I would like to thank Reza Baraheni, Thomas Lahusen, Tamara Trojanowska, and Mark D. Steinberg, as well as members of the University of Illinois Slavic Studies Kruzhok, for their valuable comments and suggestions on the various drafts of this article. Special thanks also go to the three anonymous readers at Slavic Review for their insightful critiques. The epigraph is taken from Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1953; Krakow, 2000), 60. “Don't you want to become something else, someone New? … Oh, let the Boys out of the paternal cage, Let them roam in the wilderness, let them glimpse the Unknown!” The translation is my own.

1. The novel was published in Polish. Unless otherwise noted, English-language quotes from the novel are taken from Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk, trans. Carolyn French and Nina Karsov (New Haven, 1994).

2. For a summary of these early interventions, especially once the novel became available (for a limited time and in very limited copies) in Poland after October 1956, see Brodsky, David, “Witold Gombrowicz and the ‘Polish October,'” Slavic Review 39, no. 3 (September 1980): 461-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stefan Chwin, “Gombrowicz i forma polska” (afterword), in Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (2000), 121-23.

3. This intersubjective vision was first promulgated in his debut novel Ferdydurke (Warsaw, 1937). In the novel, the ideational pressure of communal identity, which Gombrowicz termed “form,” on the development of individual subjectivity, was enacted through narrative doubling and confrontations between individuals wielding institutionalized power, such as teachers or landowners, and their pupils or subjects.

4. Chapters from the book had appeared in installments in Jerzy Giedroyc's emigre monthly Kultura between 1951 and 1952. Waclaw Zbyszewski's essay “Dezerter,” can be found in Wiadomosci in London (27 January 1952). Other back-and-forth attacks on and defenses of Gombrowicz were published in Kultura between 1951 and 1954. The anthology by Zdzislaw fapinski, ed., Gombrowicz. i krytycy (Krakow, 1984), contains an invaluable index of commentaries on the writer in Polish, English, Spanish, and other languages, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of Gombrowicz's oeuvre; for the 1951-54 period, see 766-72, 796-97. On Gombrowicz's uncompromising (and thus frequently misread) attitude toward the functions and role of literature, see also Czeslaw Milosz's meditation “Podzwonne,” in Zaczynajac od moich ulic (Krakow, 2006), esp. 424-25 and 428, where Milosz points out that never in his career, not even in the midst of the most difficult personal circumstances as the early years in Argentina no doubt constituted, did Gombrowicz compromise himself in any way in his writing. Despite his marked antagonism toward the writer, Tadeusz Kepinski's analysis of Gombrowicz's three prefaces to Trans-Atlantyk—which constituted responses to the persisting critiques of the novel—is also of interest as Kepinski notes a number of “modifications” in Gombrowicz's views about his intentions for the novel; see Kepinski, Tadeusz, Gombrowicz: Studio portretowe (Krakow, 1988), 339–409.Google Scholar

5. This was typically portrayed as abandonment of the homeland, verging on treason, paralleling his decision to stay in South America in 1939. The most clamorous commentaries from the 1951-54 period include reviews and feuilletons published in the domestic venues but also in emigre reviews such as Wiadomosci, which assumed a particularly hostile stance with regard to the work. See Jerzy Lovell, “Patriota a rebours?” Zycie Literackie, vol. 4, no. 36 (12 September 1954): 6; and for other commentators’ views, see Witold Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1957-1961 (Krakow, 2000), 14, 70-74. Among the critics—in Poland and abroad—who took up the polemic and came to Gombrowicz's defense are Jozef Wittlin, Konstantyjelenski, and Artur Sandauer. See Jozef Wittlin, “Apologia Gombrowicza,” Kultura 7/8 (1951): 52-60, which as “Uwagi wstepne” was also used as a preface to the first edition of Trans-Atlantyk; Konstantyjelenski, “Bohaterskie niebohaterstwo Gombrowicza,” Kultura 9 (1957): 31-42; and Artur Sandauer, in his seminal study of post-World War II writing, Bez taryfy ulgowej (Krakow, 1959), 37-65. Sandauer, the then-doyen of Polish literary criticism and one-time king of socialist realist orthodoxy, began championing Gombrowicz's writings particularly during the 1956-57 thaw, when he rejected the socialist realist doctrine. See Brodsky, “Witold Gombrowicz and the ‘Polish October,'” 469. Stefan Kisielewski's review “O Gombrowiczu zalosnym i Hannie Malewskiej w Londynie” appeared in Tygodnik Powszechny in 1957.

