Lost landscapes of childhood: An ecostylistic analysis of The Issa Valley

2.1 The Issa Valley: Existential treatise and ecological novel

Despite its English subtitle A Novel, The Issa Valley is a genological conundrum, described by Miłosz himself (Fiut 1981: 33) as an “oddity”, “a masked theological treatise”, but also a partly autobiographical rendition of his early years spent at Szetejnie. The protagonist of the novel, the young Tomasz (Thomas) Dilbin, lives in the village of Ginie (Gine), on the magical Issa River, whose fictive name refers to the real Niewiaża, in the manor house of his maternal grandfather Kazimierz (Casimir) Surkont. The omniscient narrator, who very consistently refers to himself as a “chronicler”, presents the early years and adolescence of Thomas. The story ends around 1921, when Thomas – almost 14 years old – is taken by his mother to Vilnius (or to Poland), to receive formal education. Several metatextual commentaries that make excursions into the future obliterate a distinction between the empirical author, narrator and Thomas, whose voices and thoughts seem to coincide (see also Łoziński 2011). The unhurried narration, similar to the flow of the eponymous Issa, proceeds in an irregular way, often broken by long descriptions and commentaries; its imagistic technique of presenting the plot has been claimed to possess some cinematographic qualities (Horbowicz and Skrzypek 2011; Rybka 2000).^[1]

It soon appears that the second main protagonist of the novel, signaled by its title, is a fragment of the Lithuanian landscape with the Issa in the center. The place seems an idyll or Paradise, as some critics claimed (Bailey 1981, see also Marek Zaleski’s afterword in Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 268), yet, actually, it is a source of several antagonistic sentiments – a landscape as experienced by a growing-up boy, at first emotionally and with time also rationally. We soon realize that we are facing not just a realistically rendered post-glacial terrain of undulating hills, pristine forests, meadows, and farmland; indeed, the description of the Issa signals an unusual ambience of its surroundings:

It’s time to pass from the general landscape to the Valley itself, which in many ways is an anomaly in the Land of Lakes. The Issa is a deep, black river with a lazy current, thickly bordered with reeds; a river whose surface is barely visible in places under the lily pads, which winds through meadows and between gentle slopes noted for their fecundity. […] The Issa Valley has the distinction of being inhabited by an unusually large number of devils. (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 5–6)

Nature around the Issa contains not only human and animal life, but is pregnant with old, mysterious powers; it is nature personified and imbued with the presence of the supernatural, not solely the devils in several varieties, ironically described in Chapter 2. The magic surrounding the Issa has its source in a mixture of pagan beliefs that have wound their way into the folk tradition of native people from the ancient polytheistic pantheons of Lithuanian and Slavic deities, accompanied by demonic forces of various shapes, merged with – for ages – a rather superficial Christianity. The Christian God resides mostly in the village church and even the mound topped by an overgrown cross is a “spooky place” to the eyes of Thomas. We soon learn about the celestial couple, the Moon and his wife the Sun (Lithuanian Saulè), accompanied by Aurora (Lithuanian Aušra, ‘dawn’) and the Evening Star waiting on her (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 5, 202); the invisible witch Laume, changing her shapes at will (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 91); Ragutis, the “corpulent idol of liquor and lusty living”, seemingly a distant relative of Bacchus, or Liethua, a divine guardian of pagan liberty, to whom the words of an old song were addressed: “Little Liethua, precious freedom. Hidden in the sky, where are you?” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 143, referring to Narbutt’s 1805 History of Lithuania; see also Łoziński 2011, quoting Moszyński 1968–1969 [1929–1939] on pagan beliefs in old Lithuania).

Later, following the lore passed to Thomas by Antonina, a Lithuanian housekeeper in the Surkonts’ manor, we become acquainted with the noisy witch Ragana, mounted on a devil assuming the shape of a flying goat, apparently hidden in the whistling of the wind (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 169). Finally, the goddess Varpeia sits in heaven spinning the threads of fate, with stars dangling from them; a falling star accompanies the cutting of the thread of somebody’s existence (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 247).^[2] Not only do the celestial bodies or more abstract concepts become personified as parts of nature, but also earthly creatures, such as water snakes, who are treated as “sacred beings”, never killed from fear of “tempting fate” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 95).^[3]

The area is haunted by other non-human and non-animal powers, like a “column of vapor”, resembling a “white pillar” that chased a manor weaver, Pakenas, in the vicinity of the eerie place called Borek (‘a clump of trees’, preserved in its original spelling by Iribarne), where an old shepherd once choked to death and was buried (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 27). Another odd monstrosity was a log mounted with three Tartar heads, whose body was repulsively soft and which followed the steward Shatybelko to the Surkonts’ manor itself, a reminiscence of the presence of Tartar prisoners of war in the Gine area in the distant past.

