Witold Gombrowicz Research Articles

„Wielka bitwa paryska”. O pierwszym francuskim wydaniu „Ferdydurke”

This article presents the story of the first French edition of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke. The novel was published in October 1958 by the Julliard publishing house. The article is based on letters that Gombrowicz exchanged with Constantin Jelenski, a Polish essayist living in Paris and a great promoter of his work, as well as on Gombrowicz’s publishing-related correspondence with Maurice Nadeau, René Julliard and Pierre Javet. The article shows that Gombrowicz was a writer who paid great attention not only to the form of his works, but also to the way in which they reached the reader. Therefore, he attempted to influence, as much as possible, the manner in which his books would be published. He sought to establish a new way of presenting the writer to the reader that would fall outside the rules and conventions of world literature. The article shows why he succeeded in Poland and Argentina, but not in France, where he did not have followers.

Freddy Durkee and Ferdydurke:

Abstract The title of Witold Gombrowicz's first novel, Ferdydurke, has inspired a great deal of speculation as to its possible meanings since the work was first published in 1937. Even in 1986, when Bodgan Baran discovered that the title came from Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, the matter was still not put to rest. In this essay, the author attempts to discover the meaning behind Gombrowicz's choice of title through a Gombrowiczian reading of Lewis's popular but generally understudied novel. Lewis scholarship has been rather sparse, owing mostly to the attitude that his works were merely examples of popular literature not worth further examination. After using Ferdydurke to explain Gombrowicz's artistic theories, the author applies these to Babbitt, demonstrating that the sociological descriptions underline deeper philosophical understandings of the world that Gombrowicz would later develop in his own writings. These are then reflected in the approach that Gombrowicz and Lewis take to their position as author and artist within their respective national cultures.

Special Issue Dedicated to Witold Gombrowicz

Abstract The year 2014 marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of the noted author Witold Gombrowicz, as well as the 75th anniversary of his arrival in Argentina, the 50th anniversary of his move to the Côte d’Azur in France, and the 25th anniversary of his death. In view of these important chronological markers, the Fifth World Congress on Polish Studies sponsored by the Polish Institute of Arts & Science of America in Warsaw in June 2014 included two complete sessions featuring several renowned Gombrowicz scholars. Those panels, along with additional papers presented at the First International Conference on Witold Gombrowicz held at the National Library in Buenos Aires in August 2014, forms the basis of this special issue of The Polish Review dedicated to his works.

Witold Gombrowicz in Spain

AbstractIn the 1960s, Witold Gombrowicz, as renowned an author as he was in Europe, with his works being translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, French, English, and Italian, was still relatively unknown in Francoist Spain. The one who came to play a crucial role in the introduction of his oeuvre to the Catalan and Spanish peninsular literary world was Gabriel Ferrater (1922–1972), a poet and literary editor at the Catalan publisher Seix Barral in Barcelona. An epistolary exchange between the two writers began in 1965. However, the relationship was initiated at least a few months earlier, when the Catalan poet became interested in the literary work of the Polish writer and came up with the idea of a Spanish edition of the novel Pornografía (Pornography). Thanks to this correspondence, which is currently held in the Witold Gombrowicz Archive at Beinecke Library at Yale University, it is possible to trace the process of translation and editing of the novel.

Narrative and Form: Gombrowicz and the Narrative Conception of Personal Identity

Abstract Boom! Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Trans-Atlantyk (Transatlantic) ends with the explosion of Form and structure, destroying the foundation of the self. From the ashes of this blast, Gombrowicz’s phoenix self reemerges, only to be destroyed again and again in a never-ending cycle of creation and explosion. The cycle of destruction and creation underlines Gombrowicz’s preoccupation with himself, or, rather, with his self, which spans his entire oeuvre. From his first novel, which he claimed "from the first to the last word … endeavors to be the assertion of an identity," to the infamous repetition of the single word "me" over the first five days of his public diary, Gombrowicz’s work always centers on the ineluctable self and keeps the self undefined, or in Bakhtinian terms, unfinalized. The self of the main characters in Gombrowicz’s novels never has the time to solidify into a single Form but, instead, remains a half-formed entity, forever in the process of becoming, or, in Gombrowicz’s own terms, suspended between Form and immaturity.

