Kotły Beethovenowskie jako partytura braku
Beethoven’s Timpani as a music score of absence

Summary/Abstract: In his novel entitled Beethoven’s Timpani, Michał Choromański made absence central category. It refers to absent persons, lost items and belongings, and the elusiveness of meaning. The narrative underscores the said category many a time in a self-referential manner, for instance, by using in various contexts a seemingly unattractive metaphor – “the hole.” Presence and absence in Choromański’s novel are not oppose in a binary fashion, but they interpenetrate. Beethoven’s Timpani is, therefore, both a crime novel and not quite, the protagonist Janek is and is not a pianist. The traces in the text elude the reader freely, by postponing or even nullifying the possibility of attaining a convincing interpretation. Beethoven’s Timpani, in whose depicted world events and claims are presented only to be subsequently dismantled, may serve as an exemplification of deconstructionism in literature. The present article’s aim is an inquiry into Choromański’s efforts to underscore the category of absence and the meaning postponement, and pointing to those efforts’ similarity to some of deconstructionist tenets. What deserve an utmost attention is the eponymous motif of Beethoven’s timpani (otherwise deserves kettledrums), which in the novel triggers the error/mistake mechanism akin to Derridean différance.

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