A special place in this company of magical and supernatural forces is held by Magdalena, the sexy housekeeper of the parish priest Peiksva, who, after an indecent affair with him, is relocated to another parish, where she commits suicide out of utter despair. Her body, apparently not decomposed, returns to Gine, where Father Peiksva buries it/her near the cemetery grounds, in the non-sacred earth, according to the then-observed rules for dealing with suicidal cases. Yet, Magdalena – as a revenant and Poltergeist in one person – refuses to leave the earth in peace and starts haunting the new, elderly curate, clattering utensils and preparing unworldly meals in the rectory’s kitchen. She thus becomes an unwanted linkage between the living and the dead, getting more and more aggressive in her behavior. She even appears to forester Balthazar in the evening, riding stark naked on a white horse to bathe in the Issa.^[4] The barbaric yet apparently efficient ritual (known also in the Slavic folk tradition), carried out by the elders of Gine at night, which consisted of decapitating the body of Magdalena, not violated by death, and piercing the coffin with an alder spike, puts an end to her annoying extravagances on the borderline of earthly and otherworldly existence. Since that time, Magdalena would return to Thomas only in dreams, lamenting over her lost carnality decomposing inside the grave, the motif which inscribes itself into one of the leading themes of the novel – the inescapability of ultimate demise.

The Issa Valley emerges as a work that pays homage to the half-real and half-mythical land of child memories seen from the perspective of an adult, a mixture of down-to-earth non-fictional prose and magical realism that poses very fundamental questions about the presence of the forces of good and evil in a world where living creatures constantly face death: “Whatever has been cannot endure; it fades, flickers, scatters” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 184). For this reason, I treat the novel as a masterpiece of what I call existential ecology, in which nature – mythologized and sacralized in a visibly pagan way – is a constant witness to the seasonal circle of birth and death: “Autumnal smells, the origin of which, the blendings of which lay beyond his or any other man’s power to describe: the rot of leaves and needles; the dank effluvium of fungi and white filaments embedded in black, beneath the slime of decaying, peeling debris” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 139).

2.2 The Issa Valley: Landscapes lost and regained?

As mentioned in the introductory Section 1, Miłosz’s voice remained lost to the Polish readership between 1955 and 1980, until the time when the Nobel Prize turned him into a “voice regained”. The Issa Valley, likewise, became a voice regained to the worldwide readership, including Lithuanian readers (since 1991). In her study devoted to Lithuanian literature and aimed at Western audiences, Paulauskiene (2007) talks about Lithuanian voices lost to the general readership and brings forgotten works by Lithuanian authors to the attention of her American (and Anglophone) receivers. She also quotes Miłosz, reminiscing on how exotic his personal ties with Lithuania appeared to Western audiences and how discouraged he felt in talking about his Polish-Lithuanian background to Americans: “How many times I had remained silent because, having come from those foggy expanses that books, even textbooks rarely provide information about […] I would have had to start from scratch” (Miłosz 1968: 2, quoted in Paulauskiene 2007: 7).

Lithuania as a native countryside was lost to Miłosz for several decades, and his return to the country of his youth after 52 years of absence was a sentimental but also an equivocal encounter with the landscapes and places either partly preserved or utterly destroyed. The disappearance of the Miłosz family’s manor, pulled down in 1969, during the Soviet rule in Lithuania, brought to life the poem “The Manor” (Miłosz 2008: 405; see also Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 2012: 228), a resigned lamentation over the home and garden of his youth erased forever from the face of the earth.

