Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz

First published:Kosmos, 1965 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Poland

Principal Characters:

• Witold, the narrator
• Fuchs, Witold’s classmate
• Kulka Wojtys, the housewife who rents a room to Witold and Fuchs
• Leo Wojtys, Kulka’s husband
• Lena, Kulka’s daughter
• Louis, Lena’s husband
• Katasia, Kulka’s poor relative, who helps in the kitchen

The Novel

Two students, Witold and Fuchs, rent a room in the mountain resort of Zakopane in Poland in order to prepare for exams. Perhaps because they are students and therefore in the habit of studying things for their meaning, they begin to observe certain signs that they think are meant to be interpreted. During their first day in Zakopane, they come across a dead, hanging sparrow, and they wonder what message was intended by this sight. They discover a crack in the ceiling that seems to be an arrow. Where is it pointing? Witold is particularly bothered by the way people look. Katasia, who works in the kitchen, has a cut across her lip to which he attributes a sinister meaning. Lena, on the other hand, has a mouth that seems fresh and unspoiled, but for that very reason it haunts him. Witold wants to believe that somehow these two women are related to each other, and that “Katasia’s dissolute perverseness, that indecent, gliding mouth movement” is connected with “Lena’s fresh, virginal, half-open lips.”

Witold and Fuchs search Katasia’s room hoping that they will find evidence with which to interpret the mysterious signs. Witold is well aware that their suspicion of her may be no more than their wild imaginings, but he cannot resist pursuing even the remote possibility that Katasia’s room might provide at least a “partial revelation.” Nothing significant is found, yet Fuchs and Witold are later beset by a number of hanged objects. Witold becomes so upset that he hangs Lena’s cat. By initiating an action, he temporarily feels in control. All along he has had the feeling that Lena wants to tell him something, yet almost no communication occurs between them.

Witold’s satisfaction over hanging the cat turns to puzzlement as he realizes that he “acted out of sheer excess and superfluity.” Reality had been giving him too many signs; he had had too much evidence to interpret and had wanted “to force reality to declare itself.” Still, the killing of the cat is something of which Witold finally knows the full meaning, and he hopes that by his own intervention he has been able to build a bridge between his feelings about Katasia and Lena.

In fact, Witold learns very little from his act. What seems clear by the end of the novel is that each character has revealed his or her obsessions, and that these obsessions do not necessarily add up to some great whole. The most dramatic event, near the end of the novel, concerns Witold’s discovery of Lena’s husband, Louis, hanging from a tree. One interpretation of this scene suggests that Louis has had an obsession with hanging which has ended in his own suicide. Unfortunately, Witold takes Louis’ hanging as a sign that he must now hang Lena, but Lena’s illness prevents him from doing so. Instead, he returns to Warsaw and his parents’ home to resume “warfare with my father” and his regular life. The novel ends with his mundane and anticlimactic statement: “Today we had chicken and rice for lunch.”

The Characters

Except for his hanging of the cat, Witold is a passive character. To say that he is in love with Lena is not quite accurate, since he never actively pursues her and is put off by even minor obstacles. He takes the path of least resistance and is somewhat upset when Fuchs assumes command of their interpretative quest. It is Fuchs who announces to their landlady’s household that he and Witold have become intrigued by the signs evidently left for them. Witold suspects that Fuchs has attached himself to the Wojtyses for lack of anything better to do, because Fuchs has had trouble with his employer and now seems to be compensating by trying to master this new situation. This explanation might prove to be as accurate for Witold, whose family quarrels have driven him away from home.

Each character in the book brings to the world a very private, compulsive way of looking at things. Kulka, for example, is obsessed with her housecleaning. Her husband, Leo, is the epitome of the tendency to create a private reality that others cannot imagine. For years, he has cherished the memory of a brief episode of lovemaking with another woman. He even brings his boarders to the location where he had made love to this woman—although he does not tell them in so many words about what the site commemorates for him. Witold is the only one who realizes that Leo is lost entirely in a world of his own making. The only way to enter that world is through “berging,” the term Leo has made up to express his divorce from the mundane reality of his marriage. When Witold says the word “berg,” Leo realizes that he has met a kindred spirit, for what Witold finally discovers is not some overarching meaning to the signs that have troubled him but rather the human knack for creating signs. Berging, or sign making, is the acknowledgment that humans are free to interpret their existence as they choose. There is no one objective meaning to be grasped, as Fuchs and Witold had supposed.

Critical Context

Cosmos, the last novel that Gombrowicz wrote, is the culmination of his longer fiction, which he began in 1937 with Ferdydurke (1937; English translation, 1961) and continued with Trans-Atlantyk (1953) and Pornografia (1960; English translation, 1966). These works share many of the same themes and fictional structures. All three books concentrate on a narrator and his male companion. The narrator has doubts about his friend but does not have the mental resources to resist a stronger intelligence than his own and thus is drawn into situations that are of his friend’s devising. In each case, the two males project a meaning onto circumstances and are fairly successful in getting others to accept and to act upon that meaning.

This, then, is a recurrent theme. Gombrowicz explores again and again the ways in which human beings are manipulated by form, whether that form be the shape of a person’s face or the structure of an institution such as a school. In each instance, the individual becomes what Gombrowicz calls in his preface to Pornografia, “Ferdydurkean man[,]...a constant producer of form: he secretes form tirelessly, just as the bee secretes honey.” Thus Witold in Cosmos gives the world its peculiar form of hanging objects and provocative mouths. Yet Gombrowicz notes that man “is also at odds with his own form,” as Witold is when he confesses that he has trouble holding together his own narrative. Near the end of Cosmos, Witold notes that “I shall find it difficult to tell the rest of this story. Incidentally, I am not sure that it is one. Such a continual accumulation and disintegration of things can hardly be called a story.”

What makes Gombrowicz such an intriguing and complex author is his talent for making stories out of the elements of “antistory.” The events of Cosmos, it is true, do not lead anywhere. Nevertheless, because reality itself is shown to be composed of fictive elements, of the forms people impose on themselves and on others, it is fascinating to watch Gombrowicz’s characters make and remake one another. This creative process must be something like the author’s, and perhaps that is why he chose in his last two novels to give his narrator his own name.

Bibliography

Fletcher, John. “Witold Gombrowicz,” in New Directions in Literature: Critical Approaches to a Contemporary Phenomenon, 1968.

Freeman, G. Review in New Statesman. LXXIV (November 17, 1967),p. 685.

Miosz, Czesaw. A History of Polish Literature, 1983 (second edition).

Thompson, Ewa W. Witold Gombrowicz, 1979.

Veeder, William. “‘A Call to Order’: Cosmos,” in Cross Currents. IV (1985), pp. 125-144.