30 Door Key (based on Ferdydurke) on YouTube

Another week, another trip to the hospital for an infection. Fortunately this was caught early enough that medication may be enough to handle it. On to brighter things...

The above video appears to be the 1991 movie 30 Door Key based on Witold Gombrowicz's book Ferdydurke. I'll be checking it out this weekend. I had posted clips from the movie before, but had been unable to locate the full movie. Hopefully this is it.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz: a total inability to encompass wholeness marks the human soul

Bruno Schulz's drawing for the original cover, 1937

Previous posts on Ferdydurke:
Introduction: who’s read it is an ass
Source of the title? Freddy Durkee
The first chapter: do you know what it feels like to be diminished within someone else?
An overview: they’re NOT a bunch of harmless duffers
Online videos

Gombrowicz had published two stories that appear in Ferdydurke after the release of his first book: “The Child Runs Deep in Filidor” and “The Child Runs Deep in Filibert.” The first story is a philosophical parable on the conflict between synthesis and analysis. The second story looks at a tennis game that devolves into violence, absurdity, and insults. In both stories “the child runs deep” in several of the characters. Both chapters are fun reads and can stand alone, although the diversions they provide parallel the rest of the story quite nicely.

The prefaces to each story are the chapters where I want to spend the most time because they provide the heart(s) of the book. The chapter Preface to “The Child Runs Deep in Filibert” shows a playful Gombrowicz, belittling his own work while providing some of the motivation for this preface:

And again a preface…and I’m a captive to a preface, I can’t do without a preface, I must have a preface, because the law of symmetry requires that the story in which the child runs deep in Filidor should have a corresponding story in which the child runs deep in Filibert, while the preface to Filidor requires a corresponding preface to Filibert. Even if I want to I can’t, I can’t, and I can’t avoid the ironclad laws of symmetry and analogy. But it’s high time to interrupt, to cease, to emerge from the greenery if only for a moment, to come back to my senses and peer from under the weight of a billion little sprouts, buds, and leaves so that no one can say that I’ve gone crazy, totally blah blah. And before I more any further on the road of second-rate, intermediate, not-quite-human horrors, I have to clarify, rationalize, substantiate, explain, and systematize, I have to draw out the primary thought from which all other thoughts in this book originate, and to reveal the primeval torment of all torments herein mentioned and brought into relief. (ellipsis in original; page 193)

So what is the source of all thought in the book? What is the chief torment?

[P]erhaps one should really say that the chief, basic torment is nothing other than the suffering that comes from our being constricted by another human being, from the fact that we are strangled and stifled by a tight, narrow, stiff notion of ourselves that is held by another human being.(page 194)

Gombrowicz goes on to list many “murderous torments” that lie at the base of the book, my favorite being “the symmetrical torment of analogy, and the analogous torment of symmetry”. The strictures placed on us all lies at the heart of three situations Joey finds himself—as a student at school, living with a bourgeoisie family, and watching the master/servant relationship. Gombrowicz makes it clear that immaturity has nothing to do with age or with innocence. I don’t see Ferdydurke as a celebration of immaturity, as is sometimes described, rather it strikes me more as a lament for that immature part of us put aside as we join society (or with whatever group we associate) and the related absurd strictures placed on us. The conflict between our outer appearance and our intimate self is resolved when we put on the Ferdydurkian mask.

The chapter Preface to “The Child Runs Deep in Filidor” covers a remarkable amount of ground in less than twenty pages. The heart of the book lies in the entire chapter, summarized in the short phrase: “A total inability to encompass wholeness marks the human soul.” (page 72) Gombrowicz focuses on forms in this chapter, how the forms are imposed on us and we let them define us. The next passage begins by looking at forms as it applies to writing but then expands its coverage :

Doesn’t all form rely on the process of exclusion, isn’t all construction a process of whittling down, can a word express anything but a part of reality? The rest is silence. And finally, do we create form or does form create us? We think we are the ones who construct it, but that’s an illusion, because we are, in equal measure, constructed by the construction. (page 72)

