The Tender Narrator by Olga Tokarczuk

The Tender Narrator

1.

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it’s a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes. The light is soft, and rainy, likely a springtime light, and definitely the kind of light that seeps in through a window, holding the room in a barely perceptible glow. My mom is sitting beside our old radio, and it’s the kind with a green eye and two dials—one to regulate the volume, the other for finding a station. This radio later became my great childhood companion; from it I learned of the existence of the cosmos. Turning an ebony knob shifted the delicate feelers of the antennae, and into their purview fell all kinds of different stations—Warsaw, London, Luxembourg and Paris. Sometimes, however, the sound would falter, as though between Prague and New York, or Moscow and Madrid, the antennae’s feelers stumbled onto black holes. Whenever that happened, it sent shivers down my spine. I believed that through this radio different solar systems and galaxies were speaking to me, crackling and warbling and sending me important information, and yet I was unable to decipher it.

When as a little girl I would look at that picture, I would feel sure that my mom had been looking for me when she turned the dial on our radio. Like a sensitive radar, she penetrated the infinite realms of the cosmos, trying to find out when I would arrive, and from where. Her haircut and outfit (a big boat neck) indicate when this picture was taken, namely, in the early sixties. Gazing off somewhere outside of the frame, the somewhat hunched-over woman sees something that isn’t available to a person looking at the photo later. As a child, I imagined that what was happening was that she was gazing into time. There’s nothing really happening in the picture—it’s a photograph of a state, not a process. The woman is sad, seemingly lost in thought—seemingly lost.

When I later asked her about that sadness—which I did on numerous occasions, always prompting the same response—my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn’t been born yet, yet she already missed me.

“How can you miss me when I’m not there yet?” I would ask.

I knew that you miss someone you’ve lost, that longing is an effect of loss.

“But it can also work the other way around,” she answered. “Missing a person means they’re there.”

This brief exchange, someplace in the countryside in western Poland in the late sixties, an exchange between my mother and me, her small child, has always remained in my memory and given me a store of strength that has lasted me my whole life. For it elevated my existence beyond the ordinary materiality of the world, beyond chance, beyond cause and effect and the laws of probability. She placed my existence out of time, in the sweet vicinity of eternity. In my child’s mind, I understood then that there was more to me than I had ever imagined before. And that even if I were to say, “I’m lost,” then I’d still be starting out with the words “I am”—the most important and the strangest set of words in the world.

And so a young woman who was never religious—my mother—gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s greatest tender narrator.

2.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of these looms is enormous—thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully, for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world. In this sense, the world is made of words.

How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.

Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world. Western civilization is to a great extent founded and reliant upon that very discovery of the self, which makes up one of our most important measures of reality. Here man is the lead actor, and his judgment—although it is one among many—is always taken seriously. Stories woven in first person appear to be among the greatest discoveries of human civilization; they are read with reverence, bestowed full confidence. This type of story, when we see the world through the eyes of some self that is unlike any other, builds a special bond with the narrator, who asks his listener to put himself in his unique position.

What first-person narratives have done for literature and in general for human civilization cannot be overestimated—they have completely reworked the story of the world, so that it is no longer a place for the operations of heroes and deities upon whom we can have no influence, but rather a place for people just like us, with individual histories. It is easy to identify with people who are just like us, which generates between the story’s narrator and its reader or listener a new variety of emotional understanding based on empathy. And this, by its very nature, brings together and eliminates borders; it is very easy to lose track in a novel of the borders between the narrator’s self and the reader’s self, and a so-called “absorbing novel” actually counts on that border being blurred—on the reader, through empathy, becoming the narrator for a while. Thus literature has become a field for the exchange of experiences, an agora where everyone can tell of their own fate, or give voice to their alter ego. It is therefore a democratic space—anyone may speak up, everyone can create a speaking voice for herself. Never in the history of humanity have so many people been writers and storytellers. We have only to look at the statistics to see that this is true.

