Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise

Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz

George Z. Gasyna

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441192981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise examines the triple compact made by displaced authors with language, their host country, and the homeland left behind. It considers the entwined phenomena of expatriation and homelessness, and the artistic responses to these conditions, including reconstructions of identity and the creation of idealized new homelands. Conrad and Gombrowicz, writers who lived with the condition of exile, were in the vanguard of what today has become a thriving intellectual community of transnationals whose calling card is precisely their hybridity and fluency in multiple cultural traditions. Conrad and Gombrowicz's Polish childhoods emerge as cultural touchstones against which they formulated their writing philosophies. Gasyna claims that in both cases negotiating exile involved processes of working through a traumatic past through the construction of narrative personae that served as strategic doubles. Both authors engaged in extensive manipulation of their public image. Above all, Conrad and Gombrowicz's narratives are united by a desire for a linguistic refuge, a proposed home-in-language, and a set of techniques deployed in the representation of their predicament as subjects caught in-between.

Chapter 1

The Condition Known as Exile

The objects with which the literary scholar deals are always given him as mediated ones. And it is with the uncovering of this mediation that literary theory should be concerned.

Peter Bürger

The essential self, a subjective self-consciousness that exists in time and space, precedes the self that can be said to exist in text. This self, inhabiting a certain spatial and temporal matrix, moreover, anticipates and mediates the scriptive figurations of the writing subject. This is not to say that the question of identity must dominate every sphere of endeavor. Rather, identity flavors writing with sets of associations, choices of subject matter, contexts for memories, either filtered or left raw and festering; with formal and stylistic reverberations, with intertextual connections of various kinds; with what one is likely to have read in one’s childhood and youth. What seems to count above all, then, is the ideational space of the community or the nation — and if the nation should today be considered to be an imaginary construct, as some maintain,¹⁹ so much the better, since the impact of the things I am invoking is principally on the imagination, on the deployment and use of symbols and signs of belonging. In the instance of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz my concern is with the effect of this national imaginary on the delineation of their own hybrid and exilic identity, both in their practice of everyday life, and in their narratives.

It is for that reason that Conrad’s and Gombrowicz’s Polishness was not effaced in exile. Instead, their Polish identity emerged both amplified and distorted in the spaces of exile, a process that principally engaged the notion of hybridity, the hybrid self producing a hybrid text, the hybrid text irrupting into culture as an other, as an intervention of alterity. By the term hybridity, in the context of exilic writers, I indicate a condition of cultural in-betweenness that allows for the fabrication of an identity that is more than a sum of the constituent parts of the cultural imaginaries and the linguistic landscapes of the former homeland and the place of expatriation. Hybridity as a state of being is the special province of exilic artists and intellectuals, perhaps more so than other groups of expatriates. It is their province by virtue of the fact that they more than others must wrestle with issues of language by the very nature of their métier: it is after all the instrument of their craft. Often, but not always and not inevitably, the sense of intercultural reciprocity is made into a cornerstone of artistic identity and finds its reflection in the techniques of articulating the scriptive self. The hybrid subject then is “performed” in the public sphere, for an author must necessarily exist as a public person, even if he or she lives the life of a recluse, and even if ensconced within a painfully exclusive linguistic or cultural ghetto. Therefore, without putting too fine a point on it, what exiles most frequently produce are exilic texts, works which may themselves, however, belong to a number of stylistic, generic, or discursive categories. Frequently — but again not always — such works are exilic meta-texts, works broadly “about” the condition and the pressures of expatriation, and which document the construction of a new exilic public self as inextricable from the development of new literary, and sometimes linguistic, selves.²⁰ And then, if these expatriated or exiled authors persist at the business of writing long enough and with sufficient tenacity, what may emerge from the total body of such narratives is an outline of an exilic discourse. By exilic discourse I mean a corpus of texts and supplementary writings such as letters, essays, and interviews that point to one’s acceptance of the essential indeterminacy of life and the protean nature of associations, affiliations, and dreams, and which also offer an individuated set of solutions for overcoming the loneliness, the essential (and thus also existential) deracination, the blinding disorientation, and the sudden shifting of horizons of thought and action wrought by emigration’s ruptures. The exilic and the hybrid, therefore, as condition and strategy respectively, are intimately tied to the limits of the prison house of being which is language itself, and the ways in which perception is systematized in an “elementary structure of signification”²¹ in order both to generate and to “detain” meaning.²² To show the degree to which they are dialogically intertwined — that is, how one depends on the other for self-articulation and the shaping of a worldview — is a chief theoretical objective here.

