Translating Gombrowicz’s Liminal Aesthetics (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631642221, 9783653036541, 3631642229

Table of contents :
Cover
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Gombrowicz’s existentialism: a Polish and Anglo-American perspective
1.1. Gombrowicz’s existentialism in the light of Polish literary studies
1.2. “Not quite our cup of tea”: An Anglo-American perspective
1.3. Gombrowicz through the lens of Translation Studies
1.3.1. Translating Gombrowicz
Chapter 2 Towards poststructuralist translation theory
2.1. Différance and the original text
2.2. Différance and hermeneutics
2.3. Translating, simulating
2.4. Supplement
Chapter 3 Voicing the Other: text and existence
3.1. Différance against Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric
3.2. Rhetoric of liminality
3.3. On metafiction
3.4. Between reading and existence
3.5. Liquidity
3.6. Textual(ter)ity: hermeneutic experience of the other
3.6.1. Conceptualisations of alterity
3.6.2. (Ef)facing the other of reading
3.7. Textu(re)ality
Chapter 4 Acts of translation
4.1. Acts of participation
4.1.1. The making of Trans-Atlantyk
4.2. (Un)common denominators
4.2.1. Postmodernism as translation
4.2.2. Polish and Western postmodern experience as translation
4.2.3. Post-war experience as simulation
4.2.4. Polish and Anglo-American simulacra
4.2.5. The cosmos of translation in the translations of Cosmos
4.3. Transgressing the liminality of translation
4.3.1. Transgressing (or not)
4.3.2. Transgressive translation
4.4. After translation
Conclusions
Selected Bibliography

Citation preview

Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY  General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 39

Paweł Wojtas

   

   

  Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics

       

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wojtas, Pawel, 1984Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics / Paweł Wojtas. pages cm. – (Literary and Cultural Theory ; Vol. 39) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-631-64222-1 1. Gombrowicz, Witold–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Liminality in literature. 3. Aesthetics in literature. I. Title. PG7158.G6692W64 2014 891.8'537--dc23 2013050503 This publication was financially supported by the Lingwistyczna Szkoła Wyższa, Warsaw. ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-64222-1 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-03654-1 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/ 978-3-653-03654-1 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2014 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This book is part of the Peter Lang Edition list and was peer reviewed prior to publication. www.peterlang.com

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my supervisor prof. Piotr Urbański for inspiring and guiding me through my doctoral proceedings. I could not wish for a better supervisor, advisor and friend. A big thanks, too, to prof. Zbigniew Białas and prof. Piotr Wilczek for their generous and instructive reviews of my thesis. I also feel much indebted to prof. Paweł Jędrzejko for putting me on the right track by inspiring some ideas of this book. Many thanks to dr Matthew Foley for looking over and revising this book. I am much obliged to my family, parents and brothers, a host of friends and fellow researchers, dr Krzysztof Fordoński, dr Stuart O’Donnell, dr Paweł Hamera, dr Paweł Kaptur, who in many ways made this publication possible. I am grateful to Jacek Nowakowski, Chancellor of the Linguistic Academy of Warsaw, for co-funding this publication. Kind thanks to Łukasz Gałecki as well as Karol Perepłyś for their valuable pre-publication advice and support. Last but not least, I would like to extend my special thanks to Aleksandra Maria Kosiak for her heart of gold, unwavering support and magical ability to make me go the extra mile.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... 5 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 1 Gombrowicz’s existentialism: a Polish and Anglo-American perspective ........ 19 1.1. Gombrowicz’s existentialism in the light of Polish literary studies..... 20 1.2. “Not quite our cup of tea”: an Anglo-American perspective ............... 30 1.3. Gombrowicz through the lens of Translation Studies .......................... 39 1.3.1. Translating Gombrowicz ............................................................ 40 Chapter 2 Towards poststructuralist translation theory ....................................................... 47 2.1. Différance and the original text ............................................................ 48 2.2. Différance and hermeneutics ................................................................ 51 2.3. Translating, simulating ......................................................................... 59 2.4. Supplement ........................................................................................... 62 Chapter 3 Voicing the Other: text and existence ................................................................. 65 3.1. Différance against Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric ......................... 67 3.2. Rhetoric of liminality............................................................................ 75 3.3. On metafiction ...................................................................................... 80 3.4. Between reading and existence............................................................. 90 3.5. Liquidity................................................................................................ 92 3.6. Textual(ter)ity: hermeneutic experience of the other ........................... 98 3.6.1. Conceptualisations of alterity ..................................................... 99 3.6.2. (Ef)facing the other of reading .................................................. 101 3.7. Textu(re)ality ...................................................................................... 108

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Table of Contents

Chapter 4 Acts of translation ............................................................................................. 115 4.1. Acts of participation ........................................................................... 117 4.1.1. The making of Trans-Atlantyk .................................................. 128 4.2. (Un)common denominators ................................................................ 137 4.2.1. Postmodernism as translation ................................................... 139 4.2.2. Polish and Western postmodern experience as translation ....... 144 4.2.3. Post-war experience as simulation ............................................ 148 4.2.4. Polish and Anglo-American simulacra ..................................... 152 4.2.5. The cosmos of translation in the translations of Cosmos ......... 158 4.3. Transgressing the liminality of translation ......................................... 167 4.3.1. Transgressing (or not) ............................................................... 168 4.3.2. Transgressive translation........................................................... 175 4.4. After translation .................................................................................. 177 Conclusions ....................................................................................................... 187 Selected Bibliography ....................................................................................... 197

Introduction The principal aim of this book is to show that a comparative textual analysis of Witold Gombrowicz’s selected works and their English translations – one carried out within historical and cultural milieux of Polish, English and American critical and literary traditions – exposes hermeneutically conditioned interpretations of the writer’s account of existentialism which approximates the condition of translation. Gombrowicz’s idiosyncratic linguistic and existential tropes will be investigated through the theoretical lens of deconstruction. This investigation involves drawing together a number of conceptual threads, chiefly coined by the poststructuralist as well as postmodernist theorists, in order to indicate metatextual parallels between the philosophers of the limit and Gombrowicz’s existentialism. These are revealed in their common denominator: the liminality between language and being. Therefore, the selected works used for close reading, namely Cosmos, Trans-Atlantyk, Ferdydurke, The Marriage, and Pornografia and their English translations, have been chosen on the grounds that they best exemplify instable reciprocal relations between the philosophy of existence and language, which lends itself as a propitious starting ground for the existential study of language. In this context, Gombrowicz divulges that “The artist who realizes himself inside art will never be creative. He must remain on its peripheries where art meets life” (Diary 54). Gombrowicz’s awareness of the ‘peripheries’ symbolising the liminality between art and existence, as well as dramatising an unstable relation between immanence and transcendence, resonates with the poststructuralist interest in the limit, which constitutes the main focus of the present study. Gombrowicz’s fiction produces a peculiar double bind of language, which is itself a metaphor of the existential concerns it conveys. Generating metalinguistic and metafictional effects, Gombrowcz’s text constructs a symbiosis between language and being, whose evident boundaries refuse to materialize. Therefore, Gombrowicz’s language does not merely function as a carrier of fiction and metaphysical existentialist philosophy, but in fact unveils linguistic operations structured as the events it refers to. At any rate, the reciprocally transposable axes of language, fiction and existence are not approached as detached textual categories. It is precisely the linguistic-ontological misalliance of the text as the exemplification of the deconstruction of metaphysics that kept poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophers busy; it also dramatises Gombrowicz’s selfreflexive writing and language. The writer was perfectly aware of the metaphysical dimension of his writing, manifested by prefaces, commentaries, forewords, essays, and diaries, which served to delineate his direct philosophical route also

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Introduction

at a discursive level. It is not, however, Gombrowicz’s overt existentialist manifestos as such that are at stake in the following research, but the ways they are disclosed in the fibre of language, or rather – in order not to disregard linguistic credence on the one hand, and to play down its totalising textual hegemony on the other – within the limits of being and language, as well as their shifting reciprocal differences. With regard to the selected methodology, the central concern of this study will address the inner workings of the language of Gombrowicz’s texts and their translations. Therefore, the orientation towards structuralist schools of thought would appear as an accurate theoretical ground from which to further the textual analysis in question. However, the reservations over adopting linguistic or structuralist orientation (with which Gombrowicz was contemporary, and relatively in agreement with, yet by no means uncritical about) stems from the conjecture that although the method would prove functional in terms of the analysis of language solely, it might fail to address some central issues pertaining to the existential study of discourse. Furthermore, unable to renounce its evident ‘transcendent objectivity’1 in relation to the subject/object of its scrutiny, structuralism makes metatextual assumptions about texts by organising them according to preprogrammed principles and restricting their semantic possibilities. Such a method entraps the text not only in a homogeneous scientific interpretation, but also in a particular historical moment, disregarding its potential temporal and socio-cultural variations, wherein the text generates further interpretations yet to come, contingent upon the liquidity of existence. To take the argument further, structuralism fails to respond to the singularity of literature as it stands outside of its subject and treats literature as an object through transcendent objectivity, which entails an encapsulation of the subject of study within a totalising discursive theory, and squanders its interminable becoming that is realised in the liquidity of existence. Gombrowicz himself would be a most ardent opponent of a priori judgments made on literature as organised in keeping with scientific taxonomies, and an advocate of the self-reflexive language, as well as literature constituting a metaphor of existence.2 As Gombrowicz would have it, a human being must re1 2

As put by Derek Attridge (2004: 6). “Look at the white-hot oven where existentialisms are cooked up; here Sartre turns molten lead into his freedom-responsibility… here bottomless cauldrons bubbling with ideologies, worldviews, and beliefs; here is the cavern of Catholicism. Further down the foundry of Marxism; then the hammers of psychoanalysis; Hegel’s artesian wells and the looms of phenomenology; and further yet are the galvanized and hydraulic pyres of surrealism or pragmatism… yet I walk among these machines and products with a thoughtful air and without much interest… trying this or that product … I say : … This is somewhat overwhelming to my taste” (Diary 92).

Introduction

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lentlessly escape form (which, as a metaphor of individual existential enslavement through dependence on social impositions, comprises the writer’s main existential trope) in order to manifest his/her singularity; literature must escape the analogous form of discursive theory: it should be the textuality and texture of text that provokes auto-commentary, something which remains the only metaphor of itself. Literature that attempts at doing justice to existence is inherently autotelic as it creates its own textual and linguistic reality structured as the existence it refers to. Concomitantly, the literary text has an advantage over its commentary ever since it constitutes its own metatext that stems from intratextual practice producing heterogeneous discourse always in the process of becoming. The very process is realised in the act of reading as an active event, which is redolent of Gombrowicz’s existential tropes that may draw parallels with the existential experience of reading: always vacillating and shunning discursive objectivity. For that reason, theory (as form) serves to restrict the semantic scope of textual phenomena, which, by oscillating within and exploding the liminality of space between word and being, is done justice to only in the reader’s response to the textual heterogeneity, through a creative reading of the text that is not merely subject to interpretation but inspires further interpretations itself. On the reader’s part the interpretation of text cannot be limited to a single approach; rather this is the accumulation of cultural assumptions based on a never-stable geographical, historical situation, as well as social hierarchies that pave the way for interpretations recorded by experience. In Gombrowicz the event of reading plays a crucial role in recognising and exploring the text as the other. Metatextual qualities create another dimension for the reader to explore the text from an alternative anamorphic angle; and it is through interpretation that the reader is committed to generating textual others. The act of interpretation is based on the existential experience that is anchored in the narrator-reader relation. With the intention of doing justice to the textual issues indicated above, the next part will employ theories investigating intratextual complexities of language and existence, namely postmodernist theories, deconstructive criticisms of textual difference, and, in order to explore the ways the text as being corresponds to the act of interpretation as an existential experience of heterogeneous literary text by the reader, poststructuralist hermeneutics. Jan Błoński in his article “O Gombrowiczu” (“On Gombrowicz”) claims that Gombrowicz deliberately refused to follow any particular philosophical doctrine as a token of refusal to the system (1984: 206). Gombrowicz denied affiliations with his contemporary philosophical canon on account of the uncritical emulation entails closure in immanent doctrine, which contradicts Gombrowicz’s existential ethics, postulating that human existence should be conceived away from the form it is enslaved by.

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Introduction

The shifting of interpretative grounds between philosophy and literature in Gombrowicz (or rather the insistence that the writer’s oeuvre be conceived beyond such conventional disciplinary divisions) will help articulate the niche of my work, extending beyond a traditional classification of Gombrowicz as an existentialist, by situating the writer’s existentialism in postmodern English and American contexts, and by exploring the ways in which it corresponds to deconstructive assumptions filtered through hermeneutic practices. With all this in mind, I consider it justified that the methodology of this analytic inquiry comprise nonessentialist approaches committed to textual reading practice as opposed to a programmatic reading method offering a descriptive explication of the text’s meaning. This orientation has been substantiated by the conviction that the liminality between language and existence can be explored in no other way than through active engagement in the intratextual workings of a self-reflexive language of text (as opposed to investigated through a discursive theory) dramatising its inherent textual difference and/or polysemy. With regard to the latter, the author proves his partial methodological indebtedness to deconstructionist and hermeneutic textual practices. In keeping with this theoretical premise, chapter 1 will endeavour to complete theoretical gaps left over in the studies of Gombrowicz by approaching the writer’s texts from both a contemporary literary and critical angle. Such an approach is justified by the analytic perspective contingent upon the historical situation from which I analyse Gombrowicz’s literature, which is different from the positions in which earlier critics and philosophers (along with Gombrowicz himself) interpreted Gombrowicz’s existentialism. Apart from this historical variation, this research will extend to an alternative cultural context, namely the English and American literary traditions in order to complement the state of research in Polish, British and American critical and translation studies of Gombrowicz, as well as account for the ways the writer’s version of existentialism is interpreted in diverse historical, social, cultural and political contexts, generating alternative interpretations of his peculiar existentialism. This chapter will then venture to inspect Gombrowicz’s critical reception by the Western intellectual tradition. The choice of English and American literary and philosophical traditions, from which to further the deconstructive analysis of Gombrowicz’s existentialism in English translations, has been motivated by the resistance of the Anglo-American readership to the writer’s literary output, which is demonstrated by the scarce production of literary criticism on Gombrowicz there. In view of that, I will seek to account for the reasons Gombrowicz’s fiction has been neglected in the Anglophone tradition (which will contribute to filling in the theoretical lacunae in the proposed context) and how far the translations allow the foreign interpreter to delve into Gombrowicz’s poetics.

Introduction

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Such recapitulation of Gombrowicz’s existential tropes as well as summary of the existing state of research will now allow to introduce in chapter 2 the theoretical framework inspiring the present line of inquiry: namely, deconstructionist and hermeneutic theories. Therefore, the concepts of Derrida’s différance and Gadamer’s variety of hermeneutics will be explained in the context of the conceptualisations of translation. The following section juxtaposes Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, which centres on destabilising the assumptions of the source text as authoritative in relation to its translations. It will be posited that the source text is nothing but its own simulacrum, because, existing only in the event of interpretation, it is subject to a constant differentiation and simulation of itself. Derrida’s and Gadamer’s theories will be informed by simulacrum, which here refers to the translated text as not merely a simulation of the source text, but in fact a new and, in Baudrillardian terms, more legitimate text than the original. This is to create an analogy with the Derridean notion of supplement, consisting in reversing the accepted prioritisation of the source-text over its translation. It will follow that the translated text, existing in no other way than as the simulacrum of itself, constitutes a ‘dangerous supplement’ (a Derridean coinage) to the text subscribing to the practice of différance, since the event of interpretation essentially conditions subsequent interpretations of the ‘original’ text. Chapter 3 will use the accumulated assumptions pertaining to deconstructive and hermeneutic acts of reading in order to scrutinise the non-places of alterity of Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text articulated by the concepts of liminality and liquidity. It is to attempt to explicate the ways that the notion of liminality – which approximates Gombrowicz’s autobiographical status as an expatriate – corresponds to différance as well as shows parallels with various textual axes. The inquiry seeks to confirm that Gombrowicz’s deployment of tropes results in the rigorous existential thought that is intricately woven into the tissue of his texts and designates the processes by which his version of liminality helps situate the writer amongst postmodern writers and thinkers – although not unquestionably. Gombrowicz’s urge towards utilising archaic, neologised language and well-worn genres in new contexts stimulates a peculiar liminal space between canon and tradition, cliché and neologism, imitation and innovation. These dichotomies are not to be methodologically unravelled with either of the components being clearly delineated and favoured over the other. Rather, I argue that the very state of liminality constitutes a necessary affirmation of the becoming of text as fiction, language and existential thought, as a token of Gombrowicz’s philosophical consistency in his literature. This said, liminality exposes analogous mechanisms on the reader-text axis in hermeneutic terms. The text as becoming remains liminal when confronted with the reader, who negotiates its

14

Introduction

shifting meanings, never to be pinned down by a decontextualised univocal interpretation and translation. By the same token, the concept of liquidity opens up a new interpretative space for conceptualising Gombrowicz’s tropes, in that it serves to explicate the mechanisms governing the self-reflexive text. Given that Gombrowicz’s fiction exposes a heavy metafictional and self-reflexive load, the notion of liquidity points to the ways in which the limits between the text and existence are fluid. This, however, as demonstrated in Gombrowicz’s texts, does not take place between fiction and a metacommentary, but within the linguistic fabric, and is actualised in the act of reading. In his The Singularity of Literature Derek Attridge juxtaposes ‘creative’ with ‘mechanical’ (that is conventional) modes of reading: Not all works will have something to offer to a reader’s openness to alterity… mechanical and instrumental interpretation is complicated by what we may term readerly hospitality, a readiness to have one’s purposes reshaped by the work to which one is responding… A creative reading is not one that overrides the work’s conventionally determined meanings in the name of imaginative freedom but rather one that, in its striving to do full justice to the work, is obliged to go beyond existing conventions… To read creatively in an attempt to respond fully and responsibly to the alterity and singularity of the text is to work against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same (2004: 80).

This definition in a way resonates with Gadamer’s ‘fusion of horizons’, whereby only the interpreter’s ‘creative reading’ can respond to the heterogeneity of the culturally and historically contingent text. Culture should by no means be conceived as a monolithic entity, but rather a blend of interimplicated assumptions always in the process of flux, mutual contagion and inter-amalgamation. The critic assumes that to read creatively is to responsibly delve into the text’s alterity instead of mechanically reducing the text’s other to the familiar. The text’s potential lies in its ability to manifest its otherness by resisting the inclination of reducing textual estrangement into cultural familiarity; as the domesticated alterity proves to be nothing but a semantically totalising mechanical interpretation. Hence, it is imperative that the readerly (pace Barthes) interpretation – that is the translation of the other to the same – be engaged in resisting the reduction of the other to the familiar (which in translation studies is referred to as domestication, as opposed to foreignisation). This reduction or translation into the same, inherent in interpretation, is in fact embodied in the process of translation, whereby the translator is confronted with the dilemma of choice between domestication and otherness. Since every translation is interpretation in the first place, and since interpretation involves the encounter with the indeterminacy of the text – offering no possibility of exploring a univocally determined meaning – the translator as interpreter is con-

Introduction

15

fronted with the impossibility of translating or pinning down any semantically protean meaning.3 The resultant translation represents another interpretation; another instance of creative reading, and becomes another simulacrum of the source text, just as the source text becomes the simulacrum of itself in the process of heterogeneous interpretation determined by the reader’s idioculture.4 This chapter will thus venture to explicate the ways Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric provokes the existential sense of alterity of text. Using an existential study of discourse, I propose that Gombrowicz’s text is larded with the blindspots of alterity complicating interpretation, accepting that they evoke the interpretative anxiety of shifting significations of text and problematise the space between language and existence. The consolidated conclusions drawn from chapter 3, pertaining to a deconstructive reading of Gombrowicz’s chosen works and translations aligned with specific hermeneutic context, will act as a theoretical prelude to chapter 4. The interpretation of Gombrowicz will not be central to this chapter, which is more theoretically oriented, and undertakes to pair up the process of translation with the liminal acts of participation. Therefore, the translations of Gombrowicz’s selected works, Trans-Atlantyk and Cosmos, will be juxtaposed to argue the extent to which Gombrowicz’s metaphysical as well as autotelic and intratextual motifs, hermeneutically comprehended through the lens of Polish cultural and historical assumptions, preserve their otherness when translated into English; as well as position them within the English and American cultures, in order to test the ways creative reading as translation responds to the alterity of texts determined by different hermeneutic conditions. The textual analysis will be inspired by the metaphysics of exile and participation as crucial cogs in Gombrowicz’s machine of becoming. Here, the ways in which Gombrowicz’s acts of exile match the experience of liminality will be suggested. The liminal experience will be used in the textual sense of the word, wherein the above tropes of exile, participation and becoming approximate the acts of reading. Translation in this instance constitutes a peculiar case of interpretation exemplifying the metaphoric of the suggested tropes. This inquiry largely draws on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which, constituting a peculiar instance of existential or textual alterity, informs the ways in which a being or text occupy non-spaces, problematizing their definite presence or location. Ex3

4

As argued by Gadamer: “’[L]iterature’ ought to be definable in quite general terms by virtue of the fact that its translation always involves a loss … What is unique, the unity of sense and sound, remains untranslatable” (1980: 7). A concept introduced by Attridge and defined as “the deposit of our personal history as a participant in a number of ill-defined and often conflicting cultural fields” (2004: 82).

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Introduction

tended to the study of Gombrowicz’s life and works, this concept will help elucidate how Gombrowicz’s exilic discourse exposes blind-spots of alterity that pair up with the metaphysics of translation. Gombrowicz’s oeuvre will be presented in various hermeneutic contexts so as to posit that the act of translation becomes a metaphor of the postmodern condition from an existentialist standpoint. At this stage, regardless of the hermeneutic contextualisation of interpreters, Gombrowicz’s tropes – interpreted by both Polish and English speaking scholars – expose the reader to the interpretative experience of textual alterity, resulting from the semantic volatility and impossibility of their univocal placement in deep structures. Again, Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum will be employed to account for the ways Polish and Anglo-American post-war realities were experienced, with their common denominator being the perception of the real as a simulation of itself, which will be used here in the context of the conceptualisation of translation. As regards the latter, language in Gombrowicz plays a crucial role in plot development and thus becomes fiction on its own merit. Language is a translation of existence into the stylistic matrix, and the fiction it conveys is nothing but the metaphor of its own inner workings; that is to say the event of fiction is the event of language in the first place. If it be so, if Gombrowicz’s existential tropes and fiction are not merely carried by language, but act as its mirror image, mistranslation may further exacerbate the socio-historically biased interpreter’s confrontation with the text’s otherness, realised in the semantic indeterminacy caused by historical and linguistic displacement. The mistranslation of language will thus entail the misinterpretation of Gombrowicz’s existential tropes. After all, it is the sense of a culturally conditioned impenetrable otherness (let alone commercial reasons) that has put off the British and American audience from assimilating Gombrowicz’s fiction. By way of analogy, the aspect of translation will be adopted for theorising linguistic alterity of Gombrowicz’s fiction as well as research the hermeneutically determined reception of his works in the proposed contexts. In turn, it will be demonstrated that Gombrowicz’s existentialism as philosophy is translated into existentialism structured as ‘text’, in a way that the very text entails the reader’s confrontation with liminality. Translation functions as a peculiar instance of interpretation as it involves the reader’s response and responsibility reflected in the choice of meaning adopted by the translator from a dense thicket of semantic textual possibilities. At this point, a certain liminality between existential acts of choice and language, as the fruit of the very choice, calls for attention. Furthermore, taking into account both textual and cultural dimensions of simulacrum, the experience of the text’s shifting meanings, undermining the ex-

Introduction

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istence of the ‘original’ text, provides parallels with the external world, in the sense that if the original text does not exist – as it, relentlessly distanced from itself, merely simulates itself as the source-text – the same befalls all possible extratextual relations, including the presence and tangibility of the book, whose interrelations draw analogies with the order of reading and interpretation. Gombrowicz’s text commences inside of the text, and goes beyond it, just to return to the very text, suspending thus a fixed immanence–transcendence border. Bearing this in mind, after having placed Gombrowicz in various contexts, the return to the original (Polish) context will harbinger a hermeneutically conditioned new text – that is to say another simulacrum of itself – resulting from the production of new interpretative stimuli emerging from the reassessment of cultural assumptions and conditions. This provokes the question of whether reading Gombrowicz in English impinges on the reinterpretation of the writer’s works in Polish, given that the latter is a revision of the former comparative analysis of Gombrowicz’s discourse in Polish and English respectively. This will guide me to a final round-up of the reception of Gombrowicz’s philosophy in the light of hermeneutic conditions of various cultural assumptions confronted with the self-reflexivity of Gombrowicz’s text of existence; the text which is little else than its own translation; its own simulacrum; always exposed to liminal tensions; always other to itself.

Chapter 1 Gombrowicz’s existentialism: a Polish and Anglo-American perspective Existentialism in the Sartrean sense of the word can be defined as a vision of the human condition entrapped in existence, wherein a person born into a void (le neant) is confronted with a choice to either remain in the void, or “by exercising his power of choice … give meaning to existence and universe” (Cuddon 1998). Such a rendition of existentialism by Sartre intrigued and galvanised the young Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who discerned in the new philosophy not only an indisputable potential, but first and foremost a philosophical resonance with his Ferdydurke (1937), published six years before Sartre’s philosophical magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1943). Gombrowicz would then selfproclaim himself the first existentialist anticipating Sartre’s philosophy and enriching it by promoting the notions of immaturity, form and later (particularly highlighted in Diaries) pain. Gombrowicz, despite his admiration for the French philosopher, would be only too keen to reproach Sartre for the double standards of the latter’s existentialist project; with Gombrowicz’s main accusations being the overstressing of subjectivity and objectivising of existence. In the writer’s view, conceptualisation of existence is self-contradictory, as it defies the main tenet of Sartrean philosophy, namely “existence precedes essence” (1969: 568). It is through art, as opposed to objective theory that existence can be better rendered; art that exposes the reader to existential experience of interpretation by delving into writing in its active creation. One crucial question – which even Gombrowicz’s propositions could not override – remained yet unaddressed: how is it possible to articulate individual existence in language whose totalising objectivity ensnares subjective freedom? In what ways is art closer to existence than philosophy, if it filters existence through the net of language, that is form, in a like manner? Gombrowicz’s answer to the unanswerable was ‘escape’, and he would remain indefatigable in pursuing his heroic runaway from forms ever since. The artist’s existential programme must have been doomed to failure: how is it possible to think outside form, language or convention? Nonetheless, he remained faithful to this ethical imperative, elaborated on in manifold ways in his oeuvre, which inevitably generated self-contradictions and antinomies. Gombrowicz would then employ protean textual means as a token of the repudiation of form. His existentialism would be encountered by the reader both

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Gombrowicz’s existentialism: a Polish and Anglo-American perspective

explicitly and implicitly in fictional events, linguistic expression (idiolect), discursive commentaries (Diary, prologues, digressions), concepts and rhetoric (immaturity, form, becoming), and insubordination to literary conventions (the multigeneric quality of novels and plays). To complicate matters further, it is not as much the miscellany of artistic expressions that problematise interpretation as their heterogeneity and mutual intersecting. Take, for instance, Ferdydurke – a novel intermittently embellished with the author’s philosophical comments, whose language constitutes philosophy; Diary – an array of philosophical essays unsettled by fictional events and literary styles as well as the demonstration of the process of writing in its fragmentariness, as the parallel of existence; and Cosmos – the existential condition embedded in fiction. Consequently, the next section will attempt to recapitulate some of the textual strategies of Gombrowicz’s non/fiction pertaining to existentialism, and test the alleged multidimensionality of philosophy embedded in non/fiction, and vice versa, in the light of Polish literary criticism.

1.1. Gombrowicz’s existentialism in the light of Polish literary studies This part will seek to appeal to various Polish critical accounts voiced in the context of Gombrowicz’s works in an attempt to expose Gombrowicz’s philosophical proclivities entrenched in his fiction. This, however, is not to impute Gombrowicz’s literature to a uniform philosophical system; nor to venture a new-fangled, consolidated philosophical paradigm arising from his fiction. The prime concern is to delve into Gombrowicz’s writing as event, which instantiates the ways existential experience parallels narrative processes, with the latter being the analogy of existence. Gombrowicz’s oeuvre as an end-product of existentialist literature and philosophy is by no means the issue here, as the very undertaking of the writer’s affiliation with various schools of thought and literary genres has already been amply elaborated on and multiplied in the vast critical body of Polish Gombrowicz Studies. Instead, Gombrowicz’s existentialism shall be scrutinized in the tissue of language, whereby narration as a dynamic process corresponds to existence as its parallel structure. Hence, it is not as much the level of the plot, or intentional narration, which is in question, as the practice of writing, which as a parallel of existence reflects upon the existential becoming of the self confronted with the other; writing as a practice whereby the writer dramatises the dynamics of existence and its antinomies by simulating a narrative reality. If narrative is structured like existence, the following argument proposing the inherent amalgamation of literature and

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philosophy will inspire further inquiry. This is to test the attempts of Gombrowicz’s critics at separating or combining the writer’s literature and philosophy, and it will argue that the common dialectic division of the disciplines inevitably ends up disregarding Gombrowicz’s ‘hands-on’ existentialism. With this in mind, some Polish critical voices pertaining to Gombrowicz’s literary existentialism shall be called upon in the ensuing section. Taking into consideration various critical accounts of Gombrowicz’s imputed existentialism within Polish literary and critical studies, it can be inferred that critics fail to come to a uniform conclusion on whether or not Gombrowicz’s literary existentialism should be classed as a consolidated philosophical system. Whereas for some critics Gombrowicz’s texts are the fruit of an existing, disciplined philosophical paradigm (whose tenets he either pioneered himself or was inspired to); others would not hesitate to point out the writer’s philosophical inconsistency. Perhaps it is most vital to start off the argument with Konstanty Jeleński’s evaluation of Gombrowicz’s philosophy voiced in 1957. The critic ascribes Gombrowicz’s insubordination to a uniform philosophical doctrine to the existential (in practical terms) nature of the writer’s approach to art and philosophy. Here, Jeleński quotes a passage from Gombrowicz’s Diary: We are not supposed to understand reality, but to express it. We, art, are reality. Art is a fact, not a commentary attached to the fact. It is not our job to explain, elucidate, systematize, prove.

and comments: According to Gombrowicz there are no boundaries between life and art ... For Gombrowicz art is an existential method of imposing form on oneself and others … Gombrowicz’s Diary is inextricably intertwined with the becoming of oneself (Jeleński 1991: 159, my translation).

For Gombrowicz, it is not the epistemological flaw of a philosophical doctrine that is in question – this is perched far beyond the horizon of his interests – but the borders delineated by ideologies with the purpose of cutting off philosophy (and other metaphysical sciences) from literature. Philosophy, in order to surface as science, has to accept form as discursive identity, which is not subject to alterations. Doctrines are thus cut and dried products, recipes applied for the evaluation of an object of inquiry. Literature on the other hand refuses to reduce itself to an object. Since art dramatises existence, literature emerges in the act of its own becoming, and there might be no meta-sphere via which to refer to literature as object, so laboriously woven by philosophers. Literature is not predetermined by any discursive philosophical system, but forms its own reality through the unsystematic appropriation of other discourses and texts it is inscribed in. Literature cannot deny its affiliations with pre-

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existing semiotic codes, and texts, yet the reference to the texts is grounded on the transposition of existing discourses as opposed to their faithful emulation. Unlike philosophy that formulates concepts to determine reality, literature weaves textual reality which transposes the predetermined concepts. While philosophy aims at the synthesis of reality, literature re-evaluates reality by simulating the trajectory of existence, and the very process of reformulation – to a certain degree of arbitrariness – as opposed to synthesis-orientated conceptuality of philosophy, is to reflect upon existence in its fluid variation. Hence, it is not a potential fallacy of scientific methods that bothers Gombrowicz, but the demarcation of an artificial meta-sphere; and for this reason, the delineation of limits between literature and life, or literature and philosophy (as a further parallel of metatexts and their metatexts). Gombrowicz has it that the nature of existence is inherently paradoxical. Existence is not essence, as it is impossible for the former to be extricated from the act of its own becoming. Whereas essence is a ready product understood through metaphysical and epistemological means. Philosophy, in the act of analysing existence by objective theoretical methods, imposes essence on existence. This, according to Gombrowicz, is the greatest fallacy of Sartrean Existentialism, which, by accepting a philosophical method, treats existence as its direct antinomy: that is essence. As do other doctrines that attempt to entrap the human condition in a discursive system. With this in mind, Jeleński, although remarking that Gombrowicz is “an existentialist avant la lettre”, rejects the writer’s scientific affiliations, by declaring: “To reduce Gombrowicz to theory would be to mock him” (1991: 157). Gombrowicz is presented as a purveyor of the literary Existentialism, whose tropes voice the most acute and convoluted existential concerns. Following Jeleński, Gombrowicz is an existentialist writer as opposed to thinker. Jerzy Jarzębski, on the other hand, proposes that Gombrowicz’s texts constitute end-products of his systematic and deliberately woven philosophical exposition (1982: 313), and Gombrowicz’s protean, every so often self-contradictory arguments are attributed to the writer’s inclination for structuring narration and plot as play/game. Jarzębski puts forward the word gra, which in Polish stands for both game and play, and states that the very semantic ambiguity does justice to Gombrowicz’s stylistic indeterminacy and serves to account for philosophical antinomies of the writer’s thinking, which are to recuperate the artist from the charge of intellectual inconsistency. Hence, game – organised by restricted principles – and play – as a free, uninhibited activity, are to systematically govern Gombrowicz’s fiction and thought, and account for his disciplined playfulness (1991: 178).

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In keeping with Jeleński, Zdzisław Łapiński deems Gombrowicz a “philosophical mind”, whose method is inherent in the tissue of his fiction and language. Art is then to explicate antinomies – irresolvable via the conceptual lens of objective theory – implicitly (1985: 150). In the same vein, Leszek Nowak expresses his agreement with Andrzej Falkiewicz over a parallel argument pertaining to Gombrowicz’s failure to establish an explicit philosophical system, yet both underscore Gombrowicz’s implicit philosophical potential embedded in the structure of his works (2000: 19). Yet, how is it possible to philosophise without the necessary conceptual tools and discursive commentary to fall back on? Falkiewicz states that textual antinomies working against each other in narration should form a symmetrical pattern in a fluid process of becoming, which reconciles the contradictions and organises them in an organic whole (1981: 30). For the same reason, Jarzębski affirms that literature as discourse has limited assertion and manages to avoid contradictions by only demonstrating (and not solving) philosophical issues (1991: 188). In this respect Gombrowicz sails close to F. R. Leavis who divulges: The process of ‘getting beyond’ [assertion] is tactical …. But what is brought out in this way is the essential critical process. Putting a finger on this and that in the text, and moving tactically from point to point, you make at each a critical observation that hardly anyone in whom the power of critical perception exists ... wouldn’t endorse ... When this tactical process has reached its final stage, there is no need for assertion; this ‘placing’ judgment is left as established (Hartman 1991: 122).

Leavis stalwartly opposes the caricatured language of criticism departing altogether from the literary dictum it claims to stand above. Productive critical process is hence characterised by the ‘placing of judgement’ with limited assertion. Falkiewicz, in turn, is alert to tell philosophy and literary philosophising apart: If borders between a man and the world, between subject and object, between the self and objects are fluid, it means that they merely form relations, and there is no substance, there are no beings conceived as substantiality … and if it’s impossible to reveal the substance (as it does not exist), art will carefully name the actions, but will not be able to name their results (1981: 20, my translation).

It is implied that art, unlike philosophy, must not assume its subjects as objects. Instead, it is to pose problems to inquire about, yet may fall short of being able to account for them, since to provide an answer would imply an objective process by itself. It is perhaps most reasonable to classify Gombrowicz as an existentialist writer as opposed to philosopher, as attempted by some critics. As stated above, Falkiewicz, in keeping with Jarzębski, issues Gombrowicz a license to philoso-

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phise implicitly through art. Such a license is, however, not granted by Tadeusz Kępiński, who, a philosopher himself, warns against confusing philosophy with literature and invokes Roman Ingarden to back up his claim. The critic refuses to bank on both the reliability of philosophical consistency of men of letters and the attempts of some literary critics to attribute an established philosophical method to Gombrowicz’s fiction (1992: 71, 82, 87).5 The critic also advances the thesis concerning the necessity of devising a method, and divulges that what Gombrowicz offers is merely ‘simulating’ – as opposed to logically ‘organising’ – his ‘fragmentary’ themes (ibid. 116-117), which disqualifies him as a pursuer of a rigorous philosophical practice. Whereas Kępiński argues that Gombrowicz merely juggles his idiosyncratic ideas in order to simulate an ordered line of thought, Janusz Margański sees the matter as precisely the opposite. To him, Gombrowicz, as a devoted reader of philosophy, utilises various theories in order to finally divert from their tenets, internalising them to his own idiosyncratic doctrine (2001: 147), with the latter being renounced in turn (which resonates with Gombrowicz’s foremost modus operandi, that is the ethical imperative to escape form). Nonetheless, some other critical voices discerned the legacy of Husserl’s phenomenology in Gombrowicz’s oeuvre. Among those were Jan Błoński and Andrzej Kowalczyk, who endeavoured to prove that the writer appropriated and emulated the systematic method of phenomenological reduction, which Kępiński steadfastly denies. If this alleged indebtedness to phenomenology is to claim due credit in Gombrowicz’s fiction, it indeed has to be admitted that both his narrative and language dramatise the problems of (a)symmetry as well as being a method of consistent dialectic reversal of proposed situations or concepts. Gombrowicz, however, manifests the failure of knowledge to do full justice to existence, and to deem phenomenology a driving force of his narrative is merely to refer to a minute part of his textual experimentation rather than a method piecing together narration and thought. Alfred Gall, however, goes against the grain in the proposed context by stating that Gombrowicz’s fiction epitomises the repudiation of phenomenology (2010: 363-364). The critic argues, in his reading of Cosmos, that textual practice defies the foundations of fundamental ontology, as literature merely demonstrates reality through the incessant transposition of the existing cultural codes, which is devoid of constructive values at the discursive level. Such a process, through the multiplication of signs, atomises reality, exposing its infinite possibilities, yet 5

“Like every man exposed to the tensions of life, Gombrowicz is not obliged to show the reader solutions. Without having exposed a quantum of philosophical power, he possesses an inner mechanism generating something else – a literary attitude and activism” (Kępiński 1992: 82, my translation).

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does nothing to interpret it. Literature experiments with and alters multiple cultural codes, but fails to provide meanings, as textual practice brings to bear the perpetuity of existential becoming, repudiating synthesising interpretation. Błoński may in fact acknowledge Gombrowicz’s habit of transforming existing concepts, but unlike Gall and Michał Paweł Markowski, considers this mechanism as constructive and dialectically conditioned. Błoński postulates that Gombrowicz’s fiction is driven by the dialectic of ‘rejection’ and ‘assimilation’ of the encountered forms. Gombrowicz might indeed organise the narration and plot in the proposed manner, but I cannot but disagree with the critic’s ensuing argument informing that the ‘rejected’ concepts are eventually re-assimilated. If so, they must return as different from themselves, in order to participate in further fluid transformations. This process, however, by exposing particularities of multiple others in the indeterminacy of writing, is irreducible to a method, much less to a Hegelian dialectic. As shall be argued further, alterity involves recourse to the supplementary textual phenomena, to the non-milieux of the arcane textual artifices, and that which unsettles any clean-cut dialectic logic. Markowski, in the same vein, challenges Błoński’s stance that Gombrowicz’s fiction is dialectically determined by supposing it to be structured like existence at its most indeterminate and fluid. The metaphoric of fluidity of existence is to demonstrate resistance to the established dialectic points of reference. Markowski’s Gombrowicz does not follow any established patterns, but rather unreservedly demonstrates life through a writing that is governed by alterity. Marginal forces do not entrap existence and writing in form, but unsettle the normative impositions. For Markowski, Gombrowicz’s writing is a fluent movement without normative, predetermined points of reference to turn to. Gombrowicz simulates the metaphoric of existential fluidity as well as subaltern pointers at narrative and linguistic matrices, which are to draw parallels with the process of writing. Gombrowicz does not impose meaning, but exposes the reader to an existential experience of interpretation. His existentialism is not voiced by discourse but is dramatised in its inner formation as a parallel of existence. This stance is substantiated by the belief that just as literature is structured like existence, life in turn is reshaped by fiction as it must be filtered through language and narrative linearity as human constructs which not only articulate, but also impinge on existence. A human being uses language to articulate one’s needs. The needs are interpreted by language which is itself classified and inherently descriptive (as it names and thus identifies things). The language in discourse is structured like narrative as it emerges as description or codes of things people refer to. Narrative is this linear description of needs expressed by language. Yet language is not autogenous either, as it emerges from the narrative of

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human existence, and constitutes the narrative itself. Language is thus not merely a code which produces narrative, which, in its turn, attempts to describe human existence, but, along with its embedded narrative, epitomises existence and approximates existential dynamics. Human discourse is thus inherently selfreferential, since it is giving away the workings of its own formation in narrative. Hence, text and metatext materialise in the course of the same process of linguistic production as a practice of interplay of creation and mimesis. In this process, the creative bits are conceptualised, they fossilise and become forms, that is codes used to keep the process of creation going. They subsequently congeal in form which has yet to become reiterated and reformulated. The complete linguistic bits influence existence, whose mechanism becomes defined, which – caused to undergo its own reiteration – forms culture. Culture, in turn, is the arrangement of the accepted codes, as existential stepping stones, prone to self-reformulation by the fluidity of existence, dependent on difference and time. Narrative is organized like culture as it also emerges as a codifying or synthesizing tool. In an attempt to make existence decipherable, language encodes it and narration renders it temporally and structurally linear. Therefore, narration follows existence and its fluidity in order to structure it by means of language, which may be reformulated in the narrative process. Narrative reveals the formation (as opposed to meaning) of human existence; it puts impact on the process of its own becoming as opposed to its being an end product. Consequently, if literature tells a story in narrative form, the story must be inspected in the process of its formation; and since it is self-referential, discursive commentary fails to account for the process itself, as it just attempts to provide a description of the process. Gombrowicz’s fiction serves as a hands-on manifestation of the existential trajectory, by dramatising the dynamics of writing and existence in their creation. If philosophy, as a metaphysical discourse, seeks to impede the existential formation by closing it in metaphysical concepts, it separates itself from art in theoretical terms. In textual terms, however, the separation of language, existence and narration is an outcome of metaphysical objectivity. The task of literature is to dramatise the very misalliance of existence, literature and language embedded in its very form (and not only, as in the case of Sartre’s Nausea, in plot). Literature is existence, not because it is about existence, but because it mirrors the trajectory of existence in its everlasting drama of succumbing to and escaping forms, so painstakingly manifested by Gombrowicz. In line with the proposed explication of textual symbioses, Markowski seems to lay emphasis on the value of the writer’s text as governed by alterity without positive terms. The critic divulges:

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Gombrowicz’s subject is distracted, hence dispersed, which is always other than itself, always subject to something else…Gombrowicz teaches us new subjectivity, which does not have to refer to predetermined points of reference, but attempts to get accustomed to a navigation of new type (2004: 57, my translation).

It becomes apparent that the critic’s intention is to highlight the crucial blind spots chiefly downplayed by other Polish critics, that is the metaphoric of alterity as a structural deconstructor. In the critic’s reading, at times seething with the rhetoric of alterity, Gombrowicz’s subject is dangerously sealed off from any tangible points of reference, which is arguably a utopian, and never fully attained, aspiration of Gombrowicz’s existential project (and presumably one on which the writer would pride himself). Gombrowicz’s narrative simulations, although calculated to shun form, need this very form (culture, objectivity, semiotic signs) as a point from which to escape into another one. To disregard preexisting cultural products is to discard norm, upon (and against) which Gombrowicz’s struggle is grounded; it is to anticipate the radical alterity of the subject entailing sheer contingency of the subjective immanence. What could be gathered from Gombrowicz’s alterity is that it attempts to multiply forms in a dynamic process of transcending cultural norms, as opposed to organising the economy of radical otherness of a formless cosmos impervious to the mechanisms of pre-existing determinations. Alterity is merely an everdeferred destination to which the narrative aspires, in its unflagging diversion from forms, as opposed to an impermeable immanence, devoid of the link to the objective world (the latter would mean to succumb to another form, disregarding Gombrowiczian dynamic transcendence-immanence interplay). An alternative evaluation of Gombrowicz’s textual mechanisms (should one insist on pinning down a method) is provided by Edward Fiała, who rightly locates Gombrowicz’s hero in an encounter with the other. The space in-between the self and the other becomes a laboratory of Gombrowicz’s dissection of human interrelations, which are customarily deconstructed. The critic points that the deconstruction of the interactions manifests itself as the transcendence of the accepted norms and dynamism of form (2002: 77). The refutation of the statics of form constitutes an existential imperative, whereby the self encapsulated in form is entangled in a dynamic process of self-reformulation. To effectuate such a mechanism in plot, Gombrowicz, as noticed by Kępiński, simulates problems in order to divulge them. To simulate a situation, however, means to create it, which cannot deny its substantiality; in other words it is to impose a form upon it. Hence, the simulated matter must be necessarily re-examined, in order to shun the entrapment by form. The rhetoric of encounter with the other (referred to by Gombrowicz as “interhuman church”) is ineluctably subject to the incessant self-reformulation or self-deconstruction.

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Fiała’s study exposes Gombrowicz’s ‘method’ at the level of the deconstruction of form, self-reflexivity of writing and ‘interhuman’ encounters, as the dynamism of form accurately corresponds to Gombrowicz’s narrative manoeuvres. Nevertheless, it fails to consider an alternative textual and philosophical dimension, irreducible to a method, that is otherness in both existential and linguistic sense of the word, with which Fiała’s reading could be complemented. The aspect of the other, understood as a practice destabilising dialectic linearity of Gombrowicz’s seemingly uniform philosophy, has been amply elaborated on by Ewa Płonowska-Ziarek as well as Markowski. The other in Gombrowicz reveals itself in nearly all axes of narrative, from rhetorical concepts pertaining to destabilising normative hegemonies and exposing cultural supplements (like immaturity), to idiolectic idiosyncrasy, to disruption of sexual and national paradigms, to the repudiation of history, tradition or objective truth as constitutive forces governing human existence, to the rewriting of literary and philosophical canons. Gombrowicz on his own part advises the reader against homogeneous interpretation and compels him/her to immerse in the “realm of the Unpredictable” (Płonowska-Ziarek 1996: 218). As expressed by PłonowskaZiarek “For Gombrowicz it is ‘the other’ that is raised to a creative principle” (ibid). The rhetoric of alterity, which in Gombrowicz’s fiction can be observed as a dynamic practice of rerouting from the normative to the singular or minor forms, comprises not only a narrative addition, but its structural backbone. This, however, is not to imply that Gombrowicz anticipates radical alterity, interhuman entanglement in form is the non-milieu from which one works against the hegemony of norm, yet not in a vacuum of absolute subjectivity. Hence, the interhuman encounter both imposes form and assumes alterity as a means of subverting form. The very aspect of the interpersonal encounter constituted the bone of contention between Sartre and Gombrowicz. The latter’s denigration of Sartrean Existentialism was founded on the assumption that it was inherently self-contradictory by having attempted at determining existence through discursive theory. As Gombrowicz would have it, Existentialism was doomed to failure in the first place, since existence – as an irreducible subject – was objectified, and hence advanced in an abstract theoretical vacuum. In addition, Gombrowicz’s ‘interhuman’ sphere challenges Sartrean absolute individualism and the uninhibited freedom of the subject. Gombrowicz does not believe in the collective on the one hand, but defies Sartrean subjectivity on the other. After all, anchored in culture, the texts and contexts impinge on the pure subjectivity of the self, and this is by no possible means disregarded in Gombrowicz. The self-other entwinement dramatises the impossibility of the subjective freedom, and the denial of the collective, deterministic or naturalistic influences. Instead, it is the intrusion of the external forces (the other) to the self that de-

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notes the antinomy of Gombrowiczian existential constitution of a human being. The irreconcilable antinomy constitutes the non-space of alterity as event; that is the liminal space between the self and the other, wherein the constructive formation of individuality is a representation of deferral of the radical ends of the subjective and objective. Therefore, Fiała’s persuasive shift of focus to the dynamism of form in interpersonal encounters could be supplied with the notion of the encounter with the other as an “active event” (as put by Płonowska-Ziarek 1996: 214). Since the encounter, inherently dynamic and singular, relatively immune to convention, compels the self to respond singularly to the other, the response runs counter to apriori norms registered in culture. Such awareness generates parallel events in narrative, oriented at playing up the singular event of the self-other encounter. Otherness at the level of language is reflected in the insubordination to the standardised linguistic forms, as the imperative of the dynamism of form contravenes the totality of grammar and exceeds its fossilised tenets. Alterity comprises the narrative turns that point towards disjunctive interstices, bifurcated blind spots disturbing the synthesising quality of language and narrative linearity. Alterity, however, is not there to voice a final assumption of its negative signification, but offers a constructive value of negotiating the deceptively ultimate limits of language and reality structured like language. The other reformulates the accepted canons in like manner. As noted by Jarzębski in his reading via the polysemy of ‘gra’, Gombrowicz adopts existing literary genres, which harbingers a promise to abide by their established principles (game), just to have them abruptly repudiated or distorted (play). Hence, the very shift from an established form to an alternative one is the very reroute to indeterminate alterity, ever since the emphasis on the particular or peculiar destabilises the taken for granted organic unity of the totalising whole (also in reference to the totality of grammar). Since human in Gombrowiczian terms is intrinsically interhuman, just as subjective is intersubjective, the entrapment by form is inevitable, and the dynamism of the encounter destabilises the objective illusion of form. To create oneself is then to incessantly develop forms comparatively impervious to the objectivity of culture. In other words, it is to respond to the singularity of the intersubjective singular others. Alterity must serve as a narrative imperative, since it offers openness and lays bare the astringent limits of the objective world, playing down the dynamism of individual uninhibited expression. If Gombrowicz organises his economy of “unconstrained elements” (as observed by Płonowska-Ziarek) he does little else than simulate (echoing Kępiński) singular narrative events premeditated to test the subjective response of the character faced with the other. Such narrative volatility must imitate the existential struggle of the encounter with the

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contagious, yet ineluctable, form. This narrative dynamics will thus be manifested in no other way than stylistic blatancy through the appropriation of devices generating linguistic indeterminacy and textual alterity. In sum, Polish critics have generated innumerable volumes covering the still unexhausted field of Gombrowicz Studies. Ever since Gombrowicz’s oeuvre has proved (according to some critics) resonant with poststructuralist and postmodernist theories,6 more and more contemporary critical voices tend to hail Gombrowicz the pioneer of postmodern thought. Having juxtaposed both traditional and current Polish critical standpoints situating Gombrowicz in philosophical light, the proposed critical niche will be transferred to an alternative milieu of inquiry, namely British and American contemporary criticism. This is not so much to juxtapose the critical standpoints by shifting cultural and historical angles, as to test the ways literary critics in Great Britain and the USA – where the awareness of postmodern theories has been exceedingly acute – perceive Gombrowicz as a writer anticipating postmodern sensibilities. The focal point of the ensuing part will be to examine if Gombrowicz has been classified as a postmodern existentialist writer or/and philosopher – as has been the case within Polish critical circles – or whether British and American scholars situate the writer beyond such disciplinary categorisations.

1.2. “Not quite our cup of tea”: An Anglo-American perspective With its over 80 entries featuring Gombrowicz (including 37 reviews of his works), the leading British literary magazine, The Times Literary Supplement holds in store the largest amongst Anglo-American literary magazines critical bulk on Gombrowicz, compared to 35 entries (10 reviews) issued in the next most prolific publication, the American New York Review of Books (to both magazines Gombrowicz himself contributed one article). Nevertheless, try as Gombrowicz’s partisans might, they have never successfully managed to smuggle Gombrowicz into the Anglophone literary pantheon. Although widely acclaimed in Continental Europe, especially France and Germany, the British literary market has remained indifferent to Gombrowicz’s advances, which the writer himself in his own contribution to The Times Liter6

Critics who examined various contemporary theoretical trends in Gombrowicz are: Michał Legierski (Modernism), Dagmara Jaszewska (Postmodernism), Ewa PłonowskaZiarek, Michał Paweł Markowski (Deconstruction, Postmodernism), Marian Bielecki (Postmodernism, Feminism), Ewa Thompson (Postcolonialism), Patricia Merivale (Gothicism).

