Counter-discourse and the postcolonial perspective: The Polish Complex by Tadeusz Konwicki

Abstract

This article defines and categorizes the forms and histories of political dependence in Poland. It explores the consequences of prolonged subjugation and assesses its impact on the Polish mentality, considering especially the specific ways of understanding patriotism and its relation to the institutions of power. Advocating a considered use of certain postcolonial paradigms to central Europe and its specific situation of fluctuating dependencies, the article illustrates this with particular reference to Poland, which played both the role of the dominating (colonial) party, and was itself subject to colonial domination by various imperial forces throughout two centuries. In order to examine the discourses of resistance that these complex histories of dependence have generated, the article proposes the framework of post-dependence studies – a critical reflection that uses some of the concepts and methodologies of postcolonialism, whilst reworking their interpretive potential to fit a different political, historical, cultural and geographical context. The Polish Complex, a novel by one of the most important contemporary Polish prose writers, Tadeusz Konwicki (first published as Kompleks polski in 1977), serves to illustrate the close link between the discourse of empire and the counter-discourse subverting it, developed by the oppressed who are aware of their situation of debasement. The contours of this opposition are almost always blurred, however; there is a constant slippage of the counter-discourse (expressive of a desire for self-elevation) into grotesque forms of complicity with the system.