Book World: Michael Dirda reviews 'Pornografia' by Witold Gombrowicz

Certainly, the novel's two vampiristic debauchees desperately need their connection with childlike Henia and Karol -- who, it turns out, aren't quite as innocent as they seem. Karol admits that he would like to sleep with Henia's mother; Henia confesses that marriage will keep her from giving in to certain of her sexual inclinations. Following such revelations, Witold proclaims that he is virtually "bathing in their eroticism." The tacitly homosexual relationship of Witold and Fryderyk further intensifies the book's perfervid kinkiness.

In the middle of the novel, Gombrowicz starts to thicken the action: A character dies from a knife wound, under particularly disquieting circumstances. Then a hero of the Underground Army comes to hide out for a few days at the country estate, bringing increased danger to the household. Suddenly, death is in the air even more than sex, until Fryderyk sees a way in which murder may be added to his designs, providing a yet more potently delicious thrill.

Through its sado-masochistic material and its almost Henry Jamesian analyses of human motives, "Pornografia" underscores Gombrowicz's lifelong philosophical obsession: the quest for authenticity. In the novel, Fryderyk detects phoniness everywhere. As Gombrowicz noted in the preface to his play "The Marriage": "Each person deforms other persons, while being at the same time deformed by them." It is a grim view of human interaction. Only the young, who have not yet wholly succumbed to society's preexisting strictures, may still possess a kind of existential lightness and freedom. Hence, Gombrowicz's fascination with youth.

Gombrowicz's French publisher once summed up the author's personality as "irritating" but added that that quality was transmuted into work that was perennially "perturbing." Certainly, most readers will find "Pornografia" perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly. As Milosz once said of Gombrowicz: "He had no reverence whatsoever for literature. He derided it as a snobbish ritual, and if he practiced it, he attempted to get rid of all its accepted rules."

Perhaps not quite all of them. Gombrowicz did believe that "the primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems." That seems absolutely right. Whether you like his work or not, you can still understand why Milan Kundera called him "one of the great novelists of our century." "Pornografia" -- which follows Danuta Borchardt's earlier and now standard translations of "Ferdydurke" and "Cosmos" -- compels its reader to recognize the complexities of human psychology and the darkness at the heart of sexual desire.

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