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ary Supplement cannot resist pointing out by pouncing on British literary criticism.7 In the same vein, although he somehow made his name on the other side of the Atlantic, namely in his beloved Argentina, America proved just as unyielding as Britain. This impermeability has been attributed by literary critics to the shortcomings of English translations of the writer’s works, partly as a result of the fact the translators adopted as their source texts foreign (French and German among others) translations, as opposed to the first-hand texts.8 This is partly because Gombrowicz’s style proved insurmountably translation-proof (especially when seen through the lens of British critics). In the words of Michael Irwin: His prose is particularly recalcitrant to translation. He modulates into pastiche, slang, dialects real or invented, neologism, whimsy and gibberish. There can be no doubt that he is a writer with a fastidious concern for stylistic flavouring; and in translation that flavouring will almost certainly be altered, diluted or altogether lost (1980: 463).

This must be particularly true of the early English second-step translation. Hence, as Jarzębski concludes, “the translators multiplied mistakes by simply leaving out a number of the most difficult expressions” (2007: 288, my translation). Similarly, Beth Holmgren states: Czerwiński and Karst’s 1978 appraisal implies the missed first step of Gombrowicz’s translation into English. His first major works to be Englished – the novels, Ferdydurke, Pornografia, and Kosmos – doubly removed him from his American readers through second-generation translations from French versions of the Polish originals (1998: 292).

Furthermore, in the bulk of her study on Gombrowicz’s reception in the USA, Holmgren invokes Enright’s critique of Gombrowicz’s fiction, who (seconded by Updike and Ashberry) is concerned about the writer’s reputed lack of a clearly delineated context to which to refer his fiction (1998: 338). Holmgren, on her part, regards the absence of Gombrowicz’s fiction in the American literary market as essentially politically conditioned. The critic informs that an obscure 7

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“For the past ten years or so my stock has been rising, but I must say frankly that in England, alas, my work has had much less impact and I have sometimes been amazed by the comments and criticisms in the papers… Elsewhere, and above all in Europe, my work has achieved recognition...” (Hunersh and Gombrowicz 1969: 1045). Ferdydurke was first translated in 1961 and Cosmos in 1967 by Eric Mosbacher, and Pornografia by Alistair Hamilton, all of which from the French. The first translations from the Polish (widely acclaimed by critics) were provided no sooner than three decades later (which also accounts for the little interest in Gombrowicz’s literature in the English speaking countries): Trans-Atlantyk by Carolyn French and Nina Karsov (1994), Ferdydurke (2000) and Cosmos (2005) by Danuta Borchardt.

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Eastern European writer cannot win acclaim in the United States – much less to assume a place in the literary canon – “unless perhaps he fought hard (on our side) in the cold war” (ibid. 295). One way or another, Gombrowicz – be he decontextualised or depoliticised – refuses to be internalised ideologically (partly as a result of his turbulent social rank of expatriate, disinherited aristocrat, conscientious objector, and abnegated writer). To take the argument a step further, it is precisely the Gombrowiczian proteanness that has deterred American readership. Although epitomising libertarian tenets, Gombrowicz’s alleged nihilism – associated with his pungent questioning of form – must have evoked uneasiness in the politically conscious America. Whether radical right or left, a post-war individual is expected to put across his political affiliations for the sake of constructive pragmatism, so much anchored in the American ideal. Subversion and rebellion might still be politically up to standard: by challenging the mainstream they work against, they stand in a relation to it. However, American consciousness does not seem able to cope with non-dialectic arbitrariness. French Existentialism, on the other hand, founded on Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus’ doctrines, very much promulgating nihilism and absurdism as existential indispensables of the modern alienated individual, assimilated Gombrowicz for the very same reasons American establishment rebuffed him. As George Cotkin has it, American existentialism “refused to make a fetish out of nihilism” (2005: 7). It was not, however, so much nihilism that put off Gombrowicz’s would-be American audience most, as his proteanness. Gombrowicz, to put it bluntly, is thought to be at one with no generic philosophical affiliations. However, should one delve into the poetics of Gombrowicz’s style, it becomes apparent that the writer does not work in a cultural vacuum, but explodes the existing canons (doctrines, genres, styles) to have them deconstructed in the process of dynamic creation. This reformulation of cultural outposts situates Gombrowicz in relation, even if the relation entails opposition, to the appropriated cultural standards. Gombrowicz emerges as the herald of various literary currents (thus many a critic lost no time to hail the writer the pioneer of the mainstream modern literary theories), which might testify to his versatility, especially within existentialist traditions. There were no countries, however, to assimilate Gombrowicz as he was, at his most abstruse and protean. Rather, they approached Gombrowicz from certain angles, conditional on the cultural familiarity or current literary proclivities. If Gombrowicz is lauded by American criticism, it is not Gombrowicz per se, but a Gombrowicz who just happened to fit in a particular paradigm.

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For this reason, Kathleen Cioffi speaks of Gombrowicz’s “minor Renaissance in America” (2003: 151), referring to the growing popularity of stage productions based on the writer’s plays (also staged in Scotland by Teatr Provisorium and Kompania Teatr at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival).9 Needless to say, this rebirth was accelerated by little else than an Anglo-American interest in absurdity, and Gombrowicz was made to bear a resemblance to Beckett and Ionesco, according to Bayley (1988); Monty Python, as suggested by Gombrowicz’s translator Bill Johnson (Simic 2006); or Harold Pinter (Irwin 1980: 463). It could be reasonably argued that Gombrowicz’s advent in America owed more to the misconception of his peculiar existentialism by an American audience who reduced the writer’s singularity to familiar cultural concepts. As observed by Gary Indiana: “Gombrowicz never greatly profited from America’s brief enthusiasm for arcane Euroculture” as he was simply “too weird” for American readers, and “his writings [were] suffused with gnarled, foggy themes” (2008: 121). Gombrowicz’s obscurity at its most convoluted – departing altogether from anti-intellectual trends coming into vogue in postmodern America – had to be assuaged.10 This stance was in fact corroborated first-hand. As reported by Krystyna Lipińska-Iłłakowicz, having won wide acclaim in Continental Europe, Gombrowicz corresponded with editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly Press in 1964 in an attempt to get Pornografia published. Davison turned the novel down on the grounds that it was to be philosophically too dense and abstruse, claiming that The Atlantic “can rarely afford to publish books appealing primarily to a small and specially qualified elite” (2010: 71). Lipińska-Iłłakowicz on her part assumes that this rejection best summarises American anti-intellectual proclivities ingrained in the vulgarisation of arts and culture by consumerist boomerism, as well as a prejudice against foreign intelligentsia, which America pandered to during the Cold War (ibid. 70). A similar appraisal of British culture was articulated by Francis King who expressed his distress about the fact that Gombrowicz’s death received little notice in England, while the French journal Le Monde carried an impressive obituary (1988: 31). The critic reviles British perfunctoriness as ardently as to conclude that “there could be no better illustration of the innate provincialism of our [British] culture” (ibid.). King makes his point not necessarily out of regard to the writer himself (full of admiration to Gombrowicz as he may have been), 9 For further reference to Gombrowicz’s stage productions see Allen J. Kuharski (2004). 10 Caterina Squillance-Piwowarczyk notices that intellectual character of Polish literature, or more precisely the general assumptions on the alleged complexity of eastern European literature, impinged on the reception of Gombrowicz in Italy as well. There, nevertheless, the writer was more widely read than other Poles (2004: 53).

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but as a result of the overall tendency toward presupposing French intellectual primacy by English academia. For it has to be noted that in France Gombrowicz was acknowledged as a high-brow writer and thinker inspiring such intellectual giants as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Michael Irwin, for that matter, in keeping with other critics, identifies a common tendency to treat Gombrowicz in Britain as an alluring display item: more attractive to look at than to buy. Although extolled and esteemed for his complexity, Gombrowicz is “not quite our cup of tea” – concludes Irwin (1980: 463). It seems that it is more down to jaded British palates, whose peculiar sense of humour would have them rather whimsically recruit their literary darlings, than anti-intellectualism (as assumed by King). Other critics (Piers 1966, Keir 1961, Anonymous 1972) would point to Gombrowicz’s hypodermic, yet consistent, philosophy rather than any burlesque qualities of his oeuvre that ought to be taken seriously. Along similar lines, Hyde asserts that Gombrowicz’s existential estrangement, promulgated in his philosophy and corroborated in life, beset with modes of “nostalgia, sybaritism, dissolution … apartness” that were seen as “remedies which English readers will probably think are rather desperate” (1990: 290), resulted in Gombrowicz being “sadly neglected by Anglo-Saxons” (1996: 38). Should one trust this conjecture, it is yet again not as much radicalism that daunts English readers (after all they have long absorbed absurdism) as ‘dissolution’, non-essentialism, obscurity, as well as a political and national waywardness that is tinged with cultural otherness. The critic would further divulge that Gombrowicz’s conception of form “may baffle the English reader” (291). Here, Gombrowicz emerges as a philosopher, namely the relentless deconstructor of established doctrines who collates forms of collectivism with the formlessness of radical individuality and always occupies a liminal position in the dialectic of epistemology and the absurd; cultural identity and contingency; form and chaos. Gombrowicz is thus unreadable, not only because of linguistic estrangement, but first and foremost because he departs from categorisable cultural labels. Concomitantly, George Gömöri in his examination of Gombrowicz’s antinomies argues that the in-betweennes of Gombrowicz’s characters is the startingoff point for the deconstruction of cultural dichotomies (1978: 129).11 Antinomy functions here as a necessary non-milieu of the liminal, wherein dialectic linearity is unsettled. Much in a similar vein, Martin Plax, attempting to elucidate the 11 “He showed modern man’s quandary: he is in the pull of conflicting cultures, torn between ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’, striving for power and wisdom but admiring the dynamic immaturity of youth, dreading the penetrating influence of ‘others’ but celebrating the mass of ‘the interhuman’”.

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philosophical shifts in the historically conscious modern condition, invokes Milan Kundera, who states that: Gombrowicz … got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century. Until then, mankind was divided in two—those who defended the status quo and those who sought to change it (Plax 2009: 260).

In both cases, Gombrowicz materialises as an exorcist of dialectics that is not to be entirely annihilated, but rather subject to constant revision. A similar argument was elaborated on by Ross, who, seconding Gömöri, states: After 1956, East European literature began to branch off, and it was Poland that took the lead in the literary trends, and is still in the lead today. One of the authors [Gömöri] mentions is Witold Gombrowicz (1971: 214).

Gombrowicz seemed to have been an acutely vigilant observer of the new modern condition, which, distorted by the existential arbitrariness of the post-war realities, could in no way squeeze in the pre-established illusory dialectic order. Plax suggests: Now that historical consciousness has made us aware that even [sic] everything is moving, even the status quo, a progressive and a conformist can be the same person… It would appear that the concept of Identity is a noble lie, meant to create the illusion of stability in a perpetually changing world (ibid.).

The fluidity of existence sketches a new silhouette of modern condition responding to its dynamic fragmentariness, which Gombrowicz, as affirmed by Kundera, painstakingly tried to interrogate. Holistic as this argument may appear, British and American post-war political arena left little room for such philosophical novelties to come to fruition. The Cold War developed an illusory political dichotomy between the righteous West and totalitarian East, and the establishment in Great Britain has never truly looked beyond its standard Conservative-Liberal horizon. Such cultural misfits as the Angry Young Men, Punk movements and arts, Queer, or postcolonial influences merely served to strengthen this dialectic paradigm, through their direct antagonism to the establishment. Gombrowicz’s philosophical heterogeneity combined with his esoteric cultural otherness and national apartness must have indeed extended beyond the received cultural and philosophical standards of the Anglophone countries. Taking a wider view, British literary criticism has hardly ever failed to catch up with modern literary and philosophical drifts, whereas, as argued by Ewa Thompson, Slavic countries have developed strong aversions to epistemology (2005: 525). Gombrowicz would challenge epistemology insofar as he would subvert the form it epitomised. Britain, quite conversely, would feel much more

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at home with the notion of form, which was seen as a constructive force determining culture, with little pejorative connotations. For Gombrowicz, form inevitably articulates its double standard: form that shapes existence is simultaneously the very same form that impedes it. American criticism – at odds with Gombrowicz’s antinomies at the axis of cultural deconstruction in quite the same manner – probably overlooked the Polish writer for prosaic reasons. Gombrowicz, against all his manifestations of artistic individuality and repudiation of conventions, is palpably on a par with Existentialism, if only in his unremitting interrogation of mechanisms of selfother interdependence as well as existential aporias. 12 Interestingly, although equipped with a better access to the latest publishing sources, accelerated news circulation and mass-media, American literature and philosophy have always failed to stay abreast of intellectual trends and movements adopted in France and England. Such was the case with Existentialism, which was already under way in Europe when it reached America (Barnes 1968: 170). If Existentialism was ever recognised by American philosophy it was appropriated implicitly. First adopted by such moderns as Melville, Faulkner or Salinger and later amended by the postmoderns (Malamud, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Updike) Existentialism was much more of a reaction to the turbulent developments of the 20th century than a blind emulation of Continental doctrines. If Gombrowicz was undervalued in post-war Anglophone countries as a result of anti-intellectual inclinations animating consumerism-driven literary markets, more contemporary postmodern literary inspirations, coinciding with and informing poststructuralist theories, have recently contributed to the aforementioned Gombrowicz’s ‘renaissance’. If earlier Gombrowicz’s vague status as neither a writer nor philosopher proved detrimental to the appreciation of his works, it now emerged in line with contemporary theoretical currents (chiefly deconstruction). Kuharski anticipates that Gombrowicz stands a realistic chance of being rehabilitated in Anglophone countries, largely as a result of the resonance of deconstructionist concepts in his tropes, evinced in the relational quality of form, textual heterogeneity and the departure from dialectics. In his foregrounding of sexuality and subversion of national identity, he is also believed by critics to fit into the templates of the most recent of literary influences: that of Queer theories as well as Postcolonialism (Płonowska-Ziarek 1996: 269). Keeping up the momentum, Gombrowicz’s parallels with Derridean philosophy of the limit are manifest, yet again, in the rhetoric of form. The disruption 12 Aporia, as indicated by Norris elaborating on the Derridean concept, augurs the undecidability of interpretation caused by “blind spots, or moments of self-contradiction, where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between … what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean” (Cuddon 1998: 50).

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of borders cultivated by deconstructive thought, that has so inspired Anglophone criticism, is only too resonant of Gombrowicz’s existential tropes, in that the subject always transcends itself in the encounter with the other. The subject is hence neither too private nor collective, but essentially relational. Since the encounter renders the subject neither entirely other nor fully itself, it is contingent on the unstable relation advancing in the intersubjective liminal non-space. Gombrowicz, seconding (or rather forerunning) Derrida, proves that there is no clean-cut limit between entities, only shifting relations and differences as traces of the mutual contagion. The human raison d’être will thus emerge not in his/her stable objective constitution, but in the encounter by which identity is conditional on the dynamic processes of becoming and self-reformulation in relation to the other. Hence, the liminality of relation and difference, attaining neither its spatio-temporal presence nor unity, dramatises its non-milieu in the dynamic process of a deferral of forms. Only in the process of translation can the entity manifest her/his existential condition of becoming, and renounce the illusory conceptions of identity as being either entirely predetermined by culture or radically immanent. Seen as such, no wonder Gombrowicz’s Diaries have surfaced as of utmost interest to critics, for they best dramatise the dynamics of writing, as well as blurring demarcated boundaries between philosophy and literature. As the assemblage of short feuilletons unsettling the limits between fact and fiction, as well as the author-narrator-protagonist relationship, they construct existential reality and anticipate the postmodern condition. Therefore, this is Gombrowicz’s indefinite status of writer-philosopher, hitherto thwarting his reception in the USA due to its excessively cerebral character, which now serves to recuperate the artist in the poststructuralist tradition. Gombrowicz seeks to recharge Sartre’s existence-essence dichotomy by repudiating philosophy as a discursive theory as well as undoing the confines of the self and other; form and chaos; the subjective and the interhuman sphere. Underpinned by arbitrariness and antinomy, these unsettled relations anticipate postmodernist tenets. In the same way, the liquid existence confronted by the constraints of semiotic predetermined codes or linguistic contagion bring to mind poststructuralist theories. Aside from its analogies with Derrida, Gombrowicz’s uneasy existentialism is now said to resemble: Deleuze’s theories of rhizome, body without organs, nomadism and becoming as extensively examined by Michael Goddard in his recent study (2010); Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary terms of the Other (Hanjo Berressem); Foucault’s heterotopic discourse (George Gasyna); and Baudrillard’s simulacrum (Dagmara Jaszewska). Although in their infancy, Gombrowicz Studies are gradually animating Anglophone academic debates.

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Taking into account the currently growing corpus of academic texts on Gombrowicz, the writer is still more written about than read. Alternatively, Gombrowicz is read by intellectuals, largely of Polish descent, or Slavic Studies academics. The parallels with postmodernism and French poststructuralism might in fact have partially inscribed Gombrowicz in the 20th century canon, yet these influences must simultaneously have ruled him out of a more popular focus. Gathering that postmodernism has never wholly coincided with popular fiction, failing entirely to depart from the modernist bourgeois legacy, and that French philosophical influences have principally remained anchored in academia, Gombrowicz might still fail to ingratiate himself with a popular readership. Then again, Western European and Anglophone criticism has suggested that Gombrowicz fits the contemporary artistic and philosophical mould. If Gombrowicz has never been fully appreciated as a philosopher, on account of his theoretical inconsistency and failure to conform to the established doctrines, not to mention his literary status as a national other, all this now casts a radically new light on the reception of his literary output. Gombrowicz as either philosopher or writer (both? neither?) has been a central subject of heated academic debates of Polish literary criticism, which, regardless of the diversity of standpoints and impressive body of critical texts, have hardly stood outside of the dialectic academic paradigms, and thus failed to do justice to the writer’s oeuvre on a discursive level, which inevitably had to disregard the liminality of Gombrowicz’s unsettled dichotomies at the philosophical and linguistic axes. The recognition of Gombrowicz beyond the writer-philosopher dialectic and the appreciation of the vocabularies of textual alterity (whereby the status of a writer/work is responded to in an active textual engagement that welcomes dynamic shifting relations determined by the fluidity of existence) can only do justice to Gombrowicz by testifying to his indeterminate status. To interrogate these disturbing liminal spaces is to put into question the margins of Gombrowicz’s literary and linguistic production. By the same token, Gombrowicz’s alleged untranslatability – once constituting an impassable barrier for the international audience – is yet another factor illustrating shifting tendencies toward Gombrowicz’s reception abroad. As stated above, Trans-Atlantyk has been hailed by some as not only untranslatable but also unreadable, and it achieved notoriety for the author’s appropriation of the convoluted archaic language of 17th century Sarmatian Baroque (gawęda). Recently though, not only has (the myth of?) untranslatability ceased to perplex readers, but with the sudden burgeoning of Translation Studies over the past three decades (yet again sparked by poststructuralist interests in the minor, vernacular literatures and languages, textual alterity, as well as cultural estrange-

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ment) the obscurity of the novel’s esoteric language has animated interest in academic circles for Gombrowicz.

1.3. Gombrowicz through the lens of Translation Studies Unsurprisingly, the alleged ‘untranslatability’ of Gombrowicz’s texts is the key concern of Gombrowicz translation studies. This in some measure reductive assumption was informed by Gombrowicz’s quirky language imbued with philosophical profundity, neologisms, archaisms, and intertextual eclecticism. Edited by Elżbieta Skibińska, the collection of essays, Gombrowicz i tłumacze (Gombrowicz and translators) remains the only comprehensive study dedicated entirely to the aspects of Gombrowicz’s translations into various languages. The critics’ conclusion is unanimous: although some acceptable translations have recently been published (especially those produced over the course of the past decade), none of the translators managed to approximate Gombrowicz’s idiolect, sacrificing either his unique style or thought. This section will venture to interrogate some critical standpoints articulated in the context of the translations of Gombrowicz’s novels through the lens of his existential philosophy. Existentialism will be understood as twofold here: as a representation of tenets associated with Existentialism in contemporary literary criticism; and as existentialism embedded in text, the mechanisms via which linguistic production is bound up with the experience of the world. While by the former I mean the approach to Gombrowicz’s tropes in the light of discursive theories (to account for historical and cultural shifts in assimilating Gombrowicz in the proposed contexts), the latter interrogates Gombrowicz’s tropes not so much in as as textual production. This division is not to propose a programmatic method of reading Gombrowicz, but rather to account for the ways Gombrowicz’s critics, by trying to fit him in the existentialist template (which proved futile, given the irreducible antinomies Gombrowicz’s texts are governed by), have disregarded Gombrowicz’s existentialism as a response to the form demonstrated in writing. The reduction of the response to a discursive method must have entailed overlooking mechanisms by which Gombrowicz interpreted existence through antinomies. Such a division will also be intertwined with the questions of un/translatability of Gombrowicz’s works reflected in translations that sacrifice Gombrowicz’s philosophy for linguistic and stylistic accuracy and vice versa.

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1.3.1. Translating Gombrowicz In his essay Des tours de Babel (1985) Derrida asserts that since language does not merely convey something pre-existing it, but reformulates the referent in the event of linguistic production, translation cannot be conceived of as a purely interlinguistic process. Translation can be paired up with mechanisms governing the formation of the original text, as it is founded on singular interpretation of differences embedded in the liminality between the subjective and the standard. The interpretation of difference is the event through which the interpreter/translator forms his textual reality, which is ruled by procedures analogous to the creation of the original text. Translation is an attempt to create binary oppositions of translated/source text (just as the existence of different standard languages is to foster such a binary illusion). However, since difference exists at a micro as well as macro level, it is embedded not only in languages conceived as systems, but also in a single linguistic unit which is not originally a product of the language it attempts to represent, but already interlinguistic. If a person ventures to foreground the very dialectic condition of language, this logic is understood as something outside of the text it refers to. To translate is to constitute such a split. Still, no language is ever totally translatable, as the dialectic split disregards the inherent intertextuality of a word. Accordingly, if translation is unable to command the untranslatable language, it fails to accomplish its purpose. If, on the other hand, the interpreter is confronted with the irreducible difference of language in the event of reading, s/he is already caught up in translation. It is in this sense that Derrida speaks of translation as being both “necessary and impossible” (1985: 196). In an attempt to undo the antinomy, translation must be conceived of as an active engagement in the irreducible difference of language selfreformulating itself in the act of interpretation, only meaningful in its processuality. Gombrowicz’s share in this line of thought is his conception of dynamic existence working within and against the form it is inscribed in. Similarly, translation is written into the confines of language to which it must conform and against whose restrictive form it must struggle. Self-reformulation, however, necessarily entails distortion resulting from spatio-temporal creation of the text. If translation is then governed by the same mechanism, it must inevitably entail distortions of the translated text. After all, to what degree is Gombrowicz’s text warped in the process of translation? And how far is existential experience (inherent in translation) lost in this process? The aforementioned problem was elaborated on manifold by critics. One should guess, taking into account the linguistic complexity of Gombrowicz’s diction, that the writer’s path to an international readership in the post-war period must have been doomed, or at least hampered, in the first place. Such was the

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case up until shortly before the writer’s death, which critics have attributed to the French translations having served as templates for further translations into English, German, Italian, and Portuguese.13 These two-step translations could not but multiply the translators’ mistakes.14 Bearing in mind Gombrowicz’s performative language – not least producing but constituting plot and philosophy – these translations resulted in the bifurcation of the axes of language and philosophy. As pointed out by Maryla Laurent, Georges Sedir’s translation of Ferdydurke lacked essential textual features, which garbled the interpretation offered by the original. Also, “no terminological paradigm, so ardently pursued by Gombrowicz, was reconstructed” (2004: 33, my translation). The critic makes a good point here, as Gombrowicz indeed deploys ‘contagious’ vocabulary, which, especially manifest in his use of the parts of the body, consists in a network of inextricably intertwined words. Since this interrelation constitutes plot as well as a philosophical system of its own accord, the alleged mistranslation, by disregarding this condition, entails the philosophical arbitrariness of motifs otherwise comprising systematic philosophical rigour.15 It is further stated that Gombrowicz’s popularity in France can be attributed to “the internal rigour of Gombrowiczian language, [which] managed to overcome the shortcomings … of the bad translations” (ibid. 34, my translation). What kind of ‘internal rigour’ the critic imputes is, however, left unexplained. Bereft of the semantic energy generated by language, what remains of the novel’s philosophical potential can only be found superficially in plot, which might render Ferdydurke a philosophical novel – in the vein of Nausea – at its best. Accordingly, literary criticism centred on Gombrowicz’s symbiosis of language and philosophy must have produced miscellaneous critical responses and interpretations of the writer’s thought. Gombrowicz utilises existing forms, translatable through the appropriation of cultural equivalents by the translator, but language that reformulates these conventions is the main producer of meaning. What Polish criticism has produced in terms of the assimilation of Gombrowicz’s textual heterogeneity would not have been detected by foreign 13 Scrutinising the complete list of Gombrowicz’s translations – compiled by Rita Gombrowicz (2010: 805) – it becomes apparent that France and Germany can boast quite an impressive collection, with scarcely any works untranslated. 14 This second-hand translation is particularly evident in the case of Ferdydurke. Gombrowicz would divulge that this first ever Spanish rendition, which he co-translated, was a ‘version’ (as opposed to ‘translation’ in the literal sense of the word) of the novel. The subsequent Sedir’s translation into French (also supervised by Gombrowicz) was modelled on this semi-translation, which in turn served as a model for other foreign renditions. 15 To corroborate this thesis, the critic goes on to prove that while readily detectable in the source text, psychoanalytical reading cannot be enacted upon the translation.

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scholars. The disregard of philosophy inherent in language produces analogous distortions at a discursive level. Foreign critics, devoid of linguistic material, will dissect whatever is left over, which, further accelerated by the cultural discrepancy, entails necessary critical oversimplification. To put it bluntly, Gombrowicz’s work read abroad is arguably little else than obscure existentialism. Hence, steps have been taken by some translators to overcome both linguistic and cultural boundaries to convey complexity. One approach was to overcome intercultural difference by domesticating the cultural background. Peculiar Polish dialects turned into their foreign counterparts (as in the case of archaisms or obsolete genres parodied by Gombrowicz), and the distinctive Gombrowiczian idiolect was rendered through the translator’s own idiolect. Paradoxically, the closer to Gombrowicz translators come, the farer their work ends up. If Gombrowicz’s language is creative as opposed to reproductive, the translator’s language must respond to the creativity, and produce language which will constitute a parallel artistic act of his/her performativity by foreignising and neologising the text. His/her act of interpretation is to approximate the process of writing it struggles to imitate. Translation is thus writing emerging from the imitation of the same existential act of interpretation through the interplay of relatedness and difference. When it comes to the foreignisation of translation, Monika SurmaGawłowska claims that Ferdydurke in Vera Verdiani’s translation was highly insufficient as the original “turned into an exotic novel, written in an exalted, though conventional, language, full of oddly sounding phrases” (ibid. 61). The translator’s approach was to attempt to exoticise language in order to approximate Gombrowicz’s singularity. The critic admits that the translator is, however, highly competent: she forms neologisms, aligns language with plot, and yet fails to render Gombrowicz’s juggling of genres as a distance to form. As a result, the dominant intertextual character of his works passes unnoticed by an Italian reader. In the same league, the linguistically breakneck, culturally exotic and strongly intertextual Trans-Atlantyk16 posed the greatest challenge for transla16 In 1939, right before the outbreak of WWII, Gombrowicz (the main character of the novel) sails from Gdynia to Buenos Aires with his Polish fellows. Having learned about the outbreak of war, Gombrowicz’s compatriots decide to go to England and Scotland to participate in the war. Gombrowicz, however, stays in Argentina, where he befriends other exiled Poles, noted for their excessive conservatism and patriotism. They cultivate obsolete, Sarmatian values (hence Trans-Atlantyk is written in mock-gawęda– an obsolete dialect of the Polish Sarmatian gentry). Gombrowicz also befriends the homosexual Gonzalo who is in love with a young Pole, Tomasz’s son. Gonzalo takes pains to court the boy and implicates Gombrowicz in his shameless subterfuge for this purpose. Tomasz and his son now epitomise two bipolar notions: ‘fatherland’ and ‘sonland’. The father’s death would entail the son’s liberation (which brings to mind patriotic and anti-

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tors, being, particularly in the English speaking world, hailed untranslatable. The critics seem to have a good reason to keep up this stance. Archaisms, distinctive idiolect, cliché-neologism reversal, hypodermic intertextuality, all this put the translators off until no sooner than the mid-nineties, when the first English speaking translation, by Carolyn French and Nina Karsov, was released. TransAtlantyk has been quoted by English speaking scholars as an exemplification of a novel based on a dead genre written in an archaic language of the gentry, which has no equivalents in other languages, and hence poses impenetrable intercultural and intertextual boundary. Hence, the novel is invoked as a case study by Annie Brisset in the major translation studies compendium: Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Studies Reader (2000: 344, 370). The translators rendered Gombrowicz’s linguistic pyrotechnics into English as faithfully as possible, which resulted in a stalwartly exoticised text. Having resolved to bite into Gombrowicz’s idiolect, the translators foreignise English idioms, appropriate the language of the English Enlightenment, and foreground interlinguistic paronomasia (the sonic qualities of language). Simply, the foreignisation of English generates a highly innovative and bold translation playing up Gombrowicz’s linguistic complexity at the expense of readability and domestication.17 At this point, the critical appraisal of the translation varies. Jerzy Jarniewicz (2004: 198) goes on to argue that the translators produced a most challenging and creative version of the text, giving rise to linguistic experimentation, and disregarding Gombrowicz’s use of clichés. Since a Gombrowicz neologism is ineluctably deconstructed by a cliché, and vice versa, the sole foregrounding of linguistic creativity by foreignisation emerges as reductionist. What a Polish reader of the source text finds in Trans-Atlantyk is a linguistic backbone of clichés (or invented clichés) studded with neologisms rendering the Polish of the novel other to itself. However, the sense of familiarity of traditional discourse serves the purpose of appeasing the linguistic estrangement, rendering the work perplexing, yet still accessible in Polish, which may not be the case when it comes to its English counterpart in the English-speaking reader’s eyes. patriotic sentiments). Gonzalo seeks to orchestrate the father’s murder in order to be able to lure his son. The novel ends with an absurd scene wherein Tomasz lies on the floor (perhaps unnoticed) and all characters dance madly and belly laugh. 17 The translation strategy that Venuti dubs ‘foreignisation’ (that is breaking the conventions of the target text, and thus foreignising it, in order to approximate the source text) is indeed owned up to by the translators themselves: “The aim of literary translation is to make a foreign-language work into one of our own. But if we had tried to turn TransAtlantyk into either a modern English historical novel with archaisms (Barth, Burgess) or a period novel (Sterne), we would have lost more than we gained: namely, the Polish essence of the work, embodied in its unique style. Trans-Atlantyk is simply too Polish to be Englished…” (Karsov, French 1994: xxii).

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French and Karsov’s translation was also subject to manifold critical views articulated in many English and American literary magazines. For instance, elaborating on Gombrowicz’s untranslatability, John Bayley goes as far as to compare the linguistic convolution of Trans-Atlantyk with Joyce’s undecipherable last novel: At least Trans-Atlantyk is short: if it were as long as Finnegans Wake no one could have translated it, and no one would probably have read it in the original either… [T]he English of Trans-Atlantyk is simply not tolerable, as English or as anything else (1994).

If the alleged inaccessibility of the novel would be somewhat far-fetched from the perspective of a Polish reader of the original, Bayley’s appraisal of its English counterpart voices a genuine concern of the English reader faced with this recondite translation. Some would share this scepticism, asserting that the novel emerges as a suitable read only “[f]or those willing to risk losing their minds” (Marx 1994: 64); while others endeavoured to account for the obscurity and pitfalls of the translator’s judgment, by affirming that, against all odds, “even baffled readers may find themselves laughing out loud at the sheer bilious energy of its sentences” (Allen 1995: 9), or attributing the intricacy to the overall linguistic estrangement typical of post/modernism (Hyde 1996: 38). It can be inferred, however, that the critics with the command of Polish, whose reviews emerged from the comparative study of both the source text and its translation, provided more favourable reviews than those without the prior access to the original source. The bilingual critics articulate their appreciation of the translator’s brave attempt to navigate the dense thicket of intricacies involved in the translation process, underscoring the difficulty of the task, as opposed to commenting on the readability of the translation as an end-product. The monolingual critics, on the other hand, mostly make light of the novel’s linguistic complexity. Given a comparable degree of unreadability, the translations of Ferdydurke have accumulated similar concerns amongst Translation Studies scholars and literary critics. Should Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurkean idiolect alone not pose a sufficient hurdle to the translator, the novel’s hardheartedly multigeneric character will not let the translator leave unscathed. The translator will have come across the features of the philosophical tale, burlesque, parodied fable, novel of manners, as well as picaresque, satirical, existential and psychological novel, stitched with the threads of surrealism, fable, feuilleton, philosophical prefaces, parody, and oneirism, to name but a few. Accordingly, although hailed as Gombrowicz’s magnum opus, readers have seen just two English translations of the work: Eric Mosbacher’s (1961) and Danuta Borchardt’s (2000). The latter’s translation was immediately regarded as authoritative mostly due it being the first, and the only so far, translation directly

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from Polish. The other, a two-step translation from French had long awaited its successor, as the translator multiplied its errors by leaving out a number of problematic expressions (Jarzębski 2007: 188). Borchardt’s translation has been almost unanimously favoured over its earlier version – with a small exception of critics who considered Borchardt’s alterations irrelevant – given the effort the translator put in recuperating Gombrowicz’s linguistic vibrancy. Hence, Madeline Levine divulges that this translation brings the reader closer to the textual aspects central to Gombrowicz’s fiction (e.g. the ways structure and language impinge on plot) that are otherwise disregarded in translation (2002: 186). In fact, bereft of structural congruence with the original, or more precisely distancing itself from the original as a result of indirect translation, Mosbacher’s version, as informed by the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, “gives an altogether false impression of the author’s unconventional style” by being “deaf” to the writer’s language and providing a “severely bowdlerized version” of the novel (2000: 210). The Borchardt-Mosbacher ‘duel’ also comes to pass in their mutual translations of Cosmos. Once again, as in the case of Ferdydurke, critics underscore the faithfulness of Borchard’s first-hand translation, who allegedly commendably approximates Gombrowicz’s linguistic verbosity and “preserves Gombrowicz’s voice, as well as the performativity and the ambivalence of the text”, tapping into the philosophical depths and metatextuality of the novel (Iłłakowicz 2006: 718). By and large, the overall searing critique of Mosbacher’s translation is substantiated by the sheer fact that although the critic faithfully rendered the plot, the standardisation of language tears apart the linguistic tissue of the original text for the sake of readability. Gombrowicz’s diction is foregrounded to expose and make manifest the process of the novel’s creation; that is, language as meaningful in itself. Accordingly, Mosbacher’s bowdlerised version provides little else than a silhouette of plot bereft of philosophical depth. Does it suffice to do justice to Gombrowicz’s existentialism? Perhaps we mean here Existentialism as a doctrine and this is a possibility. For instance, analysing Italian translations of Gombrowicz’s works, Squillance-Piwowarczyk states that Gombrowicz, despite linguistic inconsistencies of the translations, is read as an existentialist (2004: 58). So is he, as argued above, in the eyes of English speaking critics. What the insufficient translations will not do justice to, though, are the textual workings that verge on the existential experience of writing and interpretation, upon which Gombrowicz’s peculiar existentialism – as opposed to existentialism as doctrine – is contingent. Borchardt, in her introduction to her own translation of Pornografia, for which she was presented the Found in Translation Award granted by the Polish Cultural institute in London and New York (London Review of Books 2010: 6),

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speaks of the utopian vision of “seamless translation” with the intention of doing justice to Gombrowicz (2010: xiv). How can the translator possibly render a ‘seamless translation’ if Gombrowicz’s original language is nothing like seamless? Gombrowicz’s language does expose its ‘seams’ whose function goes far beyond a modernist stylistic razzle-dazzle. Those lexical cracks of Gombrowicz’s idiolect and construction of the narrative structure are not least appropriated to bow low to the modernist ‘make it new’ war cry, but to expose the text formation as a strictly existential process. The text that manifests its incessant disruption of the norm (be it lexical or generic) betrays mechanisms typical of those of human existence: in other words, the changeable character as well as constant re-negotiation of forms it is inscribed in. It promotes difference as the only means by which the human being as interpreter reads the world and translates it; the difference which defies spatio-temporal stability of form, always in the process of reformulating existing norms. The existence of those textual seams undermines the assumptions of the finiteness of text, as they point to the uncategorisable blind spots of alterity, which give away the construction of the text. The always dynamic text is never fully in form, nor ever totally outside of it. With its construction laid bare, the text, caught in its creation, reflects upon the dynamics of writing. As long as writing is the reading of reality, translation is the reading of writing, with both processes being inherently dynamic and never stable. It is precisely in this sense that the reader can understand textual reality as strictly existential, as well as existence as inescapably linguistic. Re-invoking Derrida, translation is both impossible and necessary, as the translator’s choice hampers the dynamics of translation by undertaking to pin down difference, which never succumbs to form, yet the lack of an unvarying choice entails the lack of translation. This lack, in turn, necessitates the lack of the interpretation of the world, and from the moment that a human being reads and interprets the world s/he cannot but translate. With the intention of approximating these processes, the following part will interrogate the mechanisms of translation as analogous with Gombrowicz’s existential tropes. The consolidated conclusions concerning Gombrowicz’s existentialism at the level of language, elaborated upon in the previous parts, will serve as a starting point to the subsequent discussion on Gombrowicz’s existentialism in and as translation, one which is animated by poststructuralist theories. Hence, deconstructionist, postmodernist as well as hermeneutic notions will be invoked in an attempt to fill in the theoretical blind spots in Gombrowicz translation studies, which, as proved above, have been only superficially investigated by Continental scholars, and scarcely by British and American ones.

Chapter 2 Towards poststructuralist translation theory Gombrowicz’s status as an existentialist varies across different critical accounts, largely as a result of divergent translations of his works. Nevertheless, research has demonstrated certain accuracies in the interpretation of Gombrowicz’s tropes. Gombrowicz’s works are essentially, as agreed by critics, either mistranslated or, after a collision with Gombrowicz’s distinctive idiolect as well as impenetrable intertextuality, translated awkwardly at best. Strongly neologised and intertextual, the writer’s language caused translators to foreignise the translated text in quite the same manner, which resulted in obliterating Gombrowicz’s existential tropes. Other linguistically standardised translations served to oversimplify Gombrowicz’s philosophy, by reducing it to the level of plot only. In any case, despite the mistranslations, Gombrowicz is still regarded as an existentialist writer. Such a conception is, however, understood manifold across the countries in question, and contingent on their historical and cultural traditions. With regard to the latter, Gadamer’s notion of ‘fusion of horizons’ will be appropriated to account for the multifarious stances conditional on the proposed cultural and historical settings. The tentative consolidated conclusions provided by Polish and AngloAmerican criticism will be interrogated in what follows within the context of poststructuralist theories. This reading is animated by the suggestion that a poststructuralism informed by Gombrowicz’s tropes may uncover alternative ways of understanding the workings of translation as existence. Since hardly any study on Gombrowicz’s existentialism that dramatises the mechanisms of translation has been produced, this study seeks to complement the existing corpus of Gombrowicz translation studies. With this in mind, I will demonstrate the ways Derrida’s concept of différance, unsettling the liminal space between the text and translation, and Baudrillard’s simulacrum, as a parallel of Gombrowicz’s conception of form, both complemented by Gombrowicz’s tropes, show translation as an inherently existential process. Also, Gadamer’s hermeneutics will be invoked to point to the ways the reader’s performative reading as event blurs the clean-cut border between translation and interpretation, as well as text and existence. Gadamer’s hermeneutics also offers itself as a bridge between Polish and Anglophone traditions, by accounting for the differences in the intercultural mechanisms of trans-

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lation, as well as the inherently plurivocal character of the translation and interpretation processes.

2.1. Différance and the original text As argued above, when seen in the light of deconstruction, the translated text is governed by mechanisms analogous to those of the creation of its source text. The existential nature of text creation undermines the alleged marginal status of translation, unfalteringly cultivated by occidental metaphysics. The legitimisation of translation destabilises the totality of the source text by foregrounding shifting relationships anchored in cultural and historical difference inherent in both the original and translated texts. As maintained by Derrida, the primary text is thus by no means original, but constitutes just another signifier arising from the pre-established articulations of language. Since the original text is, just as translation, constructed on other texts, as a result of the intertextual foreknowledge with which the writer is furnished, the recognition of the original as authoritative proves unfounded. Hence, two assumptions materialise: seen through the lens of deconstructionist theory repudiating dialectic metaphysical assumptions of finiteness and presence, the translated text is the fruit of artistic production (as opposed to imitation); the original text is other than itself as it constitutes an assemblage of the intertextual cultural knowledge of the author and comprises the product of translation of pre-existing cultural artefacts. Why is then this phenomenon referred to as ‘original’ text if language has no origin? As remarked by Johnson, “the starting point is thus not a point but difference” (Davis 2001: 12). If so, it can be inferred that the original text is not original, but rather a product of intertextual references and differences from anterior texts inspiring its meanings. This infinite spatio-temporal succession of signifiers is what Derrida refers to by his landmark coinage of différance. This concept emerged as a rectification of de Saussure’s theory proposing that meaning is conditional on difference in the signifier-signified trajectory. Derrida bows low to the Sausserean foregrounding of difference in the process of obtaining meaning, yet rebuffs the idea of the living presence of a signified concept and goes on to argue that, “Every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences” (1968: 11). Translation is thus this process whereby a concept differs spatially and temporally from other signifiers it emerges from; in other words, signifiers are translated into subsequent signifiers yet to come. Translation renders a signifier no longer itself; makes it subscribe to difference as its constitutional force. The textual production is in that way translation in the first instance. This theory might

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serve to delegitimise privileging the primary text over its translation. As argued by Jennifer Varney: [W]ith Derrida’s deconstruction of the notion of origin, translation can no longer be seen as occupying a lower position in some generalised hierarchy, but instead is woven, sewn, or basted onto the source text it flanks and thus exists in a form of dialectic relationship that presages dialogue between the S[ource] T[ext] and the T[arget] T[ext] (2008: 117).

With the dialectically conditioned hierarchical structure undone, deconstruction points to the inextricability of, rather than to legitimizing, either the source or translated text. Since privileging is ineluctably totalising, and every form of textual totality is reductive, deconstruction shows the ways the “totality can be shaken” by demonstrating that it is instituted on the margins it excluded (Bass 1978: xvi). Translation is thus vital for understanding the irreducible difference of text and its inherent condition of the lack of uniform origin, as it dramatises the ways meaning cannot be reduced to a single linguistic sign. Such interlinguistic difference is further multiplied by the difference arising from cultural conditioning as well as a singular understanding of the world by the interpreters, which, in turn, is multiplied by spatio-temporal difference resulting from fluid existence and shifting circumstances. If meaning is not a living presence, but instead arises from its inherent difference from other meanings nurtured on the ever-changing contexts, it can be argued that translation is a necessary condition for the text’s interpretation. Translation in this sense, as a process of transposition of the meaning of a sign into another context, which in turn generates a new meaning, is inherent in the process of reading. Interpretation is always bound up with the inscription of a text into a new context, depending on the shifting conditions of the reader. This renders interpretations as not least receptive, but essentially performative, as every act of reading involves an active renegotiation of meaning; namely, the act is governed by the mechanisms of translation. Should one accept the assumption that “meanings only exist on the basis of a continuous transposition” (IJsseling 1995: 97) and recontextualisation, the interpreter can do little else than translate. Translation in this sense a process that is inextricably intertwined with the act of reading in the existential sense, whereby the reader confronted with the text anchored in different cultural and historical contexts processes the text by filtering it through his/her own interpretative perspective, and as a result participates in the process of transposition of meanings. Since every act of reading as translation/interpretation subscribes to the practice of the renegotiation of textual meanings, that is différance, translation may be conceived as strictly an existen-

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tial act calling to mind the act of interpreting existence (as text) by a human being (as reader). On a philosophical level, correspondences between Derridean différance and Gombrowicz’s form can be drawn. Gombrowicz aims to destabilise the illusion of form that deceptively presupposes existence and foists upon an individual a unitary meaning. Form imposes boundaries, hence the illusion of finiteness, beginning and end, whereas existence cannot succumb to the idea of clearly demarcated spatio-temporal borders. Gombrowicz’s existential imperative serves to escape form in order to disentangle it from the shackles of illusory uniformity, wherein a personal freedom is restricted to the cultural templates to which one cannot but fit in. Gombrowicz proposes that in order to understand existence one has to look beyond the fossilised form and constantly renegotiate the meanings of life through an interpretation of reality; and this can only be achieved in the course of (as opposed to before or after) existence. Since this process is fluid, no single meaning can assert itself as definite and airtight. Instead, existence is governed by a constant recontextualisation and, accordingly, reapprehension of the acquired meanings. In the vein of the logic of différance, Derrida introduces the notion of iterability via which the same text, with its intractable origin, is reiterated in different contexts. Pasted into various milieux, its meanings vary, since it is conditional on contextual displacement. This intertextual character of inscription bereft of its traceable origin, like différance, points to the unstable meanings contingent on fluctuating spatio-temporal relationships of texts and the contexts they are inscribed in. Hence, it is the very transposition of the same sign that renders it different from its former self. Engaged in an analogous practice of the recontextualisation of words this, in turn, parallels with the practice of translation. Gombrowicz’s untranslatability has been almost univocally attributed to the writer’s intertextual intricacies. As intertextuality has been regarded as commonplace to 20th century literature, one might wonder why Gombrowicz’s intertextual playfulness should pose such an impassable obstacle for translators. Michał Głowiński observes that Gombrowicz’s intertextuality is not appropriated arbitrarily, but is to function as meaningful textual practise by creating meanings at various (meta)fictional axes. The critic disclaims the positivist tendency towards adopting existing genres as having any share in this instance: “The influences and relationships inspiring positivist literary historians are not an issue here” (2002: 10-11, my translation). On the word of Samuel IJsseling, commenting on Derrida’s concept of iterability and his equitable reluctance to using the term ‘intertextuality’:

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It is important to note that here Derrida is not so much concerned with the relationship between texts, but rather with the birth and appearance, the decline and withdrawal of meanings (1995: 98).

In both instances, the relationship of a text with its preformed contexts and meanings could not matter less, since there is no original source of a text. The de-legitmation of its former contexts results in its inscription in the new one; or in other words, the way that the text emerges as meaningful and different from other texts in its own right in the unrelated milieu is precisely what matters. Gombrowicz and Derrida prove that the text achieves meaning through the process of its becoming, which serves to renegotiate the references with its contexts. The original text as a single entity is not only repudiated as authoritative, but also claimed not to exist at all. Or, to accept a weaker textualist stance, exists in its incessant deferral from itself. Consistent with the research centred upon the translations of Gombrowicz’s texts, the writer emerges as unreadable and untranslatable because his appropriation of existing genres veers away from the texts he attempts to imitate. Indeed, Gombrowicz offers his own account of obsolete genres, as in the case of the language of Sarmatian gentry in Trans-Atlantyk, or the hodgepodge of genres in Ferdydurke.18 Venuti goes as far as to propose that “if translation inescapably reduces source meanings, it also releases target potentialities which redound upon the foreign text in unsettling ways” (2000: 218). By the same token, Gombrowicz’s texts in English translation should serve as apposite case-studies for accounting for the ways the translated text subscribes to unstable meanings in relation to its source text. The previous tentative thesis voiced by Gombrowicz’s translators, putting forward that most translation attempts have resulted in strongly exoticised and unfaithful texts, will be tested in the next chapter.

2.2. Différance and hermeneutics Différance is understood as neither a concept nor a method; it is a textual practice aimed at showing the ways meaning never ‘fossilises’ into a homogeneous presence, but comes to being only as different from, and in relation to, other possible deferred meanings; it assumes the meanings that are yet to come and contingent upon subsequent spatio-temporal contexts. The presence of meaning is thus technically impossible, as the only meaning is difference, which entails still further significations leading to an endless chain of signifiers. 18 A case-study of a selected corpus of Gombrowicz’s texts will later seek to account for the correspondences shown.

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This practice is linked with Gombrowicz’s existential tropes, especially form and immaturity (reflected in his coinages of mug and pupa, respectively): Because there is no escape from the mug other than into another mug, and from a human being one can only take shelter in the arms of another human being. From the pupa, however, there is absolutely no escape. Chase me if you want. I’m running away, mug in my hands (Ferdydurke 281).

This oft-quoted passage from Gombrowicz’s magnum opus Ferdydurke19 constitutes the author’s existential creed, namely the impossibility and necessity to escape form in human interrelationships, which also becomes a metaphor of his stylistic playfulness, as well as – in the proposed theoretical context – a metaphor of deconstructive reading. Gombrowicz reckons that a human being is in a state of continuous spatiotemporal transcendence.20 Unconfined to a particular time or space, a human being exists only in movement, which is to be inevitably subdued by (metaphysical) identity or categorisation. The singularity of a human being is founded upon the adjournment of form through conscious transcendence (becoming), coming to fruition in no other way than in an encounter with the other, who verifies the identity of the self. This interaction imposes a form, which must be deferred (through escape): The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definitions. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form. Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe this perfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it (Diary 93). 19 Summary: The main character of the novel, Ferdydurke is the 30 year-old Joey, who is visited by his former teacher, professor Pimko, who puts Joey back to school by force. During the school days Joey is subjected by the school authorities to the program of infantilising children (“upupianie”). The main character is further exposed to a range of situations leading him to subjection to different forms of collective pressures. He is later sent to a liberal bourgeois family, where he meets Zuta, a young schoolgirl who Joey immediately falls in love with, where the pattern of modern tolerance serves as another token of conformity. As a result, the character turns his back on the responsibilities he is expected to attend to, and, persuaded by Kneadus, escapes in pursuit of a man unbound by ‘form’ (Gombrowicz’s master trope). Further episode takes place at the Hurleccy estate, proud of their aristocratic pedigree, where another form becomes deconstructed by the character: namely, master-slave power relations. Each of the three episodes serves to expose social hypocrisy and human obsequious attitude to form and subordination to collective standards of different sorts. 20 For further reference to the aspect of transcendence in Gombrowicz’s fiction see Fiała (2002).

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Should one accept that form ‘is not in harmony with the essence of life’, Gombrowicz asserts that although there is no escape from form, an individual must not succumb to form if s/he is to preserve their singularity as a human being. This seemingly contradictory stance is to imply that a human being, although incubated by form, relentlessly transcends its confines. Form entraps being in a static identification (meaning) on the one hand, yet on the other hand the individual transcends identity through the fluidity of existence reflected in the inscription in perpetually changing contexts. Form is thus both foisted on and deferred from a human being. To come to the point, a man is always dynamic in form; never immobilized, always outdoing its borders. Form will impose its determining force, which, however, will be reformulated and distanced. Statics of form and, depreciating its totality, dynamics of human existence become metaphors of différance translated into a literary existential template, with identity being a substitute for meaning in textual processes. In a similar vein, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s study of hermeneutics takes as its focal point the protean nature of textual meaning mediated by interpretation. In his reading of Gadamer’s hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur asserts: Words of the natural languages contain in their semantic area a potential of meaning which is exhausted by no actual usage, but which has to be constantly screened and sifted and determined by the context (1975: 90).

