Freezing over history. "Lód" ("Ice") by Jacek Dukaj as a historiographic metanovel

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that Lód by Jacek Dukaj might be interpreted – referring to the methodology of Linda Hutcheon – as a historiographic metanovel. The most important element indicating such a clue is the shift from an allohistorical narration to a story about the nature of history itself. Dukaj treats history as if it were a personal character in his novel. The notable and almost freezing over presence of history in Lód proves that an attempt at this kind of reading enables interpretive endeavours in the context of the entire contemporary historiographic discourse that was initiated by the works of Hutcheon or Hayden White. The traces of postmodernist persiflage allow to look at Dukaj’s novel in a context that is much broader than only word‑building fiction, which is far too often categorized as popular literature. The author of Lód – as I have been trying to show – has turned his work into a treatise about the mechanisms that rule history, posthistory and postmemory, which in the Polish culture seems to be a direct answer to the concept of romantic paradigm, as proposed by Maria Janion.