"Insatiability" by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Weird, wild, and startlingly prescient
Life was rocking back and forth on a crest like a seesaw. On one side one could see sunny valleys of normality and great numbers of delightful little nooks to curl up in; on the other, there loomed the murky gorges and chasms of madness, smoking with thick gases and glowing with molten lava—a valle inferno, a kingdom of eternal tortures and insufferable pangs of conscience.
The doped-up visionary who wrote this book was one of the most fascinating artistic personalities of the last century. A playwright, painter, novelist and amateur philosopher, he essentially invented Theatre of the Absurd a few decades before Beckett and Ionesco arrived on the scene. The neglect of his work outside of Poland is probably due to the fact that it is intellectually dense, difficult to translate, and often highly Polish-specific. That said, I was once lucky enough to see a production of his play The Mother, staged in the basement of a restaurant in Chicago (I remember having to wend my way through a mass of diners to get to my seat).
If Anglophone readers know his novel Insatiability at all, it is probably via Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, which discusses the novel in its first chapter (“The Pill of Murti-Bing”). Miłosz’s book came out in 1953, but Insatiability wasn’t published in English until 1977. The translator, University of Toronto Slavicist Louis Iribarne, did a heroic job struggling with this sprawling, convoluted text, stuffed with neologisms, obscure references, wordplay, and overheated rhetoric.
Writing roughly a century ago, Witkiewicz (or Witkacy, to use the pseudonym he formed out of his last two names) created a future world that eerily anticipates our own. “Witkacy had a seismograph in his head attuned to the tremors of history,” said the critic Jan Kott, and that seismograph is operating at full strength in Insatiability. Here we can find the rise of China; the use of drugs to promote psychological well-being; odd and extreme ideologies; and the growth of automation. All of this plays out in an exhausted Western world which has lost any belief in itself, and where the upper classes wallow in various forms of decadence.
The character who holds the whole messy thing together is one Genezip Kapen (also called Zipcio, Zipek, Zipon, Zippy, and even Zippiepoo). Insatiability is formally a Bildungsroman, following his transformation from privileged son of a brewing magnate to military aide to the commander of the Polish army, a strongman supposedly based on Poland’s interwar leader, Marshal Piłsudski. Being well-connected socially, he is able to consort with various larger-than-life characters, mostly artists and aristocrats. Young Zipcio is tormented by nameless yearnings; like a Romantic poet, he is stirred by the phenomena of nature:
The eye, attracted to the infinite by this dazzling brilliance, collided with the stolid resistance of that murky and infinitely more real world. Genezip felt something akin to a dull pain in his breast. That eerie moment wherein a mystery had unfolded passed, and ordinary, commonplace reality revealed its drab and jaded face beneath its mask.
All of this takes place while a Chinese army is making its way toward Europe, bent on conquest. Early in the narrative, we find out that Moscow has fallen to the Chinese, so Poland is now the first (and possibly last) line of defense for Western civilization. However, much like Zipcio, the intellectual and aristocratic classes are succumbing to their own metaphysical and psychological preoccupations, and have become obsessed with other distractions. These include dissonant music, esoteric forms of philosophy, religious cults, and last but certainly not least, sex and drugs.
It is in this perfervid atmosphere that a new cult appears and begins to attract adherents in the West. Murti-Bing, a mysterious Mongolian philosopher and guru, has somehow devised a pill that induces in those who take it a sense of “self-annihilation and cancellation of the past.” It enables its users to overcome the terrors and tensions of living and thinking, the uncertainties and feelings of emptiness they experience. As the Chinese army advances westward, emissaries of Murti-Bing appear in Poland, dispensing the pills to the main characters. Besides providing its users with a holiday from the complications of real life, the pill serves as a weapon to neutralize the Western defenses.
Notwithstanding its sprawling nature, the narrative arc is clear at a distance: it’s the story of how a civilization that has lost belief in itself surrenders to a civilization that retains its vitality and is still driven by (to use the Arabic term) asabiyyah. The story only gives occasional glimpses of the Chinese approach to things, but those glimpses suggest that China is a purposeful and advanced society, bereft of the navel-gazing decadence of the West.
It must be admitted that Insatiability is a tough read, in fact one of the most difficult novels I’ve ever read. Witkacy employs a florid, repetitious style, and the characters indulge in lengthy intellectual discourses, which go on for pages at a time. By his own admission, Witkacy didn’t take the novel seriously as an art form, so he stuffed it with all kinds of material, often in a sloppy manner. A lot of scene-setting and background material is shoved into separate sections labeled “Information” rather than being integrated into the narrative in an organic way. Some of the long discussions are cast in the form of theatrical dialogues, which means that a play basically breaks out in the novel from time to time. (Witkacy was primarily a playwright anyway; he was probably falling back on his instincts here.) The narrator’s tone adds to the complexity; as Miłosz points out, “one could not always tell whether the author was serious or joking.”