The reader chances upon the text with predetermined interpretative assumptions, resulting from the accumulation of cultural and historical knowledge, which is to assist the reader in decoding the meaning of the text. Nevertheless, the actual predetermination does not guarantee detecting a univocal textual meaning, as the latter is subject to reinterpretation, contingent on shifting historical and cultural circumstances affecting the reader’s interpretative processes. In Truth and Method (1960) Gadamer suggests the concept of fusion of horizons informing that the reader’s comprehension is founded on the prejudice stemming from his/her confinement to a single historical horizon, which limits the range of interpretation to the reader’s actual position, vulnerable to the homogenous totalising objectivity: To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away, but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion… [A] truly historical consciousness always sees its own present in such a way that it sees itself, as well as the historically other, within the right relationships. It requires a special effort to acquire a historical horizon. We are always affected, in hope and fear, by what is nearest to us, and hence we approach the testimony of the past under its influence. Thus it is constantly necessary to guard against overhastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning. Only then can we listen to tradition in a way that permits it to make its own meaning heard (Gadamer 1975: 304).

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The fusion is thus adaptation to the text’s horizons, which may be different from the reader’s. This practice will draw the reader near the horizon of meanings of the text in question, which, however, cannot be unanimously determined as their context is itself in flux. Therefore, does hermeneutics allow meaning(s) to be deciphered by the interpreter? It does, yet: Possibilities of multiple interpretation are opened by a text … Beyond the polysemy of words in conversation is found a polysemy of text which invites a plural reading. This is the moment of interpretation, in the technical sense of exegesis of texts (Ricoeur 1975: 90).

Here, a difference from Derrida’s deconstructionist reading becomes apparent. Hermeneutics points to a historical and socio-cultural variation generating textual polysemy, which, through the reader’s response and adjustment to the contextual variability, calls for analogous plural readings. For the most part, the main difference between hermeneutics and deconstruction is that while the former will seek to determine plural meanings through conventions, the latter denies the possibility of pinning meanings down at all (which, however, is not to assume there is no meaning). The meaning for the former is plural whereas for the latter it is illimitable. The plurality of meaning by no means entails semantic relativity. On the contrary, the reader takes his/her own subjectivity as criterion, since objective reading evokes a consolidated – hence unalterable and biased – interpretation of the other manipulated by the homogenous illusion of presence and a stable spatio-temporal position. This phenomenon of the interpreter’s dependence on totalising objectivity is brilliantly put by Paweł Jędrzejko, who asserts that: The event of reading is reliant on the harmony of two selves, wherein the other self is dominant. What befalls the reading self then? On the one hand, it is the thinking self, on the other hand, since rejected, it is compelled to think the thoughts of the other (2008: 39, my translation).

Hermeneutics puts credence to the activity of the subjective interpretation of ‘the reading self’ and, in turn, defers the objective hegemony orientated at manipulating the subjective heterogeneity of plural interpretative engagement with the text. The text may engender a disturbing polysemy; hence its plural meanings will be analogously apprehended through interpretative pluralism (Gadamer’s coinage), whereby the interpreter’s objective is to adapt her comprehension to the changeable context in order to unravel meanings at the moment of interpretation. This criterion will not jettison the plurality of meanings, yet the interpretation is anchored in an adjustment to specific socio-cultural vantage points, constituting an interpretative measure from which a particular reading orientation may be furthered. It is in virtue of this interpretative condition that herme-

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neutic interpretative pluralism eschews radical subjectivity and – as alleged by some scholars – semantic arbitrariness. With this in mind, hermeneutics, unlike deconstruction, legitimises the possibility of decoding meaning(s), which conforms with a semi-essentialist approach towards textual interpretation, as asserted by Ricoeur: “The choice for meaning is therefore the most general presupposition of all hermeneutics” (1975: 96). According to Derrida, on the other hand, meaning does not boil down to an identity dependent on the context; a meaning’s identity is contingent on its anterior difference from other signifiers entailing it. To put it crudely, while for hermeneutics meaning is identity, for deconstruction meaning (along with its identity) is integrally difference. The event of reading is a practice which (to reinvoke the Gombrowiczian trope) defers form by pluralising textual interpretation. This event should not be understood as passive reception leaving the reader contingent on the authorial intention or objectivity arising from cultural assumptions, but an active engagement of the reader in the interpretative process. These processes (intention, interpretation, objectivity) are inextricably intertwined with one another and exposed to the mechanism of différance. Hence, the event of reading involves an interpretation of seemingly the same text – yet interpreted differently due to diverse spatiotemporal reading conditions. Form in this process appears in the text as a physical presence, as the already written. Gadamer at this point divulges: Like all readings, all writing is a discontinuous temporal figure. Its final formation is that ‘it’ stands there, released from the process of its production and only thereby is it the authentic work that it is (1980: 7).

Yet the very form is simultaneously depreciated by the creative mental cognitive processes of the reader, who not only interprets, but also translates the text by negotiating meanings. In line with Gombrowicz, the pure escape from form may not be viable, but it remains the only means via which the form can be potentially deferred (which tacitly smacks of the writer’s peculiar existential ethical imperative). The deferral of form as an absolutised force permits singularity to come to (partial) fruition until it is itself reiterated. If so, it becomes inscribed in the register of form by the same token, while simultaneously transgressing its limits. Such deferral of form, as I demonstrate, resembles the Derridean processuality of language in différance. Yet Gombrowicz’s existential imperative asserting that a human being can only fully respond to existence through relentless process of becoming of him/herself, that is by reading existence in its here-andnow, calls to mind Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Although Gombrowicz was sceptical about a human ever being able to assume a meaning, as a result of a relentless revision (and deferral) of shifting contexts, this imperative proves

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meaningful in its own right. It marks the threshold of identity; it lays tangible foundations for the economy of difference through escape or game. Such an imperative represents an ethical value of its own accord. Deconstruction, however, precludes value whose dialectically mediated (illusory) totality is inherently logocentric. Therefore, since it is hardly plausible to disregard Gombrowicz’s existential values (freedom, choice, rejection of form) two options ensue: to read Gombrowicz at his most playful, as a pessimist without positive terms, and underscore the impossibility to obtain stable meanings (pace Derrida), or to treat his textual polysemy and incessant reformulation of contexts as the pursuit of tangible meanings: as existential continuity with a difference. After all, the urge to submit to the everlasting process of becoming (and to never fully become) is a search for meanings that render existence meaningful, and the human being is to narrow down the polysemy to his own meaning, which in turn will be adopted to new contexts yet to come. In other words, polysemy may not rule out the possibility of existing meaning/s (as per Gadamer). Where is Gombrowicz in this configuration? Is he a reader whose existential imperative institutes a criterion for accepting positive terms of the interpretation of existence? Or is he an advocate of difference as an inherent existential condition? Does he expect the reader to identify meanings in the shifting contexts? The partial answer to these questions arises from close reading of Gombrowicz’s selected texts and translations in chapters 3 and 4. Before the latter can be elucidated, the different ways deconstruction and hermeneutics appertain to translation call for attention. For both Gadamer and Derrida translation is this engagement in the text that serves to confront difference. Whenever the interpreter encounters textual fissures, s/he translates in order to grapple with textual alterity. Translation is thus an interpretative response the reader is exposed to, orientated at a maximum understanding of the text. In sum, there is no interpretation if the text is not already ‘translated’ into the reader’s idiocultural comprehension. At this point Derrida and Gadamer should be in unison. The problem, however, in this deconstruction – hermeneutics match is their irreconcilable conception of difference. Gadamer, for instance, has it that: Where there is understanding, there is not translation, but speech … Every language can be learned so perfectly that using it no longer means translating from or into one’s native tongue, but thinking in the foreign language (1975: 386-387).

For Gadamer, manifestly, translation is not a necessary condition of the interpreter’s encounter with the text. This arises from the assertion that not all language constitutes an obstacle to the reader and speaker. For the interpreter “understand[s] language by living in it” (ibid. 386), and the understanding by the reiteration of linguistic structures in the course of a human existence renders it

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familiar, and no longer other. In other words, Gadamer imputes that as long as the interpreter is not coerced to negotiate the textual meanings stretching beyond the confines of understanding (and accepts that such a condition is plausible) there is no room for translation. At first glance, this might appear to be at odds with deconstructive thinking. As argued above, translation for Derrida is all-pervasive, as the trajectory of meaning from a signifier to another signifier cannot relinquish difference as its inherent condition. Translation is thus needed to extract signification, but since meaning can be inferred (if deferred) at best and signification is merely a difference between two signifiers, the process of translation participates in this procession of signifiers, which is subject to différance. Meaning thus necessarily involves translation, as meaning is nothing but difference from other meanings. Accordingly, is there any way of reconciling those seemingly bipolar camps of Derridean and Gadamerian philosophies? It will be argued that their accounts of textual alterity piece together these seemingly irreconcilable theories. To come to grips with the textualterity (that is textual difference) the reader cannot but translate: at this point both Gadamer and Derrida concur. Given that the experience of otherness is scarcely avoidable in any text, the process of interpretation essentially boils down to translation. If the text necessarily employs otherness and thus requires translation (in the vein of deconstruction), it does not mean that Gadamer is wrong by arguing that translation does not exist unless confronted with difference. It means that Gadamer ascribes the emergence of difference to a given moment of its materialisation within the text; while for Derrida difference is nothing but all-pervasive. However, should we accept that (regardless of its place within the text) difference is reflected in the textual alterity, and no text can claim the absence of alterity within its own confines, the text will necessarily employ translation to challenge otherness. Should all this be true, should alterity be an inherent condition of the text, and hence, should every text be contingent on translation, the sticking point between Derrida and Gadamer might be partially resolved. Gadamer deems translation the extractor of meaning, and thinks of the process in positive terms, whereby the interpreter does obtain meaning through the interpretative interplay of understanding (familiarity) and translation (of the other into the familiar). Bluntly, translation negotiates significations so that meanings emerge. Gadamer’s interest in translation as interpretation is partially the result of his interest in the inextricability of linguistically mediated understanding from history – “The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically affected consciousness” (ibid.). Whereas conventional scholars would consider writing as a procedure that affects understanding of original meaning of the text, Gadamer would argue against it, claiming that “writing is self-

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alienation” (ibid. 392) since it cuts itself off from its own tradition in the act of the reader’s interpretation. Its meaning is thus not fossilised, but contingent on the reader’s historical position that affects his/her interpretation. Accordingly, while the immediacy of speaking entraps speech in the moment of its own tradition, writing shuns such entrapment through its exposure to multifarious interpretative contexts. In order to unravel what the text signifies, the reader does not go back to the original context, but rather negotiates the historical situation of the text by its juxtaposition with his/her own historical and cultural position. If a text is contingent on the context from which the reader approaches it, meaning whatever the reader has it mean, does Gadamer recognise the author’s intention? In this respect, both Derrida and Gadamer would repudiate traditional intentionalism. Gadamer’s stance in this respect is that, The horizon of understanding cannot be limited either by what the writer originally had in mind or by the horizon of the person to whom the text was originally addressed (ibid. 396).

Two theses crystallise here: the text always means more than its author has meant it to signify, and since the text can always subscribe to another reader (influenced by different spatial and historical situation as well cultural assumptions) the original context also counts for little. The plurality of meaning is not to imply arbitrariness, as the meaning is anchored in a particular context and thus fashioned by the reader. Translation transpires here. The reader appropriates this medium as a means of challenging the alterity of the original meaning and context, by transposing them into the matrix of her/his own interpretative idioculture. In this sense, Gadamer claims that while not all interpretation is translation (the claim which Derrida would most probably rebut), all translation is interpretation, and textual otherness can be approached in no other way than through translation. Following this line of thought, I, as an interpreter of Gombrowicz’s tropes, contingent on his own historical and cultural contexts (different from Gombrowicz’s as well as from Gombrowicz’s critics) will render alternative reading of the writer’s tropes. The ways in which the practice of différance epitomises Gombrowicz’s vision of reality, will be demonstrated as being reflected in his intratextual existential tropes. Gombrowicz’s literature, as instantiation of the processes of différance, can be located in various socio-historical contexts, and put through the reader’s interpretation, who is confronted with difference and determined by miscellaneous conditions, in which s/he and the object of understanding are situated. Gombrowicz will now be read not only through postmodernist lens, but also through alternative cultural British and American contexts, in order to test the

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ways Gombrowicz is interpreted in various traditions through the translations of his texts. Since certain critics (as above) attributed Gombrowicz’s tropes to postmodernist writings, Gadamer’s hermeneutics has stimulated me to interrogate the contemporaneity of Gombrowicz. Accordingly, does Gombrowicz emerge as a pioneer of postmodernism (as imputed by many a critic) through his elaborate system of existential tropes? Perhaps he might appear as postmodern given that current criticism, overwhelmed by the poststructuralist mainstream, can scarcely look beyond the contemporary critical trends, and hence attribute postmodernist practices to Gombrowicz’s existentialism. With regard to the latter, postmodernist criticism will be invoked in the ensuing section.

2.3. Translating, simulating Jean Baudrillard introduces simulacrum as a supplementary reality (attached to the real) which substitutes and destabilises the ‘natural’ reality from its central position – which, in turn, forms the true reality. Applied by the theorist to explicate the ways signs subversively displace the objects they signify, simulacrum is not merely referred to as a metaphor for the workings of language, but also to account for the analogous processes on the anthropological axis pertaining to the relations between (human) nature and culture. In this process signified reality displaces the real and culture obliterates nature. A text that suggests itself as the epitome of becoming on the fictional axis is Gombrowicz’s Cosmos21 (as well as cosmos as a trope). Baudrillard argues that when culture replaces nature, the sense of longing for the lost real emerges, and 21 Summary: The plot of Cosmos – a peculiar instance of modern picaresque – revolves around the narrator Witold, accompanied by Fuks, who spends summer holidays in a guesthouse in Zakopane run by Mrs Wojtys. His attention is immediately captured by Katasia, who has distorted lips as a result of a car accident. He also accidentally notices a hanged sparrow. Fuks, in turn, discerns a mark on the ceiling shaped as an arrow, which leads the characters to a string-hanged stick. Witold suspects some mysteries are going on in the house, thinking the signs must stand for something logical. Since then Witold and Fuks are busy deciphering the signs: hanged sparrow, arrow, hanged wooden stick, a nail hammered into the wall, teapot, comprising the narrator’s meaningful constellation. The pursuit of the interdependence between the encountered traces, becomes the narrator’s obsession, and his personal meaningful cosmos: (“...being a bird, it was related to the sparrow ...being suspended in the sky ... hanged cat and hanged sparrow.... conferred a regal, transcendental quality on the idea of hanging”) (Cosmos 1967: 100).Witold is also attracted to Lena who is married to Louis. The series of hanging is complemented by Witold who hangs Lena’s cat. In the final part the characters collectively go to the mountains. During the stay Louis hangs himself, and Leon, Lena’s father, masturbates in the place of an erotic adventure his experienced whilst young.

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the panic-stricken culture hankers for the lost real by way of the overproduction of artefacts resembling the absent nature, which not only fails to resurrect the natural condition, but also produces further simulations incessantly contributing to the inevitable hegemony of the artificial signs. As Baudrillard puts it: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (1994: 6). Any attempt at revivifying nature will merely produce its simulated counterpart: the simulacrum of nature, hence just another sign. Therefore, the real returns as a distorted image, a simulation of itself.22 Gombrowicz’ Cosmos is a demonstration of the substitution of the real by the cosmos of signs, which, although arbitrary, attempt to construct their own immanent illusory logic, reflecting upon a parallel attempt of culture to attribute meaning to the haphazard artefacts it, however, legitimises. In accordance with Baudrillard, the arbitrary cosmos of cultural constructs does not reconstruct the real; it merely fabricates the representations of the real and multiplies its own simulacra. Both Gombrowicz and Baudrillard assert that the simulated reality of social constructs cannot renounce its resultant arbitrariness. The human being as an interpreter of the world comes upon difference, which can be approximated through the translation of the encountered objects into his/her idioculture, to challenge the precarious alterity. The translation results in the construction of familiar artefacts, via which the interpreter comes to terms with the arbitrariness of signs. However, the net of cultural artefacts that the interpreter painstakingly weaves to grapple with the arbitrariness of existence cannot, in turn, relinquish their contingency, as both the subjective and collective legitimation of cultural values is nothing but haphazard. The interpreter might be driven by the predetermined logical assumptions, upon which the dialectical values of totality, unity, hierarchy etc. are fashioned, but because the reader’s dependence on a particular spatio-temporal situation impinges upon the process of interpretation itself, the reader is biased by his/her current moment of tradition (Gadamerian coinage). Accordingly, contingent on the randomness of the interpretative backdrop, the reader’s legitimisation of culture is itself inherently arbitrary. Cosmos dramatises such arbitrariness of culture by deconstructing the illusion of solidity of accepted reality; as well as the objective validity of the ethically mediated legislative gestures of collective assumptions. Gombrowicz’s protagonist thus creates his own meaningful economy, which strikes at the foun-

22 Baudrillard was engaged in the investigation of parallels between semiotic and cultural phenomena, which is of high pertinence to this research for examining liminality between language and being founded on the culturally mediated interpretation; this is further elaborated on at length in chapters 3 and 4.

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dations of the acknowledged objective order of the external world. Baudrillard, in his turn, questions the stability of received reality: [S]imulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials … It is no longer a question of reduplication … [i]t is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes (1994: 2).

In his radical interpretation of the postmodern turn, Baudrillard goes as far as to argue that our cultural products not merely blur the sense of reality, but actually are the reality; the reality driven by semiotic substitution of nature. The simulation of reality is no longer a version of nature, as it breaks all possible ties with the lost real. With the ‘referentials’ to the real being liquidated, simulation is governed by the disconnected signs, making no pretence to legitimacy. In such a reversed account of the real, the translated text, as parallel with the notion of the new reality, attains an analogously unsettling position. In her juxtaposition of Derrida’s with Baudrillard’s theories, Sally Hart concludes: For what both men ‘uncover’… is an originary experience of language, time and the other which makes im-possible our made-meaningful world. The consequence of this groundless ground of thought and being, being that … in even our finest grained analyses, our tightest discursive closures, our most refined definitions, the world (the thing itself) always escapes closure (International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2008).

Along these lines of thought, the failure of the human cultural project to encapsulate the world in a homogenising meaning is also the failure of translation to render a univocal meaning. As such, translation will essentially fail in its attempts to convey a direct meaning from one linguistic system to another, and since no meaning can be obtained, translation can only be meaningful as a process of confronting the difference of the text without positive terms, with its legitimacy being realised in its coming to (partial) terms with the arbitrariness of signifiers. However, Baudrillard’s theory of simulation casts new light on the deconstructive practice, not only through its engagement in the consumerist production, but also helps draw parallels between simulacrum and the translated text. As proposed, Gombrowicz’s existential tropes pair up with the processes of différance on the textual axis, producing protean (always in potentia) meanings, whose heterogeneity, resultant from a historical situation, depend on the performative act of interpretation, which renders the reader the ‘co-author’ of semantic production on the one hand (as maintained by Derrida), and (should one invoke Gadamer) the exorcist of the textual heterogeneity on the other. The reader is, in other words, both the producer of semantic difference and the con-

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solidator of meaning, as interpretation necessarily aspires to synthesis. Put this way, is it possible to conceive of the ‘text’ in singular when a meaning entails further meanings, and text in the act of interpretation is nothing else but another (different from itself) text in subsequent readings? If text is already ‘texts’, it is never itself but other than itself, and this otherness is the fruit of spatio-temporal difference, heterogenising, and thus pluralising text, as a result of which, the text becomes the simulation of itself. Hence, paradoxically, form, existence, meaning, and text will remain themselves only by being other than themselves. Their raison d’être is approached only if the act of interpretation becomes simultaneously the act of translation (of meaning into other meanings), with the text being simulacrum of itself as a translation. In Baudrillardian terms, following the logic of simulacrum, the translated text is the result of a simulation of ‘original’ meaning, with the intention of approximating it in the new system. However, because the text always escapes closure in meaning, and interpretation means little else than what the reader makes of it in his/her unstable moment of tradition, and because the meaning cannot escape its historicity, hence return to its original meaning, the translated text is just a new programmatic and self-sufficient reality of the text it simulates. Seen from the opposite vantage point, the source-text, simulating itself, by being subject to reformulation contingent on the reader’s interpretation as event, is inherently other than itself, and automatically its own translation. With its authoritative place unsettled, the source text functions as the simulacrum of itself, granted that – existing nowhere outside of the act of reading – it succumbs to its own spatio-temporal difference. Just as the text produces the others of itself through interpretative polysemy, translation functions as just another interpretation of the text produced by the creative reading of the interpreter. Faced with its inevitable condition as simulacrum, the translated text becomes thus a dangerous supplement of the source-text, because the translation may entail further interpretations of the text generated by a different historical and socio-linguistic position of the translator, and thus destabilise the unwavering original status of the source-text. Accordingly, the next part will interrogate the Derridean concept of supplement with the aim of accounting for the unstable relationship of values at the original-source text axis.

2.4. Supplement Supplement is yet another term by Derrida, in his Of Grammatology (1967), coined to account for a shifting relationship and the unstable equilibrium between speech and writing. The concept expounds the ways a supplement, as an additional component, supplies and eventually substitutes its core; in my study

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this notion will work in tandem with Baudrillard’s simulacrum as the epitome of the reversal of textual hierarchy between the source text and its translation. Derrida explicates the subversive textual policy of supplement in the following passage: But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace... As substitute it is not simply added to the positivity of presence… Somewhere, something can be filled through sign and proxy. The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself (1967: 145).

According to the quasi-logic of deconstruction, the “thing” cannot be conceived as an organic whole, as it always displays lacunae that disrupt its totality. Supplement is thus not merely an addition to the text: it seriously threatens to obliterate it. Supplement points to difference that the text, in order to signify, must repudiate. With the difference laid bare and univocal meaning ruled out of court, the supplement no longer occupies a marginal position to the body it serves to supply. The foregrounding of supplement functions to reverse the dialectic hierarchy of values taken for granted by Western metaphysics. It has to be noted, however, that this deconstructive practice does not legitimise the contradictory values the supplement divulges, as the mere reversal would fall nothing short of just another dialectic practice. It is rather to inform that no totality is actually total, and nothing means what it is supposed to mean, as every word carries with it a supplementary meaning, which unsettles the accepted or intended signification. Supplement proves that nothing can escape its inherent difference (its intrinsic other) that serves to undo all fixed cultural assumptions. With the latter in mind, Derrida exemplifies the workings of the supplement to overturn the favouring of speech over writing by occidental metaphysics, as well as the privileging of nature over culture. This shows an obvious analogy with Baudrillard’s simulacrum. As Derrida would have it: It is indeed culture or cultivation that must supplement a deficient nature, a deficiency that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature…. [T]here is lack in Nature and because of that very fact something is added to it … [T]he supplement comes naturally to put itself in Nature’s place (ibid. 149).

Baudrillard asserts that contemporary postmodern culture is all simulacrum, which in its attempts to resurrect the squandered nature can merely produce a distorted, simulated image of nature, cutting off all references to the original. Derrida’s supplement, in a similar vein, dramatises the displacement of nature by culture, with the latter being the dangerous supplement that de-prioritises nature. Since nature needs culture to supplement its “lack” it suggests that is has an inherent fissure that repudiates its very status as nature. If the interpreter is to understand nature, s/he is to filter it through the cultural assumptions that they

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have accumulated. Culture as supplement is this element that will not allow a return to nature, as culture will foreground itself as the negotiator of nature. Culture thus translates nature into an other-than-itself, as, having subscribed to culture as different from itself, it can never return to its original representation, but merely as another version of the outcome of its reciprocal relations. Should this mechanism offer itself for the source-translation axis, the supplement will serve to disturb the hegemony of the original text as authoritative to the translated text. As argued above, the original text is nothing like original, as being approached in different acts of interpretation, it subscribes to a range of different meanings. Therefore, the text translates itself into yet another version of itself, conditional on an event of interpretation, as well as the spatio-temporal situation of the interpreter. For the same reason, the translated text cannot be merely regarded as marginal when juxtaposed with the source text, as the latter is already its own translated version. According to the logic of the Derridean supplement, as well as Baudrillad’s simulacrum, the translated text comes to the fore, given that the source text can exist in a linguistic form that is different from itself, which undermines the conception of the original as a fixed self-presence. The source text does not exist in the form it purports, but in the translation into meanings that are different from it, hence escaping the stability of meaning it promises. If meaning exists in no other form than in its translation into new meanings, the source text “defin[es] itself against the elements it banished to its outside” (Davis 2001: 35). Being defined by a dangerous supplement of translation, the source text must exist only in difference from itself, and from the meaning it puts forward. This can exist nowhere outside translation contingent on the interpreter’s event of interpretation, reformulating the meanings of the ‘original’ text. Having delineated the theoretical setting, this study will seek to posit that Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric is constructed in manifold ways in settings determined by various traditions. The existential experience, modelled by Gombrowicz’s text(s), is based on the interpreter’s confrontation with the liminality of space between the word and being, and constitutes the effect of the interpreter’s encounter with the practice of différance. The very practice, inscribed in Gombrowicz’s self-reflective text, is a pointer of the existential order – both embedded in fiction and extratextual – whereby the text is put through receptive and performative interpretation and animates further interpretations.

Chapter 3 Voicing the Other: text and existence Narration, through language and plot, offers a version of a (textual) world whose alterity stimulates the reader’s active interpretive engagement with the text and opens up space for singular interpretations. This certainly holds true for narratives that problematise the language-plot dichotomy and eschew preprogrammed semantic uniformity that is contingent on the intentional preeminence of the author (as befits plot-centred novels). The writer must thus produce language, which exposes narrative lacunae, unsettling non-spaces of textual alterity that are out there in the text, and up for grabs to the reader. This stems from the assumption that textual interpretation falls back on the production of difference inviting the reader’s textual engagement. As observed by Wolfgang Iser: We shall call this difference a liminal space, because it demarcates both the subject matter and the register from one another, as it does not belong to either but is opened up by interpretation itself. Caused by interpretation, the liminal space is bound to contain a resistance to translation. However, that energizes the drive to overcome it. Thus interpretation also turns into an attempt to narrow the very space it has produced (2000: 6).

The said liminal spaces that fuel interpretation and ward off translation, as well as navigate between language and plot, constitute peculiar textual phenomena animating alternative interpretative sensibilities. The reader is no longer occupied with a ready-made and authorially produced meaning, but is rather pressed to interrogate the margins that give rise to the sense of alterity s/he encounters, and takes to its very limits the interpretative subject of inquiry. Gombrowicz, on his part, offers literature that departs altogether from functional narrative assumptions regarding the dialectic bifurcation (or otherwise fusion) of language and textual reality, by dramatising the ways one foregrounds or unsettles the other. Gombrowicz’s characters participate in the becoming of a reality; with this reality being essentially linguistic. Just as readers complete the textual places of indeterminacy (Ingarden’s coinage, Brinker 1980: 212) with their subjective interpretations in the act of hermeneutic experience, Gombrowicz’s characters are to the same measure confronted with liminal nonspaces, whose alterity they cannot but endeavour to domesticate. In this fashion, Gombrowicz’s novels are self-reflexive; they bring home to the reader that the existential anxieties of characters are parallel to the hermeneutic experience of

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reading: the reality they are confronted with is textual, be it fictional or real. For instance, the reader will not only be struck by the unsettling of the realimaginary dichotomy in The Marriage23, but above all with the fact that it matters little which of the two represents a true meaning of the play. What counts is the very undecidability, the liminality between the two versions of reality, whose becoming extends the economy of alternative (true?) existential reality and, consequently, becomes meaningful itself. Liminal non-spaces in Gombrowicz are deployed to inform the experience of the (textual) reality of characters (as interpreters) and this serves to decentralise meanings. Othering the familiar of the text manifests itself as a way to drive the character (or interpreter for that matter) to confront strangeness. Interpretation serves to renegotiate the given meaning, be it defamiliarisation of the mundane (as demonstrated in Cosmos) or domestication of the other (as in The Marriage). The reversal of the familiar-other relation is not as much to obtain a meaning by compromising otherness or upsetting the familiar, but to underscore the plurality of meanings and extend the economy of difference. Should this assumption be accepted, the other in Gombrowicz is anything but radical, as the totality of the other would, by way of dialogic reversal, render meanings absolute and homogeneous. Dichotomies in Gombrowicz are never symmetrical, but rather wayward, which is to engender plurality (as showcased in ‘Child Runs Deep in Filidor’ in Ferdydurke). Hence, the other is liminal and always indeterminate (neither comfortably familiar nor totally other) as opposed to absolute. Further, the process of domesticating the other (or exoticising the familiar) is not dialectic, as the other is domesticated by means of another other.24 Every event, thus, has its double bind, is constantly deferred by incessant 23 Summary: The main character, Henry, hangs around with his comrade, Johnny. They suddenly end in a tavern run by his father. From this point on, the reader is unsure whether the unfolding surreal events take place in a dream, or are a result of some delusion. The tavern is a venue for psychological battle between the young and the old, real and unreal, nature and art(ificiality). The characters are mesmerized and paralysed by their own grotesque artificiality. The characters resemble string-puppets or actors unsure of their identity. Therefore, Henry attempts to name and arrange the world around him. The surrounding keeps metamorphosing, dependent on Henry’s, now king, whim. Henry seeks to fathom his own mind. Characters around him symbolise different traits: Johnny innocence, Drunkard – evil, power. Henry grapples with heavyweight philosophical issues concering truth, meaning of life. 24 In Ferdydurke, the narrator’s double – as the other – is chased away by the narrator in order to restore the familiar, but the act of slapping the imaginary/real double (who is himself indeterminate, in a sense that he occupies a liminal place between the real and imagination, carnality and spectrality, narrator’s impersonation of himself and the other) is itself strange.

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doubling, and cannot renounce its liminal status. This provokes a chain of differences as opposed to the dialogic relation of events. Liminality is thus this other of (textual) reality and language, which renders the incessant escape from form possible, without falling into a trap of absolutes. This contextual translation of the character’s plunge into the non-milieux of alterity, into the realm of the reader’s hermeneutic experience, is highly suggestive of the liminality between language and being. In view of this, the section will attempt to elucidate the ways Gombrowicz’s narratives dramatise liminal non-spaces of alterity between language and being as hermeneutic experience. Gombrowicz’s works (Cosmos, The Marriage, Ferdydurke) have been selected for close-reading to test arguments against the conceptual backdrop of poststructuralist hermeneutics and the deconstructionist study of interpretation.

3.1. Différance against Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric To juxtapose Derrida with Gombrowicz is to inevitably point to the confluence of their fundamental philosophical sensibilities; ones which pertain to the interplay of literature, language and philosophy, underscoring the subversive nature of text, forefronting the marginal, reversal of the clean-cut cultural hierarchies and dualities, as well as the undoing of totalities. Neither failed to notice that (textual) reality is governed by processes other than the dualistic constructs put forward by Western metaphysics. Since the nature of (a certain reading of) the world, by shunning dialogic oppositions, evinces itself in the other of dialectics, both Gombrowicz and Derrida accentuate difference – through liminal textual fissures – as constitutive of the becoming of text or existence. After all, what else are Gombrowicz’s textual practices redolent of if not différance: the deconstruction of form (enacted in the tropes of mug and pupa); the heterotopias of (national) identity; immaturity as a dangerous supplement; the generic indeterminacy. There is, however, a gulf between Derrida’s and Gombrowicz’s conceptualisations of difference. Although both were occupied with the ontology of text, the latter would be unable to discount its existential (in the anthropological sense of the word) aspect, which has a hold upon his conceptualisations of form. In Derrida’s terms form technically does not exist, for, as a result of bearing the traces of pre-existing forms as well as forms yet to come, it is already different from itself due to its entanglement in a perpetual flux of auto-creation. Difference precluding presence of any signification (or actually promoting its dynamic nonself-presence) can merely produce a chain of differences: forms always in pro-

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gress, energised by their active self-differentiation, as opposed to a monolithic, homogenous form. Form can only aspire to the absolute, yet its totality never comes to fruition. If Gombrowicz’s form is as protean as Derrida’s (after all the characters, language, narrative, tend to be indeterminate and existential encounters with the other systematically deconstructed), its presence is, however, taken seriously when approached from an existential perspective. Form is naturally totalising, and one has to actively engage in his/her own becoming in order to disentangle themselves from forms imposed by others in order to establish their singularity (which must remain dynamic). However, presented in light of the rhetoric of interpretation, the metaphysical totality of form pairs up with authorial intention, whose scrutiny is valid only when the reader is inclined to delve into the biography of text and author. Otherwise, the metaphysical form, although totalising, is merely illusory, along with its imputed absolutism. The only metaphysical form that impinges on the process of interpretation is the reader’s existence and the shifting contexts from which the reader advances the text. The latter, however, does not pretend to homogenise meaning. Viewed from this slant, both conceptions of form are inextricably bound up with each other; that is both acknowledge form as an artificial social construct engineered by metaphysics. Deconstruction assumes difference as a raison d’être of a subject, whereas Gombrowicz adopts an ethical imperative to challenge the artificial totality of form through the becoming of a subject. It must be noted that Gombrowicz’s philosophy of form is articulated largely in his fiction and paratexts in the form of metaphysical commentaries, which count for little in the analysis of the construction of the text as event. An ontology of the text, on the other hand, as opposed to existentialism, humanism or ethics, one devoid of the author’s intentional bias or imperatives, dramatises its own becoming through the appropriation of difference inherent in the text: a modus operandi of its own becoming. Gombrowicz’s narrative non-spaces of alterity merged with the fictional (and textual) escape from form ingrained in the fibre of language, devoid of metaphysical commentary as well as ideological affinities, might serve to heal the rift between the Derridean ‘undecidables’25 and Gombrowicz’s tropes at the level of the ontology of text, as well as, as shall emerge from the close reading of primary texts, demonstrate différance at work. The common denominator for close reading will not be as much the Derridean customary writing-speech de25 Derrida calls his theoretical non-concepts by this name: “I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, ‘false’ verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics” (1981: 43).

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construction, nor the typically Gombrowiczian metaphysical, existentialhumanistic dimension to his texts, but the self-reflexivity of the text in the existential experience of reading/writing.26 Gombrowicz’s text provokes deconstructive readings by way of demonstrating différance in plot and language and simulating the ways the reader confronted with the textual indeterminacy negotiates meanings. Approaching Gombrowicz’s oeuvre holistically, it becomes apparent that certain novels dramatise the workings of différance through fiction. Ferdydurke,27 for instance, demonstrates the fallibility of establishing meanings – other than those constructed artificially by metaphysics – through the rhetoric of form effectuated in the characters’ escape from social norms. Divided into three constituent parts, the novel is structured symmetrically, with every part being deconstructed by eclecticism at the level of genre, mirrored in the bizarre brawls of characters. The following parable excerpted from the novel provides a simulation of semantic doubling: He invited Flora Gente to our table, treated her to a glass of Cinzano, and to test her, he began synthetically: ‘The soul, the soul.’ She answered in a similar but slightly different vein, she answered with a part of something. ‘I!’ the Professor said earnestly, searchingly, and in the hope of awakening her dissipated self. ‘I!’ She replied: ‘Oh, ‘you’, very good, five zlotys.’ ‘Unity!” heatedly exclaimed the Professor. ‘Higher Unity! The One!’ ‘It’s all one to me,’ said she indifferently… (Ferdydurke 94).

In this passage, Filidor, The Professor of Synthesis who painstakingly attempts to ‘synthesise’, in the literal meaning of the word, Flora who is the Professor of Analysis anty-Filidor’s mistress. Flora proves an exceptionally acute reader of the Professor’s text, as well as the deconstructor of his rhetoric of assertion. The Professor’s totalising intention to impose absolutes, as author, through language negates itself; since its metaphysical discourse can only speak of, rather than be 26 Bereft of the metaphysical context in which both the writer and philosopher worked and developed their conceptual frameworks, this common ground of processuality of reading informs on the parallel conceptualization on the axis of existence and text (or in fact their intermingling). 27 Throughout chapter 3, the 2000 translation by Danuta Borchard will be used for close reading.

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at one with, the meaning it purports. Hence, language aspiring to absolutism, that is to the other of itself, becomes exposed. This is illustrated as a deconstruction through language: ‘soul’ is destabilised by ‘part’, the singular ‘I’ by (also) pluralising ‘you’, the indivisible ‘One’ becomes the arbitrary ‘all one’. The simplification of plot serves as an interpretive trap; it would have us believe (as manifested in the rhetoric of linguistic duel) that what the reader faces is the overtly signalled fable of the ‘synthesis – analysis’ binary opposition. Fiona is, however, the reader who exposes the author’s intentional fallacy (W.K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe Beardsley’s coinage) by renegotiating meanings and opening up semantic textual space through an active interpretation that eschews dialogic relations. The fact that she responds to the authorial intention “in a similar but slightly different vein” reveals what the Professor’s intention attempts to conceal. Namely, that absolute values emerge as already other than what they maintain to be in the act of dynamic interpretation. ‘One’ is always already ‘all’ and continues to be little else than its spatio-temporal dissemination into other significations – anything but binary – which never stop to signify and never stop signifying at the same time. Fiona’s ‘slightly different’ reading embodies thus a polysemic and shifting as opposed to a radical other of interpretation. Shifting significations are in fact illustrated in manifold ways throughout Gombrowicz’s oeuvre. While Ferdydurke laments the impossibility of establishing subjective form, untainted by the metaphysical totality, Cosmos28 further unsettles the integrity of meaning by underscoring its inherent arbitrariness. This is reflected not only in the fact that a chimerical meaning is patched up to an object (the main character sees a string of arbitrary objects – a sparrow, stick, cat, lips, etc. meaningful), but also in the way the text escapes the meanings it promises, by destabilising the newly established significations (by dint of linguistic reiteration). An encounter with a hanged sparrow early in the novel will infect the narrator’s interpretation of reality: A bird appeared, hovering high and motionless in the sky. Was it a vulture, an eagle, a hawk? At any rate it was not a sparrow, but its not being a sparrow made it a nonsparrow, and it was connected with the sparrow by virtue of this” (Cosmos 98-99).

Conditioned by cultural predeterminations, the character settles down to homogenising the scope of observation, the bird, which objectively must be ‘a vulture, an eagle, a hawk’: anything but the aleatory and objectively ‘unsuitable’ ‘sparrow’. In the vein of différance, a homogenous meaning attached to the bird automatically extends the economy of difference. The word (‘bird’) is founded on the distance it ventures to harness by semantic homogeneity. The narrator thus defers the assumed meaning by proposing the not immediately meaningful 28 Mosbacher’s 1967 translation will be used for close reading throughout chapter 3.

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‘sparrow’, whose meaningfulness banks on the semantic effect (as opposed to an actual uniform meaning) it evokes. In sum, it is a trace,29 which does not assert but subversively approximates meaning through difference (‘non-sparrow’). As long as the ‘bird’ bears the trace (‘non-sparrow’) of the subjectively conditioned, seemingly absurd sparrow (that so effectively haunts the narrator’s imagination), it asserts itself in semantic heterogeneity energised by hermeneutic experience, and exposes the cracks of functional assumptions of metaphysics through language. In Cosmos, Gombrowicz tends to deconstruct the real by heterogenising an organic whole, or otherwise, synthesising fragmentary elements: I was quickly exhausted by the profusion of things such as the chimney, a pipe, the bends in the gutter…. I realised that what attracted or perhaps captivated me about those things was one thing’s being behind another; the pipe was behind the chimney … just as Katasia’s mouth had been behind Lena’s … [T]he connection between Lena’s lips and Katasia’s only became plainer. But then I smiled, because there was nothing whatever in common between Katasia’s dissolute perverseness, that indecent, gliding mouth movement, and Lena’s fresh, virginal, half-open lips. Except that they were ‘related’ to each other as on a map (ibid. 19-20).

The mundane reality is deconstructed twofold here. The arbitrarily arranged ‘things’ are interlinked through the thread of subjective geography, somewhat meaningful in the eyes of the narrator, yet the spatiality (‘behind’) simultaneously defers and distances the objects from one another. The spatial aspect further deconstructs the disturbing relation between the girls’ lips. By stating that “there was nothing whatever in common between” Katasia’s “perverse” and Lena’s “virginal” lips the narrator only conceals the obvious fact that the binary opposition actually links the lips given the natural metaphysical assertion that every opposition is relation. But this does not yet unsettle the objective association between the two. What does, however, is again the geography of the liminal: namely, the way the lips are united through spatial doubling. The natural (perverse-virginal) opposition might link the lips, but does not exhaust the problematic ‘union’ the narration hints at. In its place, the aleatory spacing does just that: it approaches only if it distances the objects of enquiry, whose fortuitous traces of difference mark the disturbing geography of ‘relation’. The narrator of Cosmos legitimises a closed system of arbitrary objects, but the language via which the system is to be conveyed sidesteps closure by protesting to totalise itself. In this fashion, the fictional Witold’s obsession with connecting facts, words or objects, his tantalising penchant for logical synthesis by circumventing their accepted meanings, sensationalises an agony of experi29 Elucidated by Derrida as (re)iterable, a meaning ‘effect’ as opposed to meaning as such, generated in the process of signification.

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encing the other of the traditional order. The desire to mean, attempting to brazen out the terror of chaos, gives away the inevitability of difference inherent in the relational order of things. Hence, to the narrator’s mind hanging Lena’s cat seems logical, if not sought-after, inasmuch as it completes the sequence of atrociously arbitrary hanged objects. That is why, on other occasions, the narrator relishes the fact that “someone else had seen the possibility of there being something in common between [Katasia’s] lip, the bit of wood, and the bird” (39). The domestication of difference seems imperative to the narrator whose quasi-deterministic theories attempt to harness overwhelming chaos. But the act of bestowing meaning on random objects negates the natural order of signification, for only when they signify something other than their received meanings, do they truly start to mean (sparrow is meaningful only if it is hanged, and a ‘bird’ is meaningful in its being as a ‘non-sparrow’). Hence, the semantic synthesis of the objects paradoxically subverts the culturally endorsed order of the world and language. With his project of extending the meaningful economy of the symbiotic cosmos of objects legitimised by the totalising, subjective intention, the narrator seems to provide the reader with a sure recipe for obtaining meaning. Or does he? This metanarrative element is also addressed. To legitimise the capricious hanged-sparrow and hanged-stick sequence, the narrator resorts to hanging Lena’s cat; whereby he becomes a self-proclaimed creator of the meaning of the event. The intention, however, goes awry once the sequence becomes complemented by Louis’ suicide, also by hanging, as well as the reader’s awareness that the charade of hanging had commenced before the narrator’s divine intervention. The hangings serve as peculiar signatures inscribed in shifting contexts with the contextual architecture impinging upon the sequence of events. The significations proliferate even without the narrator’s intention, in response to which he places his finger in the deceased’s mouth, and thus almost completes the constellation at the hanging-mouth axis. To close the cycle, it occurs to Witold that he has yet to hang Lena (the possessor of the enticing lips and Louis’ wife): The sparrow The bit of wood. The cat. Louis. And now I should have to hang Lena (160). I thought sparrow Lena bit of wood cat in the mouth honey disfigured lip little clump of earth tear in the wallpaper finger Louis young trees hanging Lena lonely

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there teapot cat bit of wood fence road Louis priest wall cat bit of wood sparrow cat Louis hanged bit of wood hanged sparrow hanged Louis cat I’m going to hang …. I went back to Warsaw… Today we had chicken and rice for lunch (166-167).

The concluding stream of consciousness topped with the equivocal closing line belies metaphysical meaningful and intentional projects. Hanged, Lena would come to embody meaning and intention, but (as demonstrated by Louis’ suicide) signifiers multiply irrespective of authorial intention or the dictates of genre and refuse to fossilise in uniform meanings. The refusal to finalise the venture suggests a coming to terms with (or a giving oneself over to) the arbitrariness of signifiers and the indeterminacy of meaning. As Jonathan Culler puts it, any attempt to codify context can always be grafted onto the context it sought to describe, yielding a new context which escapes the previous formulation. Attempts to describe limits always make possible a displacement of those limits (1981: 25).

Does the narrator finally face up to the futility of his cosmologic stratagem, which in effect saves Lena from scaffold? Perhaps, in keeping with Culler, he resigns himself to the inexorableness of the production of meaning that is contingent on the fluidity of context. Conceivably, the concluding digressive remark (“Today we had chicken and rice for lunch”), which tenaciously moves away from the fictional course, is a blissful amnesia of the failure to make sense of the cosmos of textual reality. It is employed as yet another blind spot of narrative alterity, whereby fictional reality is sold off to the indeterminacy of language. After all, the nominalised and contracted ‘lunch’, having no link with the hitherto consolidated plot development, frustrates any expected fictional linearity given its non-dialectic rerouting from plot to language. The fact that the potential finalisation of the mystery is given up for “chicken and rice for lunch”, which deflates the dénouement, suggests that textual reality cannot but be other than that which it once promised. In Gombrowicz, this narrative effect is achieved by othering an event and jettisoning fixed narrative dichotomies, e.g. rendering a fictional event linguistic or vice versa. Not only is the potential murder diminished to its less exciting mundane counterpart (‘lunch’) at the level of plot, but also the fictional event itself becomes reified and absorbed by the word. If the Derridean assumption that language perpetually eschews its meanings holds true, such a narrative act of drowning the plot in language naturally enhances the interpretative possibilities, pluralises meanings, opens up interpretative spaces and foregrounds difference as a self-generative force of textual production. But the refuge into language paradoxically yields up its constraints. The refusal to allow the plot to develop according to its own narrative logic by its de-

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tour to language – and narrowing down the interpretative scope of its potential ending – dramatises the failure of language to reproduce reality. Although reality is structured like language, by way of their mutual contagion, the latter cannot abjure its external relation to nature. The incommensurability with reality (also fictional reality and reality as fiction) produces fissures, which are revealed in the proliferation of meanings. The language thus does open up an illimitable interpretative space, but the very space is then a progeny of its own limitations against the object it seeks to represent. In addition, the consolidated chain of inferences, as the round-up of the narrator’s investigation, is a far cry from a conventional detective cause-and-effect diagram. The contingency of words sends the reader back to square one of interpretation. Devoid of conjunctions, the disseminated words stand for little on their own and refuse to totalise themselves in a structural linguistic closure. The reader will naturally remember the genesis of the clues, their history and function in the story, but at this point the text refuses to guarantee meanings other than those that are exhausted by their own self-differentiation. Unlike the watchwords of Ferdydurke (pupa, mug), which act as conceits aspiring to the status of minutiae aphorisms, the disjunctive lexical reiterations of Cosmos serve as signatures contingent on their inscriptions into the shifting contextual cosmos. Illuminating here, Derrida points to disruptive ‘lines’ separating ‘bodies of interpretation’ that incite impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence. All these disruptive ‘anomalies’ are engendered … by repetition (1980: 56-57).

Grafted onto yet another body of context, a word infects the new domain and becomes infected by it in turn. Contextual iterability means that the traces embedded in a word corrupt its semantic stasis. Put bluntly, words never mean what they encyclopaedically state, as their iterability multiplies significations. This might provide an explanation as to why words in Cosmos fail to ossify as symbols (unlike the keywords of Ferdydurke). Inscribed into new confines, the word must yield to self-reformulation, yet the marks of the previous contexts it bears are non-present in the act of signification. Instead, with its borders disrupted, it remains actively suspended in the liminal cross-contextual space. At the level of plot, Gombrowicz’s characters enact a parallel liminal deferral of identity, by being always peculiarly unnameable and systematically other than themselves. Suspended between adulthood and immaturity (Ferdydurke), poised between waking and sleeping, language and being (The Marriage), between the objective and subjective (Cosmos), tormented by the translation of national identity (Trans-Atlantyk), overturning the truth - lie dialectic (A Premeditated Crime), problematising the laws of genre (Diary), Gombrowicz’s nar-

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rators dramatise the angst of liminal non-identity, whose raison d’être is contingent on their active non-presence in a given form. The problematic liminal state that eschews presence and destabilises clean-cut boundaries bears upon the question of the validity of a metaphysics of centre and border.

3.2. Rhetoric of liminality30 Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of limit plays a central role in his textual practices: it motors much of deconstructionist thought. Limit, in a pervasive sense of the word, virtually does not exist, or more precisely, exists only provisionally as a tentative point of departure for the consideration of a problematic relation between two entities. Inasmuch as entities separated by borders, limits, boundaries (or other metaphysical measures endeavouring to encapsulate an entity in a totalised space or time) contain traces of what they attempted to banish to the outside, stemming from establishing a self-other relation, they can never become fully enclosed in an absolutely delineated space. Hence, Derrida identifies an inherent problem of the limit: There is a problem as soon as the edge-line is threatened. And it is threatened from its first tracing. This tracing can only institute the line by dividing it intrinsically into two sides. There is a problem as soon as this intrinsic division divides the relation to itself of the border and therefore divides the being-one-self of anything (1993: 11).

Unstable relations between the entities lay bare the instability of constructed limits, as well as render the fixity of borders perpetually deferred from their assumed position. Just as borders attempt to disunite two bodies, a parallel division operates within the shifting confines of the very limit itself. Accordingly, Derrida not only questions binary oppositions between entities by unsettling the fixity of limits, but also repudiates the presence of the limit, as it always-already subscribes to its self-differentiation. Limit is then limited in its inability to set a limit. Following this logic, it should not be implied that limits do not exist at all, but rather that their spatio-temporal position in a structure cannot be pinned down given that the inside-outside relation is unsettled. Applied to the ontology of language, the impossibility to position limits within fixed structures resonates with the intrinsic failure to install rigid borders between languages. Just as variations of etymological material and borrowings bear testimony to interlinguistic tracing, vernacular varieties and idiolectic neologisms reveal intralinguistic iterability. Not only do languages fail to totally dif30 Here the notion of the liminal is understood as “the relativization of any limits of language. The justification for this relativizing is the revelation of the dynamic interrelationship between the two sides of the limits of language” (Wang 2001: 83).

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fer from each other, but also a single language can hardly set the limits of its own identity through its inherent intralinguistic polysemy. Bereft of fixed meanings, languages exist only in an open relation to each other. With its meanings deferred, language can no longer refer to its centre as the fixed origin of its inner structure. The meaning of the centre (and the centrality of meaning) whose structural presence has long been taken for granted by the occidental epistemology, must thus be radically rewritten (or else written off) should it attend to its undecidable condition. Derrida asserts: Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse- provided we can agree on this word that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely (1978: 353-54).

Devoid of a stable centre, with its borders blurred, its meaning disseminated as a consequence of the endless play of differences, and its presence deferred, the economy of language extends to a ‘non-locus’, a liminal non-milieu of interplay of significations stretching into infinity: “There is no transcendental or privileged signified and … the domain or the interplay of signification has, henceforth, no limit” (Derrida 1978: 354). The deconstructionist conceptualisations of the limit can be built into the allencompassing problematic of Gombrowiczian form. Unsurprisingly, Gombrowicz, in a similar vein, has it that form is in essence anything but monistic: Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form. Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe this imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it. That entire ethical and philosophical dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immensity, which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident (Diary vol. 1: 93).

It is not as much the existence of form that is at issue, given that form exists as long as it is conceivable by human mind. Form and meaning are real insofar as a human being aspires to (or works against) them. The starting point for consideration is then the demarcation of their boundaries.

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Form presents itself as a parasite on the healthy body of amorphous reality. Nevertheless, as Gombrowicz notices elsewhere, hardly ever does human consciousness take refuge from tying the fragmentary reality together through form. Both Derrida and Gombrowicz seem to be aware of the self-generating quality of form. Here, the facet of self-actualisation of form acts as a common denominator of their programmes voiced in different contexts: Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes (Cosmos 31). As soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn (Derrida 1980: 56).

No form that a human mind could attach to an object exists per se, but the ability to recognise the uncertainty of form comprises yet another esoteric conceptual formula. The easiest way out of this bind presents itself in the shape of dialectics, which accounts for the circularity of form. Gombrowicz, however, would not bend to the dialectic order. Every attempt to harness reality is deconstructed by ‘ferment’,31 which does not merely operate on the presence of a form-nonform axis. Since the very dichotomy always-already works against the backdrop of ‘shapelessness’, the relation is by no means one of binary opposition, but rather a detour to the other that is vague and formless. This event marks the moment of deviation into the other as well as the demarcation of the provisional border between form and its other; it presents itself thus as a subject of further inquiry. Hanjo Berresem, for that matter, identifies a “suture” that is a central moment for Gombrowicz’s poetics, because this folding of the signifying series (the signifier) onto the signified series (the signified) denotes precisely the moment when knowledge establishes itself as paranoiac (1998: 216, italics in the original).

