Introduction

Motto: “We think we all live in identical time, yet time flows differently for each of us. There are as many times and histories as there are individuals in the world.”Footnote 1

At first sight, it may seem surprising to approach Olga Tokarczuk’s work from a musical perspective. With some authors, it is possible to discern a clear connection with music—either due to biographical facts (musical studies, active musicianship, a lifelong interest in music, close connections with the music scene, etc.) or due to explicit references to music in their works. However, Tokarczuk has never openly acknowledged any association with music—either in interviews or in her most recently published book Czuły narrator (Vnímavý vypravěč, 2022)—a collection of essays, feuilletons and lectures in which she discusses her writing methods and her sensitive approach to the world (recalling her formative experiences and thinking).

Nevertheless, Tokarczuk’s work does reveal how she perceives music. Perhaps the most obvious example is “Ariadna na Naksos” (Ariadne on Naxos), from her short story collection Gra na wielu bębenkach (Playing on a Multitude of Drums, 2001); even the title of the story contains numerous literary and musical connotations. Inspired by Richard Strauss’s opera of the same name, Tokarczuk presents a hero whose perception of music becomes a form of existential revelation and catharsis—and as a consequence of this revelation, it becomes a fundamental and entirely natural mode of existence for her.

However, for musically aware readers, Tokarczuk’s work may also hold other musical connotations—as is hinted in the motto to this text. The motto expresses the notion that each individual person experiences their own individual time, living their own history within the polyphonic structure of the world. One individual, original voice (a life) is viewed from the perspective of multiple voices. I consider this polyphony to be one of the most fundamental and constant features of Tokarczuk’s novels. It is manifested in various facets of the novels’ composition, their characters and their themes, and it also poses significant challenges for reception.

One of the challenges for a scholarly reading of Tokarczuk’s work is to find convincing arguments for the claims presented above. I will seek these arguments in the intermedia relationship between literature and music—an art in which polyphony is one of the fundamental modes of composition. Additionally, in this study I have sought to address the challenge laid down by Eric Prieto (2002, p. 49), who claims that any attempt to apply a concept from one art to objects from a different art is essentially metaphorical, and that our task is to illuminate the meaning of such metaphors by “first seeking out the ‘deep structures’ (Kramer) that are common to both arts and then situating them in their ‘broader cultural context’ (Scher).”Footnote 2 Prieto recommends that we should not focus on describing direct connections between literature and music, but rather we should seek to identify those structures and principles that literature and music share, which will enable us to better understand the meaning and values of an artistic work when analyzing it.

Polyphonic thinking between music and literature

In the musical sense, polyphony can be understood as music consisting of multiple voices, created by the simultaneous flow of two or more separate, mutually independent (albeit coordinated) melodic lines. The way in which a polyphonic composition affects listeners depends primarily on the originality of the composer’s handling of melody and rhythm. When writing a polyphonic work, a composer has various options for developing the voices: voices can be repeated, imitated or varied, voices can intersect with and cross over each other before returning to their original positions, they can become calmer or more dynamic, they can appear in various keys or at various time intervals. The way in which different voices are combined in a polyphonic work is known as counterpoint (Hůla, 1985). Polyphony originated in vocal compositions (with the voices combining horizontally) and later found its way into instrumental compositions (with both horizontal and vertical combinations of voices). It spanned the period from the Late Middle Ages, culminated in the work of J. S. Bach (the mid-18th century), and continued into the 19th century, when it began to be perceived as one element of the stylistically multi-layered evolution of music. During its development, polyphony itself evolved and assimilated countless new elements, shifting from the stable, strictly structured, highly sophisticated style it represented during Bach’s era and eventually becoming a freer style. Nowadays, polyphony (in all its forms) is one of the most highly esteemed compositional techniques.

The polyphonic principle as a transmedia mode

In order to understand the options presented by polyphonic thinking and expression in literature (or indeed also in other arts), we should see polyphony as a general principle that can be viewed from two basic perspectives. Here I will not draw on Bakhtin’sFootnote 3 traditional concept of novelistic polyphony; instead my approach is based on the concept of intermediality, and it draws on the works of leading theoreticians of this concept.

In broader (more general) terms, we can view the polyphonic principle from a transmedia perspective. This approach draws on a concept advanced by Rajewsky, who considers such general principles to be “non-media-specific,” “migratory” phenomena; this means that a particular aesthetic or type of discourse appears or is applied in various arts or media (2002, pp. 12–13). Quite closely related to Rajewsky’s approach is the perspective found in the work of another theoretician, Werner Wolf, who likewise describes transmedia phenomena as “non-media-specific,” noting that they “appear in multiple media, and thus indirect relationships may exist among them.” In other words, they involve the transfer of formal (or semantic) concepts from one media to another. This generates indirect connections between the media, though these connections do not affect how a particular artefact makes meaning. In order for such a transfer to take place, the phenomena must be non-specific, i.e. they must function universally (2011, p. 67).

It is evident from these theoretical formulations that the polyphonic principle (as a transmedia mode) is particularly relevant to the way in which novelists (or other artists) think. Polyphony reflects an artist’s focus on plurality and multiple meanings; it offers us a way to acquire new understanding through the juxtaposition and comparison of various perspectives and angles of view, various questions and answers. This is analogous to music and the way in which a composer handles the counterpoint between different voices.

