YOUTH AND IMMATURITY IN THE WORKS OF GOMBROWICZ AND KUNDERA

Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are two playful and, at times, bizarre novels with roots in the Central European tradition. With Gombrowicz from Poland and Kundera from the Czech Republic, both writers come from the oft-ignored and largely disputed region of Central Europe. The two lived parallel lives, each experiencing youth in homelands dominated by foreign empires but ultimately leaving their respective motherlands for new lives in the West. In many ways, their stories are analogous as the two authors use their literary work to contemplate the image of youth and immaturity. The authors reach opposing conclusions: Gombrowicz finds a unique creative power within the grotesqueness of immaturity, and Kundera questions youth’s futile thirst for righteousness, which inevitably leads to litost– a state of despair.

Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke revolves around ideas of youth and immaturity, with special consideration for how immaturity lends itself to creativity and form. It tells the story of a thirty-year-old man, Joey, who one day wakes up and finds himself as a young boy again. Try as he might, Joey cannot convince those around him that he is actually a grown man. Every day, Joey transforms more and more into a schoolboy as he confronts questionable professors, rotten boys, and modern girls. Throughout, Gombrowicz repeats words associated with immaturity and youth: green, schoolgirls, legs, chickie, pupa… to name a few. Repetition plays a vital role in creating a sense of permanence in our memories, just as a schoolchild might memorize by rote. As Gombrowicz writes, it is through repetition “that mythology is most readily created” (Gombrowicz 70). By repeating these words, he drums the idea of immaturity into his reader’s heads, and in doing so, Gombrowicz demands the reader confront their own immaturity. He marries immaturity and creation in Ferdydurke. Immaturity allows for both imperfection and freedom in a way that nurtures creativity. The human obsession with perfection is a violation of self, for which the solution is immaturity. Gombrowicz argues that in the milestones of our development, we are only ever “halfShakespeares” and “quarter-Chopins,” and to swagger as if we were the real thing would only reveal our shortcomings (Gombrowicz 75). Essentially, we are imperfect beings who create imperfect art, and to pretend otherwise would be grossly ignorant and fraudulent. Ferdydurke, however, celebrates this imperfection. A certain freedom can be found by removing ourselves from the expectations of perfection. Through immaturity, you can be anything because immaturity subverts people’s expectations of who you are. Without these constraints we open ourselves up to change, to transformation, to newness, and to art. With this freedom, we can create unhindered by society, and so Gombrowicz declares the power of immaturity in creation.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera treats youth as a thing lost to the past, which people can only aspire to regain. Composed of seven separate narratives, The Book carries through it the thread of youth, each story presenting a variation on the theme. In one vignette, Kundera reveals how in old age, people begin to shrink: they look back at their youth and things that were once normal-sized appear larger than life. The process of moving from childhood to adulthood and back to childhood again is a common motif within the novel. The theme first appears with the character Mama, as she enters old age and widowhood, and again with Tamina as she finds herself on the island of children. Kundera does not, however, treat this reversal as a necessarily positive phenomenon. For Kundera, youth is a time of angst and self-pity. Kundera has said that the story of Tamina originated from a dream: “imagine being forced for the rest of your days to remain surrounded by children, without ever being able to speak to an adult. A nightmare” (Carlisle). Considering his younger years which consisted of foreign empires controlling his homeland, Kundera’s disdain for youth comes as no surprise. For him, youth is a place of blind naivety. Kundera’s own youth was one of high ideals and fear, which he links to immaturity (Carlisle). In The Book, he describes two phenomena related to youth: the feeling of litost and the desire for belonging. He describes litost as a “state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery” (Kundera 167). Kundera further explains that it is a consequence of inexperience, specifically the inexperience in understanding the imperfections of humanity. Youth expect perfection and thus experience litost when disappointed by their own inadequacy. We can see that Kundera relates youth and a yearning for the ideal, lending them to immaturity. Second, he writes that youth desire “rings” to dance in. By this, Kundera means to say that in youth, we want to be a part of movements and change. He himself joined the Communist movement as a young man, something he later came to regret for “it was the young who supported terror, in great numbers, through inexperience, immaturity, their all-or-nothing morality, their lyric sense” (Carlisle). According to Kundera, what may begin as a simple desire to belong can lead to the blind following of crusades. In The Book, Kundera tells a cautionary tale against the dangers of the youthful predisposition towards a passion for ideals which can emerge from immaturity and

Gombrowicz and Kundera explore youth and immaturity in their respective works yet conclude with contrasting judgments. While both agree that the yearning for youth is a desire hidden deep within us all, the two authors seem to disagree on whether this is a negative or positive desire. For instance, the entire premise of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke is a middle-aged man returning to teenagehood. It is a story of the instinctive inner child of humankind, or as Gombrowicz puts it, “the child [that] runs deep in everything” (Gombrowicz 101). Similarly, in The Book of Laughter of Forgetting, Kundera includes several stories, such as those of Tamina and Mama, in which an adult character returns to their childhood. Despite the apparent agreement between the two on the significance of our inner child, Gombrowicz and Kundera relate youth, immaturity, and imperfection in different ways. Gombrowicz finds a great creative power within immaturity, stemming from the freedom it grants. Conversely, Kundera focuses on the ingrained litost of youth, which is more destructive than the Gombrowiczian youth. Although the two authors differ in their stances towards youth and immaturity, together they reveal different sides to the idea of youth in literature.

In Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke and Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting themes of youth and immaturity are recurrent. Despite their similar èmigrè backgrounds, Gombrowicz and Kundera draw on these experiences in contrasting ways. The Gombrowiczian youth is that of creativity and freedom; it is the chance to break from tradition and forge new paths. Gombrowicz takes immaturity’s often destructive and ridiculous qualities and grants it a higher yet still absurd meaning. Conversely, Kundera finds in the gungho an all-or-nothing attitude of youth and potential for torment and misery when met with disappointment, which he attributes to the litost of youth.

Works cited

Carlisle, Olga. “A Talk with Milan Kundera.” New York Times May 19, 1985. Gombrowicz, Witold. Ferdydurke Yale University Press, 2012. Kundera, Milan. TheBookofLaughterandForgetting.Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

Lutsky, Klara K. TheAestheticsofUnfinalizability:BoundarysubjectivityandLoopholeNarrative in theNovelsofKunderaandGombrowicz New Jersey, Rutgers University, 1998.