LIKE THE MEMORY OF A DREAM THAT NEVER HAPPENED:
VISIONARY SPACE, HAUNTED LANDSCAPES, AND BRUNO SCHULZ
by Lauren Benjamin
A thesis submitted to Sonoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS m English
Dr. Thaine Steams, Chair
Dr. Anne Goldman
Date Copyright 2013
By Lauren Benjamin
11 Authorization for Reproduction of Master's Thesis (or Project)
I grant permission for the print or digital reproduction of this thesis in its entirety, without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgment of authorship.
Stgnahle• ....
iii LIKE THE MEMORY OF A DREAM THAT NEVER HAPPENED:
VISIONARY SPACE, HAUNTED LANDSCAPES, AND BRUNO SCHULZ
Thesis by Lauren Benjamin
ABSTRACT
This thesis explores visionary experience and mythic landscape in the work of Bruno Schulz. By highlighting Schulz's use of sensory perception, the written word, and evocative landscapes-as well as a semi-autobiographic narrator prone to visionary episodes-I posit that Schulz speaks to the larger question of one's connection to the past and the (in)ability to render the ineffable in verbal form. In Schulz's tales, the historical past, primordial myth, and present each appear in tum. This amalgamation serves to raise the stakes for Schulz's fantastical narratives: In creating an alternative world replete with visionary elements and mythic landscapes, Schulz simultaneously allows for an alternate tract of existence. I argue that these features are fundamental elements of Schulz's work and suggest that such exploration will illuminate not just hidden aspects of Schulz, but will serve also to further our understanding of automythographies of all kinds.
Chapter 1, "A Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body," synthesizes Martin Buber's theories of the "ecstatic vision" and Michel Serres' philosophy of des corps metes ("mingled bodies") in the context of Schulz's tales of Ksiljga ("The Book"). In this chapter, I argue that Joseph is a visionary seeker, much like medieval visionaries of Buber's collection Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions). Chapter 2 utilizes Walter Benjamin's work in Passagen-Werk (translated as The Arcades Project) to discuss Joseph's relation to the mythic landscape in Schulz's story "Sklepy Cynamonowe" ("Cinnamon Shops"). I posit that the landscape facilitates Joseph's visionary experiences and serves as a vessel of the past in the present, or what Benjamin calls the dialectical wish-image.
Signature
MA Program: English Sonoma State University Date: Acknowledgements
There are many people without whom this work would not be what it is. Firstly, many thanks are due to my generous advisors, Thaine Steams and Anne Goldman, who have seen the project from its humble beginnings through many incarnations and somehow never seemed bored. Thanks also to Sonoma State faculty with whom I have discussed this project and who have acted as a support, including Brantley Bryant, Mira-Lisa Katz, Cathy Kroll, Scott Miller, Christine Renaudin, and Suzanne Toczyski.
Karen Underhill at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Benjamin Paloff at the University of Michigan, and David Goldfarb at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York have all given me much fodder for my discussions here, both in person and in print; thank you for inculcating me with the wide world of Schulzania.
Thank you to all of my Sonoma State colleagues, in particular Emily Hostutler, who helped plot the direction of this thesis (probably without knowing it), and Loriann Negri, who managed to keep me sane. Beetle, Squirrel, Goose, and Bear also participated in managing my sanity.
I am grateful to my parents and in-laws for clapping for me through this, even if they weren't particularly sure what they were clapping for. And to Aleta Drummond and the kickstarter community, who helped fund the research that fueled this project.
I also owe an immense amount of gratitude to Reh Irwin Keller and Rabbi Ted Feldman. Thank you for your kind talks, your honest words, and your understanding hearts.
v For Adam, obviously.
VI Table of Contents
Chapter Page
Introduction: The Secret Stays in A Tangle ...... 2
I: A Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body...... 11
II: Landscaping Memory: Bruno Schulz, Walter Benjamin, and the Dialectical Myth-Image ...... 33
Epilogue ...... 5 5
Works Cited ...... 59
vu Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Sollte man ihn nicht nennen bodenlose? {Deep is the well ofthe past. Should we not call it bottomless?]
-Thomas Mann, Die Geschichten Jaakobs (The Tales ofJacob) Introduction: The Secret Stays in a Tangle
In 2004, Benjamin Paloff published an article in the Boston Review entitled "Who
Owns Bruno Schulz?: Poland Stumbles Over its Jewish Past." The focus of the article is as tricky as its title suggests: in it, Palo ff recounts the 200 I discovery of Polish-Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz's frescos in modem-day Ukraine and their controversial removal to Jerusalem by Yad Vashem. The debate that erupted over Schulz's "true" homeland pitted Jews against Poles and sparked a controversy over who, exactly, has the right to Schulz's legacy. 1 Y ad V ashem' s actions, which culminated in the destruction of portions of the artwork, suggest that "Poles [and Ukranians] are not worthy stewards of their own Polish-Jewish heritage," while Poles who wish to claim Schulz's art as exclusively Polish run the risk of ignoring his Jewish identity, as well as the forced circumstances of his murals' production (8). Each side is not without its merits, as Paloff rightly notes, but neither are they without their blind spots.
Perhaps equally interesting are the comments Paloff' s article received on the
Boston Review website in 2011, proving that this heated debate is far from closure many years after the article's original publication. One commenter, offering resounding evidence for Paloff's claim that both sides of the debate cannot disentangle themselves from their individual politics, chastises the author for his misunderstanding of Polish culture, suggesting that he seeks to "blame Poles for the fact that there are few Jews
1 Ultimately, the Ukrainians agreed to gift the murals to Y ad V ashem after the fact; however, this did not stop Ukrainians from repeatedly referring to the murals as "stolen" when I visited Drohobycz in June of 2012.
2 living there [in Poland] today" (8-9). Another claims that "[Schulz's] religion makes no difference." as he was "a Polish citizen, and created his masterpieces in the Polish language, in Poland" (9). Following this, a posting entitled "One of the Loathome [sic] and Unprofessional Examples of Holocaust Research I Have Encountered" expresses extreme dissatisfaction with what the author labels as a "deJewification of Schulz"
(9). In a surreal twist of reinterpretation, it seems that for some readers, Paloff's concentration on Polish ties was not enough; for another it is so central as to be offensive.
Brian R. Banks, author of the Schulz study Muse & Messiah, comments that ''the only current [Schulz] sought" was art, but that "he chose Polish, and thus his identity" (9).
This quick and easy solution to the debate is perhaps a bit too neat: can one really choose an identity in the same way one chooses a brand of toothpaste or college major? Is it simply a matter of what Schulz "chose"? I posit that identity is bound up in things seen and unseen, both chosen and inherited. Schulz's identity is not simply a matter of what
Schulz intended or believed; nor is it a case of nationality or religion above all. Rather, each untangling of the threads of Schulz's life and art only reveals more knots. In an
artful commentary on modem life, Schulz presents a constant push and pull between the
quotidian and the mythic to the degree that the modem world is figured as irrevocably tied to the unconscious past.
Born in 1892, Schulz lived in an Eastern European town with constantly shifting
borders. At the time of his birth, Drohobycz was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and a seat of newly emerged Hassidic Judaism; by the time of his death in 1942, it had
weathered the collapse of the empire, its reintegration into the Second Polish Republic,
and ultimately Nazi and Soviet rule. Each of these elements can be explored with relation
3 to Schulz's work, but none can be said to be the center. Schulz's work is a meeting point of many disparate centers; although his stories would bend to almost any critical reading, the larger truth is the confluence of existences and interpretational possibilities. The town of Schulz's narrator Joseph resembles the author's hometown ofDrohobycz as much as
Joseph resembles Schulz, but it would be too neat to call these tales a roman a cleftout court. Rather, they play with history, memory, tradition, modernity, and identity in the same perplexing way that Schulz's biography does. Embracing everything, they embrace nothing.
In truth, determining the strange interlacing of history, identity, and selfbood is a much more onerous task than Paloff' s commenters on The Boston Review website would suggest Much like art, the task of the critic and reader is not to "answer" the question of the work, so to speak, but to follow one question-which, ideally, only leads to more questions-among many. For his part, Schulz notes that art (and, I would add, art criticism) "does not resolve that secret [of breaking down insights into meaning] completely. The secret stays in a tangle. [Pozostaje on nierozwiklany.]2 The knot the soul got itself tied up in is not a false one that comes undone when you pull the ends. On the contrary, it draws tighter" (Letters 111, 101). Given Schulz's predilection for uncertainties, Paloff notes that "questions about Schulz's identity-not to mention the
interpretive possibilities of his writings and drawing-have become subsumed in us versus-them polemics that Schulz himself would most likely have found wholly absurd"
(7). Paloff adds that Schulz's identity-in life and in death-has been "malleable":
"Full of aporias and ambiguities, Schulz's biography has become a compelling example
2 Literally: "It remains inchoate."
4 of how the gaps in real history become occasions for invention, speculation, and appropriation. Intriguing, perplexing, moving, and elusive, Schulz could belong to everyone by belonging to no one" ( 4). Likewise, the temptation to uncover the "real"
Schulz-via critical apparatus or categorization-often proves too strong. The same holds true for Schulz's fiction, which has been claimed, at various turns, for modernism, postmodemism, the fantastical, and autobiographic. None of these categories can encompass what it means to read Schulz; even the author-identified term of
"autobiographical narrative" (powie8f: autobiograficznq) comes up short (Letters 114,
103). Rather than trying to explain Schulz's artistic or personal identity, we should instead endeavor to rid ourselves of the notion that the "true" Schulz is found so simply.
Whatever true Schulz there is, he is more than merely Jewish or Polish, or modem or post-modem, and is indeed as complex and real as his work.
Such questions, explicitly or not, are at the heart of this thesis. How best to understand Schulz? Can one discern a critical apparatus suited to the untangling of these threads? How much weight should be given to Schulz's Jewishness? Does one run the risk of"deJewification" while focusing on Schulz's Western ties and influences? In the many twists and turns this scholarship has taken, I have tried to move toward what I believe will be most illustrative of Schulz's work. Although this seems self-evident what kind of literary scholar does not seek to illuminate the dark spaces of art?-I have found that the temptation to find the "answer" to Schulz's work has proven for me, much like the Boston Review commentators, very strong. Ultimately, I have instead sought to illuminate aspects of Schulz's work by way of comparison. In placing Schulz's work up against the work of others, I believe that what is unique to Schulz finds resonance
5 elsewhere, while still remaining singular, for comparison is never simply a mere categorization of similarities and differences. It is, as W.J.T. Mitchell notes in
"Comparisons Are Odious," ''the dialectic between similarity and difference, the process of finding differences between things that appear to be similar, and of finding similarities between things that appear to be different" (321-322). This process has been one of challenging my assumptions about what Schulz does or does not "mean;" a similarity here or difference there only serves to illuminate another passage of the labyrinth of meamng.
