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.

Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz: worthless and futile emotions

Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz
An Alternate Translation by Danuta Borchardt
Yale University Press
ISBN 978-0-300-17530-1

The need for a new English translation of this novel has been well documented, but I'll point to Michael Orthofer's post at 'the complete review' for how bad the previous effort was regarded.

So is this translation a success? I'm not sure. As Gombrowicz and others have pointed out (mentioned at Gombrowicz.net),

Witold Gombrowicz himself qualified Trans-Atlantyk as a “parody of an old-time tale, in an old-fashioned and stereotypical genre.”

Inspired by the classics of Polish literature, this satire of Polish emigrants in Buenos Aires is a pastiche of the 17th-century Polish Baroque style known as Sarmatism.

I'm not familiar with the style so I can't comment on that. This translation of Trans-Atlantyk feels very similar in narration style to that of Ferdydyrke, also translated by Danuta Borchardt. The first few paragraphs definitely feel quaint, substituting metaphors of food rather than a story for example, but once the action in his tale begins I didn't notice much different from his other writing.

I do have a confession to make on Gombrowicz, though. Other than his Diary, I've felt his books and plays rather cold and I've been unable to initially 'connect' with them. Oh sure, there are many laughs at the outrageousness of it all but there's an initial distance between us. After I've finished and put the book down, though, his story worms its way into my thoughts and I can't stop thinking about it. I find myself revisiting sections of the book or play and feeling much more of a warmth and connection when reading it again. That held true for Trans-Atlantyk, too.

So, on to the story: A character named Gombrowicz, much like the author himself, finds himself stranded in Argentina at the outbreak of World War II. One night Gombrowicz finds himself befriended by the rich homosexual Gonzalo, who begs the author to assist in his seduction of a young Polish sailor. When the sailor's father figures out what Gonzalo is up to things become much more complicated. What is Gombrowicz to do? Is he going to help Gonzalo? Or is he going to help the father retain his son (for the moment, since the intention is to send him off to war)? Gombrowicz initially leans toward helping the father but soon he finds himself over his head, embroiled in plots from many directions. Gombrowicz's fascination and revulsion with many of the parties in this farce unmoors him and the scheming ends with everyone tangled in a heap (similar to how each scene in Ferdydurke ends). Everything and nothing is resolved.

Behind the farcical nature of the action lies the question of what a citizen owes his fatherland. Gombrowicz complains that he doesn't want to "incite the Son against the Father" and that "Poles are exceptionally respectful of our Fathers." While his questions are general at times, often they are specifically framed for Poland:

“Has the fate of the Poles been so delightful up till now? Hasn’t your Polishness become repugnant to you? Haven’t you had enough of Suffering? Not enough eternal Torture and Torment? Forsooth, today they’re tanning your hides again! You’re thus sticking by your hide? Don’t you want to become something Else, become something New? Do you want all your Boys to repeat in circles everything in the manner of their Fathers? Or, let the Young Guys out of the paternal cage, let them run free across the wilderness, let them likewise glimpse the Unknown!” (77)

There's a constant conflict in Gombrowicz's mind between the Land of the Sons and the Land of the Fathers. Where should his allegiance lie? With the torture and torment of the past? Or the promise, despite what it might lead to, of the future? Meanwhile, Gombrowicz pulls no punches in describing the Polish émigré community. The Polish envoy to Argentina leads the foolishness in many ways. He shows a slavish respect for formalities, such as anything read into meeting minutes must be adhered to, no matter how silly. His insistence that Polish troops are marching on Berlin, despite every newspaper report to the contrary, gives rise to many sad jokes. In the envoy's mind, the planned duel between Gonzalo and the Father provides an opportunity to counter the destruction of the Polish army, as well as providing Gombrowicz (the author, not the character) chances to comment on the war:

Thereupon, having shown the Duel to their Excellences the Ladies and to the invited Foreigners, they will thereby show their Manliness, Honor, Prowess, likewise their immeasurable Valor, Earnest Blood, their Steadfast Reverence, their Faith sacred and Invincible, their Power sacred and Highest, and the sacred Miracle of the entire Nation. (90)

The duel provides a metaphor for the war, where everyone leads each other deeper into the morass despite the lack of desire to do so. Everything becomes "Empty," theatrical, with action only for appearance's sake. It's almost as if the "impotence" of the country they are all experiencing will be offset with the sacrifice of a generation:

He wants to fight his Country’s enemy! And when his advanced years to Impotence condemn him, he gives up his only Son to the army to die or to be maimed. Hence he throws on the scale not only his Dearest Son but also his own emotions, an Old Man’s Sacrifice, heavy and bloody! But worthless is his Sacrifice. Not frightening his gray hair. Futile are the Old Man’s emotions! (121-2)

The struggle between young and old to the detriment of each other fits in with Gombrowicz's view of forms—the instant you rebel against a set form you establish a new form. Actions become only a gesture, a theatrical act where there is little behind the gesture. The heap of people at the end of the novel relieves the immediate tension but does nothing to offset the fact that the world is falling apart…the laughter is an inadequate mask / form. As I mention in the previous post on the novel and the quote from Czesław Miłosz, there is a tension between liberation and submission towards what is expected. Neither seems to adequately address what is needed or desired.

It's a tour de force of Gombrowicz's style and ability, something that didn't hit me immediately but wormed its way inside me. Very highly recommended.

