book: the question of the illusive-or-not nature of Julie’sexperience does not refer out beyond the book, but casts acomplex light on the events contained within it. On the other hand, Diderot’sJacques le fataliste imbricates appearance: by playing with the relay of the tale within the tale, it forces us to be aware of the flickering nature of what appears. (Hobson 1982, 306) When Ifirst defined the manner in which the shifts of narrative forms occur in Wirtemberska’snovel as an oscillating pattern of the tale and the letters, Ihad in mind Sterne’snomenclature, which he used to question the straight line as amodel for describing real-life and literary events. 131 The traces of Sterne’snovelistic art, visible in the composition of Malvina, provide aframework for all other Sternean influences which can be found in this novel. Here Imean not only the female protagonist and her quest, modelled upon Yorick’sjourney, but also the understanding of the correlations between human emotional lives and ethical assessments and choices, parallel to those in Sterne’swriting.33 This understanding is reflected in the events which make up the episodes of the Malvina story. Yet it would be difficult to precisely identify the aspects of these events which bring them closest to Sterne. Primarily, this is because Wirtemberska, when depicting human sensibility and human affections as powerful forces, capable of overcoming moral ambiguity, was equally inspired by Rousseau as she was by Sterne. When enlarging on this Classical, Enlightenment theme, she did so in the spirit of pre-romantic emotionalism. The Multiplicity of “Twinned” Personal Unities and Dualities Although Malvina as awhole work points to the figure of Maria Wirtemberska as its one and only creative source, in the novel’scomposition and narration, the figure of the author features as acreative source and is not the one and only: it is, in fact, split into two. There, at the very source, the writer is not only the author of Malvina, but also the narrator who plays the part of the novelist, which – to be precise – is a“twinned” division and combination of the two personal incarnations at the same time. In my discussion, Ihave highlighted the most significant aspect of Malvina’sstructure and narration, i.e. the alternating irregular pattern of the tale and the letters, and highlighted the most general manifestations of simultaneous interdependency and the disconnectedness of the author and the narrator as Wirtemberska’s“twinned” incarnations. This does not, however, exhaust the subject of the “twinned” personal unities and dualities, in which Wirtemberska becomes implicated in her novel. Indeed, the complementariness of the disparate creative acts of the author and the narrator brings more issues to light. These are less general manifestations contributing to the spoken and written narrative, as well as to concrete events. Hence, we must also consider the fact that, in Malvina, the “twinned” connections between the author and the narrator, groun33 The links between emotionalism and moral norms are discussed in detail against the backdrop of Sterne’ssentimentalism by Kazimierz Bartoszyński (1977). 132 ded in the close connection between the spoken and written narrative and the events where letter-writing is instrumental, are multiplied by means of an additional link – the female protagonist herself, Malvina. Both the author and the narrator are linked to her by means of a“twinned” reciprocity. All in all, these “twinned” aspects create awhirlpool of interdependencies and independencies. Such additional observations make it possible to fully understand why Ihave assumed that personal unity in duality concurrent with personal duality in unity, which is the essence of twindom in literal terms, is the model of personal relationships incorporated into the events presented through the novelistic narrative and into the narrative itself. “Twinned” connections between the author and the novel’sprotagonist gain durability thanks to these “twinned” references which, connecting the author with the narrator as they do, at the same time connect the narrator with the protagonist. The character of Malvina emerges out of the narrator’sspoken and written discourse, “twinned” with the author’snovelistic discourse. “Twinned” connections between the author and the narrator thus express this special state of Wirtemberska’sexistence which allows her to perceive from the outside (through the narrator’seyes) the course of another person’s(the protagonist’s) life, while at the same time allowing her to turn this perception into areflection of her own (i.e. the author’s) inner life. It is thanks to this mechanism that in Malvina the author faces both the narrator and the protagonist, presented by the narrator, as individuals distinct from herself but, at the same time, created in her own image. The fact that Wirtemberska names her protagonist “Malvina”, the author’sown drawing-room pseudonym, is the most spectacular manifestation of what Ipropose here. In the act of giving the same name to the female protagonist and to the first segment of the novel’stitle, Isee asymbol of the “twinned” connections which bind the narrator and the author to the protagonist of the novel. In consequence, the literary, Ossianic significance of the name of “Malvina”, which serves to characterise and single out the female protagonist, becomes enriched with other literary meanings, this time pertaining to