The only complaint I have about the book is that Gombrowicz seems defensive in this chapter. He distances himself from the critiques he makes in the book most of the time, but in this preface he goes after second-rate writers and the cultural aunts that judge art. Maybe I’m reading too much into it because he also provides a lament for writers that are second-rate. Gombrowicz spends a lot of time looking at the relationship of Art and Reality and how “art is the perfecting of form. … [W]e always, unceasingly, seek form, and we delight in it or suffer by it, and we conform to it or we violate and demolish it, or we let it create us, amen. Oh, the power of Form!” (pages 79-80)

Gombrowicz’s takes the irony of the situations he paints and blows them up to absurd levels. The forms do not hold in education at the school, nor with the family, and not in the master/servant relationship. Instead they get in the way of meaningful learning or interaction because their assumptions aren’t valid, leading to the “inability to encompass wholeness.” The forms are flawed because of their reliance on other people that are just as incomplete (or more so) as we are:

Isn’t it true that every being who is at a higher level of development, who is older and more mature, is dependent in a thousand different ways on beings who are less well developed, and doesn’t this dependence permeate us through and through, to our very core and to the extent that we can say: the elder is created by the younger? When we write, don’t we have to accommodate the reader? Just as when we speak—don’t we depend on the person we’re addressing? Are we not mortally in love with youth? Are we not obliged then, at every moment, to ingratiate ourselves with beings who are below us, to tune in with them, to surrender, be it to their power or to their charms—and isn’t this painful violence that’s being committed on our person by some half-enlightened, inferior being the most seminal of all violence? (page 83)

Gombrowicz’s solution sounds like a contradiction coming from someone criticizing forms—it’s to develop a new form, but one that recognized that “our element is unending immaturity.” His advice to writers can carry over to everyone: “Instead of fleeing from immaturity and shutting himself within the ambit of the sublime, he would realize that a universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed.” (page 84) It seems to be a tacit recognition that we need forms….just not the ones that are in place (or at least those in place at the time). Recognizing and dealing with our immaturity instead of falsely covering over it is the first step Gombrowicz recommends.

“It is the grotesque story of a man who becomes a child because others treat him as one. Ferdydurke aims at unveiling the Great Immaturity of humanity. The man, as described by the book, is an opaque and neutral being that must express himself through certain behaviors, and by consequence, becomes, on the outside—for others—much more defined and precise than he is in his intimate self. This causes the tragic disproportion between man’s secret immaturity and the mask that he wears to interact with others. He can only adapt in his inner self to this mask, as if he really were what he seems to be. We can say that the ‘Ferdydurke’ man is created by others, that men create themselves by imposing forms, or what we call ‘ways of being,’ upon themselves.”

— Witold Gombrowicz, preface to the French version of Pornografia [Trans. Dubowski]
Source

Of course, Gombrowicz may just be pulling our leg and everything I read and everything I’ve posted is total bullshit. If ever a twinkle in the author’s eye comes through in a novel, it is on these pages. Highest recommendation.

Ferdydurke: online videos

Still from 30 Door Key's face-pulling scene

I was unable to find a copy of 30 Door Key, the 1991 English adaptation of Ferdydurke directed by Jerzy Skolimowski (who just directed The Avengers) and starring Iain Glen and Crispin Glover. All copies available on WorldCat were at institutions that don’t participate in interlibrary loans for audiovisual material. There are a couple of clips on YouTube that will have to do for now:

The “pulling faces” duel and Mintus’ (Kneadus’) aural rape of Syphonus (Syphon). Crispin Glover is Mintus.

Joey meets the “modern girl” Zoo (Zuta), causing him to swing back and forth between the ages of thirty and seventeen. He unsuccessfully debates on how to act (Zoo is played by Judith Godrèche, who I’ve been in Ferdydurkian love with since Ridicule).

I think you would either need to read the book or be very familiar with the story in order for the scenes to make sense but they do give a good idea of the absurdity of the book.