Related post: Taking on bigger beasts

Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz: taking on bigger beasts

Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz
An Alternate Translation by Danuta Borchardt
Yale University Press
ISBN 978-0-300-17530-1

I haven't read much lately and obviously have posted even less, so I'll try and correct that with a few posts on the recent translation of Trans-Atlantyk of Witold Gombrowicz. This post will look at some comments about the book by Czesław Miłosz and Gombrowicz himself.

Czesław Miłosz in The History of Polish Literature:

For Gombrowicz, there is always both a striving toward liberation from “the form” and a necessary submission to it, since ever antiform freezes into a new form. Each book of his, however, is a renewed attempt to capture one variety of strivingand to smash one more sacrosanct rule of art.

…
His novel Transatlantic (Transatlantyk, 1953), has an Argentinian setting but is written in a language that parodies Polish seneteenth-century memorialists. Many consider it his most accomplished work, as it brings into the open a theme underlying all he writings: how to transform one’s “Polishness,” which is felt as a wound, an affliction, into a source of strength. A Pole is an immature human being, an adolescent, and this saves him from settling into a “form.”

The History of Polish Literature by Czesław Miłosz (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969; page 434)

The new translation provides the preface to the 1957 Edition of Trans-Atlantyk:

Has any author explained his work as much as Gombrowicz?

“On this scale of things the best opinion I could hope for would be one that sees in this work “a national self-examination” as well as a “criticism of our national flaws.” (xvi)

“I do not deny: Trans-Atlantyk is, among other things, a satire. It is also, among other things, a rather intense reckoning…but, obviously, not with the Poland of our time, but with the Poland that has been reated by her historical existence and her location in the world (this means a w e a k Poland). And I concur that Trans-Atlantyk is a corsair ship that smuggles a lot of dynamite in order to explode our hitherto-felt national emotions. It even conceals within it a requirement of sorts with regard to certain emotions: to overcome Polishness. To loosen up our submission to Poland! To break away just a little! Rise from our knees! To reveal, legalize another dimension of feeling which orders a human being to defend himself against his nation as against any collective force. To obtain—this is most important—freedom from the Polish form, while being a Pole to be someone larger and higher than a Pole! Here it is—Trans-Atlanthk’s ideological contraband. This might mean a very far-reaching revision of our relationship to the nation—so far-reaching that it might totally transform our frame of mind and liberate energies that would, as the final outcome, be useful to the nation. A revision, nota benne, of a universal character—I might propose this to peoples of other nations, because the problem is not only the relationship of a Pole to Poland but that of any human being to his nation. And finally a revision as it most closely relates to all the contemporary problems, because I have my sights (as always) on strengthening, enriching, the life of the individual, making him more resistant to the oppressive superiority of the masses. This is the ideological mode in which Trans-Atlantyk is written. (xvi-xvii; ellipsis in original)

Gombrowicz doesn’t aim low, does he? But then, “I am one of those ambitious shooters who, if they botch things up, it’s because they take on bigger beasts.” (xvi)

In the next breath, though, he dismisses his own statement by saying “Trans-Atlantyk does not have a subject beyond the story that it is telling” (xvii) and that it has “a multitude of meanings.” (xviii) He declares he has only written about himself, while at the same time talking about much bigger topics.

For more on Trans-Atlantyk, see the the author's pages at gombrowicz.net. More on the book in the next post later this week.

Related post: Worthless and futile emotions

Princess Ivona at The Collected Works

Publicity card from The Collected Works' production of Princess Ivona

Saturday night my wife and I attended The Collected Works’ production of Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona at the Performance Art Institue in San Francisco. I provide a cursory overview of the play in this post.

As a director, I know a good play through working with it, and Gombrowicz’s script has continue to astonish me in its careful and imaginative plotting, it’s strange and rich characters, and it’s focused pursuit of some of the philosophical questions that would haunt Gombrowicz throughout his lifetime. Perhaps the strongest of these is the way the human being is constantly pulled between two poles: conventionality on one hand (or what Gombrowicz would call form); and pure freedom on the other. The former is necessary if one is to be recognizable to an other, to be a social being; but it can also calcify into something rigid and dead, limiting our human capacity for surprise, experiment, and imagination. But pure freedom, however enticing it may be as a horizon of possibility, is also chaos; and if it’s even possible to attain it for a moment, one can’t live in it.

(From director Michael Hunter’s notes on the play)

Michael’s summary captures the heart of many of Gombrowicz’s works, including Princess Ivona. The play takes turns being funny, menacing, absurd, and heartbreaking—oftentimes several of these sensations at the same time—and it’s to the company’s credit that they were able to capture with intensity of all of these feelings. In some of the posts on the company’s blog, Renu Capelli, the assistant director, looks at possible considerations within the text and ways to read the play. I want to focus on the following quote, though:

As we become more and more familiar with the text of Princess Ivona, I've been struck by the several (plural, contingent, dynamic) philosophical questions that it sets aloft, about personality, about freedom, about love, about fear, about how broader social contexts shape and then beguile the infrastructure of personality: family, status and class, proximity to powerful agents, proximity to radically different versions of power...these relationships are the "stuff" of the play, even as they are made restless and anxious by the appearance of the "sluggish" Princess Ivona (in part it's her non-participation in all of that, which seems to make everyone else's neuroses sparkle and pop). But, on first gloss, it would seem that the play's fascinating explorations into profound internal terrains remains the privilege and the agony of those characters who already have a certain access to complex personhood: as if identity crises are the privilege of the privileged.

She nails the “stuff” of the play and Ivona’s impact. Reread the last bit with “should have” instead of “already have” and you’re back to Gombrowicz’s use of forms. In the world of Princess Ivona members of the court are supposed to be ‘betters’ and complex people but their frivolity barely masks simple monstrous passions. Prince Philip endorses Renu’s last point when he notes that privilege has…well, its privileges (at least when it comes to handling misery, although more is implied). Ivona doesn’t have that luxury.

