#1937Club: Witold Gombrowicz – irreverent, witty, wild

Witold Gombrowicz: Ferdydurke, transl. Danuta Borchardt, Yale University Press.

Polish writer Gombrowicz was born into a well-off family who were probably not entirely pleased with him giving up his university studies to embark upon a literary career, especially when he persisted in producing absurdist, scandalous works such as Ferdydurke, his first novel, which scandalised Polish society of its time. Not long after its publication, at the start of the Second World War, he went into exile abroad and never got to see his homeland again, although he continued writing in Polish.

One of the key themes of his writing, which is apparent even in this early work, is about youth and immaturity, age and so-called wisdom, putting on masks and trying to escape the confines of society. He also is highly satirical about Polish nationalist rhetoric and elitism – and perhaps (as Susan Sontag says in the introduction to the edition that I have) all of the ‘sacred monsters’ (of being mature, cultivated, superior, discreet, reserved) have been thoroughly killed off in today’s obsession with youth, ‘authenticity’, openly sharing your opinions and emotions online with strangers etc.

And yet it remains a very strange, scurrilous and scandalous piece of work, with few direct interlocutors that I’ve read. The surreal events and sudden tonal shifts designed to shock remind me a little of Urmuz, while the meandering asides and non sequiturs are similar to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I can’t claim that I was always able to follow everything in the text, including some invented or repurposed language, which the translator takes care to explain in the Translator’s Note, but I was always eager to read more, to see what next bizarre flight of fantasy the author might be on.

The story in brief, if one can even attempt to summarize the plot: The narrator is a thirty-year-old writer who is still struggling to find his place in the world and find ‘maturity’. He gets abducted by Professor Pimko who turns him into a seventeen-year-old schoolboy and imprisons him in a boys’ school with other ‘immature’ youngsters like him. He is hosted by a family with a very modern girl whom he gets a bit of a crush on. And he befriends Kneadus, a vicious schoolboy who only dreams of corrupting young, good-looking farmhands. All the while, the narrator dreams of reverting back to ‘maturity’ and normality, but gets embroiled in all sorts of fights and farcical situations. I simply don’t know how to describe it any better – it’s hard to make sense of it all, a case of ‘you have to read it to believe it’.

There are many very quotable, witty passages, and they kept me going when the plot (and, let’s face it, at times blatant misogyny – whether the author’s or the characters’ is not entirely clear to me) confused me. At times you feel like the author predicted the rise of social media:

Mankind is accursed because our existence on this earth does not tolerate any well-defined and stable hierarchy, everything continually flows, spills over, moves on, everyone must be aware of and be judged by everyone else, and the opinions that the ignorant, dull, and slow-witted hold about us are no less important than the opinions of the bright, the enlightened, the refined. This is because man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

There are plenty of sharp digs at the education system or the literary scene of his time, and I can’t help feeling that many of his darts still hit the mark. For example, this passage about readers’ attention spans:

…doesn’t the reader assimilate parts only, and only partly at that?… Quite often he’ll read a couple of segments then toss the book aside, not because he has lost interest in it, but because something else came to his mind. And even if he were to read the whole – do you think he can visualize it in its entirely and appreciate the relationship and harmony of its individual parts unless he hears it from an expert?… Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants it, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.

The digressions were sometimes the best part of all, for this is not a book to be read in a hurry. My advice would be: a chapter at a time, dipping in and out, enjoying the acrobatics.

To my great surprise, I discover that this book (which feels to me unadaptable) has been made into a film (see film poster above). I read this for Simon and Karen’s #1937Club, which runs throughout this week (or, in my case, for the whole month of April).