Po moim trupie! – karnawał według Weroniki Murek, czyli literacka kreacja świata przedstawionego w opowiadaniu "W tył, w dół, w lewo"

Abstract

The paper is an analysis of fictional reality in Weronika Murek’s W tył, w dół, w lewo focused on its carnivalesque character. The author refers to famous Mikhail Bakhtin’s study Rabelais and his world dedicated, among others, to popular festive forms and folk culture of laughter. Since there are certain rules sanctioning hierarchy and familiarity, as well as inversion or parody of values, different profanations, such as these in Murek’s prose, are possible to happen. The most disturbing one concerns the blasphemic exchange in which a juxtaposition leads to a replacement of Christ’s incarnated body by a rotting corpse. The author invokes Antoni Malczewski’s Maria and poetry of Józef Baka to find familiar voices and embed Murek in Polish literary tradition, taking under consideration her eccentric black humour, choice of grotesque language, and dark, melancholic imagination. W tył, w dół, w lewo not only breaks the taboo of talking about death, but also points out a specific aspect of necroviolence – social and lingual exclusion of the dead. Such provocative, patchwork form demands an answer concerning justification and validation of its usage. The final part of the article proposes to search them through the “metaphysics of meat” which refers to a concept developed in an essay by Jolanta Brach-Czaina.