When watching a play I’m interested to see what I pick up differently from the page. A question occurred that I hadn’t thought of earlier—why does Ivona choose to speak when she does? Sometimes she defends herself. Other times she speaks in riddles, which the other characters either dismiss or invest with deep meaning. Occasionally she answers a direct question. But with my question, I’ve been transposed into the world of the court—I’m trying to impose my need for rationality on Ivona. Fortunately I didn’t feel the need to kill her (like several of the characters in the play). But there is an uncomfortable point to the play I didn’t pick up in the reading. We watch the play and laugh along at the jokes and taunts, just like the court does with Ivona. Once again we’ve entered the world of the courtiers, acting and reacting in a similar manner, although I have the excuse that I know I’m watching a play. It’s a troubling short step between the two worlds, though.

Meredith Axelrod provided the music at various points in the play, her specialty in pre-1930s pop music fitting perfectly. The first act takes place in the foyer as the actors mingle with the audience. (This wasn’t the only mingling during the evening.) The first few lines of the play were a little rough, probably because of that interaction, but the troupe quickly found its rhythm. The last three acts take place in the main section of the warehouse—‘cavernous’ might be too strong a word for its roominess, while ‘spacious’ doesn’t capture the feel. The company took full advantage of the space, although sometimes to the detriment of the audience. With action taking place at both ends of the ‘stage’, 60+ feet apart, you had to continually turn your head to catch what was happening in both places. Where the use of the entire space worked perfectly was with projections on the warehouse walls. During the final scene, imaginative projections of a raucous feast filled the walls while the ensemble recited the closing lines. I say recited because it was a flat reading of the lines—maybe meant as a simple narration to accompany the rollicking/sinister scenes on the walls? Whatever the reason, I loved the imagery and the final image sticks with me.

Speaking of imagery, if you use Facebook be sure to look up the Princess Ivona (by The Collected Works) page for some great pictures of the play.

Since I was familiar with the play I focused on the interactions between the actors and was impressed by the chemistry present in the new company. With only a few spoken lines in the play, Tonyanna Borkovi did a wonderful job in the difficult role of Ivona, portraying someone that has to be a blank slate for the characters’ projections in addition to being repulsive. Not to slight anyone else—they all did well in their roles, many of whom had to go from absurd to serious in a few seconds (see the cast and crew page for a full listing). Prince Philip's line "Do you know the sudden transition from frivolity to seriousness. There is a holiness to it. It's a revelation." captures what the actors had to accomplish. There were several moments where things were rough around the edges and a few missteps, but surprisingly few given the newness of the group. My only regret during the evening was that we had to leave immediately after the performance. I have to thank Michael Hunter for the kindness shown to us during the evening and answering my many questions. I look forward to seeing what The Collected Works does next!

Additional pictures of the production taken by Jamie Lyons can be found here.

Picture source

Princess Ivona by Witold Gombrowicz

I am supposed to attend a performance of Princess Ivona (the English title) by Witold Gombrowicz this weekend and I wanted to write about the play in advance. For the record, there will be lots of spoilers in this post.

Gombrowicz wrote Ivona, Princess of Burgundia from 1933 to 1935 and it was first published in 1938 in the Polish literary journal Skamander. According to the chronology in Gombrowicz’s Diary it was noticed by one critic. Gombrowicz later provided a summary of the play:

The tragic-comic history of Ivona can be summed up in a few words. Prince Philip, the heir to the throne, meets this charmless and unattractive girl as he goes for a walk. Ivona is awkward, apathetic, anaemic, shy, nervous and boring. From the start the prince cannot stand her, she irritates him too much; but at the same time he cannot bear to see himself obliged to hate the wretched Ivona. He suddenly rebels against those laws of nature which order young men only to love seductive girls. ‘I won’t stand for it, I’ll love her!’ He defies the laws of nature and gets engaged to Ivona.

Introduced to the court as the prince’s fiancée, Ivona becomes a decomposing agent. The mute, frightened presence of her innumerable deficiencies reveals to each courtier his own blemishes, his own vices, his own dirtiness... . In a short time the court turns into an incubator of monsters. And each monster, including the fiancé, longs to murder the unbearable Ivona. Finally, the court mobilizes its pomp, its superiority and its splendor and, with full grandeur, kills her.

That’s the story of Ivona. Is it so hard to understand?

- A Kind of Testament, translated by Alastair Hamilton (Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), pages 48-49. (Ellipsis in original)

As usual with Gombrowicz, it simultaneously is and isn’t easy to understand. On the page additional and contradictory meanings lurk just beneath the surface. I’ll add a few additional points on the story to flesh out the play. Prince Philip, tired of the frivolity and superficiality of the court, suffers from some sort of melancholy. He is unsure what he wants, and when he meets Ivona (with her insufferable aunts) he immediately sees her to be a “universal irritant.”

Ivona’s silence allows people to project their own behavior and feelings onto her. Philip sees Ivona by the light of his own turmoil, but his is a misery that he is rich and privileged enough to endure. The laws of nature Gombrowicz mentions in his summary are, of course, nothing of the sort but are social constructs, the sort Philip feels an urge to rebel against in order to prove his freedom. The court, in order to save face, calls the engagement an act of generosity. The lack of response from Ivona to questions and actions provokes everyone, who then blame her for her perceived provocations and slights.

