Secrets of Literature and a Hunger for Initiation

Abstract

This article concerns secrets and secrecy in narrative works. The author, following in the footsteps of Auerbach and Kermode, argues that secrets should be understood as discontinuous places, gaps that demand to be filled. Auerbach and Kermode pointed to the biblical origins of the secret narrative. The latter in The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative noted that secrets presuppose a mode of initiation – this was the case in the gospel of St Mark he analysed, addressed to believers. However, this sender’s intention also appears in strictly literary texts that operate the convention of the secret. This article refers to four twentieth-century Polish narrative texts that use elements of secrecy in different ways. Mrożek’s Moniza Clavier conceals the confabulatory character of the first-person statement, Miłosz’s Dolina Issy and Gombrowicz’s Kosmos conceal the deeply autobiographical character of the reflection on individual fate, while the narrative in Lem’s Solaris activates the possibility of ‘vertical reading’, referring to the concept of some absolute. Secrets in literary texts tend to be secularized versions of religious narratives addressed to the initiated, and the promise of an integration of discontinuous places attracts sceptics and believers.