aflesh-and-blood individual, Maria Wirtemberska (after: Aleksandrowicz 1978b, 257). We cannot pinpoint exactly the “twinned” interconnections between the author and the protagonist with as much precision as we can those between the narrator and the protagonist, or between the author and the narrator. Yet because we know that the “twinned” connection between the author and the protagonist comes to the fore through those other 133 “twinned” connections, we can outline the range of its content on this basis. How is all this done within the novel? To understand this, it is important to view events in acomparative manner, oscillating between two subject sources. It is by following this cognitive directive that both the “twinned” narrator-protagonist and author-protagonist connections emerge. The narrator follows this directive when she opts for telling the story of Malvina’s emotional tribulations through passages from her letters or letters by other characters. The same occurs when she develops the story through repeated shifts from issues of personal significance to Malvina and other characters to the presentation of her own views on these issues, or the other way around. This shift from one to another presentational and interpretative perspective becomes the foundation of the “twinned” connections which link her to the protagonist – as does her perception of affairs brought about by the events in away which interlocks her own “views” about them with the protagonist’s“views”. The cognitive directive, that is the “twinned” connection between the narrator and the protagonist, becomes simultaneously the foundation of the “twinned” connection between the author and the protagonist. It equips the author with possibilities which, on the strength of this very cognitive principle, are available to the narrator. Hence the narrator is given the opportunity to locate her “twinned” reflection in the protagonist; the author – in the other two. This occurs, in both cases, following the interlocking views of the two “twinned” parties about the matters of importance to them, that is an “exchange of opinion” between them. The author remains the co-creator of the cognitive directive on which the narrator’sacts of presentation and interpretation are focused; she also becomes aco-participant in acognitive performance which has been called into being in this way. The participation of the author counts in this performance no less than that of the narrator, even though it remains somewhat less definite. It pertains to the image which Wirtemberska the author creates of herself – as aperson with arich inner life, and one ready to share the story of what personal experience is. What shapes this image is the content of the “twinned” connections between the author and the protagonist. The reason why it takes on the form of acognitive performance is that the “twinned” connections between the author and the protagonist are fulfilled through the medium of the “twinned” connections between the narrator and the protagonist. Before Iillustrate this from the novel’smaterial, let me examine the preface to the novel. The preface constitutes adistinct part of the novel 134 – one in which Wirtemberska presents herself and speaks as the author exclusively. It is significant then that, when pondering the role of reading romances in shaping readers’ personal experience, she highlights the role of comparing the components of this cognitive performance, in which the author herself, standing face-to-face with both narrator and protagonist, has participated: Whereas in romances, in those faithful portraits, in which almost every reader encounters events similar to those he or she has experienced, emotions familiar to his own heart, errors into which he himself has fallen, passions which he has met often in life, that reader involuntarily becomes caught up in the portrayal, makes comparisons, reflects. And often as aresult of those reflections, made without prejudice, the conviction takes root in his heart that whatever his fate, whatever his circumstances, striving for virtue is amore certain way than any other of striving for happiness. (3–4; italics original) Wirtemberska herself could not have been astranger to the kind of personal experience which she deems typical of reading romances. One of the phrases used at the opening of the quoted description of this complex phenomenon (“almost every reader”) testifies to this. Moreover, the precision with which she enumerates the intellectual and moral acts attending the reading of romances suggests that Wirtemberska must have been familiar with them not only as areader but also as an author. In brief, it implies that she must have considered these acts to be the building material of personal experience not only for the readers of romances, but also for their authors. The very conviction, so aptly rendered by Wirtemberska, that reading romances is an extraordinary personal experience and that it bears fruit in the reality of existence and ethics, demonstrates that those individual acts, thanks to which it is possible to achieve this end result, such as “becom[ing] caught up in the portrayal”, “making comparisons” and “reflecting”, must have had for her avery real existential and ethical dimension. The Narrator – Malvina: Closeness, Sympathy, Understanding The narrator does not hide her closeness to her protagonist. Her attitude reflects her attachment to her protagonist as the image of aperson, created