A few more words about that style, as it is likely to be the biggest stumbling block to readers. Apparently no one ever told the author that there is such a concept as “too much.” Here, upon opening the book at random (page 163 of the Quartet Encounters edition), you will find Zipcio’s reaction to a piece of highly dissonant atonal music:
Zipcio began to squirm in his seat, as though ground to pulp in the mortar of his own baseness by the dreadful pestle of this metallic, masticating cacophony of insatiable chords crashing down upon him, and was reduced to a tiny piece of excrement in the wilderness of evil created by these zigzag, angular, jabbing, piercing passages. One theme in particular kept recurring, a theme that was worse than the desecration of the host during a satanical mass, and which kept expanding to an inconceivable immensity, spilling over the rim of the universe into Nothingness.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you’re in luck, because you will find page after page of it. Witkacy ladles this rhetoric copiously onto his subject matter like a sauce that drowns the main dish, paradoxically becoming the main meal in itself. That said, if you’ve successfully hacked your way through the likes of Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, then Insatiability shouldn’t be too intimidating.
Stepping back from the difficulties posed by this kind of writing, here is my overall impression of the story. It’s as if Witkacy had taken the sentiments expressed in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” added some salient aspects of Brave New World, hitched them to a mock-serious Yellow Peril plot line, tossed in a few of Dostoevsky’s more extreme characters, scrambled the whole mixture in a blender, then poured it out and baked it in a casserole with some psychedelic drugs thrown in. (Incidentally, Witkacy was in the habit of painting portraits under the influence of various drug combinations, which he listed on each portrait next to his signature.)
At the book’s end, the commander of the Polish army, having himself been Murti-Bing-pilled into passivity, realizes the hopelessness of his position and gives up without a fight. The Chinese leader’s speech sums up the situation:
“You do not know how to govern yourselves, and your race has exhausted its vitality. We, on the other hand, do know how to govern ourselves. You see, once our intellectuals got hold of your ingenious alphabet, they suddenly awoke from their centuries-old slumber. Almost overnight our science became more advanced than yours. For it was then that we discovered that you did not know how to govern yourselves, while we did. Every country possesses its own ideal system by virtue of which it is able to achieve the greatest amount of prosperity … We will organize you and you will be happy.”
As folks like to say nowadays, there’s a lot to unpack here. The China of today didn’t need a phonetic alphabet to kick-start its economic and technological boom. But the overall tenor of this speech is a kind of inversion of the old White Man’s Burden, mixed with a shot of today’s managerial techno-authoritarianism (“We will organize you and you will be happy”). Things get even more topical from there:
They later went on to speak about the problem of automation and the preservation of culture; about the process of automation itself; about various methods for automating the processes of automation; and, finally, about what it would be like in the future after everything had been automated.
Despite the seeming finality of the conclusion – East beats West, reversing a centuries-old trend, and Asian civilization triumphs outside of Asia – the book’s final paragraphs don’t suggest anything as simple as a Fukuyama-style “end of history.” Artists continue to thrive, though now their work must privilege the collective rather than the individual. Forced marriage between races and ethnicities becomes common: Zipcio himself, as he climbs the administrative ladder, is “forced to marry a Chinese girl of exquisite beauty who traced her ancestry back to some Mongolian khans.” Meanwhile, the Chinese prepare to take on Germany for not being “communist enough,” while later, anti-Chinese riots break out, suggesting that the prediction “you will be happy” is not entirely accurate. In short, history continues to happen.
For the author, history stopped abruptly, by his own choice. “Witkacy is a product of the Russian Revolution,” says Kott. As an officer in the Russian army during World War I, the man with the cranially-implanted seismograph personally witnessed the upheavals of 1917; it gave him a prophetic sense of how European history would develop in the following decades. Shortly after the beginning of World War II – he had been expecting such a cataclysmic development for some time – he committed suicide.
I first read Insatiability sometime in the 1980s. I remember buying the Quartet Encounters edition, with its impossibly tiny print, at an academic bookstore in Edinburgh. That first read was entertaining, puzzling, and sometimes irritating (in addition to making my eyes hurt). Reading it again in the 2020s makes me realize how prophetic it is in its depiction of a Western world losing faith in itself while China regains its status as the “Middle Kingdom.” And wouldn’t many of us, looking at the state of the world today, like to pop a few Murti-Bing pills and forget about everything?