-
Up Front: Importing Gombrowicz
- Theater
- Duke University Press
- Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2004
- pp. vi,1-3
- Article
- Additional Information
Theater 34.3 (2004) vi, 1-3
[Access article in PDF]
Up Front
Importing Gombrowicz
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Witold Gombrowicz. Photo: Bohdan Paczowski |
The standard American repertory has so many blind spots when it comes to other national literary traditions that it's easy to stop noticing them, let alone challenge or counter them. But at a moment in history when the United States stands in unprecedented political and cultural isolation, any project expanding cultural boundaries has an added vitality.
If this year's international centenary observing Witold Gombrowicz's life and oeuvre does nothing else in the American theater, it will point out that a major modern European dramatist—one of the most frequently produced twentieth-century playwrights in Europe, whose work has nourished the aesthetic development of directors as different as Tadeusz Kantor and Ingmar Bergman—has been largely absent from U.S. stages. (Allen Kuharski cites some notable exceptions elsewhere in this issue, most of them successes and a disproportionate number by young companies.) Among the reasons for this omission, even from the most serious repertory theaters, are the usual practical ones—prohibitive cast sizes, editions out of print, and a lack of up-to-date actable [End Page ix] translations. But they are also cultural: Gombrowicz's wordy insolence, his reflexive contempt for authority figures, his scorn for social and intellectual convention of any kind—what he calls "form"—all fall out of step with the complacence and conformity creeping into American theater and life in general. In the struggle within and against received ideas and prescribed social "roles," Gombrowicz found humor as well as danger—a contradiction made especially palpable on stage.
It's an irony of history that Gombrowicz would need to be re-imported to the New World, since he spent a large portion of his life in Argentinean exile and trans-Atlantic currents churn through his subsequent writings. Gombrowicz, a contrarian by nature, loved to define himself through contradiction. A bisexual, anticlerical Catholic Pole from a privileged background, he rejected the world of codified behavior, embraced immaturity, and sought a kind of "perpetual adolescence" leaving the future open, not fixed. As Czesław Miłosz writes in his History of Polish Literature, Gombrowicz's fascination with immaturity is part of his larger "chase after authenticity," since "an adolescent is a set of contradictions which may be envisaged as possibilities; he can take one or another form" as an adult. Acting a role, or staging a play, becomes another—perhaps the ultimate—experiment with possibility. [End Page x]
While living in France at the end of his life, the author wondered: "Will my former revolt sow a seed in someone else's youthful and triumphant imagination? I don't know." After a hundred years of responses from some of the most important stage artists, we can safely answer in the affirmative. The next century of American theater artists would do well to build on Gombrowicz's contention that, in a tormenting world where everyone is lying, "to contradict, even on little things, is the supreme necessity of art today."
—Tom Sellar
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to those (in addition to our contributors) whose generous time and resources facilitated this issue: Paweł Potoroczyn and the Polish Cultural Institute of New York, and Monika Talar and the staff of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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