"Nothing but face" - "To hell with philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the scandal of human countenance

6 In the introduction to Pornografia, Gombrowicz writes, "Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly [. . .] a secondary domain of compensation" (8).

7 A parallel moment, for instance, occurs in Diary, volume 2: "I was walking along a eucalyptus-lined avenue when a cow sauntered out from behind a tree. I stopped and we looked each other in the eye. Her cowness shocked my humanness to such a degree - the moment our eyes met was so tense - I stopped dead in my tracks and lost my bearings as a man, that is, as a member of the human species. The strange feeling that I was apparently discovering for the first time was the shame of a man come face-to-face with an animal. I allowed here to look and see me - this made us equal - and resulted in my also becoming an animal but a strange even forbidden one, I would say. I continued my walk, but I felt uncomfortable [. . .] in nature, surrounding me on all sides, as if it were [. . .] watching me" (24). The volume closes with an extended episode (231-239) that contains the following: "Face to face. Alone. Hand to Hand. Foot to foot. Knee to knee. Face to face. Until this stupid identity begins to irritate me in the room, and I think, how is it that he repeats me, that I repeat him, face to face" (231).

8 See also Diary 1, 181-187. In A Kind of Testament, Gombrowicz makes similar claims about structuralism: "Yes I am a structuralist just as I am an existentialist. I am bound to structuralism by my approach to Form. Of course the human personality, which I believe is created 'between men,' in the human context which defines a system of dependencies by no means dissimilar to a 'structure.' In what I wrote before the war you will find expressions which have now been incorporated by the structuralists" (152). In Diary, volume 3, he says irascibly, "and please replace the word form with structuralism and you will see me at the center of today's French intellectual issues" (182).

9 The provenance of the face trope in Levinas is probably dual, appearing conspicuously at the end of Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, a work that influenced Levinas deeply, but also saturating the Biblical and Rabbinic texts that undergird much of Levinas's philosophy. In Hebrew, the word for face also means presence or selfhood, and it appears in numerous scenes of encounter in the Pentateuch. As Moses "hides his face" from God on Sinai in Exodus 10, for example, so God's answering threat of absence from the plane of human events is called hister panim - the hiding of face - in Deuteronomy. Though not particularly Levinasian, perhaps most relevant in the light of Gombrowicz's fiction may be the verses in Genesis 31:2, "And Jacob saw that Laban's face was not with him, as it had been in the best," and 31:5, "Laban's face is not to me as it was previously." As Avivah Zornberg brilliantly reads them in her The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, "Laban's face is part of Jacob's world; he carries its impress, its changing looks around with him." She adduces a homiletic gloss on a related Talmudic passage (Berakhot 6b) that centers on the self-consciousness induced by the gaze of others: "one who is too much affected by other's faces finds his own face turning all colors, blushing and paling in response to their changing expressions." (206)