Trans-Atlantyk
Trans-Atlantyk
Witold Gombrowicz
Translated by Carolyn French and Nina Karsov
Introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak
The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Legion of Young Polish Women.
English edition copyright © 1994 by Yale University. Polish edition copyright © 1970 by Institut Littéraire SARL.
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gombrowicz, Witold.
[Trans-Atlantyk. English]
Trans-Atlantyk / Witold
Gombrowicz; translated by
Carolyn French and Nina Karsov;
introduction by Stanislaw
Baranczak.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-300-06503-9 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PG7158.G669T713 1994.
891.8′537—dc20 93-11880 CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
This translation is dedicated to Szymon Szechter,
without whose encouragement we would not have persisted.
Contents
Introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak
Translators’ Note
Note on Pronunciation
Trans-Atlantyk
Introduction
A masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction and one of the most dazzlingly original works in all of Polish literature, Trans-Atlantyk would not exist had its author declined an offer to spend a few leisurely weeks aboard a pleasure boat. Almost exactly forty years have passed since the first Polish-language edition of this Argentinian novel by a Polish writer came out—as if to make its own geographic unorthodoxy even more perplexing—in Paris. Many of its readers have probably reflected on how the emergence of even the most accomplished work of a writer of genius may depend not so much on his or her creative intent as on an utterly trivial twist of fate.
In the case of Witold Gombrowicz, it was not a single accident but rather a random coincidence that made the creation of his masterpiece possible, albeit fourteen years after the voyage that inspired it. Gombrowicz’s disembarcation in Buenos Aires on August 21, 1939, and the Nazi invasion of his homeland eleven days later recall the “twin halves of one august event” in Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain”—another masterpiece having to do with transatlantic liners. That Trans-Atlantyk was born from the marriage of something as grand as world war and something as minuscule as the author’s ocean cruise does, however, have its own peculiar logic. These two unequal events have one thing in common: the ironic discrepancy between the individual’s aspirations and the burden of obligations that ethnicity, national tradition, and one’s chosen profession put upon one’s shoulders. Both Gombrowicz and the novel’s narrator (who bears Gombrowicz’s name) are concerned with the supra-individual notion of being a Pole or, more specifically, a Polish writer.
The transatlantic travel was not just a pleasure cruise: Gombrowicz the real-life author (Gombrowicz the narrator does not reveal much on this account) was invited abroad, all expenses paid, for a specific purpose. The trip was the maiden voyage of the ocean liner Boleslaw Chrobry, named after the first king of Poland in the eleventh century. Gombrowicz, along with another young author, Czesław Straszewicz, was expected to represent (in particular to the sizable Polish émigré community in Argentina) the culture of the Polish Republic, reborn in 1918 as a result of the world war. In the novel, as soon as the news of the German-Polish hostilities reaches Argentina, the expectations of Gombrowicz’s compatriots change: instead of fulfilling his mission as an informal cultural envoy he is supposed to rush back home, arms in hand, to defend Poland against the enemy. Yet Gombrowicz, a sort of human synecdoche, is still expected to function as part of a whole, as a representative of something larger than himself: his nation, its indomitable spirit, and its literature’s traditional role of making this spirit even more indomitable.
Gombrowicz the narrator refuses to comply, despite his casual acceptance of the peace-time “mission” (which, we may surmise, was just a convenient excuse to take a vacation abroad at the government’s expense). His one-person mutiny may, of course, be attributed by some to simple cowardice, by others to an abhorrence of the essentially senseless bloodbath of war. Yet the truth is more complex. What Gombrowicz the narrator refuses to suffer any more—taking the dramatic yes-or-no question of his return as an opportunity to make a clean break with his half-hearted compliance—is the overwhelming power of stereotype, of What Is Expected from You, of (to use the term that Gombrowicz adopted in his essays and diary) Form.
American readers of Gombrowicz’s Diary will be familiar with this term, which denotes one of the two opposed pillars of his philosophy. Probably no other fiction writer in modern world literature can match the almost intimidating consistency and precision of Gombrowicz’s system of ideas. The words philosophy and system contain no exaggeration: Gombrowicz the Philosopher, a selection of his essays published a few years ago in Poland, attests to the utmost seriousness and orderliness of the intellect of this seemingly whimsical and nonsensical writer.
The central and most original component of Gombrowicz’s system is his vision of what he calls the “interhuman church.” This slightly puzzling term embraces the entirety of more or less ritualized or institutionalized (hence the metaphor of “church”) relationships binding—and/or pitting against each other—the individual and “others” (both other individuals and society as a whole). According to Gombrowicz, by virtue of being human each of us is doomed to be part of the “interhuman church”: leaving it would be tantamount to renouncing one’s humanity. Specific individuals’ relations to others may, however, vary widely, stretching from a tendency to comply with the prevailing stereotype of behavior to a striving for independence, spontaneity, and freedom.
