Piotr Sobolczyk

In this paper I would like to examine two approaches to Tarot as a postmodern way of constructing, de-constructing and re-constructing female identity in postmodern Polish fiction written by women after 1989. In her debut novel Podróż ludzi księgi (The Travel of the People of the Book, not translated to English) Olga Tokarczuk, a psychologist by profession, and an admirer of the so called "new age" spirituality, coded some of the Tarot Major Arcana archetypes. Her approach is clearly Jungian, and she was an admirer of Carl Gustav Jung's esoteric psychoanalysis. Jung left writings on astrology and I Cing, yet it waere his his students who completed his work by offering an archetypical interpretation of Tarot's 22 Major Arcana. My point is to study this hidden presence of Tarot understood through Jung in the novel, and also to ask what for the writer needs archetypes and esoterism. Eventually her novel constructs a myth (her later works usually tend to myths, only sometimes touching on esoterism). A different approach to Tarot and to writing (female writing) is present in Manuela Gretkowska's novel Tarot paryski (Paris Tarot, not translated to English). Both books were published in 1993. Gretkowska uses her syncretic imagination rather to chop and rearrange myths, creating a certain postmodern bricolage, rather than leading towards a consoling closed mythical structure, which is Tokarczuk's goal, albeit achieved ironically.