This thesis takes on two separate aspects of Schulz's work: the visionary experience and the relationship between landscape and memory. My first chapter, "A
Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body" explores the relationship between Schulz's stories of The Book (Ksi~ga) and Martin
Buber's 1909 collection of mystical texts Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic
Confessions). This chapter was born as a seminar paper in Prof. Niklaus Largier's Spring
2012 seminar on medieval visionary literature at UC Berkeley. Initially, though I had
committed to writing a thesis on Schulz, it did not occur to me that there was a
connection to be made between Schulz, Julian of Norwich, et al. Perhaps I had in mind
too rigid a definition of"comparison"-the kind that W.J.T. Mitchell decries--and
couldn't imagine what medieval Christian visionaries could lend to a discussion of
Schulz. Little by little, as Professor Largier's course discussions progressed, I came to see that a pronounced parallel was emerging; eventually, I came to view Joseph as a sort of
visionary figure, one whose visions are mediated by sensory experience and the written
word.
6 1broughout this work, the term "visionary experience" refers to occasions of
otherworldly insight obtained by a divine agent These moments often involve a vivid
depiction of something that is not actually present (i.e. angels or bursts of light) and a
written account that attempts to, in effect, say the unsayable. Since these visionary moments are, I argue, a synesthetic experience, the writers struggle with the act of
depiction, often expressing their defeat in the face of the unexplainable. In Schulz's tales
centering around "The Book," Joseph experiences bursts of light and color that threaten to devour him; he also sees visions of words turning to flocks of birds and creates art
while "trembling in ecstasy" ( 15). In Chapter One, I argue that looking to medieval
ecstatic texts-which Martin Buber defines as those texts describing an experience of
unity with God-can help illuminate Schulz's sensory-heavy depiction of Joseph's
experiences. In utilizing the philosophy of Michel Serres, I argue that these visionary
experiences are centered in "a mingled body" (un corps mete), working in tandem with
the soul. In this way, the visionary exists both within (the body) and without (the
otherworldly, or soul); in the case of both Joseph and Buber's visionaries, the connecting
tissue, though fraught with ambiguity, is the written word.
My second chapter, "Landscaping Memory: Bruno Schulz, Walter Benjamin, and
the Dialectical Myth-Image," deals with the depiction of landscape in Schulz's story
"Cinnamon Shops" ("Sklepy cynamonowe") and its relation to a mythic past. Although
ostensibly revolving around a simple plot-a family goes to the cinema, the father sends
his son home to fetch his forgotten wallet, boy gets lost in the process-the city that pulls
Joseph into a labyrinth of mythic images and events is more of what Benjamin terms a
"wish image" than mere plot detail. In discussing wish images in this chapter-which
7 Susan Buck-Morss helpfully defines as "a cultural memory reservoir of myths and
symbols from a more distant ur-past" ( 116)-I utilize Walter Benjamin's Arcades
Project, parts of which discuss the potential for the past to be written on the present in the
form of a landscape. Although it may seem self-evident, it is worth defining exactly what
I mean by landscape. In the strictest sense, a landscape is a pastoral scene of rural
imagery, either in nature or in (usually painted) representation. Here, though, I am
utilizing the second part of this traditional definition in a rather unorthodox way: I see
Bruno Schulz-via Joseph's perception-landscaping the world through verbal imagery,
and, in this way, the landscape represents that which is external to Joseph. 3 In other
words, the spaces and places that Joseph traverses are all landscapes of Schulz's design,
even if they are urban rather than rural settings.
The landscapes of "Cinnamon Shops" are emblematic of the type of places that
blend historical memory, personal past, and mythic remnants. In conjuring the streets of a
mythic Drohobycz, Schulz invites the landscape to grow and change with Joseph's
experiences and perceptions. With Benjamin as our guide, I argue that we can begin to
understand the physical landscape of Schulz's fiction as a multi-layered character: it is as
once a function of Joseph's (and Schulz's) landscaping of the external environment as it
is an actant facilitating Joseph's visionary experiences. One gets the sense that such
adventures are not possible anywhere but exactly where they take place; I argue that this
is as much a function of Schulz's childhood in Austro-Hungarian Empire as it is the tale
itself For, in truth, landscape is a function of an individual consciousness, an act of
perception that "is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock"
3 See W.J.T. Mitchell's introduction to Landscape and Power, where he suggests that we begin to "change 'landscape' from a noun to a verb" (1).
8 (Schama 7). No aspect of the external landscape is free from such a push and pull; with each new adventure, the ground beneath Joseph's feet shifts to reveal different aspects of the mysterious land of Drohobycz-a land that, for Schulz, could only be truthfully rendered in this form of auto-mythology. In cataloguing the effect of the external environment on Joseph, I propose an understanding of Schulz's landscapes as purveyors of a historical memory overlaid on a mythic present.
It is no accident-and certainly should not be overlooked--that each of these experiences are mediated through a narrator in the throws of a messianic childhood. His world is in the stuff of dreams and visions; and nowhere are these aspects mere allegories. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Joseph sees the world through a child's eyes
but with an adult's capacity for expression. It is a re-entrance into childhood as an adult, with all the tricky baggage of stored up memories and intellectual self-awareness. As
Schulz notes:
After all, the kind of art I care about is precisely a regression, childhood revisited. If it were possible to reverse development, to attain the state of childhood again, to have its abundance and limitless once more, that "age of genius," [,,genialnej epoce"] those "messianic times" promised and sworn to us by all mythologies, would come to pass. My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity for you. (Letters 126, 113-114)
It may not be possible to re-enter childhood; it may not even be possible to describe it
without bending the truth to our present-day whims. But Schulz makes an attempt to re-
view the world in this way and, in the process, remake it with what he calls "a certain
recipe for reality" (Letters 113). In Schulz, the detritus of everyday lifo-the tables and
chairs, a dilapidated building or stamp album-is enfolded into a mystical consciousness
evoking just such a return to childhood fantasy. I have tried to bring this child-like
9 maturity-and wonder-to my discussions of Schulz's visionary moments and haunted landscapes. In each case I hope to have found threads that are worth (un)tangling; I take comfort in the questions that have arisen for me in writing this, which are innumerable and, thankfully, only lead to more tangles.
10 Chapter I
A Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body
But is the myth a phantasm? Is it not a revelation ofthe ultimate reality of being? ls not the experience ofthe ecstatic a symbol ofthe primal experience ofthe universal mind? Are not both a living, inner experience?
We listen to our inmost selves-and do not know which sea we hear murmuring. -Martin Buber, "Ecstasy and Confession" (Ecstatic Confessions 11 )4
In the Schulz's stories revolving around a mystical and varied text-"Ksi~ga"
("The Book"), "Genialna Epoka" ("The Age of Genius" 5), and "Wiosna" ("Spring"}- boundaries are confronted, crossed, and sometimes even entirely erased. One page presents the narrator Joseph as a typical provincial child fawning over a colleague's stamp album, while the next casts his character in the glow of messianic aspirations. In this chapter, I shall explore the visionary quest of Schulz's semi-autobiographical narrator Joseph and the ways in which this character interacts with what Martin Buber terms "the ecstatic." As we will see, Schulz's use of a visionary landscape to situate the narrator's return to an "age of genius" bears a strong resemblance to medieval writers of mystical literature, both in the Jewish and Christian traditions. My argument focuses on the Christian tradition, because of its unique relationship to the body, which parallels the
4 Hereafter references will be listed as EC. All translations from the German are Esther Cameron's. 5 "Genialna Epoka" is perhaps better rendered as "The Brilliant Epoch" or "The Wondrous Era" but I have decided to honor Celina Wieniewska' s translation for consistency's sake. I have used Wieniewska's translations throughout, except where otherwise noted, and have included the Polish original where there is some inconsistency or nuance not contained in the translation. Page citations refer to English version first and the Polish second.
11 role of Joseph's sensory body in his visionary experiences.6 By understanding Schulz's link with these mystical visionaries, I hope that we can better understand the relationship between the sensory perception and visionary experience in Schulz's work; I assert that these visionary experiences create a rift in the quotidian facilitated by the visionary and sensory body, allowing for an alternative tract of existence particularly visible in medieval mystical literature. In these narratives, the sensory body acts in tandem with the visionary experience in order to surpass the visionary's everyday existence and gesture to the divine in this world. In this way, Joseph's body becomes a conduit for the visionary experience and, in actively participating in the visionary experience, ceases to be a mere allegorical figure for the visionary.
In particular, I will situate Schulz's work within the context of Martin Buber's
Ekstatische Konfossionen (translated as Ecstatic Corifessions), a collection spanning several centuries of multi-denominational writings on the subject of what Buber defmes as the ecstatic visionary experience. Published in 1909, Buber's collection of texts exerted a powerful influence on the readers and thinkers of his day; indeed, similar threads of"ecstatic" mystical testimonies can be found in many of Schulz's interwar contemporaries, most notably Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. 7
Bruno Schulz's narratives of visionary space in the tales "written under the sign of the
6 Interesting explications of Schulz's ties to the Jewish mystical tradition abound elsewhere. See, for example, Dieter De Bruyn and Kris Van Heuckelom's collection of essays (Un) Masking Bruno Schulz: New Combinations, Further Fragmentations, Ultimate Reintegrations. New York: Rodopi, 2009. 7 See Paul Mendes-Flohr' s editor's introduction and notes in EC. It should most certainly be noted that Rilke and Mann were perhaps Schulz's greatest influences. (See Letters and Drawings ofBruno Schulz.)
12 Book"8 mirror the ways in which medieval visionaries utilized the sensory experience of what Michel Serres has called "a mingled body" (un corps mele') to evoke a living word, both in the vision itself and in the mind of the reader. Buber's philosophical ruminations on "ecstasy" in his introduction to the collection both reflect and help to elucidate
Schulz's own belief, expressed in his oft-cited essay "The Mythicization of Reality"
(,,Mityzacja rzeczywisto5ci"), of a primordial word. In both sets of visionary texts
(Schulz's and those included in Buber's collection), the allegory for "seeing" a vision or
"feeling" the presence of the divine comingles with experiences of physiological seeing and feeling. Moreover, for Schulz, Buber, and Serres, language remains the common link between spiritual insight and sensory experience: In attempting to describe the ineffable,
it becomes possible for these authors to gesture to a sacred, divine, and primordial word.
