Insatiability, 530-page literary gush from the pen of Polish author Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz aka Witkacy, protein creator par excellence - novelist, playwright, photographer, painter (the paintings included here are Witkacy's).
Insatiability, written in the late 1920s, where the fire of romanticism meets the dolor of decadence, reminding me, in turn, of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (published in the same year), Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (written mostly during the same period) and, for its sheer exuberance and personal pyrotechnics, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
insatiability, wherein we follow the rollicking adventures of Polish aristocrat Genezip Kapen aka Zip in a future Poland around the year 2000. Oh, have times changed! The first Polish novel published in 1776, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom by Ignacy Krasicki, describes a young aristocrat's sojourns in Warsaw and Paris leading him to become a good man and upstanding citizen, a rationalist in the Age of Enlightenment. Quite a different story for young Zip.
I was first introduced to Insatiability via Czesław Miłosz's The Captive Mind wherein the Nobel prizewinning author points out how Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's novel foretells Poland overrun by a foreign power. For Witkacy, a Chinese cult with their Murti Bing pills turning the Poles passive, so the entire population accepts alien rulers without resistance. Of course, in reality, the foreigners were first Nazis and then Soviet Stalinists feeding the Poles Marxist dialectics as a sort of conceptual Murit Bing pill.
With this in mind, while reading Insatiability I was forever on the lookout for Murti Bing pills but, as it so happened, the first mention of this notorious drug doesn't show up until page 413. This to say the bulk of the novel covers the years preceding anybody in Poland imbibing the foreign substance causing their passivity.
Translator Louis Iribarne deserves a special call-out for rendering the author's Polish into lively, luscious, hip English, as in "people had become so stupefied through automation that in time they ceased to know why they did anything and began to blend into a homogenous and stuporous state of poopefaction." And, "Under such circumstances even the grubbiest, raunchiest blabbermounths and gossipmongering gasbags learned to keep silent - and that included the press" And, "Every passing moment seemed rich with a supreme understanding of that everywhere sought, but eternally elusive, life: each succeeding moment seemed to deny the element of finality by exposing new levels of the interior and new domains in the existential realm - in other words, everything was screwed up."
As we follow young Genezip Kapen on his adventures through youthful awakening and spiraling down to insanity (indeed, the novel is divided into two parts: Awakening and Insanity), a number of key themes and highlights are encountered along the way:
High Esteem for Art: "Literature was to be the ideal substitute for life's nagging multiplicity: through literature you could devour everything without suffering food poisoning or becoming a cad." Keen observations regarding literature, music and the arts are made by Zip and others throughout the novel, most notably Putricides Tenzer, a composer of atonal and unstructured music a la Arnold Schoenberg and the novelist Sturfan Abnol as when he pronounces: "What I do serves the mysterious aims of my own inner development. I'm poisoned by unspoken things that I can know only by writing novels. Chemically dissolved in my brain, life's mysteries produce ptomaines of sloth, confusion, inertia. I must go beyond mere appearances."
Soaring Metaphysics: Husserl, Kant, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson - they're all here and discussions about their ideas occasionally go on for pages, sometimes serious, sometimes not so serious, for, as Czesław Miłosz observed, we are never quite sure when Witkacy has his tongue deep in his cheek. Zip never read Schopenhauer and didn't have a high regard for pessimism but "at times he found himself contemplating suicide, but he went on living out of sheer curiosity about what was going to happen next and about what God, so mysterious in His ability to devise temporal torments (Hell, for example, was just eternal boredom), had cooked up for him."
Mechanization and Regimentation: Much more than physical or social mechanization such as one finds in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Zip's concern (likewise author Witkacy's concern) is a psychic mechanization where everyone thinks in the same suffocating categories and willingly lives as identical ants moving around on identical anthills. One telling quote: "People were grinning at each other idiotically, incredulous that they could feel anything. Like a rock rising up in the receding waters of an ebb tide, one truth, one value, was emerging: society as a fact in itself."
Scathing Cultural Commentary: Witkacy doesn't hold back poking his long satiric needle into the belly of politics and the prevailing culture as when he cites the League in Defense of a More Humane War placing a worldwide ban on chemical gas and airplanes. Love that "more humane war" - if Europe is plunged into another war, by all means, let it be the most humane type of war. We wouldn't want all that messy inhumane stuff!
Scintillating Self-Reference: There it is right at the bottom of page 327, the author makes a direct reference to his very own art: "Before the curtain, an utter monstrosity crying out to Witkiewicz's Pure Form for revenge" - as a reader you know Witkacy has the good sense to take the dissolution of his country's culture seriously but not to take himself too seriously.
In a Gadda Da Vida, Honey: Zip and those around him partake of cocaine, peyote and other recently imported drugs into Poland. Zip under the influence: "Time was moving at a frantic clip. Hundreds of years became squeezed into seconds - what De Quincey experienced under the influence of opium - as if time had been compressed into pills of condensed duration."
Murti Bing Pills: I encourage you to read this overlooked European classic for yourself. One last quote about Poland's impending nightmare (feel free to substitute Nazism or Communism for Witkacy's Chinese Murti Bing Pills): "Normally a person would take the pills, then proceed to the indoctrination stage. Zip decided to do the opposite: to become initiated first, then take the pills. But such decisions do not always work out in practice."
"Even Russian literature was nearing the end; the possibilities were indeed shrinking. People tread an even smaller patch, like those clinging to a sinking iceberg. Fiction, following the example of the Pure Arts, was headed for the abyss. And are we not right to be scornful? While a good narcotic is still okay, a fake narcotic that fails to work the way it should but still produces all the bad side effects is worthy of contempt, and its manufacturers are a bunch of swindlers. But, alas, fiction written for the sake of fiction, without a purely artistic justification (as in poetry, for example, where a violation of the sense is justified), fiction without substance, has proved to be an invention on the part of verbally gifted morons and graphomaniacs." - Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1885-1939
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