The lack of response has other repercussions that can take several stages—in the case of Philip he initially believes her to be in love with him, causing him to feel a responsibility and tenderness for her. “She is the trap and I am captured. You love me, I must love you.” But then he sees himself as a laughingstock, interpreting every laugh and smile from members of the court as a barb aimed at him. Ivona signifies a mirror, always true in the reflection. People around her dismiss or rationalize the upsetting things they see, since she is, as the Prince puts it, “a living reproach.”

I’m interested to see how The Collected Works stages some of the ambiguous sections of the play, such as Ivona’s death. In that scene, the actors are saying one thing but their actions indicate something much more sinister. In addition, there will plenty of opportunities for slapstick and absurdity, with running gags showing up throughout the play. In other words, typical Gombrowicz, which is a good thing.

I’ll add a section with a few excerpts, and be sure to check out the links below for more examples as well as information on the play. All quotations are from the translation by Krystyna Griffith-Jones and Catherine Robins in Three Plays by Wiltold Gombrowicz (London: Marion Boyers Publishers Ltd., 1998). Ellipsis are in the original unless specified:

Prince Philip (responding to the charge that he frightened away some ladies of the court): I did not, their own secrets have driven them away. It appears that there is nothing more frightening. Famine and war are nothing compared to one little well hidden false tooth.


Prince Philip: Do you know the sudden transition from frivolity to seriousness. There is holiness to it. It’s a revelation.


King: I’ve just remembered something….
Chamlerlain: Remembered? What?
King: It’s a long time, I have forgotten all about it till now. I was only a prince and you were only an embryo of a chamberlain. That little one we…. You know…. I think on this sofa. I think she was a seamstress.
Chamberlain: The little seamstress. The sofa. Youth, oh blissful days of youth. [I'm skipping a brief interruption]
King: She died soon after that, I think…drowned herself.
Chamberlain: She did. I remember as if it were yesterday, she walked on to a bridge and then from the bridge…splash…oh, youth, youth. There is nothing equal to it.


Queen: I can’t go on like this. I must bring all my ugliness into the open before I am ready to go [kill Ivona]. Stop talking to yourself. Somebody will hear you. I can’t stop talking to myself. Do all murderers talk to themselves before the act?


For more on the play, including reviews of productions, see its page at Gombrowicz.net.
Thanks to Cynthia Haven for bringing the current production to my attention.
The Collected Works’ blog has some insight on their production.

As an aside, in Gombrowicz’s Diary there is a letter to the editor of a Polish journal that reports on the play Princess Ivona being panned by the critics upon its performance in Paris. Gombrowicz reports the summary of reviews that the troupe performing the play compiled, noting only four of thirty-nine reviews were unfavorable. The least favorable, of course, was the one reprinted in the journal. He may have had some thin skin, although his approach in the letter was more of trying to set the record straight. Finally getting performed in France and reviewed over 30 years after writing the play, Gombrowicz called his work “this Cinderella native literature,” a fitting description. (see pages 691-693 in the Yale University Press edition of Diary for the letter, translation by Lillian Vallee).

Update: see my post after attending it for more thoughts on the play and The Collected Works' wonderful performance.

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
Translation by Danuta Borchardt
Grove Press, 248 pages (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0802145130

I'm having trouble getting motivated to read or post so I'll provide a wrap-up on Pornografia that is heavy on links, quotes, and impressions. First, the summary from the Publishers Weekly review (taken from Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog):

While recuperating from wartime Warsaw in the Polish countryside, the unnamed narrator and his friend, Fryderyk, attempt to force amour between two local youths, Karol and Henia, as a kind of a lewd entertainment. They become increasingly frustrated as they discover that the two have no interest in one another, and the games are momentarily stopped by a local murder and a directive to assassinate a rogue member of the Polish resistance. Gombrowicz connects these threads magnificently in a tense climax that imbues his novel with a deep sense of the absurd and multiplies its complexity. Gombrowicz is a relentless psychoanalyzer and a consummate stylist; his prose is precise and forceful, and the narrator’s strained attempts to elucidate why he takes such pleasure at soiling youth creepily evoke authentic pride and disgust. Borchardt’s translation (the first into English from the original Polish) is a model of consistency, maintaining a manic tone as it navigates between lengthy, comma-spliced sentences and sharp, declarative thrusts.

My posts on (and around) the novel:

A disastrous adventure

Gombrowicz’s thoughts on the novel in his Diary and from A Kind of Testament

The 2003 movie adaptation


Stray thoughts:

It’s easy to tell I’ve become a fan of Gombrowicz and this book highlights much of what I enjoy about his writing. The themes at its heart lie with the interaction and influence between youth and maturity (or you can call it naturalness and artificiality, or nature and culture, or controlling and being controlled). The interaction, straight-forward at first, becomes complicated as thoughts and being intertwine. One example begins with the narrator Witold’s ecstasy in church, not from religious matters but from seeing two beautiful adolescents. The part of the body he first notices are their necks, then their body parts begin to merge in his imagination:

What’s this? It was as if the nape of her neck (the girl’s) was taking a run for and uniting itself with (the boy’s) neck, this neck as if taken by the scruff was taking the other neck by the scruff of the neck! Please forgive the awkwardness of these metaphors.
(page 24)

Witold and Fryderyk attempt to turn this imaginary combination of the two kids into a real, carnal coupling. Along the way, the friendship between Witold and Fryderyk deepens in a manner such that they begin to identify with each other, think the same thoughts and anticipate the actions of each other. There are other mergers along the way, leading to an ending where the four characters briefly become one.

