Gombrowicz in the Universe

As a hypochondriac, I have always had frequent “health scares” in which I go through a kind of ritual of worrying and agonizing, wondering if it’s just my hypochondria, finally consulting a doctor and learning that my worrying is indeed unfounded. If I were honest with myself, I’d admit that my biannual hypochondria ritual is a kind of bargaining, somehow buying myself immunity from disease through the price of constant worry.

Recently, though, I had what to my great indignance turned out to be a “real” – i.e. warranted, requiring tests – health scare. I was scared shitless for a week, awaiting the test results, and my fright was completely different from my usual fear. It turned out to be nothing, in the end (thank the gods), but it did make me think about mortality in a more serious, non-bargaining sort of way. It was kind of a valuable experience, actually.

One thing I realized was that a big part of my fear of having a serious illness was actually a fear of having to act out the role of someone facing a serious illness. My relief at the end of the ordeal was largely a relief of not having to put on an act for other people and for myself – and act that, moreover, thrusts you into a kind of limelight. Mortality is the biggest drama, and the sick or dying man is center stage, with the lights shining brightly on him.

Fear of a major calamity like a serious illness is partly a kind of stage fright, in other words. Going through this brief scare, I suddenly understood why, when my father was fighting and, eventually, dying from cancer, he avoided contact with people, and avoided telling even his closest friends about it. Now I can totally understand not wanting to have to play that role. Now I felt bad, in retrospect, for having tried to make him talk about what he was going through: I had been forcing him to play a role that compounded his suffering.

I think people naturally do that as a way of showing their own concern, making sure their concern is registered and recognized. But to some degree it can be selfish, overlooking the pain of forcing the sick person to dramatize.

Sartre wrote about life as perpetual act, but he put it in strenuous, moralistic terms: You were a liar, living in bad faith, when you dramatized your predicament, allowing social roles to define you. G. put the issue of dramatizing your life in much more humane and forgiving terms. The problem with acting is not some metaphysical wrongness or dishonesty; the problem is simply that it causes pain, and it’s a pain we can never quite escape. The best we can do is think carefully about that pain, notice how our acting causes it, and try to defy or subvert the roles that are pre-written for whatever situation or predicament we are in.

My favorite part of G’s memoir A Kind of Testament is his description of a trip to Rome after the publication of Ferdydurke. A Polish painting student he met there wondered about his disinterest in the beautiful churches. He said they all looked the same inside, but in reality his distaste at visiting St. Peters and the other monuments of Western civilization was a desire to avoid the standard act of feeling humbled and dwarfed by them, having to take your hat off. The painter said, well why don’t you just not take your hat off? So that’s what he did. He went into the churches with his hat on and this choice empowered him.

Death is like a big awesome dark cathedral. It is so frightening that mostly we ignore it or push it out of view. But then when we are dragged kicking and screaming to its doorstep, we genufluct and bow and scrape. We are frightened and humbled by it, and we go through the postures and the poses and make the grimaces of awe and fear. Because that’s what other people expect of us. In other words, we remove our hats. Or, we go to great lengths to try and escape it, flee from it, which is kind of like chasing after our hat in a wind. And as some European writer said (not G.), there’s nothing so absurd as a man chasing after his hat.

So I hope that, when eventually I do approach the doors of that cathedral, I figure out how to do it on my own terms—maybe by just not taking my hat off.

Because Richard Rorty just died, I keep thinking of him, and his reading of Orwell’s 1984, particularly the ‘undoing’ of Winston Smith: “Do it to Julia” as the turning point in his character. This is an extreme example, but it reminds me of the zone of “sub-culture” revealed by G. We all start out heroes, ethical beings, and our failures and weaknesses show us up, drag us down into an “inferior” realm. Having once done something cowardly or confused, how can I now rise up to be a hero? Instead I try to make my existence an argument for why that cowardly or confused act was consistent with my values and with my being, and indeed consistent with my carefully constructed picture of humanity.