The arcadian memories of nature seen and emotionally experienced in our childhood may never return to us in our adult life in their original shape for a variety of reasons, political and social changes being only one of the factors responsible for this loss. And yet, “Such scenes remain fixed forever in one’s memory” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 174), a precious receptacle for holding and sharing with others the natural imagery once dear to our hearts. Recollections in literature may also prove to be a life-saving strategy, allowing nature, pristine and unspoiled, to stay alive within language after its disappearance from reality. Ecological literature thus plays a role similar to other efforts to preserve natural areas and safeguard them against the often soulless decisions of passing regimes and mindless fashions. “Let there be wooded lands where animals could run wild”, was one of Thomas’s dreams about the closed Kingdom of Forest he wanted to establish in the future. Fortunately, such dreams resurge nowadays in the ecological programs of “rewilding” Europe, introduced in several European countries.

4.1 Context

The natural setting of the Issa Valley stages a variety of human activities for the simple reason that the biosphere can never be separated from the semiosphere – the area where language and ideology belong. Consequently, a brief contextual setting, a sketch of a wider frame of reference, is needed to help the reader understand rather entangled historical, religious and social undertones of the narration. The plot of the novel is situated on the territory that historically belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, formed in 1240 and since 1385 united into one political organism with the Kingdom of Poland. This union was strengthened twice, in 1413 and 1569, into what was ultimately dubbed the Republic of Two Nations, extending over a huge territory inclusive of the contemporary states of Belarus and Ukraine. Over the ages, several Polish noble families migrated to the Lithuanian territory, partly on the invitation of the princely Radziwiłł family, and settled there for centuries. Even if, with time, their way of life deteriorated and made them fall into the class of yeomanry, often hardly distinguishable from native Lithuanian peasants, their feeling of Polishness remained very strong, likewise their social affiliation with the landed gentry. Some of the Lithuanian noble families underwent Polonization, as did several townspeople and Catholic priests. The Republic of the Two Nations ended its life in 1795, when the Lithuanian territory and a part of the Polish Crown fell into the hands of Tsarist Russia.

The historical setting of the novel includes the period of World War I and its termination, with the Republic of Lithuania being declared an independent state in 1918. In 1920, in the wake of the success of the Polish army in the Polish-Bolshevik War, Poles took over Vilnius and its environs and held them until 1939; that disputed military-political act resulted in the breaking of diplomatic connections between Lithuania and Poland. A meandering motif of an age-long and sociologically unsurprising animosity between the Polish lords (Polish pan, ‘master’, ‘lord’) and the native peasantry forms the background of the relationship between the Surkont and the Bukowski families, both sturdy in their Polishness, and the local peasantry. Paradoxically, Thomas Dilbin is instructed in Polish by a local teacher, a Lithuanian nationalist, Joseph the Black, full of hatred towards the Slavs (Poles and Russians alike) (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 81). It has to be remembered, however, that the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were ethnically quite complex – Casimir Surkont had German ancestors, as did Grandmother Dilbin (born Ritter); several villages and towns had also their Jewish communities. The narrator emphasizes that Thomas was largely ignorant of those national antagonisms, and compares his situation to that of a young Englishman brought up in Ireland or a Swedish boy raised in Finland (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 32). Even in his adult life, Thomas felt a “distrust whenever heated reference was made in his presence to any flags or emblems” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 33). Miłosz himself possessed a double identification, clearly Polish as far as the language of his literary creation was concerned, but with a high dose of affinity with Lithuania, the stance that engendered several controversies among his critics, continuing after the author’s death. Like Socrates, who preferred to be “a citizen of Cosmos” rather than of Athens, Miłosz thought of himself as “the last citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”,^[6] in which context it comes as no surprise that he was granted an Honorary Citizenship of Lithuania in 1992.

4.2 Lexicon

Against this historical, social, and linguistic background, Lithuanian Polish, spoken both by the gentry of Polish descent and by Polonized Lithuanians, had two variants: (a) The “high” variety, used by the upper and middle classes, that is, nobles and educated town dwellers, was the general Polish with several regional elements typical of north-eastern Frontiers (Polish Kresy); (b) The “middle” variant was spoken by the yeomanry and was closer to the language of local peasants, with Lithuanian borrowings.

Lithuanized Polish in variants (a) and (b), despite its strong regional flavor, has been classified as an independent linguistic system, a gentry sociolect rather than a dialect. Apart from regionalisms, it contained dialecticisms common to other areas of ethnic Poland, archaisms, and neologisms (Sawaniewska-Mochowa 1985; Sawaniewska-Mochowa and Zielińska 2007).^[7] In turn, peasants used the “low’ variety, which was a specific mixture of Lithuanian with strong Polish and noticeable Belorussian influences. In The Issa Valley, Lithuanian was the mother-tongue, while Polish an acquired language for the bilingual children of Akulonis, Józiuk, and Onutè, who played with the young Thomas, as well as for bilingual servants on the Polish manors.

