THINGS AS A TOOL OF OTHERING IN THE STORY ‘SEAMS’ BY OLGA TOKARCHUK

Abstract

The article examines the material world of the story by the contemporary Polish writer, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. The genre in which the writer works, and within which she reveals artistic themes and problems, is difficult to define for sure – it is a unique mixture of postmodern and baroque features, magical realism and humanistic, philosophical fiction. The article is devoted to an important component of the unique artistic canvas woven by Olga Tokarczuk – the material world of the story ‘Seams’ from the collection ‘Quirky Stories’ (2018). The focus of Tokarchuk's prose is the theme of borders and borderlands, changes and transformations, as well as connections for different times and spaces. Another important topic for the writer is the meeting with The Stranger, The Other. The research of Olga Tokarczuk’s short prose proved that she uses the material world as an stylistic means to express and reveal the borderline, otherness and disorientation of the world – topics that are important for the author and her readers. Things very rarely perform only the auxiliary role of ‘props’ in the text, especially when it comes to highly artistic, intellectual literature. They usually represent the ideological and artistic features of the work, become an important content factor of the text, a component of the human concept and a means of psychologization, or embody the specifics of the author's model of the world. The hero of the studied story by Olga Tokarchuk finds himself in a situation when things around him suddenly transform, change their usual appearance or ‘basic characteristics’. At the same time, the changes are very small, not fundamental, but they become a source of discomfort and embarrassment for the main character. In the end, what at first looks like a dissonance, a ‘failure of the matrix’, a small, barely noticeable inconsistency of things in the world, first angers and then scares him – he perceives it as a sign of indifference and alienation from the world. The world seems to push the hero away, rejects him and does not extend its laws to him – it is othering him, and things become a tool for a kind of a person’s discrimination, a way to point out his redundancy and uselessness, a tool for removing him from the current reality.