The Janus-Faced Author: Narrative Unreliability and Metafiction in Karol Irzykowski's Pałuba and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke

Abstract

Only a few months after the publication of Ferdydurke (1937), two major voices in twentieth-century Polish literature, Bruno Schulz and Artur Sandauer, came up with the hypothesis that Karol Irzykowski's only novel Pałuba (1903) was an immediate predecessor of Gombrowicz's novel. Although any such influence of Pałuba on his first and most successful novel was categorically denied by the author himself, Gombrowicz must have been acquainted with at least some details of its exceptional literary form ever since he started writing his own experimental prose. The question remains, however, what made both Schulz and Sandauer conclude that Ferdydurke descended from Pałuba – and from Pałuba alone. The present article sets out to answer this question, not only by elucidating what the two critics might have thought about the connection between both novels, but also by adding some new arguments from a contemporary narratological standpoint. More specifically, I claim that a more cautious approach to both novels' alleged “discursivity”, which appears to be less reliable than commonly thought, might pave the way for an analogous metafictional reading of their entire textual structure.