by herself, to whom she remains equally close: 135 But since the opportunity arises, let me be permitted to give my own, sincere representation of my Malvina and may Ibe forgiven for lingering awhile over this portrait. Iadmit my weakness for the original, therefore it should not seem strange that Iindulge myself alittle longer with my description. (26) The narrator’sattitude, full of such positive feeling, makes it possible for her to present and interpret the behaviours, actions and spoken utterances of her protagonist all the more naturally. In other words, it enables her to recognise the protagonist’ssensations, which are expressed through these external spheres of activity, all the more naturally. This ability of the narrator parallels the protagonist’sability to portray sensations in her letters. Malvina feels and thinks; the narrator who tells her story and quotes from her letters, sympathises and understands. As aresult, the narrator’stale expresses the protagonist in away different from that expressed by her letters, quoted in the tale: it is less direct, but equally sharp on observation and reflection. This utterly positive effect is achieved not only because the narrator shifts from recounting the protagonist’semotional upheavals to quoting from her letters. Another factor is that, in the tale, she shifts many times from presenting Malvina’ssensations, as she recognises them from her external activity, to expounding on her own opinions about these sensations, or the other way around. Were this not the case, the narrator’s tale would not equal the protagonist’s letters in its wealth of observations and reflections. Here I point to those properties of the narrator’s dual discourse which, apart from all that they carry, make that discourse the common ground of the “twinned” connections between the narrator’s person and personality as well as between the person and personality of the protagonist. The syntactic and semantic foundation for this is the narrator’sshifting from the tale, featuring the protagonist, to the quoting of the protagonist’sown letters, thus making the dual narratorial discourse afield where the two characters and their personalities confront each other. The most important syntactic and semantic expression of this, meanwhile, adding the sense of “twinned” connections” to the confrontations between the narrator and the protagonist, is the narrator’sshifting within the tale itself, from the presentation of the protagonist’ssensations to the presentation of her own opinion about them, or the other way around – from adepiction of the sensations to the presentation of opinions. Now let me focus on the tale itself as the most significant element of what Iwish to outline. 136 The seemingly “twinned” connections which the narrator forges between herself and the protagonist consist in the establishment of complete reciprocity between them. Yet this is not so when the narrator informs the reader, as in the passages below, about the identical mental states in herself and her protagonist: “In this Malvina thought much like myself” (75) and “Iam unable to say, for Malvina herself could not properly understand” (88; see the third and fourth examples below). This is because the narrator’sconvictions and her recognition of the protagonist’ssensations, or – conversely – the protagonist’ssensations and the narrator’sconvictions, cannot be reconciled with each other (see the first, second and third examples). What the narrator recounts, either to begin with or at alater point, as she recognises Malvina’ssensations, does not fully correspond to what she has to say about these sensations from her own experience. The result of alternating these two ways of providing information about the protagonist, is that any pure reciprocity between the narrator and the protagonist becomes blurred. This occurs even though the narrator, when shifting in her tale between the two forms of conveying information, establishes “twinned” connections between herself and her protagonist. The first example: Abench under aspreading chestnut at the far end of the dike enticed her towards it. The view over the backwater, the wooded knoll, the Vistula, the loveliest of landscapes made this spot especially attractive. Malvina rested there and removed the white veil that had concealed her face. Mechanically she took up her guitar and, having strummed awhile to herself, began to sing in alow voice words that reflected her feelings: To be loved as one loves To find asoul to match one’ssoul, Is it arequest too frivolous To move the heavenly whole? Vain dreams of happiness, Where hearts deceive the mind, Constant, sweet illusoriness, No requital will you find! People are sometimes amazed when infatuated lovers, by some peculiar twist of fate, always contrive to find themselves in the very place where they 137 might catch aglimpse, if only for amoment, of the object of their infatuation. This does not happen by magic and we should stop being surprised by it. It is not difficult to conceive how those who are constantly occupied with the same thought might also, to some degree, act the same. Ludomir, preoccupied exclusively with Malvina, as she was likewise preoccupied with him, had also risen with the dawn, and gone into the garden, so that he might think about her in freedom. Hearing her voice he ran to where she was sitting, unobserved by her. (36–37) The second example: Those who imagine that the first moments following