Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
Translation by Danuta Borchardt
Grove Press, 248 pages (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0802145130

I'm having trouble getting motivated to read or post so I'll provide a wrap-up on Pornografia that is heavy on links, quotes, and impressions. First, the summary from the Publishers Weekly review (taken from Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog):

While recuperating from wartime Warsaw in the Polish countryside, the unnamed narrator and his friend, Fryderyk, attempt to force amour between two local youths, Karol and Henia, as a kind of a lewd entertainment. They become increasingly frustrated as they discover that the two have no interest in one another, and the games are momentarily stopped by a local murder and a directive to assassinate a rogue member of the Polish resistance. Gombrowicz connects these threads magnificently in a tense climax that imbues his novel with a deep sense of the absurd and multiplies its complexity. Gombrowicz is a relentless psychoanalyzer and a consummate stylist; his prose is precise and forceful, and the narrator’s strained attempts to elucidate why he takes such pleasure at soiling youth creepily evoke authentic pride and disgust. Borchardt’s translation (the first into English from the original Polish) is a model of consistency, maintaining a manic tone as it navigates between lengthy, comma-spliced sentences and sharp, declarative thrusts.

My posts on (and around) the novel:

A disastrous adventure

Gombrowicz’s thoughts on the novel in his Diary and from A Kind of Testament

The 2003 movie adaptation


Stray thoughts:

It’s easy to tell I’ve become a fan of Gombrowicz and this book highlights much of what I enjoy about his writing. The themes at its heart lie with the interaction and influence between youth and maturity (or you can call it naturalness and artificiality, or nature and culture, or controlling and being controlled). The interaction, straight-forward at first, becomes complicated as thoughts and being intertwine. One example begins with the narrator Witold’s ecstasy in church, not from religious matters but from seeing two beautiful adolescents. The part of the body he first notices are their necks, then their body parts begin to merge in his imagination:

What’s this? It was as if the nape of her neck (the girl’s) was taking a run for and uniting itself with (the boy’s) neck, this neck as if taken by the scruff was taking the other neck by the scruff of the neck! Please forgive the awkwardness of these metaphors.
(page 24)

Witold and Fryderyk attempt to turn this imaginary combination of the two kids into a real, carnal coupling. Along the way, the friendship between Witold and Fryderyk deepens in a manner such that they begin to identify with each other, think the same thoughts and anticipate the actions of each other. There are other mergers along the way, leading to an ending where the four characters briefly become one.

There are several such troubling cases of symmetry, pairings, and mirroring throughout the novel. Another example starts with the imagery of Henia and Karol killing a worm (see my first post for the excerpt). Later, after Vaclav sees Henia toying with Karol (although Vaclav doesn’t know it is staged) he declares he will kill Karol like a worm. Once again this sets the stage for the final scene.

While there are many humorous things Gombrowicz does in his narration, I wanted to point out the use of parentheses around (the boy) and (the girl) as seen in the above excerpt. Like many other things in the novel, this usage is open to interpretation. The narrator promises he will explain why he uses this notation for Karol and Henia but never does. There’s a hint later on that, while maybe not correct, provides plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor (which leads me to believe that it is not incorrect). In a letter to Witold, Fryderyk uses symbols and characters’ initials to find an explanation on what has happened and how things can play out:

The knife creates a new formula, S (Siemian)—S¹ (Skuziak).
Which makes: (SS¹)—A, through A, through Amelia’s murder.
But at the same time there is A—KH. Or (KH)—(SS¹)
What chemistry! It is all connected.
(page 160)

Don’t try to understand it…you would have to be much more immersed in the novel for that excerpt to approach making sense (and for me it doesn’t go beyond the ‘approach’ stage). The key lies with the formulae and the chemistry. Witold and Fryderyk attempt to manipulate Karol and Henia just like a chemistry experiment. Alas, there is no apparent chemistry between the youth. Like any pun or joke, it loses a lot in the explanation.

There are a lot more topics to delve into, especially the character of Fryderyk and the role religion plays in the novel, but I’m going to end here. Please forgive my erratic spelling of characters’ names across the posts. I’ve tried to remain consistent with the novel’s spellings when discussing the novel, but lapsed into the Anglicized spellings that were used in the movie occasionally. Hopefully I haven’t confused anyone.