An Epoque of (Visionary) Genius
By the time Schulz's period of artistic creation reached its height in the early
1930s, the land of his birth had undergone significant changes, not the least of which was
its incorporation into a restored Republic of Poland. This region of Galicia, which is now
located in Ukraine, was the site of tremendous upheaval in World War I and has
historically endured a precarious existence, dominated at turns by Germany and Russia.
In the late 19th century, however, when Schulz was still a child, Galicia was home to a
wide array of cultures and nationalities, including Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, and
Armenian peoples. Galicia at the turn of the century was in some ways "a stagnant
8 This is Jan Blonski's phrase, as expressed in "On the Jewish Sources of Bruno Schulz," trans. Michael C. Steinlauf, Cross Currents: A Yearbook ofCentral European Culture.
13 economic backwater," rife with extreme poverty, but it also experienced an emerging and proud nationalism founded on cultural difference (Bideleux and Jefferies 294).
This golden-tinged time in Galician history, poised between periods of geopolitical instability, is the autobiographical backdrop against which Schulz's fantastical narratives are written. Schulz's childhood undoubtedly had a profound impact on his art. The stories of Cinnamon Shops (translated into English as The Street of
Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign ofthe Hourglass9 transcend the confining reality a purely socio-historical reading would imply, but, nevertheless, these tales indeed form a sort of mythical roman a clef. Io As Schulz notes in a letter to poet Julian Tuwin praising a reading in Drohobycz:
At that time I harbored in my mind a sort of utopia about an "age of genius" [,,genialnej epoce"] that supposedly existed in my life once upon a time, not in any calendar year but on a level above chronology, an age when everything blazed with godly colors and one took in the whole sky with a single breath, like a gulp of pure ultramarine. (Letters 51, 46)
For Schulz, this "age of genius" (genialnej epoce) expresses itself as somewhere beyond reality and yet also with a very direct correlation to it. As such, the boy narrator of
Sanatorium and Cinnamon Shops both is and is not Schulz himself, just as the town the narrative inhabits both is and is not the Drohobycz of the author's past. In both cases,
more than passing resemblances are easily noted-for example, the narrator's father
figure is aging and unwell, much like Schulz's father was for the majority of his
9 Hereafter referred to as Sanatorium. Io David Golfarb convincingly argues that Schulz's obsession with childhood was not necessarily exclusive to his own childhood, but rather a state of Kantian ecstasy owing more to metaphysics than nostalgia, for "there could be no biographical materials on the utopian childhood Schulz describes" (28).
14 childhood, and the "Street of Crocodiles" of Cinnamon Shops is almost directly lifted from a commercial district in Drohobycz. II However, such parallels can only take us so far, as the narratives of Schulz's tales quickly reveal a clear break with realism as such. In order to present the reader with an "age of genius" viewed through the landscape of his youth, Schulz takes on the language of a visionary tale rife with elements of fantastical mythology.12
"The Book" centers on an eternal, "authentic" text that exceeds the narrator's capacity to describe it. It is important to note that there are two words for "book" in
Polish: ksiqtka refers to any book, while ksi(lga, the title of Schulz's story, refers to a holy or otherwise precious book, such as the Bible. Appropriately then, Schulz's narrator even notes that his act of naming it "The Book" (Ksiflga) is preceded by "a silent capitulation before the vastness of the transcendental [nieobj(ltnosciq transcendentu] ... of a thing without a name" (115). The Book is something concrete yet ultimately unknowable-a text with the power to extend beyond its existence and gesture to the
sublime. In light of this, Joseph's first encounters with The Book are recounted with
appropriate reverence:
Sometimes my father would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were turned, merging the colors and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks. Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness [sycila barwnosciq]. (115-116, 104)
11 In his painstakingly crafted biography of Schulz, Jerzy Ficowski even suggests that Schulz's written description of the sun in several stories corresponds with the actual experience of walking through the Drohobycz market square (93-95). 12 See Schulz's 1934 letter to Tadeusz Breza in Ficowski, ed. Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, in which he expresses a desire to "show [Breza] Drohobycz and its surrounding and see the landscape of my youth afresh through [his] eyes," 53.
15 Clearly, this object-if it can be called that-is no mere book. At once alive and variable,
The Book has the ability to both reflect and challenge the everyday reality of language and the nature of things. Shortly after this description of a landscape brightened by The
Book, the narrator notes that he may have "forgotten The Book forever, had it not been for a certain night and a certain dream" (116). This dream, we soon learn, is the stuff of the Book itself, fluttering magically beneath Joseph's closed eyelids. For weeks afterwards, he searches and searches, only to find one "clumsy falsification" (nieudolny falsyftkat) after another until he spots "a large folio page" in the hands of the family maid, Adela (118, 106). This folio is, once again, The Book.
In "The Age of Genius," Schulz replaces the authentic book with the authentic creation; as Joseph brings these visions to the page, they subsequently come alive in bursts of color and movement. Here, Joseph is compelled, to draw "wildly and
feverishly" (w pospiechu, w panice) in the margins of old newspapers and magazines
"zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision" ( 131-13 2, 120). As if
in a fever, Joseph creates and creates, ultimately showing his drawings to a shifty relative
named Shloma who deems them "amazingly accurate, and final, and [which] like
lightning illuminate the very center of things" (139). For Schulz, such primordial
mystical illuminations clearly bear repeating, as they reassert themselves again and again
in these fantastical narratives.
Gradually, the act of "seeing" a vision gives way to the language of physical
sight, and Schulz literalizes the allegorical vision. In "Spring," the third story in
Sanatorium, The Book reemerges as a coveted stamp album owned by Joseph's friend
16 Rudolph. Upon viewing the album for the frrst time, the narrator experiences what he
calls "the revelation ...the vision of the fiery beauty [rozplomienionej pi~knosci] of the
world" (150, 138). In the stamp album-and a stamp of Franz Joseph I in particular-
Joseph glimpses an outside world that exists as he sees it and soon comes to believe himself the only true owner:
Many signs seemed to point to its [the album] holding a message and a personal commission for me. There was, for instance, the fact that no one felt himself to be the owner of the album, not even Rudolph ... He looked with envy on the reflection of distant worlds that flooded my face with a gamut of color. Only in that reflection did he notice the glow of these pages. (35)
The pages of the text shine and are filled with "a gamut of color" that imprints itself on
Joseph's face, much like The Book marks itself on his eyelids the fateful night before it is
rediscovered. Similarly, in "The Book," "colors" and "shapes" emerge from the pages
and the landscape is "saturated ... with brightness" (sycila barwnosciq) (116, 105). Far
from an inconsequential bystander, Joseph's body becomes an active participant in the
mystical experience through its capacity to see and be imprinted upon.
In these experiences, physical sense is rendered instrumental in establishing a
relationship between an internal world and the external world of the vision. The visionary
nights of "Spring," for example, are accompanied by the scent ofjasmine and lilac while
the hand-drawn birds of "The Age of Genius" imbue the landscape with "cherry red
sweetness" and "air scented with lavender" (powietrze pelne lawendy) (135, 124).
Elsewhere the "glare of [God's] wisdom [spreads] a super-scent [nad-aromatem]" and
The Book is turned with "trembling fingers" (1521121, 140). Indeed, the fever of
17 creativity itself, which serves as the stabilizing event in what is dubbed the "Age of
Genius," is accompanied by a full bodily experience of smells, sights, textures, tastes:
It was toward the end of winter. The world had dissolved in puddles, but sudden waves of heat seemed full of fire and pepper. The honeysweet pulp of day was cut into silvery furrow, into prisms filled with colors and spicy piquancies. Noonday collected within a short space the whole fire of these days and all the moments that glowed [wszystkie godziny palajqce i pelne ognia]. At that hour, unable to contain the heat, the day shed its scales of silvery tinplate, of crunchy tinfoil, and, layer after layer, disclosed its core of solid brightness [litego blasku]. (130, 118)
Here time itself is represented with a body: its qualities are marked by such tactile images as "pulp," "scales" and "silvery tinplate" while its flavors are "honeysweet" and filled with a heat that seems "full of fire and pepper." One would be hard pressed to discover a more synesthetic verbal experience; indeed, the reader is pulled along with Joseph, tasting and smelling as the visions emerge. Schulz goes on to note that "[a]s if this were not enough, chimneys smoked and billowed with lustrous steam," underscoring the
impossible fullness of the sensory landscape (130). Bursting with these colors and
flavors, time regresses into a Schulzian space filled with "solid brightness," (litego
blasku) and in this apex of sensuality visionary travel becomes possible.
Somewhat paradoxically, a similar disavowal of the body-much akin to that of
an ascetic monk-also accompanies these visionary experiences. Joseph is so enraptured
with his vision of The Book that, burning "with quiet ecstasy," he forgets to eat (134).
The reader assumes that The Book provides the only nourishment necessary, rendering
physical needs irrelevant. Again, in the midst of furious creation and "prey to [his]
inspirations," Joseph does not notice Adela when she brings him food, despite the fact
that she is dressed "in her Sunday best" and smells "of spring" (134). Amidst the flurry of
18 imagination, sight, smell, and taste are subsumed. Instead, Joseph becomes a sort of automaton by which the drawings of his "age of genius," are committed to paper:
I stood rigid as a signpost, with outstretched, elongated fingers, pointed in anger, in fierce concentration, hand trembling in ecstasy. My hand guided me, alien and pale, and pulled me after it, a stiff, waxen hand, like the large votive hands in churches, like angels palms raised for an oath (130).
Joseph here, "rigid as a signpost," still retains the use of his body, but exists as a conduit through which the visionary experience flows. He barks curses in an "alien voice" and creates "as if by a foreign hand" ( 131 ). The sense of touch and the use of his hand are crucial, but so is a retreat from the physical realm.
Schulz's explorations of vision throughout these stories manifest in an uneasy tension, both affirming and denying the body. In one sense, Joseph explores the visionary world with his body, and sensory perception becomes a crucial element of discovery. He produces a bodily engagement with the visions themselves, which manifests in the language of the senses. On the other hand, though, Joseph becomes a saintly, disembodied figure comparable to an angelic statue through which the mysteries of vision are transmitted.
