NARRATIVES OF FRONTIER CROSSING: THE EXISTENTIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL NATURE OF SOFIA NAŁKOWSKA’S NOVEL “THE FRONTIER”

Abstract

The authors of the investigation focus on the analytical and interpretive understanding of the existential experiences of the literary subjects of Zofia Nałkowska’s novel “The Frontier”. The shape-creating and sense-creating dominants of the characters’ experience are alienation, suffering, illness, despair, madness, and death. These dominants are formed into mutually complementary narratives of the novel which, in their turn, build its architectural, plot-fabulous and personospheric whole, thus proving its existential-psychological nature. Among the narratives of experience revealed through the literary subjects of the work, anxiety and its related states of suffering and confusion the characters are filled with because of the refusal to take responsibility for their lives as well as the inability to choose one of the options of the ongoing event are distinguished. The narrative of death is expressed in the ontological space: play with fate (Cecylia Kolichowska), taking the life of an unborn person (Justyna Bogutówna), suicide (Zenon Ziembiewicz), identification of one’s own existence with the existence of another and – as a result – the lost of personal identity. Narratives of both suffering and illness also lead to death – psychological (Justyna’s schizophrenia), and therefore biological (the death of Adela, Cecylia Kolichowska, Jasia Gołąbska’s mother, Justyna’s mother, and Zenon’s suicide). Narratives of existential-psychological experiences are united and caused by the super-narrative of crossing the frontier– moral, social, and existential-philosophical. The consequence of crossing the moral frontier is the literary subject’s loss of the inner self, crushed in the irreconcilability between the moral norm and the actions that deny it. The social frontier is crossed by Zenon and Justyna – the illusory justification is the belief that it is impossible to change a person’s social status, symbolized by Cecylia Kolichowska’s tenement with a clear division into the basement and the upper part. The crossing of the existential-philosophical frontier, beyond which the meaning of life is lost and the abyss of death awaits, becomes profoundly irreparable for the characters of the novel. The antagonistic kinship of frontier crossings by individual characters builds up a collective picture of the world and outlines the work as a psychological novel with geneological features of a socio-moral novel which goes back to realistic literary writing, and at the same time – with the signs of existentialist philosophy characteristic of modernism. Zofia Nałkowska’s novel “The Frontier” – with its various narratives of the existential and psychological experiences of the literary subject – is a significant literary achievement of Polish interwar prose, emerging from realism and plunging into twilight modernist philosophy and glorified in interwar psychoanalysis.