Tag Archives: Witold Gombrowicz

A Note on Reggie Watts @ TED Talks

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Reggie Watts shows us how right Marshall McLuhan was when he said that the “medium is the message.”  But with Reggie I would revise McLuhan to say that the “medium is the message(s).” Or, alternatively, we can also say that Reggie Watts is the message. He’s a signal of sorts, sometimes its coded and mystical; sometimes it’s cultural; but the signal we get, regardless of what he does, is always comic, rhythmic, and musical.

What makes Watts so fascinating, however, is that, like a radio switching from channel to channel (to use an “old school” metaphor) or a person scanning through their texts or facebook feeds, Watts moves from language to language and medium to medium.  Yet he gives us enough time to check out each medium or language before he moves on to the next.  But what makes his routine comic is not just found in how he works with each medium or voice, but also in how he moves from voice to voice with such rapidity and skill.

Reggie’s comic greatness is also written into his body and history.  He is a hybridic character with an unkempt retro-afro.  His mother is French and his father is American.  And since his father was in the military, he moved from place to place before he ended up in Great Falls, Montana.

In a way, Reggie seems to be linking these places, identities, and bodies.  He is seeking for a child-like relationship between them, one that plays at maturity.  In his work, I find an interesting take on what I looked at in yesterday’s blog entry; namely, what Gombrowicz calls “difficult childhood.”  Gombrowicz points out how a good artist will necessarily exhaust maturity and will be thrown into a “difficult childhood” while, at the same time, being, a grown person.  But while Gombrowicz returns to childhood in order to ruin his “Polish Childhood,” Watts returns in order to play on it.

In this clip from TED Talks, Watts inhabits a “difficult childhood” but in a way that seems to be lacking the anxious edge of Gombrowicz’s “difficult childhood.”  Watts does this by way of switching languages, melodies, and rhythms.  The affect of this is to play on the “seriousness” of TED talks.  Yet, at the same time, while playing on it, it does seem as if he is “serious.”  This is what we get from the audience.  They don’t laugh at him when he gets serious.  But at a certain point they do.  Like Andy Kaufman (Watts received the “Andy Kaufman Award” in 2006), he is able to hold the audience in an ambiguous space between laughter and seriousness.

Watts’s form of comedy is working on many levels and, as I mentioned above, he moves between one mode and another in a comic manner so as to create an unusual relatonship that we would never have surmised.  But, in the midst of all this, there is a mark of humility, charm, and absent-mindedness that makes one think of the schlemiel.   But he is not a traditional schlemiel; he is a schlemiel for a new age, an age that has been raised on the internet, hip-hop, and youtube.   But he is not for everyone.  His appeal is to a more narrow audience which appreciates all of this and, at the same time, likes to think deeply about the “meaning of it all.”

Reggie Watts is a comical mystic of the information age.

I would like to return to Watts’ work in future entries.  He is one of the most interesting and innovative comedians out there and watching him is not only entertaining but meaningful and thought provoking.  Playing on McLuhan, I’d say Watts is the message(s).

Witold Gombrowicz’s Affirmation of “Difficult Childhood”

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Following the passages of Witold Gombrowicz’s diary entries on Simone Weil, which I commented on the other day, there is a fascinating entry labeled “Friday.” It’s first two words – at the top of the entry – are “Polish Catholicism.” In this passage, Gombrowicz expresses his past and present ambivalent attitude toward “childishness” by way of his reading of Polish Catholicism.   His reading has strange resonances with the man-childish-ness we find in many instances of the schlemiel.

The first childishness, for Gombrowicz, has to do with Catholicism “such as the one that historically developed in Poland.”  As he understood it, the Polish people became like children in relation to God.  They gave up their “burdens” to God and, like a child, “sought God’s protection.”  By “listening..respecting…loving…and abiding” by God’s commandments, man gained “a green world, green because it was immature.”  Although Gombrowicz looks down on this, he notes that it was also a “green world” because it was not the “black world” of metaphysics: “To live in the lap of nature, in a limited world, leaving the black universe to God.”

But this isn’t enough.  To be sure, Gombrowicz is more interested in criticizing the Polish Green of “immaturity” than in its embrace of nature. And this is because, he wants to be critical of Poland and its Catholicism.  He notes that this childish religiosity was responsible for a “historical lack of dynamism” and for Poland’s “cultural impotence.”

