Russian Literature LXII (2007) IV

www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit

GOMBROWICZ AND THE GROTESQUE

JERZY JARZĉBSKI

Abstract
Gombrowicz’s oeuvre is routinely described by referring it to the grotesque. It seems
that in the case of Gombrowicz the grotesque is connected with dismemberment and
decomposition. The motive of this artistic device must be sought in the author’s en-
tanglement in the horrors of twentieth-century history and his artistic preoccupation
with avant-garde literature. If the human body can be subjected to dismemberment,
then all forms are exposed to the same kind of decomposition. We discover that the
wholeness of the world is in reality a result of being accustomed to certain forms.
The task of modern literature lies in undermining the cultural foundations of these
apparently self-evident forms. This project has an essential bearing on the organiza-
tion of meaning in Gombrowicz’s texts. The story is broken up and put together
according to certain (quasi) logical chains that show the underlying mutability of
life. These chains lack stability, are provisional, fall to pieces almost at the very
moment when they are established.
Keywords: Gombrowicz; Grotesque

The question of the grotesque in Gombrowicz is one that is routinely posed to

students in Polish high schools, and it is easy enough to image the kinds of
responses it elicits, especially since one can easily find term papers on this
subject, packed with clichés, on the internet. It is surely for this reason, and
also because of the ambiguity of the term, that Michaá Paweá Markowski, in
an interview conducted in the journal LiteRacje, declares that he does not

0304-3479/$ – see front matter © 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.

doi:10.1016/j.ruslit.2007.10.006
442 Jerzy JarzĊbski

favor the use of the category of the grotesque to describe Gombrowicz’s

texts. 1 But isn’t it possible to delimit the grotesque, selecting only certain of
its features? In place of the grotesque, Markowski proposes “monstrosity” – a
term that puts me off, first, with its judgmental connotations, and next, with
its excessive narrowing of meaning. Perhaps this is why I again decided to
ask myself the question of the Gombrowiczean grotesque and to attempt an
answer without, on the one hand, ascribing necessarily horrifying or abomin-
able features to grotesque phenomena, or, on the other, invoking the many
textbook features that the grotesque work of art or literature is supposed to
contain. For it is my conviction that that which is most important in the
Gombrowiczean grotesque lies elsewhere, and that it embraces those features
of the work that do not necessarily occur to the authors of classroom
textbooks.
In order to avoid the ambiguity of the concept of “the grotesque”, let us
limit our investigation of its aspects in Gombrowicz to one thing that I find
particularly important, namely, to the group of motifs connected with the
matter of dismemberment, the breakdown of form into elements that then
make up a new whole, whose characteristics differ from those of the initial
form.
In many classic studies on the grotesque – as a constituent of this
aesthetic category – we find the motif of decomposing, of deliberately shock-
ing the reader with a movement away from forms that are accepted in a given
culture and toward forms that are monstrous and comic at the same time. Lee
Byron Jennings writes:

The grotesque creature usually strikes a demonic or buffoonish figure,

and both these types are inextricably bound within him, and thus we
can say that he is always characterized by a link between the horrifying
and the humorous – or rather, that in his audience he summons anxiety
2
and amusement simultaneously.

In the discussions of the grotesque with which I am familiar, one

usually finds a consideration of the peculiar hybridism of grotesque repre-
sentations, of how their heterogeneous or contradictory components are link-
ed. It is significantly less often that one discerns a decomposition arising not
from the blending of many different elements, but from a familiar form’s
collapse into anarchy, from the breakdown of the factors that had formerly
composed the picture as a whole, perceived as something familiar, and
therefore arousing no feeling. For example, let us take the dismemberment of
the human body: in such instances it would be possible to separate the
grotesque that arises from splitting apart elements that are usually together –
as in the case of mutilation, for example, resulting from a bomb, or because
of some tragic catastrophe – to separate this grotesque from “the grotesque of
 Gombrowicz and the Grotesque 443

