„Są dni, w które ojciec przestaje się dziać”
“There Are Days When Father Fails to Happen”

An Impersonal Perspective in Bronka Nowicka’s “To Feed the Stone”

Summary/Abstract: The research paper proposes a new perspective on "To Feed the Stone" (2015), Bronka Nowicka’s debut volume which won her the Nike Literary Award (2016) and has so far been discussed mainly in the context of the issues of silence, trauma, and domestic violence. The article focuses on structuring the issues related to the narrative dynamics of the work (including focalization). The main aim of this paper is to present and develop the concept of impersonal perspective that replaces the imprecise notion of a “child’s perspective” and builds on the philosophy of the impersonal by Roberto Esposito. The new concept explains the specific form of reification in "To Feed the Stone", blurring modern divisions between subject and object, culture and nature, and, in combination with Tadeusz Sławek’s term “u-chodzić” (re-treat), enables us to characterize the protagonists, that is, the child, the great-grandmother, and the local eccentrics. Furthermore, owing to Slavoj Žižek’s version of psychoanalysis and the assumption made about the synthesizing function of memory that consolidates heterogenic images, the problem of the awkward and ambiguous figure of the tyrannical father – healthy and ill, adult and adolescent at once – becomes unraveled.

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