Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz fascinated my literary generation in the somber thirties and today, many years after his death, he is no less fascinating to the young in Poland. To write about him is to explore the continuity of certain themes that go back to a more cosmopolitan era of Europe on the eve of World War I.
A few biographical data. He was born in Warsaw in 1885 as the only son of an eminent painter and art critic. His childhood and adolescence were spent in the mountain village of Zakopane in southern Poland, then a newly discovered "primitive area" with its rich folklore and fine specimens of peasant wooden architecture. Already fashionable as a center of mountaineering, Zakopane was a meeting place for intellectuals; young Witkiewicz grew up in a refined milieu. Perhaps the contrast between his physical vigor and the mood obligatory in those circles—that of "decadence," of "fin-de-siecle"—is one of the keys to his development as a thinker and as an artist. A student of fine arts in Krakow in 1904-1905, he traveled to Italy, France, Germany, and in 1914 went to Australia through Ceylon and the Malayan archipelago as a secretary to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. The outbreak of World War I caught him in Australia. As the holder of a Russian passport he had to go back, arrived in St. Petersburg, and without waiting to be drafted, which was unavoidable anyway, volunteered. He fought as an infantry officer in an elite tsarist regiment, was decorated for bravery with the highest Russian distinction (the order of St. Anne) and probably was loved by his soldiers, for at the outbreak of the Revolution they elected him a commissar. We know little, however, of this or of any other wartime incidents. He did not like to talk about them except for a casual remark in a conversation with a friend, for example that counting the minutes before an attack is one of the most dire experiences in the life of man. In 1918 he returned to independent Poland, where he lived mostly in Zakopane and Krakow.
The experience he acquired was of an exceptional scope—in art, in life, in historical situations. His formative years were marked by the ascendancy of the "Young Poland" movement whose great master of ceremonies or witchdoctor was Stanislaw Przybyszewski, formerly a student of psychiatry in Berlin and a highly regarded member of the bohemian groups known as "Young Germany" and "Young Scandinavia." Przybyszewski proclaimed a manifesto in 1899 of the absolute supremacy of art over any other human activity and its complete independence from moral, social, or political considerations. Today his formulas sound curiously pre-Freudian: "in the beginning there was lust"; art is an outflow of the "naked soul" uniting man with the unconscious life of the universe. Hence Przybyszew-ski's preoccupation with satanic forces that revealed the illusory character of "poor, poor consciousness," with medieval witches, sabbaths, hysteria and insanity. But Witkiewicz's plays and essays on drama would be incomprehensible without reference to another leading figure of "Young Poland," Stanislaw Wyspianski, from whom stems the entire modern Polish theater. The staging of his Wedding in Krakow in 1901 was a revolutionary event. Wyspianski broke with "imitation of life" on the stage; he conceived of a theatrical spectacle as a unity of color, movement, and sound, and in his dramas fantastic symbolic creatures appeared on an equal footing with lifelike characters. Using today's language we would say he took the spectators on a "trip," for after each of his plays in verse people used to leave the theater reeling. Parenthetically, let us add that contrary to Przybyszewski he advocated a committed art: drama, not unlike Greek tragedy, in his view should be an instrument for exploring all the problems of a national community and a call to energy—but through a peculiar medium of its own having nothing to do with photographic naturalism.
Shaped by the Polish vanguard currents in literature, in painting, and in the theater, Witkiewicz landed in Russia at the very moment of her creative eruption—a period that remains unsurpassed in the excellence of its achievements. The most incredible "isms" were proliferating. The first purely abstract paintings were simultaneously being done in Germany by the Russian Vassily Kandinsky (1910), in Russia by the Pole Kazi-mierz Malewicz (1913), in Holland by Piet Mondrian (though his canvas of 1911 is still entitled "A Blooming Apple Tree"). Cubism was debated in Moscow and St. Petersburg (a school of poets called themselves "cubofuturists"), and in Moscow Witkiewicz saw the paintings of Picasso, whose exhibition he had already seen in Paris.