Toward the Ecstatic Vision
In each of these cases, Joseph's visions of the authentic Book are also rife with examples of the type of "ecstasy" Martin Buber traces in his volume Ecstatic
Confessions. In his introduction to the first edition published by Eugen Diederichs, a publisher of esoteric texts most prolific at the turn of century, Buber expresses an interest in his collection's collective expression with ''the placing outside [i.e. the written text] of
19 something inward [i.e. the visionary experience]" despite the ineffability of such an event
(3). "Ecstasy," he notes, "stands beyond the common experience. It is unity, solitude,
uniqueness: that which cannot be transferred. It is the abyss that cannot be fathomed: the unsayable" ( 6). lhls "unsayable" experience is then paradoxically rendered in written form in an attempt to understand the ecstatic vision.
Such concerns of the mystical tradition are appropriately placed in any discussion
of Schulz, for despite the fact that there is no concrete evidence that Schulz read these texts, mystical visionary literature was an important intellectual currency exchanged
within the interwar Jewish milieu in which Schulz lived.13 As David Goldfarb notes,
although Schulz may not have had "direct knowledge" of a mystical tradition, "it would
have been difficult to avoid absorbing their [in particular the Zohar and Talmud] style
and fragments of their substance from the conversation of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in
Galicia" (265). Similarly, Jerzy Ficowski notes that in spite of the fact that Schulz's
family was not religious, he was nonetheless "not indifferent to myths or sacred rites"
(35).
Moreover, an interest in the type of"ecstatic confessions" that Martin Buber
collected in his 1909 volume-if not with this collection specifically-flourished during
Schulz's brief period of artistic creation. The interwar period itself was a key juncture in
the history of Eastern European Jewry; in spite of repeated threats to their religion,
personhood, and claim to rights, the newly emerging Polish state was what Harry M.
Rabinowicz calls "a period of religious renaissance" for the Jews:
13 It should be noted, though, that the vast majority of Schulz's correspondence, and close to the entirety of his library, has been destroyed or lost; thus, there is little concrete evidence of anything Schulz read
20 It marked a reemphasis on Torah, and the reemergence of a Shulchan Aruch Jew for whom the Torah was all-embracing and all-sufficient. It was "hard to be a Jew," but it was compensatingly "good to be a Jew." In an age of systematic persecution and licensed persecution, the Jew managed to retain a spiritualjoie de vivre. (12)
In this fruitful environment Jewish modernism surfaced as well, and Schulz's work bears the mark of this tradition.14 Hassidic fables, religious texts, and a new interest in mysticism all helped structure an emerging Jewish artist. Martin Buber, a proponent for an individual religiosity divorced from dogma, published several influential collections that helped further this tradition, including Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (The
Tales ofRabbi Nachman) in 1906, Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend of
Baalschem) in 1908, and Die Erzahlungen der Chassidim (Tales ofthe Hasidism) in
1949. However, Buber's interests, much like Schulz's, were not exclusively tied to the
Jewish faith, and this allowed his work's influence to extend beyond Jewish communities. His admiration of non-denomination mystical literature, as evidenced in
EC, both reflected and furthered an emerging European artistic tradition toward the inner experience of ecstasy. Not the least significant of these artists to engage with this tradition is Rainer Maria Rilke, whose works of "precision and purity" Schulz described as so influential to his artistic development (Letters 133). As Niklaus Largier notes:
Rilke's readings might give a nice picture of a reading list of mystical texts in the early twentieth century: As we know, he read Angelus Silesius in 1903, Meister Eckhart in 1905, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Teresa of Avila, Katharina of Siena in 1910, Heinrich Seuse in 1913, and John of the Cross in 1926. Rilke himself was
14 Schulz's decision to write in Polish, rather German or Yiddish as many of his colleagues did, should be noted. For an excellent explication of Schulz's relation to Jewish modernism, see Karen Underhill's "Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity."
21 perceived by some of his contemporary critics as a mystic, e.g., in an essay by Wilhelm von Scholz published in 1904 with the title "Mystiker." (2)
At the very least, Schulz's admiration for Rilke places him in contact with this tradition, as does his geographic locale. In Buber's collection, too, there exist some parallels that are certainly worth noting and exploring, not the least of which is a recurring concern with bodily sensation, which elicits marked resonances to Schulz's depiction of Joseph's visionary landscape.
Like Schulz, many medieval mystics evoked the language of sensory perception in descriptions of visionary ecstasy. Christian visionary literature of the Middle Ages- the period from which the bulk of EC is drawn-is rife with expressions of bodily sensation. Although one may be inclined to imagine the medieval mystic as an ascetic man or woman with little need of the physical senses, we actually see that in their written texts "the artificial evocation of taste, touch, and smell form a sphere of exploration and education of the senses and passions in a specific way" (73-91). In Buber's anthology, for example, Mechtild Von Magdenburg, speaking from the voice of God, compares the soul to the taste of a grape, the fragrance of balsam, and the radiance of the sun (EC 52).
Angela Di Foligno refers repeatedly to ''the eyes of the soul" and Julian of Norwich opens a "spiritual eye" (99, 95). Again, in a text by Alpais of Cudot, the author's soul trembles, much like Joseph's hand trembles when it is possessed by a mystical creativity in "The Age of Genius." In fact, the texts included in Ekstatische Konfessionen refer so frequently to the language of sight, the fragrances of spiritual love, and the touch of God, that a catalogue of the many instances here would be repetitious. What is important to note are the ways in which this language is applied, and to what ends.
22 A long history of sensual and religious experience tells us that the two are interconnected, but what is particularly germane is the conflation of an allegorical sensory experience and a physical one. Many critics trace a long religious tradition of an engagement with the senses back to the Greek exegetic practice of "the five spiritual senses," the invention of which "allowed for the creation of a space of experience, exploration, and amplification of the emotional as well as the sensory life of the soul"
(80). That the soul has senses is an assertion with a specific set of consequences not to be taken lightly. These senses are analogous to our physical five senses, but they also traverse the boundaries of the corporeal world. Echoing this, several texts in Ekstatische
Konfessionen reference an inward and outward vision or a sort of"second sense."
Consider, for example, this passage from Hildegard Von Bingen:
But from my childhood, since before I grew strong in bones and nerves and veins, I have constantly beheld this vision in my soul ... And when I see this in such a manner of my soul, I also perceive it according to the changes of the layer of clouds and other created things. Yet I do not hear it with outward ears, nor receive it in the thoughts of my heart, nor with any contribution of my five senses, but rather in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open, so that I never suffer in them the weariness of ecstasy, but gaze upon it waking by day and in the night (EC43-44)
The visionary experience is dependent on the metaphor of vision, and simultaneously incorporates a clear link with the physical sense. Though this vision exhibits a clear grounding in the material world-it is perceived "according to the changes of the layer of clouds and other created things"-there is a break with reality as such when the narrator of these visions transcends her corporeal being and "sees" with inward eyes that do not fatigue the outward ones. Similarly, Mechtild Von Magdeburg notes that "[i]n the greatest strength she [the visionary] comes out of herself, and in the greatest blindness
23 she sees with the greatest clarity" (52). This paradoxical experience of seeing offers a unique metaphor for the intertwining of spiritual and physical sight.
The language of the body is crucial to the depiction of the visionary place, but coexists with a disavowal of the corporeal world. Like Schulz's visionary Joseph, the experience of ecstasy in Buber's collection is often accompanied by a lack of physical nourishment A nun from Elsbet Stagel's Sister-Book notes that "except for her bodily needs she [the visionary] ate and slept a little" (85). Another author in the same sister book notes that in her visionary state she "had no hunger nor thirst nor desire for sleep"
(85). The spirit breaks with the body's need for external sustenance at the same time it is able to feel pain, see, touch, taste, and hear in order to chart the visionary experience. In this way, the uneasy Cartesian mind-body split is worked out through a kind of mingled secondary body-soul; in order to accomplish the visionary task, the body works itself inward and merges with the soul in order to produce an existence that relies on the language of the physical-if in name only-as much as it does the spiritual. According to
Buber, this "self-liberating soul" has no need "for nourishment, and no poison can touch it. It experiences itself as a unity ... because it has submerged itself entirely in itself, has plunged down to the very ground of itself, is kernel and husk, sun and eye, carouser and drink, at once" (2). Interestingly enough, the same sister who had "no hunger nor thirst nor desire for sleep" awakens from her visionary state to feel "for the first time ... that I had a body" (85). Such a descent into the self is not one that is merely a descent from the physical; rather, its absorption of sense into soul is a crucial component of inward authenticity.
24 Elsewhere, this mingled selfhood often manifests as the burning light of revelation. In Schulz's text, the entire collection of Sanatorium begins with an "invasion of brightness" (inwazja blasku) brought on by The Book (115, 103). By rubbing the pages with a wet fingertip, the narrator's father causes The Book to come alive, whereby
"one's eyes turned toward a virgin dawn of divine colors, toward a miraculous moistness of purest azure" (w dziewiczy §wit bo:tych ko/or6w, w cudownq mokrosc najczystszych
/azurow) (115, 103). This inward movement of the eye toward a "divine" sight recalls the inner visions ofMechtild Von Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich: all three utilize the language of vision to describe an inner light. This equating of light and brightness with the revelation of the authentic text continues throughout the collection; with The Book's emergence, the landscape becomes "saturated ... with brightness" (sycila barwnosciq) and continues to burn in the narrator's memory "with a bright flame" while he also notes that pages of drawing in "The Age of Genius" "glowed brightly in the sun" and "breathed brightness" (115-116/134, 103). This emission of''brightness" (barwnosciq) is, it seems, the stuff of the visions themselves and appears to be the cause of Joseph's visionary experience. The descent into "The Age of Genius" accompanies a landscape rife with fire and brightness, as "the curtains stood in flames, smoking in the fire ... Askew on the carpet lay a quadrilateral of brightness that could not detach itself from the floor" ( 131 ).
The narrator notes that this "bar of fire" (slup ognisty) gives him a sense of being ill at ease, presumably because he is overwhelmed with the visionary experience that this brightness exemplifies. "How can I face the flood alone," he immediately wonders aloud,
"How can I, all alone, answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?" (131, 120). The connection between light and God is by no means a unique one;
25 just as Joseph knows to connect the light of the book to demands from God, so too did
Christian confessions of ecstasy abound with visions of God's light.
