Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
This is my first experience reading Gombrowicz. A curious and provocative book, full of metaphors, not particularly easy to read, but brilliantly written. It’s a dream-like story of irrationality, erotic manipulations and voyeurism, a depiction of desire and jealousy of old men for the young and beautiful. Susan Sontag described Gombrowicz as “one of the super-arguers of the 20th century” and who am I to disagree?
One of the things that made me pick up Pornografia is the author’s biography. He was born in an old aristocratic family near Warsaw in 1904. He studied Law in Warsaw and then he went to Paris to study international affairs. In 1939, he accepts an invitation for an ocean cruise to South America. But once he sets sail, Hitlerl launched an invasion of Poland that triggered the start of World War II. Gombrowicz is tapped in Buenos Aires with little money and no Spanish. He finds a job, learn Spanish and for the next 24 years, Argentina becomes his home. Take a moment to think about it, in just fifteen days his life changed forever.
“I left for Argentina accidentally, for two weeks, if by some quirk of fate the war has not broken out during those two weeks, I would have returned to Poland–but I did not conceal that when the door was bolted and I was locked in Argentina, it was as if I had finally heard my own voice.” __ Diary, 1964
He eventually returned to Europe, but never again to Poland. He died in France in 1969.
Pornografia is set in the World War II in occupied Poland. Witold, the narrator of the story, is invited to the countryside by a landowner, known as Hipolit. He is accompanied to his journey by a strange man called Fryderyk. As soon as they arrive, Witold notices that Hipolit’s daughter Henia and the son of Hipolit’s steward, Karol, (both around 17 years old) form a good match. There is a kind of energy about them, or so he thinks, that made him and Fryderyk think that they are the perfect couple.
From there begins a strange experiment where these two older and bored men try to make these two typical country teenagers fall in love. But then several events take place, including a murder and the situation out of control.
Pornografia is a behavioral study; as Sam Lipsyte write in the foreword of the book,
“Here the psychology – the observations, projections, paradoxes, negations – belong to the panting insatiability of “Gombrowicz” himself, as he negotiates sexual devastation, poisonous and ecstatic social maneuvering, moral collapse, political ambivalence, and a country manor murder.”
And in Gombrowicz own words,
"It was a particular teasing, somewhere, in a galaxy, a human provocation in darkness, a performance of bizarre movements in an abyss, grimacing in boundless immensity. And our drowning in space was accompanied by a horrible intensification of the concrete nature of things, we were in the cosmos, yet we were like something terrifyingly known, defined in every detail."
It's beautiful, I mean it's just wow!