Whenever I go to book fairs, I see how many of the books being published in the world today have to do with precisely this—the authorial self. The expression instinct may be just as strong as other instincts that protect our lives—and it is most fully manifested in art. We want to be noticed, we want to feel exceptional. Narratives of the “I’m going to tell you my story” variety, or “I’m going to tell you the story of my family,” or even simply, “I’m going to tell you where I’ve been,” comprise today’s most popular literary genre. This is a large-scale phenomenon also because nowadays we are universally able to access writing, and many people attain the ability, once reserved for the few, of expressing themselves in words and stories. Paradoxically, however, this situation is akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out. We know everything there is to know about them, we are able to identify with them and experience their lives as if they were our own. And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial “self” hardly guarantees universality. What we are missing—it would seem—is the dimension of the story that is the parable. For the hero of the parable is at once himself, a person living under specific historical and geographical conditions, yet at the same time he also goes well beyond those concrete particulars, becoming a kind of Everywhere Everyman. When a reader follows along with someone’s story written in a novel, he can identify with the fate of the character described and consider their situation as if it were his own, while in a parable, he must surrender completely his distinctness and become the Everyman. In this demanding psychological operation, the parable universalizes our experience, finding for very different fates a common denominator. That we have largely lost the parable from view is

a testament to our current helplessness.

Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature’s leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players.

The general commercialization of the literary market has led to a division into branches—now there are fairs and festivals of this or that type of literature, completely separate, creating a clientele of readers eager to hole up with a crime novel, some fantasy or science fiction. A notable characteristic of this situation is that what was only supposed to help booksellers and librarians organize on their shelves the massive quantity of published books, and readers to orient themselves in the vastness of the offering, became instead abstract categories not only into which existing works are placed, but also according to which writers themselves have started writing. Increasingly, genre work is like a kind of cake mold that produces very similar results, their predictability considered a virtue, their banality an achievement. The reader knows what to expect and gets exactly what he wanted.

I have always intuitively opposed such orders, since they lead to the limiting of authorial freedom, to a reluctance toward the experimentation and transgression that is in fact the essential quality of creation in general. And they completely exclude from the creative process any of the eccentricity without which art would be lost. A good book does not need to champion its generic affiliation. The division into genres is the result of the commercialization of literature as a whole and an effect of treating it as a product for sale with the whole philosophy of branding and targeting and other, similar inventions of contemporary capitalism.

Today we can have the great satisfaction of seeing the emergence of a wholly new way of telling the world’s story that is purveyed by the on-screen series, the hidden task of which is to induce in us a trance. Of course this mode of storytelling has long existed in the myths and Homeric tales, and Heracles, Achilles or Odysseus are without doubt the first heroes of series. But never before has this mode taken up so much space or exerted such a powerful influence on the collective imagination. The first two decades of the twenty-first century are the unquestionable property of the series. Their influence on the modes of telling the story of the world (and therefore on our way of understanding that story, too) is revolutionary.

In today’s version, the series has not only extended our participation in the narrative in the temporal sphere, generating its various tempos, offshoots and aspects, but also introduced its own new orders. Since in many cases its task is to hold the viewer’s attention for as long as possible—the series narrative multiplies the threads, interweaving them in the most improbable manner so much so that when at a loss it even harks back to the old narrative technique, once compromised by classical opera, of the Deus ex machina. The creation of new episodes often entails the total, ad-hoc overhaul of the psychology of the characters, so that they will be better suited to the developing events of the plot. A character who begins as gentle and reserved winds up vindictive and violent, a supporting character turns protagonist, while the main character, to whom we have already grown attached, loses significance or actually completely disappears, much to our dismay.

The potential materialization of another season creates the necessity of open endings in which there is no way that mysterious things called catharsis can occur or resound fully—catharsis, formerly the experience of the internal transformation, the fulfillment and satisfaction of having participated in the action of the tale. Such complication, rather than conclusion—the constant postponement of the reward that is catharsis—renders the viewer dependent, hypnotizes her. The fabula interrupta, created long ago, and well known from the stories of Scheherazade, has now made its bold return in series, altering our subjectivity and having bizarre psychological effects, tearing us out of our own lives and hypnotizing us like a stimulant. At the same time, the series inscribes itself into the new, drawn-out and disordered rhythm of the world, into its chaotic communication, its instability and fluidity. This story-telling form is probably the one most creatively searching for a new formula today.

In that sense, there is serious work in the series on the narratives of the future, on reformatting the story so that it suits our new reality.

