After reading Ferdydurke,
it becomes abundantly clear that Witold Gombrowicz possessed what
Hemingway referred to as a first-rate shit detector. Not doubt this was a
prime reason the Polish author, in 1939, at the age of thirty-five,
decided at the last moment to try his luck in Argentine rather than
return on a voyage to Europe, knowing the Nazis just did launch a
massive attack on his native country of Poland.
Ferdydurke
published in 1937, long before Gombrowitcz boarded the cruise ship that
would take him to Argentina, a country where he would remain until his
return to Europe in the early 1960s. The Polish author's life and other
writings, including his three-volume Diary spanning the years
1953-1969, are so worth any reader's time to explore. However, since I'm
writing a book review not an extended essay, I will restrict myself to Ferdydurke, considered one of the great 20th century novels by none other than Milan Kundera.
The
story follows a thirty-year-old writer by the name of Joey who is lead
off to a school for boys, then taken to live in a home of an engineer
and his wife and schoolgirl daughter, until finally, Joey and his school
chum run away to the Polish farmlands. Witold Gombrowicz twice inserts a
philosophic preface and one of his previously published short-stories
to demarcate Joey's three-part madcap adventure.
What makes Ferdydurke such a highly regarded European literary classic, right up there with Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers?
To highlight several of the novel's key aspects, I'll cycle back and
link my comments with a number of direct quotes, starting with a few
from the first chapter.
“the thirty-year-old man I am today was
aping and ridiculing the callow juvenile I once was, while he in turn
was aping me and, by the same token, each of us was aping himself.”
Right
in the opening pages, we're given a full dose of Joey's views on his
own identity, the ongoing battle of his adult self against his younger,
juvenile self. This conflict sets the tone for much of the novel's humor
and satire. Joey muses: “Yet it just didn't seem appropriate to
dismiss, easily and glibly, the sniveling brat within me.”
Curiously,
Joey's reflections bring to mind Julio Cortázar, where the Argentine
author stated, “I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those
children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the
little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and,
nel mezzo del camino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at
least two outlooks onto the world.” Thus, in their main character's
refusal to become fully and wholly adult (Cortázar gives this quality to
Horacio in his 1963 Hopscotch), along with both authors' refusal
to submit to established, traditional forms, Cortázar's innovative
novel shares much common ground with Ferdydurke.
“man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of the idiot.”
Joey,
and indirectly, Witold Gombrowicz, have a profound existential
awareness of the influence other people exert on the way we see and
define ourselves. Additionally, along with Joey, we're prompted to ask,
is there a unique core that is our Self with a capital S? What if the
universe is at base meaningless and this lack of meaning nullifies any
claim to a fixed center, that is, a true, authentic Self?
“It is
conceivable that my book, too subtle for dullards, was at the same time
not sufficiently lofty or puffed up for the rabble who respond solely
to the outer trappings of what is important.”
Joey, the
published writer, can be seen as a stand-in for Witold Gombrowicz, who
received less than positive reviews for his short story collection
entitled Bakakaj. Similarly, when Joey observes, "there is
nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them
more, than immaturity," it echoes the sentiments of young Witold who
detested the posturing of the adult world he encountered in his home
country of Poland, especially among the upper classes (he himself was
the son of a lawyer), a common thread running throughout Ferdydurke.
“I became small, my leg became a little leg, my hand a little hand, my persona a little persona, my being a little being.”
When a Professor Pimko appears in Joey's bedroom and takes the
thirty-year-old off to a school to join the sixth graders (echoes of
Josef K taken off in Kafka's The Trial), we're treated to the
comic combined with the philosophic. And, why doesn't Joey fight back?
As he explains, "This was ridiculous! Too ridiculous to be real!" Ah,
another author comes to mind, someone writing under the jackboot of
Stalinism, a Russian author only interested in nonsense - Daniil Kharms.
“but
how was I supposed to regain my bearing when a couple of steps away, in
the cool and bracing air, naivete and innocence were on the rise. The
pupa has rolled over the lads and the guys.”
So Joey muses once
he's in school among his schoolmates where the terms “pupa” and “mug”
assume central importance. Translator Danuta Borchardt provides the
cultural and linguistic context for these two supercharged words in her Translator's Note.
“And
finally, do we create form or does form create us? We think we are the
ones who construct it, but that's an illusion, because we are, in equal
measure, constructed by the construction.”
The above quote is
taken from the first preface, adding yet again another conceptual layer
on top of what is already a rich philosophic work of fiction.
“It's
a modern household,” he remarked, “modern and naturalistic, favoring
the trends, and foreign to my ideology.”... “The schoolgirl,” he said,
“she's modern too.”
Thus are the words of Pimko as he brings
Joey to the home where he'll be staying. The idea of modernism is yet
another pivotal theme addressed in Ferdydurke. The Poland of the
1930s, saturated by elements such as automobiles, electricity, radios,
movie theaters, jazz records, American magazines, and American fashions
was a world away from the Poland of their parents' youth. The Photo on
the cover of the French edition of the novel I included above speaks
volumes. Now, that's a modern schoolgirl! The perfect lure for the pupa
and mug of little Joey.
What a novel. Much more awaits a reader of Gombrowicz's classic. And this Yale University Press edition includes a splendid incisive essay by Susan Sontag. Not to be missed. 
Witold Gombrowicz, 1904-1969
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