Interrupted Waiting: Justyna Bargielska’s Obsoletki as a Paradoxical Story
Iwona GRALEWICZ-WOLNY
Institute of Literary Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia in Katowice, ul. Uniwersytecka 4, 40-007 Katowice, Poland , Polandhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5508-9805
Abstract
The subject-matter of the article is Justyna Bargielska’s Obsoletki interpreted as an attempt at finding a language to express in literary prose the experience of miscarriage. An important component of such an experience is a sudden shift from imagining the future as organized around the baby about to be born to forced relinquishing such ideas, which was indicated in the title of the paper by the phrase “interrupted waiting.” The literary strategy of confronting a completely unexpected loss was presented against the background of feminist, affective, and hauntological theories. In all those contexts, miscarriage reveals its multifaceted paradoxicality expressed, for instance, by the narrator of Obsoletki taking photographs of the dead fetuses at the request of their parents. Such a practice was justified by referring to Susan Sontag’s ideas and interpreting the narrator’s actions as a manner of participating in the grief of the other. Comic and, at the same time, brutal, associative and alogical, the narration of Obsoletki signals the specificity of waiting for a child to be born: the exclusion from one’s view the possibility of the loss which, if it occurs, eludes efforts to both describe it and interpret it as meaningful.
Keywords:
Justyna Bargielska, Obsoletki, miscarriage, pradox, waitingInstitute of Literary Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia in Katowice, ul. Uniwersytecka 4, 40-007 Katowice, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5508-9805