Thanks to Artur Rosman and Dr. Leroy Searle at the University of Washington for letting me know about a 1985 Polish TV show that is available on YouTube. I only understand a word or two of it (especially “Pupa, pupa, pupa!”) but still found it well done in parts. Most of the clips are nine-minute bites for a total of just over two hours. During the low-budget PBS/BBC feel (reminding me of a series of extended SCTV skits) you’ll have to overlook Joey’s appearance as a 40-year old. I don’t recommend the whole series unless you’re really into Ferdydurke. If you have some curiosity, I’m listing what’s in each clip (it seems to follow the book fairly faithfully) so you can target what’s of interest:

Part 1: Joey wakes up; recalls aunt’s exhortations; Professor Pimko and school

Part 2: At school; faculty lounge; Pimko drops his note for the students; Kneadus vs. Syphon

Part 3: Kneadus vs. Syphon, continued; poetry class

Part 4: Poetry class, continued; Syphon recites; class over; Kopyrda jumps out the window;

Part 5: The face pulling challenge; Kneadus violates Syphon’s ear; Pimko arrives to take Joey to the Youngblood’s house

Part 6: At the Youngblood’s house; Zuta; Mrs. Youngblood; “It’s the era”; phone call and Zuta’s calves

Part 7: Being alone with a girl; Kneadus appears, visiting the housemaid; Kneadus dreams of his farmhand; beginning of fruit compote dinner; “Mommy”

Part 8: Dabbling in his fruit compote; bearded man with twig in his mouth; peeping; rummaging through Zuta’s letters; writes letters to Kopyrda and Pimko

Part 9: Spies on the Youngloods; Kopyrda and Pimko arrive; “Thieves!”

Part 10: Swarm of bodies in Zuta’s room; barking villagers; Joey meets Aunt Hurlecka and her family

Part 11: Dinner; Valek the farmhand; the slap; cousin Zygmunt

Part 12: Zygmunt and Joey; Kneadus slapped by Valek, fraternizes with the servants; aunt and uncle concerned about Kneadus’ behavior

Part 13: Francis tells Uncle Konstanty what has happened; Kneadus confronted; uncle fires warning shots outside; Joey’s attempt to kidnap Valek; uncle and cousin find Valek—the beating begins

Part 14: Valek’s beating continues; Valek serves Konstanty and Zygmunt; Kneadus protects Valek, peasants enter and there’s another scrum; Joey proposes that Zosia run away with him

Part 15: Joey and Zosia leave; they kiss; movie ends with Joey back in bed, alone

Update (23 Jun 2017): I believe I have found a YouTube video of the movie. See this post.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz: they’re NOT a bunch of harmless duffers

Wiesław Walkuski’s poster for the third Gombrowicz Festival in Radom, Poland, 1997
Picture source (and another source)

Czeslaw Milosz’s overview can be found here and the opening chapter addresses some of the book’s themes. After Joey’s transformation into a teenager by Pimko, he finds himself assigned to the sixth grade in Principal Piórkowski’s school. His fellow students, angry at being told they are immature, act in a manner they think is mature. They use inflated language, talk about sex, curse with abandon, proving their immaturity with their actions. Gombrowicz summarizes: “They were innocent in their desire not to be innocent. …Ever threatened by a sacrosanct naiveté, even as they spilled blood, tortured, raped, or cursed—they did everything to avoid falling into innocence!” (page 24) Some students stay above the vulgar actions but are ridiculed for it.

