MENAŻERIA OSOBOWOŚCI I KAKOFONIA GŁOSÓW WARSZAWSKIEJ ULICY W PROZIE SYLWII CHUTNIK I KRZYSZTOFA VARGI
Menagerie of personalities and cacophony of voices of the Warsaw street in the prose of Sylwia Chutnik and Krzysztof Varga

Summary/Abstract: The analysis covered interesting, in terms of kind, fiction, language, and above all narration, prose texts of Sylvia Chutnik and the last novel by Krzysztof Varga. The winner of the “Polityka Passport” combines the high with the low – what is full of acute seriousness and authenticity with what is gaudy, vulgar, cheap and sensational. From the collision of contradictions arise portraits of women, people of Warsaw streets, daily and festive situations, sketched with humor and seriousness, distance and irony. Whereas “Massacre” by Varga in a satirically-ironic form, feature as to its spirit and marked with distance, diagnoses contemporary Polish afflictions focused as in a lens in the Warsaw area. The main context are poetic issues of the literary work, which is why the centre of gravity was placed on the most interesting, in the case of these novels, way of telling the story and presenting the main characters. It is clearly visible, on the one hand, that they are rooted in traditional storytelling techniques, mainly Bakhtin’s dialogism, but on the other hand, the novels, within the meaning of the author, set new trails, new possibilities of organising the narrator’s and characters’ utterances. Technical measures, involving the combination of “voices”, their partial merger, mutual influence and other transformations result, paradoxically, in a breakup. The predominant effect, resulting from the application of these measures, related to the use of “someone else’s speech”, is even greater stratification of consciousness and languages, their atomisation and separation, without the possibility of participating in the real, not illusory dialogue. In effect, an image is created of a socio-linguistic magma with separated, although apparently linked consciousnesses – a cacophony of voices.

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