“Exhausted” Literature? Reception of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Narrative Strategies

Abstract

Andrzej Sapkowski’s works have been arousing controversies since the beginning of his career. One of the causes of this phenomenon is the fact that the writer used re-writing, a technique grounded in avant-garde forms of expression. His narrative strategy caused some misunderstandings among readers who were used to modernist literature, and the idea of originality. It may seem that those controversiesshould have been refu ted by literary critics (what, at least partly, has been done), but the truth is that describing the relation between the initial text and its re-written version caused them some problems as well. The aim of this article is the analysis of the reception of Sapkowski’s narrative strategies. The following questions were asked here: is originality (as a category) useful to interpret re-written discourse? Can popular literature be called exhausted only because it uses iterations? To what extent does iteration provide ludic satisfaction to readers, and to what degree it obstructs interpretations provided by critics? By analysing critical texts written by Krzysztof Uniłowski, Anna Misztak and Marek Szyjewski it was shown that using the category of originality to interpret a postmodern literary work is an ideological operation. For confronting originality and iteration generally helps critics to place the literary work in the context they want to see it in. To carry out the research, the tools provided by history and theory of literature (such as discourse analysis and ideology criticism) were used.