Picked-Up Pieces (48 page)

F
ERDYDURKE
, by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Eric Mosbacher. 272 pp. Grove Press, 1967.

P
ORNOGRAFIA
, by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Alastair Hamilton from the French translation from the Polish by Georges Lisowski. 191 pp. Grove Press, 1967.

Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish writer born in 1904, is being set forward as a master, whose not very copious complete works, mostly composed in the obscurity of Argentine exile, are to be published in America by that zealous exhumer of overlooked classics, Grove Press. The project begins
^†
with two novels—
Ferdydurke
and
Pornografia
. Gombrowicz’s claim to be—to quote
L’Express
—“the greatest unknown writer of our time” has reached us via the French, who took him up after his triumphant but short-lived resurrection in Poland itself, during a moment (in 1957) of cultural thaw.

Ferdydurke
(the word is Polish schoolboy slang meaning nothing in particular) came out, with considerable success, in 1937 but was suppressed under both the Nazis and the Communists. In Gomulka’s Poland of 1957, the novel’s burlesque of psychological tyrannies, its premonitions of brainwashing, and its sharp savor of the prewar avant
garde must have seemed liberating. The French presumably found congenial Gombrowicz’s mixture of intellection and impudence, his familiar air of knowledgeable disillusion. This country may find its own contemporary style reflected in his freewheeling “black humor” and his avid delineation of interpersonal “games.” Myself, I must register my sensation that
Ferdydurke
, a book about the imposition of form, has itself more the form—the assurance, the daring—of greatness than the substance. Beneath the energetic surface there is a static difficulty of event. The recurrent motifs seem merely curious—a strange jealousy of the young, an eccentric trick of seeing human bodies as assemblies of parts. Compared with the ideas (the recovery of time through involuntary memory, the eventual union of the paths of innocence and experience) that give momentum to Proust’s masses of description, or with Kafka’s intuitions of exclusion and interminability, Gombrowicz’s themes are spindly, infertile, too much insisted upon, too little dramatized. There is, at least for a reader deprived of the nuances of the original Polish, not much warmth, of the kind that led Nathalie Sarraute to liken classics to furnaces still giving off the heat of their passion for reality.

In the most up-to-date manner, Gombrowicz disarms criticism by including it in his text, mocking the reader’s eagerness “to evaluate and to assess, and to decide whether the work is a novel, or a book of memories, or a parody, or a lampoon, or a variation on imaginative themes, or a psychological study; and to establish its predominant characteristics; whether the whole thing is a joke, or whether its importance lies in its deeper meaning, or whether it is just irony, sarcasm, ridicule, invective, downright stupidity and nonsense, or a piece of pure leg-pulling.”
Ferdydurke
is peppered with essays on itself, disarming admissions of its own confusion, invitations to “start dancing with the book instead of asking for meanings.” Its author, in the preface to
Pornografia
, writes in an almost liturgical vein, “
Ferdydurke
is undoubtedly my basic work.… [It] is intended to reveal the Great Immaturity of humanity. Man, as he is described in this book, is an opaque and neutral being who has to express himself by certain means of behavior and therefore becomes, from outside—for others—far more definite and precise than he is for himself. Hence a tragic disproportion between his secret immaturity and the mask he assumes when he deals with other people. All he can do is to adapt himself internally to his mask, as though he really were what he appears to be.” This thesis, however true (and perhaps it seemed truer in
the 1930’s; might not Fascism be understood as a country’s attempt to become “far more definite and precise” than it feels?), is erratically borne out by the narrative, which comes to life in some areas and churns unconvincingly in others.

