Zygmunt Haupt’s literary engineering

Abstract

With the tools borrowed from the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, this article discusses the topic of the represented world, and especially literary characters, in the prose of Zygmunt Haupt. The concept of the drive presented as an artistic montage – as developed by Lacan – turns out to be particularly useful in the analysis of literary portraits depicted by Haupt. Constructed as a montage of memories, this prose points to the very mechanism of imaginary representation driven by what is described by Freud as “drive-spring”. It constructs a stage on which individual characters are presented; it drives them as characters. It is also a metaphor describing the mechanisms of remembering and writing. Propelled by the “drive-spring” those literary characters resemble dolls or mannequins; they also point to the surrealist tradition within which these literary representations can be located.