Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Russian Literature 116 (2020) 17–39 www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit THE DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD OF AN ADULT: AGING AND MATURITY IN WITOLD GOMBROWICZ’S PORNOGRAFIA DANIEL JUST
[email protected] Bilkent University Abstract Maturity and immaturity are the hallmarks of Witold Gombrowicz’s literary texts. They were introduced in his first novel, Ferdydurke, and an early collection of short stories, Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, and continued to play a central role in his fiction and nonfiction works, including the Diary, A Kind of Testament, and the penultimate novel, Pornografia. Although Gombrowicz has been widely regarded as a staunch critic of maturity and defender of immature spontaneity, playfulness, and formlessness, this view is largely based on his earlier writings. Later works offer a more complex image of Gombrowicz. Pornografia, in parti- cular, no longer pits immaturity against maturity with the goal of discrediting the latter through humor and irony. Instead, it experiments with the possibility of a new relationship between the two, a relationship which would ameliorate the discontents that often come with aging. Keywords: Witold Gombrowicz; Maturity; Aging; Polish Modernism; Trans- gression https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2020.09.002 0304-3479/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 18 Daniel Just Maturity and Immaturity in Gombrowicz’s Writings If it were possible to reverse development, to achieve some sort of roundabout way back to childhood, to have once again its fullness and limitlessness. My ideal is to “mature” into childhood [“dojrzeć” do dzieciństwa]. Only that would be true maturity.