Ferdydurke
begins with a diatribe against literary criticism, and here Gombrowicz is very funny. The narrator (named Johnnie in most places and Anton Swistak in one episode) observes that “the more inept and petty criticism is, the more constricting it is, like a tight shoe.” The experience of publishing a book is “like being born in a thousand rather narrow minds.” He envies men of letters whose minds move perpetually toward the heights “just as if their backsides had been pricked with a pin!” He inveighs against cultural “aunts,” and creates his main comic character, the Cracow philologist Pimko, who enters the room, spots the opening pages of this novel on the desk, and cries, “Well! Well! Well! An author! Let me immediately criticize, encourage, advise!” With “masterly composure” Pimko sits and reads, while Johnnie inwardly writhes: “The minutes lasted for hours and the seconds were unnaturally extended, and I was ill at ease, like a sea that somebody was trying to suck up through a straw.” Gombrowicz expresses more vividly than I have seen elsewhere the something intolerable about a literary establishment—any literary establishment. If a harsh Providence were to obliterate, say, Alfred Kazin, Richard Gilman, Stanley Kauffmann, and Irving Howe, tomorrow new critics would arise with the same worthy intelligence, the same complacently agonized humanism, the same inability to read a book except as a disappointing version of one they might have written, the same deadly “auntiness.” Gombrowicz’s irritation is heartfelt, and the whole style of the book—its fragmentation, its tauntingness, its serene implausibility, its violent catalogues and metaphors—sustains his protest against “being tied to the cultural aunts’ apron strings.”

Pimko takes the thirty-year-old narrator in hand and unaccountably but irresistibly places him in school, among cruel and obscene boys extolled for their “innocence.” Two schoolmates, Mientus and Siphon, engage in a grotesque combat: “The two contestants will stand facing each other and will make a series of faces. Each and every constructive and beautiful face made by Siphon will be answered by an ugly and destructive counter-face made by Mientus. The faces made will be as personal and as wounding as possible, and the contestants will continue to make
them until a final decision is reached.” Mientus scowls, spits, and dips his finger into a spittoon, but Siphon implacably points at the sky; “his face became diffused with seven colors, like a rainbow after a storm, and lo! there he stood in seven colors, the Boy Scout, Purity Incarnate, the Innocent Adolescent.” Defeated, Mientus shouts filth into Siphon’s ears, and Siphon dies.

All encounters, for Gombrowicz, are a species of duel by gesture, a clash of impersonations. The opening episode with Pimko and the narrator is such a contest: “He remained seated, so firmly and inexorably seated that the fact of his sitting, though intolerably stupid, was nevertheless all-powerful.” Into the main narrative is spliced the anecdote of “Philifor Honeycombed with Childishness,” wherein two philosophers—the greatest synthesist of all time and his arch-opponent, the analyst Anti-Philifor—duel by pruning with gunfire the bodies of their wife and mistress, finally killing them both. Johnnie, still a schoolboy, goes to live with a banally “modern” family called the Youthfuls and is caught up in a fierce duel of love with Zutka, the daughter. His maneuvers grow in complexity and ferocity and finally plunge the Youthfuls, plus Pimko, plus a schoolmate, into a lunatic melee, freeing the hero to launch himself into “Asphalt. Emptiness. Dew. Nothing.” An antic essay interposes, and a shaggy-dog story symmetrically titled “Philimor Honeycombed with Childishness.” The narrative moves to the country estate of Johnnie’s rich aunt and Mientus’ struggle to fraternize with a stableboy. The consequent duel of class consciousness and physical abuse culminates in yet another, crueller fray. At the end, Johnnie abducts his cousin Isabel, and then flees the blackmail of compliments and kisses (“I writhed under the blows of her admiration as under Satan’s whip”) that passes, in the Gombrowiczian universe, for heterosexual love.

