What is there really to know about modern Polish literature? This might constitute a slippery question for most readers of Slavic Review who do not happen to be Polish studies specialists. Anita Starosta's new book seeks to offer a set of generalist responses, and a novel theoretical structure that would contain them. The greatest insight of her lucid though too cursory account is that it is a corpus that indexes and articulates a set of existential conditions elaborated from a place of temporal delay and general untranslatability, and that these conditions and practices, in sum, both mark and enact a kind of cultural mutual illegibility with respect to western audiences.
The book is broken into two parts and five chapters, of which all but one examine selected narratives by a major twentieth century Polish author in the twin contexts of Polish marginality or hermeticism which enables forgetting and “misprision” (165), and a frisson of “postimperial difference” that these works presumably offer readers today (Chapter 2 comparatively reads two authors, one of a late nineteenth century writer). In sequence, the writers under discussion are Tadeusz Konwicki, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Joseph Conrad (re-assimilated for the text's purposes), Witold Gombrowicz, and Jozef Tischner.
In Chapter 1, “The Passing of Eastern Europe,” Starosta traces the spectacular changes that the region has experienced over the last several decades. This reading of postimperial difference is taken up again in the final Chapter, where she analyzes a recent French work of comparative philology, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, to see whether the new status of eastern Europe has at all increased its visibility and indeed its representability. She shows that marginalization of east European culture is still emphatically the modus operandi, the Vocabulaire devoting exactly zero space to Poland's thinkers and movements.
Starosta's project is to resituate Polish culture into a liminal place, between monocultures (western Europe through its synecdoche, Paris) and political blocs (Cold War binaries). The emergent Poland is variously a constitutive part of eastern Europe and an important player in the postcolonial, “postimperial” world—with the two terms applied sequentially and sometimes interchangeably, as in the chapter on Conrad. The resulting slippage and lack of denotative precision constitutes the first obstacle to the argument's legibility: she means to say that Poland is actually both an “eastern” European space/culture, thus nominally delayed, inferior, “othered” both through external representational practices and internally, in response to those practices, and post-colonial, its cultural offerings over the last 200 years providing proof of a pedagogy of the marginalized. This tenuous positionality, Starosta tries to show but not always convincingly, has guided Polish national self-expression and “successful[ly] reifi[ed]” its cultural identity (137). It is somewhat unfortunate that the authors chosen for explication of the central hypothesis occupy the “spaces” of contestation only partially: for example, a propos of “postimperial” discourse, it seems an anachronism to devote a chapter to Gombrowicz or Konwicki, who wrote between the 1930s and 1980s, but not Andrzej Stasiuk or Olga Tokarczuk, who are writing now, and may have something direct to say about postimperial “difference” as a category of experience felt on one's skin. Referring to Conrad as principally a Polish or even east European writer, when his own repeated proclamations on the subject sought to align his life and particularly his work (perhaps too desperately?) with Britain, when he wrote his fictions and memoirs only in English is even more confusing. The book is beset by a still more fundamental problem, however, with respect to the thematic trajectory and the readerly horizon of expectation established thereby.
That central shortcoming of the book's approach is one of effective scope, and this is signaled right in the title. Despite the foregrounding of “Eastern Europe” the study is only remotely interested in this region as a whole, focusing almost exclusively on Polish literature and culture, both domestic and diasporic. Anyone interested in a sustained discussion of how east European cultures in Poland's general neighborhood may have negotiated problems of social, cultural, and political transition from state socialism to being part of a globalized market economy, or what authors hailing from these places—as well as literary and cultural critics who “globally” work on these regions—may have written on the subject, will be disappointed. And even the discussion of the Polish experience seems rushed, the author more interested in laying out the groundwork for framing the discourse of audience reception and reading theory as a way of explaining minor-literature legibility, “cognizability” (131), and marketability (though that Deleuzoguattarian term does not appear anywhere, in favor of Franco Moretti's notion of “distant reading” and “the great unread,” effectively a passing over of texts coming from “marginal” cultures, which consigns them to perpetual exclusion [133–35]).
Despite the misleading subtitle—Literature, Postimperial Difference, and Poland (is what this is really about), the work, which colonizes, so to speak, new spaces of cultural contestation and cognizability in a (hoped for) post-Eurocentric world, has much to offer the general reader. Starosta deftly interrogates the space of production for the writers surveyed, proceeding from a careful articulation of formal concerns—for instance, issues of genre and belatedness—and the processes of de-formation exerted on art of the not exactly postimperial and not quite postcolonial Poland of the last hundred or so years.
That being said, the study does not have much to offer the specialist reader, in particular the two chapters treating the biggest “names,” the Polish-exile Gombrowicz, and the hyphenated-Polish (yet still perennially “foreign”-in-Britain) Conrad. Readers familiar with their complex personal and artistic itineraries and seeking new insight will find none here, the author mainly rehearsing well-known arguments, respectively, on form and deformation (as two posts of authentic self-articulation for the four-decade long Gombrowiczian subjectivity project), and duality and subversive irony (which undercut or multiply the meanings of Conradian textuality).
In contrast, Chapter 2, “Strategies of Accession,” where Starosta closely reads a set of lectures and essays by the famed Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, merit wide recognition. Through her juxtaposition of early writings on and from a still-colonial Africa published for the early 2000s volume The Other, Starosta brilliantly adumbrates the extent of Janus-faced games with reality employed by this globe-trotting “reporter of reality.” The primary contribution of this chapter is her innovative reading of Kapuscinski's blindness and insight with regard to race, which represents a continuation of Polish attitudes to the non-western and non-white “others” encountered in earlier authors, particularly Sienkiewicz's 1910 adventure cum pedagogical novel for adolescents, W pustyni i w puszczy. Starosta offers a key revision, and in linking Kapuscinski's treatment of “whiteness” (60–65) to Sienkiewicz's tale's “nesting Orientalisms” (5) and blindly “declarative” racism (66–69), performs a critical coup. Along with the introduction, (its somewhat misidentified scope notwithstanding), the judiciously prosecuted Chapter 2 reveals Starosta at her polemicizing best.
