STANISLAW BARANCZAK
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him.... Man through man. Man in relation to man. Man created
by man."
At this central juncture, however, the consistency of his own
argument forces Gombrowicz in his
Diary
to make a number of
necessary qualifications and reservations .
In
order to prove that his
philosophy of the individual is itself individual he has to distinguish
his views from those popular philosophies of his time which for
various reasons might be suspected of having influenced him. For
such a programmatic artist as he was, Gombrowicz was amazingly
well-versed in philosophy- in Argentina, he even supplemented his
income for a while by giving occasional philosophy lessons - and the
philosophical pages of
Diary:
Volume One
testify to his impressive in–
tellectual precision. He is perfectly aware that certain elements of his
vision put him close to several existing doctrines but he identifies
with none of them - not only for the simple reason that he had
developed his own ideas before the emergence of some of these doc–
trines (such as existentialism), but because neither of them fits com–
pletely into his System. On the one hand, for instance, he clearly
realizes his proximity to modern Catholicism:
I am joined to it by its acute sense of hell contained in our
nature and by its fear of man's excessive dynamics.... The
Church has become close to me in its distrust of man, and my
distrust of form, my urgent desire to withdraw from it, to claim
"that that is not yet I," which accompanies my every thought and
feeling, coincides with the intentions of its doctrine. The Church
is afraid of man and I am afraid of man. The Church does not
trust man and I do not trust man. The Church, in opposing tem–
porality to eternity, heaven to earth, tries to provide man with
the distance to his own nature that I find indispensable....
The important thing for me is that it and I both insist on the divi–
sion of man : the Church into the divine and human components,
I into life and consciousness . After the period in which
art ,
philosophy, and politics looked for the integral, uniform, con–
crete, and literal man, the need for an elusive man who is a play
of contradictions, a fountain of gushing antinomies and a system
of infinite compensation, is growing.
Yet Gombrowicz, a declared atheist and rationalist, realizes
with equal clarity that no authentic communication between him
and a Catholic is possible: in the latter "Everything is already re-
