The Doll Read Free Page A

perhaps even more so, the decay of Positivist beliefs. The fundamental idea of both Western and Polish Positivists — their concept of society as a gigantic organism, whose parts function harmoniously for the benefit of the whole — could not sound more ridiculous than it does here, when confronted with a starkly realistic picture of contemporary Polish society, chronicled so accurately by Prus the journalist. If this society is a living organism at all, it is the organism of a Colossus with clay feet and a very little brain. It has a disenfranchised, hopelessly vegetating lower class at the base and aristocratic nincompoops, like Izabela’s father, at the top. For a former enthusiast of Positivism such as Prus, who had placed so much hope in the enterprising spirit of the middle class, it must have been painful that between the workers and the aristocracy there was little more than isolated figures like Wokulski, whose every effort at lasting social improvement (
not
merely philanthropic improvisation) is doomed to fail. Why? Because each of Wokulski’s specific actions is bound to be misinterpreted. His generosity is taken for a
nouveau-riche’s
wish to impress; his sound economic reasoning, for greed; his energy, for pushiness; his caution, for pettymindedness. In a total standstill, every step forward treads on a corn or two. Prus’s ‘social decay’ is a mire of stagnation. Every effort that carries some weight has to sink sooner or later. Only the operations of small-time crooks stay afloat.
    This diagnosis sounds even more well-founded since Prus makes it work ingeniously in many dimensions of his novelistic world simultaneously. His keen observation dissects society not merely along its vertical axis. It also moves horizontally, revealing, for instance, the immobilising, destructive results of ethnic animosity. Polish-Russian and Polish-Jewish conflict can find, in the eyes of Prus, neither a rational explanation nor an easy solution. It tears the fabric of society even more irreparably than the class distinctions. Yet another concern is the perennial problem of Poland’s place among the civilised nations of the West. Wokulski’s trip to Paris makes him — and the reader — realise the enormous distance separating Poland from France, which it claims to have emulated for centuries.
    Lastly, the Polish stalemate is scrutinised in historical time. First and foremost a contemporary novel, focused on the present moment in history,
The Doll
is also to some extent a historical novel — a novel whose contemporary plot depends on the backdrop of the historical past. The narrative structure of
The Doll
is affected by the almost compulsive retrospection of at least some of the characters. They either idealise the past or abhor it as the source of present troubles. The most significant of these characters is Ignacy Rzecki. Prus had the brilliant idea of inserting entries from the ‘Journal of the Old Clerk’ into his narrative. This hybrid — third-person narration with pockets of first-person diaristic narration — crucially affected the novel’s narrative and earned the writer much critical abuse. Yet it pays off in more ways than one. It allows him, first of all, to let Rzecki draw his own self-portrait — engaging and sympathetic because expressed in his idiosyncratic style. Second, Rzecki’s diary releases a multitude of subtle ironies: the old clerk’s naive interpretations of Wokulski’s actions diverge from the actual motivations, revealed to the reader in the third-person narrative. But Rzecki’s habit of reminiscing, turning back towards the distant historical past at every opportunity, seems to be the chief benefit. It gives the novel a new dimension by demonstrating the extent — one unknown in nations blessed with more peaceful and less absurd histories — to which the burden of the past can mould an individual’s