This beatific brightness-most commonly viewed as the antithesis of Hell's darkness-is a common medieval trope that appears with great frequency in the visionary texts of the Middle Ages. In Buber's collection of ecstatic confessions, an explosion of light often manifests as the light of God either inhabiting the visionary or pulling the visionary toward the ecstatic experience. Gerlach Peters, a mystic from the Netherlands, describes her vision as light itself, remarking, "Now I see; I see the light that shines in the darkness" (EC 96). And Sofia von Klingnau, a nun writing in Elsbet Stagel's Sister
Book, records a sister's visionary experience as seeing "a light, beautiful and blissful beyond measure" which surrounds her and then enters her body to illuminate and transform her'' (83). Von Klingnau's text continues to describe the experience of seeing one's bright soul in a way that transcends mere metaphor, though it presents itself as a
"parable": "It was a round, beautiful, and illuminating light, like the sun, and was of a gold-colored red, and this light was so immeasurably beautiful and blissful that I could not compare it with anything else ... And it seemed to me that a splendor went out from me that illuminated the whole world, and a blissful day dawned over the whole earth"
(83). Here we see an excellent example of what Buber terms the unity of the soul with the world. By virtue of a divine brightness, the visionary experiences the macrocosm of the external writ on the soul.
This experience, blissful though it may be, is also terrifying for Schulz's Joseph, as he equates the "bar of fire" with a host of metaphysical questions. After noticing that his friends and neighbors cannot assist him with the answers, he answers with creation,
26 drawing "wildly, feverishly, across the paper," while "blinded by the glare, my eyes full of explosions, rockets and colors" (16). A connection to this ineffable experience with the divine creates an uncomfortable testing of bodily limits; while Joseph is given a glimpse into the mysteries of the divine, the price he pays is being "blinded" and feverish.
In each case, the experience of "light" is more than mere visual experience-it incorporates the entire body. In this way, the visionary experience joins an immaterial body with sensory experience in an attempt to create something new that is paradoxically within and without. It exists in unity, as a whole. As Alpsis ofCudot remarks:
For in all its [the soul's] actions and movements it is wholly present. Whatever it touches, it touches as a whole and all at once, and all at once it experiences and apprehends soft or hard; warm and cold it distinguishes with the fingertip as a whole; what it smells, it smells as a whole and absorbs fragrances with all its being; what it tastes it tastes as a whole, and as a whole distinguishes each taste; what it hears, it hears as a whole and as a whole recalls the sounds; what it sees, it sees as a whole and as a whole remembers the images (EC 46).
The ability of the soul to incorporate both physical and spiritual touch is thus shown to be a function of the soul's unity. It is not surprising, then, that the point at which the body ends and the soul begins is an unclear one; one must learn to see with inward eyes, but not at the expense of losing physical sight.
In his book Le cinq sens: philosophie des corps me/es- I (The Five Senses: A
Philosophy ofMingled Bodies), French philosopher Michel Serres describes this embodiment of spiritual and sensory knowledge as "a mingled body" ( un corps meli), a synesthetic experience of feeling and knowing concurrently. The mingled body, for
Serres, represents an expression of the fact that "there is nothing in the intellect that has
27 not passed through the senses" (177). 15 This is nothing short of a call to arms, as Serres repeatedly decries the popular model of a philosophy of knowledge that is divorced from sensory experience. He favors mixing inward and outward, sapience and sagacity, for
"we cannot survive without mingling with other worlds" (177). It seems to me that
Serres' concept of a knowing sensory body is one that can lend much to our understanding of visionary ecstatic experience. Much in the same way that Joseph attempts to mingle within and without, body and spirit in the manner of a medieval visionary, Serres' philosophy of mingled bodies serves to underscore the necessity of an amalgamation of worlds and experiences.
As Alpsis of Cudot attests to, the visionary experience is one of unity. One is united with God in the same way spiritual and sensory experiences are united. For
Joseph, this entails the language of sensory experience· as more than just a metaphor for the visionary experience; the visionary experience itself is a bodily one. If, as Serres suggests, a mingling of worlds is necessary for holistic experience, Joseph's episodes of visionary insight are more than mere spiritual endeavor. They speak to a philosophy that melds the physical and spiritual possibilities of existence and does not highlight one form of seeing--or one sense--over another.
What No Tongue Can Express: Sensation and the Ineffable Vision
And then what of the art of depiction-the medium by which all of these individuals seek to communicate their sensory, sacred experience? How does the very act of writing connect to the mingled body, or can it? Lying parallel to a sometimes-
15 Translations from the French are my own.
28 contentious relation between body and spirit in these texts is the tension between language and the ineffability of visionary experience. For Serres, language anesthetizes experience and is a way in which the sensory subject "retires the senses in a black box"
(58). Following this proclivity, ecstasy, for Buber, "is the abyss that cannot be fathomable: the unsayable" (EC 6). One writer in Buber's collection describes how the visionary "saw and heard what no tongue can express" ( 65). Another describes visionary truths as "inexpressible treasures, which cannot be comparable to anything" (97). How then to rectify the fact that it is by virtue of language alone that I read these authors and write about them today?
In an oft-cited 1936 essay entitled "The Mythicization of Reality," Bruno Schulz describes language as "man's metaphysical organ" and argues that ''to name something means to include it in some universal Sense" (Letters 115-116).16 For Schulz, the Word may have been subjected to our base whims of "everyday speech ... adapted to practical needs" and "handed down to us as a handy code of communication," but that does not mar its deepest function (116). For the word "in its common usage today is only a fragment" of its "former, all-embracing, integral mythology" (116). The job of poetry is to render this True Word manifest. In this way, Schulz subverts the negative theology of the ineffable by arguing for a primordial Word that "strives for its former connections, wants to complete itself with Sense" ( 115). Unwilling to adhere strictly to a traditional notion of the Word divorced from, and secondary to, religious experience, Schulz rewrites the Word to incorporate a deep-seated and primordial spirituality capable of speaking the ineffable "Sense."
16 I've used the translations in the English language Letters with the exception of the title; "Mythicization" more accurately reflects the Polish neologism.
29 Buber and Serres make similar concessions; the former describes the ecstatic visionary as someone who, driven by "the flame of the Word ... does not fling down the
Word as fodder for the words, but bears witness for the Word"; the latter admits that while language may be "closed on the language side, closed in by its qualities of exactness, precision, rigor, theses, it opens on the world side" (EC 8, Serres 368). In spite of repeated attacks on hard, sterile language, Serres reminds us, in his final chapter entitled "Joy," that honest writing can be an experience of "beautiful liberation," of ecstasy (368). Serres suggests that true language resides in the experience of the sensory while Schulz and Buber argue for a true Word rooted in myth, but all three agree that there exists a sacred, freeing language underlying the sterile language of mere information and communication.
In the medieval visionary texts of Buber's collection, a similar progression toward a true word distinct from mere language takes place. Mystic Hildegard Von Bingen professes that "the words in this vision are not like the words that sound from the mouths of human beings, but like a vibrating flame" (EC 44). At other times, the language of the vision is given as if from God himself, as Alpais of Cudot notes, "what I say, I see as I say it, and I say it as I see it" (45). In each case, the Word moves through the human, and the human does not manipulate mere words. This sensory experience is echoed in
Joseph's search for the authentic text, which "unfolds while being read [rozwija si<:_ on podczas czytania], its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations" (127, 114).
Moreover, the "age of genius" itselfis, for Joseph, an expression of the divine, for even a small event may be the result of"a higher order of being ... trying to express itself' (13).
30 Schulz's "Sense" returns here in full-force; this text does not merely reflect the meaning of a potentially divine author, its twin anns of Word and Sense are the divine author.
Ultimately, Schulz's collection of stories transforms into something more; it becomes The Book. Unable to adequately describe the "splendiferous thing" that is "The
Book," Schulz instead recreates the affair of The Book for the reader to experience in narrative form. As a sort of introduction to the form, the story of "The Book" promises to be written exclusively for a "true reader" who ''will understand me when I look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning" (116). It is unclear whether this
"I" exists as Joseph the narrator or Schulz himself, but even the briefest glance at
Schulz's non-fiction suggests that it is probably a combination of the two. In a 1935 essay for S.I. Witkiewicz, Schulz situates his work loosely under the heading of
"autobiographical narrative" (powie8{: autobiograficznq) and acknowledges "the
unending exegesis" of any creative endeavor:
Art, for that matter, does not resolve that secret completely. The secret stays in a tangle. [Pozostaje on nierozwiklany.] The knot the soul got itself tied up in is not a false one that comes undone when you pull the ends. On the contrary, it draws tighter. We handle it, trace the path of the separate threads, look for the end of the string, and out of these manipulations comes art. (Letters 111, 101)
Joseph's visionary expressions are the threads of these fundamental secrets; Schulz
appeals to the reader to trust and understand him as only a "true reader" can in an attempt
to lessen the burden of the ineffable.
The mingled body is more than mere allegory in each of these texts; its evocation
serves a very specific function of unity that negates both extreme exteriority and
interiority. In creating a mingled text replete with evocative textual markers, Schulz
31 traverses the chasm separating reader and author and opens up a new space in which the imagination remakes the world. Such new spaces are "the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being," his narrator notes in "The Book" (13). This notion of a second genesis in the reader's mind is true to the form of the genre of visionary literature. In fact, the very practice of prayer in the Middle Ages, of which many of Buber's ecstatic visions testify, transcends mere Augustinian visionary polarities and utilizes the language of sensory experience in order to evoke a bodily response in the reader. 17 This "praying by numbers" is "an art of figuration that is meant to inform the workings of perception, to alienate sensation from its everydayness, and to immerse them in artificial states that both negate and reveal the natural and historical face of the world" (Largier 88). Gone are false splits of inward and outward experience, sense and spirit, reader and writer.
Appropriate, then, that Schulz chooses to appeal to his reader on the first pages of
Sanatorium: "A short sharp look or a light clasp of the hand will stir him into awareness, and he will blink in rapture at the brilliance of The Book. For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands?" (116)
Glances, touches, imagination, and the Word: A mingled journey for a mingled book.
17 See Bernard McGinn's "Visions and Visualizations in the Here and Hereafter," Harvard Theological Review 98:3 (2005), 227-246, for an excellent discussion of the history and evolution of the medieval visionary imagination.
32 Chapter II
Landscaping Memory: Bruno Schulz, Walter Benjamin, and the Dialectical Myth-Image
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
-William Faulkner, Light in August
Among several strange commonalities, Bruno Schulz and Walter Benjamin share a birth year (1892), background (assimilated Jews), and passion (the written word). What is perhaps the most enduring commonality between Schulz and Benjamin, though, is their common struggle for artistic rebirth. In their texts, as I shall make clear, both authors utilize the written word to discuss-and, thus, attempt to create-a world set apart from our own and yet deeper to a primordial truth. This "messianic" impulse lends itself to a style writing that is often fragmented and always elusive. 18 In particular, Benjamin's
Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), is so formidable a philosophic endeavor that
"even the most seasoned Benjamin expert might be forgiven a feeling of helplessness in the face of such a powerful an enigmatic array of claims" (Pensky 177). Likewise, as a steady stream of critical attention proves, Schulz has perplexed and awed critics for nearly six decades. Both artists struggled with creating, as it were, blueprints for the world in written form, and this revolutionary endeavor makes their work both perplexing and timeless. Of these experiments, perhaps most striking is the artists' collective usage
18 Karen Underhill has dealt with this aspect of messianism in Schulz and Benjamin beautifully and in great detail. See her University of Chicago dissertation, Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity (2009), particularly chapter one, "Bruno Schulz and Modem Jewish Messianism." See also Eric Jacobson's Metaphysics ofthe Profane: The Political Theology ofWalter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, particularly chapters one and two.