The individual is, in other words, suspended between the external ideas of Form and Chaos, between total subordination of the ego to the generally accepted patterns of behavior, logic, language, and so forth, and total liberation from all that is inherited or imitated. If this dialectical dualism of Gombrowicz’s thought proved so productive as the generating mechanism of each of his short stories, plays, and novels, it is for one reason: neither the extreme of Form nor that of Chaos is accepted unequivocally as a positive solution for the dilemma of human existence.
Such an acceptance can never happen in Gombrowicz, since he is fully aware that both Form and Chaos have disadvantages as well as advantages. Compliance to Form gives us something to lean on in our attempts to fit into this or that human community or group; by adopting that which is commonly shared within such a group, we gain access to its repertory of symbols, and that in turn enables us to communicate with others and to confirm our existence by means of its reflection in others’ eyes. On the other hand, the same Form that enables the individual psyche to express itself is also the psyche’s chief obstacle to expressing itself. By imposing on us ready-made “languages” of generally recognizable, therefore more or less repetitive and trite, symbols, Form
in fact distorts as much as it grants, in extreme cases making it impossible for us to communicate anything spontaneously and freely. To reverse this equation, attaining the extreme of Chaos would allow us to be completely spontaneous, free, and sincere in whatever we try to communicate, but then the very process of communication would not occur, since a complete absence of Form would entail the lack of any “language” common to us and the others. Striving for Form, we gain acceptance of others but lose our individual uniqueness; letting ourselves sink into Chaos, we remain individually unique all right, but others cannot comprehend and accept us. In fact, complete identification of the individual with the extreme of Form would mean dissolution in the conventional, that is, spiritual death; complete identification with the extreme of Chaos would mean absolute isolation, that is, spiritual death again.
Both extremes—instead of Form versus Chaos, we might speak of perfection versus freedom—remain, therefore, equally unattainable. This realization is part of the genius of Gombrowicz. He never let himself be fooled by the two most popular fallacies of the past two centuries concerning the relationship between the individual and society: the romantic claim that only the individual’s total self-liberation from society’s constraints is worth living for, and the positivistic or, especially, Marxist illusion that human beings can be defined completely in terms of their social roles. It is not just the consistency of his philosophical system that makes Gombrowicz a great writer; it is, rather, his ability to discern and expose the same fundamental antinomy in a number of apparently different kinds of interhuman relationships. In his literary works, the opposition of Form and Chaos or perfection and freedom takes on many shapes depending on which particular social hierarchies are scrutinized. Form versus Chaos can thus be translated into oppositions of age (maturity/immaturity), social class (aristocrats/plebeians), civilizational tradition (West/East), cultural background (elitist/mass culture), and even sexual persuasion (“accepted” heterosexuality/“ostracized” homosexuality). Superiority versus inferiority would be another pair of synonyms housing diverse oppositions under its roof—that is, if we keep in mind that superiority may take on, ironically, the shape of constraining uniformity, whereas inferiority may appear darkly attractive because of the chance of liberation it seems to offer to the individual.
Gombrowicz’s slim oeuvre may contain novels such as Ferdydurke whose revelatory impact was much stronger than Trans-Atlantyk’s, or which hit a higher notch on an imaginary scale of philosophical complexity, such as Kosmos; however, it is not only my opinion that Trans-Atlantyk represents his greatest accomplishment as an artist. Although this novel, his second (if we are to omit his serialized gothic parody Opętani [The possessed], the publication of which in a Warsaw tabloid had been interrupted by the outbreak of war), is his shortest, it took the longest time to write. Begun in 1948, it appeared only in 1953, sixteen years after Ferdydurke. To be sure, Gombrowicz did not spend all of that time chiseling Trans-Atlantyk’s fine points. During most of the war and postwar years he was reduced to struggling for survival, coping with extreme poverty and wasting his energies on a job as a bank clerk offered to him by a Polish banker in Buenos Aires. According to Gombrowicz, he wrote Trans-Atlantyk on his desk at the bank, hiding the manuscript in a drawer whenever his superior entered the room.
Great as Gombrowicz’s earlier and later novels are, Trans-Atlantyk surpasses them, I think, in at least four essential respects. First, its plot, for all its absurdly unexpected twists and downright fantastic developments, stems consistently from the initial premise, the fictitious version of the author’s momentous decision to stay in Argentina—the single most dramatic event in his life. The first words of the novel, “I feel a need to relate here …,” are already charged with the urgency that spurs the narrative momentum of the ensuing paragraphs and chapters. As a result, even though no one would be naive enough to take Gombrowicz the narrator for a mirror-reflection of Gombrowicz the author, or the former’s wildly spun tall tale for the latter’s genuine and accurate confession, the fact remains that this novel, perhaps the most grotesquely fantastic ever written in Polish, is also the most personal and engaging of all Gombrowicz’s works of fiction.
