NEW BOOKS: A GREAT POLISH NOVELIST

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A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in European literature, Poland, intellectual history, philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, and related subjects.

Possessed is a 1939 novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz.

The TU Library collection also includes other books by and about Gombrowicz.

Gombrowicz is admired by readers for his philosophy, his way of building texts, and the power of his language.

He studied law at the University of Warsaw and philosophy and economics in Paris.

The Nobel Prizewinning poet Czesław Miłosz wrote of Gombrowicz:

Gombrowicz’s art cannot be judged with the passing of several decades. It is a monument of Polish prose, a fragment of a body of work that also includes Pasek and Sienkiewicz.

Thirty years after the author’s death, one can only ask how contemporary Poland compares to the Poland with which he fought in his desire to introduce the notion of ‘sonland’ rather than ‘fatherland’. Is it the same, is it similar or is it completely different?

There is no answer to this question, especially since the true Poland has not appeared in any literary work in recent years.

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One reviewer commented about Possessed:

Perhaps it’s best for Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) to introduce himself: “I am a humourist,” he wrote, “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?” 

Exuberant, playful, insincere, sometimes haughty, Gombrowicz was one of Poland’s greatest modernist writers, best known for his fantastical novel Ferdydurke (1937), which Susan Sontag described as “an epic in defence of immaturity”.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times, once allegedly losing out to the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata in 1968 by one vote. He died the following year.

Gombrowicz is a serious writer, then, but he didn’t think we should take The Possessed seriously. It was written as a piece of travail alimentaire — work to pay the bills — under the pseudonym Zdzisław Niewieski. Serialised in two Polish dailies in the summer of 1939, until publication was halted when war broke out, it wasn’t published as a book until 1973, and has now been rendered into English from Polish by the prodigious Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Olga Tokarczuk’s longtime translator.

Brimming with unruly, high-octane prose, the book has the hallmarks of a classic gothic story: a haunted castle, a mad prince and his conniving secretary — and, of course, treasure. At first glance, this surface is rather depthless, but look closer and you’ll see the philosophically minded Gombrowicz getting on with what he described as the central aim of his writing: “to forge a path through the Unreal to Reality”.

True to its title, the novel twists and turns around the themes of possession, likeness and doubles, its central thread a love story between Maja Ochołowska, a bourgeois tennis star, and her coach Leszczuk. […]

The Possessed contains loose moments, especially when it relates to plot exposition. But this can be forgiven in the context of Gombrowicz’s prose style, which so conspicuously wants to break free of its own constraints. “In my opinion,” as the author notes in his Diary — written between 1953 and 1969 and now considered his enduring masterpiece — “only a literature that cannot be taken seriously attempts to solve the problems of existence.” A sentiment we should take very seriously.

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Here are some thoughts by Gombrowicz from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:

On his literature:

My literature must remain that which it is. Especially that something which does not fit into politics and does not want to serve it. I cultivate just one politics: my own. I am a separate state.

  •  Cosmos

On himself

I, a child of chaos, son of darkness, blind coincidence, and absurdity.

  • Diary

On becoming oneself

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

  • Diary

On egotism

Monday: Me

Tuesday: Me

Wednesday: Me

Thursday: Me

  • Diary

Witold Gombrowicz

On dependence

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

  • Ferdydurke

On spirit & being a writer

Spirit is born of the imitation of spirit and a writer must pretend to be a writer in order finally to become a writer.

  • Diary

On humanity

It is not without pleasure that I can tell my majestic colleagues who write for humanity, and in the name of humanity, that I have never written a single word other than for a selfish purpose; but at, each time, the work betrayed me and escaped from me.

  • A Kind of Testament

On existence

Revolutions, wars, cataclysms – what does this foam mean when compared to the fundamental horror of existence?

  • Diary

On poetry

Why then does this pharmaceutical extract called “pure poetry” bore and weary me, especially when it appears in rhymed form?

  • Against Poets

On reading novels

I do not fear that ‘future generations will not read novels’, etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand (…) art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them.

If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them…

  • Diary

On the world

It was too late to retreat – the world exists only because it is always too late to retreat.

  • Ferdydurke

On emigration

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an émigré.

On different kinds of intellectuals (I)

Intellectuals can be divided into two groups: those who have never got a kick in the backside, and those who have got a kick in the backside. The latter are more sensible.

  • Operetta

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(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)