Appendix B

[Reprinted from The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Translated & Edited by Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer, University of Washington Press.]

     By the latter half of the 1920s Witkiewicz had virtually abandoned the theater and pure form and created a new artistic role and personality for himself, that of novelist or rather antinovelist, since he regarded the novel as outside the realm of art and a kind of grab bag into which the most heterogeneous material could be stuffed. He had already written Bung's Downfall 622 Times, or A Demonic Woman in 1910, an unpublished and unfinished work. Now he produced 2 vast works of fantastic fiction, Farewell to Autumn (begun in 1925, published in 1927) and Insatiability (1930), both of which portray the collapse of Western civilization in nightmare visions of the future where the sexual, political, and philosophical are grotesquely intermingled. Witkiewicz was indeed insatiable in his pursuit of new artistic forms, and in the nonart form of the novel he found a perfect receptacle into which to pour satire, literary criticism, philosophical treatises, footnotes, personal invective, digressions of every sort, apocalyptic visions of disaster, and all kinds of verbal games, ironies, and parodies reducing the novel form itself to absurdity. The characters' names continue the multilingual anagrams and crossword puzzles found also in the cast of characters in the plays. The style is a bizarre mixture of philosophical language, polyglot puns, exaggerated grandiosity, invented words, and convoluted syntax. The world portrayed is the decadent artistic and intellectual circle on the verge of collapse; religion and philosophy are dead, art is growing more and more perverse and insane.

     In Farewell to Autumn, 2 revolutions take place, the first bourgeois/liberal; the second, totalitarian, reducing all to the same level and bringing about universal grayness and social mechanization. The hero, Atanzy Razakbal, a wouldbe artist, comes home from India at the time of the revolution, becomes a petty functionary, and...becomes obsessed with the seemingly irreversible process of socialization which is destroying the individual and the mystery of life. After taking cocaine, he decides to escape across the mountains...but finally returns to alert others to their plight and to the necessity of doing something about it. He is shot at the border as a spy. Insatiability presents an even more phantasmogoric picture of times to come, in which the world is divided up into warring factions dominated by different ideologies. Communist China is threatening to conquer all of Europe, having already taken over Russia. Witkiewicz's usual group of neurotic artists and demonic women suffers from a total sense of futility and metaphysical insatiability and is unable to do anything to resist the coming catastrophe. At this point, mysterious vendors start selling a magic pill, devised by the Malayan/Chinese philosopher MurtiBing and called the MurtiBing pill. The pill is a condensed form of the philosophy that has made the Sino/Mongolian army so successful; it brings perfect contentment and makes all metaphysical questioning disappear. More and more people take the pill and become converted to MurtiBingism, which solves all their problems and lulls their anxieties. Ultimately the armies of the East occupy the West after the surrender of the Western general, and Murti-Bingism triumphs. The old neurotic heroes no longer write dissonant modern music but joyful marches and no longer paint abstractions but socially useful pictures, all under the auspices of the Ministry of the Mechanization of Culture.

     Witkiewicz deplored all substitutes for metaphysics, whether a pill or a materialistic totalitarian philosophy. Mankind looked for answers to the basic questions about existence first in religion, then in philosophy and art. Religion was dead, philosophy was dying. Only art survived to deal with metaphysical questions, but, cut off from the once orderly picture of the universe formerly supplied by religion and philosophy, art could no longer be harmonious. As a substitute for religion and philosophy, modern art was forced to go to greater and greater extremes and artists were driven to madness in their quest to satisfy man's metaphysical longings. Modern artists were the last spokesmen for the old world of suffering from metaphysical anguish; soon they would be put into insane asylums. Socialization would turn theaters into foundling homes for retarded children. The new social order would make all mankind happy, without religion, without philosophy, without art. These are the two extreme positions: art grows more and more desperately mad; the forces for social mechanization and conformity become more and more powerful. Only philosophy could save mankind and philosophy was bankrupt.

"Every epoch has the philosophy it deserves. In our present phase we deserve nothing better than a drug of the most inferior kind, to lull to sleep our metaphysical anxiety which hinders our transformation into automatic machines."

S. I. Witkiewicz [quoted by Czeslaw Milosz in S. I. Witkiewicz , a Polish Writer for Today.]