There are several such troubling cases of symmetry, pairings, and mirroring throughout the novel. Another example starts with the imagery of Henia and Karol killing a worm (see my first post for the excerpt). Later, after Vaclav sees Henia toying with Karol (although Vaclav doesn’t know it is staged) he declares he will kill Karol like a worm. Once again this sets the stage for the final scene.

While there are many humorous things Gombrowicz does in his narration, I wanted to point out the use of parentheses around (the boy) and (the girl) as seen in the above excerpt. Like many other things in the novel, this usage is open to interpretation. The narrator promises he will explain why he uses this notation for Karol and Henia but never does. There’s a hint later on that, while maybe not correct, provides plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor (which leads me to believe that it is not incorrect). In a letter to Witold, Fryderyk uses symbols and characters’ initials to find an explanation on what has happened and how things can play out:

The knife creates a new formula, S (Siemian)—S¹ (Skuziak).
Which makes: (SS¹)—A, through A, through Amelia’s murder.
But at the same time there is A—KH. Or (KH)—(SS¹)
What chemistry! It is all connected.
(page 160)

Don’t try to understand it…you would have to be much more immersed in the novel for that excerpt to approach making sense (and for me it doesn’t go beyond the ‘approach’ stage). The key lies with the formulae and the chemistry. Witold and Fryderyk attempt to manipulate Karol and Henia just like a chemistry experiment. Alas, there is no apparent chemistry between the youth. Like any pun or joke, it loses a lot in the explanation.

There are a lot more topics to delve into, especially the character of Fryderyk and the role religion plays in the novel, but I’m going to end here. Please forgive my erratic spelling of characters’ names across the posts. I’ve tried to remain consistent with the novel’s spellings when discussing the novel, but lapsed into the Anglicized spellings that were used in the movie occasionally. Hopefully I haven’t confused anyone.


Some additional links:

An interview with translator Danuta Borchardt:

DB: Pornografia focuses, perhaps more than his other three novels, on the outer limits of the imagination—on the “forbidden”—on the erotic fantasies of middle age and on living them through the young, and on manipulations that influence the young to the point of crime and murder.

Also, in Pornografia Gombrowicz tests the notion of belief in God versus non-belief. According to Jerzy Jarzębski, one of Gombrowicz’s foremost scholars: “Pornografia is blasphemous in the sense that it presents traditional culture and national customs in a state of exhaustion and atrophy.” Jarzębski, suggests that Gombrowicz’s ideas may originate from the existentialists’ “death of God,” from old age generally, from World War II and the demands it placed on Polish society, and from the collapse of moral values.

Another interview with Borchardt (via podcast) can be found here

More on the novel (and some suggestive covers) at Gombrowicz.net

An excerpt at The Quarterly Conversation

Reviews at:
Three Percent
The Washington Post (Michael Dirda)
The New Republic

Pornografia: 2003 movie, Poland

At Frederick's command, Henia (Sandra Samos) rolls up Karol's torn pants leg

I continue with my erratic foreign movie posts for this year as well as posting on movies adapted from books (as usual, this post will look at the differences between the film adaptation and the novel). For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up (first half of year and second half). I’m trying to get back in the swing of things after being offline for a while…

Pornografia tests the limits of how much you can add or change before a movie becomes something very different from the novel on which it’s based. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a great novel and an enjoyable movie. See my first post on the novel for the general storyline, which remains essentially the same—Frederick and Witold try to engineer the pairing of Henia and Karol, while the residents of a country estate are tasked with the murder of a resistance office. The main themes regarding the interaction of youth and maturity are consistent with the novel. So what changes?

The movie makes good use of visual imagery, such as focusing on moths trapped in a lamp shade—a little heavy handed at times but in this gorgeous film it usually works. The war (World War II), downplayed in the early part of the novel, remains in the forefront of the movie, whether with soldiers visiting the estate for milk and eggs or in a soldier’s rape of a country girl during a dreamlike sequence in the forest.

One addition clarifies an important point of the novel—Veronika, one of the estate’s maids, attempts to seduce Frederick. He gently rejects her, highlighting Witold’s and Frederick’s interest in pairing Karol and Henia for reasons other than physical enjoyment. The best addition to the movie for me was Henia’s reading of the poem “Without You” by Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska. The timing of its reading adds to the impact of the poem (translation from the subtitles, which includes the ellipsis):

I’m bored without you, bored to madness…
Along with my dog and my squirrel…
I write, read, and smoke, and my eyes are still blue.
But all this is just the force of habit…
The dawn is still gray and the dusk gold-blue…
Day crosses to one, night to the other side…
and the roses bloom, seemingly unwilling…
as they can’t do otherwise.
Yet the world has ended, can you understand?
It is no more and won’t bring it to life.
The time is hard and quiet but wait a minute…I…
may be already on the other side.

Henia runs with Frederick and Witold

There are many other changes which make little difference or represent a different emphasis from the novel, such as the mistress of the estate being an alcoholic. I had to wonder, though, why bother making such a change? There are some key additions, though, I would like to address because they change the course of the story from the novel.

After the arrival of Siemian (the resistance officer who wishes to quit) at the estate, Witold and Frederick slowly scale back their plans for a forced pairing between Karol and Henia. In place of the original plan, the corruption of the youth is to come from their assignment to murder Siemian. On the way to Siemian’s room, Karol and Henia pause for a brief tryst, showing that despite all the elders’ plans youth will follow its own path. What’s most troubling about the scene to me, though, is the impersonal nature of the sex. Karol and Henia demonstrate about as much passion as if they had stopped for a drink of water. All of which may be the point—the rapturous flights of fancy by Witold and Frederick end in a different, cold reality. There are other ways to view the act, too, but whatever your interpretation its inclusion alters some of the dimensions of the story.