Whereas Berresem would have us see the ‘suture’ through the Lacanian lens as the moment of the unfurling of ‘paranoia’, I am intrigued by the ways in which ‘folding’ establishes itself as a liminal space between language, reality and ‘paranoia’: the event of the surfacing of textual alterity. This unfolding of the liminal space is thus a moment in which alterity is generated in the text when language capitulates against the volatility of existence. Let us for the sake of the argument examine the moment of a folding that precipitates a textual schism, or, as imputed, ‘paranoia’. Gombrowicz is so anxious to voice the existential angst evoked by the experience of liminality that he articulates it right at the outset of Ferdydurke in its resounding, almost Gothic overture: 31 By this word Gombrowicz refers to corruption in ethical and existential terms.

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This vacuum is a recurring concern of the novel: What was going on? …Was it Pimko’s imperious yet incomplete sitting? An abandoned prof? A prof? The incompleteness was clamoring for completion – like those nagging gaps when one thing is ending and another not yet began. And a void opens up in one’s head. I suddenly saw the prof’s old age showing (106).

The opening lines – surreptitiously echoing Kafka’s classic opening of Metamorphosis – paraphrased in the latter fragment, inaugurates the economy of the novel’s disturbing liminal non-places to come. These points of ‘incompleteness’ that a human mind aims to contain through form, the fear of indeterminacy, can be assuaged only through aspiration to the totalising ‘completion’. As befits Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of alterity, the narration does not offer a remedy for exorcising the unsettled order, but rather precariously swerves at the point of explication. Not only does Gombrowicz upset the stability of the limit here, he also has the limit sabotage the sought-for sense of completion. The liminal space activated by “sitting” (which earlier in the novel is a token of Pimko’s totalitarian and manipulative power over the narrator) has a powerful rhetorical effect, as hyperbolisation comes to being through a mundane (or else absurd) metaphor (usually on the lexical level). His antithetical “imperious yet incomplete sitting” thus inverts the anticipated order, which can now only collapse into the “void”, precipitated by the illusion of the physical decomposition of Pimko. The overly hyperbolised description narrates nothing more than Pimko’s humiliation caused by Zuta’s indifference, and hence Pimko’s demise could have been articulated by means of more conventional cause-and-effect narrative tools. Before cause ripens into effect, however, it becomes filtered through the liminal (“sitting”), which curiously implodes the situational logic and undercuts its foundations. His liminal sitting, purposefully ambiguous since both powerful and diminished, figuratively constitutes a narrative schism that results in the deconstruction of interpersonal relations (as Fiała would have it), and compromises illusive totality, as well as the stability of the limit. This is not, however, to jump to a tempting conclusion that meaning in Gombrowicz radically disseminates. Also, it is far from the case that chaos is an ultimate corollary or a narrative end product. In actual fact, liminal space is merely a turning point for a radical development of a new course of events that aspire to new forms. Pimko’s denigration, after all, liberates the narrator, at least partially, from the former’s deceptive totalitarian authority. Obtaining form through disorder acts as the agent for yet another

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of Gombrowicz’s rhetorical devices that aim at reaching – rather than shunning – meaning. Some obvious parallels between those liminal narrative spaces, detected on the map of Gombrowiczian rhetoric, and Derrida’s concept of scission (which lends itself as another conceptual derivative of the limit) can thus be drawn. Scission is elucidated by Derrida as: [t]he exit out of the ‘primitive’ mythical unity (which is always reconstituted retrospectively in the aftermath of the break [dans l’ après-coupure]), the scission … parts the seeds as it projects it. It inscribes difference in the heart of life (“it is that very difference [that implacable difference”] which is the condition for their operation. No thing is complete in itself, and it can only be completed by what it lacks) (1981: 334).

Like Gombrowicz’s rifts that cut up the narrative to open a liminal space where meanings unfold and destabilise the unity of the space it challenges, Derrida’s scission undercuts the unity of a whole. Semantic schism emerges at the moment of incision into the textual fibre, whereby signifiers come apart and multiply. “Indeed!” – Gombrowicz would perhaps interject, “Doesn’t all form rely on the process of exclusion, isn’t all construction a process of whittling down … ?” (Ferdydurke 72). Scission is to atomise signifieds into ‘parts’ through their subscription to difference as “the condition for their operation”. This, however, far from announcing the death of meaning, is actually proxy for the reconstitution of meaning, given that it “can be completed by what it lacks”. Scission precipitates différance by proliferating differences, as a result of which meanings come forward from the incised crevices between the signifiers. This sends us back to the domain of the liminal that implodes totality only to proliferate with new significations. Accordingly, a meaning that is cut off from itself participates in the procession of signifiers, and it is scission or limit instigating difference that makes this practice possible. Gombrowicz’s version of the liminal sensibility is demonstrated in Ferdydurke as follows: But how is one supposed to run from something one is, where is the reference point, the foothold from which to oppose it? ... I felt sure that, had reality asserted itself for one moment, the incredibly grotesque situation in which I found myself would have become so glaringly obvious (Ferdydurke 47).

‘Run’ or ‘escape’ constitutes another rhetorical trope in Gombrowicz’s existentialist ledger and emblematises ethical compulsion to repeal form, as well as, for the sake of the argument, a metaphor of différance at work. Nevertheless, to escape form, that is, to give oneself over to the unbridled fluidity of existence, one must start escaping; and to escape form is above all to escape from form. Gombrowicz gives away his responsiveness to the complexity of the limit, distressing-

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ly creeping in his conceptualisation of form. The expected point of departure from the totalising identity; the ‘foothold’ via which the annulment of its authority would come to being is, however, positioned only provisionally and can only be deferred/differed from itself (“Where is the reference point?”). The limit that is essential to lay bare limitations of totality of form cannot be detected. Here, the reality that fails to “assert itself for one moment” - which, if it did, would help the narrator to test the shackles of form - itself occupies a site of the liminal, the space between the subjective and objective real, whose overlapping makes it impossible to establish a point of departure the narrator hankers after. To disown identity, one would have to pretend to be the other to oneself, and this escape into dialectic enslaves one in a relation. On the other hand, one is oneself only in the eyes of the other, which leaves identity inherently biased and metaphysical (in a sense that identity is formed in the discourse of others). The agony of establishing the turning point from form is then an agony of reconciling fluidity of existence to the rigidity of metaphysics. The problem of limit is not only one of its fixity, but also its spatio-temporally untraceable inbetweenness. Limit not only delineates (or fails to delineate) a liminal space, but is the space it seeks to circumscribe. Gombrowicz’s rhetoric provides a fertile soil for liminal milieux by dramatising reciprocal relations between language and being, the self and other, writer and reader, reading/writing and existence, or, as suggested above, existential volatility and metaphysical unity. Since the aspect of the liminal in the existential context shall be a focal point of further inquiry, let us, with the purpose of establishing a conceptual framework for the analysis in question, interrogate the unstable relationship between the experience of reality and text. For now, two analytical angles call for inquiry. In what ways does Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of (the fluidity of) existence inform the hermeneutic experience of reading? Does Gombrowicz’s text demonstrate the self-reflexive process of the works’ auto(de)construction?

3.3. On metafiction Reading through the tracts of deconstructionist practices, some common denominators between Derridean tenets have been pointed out, as well as the ways they echo the narrative tensions of Gombrowicz’s subversive rhetoric. Gombrowicz’s text subverts commonplace assumptions concerning the metaphysics of form and its presence, whose untraceable centre and limits comprise the unstable liminal economy. Such a text, through its disruption of the totality of form and the play of significations, foregoes the stability of meaning sedimented in language, rendering the very play meaningful in itself and “the play of language truer real-

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ism” (Wooley 1985: 461). Language that holds in store no other meaning than the dramatisation of its own indeterminacy must thus tell its own story, which, as event, constitutes meaning to itself.32 Literature that responds to such sensibilities (by producing language recounting the story of its own construction) will in turn begin to unfurl the seams of its auto-creation. Narrative self-referentiality, self-reflexivity, self-consciousness, metanarration, are all confusingly lodged under the umbrella term ‘metafiction’ in postwar critical thought. Although voluminously expanded upon and conceptualised manifold by occidental literary criticism, the term remains as typologically puzzling as ever. Metafiction emerges as a concept that engages with the postmodernist literary drift in which fiction is to display the workings of its own construction: “Metafictional writers thus operate and function with a freedom of exposing illusion for what it is – a device used to mask narrative as a construct and a figment of one's imagination” (Vieira 1981: 584). In the bulk of her study on metafiction, Patricia Waugh defines the term as “a fiction that selfconsciously reflects upon its own structure as language” (1984: 14). With its tectonic foundations laid bare via narrative – be it implicitly or otherwise – fiction can no longer parade its realist verisimilitude and play down its linguistic, as opposed to illusively ontological, existence. Quite the reverse, it is the very edifice of the text that turns into its semantic epicentre, around which all other fictional (realist, existentialist, humanistic) constellations revolve. Fiction is thus distanced from the real world it has long usurped to approximate. Although largely associated with literary postmodernism, metafiction not only refuses to fully encapsulate itself in any single literary period, but also – mainly by dint of its dual references set out to sabotage the realist literary contract – in a standardised literary terminology. With an eye to unknot the elusiveness tangled up in the categorical considerations of narrative self-reflexivity, a brief literary-critical history of the term is necessary. Back in 1952, as an immediate response to the post-war and soon-to-come postmodernist sensibilities, Wayne C. Booth’s idea of the self-conscious narrator sparked off the critical attention to metafiction; even though it was not termed as such until the 1970’s, when Robert Scholes and William Gass coined and conceptualised the term in their essays. Linda Hutcheon distinguishes between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ metafictional discourses, with the former being unequivocally thematised accounts of diegetic or linguistic fictional identities, and the latter implicitly bringing in those identities by means of the narrative modes 32 Gadamer, although largely at odds with deconstructionist complacency as regards allpervasiveness of language, acknowledges that word can be meaningful as event: ‘being an event is a characteristic belonging to the meaning itself” (1975: 426, italics in the original).

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other than fictionalised assertions. As put by the critic, “this process is internalized, actualized; such a text is self-reflective but not necessarily self-conscious” (1984: 7). Later studies take pains to separate and multiply further divisions and subdivisions of metafiction. Hence, Ansgar Nunning, Monika Fludernik, Werner Wolf, among others, busy themselves with conceptually atomising metafiction by sketching provisional typological paradigms. As a result, metanarration, metafiction, narrative self-reflexivity, metareferrence are distinguished in terms of the formal, structural, fictional aspects that seek to categorically dichotomise the apparently indissoluble metatextual homologies. But does such discursive sectioning off indeed help inform the raison d’etre of metafiction? Is this exorcism of the meta- of fiction and narrative by means of yet another meta-narrative (of theory) truly the way to conceptualise it? Perhaps “theory is indispensably the precondition of enlightened modern thinking, strive as it may to recapture the innocence of communal narrative forms” (Norris 1984: 14-16). Following this thread, does it really matter if the ‘first-order language’ (to use Barthes' coinage) fabricates this peculiar self-image of an intangible meta-sphere, at once detached from and attached to itself through language, whose recognition only the ‘enlightened’, theoretically predisposed mind can fathom? The self-consciousness of the text must be then a natural response to the dissociation of meaning that postmodernism consistently condones and proliferates. Having announced the death of metanarratives (meaning Lyotard’s grands récits), a postmodern mind must brace itself against the contingency of meaning by actualising self-aware language first-hand. Since postmodern identity has to come to grips with the fact that its existence is at roots linguistic, the very amalgamation of language and existence, ardently lionised by textualists (and otherwise separated by realists), heralds self-referentiality as the postmodern existential condition. Yet again, the border between language and existence, set against the facet of metafiction, constitutes its most pertinent quandary and must be taken as the subject of examination.33

33 Poulet goes against the thrust of the argument postulating that it is language that makes the absolute communication between the text and the reader possible. Assumed to communicate the meaning of the text, language is actually a ‘being’ in itself and communicates nothing but itself. What is read is language which cannot pretend to be literature and paradoxically literature cannot transcend language. Blanchot, hence, pinpoints the notion of ’lack’ whereby the juxtapositions of self-other or reader-text, immanencetranscendence will never attain absolute communion and will always harbinger interpretative aporias (Jędrzejko 2008: 41).

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A paradox within this theoretical ambit has been opined by David Herzberger: It appears, then, that we wish to have it both ways: on the one hand, we evoke the self-referentiality of the text and affirm the purely linguistic material of which characters are made, while on the other, we attribute to these characters the same body of traits and dilemmas generally associated with the characters of realistic tradition. We identify the technical process of metafiction through which narrative invents itself as something other than the real world, but then proceed to perceive characters as if they embody life in its full range of existential possibilities (1988: 423).

On the face of it, Herzberger gets to the heart of the matter by exposing this natural paradox. But how else is fiction to manifest itself as fiction but through selfthematising itself? Language that narrates its own construction must ‘have it both ways’ in a sense that narration is structurally fictional at its core, which in turn cannot eschew its existential proximity. If metafiction is nothing more than language’s story of its own construction in progress, communicated by its linguistic fabric (with story, structured like narration, being inherently existential), it seems that the homology of dual energies between language and being naturally circumscribes discursive formulae and cannot be merely detached through binary oppositions. Radical adherence to linguistic self-consciousness is in fact as reductive as realist insistence on the transparency of language, as it closes the text’s possibilities for meaning, given that the language-reality tension is univocally resolved. Metafiction as a concept accedes thus to the mutual displacement of a metaphysics of ontological existence and linguistic pertinence. Here, Gombrowicz’s approach to fiction becomes important to reconceptualising this argument. His existentialist insistence on becoming prefigures writing caught in the act of auto-creation. The existential innocence-experience trajectory has the earmark of a parallel process of character construction in fiction, as both typify the structural processuality of creation as event, as opposed to a realist verisimilitude that only utilises language to staunchly reproduce existence, in keeping with the mimetic tradition. Accordingly, mindful of its linguistic and narrative tectonics, fiction produces characters dramatising their narrative identity as being essentially a literary creation. In pursuit of this line of reasoning, let us provisionally call up Hutcheon’s above typology: that is overt and covert metafictional discourses. The selfreflexivity of Gombrowicz’s fiction comes to pass in both explicit fictionalised metanarrative assertions of characters/narrators and internalised self-conscious narrative embedded in the construction of language. The narrator may talk the reader through the intricacies of plot, an implied philosophy of the work through metafictional discursive explication (Diary, Ferdydurke), or even opaque paratextual commentary (the prefaces to “Filidor” and “Filibert” in Ferdydurke,

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The Marriage).34 The overt metafictional dictum, as exemplified below, is to get the reader familiarised with the process of writing step-by-step: “Please excuse the clumsiness of these metaphors. It is not easy for me to discuss them (and one day I shall have to explain why I put the words boy and girl in parentheses…)” (Pornografia 30).35 Gombrowicz seemed to have good reason to have the reader participate in the making of his fiction. Obsessed with the idea of being misunderstood, flagrantly articulated in Diary, the autofictional elements are to forestall any rash interpretative stances on the reader’s part and ensure the author’s monopoly on textual meaning.36 However, these totalising discursive closures comprise only a simulacrum of the clandestine metafictional infrastructure of the novels. Such autofictional simulacra bewail the fact that fiction can be all but itself and fictionality of fiction leads to the textual fissures from which fiction disseminates. As such, these spaces are not the ones of simulacra per se, but of what they set out to cover up. A quick flick through Gombrowicz’s literature shows the writer’s systematic use of explanatory narrative, as if in a futile attempt to stand outside fiction. Such a detour from rhetoric to philosophising constitutes a promise. Philosophy, detached from the waywardness of rhetoric, has deceived itself into believing that it, by way of detailed methods, can present us with truth as well as give final answers to substantial questions. Gombrowicz, however, lays bare the fact that such explanatory discourse is nothing but rhetoric masquerading as philosophy. By exposing the construction of fiction, overt autofiction only exposes its own construction in turn. But the text the reader is confronted with is not founded on what metacommentary speaks of, as the fictional structure is entrenched in its linguistic material as event. These blatant metafictional comments just divert the reader’s attention from (and simultaneously get at) the fact that self-reflexivity can be captured beyond the discourse of commentary. Failure of explicit metanarration to epitomise the mechanisms it so espouses, subversively leads to internalised narrative markers of the text’s autocreation. This metafictional dissonance of Gombrowicz’s fiction can be partly answered for when set beside his problematic definition of form. Jarzębski under34 Prefaces to Filidor and Filibert in Ferdydurke problematise their status as prefaces, bringing about a peculiar overlapping of para and meta-discourses, given their placement in the middle of the novel. The prefatory material self-negates itself as paratextual in this instance, for it acts as the narrator’s metafictional commentary on the process of writing. 35 The 1966 translation by Alastair Hamilton will be used for close reading throughout chapter 3. 36 “And I will prove that my construction is in no way inferior, as far as precision and logic are concerned, to even the most precise and logical constructions” (Ferdydurke 69).

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stands form as a medium between reality and consciousness, which surfaces via the construction of descriptive discourses, and largely for the purposes of selfdiscovery. Writing, which is subject to standardised linguistic conventions, comprises a process of dynamic autocreation; the acknowledgement of the self through form. As said by Jarzębski: we do not possess form as such, but once we wish to learn or express our own personality, we must, somehow, construct ourselves from outside, that is impose form on ourselves the way we impose it on others (1984: 342, my translation).

Dual agencies of form, translated into the fictional discourse, entail a peculiar structural narrative bifurcation. Hence, one comes across a double-edged language – communicated in existential tropes – as an articulation of the reduced assertion of narrative, which opens up the interpretative space and engenders indeterminacy. The non-affirmative character of Gombrowicz’s narrative is inspired by the awareness of totalising form. Form (or descriptive metafictional discourse for that matter), as noted by Goddard, is “a map of reality, rather than reality itself, and therefore explanatory systems should be understood in a profound relation to their outside” (2010: 135). This effect, bolstered by the provisional encapsulation of indeterminacy is an accurate account of Gombrowicz’s narrative dualities. Discursive explication imposes a certain contextual plan only for it to dissolve in the chaos of language. Discourse in fiction as a manifestation of language’s ‘outside’ returns to its borderless inside through the failure of approximation of what it ventures to relate, be it life or reality. There is surely a deep-laid consistency to the manner in which Gombrowicz endows his narrative with meta- and autofictional qualities. This he achieves by problematising interpersonal relations between the narrator – usually a playful artificer of narrative events – and other characters. Since Gombrowicz rarely lets his reader forget his authorial presence, as he often slyly impersonates narrators by dubbing them Witold or even Witold Gombrowicz, the reader is haunted by a belief that such authorial self-referentiality entails writing as an essentially selfconscious process. The author’s avatar participates in a fictional episode and becomes a commentator and a judge of an event so as to impose his fixed interpretative framework and render it directly to the reader. He attempts to recapture the surrounding world, putting aside accepted norms, ethical values or social standards. Gombrowicz as narrator is thus a double-edged figure, who – by arranging and upsetting his fictional reality, hence ‘writing’ it, much like a reallife author does – renders plot often as a metaphor for writing. This self-conscious act of exposing plot as an essentially literary construct unfolding in the process of its creation and approximating the artist-work relation manifests itself on the narrator-reality as well as narrator-characters axes. Herein, it could be reasonably argued that Gombrowicz’s oeuvre should be put

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in the literary tradition of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, or Nabokov’s Lolita, to name just a few, as all constitute a tragicomic illustration of the fruitless existential project of grafting fictionally-constructed worlds on to extratextual reality. Gombrowicz’s characters neurotically endeavour to project form and meaning on to the arbitrariness of existence, just like a writer who weaves a fictional tale. However, unlike writers who foist a sense of finiteness upon the text as they construct and control fictional events, in Gombrowicz an individual, fictional or otherwise, is dropped into the overwhelming world of chaos, and is confronted with the Sisyphean problem of organising the world logically. This existential aporia, emerging from a liminal space between fiction and the reality manifested in the fictional unsettling of narrator-world relations, imprints itself on other dimensions so as to fashion an equally upsetting reader-text dialogic. Much in tune with the Nabokovian project of rendering a female character as an autofictional metaphor, almost every novel and all his plays appear to deliver their own Lolita, epitomising (in my reading of it) a failed attempt of a writer to totalise his/her work of art: e.g. Lena (Cosmos), Zuta (Ferdydurke), Henia (and Karol) (Pornografia), the eponymous Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, Albertine (Operetta), and, to a smaller degree, Molly (The Marriage) and Alicia (Bacacay). Zuta, bearing the most striking resemblance to a Nabokovian ‘nymphet’, opens up the autofictional space the moment Joey desperately falls for her, defenceless against her power to ‘put the screws to [his] mug’, or else, to overpower him. The protagonist confesses: “I sat there for her, for her I sat, I sat there for her alone, and I couldn’t miss a single second of sitting for her, I was within her, she enclosed me within herself” (Ferdydurke 137). If Zuta acts as an allegory of the objet d'art, it could be argued that writing becomes the writer’s token of disentanglement from form. A writer, literally ‘sitting’ down writing, left to his/her fate against the yawning chasm of language, must transform the essence of life into language, but it is ‘enclosed’ in its totality. This defencelessness is given away by the narrator’s apprehensive stutter upon the word ‘sit’, which marks Gombrowicz’s stylistic tic of reducing fictional events to the level of linguistic material. This contention is supported by another metafictional episode set in the opening of the novel, where the narrator’s plan of writing his new novel (with the first being Gombrowicz’s debut Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity – yet another autobiographical reference) is thwarted by the intrusion of ‘overpowering’ Pimko. Form is thus a point of departure from which writing presents itself as an existential undertaking. Writing in this sense is more than an act of pure production of a literary artefact, as it constitutes a revolutionary gesture of prioritising

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the becoming of the self. Zuta embodies a self-contained enclosure, whose immanence ensures radical inaccessibility to its meaning. Immanent to itself, her creation also resonates with the writer’s inability to represent existence with fidelity on paper. Here, the narrator-artificer begins his deconstructive work: he will use symbol (by placing a wingless fly in her shoe), embarrass the girl by unexpectedly planting ambiguous words (uttering absurd minutiae “Mommy”), “dabbles in his fruit compote” (144), and evokes Zuta’s running nose as the result of his peeping through the keyhole; all of this work is done in order to “pull her into the orbit of [his] activity” (148). Having deployed linguistic playfulness and heterogeneity to break the immanence of his artwork, he manages to avoid being bound by form by gaily concluding: “it had extricated me from the schoolgirl. I could finally touch her!” (143). Such an urge to penetrate the seemingly imponderable immanence of the other is even more conspicuously paraded in Cosmos, where the reality the narrator attempts to assemble is not predicated upon standardised cultural presuppositions. Kazimierz Bartoszyński notices that reality in the novel is contingent on the narrator’s “creative moves” (1986: 159). The logic of Gombrowicz’s fictional reality, far from being determined by a mimetic order, is rooted in the constructedness of the work. Hence, the preposterous narrator’s inferences, having law unto themselves, carry credibility only if they resonate with the deconstructive process of the becoming of reality or writing of text, which is bereft of the metaphysical delusion of continuity. Much like Zuta, Lena implodes metafictional space. She not only constitutes a missing nexus in the mystery, but actually functions as the backdrop against which the plot unfolds. The obsession to hang Lena, although outlandish in terms of the objective sequential order of events, presents itself in the eyes of the narrator as perfectly ‘natural’: Of course I might not hang her as I had hanged the cat, but what a let-down, what a fiasco, that would be. Was I to disturb a natural order of things? After all that striving and scheming hanging had been plainly revealed to me and I had connected it with ‘mouth’. Was I to give up and become a renegade now? (Cosmos 161-162).

Having completed his intricately woven story, the narrator as author must, as you would expect from literary convention, finalise his story, thus ascribing the metaphysical quality of finiteness to his composition. To write is to be prepared to accept that the author must at some point ink in the final dot. As befits the detective genre, the narrator has taken pains to rationally unpick facts (“connect it with ‘mouth’”) and have all the fictional systems work. To have the literary canons collapsed would be to run the risk of a ‘fiasco’, a failure to meet his authorial obligation. Hence, Lena, as the object of art personified, must be annihilated for reasons purely metafictional: to bestow the meaning upon the book.

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The fact that she is not ultimately hanged and he can only return to the “problems, difficulties, and complications” (166) of his life in Warsaw, corroborates the thesis that homology between real life and literature can only be approximated in the unfolding of the text’s composition, collapsed against the fluidity of heterogeneous energies of text and language. Perhaps the most blatant instance of the way the narrator writes his characters in the act simulating artistic production is portrayed in Pornografia, where Witold and Frederic, with the latter being a theatre director, attempt to draw a young couple, Henia and Karol, into the limbo of their perverse imagination through a series of theatrical acts and stratagems. The narrator explains: There was this common sin: a sin which was almost created to join in illegal matrimony the flowering of the young couple to somebody – somebody not so attractive… In virtue they were hermetically sealed to us. But once in sin, they could wallow in it with us. And I could almost see him [Frederic]… searching for the sin that would penetrate them (Pornografia 74).

The fact that Frederic is a film director, and the fact also of the chimerical sexual attraction between Karol and Henia, places the narrator in a complicated narrative position. On this occasion, unlike in his other novels and plays, the project is overtly perverse, and Gombrowicz might have arranged to employ the nefarious Frederic as a usurper of the underhand artifice; such a move would acquit his avatar from the burden of guilty sexual fancies. Either way, such an episode is close to other Gombrowiczian metafictional ventures, not least because of Frederic as a director, who openly calls to mind the business of the writer; even more pertinent is the way the ‘actors’ are ‘stage-managed’ through the mobilisation of hypodermic existential and psychological ploys (sin), as opposed to discursive directorial commands. This is much like an author who writes his existential baggage into the fibre of narration without any explanatory discourse. What remains striking is the way in which the narrator’s interpretation of the world evinces its performative qualities and affects the existential experience of the characters. Once he identifies the disquieting hermetic qualities of the other, he embarks on the deconstruction of immanent totality; to ‘penetrate them’, to make them fit his narcissistic interpretation. The couple may be virtuous as they stand, yet his one-sided take on the them remains bemired in prurient fantasies, and he sets off on artificially inveigling them into erotic exploits in order to uphold his version of reality. He breaks the immanence of the characters who materialise as his own solipsistic constructs. The fidelity of the narrator’s selfsatisfying visions matter little, having nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, if he is himself a god-like creator of their new-fangled meaning. He is thus a writer whose truth exists nowhere outside of the linguistic material via which he breathes existence into his protagonists; whose only existential legiti-

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macy is his artwork unfolding in its own becoming. For reasons no different, the narrator-detective in A Premeditated Crime persuades Ignacy’s son to strangle his already deceased father. Far from seeking truth, he is obsessed with the completion of his case (the object of art), whose disturbing unfathomability is attuned to the detective’s imagination. Second to none when it comes to Gombrowiczian autofictional blueprints – germane to his singular account of existence – is The Marriage. The play can be situated alongside Cosmos in this respect, since it portrays a liminal vision of reality inextricably enmeshed between the objective world and language: “Henry: … I don’t want to be solemn! But how can I help / Not being solemn when my voice sounds solemn?” (110). This fictional reality, in a typically structuralist manner, demonstrates existentialist aporia, whereby a unified identity must self-contradict itself against the performative agency of language. The human being is thus presented as a linguistic animal, incapable of constituting him/herself in the face of moments of aporia – the lacuna between what s/he means and what this meaning is constrained to by language. In this respect, speaking speaks us, as voiced by the protagonist of The Marriage, but in its limited construction language cannot fully articulate existence. Far from being bottled-up in the structuralist dogma, the play reconnoitres disturbing extratextual spaces. Events unfurl in the oneiric indeterminate space; it remains unresolved whether the narrator is dreaming or merely mixes the real with his distorted autistic visions; or – in the metafictional reading of it – the real with the fictional world. This lends itself as a parallel to the process in which fictional reality unfolds, attempting to simulate the real, and being empty of the rules that it seeks to simulate. Literature might mimic the world, but the mechanisms that govern its production eschew the metaphysics of simulation that collapse when faced with the autocreative potential of writing. Just like dreams, which, pace Freud, do not need conjunctions to put together their subconscious and also linguistic logic, literature works against the standardised linguistic formulas and perverts objective truth, whilst bequeathing existence with linguistic shape. Like dreamers, writers formulate fictional reality along with the fluidity of writing, as opposed to adhering to fixed formulae: Henry: … No, it’s just my imagination … I know it’s idiotic and yet I have to say it …. And saying it I declare it (The Marriage 160-161)

Artistic imagination, even when preposterous, is answerable to the inhibitions of the real, but since “every truth is structured like fiction, as it must be filtered through the net of language” (Markowski 2004: 130, my translation) it must accept its structural fictionality by yielding to the rigour of language. Fictional re-

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ality, formed through language, can thus only tell lies legitimated by the process of its dynamic autocreation. The very act of legitimation comes to fruition through the self-explanatory becoming (‘saying’ or writing) of an event, which only then can ‘declare’ itself as event. Similarly, writing fiction is largely all about coming up with events through words, multiplying themselves through the contagious driving force of language. Accordingly, The Marriage is, more than anything else, cut from the same cloth as Cosmos, as regards the autofictional sensibilities of text, and departs altogether from the structuralist creed, which can only to a degree do justice to the complexity of the play. Central here is the inclusion of the existentialist tenets especially in the context of hermeneutic experience. To cap it all, Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text, far from attempting to explicate discursively its own story, exposes the cracks of its own creation, which downplay the importance of plot, becoming the text’s truer reality. Such text never lets itself be read via the fictional film it enwraps itself with, but rather via the inner metaficational mechanisms that upset the linear certainties of literature and its conceptions. Mapped out as such, it is always prepared to tell the reader more than the programmatic manipulations of its author would have it. A text as event is always the other of fiction and the other of itself. Accommodating both existential(ist) and linguistic becoming as a paradigm of autofictional metaphysics, the next section will elucidate the ways in which creative autofictional elements correspond to the hermeneutic experience of reading.

3.4. Between reading and existence As I have suggested, deconstructionist tenets do permeate, to varying degrees, Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive texts, and I will argue this further. Nevertheless, in some measure, there is a reductionist quality to a deconstructionist approach to text. The Derridean self-contained text, whose free play of significations and indeterminacy of meaning, although do not disqualify the reader altogether, for the most part take little notice of him/her in an existentialist sense. This is not to say that deconstruction falls flat against the recognition of the reader or reading, as it in fact perfectly accommodates both. After all, Derrida admits that “reading … is production”, the reader must go beyond the author’s intention and “reading must be intrinsic and remain in the text” (1967: 163). However, one cannot resist the feeling that there remains a serious understatement of the reader’s interpretative self-service and the unfeasibility of their locating a meaning eulogised by deconstruction. In his Against Deconstruction, John Martin Ellis lists deconstructionist fallacies, with his central argument being that deconstruction offers no new criti-

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cism, as, for instance, its postulate ‘all interpretation is misinterpretation’ voices a commonly known view that the interpretation is always vulnerable to distortion, because it is subject to an eventual reformulation of thoughts. Exposed to the changeability of existence every argument is already doomed to its reformulation. The author goes on to claim that such a stance had already been suggested by others (e.g. Charles Sanders Pierce). This is further informed by the argument that “the reader’s needs, preconceptions, and biases come into play to undermine his interpretation, which will therefore involve misinterpretation” (1989: 106). The reader indeed faces up to the undecidability of meaning as a result of conflicting cultural preconceptions that are innate in his/her experience; but this pays no heed to the ethical-existential anguish of the moment of choice. Deconstruction might successfully mirror the existential fallacy of arriving at a ‘right’ or ‘true’ meaning, yet it fails to account for the existentialist’s responsibility to stand his/her ground in choosing between interpretations, which in the act of reading can hardly be overridden should we attempt to account for reading as a complex and multifaceted event. Umberto Eco, although at home with deconstructionist practices, would propose that, even though the interpreters cannot decide which interpretation is the privileged one, they can agree on the fact that certain interpretations are not contextually legitimated. Thus, even though using a text as a playground for implementing unlimited semiosis, they can agree that at certain moments the ‘play of amusement’ can transitorily stop by producing a consensual judgment. Indeed, symbols grow, but do not remain empty (1994: 41).

The interpretative stopovers that bring into being ‘consensual judgement’ are the moments of the negotiation of meaning between the reader and the text. Eco rightly points to the transitoriness of the moment, for meaning cannot be univocally arbitrated by any authority. Nor is it to unconditionally bank on the reader’s intention – as some reader-oriented theorists would have us believe – which is in fact as self-serving as the long-vilified, at least by poststructuralism, authorial intention. This is not a matter of changing sides; the reader on his/her part is not to monopolise meaning either. It is, however, rather than anything else, a matter of acknowledging the possibility of meaning as an event at a given moment of interpretation, which is predicated on the tension between the reader’s hermeneutic experience of text generating ‘consensual judgments’ and the fluidity of significations (generated by the reciprocal differentiation at the existential – textual axis). Totalised by its own immanence, literature is then exorcised in the eyes of the reader, who, confronted with the otherness of the text, subjectively renegoti-

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ates meanings. Gadamer on his part holds forth that meaning – conditional on the reader’s situation in a given moment of tradition, which is subject to a perpetual reinstitution of its historical perspective, changes along with the interpretative contexts of the reader, for “every interpretation has to adapt itself to the hermeneutical situation to which it belongs” (1975: 398). Does the process of reading enclose meanings in a totalising subjective unity, one that is wholly regulated by the reader’s response? Suffice to quote Stanley Fish who divulges that “it is the structure of the reader’s experience rather than any structures available on page that should be the object of description” (1980: 152). Iser would surely interrupt at this point, by arguing that, Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure and its recipient. … the study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involving in responding to that text (1993: 31).

As he further maintains, it is the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between the text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process… it is this very indeterminacy that increases the variety of communication possible (ibid. 33).

Reading transpires thus as an existential experience of facing the ‘indeterminacy’ of text (set against the backdrop of the fluidity of shifting interpretative contexts) and the liminal space extended between the text and the reader must be the one of alterity, which curiously evokes a positive readerly response. Whichever critical camp proves right in the dispute (is text meaningful on its own merit? or else is it really dead without the reader?), Gombrowicz’s text proves exceptionally useful for the argument, as it not only produces textual energies that evoke a meaningful (as per Iser) interpretative site of alterity, but also provides a peculiar existential philosophy conveyed through the self-reflexive narrative.

3.5. Liquidity This study has tentatively subscribed to three, somewhat disparate proposals: x

différance is the prerequisite for the becoming of text,

x

Gombrowicz’s fiction is self-reflexive,

x

the deconstructionist approach to text may be incomplete insofar as it plays down existential economy of choice.

Gombrowicz’s self-conscious fiction is a vivid manifestation of the text calling attention to the act of its own becoming. But given that such manifestation

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comes to being through the language of limited assertion (language reluctant to own up to what it holds in store), and since the text’s self-consciousness cannot be integrated into a fact communicated through explanatory discourse, but should be rather conceived as a self-differentiating, covert event, how can it be legitimated as the very event it claims to be? Hereby, we draw close to the much debated question of textual interpretation as inherently an existential act, as well as the role of the reader, which Jędrzejko explicates as follows: as soon as the act of reading is unfolding, borders between the text and the reader are being blurred. The book ceases to act as an object; it becomes the incarnation of thinking consciousness, a conscious subject (2008: 37, my translation).

The critic, underscoring the symbiosis between the text and the reader, draws attention to the fact that the act of reading (‘akt lektury’), subject to the fluidity of existence, precludes the metaphysical divisions demarcated by theory. The symbolic nature of language, guaranteeing its heterogeneity – the only ‘reality’ of both the reader and the text – upsets the binary opposition(s) of reality and fiction. Liquidity, Jędrzejko’s conceptual watchword, is this non-milieu of heterogeneity that, much like différance, defers textual totalities and binarisms at various textual and extratextual axes. Hence, the act of reading will thus blotch any supposed boundaries between the text and the reader, fiction and metafiction, fiction and reality, literature and philosophy. Salient to the argument is the re-enactment of another provisional axis: the one between the reader and the author. Texts are written by authors who more often than not do not fully share a hermeneutic tradition and cultural assumptions with the reader. The ‘competition’ between the reader and author, looming as a failure of securing the middle ground of meaning reconciled in a dialogue, is engendered by the blind spots symptomatic of the indeterminacy of the text. Text does not pass itself off as a forbearer of solid ‘facts’ but, existing within self-sufficient and non-affirmative language, proliferates in meanings lying at the heart of the language it consists of. Text does not function but is. Word is a being and does not pretend to communicate anything else than its own being: it does not mean to mean. It is the act of reading that makes it transcend its own confines. Reading, a fusion of two consciousnesses, outdoes its metaphysical identity as text via the reader’s staunch commitment to text. Yet ‘fusion’ is still a far cry from ‘communion’ given that communicative imbalance is a sine qua non of the self-other encounter. Communication fails because the difference between two singular consciousnesses cannot be bridged entirely. Since the text is not homogenous, it undergoes critical variation on the part of the interpreter. This dialogic disjunction may be reduced to overlapping cul-

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tural traditions pouring their singular existences onto the text. Difference, inherent in the reader-text interdependence, generates meanings which, however, are themselves subject to differentiation. Difference constitutes a dividing line between the writer’s and reader’s cognitive frameworks, ironically producing irreconcilable interpretative rifts between beings, and at the same time being the condition of the interpretation of text. The reader’s encounter with the fluidity of meaning in reading is this very impossible phenomenon of imploded explosion, or transcendent immanence that obliterates borders between text and the reader, only to make them capitulate against the waywardness of language. The fluidity of shifting meanings that human consciousness experiences in the act of interpreting the surrounding world tallies closely with the existential experience of reading. Texts are no longer thought to be autonomous entities, impervious to intertextual contamination, but rather a part of the tradition of all interlinked relics of language. As such, everything falls into the category of text, given that human consciousness cannot think outside of language. This homology of textual and extratextual realities furnishes the reader with all the anxieties and interpretative dilemmas that accompany him/her in their encounter with the world if the text is an artefact of existence, or more precisely, is inscribed into existence. Hence, literature that is to respond to existential angst will not attempt to reproduce the world through direct description, but rather sensationalise the existential hopelessness of making sense of the world by the reader, through vibrant language that is itself bursting to do justice to the dynamics and indeterminacy of existence: I went on looking though I could not see, I went on gazing blindly into the pitchblack darkness. What were they doing? … Anything whatever might be going on. There was nothing on their part that was inconceivable, the darkness was impenetrable, she might be timid or reluctant or amorous or shameless or perhaps none of these things, indeed abomination and horror might be taking place, but I should never know (Cosmos 67).

Gombrowicz’s fiction evokes the metaphysics of reading, as narrators relentlessly act as acute observers of immediate reality. Not only are they storytellers of the events they happen upon, but – since a conscious mind cannot sidestep the encountered objects as if in blissful ignorance – they also become actively ensnared by the world that is projected upon them. The passage demonstrates the futility of blocking existence out of the subject’s immanent self. Witold is peeping through the window to catch Lena in bed with her husband, which is to help see right through her and dissipate the mysterious aura she exudes, in turn galvanising the voyeur. The undertaking he commits himself to is, however, undoable as a result of the unfathomability of the text he is confronted with. On the level of language, the fiasco of arriving at meaning, the icing on the cake of in-

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terpretation, is accelerated by the vocabularies of alterity, against which metaphysics of unity, description, stability, and order clash. The uneasy language anticipates yet another of the reader’s conditions: his/her failed effort to exist outside of the text s/he is confronted by. The reader cannot retreat into his/her former self because the chance encounter with the text plays a part in the procession of existential events. As such, consciousness succumbs to contagious existence, never to lock itself in immanence and discard the heaviness of experience. This is not, however, to assert that experience imposing itself upon an entity trusses it in time and being, as it falls prey to the reformulation of the self. The narrator muses: Supposing she had done it? Of course I was very well aware that I had done it myself, but by saying ‘Leo’ like that she attracted everyone’s attention to herself and Leo’s persistence seemed to have attained its object and alighted to her. I had the feeling that in spite of everything she could have done it, that if she was capable of battering a tree stump with a hammer in a nervous crisis she was equally capable of a murderous onslaught on a cat (Cosmos 79).

Absurd as Witold’s interpretation of the unfolding affairs may be, it goes well with the postmodernist tenets of the failure of the episteme, historical relativism and anti-intentionalism. Whilst reading, the self actualises itself in a dialogic relation to the text. But once inflicted with the text the self cannot but think the thoughts of the other. Witold, going against the grain of objective ‘truth’, relents against the shifting circumstances that revise his foreknowledge of the event. Symptomatically, it is a single word – here ‘Leo’ – that impinges on the hitherto asserted interpretation and reroutes the narrator’s train of thought. Such a response does not herald a radical obliteration of history, as he does legitimise the past (“I had done it myself”). Nevertheless, he must abandon his monopoly for killing the cat, renounce his intentional project as an author of the crime, and sanction the volatility of text as it opens out to be exclusive of his interference. This engenders a subversive logic of text that operates on the level of demonstration – in place of description – through a first-order language that exposes, in effacing, the self-reflexive values of text and fiction. Birgit Neuman and Ansgar Nünning, in their conceptualisation of metafiction, hold fast to the position that self-reflexive texts, often produce a hermeneutic paradox: readers are forced to acknowledge the fictional status of the narrative, while at the same time they become co-creators of its meanings (2010: 206).

Such reading can be approached twofold: besides the implied metafictional quality to the passage (namely, taking the committed crime for text and Witold for interpreter), the fictional Witold is also confronted with a similar ‘hermeneutic paradox’ of both acknowledging the fictitiousness of his interpretative cosmos

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and remaining inexorable in pursuing the burgeoning meanings of events. Underlying this reading is, to take the metafictional line further, the belief that such paradoxes are part and parcel of Gombrowicz’s text. The tangled maze of his narrative practices hardly offers a trouble-free auto-explication of his rhetoric of subversion. Take the narrator as reader/writer axis. Witold as the artificer of events can barely extricate himself from the reality he ventures to stand outside of. Witold the reader falls squarely into the trap of becoming simultaneously the writer of events, and vice versa. As already suggested, in such practices Witold, a passive interpreter of the sparrow mystery, turns into the culprit (by hanging the cat). This, however, does not close down the interpretative possibilities. Imposing total values, by proclaiming himself the author of hanging (“Hanging and I were one.” 160), does not negate the process of perpetual significations. Conversely, it actually activates further sequences of events and clues for Witold (and others) to grasp, as if Witold could never come to an end of his venture; as if interpretation was to ineluctably necessitate participation. The narrator divulges: The word ‘permutations’ used by Louis suggested all the permutations and combinations going on in my own mind, … and Louis’ use of the phrase could be regarded as a strange coincidence – did it not ‘almost’ amount to an open expression of my uneasiness? How many ‘almosts’ had I not come across like that? … it seemed to be connected with what was going on in my own mind, and that thus the coincidence was partly (oh, that partly) created by myself….Thus the dreadful, baffling, bewildering thing was that I could never be sure to what extent I was myself the creator of the permutations… (Cosmos 54).

Putting himself in the shoes of the interpreter, Witold snubs the idea of being merely a placid recipient of the world at hand. To be confronted with the world is to participate in it, and hence to never cease rewriting the present. Although radically extricated from others as regards his interpretation of reality, keeping them oblivious of whatever he has masterminded, he cannot be individuated from the bind of the text he throws himself into. Be it intentional or chance, Louis’ ‘permutations’ connote meanings that strike a chord with Witold: he cannot free the word from the clutch of the text. Once uttered, the word cannot get out of this fix. Louis’ probable allusion to Witold is here a secondary issue, since Witold appears to be galvanised by the fact that language itself recalls reality as an “expression of [his] uneasiness” which can no longer override the very word, or cast it to the outside. It is of no note whether Louis means what he says; whether he does allude to Witold or otherwise. What does matter though is that his language activates meanings. Intention on Louis’ part is actually denigrated to its representational status should one consider the supplementary ‘almost’ that subverts this hastily reputed deliberation, as well as the fact that

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Witold eventually clings to the belief that those disturbing connotations could be ‘created by [him]self’. An insightful point has been made by Andrzej Kijowski, who affirms: Mysteries are impenetrable. Confronted with them, the mind recognizes only familiar forms and categories by means of which it constructs new versions of reality, only to aggressively impose them on another, unfamiliar system (1984: 454, my translation).

The critic holds that if reality inflicts the reader with its own otherness, the reader, in order to grapple with the other, not only construes but also constructs new acts emerging as the prosthesis of their former existence. As the reader is at one with the text he delves into, he is incapable of drawing a line of demarcation between himself as the interpreter and writer. Such a disruption of the interpreter’s identity, his/her failure to meet the text half-way in pursuit of meaning, the hopelessness of setting up a perimeter between the receptive and performative, comes down to the homology of text and existence, whereby indeterminacy and liquidity override such dichotomies. The Marriage is the next of Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive works that epitomise the fluidity of reading, but it is founded on different linguistic and fictional material. Peculiarly, language in the play nearly deputises for characters, if one may so put it, as it has a direct impact on the development of plot. Language literally structuring reality doubles as a metaphor of the act of reading, where it is nothing but language that forms fictional reality. While an extratextual world can do without language, fiction essentially is language. The problem arises once language as the cultural artefact turns into a powerful agent and becomes a condition for existence. Once tarnished by culture through language, nature can no longer retreat to the safe haven of its former self, but rather persists in the perpetual entanglement of the two driving forces incorporated in its being. With this as template, the foremost concern of The Marriage is the inextricable fusion of fluctuating, conflicting dualities of language and existence. “Here”, as averred by Gombrowicz in the preface to a Polish edition of the play, “everything is constantly ‘becoming’” (92)37 and the characters “are forever arranging themselves into new forms” (199). Indeed, nowhere else in his oeuvre does Gombrowicz fixate on existential inertia against the overriding rush of fluidity of existence, as well as the impossibility of solidifying the self in the face 37 My translation of “Wszystko tu bez przerwy ‘stwarza się’” in the original version. The Polish phrase ‘stwarzać się’ stands for both ‘to become’ and ‘to self-create’. Even though I opted for the former – perhaps more existentialist in tone – version, ‘becoming’, the latter is surely just as pertinent for the argument in question for it hints at essentially selfreflexive nature of the play.

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of a shifting relationship between the seditious dualities: the real and imaginary, language and being, text and existence. As has been surmised, Gombrowicz’s oeuvre displays a systematic awareness of the textuality of existence. Conflicting forces of the structuredness of language and liquidity of existence generate blind spots of indeterminacy resulting from non-dialectic qualities of the fundamentally self-reflexive text. Having taken the backdrop against which those blind spots work as the focal point – with the perimeters of existence and (meta)textuality in Gombrowicz starkly drawn – the next part embarks on interrogating the non-spaces of otherness. The aspect of the other begs careful scrutiny insofar as it pertains to the poetics of translation (see chapter 4) governed by similar mechanisms of instability.

3.6. Textual(ter)ity: hermeneutic experience of the other There are many reasons why literary theorists have published so frequently on otherness over the last three decades. Otherness, largely due to its conceptual ambiguity, has been appropriated by many theoretical niches. Deconstructionist practices lionising the promotion of cultural others hitherto brushed aside by Western centre-oriented hegemonies, and pushed to the cultural margins, have inspired minoritised voices to emerge. Hence, the cultural others: sexual minorities (Queer Theory), exiles (Postcolonialism), ‘the second sex’ – to quote de Beauvoir – (Feminism) have their say in the re-evaluation of collective cultural knowledge. Also, Foucault’s rigorous reassessment of the Western episteme, as well as the New Historicist commitment to unravelling the untold stories of the past, which goes hand in hand with a postmodernist politics of decentralisation, all recuperate the other from its inferior position. Sweeping transformations in 20th century occidental philosophy, science, literature and art further exacerbated by the experience of the World Wars called for a radical review of identity. Western thought consistently promulgated dialectic anthropology up until late modernity – presupposing the fixity of the self and situating it in a stable relationship towards the other – be it God or human. As such, both in the Christian and early modern humanistic tradition the human being assumed an uncomplicated centralised (theo- or anthropocentric) position. Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, argues that ‘liquid’ – as opposed to the preceding ‘solid’ – modernity accommodates nomadism, decentralisation and ambivalence, with the impossibility to solidify as endemic to postmodern culture. Baudrillard, in turn, demonstrates the ways conflicting cultural forces subversively work against its own structure undermining itself as culture; culture is

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then essentially a simulation of itself. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari in their schizoanalysis appropriate terms such as rhizome, schizophrenia, body without organs, nomadism, to account for the postmodern raison d’être. Such theories, to name just a few, complicate the centrality of identity as well as its reference to itself and the other. Having rather reticently gone into the notion of otherness, the subsequent part will now delve into different ways of conceptualising this problematic and inexhaustible notion under the rubrics of poststructuralist theories: a prelude to interrogating the hermeneutic aspects of otherness in Gombrowicz’s fiction.

3.6.1. Conceptualisations of alterity Following the lines adumbrated above, postmodern identity turns into the other of itself. The infringement of the other, on the word of Attridge, comes into being as “remoulding of the self”: “I am always, in a way, other to myself. It is this instability, inconsistency [and] self-dividedness that constitute the conditions for the emergence of the other” (2004: 25). This “self-dividedness” engendering the other mirrors existentialist unease. As declared by Gombrowicz: I proceeded to amputate. The following thought was the scalpel: accept, understand that you are not yourself, that no-one is ever himself with anyone, in any situation, that to be a man is to be artificial (A Kind of Testament 1973: 58).

Such bifurcation of the ego is to assert that the other seeps into the self from within; inside cannot be extricated from the outside. The thinking self, inscribed in its essentially linguistic existence, will produce language that must communicate the new upturned order driven by alienation, mystification and uncertainty. The language is then expected to accommodate otherness, which is inherent in its texture, form and structure. Such otherness of text was termed by Attridge as textualterity, which the critic elucidates as, “a verbal artefact that estranges as it entices, that foregrounds the Symbolic as it exploits the Imaginary, that speaks of that about which it has to remain silent” (2004: 30). Translated into a linguistic domain, the other of (and in) language will accentuate the unfamiliar blind spots, which upset comprehension. This is not, however, to say that the other in language is inherently radical. Radical alterity would make the language wholly incomprehensible, hence it would thwart any chance for negotiating meanings of text. The other of text rather emerges from the spaces where the familiar gives up its own totality and opens up to difference. To ensure readability on the one hand and respond to irreducible alterity on the other, otherness is nurtured through familiarity, where it emerges as a liquid event, always already in the

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process of becoming. As such, it is “a relation, or a relating, between me, as the same, and that which, in its uniqueness, is heterogeneous to me” (Attridge 1999: 24). As an event, the other is not present, but exists through its participation in the becoming of itself. In this sense, as said by Derrida, the other cannot be conceived of as a ‘referent’ realised in its actual presence, as it is both “beyond language” and “summons language” (2004: 123). Absent from the system it inhabits, both inside and outside of its confines, the other occupies a space defined by Foucault as a heterotopia. Heterotopic non-places are the ones of otherness and paradox, placed neither here nor there, “a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity” (1986: 27). Much like a mirror-effect (Foucault’s own case study), where an entity both exists – by the materialising self – and fails to really exist as the reflection is nothing but the illusion of a real place and physical presence, heterotopic discourse both vouches for the existence of language, that substantialises as a singular event, and debunks its identity, since every text cannot circumvent its intertextuality. Heterotopia of text, taking this line, discloses its inherent paradox: it is already other to itself. The text must physically exist, otherwise the reader would be unable to read it. But since it actualises itself in the act of reading, it exists only as a continuity of other texts and experiences of the reader, who is creating the text as event through interpretation. Text, in order to verify its identity, must lend itself to the processes that nullify it as text. A trope that is conceptually cognate with Foucalt’s heterotopia is Derridean spectrality. Spectre, taken literally by Derrida as ghost, phantom, apparition, constitutes a peculiar instance of the other, as it can in no possible way be ushered into dialectic metaphysical conceptions. It hence upsets binary oppositions of presence and absence and encroaches upon linear temporality. Spectre, not merely a symmetrical other to being, forms the basis of Derridean ‘hauntology’ that “resists relying upon some of the traditional notions of metaphysics of presence but also encompasses them” (Foley 2011: 23). Much like heterotopias, spectres constitute dual spaces of injunction of the other, which in a sense abjure presence, but by being suspended beyond the opposition of being and non-being, they become integrated in the existence they are banished from. In a different register, Baudrillard provides a double reading of the notion of spectre, which as “the ghost, the double behind the ghost” stands for “disconnection”, and simultaneously, understood as ”prismatic spectrality”, it harbingers the subject being split into “multiple connections, … different facets” within itself (2008: 40-41). Those readings bring us back to questions of (non)present spectres of author/reader against the backdrop of heterotopias of text/reading/writing. Following this line, fiction can be read through the lens of spectrality, ever since it

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occupies this unstable place wherein reality is as much there – real in its approximation of an actual, tangible reality – as it is deferred through its own fictionality. Fictional events are the spectres of the real on the one hand, and material through their eventness on the other. This instability of being-there is a functional entrée to the spectrality of writing (elsewhere elaborated on in the Derridean master trope of différance). The written text enacts heterotopic discourse – sporting its existence as the written – as being there in black and white. But since the legitimation of text can come to being through interpretative intervention, the presence of the text becomes deferred. Language also constitutes a liminal space of spectral tensions. Following Lacan: “All that is language is lent from this otherness and this is why the subject is always a fading thing that runs under the chain of signifiers” (1970: 194). Language contains the other in its own texture and is itself inscribed in the field of the Other. Nevertheless, the multifaceted textual otherness calls for other hermeneutic angles besides this self-generative polysemy of language. This is elaborated upon in the following section. There is of course a great deal more to the nebulous notion of the other under the auspices of literary theory and occidental philosophy: such as Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation, Said’s containment of the other as postcolonial identity, Kristeva’s abject, Lyotard’s differend, Levinas’ ethical encounter with the Other that so influenced Derrida, to name just a few. The ensuing section will focus more closely on the concept’s relation to the metaphysics of reading as it is exemplified by Gombrowicz’s self-conscious fiction.

