POLISHNESS in the WORKS of WITOLD GOMBROWICZ by JON

FORM AND FORMLESS:

POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

JON TOBIAS GALUCKI

(Under Direction the of Katarzyna Jerzak)

ABSTRACT

Witold Gombrowicz spent his entire life struggling to reconcile his innately formed Polishness with his insatiable desire to be free from all restricting Forms whether they are literary, cultural, political, or sexual. Through an examination of Gombrowicz’s biographical texts, his fictional writing, and secondary source materials, one can discern his ongoing battle with Form. In addition, a comparison between Gombrowicz and James Joyce will elucidate their striking literary similarities. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film “White” also demonstrates the arduous attempt at reconciliation between nationality and Form. Finally, Andrzej Wajda’s historic film “Man of

Marble” accurately presents the fallacy of an imposed Form during the early stages of the

Solidarity movement in Poland. These three Polish artists strive to define Polishness, to reinvent

Polishness, and to confront the difficulties that ensue with such an attempt.

INDEX WORDS: Form, Exile, Polishness, Gombrowicz, Kieślowski, Wajda, Joyce, Campbell

FORM AND FORMLESSNESS:

POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

JON TOBIAS GALUCKI

B.A. University of Georgia, 1996

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2005

Jon Tobias Galucki

FORM AND FORMLESSNESS:

POLISHNESS IN THE WORKS OF WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

JON TOBIAS GALUCKI

Major Professor: Katarzyna Jerzak

Committee: Thomas Cerbu Katharina Wilson

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2005

DEDICATION

To the loving memory of my grandmother

Dorothy T. Budziszewski Gerwitz

1922-2005

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Inspiration comes from many difference sources and people—all of whom have illustrated tremendous patience with me and have illuminated my imagination on countless occasions.

What started as an acknowledgment of my own Polish extraction on the first day of a Modern Poetry class at UGA and the correct pronunciation of my last name, led to a renewed interest in my heritage and ultimately my own process of identity. I would like to recognize and show my gratitude to Dr. Katarzyna Jerzak for her firm direction, patience, and friendship.

I would also like to share my appreciation to the following committee members. Dr. Thomas Cerbu for his patience, understanding and profound wisdom, and Dr. Katharina Wilson for her compassion and support.

My parents, Dennis and Rosemarie, my closest friends and constant advisors and maintainers of certain Polish traditions. By leaving me to my own devices they allowed me to follow their path of morals, values and discipline. My brothers Thomas, Tim, Todd for their tolerance of my differences. My sister Tracy for her trust and allegiance.

Ted and Melissa, without your friendship and insistence this thesis might never have been completed. Also, in an understated way Natasha, Scott, Amanda, and Hope have been reliable friends and advisors throughout my graduate years.

Finally, the one who has given my life clear focus and purpose, Clare Ellis, whose stability, balance and sanity have tempered my own wildness and recklessness. To you I am eternally grateful.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... v

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION: Who is Witold Gombrowicz? ...... 1

1 Dueling with Polishness...... 5

The ‘Pole’ of Chance (Part I) ...... 8

Exile (Part I) ...... 9

Separation Anxiety...... 13

Grappling with Polish Form (Part I)...... 18

Minor Literature ...... 27

Grappling with Polish Form (Part II) ...... 29

Exile (Part II)...... 34

A Walking Contradiction ...... 37

The Interhuman Church...... 40

The ‘Pole’ of Chance (Part II)...... 42

Spilled Compote...... 45

2 Polishness as Metaphor...... 47

The Case of James Joyce...... 49

3 Ferdydurke and the Birth of Form...... 55

4 The Myth of Witoldo ...... 66

Departure...... 67

Initiation ...... 68

Return ...... 70

5 Chiseled Form: Andrzej Wajda’s “Man of Marble”...... 75

6 Ineffectual Polishness: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “White” ...... 78

CONCLUSION: Why Gombrowicz? ...... 81

WORKS CITED ...... 84

END NOTES ...... 87

vii

INTRODUCTION

WHO IS WITOLD GOMBROWICZ?1

“American readers perceive Gombrowicz ‘to be a Polish writer rather than a great writer,’ ghettoizing him by their own narrow sense of his nationality.” – Beth Holmgren quoting Susan Harris in her essay entitled “Witold Gombrowicz in the United States” from Gombrowicz’s Grimaces (295)

Unduly, Witold Gombrowicz is a largely overlooked literary figure in the study of modern world literature. What English-speaking attention he does receive is oftentimes marginalized in highly specified Eastern European Literature classes or the even less frequently offered Polish Literature survey. Gombrowicz’s American relevance tends to focus on his literary unusualness rather than his importance, as the Susan Harris fragment above suggests. In addition, his works are somewhat difficult to attain. As of the summer of 2004, three of his major texts were readily available in translation from Polish directly into idiomatic English:

Ferdydurke (1937, translated by Danuta Borchardt in 2001), Trans-Atlantyk (1953, translated by

Nina Karsow in 1994) and his three volume Diary (1957-1966, translated by Lillian Vallee from

1988-1993). By the Fall of 2004 there was a conference at Yale University to honor his life and works as well as the release of three more of his works in English: Bacacay, his first collection of short stories (originally titled Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity in 1933, translated by Bill

Johnston, Archipelago Books), Polish Memories (translated by Bill Johnston, Yale UP), a veritable autobiography and elaborate description of his literary allusions, and Philosophy Lesson

In Six and a Half Hours (translated by Benjamin Ivry, Yale UP), a lucid albeit jocular approach to teaching modern philosophy. 2004 marked the 100th anniversary of his birth and was declared

“The International Year of Gombrowicz.” His other works are retranslations from French or

German into English and there is a notable lack of playfulness in his language due to the double translations. The texts include the plays The Marriage (1948) and Operetta (1953), the novels

Pornografia (1960) and Kosmos (1965), the memoir A Kind of Testament (appeared in French in

1968) and a gothic novel entitled Possessed or The Secret of Myslotch (Translated by J.A.

Underwood). Scholarship on the topic of Gombrowicz in English is also currently limited to a collection of essays, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces (1998), which will be referred to often in this thesis. There have been productions of his plays both in the U.S. and abroad as well as a recent

Polish film version of his novel Pornografia (2003, directed by Jan Jakub Kolski). Indeed,

Gombrowicz scholarship finds itself on the periphery at best and it is the intention of this thesis to argue that his oeuvre ought to be reevaluated because it contains within its idiosyncratic style a strict philosophy on the nature of Form that is universal, timeless, and provocative, especially for modern audiences, not just Polish audiences. This thesis serves as an examination of secondary source material on the subject of Gombrowicz’s apparent ambivalence towards

Poland, his own impressions of Poland found in his non-fictional writing, his treatment of

Polishness and Form in his fiction and in the works of other Polish filmmakers, a comparison with the Irish writer James Joyce, and even an examination of how his biography itself demonstrates an individual’s struggle with the Forms imposed by any given nationality, albeit one that is a relatively “minor” nation. Through this examination, it will be proved that

Gombrowicz uses Polishness as a metaphor for the constant struggle within humanity against the indoctrination of Form.

The following biographical outline comes from Gombrowicz himself who wrote it purportedly as a series of interviews with Dominique de Roux that culminated in the nonfiction text A Kind of Testament in 1968. Witold Gombrowicz was born on 4 August 19042 in

Maloszyce, Poland, an estate about 200 kilometers south of Warsaw. His parents were educated,

landed-gentry, and like most Poles, Catholic. As a ten-year-old, Gombrowicz witnessed some of

the most violent fighting on the German-Russian front of World War I. Because of minor lung

infections, Gombrowicz spent time in the mountain resort of Zakopane where he wrote and later

destroyed his first series of fiction. Gombrowicz studied law in Warsaw in 1926 but he never

graduated. Nonetheless, the objective and lawyerly precision of his writing comes across

especially in the recent direct translations. His battle against Polish Form began early in his adult

life following the First World War when Poland regained its nationhood. In 1933 Gombrowicz

published his first collection entitled Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity. Critics were confused by

this collection of stories and thought his praise of immaturity was precocious and unrefined—

ultimately he was a national embarrassment.3 In 1934 he began writing Princess Ivona and the first few chapters of Ferdydurke while sipping coffee at the famous Café Ziemianska in Warsaw.

Gombrowicz published his first novel, Ferdydurke, in 1937 and was both praised and criticized by the literati. Many were confused by his open disdain for Poland. In 1939 a Polish shipping company on their maiden voyage to Buenos Aires invited Gombrowicz to join them. World War

II broke out only days after the ship docked in Buenos Aires and Gombrowicz chose voluntary exile in Argentina where he would stay for the next twenty-four years.4 In Buenos Aires,

Gombrowicz wrote little, worked at a bank, played chess and had affairs with both men and women. He experienced severe poverty, sickness, and loneliness. He read Sartre and Nietzsche where many of his views on existence and the self were reinforced. Between1947-1962,

Gombrowicz published the play The Marriage and the novel Pornografia. He returned to Europe in 1963 but he never returned to Poland—though when he was in Berlin he wrote that he was close enough to “smell Poland.” He resided in Vence, France where he wrote Kosmos in 1964

and Operetta in 1966. From 1953 to 1967 Gombrowicz contributed regularly to underground and

émigré publications. In 1968 Gombrowicz came within a few votes of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Gombrowicz died of a heart attack on July 24th 1969, seven months after marrying his companion Marie-Rita Labrosse

CHAPTER 1

DUELING WITH POLISHNESS Witold Gombrowicz’s Polish Identity Crisis

“…[T]hese are my adventures, not Poland’s. Except that I just happen to be a Pole.” — Gombrowicz Diary II (20)

While many authors evolve towards greatness, Gombrowicz was one of the most consistently sharp writers of the twentieth century who garnered some attention but was mostly ignored. The blade of his pen and the sharpness of his invective against Form never seemed to dull or become speckled5 from the time of his youth to his final days. From his earliest short stories until his highly unorthodox, post-modern Diary, his collected works represent a sprawling and vast meditation on the notion of Form. Embedded within that discussion is Gombrowicz’s polemic on Polishness. Also referred to as the “interhuman church,” Gombrowicz’s notion of

Form suggests that all human beings are molded or Formed by other human beings for better but more often, in the case of Polish Form, for worse. Gombrowicz’s struggle with Form is best illustrated through his explication of his own Form, or what he personally terms Polishness

(polskość in Polish). Gombrowicz refers to Polishness as a way to represent any Form that is inauthentic, antiquated, residual, derivative, stagnant, and unflatteringly banal. In order to be free from Form, Gombrowicz emphasized Formlessness, which he found to be sincere, modern, purifying, original, fresh, and real. To visualize Formlessness, think of a clump of clay that is yet to be sculpted; Gombrowicz embraced (and he lived) the infinite possibilities inherent in an undefined state.

According to Ewa Płonowska Ziarek in Gombrowicz’s Grimaces, “‘Polishness’ is, no doubt, one of the most complicated and controversial figures in Gombrowicz’s texts” (16). Gombrowicz

sought to embrace his own Polishness in a progressive way. While to some readers his

observations of Polish culture and literary history may seem overwhelmingly negative, upon

closer inspection Gombrowicz is actually trying to reinvent and rejuvenate Polishness. In one

sense, he is like a surgeon, he wants to use the scalpel and extricate the “Pole” from his or her

“Polishness.” A better analogy might be a plastic surgeon instead because Gombrowicz does not

want to maim or amputate the Poles; he wants to use the features that are innate while enhancing

those that have been partitioned by stale Polish Form. His paradoxical relationship with

Polishness is complicated by his open disdain for Polish romanticism juxtaposed to his loving

embrace of Polishness because it represents one of “numerous forgotten peripheries of European

culture” (Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 16). Given Poland’s history, which includes a series of partitions over the last several centuries that eliminated Poland from the map, Polishness found itself in a state of confusion. In such a lost state, the Poles, according to Gombrowicz, reverted to the past, to a time of security and pride. The Pole became epidemically nostalgic. By approaching Polishness negatively, Gombrowicz takes the stance that this Form of Polishness must be destroyed before it can be reborn or reformed. Thus his seemingly antagonistic approach to Polish Form is actually a cathartic discourse intended to give a voice to the literary history of

Poland, and other nations like Poland, that were mostly ignored elsewhere, nations that were themselves exiled, like Poland, throughout much of their history.

[Poland needs] “…a great poet, a master of his own language who could give his countrymen an idea of the level of our poets, equal to the greatest in the world, and could convince them that this poetry is of the same mettle, of the same fineness as the poetry of Dante, Racine, and Shakespeare.” —Gombrowicz Diary I (4)

This fragment reads like a classified advertisement in which the collective cultural consciousness of Poland (spoken through the paradoxical persona Gombrowicz often adopted

throughout his autobiographical writings) is actively seeking someone, a savior, who will

poetically and eloquently instruct not only fellow Poles but the rest of the Western world that the

“secondary” and “minor” nation, Poland, deserves to be acknowledged and praised for its art and

literature—that it deserves to be on the same map as the rest of Europe. It is an assertion,

however absurdly expressed, that Poland and Polish writers ought to be reconsidered and

reconfigured back onto the literary map as well. Gombrowicz actualized the duality of this chore

and he answered the call; he viewed Polishness as both a blessing and a curse, but his mixed

feelings on artistry and nationality would make any efforts to reconstruct or resurrect Polishness

difficult for fellow Poles to decipher. He both chastised Polishness and, eventually tried to

redeem it.

During his first visit to the Polish cultural capital, Kraków, at the age of thirty,

Gombrowicz prepared himself for the intrusion of romanticized Polish Form by anticipating his

obligatory defamation of such oppressive sentimentality. In Polish Memories he recalls his first visit to historic Wawel Castle where he places his then newfound literary voice in its proper context when he writes, “my times required me to be critical, austere, and sober. Everything depended on the yardstick by which I would judge those sarcophagi: a local, Polish measure or a

European or worldwide one?” (168) Would Gombrowicz choose to be strictly a Polish writer for

Poland or a Polish writer for the world? Faced with such a dilemma, at a time when his “attitude to Poland was not yet properly formed” (168), he decided to pursue broader horizons. Note that this decision was made well before his Argentinean exile. “Then was I to forget about the world here and enclose myself in my Polishness? Or was it precisely here that my duty was to become a Pole on a world scale, one that is conscious of the presence of the world?” (168) Gombrowicz leaned towards the latter, and this thesis will show that he succeeded. Needless to say,

Gombrowicz found fault with Wawel’s inauthentic display of Polishness, from its celebration of

foreign artists to the Flemish tapestry makers, all conscripted with Polish zlotys.

Polishness itself, according to Gombrowicz, is a complex blend of national pride and a

debilitating inferiority complex. Due to Poland’s tortured military history over the last several

centuries, including foreign occupations and the surrender of its very nationhood during the time

of partitions, Poland developed a figurative complex that it still strives today to overcome.

Gombrowicz gave expression to this struggle and suggested ways of recovery. Like any

physician, he diagnosed the ailment, recognized the symptoms, looked at other case studies, and

prescribes a panacea of sorts to cure the ills. His cure-all consisted mainly of self-reflexive

laughter.6

The ‘Pole’ of Chance (Part I)

“…one should not take too seriously the metaphor that we, Poles, ‘gave’ these people [the Polish composer Chopin, the Polish astronomer Copernicus, and the Polish poet Mickiewicz] to the world as they were merely born among us.” —Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume 1 (3) [Bracketed references mine]

This passage reminds us that chance plays a crucial role determining nationality and personal origins, thus refuting the notion that any given nation “produces” geniuses, masters, philosophers or captivating artists (filmmaker Kieślowski was also struck by the role chance played in his life). There is not some intangible ingredient that makes one place more able to produce great minds than another. Yes, Gombrowicz is Polish, but he could just as easily have been born Canadian, Nigerian, or Cambodian7. Throughout his autobiographical writings, including his literary Diary and A Kind of Testament, Gombrowicz reconciles his given nationality with his desire for internal freedom to be himself. This subject matter even appears in his fictional writing such as his first novel Ferdydurke and his final novel Cosmos.

When Gombrowicz writes that he “just happen[s] to be a Pole” and that Poland needs a

poet who will show that Polish authors are “equal to the greatest in the world,” he is showing

that he wants to work on two apparently contradictory levels simultaneously. He wants to

separate himself from his Polish identity and redeem Polishness at the same time. In many ways,

Gombrowicz is dealing with the fundamental existential concerns of the 20th century: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? How do we know what we know? The manner in which Gombrowicz broached these questions illustrates exactly how he intended to resurrect what he felt was a doomed Polishness. His own manner shows authenticity, originality and timelessness—all characteristics that could be applied to the canonical works of Shakespeare or

James Joyce, for instance. Through an analysis of Gombrowicz’s diatribe on nationality and

Form, in both his autobiographical writings as well as his fiction, one will discover that

Gombrowicz has fulfilled the job requirements to which he sarcastically alludes in the aforementioned quotation when he writes that [Poland] needs “a great poet…who could give his countrymen an idea of the level of our poets.” However, his methods are rather unorthodox and paradoxically he alienates himself from his fellow Poles in the process.

Exile (Part I)

“He did not find happiness, for there was no happiness in his country” —Adam Mickiewicz quoted in Czeslaw Milosz’s To Begin Where I Am (13)

It is one thing for a writer to grapple with nationality and identity while he himself is

submerged in his own culture, language, and heritage. It is quite another thing entirely if that

same writer is living in exile in a different hemisphere, surrounded by a foreign tongue.

Gombrowicz’s lifelong battle with Form began as an adolescent in rural Poland, but crystallized

while in exile in Argentina during much of his mature life. Thus, distance made his argument

against Form grow stronger.

