Huck Finn in Poland
TYRMAND, LEOPOLD
WRITERS WRITING Huck Finn in Poland By Leopold Tyrmand Not exactly a novel, more than a philosophical tract with stage directions, Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (Grove Press, 272 pp., $5.00;...
...It seems to me that another of man's aims appears, a more secret one, one which is in some way illegal: His need for the unfinished...
...At fulfillment...
...Ferdydurke is Huckleberry Finn educated by Husserl, Proust, Kafka and Celine...
...The notion is terrifying, and the author never for a moment blunts its impact with exceptions or conciliations...
...What is left in translation can only stir the imagination of an intelligent reader and plant in him a fascinated dissatisfaction...
...Dating from 1953 to the present, the Journals comprise one of the most interesting literary documents of the last half-century...
...It seems difficult to imagine that a work focusing on so contemporary a question as the relationship between youth and maturity could have been written 30 years ago...
...She despised maturity or, rather, for her immaturity was maturity...
...Ironically, Gombrowicz attained a popularity in postwar Poland that he could never have hoped for between the wars...
...half of America, for instance, is under 28...
...Everyone familiar with "mod," "hip," "teeny-boppers," "Carnaby Street," and "mini-skirts" will find his commentary relevant...
...This sets off a chain reaction of discovery and recognition, giving a surrealistic twist to a familiar hero —the malicious adolescent, tortured by his youth and distressed by the stupidities of the adult world...
...Despite these repetitions and borrowed themes, however, Pornografia is a substantial supplement to Gombrowicz's commentaries on one of the chief problems of our time: the irresistible victory of immaturity everywhere...
...Like all Polish writers, Gombrowicz suffers in translation...
...Some people may consider him an awkward philosophizer, but Gombrowicz knows more about these phenomena than Marshall McLuhan himself...
...Instead, he presents immaturity as a new maturity...
...He was accused of every possible "sin," from homosexuality to fraternizing with the Germans...
...he also refuses to surrender to the tyranny of probability or the need for self-justification...
...Two old men feed their empty and dull middle age with the sexual dynamite of youth, coercing two repulsive, primitive and awkward adolescents toward psychic and physical copulation...
...Attacks upon him in the Communist press increased thereafter in direct proportion to his growing reputation as the most interesting contemporary Polish-language writer...
...He was accused in the emigre press of buffoonery, snobbism, national indifference, and outspoken anti-Polish sentiments—accusations which, whatever the factual grounds, were proof more of the accusers' righteousness than of their real understanding...
...While Ferdydurke deals with the forced nightmare of immaturity, Pornografia is about the treasures of immaturity...
...form and meaning acquire under his touch nuances that compel rapt attention and mental effort...
...Maturity, teaches Gombrowicz, means inauthenticity, a constant posing as someone else to meet the demands of circumstances and the whims of other people...
...There is, as well, a lack of impartiality in the book's scale of sexual values, giving it a deep if unstated homosexual commitment...
...the playful anachronisms that come through like Beau-marchais emended by Alfred Jarry...
...paperback, $1.95...
...Although 20 years earlier Gombrowicz had been the exclusive fare of literary gourmets, as a banned writer read in carefully salvaged or smuggled copies, he became a literary power, shaping the imagination of a wide circle of readers and influencing the work of many young writers...
...But the idyll was short-lived, and Gomulka's counterreformation put Gombrowicz back on the index...
...and destitute...
...the burden of being created inside ourselves by others"—move beyond their specific national tradition to encompass our Western literary heritage...
...Considered as fiction, Ferdydurke is the story of a 30-year-old man who becomes a schoolboy...
...Yet Gombrowicz recognizes that while he is "an opponent of immaturity, [he] is mortally in love with immaturity...
...Gombrowicz involves semantics in unexpected cognitive adventures...
...The primary weakness of Pornografia is its setting?the action takes place in German-occupied Poland, which the author did not know and does not understand...
...Their universal visions of human alienation, their skillful decomposition of experience, their understanding of the absurd and its philosophical role in a world of dehumanized structures, correspond to the achievements of the early 20th-century French Surrealists and long preceded the cynicism of Celine, Ionesco or Beckett...
