In Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska studies strange novels from Poland and Ireland to question histories of the novel that emphasize the rise of realism. Instead of thinking about what these novels are—realist or romance, Polish or Irish, fact or fiction—she considers what these novels do. In the process, she offers a compelling formalist analysis of Polish and Irish novels that demonstrates the novel's wide-ranging “capabilities” (12) and advances a new “weak theory” of the novel that focuses on fictionality rather than realism or history (14).This book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone. Polish and Irish novels are both “minor” forms. They are misplaced within narratives of the novel's linear rise—understood to be peripheral and anomalous. Scholars of Polish literature, Bartoszyńska explains, attribute the Polish novel's strange forms to, on the one hand, the fact that Poland lacked a strong middle-class reading public, and, on the other, to authors' inability to detach themselves from unsettling political turmoil—their inability to be disinterested observers of everyday life. In turn, many studies of nineteenth-century Irish novels often emphasize the importance of realism by focusing on what Irish novels are not: George Eliot's Middlemarch. As a result, these accounts tend to focus on what these novels fail to do rather than what they accomplish—how they depart from more studied novelistic forms rather than how their own distinct forms work. For Bartoszyńska, this emphasis on failure results from an attention to history rather than form; English novels provide the model, while Irish history explains why Irish novels do not produce this model. To study the forms of these peripheral novels—to take what they do seriously—is thus already an important scholarly intervention that deepens our understanding of the novel.But reading Polish and Irish novels together is especially exciting, not only because of the many shared forms Bartoszyńska uncovers, but also because of the experience of reading across different national traditions. Bartoszyńska's deft criticism is humbling, forcing readers to confront what they do not know. Starting on the “anecdotal level,” Bartoszyńska explains the similarities between Poland and Ireland: “both are countries on the peripheries of Europe, largely Catholic, with lengthy histories of political oppression and traditions of exile and immigration” (1). As a scholar of Irish literature I am familiar with this anecdote; it sometimes circulates in footnotes, scholarly asides, or maybe even in response to questions at Irish studies conferences. And yet, by taking this anecdote seriously as a starting place for close reading and careful attention, Bartoszyńska estranges not only the Irish novel but also some of the core assumptions of the field of Irish studies by unsettling the ways in which Irish studies scholars often view Ireland as anomalous and even exceptional. She dramatizes the limits of fields of study and historical periods by refusing their boundaries, pursuing her own path through world literature and literary history.Reading this book not only helped me realize what I miss in knowing so little about Polish literature and not being able to read the Polish language, but it also helped me speculate about all the other things I did not know about novels and world literature. I can imagine that scholars of Polish literature or English literature or world literature would have similar but different experiences of reading this text as their distinct mooring posts become mobile. The book confronts readers with institutionally sanctioned ignorance, but it does so with an eye toward possibility, inspiring attention to less studied forms and surprising relations. Concluding the book by questioning the impulse toward mastery as she proposes a “weak theory” of the novel, Bartoszyńska emphasizes what the experience of reading the book has already taught: there will always be more novels to read, more forms to attend to, more languages to learn, more connections and distinctions to draw. The point, then, is not Bartoszyńska's own masterful readings of novelistic forms—although they are a delight to read—but rather the possibilities such readings open up, the sense that they are just the beginning for new theories of the novel, new accounts of world literature, and new methods of study.The book unfolds by focusing on different novel pairs that elucidate the novel's disparate capacities. Considering Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki's The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom (1776), the first chapter thinks about the forms and politics of utopian fiction while also considering satire, irony, and travel narratives. Explaining the politics of travel narratives in Ireland and Poland—both places tend to appear “as barbaric outposts of civilization”—Bartoszyńska shifts to consider how the form of such narratives travel, that is, how travel narratives operate as models for utopian literature where there is no historical referent for the utopia, only an imagined happily ever after (19). Utopian fiction, like travel narratives, considers “the disjunct between abstraction and lived experience,” she claims (20). Travel narratives attempt to offer the experience of travel but also assert that representations of travel cannot be trusted because they mediate lived experience. In turn, utopian fiction wonders about the politics of travel to a better place: Will the protagonist be content to stay put? Does individual travel lead to collective improvement? Bartoszyńska concludes that these two novels represent a gap between utopian societies and the