In general terms, the polyphonic principle in art is associated with the idea that nothing in the world is unambiguous, that there is no single truth, no single perspective or way of looking at things, and each thought always exists in counterpoint with another thought. As such, no one voice is preferred over the others within a polyphonic architecture (no one voice is the sole “bearer of truth”), but rather all the voices are of equal status (each voice has the right to be heard and understood). The purpose of such an architectural structure is not to objectivize or relativize utterances, but to attain a genuine multiplicity of equal voices. Such a structure is also coherent, in order to imbue the polyphonic plurality with the sense of order that is so essential if the work is to be convincing and comprehensible, to create “the harmonious system of the whole” (Chvatík, 2008, p. 162). If we consider a person as a complex simultaneous structure consisting of emotions and thoughts, then it is clear that we can express this structure via polyphony, in which the individual voices exist in a certain relation to each other: the voices may be contrasting, they may be mutually paradoxical, one voice may develop or reinforce or complement another voice, one voice may ask and another may answer, and so on. None of the voices is absolute; none of them represents a dominant idea or a definitive truth.

The polyphonic principle as intermedia imitation

Viewing the polyphonic principle from a narrower perspective, as an intermedia relationship within a single medium (in our case a literary text) rather than as a relationship between different media (as in the case of transmediality), we are faced with one fundamental problem if we attempt to apply this approach to literature: the problem of simultaneity. The reader will evidently not be able to follow two simultaneous utterances and understand both of them at once. This is in contrast to music, in which listeners are able to perceive any number of voices at the same time. In view of this obstacle, we can certainly consider the existence of the polyphonic principle in literature, but only in the form that Wolf terms imitation. In his definition, imitation is a structural type of intermedia relationship (unlike transmediality, which he considers a relational type) which can be characterized as an implicit form of reference by one medium to another. In Wolf’s words, the principle of imitation is active if “the medium of the analyzed work imitates signs from a different medium using its own (mainly formal) resources, thus referring to that different medium via iconicity, on the basis of similarity” (2011, p. 70).

The notion of polyphony as an intermedia relationship, in the form of imitation, can be applied to a specific work—specifically to the way in which an author expresses polyphonic thinking in a text. We can view this as a parallel between musical and novelistic thinking, manifested when a musical notion is applied to the structure of a novel. Polyphonic thinking can be expressed either by juxtaposing genres (with diverse genres coexisting side by side in the text—a story, essay, reportage, documentary text, etc.) or on the compositional or thematic level. Whenever we express something that we consider to be polyphonic in nature, it should retain an experimental character—in other words, it should not be a complete conceptual entity, but it should instead create space for a never-ending dialogue both within and outside the text. Each voice should be separate, emancipated, existing in its own right. It should interact with the other voices (whether by repetition, imitation, variation, crossing, contrast, complementation or gradation), yet it should also form an integral part of the whole. Just as in music, also in literature (as well as in other arts) it is possible to imitate the way in which polyphony develops (and is then perceived)—whether horizontally (the horizontal development of voices in a linearly developed text) or vertically (harmonious combinations—the sum of the various intersecting thoughts at any given moment).Footnote 4 In this manner, each equal voice contributes to the meaning of the text. A specific example of a combination of horizontally and vertically developed voices with a constant theme is the fugue—as I will demonstrate below when discussing the novel Primeval and Other Times.

Possibilities for a reception-based approach

If we view a text composed using the contrapuntal principle as a polyphonic composition from the perspective of the recipient, then—just as in the phase of the text’s composition (the intermedia imitation of a musical principle)—we can likewise draw inspiration from music, and to some extent we can imitate the position of a recipient (listener) of a polyphonic musical work. An ability to use contrapuntal techniques is an essential practical skill for a composer of music, and this should also apply to an educated and skilled literary writer. A composer usually proceeds from the starting-point of a univocal line (melodic, horizonal thinking) towards a multivocal composition, from simple rhythmic relationships towards a freer, mixed or syncopated rhythm. Likewise, as I will demonstrate below, a writer builds a literary “composition” by gradually developing different voices (narrators, characters, themes etc.), elaborating these voices, enriching them, and complicating their relationships with the other voices.

This manner of polyphonic composition is closely connected with reception. In a musical context, it is particularly bound up with our ability to understand what we hear, our imagination, invention, and musicality. The general goal of reception in such a situation is to achieve “a deeper and broader understanding of polyphony as a means of musical thinking and expression” (Thakar, 2012, p. 12). In the case of the reception of a literary text, just as with music, it is essential to be sensitive towards the individual voices, to understand how these voices develop, and to appreciate the harmonies created by their combinations. It therefore depends on the listeners’ (readers’) memory, and their ability to retain the individual lines within their mind, whether they are able to uncover the relationships between these individual lines (on various levels of the text) and ultimately to arrive at the theme and the meaning of the text. The first interpretative cue for the reader may be the title, which very frequently refers to a unifying theme that encompasses all parts of the text. The reader’s perception must be an active process: concentration, conscious focus on what is happening in the text, on both the entire text and its detailed components, spontaneous understanding of their meaning and function—all of which enhances the quality of our reading (listening) experience on a holistic level. Thakar claims that a counterpoint should not be perceived as a composite consisting of two or more melodic layers which, though they proceed simultaneously, nevertheless remain separate; instead, it should be perceived as a single, organic “whole which breathes a single content.” (ibid., p. 14) For both listeners and readers, this also means that it is not sufficient merely to register the composer’s/author’s use of counterpoint in terms of the voices’ horizontal development; to experience the full richness of a work, it must be perceived as a combination of both horizontal and vertical development. This represents a challenge for readers, who have in front of them a text that resembles a complex musical score; an ordinary reading of such a text is not enough to fully decode it, to uncover its full potential.