vision”, which demands out of the blue that we see the individual com-
ponents of the figure that connects them. It is easy to notice that this latter
grotesque is incomparably less understood, enmeshed as it is in subjectivism,
appearing only under certain special circumstances. This lack of understand-
ing, however, does not mean, in my opinion, that the internal experience of
grotesque dismemberment would lose any of its own authenticity.
As we know, in grotesque representations of the world it is remarkably
common to find the motif of breaking things into parts, and what is most
often broken apart is the human body. Markowski has recently discussed the
disiecta membra in Gombrowicz in extreme detail, tracing this motif first
from Lacan, for whom the fear of the body being cut to pieces is supposed to
characterize the first months of the child’s life, through the “mirror stage”,
when the observation of one’s reflection in the mirror leads to the physical
integration of the subject (an interpretation that works perfectly in the scene
of the double at the beginning of Ferdydurke). The second version of the
sources of this motif leads us to the beginnings of modern Europe, when the
passion of intellectual analyses led to the disintegration of images of the
human body, to the “twisting” of the limbs, which started to work on their
own and to have their own significance, as we see so clearly in Shakespeare. 3
Markowski therefore locates the sources of Gombrowiczean dismemberment
in an early stage of the individual’s life and in an equally early stage in the
existence of modern Europe. I would like to look for these sources elsewhere,
to find in them, first of all, the quintessence of an anxiety that arises from
contemporary historical events, and second, the result of a conscious decision
concerning the artistic form of the work and connected with the Gombro-
wiczean concept of the avant-garde as that which binds the state of culture
immediately with the artistic form of the literary work. Accordingly, the
grotesque as a category suits me better than it does the author of ‘Czarny
nurt’ (‘Dark Waters’), precisely because it is an aesthetic category, and we
can connect its appearance with the decisions of a mind that is as much
philosophic as artistic or technical.
Let us look to the first motif of dismemberment in Gombrowicz’s texts.
We find it in the story ‘PamiĊtnik Stefana Czarnieckiego’ (‘The Memoir of
Stefan Czarniecki’), when an incoming shell

fractures, explodes, severs both legs of Lancer Kacperski, tears through

his belly, and at first he’s lost, he doesn’t get what happened, and a
moment later he also explodes, but with laughter! – holding his belly,
gushing blood like a fountain, he squeals and squeals with a humorous,
piercing, hysterical, impish squeak – for long minutes! What an in-
fectious laugh! You have no idea how unexpected such a voice can be
on the battlefield. I barely managed to last until the end of the war. –
And when I returned home, I found, with my ears still filled with that
444 Jerzy JarzĊbski

laughter, that everything I had lived for until then had fallen to
4
pieces…

This passage is significant because it contains both the destruction, the

tearing apart of the body, as well as the reaction to that decomposition –
laughter, but a laughter that is truly “grotesque”, since it is infected with
dread, laughter being the paradoxical reaction to an image that we can in no
way accept or grasp, for it exceeds everything to which we have become
accustomed through our experience of the world until now. This laughter, we
could add, is infected with death as such, which generally escapes our ex-
perience. The most elementary process to reach the human psyche is learning
one’s own body, recognizing it, determining its limits, differentiating it from
the rest of the world around it. This is why it is such a dramatic experience to
see one’s own body torn to pieces, deprived of its original integrity,
especially given that the shock breaks off at the first moment of feeling pain,
leaving the subject nothing but the pure absurdity of the image. Lacan?
Shakespeare? Maybe, but more likely this image invokes sensations that are
not buried so deeply and that are closer to the personal experience of the
author. We know, after all, that the prospect of participating in war always
caused him anxiety.
The sight of the wounded Lancer Kacperski is one of the most im-
portant images to appear in Gombrowicz, especially given that the author
furnished it with a very significant commentary. This commentary tells us
that the experience of war is, above all else, an experience of previously
familiar forms. If even one’s own body can succumb to drastic dismember-
ment, then maybe all forms can be subjected to the same kind of de-
composition. In Gombrowicz, the conclusions drawn from the case of Lancer
Kacperski are radically nihilistic, since the character of the “beautiful” lancer
had earlier underwritten the whole beauty of the world and its “coherence”,
consisting of – among other things – the harmony of the aesthetic (the
uniform, competence at riding) with the ethical (patriotic duty). The dissi-
pation of the parts of the lancer’s body leads simultaneously to a dissipation
of values. At the same time, this grotesque aspect of war appears as some-
thing connected in a special way to twentieth-century experience: the First
World War, on such a large scale, contradicted the stereotype of chivalrous
and “aesthetic” war; this myth finally collapsed in the trenches at Verdun.
The grotesque of world war no longer held even that pathos that infuses the
prints of Goya: it was absurd, just as wounds and death are absurd when
delivered anonymously by bombs and shells shot from a distance. Lancer
Kacperski’s torn body thus becomes the introduction to a significantly broad-
er experience: the dissipation of all “domesticated” forms in the twentieth
century.
 Gombrowicz and the Grotesque 445