Gombrowicz has garnered a reputation [albeit scant] in literary circles in the decades that

have spanned since his death in 1969. Noted American critics and writers such as Susan Sontag

and John Updike have defended his honor and have helped to introduce English-readers to his

prose, which is often characterized as “obscure,” “abstract,” “absurd,” “theoretical” and

“narcissistic.” However, one does not have to look very far to discover Gombrowicz’s literary

style or his agenda in Diary. It is not hidden between the lines, nor is it indirectly alluded to through his clever analogies or in his typical sardonic humor.

Using the traditional diary template that gives the date and location of a given entry,

Gombrowicz opens his first volume with the heading, “Monday.” The discussion on this particular day is simple, direct and to the point: “Me” [in Polish it is Ja meaning I]. The exact same entries follow for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It is not until Friday’s entry that readers get some kind of explanation for his apparent self-centeredness. This sharply focused attention on himself, upon individuality, can be (and was) easily misconstrued as narcissistic and thus unPolish. Further analysis suggests that in actuality, in large part due to exile, there has been a rupture between the writer who left Poland, Gombrowicz, and the persona of “Gombrowicz” that is created, ironically with the help of exile, through his writing. Thus, a fundamental identity crisis is taking place. You can take the writer out of Poland, but you cannot take the Poland out of the writer, it has to manifest itself in some way. When one considers that Gombrowicz found himself in Argentina at a time when Polish patriotism had its back to the wall, during the onset of

World War II, and that he ultimately turns his back on his homeland and stays in a foreign land, one realizes that Gombrowicz used the war as a catalyst for personal growth. Was he a deserter?

Was he morally objecting to the war or his Polishness? Does he feel guilt for what he has done?

This is only one of many examples of Gombrowicz’s dialectical confrontation with Form, the

notion that others impose Forms upon us and that we are thus a product of those Forms. Given his unsought for newfound freedom, Gombrowicz began shedding other layers of himself and not just his geographical tie to Poland. He began an intense examination of himself and his place in the world as well as his likes and dislikes. In short, he lived a Formless life. His art was born out of that chaos.

Gombrowicz diagnoses Polish Form throughout the early part of his oeuvre by creating a wise-cracking persona, like the American writer Samuel Clemens (also known as Mark Twain), to effectively communicate his intrepid opinion on the relationship between “self” and

“nationality” without the hindrance of self-censorship or national censorship. He at once “bites the hand that feeds him” and refuses to “sleep in the bed that he has made.” If one were to rank the topical order apparent in Gombrowicz’s work it would first and foremost revolve around a quest for self-understanding and freedom from Form, and his reconsideration of Polishness would be only a by-product of that process. In his discussion of Form, Gombrowicz attempts to supercede his “given” nationality (Polish) and to displace the burden of those expectations that come from originating in a nation that has not evolved beyond being considered “minor,” to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s later assessment of East-Central European literatures. It is exile that put Gombrowicz’s relief of Polishness into the greatest clarity but even before being physically displaced, he was a stranger in Poland, a “minor” author:

Deleuze and Guattari felt that “[M]inor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it.” (A Thousand Plateaus 105)

Much of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre can likewise be personified by a tense and tightened musculature especially in the face. Given that he principally tries to separate himself from the Form that has

been imposed upon him by his nationality and his cultural expectations, tenseness and strain is

certainly warranted. His gaze towards others and the world is a “grimace”—indeed, a forced and

artificial tightening of the facial muscles to give the impression of laughter all the while

disguising internal pain. A “grimace” is one of the many ways, along with laughter, that

Gombrowicz likes to use to illustrate the negative consequences and absurdity of Form imposed

upon us. The freedom to be himself, to break from Form, would be the only way that

Gombrowicz could relax that tension. It is not surprising then that when Gombrowicz leaves

Poland in 1939 and lands in Argentina, he truly begins to articulate with full venom his desire for

artistic freedom from the imposing Forms that preyed upon him in Poland. Tomislav Longinovic,

a contributor to Gombrowicz’s Grimaces, suggests that exile allowed Gombrowicz to assess his

life and to note the forms that had sculpted who he was when he writes that “[t]he advantage of

the writer in exile is the ability to subject his life to the laws of form as if it were a literary text . .

. Exile is perceived as a beneficial condition in this process of distancing from one’s own roots,

which are perceived as obstacles to the process of artistic and personal self-creation”

(Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 43). Consequently, while the subject of Form encompasses the drama of Gombrowicz’s fiction before his exile, most notably in Ferdydurke, he scrutinizes the dialectic of Form and the formerly imposed Forms of Poland through a telescope all the way from Argentina. Exile would painfully and necessarily prove to be the impetus Gombrowicz needed to fully flesh out his notions of Form, thus working out his own philosophy and helping him better understand himself.

While Gombrowicz’s introspection of his fellow Polish writers and critics is bitterly critical at times and very specific (he names names), his reflections on Poland and Polish

literature are more generalized. “I watch Poland as if through a telescope and can see only the

most general contours of their existence, and this invites ruthlessness” (Diary II 9). Exile merely

intensified the on-going dialogue Gombrowicz has with himself and his readers on the subject of

Form. Within that dialogue, Gombrowicz raises his biography to the status of myth and

resurrects a sense of Polish literature that has been plagued by outside Forms and nostalgia (stale

Form akin to kitsch) for much of its history. As Czeslaw Milosz suggests, a person who is

homesick will often resurrect memories in an attempt to pacify loneliness and nostalgia:

“Imagination tending toward the distant region of one’s childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time). Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with estrangement from one’s native land . . . That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around them interfere with each other or—and that is a happy solution— coalesce.” (To Begin Where I Am 17)

Gombrowicz in exile does not forget the argument that he started in his youth concerning Polish

Form. On the contrary, while he may honor past Polish genres (as in the country squire “gaweda”

technique used in Trans-Atlantyk, his first novel written in exile and the structure of Pan Tadeusz

by Mickiewicz in Ferdydurke), he does not preach Polish superiority, rather he makes fun of

well-known Polish poems and novels. He devotes himself to unmasking the Polish inferiority

complex and tries to get Poles to embrace their Formlessness, their immaturity, their infiniteness,

and their singularity simply by not regurgitating the well-cleft patriotic Polishness that helped

Poland in the past when it was struggling for nationhood. By embracing their newness, their yet-

to-be defined status in the European context, Gombrowicz felt that only then the Pole could hold

his or her head up high.

Separation Anxiety

The context of the aforementioned scenario that opens the Diary with the series of entries with only the word “Me” is that Gombrowicz is in exile from Poland in Argentina. He

voluntarily left Poland on August 1st 1939 to take part in the inaugural voyage of the Polish vessel the Chrobry. As a burgeoning writer, Gombrowicz’s sudden and unsought fame is subject to momentary stasis when he leaves but it would be reborn in a way while he is away. His time in exile does solidify some of his feelings about Poland, but it does change how he views himself significantly. In his Diary he notes a feeling of separation at the midpoint of his journey back to

Europe—a feeling that he is returning to an avatar of himself that had been left behind. Twenty- four years after his arrival in Argentina he writes, “[y]es, I knew I would have to confront the

Gombrowicz sailing to [South] America, I the Gombrowicz sailing away from America” (Diary

III 72). Gombrowicz realizes that the direction that his life has taken has allowed him to, in a sense, divide his own sense of self between the provincial Polish renegade-writer that left Poland in 1939 and the more enlightened and somewhat confident philosophical thinker that is returning to Europe in 1953. He shows an awareness that he has profoundly changed. His texts, written in exile, ultimately chronicle departure from his former self. Given the time it would take to have them ingested by Poles, translated and read by non-Poles, it is only recently that his work is truly being appreciated.

Gombrowicz was originally invited on this voyage to South America because of the celebrity he achieved in Poland due to his literary feats and accomplishments (three published works, a collection of short stories entitled Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity in 1933, a play

Princess Ivona in 1935 and his first novel Ferdydurke in 1937). It has also been noted by Ewa

Ziarek in Gombrowicz’s Grimaces that he invited himself on this voyage perhaps unconsciously seeking refuge from Polish Form. When immediately after his arrival in Argentina war had broken out in Poland and the rest of Europe (WWII 1939-1945), a return home was a certain physical, metaphorical and artistic suicide. Poland was attacked by Hitler and eventually,

kidnapped by Stalin. Many other writers went into exile, many were killed and/or censored, and some, like Czeslaw Milosz, decided to stay and cooperate with the political climate rather than flee. These two writers ultimately combine the attack on Polishness: Gombrowicz challenged

Polish aesthetics while Milosz took a more political stance.

Gombrowicz begins his Diary by informing us that though he has been physically away from Poland for the past fourteen years, friends have been keeping him abreast of the literary and political situation in Poland via émigré publications and various Polish newspapers. Cut off from

Poland, Gombrowicz nonetheless has a vested interest in matters of home. He experiences a distorted form of separation anxiety. This fact underscores the notion that Gombrowicz sought to redeem Polishness because if he didn’t care about Polishness, he would have occupied his writing with some other topic. Why didn’t Gombrowicz use this opportunity to separate himself from Poland decisively and symbolically, if that connection was plaguing him? The answer to this question shows his contradictory feelings toward his homeland, language, culture, and heritage. In this particular case, distance has afforded Gombrowicz a unique perspective and an acute awareness of himself and his nationality due to that altered state. There is safety in distance, but there is also isolation and sometimes impotence. The temptation to forget combined with the security of distance only seemed to fuel Gombrowicz’s artistic dialogue with himself and ultimately with the world.

Czeslaw Milosz, who in due time became another renowned Polish writer who eventually went into exile, albeit voluntary, has written much about the mentality of exile that corresponds to Gombrowicz’s predicament. One of Milosz’s discussions of exile accounts for the decision of the person in exile to maintain his or her own native language despite whatever ambivalence he or she may have towards his or her homeland:

“One possibility offered him is to change his language, either literally, by writing in the tongue of the country of his residence, or to use his native tongue in such a manner that what he writes will be understandable and acceptable to a new audience. Then, however, he ceases to be an exile.” (To Begin Where I Am 14)

This concept resonates with Gombrowicz, who continued to write in Polish despite attempts to learn Spanish. In fact, as will later be discussed, he preserved some of the more obscure forms of

Polish literary style including the gaweda (country squire tale) style that he mimicked when he wrote Trans-Atlantyk. In addition, Milosz suggests that some literary genres are simply not appropriate in exile:

“Certain literary genres (the realistic novel, for instance) and certain styles cannot, by definition, be practiced in exile. On the other hand, the condition of exile, by enforcing upon a writer several perspectives, favors other genres and styles, especially those which are related to a symbolic transposition of reality.” (To Begin Where I Am 15)

Given Milosz’s opinions, if one were to assess the genres that Gombrowicz does employ throughout his oeuvre, it is apparent that he steered away from the realistic novel. In fact,

Gombrowicz’s fiction is highly stylized and is a quite precise “symbolic transposition of reality.”

Throughout all of his exilic fictional prose, Gombrowicz applies a certain literary and philosophical structure and sets up a number of clear oppositions in order to present reality as filled with the duels between those oppositions. As a member of the landed gentry, Gombrowicz grew up with full knowledge of the honor-bound duel. He recalls in Polish Memories that the disintegration of the duel was taking place between the two World Wars. “The most striking transformation was in conceptions of honor. The catastrophic demise of the old, formal notion of honor, with duels, seconds, and protocols, manifested itself clearly in my immediate family”

(Polish Memories 161). He, as well as others, will refer to these oppositions or duels as antinomies. By setting up and personifying these antinomies, Gombrowicz projects scenarios

where individuals are constantly confronted by a dominant Form and chose to embrace their own

Formlessness rather than give in to the pressure of the given dictatorial presence.

Stanislaw Baranczak further suggests that in exile Gombrowicz used his fictional depiction of reality to illustrate…

“…[the] two most popular fallacies of the past two centuries concerning the relationship between the individual and society: the romantic claim that only the individual’s total self-liberation from society’s constraints is worth living for, and the positivistic or, especially, Marxist illusion that human beings can be defined completely in terms of their social roles.” (Baranczak in Trans-Atlantyk introduction xii)

Baranczak goes on to suggest that Gombrowicz’s greatness can be measured through his literary and philosophical consistency in terms of the following antinomies presents in his novels:

“In his literary works, the opposition of Form and Chaos or perfection and freedom takes on many shapes depending on which particular social hierarchies are scrutinized. Form versus Chaos can thus be translated into oppositions of age (maturity/immaturity), social class (aristocratic/plebeians), civilizational tradition (West/East), cultural background (elitist/mass culture), and even sexual persuasion (‘accepted’ heterosexuality/ ‘ostracized’ homosexuality).” (Baranczak xiii)

While Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear show the relationship between power and corruption, between sanity and insanity, between obligation and honor,

Gombrowicz’s antinomian relationships as represented above are equally as human, equally as enduring, and fundamentally as rigidly expressed as a scientist in a laboratory. He paints a portrait using extremes to underscore the notion that as human beings we more often than not find ourselves caught between extremes in some liminal wasteland of indecision, indifference, and uncertainty. Gombrowicz, like many other artists and writers of the twentieth century, experienced and expressed the general sense of ambivalence, the feelings of ineffectualness and impotence, and the sense of isolation and confusion that have come to define the era around the two World Wars, eras that saw the moral decline, the rise of Freud and the impact of Darwin; he

was as much a product of his environment in Argentina as he was in Poland. In such a landscape,

the Forms that do surround us often contribute greatly to who and what we are. If those Forms

happen to be fragmented and ambiguous, then the by-product itself will have to be fragmented

and ambiguous to some degree.

Grappling with Polish Form: (Part I)

“I read these Polish newspapers as if I were reading a story about someone whom I knew intimately and well, who suddenly leaves for Australia, for example, and there experiences rather strange adventures which are no longer real because they concern someone different and strange, who can only be loosely identified with the person we once knew.” (Diary I 3)

Gombrowicz is recalling how Poland appeared to him from Argentina. He is able to recognize his homeland from afar, but something is clearly not right about what he perceives.

Has a change occurred within him or Polishness itself? The answer is both; history tells us that

Poland underwent a massive face-lift between the two World Wars and Gombrowicz’s experiences in exile provided the perspective he needed to disclose his personal invective against

Polishness. The distance and penury that Gombrowicz had endured during his exile sharpened his criticism of his nationality and his peers—Polish Form, in all its unattractiveness, is clearly discernible through Gombrowicz’s exilic telescope. “…[O]ne day, having looked carefully in the mirror, I saw something new on my face: a subtle net of wrinkles, appearing on my forehead and under my eyes and in the corners of my mouth . . . My accursed face! My face betrayed me, betrayal, betrayal!” (Diary I 137) What disgusts him most about what he reads (and sees in himself) in these émigré publications and Polish newspapers is the charitable subtext. It is like reading something unsavory about a family member. Hidden within the charitable art and literature reviews that he reads is the fundamental problem that Gombrowicz finds with his nationality: a lack of authenticity, i.e. corrupted or tainted Form. For Gombrowicz, Polishness is

formed by fellow Poles through a sort of osmosis. Within this process there are certain tinctures

that maintain, perpetuate, and form Polish Form. Poland itself was undergoing an identity crisis,

was going through a period of adolescence all over again, and was still clinging to the past for

moral ballast. Gombrowicz acknowledges the inevitability of this fact and he struggles

throughout his life to express his solution.

“Mankind is accursed because our existence on this earth does not tolerate any well-defined and stable hierarchy, everything continually flows, spills over, moves on, everyone must be aware of and be judged by everyone else, and the opinions that the ignorant, dull, and slow-witted hold about us are no less important than the opinions of the bright, the enlightened, the refined. This is because man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.” (Ferdydurke 5)

It’s one thing to be surrounded by genius and greatness and to absorb some of that prodigious

talent, however, it is quite another thing to be surrounded by confidence and pride that disguises

genuine inferiority. That is the realization that Gombrowicz articulates in the above fragment

from Ferdydurke (again, written before his exile—thus proving that his issue with Form is in existence all throughout his life—and it is only magnified while he lives in exile). According to

Gombrowicz, Polish literature during the interwar period suffered because it was formed by a tainted source, a desire to move backwards to a time when Poland was more self-assured.

Gombrowicz strove to instill honesty and authenticity, even if that meant highlighting the weaknesses and shortcomings of his own culture and heritage.

Why does Gombrowicz guffaw at optimistic appraisals of Polish literature that he reads in émigré publications? Is the reason jealousy or is it disgust? After Gombrowicz published

Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity and Ferdydurke, he experienced the double-edged sword of

Polish criticism. He was both praised and held in contempt for his writing. In exile he found that

Polish critics were unilaterally praising Polish letters in an attempt to reassert Polish pride and

promote future Polish independence. Fellow Pole, Czeslaw Milosz, suggests the following exilic paradigm that he observes within any exilic literary endeavor: “He [not Gombrowicz in particular, just any writer in exile] was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words, but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say” (To Begin Where I Am 13).

Gombrowicz found the disillusioned Polish critics who scorned him because he was not overtly Polish to be outwardly helping Polish confidence by praising pro-Poland literary output, but inwardly wounding Polishness through disingenuousness, through gushing praise of literature the recalls a time of greater Polish superiority. As an occupied nation, Poland responded by abandoning its critical venom and reverted to the motherly role of willful supporter of its progeny. This backwards progression was very disturbing to Gombrowicz and it reeked of fallaciousness and, ironically, unconscious immaturity. Ursula Philips writes her essay

“Gombrowicz’s Polish Complex” that Gombrowicz was irked by “the way in which the

Romantic vision of Poland and Polishness has dominated not only literature but the mentality of

Polish intellectuals ever since” (Philips 28). Thanks to Adam Mickiewicz’s depiction of Poland

“as the Christ of Nations, as the innocent sufferer for the crimes of other European powers, especially those of Imperial Russia” (Philips 28-29), Poland would relish the role of victim and never achieve a new and more modern identity. Gombrowicz’s attempt to do just that was not appreciated. Philips notes that “For any individual not to commit himself in this way, not to put his identity as a Pole before his individuality, was not only dishonorable, it was tantamount to treachery” (Philips 29). Furthermore, Milosz writes that the writer in exile “[n]o longer even exists as a person whose virtues and faults were known to his friends. Nobody knows who he is, and if he reads about himself in the press, he finds that the data concerning him are grotesquely

distorted. Then his humiliation is proportionate to his pride, and that is perhaps a just

punishment” (To Begin Where I Am 15). Indeed, exile provided Gombrowicz with a painful

silence that allowed him to attain a powerful concentration of himself and his nationality.

