A few words on Olga Tokarczuk’s The Land of Metaxy

Abstract

In her volume of essays The Tender Narrator, Olga Tokarczuk devotes one of them to The Land of Metaxy, which she calls – following Plato – a place between the world of humans and the world of gods. The status of this place is peculiar: it mediates between the worlds, and yet does not belong to either. It is from that place that characters come to the writer. An attempt to explain the actual meaning of Metaxy and who its inhabitants are boils down to four possible interpretations. We can analyse Metaxy in accordance with contemporary quantum physics and cosmology (parallel worlds), from the perspective of religious models created by the civilization of the West, according to the astrology of astral planes, and finally as a domain of collective unconscious, in accordance with Carl Gustav Jung’s analytic psychology and Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology.