“People of Knowledge”, or About the Stupidity of Information Overload (on the Basis of “Death in Old Decorations” by Różewicz and “Bouvard and Pécuchet” by Gustav Flaubert)

Abstract

The text is comparative in nature. Its aim is first and foremost to reflect on the phenomenon of excessive knowledge, strongly exposed in both works mentioned in the title, the consequence of which was a peculiarly modern affliction, which the contemporary researcher Matthijs van Boxsel (2004: 256) treated as one of the modern variants of (encyclopaedic) stupidity. This somewhat paradoxical – because it is not due to scarcity, but excess of information – kind of intellectual frailty has its origins in the civilisational and cultural changes characteristic of the nineteenth century, namely the reproduction of cultural goods, the development of the daily press, the rush of life, and thus the rush of reading and the rush of perception (as pointed out by, among others, Paul Valéry [1971: 185–186]), as well as the proliferation of knowledge, which is, in fact, a collection of hastily crafted information-banalities. The article seeks to show both the similarities in terms of the literary creations of the protagonists of the two works (their consciousnesses, attitudes, dilemmas, and aspirations), as well as to characterise the cultural environments in which they function, thereby confirming the thesis of a kind of homogeneity  and  historical continuity of the ‘stupidity  of informational excess’, which – regardless of the time and civilisational realities of the era – has the same causes and the same nature – becoming ‘worthless offer’ for audiences with similar mental predispositions.