Formerly, exile was used as a form of punishment, to banish unwanted, unwelcome persons.

Since Gombrowicz’s exile was at least partially voluntary and partially imposed upon him, what

is the crime he is being punished for? Gombrowicz cites that he is striving to be an individual,

that what he is doing is a matter of life and death. Ursula Phillips writes, “[a] struggle against

Form is an expression of life, whereas an acceptance of Form is to give in to the process of stagnation, decay, and the movement towards death. Form is analogous with completion, definite sharp, ‘maturity’—the eventual lifeless result of any creative process” (31-32). Phillips takes

Polishness out of the Poland context and suggests that Gombrowicz aligns himself in a literary way with Ponce de Leon, the purveyor of the fountain of youth. If Form equates to death, then

Formlessness becomes synonymous with life itself. “Life, however, is expressed in the process itself—in the realm of the unformed, the incomplete, the developing and immature” (32).

Gombrowicz walks the tightrope between Form and Formlessness so when he sees Poland continually reverting to stale Forms, he feels obligated to shake the Poles out of their stupor.

“If only one could hear a real voice in this kingdom of passing fiction! No—you hear either the echoes of fifteen years ago, or the rehearsed songs. The press in Poland, singing on the obligatory note, is as silent as a tombstone, an abyss, a secret, and the émigré Polish press is—charitable.” (Diary I 3)

Karol Karol, protagonist of Kieślowski’s film White, experiences the nadir of his difficult life when he is divorced by his French wife, loses his bank accounts, loses his job and his apartment and is forced to loiter in the Paris subway for spare change all due to his sexual impotence when he is outside Poland. Karol Karol is playing a traditional Polish song on a comb, when a fellow Pole walks by, recognizes the song and offers him a swig of his bottle of Scotch8.

Thus when a Pole is beaten down and their dignity is taken away, and they are removed from their comfort zone in Poland, they involuntarily revert to an ancestral time when they were potently fighting for a brighter future. Likewise, Gombrowicz notices that the occupied Poland circa 1945-1953 is also suffering, is reverting to the romanticism that earlier generations used to strengthen Polishness and overcome oppression. These images are not strictly reserved for

Poland. Any nation that has experienced an invasion, an occupation, colonization, imperialism can relate. There is a predictable resistance to such an invasion that can be traced to the arts and cultural tendencies.

Imagine Poland during the onslaught of World War II when they were feeling the pressure from all sides: Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia and even Mussolini in Italy. In a metaphorical sense, the imposing nations of Europe were like a schoolyard during recess. In the schoolyard of Europe, France, Germany, and England were well dressed, athletically coordinated, intelligent, and mannered; meanwhile, Poland was the gangly and uncoordinated teenager. Russia was the archetypal bully that pushed Poland down in the muck. Within this paradigm a brand of Polishness emerged that was resigned to absurd and fraternal self- congratulatory behavior as a means of confidence boosting. One day Poland, the previously great and almighty Poland, would rise again and trump the schoolyard bullies of the world that had kept them down for so long and prove to those other well-mannered children from Western

Europe that they were equals. It is not without irony that this particular metaphorical scenario strikingly resembles the duels and facial confrontations from Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke or the ankle-striking scene from Trans-Atlantyk. During Gombrowicz’s fourteen years in exile, the occupations in Poland did not strengthen Polish resolve, character or national identity. It had only twisted it into a grotesque display of pompous national pride and ridiculous nostalgia. All of

this resembling a scene from Trans-Atlantyk where a mish mash of high and low society find themselves in an absurd duel, “[w]hereupon the Baron thrust his spur in Pyckal, Pyckal his into the Baron, and thus in a Snare they got so that they could not even move” (Trans-Atlantyk 102).

In short, Trans-Atlantyk is Gombrowicz’s most autobiographical work of fiction. In the story, the

protagonist named Witold Gombrowicz is exiled in Buenos Aires and his peer group comprises

Polish expatriates who suffer from an extreme form of Polishness. They worship everything

Polish. “The narrator is constantly torn between contrary tensions; he continually wavers and

changes sides. Part of him feels a moral deserter, and he often displays outward loyalty to his

fellow-countrymen whilst not really sharing their attitudes; he is critical of, indeed embarrassed

by, the behavior of the émigré community” (Phillips 38). Caught between two extremes, nostalgia

and Polish Form on the one side and Formlessness and irreverence on the other, the story

chronicles the real-life author’s decision to stay abroad. To Gombrowicz’s eternal frustration, his

time in exile had only given the already pimply-faced, under-confident, bed-wetting, Polish

adolescence, as represented in Trans-Atlantyk, now had teeth braces and a retainer, a worse

haircut, underdeveloped musculature, body odor, and more pimples. In Gombrowicz’s absence,

Polishness had morphed into even more grotesque self-aggrandizement due to the further beaten

down state the country had entered during the Second World War.

While Gombrowicz used the Communist domination of Poland and his exile in Argentina

as an impetus to reassert and redefine himself, he had hoped that Poland and Polish literature

would do the same. However, the disappearance of the strict critical tradition in Poland, and its

replacement with the blind and subjective supporters of Polish letters who gave their glorious

approbation to nearly everything contemporary and past became a source of embarrassment for

him. Gombrowicz aligns himself with Nietzsche whom he quotes in his Diary: “[T]he mitigation

of our customs is the consequence of our weakness” (Diary I 4). In many ways Gombrowicz viewed Poland as a condemned nation “… on account of its geographical position and its history” (A Kind of Testament 102) that simply needed to change “…something within ourselves to rescue our humanity” (A Kind of Testament 102). Poland should use history in its favor and as a motivator towards change as opposed to playing the familiar role of victim. “Our relationship to the world had something bad, something tainted about it, and I, as an artist, felt somewhat responsible for this fateful ‘Polish legend’” (A Kind of Testament 103). To what extent did

Gombrowicz resurrect and redefine Polishness? Both later chapters devoted to two Polish films

attempt to provide some examples of post-Gombrowicz Polish Form that might have pleased

Gombrowicz on some levels, had he lived to see them, and might have frustrated him on other

levels.

While Gombrowicz was living in Poland he had forged an existence out of repressed and

cleverly veiled satire. On a purely aesthetic level, his literary style would appear to be absurdist

or surreal while on other levels readers find allegorical interpretations of his fictional creations.

Many of his texts would later be banned because of their supposed subversive qualities and were

only reissued during periods of totalitarian thaw. In those texts, absurdity and confounded plot

lines are Gombrowicz’s way of coping with and of outsmarting his opponent—either the Polish

critics or later the Communists. Instead of cowering under censorship, or inflating his own ego,

Gombrowicz preferred to laugh in the face of oppression. All of these literary exercises were

Gombrowicz’s attempts to dismantle Form. In his absence, the torch was dropped, burned out,

and in its place there appeared an immature, myopic assertion that Poland was once great and the

home to great thinkers and geniuses. Gombrowicz clearly saw this reinvestment in the past as a

step backwards. It would take an exaggerated change of trajectory to get Poland back on its feet

and going in the right direction. Thus, Gombrowicz placed upon himself the burden of fighting

the laws of physics and altering the centripetal force that plagued Poland and its defeated

Polishness. Truly this would require a Herculean effort and, unfortunately, Gombrowicz had

weak lungs. But the pen is mightier than the sword. “A sick man is better able to grasp the

absolute essence of health—because he does not possess it, he longs for it” (Diary II 17). This

quixotic and contradictory notion of a physically weak man, who withstands hardship and

disorder for his idealized goal, is not new. “And our weakness warned us not to touch

ourselves—because, well, everything was ready to fall apart. We wore the Poland of that time on

our chests like Don Quixote wore his armor, preferring not to test its strength, just in case”

(Diary I 151). Antiquated forms have replaced the windmills and our hero, Gombrowicz, will slay any fallacious Form that stands in his way. Though, unlike Don Quixote, Gombrowicz’s awareness of Form was not delusional, though he felt fellow Poles deluded themselves. The extreme nature of this battle requires our hero to conquer those Forms. The use of antinomies

(extremes) would become his signature style. Who better to resurrect Polish letters than a grimacing, and intellectually confident exiled Pole in Argentina? The crux of Gombrowicz’s realignment of Polishness is that the Poles must embrace their very immaturity and formlessness and disregard past successes. Ursula Phillips writes that “[t]he implication for Polish culture as a whole is that new territory should be explored together with a greater contact with reality, rather than the reiteration of the clichés of the past; there is also the suggestion that the relative immaturity of Polish culture might possibly be a productive spring-board for future developments” (Phillips 41). To get Poles to see the light, Gombrowicz likes to make his readers uncomfortable—the more uncomfortable the better—and when dealing with Polishness, he says exactly what Poles at the time do not want to hear in hopes that the light will come on.

A scene from Gombrowicz’s Diary metaphorically illustrates his dilemma with

Polishness. He is in Argentina, sunbathing on a beach when an enormous gust of wind kicks up a cloud of sand. Gombrowicz notices a beetle on its back.

“The wind had overturned it. The sun beat on its belly, which certainly must have been unpleasant considering that this belly was usually left in the shade—there he lay, trashing his little legs—and it was obvious that nothing was left to it except a monotonous and desperate thrashing of its legs—and it was growing weak, perhaps it had been there for hours; it was dying.” (Diary II 39)

To summarize a Gombrowiczian interpretation of this episode, the beetle on its back symbolizes futility and the compromising and vulnerable position the insect is in, suggesting the stale Pole clinging powerlessly to a version of Polish Form that it had actually outgrown. With nothing to help turn it right side up, Polishness would become the victim of kitsch. The singing of Polish anthems, the praising of patriotic Polish poets, and the donning of antique clothing and the celebrating of Polish geniuses represent kitsch. Polish Form would helplessly cling to the past and the false pride gained as a result, Gombrowicz thought, was debilitating.

“…I watched the thrashing of legs . . . and extending my hand, extricated him from his agony. He [the insect] moved ahead, returned to life in a split second.” (Diary II 39)

Given the scale of this metaphorical scene, Gombrowicz’s largeness compared to the beetle’s smallness might represent his newfound liberation due to the distance of his exile—he has a new perspective of Polishness and from this distance he is able to decipher Polish impotence or helplessness. His act of kindness to help one particular beetle would be just the beginning.

“I had barely done this when I noticed a little farther away, an identical beetle in an identical predicament. And he, too, was thrashing his little legs. I didn’t want to move . . . But—why did you save that little guy and not this one? . . . Why that one . . . when this one? . . . You make one happy and the other should suffer? I took a stick, extended my hand—and saved him.” (Diary II 39)

Gombrowicz then notices an infinite number of helpless beetles, all stuck on their backs, all thrashing about, helplessly hoping for salvation. Just as Gombrowicz mentions that his duel with

Polishness is not unique and those other nationalities that, like Poland, are placed on the periphery of the literary or cultural map, so to this scene illustrates his universal message to all voices that have been unheard.

“And by this time I was so wrapped up in their suffering, I was so absorbed by it, that, seeing new beetles all along the plains, ravines, and canyons, an endless rash of tortured dots, I began to walk the sands as if I were demented, rescuing, rescuing, rescuing! But I knew this could not last forever—for it was not just this beach, but the entire coast, as far as the eye could see; it was sown with them so there had to come a moment when I would say ‘Enough!’ The first unrescued beetle would have to happen, too.” (Diary II 39)

Like with his efforts to alter Polishness, and the universal debilitating nature of Form,

Gombrowicz would have to set his boundaries and only hope to help whom he could.

The messianic Gombrowicz wants to help the handicapped Poles, but he realizes that it is not just Poland that suffers from Polishness, it is also the many other minor nations that huddle around more Formed or solidified nations. Distance has a way of bringing hard to see issues into better focus. Is one more aware that one is in love in the presence of the beloved or when they are apart? For Gombrowicz, never were his insights into Polishness and ultimately his love for

Poland clearer than after he left Poland and was granted an alternative perspective. The love/hate relationship with Poland truly came to life when he was abroad. Deeply rooted in his disdain for

Poland is an undeniable love.

Minor Literature

If Gombrowicz’s insights into Polishness were transformed into an outsider’s awareness of Poland and if one could apply his lens to one’s own identity and to issues that have nothing to do with Poland, then Gombrowicz’s importance in world literature becomes clear. We return to the Deleuzian notion of minor literature and the cultural currency within this marginalized phenomena. According to Deleuze, several characteristics of minor literature end up being

virtuous blessings rather than curses. Gombrowicz embraced rather than discarded certain aspects of the minority nature of his given nationality. “The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze 154).

To a greater and lesser degree, some of these characteristics are applicable to Gombrowicz.

Deleuze, using the example of Franz Kafka, theorizes that Kafka, a Jew living in Prague and writing in German represented a “minority construct within a major language” (Deleuze 152).

Having no choice but to express himself, to write, in the language of his oppressor gives him the imperative that Deleuze calls the “impossibility of not writing” (Deleuze 152). While Polish is not a “minor” language in and of itself; in the context of European letters, Polish is treated as a marginalized language—more of a novelty in academia than French, German, Italian, Spanish or

English. Furthermore, once Gombrowicz decided to stay in Argentina and continue to express himself in Polish, he attained the Deleuzian situation of the “impossibility of not writing.” While he made attempts in Argentina to learn Spanish, his first drafts were always written in Polish. His primary audience was made up of other Polish émigrés living in Buenos Aires. Gombrowicz’s readership and geographical isolation created a hermetical bubble as if he were writing in a vacuum.

Deleuze assumes that the role of the individual in a major literature is drowned out by their “social milieu” (Deleuze 153). In other words, the social wallpaper that plays a more dominant role in major literatures eliminates the possibility of true individuality. On the other hand, “[m]inor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it” (Deleuze

153). This quotation expresses notions very familiar to Gombrowicz and reiterates the

domineering internal self-focus that occurs in most of his writings and is best illustrated by the

aforementioned method he uses to begin his Diary.

The third characteristic follows the assumption that talented writers and artists are scarcer in minor literature realms; therefore, the literature itself becomes infused with the interests of the collective. “It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze 154). Despite the scorn that is evident in nearly every reference to Polishness, the subtext is antithetical. In a sense,

Gombrowicz tries to foster solidarity among fellow Poles by pointing out their unsavory idiosyncrasies and getting them to discard the kitschy nostalgia and either embrace their collective immaturity or at least stop being something they are not. Minor literature need not be viewed as merely a novelty within the study of world literature; rather, due to the difficulty that it generally takes to get to the surface, it can be viewed as something that “cuts to the quick” and in many ways may surpass some of the superficial qualities of a grandiose major literature. In some ways, a minor literature can be dismissed as merely an involuntary by-product of a culture versus major literature that can occasionally take on characteristics of decoration, ornament, or something superfluous. By stressing the universality of his situation, Gombrowicz builds an argument that his plight and his methods of expression are not merely a novelty but are fundamentally authentic, uncorrupted, and timeless.

Grappling with Polish Form: (Part II)

“Man submitted to the interhuman is like a twig on a rough sea: he bobs up and down, plunges into the raging waters, slides gently along the surface of the

luminous waves, he is engulfed by rhymes and vertiginous rhythms, and loses himself in unforeseen perspectives. Through Form, penetrated to the marrow by other men, he emerges more powerful than himself, a stranger to himself. Unsuspected paths appear and he sometimes no longer knows what is happening to him. He becomes a function of the tensions which arise, and which are the results of various impulses. This interhuman creation, unknown and unseizable, determines his possibilities.” (A Kind of Testament 75)

The crux of Gombrowicz’s interpretation of Form, a more universal term that coincides with Polishness, is that mankind creates and destroys itself; hence, the influence of the “other” can be both constructive and destructive. In addition, Gombrowicz believes that a part of our biological make-up includes something he calls the “Formal Imperative” that propels us to complete that which is incomplete—to constantly seek out symmetry and balance and logical order (A Kind of Testament 69). However, this “Formal Imperative,” this insatiable desire to solve every problem, to bridge every gap, and bring harmony where there is dissonance, is itself a blessing and a curse. Gombrowicz believes that it is precisely this relationship, the relationship between mankind and their “Formal Imperative,” that connects all organic creation. Thus, an inquiry into Form is really an investigation into the nature of existence and the search for the self as only a part of a whole. Gombrowicz dealt with Form from the perspective of Polishness and how it affected his sense of self. He also confronted this issue more broadly in his fiction where he illustrated his analysis of Form by creating characters that struggle with their own “Formal

Imperative.” There is not a more dominant motif within the Gombrowiczian oeuvre than the duel with Form. While Freud focused on human sexuality and dream interpretation, Gombrowicz believed Form to be the force that motivated all human behavior.

As it has already been said, Gombrowicz felt it was his duty to reexamine Polish Form.

By examining exactly what Polish Form meant, by discerning how it was created, and by attempting to alter its course, Gombrowicz was partially acting upon his own vanity within his

culture (the role of the artist who is trying to amend his culture) and the Polish culture as a whole. He did not like what he saw. He believed that Polish Form originated from a tainted source, that it was founded on unstable ground. It was out of his own “profound spiritual necessity” that he attempted to assess the problems of Polish Form and to offer his solution.

