Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form

Chapter One: Polish Modernism and the Problematics of Form

6 Chapter One Polish Modernism and the Problematics of Form Independent Poland, modernity, and Polish modernism In order to evaluate the modernist aesthetic practices such as those of Gombrowicz that took place in independent Poland and more specifically to account for their singularity and intensity, it is necessary to sketch out briefly some of the vicissitudes of Polish history. For the purposes of this book, modernism is defined as the European aesthetic practices that took place between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century and that were characterized by a response to modernity involving artistic experimentation, self-reflexivity, and the cultivation of the new. Polish modernism took place in two distinct phases, before and after the advent of independent Poland, and this section of the volume shows how the modernism of independent Poland was characterized by different yet related tendencies to its nineteenth-century beginnings . While the artistic developments that took place in Poland from the nineteenth century often bear strong resemblances to their Western European counterparts, there are also singular elements due at least partially to the subjugation of Poland by other nations from the eighteenth century up until 1918. This occupation had the effect of both delaying and intensifying the experience of modernity and modernism and also of ensuring that aesthetic and especially literary aspirations were inseparable from revolutionary dreams of emancipation. The entwining of aesthetic styles with politics may hardly have been unique in this period of political and artistic insurrections, but the central role that literature played in Poland as a voice of national resistance to a hundred-and-fifty years of occupation, a voice at once euphoric and despairing, gave this nexus between aesthetics and politics a unique intensity. From the late Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, Poland, or more exactly the united kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania, also known as the Grand Duchy, existed as a sovereign state (see, e.g., Miłosz, History 6-7). From the fifteenth century quasi-democratic institutions, which extended power only as far as the nobility, were introduced into what had formerly been a hereditary kingdom. Poland-Lithuania remained a predominantly feudal and agricultural society, however, in which the Polish Modernism and the Problematics of Form 7 bulk of the population, the peasantry, had little say. Nevertheless, in the relatively stable atmosphere of the Respublica, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , there was both economic prosperity and the flourishing of cultural and aesthetic practices from Renaissance humanism to the Polish baroque (Miłosz, History 25-27). In contrast, the eighteenth century was a period of significant cultural and economic decline, in which the consequences of Poland's archaic feudal structure led to both internal divisions and cultural stagnation. Despite a brief resurgence in the late eighteenth century and attempts at modernizing reforms, the much weakened commonwealth was no match for the military forces of Prussia, Muscovy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire, between whom Poland was partitioned at first partially and then entirely in 1795: Poland was no longer on the map of Europe. What is crucial about the following period of subjugation and insurrection is that it was during this anomalous and violent period that Polish nationalism really developed rather than during the period when Poland actually existed as a sovereign state. As Czesław Miłosz points out: "In the old Respublica the line between 'Polishness ' and 'non-Polishness' had been a blurred one . . . but when Poland lost her independence, the concept of 'Polishness' gradually emerged as an ethereal entity requiring loyalty and existing even without embodiment in a state" (History 200). Of course various forms of nationalism were crystallizing all over Europe, but it is crucial to Poland's singular destiny that its variant of nationalism should be more a desire for a lost sovereignty than the expression of an existing political reality. The consequences of this situation were the association of nationalist aspirations with both revolutionary and messianic tendencies, so much so that the concept of the national was more connected to insurrection and resistance than it was to the establishment of a democratic state. According to Andrzej Walicki, this combination of messianism, romanticism and nationalism, while related to surrounding European trends, attained a particular force in subjugated Poland: "It represented a peculiar recrudescence of millenarian tendencies within a secularized cultural and political setting. The European importance of Polish Romantic Messianism lies in the fact that in it those millenarian or quasi-millenarian tendencies which were inherent in or patent in most nineteenth...