G. didn’t mean “sub-culture” in the 60s sociological catchword meaning, youth and rebellion, etc.; he meant it in the old sense of “culture” as nurture, as cultivation, as well as culture as “high culture.” Sub-culture is our inferior, degraded, idiosyncratic mythology constituted out of our inability to live up to our high (and, I would add, youthful) ideals. We sooner describe ourselves as evil than as misguided.

In this connection I’m reminded of William S. Burroughs again. He shot his wife in the head, playing a “William Tell” game. He became a misogynist, a lover of guns, even wrote of the Zen of marksmanship. All of these things, lifestyle choices, identities, interests and fascinations, predicated on covering up a trauma. The trauma was not the death of his wife. The trauma was that he had once done something singularly stupid and thoughtless, and had bad aim, and it had tragic consequences. How was he supposed to continue after that moment, being who he had been? If he was to go on living (some people would have killed themselves directly or indirectly), he had to make it make sense.

So he formed an identity in which, retroactively, his killing of his wife became not really such a terrible thing within the larger context of his values.

People do thoughtless or careless things, often in their youth, and if those things end in tragedy for someone, or otherwise stick in people’s memory, they spend their lives trying to live up to those acts. This is the roots, not of “evil” because that’s too strong a word for what most people are, but of “badness.” Of how we choose paths of selfishness and irresponsibility and make them into ethical choices. Transforming (unconscious, unchosen) practice, or accident, into (willed, self-defining) action.

It’s the tendency of the mind to claim happenstance and transform it into fate (which is just character) - the tendency that therapists often find themselves deconstructing and undoing, or helping patients to undo.

You could call it “sour grapes.” Principles, standards, ambitions, capacities - these upper definitions of ourselves - become grapes, and in our failure to live up to them, in our confusion, our lapses, our clumsiness, our failures, etc., our attitude toward those grapes is that they are sour. We redefine our ideals - not “downward,” because that would be to admit failure (and confusion, and clumsiness, etc.), but in some other direction. Upward in another direction.

(It’s what happens to us when we are old, too: Our bodies go out from under us, and we become sad to ourselves. You stumble. “I meant to do that.” Because someone who ‘just stumbles’ is sad, pathetic, pitiable. Does the mind, the personality, chase the body into its decrepitude, to have the whole thing be consistent?)

The most well-developed Western philosophies of failure are Catholicism (the Fall), Psychoanalysis (the Unconscious, Trauma), Marxism (again, trauma, due to class oppression). Other cultures, like Japan, make less room for failure. Saving face, honor, may well demand suicide. It’s an interesting attitude to human failure. In the West, failure is more negotiable. Because values are more negotiable, I suppose. Our culture makes room for disagreement. Whatever wrong you have done, there is always some point of view you could adopt from which it is right. Your story of getting there could be a story of self-discovery. The personal journey is always a good story, in whatever direction you travel.

My French paperback translation of Bakakai has Magritte’s Golconde on the cover — rain imagined as men in bowler hats descending from a blue sky.

Maybe it’s because of this cover, but I can’t not think of Magritte when I think of Gombrowicz. The two are never very far apart in my mind. I picture them both as a little bit aloof and alone. For some reason, I picture them both in bowler hats.

I imagine them both, Magritte and Gombrowicz, struggling to find a method to cut through appearances and find something true, something rock solid, lying underneath. In both cases — as painting, or as fiction — the result is surrealistic, as well as charming and humane. You could escape into one of Magritte’s evening paintings, just like you can escape into G.’s Diary.

I even imagine their domesticity similarly — with their wives and dogs (in Gombrowicz’s case, only late in life).

When I look at the photo of G. and his wife Rita, from the cover of her book Gombrowicz w Europie, Paul Simon’s song “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War” (based on a photo caption that captured the songwriter’s imagination) runs through my head.

