Ambiwalencja Frei z Siedmiu Wysp – wada czy zaleta? Intertekstualna reinterpretacja opowiadania Josepha Conrada
The Ambivalence of Freya of the Seven Isles – a Fault or an Asset? An Intertextual Interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Story

Author(s): Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Conrad; Freya of the Seven Isles; Prorok; Freja – zimna bogini miłości; modernism;intertextuality;
Summary/Abstract: The article is a comparative and intertextual study of two texts which are both grounded in the mythological motif of the Nordic goddess Freya, i.e. Joseph Conrad’s 1912 short story Freya of the Seven Isles and Leszek Prorok’s 1977 play entitled Freja – zimna bogini miłości [Freya – the Cold Goddess of Love]. As both texts exploit Freya’s ambiguity as a goddess of love, fertility, death, war and revenge (also of conjugal love and promiscuity), they shed light on each other’s nuances of meaning. It is Prorok’s deliberate use of Conradian motifs (e.g. Freya, elopement, Wagnerian music, the colonial Seven Isles) in his play about the Nazi Lebensborn programme that exposes the full implications of Conrad’s hitherto underrated story. This leads us to drawing novel conclusions about the nature of the “illness” of Prorok’s Freya (and the reasons for her unexpected death) as well as the role of colonial ideology in Conrad’s story as a whole. Moreover, by means of a critical reading of Sylvère Monod’s derisive article on Freya of the Seven Isles – together with an evocation of Faulkner’s denegative style in his Absalom, Absalom! – the article disproves the allegations levelled by the French critic against Conrad’s text (a lack of foreshadowing, an inconsistency of mood, bdelygmia, etc.), revealing instead its complex epistemological implications relating to the modernist intricacy of denegative stylistics, of which Conrad – and not Faulkner – appears to have been the real precursor.

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