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The Possessed

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
304 Seiten
Englisch
Fitzcarraldo Editionserschienen am18.10.2023
In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ocho?owska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than the relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) is one of the twentieth century's most enduring avant-garde writers. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and his remarkable Diary; and - after returning to Europe from Argentina in 1963 - was awarded the 1967 Prix Formentor International for Cosmos.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextIn The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ocho?owska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than the relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) is one of the twentieth century's most enduring avant-garde writers. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and his remarkable Diary; and - after returning to Europe from Argentina in 1963 - was awarded the 1967 Prix Formentor International for Cosmos.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781804270622
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum18.10.2023
Seiten304 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse441 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.12576040
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



INTRODUCTION

by adam thirlwell

I.

No one was better than Gombrowicz at talking about Gombrowicz. It´s possible that his masterpiece is his Diary, which he began writing in the Parisian émigré magazine Kultura in 1953, and continued until he died in July 1969. I must become my own commentator, even better, my own theatrical director. I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes.´ In another brilliant work of self-commentary, Testament, a book-length interview with Dominique de Roux published in 1968, where Gombrowicz considers his entire oeuvre, he comes up with a constant barrage of self-definitions and aphorisms: I consider myself a relentless realist. One of the central aims of my writing is to forge a path through the Unreal to Reality.´ Or: I could define myself as a little Polish nobleman who has discovered his raison d´être in what I´d call a distance from Form (and therefore also from culture).´ But also: Sincerity? As a writer, that´s what I fear above all. In literature, sincerity leads nowhere.´

The persona was all violence and haughtiness, but at the same time this violence was a product of a total marginalization. He had grown up in Poland in the early twentieth century. In 1933 he published his first book, a collection of stories called Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity (later republished in an expanded version with the new title Bacacay) and entered the world of Warsaw publication: of little magazines and their domestic disputes. Four years later he published a novel, Ferdydurke, and then a year later a play called Yvonne, Princess of Bourgogne. A year after that, in the summer of 1939, he had his so-called potboiler, The Possessed, published in serial form in a popular daily paper, using a pseudonym: Z. Niewieski.

Now, we will come back to The Possessed. But what then happened to Gombrowicz was a catastrophe but also a fairy tale of world history. On 29 July 1939 he took the inaugural transatlantic liner from Gdynia in Poland to Buenos Aires in Argentina, a diplomatic voyage to which he was invited by Jerzy Giedroyc, who worked at the Ministry of Industry. (After the war, Giedroyc, in his Parisian version of exile, went on to found Kultura.) Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires on 21 August. Two days later, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression pact, and just over a week later Hitler invaded Poland. As scheduled, the liner turned to go back to Europe. Gombrowicz took his suitcases on board and then, just before departure, in a moment of self-preservation, took them back to shore - where he remained, in Argentina, until 1963. The literary life had suddenly become a life of anonymity and poverty.

I cherish this image of Gombrowicz anonymous very much - working a terrible nine-to-five career in the Banco Polaco, a European writer lost in Argentina, while the Nazis annihilated central Europe, including his friends from literary bohemia, like Bruno Schulz. With some Latin American writers Gombrowicz worked on a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke - a translation that became legendary partly because of the difficulty of its production: between Latin Americans who spoke no Polish, and a Polish writer who spoke only rudimentary Spanish. It appeared in 1947, and was infinitely ignored in Latin America. Gombrowicz´s next novel, Trans-Atlantyk, was published in Kultura, and therefore only read by its 3,000 subscribers. This was why in 1952 Gombrowicz began to write a Diary for Kultura. In it, he would create a personality equal to his lost ambition. It was his only method left to impose himself on the world.
II.

What I mean is that, between the Gombrowicz who finally died in the south of France in 1969, a celebrated European novelist, and the Gombrowicz who wrote The Possessed aged thirty-four, in the full typewriter wildness of central Europe, there is this thirty-year gap in which he offered up his early writing to the full clarity of his dominating intelligence. The Possessed, however, is almost an absence in this analysis. Serial publication of The Possessed hadn´t been completed when war broke out, and on 3 September 1939 its publication ceased. And it was only just before Gombrowicz died, when he compiled a list of key dates and works for Dominique de Roux, that he acknowledged that The Possessed was one of his works at all. The Possessed therefore has the allure of a disowned work, a tacit work - a pulp novel that was written under a pseudonym, written only (so the story goes) for money: as if this novel couldn´t fit into the vast work of self-commentary and explication Gombrowicz had set himself.