aloss are the most painful judge wrongly. Then at least everyone is occupied with the event, talks about it, is involved in it. The person whose loss is mourned is not forgotten, not yet regarded as totally removed and remote. The heart, unaccustomed to grieving, does not admit the thought that grieving is without return; the beginning of the most terrible separation appears to be but atemporary parting. But when days, hours, events follow on one after the other and fail to restore the person who is loved, who is needed, who is missed every day, every moment – oh! Only then do we realise our misfortune and constantly say to ourselves with an aching sigh: “Alas! He really has gone forever!” In the first moments following Ludomir’sdisappearance Malvina had, in accordance with her undertaking, sufficient self-control to enable her to listen almost with indifference even to the conversations of her aunt and sister upon the subject. “It’strue,” her aunt said on one occasion, “that his concealment of his social position, of his name, this sudden departure, are things which remain unclear, and Ihave never read anything like them in any romance. But all the same Icannot forget that Malvina owes him her life, and Icannot believe that this same Ludomir, who possessed something particularly noble in his bearing, was nothing but adissembling imposter.” These last words touched Malvina acutely. “If that is what he really is,” she hurriedly declared, “then Ialone should suffer as apunishment for my lack of caution in receiving him into my home. But if he is not, then it would be acruel injustice to thank him for his efforts during the fire and for saving my life with such wrongful suspicion. So as we are unable to judge his conduct with certainty, it seems to me it would be best to discuss it as little as possible.” These words put astop to her aunt’stalk. In order to comply with Malvina’simmediate wishes, and later due to the natural passage of time, everyone 144 to be the result of Wirtemberska’sfulfilment of this confrontative task, parallel to the protagonist’sconfrontative effort. In terms of the above, the most significant aspect is that Wirtemberska the author, while adopting the same cognitive approach as her narrator, establishes her “twinned” connection with Malvina in away different from her narrator’s. Wirtemberska the narrator builds that connection, as we recall, thanks to the quotations from Malvina’sletters, which enrich her narrative, and thanks to her sympathy for and understanding of the protagonist’ssensations, expressed in the tale, which Malvina herself expresses through utterances, behaviours and precisely her letters. Wirtemberska the author in turn builds her “twinned” connection with Malvina thanks to her understanding both of the protagonist’sepistolary utterances and of the narrator’sreflections and, consequently, thanks to the formation of semantic correspondences between these two perceptions of the protagonist’spersonal experiences and her own perception of them relayed in the novel’sdiscourse. The acts of Wirtemberska the author, the understanding and formation of semantic correspondences, are central to several major issues. It is through them that Wirtemberska co-creates, together with the narrator, the cognitive approach which brings both face to face with Malvina. And it is thanks to these acts that Malvina the novel, taking on the illusionary appearance of astory-telling and epistolary discourse that includes the letters themselves, remains asign of Wirtemberska’sinvolvement in it as acognitive performance, in which she is confronted with her narrator and her protagonist. Amajor role in shaping these issues is played by the relational nature of the two acts: of understanding and of forming semantic correspondences. Understanding refers here to the knowledge of Wirtemberska the author both about what her protagonist makes of her personal experiences and about what the narrator makes of them: this is what accounts for the duality – the understanding of understanding. In the hands of Wirtemberska the author, the creation of semantic correspondences becomes asubtle tool for finding aseparate and unique semantic expression for the epistolary and story-telling forms of the protagonist’spersonal experience; and also, indirectly, for expressing the experience itself. It is this relational nature of both acts that gives the connections between the author and the narrator and Malvina the aspect of mirror reflections of one another, and their partial reciprocity. In this way, it gives to these connections the same meaning which was given by the narrator to her sympathy with, and understanding of, Malvina’ssensations. With the reservation, however, that in that case the locus 145 of self-reflection and partial reciprocity of the participants lies in the narrator’sdiscourse; here the process centres around the author’sintellectual acts as they become elements of her novel. These acts, focused on the endeavours of understanding and forming semantic correspondences, enable the author to grasp, in the one and only way possible – that is, based on the novelistic discourse – the internal connections between the many detailed observations, confessions and opinions conveyed by the protagonist’sletters, and the corresponding detailed observations, confessions and opinions conveyed by the narrator’sstory-telling and epistolary discourse in relation to the protagonist’sexperiences. So when