44 pages • 1 hour read
Tomasz JedrowskiSwimming in the Dark
Fiction | Memoir in Verse | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Giovanni’s Room
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin serves as a motif that represents Ludwik’s relationship to The Friction of Desire and Shame. For Ludwik, being gay is a constant battle between accepting his attraction to other men and the shame that he feels for it. This shame stems from the repressive communist society around him as well as his upbringing in a Catholic community. Without anyone to speak to about it, he struggles alone, until his discovery of Giovanni’s Room opens his mind to the possibilities of life as an LGBTQIA+ individual: “This wasn’t a distraction or entertainment: here was a book that seemed to have been written for me, which lifted me up into its realm and united me with something that seemed to have been there all along and that I seemed to be a part of” (45). For a long time, Ludwik reads books to escape from his everyday life, biding time. However, Giovanni’s Room strikes a chord within Ludwik, and he feels seen and connected to a larger community for the first time in his life. His conflicted feelings about being gay are echoed by Baldwin’s protagonist, and Ludwik finally has a safe place to explore and reconsider the relationship between the shame and desire for other men he feels. It is through this novel that Ludwik begins a relationship with Janusz, and it is through this novel that he maneuvers through its tensions and conflicts.
Swimming
Swimming in Swimming in the Dark is a motif that represents Ludwik’s freedom from his double lives produced by The Impact of Repressive Society on Personal Identity and The Friction of Desire and Shame. He is at first hesitant to join Janusz for swims, as he eventually reveals that he associates the act of swimming with painful memories of his father’s departure from his family and his mother’s passing. However, when he finally does swim, he finds it liberating. When he swims, he disconnects from these struggles, unburdened from the weight of living: “But I stepped in. And the water embraced me completely, softly and coolly. I felt myself anew, as if something in me had been switched on after a long time. It was a sensation of lightness and power and total inconsequence” (63). Ludwik spends so much of the novel feeling stuck or held back, unable to live the life he wants, both in his personal relationships and career. The burden of living double lives, believing and desiring the opposite of what he publicly presents to others, constantly drains him. When he swims, however, he is free, able to move freely and move forward, an experience and sensation he cannot find elsewhere in his life.
Black Mercedes
The black Mercedes driven by Hania and Maksio is a symbol that represents the hypocrisy and corruption of the communist system in Poland. Throughout the novel, Ludwik is aware of the imbalance of power between the Party and the people, but there is no better physical representation of that divide than the twins. Their wealth and status, so much higher than everyone else, shows how the Party indulges at the expense of the people. When Ludwik sees the car, he immediately understands why Hania and Maksio are so attractive to others: “Foreign cars were so rare even I could tell them apart from the two other kinds that one could dream of owning in our country […] Here was a thing as smooth and elegant as a panther—a black Mercedes” (150). The common person in communist Poland has no hope of access to a foreign car. The twins’ car therefore represents immense wealth and strong, high-up connections. Their ability to obtain a Western-made car shows that they can circumvent the system and ignore the many rules that confine and control others. This makes them useful connections themselves and demonstrates a level of hypocrisy to Ludwik, who cannot ignore that while they live in such finery, he cannot find medical help for Pani Kolecka without someone like them finding it for him.
