Gombrowicz and Masks

Well, gentle readers - if there are any of you out there - it appears that there is no reaction to Christmas. Perhaps it's been around so long that it has become something like a Wednesday, so prosaic that it gets no more reaction that a door, the ground, or your finger nail.

So we are on to another topic. Let's turn to Witold Gombrowicz, who has little to say about Christmas, but lots to say about many many other things. Gombrowicz is a Polish writer of novels, short stories, plays, and essays. He grew up in Poland, but spent most of the second part of his life, from 1939 onward (he was actually on a Polish cruise ship when Poland was invated by Germany) as a Polish ex-pat, who lived in Argentina, Germany, and Italy, where he died in 1969. His best known novels are Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, and Cosmos. Big Frank isn't going to attempt to any far reaching coverage of Gombrowicz - the web has lots of sites where you can get a better version than what Big Frank could provide. Big Frank, however, has been struck by one theme of Gombrowicz's that bears some examination: his concept of the immature and mature self and the masks of man.

The following passage is taken from his Diaries:

By virtue of the fact that I am always "for another", counting on someone else seeing me, being able to exist in a specific manner only for someone else, and by someone else, and existing - as a form - only through another. . . Why my man is created from the outside, that is he is inauthentic in essence - he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His "I" therefore is marked for him in that "interhumanity". An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn - it makes up a feature of his humanity - to be a man means to be an actor - to be a man means to pretend to be a man - to be a man means to "act like" a man, while not being one deep inside - to be a man is to recite humanity.

Gombrowicz called the man with the mask the mature man; and what was hidden - the truthful core of man - he called immature. All of culture and convention supported the mask and hid the truth, which led man to superimpose that mask on his inner self. The way out? He puts it this way:

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act. Action will delineate and define you. You will find out from your actions. But you must act as an “I,” as an individual, because you can be certain only of your own needs, inclinations, passions, necessities. Only this kind of action is direct and is a genuine extricating of yourself from chaos, self-creation. As for the rest: isn’t it mere recitation, execution of a preordained plan, rubbish, kitsch?

In this way a certain hidden truth can emerge. He also believes that man can create his kind of "subculture" out of certain "immature myths" and "inadmissible passions". For him this is poetic and beautiful.

Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly, for his own usage, a sort of “subculture”: a world made out of the refuse of a higher world of culture, a domain of trash, immature myths, inadmissible passions . . . a secondary domain of compensation. That is where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty . . .