| Abstract [eng] |
The subject of this master's thesis is Witold Gombrowicz's last novel "Cosmos", which he called "a novel about the creation of reality". This definition reveals the key to approaching the novel – the necessity to reflect on the ambiguous nature of subject’s relationship to reality and literary creation. The phenomenological analysis of literature allows this to be done - it draws attention to the intentionality found in the work, its relationship to the intentionality of the self-reflexive interpreter, offers to question the classical division between subject-activity and object-passivity, and even more - hints at the possibility of an intertwined relationship. This master's thesis focuses on the problem: how in the specific case of the analysis of a literary work - Gombrowicz's "Cosmos" - the correlation of the phenomenological method, metafiction and obsession forms tools that provide access to the meaning of the novel. The main goal of the master's thesis is to show how Witold Gombrowicz's "Cosmos", being a metafiction about the formation of reality, reenacts the very process of the formation of reality, involves the reader in it and also explicitly highlights to the reader this scheme of formation and its inevitability. In order to achieve this goal, the following tasks are set in the work: 1) To accentuate the main methodological assumptions of the phenomenology of literature that are relevant for this work; 2) To introduce the concept of metafiction and reveal why "Cosmos" can be considered metafiction; 3) To substantiate the necessity of the concept of obsession and the reflected relationship with pathology in the context of the analysis of "Cosmos"; 4) To reveal how, following the basic premise of phenomenology about the non-radicality of the distinction between activity/passivity, the dichotomies of chaos/cosmos and reality creation (its passivity/activity), which open the novel, can be examined; 5) To show how, according to this interpretation, the novel itself appears as a third obsessive system illustrated by it - how the impossibility of "Cosmos" to become absurd reflects the necessity of human reality as a meaningful reality. After carrying out the research planned in the work, it becomes clear that what is revealed to us in "Cosmos" - Witold's pathologically limited, excessively meaningful world - corresponds to what we encounter in the novel. In this case, the novel, just like pathology, reveals the conditions of experience in an intensified state. The novel, as defined actuality of combinations, reflects on its formation and necessity. In its inescapable definiteness, it provides an analogy – an obsessive process of sense-creation in a tiny, disoriented world, carried out by both Witold and the reader. In this sense, creation reveals itself as the third obsessive system of "Cosmos" - a text about the formation of obsessive systems is written, read, and experienced as an obsessive system. In the Lithuanian context of the reception of Gombrowicz's work, this master’s thesis is distinguished by attention to the analysis of "Cosmos" as a metafiction, its interweaving with the method of literary phenomenology and the reflection of the phenomenon of obsession. Grasping the problematic of "Cosmos", this thesis invites for further research of its meanings as well as of Gombrowicz's work in general. |
