I have
never been to Poland. I have been to
Germany. I tried to get over to Poland, but I ran out of time.
A good
friend of mine from grad school, a lesbian poet and rare books expert who lives
in Las Vegas, spent three months in Krakow, and I never fail to press her for
stories from her time there, which she always enjoys sharing. I also very much
like the look and sound of the word “Katowice.”
Growing
up, I had an elderly neighbor named Sofie (she’s still alive and in her 90s)
who left Poland, orphaned and alone, when she was eight. She is often described
as a “tough lady” by my relatives. She’s a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t
trust much of anything she hears or reads, and it’s not exactly easy to argue
with her, this tiny woman, now blind, literally on her own since she was a
child, a war refugee who had to bury her own parents.
During
my grade school years back in working-class New Jersey, I had a Polish-American
friend named Mark. In sixth and seventh grade, Monday through Friday, we played
basketball together every afternoon. He was a big kid. He is now a big man. He
is referred to, respectfully, as a “big, strong Polack.” He has an absolutely
gigantic pair of hands. Even at the gym, where he spends a lot of time, he
often impresses the other large men who spend a lot of time at gyms. He doesn’t
so much shake your hand as try not to crush it.
All of
this is to say: That’s about as close as I have gotten to Poland.
Witold
Gombrowicz famously left his native Poland and wrote his best-known works in
Argentina before eventually settling in Paris. He is often studied alongside
well-known émigré writers like Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov (the latter
was, like Gombrowicz, a big fan of parentheses, though Witold uses ellipses far
more liberally than Nabokov, and unlike Conrad, Gombrowicz continued to write
in Polish).
As far
as my knowledge of Polish literature is concerned, I enjoyed Tadeusz Borowski’s
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1946), as well as what I’ve read of
Czesław Miłosz. I have yet to dip into Wisława Szymborska and look forward to
doing so. I read excerpts from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961) for a summer
class in grad school and pieces of Marek Bieńczyk’s Tworki (1999) while
researching narratives of imprisonment and confinement. Jerzy Kosinski’s
portrait of World War II–era Poland in The Painted Bird (1965) is about as
disturbing and unforgettable a series of images as I’ve encountered, a
legitimate heir to Dante and Dostoyevsky, Bruegel and Bosch, in terms of sheer
visceral impact. But I’m from northern New Jersey, just across the river from
Newark, a post-DeLilloan from the land of Philip Roth, and while there is a
very active Polish-American community in Newark (at St. Casimir’s you can even
hear them say mass in Polish), I want to be as forthcoming as I can about my
knowledge of the relevant literature before tackling Gombrowicz — in
particular, his 1965 novel Cosmos, one of the great non-novels, or
pseudo-novels, or reality-hungry books, or barely fictional narratives that we
have.
A book
that opens mid-story like Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (1866), Cosmos is a
first-person recounting of an infinitely precise — and infinitely extrapolative
— period of time. Gombrowicz’s theme of entanglement is proto-Jaussian,
anticipating late-20th-century chroniclers of anthropocenic time like David
Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, and Tom McCarthy. Cosmos,
translated into English by Danuta Borchardt, is a novel about the accrued
importance of moments — and the momentum of importance-accruing.
There is
a poignant philosophical consciousness — almost Tolstoyan though more secular —
undergirding this deceptively slim text. Cosmos is one of those thin books that
is best read very slowly. Perhaps its closest Western-hemisphere equivalent is
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), another text that privileges the ruminative,
interrogates the reliability of memory, and delves into darker places than most
literary fictions dare to explore.
Suffice
it to say that Cosmos is about disorder, the out-of-place person or thing
(“thing” as opposed to “object”) that strikes one as not quite right. Hanging
things are the most frequently recurrent trope of that type, as Cosmos’s
protagonist (named Witold) comes across a hanged sparrow, then hears of a
hanged chicken, then finds what may or may not be an intentionally hung stick,
then strangles and hangs a cat, then lastly finds a hanging suicide. If you are
already put off by the subject matter of Cosmos, I would point out that the
novel is also incredibly funny.
Witold,
the character, shares the name of his author, in a way that Philip Roth would
later lift as an explicit tribute. Indeed, in their mordant tone and embrace of
self-lacerating immaturity, the Eastern European writer and the one from
Newark, New Jersey, are quite clearly kin. In a 2012 essay in The New Yorker,
Ruth Franklin dubbed Gombrowicz an “imp of the perverse,” a fitting title for
Roth as well. Other contemporary successors to Gombrowicz include Geoff Dyer and
Lars Iyer, while in Don DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K, the vagabond protagonist
recalls himself as a teenager being fascinated by Gombrowicz, chanting the
author’s name aloud until his mother told him, “Enough.”
Witold,
the protagonist of Cosmos, has left his native Warsaw due to conflicts with his
family, particularly his father, in search of a place where he can find peace
and solitude. Also seeking sanctuary and trying to sate his wanderlust is
Witold’s companion, the comically named Fuks, who leaves behind his job and his
tyrannical boss. They are a pair of nomadic and dissatisfied young men. Most of
the book’s action occurs at an inn in the resort town of Zakopane, located in
the deep southern region of Poland and far from their homes in urban Warsaw.
Their
story has an intriguing multi-genre appeal: the novel is at once a satiric
send-up, a travelogue, and a work of noir. Witold and Fuks are adventuresome
detectives, continuously obsessed with finding meaning — in hanging things and
in the mystery of the opposite sex (perhaps the biggest biological disparity
between male and female is that the former’s sex organs literally hang,
externalized and unavoidable). The two young men constantly note — and
hypothesize about — deep metaphysical questions. Gombrowicz himself has said of
Cosmos, “I gladly call this work ‘a novel about a reality that is creating
itself.’ And because a detective novel is precisely this — an attempt at
organizing chaos — Cosmos has a little of the form of a detective romance.”
Early in
the novel, after coming across the hanged sparrow, Witold can’t sleep because
he wonders what his companion Fuks is up to,
Where did he go? To the
bathroom? No, the hum of water from there was solitary. But in that case … what
if he had gone to see the sparrow […] it was just like him … to ponder, to
scheme, who hanged it, why did he hang it […] was he playing detective?
Later,
as the two young men snoop around the bedroom of Katasia, the niece of their
innkeeper’s wife, to see if she might be behind the hanged sparrow and other
unexplained phenomena, they find no evidence of her involvement, but afterward
Witold feels satisfied nonetheless. “And so, in spite of everything, I felt
better — our return along the gravel path was like the return of two detectives
— working on our detailed plans allowed me to survive with honor until the next
day.” If there’s a better metaphor for the life of the writer, I haven’t found
one.
