Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Smoke

For a sign to be a sign there must be an intention which is quite independent of the object which constitutes the sign itself. Finding intention, and therefore meaning, is a tricky business. It requires imagination, which projects meaning onto objects, making them signs by magic as it were. This creates a mystery: “For every sign deciphered by accident how many might go unnoticed, buried in the natural order of things? ... as if the surrounding reality was already contaminated by the possibility of meanings”

This density of ephemeral signs is the character of religious imagery - a multitude of self-referential signs authorised (literally) by accepted convention and extended everywhere. But it is also the character of sex in which the most unlikely objects - “needles, frogs, sparrow, stick, whiffle- tree, pen nib, leather, cardboard, et cetera, chimney, cork, scratch, drainpipe, hand, pellets, etc. etc., clods of dirt, wire mesh, wire, bed, pebbles, toothpick, chicken, warts, bays, islands” - can become signs and sources of sexual stimulation, that is, fetishes. A fetish is a sign of only itself; it is the feeling it creates. A fetish is therefore a linguistic dead end; it is the antithesis of an ikon, which makes connections elsewhere.

Fetishism is a slippery slope. As the patient responded to his psychiatrist’s Rorschach inkblots: “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures.” If religion sees everything as having its source in the divine, there should be little mystery in how some see the world as entirely sexualised. Intention projected is intention perceived. Hence paranoia maintains itself with all the evidence it needs. “How sticky is this cobweb of connections!”

Gombrowicz’s protagonist says, “What attracted me to the “behind,” the “beyond,” was the way that one object was “behind” the other.” Of course what’s ‘behind’ a fetish is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’ But in here is the last place anyone wants to look. Fetishes are dirty, shadow-side things. In terms of projected meaning, the closest thing to religion and sex is death, the ultimate shadow. And no one relishes the idea of introspection about death and its fetishes.

A problem arises however when the desire to keep the projected meaning of death external leads to a self-protecting action - murder - thus confirming the objective otherness of death. Even if the victim is only a cat, the point is made: death is there not here, the ultimate projection. And a satisfying outcome for the fetishist. But nonetheless even this is uncertain:“Such a trifle on the very boundary of chance and non-chance, what can one know?”

Cosmos goes considerably beyond Gombrowicz’s fellow-Pole Stanislaw Lem in his exploration of epistemology. Lem’s His Master’s Voice, for example, (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) considers the difficulty in distinguishing signal and noise from outer space. For him, meaning must be presumed in order to find meaning but not a particular meaning. Gombrowicz presents a rather more complex situation, the human compulsion to assign specific, definite meaning from a sort of inner space. The result of this compulsion is much more difficult to decipher than alien transmissions. About intentions: “What can one know, one can’t know anything, nothing is known.”




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