Smart smut

All I could think when I watched this video was: someone should tap these kids to star in a modern cinematic adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. And then I realized, oops, there already is one.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that Henri Bergson derided Kant for his view of all the sciences as "frames within frames." According to Bergson, the world could not be classified into ready-made concepts, just like, according to Bachelard, the metaphor of the drawer that Bergson loves to use when discussing concepts cannot be reused to teach Bergsonian theory. For Bachelard, it is ultimately the new, rich, and surprising poetic image rather than the old, static, expected metaphor that has the potential to surpass traditional philosophical discourse, since it has the potential to unite the disparate fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and phenomenology and truly penetrate the depths of human consciousness in a way that each of these separate disciplines cannot.

Whether or not I think Bachelard's project is ultimately successful (I haven't yet finished the book, but it makes for some seductive whiskey-drunk reading on a spring break night, I'll tell you what), that's exactly how I'd describe Gombrowicz's novels. In the hands of a realist novelist, actions are framed within two-dimensional diegetic space in a neat, neutral, unobtrusive tableau -- the epitome of the Bergsonian drawer/frame/concept. I'm thinking of Tolstoy, the master of this game... specifically, one of the greatest showstoppers in any novel ever written, the horse-racing scene in Anna Karenina, wherein the adrenaline-pumping race and the gruesome injury suffered by Vronsky's horse is presented in meticulous (if heightened Sir Walter Scottean) realism, gesturing gracefully, elusively to the inevitable tragedy bubbling up alongside their passion.

Gombrowicz, in contrast, conjures up the realist tableau only to destroy it, obsessively continuing the process of framing and reframing, rejecting any naturalness that might have been present in the connection between the event and the its signification/interpretation. Take the opening scene from Pornografia (in Danuta Borchardt's recent translation), for example:

He was served tea, which he drank -- but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate, so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth -- but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand -- but withdrawing his hand was something even less justified -- so he reached for the sugar again and ate it -- but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as for the sake of behaving properly ... towards the sugar or towards us? ... and wishing to erase this impression, he coughed, and to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn't dare wipe his nose -- so he just moved his leg.

In this one-sentence scene, the narrator manages to overload a few insignificant actions with a pathological amount of significance and, in doing so, destabilizes the narrative project as such. The reader might follow along the first or second of the narrator's dogmatic interpretations of the tea-drinker's action, but it isn't long before we start to question the ability of this narrator to extrapolate truth from such trivial details (it is no coincidence, I think, that Borchardt's hardback boasts Milan Kundera's appraisal of Gombrowicz as "one of the greatest novelists of our century" -- Unbearablelightnessofbeingreliable Narrators Club!). And yet it is precisely because of the sheer ingenuity of this narrator to create the most bizarre analogies and metaphorical connections in the most mundane (and not-so-mundane, decidedly "literary") events that this novel is so incredibly seductive. If ever there was a text that embodied Bachelard's utopian aesthetic-psychoanalytic-phenomenological project, this would be it, but the kind of findings of this poetics of inner space are decidedly less refined or, uh, French.

In fact, in crafting this kind of fiction, I think Gombrowicz answers back to Bachelard's main fault: he points out how contaminated human consciousness is with all kind of literariness, with undigested chunks of other people's stories, or with our own desperate, pathological desire to cast ourselves in the role of director/author of the petty spectacle of our lives. By always having to express our thoughts not in primal images, but in an acquired language (even if what we're expressing is the primal image!), our experience of the world is inseparable from our experience of pre-narrated reality. And, with all due propers to Steven Pinker and the new gang fronting the "back to images" linguistic movement, I'd say that's one of the profoundest -- and scariest -- lessons that literature can teach us.