Witkiewicz was one of those who by their very behavior give fuel to a personal legend. Perhaps his oddity and humorous eccentricity increased with age, but already as a young man he was puzzling: a huge taciturn beast of prey in an invisible cage, a jester disguising some unavowed potential. He attracted women magnetically. One of them, who remembered him from Zakopane before World War I, related: "He was beautiful like an archangel with those gray-green eyes of his. When he entered a cafe, my knees shook. And I guess all the women felt the same." In Russia, he shared the peculiar way of life led by elite officers (mostly from aristocratic families), divided into encounters with death and crazy pleasures. It was a time not only of alcohol and of sexual orgies but of a fashion for new drugs. Witkiewicz got acquainted with cocaine and tasted peyote. Later on he experimented with the influence of drugs upon his painting and wrote a book on the subject (many years before Aldous Huxley and Michaux), Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine, Ether + Appendix (1932).
The Russian Revolution, as we may guess from his writings, left traumatic traces. Witkiewicz was brought up, let us not forget, on the basic premise of "decadentism"—namely, that Western bourgeois civilization was living out its last decades if not days. The upheaval of the masses in Russia seemed to confirm that view and for Witkiewicz gave it a more tangible shape. He became convinced that universal Comunist revolution was unavoidable. As for himself, he belonged to a world in decline. Revolution would have meant a victory of justice, but he was not primarily interested in "happiness for all," an aim he relegated to the realm of "ethics"; revolution, in his opinion, was but a stage in the general trend toward social conformity and destruction of the individual. This explains his subsequent polemics with Polish Marxists, in which he showed a good knowledge of dialectical materialism.
Upon his return to Poland, Witkiewicz joined a vanguard group of painters and poets in Krakow who called themselves "formists." His book New Forms in Painting and Resulting Misunderstandings (1919), as well as his essays on the theater published in magazines from 1920 on and gathered in a book The Theater (1923), demonstrated the application of his theory of "pure form" to all the arts. But it is time to ask who, after all, was he—painter, creative writer, or theoretician? He painted, but announced to all and sundry that his "atelier" produced portraits at fixed prices and that he himself did not pretend to the title of artist. It is true, though, that not everybody acceded to the honor of posing as his model. His "psychological portraits," mostly of intellectual friends, resemble by their treatment of line and color what we associate today with psychedelic art. He wrote plays, beginning with Cockroaches (when he was eight years old) about cockroaches invading a city; a two-volume edition of his collected plays published in Warsaw in 1962 surpasses in daring "the theater of the absurd." He wrote a few novels, the first in 1910: 622 Downfalls of Bungo or a Demoniac Woman. Two novels of his are major contributions to Polish literature of the years 1918-1939, yet he excluded the novel from the domain of "art." For him the novel was a bastard genre, a catchall, a bag, a device to convey the author's quarrels with his contemporaries. He wrote essays on the theory of painting and of drama. He had, however, only one true passion: philosophy. Let me stress this, for his philosophical concepts underlie everything he attempted to do. His first "metaphysical divagations," as he called them, date from 1904. For many years, between 1917 and 1932, he worked on a rather slim concise treatise to which he attached much importance, Notions and Assertions—Implied by the Notion of Being. A dilettante—though highly esteemed by university scholars such as Professor Tadeusz Kotarbinski, the dean of Polish philosophers—Witkiewicz was better equipped than many professionals. He read fluently in Russian, German, French, and English, not to mention his native tongue.
The state of European and American philosophy, as he observed it, strengthened his historical pessimism. Philosophers, behaving like the fox who pronounced the grapes sour because they were too high, were engaged in explaining away metaphysics as a semantic misunderstanding. Wasn't this a sign foreboding the end of the search for "unattainable absolute truth"? To quote from him: "Throughout the entire struggle with Mystery, veils dropped away one by one and the time has come when we see a naked, hard body, with nothing more to be taken off, invincible in the indifference of a dead statue." The fable of the fox applied not only to the neo-positivists. Witkiewicz raged against Bergson: "intuition" was indeed a meager substitute for striving toward clear cognition. Pragmatism and Marxism fared even worse: They exemplified the approaching era when "ethics will devour metaphysics." Or, to again use his own words: "Every epoch has the philosophy it deserves. In our present phase we deserve nothing better than a drug of the most inferior kind, to lull to sleep the metaphysical anxiety which hinders our transformation into automatic machines."
