Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  Pimko takes the thirty-year-old narrator in hand and unaccountably but irresistibly places him in school, among cruel and obscene boys extolled for their “innocence.” Two schoolmates, Mientus and Siphon, engage in a grotesque combat: “The two contestants will stand facing each other and will make a series of faces. Each and every constructive and beautiful face made by Siphon will be answered by an ugly and destructive counter-face made by Mientus. The faces made will be as personal and as wounding as possible, and the contestants will continue to make them until a final decision is reached.” Mientus scowls, spits, and dips his finger into a spittoon, but Siphon implacably points at the sky; “his face became diffused with seven colors, like a rainbow after a storm, and lo! there he stood in seven colors, the Boy Scout, Purity Incarnate, the Innocent Adolescent.” Defeated, Mientus shouts filth into Siphon’s ears, and Siphon dies.

  All encounters, for Gombrowicz, are a species of duel by gesture, a clash of impersonations. The opening episode with Pimko and the narrator is such a contest: “He remained seated, so firmly and inexorably seated that the fact of his sitting, though intolerably stupid, was nevertheless all-powerful.” Into the main narrative is spliced the anecdote of “Philifor Honeycombed with Childishness,” wherein two philosophers—the greatest synthesist of all time and his arch-opponent, the analyst Anti-Philifor—duel by pruning with gunfire the bodies of their wife and mistress, finally killing them both. Johnnie, still a schoolboy, goes to live with a banally “modern” family called the Youthfuls and is caught up in a fierce duel of love with Zutka, the daughter. His maneuvers grow in complexity and ferocity and finally plunge the Youthfuls, plus Pimko, plus a schoolmate, into a lunatic melee, freeing the hero to launch himself into “Asphalt. Emptiness. Dew. Nothing.” An antic essay interposes, and a shaggy-dog story symmetrically titled “Philimor Honeycombed with Childishness.” The narrative moves to the country estate of Johnnie’s rich aunt and Mientus’ struggle to fraternize with a stableboy. The consequent duel of class consciousness and physical abuse culminates in yet another, crueller fray. At the end, Johnnie abducts his cousin Isabel, and then flees the blackmail of compliments and kisses (“I writhed under the blows of her admiration as under Satan’s whip”) that passes, in the Gombrowiczian universe, for heterosexual love.

  What is the core of this repetitive whirligig of pretense, bluff, and annihilation? At one point in the country house, four men find themselves in total darkness, standing paralyzed by fear within inches of one another, unable to move, and Johnnie experiences “a sense of becoming enormous, gigantic and simultaneously a sense of growing smaller, shrinking and stiffening, a sense of escape and at the same time a kind of general and particular impoverishment, a sense of paralysing tension and tense paralysis, of being hung by a tense thread, as well as of being converted and changed into something, a sense of transmutation and also of relapse into a kind of accumulating and mounting mechanism.” In this frozen moment of overwhelming, contradictory sensation, we seem close to Gombrowicz’s central inkling—the duel between consciousness and will. Awareness mocks and clogs and warps action. From our sticky web of apprehension, sporadic and incongruous deeds shake loose. The narrator, “while suspense and repetition still remained ceaselessly at work,” abruptly moves: “Suddenly I insolently moved and stepped behind the curtain.” In the context of these pages even such a small exercise of volition is intensely dramatic. Perhaps the composition of Ferdydurke can be understood as another such act, a random, twitched escape from paralysis. Hence the book’s flaws of flimsiness and centrifugality, hence the monotonous mood of wry nervousness. Gombrowicz has made his move, but he is not yet at home behind the curtain.