Rather than itemize a curriculum for the advancement of Polish Form, Gombrowicz chose to have his life and his writing serve as the basis of his educational intentions. “I don’t want to teach like a professor, I want my life and work to be a lesson, I want to be a lesson myself” (A

Kind of Testament 105). What can be learned from Gombrowicz’s biography and collected writings? Gombrowicz’s life proved to be an example of the universal struggle with Form in its many incarnations. In the process of playing guinea pig in this experiment with Form and using his life as an example for others to learn by, Gombrowicz’s life achieves a kind of mythological level. The mythological elements of Gombrowicz’s life will be reexamined later in this thesis.

“In a way, I feel like Moses. Yes, this is an amusing characteristic of my nature: to exaggerate on my own behalf. In my daydreams, I puff myself up as much as I can. Ha, ha, why, you ask, do I feel like Moses? A hundred years ago, a Lithuanian poet [Mickiewicz] forged the shape of the Polish spirit and today, I, like Moses, am leading Poles out of the slavery of that form. I am leading the Pole out of himself.” (Diary I 36)

Thus, Poland, the “Christ of nations” that Mickiewicz’s refers to, which historically bore many sacrifices meant to propel Polish culture above or on par with the rest of Europe was the home of its latest savior, Gombrowicz, who would take on the burden of plagued Polishness and resurrect the entire nation from abroad. These conjectures, of course, are made with Gombrowicz’s tongue in his cheek lest they sound too altruistic.

Polish Form was externally plagued by Poland’s relationship with the rest of Europe and internally by a Polish bravado that arose in light of those tortured relationships. Centuries of humiliation had taken their toll on Polish character. Interspersed between those periods of

hardship were rare moments of Polish superiority in the arts and cultural realms. Polish Form is

thus the product of the reconciliation between those two extremes—at once, proud of its past

glories and inferior because of its defeats. Is the best way to overcome a traumatic event to build

a memorial to that event that could be revisited and remembered with the hope of it not being

repeated or is it better to forget that the traumatic event occurred in the first place and to move on

with a fresh perspective? For Gombrowicz, as always, the answer lies someplace in between.

Thus, Gombrowicz’s analysis of the émigré press reinforced his notion that Poland had not evolved

or matured as a national literature and culture in his absence. Like many other European nations,

Poland has always taken its literature seriously. Sometimes, however, that enthusiasm, especially

toward past achievements, was misguided and exposed the rest of the world to what he thought

was the Polish complex—an absurdly nostalgic caricature on the outside that hid the wounded

pride on the inside. Many times throughout the Diary Gombrowicz expresses annoyance at these

sad Polish personae.

“For they, in elevating Mickiewicz, were denigrating themselves and with their praise of Chopin showed that they had not yet sufficiently matured to appreciate him and that by basking in their own culture, they were simply baring their primitiveness.” (Diary I 5)

Indeed, the overly nostalgic Polish culture was not merely an act of bravado. For Gombrowicz,

Form is something that is almost hereditary, a product of Polish nature and nurturing, and something that would require dramatic and potentially dangerous surgery to eradicate or augment. “Give me a knife, then! I must perform a still more radical operation! I must amputate myself from myself” (A Kind of Testament 58). Gombrowicz viewed the unyielding allegiance

Poles had toward everything Polish as a kind of mask. In order to hide the embarrassment of past defeats and periods of foreign domination, Poles tended to proclaim and exaggerate the positive.

Subsequently, according to Gombrowicz, ignoring its fundamental flaws became inherent in

Polishness and kept the nation mired in a perpetual state of immaturity and primitiveness.

“A Pole is a Pole by nature. Whereby the more a Pole is himself, the more will he be a Pole. If Poland does not allow him to think and feel freely, it means that Poland does not allow him to be himself fully, that is, to be a Pole fully….” (Diary II 14)

Gombrowicz wants to unmask this form of Polishness—he wants to expose it for what it is. He is also interested in honesty and authenticity but acknowledges that at certain times everyone becomes an “actor” of sorts and he is not trying to deny that urge. He is simply trying to create an awareness of the mask. Once there is awareness of Form, some fun can be had with masks

and role-playing. Gombrowicz’s description of how he spent most of his evenings in Poland,

from Polish Memories, shows that he often donned a figurative mask in a café and antagonized whomever he was seated besides. These nightly exercises, which turned out to be carried over from his playful childhood, ultimately spilled over into his prose. Until the Poles learn to acknowledge and embrace their shortcomings and consciously evaluate their past, present, and future, they would continue to be stuck in this ineffectual, abortive mode.

“…a Pole does not know how to act toward Poland, it confuses him and makes him mannered. Poland inhibits the Pole to such a degree that nothing really ‘works’ for him. Poland forces him into a cramped state—he wants to help it too much, he wants to elevate it too much. Observe that Poles act normally and correctly toward God, (in church), but toward Poland they lose themselves. This means there is something here with which they are not yet comfortable.” (Diary II 6)

The sobriety of Polish Form in church becomes inebriated when taken out of that context and especially when confronted with Poland itself—suggesting that the Pole has it in him/herself to know how to act. The adolescent Poland was experiencing growing pains and Gombrowicz, a writer especially tapped into immaturity as a subject recognized this much before anyone else. “I strove for a Pole who could take pride in saying: I belong to an inferior nation. With pride”

(Diary II 15). According to Gombrowicz, Poles ought to embrace their insecurities and stop

masking them in absurdities. This task of creating a consciousness of something like the new

Polish Form is nearly impossible for one writer to accomplish. Even more so, it would appear to a formidable task for an exiled writer. However, exile itself may have been the ingredient that

enabled Gombrowicz to fully realize the scope of Polish Form and articulate his views on Form

in a way that he simply would not have been able to, because of censorship, had he stayed in

Poland. The struggle with Form for the Pole would continue beyond Gombrowicz’s lifespan.

Two post-Gombrowicz films will be discussed below that further illustrate the Pole’s apparently

innate battle with Form.

Exile (Part II)

“It is very painful not to have readers and very unpleasant not to be able to publish one’s works. It certainly is not sweet being unknown, highly unpleasant to see oneself deprived of the aid of that mechanism that pushes one to the top, that creates publicity and organizes fame, but art is loaded with elements of loneliness and self-sufficiency, it finds its satisfaction and sense of purpose in itself. The homeland? Why, every eminent person because of that very eminence was a foreigner even at home. Readers? Why, they never wrote ‘for’ readers anyway, always ‘against’ them. Honors, success, renown, fame: why, they became famous exactly because they valued themselves more than their success.” (Diary I 39)

Much has been said about the overwhelmingly negative affects of exile on any writer.

The argument can be made in Gombrowicz’s case that exile sharpened his insight into the relationship between the self and nationality. In addition, because of the isolation and solitude brought by exile, he gave the question of individual Form undistracted attention. The negative side of exile for Gombrowicz was that he was forced to develop thick skin towards others, especially other Poles. Gombrowicz metaphorically looks into the mirror and does not like what he sees. “[I]f I am always an artifact, always defined by others and by culture as well as by my own formal necessities, where should I look for my ‘self’? Who am I really and to what extent

am I?” (A Kind of Testament 77) Once Gombrowicz recognizes, in part thanks to his exile, his

own deformation, only then can he become reformed.

Antiquated Polish Form would soon become the first platitude that needed to be

surgically removed. Polishness had become a cliché synonymous with frailty, pity, condemnation,

and defeat. “As long as people were having their teeth knocked out in Poland, the world would

continue to expatiate on ‘Polish romanticism’ and ‘Polish idealism’, or repeat the same clichés

about ‘martyred Poland’” (A Kind of Testament 103). Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, this

Form or style that both embraced his own Polishness and destroyed it would not endear

Gombrowicz to others and in a way even to himself. What few readers that Gombrowicz had

during his exile were all subject to the harsh realities exposed in his prose. The fundamental

principle involved in living and writing and thinking in this way was to embrace authenticity, to

discard societal masks, to be oneself. Thus, Gombrowicz set out to “write in such a way that your

reader will see you as an honest man” (A Kind of Testament 78). The truth sometimes hurts.

“Only the most merciless realism could rescue us from the morass of our ‘legend’. I believe in

the purifying power of reality” (A Kind of Testament 104). His later years were indeed difficult and during many occasions it can be inferred from the Diary that Gombrowicz was losing his struggle with Form, with himself, and with life. “That day my neurasthenic despair reached such a pitch that if I had had the means for an easy death at hand, who knows if I would not have liquidated myself” (Diary I xi). Indeed, the difficulties of exile, the lack of a financial means, the lack of an audience, the hermetical nature of his existence, living alone, cut-off from all that is familiar, not knowing where he belongs, not wanting to return; all of these obstacles, proved to be daunting and at times exhausting. It is, therefore, not surprising that as a means of survival in the most basic sense Gombrowicz had to cut the umbilical cord that connected him to Poland, he

had to sever the rope that anchored his ship to any given harbor (either Polish or Argentinean)

and he had to view himself as adrift and internally free. Once all other distractions are discarded,

only then can the gaze upon the self be pure. So, while exile gave him perspective, it

uncomfortably forced himself to gain a sense of nationalistic closure.

“I am not eager in the least to represent anything beyond my own person: nevertheless, the world imposes these representative functions upon us against our will and it is not my fault that for these Argentines I was a representative of modern Polish literature. Therefore, I had a choice: ratify that style . . . or destroy it, which destruction would have to take place at the cost of all the more or less flattering and positive information that had been imparted and the whole process would certainly be detrimental to our Polish interests.” (Diary I 7)

Those who argue that Gombrowicz was anti-Polish or scabrous towards his homeland should note that in this passage Gombrowicz shows an awareness that what he is embarking upon could ultimately have a negative affect on his Polish diplomacy—against his stated intentions. The mere fact that he even cares about this legacy and his role in Polish letters proves that

Gombrowicz had not completely divorced himself from his homeland. However, Gombrowicz found himself caught in the biological imperative of Form—he wrought his identity through his work and he discovered a dueling consciousness or inherent Formlessness. The primary method

Gombrowicz used to express authenticity was through his writing. However, in the process of writing, the already struggling artist who fought the outside world found himself in a struggle between his “I” (the person with the writing utensil in his hand) and the Frankenstein-like creation that he was responsible for, named “Witold Gombrowicz” (the persona created in the minds of others through his writing). An awareness of and reconciliation between theses two opposing forces would constitute the drama of Gombrowicz’s life that, as it has already been discussed, lacked the normal reader/audience relationship because of his exile. These internal

contradictions were not specific to Gombrowicz as he believed everyone possessed such a

duality. His particular awareness of his own duality only fueled his argument with Form.

A Walking Contradiction

“Thus my desire to overcome Poland was synonymous with the desire to strengthen our individual Polishness. I simply wanted the Pole to stop being the product of an exclusively collective life and for a collective life. I wanted to complete him. To legitimize his other pole—the pole of individual life—and stretch him between the two. I wanted to have him between Poland and his own existence—in a perspective more dialectical and full of antinomies, conscious of his internal contradictions and capable of exploiting them for his own development.” (Diary II 15 my emphasis)

“…for Gombrowicz, the subject is not only defined by but actually reduced to nothing but a fundamental split: a reduction expressed in Gombrowicz’s statement that man is ‘a walking contradiction’ and in his polemical question of whether we are not ‘forced to live the division we are.’” –Hanjo Berressem from The Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Novels with Lacan (12 my emphasis)

The feeling of being pulled in two opposite directions may have plagued Gombrowicz’s exilic experience, but the constant struggle between his authorial “I” and the persona he created named “Witold Gombrowicz” was not entirely new for Gombrowicz. “Our form permeates us, imprisons us from within as well as from without” (Ferdydurke 47). Since there is no real way to escape Form, Gombrowicz instead chose to discard those Forms that he found to be obsolete and the products of others and he attempted to embrace the Formlessness (also expressed through the notion of immaturity) that resulted from stripping away the Forms imposed upon him.

In many respects, Gombrowicz had been caught between two opposing forces, between

Form and Formlessness, throughout his entire life. In A Kind of Testament he describes how even his lineage was fraught by what he would term “in betweens”.

“…we were a displaced family whose social status was far from clear, living between Lithuania and the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, between land and industry, between what is known as ‘good society’ and another, more middle- class society. These were the first ‘betweens’, which subsequently multiplied until

they almost constituted my country of residence, my true home.” (A Kind of Testament 28)

No literary construction dominates Gombrowicz’s oeuvre more pervasively than the notion of contradiction, which we can see, comes from his own experiences.

“There was undoubtedly a contradiction at the very root of my artistic efforts. By questioning Form my works, themselves the products of Form, defined me more and more. But contradiction, which is the philosopher’s death, is the artist’s life. Let us repeat this: one can never emphasize it sufficiently: art is born out of contradiction.” (A Kind of Testament 78)

Why are contradictions so important to Gombrowicz? Why does he state that “[t]o contradict, even on little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today”? (A Kind of Testament 141)

Gombrowicz, in valuing chaos over order, was in a sense anticipating a multicultural future. If postmodernism as an artistic movement can be characterized by a variety of disparaging forms, all working together, like a collage, and lacking a hierarchical relationship—then Gombrowicz’s embracing formlessness (chaos) and hybridism would prove to be one of his seminal contributions to modern thought. In her essay entitled “Formed Lives, Formless Traditions: The

Argentinean Legacy of Witold Gombrowicz,” Marzena Grzegorczyk argues that a by-product of

Gombrowicz’s Argentinean experience was to reinforce the notion “celebrating hybridity rather than the deformed purity propagated by the military government” (Gombrowicz’s Grimaces

136). This notion further coincides with the reality that the beauty of literary analysis as it pertains to Gombrowiczian literary scholarship is that any one of a multitude of theoretical lenses could be applied to his work—thus furthering his legacy, as Deleuze and Guattari might have termed it de-territorialization or unclassifiableness.

Given his “in between” status (miedzyludzkosc in Polish according to Ursula Phillips in her essay “The Polish Complex” here and elsewhere), Gombrowicz chose to use this characteristic to inform his most fundamental conflict—that between Form (Forma in Polish)

and Immaturity (Niedojrzalość). Because of his own experience with these opposing forces,

Gombrowicz felt he was in a privileged position to grapple with them with some authenticity and potency.

“Having one leg in the jolly world of the landed gentry, another in the world of the intellect and avant-garde literature, I was in between worlds. Being in- between is not a bad way to elevate yourself—for in applying the principle of divide et impera you can bring about the mutual devouring of the two worlds and then escape and soar ‘above’ them.” (Diary III 9)

The chameleon-like quality that Gombrowicz obtained led to serious misunderstanding of his works and created a barrier to understanding of his own nature. Did he consider himself an artist or not? Was he proud of his Polishness? Was he mature or immature? Without answers to these questions, readers have been perplexed by his works and irritated by the discord discernible within them. Gombrowicz’s texts irritate and provoke disharmony in his readers. Perhaps that provocation means that he is striking a universal nerve. This desire to provoke came naturally to

Gombrowicz:

“I had the habit of passing myself off as an artist with my relatives in the country (to irritate them), and with artists I passed myself off as a first-rate landed gentleman (to infuriate them in turn) . . . I, on the other hand, wanted to be myself, myself, not an artist or an idea or any of my works—just myself. I wanted to be above art, writing, styles, ideas.” (Diary III 9)

So what is it that Gombrowicz wants his readers to see, to understand, and ultimately to incorporate into their own thinking? The answer to this question has nothing to do with

Polishness—though he used Polishness as a way of illustrating his fundamental duel with

Form—instead, Gombrowicz wants us to actively struggle with Form rather than accept it. To

Gombrowicz, this struggle is synonymous with the struggle between life and death.

In Ferdydurke, there are three fundamental and absurd duels between Form and

Formlessness: The first involves a group of school boys making obscene facial gestures at each

other—each trying to outdo the other, with the narrator caught in between as the referee; the second involving a sixteen year old girl named Ziuta Youngblood who is trapped between the affections of another young modern boy named Kopyrda and the crusted old-time professor

Pimko—Gombrowicz’s autobiographical character Joey Kowalski is caught in between their intrigues; finally there is Kneadus in the final section who is seeking to fraternize with a young farmhand— and Kowalski finds himself caught between their fraternization.

“And out of nothing evolved a monstrous configuration, a horribly poetic cast of characters: under the window the could-not-care-less, modern schoolgirl, here on the sofa the fuddy-duddy professor bemoaning postwar barbarism, and I, between the two of them, hemmed in by the young-old poetry. God help me!” (Ferdydurke 109)

Gombrowicz used the in-between status to provide a balanced perspective on these strange confrontations. In an attempt to show the distrust of absolutes, Gombrowicz places himself in the middle to emphasize his notion that we are all the sum total of our characteristics—they are agglomerates rather than absolutes.

The Interhuman Church

Believers who attend religious services are by and large influenced by the sermon. They incorporate the teachings and lessons of the stories they hear into their own lives and their own belief systems. They are influenced by what they are told is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior.

