Witold Gombrowicz Archives

Here are a few paragraphs from the opening of my essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos. The essay was just published this morning at 3:AM Magazine. A great magazine, a pleasure to appear there.

Note my amazing coinage “onanomaniacal.” I was asked to explain what the word meant. I wrote:

Onanomaniacal is my coinage. It combines Onan (Genesis, Chapter 38) and “maniacal”. God smites Onan for “spilling his seed” on the ground. This is most often construed as masturbation (although some biblical critics are more precise and suggest it might just be coitus interruptus). In any case, Onan is the great masturbator of the Bible and hence Onanomaniacal means something like the adjective form of frenzied masturbator. So it’s a joke, of sorts. And there is quite a lot of talk of masturbation in Cosmos.

I used to drive by a warehouse in Guelph, Ontario, which bore the sign “Onan Generators” — this always seemed hilarious to me.

In Cosmos — the title makes it obvious — Gombrowicz is satirizing the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process by which we construct a frame of meaning for ourselves. Not the world (whatever that is), my world. Both inside and outside the novel (that is, in so-called real life), the modus operandi of consciousness is comically super-rational and simultaneously self-defeating (Husserl demonstrated that reason was never going to get where it said it was going). You (a subject, a consciousness) begin to notice hints of repetition and pattern; you look for other instances of the pattern in the chaotic flux of sensation; and eventually you decide the pattern is real. This is the procedure of reason and science. But, of course, in Cosmos what seems real to the narrator is in fact utterly contingent and often ridiculous or even murderous.

Form cannot enclose reality, but form always threatens to become reality. That is the antinomy of the novel: you can’t fit the world into a book, and yet form (read: custom, tradition, ideology, inter-personal expectation, etc.) is always threatening to derail the life of the individual, that is, there is always someone or some thing trying to fit you into his book. Cosmos is, in part, a horror story in which the monstrous evil is a form (in this case, a literary device) that haunts the narrator and eventually takes over his life. Instead of Godzilla or the mad slasher moving ineluctably toward its victim, the villain of Cosmos is an image pattern.

There are two other forces working on the human mind besides reason. One is the dark and unknowable current of desire; the narrator, whose name is Witold, can’t sleep with the girl he’s attracted to so he suddenly and incomprehensibly kills her cat (it’s a sick joke, right? He orgasmically strangles her pussy). The other force is the desire or gaze of the other. As soon as you enter a relationship (however trivial), you begin to bend yourself to fulfill, oppose or circumvent the desire (expectation, form) of the other. Even if you resist, the purity of selfhood has been corrupted. So you construct another self in secret, the masturbatory self, the self who doesn’t have to relate or unmask himself before the eyes of the other (but who is corrupt, seedy, infantile, trivial and evasive in any case).

Out of this triangle of forces, Gombrowicz creates a truly awe-ful, hilarious novel. The narrator discovers patterns and deduces meaning; his own sexual violence betrays reason; he discovers that the secret life of the adult male patriarch is one of chronic secret masturbation (the creation of private, obsessive cosmos).

Read the rest at Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos » 3:AM Magazine.

Jonah, The Scarlet Letter, notebook, and coffee inside the tent one morning

What we read on the EPE (Epic Canoe Event): Jacob reread Dante’s Inferno, Jonah read The Scarlet Letter, dg brought along Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, Volume One. Jonah finished The Scarlet Letter early which was a problem (dg had, perhaps too hastily, ordered him to leave behind the Richard Dawkins hardcover he had wanted to bring). But then one lovely night dg got to listen to Jacob reading three cantos of The Inferno out loud by flashlight to his brother (with glosses and explanations). Throughout the trip there was much animated campfire discussion of The Scarlet Letter as Jonah waded through: the frequency of the word “bosom,” Hester’s personality, the demonic epithets applied to little Pearl, the peculiar role of Chillingworth (the “black” man, healer, and a man who consorted with Indians), and the nature of Dimmesdale’s wound.

I just had to write a tiny piece on what I am currently reading to go with a new essay of mine coming out in The New Quarterly. No reason not to share it here.

I’m reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn’t really a diary–it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he’s funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice–mostly circumstance–I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you–this is where your art comes from. He’s also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus’ novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person–he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).

Lucy checking possible fox hole just before Pileated Woodpeckers appeared

Walking Lucy in the woods behind my house on the weekend, I found a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers, male and female. I’ve seen single males from time to time but never a pair–and in the same tree, the male making that strange clucking sound. This was about 15 seconds after my camera ran out of battery.

I read Witold Gombrowicz’s short story “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer” (from his collection Bacacay). A weedy little semi-invalid (he suffers from epilepsy) tries to jump the ticket line at the opera. A wealthy, handsome lawyer drags him back. The semi-invalid, surprisingly, becomes obsessed with the lawyer. He stalks him, tries to imitate him, even tries to help him bed the married woman he is pursuing. When the lawyer finally manages a clandestine kiss with his sweetie in a secluded park, the narrator has a (very literary) grand mal seizure (the “dance” of the title) and is hospitalized. The lawyer escapes to the country. Deep shades of Dostoevsky and Gogol here. Notes from the Underground and “The Overcoat.” But it also, very interestingly, echoes some of the things René Girard says about the triangulation of desire in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, for example, the idea that the self is created when it identifies with the desire of the other (which is the principle upon which all modern advertising works). What is fascinating about the story is the power it generates from the protagonist’s surprise reaction to being yanked back into line. Instead of feeling anger and resentment, he falls under a kind of spell of obsequious adoration for his persecutor. Shamelessly, he debases himself, courts public humiliation. Very mysterious.

I finished re-reading Gombrowicz’s A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. G was sick with heart disease and his wife realized the only thing that could take his mind off his trouble was to get him to talk about philosophy. So she and a friend sat through these little talks and, I guess, took notes or these are G’s notes. Apparently, some of the original was unreadable hence the dropped lines indicated in the text. G’s main idea is that the history of philosophy is the story of the step-by-step reduction or narrowing of our conception of what can be accomplished by reason. He can be pretty acerbic. Here he is on Nietzsche:

In order to understand Nietzsche, it is necessary to understand an idea as simple as that of raising cows.

A cattleman is going to try to improve the species in such a way that he will let the weakest cows die and will keep the strongest cows and bulls for breeding.

All of Nietzschean morality finds its basis here.

Then I read the first and last stories in James Purdy’s 63: Dream Palace. Purdy is something else. He works to create a patina of anxious ordinariness that he then ruptures with violence. A young father grapples with his little son, forcing him to spit out something metallic concealed in his mouth. The object turns out to be the father’s wedding ring (the mother/wife had run off with someone else shortly after the boy was born). The boy (he really is little, sleeps with a stuffed crocodile–now that I think of it, that should have been a clue) kicks the father in the balls and leaves him weeping on the carpet.

I went on reading into the morning.