Gombrowicz and the Reality of Metafiction
Gombrowicz and the Reality of Metafiction

Summary/Abstract: The problem of reality seems to be central in Gombrowicz's last novel Cosmos (1965). The described reality is modeled upon the work of the abundant and the excessive. This gives ground to see some parallels with a work published exactly a hundred years before Cosmos – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). How does Gombrowicz illustrate Lewis Carroll's "much of a muchness" and what is the role of the teapot? Reality, "obsessive by its very essence," grows and swells beyond endurance, demonstrating how “the last drop [...] makes the cup overflow”. Nevertheless, it remains always partial, fragmented, fractional, fractal. Can then metafiction be pictured by a fractal and could we read Cosmos as Gombrowicz’s theory and practice of metafiction? Towards a theory of metafiction as an excess of reality the following paper presents Gombrowicz as the first theoretician of metafiction.

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