The uncanny and the witty, On Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet by Sylwia Chutnik

Abstract

In Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet (2008), the first novel by Sylwia Chutnik (born in 1979), all protagonists bear traits of uncanniness. Her female characters reside between life and death, real life and nightmare, day and night, the acceptable and the (socially) forbidden. They are also bordering on madness. These motives, however, are presented by the author as comic, and what is more, in a manner resembling the game of cognitive perspectives in Romantic literature. Like a Romantic ballad-writer, the author’s narrator either enters the imaginary world vouching for its reality, or she undermines it, discreetly suggesting the fictional and literary nature of a story. The Romantic aesthetics has not, however, been revised by Chutnik, but used similarly to Umberto Eco’s notion of intertextual irony. Chutnik emphasizes her distance toward employed conventions (if only because of their historic character). As a result, she creates an ironic variation of the identity novel, which proves only partial identification of Chutnik’s writings with the prevailing narrative models. However indispensable these models are, their validity is totally arguable.