Herbert, Narcissus and the Fly, or the Process of Text Creation as an Exercise in Reinterpretation
Herbert, Narcissus and the Fly, or the Process of Text Creation as an Exercise in Reinterpretation

Summary/Abstract: This article chronicles the travails of Zbigniew Herbert during the process of writing his short prose piece depicting the image of the mythological Narcissus. An analysis of the extant versions of the manuscript serves as a telling illustration of how multivariate the reinterpretation of this myth can be. In the laboratory of his notebook, Herbert experimented with multifarious avenues of such conceptual reimagining. Those of Herbert’s texts about Narcissus which have actually been released in print are only narrowly reflective of the enormous scope of his protean creativity in the deconstruction and transformation of the canonical version of this Greek myth.

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