Context
from A Kind of Testament
by Witold Gombrowicz
All on my own, without any support, racked
by doubts, I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? I was only sure
of one thing: it was solely by cutting it that I could escape from this
Gordian knot. This idea of total intransigence, which had occurred to
me, had existed somewhere inside me ever since my childhood. It was
even connected with a certain optimism, at least as far as literature
is concerned. Because I—and I was sure of that, immature though I
was—had a right to speak. I had the right to express myself, like
everything that exists, like everything that is. You see, I had what
everyone has: I knew what one might call the language of fact. What
could I do? To start with, I told myself, I must acknowledge this state
of affairs. I must acknowledge reality and bring it to light. If,
as a man, as a Pole and an artist, I was doomed to imperfection, there
was no point in my grinning and bearing it, in my pretending, to myself
and to everybody else, that everything was getting better and better.
To break, once and for all, with mystification, was a matter of
honesty, dignity, lucidity and vitality. Let us start with
Poland. I had to break with Poland and turn against it. Like France for
the French, Poland for the Poles is a treasure worthy of the greatest
sacrifice. Well, it was absolutely necessary to state that Poland, that
intermediary creature between the East and the West, was doomed, by its
geographical position and by its historical development, to
imperfection, to a minor role, and that Poland must be passed over
because it could not guarantee any fully authentic value for the Poles.
It is not right that a Pole should sacrifice all his individual
development, all his humanity, to Poland. The Pole, formed by Poland,
by the Polish environment and tradition, is necessarily a less
sophisticated man than the westerner. One can understand how a
Frenchman might dedicate himself to adoring France, an Englishman to
adoring England. These countries have provided their natives with
precious advantages. But to be a man is more significant than to be a
Frenchman, and Europe is more significant than England and France. So,
for men situated in minor, weaker countries, like Poland, the
Argentine, Norway or Holland, and bound to them sentimentally,
subjugated by them, formed by them, it was really a matter of life and
death to break away, to keep one’s distance . . . No, even
‘constructive’ criticism of one’s country’s faults—undertaken in a
patriotic spirit, in order to improve it—was no longer sufficient. Such
criticism was itself conditioned by the country. To break away! To keep
one’s distance! The writer, the artist, or anyone who attaches
importance to his spiritual development, must feel no more than a
resident in Poland or the Argentine, and it is his duty to regard
Poland or the Argentine as an obstacle, almost as an enemy. That is the
only way to feel really free. And only those people for whom
their country is an obstacle rather than an advantage will have a
chance of becoming truly free spiritually, and, in the case of Europe,
truly a European. So, these were my views then, but I elaborated on them as time went by. Well,
I wanted to be like those young men one sees in the stations of small
provincial towns, their packs in their hands. They are just about to
leave, and when they see the train which is to take them away, they
murmur: ‘Yes, I must leave my birthplace. It’s too small for me.
Farewell! I may return, but not before the wide world has given birth
to me again.’ ‘After that I shall no longer be Polish! I shall be all on my own.’ ‘On your own? But loneliness will deliver you up to your own misery!’ ‘Give me a knife, then! I must perform a still more radical operation! I must amputate myself from myself!’ I
suppose that Nietzsche might have formulated my dilemma in these terms.
I proceeded to amputate. The following thought was the scalpel: accept,
understand that you are not yourself, that no one is ever himself with
anyone, in any situation, that to be a man is to be artificial. Is
that simple enough? Yes. There was only one difficulty. It was not
sufficient to accept it and to understand it, I had to experience it. History
came to my assistance. In the pre-war days something odd was happening
to people. I saw with amazement how, with the war, Europe, particularly
central and eastern Europe, entered a demoniacal period of formal
mobilization. The Nazis and the communists fashioned menacing,
fanatical masks for themselves; the fabrication of faiths, enthusiasms
and ideals resembled the fabrication of cannons and bombs. Blind
obedience and blind faith had become essential, and not only in the
barracks. People were artificially putting themselves into artificial
states, and everything—even, and above all, reality—had to be
sacrificed in order to obtain strength. What was all that? Glaring
idiocies, cynical falsifications, the most obvious distortions of
reality, a nightmarish atmosphere . . . Monstrous horror . . . These
pre-war years were possibly more damaging than the war itself.
Suffocating under this pressure I leapt as energetically as I could
towards a new understanding of man—this was the only hope. Where was I?
I was in the darkest of nights, together with the whole of humanity.
The old God was dying. The laws, the principles, the customs which had
constituted the patrimony of humanity were suspended in space,
despoiled of their authority. Man bereft of God, liberated and
solitary, began to forge himself through other men . . . It was Form
and nothing else which was at the basis of these convulsions. Modern
man was characterized by a new attitude towards Form. How much more
easily he created himself, created as he was by it! I imagined
the men of the future forming each other deliberately: a shy man will
find people who make him bold; by skillfully manoeuvring others and
himself, a roué will obtain a good dose of asceticism. I added
my private experience to this general view of humanity and I derived a
measure of tranquility from it. I was not the only chameleon. Everybody
was a chameleon. It was the new human condition, and one would have to
face up to it. I became ‘the poet of form.’ I amputated myself from myself. I discovered man’s reality in this unreality to which he is condemned. And Ferdydurke,
instead of serving me, became a fantastic poem describing, as Schulz
said, the tortures of man on a Procrustean bed, the bed of Form. I
may be oversimplifying, if only by presenting this mental process as
something decreed in advance, previous to the composition of Ferdyduke. To
tell the truth the artist doesn’t think, if by ‘thinking’ we mean the
elaboration of a chain of concepts. In him thought is born from contact
with the matter which it forms, like something auxiliary, like the
demands of matter itself, like the requirement of a form in the process
of being born. Truth is less important to the artist than that his work
should succeed, that it should come to life. My ‘thoughts’ were formed
together with my work, they gnawed their way perversely and tenaciously
into a world which gradually revealed itself.