In his
1990 essay “The Empty Plenum,” David Foster Wallace categorizes Cosmos as an
“interpret-me novel,” a piece of great literature because it offers its
readers, in a way that other media — such as movies — do not, an almost
unlimited surfeit of opportunities. This is also the thrust of the oft-iterated
piece of writing-workshop advice, “Trust your reader.” What writers do is to
probe, to nose around, to search for meaning, and though they often find little
or nothing, if they keep at it, day by day, their detailed plans give them
purpose. As a result, they needn’t dwell too long on their own private miseries
because there is always tomorrow’s work. As Gombrowicz’s novel continually
teaches, there is no meaning, there is no reality, there are only
interpretations, guesses and approximations, ephemeral perceptions.
Witold
spends his days, he tells us, “configuring the configurations around me. […]
When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every
moment of our existence … the swarm, the roar, the river … nothing is easier
than to configure!” Along with configuring, he strives to “explain everything,
clarify, get to the bottom of it,” but in the end, “the world was indeed a kind
of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on — I
was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!” Neil Gordon titled his
New York Times review of the 2005 Yale University Press translation of Cosmos,
“The Plotlessness Thickens.”
Unable
to consummate his affections for the innkeeper’s daughter, Witold’s unrequited
love leads him to strangle Katasia’s cat — not just strangle but hang it
because of all the other hanged items and objects that surround him, in which
he searches obsessively for meaning. The dead feline is the result of misplaced
passion, because other people, especially the ones we love, are so intrinsically unknowable,
Love, love — my foot, my passion,
yes, but what sort? It all began because I didn’t know, just didn’t know who
she was, what she was like, she was complex, blurry, inscrutable. […] I could
imagine her this way or that, in a hundred thousand situations, consider her from
one side or another, lose her, then find her again, turn her every which way
[…] but there could be no doubt that her emptiness was sucking me in, soaking
me up, it was she and she alone, yes, yes, but, I wondered […] what did I want
with her? To caress? To torture? To humiliate? To adore? Or did I want
something swinish, or angelic, with her? What was important to me: to wallow in
her, to embrace and cuddle her? I don’t know, don’t know, that’s just the
point, that I don’t know …
This shrug
of unknowability is inherited most directly from Gogol, and has been extended
by writers as disparate as Milan Kundera and Walker Percy. In their works,
these writers allow us access to a deep, disturbing, and existential truth.
Their books are an antidote for boredom, for meaninglessness, for the big,
random nothing that is life.
The
journey in Cosmos follows the innkeeper, Leon, as he leads Witold, Fuks, Leon’s
wife (dubbed “Roly-Poly” by Witold), and daughter Lena, along with a Chaucerian
band of newlywed couples and a priest to a spot in the mountains that
supposedly has, according to Leon, the “best view in the world.” But before
they get there, Leon confides to Witold that his real reason for visiting is
because, a quarter-century ago, it was the site of Leon’s one moment of
infidelity to his wife, a sexual fling with a kitchen maid, and the whole trip
is an excuse for Leon’s pilgrimage to a place of personal rapture. When he
comes across Leon sitting on a tree stump in the forest, smoking a cigarette,
Witold asks him, “What are you doing here?” and Leon replies, “‘Nothing,
nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,’ […] and smiled blissfully.”
Witold then asks, “What’s so amusing?” and Leon sums up the chasmic
unknowability suffusing the novel by remarking,
“What? Nothing! Exactly that:
nothing! Ha, that’s a language game, if you please, hm. … I’m amused by
‘nothing,’ mark you, Your Reverence, my venerable companion and merry-maker and
horse-drawn carriage, because ‘nothing’ is exactly what we do all our lives. A
fellow stands, sits, talks, writes and … nothing. A fellow buys, sells,
marries, doesn’t marry and — nothing. A fellow sitzum on a stumpium and — nothing.
Soda pop.”
Though
Witold observes that Leon says these words in a nonchalant, condescending
drawl, he soon finds himself in agreement.
Witold
is something of an underground man, and in further Dostoyevskian echoes, uses
the phrase “I was sick” several times late in the novel. He realizes with
gleeful resignation that his first-person narrative is a compiled one,
anticipating the clever mode that would be adopted a decade and a half later by
Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Gombrowicz
reconciles Witold’s fate in a final chapter that begins, “It will be difficult
to continue this story of mine. I don’t even know if it is a story. It is difficult
to call this a story, this constant … clustering and falling apart … of
elements.” The novel then ends with a punch line (with “wit” that is “told”):
after he cycles through his many obsessions (the hanged things and creatures
and people, his lust/love for Lena), it begins raining, and Witold telescopes
forward in time, running through what will happen after the rain stops. He’ll
get a head cold and a fever, and they’ll have to order a taxi back to the inn,
and his “sickness” (primarily eczema) will need to be treated by doctors, and
he’ll return to Warsaw, and fight with his father again, and “various other
things, problems, complications, difficulties. Today we had chicken fricassee
for dinner.”
That doesn’t
feel like a spoiler only because the journey that Gombrowicz takes to get to
that utterly perfect mundane detail is so much the reason to read this fine
little book. The “destination” is foretold so many times in this existential
chronicle of the banal and the everyday, that to separate a journey from its
conclusion is as pointless (and as essential) as life itself.
In the
summer of 1939, the writer Witold Gombrowicz set sail from Poland, on the ocean
liner Chrobry, on what he thought would be a brief mission as a cultural
ambassador to the Polish community in Argentina. He was not an obvious
candidate for the job, having made his name as an eccentric irritant to the
literary establishment. He was the author of a wildly surrealist collection of
short stories; a dreamlike play, “Ivona, Princess of Burgundia,” which remained
unperformed for decades after it was written; and a novel, “Ferdydurke,” which
is now recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, but
was dismissed by establishment critics at the time as “the ravings of a
madman.”
A week after
the Chrobry docked in Buenos Aires, Germany invaded Poland. The temporary
emissary, who spoke no Spanish and had few local contacts, had little choice
but to stay where he was. His exile lasted for more than two decades. Back
home, his books were banned by the Nazis, and then, after 1945, by the
Stalinists. In the rest of the world, they were merely unknown.
By 1952, when
he pitched to Kultura, a prestigious Polish literary journal based in Paris,
the idea of writing a diary for publication, Gombrowicz was demoralized and
desperate. He had been living in isolation and obscurity for thirteen years.
