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.
In The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz delineates a startling vision of his hometown of Drohobycz as a space governed by second-hand cast-offs of metropolitan modernity and posits the artist as a ...demiurge who reigns over an accumulation of matter. Seeking escape from the shabbiness and tedium of daily life, the narrator plunges into an imaginary zone of his own making, one marked by temporal distortion, spatial instability, and the superabundance of matter, trash in particular. In the province, trash—as well as other "trashy" objects (tandeta and Bylejakość)—can be put to novel creative uses. It is thus possible to speak of a poetics of trash, wherein civilizational detritus returns to the foreground as a productive mode of representation and of micropolitical resistance. It is reterritorialized in Schulz as an archive of individual longings and desires and an index of local achievement. Trash, then, both as physical tandeta and as a key component of dream-work, emerges as a unifying sign of Schulz's provincial poetics.
Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69) is a modernist novelist and playwright, a provocateur whose work is fuelled by antinomy and paradox. For instance, he conceived his literary work as a means of “liberating ...the Pole from his nation” to help him become a “human being in the world.”¹ Yet, he revolutionized Polish literature by unmasking one of its fun damental themes – the discourse on historical forms of Polishness – as a set of pathological dependencies, which his writing managed to transpose, perhaps for the first time in the nation’s literary history, into new cultural, exilic contexts. Similarly, Gombrowicz pined for worldwide fame
Andrzej Stasiuk, born in 1960 in Warsaw, ranks among postcommunist Poland’s most successful cultural exports. His novels and his persona have achieved cult status both in Poland and elsewhere, ...especially in Ukraine and the Balkans. Despite only one reading tour of North America, in 2010, Stasiuk is a relatively familiar name in the United States, specifically in academia. Indeed, no syllabus for a college course on postcommunist European fiction would be complete without at least one work by Stasiuk on it—most often, the novelTales of Galiciaor collections of essays/stories such asFado or My Europeare included.
In August 1939, the Polish avant-garde writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz left Poland for what was to be a month-long literary tour of South America. World War II broke out a week after ...Gombrowicz's arrival in Argentina, and he was never to return to Poland; instead he remained in Buenos Aires, where he would live for the next quarter of a century. In this essay George Gasyna argues that Gombrowicz overcame whatever nostalgic longings he may have felt for the homeland he had left behind—by an “accident” of world history—through articulating a new type of poetics, which Gasyna terms a “heterotopic imagination.” Employing a key term used by Michel Foucault in his archaeologizing of western cultural knowledge, Gasyna theorizes heterotopia both as a desire to articulate the existential condition of deterritorialization in the spaces between mainstream literary and cultural discourses, and as a kind of textual sanctuary from the world. Within the zone of heterotopia, Gasyna argues, an author's exilic imagination may transform the nonplace of language into a linguistic refuge, a home-in-language. In his reading of Gombrowicz's second and perhaps most outrageous novel, Trans-Atlantyk, Gasyna demonstrates that despite its overt stylistic deviation and blatant political provocations, the novel is primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for an autonomous subject—in this case the deracinated author who chose to divest himself of the political pressures of being a Polish émigré in wartime and the Cold War era, in order to become “merely a human being.“
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