Gombrowicz takes the aforementioned notion of an influential organization (the church) and takes the power away from the church and into the hands of humanity. Stanislaw Baranczak describes the notion of the “interhuman church” in his introduction to Gombrowicz’s Trans-

Atlantyk:

“This slightly puzzling term embraces the entirety more or less ritualized or institutionalized (hence the metaphor of ‘church’) relationships binding—and/or pitting against each other—the individual and ‘others’ (both other individuals and society as a whole). According to Gombrowicz, by virtue of being human each of

us is doomed to be part of the ‘interhuman church’: leaving it would be tantamount to renouncing one’s humanity. Specific individuals’ relations to others may, however, vary widely, stretching from a tendency to comply with the prevailing stereotype of behavior to a striving for independence, spontaneity, and freedom.” (xi from introduction to Trans-Atlantyk)

Gombrowicz, for all intents and purposes, an atheist, hypothesized that what controls and influences human behavior in the absence of God is simply other humans, what he termed the

“inter-human church” (kościól międzyludzki in Polish). Ursula Phillips clearly elucidates the crux of Gombrowicz’s debate with Form:

“The word and concept ‘Form’ is used by Gombrowicz to express an individual’s way or manner of being, thinking, reacting, feeling, behaving—which is imposed upon him from without, by the way he is perceived and treated by others and by the pressure of cultural forces. The individual self can never be whole, definite, truly authentic and unchanging, created by nature or by divine inspiration or by its own will; rather it is changeable, shaped by Form, which is not so much created by other people as between people, by a kind of ever-shifting no-man’s-land of possibility…” (Ursula Philips Gombrowicz’s Polish Complex 31)

In this inter-human church, man is torn between two opposing agendas. On the one hand mankind has the desire and imperative to perfect that which is imperfect, to become immortal and omnipotent, to become like God. However, with the onset, in the twentieth century, of doubt, of confusion about the existence of God brought about by man’s destructive capabilities in a century fraught with bloodshed, comes the antithesis of being god-like; now, mankind wants simply to be young and innocent again—realizing that promises of an afterlife might not manifest themselves and the new awareness of the shortness of life—to be young again is the best way to avoid the inevitable: death. Gombrowicz found a veritable “fountain of youth.”

Furthermore, Philips argues that Gombrowicz’s duel between Youth and God is fundamentally the same as that between Formlessness (Chaos) and Form (Order), which is the same as life versus death.

Thus, we will see in Gombrowicz’s works the emphasis on immaturity over Form (especially in

Pornografia), and the identification of Polishness with disguised-immaturity. Paradoxically, the

tendency to over-inflate past Polish successes, to mythologize past Polish artists and writers, and

to exaggerate their display of cultural awareness at times of foreign conflict and struggle, show that Poland, unbeknownst to itself, was behaving rather immaturely. Gombrowicz believed this very Polish immaturity, channeled correctly and unmasked, might actually be a virtue in disguise.

Once other Poles discarded the antiquated Forms recycled from their past, then an awareness of the unique and liberating position they find themselves in would hearken in a new cultural and literary era. Instead of masking their immaturity in a disguised nostalgia, embrace the immaturity and seek a provocative stance as the aggressor rather than the victim. There is really nothing anti-Polish about Gombrowicz’s agenda. However, the fact that he, through his life and his writings strove to leave a lasting impression was far from intentional. An examination of

Gombrowicz’s life highlights that it was mostly by chance that he came to many of the insights he elucidates in his writing.

The ‘Pole’ of Chance (Part II)

It is one thing to take it upon oneself to single-handedly rejuvenate an entire culture and bring to light that culture’s biggest flaws. It is quite another thing do this at the time of your country’s most difficult period of history. Gombrowicz grew up in Poland during the era following 1918’s new independence when patriotism ran high. However, he went to Argentina in

1938 right before the invasion and occupation by Hitler and Stalin, and the subsequent implementation of Communism in 1945. As the films discussed later will testify, even long after

Gombrowicz’s death in 1969 did Polishness go on to suffer during the onset of martial law in

1981. Thus, the twentieth century was a difficult one for Poland and its literature reflects those tensions.

Some of Gombrowicz’s readers mistook his criticisms of Polishness as betrayal and desertion when in fact he was using the only means he knew of revolt. Thus, while the timing of

Gombrowicz’s own attack on Polishness may have coincided with Hitler’s and Stalin’s, his intention to reawaken a form of Polishness that embraced its weaknesses and youthful qualities was really his way of protesting the injustices that battered his homeland though he was not there to witness most of them. The combination of the mythological qualities of his biographical life journey and his overriding attempt to solidify Poland’s place on the literary map gives

Gombrowicz himself a messianic role (Philips 34).

The role chance has played in his life is not limited to Gombrowicz’s nonfiction writing.

Even the very subject of Form was stumbled upon by chance as related in this scene from

Ferdydurke:

“Can an author who is responsible for his every word admit that he just stumbled upon a heroic theme, that those deep convictions are not his deep convictions at all, that they had somehow crept in from outside and had crawled over, ambled, and clambered into his text? Absolutely not! Because such trite methods as stumbling upon, crawling over, or creeping in have no place in a sophisticated piece of work, they are a makeshift approach suitable only for a frothy and playfully unimportant magazine article.” (Ferdydurke 73)

The notions that writers and thinkers tend to tap into that which is universal and timeless coincides with Carl Jung’s notion of the archetype and the collective unconscious. Indeed,

Gombrowicz’s dialectic of Form may have come about by chance, but given the environment in which Gombrowicz found himself, it was an inevitable subject matter for him. Marzena

Grzegorczyk suggests that “[C]hance has an important role in the creation of tradition, for it

destabilizes the notion of form” (149). In other words, a chance occurrence can compromise the

perpetual function of form—it can disrupt and ultimately abolish form.

“[C]ontingency is one of the primary characteristics of rubbish: we never know why particular elements are in the heap, and we are not quite sure what will spring from them… Rubbish has to be excluded, for, just like chance, it is a threat to the work of reason. Chance has marked all his life: his arrival to Argentina, his move to Concordia, everything.” (Gombrowicz’s Grimaces 149)

Krzysztof Kieślowski, too, acknowledged the thread of chance that may have dictated the course of his life. “By chance, a relative directed a school for theater technicians in Warsaw. If this distant uncle had been in charge of a bank, I’d be a banker now” (Insorf 7). Both

Gombrowicz and Kiesłowski became victims of chance and both men also used chance to alter their artistic trajectories. Gombrowicz writes in A Kind of Testament that . . . “I left for the

Argentine a month before the war broke out and remained there twenty-three years. It all

happened by chance. Chance?” (A Kind of Testament 83) Gombrowicz refutes the notion that he

fled Poland on purpose. “I sometimes read in the papers that I went to the Argentine in order to

escape from the war. Not at all! I prepared for the journey quite casually and it was thanks to

chance alone (chance?) that I didn’t remain in Poland” (A Kind of Testament 83). One cannot

ignore his persistent questioning of the notion of chance. When does chance become destiny?

That’s Gombrowicz’s question.

Hence, while Gombrowicz’s Polish legacy may have more potency than he might have

predicted, that legacy was in large part a product of chance. The notion that apparently random

occurrences such as stumbling upon the idea of Form and finding oneself in exile in Argentina

for nearly twenty-four years would refute any notion that human beings construct their destinies.

While chance may appear to be a random obstacle in the lives of both Gombrowicz and

Kieślowski, chance ultimately serves as a metaphor for the human condition in relation to Form.

Spilled Compote

The final published utterances of Gombrowicz from his Diary in 1968 come from April

7th when he simply writes, “I spilled the compote” (Diary III 208). This otherwise nonsensical

remark finds its counterpart in the second entry to his Diary in 1953 when he writes, “[T]o

compare Mickiewicz to Dante or to Shakespeare is to compare fruit to preserves, a natural

product to a processed one; a meadow, field, or village to a cathedral or city; an idyllic soul to an

urban one which is rooted in people, not in nature, which is loaded with knowledge about the

world of the human race” (Diary I 4). The bookend nature of these two comments carries with them symbolical weight and they illustrate the perpetual duel that Gombrowicz fights with nationality. Gombrowicz reinforces the notion that some Polish literature is simply not of the caliber of canonical works of Shakespeare or Dante. What do works by such authors possess which certain Polish works lack? While authenticity, timelessness, and originality might be an adequate beginning to delineate the differences; however, for Gombrowicz, the differences arose due to the matter of Form. Subsequently, the notion of “spilling” seems appropriate if one reevaluates the method of contribution that Gombrowicz made to modernism. “Spilling” implies an accidental quality, one that requires a quick clean up lest stain damage form. In a sense,

Gombrowicz took modernism in literature and “spilled” his perspective on top of that somewhat defined surface and as collections like Gombrowicz’s Grimaces insist, the case of Gombrowicz and modernity has not been closed or cleaned up. Hopefully, through this analysis, the case for

Gombrowicz and Polishness has been correctly characterized as a liminal relationship.

Gombrowicz expressed his love for his homeland through unorthodox methods and he attempted to provide the necessary “shot in the arm” that he felt Polishness needed. This injection would be

formed by a variety of seemingly contradictory panacea: embracing the inherent formlessness of

Polishness, accepting the limitations of Polishness, and reconciling the embarrassment of the past with the hope and pride for the future.

46 CHAPTER 2

POLISHNESS AS METAPHOR The parallel trajectory of Witold Gombrowicz and James Joyce

To call Witold Gombrowicz anti-Polish would be like calling James Joyce anti-Irish. The next question then becomes how one would classify Gombrowicz’s stance on Poland— something that is unGombrowiczian in its very essence. He liked to hover in between extremes as opposed to being diametrically categorized; however, this ambiguity has been a source of confusion for his readers and ultimately his legacy. An attempt has been made thus far to elucidate Gombrowicz’s view of Polishness and his role as a Polish writer. However, some of the issues that dominate much of his writing pertain to any text of the self. In other words,

Gombrowicz’s philosophical duel with Form can be found in other canonical writers’ works— thus Gombrowicz brought to consciousness something that had mainly held sway in the unconscious.

“Some of my compatriots regard me as an exceptionally Polish author—and I may well be both very anti-Polish and very Polish—or perhaps Polish because anti-Polish; because the Pole comes to life in me spontaneously, freely, to the extent in which he becomes stronger than I.” (A Kind of Testament 105)

This quotation contains the synthesis of Gombrowicz’s novel Trans-Atlantyk—a novel that both borrows from the Polish Baroque style and ridicules the formerly idealized humble

Polish country squire. Thus, it mocks Poland’s cultural past all the while it represents a faithful reproduction of an antiquated Polish literary style. Furthermore, the notion that Gombrowicz is

“Polish because anti-Polish” implies a self-loathing inherent in Polishness. To be a Pole means to be somewhat ashamed and under-confident—a mixture of pride and humility. In addition, the confrontation with Polishness appears to be out of Gombrowicz’s control—it happens to him

“spontaneously” or reflexively. He cannot turn it on or off. Thus, “[a]t the darkest hour of our

history, when we would have done better to sing a Requiem mass,” (A Kind of Testament 105)

Gombrowicz writes Trans-Atlantyk which amounts to a metaphorical spitting at his own battered nation. It is “[l]ike a burst of laughter at a funeral” (A Kind of Testament 105). Given a choice between being true to the past or having the freedom to “create oneself as one will,”

Gombrowicz leaned toward the latter and wrote a story that was the exact opposite of

Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, which was about the Polish spirit inspired by nostalgia. Trans-

Atlantyk shows the defamation and immaturity of Polishness due to illogical and ill-placed nostalgia (A Kind of Testament 107).

“Poland’s real reality, therefore, did not express itself in books, which were not of it—they were next to it—but in the fact that books did not express us. Our existence was dependent on the fact that we did not have an existence adequately crystallized. Our form consisted of its inappropriateness to us. So where had Polish writers made their mistake? In trying to be that which they could not be— formed individuals, when instead they were people in the process of being formed . . . and that they desired, in poetry and prose, to pull themselves up to the level of the European, more crystallized nations, regardless of the fact that this condemned them to everlasting inferiority—as they could not compete with that more polished form.” (Diary I 167)

On a micro level, Gombrowicz certainly had a specific interest in Polishness and he tried to unveil a true Polish Form that made accommodations and showed awareness for its relative immaturity. However, on a macro level, Gombrowicz was making other nationalities aware of the phenomenon that occurs in any relationship between unequal forces, between the past and the present. Thus, Gombrowicz used the Polish identity crisis as a metaphor for the human identity crisis. Gombrowicz, a Pole, writing in Polish, did not limit himself to Polishness. Instead, he used Polishness as a point of departure for a larger and more resonant purpose: to ask the fundamental questions which plague modern mankind pertaining to identity.

“The passages in my diary where I mention ‘Polishness’ have only been read very superficially by western readers. I was almost told: ‘You’d better cut all that. What has that got to do with us?’ It is high time that the heirs of superior cultures

stopped turning up their noses. Instead of ‘Poland’ put the Argentine, Canada, Romania and so on, and you’ll see that my allusions (and my sufferings) can be applied to most of the globe. They concern all secondary European cultures. Look at them still closer: you’ll see that they constitute a poison which may affect you too.” (A Kind of Testament 53)

Perhaps Gombrowicz devoted so much of his energy to the issue of Polishness because

he sought to resurrect it by describing the symptoms that plagued Poles on a pandemic level—he

saw that those symptoms plague nearly everyone. In an effort to illustrate the relevance of

Gombrowicz to non-Polish speakers and to those unfamiliar with “minor literatures”, this

analysis will now focus on the Irish writer James Joyce.

The Case of James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yet to be Formed Man

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” --James Joyce from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (276)

“It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It’s in this smithy that our maturity is forged.” --Witold Gombrowicz from Ferdydurke (68)

In Stephen Dedalus’s claim that he wanted to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race,” (Joyce 276) one cannot help but recognize a sentiment familiar to Gombrowicz’s characters. When the protagonist (a thinly veiled James Joyce) recognizes that he is a product of Irish Form, and that he has certain obligations to that Form, he recognizes a conflict of interest between his personality and his authorial voice. As a response to this confrontation, Dedalus voluntarily exiles himself from Ireland. It is in exile that he will go about creating that “uncreated conscience.” Gombrowicz voluntarily left Poland and partly because of chance and partly out of necessity, he created a Polishness that incorporated an acceptance of Formlessness and discarded antiquated Forms. Seamus Deane analyzes Joyces’ feelings towards nationality that are remarkably similar to Gombrowicz’s:

“Joyce was unforgiving in his analysis of the Irish version of degeneration, but he came to understand that the morbidity of his community’s condition was not the consequence of a lost wholeness or of a traditional culture. Instead, it was the adherence to deforming systems of belief and modes of behavior that kept the Irish in bondage. It was fear of freedom, fear of the body, fear of the complexity of experience that would always be in excess of the conventions which attempted to organize it into stereotyped patterns that wounded the Irish spirit.” (Deane viii-ix, my emphasis)

Joyce’s protagonist, throughout his adolescence, realized that Irish Form was keeping Ireland in a state of paralysis. Ireland, like Poland, is a Catholic country, which cultivates repression and fear. Stephen Dedalus fought to destroy the Irish stereotype by choosing certain aspects of his culture to honor and discarding those that needed to be destroyed. And, just as France and

Germany influenced Poland, Ireland was highly influenced by Rome and London.

“This fear was all the more pronounced because the conventional systems by which that Irish lived were borrowed, from both London and Rome; even their revival was, in his view, a fake, both because it found its ratification in a misty and suspect past rather than in the present and because it reproduced—in its valorization of manliness, sexual purity, and glory of defeat, the imaginative destiny of the Celt or Gael, the spiritual and religious character of the race—the very features of its colonial—Catholic oppression that it was trying to erase.” (Deane ix, my emphasis)

The similarity between Ireland and Poland becomes even clearer when their respective Forms are compared. Joyce and Gombrowicz found the mixture of victimization and an overly glorified past to be lethal to the creation of a progressive and authentic identity. Not only were both countries bound by their outside neighbors, they were both internally misguided as well. One can easily replace the character Stephen Dedealus with the writer Witold Gombrowicz in the following quotation:

“Stephen (Witold) literally leaves, or prepares to leave, the territory of Ireland (Poland) for his extraterritorial project—the production of a writing that is not embedded in or reducible to the categories of earlier Irish experience. His art is new and free. It has undergone the process of decolonizing itself from the history by which the Irish (Polish) have been made. It is, instead, a making, an act of

freedom that lifts the historical along into a new region.” (Deane xli, my emendations)

Whereas Gombrowicz ultimately split his identity between the authorial “I” and the persona

“Witold Gombrowicz” in part to compensate for the lack of a more immediate audience and to illustrate the modern existential dilemma, Joyce too illustrates a division of personality.

“Stephen is, as he set out to be, self-begotten. He makes himself into a character and he contrasts that act of will on his part with the obedience of his contemporaries, men and women, who have allowed themselves to be constructed [formed] by the social, economic and political circumstances of their lives.” (Deane xlii my emendations)

The Gombrowiczian hypothesis that people are a product of forms imposed upon them by others is present here and a revolt against that trend is apparent in both authors’ works. When Stephen

Dedalus finally realizes what he must do in order to be an artist, he lists the tools that he will need to ratify his decision and to embark upon his independence.

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.” (Joyce from Portrait 268-269, my emphasis)

These three concepts are eerily relevant to Gombrowicz’s exilic experience—which has been characterized as three individual epochs lasting eight years each: “the first, marked by poverty, bohemia, and light-heartedness; the second spent, in the Polish Bank; and the third, of modest life and growing literary prestige” (Diary I 82). Gombrowicz himself comments on the silence caused by the lack of a traditional audience. He relied upon cunning to create an audience and a theoretical legacy through his inventive style and subterranean publications. Similarly, Joyce’s experiences in Trieste were “ten years in a poverty that bordered on destitution.” (Potts 110) The analogy can be made between Gombrowicz living in Buenos Aires and Joyce living in Trieste.

Once again, distance would prove to be the necessary ingredient for both authors to achieve unforeseen perspectives on their own nationality and to further develop their love / hate relationship with their respective homelands.

“Trieste also provided Joyce with a necessary detachment: he felt himself far removed from Ireland, still distinguishing images and echoes of Dublin, but seeing, feeling, and hearing better from afar that city where he had loved and suffered and where he was to set all of his work. Distance gives harmonies to love and confers a supernatural appearance to it.” (Potts 110)

Even though Gombrowicz wrote in Polish throughout his exile and despite the fact that the setting for his fictional stories was Poland (with the exception of Trans-Atlantyk), one does not get a loving sense for Poland. Rather than indulge in sentimentality, Gombrowicz strove to depict the Poland that he remembered, authentically and honestly and ultimately foolishly.

