Form gets everyone
The protagonist of Morphine fights – more or less consciously – not just for national identity, but also for his masculine identity. The two interfuse and intertwine. Twardoch's patriotic and national imponderables are laced with demonic sexuality, or even a dose of insanity in the background. In Morphine, everyone who tries to become a man is grotesque or completely passive.
The author reached for an interesting formal solution – the narrator is a woman: “What is history, Kostek? Manure, black gods' nourishment, a sum of cries and tears, dust and ash”, the omniscient narrator says. Is this Moira? Death? Despair? Or maybe Poland? We don't know, but the author wittily distributes the proportions, giving voice now to Konstanty, then to the narrator, who addresses the former in a suspiciously tender way, every now and then giving away the future fate of selected secondary protagonists.
Twardoch managed to achieve something normally unseen in Polish prose. In Morphine, the audacious language, manic narration and ease with which the author handled the literary matter is paired with an excellently structured plot. His displays of literary craft and skill do not come to the foreground, but act as the background of the aptly conducted story. Despite the classic Polish themes, it is a universal story. Even though the author operates with stereotypes – a sensual Jewish lady, a Polish mother, an old national democrat – he transgresses and deconstructs them in a clever way. Nobody and nothing turns out to be what it seemed at first. We hear echoes of Gombrowicz's theory of “a mug”, even though Twardoch stressed in interviews that the author of Ferdydurke has never been a significant writer for him. Perhaps that's true, but his protagonist, who perceives himself only through the eyes of others, mostly women, sees something else each time. Finally, he finds himself in the eyes of one of these ladies. The form gets him, one way or another, just like it gets everyone, inevitably.