Witold Gombrowicz: Cosmos

[Bjorn]

Two young men show up at a bed & breakfast in the Polish countryside. They've come there to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and have some peace and quiet, but it turns out to be anything but; not only do they find a macabre and mystifying corpse nearby, but the family they get to live with seems to have a lot of unresolved issues, which the two youngsters soon find themselves caught up in... and as always in these types of stories, somebody's going to die before it's all over.

Cosmos, like all detective novels, is all about finding the clues. Clues being that which deviates from what we perceive to be the norm; the "C'est un cauchemar!" spoken in the wrong language, the mysterious blue key on the table, the rake moved to point at the servant's window. So our hero and narrator Witold and his friend start to gather evidence. But how, in a world they don't know, surrounded by people they don't know, are they supposed to know what are actual clues and what is normal? In trying to find out what things mean, at what point do they go from observing to concluding to ascribing?

The defining ability of mankind is not our sense of humour, or our love, or our hate, or our ability to use tools; animals can do all of that, in one way or another. What we can do, what only we can do, is to try and figure out meaning, to make sense. We (supposedly) understand intricate chains of cause-and-effect, we (supposedly) understand symbolism, we (supposedly) understand how context matters... and even when we get it wrong, even when there is no sense, we can make it. We look at a bunch of stars that are hundreds of light years apart and call them a constellation; we look at an abstract painting and call it a portrait; we look at a bunch of possibly related lives and call them a plot. Where there is no causal relationship, we'll invent one ? thereby becoming both cause and effect ourselves.

...As you may gather, Cosmos is not your typical detective story. The obsession with the tiniest details is similar to another novel I read recently, Le Clezio's Terra Amata, but the difference couldn't be more drastic; where Le Clezio's protagonist sees only beauty and harmony in the great jumble of existence, Gombrowicz's sees perversion, deviance and taboo in everything that doesn't fit his picture of what's normal; and being a good catholic, he's both repulsed and attracted, ashamed and excited by it. It's not an easy read; it's confusing, with a narrator who at times is verging on either stream-of-consciousness or full-on paranoia, another main character who speaks complete nonsense half the time, and those looking for a straight A to Z plot are advised to stay away. As darkly humorous as Gombrowicz always is, the narrator gets on my nerves a bit after a while. Not a lot, but a little bit.

And yet somehow, Cosmos is a detective story. A surreal, nightmarish, perverted detective story, but a detective story nonetheless in both plot and form. (Then again, so is Crime And Punishment.) And like all great detective stories (and opposed to the vast majority of them) it goes much further than that; in trying to ferret out the cause and effect of what's going on, it's a perfect analogy for modern man trying to find his way in an ever more confusing world. Find the killer, save the damsel, save the world, figure out how everything works, live happily ever after. And so, the one place where Cosmos deviates (heh) from the norm is in its perception of whether that is at all possible. The traditional detective story tries to create order from chaos; take a number of seemingly unrelated clues, and then use your little grey cells to piece them all together into a watertight cause-and-effect narration of what happened; the killer is caught, the deviant object is removed and order is restored. The story has a clear beginning and a clear end. Except Gombrowicz won't play that game; he can't see one clear meaning, one clear plot rising from chaos - you can't return to normalcy since there was never any normalcy to begin with. In trying to solve one mystery, bring order to one seemingly chaotic chain of events, the detective has just created new mysteries, uncovered new deviations. At some point, the deviation becomes the norm; as Frank Zappa once said, "anything played wrong twice in a row is a new arrangement".

It's a hell of a novel. It gives me a headache, and I'm actually not sure I enjoyed it all that much, but it's certainly a thinker. Much like Witold, your experience of it will probably depend on what you bring into it and how much you're willing to work. It's a novel that makes you doubt your own reading of it, and that can only be a good thing.

"I accept chaos. I hope it accepts me." - B. Dylan

[jackdawdle]

Wye told Jahm bro wick, am I remotely close to it's correct pronunciation?

[Bjorn]

Not really. According to this, it's VEE-told GOM-bro-vich - which sounds about right according to a friend who lives in Poland.

