Estranging the Novel

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska's first monograph, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature, opens with a brief overview of the sociohistorical affinities 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). From a literary standpoint, both cultures are known for their “proud poetic heritage” as well as their “robust national theater,” and—a detail that will become important for Bartoszyńska's argument later—“a seemingly underdeveloped nineteenth-century novelistic tradition” (1–2). At first glance, then, Estranging the Novel might appear to carve out a space for Polish and Irish novels within two literary traditions that have prioritized the lyric and dramatic. Yet instead, Bartoszyńska's comparison of Polish and Irish novels relies on a two-pronged argument about form and genre. First, Bartoszyńska argues that there has been a dearth of formalist criticism in interpretations of global literature, a category in which she includes Polish and Irish novels. Texts from “peripheral” areas of the world have been read instead, first and foremost, as symptoms of their sociopolitical surroundings. Second, within the discourse of novel studies, emphasis on the “rise of the realist novel” in eighteenth-century England has led to the exclusion of rich, alternative histories of novel writing that fall outside realism's teleological trajectory. Bartoszyńska finds examples of such nonrealist genres in travelogues and gothic novels. These two points of criticism in Bartoszyńska's book undergird its central thesis: reading side by side the formal and nonrealist features of Polish and Irish novels can bring to light “blind spots in theories of the novel's development” (2), estranging our understanding of the novel's historical emergence and development.Bartoszyńska arranges her book into four chapters in chronological order, each of which contains a comparative formal analysis of a Polish novel with an Irish one. The first chapter couples two utopian novels, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki's Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, 1776). Bartoszyńska examines how these two works reconcile the concrete with the abstract (or the contingent with the ideal) by harnessing literary strategies of irony and identification. In the second chapter, she moves to Jan Potocki's Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1804/1810/1848) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). For Bartoszyńska, these two nineteenth-century gothic novels present alternative models of “world-building” that muddle the ontological boundaries between true and fictional and thereby contest the realist model. In chapter 3, Bartoszyńska borrows from both queer theory and Lessing's discourse on art to analyze Narcyza Żmichowska's Poganka (The Heathen, 1846/1861) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She discusses how these texts display a “queer” desire for form that leads them to emulate the temporal-spatial structure of a painting within the formal constraints of prose writing. Bartoszyńska's fourth and final chapter turns to Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1938) and Samuel Beckett's trilogy, especially Molloy (1955) and The Unnamable (1958), exploring how these novels demonstrate fiction's unique freedom to affirm the negative; while seeming to negate all meaning immanently, these texts simultaneously produce a higher literary and philosophical value outside themselves.While each chapter can be read in isolation, there are nevertheless a set of shared implications that emerge by the end of the book. To begin with, Bartoszyńska's chapters echo theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin or, more recently, Guido Mazzoni by showing that the novel's defining characteristic lies ultimately in its capacious unruliness. The works she discusses go far in testing the limits of fictional form, harnessing the novel's power to hold in tension even the most bewildering antinomies and antitheses. Swift's and Krasicki's travel narratives must find a way to channel the abstract idealism of a utopian world through the experience of a concrete and embodied traveling subject; Gombrowicz and Beckett perform the Wittgensteinian acrobatics of making public and communicable the ineffably private realm of an individual's subjectivity.Arguably the most ambitious chapter of the book is the third one, where Bartoszyńska's interests in antirealist novels and formalist analysis are most thoroughly wedded to each other. As she explores Żmichowska's Poganka and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of intermedial analysis and queer formalism, Bartoszyńska argues that both novels display a “queer” desire for pictorial form. In other words, these are novels that desire to become paintings, to transcend their formal and medial constraints to become what they are not. Bartoszyńska borrows Leo Bersani's depiction of disruptive, queer desire as one that “could be thought of as a disease of disconnectedness” wherein parts of a structure assert “a scandalous affinity with elements alien to that structure” (Bersani 1976: 66, quoted on p. 84). Both Poganka and The Picture of Dorian Gray manifest such a “scandalous” desire by emulating the structural principles of a painting rather than a text. For instance, Bartoszyńska shows how Poganka's characters are constantly introduced and described as quasi-Platonic “types” in whose single biographical moment the entirety of the character's past, present, and future is distilled. For Bartoszyńska, such descriptions in the novel evoke the representational mode of a portrait, which, as Michal Peled Ginsburg puts it, is “an attempt to transcend the merely physical, ephemeral aspect of the subject (by summing up a whole life or bringing out the subject's essence)” (Ginsburg 2015: 6, quoted on p. 87).At the same time, these novels’ desire for pictorial representation enters into a more complex, dialectical relation with what Bartoszyńska sees as the ethical program of Żmichowska's and Wilde's novels. Discussing the latter, Bartoszyńska makes the acute point that the central question at the heart of Wilde's novel—the story of a man who retains perpetual youth—is: “What if the moral consequences of a person's