Polish, hybrid, and otherwise: exilic discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz

Abstract

George Gasyna. Polish, Hybrid and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. New York: Continuum. 2011. 276 pp. $42.95, paper.George Gasyna offers a unique and much anticipated comparative reading of selected works by Witold Gombrowicz (Cosmos, Trans-Atlantyk) and Joseph Conrad (Nostromo). Such an approach might not immediately strike one as all too original, but it is truly thought-provoking in exploring the indeterminate discour se that Conrad and Gombrowicz produce as a result of their exilic experience. Far from merely cataloguing biographical events, Gasyna seeks to interrogate the inner workings of Conrad's and Gombrowicz's exilic liminal discourses, ones that defy the gravity of the sanctified cultural and literary assumptions of their age or any clean-cut identifiable ideological affirmations. Configured as such, liminal rather than reactionary, Conrad and Gombrowicz anticipate modernist and postmodernist poetics respectively. On the face of it, such a bold periodization endeavour is anything but ground-breaking, as a battery of publications calculated to tag both Polish writers with tins or that -ism has already been fired by many scholars (Slavic or otherwise). But the angle from which Gasyna delves into the writers' aesthetics is novel: he interrogates the language triggered by their cultural in-betweenness in order to point to the blind spots of indeterminacy undercutting their poetics.With tins as his solid point of departure, Gasyna superbly charts Gombrowicz's and Conrad's trajectories of exile, asserting their dual hybrid identities, or, as he puts rt, homo duplex persona, as epitomised in their works of fiction and life writing. Equipped with acute analytical skills, for winch the author owes much intellectual indebtedness to such pillars of postmodernist and poststructurahst theory as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, to list but a few, and encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth-century European history and culture, Gasyna magnificently caters to the tastes of those who seek in-depth historical references and close-readers orientated toward interpretive hair-splitting in a characteristically deconstructionist vein.Particularly well-argued is the author's examination of the heterotopic discourse of Trans-Atlantyk, winch helped precipitate a crucial debate on the subjectivity of exilic writing (p. 178) in its indomitable resistance to cut-and-dried ideological schemata. This project of a disbanding of linguistic autonomy is pushed a step further in Cosmos, winch for Gasyna amiounces the dissolution of modern narrative subjectivity into a mise-enabime of competing simulacra (p. …