33 of a primeval landscape that is both haunted and teeming with elan vital; in Schulz's work, as well as Benjamin's, the landscape becomes a harbinger of historical past and mythic-infused present, subsequently enfolded in the dialectical image that Benjamin describes so often.
Begun in 1927, and unfinished at the time of his death in 1940, the materials assembled to create The Arcades Project remain one of Walter Benjamin's most ambitious philosophical endeavors. Left with nothing more than a compendium of
quotes, musings, and aphoristic non-sequiturs, we can consider the contents of this work as mere suggestions of future essays, unfinished and hopelessly scattered.19 Or, we can
look at these literary sketches and see the blueprint for a new literary-philosophic
landscape. We cannot know what Benjamin aimed to create, but this somewhat haphazard format, though unintended, may very well have suited Benjamin's purposes. In
a brief note, the author compares his philosophical opus to a literary montage, one in
which "I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no
ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse-these I will not inventory but allow, in
the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them" (Nla, 8).20 The
Arcades Project is full of such notes that confirm the project's revolutionary aims; in an
oft-cited letter from 1930, Benjamin goes so far as to refer to it as "the theater of all my
struggles and all my ideas" (Eiland and McLaughlin x). If we continue with this
19 In many ways, this contrast mirrors the fate of the Jewish people: For both Schulz and Benjamin, an overt focus on their deaths has led many writers to see their work through the lens of absence and mourning. I would like to push against this impulse and suggest that both artists infuse their texts with life and, indeed, hope. 20 All translations are taken from the 1999 edition of The Arcades Project translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
34 metaphor, the theater is undoubtedly set in Paris; and the image it showcases is a dialectical wish-image of the nineteenth century arcade.
What Benjamin exactly meant by a dialectical image is, somewhat heartbreakingly, never expressly stated and remains open for interpretation. 21 What we do know, however, is that the dialectical image is a powerful place "wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now" (N2a, 3). In other words, the arcade (to use his favorite example) was, for Benjamin, a site through which the past interacted with the future in order to dialectically assemble a present. These arcades were as much a trashy expression of pop culture as they were a glimpse into myth. In representing a glimpse of the past in their Greek architectural inspirations, the onlooker melds the image of the past into the present. The experience is both tragedy and farce, tawdry and transcendent. In
"Expose of 1935," Benjamin describes this as a function of the "wish-image," which
"deflect[s] the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past" (4). Such wish-images have the power to recreate and reinterpret the world as much as they are tied to their "primal past."
In exploring this dialectical movement, both Bruno Schulz and Walter Benjamin found themselves haunted by the ghostly remains of a mythic city. Benjamin's obsession with the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century owed as much to their historical context as their mythical one: In speaking both of newness (in the early 1800s) and decay, the arcades serve to exemplify the means by which a memory of the past is
21 For further study on Benjamin's dialectical image, including possible solutions to the puzzle, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. See also Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory ofLiterary Criticism and Pensky, Max "Method and Time: Benjamin's Dialectical Images" in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin.
35 brought to fruition in the present. Schulz similarly revels in the useless and broken as means by which to achieve the mythic; his tales are littered with an ordinariness that somehow glitters and transcends the everyday. 22 Perhaps more striking, though, is the echo of a dialectical image in his depiction of his book Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe ):
This book represents an attempt to recreate the history of a certain family, a certain home in the provinces, not from their actual elements, events, characters, or experiences, but by seeking their mythic content, the primal meaning of that history (Letters, 153).
In short, Schulz wishes to embrace a dialectical relationship with the past, as created in the present. He seeks to draw in the past in the truest way possible: by grounding it in myth and "primal meaning."
As defined by Schulz, landscape offers a crucial dimension to this "mythic content." The author's description of his "metaphysical mission" culminates in an admission that the semiautobiographical narrator moves from "adventure to adventure ... within the boundary of the brightly colored landscape that, in constantly mutating forms, keeps company with his exploits" (155). The landscape of Cinnamon
Shops was, for Schulz, not just an element of semi-autobiographical fiction; rather, this entity in constant flux is possessed of the capability to act as a companion to his narrator.
The place mutates, and with this mutation it determines the direction of the narrative.
Like Bertjamin, Schulz posits that the spiritual materiality of the mythic image can be
grounded in and determined by place. Although the backdrop of Schulz's fiction was
22 Schulz is often thought of as a post-modernist, rather than a modernist; however, this aim-and, indeed, many others--sets him squarely in the modernist camp.
36 modeled on his hometown of Drohobycz, it also presents itself as otherworldly and, indeed, an agent of change. Echoing Benjamin, Schulz's landscape keeps equal parts footing in past, present, and mythic, embodying the "now" that characterizes the flash of the dialectical image.
This chapter shall illustrate the connection between landscape and dialectical imagery in Schulz's fiction by drawing on several convolutes of Benjamin's AP, namely
"D: Boredom, Eternal Return," "K: Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future,
Anthropological Nihilism, Jung," and "M: The Flaneur." As previously mentioned, the dialectical image is murky water; however, it is my aim to take Benjamin's expression as an intentionally ambiguous one. Like most good works of art, the secret is inextricably linked to its beauty and is open to multiple interpretations. At times, AP reads less like a work of philosophy and more like a map to a novel, where the author's intention is not to rectify the ambiguities of past, present, and mythic, but to bring attention to points of rupture in each. Much like a feeling of deja-vu, the sense of the happened-before has an uncanny ability to mingle with the present, and myth is never far behind.
For our purposes here, the dialectical link between history and the present can best be thought of as the relationship between a horizontal (past) and vertical (present)
line; where the two intersect, the ''wish-image" of primordial myth emerges. Now, this connection of three disparate temporal existences is all but impossible in our day-to-day existence, but it attains the status of dream memory in AP. One has the sense that the emergence of a present grounded in myth and past is possible, but only in the way a
dream makes its contents seem possible. It is as if it has happened before and may happen
again, but only in a faint, disconnected way. In short, the potential for dialectical imagery
37 is the realm of good fiction. In discussing the eruptions of the dialectical image in
Schulz's fiction, I hope to muddy the waters of Schulz's fictional history and to give an added sense of urgency to his project; for this is, for both Benjamin and Schulz, a profoundly utopian endeavor.
The Vertical Line: Galicia
The land of Schulz's birth was an extraordinary one, especially considering the mythic implications of the term "homeland." Contrasted with the variations of everyday
life, one's homeland remains a fixed image often associated with the nostalgia of childhood-a static measure of stability in the face of unending change. However, as
discussed in chapter one, Schulz's childhood land was anything but stable. After over a century of existence, the land of Galicia ( 1772-1918) gave way to the Second Polish
Republic, which put Poland back on the map after over 123 years of geographical
nonexistence. When Poland returned, the Schulz's homeland was officially no more. It
would take more than an erasure from the maps to destroy the spirit of Galicia, however.
Galicia may have been the name of a region, but to its inhabitants it was much more. As
Larry Wolff notes in The Idea ofGalicia, there are several important cultural elements
that emerged out of provincial Galician life, not the least of which was the messianic
Jewish sect of Hasidism. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, for example, was convinced that
"Hassidism was fundamentally Galician" (208):
In order to understand the Hasidic sect, one has to understand the land where they live. One has to know Galicia. Think of a boundless plain covered with green sprouts in the spring, yellow fields of grain in the summer, and snow in the winter .... Here people have a feeling of infinity that they cannot grasp, and they withdraw into themselves... (quoted in Wolff209)
38 Here the land is seen as a catalyst for mystical fantasies where, in "withdraw[ing] into themselves," the people obtain a unity with everything; although there are undoubtedly many other lands plains covered with sprouts in winter and snow in summer {could
Sacher-Masoch have utilized a more mundane example?), it is not simply the physical landscape that defines Galicia. Especially for the Jews of the region, Galicia was a sort of metaphysical homeland where the land and spirit worked in tandem. When Poland re emerged after the First World War and Galicia receded into the past, the idealized landscape of Galicia "became the haunted terrain of phantoms and fantasies" for its former inhabitants {Wolff 4).
For Benjamin, such "haunted terrain" reveals an underlying truth: beneath the detritus of the present resounds echoes of primordial myth. Such terrain, for Benjamin, has its roots not in physical geography {although the Parisian arcades may be emblematic of such a turn), but rather in the dreamscape of the collective-a well of images from which all of humanity may pull. Much of what Benjamin has to say regarding the
influence of the external {i.e. landscape) on the internal {i.e. individual) is embedded in his theories of the dream collective, a place where such primordial myth resides. For
Benjamin, "the image stock of humanity" is recognized by the proverbial child, whose job it is to "recognize the new once again" {Kia, 3). In this way, there is no such thing as
"the new," only the new rediscovered in the old. Although Benjamin seeks to establish
such a pattern in fashion and architecture, he is equally concerned with what he terms
"symbolic space" {Kia, 3). The dialectic of old and new here correlates with that of
dreaming and awakening; and the messianic awakening is "poised, like the wooden horse
39 of the Greeks, in the Troy of Dreams" (K2, 4). The individual and collective float back and forth in Convolute K, each adopting subjective presence in tum. For Benjamin, the relationship between old and new, past and present, is analogous to the individual's relationship to the collective, and, I argue, external and internal. One awakens from sleep and, in remembering the dream, incorporates it into the present. In the same way, the past of a haunted landscape reasserts itself in the present to form a mythic ur-landscape, a place of equal parts dream, memory, and history.
The Horizontal Line: Drohobycz, Poland
Even a cursory look at Schulz's work makes clear that this author was haunted by landscape in just such a way. When Schulz's Galician myths were written, Galicia no longer existed. What did remain was Drohobycz, a place that fueled Schulz's creativity.