A regional and dialectal stylization present in conversations and folk songs forms an inalienable attribute of the atmosphere created in Dolina Issy. The translator had to cope with it either by standardizing regional expressions (ajer is rendered as “sweet flag” or “calamus”) or explicitation (skierdź as “old shepherd”; bitnik from Lithuanian Bite “bee” as “bee-keeper”). Some Polish words are kept in the original (pan “master”, “lord”; baba – an augmentative for a “country woman”). Few Lithuanian expressions appear as well, with explanation added: shutas, a vulgar Lithuanian epithet, and the exclamation of boys jumping into water Ei virai! (“Forward, men!”). Male Christian names have been translated into English whenever their equivalents exist (Polish Tomasz “Thomas”, Kazimierz “Casimir”, Dyonizy [archaic Polish] “Denis”), while female names are kept in the original Polish spelling (Misia, Antonina, Bronisława, Barbarka), and so are the names of Romuald Bukowski’s hunting dogs (Zagray, Dunay, Lutnia, Karo, with the first two marked by a slight phonetic-orthographic adaptation to English).

A regional flavor is carried by the diminutive suffix -uk, borrowed from Belorussian and Ukrainian, used as a term of endearment placed on Christian names like Józiuk (“young Joseph”), which the translator keeps in the original (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 20). However, the same suffix employed on psiuk (from “dog”) or kudłuk (from “curly”), functioning as terms of endearment for hunting dogs, was replaced with “hound”. The same -uk suffix was also used in the sense of “the son of”, thus Thomas is called Dilbiniuk by the Lithuanian villagers, which becomes “the Dilbin kid” in translation (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 82).

Another salient regional quality was a high amount of exclamations, often reduplicated, where the translation strategies differ: Oje, oje, a lamentation of Grandmother Dilbin, is dropped altogether; Ojejejej!, uttered by Luczek Juchniewicz, becomes “Oh, oh, oh!”; a common religious exclamation, Jezus Maria!, is either dropped or substituted with “Holy Jesus!”; and the onomatopoeic rendition of hounds barking in the forest, Ach, ach, becomes “Arf, arf”.

The only linguistic feature that has disappeared from the translation altogether is the so-called akanie, typical of Lithuanian Polish, which results in the leveling of inflectional suffixes into -a: -ę>-e>-a. The -a suffix is employed on verbs; for instance, Prosza, prosza zakąsywać, instead of standard Polish Proszę, proszę zakąsywać, is standardized into “Please – help yourselves” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 36), an unavoidable translation technique for non- or weakly inflected languages.^[8]

From the angle of our ecostylistic analysis, however, of greatest import seems to be the specialized vocabulary used by Miłosz to recreate the abundance of all forms of life in the Issa Valley. Miłosz is very particular about being truthful to reality in his description of the Issa habitat. He emphatically stresses the absence of beech trees and even criticizes Adam Mickiewicz for some inadequacies in presenting Lithuanian nature in the famous Polish national epic poem Pan Tadeusz (for instance, not greyhounds but hounds were kept there for hunting) (Fiut 1981: 121). Let us divide this specialized vocabulary into categories and mention the most important terms, referring to plants, birds, and animals of that part of Lithuania as thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century:

1. trees: alder, birch, blackthorn, bird cherries, hazel, hornbeam, linden, maple, oak, pine, spruce;

2. crops: buckwheat, clover, flax, hops, oats, potatoes, rye;

3. fruit: apples, pears;

4. garden flowers and plants: asters, gillyflowers, cowslips (“keys of St. Peter”), dahlias, lilacs, mallows, night-scented stocks, peonies, reseda, rue;

5. wild plants: daphne, globe flowers, morning glory, mulleins, orchids, plantain;

6. domestic animals: dog, hound, pointer;

7. domestic fowl: duck, goose, hen;

8. wild animals: bear, buck, ermine, fox, hare, marten, roe, squirrel, wild pig, wolf;

9. waterfowl: grebe, mallard, garganey, snipe, wild duck;

10. birds: black cock, black grouse, bullfinch, cuckoo, goatsucker, goshawk, hazel grouse, hoopoe, jay, kinglet, oriole, eagle owl, ptarmigan, sparrow, starling, stork, swallow, thrush, wild pigeon, woodgrouse, woodpecker (dappled and black);

11. reptiles and amphibians: adder, black snake, frog, water snake;

12. insects: bee, beetle, hornet, spider, wasp.