The process of interpreting a novel composed in a polyphonic manner requires readers to focus and concentrate; they should not merely follow the course of individual events, but they should also remain sensitive to things which periodically recur, undergoing development and variation. They should observe the individual voices as bearers of themes, while also following their development as part of a counterpoint, as they accrete interactions with the other voices and illuminate the theme from various perspectives; although each voice is independent and separable from the others, the voices nevertheless mutually complement each other and co-create “a melodic, semantic and referential complex” (Zurawská, 2012, p. 294).

In line with Kennan (1999), one of the aims of this study is to awaken, strengthen and develop the reader’s sensitivity to the contrapuntal aspects that are to some extent present in all literary texts. It seeks to boost readers’ awareness of the power inherent in contradictions and harmony, tension and release, and the movement towards a climax—aspects which are always present whenever two or more voices coexist.

The four-voice fugue in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Primeval and Other Times

Primeval and other times—playing with myth

Olga Tokarczuk is one of the best-known and most acclaimedFootnote 5 Polish literary authors. Her novel Primeval and Other Times was her third prose work. It was largely thanks to this novel that she became a prominent literary figure not only in Poland, but also internationally (it was translated into over 20 languages).

The word Primeval in the novel’s title is associated with the oldest period of human history (prehistoric times), from which no written sources have survived. This fundamental fact gave the author the freedom to create and describe a world according to her own imagination. In Tokarczuk’s own words, the basic “function of literature is to narrate myths in new situations and realities”; a myth “shows us the pattern according to which things happen” (Putzlacherová-Buchtová, 1999, pp. 192–193), and it can be seen as a universal story about the course of human life. At the same time, it should be noted that Tokarczuk does not copy established mythical models, nor does she refer to them to any great extent. She creates her own myth, which is distinctively personal, original, and consistent. Her mythical space, a village with the name Primeval, lacks a real geographical context (with the exception of a reference to Polish village names), yet it is clearly defined, it has its time, its order, its archetypical figures, angels and God. Reality, with its historical time (spanning from the end of the First World War until the 1980s), penetrates into this mythical space and forms a background to it—not in order to allow the author to depict the turbulent events of the 20th century, but primarily to enable her to present the image of a suffering, lonely person. Tokarczuk uses both realistic descriptions and rich imagination to create a kind of peculiar microcosm.

On the bookmark accompanying the 1999 Czech translation, Tokarczuk writes: “I always wanted to write a book like this one. To create and describe a world. It’s the story of a world which—like everything that is alive—is born, develops, and dies.” Elsewhere, the author adds that each great novel reaches into the realm of myths, into the treasure-chest of universals. For readers, myth therefore appears to be the key to understanding “Primeval,” and the novel’s setting ceases to be merely a provincial village and instead becomes a metaphor for the world, as is also observed by Klejnocki (2008).

The polyphonic view of the world: a four-voice fugue

The polyphonic lens through which Tokarczuk views the present-day world, and which is reflected in her fictional worlds, can be seen as the key to understanding her novelistic thinking. She convinces us of this in many of the ideas that she expresses—as we can observe in her most recent book, The Tender Narrator. In one chapter of this book, entitled Many Worlds in One Place, the author writes that contemporary society is divided into generations which differ “in their approach to the world, their knowledge, the use and quality of their language, their skills, mentality, type of politics, and role models for life”; she notes that this division shows “how many realities are present in the same space, interlocking and overlapping, mutually stimulating each other, yet remaining separate” (Tokarczuk, 2022, pp. 21–23). As I have pointed out above, it is this principle of polyperspectivity, the multiplicity of voices (polyphony) inherent in an awareness of individual human fates (individual voices) which are separate yet interact with each other and ultimately form our collective consciousness, upon which the notion of polyphonic music is built. By applying this principle, Tokarczuk is able to show the world in terms of the interaction of various influences and interconnections.

Let us now explore how this polyphonic perspective is applied in the novel under investigation here. The number four plays an absolutely fundamental role in Primeval and Other Times. Not only is the village of Primeval delineated by its boundaries at the traditional four points of the compass, but these boundaries are also guarded by four archangels, and the book even contains a chapter devoted to the magic of the number four, deriving from the number of basic points of the compass and the number of natural elements (air, fire, earth, water). Moreover, the mythical model of the world of Primeval is based on four fundamental constants: space, time, God, and people.

Although the internal composition of the novel is quite complex (it consists of 84 relatively short chapters), and although it may appear to consist of small fragments, images and individual events, with the story meandering and taking various diversions, the above-mentioned constants (voices) nevertheless form a strict fugue, whose main theme (cantus firmus) is the creation of the world, the new cosmogony of the universe. A musical fugue can likewise be described as a flowing, constantly developing stream of music, regulated and reinforced by an unchanging theme (Hůla, 1985, p. 231) and evolving by the addition to this main theme (cantus firmus) of counterpoints with new motifs. In our case, the novel is a four-voice fugue with four core themes (Space: Time: God: People), whose mutual status is unchanging. The themes form stable boundaries for the counterpoints, and they are constantly recalled (cited) in various voices, accompanied by new counterpoints, either separately or in a group. This means that the fundamental themes are mutually interlinked in various combinations (Space: Time, Space: God, Space: People, Time: God, Time: People, God: People), but each theme is at the same time developed by numerous other counterpoints in various interrelations, as will be shown below (e.g., the relation between people and space will be developed by contrasting counterpoints as either remaining in a space or leaving a space). In this way, the novel gradually builds up a complex polyphonic stream of connections inviting us to think about the essential nature of the individual themes—involving not only the interpretation of their general regularities (e.g., the general question of what attributes space can have), but also consideration of their polyphonic relations (e.g., what relationship people have to space, space to time, and so on).

Space: time: God: people

Space

The novel begins with a description of space: “Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 9). The metaphorical description is instantly complemented by a very specific description of the village’s boundaries on all four sides, the boundaries of rivers and towns (Taszów, Kielce, Jeszkotle), the boundaries guarded by four archangels (Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Uriel). The names evoke connotations associated with specific Polish toponyms (names of towns and villages) and with Christian mythology (names of angels), yet on the other hand they very easily cross the boundaries of reality into the realm of mythical symbols (in addition to the names of two rivers—Black River and White River—there is also a river simply named The River; the functions of the angels are also symbolic, e.g. Gabriel guards Primeval’s southern boundary from the desire to own and be owned, Raphael guards its northern boundary from travel fever, Michael guards the western boundary from pride, and Uriel guards the eastern boundary from foolishness and cunning). With a little imagination, we could easily draw a diagram of the space described, as Magdalena Maria Jaroń does in her review (2020), organizing the space according to the model of a mandala—a circle drawn inside a square, the geometric representation of perfection and completion. At the same time, we could also view the space from above, from a panoptical perspective, as a model of the world firmly anchored within its boundaries, where everything is both graspable and ungraspable in equal measure.

Space: People

It appears that the boundaries of Primeval cannot be crossed, as if its world is hermetically sealed. When two of the characters, Izydor and Ruta, want to leave the village, they are horrified that they cannot leave; they are “as in a pot,” and Izydor suggests that they walk along the boundaries, because “maybe there’s a hole somewhere” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 109). Ruta gives up, and asks: “What do we need any other worlds for?” (ibid., p. 81). In this manner, humans are connected to space. They are imprisoned within it, though the boundaries (physical borders or mental limits) perform a function of protecting them from external influences. At the same time, they think that a different, more beautiful world awaits them beyond the boundaries (the metaphor of the harmonious universe).

Space can thus not be viewed solely as a static place delineated by boundaries, as each boundary represents a provocation to cross it, evoking the dynamism of motion to and fro, activating departures and returns. Tokarczuk very clearly illustrates this in two counterpoints that are placed in opposition to each other in two successive chapters. On the one hand, characters leave Primeval and do not want to return (Janek, the son of Stasia), yet on the other hand there are characters who attempt to find meaning and order within the defined space of Primeval (Izydor). In the first of the above-mentioned chapters (“The Time of Mrs Papuga”), Janek appears to be in Primeval for the last time following his mother’s funeral, as there is nothing left to tie him to the place, and he is fascinated with the world beyond its boundaries. We can see this in the gesture in which he presses his hand to a stone—a gesture his mother forced him to make every time he left Primeval: “This time he pressed his hand deep into the chill, half-frozen ground and kept it there until his fingers went numb with cold” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 223). In the following chapter (“The Time of Things in Fours”), Izydor is convinced that he will never leave Primeval, and he strives to find order in the world and the universe, both in a dream (in which he sees regular geometric shapes hovering in space) and also in the fantastical notion that most important things exist four times: “He also thought he had come upon the trail of an order that is in force throughout the universe, a special divine alphabet” (ibid., p. 230). For this character, the boundaries of Primeval “enclose the entire primeval original world, and with it the history of humanity,” and “everything that lives, lives inside it, within the points that delineate the four boundaries” (Jaroń, 2020).

Space: God

Space is perceived differently in a world where God is present and in a world without God. This is demonstrated in a dialogue between Izydor (an inhabitant of Primeval) and the Russian soldier Ivan Mukta. When Ivan shows him a world without God, Izydor no longer sees a meadow, a forest, grass, mushrooms, the sky—instead, all at once within just a brief moment, he sees a world that is empty, infinite and dead; all that is a living part of the world is alone, helpless, full of sadness, suffering and despair. Everything is temporary, everything is subject to decay and extinction. This also demonstrates the relationship between people and God. While the first vision of the world comes to Izydor naturally, in connection with the intensity with which he is capable of viewing the world, the second vision offers him a previously unsuspected perspective which undermines his certainty in his previous knowledge, inverting it to create its opposite (an example of inverted counterpoint).

Space: Time

Within the space of Primeval, the times of the individual characters and things are successively described, in a rapid narrative sequence (the novel is divided into short chapters, whose titles all begin with the word “time”); we follow their birth, maturation and eventual demise in a richly complex counterpoint, witnessing how as the individual lines develop, they enter into relationships with other lines in the counterpoint. We witness conflicts, contrasting perceptions, different perspectives, repetitions, and other relationships. These counterpoints reveal how the characters seek a form of internal order within the given space and during the course of time. Most of them (e.g. the characters of Izydor or Cornspike) do so in unconventional ways.Footnote 6

However, there is also a different relationship between space and time, in which human time becomes permeated with the timeless; there is a permeability between the human world and the after-world. In the latter, space is configured according to entirely different rules, as can be seen in the vision of a drowned man who awakes: “The water was ruffled and cloudy, and heat and fire were beating down on it. What had been above was now below, and what had been below was pushing its way above” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 143). This appears to be a metaphor for the end of the world; everywhere are just the corpses of soldiers, silence and emptiness.

