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

Style, Summer, 1998 by Adam Zachary Newton

The end result is not so very different from that of the railway compartment: "each person is curling up, rolling up, shutting, shrinking, limiting to a minimum his eyes, ears, lips, trying to be as little as possible." Where the one is a duel, the other is a skirmish. As Gombrowicz puts it in Diary, "I am tumbling into publicism along with you and the rest of the world" (1: 35). And it is face - textual and interpersonal - that drags me out of the amnion and clandestinity of "me," and pushes me into public view. Thus do faces not only "answer" backsides in Gombrowicz, they deliver kicks to them, and send their owners tumbling.

The train compartment and Sartre versus everybody, the face-to-face and the book-as-face: Gombrowicz makes human countenance a scandal in both. In the railway compartment it was the too-close Other, a foil or antagonist, a counter-face, a synechoche for the crowd. In the case of Sartre, it is a crowd that is finally only imagined but just as threatening - a virtual throng, the surplus of unseeable reading Others who lock eyes onto him through his book.(12) Medusa or the Maenads: stared at, or dispersed into pieces. A facial claustrophobia or its agoraphobic counterpart. Hairs, sweat, and pupils, or "those human opinions, the abyss of views and criticisms of your intelligence, your heart, every detail of your being, which opens up in front of you when you have incautiously clothed your thoughts in words, put them on paper and spread them among men!" (1: 16-17).

But instead of leaving the impression of a tidy opposition, I see these two scenes of otherness either squared off against me or catching me by surprise as converging upon a third, from a Diary entry that precedes the other two by only pages, that combines features of both.

Scene Three: Poland; or the Space of Literature

Bruno.

I have long known about this edition prepared with such pains;taking effort, yet when I finally saw the book [a recent French translation of Schulz's Cinnamon Shops] I winced [. . .] He first showed up at my place, on Sluzewska, after the publication of Cinnamon Shops. He was small, strange, chimerical, focused, intense, almost feverish and this is how our conversations got started, usually on walks. That we needed one another is indisputable. We found ourselves in a vacuum, our literary situations were permeated with a void, our admirers were spectral [. . .] After reading my first book, Bruno discovered a companion in me, for me to furnish him with the Outside without which an inner life is condemned to a monologue - and he wanted me to use him in the same way [. . .] And here is where the "miss" or "dislocation," to use the language of our works, came in; for his; extended hand did not meet my own. I did not return his regard, I gave him abysmally little, almost nothing, of myself, our relationship was a fiasco; but perhaps this secretly worked to our advantage? Perhaps he and I needed fiasco rather than happy symbiosis. Today I can speak of this openly because he has died. (3: 3)