Likewise, Joyce literally reconstructed the architecture of Dublin down to the minutest detail of the landscape, people and the culture. Both authors did not cover up cultural blemishes. Instead, given the freedom afforded by exile, they openly criticized their homelands and both hoped to alter the national Forms that plagued any future progression or individuality. Gombrowicz and

Joyce had a similar exilic experience and both hoped to pass on a message to other cultures, interested in neither Polishness nor Irishness. Both authors achieved universality and timelessness even though they wrote from and about specific times and locations.

“He [Joyce] was just as interested in people. He chose Dubliners as his example, but he was aiming at mankind. No one has illustrated better than he that road leading from the particular to the general.” (Potts 112-113)

Subsequently, after their departure from their homelands and their initiation in unfamiliar lands, neither author ever returned to his native land—nor were these decisions due to circumstances but rather both consciously denied the return. “More strange was his refusal to return to Ireland.

Can one say that he loved Ireland or that he didn’t love it? All his work has Dublin and its

environs for a setting” (Potts 116). While Joyce was never as far away from Ireland as

Gombrowicz was from Poland, Gombrowicz did visit Germany in 1964 and had an opportunity

to visit Poland, an opportunity that he rejected.

“It was then (while walking in the Tiergarten) that I caught a certain scent, a mixture of herbs, water, stone, wood bark, I couldn’t say what exactly . . . yes, Poland, this was Polish, just like in Maloszyce, Bodzechow, my childhood, yes, yes, the same, why, it wasn’t too far away now, a stone’s throw away, the same nature . . . which I had left behind a quarter of a century earlier. Death. The cycle was coming to a close.” (Diary III 108)

The cadence of this passage illustrates the profound realization that Gombrowicz makes

concerning his mortality and his awareness of a cycle thus completed. His life had imitated a sort

of heroic journey and he was undergoing the “return” phase of the cycle. Coinciding with this

“return” phase was the awareness of death. Indeed, Gombrowicz’s Proustian reaction to the

smell of Poland wafting through his Berlin balcony only suggests the realization that perhaps his

Argentine exile had in many ways prolonged his life and he had in essence become a new

person. It was his destiny to leave Poland in order to discover himself. Amidst the “din of

European radio speakers” in Poland broadcasting the forthcoming war in 1939, Gombrowicz

experienced an “uncommon moment” where his senses were heightened and he achieved

singularity in which “two exceptional, singular, specific words began to make themselves

audible: Witold Gombrowicz. Witold Gombrowicz” and once he was in Argentina he “finally

heard [his] own voice” for the first time (Diary III 108). Like with Joyce, the desire for distance was not a choice but an imperative. The stifling Forms of their homeland had to be destroyed in order for both of them to exist. Thus, exile allowed both writers to amputate a part of themselves in order to achieve a freer sense of self—like a lizard, caught in the grasp of a predator, will allow its tail to be removed, knowing that it can simply regenerate one later on.

“It never can be sufficiently emphasized that Joyce lived in exile voluntarily, lived in exile in order to complete his work. It would have been sweet and exalting, especially for an Irishman, to be received in Dublin, to take his revenge thirty years later on those who mocked the poor student going into exile. His work was not finished. That was enough to silence his desire.” (Potts 116-117)

Joyce would, of course, go on to write Ulysses while in exile. Ulysses is an epic novel that transformed modern literature with its attention to detail and its scope. Fearing that the past would come back to haunt him, Gombrowicz anticipated a fate not unlike that of his protagonist

Joey in Ferdydurke whose adolescence is imposed upon him in his thirtieth year:

“To go? Or not to go? I would not be journeying to Poland but to myself as I was . . . and this I feared a bit . . . The fate of any person, at a certain age, whose life has been split into two parts. To peer into that moldy well where I would see my ten- year-old, sixteen-year-old, and twenty-year-old face and go to the cemetery and dig up the grave where I lay…” (Diary III 111)

Indeed, inherent in the biographical chronology of both Joyce and Gombrowicz is the basic outline of the hero’s journey. Thus, the awareness of the author’s individual progression highlights their ancient heroic similarities and reinforces Gombrowicz’s desire to have his “life and work to be a lesson. I want to be a lesson myself” (A Kind of Testament 105).

CHAPTER 3

FERDYDURKE AND THE BIRTH OF FORM

“But in Reality matters stand as follows: a human being does not express himself forthrightly and in keeping with his nature but always in some well-defined form, and this form, this style, this manner of being is not of our making but is thrust upon us from outside—and this is why one and the same individual can present himself on the outside as wise or stupid, as bloodthirsty or angelic, as mature or immature—depending upon the style he happens to come up with, and in what way he is dependent on others. And just as beetles, insects chase after food all day, so do we tirelessly pursue form.” —Ferdydurke (80)

After Gombrowicz published Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity, his first publication, he received both harsh and praiseworthy criticism from Polish literary public. Some branded him immature, irrelevant, and precocious. As a response to these reprimands, he wrote Ferdydurke in

1937. In A Kind of Testament he asks:

“. . . Why did a work born out of such personal injuries drag me into so universal an adventure as the drama of human Form, as the ferocious battle between man and his own Form (that is to say his battle against his way of being, feeling, thinking, talking, acting, against his culture, his ideas, and his ideologies, his convictions, his creeds . . . against everything by which he appears to the outer world)?” (51)

Gombrowicz’s own response to these questions shows his awareness of Form and how

Ferdydurke would become the manifestation of his conflict with Form.

“. . . we already know that I was an agglomeration of different worlds, neither one thing nor the other. Indefinite. If I were followed step by step and spied on, my every contact with people could easily show just how much of a chameleon I was. According to the place, the people, the circumstances, I was good, stupid, primitive, refined, taciturn, talkative, self-effacing, arrogant, superficial or profound. I was agile, heavy, important, unimportant, bashful, shameless, bold or shy, cynical or idealistic. What was I not? I was everything.” (51)

Simply put, Ferdydurke would only go on to confirm Gombrowicz’s thesis that we are all prisoners of Form. Instead of struggling with Form, Gombrowicz fictionalizes a narrative that shows a playful embrace with Form.

Ferdydurke is the story of Joey Kowalski, a thirty-year-old author, who in a Kafkaesque way, wakes up one morning to find himself back in school. The premise is that since the thirty- year-old insisted on writing about immaturity [Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity], perhaps he

ought to literally return to a time of immaturity. Joey Kowalski spends his time being

reprimanded by professor Pimko at school, playing pranks on fellow classmates, getting into

facial duels with other boys, making fun of body parts, and being irreverent to the stodgy

traditional class all the while embracing the new modern prototypical youth of a free, democratic

Poland.

The title itself is nonsense. Susan Sontag suggests in her recent foreword to the novel that

the title, which does not indicate a character in the novel, is “only a foretaste of insolence to

come” (Ferdydurke vii). Danuta Borchardt, the translator of the recent English edition suggests

that “[T]he title itself, Ferdydurke, has no meaning in Polish, although there is some conjecture

that the word was a contraction and alteration of the name Freddy Durkee, the chief character in

Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which was widely read in Poland in the early 1930s” (xx Translator’s

Note). The title both prepares the reader for shenanigans to come and pokes fun at literary critics

who sometimes stretch feebly to discover the authorial intent or meaning behind every written

word.

The structure of the novel clearly follows Dante’s Inferno. At roughly the midpoint of the

narrator’s life journey he is awakened to find himself drudging through an apparently hellish

landscape: adolescence. The mere time of day when Joey Kowalski experiences his new state is

symbolical. The opening sentence, “[T]uesday morning I awoke at the pale and lifeless hour

when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own” (Ferdydurke 1), suggests a

yet another liminal time and place. This in-between-ness only serves to illustrate Gombrowicz’s

premise that we are not absolutes; instead, we are all different at different times and places—we

are young and old, we are mature and immature, we are wise and we are foolish. Like Dante’s

traveler who awoke and said, “[M]idway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods,

the right road is lost. To tell / About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough / And savage

that thinking of it now, I feel / The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter,” (Inferno 1.1-5) so too does Kowalski find himself on an epic journey through a nightmarish landscape. Kowalski describes his abduction as such when he states “[I] was halfway down the path of my life when I found myself in a dark forest. But this forest, worse luck, was green” (Ferdydurke 2). The color green is symbolic of the narrator’s newfound naïveté and inexperience.

Gombrowicz metaphorically describes the turning from 29 to 30 as similar to a butterfly that leaves the cocoon and flies away: “[I]t was time for the inevitable kill, for the man to kill the inconsolable little boy, to emerge like a butterfly and leave behind the remains of the chrysalis that had spent itself” (Ferdydurke 3). Like most people, Kowalski uses his 30th birthday as time to reassess his life. Is he where he thought he’d be? Has he accomplished what he thought he would? Is he successful? Do others respect him? Is he fully Formed? Instead of embracing the concept that one becomes fully formed as one matures and gains experience, Gombrowicz rejects it and suggests that one is the sum total of one’s characteristics. One may be 30 years-old, but the

17 year-old is still in there somewhere. Gombrowicz goes on to suggest that “[A] life unmindful of these bonds, a life that does not evolve in unbroken continuity from one phase to another is

like a house that is being built from the top down, and must inevitably end in a schizophrenic

split of the inner self” (Ferdydurke 5).

Kowalski learns to embrace his newfound immaturity. There is a freshness, a realness,

and a formlessness [i.e. freedom] in immaturity that is lacking among the mature. If the mature would not accept him, Kowalski would find a home with the immature. “…I wondered where did my infatuation with all the greenness have its origins—it is because I come from a country rife with uncouth, mediocre, transitory individuals who feel awkward in a starched collar . . .

[O]r is it because I’ve lived in an era that, every five minutes, emits new fads and slogans, and, at the slightest opportunity, grimaces convulsively—a transitory era?” (Ferdydurke 11) It is with these comments that Joey Kowalski’s story becomes Poland’s story. Gombrowicz posits that

Polishness is rife with Immaturity and Formlessness. Some chose to mask those undesirable traits with false maturity and a more refined Form, but Gombrowicz suggests that like a starched collar, those traits do not fit the Pole comfortably and it is clear to outsiders that their clothing doesn’t fit properly.

In the text, Joey Kowalski reenters high school where his teacher, Pimko, tries to overcompensate for Joey’s literary precociousness by reminding him of the Polish literary masters whom he ought to emulate simply because they wrote poetry that praised Poland. Pimko gets Kowalski and all the other students to regurgitate the virtues of the Polish poets of yore:

“[G]reat poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it” (Ferdydurke 43). Pimko eventually loses his better judgment and begins ranting that the great

Polish tradition had better be appreciated: “Towianski, Towianski, Towianski, his messianism and his ‘forty and four,’ Poland—the Christ of Nations, flame eternal, sacrifice, inspiration, suffering, redemption, heroes, and symbols” (Ferdydurke 45). It is this blind acceptance and self-

aggrandizing behavior that would later incite Gombrowicz to write his diatribe “Against Poets” which appeared in his Diary:“[T]he thesis of the following essay, that almost no one likes poems and that the world of verse is a fiction and falsehood, will seem, I assume, as bold as it is frivolous. Yet here I stand before you and declare that I don’t like poems at all and that they even bore me” (Diary I 215). The blind honoring of the past masters, Gombrowicz thought, only led to imitation and he believed, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that imitation is the death of art.

It is also in Ferdydurke that Gombrowicz explains why his later writing would continue

to develop his notions of maturity and formlessness. He refutes the notion that he himself is

repetitive:

“…I recommend repetition as the method for enhancing the vigor of your work, because by systematically repeating certain words, phrases, situations, and parts I intensify them, thereby heightening the impression of uniformity of style to the point of near mania. It’s by means of repetition, repetition that mythology is most readily created!” (Ferdydurke 70)

Hence, many of the situations from Ferdydurke reappear in different incarnations in his other

fictional work. The notion that repetition is the key ingredient in the creation of myth is further

developed through the idea that Gombrowicz’s work and life are almost inseparable. In the next

chapter I will focus on the mythological attributes of Gombrowicz’s life arc.

Perhaps the pivotal aspect of Ferdydurke is the chapter titled “Preface to ‘The Child Runs

Deep in Filidor.’” This preface, written much later that the rest of the novel, provides the

foundation for much of Gombrowicz’s later works. In addition, from a structural standpoint it

lends yet another stylistic flare to his fiction as it veers towards postmodernism. Ferdydurke is at

once a comical satire, a dialectic exercise in extremes and antinomies, an explanation of art, a

discussion of Form and nationalism, and a twisted version of the heroic journey. It both explains

where Gombrowicz came from and predicts where he will go. When Gombrowicz states

“…shouldn’t a man pack his bags and leave, shouldn’t he hide somewhere so he can’t be seen?

Can inadequacy which parades in the light of day and which craves honors be wholesome, won’t

it provoke one’s nature to hiccup?” (Ferdydurke 76), it would seem that he is anticipating his exile in the next two years after publishing Ferdydurke. Sontag, in her Foreword to Ferdydurke,

places Gombrowicz firmly between modernism and postmodernism:

“Gombrowicz gaily deploys many of the devices of high literary modernism lately re-labeled ‘post-modern,’ which tweak the traditional decorums of novel writing: notably, that of a garrulous, intrusive narrator awash in his own contradictory emotional states. Burlesque slides into pathos. When not preening, he is abject; when not clowning, he is vulnerable and self-pitying.” (Sontag x-xi)

As already noted in the previous chapter, Gombrowicz believed that though his trajectory

was determined by his nationality, his plight and duel with Form was ultimately a universal

dilemma. “Oh, the power of Form! Nations die because of it. It is the cause of wars. It creates

something in us that is not of us” (Ferdydurke 80). Gombrowicz goes on to suggest, “I have a

hunch (but I don’t know whether my lips should confess it now) that the time for a Universal

Retreat is at hand. The son of earth will henceforth understand that he is not expressing himself

in harmony with his deepest being but always in accordance with some artificial form painfully

thrust upon him from without, either by people or by circumstances” (Ferdydurke 85). While

Chopin may have delivered the perfected Form of a mazurka, Mickiewicz created the perfect

Polish Romantic Epic, and Copernicus observed the Solar system intrepidly; Gombrowicz had

his own great discovery and contribution:

“Great discoveries are indispensable—powerful blows struck by the soft human hand at the steel armor of Form, as well as unparalleled cunning and great integrity of thought and an extreme sharpening of intelligence—so that man may break loose from his rigidity and reconcile within himself form with the formless, law with anarchy, maturity with sacred and eternal immaturity.” (Ferdydurke 86)

The degradation that occurs in Ferdydurke (compromising positions between young and old, between men and women, between aristocracy and peasantry, between teachers and students) is the result of and is inspired by the weakened forms that Gombrowicz experienced in

Poland. He believed that his position in Poland enabled him to become aware of the degraded forms all around him.

“It is a country between the East and the West, where Europe starts to draw to an end, a border country where the East and the West soften into each other. A country of weakened forms . . . None of the great movements of European culture has ever really penetrated Poland, not the Renaissance, not the wars of religion, not the French revolution, not the industrial revolution. Of all these phenomena Poland has felt no more than a muted echo. And the contemporary Russian revolution hasn’t really been experienced there either: its prefabricated results have simply been (forcibly) imposed. Catholicism? The country is admittedly in the orbit of the Vatican, but Polish Catholicism is passive, it is limited to a rigorous observance of the catechism; it has never been collaborated creatively with the Church. So those plains, open to every wind, had long been the scene of a great compromise between Form and its Degradation.” (A Kind of Testament 53)

Gombrowicz’s view of recent Polish history illustrates that Polish Form was lacking and it was subjected to outside forces. Gombrowicz believed that the literature that came out of Poland during the last hundred and fifty-year period was responding to these outside forces. The great poet Mickiewicz has spoken of Polish history and has mystified and ennobled the Polish population. To Gombrowicz, this only enabled a certain Polish sense of inferiority, a collective loathing that produced feelings of inadequacy. Sontag writes:

“[T]he Polish sense of being marginal to European culture, and to Western European concern while enduring generations of foreign occupation, had prepared the hapless émigré writer better than he might have wished to endure being sentenced to many years of near total isolation as a writer. Courageously, he embarked on the enterprise of making deep, liberating sense out of the unprotectedness of his situation in Argentina. Exile tested his vocation and expanded it. Strengthening his disaffection from nationalist pieties and self- congratulation, it made him a consummate citizen of world literature.” (xiv)

As Gombrowicz will acknowledge in A Kind of Testament and his Diary, he does use his

Polishness to reinforce his theories on Form and the necessity of distance to limit the power that

Form has on us. During his stay in Argentina, these notions would only be strengthened and they

would go on to serve other secondary Forms besides Polishness.

“Most Polish writers of my generation could choose between two alternatives. They could limit themselves to Polish ground, but were thereby condemned to play a secondary role; or they could aspire to a European role, but in this case they were still condemned to a secondary role, because they were merely second- hand Europeans, they could only try to equal Europe and to repeat Europe” (A Kind of Testament 54-55).

As a result, Gombrowicz ceased being a Polish writer or a writer for the new Poland. Instead, the

only recourse he had was to write about what he did have authority over and could adequately

express: himself. “You see, for me, the postulate which consisted of speaking only in my own

personal name was not simply the elementary pre-requiste of a good style: it also proved my

moral sense, my sense of responsibility” (A Kind of Testament 55). Two ideas were

accomplished through the publication of Ferdydurke: he identified the degrading qualities of

Form and he sought to distance himself from his imposed nationality. “So, for men situated in minor, weaker countries, like Poland, the Argentine, Norway or Holland, and bound to them sentimentally, subjugated by them, formed by them, it was really a matter of life and death to break away, to keep one’s distance…” (A Kind of Testament 57) It would appear from this desire

for separation that Gombrowicz’s time in Argentina did not come unexpectedly. Once

Gombrowicz realized his position in Poland following the publication of Ferdydurke, a position

where he would provoke others and possibly instigate revolutions of Form all the while

defending himself against literary critics who still clung to Polish romanticism, he understood

that distance was imperative. It is at this very point that Gombrowicz fundamentally ceased to be

a Polish writer—he was instead a writer for humanity, in particular European humanity, and

where he resided or what language he wrote in was ultimately inconsequential.

