Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Abstract

Reviewed by: Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska Liam Lanigan Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. By Katarzyna Bartoszyńska. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2021. xi+182 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978–1–4214–4065–1. In the past two decades models of the ‘literary world-system’, such as those of Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and the Warwick Research Collective, have sought to explain the power relationships between literary traditions and how writers’ work navigates and restructures them. Such models have reshaped how we understand the history of the novel, and especially the role of writing from ‘peripheral’ traditions in that history. In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska challenges the tendency of such theories to read novels in terms of their position on a teleological path towards realism and modernism. For such theorists ‘the central feature of the modern novel is its interest in representing reality’; in doing so, they valorize realism, studying peripheral traditions primarily in terms that seek to explain ‘why these traditions do not follow what is seen as the typical trajectory of the novel’s development’ (p. 4). Bartoszyńska explores novels whose stylistic and formal ‘strangeness’ (p. 4) refuse a realist aesthetic, but she argues that these works ‘illuminate blind spots in theories of the novel’s development’ rather than being ‘detours on the path to realism’ (p. 2). Each chapter places two novels from a given historical era, one Polish and one Irish, in conversation with one another, and in doing so explores aspects of their literary mechanics, exploring what they tell us about the possibilities of the novel form. By analysing peripheral literatures together outside a metropolitan framework, their ‘conscious experiment with literary form’ can be explored on its own terms rather than as a ‘struggle to adapt’ (pp. 4–5), revealing ‘the structural inadequacy of rise-of-the-novel paradigms’ (p. 10). The book eschews broad generalizations about the development of the novel, focusing on the idiosyncratic and self-reflexive formal elements of the particular texts it explores. It examines their often messy narrative elements and internal contradictions for what they reveal about the possibilities of the novel form. In the first chapter, for instance, Bartoszyńska discusses Gulliver’s Travels in conjunction with Ignacy Krasicki’s Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr Nicholas Wisdom). In both texts the effort to depict possible utopian worlds leads them also to ‘illuminate the limits of fiction’s powers of political pedagogy’ (p. 17). Their narrators are simultaneously reliable guides to the worlds they explore and ironic figures whose errors are themselves the lesson from which the reader is asked to learn. The novels ‘playfully explore the way fiction solicits belief in the unreal, thereby examining the effects of fictionality and the question of whether it deludes or corrupts readers’ (p. 39). Bartoszyńska argues that they serve to ‘call into question fiction’s ability to deliver utopianism’s message, or indeed, any kind of lesson at all’ (pp. 16–17). The following chapter, which discusses Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer [End Page 687] and Jan Potocki’s Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa), is similarly concerned with how the texts self-consciously play with the mechanics of fiction, brilliantly exploring the implications of their use of nested narratives and paratextual information such as footnotes that serve to complicate the relationship between the fictional and the real rather than to clarify or codify it. In subsequent chapters Bartoszyńska identifies similar preoccupations with the genre and the ways in which novels create literary worlds that are often internally contradictory and impossible, as a recurring formal feature of Irish and Polish fiction. What emerges is what she calls an understanding of the ‘power of fictionality itself, its ability to bring worlds into being that are experienced as real despite their impossibility’ (p. 124). Fiction, she argues, ‘opens a space beyond the reach of logic or empiricism’ (p. 124). The wider implication of the analysis in Estranging the Novel is that we need an account of novels which are ‘anomalous or strange...