Last time I wrote about Witold Gombrowicz, I'd just finished Cosmos, an odd, sometimes uneven, novel of cruelty and violence.
And I must say, Pornografia, Gombrowicz's most acclaimed work, is much the same: here's a book divided in two (as is Cosmos), peppered with bizarre happenings, preoccupied with the human capacity to harm.
No doubt, Gombrowicz has a certain style, a fixed method: banish a set of characters to the European countryside, introduce an element of sexuality and violence, let the characters meditate on the meaning on that violence, and watch as the whole thing comes undone. Violence, in Gombrowicz's world, is so average it becomes banal, unreal.
In a way, that formula - of banishment, violence, and discovery - struck me as Shakespearean: the second part of Pornografia, especially, reads as a tragedy: plot twists, mistaken identity, cruelty, and revenge. By the end of the novel, blood abounds, but its meaning is unclear.
Compared with Cosmos, Pornografia is a more complete, I think, more satisfying work. At its root, this is a book about looking. Gombrowicz's main characters - both older men - read an erotic quality into, well, everything, and the effect is a perverse sense of voyeurism, of sensuality on the brink of corruption.
That quality - of lurking in the shadows, of crouching in the dark - is magnified by Gombrowicz's attention in Pornografia to the division between adolescence and adulthood, between the young and the old, and their ways of interacting.
Gombrowicz locates most of the unseemly voyeurism in this book with the old and their attempts to read into youthful flirtation an erotic quality reserved, primarily, for adults. But that voyeurism cuts two ways as Gombrowicz identifies in youthful coupling a deliberate attempt to engage - even provoke - a more mature form of eroticism.
The result is a uncomfortable balance in which the youth taunt the old with a budding sexuality, while the old identify in that sexuality a path to their youth, to their own vitality and charm.
At the final moment of the book, as the Shakespearean tragedy strikes, and as the young and old alike face the consequences of their violence, they emerge from behind the anonymity of the pornographic stare and engage in a more intimate form of human interaction, one in which they see each other - not as enemies in a sexual arena, but as individuals with a shared humanity, a common reality.
And I must say, Pornografia, Gombrowicz's most acclaimed work, is much the same: here's a book divided in two (as is Cosmos), peppered with bizarre happenings, preoccupied with the human capacity to harm.
No doubt, Gombrowicz has a certain style, a fixed method: banish a set of characters to the European countryside, introduce an element of sexuality and violence, let the characters meditate on the meaning on that violence, and watch as the whole thing comes undone. Violence, in Gombrowicz's world, is so average it becomes banal, unreal.
In a way, that formula - of banishment, violence, and discovery - struck me as Shakespearean: the second part of Pornografia, especially, reads as a tragedy: plot twists, mistaken identity, cruelty, and revenge. By the end of the novel, blood abounds, but its meaning is unclear.
Compared with Cosmos, Pornografia is a more complete, I think, more satisfying work. At its root, this is a book about looking. Gombrowicz's main characters - both older men - read an erotic quality into, well, everything, and the effect is a perverse sense of voyeurism, of sensuality on the brink of corruption.
That quality - of lurking in the shadows, of crouching in the dark - is magnified by Gombrowicz's attention in Pornografia to the division between adolescence and adulthood, between the young and the old, and their ways of interacting.
Gombrowicz locates most of the unseemly voyeurism in this book with the old and their attempts to read into youthful flirtation an erotic quality reserved, primarily, for adults. But that voyeurism cuts two ways as Gombrowicz identifies in youthful coupling a deliberate attempt to engage - even provoke - a more mature form of eroticism.
The result is a uncomfortable balance in which the youth taunt the old with a budding sexuality, while the old identify in that sexuality a path to their youth, to their own vitality and charm.
At the final moment of the book, as the Shakespearean tragedy strikes, and as the young and old alike face the consequences of their violence, they emerge from behind the anonymity of the pornographic stare and engage in a more intimate form of human interaction, one in which they see each other - not as enemies in a sexual arena, but as individuals with a shared humanity, a common reality.
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