The biggest addition revolves around the inclusion of the Holocaust, which (if I remember correctly) is never mentioned or alluded to in the novel. Its inclusion comes completely from left field and markedly modifies the story. Karol and Witold’s visit to town for kerosene provides the first time its presence is felt. Witold, wandering around the store, spies a family hiding in the basement. The next inclusion, though, is what takes the storyline into a completely different direction from the novel. I apologize for not going into more detail after providing other spoilers, but I think discussing it would ruin watching the movie. It’s enough of a change, even though you can argue it is consistent with other themes, to transform the movie into something completely different than the novel.

I’m not sure the addition of this storyline works. It proves to be powerful but adds a maudlin feeling. For the first 90% of the movie, Director Jan Jakub Kolski did a wonderful job of translating a novel that plays out mostly from Witold’s thoughts. Because of that, even with reservations about the added storylines, I still recommend the movie.

Maria (Grazyna Blecka-Kolska), the mistress of the estate, and Frederick (Krzysztof Majchrzak)

Gombrowicz on Pornografia (from A Kind of Testament)

Witold Gombrowicz wrote A Kind of Testament, an autobiographical account of his life and work, in 1968, a year before he died. While anything that comes directly from Gombrowicz has to be taken with a grain of salt, the flow of information and insight that comes from the book feels as wonderful as his other writing. I’m going to provide a few excerpts from the chapter on Pronografia to give you a taste of the writing in this memoir as well as some of views on the topics in the novel. All quotes come from the Dalkey Archive Press paperback edition (2007), translated by Alastair Hamilton.

I won’t vouch for the quality of logic in the first excerpt, but it includes topics he addresses throughout the chapter:

As for the subsequent adventures I had with the two goddesses, Youth and Beauty, I could sum them up in four theses, which I consider most revealing:

The first: youth is inferiority

The second: youth is beauty

The third (and how thrilling!): so, beauty is inferiority

The fourth (dialectical): man is suspended between God and youth.

(page 135)

Gombrowicz goes into the last thesis in more detail. The last paragraph in the following excerpt touches on Pornografia’s inversion of Ferdydurke:

I then tended to see youth as a value in itself. But youth is beneath all value, the only value of youth is youth. And that is why, as I wrote a brief preface to the French edition of Pornografia, a phrase a little like this came to my mind: ‘Man is suspended between God and youth.’

This means that man has two ideals, divinity and youth. He wants to be perfect, immortal, omnipotent. He wants to be God. And he wants to be in full bloom, fresh and pink, always to remain in the ascendant phase of his life—he wants to be young.

He aspires to perfection, but he is afraid of it because he knows that it is death. He rejects imperfection, but it attracts him because it is life and beauty.

There’s nothing extraordinary about that—it’s an idea like any other…but what a beacon for me!

For, as I write, I have a tendency—a subterranean, illegal tendency—to complete the natural development of immaturity towards maturity with a radically opposite trend, leading downwards, from maturity to immaturity. In Ferdydurke, one can see the extent to which, despite my efforts to become mature, I remained attached to immaturity. That has always tormented me. Man pursues two goals, he is torn between two poles…. Yes, of course the adult is the professor, the master of youth. But does this adult not secretly frequent another school, where the youth dominates him? Would the furious dynamism of life, this compression (the source of its energy), be possible without it?

(pages 138-139, ellipsis in original)

Gombrowicz goes into detail about Pornografia. I’m only including a couple of paragraphs from this discussion, but they succinctly summarize what happens in the novel:

What happens in Pornografia? We, Frederick [Fryderyk ] and I, two middle-aged gentlemen, see a young couple, a girl and a boy, who seem to be made for each other, welded to each other with a striking and reciprocal sex appeal. But as far as they’re concerned they might not even have noticed it; it is drowned, we might say, in their youthful incapacity for fulfillment (the inexperience peculiar to their age). We, the older ones, are excited by it, we would like the charm to take shape. And, with due precautions, and keeping up appearances, we start to help them. But our efforts lead us nowhere; they founder in that sphere of pre-reality where they reside, and which characterizes them—in that antechamber of their existence.

And then? Let us glide over the cunning devices of the matchmaker-producer, who is also a voyeur, but a poet-voyeur. The smoke that rises from this magic enclosure intoxicates us more and more and, exasperated by the indifference of the two children, it occurs to us that, failing physical possession, sin, a common sin, can tie them together and—oh joy!—can tie us to them, like accomplices, despite the difference of age.

(pages 140-141)

Gombrowicz goes into more detail about the novel but he reveals even more than I did in my previous posts. At the end of this chapter Gombrowicz reflects on the student/youth riots occurring as he writes this memoir and how they tie in (“in a sense”) with many of the themes he has included in his works, especially with Pornografia. He doesn’t have much good to say about either side in these riots. He does take care to differentiate what is happening in the West with what he is seeing in Eastern Europe (this is 1968, so events like the Soviet invasion after the Prague Spring and the Polish March crisis). The end of the chapter highlights this difference and summarizes his disdain:

But I would like to add: the student revolts in Eastern Europe have nothing to do with those in the West. The former are the result of misery, the latter of satiety.

(page 146)

The next post will look at the 2003 Polish movie version of the movie (you knew that was coming at some point).