Trying to salvage whatever survived from the ambitious ontological drives of the past, Witkiewicz elaborated a minimal "system" somewhat akin to Leibniz's monadology. Its analysis does not belong here; I limit myself to a few points. According to Witkiewicz, nothing can be asserted about being except that it predicates "Particular Existences." Every monad embodies what he calls the "Principle of Factual Particular Identity." In man this gives rise to a "Metaphysical Feeling of the Strangeness of Existence," expressed by questions: "Why am I exactly this and not that being? At this point of unlimited space and in this moment of infinite time? In this group of beings, on exactly this planet? Why do I exist, if I could have been without any existence? Why does anything exist at all?"
Mankind looked for answers in religion, then in philosophy. Yet religion was dead and philosophy was dying. Art, which has always been a means of soothing the anxieties provoked by the "Metaphysical Feeling of the Strangeness of Existence," survived. Art in the past functioned, however, in a universe ordered by ontological concepts of religion or of philosophy. Its harmonious forms reflected that serenity which is granted when man has also other means of satisfying his basic craving. Art as the only channel, as a substitute for religion and philosophy, by necessity would change. Its "unity in multiplicity," reflecting the increased sense of identity in its creator, could only be achieved at an increasing cost—namely, a savage intensification of the elements used, lest the harmony become tepid. Here Wit-kiewicz's formulations are not quite clear. He seemed to believe that modern artists, as opposed to their healthy predecessors, became neurotics because of their inability to quench their metaphysical thirst in any other way than through their art. They were condemned to endow it with their neurosis by choosing as their material more and more ugly, jarring, garish images, sounds, lines, and colors. They were the last representatives of a species marked by a metaphysical "insatiability" and threatened by mass ethics in which the craving that constitutes the very dignity of man was already being twisted. Art was moving toward insanity, and the future was not far off when artists would be imprisoned in insane asylums. Mankind would be "happy," but it would know neither religion, nor a philosophy deserving the name, nor art.
However we judge Witkiewicz's pessimism, one thing is certain: his creative work combines a rare vital energy with a conviction that art should select procedures adapted to its final phase. It should achieve "Pure Form." A painting, for instance, should be no more than a set of "oriented tensions" of line and color (he deviated from his principle when making his "psychological portraits," and that is why he dismissed them as merely an income-bringing craft). In his stress upon "purity" he was, of course, no exception in the Europe of his time: even the French Academy of Literature listened, as early as 1925, to Henri Bre-mond's lecture on "pure poetry." Yet of great consequence was Witkiewicz's application of the concept to the theater. If modern painting tended toward a refusal to represent anything, could not drama be conceived as "pure action" without any care for reproduction of reality? While posing the problem, he did not want to go so far:
Though we can imagine a painting composed entirely of abstract forms which, unless we indulge in obvious autosuggestion, would not provoke any associations with objects in the external world, no such a theatrical play can even be thought of, because a pure becoming in time is possible only in the sphere of sounds, and the theater without actions of characters, even most strange and improbable characters, is impossible, since the theater is a composite art and not based upon homogenous elements as are the pure arts: music and painting.
But "deformation" (as in cubist art) is not beyond the playwright's reach: "In painting, a new form, pure and abstract, without a direct religious background, was achieved through a deformation of our vision of the external world, and in a similar manner Pure Form in the theater can be achieved at the price of a deformation of psychology and of action." Since he presents his intentions rather clearly, let me continue quoting him: "What matters is the possibility of freely deforming life or an imaginary world in order to create a totality, the sense of which would be determined by a purely internal, purely scenic construction and not by any exigencies of consequent psychology or action, corresponding to the rules of ordinary life." The date when those sentences were written—around 1920—should be kept in mind. It was in Europe a period of radical experimentation. Witkiewicz explains what a play written according to his recipe would be like:
Thus three persons, dressed in red, enter and bow, we do not know to whom. One of them recites a poem (which should make the impression of something necessary exactly at that moment). A gentle old man enters with a cat he leads on a string. Until now everything has been going on against the background of a black curtain. The curtain is drawn apart and an Italian landscape appears. Organ music is heard. The old man talks to the three persons. He says something which corresponds to the created mood. A glass falls from the table. All of them, suddenly on their knees, are weeping. The old man changes into a furious brute and murders a little girl who just crawled out from the left side. At this, a handsome young man runs in and thanks the old man for that murder, while the persons in red sing and dance. The young man then weeps over the corpse of the little girl saying extremely funny things, and the old man changes again into a tender-hearted character chuckling on the sidelines. The sentences he pronounces are sublime and lofty. The costumes may be of any kind, stylized or fantastic—and music may intervene in various parts. So, you would say, this is a lunatic asylum. Or rather the brain of a madman on stage. Perhaps you are right, but we affirm that by applying this method one can write serious plays and if they are staged in a proper way, it would be possible to create things of extraordinary beauty, they may be dramas, tragedies, farces or grotesques, but always in a style not resembling anything that exists. When leaving the theater, one should have the impression of waking up from a strange dream in which the most trite things have an elusive, deep charm, characteristic of dreams, not comparable to anything.
Yet for Witkiewicz programmatic deformation for its own sake, not justified by the real need for formal unity, was to be categorically condemned. He underlined this: "Our aim is not programmatic nonsense, we are trying rather to enlarge the possibilities of composition by abandoning in art any lifelike logic, by introducing a fantastic psychology and fantastic action, in order to win a complete freedom of formal elements."
In spite of those reservations, it is doubtful whether the recipe is conducive to anything but the monotony of a few devices repeated ad infinitum: once all improbabilities are accepted, no increase in dose could ever stir the spectator. Fortunately, Witkiewicz as a theoretician and as a practitioner are two not quite identical persons. In his thirty or so plays written between 1918 and 1934 he gives free vent to his ferocity, a virtue rarely praised by "pure artists." He becomes a high-school prankster who makes us think of Alfred Jarry more than of any other writer. His characters, through their roars and their mad thrashing around, resemble the abominable Father Ubu with his exclamations "merrrrdrre" and his machine for blowing up brains. Witkiewicz delighted in coining names for his characters appropriate to their behavior. Many are untranslatable puns; some, often a cross-breed of several languages, can give an idea of his buffoonery. Thus we are confronted with Dona Scabrosa Maca-brescu and her teenage daughter Swintusia (Piggy) Macabrescu, with psychiatrist Mieczyslaw Valpurg and attorney general Robert Scurvy (meaning in Polish both scurvy and s.o.b.); with Gottfried Reichsgraf von und zu Berchtoldingen, the Great Master of the Teutonic Order; two hassidim, Haberboaz and Rederhagaz; with Princess Alice of Nevermore; Minna Countess de Barnhelm; Maxim Grigorevich Prince Bublikov-Tmutara-kanskii, a counteradmiral; with Richard III in person, vice-count Wojciech (Adalbert) de Malensac de Troufieres, the naturalist painter Oblivion Grampus. And so on, and so on.
The titles of the plays are often no less promising: Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf; Gyubal Wahazar or Along the Cliffs of the Absurd, a Non-Euclidean Drama in Four Acts; Mister Price or Tropical Madness; The Ominous Bastard of Vermiston; The Independence of Triangles. On his characters two remarks can be made. All of them, men and women, are oversexed; practically all of them are on the verge of bursting asunder, victims of inexpressible yearning. Sex, since it is intimately connected with the "metaphysical feeling of strangeness of existence," was for Witkiewicz akin to art. Yet no discharges are able to calm down his weird puppets. They are under the pressure of a cosmic reality which they feel is "too much." And since they are not supposed to be "probable" as to the language they speak, they deliver tirades mixing slang and terms of modern philosophy whether they are artists, princes, or peasants.
