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“Words tickle me, thoughts caress me”: Gombrowicz on the Point of Interpretation
Author(s) -
Chrostowska S. D.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2010.01011.x
Subject(s) - interpretation (philosophy) , metaphor , meaning (existential) , semiotics , gesture , linguistics , objectivity (philosophy) , dream , reading (process) , performative utterance , epistemology , sociology , philosophy , psychology , neuroscience
This article focuses on Witold Gombrowicz’s most challenging drama, The Marriage (1948). 1 Based on the creation and manipulation of meaning it stages, I tease out the play’s implicit semiotics and relate this to the difficulty of interpreting the text as a whole. The Marriage , I argue, indicates an unorthodox direction for literary analysis, one overlooked in the exegetical search for deeper significances and the application of external theoretical models. An outlier in the crop of postmodern readings of Gombrowicz, my article develops considerably the most recent and still sparse work in this area. The fragmented body of what scholars have dubbed “Gombrowiczian Man” is the principal metaphor of man’s participation in form, the fragmentation of self, and the multiplicity of meaning. In my reading, Gombrowicz’s use of the metaphor in The Marriage – and specifically of the finger to which it grants such prominence – challenges the traditional method of interpretation interested in extracting from signs (words, gestures) a stable meaning. Utilizing the dramatic topos of the dream, the frame of drunkenness, and the figure of the extended finger (touching, pointing, cuing, designating, and so on), the play presents its author’s anti‐essentialist stand on meaning, language, and reality, placing the interpretation of form before that of content.