of the opposition between Form and Chaos have a common denominator in the concept of inequality; each opposed pair can be interpreted as a case of Superiority confronted with Inferiority. According to Gombrowicz, the essence of human existence lies in the individual’s striving all of his or her life for Superiority and Form but is not really attracted by these values, since their ultimate attainment would be tantamount to death. Therefore, the individual secretly desires Inferiority and Chaos, because only these extremes offer a chance of freedom. On the other hand, the ultimate attainment of this other goal would mean isolation, lack of communication, and impossibility of affirming one’s self-image through its reflection in the eyes of others. In the final analysis, the conflict is insoluble.

It can be, however, partly overcome and contained, if not fully resolved, by artistic creativity. Gombrowicz, as noted above, views the artist as someone who experiences the existential antinomy in a particularly acute way, but the artist has, at the same time, a certain advantage that nobody else has. Even though he cannot avoid the use of Form—if he did, he would not be understood—he can at least be aware of the artificial nature of Form and, as a consequence, he can be free to play with it. To play with Form means, in practice, to use it consciously and to make it “visible” instead of concealing it. Accordingly, Gombrowicz’s own works are filled with deliberately introduced literary conventions that the reader can recognize instantly—the conventions of the mystery novel, operetta, family chronicle, traditional oral tale, Shakespearean historical drama, or novel of the life of the upper classes. At the same time, the personality of the narrator is usually multilayered: He exists within the world presented by his narration, but he can also at any given moment rise above that reality and his own narration to comment on them, or rise even higher to comment on his own comment, and so forth; in other words, he plays not merely with the conventions of literary genres and styles but also with the very convention of literary discourse.

All of his ambiguity considered, the narrator’s point of view in Gombrowicz’s novels is, however, stable in one specific sense: As a rule, he represents the author, if not fully identifying himself with Gombrowicz (even to the point of assuming the latter’s name). Likewise, the time of the novel’s action is always, or at least seems to be, historically specified, and it usually coincides with various phases of Gombrowicz’s own life. What is particularly meaningful is the place of the novel’s action, usually a single and rather limited setting; the narration more often than not begins with the moment of the narrator’s arrival in a certain place new to him, which he must then explore and comprehend. In the course of such exploration, the narrator is usually confronted with a problem that he is supposed to solve, and thus the next phases of action develop conspicuously along the lines of the traditional detective story or novel of adventure.

What seems to be particularly characteristic of Gombrowicz is that his narrator’s relationship with the reality presented is twofold. On one hand, it is a reality that oppresses him, poses problems to solve, forces him to assume a certain stance or adopt a certain behavior. On the other hand, it is, simultaneously, the narrator himself who attempts to shape reality, to stage and direct events, to manipulate other characters, to impose some sense upon the world that surrounds him. Accordingly, two basic models of fictional plot coexist with each other in Gombrowicz’s novels—the model of an investigation (in which reality appears to the narrator as a problem to solve) and the model of a stage setting (in which the narrator becomes an active manipulator of reality).

All of this is additionally complicated by the world presented in Gombrowicz’s fiction: The world consists not only of facts, persons, objects, and their mutual relations but also words and their sounds and meanings. Words not only serve here as a means to tell the story but also assume, as it were, an independent existence. This particular aspect of Gombrowicz’s artistic play has for its object the tension between the order of facts and the order of words, between the meaning of a related situation and the meaning of specific words or expressions in which the situation is related; one can never be sure whether the action will follow the former or the latter semantic line. Sometimes, for example, a word that is central to a specific situation is foregrounded by constant repetition and other stylistic devices to such an extent that it, so to speak, proliferates and begins to function as an independent Form imposed on the Chaos of reality.

Ferdydurke

This is particularly noticeable in Gombrowicz’s first and most famous work of long fiction, Ferdydurke, which has been perhaps artistically surpassed by his later novels, yet still remains the most exemplary illustration of his philosophy, his vision of society, his idea of narration, and his use of language. The attacks against this novel from both the Right and the Left in the late 1930’s seem, in a sense, understandable, since the novel ridicules all ideologies or, more generally, all socially sanctified attitudes, conventions, or Forms.

Ferdydurke falls into three sharply divided parts, each of which is preceded by a brief essay or parable. At the outset of the story, the reader meets the narrator (and, at the same time, the main character of the whole novel), a man in his thirties who, like Gombrowicz himself, has published his first book and has been massacred by the critics as an immature and irresponsible youngster. The narrator is torn between his desire to achieve maturity and social acceptance (that is, any Form) and his dislike for various specific Forms that have been imposed on him by others and that he cannot accept as his authentic self. What, actually, is his “authentic” Form? To find an answer, he embarks on writing another book. Here, however, something unexpected occurs: A certain Professor Pimko, an old-fashioned high school teacher, arrives and literally kidnaps the narrator to put him back in school, as if he were still a teenager.

The subsequent three parts of the novel put the narrator-turned-teenager into three different locales, each of which represents a different kind of petrified, inauthentic Form. After the school sequence, the narrator is placed by Pimko as a subtenant in the house of Mr. and Mrs. Youthful, a middle-aged couple imprisoned, as it were, within their own idea of what is “modern” and “progressive”; finally, he finds himself in a countryside manor where the conservative social distinctions between the upper class and the “boors” are still very much alive. In none of these three places—the school, the “modern” household, the traditional manor—can the narrator feel fully identified with the Form that prevails there, nor can he find an authentic Form of his own. Each of the three plots sooner or later develops into the narrator’s attempts to manipulate the people who surround him, which in turn leads each time to a conflict culminating in a grotesque brawl and the narrator’s escape. The conflict between Form and Chaos, shown simultaneously in its cultural, social, civilizational, generational, and sexual dimensions, cannot possibly be resolved—escape is the only solution. Even that, however, proves futile: In the final scene, the escaping narrator winds up in the company of his hosts’ young daughter and thus unwillingly contributes to the triumph of yet another hollow Form—the romantic stereotype of lovers’ elopement.

Trans-Atlantyk

In his subsequent novels, Gombrowicz continued to explore the fundamental problem of Form versus Chaos, illustrating it with even more intricate fictional plots. Trans-Atlantyk, a novel ostensibly based on the author’s 1939 Argentinian defection, dissects Form in its specific version of patriotic stereotype, while the extreme of Chaos, Freedom, and Youth is identified with a refusal to conform to such a stereotype. There is, perhaps, no other work by Gombrowicz in which language, style, and literary convention would play such a crucial role: A twentieth century story is told here in the masterfully parodied style of an oral tale spoken by a seventeenth century old Polish nobleman.

Pornografia and Cosmos

In Pornografia, the relationship between Form and Chaos, Divinity and Youth, takes on the shape of a perverse story of a young couple whose love is “stage set” and “directed” by a pair of older men—all of this against the social and political background of Nazi-occupied Poland. Gombrowicz’s last novel, Cosmos, is his most metaphysical, although, like everything he wrote, it also reveals his powerful vis comica and penchant for the grotesque. The central problem here is nothing less than the nature of external reality as reflected in human consciousness. Is meaning immanent, or is it merely imposed on reality by the human mind? Gombrowicz asks this question by structuring his novel once again on the model of an investigation and by means of parody referring in its style and construction to the conventions of the mystery story. Like the rest of Gombrowicz’s work, Cosmos can be read as a mad piece of nonsensical tomfoolery—but it can also be read as a profound philosophical treatise on the most excruciating conflicts of human existence.