On this point, Gombrowicz comes together with Witkacy, different

though they may be in almost every respect. Witkacy would say that the
knowledge of every form is the knowledge of “unity in multitude”, the regu-
lation of which slips away from us, is a mystery that leads to metaphysical
experience. For Gombrowicz, “unity in multitude” is rather a product of
education and of becoming accustomed, but the moment when the clasp of
this unity breaks, it triggers unusually strong emotions whose nature is not
entirely clear, but that in any case touches on some fundamental human
feelings that allow us to grasp the world.
In his book, Markowski offers an eager late analysis of the image
created by Gombrowicz in the first chapter of Ferdydurke, namely, when
Józio finds himself in the company of his double. Sure enough, this double
appears broken into fragments, like a Lacanian child who is yet to learn how
to integrate his own body. In the first chapter of Ferdydurke and in ‘The
Memoir of Stefan Czarniecki’, we therefore have two distinct experiences of
dismemberment: one arises from a return to adolescence, the other – from the
aggression of the outside world. But in actuality, here there is no true return
to the early developmental stages of childhood. The return to adolescence is
also connected with external aggression, even if the aggressive, fragmenting
gaze is the gaze of the hero himself, encountering his reflection in the mirror.
The sharpest example of such aggression through decomposition is the
story told in ‘Filidor dzieckiem podszyty’ (‘The Child Runs Deep in Phili-
dor’). It begins with the conflict between Synthesis and Analysis, in which
the analysts view the world from this very same “decompositional” perspect-
ive, constantly perceiving the gathered elements themselves instead of the
Whole. But we do not arrive at genuine aggression until the dueling scene,
when both heroes – the master of Synthesis and the master of Analysis alike
– shoot off parts of their wives’ bodies, one after the other. This scene has all
the trappings of a grotesque spectacle, imbued with horror, and at the same
time comic in its absurd mechanicalness. Moreover, the grotesque decompo-
sition of both ladies finds its origin in the lunacies of doctrine, which for no
reason busies itself with the human individual. The demands of theory are
always towering over the individual, even if the theory is abstract and absurd.
I am inclined to believe, therefore, that the power that tears existing forms
apart is, in Gombrowicz, of external rather than internal origin: it is born in a
public forum, and one would have to seek its sources in the modernist
passion for incessantly undermining the foundations of culture, and not in the
psyche of the hero.
In 1935, there appeared in Tygodnik Ilustrowany fragments of a story
by Gombrowicz entitled ‘ToĞka’, along with a note that the text would form
part of the novel Ferdydurke, then in progress. 5 As we know, it was never
included in the novel, and today ‘ToĞka’ strikes us as a work that is, if not
abortive, then at least quite schematic with regard to its literary concept, but
446 Jerzy JarzĊbski

in any case it is revealing that the author quickly depleted the possibilities of
a certain device, repeated there ad infinitum, and he tossed the text out almost
in mid-sentence so as to never return to it again. But what is ‘ToĞka’ about,
and what is the device that Gombrowicz demonstrates? The story is preceded
by a short introduction, in which the author lays out the idea of his brief
work:

‘ToĞka’ is supposed to be a delicate and poetic satire on the weaknesses

and poverties of the human mind, on the dullness, ponderousness,
contrariness, and maliciousness of that jackass that is called the mind,
of that mechanical hatchery of concepts, which from its own
associations, errors, and platitudes gives birth to a reality that is com-
pletely different from the real. Thus it is that the mind, allowed to run
wild, spins an epic thread of its own accord, and ToĞka and her
companion (who is also the author) get tangled in it, like a fly in a
6
spider’s web.