For a while he had worked at a bank, where the director gave him permission to
write during business hours, but this cozy arrangement did not last long. The
translation of “Ferdydurke” into Spanish, financed by a wealthy friend, had
been ignored. Another novel, “Trans-Atlantic,” received plenty of attention in
the Polish émigré community but did little to bolster Gombrowicz’s
international reputation. Written in a hybridized, deliberately antiquated style
rich with puns and double-entendres, the book was all but untranslatable. (An
English version, ten years in the making, did not appear until 1994.) He needed
to reinvent himself. “I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the
genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary
Gombrowiczes,” he wrote to Kultura’s editor.
Under the
heading “Fragments of a Diary,” the magazine published Gombrowicz’s
provocative, idiosyncratic, highly personal musings from 1953 until his death,
in 1969. In entries ranging from a few sentences to multiple pages, Gombrowicz
recorded his daily routine, his diet, and his to-do lists; his reading, his
travels, and his moods. He reproduced cantankerous letters to the editors of
various publications; he fulminated against Communism, existentialism, and even
democracy; he deployed elegant quips and humorous aphorisms. Most of all, he
wrote about literature: he described in detail his writing process, explicated
his own works, and railed against the deplorable state of the literary scene in
Poland, in the émigré community, and virtually everywhere else. “People!” he
exclaimed after reading a particularly obtuse critic on his work. “Cut my
throat if you are told to, but not with such a dull, such a terribly dull,
knife!” An immediate hit among Kultura’s readers, the diary was collected in
three volumes by the magazine’s book division, but it was not legally sold in
Poland until after his death, and even then only in censored form.
Now, for the
first time, the complete “Diary” has been published in English, by Yale, in a
heroic translation, by Lillian Vallee, that totals more than seven hundred
pages. (Vallee’s versions of the three volumes appeared piecemeal between 1988
and 1993, but they have long been out of print.) English-speaking readers can finally
experience the diary as Gombrowicz intended it—as a single, coherent work. On
the face of it, Gombrowicz sought in the diary to revive Polish culture from
the near-fatal blows dealt to it over the twentieth century. But he was equally
concerned with saving himself.
The class of
noble gentry into which Gombrowicz was born subscribed to a vision of
Polishness that could be traced back at least to Boleslaw I Chrobry (“the
Brave”), the ocean liner’s namesake and the first king of a unified Polish
nation, at the turn of the first millennium. The family owned multiple estates,
and his mother once served as president of the Society of Landed Ladies. But by
1904, when Gombrowicz was born, this class was on the verge of dying out;
Polish independence, in 1918, and later occupations by the Nazis and the
Soviets finished it off. In the diary, Gombrowicz describes himself as both
“terribly Polish and terribly rebellious against Poland.” The once venerated
traditional customs—honor, ceremoniousness, even duelling—struck him as
hopelessly insincere. In response, he offered the absurd: if his mother said it
was raining, he would claim the sun was shining. “This early training in
evident falsehood and open preposterousness proved immensely useful in later years
when I began to write,” he said later.
Through provocation,
Gombrowicz believed, he could find his way to a more authentic form of
life—surreal, perhaps, but more akin to reality than the privileged sphere of
the aristocracy. “Within me a rebelliousness was growing that I could neither
comprehend nor control,” he wrote in a collection of autobiographical sketches,
published posthumously as “Polish Memories.” He openly mocked his high-school
teachers; at a funeral, uncontrollable laughter seized him by the graveside.
“If I learned anything at all in school, it was more likely to be in the
breaks, from my schoolmates as they beat me up,” he recalled. “Other than that,
I educated myself by reading books, especially those that were forbidden, and
by doing nothing—for the freely wandering mind of the loafer is that which best
develops the intelligence.” After a desultory attempt at law school—he later
claimed that he sent his valet to the lectures as his proxy—he passed the final
exam only by chance.
Recurrent
bouts of ill health often forced him to the countryside. There, solitary and
bored, he began to sketch out a novel. Everyone he showed it to told him it was
awful. But he enjoyed the “strange, toxic work” of writing fiction. Gombrowicz
puzzled over the symbolism of his dreams, believing that they offered a way to
break out of “the whole Polish farce.” His first stories were published in
1933, as the collection “Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity”—later renamed
“Bacacay,” after the street he lived on in Buenos Aires. (Gombrowicz’s titles
are consistently random: he once explained that he named his books “for the
same reason that a person names his dogs—to distinguish them from others.”)
Grotesque,
erotic, and often hilarious, the stories immediately established Gombrowicz’s
extraordinary voice. A man encounters another man by chance at the opera and
shadows him for weeks—sending him flowers, writing letters to his
mistress—unaware of the torment his attentions are causing. A visitor to a
country estate where the head of the household has just died becomes convinced,
for no logical reason, that the man was murdered by a member of his family. A
countess famous for her meatless dinners may, it turns out, be serving human
flesh. “From the beginning the nonsensical and the absurd were very much to my
liking, and I was never more satisfied than when my pen gave birth to some
scene that was truly crazy, removed from the (healthy) expectations of mediocre
logic, and yet firmly rooted in its own separate logic,” he wrote in “Polish
Memories.” As creepy as Poe and as absurdist as Kafka, the stories earned the
admiration of Bruno Schulz—an admiration that was not initially reciprocated.
But the critics took the title literally, deploring the author’s juvenility.
Their disapproval spurred Gombrowicz to greater outrage.
His rebellion
was primarily targeted at what he came to call “form.” He gave the word many
meanings, but essentially he used it to identify convention in all its
guises—rigid manners, standardized attitudes, and, most pernicious,
preconceptions about artistic genre or style. “Each second I saw how one of my
‘friends’ tamed a faith for himself, an ideological or aesthetic position, in
the hope that in the end he would become a real writer. This approach
inevitably ended in a series of grimaces, a pyramid of claptrap, and an orgy of
unreality,” he writes in the diary. Instead, he set out to create a new kind of
literature—promoting immaturity and imperfection as a cure for
inauthenticity—and to lead a life he considered authentic. As he later put it,
“I am a humorist, a clown, a tightrope walker, a provocateur, my works stand on
their head to please, I am a circus, lyricism, poetry, terror, struggle, fun
and games—what more do you want?”
