Deferred Love: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Naples

Abstract

The article analyses the role of Naples in the work of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński
(1919-2000), one of the most eminent Polish emigrant writers of the twentieth century. Herling spent here almost half a century (1955–2000) and his prose reflects a complex path from confrontation to acceptance of the city. The analysis is primarily based on the writer’s diary (Diary Written at Night), published between 1971 and 2000. The article also considers biographical facts (Gulag, Anders’ army, emigration) that are significant for understanding the formation of Herling's worldview and perspective. Herling's diary, which includes essays and stories, is a striking example of the interpenetration of the documentary and the artistic, the progressive and the retrospective, the experience of creating a single field of reference, always unfinished and open. The mentality of the Neapolitans was in tune with the vector of the writer's artistic reflection; the structure of Naples (a city open to the underworld and communicating with it; a labyrinthine city; a city standing at the foot of a volcano) is closely resemblant to Herling's narrative strategy. Naples (everyday observations, architecture, paintings, sculptures, city chronicles, legends, rumours, etc.) is above all a source of inspiration and reflection for Herling, on the basis of which, manipulating the boundary between fiction and documentary, he creates allegoric stories about human passions and destinies, as well as historical similes. Turning to the city’s past was also a way of adaptation for the emigrant writer. From the point of view of artistic and psychological mechanisms of inhabiting a foreign space, two functions seem to be the most significant ones in the dialogue between the writer and the city: Naples plays the role of an intermediary space, which allows us to experience in the text the impossible (meeting with the dead wife) or the silenced (Jewish origin), as well as a doppelganger space, which comforts and reconciles us with our own dramatic fate, which thus appears not as an exception, but as a variant of the universal.