The composition of his plays may be defined as a parody of psychological drama. Instead of middle-class husbands, wives, and mistresses, we find bizarre mathematicians of genius, artist-misfits, unashamedly lurid women, with the author's obvious predilection for the international set, for aristocrats and proletarians, as well as for meetings between figures taken from different epochs; instead of dialogues in a living room, the ravings move into a dimension of opera-buffa; instead of murders out of jealousy and suicides, sham murders and sham suicides— plenty of corpses, yes, but they soon resurrect and rejoin the conversation.
Witkiewicz's imagination, nourished by the apocalyptic events of war and revolution in Russia, was ill adapted to what prevailed in the literature of Poland after 1918. The country was independent but provincial, confronted with immediate tasks, and the radical vanguard schools of 1918-1920 soon declined or entrenched themselves in little magazines for the elite. Fortunately for him Poland was a theatrical country, with good repertory theaters directed by people who continued the line of Stanislaw Wyspianski. A few plays of Witkiewicz were staged and some reached fifteen, thirty, even forty performances. He obtained the support of intelligent theater critics, and won notoriety as an enfant terrible of Polish letters. Yet it is significant that performances of his plays date from the twenties. After this he was more and more isolated, and the majority of his dramas were neither published nor staged in his lifetime. Because of his language—with its humorous-macabre exuberance, puns, parody of styles—he is difficult to render into other languages. But even had he been translated, what chance would he have had abroad if the "theater of the absurd" conquered Paris and London only some thirty years later? At least in Poland the theater was not as commercialized as in Western Europe and directors, if not the public, understood what he was after.
Today, while considerable "freedom of formal elements" has been attained everywhere, Witkiewicz still fails to fit into any accepted category. He started from other premises than Angst and alienation; not being-in-an-unbearable-situation, but Being as such, was his primary concern. If we assume that Beckett's Ah, les beaux jours is the highest achievement of the theater of the absurd (Francois Mauriac compared it to Aeschylus) the insectlike, weak buzz of its heroine sinking into the sand (symbolizing time) does not recall anything in the plays of Witkiewicz. Curiously enough, a melancholy perception of tran-science is absent from his writings. On the contrary, his characters have to cope with a superabundance of Being as an eternal now.Perhaps more than the insane action, the intellectual contents of his dramas estranged the public. After all, in spite of his theoretical claims, he conveyed his philosophy in them by the very choice of his heroes. A lunatic fringe, the last of a perishing tribe—artists, aristocrats, descendants of rich factory owners— represented an intensification of individuality through delirium and decadence; a kind of "last stand" before universal grayness, historically preordained, swallowed them in. The scene hints more at Russia on the eve of the Revolution than at Poland or any other country, unless one shares (which was not easy at the time) the author's belief in a doomsday awaiting the precarious "normalcy" that was patched together in 1918.
Witkiewicz abandoned writing plays after the twenties, except for one in 1934, the closest to a parable, full of transposed realistic details, a response to the oncoming doomsday which was already announced by the rise of totalitarian dictatorships: The Shoemakers. In my view it is not accidental that in departing from "Pure Form" and injecting the work with "contents" he succeeded so well. As to "contents," to put it shortly there are the shoemakers (social rebels hungry for good living and sex galore) who are destined after the revolution to be playthings of the Super-Worker, a potential bureaucratic operator; and a primordial male-devouring female, Princess Irina, personifying the rotten system which is defended by attorney general Robert Scurvy. The attorney makes an alliance with the "Brave Boys" (a native fascist movement, the last phase of capitalism) and ends his career on all fours chained as a dog (smoking a cigarette). Altogether, though it is no less a lunatic asylum than Witkiewicz's other plays, The Shoemakers follows an anticipated historical logic, which is why it bears the subtitle: "a scientific play with songs."