As can be inferred from this list, of all these groups the young Thomas’s greatest fascination goes to birds – he even produces his own Book of Birds with detailed ornithological descriptions (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 150). This highly specialized eco-lexicon is one of the outstanding features of Miłosz’s prose; it also requires some kind of specialized knowledge of the biosphere on the reader’s part.

4.3 Syntax

The novel is an instance of poetic prose, well cadenced as Miłosz was concerned about the rhythmicity of his text. The most striking stylistic features are as follows:

1. non-canonical word order – several sentences are marked with fronting (topicalization), e.g. “Of the customs and cares of those who stir in realms above us, we know very little” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 202);

2. elliptical constructions that may call to mind theatrical or cinematographic didascalies (Horbowicz and Skrzypek 2011: 295, quoting Rybka 2000), e.g. “No luck” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 36, about Balthazar’s spiritual torments); “Tall for his age” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 99, about Thomas’s appearance);

3. sequences of nominal constructions, often asyndetic: “A blue dress, a bronzed face, surrounded by a disk of real gold” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 43, a description of Virgin Mary in a holy picture); “A flock of ducks: a floating city, a concentration of blotches wrapped in mist” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 197), which – additionally – plays on a double nominal metaphorization;

4. frequent questions, either (i) rhetorical (erotesis) or (ii) cases of aitiology, when the answer is provided: (i) “And why were bears thought to be so nice and gentle? Was it because they were so hairy?” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 104); (ii) “Was it God who had decreed that its life should be spared? If it was God’s decision, then He must have whispered to Thomas not to shoot” (of the wild duck Thomas decided not to kill) (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 200);

5. archaic or regional constructions, used by the protagonists in conversations in the Polish original, are either stylized (“She’s picked it up, but it’s a weak ‘un, she’s gonter have to work at it”, about the bloodhound Lutnia finding the weak smell of a hare: Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 139) or, more frequently, replaced with a standard English syntax.

The above-mentioned syntactic devices yield a complex stylistic effect of peculiar instrumentation combined with an archaic and regional aura, at times presenting actions and imagery in a filmic or theatrical fashion.

5.1 Analytical methodology

The methodological paradigm I assume in this section is the one I elaborated in detail in my monograph (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 2013b), and which is a slightly eclectic approach to figuration. It is cognitive at its core, as I believe that nothing can exist in language that has not received a prior conceptual realization in the mind. The starting point for my description of the leading tropes of human language is the “poetic logic” of Neapolitan philosopher of language and historiographer Giambattista Vico, as expounded in his treatise The Second New Science (1984 [1744]). Vico was not only a follower of an earlier stylistic tradition, especially the Renaissance rhetoric of Petrus Ramus, but can be rightly called an early precursor of cognitive poetics. The Vichian tetrad of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony was claimed to reflect not only the main modes of human consciousness needed to “tame” the world, but also a discursive pattern in the development of social consciousness – from metaphoric thinking in terms of similarity of events, to the metonymic dispersal and reduction of the world into fragments, to the reconstructive force of synecdoche as the figure of integration, to the decadent trope of irony – the figure of falsehood substituted for truth, of skepticism and self-criticism. The Vichian paradigm found two outstanding contemporary American continuators – Kenneth Burke (1962 [1945]), who famously renamed these four leading figures master tropes, defining them as styles of thought rather than mere linguistic embellishments. In turn, Hayden White (1987 [1973]), in his ponderings on the nature of historical and literary discourses, defined the basic tropes as “paradigms, provided by language itself, of the operations by which consciousness can prefigure areas of experience that are cognitively problematic in order subsequently to submit them to analysis and explanation”.

