Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz by George Z. Gasyna

Abstract

Reviewed by: Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz by George Z. Gasyna Andrew Busza (bio) George Z. Gasyna. Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 276 pp. 9781441140791. In 1986 Polish scholar Aniela Kowalska, professor at Łódź University, published a modest monograph entitled: Conrad i Gombrowicz w walce o swoją wybitność (Conrad's and Gombrowicz's Struggle for Eminence). It was the first study in any language to link the two major modern writers of Polish extraction and, despite perhaps a lame title, it was a valuable and insightful broaching of the topic. A quarter of a century later, a young Polish-American academic, George Gasyna, has revisited the subject in his Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. Strangely enough, Gasyna does not seem to know Kowalska's work, and refers to it only at secondhand in a footnote. Although there is some overlap in the texts examined by the two critics—both deal with Conrad's A Personal Record and Gombrowicz's Diary as well as the latter's Trans-Atlantic and Cosmos—the monographs vary in their choice of Conrad's fiction. Kowalska discusses "The Secret Sharer" and "The Shadow Line," while Gasyna focuses on Nostromo. More significant and telling, however, is the fundamental difference in the two scholars' approach and critical method linked to the time and place in [End Page 155] which the respective works were written. For in the twenty-five years that separate the two books, a virtual chasm has opened up in critical practice. Writing in the mid-eighties, barely a few years before the final collapse of the communist system, ideological censorship was no longer an issue for Kowalska. The only compromise which she perhaps makes is to omit any substantial discussion of Conrad's political novels and prose. While the historical context resurfaces periodically in Kowalska's work, her critical discourse is primarily text-centered. Working inductively, she explores Conrad's and Gombrowicz's existential vision anchored in personal experience and expressive of a defiant individualism. Gasyna does not have to contend with political coercion of the overt kind, but as an academic scholar he is subject to the corporate pressures of the system and its "mind forg'd manacles." Since the theoretical turn, the deductive mode of argumentation has come to predominate in literary criticism. Although Gasyna's discussion is full of detailed references to texts, he is not a "close reader" in the New Critical sense. References to texts function for the most part deductively, either buttressing the thematic framework or elaborating on it. In fact, in his introduction he sets out what he calls his "fundamental assumptions" or "premises" that have guided his thinking in establishing "the discursive horizon of this study" (Gasyna 3-4). The first premise is that "Conradian and Gombrowiczian narratives represent the two respective end-posts in the project of modernism" (3). Conrad, writes Gasyna, "elaborates a modernist poetics at an early point in his literary career" (3); while Gombrowicz's "later style could be properly termed postmodernist" (4). The second premise is that "text and bios for exiled writers are often intertwined more intimately than for those who do not experience […] separation from the homeland" (4; original emphasis). The third premise is that "Conrad and Gombrowicz should be treated first and foremost as Polish writers" (4). I have no major problems with the first two propositions, but the third is certainly questionable. In what sense are "The Secret Sharer" and "The Shadow Line" Polish narratives? What insight would one gain from viewing these two texts from a specifically Polish perspective? Similarly, of all Gombrowicz's major fictions, Cosmos is probably the least essentially Polish. Be that as it may, the overarching argument of Gasyna's study is in essence relatively straightforward. Conrad and Gombrowicz were both expatriates who wrote most of their work in a linguistically foreign environment. Conrad learned English in his early twenties and chose that language as the vehicle of his artistic expression. Gombrowicz, finding himself in Argentina at thirty-five, continued to write in his native tongue...