Some additional links:

An interview with translator Danuta Borchardt:

DB: Pornografia focuses, perhaps more than his other three novels, on the outer limits of the imagination—on the “forbidden”—on the erotic fantasies of middle age and on living them through the young, and on manipulations that influence the young to the point of crime and murder.

Also, in Pornografia Gombrowicz tests the notion of belief in God versus non-belief. According to Jerzy Jarzębski, one of Gombrowicz’s foremost scholars: “Pornografia is blasphemous in the sense that it presents traditional culture and national customs in a state of exhaustion and atrophy.” Jarzębski, suggests that Gombrowicz’s ideas may originate from the existentialists’ “death of God,” from old age generally, from World War II and the demands it placed on Polish society, and from the collapse of moral values.

Another interview with Borchardt (via podcast) can be found here

More on the novel (and some suggestive covers) at Gombrowicz.net

An excerpt at The Quarterly Conversation

Reviews at:
Three Percent
The Washington Post (Michael Dirda)
The New Republic

Pornografia: 2003 movie, Poland

At Frederick's command, Henia (Sandra Samos) rolls up Karol's torn pants leg

I continue with my erratic foreign movie posts for this year as well as posting on movies adapted from books (as usual, this post will look at the differences between the film adaptation and the novel). For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up (first half of year and second half). I’m trying to get back in the swing of things after being offline for a while…

Pornografia tests the limits of how much you can add or change before a movie becomes something very different from the novel on which it’s based. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a great novel and an enjoyable movie. See my first post on the novel for the general storyline, which remains essentially the same—Frederick and Witold try to engineer the pairing of Henia and Karol, while the residents of a country estate are tasked with the murder of a resistance office. The main themes regarding the interaction of youth and maturity are consistent with the novel. So what changes?

The movie makes good use of visual imagery, such as focusing on moths trapped in a lamp shade—a little heavy handed at times but in this gorgeous film it usually works. The war (World War II), downplayed in the early part of the novel, remains in the forefront of the movie, whether with soldiers visiting the estate for milk and eggs or in a soldier’s rape of a country girl during a dreamlike sequence in the forest.

One addition clarifies an important point of the novel—Veronika, one of the estate’s maids, attempts to seduce Frederick. He gently rejects her, highlighting Witold’s and Frederick’s interest in pairing Karol and Henia for reasons other than physical enjoyment. The best addition to the movie for me was Henia’s reading of the poem “Without You” by Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska. The timing of its reading adds to the impact of the poem (translation from the subtitles, which includes the ellipsis):

I’m bored without you, bored to madness…
Along with my dog and my squirrel…
I write, read, and smoke, and my eyes are still blue.
But all this is just the force of habit…
The dawn is still gray and the dusk gold-blue…
Day crosses to one, night to the other side…
and the roses bloom, seemingly unwilling…
as they can’t do otherwise.
Yet the world has ended, can you understand?
It is no more and won’t bring it to life.
The time is hard and quiet but wait a minute…I…
may be already on the other side.

Henia runs with Frederick and Witold

There are many other changes which make little difference or represent a different emphasis from the novel, such as the mistress of the estate being an alcoholic. I had to wonder, though, why bother making such a change? There are some key additions, though, I would like to address because they change the course of the story from the novel.

After the arrival of Siemian (the resistance officer who wishes to quit) at the estate, Witold and Frederick slowly scale back their plans for a forced pairing between Karol and Henia. In place of the original plan, the corruption of the youth is to come from their assignment to murder Siemian. On the way to Siemian’s room, Karol and Henia pause for a brief tryst, showing that despite all the elders’ plans youth will follow its own path. What’s most troubling about the scene to me, though, is the impersonal nature of the sex. Karol and Henia demonstrate about as much passion as if they had stopped for a drink of water. All of which may be the point—the rapturous flights of fancy by Witold and Frederick end in a different, cold reality. There are other ways to view the act, too, but whatever your interpretation its inclusion alters some of the dimensions of the story.

