Pornografia

Yoav — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:06:49 +0000

Witold Gombrowicz is one of the most influential Polish writers from the first half of the 20^th century. Pornografia is a story about the corruption of two young resistance members by the author’s alter egos, who try to draw from the youth’s zeal. He was very critical about the culture of his country and saw it as a cultural wasteland. His devotion to youth culture reminds me of Yukio Mishima, as his dualism concerning youth and the grown-up world is somewhat similar because the two books end with murder. But here, unlike The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the youth are manipulated to commit this murder, and are not the manipulators. What is so interesting about this book’s structure is that as Gombrowicz himself admits, he used a formula to write the book:

“My literature artwork is based on classical shapes… Pornografia is based on the good old Polish countryside story, Cosmos is a kind of detective novel, my theater is a parody of Shakespeare and my last play is a kind of operetta. I use classical shapes because they are perfect and the reader has become accustomed to them, but do remember – it’s important – that the shape, in my case, is but a parody upon shape. I use it but put myself outside of it, I’m looking for a connection between readable literary types and new, fresh world experiences.”

This idea of basing a novel upon shape is one important lesson that I have learnt from Pornografia. The other great aspect is the alter-ego of the author who narrows the distance between the writer and the character – a character who tries to direct the events in the book and in turn makes the book more interesting.

The following article will be on another borrower of sorts – Israel Rabon.

Weekend the Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Yoav — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:40:51 +0000

The turn of the century saw the building of many very large libraries all over the world, but today, in an age where we can put an entire library on one disk-on-key, one could wonder why…
One can say that a library is like a vessel of knowledge, and we are all sailors, and the intimate feeling we get from sitting and reading together is important. In some instances, librarians are our captains in the sea of information, but for me at least, the public library is Aladdin’s cave. I never visit the library without discovering some author that I never met before. Some exciting book is bound to fall into my hand with the promise of adventure. I truly don’t know how I would ever stumble upon such a book on the internet, between the limitations of the language and the copyright laws. I guess that without the library I probably would have played it safe. I would have been reading only the major writers and wouldn’t travel as far as I did in the literary ocean.
One of the most special books that I read lately is The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s modern and most translated writers who lived his life to the fullest and was acknowledged for his work, a true renaissance man whose death fitted the life that he lived and his ideology.
The story of the book in general terms is simple. A widow and her son meet a naval officer and the mother falls in love with him. Her son, who belongs to an intellectual youth gang, sees the sailor act in a way that is a betrayal to the manly code and the gang kills the sailor. However, simplifying the plot does this book a gross injustice. There are many lessons that need to be learnt from this book:
1. This book is filled with sharp and detailed descriptions of feeling and sexuality, which one must learn from, especially because the author was homosexual and probably didn’t take part in something like the relationship that he describes in the book.
2. The ideology that the writer shares with us of each and every character is astounding. I, as a westerner, could not identify with the youth world that he describes that created a revolution in Japan in his days, but it reminded me of King’s horror stories and tales from the 19th century. His ideology is revolutionary and nonconformist and he is not ashamed to describe the two worlds that tear him apart, the youth and the grownup, the east and the west, in such detailed manner.
3. One can see that the writer made a real study about the lives of sailors and the grownup world that he describes. He might have known of those levels of society from a meta-literary interest and this is a tip for everyone, if you want to create a persuasive world, you must conduct thorough research.
4. One must know a lot of literature by heart, I can find traces of Sophocles and Balzac in this novel, and I doubt if authors today know them as well as he did.
5. Even though the story is simple, it is loaded with so many good materials that you identify with the heroes, and you don’t feel the time passing.
6. The book works on so many levels and is, therefore, a true work of timeless art. In Hebrew the book is only 110 pages long, which shows that you don’t necessarily have to write an eternally long book for it to feel ‘internal’.
This week we shall deal with more writers from the Far East, and their relationship with the western culture.

Successful Writer » Yukio Mishima

Pornografia

Weekend the Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea