The Art Of Navel-Gazing

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The New York Sun

Czeslaw Milosz discussed his compatriot Witold Gombrowicz in terms of an onion and, later, in terms of an apple. Milosz, the more earnest writer, worried that, for Gombrowicz, man is like an onion: Every surface reveals another surface, but no core. Milosz argued that Gombrowicz resisted worldly essences, that he lived too much in his own head, and that even a simple apple interested him only insofar as it tickled his own mental equilibrium. Milosz, on the other hand, was interested in the very core of the apple itself.

That Milosz can best introduce Gombrowicz demonstrates the coziness of Polish literature: One would not read Beckett over Seamus Heaney’s shoulder, for example. Compared to Milosz, Gombrowicz (1904–1969) was a radical. His novels and plays stormed the same, desperate philosophical ground as Sartre’s, but Gombrowicz went further, artistically. He was Rabelaisian. On the first page of his first novel, “Ferdydurke” (1937), Gombrowicz is at pains to write of angst bodily:

I lay in the murky light while my body, unbearably frightened, crushed my spirit with fear, and my spirit crushed my body, whose tiniest fibers cringed in apprehension that nothing would ever happen…

He continues with devilish specificity, cringing as he remembers the “roosterlike squeaky” voice of his youth, insisting on the physicality of the legs of his “cultural aunts,” while desperate not to offer up his writerly pupa — the diminutive for a child’s bottom — to these same authorities.

Concepts such as the pupa fascinated Gombrowicz. His first story collection, “Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity” (1933) was dismissed as just that — immature. Gombrowicz responded in “Ferdydurke,” asking why men of letters act as if they have “dropped from the sky, talent and all; they are too embarrassed to shed any light on the concessions they had to make as individuals.”

Because he was willing to embarrass himself, Gombrowicz could write about himself as few great writers can. Many critics even prefer his matter-of-fact “Diary” (1953–1969) to his self-conscious artworks. Poet Adam Zagajewski reads Gombrowicz as two authors — the strange, wizard-like fiction writer, and the seasoned, ironical diarist.

And now the autobiographical “Testament” (1968), delivered by Gombrowicz near his death to the trusted critic Dominique de Roux, has been published by the Dalkey Archive Press as “A Kind of Testament” (Dalkey Archive Press, 173 pages, $12.95). It has in common with the major work the benefit of Gombrowicz’s frankness, the same perverse objectivity that leads him, in the past tense, to examine his own immaturity, and, in the future tense, to admit his own desire for greatness.

“I shall be unable to avoid some rather powerful words — like magic,” writes Gombrowicz, as he sets off to explain himself in fewer than 200 pages. Magic, as he understood it, first entered the author’s life in the form of his aristocratic mother, who “firmly believed herself to be the opposite of what she was.” She believed herself, capriciously, to be disciplined; and in her impulsive, naïve way, she assumed that she was a rational and lucid person. Gombrowicz and his brothers therefore loved to contradict her. She would remark that the sun was out, and young Jerzy Gombrowicz would reply, “What? Go on with you! It’s raining.” Witold would continue:

‘Let’s say that it isn’t raining, but that it might rain!’ And I added after a moment’s thought: ‘Let’s say that it isn’t raining, but that if it started to rain it would be raining.’

“This sport,” writes Gombrowicz, “was one of my first introductions to the world of art (and dialectics).” These parentheses are typical. Early on, he discovered that philosophy — typically in absurd, existentialist formulations — animated his everyday humor: “I learned to support nonsense heroically, to insist solemnly on stupidity, to celebrate cretinism piously.”

These boasts might sound like a tedious provocation. But Gombrowicz’s accomplishments, as a novelist, circulate through the polemics of “Testament,” bringing his arguments to life. Zagajewski’s two authors become one. Gombrowicz is quite aware of the kind of case he is making: “My thoughts’ were formed together with my work, they gnawed their way perversely and tenaciously … It is partly because of this that the artist’s ‘thought’, however lame it might sometimes appear if compared with the thinker’s thought, is often taken seriously.”

Little happened to Gombrowicz in his life — he left for Argentina shortly before World War II and stayed there for almost 24 years. He witnessed the rise of Nazism in Europe, but he did not live through the war itself, as Milosz did, nor did he concern himself much with the long Soviet aftermath. But his writing was experience enough, and it provided the ground for a philosophical stance as winning as any other in 20th-century literature: “Alienation? No, let us try to admit that this alienation is not so bad, that we have it in our fingers as pianists say … “

Putting the Polish context aside, how can we assimilate Gombrowicz? Milan Kundera has always claimed him for the great modernists, right alongside Joyce and Proust. That scale seems wrong, but even though he did most of his work after World War II, Gombrowicz does belong to the modernists. Indeed, his insistence on the dirty truth about ideas can be downright Nietzschean. He was a straight-talker with a crooked worldview. “According to contemporary convention,” Gombrowicz wrote, “the artist can only express himself partially. He can ‘sing,’ but he is not entitled to talk.” Gombrowicz talked.

blytal@nysun.com


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