Gombrowicz and the Monster

Abstract It is no coincidence that, together with his best- known novel—Ferdydurke— which placed him as one of the most important Polish Modernism writers, Witold Gombrowicz, around the same period, became involved in the writing of a gothic novel: Opętani (Possessed; or, The secret of Myslotch). Under the pseudonym Z. Niewieski, Gombrowicz serialized Possessed in two Polish daily newspapers from June 6 to August 30, 1939. The German attack on Poland interrupted its publication.

Some Remarks on Gombrowicz’s Kronos

Abstract Is it a rough draft or a finished text? Are these private notes that should never have been published or an important work by Witold Gombrowicz? Do we now have—at long last—a portrait of the real Gombrowicz, without masks or mystifications? The discussion that has raged in various journals since the publication of Kronos has continually returned to these questions

Was Gombrowicz the First Postsecularist?

Abstract In this article, based on my recent book Gombrowicza milczenie o Bogu (Gombrowicz’s silence about God),1 I demonstrate the essence of Witold Gombrowicz’s singularity, as well as the paradox of his attitude with regard to religion. The subject is of interest insofar as the author often passed over it in silence, though it was crucial to his worldview—all the more so in that it allows us to speak of the originality of his thought. Gombrowicz liked to provoke; he would mention his innovation or even his genius, and he regarded himself as a “universal precursor,” who had come before postwar existentialism and structuralism. This was, of course, part of his strategy to spread his fame. The onetime “first of the Structuralists,” as he called himself in an interview with himself in 1967, would have doubtless applauded my attempts to paint him as the first “postsecularist.”

Kronos and Literature

Abstract The publication of Witold Gombrowicz’s Kronos elicited a range of reactions from its readers: from affirmative to aggressive. The aggressive ranged from civil to brutal and rude. Jerzy Franczak (at the civil end of the spectrum) maintains that Kronos does not teach anything, does not aid the reader, and appears totally unnecessary—it does not pass the test of reading as literature.1 At the other end of the spectrum, expressed mainly in Internet forums, we find that the publication of the book is either a swindle on the part of the publisher (and editors, with me leading the way) or a nail in the coffin of this perverse and depraved writer.

Two Ways of Thinking About Crime Gombrowicz’s “A Premeditated Crime” (1933) and Borges’s “Emma Zunz” (1948)

Abstract Both Witold Gombrowicz’s “A Premeditated Crime” (1933) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “Emma Zunz” (1948) have characteristics that allow them to be placed within the detective story genre.1 Thus, as in detective fiction, both stories revolve around a seemingly “perfect” crime, although in Gombrowicz the crime is only in the mind of the narrator. Moreover, in both Gombrowicz’s and Borges’s stories, the narrative does not lead to unveiling a crime but to a crime itself. Ultimately both Gombrowicz’s and Borges’s narratives have a concern about truth. However, unlike traditional detective stories, in which the truth (“how things really happened”) is “out there” and the detective arrives at it through a process of inference carried out by his superior mind, in Gombrowicz’s short story the detective is not concerned with a realist notion of truth, while in Borges there is no perspicacious detective who unravels “what really happened” and reveals the identity of the culprit. By examining Gombrowicz’s and Borges’s stories, this article explores the particular notion of truth used by each author as well as the relationship between reality and representation as it appears in each of them.

Witold Gombrowicz Diary of a Playwright

Abstract Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary does not fulfill any of the obvious expectations of such a work by a major playwright. Gombrowicz never attended the performance of his works or collaborated in any way with producers, directors, actors, designers, or composers. As a result, there is a complete dearth of theatrical anecdote in the text, though he expresses profound vindication at the positive critical response in Paris and Stockholm to Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. References to other contemporary playwrights such as Beckett, Brecht, or Weiss are fleeting and superficial. Gombrowicz’s interest in Genet was apparently limited to the novels and [Jean- Paul] Sartre’s critical biography Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr. Virgilio Piñera was one of Gombrowicz’s closest contacts in Buenos Aires and a major presence in the Diary, and he went on to become a prolific and influential playwright in his native Cuba, but their respective interest in playwriting was apparently not a significant part of their relationship. [Henrik] Ibsen receives several respectful mentions, but functions primarily as the author of the kind of plays that Gombrowicz is not interested in writing himself.

Rex Café, Buenos Aires, 1947: On the Spanish Translation of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke

In this article I examine a partial typescript in Spanish of the collective translation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke, originally published in Polish in 1939. The translation, with Virgilio Pinera chairing a large team of translators, is an important myth of Buenos Aires literary society and of Gombrowicz studies. The typescript shows that the translation hewed much closer to the Polish original than has been stated, and that the final manuscript corrections are by Gombrowicz himself. I also cite letters by Gombrowicz from this period, showing that his command of Spanish was better than he pretended.

Gombrowicz, a Slippery Liar

Abstract The general historical account of Witold Gombrowicz is that no sooner had the young author arrived in Argentina than the war broke out in Europe. Germany’s invasion of Poland meant a closing of the borders, and that prompted Gombrowicz’s decision to remain in Argentina. A strong, committed choice (albeit one committed to noncommitment), since his compatriots opted to scramble back on board the Chroby, the boat that had brought them to the Río de la Plata, to head home to Europe and enlist in the Polish resistance. A tough decision, but one influenced by an incontrovertible fact: Gombrowicz chose to stay because his homeland was occupied, and he did not want to fight, basically for three reasons: he was asthmatic, ideologically he was against war and those who wage it, and it was apparently a matter of no interest to him.

Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz by George Z. Gasyna

Reviewed by: Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz by George Z. Gasyna Andrew Busza (bio) George Z. Gasyna. Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 276 pp. 9781441140791. In 1986 Polish scholar Aniela Kowalska, professor at Łódź University, published a modest monograph entitled: Conrad i Gombrowicz w walce o swoją wybitność (Conrad's and Gombrowicz's Struggle for Eminence). It was the first study in any language to link the two major modern writers of Polish extraction and, despite perhaps a lame title, it was a valuable and insightful broaching of the topic. A quarter of a century later, a young Polish-American academic, George Gasyna, has revisited the subject in his Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. Strangely enough, Gasyna does not seem to know Kowalska's work, and refers to it only at secondhand in a footnote. Although there is some overlap in the texts examined by the two critics—both deal with Conrad's A Personal Record and Gombrowicz's Diary as well as the latter's Trans-Atlantic and Cosmos—the monographs vary in their choice of Conrad's fiction. Kowalska discusses "The Secret Sharer" and "The Shadow Line," while Gasyna focuses on Nostromo. More significant and telling, however, is the fundamental difference in the two scholars' approach and critical method linked to the time and place in [End Page 155] which the respective works were written. For in the twenty-five years that separate the two books, a virtual chasm has opened up in critical practice. Writing in the mid-eighties, barely a few years before the final collapse of the communist system, ideological censorship was no longer an issue for Kowalska. The only compromise which she perhaps makes is to omit any substantial discussion of Conrad's political novels and prose. While the historical context resurfaces periodically in Kowalska's work, her critical discourse is primarily text-centered. Working inductively, she explores Conrad's and Gombrowicz's existential vision anchored in personal experience and expressive of a defiant individualism. Gasyna does not have to contend with political coercion of the overt kind, but as an academic scholar he is subject to the corporate pressures of the system and its "mind forg'd manacles." Since the theoretical turn, the deductive mode of argumentation has come to predominate in literary criticism. Although Gasyna's discussion is full of detailed references to texts, he is not a "close reader" in the New Critical sense. References to texts function for the most part deductively, either buttressing the thematic framework or elaborating on it. In fact, in his introduction he sets out what he calls his "fundamental assumptions" or "premises" that have guided his thinking in establishing "the discursive horizon of this study" (Gasyna 3-4). The first premise is that "Conradian and Gombrowiczian narratives represent the two respective end-posts in the project of modernism" (3). Conrad, writes Gasyna, "elaborates a modernist poetics at an early point in his literary career" (3); while Gombrowicz's "later style could be properly termed postmodernist" (4). The second premise is that "text and bios for exiled writers are often intertwined more intimately than for those who do not experience […] separation from the homeland" (4; original emphasis). The third premise is that "Conrad and Gombrowicz should be treated first and foremost as Polish writers" (4). I have no major problems with the first two propositions, but the third is certainly questionable. In what sense are "The Secret Sharer" and "The Shadow Line" Polish narratives? What insight would one gain from viewing these two texts from a specifically Polish perspective? Similarly, of all Gombrowicz's major fictions, Cosmos is probably the least essentially Polish. Be that as it may, the overarching argument of Gasyna's study is in essence relatively straightforward. Conrad and Gombrowicz were both expatriates who wrote most of their work in a linguistically foreign environment. Conrad learned English in his early twenties and chose that language as the vehicle of his artistic expression. Gombrowicz, finding himself in Argentina at thirty-five, continued to write in his native tongue...

O odradzaniu się potrzeby zakorzenienia – „Między nami dobrze jest” Doroty Masłowskiej

The article tries to grasp the specifics of Masłowska’s works by using the categories of lightness and heaviness. The main subject of analysis is the play Między nami dobrze jest (All is Right between Us), which treats about Polish national identity via the concept of grotesque. Although the author of the play follows the tradition to critically recognize Polishness (tradition mainly represented by Czesław Miłosz and Witold Gombrowicz), ultimately, she appreciates what have previously seemed to be underestimated. This is mainly due to the tension generated both by the structure of the play and the one caused in the process of its interpretation. The pathos and heaviness usually present in the reflections on topics related to national identity tend to be overcome here by the lightness introduced to the text via irony and grotesque. Moreover, the use of such means does not devalue the problems discussed; on the contrary, they become a key to the new and fresh attempt to redefine Polishnees. The article also treats about the relation between the original text of the play and its stage interpretation by Grzegorz Jarzyna − the specificity of presenting the same concepts across different fields of artistic culture.

Prowincja–centrum. Strategie mocy i słabości literatury peryferyjnej (Mickiewicz – Gombrowicz – Stasiuk)

The article discusess the strategies of authors of a smaller nation, smaller literature, related to positioning oneself and one’s works in comparison to the dominant cultural centres. This issue is explored with regard to Polish literature (Adam Mickiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Andrzej Stasiuk). The author of the article presents changes in awareness of Polish culture being inferior towards European culture(s) that have undergone from the second half of the 18th cenury until now.

"Living in Another Language": Witold Gombrowicz’s Argentinean Experience

"Living in Another Language": Witold Gombrowicz’s Argentinean Experience

Between Mourning and Melancholy: Narrative Ethics in Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz

The essay offers a comparative study of “narrative ethics” in the prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Witold Gombrowicz. Analyzing the relationship between the texts' poetics and moral philosophy, the essay investigates how narrative dynamics of fiction shape the ethical parameters for the reader's engagement with the text. The argument aligns the differences in each author's narrative ethics with the differences between modernist and postmodernist modes of addressing the loss of ontological certainty as outlined by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction. Thus, this comparison strives to trace the evolution of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature — from the ontologic instability of modernist prose to the ontologic plurality of postmodernist prose — with the focus on how this shift affects the formation of the subjectivity of the reader. The author proposes that Freud's conceptualization of melancholy and mourning as two processes describing the subject's dealing with loss can be a productive theoretical framework for understanding how modernist and postmodernist fiction in general (and that of Dostoevsky and Gombrowicz in particular) deals with the loss of ontological certainty. The essay argues that this psychoanalytic conceptual framework — elaborated further by an analysis of political and philosophical takes on it by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva —allows us to see the shift between modernist and postmodernist fiction in intersubjective terms, thus situating it within the ethical discursive sphere.

Playing with Form: Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz

Possessed, the novel written by Witold Gombrowicz, like a piece of grotesque proper, mixes various styles: high and low, neutral and disturbing, sentimental/romantic and prosaic. The author consciously emphasizes particular genre markers in some passages, leading the reader down a specifi c path, just to clash them with passages of a contradictory genre type. A good case in point is the description of the prince’s residence that complies with gothic novel conventions: it is horrifying and accentuates the singularity of the historical place. Possessed, apparently, was not only to be a product for a mass readership, but an experiment binding the features of high and low art, merging various audiences; it lives up to the expectations of the common reader of mass literature, as well as of the reader of a more sophisticated taste; on the one hand, the novel copies the mechanism of mass culture, as described by Eco48, and on the other, it is a frivolous and pleasant entertainment for a highbrow reader. As an experiment, therefore, the novel is a success because of the abovementioned recent theatrical adaptations, as well as its explicit comic effects.

Under the Sign of Parody and the Grotesque (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz)

The article considers the question of what common features connect three remarkable twentieth-century Polish writers – Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz – an irresistible suggestion presents itself. All three writers, to a greater or lesser extent and in personally specifi c ways, represent the parodic and grotesque trends in contemporary Polish literature, and are its most innovative and prominent implementers. Neither different birthdates nor differences that filled their biographies can negate the collectivity of these authors. Not even their professing often different philosophies, artistic attitudes, or styles, which define their individuality and originality, is enough to terminate their union. It is uncommon in history when diversity and collectivity, which brings together as much as pushes apart authors, creates such a colorful and suggestive constellation.