Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction
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' MODERNIST TRENDS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLISH FICTION STANISLAW EILE School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/SSEES0013 MODERNIST TRENDS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLISH FICTION MODERNIST TRENDS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLISH FICTION STANISLAW EILE School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London 1996 MODERNIST TRENDS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLISH FICTION Stanislaw Eile Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction © School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1996 SSEES Occasional Papers No. 30 ISBN: 0 903425 41 6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Copies of this publication and others in the School’s refereed series of Occasional Papers can be obtained from the Publications and Conferences Office, SSEES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU The cover picture is Portrait of Nina Stachurska by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1929, pastel, in the National Museum in Poznan Printed in Great Britain by Quom Selective Repro Limited Queens Road, Loughborough, Leics. LE11 1HH Contents Introduction: Modernism, Postmodernism and Polish fiction 1 THE ORIGIN OF MODERN FICTION 1 The evolution of Polish fiction in the XIX century and modernity 21 2 Boleslaw Prus and his Lalka 33 3 The lyrical mood of early Modernism I Between the essay and ‘landscapes of the soul’ 41 4 The lyrical mood of early Modernism II Symbols, myths and the grotesque 53 BETWEEN TRADITIONALISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE: THE INTERWAR PERIOD 5 The author reintroduced: realism, psychologisme and inverted narrative 69 6 Demiurges perplexed: Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz 85 7 Clown turned bard: Witold Gombrowicz 103 FICTION AT THE CROSSROADS: FROM WORLD WAR II TO RECENT TIMES 8 Modernity versus ideology 119 9 On the borderline of fiction: B orowski—B ialosze wski—Konwicki 141 10 From reality under scrutiny to reality under question I Retrospective order 157 11 From reality under scrutiny to reality under question II Heterotopia and metafiction 171 References 192 Index 217 INTRODUCTION MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND POLISH FICTION In the English-speaking world Polish fiction has never been granted the same recognition as the Russian novel. The Nobel Prize for Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905 was followed by many translations and by films based on his most acclaimed work, Quo vadis, but still this, the best known Polish author, is unable, because of the nature of his popular narratives, to achieve the rank of a true classic. Wladyslaw Reymont, another Nobel Prize winner, is usually known only to Slav scholars. The postwar period has brought some change because of the growing interest in non-realistic writing, well represented in Poland by Witkacy, Gombrowicz and Schulz. The very fact that a volume of short stories by Schulz was introduced by John Updike (1979) seems remarkable, but not everyone is equally sympathetic to this writer (see for example Josipovici, 1983, 102-5). Somewhat underestimated in his native Poland, Stanislaw Lem has gained an international reputation not only by virtue of his highly ambitious science fiction, but also his metafictional bias (e.g. Nash, 1987). Over the last fifty years the predominant trend in the reception of Polish fiction has, however, usually been marred by politics. Politics determined the choice of translations and above all those translated works’ interpretations in reviews. As a result, many novels have their complex content reduced to Polish-German or Polish-Russian antagonisms, minority problems (particularly Jewish) or an anti- Communist stand. Apart from a few academic books, such as Daniel Gerould’s on S.I. Witkiewicz (1981) or Russell E. Brown’s on Schulz (1991), little attention has been paid to the position of Polish fiction within the history of the twentieth-century novel, or to its contribution to the modern plurality of vision. Habitually regarded as belonging to a somewhat provincial culture, it has often been considered important only insofar as certain political points can be made. I The purpose of this book is not to promote the Polish novel to a status equal to those literatures that govern the development of modem fiction. There is little doubt that, notwithstanding all their achievement, Polish writers hardly match Joyce, Proust, Faulkner or Garcia Marquez in originality. Yet the history of the modem novel is incomplete when the 1 2 STANISLAW EILE output of less well-known literatures