The history, deconstruction How Tomasz Burek and Ryszard Koziołek read the Prologue to the second part of the Face of the Moon by Teodor Parnicki

Abstract

A large Prologue to the second part of the Face of the Moon by Teodor Parnicki shows a mechanism of a complicated bureaucratic-counterintelligence in Byzantium in the middle of the fifth century. The task of agents (recruited among unemployed rhetoricians) is to make the most precise reports, however, as Tomasz Burek, a critic, has noticed, they do not follow the course of events. After years, similar remarks were made by Ryszard Koziołek in his work devoted to Parnicki’s trilogy. Referring to these remarks, the author of the article claims that a dynamic relation between an event and word in Parnicki’s novel is similar to a „source difference” typical of a language of deconstruction. Thus, one can speak of analogies between Parnicki’s prose from the 1960s and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction deriving from the criticism of phenomenology at the same time. Eventually, the history taking place seems to be an event muddle in Parnicki’s works, around which something happens, though, we cannot definitely say what happens in fact. Reality, „ungraspable and unembraceable” becomes marked with stereotypical female features, taking on the status of an unapproachable object of desire. At the same time, it is being constantly disciplined by écriture masculine, an institutionalised discourse of a patriarchal culture while a monstrous SCHOLA AGENTORUM from the Prologue to Parnicki’s novel may successfully be considered a hyperbole of such a discourse. Maksymian, the main protagonist, chooses another discourse which is confronted with a Nietzschean principle of vita femina.