Improvisation with a Corpse: The Theater of Witold Gombrowicz Enters the Twenty-First Century

Figure 1.

Gombrowicz with his wife Rita and Maria Paczowska, 1966. Photo: Bohdan Paczowski

The totality of Witold Gombrowicz's life and theatrical work can be grasped only through multiple perspectives—one must see the road ahead and look in the rearview mirror at the same time. This has always been true but is especially apparent in the midst of the Gombrowicz centennial year in 2004. Gombrowicz was a playwright and the consummate writer's writer. He lived in Poland for the first half of his life and as an émigré for the rest. His plays consistently waited decades for their first professional productions, yet his theatrical talent was always ultimately vindicated in performance. He wrote his four plays in Polish, but they were often first published and performed in foreign languages—or published in Polish in a foreign country and smuggled back home. Gombrowicz is thus inevitably an icon of the Polish theater, but his fame as a playwright was established by productions outside of Poland. His acknowledged muses as a playwright were both classical (Shakespeare, Goethe) and avant-garde (Alfred Jarry). He never acknowledged any Poles.

Nevertheless, in today's Poland he is considered a definitive twentieth-century writer by the country's theatrical and literary culture. Alongside successful eVorts to launch his plays in classical repertory companies, Gombrowicz's writing has always circulated in bohemian, "oV" theatrical and literary milieus—with great benefit to his later fame.

When we look in the rearview mirror, there is a complicated landscape. We see Poland, Argentina, and Western Europe; we don't see much of the English-speaking world. This year's Gombrowicz centenary, in the first decade of a new century and millennium, raises questions about whether he will have a future in the English-language theater. What opportunities does he bring to this most stubborn of cultural frontiers—and what contributions can we bring to the already venerable history of Gombrowicz in performance in Poland and the rest of Europe?

Gombrowicz's biography deeply informs his work and has acquired a certain legendary character. He was born a child of privilege to a prosperous upper-class family in Russian Poland in 1904, received an excellent education in Polish and French, played tennis and chess, studied law, and eventually inherited enough wealth to devote himself exclusively to writing in the late 1930s. He was born into a conventionally Roman Catholic but politically progressive family with ties to the Polish Socialist Party. He circulated socially in high artistic society in prewar Warsaw, where he published his earliest works, including a collection of short stories, his celebrated first novel Ferdydurke (1938), and his play Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (the same year). He was already an agnostic, a pacifist, a self-styled literary dandy and provocateur, and he enjoyed excellent relations with the assimilated Jews of Warsaw's artistic cafés. In the summer of 1939, he accepted an invitation to travel to Buenos Aires as a minor celebrity on the maiden voyage of a new Polish luxury liner.

Shortly after the ship docked in Buenos Aires, the Germans invaded Poland and World War II began. In contrast to his fellow passengers, Gombrowicz fatefully opted to stay in Argentina rather than attempt to return to Europe. Three weeks later Poland surrendered and he became a displaced person, oYcially stateless when the Polish embassy was shuttered. He spoke no Spanish, had only one distant relative in Argentina, and very little money. He lived in Argentina for twenty-four years, at times in dire poverty, but this period nevertheless proved immensely fertile artistically. He never returned to Poland or saw his immediate family again. During the war, one of Gombrowicz's brothers fled to Romania and the other barely survived the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was interned with his young son. After the war, the family was completely dispossessed by Poland's communist rulers. It was at this point in 1944 that Gombrowicz began his play The Marriage, which he...