The two novels by Witkiewicz, Farewell to Autumn (written 1925, published 1927) and Insatiability (1931), are populated with the same kind of personalities as his dramas, often appearing under the same names. They deal with similar problems, though the author is less bound by his search for "Pure Form." As I have said already, he excluded the novel from artistic genres. All of his creative activity, and I hope I am making this clear, was the result of a tension between his aggressiveness and his concept of art as unity in multiplicity, indifferent to the "gut-level" (by which he designated "everyday-life" feelings and emotions). He was more inclined to attack than to whine, and "contents" did explode in The Shoemakers (which reminds one the most of his novels). Once he had decided the novel was a "bag" with freely invented rules, beyond any exigencies of "art," he could pack it with philosophical treatises, digressions, and polemics. His novels are powerful, however, for the very reason that in scorning form he hit upon a specific novelistic form of his own. In this he was probably helped by his readings as an adolescent, by the science fiction of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and other authors. Science fiction, before World War I and immediately after, was undergoing a mutation (not without some contribution brought by the genre of ironic allegories, Anatole France's for instance) into a novel of apprehensive anticipation, a novel of antiutopia. Usually the future was visualized as dominated by machines winning their independence and crushing human beings. To give a few examples: in the twenties appeared Karel Capek's Krakatit; in Poland, futurist Bruno Jasieriski's Legs of Isolda Morgan (1923) and the dialectical stories of Aleksander Wat on the twists and turns of history to come, Lucifer Unemployed (1927). Witkiewicz's antiutopias concentrate upon social mechanization, not upon the negative aspects of technology. His vision is close to that of the Russian writer Eugene Zamyatin, whose We was published in England in 1924, though whether he read Zamyatin has never been ascertained. His Polish sources are obvious and acknowledged by him: most of all, the wild theosophical imagination of Tadeusz Miciriski (killed in 1918 in Russia by a mob which mistook him for a tzarist general) who, shuffling together epochs and countries in his dramas and novels, was in his turn a descendant of Polish romantic historiosophy.
In both novels the action is placed in the future, yet the present—namely the Poland of his day—is easily recognizable as material reshaped, magnified, seasoned with the grotesque; it has been justly said that all the "realistic" fiction of those years could not match Witkiewicz's insights into social and political imbroglios. The names of the characters are construed in his usual prankish way. For instance there is a Polish verb "zipac," to breathe with difficulty; he makes a French verb out of it, "ziper"; concocts a phrase, "je ne zipe qu'a peine"; changes spelling and obtains the name of one of his heroes, Genezyp Kapen. His style is not unlike that of Polish fiction before 1914 with its tendency to the profound and the sublime, especially in love scenes. He pushes the pedal just a bit more, so that the boundary between seriousness and joking is blurred. This serves him particularly well in his erotic passages. As might be expected, for his heroes the sexual act acquires an ontological magnitude comparable only to the act of artistic creation. His women, enamored with their genitalia—spider-females—do not wear ordinary bras and pants: "she took off her metaphysical hyper-panties." Yet because of this overemphasis and ironicgrandeur,the brutality of his sexual duels (there is a fundamental hostility between his males and females) is not naturalistic and would not provide excitement for any shy pornogra-pher. Sex for him equals an experience of the overwhelming, orgiastic monstrosity of existence.Not a brave new world, but the last phase of decay preceding the advent of a brave new world, is the subject of his novels. This renders questionable their classification with the genre that In our century begins with Zamyatin's We and embraces Aldous Huxley's already proverbial Brave New World (1932) as well as George Orwell's 1984 (1948). A particular society drawn from observation and anticipation lurks behind the artistic and pseudo-artistic milieu on which he focuses. Death of religion (sarcastically treated attempts at "neo-Catholicism"), death of philosophy (whole pages of discussion with logical positivists), art going mad (music being the most tenacious, hence his frequent identification with composers)—such are portents of the approaching change of the social system. In Farewell to Autumn it is brought about by two successive revolutions: first bourgeois-democratic (echo of Kerensky in Russia and of the Leninist theory), second of the "Levellers." The last chapters depict a new order in quite Orwellian terms but emphasize universal grayness and shabbiness, not terror. The central figure in the novel, Atanazy Bazakbal—more gifted in sex than in art though he wanted to be an artist—returns home from India at the news of the revolution, is given a small job in one of the state offices, and meditates upon the impotence of the individual to reverse the course of events. While in Zakopane, he decides to escape across the mountains. Witkiewicz was excellent in his descriptions of mountain scenery; the dawn over the summits as seen by Bazakbal, high on cocaine, is treated in a grandiose manner without a bit of mockery. The final pages summarize the author's dilemma throughout his whole career. If what awaits us is an anthill in which it will be forbidden to confess one's metaphysical craving, should not those few who are aware of it launch a warning? Bazakbal, under the influence of cocaine, has a revelation: a warning must be launched and it must be effective. He retraces his steps but is caught by a border patrol and shot as a spy.