The biggest addition revolves around the inclusion of the Holocaust, which (if I remember correctly) is never mentioned or alluded to in the novel. Its inclusion comes completely from left field and markedly modifies the story. Karol and Witold’s visit to town for kerosene provides the first time its presence is felt. Witold, wandering around the store, spies a family hiding in the basement. The next inclusion, though, is what takes the storyline into a completely different direction from the novel. I apologize for not going into more detail after providing other spoilers, but I think discussing it would ruin watching the movie. It’s enough of a change, even though you can argue it is consistent with other themes, to transform the movie into something completely different than the novel.

I’m not sure the addition of this storyline works. It proves to be powerful but adds a maudlin feeling. For the first 90% of the movie, Director Jan Jakub Kolski did a wonderful job of translating a novel that plays out mostly from Witold’s thoughts. Because of that, even with reservations about the added storylines, I still recommend the movie.

Maria (Grazyna Blecka-Kolska), the mistress of the estate, and Frederick (Krzysztof Majchrzak)

Gombrowicz on Pornografia (from A Kind of Testament)

Witold Gombrowicz wrote A Kind of Testament, an autobiographical account of his life and work, in 1968, a year before he died. While anything that comes directly from Gombrowicz has to be taken with a grain of salt, the flow of information and insight that comes from the book feels as wonderful as his other writing. I’m going to provide a few excerpts from the chapter on Pronografia to give you a taste of the writing in this memoir as well as some of views on the topics in the novel. All quotes come from the Dalkey Archive Press paperback edition (2007), translated by Alastair Hamilton.

I won’t vouch for the quality of logic in the first excerpt, but it includes topics he addresses throughout the chapter:

As for the subsequent adventures I had with the two goddesses, Youth and Beauty, I could sum them up in four theses, which I consider most revealing:

The first: youth is inferiority

The second: youth is beauty

The third (and how thrilling!): so, beauty is inferiority

The fourth (dialectical): man is suspended between God and youth.

(page 135)

Gombrowicz goes into the last thesis in more detail. The last paragraph in the following excerpt touches on Pornografia’s inversion of Ferdydurke:

I then tended to see youth as a value in itself. But youth is beneath all value, the only value of youth is youth. And that is why, as I wrote a brief preface to the French edition of Pornografia, a phrase a little like this came to my mind: ‘Man is suspended between God and youth.’

This means that man has two ideals, divinity and youth. He wants to be perfect, immortal, omnipotent. He wants to be God. And he wants to be in full bloom, fresh and pink, always to remain in the ascendant phase of his life—he wants to be young.

He aspires to perfection, but he is afraid of it because he knows that it is death. He rejects imperfection, but it attracts him because it is life and beauty.

There’s nothing extraordinary about that—it’s an idea like any other…but what a beacon for me!

For, as I write, I have a tendency—a subterranean, illegal tendency—to complete the natural development of immaturity towards maturity with a radically opposite trend, leading downwards, from maturity to immaturity. In Ferdydurke, one can see the extent to which, despite my efforts to become mature, I remained attached to immaturity. That has always tormented me. Man pursues two goals, he is torn between two poles…. Yes, of course the adult is the professor, the master of youth. But does this adult not secretly frequent another school, where the youth dominates him? Would the furious dynamism of life, this compression (the source of its energy), be possible without it?

(pages 138-139, ellipsis in original)

Gombrowicz goes into detail about Pornografia. I’m only including a couple of paragraphs from this discussion, but they succinctly summarize what happens in the novel:

What happens in Pornografia? We, Frederick [Fryderyk ] and I, two middle-aged gentlemen, see a young couple, a girl and a boy, who seem to be made for each other, welded to each other with a striking and reciprocal sex appeal. But as far as they’re concerned they might not even have noticed it; it is drowned, we might say, in their youthful incapacity for fulfillment (the inexperience peculiar to their age). We, the older ones, are excited by it, we would like the charm to take shape. And, with due precautions, and keeping up appearances, we start to help them. But our efforts lead us nowhere; they founder in that sphere of pre-reality where they reside, and which characterizes them—in that antechamber of their existence.

