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Article Excerpt
In recent years, it has become increasingly common in the study of the cultures of both the First and the Third World to speak of the complex intertwining of the construction and articulation of nationality and sexuality within the modern discourses of identity and community, and of the ways the destabilization and subversion of these identities by means of the foregrounding of queer sexual practices poses a challenge to the stifling dogmas of social ordering and opens up the vistas of alternative identifications and communities. Perhaps the most important milestones in this development were the volumes Nationalisms and Sexualities (Parker et al. 1992) and Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner 1993). Yet while the Second World, that is, the former Soviet Union and its former East European satellites, historically provides a significant share of material dealing with the question of nationalism (the recent years in particular witnessed a truly explosive growth of nationalist discourse there), this scholarly trend is only beginning to penetrate Russian and East European studies.
At the same time, although the discourses on and of nationalism(s) are engaged in a complex way with diasporic discourses, experiences and spaces (many, if not most theorizations of nationalism in the past century arose in diasporic contexts), the contemporary scholarly discourse on diasporas is only beginning to engage either with the questions of sexuality (1) or to pay closer attention to the diasporic communities of Slavic and East European origin. The present essay is envisioned as an intervention into these discursive practices aimed at bringing them into a productive mutual engagement.
In the case of the discourse on sexuality in diasporic contexts, an Important pioneering contribution has been made by the recent volume Queer Diasporas. In their introduction to this collection, Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler argue for a vision of identity as not merely a succession of strategic moves but a highly mobile cluster of claims to self that appear and transmogrify in and of place. " ... [W]hen ... a body that carries any of the many queering marks moves between officially designated spaces--nation, region, metropole, neighborhood, or even culture, gender, religion, disease--intricate realignments of identity, politics and desire take place" (3-4).
Another unresolved tension between two critical discourses that the present essay intends to address is that between the discourse on diasporas and that on intellectuals in exile. Paul Gilroy asserts in his essay "Diaspora and the Detours of Identity" that "[d]iaspora lacks the modernist and cosmopolitan associations of the word 'exile' from which it has been carefully distinguished" (330), yet I would argue that the distinction is far from clear-cut and is fraught with numerous complications. Consider, for instance, the examples Edward Said chooses in the chapter "Intellectual Exile" in his volume Representation of the Intellectual. They are Theodor W. Adorno, V. S. Naipaul and C. L. R. James (47-64; we may add to this list the figure of Said himself). In neither case we can speak of the particular person without invoking the important (if not always strongly articulated or actively embraced) presence of diasporic concerns in their work and lived experiences. Moreover, this consideration allows us to define a certain force field of productive tension determined by the parameters of the diasporic/exiled intellectual's engagement with, first, her/his local diasporic community; second, the larger--"imagined"--diaspora (sustained, in full accordance with Benedict Anderson's thesis, with the help of print--and now also Electronic--media that connects the diasporic communities dispersed around the globe); third, the local populace, both in the course of everyday living and in the interaction with the intellectual circles; and finally, "the world," that is, certain universal themes and concerns with which the particular diasporic intellectual is trying to grapple (which themselves undergo a profound impact of diasporic existence). I believe that a fruitful approach to the distinction between the diasporic and the exilic would be through highlighting the collective, communitarian aspect of the former, in contrast to the individualist overtones of the latter. Yet the construction of the self is of necessity involved with processes of social interaction; the diasporic, then, puts greater emphasis on the "outreach" to others marked through displacement and liminality, while the exilic focuses to a greater extent on the psychic trauma of displacement.
In this essay, I consider two instructive--and still relatively little-studied--cases of such interactions of the diasporic and the exilic, articulated in the lives and work of two writers who spent the greater part of their lives as members of Slavic diasporic communities in Latin America, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), who lived in Argentina from 1939 through 1963, and Valerii Pereleshin (2) (1913-1992), who lived in Brazil from 1953 until his death. For both, their individual diasporic experiences contributed in a major way to their reformulation of, and challenge to, the pressures of socially prescribed identity: that of nationhood, gender, sexuality, age-appropriate behavior, and so forth.
Gombrowicz is the better known of the two authors. A major Polish modernist, he is championed by some as one of the greatest twentieth-century writers. (3) Pereleshin, although he has his own small diaspora of enthusiasts scattered around the globe, (4) remains to a large extent an "undiscovered" writer. But, as I will try to demonstrate here, there are reasons beyond geography alone that suggest significant similarities between the oeuvre of the two authors and its ideological underpinnings. To a degree, both served, or attempted to serve, as the sui generis gadflies of their respective national literary discourses.
Gombrowicz's work is usually associated primarily with his struggle with the strictures of Form, which he understood not only in aesthetic terms, but generally as the conventions forcibly inscribed upon us, the pressures of prescribed identification. In his Dziennik (Diary), an idiosyncratic heterogeneous blend of personal observations, philosophical musings, and even book reviews written for publication and serialized in the leading Polish diasporic periodical, the Paris-based Kultura, from 1953 until his death, Gombrowicz famously claims, "My attitude to Poland is the consequence of my attitude to form: I would like to elude Poland as I elude style, I would like to soar above Poland, as above style, here and there, my task is the same." Yet at the same time he asserts that
I attack Polish form because it is my form, because all of my works desire to be, in a certain sense ... a revision of the modern man in relation to form, to form which is not a result of him but which is formed "between" people. ... I, who am terribly Polish and terribly rebellious against Poland, have always been irritated by that little, childish, secondary, ordered, and religious world that is Poland.... My literary work is guided by the desire to extricate the Pole from all secondary realities and to put him in direct confrontation with the universe. Let him fend for himself as best as he can. I desire to ruin his childhood. (1: 36, 16, 178)
For both authors I consider here, one of the key paths for such subversion and shaking things up lay through the domain of sexuality.
In the case of Gombrowicz, this subversion was channeled through his continuing fascination with youth and what he called "immaturity," that is, a fluid, flexible state through which a young person passes before the socially prescribed identity and patterns of behavior set in (from his first book, the short story collection Pamietnik z okresu dojrzewania [Memories of a Time of Immaturity, 1933], through most of his major novels, such as Ferdydurke [1937] and Pornografia [1960]). In his Diary, Gombrowicz comments:
The only difference that came between me and "normal" men was that I adored the brilliance of this goddess--youth--not only in a girl but in a young man and he was an even more perfect embodiment than she was.... Yes, the sin, if it existed, boiled down to the fact that I dared to admire youth irrespective of its sex.... On the pedestal where they had placed a young woman, I dared to put a boy. (1: 142-43)
However, despite this frank admission and the obviousness of this concern in his work, only recently did Gombrowicz criticism make a move to "reclaim the centrality of homosexuality in his critique of aesthetics and culture, without reducing its importance ... to the sensational biographic secret" (Ziarek 5), most notably in the 1998 volume Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, edited by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. In his contribution to this volume, Allen Kuharski offers an intellectual contextualization of Gombrowicz's project, stressing the affinities between Gombrowicz's work and Judith Butler's theory of identity as performance. Kuharski argues that "Gombrowicz in retrospect can be seen as anticipating ... much of Butler's theory of 'performativity'" (269). He traces this feature of Gombrowicz's writing through the latter's...
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