6. See Markowski, Michat Pawel, Czarny nurt: Gombrowicz, swiat, literatura (Krakow, 2004), 9–33 Google Scholar, for a discussion of the traditional “thematic” readings of Gombrowicz the polemicist and “critic” (16), especially 13-19, where Markowski develops the thesis that “no other Polish writer” devoted as much effort to creating (wynalezienie) or more specifically inventing (wynajdywanie) a language with which to comment on the unknown depth that is the world (14)—essentially the unheimlich discourse of the self-deterritorialized writing subject, writing on and of the margin (19); on the idea of the deracinated writer, with Gombrowicz posited as an exorbitant (wykolejony, vjyrzucony sam z siebie), see 344-46. On a more general metatextual register, see Legierski's summary of the history of Gombrowicz criticism from the moment of the socialist thaw of 1955-57, when Gombrowicz ceased to be considered persona non grata in Poland, until the time of his own monograph. Legierski, Michal, Modernizm Gombrowicza: Wybrane zagadnienia (Stockholm, 1996).Google Scholar Legierski's frustration with the early Gombrowiczian critical industry is clearly apparent when he writes, for example, that “Gombrowicz's vanguardist provocations clearly unsettled the more pedantic of his readers [pimkowatych uczniow], who uttered their pronouncements with priestly, decorous solemnity” (17). Note thatPimko is the name of the clueless teacher in Ferdydurke who “kidnaps” the protagonist and sends him back to primary school against his will. The grounds of such spiteful readings? Legierski points especially to “tedious academism and intertextual befuddlement” (391).

7. See, for instance, Marcin Kepinski's recent study Mit, symbol, historia, tradycja: Gombrowicza gry z kultura (Warsaw, 2006), a text that, for all of its claims of scholarly detachment and objectivity, nonetheless remains oddly ambivalent about Gombrowicz's professed iconoclasm with respect to violating, in Trans-Atlantyk, the “national sacrum” of the Romantic-martyrological imperative, and his insistence on Poland's provincial status (254-86). Reading Kepinski, one has the uneasy feeling diat the critic is blaming Gombrowicz for the negative press that his provocations garnered.

8. See Waclaw Kozlowski, “Komu shizy Gombrowicz?” published in the Buenos Aires expat paper Glos Polski (28 May 1954): 6.

9. See especially his meditation in the second volume of his diary, Dziennik, 1957- 1961, 18-30. Gombrowicz had arrived in Buenos Aires on a literary tour in August 1939, but by a quirk of history was not to leave until mid-1963. World War II erupted shortly after Gombrowicz's arrival on the main line ship Boleslaw Chrobry; he stayed behind by choice when his fellow book tour members set sail on their return journey toward Poland. They never made it home, however; the Nazi naval blockade of the Baltic Sea caused their course to be diverted to the United Kingdom. See Roux, Dominique de, Rozmowy z Gombrowiczem (Paris, 1969), 68–70 Google Scholar; and Suchanow, Klementyna, Argentynskieprzygody Gombrowicza (Krakow, 2005), 5–30.Google Scholar

10. As does his final word on the subject (of himself and his art). See de Roux, Rozmowy z Gombrowiczem, 88-89.

11. See, for example, Giedroyc, Jerzy, Autobiografia na cilery rgce (Warsaw, 2006), 177 Google Scholar; Suchanow, Argentynskie przygody Gombrowicza, 156-58, and Milosz, Zaczynajac od moich ulic, 141-42. For the author's own perspective on the storm brewing around his work and his name, see the first volume of Gombrowicz's diary, Dziennik, 1953-1956 (Krakow, 2000), esp. 26-29 and 36-37.

12. Michal Pawel Markowski, author of an incisive recent study of Gombrowicz, suggests that Z)2i«nw'A is essentially a parody of forms and not to be looked to as a source of the official documented “truth” by and about Gombrowicz. I largely agree with this position, as Gombrowicz was a master of literary manipulations. However—and I think Markowski would concur here—it is nonetheless an unmatched document for scholarly illumination about Gombrowicz, and that illumination often comes when we read the Diaries, not only against the grain, but specifically also against Gombrowicz's own stated (but often cleverly disguised) “literary” intentions for the text. See especially Markowski's discussion in Czarny nurt, 22-25, 31-33, and 303-10; see also Gombrowicz's rebuttal to his critics, cited in Markowski, Czarny nurt, 32.

13. de Roux, Rozmowy z Gombrotuiczem, 80-81; my translation.