What is the core of this repetitive whirligig of pretense, bluff, and annihilation? At one point in the country house, four men find themselves in total darkness, standing paralyzed by fear within inches of one another, unable to move, and Johnnie experiences “a sense of becoming enormous, gigantic and simultaneously a sense of growing smaller, shrinking and stiffening, a sense of escape and at the same time a kind of general and particular impoverishment, a sense of paralysing tension and tense paralysis, of being hung by a tense thread, as well as of being
converted and changed into something, a sense of transmutation and also of relapse into a kind of accumulating and mounting mechanism.” In this frozen moment of overwhelming, contradictory sensation, we seem close to Gombrowicz’s central inkling—the duel between consciousness and will. Awareness mocks and clogs and warps action. From our sticky web of apprehension, sporadic and incongruous deeds shake loose. The narrator, “while suspense and repetition still remained ceaselessly at work,” abruptly moves: “Suddenly I insolently moved and stepped behind the curtain.” In the context of these pages even such a small exercise of volition is intensely dramatic. Perhaps the composition of
Ferdydurke
can be understood as another such act, a random, twitched escape from paralysis. Hence the book’s flaws of flimsiness and centrifugality, hence the monotonous mood of wry nervousness. Gombrowicz has made his move, but he is not yet at home behind the curtain.

Pornografia
, written twenty years later, is a more conventional and integrated work, perfectly shaped and thoroughly sinister. Set in the Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943 (where Gombrowicz never was), “at the depths of the
fait accompli
,” the novel tells of the hyper-subtle corruption worked upon an adolescent boy and girl by a pair of middle-aged Warsaw intellectuals, one of whom is Gombrowicz himself. He narrates the story in accents grimmer and neater than the quirky pellmell of
Ferdydurke
. Compare a landscape from each of these novels:

The first is a wordy conjuration of vagueness whose gaiety tugs strangely against the metaphor of strangulation with which it is clinched. The second, also vague, needs no specification of the emotion it is meant to arouse; there is no doubt that we are in the drab reaches of rural Poland, in a sordid trough of history. “An oppressive smell of iniquity permeated this landscape,” the author observes, and, in town, on the next page, notices that “something was missing—there were no Jews.” Jews are not mentioned again, and Germans are hardly ever seen. The thematic and metaphoric furniture of
Pornografia
is as economically distributed as the personnel of its plot; the rabid envy of young people, for instance, which seemed eccentric in the thirtyish author of
Ferdydurke
, comes plausibly from a fifty-year-old man “already poisoned by death.” The duels—between a Catholic and an atheist, between a panicked resistance leader and a household—cluster tightly around the core struggle of the two adolescents and the two old men, who are themselves involved in a duel of implication and avoidance. The gratuitous, sudden actions—a boy pulling up an old woman’s skirt, an old woman attacking and biting a boy—all serve to advance the action by enlarging the possibilities of depravity, and to enforce the image of man as “an angelic and demonic abyss, steeper than a mirror!” The notion of “form” has been reduced to a biting Dostoevskian essence: “There are certain human deeds which seem totally senseless, but which are necessary for man because they define him.” The notion of “youth” has succinctly become: “After the age of thirty men lapse into monstrosity.” All mutual existence is mutual blackmail. Inexorably the elements of
Pornografia
combine, in its less than two hundred pages, to transmute the most delicate and obscurely felt interrelations into a climax of multiple murder. The book has the clean cruelty of
Laughter in the Dark
, without Nabokov’s playful puppetry; it has the moral pessimism of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, without de Laclos’ peremptory restoration of virtue.

In short, Gombrowicz, an apostle of immaturity, has maturely subdued his formal preoccupations and instinctive obsessions to the principles of art and created, in his own prefatory words, “a noble, a classical novel … a sensually metaphysical novel.” Is this victory at all Pyrrhic? Have the determined insights and dramatic thrust of
Pornografia
been obtained at the cost of a certain honesty present in the confusions of
Ferdydurke
? For in penetrating the imaginative curtain separating him from wartime Poland, and in creating behind it a coherent “classical”
action, he in a sense hides; a book like
Ferdydurke
exists as a fantastical gloss upon the real world, whereas
Pornografia
is a small world complete in itself and sealed by its own completeness as if in cellophane. Its consummate finish deprives it of osmotic margins; it becomes an object we can turn our backs on, having experienced its catharsis, its systematic arousal and relief of suspense. Does the world require many more such novels? Or does history insist that the writer abolish, by exhortation and trickery, the glaring edge that divides the proscenium novel from its audience of readers? Ask Dr. Pimko, or some other kindly aunt.