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

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska prefaces her innovative project pairing a series of "anomalous" (or "freakish") Polish and Irish novels with epigraphs from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy on the power of storytelling ("let the people tell their stories their own way") and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire about Stanley's Polishness ("They're something like the Irish, aren't they? . . . Only not so—highbrow?"). The seeming disconnect between these two quotations signals a central tension between the universal and the particular at the heart of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. Bartoszyńska's book is organized around four pairs of Polish and Irish novels whose "oddness," she argues, calls for a "new global history" that estranges "our sense of the novel as form, offering new and interesting perspective on what it can do" (p. 126). This approach, which Bartoszyńska defines as a "weak theory of the novel," naturally decenters the novel by extending it "geographically and chronologically, without claiming any particular mode as definitive" (p. 134). The irony that Williams toyed at times with the idea of making Stanley Italian, Irish, and even Mexican in drafts of his play only speaks to the common or "anecdotal" similarities many observers perceive between the Poles and the Irish that conflate their experience on a range of levels (from politics to stereotypes). As she admits in her introduction, the resemblance between Poland and Ireland may, in fact, not mean much of anything, but by focusing on the formal features of these novels, she makes a compelling case for the value of understanding how people "tell their stories their own way" as a way "to teach us different ways of reading" (p. 15).For Polish and Irish scholars, there is something very welcome, if not obvious, about Bartoszyńska's project. The complexities of the Polish and Irish experience, which features elements of isolation, non-existence, and global reach, naturally invites comparative study. The apparent value of such a comparison, however, has not always been appreciated by scholars of the history of the novel, who have tended to situate its rise in centers of power (England, France, Spain, and Russia) and in a specific form, realism. This is where the concept of Bartoszyńska's project has real, explicit value. Over the course of four chapters, in which she compares Ignacy Krasicki's The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Narcyza Żmichowska's The Heathen and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke and Samuel Becket's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable), Bartoszyńska performs a great service by analyzing the works of writers who have been rarely, if ever, discussed together. This, alone, is enough to make this an engaging read. By tracing the formal evolution of the novel from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century through these "anomalous" pairs, though, she accomplishes something rather more ambitious; instead of attempting to place these works in an existing history of the novel or pushing for a subversive or subaltern dismantling of it, she argues for an understanding of the novel's rise that is more inclusive, expansive, and varied.Each of the novel pairings presented give a great deal of food for thought. The novels of Krasicki and Swift draw on the tradition of the travel narrative that emerged after the publication of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe both to deliver and to undercut Enlightenment thinking and utopian ideals. By demonstrating how they make it possible simultaneously to identify with Gulliver and Nicholas through their adventures and to understand them ironically, Bartoszyńska explains that what "these novels show us is that fiction's unique power is its ability to do contradictory things at the same time, a power that allows it to illuminate the ironies of the human condition" (p. 17). With their heavy use of irony, Swift and Krasicki present a challenge to the standard understanding of the novel as one rooted in realism. While Gulliver and Nicholas encounter utopian modes of living by traveling the world, this experience also undermines any thoughts of universal thinking, which is at the heart of the Enlightenment. Building on the work of Terry Eagleton, Bartoszyńska underscores the "ironic awareness" of both novels, in which the "universal truth" of the utopian project is shown to be incompatible with the particular nature of lived experience. Moving through the nineteenth century, the novels of Potocki and Maturin, which have been characterized as "freakishly irregular," pose a different problem for the novel by speaking more directly to the novel as form, and the "question of what fictions do and how they affect their audience" (p. 41). Comprised of a network of interlacing stories, which obscure if not also defy a clear sense of plot, she argues that "these two novels are the most central to a better understanding of the novel form, precisely because they are so absorbed in investigating it themselves . . . both works playfully explore the way fictions solicit belief in the unreal, thereby examining the effects of fictionality and whether it deludes or corrupts readers" (p. 39). Far from disorienting or losing the reader, Bartoszyńska suggests that these complex novels of interwoven tales "produce a different kind of effect: the image of a vast, interconnected world" (p. 42). In this chapter, she draws a much finer line under the distinct techniques of the novel by drawing on the work of scholars like Sarah Tindal Kareem and Joshua Landy, who examine how fiction trains readers by helping them to suspend disbelief and to develop certain skills as readers (pp. 49–50).The last two chapters offer rather different formal possibilities for the novel. The novels of Żmichowska and Wilde, for instance, embody hybrid or "queer" forms that both challenge the novel as such and feature "a queer formalism" that seeks "a desire not for a body, but for a form—a desire that shapes the way they are themselves constructed" (p. 83). Bartoszyńska interestingly situates this desire for form in aspects of queer theory and the representative possibilities of painting. The two are bound together in what she calls "queer formalism, their desire for a painting's form, is also a desire for the painting's subject, or world, an idealized realm of beauty that is free of society's rules" (p. 97). Although novels cannot do what paintings can, these two works demonstrate through their unique formal construction that "the painting makes visible, but it is words that bring the immaterial to life" (p. 98). Gombrowicz and Beckett, in contrast, "use form to dismantle standard modes of reference and meaning in narrative, serving as limit cases in the power of fictionality to construct worlds" (p. 102) in an attempt "to find a unique way of expressing the self" (p. 108). Despite Gombrowicz's attempts to throw off the strictures of Form and Beckett's search for a private language with which to express the self, Bartoszyńska claims that neither author is ultimately successful because "those limits do exist for a reason" (p. 123). Their failure is ultimately their strength, for "that is what is ultimately so powerful about these books: the way in which they bring to life fictionality as such . . . its ability to bring worlds into being that are experienced as real despite their impossibility" (p. 124).As persuasive as Bartoszyńska's overall argument is for decentering the novel by focusing on form, the express use of pairings of Polish and Irish novels conflicts somewhat with her push against contextualist readings. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a similar book being written in which the works selected for comparison are truly global in scale and decentered in nature. A comparison of the formal possibilities of Polish and Irish novels, however, does not necessarily have to exclude contextual readings, for as Gombrowicz argues, the more Poles try not to be Polish the more Polish they reveal themselves to be. In short, there is no escaping Form. There are also some interesting omissions in Bartoszyńska's book, whether it be writers who tend toward realism (Bolesław Prus), modernism (James Joyce), or something in between (Joseph Conrad). While these are just three examples, Prus's Lalka (The Doll, 1890) counters Bartoszyńska's claim that there were no masterpieces of realism in the nineteenth century, Joyce arguably did the most to reimagine the formal possibilities of the modern novel and flew farthest to escape the "nets" of his native Ireland in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939), and Conrad introduced a unique form of hybrid modernism into English literature by creating a distinct space for his novels in the non-place of exile. Far from undermining the central thesis in Bartoszyńska's book, however, examples such as these only serve to strengthen it. The same could be said of other works of global fiction, which her "weak theory" of the novel clearly invites to be included alongside this selection of truly original Polish and Irish writers.