Przed bramą. Od alegorii do katachrezy
Streszczenie
The allegorical story entitled At the Gate, which appeared as the eighth chapter of
Elizabeth Costello, a novel by John M. Coetzee, ostentatiously alludes to the famous
parable by Franz Kafka, Before the Law. Deconstructing an allegory with its own devices,
Coetzee points to the need to replace allegorical reading, transform vague
narrative meanings into unambiguous ideological senses, with interpretation, which
always has to negotiate between the rule of the Law and the idiomatic singular voice,
since both of them — the Law, as well as the narrative — are equally necessary to
make interpretation possible. Rhetorically, it means replacing a readable allegory
with a catachresis, which, by its ambiguous and intermediate status, eludes the opposition
of the original and the figurative, situating itself into the borderland between
them. Thus, it is a catachresis which becomes a figure of literature, which
cannot make unambiguous ideological choices, but at the same time it cannot avoid
them, if it is to hold any existential value.
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