"Nothing but face" - "To hell with philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the scandal of human countenance

Style, Summer, 1998 by Adam Zachary Newton

Scene One: A Railway in Argentina

Sitting in an Argentine train compartment, seething at the press of others, the twentieth-century Polish emigre writer Witold Gombrowicz begins his Diary entry for the year 1962 this way:

That mug ten centimeters away. The teary, reddish pupils? Little hairs on this ear? I don't want this! Away! I will not go on about his chapped skin! By what right did this find itself so close that I practically have to breathe him in, yet at the same time feel his hot trickles on my ear and neck? We rest our unseeing gazes on each other from a very near distance [. . . E]ach person is curling up, rolling up, shutting, shrinking, limiting to a minimum his eyes, ears, lips, trying to be a little as possible. (3: 17)

While the entry makes it clear that its ressentiment is centered chiefly on the numbers of people compressed into the same car as Gombrowicz himself, "that mug ten centimeters away" does not exactly fade from readers' sight. It stays vivid (Gombrowicz has ensured as much), but partly because of the uncanny little scene that embeds it.

Literature, with criticism's help, has accustomed us by now to a whole scenic pallet, diminutive theaters of figural enactment: Mirror Scenes, Scenes of Writing, Scenes of Reading, Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Eating, even Scenes of Fasting (in Kafka's case). Gombrowicz offers, in their place, a Scene of Facing. Indeed, it is fair to assume that Gombrowicz expects readers of his Diary who are already familiar with his work - the 1937 novel Ferdydurke, in particular - to recognize such a scene as a lately-added snapshot to a much larger portfolio of signature studies in the face-to-face.(1)

Thus, against the background of the author's abiding concern with the space between two persons(2), that mug ten centimeters away denotes not so much a countenance positioned opposite as an incitement to Opposition itself. The gauntlet-slap delivered to Gombrowicz's face is the fact that another faces him. The slap that answers it is his counter-face grimacing in return.

Przyprawienie geby ("fitting someone with a mug") describes the norm of human interaction in Gombrowicz, a relentless duel of face-making, face-wearing, face-imposing. One face creates the other; a grimace responds. Both faces remain in dependent relation, face and grimace, mug and countenance, tracing a double helix of mutual deformation on into the negative infinity.(3) There is no sublation or sublimation. Higher, theoretical operations merely repeat rather than resolve an almost chthonic drama.

Nothing but face, says a character in Ferdydurke who is looking for authentic countenance: the face that looks at me and the face it imposes on mine and the face I adopt in return and all the faces, mugs, grimaces, and permutations of phiz that pass between us. Just as that definitive paradox of Gombrowiczian space - "from a very near distance" - overrides any proprietary ideas about autonomous identity, so face is synecdochic shorthand for the face-to-face relation, for the scandal of one's own face forced into self-consciousness and counter-move by the face of another.(4) One wears a face; one doesn't own it.

The sufficiency of my own private physiognomy is always being interrupted or compromised by the intervening faces of others. Even more, that desire is ridiculed by the unruliness of the face to begin with, by its enslavement not only to the faces of others, but also to one's own body. Thus, sometimes in Ferdydurke face just signifies personhood; other times, it means "the agony of outward form." As above, in extended form, "Nothing but face, nothing sincere or natural, everything false, imitated, and artificial" (3: 199). Physiognomy - as counterintuitive but also deeply intuitive as it sounds - is anything but private property. That is the obvious point about the train compartment. Even if I seem finished to myself, a facing other will make me seem unfinished, de-shaped.

And I endure a ludicrous self-sabotage, too. Standing up to the top of my height, I am still mocked by the very backside that joins trunk to head.(5) The very fact of thighs calls consciousness down from its lofty perch. Digits and toes conduct their own duel of grimaces in repeating each other, hand to foot. Human forms aren't unified or consolidated; they're composite, an aggregate of parts. Faces are their own mugs because self-identity is self-parody. The face is a kind of double agent: the seat and sign of personal identity but also just another composite body part. Selfhood isn't realism, but rather innately surrealistic.

"How can one escape from what one is, where is the leverage to come from?" Gombrowicz writes. "Our shape penetrates and confines us, as much as from within as from without" (3: 49).(6) My face is also my mask, not just a saving and necessary heteroglossia in Bakhtin's sense, but a hetero-physiognomia, a blend of my features and the faces opposite mine. And if "it is impossible to detach from other people" (3: 77), it is no less impossible to free the face from its own mugs and grimaces. The socializing stick shaken by parents at children - "don't make such faces or they'll get stuck" - has the ring of deepest ontological truth, face as rictus. (Indeed, that's how parents and children make each other up, precisely needing each other to do so.)