But above all, we live in a world of too many contradictory, mutually exclusive facts, all battling one another tooth and nail.

Our ancestors believed that access to knowledge would not only bring people happiness, well-being, health and wealth, but would also create an equal and just society. What was missing in the world, to their minds, was the ubiquitous wisdom that would naturally arise from information.

John Amos Comenius, the great seventeenth-century pedagogue, coined the term “pansophism,” by which he meant the idea of potential omniscience, universal knowledge that would contain within it all possible cognition. This was also, and above all, a dream of information available to everyone. Would not access to facts about the world transform an illiterate peasant into a reflective individual conscious of himself and the world? Will not knowledge within easy reach mean that people will become sensible, that they will direct the progress of their lives with equanimity and wisdom?

When the Internet first came about, it seemed that this notion would finally be realized in a total way. Wikipedia, which I admire and support, might have seemed to Comenius, like many like-minded philosophers, the fulfillment of the dream of humanity—now we can create and receive an enormous store of facts being ceaselessly supplemented and updated that is democratically accessible to just about every place on Earth.

A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing.

Furthermore, the Internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behavior of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair. Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat. The famous Shakespeare quote has never been a better fit than it is for this cacophonous new reality: more and more often, the Internet is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Research by political scientists unfortunately also contradicts John Amos Comenius’ intuitions, which were based on the conviction that the more universally available was information about the world, the more politicians would avail themselves of reason and make considered decisions. But it would appear that the matter is not at all so simple as that. Information can be overwhelming, and its complexity and ambiguity give rise to all sorts of defense mechanisms—from denial to repression, even to escape into the simple principles of simplifying, ideological, party-line thinking.

The category of fake news raises new questions about what fiction is. Readers who have been repeatedly deceived, misinformed or misled have begun to slowly acquire a specific neurotic idiosyncrasy. The reaction to such exhaustion with fiction could be the enormous success of non-fiction, which in this great informational chaos screams over our heads: “I will tell you the truth, nothing but the truth,” and “My story is based on facts!”

Fiction has lost the readers’ trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool. I am often asked this incredulous question: “Is this thing you wrote really true?” And every time I feel this question bodes the end of literature.

This question, innocent from the reader’s point of view, sounds to the writer’s ear truly apocalyptic. What am I supposed to say? How am I to explain the ontological status of Hans Castorp, Anna Karenina or Winnie the Pooh?

I consider this type of readerly curiosity a regression of civilization. It is a major impairment of our multidimensional ability (concrete, historical, but also symbolic, mythic) to participate in the chain of events called our lives. Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully. I believe that myth performs the function of that structure. Everyone knows that myths never really happened but are always going on. Now they go on not only through the adventures of ancient heroes, but rather also make their way into the ubiquitous and most popular stories of contemporary film, games and literature. The lives of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus have been transferred to Dynasty, and the heroic acts of the heroes are attended to by Lara Croft.

In this ardent division into truth and falsehood, the tales of our experience that literature creates have their own dimension.

I have never been particularly excited about any straight distinction between fiction and non-fiction, unless we understand such a distinction to be declarative and discretionary. In a sea of many definitions of fiction, the one I like the best is also the oldest, and it comes from Aristotle. Fiction is always a kind of truth.

I am also convinced by the distinction between true story and plot made by the writer and essayist E.M. Forster. He said that when we say, “The king died and then the queen died,” it’s a story. But when we say, “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” that is a plot. Every fictionalization involves a transition from the question “What happened next?” to an attempt at understanding it based on our human experience: “Why did it happen that way?”

Literature begins with that “why,” even if we were to answer that question over and over with an ordinary “I don’t know.”

Thus literature poses questions that cannot be answered with the help of Wikipedia, since it goes beyond just information and events, referring directly to our experience.

But it is possible that the novel and literature in general are becoming before our very eyes something actually quite marginal in comparison with other forms of narration. That the weight of the image and of new forms of directly transmitting experience—film, photography, virtual reality—will constitute a viable alternative to traditional reading. Reading is quite a complicated psychological and perceptual process. To put it simply: first the most elusive content is conceptualized and verbalized, transforming into signs and symbols, and then it is “decoded” back from language into experience. That requires a certain intellectual competence. And above all it demands attention and focus, abilities ever rarer in today’s extremely distracting world.

Humanity has come a long way in its ways of communicating and sharing personal experience, from orality, relying on the living word and human memory, through the Gutenberg Revolution, when stories began to be widely mediated by writing and in this way fixed and codified as well as possible to reproduce without alteration. The major attainment of this change was that we came to identify thinking with language, with writing. Today we are facing a revolution on a similar scale, when experience can be transmitted directly, without recourse to the printed word.

There is no longer any need to keep a travel diary when you can simply take pictures and send those pictures via social networking sites straight into the world, at once and to all. There is no need to write letters, since it is easier to call. Why write fat novels, when you can just get into a television series instead? Instead of going out on the town with friends, it would be better to play a game. Reach for an autobiography? There’s no point, since I am following the lives of celebrities on Instagram and know everything about them.

It is not even the image that is the greatest opponent of text today, as we thought back in the twentieth century, worrying about the influence of television and film. It is instead a completely different dimension of the world—acting directly on our senses.

3.

I don’t want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I’m often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy. These days the worrying words “someone, “something,” “somewhere,” “some time” can seem riskier than very specific, definite ideas uttered with complete certainty―such as that “the earth is flat,” “vaccinations kill,” “climate change is nonsense,” or “democracy is not under threat anywhere in the world.” “Somewhere” some people are drowning as they try to cross the sea. “Somewhere,” for “some” time, “some sort of” a war has been going on. In the deluge of information individual messages lose their contours, dissipate in our memory, become unreal and vanish.

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions.

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

A story always turns circles around meaning. Even if it doesn’t express it directly, even when it deliberately refuses to seek meaning, and focuses on form, on experiment, when it stages a formal rebellion, looking for new means of expression. As we read even the most behavioristically, sparingly written story, we cannot help asking the questions: “Why is this happening?,” “What does it mean?,” “What is the point?,” “Where is this leading?” Quite possibly our minds have evolved toward the story as a process of giving meaning to millions of stimuli that surround us, and that even when we’re asleep keep on relentlessly devising their narratives. So the story is a way of organizing an infinite amount of information within time, establishing its relationship to the past, the present and the future, revealing its recurrence, and arranging it in categories of cause and effect. Both the mind and the emotions take part in this effort.

No wonder one of the earliest discoveries made by stories was Fate, which apart from always appearing to people as something terrifying and inhuman, did in fact introduce order and immutability into everyday reality.

4.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

A few years later, the woman in the photograph, my mother, who missed me although I hadn’t yet been born, was reading me fairy tales.

In one of them, by Hans Christian Andersen, a teapot that had been thrown on the trash heap complained about how cruelly it had been treated by people―as soon as its handle broke off, they had disposed of it. But if they weren’t such demanding perfectionists it could still have been of use to them. Other broken objects picked up his tune, and told truly epic stories of their modest little lives as objects.

As a child, I listened to these fairy tales with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes, because I believed deeply that objects have their own problems and emotions, as well as a sort of social life, entirely comparable to our human one. The plates in the dresser could talk to each other, and the spoons, knives and forks in the drawer formed a sort of a family. Similarly, animals were mysterious, wise, self-aware creatures with whom we had always been connected by a spiritual bond and a deep-seated similarity. But rivers, forests and roads had their existence too―they were living beings that mapped our space and built a sense of belonging, an enigmatic Raumgeist. The landscape surrounding us was alive too, and so were the Sun and the Moon, and all the celestial bodies―the entire visible and invisible world.

When did I start to have doubts? I’m trying to find the moment in my life when at the flick of a switch everything became different, less nuanced, simpler. The world’s whisper fell silent, to be replaced by the din of the city, the murmur of computers, the thunder of airplanes flying past overhead, and the exhausting white noise of oceans of information.

At some point in our lives we start to see the world in pieces, everything separately, in little bits that are galaxies apart from one another, and the reality in which we live keeps affirming it: doctors treat us by specialty, taxes have no connection with snow-plowing the road we drive to work along, our lunch has nothing to do with an enormous stock farm, or my new top with a shabby factory somewhere in Asia. Everything is separate from everything else, everything lives apart, without any connection.