I first encountered Gombrowicz during a period of my life when I was reading the Beats — Burroughs, Ginsberg, especially. There’s an interesting contrast between G. and Burroughs. In various writings and interviews throughout his life, Burroughs returned again and again to the sinking of the Titanic, and his admiration for the men on the ship who supposedly donned women’s clothing in order to get into the lifeboats and save their own lives. Partly, I suppose, Burroughs was drawn to the comic possibilities of the lifeboat scenario — plus, he was an unashamed misogynist and resented the old-fashioned “women and children first” idea.

But also, the notion of abandoning all pride and decorum, donning a costume to save your life, has redemptive possibility. I am not I, I am not what I am. It represents the ultimate power to escape from past conditioning, the power as Burroughs puts it, to travel into space. It’s a very American dream, obviously. Reinventing yourself.

Well, ocean liners figure prominently in G.’s life and in his writing, and his own thought experiment of how a man behaves on a sinking ship makes an interesting, and very European, contrast:

[A] person for whom everything is over and done with is in a different position than those for whom much is over and done with. In what sense, in what direction, can a person whose meanings and directions have evaporated change? What remains if not the one thing still left to do: repeat oneself? This is why people who appear completely defeated by life function “as if nothing had ever happened” down to the very last minute of their lives. The captain of a sinking ship knows that in a minute the water will swallow him up–him and his honor, responsibility, duty–that for all practical purposes these no longer exist, that the water is already reaching his calves…why, then, does he recite his captainhood to the last minute of his life, instead of, let us say, singing or dancing? Perhaps because when there is nothing else to cling to, man can only grab onto himself, the principle of identity. “I am I” is a fundamental principle not only of logic but also the ultimate right of humanity; and when everything disappears, there is only the fact that I was someone; such a person and no other; and loyalty toward oneself appears to be the last law we can still obey.

So, which man is more free? The man who puts on a dress to save his life, or the captain who clings to his captain-hood as the ocean swallows him — claiming, as G. puts it, his “ultimate right of humanity”?

I don’t have an answer to this question. But in this quote I see America facing Europe across a vast dark ocean.

In one of his earliest stories, G. wrote: “there’s nothing so difficult and delicate, so sacred even, as human individuality; nothing can equal the rapacity of secret connections that arise, faint and purposeless, between strangers, only to bind imperceptibly with a terrible chain.”

People that (we think) shouldn’t matter to us, do. Being slighted or ignored by a clerk or some anonymous person on the subway can ruin you for hours, sometimes. G. noted that having something he wrote criticized by some anonymous person was far more stinging than having a book savaged by a noted reviewer, because the smaller the shoe, the more it hurts.

It is particularly humiliating to want or need the approval of people who are “inferior” to us — that is, inferior in age, in station, in experience. It can produce a deformation of perception, whereby younger people seem much older, poorer people much richer, and so on. The power of the inferior and the “immature” over the superior and the mature is one of G.’s main themes. But this humiliation contains the seeds of something transcendent.

G. writes: “Allow a child, a puppy, a half-wit to seduce you.” That he spent his life mixing with people of different classes and ages is one of the most inspiring things about him. His gang of young friends in Buenos Aires. The young Canadian student he met and married during the last years of his life. It would be easy to compartmentalize him as a writer of the midlife crisis. A recurring theme in his fiction is middle aged men trying to orchestrate contact with youth. And indeed, much of his Diary is an extended meditation on youth and the way age feeds and depends on it.

Acknowledgement of the “inferior.” Declining to it willingly, allowing it to support you. It is like an underlying water to the universe. A water below the water. (I am thinking now of the Talking Heads line, “There is water at the bottom of the ocean” from that great midlife crisis song “Once in a Lifetime.”) Through intense and honest contact across divides of age and station, we can achieve a broader reinterpretation of our humanity.

(G. never would have called other people “hell,” like Sartre did.)

So what is G. about? I think the key utterance in his works is in Ferdydurke — the query, posed by the owner of a country estate to the darkness in his parlor, in which he has heard a noise at night:

“Who’s there?” he asked cautiously, to avoid looking foolish if nobody was there.

To get at what humanity means in the context of Gombrowicz, it’s necessary to talk about the blurring, the deforming, that happens between humans and in spite of them — even when, or perhaps especially when, “nobody is there.”

How often do you feel like yourself? I suspect that for most people, this feeling is not a constant companion but something that waxes and wanes. I only know I have trouble with myself. I get in trouble with myself. I get lost with other people and get lost in other people.

This is the thing, the herd instinct in us, the thing that makes us “social animals.” We are pulled away from our own uniqueness, our individuality, and in the direction of who we are with, or who we are thinking about. Our boundaries are permeable, weak, non-fortified. When confronted by another person (or the possibility of another person) I go forward to meet them, but I become blurred in the process. Even if only momentarily, for an instant, I may forget who I am and become instead some amalgam of them and me. (I “italicize,” to borrow an apt expression used by the novelist Padgett Powell.)

It is like a king who gets up to go meet a supplicant, rather than remaining seated in his throne and letting them approach, which more becomes a true king. When another person annoys me, the annoyance, if I am honest, comes from my own momentary mistake of thinking that I am them. When we thrill to another’s exploits, or fall under the spell of someone’s charisma, isn’t it because they have caused us to feel heroic or charismatic ourselves?

Deformation is this loss of boundaries brought on by the exciting, unseating, overthrowing, perilous presence of the other. Ceasing to be oneself and in essence “trying on” that other person like they are clothes, then frequently lamenting when we look in the mirror because those clothes don’t fit or suit us. All of G.’s writing is, in one way or another, about this.

It starts with the face. The most memorable scene in Ferdydurke is a “grimace war” between two rival schoolboys. Psychology should begin not with the mind but with the faces we make, the ways we force ourselves to look a certain way, and thus impress upon ourselves a certain impression of who we are, both for and with other people. (When the Zen Buddhists talk about “finding your original face,” they mean dropping all these habitual grimaces.)

You wouldn’t probably think of G. as a particularly human or humane writer if all you had to go on was his fictional works. His stories, plays, and novels are thought experiments about the disturbing mess, the confusion, that takes place between humans. He was obsessed with this “inter” place, the oozing, blurring borders between people. In his novels he made this thing monstrous and comical. His narratives explore the obscure, dark, and perverse ways humans affect each other.

I think of G.’s fiction like Seinfeld episodes — you might call them situation tragicomedies that are essentially “about nothing.” Selfish, surly protagonists maintain outward social decorum while surreptitiously trying to accomplish something perverse and selfish behind the scenes, or, as G. put it, “under the table.” As in Seinfeld, it might involve a character taking advantage of someone weaker, younger, or poorer. Typically, as in Seinfeld, a cascading chain of ridiculous events leads to a big, humiliating trainwreck of an end. In G.’s stories, sometimes it’s very funny, other times dark and strange.

In his most famous novel, Ferdydurke, the narrator is led by a childish sidekick on a Quixotic quest out into the rural environs of Warsaw in search of a simple, rustic stable lad with whom to “fra…ternise” — and it remains unclear just what the nature of this “fra…ternization” is — to what extent it is a homoerotic quest, to what extent it is a kind of liberal gesture toward the “common man”; in any event, the hubris of their pathetic and trivial odyssey leads to humiliations for everyone involved.

But the best thing Gombrowicz wrote, and the reason readers fall in love with him, was his Diary, written over two decades in Argentina and Western Europe for serial publication in a Polish literary journal. Because it was for public consumption and sort of a mix of personal experiences and opinions and reactions to contemporary literature and philosophy, G.’s Diary was really more of an early “blog.”

It is here, mainly, that the author’s humanity … I won’t say “shines forth” because that is exactly wrong, exactly what humanity doesn’t do. But there’s that ball in my mouth again. What does humanity do? What does anybody’s humanity do? What’s the operative verb?