Awareness of Form in the Novel Other Songs by Jacek Dukaj

Jacek Dukaj’s prose is placed at the borderlines of literary genres, among science fiction, fantasy, saga, and forms of re-written, re-factional literature. It is governed by two mental mechanisms: the “game of make-believe” and the game with a reader and the philosophical awareness of Form. The creative re-writing occurring in the novel Other Songs is based on reference to the battle fought between Synthesis and Analysis from Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, to Aristotelean conjectures on Form and Matter, maybe also to Paul Dirac’s physics and the electronic visions of penetration and dispersal, which are revealed by the short story The Cathedral, adapted for the screen by Tomasz Bagiński