To make it easier for us to cope with this we are given numbers, name tags, cards, crude plastic identities that try to reduce us to using one small part of the whole that we have already ceased to perceive.

The world is dying, and we are failing to notice. We fail to see that the world is becoming a collection of things and incidents, a lifeless expanse in which we move around lost and lonely, tossed here and there by somebody else’s decisions, constrained by an incomprehensible fate, a sense of being the plaything of the major forces of history or chance. Our spirituality is either vanishing or becoming superficial and ritualistic. Or else we are just becoming the followers of simple forces―physical, social, and economic―that move us around as if we were zombies. And in such a world we really are zombies.

This is why I long for that other world, the world of the teapot.

5.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors that I followed in Flights. I’m fascinated by associating facts, and by searching for order. At base―as I am convinced―the writer’s mind is a synthetic mind that doggedly gathers up all the tiny pieces in an attempt to stick them together again to create a universal whole.

How are we to write, how are we to structure our story to make it capable of raising this great, constellation form of the world?

Naturally, I realize that it is impossible to return to the sort of story about the world that we know from myths, fables and legends, which, communicated orally, kept the world in existence. Nowadays the story would have to be far more multidimensional and complicated; after all, we really do know much more, we’re aware of the incredible connections between things that seem to be far apart.

Let us take a close look at a particular moment in the history of the world.

It is August 3, 1492, the day on which a small caravel named Santa Maria is to set sail from a quay at the port of Palos in Spain. The ship is commanded by Christopher Columbus. The sun is shining, there are sailors going to and fro on the quay, and there are stevedores loading the last crates of provisions on board. It is hot, but a light breeze from the west saves the families who have come to say farewell from fainting. Seagulls strut grandly up and down the loading ramp, closely observing the human activities.

The moment that we can now see across time led to the death of 56 million of the almost 60 million native Americans. At the time, they represented about 10 percent of the world’s entire population. The Europeans unwittingly brought them some lethal gifts―diseases and bacteria to which the indigenous inhabitants of America had no resistance. On top of that came ruthless oppression and killing. The extermination continued for years, and changed the nature of the land. Where beans, corn, potatoes and tomatoes had once grown in cultivated fields that were irrigated in a sophisticated way, wild vegetation returned. In just a few years, almost 150 million acres of arable land changed into jungle.

As it regenerated, the vegetation consumed vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thus weakening the greenhouse effect, and that in turn lowered the global temperature of the Earth.

This is one of many scientific hypotheses to explain the onset of the minor ice age that in the late sixteenth century brought a long-term cooling of the climate in Europe.

The minor ice age changed the economy of Europe. Over the decades that followed, the long, frozen winters, cool summers and intense precipitation reduced the yield of traditional forms of farming. In Western Europe, small family farms producing food for their own needs proved inefficient. Waves of famine ensued, and the need to specialize production. England and Holland were worst affected by the colder climate; as their economies could no longer rely on farming, they began to develop trade and industry. The threat of storms prompted the Dutch to dry out the polders and to convert marshy areas and shallow marine zones into land. The southward shift of the range where cod occur, though catastrophic for Scandinavia, proved advantageous for England and Holland―it allowed these countries to start developing into naval and commercial powers. The significant cooling was particularly acutely felt in the Scandinavian countries. Contact with Greenland and Iceland broke off, the severe winters reduced the harvests, and years of famine and shortages set in. So Sweden turned its greedy gaze southward, embarking on war against Poland (especially as the Baltic Sea had frozen, making it easy to march an army across it) and getting involved in the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.

The efforts of scientists, trying to establish a better understanding of our reality, show it to be a mutually coherent, densely connected system of influences. This is no longer just the famous “butterfly effect,” which as we know involves the way that minimal changes at the start of a process can lead in the future to tremendous, unpredictable results, but here we have an infinite number of butterflies and their wings, in constant motion―

a powerful wave of life that travels through time.

In my view, the discovery of “the butterfly effect” marks the end of the era of unswerving faith in our own capacity to be effective, our ability to control, and by the same token our sense of supremacy in the world. This does not take away from mankind our power to be a builder, a conqueror and an inventor, yet it illustrates that reality is more complicated than mankind might ever have supposed. And that we are nothing but a tiny part of these processes.

