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

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.2023.0037

1086-315X

Wendy Anne Lee,

Central European Literary Studies

Reviewed by: Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska Wendy Anne Lee Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 182. $37.00 paper, $97.00 cloth. "What do we want from our accounts of literary development?" asks Katarzyna Bartoszyńska in the introduction to her own inventive account and roving "theorization of what a novel can do" (13). Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature is a study of "anomalous pairs" of Polish and Irish fictions whose unlikely juxtapositions want to reveal some shared dream or conceptual task for a genre whose history—as readers of this journal well know—loves to be debated, displaced, and debunked (103). Polish and Irish literature share many aspects (a national condition of political marginalization most obviously), but the important commonality here is that neither is known for its "masterpieces of realism"—an underachievement celebrated by Bartoszyńska with contrarian zest (108). The particular, and particularly paired, novels in this book possess commitments decidedly other than, as George Eliot's narrator of Adam Bede puts it, "the faithful representing of commonplace things." Instead, they strive for "mind-bending philosophical games," metafictional and even metalinguistic experimentation, cumulative moves of negation, irony, and irresolution (2). These features would not, Bartoszyńska argues, get picked up by standard-issue lenses of historicism and realism, most culpably by "socioeconomic master narratives" (131)—the "most seductive" of which "for novel studies, is the story of modernity's rise" (131). Estranging the Novel disregards that story and its attendant values of empirical, psychological, and narrative coherence. What Bartoszyńska wants (thinking with Eric Hayot's "literary worlds") is to approach each text as an idiosyncratic act of world-making, a construction of its own ontological terms (thinking with Scott Black's romance). The estranging novel is neither symptom nor representation of some historical point on the timeline of a constricted and constricting modernity. Its "myriad faces" evince loopier, less determined qualities—both more free and more effortful than, say, (my own beloved examples) Jane Eyre or David Copperfield (126). Her methodological wager for achieving this loosening is to curate a span of four Polish-Irish, roughly contemporaneous or at least adjacent dyads that begin with Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki's Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom) (1776), move to Jan Potocki's Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found [End Page 486] in Saragossa) (1804/1810/1847) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), reach Narcyza Żmichowska's Poganka (The Heathen) (1846/1861) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and end with Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable trilogy (1955-1958) and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1938). While each pairing highlights a different program of experimentation, all express a wish to do or think something extraordinary or impossible within (or despite) narrative prose fiction and to make that tension (or failure) part of its novelistic jouissance. Bartoszyńska charmingly writes, "The texts I discuss are anomalous enough that the question regularly arises whether they are even novels. What else would they be?" (127). What else could they be? "[A]nti-novels" (on Żmichowska and Wilde) (75), "a Bildungsroman that is not a Bildungsroman" (103) (on Gombrowicz and Beckett), "a worldview that is provisional, assembled from an assortment of sources, some of which are fictional" (on Potocki), "texts that seem relentlessly negative, and yet remain, for all that, novels" (106). With a flair for critical versatility (here putting Bakhtin in dialogue with Lloyd Bishop writing on Schlegel), Bartoszyńska reinforces the theory of a genre, or "ironic totality," that can "contain its own antithesis," a species always quarreling with itself (122). This restless state of the novel expresses its singular power to perform and remain within contradiction, which for the author is a baseline truth about human existence. Or, to add a Janeite's touchstone to the mix: "Yes, novels … or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in...