Wirtemberska the narrator establishes a “twinned” connection with Malvina through utterance, at the same time Wirtemberska the author parallels it with intellectual acts, from which aunique semantic perception of the protagonist’spersonal experience emerges. That does not mean, however, that the “twinned” connection set up by Wirtemberska the author between herself and Malvina does not include material which the author was unable to put into words. It only means that this content springs from her acts of understanding and forming semantic correspondences, and cannot be defined in amanner as precise as the material which informs the connections between the narrator and the protagonist. These acts give meaning to the novel’stitle, to chapter titles, to the motto, to the subject matter of the preface and to the theme of “the heart’sintuition” with its novelistic, irregular structure. Briefly speaking, this is an interpretation of personal experience, which draws on astudy of the protagonist’spsychological and moral sensitivity manifest in her letters and in the narrator’sstory-telling and epistolary discourse, and expresses the results of that study through the subject matter and structure of the novel. The point is that the written discourse, that is Malvina the novel, asserts its supremacy by means of the illusion of speech and writing. Let us note that all these aspects, including the involvement of Wirtemberska’sauthorial and narratorial selves in their “twinned” connections with the protagonist, along with other configurations, such as Wirtemberska’sinvolvement in the “twinned” connections with the protagonist through the parallel connections between herself and the narrator, are enacted on the basis of interlocking, or put more literally – of the internal interplay between the spoken and written semantic properties of the novel’sdiscourses. In addition, this process comprises links between the spoken aloud and written utterances of the novel’sprotagonists. This leads to the conclusion that the true agent of Wirtemberska’s“twinned” 146 involvement under discussion is in fact the “twinned” nature of the spoken and written semantic properties that define the discourses making up the novel, as well as defining the protagonists’ utterances that form part of the discourses. Let us also note that within the “twinned” contrasts and correspondences visible within the narrator’sdiscourse, which combines the tale and the letters, as well as within the “twinned” tensions and connections emerging between the protagonists’ spoken and written utterances, Wirtemberska the author’sacts of understanding and forming semantic correspondences are fulfilled. It is these acts, after all, which enable all these spoken and written elements to surface as illusive elements in the written nature of the novel. In order to highlight the issues and processes outlined here, Ishould now return to all the unique properties, analysed above, which accompany the combination of the tale and the letters in the narrator’sdiscourse, as well as situating this spoken and written discourse within the written discourse of the novel. This is not possible, for understandable reasons. So much so, Iwould like us to bear in mind that we are talking about aspects and processes spawned by awhole subtle range of simultaneous similarities (parallels) and differences (contrasts), both between the spoken status of the tale and the written status of the letters, and the spoken and written status of the novelistic discourse. The creation of these “between” spaces, firstly, is the creation of the form of the tale which stands in contrast to the letters – atransmission that relies on the stylised and real novel-writing acts of the author and the narrator, and yet is endowed with the meaning of an utterance. Secondly, it is also the creation of the story-telling and epistolary discourse, which remains at one and the same time in accord and discord with the novel’swritten discourse. In short, the creation of the “between” spaces becomes the creation of the illusion of speech and writing, as well as of the semantic impact of the novel. In other words, this is the formation of the mirror relationships which encompass the author, the narrator and the protagonist. This leads me to believe that it is in these spoken and written semantic properties of the discourses making up Malvina, as well as in the novel’splot complexities focused around the spoken and written utterances of the protagonists, that the climax of the “twinned” semantic qualities of the voice and the writing is located. Therefore, we should say that it is not so much the “twinned” interplay between the spoken and written semantic properties of the discourses, but the “twinned” semantic energies of the voice and the writing contained within them, that splits and simultaneously 147 sustains the unity of the person of Wirtemberska as author. It should also be said that this semantic energy of the voice and of the writing is what implicates Wirtemberska in the cognitive performance, confronting her with the narrator and with the protagonist – as images of herself and not of herself at the same time. For Wirtemberska the author, the “twinned” connections that bind her to Malvina, just like the others that bind her in her capacity as narrator to the protagonist, carry existential and creative significance, yet different in kind since she is also aflesh-and-blood individual. These connections are