Philippe Sollers :
|
Gombrowicz’s entire work is of polemical nature. Gombrowicz has an absolute Voltairean character. I am profoundly convinced of it each time that I open one of his book or read one of his letters. I always find a similar Voltairean inspiration in them: he calls everything into question, according to what is brought to light as faces, cultural attitudes, prejudices, various acquired slacknesses, and so forth. These work foster permanent vigilance.
I am particularly interested in the text “On Dante” (1966), because it opens a path of freedom of action regarding cultural monuments, a path towards full emancipation from what is considered sacred or upsetting. When Gombrowicz writes to a Polish friend who quotes Nietzsche or Thomas Mann, he answers: “It’s me, it’s me who’s speaking. It’s me and only me.” Philippe Sollers [1] in Gombrowicz vingt ans après, Paris, 1989 |
E. M. Cioran :
|
Gombrowicz’s comments on Dante remind me of Tolstoy’s on Shakespeare: they are beautiful, unnerving, crazy and intolerable.
Letter from E. M. Cioran to Dominique de Roux, March 17, 1970 |
Michel Polac :
|
Although I hold “Ferdydurke” and “Pornografia” in high esteem, I prefer Gombrowicz’s “Diary”. It is a stunningly clear text, closer to the "French clarity" of the 18th century than to the Mitteleuropean Baroque. Nothing stimulates the mind more than reading a random passage by Nietzsche, Cioran or Gombrowicz. […]
This pride may seem childish, in a similar way that Gombrowicz’s attacks on poets, painters or Dante himself have been deemed childish by critics. However, one must be thankful to those who draw mustaches on Mona Lisa (actually, since Gombrowicz is not a barbarian, he does so on copies of the painting), who speak out bluntly, who are aware that everything is important but nothing is serious, that flauntingly acting in bad faith is jubilant, that tearing down false celebrities is necessary and that shattering actual glories is almost an exercise in asceticism. There are no untouchable works and admiration is anything but compulsory. Michel Polac [2] in Gombrowicz vingt ans après, Paris, 1989 |
André Major :
|
From the heart of Argentina, a country so ashamed by its cultural immaturity that it plagiarized far-distant Europe, Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish writer, would gather with a handful of young people around a table in a Buenos Aires café and, with his sarcastic ways, would shatter their inferiority complex towards Europe.
As a Quebecker, struggling blindly to find my own path in the rife context of the general mobilization at the end of the 1960s, I naturally sympathized to the fate of this Pole who was painfully aware of the historical trap in which so many artists from dominated peoples and secondary cultures have fallen. Gombrowicz learned the following lesson from his own experience: one must turn their weakness into strengths and their inferiority into creativity, instead of pathetically mocking the mighty and the superior. This is what I learned from Gombrowicz’s Diary, a book in which I penetrated as if it were the space which I had always yearned for. André Major, L’esprit vagabond (The Vagrant Mind), Montreal, 2007 |