The story’s hero and narrator are therefore identified as ToĞka and the
author – this is a pretty standard gimmick in Gombrowicz. But the main thing
is not this device, but rather the manner in which the story connects its
separate events. One could say that they are governed by the principle of
“stupid” associations. “Stupid”, that is – mechanical, resting on the simplest
linguistic or imaginative clichés. These kinds of associations bring on the
subsequent plot twists, themselves often generated by ToĞka, who is also
“stupid”. But why does this accumulation of clichés lead to glaring absurd-
ity? Let us read a more extensive fragment of the text, in which the narrator
and ToĞka set out together for the forest, and there they meet a robber:

The robber grunted for a moment, but then he muttered something

furiously, and all over again he started to threaten ToĞka, who giggled
all the more. Infuriated, he twitched his whiskers, he showed us his
foot, that he could kick us, and he showed us his fists – and meanwhile
the cuckoos were cuckooing, and the little sun was beating down on the
forest glade. ToĞka, constantly laughing like an idiot on the fence,
observed everything that he was showing, and she even wanted to
observe the rest – which so frightened the brigand, who after all was a
man, that he hid behind a bush in shame.
ToĞka started crying that he’ll get away from us. I screamed that she
was stupid, which she happened to be, and I tried to entice the robber
with the help of a gold watch. He finally came out from the thicket,
blushing like a little girl, and confessed bashfully that he would spare
our lives on the condition that we pay him a ransom. I replied that we
did not have the means to do so. – Ha! – he whispered – so what now?
You don’t want to pay the ransom, so I can’t let you go, but I can’t keep
you either, since you laugh at my fearsome banditry. Maybe you could
 Gombrowicz and the Grotesque 447

give me a grosz, after all, I showed you my fangs, my fists, my claws,

just give me the same as you’d pay for entrance to a museum, and let’s
say nothing more about it – he begged, pestered, and meanwhile the
little sun was blazing, and a forest bee alighted on a tree limb.
I looked at the old curator of his own museum of frights with a
strange feeling of sadness mixed with disgust, and ToĞka screamed that
he was an insolent beggar. – Just give me 20 grosze – the beggar
whined, and that mystical figure suddenly put ToĞka on the trail of the
tram driver…
– And could he really be a tram driver? – She asked me in a
whisper. – That beggar?
I examined him closely, because he was standing in the sun. – No,
7
ToĞka – I said – This beggar’s a curator. What tram driver?

Let me add that the “tram driver version” ultimately wins, at which
point a tram appears (in the forest!), and the heroes take it to the castle.
The story’s strangeness arises, it seems, from an overabundance of
words and events that have several interpretations at once, among them
metaphorical and symbolic. In this way, the beggar, for example, “the curator
of frights”, soon becomes a custodian tout court, and the sum of twenty
grosze triggers the sudden association with a tram, which is consequential for
the plot. There is no doubt that here we have to deal with what KáosiĔski and
Markowski have called a “game of signifiants”, 8 which leads to absurd re-
sults. The absurd, in turn, comes up in ‘ToĞka’ because the story does not
demonstrate any overarching or generic logic that might order the choice of
associations according to some general principle. Or rather: such principles
appear as if just for a moment, locally, only to give way a moment later to
others. What, therefore, is this story about? One could say that it is about the
“spinning of the story” itself, about stringing words, sentences, and events
together into (quasi) logical chains, and about the underlying mutability of
life and literature. Gombrowicz realized something similar in the story ‘The
Mechanism of Life’, which was printed side-by-side, and which – unlike
‘ToĞka’ – was included in an expanded form in Ferdydurke as ‘Filibert
dzieckiem podszyty’ (‘The Child Runs Deep in Philibert’). 9
What is the basis of the writer’s activity? We can say that it is the
operation of breaking up – in a peculiar manner – the material of the story
into particles smaller than those utilized in the analysis of plot by Propp or
Structuralists in the spirit of Claude Bremond. Gombrowicz does not use
fictional building blocks shaped according to a certain principle so much as
the gravel from those blocks, with which he pastes together something
indefinable in the terms of fictional logic. In this procedure, I see an activity
analogous to that which forms the basis of the breaking apart of the human
body, that is, an attempt to break through the conventional image toward a
vision that is grotesque or, in other words, somehow revealing, exposing the
448 Jerzy JarzĊbski

falsehood that is always bound up with the use of ready-made cultural

formulas and ready-made notions about the individual. Gombrowicz also
accomplishes this sort of breaking-down and assembling a new kind of whole
in ĝlub (The Marriage), in which he draws many theatrical conventions
together. Here I will not undertake a thorough analysis of this play with
regard to how it uses fragments of various generic models; suffice it to say
that – as the actors are well aware – the main difficulty in building one’s role
in The Marriage is that the actor is required to know how to transform
himself constantly, to change the style of his performance and his distance to
the conventions he only partially fulfills.
The next level where we see in Gombrowicz the operation of breaking
down extant structures and assembling a new whole from their material is
language. One can see this most clearly, of course, in Trans-Atlantyk, in
which it would be very difficult to talk about a single, consistently realized
stylization of language. Trans-Atlantyk is written in a language in which we
encounter the patterns of speech of seventeenth-century memoirists, nine-
teenth-century authors of gawĊda, Romantic poet-prophets, the heroes of
Sienkiewicz, minor functionaries, peasants on their way to find work in Ame-
rica, and contemporary politicians blowing the horn of nationalism. 10 All of
this is seasoned further with fragments of the archaic legal jargon that
Gombrowicz surely knew from his family archives, which contained docu-
ments dating to the sixteenth century. This is all mixed so precisely that it
would be exceedingly difficult to carry out an exact identification of parti-
cular words, grammatical forms, or rhetorical figures, ascribing them to one
or another literary style or class of jargon. Instead, they form a grotesque
mixture, in which the Pole recognizes the “underground language” his
parents use to communicate when they want to express something intimate,
national, or when they want to use language as an instrument of persuasion
among their compatriots. Of course, certain languages agree more with
certain protagonists, and there is no doubt that the main dispatcher of patrio-
tic slogans in Trans-Atlantyk is the envoy. But even in the envoy’s jargon we
can easily recognize elements of peasant language or the archaic speech of
memoirists from long ago, of great Romantics, noble authors of gawĊda, and
still other sources of stylistic patterns. Thus, in this novel, there are no well-
developed idiolects for the individual characters – everyone is adrift in a sea
of language-mixture, which forms the specific idiolect of the novel. So it is
precisely in language that the novel accomplishes its fictional dénouement,
for it is only in language that a “bursting” (a blow) comes to resemble
another “bursting” – with laughter – and is perhaps replaced by it. In Trans-
Atlantyk, the Polishness in which the heroes are imprisoned is defined
through language. It is therefore – like that language – misshapen, anachro-
nistic, pasted together from irreconcilable elements, but at the same time it
“allows one to live”, because it is in fact this mess that allows us to find
 Gombrowicz and the Grotesque 449

unexpected spaces within its rigors – like the ambiguity of “bursting”, thanks
to which we do not arrive at filicide or patricide.
Now let us move on to Cosmos, in which the process of breaking down
first concerns the world in which the novel’s action unfolds. In his book,
Michaá Paweá Markowski dedicates a lot of space to the motifs of “soil,
clumps of dirt, pebbles”, concluding that “Clumps of dirt are allegories of
dissipation and illegibility: no one knows what they are or what they
mean”, 11 though they are persistently present. It is in clumps of dirt, or more
generally – in the vague details from which our world is formed, when we are
not trying par force to provide it with meaning – that Markowski perceives
the uncanny – or rather the diabolic – element of being. “Cosmos,” he
continues, “is an uncanny tale about how the world falls to pieces under the
pressure of an incomprehensible cosmos and doesn’t allow itself, despite
extraordinary effort, to form a whole according to any model currently
known.” 12
I have to agree with this sentence, of course, though it seems that
Markowski places his emphasis first of all on the impossibility of forming a
whole – and I place my emphasis, rather, on the “extraordinary efforts”.
These are preceded, however, by a certain operation, without which seeing
the world as an accumulation of “clumps” would be unimaginable.
First, one must know how to reach the world as an ocean of little
pieces. The Gestaltists affirmed quite aptly that the primal visions of the
world are seen through ready-made forms and “characters”. Thus the hero
must first break the world down in his gaze, and only then does he put it
together, impose local meanings on it, introduce his own, “private” orders
like Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, and then so what if the universe is imperfect,
constantly cracking, never stretching into wholeness? The principles of this
gluing-together of little pieces have already been described many times, even
by the protagonist-narrator himself, in his autothematic deliberations, so I
will not devote any more attention to them here, just as there is no need to
justify the thesis about the grotesque oddity of the products of those actions –
those series of hangings, the mouths that refer to each other, etc. At any rate,
all this takes place only in certain places designated by the hero, and their
background consists of billions of little neglected bits, the entire “roaring
storm of matter”.
More interesting in Cosmos is a “breaking-down” and a “putting-
together” of a slightly different nature. Years ago I wrote about the possibility
of reading this book through diverse generic models, depending on which
pair (or group) of heroes we place at the center of the story. 13 It would
therefore be either a detective story (Witold and Fuks), or a romance (Witold
and Lena), or a psychoanalytic novel (Witold and Leon), or a romance tinged
with perversity (Witold, Lena, Katasia, Ludwik), or instead a novel of
manners (Witold, Kulka, Leon, Lulusie), and so on. Yet none of these models
450 Jerzy JarzĊbski

is realized in its entirety; instead, they are integrated in a strange, hybrid

whole consisting of elements of various genres, which become interwoven,
displace one another, and form temporary chains that fall to pieces moments
later.
But why do these chains fall apart? I would venture to say that it is
because there are no dominant emotions governing conduct in Witold
himself. It is difficult to say whether he is concerned more with surviving his
adventures, figuring out the mystery of the hangings, conquering Lena, or in
“placing the cosmos” in some reasonable whole. These emotions do not
achieve complete definition, because the people with whom Witold would
have to cooperate in his projects also break apart into “parts of the body”,
engaging in illicit interactions among themselves (like the mouth of Lena
with the mouth of Katasia, the priest, or Ludwik, hanged). Breakdown and
assembly in Cosmos therefore overlap many parallel levels of the book’s
organization; its grotesqueness has many dimensions.
The problem with reading Gombrowicz psychoanalytically – through
Freud or Lacan – is that in this view, the writer seems of necessity similar to
many other people, though perhaps more aware of his own individuality. In
turn, if we derive the motif of dismembering the world and putting it back
together from phenomena that reach all the way back to the threshold of the
Age of Enlightenment, we lose the specificity of the years in which the
author of Ferdydurke happened to live. I will admit that I am less interested
in what he had to say about man in general, than I am interested (and this
concerned him a great deal more) in what he said about man tangled up in the
history of the twentieth century, and about the artist trying to find a form that
adequately conveys the state of collapse of all ideologies and concepts of the
whole of the world and of man in modern times.
Gombrowicz saw his century most clearly as an era in which all known
forms were subject to breakage. The causes of this breakage were various.
Both World Wars fostered them in a purely material sense, resulting, on a
scale previously unimaginable, in the ruination of the human body. But the
wars also fostered, in the Nietzschean sense, the “revaluation of all values”,
and this had been occurring in philosophy, physics, social sciences, and
psychology since the turn of the century. Gombrowicz was fascinated by
such generalizing perspectives, and it was not in vain that he was an avid
reader of Gaëtan Picon’s Panorama of Contemporary Thought. 14 It is from
there that we find the well-known images in the Diary of the warship of
humanity, which in the twentieth century snaps its mooring-line and sails the
stormy seas.
Literature most often answers challenges of this kind in the simplest
way, that is, by allowing a new problematic to enter the realm of the dis-
cussion in which the heroes are engaging, or by making it into the engine for
the plot. Gombrowicz did something considerably more refined. His heroes
 Gombrowicz and the Grotesque 451

do not seem to know anything about the revolution in their manner of seeing
the world and man. This crisis reaches them as if indirectly, through barely
noticed transformations in the reception of reality, the traditional forms of
which lose their gravity, their hard center, and swell with emptiness or fall
apart (like the church in Pornografia). At the same time, emptiness also
infects the notions held by the heroes. Given these conditions, one also finds
a question mark over the reasons for which writers traditionally bother with
literature: to describe the world as it exists, to propagate ethical principles, to
suggest positive models of behavior to society. Instead, Gombrowicz
introduces a style of describing the world that emphasizes the state of its
disintegration. Put back together within the frame of the text, this world is an
aesthetic that corresponds perfectly with those that were current at the time in
the poetic avant-garde. It is an aesthetic of provocation, of parodying
traditional forms of language and plot, a parody of description, 15 of the
characterizations of the heroes, etc. As Jean-Pierre Salgas writes, in Gom-
browicz “Philosophy is a theory of the novel, or else of the theory of the
body, of social theory, and finally – of the theory of ‘the real’ […]. The frag-
mented body of literature imitates all other bodies”. 16
Gombrowicz was, of course, a person with an unusually well-develop-
ed self-consciousness, and for this reason he knew how to discern in himself
and in others those phenomena whose nature psychoanalysts started to
identify many years after their first literary instantiations in Bakakaj and
Ferdydurke. Meanwhile, he gladly took advantage of literary models derived
from the works of old masters, especially Shakespeare. But at the same time,
he definitely considered himself an artist of the twentieth century, and even
if, in his creative works, he described the pre-cognitive and elementary acts
of man’s encounter with the otherness and inhumanity of the world, he then
offered the processes of their literary treatment a significantly more
organized and conscious character – even if the introduction to these
processes had to be a notorious “entering into the sphere of dreams”. Thus I
see, in acts of breaking down and assembling the world, the effect of an
artistic choice, and in the Gombrowiczean grotesque – a distinct reflection of
his views of the aesthetic most suited to describing the insanities and terrors
of his contemporary world.