Gombrowicz on Pornografia (from his Diary)

I plan on posting occasional entries from Diary by Witold Gombrowicz over the next few months (or however long it takes me to get through it). I’m reading the 2012 Yale University Press edition, translation by Lillian Vallee. There are several references to Pornografia in the Diary and I’ll post from two related entries. Before I do so, I think it’s important to understand the intent of the Diary. From the foreword by Rita Gombrowicz:

When Witold Gombrowicz began writing his Diary in 1953, he was forty-nine years old. He had been living in Buenos Aires since 1939, when the war had caught him by surprise. As a promising young writer, he had been officially invited to the inaugural voyage of a new maritime route between Poland and Argentina, departing from the port of Gdynia the 29th of July 1939 on the dazzling transatlantic liner Chrobry (The Brave). … [W]hile reading The Journals of André Gide, he had the idea of writing his own diary. On August 6 of that same year, he wrote to Jerzy Giedroye, the director of Kultura [a Polish émigré journal]: “I must become my own commentator, even better, my own theatrical director. I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes.” The Diary was the realization of this mad ambition. But Gide had written his diary when he was already famous, whereas Gombrowicz wrote his to become so.

In other words, take everything you read with a grain of salt. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true, just that Gombrowicz is framing things how he wanted them to be seen. Even so, I think these two entries are helpful in understanding the novel. Here’s the first entry I’ll quote, from 1958:

On 4 February of this year (’58), I finished Pornografia. This is what I have called it for the time being. I am not promising that the title will stay. I am in no hurry to publish it. Too many of my books have appeared in print lately.

One of my most persistent needs, during the writing of this quite pornographic—in some places—Pornografia was: to pass the world through youth; to translate it into the language of youth…To spice it with your—so it allows itself to be violated.

The intuition that dictated this to me is probably based on the conviction that a Man is helpless against the world…by being only power, not beauty…and, furthermore, in order for him to be able to possess reality, it must first be put through a being that can be attractive…that is, that can surrender itself…a lower, weaker being. Here there is a choice—woman or youth. The woman I dismiss because of the child, that is, because her function is too specific. Youth is what is left. And here one comes upon extreme formulas: maturity for youth, youth for maturity.

What is this? What have I written? Whether or not the accent I put on the Spirit of Youth and its Doings is worth anything…and how much will be hard to tell for a while.

(pages 372-3; ellipsis in original)

The second entry is from 1960, (supposedly) in reply to a letter asking for the metaphysical content of Pornografia:

Let us try to express it another way: man, as we know, strives for the Absolute, for Completeness. For absolute truth, God, complete maturity, etc. To embrace everything, to fully realize the process of his development—such is the imperative.

Thus, in Pornografia (in keeping with my old habit, because Ferdydurke is also saturated with this) another, probably more hidden and less legitimate, aim of man is revealed, his need for the Incomplete…Imperfection…Inferiority…Youth….

One of the key scenes of the work is the one in the church where under the pressure of Frederick’s [Fryderyk's] consciousness the Mass, together with God-the-Absolute, collapses. Then out of the darkness and emptiness of the cosmos comes a new divinity, earthly, sensual, underage, made up of two underdeveloped beings creating a closed world—because they attract one another.

Another key scene is the deliberations preceding Siemian’s murder—the Adults are not in a state to commit murder because they know all too well what it is, what weight it has, and they must do it with the hands of the minors. This murder must, therefore, be cast into a sphere of lightness, irresponsibility—only there does it become possible.

… [Gombrowicz goes into several other ideas permeating this book, but I’ll close with these two sentences.]

A lack of seriousness is just as important to man as seriousness. If a philosopher says that ‘Man wants to be God,’ then I would add: ‘Man wants to be young.’

(pages 485-6; ellipsis in original except for noted excision)

I briefly touched on a few of the religious aspects to the novel in the opening post on the novel, choosing to note and then skip them. One facet of the religious undertones fits in nicely with Gomborwicz’s first key scene—the epiphany the narrator has on seeing the two adolescents in church. To say the country estate becomes a garden of Eden with these two perfect beings is a bit of an overstatement, but not by much. The raptures Witold (the narrator) experiences when describing the perfect nature of the youths proves to be funny, then darkly ironic as he and Fryderyk try to corrupt them. Since the adults cannot get them to combine in a physical act, the set-up for a shared sin ("cast into a sphere of lightness") is attempted. (I'm not going to comment on possible political aspects of the novel in these religious aspects, such as the corruption/sacrifice of Poland during World War II, but I think they are there.)

The next post, delivery gods willing, will have Gombrowicz's comments on Pornografia in his memoir A Kind of Testament.

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz: a disastrous adventure

I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafes—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, the Ipsu—would gather in an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers…picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art… . Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.

- the opening paragraph to Pornografia, translation by Danuta Borchardt (ellipsis in original)

The dark and lean gentleman (Fryderyk) and the narrator (Witold) leave Warsaw for the countryside to visit Hipolit, a business acquaintance. At Hipolit’s estate, Fryderyk and Witold become obsessed with pairing Hipolit’s daughter Henia with the estate administrator’s son, Karol. Both youth, however, resist attempts at pushing the relationship beyond their friendship from childhood. Violent elements, not all of which are associated with the war, intrude on their plans. On a visit to the family house of Vaclav, Henia’s fiancé, Vaclav’s mother Amelia is killed. Upon return to Hipolit’s estate, an Underground Army officer, Siemian, stays with the family. Siemian, having second thoughts about fighting, has been marked for murder by the resistance for security purposes. Members of the resistance fail to appear but assign the murder to Hipolit.

