Pornografia — Gombrowicz

Pornografia — as the title suggests, it's to some extent a book about 'porn.'

Briefly looking at the meaning of 'porn':

- A general term for books, films, photographs, pictures, and the like that arouse sexual desire by explicitly depicting human sexual acts. -

per the Daum Korean dictionary.

And so it is. What this book too tries to show is 'human sexual acts.' Saying 'sexual acts' might make the scope a bit ambiguous, but here I'd like to define the category of sexual acts as all acts done with 'sexual' thoughts. Honestly, expressing the rhetoric written in the book this way is a bit of a stretch, but it's possible to some degree, so I'll define it as 'all acts.' About five people — Karl and Henia, Albert, Frederick, and Witold — can be said to be the agents driving this story; the narrator here is 'Witold,' the one directing the story directly and indirectly is 'Frederick' (Frederick is almost the 'key' to the lock), the protagonists of that play are 'Karl' and 'Henia,' and the spectator watching them is 'Albert.'

The part I think about most while reading this book is the 'narrative technique.' Lately, having read books like Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights,' and Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' my thinking about the 'narrative technique' I previously held had been changing little by little. Because all these works were clearly markedly different from the 'social science' books or ordinary novels I usually enjoyed, and as a result my way of grasping the story and the process of empathizing with the protagonist to build a 'self' were also different. This book is a bit different too. Overall it seems close to 'first-person observer point of view,' but at times it also seems like third-person observer. (Of course, the four-point-of-view distinction learned in high school — first-person omniscient, first-person observer, third-person omniscient, third-person observer — may itself be a flawed division. This is, after all, a manufactured 'formula,' and you can't know how a novel's actual narration will differ.) Anyway, partial elements come together to create Pornografia's own distinctive character.

Frederick is the most important figure composing this book. Under the name of natural law, he leads everything. Witold feels something strange from the very moment he first sees Frederick, and I realized while writing this that that feeling was foreshadowing for Frederick's 'character' that appears in the middle of the story. The one who dominates and leads this book's atmosphere with some indefinable feeling is 'Frederick.' (Even his name resembles 'predator.') It was he who told Henia to fold up the hem of Karl's trousers, and he who had Albert witness Karl and Henia's relationship on the island. The one who makes them conform to the 'law of nature' rather than destroying the relationship is Frederick.

What is the 'sexuality' that 17-year-old boys and girls feel? Where on earth does the unknowable emotion they feel toward each other come from? Even though the 'sexual' gestures the book depicts are acts that hold no meaning without some modifier, do they become gestures toward each other, toward the 'other party,' between Karl and Henia? I'm not sure whether it's because 'feeling' works more importantly than the heart, but it seems to apply to some degree.

You might think everything proceeds by Frederick's hand, but in the end isn't it because Henia's and Karl's wills don't run counter to Frederick's thoughts? Henia, as her engagement to Albert is decided, declares to Frederick that she 'will no longer spread her legs for just anyone,' but in the end it seems to hint that Henia and Karl, caught in the threads they've woven around each other, form a relationship again.

Expressing 'sexuality' doesn't seem to warrant any modifier like especially more intense or lurid; I think this book's greatest strength is that the point of view, overall, is really distinctive.