Chapter Seven Origin of the Source Texts and Methods of Their Interpretation Texts that we are about to analyze have been collected in the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia (Teschen Silesia, Těšín Silesia) called Zaolzie (former Český Těšín District)� Cieszyn Silesia is a historical area of the former Duchy that bordered Lesser Poland in the East, Slovakia in the South, Moravia in the West and Upper Silesia in the North, and was split by the Polish-Czech border since 1920� I have omitted the historical outline of the area first, because there already exists a rich body of literature on the subject and second, because the political history of the area has no direct connection to the displays of magic in the popular narrative found there� The best proof for that could be the fact that there are no – as far as the researched phenomenon is concerned – significant differences between its Polish and Czech part (Kajfosz 2001: 137–144) and a lot points to a conclu- sion that there are no significant differences between the Cieszyn Silesia and its neighboring areas� If we were to consider proposal of historical anthropology (Dülmen 2002), which looks at everything that is omitted or unappreciated in classical works about the past, we would have to conclude that the area we are looking at is rather interesting not only due to the history of the identity of its inhabitants or the history of its shifting territorial allegiances, but also because of its popular imagination and its everyday realities as such� Cieszyn Silesia saw the publication of a valuable research on its culture entitled Uwarunkowania cieszyńskiej kultury ludowej [Cieszyn’s Folk Culture] (Kadłubiec 1987), which discusses everyday lives of its ordinary inhabitants in different historical periods� The choice of Cieszyn Silesia as a research subject area was not guided by the fact that its folk culture has been dominated by magic more than in other places� Moreover, due to histor- ical circumstances surrounding that culture, we could accept quite the opposite assumption� The choice of the research area was guided solely by the abundance of materials collected there, with a significant number of folklore texts valuable for theoreticians of language and culture who examine magic� The richness of the materials collected is an achievement of the Folklore Section of the Polish Cultural and Educational Society that operated from 1965 to 1995 in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic since 1993)� The object of analyses presented later on in this chapter are narratives collected by Józef Ondrusz and Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 03:26:32AM via free access 152 Origin of the Source Texts and Methods of Their Interpretation Karol Daniel Kadłubiec between the 1950s and the 1980s� A vast majority of the presented texts was published by the General Board of the above- mentioned association (ZG PZKO) in the magazine Zwrot, in the column entitled “Living texts;” some of them appeared in Głos Ludu [Voice of the People] (published by the Congress of Poles in the Czech Republic) and others in different collections of stories� One of such collections, Śląskie opowieści ludowe [Silesian Folk Stories] by J� Ondrusz (1963), is particularly interesting from the perspective of the traces of magic� All texts, from among which only a representative part could have been reprinted and reinterpreted in this book, are written in Cieszyn and Jabłonków (Jablunkov) dialect� Presented interpretations constitute an attempt of recreating the cultural “grammar,” according to which the worlds presented within those narratives are built� The focus was to recreate the “morphology” of texts, however not in the form of systematization of its themes (A� Aarne, S� Thompson), nor in the form of functions fulfilled by particular characters (W� Propp)� The laws of magic became the focus of the search for the internal form of those texts� Based on the analysis of the folklore texts from Cieszyn Silesia, I will try to show that magic is something more than an action and objectified worldview� It is primarily a system of constructing the image of the world that, even within contemporary culture, can uphold its hegemony over some realms of the socially constructed meaning� The ambition of this work is to present magic as a particular, cognitive paradigm that, at least in some specific circumstances, governs the categoriza- tion or ordering of the world based on its spatial and temporal delimitations and defining the mutual relationships between its highlighted fragments� As it has been already mentioned, the best source of knowledge about the cul- ture of a particular place and particular epoch are the folklore texts functioning within its boundaries� The compositional norms emerging in folklore or the rules for building the represented world are relatively common and repetitive within the community of its carriers� The structure of a text of folklore has a universal, cultural character (as is the case of a folklore text created by representatives of one generation who form a communication community)� If a particular text at a particular stage of history, and within a particular environment, can withstand attempts at placing it under preventive censorship, then it follows that the prac- tice of building its represented world is not accidental, but is more or less char- acteristic for the entire community within which it circulates� This is why the image of the world contained within a folklore text has a commonly shared char- acter more often than the image of the world contained in a literary text, which is marked, to a much greater degree, by individual creativity and its accidental qualities� The represented world within a literary text could obviously represent Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 03:26:32AM via free access Origin of the Source Texts and Methods of Their Interpretation 153 the widespread image of the world of a particular group and epoch, however, deriving conclusions in this particular case is harder, because a researcher has to decide in each specific case whether the identified structure of meaning in each text has more individual or collective character� A researcher examining a text of folklore is in a simpler position, because he or she can be certain that whatever is found in the text represents a common image of the world or at least one of its planes – an image which is widespread in a given time, space, and social milieu� By analyzing and interpreting particular narratives, we should be equally inter- ested in what these texts concern and in the “silent” order of meaning within which these texts are created and acquire their sense� The concept of a silent order of meaning could be understood as a discourse which informs these texts, filling them with knowledge� In other words, the author is equally interested in the meanings objec- tified in the text (theparole plane) and in the meanings composing its background, which provides a basis for the objectification (the langue plane)� Therefore, we are interested in the contents of the text and the system of meanings that constitutes a condition of their creation and existence� Repeating after �P Kowalski: “The cat- egories of culture can be grasped not in the direct, explicit formulations, but on the level of ‘obviousness,’ that is knowledge that is not justified and, what is more, it does not undergo procedures of self-reflection from those, who act (perceive the world) according to these categories” (Kowalski 2000a: 11, cf� Ługowska 2002: 304, Sulima 1995: 58)� By defining elements and relics (traces) of magic in the image of the world through the analysis of narrative folklore, we have to focus on what the text is saying and what are its “silent” cognitive assumptions� The notion of fully objectified meaning is a contradiction, because the meaning can never be objectified “completely�” No phenomenon can be fully defined because it is impossible to recreate the entire context of meaning, within which the phenomenon occurs, nor all the contexts in which it has occurred before� Any presence understood as meaning defined within the interpretation is always conditioned by the absence� In other words, all meaning that is present, or recognized during the interpretation process is accompanied by irremovable absence (Frank 1989) in the form of “silent” meanings that precede and presup- pose it� Hence, the condition for the recognized presence of meaning is always the inability to define it exhaustively, since it is co-created by only partially vis- ible context� Therefore, the interpretation understood as semiosis can never be “completed” in a sense that the defined meaning cannot be reduced to the ulti- mate “explanation” (Bense 1980: 8– 13,64 cf� Frank 1989, Kalaga 2001: 74– 77)� 64 Foreword by Hanna Buczyńska- Garewicz� Jan Kajfosz - 9783631840351 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 03:26:32AM via free access 154 Origin of the Source Texts and Methods of Their Interpretation Ludwig Wittgenstein stressed that a man who enters any kind of a linguistic game – and we should assume that also includes a cultural game – is never fully equipped with a secured, theoretical key that would allow him to enter into a new game (understood as a system of natural language) on the basis of unam- biguous, previously presented rules instead of approaching it blindfolded� The conclusions for the very interpretation could be in this case that one cannot learn its proper criteria other than through the