14. See Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1953-1956,19-30; Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1957-1961, 25-27. See also his “Reply to Cioran,” in Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1953-1956, 66-69. This short essay is Gombrowicz's first affirmation of the potentiality of exilic becoming as a function of severance from the familiar and the complacent—an affirmation, in other words, of immersion into “excessive freedom” of the spaces of the ex-patria.

15. See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Polan, Dana (Minneapolis, 1986), chap. 3.Google Scholar For a discussion of interstitial discourse, see Foucault, Michel, “Preface,” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

16. See Suchanow, Argentynskieprzygody Gombrowicza, esp. 47-81.

17. Foucault, The Order of Things, xx.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., xv.

20. See Czeslaw Milosz, “Notes on Exile,” in Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere, 36-39. For a “contrapuntal” mode of perception, see Edward Said, “Lessons and Opportunities: Reflections on Exile,” in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Boston, 1994), 148.

21. In both the English- and French-language versions of the novel, “Synczyzna” is felicitously translated as “Filistria” (versus “Patria“).

22. See Berressem, Hanjo, Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz's Fiction tuith Lacan (Evanston, 1997), 104.Google Scholar

23. Knut Andreas Grimstad is one contemporary critic who makes this claim explicitly. See his “Beyond Identity Politics, or the Polish Past Mastered: Transatlantic Strategies in the Writings of Witold Gombrowicz,” Slavonica 11, no. 1 (April 2005): 60, 66; compare the 1994 edition of Trans-Atlantyk, 37-40. Here Gonzalo refers to his appetite, nay hunger, for “Young ones—Boys …” (37), as opposed to the narrator who is in his mid-thirties; this, however, is further contextualized—and complicated—by his stated preference for “a Craftsman, now a Labourer or an Apprentice, or a Scullery Lad or a Soldier, or a Sailor” (38). It is difficult to defend the notion that he is a pedophile from the reference to “Boy” alone.

24. Of course the experience of alterity in its various registers does not require the condition of exile; however, expatriation foregrounds the Other and simultaneously foreshortens our distance from this Other, so that we may (even) coincide with the Other's “otherness.” See Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), 68-78. On the dialectics of euphoria-despondency in exilic identity-construction, see Naficy, Hamid, “Introduction,” The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis, 1993), 1–7 Google Scholar. For a more cynical perspective on exile (“a f a l l … into a ridiculously small infinite“), see Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, Journey to the End of the Night (1934), trans. Manheim, Ralph (New York, 1983), 184-85.Google Scholar

25. For example, for Berressem the narrator's voyage is an embodiment of a “smooth … deterritorialized space.” Berressem, Lines of Desire, 105; for Zdravko Malic it constitutes a “zero-point.” See Zdravko Malic, “Trans-Atlantyk Witolda Gombrowicza,” in Lapinski, ed., Gombrowicz i krytycy, 236.

26. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 3.

27. On the issue of liminality, see Kristeva, Julia, The Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Waller, Margaret (New York, 1984), 20–30.Google Scholar

28. It is purely incidental, though surely not without some symbolic significance, that King Chrobry was one of the purveyors of Christianity in medieval Poland, as well as a legendary unifier of the Polish nation.

29. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 6-7.

30. Seejerzyjarzebski's moving essay “W Buenos Aires—po trzydziestu pieciu latach,” Podgladanie Gombrowiaa (Krakow, 2000), 220-35. For Gombrowicz exile coincides with the outbreak of World War II, but the exact causal relation is oblique, since his decision to remain in Argentina, as opposed to returning to war-torn Poland by any means necessary, is a voluntary act (the novel contains a number of playful references to this process). Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 5-6. Exile effectively provides an opportunity to escape the quagmire of yet another pan-European conflict, which in any event was widely thought to be forthcoming—according to Gombrowicz, “perhaps sometime in the new year [1940].” See Gombrowicz, Rita, Gombrowicz w Europie: Swiadectwa i dokumenty 1963-1969, trans. Hedemann, Oskar et al. (Krakow, 1993), 14–15.Google Scholar

31. As he affirms in the Diary, “the individual is something more fundamental than the nation. He takes precedence over the nation.” Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1953-1956, 16. All translations from the diaries are my own.

32. The figure of Cieciszowski, apparently modeled after a distant relative, is a metonymy for the “in-between” emigre, paralyzed into inaction by a primary sense of liminality and attendant ambivalence, trudging softly and back and forth between the host culture and the patriotic/anachronistic agencies of the expatriate “colony.”

33. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 8.

34. Ibid., 7-8 (emphasis added).

35. See Berressem, Lines of Desire, 108.

36. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 63-64.

37. Ibid., 75-79.

38. See the narrator's initial exchange with the embassy dignitaries, Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 11-16.

39. For an elaboration cum deconstruction of interwar Poland's (semiofficial) policy of positional exceptionalism, see Gombrowicz, Witold, Polish Memories, trans. Johnston, Bill (New Haven, 2004), esp. 120-23, 146-48, 165-69, 177-88.Google Scholar For a sampling of additional contextual commentary on the troubled treatment of minorities in interwar Poland, especially the chauvinism exhibited toward the borderland Poles and increasingly, as the 1930s wore on, the Jews in Poland, see, in particular, Milosz, Czeslaw, “Narodowosci,” Rodzinna Europa (1959; Krakow, 2001), 105-23Google Scholar, also 220-21, and Milosz, Zaczynajac od moich ulic, 28-32, and esp. 37-54; Giedroyc, Autobiografia na cztery rece, 46-52, 66-68; Hoffman, Eva, Shtetl: The Life andDeath of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Boston, 1997), 159–200 Google Scholar; Paczkowski, Andrzej, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Cave, Jane (University Park, 2003), 1–36.Google Scholar

40. See, for example, Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1957-1961, 20. On the subject of marginality, Gombrowicz's position may have been more indicative of the international realities—either before 1939 or during the 1950s—than of his own cultural hypersensitivity to the dialectic of master and servant, metropolitan versus provincial subject, which was in turn txopologically mediated in the novels through the self-reflexive synecdoches of immaturity/youth/fluidity of incomplete form versus maturity/completeness of form.

41. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 55-57.

42. Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1957-1961, 19-21.

43. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, chap. 1.

44. Gombrowicz, Polish Memories, 93.

45. Gombrowicz, Polish Memories, 93. Also see Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1953-1956, 32- 33, and 38-40; Gombrowicz, Polish Memories, 25-27. On Poland's “modest contribution to world culture,” see also 76-77, 87-100, and esp. 123-24, where Gombrowicz points out that the Wawel Castle complex—perhaps Poland's most intensely concentrated artistic monument—was constructed and outfitted almost entirely by foreign architects and artisans who had been invited to Krakow by a succession of Polish rulers. See also the essay in de Roux, Rozmowy z Gombrowiczem, 35-40, on the subject of the great “Compromise (and Degradation) of Form” in Polish culture and literature (36; capitalization in the original).

46. Gombrowicz, Dziennik, 1957-1961, 22-23.

47. Ibid., 25.

48. Ibid., 21.

49. Gombrowicz's tendency in his narratives to establish subversive oppositions that prey on the symbolic and psychological complexes and introduce structural turbulence or ideational impurities is well documented. See, for example, Berressem, Hanjo, “The Laws of Deviation: Physical and Psychic Aberrations in the Novels of Witold Gombrowicz,” in Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, ed., Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (Albany, 1998), 90–98,124-27.Google Scholar

50. Gombrowicz reiterates this position in several of his works. See, for example, Dziennik, 1953-1956, 122-24, 143-44, 232-33; and Dziennik, 1957-1961, 20-27. On the issue of Polish martyrdom, see Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk,” in Plonowska Ziarek, ed., Gombrowicz's Grimaces, 225.

51. And see Milosz, Rodzinna Europa, 62-63, where these two scions of the Polish gentry—contemporaries nearly—are (shockingly?) compared and contrasted.

52. Milosz referred to this internal splitting as Ketman, a term that described a survival strategy among intellectuals in east central Europe who found diemselves forced to learn new rules of survival under communist regimes. See Milosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind, trans. Zielonko, Jane (New York, 1953).Google Scholar In this political treatise Milosz undertakes a sociohistorical analysis of the life of four Polish writers active before and after the 1945 communist takeover. The concept of Ketman as an instrument of political survival is elaborated in the introductory chapter.

53. See also Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 216.

54. See Thompson, Ewa, Witold Gombrowicz (Boston, 1979), 120-21Google Scholar, and Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 225-26.