NOTES

1
Cf. ‘WystĊpne rozwaĪania o szaleĔstwie. O terapii przez sztukĊ, melancholii
oraz ponowoczesnych dyskursach szaleĔstwa – rozmawiamy z Michaáem
452 Jerzy JarzĊbski

Pawáem Markowskim’, rozmawiaáy K. Krowiranda i ĩ. Nalewajek (‘Intro-

ductory Remarks on Madness. On Therapy by Art, Melancholy and Post-
Modern Discourses of Madness – an interview with Michaá Paweá Markow-
ski’ by K. Krowiranda and ĩ. Nalewajek), LiteRacje, No. 2 (4), summer-
autumn 2004, p. 29.
2
L.B. Jennings, ‘Termin “groteska”’ (‘The Notion of the Grotesque’), translat-
ed by M.B. Fedewicz, in a collection of articles Groteska, compiled and
edited by M. GáowiĔski, GdaĔsk, 2003, p. 46. (a selection of the most import-
ant theoretical papers on the grotesque).
3
In this connection Markowski refers to the papers published in a collection
compiled and edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio: The Body in Parts:
Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York and London,
1997.
4
W. Gombrowicz, Bakakaj, Kraków, 1986, p. 27.
5
W. Gombrowicz, ‘ToĞka (fragmenty)’, Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1935, No. 28,
pp. 556-557. Reprint in: W. Gombrowicz, Proza (fragmenty). ReportaĪe. Kry-
tyka literacka 1933-1939, Kraków, 1995, pp. 36-44.
6
Op. cit., p. 36.
7
Op. cit., pp. 37-38.
8
Cf. K. KáosiĔski, ‘Przemiany prozy XX wieku’, Eros. Dekonstrukcja.
Polityka (‘Transformations of Twentieth-Century Prose’, in: Eros, Decon-
struction, Politics), Katowice, 2000, pp. 34-40; M.P. Markowski, ‘Czarny
nurt’ (‘Dark Current’), op. cit., p. 261.
9
W. Gombrowicz, ‘Uwagi: Mechanizm Īycia; Biurokrata’ (‘Considerations:
the Mechanism of Life: a Bureaucrat’), Prosto z mostu, 1935, No. 1, p. 10.
Reprint in: W. Gombrowicz, Proza (fragmenty). ReportaĪe. Krytyka literacka
1933-1939, op. cit., pp. 27-29.
10
In her first paper on the language of Trans-Atlantyk Ewa Sáawkowa recog-
nized the so-called “szlachecka gawĊdĊ” as its main stylistic model, over-
seeing the essential role of other (e.g. plebeian) models (Trans-Atlantyk Wi-
tolda Gombrowicza. Studia nad jĊzykiem i stylem tekstu [Witold Gom-
browicz’s ‘Trans-Atlantyk’. Studies on the language and the style of the text],
Katowice, 1981).
11
Markowski, ‘Czarny nurt’, op. cit., p. 149.
12
Op. cit., p. 151.
13
J. JarzĊbski, Gra w Gombrowicza (Playing at Gombrowicz), Warszawa, 1982.
14
The importance of reading Picon is stressed by Jean Pierre Salgas (Witold
Gombrowicz lub ateizm integralny [Witold Gombrowicz or Integral Atheism],
translated by J.M. Káoczowski, Warszawa, 2004, p. 231).
15
Wáodzimierz Bolecki has written about the parodical character of descriptions
(Poetycki model prozy w dwudziestoleciu miĊdzywojennym [The Poetical
Model of Prose during the Interbellum], Wrocáaw, 1982, p. 115).
16
Salgas, op. cit., p. 243.