[jackdawdle]

Yes, but what does Bjorn say?

[Colette Jones]

Bjorn, did you read this in translation, and if so, which one? I couldn't make much sense out of the book and ended up completely frustrated by it. I wonder if I would have fared better with the translation by Danuta Borchardt. Perhaps not, but one can hope.

[Bjorn]

Bjorn, did you read this in translation, and if so, which one? I couldn't make much sense out of the book and ended up completely frustrated by it. I wonder if I would have fared better with the translation by Danuta Borchardt. Perhaps not, but one can hope.

I read it in the Swedish translation, which doesn't help you much I guess... But I've heard good things about Borchardt's translation, which is supposedly the only translation of Cosmos directly from Polish to English. That said, it is a bit frustrating at times.

[jackdawdle]

Bjorn,

My compliments on the review, and not the first one deserving of my stamp of approval (lol), I might add.

Best regards,
Jack Dawdle

[Eric]

Yes, thanks for the review, Bj?rn. It's years since I read that novel. I've got it in Dutch, Polish and French, so there no excuse for not re-reading it, bar time. The Dutch cover makes it very clear what kind of corpse is being talked about. I found it odd, from what I remember, neither brilliant nor bad. Middling. Isn't that the novel with the maid's mouth?

*

Just to be utterly pedantic about the pronunciation, Polish words, including names, are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, with extremely few exceptions. And a voiced consonant becomes voiceless at the end of a word. So the name is pronounced (using Bj?rn's phonetics; the "-oh" is to indicate an "o" as in "tot" not in "tote"):

VEE-tolt gom-BROH-veech

So you also have the phonetics of a few Polish authors we've discussed: veet-KYEH-veech / veet-KAT-si, ee-vash-KYEH-veech, khoh-roh-MAN-skee, kon-VEET-skee, shim-BORR-ska, HERR-bert, roo-ZHEH-veech, meets-KYEH-veech (not: Micky Witch), LESH-myan, swoh-VATS-kee, NORR-veet, and the pre-Ratzinger pontiff and playwright: KAR-ol voy-TY-wa. (If there's a stroke through the "L", it becomes an English double-u sound, a "w".)

You will note that a Polish "y" is roughly and English "i" as in "pit" or "bit", while a Polish "i" is more or less an English "ee"-sound as in "free" or "tea".

[adaorardor]

Yes, thanks for the review, Bj?rn. It's years since I read that novel. I've got it in Dutch, Polish and French, so there no excuse for not re-reading it, bar time. The Dutch cover makes it very clear what kind of corpse is being talked about. I found it odd, from what I remember, neither brilliant nor bad. Middling. Isn't that the novel with the maid's mouth?

*

Just to be utterly pedantic about the pronunciation, Polish words, including names, are always stressed on the penultimate syllable, with extremely few exceptions. And a voiced consonant becomes voiceless at the end of a word. So the name is pronounced (using Bj?rn's phonetics; the "-oh" is to indicate an "o" as in "tot" not in "tote"):

VEE-tolt gom-BROH-veech

So you also have the phonetics of a few Polish authors we've discussed: veet-KYEH-veech / veet-KAT-si, ee-vash-KYEH-veech, khoh-roh-MAN-skee, kon-VEET-skee, shim-BORR-ska, HERR-bert, roo-ZHEH-veech, meets-KYEH-veech (not: Micky Witch), LESH-myan, swoh-VATS-kee, NORR-veet, and the pre-Ratzinger pontiff and playwright: KAR-ol voy-TY-wa. (If there's a stroke through the "L", it becomes an English double-u sound, a "w".)

You will note that a Polish "y" is roughly and English "i" as in "pit" or "bit", while a Polish "i" is more or less an English "ee"-sound as in "free" or "tea".

How do you pronounce Teodor Parnicki and Adam Zagajewski?

[Eric]

TAY-oh-dor par-NEET-skee [note the pen-penultimate stress of Teodor]

ADD-am za-ga-YEFF-skee

Names mostly follow the rules. Another little thing to know is that a Polish "c" is a "ts" sound. If it has an accent, or appears before an "i" it is pronounced "ch". And "cz" is "ch"; "sz" is "sh" and "rz" is "zh". I can't go into all the subtleties, but a rule of thumb is better than saying "par-nicky" and "zagger-jewsky", which sound rather comical.

