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

20 In his "Open Letter to Bruno Schulz" from two years earlier, Gombrowicz accuses his compatriot of a mandarin facade that remains opaque to the common reader ("the doctor's wife"), exhorting him at the end to "show us this expression on your face, give us one look at it, how gentle Bruno shakes off the opinion of the doctor's wife from Line 18" (Schulz, Letters 119). Schulz's riposte was witty and unafraid, and certainly places Gombrowicz's assessment of him there and in his Diary in a different light. Two years after this exchange, Schulz published a review of Ferdydurke in the journal Skamander in 1938, which, to use Gombrowicz's terms, reflects almost undistilled "symbiosis." One of its organizing metaphors, however, is telling: "Both the troubles, the misfortunes, and the puns of form, and the torture of man on form's Procrustean bed, excite and move him passionately. But how meager and dry, how poor is the skeleton of those problems lifted out of the living organism of the novel Ferdydurke. It is scarcely one cross-section of the living, whirling bulk of its body, hardly one of the thousand aspects of this thousand-faceted creature. Here we finally encounter a natural, first-hand mind that has not been stuffed full of ready-made ideas. Whenever we lay our hands on the flesh of this work, we feel a powerful musculature of thought, muscles, and sinews of an athletic anatomy that needs no artificial padding. This book bursts from an abundance of ideas, overflows with creative and destructive energy." The same somatic conceit concludes the piece, reproving criticism in its clinical impropriety: "Yet how much must the work, through this sort of stripping and medical prepping of the bare skeleton suffer damage to its unlimited perspective [. . .] that bestows on Gombrowicz's ideas the value of a microcosmos, the value of a universal model of the world and life!" (Letters 163-64).

21 Which is to say of the prose's sexual energies, that, unlike Gombrowicz's, there is no friction. It is worth pursuing the question of eros as a differentiating category for these two writers, say, along lines suggested by Barthes's distinction between texts of plaisir and those of jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text. If texts of pleasure can be linked to a "comfortable practice of reading," and texts of bliss to "a state of loss" or discomfort (14), Gombrowicz and Schulz might be thought of, likewise, in terms of the text that chafes or abrades on the one hand, and the text that slides and slips away on the other.

22 "He was a fanatic of art, its slave. He entered this cloister and submitted to its rigors, carrying out its strictest injunctions with great humility in order to attain perfection. [. . .] Falling to his knees before the Spirit, he experienced sensual pleasure. He wanted to be a servant, nothing more. He craved nonexistence" (7).

23 See Peter Sloterdijk's highly Gombrowiczian Critique of Cynical Reason, especially the section "Pyschosomatics of the Zeitgeist" and its first chapter, "Physiognomic Main Text." I thank Felicia Steele for discussions about Gombrowicz in this regard.