| You think you’re going to experience something, and you may even actually experience it, but then suddenly you realize that you didn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t bother you at all. It doesn’t bother you that you can’t remember anything about what you didn’t experience and what you experienced. It doesn’t (...)
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| | Down Garwolińska to the end, then hang a right onto Makowska along the railroad tracks toward Olszynka. Sometimes all the way to the roundhouse. The street looked like a village road; on hot days it would be lined with guys sitting and drinking. Branches of fruit trees reached over the fences. (...)
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Janusz MargańskiGombrowicz - The Eternal Debutant
Excerpt
Virginity is in fact a parody of an eighteenth-century work by a French writer. The author of Memoirs initiates the parody as he enters into the strange polemics - what an anachronism! - that open the narrative monologue in Virginity.
There is nothing more artificial than the descriptions of young girls and the fanciful comparisons coined for the purpose. Lips like cherries, breasts like roses, oh, if it were enough to buy some fruit and flowers in a shop! And if the lips really tasted of ripe cherry, who would have the courage to make love? Who would be tempted by the caramel, the sweet kiss? But hush, enough, secret, let's not talk too much about lips (Bakajaj, p. 82).
Is this really about the taste and the style of the descriptions? Certainly not, or, at least, not only, since for the French pre-Romantics the Polish writer was alluding to, style was a manifestation of the spirit and/or an expression of the inner self, while for Gombrowicz, style determined the quality of existence on earth. The author of Memoirs never stopped repeating that "style is man", paraphrasing Buffon's thought in a fashionable existentialist context. He never forgot about taste, which, aside from the potential of boredom-curiosity, had a crucial influence on the aesthetic judgements of people as well as on their everyday behaviour. Gombrowicz ironically polemicises the style of passages describing girls' beauty, and this leads the reader directly to Bernard de Saint-Pierre, whose entire story he makes use of later. But for what purpose? After all, there is nothing more alien to Gombrowicz than description and sentimentalism. What could be the link between Virginity and the French writer's Etudes de la nature? As we know, the French sentimentalist enjoyed using figures, or rather, images of fauna. Following the assumptions of the new poetics, which rebelled both against the style of the Encyclopaedists and the luxury of the Rococo, he advocated, more emphatically than Jean Jacques Rousseau, the idea of a return to nature, in which he saw a remedy for the moral decline of the contemporary world. The natural metaphor is not only a figure in Saint-Pierre. Flowers, fruit, trees, and landscapes are indeed symbols of that highest of virtues, virginity, but they also form a unique garden which the author-gardener cultivates in order to prove the existence of God - nature is a metaphor for virginity only because it is virginal itself. Such is the interpretation he built into Paul and Virginia - the proof can be made by drawing "the argument from nature." In doing this, Saint-Pierre refers to and paraphrases The Song of Songs, a text used by the Fathers of the Church to support the dogma of virginity and the Brautsmistik theology.
Paul and Virginia is by no means only an apologetic work - it was interpreted as a defence and a glorification of faith only in its immediate historical context, the years preceding the French Revolution and then during the post-revolutionary crisis. In later times, the book was commonly perceived to be a didactic story for adolescent youth. It tells the story of a boy and a girl, both born of m
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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