I would propose that the locus where the fantastic and the Other from the Chinese encyclopedia meet or coincide is in the immaterial sound of the narrative voice, in the nonplace of language that could be theorized as the space of heterotopia. Cosmos constitutes Gombrowicz’s final episode in the construction of such a symbolic zone.

The Poetics of (Subjective) Failure

What, then, is Gombrowicz’s Cosmos? While stylistically and thematically the work retains something of the aura of the nouveau-roman, especially in the vacillation between objective appearances of objects and phenomena, and our perception and domestication of them, Gombrowicz’s novel is really about the engagementand dissatisfaction with the currents in contemporary literature; it is a postmodern refusal to arrive at any positivist solution to the problems of narrativity and of the subject who is narrating and is becoming narrated. Still, the influences and authorial dialogues that this work reflects require comment. Even though by 1965 the nouveau-roman’s influence was on the wane, the genre represented the kind of narrative Gombrowicz wrote against, while certainly recognizing the technical innovations of its practitioners, Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular.[6] Especially in Eric Mosbacher’s English version of Cosmos, compiled from earlier French and German direct translations, the grammatical structuring of some passages and even the text’s physical appearance on the page tend to give the impression that the author and/or the narrating subject is concerned with the positions and functions of each object or person described, and ultimately with depiction of static forms of being and differences between them.[7]

We will thus look in vain in Cosmos for subjective involutions of the type inscribed in, for example, Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, in which the readerly hermeneutic desire for narrative closure is substituted, in effect, by repetition of entire narrative units with subtle differences. [9] Indeed, the textual experience of Jealousy deceives one’s expectations of a readerly [lisible] narrative; as Kermode suggests, after Barthes, “The sense in which we, skillfully enough, see through a text [is] frustrated; we are checked at the surface” (Kermode 106). In other words, Robbe-Grillet’s narrator (though in fact the word “narrator” is somewhat inaccurate here) is no Sherlock Holmes. If he were, he would seize on a small observed detail and render a hypothesis, which could explicate and account for all the other details collected and duly noted. With the suspected reality revealed, the story could end with an actual or implied resolution of the characters’ inner conflict: were Franck and A. . . in fact having an affair, thus substantiating the narrator’s jealousy? Did they-or in any event, Franck-in fact perish in a fiery automobile crash? But the narrator in Jealousy is not interested in the grounds of knowledge and its objects. He is not ontological in his primary orientation. By contrast, in the Gombrowiczian universe Witold is frankly obsessed with finding a whole, that “thread running through all these things” (Gombrowicz 1985, 86) amid the “oppressive profusion of. . . links and clues” (Gombrowicz 1985, 36). At the same time, as Francesco Cataluccio points out in his preface to Gombrowicz’s Przewodnik po filozofii w sześć godzin i kwadrans [A Guide Through Philosophy in Six and a Quarter Hours], any pretense to objectivity, so dear to the nouveau-romanciers, is a priori abstracted in this novel: “The objective world does not exist; it is unknowable like the Kantian noumen. Every individual forms his own reality, but the order imposed on such a reality is highly personal, isolated, private. The order that we impose on the world, according to Gombrowicz, is boundlessly subjective. There are as many worlds as there are subjects who thought them up” (Cataluccio 16-8). This essential textual subjectivity, then, is one reason why the narrator “Witold” feels compelled to go to such great lengths in his investigations of objects and events witnessed: with a mounting desperation as the story progresses (or fails to progress), he is seeking to determine their ontological status and impose on them their proper place in the symbolic and semiotic order of the real. He is conspicuously unsatisfied with simply noting that they do in fact exist and take up space, and then letting the matter rest - even though it causes him utmost fatigue and anxiety to continue his indexing endeavors: “Byłem roztargniony, jakże męcząca ta obfitość wciąż wywalająca nowe osoby, zdarzenia, rzeczy, żebyż raz przerwał się ten cały strumień” (Gombrowicz 2001, 95) [“I was distracted. How exhausting was this superabundance and the excess from which new persons, events and things constantly emerged” (Gombrowicz 1985, 109)]. This psychic overbearance represents a significant departure from the poetics of the nouveau roman, while sharing its rejection of the normative teleology of the bourgeois novel and especially the nineteenth-century realist/positivist narrative. Specifically, Cosmos ignores the nouveau-roman tendency to disrupt chronology and the hierarchies of events (which then perforce privileges the reader as coconspirator in the task of narrative reconstruction) in favor of recuperating the narrator’s prerogative of ordering the world for the reader, even though the enterprise is doomed to failure.[10] In Mosbacher’s English version the inadvertent nouveau-romanization of the text has the unwelcome effect, to my mind, of bluntly countering the logic of the narration by masking the obsessiveness of the narrator’s gaze and desire for ordering, and concealing the weaving chains of linguistic dispersion and association produced by this process. For it is the gaze, in the end, that can be held responsible for making the narrator’s descriptions and repetitions appear patently subjective; that is, for his refusal to restore any sort of narratorial objectivity. This effect, then, represents the opposite of the aesthetics of the nouveau roman whose modus operandi was the undermining of the Cartesian assumptions behind the bourgeois realist novel, in particular those concerning the inner logics of narrative time and plot teleology, and especially the refusal to provide any further “explanations of the world.” The world, this world of ours, and the objects in it, Robbe-Grillet wrote, are “neither significant nor absurd,” nor for that matter cruel. Rather, the world simply “is” (Robbe-Grillet 1965, 19). Robbe-Grillet’s conceptualization and privileging of chosisme,[11] as in the essays in his collection For a New Novel, form a philosophical foundation for the “exploration” (Robbe-Grillet 1965, 134) of the nouveau-roman genre.

