The Anguish and Glory of Being an Outsider

Gombrowicz attempts in his oeuvre to give voice to a paradoxical, self-undermining concept of authenticity. “Inauthentic” authenticity is best realized by the personal and fragmentary form of his Diary. Gombrowicz turns out to be an heir of Romanticism, especially of the philosophy of the self-development of “Geist” (Hegel), which, however, in his case, does not culminate in “fulfilment”. The author's ambivalent attitude towards Romantic authenticity determines his critical attitude to Polish Romanticism, which in his times had become an ossified part of the Polish national tradition. According to Gombrowicz the thoughtless adoption of the Polish romantic paradigm of exile, suffering and alienation as the general fundament of Polishness made it unfit (in spite of its similarity to the predicament of twentieth-century man) to express existential anguish. So he had to find a new form of alienation without reminiscences of its romantic counterpart. This led to a reappraisal of the Polish literary tradition. Especially to Gombrowicz's liking was the “degenerate” style of the Sarmatic Baroque.