His first
major attempt at this, in 1937, was “Ferdydurke,” a fantasia derived from his
torturous school years: the students who bullied him, the teachers who babbled
clichés, and the never-ending battle against phoniness. It consists of a series
of hallucinatory episodes that dissolve into hilarity or violence. The
protagonist, Joey Kowalski, has just turned thirty; he is the author of an
unappreciated book of short stories (which happens to have the same title as
Gombrowicz’s first book). One day, a professor and mad magician named Pimko
appears on his doorstep and turns him into a teen-age boy. Wherever Joey goes,
from the schoolyard to a country estate, he is surrounded by bizarre, sometimes
humorous acts of sadism. Joey is forever being “dealt the pupa”—a kind of
shorthand for humiliation, physical or sexual. (Pupa is a Polish slang word for
“buttocks,” which Danuta Borchardt, the translator of the current English
edition, ingeniously leaves unaltered, giving the translation some of the
weirdness of the original.)
The funniest
moments in “Ferdydurke” are those in which Gombrowicz satirizes the literary
scene, mocking the “cultural aunts” who pass for authorities on literature and
the schoolteachers who repeat nonsense like “Great poetry must be admired,
because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.” When Pimko
first arrives at Joey’s apartment, he torments the fledgling author by making
him sit while he reads the manuscript he has been working on:
“Well, well, well,” [Pimko] said, “chirp,
chirp, little chickie.” He wiped one eye as he said this . . . and, still
seated, he began to read. And sitting squarely on his wisdom, he went on
reading. I felt sick at the sight of him reading. My world collapsed and
promptly reset itself according to the rules of a conventional prof. I could
not pounce on him because I was seated, and I was seated because he was seated.
. . . Not knowing what to do or how to behave I fidgeted in my seat, moved my
leg, looked around at the walls and bit my nails, while he went on sitting,
logically and consistently, his seat fairly and squarely filled with that of a
prof, reading. This went on for a terribly long time. . . . I groaned: “For
God’s sake, not your prof stuff! You’re killing me with it!”
Yet the
mockery here implies a paradoxical submission to convention. To constantly
struggle against form is to be constantly aware of form; to defend oneself
against one’s critics is to admit, despite it all, that they have something to
say. In an open letter to Bruno Schulz, published in a Polish literary journal
while he was writing “Ferdydurke,” Gombrowicz challenged Schulz—a dozen years
older and more established in the literary scene—to respond to an anonymous
reader who called Schulz’s writing perverted. Schulz good-naturedly declined to
take the bait; he pointed out Gombrowicz’s obsession with codes of value and
challenged him to be the “dragonslayer” of convention. It was a challenge
Gombrowicz was never able fully to live up to. Even in Argentina, for all his
talk of isolation, he could not abandon his lifelong obsession with what
everyone else thought of him.
The most
famous passage from Gombrowicz’s diary is the one that now stands as its
opening:
Monday
Me.
Tuesday
Me.
Wednesday
Me.
Thursday
Me.
But this is
not what greeted the readers who opened the April, 1953, issue of Kultura.
Gombrowicz added it retrospectively, when the segments were collected in book
form. Though his project was defined by the search for self, he was not yet
ready to thrust himself into it. Later, he grew more adventurous, branching
into increasingly personal territory and experimenting more with the form and
structure of his entries. But the diary’s initial readers found something more
polemical.
In the early
years, Gombrowicz fires off one screed after another at the literary
establishment. He rails regularly against the niceties of émigré publications
(such as the one he is writing in), which he says remind him “of a hospital
where the patients are given only soups that are easily digested.” He worries
that literature “is in danger of becoming a soft-boiled egg instead of being a
hard-boiled one, which is its vocation.” More than anything else, he is
infuriated to see Poles comparing their work to Western European art and
literature: “Don’t try to become Polish Matisses, you will not spawn a Braque
with your deficiencies.” This becomes a favorite theme of the diary:
Gombrowicz’s quest to save Polish culture from its own admirers.
Of course, if
the émigré press was too kind to writers, the situation in Communist Poland was
far worse. Gombrowicz made sure to use his platform to lob grenades at the
Communist government. Marxism had been imposed upon the country “just as one
drops a cage over a stunned bird,” leaving the intellectual climate shocked and
stunted, he wrote in 1956. Communism, in his view, was the ultimate tyranny of
“form,” requiring its adherents to submit entirely to the authority of others.
In the mid-eighties, when the diary was eventually published in Poland, much of
this commentary was excised.
Letters from
readers could take months to reach Gombrowicz, but that did not deter him from
using his diary to respond to them. Once, Czeslaw Milosz, who served as a kind
of spokesman for the Polish literati-in-exile, criticized Gombrowicz for
writing as if the Second World War had never happened: “You come along with
your revulsion to an immature, provincial Poland from before 1939.” Gombrowicz
responded that he was too far removed from contemporary Poland to write about
it: “I decided quite a while ago that I would write only about my own reality.”
Besides, he was supremely unimpressed by the way Polish writers had responded
to the disaster of the war: “Proust found more in his cookie, servant, and
counts than they found in years of smoking crematoria.”
Gombrowicz’s
unconventional literary judgments are among the funniest moments in the diary.
He called Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the much-loved
historical epic “Quo Vadis,” a “first-rate second-rate writer.” Rabelais wrote,
he said, “the way a child pees against a tree, in order to relieve himself.”
(This was intended as a compliment.) Much of Kafka he found simply impossible:
“Some day we will know why in our century so many great artists wrote so many
unreadable books . . . what sort of warped marriage of artist and recipient
spawned these works so deprived of artistic sex appeal.”
Not
surprisingly, in criticism he valued the personal approach above all else:
Literary criticism is not the judging of
one man by another (who gave you this right?) but the meeting of two
personalities on absolutely equal terms.
Therefore: do
not judge. Simply describe your reactions. Never write about the author or the
work, only about yourself in confrontation with the work or the author. You are
allowed to write about yourself.
‘I ought to
treat this diary as an instrument of my becoming before you,” Gombrowicz
ventured early on. Indeed, as the years went by, he began to draw away from the
polemics and to focus increasingly on his own life. In this sense, the
diary—which he called “faithful dog of my soul”—became his major creative
endeavor, the work through which he discovered himself.
His
exhibitionism begins in mild form, with an almost sheepish account of his daily
routine: breakfast each morning at ten o’clock (“tea with ladyfingers, then
Quaker Oats”). But soon the diarist moves into the darker corners of his
personality. He describes, with exhilaration, writing graffiti in a café
bathroom:
The
murmur of water whispered: do it, do it, do it. I took out the pencil. I wet
the tip. I wrote on the wall, high up so it would be hard to erase, I wrote
something quite vulgar in Spanish like:
“Ladies and
gentlemen, please comply . . .
S--- not on
the toilet seat but straight in its eye!”
I hid the pen.
Opened the door. I walked through the whole café and mingled with the crowd on
the street. And the graffito remained.