But there is another issue that needs to be addressed at the outset, for it is a theme that guides my overall approach to the two writers: all culture and experience ultimately involves a dialectic, if for no other reason than simply because it is in the nature of choice itself to be dialectical. Yet the usual view that exile represents a kind of trauma should not obviate the notion of exile as a potential opportunity, as a paradoxically privileged existential condition which allows one to seek out new creative spaces and thus transcend or sidestep the limitations of monological, that is, monolingual and monocultural, discourses. Indeed, it is something of an emigrant creed, though not always articulated with equal insistence from author to author, to beware of dominant ideologies, orthodoxies, and other “common-sense” approaches handed down by impersonal tradition. Likewise, exiles tend to be suspicious of seemingly normative forms of authority and legitimatization masquerading behind unwavering systems of coercion, of the idea of the “norm” itself, and indeed of systems of signification taken for granted as “natural,” “neutral,” “inevitable” or “self-evident.” I would suggest that this is so in large part because, insofar as these notions have often been tools or surrogates of the nation and of patriotic discourses, they belong to the sphere of centripetal obligations. Finally, it is something of an exile’s imperative to approach culture, in Edward Said’s remarkable formulation, “contrapuntally,” the reverberation of the native land echoing in the cultural practices or linguistic forms of the native country or vice versa, yet always asymmetrically and ambivalently — for only one of the two can typically constitute the privileged space; for Said himself, expatriation, and political exile in particular, was painful and terrifying to experience.²³

The notion of (exilic) displacement/deracination in the modern context thus obliquely suggests the conflict between discourses of nationalism and transnationalism/cosmopolitanism. Exiles, after all, are rejects from a nation’s formulation of itself (usually dictated by the top power structure) and are ejected onto terra infirma, frequently forced to begin again, indeed ex nihilo. That first term, nationalism, may be defined as a subject’s affiliation with and faith in the native culture and identification with the sphere of the domestic. The second, transnationalism, reflects affiliation with groups which unlike the nation are united not necessarily by ethnic or religious commonalities so much as a certain shared condition (here, expatriation itself), and the attendant set of new quotidian realities. Those may include such factors as the need to re-invent one’s persona to account for a new bicultural identity in a monocultural (because foreign in nature, in essence, even if institutionally multicultural and socially pluralistic in reality) context of the hosting place, and to decide on one’s linguistic community and choice of readership. We may broadly posit that the first type of response to expatriation is centripetal in nature and encompasses a series of defensive reactions to the loss of a formerly stable sense of self, agency, and setting — “stable” here signifying an identity that over time comes to be accepted as dominant and my own and is validated by collective (national) and — perhaps as important — temporal identification.²⁴ In this model, reactions to the loss of home may range from paralysing nostalgia to the sometimes comforting but frequently stifling self-isolation in ethnic or linguistic enclaves. The second response is centrifugal in nature. Within those same initially unfamiliar, but gradually uncovered and perhaps even assimilated spaces of exile, it seeks to forge dialogic complements to those earlier notions of self and agency that have become invalidated in the new emigrant milieu. In most though not all scenarios of expatriation, the first response, then, represents that force which pulls the writer toward the sphere of his or her native language and the emigrant communities. The second is what pushes him or her out, guided by compulsion as much as curiosity, in the direction of the language and cultural zones of the adoptive land. However, this second orientation is also what launches him or her out of time, as it were, out of synchrony with the former nation’s orbit and toward a new temporality, represented by another nation’s time, which the exile will stitch together using the new culture or language. This is but a rough guide: the effects of exile and the displacements brought with it can often appear paradoxical. Sometimes, very fruitful contacts with the adopted culture may lead to a nuanced return to the writer’s native letters and language.²⁵ In other instances, exilic nostalgia finds a neutralizing counterbalance when a writer reaches out to the host country’s audience, using its own language and cultural lexicon. The apparently paradoxical exilic responses to the question of language — not only the realization of the not entirely unexpected otherness of the other’s language but also the utter otherness of language as such²⁶ — speak to the potential of language as a polemical and ideological space and as a cathected tool for articulating the scriptive self.

