Combining the natural & supernatural in crime fiction. Carl
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/books/review/20gordon.html?pagewanted=printNovember 20, 2005
'Cosmos,' by Witold Gombrowicz
The Plotlessness Thickens
By NEIL GORDON
A Polish student, seeking peace and quiet to study for his exams, and his
friend, desperately needing a vacation from his oppressive office job, leave the
city to board for a time with a rural family. Afflicted with anomie and a
strange laziness, Witold and Fuks don't suspect what's ahead. Little by little,
they find themselves drawn into a mystery hidden deep in the boarding house and
the pretty summer countryside. But it is a mystery - and they are detectives -
unlike any others.
The first sign of trouble is real enough: a sparrow is found hanging by the neck
on a wire in a tree, "its little head to one side, its beak wide open." The
second, while more troubling, is less clearly the work of a malefactor:
wandering alone in the garden that evening, Witold begins to think there's a
troubling connection between the sparrow and the "slithering," "slippery" lips
of two of the women in the house. "A tiresome game of tennis evolved, for the
sparrow sent me to the mouth, the mouth back to the sparrow, and I found myself
between the sparrow and the mouth, one hiding behind the other." The third sign
is even more tenuous: there is a line on the ceiling of Witold and Fuks's room
that may or may not resemble an arrow, pointing at something. Who put it there?
What might it mean? The two young men, increasingly worried, venture outside to
confer. "Did one of the windowpanes look at me with a human eye?" Witold
wonders. "It was conceivable that the one watching us was the same person who
sneaked into our room, most likely during the morning hours, and gouged the line
that created the arrow."
Lips, lines, arrows, sparrows. With the addition of these elements, the plot -
although it may be about absolutely nothing - seems to thicken. There is a
broken farm tool lying on a pile of rubbish in the door of the garden shed. Is
it pointing somewhere deliberately, like the arrow? Fuks finds the evidence
overwhelming: "There is a track where the wood scraps have been moved, as if the
whiffletree lay in a different position before."
So progresses the investigation in Witold Gombrowicz's sly, funny, absorbing
fourth novel, published in Polish in 1965 and lovingly translated by Danuta
Borchardt. The two neurotic detectives single-mindedly interrogate the meaning
of their surroundings, seeking in the most mundane objects and events the
solution to a mystery only they can see, their suspicions growing and growing
until we begin to fear for their sanity - or ours.
Writing in the online magazine Words Without Borders, Benjamin Paloff calls
Gombrowicz "probably the most important 20th-century novelist most Western
readers have never heard of." Praised by Sontag, Updike, Kundera, Sartre and
Milosz, he is the underdog in late modernism's literary competition - perhaps,
in part, because he left Poland in 1939, just before the German invasion, and
remained in exile in Argentina for the next 25 years. He died in France in 1969,
but since then his fiction and plays and his renowned three-volume diary have
stubbornly refused to be forgotten, not only in Poland but throughout the world.
Critics have tended to treat "Cosmos" as a fictional reflection on the nature of
meaning: a novel that asks whether we impose meaning on reality or discover it
there. Is something truly amiss in the lips, the tree, the sparrow? Or is their
portentous symbolism just a product of the nervous, erotic imagination of the
characters? But if Gombrowicz's 1937 novel, "Ferdydurke," can be called a
philosophical novel, then "Cosmos," published roughly 30 years later, strikes me
as a novel about language.
Whether or not there's any substance to Witold's suspicions is up to the reader
to decide. But each of the book's clues seems to have a linguistic counterpart:
the association of the sparrow with the women's lips is an example of metonymy,
and as for the various signs and arrows, there's surely a Ph.D. dissertation
somewhere documenting - correctly - how they add up to a virtual catalog of the
forms of deixis, the ways in which language relays spatial and directional
information. And that's no surprise. Throughout the book, there are faint
resonances of the intellectual prepossession with language that marked the era
when "Cosmos" was written: the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson,
semiotics, the echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of "linguistic relativity"
(which posits not consciousness but language itself as the human capacity that
creates and organizes reality).
I don't know whether Gombrowicz was deliberately playing with the intellectual
currents of his day or whether he was one of those seminal artists who give
voice to questions scholars will later rationalize. It doesn't really matter.
What's important is that the insight in these remarkable pages is creatively
captivating and intellectually challenging. Perhaps Gombrowicz's break-out
attempt from the Nietzschean "prison house of language," in which postmodernism
so blithely accepts its life sentence, feels a bit quaint today. But it's also
true that in the 40 years since "Cosmos" was published, no one has done any
better.
Neil Gordon is chairman of the writing program at Eugene Lang College of New
School University, literary editor of Boston Review and the author, most
recently, of a novel, "The Company You Keep."
