An Apprenticeship in Immaturity: Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke as an Anti-Bildungsroman

Year 2017, Issue: 38, 393 - 406, 18.12.2017

Selin Ever

https://doi.org/10.21497/sefad.377435

Abstract

This article argues that Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz’s  novel published in 1937 in Poland, formally
and thematically subverts the classical Bildungsroman.
The seminal novel that has propagated the Bildungsroman
genre is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship (1795). Bildungsroman,
commonly understood as a narrative of self-formation, was conceived in Germany
in the late eighteenth century in the age of humanism and emphasizes the
harmonious integration of the individual with society. This social mission also
carries over to aesthetic idealism’s notion of form, which is modeled on the
organic unity of parts and the whole. Comparing Gombrowicz’s Ferydurke with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the
article contends that Ferdydurke
displaces Bildungroman’s notion of “beautiful totality” by a grotesque
aesthetics of parts that alludes to the collapse of harmonious social relations
in the aftermath of the First World War, and on the threshold of the Second.
Gombrowicz’s unique articulation of Form as the sedimentation of interpersonal
antagonism is embodied in Ferdydurke,
which, much like its protagonist, sabotages its own formal maturation through
manifestoes, theoretical reflections, narrative digressions, and prefaces to
the digressions thrown between the chapters. If the classical Bildungsroman presents us with the image
of man in the process of becoming as Bakhtin has argued, Ferdydurke enacts the dissolution of that process in its very form.

Keywords

Bildungsroman, Gombrowicz, bildung, modernism, Ferdydurke

Toylukta Bir Çıraklık: Bir Anti-Bildungsroman Örneği Olarak Witold Gombrowicz’ten Ferdydurke

Abstract

Bu makale, Witold Gombrowicz’in 1937 yılında Polonya’da yayımlanmış olan
romanı Ferdydurke’ün klasik Bildungsroman türünü biçimsel ve tematik
olarak alaşağı ettiğini tartışır. Bildungsroman
türünün yayılmasını sağlayan eser, Goethe’nin çığır açıcı romanı Wilhelm Meister’in Çıraklık Yılları’dır (1795). Çoğunlukla bir öz-oluşum
anlatısı olarak değerlendirilen Bildungsroman
türü, on sekizinci yüzyıl Almanya’sında, hümanizm çağında ortaya çıkmış olup,
bireyin toplumla uyumlu bir şekilde birleşmesine vurgu yapar. Bu toplumsal
amaç, estetik idealizmin parçalar ve bütünün organik birliği üzerine
modellenmiş biçim anlayışına da taşar. Bu makale, Ferdydurke ve Wilhelm
Meister’in Çıraklık Yılları romanlarını karşılaştırır ve Ferdydurke’ün Bildungsroman’ın “güzel bütünlük” anlayışını grotesk bir parça
estetiği aracılığıyla sarsarak, bu estetiğin 
Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nın sonrasında ve ikincisinin eşiğinde çökmüş olan
toplumsal uyumu anıştırdığını iddia eder. Gombrowicz’in insanlararası
düşmanlığın çökeltisini yansıtan özgün Biçim anlayışı, Ferdydurke’te vücut bulmuştur. Roman da kahramanı gibi bölümleri
arasına yerleştirilmiş manifestolar, kuramsal düşünüşler, anlatıdan sapmalar ve
bu sapmalara yazılmış önsözler aracılığıyla kendi biçimsel olgunluğunu sekteye
uğratır. Bakhtin’in dediği gibi, Bildungsroman,
oluşum sürecindeki insanın imgesini sunuyorsa, Ferdydurke bu sürecin çözülümünü kendi biçimi aracılığıyla
gerçekleştirir.

Keywords

Bildungsroman, Gombrowicz, bildung, modernizm, Ferdydurke

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