Just this once, I think, Gombrowicz was wrong in his auto-analysis. The Possessed is a true planet from Gombrowicz´s galaxy. Out of its high-speed plot emerge many themes of his later self-portrait. It´s true that it poses as some kind of gothic novel, or the parody of a gothic novel. It has a mad prince in a remote and ruined castle, and a haunted room, and a possible treasure. But it also has a strange layer of ultra-modernity: the dance halls and tennis courts of 1930s Warsaw. And anyway, Gombrowicz was always a writer of the fantastical: his art, he pointed out, was based on pure non-sense, on the absurd. To detach The Possessed from the equally parodic stories he wrote in the 1930s, or from the wild opening of Ferdydurke (where a writer who very much resembles Gombrowicz is abducted by a teacher called Pinko and taken back to school), just because its genre is a fantasy genre, is possible only through a feat of impossible engineering. In Testament he looked back on these early works: The formal apparatus I had set in motion was all my own creation. And this apparatus led me by surprise into regions I would never have risked myself if I hadn´t been so high on the absurd, on playfulness, on mystification, on parody.´

The Possessed has one surface plot, which it gradually abandons. This plot concerns the machinations of the mad prince´s secretary to inherit or steal the prince´s art collection - a collection which has so far been unaccountably undervalued - so that he can then marry Maja OchoÅowska: a beautiful, bourgeois girl who is also a tennis star. Gradually that story is overtaken by a darker narrative, which contains two different forms of haunting. The first form is the ghost of the prince´s unacknowledged son, whose presence is figured in the uncanny movements of a towel at a kitchen window in the castle:


It was very gently quivering, probably because of a current of fresh air coming from the window. But this motion was strange. The towel wasn´t moving freely in the draught, but quivering, and it was taut. And that made it look as if an invisible hand were holding onto it from below. This motion could not have been the result of air currents - it was a different motion.


The second form is the developing intimacy between Maja, the tennis star, and her new coach, Marian Leszczuk (whose name, until the end of chapter 2, is in fact Walczak - a change apparently determined by a wish to avoid accusations of libel by a real tennis coach named Mr Walczak´, but really, of course, for Gombrowicz to show off the patisserie lightness of his philosophical style). From the moment they meet, Maja and Marian feel a strange frisson of similarity and resemblance, both physical and psychological, that encroaches on them until soon every conversation and interaction feels uncanny.

And at last here we are, inside Gombrowicz´s studio. The Possessed is a fugue on the theme of resemblance. It imagines resemblance as possession by another, and therefore as a state that´s both intoxicating and also to be resisted. There are likenesses everywhere in this novel, all centring on the trio of Maja and Marian and the prince´s apparently dead and unacknowledged son, Franek. Among them, there are many forms of possession, because there are many ways people can be inhabited by other people: like lust or greed or grief. Everyone is vulnerable to being petrified into a form that belongs to someone else, misshapen by other people´s neuroses and psychoses, or the inherited forms of invisible traditions.

This was the terrible wisdom Gombrowicz discovered in his early works, including Ferdydurke, his novelistic masterpiece - a wisdom partly prompted by the horror of a city´s domestic literary criticism. That city happened to be Warsaw. It could have been anywhere. He had entered the world of publication and found himself deformed, into a subject of conversation and journalism. And so he had been forced into a defining philosophy, a sort of existentialism based on shame and humiliation: Accept and understand that you are not yourself, no one is ever themselves, with anyone, in any situation; to be human means to be artificial.´ And then, as he told the revelation thirty years later to Dominique de Roux:


I wasn´t the only one to be a chameleon, everyone was a chameleon. It was the new human condition, you had to understand this very...


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Autor

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) is one of the twentieth century's most enduring avant-garde writers. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and his remarkable Diary; and - after returning to Europe from Argentina in 1963 - was awarded the 1967 Prix Formentor/International for Cosmos.

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