...the torments and lacerations of a noble origin...
...Gombrowicz long ago captured the essence of what Time, Look and Newsweek have been trying to convey in their many cover stories from Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury or the East Village...
...In this sense Polish is one of the world's richest languages...
...In the early '50s Gombrowicz finally found a publisher, the Paris-based Kultura, a Polish literary monthly open to dissident East Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain...
...This is apparent not only from Ferdydurke but from another recently translated novel written two decades later, Pornografia (Grove Press, 191 pp., $5.00...
...And, astonishingly, he knew all this 30 years ago...
...The more malleable a language, the more interesting the literature that develops out of it...
...Abroad, meanwhile, interest in the "heretic" grew, and translations of his work appeared in French, German and English...
...At truth, at God, at total maturity...
...The young Polish intelligentsia, tormented by the absurdities and failures of Communism, found in his jarring grotesques new explanations for the nightmare they were living...
...for imperfection . . . for inferiority...
...paperback, $2.45) recalls Tristam Shandy in its defiance of neat critical distinctions...
...These words put him unexpectedly not on our side, not on the side of our shopworn phrases?sense through nonsense, knowledge through ignorance, maturity through immaturity...
...The world is steadily becoming younger...
...Shortly before World War II he enjoyed the reputation of a literary enfant terrible in his native Poland...
...The pain of unformed form...
...for youth...
...A political emigre from 1939...
...Describing the boarding school girl of 30 years ago in his first novel, he wrote: "Youth for her was not an age of transition...
...But if the Older submits to the Younger—what darkness...
...Ferdydurke, with its precise illustrations, preceded all the inquiries from sociologists and journalists that currently fill the newspapers with discussions on the generation gap or youth as a new social class...
...For Gombrowicz the danger is clear: "When the Older creates the Younger, everything works very well from a social and cultural point of view...
...Employing an unrelentingly grotesque symbolism, he involves the reader in the unpleasant implications of his main premise: the "universal impossibility" governing existence, the dangers of degradation and dehumaniza-tion that lurk around each bend in life, behind a man's every act and word...
...Only the language barrier has prevented these writers from breaking out of the ghetto of Polish culture...
...Kultura brought out all his novels as well as his Journals...
...he refused to return after the Communist takeover and lived for 25 years in Argentina, forgotten Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish novelist, has contributed articles to the "New Yorker" and to the "Reporter...
...In Polish literature he has a precursor in Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and a contemporary in Bruno Schulz...
...Gombrowicz's great phrases?O, what an instrument of tyranny is style...
...During the relaxed atmosphere of the Polish October (1955-57), the Communists published his books, and a Warsaw theater staged his plays...
...And yet Youth, biologically superior, physically more beautiful, has no trouble in charming and conquering the adult, already poisoned by death...
...Although Gombrowicz coquettishly says the book is "in the style of a Polish provincial novel," its obsessions and sophistication lift it far above that comparison...
...They find him a mere describer of deformation, a mechanic of subjective realities that have been too often exploited by much larger talents...
...Gombrowicz pays no heed to traditional literary concepts of time, space, logic or action...
...In the years since this first novel, Gombrowicz has demonstrated moral values and a fortitude that are perhaps not fully reflected in his writing...
...Gombrowicz explores events on many levels, a fact that may explain the confused reactions of certain American reviewers to his work...
...It was the only acceptable phase in human life, the only phase that had value or importance...
...It is easy to trace in this novel the main ideas from Ferdydurke: the notion of aristocracy...
...Thus any attempt to summarize Ferdy-durke is doomed to failure...
...Gombrowicz can best be understood, though, in the context of a complex culture whose quality and diversity is relatively unknown in the West...
...L'Express dubbed him the "greatest unknown writer of our time," but by 1967 he was famous enough to win the lucrative International Literary Prize for his latest novel, Cosmos...
...The roots of this strange and paradoxical phenomenon lie deep in the wild expansion of civilization and technology...
...What perversity and shame...
...Gombrowicz writes in the preface: "Man, as we know, aims at the absolute...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