From that time
on, I exist with the awareness that my graffito is still there.
I hesitated to
disclose this. I hesitated not for reasons of prestige but because the written
word should not serve to spread certain . . . manias. But I won’t hide the fact
that never would I have dreamed that such things could be this . . .
electrifying.
Gombrowicz,
who had affairs with both men and women, also writes with remarkable honesty
about his adventures in the homosexual underworld of Buenos Aires. “It is
important for a man speaking publicly—a man of letters—to lead his reader
beyond the façade of form, into the boiling cauldron of his private history,”
he explained. “Is it ridiculous, even humiliating? Only children or kindhearted
aunts . . . can imagine that a writer is a calmly sublime being, a lofty spirit
instructing . . . about what is Good and Beautiful from on high.”
Not all of
Gombrowicz’s readers appreciated his candor. A subscriber in Canada wrote to
complain that “the last ‘diaries’ provoke no reaction in me, beyond the amazement
that you write that stuff and that Kultura prints it.” Gombrowicz
responds that the letter is “witness to that stifling pressure to which readers
always subject the author. Don’t write this, write only that. . . . I am also
writing my own story in this diary. That is, not what is important to her or
you but to me. I need each of these monologues, each gives me a light impulse.
Does my story bore you? That is evidence that you do not know how to read your
own from it.”
By the
seventh year of his diary, Gombrowicz had fully embraced his new identity.
“Today I awakened in the delight of not knowing what a literary award is, that
I do not know official honors, the caresses of the public or critics, that I am
not one of ‘ours,’ that I entered literature by force—arrogant and sneering. I
am the self-made man of literature!” he wrote in 1960. He is grateful that he
got out of Poland before he became successful, he says—otherwise, he, too,
might have been ruined by the stultifying intellectual scene—and equally
grateful that he had the opportunity to write the diary: “What security when it
turned out that in a tight spot I could comment on myself—that is exactly what
I needed: to become my own critic, my own annotator, judge, director.” The
diary had become his engine of creative autonomy: “It was only when I really
started to write in the Diary that I felt I was wielding my pen—a wonderful
feeling, which I got from neither ‘Ferdydurke’ nor any of my other works of
art, which seemed to write themselves . . . somewhere beyond me.”
Yet it
was during this period that he returned to fiction, publishing “Pornografia”
(1960) and “Cosmos” (1965), his most accomplished novel. “Cosmos,” which
Gombrowicz began in 1961, arises from the same existential absurdity that
animates “Ferdydurke,” but grounds it in the trappings of daily life. As in all
of Gombrowicz’s fiction, there is an autobiographical component: the narrator’s
name is Witold, and he has taken refuge from his dissolute life in Warsaw, and
from his parents, fleeing to a country inn to relax and write. But he cannot
stop noticing things—“signs”—that are unimportant on their own but, taken
together, seem to have some sinister significance: a dead sparrow found hanging
in the woods, a mark on the ceiling of his room in the shape of an arrow. At
the same time, he becomes weirdly fixated on two young women at the inn, until
his sexual obsession combines with the strange signs to create an
unidentifiable menace. In this novel, Gombrowicz is no longer a circus. His
tone is both calmer and more unsettling than the rollicking antics of
“Ferdydurke.” Though the fundamental absurdity remains, Gombrowicz’s habitual
hilarity is gone, replaced with a quiet dread, beyond rational understanding
but nonetheless real:
Even if something were hiding here, to
which the arrow, on the ceiling, in our room, was pointing, how would we find
it in this entanglement, among weeds, among bits and pieces, in the litter,
surpassing in number everything that could be happening on walls, on ceilings?
. . . How many meanings can one glean from hundreds of weeds, clods of dirt,
and other trifles? Heaps and multitudes gushed also from the boards of the
shed, from the wall. I got bored.
Naturally,
as soon as Gombrowicz had resigned himself to a life of obscurity, his
reputation caught up with him. The Polish “thaw”—the brief period of relative
freedom that followed a change of government in 1956—resulted in the
publication in Poland of all his works except the diary, and “Ferdydurke” soon
became a best-seller; French, German, and English translations followed in the
next few years. (The book was admired in Europe, but got a cool reception in
America; John Ashbery wrote that the novel “refuses to let itself be taken
seriously, and it must ultimately face the consequences.”) In 1963, the Ford
Foundation invited Gombrowicz to spend a year as a writer-in-residence in
Berlin. He left South America for the first time in nearly twenty-four years.
“I am writing these words in Berlin,” he recorded in his diary in amazement.
Through
his long exile, Gombrowicz had nurtured a fantasy of universal acceptance which
he strongly associated with the idea of Europe. But he was disappointed.
Visiting Paris and the offices of Kultura for the first time, he discovered
that he and his editors had vastly different frames of reference; their
Continental sophistication made him feel like a bumpkin. The German writers he
encountered—Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss—were friendly but distant.
By the time his stay was over, he was seriously ill, and soon developed heart disease
in addition to the respiratory ailments he had suffered for years.
Gombrowicz
never returned to Argentina, and, having found his mature fictional voice, he
all but abandoned his diary. The last few years of entries—occupying less than
thirty pages of the new edition—were written in quick bursts, as he shuttled
between Paris, Italy, and the French Riviera. Meanwhile, his plays were being
performed all over Europe; “Cosmos” appeared to great acclaim. In 1968, he was
short-listed for the Nobel Prize, and the story goes that Yasunari Kawabata
beat him by one vote. The following summer, he died, at the age of sixty-four.
In the
final diary entry, written shortly before his death, he was still railing
against the provincialism of literary Poland. “My entire life I have fought not
to be a ‘Polish writer’ but myself, Gombrowicz,” he wrote. He nearly succeeded.
Imp of
the Perverse. By Ruth Franklin. The New Yorker , July 30, 2012.
Also
interesting : Argentina's
Curious Battle Over the Legacy of Gombrowicz.
By Alexis Angulo.
Culture PL ,
February 17, 2017
I smiled
in the moonlight at the docile thought of the mind’s helplessness in the face
of overwhelming, confounding, entangling reality…No combination is
impossible…Any combination is possible…”
—Witold
Gombrowicz, Cosmos
“The
bird can’t hang itself.”
