The Intertextual After-Image

Abstract

A particular model of intertextuality can be observed in Julian Przyboś’s poetry; it occurs in poems bearing witness simultaenously to the reception of a literary work and the perception of a fragment of reality dealt with in that work. Przyboś feels that the viewer’s individual history of visual experiences and overall consciousness has a decisive influence on the way he or she assimilates and registers subsequent experiences. This conviction is directly linked to Strzemiński’s theory of seeing; in his view, the reception of visual stimuli is crucially dependent on the impulses directly preceding it, so that the way we perceive what we are looking at now is determined by the image of what have looked at earlier. A particular kind of dependence between Przyboś’s poetry and the poems of Słowacki can be called an intertextual after-image. This term can have further applications in dealing with intertextual dependence in other texts.