Andrzej Strug

"History Hysteria" is an analysis of Agnieszka Holland's 1981 film "Fever" in a feminist perspective. The film, which is a film adaptation of Andrzej Strug's novel "The Story of One Bullet" ("Dzieje jednego pocisku",1910) about the 1905 revolution, unlike the novel, it brings to the fore the female heroine, revolutionary, Kama.

Zebrane w książce analizy pokazują, iż melodramatyzm, występujący i ukształtowany w melodramacie scenicznym, pod wpływem procesów i przemian demokratyzacji kultury, staje się w prozie odrębną kategorią estetyczną o szerokim znaczeniu i oddziaływaniu. W jego skład wchodzą elementy charakterystyczne zarówno dla kultury popularnej (np. występowanie klisz literackich, powtarzalnych postaci i ich zachowań), jak i dla kultury wysokiej (np. konflikt między wartościami duchowymi i materialnymi, świat spolaryzowany: dobro i zło, cnota i zagrożenie, niewinność i doświadczenie; wielkie spektakle historyczno-społeczne, jako tło wydarzeń: rewolucja, wojna). Melodramatyzm przedstawia zdesakralizowany świat w chaosie, w którym społeczność musi odnaleźć bądź zrekonstruować system znaków w celu pokonania i usunięcia zła, dla oczyszczenia porządku socjalnego. 

Melodramatyzm tworzy pięć podstawowych elementów: silny patos, emocjonalne opisy sytuacji i postaci, moralna polaryzacja, nieklasyczne struktura narracji i spektakularne efekty. Przedstawia świat poddawany przeobrażeniom, dlatego też jego bohaterami są postacie przebywające w zmiennej, fragmentarycznej przestrzeni. Otoczenie to sprawia początkowo wrażenie idealnego, dopiero wtargnięcie złego powoduje, iż musi ono zostać poddane redefinicji. Fabuła utworu melodramatycznego jest osadzona w konkretnej historii, ale ze względu na ilość wydarzeń, wątków (przygodowych, sensacyjnych), nagłych zmian, czytelnik odnosi wrażenie, iż spotka się z uniwersum, które wymyka się kontroli.

W poszczególnych rozdziałach zostały przeanalizowane związki powieściowego melodramatyzmu z rytuałem, romansem, powieścią gotycką, sensacją. Jednocześnie zwrócono uwagę na stałe dla melodramatu figury oraz ich przeobrażenia w konfrontacji z nowoczesnością. Do pełniejszego obrazu melodramatyzmu celowo wybrano twórców różnorodnych. Przedstawione w pracy rozważania poświęcone melodramatyzmowi w wybranych powieściach napisanych przed 1939 rokiem z pewnością nie wyczerpują wszystkich aspektów jego funkcjonowania ani w omawianych utworach, ani – zwłaszcza - w literaturze polskiej pierwszych dziesięcioleci XX wieku, ale dowodzą, iż zarysowana problematyka zasługuje na wyodrębnienie i badanie.

The analyzes collected in the book show that melodramaticism occurring and shaped in stage melodrama is becoming
a distinct esthetic prose category exerting widespread importance and impact due to the processes and changes resulting from culture democratization. Melodramaticism consists of elements characteristic for both popular culture (e.g. the occurrence of literary cliches, recurring characters and their behaviors) and high culture (e.g. the conflict between spiritual and material values, the polarized world: good and evil, virtue and threat, innocence and experience, or great historical and social spectacles as a background of events: a revolution or a war).
Melodramaticism depicts a deconsecrated world in chaos where a community must find or reconstruct the system of signs or symbols in order to defeat and eliminate evil and purify social order.

Melodramaticism creates five elementary elements: strong pathos, emotional descriptions of situations and characters, moral polarization, non-classical narrative structure and spectacular effects. It shows a changing world subject to transformations, hence its characters are individuals living in variable fragmentary space. Initially, this surrounding appears to be ideal but the intrusion of evil evokes its necessary redefinition. The plot of a melodramatic work is set within a specific story but because of the number of events, threads (adventurous and sensational) and sudden changes, a reader has an impression that they will encounter the universe which is getting out of control.