Gombrowicz precedes to tell us why he thinks of Poland has culturally impotent.  Strangely enough, his reading echoes a view that Sander Gilman uncovers in his book Jewish Self-Hatred.  But, here, it is not the view of an Enlightened Western Jew criticizing his “backwards” Eastern European brethren (the Ostjuden), but the view of a Pole towards the Polish people:

The nation without a philosophy, without a conscious history, intellectually soft and spiritually timid, a nation that produced only “kindly” and “noble-minded” art, a languid people of lyrical scribblers of poetry, folklorists, pianists, actors…

In other words, the Poles are not autonomous.  They are childish and even
“effeminate.”   And Gombrowicz notes that his work, in the present tense, “is guided by the desire to extricate the Pole from all secondary realities and to put him in direct confrontation with the universe.”  His utmost “desire” is to “ruin his (Poland’s) childhood.”  And by ruining it, Gombrowicz would compel him to become a man.

However, in the following paragraph, Gombrowicz takes a radical turn and suggests he has just contradicted himself.  He cannot and doesn’t want to ruin childhood; rather, he wants to find a way to affirm (albeit with a difference):

But now in the pursuant din, in the face of my own helplessness, in this inability to straighten things out, it occurs to me that I have just contradicted myself.  Ruin a childhood? In the name of what?  IN the name of a maturity that I myself can neither bear nor accept?

Gombrowicz, at this point, realizes that he cannot “ruin” the childishness of the Polish people because he himself wants to be a child! “How can I desire that they (the Polish) not be children if I myself, per fas et nefas, want to be a child?”

But then he explains the difference, and this is crucial.  He wants to be a man-child; in short, a schlemiel (albeit of a Polish variety): “A child, yes, but one that has come to know and has exhausted all the possibilities of adult seriousness.  This is the big difference.”

What he means by this is still in need of explanation. To this end, Gombrowicz suggests a process that brings out to this “other” kind of childishness: “First, push away all the things that make everything easier, find yourself in a cosmos that is as bottomless as you can stand…where you are left to your own loneliness and your own strength.”  This first part of the process sounds no different from what he had claimed, originally, was his task; namely, autonomy.  However, this leads one to the next step which is, more or less, failure and retreat to childhood: “Then, when the abyss which you have not managed to tame throws you from the saddle, sit down on the earth and discover the sand and grass anew.”  This process, for Gombrowicz, is – in-itself – a justification of childhood:

For childhood to be allowed, one must have driven maturity to bankruptcy.

While Gombrowicz, as we saw in the last blog entry, thinks that on his lips Simone Weil’s religious passion sounds “stupid,” he, in contrast, thinks the word “childhood” sounds much more earnest:

When I pronounce the word “childishness,” I have the feeling that I am expressing the deepest but not yet roused contents of the people who gave me birth.

In other words, the desire for “childishness” – true childishness as opposed to the Catholic variety – is hidden within the Polish people.  And this is “not the childhood of a child, but the difficult childhood of an adult.”

When I first read these words, I couldn’t help but think of Emmanuel Levinas’s expression: “difficult freedom.”  But this seems to be the opposite.  In fact, Levinas speaks a lot about maturity in his essay – in the book Difficult Freedom – entitled “A Religion for Adults.”  Like Gombrowicz, Levinas also uses “childhood” to express a kind of lack.  For him it is the lack of responsibility.  The “religion for adults” that Levinas speaks of is not a religion that is based on the passion of ecstasy and losing one’s freedom.  To be sure, the religion for adults insists that one’s freedom stay in tact but not, as Gombrowicz would seem to insist, in relation to the world, but in relation to the other.

Gombrowicz’s “difficult childhood,” however, does retain a kind of freedom.  It seems that this freedom is, on the one hand, the freedom of retreat from a ridiculous world of maturity that one “must,” on the other hand, “drive” to “bankruptcy.”

In future posts, I hope to look more into what Gombrowicz calls “difficult childhood.”  It resurfaces throughout this work and provides us an innovative way of thinking the schlemiel.  In light of this research, we will be in a better position to ask several relevant questions: Does the schlemiel also have a “difficult childhood?”  Or is the schlemiel’s difficult childhood entirely different? What, after all, is difficult about the man-childhood of I.B. Singer’s Gimpel, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl, or Philip Roth’s Portnoy?   Or is the “difficult childhood” that of the author?  If it is the author’s, does this imply that the author and not the character is the real schlemiel?

 

 

 

A Note on Witold Gombrowicz and Simone Weil

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I have been reading parts of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s diary.  I read him and include him in Schlemiel-in-Theory because I think his comic novels (Ferdydurke being my favorite) and many of his comic reflections on himself have schlemiel-like resonances.   He is an exceptional writer who has been recognized by Susan Sontag and others.

For now, I only want to note a few diary entries which caught my eye.  The first is dated 1956. The place it was written in – Mar de Plata (a city in Argentina; since he left Poland for Argentina before WWII – is also noted.