The absurdity of the students’ actions is surpassed by the incompetence of the teaching staff. Joey’s initially sees the faculty in the staff lounge:

In the large room teachers sat at a table drinking tea and muching on breadrolls. Never before had I seen a gathering of so many, so hopeless little old men. … “These are the soundest brains in the capital,” replied the principal, “but not one of them has a single through of his own in his head; if one of them should spawn a thought, I’d be sure to chase away either the thought or the thinker. They’re actually a bunch of harmless duffers, they teach only what’s in their worksheets, and, no, they don’t entertain a single thought of their own.”
(pages 36-37)

Joey witnesses the teachers’ incompetence during his classes. “A great poet! Remember that, it’s important! And why do we love him? Because he was a great poet.” And “Great poetry must be admired because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.” (pages 42 and 43) Throughout the novel Gombrowicz makes fun of institutions and culture as well as those that submit themselves their incompetence. Breaking the cycle, though, would prove difficult since, in the students’ case, “everyone was a prisoner of his own ghastly face, and even though they should have run they couldn’t, because they no longer were what they should have been. To run meant not only running from school but, first and foremost, running from oneself…”. (pages 46-47) The outcome is predictable, for the teachers as well as the students:

Having totally lost touch with life and with reality, mangled by all kinds of factions, trends, and currents, constantly subjected to pedagogy, surrounded by falsehood, they gave vent to their own falsehood! … Their pathos was artificial, their lyricism was odious, they were dreadful in the sentimentalism, inept in their irony, jest, and wit, pretentious in their flights of fancy, repulsive in their failures. And so their world turned. Turned and proliferated. Treated with artifice, how else could they be but artificial?
(page 49)

The school section ends with a contest involving making faces, finishing in a heap of bodies as the innocent student Syphon (suck up?) has murderous words, figuratively and literally, whispered in his ear by the corrupting Kneadus. Pimko appears at the door to take Joey to his lodgings at the Youngblood residence. The family, especially the mother, takes pride in their modern approach to morals while doing away with old ways. Just as the students’ behavior was trapped in their rebellion, so are the mother’s beliefs restricted, not freeing, because of her “liberalizing” rules. The modernizing ways include a reversal of family roles as the father feminizes himself. Complicating Joey’s life is the Youngblood’s sixteen-year old daughter—the mother uses her modernist views to vicariously live through her daughter, ignoring the damage it does to the girl. Making matters worse for Joey is his belief that he is in love with the girl (Zuta)—sex and lust creep into his self-declarations. Joey reads admirers’ letters sent to Zuta and believes he has cracked the code in their horrible poetry:

          The Poem
Horizons burst like flasks
a green blotch swells high in the clouds
I move back to the shadow of the pine—
and there:
with greedy gulps I drink
my diurnal springtime

          My Translation
Calves of legs, calves, calves
Calves of legs, calves, calves, calves
Calves of legs, calves, calves, calves, calves—
The calf of my leg:
the calf of my leg, calf, calf,
calves, calves, calves. (page 161)

Projection isn’t limited to movie theaters. Throughout the torture of his “love,” Joey constantly expresses his powerlessness and worthlessness: “I was neither this nor that, I was nothing”. (page 190) Joey concocts a plan to ruin the Youngbloods as revenge for his rejection as well as everything else they put him through. This section ends in another heap of bodies as Joey and Kneadus escape to search for an ideal country lad. After being attacked by villagers who bark and bite like dogs (peasant life is getting off to a rough start), the boys are taken by Aunt Huerlecka to their country estate. The people and their actions are as unreal here as in the other sections, where servants take servitude to a higher (lower?) level while masters preserve patrician customs. The aunt’s family seems just as captive and constrained as the servants—years of custom dictated how the two groups interact. Joey’s uncle is unable to comprehend Kneadus’ infatuation with the lower class: “The worldly country squire proved childishly naïve when faced with naiveté.” (page 241) The gentry’s view echoes that of the teachers, treating the ignorant and immature peasants like children. Joey’s despair boils over at the unreality he has seen in his experiences. His lament as he and Kneadus attempt to abduct a servant emphasizes the absurdity of the expected course as well as the unexpected one:

How do we find ourselves on these tortuous and abnormal roads? Normality is a tightrope-walker above the abyss of abnormality. How much potential madness is contained in the everyday order of things—you never know when and how the course of events will lead you to kidnap a farmhand and take to the fields. It’s Zosia [Joey’s cousin] that I should be kidnapping. If anyone, it should be Zosia, kidnapping Zosia from a country manor would be the normal and correct thing to do, if anyone it was Zosia, Zosia, and not this stupid, idiotic farmhand.
page 259)