Unfortunately, I can't write most Polish accents (e.g. "n-acute", "L with a line through it") on this keyboard. But anyway, I lived for a year in Krak?w, so I think I get the pronunciation right most of the time. A few more to be getting on with, painters, playwrights, film, novelists, etc:

Tadeusz Kantor [tad-AY-oosh KANN-tor]; Stanislaw Wyspianski [sta-NEE-swaff viss-PYAN-skee]; Jerzy Andrzejewski [YEZH-i ann-dzheh-YEFF-skee]; Krzysztof Kieslowski [KSHISH-toff kyesh-LOFF-skee]; Julian Tuwim [YOOL-yan TOO-veem]; Zofia Nalkowska [zoh-FEE-ya nau-KOFF-ska]; Jan J?zef Szczepanski [YAN YOO-zef shche-PANN-skee]; Czeslaw Milosz [CHESS-waff MEE-wosh].

You get the picture. Just because you've got lots of zeds (American: zees), this doesn't make words completely unpronounceable. Though there are few tongue-twisters, like bumble-bee, "pszczola" [PSHCHOH-wa], and mercury (i.e. quicksilver), which is "rtec" [RTENCH]. The word for nonsense is "bzdura" [BZDOO-ra].

[Heteronym]

Kosmos is very much like Pornografia, which I read just before. It?s another novel about creating madness out of nothing. Except in this novel the protagonists aren?t trying to play mind games with innocent people, but are victims of their own delusions.

Witold and Fuchs are two travelers who are trying to escape problems back home: Witold hates his family, whereas poor Fuchs can?t work at the office anymore because his presence drives his boss sick for no reason. One day they find a hanged sparrow: they find this mysterious and try to understand it; they take rooms in a pension nearby. Shortly after they discover a piece of wood suspended from a wire, ominously similar to the hanged sparrow. And then they think they see arrows drawn on walls. From here things just become weird.

There?s no point trying to explain the plot because this is one of those novels that don?t operate on reality but just on the mental plane. The novel is narrated by Witold, who?s probably insane for trying to find a meaning between a sparrow and a piece of wood. Later on he strangles a cat and leaves him hanging too; why? He can?t explain; it becomes another piece for Fuchs to integrate in the puzzle. To complete the circle of weird coincidences, a man hangs himself at the end.

What I really loved about the novel is Witold?s narrative voice: fixated on the same word and concepts, perversely humorous, paranoid. This was a quality that was present in Pornografia too, the way things are narrated and not the events themselves, which are mundane and forgettable, and for those reasons become absurd and terrifying because of the importance he gives them. I think the author came very close to describing the way the mind of a mad man really works, better than anything noble precursors like Poe or Lautr?amont did.

Gombrowicz described this novel as a detective novel; he said detective novels, like Kosmos, concerned themselves with the perception of reality, with the way people build reality. But I?d say this was an anti-detective novel, more like Michaelangelo Antonioni?s movie Blowup. It?s a text that creates a mystery out of nothing and not only does it not give the clues to solve it, it suggests there?s nothing to solve at all.

But beware, this novel was intellectually exhausting. I read two Gombrowicz novels back-to-back and don?t think I have the strength to read another one in a long time. A novel hadn?t taken me to the limit of my patience like this in a long time.

[Heteronym]

The defining ability of mankind is not our sense of humour

Ah, but it's through humor, or absurd, that Gombrowicz narrates this story. The narrator's voice is steeped in nonsense, sarcasm, irony, frivolity. Even when the voice displays despair and terror, it's always tinged with lack of seriousness.

...another main character who speaks complete nonsense half the time...

Berg!

It's a hell of a novel. It gives me a headache, and I'm actually not sure I enjoyed it all that much, but it's certainly a thinker.

That's how I felt about it. I felt proud for finishing it because it was challenging, but I don't think I'd like to read Gombrowicz again in a near future.