We have more and more proof of the existence of some spectacular, sometimes highly surprising dependencies on a worldwide scale.

We are all―people, plants, animals, and objects―immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities.

Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.

6.

I keep wondering if these days it’s possible to find the foundations of a new story that’s universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable.

Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self, revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections? That would be able to keep its distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal center point of commonly shared opinions, and manage to look at things ex-centrically, away from the center?

I am pleased that literature has miraculously preserved its right to all sorts of eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy. I dream of high viewing points and wide perspectives, where the context goes far beyond what we might have expected. I dream of a language that is capable of expressing the vaguest intuition, I dream of a metaphor that surpasses cultural differences, and finally of a genre that is capacious and transgressive, but that at the same time the readers will love.

I also dream of a new kind of narrator―a “fourth-person” one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time. Oh yes, I think this narrator’s existence is possible.

Have you ever wondered who the marvelous storyteller is in the Bible who calls out in a loud voice: “In the beginning was the word”? Who is the narrator who describes the creation of the world, its first day, when chaos was separated from order, who follows the serial about the origin of the universe, who knows the thoughts of God, is aware of his doubts, and with a steady hand sets down on paper the incredible sentence: “And God saw that it was good”? Who is this, who knows what God thought?

Leaving aside all theological doubts, we can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. Seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture “here” is connected to a gesture “there,” that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between “mine” and “yours” starts to be debatable.

So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader’s mind, that sets off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet.

Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of “national literatures,” knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation.

Perhaps we should trust fragments, as it is fragments that create constellations capable of describing more, and in a more complex way, multi-dimensionally. Our stories could refer to one another in an infinite way, and their central characters could enter into relationships with each other.

I think we have a redefinition ahead of us of what we understand nowadays by the concept of realism, and a search for a new one that would allow us to go beyond the limits of our ego and penetrate the glass screen through which we see the world. Because these days the need for reality is served by the media, social networking sites, and indirect relationships on the internet. Perhaps what inevitably lies ahead of us is a sort of neo-surrealism, some rearranged points of view that won’t be afraid to stand up to a paradox, and will go against the grain when it comes to the simple order of cause-and-effect. Indeed, our reality has already become surreal. I am also sure that many stories require rewriting in our new intellectual contexts, taking their inspiration from new scientific theories. But I find it equally important to make constant reference to myth and to the entire human imaginarium. Returning to the compact structures of mythology could bring a sense of stability within the lack of specificity in which we are living nowadays. I believe that myths are the building material for our psyche, and we cannot possibly ignore them (at most we might be unaware of their influence).

No doubt a genius will soon appear, capable of constructing an entirely different, as yet unimaginable narrative in which everything essential will be accommodated. This method of storytelling is sure to change us; we will drop our old, constricting perspectives and we will open up to new ones that have in fact always existed somewhere here, but we have been blind to them.

In Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann wrote about a composer who devised a new form of absolute music capable of changing human thinking. But Mann did not describe what this music would depend on, he merely created the imaginary idea of how it might sound. Perhaps that is what the role of an artist relies on―giving a foretaste of something that could exist, and thus causing it to become imaginable. And being imagined is the first stage of existence.

7.

I write fiction, but it is never pure fabrication. When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.

That is what tenderness serves me for―because tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.

It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self”.

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

I have no idea what their life will be like, or who they will be. I often think about them with a sense of guilt and shame.

The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of nowhere. We often forget that they are not just the result of a twist of fate or destiny, but of some very specific moves and decisions―economic, social, and to do with world outlook (including religious ones). Greed, failure to respect nature, selfishness, lack of imagination, endless rivalry and lack of responsibility have reduced the world to the status of an object that can be cut into pieces, used up and destroyed.

That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.

Translated by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018. Olga Tokarczuk – Nobel Lecture.

The Nobel Prize

Nobel Lecture: Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize in Literature 2018.  Streamed live on December 7, 2019

YouTube

Witold Gombrowicz : Cosmos

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.

Pointless and Essential: On Witold Gombrowicz’s “Cosmos”. By Sean Hooks. Los Angeles Review of Books, March 17, 2019. 

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