The situation at the manor spirals deeper into absurdity while Joey impotently watches everything happen (a recurring motif). As his family and their servants descend into physical violence and yet another scrum occurs, Joey runs away with Zosia, intending to dump her once he is successfully clear of the manor. His conscience gets the better of him (and his maturity?) and he appears set on carrying through on his elopement, although judging from the chapter title (“Mug on the Loose and New Entrapment”) he views this as another prison. Also swaying his decision is a kiss, a different kind of human contact from the dogpiles ending other sections. He realizes human contact is essential but it comes with a caveat: “[F]rom a human being one can only take shelter in the arms of another human being. From the pupa, however, there is absolutely no escape.” (page 281) Has the reader been had?

The absurdity of these situations leads to all sorts of contradictions. Joey, a thirty-year old who doesn’t feel grown up…who feels as if he is nothing…is turned into a teenager. He is not transported back in time to his teenage years, though. It is important that he view the world through teenage eyes at the (then) current time. At some points during his repeated kidnappings, though, he plays the role of an adult while commenting on others’ immaturity. Gombrowicz makes the difference between immaturity and innocence clear, especially when showing that immaturity dominates while innocence (Syphon) is killed. The school, the place intended to help the students mature and grow, fails to provide any meaningful education. Modern behavior proves to be another trap that limits the individual. The relationships shown in the first two sections find their basis from the master/peasant relationship shown in the final segment. Conflict turns out to be the normal way of life throughout the book, where groups only unite because of a shared fear of a third group. In a world that was fragmenting as Gombrowicz wrote Ferdydurke in the mid-1930s, the book points out the absurdity of escalating petty squabbles when bigger problems are looming.

The opening chapter shows a psychological breakdown when the adult Joey felt fragmented upon waking from his dream. This fragmentation carries throughout the story as oftentimes a person is reduced to body parts, Zuta’s calves being the most obvious I've described. The perverse bodily descriptions and analogies continue to represent the psychic fragmentation within. In the next post I’ll look at the book’s diversions, which goes into this topic more and provide the heart of the book.

Ferdydurke also lashes out at the “cultural aunts” he mentions in the opening chapters (see the update in the previous post on the book for additional meaning to the term). Why should he, Joey or Gombrowicz, view himself as others judge him when those judging are perverse, the natural products of the warped forms they try to impose? The forms shown in Ferdydurke, whether educational or social, focus on exterior behavior and actions which distorts the individual trying to conform to them.

“But how to describe this Ferdydurkian man? Created by form, he is created from the exterior, which means inauthentic, deformed. To be a man is to never be oneself. He is also a constant producer of form: He secretes form indefatigably, like the bee secretes honey.”

—Gombrowicz’s preface to the French edition of Pornografia, 1962 [Trans. Dubowski]
Online source (follow for another overview and some wonderful illustrations)

Note: all quotes and page references are to the 2000 Yale University Press edition of the novel, translation by Danuta Borchardt.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz: do you know what it feels like to be diminished within someone else?

I provided Czeslaw Milosz’s overview of Ferdydurke in the opening post on this book. I’ll probably have one post on the action he summarizes because it is the most straightforward part of the book. Well, as straightforward as Gombrowicz can be. I want to spend more time on a few sections that people might tend to skim in order to get to the action or funny parts—these chapters provide the foundation for the rest of the novel. In a separate post I’ll cover the “digressions” in the novel, stories Gombrowicz published after his collection of stories in Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity: “The Child Runs Deep in Filidor” and “The Child Runs Deep in Filibert”. Gombrowicz adds prefaces to each story, the first one providing the philosophical core of the novel. This post will take a stroll through the opening chapter since it introduces many of the themes seen in the rest of the novel.