3.6.2. (Ef)facing the other of reading Reading suggests itself as an event determined by the constant re-negotiation of meanings through the irruption of dynamic non-presences into the text. The reader cannot embark on reading without being haunted by the spectres of the author – the air of transcendental authority that involuntarily encroaches into reading. In the same way, the writer can hardly pin down a word, without the phantom of the reader-to-come returning to manipulate the trajectory of writing set autonomously by the author’s subjective standards. Gombrowicz preoccupied with such an apprehension, which is articulated in his oft-quoted rhetorical question: For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, why do I pretend that I am talking to myself? Are you talking to yourself so that others will hear you? (Diary 34).

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It seems that the intimacy of the other, or in fact extimacy,38 complicating the binary inside-outside opposition, is a prerequisite for reading and writing. Expressed in continuous tenses, it is this processuality of an event, the becoming of text that betrays the finiteness of writing, which has already called upon the spectre of the reader before it actually gets off the ground. Gombrowicz dramatises the inner conflict, the anxiety of laying down the writer’s arms to the other as the precondition of writing. The writer must then resign himself to the inability to write on his/her own account as the text has already been written by the reader. Although physically absent at the moment of writing, the reader’s active non-presence violates the oasis of authorial totalising subjectivity and thwarts the authorial monopoly to arbitrate the meanings of text. Elsewhere, this artistic tribulation inspired by the failure to control his/her own text, is implied, also metafictionally, by Henry in The Marriage, who – having persuaded Johnny to commit suicide – now blurts out: This corpse is my creation But this creation is incomprehensible Dark Obscure…. More powerful than I, and Perhaps not even my own (The Marriage 198).

Henry’s futile attempt to make sense of the protean oneiric reality uncovering around him keeps him making this reality into art. Having masterminded and realised his stratagem, he no longer seems to be reconciled to it, as it is imbued with unfamiliar tensions going beyond his comprehension and authority. The artist fails. The artwork that he should legitimately monopolise as its patron has him capitulate against its obscurity, darkness and power, and finally to make him doubt his own authorship. The ‘incomprehensibility’ springs from the futility to close up the object of art within the artist’s intention. Unable to exist anywhere beyond its own textuality, the text’s raison d’être depends subversively on anything but intention; the text as being is thus the other of any intentional project of its creator: “How can I control myself if I am … greater than myself?” (ibid. 148). The reader’s spectral intervention, however, is not an end in itself when it comes to arbitrating meanings of the text, as this would be to announce the reader as the sole creator of the text by assuring his dialectical substitution for the 38 According to Lacan the blend of exterieur and intimacy means that the Real is as much inside as outside, which exteriorizes the unconscious, and the self occupies the position of the other (Evans 1996).

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writer. The reader on his part experiences the spectral non-presence of the author whilst reading; that is an inexorable sense of authoredness, coined and elucidated by Attridge as “the presupposition that the words we are reading are the product of a mental event” (2004: 101). This acknowledgement of the authorial active non-presence suggests itself as a tacit approval of the fact that the text being read is authored and evinces itself as a sum of cultural assumptions of an individual. The authors’ communiqué, along with his/her intention, is, however, inaccessible to the reader, which is by no means to say it counts for nothing. Quite the contrary, the author’s spectral appearance is always looming heavily over the reader who at the back of his/her head aspires to decipher the author’s – completely unknown, inaccessible, enigmatic in his absence – intentional project. The desire to identify with the author, combined with the awareness that this dialogue is beyond the reader’s grasp – that the author will always remain locked up in his irreducible immanence – is precisely what activates meanings of the text. The interpretative ambition (or necessity) to fill in the fissures left behind by indeterminacy is what renders reading and interpretation warrantable in every respect. The narrator of Ferdydurke does not remain unresponsive to the desire to exist in a symbiosis with his text: “I begin, amid shimmering and finely chiselled forms, to write the first pages of my very own oeuvre, which will be just like me, identical with me, the sum total of me” (14). This project is, however, plausible only up to a point. In the world of indeterminacy, fragmentariness and uncertainty, it is one’s immanent consciousness that guarantees the only possible remedy for ambiguity. The self as a being is perfectly at home with itself. However, being that goes beyond itself in order to participate in the world becomes existence. A conscious being existing in the world is no longer itself, but turns into an existent. Etymologically, to exist, as reminded by Markowski, is to “go beyond one’s own being” (2004: 40, my translation). Joey’s work might indeed be the prosthesis of himself, the progeny of his irreducible interiority sealed off from the world, as long as it does not transcend itself. Once projected on to the world, it exists outside of itself, exposed to the gazes of others – the author included. Henry lends himself as a curious case study here as he occupies the peculiar position of being the creator of events that are deliberately exposed to the gazes of others. Entrapped in the liminal (delirious? oneiric?) space suspended between reality and dream, reason and the absurd, Henry, in order to substantiate his existence, must produce meanings; these, however, do not hold water. The instability of existence, its refusal to solidify in liquid reality, invokes the other just to corroborate its being in the world. Hence, Henry is desperate to have others sanction the truth he institutes: “I shall force this pack of fools to pump me full of divinity” (The Marriage 176).

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Elsewhere in the play, the corroboration of the self through the other is further intensified and comes to fruition through language that is exclusive of the author’s intention (“I am talking nonsense / But you are listening wisely to me, and hence / I am becoming wise” ibid. 126). Whereas Witold from Cosmos, as an engineer constructing the world around him, refuses to transcend his immanent logic, Henry’s skewed constructs exist nowhere outside the others that define his own choice. Both fail to respond to the singularity of the other. While the former’s failure was in negotiating the singularity of his cosmos with the world, the latter cannot domesticate an otherness impending from within. The only solace against irreconcilability of the other comes from the safe haven of form. (“No, there is no responsibility / Still there are formalities / To be attended to …” The Marriage 199). Existence surrendered to form through the lack of a ‘responsible’ response to the other can now only take refuge in social conventions (the closing abduction of Zosia in Ferdydurke), ordinary life in Warsaw (Cosmos), or ‘formalities’ (the funeral of The Marriage). Perhaps this reduction of existence to ‘formality’ – an empty form dictated by convention – is the clearest admission of the defeat of humanity against the solidity of form in all of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre. This becomes the funeral of the author. Right at the start of the funeral procession Henry concludes: “If I am imprisoned here, then somewhere … let this deed of mine be raised on high” (ibid. 200). Having ‘imprisoned’ writing in metaphysical measures (printed letters, pages, chapters, enclosed between beginning and ending, binding), writing turns into a product, up for grabs by others. Much like in the real world, in the play writing writes the narrator up to the point in which the funeral procession as form(ality) ‘imprisons’ and radically divorces Henry from his creation. From now on the author’s text is submitted to the reader’s gaze. Approached from a consideration of the metaphysics of reading Gombrowicz’s text opens up new spaces of alterity. The optics of reading was, for instance, touched upon by Gadamer in his study of fore-conceptions of interpretation, where the philosopher posits that understanding essentially involves ‘projecting’. The reader “projects a meaning for the text … as soon as some initial meaning emerges” (1975: 269). The reader approaching the text with prior knowledge and expectations is “fore-projecting” it, which involves a constant revision of cultural knowledge and its adaptation to the unfolding process of interpreting the text. The compromising of the ‘fore-projection’, incessant reactualisation of ‘fore-conceptions’, is according to Gadamer what activates understanding of the text’s meanings – defined as “a fluid multiplicity of possibilities” (ibid. 271).

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Gadamer’s account of interpretative otherness is expressed as follows: A hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity… The important thing is to be aware of one’s bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert truth against one’s own foremeanings (ibid. 271-72).

The conception of reading as ‘projection’ supplements functional assumptions of reading, ever since it deems reading not only a receptive, but in essence performative event. The ‘projection’ of the reader’s preconception onto the text manipulates the text as an autonomous being. This encroachment requires an active reformulation from the reader of his/her ‘fore-meanings’ in order to respond to the text’s otherness. The reader perceives the text from a particular historical angle that contaminates the text’s alterity by instilling bias. The working out of this projection, the continual re-adjustment of the optics of the gaze as a shifting anamorphic slant from which to advance the text, constitutes the other of reading that refuses to domesticate the text’s alterity. The notion of anamorphosis39 solicits extensive commentary in the proposed field as it plays into the aspects of reading as the other of itself. As maintained by Slavoj Žižek, the anamorphic perspective, complicating the axis of projection, is a consequence of the fact that language doubles reality. The doubling of reality brings about a gap that can no longer be advanced from a standard ‘frontal’ standpoint, but rather from aside, from the position of the other (Markowski 2004: 197). The anamorphosis of reading comes into play in Gombrowicz’s oeuvre whenever the narrator acts as an observer of fictional events. The fact that Gombrowicz’s narrators-protagonists are active participants of the fictional events, rather than omniscient narrators, only helps multiply the slants from which other characters are portrayed: After eleven o’clock the schoolgirl went to bed. Earlier in the day I had used a chisel to widen the angle of sight through the slit in the door, and now I could see the part of the room, which so far, had been inaccessible to my vision… She lit a lamp, picked up an English crime novel from her bedside table, and I could tell she was forcing herself to read. The modern one looked attentively into space as if visually trying to decipher the danger, to guess its shape and see at last the configuration of horror… She didn’t know the danger had neither shape nor sense – senseless, shapeless, and lawless, a murky, jumbled-up, elemental force devoid of style was endangering her modern shape, and that was all (Ferdydurke 174).

Gombrowicz’s emblematic narrator-protagonist more often than not acts as a voyeur. Such a position helps better penetrate the subject by sharpening and nar39 Anamorphosis is “a part of the picture which, when we look at the picture in a direct frontal way, appears as a meaningless stain, acquires the contours of a known object when we change our position and look at the picture from aside” (Žižek 1997).

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rowing down the scope of interpretation. Voyeurism is a peculiar sort of looking at the other, given that the subject looked at – unaware of the gaze of the other – can remain itself; it needs not stick out of its being to face the other, and allows unknowingly to be studied in its irreducible singularity. The lack of the encounter and negotiation of possibilities of both parties entail the radical alterity of the observed in the eyes of the voyeur. This is the point in which interpretation is paradoxically performative, although simultaneously receptive and passive in the impossibility of the direct encounter. Powerless to negotiate meanings of the observed, the interpreter ‘projects’ meanings upon the other that opens out its inexhaustible economy of possibilities. The narrator-voyeur of Ferdydurke passionately peeping at Zuta, absolute in her modernity, can now only project his own solipsistic fore-meanings upon the object of his examination. As she is now ‘accessible to his vision’, the narrator unearths safe places of familiarity, which undo the absolute otherness of his target. After all he confidently “could tell” what she engaged herself in. What immediately ensues, however, is nothing but his narcissistic, biased testimony emerging as a defence mechanism against the multiple possibilities of her singular self. The grammar of uncertainty (“as if”) must then give away his solipsistic project(ion). From now on, she means whatever he has her mean. Every single move (“she looked attentively into space”) becomes inscribed in the stencil of his fore-conceptions (“to decipher the danger”). At this point the rhetoric of alterity superbly overlaps with metaphors of reading. Her obliviousness to “the danger” is signalled in a meta-discursive comment implying that she, as nothing but his own ‘text’, vulnerable to his interpretative authority, is now being reshaped from within. The event of ‘reading’ her, curiously imbued with the vocabularies of chaos and alterity, dramatises the depthlessness, contingency, and multiplicity of meanings. ‘Her modern shape’ is thus ‘endangered’ by the performative, predisposed gaze – reading – projected upon her. Reading in Gombrowicz, exemplified manifold, is a scandal, an instrument of otherness and othering. Reading, the other’s gaze, inaugurates existence as long as it enforces the encounter between beings through spectral projection, which unsettles the immanence of the self and makes it transcend its hermetic bind. Allegories of gaze will thus necessarily, on the word of Leonard Neuger, be articulated in a negative tenor (2010: 698). The narrators often act, like readers do, from a safe distance, an existential vacuum, from which the gaze is comfortably one-sided and unreciprocated. In Gombrowicz the penetration of the other is carried out from an anamorphic slant wherein the vantage point of silence or spectrality of the observer in relation to the other recuperates one from the scandal of form – which, as said by Gombrowicz elsewhere, emerges between (as opposed to beyond) people. The hideaway of beyond becomes an opti-

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cal point of departure for the characters’ voyeuristic exploits. Therefore, the protagonists are usually outward voyeurs peeping through windows, peepholes, penetrating rooms, masterminding stratagems from hiding. Such estrangement develops a quirky ambition of characters to immure themselves from others whilst in the crowd. Witold (Cosmos), for instance, strives to decipher the meaning of the constellation of ‘hands’ under the line of sight of the gaze during lunches. By focusing on the idiosyncratic, impervious by others elements, he expands his peculiar reading space. Such autistic proclivity, the urge to become absent amongst others, a sort of spectral presence, is to paradoxically recuperate pseudo-voyeuristic vantage points, where the ignorance of the looking other’s presence can assure a distance. One can thus assume the heterotopic position of being both beyond and within, disrupting the supposed inside-outside binary. Remarkably, it appears that for Gombrowicz a true meaning of the other unfurls in his/her non-presence. Allowing for the argument that form uncoils between people, the only way of overriding form is to circumvent the inbetweenness. Paradoxically, to get to the core of the other but also counter the other’s contagious influence, is not to become entangled in the encounter. Therefore, cutting the binding ties with the other through anamorphosis (realised in peeping), the heterotopic non-presence of the onlooker (who actively ‘projects’ and thus influences the other), as well as the spectrality of the other (getting to Lena “through” the cat, foraging around empty rooms of Katasia, Zuta, Youngloods) help the narrator get to the core of the other: “Though every single thing in the room separately and individually belonged to her, it was only collectively that they created Katasia’s presence” (Cosmos 61). Rooms – prostheses of the other, liminal spaces that speak for the other in her/his absence – are thus for Gombrowicz’s narrators matrices of condensed experiences of the self: I stood there unable to discover the formula for my disgust, because there was no word, no gesture or act with which I could catch the distasteful essence and call it my own – and then my eyes fell on a book lying open on a bedside table. It was Chaplin’s memoirs opened to the page on which he tells how H.G. Wells had danced before him a solo … An English writer’s solo helped me to catch that distaste (Ferdydurke 154).

The artefacts of one’s collective knowledge simulating living presence perhaps constitute the true ‘essence’ of the other. However, the rhetoric of otherness gradually comes down to the demonstration of a metaphysics of reading. The narrator in pursuit of the essence of the other attempts to domesticate it, make it “his own”. The obsession of locating a meaning when faced by (con)textual otherness renders interpretation the lifeblood of existence. Curiously, since no formula can be applied for the identification of meaning, there is no method to offset the peculiarities of text; meaning must be solipsistically projected upon it.

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The fact that an aleatory object (Chaplin’s memoir) sanctifies a meaning of his own arrangement, which will later influence the plot, exposes the performative qualities of interpretation. Gombrowicz proves that the experience of otherness in reading is essentially the experience of the otherness of language. This works both ways. Born of multiplicity, the language (seething with the vocabularies of alterity like the event it seeks to describe) demonstrates first-hand that the metafictional anxieties of interpretation can in Gombrowicz come to fruition in the narrative of otherness. The refuge to solipsism, in terms of the peculiarities of the text that are not mediated for others, is not as much to celebrate immanence as to manifest and get back at the irreducibility of the other, which entails the irreducibility of language. Hence, Mrs Youngblood “suspected that the twig had a hidden meaning … but she had no way of knowing that for me the twig in the mouth had become an attribute of modernity” (Ferdydurke 152). Indeed, the only way of coming to grips with the immanence of the Youngbloods’ modernity is to develop the idiosyncrasy of his own interpretation of modernity against them and thus accommodate the alterity of others. Gombrowicz generates hermetic alterity in order to touch the otherness of the other; or, in a hermeneutic reading of it, he is othering interpretation in order to explode the singular other of the text and language. It seems that the otherness of the interpretation of the text constitutes its selfinterpretation by the appropriation of the mechanism of indeterminacy by which language and text are governed. Otherness of language celebrates the openness of text and multiple possibilities of interpretation. Having come to the central thesis positing that Gombrowicz’s narratives of otherness (as well as his otherness of narrative) are cognate with the existential experience of reading, the next part now furthers this proposed relation by interrogating the liminal space between language and existence, and by questioning the contours of its border.

3.7. Textu(re)ality It is not without reason that I contaminate the stylistic standard of this academic disquisition by putting forward a peculiar eponymous coinage: textu(re)ality. Many a reader of deconstruction will instantly identify a bent toward Derridean ‘undecidables’, that is “multiple coherences” (Johnson 1981: xviii) ingrained in linguistic units, which play upon the multitude of significations filtering through rigid conventions of grammar and lexis. And this is assumed to be true not only of such idiolectic practices, but lies at the roots of language itself. Polysemy of any lexical part debases etymological projects postulating the semantic standardisation of words. Language that fails to deliver what it is commanded to sub-

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scribes to practices defying its status as language. Language that unsettles the standards it sets does not communicate but approximates existence in its unbridled volatility and liquidity. Finally, language does not function but is; it demonstrates rather than communicates, and this shift of optics from the functional to purely the ontological collapses assumptions about the metaphysical nature of language. Textu(re)ality inaugurates a double-edged dynamic. It meta-linguistically visualises a perfect synergy between text and existence in the arrangement of letters and punctuation. The non-standard intrusion of brackets and letters they enfold forms a liminal space in which both concepts are fused. This is further intensified by the connotations of the word ‘texture’, bringing to mind (should we trust etymology) ‘constitution’ and ‘intermixture’. But the very same liminal space that holds both ends close together unhinges the juxtaposition. As both stems claim to be language, governed by standardised codes, they essentially malfunction: they do not mean anything in unison even given the linguistic assumptions that they aspire to (until collectively approved and standardised by language users through reiteration). Hence, this liminal space is also adopted to obscure the limit between entities. Still, it is a neologism that hardly goes beyond the linguistic reality of the words it seeks to represent: namely, the reality of the word ‘reality’ is nothing but linguistic since it literally is language and hence derides itself as it allegedly heralds the communion of text and existence. This demonstration, although to all intents and purposes merely rhetorical in value, surreptitiously points to the central business of this part, which is to test the titular non-dual relation between language and being as exemplified by Gombrowicz’s fiction, by interrogating the ways in which the liminality of language relativises its fixed limits. Since the Western episteme invented discursive tools that refer to language as the prosthesis of human consciousness, serving to describe existence, the border between language and existence has never been more flagrant. It could be even argued that language and being develop a purely dialectic relationship, given the substantiality of existence when set against the ethereality of language. But since artefacts of culture or values are expressed in language, and their substance is communicated by language through repetition – that anchors them in tradition – this reiteration does not turn into the representation of the artefact, but the reiteration of language. By the same token, the consciousness oriented at the interpretation of the world does not merely appropriate language to capture its essence. If in reading one cannot but generate a signifying formation, which approximates the structuredness of language, a transgression of language towards the other of itself is no longer viable (Schweiker 2002). This is to say that an object cannot exist through the transparency of language. The text’s calcu-

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lated meaning cannot do away with its carrier, as well as language cannot dispose of itself. In fact there is no lucid border that marks the transposition of language into the object, and vice versa. Literature as language that seeks to describe existence brings into play aesthetics to denote values, whose associations are by no means governed by causation, but rather, much like language, the accumulation of its semantic potential. Such a take on literature and language is, however, a two-edged sword. As Frederic Jameson suggests, the literary work … brings into being that very situation to which it is also … a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it, thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text (2010: 1831).

It is implied that uncritical assumptions about the totality of language represent in fact the other side of the same coin. Stalwartly as textualists might serenade their anthem of pantextuality, the relationship between language and reality in fact remains as unresolved as in the 19th century, when the realists were not any less complacent about the transparency of language than contemporary textualists are about the ubiquity of the text which must “draw the Real into its own texture” (ibid.). What is at issue, however, is the space between language and the real which invalidates the totality of one party over the other; a point of unsettling the boundaries between the entities masquerading as absolutised forms; a liminal milieu relativising their immanence. This logical stalemate constitutes an existential aporia between text and reality; it acts, too, as a moment of tension in reading. In such a process the moment of aporia emerges when the reader experiences the text that, on the one hand, appears to be merely a simulation of the reality it refers to in language, promising a smooth separation from language. On the other hand, since reading as an existential act is, like language, a structured sequence of signifying forms, the separation no longer applies. As imputed by Heidegger, language that means to express reality self-contradicts itself as it attempts to describe existence with purely linguistic means (at the end of the day what other means can it use?). Hence, the isomorphosis of language and reality, if possible, cannot come to pass through language. This is reflected in the fact that language does not merely have functional values, in that it communicates meaning or approximates reality, but forms consciousness and “speaks man” (2010: 987). In Gombrowicz’s fiction the conflicting relation between language and existence is perhaps most blatantly accentuated in The Marriage. The play actually makes one think that critics have over-pressed it as an oneiric story. The protagonist, Henry, exclaims:

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Forgive me for speaking in an artificial manner, but everything here is artificial! … I said it / But this again / Sounds solemn, and transforms what I am saying into a / DECLARATION (The Marriage 109-111).

The play speculates the displacement of the real. The narrator recognises the otherness of the liminal space he involuntarily ends up in. This is indeed a peculiar, indeterminate reality: “Where are we? … all the same I have the feeling … we’re somewhere…” (88). Haunted by the tacit awareness of dislocation and uncertainty (expressed in the ellipsis), the narrator takes pains to position himself at a stable centre. This ‘artificial’ world where objects and characters are “surfacing” or “looming” (wyłaniać się),40 as opposed to just appearing – with the characters uncertain about their whereabouts – perhaps suggests a dreamlike, surreal milieu. Alternatively, what extends into the full view of the narrator is a ‘linguistic’ reality. The reality governed by ‘artificial’ structures; where words are arbitrarily ‘surfacing’ in their dynamic multiplicity; where language distanced from thought always express simultaneously more and less than one means it to, and hence ‘transforms’ intention; finally, the liquid surge of consciousness coagulates – through the rigidity of linguistic conventions – into irrevocable ‘DECLARATIONS’.41 In this sense, the play also serves as a metaphor of postmodernity governed by an over-encompassing textuality. The postmodern entity no longer pretends to incorporate language (as if it was a sort of detachable prosthetic device) into their existence, but precisely the opposite, just like the characters of The Marriage, s/he rather articulates the anguish of being incorporated into language: “I might kneel down … Of course that would be pretty … but I did say I might kneel down …even though it would look a little … but I did say I might kneel down” (ibid. 111). Language impinges on thought even (or perhaps principally) in commonplace acts. Henry aspires to think outside language; to act in a reality unmediated by its paralysing power: the only way in which he can be himself. But since he has already articulated an act calculated to be performed in reality, he performs the act in language, or rather language performs the act for him; he becomes benumbed by it, which evacuates the notion of a world undisturbed by the yoke of language. Since language has already written him into his existence, he can only mumble resignedly: “I knelt down. But I knelt down quietly and not for myself, 40 I propose my own translation here since the word crucial for the analysis was missed in the existing translation of the play. 41 Dreams might in fact come into play in the plot, which, however, do not interfere with the thesis that language constitutes the fictional reality of The Marriage, as dreaming may act as a metaphor of language.

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but for them, and not for them, but for myself as though I were a priest … a priest …. of what I don’t know” (ibid. 111). In some senses, he affirms through the rhetoric of alterity that once encapsulated in language one can never articulate the self, but instead expose the self to the other. Such exposition is not intentioned by the self; it is the submission to the interpretation by the other. Narrated from the hermetic optics of the narrator, the language of indeterminacy does not necessitate schizophrenia but rather heterotopia and liminality. Recited by language, his acts are (n)either ‘for himself’ (n)or ‘for them’; not outside but in-between himself and the other, between language and existence. Gombrowicz’s characters do treat language seriously given that it is an active element of plot: it works as fiction. All philosophical concepts are enmeshed in the linguistic fibre and the fictional events are largely the events of language. Words impinging on plot are anthropomorphised: “I said: Mommy… And I said it warmly, mawkishly, with great sadness, and I infused the word with all the sickly-sweet-mommy warmth…” (Ferdydurke 142). The ontology of language harbours within itself an irresolvable aporia: the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of approximating existence. The structuredness of language is at odds with the liquidity of existence; one appears to exclude the other. Yet no structure would emerge without the generative agency of indeterminacy. As remarked by Gombrowicz elsewhere, form is born of chaos, hence structure emerges from the milieu it seeks to annihilate. This, however, is not to imply that chaos precedes structure, since if the former is to be identified as chaos, emerge as itself, it needs a metaphysical form to speak on its behalf. In this sense, there is no precedence between form and chaos. My argument in this sense counters the Sartrean credo positing that existence precedes essence. Gombrowicz’s use of language explodes this formula by hinting at textual fissures that strike at the foundations of the assumed notion of precedence. This aporia, on the language-existence axis, is reflected in Gombrowicz’s unsettling of the constructedness of language: I had been ready for anything, but not for a teapot. Enough is enough… there is a sort of excess about reality… After so many things I could no longer enumerate, the nails, the frog, the sparrow, the bit of wood, the pole, the nib, the lemon peel, the cardboard box.etc, the chimney, the hand, the hands, etc., etc., the lumps of earth, the bed springs, the ashtray, the bits of wire, toothpicks, pebbles, the chicken…. (Cosmos 66-67).

Enumeration and reiteration are inextricably inscribed in Gombrowicz’s stylistics, (appropriated in abundance in Cosmos and Ferdydurke in particular). Enumeration undermines the structural assumptions of language as it disposes of syntax as its structural backbone. In its fluid procession of words, it approximates existence abolishing the rigidity of form. Enumeration is thus language

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that refuses to act as language. Gombrowicz’s stylistic tic of the overproduction of verbal artefacts is used to turn against language conceived as a received formula in favour of the liquidity of forms. This is not as much to lionise a homology between language and existence, but rather disturb their border and stretch the liminal space extending in-between. In this way language boycotts itself by inaugurating its self-erasure through the confounding of its own limits. However, what draws language near existence is the very thing that distances them. The overaccumulation of (verbal) artefacts causes an ‘excess of reality’ wherein the narrator cannot keep afloat amid the surging ocean of chaos around him. His reality needs form which is both granted by the constructedness of language and denied by its excess. On the hermeneutic level, the double-edged structure of language opens up its heterotopic non-space of exchange between text and the reader at the moment of interpretation. The doubling of language impinges on the interpretation of text in terms of its genre. For instance, can Cosmos be classified as a (problematic but still) detective story, as affirmed by many a critic? It can, but not in terms of plot but language. Among other stylistic techniques, the lack of conjunctions, enumeration, and reiteration constitute blind spots to be completed by the interpreter; Cosmos becomes a detective story for the reader. These postulations concerning the otherness of interpretation as an existential experience will be tested in chapter 4; it will take as its focal point an analysis of translation as an act approximating the experience of liminality, liquidity and différance. Therefore, the chapter will be theory-oriented, and aimed at providing a hermeneutic interpretation of the act of translation, one which is based upon hitherto accepted poststructuralist methodologies.

Chapter 4 Acts of translation Literature and translation are practices marked by their inherent resistance to theory.42 Whenever submitted to metaphysical conceptualisations, their complex qualities and workings prove more aleatory than ordered. That is not, however, to say that they wholly shun a conceptual framework – one could not possibly turn a blind eye to the bulk of literary and translation theories spawned by modern occidental epistemology. In fact, one cannot conceive of literature and translation without already having submitted them to form. The ontological inquiry into the essence of literature is nothing but philosophical – as opposed to literary. Like a literary text, translation resists theorisations and encapsulation in formal categories as there is no one way to translate, much like there is no one interpretation of a literary text. Reconciled to the indeterminacy and plurivocality of literature, the chief exponents of poststructuralist literary and translation theories have coined a range of double-edged non-concepts that foreground the essentially protean character of literature (and writing overall). If anything, literature, much like translation, is a ‘process’, ‘event’, ‘performance’, ‘act’, incessant in its ‘becoming’, or ‘beingat-work’; extended in the liminal non-space between – as Aristotle proposed – ‘actuality’ and ‘potentiality’.43 To trust etymology, act, on the one hand, stands for ‘a thing done’ (actum), and “a doing” (actus), or a thing being done on the other. Act is thus a concept accommodating the conflicting properties of writing: its imputed entelechy (as a dead letter, the written as documentation of writing, an intertextual ricochet of all preceding writings absent from itself) and action (as being read, with its potentiality for reinterpretation and retranslation). Hence, act both compartmentalises and activates what it inscribes in itself. Such liminality of act brings to the table those domains of literature and translation that disrupt the metaphysical dichotomies of philosophy. This duality implies that the text in the act of literature and translation offers its twofold nature up to the reader. Accordingly, in the act of reading, every text can be appreciated as literary, inasmuch as no fixed guidelines of identification

42 To echo Paul de Man’s celebrated essay “Resistance to Theory” (1992). 43 The notion of act is extensively elaborated on in Derrida and Attridge’s Acts of Literature, which inspired the ongoing argument (1992).

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of the non/literary apply, and at the same time no text is only literary. Similarly, every text (translated in a literal sense of the word or otherwise) is already a translation of all texts inspiring the writer, but which is absent from the moment of writing and shuns translation by being singular. The act of (literal) translation renders the text as an imitation of its ‘original(s)’, but also as an original product of the translator’s creativity. If it is through this inscription in an act that the de-totalising questioning of text commences, it is imperative, in the context of my argument, to present the critical angle to the reader. A singular act of reading secures that there never be two indistinguishable interpretations of the text. Translation augurs unreadability in the confrontation of the translator with the unreadable other of text. Summoned by the other – as only what is not immediately readable requires translation – translation must give itself over to the text; it must translate itself into the other of text to resuscitate readability. Such a response to text is one of responsibility in the face of the demands made by the text on the reader. An act of translation is not hermetically text-bound, against Saussure’s and structuralists’ assertions, but rather acts as a gesture of the participation of the reader in the world. The question of translation naturally entails the translator’s ethical accountability for the text, not only in the legal - dictated by a policy of publishing houses, subject to the standards of market economy - but for the most part in the existential sense. Translation-as-being pulls the reader/translator into its orbit wherein his/her being-in-translation approximates an existential act of participation. To push the argument a step further, the reader’s encounter with liminality, liquidity and the indeterminacy of the text recaptures the agony of living through the ‘chaosmos’ of existence. With this in mind, Gombrowicz’s life and work should lend themselves as propitious cases in point. Gombrowicz’s essentially liminal text will be juxtaposed with the his real life exile to Argentina, which in effect rendered the writer a liminal figure on the pantheon of European writers. Transplanted, his translation into the other of his former self could not but spawn an exilic discourse. Translating artistic or philosophical concepts into the canvas of existence was not uncommon among Continental writers and philosophers. The philosophical consistency between life and work was particularly conspicuous among Existentialists and some Poststructuralists, e.g. Deleuze and Guattari (Shatz 2010). In fact, the commitment to practise the philosophy he preached was precisely what Deleuze most appreciated about Gombrowicz as can be gathered from the former’s “Literature and Life” (1997). Gombrowicz’s liminal text and existence (and in effect text of existence) has inspired the present argument and constitutes the chief subject of inquiry of this chapter. I propose that the act of translation, approximating the translator’s experience of text, is fundamentally the experience of liminality between language

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and existence. The next part of the study will therefore scrutinise the ways Gombrowicz’s literature corresponds with the writer’s existential philosophy and experience of exile. If his literature makes demands on the reader confronted by the liminality and indeterminacy of text – and, as argued, the same holds true for the text in the act of translation – the translated text will thus emerge as a peculiar instance of the acts of interpretation of the literary text. Accordingly, a comparative analysis of Gombrowicz’s two novels – Kosmos and TransAtlantyk – and their English translations – Cosmos (1967, 2005), Trans-Atlantyk (1994) – shall ensue. For the sake of clarity, in terms of a conceptual understanding of ‘translation’, three distinct conceptualisations of the term will be employed. Namely: ‘linguistic’ translation or the communication of meaning from the source to target language or within a single language;44 ‘philosophical’ or as a rhetorical device mirroring existential becoming; and ‘theoretical’ or the liminal non-space of linguistic doubling.

4.1. Acts of participation When in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, the transatlantic cruise liner Bolesław Chrobry set off for Argentina from Poland, with Witold Gombrowicz on board, little had the young writer known it was to be the last time he would ever see his motherland. Gombrowicz would, after the 24-year-long exile, briefly revisit Europe: Germany in 1963 – after receiving a scholarship granted by the Ford Foundation, and France in 1964, where he met his death a year later, never to revisit Poland again. As befalls exiled writers, Gombrowicz – with almost half his life abroad – undergoes a translation into the other of his former self. If the radical rethinking of national values leading up to the translation of the self into the other, which results in the development of a liminal, bifurcated sense of national identity, appears to be only too natural a symptom of exile, Gombrowicz’s is indeed a curious casus of exilic liminal sensibility. Gombrowicz would by no means have been alienated in living and breathing his exilic condition, as the Polish pre and post-War literary pantheon was larded with high-profile emigrant intellectuals escaping either the War or Stalinism: 44 For linguistic purposes the following Jakobson’s taxonomy will be referred to throughout: “1) Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. 2) Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. 3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (1971: 261).

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Sławomir Mrożek, Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Głowacki, Andrzej Bobkowski, Jerzy Kosiński, to name but a few. Although each had their own singular way of undergoing the angst of translation, a universal aperçu of an (not exclusively Polish) exilic code of conduct can be sketched in their cases. Having come across the other of nation, culture and language, an individual naturally blends into the new host community through a process of cultural adaptations and assimilation. However, unable to entirely shed the skin of the former self in favour of the other, one experiences liminal, conflicting forces of identification coming to light dialectically through language. The total translation is thwarted by what George Gasyna (after Foucault) dubs “a drive to heterotopia”, namely “a rhetorical strategy wherein the pressures of exilic acculturation are defused by a tactical choosing of a home in an entirely ‘other’ place” (Gasyna 2009: 902). Gombrowicz’s version of exile, however, cannot be placed within the curvature of the dialectical displacement of the self (through language). It turns out that what presents itself as binary a relation, morphs into the subversive politics of liminal agitation. Curiously, in Trans-Atlantyk, the post-war semiautobiograhical novel, Gombrowicz (the main character and narrator), on seeing his fellow countrymen return to the war-stricken Poland, mounts a ferocious polonoclastic diatribe against the Leviathan motherland: Sail, sail, you Compatriots, to your People! Sail to that holy Nation of yours haply cursed! Sail to that St. Monster dark, dying for ages yet unable to die! Sail to your St. Freak, cursed by all Nature, ever being born and still Unborn! Sail, sail, so he will not suffer you to Live or Die but keep you forever between Being and Nonbeing (Trans-Atlantyk, 6-7).

Curiously, the narrator, far from bewailing his new bastardized, mongrelised, state of the displaced other, subversively overturns the vector of exilic protocol retorting that it is rather his motherland, the ‘St. Monster’, that is liminal. 45 If he ever experienced a heterotopia of being, it had already been eventuated back in Poland; if exiled now, he will have been always-already an émigré in his own country. Transported from his ‘original’ country and written off as the other he might appear to be, he had already been translated back into the other of himself. Gombrowicz pushes his idiolect through the narrative funnel of liminal rhetoric, wherein Poland and his former “Compatriots” are neither dead nor alive, born nor unborn, stuck between being and non-being. Perhaps in order to come to grips with the alterity of the self, one should keep it at a safe distance. Hence, the relocation to the heterotopic non-place re45 On more than one occasion Gombrowicz underscores both the geographical and cultural liminality of Poland: “What is Poland? It is a country between East and West, a place where Europe is going to its end, the transitional land, where East and West undermine each other. The land of weakened form.” (Stath 1999: 204)

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verses the vantage point from which the former self moves into sight as the other. As such, the polonoclastic tirade is merely served up as a hopeless manifestation of the fact that there is nothing but translation; that Mother is already other, already bastardised and orphaned; that there are no roots to hold on to; that the body has always-already been eviscerated and organ-less (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari’s key concept). The narrator’s mock-lament to his motherland – which resonates and parodies Mickiewicz’s sonnets (Crimean Sonnets – Sonety krymskie) – sabotages the spatial and temporal exilic dimension. Gombrowicz is – as coined by Paolo Bartoloni in an altogether different context (2008) - ‘turning back’ as a means of ‘looking forward’, which is to say that the narrator’s mnemonic retrospection is a token of his translation into the present (superbly accomplished in the mixture of the archaic and postmodern stylistics of Trans-Atlantyk). Gombrowicz himself never ceased to reassure and infuriate his Polish readers and critics that his exilic angle was more first-hand than the biased Polish perspective (Brodsky 1980). In a related argument, Filipowicz surmised that, since Poland developed a stalwart émigré tradition, the exiled writers’ alluring exoticism made them in the eyes of domestic readers more at home whilst abroad, which the critic referred to as “the literature of awkward presence”.46 The gestural “awkward presence” is thus the liminal non-presence problematising – both obscuring and elucidating – the normative optics of cultural reception via exilic discourse (pace Gasyna). Liminal rhetoric makes its presence felt in the fibre of language. Leaving aside the political purposes of appropriating gawęda – an archaic oral genre of Polish Sarmatian gentry – under the veneer of the writer’s modern idiolect, the appropriation of a cornucopia of stylistic manoeuvres in Trans-Atlantyk makes the novel tell the story of its own autotranslation. The dead dialect being transplanted to the postmodern dictum is little else than translation caught in the act of its own becoming. Be it in original or translation, Gombrowicz produces a text that approximates the act of translation as an existential trajectory of becoming the other of itself by polluting it with stylistic duality. Literal translation is in the same way a fruit of the mingling of collision and compromise, of two languages pushed through the channel of a single discourse. Such hyperbolisation of bipolar linguistic traditions serves to intensify the liminal resonance, given that the polarity of the stylistic ends stymies the totality of text – and hence the presence of the thing itself – and complicates translata46 “Polish émigré literature, then, is hardly perceived as the other literature or the literature of the Polish diaspora. It is regarded not only as being of the native culture but in it-at one with it-as well, even when works by émigré authors are not readily available in Poland” (Filipowicz 1989: 160).

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bility. Herein lies the inherent paradox of the liminal acts of exilic imagination and discourse. The exilic subject is, if anything, the product of translation par excellence, but since his/her heterotopic longing for the loss of the self generates heterogeneous exilic discourse – a fusion of bifurcated national and linguistic selves – it resists translatability. A liminal text is both governed by translation, as its driving force of becoming, and refuses to be finalised by the totalising synthesis of translation. As I have argued, translation as act both aspires to the finality of its design – to the ultimate status of ‘the translated’ of a text – and to the processuality of it always being-at-work. It is in this sense that Trans-Atlantyk is served up as a metaphor for the act of translation and as the epitome of untranslatability – the Polish Finnegans Wake if Bayley is to be believed. Needless to say, Gombrowicz was only too aware of the corollaries that his subversive programme was about to cause: Trans-Atlantyk was such a folly, from every point of view! To think that I wrote something like that, just when I was isolated on the American continent, without a penny, deserted by God and men! In my position it was important to write something quickly which could be translated and published in foreign languages. Or, if I wanted to write something for Poles, something which didn’t injure their national pride. And I dared – the very height of irresponsibility! – to fabricate a novel which was inaccessible to foreigners because of its linguistic difficulties and which was a deliberate provocation of the Polish émigrés, the only readership on which I could rely! (A Kind of Testament 106).

Even reading between the lines of this barrage of assurances regarding his blissful recklessness, indicative of Gombrowicz’s inflammatory rhetoric, one can hit upon the double points undercutting the assertions. For all its perkiness, the writer hits a higher notch than he is prepared to admit here. What Gombrowicz truly inveigles the reader into believing, smirking behind the veil of the brash braggadocio, is a heavy-weight ethical message if approached from the exilic angle. “The very height of irresponsibility” is essentially the acme of exilic responsibility; in that he does justice to and accepts the consequences of the translation of himself into the other. This gesture is, however, not the one of sheer cosmopolitan complacency. Gombrowicz does not trade Polish for another language, but rather foreignises its interlinear construction; lets it undergo the existential turbulences of becoming the liminal – as opposed to radical – other of itself, has it translate and demonstrate the translation as an effectively experiential act. As such, the text chips away at Gombrowicz’s smug belief in the “inaccessibility” of the novel “to foreigners”. As the text of translation (as existential act), Trans-Atlantyk cannot exist except in its liminal non-form manifesting its becoming as text. Hence, the only way the novel can exist as what it is set to be – that is the text of existence – is when it materialises in the act of reading as such. Wholly readable for Poles, it would just cease to stand for a metaphor of

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becoming and translation; domesticated by and for foreigners, it would be reduced to the role projected upon it – that of a foreign text neatly lodged in the confines of the familiar. Since neither linguistic inner fissures and scissions (as reminded by radical textualists) nor the liquidity of existence (governing Gombrowicz’s text and language) let such an utopian, dialectic, inter-linguistic translation project come to fruition, it is only by being unreadable that it can be read at all as the text of existence; it is by no means understood as existential, Existentialist or about existence, but rather as the event of reading evoking the reader’s experience of the liminality of the text as an experiential act. Only if “inaccessible” can it be accessed at all, which undermines its pure inaccessibility in turn. If the stylistic doubling of Trans-Atlantyk immediately brings to the table questions of un/translatability and the spatio-temporal dualising of exilic imagination, it also suggests the purity, as opposed to dissemination, of language in translation. One of the seminal essays to extend the question of a mythical ‘pure language’ and multiple languages to the corresponding relation between ‘original’ and translation is Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923/2000). As argued by the philosopher: It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language (22).

What the philosopher reasons is that pure language lying dormant in languages that contain its traces is contaminated by the dissemination into multiple languages it undergoes. Translation as a linguistic transfer from the original to other languages evinces itself as an act of the approximation of the archetypal translation from the pure to other languages. Although translation itself participates in the multiplication of the negative material as a result of dissemination, thus further distancing language from its pure archetype, it may be also taken to achieve the opposite. Since translation endeavours to transport the original into the other, it essentially carries it within itself, and offers purity up to the other. Successful or otherwise, such a design aims at restoring language to its purity – its pre-translation square one. This said, translation can be conceived as the becoming of an original, pure language-to-come. If translation is the becoming of (pure) language – which imitates the trajectory of narrative production – it can serve to inform Gombrowicz’s project of detotalising form. In Benjamin’s account, translation may venture to reinstate the purity of language. However, this reinstitution comes to being always in potentia through the processuality of becoming, which translation cannot transcend. In this sense, unable to ever finalise its pursuit, translation can merely render yet another ver-

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sion of language. Gombrowicz, on his part, does not believe that becoming leads to purity, but to a (partial and provisional) detotalisation of form. For both Benjamin and Gombrowicz then, translation has a messianic mission. Where their ways part, however, is that the former seeks to experience the epiphany of pure form via translation, and the latter to elude it. As Derrida holds: The event of a translation, the performance of all translations, is not that they succeed. A translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the term. Rather, a translation succeeds in promising success, in promising reconciliation (1988: 123).

The “reconciliation” that Derrida proposes is one between languages. Translation assures illimitable iterability and mutability of meanings between the languages, which is precipitated by relentless dissemination. If so, meanings travel across languages, but never assume their total forms, which marks the failure of translation as the transfer of meaning. What to a certain extent legitimises the validity of translation and its endeavour to assume a totality of meanings is – as put forward by Benjamin and sanctified by Derrida – the programme of reconciling languages given their common denominator of the shared, ‘sacred’, pure language that all languages carry. On the face of it, translation just entails unbridled dissemination, but is at the same time answerable to its primeval form. Hence, the task of translation is this aspiration towards totality without ever assuming it. Given that no pure language can be revivified, and form resisted entirely, translation has to end up in failure. Alternatively, Gombrowicz actually endorses a seditious account of purity, which the act of translation could cater for. It has to be noted that in Gombrowicz’s book all the orders of cultural hegemony serve to restrict individual expression: the lionisation of national heroes, a championing of the collective national spirit derived from the Polish Romantic ideal at the expense of the individual, and gullible conventionalism. As such, on the word of Gombrowicz, an individual is always below the culture s/he eulogises. If all artefacts of culture and tradition merely herald an elusive and erroneously totalising purity, it is the free, unbiased individual consciousness that stands a chance of progressing to purity. If convention – unremittingly reducing the individual to the absence from its totalising paradigm – is the cry of the troubled, misguided, corrupt politics of the collective, it is the singular ‘I’ that translates the contingency of language into the original voice. It is in this sense that, counterintuitively, the canonically adulterated verbal pyrotechnics of the language of TransAtlantyk – etymological (purposeful?) fallacies and misnomers, intertextuality, stylistic hotchpotch, archaism-idiolect agglutination – which are written off from

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the sanctified cultural dogma and cast to its outside, seek to recuperate originality and purity through singular acts of translation. Closer etymological inspection of the word original might suggest its value here. The two-edgedness of the word – as both the first and the last, old and new – implies that the subversion of convention through the heterogeneity of a singular expression augurs a new purity of the postmodern condition. With the rediscovery of the original language doomed to failure, after all no language can shake off its historical load, translation proposes another way out by sanctifying the becoming-of-purity, as opposed to purity-per-se (in its potential ultimate form). In this respect the means justifies the end. For a postmodern consciousness, purity is always-yet-to-come, and it is rather the participation in the unfolding of language(s) that can begin to negotiate the text’s nonnegotiable terms; that is participate in the (re)creation (or recreation via creation) of language’s meanings. It is via the act of participation that language and exile intersect. One might go as far as to argue that there is no translation without participation, which in turn renders translation an inherently existential practice. To follow the line of reasoning, the act of participation, as appreciated by the modern consciousness, informs how the experience of text evinces itself as intrinsically liminal, which hints at the inextricability of reading – or for that matter the interpreter’s participation in the world/text – from translation. Earlier chapters of the history of modern thinking put on view alternative conceptions of experiencing the otherness of (and in) literature and culture. Romanticism is thought to have adopted a binary relation to the idea(l) of the other. The Romantic spirit tended to panegyrise the cultural others, which is unveiled in the radical shift towards miscellaneous representations of alterity in literature and art: Medievalism, Hellenism, Gothicism, the sublime. These new optics must have impinged on the perception of the literary. Hence, literature itself – with its written word far distanced from the spirit – presented itself as the other, as well as other to other forms of writing; via its implicit elitism that was at odds with rural naturalism. Consequently, it was not merely the exploration of cultural others that contributed to the approval of foreign texts but also the treatment of literature as ‘high’, mystical, and other to itself. Subsequent conceptions of language and literature in Victorian or Positivist thought, as having an inherently utilitarian function, further distanced the reader from the written word; s/he appreciated the text as a means – as opposed to the end in itself – of understanding the world. Language is figured as an accessory via which to delve into the centre of things. The high-brow Modernists, on the other hand, almost got it right by spilling into the text the stream of the writer’s consciousness, to which the reader was to have direct access, as well as shifting focus from functional assump-

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tions of language to its ontological value. The bombastic smokescreen of cerebral language, however, hinting at the elitist position of literature in relation to other (inferior) non-literary forms, kowtows to the epistemological project of compartmentalising language, literature and existence via metaphysical conceptualisation. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has come to terms with an allencompassing textuality, as well as intertextuality whose chief deconstructionist war cry argues that there is nothing but text, that the outside of a text is yet another text ad infinitum. If all is text, without borders, centres and forms, the binary relation of the self to the other collapses, thus resisting programmatic paradigms. Since no limits apply, oppositions of sorts – such as those of the reader and text as well as text and existence – must be subverted. Interwoven in the text, the reader cannot but participate in its becoming, suspended in the liminal (since the dialectic is no longer an option) state between language and existence. The Enlightenment programme set out to legitimise the world according to the protocols of the hegemonic culture that precipitated the dehumanisation of an individual – now answerable and identified according to the registers of form – via the compartmentalisation of identity. On the cusp of modernity – strongly catechised by French Existentialism – an individual was condemned to freedom (pace Sartre) and liberated from the yoke of “grand meta-narratives” (Lyotard 1984: 18). Gombrowicz’s share in this ‘liberation’ mindset – aside from his relentless reminders that the strikingly existentialist Ferdydurke pre-dated Sartre’s Nausea by two years – is his ferocious urge for individualism, as well as his resistance to all forms of cultural hegemony and collectivism known as the demystification of culture. Symptomatic of his audacious rhetoric of ethical imperatives, Gombrowicz exhorts an individual to adhere to his existential venture: Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act. Action will delineate and define you. You will find out from your actions. But you must act as an 'I', as an individual, because you can be certain only of your own needs, inclinations, passions, necessities (Diary Vol. 2: 130).

In Gombrowicz’s account, ‘action’ – or active participation in one’s existence – is, like for Sartre, the act of moulding one’s identity. By being ‘defined’, however, one has to reconcile him/herself to being in a form, which might strike as out-and-out anti-Gombrowiczian. The writer, however, aware of the impossibility of entirely eschewing form, calls for an unravelling individual forms, as opposed to those imposed by cultural assumptions. However, what is the difference between one’s private form and the one served on a silver plate of culture? On what grounds is this elitist and solipsistic gesture supposed to be superior to the democratic complacency with form, if it fails to shun form in the

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same way? The crux of the matter lies is in the notion of ‘action’. Intimate as opposed to external forms, are not only the tokens of personal freedom – thus kowtowing to Sartrean creed – but they also tend to undercut their condition as form by being constantly reformulated in the liquidity of becoming. The private form comes to being in multitudes by incessantly reformulating itself. As such, form is already forms, multiplied in the trajectory of becoming. In view of that, in no other way can one actively participate in becoming than by ‘acting as I’ and resisting external precepts. Coming back to (post)modernist assumptions, an individual is now to participate in the existence s/he has been written into. However, because the new, post-war order has contended that reality could not be pieced together and restored to its former order, with Grand Narratives dead (Lyotard), no metaphysical borders (Derrida) or roots (Deleuze and Guattari), hence no identity, and a new liquid modernity (Bauman), this participation necessitates the individual to engage with the irreconcilable arbitrariness of the world-as-text. With borders fluid, the reader, in his/her turn, cannot be contentedly ushered in the comfortable furniture of convention and genre when confronted with the literary text (which no longer can be categorised as such), but is instead bulldozed to the liminal chasm between the text in front of her/him and text-as-existence. Postcolonial sensibilities, animated by the exilic experience, further precipitated the existential vector towards participation, ever since the exilic subject – confronted with the other first hand – epitomises the individual’s entanglement in the liminal state between language and being par excellence. Hence, in his reading of Gombrowicz’s exilic experience, Gasyna divulges: And if Gombrowicz could be situated on the vanguard of what I will call a postmodern, post-war relative subjectivity, a mode of viewing the self ‘contrapuntally’, then his later work especially displays a bifocal perspective whereby the exilic other is always already implicit and in dialogue with (a dominant perception of) the self (2011: 29).