In individual chapters, the relations between fictional melodramaticism and ritual, romance, Gothic novel and sensation have been analyzed. At the same time, attention has been drawn to figures occurring on a permanent basis in melodrama as well as their transformations in confrontation with modernity. Distinct authors were purposefully selected to provide a fuller image of melodramaticism. Reflections on melodramaticism in selected novels written before 1939 presented in the work definitely do not exhaust all aspects of its functioning neither in discussed works nor in the Polish literature of the first decades of the 20th century in particular. Nevertheless, they prove that the outlined issues deserve distinction and research.

The analyzes collected in the book show that melodramaticism occurring and shaped in stage melodrama is becoming a distinct esthetic prose category exerting widespread importance and impact due to the processes and changes resulting from culture democratization. Melodramaticism consists of elements characteristic for both popular culture (e.g. the occurrence of literary cliches, recurring characters and their behaviors) and high culture (e.g. the conflict between spiritual and material values, the polarized world: good and evil, virtue and threat, innocence and experience, or great historical and social spectacles as a background of events: a revolution or a war). Melodramaticism depicts a deconsecrated world in chaos where a community must find or reconstruct the system of signs or symbols in order to defeat and eliminate evil and purify social order. Melodramaticism creates five elementary elements: strong pathos, emotional descriptions of situations and characters, moral polarization, non-classical narrative structure and spectacular effects. It shows a changing world subject to transformations, hence its characters are individuals living in variable fragmentary space. Initially, this surrounding appears to be ideal but the intrusion of evil evokes its necessary redefinition. The plot of a melodramatic work is set within a specific story but because of the number of events, threads (adventurous and sensational) and sudden changes, a reader has an impression that they will encounter the universe which is getting out of control. The methodology of the work assumed a critical connection of two scientific discourses: one appropriate for research on culture and popular literature and another referring to culture and high literature. Verification of the following hypotheses seemed to be particularly important. Firstly, melodramaticism appears when the presented world modeled on a historical one contains many elements confirming its temporariness, decay and defragmentation of traditional values and their representatives, which occurs due to: revolutionary events leading to relativization of human behaviors, an alien interfering in a closed group of people fossilized by customs and imaginations, a social state, economic and perceptual crisis resulting from the lack of an individual’s adaptive skills, strengthened by sensational and catastrophic events modified by mass media and popular entertainment. Secondly, melodramaticism introduces intensification of all devices used to describe this world and, under the rules of an experiment, ceases to be identified solely with entertainment and becomes an important modus for the matters which have frequently been ascribed exclusively to elite culture. Thirdly, getting entangled in situations connected with love, characters acquire a status of an alien in many environments, participate in various ritual forms of transition entering the sphere of sacrum and profanum alternately while their behavior is subject to modifications connected with entering specific space. The choice of exactly those three writers has not been accidental as well since it has been the author’s particular intention to present representatives of different levels of literary circulations and such their works which contain elements typical for both high and popular literature, particularly in case of S. Żeromski and A. Strug’s texts. The author’s research intention is to fill in a considerable gap in the studies on the presence of elements typical for melodramaticism in selected prose writings before 1939 and draw attention to the factors displayed in the analyzed texts, the knowledge, discovery and interpretation of which do not only enrich previous comprehension of Stefan Żeromski, Andrzej Strug or Helena Mniszkówna works, but also reveal in a more profound manner dynamism of our national modernism whose opposing attitude is determined, among others, by dialectics of high and popular literature. The interpreted plots presented the world where evil became unmotivated and unpredictable (Dzieje grzechu – The Story of Sin) whereas obstacles for main characters’ actions were multiplying and impossible to surpass (Andrzej Strug’s novels). Melodramaticism in S. Żeromski’s texts fulfills a subordinate function towards a tragic undertone of the characters’ actions. H. Mniszkówna, on the other hand, depicts a dark side of men possessed by lust and skillfully combines different codes (sacral, psychological and typical for Gothic novels). Andrzej Strug universally defines the impact of capital on an individual’s condition depriving main characters of hope to preserve any traditional foundations of the world before transformation. He forces them to make individual choices, which yield different results. In the analyzed works, traditionally understood love – the basis of melodramaticism – is beginning to play a less significant role: it becomes deviant, rapacious, unrestrained, pathological, leading to death or,…