Malvina, or Spoken and Written Word in the Novel (Ukázka, strana 99)

even utterances of the protagonists. This is one of the factors creating the impression of the multiple game of unity and unambiguity with duality and ambiguity, which I have already outlined. In the Malvina-Ludomir couple, the “twinned” parallel between personality traits, actions, and – in their case particularly – utterances, is broken. I have referred several times to the consequences of this shift. As we remember, the opposition of Ludomir and Ludomir, and consequently – of Malvina and Malvina, gives an explicit doppelgänger touch to the couple’s past relationship.

Malvina with respect to Ludomir, and Ludomir with respect to Malvina, both play their simultaneous parts on two opposing planes: the Warsaw plane and the Krzewin plane. To each other, they become split persons: at those moments when the Warsaw Ludomir comes across as the Krzewin Ludomir, Malvina finds him puzzling and inaccessible; when Malvina meets the Warsaw Ludomir, she in turn becomes puzzling and inaccessible to him. The split in the person of Ludomir within the “twin” Malvina-Ludomir couple is one of the explicit components of the plot, while the split in the person of Malvina is one of the less explicit.

The episode which recapitulates all the previous manifestations of this doppelgänger game, and simultaneously highlights the circumstances which explain its origin, is the finale of the Warsaw plot. As in the entire novel, so too in this episode, the events and Malvina’s resulting experiences are recounted both in the narrator’s tale and in the heroine’s letter. Malvina’s private conversation with one Ludomir is disrupted by a scream from the other Ludomir, an alter ego of the former. The scream becomes an integral component of the utterance which Malvina formulates, marked by a genuine turn to the Ludomir with whom she was actually conversing. Her utterance was to have communicated her emotional commitment, but is instead disrupted and followed by the heroine’s loss of consciousness: Rais[ing] her eyes, [she gave] the Prince her hand and declare[d]: “Return safely, Prince, and when the war is over…”

But her words were cut short by an horrendous shriek as the most extraordinary apparition confounded her senses. In the dense thicket of the hedge, clearly illuminated by the moonlight, Malvina saw standing opposite her a second image of Ludomir. (132)

The letter in which the heroine quotes the unuttered part of her promise demonstrates that her simultaneous hearing and seeing of the two Ludomirs was, to her, equivalent to facing that which divided and 98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS517885

split herself – having divided and split the person of the Ludomir she had encountered in Warsaw: I meant to add, “…and when the war is over, you will receive my hand.”

But I was unable to conclude these final words. My words were interrupted, interrupted perhaps forever, by an appalling scream and by a supernatural apparition, whose appearance dumbfounded my senses at the time, and whose memory has thrown me into a terrified panic ever since. I suddenly saw Ludomir’s image reproduced behind him; despair and death were written on his face; he was lit up by the moonlight and seemed to emerge out of the darkness of the night. (136–137)

Malvina’s letter allows me to conclude that this very incident forced her to face the duality of the Warsaw Ludomir as a problem of one and the same person, and of two different persons at the same time. Malvina depicts the other Ludomir as “a supernatural apparition” (136), and yet – as in the split second when she sees him, she denies the reality of that impression by refusing to accept the sighting of the other Ludomir as “hallucination”, and not “all too real” (138). In the process, she resorts to self-accusation: the more she accepts the thought of the other Ludomir’s real existence, the more she blames herself for having made a promise to the first: Agh, Wanda, that loathsome ghost returned to me along with my memory and has made such a deep impression on my mind that, even if I were to lose my memory, I would never shake it off. Wanda! Believe me, it was no hallucination. Wanda, it could have been an unhappy omen for Ludomir... an omen perhaps for Malvina, as well as an early punishment for the fact that her lips were about to utter something other than what her soul felt, and that she was about to give her hand to Prince Melsztyński when she was no longer able to give him her heart! (137)

The setting of the incident recalled by the heroine resembles the circumstances in which the mythological offspring of the Moon, the four-armed and four-legged Androgynes, who combined masculine with feminine traits, were cut in two by Zeus, assisted by Apollo. This mythological incident is thus narrated by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium: [Zeus] proceeded to cut everyone in two, just as people cut up sorb-apples for preserving or slice eggs with a hair. As he divided them he told Apollo 99 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS517885

to take each separated half and turn round the face and half neck to the cut side, so that each person by contemplating its own cut surface might behave more moderately. (2008, 23)

Roland Barthes elucidates that it was Zeus’ intention to force the divided, two-armed and two-legged Androgynes to be continually reminded of their inner division. In Zeus’ order, Barthes sees the prototypical inner imperative which insists that humans try to mentally control all that divides and splits them: “Understand your madness: that was Zeus’ command when he ordered Apollo to turn the faces of the divided Androgynes (like an egg, a berry) toward the place where they had been cut apart (the belly)” (2001, 60; italics original). I point here to the mythical and problematic context of the incident recalled by the heroine, because components analogous to the mythological ones may be found in Malvina. Moreover, a violent change should be noted in Malvina’s attitude towards the object of her affections: a riddle involving not one but two different individuals. It shows that she understands where she might have erred: she was guilty not of misconstruing the doppelgänger inconstancy of the Ludomir whom she encountered in Warsaw, but of misconstruing his identity.

This is how the final scene of the Warsaw plot endorses Ivanov’s argument concerning the merging of archaic twin symbolism with the motif of the human doppelgänger in contemporary literature. The scene also endorses his belief that one component of this both ancient and modern problem is the inner co-existence of the duality of twins (two persons to represent one) and the androgynous duality (one person to represent two).

At this point let me draw attention to one more problematic complication of the motif of twins in Wirtemberska’s novel. Interesting and important as it is, its content is associated with the twin motif popular during Classicism, which developed subsequently during the Enlightenment. In Wirtemberska’s novel, as in Molière’s comedy Amphitryon, this complication depends on the connection between twins and doppelgängers, i.e. on a game of personal unity and duality, as well as symptoms of crisis in the institution of marriage. Jacques Lacan was the first to note and discuss these issues in relation to Molière’s play (Lacan 1991).

In Lacan’s view, in the eighteenth century, the essence of the parallel between twindom and marriage lay in the latter’s failure to engage with the ethical categories of “love”, “constancy”, or “commitment”. In other words, in society’s view, this bred the clash between strict moral require100 Ukázka elektronické knihy