Gombrowicz in Argentina, circa 1955.

Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Anna Kraje wska-Wiecz orek

Gombr owicz s Gr imace s and Game s

Whenever I think of Gombrowicz or read his works I remember an anecdote from his life in Argentina. A child asked about the writer during a long absence from his friends house: What happened to that man who makes such funny faces? From his rst publication of Recollections of Adolescence in Warsaw in 1933 a volume of short stories containing A Feast at Countess Kotlubays Gombrowicz made faces at various social conventions and initiated literary games to provoke a reevaluation of cultural patterns. Although that rst volume brought a considerable number of reviews, several in major literary magazines, only a few were enthusiastic or recognized his talent. Most critics read Gombrowiczs short stories merely as the grimaces of an idiosyncratic teenager and as documents of his pathological deviations. The stories were so completely dierent from contemporary writing that they aroused controversy for both their style and their subjects. Critics found them odd, bizarre, and eccentric, and they were criticized as maniacal stories breathing sexual obsessions. Others, however, received the author of Recollections as an exciting promise of Polish literature, including such prominent authors as Bruno Schulz, Leon Chwistek, and Zoa Nal kowska. Schulz was so enchanted with the fantastic and absurd style of the short stories that he had trouble accepting Gombrowiczs later novel Ferdydurke. When it stirred up a scandal in 1937, critics were divided between those who found it sensational and others who hardly could hide their confusion. But Ferdydurke brought the critics to accept reality: Gombrowicz was a writer who proved to be excitingly original. Jerzy Jarzebski, one of the most renowned literary critics devoted to Gombrowiczs work, has observed that in the short stories reception, the game-playing motif, so present in Gombrowiczs early writing, escaped the attention of most reviewers. They didnt capture the element of a game: with a reader, with a cognitive stereotype . . . nobody took up the challenge to come together with the hero, to look with his eyes at the silliness and absurdities of the mature world.1 It would take more than a decade before Gombrowicz emerged as a writer of international reputation. In the summer of 1939, at the age of thirty-ve, he was invited

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on the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner Chrobry, and he decided to stay in its destination port in Argentina when the war broke out in September of that year. Like Kafka, he worked in a bank for nearly a decade, during which time he sharpened his tongue and developed his youthful games and faces into a well-dened theory of constantly changing forms. According to Gombrowicz, our self-image is created by other peoples perceptions and our environment, and we become molded in that form. The continuing evolution of our form is propelled by an ongoing tension between superiority and commonality, and an everlasting contest between maturity and youthful innocence. His early writing testies to his fascination with immaturity and his weakness for all that is common (or lower, as in lower-class company). His plays, the novel Pornograa, and the short story The Back Stairs make these obsessions manifest. At the same time Gombrowicz never lost the intrinsic features of his noble ancestors: the propensity for conversation, social skills, and word games in which the main task was to seize the attention and passions of the interlocutors. In his own life Gombrowicz always provoked such contests at Ziemianska, Warsaws literary caf, where he had his table, and he did the same later in Buenos Aires, and in his erce polemics with art- and literary-world moguls in his famous Diaries. A Feast at Countess Kotlubays is a gem of Gombrowiczs early writing. When it rst appeared in 1933, the story did not excite as much interest as Premeditated Murder or Five Minutes before Sleep (later retitled The Adventures) in the same volume. In the sociopolitical context of the 1930s this is understandable. The Premeditated Murder provoked revulsion to its unprecedented treatment of a crime, and the exoticism of Five Minutes was also alluring in its way. A Feast, read in an era of aristocracy and landownership, could only have been regarded as mockery or caricature of societys upper spheres. Leon Chwistek, the writer, art theorist, and mathematician, was one of the very few who singled out A Feast at Countess Kotlubays as a masterpiece of symmetry and exhilarating wordplay. When Ferdydurke was published later, Chwistek proclaimed: Once I had read the story of Countess Kotlubay, I knew that I had encountered a writer of uncommon caliber!2 A Feast at Countess Kotlubays is the rst of many Gombrowicz works situated in aristocratic or royal circles. The important plays Ivona, Princess of Burgundy and Operetta take place in a palace or court and involve aristocracy. The novellas Pornograa and Cosmos are located on the estates of landowners, and high societys manners and customs become vital elements in two other major works: Ferdydurke and Trans-Atlantyk. In all, contradictions of superiority and commonness, a dialectic of higher and lower, compel a literary mechanism allowing Gombrowicz to initiate interactive games. Those games transmit a subconscious desire to free oneself from ones form, a form imposed by another party or antagonist of some kind. Nonetheless, such an opposition, in spite of vigorous confrontation, remains governed by rules of symmetry.

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The aristocrats in A Feast at Countess Kotlubays need a guest from the common sphere at their banquet as much as their common guest aspires to enter their world. Their higher or superior existence is sanctioned by its distance from the lower level of the bourgeois; he mirrors himself in them, and they do the same in his presence. Higher needs lower as aristocrats need their servants and lackeys in order to celebrate their superiority and to have an audience for their games. The guest (our Narrator) at Kotlubays feast becomes an object of the game because he is excluded from the closed system of etiquette and speech codes; the more he tries to imitate the higher style, the lower he falls. It happens because the higher here an aristocratic baron responds to an aspiration of the lower (the Narrator) by retreating behind the tricks and styles associated with a person of a lower class. Paradoxically, this makes the Narrator feel like the one ascending to an equal (i.e., higher) position. This, however, proves even worse for him; the Narrator, unexpectedly placed above his station, becomes defensive behavior that sends him lower again. In Gombrowiczs commentary on his early work, prepared for a new publication in Poland in 1957 but withdrawn from the volume Bakakaj shortly before it was published, the author writes:
In the grotesque Feast the Countess Kotlubay and her guests consume, of course, an ordinary cauliower, while a boy named Cauliower wanders in the elds, comes to the window of the palace, and dies there of exhaustion. The connection between Cauliowera man and cauliowera vegetable is strictly formal and lies in a sound of the name. The meaning of that story is based in the fact that starvation and suering of poor Bolek Cauliower increases the appetite of the aristocrats who eat cauliower-vegetable. A natural cruelty of aristocracy of all sorts is the mystery, which my humanitarian vegetarian cannot conceive for so long.3
Tom Wheatley (Marquise, at top) and Paul Gutrecht (Narrator) in A Feast at Countess Kotlubays, directed by Michael Hackett, 1997. Photo: Bogdan Krezel

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In Feast the tension between higher and lower takes a form of snobbery. Snobbery becomes heightened, and underpinned, by the cannibalism of the aristocracy. Gombrowicz himself admitted to his own mania of snobbishness in both his Diaries and Conversations with Dominique de Roux. He said in the latter: Snobbishness got the better of us, my brothers and me, which was to some degree unavoidable in our circle. However, it was also strange because we were intelligent enough to realize how silly and nihilistic it all had been. Thus the voice of a narrator in Feast can be treated as the voice of its writer, and the stage character might be modeled upon Gombrowicz. While adapting the story for the stage, Michael Hackett and I followed this course and shaped an image of the Narrator as an aspiring intellectual attered by his invitation to Kotlubays salon. The Narrators lofty speeches or so he believes in his attempts to impress the Countess, Marquise, and Baron echo the amateurish poetry written with pretentious pathos by the nobly born women in the Ziemianska Association, to which Gombro wiczs mother belonged. Our production of Feast at UCLA was spurred by an invitation to participate in the Third International Gombrowicz Festival in Radom, Poland, in 1997. (The production was subsequently performed in dz, Krakow, and Warsaw.) We were L committed rst to nding a work unknown to Southern California audiences and second to creating a role for Barbara Kratowna, famous for her performance as Ivona in the world premiere of Gombrowiczs Ivona, Princess of Burgundy at Warsaws Teatr Dramatyczny in 1957. Kratowna had previously collaborated with us on Senecas Hippolytus, as one of several professional actors performing with UCLA students in our Laboratory for Theater Research. As the projects dramaturg, I searched through Gombrowiczs writing for a piece that would satisfy both ambitions. In reading the short stories, A Feast at Countess Kotlubays seemed to promise ideal stage material for our needs. The adaptation called for a cast of ve (which we later enlarged by creating servants roles performed by students) and the irresistibly theatrical character of Countess Maria Kotlubay. Luckily, Michael Hackett, who had successfully directed three productions in Warsaw during the 1990s, shared my enthusiasm and saw what Kotlubays story oers a theater director. Hacketts directing style, which combines elements of text with music and dance, seemed to t well with the story. The only remaining issue was the task of translation. (There wasnt an English translation of Gombrowiczs early stories at that point, though they are forthcoming in this centenary year.) I took up the challenge with trepidation. Knowing the subtlety of Gombrowiczs original Polish, his playful creation of linguistic quibbles, and the stubbornly ineective English translations of Gombrowiczs longer works, I felt intimidated. Hackett helped me nd English equivalents for such puzzles as the transformation of

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the Countesss name (the Polish Kotlubaj morphs into her pen name Podlubaj, which has erotic connotations). Hackett also penned additional lines and composed lyrics for the Countesss song. His text radiates Gombrowicz in its esoteric and quasigrotesque style. In his staging, Hackett sought an atmosphere that would convey the 1930s origins of Feast. He was drawn to the American comedies of manners by Philip Barry as well as the screwball comedy tradition especially the work of Preston Sturges. While apparently elegant and light, this style masks the Depressions dark social anxieties and American cultures hidden class consciousness. Over the course of the play Hackett staged an increasing disjunction between what was happening and what was being said. At times the gestures, movement, and musical tone stood in direct contradiction to the Narrators lines. Barbara Kratowna used her remarkable ability to convey one meaning in her spoken text and another in nuances of vocal inection and gesture. The Footmen evolved into sinister forces, adding an element of constant foreboding and danger; they were the embodiment of the Countesss subtext of aggression and decadence. In the course of translating Feast and before rehearsals, Michael asked me how the style of Gombrowicz might be characterized or compared with other writers. I answered hesitantly (because Gombrowiczs style is singular and hardly comparable to anything) that it could be called a conglomerate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Marx Brothers. The sinister dance of cannibals at the close brings to mind a story passed down among generations of Gombrowiczs family. As a child of seven or eight, having received a bow and arrows as a gift, young Witold started testing his arms by aiming at his cousin, an older girl. Witolds aunt warned him against such a dangerous act, and when it was clear that he would not heed her, she suggested to the girl that she pretend she had been killed. When the girl fell on the ground motionless, Gombrowicz approached her, and said: Its true; she is killed all right. We have to carry her to the cook.

Notes
1. Jerzy Jarzebski, Gra w Gombrowicza (Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniezy, 1982); my translation. 2. Leon Chwistek, Czas no. 36 (1938). 3. Editors note, Bakakaj (Krakow: Wydawn. Literackie, 1986); my translation.

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