Witold Gombrowicz affirme dans Kronos, le journal plus intime que Journal, écrit en 1955 mais publié en 2016 chez Stock, « Je n’écris rien ». N’écrire « rien » n’est pas une provocation conceptuelle, ...c’est vouloir secrètement faire tomber les masques, dévoiler son vrai visage, se mettre à nu. Dans ce journal classé X, la littérature est écriture, une matière sans artifice, accessible à qui veut bien le lire. C’est aussi un texte essentiel, touchant, parfois dérangeant, créant indiscutablement du lien avec le lecteur, que celui-ci soit séduit ou choqué, dans lequel l’auteur s’autorise à tout dire, à déconstruire la langue et les formes, à palper l’impertinence et fait émerger un anti-héros inachevé, égal à l’homme ordinaire contemporain. In Witold Gombrowicz’s Kronos, a more intimate diary than his Journal, written in 1955 but published in 2016 by Stock, the author claims “I write nothing”. Writing “nothing” is not a conceptual provocation. Rather, it means secretly wanting to drop his masks, to reveal his true face, to strip bare. In this X-rated diary, literature is writing, a material without artifice, accessible to whoever is willing to read it. It is also an essential, touching and sometimes disturbing text, a text that creates an unquestionable link with the reader, whether they are seduced or shocked; a text in which the writer allows himself to say everything, to deconstruct language and forms, to touch on impertinence and develop an unfinished anti-hero, the same as the ordinary contemporary man.
Witold Gombrowicz affirme dans Kronos, le journal plus intime que Journal, écrit en 1955 mais publié en 2016 chez Stock, « Je n’écris rien ». N’écrire « rien » n’est pas une provocation conceptuelle, ...c’est vouloir secrètement faire tomber les masques, dévoiler son vrai visage, se mettre à nu. Dans ce journal classé X, la littérature est écriture, une matière sans artifice, accessible à qui veut bien le lire. C’est aussi un texte essentiel, touchant, parfois dérangeant, créant indiscutablement du lien avec le lecteur, que celui-ci soit séduit ou choqué, dans lequel l’auteur s’autorise à tout dire, à déconstruire la langue et les formes, à palper l’impertinence et fait émerger un anti-héros inachevé, égal à l’homme ordinaire contemporain. In Witold Gombrowicz’s Kronos, a more intimate diary than his Journal, written in 1955 but published in 2016 by Stock, the author claims “I write nothing”. Writing “nothing” is not a conceptual provocation. Rather, it means secretly wanting to drop his masks, to reveal his true face, to strip bare. In this X-rated diary, literature is writing, a material without artifice, accessible to whoever is willing to read it. It is also an essential, touching and sometimes disturbing text, a text that creates an unquestionable link with the reader, whether they are seduced or shocked; a text in which the writer allows himself to say everything, to deconstruct language and forms, to touch on impertinence and develop an unfinished anti-hero, the same as the ordinary contemporary man.
In 1964, Sudamericana Publishing House printed in Buenos Aires the second edition of the Spanish version of the novel
Ferdydurke
(1937) by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Apparently, it was ...identical to the first publication in Spanish (by Argos Publishing House, Buenos Aires, 1947); however, the text had been extensively revised according to Ernesto Sabato’s indications. Furthermore, a new prologue written by Sabato substituted the previous initials materials. This article documents and explains how this revision, the new prologue, the decision to publish in Sudamericana, and the publicity given to the book were conscious decisions either by Gombrowicz or by Sabato in search of editorial success. Their final goal was to place the novel and its author in a visible and privileged place in the Argentine and Spanish-speaking literary system. The study also focuses on the textual differences between
Ferdydurke
’s first and second Spanish editions: it tries to explain how and why specific changes were made and the implications of these changes.
Maturity and immaturity are the hallmarks of Witold Gombrowicz’s literary texts. They were introduced in his first novel, Ferdydurke, and an early collection of short stories, Memoirs from a Time of ...Immaturity, and continued to play a central role in his fiction and nonfiction works, including the Diary, A Kind of Testament, and the penultimate novel, Pornografia. Although Gombrowicz has been widely regarded as a staunch critic of maturity and defender of immature spontaneity, playfulness, and formlessness, this view is largely based on his earlier writings. Later works offer a more complex image of Gombrowicz. Pornografia, in particular, no longer pits immaturity against maturity with the goal of discrediting the latter through humor and irony. Instead, it experiments with the possibility of a new relationship between the two, a relationship which would ameliorate the discontents that often come with aging.
My aim is to contextualise and reflect on the ambivalences of Gombrowicz’s view of the interwar Polish Jews both in his satirical short story The Brief Memoir of Jakób Czarniecki (1933), focused on ...the mechanisms of the exclusion of Jews from the Polish society, as well in his later controversial declarations in The Diary and in Polish Memories. During the interwar period, assimilated Jews represented a significant part of Polish cultural life: Gombrowicz’s colleagues, reviewers, readers, friends, and his publisher were Jews. The Polish writer was linked with the assimilated creative intelligentsia by a dynamic of enchantment and disenchantment: on the one hand, he observed its typical neurosis of mimicking the Gentiles; on the other hand, he esteemed Jews’ open-mindedness and creativity, considering them as potential allies in this fight against the Polish Form. My hypothesis is that deep penetration of Jewishness into 20th-century Polish culture and society offered Gombrowicz some living models not only for Czarniecki’s story but also for his philosophy of Form.
I borrow part of the title of my paper from Susan Sontag. In 2003, a year before her death, Susan Sontag published an essay entitled Regarding the Pain of Others. There she takes up the subject of ...the moral significance of presenting the views of war, violent human death exposed to the lenses of cameras. Her approach to the contemporary issue of mediatisation through the image of the sight of human suffering provokes a question: Do we need teleethics today, the ethics of remote moral relations? Using the method of comparative analysis in the area of cultural determinants of ethics, I draw attention to the contemporary challenges that the culture of late modernity imposes on the morality of everyday life. My thesis is this: The images of human suffering provided by the media reveal the imperfection of our morality. As moral subjects, we are not prepared to respond to the suffering of human beings absent from face-to-face relationships. So, we need teleethics. The paper is devoted to this issue.
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