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 [...]
Gombrowicz in the Universe
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Art
I started this blog because, in the Hirshhorn Gallery, I got into a conversation about Gombrowicz and couldn’t explain what I saw in him. I recently went back, and was delighted (and inspired) to see some of my favorite Magrittes back on display–which of course reminded me of G.
G. wrote about art fairly cynically. Art, [...]
Sour Grapes
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, [...]
Animal Suffering
G. writes in Ferdydurke of the “metaphysical pain” of a fly with its legs pulled off in the bottom of a trashcan. Various places in his Diary he writes of the pain of animals, and of the confused, deeply troubled human response to animal pain. (The farmer’s dying dog; the beetles on the beach, etc.) [...]
Gombrowicz with Magritte
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 [...]
The End of the Bookstore
One of the best things I ever read was not by Gombrowicz but it expresses something that, to me, sort of rhymes with G.’s take on the promise and danger of fellow humanity. In an interview Allen Ginsberg did in the Paris Review, the poet described a religious experience he had as an undergraduate, brought [...]
Sinking Ships
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 [...]
What Do You Want?
It is all about other people. Art and philosophy are just ways of contacting other people.
It can be both positive and negative. It’s Gombrowiczean the way we share music with people, for example. We have in our heads images, fantasies, of others when we are appreciating music. We want to put it out there for [...]
Other People
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 [...]
Better-Sounding Reasons
From outside, objectively, it is hard not to ascribe a fullness of meaning to the things other people do. They did X therefore they must feel Y. But human action is seldom so tightly chained to will or desire.
As with the character earnestly, doubtfully questioning the dark — but quietly, in case no one is [...]
Who’s There?
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 [...]
Fever Pitch??
Start, I suppose, with what his humanity isn’t.
There’s a quote from Publisher’s Weekly on the back of the Northwestern University Press edition of G.’s Diary. This quote has always bugged me; it goes: “Nearly every moment is lived at fever pitch in this dark, exhilarating masterpiece…”
Nothing could be farther from the truth, I feel like [...]
Humanity
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 [...]
What’s in a Face?
I suppose it’s a normal feeling to have about a favorite writer. I have this nice experience whenever I pick up — I mean, really, carefully, pick up, and look at — a book with G.’s face on the cover. I particularly love the picture on the cover of Gombrowicz w Europie (Gombrowicz in Europe), [...]