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PARTISAN REVIEW
religion to sex. The struggle between Form and Chaos may reveal
itself, for example, in its sociological version, in which Aristocracy
represents the perfect (but also petrified) Maturity or Form, while
Peasantry stands for spontaneous (but also inarticulate) Immaturity
and Chaos.
It
may also be illustrated by the inequality of civiliza–
tions- Western civilization is, in this respect, an embodiment of
Maturity, while the "second-rate" civilizations of countries such as
Poland, "the poor relations of the [Western] world," represent Im–
maturity. Or, the tension between the extremes of Form and Chaos
makes itself felt within the confines of the individual ego, as a self–
contradictory, simultaneous yearning for the "perfection" embodied
in a complete personality of an adult on the one hand and the
"beauty" of a child's or adolescent's spontaneity on the other.
In fact, all these versions of the basic opposition between Form
and Chaos have a common denominator in the concept of inequal–
ity; each opposing pair can be interpreted as a case of Superiority
confronted with Inferiority. According to Gombrowicz, the very
essence of human existence lies in the fact that the individual strives
all of his life for Superiority and Form but in reality is by no means
unequivocally attracted by these values, since their ultimate attain–
ment equals spiritual petrification and death. Therefore, the in–
dividual secretly desires Inferiority, Immaturity and Chaos, because
only these extremes offer a chance of freedom. Yet, on the other
hand, the ultimate attainment of this other goal would mean isola–
tion, impossibility of any communication and self-affirmation. In
the final analysis, the conflict is insoluble. It can be only partly over–
come and contained, if not fully resolved, by artistic creativity. Even
though the artist can neither escape from nor achieve perfect Form,
he can at least feel free to
play
with it. He can make both the Matur–
ity of artistic convention and his own Immaturity "visible" instead of
concealing them, and thus, by gaining a salutary distance from
both, to liberate himself to a certain extent from their oppression.
Gombrowicz's way of relating everything to human Superiority
and Inferiority means, in turn, that the focal point of his outlook is
neither the individual
per se
nor society in general but, rather, what
emerges at the point of their mutual clash: the "inter-human
Church." His philosophy, as he puts it in
Diary:
VoluTTUJ One,
sub–
scribes neither to individualist nor to collectivist philosophies but
to "the third vision" built on the corpses of both: it is a vision of "man
in relation to another man, a concrete man, I in relation to you and