less conspicuous than the others. On the one hand, they are afocus for Wirtemberska’sultimate knowledge of the illusory nature of the novelistic endeavour, which she creates in her capacity as narrator; on the other, they enable her to co-create this narratorial representation of Malvina’stribulations and inner life according to her own knowledge. Even though the content of these connections cannot be specified as accurately as that of the others, which are the subject of the bonds between the narrator and the protagonist, their general nature can be identified. First and foremost, it can be done on the basis of her truly authorial contribution to the novel’screation, evident in its subject matter, structure and the content of the preface. Further, on the basis of that “twinned” situation binding the narrator and the protagonist, but reflected in the one under discussion. And, last but not least, on the basis of the name “Malvina” given to the protagonist. Ibelieve that this very gesture symbolises the material with which Wirtemberska the author fills the “twinned” connections between herself and her protagonist. It is significant that she bestows on her protagonist not her real name, but her drawing-room pseudonym. In this way, naming becomes ameans in the same interplay that she maintains with the protagonist in the novel, primarily through her other narratorial incarnation. The naming of her protagonist “Malvina” points to an “affinity” between Malvina and Wirtemberska herself, but – once again – what comes to the fore, as in the novel, is the other “drawing-room” self of the author. It should be assumed that the most important factor in the “twinned” connections binding Wirtemberska the author to Malvina is the author’sattitude to the “events”, “errors” and “passions” (4), which she experiences herself, and as aresult of which she acquires her familiarity with the most common personal experiences. In her preface to Malvina, Wirtemberska says that no one is exempt from these “events”, “errors” and “passions” (4), and that novels, by representing such experiences, enable readers to better understand their own personal experience. There 148 is no doubt that these “twinned” connections cover both the experiences of the novel’sheroine, related to the emotional dilemma which she needs to resolve, as well as to the author’sown inner struggles, victories and failures. All the same, the appearance of the novel’sheroine necessitates the disappearance of the character who resembled her, along with the appearance of the one to whom the creation of this character is illusively ascribed. Nothing remains more mysterious than this process, always the same and always inscrutable, which transforms reality into illusion, the author into the narrator, and Maria – into Malvina. If the author’spersonal experience, with its “events”, “errors” and “passions” (4), is the real agent, it has become dissipated. What is at stake then, in the “twinned” connections construed by Wirtemberska the author and binding her to Malvina, is the very possibility for Wirtemberska to reflect herself in her heroine’stribulations and sensations, and not the establishment of event-based parallels between their inner lives. When placing these “twinned” connections at the core of her novel, making them its spiritus movens, thereby taking them beyond the bounds of her own consciousness, Wirtemberska illustrates the paradoxical nature of human personal experience, which is perceptible to individuals only through references to matters which bind them to others. The “twinned” connections which the narrator establishes in her storytelling and epistolary discourse are subordinated to the same goal. In this sense, the “twinned” connections established by the narratorial and authorial incarnations of Maria Wirtemberska make up arepresentation of personal experience which is never entirely individualistic. 151 Part Four Malvina and the Salon Malvina asked Ludomir (who amongst other things reads wonderfully) whether he would like to read us Ludgarda, an original and unconventional tragedy, which has recently been published. Ludomir read magnificently, with great attention; he seemed to read the scenes not only with his eyes but with his heart. (23–24) Alina Aleksandrowicz has found that Wirtemberska’ssalon resembled in its internal organisation and in the cultural and social activities it pursued, the seventeenth-century salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet, and was in asense intended to commemorate its predecessor (Aleksandrowicz, 1974; Aleksandrowicz, 1978b). When discussing seventeenth-century French salons, and particularly Rambouillet’s“blue hotel”, the model for all salons of those and later times, scholars Roger Picard, Roger Lathuillère and Yuri Lotman present them as specialised institutions which fulfilled major cultural functions. The salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet, aselect and initiated community of literary people and artists, acted as acounterbalance to the Académie française, the central and official institution of culture, founded by Cardinal Richelieu. The salon aimed at creating acultural reality distinct from and independent of the state’sabsolutism, instilling it with refinement and idealism as purification from ordinariness and the dictates of political reality (Lotman 1992). Lotman says, “That opposition was not political: the state’sseriousness was counterbalanced by