55. See de Roux, Rozmowy z Gombrowiczem, 89, 91.

56. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 31-35. If Gombrowicz can be believed, Borges is, apparently, his inadvertent rival. It is worth noting that all major confrontations that transpire during this quest for heterotopia are resolved through the atavistic institution of a literal or figurative duel. Only the first of the three staged duels implicates the narrator directiy. The second duel, an “empty” gunfight between Tomasz and Gonzalo, is inscribed as a metonymic confrontation between the Fatherland's weighty institutions and the unlegislated potentials of life in the Sonland. The final duel scene, this time involving Tomasz and Ignacy in a dialogic reversal of patricide, represents the definitive clash between these two zones, ultimately culminating in an anticlimax since the only real solution Gombrowicz can (for die moment) advance is an outburst of neutralizing—but also outrageous—laughter. It may also be instructive to consider the Cuban exile writer Reinaldo Arenas's take on this rivalry. See Arenas, Reinaldo, Before Night Falls: A Memoir, trans. Koch, Dolores (New York, 1994), 80–81.Google Scholar

57. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 32.

58. See Berressem, Lines of Desire, 117-18. To be fair to Jorge Luis Borges, any claims to his own ambassadorship are problematized as much by the textual cosmopolitanism he espoused as by the assertion, in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” that local writers should not preoccupy themselves with describing Argentinean “color” and the domestic realities. Their task, in order to be counted among fully realized artists, should instead be to engage European themes and speak to a global culture. In brief, Borges's prescription for the success of his fellow writers on the world stage rests on their being capable of becoming “universal” subjects. See Borges, Jorge Luis, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York, 1964), 181-84.Google Scholar As even a cursory reading of the Diary or A Kind of Testament reveals, this model of writerly subjectivity would not be entirely unfamiliar to Gombrowicz.

59. In particular see Jerzyjarzebski, Gra w Gombrowicza (Warsaw, 1982), 399-416.

60. Berressem, Lines of Desire, 117.

61. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 32; Berressem, Lines of Desire, 118.

62. Berressem, Lines of Desire, 118-19.

63. Ibid., 119-22.

64. Despite this, and even though Gombrowicz scores a point against the intertextual subjectivity of the modernist elite—it may be parodied here from an early postmodernist perspective, but it was a technique of self-inscription that he, too, once explored, in Ferdydurke—the dialectics of originality and imitation nonetheless remain deeply etched in this text as a problem to work through on a subject's path toward autonomy. On the parodist styles of early postmodernism, see, for example, Spanos, William, “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,” in Bove, Paul A., ed., Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays (Durham, 1995), 17–39 Google Scholar; Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London, 1988), esp. chap. 8, “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History,” 124-40.

65. On the Poles’ traditional self-conscious epigonality, their dialectic of inferioritysuperiority in relation to their neighbors, and their inability (beginning before the Age of Enlightenment), to transform major western artistic and literary ideas into a unique form, see, for example, Milosz's ruminations in Rodzinna Europa, 66-99, on interwar nationalism and the Polish brand of Catholicism (which was for him akin to a Roman corset of imported liturgy that, when taken off or broken, would expose an inner chaos of unsystematized “western” forms and beliefs); and 146-72, on the relation between Polish and Russian nation making since the Partitions of Poland (“Rosja“). See also Gombrowicz, Polish Memories, 90-93. The “represented,” in Edward Said's now-classic dictum, are the Orientalized: they are voiceless subjects unable to, or more often forbidden from, representing themselves. For Said, the policies of their self-perception and their representation are always already the task of Another, either dictated or strongly reinforced by dominant (chiefly western European but also North American) authorizing centers. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 20-22. In Orientalism the concept of the “subaltern” is employed as a synonym for “Oriental.” As is well-known, however, Said cautions that within the orientalist enterprise, “Oriental” was “often meant as a derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being,” no matter which parts of the world they hailed from. See Said, Orientalism, 340.

66. The notion of “west-struckness” (also rendered as “occidentosis” and “westoxication“) was first formulated by the Iranian philosopher Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the 1960s. See Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness), trans. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeth (Costa Mesa, Calif., 1987). The prototype of this practice in the history of Poland is surely the phenomenon of elected, mainly foreign (western European) kings, principally during an era of budding national consciousness that begins with the Reformation era and culminates in the European Enlightenment.

67. Cf. Gombrowicz, Dxiennik, 1957-1961, 136-39 (emphasis added). It is certainly ironic that Gombrowicz would become an exile precisely because the beacon-of-light Europeans have launched a war of unparalleled brutality against one another, a technological war justified in part by modish not to say avant-gardist theories of social and scientific determinism.