This impossibility of detachment of the self from the other, whereby the exilic sensibility destabilises metaphysical preconceptions ingrained in dialectically conditioned consciousness by imploding culturally approved polarities, is what lies beneath the filament of Gombrowicz’s assertions and meditations. Given that an exilic schizophrenia emerges as all too natural a corollary of the split national and cultural selves (at the level of intercultural translation) I will now venture to investigate how this mechanism of the folding up of the split selves translates into the linguistic domain (which Gasyna dubs “scriptive self”, 2011: 22); and to push the latter even further, I will pursue how such translation allows not only the exilic subject to perceive the alterity of the other language,

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but how language appears to her/him as the other itself, precipitated by his/her immersion the liminal experience. Translation, in a linguistic sense of the word, plays second fiddle to translation as the double bind of language, whose inherent heterogeneity sanctions the language’s possibility to lend itself to further translations. Before the text is subject to translation, it is the implicit exilic factor of language itself – whose structure warrants the condition for accommodating otherness – that foreignises itself. If this be the case, translation does not start off with the encounter with the other (foreign or second) language, but with the other of language per se, which entails the fact that an original text is already a translation of itself and a mother language becomes foreign to itself before translation begins. The mother language – existing as a construct, an image projected onto language to account for and sanctify the raison d’être of identity – does not exist except in its disclosure of fissures and deficiencies inviting translation, and hence legitimates itself as maternal in opposition to the absent other of a foreign language. In this sense, as held by Levesque in his interview with Derrida, “in order for any language to be a language, it can only be – structurally – a place of exile” (Derrida 1988: 143). The metaphoric of exile dramatises this peculiar condition of language as a space of the folding up of itself and its other. Exilic optics – appreciated from existential angle – lends itself as a parallel to the related workings of language by pointing to the ways in which language becomes the signature of a liminal, schizoid self. The exilic catastrophe, however, does not lie in the fact that the language is both what it was and the other it is becoming, but that it is neither. Language is “a place of exile” as it is always already answerable to the ‘greater’ pure language (in Benjamin’s sense) it is born of and whose traces iterate through itself and to a language-yet-to come. With regard to the latter, Derrida maintains that “if the translation is indebted to the original … it is because original is indebted to the coming translation” (1988: 153). Reconciled to the impossibility of reconstructing the pure language it bears the structure of, language must position itself in relation to what it is to become. The obligation of language to sacrifice itself to translation stems from its intrinsic crevices de-totalising the deceptive wholeness of itself. Incomplete, language submits itself to a translation that works to fill-in the fissures left by language’s inability to ever recuperate its totality. In this sense, translation not only refuses to be expropriated by the original as a subaltern supplement, but renders the original secondary to itself. Exiled from itself, language must recognise its inscription into translation if it is to aspire to mend the lacunae exposing its secondariness. Gadamer’s formulation of the process of reading as translation gets to the core of this argument:

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Reading in one’s own language is already translation to a certain extent. Like translation into another language, it is a transposition into a different medium – a medium of sound and stream of speech. Reading is … transposition bordering on an artistic act. It could be paradoxically argued that every reader is like a translator. Is overcoming the distance between letters and living speech indeed not a greater miracle than putting the distance between two languages in the act of communication? … Reading is like reaching a distant coast, crossing from shore to shore, from text to text (1993: 283-284, my translation).

The philosopher argues that the act of reading requires the interpreter to bridge the gap between the written and spoken word (perhaps other binaries could supplement the hypothesis, namely those of thought and language, as well as the word and the self). This imposes greater demands on the reader than what is conceived of in the translation between languages. In so doing, Gadamer not only shifts the centrepiece from inter-linguistic translation to the exigencies of reading as the act of intra-linguistic translation, but first and foremost to the pertinence of the act of reading as participation. Whichever proves more exigent – be it reading, as per Gadamer, or language-to-language translation – is open to question. Either way, it is participation that awakens the apparatus of cognition and the interpretation of the world, and the resultant translation of the alterity of the world, text, and language into familiar cognitive registers. Gadamer’s underscoring of reading as more in keeping with translation than translation itself, constitutes a telling gesture towards unravelling the other within the domain of the self, which animates debates on the implicit liminal status of language in relation to itself – and this formula might apply to the existential-exilic frame just as well. As hinted above, the language of Trans-Atlantyk epitomises this predicament of language as being other to itself; and thus a text that – translated or in original – reveals the protocols of translation inherent in its structure. It is not only what Barthes’ coined a writerly text (1975), one requiring of the reader active participation and unremitting negotiation of its meanings, but it relies further upon the incessant self-contradiction and indeterminacy of language. The novel that systematically dramatises the reciprocal denial and mutual implosion of the planted dichotomies of idiosyncrasy and platitude, history and presence, selfhood and nationhood, existence and language, faithfully reproduces the liminal existential quandaries of the translator; ones regarding dilemmas surrounding the negotiation of cultural, historical, and linguistic values, as well as the balance between their assimilation and resistance. Following Gadamer, reading is translation, in that both processes require a performative act of participation on behalf of the reader/translator, who must come to grips with the liminality of text. But how does this equation work in reverse? If confirmed that interpretation is translation, what sort of an act of in-

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terpretation is a single translation? Or, if an original text can be read as translation, what experiential acts of interpretation does a translated text evoke? To address the posited questions, I will now turn to a comparative analysis of Trans-Atlantyk47 in original and translation with the intention of addressing the issue of the double bind of language as ‘the space of exile’, as well as the reciprocal doubling and unstable hierarchies between original and translation. If Trans-Atlantyk, as assumed, offers itself up as a text dramatising exilic dualities between the word and being, as well as a case in point of a text exposing the mechanisms of self-translation, does the interpretation of the novel in translation via the lens of the postulates impinge on understanding the novel as such? 48 The next section will address this very question.

4.1.1. The making of Trans-Atlantyk When the authors of the 1994 English translation of Trans-Atlantyk famously exclaimed that the novel “is simply too Polish to be Englished” (Karsov, French 1994: xxii), one, after reading their collaborative version, quickly learns that they were not kidding. The translators must have taken the idea to heart as it is the principle that inspires and governs their translation strategy throughout. This proclivity towards foreignising the text resulted in a shaping of English into the rubrics of Polish idioms. Indeed, what emerged was a translation simply too Polish to be English. In keeping with Jarniewicz (as quoted in chapter 1), the English idiom was almost entirely sacrificed at the expense of rekindling gawęda. Since the latter’s origins are rooted in oral tradition, to the degree that very few specimens of it were committed to literature, the genre is naturally imbued with idioms and proverbs.49 Given that the Polish reader of the novel in original is confronted with a native obsolete genre, the overall effect the work has on the reader is that of homely otherness; the translator’s version, on the other hand, leads the English reader 47 For a summary of the critical reception of the 1994 English translation of Trans-Atlantyk as well as list of its stylistic techniques resisting translatability, see chapter 1. 48 These queries might just as well be addressed to, and implicitly answered by, Derrida’s own writing projects. The philosopher was also painfully committed to never submitting himself to the protocols of genre and linguistic registers. Therefore, Living On/Borderlines, with its upper unreadable text, and the footnoted one aimed at maximum readability and thus translatability; Spurs, original French text and its English translation sitting next to each other column by column throughout the book. All the stylistic manoeuvres in different ways approach the aspects of un/translatability, interlinear translation and text as (becoming of) translation of itself. 49 For more references to gawęda, see Barańczak 1994.

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to encounter the radical alterity of a different language and culture. With little idiomatic and cultural overlap between both varieties of Polish and English,50 at no fault of the translators, the English read the novel as a doubly exoticised obscure text. In terms of strategy, the text discloses many instances of literal translation, which in places might be seen as slovenly tokenism rather than a rigorous foreignisation of the translation.51 This foreignising strategy, however, does suggest the existential facets of the becoming of a translation.52 In terms of existentialism, an event of curtsy towards foreignisation stands for this impassable moment of choice wherein the translator plays devil’s advocate by giving preference to one linguistic item at the cost of another. The moment of choice is then patently the moment of error or irreparable loss. Liable for the loss is unmistakably the demonised translator her/himself. As maintained by Littau: [T]he insistence on the ‘errors and inadequacies’ of any translation, the insistence on loss, and the concentration on its failures, is not only a way of reducing its status to a second-order product – always measured against its first-order model but constitutes the very attempt to reduce its potential for proliferation. In other words, we have inferiorised translation, we have devalued it, because we fear it, since it is a flaunting manifestation of textuality's most ‘uncontrollable aspects’, since it is an index of the "cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations” (1997: 81).

The agony of coming to terms with the insufficiency of translation to bridge the impassable chasm between languages is what commonly renders translation the object of vilification. Translation always produces surplus material, the ‘cancerous’ compound that distances the bastard target text from its legitimate ‘firstorder model’. Perched on the wrong end of the hierarchy, translation must take 50 There is no direct equivalent of the Baroque Sarmatian model in 18th century England. 51 Some of the instances in which the translators render Polish idioms word for word, diverting thus altogether from domesticating translating strategies, are: “… o tyle ten jak psu z gardła albo zza stodoły…” (26) – “…as if pulled from a dog’s throat or from behind a barn…” (19), or the following, literal and quantitatively inaccurate yet requiring poetic skill of the translator: “Cóż to, nie wiesz, że Polak do tańca a i do Różańca? (124) – “Know you not that a dance suits the soles of a Pole as a Prayer becometh his soul?” (117). 52 Gayatri Spivak fiercely advocates the idea of foreignising text (and hence bringing it closer to the text and not the target reader) which is otherwise ‘betrayed’ by the translator: “If you want to make the translated text accessible, try doing it for the person who wrote it. The problem comes clear then, for she is not within the same history of style. What is it that you are making accessible? The accessible level is the level of abstraction where the individual is already formed, where one can speak individual rights. …. If you are making anything else accessible, through a language quickly learnt with an idea that you transfer content, then you are betraying the text and showing rather dubious politics” (2000: 407).

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responsibility for its treason against the ‘original’. Then again, the very unmanageable surfeit – or remainder, in Venuti’s terms – of significations squandering the translation programme can paradoxically be served up to reverse the sanctified order by not only recuperating the original but also making up for its deficiencies. Swerving back to Benjamin’s philosophising of the existence of pure language, it can be argued that the flaws of translation stem from the lack of purity in the first-order language. Impure, the original language requires a (superior to itself?) translation to fill in the lacunae. Translation reverses the accepted order since the original text, inherently adulterated and plurivocal, seeks to restore its purity via translation, and steers itself towards translation as the possibility of convalescing the purity of language. As such, translation is becoming the ‘original’ not only by carrying it within itself, but also by bearing the purity materialising in the remainder the original lacks. Let us take this fortuitous passage as an example: Tchórze! Czynu domagam się, Czynu strasznego a Najstraszniejszego! (1996: 113). You poltroons! A deed I demand, a dready Deed, and one most Dready! (1994: 107).

In the Polish fragment, the stylisation is subject to an inversion of syntax that is modelled on Latin, where the predicate is pushed to the end. Such a manoeuvre is not possible in English. As a literary genre simulating oral storytelling – much in the vein of the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition or medieval Alliterative Revival – gawęda is heavily adorned with alliteration, which Trans-Atlantyk does not fall short of. Karsov and French, however, put forward a more prominent (purer?) exemplification of alliteration than Gombrowicz’s text. Do the translators offer an officious version of a reputedly undefiled text that aims at rendering Gombrowicz more Gombrowiczian in translation? Or else is Gombrowicz always below the Gombrowiczian ‘form’ he instituted? Or perhaps translators set out to patch up the apertures left over by the ‘impure’ original by tilting towards the conventional literary axioms as opposed to Gombrowicz’s idiolect? Let us tentatively assume that the translation strikes in places as either too Polishised or overstylised – even for Gombrowicz’s standards at their most convoluted. The translation, bearing the brunt of inaccessibility, will then appear as an ostentatious product of cerebral, high-brow Modernist stylistic intricacies calling for a Joycean mythical “ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia” (Quinn 2006: 131), in which it departs from the relative degree of readability of the source text in the eye of the Polish reader. Out of the two, Gombrowicz’s text offers itself as arguably a more democratic bow towards the reader. The

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(excessive) foreignisation of text in the translation, however, might not as much result from the implicit Polishness of the novel, as from the tacit agreement of the writer himself for such self-willed, performative practices. Namely, seeing Gombrowicz neologise the language by inventing not only non-existent words but also, as befits the garrulousness and orality of gawęda, idioms and proverbs; the translator, if expected to translate not only language but the mechanisms organising the structure of the original text, may choose to adopt an analogous method. At any rate, whoever has ever come across (much less knows what to make of it) “Zawijas, podbijas, bum cyk cyk, Kopijas” (29) in Polish, valiantly rendered in English as “Squiddle fiddle, de dum dum Diddle!” (23)? Other instances of the phrases non-existent in Polish and appearing as idioms or proverbs and translated into false English idioms are: “Nic piskorzowi kiedy raka biją” (16)”, (“Naught to the eel when the Crayfish takes a beating.” 10) (“The Greenfinch is healthy when the Ram is fleeced.” 10) “Otóż to makolągwa czyrka, a borsuk w potrzasku, mało co ze skóry nie wyskoczy.” (16) (So the Linnet chirps whilst the Nadger in a trap strives nearly out of skin” (10). The translation of the mechanism – the liminality of the exilic condition itself and not only the language it has been expressed by – helps understand the nature of translation and the liquid experience of writing and reading. If translation is the becoming of a new text anchored to varying degrees in its source, this becoming can only be foregrounded in the difference from the original. By becoming new, or other, the text cannot conceal its structural vicissitudes as the points of departure from the original. As such, translation ceases to act as a calque, mirroring blindly the language and eclipsing the existential character of translation, and instead starts to approximate the mechanisms of the making of text. Such a project leads to the assumption that the further from the tincture of the text, the closer to its core. There is always a better or worse translation, and even a critically acclaimed translation can be offset against other potentially ‘better’ unchosen choices, and hence the dispute over the qualitative value of a linguistic item ends in an argumentative catch-22. French and Karsov’s translation distances the English reader from text at the expense of doing justice to the underlying philosophical mechanisms governing the making of the original text: that is the appreciation of writing as the becoming of writing, as opposed to writing about writing. Hence, the translation might not strike as an emblematic Gombrowicz text but surely as Gombrowiczian in its performativity. In like manner, Gunter Grass claims to be relentless in goading his translators “to recreate the book within [their] own language”.53 Correspondingly, Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 film adaptation of Tristram Shandy, titled A Cock 53 “I tell them, if this word doesn’t exist in your language, create it” (1991).

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and Bull Story, is orientated at recreating the process of the formation of Laurence Sterne’s metafictional novel. If the novel’s leitmotif is the writer’s failed attempt to write a novel, Winterbottom directs a film about a failed endeavour to make a film. As a result, the film’s plot departs altogether from that of the novel’s, yet suggestively pairs up with the writer’s project: catching the object of art in the act of becoming. French and Karsov do not of course go to such great lengths in their translation, yet the foreignising angle from which they capture Gombrowicz’s idiolect, does do (if partial) justice to Gombrowicz’s programme of rendering his mother language other to itself, by producing an overly foreignised version of Polish. Following this logic, a translation that has the reader participate in the unfolding of the text itself, can foreground the existential aspects of experiencing its liminality and help anticipate the otherness of the text. Symptomatically, the text must appreciate its own condition as being always-already a translation of itself. This example does not condone entirely the radical foreignisation of the text or advocate the reversal of the original-translation hierarchy, entailing prioritisation of a translation over the source text; it rather brings out the impassability of the moment of choice in the act of translation that always undercuts itself. Translation always releases surplus material that neither the author nor translator has intended (if it works to the benefit or detriment of the quality of the work), which is contingent on particular historical and cultural conditions.54 The surfeit cannot but resonate with the unpremeditated meanings, but whether the meanings happen to ingratiate themselves with the dominant qualitative measures, and hence be graced by the state-of-the-art linguistic paradigms or otherwise, is a game of chance that translation cannot avoid. Trading qualitative for existential measures, the impassable moment of choice as event, mirroring the trajectory of translation, is in Gombrowicz’s text exemplified in his rhetoric. This is, however, not to say that Trans-Atlantyk is a story of the becoming of a translation or a provocative call for translators; rather, the existential and liminal anxiety provoked by the text, which is exemplified in the narrative structure and language of the novel, verges on the experience of translation taken as an exis54 The contemporary publishing industry has a score of ways to capitalise on translation. With the emergence of latest gadgetry (Kindle, iBooks) boosting the international dissemination of press and books; the rise of commercial fiction culture as a real profit centre (non-existent until very recently, massively exported from USA and translated from English into countless world languages); publishing houses delegating their literary scouts orientated at maximising sales by importing literary gems, to enumerate a few, translation must put itself in the awkward position of a ‘product’ – to resort to the jargon of market economy – answerable to the pragmatic tides of popular culture and directives of publishing marketplace.

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tential act, wherein a translator is equally confronted with the liminality of the text. As an émigré, Gombrowicz as narrator has to face the eternal exilic task of reconciling homely and foreign values. This, at the level of plot, is offered as the narrator’s dilemma between turning a blind eye to Tomasz’s stratagem of killing his son Ignac (in the name of honour) or, somewhat paradoxically, letting Gonzalo implicate Ignac in murdering his father. At this stage, the plot’s leitmotif, the primeval paradoxical exilic contract of shifting loyalties between Sonland (Filistria) and Motherland (Patria, or Fatherland, Ojczyzna in Polish) is given its fullest staging. On his way to Ignac, Gombrowicz is agonizingly in two minds about his choice, which, expressed in a poetic dictum inflates the predicament with pathos: “And I know not whether as a Killer, a Slayer, to the son I speed or as to a Spring parched lips to refresh” (108). The invigorating exoticism (eroticism?) of the new other is subdued by the sense of a level-headed fidelity to the old order. Hence, vacillating between repressed desire and rationality, he articulates a Hamletian-like soliloquy beside the sleeping Ignac: Oh no, no, I will not to that shame deliver you, haply I shall anon here awaken you and of Gonzalo’s trap warn you, haply I shall tell you that by this Play they into a Crime upon the person of your Father draw you!! ... Oh no, never, never, never! And I was about to put out my hand to waken him: Ignac, Ignac, for God’s sake, get up, they would your father murder! Albeit I look, but there he lies. And again suddenly a Doubt comes over me, viz., if I tell him this and out he Gonzalo, Horatio drives, to his Father’s legs in tears falls, what then? Again all as of old, as it was? Again then beside Pan Father will be… to Pan Father’s coat-tails will cling… Still on and on, over and over, again the same? Yet desire of my soul this: viz. that something will have Become. Oh, come what may, just to make some movement… May there be something New! (114-115).

The moment of choice, the “movement”, is the one of translation, a passage towards confronting the other of oneself. As such, this is a gesture of utter irresponsibility and betrayal, and a foremost responsibility towards the other – token of fraternity with the other by becoming him/her – in one movement. The moment of translation is the one of treason and charity; it is liminal by accommodating their cohabitation and mutual exclusion. The preference of one immediately entails one’s liability for taking the life of the other. This is a total sacrifice required for making “something New” and for “Becoming”. As a liminal act itself, imploding and interlacing conflicting or contradictory forces of signification, can translation oversee the presence, event and consequences of choice? If to translate is to become and never to have become, can translation, or the translator for that matter, metaphysically stand above the text and consciously choose? In other words, even if at the moment of translation one subscribes univocally to one word or another, does it mean that the thing

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emerges in a pure form, deprived of the vestiges of the other? Since a translation bears traces of the text it was translated from it belongs to the text. Having translated, one has either ‘ma[de] something new’ or is merely imitating the old. As a liminal act, translation cannot just monopolise the meaning of the text it endorses, since the text is subject to reading (as translation to recall Gadamer) governed by the reader’s liminal experience of the text. How does Gombrowicz’s rhetoric counter this ultimate task of translation? But what’s this, what’s this? Oh, perchance Salvation! Since, whilst he so at his Father Swoops, Swoops, Swoops, and yet Swoops, is Swooping, nigh, nigh, Swooping down, upon him Laughter, oh, on him Laughter, Laughter, God, God, he into Laughter perchance, oh, he into Laughter and so he into Laughter, into laughter is swooping and aloft he Swoops! (121). Ale co to? Co to? O, chyba Zbawienie! O, co to, jak to, co to? Ach, chyba Zbawienie! A bo, gdy tak z Bachem swoim leci, nadlatuje, aż wszyscy Zamarli, on śmiechem wybucha. I zamiast żeby Ojca swego Bachem Bachnąć on Buch w śmiech i, śmiechem Buchnąwszy, przez Ojca skoka daje i tak, uskoczywszy, śmiechem Bucha, Bucha! Śmiech tedy, Śmiech! (127).

At this stage Gombrowicz refuses to sound Sartrean in that his existentialism departs from the latter’s axioms particularly with regard to one’s responsibility for their actions. For Sartre actions define an individual, insofar as there is no metaphysical essence preceding one’s existence. As such, if the value or essence of a human being is a total of his/her conscious actions, one is accountable for their individual choices. Existence, governed by this drive towards activism, grows to be a perpetual theatre of choices and consequences. Trans-Atlantyk sets out to deconstruct this paradigm. Having wavered between irresolvable quandaries – indeed much stylistic effort is invested in hyperbolising the narrator’s vacillation – the plot turns on itself at its climax. At the moment of Ignac’s act of patricide – or what presents itself as such – the narrator and his entourage collectively burst into laughter. The contagious laughter paralysing all characters and thwarting both conspiratorial stratagems is the moment in which consciousness is submitted to liminality. Actually, the argument extends itself beyond the confines of plot and fiction. Laughter seems to suck Gombrowicz as author into the orbit of collective paralysis, given that he, and language itself for that matter, doubles himself with laughter until the closing line of the novel: “And so from Laughter into Laughter, they with Laughter Boom, with laughter bam, boom, boom, bam Boom!...” (122). Laughter is a black hole, a non-place soaking up the subterfuges, where the orders of morality, honour, ideology no longer apply. In the novel it is the moment of the negation of culture, epistemology and dialectics. And in Gombrowicz, Polishness (or patriotism overall) is served up as a construct, a bogus historical episteme. His

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project, in my reading of it, is by no means one of nihilism, iconoclasm or absurdism. The note on which Trans-Atlantyk ends has it that the grand designs of humanity and civilisation, governed by misguided ideological programmes, must at some point undo themselves. Absurd as the ending may be, it points towards the fact that responsibility is merely a human metaphysical construct, and an ideology calculated to organise existence. Conceived as such, responsibilityas-concept does not belong to existence, and cannot arbitrate its trajectory and impinge on its becoming. Unlike Sartre, Gombrowicz believes that an individual cannot always consciously control and vouch for all his/her intentions given that things unfold implicitly, without human godlike intervention. Anesthetised by such impotence, an individual is reduced to a second-class citizen in the realm of his own existence, wherein his/her conscious acts undo themselves in the trajectory of becoming. Gombrowicz does not fall back upon sheer polonoclasm (Tomasz embodying Motherland is not killed), nor does he uncritically lap up the cosmopolitan. His conclusive trump card, on the other hand, lies in the thought that things metamorphose with the tide of liquid existence, whose untheorisable intricacies cannot always be mediated by moral deliberations and philosophical agenda; the existential questions of responsibility-irresponsibility cannot be measured against each other at diametrically opposed ends of a metaphysical axis. To make his point, Gombrowicz yet again calls upon seditious language; the reader’s attempts to isolate assertions in Gombrowicz’s rhetoric are fruitless. This peculiar swarm of stylistic manoeuvres points to the author’s dictum as essentially heuristic in nature (approached from the Leavisian angle of rejecting the conception that language conveys thought but rather that it materialises in the use of language). As such the ‘pantomimic’ language demonstrates, stages, acts, vibrates with significations with a minimum degree of assertion of – and hence responsibility for – what it sets out to lay bare. At closer inspection, language as a ‘stage-manager’ of events is an irresponsible joker that gives away the plot and exposes the artifices of writing. Along this metafictional line, the laughing lot is little else than a collection of good-for-nothing actors/characters failing to deliver a logical conclusion and an expected ending to the story. Laughter, as a trope, does not assert, but does not negate either. It sparks debate on Gombrowicz’s subversive relation to Poland, and refuses to settle it. Any reading of Trans-Atlantyk, imbued with the language and rhetoric of subversion and exilic liminality, however, problematises the assumed gravity and unanimity of such choices. A natural consequence of the implied indeterminacy of the act of choice is its paradox. Such an act as an event contains multitudes of the traces it carries: the manifold options that are absent from the moment of choice. It holds multiple responsibilities that emerge as a result of

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exiling the un-choices: all un-chosen singularities are banished to the outside of the economy of the singular choice. From the translator’s angle, the vengeance of the un-chosen is the event in which a translator is punished for subscribing to a linguistic item, idiom, or strategy at the expense of another. In the above passage, the words ‘buch’ and ‘bach’, elsewhere in the translation rendered faithfully as ‘boom’ and ‘bam’, are for some reason brushed aside and substituted for ‘swoop’. Although the word might neatly serve the sonic and rhythmic purposes of the text – and even go a step further in capturing the sound of the laughter, which the characters are on the verge of, than its Polish or Polishised equivalents – the choice fails to regard properly its ‘stylistic contagion’ – Dorrit Cohn’s coinage (Stevenson 1998: 47)55. Gombrowicz’s texts break down into a patchwork of stylistic pointers interlining the text from within to form an organic whole of the text’s philosophical backbone. A chance encounter and materialisation of one such word/phrase accelerates its reiteration and actively impinges on the development of plot. In a structuralist manner, language does not convey but becomes plot. The sound of “buch” and “bach”, speaking of which, thudding under the “horse’s hooves” on the narrator’s ecstatic way “to the Son, to the Son!” (109), lends itself in various contexts throughout the novel to onomatopoeically signify as thudding, the rampant behaviour of the narrator’s entourage, premeditated murder (“Boombam” 111), laughter (“Laughter then Boomed” 121), and, implicitly, the narrator’s homoerotic fantasies (“Now they are so befellowed that when Horatio Booms, Ignac to him Bams!” 111). The translators abscond from Gombrowicz’s intricately woven network of verbal references at the critically liminal narrative moment in which the multiple significations of “buch-bach” combine polonoclasm and its deconstruction in a single narrative stroke (“I zamiast żeby Ojca swego Bachem Bachnąć on Buch w śmiech i, śmiechem Buchnąwszy”); this partially thwarts the systematic philosophical consistency that Gombrowicz writes into the body of the text via stylistic contagion and undermines its generative and organic power in terms of stitching together seemingly aleatory elements of plot and philosophy. 56 The production of language of limited assertion rebounds with analogous experiential acts of reading of a text. The reader’s task is thus to participate in the making of ‘consensual judgements’ enfolding in reading as events as opposed to end-products of theorised interpretation. Assuming that translation is ruled by analogous mechanisms, it must entail a blissful irresponsibility – or limited liability at most, given that participation in determining the text’s mean55 For further reference on stylistic contagion in Gombrowicz, see Wojtas (2009: 339, 2010: 49). 56 For further reference to the philosophical aspects of Gombrowicz’s texts in the eyes of literary critics see chapter 1.

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ings is neither compulsory nor does it require that the reader determine a meaning in singular – of a translator for his text. On the translator’s part, however, the appropriation of such a proposition is fraught with consequences. A translator, in pragmatic terms, is bound by strict responsibilities towards the text; if not moral or ethical, then surely dictated by the marketplace agenda: copyright restrictions, political correctness, remuneration, etc. In the age of the aggressive capitalist free market economy, the translator must approach the text as a marketable product, and hence subject himself/herself to the directives of professional disciplines organising such orders. S/he is to produce a text matching specific cultural standards and requirements, and particular translation strategies and methodologies. Bluntly, the translator must choose. How does Gombrowicz reach out to such ‘institutionalised’ and politicised aspects of translation? He may actually bring very little to the table, unless one appreciates that the task of a translator today is to abandon institutionalised cultural assumptions, accepting that translation is an experiential event wherein the translator’s engagement in the liminality of language as an existential act of participation takes on a value of its own.

4.2. (Un)common denominators As tentatively posited in chapter 3, Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text evokes the sense of experiential anxiety enfolding in the act of reading resulting from the liquidity of shifting textual significations and the impossibility of anchoring them in deep semantic structures. This textual angle, contingent on the disseminative character of the text, and engendering points of indeterminacy and disrupting understanding, is commensurate with existential optics; the way in which a human being experiences the liquidity of existence of the world in which s/he has been ‘condemned’ to participate. Liquidity as a concept portends more radical disseminative energies of text than liminality, which, by reason of its irresolvable inbetweenness might in fact open up the unpatchable glitches of indeterminacy, but is at least subordinated to the gravity of the poles it finds itself between. Liminality is thus a non-space of centrifugal implosion, whereas liquidity gears centripetally towards infinity, unmindful of the laws of the limit, unity or univocality. It is an economy of irresolvable and contradictory dualisms. Hence, translation in liminal acts will always bring to the table a dichotomy (the interlinguistic relation between two or more languages) folded up and subverted from within, and it will articulate itself as such. As argued, the language and rhetoric of Trans-Atlantyk exemplifies the liminality of translation in that it, in a modernist fashion, blurs the boundary be-

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tween the source and its translation. The novel’s complicating of the historicity, purity and convention of a single language disrupts the conservative and qualitative original-translation distinction. Translation as the act approximating the existential experience of liquidity of meanings, on the other hand, dramatises the essentially plurivocal character of a text or language (both source and target) caught up in uninhibited semantic multitudes, intertextuality and pan-textuality. This radically disseminative activity of reading, promulgated by the pillars of 1960’s French thought, will be measured against the hermeneutic model championed by reader-response theorists. Both camps prove instrumental for the purposes in question. Unlike those uncritically gracing the endless proliferation of significations, a hermeneutical interpreter, no less aware of the textual plurality, seeks to integrate the heterogeneous fragments into a synthetic (though tentative) interpretative paradigm. Deconstruction would seemingly fend off this programme by pouncing on the cracks in any hermeneutic system that aspires to totality. Anthony Pym, however, would refuse to go as far as to radicalise translation as it is practiced under the deconstructionist veneer: We can say that no matter how much an approach like deconstruction might be useful for studying translation, at some particular points you have to believe in something that you’re not going to deconstruct. If you don’t, you’ll have to doubt everything, and you will be unable to take any real action (1993: 46).

The theorist does not reject the indeterminacy of translation but rather underscores that reading and translating by nature involve certain existential mechanisms (such as ethical, logical, etc.) that drive towards conclusive or finite textual facets. If, following Gadamer, translation is called upon in the face of the encounter with the unknown, all textual provinces of familiarity that the reader can (or presumes s/he can) take for granted are the places that make translation possible. On the plus side, by provisionally adopting both practices, the deconstructive reading anticipates and takes seriously the irreducible indeterminacy of text, while hermeneutical one prevents the seemingly uninhibited multiple meanings from meandering on endlessly.57 With disseminative reading offset by a hermeneutical commitment to making sense of the text, as well as the magnitude of its historicity, the next part will centre on a comparative analysis of Gombrowicz’s novels (whose rhetoric pro57 Pym’s scepticism about deconstruction’s radicalism would be partly applauded by David Hoy who maintains that “There must be more to interpretation than pure dissemination can insist that deconstruction presupposes a prior construction of the text’s unity or sense. Even if the disseminative reading then succeeds in disrupting this understanding, the fact that there are difficult interpretive decisions in practice does not entail undecidability or the impossibility of understanding in principle” (1982: 5).

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vokes the existential sense of liquidity of text) in the context of contemporary Anglo-American intellectual traditions. The preliminary historical outline of critical and literary (translation) landscapes of the second half of the twentieth century will lay the ground for further analysis.

4.2.1. Postmodernism as translation Walter Jumplelt boldly states that the “Twentieth century is the age of translation” (1984: 5). Drastically as modern and postmodern consciousnesses might differ in terms of their mutual accommodations of translation, both traditions appreciate it as not only a linguistic or literary practice, but essentially as a metaphor of the new social order, largely stemming from new radical social, political, and artistic transformations. As maintained and elaborated on manifold by Steven Yao, translation is a “compositional practice” underlying the modernist thinking that explains thematic and philosophical issues of the period as well as approximates the ways modernists perceived themselves (2002: 7). Translation was to be a means to navigate towards other cultures, histories, and literary modes, which functioned to rework and explode the dominant artistic scope, and was to serve individual or collective ideological purposes. Translation helped delineate the defining limits of nation and culture in which modernists were to further their exploits beyond the confines of their mother language and history. Much like Gombrowicz’s disruption of the standard Polish in Trans-Atlantyk, “through the practice of translation, Modernist writers undertook to extend the limits of English itself” (ibid.). If the social, political, and cultural orders, as well as individual sensibilities, were upturned by the wars and industrialisation of mass culture, the external disarray filtered through to the individual; it provoked their psychological insecurity, as well as a personal chaos, which found expression in decadence, atheism and nihilism. Unable to fall back on the world, the individual takes refuge in their hermetic consciousness. The disconnection from the external world comes down to the investment in the private psychological domain, which in effect generates language that “must communicate … a world of alienation, confusion, distortion, acceleration – a world turned upside down” (Malamud 1989: 12). Such a world is surely one of radical translation. Individualisation accelerates the ideological schizophrenia. The propensity to fragmentation results in the analogous discontinuity of narrative, which denies authorial centrality, and banishes him/her to its margins. Unaided, untutored, alienated, an artist experiments with arbitrary, multiple textual means and articulates himself via stream of consciousness. The subcutaneous needle of translation, viscerally piercing the modern consciousness throughout, makes its jab particularly felt in the revolutionary

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vicissitudes of the new reality. We might be even forgiven for thinking that it is the translator who is most coerced to undergo these modernist agonies. S/he is alienated against the semantic chaos and incompatibility of languages. Faced with such irreconcilability, s/he is reduced to a mere arranger of fragmentary and random linguistic assemblages, pregnant with uncontainable significations and ideologies lying dormant in the text. As his/her text is nothing more than a distorted mirror image of the original, the translator, measured against the preeminence of its author, is vilified for the adulteration of the original and denied authority over his/her text. The postmodern period of the second half of the 20th century continued to make manifest modernist concerns; yet the historical distance (precipitated by the fast-paced capitalist transformations), the acceleration of consumerist production, and “the advance of capitalism into language” entailing its selfinvalidation (Lyotard, Brugger 2001: 86), as well as the failure of legitimating narratives, opened up a critical awareness of the aesthetic divide between both versions of modernity. This line of demarcation made itself awkwardly palpable in the face of the foreseeable encroachment of the popular upon the aesthetic. From a political perspective, the conservative ideology aimed at rehabilitating middle-class high modernist aesthetic values as a token of refutation of the postmodern populism – already ushered in the canonical precincts – further opened this ideological fissure. As for aesthetics, the question of the popular was no longer one of a comfortable Bakhtinian dialectic reversal of the high and low of the modernists, but rather their mutual non-hierarchical assimilation. Whereas the moderns anticipated the collage of the high and low culture, postmodernism sees them as integrated in the pantextuality of the world and indistinguishable from each other, and hence thwarts the modernist ambition of clean-cut differentiation. At this point, Jameson proposes a sound assessment of the postmodern socio-aesthetic amalgamation: At any rate, it becomes minimally obvious that the newer artists no longer ‘quote’ the materials, the fragments and motifs, of a mass or popular culture, as Joyce (and Flaubert) began to do, or Mahler; they somehow incorporate them to the point where many of our older critical and evaluative categories (founded precisely on the radical differentiation of modernist and mass culture) no longer seem functional (1984: 65).

Perhaps unaware, Jameson ventriloquises the problematics of translation. Try as the translator might, s/he cannot renounce his/her historicity, their (sub- or multi-) cultural identity, sociolinguistic imports (register, dialect, jargon etc.), or class affiliations. A confusion of identities and languages him/herself, the translator cannot but incorporate the surplus material to the body of translated text,

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which is always (up to a point, if not radically) different from the tradition of the author of the source text. Translators do not “quote” their own idiolanguage (pregnant with multiple significations) in translation but weave it into the text inadvertently. Although still unsettled, the critical endeavour of the historical, political and aesthetic distancing of modernism from its provisionally accepted post- with Lyotard, Jameson and Baudrillard as its champions, comes as hardly surprising. In any case, multiple modernist ‘deaths’ loom at the postmodern horizon, and the obituary lists: metanarratives, metaphysics, teleology, history, truth, and meaning. With the loss of values, the postmodern condition, repudiating a hierarchical character of things, is rather informed by production and processuality. Therefore, a literary text bereft of a solid centre, meaning, and essence loses its status as literary, and is recognised in the light of its self-reflexive and autopoietic mechanisms. A text remains text as long as it reflects upon its auto-creation and presents itself as an act of unyielding production of textuality (exemplified by Barthes in his monumental S/Z). The act of translation reproduces the auotopoietic mechanisms of the text and underscores its own perpetuity and the impossibility of it ever reaching closure. The autopoietic properties of translation serve to second the assumptions that underpin the end of metanarratives, in that translation (like literature) resists theoretical prescriptions, failing to explain the processes it is ruled by. Decentralised, text as an assemblage expressed by language (rather than an essence) can stake no claim to conveying truth. It is decontextualised (cannot exist outside of its own textuality) and dehistoricised (it might be an assemblage of other, antecedent writings, but cannot anchor itself in any stable historical moment). A translation, in the same way, attempts to establish a relation with the original text, but is itself a throng of linguistic items assembled to bear a resemblance to the source text without being historically or generically linked. A translation itself belongs to a historical moment, stemming from given cultural assumptions and aesthetic standards. It is a semi-arbitrary collection of words contingent upon the translator’s and not the source text’s cultural historical identity. Barthes, the forerunner and campaigner of pan-textualism, declares that the [text] is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author – God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture (1977: 142-143).

If Barthes’ is an accurate definition of text and diagnosis of its postmodern condition, then one could argue that text is tantamount to translation, or go so far as to claim that text is translation. Seething with (anything but theological) contingent meanings; deprived of authorial presence (the translator is denied authority

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over the text and the author of the source text does not author the translation); denied the status of ‘original’; carrying multiple cultural, historical, and aesthetic references (other than those of the source text it seeks to reproduce); reduced to a mere articulation (a ‘quotation’ of a source text), translation matches the postmodern conception of text. Translation shares the fate of text, not merely as another text in the infinite cosmos of textuality, but by communicating the contingency of text as its irreducible condition. Postmodernism experiencing itself as translation is further disclosed in the shift of emphasis from pre-postmodern epistemology to ontology. The paradigmatic propensities of metaphysics to accommodate transcendental notions of reality and existence gave way to a purely experiential perception of an immanent (textual) reality. Metaphysical distance is substituted for existential participation: an anamorphic shift from the abstract in which the individual perceives reality in terms of the visible. Hence, the kinetic dynamics of perceiving the world serves to authenticate one’s existence with more validity than epistemological constructions of reality.58 Toppled, horizontal rather than vertical, the world and/as narrative can no longer be seen through the lens of a hierarchical ladder but rather as syntagmatic continuity. With this new horizontal optics, an individual, incapable of registering hierarchies, classes, or strata, acknowledges indeterminacy as the new order. For the postmodern immanence of textuality implodes and randomises the conflicting dichotomies that resist the absolutes of a transcendental other or a monistic self (wholly present to itself), its genital and genealogical potency is traded for rhizome, schizophrenia, polymorphosis. By the same token, collective, decentralised master codes of episteme give up their place to idiolect: the only language capable of articulating an individual’s existential experience. To cap it all, certain tropes of postmodernism, exemplified in the table below, which partly draws on Ihab Hassan’s table of opposites between modernity and postmodernity (1980: 70), coincide with the condition of translation. Table 1.1: Common denominators between the postmodern conceptual construction of text and translation Text

Translation

Immanent textuality

Translation as a text accommodating other text/s

Death of metaphysics

Translation as metaphysical)

act

or

event

(non-

58 In aesthetics, this revision accounts for the postmodernist privileging of metonymy over metaphor (Connor 1997: 117).

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Ontology: processuality, the becoming of a translation

Contingency: of meanings of the text unin- Contingency: Semantic surfeit resulting from tended by the author and interpreted mani- the encroachment of a translator’s experience fold by the readers onto the translation and unintended by the author of the ST Intralinguistic plurivocality of the text

Intralinguistic plurivocality: the translator’s sociolinguistic background multiplying the translation’s registers

Autopoiesis

Self-reflexivity of auto-production of translation

Participation of the reader in interpreting and Participation of the translator in selecting and negotiating meanings hence negotiating meanings Non-hierarchical construction

Syntagmatic reproduction of the original

Polymorphosis, assemblage

Product of the author of ST, translator, and authors of all antecedent texts ventriloquising the text

Idiolect of the text

Idiolect of the translator distorting the meaning of a translation

Absence: the text is absent from itself in that Absence: translation as a mirror image of the it ventriloquises narratives of the past source text is denied existence as an independent object of art No history: the text accommodates the texts No history: a translation fails to position itof the past self in the historical moment of the ST and its author Intertextuality

Translation as process is inherently intertextual

No author

The translator is denied artistic and authorial privileges

Otherness (to itself), singularity (of the text)

Foreignisation (of a translation)

Liminality: interlacing of language and exist- Liminality of translation as extended beence in the pan-textuality of the world tween languages as well as between itself and the other text or texts Liquidity of shifting meanings

Liquidity of shifting meanings (both intraand interlinguistic)

Simulacrum: the condition of a text is that of Simulacrum: both source text and translation simulation of itself given that since it already are the simulacra of themselves in that the consists of other texts it cannot be itself. text can only exist in its potentiality as another text or texts-to-come.

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4.2.2. Polish and Western postmodern experience as translation If postmodernism in the Western world had the post-war thinkers and critics in a quandary over the taxonomic assessment of this turbulent socio-aesthetic drift, its critical reception and literary practice within the Polish intellectual landscape went even further in complicating the subversive postmodern assumptions. Exposed to a range of ‘posts’ (post-war, post-Thaw, post-1989) Poland became a fertile soil for socio-political and aesthetic transformations, tenaciously departing from communist authoritarianism towards liberal capitalism. With the appearance of a free-market economy, flourishing bourgeois interests and values, the materialisation of a constitutional and democratic state, burgeoning consumerism, as well as the acceleration of university education, Poland steadfastly strived for an altogether new definition and cultural mapping. Having rerouted the political vector towards the west (the USA in particular), the Polish cultural identity must have positioned itself not only in relation to but in line with Western cultural standards, and the asymmetrical power relations resulted in the minoritisation of Polish culture and language. According to Kwieciński, postcommunist political transformations intensified “cultural asymmetry” within the Anglo-American and Polish gambit, with the latter as a “minority language culture” now being the “weaker party in the unequal exchange” (2001: 98). The first cultural leap across the Atlantic was done as early as the 70’s, when American writers immediately associated with an emerging postmodernism had their first novels translated and published in Poland (as a matter of fact, postmodernism was in Poland thought to be exclusively bound up with American literature at the time). From now, publishing houses were in the main busy publishing translations (with Literatura na Świecie taking the lead) – relatively prolific up until the late nineties – of new transatlantic imports. The catalogue of translations included a number of icons of American postmodernism, such as: John Barth (1972), Donald Barthelme (1974), Kurt Vonnegut (1976), Vladimir Nabokov (1982), William Gaddis (1984), Jerzy Kosiński (1989), Thomas Pynchon (1990), Robert Coover (1991), and Ronald Sukenick (1992). Startlingly, largely owing to Literatura na Świecie, some of the writers sold more copies to Polish readers than at home, where the target readership largely consisted of an academic elite (Uniłowski 1999).59 Momentous for the promulgation of Western literary trends was also the foundation of Brulion (1986) – an underground and anti-communist magazine 59 For a related argument, namely the reception of Gombrowicz’s work in the USA and the evaluation of the intellectual condition of Polish and American readership, see chapter 1.

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inspired by American postmodernism, The New York School and the Beat Generation. Departing altogether from the contemporaneous ethical tendencies in literature,60 the quarterly shifted drastically towards international literary and cultural fads, like feminism, cyberpunk, multimedia, etc., diving into existential aspects of human experience and art. Given these inspirations, artists and translators affiliated with the magazine busied themselves with translating American writers and poets. Stanisław Barańczak translated into Polish Larkin, Auden and Frost, while Piotr Sommer rendered the works of Ginsberg and Ashbery. Nevertheless, reading is one thing and understanding is quite another. The conceptualisations of postmodernism in Anglo-American and Polish academic criticism stood worlds apart. In some senses, Poland indeed became a sponge, greedily absorbing all cultural articles of the Western postmodern world that had hitherto been fenced out by the Iron Curtain, and what occurred was a misguided and turbid version of the original. A reductionist conception of postmodernism in Poland was promulgated by literary critics (downgrading it to a mere wordplay, a philosophically paltry intellectual fad incessantly uttering nihilistic clichés of death of history and grand narratives); and this served as a smokescreen obscuring the complexity of what postmodernism truly had to offer. Seen as such, this simplified version of postmodernism might have appeared a shade too much for a readership that had barely convalesced after the intellectual stagnation, hermeticity and conventionalism of the communist yoke (which had once censored and banned Gombrowicz’s works). As rightly observed by Piotr Wilczek, “postmodernist methodologies have not captured Polish literary studies to the degree apparent in the western world” (2005: 137). Whereas the socio-cultural and aesthetic facets of postmodernism dominated the French and American poststructuralist academic roundtables between the late 60’s and early 90’s, at their most fierce in the mid 80’s, a glance through the state of the Polish translations of the key poststructuralist works speaks volumes (bracketed dates: original / Polish translation, respectively): Derrida De la grammatologie (1967 / 1999), L'ecriture et la difference (1967 / 2004), Baudrillard Simulacres et simulation, (1981 / 2005), Deleuze and Guattari Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (1972/untranslated), Lyotard La Condition postmoderne : rapport sur le savoir (1979 /1997), Foucault Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966 / 2005), Paul de Man Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust

60 The post-holocaust trauma and communism’s relentless censure inspired some poets and writers, like Zbigniew Herbert, to focus on the conception of literature as resistance, which naturally gestured towards ethical aspects rejected by the contributors of Brulion.

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(1979 / 2004), Richard Rorty Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979 / 1994).61 When by the early 90’s critical debates on postmodernism and poststructuralism had almost completely died away in Anglo-American criticism – committed to translating the French within a year of their premières – Polish scholars would still have to wait another decade for the first translations. This considerable delay may be attributed to the nature of the Polish literary translation market, hitherto held back by the Iron Curtain, but eventually flourishing – and rapidly at that – after the 1989 transformations (Fordoński 1998). Those without the command of English or French, long fed on biased assumptions, have only recently had a chance to draw on the poststructuralist critical works, which might serve to rekindle discussions that are long dated elsewhere.62 In a related argument, Włodzimierz Bolecki sees Polish postmodernism as a plagiarised imitation of its Western counterpart, and substantiates his stance by positing that since the cultural gap on the East-West axis (widened by the rapid technologisation and acceleration of life in the West) is unbridgeable: any attempt at reproducing or approximating postmodern aesthetics must result in a second-hand duplicate (Bolecki 1999). Janaszek-Ivaničkova, on the other hand, directly counters Bolecki’s stand, by asserting that there is a universal postmodern quality to the Polish contemporary literature, which shares the international postmodern project of resisting “reductionism and dogmatic thinking” (1997: 425). Assuming that postmodernism is a (non-theoretical) response to the oncoming transformations taking place in the West, the postmodernism of the East is seen as a simulation of the original postmodern condition: stage-managed, rather than experienced first-hand. Given that postmodernism rejects metanarratives and metaphysical assumptions, its criticism is interlaced in the narratives it pro61 Postmodernizm. Antologia przekładów, edited in 1997 by Ryszard Nycz is a compilation of translations of works and essays of the world’s leading exponents of postmodernism and poststructuralism. 62 When it comes to art and aesthetics, some common denominators between the Western postmodernist model and its Polish (borrowed?) counterpart are exemplified in the prose of some leading exponents of the Polish contemporary letters. Tadeusz Kantor, as observed by Janaszek-Ivaničkova problematises the high and low in his art and fiction, and Krystyna Kofta is an exponent of feminist novel (1997). Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski experiment with collage techniques; Stanisław Lem, the father of Polish Science fiction, underscores metafictional elements; Teodor Parnicki expresses his scepticism towards the meta-sphere of fiction by shifting focus to the optical cognitive dynamics of fiction. Uniłowski, probably the most engaged in theorising the Polish postmodern condition among the Polish critics, on his part, also sees Parnicki and Lem (and Gombrowicz for that matter) as the pioneers of postmodernism.

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duces. To be postmodern is to experience and articulate existence without the crux of a metaphysical grand-narrative. Poland, with its distinct socio-political trajectory, in order to become postmodern, must produce a singular response to its own status quo. As such, however, it ceases to resemble Western postmodernism. Subscribing to such a supposition it follows that in order to become postmodern one is obliged to eschew postmodern collective knowledge and standards. Whereas the Anglo-American conceptualisation of postmodernism emerged from the urge to round up and distance itself from so-called dated modernist values, Poland, whose direct experience of war as well as Communist censure irrevocably impinged upon its aesthetic views, was concerned by filling an intellectual lacunae. Hence, the Polish re-evaluation of modernism was not, as in the case of its Western experience, its rejection, but its re-adoption; the beginnings of modernism were returned to as points of departure from which to approach the new postmodern (neo-modern?) experience. This might account for Gombrowicz’s unflagging popularity in Poland, whose version of postmodernism cannot be extricated from his pre-war existentialist and modernist activity; it may also explain why, despite such dated influences infiltrating his rhetoric and style, the writer does not go out of fashion. Other writers – still in vogue, though modernist – who might be intuited as Gombrowicz’s doubles in this respect are Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Karol Irzykowski, Sławomir Mrożek, and Tadeusz Różewicz. In any case, Poland practices a postmodernism caught up in the problematics of translation. Drawing on the Western aesthetic (as per Bolecki), Polish postmodernism revises itself in keeping with the metaphysical standards of the competing pole. Defined through the lens of differences and common denominators between itself and the cultural other, it becomes the simulacrum and the translation of the foreign version of itself. Should (after Janaszek-Ivaničkova) the obverse hold true, Polish postmodernism participates in the global postmodern project by producing a singular and unadulterated answer to contemporary existential anxieties surrounding intra and intercultural displacement, the unpalatable assimilation of the collapsed limits, languages, narratives and institutions. If so, it must privilege translation as its main trope; it must demonstrate its own becoming caught in the intricacies of a system informed by liminality and the difficult negotiation of the indeterminacy of signification as well as the demands pressed by the competing forces of the familiar and the global other.

