This study is an investigation of the autobiographical narratives of two authors, the Pole Marek Hlasko, and the American Henry Miller. Though they lived in different times and places Miller and ...Hlasko, share some remarkable features with respect to temperament, philosophies of writing, and modes of narrative output. In the chapters that follow I will examine both the biographical and the textual points of contact between these two men, concentrating on the problem of self-inscription in the autobiographical novels, and on the games played with identity that both men engaged in throughout their artistic careers, especially during their periods of exile.
The first section provides a recapitulation of relevant biographical data together with a summary of the social and historical contexts as these affect the personal ideology of each writer. I begin with an expose of some parallels in the biographies and the autobiographical narratives of the two men, and subsequently turn to a summary of the broader polemics of authorial representation in works written in the first person. Here the traditional notion of equating the author of an autobiographical novel with its subject will be rejected in favour of examining the network of relationships that exist among the writer, the writer's cultural "persona", and the textual voice. Following this theoretical framework, I explore each author's personal script of emigration, his sense of self-understanding and self-positioning in the world, and the strategies of self-construction and self-invention undertaken both in the narratives and in the public arena. My analysis of each author's most representative autobiographical works of the exile period will finally suggest the conclusion that while the autobiographical impulse supplied the form for virtually all of Hlasko's and Miller's writing, it is the experience of exile that furnished the content for successful narrative self-revelation.
The resulting slippage and lack of denotative precision constitutes the first obstacle to the argument's legibility: she means to say that Poland is actually both an “eastern” European space/culture, ...thus nominally delayed, inferior, “othered” both through external representational practices and internally, in response to those practices, and post-colonial, its cultural offerings over the last 200 years providing proof of a pedagogy of the marginalized. Anyone interested in a sustained discussion of how east European cultures in Poland's general neighborhood may have negotiated problems of social, cultural, and political transition from state socialism to being part of a globalized market economy, or what authors hailing from these places—as well as literary and cultural critics who “globally” work on these regions—may have written on the subject, will be disappointed. ...even the discussion of the Polish experience seems rushed, the author more interested in laying out the groundwork for framing the discourse of audience reception and reading theory as a way of explaining minor-literature legibility, “cognizability” (131), and marketability (though that Deleuzoguattarian term does not appear anywhere, in favor of Franco Moretti's notion of “distant reading” and “the great unread,” effectively a passing over of texts coming from “marginal” cultures, which consigns them to perpetual exclusion 133–35). Readers familiar with their complex personal and artistic itineraries and seeking new insight will find none here, the author mainly rehearsing well-known arguments, respectively, on form and deformation (as two posts of authentic self-articulation for the four-decade long Gombrowiczian subjectivity project), and duality and subversive irony (which undercut or multiply the meanings of Conradian textuality).
This study is an investigation of the autobiographical narratives of two authors, the Pole Marek Hłasko, and the American Henry Miller. Though they lived in different times and places Miller and ...Hłasko, share some remarkable features with respect to temperament, philosophies of writing, and modes of narrative output. In the chapters that follow I will examine both the biographical and the textual points of contact between these two men, concentrating on the problem of self-inscription in the autobiographical novels, and on the games played with identity that both men engaged in throughout their artistic careers, especially during their periods of exile. The first section provides a recapitulation of relevant biographical data together with a summary of the social and historical contexts as these affect the personal ideology of each writer. I begin with an exposé of some parallels in the biographies and the autobiographical narratives of the two men, and subsequently turn to a summary of the broader polemics of authorial representation in works written in the first person. Here the traditional notion of equating the author of an autobiographical novel with its subject will be rejected in favour of examining the network of relationships that exist among the writer, the writer's cultural “persona”, and the textual voice. Following this theoretical framework, I explore each author's personal script of emigration, his sense of self-understanding and self-positioning in the world, and the strategies of self-construction and self-invention undertaken both in the narratives and in the public arena. My analysis of each author's most representative autobiographical works of the exile period will finally suggest the conclusion that while the autobiographical impulse supplied the form for virtually all of Hłasko's and Miller's writing, it is the experience of exile that furnished the content for successful narrative self-revelation.
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