Now
that’s a thing we all can agree on, can’t we? Surely that little sparrow,
inexplicably dangling on a blue wire from the branch of a tree, didn’t commit
suicide—although later there will be mind-boggling speculation that he was
sacrificed by the other birds. This hardly qualifies as weird in the context of
Cosmos, whose progression rigorously follows through such increasingly
haphazard connections, befitting the belated conjunction of two major Polish
surrealists: infamous iconoclast Andrzej Zulawski, returning after a
15-year-hiatus from filmmaking to translate the final novel by Witold
Gombrowicz (1904-1969) to the screen, with the title remaining both ironic and
sincere. After all, the somewhat puzzling but inconspicuous case of the hanged
bird, which crucially fascinates and nauseates the protagonist—named Witold,
like the writer—turns out to be the first major event in an ever-escalating
chain of associations, whose implications are indeed cosmic. Attempting to
forge order from the chaos of the real world, Witold builds a private cosmos
founded on arbitrary associations. Increasingly aware of facing a universe of
possibilities, in which every connection can be randomly made, and thus is
equally profound and silly, Gombrowicz’s (and Zulawski’s) Witold is seized by
an existential vertigo: “All this within time that was reverberating like a
gong, filled to the brim, cascade, vortex, swarm, cloud, the Milky Way, dust,
sounds, events, this and that, etc., etc., etc.”
In
short, it becomes impossible to distinguish the awesome from the absurd, and
Zulawski’s cinema of intensity has been zig-zagging with furious power between
those two poles for nearly half a century. This prototypical outlaw-auteur,
equally given to extroverted grand gestures and an introverted, even implosive
streak of self-scrutiny, has rebounded a few months shy of his 75th birthday in
Locarno, emerging with the prize for Best Director. Zulawski’s adaptation of
Gombrowicz’s attack against stupidity and lack of imagination, in which an
(admittedly absurd) cosmos is willfully forged from unrelated details and
fragments of human interaction, may be deceptively small-scale and less
passion-aggressive than his most notorious achievements, but stays true to his
surrealist leanings. Often considered a provocateur, not least for his naked
(pun intended), emotionally excessive depictions of amour fou, Zulawski has
built his own, hard-won ciné-cosmos without compromising an inch over the
course of 13 features. Born in Lwow, now part of the Ukraine, he grew up in
France, where his father Miroslaw, a writer and diplomat, worked at the Polish
embassy and for UNESCO. Having studied philosophy and cinema in Paris, Zulawski
returned to Poland, starting out as a journalist and writer, first publishing
poems, followed by a novel in 1966, which was promptly censored. In the
meantime he had become a protégé of another Andrzej, Wajda. Serving as
assistant director on Samson (1961), a claustrophobic WWII drama set in the
Warsaw Ghetto, and The Ashes (1965), an epic saga from the Napoleonic Wars,
Zulawski managed to get a “made in collaboration with” credit on Wajda’s
contribution to the international omnibus L’amour à vingt ans (1962) in between.
Real
proof of an emerging talent came with two fluent, if still somewhat
conventional half-hour shorts made for Polish television in 1967—the only
black-and-white works by a bright colourist: Pavoncello, based on a story by
The Ashes scribe Stefan Zeromski, and the Turgenev-inspired The Story of
Triumphant Love (first broadcast in 1969) already scrutinize aspects of (mad)
love in sparse historical settings, but Zulawski creates a rich, eerie
atmosphere with few visual coups and a number of mysterious turns. (In the
Turgenev short, a magic melody ensures that “those who love can do unusual
things,” so a man who stabs his own heart with a huge kris emerges unscathed.)
Yet the true Zulawskian frenzy was to be unleashed with his astonishing
big-screen debut The Third Part of the Night (1971), establishing many key
themes and stylistic ideas, and the director as someone to watch—not least by
the Polish authorities. Though pleased with the film’s international festival
success, they were considerably less so with its allegoric portrayal of life
under oppressive rule. Inspired by conversations with his father, who is
credited as co-writer, about his WWII experiences, Zulawski fashioned a
decidedly downbeat, disorienting resistance tale, uplifted by hallucinatory forward
thrust—a woman quoting the titular Bible passage at the start gets a painful
rifle-butt to the head moments later from a soldier on horseback in her living
room, then is brutally killed, along with her child. Shacking up with her
pregnant doppelgänger (doubles abound in Zulawski), the husband vows to join
the partisans and partakes in medical experiments as a cover, feeding his blood
to lice in order to help create a typhus vaccine. The latter makes for the most
surreal passages, but tellingly it’s taken directly from the life of dad
Miroslaw. No matter how outlandish, Zulawski’s films are always based on
personal experience.
Next he
transposed the recent Polish student riots to the late 18th century for The
Devil (1972), a film about idealism corrupted, conceived as an insane
smorgasbord of brutal betrayal, with generous helpings of Hamlet. The punch
line that the film’s Mephistophelian figure turns out to be rather feeble—the
devil is not in the system, it is the system—was apparent to the censors this
time, the film’s instant ban only lifted in 1988. Invited to leave the country,
Zulawski relocated to France, rebounding with L’important c’est d’aimer (1975),
a melodrama about love, pain, and the whole damn thing in a world of faked
feelings. Sordid sex productions served as ideal backdrop for Zulawski’s
idiosyncratic mix of intellectual reflection—most prominently, his relentless
questioning of the artist’s role (in Cosmos, he’s changed Witold from a student
to an aspiring writer)—and raw, uninhibitedly acted emotions. Taken with the
film’s enormous success, the Polish authorities made Zulawski a carte blanche
return offer he couldn’t refuse. With characteristic perversity, he picked “the
saddest books I know,” his grand-uncle’s Jerzy’s influential “Lunar Trilogy” of
early-20th-century science-fiction novels, to embark on his masterpiece, On the
Silver Globe. It would remain, per the resulting film’s voiceover, a “stump of
a movie.” After two years, the plug was pulled on the mammoth production, allegedly
for going over budget, although one can imagine the shock of the politicians
when seeing the rushes of Hieronymus Boschian visions, like a beachfront
adorned with convicts impaled on 50-foot-poles. About a fifth of the script
remained unshot, but belatedly learning that the original material had been
saved from state-mandated destruction, Zulawski managed to salvage a
166-minute-version in 1988, with his narration of the plot gaps poetically
wedded to images of contemporary Poland. Even so, On the Silver Globe remains a
singular cinematic experience, challenged only a quarter-century later by
Aleksei German’s posthumous Hard to Be a God (2013): it’s a monumental
adventure of astronauts marooned on the barren moon (key location: Gobi
Desert), but really an immersion in the coming and going of an entire
civilization in all its aspects. It is essentially indescribable, but as a
heady tour de force it may be the ecstatic epitome of Zulawskian mise en scène.