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4.2.3. Post-war experience as simulation Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of Cosmos does not cease to remind the reader that the text s/he holds in her/his hand is a macrocosm of all textuality (which also translates into the extratextual word). The resultant hermeneutic mixture of significations, projecting from its hermetic confines, reflects upon the large-scale, total intertextual project, wherein the text is but a circuit inducing the energies of antecedent texts and texts-yet-to-come (or translation, whose purity and possibility of meaning exists only in potentia). Given that Western epistemology is the tradition of discourse, the extra-textual reality cannot but participate in the pantextual project. Inscribed in textuality, the world, as well as human existence, is no longer itself but rather a simulacrum of its natural or ‘original’ condition. Articulated by and incapable of existing outside of language, an individual can now only simulate the lost existence in that it, now ruled by the programmatic dangerous supplement of language, cannot return to the pre- or nonlinguistic forms. Its condition is not that of nature but of the simulation of nature via the culture of language. Should the textualist mantra be in the right by proposing that textuality is the tapestry upon which the world is embroidered, reading (as well as all imaginable physical and corporeal accessories revolving around its orbit) is an inherently existential act. The proposed turbulent dichotomies of language-existence and nature and culture were the anvils on which Derrida as well as Baudrillard forged their theories of supplement and simulacrum, respectively. If the concepts should not be equated, the ways both thinkers conceptualise their coinages can scarcely avoid common denominators. Upon this common ground this study has tentatively subscribed to the deconstructionist thesis positing that the presence of the source text is questionable in that it exists only in a linguistic structure that is different from itself, namely in a translation, which serves to destabilize the assumption of the source text as a stable self-presence. Translatable, a source text is already a translation-to-come, and as a potential translation it can no longer pretend to be a pure original: ever-deferred from itself, it becomes its own simulacrum (auguring no possibility to return to the lost purity), as well as a dangerous supplement (given that translation complements and replaces the original). The point of intersection of the related notions of Derrida’s supplement and Baudrillard’s simulacrum makes itself apparent in the latter’s conceptualisation of the remainder. Baudrillard’s depiction of the world as essentially simulative, where “the real [is] disappearing to make room for an image, more real than the real” (1994: 144), proposes that the remainder is an addition, a marginal appendage on the body of a symbiotic whole. Such a remainder, however, formulates its own spurious policy by shaking the foundations of the normative

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metaphysics encapsulating it: a binary opposition wherein it is marginalised and pushed away from the “privileged element”. According to Baudrillard, however, remainder, although inscribed in such a dichotomy, unsettles it from within, given that it has no direct other against which to measure itself; it rather participates in an “asymmetrical opposition” negating its clean-cut marginality. As such “the remainder [is] disappearing from the assigned location to resurface inside out, in what it was the remainder of” (ibid.). Irreducible to a supplementary role consigned by the hierarchically structured Western metaphysics, the remainder subverts the accepted order. Having argued for this concept, the philosopher continues: Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste product... of what else? Of a process, which even if it were to completely disappear and had no name except the social would nevertheless only be its remainder. The residue can be completely at the level of the real. When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder (ibid.).

Like simulacrum, assuming the place of the real, the remainder now accommodates and constitutes the space that has hitherto banished it to its margins. Like supplement, it is the addition that completes the body just to substitute for it. The existential rhetoric of Cosmos dramatises the way in which an individual existence occupies the place of a weaker term in the man-world dichotomy; in order to subvert the order by becoming a microcosm of the world’s totality, and consequently its truer reality. The novel demonstrates the act of simulation on both the linguistic and existential matrices. Its arbitrary textual artefacts (a sparrow, arrow, stick, cat, etc.) function as mere supplements to a linear narrative proceed and accumulate to form their own fragmentary system. Such narrative is structured like postmodern existence where the manufactured goods of rampant consumerist production amass, which are aimed at accessorising or facilitating existence; the accrual of remainders in this linear yet arbitrary procession exposes its own ruptures, and compensates for the totality of the world offering itself up as a new order. The totalising authority of an individual in the novel comes to fruition through kinetic dynamics; the narrator projects upon the world his idiosyncrasy privileging fragmentariness; the processuality of visual perception over the paradigmatic order dictated by the collective assumptions. The world, projected upon, rather than projecting its own meaning, is thus a simulation of itself, whose only reality is the one suggested by interpretation. The reader naturally interprets fictional reality in light of his/her accumulative perceptual experience, not only individual but also influenced by the immersion in the ‘interhuman

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church’ (Gombrowicz’s foremost existential trope). This sparks the awareness that an interpretation of the world cannot exist without a degree of received collective knowledge or dialogic exchange with others, entailing in turn that the act of reading a text must involve participation; not least of the reader him/herself but others who impinge on the process of interpretation as a result of such an exchange. The performative energies of perception that have the means to de-totalise the metaphysics of collective culture and existence privilege an individual interpretation over the collective description; they render a reading experience capable of translating the assumed interpretative orders. Reading as translation, incessant in the renegotiation of textual meanings, translates into an analogous extratextual order, where a translated text resulting from the translator’s singular experience acts as a remainder adduced to the original text; one that is now to displace the original from its privileged position and become original upon its own merit. The text inveigles the reader into adopting an extratextual perspective from which to interpret the textual meaning. In such a process the reader can conceive of a fictional event only if it is capable of simulating the real.63 If the textual reality simulates the extratextual orders, turning itself into a remainder that encompasses the dominant system, extratextuality becomes structured like its residue. Postmodernism, in exposing the world as an image of itself, one that exists only as its own simulacrum, matches the condition of text which does not exist (at least not in the pure form that has been irretrievably lost) except in translation into its forms always-to-come. This is the moment when existence becomes lost in translation. Like the original text, its only existence is simulation; it becomes a residue engendered by the reversed dynamic, wherein the system is soaked up and denigrated to the role of supplement. Similarly, the textual-extratextual exchange undergoes the reversed supplementarity in the act of reading. Whilst reading, the reader cannot push aside the received tacit awareness of borders detaching the text from existence. With the line between physical existence and the textuality of the book starkly drawn, the reader supposes that it is the book as the physical object that participates in the world, offering itself as another more or less realistic version, a simulation of the 63 The narrator of Cosmos, even when idiosyncratic, never falters to acknowledge the contagious quality of the received cultural and historical forces in his deconstructive project of reversing the individual-world order. This is made apparent in the points where the complacency about chaos negates itself in a moment of indeterminacy running counter to the awareness of form or social convention: the illogical is reminded of the dictum of logic (the irrationality of the arbitrary items as relevant ‘clues’); the de-historicised event that referred back to its historicity, lie answerable to truth.

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reality it is a particle of. The reversal of this order occurs the moment the reader consciously commits himself to the reading process. At this point, the reader’s consciousness succumbs to the deluge of significations, in turn rendering boundaries liquid and unstable. Plunged into the chasm of the text, the reader lets her/himself become a voyeur of textual reality, an attachment to its selfsufficient body. From now, the privileging of the world’s physicality loses its raison d’être given the abysmal textual totality that is reflected in its heterogeneity; one that consumes the now supplementary corporeality of the world. Denigrated to a secondary status, the physicality of the text is now nullified by textuality as the remainder that sets out to totalise the text in turn. Such a reversal is a translation in which the originality of the extratextual world in relation to the text is rejected: every ‘original’ entity only simulates its originality and purity, which entails its unremitting deferral and distance from itself. Cosmos lets itself be identified as a portrait of this reciprocal relation and the precarious transition from the text to its outside. The molecular proliferation of matter in the novel can hardly be catalogued as radically disseminative in that the narrator as interpreter involuntarily coordinates and ‘configures’ them in patterns. The molecular optics carries out a critical narrative function given that in the act of interpretation the negative abundance of atomic traces are arranged into a grid map integrating disseminative constituents into a meaningful system of significations. The subjective constitution of the new reality has it that although it inescapably draws on and becomes indebted to the singularity of the system it sets out to simulate, the extrication from its internal body externalises the simulated identity and reduces it to external – as put by D.W. Smith after Deleuze – ‘optical effects’ (2006: 100). Such effects are integral to the workings of the new system that ceases to emulate the internal mechanism of the source body, but is instead actualised by its own processes at work. The machine of simulation, however, does not come to a standstill once the resemblance with the original body is renounced, but rather cleaves to its continual production, as in the novel, of its own rootless, itinerant, disseminative matter. 64 Gombrowicz’s narrator does indeed come to a point in which his idiosyncratic significations appear to detach themselves from the received logic and to encapsulate themselves in a self-sufficient, programmatic system. This, however, is not to serve to unanimously legitimise the new order. The reader promptly realises that the new pattern is only substantial if it is the pattern of existence, however detached from it. The fact the it becomes the simulation of something plays on the idea that simulation stands in an uncomfortable position of being 64 Deleuze denies the simulacrum’s resemblance with the source body: “The copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance” (2005: 295).

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the meta of the reality it sets out to simulate. Hence, the narrator’s cosmos does not offer itself as a new substantial reality, but rather as a or another reality that tentatively approximates and distances itself from the world. For the reason that it simulates, it fails to fully become the world it simulates. The act of reading actualises such a provisional reality, which, having soaked up some of the extratextual world, whose borders liquidify in the reading consciousness, now forms a self-contained paradigm. Once the reading subject disengages her/himself from reading, the metaphysical borders between the world and the text solidify. This, in turn, is not to assume that simulation comes back to its pre-simulative source the moment the book is put back on the shelf; a particular reading experience leaves the imprint of itself in the reader’s historically conditioned consciousness and fails to erase itself from the thinking process. These unsettling acts of simulation (as transition or translation) are ones of reciprocal, liquid relations between simulacrum and its source. As such, the concepts of simulacrum and supplement (or remainder) complement one another; since the experience of textual liquid meanings undercutting the presence of the original jettisons the text out of itself through translation (via which the text is constantly distancing and hence simulating itself). The process translates into extratextual orders including artefacts of the physical world as well as corporeal sensations that actualise in and become the imprints of the orders of interpretation and participation. This postulate has been tested in the context of Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of existence as exemplified in Cosmos, which serves to approximate the condition of a reality (textual or otherwise) as participating in its active non-presence (a simulation of itself), and always prone to the dangerous supplement of translation. Having begun on the premise that the condition of translation as simulacrum translates into extratextual reality, the subsequent parts will use the accumulated theoretical material as a foundation for the analysis of the existential simulacra of the Polish and Anglo-American hermeneutic experience.

4.2.4. Polish and Anglo-American simulacra If for Baudrillard the postmodern consumer society inadvertently hosts hyperreality, wherein a human being can no longer tell apart the real from its simulation, divergent accounts of the hyperreal have already arisen out of the post-war Continental and Anglo-American socio-political transformations. AngloAmerican capitalism naturally is geared towards what Baudrillard terms the precession of simulacra (the overaccumulation of artificially constructed images and items that organise the new reality). By first creating a demand and later the product that is to satisfy the demand, capitalist marketing coerces culturally

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conditioned reality, one that consumers subscribe to by purchasing produced items. The artificial real, or the hyperreal, which has ensued as a result, is the projection of those constructed cultural artefacts so as to displace the hitherto instituted order. Given that the projection of the real is nothing like the real itself, simulation becomes the order of the day. Such consumerist artefacts are referred to by Daniel J. Boorstin in his diagnosis of postmodern American culture as pseudo-events; ones that are propagated by media for the sole purpose of publicity, but are of no functional value as such. They simulate an event rather than constitute it, but their reproduction pairs them up with real events. Pseudo-event becomes an “ambiguous truth” in its own right (1992: xv), to the extent that the real becomes marginalised and replaced by its own simulacra.65 Before Poland could even begin to participate in this Western pageant of simulacra, with which it can to varying degrees claim continuity after the 1989 socio-political transformations and power changeover, it had already gone through other social simulations. While across the Channel and the Atlantic capitalism was extending itself, progressively increasing its simulative business, Poland underwent at least three consecutive radical turns, each heavily impinging on the perception of reality and art. The experience of holocaust overturning existential and ethical assumptions made the first sweeping gesture towards conceiving of life and reality as simulacrum par excellence. Concentration camps became microcosms of the world where the taken for granted, lofty, metaphysical values of civilised culture were placed in question by the basic urge for survival. For Poland, this was the moment of the demise of metaphysics. Proud cultural premises became frivolous; bringing the individual home to a realisation that civilisation had been a noble lie, a simulation of itself all along. When the Darwinian credo of the survival of the fittest rings cynically true, the Western culture of logos and episteme has little to inform on how to confront the dictates of basic instincts and pain.66 Hence, some Polish writers must have taken to heart Adorno’s oft-quoted credo: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (2003: 162), evident in the pun65 “In the age of pseudo-events it is less the artificial simplification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo-event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo-event will tend to dominate. ...” (ibid. xx) 66 Pain is another Gombrowiczean trope that the writer elaborated on extensively in his Diary. Gombrowicz’s ill health – he continually suffered from and eventually died of asthma (see Siedlecka 1997 for further reference) – that became significantly aggravated in the final decade of his life, and had him delve into the existential aspects of pain, which the writer pessimistically concludes as something a human being is absolutely defenceless against.

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gent critique, as well as rethinking, of culture, civilisation and humanity that dominates the literature of Stanisław Czycz, Jerzy Harasymowicz, and Miron Białoszewski. The latter’s prose was stylistically pregnant with post-war angst and fragmentation, which are clear in his linguistic experiments. The subsequent phase of simulation generated by political indoctrination was to be the aftermath of the Polish President, Bolesław Bierut’s, 1947 ‘cultural revolution’; it brazened out the deficiencies of contemporaneous literature and the new communist and socrealist influences were to offer themselves for the job (Pietraszko 1997: 87). What followed was communist censure successfully thwarting any nonconformist revolutionary literary gestures; something that was realised in the large-scale withdrawal of independent literature from the bookshops. Having totally monopolised the publishing industry, with the dissenting authors already out of print, scarcely anything except the classics and socialist realist literature was allowed for publishing by the authorities. Never before had the individual been made more painfully aware of the clash of the metaphysical, chimerical doctrines (facts were fabricated to support the utopian socialist vision) and reality. The problem was that society was inveigled into living such reality. The Poznań 1956 protests (leading to the Polish October, or Thaw) might have provisionally dissipated the communist phantasm, given that the initial phase of Gomułka’s leadership allowed for the fresh import of American and Polish émigré literature (with Gombrowicz among others), only to reassert itself as a soviet satellite soon after and keep a tight rein on literature and culture.67 Mass icon-toppling ensued with many writers being interrogated and their works often eventually being banned. The Thaw was irrefutably momentous for Gombrowicz, allowing for the appearance of long awaited works that provided the writer’s immediate publicity in his motherland. Although viciously advocated by Jerzy Giedoryć and his Kultura, Gombrowicz cast his lot with other writers (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Marek Hłasko, and Miłosz, Herbert) whose oeuvres were banned in less than two years. By 1963 he had already been made public enemy number one given the ferocious press campaign launched by the authorities against the writer’s Ford Foundation scholarship. 67 Albert Borgmann accounts for the ‘hyperactive society’ as “a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause" (1993: 14); which in postmodern reality the philosopher understands as the “pursuit of success”. Such reality doubles itself up as a hyperreal non-space, where the new dictum is burgeoning at the expense and in place of the old values. Put like this, the contemporaneous Polish socrealism where the communist indoctrination (e.g. superproductivity promulgated by the Udarnik propaganda) led to an alternative, yet corresponding, version of the hyperreal (with an “urgent cause”, here socialist ideology, being a substitute for the real).

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Gombrowicz’s place in this turbulent period was liminal. Although acclaimed by the literary elite, a good part of the literati were intransigent and still ill-disposed towards the notorious unreadable émigré. On the word of Brodsky, the post-war as well as the post-Thaw transformations marked a dramatic and long-term cultural shift, and as a result “what was once considered to be nonsense now began to make sense” (1980: 459). Or to be more precise, the firsthand experience of the nonsense reality facilitated the recognition of Gombrowicz’s philosophical and stylistic antinomies by a post-war individual as his/her own legitimate and genuine voice. If the world now lived through antinomies and the absurd, the gramophone of Gombrowicz’s existential rhetoric must have hit a strangely familiar note. Loved or hated, he had never been more present than in his absence. He refused to be knocked off his perch, with his émigré spectre incessantly haunting the Polish cultural and literary circles from across the Atlantic. The manifestly divergent socio-political backgrounds of Polish and AngloAmerican post-war reality constructed hardly compatible hermeneutic traditions that heavily impinged on the interpretation of Gombrowicz’s literature. 68 The common ground, however, is partly attributable to Gombrowicz’s iconoclastic approach towards Polish letters, to a degree due to the writer’s exilic experience and in part to Gombrowicz’s philosophy of literature and textuality. Central here is the essentially intertextual character of Gombrowicz’s works. His oeuvre, inciting the reader to search for comparisons with other works, appropriates tradition as its macroscopic textual context (Fazan 2010: 657). Głowiński (running counter to Bolecki’s thesis postulating the collagist nature of Gombrowicz’s intertextual references) alleges that the borrowed intertextual material is by no means random or (as he puts it) ‘indifferent’ to interpretation as it constitutes “the fact of reading” (2002: 13, my translation). Uniłowski in his turn puts forward that “the awareness of the doubleness of the text, the assumption that all that is written down in the book simultaneously acts as the ‘fact of reading’, is a condition of understanding the text” (2010: 674, my translation). Gombrowicz’s intertextual enterprise is then not as much a textually ‘nihilistic’ gesture aiming at radical obliteration or randomisation of meaning of the appropriated textual material; nor does it claim an uninterrupted continuity with the tradition it draws on. The intertextual potential lies in the hermeneutic energies of text in its relation to other texts, wherein the seemingly random and empty references mean only when they comprise the act of reading and accelerate interpretations. To claim that the disparate range of genres intertwined into the narration of Ferdydurke must be interpreted away from the tradition 68 See chapter 1 for the state of current research on the differences in reception of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre in Poland, England and the USA.

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they were derived from, or that the gawęda of Trans-Atlantyk has little else than aesthetic or ornamental stylistic value, is to pretend that the genres had not existed in the first place. Gombrowicz does not merely imitate to mock, but first and foremost to renegotiate: to summon up and make terms with the spectres of the canon. By doing this, he endows the recycled material with a double energy. To respond to this demand of the text, the reader must not only project upon the text his/her interpretative horizon, but also make himself answerable to the horizons of the text. Doubled up, with its divergent plurivocal energies inextricable from themselves, the text extends its spectrum and becomes, like Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (also as the eponymous trope), a microcosm of all textuality. With its immanent and monistic rather than dualistic textuality, as observed by Uniłowski, Gombrowicz’s literature pairs itself up with postmodernism. As such, hermeneutic common denominators extend themselves not only to literary but also theoretical frameworks. As put forward by Graff: If there is any point of agreement among deconstructionists, structuralists, readerresponse critics, pragmatists, phenomenologists, speech-act theorists and theoretically-minded humanists, it is on the principle that the meaning of any text in itself depends for its comprehension on other texts and textualised frames of reference (2007: 256).

Gombrowicz’s is a precocious response to such sensibilities, allowing for the fact that the intertextually pregnant Ferdydurke inscribes itself in Gombrowicz’s interwar legacy. Gombrowicz’s text implodes intertextual material, simultaneously unsettling the references it is indebted to, and having the text extend itself beyond its own hermeneutic horizon. By doing this, not only does Gombrowicz’s text lend itself as propitious material to be read from the angles of contemporary theories, but also, by being a first-hand performance of postmodern anxieties, it does what contemporary theory only attempts to do: it announces the pantextuality of the text and bypasses assertive modes of articulation. Notable is the general penchant of poststructuralist thinkers for deflating the academic register, often endowing it with poetic or literary rhetoric in order to override metanarrative modes of expression. This is informed by the assurance that philosophy and criticism are to be recognised as “part of literature, not as a piece of scholastic apparatus” (Hough 1985: 15). Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze serve here as the most vivid instances of this phenomenon. For instance, the style of Derrida’s Glas (1986), a quadruplecolumned intermingling of philosophical and literary registers, is to demonstrate that “criticism itself is the new literature” (Shaffer 1980: 15). Gombrowicz’s Diary, by the same token, with its intentional obliteration of the metaphysical borders between commentary and fiction, foreruns the tradition of seemingly non-literary texts whose literariness is behind the explanation; or the other way

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round, where explanation resonates from rhetoric. Seen in this light, through the implementation of the intertextual imprints of tradition – renegotiated rather that obliterated – Gombrowicz inscribes himself in the Western intellectual tradition, endeavouring to erase the border line between art and philosophy, and to subvert their binary relation through a narration that avoids affirmative stances and metacommentary. On the whole, different Gombrowiczes materialise against the backdrop of divergent hermeneutic traditions. The turbulent socio-political backgrounds of the Polish as well as English and American experiences internalise Gombrowicz to their own interpretative frame. Seen through the Anglo-American prism, Gombrowicz’s philosophy of form provides a strikingly similar portrayal of the Anglo-American post-war condition as the consumer society simulacrum. The Polish post-war reader, on the other hand, experiencing the farce of the communist yoke, dissected Gombrowicz to find a repost to the communist deluge of absurdity. Although poles apart, both accounts of the post-war experience share their common denominator as the simulacrum of reality. Be it manipulated outwardly by the authoritarian dictatorship or subliminally by the capitalist machinations, the post-war individual can do little else than trade one machine of oppression for another. Form, like simulacrum, is but an artificial construction that the individual should never cease to keep breaking away from. Should one hold with the notion of form as simulacrum, it naturally follows that Gombrowicz’s philosophical imperatives lend themselves as clear agendas for liberation from the coercive machinations of the instituted orders. Having experienced the manifold forms of suppression, an individual cannot go back to the lost world. Once translated, one cannot be untranslated, but rather has to participate in the further transformation of oneself. The lost purity of existence will not turn itself in to the bereaving individual, overwhelmed by the external disintegration. Translation proves to be an apparatus of subjugation that extirpates the text out of its original, natural habitat and takes it into the captivity of simulacrum. Translation, which is itself an instrument of simulation, the dangerous supplement that supplies only to replace, is, however, a two-edged sword. Having squandered purity, it is paradoxically now the only instrument via which to test the boundaries of simulacrum, if one accepts that it is only via translation that the text can escape the authoritarianism of its ‘original’; an interpreter looks beyond his/her own stifling interpretative horizon and historical perspective. With translation as the implicit master trope of postmodernity accounting for its liquidity and arbitrariness, as well as ventriloquising its self-conscious petite récits, the prior business of the ensuing inquiry will be to probe to what extent a (literary/translated) text gives away the indeterminacy of translation inherent in

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its rhetoric. Hence, having delineated the hermeneutic and conceptual ground, the comparative close-reading of the source text of Kosmos (1965) and its English translations (Cosmos 1967 / 2005) will now follow. By narrowing down conceptual optics to the problematics of translation as an existential act and projecting it onto specific literary material (the translations of Gombrowicz’s last novel), the next part tests the ways in which Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text evokes (or fails to) the interpretative anxieties of indeterminacy and liquidity.

4.2.5. The cosmos of translation in the translations of Cosmos Although English publishers were in no hurry to translate Gombrowicz’s latest publications, his oeuvres seemed to eventually find a readership across the Channel in the late 60’s – the writer’s arguably most prolific and profitable decade. Many novels and plays were translated and published – largely by MacGibbon and Kee as well as Calder and Boyars Publishers – within a short space of time: Ferdydurke (1961) Pornografia (1966), Cosmos (1967), Princess Ivona (1969), The Marriage (1969), and shortly after, Operetta (1971).69 The publicity Gombrowicz gained in Europe must have been sparked off by the publication of his last novel, Cosmos in 1965, which became an immediate success in France, and which won the Editor’s International Prize for Literature in 1967, “second in importance only to the Nobel Prize” (Borchardt 2005: vii). It might then strike as a little less startling that the novel’s English translation was already cut and dried within barely two years of its premiere. Prompt as this first version might have been, Mosbacher translates from Georges Sedir’s French and Walter Tiel’s German translations; the novel waited until 2005 for its first translation made directly from Polish by Borchardt.70 In stark contrast to the critically acclaimed Borchard version, which is now considered authoritative, the 1967 translation is lambasted by critics for its inattention to philosophical and idiolectic details, superficiality, its distance from the original and the multiplication of errors accrued in its cross-linguistic trajectory. Nevertheless, this version constitutes a vital point of departure from which to posit the extent to which a translation severely distanced from its source manages to preserve Gombrowicz’s postmodern existentialism. For consideration further is whether the translation manages to recuperate the self-reflexivity of 69 Trans-Atlantyk and Diary had to wait at least another two decades for their translations (1994, 1988, respectively). 70 See chapter 1 for further information on these and other English translations as well as their reception in the Anglo-American literary and publishing market.

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Gombrowicz’s language, which at many narrative levels foregrounds itself as and approximates the processuality of translation. In order to take the first argumentative step, let us begin with a tentative assumption: Cosmos is in many ways a diagnosis of postmodernism. With the deluge of quotidian artefacts and significations, disconnected associations, antinomic juxtapositions, it is in essence a photograph of the liquidity of existence. Both at the level of plot (given its subverted detective story plotline) and language (by design choppy, idiolectic and telegraphic arrangement of reiterations) the novel evokes the sense of the optical surge of seemingly irreconcilable dissociations. This version of cosmos is, however, neither radically disseminative nor totalising. Here, chaos has hardly a moment to announce itself before it amalgamates into a ‘shape’, and form falls to pieces before it is properly formed: When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence . . . the swarm, the roar, the river . . . nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! For a split second this word took me by surprise like a wild beast in a dark forest, but it soon sank into the hurly-burly of the seven people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on, Katasia handed Lena the ashtray . . . (2005: 55).

Gombrowicz indeed seems to have perfected the craft of magnetising and deferring forms at a single stroke. As soon as the narrator confidently legitimates a truth through an overt assertion (“nothing is easier than to configure”) the hypothesis gains its representation in – and becomes immediately deconstructed by – language. Mulling over ‘configurations’, the narrator becomes ‘configured’ himself; hooked by the word and hence minutely, “for a split second”, salvaged from the liquidity of cosmos. Minutely, ever since the moment a form affirms its being, it “soon s[inks] into the hurly-burly” of patchy significations. This proceeds here from yet another commentary (‘this word took me by surprise’) that dissolves into a literary representation of the arbitrariness it speaks of (“people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on, Katasia handed Lena the ashtray”). When it comes to the narrative aspects of Gombrowicz’s prose, despite its trouble-free chronological structure of plot, the inundation of significations moves the linearity of history to its vortex: past and present are entangled in the spatial fragmentariness of language.71 [M]y thoughts were entangled in this overgrowth abounding in a million combinations, the jolting train ride, the night filled with the rumble of the train, lack of sleep, the air, the sun, the march here with this Fuks, there was Jasia and my mother, the mess with the letter, the way I had “cold-shouldered” my father, there was 71 The relativisation of history in Gombrowicz, exemplified in the narrator’s suspicion that it was Lena who could have killed the cat, although aware he did it himself, is expanded upon in chapter 3.

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Historical synchrony is blurred in the syntagmatic, horizontal procession of the arbitrariness of narrative. Arranged in such a way, dissociation becomes order. Narration that reflects upon such reality must be spun from the vantage point of the observer. Kinetic dynamics governing the narration render the narrator a ‘scanner’ of the signals, signs and other stimuli s/he receives. And the reverse also holds true. Since the observer interprets the world around them, perception does not boil down to a mere reception; s/he just as well projects an interpretation upon the world. Since existence refuses to subject itself to the programmatic rules of grammar, such metaphysical notions governing the written word as chronology, logic, quantity, rhetoric, accuracy, etc., must be rethought in the face of the new (dis)order. The strictness of syntax must capitulate against the fluidity of existence sneaking contagiously into its tissue. Reduced to its horizontal optics, the narration eschews the hierarchisation suggested by the stylistic manoeuvres that punctuate the narration – the choppiness of syntax, the juggling of nouns as “the jolting train ride” of “thoughts” – and that catalyse the metrical procession of significations. At the translator’s workbench, however, liquidity in fiction does not entail an analogous randomisation of translation. Far from this, mapping out of the stylistic markers of fragmentariness might actually call for the full rigour of the translator. A meticulous attention to detail is required for translating Cosmos, where certain philosophical concerns, far from being diluted in the liquidity of narration, are rather submerged and carefully planted under its surface. One of the underlying facets of the novel, is Leo’s masturbatory penchant, which the character resorts to in order to repress his sexual desires and persevere in his conjugal fidelity: “…those little games of mine on the tablecloth, under the eyes of my better half? Discretely, all correct, so that there would be no scandals?” (ibid. 134). Curiously, before Leon’s “little games” (elsewhere encrypted in the inflected manifold coinage “Berg”72) amalgamate into outward declarations later in the plot, they are implicitly hinted at throughout the text. Hence, Gombrowicz’s backhanded “swój do swego po swoje” (1986: 32) reiterated in different contexts, makes demands on the translators in question who ei72 The Polish language is fundamentally inflectional and the word formation is significantly characterised by affixation (PWN-Oxford 2004). As a result, the proliferation of affixes in Polish allows for more lexical flexibility and experiments than in English. Gombrowicz’s style is largely governed by inflection resulting in innovative, idiolectic or altogether non-existent in the Polish language words or phrases.

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ther attempt to recuperate (with unassured success) its connotations: “Go to your own for whatever turns you on” (2005: 34), or capitulate altogether: “One is what one is, after all” (1967: 38). Elsewhere, the varicose veins of narration swell underhandedly with onanistic resonances even more clandestinely: Bez takiej smykałki on ci się zanadto zamknie, stwardnieje. A jak z klientem, na odwrót, jesteś słodki, podpuść od czasu do czasu słówko grubsze, żeby go wysmyczyć z ewentualnego zastygnięcia, bo jak ci stwardnieje i zastygnie, to co? (1986: 35). If you don’t have the knack he’ll close up on you too much and grow stiơ. On the other hand, when you’re all sweetness with your client, slip in a crude word from time to time to jerk his leash and keep him from possibly stiơening up, because if he hardens and grows stiơ on you, what then? (2005: 38). …otherwise you risk antagonising him too much. On the other hand, if you wish to be obliging or conciliatory to him, every now and then you must say something quite rude or disagreeable, to startle him out of torpor, otherwise you won’t get anywhere with him (1967: 41).

The groundswell of onanistic signals impinges heavily on both language and plot, with its climax at the point where Leon invites all the characters to bear witness to his “Berging with a berg into a berg” (2005: 134), publicly acted out as a sacralised ritual, “the holiest sacrament” (ibid. 140). Hence, Leon’s speech, saturated with diminutives and pet names (exemplified below), reverberates with sexual innuendoes both at the level of discourse and linguistic material. Borchardt appears to foreground this aspect at the narrative and lexical level as well as in paratextual commentaries, as manifested in the translator’s preface, and often footnoted. The overt sexual pointers (‘grow stiff’, ‘stiff up’, ‘jerk’) are, however, repressed and camouflaged in the metonymical displacement of sexual organs by ‘client’ or ‘leash’. Interestingly, while Borchardt’s attention to this facet in the excerpt outdoes the source text, which faintly taints its narrative with ambiguous lexical hues (‘podpuść’, ‘stwardnieje’, ‘wysmyczyć’), Mosbacher seems to pay it no heed whatsoever. The fact that sexual implications are hypodermically incorporated into the text develops from the essentially clandestine nature of Leon’s acts. Since a sexual act is conventionally tabooed and outlawed to the margins of standard discourse, it exists as a negation of normality. The way Leon manoeuvres his masturbatory acts makes them a camouflaged part of ordinariness (“on the tablecloth, under the eyes of my better half”). Conventionally, masturbation exists only in its absence: it is acknowledged to exist, but its time, place and agents are always deferred by their anonymity and liminality. Leon’s masturbation as act might not eschew liminality either, but neither is it sociophobically pushed to the spaces of a claustrophilic con-

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finement. Spatially, its presence is covered under the blanket of convention. If it takes place, it is always absent and inaccessible to the consciousness of others. If Gombrowicz, to render its presence deferred and liminal, deposits onanistic markers on the narrative grid furtively under the liquid significations, Borchard subtly, almost subliminally, inscribes the sexual connotations in the text to approximate the effect. At times, however, Borchard plays up this element where the need for it is questionable at best: Czemużbyś papusiu swojmsusiu nie podpapciła papupapu rzodkiewskagowego (1986: 21). Why don’t you toss your Daddy daddy some radishy foodie food? Toss it! (2005: 21). Pray papass to your papakins a radiculous radicle (1967: 27).

Dubious, though telling, is the choice of the word ‘toss’ – bringing about sexual connotations in English – for the woolly ‘podpapciła’, which in Polish, even if one is inclined to associate it with a sexual act, does not necessarily bring to mind masturbation. Borchard once again attempts to recreate sexuality, while Mosbacher commits himself to approximating Gombrowicz’s linguistic acrobatics with an admirable result.73 If Mosbacher’s dedication to recreating Gombrowicz’s idiolect is generally lukewarm at best (the second-step translation certainly did not help in this respect), here the alliterative rhythm, anagramic wordplay, and a portmanteau bring the translation startlingly close to Gombrowiczian stylistics and suggest an arduous attention to detail. Gombrowicz’s staging of endlessly flowing significations, to go on to other stylistic representations of the trope of liquidity, cannot be reduced to a single stylistic or narrative technique. And there appears to be a cogent reason behind this. As everything else in Gombrowicz, the lack of resistance to forms leads in the long run to subscription to a doctrine, which in turn entails the fossilisation of the self. Hence, absolutes in Gombrowicz serve as the caricatures of themselves and must be deconstructed the moment they precariously slip into totality. For this reason, the means of depiction of indeterminacy in Gombrowicz’s prose, other than radical stylistic representations (of say high-brow moderns), assume various forms, which in turn evoke singular reader responses and a hermeneutic experience of narrative liquidity. Therefore, “this wave … simply dissolving everything, a huge river, an inundation, a deluge, immeasurable waters” of significations are habitually com73 The narrator himself refers to them as ‘word-monsters’: „dziwolążył się ze słowostworem” (1986: 21).

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municated via a cascade of lexical items: “needles, frogs, sparrow, stick, whiffletree, pen nib, leather, cardboard, et cetera, chimney, cork, scratch, drainpipe, hand, pellets, etc. etc., clods of dirt” (2005: 102). Elsewhere, the sense of fragmentariness is extended beyond the lexical level, with no less fragmentary results: “I drank tea, no one stirred, lethargy, everyone relaxed, their chairs slightly pushed back from the table, Ludwik reached for the newspaper, RolyPoly froze” (ibid. 45). As such, Gombrowicz’s prose does not move far from the modernist aesthetic (Gertrude Stein’s cubistic experiments, as showcased in her Tender Buttons, in particular come to mind). At this point, Gombrowicz illustrates how postmodernism shifts from the metaphorical and metaphysical (vertical) to the kinetic (horizontal). Descriptions are optical scans of the narrator’s experience, usually written in a terse, tachygraphic style purposefully departing from the fustian, bombastic loquacity of grand narratives. The photographic quality of narrative (that underscores the linguistic texture as meaningful in itself) is on occasion intertwined into more poetic narrative forms: A great palaver of events, unending factoids such as the croaking of frogs in the pond, mosquitoes swarming, a swarming of stars, a cloud enclosing me, obliterating me, drifting with me, the ceiling with the archipelago and the peninsulas, with dots and damp patches all the way to the boring whiteness of the window shade (ibid. 46).

The complexity of the passage (and many passages of the same sort gesturing towards reiteration as a major stylistic device that dictates the novel’s rhythm) consists in the manner Gombrowicz encapsulates macro spaces within claustrophobic confinements. The deconstructed spaces, whose micro and macro dimensions overlap and defer one another, are the liminal points of contradiction, assimilating conflicting fears and sensibilities. Here confined spaces become unsettling not because they are claustrophobic, but, contrarily, because they ironically forefront their agoraphobic energy articulated in the cosmologic and geographic vocabularies. After all, the room the narrator finds himself in becomes unbearable once it becomes a microcosm of the world that exerts its cosmic potential against him: in other words, the constellation of significations. It is a liminal space that accommodates vastness and the immeasurable proliferation of signs, exploding any clean-cut physical limits. The preceding stenographic narrative breaks into stream of consciousness and ends with a sense of fragmentation and decadence. Gombrowicz’s poetics is larded with such points of departure, often abrupt, wherein philosophical perorations escape narrative and stylistic closures in order to circumvent the monovocality of the narrator’s voice. The narrator who systematically betrays (or otherwise is betrayed by) his own voice can be said to employ an indeterminacy

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that disturbs his linear thinking and stimulates his decadence. At this point narration incessantly translates itself so as to reflect upon its own condition as liquid, shifting, and uncertain. Accordingly, Gombrowicz’s confined spaces become apt metaphors for a book; the reader delves into a violent torrent of meanings that are accommodated within the narrow physical space of the book held in his/her hand. If this applies, Gombrowicz’s liminal rhetoric lends itself as no less a reliable metaphor for translation. Limited by quantitative translation standards, a translation must accommodate the source text’s manifold meanings further multiplied (especially in the case of two-step translations) by the surplus material rising from crosslinguistic fissures, as well as the translator’s own experience within the same physical scope (word limit) as its source text. Paradoxically, these narrative shifts in no way impinge on the philosophical undercurrents inspiring the narrator. The groundswell of existential fluidity still flows under the texture of the narration. Hereby lies the ‘scandal’ of the unstable stability; the consistency undercutting indeterminacy. Further, the contrary applies, in that no consistent form can sidestep indeterminacy at the moment of assuming an identity and becoming fully itself. Hence Gombrowicz’s irreconcilable contradictions, overtly manifested and hypodermically inscribed in language, resulting from attempting to order cosmos: “licentious virginity, brutal timidity, wide-open closing, shameless shame, icy fervor, sober drunkenness” (ibid. 44). Discourse governed by contradictions and the shapelessness of existence is reflected in the relatively free format of postmodern prose and poetry. Now old stylistic forms of linearity give way to spatial textual representations. The departure from the time-honoured practices is triggered by the recognition of the aporia (coined by Derrida) between the author’s intention and the text’s surface that undercuts such intentional projects. The subversion of the conventional order by underscoring such textual contradictions, wherein the texture of narration undermines what the author has in mind, naturally steers the postmodern compass towards the self-reflexive surface. The texture, which is now to articulate the text’s significations and intentions, will vibrate in typographic and lexical aspects. Ideas are now veiled in texture just as there is a texture to ideas themselves. The text is made to be felt rather than only read. If structure is to coincide with postmodern existentialism, it must reorganise itself to communicate the meaninglessness and chaos of the world. To approximate such a state, the new syntactic order will involve erratic punctuation, variable word order and formation, line breaks, excessive reiterations, run-on sentences, a lack of conjunctions and linkers (that have hitherto warranted the text’s structural coherence and unity in ideas). Mapped out on the

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syntactic plane in this fashion, language announces the futility of forms, as well as the hopelessness of teleological and epistemological assumptions: the text has neither a fixed set of meanings nor a metaphysical purpose attached to it. If typography is a powerful means via which to voice postmodern anxieties, Cosmos proves pertinent: Something hit me in the mouth sliding out cold shapeless smack into mouth get out beat it the wire mesh with the leg twisted contorted and silence dead silence cavern nothing . . . and out of chaos, out of all the churning (after Katasia had left) the mouth constellation appears, shining irrepressibly, glittering (2005: 46).

The manner in which the narrator gives in to and pulls himself together from ‘chaos’ is dictated (in the source text as well) by punctuation. When the narrative at the lexical level underscores liquidity through pointers of textual otherness (‘sliding out’, ‘shapeless’) the text is left unpunctuated. At this point, logic and coherence are drowned in the spatial, non-linear carnival of arbitrary words. Once the narrator rallies and wriggles out of “all the churning”, punctuation returns as a harbinger of the restored order and regained sanity. Punctuation marks are hence the stepping stones from which the narrator can now extend his meaningful ‘constellation’ ‘out of chaos’. Typography then participates in the moment of consciousness, which is also the moment of translation that inaugurates the act of confrontation with the immensity of unsettling, arbitrary signals. Mosbacher’s punctuated counterpart provides a rather stylistically polished and considerably reshaped text that in no way voices similar concerns.74 Mosbacher’s version is visibly domesticated and distanced severely from the source text, aiming at readability and essentially lacking in the novel’s (and Borchardt’s translation for that matter) typographical detail, as well as the purposeful syntactic infelicities approximating postmodern condition. The linear structure and syntactic orderliness of the translation might in fact bring it closer to the English reader, but little is left from the stylistic simulation of chaos that Borchardt goes to considerable lengths to reproduce. Having in a sense rewritten the text, is Mosbacher a performative translator who generates textual alterity by producing an essentially other text? Performative translation might aim to reproduce alterity but it does not make a wholly other text. Its project is not radical. It rather must recuperate in itself and do justice to the otherness of the source text. Accordingly, a performative translator creates by recreating this otherness. If the translator creates and recreates s/he 74 “That mouth, the cold, hideous, darting and gliding movement of that mouth. Stop, don’t, take it away, and the ashtray and the springs of the bed and the leg on it. . . Silence, a black abyss, a turbulent void. And in the midst of the turbulence (Katasia having withdrawn) there suddenly loomed an irresistible, shining constellation of mouths” (1967: 48).

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must not do it by departing from the source text but by moving directly towards it. By gesturing towards the text as opposed to the reader the translation does not eschew interlinguistic tension between or reduce disseminative elements leading to aporia; only through such a responsibility towards the text can the translator truly participate in its recreation. If the lack of punctuation in the previous excerpt extends the rhetoric of liquidity and indeterminacy, the ample use of commas often within the space of a half-page long sentence elsewhere in the novel stands in for (in a manner symptomatic of modernist stylistics, much in the vein of William Faulkner or Dorothy Richardson) a metaphor of fragmentation (as exemplified in Cosmos 1986: 10, 1967: 15, 2005: 8). In such instances punctuation endows the text with rhythmic qualities of non-linear discourse and substitutes coordinating and subordinating discourse markers: such as conjunctions, linkers, and pronouns. The seemingly excessive length of the sentence also underscores its hermeticity and immanence by acting as a confined microcosm that encapsulates aleatory items. Once again the doubling of micro-macro dimensions, having parallels at the level of plot, proves to be, if anything, a linguistic concern in the first instance. Borchardt’s rendition once again attests to the translator’s commitment to revivifying stylistic manoeuvres by drawing on the philosophical framework. Mosbacher on his part, by splitting the sentence into three, disregarding quantitative translation standards, adding conjunctions, expanding and even erroneously altering the text’s plotline in an attempt to communicate meaning,75 invests in deciphering coherence at the expense of recuperating unsettling stylistics; ones that are otherwise pregnant with postmodernist anxieties that are intertwined into its tissue. All things considered, as posited and exemplified in the selected fragments, whether in the source text or a translation, the reader is exposed to the sense of liquidity of meanings generated by Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text that anticipates some literary and philosophical practices which informed postmodernist thought. Pulsating from under the texture of language, the elements of postmodern existentialism that foreground différance as its modus operandi make their existence felt in Gombrowicz’s text in places where existential rhetoric exposes the fissures of linearity. The metaphoric of the cosmos – both ordered and arbitrary – participates in the intratextual as opposed to metanarrative explication of such non-linear structures. Cosmos, as a trope, in turn, offers itself as the parallel of language given it is designed to manifest its own inherent paradox. On the one hand, it is the epitome of stability organised by the rigorous principles of grammar, on the other 75 Compare “…obok Lena, jezioro, grzeczna pani Leonowa ...” (10: 1986) with “Lena, sitting next to him, was as gentle as a sleeping pool” (1967: 15). It has to be noted that in the source text the word ‘grzeczna’ (here ‘gentle’) refers to Mrs Wojtys and not Lena.

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hand, its multiple possibilities spawning idiolectic deviations go against the grain of the standard and bring in points of indeterminacy, where the rigidity of grammar and linearity of syntax count for nothing. In Cosmos, enmeshed in the procession of liquidity is historical and chronological consistency, which, although linear in terms of plot,76 is problematic at the level of language. The compromising of this and other paradigmatic assumptions of the epistemological dictum is attributable to the shift of optics from metaphysical to kinetic, which in the language of Cosmos is played up in both narrative fragmentation and typographic detail. The sense of indeterminacy swells in the plurivocality of linguistic representations and the narrative gives away its condition as translation via this very volatility. Language is not, however, the only pointer of translation. Gombrowicz’s economy of heterotopic confined spaces, or microcosms becoming paradoxically the milieux of the macrocosmic explosion of significations, give away the inherent quality of the text as being always-already inscribed in pan-textuality. A text can exist in no other form than in its incessant translation from and into other texts. Just like Gombrowicz’s claustrophobic spaces filtering the vastness of the cosmos, a text (and a translation) contains the multiplicity of other texts vibrating in its own confines. Hence, Gombrowicz’s language and existential rhetoric fundamentally dramatise the processuality of translation as a necessary condition. After all, form can only be provisionally eschewed in the incessant becoming of a character. Hence, the impossibility of translation denies the possibility of being fully oneself.77 Bereft of the intervention of translation, one’s consolation prize can be merely an incomplete, since static, existence; an existence that is merely a simulation.

4.3. Transgressing the liminality of translation This section posits that Gombrowicz’s text exposes a systematic impulse towards transgression. Far from contending that Gombrowicz’s fiction imparts 76 Unlike noveau roman, the emerging and soon dominant French literary detective genre contemporary to and that claimed to have inspired Cosmos, Gombrowicz’s novel does not problematise plot and chronology of events. 77 At the level of plot, Gombrowicz’s protagonists present primarily immanent personalities, incapable of translation, and they are somehow dehumanised: “Bodily egoism? Physical egocentricity? One sensed that her hands, legs, nose, and ears were only for herself, these were her organs, nothing more, she totally lacked that generosity which knows how to whisper to a woman that her little hand is an alluring and exciting gift. Moral severity? . . . No, no, rather a strange bodily solitude…” (Cosmos 2005: 118).

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overtly transgressive themes, it will be argued that his peculiar deferral of the transgressive on its unfolding results in problematizing the nature of such acts. What follows is the paradoxical gesture of a transgression that refuses to transgress. Gombrowicz has a propensity for constructing a transgressive narrative edifice calculated to thwart his own designs. Configured as such, Gombrowicz’s transgression seems always empty of itself, exhausted, not the least because it fails to carry out its transgressive project, but rather that the limits it is defined by fall prey to liminal indeterminacy. This flies in the face of established occidental wisdom maintaining that transgression depends upon the limit for its presence. By blurring the limits upon which the narrative framework is structured, Gombrowicz relativizes transgression so as to render it a blank sign. The foregoing discussion will close-read Gombrowicz’s second to last novel Pornografia78 which doubles up as an instance of the author’s unfulfilled transgressive venture: liminal pornography. Ultimately, the tentative conclusions drawn from the analysis will be employed to indicate a resemblance between Gombrowicz’s liminal rhetoric and the process of translation.

4.3.1. Transgressing (or not) If one were to embark on tracking down the limits of transgression, s/he might be forgiven for thinking that transgression starts within itself – in its prefix. Taking a wider view, Jędrzejko would go as far as to assert that prefixes, “these seemingly innocent morphemes … denoting liminality”, “have the power of collapsing binary oppositions upon which Western metanarratives so heavily depend” (2011: 13). In this fashion, the prefix trans-, signifying simultaneously across and beyond, situates itself within and extends beyond the stem it precedes. The postmodern cultural condition seems to pair up with this linguistic doubling. Given the wiping out of universal values and essentialism, as well as such incontrovertible concepts sanctified by western metaphysics as subject, centre, history, presence, God, morality, there may be no limits left to transgress today. If postmodernism blotched out the boundaries between philosophy and the language it is expressed by – and if language can never abort the ceaseless procession of signifiers, mafficking its inexhaustible ambiguity – transgression may find no place if it is not confronted by feasible limits. Gombrowicz does little to settle this ambiguity. His text denies the prefix trans- its application and function consistently. As such, the impulse to go across or beyond – should one trust etymology – marks itself as forever78 In this chapter, fragments from Borchardt’s 2010 translation of Pornografia will be used throughout.

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unfinished business. This is partly because metaphysically trained reasoning relies upon an etymology that delineates the semantic limits that the reader is to follow. Since trans- has ambiguity at its roots – accepting its double meaning – Gombrowicz in quite the same manner trammels existential and interhuman relations, and, in so doing, his narrative artifices become metaphors for language, given that they feign the uncertainty inherent in language. Untrained to think outside of the stable concepts of presence, origin, etc., the reader - expecting limits to be transgressed - is now confronted with ethical demands imposed by the text that refuses to exhaust itself. Derrida, for that matter, in his reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, forefronts the dual meaning of the preposition before. Put before the Law, one finds herself both in and outside it – like the reader who is forever in and outside the reading text. Approximating the metaphysics of language, literature itself makes law, emerging in that place where the law is made. Therefore, under certain determined conditions, it can exercise the legislative power of linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, however, it derives protection and receives its conditions of emergence. This is owing to the referential equivocation of certain linguistic structures. Under these conditions literature can play the law, repeating it while diverting or circumventing it (1992: 216).

This unsettling double gesture of literature means that no demarcation of limits (here, the law) can be detached from its inherent transgression. Such transgressive ‘circumventing’ of limits renders them, counterintuitively, possible. Does it mean that literature has it both ways? Does it monopolise and avoid limits? Is the limit inherently liminal? If the transgressive gesture of ‘transgression’, as assumed, starts in its own prefix, the transgressive economy of Pornografia, in much the same vein, springs from the title itself: not because of the novel’s success in delivering what the title promises, but in its failure in this very venture. Many a reader expecting explicit sexual content, or clinical corporeal details, will have been disappointed. Indeed, the novel is not an erotic fiction designed to satiate the reader’s sexual preferences. The title’s complicity in the obscene depends on the imbedded rather than explicit erotic articulations – that are, however, no less inflammatory, given the paedophilic undertone of the novel. In that way, the novel’s possibilities refuse to exhaust themselves. To contend that the text’s transgressive energies pivot on the obliqueness of the obscene is to disregard Gombrowicz’s antonymic proclivities. Rather than just pornocryptic or pornographic, Pornografia, by problematizing the limits between reality and art, precludes the closure and limits the assertion of pornographic articulations. With no detectable limits to transgress, the delimitation of the transgressive or pornographic space cannot be achieved.

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Let us interrogate the passages foregrounding the imputed locus of the novel’s liminal – as opposed to explicit or covert – pornography by navigating towards Gombrowicz’s peculiar use of a Gothic idiom to dramatise the (liminal) obscene. If one is inclined to class Pornografia as a transgressive work implicitly making a fetish out of the erotic, paedophilic or sadistic then language doubles up to problematise such sweeping statements. As noted in a chapter above, the narrator, Witold Gombrowicz, parenthesises Henia and Karol when referring to them as “(the girl)” and “(the boy)”, respectively. Elsewhere, as in Ferdydurke, ellipsis is used whenever the narrator hints at the erotic: “And his body, that body so …”peculiar” ? … To travel with him and ignore his untiring silently-shouting impropriety?” (Pornografia 5). In so doing, the punctuation signposts the chthonic and often erotic elements. One may be tempted to bring the issue to a close by, in the psychoanalytical spirit, attributing the stylistic tics to repressed desires reflected discreetly in language. Witold, however, is defensive: “… (someday I’ll explain the meaning of the parentheses)…” (57). The fact that he never does, though, is gestural: it is to portend the failure of discursive language to communicate the unspoken, peculiar, liminal, or erotic for that matter. Bereft of a comfortable, metafictional “explanation” to bank on, only the liminal articulations, the language of limited affirmation, dramatises the elements that refuse to totalise themselves in explicatory language. At this point, we find Gombrowicz at his most ironic. From now on in the novel language cheats by quashing the erotic right before its closure, and foregrounding it via devices otherwise ill-equipped to deliver eroticism, e.g. the Gothic, religion, and crime. Witold and Fryderyk stalk Henia and Karol, a pair of teenagers, and infatuated by their youth, endeavour to “bind them together” (34). When asked by Witold whether they are fond of each other, Karol responds: “Naw…after all we’ve known each other since childhood” (65). The same is reiterated by Henia almost word for word soon after. Here, the pornographic project extends to two planes around which the plot revolves. Whereas Witold projects his misguided sexual fancies onto the young couple (“Nothing but my own pornography preying on them!” 34), Fryderyk, the narrator’s alter ego, the theatre director, doubles up as an extension of Witold’s closeted fantasies by ‘stage-managing’ their sexual act. Sexual consummation is not to come and it was never meant to. Their ‘relationship’ becomes consummated on another, deep-seated, metaphysical level: that of art and murder. This pins down the moment in which the expected erotic denouement capitulates against the liminal. The liminal economy grows in the prosthetic events or characters. For instance, Fryderyk becomes the extension of Witold, and from this non-space of in-betweenness further events unfurl: “Yes, that’s what Fryderyk must have been imagining – or this is what he imagines I was imagining –

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his profile was close to mine, and I didn’t know which one of us had initiated this” (119). Similar liminal relational configurations (e.g. Henia and Karol, Fryderyk and Amelia) iterate throughout the text. Prosthetic events, in the same way, are in operation to map out the non-places of liminality. When Henia fulfils Fryderyk’s whimsical wish to “roll up” Karol’s “pant legs” without much ado (44), which serves as “a forced entry into them” (45), the old artificer cajoles them into acting out a benign love scene in front of Henia’s fiancé Vaclav, with “their hands, high above their heads, intertwined ‘unintentionally’” (147). This theatrical ruse translating nature into art, triggered by the failure to have the couple fall for each other, induces Fryderyk to turn the tables and return art to the real. To achieve this, excited by his devious theatrical feats, Fryderyk goes somewhat further. Upon seeing Henia and Karol crush a worm jointly, Fryderyk is now to extend the project by having them commit another murder: “Vaclav is the worm! They have united on top of the worm. They will unite on top of Vaclav. By trampling Vaclav” (142). Fryderyk’s transgressive urges, which are reflected in his underhand designs, arise from the liminal overlapping of reality and art. This is resonant of Nietzsche’s conception of the world “as a selfgenerating work of art” (1924: 239). The philosopher finds parallels between the human will to power and artistic creation. Much like an artist who engineers his fictional world, a human being has always endeavoured to dominate the other by legitimising his/her own misguided version of the real. The repositioning of the limits between art and reality seems to authorise Fryderyk to spin out his transgressive artistic ambitions to the real. Fryderyk appears to have good reason to employ Henia and Karol in this liminal performance. After all, the method … for writing plays or screenplays ‘separate from the actor was ’totally obsolete’. One should begin with actors by ‘composing them together’… Because a play ‘should bring out only that which is already potentially inherent in the actors as living people who have their own range of possibilities (136).