And then? Let us glide over the cunning devices of the matchmaker-producer, who is also a voyeur, but a poet-voyeur. The smoke that rises from this magic enclosure intoxicates us more and more and, exasperated by the indifference of the two children, it occurs to us that, failing physical possession, sin, a common sin, can tie them together and—oh joy!—can tie us to them, like accomplices, despite the difference of age.

(pages 140-141)

Gombrowicz goes into more detail about the novel but he reveals even more than I did in my previous posts. At the end of this chapter Gombrowicz reflects on the student/youth riots occurring as he writes this memoir and how they tie in (“in a sense”) with many of the themes he has included in his works, especially with Pornografia. He doesn’t have much good to say about either side in these riots. He does take care to differentiate what is happening in the West with what he is seeing in Eastern Europe (this is 1968, so events like the Soviet invasion after the Prague Spring and the Polish March crisis). The end of the chapter highlights this difference and summarizes his disdain:

But I would like to add: the student revolts in Eastern Europe have nothing to do with those in the West. The former are the result of misery, the latter of satiety.

(page 146)

The next post will look at the 2003 Polish movie version of the movie (you knew that was coming at some point).

Gombrowicz on Pornografia (from his Diary)

I plan on posting occasional entries from Diary by Witold Gombrowicz over the next few months (or however long it takes me to get through it). I’m reading the 2012 Yale University Press edition, translation by Lillian Vallee. There are several references to Pornografia in the Diary and I’ll post from two related entries. Before I do so, I think it’s important to understand the intent of the Diary. From the foreword by Rita Gombrowicz:

When Witold Gombrowicz began writing his Diary in 1953, he was forty-nine years old. He had been living in Buenos Aires since 1939, when the war had caught him by surprise. As a promising young writer, he had been officially invited to the inaugural voyage of a new maritime route between Poland and Argentina, departing from the port of Gdynia the 29th of July 1939 on the dazzling transatlantic liner Chrobry (The Brave). … [W]hile reading The Journals of André Gide, he had the idea of writing his own diary. On August 6 of that same year, he wrote to Jerzy Giedroye, the director of Kultura [a Polish émigré journal]: “I must become my own commentator, even better, my own theatrical director. I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes.” The Diary was the realization of this mad ambition. But Gide had written his diary when he was already famous, whereas Gombrowicz wrote his to become so.

In other words, take everything you read with a grain of salt. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true, just that Gombrowicz is framing things how he wanted them to be seen. Even so, I think these two entries are helpful in understanding the novel. Here’s the first entry I’ll quote, from 1958:

On 4 February of this year (’58), I finished Pornografia. This is what I have called it for the time being. I am not promising that the title will stay. I am in no hurry to publish it. Too many of my books have appeared in print lately.

One of my most persistent needs, during the writing of this quite pornographic—in some places—Pornografia was: to pass the world through youth; to translate it into the language of youth…To spice it with your—so it allows itself to be violated.

The intuition that dictated this to me is probably based on the conviction that a Man is helpless against the world…by being only power, not beauty…and, furthermore, in order for him to be able to possess reality, it must first be put through a being that can be attractive…that is, that can surrender itself…a lower, weaker being. Here there is a choice—woman or youth. The woman I dismiss because of the child, that is, because her function is too specific. Youth is what is left. And here one comes upon extreme formulas: maturity for youth, youth for maturity.

What is this? What have I written? Whether or not the accent I put on the Spirit of Youth and its Doings is worth anything…and how much will be hard to tell for a while.

(pages 372-3; ellipsis in original)

The second entry is from 1960, (supposedly) in reply to a letter asking for the metaphysical content of Pornografia:

Let us try to express it another way: man, as we know, strives for the Absolute, for Completeness. For absolute truth, God, complete maturity, etc. To embrace everything, to fully realize the process of his development—such is the imperative.

Thus, in Pornografia (in keeping with my old habit, because Ferdydurke is also saturated with this) another, probably more hidden and less legitimate, aim of man is revealed, his need for the Incomplete…Imperfection…Inferiority…Youth….

