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32 Chapter Two Ferdydurke as Exemplary Symptomatology of and Resistance to (Polish) Modernity Ferdydurke and the problem of form Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke, presents a demonic world of immaturity which, like the earlier novels by Witkacy such as Insatiability, is clearly also a symptomatology of modernity, interweaving philosophical speculations with parodic black humor and eroticism. Ferdydurke consists of a reverse initiation from adulthood into the world of adolescence and immaturity and hence constitutes a profound complication of the linear narrative of the Bildungsroman. Its difference from Witkacy's modernist aesthetics is most clearly apparent in its treatment of form. Any modernist or purely aesthetic account of form such as Wikacy's pure form is precisely what is absent from Ferdydurke. In the world of Ferdydurke there is neither pure form nor any transcendent realm in which it could operate. Instead, form is grasped as an event that is entirely immanent to life and hence subject to unforeseeable contingencies that subvert any possible purity or transcendence. Rather than limiting the scope of the concept of form, this immanence greatly expands its operations. In the world of Ferdydurke form pervades every aspect of life and is only secondarily applied to the cultural realm of works of art. This does not mean that form loses all connection to either aesthetics or transcendence; rather it is seen as an aestheticization process, or an attempt to apply aesthetic transcendence to all areas of experience. Form is therefore a pseudo-transcendence, but one that has real effects. By reconceptualizing form in this way, Gombrowicz was able to extend Witkacy's symptomatology of modernity in terms of the insatiability for pure form into an analysis of the productivity of form itself. For Gombrowicz, form is a paradoxical concept that, instead of giving rise to a unidirectional desire for transcendence , leads to irresolvable contradictions. The other term in relation to form is immaturity, which is not so much the opposite of form as its outside. The antinomy between these two concepts gives rise not only to desires for form but also for an escape from form into immaturity, as two competing and interwoven tendencies To Ferdydurke as Exemplary Symptomatology of and Resistance to Modernity 33 characterize modernity only in terms of its form, or the desire for form is, for Gombrowicz , an aestheticizing, static account of contemporary life that misses the contrary tendency towards the unformed and the immature. The novel Ferdydurke is precisely a demonstration of this antinomy between form and immaturity. However, the novel is neither the arid demonstration of a conceptual schema, nor simply a narrative that develops in an imaginary world. Rather, the work is composed as an allegory of modernity, a machine that puts the concepts of form and immaturity into what Deleuze and Guattari call a machinic assemblage. An assemblage is a constellation of practices, concepts, or events that together form a nontotalized multiplicity. What differentiates an assemblage from a structure, or the machinic from the mechanical, is that an assemblage is a process of production, a spatio-temporal becoming, rather than a static state of affairs. In other words, an assemblage is an autopoietic set of shifting, virtual relations rather than the static actualization of these relations at a particular point in time. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define how a book can be an assemblage in the following terms: "In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. . . . All this . . . constitutes an assemblage" (3-4). While the concept of the machinic assemblage can be applied to works of literature in general, Ferdydurke takes this machinism to a very radical and productive level. With Ferdydurke, the distinctions between the fictional and the nonfictional, as well as the real and the imaginary, are not merely challenged but completely dismantled . The very composition of Ferdydurke as the mutual interference of multiple narratives breaks down any closure of the novel as a conventional, autonomous work of art and connects it up directly with external forces, social transformations, and becomings . It is this autopoietic composition or assemblage that will be examined next as a framework for reading the various parts of the novel in terms of the problematics of form and immaturity. The composition of Ferdydurke as machinic assemblage To account for the composition rather than the structure of Ferdydurke necessitates a critical engagement with Berressem's work on Gombrowicz, Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz...

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