68. In connection with this observation, see Markowski's superb deconstruction of Gombrowicz's portrayal (this one can be found in the Diary, but the paradigm remains the same) of the uncanny otherness of objects in the Argentinean port town of Goya, as well as his discussion of the concept of otherness in Gombrowicz's novel Cosmos, specifically the dynamics of the “relatedness or inter-relatedness [odnoszenie sie, czyli relacyjnosc]” of objects to one another and to the ordering consciousness of the narrative voice. See Markowski, Czarny nurt, 86-89. This later concept of otherness has its root in tracing the exilic otherness of a queer minor Polish noble author living out his personal drama, virtually unknown, under the vast and indifferent skies of Argentina.

69. This kind of heterotopic move, then, would seem to embody a postmodern strategy of self-inscription. See McHale's, Brian Postmodernist Fiction (London, 1987), 44–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70. Milosz, “Notes on Exile,” 37.

71. Emile M. Cioran, an exile in France and Gombrowicz's contemporary, savagely decried the second of the two possibilities: Such emigres, he wrote, form close-knit groups “to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals…. The little emigre reviews appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations.” See Cioran, E. M., “Advantages of Exile,“in Robinson, , ed., Altogether Elsewhere, 151.Google Scholar

72. See Ptonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 227-39.

73. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 36; Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 220-21.

74. Foucault, The Order of Things, xvi.

75. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 92-93 (emphasis added).

76. Ibid., 80.

77. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, 1987), chap. 4, on kitsch (225-62), for an analysis of this term with reference to the postmodernist Zeitgeist and western consumerist paradigms.

78. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 80.

79. Ibid., 81-82, 85.

80. Ibid., 82-83.

81. Ibid., 80-91.

82. Ibid., 81-82.

83. Ibid., 81.

84. Ibid., 81-82.

85. Ibid., 80, 84.

86. Ibid., 86.

87. Ibid., 91.

88. Ibid., 81-85.

89. Although completed at the end of the seventeenth century, the work was not published in its entirety until 1836, when a run of 250 copies was commissioned by Count Edward Raczynski of Poznan and apparently caused a literary furor. See Catherine S. Leach's preface and introduction to Catherine S. Leach, ed. and trans., Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, A Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania (Berkeley, 1976), xvi.

90. Ibid., 255-56.

91. See Grimstad, “Beyond Identity Politics,” 58-62; cf. Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 229-37.

92. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 82 (emphasis added).

93. See Foucault, The Order of Things, xiv-xvi.

94. Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (1994), 118 (emphasis added).

95. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 45.

96. The liminal positionality of die concepts of “hybridity” and “deformation” in Gombrowicz's practices of the self serves to help ratify his rejection of the sexual law of the majority. Trans-Atlantyk has been productively read in terms of queer theory, illuminating Gombrowicz's struggles with negotiating his sexual orientation while under scrutiny of a patriarchal culture, not only in Poland but also in Argentina, where homosexuals during Gombrowicz's time were contemptuously referred to asputos (the use of this term in Trans- Atlantyk is almost certainly an ironic one, though with conspicuous personal connotations that are surely not insignificant). For a discussion of the implications of Gombrowicz's queerness or bisexuality and the development of a personal manifesto of deformation against the “law of the majority,” see Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner,” 213— 25. See also Agnieszka Soltysik, “Witold Gombrowicz's Struggle with Heterosexual Form: From a National to a Performative Self,” in Plonowska Ziarek, ed., Gombrowicz's Grimaces, esp. 252-60; cf. Grimstad, “Beyond Identity Politics.”

97. On the scope of provocations in Gombrowicz's work and his disavowal of the cult of Great National Authors, including his own, see, for instance, Marzena Glowacka, “The Heresiarchs of Form: Gombrowicz and Schulz,” and Holmgren, Beth, “Witold Gombrowicz in the United States,” both in Ziarek, Plonowska, ed., Gombrowicz's Grimaces, 80–88 and 289-99.Google Scholar

98. This point is made eloquently by Janusz Marganski, in his introduction to Witold Gombrowicz: Listy dorodziny (Krakow, 2004), 14-16.

99. See Gombrowicz, , Wspomnieniapolskie: Wedroivki po Argentynie (1977; Warsaw, 1990), 10.Google Scholar On the persistence of his belief, see, for example, de Roux, Rozmorvy z Gombrowiczem, 35-37,38-41.

100. One of the earliest commentators to notice the novel's transitional poetics and its synthetic vanguardism as a work of art (“[w] Trans-Atlantyku czuje sie tchnienie nowej sztuki“) was the Yugoslav critic Zdravko Malic, writing in 1970. See Malic, “Trans-Atlantyk Witolda Gombrowicza,” 255-56.