  Pornografia, written twenty years later, is a more conventional and integrated work, perfectly shaped and thoroughly sinister. Set in the Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943 (where Gombrowicz never was), “at the depths of the fait accompli,” the novel tells of the hyper-subtle corruption worked upon an adolescent boy and girl by a pair of middle-aged Warsaw intellectuals, one of whom is Gombrowicz himself. He narrates the story in accents grimmer and neater than the quirky pellmell of Ferdydurke. Compare a landscape from each of these novels:

  Overhead there were fat little reddish, bluish, and whitish clouds, which looked as if they were made of silk paper, sorry and sentimental-looking. Everything was so vague and confused in outline, so silent, so chaste, so full of waiting, so unborn and undefined, that in reality nothing was separate or distinct from anything else; on the contrary, everything was connected with everything else in the bosom of a single, thick, whitish and silent, extinguished mass. Tenuous little brooks murmured, wetted the earth, vaporized or bubbled. And this world dwindled and seemed to shrink, and as it shrank it seemed to tighten, to close round your throat, like a delicate cord strangling you.

  We reached the top of the hill and were confronted with the unaltered view: the earth rising in hills, swollen in a motionless surge in the slanting light which here and there pierced the clouds.

  The first is a wordy conjuration of vagueness whose gaiety tugs strangely against the metaphor of strangulation with which it is clinched. The second, also vague, needs no specification of the emotion it is meant to arouse; there is no doubt that we are in the drab reaches of rural Poland, in a sordid trough of history. “An oppressive smell of iniquity permeated this landscape,” the author observes, and, in town, on the next page, notices that “something was missing—there were no Jews.” Jews are not mentioned again, and Germans are hardly ever seen. The thematic and metaphoric furniture of Pornografia is as economically distributed as the personnel of its plot; the rabid envy of young people, for instance, which seemed eccentric in the thirtyish author of Ferdydurke, comes plausibly from a fifty-year-old man “already poisoned by death.” The duels—between a Catholic and an atheist, between a panicked resistance leader and a household—cluster tightly around the core struggle of the two adolescents and the two old men, who are themselves involved in a duel of implication and avoidance. The gratuitous, sudden actions—a boy pulling up an old woman’s skirt, an old woman attacking and biting a boy—all serve to advance the action by enlarging the possibilities of depravity, and to enforce the image of man as “an angelic and demonic abyss, steeper than a mirror!” The notion of “form” has been reduced to a biting Dostoevskian essence: “There are certain human deeds which seem totally senseless, but which are necessary for man because they define him.” The notion of “youth” has succinctly become: “After the age of thirty men lapse into monstrosity.” All mutual existence is mutual blackmail. Inexorably the elements of Pornografia combine, in its less than two hundred pages, to transmute the most delicate and obscurely felt interrelations into a climax of multiple murder. The book has the clean cruelty of Laughter in the Dark, without Nabokov’s playful puppetry; it has the moral pessimism of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, without de Laclos’ peremptory restoration of virtue.

  In short, Gombrowicz, an apostle of immaturity, has maturely subdued his formal preoccupations and instinctive obsessions to the principles of art and created, in his own prefatory words, “a noble, a classical novel … a sensually metaphysical novel.” Is this victory at all Pyrrhic? Have the determined insights and dramatic thrust of Pornografia been obtained at the cost of a certain honesty present in the confusions of Ferdydurke? For in penetrating the imaginative curtain separating him from wartime Poland, and in creating behind it a coherent “classical” action, he in a sense hides; a book like Ferdydurke exists as a fantastical gloss upon the real world, whereas Pornografia is a small world complete in itself and sealed by its own completeness as if in cellophane. Its consummate finish deprives it of osmotic margins; it becomes an object we can turn our backs on, having experienced its catharsis, its systematic arousal and relief of suspense. Does the world require many more such novels? Or does history insist that the writer abolish, by exhortation and trickery, the glaring edge that divides the proscenium novel from its audience of readers? Ask Dr. Pimko, or s
ome other kindly aunt.

  Inward and Onward

  THE INWARD TURN OF NARRATIVE, by Erich Kahler, translated by Richard and Clara Winston. 216 pp. Princeton, 1973.