Tuesday morning I awoke at that pale and lifeless hour when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own. Awakened suddenly, I wanted to take a taxi and dash to the railroad station, thinking I was due to leave, when, in the next minute, I realized to my chagrin that no train was waiting for me at the station, that no hour had struck. 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, nothing ever change, that nothing would ever come to pass, and whatever I undertook, nothing, but nothing, would ever come of it. It was the dread of nonexistence, the terror extinction, it was the angst of nonlife, the fear of unreality, a biological scream of all my cells in the face of an inner disintegration when all would be blown to pieces and scattered to the winds. It was the fear of unseemly pettiness and mediocrity, the fright of distraction, panic at fragmentation, the dread of rape from within and or rape that was threatening me from without—but most important, there was something on my heels at all times, something that I would call a sense of inner, intermolecular mockery and derision, an inbred superlaugh of my bodily parts and the analogous parts of my spirit, all running wild.
(pages 1 – 2)

So the narrator, Joey Kowalski, begins his tale. The theme of his body not being unified or homogeneous runs throughout the novel. Sometimes it rebels at the molecular level as described above. Other times he feels parts of his body were that of a boy while other parts remain adult-size. Joey also was frightened from an earlier dream that took him back to when he was fifteen or sixteen. While Kafka’s The Trial echoes in the novel, Gombrowicz adds Dante for good measure to expound on his current age of thirty: “I was halfway down the path of my life when I found myself in a dark forest. But this forest, worse luck, was green.” (page 2) Green as in immature, non-developed: “I myself did not know whether I was a mature man or a green youth; at this turning point of my life I was neither this nor that—I was nothing…”. (page 3)

Joey uses violent terms to explain the metamorphosis that should have happened during his growth: “When I cut my last teeth, my wisdom teeth, my development was supposed to be complete, and it 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.” (page 3) To explain why he was unsuccessful and try to make himself presentable to the world, Joey explains he wrote a book titled Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity, not coincidentally the title of Gombrowicz’s first book [now titled Bacacay]. His friends and family reprove him for the title, telling him he should think of himself as mature in order to be mature. “Yet it just didn’t seem appropriate to dismiss, easily and glibly, the sniveling brat within me.” (page 4) Joey later has good things to say about immaturity.

Joey regrets (to some extent) having penned the memoirs of his earlier age, noting “man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.” (page 5) Earlier, Joey described his aunts as “quarter-mothers, tacked-on, patched-on” ladies who didn’t know what to make of him. Joey now describes with scorn

“the cultural aunts, those female semi-writers and tacked-on semi-critics who make pronouncements in literary magazines. … Unless you have ever found yourself in the laboratory of a cultural aunt and been dissected, mute and without a groan, by her trivializing mentality that turns all life lifeless, unless you have ever seen an auntie’s critique of yourself in a newspaper, you have no concept of triviality, and auntie-triviality in particular.
(page 6)

Update: Artur Rosman at the University of Washington informs me that "aunt" is used as a term of abuse, with connotations of homosexuality. This despite Gombrowicz uncertain sexuality. Like the rest of the novel, we're a long way from political correctness.

For these and other reasons Joey believes that a writer sharing his thoughts is a daredevil to set them to paper. Subtlety is lost on dullards while the rabble only respond to a work’s outer trappings. His inability to move to full maturity tears him apart, making him feel less than human and inadequate. At times Joey pre-emptively acts immature, knowing others expect him to act that way. Once again we see the circular logic of defining ourselves through the reflection of others. Joey muses on why being immature appeals to him and comes up with some rather stinging critiques:

[I]s it because I come from a country rife with uncouth, mediocre, transitory individuals who feel awkward in a starched collar, where it is not Melancholy and Destiny but rather Duffer and Fumbler who moon about the fields in lamentation? Or 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?
(page 10-11)

Keep in mind Poland has been an independent country for less than two decades while Gombrowicz is writing this. After musing on all these things in bed, Joey’s fear returns as he sees a double of himself standing in the room. Which is the real Joey? The one in bed isn’t quite sure anymore. The double in the room panics at having been identified and runs away. We keep getting this sense of Joey’s incompleteness, whether in having inconsistent or rebelling body parts or not defining himself, his two outer selves reflecting his inner fragmentation. The uncertainty on being also dovetails nicely with the theme of immaturity—what has to happen in order to be mature? Is maturity such a good thing—are there good things about being immature? What does it take to define ourselves?