In their use of language, and especially when language is considered as a function and a correlative of identity, that is, in the Heideggerian sense of language as a “prison house” of being, wherein meaning is ascribed through the living body,²⁷ Conrad and Gombrowicz are iconoclastic authors. Specifically, my position is that they are simultaneously figures of their time, with their writings apposite representatives of its cultural trends and major philosophical ideas, and iconoclastic in their poetics or their politics, especially with regard to the homeland. The term iconoclasm in its secondary definition refers to the practice of attacking cherished beliefs or institutions.²⁸ Gombrowicz, as I will show in the chapter on Trans-Atlantyk, engages a persona of the iconoclastic with regard to Polish national form and, no less, the expected and sanctioned identities and practices of Polish émigré artists, especially in their post-war manifestations.²⁹ Though initially seduced by the notion of form and its potential not only to circumscribe via ritual but also to liberate, or, as Ewa Thompson puts it, between the “submission to the symmetries of the system and a desire to exercise the force of [will]” (Thompson 1979: 54), he remained unconvinced both by the national form/ritual of the newly reborn country after 1920 and by the tendentious and shallow avant-gardism of many of his contemporaries.³⁰ As Gombrowicz saw it, form, especially when imposed from without, distorted and effectively deformed the subject who assumed it, especially those in a minority situation, such as exiles or the acolytes in a movement, on whom form was forced by virtue of their subaltern status. Suspended in-between, yet certain not only of the imposing ascendancy of form, indeed its omnipresence as “the communicative framework between people and also the impulse in man … to finish what is unfinished and add to what has already been built,” but also of his own will to oppose form in order to liberate the “inner self” (Thompson 1979: 150), Gombrowicz became a consummate destroyer of forms and formal -isms. It is a central paradox of his poetics, however, that while embarking on the dismantling of tenacious “weak” forms he himself remained trapped within a form of his own making, that of the formal dialectic between logos and the corporeal, in particular desire.

Conrad’s iconoclasm, perhaps more subtle and amorphous, and less insistent in its literary manifestations,³¹ but as with Gombrowicz backed by the full resonance of his exilic identity politics, questions and problematizes the notion of the modern(-ist) self. It also problematizes and frustrates the notion of identity tout court, in the sense of a monad of being. The dynamic is well illustrated in the following summing-up of Conrad’s “exceptional life” by one of his foremost scholars:

Conrad was a unique phenomenon in the history of letters. His was a very unusual life, clearly divided into four distinct stages, each unlike the others. There were seventeen years of childhood and youth in partitioned Poland under the shadow of neighbouring autocratic powers … Then followed four years of early manhood in Marseille, which had a formative effect … and proved to be a kind of “rite of passage” into the political, marine and emotional aspects of his adult life. Next came twenty years of service with the British Merchant Navy, a period which was decisive in shaping his mature self. The remaining years of his life were spent creating his literary identity. His life was like a succession of jumps into four distinct realities … [The] years of childhood and youth in Poland left a very strong imprint on [his] life, personality and works … [Polish] national culture, mind, and ethos … is deeply ingrained in his character and texts.

(Krajka 1999: 41, 48–9)

Wiesław Krajka is surely correct to view the years Conrad spent “creating his literary identity” as central to a proper appreciation of the man. Especially during that fourth and last period Conrad elaborated a dual public “performative” self, eventually ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Translations
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Condition Known as Exile
• Chapter 2: Crossing the Thresholds of Modernist Discourse
• Chapter 3: Life Writing
• Chapter 4: Toward Heterotopia
• Chapter 5: Imagined Nations, Fractured Narrations
• Chapter 6: The Conditional Narrativity of Cosmos
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Copyright