  Erich Kahler, the late literary philosopher and polymath, published some fifteen years ago, in the Neue Rundschau, two long essays on the development of narrative technique and perspective which have now been published in the Bollingen series as The Inward Turn of Narrative. Kahler’s thesis is more easily stated than grasped. His first sentence proposes “to show the vast changes in the modern novel as the consequence of a process that has been at work throughout the whole history of Western man,” and this process seems simply the development of consciousness: “Literary history will be considered here as an aspect of the history of consciousness.” The “inward turn” of narrative is in fact an outward envelopment, our mental incorporation of more and more of the outer world: “Man constantly draws outer space into his inner space, into an inner space newly created by consciousness. The world is integrated into the ego, into the illuminated self.” This grand one-way process (Kahler speaks of “advancing consciousness” with the confident progressivism of a 19th-century colonialist) finds literary reflection in surprising proportions. Three brisk sentences, and all of primitive narrative sweeps by:

  Initially, the process of internalization of narrative consists in gradually bringing the narrated material down to earth and breathing into it a human soul. Narrative begins with cosmogonies and theogonies. Slowly, then, the themes descend to the level of annals and chronicles, to the recording of specific earthly events.

  The reader takes this “slowly” on faith, for very rapidly, in Kahler’s exposition, we arrive at Homer and the Old Testament, narratives of pronounced sophistication and “humanness.” Of pre-Homeric tales, the only example discussed is the fragmentary Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which, though “still entirely within the primal mythic chaos,” does present, in the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, an “impulse to attain humanity”; “in it man is increasingly brought down to earth, is liberated from his primal link with the elemental powers.” More seems meant than demythicization of experience; as the gods recede into a distinctly separate realm, feeling arises out of the “internalization of raw event. By stirring the imagination narration itself—in contradistinction to mere chronicle—provokes feeling.” When we arrive, with Homer, at the threshold of Western literature, the gap between “chronicle” and imaginative “narration” has already been crossed.

  There can be no doubt that the articulation of human experience in the Homeric epic is far beyond that of the Babylonian epic.… In the Old Testament, finally, complete humanness is revealed.

  What remains, humanness revealed, is relatively a matter of detail, and of increasingly detailed description of masterpieces. With Virgil’s Aeneid deliberate artistic construction appears in the epic form. Early in the Christian era, “novelty itself, the novella,” adds to the telling of acts of heroism and martyrdom “the relation of curious incidents, preferably spiced with eroticism.” Then “Christian influence [leaves] a new residue in narrative: deliberate, imposed meaning.” With the Renaissance dawns individual psychology; from Boccaccio on, narration becomes “entirely a psychological process.” The rise of cities generates a sharp contrast between town and nature, burgher and knight; from this contrast arises what Kahler calls “the romantic situation”: on the one hand, the burgher’s illicit impulses and fantasies find embodiment in the obsolete figure of the knight, and, on the other, the “new objectifying awareness of nature” produces sensuous natural description and a complementary realism in the depiction of social classes. Milieu deepens its substance; “perspectivistic narrative” arrives, somewhat later than perspectivistic painting. Of this “baroque” period’s masterworks—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Grimelshausen’s Simplicissimus, Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Gargantua—Don Quixote is especially momentous, because it supplies the first fully realized instance of “ascending symbolism”; that is, symbolism which proceeds from an individual instance to supra-individual significance entirely within a human world created by the artist, rather than the “descending symbolism” of the Greeks and Dante, wherein the signification descends upon the individual from a higher reality—a divine or mythic entity. From Cervantes on, the writer builds the symbolic structure out of himself, and the reader extracts it for himself. This immense “internalization” achieved, little distance remains to modern narrative. Milton, intending to portray the Christian cosmos, unwittingly dramatizes instead the “vast, immeasurable Abyss” opened to view by the new astronomy, and man’s dreadful, defiant autonomy within it. First-person narratives such as those of Marivaux, Defoe, and Richardson move the narrator’s observation post deeper into the interior of the confessing ego. Eighteenth-century poets, under the influence of deism, for the first time make nature an independent object of observation. As the invention of the microscope opens on the other side of man an infinity as daunting as that revealed through the telescope, Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, rings a number of changes on the theme of relativity and arrives at an absolute condemnation of man. And in Tristram Shandy—“an end and a beginning, a harvest and a new sowing”—Sterne, making narrative entirely willful and sequence and time dependent upon the narrator’s whim, so imbues reality “with the patterns, structures, and techniques of consciousness that the creatively working consciousness finds itself face to face with its own image.”

