by Sam Lipsyte
The story sounds like the set-up for a very dark joke. It is 1939, the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Somewhat oblivious to the coming catastrophe (like most everyone else), a writer from Warsaw accepts an invitation for an ocean cruise to South America. He’ll be back in a few months, refreshed for his next project. But once he sets sail there is a slight problem with his itinerary: World War Two. Trapped in Buenos Aires with little money and no Spanish, the writer forges a life there for over two decades. Though he eventually returns to Europe, he never sees Poland, the country that formed (and infuriated) him, again.
Such was the odd fate of Witold Gombrowicz, one of the major writers of the modern age, though readers in the United States have not heard enough about him. International acclaim came late to Gombrowicz, with the French translation of his first published novel, Ferdydurke (1937). This masterpiece takes on more than a few literary forms in its hilarious skewering of European philosophy, cultural upheaval, and generational struggle. It remains one of the funniest books of an unfunny century.
Pornografia (1960), published over twenty years later, mirrors many of the earlier novel’s themes, but in many ways it is a strikingly different work from Ferdydurke. It is also possibly a better one, tauter, its contents under more ferocious pressure, its savagery and comedy more directed. Narrated by a delightfully disturbing and nuanced man named (why not?) Witold Gombrowicz, Pornografia embraces an array of corrosive conflicts, between boys and girls, children and grown-ups, anarchy and the law, inferiority (life) and superiority (death), and competing versions of the real. (When the categories begin to deform and melt together, of course, things get truly, intriguingly, dicey.) Another opposition thrown into the pot is war and, if not peace, then a maddening state of not-yet-war. The latter seems especially important because Pornografia is set in a relatively calm pocket of Nazi-ravaged Poland, a place Gombrowicz never knew, and its plot consists of the erotic manipulations of a pair of would-be resistance fighters upon some increasingly witting farm teens. If that sounds like the makings of a gleefully tasteless farce, it might be because on a certain diabolical level Pornografia is one.
But it is also a profound behavioral study, though Gombrowicz eschews the staid tactics of some literary traditions, whose human specimens writhe under pins of omniscience. Here the psychology—the observations, projections, paradoxes, negations—belong to the panting insatiability of “Gombrowicz” himself, as he negotiates sexual devastation, poisonous and ecstatic social maneuvering, moral collapse, political ambivalence, and a country manor murder. The manic oscillations of this voice escort us into the wonderful, horrible core of the novel, a whirl of masks, duplicity, flesh and fragmentation.
It is a universe where an atheist must pray with true sincerity, deceiving even himself, to cover up the “immensity of his non-prayer,” where a girl’s hand is “naked with the nakedness not of a hand but of a knee emerging from under a dress,” and where all human endeavor might just be a “monkey making faces in a vacuum.”
Outlandish metaphors, syntactical bolo punches, arias of exquisite paranoia, these are not adornments in Gombrowicz, they are the essence of his style. His word play is deep play. “In the end a battle arises between you and your work,” he wrote in his public diaries, “the same as that between a driver and the horses which are carrying him off. I cannot control the horses, but I must take care not to overturn the wagon on any of the sharp curves of the course.”
Helping to keep the wagon upright here is Danuta Borchardt’s brilliant new translation, the first in English from the original Polish. Borchardt’s Pornografia honors both the wildness and the precision of Gombrowicz. She preserves his sudden and propulsive tense shifts and reveals a treasure of new cadences and swerves. Consider an older translation’s description of the pious Amelia’s sudden undoing in conversation with the novel’s chief instigator, Fryderyk: “She was dumfounded (sic) and disarmed …” Borchardt’s version is not only more vivid, but pivots on the weirdly compelling repetition of a word: “Knocked out of the game … she was like someone whose weapon had been knocked from her hand.” Better still is Borchardt’s Gombrowicz’s take on nightfall. The older translation details “… the sudden expansion of the holes and corners that fills the thick flux of night.” Fine, if a little vague, but it is no match for “… the intensification of nooks and crannies that the night’s sauce was filling.” The “night’s sauce” is almost more than we deserve.
But it is never a matter of what we deserve. I certainly didn’t deserve the gift of Gombrowicz when a good friend gave me Ferdydurke many years ago. I was just a young jerk who thought he had a fix on the frontiers of literature. But that book and others revealed the raucous speed and sublime vaudeville the right kind of runaway wagon could deliver. All who enter may revel in the many-layered excitements of Pornografia, though the reader is advised to refrain from slapping easy rejoinders to the existential difficulties the novel raises. “The primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems,” said Gombrowicz in A Kind of Testament, a series of interviews with Dominique de Roux. And Gombrowicz did exactly that, through philosophy, satire, critique, all of it powered by a subtle and vicious comic prose that continues to offer dazzling views of our individual and collective derangements.
“I am a humorist, a joker, an acrobat, a provocateur,” he once said. “My works turn double somersaults to please. I am a circus, lyricism, poetry, horror, riots, games—what more do you want?”
Let me know if you think of anything.