Time functions entirely differently in the mushroom spawn that grows under the forest (and perhaps under the whole village, according to the narrator). It is thus a space with a different order, a different type of coexistence among organisms, a different perception of time: “Ruta heard the spawn’s heartbeat, which happens once every eighty human years” (ibid., p. 159). It is clear that time moves slower here. All the organisms form a unified entity, whose rhythm is defined by a single heartbeat. This world is mysterious and unknowable, yet on the other hand also natural and self-evident. Here too, we can see Tokarczuk’s polyphonic vision of the multiplicity of worlds, each of which is built “on different principles from ours, and thus they are neither better nor worse”; the notion that our order is the only one that exists, “because we have become used to it,” is merely an illusion (Tokarczuk, 2022, pp. 79–80).

Time

The introductory motto makes it clear that time flows differently for each thing and each character in the novel: there are as many times and histories as there are individuals in the world. This lies at the heart of the fundamentally polyphonic nature of time, which is also reflected in the titles of the novel’s individual chapters—each of which begins with the word “time.”

It appears that time appears in its real form in the novel, when it comes from a space outside Primeval. This time mainly involves historical milestones, whose consequences impinge and impact upon the space of the village: “Michał came back in the summer of 1919. It was a miracle, because in a world where war has pushed every kind of law beyond its limits, miracles often occur.” After crossing the boundary, this character finds himself in something that “is blurred and fluid as a dream,” a space in which he forgets the past he has experienced (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 40). It appears that this mythical time, the cycle of birth and death, is more important for understanding the theme, as it gravitates towards the natural order of existence.

We also encounter the notion of time as an imprisoner of people. The narrator presents this notion in the chapter “The Time of Dolly,” by comparing how time is perceived by animals and by humans. Here there is a counterpoint which contrasts the perception of time as the pure present (the dog Misia, known as Dolly) and the perception of time as the past, present and future, including all the constant changes that make time ephemeral (Misia). This means that time does not exist outside people; it is people who imbue time with their own associations (emotions and thoughts). When a person suffers, it is because their past has been transferred into the present, and when a person thinks, they need to understand the purpose of what they do, because they are prisoners of time. They experience a kind of “private, inner time stream” (ibid., p. 216). Animals need no such purpose; they perceive the world through their senses—smell, touch, taste, hearing. Along with the narrator, in a small part of the text we are witnesses to a disputation which presents convincing arguments for both sides, using suggestive metaphorical language: “For animals, God is a painter. He spreads the world before them in the form of panoramic views. The extent of the crude pictures lies in smells, touches, flavours, and sounds, which contain no meaning” (ibid., p. 211).

The time of nature is not dependent on humans; this type of time is described by the narrator in the chapter “The Time of the Orchard.” Here too, Tokarczuk works with counterpoint. The time of the apple tree is contraposed to the time of the pear tree, but both times are intertwined and regularly alternate without losing their own characteristic features. Both times are described using lyrical language, as natural processes in which nothing stands in isolation and everything is mutually interwoven as well as being interconnected with human actions.

In the subsequent chapter, entitled “The Time of the Lime Trees,” Tokarczuk presents a variation on the preceding chapter, enriching the theme of the life of trees (or all plants) in the context of time. The basic premise of the characterization of lime trees is an oxymoron: they “live an eternal dream” (ibid., p. 188). Sleep is an unchanging constant for them; the world is a unified entity (“death is part of birth”), and time does not exist (“cold is part of hot”). Taking this as the starting point, the narrator unfolds a chain of thoughts, creating counterpoints to the previous topics, i.e. space and time (“the trees are trapped in space, but not in time”), the notion of sleep in animals (“feelings do not grow in it, as they do in animals”) and in people (“nor do images appear in it, as they do in people’s dreams”). Other mirroring counterpoints are created when a tree looks at a person and vice versa. The text arrives at a philosophical point which suggests a different perspective on the time of humans and of trees: “When a tree dies, its dream that has no meaning or impression is taken over by another tree. That is why trees never die. In ignorance of their own existence, they are liberated from time and death” (ibid., p. 189).

Finally, we see what at first sight appears to be a natural connection between time and death (“The Time of the Dead”); this serves as an impulse for thinking about life, whose meaning does not become clear until it is too late—after death. Instead of peace, there is a feeling of futility and having wasted the time that was allocated to our life. After his death, the character Old Boski finds himself in the time of the dead, and he understands that “he had made a mistake, he had died badly, carelessly, that he had made a mistake in dying and that he would have to go through the whole thing again.” (ibid., p. 182).

Time: People

One object which plays a symbolic role in the novel with regard to time is a coffee-grinder. Michał brings it home from the first war; during the war it became a symbol of safety and home for him. His daughter Misia finds it among his things, and is fascinated by it. When the second war breaks out and Russian soldiers are marching past Michał’s house, he has the feeling of being in a dream, in which his emotions from the first war return to him; it is as if he is in a time loop, in which everything has already happened and “time had gone into a spin” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 125).

The coffee-grinder symbolizes stability and permanence; it exists beyond time and motion. In connection with the hands that used it, it symbolizes the continuity of life. It is a witness to events and an expression of humans’ desire to belong to a particular place and time (Jaroń, 2020). Its symbolism holds such potential that it is “a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without this world could not go round or would be completely different” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 45). As such, it could be considered the fundamental pillar of Primeval.