One of the key scenes of the work is the one in the church where under the pressure of Frederick’s [Fryderyk's] consciousness the Mass, together with God-the-Absolute, collapses. Then out of the darkness and emptiness of the cosmos comes a new divinity, earthly, sensual, underage, made up of two underdeveloped beings creating a closed world—because they attract one another.

Another key scene is the deliberations preceding Siemian’s murder—the Adults are not in a state to commit murder because they know all too well what it is, what weight it has, and they must do it with the hands of the minors. This murder must, therefore, be cast into a sphere of lightness, irresponsibility—only there does it become possible.

… [Gombrowicz goes into several other ideas permeating this book, but I’ll close with these two sentences.]

A lack of seriousness is just as important to man as seriousness. If a philosopher says that ‘Man wants to be God,’ then I would add: ‘Man wants to be young.’

(pages 485-6; ellipsis in original except for noted excision)

I briefly touched on a few of the religious aspects to the novel in the opening post on the novel, choosing to note and then skip them. One facet of the religious undertones fits in nicely with Gomborwicz’s first key scene—the epiphany the narrator has on seeing the two adolescents in church. To say the country estate becomes a garden of Eden with these two perfect beings is a bit of an overstatement, but not by much. The raptures Witold (the narrator) experiences when describing the perfect nature of the youths proves to be funny, then darkly ironic as he and Fryderyk try to corrupt them. Since the adults cannot get them to combine in a physical act, the set-up for a shared sin ("cast into a sphere of lightness") is attempted. (I'm not going to comment on possible political aspects of the novel in these religious aspects, such as the corruption/sacrifice of Poland during World War II, but I think they are there.)

The next post, delivery gods willing, will have Gombrowicz's comments on Pornografia in his memoir A Kind of Testament.

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz: a disastrous adventure

I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafes—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, the Ipsu—would gather in an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers…picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art… . Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.

- the opening paragraph to Pornografia, translation by Danuta Borchardt (ellipsis in original)

The dark and lean gentleman (Fryderyk) and the narrator (Witold) leave Warsaw for the countryside to visit Hipolit, a business acquaintance. At Hipolit’s estate, Fryderyk and Witold become obsessed with pairing Hipolit’s daughter Henia with the estate administrator’s son, Karol. Both youth, however, resist attempts at pushing the relationship beyond their friendship from childhood. Violent elements, not all of which are associated with the war, intrude on their plans. On a visit to the family house of Vaclav, Henia’s fiancé, Vaclav’s mother Amelia is killed. Upon return to Hipolit’s estate, an Underground Army officer, Siemian, stays with the family. Siemian, having second thoughts about fighting, has been marked for murder by the resistance for security purposes. Members of the resistance fail to appear but assign the murder to Hipolit.

I’m leaving a lot of this brief overview of the novel, some of which I’ll develop here or in additional posts while other areas I’d rather avoid so as not to give away the “twists.” A few notes on the novel…

A natural comparison for Pornografia is Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke since several of the theme are comparable, although several premises become inverted. Ferdydurke explored, among many things, the power of maturity over youth and its corrosive effects. Here we have an attempt at something similar as the adults try to manufacture a loss of innocence, first through sex and then through murder. Along the way, though, the power of youth exerts itself over maturity, refusing to be tarnished by its actions. It becomes a question of who is manipulating whom. The adults, failing at their attempts to control the actions of the youth, become obsessed with and, in turn, controlled by the young. It turns out that the youth aren’t completely innocent. The raptures that Witold goes into over their youth and beauty is an ideal he imposes on them regardless of the reality, their pliable behavior helping prolong his vision.

The discussions over “God, art, nation, proletariat” sound like they should have taken place in pre-World War II Poland, before Gombrowicz ended up in exile (he readily admits it is an imaginary Poland in his “Information” introduction). Completely missing from the brief Warsaw section is any real mention of the war and what was happening in the city at the time. In the countryside the talk of war is initially limited but it increasingly intrudes on their lives. In addition to the impositions from various armies, language and actions include progressively more violent features. The following excerpt can be read several ways—the intention of the two adults on the youth, the impact of the war on all of them, or the influence the youth have had on the adults with some implication of things to come:

A bird flew by.