Within
the next decade, the French would coin the word Zulawskienne for his divisive,
distinctive direction that assaults the viewer with a barrage of roving,
frantic, sometimes subjective and handheld camera takes and corresponding
actorly transgressions. This manifests itself in primal scenes of excessive
physicality and/or eruptive torrents of verbiage, consciously teetering on the
brink between the philosophical and the absurd. Zulawski’s cinema has always
been a take-no-prisoners proposition seemingly transmitted from the edge of a
volcanic abyss, in the process trampling over many (but not all) niceties of
conventional filmmaking with a manic energy that can be hard to take for some,
revelatory to others. Starting with the English-language relationship monster
movie Possession (1981), still his best-known work, he reinvented himself as a
notorious maverick during a prolonged French exile. A maximalist cousin of
David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), Possession was inspired by Zulawski’s
painful separation and divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek (who played in
his first two features), shot in the divided Berlin (making for a memorable
time-capsule as well as a typically cryptic political allegory) and infused
with an overwhelming bleakness that makes its deferred turn towards
full-fledged fantastic horror seem inevitable in retrospect. After her first
viewing, lead actress Isabelle Adjani, whose
minutes-on-end-slobber-birth-breakdown scene in a metro station is legendary,
called the result “psychological pornography” (and feigned a suicide attempt,
according to Zulawski), then won a César to go with her Best Actress in Cannes
(shared with her role in James Ivory’s Quartet). From there, the director’s
ongoing succès de scandale continued down ’80s France’s neon-lit boulevards
with two Dostoyevsky variations: in Le femme publique (1984), an inexperienced
actress (Valérie Kaprisky) is cast for a film version of The Possessed, while
L’amour braque (1985) takes The Idiot and puts it into crime-cinéma de look
overdrive to repeatedly crash into the wall of contemporary indifference
(“Impossible,” one character notes, “is a French word”). The general public was
more concerned about Zulawski’s affair with his 18-year-old star Sophie
Marceau, shockingly shedding her innocent-teen image from the super-hit La Boum
(1980).
The
outrage (and box-office drawing power) waned, but Zulawski and Marceau kept
working till their private separation in 2001. Inaugurating a mellower phase,
Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) couples Marceau’s clairvoyant
(whose outrageous revelations are inevitably greeted with grateful applause)
with a genius computer programmer (Jacques Dutronc) afflicted by a brain
tumour, the resulting memory loss a convenient hook for Zulawski’s preferred
method of forging ahead through a fragmentary, but never arbitrary, dramaturgy.
His musical side was given full reign in an adaptation of Mussorgsky’s Boris
Godounov (1989) and The Blue Note (1991), chronicling the last days of Frédéric
Chopin’s relationship with George Sand (he seems more fascinated by her
daughter, played by Marceau) in a Zulawski-style refashioning of the Romantic
era, equally melancholic and satiric. Returning to Poland for the superb
She-Shaman (1996), Zulawski created another, strictly homegrown scandal,
charting an amour fou in tribal terms, the psychotic deterioration crowned with
a brain-splitting exit. Hated at home and long overlooked elsewhere, despite a
marginal Venice screening, She-Shaman has only been acknowledged in the DVD
era, which has garnered Zulawski an overdue overseas reputation, bolstered by a
few recent retrospectives (only Possession had a US release, albeit in a
heavily truncated version). Taking a sharp turn from She-Shaman’s unbridled
aggression, La fidélité (2000) seemed a perfect goodbye—to filmmaking and to
Marceau. A majestic and mature contemporary version of La Princesse de Clèves,
just as distinctive as Manoel de Oliveira’s The Letter (1999), it peppered a
deeply developed meditation on duty and honour versus passion and happiness
with ludicrous sub-plots featuring unscrupulous paparazzi and stylized
violence—a reminder that Zulawski is a really impressive action director.
Having
said that he made every film as if it were his last since the beginning,
Zulawski busied himself in the years since by living and writing (a lot). But
regardless of the medium, Zulawski’s art has always been driven by the
challenge of wrestling meaning from life. “I write because I’m a director. I
shoot because I’m a writer,” he wrote in the introduction to one of his books’
French translations, and Cosmos offers him a felicitous opportunity for further
investigation of the word’s filmic power, though with Zulawski’s twin strategy
of amplification and deconstruction, language takes a backseat to speech, if
not sound. Despite unique sensual pleasures, the film’s provocation may be
resolutely cerebral, but Zulawski still tackles all-or-nothing subject matter,
leaving no stone unturned. Or, maybe one should say, no leaf of grass unmoved,
given the following Gombrowicz passage that perfectly encapsulates the driving
idea of being constantly, concurrently, overwhelmed and underwhelmed by the
cosmos, dumbstruck by the sheer enormity of impressions, too numerous to
process in detail, yet also leaving Witold disappointed by the digestion
resulting from his mind’s attempts to transform it into a whole: “At my feet
the grass—the grass—consisting of stalks and blades whose individual
positions—twists, slants, bends, desolations, crunches, desiccations—loomed
before me, flashing, escaping, absorbed as they were by the totality of the
grass that breathlessly stretched all the way to the mountains, but already
under lock and key, dejected, condemned to itself…” Similarly condemned to
themselves, the characters of Cosmos relentlessly try overcoming barriers,
circling around each other and some elusive centre, only to be thwarted in
their attempts, held at bay by a force that essentially remains (and must
remain) mysterious. The enigma at the centre of Zulawski’s work is that he’s
trying to film the unspeakable.
Unmistakably
Zulawskian, Cosmos is nevertheless only moderately Zulawskienne. Surprisingly,
its relative temperance hardly makes a difference. The intimate outlines of
Gombrowicz’s novel—a few locations (the outdoors settings—swallowing sea, snowy
mountains, dark woods—reliably inspiring the director’s metaphorical penchant),
characters, and a simple plot—contain a multitude, and Zulawski follows suit,
making a summary of the narrative a somewhat superfluous exercise, like drawing
a map of sets and actors’ chalk-marks, when the essence of the enterprise is
almost exclusively to be found in the choreography of images and gestures,
bodies and sounds, of space and time. Zulawski’s directorial statement hints at
the goings-on beyond the surface: “This novel by Witold Gombrowicz, certainly
the one I admire most in his work, is a gem, a little perverse and sharp
diamond. I had never thought of making a film out of it: perhaps due to my
admiration, or perhaps because all adaptations of the writer have proven
disappointing, or even ridiculous. The man was supremely intelligent, his
writing capricious, full of intrigues veiled by a surreal humor, that is to
say, in the simplest case, whimsical. Or—and—black…A thriller, a love story, an
exploration of the human heart in its youth. A little frightening, very funny
when it wants to.” Exactly Zulawski’s hunting ground, even as his comic side
remains undervalued, especially by the French. Moved from Gombrowicz’s specific
setting of southernmost Poland, 1939, to somewhere in Europe, about now (the
language is French, the location Portuguese, the producer Paulo Branco), Cosmos
briskly sets up its tonal coordinates, replete with stop-and-go synth-violin
faux-cheese orchestrated by versatile regular Zulawski collaborator Andrzej
Korzynski.
