Resumption on Another Periphery. Gombrowicz in Argentina

Pálfalvi Lajos


The region has been liberated from the direct supervising imperial center for two decades, but it certainly does not mean that it would have the same cultural prestige as the European hard core, which can be called, with postcolonial terminology, substitute hegemony. This is the superior platform that decides to what extent we are deviant. It marginalizes our historical experiences gained about the two totalitarianisms and forces its own pc etiquette on us.

Gombrowiczs example is instructive because he fought a successful fight in a hopeless situation, not letting marginalize himself and he found an opportunity at the point where others would have given up. He freed himself from the prohibitions in Argentina, that is considered the exotic south, and immersed “in the poetry of life” as a being outside the castes. He built a new hybrid identity, in which voluptuousness came to the forefront. He submerged in the dilemmas of the Argentinian periphery. Of course, this has nothing to do with the immigrants’ fervour concerning the knowledge about their country. Those immigrants were driven by the desire to assimilate. Gombrowicz did not want to be an Argentinian writer, but at the time he could not find his readers outside of earshot. He affected only those, who he was able to address directly. Since this communicational situation was going on for years, it can be reasonably presumed that it also left its marks on Gombrowicz’s writing. Although he intended an important role for self-commentaries and self-interpretations in Poland as well, he fought against the misunderstandings and making the works of art shallow there. He did not complain about nobody being aware of his existence.

In Argentina he could not rely on competent and unselfish interpreters resembling Bruno Schulz, so he had to do everything on his own. He was the one who had to write the works and had to convince the recipient medium about their significance of the period. He was practicing this type of activity in the most various ways for almost one and a half decades, so when he finally started his diary, he knew exactly from the very first moment what he wanted to achieve with it, by what means.

He speaks in the traditional role of emigrants in his writing titled ”Poland and the Latin World”: he introduces his own culture to those people of the host country who are interested in it and he is looking for connection points with them. The ”Polish emigration” dedicated several volumes to the country’s European nature and to its thousand-year-old Christianity. The title suggests that Gombrowicz also wants to strengthen the cultural consciousness of the Polish by enumerating the results and then he declares the Polish-Latin togetherness. The most interesting thing is that in essence he really does this. However, he spreads completely new arguments and emphasizes keeping a distance instead of belonging together. Speaking in terms of the language of post-colonialism: he rejects the custodianship of the substitute hegemon. This is unusual from the Polish part because the thousand-year-old presence of the Latin culture has never coincided with violence.