What I found of special attraction in this post-Vichian approach to figuration was the escape from the limiting metaphor-metonymy bipolarity advocated by Roman Jakobson, David Lodge, and a number of cognitive linguists following Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Inspired by a wealth of insights into the tropics of human language voiced by leading deconstructionists (James Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man), as well as by the ideas of Jurij Lotman (1977 [1970]) developed within his cultural semiotics, I have decided to extend the list of master tropes into a ten-member set inclusive of: (1) metaphor, (2) metonymy, (3) synecdoche, (4) irony, (5) simile, (6) antithesis, (7) catachresis (generalized semantic abuse, like paradox, oxymoron, etc.), (8) hyperbole, (9) euphemia (generalized understatement), and (10) suppression (passing over, omission, silence). I assume these figures to function not only in the capacity of stylistic universals, whose presence may be expected across natural languages, but also of semiotic universals, that is, figures shaping non-verbal artistic modes of expression, especially the visual arts.

The second methodological assumption I have been developing for years is a recognition of the fact that all figures, and master tropes in particular, possess their own functional domain of operation within a text. Consequently, I postulate a triple (and not dual, like in Werth 1994 and 1999) subdivision of tropes according to the level of their occurrence in text:

1. Microtropes (small figures, overt, conceptual, and verbal), whose scope varies from phrases to clauses and, at most, simple sentences;

2. Macrotropes (big figures, overt, conceptual, and verbal), whose scope is textual, including sequences of sentences, larger stretches of text, and even entire texts (typically poems); macrotropes often form figurative chains that meander through text (see also Semino 2008: Section 1.2.3 on various patterns of metaphors in discourse);

3. Megatropes (large figures, covert, conceptual), whose scope is discursive (holistic interpretation, “higher meanings”); they have to be read off the entire text and require a more mature literary competence to be recognized; they contain a subset of metatropes (reflexive figures that talk about themselves or comment on other figures). The megatropical level of interpretation may enjoy independence from the tropological structure of the two lower levels.

To briefly illustrate how this tropological paradigm can be applied in practice, let us turn to William Wordsworth’s famed poem, known by its incipit “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” (1798–1799), a part of the collection Lucy Poems:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthy years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

(Wordsworth 2004 [1798–1799]: 332)

Superficially of a very limited scope, this two-stanza poem is very rich from a figurative perspective. We begin our search for microtropes in the first verse. “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” contains two separate micro-metaphors that together build a compound metaphor: a personification of slumber and the concurrent reification of a spirit. “She seemed a thing” is a micro-simile verging on a reifying metaphor. In turn, the subordinate clause “that could not feel/The touch of earthy years” contains a personification of “earthy years” capable of touching the girl. The nominal phrase “earthy years” instantiates periphrasis that refers to the span of human life spent in this world. And so within the first stanza, we come across very typical micro-figures: metaphor, simile, and periphrasis.

The second stanza is a description of the dead Lucy, already interred, whose corpse undergoes the revolution of the Earth as a planet. At the micro-level, we can notice that the poem becomes quite literal, the only personification being the description of the dead body of the girl as “she”. The nominal phrase “earth’s diurnal course” is another periphrasis denoting “the daily revolution of the Earth around the Sun”. However, considering the subject of this stanza, we quickly realize that it is a description of the girl’s fate after her death. Consequently, the entire second stanza can be recognized as an extended metaphor, a macro-metaphor of death, although the lexeme “death” does not appear in the poem.

We enter now the third level of interpretation, the holistic megatropical level of covert meanings. At this level, the whole poem can be assumed to be a mega-antithesis: alive versus dead, with the first stanza devoted to Lucy in her lifetime and the second reflecting on her state after death. Noticeable is the fact that nowhere on the overt level of troping do we meet pairs of opposites and that antithesis reveals itself to us only upon reflection, imparting the structure to the entire text. Hillis Miller (1986) suggested the following pairs of antinomies that can be deciphered from the text at this stage of interpretation: alive/dead or life/death (the pivotal distinction), waking state/slumber, masculinity/femininity, past/present, ignorance/knowledge.

Hartman (1985) discovered the presence of yet another megatrope in Wordsworth’s lyric: mega-euphemy (mega-understatement). Indeed, the description of the departed girl demonstrates an emotional distance of the lyrical ego – a very reserved attitude towards what has happened to him, peaceful sadness and resignation, patient endurance of the fate without any stronger empathy with the dead girl. The feelings of the poetic persona themselves are slumber-like – slowed down, with no signs of despair.

