Gombrowicz Pornografia

The tawdry antics of a giddy existentialism
A Contrary review by Frances Badgett
 
Pornografia Witold Gombrowicz
Grove Press
2009
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“All around us a weakening of existence found its expression in the approaching night. We moved on in the dusk—Fryderyk, I , Henia, Karol—like some strange erotic combination, an eerie yet sensual quartet.”

A reader’s journey with Pornografia begins with the title. Witold Gombrowicz dares us to enter, eyes twinkling with mischief. Once inside, the narrator—also named Witold—invites us into his obsession with the tawdry antics of the “sensual quartet.” The four of them—narrator, Witold, his companion Fryderyk, and the two teenaged lovers, Henia and Karol, create the central action of the novel. As Henia and Karol heighten their flirtation and perform for their voyeurs, the novel takes on shades of vintage erotica—Henia as the faux-naif farm girl, spilling out of her petticoats and aprons.

Gombrowicz both does—and does not—intend to invoke the oiled, tanned, surgically enhanced, and carefully waxed pornography littering the internet, or, rather, the 1960’s version thereof. The title seeks to titillate, to get the dirty book store crowd to pick up the novel and read it. But undergirding these titillations is a very serious existentialist novel that explores the Nazi occupation of Poland and its effects on the far corners of the Polish countryside.

Gombrowicz spins his plates of world-weary existentialism, history, and erotica with a playful sense of rebellion. In the early chapters, Witold describes churchgoers (including himself) as “caricatures that have been deprived of a model, no longer caricatures of ‘something,’ they were just themselves, and bare as an ass! And the mutual explosion of grotesqueness, of both the lordly and the boorish, converged in the gesture of the priest who was celebrating...what? What? Nothing.”

He then launches into a lyrical passage about the church, its darkness, the meaninglessness of its mission in the face of the cosmos, and ends with his anger at Fryderyk for being an atheist who genuflects at Mass. Gombowicz mixes the lyricism with plain-spoken colloquialism, keeping the reader enthralled.

Today’s readers will be intrigued by the emotional flatness with which Witold witnesses the coming of the Nazis across Poland. He describes the Germans’ arrival as almost an aside: “Hipolit went briskly ahead ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘The Germans have arrived from Opatow’—indeed, we could see some people in front of the barn—and suddenly apoplectic, he ran on, his wife behind him...As far as I was concerned I preferred, while it was still possible, not to be anywhere close to this, I was seized with weariness at the thought of the Germans, who were unavoidable, oppressive. What a curse. I returned to the house.” Later in the novel, while having lunch with a refugee family, Witold reflects on their discussion of the coming occupation of the Nazis and the attempts of the Poles to resist: “...the lunch was tiresome...I only understood the half of it, but I didn’t ask any questions, I didn’t want to ask about anything, I knew it was not worth bothering about, and besides, it wouldn’t be advisable to do so, why bother, I would know soon enough....” This tone is, of course, wholly intentional, as Gombrowicz is playing with the layers of his novel, keeping his narrator’s and Fryderyk’s obsession with the two young lovers at the center of the story.

One of the strongest recurring patterns in Pornographia is Gombrowicz’s use of small, vivid scenes to illustrate a point that also advances the larger narrative. In one of these, the two young lovers crush a worm—Karol first, then Henia. In another, Karol inexplicably raises the skirt of an old woman in front of Henia. In a third, Henia and Karol “perform,” to Fryderyk’s specifications, a “play” for scattered, hidden voyeurs. Rather than coming across as irremediably repulsive, these scenes are playful and lively.

It bears mentioning that Witold Gombrowicz’s own life story could have sprung from the pages of Pornografia: On the eve of the German invasion of Poland, Gombrowicz took a cruise to Argentina. He ended up stuck in Buenos Aires and never returned to Poland. In one sense, Pornografia is his response to this strange happenstance—watching Nazis occupy his home country (about which he was ambivalent)—with its potential for dramatic and darkly comic undertones. In the Forward, Sam Lipsyte quotes Gombrowicz from an interview with Dominique de Roux, “I am a humorist, a joker, an acrobat, a provocateur. My works turn double somersaults to please. I am a circus, lyricism, poetry, horror, riots, games—what more do you want?”

What more, indeed?

Frances Badgett is fiction editor of Contrary.

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WINTER 2010 COVER

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