Already
given to bursts of ranting, Witold (Jonathan Genet, ideal as a literary
Romantic type) marches from a train station into the woods, discovers the
hanged bird and instinctively examines it, only to wipe his hand afterwards in
disgust. But the infection cannot be stopped. Witold meets a fishy old
acquaintance—their previous relationship remains unaccounted for, like much
else—named Fuchs (often also characterized by Gombrowicz as “carroty,” less so
as played by Johan Libéreau) and the duo boards in the house of Madame Woytis
(Sabine Azéma) and her husband Leon (Jean-François Balmer). Proceedings are
ripe for misunderstandings developed in time-honoured farce tradition, but with
a sinister bent. The boarders’ subsequent sleuthing-by-near-random-association
also suggests a parody of detective story templates, yet the absurd details
have uncanny inflections, like the disfigured lip of house servant Ginette
(Clémentine Pons), lovingly nicknamed Catherette. The eerie close-up of Ginette’s
face serving as a wake-up call, Witold and Fuchs soon obsess over connecting
possible signs and pursuing perverse parallels, heatedly debating in between:
Witold’s fixation on the servant’s mouth is transferred on Madame Woytis’
fetching, but recently married daughter Lena (Victoria Guerra). Loaded gestures
are studied intensely, especially hand movements around cutlery during dinner,
while Leon dispenses doting life lessons punctuated by his enigmatic private
sing-song-pronunciation and little rituals (small balls of bread, grains of
salt). Then there’s the hanged piece of wood in the backyard, undoubtedly
hinting at a serial executioner of very peculiar persuasion. Not to mention the
“arrows” the duo detects in dirt patches on the ceiling and the like, to be
diligently followed, uncovering an ever more elusive trail…
“When
will I awake from being awake,” Witold wonders at some point, but Cosmos is
hardly dreamy—the only oneiric phrase regularly applied to Zulawski’s
hallucinatory films is “fever dream.” Part of the sickness from which this
fever springs is intermittent logorrhea, with monological harangues lingering
more prominently than the dialogue battles—or the hushed exchanges serving as
crucial counterpoint. The interior narration of Witold’s
stream-of-consciousness remembrance from Gombrowicz’s novel is translated into
big chunks of external verbiage, at times delivered literally in-your-face as
Witold dashes in close-up from one scene to the next. Zulawski’s patented
mobile camera style, ever-sliding between characters, mostly keeps a
medium-shot distance this time around, his brusque transitions and disorienting
edits—the finale is particularly inspired—not exactly the time-mosaic-staccato
suggested by the welter of digressions and detailed associations in the book:
Cosmos is closer to late-period Resnais than to early work of this French
fellow traveller in sophisticated surrealism. (That Resnais’ actress-widow
Azéma plays the cataleptic Madame freezing at inopportune moments adds an in-
to the joke.) Though Cosmos is hardly lacking in perversity, sex, and violence,
not to mention fierce freak-out acting spectaculars, the manic(-depressive)
tone of earlier films has been replaced by a state of constant agitation.
Zulawski diligently conjures the restlessness evoked by the novel’s narrator at
a particularly absurd juncture: “But my standing was becoming increasingly
irresponsible, even insane, I had no right to stand, this is IMPOSSIBLE, I HAVE
TO GO…yet I stood.”
Himself
standing firm with regards to his proclivities, Zulawski maintains this nervous
tension, a little too frenetic for full-on-comedy, only accentuated by
trademark dollops of obscure horror and emotional outbursts, even as he freely
inserts his usual counterpoint proto-slapstick and heated, digressive debates
about art and pop culture, as passionate as they are parodic, especially
regarding literature (“Sartre,” Witold pontificates, “was hideous, except that
he wrote Nausea”), film (including a pun on Zulawski’s own L’important c’est
d’aimer, but c’mon: Luc Bresson?) and comics (Edgar P. Jacobs’ The Mystery of
the Great Pyramid serves as one fetish object). Zulawski’s films always contain
such reflexive reminders, but in Cosmos the strategy proves especially
fruitful. Like the characters, the filmmaker builds his absurd cosmos from
minimal means. More unusual is the film’s focus on men. Despite some great male
performances (like Sam Neill’s in Possession or Francis Huster’s very different
turns as the possessed The Possessed director and the resident idiot in the
Dostoyevsky variations), women usually rule Zulawski’s films—here, their
unknowability simply leaves the immature guys stranded in the dark, lost in
their perplexing cosmos-building.
The key
performance may be Chabrol-Ruiz veteran Balmer’s irresistible turn as aged, but
certainly not matured paterfamilias, who has receded into a private world of
kinky mini-pleasures, given to the juiciest expressions of barely sublimated
obscenity, especially his onanistic onomatopoetry, the endlessly combinable
centrepiece of his wordplay being “bleurgh,” per the English subtitles. The
novel’s most recent English translation by Danuta Borchardt had used a simpler
“berg,” but wouldn’t the world be poorer without Bleurghson, Spielbleurgh, and
Bleurghman? No matter how ridiculously expressed, the unspeakable is still what
Zulawski’s art tries to wrestle from life. That he gives Gombrowicz’s hilarious
non-sequitur ending—his wife’s dinner announcement—pride of place as the big
final quote before he does one of his end-credits meta-showstoppers, serves as
a reminder that common-sense logic proves an unsatisfactory tool in the absurd
maelstrom of life’s (and art’s) sensations, no matter how seemingly
insignificant: “One must understand what is the drop that makes the cup
overflow. What is it that’s ‘too much?’ There is something like an excess of
reality, a swelling beyond endurance,” Witold muses in Gombrowicz’s novel. By
the end of both book and film, the equilibrium of existence has been so
thoroughly pierced that the bird might as well have hanged itself.
Bleurghing
the Unspeakable: A Stroll Through Andrzej Zulawski’s Cosmos. By Christoph Huber. Cinema Scope on line, no date
Also interesting : Cosmos –
Andrzej Żuławski. Culture PL , February 29, 2016.
Official
UK trailer Cosmos by Andrzej Zulawski
