“And so it was this coincidence that was partially (oh, only partially!) of my own doing—and that’s exactly what was so difficult, awful, misleading, I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime!”
|
“I gladly call this work ‘a novel about a reality that is creating itself.’ And because a detective novel is precisely this—an attempt at organizing chaos—Cosmos has a little of the form of a detective romance. I am establishing two starting points, two anomalies, very distant from one another: (a) a hanged sparrow, (b) the association of Katasia’s lips with Lena’s. These two puzzles will begin to demand sense. One will permeate the other in striving to create a whole.”
—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, 1966 [Trans. Vallee] |
Witold, the young narrator, and his friend Fuchs arrive in a family pension in the country mid-summer. The discovery of a dead sparrow, hanged on an iron thread from the crook of a branch, sets off a series of similarly strange signs that knot into one another in the more and more cramped atmosphere recalling that of a police novel. It all leads to a brutal outcome—a suite of hangings.
"Cosmos", adapted and directed by Jerzy Jarocki, Teatr Narodowy, Warsaw, 2005.
|
“ […] In Cosmos, I am telling the simple story of a simple student.
“This student goes to spend his holidays as a paying guest in a house where he meets two women, one has a hideous mouth which has been ruined by a motor car accident, while the other has an attractive mouth. The two mouths are associated in his mind and become an obsession. On the other hand he has seen a sparrow hanging from a wire and a piece of wood hanging from a thread... . And all this, a little out of boredom, a little out of curiosity, a little out of love, out of violent passion, starts dragging him towards a certain means of action ... to which he abandons himself, but not without skepticism. […] “Cosmos is an ordinary introduction to an extraordinary world, to the wings of the world, if you like.” —A Kind of Testament: Interviews with Dominique de Roux [Trans. Hamilton] |
Production by Jerzy Jarocki, Warsaw, 2005.
Structure de Cosmos
| I. | « Je vous raconterai une autre aventure... » |
| II. | « Je ne peux pas raconter cela... » |
| III. | « Tout cela était menu... » |
| IV. | « Le jour suivant se montra distrait... » |
| V. | « Au-dessus de moi... » |
| VI. | « Il fut enterré de l’autre côté de la clôture... » |
| VII. | « Tout se passait dans l’éloignement... » |
| VIII. | « Lucien a dit à Léna d’une voix somnolente... » |
| IX. | « Elle me servit et le silence se fit... » |
| X. | « Il me sera difficile de raconter la suite... » |