Second, the urgency that marks the narrator’s “need to relate” his story translates felicitously into the elusive quality of Trans-Atlantyk’s style and composition. This quality might be described as a combination of extreme speed with highly precise rhythmic organization. The latter is felt on all levels of this freely moving yet carefully choreographed work, from phonetics (for instance, devices such as alliteration) to syntax (contrasting long and short sentences, dramatic use of the historical present tense, and so on) to the composition of paragraphs and chapters (the refrainlike repetitions of certain key words or phrases). With the possible exception of Gombrowicz’s play Operetta, there is no other work in his entire output which, for all its deliberately jarring notes, is so firmly based on musical principles of composition and which, for all its deliberate tripping over its own feet, rushes forward with such an irresistible dancelike aplomb.
Third, Trans-Atlantyk is the most memorably compact among Gombrowicz’s fictional embodiments of his recurrent system of ideas. What might be called the objective correlatives of his philosophy—fictional plots, situations, characters and their mutual relationships incarnating this or that specific variant of “the interhuman church”—are no less admirably inventive in most of his other works. Here, however, several such variants come together to form a kind of musical chord characterized by extraordinarily complex harmony. In Ferdydurke, for example, three different locales, milieus, and corresponding stages of the plot (the narrator’s adventures at school, in Mr. and Mrs. Youthful’s house, and in the country estate) had to be presented consecutively, in a linear sequence, as three different versions of the Form-versus-Chaos conflict. The innovation of Trans-Atlantyk is that Gombrowicz puts several manifestations of the same conflict together and makes them resound simultaneously, in a polyphonic composition reminiscent of a Baroque fugue.
This is mostly possible thanks to the power with which the plot’s point of departure—the narrator’s decision to stay in Argentina—continues to weigh on everything that happens afterwards. This decision to accept the in-between status of a quasi-deserter and would-be immigrant, never at home either among the Poles or among the Argentinians, results in the radical clash of opposites within the narrator’s mind and in his immediate surroundings. From that point on, continuously pulled by antithetical values of various sorts and never able to attain either of the two extremes, he can only be a double outcast who strives in vain for an unequivocal identity. Reduced to being a function of what others see in him, the narrator finds himself stretched insufferably between the opposing forces—ethnic, historic, geographic, social, cultural, sexual—to which his new status exposes him. A reluctant performer of several preprogramed roles at once, he is soon entangled in so many different contexts and challenged by so many stereotypes that Gombrowicz the author does not have to lead his protagonist/narrator through changing settings and milieus, as he did in Ferdydurke. Once the cast of characters has been introduced (in particular, the father-and-son pair of Tomasz and Ignac, the Argentinian homosexual millionaire Gonzalo, the Baron-Pyckal-Ciumkala trio, and the staff of the Polish embassy), the opposition of Form and Chaos primarily takes on the shape of Ojczyzna versus Synczyzna (literally, “Fatherland” versus “Sonland,” in this translation rendered felicitously as “Patria” and “Filistria”); but this single antimony is just a shorthand for many others.
Fourth, the ingenious polyphony of Trans-Atlantyk owes its striking effect to Gombrowicz’s use of stylization. A work of art achieves true greatness when the author invents a crucial device and utilizes it so magnificently that no one can successfully imitate it later. This is precisely what happens in Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz’s chief stroke of genius while planning the novel was his choice of the specific style to imitate—a style which, one imagines,
initially must have sounded bizarre even to him. The story of the twentieth-century Polish writer defecting to Argentina in the first days of the Second World War was to be told, from first to last, in a language and style typical of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish country squire. Trans-Atlantyk was to adopt the generic principles of the Baroque nobleman’s oral tale, known in the Polish tradition as gawęda.
Not just an aura of anachronism but a set of specific historic, social, and cultural connotations are immediately brought into play by the writer who makes use of this particular convention. Gaweda was a genre characteristic of the culture of provincial gentry at the time when Poland—as a result of the devastating wars that raged all over its territory throughout the seventeenth century—entered a prolonged cultural decline in the early 1700s. One legacy of the Baroque era was Polish literature’s profound split between the Westernized model, which flourished mostly at the royal and aristocratic courts, and the so-called Sarmatian model, which found its refuges in thousands of provincial noblemen’s manors. The literature that those country squires produced, mostly for their own or their neighbors’ entertainment, starting in the early 1600s, was (with a few notable exceptions) more local, parochial, conservative, narrow-minded, and artistically primitive than the writings of the well-educated and cosmopolitan court poets. It had its own strengths, though, which allowed it to survive the tough times; and of all the Sarmatian genres the gawęda in particular proved extraordinarily durable. Although gawęda was occasionally committed to paper and even published, it remained primarily an oral genre, partly because of the deterioration of printing in Poland during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and partly because of the migration of cultural life from the warravaged cities to the provinces. The existence of gawęda was supported by its stable social context. As a rule it was listened to rather than read, most typically at convivial gatherings of gentry neighbors on the occasion of a wedding or funeral, on holidays, and so forth.
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