Around 1944, a person doing research for the newspaper The American (of Nashville, Tennessee), brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius. The latter is more likely. . . .The fact is that the international press infinitely proclaimed the “find.” . . . Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order-dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism-was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one but submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world . . . already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood. (Borges 17-8; my italics)

Borges’s superb parable of totalitarian power transforming the logic of social functioning and forcing the substitution of one past/future couplet for another in ways previously inconceivable predates Cosmos by over a decade. But there is a deep symmetry here with Gombrowicz’s dystopian vision of intersubjectivity: both texts are chiefly concerned with our enchantment with the appearance of “rigor,” and with the dream of a philosophically and semiologically orderly cosmos. Still, I think that on the political as opposed to the ontological register, Gombrowicz would have viewed the largely undetected eruption of discursive influence over intellectuals, so key to the poetics of Borges’s text, as self-evident and ultimately deserving only contempt. After all, for Gombrowicz the individual’s job (and especially the intellectual’s) is to resist any such forms of influence, which are as pervasive as they are inevitable.[17]

Interestingly, the narrator of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” confronted by the sober realization that the “world will be Tlön” (Borges 18), capitulates before the force of history. The narrator tells us that “in the still days at the Adrogué hotel” (18), he persists in revising a translation of an obscure work that he knows will never be published because the old languages of the world, “English and French and mere Spanish,” will soon “disappear from the globe” (18). The narrator’s submission to the logic of events may be real; however, his intellectual work takes on the form of active, if futile, resistance. Either way, his mind will not be colonized but that might not, probably will not, be enough to secure his subjective autonomy.

By contrast, Gombrowicz’s engagement with discourses of power and authority, no less averse to colonization by discourse, instead concentrates on one of the corollaries of the techniques of power maintenance. Cosmos surveys the paradoxical pressures that are exerted on an individual who has suddenly been given a temporary reprieve from some of the rules with which civilization holds us; like the heretic, he fashions his own self-reflexive order, or at least tries or is compelled to create (the illusion of) such ritualized space in the epistemological vacuum that ensues, before either chaos or the metadiscourses of power threaten to close in again. Cosmos thus reads like Robinson Crusoe for the mind. It presents an open ideational space to be recolonized and mastered using the self-reflexive discourse of the subject.

