Book review: Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz.

Book review: Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Danuta Borchardt.

By war’s end in 1945, the Polish capital of Warsaw nearly had been obliterated from the face of the earth, first razed by the occupying Nazis, and then flattened by Soviet armies in the process of annihilating the retreating Germans. Poland would again rise from non-existence and take its place as a Soviet satellite, but not just yet.

Two years earlier, with the worst still yet to come, the situation was becoming grim for the capital’s arty urbanites. Two intellectuals languishing in Warsaw’s wartime malaise, with little to do apart from debating abstractions and drinking vodka, are offered the chance to perform an obscure errand (never explained), requiring them to leave the city and travel to the country estate of a provincial squire, whose bucolic days of regional pre-eminence also are ticking down.

After a sweaty, grinding train trip, they find themselves far removed from their familiar milieu, riding around in horse-drawn carts and observing, though not genuinely embracing, the time-honored, unchanged agricultural lifestyle. Rural Poland has yet to be touched directly by the war, although the tumult is keenly felt, contributing to a palpable sense of paranoia. Verily, things aren’t what they seem. Then again, they seemingly never are in works by Witold Gombrowicz, whose novel Cosmos I read in 2012.

Appropriately, Pornografia’s narrator also is named Witold Gombrowicz, and yet in this instance, truth is certifiably stranger than fiction. The real-life writer was far away at the time of the fictional story. He had boarded a cruise ship destined for South America just days prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and was unable to return after his country’s quick collapse, as it was dissolved and divided between the Nazis and Soviets. Abruptly stateless, Gombrowicz remained abroad, living in Argentina until 1963, and spending the remainder of his life in France.

Perhaps his personal experience with the surreal helps to explain the deep psychological issues inherent in novels such as Pornografia and Cosmos, where a thinly veiled collective delirium seems always to be simultaneously obscuring and exposing the motives of his characters.

In Cosmos, two city slickers visiting the sticks become fascinated with patterns of cracks running across a plaster ceiling, and are obsessed by conspiracy theories pertaining to their host family. Similarly, Pornografia’s two bored Warsaw escapees shift their attention to Henia, the 16-year-old daughter of the estate’s owners, and Karol, son of a neighbor and also 16, who is working on the farm again after an abortive stint (also never explained) in the resistance forces.

She’s a good looking girl, betrothed to an older lawyer from a nearby city. He’s a good looking boy, neither completely adolescent nor a full-fledged adult. They’re a fine couple, except they’re not; Karol and Henia have known each other since childhood, and are chums, though never before regarding one another romantically.

Fevered and voyeuristic, and with a dash of their own latent homoeroticism added for good measure, Witold and his friend Fryderyk convince themselves first that Henia and Karol belong with each other – not in spite of her fiancé Vaclav’s continual presence, but precisely because of it – and hatch an elaborate plan to choreograph the union.

With Fryderyk in the driver’s seat, constructing an ever-more elaborate web of instigation, the ensuing quasi-theatrical campaign becomes progressively creepier. But there is more to the teenagers than meets the eye of the visitors, who conclude that only by manipulating their youthful innocence can the interminable wartime muddle of the adults be made sensible -- except that the children turn out to have seen and experienced far more of the world than is immediately evident.

It only strengthens the Warsaw duo’s resolve, and the plot moves tautly toward a conclusion, one complicated by two unexpected developments.

If Witold Gombrowicz did not meet Rod Serling, he should have. The two could have discussed the razor’s edge of sanity, in the twilight zone, where reality and imagination meet … sometimes with palpable consequences.