A madcap pastiche of the Gothic literary movement that was first popularised in the late 1700s by the likes of Horace Walpole – which was amply satirised on these shores not long afterwards by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818) – Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed originally appeared in serialised form in 1938, with book publication trailing a good thirty-four years behind. The first English translation didn’t appear until 1980, and even then, as with the Polish version, the final three sections were missing. Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s new edition is, then, the first complete version to hit the UK: another coup for Fitzcarraldo Edition, following Jon Fosse’s netting them another Nobel Prize.
If you’re a Fitzcarraldo aficionado, you might be expecting a lyrical and considered unpacking of the human condition, or a sweeping exploration of cultural oppression, or a taboo-defying work of autobiography. Well, you’re not going to get that here, or not exactly, anyway. The Possessed takes all the melodrama and supernatural intrigue and creepy doppelgangers and haunted castles that you’d expect from the Gothic tradition – think The Castle of Otranto, Jekyll and Hyde, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Dracula – and dials them up to eleven. Think Scooby Doo in a Polish forest. Gombrowicz was known for his sense of the absurd and the parodic, but also his scepticism about Polish nationalism and romanticism, and his disdain for the class system, and The Possessed bears all this out in abundance.
Leszczuk is a young proletariat man working as a sportscoach and a waiter, but when he lands a temporary job playing tennis with rising star and impoverished aristocrat Maja Ochołowska, he’s plunged into a tempestuous and bewildering world of passion and horror. There’s a ruined and haunted castle with a locked chamber that emanates evil; there’s a mad old prince and scheming underlings; there are doppelgängers, as Maja and Leszczuk take on a terrifying resemblance to one another that’s sort of reluctantly romantic but erupts in violence; there’s a psychic and a professor and a mysterious peasant; there’s a debauched ballroom scene and underground tunnels and copious revelations delivered via the post. There’s a haunted towel. You read that correctly. Gombrowicz opens the novel in the ordinary world, with half his caste sharing a train carriage on their way to the countryside, but a series of odd coincidences soon ruffle their peace, until, by the end, if they’re not possessed or amnesiac, they’re dropping to the ground in dead faints. The characters in Gothic literature don’t hide their emotions – they’re all about romance gone badly wrong and uncontrollable terror – and Gombrowicz’s crew make Walpole’s seem reserved: they whip from one sensation to another with all the subtlety of the orgy in Suskind’s Perfume.
So Gombrowicz is sending up the Gothic as a genre, certainly, but he’s also sending up the mysticism of Polish romanticism, the snobbery of the upper classes, and the treatment of women both in literature and in society: his characters, male and female, behave almost entirely viciously and sneeringly towards Maja, a woman who acts with an impunity and agency typically assigned to men, and who refuses to play her designated role. It’s all so over the top that it’s ludicrous, but the sheer intensity and lack of credibility is cumulatively very compelling. (There’s one major plot point where he professor and the mystic bond over a possessed pencil.) It’s also suffused with a genuine layer of horror. The towel is disturbing in the same uncanny way as the house in House of Leaves: it’s just enough the wrong side of weird to make you shiver and keep you reading.
To a contemporary reader, who’s maybe expecting something a little smoother, remember that this was serialised: there’s a corresponding degree of repetition, as Gombrowicz reminded his readers what was going on, which mostly involves shriekingly blunt explanations of the characters’ mental states. Let it wash over you. Enjoy the haunted household implements and Leszczuk’s pettiness and Maja’s inept ventures into the world of (not very) honest employment.
Any Cop?: It’s lengthy and wacky and irritating in places (Leszczuk is absolutely an incel in the making) but it’s also a nice insight into the Modernist tradition in Polish fiction and an overdue introduction to Gombrowicz for latter-day UK readers.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 