In the novel’s symbolism, time also has the form of a game; in the chapter “The Time of Squire Popielski,” the squire has received a gift from a rabbi in the form of an instructive game that will help him to answer burning questions: “Where do I come from?,” “Where did I come from, where is my beginning?,” “What can a person actually know?,” “Where are we heading? What is the goal of time?” (ibid., pp. 75–76). Through this character, we approach gnosis—mystical knowledge as realization of the self and an insight into profound truths. Mystical knowledge seeks to answer questions of where we came from, who we are, and where we are going. It is contained in our mystical lived experience (here mediated via the game, whose shape is symbolically that of a circular labyrinth), in our experience of the flow of the world’s time, the past, the present and the future. For Popielski, the game becomes his only reason for living, the only meaning of life. Tokarczuk terms the game “Ignis fatuum, or an instructive game for one player.” In this novel, the Latin phrase ignis fatuum can be read as a metaphor for a person whose life has gone astray, or who is pursuing a false goal. The person’s existence is thus symbolically integrated with the principle of the circular labyrinth of time. The question is whether this labyrinth should be seen as representing a prison from which one cannot escape, or whether it signifies the possibility of choice—though ultimately this possibility may be a mere illusion. By asking questions such as these, the novel comes close to a philosophical disputation—which is natural if we are thinking about a category such as time.

Time: God

Squire Popelski’s symbolic game naturally also evokes the question of God. Here too, there are two basic counterpoints, reminiscent of the discussion of space: on the one hand there is “divine judgement,” and standing opposite this there is “coincidence,” “accident,” “my free choice” (ibid., p. 85). In contrast to the usual biblical description of the creation of the world within a seven-day period, Tokarczuk presents the aim of the game as being to pass through all the circles of the labyrinth and to “break free of the fetters of the Eight Worlds” (ibid., p. 85). Then, in the individual chapters—where this motif appears as a distinctive line comprising the philosophy of time—she successively tells the story of the emergence of the Eight Worlds. This creates a new mythology of time, in which God is not only the creator, but also the object of His own gnosis. He appears as an ungraspable, unstable entity, constantly in motion, manifested via the flow of time. He becomes the basis of the polyphonic orchestration of the world: “From then on He looks at Himself through the eyes of people. He sees thousands of His own faces and tries them on like masks and, like an actor, for a while becomes the mask. Praying to Himself through the mouths of people, He discovers contradiction in Himself, for in the mirror the reflection can be real, and reality can pass into the reflection” (ibid., p. 86).

In the description of the First World, the text returns to the novel’s title; an arrow marked “Primeval” leads to it, surprisingly both for the player of the game (Squire Popielski) and for the reader. The name Primeval thus acquires an additional function within the novel; it is considered the centre of the labyrinth, from which other complicated paths and exits lead us into other worlds. According to M. M. Jaroń, it is “a kind of central point, a Nullpoint, the centre of the universe, an absolute place that will define all possible directions: up and down, forward and backward, east and west, north and south” (2020). The player’s route from this centre via all the worlds is not only metaphorically depicted by the initial journey towards knowledge and the search for answers to already-asked gnostic questions; it also creates a parallel, meta-novelistic counterpoint to the stories in the novel’s fictional world. In a sense, this could serve as a guide to reception, showing how we can understand the concept, style and meaning of this fictional world.

God

Tokarczuk has imbued the fictional world of her novel with a cosmology many of whose attributes evoke the Christian model of God’s creation of the world, yet it is stripped of all dogma, biblical truths and our traditional notions. Here, notions of God form a constantly changing stream which creates His essence, without prejudices or fear of controversy. The relationship between God and people develops as a polyphonic stream of voices with equal status, which often mirror each other. Familiar Bible stories are evoked in a different context in order to position two fundamental standpoints opposite each other: faith and lack of faith, as we seen in the dialogue between Cain and Abel in the war-ravaged world. The irreconcilability of these standpoints is confirmed by Cain’s murder of his brother. In an evocation of the story of Job, God discovers that even when he takes everything away from Job, the latter nevertheless continues to shine with a bright light. God is unnerved by this, and He returns everything to Job, showering gifts on him; as a consequence, Job feels endless fear, and his light is extinguished (“The Time of the Game”).

Many observations of relevance to this theme have already been made above when describing the counterpoints of space and God, and of time and God. All the chapters entitled “The Time of the Game” appear to be devoted to the category of God.Footnote 7 During the course of these chapters, the already-mentioned symbolism of the game Ignis fatuum is developed in a linear manner as a kind of parable of creation: God creates the world per se, and the author creates the fictional world of the novel. This is a distinctive divine biography, an individual mythology of the creation of the world and the transformations of God. As has been noted above, the game is initiated by Squire Popielski’s doubts about the meaning of the world and existence, his desire to know God and an order that defies time. The notion of the world as a labyrinth with Primeval at its centre forces players to pass through all Eight Worlds and then to exit via a complex network of paths. This route is symbolic of a person’s detachment from the surrounding world, finding peace and calm; it is a path towards knowledge, and in a certain sense towards salvation or enlightenment (discovering the meaning of one’s existence).

The stories of the creation of all Eight Worlds are far removed from a paraphrase of the biblical story. Specifically, they refer to several traditional events and connections (God—the word, the creation of animals and people, the unity and division of the world, the flood, the story of Job, the story of the Tower of Babel, and so on), yet in their essence they represent a distinctive mirroring between God and people. God is mirrored in people, and people are mirrored in God: they share the same emotions (loneliness, suffering, sadness, joy, desire), they possess the same creative power, and they follow the same life cycle (from youth to old age)—with the exception that God would like to die, but death does not exist for Him. This original game centred on the creation of the world culminates with two concluding statements: first, that the creation of the world has no meaning, because the world is static and disintegrating, and second, the following fundamental observation: “For He knows that apart from Him there exists an invariable order, joining everything variable into a single pattern. And in this order, which even contains God Himself, everything that seems transient and scattered in time starts to exist simultaneously and eternally, outside time” (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 242).

This culmination of the symbolic game represents one of the key moments in the novel, a moment at which Tokarczuk’s philosophy is manifested in the text.