In his “Thursday” entry, he reflects on Simone Weil’s La pesanteur et la grace.   To preface his thoughts, he points out how his generation can’t stomach the metaphyics of Kant or the Theologians. The issue, here, being God:

We, the grandchildren of Kierkegaard, can no longer digest the reasoned God of Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant.  My generation’s relationship with abstraction is completely in ruins, or, rather, has coarsened because we evidence a completely peasant distrust of it. (212)

After noting this, Gombrowicz reflects on himself.  But this time he notes how he is pushed toward metaphysics although he is disheartened by it:

Life in its very monstrousness pushes me in the direction of metaphysics.  Wind, noise, house, all of this has stopped being “natural” because I myself am no longer nature but something gradually cast beyond its limits.  It is not I myself, but that which is coming to an end in  me that clamors for God, this need or necessity is not in my, but my predicament.

Following this reflection, Gombrowicz brings up Simone Weil’s approach to God and shows how he cannot accept her conclusions about God:

I look at her with amazement and saw: how, by means of what magic, has this woman been able to arrange herself so internally so that she is able to cope with what devastates me? 

He can’t turn to metaphysics even though he wants to, so where does he go with his religious desires?  Gombrowicz takes a comic turn.  He comically notes that he is “amazed” that people lives their lives based on principles that differ from his own.  And then he launches into a meditation on how small he is.  This meditation, it seems, suggests that for Gombrowicz the best response to monstrosity is not to take the religious leap suggested by Weil so much as a comic leap into humility and the accidental nature of arriving at this or that insight in his fiction:

I know no, absolutely no greatness.  I am a petit bourgeois promenader, who has wandered into the Alps or Himalayas.  My pen touches mighty and ultimate issues all the time, but if I have reached them, it was done while playing…As a boy I climbed up iont them and wandered around them frivolously.

Comparing himself to Weil, he points out that she is heroic while he is a coward: “whereas I constantly elude life, she takes it on fully, elle s’engage, she is the antithesis of my desertion.  Simone Weil and I are the sharpest contrast that one can imagine, two mutually exclusive interpretations.”  But, lest we not be fooled here, he is taking Weil and himself as comic targets of this and his following reflections.

The next day Gombrowicz takes an interesting detour which, to my mind, echoes this entry.  The next day he is on the beach and starts off with a meditation on what he sees:

Bodies, bodies, bodies…Today on the beaches sheltered from the southern gale, where the sun warms and roasts, a multitude of bodies, the great sensuality of beaches, yet as always, undercut, defeated.

As you can see, the final note is that he sees himself as a schlemiel or sorts – the “odd one out.”  He can’t fit into this beach scene.  And he can’t assert himself heroically on the page, as Weil does, or at the beach with the multitude of bodies in the resplendent sun.  Rather, sounding much like Portnoy at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint (but with a more tragic tone) he says, “Impotence overwhelms the beach, beauty, grace, charm. They are unimportant: they are not possessive, they neither wound nor engage….This impotence debilitated even me and I returned home without the least spark, powerless.”

He leaves the beach to go home and face the novel he is writing and he sarcastically notes that “I will have to exert myself to inject a little ‘brilliance’ into a scene that is like wet powder and wont’ ignite.”

The next day, the impotent artist turns to Simone Weil and says, quite frankly, that the words of religious passion sound “stupid” on his lips.  He feels like a fool who is trying to be holy.   But then he asks himself if Weil was really beyond the impotence of modernity and he notes, by way of Gustave Thibone’s criticism of Weil, that she wrote of religious passion because she was bored.

(This reading of Boredom and modernity, I’d like to note, sounds much like that of Charles Baudelaire’s which I have been blogging on.)

He also calls her a hermit who didn’t know how to deal with the monstrous world, and in this view he also sees himself or anyone who may turn to the holy out of desperation: “A hysterical woman, tormenting and boring, an egotist, whose swollen and aggressive personality is incapable of noticing others – a know of tensions, torments, hallucinations, and manias…”

Gombrowicz is attracted and repulsed by his own outburst about Weil.  After pointing this out, he writes to himself “calm down.”  The fact that he is excited and angry about Weil show us that he, in his own eyes, falls into a similar trap, a modern trap; but unlike Weil, he doesn’t believe in his profundities.  Instead, he sees himself as a failure who happens to run across things like a child at play.

And in this gesture, which is based on comically targeting a belief that human beings can be heroic (religiously or artistically) he avoids metaphysics.  This turn to childishness is fascinating as it can be found in several modern writers and thinkers – like Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Woody Allen, and Ernst Bloch (to name a few) – that schlemiel-in-theory addresses from time to time.