“No, even ‘constructive’ criticism of one’s country’s faults—undertaken in a patriotic spirit, in order to improve it—was no longer sufficient. Such criticism was itself conditioned by the country. To break away! To keep one’s distance! The writer, the artist, or anyone who attaches importance to his spiritual development, must feel no more than a resident in Poland or the Argentine, and it is his duty to regard Poland or the Argentine as an obstacle, almost as an enemy. That is the only way to feel really free.” (A Kind of Testament 57)

If the condition of exile has changed over history, so to has the emergence of homelessness has

become a metaphor for the fragmented 20th century. Displacement, alienation, and inability to fully communicate have become the by-products of the times. The sense of being at home some place lost its luster. Sontag suggests that Gombrowicz’s duel with Polishness would ironically make his legacy become the epitome and the embodiment of Polishness:

“Gombrowicz never stopped arguing with Polish culture, with its intractable collectivism of spirit (usually called ‘romanticism’) and the obsession of its writers with the national martyrdom, the national identity. The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.” (Sontag xiii-xiv)

The next area Gombrowicz had to distance him from was himself. Once he was outside of his

Polishness and he realized he had no desire to be the voice of a new Poland, he quickly found himself alone and unfulfilled.

“I suppose that Nietzsche might have formulated my dilemma in these terms. I proceeded to amputate. The following thought was the scalpel: accept, understand that you are not yourself, that no-one is ever himself with anyone, in any situation, that to be a man is to be artificial.” (A Kind of Testament 58)

As a reaction to the world around him, a world consumed by fanatics, Nazis, communists,

believers and devotees to ancient belief systems, Gombrowicz, an acknowledged non-believer

became an island unto himself. He started by distancing himself from his nationality, then from

his archetypal role as a young writer, then from himself: “Is it possible to extricate oneself from

someone, under one’s own power, when that person is one’s only support, the only contact you

have, when that person’s style dominates you completely? No, not under your own power, that’s

impossible, totally out of the question. Unless a third person helps you from the sidelines…”

(Ferdydurke 138) Thus, the notion that may have helped Gombrowicz achieve the separation he

sought was Form itself. He became a prophet of Form, left to wander the proverbial desert, a

vagabond philosopher, lost to himself and his homeland.

“The old God was dying. The laws, the principles, the customs which had constituted the patrimony of humanity were suspended in space, despoiled of their authority. Man, bereft of God, liberated and solitary, began to forge himself through other men . . . It was Form and nothing else which was at the basis of these convulsions. Modern man was characterized by a new attitude towards Form. How much more easily he created himself, created as he was by it!” (A Kind of Testament 58-59)

These lucid descriptions of Form, the new ideology, the new belief system born out of the

dustbin of the 20th century is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s 1982 film Zelig. In this

Gombrowiczian film, the main character, named Zelig, is characterized as a human chameleon.

Zelig assumes the literal form of the person or people he is with. If he is beside an African-

American man, he will become African-American. If he is near over-weight people, he will become over-weight. If he is with Chinese people, he will become Chinese. Sadly, Zelig becomes a freak-show specialty item. He is psychoanalyzed by a Freudian psychoanalysis that basically summarizes Gombrowicz’s theories on Form—that people are formed by their surroundings for better or more often for worse. Zelig merely seeks acceptance so he becomes like that which he is with. This rather comical film echoes with the Gombrowiczian concept of

Form—that individuals, in order to fit in with their environment, will adopt the outward Form in order to gain acceptance:

“I imagined the men of the future forming each other deliberately: a shy man will find people who make him bold; by skillfully maneuvering others and himself, a roué will obtain a good dose of asceticism. I added my private experience to this general view of humanity and I derived a measure of tranquility from it. I was not the only chameleon. Everybody was a chameleon. It was the new human condition, and one would have to face up to it.” (A Kind of Testament 59)

However, Gombrowicz was the Anti-Zelig, the non-conformist who sought an identity that was abrasive as opposed to melding, that was singular as opposed to collective, that was pungent as opposed to bland. As a result of these provocative assertions, Gombrowicz embraces the ideals of the superiority of immaturity, imperfection, and formlessness. He abandoned Poland and he learned to distance himself from himself and to realign his new self solely within and without the notion of Form. He adopted personae and a strong literary voice that is clear in his fiction and critical writing. While the impetus for writing Ferdydurke may have been the stifling feelings

Gombrowicz experienced in Poland, the end result was a rebirth for him. As Gombrowicz himself said of Ferdydurke’s success: “A successful work lives a life of its own, it exists somewhere, on the side, and there’s not much it can do for the life of its author” (A Kind of

Testament 67). Indeed, Gombrowicz’s legacy and current relevance in Europe and in American in particular is unquestionable. Sontag writes: “[T]he European-style ideals of maturity, cultivation, wisdom have given way steadily to American-style celebrations of the Forever

Young. The discrediting of literature and other expressions of ‘high’ culture as elitist or anti-life is a staple of the new culture ruled by entertainment values. Indiscretion about one’s unconventional sexual feelings is now a routine, if not mandatory, contribution to public entertainment” (Sontag xv). Thus, Gombrowicz, not unlike Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” left his mark in a way that has slowly infiltrated the collective cultural unconsciousness of our time.

CHAPTER 4

THE MYTH OF WITOLDO Tracing Gombrowicz South American Exile With Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Journey

In Joseph Campbell’s study (The Hero With a Thousand Faces) of the heroic journey he outlines the three phases of the voyage. There is first the Departure including the Call to

Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, and the Crossing of the First Threshold.

The second phase is the Initiation including the Road of Trials, Atonement with the Father,

Apotheosis, and finally the Ultimate Boon. Lastly, there is the final phase that he called the

Return that invariably included the Refusal of the Return, The Magic Flight, Crossing of the

Return Threshold, the Master of Two World and the Freedom to Live. Sontag writes as “[a] zealous administrator of his own legend, Gombrowicz was both telling and not telling the truth when he claimed to have successfully avoided all forms of greatness” (Sontag xv). In addition, like Homer, who is credited with taking an agglomeration of oral tales and synthesizing them into his Iliad and Odyssey, Gombrowicz too is credited with taking a mainly oral form of storytelling and transposing that into preserved text in his Trans-Atlantyk. Baranczak writes that

Gombrowicz used the Sarmatian model when he wrote Trans-Atlantyk:

“[T]he literature that those country squires produced, mostly for their own or their neighbors’ entertainment, starting in the early 1600s, was (with a few notable exceptions) more local, parochial, conservative, narrow-minded, and artistically primitive than the writings of the well-educated and cosmopolitan court poets. It had its own strengths, though, which allowed it to survive the tough times; and of all the Sarmatian genres the gaweda in particular proved extraordinarily durable. Although gaweda was occasionally committed to paper and even published, it remained primarily an oral genre, partly because of the deterioration of printing in Poland during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and partly because of the migration of cultural life from the war ravaged cities to the provinces.” (Baranczak from introduction to Trans-Atlantyk xvi-xvii)

Thus, the decision to recapture the gawęda style of writing, the style of the country squire, was an ironical decision to preserve and positively represent Polish literary heritage. An examination of the life of Witold Gombrowicz will highlight the other mythological elements of his biography.

Departure

Campbell suggests that the Call to Adventure required a moment of chance, which served as the impetus for the hero’s journey to begin. “A blunder—apparently the merest chance— reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell 51). The timing of Gombrowicz’s journey (pre-war 1939) caused the blunder that set a chain of events into motion when he traveled to the Argentine.

Thus, chance proves to play a key role in Gombrowicz’s destiny in that had he left a week earlier or later—his life would have been profoundly different. “I prepared for the journey quite casually and it was thanks to chance alone (chance?) that I didn’t remain in Poland” (A Kind of

Testament 83). Ironically, “A week later the first German bombs fell on Warsaw” (A Kind of

Testament 85). Not only does ‘chance’ play a role in Gombrowicz’s personal destiny and his heroic trajectory—but ‘chance’ also informs his philosophical understanding of Form.

“…beauty is synonymous with inferiority…I think is was at the end of my stay in the Argentine, by chance, during a conversation, that this formula occurred to me, although it had existed within me for some time…The artist works in beauty…yet he doesn’t necessarily know what beauty is . . . then suddenly, that little phrase (“beauty is synonymous with inferiority”), which occurred quite accidentally, illuminated many, many things.” (A Kind of Testament 125)

By chance Gombrowicz left Poland and by chance he discovered that embedded within Polish inferiority was an element of beauty. Indeed, once in Argentina, he found himself in an

“unsuspected world” that both enthralled him by its lack of crystallized form and by the foreign

tongue. In many ways, as his biographical writings attest, Gombrowicz found himself and the freedom to live and act in ways that he had repressed up until that point.

Though Gombrowicz did live a destitute existence throughout a majority of his twenty-four years

in Argentina, he was aided along the way. “For those who have not refused the call, the first

encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure who provides the adventurer with

amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (Campbell 69). Gombrowicz mentioned

that he did receive aid from abroad. “Certain Poles helped me . . . For some time our Embassy

gave me a modest grant. But that wasn’t enough, I didn’t know how to survive the next month,

and I had to borrow a few pesos to eat” (A Kind of Testament 85). Gombrowicz was also aided by the hospitality of other artists and writers.

The final two stages are rather obvious in that Gombrowicz crosses the First Threshold when he traverses the Atlantic on his voyage, leaving behind his language, his home, his family, and his culture. Furthermore, Gombrowicz finds himself in the Belly of the Whale when he morally deserts his homeland and decides to live in exile in Buenos Aires—thus he is

“swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Campbell 90).

Initiation

The second major phase of the heroic journey is the Initiation. In this phase the hero

“moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous form, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Campbell 97). Indeed, Gombrowicz alludes to his Argentine existence using the same adjectives one would use to describe a dreamscape. “Magic. An almost preconceived form of life. The further we move away from Form, the more we are in its power.

Mysterious contradictions, contrasts . . .” (A Kind of Testament 84). This Road of Trials would not only include poverty and hunger pangs for Gombrowicz, but would also place him in

situations and environments unlike those he had ever had the freedom to experience in Poland.

“I, Mr. Gombrowicz, plunged into degradation with passion! Then suddenly I became young again, both morally and physically” (A Kind of Testament 86). In addition to realizing his inner child, Gombrowicz associated with Argentinean adolescents and he confesses to fraternizing with some of them.

The most powerful phase of the Initiation of the hero is the Apotheosis that he experiences—the achievement of a god-like status. It is relatively clear in examining

Gombrowicz’s Argentinean experience that the creation of a new self, the re-birth of “Witold

Gombrowicz” endowed Gombrowicz with god-like powers. Furthermore, the Ultimate Boon that

Gombrowicz accomplished was a form of indestructibility and immunity to, among other groups, literary critics and fellow Poles. “Another image of indestructibility is represented in the folk idea of the spiritual ‘double’—and external soul not afflicted by the losses and injuries of the present body, but existing safely in some place removed” (Campbell 174-175). Gombrowicz expresses his achievement of internal and external freedom, from the shackles of Form, when he states, “No nation can benefit from me, a permanently private individual. I am an outsider. In the international match I was never a member of their literary team” (A Kind of Testament 93). In the world of literature Gombrowicz played by his own rules. Czeslaw Milosz summerizes

Gombrowicz’s relationship with literature as ‘crazy’:

“If we employed the word ‘crazy,’ it is because Gombrowicz exhilarated the public with his buffoonery. In fact, he proceeded by a game of constant provocation, cornering the reader into an admission of unpalatable truths . . .he had no reverence whatsoever for literature. He derided it as a snobbish ritual, and if he practiced it, he attempted to get rid of all its accepted rules.” (The History of Polish Literature 432)

Because of his exile and due to his lifelong preoccupation with Form, Gombrowicz affords himself a singular position among world authors—one that both expresses uniqueness of style,

shows centrality of focus on Form, and avoids hypocrisy—he lived a Formless life that mirrored

his beautifully clear yet formless (indefinable) writing.

Return

“When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source . . .the adventurer must run with his life-transmuting trophy. The full-round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin that labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon my redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.” (Campbell 193)

Gombrowicz did return to Europe but never to his homeland Poland, though he was physically very close. Typical of the heroic quest is the Refusal of the Return. “Even the Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated”

(Campbell 193). Why does Gombrowicz refuse to visit Poland? Why does he refuse to promulgate whatever audience he had in Poland still after his departure? As it has already been stated, Gombrowicz had no interest in reaping the typical benefits that arise out of literary notoriety. By returning to Poland he would be voluntarily imposing upon himself a slew of annoying hardships.

“I think often of Gombrowicz in Berlin. Of his refusal to see Poland again. Distrust toward the Communist regime still in power there? I don’t think so: Polish Communism was already falling apart, cultivated people were almost all involved in the opposition, and they would have turned Gombrowicz’s visit into a triumph. The real reasons for the refusal could only have been existential. And incommunicable. Incommunicable because too intimate. Incommunicable, also, because too wounding for the others. Some things we can only leave unsaid.” (Kundera, Testaments Betrayed 95)

If Gombrowicz’s quest ultimately led him to himself—then why subjugate that newfound sense of self to torment and publicity? However, even a return to Europe brought about some unpleasant confrontations for Gombrowicz.

Campbell describes the Magic Flight that often occurs on the return portion of the heroic

quest. He writes, “…if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if

the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last

stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical pursuit. This flight may be

complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion” (Campbell 197). Indeed, on his

return trans-Atlantic voyage, Gombrowicz experiences a magical confrontation.

“…I knew I would have to confront the Gombrowicz sailing to America, I, the Gombrowicz sailing away from America. What a monstrous curiosity about my destiny gnawed at me, I felt my fate like a dark room, where you have no idea what you’ll break your neck on, how much I would give for the slightest ray to illuminate the contours of the future—and so today I am approaching that other Gombrowicz, as solution and explanation, I am the answer.” (Diary III 72)

Anxiety, pain, and confusion are all encompassed within this excerpt. The division of the self

that has occurred and the confrontation with the other version of himself would prove to be a

moment of epiphany for Gombrowicz. The mythological journey is nearing its completion.

The Rescue from Without implies that some force outside of the hero controls the path of

destiny which leads him or her back home. “The hero may have to be brought back from his

supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say the world may have to come

and get him” (Campbell 207). In Gombrowicz’s case, the literary world came and got him out of

Argentina and brought him back to Europe. During the writing of Cosmos Gombrowicz received

a letter “…in which I was being asked privately if I would accept a Ford Foundation invitation to

spend a year in Berlin” (Diary III 67). Had it not been for this invitation, Gombrowicz conceivably might have remained in Argentina. This Rescue from Without “…solved a problem

I had been mulling over for a long time and somewhat bitterly—of breaking with Argentina and returning to Europe—and already I felt that the die was cast” (Diary III 67).

”The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.” (Campbell 217)

This Crossing of the Return Threshold, or in Gombrowicz’s case, the re-crossing of the Atlantic, would be imbued with symbolic as well as literal meaning. Several realizations are elucidated in his Diary about this return voyage. The distinctions between Poland and the Argentine become less sharp; the darkness that penetrated his initial Argentine experiences is suddenly illuminated.

As a writer, he was lost to the rest of the world, but now he is returning to the realm of the known. Gombrowicz, subsequently, assimilates back into European culture; fortified with a formal exterior that will make him resilient to the imposition of Form that he knows is inherent there. “…[I]n Paris I will have to be the enemy of Paris. Never mind talking about it! They will swallow me up too easily if I don’t become a pain in their side—I will not be able to exist if they do not perceive me as their enemy” (Diary III 82). One might imagine that the difficulties of exile would make the subject appreciative of the creature comforts surrounding literary appreciation. In the case of Gombrowicz, his defenses had never been more on guard.

Invariably, once the hero returns and assimilates to the place that he or she left, there is a profound realization that they have become the Master of the Two Worlds. “Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the talent of the master”

(Campbell 229). Gombrowicz neither forgets what he learned in Argentina nor what he initially fled when he had left Poland in the twenty-four years that separated the two trajectories. Instead, he is bolstered by his two separate experiences and he becomes even more immune to the imposition of Form.

The final phase of the Return process involves the Freedom to Live. The culmination of

Gombrowicz’s battle with Form and with his exile has given him the Freedom to Live—and subsequently, die, upon his return to Europe.

“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that . . . one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.” (Campbell 238)

This awareness of the completed cycles, the realization of lessons learned and truths unveiled, and the overwhelming sense of liberation triggered by nostalgia and recollections of the past; all of these elements existed inside of Gombrowicz upon his return to Europe—including the new and overwhelming awareness of mortality.

“Why didn’t I understand that Europe meant my death? Why, for a man like me, for someone in my situation, any sort of getting closer to childhood and youth has to be deadly—and even though later ‘I was amazed’ that something as delicate as a smell could so suddenly bring my life to a close, from then on death sat on my shoulder, like a bird, throughout my entire stay in Berlin.” (Diary III 108)

Gombrowicz’s decision not to return to Poland tells us a lot about his epistemological quest. All of the ontological questions that had plagued him have been resolved to some degree by his decision to continue to move forward towards the future rather than backwards toward Poland

and his Polishness: Who am I? To what extent am I what I thought I was going to be? Am I being true to myself? Am I having Forms imposed upon me? Where do I belong? What have I accomplished? Do I matter? Gombrowicz died knowing he never compromised his individual

Form for Poland, he never pandered to an adoring audience in Poland or abroad, he maintained a sincerity that repelled some people and attracted others, he resisted certain Forms while he playfully embraced other Forms (not unlike an actor), he accomplished a literary legacy that is truly singular and though unfamiliar to most, worthy of reconsideration. Gombrowicz matters to those who have these existential concerns—which find themselves into the collective psyche at some point.