In Insatiability, America and most of Europe have participated in counterrevolutionary "crusades" with the result that the "West" is half Communist. Russia has gone in an opposite direction; it has been ruled for a while by White terror. Poland did not join the anti-Bolshevik crusades (echo of 1919-1920 when Pilsudski refused to cooperate with White Russian generals Denikin and Wrangel) and has a native brand of semi-fascism. Europe, however, is threatened by Communist China which has conquered Russia and whose armies are already near the borders of Poland. All hopes turn to the charismatic commander of the army, Kocmoluchowicz (from kocmoluch— sooty face). The imminent danger does not disturb Witkiewicz's milieu too much, except as an oppressive atmosphere of futility and paralysis exacerbating their sexual and metaphysical "insatiability." The reader follows the story of a young man, Genezyp Kapen, opening on the night when he is erotically initiated by a homosexual composer, Putrycydes Tenger, and Princess Irina Vsievolodovna de Ticonderoga. A new element is added to Witkiewicz's normal paraphernalia: a magic pill. If the society in this novel, thanks to the author's extrapolation, brings to one's mind more the Western Europe and America of the sixties than that of the twenties, the role ascribed to chemically induced states of "oneness" with the universe sounds little short of prophetic. No more and no less, he writes a report on LSD. The pill is of Eastern provenance; it has been devised by a Malayan-Chinese ideologist, Murti Bing (and Chinese communism is in fact "Murtibingism"), as a means of pacifying the minds. Those who take the pill, provided by mysterious peddlers, become indifferent to such trifles as wars or changes of political systems. Witkiewicz, as it was already mentioned, experimented with drugs and was not a philistine; yet the pill is for him a signal of the end. Both the chemical compound and the philosophical "drugs" of pragmatism, Marxism, "intuition" —and their growing popularity—show that man is ready to renounce what torments him and makes his true stature, a confrontation with the unmitigated nakedness (one is tempted to say "otherness") of Being.
The plot of Insatiability leads Genezyp Kapen to the immediate surroundings of General Kocmoluchowicz, a magnificent beast relying only upon instinct and his intuition as a leader, and of his lash-wielding mistress Percy Zvierzontkovskaya (zwierzatko in Polish means a little animal; transcribe it a Russian way, add a Russian ending and the outcome is hilarious to anybody familiar with Slavic languages). The general—no brains, only animal vitality—on the eve of a decisive battle with the Chinese has one of his intuitive strokes of understanding: it is of no use to oppose "historical necessity." He surrenders and with all ceremonies due to his rank is beheaded. In the new order under Chinese rule no harm is done to lunatics such as Genezyp Kapen and his friends. Well paid, they participate in a cultural revolution under the auspices of the Ministry of the Mechanization of Culture and develop a perfect schizophrenia, in the clinical sense, too.
