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

Style, Summer, 1998 by Adam Zachary Newton

But this isn't the whole story. There is more to Gombrowicz, in other words, than just face. There is even philosophy. The mini-opera above that ends with "curling up, rolling up, shutting, shrinking; and trying to be as little as possible," while it may tap the figural marrow of Gombrowicz's work,(7) connects him, quite self-consciously, to a whole matrix of continental thought - though Poland's exact place on that continent is merely another way of putting Gombrowicz's central question. Countries, as my coda on Bruno Schulz suggests, have faces too. The railway set-piece, nested within Diary as a whole, itself the culminating work of Gombrowicz's ouevre, can, without too much of a stretch, be understood to allegorize his own keen awareness of writing in the presence of reading others, the aggregate mugs, reddish pupils, and tiny hairs of writerly/readerly nearness.

Diary is where Gombrowicz achieves a Form possible only with readers' complicity. Unlike more "tactful" French diaries, he wants his own to be "more modern and more conscious, and let it be permeated by the idea that my talent can only arise in connection with you, that only you can excite me to talent, or what's more that only you can create it in me" (1: 35). But Diary is also where he relates anecdotes like the one above or first cousins to it like the following, set against the backdrop of Argentina's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes:

There were ten other people besides ourselves who walked up, looked, then walked away. The mechanical quality of their movements, their muteness, gave them the appearance of marionettes and their faces were nonexistent compared to the faces that peered out of the canvas. This is not the first time that the face of art has irritated me by extinguishing the faces of the living [. . .] Here in the museum, the paintings are crowded, the amount crowds the quality, masterpieces counted in the dozens stop being masterpieces. Who can look closely at a Murillo when the Tiepolo next to it demands attention and thirty other paintings shout: look at us! (1: 22)

This kind of nausea is, in its way, profounder than Existentialist dread, because it draws a continuous line between the Sartrean "L'enfer, c'est l'autres" and the "hell which is other paintings or other books or even this book or this painting directly in front of me." While the image is obviously more dramatic for portraiture, Gombrowicz projects a face onto literature and philosophy, too: I don't just look at books, they hector me, shouting "look at us."

"Ferdydurke was published in 1937," Gombrowicz writes, "before Sartre formulated his theory of the regard d'autrui. But it is owing to the popularization of Sartrean concepts that this aspect of my book has been better understood and assimilated" (3: 8).(8) In Diary volume 3, he lays claim to having similarly presaged French Structuralism. Ferdydurke predates Merleau Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception), Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power), Georges Poulet ("Criticism and the Experience of Interiority"), and, most relevant of all perhaps, the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in which the figure of the face occupies an absolutely central position, the place where ethics is manifested and where the Other cuts across the grain of Self.(9)