Indeed the mythological elements of the fantastic voyage of Gombrowicz, portrayed through and analysis of his life, illustrates the extent to which he traveled both externally and internally to honestly answer the aforementioned questions. The inner demons and the obstacles of Form are not that dissimilar to Odysseus’s foes of vanity and pride along with the bloodthirsty teeth of Scylla and the ship-destroying capabilities of Charybdis. Ultimately, Gombrowicz strove to redefine Polishness albeit far from Poland. He pleaded with Poles throughout his life to accept their secondary status, what he termed their formlessness. Gombrowicz believed that strength and authenticity was only achieved through acknowledgement and acceptance—Form will continue to pick away at our individual and collective unconscious. Gombrowicz’s Polish legacy can be traced through the works of others and through other mediums, most notably in film.

CHAPTER 5

CHISELED FORM: ANDRZEJ WAJDA’S “MAN OF MARBLE”

Between Andrzej Wajda’s film 1979 “Man of Marble” and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 film “White,” there is a paradigm shift in the depiction of Polishness.

Wajda’s narrative follows a man named Birkut whose national fame arose out of the totalitarian era. The protagonist Karol Karol of Kieślowski’s “White” embodies a caricature of modern

Polishness following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Both depict stereotypical Polishness, yet both also illustrate one of Gombrowicz’s universal conflicts of a man versus his nationality. Both protagonists are ultimately consumed by Form.

Wajda’s “Man of Marble” centers itself around a young graduate student, Agnieszka, who is attempting to complete her film thesis. For a subject matter she has chosen the 1950s bricklayer Birkut. She finds propaganda footage from the era that overtly depicts Birkut as both a caricature of a young and new Poland but less obviously shows him as a puppet to a much larger

Form creating force. Birkut would rise from the ranks of lowly bricklayer at Nowa Huta, located outside Krakow, to become a representative and leader of a Worker’s Union also known as a

Stakhanovite9. He is praised and deified to some degree. Marble statues are chiseled in his likeness. Eventually, Agnieszka stumbles upon some discarded documentary footage that depicts the fall of Birkut. His statue is removed from display at the museums and his portrait is taken down from the celebrated rafters. Agieneszka’s curiosity is aroused and she tries to uncover the truth.

What Agnieszka discovers is that Birkut was a completely manufactured persona and that his outward Form was manipulated by the media and the ruling regime to represent the new face

of Poland to a younger generation that wanted to think that its future was in its own hands— thanks to the new regime. When Birkut’s conscience tries to voice his dissatisfaction with his role in this game of propaganda, he is discarded and squashed like an insect. Since Agnieszska’s film takes place during the 1970s, she too encounters censorship and is physically threatened not to pursue this theme for her thesis. Her quest for understanding would go on to coincide with the labor-inspired Solidarity movement that was provoked in Gdansk, Poland in the early 1980s.

The link that can be made between “Man of Marble” and Gombrowicz relates to his notion of Form. The force that exists in any society that encourages everyone to behave a certain way is more or less at work in both the film and in Gombrowicz’s polemical writings. An authoritarian force formed Birkut. At first he accepted the Form that was given to him because of the praise and prestige he received. However, in time, Birkut became uncomfortable being something that he wasn’t and he rebelled. The powers that be did not allow him to exist in any other way, so he was discarded.

The Gombrowiczian connections do not end there. Agnieszka herself seems in many ways to be a by-product of the Gombrowiczian quest for Formlessness. She is reminiscent of the cheeky sixteen year old Zuta Youngblood in Ferdydurke that Gombrowicz described as a

“[S]ixteen years old, in a skirt, sweater, and sneakers, athletic looking, easygoing, smooth, limber, agile, and impudent!” (Ferdydurke 105) She is not content with being intimidated against pursuing this subject for her thesis film. She resorts at time to immaturity and comes up with many clever stratagems that allow her to pursue her quest. She challenges the established gender roles at the time by using her sexuality and sensuality to help her continue her fight.

Furthermore, for the purposes of this thesis, she represents a new Polishness in her own way. She is aware of what came before and she has no interest in blindly accepting the past and continuing

forward. She wants, with her films, to uncover the misconceptions of the past with a hope that a completely self-aware future will unfold. Agnieszka is resourceful and determined, she is peerless and self-motivated; she is the new Polish woman.

Wajda’s film creations Birkut and Agnieszka both show Gombrowicz’s confrontation with form. The former is consumed by form while the latter transcends the antiquated forms that had been imposed upon her and she forges ahead with authenticity and self-awareness. Krzysztof

Kiesłowski also twisted the definition of Polishness at a pivotal time in Polish history.

CHAPTER 6

INEFFECTUALITY AND POLISHNESS IN KIEŚLOWSKI’S FILM “WHITE”

“Karol, who is impotent in Paris (invoking on a political level Eastern Europe’s impotence in the West), must die and resurrect himself in Poland for the relationship to resume.” – Annette Insdorf from Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski (164)

“White” is the second of three films that Kieślowski made during the 1990s that corresponds to the three principles of Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity that form the foundation of French nationalism. The form of equality that is represented in “White” is not what one would expect. “White” is a story of revenge, getting even or equal with someone who has wronged you.

According to Kieślowski:

“In Poland we say, ‘Everyone wants to be more equal than everyone else.’ It’s practically a proverb. And it shows that equality is impossible: it’s contradictory to human nature. Hence, the failure of Communism. But it’s a pretty word, and every effort must be made to help bring equality about . . . keeping in mind that we won’t achieve it.” (Insdorf 159)

The main protagonist of “White” is a man named Karol Karol who has been divorced by his French wife Dominique. The primary reason for the divorce is Karol’s apparent sexual impotence since they had gotten married and he moved to Paris to be with her.

Karol, a comedic everyman-type character, begins the film by living up to every negative

Polish stereotype imaginable. He is slovenly, of short stature, unkempt, and apparently oblivious to the language of legalese and the realities of divorce. In the opening scene at the courthouse in

Paris, Karol happily smiles at a group of pigeons on the steps. A pigeon proceeds to defecate on his shoulder. He is not only sexually ineffectual for Dominique, but he is unable to use his bank teller card, a telephone booth steals his money when he tries to call her (while she is already in the arms of a more potent lover), and he has the zipper of his trousers left open when he is

soliciting charity in the Paris subway. Strangers bump into him often. His French is coarse and vulgar at first. Karol finds himself on the outside looking in. Throughout several scenes he is seen peering in Dominique’s life from afar, through binoculars: once from the street into her apartment, once when she is at his funeral, and lastly, when she is in prison. He is the butt of nearly every Polish joke that has ever been told.

Ironically, while peddling for small change in the subway, he decides to play a traditional

Polish tune on his comb (he is a hairdresser by trade) and he attracts the ear of a fellow Pole. He plays “The Last Sunday” which is a “popular Polish song about doomed lovers” (Insdorf 155).

He meets Mikolaj who helps him get back to Poland by literally stuffing him in a large piece of luggage and shipping him there. Amidst apparent lawlessness of post-Communist Poland, petty thieves at the Warsaw airport steal him. He is found out, beaten up, and left for dead. Weak and impotent in Western Europe Karol has to metaphorically die and be reborn to regain potency back in Poland: a kind of reverse of Gombrowicz’s biographical direction.

It is suggested that Karol does not experience impotence while in Poland. To get equal with Dominique, the once-buffoon Karol Karol quickly learns to exploit a lawless and newly capitalistic Poland, make a lot of money, fake his death, and leave his newfound wealth to

Dominique in his will. She attends the funeral; cries when she sees his closed casket (someone else’s body is in the casket), and makes Karol feel vindicated once again. He surprises her in her hotel room where they finally consummate their now dissolved marriage. Karol is potent once again and Dominique (though angry at his trick at first) is enraptured. Karol has since learned impeccable French including some of the obscure conditional tenses. The two unexpectedly fall back in love with each other. However, to fulfill Karol’s plan to get even with Dominique, she is arrested and imprisoned based on the suspiciousness of her newfound inheritance and the

disappearance of Karol. Thus, they are yet again separated. The film ends with Karol peering at

Dominique through binoculars in a Polish prison. His born identity is forever destroyed. Their unrequited love is refueled. In a twisty way, Karol has regained authority over Dominique.

The formula apparent in the film is rather elementary. Outside of Poland, a Pole is ineffectual while back in Poland he is more powerful and even wily like Odysseus. The film plays upon Gombrowicz’s notion that Poland is an inferior or secondary nation that is bullied around by other more established national forms. However, like in Wajda’s “Man of Marble,” there is an unexpected Gombrowiczian twist. Just as Agnieszka was an unexpected and unassuming heroine, so too is Karol Karol. His deft ascent to wealth and status (albeit mostly illegally) all in an effort to win back Dominique is nothing less than resourcefulness and determination—the same traits that Agnieszka displayed in “Man of Marble.” In a way, both serve to reinforce many of the negative Polish Forms that Gombrowicz sought to abolish, but then both also go about turning the rock over and exposing a whole other side to their character—a side that shows depth, intelligence, conniving, and worldliness. Indeed, Polishness itself is clearly depicted in both films and a new stereotype if forged to represent a new Poland.

The link between these two films and the ideas of Gombrowicz may be vague, but one cannot help but notice some of Gombrowicz’s tendencies in other artists.

CONCLUSION

WHY GOMBROWICZ?

English speaking audiences have overlooked Gombrowicz, who deserves academic reconsideration in both secondary schools and in institutions of higher education. As mentioned before, even finding a copy of some of Gombrowicz’s texts can be daunting in and of itself. His inaccessibility might suggest to some that he is irrelevant in terms of world literary study.

However, during a recent study abroad in Kraków, Poland I was privy to a new perspective on

Gombrowicz.

While riding the public transportation into Kraków one afternoon I found myself sitting near a group of four teenagers at the back of the tram. I was learning Polish at the Jagiellonian

University so my grasp of the language was elementary at best. Nonetheless, as I eavesdropped on the teenage conversation I heard them discuss Gombrowicz. Our tram had at that moment passed a local theatre where a production of Gombrowicz’s Kosmos was being performed.

Whether they were talking about the production or just Gombrowicz in general was unclear to me given my inadequate understanding of the language. What was clear, however, was the manner and tone of the conversation. Two of the teenagers had obviously read or studied

Gombrowicz and were basically pitching his writing or the play to the other two teenagers. Their tone, from what I could decipher, was not merely that of a group of academic snobs dropping names. Instead, it was more hushed and secretive, as if they were privileged as the ones who are on to something special. It was literary peer pressure at its best and it showed me that

Gombrowicz’s legacy was alive and well in the cultural heart of Poland.

The breadth of Gombrowicz’s literary contributions in America pale in comparison to other places like Argentina, France, Germany, and Poland. Translations of his works are oftentimes re-translations from the German or the French. One does not have to be a linguistic scholar to gauge what might be lost in those retranslations.

I was introduced to the works of Gombrowicz in an Eastern European Literature class at the University of Georgia instructed by Dr. Jerzak. It was there that I first read Trans-Atlantyk. I remember reading the introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak who provided the context for the novel. Baranczak’s reminiscence about rereading Trans-Atlantyk with a group of students one night instead of studying for his final exam in Marxist political economy struck me. What is it about this writer that makes everyone speak of him in these hushed and intimate tones, I asked myself? As I struggled through the first reading of Trans-Atlantyk I was coincidentally reading

Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. In that text, Kundera acknowledges Gombrowicz as one of the “great novelists of our century.” Between my admirations for Kundera and my new found curiosity about Gombrowicz came my obsession with Polishness.

Nowadays, Gombrowicz lives on through theatrical performances of his plays and adaptations of his novels into theatre, through films adapted from his novels (Pornografia) and in allusions to his life and work by other writers like Ricardo Piglia, and through Eastern

European Literature classes taught at universities across the world. I believe that Gombrowicz ought to have a wider audience than the aforementioned select crowd because he taps into universal struggles that pertain to issues that are not necessarily Polish-specific but timeless and borderless and are not relegated to a solely college readership.

Now that Poland has officially joined the European Union in 2004, at least in a symbolical and political sense it has joined the rest of Western Europe. Where Poland goes from

here is yet to be determined. This thesis has attempted to prove that Gombrowicz ought to be

reconsidered both literarily and philosophically. His message has a universal and nascent quality

about it that transcends time and place—not unlike Joyce or Shakespeare. While the lessons that

Gombrowicz teaches could withstand the most arduous literary and theoretical analysis—his

writing is better suited for other purposes and places. Gombrowicz once mentioned in his Diary

that the best way to hear Chopin was while walking on the sidewalk in the city and having his

music seep out through an open window. Likewise, the best way to read Gombrowicz is not in

the upper echelons of academia [though one could do that], but at the street level—with the

realization that what he wrote about mattered then and it still matters now. We are creatures of

our environment, for better and for worse. Gombrowicz teaches us that the fusion of life and art

is oftentimes seamless. An examination of his life shows that the unexpected trajectory his life

took through exile led him away from his homeland and to himself. The three artists,

Gombrowicz, Wajda, and Kiesłowski each contributed to the rejuvenation of the Polish spirit and each do so in their own way, at their own time. Poland is no longer the butt of jokes, it is no longer a curiosity to gawk at; instead, it is a thriving cultural center. It is a postmodern place that gazes back at its past honorably, that lives the present fashionably, and that it putting a more confident gaze on its future—thanks in part, to Witold Gombrowicz.

WORKS CITED

Baranczak, Stanislaw. Breathing Under Water and other Eastern European essays.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

Berressem, Hanjo. Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan.

Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. New York: Princeton UP, 1949.

Dante. Inferno. Trans by Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Davies, Norman. Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Deane, Seamus. Introduction. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York:

Penguin Publishing, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Deleuze Reader. Ed by Constantin V. Boundas. New York:

Columbia UP, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Trans Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gombrowicz, Witold. A Kind of Testament. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder &

Boyars, 1973.

---. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New

Haven & London: Princeton UP, 2004.

---. Bacacay. Trans. Bill Johnston. New York: Archipelago Books, 2004.

---. Cosmos and Pornografia. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and Alastair Hamilton. New York:

Grove Press, 1978.

---. Diary. 3 vols. Trans. Lillian Vallee. Evanston, IL. Northwestern UP, 1988-1993.

---. Ferdydurke. Trans. Danuta Borchardt. New Haven & London. Yale UP, 2000.

---. The Marriage. Trans. Louis Iribarne. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1986.

---. Polish Memories. Trans. Bill Johnston. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2004.

---. Possessed or The Secret of Myslotch. Trans. J.A. Underwood. London & New

York: Marion Boyars, 1988.

---. Trans-Atlantyk. Trans. Carolyn French and Nina Karsov.

New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1994.

Insdorf, Annette. Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski.

New York: Hyperion, 1999.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Publishing,

1993.

Kiesłowski, Krzysztof. White. Buena Vista Home Video, 2003.

Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins

Publishers, 1996.

---. The Art of the Novel. Trans Linda Asher. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Milosz, Czeslaw. To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux, 2002.

---. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Phillips, Ursula. Four Decades of Polish Essays. Ed. Jan Kott. Evanston: Northwestern

UP, 1990.

Potts, Willard. Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by

Europeans. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.

Wajda, Andrzej. Man of Marble. Vanguard Cinema, 2004.

Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, ed. Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Nationality, Gender.

Albany, New York. State University of New York Press, 1998.

END NOTES

Introduction

1 This is an implicit allusion to Czeslaw Milosz’s Introduction to Ferdydurke titled “Who is Gombrowicz?” from 1986.

2 For further coincidental parallels of this date, read Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier published 1914 where the date August 4th is given considerable significance in addition to the date that England entered into World War I.

3 Czeslaw Milosz writes in The History of Polish Literature “Gombrowicz exhilarated the public with his buffoonery. In fact, he proceeded by a game of constant provocation, cornering the reader into an admission of unpalatable truth…he had no reverence whatsoever for literature” (432).

4 For a more complete discussion of the modern implications of exile, see Katarzyna Jerzak’s essay entitled “Modernity and the Trajectories of Exile” from Gombrowicz’s Grimaces, where she elucidates the significant differences between the ancient forms of exile and those that sprouted up during the 20th century.

Chapter 1

5 See The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin where he spouts the virtues of a speckled axe.

6 Again, I am indebted to Dr. Jerzak’s aforementioned article where the role of laughter in Gombrowicz’s work is described as not joyous. Instead, it is uncomfortable, involuntary and the only therapy against absurdity.

7 Gombrowicz often refers to these particular countries en lieu of the universality of Polishness.

8Annette Insdorf suggests that the bottle of scotch shows to Polish expatriate to be cutting himself off from his homeland by not drinking the traditional Polish vodka but the aristocratic scotch instead.

Chapter 5

9 Norman Davies writes in Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland that “Stakhanovites [were] the heroes of labour, were glorified for the emulation of the masses. Conformism in dress and thought was encouraged. A specific form of megalomania took hold. All the public works of the day had to be colossal. Bigger was thought to mean better. Quantitative production was the ultimate good. Statistics acquired a magical value. Workers were enslaved by their ever-increasing work norms. In art, Socialist Realism gained exclusive approval, with novels about tractor drivers, and paintings about concrete factories. However miserable and downtrodden the writers actually felt, they were ordered to exude Optimism. In public architecture, a taste developed for pinnacles” (8).