Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

Author:Witold Gombrowicz [Gombrowicz, Witold]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

9 Peeping and Further Incursion into Modernity

I quietly went into my room and lay down on my bed. I had to devise a plan of action. I trembled, and sweat poured off me as I realized that in this pilgrimage of mine I was descending, through a sequence of defeats, to the very bottom of hell. Nothing that is really tasty can be really awful (as the word "tasty" indicates), and only that which has bad taste is truly inedible. With envy, I was reminiscing about those beautiful, romantic, classical crimes, the rapes and gouging of eyes in poetry and prose—herring with jam, that I know are awful, unlike those wonderful and beautiful crimes in Shakespeare. So don't talk to me, don't, about those rhymed agonies we swallow as easily as oysters, don't talk about the candy of disgrace, about the chocolate cream of horror, the little cakes of wretchedness, about the lollipops of suffering and sweetmeats of despair. So why does this busybody of a woman, who uses her finger to tear at the most bloody social ills, death by starvation of a worker's family of six, why, I ask, does she not dare, with the same finger, to pick her ear in public? Because this would have been much more dreadful. Death from starvation, or the death of a million in war—this can be eaten, even relished—yet there still exist in this world combinations that are not edible, that make us vomit, that are bad, discordant, repulsive, and repellent, oh, even satanic, and these the human organism rejects. And yet our first and foremost task is to relish, we must relish, relish, let the husband, wife, and children lie dying, let our heart be torn to shreds, as long as it's done tastefully, yes, tastefully! Indeed, that which I was about to undertake in the name of Maturity, and in order to free myself from the schoolgirl's spell, would be an anti-culinary and a counter-palatable activity, something the gullet finds quite revolting!

Anyway, I didn't delude myself—my success at lunch was rather dubious, it mainly affected the parents, the girl escaped unharmed, she remained distant and unattainable. How could I defile her modern style from a distance? How was I to pull her into the orbit of my activity? And, in addition to the psychological distance, there was also the physical distance—she saw me only during lunch and dinner. How could I break her down, pierce her mentally from a distance, that is, when I was not with her, when she was alone? "Perhaps," I went on with my lame thinking, "by peeping and eavesdropping." The Youngbloods had paved the way for me because they had perceived me, from the first moment of our encounter, as an eavesdropper and a Peeping Tom. "And who knows," I thought, drowsy but hopeful, "perhaps if I put my eye to the keyhole I'll immediately see in her something repugnant, many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides.

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