With this tropological paradigm at hand, explicated in relation to the Wordsworthian lyric chosen for the reason that will become clearer further on, we can now turn to a brief overview of the figurative tactics deployed by Miłosz throughout the novel to create the landscape of his youth. Worth emphasizing is a very intense corporeality, intermingled with figurative language, of all the descriptions of the Issa Valley offered to us, as seen through the eyes of both Thomas and the omniscient chronicler. Miłosz (2008 [1996]: 221) called it “the opening of the five senses” in the poem “An Hour”, thus proving an obvious advantage enjoyed by a verbal picturing over a visual representation – the language in its endeavor towards multimodality can refer to visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and gustatory perception of the world, which modern neurobiological studies have extended to cover additionally the feeling of temperature, the feeling of space and kinesthetic abilities.

5.2 Microtropes

Moving from the theoretical and analytical background outlined in Section 5.1, this and the following Sections 5.3 and 5.4 scrutinize carefully selected examples from Miłosz’s novel and relate them to an ecological reading of the book. At the level of microtropes, unsurprisingly, similes and metaphors are found to dominate, as is often the case in the literature for children or trying to recreate the child’s perception of the world (see Hughes 2008 [2005]). Some instances of metonymy and synecdoche occur, as does irony, which – however – appears only in commentaries uttered by the narratorial voice. From the extended Vichian set, antithesis crops up in several places, while hyperbole is relatively infrequent. Let us quote some instances of this low-level overt figuration:

5.3 Macrotroping

Macrofigures operate across longer passages and can even structure entire chapters. In Chrzanowska-Kluczewska (2013a), I discussed at some length macrosynecdoches present in Miłosz’s poems; unsurprisingly, they appear in his prose as well.

Macrosynecdoche/macrometonymy (a metonymic-synecdochic chain)

1. “To name a bird, to case it in letters, was tantamount to owning it forever. The endless multiplicity of colors, shadings, mating calls, trills, wing sounds […] The way the light modulated their feathers in flight, the warm, yellow flesh lining the bills of the young feeding in deeply sequestered nests” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 151, italics mine)

2. The whole paragraph is structured by the chain of the body-part synecdoches that summarize the essence of birds’ beauty and mysteriousness;

3. A longer chain appears in the description of the eagle owl, called Squeaky, that Thomas kept as a pet and looked upon with great affection: “A soundless flight, a rush of air […] a real owl hoot […] The softness of his feathers, the russet-gold eyes, the way he nodded, like a farsighted person” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 104, italics mine)

4. This figurative macrostructure organizes two consecutive paragraphs, picturing the bird through its salient body parts but also through the noise he made, with the “rush of air” standing metonymically for his flight. The image of the bird of prey combines the visual, acoustic, and tactile elements that call to mind the way Miłosz describes a magpie in the poem “Magpiety” (Miłosz 2008 [1996]: 128) or a bird of prey (hawk) in the “Ode to a Bird” (Miłosz 2008 [1996]: 134; see also Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 2013a: 242), all testimonies to his lifelong fascination with “birdiness”.

Macroirony , as mentioned before, appears conspicuously in the imagery related to all kinds of devils that inhabit the Issa Valley and pester their inhabitants (see the entire Chapter 2). Similarly, irony forms the backbone of Chapter 11, in which Balthazar, a tragic figure of a forester haunted by the memory of a pointless crime he committed in the past, converses with his personal devil, appearing in the late eighteenth-century guise of Herr Doktor, the “Little German”, with “a goatee, a flickering glance, the meekly folded hands of a city dweller” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 37). Irony helps the narrator/chronicler to maintain his distance from folk superstitions that mingle the Christian belief in the personified evil in the shape of fallen angels with pagan echoes of demonic powers that stay close to human beings, especially at the time of trauma or when death is approaching.^[10]

5.4 Mega-antithesis

Not without reason did Miłosz define his novel as a Manichean treatise (Fiut 1981: 33), for at the highest level of interpretation the book comes as a pondering on two major antipodal conceptual pairs: good versus evil, life versus death. These two overarching antinomies include also several other opposites. “We are given to live on the border of the human and the bestial, and it is good so” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 284).^[11]

