Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

If Eugene Ionesco wrote Billy Madison

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is one of Poland’s internationally best-known authors of the twentieth century. Ferdydurke, published in 1937, is his debut novel, after having previously published some poetry and short stories. I have an outsider’s interest in Polish culture, and I like to explore Polish literature old and new. I had previously read Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel Cosmos, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Eugene Ionesco, Gombrowicz is known for his absurd sense of humor and for pushing the envelope of narrative form in his fiction. In Ferdydurke, however, his envelope-pushing challenged my attention span, and his absurdity failed to inspire laughter.

Like much of its content, the word “Ferdydurke” is simply nonsensical, and isn’t even used in the text. The narrator of the novel is Johnnie, a 30-year-old writer whom critics have accused of immaturity. Such criticism is taken very literally when a professor named Pimko, an old acquaintance of the narrator, demands that Johnnie relive his youth. Pimko sends Johnnie to a school for boys, where everyone inexplicably perceives him as roughly a 15- or 16-year-old. Also inexplicable is why Johnnie doesn’t just say no to Pimko and refuse to be demoted to youthdom, but then there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Eventually, Johnnie becomes infatuated with a teenage girl and vies for her affection with other suitors, young and old, with comic results.

Ferdydurke is a satirical novel. In fact, it satirizes just about everything—the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative, the urban and the rural, literary criticism, the educational system, class distinctions, the pretensions of intellectualism, love, nostalgia, conventions of masculinity, so-called modernity, and the fetishizing of youth. Unfortunately, I found very little of this satire to be actually funny, and only small portions of it to be mildly amusing. Maybe with some good comic actors and some rapidly paced direction, this might amount to a somewhat entertaining movie, but on paper it felt like a witless waste of time.

What I do like about Gombrowicz’s writing is that even though it’s experimental and intended to be humorous, he does tell his story through actual sentences with correct syntax. It’s not an anything-goes modernist language game like something by James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. As he did in Cosmos, Gombrowicz does repeat a few choice words over and over again like a beat poet beating a bongo. In this case, those words are “thighs,” “youthful,” “stable-boy,” “fraternize,” and “bum” as in buttocks (from the English translation by Eric Mosbacher).

Ferdydurke is now considered a cult classic, which probably means many people like to think they’re cool for liking it whether they understand it or not, something like the Polish equivalent of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I suspect probably the only people who really understand Ferdydurke, however, are Poles or their European neighbors who lived through the 1930s or thereabouts. Rather than a satiric masterpiece, I thought this was just a self-indulgent exercise in nonsense. It didn’t offend me with its self-indulgence like, say, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Instead, Ferdydurke just bored me. It was like listening to a silly children’s song repeated over and over again until it just makes you want to go to sleep. Cosmos was also innovative and goofy, but I felt it had a purpose, whereas here the satire just seemed simplistic, pointless, and unfunny.
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