is totally ignored. Besides, Modernism and Postmodernism are not monolithic, as they are understood in various ways in different national literatures. While many books on the subject are inclined to portray a unified picture of modem fiction (e.g. Bradbury and McFarlane, 1976; Lodge, 1979;1 Fokkema and Ibsch, 1987) the author of this study emphasizes discords, which are often irreconcilable. In fact, the diversity of trends originating in various cultures undoubtedly helps one to understand the modern novel and the multiplicity of its inspirations and goals, which are unified only in their broadest appeal. It is necessary to find an unprejudiced perspective to adequately describe dominant trends and attitudes. This can be better achieved by an observant study of pertinent materials, rather than by the arbitrary imposition of prevalent ideas of modernity or postmodernity, which are usually marred by fashionable trends in philosophy and literature. Thus the influence of Barthes on the understanding of twentieth-century trends and the consequent postmodern perception of Modernism has been reflected primarily in contemporary prejudice against any form of realism, regarded as an approach founded on ‘bad faith’ and an instrument of much hated bourgeois ideology, and also in an attempt to overestimate the role of metalingual function in narratives before 1950 (e.g. Fokkema and Ibsch, 1987). As a result, not only the behaviourist, newsreel style of Hemingway and Dos Passos, but also the sophisticated narratives of Henry James and Joseph Conrad find themselves beyond the doctrinal confine of modernity as it is thus understood. Therefore Michael H. Levenson’s Genealogy of Modernism, concerned with English literary doctrines between 1908 and 1922, provides invaluable inspiration. As the author points out, Modernism is a term ‘at once vague and unavoidable’, mostly based on a sharp, dualistic, and indeed Manichaean contrast with what is understood as nineteenth-century culture (1986, vii-ix). None the less, its own development is nothing but a ‘history of oppositions, disproportions and asymmetries, a history of distinctions drawn then dramatized, a doctrinal struggle waged often between mutually excluding extremes’ (ibid., 186). There is friction between Romantic notions of freedom and individualism on the one side, and Classical notions of order and restraint on the other, between subjectivism and objectivism, creativity and mimesis, realism and non¬ realism or the idea of pure form (ibid., passim). Thus we have to assume that any search for the meaning of modernity must remain within broad formulas which allow for pluralism. Since the nineteenth-century novel had not been uniform and had several, nationally-based, formal variations, twentieth-century writers were frequently opposing different local traditions, and sometimes looked for inspiration in what was 1 In his more recent book (1990), Lodge’s inclination to understand all twentieth- century fiction from one contemporary perspective never exceeds reasonable limits. INTRODUCTION 3 considered old-fashioned elsewhere. Thus the loose and digressive structure of the Victorian novel, denigrated at home, was found interesting by some French critics, disenchanted with the well-disciplined structure of their own fiction (see Raimond, 1966), while in England Percy Lubbock (1957 [1921]) preferred Flaubert, Tolstoy and Balzac to Thackeray or George Eliot. Making allowances for ‘borrowed’ ideas and forms appears to be helpful in understanding the contradictory forces that have shaped Modernism and Postmodernism. We may start from the assumption that during the late nineteenth century the supremacy of the English and the French novel was eventually undermined in the West by the discovery of the great Russian writers, particularly after the publication of Eugene M. de Vogue’s Le roman russe (Paris, 1886). The contribution of Scandinavian novelists and playwrights at the turn of the century also created grounds for a reassessment of what had hitherto been regarded as good narrative. In the English-speaking world, however, the model was first found in France in the writings of Gustave Flaubert and in the Impressionist attention to visual immediacy, coupled in the works of James and Conrad with intellectual inwardness. Henry James’s notion of the ‘central intelligence’ and his point-of-view technique were later elaborated and turned into mandatory principles by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921). His more prescriptive than descriptive account of Madame Bovary and the novels of Henry James paved the way for the ascendancy of such differentiation as ‘scenic and panoramic presentation’ (later ‘telling and showing’) (Lubbock, 1957 [1921], 67, 110-13). Beach’s The Twentieth- Century