God: People

This relationship is genuinely polyphonic: the voices of God and people are of equal status, and if we are shown God’s view of humans, we are then immediately presented with people’s view of God—two views which frequently mirror each other. In the very introduction to the novel, both roles are clearly and precisely delineated: “For it is God’s business to create, and people’s business to name” (ibid., p. 10). In the chapter “The Time of God,” a further characterization is offered: God exists outside time, but he is manifested in time and its changes, and he is present in all processes; people themselves are a process, and they are afraid of what is ephemeral, so they have invented an unchanging permanence that they have attributed to God. Paradoxically, they have thus deprived themselves of the ability to understand God (ibid., p. 110).

The relationship between God and people is depicted in the novel via numerous counterpoints, depending on the context, the character, and the specific situation. We can find a traditional view of God characterized by its childlike naivety—Misia loves Jesus as the chubby, curly-haired boy shown in a painting, but she is afraid of God, who is depicted as a bearded man with a staff of thunder (“The Time of Misia”). Izydor wants to join a monastery and isolate himself from the world, so he can understand God and gain answers to the questions that trouble him (“The Time of Izydor”). However, we can also see a somewhat rebellious attitude to God, as when two pregnant heroines discuss why they should bear children during wartime: “God, God… He’s just a good accountant with an eye on the debit as well as the credit column. There has to be a balance. One life is wasted, another is born…” (ibid., p. 15). At another point in the text, Ruta asks: “What sort of a God created a world like this? Either He’s evil Himself, or He allows evil to happen. Or else He’s got it all messed up” (ibid., p. 161). However, this low-key rebelliousness gradually grows into a fundamental question: why God allows evil to happen. Squire Popielski considers this question when looking at the war-ravaged village (in the chapter “The Time of Squire Popielski”). He loses his faith and his hope, driven into pessimism by the all-pervading destruction; he comes to understand that a person’s fate is in the hands of time, and he finds it very difficult to see any more meaning in his life. As usual in the novel, this is immediately followed by a counter-voice, in the form of the personified Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle (in the chapter “The Time of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle”), who embodies good, help, strength and faith—but only for those whose hearts and minds are open, which is not the case of the pessimistic Squire Popielski.

The characters of the saints and God Himself exist on the same level as people; they have the same communicative status, speaking to people, answering them or deliberately remaining silent, yet their sacredness has been removed, and they frequently mirror people. When the local landowner (“The Time of the Parish Priest”) is unable to find enough workers to drain a meadow, God advises him to pay them, but not a lot of money, because the expense would not be worth it. In this, God mirrors the nature and intentions of the person who turns to Him asking for advice. On Holy Saturday, when Florentynka (accompanied by one of her dogs) goes to the church to pray and have her food blessed, she entrusts her dog to the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, whose image is displayed in a painting over an altar. The Virgin Mary fulfils her duty by shouting at the sacristan when he tries to drive the dog out of the church (“The Time of Florentynka”).

People

Each character in the novel appears to belong to a different world their own. When little Misia (“The Time of Misia”) looks at a window through the green stone of her ring, she cannot decide “what sort of world she would prefer to live in: green, ruby, blue, or yellow” (ibid., p. 59). With her naive childlike intuition, Misia perceives the multiplicity of the worlds whose colours change before her. The symbolism of these changing colours can be seen as a reference to the multiple ways in which the world can be seen, viewed from the perspective of a character, the narrator, and also the recipient.

At the same time, the characters also function in the projection of myths (revealing the light and dark sides of existence), while also having to deal with the question of time (being part of history). They are enclosed in the hermetic circle of the local community, enclosed in the space of Primeval—in contrast to the characters from outside (beyond Primeval, e.g. Kurt or Ivan Mukta), who hold up mirrors different to the ones they are used to, thus undermining their existential certainties.

The characters are firmly anchored in their physical existence: “A person is a body. And everything a person experiences has its beginning and end in the body” (ibid., p. 151). They belong to particular generations, they are ground down by time, and they follow the natural cycle of life, depicted as a motion from birth to death: “the open spaces that Izydor had inside him began to roll up, spaces that were neither earthly nor celestial—they fell apart into tiny pieces, caved in on each other and vanished forever” (ibid., p. 241). However, the fictional world of Primeval is also inhabited by characters who defy rational understanding, and whose existence defies probability and the laws of physics, situated between being and non-being, which remove the story from the temporal and spatial order.Footnote 8 Already in the introduction, we encounter the characters of the archangels who guard the boundaries of Primeval, as well as accompanying some of the novel’s other characters (Misia) and appearing at the most important moments of their lives: “her guardian angel was waiting for her, who always appeared at truly important moments” (ibid., p. 235). Another strange character is the Bad Man, who used to be an ordinary boy but who fled into the forest to escape his guilt, gradually forgetting everything unimportant—including his own name. We thus see a character who is alienated from himself, detached from time and its laws, returning to the state of a free “animal.” Tokarczuk goes even further with the character of the Drowned Man (“The Time of Dipper the Drowned Man”). After drowning, his soul remains inside his body: “his intoxicated soul, a soul that hadn’t been absolved, with no map of the road onwards to God, remained like a dog by the body going cold in the bulrushes” (ibid., pp. 77–78); the soul thus remains in an intermediate zone between the material and the spiritual, unable to free itself, and as a consequence it is taken over by anger and evil. We can observe that the chapters devoted to the above-mentioned characters are written in a particularly poetic style, reminiscent of fairy-tale narratives and replete with superstitions and supernatural beings.

