Scholarly record

METATEXTUAL THEOREM IN LITERARY AND ILLUSTRATIVE PORTRAYAL OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY

D. Leskova, I. G. Drzewiecka

Abstract

The literary portrayal of physical disability and death in the book by Czech author Daniel Rusar Spring of Cripples (Paskuda books, Bratislava, 2011) combines the means of narrative and non-narrative textual strategies and at the story level uses the contrast between emotional and deemotionalised attitudes of the protagonists to difficult life situations. The resulting textual incoherence creates a receptional situation that makes the reader’s cooperation in relation to the plot (his temporal and emotional immersion into the story) uncertain. The reader’s reception is also made unstable by the discursive level of narration and, within fictional ontology, also by the powerful blurring of the line between dreams and reality. The chosen discoursive strategy allows the author to display the complexity of human coping with physical disabilities. The disillusion of the reader’s expectations that arise from the initial (naive) receptive approach to the text offers the recipient the opportunity to reflect and reconsider the stereotypical perception of physical otherness and handicap. The text thus takes on the nature of metatextual theorem, which allows the reader to uncover the mechanisms of his own interpretational cooperation. The above-mentioned characteristics of the literary text are followed by the illustrator Matus Matatko with his “non-illustrative” pictorial interpretation of the story. In his illustrations the traditional, expressively marked graphic technique of linocut is interconnected with forms of current visual sub- and pop-culture. He uses the principles of caricaturization and hybridization to depict the characters. The intention, however, is not to emphasize their physical anomalies, but to raise the quintessence of the undisguised (tragi)comedy and the absurdity of the situations that the story’s protagonists are facing. The illustrator thus responds to their inner experiencing, (self-) irony and deemotionalised attitudes to the handicap, i.e. primarily to the (pato)psychological aspects of physical disability. The meanings of the figurative elements in illustrations are produced by the principles of metaphorical and metonymic image transposition. The unusual way of illustrating the physical disability invites the recipient to map independently the structural and functional analogies between the human body and the mechanism of the machine, and also points out the complexity of internal coping with the handicap.

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