flawed human subjects that travel to them, demonstrating fiction's capacity to both build better worlds and expose the limits of utopian thinking and abstract reasoning.The next chapter studies world building in Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1804/1810/1847) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Bartoszyńska starts by thinking about the strangeness of these two novels. Neither has a clear plotline: Potocki's novel was published in parts—the first completed edition first appeared in 1847 and was then translated into Polish—while Maturin's gothic novel has tales within tales. But precisely because these novels share this strangeness, Bartoszyńska refuses to read them as outliers and instead argues that they highlight how “our experience of the world is not as a container, or spatial extension, but as a dense network of stories, which are always, at least in part, products of imagination” (41). Representing the supernatural, these novels show the importance of fictionality to building and also experiencing a world.Considering the relationship between painting and prose in Narcyza Żmichowska's The Heathen (1846/1861) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), chapter 3 proposes a queer formalism. Rather than focusing on biography or sociohistorical context—that is, the identity of these authors or the importance of the Wilde trials to queer literature and history—the chapter claims that these two novels manifest queer desire through the “erotics of their textual construction” (81). What results is an account of novelistic forms and “the longing for form” that exceed the novel (85). In the case of these two novels, this longing for form appears in painting (85). Bartoszyńska claims that the novels consider the relationship between aesthetics and morality as well as the relation between ideal worlds, “an idealized being,” and the constraints of everyday life.The final chapter shifts from strange forms to strange worlds, exploring how Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1938) enact a modernist undoing of narrative form. Arguing that Ferdydurke and The Unnamable “attempt to find a unique way of expressing the self”—to escape conventional forms—Bartoszyńska concludes that they surrender to “a higher power, that of Form, which governs society” (113). Showing the value of an argument with such transhistorical reach, she offers an especially compelling reading of metaphor and irony in Beckett's novels alongside the Irish bull, a form of speech much discussed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that combines incompatible thoughts. In the process, she shows how even literary forms defined in relation to place—the “Irish” bull—travel, making the case for the value of formalist analysis because of the surprising relations it uncovers.In the conclusion, Bartoszyńska synthesizes these readings to propose a “weak theory” of the novel as well as a “global formalism” (126). This approach to world literature does not seek out representative novels—one novel need not represent all novels or speak directly to its own historical conditions—but rather shows how the overlooked, the minor, and the strange are just as important to world literature as the exemplary text. The goal is not to be comprehensive—to organize novels and history into typologies, to offer a single account of the novel's evolution, to generalize—but rather to pursue what's interesting. Doing so will not only estrange our understanding of the novel but it will show the importance of strange novelistic forms that expand world literature and formalist theory, according to Bartoszyńska.The smart arguments of this book emerge through an attention to detail and the accumulation of insight gleaned from close reading. A layered sense of the novel's capacities and contradictions, its embrace of and resistance to form, its realism and romance emerges alongside a more focused sense of the connections, but also differences, between Polish and Irish novels. But because of the carefully crafted form of each chapter, I sometimes found myself wondering about the connections between chapters. What is the relationship between the first chapter's discussion of travel and travel narratives and the second's focus on “transport” (60)? Are travel and transport distinct forms or different instantiations of the same form? Similarly, the discussion of abstraction and lived experience throughout the book, after the opening grounding of this contradiction in utopian fiction, made me wonder whether all fiction dabbles in utopic forms or whether the utopic was a dimension of fictionality itself. In the conclusion, Bartoszyńska suggests that fictional texts “engage in efforts to formally model abstract ideas” (127). Is this utopic? Does it mean that the novel's impulse toward abstraction ultimately triumphs over its representation of lived experience? These questions are not problems of the book but rather demonstrate how the echoes between chapters are in themselves productive, prompting questions about fictionality's distinct but related capacities, about the relationship between what fictionality does and fiction's disparate forms, between the worlds fiction builds and the worlds we inhabit.Weak theory, perhaps; but Bartoszyńska takes seriously literature's power not only to be but to do. The experience of reading this book is thus an experience of encountering strange forms not as an end point but as a starting place: as a call to pay attention, read carefully, consider surprising relations, and understand new possibilities.
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Mar 5, 2024
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