“I was left alone but actually not alone—how could I be alone when I wasn’t even there, I had no sense of being there, and not a single thought, gesture, action, or word, in fact nothing seemed to be mine, but rather it was as if it had all be settled somewhere outside myself, decided for me—because in reality I was quite different! And this upset me terribly. Oh, to create my own form! To turn outward! To express myself! Let me conceive my own shape, let no one do it for me!
(pages 13-14)

Joey’s agitation leads him to begin writing his “own oeuvre, which will be just like me, identical with me, the sum total of me.” (page 14) Given Joey’s thoughts on people judging him from his first book, it can’t be coincidental that he is writing when T. Pimko, professor and schoolteacher, appears at the door. Pimko spouts banalities, mentions Joey’s long-dead aunt (and gives her a C+ as she was “not a bad book”), and begins to evaluate Joey’s writing (while “sitting squarely on his wisdom”). (page 15) While Pimko judges Joey’s writing, Joey begins to grow younger as a reflection of how the professor views him.

I became small, my leg became a little leg, my hand a little hand, my persona a little persona, my being a little being, my oeuvre a little oeuvre, my body a little body, while he grew larger and larger, sitting and glancing at me, and reading my manuscript forever and ever amen—he sat.

Do you know what it feels like to be diminished within someone else? Oh, to be diminished within an aunt is unseemly enough, but to be diminished within a huge, commonplace prof is the peak of unseemly diminishment. And I noticed that the prof was like a cow grazing on my greenness.
(page 16)

Joey tries to complain but Pimko silences him, not allowing Joey to express himself as he is but requires him to do so through the spirit of others or of his country. This denial of self-expression lays the groundwork for the schoolroom chapters that follow, or at least what the teachers try to impart. Pimko drags Joey’s “infantile form, so callow and green” (page 19) to Principal Piórkowski’s school and places him in the sixth grade. As you can guess, hilarity (loaded with irony) ensues.

Note: all quotes and page references are to the 2000 Yale University Press edition of the novel, translation by Danuta Borchardt.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz: Freddy Durkee?

I run the risk of posting too much on this novel since I thoroughly enjoyed it. As I sit down to write I’m starting to understand more of what’s going on in the book, causing me to appreciate it even more. I don’t plan on covering the entire novel in detail but there are parts I want to highlight—hopefully it will help anyone else that ends up reading it.

So why the title Ferdydurke? The word never appears in the novel. Translator Danuta Borchardt relays one speculation:

The 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. Gombrowicz himself never explained the title.

“Chief character” can’t be right—Freddy shows up only briefly as part of an advertisement for home study courses that Babbitt’s son had cut out from a newspaper or magazine. Freddy represents a rise in society: from “Mr. Mouse-Man” to being “right on the High Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence to a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best society and the kiddies getting a first-class education." (See Pages 78 and 79 for the ad)

The choice fits in several ways with Ferdydurke. There is the joke of naming a novel not after a character in a novel but for a fictional character in an ad from a novel, something meshing with the silliness and irony of Ferdydurke. The ad's cited importance of education and self-improvement echoes with Gombrowicz’s plot. Both Freddy Durkee and George Babbitt try to get ahead and become a “master man!”, something Joey Kowalski (the narrator of Ferdydurke) tries to do in his limited striving for maturity. That something is lacking or isn’t whole is a central point of both novels. While Gombrowicz may have had something else in mind, I'd like to believe Freddy was the inspiration for the title since I love the relation between the ad and the book.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz: who's read it is an ass

Cover of original release of Ferdydurke, 1937/1938
Cover drawing by Bruno Schulz
Picture source

Since mash-ups are popular now, imagine a combination of Kafka (particularly The Trial), Voltaire, and François Rabelais. It turns out something akin to this combination has already been done in Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. Any description of the book will fall short of encapsulating it as the absurdity of the above description demonstrates but I'll include one at the end of this post. I’m not sure how well known the novel or author might be, although Gombrowicz seems to have an increased popularity in the English-speaking world in the past decade because of new or updated translations. I hope posts on this novel (and on his diary and Pornografia in the next few months) will help that momentum—he deserves it.

