Counter-discourse and the postcolonial perspective: The Polish Complex by Tadeusz Konwicki

Abstract

This article defines and categorizes the forms and histories of political dependence in Poland. It explores the consequences of prolonged subjugation and assesses its impact on the Polish mentality, considering especially the specific ways of understanding patriotism and its relation to the institutions of power. Advocating a considered use of certain postcolonial paradigms to central Europe and its specific situation of fluctuating dependencies, the article illustrates this with particular reference to Poland, which played both the role of the dominating (colonial) party, and was itself subject to colonial domination by various imperial forces throughout two centuries. In order to examine the discourses of resistance that these complex histories of dependence have generated, the article proposes the framework of post-dependence studies – a critical reflection that uses some of the concepts and methodologies of postcolonialism, whilst reworking their interpretive potential to fit a different political, historical, cultural and geographical context. The Polish Complex, a novel by one of the most important contemporary Polish prose writers, Tadeusz Konwicki (first published as Kompleks polski in 1977), serves to illustrate the close link between the discourse of empire and the counter-discourse subverting it, developed by the oppressed who are aware of their situation of debasement. The contours of this opposition are almost always blurred, however; there is a constant slippage of the counter-discourse (expressive of a desire for self-elevation) into grotesque forms of complicity with the system.

Keywords:

• Konwicki
• post-dependence studies
• counter-discourse
• Soviet empire
• Postcolonialism

Notes

1. Kompleks polski, English translation by Richard Lourie, The Polish Complex, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1982; Mała Apokalipsa, English translation by Richard Lourie, A Minor Apocalypse, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983; Wschody i zachody księżyca, English translation by Richard Lourie, Moonrise, Moonset, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987; Rzeka podziemna, published in 1985 as Podziemna rzeka, podziemne ptaki [The Underground River, Underground Birds] in London by the émigré press Aneks.

2. Historical names given to the stages of Polish statehood. The First Republic refers to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the beginnings of the union reach back to the 14th century) lasting until the final partitioning of the country by three neighbouring empires (Russia, Austria and Prussia) in 1795. The Second Republic refers to the interwar period of regained statehood between 1918 and 1939, followed by the Polish People’s Republic between 1945 and 1989 and the Third Republic from 1989, after the collapse of the communist system.

3. In the original, the Soviet interlocutor speaks a hybrid language of pre-war borderland Polish mixed with Russian. This aspect of linguistic closeness through difference is unavoidably lost in translation.

4. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, referred to as the “First Republic”, was a republic of nobility with an elective king.

5. Here the translation “you denounced us as police agents” changes the sense of the original, hence the inclusion of the correct translation in brackets.