Bohiń de Tadeusz Konwicki et le postmodernisme

Abstract

Tadeusz Konwicki’s Bohiń and Postmodernism The article initially raises the question what is the nature of postmodernism. After a brief discussion of various critical views on this matter, the answer is discovered in Brian McHale’s approach, where the new intellectual climate of heterogeneity and relativity found its equivalent in a spécifie narrative form, distinct from modernism. The Polish literary tradition in fiction was rather alien to modernism proper and therefore avant-garde techniques led towards postmodern trends. Konwicki’s lyrical art and tendency to undermine homogeneous structures has been reflected in several novels preceding Bohiń. Bohiń approaches the past in a distinctively postmodern way. Its world has been deprived of any stability and coherence and the whole effort of création is eventually undermined by the pervading idea of futility. Correspondingly the plurality of novelistic styles and the multiplicity of representations give the novela syncretic character, dominated by literary stéréotypes. Against that background only the fear of an oncoming catastrophe seems authentic.