Published in Polish in 1937, Ferdydurke was translated into English in 1961 from French, English, and (possibly) Spanish translations. Finally in 2000 a direct translation from Polish into English was published by Yale University Press. Translator Danuta Borchardt comments on the importance of body parts and two particular words central to the story but difficult to translate:

The Polish word pupa (pronounced “poopa”) presented a special problem. It means the buttocks, behind, bum, tush, rump, but not one of these (nor any others that I considered adequately conveys the sense in which Gombrowicz uses “pupa” in the text. While the “mug” is Gombrowicz’s metaphor for the destructive elements in human relationships, the pupa is his metaphor for the gentle, insidious, but definite infantilizing and humiliation that we inflict on one another. We made the decision to stay with the Polish word.

Ferdydurke is a tragi-farce, in which events are often tragic and comic at the same time, and in which the mug and the pupa are the metaphors for violence and belittlement. Names of body parts are given meaning beyond the usual, often through wordplay. This wordplay is, whenever possible, translated literally. Some plays on words are impossible to translate—for example, Gombrowicz uses the fact that the Polish term for fingers and toes is the same word to create wordplay between “fingers” and “tiptoeing.”

For a work focusing on immaturity or inferiority and the two-way degradation in relation to maturity or superiority (and the way in which these relationships are breaking down), using body parts makes a perverse sort of sense. They are what the immature can understand and provide the perfect focus for the id run amuck. And there are a lot of body parts…as well as a lot of id. In the Foreword, Susan Sontag puts it perfectly:

Ferdydurke is one of the most bracing, direct books ever written about sexual desire—this without a single scene of sexual union. To be sure, the cards are stacked from the start in favor of eros. Who would not concur in the silencing of this social babble by the clamor of rumps, thighs, calves? The head commands, or wishes to. The buttocks reign.

So how does Gombrowicz do all this? Czeslaw Milosz in The History of Polish Literature has a succinct overview of the book's plot:

Ferdydurke’ is a story of a thirty-year-old whom a malicious schoolmaster-magician, Pimko, transforms into a schoolboy. The first part deals with the hero’s adventures in high school, where the teaching is frozen into formulas repeated ad nauseam and where the youngsters are forced to admire such and such a great poet only ‘because he is great.’ Moreover, the youngsters, when they are by themselves, submit to a frozen convention of ‘boys will be boys’ (dirty words, bragging, etc.). The hero, who is also the narrator, loses his battle for self-liberation, since his escape from high school ‘patterns’ merely lands him in a Warsaw family of young intelligentsia, and this means a new serfdom: progressivism, lack of prejudices, a daring approach to sex, everything that seems to be ‘anti-Establishment,’ but, again, is frozen in forms, rules, and canons. The hero escapes a second time, with the vague hope of recovering his authenticity in the countryside, not through any union with nature but through fraternization with a fellow man who personifies primitive health, the country lad. The third part recounts a new disaster, as on the estate where the hero lives, both masters and servants repeat automatically the gestures and attitudes prescribed for masters and servants.
(page 433)

I’ll have another post or two that looks at the story and a couple of side-trips taken during the tale. It turns out the original English translation of the novel did not have the author’s parting words, which I’ll include here.
"It's the end, what a gas,
And who's read it is an ass!"
W.G.


For more on Gombrowicz the info at gombrowicz.net provides a quick introduction and overview of his life and work. Translator Danuta Borchardt’s essay on translating Ferdydurke (adapted from a lecture) covers much of her notes in the book plus additional details about Gombrowicz’s life, how his work has been viewed, and additional difficulties in the book’s translation. Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog has several posts and links on Gombrowicz and his books.