The worm-crushing episode evinced itself as an unprompted act, or ‘possibility’ that inspired Fryderyk to write up his own darker sequel to the saga. Fryderyk’s manifesto resonates with Foucault’s positioning of the subject that “is linked to the existence of an operation that is both determined and present,” but whose position is “a vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals.” Of interest is hence “what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it” (1972: 96). On the word of Susan Broadhurst, Foucault’s positioning of the subject can inform the workings of “liminal performance, which precludes closure and resolution, thereby allowing several possibilities of subject positioning” (1999: 47). Fryderyk, as a director and manipulator, has it both ways: by slyly suggesting Henia and Karol for executing

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Siemian’s murder, Fryderyk “positions” his “subjects” who now occupy the “vacant place”, and assigns a function (“operation”) to them, which is in turn inspired by their own previous performance (worm-crushing). Crudely, their play-acting is liminal: both performative and stage-managed. This liminal effect would not be realised without its mastermind Fryderyk, a liminal figure himself, who having artfully concocted the unfolding events in painful detail now asserts rather startlingly: “I have no plan. I walk the line of tensions … the line of excitements” (140). Nevertheless, the earlier ‘love scene’ has already released its liminal potential. Having seen his fiancée with Karol, Vaclav is apparently unsettled. He finds it “somehow peculiar. One doesn’t do it like that! … Even if he had simply taken her right before my eyes. All that would have disconcerted me less than this strangeness … the strangeness of their movements” (163). His confusion may arguably stem from reasons most mundane: Karol and Henia are just bad actors, hardly capable of acting out a simple love scene. This, however, is to misread Gombrowicz’s symptomatic use of performative language. Characteristically, the rhetoric of alterity the passage is endowed with gestures towards the fissures in the construction of reality. It is neither the act itself nor its theatricality that evoke the peculiar sense of strangeness. What touches a raw nerve here is the collapsing art with reality and hence throwing into question their clean-cut borders. The fact that “one doesn’t do it like that” strikes at the foundations of received cultural assumptions about the world and its accepted order. As a result, Vaclav would rather see his fiancée “taken right before his eyes” by Karol, which would be at least explicable, if dissolute. Such a transgressive act, as defined in keeping with fixed moral laws, would not risk jettisoning the fixed limits of the real. The liminal transgression, on the other hand, inaugurates the space where reality is given to the abstraction of art; where, faced with the impossibility of establishing limits, the transgressor cannot be held liable for the misdemeanour. And this cannot be assimilated by Vaclav’s conservatively trained mind. Still, the intersecting of nature and art is hardly the sole engineer of the liminal staging of the erotic in the novel. Evacuated of personality, Henia and Karol seem to be disposable subjects, defined by their narrative function rather than their singularity. This, however, is the rendering of the unreliable narrator. Indeed, more often than not the erotic language materialises in the garbled narratorial account as opposed to the characters’ first-hand involvement: “Well and good … But … This could not be. There was an artificiality about it, something disturbing, something perverse” (135). Again, understatement, punctuation, and vocabularies of alterity mark the advent of the narrator’s unwarranted erotic vignettes. Elsewhere, eroticised language is used to recuperate the narrator, some-

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how counter-intuitively, who projects the perverse upon his subjects: “And then, even though I had not yet understood anything, the chill of lasciviousness blew from them. Depravity” (135). Reluctant to come to terms with the couple’s indifference to each other, whose “young freshness was terribly cold” (135), Witold is desperate to track down even the slightest minutiae testifying to their imputed lust. Such a trifle as their (inadvertent?) simultaneous playing with a fork suffices to give the narrator food for thought. In spite of everything, this trifle was actually giving them permission for a prank, oh so light, so lightweight, so microscopic that (the girl) cold be submitting to it with (the boy) while not violating her virtue with regard to her fiancé – indeed, it was totally imperceptible… And wasn’t it this very lightness that was tempting them… (183-184).

Curiously, the liminal effect operates twofold at this juncture. Language seeks to divulge an erotic tension where there is none or little at best; but in doing so the language is purposefully toned down to achieve the opposite powerful effect: the more Gombrowicz plays around his subtle rhetoric, the more forcefully it gestures towards eroticism. Hence, the visible reduction of epithets – from “light”, to “lightweight”, to “microscopic”, down to “imperceptible” – inevitably funnels down to its erotic apogee (“tempting”). Again, such liminal rhetoric, where the transgressive is articulated via a form antithetical to itself, serves to complicate erotic explicitness. And there is peculiar logic to it: “We must stick to our purpose even if it does look like lascivious swinishness. The swinishness will cease to be swinishness if we stick to it! … There is no retreat” (161). It appears that transgressive venture cannot be revoked. The return to order and purity calls for a systematic move forward when faced with the futility of recuperating lost limits. Once transgressed, the limit must be re-established to fend off transgression. Therefore, this marks the impossibility of the return of the limit to its original self, as well as reveals the paradoxical quality of transgression, which ceases to be itself the moment it transgresses. Accordingly, the systematic erotic impulse of Pornografia to exhaust itself transpires by a constant remapping of its limits. The ultimate exhaustion of limits, via their incessant reconfiguration, and transgression, that turns on itself, points to the ways in which the text can foreground its underlying liminal tensions, which affirm the becoming of the text.79 If a liminal aesthetic emerges from the indeterminacy of the obscene, the incorporation of chthonic Gothic elements further complicates the erotic articulations. As rightly claimed by Patricia Merivale, Pornografia parodies the Gothic to underscore the metafictional construction of the novel (1978: 1001). The Gothic rhetoric underlying the erotic edifice intensifies the aura of the obscene. 79 Similarly, Witold voices his diatribe against finality: “I was left alone, disappointed, as is always the case when something comes to fulfilment – because fulfilment is always murky, insufficiently clear, devoid of the greatness and purity of the undertaking” (149).

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Informed by the empty form of the Gothic, the perverse, as argued above, also operates at the level of form alone. Hence, if Gothic is contingent on parody, eroticism is used to the same effect. The Gothic sense that underlies the narrative formation is set in tone right from the novel’s outset. On his way to Brzustowa, Witold is suddenly struck by the deep-seated otherness of the coachman: “I preferred not to look anyone in the face … because I suddenly realized that this something sitting next to me is radical in its silence, radical to the point of frenzy!” (9). This apprehension of the other’s impermeable alterity is pivotal in its enactment of a Gothic rhetoric that informs the novel’s narrative construction and its ethical undercurrents. The sociophobic testimony is not, however, a gesture of refusal to respond ethically to the other, but rather acts as a marker of an existential angst resulting from such an encounter. It is granted that the encounter with the other makes ethical demands on the so far unimpeded self; Witold’s affirmation of the radical alterity of the other in an everyday encounter unsettles established cultural assumptions presupposing comfortable familiarity with ‘immediate’ others. The narrator’s voicing of existential anxiety is a prelude to an intersecting of the gothic and the perverse; from this time forth the existential anguish – his distancing from others – predisposes the narrator, motivated by repressed sexual desires, to be a voyeur of the unfolding perverse designs. The linking of these themes manifests itself in the erotic vampirism of Witold and Fryderyk as they extort the youthful innocence of the young: “They were, in their virtue, closed off from us, hermetic. But in sin, they could roll about with us…” (78). Ethical transgression functions as a prerequisite to licentious ends. As suggested by the religious reference to sin, the sacred-profane dialectic is a foil for the unfolding of sadoerotic tensions. The subversion of this dialectic is exemplified in a scene where Madame Amelia, the Catholic paragon of virtue, “flings herself” with a knife on top of a farmhand, Skuziak, mutilating the boy. If Skuziak, “a wild predatory, blond youth” (104), stands for crude brutality in the symbolic order, and Amelia for innocence and sanctity, this dichotomy is ironically reversed by her transgressive act. Spotted by Witold, Skuziak, the “grimy little god”, is found lying on the floor “acting out his surly seductions” (104). Again, Witold sets forth an idiosyncratic account reverberating with sadoerotic and paedophilic undertones. The irruption of the perverse characteristically undercuts the transgressive act that up to now has served as a reversal of the sacred and profane in a dialectic fashion. Again, the unreliable narrator projects his slanted debauched fancies upon the affair, and in doing so complicates the otherwise coherent course of events. The fusion of the diabolical and erotic constituents arranges itself in a logically ordered whole given the narrative denouement in which the murder plan –

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larded with over-intricate particulars - is fulfilled to the last detail. This may testify to the inherent structural logic underlying the novel. In this vein, Berressem argues that Pornografia could be read within “chemical parameters”, describing “the gradual assembly of a complicated of experimental apparatus”, in which events are organised by the principle of chemical composition (1998: 156). This could be the case – backed by Berressem’s impressively lucid and rigorous reasoning - but it overlooks the novel’s liminal energy. The characteristic union of characters does not so much construct a stable narrative edifice, but instead foregrounds acts that border on transgression by its perpetual deferral. If the act of crushing a worm is classed as an exemplar of transgression, the planning of Siemian’s murder not only loses momentum in ethical terms but also rather haphazardly moves towards pornography: To be able to involve Karol in this… and thanks to that the intended death heated up at once and flared up, not only due to Karol but also to Henia, their hands, legs – and the planned corpse suddenly bloomed with the forbidden, boy-girl, awkward, coarse sensuality (193).

Symptomatically, the language at work here unsettles conventional moral standards. The would-be victim extended on the altar of ‘sensuality’ loses its intended transgressive quality, as it is anesthetised by transgression of a different sort. Transgression is hence never organic, but subject to a constant reshuffling and questioning of its own limits, and contingent on shifting contexts. Doing justice to the Berressem’s “chemical parameters” theory, the ambition with which elements, characters, events and themes intersect following their rigorous structural logic is undeniable. Such a reading, however, is tangential, if not detrimental, to understanding the novel’s staging of transgression and its limits as a forever unsettled, ethically or otherwise, dynamic. Structurally coherent, Pornografia would have to answer the questions it poses with certainty and become final, which it clearly refuses to do. What it does offer though, is a language that operates away from the structural rigour of events and categorical paradigms; by doing this, it implodes intricately woven narrative construction in order to foreground the shifting nature of its own limits.

4.3.2. Transgressive translation As argued, Pornografia depends on the fissures that undo its narrative construction. Such liminal textual non-places seek to belie the structural closure of the novel, which in Pornografia are activated by: 1) the overlapping of art and reality, 2) the foregrounding of the perverse by employing Gothic rhetoric,

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3) prosthetic events employed to problematise or transgress accepted cultural or ethical limits, 4) the impossibility of restoring the transgressed limits to their original form, 5) the relativization of cultural, ethical or textual limits that complicate the act of transgression. This navigates us to parallel practices governing language in translation that is itself undercut by liminality as its organising principle. Essentially, language draws on the metaphysics of translation as its inherent multiplicity activates processes that organize translation. Gombrowicz, as has been explicated at length, implodes transgression that becomes the other of what it overtly manifests to be and it finds itself in what counter-intuitively defers transgression. In a like manner, although language might appear to demarcate its own ‘native’ and standardized borders by marking its identity away from a foreign language, it still heavily depends upon translation for its existence. Should one accept, after Gombrowicz and Derrida, that the attempt to establish firm limits is always but an unviable venture rendering transgression problematic, the inherent complexity of language impedes ‘painless’ translation likewise. Since the process of translation starts always-already in a mother language, the project of clean-cut interlinguistic translation, much like transgression against its unstable limit, cannot be wholly fulfilled. With no language completely native, and no limit neatly drawn, both translation and transgression are answerable to the impossible double-bind of the liminal. This is not, however, to assert an ultimate equivocation of limits. Without standardisation, or a responsible attempt to demarcate a limit, there would be not only no identity, but no difference either. If identity depends on the difference it pushes to its outside, difference must depend on identity and the limit upon its existence in equal measure. Gombrowicz’s narrative liminal non-places rely upon his characteristic style, recurring tropes, and the rigorous – be it antithetical – thought underlying his prose. It is against those systematic articulations that blind-spots of alterity can be defined. Coming back to language in broad terms, limits fossilise through their reiteration, assuming a sort of transcendental presence. At this point, the integral modality of the limit is jettisoned in favour of this transcendental stability. After all, language can be classed as language if it subjects itself to systematic mutability, as only vibrant, fluctuating languages can survive by adapting to cultural transformations. Transgression of the established linguistic limits, in its counterintuitive gesture, is at service to assert them. If the affirmation of the transgression-limit interdependence seems to alleviate a quandary, Gombrowicz’s language, as posited above, demonstrates that a return to the transgressed limit borders on the impossible. If this be workable, if the

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transgressed limit cannot return to itself other than as its own other, then limits do not exist except in perpetual flux, and, by the same token, transgression ceases to transgress. This impossibility of establishing limits is precisely what complicates translation. If wholly translatable, there would be no languages conceived as plural, hence no translation to call for; if totally untranslatable, languages would evince no traces of internal standardisation, which is also far from the case. Hence, the question of translation is less one of quantity or quality and more of limit and liminality. Liminality indicates that such qualitative or quantitative measures count for nothing if confronted with inter and intra linguistic indeterminacy. But liminality, like Gombrowicz’s fiction, refuses to answer questions, and only selfreflexively points to indeterminacy or antinomy as constitutive of what cannot be wholly constituted. In turn, liminality is the nature of translation. After the in-depth textual analysis of the translations of Trans-Atlantyk, Cosmos, and Pornografia, the next part will set out to revisit Gombrowicz’s oeuvre in Polish with the purpose of interrogating whether the interpretation of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre in English brings about a revision in the conceptualisation of his tropes. This is to test the ways in which the text undergoes interpretative alterations in the full hermeneutic circle of translation, wherein the original text goes beyond its confines as a translated text, so as to revisit itself as its own other. For the purposes in question, poststructuralist hermeneutics will be employed as the primary methodology that underpins the textual analysis.

4.4. After translation Gadamer, in his reading of Heidegger, regards the latter’s conceptualisation of a hermeneutic circle, hitherto expanded upon by Schleiermacher, as a defining moment of hermeneutic philosophy. Taking Schleiermacher’s point a step further, aware that the understanding of a text is contingent on its ‘total context’, Heidegger now underscores an essentially existential property of tradition, in which the interpreter’s understanding is “the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter” (1975: 293). As in traditional assumptions, if interpretation is to turn full circle, a part must be understood in reference to the whole, as much as the total whole cannot be fully comprehended unless seen from the micro angle of a single part. This time, however, the reciprocity of the circle of understanding refuses to totalise itself; the shifting context calls for an incessant re-evaluation of any provisionally asserted knowledge. As further postulated by Gadamer:

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Unlike his predecessors, Gadamer is adamant that the hermeneutic circle not be conceived of as a ‘method’ but rather a process that lends itself to the everprotean moment of the tradition of the interpreter. In defiance of Heidegger’s alleged claim that tradition can be reduced to the interpreter’s foreknowledge that is determined permanently, for Gadamer tradition is rather the procession of the unstable experiential acts of the individual, which require of the interpreter a singular and always provisional response. Understanding is thus an existential iterative practice; it is a trajectory via which reality can only be comprehended if approximated from the slant of a single element of existence. At this point, Gadamer comes close to recalling Derrida. The latter divulges that itera-bility, just as is Gadamer’s unstable ‘moment of tradition’, is a fundamental condition of the text in terms of the reciprocal relation it has to its context. Iterable at its roots, a single sign or text, extirpated from its maternal context, refuses to generate the same meanings in a different interpretative milieu. Since the reader cannot think beyond the moment of their tradition, the recontextualised, reiterated text means as much as the interpreter, furnished with his/ her singular, historically mediated knowledge. The moment of inscription of text into another milieu is thus also the moment of re-interpretation, wherein the text, deprived of a stable origin cannot but keep reiterating itself perpetually into yet new contexts to come and, as a result, translate itself into other meanings. This lack of an observable origin is a common denominator of Heidegger’s, Derrida’s and Gadamer’s theories. Heidegger’s suggestion of a reciprocal relationship between text and its context (wherein one cannot be conceived away from the other), Gadamer’s shifting moment of tradition as interpretative optics, and Derrida’s text as the non-milieu of difference, all question the metaphysics of origin and highlight its elusiveness. Seen this way, the text cannot be conceived of as a self-sufficient identity, given that it cannot break its ties with what it is different from or related to, be it context, another text or the reader (or all taken together). Drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutic model that defies tradition as a ‘permanent precondition’, the text that is uprooted from its historical ground cannot now be recontextualised without semantic surfeit and loss; where, in the eye of the interpreter, the re-read text returns to itself as its own other. Needless to say, this calls to mind the condition of translation par excellence, wherein the source text doubles itself up as a translation. Seen in this fashion, however, the understanding of text has not yet turned full circle. The transition from the source to

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translation marks the disseminative gesture from which the text promises to multiply itself endlessly. Here, translation doubles the mechanisms of becoming that can do little else than proceed, transform, or reshape it. After all, a literary text can iterate endlessly across languages in miscellaneous translations, as well as translations of translations. At this point, aside from the reassertion of the endless accumulation of significations always to come, the disseminative project can tell us no more. Paradoxically, at this stage, the interpreter, having experienced the perpetual deluge of significations generated by translation, must now turn back to the source text in order to be able to identify ‘difference’. Prior to reading, the reader naturally develops what Gadamer terms ‘foreconception of completeness of text’ (1975: 294). It is only when this assumption is challenged that, at the moment in which the text exposes the fissures of its totality, interpretative suspicion may embark on compensating for the infelicities of the deficient text. Translation happens to lend itself as a mechanism to fill in the lacunae. As George Steiner puts it: Where it surpasses the original, the real translation infers that the source-text possesses potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself…. Where it falls short of the original, the authentic translation makes the autonomous virtues of the original more precisely visible (2000: 190).

Translation is not only to transform the original text by modifying its linguistic structure: this would lead to the assumption that a translation, once completed, has nothing whatsoever in common with its source. Having been translated, it is not merely a translation that becomes a new text, essentially different from its authoritative source text, but the source text itself now measured up against its own translation suggests hitherto unaccounted ‘potentialities’ and losses. After translation, the source text can learn something about itself. If the ‘original’ can self-reflexively return to itself as its own other, does Gombrowicz’s oeuvre in Polish, in the eyes of the interpreter, inflate itself with new meanings in the act of re-reading? As tested and corroborated in chapter 4, two somehow conflicting theses eventuate from the textual analysis of the English translation of Trans-Atlantyk. Linguistic infidelities and infelicities of the translation, resulting from overstylised English quasi-idioms (as observed by Jarniewicz), make it an unreadable caricature of the original (as per Bayley). Despite this distance, however, French and Karsov manage to recuperate the philosophical undercurrents approximating the process of the becoming of the text. The foreignising approach towards Gombrowicz’s idiolect adopted by the translators is modelled on Gombrowicz’s own project of exoticising the Polish language in the original. As regards the latter, the scrutiny of the translation inspires the rereading of the original. After all, decisive here is not that a translation differs markedly from the source text

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by releasing the surplus or deficient material that disturbs the reliable transmission of philosophical communiqué, but rather the act of translation on its own merit, which helps extricate the intentional designs of the writer from the text, otherwise concealed under the dense thicket of the ‘original’. The philosophy of translation, by associating it with the problematics of exile, makes Gombrowicz’s reader aware that the writer’s linguistic experiment bears an indelible imprint of his existential acts of experiencing the world. What in the eye of the Polish reader might have hitherto presented itself as an archaic, anti-Polish statement, now burgeons with new significations. The employment of experimental, twisted or bogus linguistic elements by Gombrowicz, resulting from the writer’s trauma of exile, suggests that the deficiencies of the translation have already taken place in the original text. Paradoxically, the errors project the textual heterogeneity of the novel’s language. If the Polish Trans-Atlantyk is stylistically heterogeneous, and Polish scholars almost unanimously claim just this, translation dramatises this heterogeneity more prominently. Having read the translation, the reader becomes conversant with those textual values that have by no means emerged in translation, but rather have already been lying dormant in the original. Those facets, hitherto concealed from the reader, would not have been rekindled without the intervention of translation as a metaphor for becoming; one that precipitates difference as the structure of being. What has previously appeared as archaic is now the revision of this archaism in its encounter with the experience of its author. Translation gives away that Gombrowicz is a bad translator of the gawęda genre, which, however, is not a product of the writer’s incompetence, but rather a genuine, arguably calculated revision of reality. Such revision of the original text can come to fruition in no other way than in its absence from itself. The text, then, goes beyond itself, not only by lending itself to a different form by undergoing the metamorphosis of translation in the translator’s workshop, but also by projecting itself upon the author’s and the reader’s historical horizons.80 Only if it is offset against what it is absent from can the text return to itself full circle, and so its cycles never cease. Aside from their faults, the examined translations accentuate their revisionist venture by releasing the remainders that paradoxically distort the original in order to attempt to restore it. This is palpable in those places where, as demonstrated in the analysis of Borchard’s rendering of Kosmos, the translation 80 This stance would most probably be challenged by New Critics, who in their radical close reading project reject that extratextual references have any bearing on understanding the text’s meaning. The text immune to the signals that gear towards the text from the outside, pretends that such aspects as politics, gender, race, class, ethics and reader’s response and historical horizon should not be legitimated as constitutive of the text’s meaning.

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outdoes the original in terms of delivering those facets which serve to recuperate Gombrowicz’s systematic philosophical and stylistic desiderata in language. The linguistic manoeuvres in Borchardt’s translation are applied to foreground sexuality (with which the tissue of the original text is soaked) even in those places, where such elements are absent from, or not immediately discernible in, the original text. The remainder might be deemed detrimental to the quality of translation; it after all releases negative material generating meanings enfolding away from the source, unsanctioned by its author. Alternatively, the places of surfeit draw attention to the blind spots of text patched up by translation, which now assures the continuity of Gombrowicz’s own philosophical tenets absent from the original. As such, translation as revision is by the same token translation as a defibrillator resuscitating the otherwise vacant or silent possibilities of text. The inherent polylogic of Gombrowicz’s discourse must dictate the polylogic of translation as a process that necessitates semantic disturbances and inaccuracies, which are not fallacies but rather emerge as natural corollaries of the translator’s encounter with textualterity. The translation of Pornografia in its turn offers an alternative revisionist project. The text serves to remind that translation is always-already a liminal business, and the full transgression of limits of languages can never be fulfilled given the impossibility of the institution of such limits. Therefore, Pornografia does not return to itself after translation; its tropes and rhetoric, foregrounding liminality via articulations of gothicism and perversion, demonstrate that such a return is implausible since the limits of language have not been transgressed in the first place; to speak of languages in plural one must simultaneously accept the impossibility of sanctifying such plurality that is given to a liminal implosion of limits. After translation Pornografia utters the paradoxical statement that there has never been a trans-, across or after, but that no language can ever conceive of itself as language without such transgressive gestures. As tellingly put by Deleuze and Guattari: “What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is create concepts for problems that necessarily change?” (1994: 28). Seen from this slant, the translator’s task is no longer to imitate the artist, but reconcile him/herself to the fact that the vicissitudes of language and shifting historical contexts will never let him/her translate faithfully. To translate the writing process, “to do what” the artist “did”, is to create and to lay oneself bare to an “inventive singularity [that] provokes translation … as a creative response, rather than a mechanical rewording” (Attridge 2004: 74-75). The translator’s performativity, aside from the above adumbrated renditions of Trans-Atlantyk and Cosmos, appears to have governed the 2000 translation of Ferdydurke (by Borchardt once more). Here, however, linguistic aberrations im-

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pinging on the philosophical flesh of the original are not, as before, the result of surplus material written into the translation, but its lack; or rather the very surplus being released through a lack. Gombrowicz’s coinage of pupa, as an epitome of manipulation by the higher authorities, remains the writer’s existential master trope, which the translator decides to leave untranslated. As postulated elsewhere, Borchardt’s zero-translation of the trope has a bearing on the continuity of Gombrowicz’s philosophical project, the upshot of which is twofold. Gombrowicz’s economy of body parts (usually extended to embody philosophical concepts) aspires to constitute a self-sufficient philosophical paradigm. For example, the word ‘pupa’ used as a borrowing, which in the original is used in its literal and figurative meaning, by failing to carry the same connotations in English, might thwart the deep-laid symbolic consistency of body parts that is now inaccessible to the English reader. On the other hand, since the nontranslated word ‘pupa’ denotes in English simultaneously the insect in the postlarval and pre-adult stage, the crosslinguistic common denominators serve to recuperate the metaphoric energy of this word-aphorism. Besides, since this zero-translation brings with it a collagist effect, recalling the experimental tenet of fragmentation, Borchardt’s silence endows the source with surplus significations to a degree at odds with Gombrowicz’s intentional programme, but, hermeneutically, surely on a par with the modernist project contemporary to the writer (Wojtas 2010: 44). The text, when offset against divergent interpretative perspectives, inflates itself with supplementary meanings. The Polish reader, who aligns the reading of the text not only with the familiar but also the foreign socio-political perspective, appreciates that in translation (be it zero-translation) ‘gęba’, (mug) ‘pupa’ and ‘forma’ (form) resonate with meanings hitherto hidden from them; not only as regards language comprehension (although the semantic surplus is important) but as hermeneutically contextualised semi-aphorisms that work extratextually. If for the Polish post-war reader the tropes standing for the mechanisms of oppression or control highlight the Communist regime, the Anglo-American interpreter will read alternative forms of coercion (consumerist simulacrum) into them. It is only after the reader re-navigates her/his way to the original text that s/he can find the apparatus of form, one of Gombrowicz’s key concerns, at work. Gombrowicz’s form does not totalise itself but rather escapes its own confines by eschewing any encapsulation into a single complacent meaning. It is hence in translation that Gombrowicz’s trope of form extends itself beyond the Polish cause towards other contexts. At this point, translation (not only linguistic but also hermeneutic) serves as metaphor for Gombrowicz’s existential programme that urges the individual to incessantly break away from form.

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To complacently stipulate, nevertheless, that Gombrowicz’s text undergoes revision of itself in translation is to suggest that such reconsiderations are definite and require no contextualisation. If the translatability of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre means that his texts can never exist as immanent beings operating away from the reader’s consciousness, the revision cannot be approached outside of its own hermeneutic moment. Such was one of the cardinal sins of Sartre’s existentialism, who offered an unworldly or “decontextualised” silhouette of man’s existential condition (Sherman 2009: 276). For all its novelty, Sartre’s groundbreaking project was many a time lambasted for addressing man as a space-less and time-less creature. To read Gombrowicz’s text from my singular historical perspective, distanced from both the writer’s own historical moment and postmodernity (if one consents that the 21 st century has developed a safe historical and critical distance from postmodernism) is to submit it to a new intellectual tradition. W.J.L. Mitchell can surely be forgiven for claiming that the 20 th century is “the golden age of criticism” (1987: 16). Institutionalised, largely fixed in academia, literary theory incorporated manifold critical voices that expanded the methods and disciplines from which to pursue the close-reading of a literary text (e.g. feminism, queer, or post-colonialism). These eclectic sensibilities leave 21st century criticism with an expected legacy, where the interdisciplinary nature of university education (and university-bound literary criticism for that matter) emerges as a natural corollary. This, however, does not entail the repudiation of the canon (in fact canonical literary texts animate heated critical debates today), but rather the slants via which the canon is now approached. Energised by the emergent political and ethical sensibilities (as a turn from destructive postmodern arbitrariness and the total loss of meaning), such critical anamorphosis now treats individual existence as inherently embedded in a given context. This far-reaching contextualisation has it that ecocriticism situates a human being in the total context of environment, who, by an awareness of the limitations of natural resources, can no longer take it for granted. Cultural and media studies in turn serve to reroute the canonical line of flight towards non-elitist artistic forms. The detour from elitism is also apparent in the emergent phenomenon labelled intellectual history. With multiple contexts at play (social, historical, political), intellectual history is committed to unearthing the untold stories of the past, which are central to understanding the history of ideas. Here, the vital point is that accumulated human knowledge cannot be extricated from the human being as the producer of ideas. Hence, the umbrella of post-postmodern sensibilities covers the vast micro-macro spectrum of man and his position in the world. Comfortably ushered in democracy, by rehabilitating the popular, the marginal, the foreign, and the other, the contemporary world now sets out to

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bring to light those historical facts that depart from elitist optics to an egalitarian perspective. If the 20th century was successful in instilling its subversive policy of the reversal of old values, the contemporary world now uses it as a product. While for the moderns the banner of reversal fluttered under the auspices of revolution, with the war now won our contemporaries live, breathe and exude the new revisionist manifesto. It is in this sense that the contemporary condition is one of translation, wherein the individual consciousness (and that of literature and philosophy for that matter) is encyclopaedic: it positions itself against all possible cultural milieux – political, religious, and sexual, to name but a few. The incessant renegotiation of man in relation to various contexts, as well as contexts against the contemporary condition of man, sets in motion the mechanism of circular reasoning in which history amalgamates the old and new for the very reason that it is seen through the prism of the new. The New Historicist sensitivity towards minor histories, manifest in the repudiation of the misguided and collective cultural assumptions of the Western epistemology, may constitute a token action towards retelling the ‘truer’ history; but because such an approach is inspired by the up-to-the-minute interest in cultural others, this truer history is a distorted mirror image of the present. History, like Gombrowicz’s tropes and characters, makes a double gesture; an impossible liminal movement of backward progression, referred to by Berressem as “belated temporality”, in keeping with which “Gombrowicz’s politics are never fully those of infantile pleasure principle nor those of the mature reality principle” (1998: 185-186). This inaugurates a vicious existential circle, in which one cannot live except in movement. Immature maturity (Ferdydurke), Fatherland as ‘Sonland’ (Transatlatyk), micro- as macrocosm (Cosmos), reality as dream (The Marriage), art as life (Pornografia), all activate liquid circular reasoning in which spatial or temporal progression forward always loops back to renegotiate itself. Seen as such, Gombrowicz’s tropes are essentially revisionist, in that they extend the liminal spatio-temporal milieux (backward – forward, inward – outward) that emerge as a result of the incessant interlacing of the dichotomies they are written into. After (post)modernism, after translation, Gombrowicz is still sitting and writing his unfinished oeuvre; the same oeuvre, the same Cosmos, Ferdydurke and Baccacay; it is just the curious voyeur greedily peeping at the author at work who has changed. Little does this new innocent reader know about Gombrowicz’s solipsistic invasive interpretations of his own work that are forced upon the reader and critic (in this context Jarzębski ironically calls Gombrowicz “the leading Gombrowicz Studies reader”, 2010: 5). The new Gombrowicz reader “will construct out of the work the double, ‘the other’ author” called for

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simplicity’s sake, ‘Witold Gombrowicz’” (Berressem 1998: 287), who is himself in nothing but name. After translation, Gombrowicz is still heard, and listened to, still contentious, invariably immature in his maturity, strangely familiar in his strangeness, never more ferocious in his pouncing on form. According to Stala, however, Gombrowicz approaching the millennium, although still badly needed for his programme of confronting various forms of coercion, is of no use as a guide to “a world of order, value, myth”, for which a postmodern individual yearns (1999: 217). One way or the other, the age of translation and revision calls for the adequate diagnosis of its own condition, to which Gombrowicz’s text, for all its waywardness, has an answer hidden in the self-reflexive processuality of the text that is approximating this very order. After translation Gombrowicz – never mind the linguistic surplus or performativity of translators elaborated on above – is no longer himself given that he is ‘borrowed’ for entirely other purposes incidental to the ever-changing historical horizon from which the reader/translator approaches his/her text. However, the timeless existential anxiety provoked by Gombrowicz’s text does not get buried in the opacity of translation. In the becoming of Gombrowicz’s text it dramatises its own condition, which is also the existential condition of wo/man as différance, translation, liminality, and liquidity: the pre-requisites of being in the world. This proposal never rings truer than after translation.

Conclusions The present study commenced with surveying the state of current research in Polish Gombrowicz Studies with the intention of probing the critical standpoints that explore the writer’s oeuvre from an existentialist angle. The consolidated conclusions aiming at filling in the conceptual gaps in Polish criticism were subsequently juxtaposed with the parallel critical reception of Gombrowicz in the Anglo-American context. The comparative approach proved particularly vital for my work bearing in mind that the line of argumentation drew largely on poststructuralist hermeneutics informed by the assumption that the meaning of the text is defined by what the reader brings to the interpretative table. Namely, a hermeneutic study of the text dissects the textual fabric according to the reader’s experience, their cultural and historical background and assumptions. Having aligned Gombrowicz’s text with a foreign hermeneutic perspective, I sought to examine in what ways Gombrowicz’s rhetoric, suffused with blind spots of otherness, inspired alternative interpretations of his fiction. The failure of the Anglo-American readership to assimilate Gombrowicz could be attributed to their relative indifference to Existentialism; which, although dominant in post-war Continental Europe, had a limited impact across the Atlantic and the Channel. In other words, if the Gombrowicz who conquered Europe was the one classed as a philosopher who augmented, or perhaps even pioneered, existentialism, British and American readers would sooner appreciate him as a playwright. The proposed conclusion calls for the interpretation of Gombrowicz as both a philosopher and writer, or rather as one beyond such disciplinary classification. The theoretical backbone depolarising the above competing hermeneutic camps was translation, appreciated as both concept and textual practice. The current state of the arts in Gombrowicz Translation Studies was compiled with the purpose of examining the reception of Gombrowicz’s language and philosophy by both translators and the critics of translations. Whereas critics almost unanimously detected an underlying philosophical consistency in translations, views tended to vary as to its potential given the language itself. Taking into account differences in standpoints between English-speaking and bilingual critics of the translations, and considering the philosophical and linguistic complexity of Gombrowicz’s works, chapter 4 tested consolidated assumptions concerning the intralinguistic philosophical weight of the chosen translations. In order to posit whether translation as a practice, as well as translations as texts, impinge on the interpretation of Gombrowicz’s singular account of existentialism (as opposed to existentialism as a fixed philosophical doctrine), it was imperative to implement poststructuralist conceptual tools when confronting tex-

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tual alterity. The starting point upon which the theoretical framework, adumbrated in chapter 2, was constructed was the deconstructionist practice of textual interpretation in terms, particularly, of translation. This approach allowed for tentative theoretical assumptions pertaining to the conceptualisation of translation to be suggested. The latter was conceived not only as a sort of text, but essentially as a reading practice informing the trajectory of textual production in general terms. The chief thesis animating the disquisition was that translation is a process underlying interpretation and approximating also extratextual existential orders. This stance naturally runs counter to conventionalist methodologies assuming that translation (as process) is preceded by interpretation, and a translation (as text) is granted a secondary position in relation to the original text. Renouncing all metaphysical assumptions promulgated by Western epistemology (e.g. hierarchisation, prioritisation, centrality, limit and presence) the original text, cut off from accepted cultural references, proves no longer original, but merely a text that participates in the endless intertextual procession. As the total of anterior texts to which it is indebted, the text cannot exist in isolation. As such, it exists only in translation in that its meanings are fluid – always contingent on the intertextual interplay of existing texts and texts to come. This process is informed by the practice of différance via which the original text cannot claim its originality, given that its meanings are ever-deferred and stable identity denied. Translated into an existential matrix, différance lends itself as a precondition of being in the world, wherein an individual can no longer fall back on a metaphysical notion of identity, but his/her existence is contingent on, and always reformulated by, becoming – paired up with translation. Informed and complemented by Gombrowicz’s existential tropes of form, cosmos, immaturity, as well as (implicitly) otherness and exile, these hypotheses were examined in a close reading of the writer’s texts. Gombrowicz’s philosophy was placed in between the quasi-logic of Derridean différance and hermeneutical textual practice. Such juxtaposition seeks not only to reflect Gombrowicz’s own existential project but also helps approximate the condition of translation. Hence, on the one hand translation pairs itself up with the radical disseminative liquidity of différance in its inability to ever establish fixed meanings (the translator’s choices are illimitable and to a degree arbitrary). On the other hand, since hermeneutics presupposes a meaning (out of the illimitable possibilities of text), its version of translation leads to less radical and more essentialist assumptions on translation. After all, although confronted with the indeterminacy of text, the translator’s acts of participation involve choice as an arbitrator (however reliable) of meaning. At this point, Gombrowicz’s existentialism approximates the condition of translation and as such

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appears to reconcile the competing theoretical camps. Since Gombrowicz’s ethical imperative urging an individual to never cease to defer form seems deconstructionist in nature, his foregrounding of the acts of existential participation (as in Trans-Atlantyk and Cosmos) in one’s existence naturally resists radically disseminative gestures. Gombrowicz’s existentialism, then, much like translation, occupies a liminal position between radical indeterminacy and essentialism (reflected in the tropes of cosmos and form, respectively). If, probed from the conceptual slant of différance, the ‘original text’ is different from itself because it is indebted to intertextual dissemination, and hence can claim no origin given that its origin is difference, the original merely simulates its originality. For this reason, aligning with Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, the original text does not exist since a translation of the source text generates a new textual reality that is substituted for the original. Extending this argument into a hermeneutic reading, if the original exists nowhere else than in the act of reading, the interpreter’s understanding supplants the textual reality guaranteed by the intentional project of its author. As such, the reader’s conscious acts of interpretation fashion a new, more pertinent and meaningful economy of the text. Contingent on the reader’s consciousness, the text becomes its own simulacrum; it doubles up as the other of itself, and hence, paradoxically, turns into its own translation. In this sense, it is not only translation that simulates the original text, but the original is itself always-already governed by the machine of self-simulation. This allows for an alignment with Derrida’s notion of the supplement. As simulacrum, a translation turns out to be a dangerous supplement in relation to the source-text, on account of the fact that it supplies the text to eventually displace it from its central position, hitherto secured by the hierarchically-minded Western metaphysics. With the theoretical framework adumbrated, the consolidated conclusions from chapters 1 and 2 made way for the central thesis statement. Namely, Gombrowicz’s peculiar account of systematic existential thought is conceptualised manifold, depending on a specific ‘moment of tradition’. Gombrowicz’s text of existence evokes an interpretative sense of liminality between language and being. Governed by différance, Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive fiction lends itself as a template for an existential (textual and extratextual) order, which accelerates the infinite chain of significations brought about by both the indeterminacy embedded in text as well as by the interpreter’s historical moment of tradition and existential acts of participation. In chapter 3, I principally sought to demonstrate the ways in which textual indeterminacy and the nebulous notion of the other underpin Gombrowicz’s text of existence. In its manifold conceptualisations, otherness occupies indeterminate (spectral, liminal, heterotopic) (non)positions, which illustrate how a self-

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conscious language overrides description to tell the story of its own heterogeneity and creation. This heterogeneity, however, can be brought to light in no other way than in the act of reading, whereby the reader confronted with the text is forced to question the margins that generate the sense of otherness he or she encounters, and takes those limits as the focal points of interpretation. Otherness in Gombrowicz’s fiction (like his own philosophy of existence) eschews absolutism, since radical alterity – in its dialogic reversal – would render meanings as homogenous as the obsequious dependence on familiar forms. Gombrowicz seems to balance between totalising form and radical indeterminacy, and remains vigilant not to subscribe to either. This is reflected in the paradox of language. On the one hand, language that seeks to represent an individual must come to terms with its own limitations and failure of encapsulating the very object. This insufficiency of language unfolds in the liminal space between language and existence at the moment in which language capitulates against the liquidity of existence, thwarting the possibilities of pure translation. On the other hand, language by which the entrapment in form is communicated, circumvents closure by refusing to totalise itself in a single form given its polysemy. Gombrowicz does not offer an antidote to the indeterminacy. Instead of overtly elucidating existential dilemmas, he veers off at the moment of discursive explanation, inflating while reducing the text to a demonstration of heterogeneity in the linguistic material. Not only does Gombrowicz fail to delineate any clean-cut limits between language and existence, but he also has the limit disrupt the totalities of both systems. Liminal in-betweenness becomes a point of departure for the incessant production of new forms that collapse at the moment of creation (at this point Gombrowicz’s philosophy of form sails close to Derridean concept of différance). The problematic liminality between language and being is concealed in the metafictionality of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre and the quasi-logic of Gombrowicz’s fiction is anchored in the textual architecture. Conflicting forces of language as the structure and liquidity of existence produce an indeterminacy that is symptomatic of the non-dialectic qualities of the self-reflexive text. If the self-aware text conveys the story of its own creation, the contradictory energies within the homology between language and being cannot be conceived of as binary oppositions. The text is inscribed in the pan-textuality of the world wherein the physical or otherwise borders, between the book as artefact and the text as being-in-itself, as well as between language and existence, liquidify in the act of reading. With this in mind, the self-reflexivity of Gombrowicz’s text triggers the existential experience developing in the act of reading given the unfeasibility of fixing meaning in semantic structures.

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The reader confronted with this conflicting synergy occupies a peculiar position. On the one hand, s/he is positioned against the text in a dual relation to it; on the other hand, since reading emerges nowhere outside the conscious mind, s/he is at one with the text. Hence, reading as an act extended between the text and life must compromise the intertextuality and heterogeneity inherent in text and the reader’s synthesising ambition towards unravelling stable meanings that is predicated on his existential choice. Such an interpretative dilemma (between a complacent assertion of a stable meaning and radical heterogeneity) can be alleviated by recognising the possibility of meaning as an event in the moment of interpretation; one that is dependent on the tension between a reader’s ‘consensual judgments’ emerging in the act of participation and the fluidity of significations. Reading manifests itself as an event determined by an incessant renegotiation of meanings through the eruption of dynamic non-presences into the text. Otherness leads to indeterminate narrative spots and practices that can hardly offer a trouble-free auto-explication of Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of subversion. As an event, the other cannot be conceived of as present, but exists in its participation in the becoming of itself. The places of alterity (e.g. liminality, heterotopias of reading, spectral non-presences of reader / author) occupy dual spaces of the injunction of the other, which forswear presence, but by existing beyond the binary opposition of being and non-being, become integrated into the existence they are banished from. Gombrowicz proves that the experience of the alterity of reading is fundamentally the experience of the otherness of language as reality (as exemplified in The Marriage). His language and philosophy eschew radical and absolutist assertions. Hence, Gombrowicz’s places of alterity underscore their necessary in-betweenness (reflected in the vocabularies of spectrality, liminality, heterotopias, and difference). The liquidity of existence, modelled by Gombrowicz’s rhetorical tropes and reflected in the fibre of language, undermines totalising taxonomies and dialectical order. These consolidated conclusions served as the starting points for the theoretical examination of the practice of translation from an existential angle in chapter 4, based on the English translations of Gombrowicz’s Kosmos and TransAtlantyk. The act of translation, rather than text-bound, is a token of participation of the reader/translator in both the textual and physical world. Seeing as every text is already a translation of itself, since it is a symptom of texts absent from the moment of writing and partially dehibernated through the reader’s active engagement in the text, reading is already translation by the same token. Reading is translation, because it calls for an act of participation to activate the text’s meanings. If, as posited, Gombrowicz’s rhetoric evokes the experience of

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liminality between language and existence, Trans-Atlantyk doubles up as a demonstration of this liminal state, in that it puts forward a seditious account of exile through language. The politics of subversion of this account of exile and its liminal energy lies in the fact that translation evinces itself as not as much an interlinguistic contract, as an individual’s post-translation or post-exilic realisation that translation has already taken place in one’s mother language. Gombrowicz’s rhetoric entails that language exists in no other way than in its anticipation of translation into the version of itself to come. In this sense, not only is the original its own translation, by dint of such anticipation, but the translation aspires to ‘originality’ in turn. The latter thesis was inspired by Benjamin’s postulate that multiple languages contain the traces of the ‘pure’ language. The act of translation subversively gears towards the lost purity of language, whose elements travel via translation. As such, translation seeks the ‘original’ not least by transporting it, but also by carrying the purity crystallising in the remainder the original lacks. Reinvoking Gombrowicz’s trope, language is itself a milieu of exile as it is always on the other side of purity, which can be reached only in potentia via the acts of participation and anticipation that translation warrants. Nowhere else are the existential participatory acts more evident in Gombrowicz than in Trans-Atlantyk, and its translations. Agreeing that the translators adopted the foreignising approach, although the excessively exoticised elements of translation might depart from Gombrowicz’s intentional linguistic programme, the technique does justice to the self-reflexive textual workings characteristic of Gombrowicz’s rhetoric and stylistics. Since Gombrowicz classically provided either exoticised or idiolectic accounts of language, making Polish other to itself, translators managed (if unintentionally) to pay heed to these metatextual mechanisms. In this context, interrogated against the backdrop of the post-war Polish and Anglo-American intellectual landscape, a comparative analysis of Gombrowicz’s selected texts systematically exposes a rhetoric engendering the existential experience of the liquidity of text. Central at this stage is the argument, studied against the backdrop of major tropes of postmodernism in terms of the conceptualisations of text and translation, that the practice of translation can be aligned with the postmodern condition. The historical study of the postmodern experience, narrowed down to its Polish and Anglo-American accounts, led to the assumption that both traditions developed distinctive versions of post-war reality contingent on different sociopolitical situations. Whereas the Anglo-American theorising of the postmodern condition was stimulated by the push for distancing itself from the modernist values, Poland to a degree claimed continuity with modernism as a result of the firsthand experience of the War and communist censure, which entailed intellec-

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tual and cultural stagnation. Approached from the aesthetic angle, Gombrowicz was in this study placed in the Western intellectual tradition owing to his existential tropes and the self-reflexivity of his text that attempted to blur the boundary between literature and philosophy by eschewing affirmative and metaphysical forms of articulation. Seen from bipolar hermeneutic angles, Gombrowicz is read twofold: while the Anglo-American reader finds in the writer’s philosophy of form the Western postmodern situation as the place of simulacrum (where the overaccumulated artefacts of consumerist culture eclipse and substitute nature), for the Polish reader Gombrowicz is a remedy for the mechanisms of totalitarian oppression. Postmodernism as simulacrum, appreciated as the reality that is essentially the image of itself, finds itself in keeping with the condition of text that, being a total of all texts, only simulates its own identity and exists only in the anticipation of translation into forms that are always to come. Translation, then, serves as a process inaugurating a dynamic through which the dominant (original) system is displaced by the simulating reality (the translation). On the one hand then, translation is itself a machine of simulation of the original, which serves to squander its originality via the mutiplication of a negative remainder. On the other hand, the simulation guarantees a truer textual reality in that the source text must give up its claim to originality (thwarted by its indebtedness to other text) and appreciate its simulation (translation) as a process via which it can anticipate ‘purity’ iterating across texts. The alleged postmodern condition of Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive text triggering the interpretative acts of liquidity, as well as the ways in which his existential tropes match the metaphysics of translation can be tested in the close-reading of two English translations of Kosmos (1967, 2005). The close textual analysis of the translations served to point to those places in Gombrowicz’s language that expose the untranslatable fractures of narrative linearity, which in turn provoke the interpretative indeterminacy in the act of reading. Since the novel escapes semantic closures, accepting that meanings disseminate at the moment of construction, and coagulate at the moment of dissemination, the text approximates the trajectory of translation (as well as différance) in that meanings exist only in incessant and fluid transformation. Hence, be it in translation or the original, the reader is confronted with the liquidity of meanings of the text. Furthermore, the aspect of liminality of the rhetoric of Cosmos dramatises the experiential acts of translation. Gombrowicz’s closed spaces that paradoxically escape closure, in that they implode the totality of the world, act as textual microcosmoses that encapsulate the entirety of pantextuality. Much in the same vein, the translator has to condense the totality of unfamiliar (linguistic, historical, metafictional, intertextual etc.) significations the source text is pregnant with.

194

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Further, the study of the limit and transgression based on Pornografia revealed that faced with the impossibility of establishing and dramatizing fixed borders, Gombrowicz’s articulations of Gothic perversion serve to implode generic and ethical limits. This hints at the condition of translation: it exposes the impossibility of securing any clean-cut limits to a single language on the one hand, and their transgression on the other. Gombrowicz’s text generates new significations in alternative hermeneutic contexts. Not only is Gombrowicz’s text other when approached in an unfamiliar context, but it returns to itself in the act of rereading eventually different from its former self in the pre-translation stage; this testifies to the incessant deferral of meanings in the hermeneutical circle. Such text always defers its own meanings, as proposed by Derrida, but the very deferral is contingent on the constantly changing historical condition of the interpreter, as per Gadamer. Since rereading takes place from a singular hermeneutical horizon, remarks on the place of Gombrowicz’s existentialism from the most current historical perspective inspired this enquiry. I pointed to the ways in which contextual displacement impinges on and reformulates the interpretation of the ‘original’ meaning of text (as seen from the historical perspective of Gombrowicz and his critics). Gombrowicz’s rhetoric of exile seen from the slant of the metaphysics of translation suggests that transformation is not a product of interlinguistic translation, but that it has always-already been there in the original. Such logic, based on the comparative analysis of the translations of Cosmos, led to the final conclusion that the deficiencies of translation, realised in the linguistic surfeit departing from the original, point to the blind spots of alterity of Gombrowicz’s text. This is not, however, to say that the translators’ errors do justice to Gombrowicz’s stylistics by departing from them altogether, but rather that the economy of the textual fissures, escaping the totalising means of articulation and going against the grain of any fixed, systematic thought organise Gombrowicz’s text of existence. Such text usurps no claim to totality, philosophical consistency, subordination to a doctrine, or simply form, and manifests its inherent otherness, indeterminacy, liminality and fluidity actualised in the event of reading as an existential act of participation that never stops becoming, or that never ceases translating. With the above arguments sketched and consolidated, this book might serve as a starting off point for further research, suggested as follows: x

linguistic/translation analysis of Gombrowicz’s text of existence via an extension of the method to other concepts/theories,

x

qualitative examination of translations in the proposed hermeneutic context and according to the suggested methodologies,

Conclusions

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x

extension of the existential study of discourse to unrelated textual material,

x

extension of the existential study of discourse to the most state-of-the-art theories (e.g. cultural studies animating the contemporary academic debates),

x

interpretation of Gombrowicz’s existentialism in translation in the context of other postmodern theories (e.g. Postcolonialism, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, to enumerate merely a few).

It is hoped that this study approaching Gombrowicz’s literature from the hitherto scarcely researched standpoint of the Anglo-American intellectual tradition and conceptual angle of translation, filled, if partially, some lacunae on the map of Gombrowicz’s (Translation) Studies and will inspire further debates on the related aspects of postmodern existentialism of Gombrowicz’s works.

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