Odstęp, czyli gramatologia partyjska (wstęp do interpretacji „Słowa i ciała” Teodora Parnickiego) [1996] (original) (raw)

1996, Przełomy: rok 1956. Edited by W. Wójcik, M. Kisiel

SPACE, OR A PARTHIAN GRAMMATOLOGY (AN INTRODUCTORY INTERPRETATION OF "SŁOWO I CIAŁO" BY TEODOR PARNICKI) The author comments on the writing stratefy of the fictional narrators of T. Parnicki's epistolary novel, Słowo i ciało (The Word and the Flesh, 1959). The Parthian duke, Khosroes, the author of the letters to Markia (cf. the first part of the book) appears as a textual nomad, who undertakes a never accomplished effort of constructing his own biography and image. His discourse his centred on a criticism of universalist ideologies and theosophies (such as Buddhism, or Christianity) and on incessant referring to numerous situational, cultural, and literary contexts. An utterance becomes a "rhizome" of many equivalent, narrative threads and persistent motifs, or turns of speech. A digressive mode of writing, with constant switching between one topic and another (from the "word-sign" to the "body-sign" and vice versa) is predominant here. Markia, the alleged author of the letters in the second part of the book, is teh source and purpose of Khosroes's writing, since, however, she is most probably long dead, she functions in the novel as a kind of 'aporia', on which the coomunicative game, played here, is based. As a source and purpose of writing, and as a wirter, Markia is an absence veiled in writing, a woman that appears in no other way than from behind the curtain, a curtain behind nothing and nobody is hidden. She is reality of the illusion of the sender's and receiver's presence, of truth and enlightenment. In that novel, which inidactes an important turn in Parnicki's writing career, one may notice a concept of writing that in many ways corresponds to Derrida's grammatology