  This complex world, which already includes the phenomena of cognition and imagination—this already half-internalized world—becomes the raw material which is handed on to Romanticism as its reality.

  There Kahler ends, having surprised us as much with what he dwells upon as with what he skimps. Even in the sparest summary, the book’s scope and strength of synthesizing vision must be apparent. Many passing critical felicities adorn the exposition: Milton’s Hell, he says, becomes “almost a colony of paradise”; Pope’s linguistic wit “is constantly overflowing and leaving no room to breathe.” The critic’s essential service of recommending is enthusiastically performed; I can hardly wait to read Clarissa and Simplicissimus. The translators append their regret that Kahler did not live to revise his German articles for publication in English, but the translation reads well, and such imbalances toward the German as exist—conspicuously, the lengthy quotation from the poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes—are rather refreshing. Kahler was unaffectedly erudite in at least three European literatures, and the reader of English can only be pleased by the importance assigned Chaucer, Milton, James Thomson, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. Amazing how much these Europeans can read into offhand British scribbling!

  To Kahler’s generosity of spirit and shared learning, reservations must attach apologetically, like limpets to the back of a sleeping walrus. But The Inward Turn of Narrative in its sweep describes a bigger circle than it seems to fill. If we are to examine the evolution—the inward turn—of narrative, then we need to grasp primordial narrative at some point deeper than the Gilgamesh epic, which Dr. Albert Lord, in his class in Oral Epic Tradition, used to classify with the “sophisticated” specimens of epic form. Ancient though the Babylonian fragments are, they represent the end of a development whose earlier stages have analogues in the tales collected by anthropology. The world does not (as Kahler implies) age all in one piece; Stone Age cultures survive to this day, and among them the scholar might find clues to the embryology of this mysterious art called narration. Kahler considers a series of forms without searching out the question of function. Why do we harken to stories? What instinct do they arouse and satisfy? What is happening between writer and reader? Is the tribal tale-teller in the same relation to his audience as James Joyce to his? Are a medieval allegory, a dirty joke, and a Chekhov short story any more similar in intent than an icon, a comic book, and a Cézanne? Kahler does touch upon the issue of audience, provocatively but briefly:

  Early, naïve storytelling proceeded from a rathe
r unsubtle narrator to a ubiquitous and tangible listener. Serious, weightier narrative, which begins in the eighteenth century, involves a personal relationship between a narrator who steps forth in his subjectivity and a virtually individualized specific listener whom the author holds by the lapel, so to speak. The later modern narrator is an impersonally objectified artistic consciousness caught up in the labor of expression.… The work requires, demands, and shapes its own ideal recipient.

  The progression from “naïve” to “weightier,” from “unsubtle” to “ideal,” is not so much demonstrated as assumed. Indeed, an almost blithe assumption of progress pervades the book. Repeatedly, Kahler has to explain away some Hellenic anticipation of a post-Renaissance “advance”: “The art of classical antiquity often came to the verge of modern achievements—but stopped short at certain limits. Developmental processes do not proceed in a straight line. Rather, they occur in waves, or, if we prefer a three-dimensional image, in ever-widening spirals.” But art moves, surely, as often by regression and setting-aside as by any kind of accumulation. Hemingway and Pound said no to the elaborate genteel art prevailing around them; Cervantes, Fielding, even Jane Austen began with parody, in a spirit of deflation. Kahler instinctively sees human progress as the dethroning of the gods: “Man has liberated himself from his primordial entanglement with mythic powers.” The two-thousand-year episode of Christendom, then, lies rather athwart his synopsis. The narratives of the Middle Ages rate less than a paragraph. Whereas Malraux, in his Voices of Silence, persuades us that the portal statuary of Chartres and Rheims expressed something missing from the blank-faced marbles of Greece and Rome, the best Kahler can make of Christian influence on narrative is the “residue” that remains once stories are “freed from their didactic purposes.” Milton’s conscious purposes (and the overt deism of the nature poets) are brushed aside as transitional illusions: “This wide-ranging epic was inherently contradictory and uncontrolled, a transitional opus expressing the rift that had developed between science and Biblical orthodoxy.”