play; official poetic genres – by personal ones; the male dictatorship – by awomen’sstate; anational unification – by aclosed system, different from the rest of the world” (1992, 23; trans. M.O.). De Rambouillet’ssalon, just as much as other similar institutions, including the salons of Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame de La 152 Fayette, contributed to the shaping of préciosité, acomplex style which influenced both the writing of literature and social behaviours. The préciosité style required nobility and dignity, along with elegant and ornamented language. Lathuillère explains that this style was the focal point for several contradictory tendencies: “on the one hand, it is characterised by purism, concerned with delicacy and good manners; on the other, it aims at arich expression, abrilliant language, an ornate style” (1966, 679; trans. M.O.). The complexity of the phenomenon of préciosité also resulted from its combining atendency towards idealism with acknowledgement of the superiority of the human mind. When discussing this self-contradictory aspect of préciosité, Lathuillère claims: “passionately concerned with ideal values, it manifests itself as aristocratism that recognizes only one superiority, that of the spirit”(1966, 677; trans. M.O.). Lathuillère believes that the complexity of préciosité, cultivated in the French salons of the seventeenth century, made it possible for apparently unconnected phenomena to emerge. They included the idealised and mythologised sentimentality of pastoral romances such as Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée or Madeleine de Scudéry’sClélie, reflection on the old and new French vocabulary by Dominique Bouhours, an insightful analysis of the moral contradictions between desire and marital obligations in Madame de La Fayette’sLa Princesse de Clèves, and eventually the moral and psychological depth of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. In discussing the complexity of préciosité and the richness of the contemporary salon culture, Lathuillère lists these issues in precisely this order (1966, 677–678). Lotman considers “the main property of seventeenth-century French salons to be the blurring of borders between life, play and art” (1992, 25; trans. M.O.). Lathuillère links to them manifestations of asubtle, continuing interplay between real life and the beautifying imagery of poetry and novels. In his opinion, the most common desire driving frequenters to seventeenth-century French salons and to the game itself was to exchange “daily monotony and greyness” for “aspiring to live to the highest degree and in an exaggerated manner” [tenter de vivre au superlatif et dans l’hyperbole] (Lathuillère 1966, 339–347; trans. M.O.). Gérard Genette is therefore right to claim that d’Urfé’snovel L’Astrée, one of those texts which inspired the salons’ discourse, salon forms of emotional sensitivity and pseudonyms, ought to be treated “not only as a‘literary genre’, but also as aform of sensibility and existence” (1964, 8; trans. M.O.). 153 The salons discussed by Lathuillère and Lotman were the sites of remarkable complementariness, when it came to human behaviour – the interplay between reality and idealism, the sources of which were literary. Lotman explains: Literary texts were written or improvised in avariety of situations, and they were an inseparable part of human lives, while the lives themselves merged with poetic themes. Literary masks came to characterise individuals and define their behaviours in real life. (1992, 25; trans. M.O.) Yet this transformation of the real salon space into “the world of artistic utopia” was by no means complete: Politics and Reason that enlightened it were opposed by Play and Fancy. Yet reason was not expelled: the world of préciosité is not the world of some Baroque, tragic folly. It merely follows the dictates of masquerade travesty which ruled the salons. (1992, 24; trans. M.O.) The literary activity of the salons was most frequently expressed in love and occasional poetry, pastoral and antique tales, epigrammatic genres, portraits and letters. All these various forms of literary activity originated from salon life. It bred the enhanced (in their salon eccentricity) intellectual and ludic uses of these forms. The essence of salon literary activity lay not only with individual artists but also with the community of recipients. Authors used the conventionally concealed “live address” in their works, while the recipients decoded these texts and complemented them with their own creative activity and knowledge, “the communal memory”. It is significant in this respect that the seventeenth-century French salons produced unique forms of their communal pursuits. The major ones which scholars have identified include conversation and correspondence, transformed in the salons into “the art of conversation” and “the epistolary art”, as well as adaptations of selected literary themes, improvisations on major social events or competitions for the so-called “bouquets of poems”. These activities were aimed, respectively, at focusing the attention of the salon community on particular subjects, and imposing on them the requirements for spontaneity or rivalry. In addition, the literary forms which regularly triggered creative activity in the salon communities also included literary and language games, whose major component was giving the salon frequenters opportunities to demonstrate their intellectual