To the young Thomas, the mystery of ever-present death in Nature comes as the more important of the two structuring opposites: “God: why had He created a world where there was only death and death and death” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 247). This dramatic tricolon is the child’s cry in the face of the imminence of passing away, not only among his family members (Grandmother Dilbin) but, even more prominently, in the seasonal course of nature and in the human intrusion into it. A beautiful antithetical prayer over a dying person does not bring much consolation to Thomas: “It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 205). The presence of the pervasive antithesis life versus death as a structuring megatrope makes The Issa Valley comparable to the Wordsworthian meditation on a similar subject in the lyric “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” discussed in Section 5.1 above, albeit the childish sensitivity of Thomas is much more emotional than that of Wordsworth’s poetic persona, a mature man apparently better prepared to cope with the death of the beloved person through resignation. Fiut, a Polish literary critic and a distinguished expert on Miłosz’s life and work, points to a more philosophical aspect of the life versus death antagonism. He claims that Miłosz was intrigued by the status of human beings as “biological creatures that on the one hand belonged to nature, and on the other, paradoxically, were no longer a part of it, owing to their awareness of death” (Fiut and Kaźmierczyk 2021: 3, translation mine).

One of Thomas’s early metaphysical worries remains his involvement in hunting, a traditional pastime of the gentry that, together with fishing, was also a regular occupation of the native inhabitants of the land. Thomas’s attitude towards hunting presents a cognitive dissonance, an internal conflict shown as a fluctuation between the thrill of being a part of the hunting company, ravishment with nature, and a desire to become its master, all the way down to repeated disillusionment while examining a shot bird or animal: “But as he picked it up by the feet, as the wings unfurled and a drop of blood beaded the jay’s beak, he experienced a letdown he was not eager to acknowledge” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 134). Thomas offers antipodal arguments in favor or against hunting: “But one had to be manly, to stifle any squeamishness, if one was to earn the title of hunter and naturalist” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 134). This is contrasted with his rapture at the beauty of an ermine and a decision to spare its life: “[…] no, it was better to feast one’s eyes and let it go at that” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 24). On the one hand he experiences “some magical bond between himself and the animal hunted” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 238), on the other he has to cope with the utter cruelty of the hunt. The climactic moment comes with the senseless killing of a young squirrel by Thomas himself and his participation in its heart-rending agony, which brings a feeling of guilt and an acute remorse: “A being, unique, never to be repeated, never to be resurrected” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 243). This incident stands as the last among Thomas’s hunting “feats”, making him realize that at the moment of killing an animal “the entire landscape would be altered” (Miłosz 2011 [1955]: 89).^[12]

The entire texture of the novel should be taken as an antagonistic, antithetical rendition of the Issa Valley, the place torn between the manorial and rural reality, between the real world and magic powers. Christianity confronts several pagan reminiscences of the old Lithuanian and Slavic beliefs, the Polish gentry is confronted with the Lithuanian population that regains its nationhood. The description of the Issa Valley, represented as the heroine of a basically ecological story, makes us realize that every landscape contains the human element within its confines and that the separation of the natural habitat from its inhabitants, with all their historical, social, cultural and ideological problems, is hardly possible.

5.5 Summary

In The Tropics of Discourse, White (1985 [1978]: 2) offers the following summary of his ideas, which is the best way to finish our – of necessity – brief sketch of the figurative potential of The Issa Valley: “And troping is the soul of discourse, therefore, the mechanism without which discourse cannot do its work or achieve its end”. Indeed, Miłosz’s novel should be looked upon not only as a simultaneously autobiographical, philosophical, historical, and ethnographic venture, but also as a text in honor of nature, which is presented as neither friendly nor hostile towards people, just a powerful presence within which human histories are deployed (but see Section 6).

The story is exquisitely construed as far as its tropological schema goes. In the triple functional model of figuration I have assumed, the lower overt levels of troping – whether isolated microtropes or their chains and sequences in the form of macrotropes – play a major role in building the overall cohesion of the text. In fact, one of my concluding remarks on the role of macrosynecdoche as a structuring device in several of Miłosz’s poems can be repeated here as well (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 2013a), namely, the gamut of figures discussed above at the level of micro- and macrotroping should be treated as a cohesive instrument per se, in addition to a classic list of such devices postulated in text and discourse studies. The situation differs at the highest level of figuration, which is latent and has to be read off the entire text, like the mega-antithesis discussed above. It is a conceptual enterprise and a coherence-building mechanism, either related to or quite autonomous from the tropological mechanisms operative at the lower levels. In Miłosz’s novel, it happens to be the former case – antithesis appears at the overt levels in several places but is not as salient as the organizing existential opposition of life facing death or good facing evil that becomes prominent at the mega-level of interpretation.