Gombrowicz and Woolf: the Face As Culture

chapter 3 Gombrowicz and Woolf: The Face as Culture

Introduction

Championed by Baudelaire, the face in which the importance of ‘depth’ is eclipsed by the spectacle of surface inaugurates a new era in portraiture. Authors active in the 1920s, 1930s, and later tend to produce portraits which circumvent the principles of phrenology and physiognomics without explicit reference to those ‘sciences’. In this period, theories of ‘reading’ the face as instruments of characterisation are used less frequently. Writers tend to chal- lenge the traditional role of the face as an instrument of characterisation directly. Thus, the face is no longer simply a passage to the soul. This ‘meaning- less’ type of portraiture (to borrow Edmund Heier’s phrase), which not only complicates physiognomic characterisation but often completely destroys it, will be the focus of this chapter (1976, 324). I will examine portraits in the works of two authors considered to be paradigmatic of modernist style, the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69).1 One reason why twentieth-century portraiture received little critical atten- tion is that modernist accounts of faces have not been considered as portraits at all. Heier suggests that ‘modernist’ faces are often reduced to “mere signals” and “meagre suggestions” which compel the reader to “felicitous accidental com- pletion” (1976, 323). To be a literary portrait, a description must fulfil two con ditions: it must “draw forth” the character (as French pourtraire would sugg est);

1 Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish author of plays, novels, short stories and other non-fictional texts, is recognised as a representative of Polish literary modernism. Before emigrating to Argentina in September 1939, Gombrowicz read law at the University of Warsaw and, for a year (1926–7), at the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris. From 1928 to 1932 he wrote short stories that were published in 1933 as Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity of which the reviews were unfavourable. In 1935 he published the play Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, in 1937 Ferdydurke, both of which were unsuccessful. From 1939 to 1963 he lived in Buenos Aires where, despite poverty, he kept writing. After the war his books were banned in Poland. From 1950, excerpts from his novel Trans-Atlantyk and instalments of his Diary were published in the Polish émigré review in Paris, Kultura. He subsequently published the novels Pornografia (1960) and Cosmos (1965), as well as the plays The Marriage (1952) and Operetta (1966). In 1965 the plays were staged and well-received in Paris and Stockholm. In 1967 he received the International Publishers’ Prize for Cosmos. He died in 1969 in Vence, France.

Gombrowicz And Woolf 137 and it must be ‘complete’ (323). Fortunately, Michael Irwin, who also studies prose portraits, appreciates the advantages of a lack of closure.2 A catalogue of facial features, he observes, may hinder imagination, while a vague description can be stimulating (1979, 20–1). However, both Irwin and Heier think like phys- iognomists. They evaluate literary portraits according to the physiognomic paradigm, that is, they seek to establish conditions under which physical descriptions can best ‘represent’ their fictional subjects. As this book is preoc- cupied chiefly with anti-physiognomic faces, only a very different view, one which treats with suspicion the face’s capacity to signify, can guide it methodologically. Physiognomics (in the world) takes for granted that the subject presupposes the face – the person’s character is pre-existing and reflected in the face. Observers often assume that the face is necessary to gain knowledge about the person, as do the readers with respect to fictional characters. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the order is reversed: we identify “faciality traits” in order to make a judgement and assign the subject to a specific category. “Faciality traits” determine our estimation of the person. Reading the face is not an act of ‘recognition’ of an individual but of classifying the concrete face into a given unit of a ready-made grid. We ‘recognise’ faces by relying on pre- programmed (binary) categories. The face does not have a pre-existent ‘subject’, or a signifier, but “provides substance necessary to them” (2004, 199). This response to the face, specific to Occidental culture, is involuntary and automatic; therefore, Deleuze and Guattari call it the ‘faciality machine’. Reconfiguring facial traits, removing them, or obliterating faces can, according to the authors of Plateaux, restore complex connections and dependencies. The whole “faciality” concept arises as they argue that the human body con- sists of manifold impulses and forces and can have multiple meanings. However, culture and language reduce all this complexity to simplistic and despotic formulae (200-1). Woolf and Gombrowicz have been chosen for this chapter because their anti-physiognomic portraits open avenues for what Deleuze and Guattari call “polyvocal semiotics” (200), and rebuff Heier’s asser- tion about the ‘meaninglessness’ of a non-physiognomic portrait. Phrenology and physiognomics are not evident in the writings of Woolf and Gombrowicz in the same way that they are in the works of George Eliot or Poe. Likewise, there is little evidence that Gombrowicz and Woolf were familiar with the work of the physiognomist Lavater or the phrenologists. They craft their anti-portraits against the literary conventions which physiognomic

2 Chapter entitled “Fictitious Faces” (in Michael Irwin, Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1979).