While on the topic of the production and the ordering of space, a few words need to be said about the setting of Cosmos since it is the launchpad for the metaphysical quest that follows. Like its more famous Alpine equivalents (Davos, Annecy), the town of Zakopane, qua cultural locus, is all about the promise of difference, of countercultural or avant-gardist artistic form. Central to this aura of difference is the town’s psychogeography as a privileged space, historically prized by the national consciousness: Zakopane is the final point on the itinerary from “ordinary” Poland of the plain and the forest to the extraordinary Poland of the mountainous frontier, with the surrounding High Tatra alpine chain forming a headland where one goes to encounter the sublime.[18] As the critic Kazimierz Bartoszyński points out in an essay on Cosmos, “Zakopane has long inspired both the writers of high realist literature and those like Miciński or Witkacy, whose texts veer very far away from that type of realism” (Bartoszyński 153). Indeed, in Cosmos the budding sentimental narrative-let us say, for the sake of schematic convenience, a Bildungsroman-becomes subverted almost immediately, on the second page, with the troublesome hanging sparrow and the sense of “shrieking eccentricity” this fact generates.

We wtorek obudziłem się o tej porze bezdusznej i nikłej, kiedy właściwie noc się już skończyła, a świt nie zdążył jeszcze zacząć się na dobre. Zbudzony nagle, chciałem pędzić taksówką na dworzec, zdawało mi się bowiem, że wyježdžam- dopiero w następnej minucie z biedą rozeznałem, že pociąg dla mnie na dworcu nie stoi, nie wybiła žadna godzina. Ležałem w mętnymświetle, a ciało moje bało się nieznośnie, uciskając strachem mego ducha, duch uciskał ciało i každa najdrobniejsza fibra kurczyła się w oczekiwaniu, že nic się nie stanie, nic się nie odmieni, nic nigdy nie nastąpi i cokolwiek by sę przedsięwzieło, nie pocznie się nic i nic. (Gombrowicz 2000, 33)

Tuesday morning I awoke at that pale and lifeless hour when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own. Awakened suddenly, I wanted to take a taxi and dash to the railroad station, thinking I was due to leave, when, in the next minute, I realized to my chagrin that no train was waiting for me at the station, that no hour had struck. I lay in the murky light while my body, unbearably frightened, crushed my spirit with fear, and my spirit crushed my body, whose tiniest fibers cringed in apprehension that nothing would ever happen, nothing ever change, that nothing would ever come to pass, and whatever I undertook, nothing, but nothing, would ever come of it. (Gombrowicz 2000a, 1)

Był to lęk nieistnienia, strach niebytu, niepokój niežycia, obawa nierzeczywistości, krzyk biologiczny, wszystkich komórek moich wobec wewnętrznego rozdarcia, rozproszenia i rozproszkowania. (33)

It was the dread of nonexistence, the terror of extinction, it was the angst of nonlife, the fear of unreality, a biological scream of all my cells in the face of an inner disintegration when all would be blown to pieces and scattered to the winds. (Gombrowicz 2000a, 1)

In Cosmos, on the other hand, Witold possesses the firm certainty that he really exists in space, that he is functioning between concrete temporal markers; on the other hand, he grows increasingly unsure both of the structures he is perceiving and eventually even of the rules that govern perception. However, this loss of horizon, paradoxically, rebounds him back to subjectivity, to being in time, to ipseity, and to existence through language. Though language as a tool is not the prime suspect for Witold, its instrumental use for ordering his particular cosmos foregrounds its susceptibility to the laws of contingency. Language, then, is the law but it is also the adjudicator in the service of the demiurge. Gombrowicz, by that point habituated himself to playing his identity games in between the spaces of languages, cultures, and writings, was as good a judge of language as anyone. When all else began its inevitable representational collapse as at the end of Leo’s triumphant jouissance and his final “Berg,” there was at least language left. Language, and thought, thus consciousness, thus our essential condition and our “narratological” enchainment as conscious beings: these are perhaps the only realities to which one can remain faithful. However, they need not necessarily avert us from our desires, such as planning to commit a murder: