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

2023; Indiana University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.00082

1527-2052

Lidia Wiśniewska,

European Cultural and National Identity

Reviewed by: Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland and Theories of World Literature by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska Lidia Wiśniewska (bio) Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland and Theories of World Literature, by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska; pp. xi + 182. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021, $97.00, $37.00 paper, $37.00 ebook. In Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland and Theories of World Literature, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska has a sense that the literatures of Poland and Ireland, perceived as peripheral from the perspective of the (particularly English-speaking) center, can present important values in relation to the literary past and present. In bi-national pairs, she juxtaposes works perceived as bizarre. These include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki's Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom) (1776), both written within the framework of the Enlightenment but satirizing its rational utopia; [End Page 717] Jan Potocki's Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa) (1804, 1810, 1847), and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), originating in the early nineteenth century but using supposedly Oriental or medieval-sourced Gothic motifs, baroque and quasi-romantic elements, with the former also evoking proto-postmodern references; Narcyza Żmichowska's Poganka (The Heathen) (1846), representing late Romanticism with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—rooted in the l'art-pour-l'art trend developing (as Philippe Van Tieghem put it) in parallel to Romanticism, with reverberations of dandyism; Samuel Beckett's Trilogy, particularly Molloy (1955) and Unnamable (1958), and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1938), transforming Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Bildungsroman and situated by Bartoszyńska within modernism. These works can be seen to transgress an intra-epoch questioning of the idea of a perfect society (the Enlightenment's nonsacral counterpart to the myth of the Divine Paradise) moving to a trans-epoch, transcultural, or inter-artistically (word versus image) arising vision of a simple world in favor of a complex one: away from the Enlightenment, situated at the foundations of modernism, and toward a formative line running from the Middle Ages through the Baroque and Romantic eras to postmodernism, and by referring to Gotthold Lessing's Laocoön (1766), from the linearity of the word to the spatiality of the image (here referring to antiquity and its myth of Nature); and, in some regards, away from the West and to the East. These works—seen as anomalies from the positions of rationalist (for example, György Lukács's) conceptions of the development of the novel as a realistic reflection of modernist socio-economic historical development—interest Bartoszyńska precisely because of their nonstandard form and their reversal of the one-sided mimetic assumption that reality shapes fiction. She places them in the equalizing perspective of so-called world, global, or republican literature rather than in the hierarchy that devalues smaller, peripheral, or postcolonial literatures. She demands the adoption of the perspective of a weak, decentralized theory of the novel, rather than the normative strong theory, thus moving against the selection approach toward directions of research aiming at a modified, geographically and formally inclusive history of literature, valuing the novel focused on building its own worlds, understanding itself and fiction's impact on reality. Referring, for example, to the Warwick Research Collective, Bartoszyńska highlights the characteristics of these worlds: event structure undermining rectilinear time (one might add, close to the multidirectional spatial perspective indicated by Michel Foucault as the dominant feature of contemporariness), unreliable narrators undermining objectivity, or conflicting points of view replacing a single truth derived from the supreme instance. This explicit and ambitious incorporation into the newer tendencies, however, seems not yet fully grounded philosophically, given her invocation of René Descartes, setting the modernist trail, but not—for instance—Immanuel Kant, underpinning constructivism, so relevant to the construction of one's own worlds, or Ernst Cassirer, broadening Kant's perspective. Bartoszyńska recognizes the second pair of the works as most relevant to understanding the novelistic form that explores the ways in which fictional stories induce belief in the unreal by informing, entertaining, deceiving, or corrupting audiences, and modeling worlds, including those outside one's own. Presented...