Since both his novels wait until their last chapters to carry the action into a new "happy" society (modeled upon what he knew of postrevolutionary Russia), they do not suffer from that certain leanness of psychological design so typical of science fiction and its social satire mutation. Their density and allusiveness relate them to the psychological novel with a contemporary sociopolitical setting, though the pattern is pushed to a caricature. Some critics maintain that through his handling of plots and characters as mere pretexts for a philosophical debate, with the author's direct commentaries and even footnotes, Witkiewicz merely rejuvenated the eighteenth-century techniques. Probably this is true, provided, however, that we see the genealogy of all "fantasy" fiction as specific, different from that of a "realistic" portrayal of a psyche in its conflicts with externally imposed laws and mores.
Many years separate us from Witkiewicz's death. In September 1939 he left Warsaw, then being surrounded by the Nazi armies, for the Eastern provinces. He committed suicide on September 17, at the news of the Soviet army's advance in fulfillment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. This suicide (he took sleeping pills in a wood, woke up and slashed his wrists with a razor) remains rightly or wrongly blended in the mind of his readers with the tragic ends of both his novels, where the splendor of Polish landscapes in autumn is used as a background.
In postwar Poland, Witkiewicz for a long time was a disquieting case and a taboo. He did not oppose Marxism on political grounds; on the contrary, few Marxist writers or sympathizers could compete with him in his disdainful appraisals of the "free world," and he grasped perhaps even better than they the workings of fascism. Yet Western technology, the mass dementias of the "Brave Boys," and Marxist revolutions were for him the phenomena of an immense twilight, in which he preserved loyalty to a belief in "decadence" shared by European bohemians around 1900. If he was disquieting, it was above all because of his sophistication; a literature able to produce such a writer probably called for more subtle methods of investigation (and direction) than a few vulgarized precepts of "realism." The less one spoke of him, the better. His writings were unhealthy as they prophesied what everybody lived through, especially after 1949: boredom and fear.
The revival of Witkiewicz in Poland after 1956 seems to deny his utter pessimism as to the irreversibility of the historical trend. His plays have never been performed with such a zeal and have never attracted such numerous audiences. They are already a permanent fixture in the repertory of the Polish theater. His theatrical essays are a must for every theater director. One of his novels, Insatiability, has appeared in a new edition (not Farewell to Autumn, as it is too exact an image of Poland after the revolution of the "Levellers"). His philosophy is avoided but his admirers managed to give it attention, profiting from a temporary relaxation of censorship, in a symposium
Stanisiaw Witkiewicz, Man and Creator(Warsaw, 1957). He is an acting force in Polish letters, thus his "hope against hope" is at least in part vindicated. His significance, however, transcends the limits traced by one historical moment and one language. It depends upon the judgment we make about the theme of decadence, so persistent in the history of European civilization since the second half of the nineteenth century. Desperate Jules Laforgue, Spengler, T. S. Eliot in search of "live water" in the wasteland, as well as those playwrights and film makers of today who popularized what they stole from poets—all are relatives of characters in Witkiewicz's plays and novels. As the transformation of social organisms into abstract Molochs gathers momentum, we observe a parallel rebellion against society as a machine nobody can control, with the resulting proliferation of bohemian attitudes of withdrawal.
It is possible Witkiewicz was not dialectical enough and underestimated the resourcefulness of our species, its sly, waterlike flowing around obstacles which are but a solidified, frozen vestige of our creative powers. In all probability we are going through another crisis of the Renaissance man when "the world was out of joint." Yet Witkiewicz was hardly wrong, it seems to me, in his realization that something strange had happened to religion, philosophy, and art, even though their radical mutation did not equal their disappearance.11967
'Witkiewicz's plays have now been translated into several languages, and some have been staged with success in the United States as well. Two collections of his plays appeared in English: The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, trans, and ed. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer with a foreword by Jan Kott (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966) and Tropical Madness, four plays trans. Daniel and Eleanor Gerould with introd. by Martin Esslin (New York: Winter House Ltd., 1972). The novel Insatiability, translated by Louis Iribarne, is scheduled to appear forthwith.
Emperor of the Earth
Czeslaw Milosz
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