Authors

Juliette Bretan¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

D.H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow is a canonical work of modernist literature, and it has long been esteemed as a text implicated in novel themes of femininity, corporeality, and censorship. However, its subplot, concerning Polish characters displaced and exiled in Britain, is oft-neglected in scholarship, despite its pertinence across the novel’s duration, and Lawrence’s compelling descriptions of migration, and British-Polish cultural collision. Nonetheless, this subplot also does not give much to work with at all, as Poland is described variously as a blot, a fairytale, a source for imagination, and a place of scandal and riot; whilst Poles have a tendency towards concealment, abstraction, distancing, incomprehensibility, surprise, and vagueness. 

In fact, several works by authors who are generally considered to be keystones of Anglophone modernism – e.g. Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot – depict or allude towards Poland, raising pertinent questions about language, representation, and identity, as well as Modernism itself. Whilst some critics, most recently, Rebecca Beasley, have conceptualised these texts as part of a Russia-inspired literary model, this paper instead seeks to illuminate the hidden, uncertain, and elided references to Poland in Modernist literature, exploring how they disrupt authors, texts, readers and literary histories in complicated and emancipatory ways. I take the tension between an absent or repressed Poland and a seam of Russian culture in early twentieth Britain as a useful and – in the context of a new effort to ‘decolonise Slavonic Studies’ – urgent starting point, to consider Anglophone Modernist connections with Russia and East-Central Europe more broadly. Indeed, another keystone Anglophone modernist figure is Joseph Conrad; his limited, disrupted writing about a disruptive Poland, and about the dominance of Russia, might epitomise this paper.

I particularly draw attention to how portrayals of Poland reflect the geopolitical reality at the time of writing, when the country did not exist, and when East-Central Europe was a multi-national space. In their challenges to the possibilities of discovery and representation, these texts are less about complete, closed, or verified understandings of Poland, but show how Poland disrupts Modernist conventions. They also provoke wider questions about how far – amid the development of different Modernisms in Anglophone literary studies (e.g. ‘Northern Modernism’ and ‘Yorkshire Modernism’) and the presence of Poland in Britain in the early twentieth century – there might be a ‘Polish Modernism’.