actions were not visible on their face, or, what if a man were able to freely indulge his desires and avoid society's censure?” (80). For Bartoszyńska, the ultimate undoing of Dorian and the portrait that faithfully records his corruption signal to readers a more abstract point about the medium of painting itself: no matter how “real” Dorian's portrait might seem, it cannot truly enliven its subject. As Bartoszyńska writes, Though the paintings seem to become real, in these two books [by Żmichowska and Wilde] they never really do. They remain frozen, resistant to being incorporated into the worlds they have come to inhabit. The clearest evidence of this is their exemption from the social mores and moral strictures of their milieus; the living paintings are able to do whatever they want, without regard for the consequences. (99)If paintings are immune to moral consequences, they also lie outside the order of life. For Bartoszyńska, the novel's formal desire for a pictorial mode of representation thus doubles back on itself, proving painting as an ultimately “dead” medium that cannot match the text's ability to bring objects to life. “The ability of a painting to make visible is seductive,” Bartoszyńska notes, “but it is also empty. It is narrative fiction that can build worlds that render ideals living and morality meaningful” (100). Moving from queer formalism to Lessingian media analysis, Bartoszyńska's chapter demonstrates the degree of formal self-reflexiveness shown by Żmichowska's and Wilde's emphatically antirealist novels, bringing to view how both works push the limits of the medium's spatiotemporal representation.The other interesting intervention of Estranging the Novel, though not explicitly stated by the author, is that it tells the story of the novel's development as an essentially pedagogical one. Novels become what they are, Bartoszyńska suggests, by training readers to become novel readers. This idea features most prominently in the second chapter, although echoes of varying intensity are traceable in other chapters as well. Discussing Potocki and Maturin, Bartoszyńska establishes the gothic novel as a genre that played an especially important role in the history of the development of the novel; by producing “a sense of the marvelous that [does] not rely on the supernatural” (49), the gothic novel conspicuously demanded suspension of disbelief from its readers. Borrowing Joshua Landy's vocabulary, Bartoszyńska defines gothic novels as “formative fictions” that “train readers in particular skills” (50). Similarly, Bartoszyńska rereads Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Krasicki's Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki as pedagogical exercises that train readers to learn how to simultaneously identify with and distance themselves from flawed characters. The story of the novel's emergence cannot be told without the concurrent story of the emergence of the ideal novel reader.Throughout her book, Bartoszyńska locates the fascination of her novels “neither in their development of techniques central to realist fiction, nor in the way they figure or reflect upon their sociohistorical realities,” but rather in their interest in “questions of literary form and epistemology” (126–27). Her dedication to formal and epistemological questions helps to address, among other things, the political implications of different hermeneutical methodologies that normally escape the reader's notice. In Bartoszyńska's account, it emerges that “minor literature” is often exclusively studied through a sociohistorical and extraliterary lens. Formalist analysis, on the other hand, is typically reserved for more canonical literature, to whose application lesser-known literatures must laboriously earn their rights. Bartoszyńska's project is essentially an attempt to short-circuit this methodological hierarchy by giving all her novels the form-centered, textually immanent interpretation that they deserve.Yet, Bartoszyńska's plea for global formalism, however convincing and commendable on its own, rests on a noticeable asymmetry between her case studies vis-à-vis the urgency of formalist reading; few will argue that Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray or Beckett's The Unnamable count as “minor literature” in need of a more rigorous formalist critical paradigm. All in all, the Irish side of Estranging the Novel ends up playing a smaller role in the book's argument about global formalism. Furthermore, if Bartoszyńska's strong commitment to formalism leads her to consciously omit from her literary analyses sociohistorical affinities between Poland and Ireland, the question remains why, nevertheless, the overarching comparative paradigm of the book must be international. Why, in other words, must the book's comparison hinge on “Polish” and “Irish” literatures, if the purpose of the book is precisely to challenge the national or sociohistorical determination of literary value?Despite these admittedly minor moments of ambiguity, Bartoszyńska's book is overall a lucid and captivating study of eight novels, regardless of their familiarity to the reader. While the larger polemic structure of the book does not always neatly map on to the author's specific case studies, Estranging the Novel will reward readers who are searching for a thoughtful conversation with the most recent updates in theories of world literature, such as Pheng Cheah's What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Bartoszyńska's project boldly renounces both the telos of realism and the search for sociohistorical patterns in its discussion of novels. Instead, the author commits herself to the centrifugal forces of these novels’ experiments, not readily subsumable under any towering, systematic theory. Hence, Bartoszyńska ends her book with an advocacy for a “weak theory” of the novel, a petition that the novel be reckoned as a “softer and more diffuse category” than most accounts of the novel would advocate for (134). This is a welcome appeal for readers who continue to admire novels for being, as Henry James notoriously put it, the “large, loose, baggy monsters” that they are

European Cultural and National Identity · History · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

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