Under Latin American Eyes Witold Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literature

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) is known as a Polish writer and playwright who belongs to the world literature canon because of his monumental Diary and the novel Ferdydurke. We usually treat Gombrowicz’s connections with Argentina – where he lived from 1939 to 1963 – as a life-related curiosity, eagerly noted in the biographies of the writer, but deprived of much significance from the perspective of the meaning of his work or philosophical and literary implications contained within it. Even though Gombrowicz lived abroad for years (first in Argentina, then in France), he never abandoned his mother tongue, writing exclusively in Polish. Indeed, the country of his birth considers him one of the greatest if not the greatest national writer. Without denying his otherwise obvious belonging to the Polish canon, I will look at Gombrowicz’s oeuvre from the Argentinian point of view, that is to say, as works belonging to this country’s literary tradition. Such reading is aligned with Argentinian interpretative practice since Argentinians themselves do not perceive Gombrowicz as a foreign writer, but rather a native one, even if his work does not belong to the mainstream national literature. As I will explain in detail below, the fact that he did not write in Spanish was not an obstacle to this “annexation.” Argentinians argue, not unrightfully, that it was their country where Gombrowicz wrote most of his books: Trans-Atlantyk, The Marriage, Pornography, a lion’s share of Diary, and most of Cosmos and Kronos.

My book, then, will not be a study of Gombrowicz’s life in Argentina,¹ and the biographical matters will be addressed only marginally – wherever they are necessary for the understanding of how Argentinians read his works. The main purpose of this book is to trace the “Gombrowicz effect” in Argentinian literature, and to answer the following questions: Who has read his works and in what ways? What has been filtered out of the works? Where in Argentinian culture can we find Gombrowicz’s traces and themes? The assumptions that surround the comparative studies on the reception of the author in another national culture that I propose may cause some discomfort to the readers familiar with classical interpretations of Gombrowicz’s works. This discomfort would stem from the conviction that, in his uniqueness, Gombrowicz escapes interpretative control. This, in turn, happens precisely because they heavily privilege the context of reception, giving it the right to (over)interpret the text received “from the outside.” In other words, the “Argentinian Gombrowicz” that I present will tell much more about Argentinian literature than about Gombrowicz himself. Only such an approach, focused on the receiving culture, makes it possible to avoid criticizing Argentinians for mistakes and inconsistencies in their understanding compared to Polish criticism: their doxa in the light of Polish episteme. Naturally, such a pragmatically directed research method – intended to indicate how Gombrowicz “acts” in the literary universe of his adopted homeland – requires some conscious concessions to the target culture.

The most important one would be the permission to read Gombrowicz as an Argentinian writer, which seems to be a challenging task, not only because of the Polish national sentiment but because of the need to suspend the Polish context of genesis and reception of Gombrowicz’s work. The native and the universal circumstances of the works’ creation (undoubtedly present, despite his gradual “entering into Argentina”²) and the “Gombrowicz studies” (Gombrowiczologia) that have emerged around them remain of little importance here. In turn, the “Argentinization” of Gombrowicz also means renouncing the recent transcultural perspective which is gladly accepted by comparatists. The perspective involves the study of literary creations not so much in isolation from the culture in which they were produced, but in isolation, or freedom, from all cultural constraints, perceived as a prison for individual experience. The typically Argentinian reading of Gombrowicz is far from such an understanding, reluctant to abandon native reference points. Even today, when Hispanic literature seemingly enters the path to globalization, glorifying various post-national identities, Argentinians continue to read Gombrowicz as their own writer, worthy of referencing in their strictly national contexts, although at the same time they perceive his work as a borderline case in their literature, otherwise fairly open to foreignness (after all, he wrote in Polish).

In the first chapter of the monograph, I discuss in detail the research method that will then serve to analyze the “Gombrowicz effect” in the literature of the La Plata region. The reader that is uninterested in the methodological issues may proceed to the next chapter in which I cover the Spanish translations of Gombrowicz’s works, often significantly different from the Polish originals, for Argentinian versions of Ferdydurke, The Marriage, and Diary were rewritten or updated by Gombrowicz, which alters the scope of acceptable interpretative possibilities. I devote the next chapter to map the loci communes that Argentinian criticism sets for the work of Gombrowicz – such as corporeality and youth, language, travel and exile, and configuration of the literary “self” – always determined based on the internal dynamics of the local literature. The introduction to these considerations presents a brief reconstruction of the historical and critical process which enabled the “Argentinization” of Gombrowicz. The last and the longest chapter of this monograph is about the “use” of Gombrowicz by contemporary Argentinian writers, often representing very distant esthetics which, in turn, led them to create various precursors, other Gombrowiczes, by accentuating the various components of his work. I adopt 1970 as the symbolic starting point of my research, to focus on the interpretations unmediated by Gombrowicz’s self-commentary – he left Argentina forever in 1963, and his works gradually “freed” themselves from the burden of Gombrowicz’s legend as the provocateur and the enfant terrible of the literary scene, and the group of his works’ commentators was no longer limited to the circle of close friends.

In this chapter, I primarily reflect on the suitability of the methodological tools which I have chosen to analyze the case of “Argentinian Gombrowicz.” I begin with a general discussion of the comparative literature, the advantages and disadvantages attributed to it, and the hopes placed therein. Then, I proceed to the issue of reception conditions of a foreign writer in national literature. Here, I especially ponder the specifically Polish context, both from the perspective of the “attractiveness” of Polish literature for a foreign reader and how it “annexes” foreign writers. Next, I check to what extent the research tools based on the theory of “world literature” (of Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch) are used in the research on the creativity transfer of Gombrowicz to Argentinian culture. I also discuss the category of “intertextuality” and set boundaries to the “approved intertextuality” for the literary analyses in later chapters. I conclude this chapter with a brief review of the current state of knowledge of the reception of the work and the legend of Gombrowicz in Argentina.

The Method

The research on the reception of Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina is undoubtedly of interest for the comparative studies which over recent decades have earned a multitude of epithets: aside from the traditional comparative literature, there are also comparative interdisciplinary, cultural, and media studies.¹ Furthermore, this field shares its object of study with the postcolonial reflection (and a spectrum of political approaches proper to it), theory and practice of “world literature,” translation studies, and the proposed “possible history of literature.”² Depending on the adopted perspective, comparative studies absorb those fields, intermingle with them, or become part of those fields, accepting that they are unstable and “undisciplined” as the price of such a broad research horizon. At the same time, however, the opponents of comparative studies allege that they lack a proper object of study and are parasitic on related disciplines, particularly national philologies.³ Together with the troubling abundance of terminology, this multidimensional quality makes the researchers who deal with literary (or cultural) texts from this perspective feel obliged to determine, by extensively referring to theoretical works, the actual type of comparative studies they aim to conduct.