Toward Heterotopia: The Case of Trans-Atlantyk

Abstract

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.“