Fryderyk: “What kind of bird was that?”

Karol: “An oriole.”

Fryderyk: “Are there a lot of them here?”

She [Henia]: “Look what a big earthworm.

Karol kept rocking, his legs spread apart, she raised her leg to scratch her calf—but his shoe, resting just on the heel, rose, made a half-turn, and squashed the earthworm…just at one end, just as much as the reach of his foot allowed, because he didn’t feel like lifting his heel from the ground, the rest of the worm’s thorax began to stiffen and squirm, which he watched with interest. This would not have been any more important than a fly’s throes of death on a flytrap or a moth’s within the glass of a lamp—if Fryderyk’s gaze, glassy, had not sucked itself onto that earthworm, extracting its suffering to the full. One could imagine that he would be indignant, but in truth there was nothing within him but penetration into torture, draining the chalice to the last drop. He hunted it, sucked it, caught it, took it in and—numb and mute, caught in the claws of pain—he was unable to move. Karol looked at him out of the corner of his eye but did not finish the earthworm, he saw Fryderyk’s horror as sheer hysterics… .

Henia’s shoe moved forward and she crushed the worm.

But only from the opposite end, with great precision, saving the central part so that it could continue to squirm and twist.

All of it—was insignificant…as far as the crushing of a worm can be trivial and insignificant.

Karol: “Near Lvov there are more birds than here.”

Henia: “I have to peel the potatoes.”

Fryderyk: “I don’t envy you… . It’s a boring job.”

As we were returning home we talked for a while, then Fryderyk disappeared somewhere, and I didn’t know where he was—but I knew what he was into. He was thinking about what had just happened, about the thoughtless legs that had joined in the cruelty they committed jointly to the twitching body. Cruelty? Was it Cruelty? More like something trivial, the trivial killing of a worm, just so, nonchalantly, because it had crawled under a shoe—oh, we kill so many worms! No, not cruelty, thoughtlessness rather, which, with children’s eyes, watches the droll throes of death without feeling pain. It was a trifle. But for Fryderyk? To a discerning consciousness? To a sensibility that is cable [? supposed to be capable?] of empathy? Wasn’t this, for him, a bloodcurdling deed in its enormity—surely pain, suffering are as terrible in a worm’s body as in the body of a giant, pain is “one” just as space is one, indivisible, wherever it appears, it is the same total horror. Thus for him this deed must have been, one could say, terrible, they had called forth torture, created pain, with the soles of their shoes they had changed the earth’s peaceful existence into an existence that was hellish—one cannot imagine a more powerful crime, a greater sin. Sin…Sin…Yes, this was a sin—but, if a sin, it was a sin committed jointly—and their legs had united on the worm’s twitching body… .

(ellipsis in original)

So who is this Fryderyk that becomes hysterical (or maybe rapturous) during this scene? One key aspect of Fryderyk lies in his scripted behavior. His movements with his tea during the opening meeting demonstrate his need to justify each action. This behavior continues through to his “directing” Karol and Henia, putting them in situations for an alleged screenplay he’s writing in order to bring them closer together, and then again to another end. His control of a situation carries over to his power of negation. He acts to avoid “not acting.” He kneels at mass to keep from “not kneeling.” (This negation leads to a pivotal moment in the church, which will be mentioned in the next post.) Fryderyk and Witold are in synch with their plans to contaminate the youth, part of the real pornography of the title. Trying to pair Henia and Karol as lovers proves laughable but the adults’ desire progresses to involving them in the murder of Siemian. Fryderyk and Witold avoid performing the murder because they understand, from experience and maturity, the act’s implications and cost. Yet they are willing to have the adolescents do it by trivializing the act, making it easy for Karol and Henia to perform it.

There is a religious component to the novel but I’m only going to lightly touch on it. Fryderyk’s atheism stands in marked contrast to Ameila’s fervent beliefs, yet he quickly becomes her favorite companion. She (and later her son) commit acts that can be viewed as sacrificial in nature—a topic that could be a post by itself but I’m going to avoid it for now since it would ruin the perfect perverse ending.

The next post will include a couple of entries from his Diary that include some of his thoughts on Pornografia.