I’m leaving a lot of this brief overview of the novel, some of which I’ll develop here or in additional posts while other areas I’d rather avoid so as not to give away the “twists.” A few notes on the novel…

A natural comparison for Pornografia is Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke since several of the theme are comparable, although several premises become inverted. Ferdydurke explored, among many things, the power of maturity over youth and its corrosive effects. Here we have an attempt at something similar as the adults try to manufacture a loss of innocence, first through sex and then through murder. Along the way, though, the power of youth exerts itself over maturity, refusing to be tarnished by its actions. It becomes a question of who is manipulating whom. The adults, failing at their attempts to control the actions of the youth, become obsessed with and, in turn, controlled by the young. It turns out that the youth aren’t completely innocent. The raptures that Witold goes into over their youth and beauty is an ideal he imposes on them regardless of the reality, their pliable behavior helping prolong his vision.

The discussions over “God, art, nation, proletariat” sound like they should have taken place in pre-World War II Poland, before Gombrowicz ended up in exile (he readily admits it is an imaginary Poland in his “Information” introduction). Completely missing from the brief Warsaw section is any real mention of the war and what was happening in the city at the time. In the countryside the talk of war is initially limited but it increasingly intrudes on their lives. In addition to the impositions from various armies, language and actions include progressively more violent features. The following excerpt can be read several ways—the intention of the two adults on the youth, the impact of the war on all of them, or the influence the youth have had on the adults with some implication of things to come:

A bird flew by.

Fryderyk: “What kind of bird was that?”

Karol: “An oriole.”

Fryderyk: “Are there a lot of them here?”

She [Henia]: “Look what a big earthworm.

Karol kept rocking, his legs spread apart, she raised her leg to scratch her calf—but his shoe, resting just on the heel, rose, made a half-turn, and squashed the earthworm…just at one end, just as much as the reach of his foot allowed, because he didn’t feel like lifting his heel from the ground, the rest of the worm’s thorax began to stiffen and squirm, which he watched with interest. This would not have been any more important than a fly’s throes of death on a flytrap or a moth’s within the glass of a lamp—if Fryderyk’s gaze, glassy, had not sucked itself onto that earthworm, extracting its suffering to the full. One could imagine that he would be indignant, but in truth there was nothing within him but penetration into torture, draining the chalice to the last drop. He hunted it, sucked it, caught it, took it in and—numb and mute, caught in the claws of pain—he was unable to move. Karol looked at him out of the corner of his eye but did not finish the earthworm, he saw Fryderyk’s horror as sheer hysterics… .

Henia’s shoe moved forward and she crushed the worm.

But only from the opposite end, with great precision, saving the central part so that it could continue to squirm and twist.

All of it—was insignificant…as far as the crushing of a worm can be trivial and insignificant.

Karol: “Near Lvov there are more birds than here.”

Henia: “I have to peel the potatoes.”

Fryderyk: “I don’t envy you… . It’s a boring job.”

As we were returning home we talked for a while, then Fryderyk disappeared somewhere, and I didn’t know where he was—but I knew what he was into. He was thinking about what had just happened, about the thoughtless legs that had joined in the cruelty they committed jointly to the twitching body. Cruelty? Was it Cruelty? More like something trivial, the trivial killing of a worm, just so, nonchalantly, because it had crawled under a shoe—oh, we kill so many worms! No, not cruelty, thoughtlessness rather, which, with children’s eyes, watches the droll throes of death without feeling pain. It was a trifle. But for Fryderyk? To a discerning consciousness? To a sensibility that is cable [? supposed to be capable?] of empathy? Wasn’t this, for him, a bloodcurdling deed in its enormity—surely pain, suffering are as terrible in a worm’s body as in the body of a giant, pain is “one” just as space is one, indivisible, wherever it appears, it is the same total horror. Thus for him this deed must have been, one could say, terrible, they had called forth torture, created pain, with the soles of their shoes they had changed the earth’s peaceful existence into an existence that was hellish—one cannot imagine a more powerful crime, a greater sin. Sin…Sin…Yes, this was a sin—but, if a sin, it was a sin committed jointly—and their legs had united on the worm’s twitching body… .

(ellipsis in original)

So who is this Fryderyk that becomes hysterical (or maybe rapturous) during this scene? One key aspect of Fryderyk lies in his scripted behavior. His movements with his tea during the opening meeting demonstrate his need to justify each action. This behavior continues through to his “directing” Karol and Henia, putting them in situations for an alleged screenplay he’s writing in order to bring them closer together, and then again to another end. His control of a situation carries over to his power of negation. He acts to avoid “not acting.” He kneels at mass to keep from “not kneeling.” (This negation leads to a pivotal moment in the church, which will be mentioned in the next post.) Fryderyk and Witold are in synch with their plans to contaminate the youth, part of the real pornography of the title. Trying to pair Henia and Karol as lovers proves laughable but the adults’ desire progresses to involving them in the murder of Siemian. Fryderyk and Witold avoid performing the murder because they understand, from experience and maturity, the act’s implications and cost. Yet they are willing to have the adolescents do it by trivializing the act, making it easy for Karol and Henia to perform it.

There is a religious component to the novel but I’m only going to lightly touch on it. Fryderyk’s atheism stands in marked contrast to Ameila’s fervent beliefs, yet he quickly becomes her favorite companion. She (and later her son) commit acts that can be viewed as sacrificial in nature—a topic that could be a post by itself but I’m going to avoid it for now since it would ruin the perfect perverse ending.

The next post will include a couple of entries from his Diary that include some of his thoughts on Pornografia.

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.