The polyphonic structure of the novel is also manifested in the fact that each character (whether a person, an animal, a plant or a thing)Footnote 9 has its own “time”—a fact which is made explicit by the division into chapters whose titles begin with the phrase “The Time of…” (i.e. of whom or what). The individual stories of the protagonists are also interwoven with other stories; characters appear not only in their own stories, but also in the stories of other characters, on the basis of family ties, chance meetings, dreams, and other connections; “they show the internal functioning of the community, the interactions among people, causes and effects, convictions and desires” (Eberhart, 2010).

Although the novel’s characters project various philosophical attitudes (e.g. optimism, nihilism, determination, free will), none of them is privileged to possess a greater truth than any other character. We can see this, for example, in the depiction of female characters in Primeval (Genowefa, Misia, Cornspike, Ruta, Florentynka). These characters embody various counterpoints of archetypes: homemaking and subordination to men vs. emancipation, coexistence with nature vs. the modernity of civilization (the city), alienation from people vs. love of animals. The same is visible in the male characters: Popelski (the game—a desire for understanding), Boski (playing God when looking down from the roof), Niebiesky (work, family), Paweł (crossing boundaries, alienation from oneself, glitter, superficiality), Izydor (an outsider with a specific type of perception, a madman? ).

In these counterpoints, on the one hand we see stereotypes: “It is the woman who should take care of the food—both its preparing and its blessing. God-the-man has more important matters in his head: wars, catastrophes, conquests, and distant journeys…” (Tokarczuk, 2010, pp. 91–92). Yet on the other hand, we also see these stereotypes being transcended (Cornspike’s independence, Ruta’s emancipation).

The stories of the characters are narrated in the form of parables, not as psychological analyses. As such, we can see the novel as a narrative of human history; Tokarczuk has rooted Primeval within a myth which (as the author herself has observed) encompasses the entirety of human experience of life and the world. It can function as a universal story, explaining and justifying the order of the world (Tokarczuk, 2022, pp. 203–204).

Conclusion

The novel Primeval and Other Times is fascinating in its gradual polyphonic development of its individual themes, a process that is constantly enriched by other counterpoints that always offer us a different perspective, a different view—a view that always has equal status to that of the previous view, yet at the same time undermines our certainties. Tokarczuk does not give us the option of resting on a simple, direct truth; she does not allow us to view the world in a black-and-white way, or from only one perspective: in her novel, everything is in life-giving motion, a process which is synonymous with life and which convinces us that we are alive. In Tokarczuk’s writing, the polyphony of the world (people, animals, trees, things, etc.) forms a living entity of which we are a part—without any importance attached to hierarchy (superordination, subordination) or beginnings and ends (the symbolism of the circle): “People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else”Footnote 10 (Tokarczuk, 2010, p. 43).

Polyphonic thinking is crucially important in the novel analyzed here, as well as in other works by Tokarczuk, because it reflects the polyphonic nature of reality,Footnote 11 in which “the self fades away, and we touch upon the general possibilities of human existence” (Kosková, 1998, p. 179). In Primeval and Other Times, the author convincingly (though without doing so consciously) simulates the fundamental principle of a strict fugue: in a highly concentrated manner, she provokes us to think about four key themes, inviting us to doubt traditional truths (about God and the human soul) and to discover further layers of knowledge about oneself and the world.Footnote 12 She has imbued this composition with such original approaches to themes, and she has chosen such important themes, that reading the novel remains a constant challenge of interpretation. The analogy with the musical principle that forms the basis of this analysis helps the recipient “to reconfigure and deepen our understanding of art and its roles” (Prieto, 2002, p. 51). In the narrower sense of the word, the analogy applied in this study provides a sui generis guide to reception, as it allows us to take the original fragments of stories, happenings and situations (compositionally formulated in short chapters) and view them from the perspective of an entity which possesses its own dynamism and laws and which is able to use this perspective to refer to the multi-layered structure of the world, with its multiple meanings (within the world of the novel, it refers to a mutually interwoven network of connections and influences).

Tokarczuk’s ambition is to tell stories “so that we evoke in the reader a picture of a complete entity, activating readers’ ability to join together fragments into a single pattern, to discover entire constellations in minor events” (2022, p. 264). This ambition has consequences for the reception of her works. It means that we have to emulate the author’s way of thinking, not only to be capable of discerning the individual voices (being aware that the complete entity can be dismantled into smaller parts, fragments), but also to be aware of their correspondence or non-correspondence (counterpoint) and their synthesis into the universe of the complete entity. It requires us to be aware that “synthesis is essential to a full and multi-dimensional experience of the world” (ibid., p. 237).

We could take an even broader approach to the issue in connection with Markand Thakar’s observation that elements of counterpoint are to some extent present in all music, that counterpoint is one of the sources of music’s inner vitality, and that by being universally present in all music, counterpoint involves something deeper than merely connections between different voices (2012, p. 341). Can we therefore not draw an analogy and state that this polyphonic aspect is to some extent present in all literature, and indeed in other arts too (the transmedia aspects)? Does it not perhaps teach us the ability to consciously and actively perceive any counterpoint (a composite of two or more simultaneously developing yet still separate “voices”) as a single organic “entity breathing a single content,” and “not as a mere construct, but as a living organism” (ibid., p. 13)? Is there not here a clearly evident connection between the author’s philosophy (rooted in the correlation between fragments and the whole) and the polyphonic perspective on the world? Could the study of counterpoint perhaps serve as a methodological guide to the reception of a particular type of literary work? In my view, the answer to all these questions is yes, and in this text I have attempted to explain why—though naturally the issue will require further study.