The Demiurgic Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer and a painter whose work should by all means be much more widely read than it is. His oeuvre is small, so I don't see why it isn't devoured whole as it should be, other than because of the way he seems to eschew any and all classification as a writer. The reason his body of work is so meager is part of his tragic story. Schulz, a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and who was immersed within the Jewish culture despite being unfamiliar with Yiddish, was killed in 1942 at the age of 50 by a German Nazi officer. Prior to his death, the story has it that he remained in his hometown with a handful of other poor artists even after the outbreak of WWII, somehow managing to stay alive under the aegis of a Gestapo officer who took a liking to the Pole's drawings. Many regard him as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the twentieth century. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? What a title. The problem with that claim to fame is that many, many more people have no idea about any Polish writers, least of all the colossal ones, which Schulz without a doubt is. His work, relying heavily on this notion of writer or artist as modern day mythmaker, revolves around a central idea that has something decidedly Frostian about it: the pureness and innocence of childhood, the return to childhood, where he thought happiness was perfected and always just around the corner and where dreams and reality converged into one.

The story of how he found himself as a writer is an interesting one and worth checking out. In part the publication of his first collection of stories is with thanks to Zofia Nalkowska, another Polish writer at the time, whom I would imagine used a bit of her clout to help the process along. My wish is to see more and more literature, of both past and present, from this Eastern European bloc to continue  translated, as I'm sure there are numerous other fantastically exciting writers of whom those of us stateside have no knowledge of. I always find such richness in the literature hailing from that part of the world, a vast region that over the past one hundred years, much like Latin America leading up to the Boom, has seen more than its fair share of strife and horror. Wars, violence, disease, genocide, dictators, and failed bouts of socialism and fascism abound. 

More to the point, though, I've had Schulz's novel The Street of Crocodiles sitting around for a few years, and its place on my queue had been rather secure, even if a bit stagnant. Always there, never moving forward. Not that I wasn't interested. Whenever I picked it up to leaf through its pages whilst trying to decide what to read next I always wound up drawn in, but for whatever nameless reason decided to put it off. Now I'm finally reading it, and it's fucking fantastic. I'll hold off on quotations from the novel itself until I'm finished, but I will provide a few revelatory sentences, some from Schulz himself, others from those who knew him, on his craft and his theories on art in general written in the Preface and the Introduction, which by themselves are intriguing enough.

"He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation - a volcano, smoldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town."

"Lacking the courage to address readers, he tried at first to write for a reader, a recipient of his letters. When at last, around 1930, he found a partner for this exchange in the person of Deborah Vogel,... his letters underwent a metamorphosis, becoming daring fragments of dazzling prose."

"Writing this way Schulz could be wholly indifferent to the tastes of the literary coterie and the capricious demands of the official critics. He would experience their pressures later on, and more than once he claimed that they paralyzed him, changing the quiet immediacy of personal communication into work fraught with peril and addressed to the unknown - and this for one to whom art was a confession of faith, faith in the demiurgic role of myth."

"What is this Schulzian mythopoeia, this mythologizing of reality? On what was his artistic purpose to "mature into childhood" based? Childhood here is understood s the stage when each sensation is accompanied by an inventive act of the imagination, when reality, not yet systematized by experience, "submits" to new associations, assumes the forms suggested to it, and comes to life fecund with dynamic visions."

"Childhood is a stage when etiological myths are born at every step. It is precisely there, in the mythmaking realm, that both the source and the final goal of Bruno Schulz's work reside."

"From sublime spheres the Schulzian myth sinks to the depths of ordinary existence; or, if you will, what Schulz gives us is the mythological Ascension of the Everyday. The myth takes on human shape, and simultaneously the reality made mythical becomes more nonhuman than ever before. Conjecture easily changes into certainty, the obvious into illusion; possibilities materialize. Myth stalks the streets of Drogobych, turning ragamuffins playing tiddledywinks into enchanted soothsayers who read the future in the cracks of a wall, or transforming a shopkeeper into a prophet or a goblin."

"Art was to Schulz 'a short circuit of sense between words, a sudden regeneration of the primal myths.' Schulz said: 'All poetry is mythmaking; it strives to recreate the myths about the world."

"Schulzian time -- his mythic time -- obedient and submissive to man, offers artistic recompense for the profaned time of everyday life, which relentlessly subordinates all things to itself and carries events and people off in a current of evanescence. Schulz introduces a subjective, psychological time and then gives it substance, objectivity, by subjecting the course of occurrences to its laws."

"The reckoning of time by the calender is likewise called into question. It can happen, writes, Schulz, that 'in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which -- like a sixth, smallest toe -- grow a thirteenth freak month.'"

"Schulz's fantasies -- dazzling, full of the paradoxical and the plausible -- are 'apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year.' They are Schulz's mythological supplement to the calender, and when he wishes that the stories about his father, smuggled into the pages of his old calendar, would there grow equal in authority to its true text, he is expressing his own not merely artistic desire to materialize the yearnings of the imagination, to impart to its creations an objective reality, to erase the boundary between fact and dream."

"'Should I tell you that my room is walled up?...In what way might I leave it?' asks Schulz. 'Here is how: Goodwill knows no obstacle; nothing can stand before a deep desire. I have only to imagine a door, a door old and good, like in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron latch and bolt. There is no room so walled up that it will not open with such a trusty door, if you have but the strength to insinuate it.' On one side of that door lies life and its restricted freedom, on the other -- art."

"This is the credo of Bruno Schulz -- of the Great Heresiarch who imposed new measurements on time, in this way taking his revenge on life. Yet from behind the mythological faith of the writer there peers, again and again, the mocking grin of reality, revealing the ephemeral nature of the fictions that seek to contend with it." 

"'I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystalizes for us...They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life. Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is alotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings...These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned him.'"

"'But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remain insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulating comes art.'"

"'I have always felt that the roots of the individual mind, if followed far enough down, would lose themselves in some mythic lair. This is the final depth beyond which one can no longer go.'"

"Schulz's work is an expression of rebellion against the kingdom 'of the quotidian, that fixing and delimiting of all possibilities, the guarantee of secure borders, within which art is once and for all time...closed off.' "

"Schulz says: 'Just beyond our words...roar the dark and incommensurable elements...Thus is accomplished within us a complete regression, a retreat to the interior, the return journey to the roots.' The meddling with language, with semantics, in these depths, in order to give form to the inexpressible -- that is the goal of Schulz's poetic search for definitions."

                                                                                     All of the works included here are Schulz's own. His body of work as a visual artist, in addition to his fiction, is fascinating in its own right.