I have just read Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. Gombrowicz writes in the introduction:
'Youth seemed to me the highest value of life. . . but this "value" has a particularity undoubtedly invented by the devil himself: being youth it is below the level of all values.'
" These last words ('below all values') explained why I have been unable to take root in any contemporary existentialism. Existentialism tries to re-establish value, while for me the 'undervalue', the 'insufficiency', the 'underdevelopment' are closer to man than any value. I believe the formula 'Man wants to be God' expresses very well the
nostalgia of existentialism, while I set up another immeasurable formula against it: 'Man wants to be young.'
The book is a meticulous observation of human motivation and a novel variation on the Faustian theme. The author and his artist friend, Frederick, spend a summer in the Polish countryside as guests of an old friend. Against a background of 1940s German-occupied Poland, the plot is propelled by the visitors' shared observation that their friend's daughter, Henia, and the boy she has grown up with, Karol, a peasant boy, are ideally and erotically suited to each other but somehow blissfully unaware of it. Indeed Henia is contentedly betrothed to another. It becomes the artists' obsession and project to bring Henia and Karol to awareness of their mutual erotic potential.
Pornografia is a prolonged meditation on the relations between youth and maturity, innocence and experience, power and authority. The writing style is simple and direct, a condition it shares with all the best metaphysical detective writers: Kafka, Hamsun, Dostoevsky.
There is also a film made in 2003 by Jan Kolski which I have seen and would recommend. Though it digresses in some ways from the book, it has integrity and is an assured production. A review somewhere has noted that the atmosphere of the film has a profound impact on a Polish audience who are closer to the specific political history and for whom the elemental, pastoral setting elicits nostalgic response.
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