He was desperate for any guidance for his actions; even geomancy, using the rocks in his front yard.
"Raw chunks of butchered hyperrality were squirming in the dust and powder of what were once noble stage boards, all that was left of the old theatre….After the first act, the gut wrenched audience sank back into their seats like limp intestine." -Insatiability Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
This is the 1st part in two parts of notes and impressions.
For the past month, I have wanted to write a comprehensive and intelligent review of Insatiability, by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. I read it over a month ago, and it took me a month to read (far longer than it takes for me to read most books). It is a difficult book to discuss. It fits within the strange and perverse literary universe, between Lautréamont's Songs of Maldoror and Alfred Jarry's Days & Nights. Complicated, perverse and at times unwieldy, I was mesmerized and overwhelmed, simultaneously. I vacillated between being unable to put the book down, to being incapable of reading another sentence; but I finished it.
Oddly, I encountered Witkiewicz, Witacy, when I was 16, but did not know it at the time. I used to skip classes while in high school and I would spend my days at the college library. I was wander through the stacks and read whatever seemed curious and would leaped out at me. One day it was a book of surrealist plays, which was titled, The Water Hen. I read it, I did not understand it very well, but I always remembered it. The playwright's name did not stay with me, however, (due to its difficult Polish name) and I went through life with this play in my head, but with no author. Then I came across Insatiability and its author and realized the connection. Nothing, not even that play, with its absurdist plot and its suicidal, nihilistic overtones, could prepare me for the madness of this novel.
Its language is phantasmagoric and punful, even through translation, and the characters are grotesque and unreal. It is a basic story plot; a coming of age story for the main character: Genezip Kapen, and his initiation into the sexual to his final dehumanization. His initial sexual, romantic relationship (and involvement with a group of artistic sadists) eventually corrupts him and he loses his mind. Genezip, or Zip, runs off to join the military and then has a few more mind-loosening romances, which he ends up committing and participating in some unforeseeable acts. Zip occupies an unsettling world, where Europe is under threat of Communist China's takeover, and Poland is embroiled in war with China.
more to come......