Indeed, as we know from his letters, traveling to Paris or Warsaw left Schulz longing for the small, somewhat provincial town ofDrohobycz.23 It was the only place he could write. As noted in the previous chapter, the links between Schulz's fictional landscape and that of the actual landscape of Drohobycz, Poland are numerous. Equally important, though, is what Benjamin calls "the increasing concentration of reality," a commonly perceived phenomenon in which "everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had at the moment of existing" (K2, 3). Put simply, Schulz wrote tales about his childhood in Galicia filtered through the lens of Polish existence; as we shall
23 In his introduction to Schulz's letters, Jerzy Ficowski notes that "Schulz remained an outsider and anchorite in the provincial backwater of Drohobycz--at a remove from the mainstream ideas and events in the cultural centers of Warsaw, Krakow, and Lw6w" (25). However, Schulz's work was both stifled and created there; the overall critical consensus of Schulz's relationship to Drohobycz is one of artist and muse.
40 see, this dialectical relationship is crucial to understanding the mythic landscape of
Schulz's texts.
Certainly one important consideration for both Schulz and Benjamin is that of their background: one would be remiss to ignore the important-yet not uncomplicated- role of Judaism in each of their lives. In Schulz's time, Drohobycz was indeed a center of
Jewish life.24 Much thought has been given to the level of"Jewishness" we can attribute
25 to Schulz's stories and influences , but, as the earlier Sacher-Masoch citation attests,
Hasidism was indivisible from the land of Galicia, as well as interwar Poland. Schulz's tales repeatedly insist on their time as somehow beyond time, or eternal, but such boundary crossing and remapping of intellectual territory accurately parallel an emerging interwar Poland and profound changes in Jewish identity between the wars.
Moreover, the years in which Schulz wrote saw an unprecedented reemergence of
Polish-Jewish community. Schulz's family was not strictly religious and Schulz probably never learned to read Yiddish, but he was, as Jerzy Ficowski notes "not indifferent to myths or sacred rites" (35). As such, Schulz's stories retain the essence of Jewish mythology, if not the realism of everyday Jewish life. In an essay discussing Schulz in the context Martin Buber's work, Karen Underhill rightly avers that this generation of writers "can fruitfully be placed within a constellation of assimilated Jewish intellectuals ... whose work reveals an attempt to incorporate Jewish philosophical and
24 Drohobycz's Jewish population at the turn of the century approached 50% of the total population; this is well over the Polish national average (Wirtualny Sztetl/Online Virtual Shtetl). 25 See, for example, my discussion of Benjamin Paloff' s article "Who Owns Bruno Schulz?: Poland Stumbles Over its Jewish Past" in the introduction to this work. Jan Blonsky' s "On the Jewish Sources of Bruno Schulz" in Cross Currents also presents an interesting take on the "Jewishness" of Schulz's work.
41 mystical heritage into modem, often secular systems of thought" ("Ecstasy and Heresy"
28). Additionally, Schulz's work often reflects the juncture between old and new
Judaism, between the cultural traditions of an ostracized Jewish community and the secularism of an emerging Jewish intellectualism.
Works such as Schulz's--and Benjamin's-present what Underhill calls "a third position" in which both authors vacillate between disguising and elucidating their respective Jewish beliefs (Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity 7). One can claim, as did his good friend Gershom Sholem, that Benjamin was a religious thinker, but nowhere in his texts does he explicitly say as much. Similarly, the Jewish themes in Schulz's texts are easily extrapolated, but Judaism as such is never mentioned.26 According to
Underhill, this third position posits the modem Jewish intellectual as neither primarily religious, nor primarily secular, but as rather an integration of both parts into a Jewish- other hybrid.
This integration of self and other involves a shifting of identities that is often chaotic, and, as Underhill argues, uniquely modem. One must reconcile a collective past with its individual present, a historical reality with its material one. In other words, much in the way the Benjaminian child creates ''the image stock of humanity" out of the detritus of the old, hybrid individuality requires an ability to discover a "third position" where once there were only two extremes. I believe that such a relationship between the internal and external is mirrored by the dialectic relationship oflandscape to the present
26 The collection Cinnamon Shops begins with a leisurely Shabbat afternoon, for example. Joseph's father also delivers a series oflectures entitled "Traktat o manekinach" (Tractate on Mannequins''). Although often translated misleadingly as "Treatise on Tailor's Dummies," the word traktat (tractate) has Talmudic connotations: a tractate is a portion of the Talmud that explicates a specific Biblical subject. It can also refer to an entire book of the Talmud.
42 in Schulz's tales, insofar as the author addresses place, location, and mythic reality. In
Schulz's texts, the tandeta of reality is never far beneath the surface, but neither is it far from the magical terrain of history. For Joseph, the city serves as a conduit through which the mythological experience occurs. Much can be gleaned from utilizing Benjamin's myth-image to understand these tales; as will be come clear, by juxtaposing these two seemingly disparate dialectical elements-the ordinary (represented frequently by tandeta, or rubbish) and myth-Schulz reveals the mythic potential of the mundane.
The Third Rail, Or An Accidental Flineur
Schulz's tale "Cinnamon Shops" is perhaps one of his most canonical. In the title story from Schulz's 1934 collection (translated into English as The Street ofCrocodiles), the narrator and his family are about to spend an evening in a theater when the father
realizes that he's forgotten his wallet. On his way to retrieve the wallet, Joseph takes a shortcut and gets lost in the city that was once so familiar; streets turn and twist, a
childhood gymnasium becomes a place of mythic ritual, and the plot-if one can call it this-culminates in a fantastical carriage ride to the outskirts of the city. The story
begins, appropriately enough, with a personification of the city's labyrinthine structure as
emblematic of the father character's decline:
At the time of the shortest, sleepy [sennych] winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out [rozgal~zialo si~] deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was shaken reluctantly into consciousness by the short dawn, my father was already lost, sold and surrendered to the other sphere. (53, 57)
43 As occurs frequently in Schulz's texts, place and time are here allowed physical attributes. Winter days are not just oppressive or dull; they are sennych--"sleepy" or
"dreamy." The city not only darkens or lightens, it "reach[es]" out into the night and is
"shaken reluctantly into consciousness" by the new day. Here the city is poised as a corporeal figure at the mercy of a capricious time-repeatedly thrown from day to night and night to day.
Here, too, the character of the father is equated with an "other sphere" which lies between the world of time and cityscape. Schulz later describes him as "in permanent contact with the unseen world" and "completely submerged in an inaccessible sphere"
(53). This belief in a sacred, unseen world underneath the mundane owes much to Judaic mystical thought and modernist tendencies, but it also serves to pose the father as a man emblematic of a past always already lost. In a sense, Schulz's father figure is the Galician past underneath modem-day Poland; unlike the narrator, though, he has no way to integrate these two antithetical modes of being. He exists simultaneously in the past and present-in the mythic and ordinary-to such a point that he risks disappearing from both. His movements and actions become absurd and inscrutable; he is preoccupied with things the rest of the family doesn't understand. In an attempt to bring the father into the everyday, or perhaps to ignore the otherworldliness that the father is descending into, the family goes to the theater. It is here, and for these reasons, that Joseph is driven on a sort of visionary quest facilitated by the city's landscape.
Driven by this mythic, yet ordinary quest, Joseph becomes a sort of accidental
"flaneur," which Benjamin describes as inextricably tied to the landscape he wanders. In the first of four epigraphs for Convolute M: "The Flaneur", Walter Benjamin
44 appropriates a brief and poignant line from Stephane Mallarme ideally suited to Joseph's journey through "Cinnamon Shops": "A landscape haunts, intense as opium." Although
Benjamin seems to vacillate between admonishing the flaneur for his bourgeois pastime and acknowledging the very real connection the flaneur has with his (and it is always his) city, an important underlying thematic concern emerges regarding the power of landscape. Borrowing the term from Baudelaire, who Benjamin translated and later devotes a separate convolute to, the flaneur wanders the city as both internal and external participant, both marking and marked by the landscape.27 This mutually transformative experience leads to a "vanished time":
For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward-if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a fsast that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. 8 Nevertheless, it always remains the time ofa childhood But why that of the life he has lived? In the asphalt over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance. The gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws an unequivocal light on this double ground. (Ml, 2, italics mine)
While the city of the flaneur leads "downward" into a collective past, it simultaneously reaches back to the flaneur's individual past, achieving a "surprising resonance" in the present. The question that Benjamin asks is, I think, a sincere one: why on earth would something so primordial and mythical resonate with personal experience? Benjamin does
27 "For the perfect flaneur, that passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure [jouissance] to take up residence in the crowd: in the undulating, in the motion, in the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home everywhere--to see the world, be at the center of the world, and to remain hidden from the world" (Baudelaire 9, translation mine). 28 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, Schulz also makes an allusion to such a mother figure of the depths in his story "Spring": "We are here at the very bottom, in the dark foundations, among the Mothers" (162). This decent is also echoed in the carriage ride discussed later in this chapter, as well as in Thomas Mann's preface to Joseph und seine Bruder, a work Schulz much admired.
45 not give us a straight answer, most likely because there isn't one. For Benjamin, the city of Paris exists in two dialectical realms for the flaneur: "It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room" (Ml, 4). Somehow the city has an uncanny ability to render the landscape both internal and external and, in doing so, creates a "double ground" of eternal mystery. The double here is between self and the external, mythic and ordinary: the flaneur embodies the contradiction of being oneself in all of the ordinariness that implies-while simultaneously gesturing to the divine.
Indeed, like Joseph, ordinariness combines with the experience of the landscape to actively create the mystical experience of the flaneur.
Joseph, for his part, does not present himself as a typical flaneur. In "Cinnamon
Shops" he has been enlisted in a very specific mission to retrieve his father's wallet. He does, however, find himself in the midst of a uniquely mysterious night, and notes that he finds it "exceedingly thoughtless [lekkomyslnosciq] to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that" (55, 59). On such a night, wandering is necessitated, for even though he hopes that he can be back to the theater before the curtain rises, on such a night "the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged.
There opens up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make believe streets [ulice podwojne, ulice sobowtory, ulice klamliwe i zwodne]" (55, 59). In this way, Joseph becomes a kind of accidentalflaneur, traveling the doubled streets as wide-eyed and aimless as a Parisian dandy. It is as if he had never seen this city before and, indeed, he hasn't. The city that lies in front of him is a ghostly double to his hometown, and it isn't long before he is rendered, not exactly lost, but nowhere any map would be able to place.
46 In the course of his journey, Joseph's city opens up as an active participant in the story. As much as Joseph tries to consider the imminent start of the theater performance, he finds himself"lent wings" (uskrzydlony) by a strange and urgent desire to visit what he calls the "cinnamon shops" (for their dark-paneled walls) of Market Square (56, 61).
However, despite his having taken a route that "according to his calculations" should have brought him to the neighborhood, Joseph finds himself unable to recognize anything. The street's configuration, moreover, "was different from what [he] had expected" (nawet konjiguracja ulic nie odpowiadala oczekiwanemu obrazowi) (56, 61).
This is not simply a case of a child misremembering his way; the author gives us every indication that the city itself is changing course-if not in actuality then at least in appearance. In this way, Schulz plays with the notion of perception: Is the city as Joseph sees it or is it merely an expression of Joseph's internal journey? I posit that both aspects of the city's appearance are bound together and that, on this particular night, Joseph is able to see the city double.
On this night, Joseph is opened up to a way of seeing that is particular to this period of time. As previously mentioned, the specificity of this night is crucial; it is as if a sliver of myth-time has made a rupture in present time for young Joseph. Like
Benjamin's dialectical image, the city embraces its mythic potential alongside the quotidian landscape of buildings and labyrinthine streets. Moreover, the heavenly landscape reflects the otherworldliness of its terrestrial counterpart: The sky appears large enough to cover "a whole month of winter nights", and the moon is projected against various clouds "showing all its positions at once" (demonstrujqc w tym zwielokrotnieniu
47 wszystkie swe fazy i pozycje) (55, 59).29 As he wanders the streets under this fantastical sky, he sees familiar landscapes rendered unfamiliar. Expecting to see the cinnamon shops, for example, he instead sees "a street of houses with no doors and of which the tightly shut windows were blind from reflected moonlight" (57). Although he wants nothing more than "to get out of there quickly" and back to familiar ground, he is instead compelled to traverse this strange land:
I felt on me the breath of a wide-open space. Close to the pavement, or in the midst of their gardens, picturesque villas stood there, the private houses of the rich. In the gaps between them were parks and walls of orchards. The whole area [Obraz przypominal z daleka] looked like Lesznianska Street in its lower and rarely visited part. The moonlight filtered through a thousand feathery clouds, like silver scales on the sky. It was pale and bright as daylight-only the parks and gardens stood black in that silvery landscape. (57, 61)
Unbelievable though it may be, this mystical landscape is nothing more than the back of
Joseph's high school seen from a strange angle. But it more than just the angle that has rendered this scene unfamiliar. The landscape itself has become an active participant, breathing its "wide-open space" onto Joseph. Moreover, the colors of night here seem to transcend the confmes of any typical night: Like a chiaroscuro drawing, the background becomes "pale and bright as daylight," while the buildings are foregrounded black against gray.
Appropriate, then, that Joseph should fmd himself wandering into a late-night high school drawing class. Here, "a small group of industrious pupils" is gathered by candlelight--some drawing, some not (57). In this strange space, time runs "unevenly, as
29 Elements such as these inspired Benjamin Paloff's excellent argument for the influence of Einstein's theory ofrelativity on Schulz's work. "Bruno Schulz as Theoretical Physicist" was delivered at the 2012 Annual Bruno Schulz Conference at the University of Chicago.
48 if making knots in the passage of hours, swallowing somewhere whole empty periods"
(58). Again, the childish trope oflost time is rendered something more; here time itself, like space elsewhere in the text, is capable of very human actions, namely running and swallowing. It does not behave as proper time, and this has everything to do with the mystical landscape Joseph has entered. As the pupils laze about, Professor Arendt shows old lithographs of "night landscapes ... of avenues in wintry parks outlined black on the white moonlit background" and a strange thing happens: the landscape itself becomes a drawing (58). "The night was copying fpowtarzala] now," Joseph notes, "at that late hour, the nightly landscapes of Professor Arendt's engravings, reenacting [kontynuowala] his fantasies" (58, 63). As time recedes into the distance-and, simultaneously, stretches
out into one moment-the landscape also changes form. Rather than the drawing replicating what is seen in nature, here we realize that the strange buildings and
unfamiliar streets that Joseph has seen on this mystical night are born of drawings.
Our first visionary moment in this text centers around the act of perceiving the
cityscape with the ultimate realization that this nightly landscape is molded from human
illustration. Joseph here participates in what Benjamin terms "illustrative seeing" (M2, 2).
For Benjamin, the fliineur does not merely take in the images of his city whole; he is also
an active participant in his specific image production. Whether it is through disregarding
certain images and picking up on others or actively viewing the cityscape in his own
particular way, the fliineur "composes his reverie as text to accompany the images" (M2,
2). This back-and-forth image creation allows Joseph to view the landscape as an intrinsic
part of space as well as a moveable part.
49 After exiting this labyrinth, Joseph enters into a second, even more surreal visionary space. Again, Joseph fmds himself lost and winding through strange corridors of the school that are "completely Wlknown" to him (nigdy nie widzianej stronie gmach)
(59, 64). The strange room he ultimately discovers himself in, he realizes with an increased heart rate, is the headmaster's apartment. He realizes suddenly that he needs to get back to the familiar streets that have taken him here, and devises a specific plan:
This is what I did. When I found myself on the parquet floor under the potted palms that reached up to the frieze of the ceiling, I noticed that now I really was on neutral ground, because the living room did not have a front wall. It was a kind of large loggia, connected by a few steps with a city square, an enclosed part of the square, because some of the garden :furniture stood directly on the pavement. I ran down the short flight of stone steps and found myself at street level once more. (60)
It is curious that Joseph needs such an elaborate plan to escape this room. Indeed, it seems as ifhe has entered the rabbit hole of his high school and cannot fmd his way back to reality. Although a familiar enough place-at least in concept-the apartment is recreated as a mythic, otherworldly location where the image of the loggia transcends a typical balcony. Schulz states that ''the living room did not have a front wall" and that it was therefore "neutral territory." Utilizing such idiosyncratic language renders the familiar unfamiliar and removes Joseph even further from the reality of the family excursion that starts the story.
After this, the landscape becomes an overtly mystical one. Once safely outside the high school, Joseph discovers a horse-drawn carriage driven by a man with a "small red kindly face" who takes him on a metaphysical excursion to the outskirts of the city
(60). Ifwe concede to discuss Schulz in tenns of plot, this is certainly the crux of the
50 story. Joseph even notes, in rare candor, that the experience proves not only instructive or otherwise enlightening; it is also one of sheer pleasure:
I shall never forget that luminous journey on that brightest of winter nights. The colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography .... We entered a hilly landscape. The lines of hills, bristling with the bare spikes of trees, rose like sighs of bliss. I saw on these happy slopes groups of wanderers, gathering among the moss and the bushes the fallen stars which now were damp with snow ... I was happy. ( 61)
Schulz presents us here with yet another curious event without obvious signification. We are reminded of a Galician countryside that, in its everydayness, was a place of mystical dreams. The language of ecstasy remains ever-present: the journey is "luminous," the geography "heavenly," and the "happy slopes" rise like "like sighs of bliss." As Schulz projects this landscape through his text, he simultaneously anchors it to its Galician past and ties it to Joseph's present The "wanderers" gathering fallen stars situate themselves in a landscape that both fuels and reaffirms their ethereal endeavor. Emblematic of a prophetic past that exceeds the everyday vision of the city's present, these figures nonetheless undergird it Joseph is privy to a kind of mythic image that dialectically integrates a history, myth, and the present.
The carriage ride was a personal myth that interested Schulz from his earliest days, and an image very much connected with the Benjaminian "wish-image." As an act that seemed to be "full of weight and arcane [utajone11 symbolism," Schulz felt that this trope drew from "the basic material of [his] imagination; it is a kind of node to many receding series" (Letters 110, 100). This is to say that the image itself was born of something beyond Schulz, what he called "an iron capital of spirit" [zelaznego kapitalu
51 mojej fantazji] (110, 100). If, as Benjamin notes, "the essence of the mythic event is return," then it is no surprise that Schulz returns to this image, as does Joseph (DlOa, 4).
Even while in the carriage, Joseph and his kindly driver do nothing more than circle the city, embarking on a circular descent to the realm of the proverbial "Mothers." In this way, the mundane experience of a carriage ride is weighted with the significance of myth; yet again, in his evocation of the aimless carriage ride, Schulz weds the quotidian with the divine.
For his part, Joseph is indelibly marked by the landscape of this mythic event.
"On such a night, unique in the year" the narrator notes, "one feels touched by the divine finger of poetry [palca botego]" (62). The landscape circles around Joseph and Joseph circles around it; when he attempts to return back to the town, he finds his classmates sleepy-eyed and carrying their books, but he finds it difficult to return to normalcy. The scent of violets permeates the air-the same scent that explodes over the landscape of the wanderers-and a certain "magic ... which lay like silver on the snow" blankets the landscape ( 62). Although the night-with its messianic drawing teachers, uncanny wanderers and kindly carriage drivers-has faded into the past, the residue of the myth- image remains.
Conclusion, Or The Phantasmagoria of ffistory
Schulz's tales are perhaps best analogized to a dream of a memory that never happened.30 In "Cinnamon Shops" in particular, the landscape ofDrohobycz during its
Galician past rears its head alongside that of its Polish present to create an amalgamation
30 I am indebted to an anonymous Wes Anderson fan for this metaphor. It works for Schulz-and, I think, in the same way- as well as it does for Anderson.
52 of mythic proportions. Time and landscape come alive, twist into fantastic forms, and help to facilitate a visionary experience. To muddy the water even further, there are frequent glimpses of the Schulz that wrote these tales embedded throughout; indeed, it is often difficult to separate the (once) corporeal author from his fictional protagonist. In this way, the world of Schulz's tales is an accordion-style book of the past, the present, the historical, and mythic. It is, in short, what Benjamin might term a "phantasmagoria of history."31 Underneath the tandeta of everyday reality lays an eternal, primal past that in its actuality also recedes into myth. In his accidental flanerie and through his mythic carriage ride, Joseph stumbles upon the outskirts of a mythic past while simultaneously rewriting that past under the light of the present.
Both Schulz and Benjamin, in "Cinnamon Shops" and The Arcades Project respectively, succeed in recreating the way in which readers view the world. Although retaining a certain historical materialism, dreamlike proportions are made tantamount, serving to indoctrinate the reader into an alternative vision of reality. If Schulz's text is the cityscape, Benjamin's notes are the map. In remembering the dream, we are able to
"pass through and carry out what has been" much the same way reading Schulz's texts have equal footing in the quotidian, historical, and mythic (Kl, 3). Reading both texts is akin to remembering a cultural-and personal--dream of a memory long forgotten. It is the stuff of "third position" remembrance. Benjamin notes that ''the place where one encounters [dialectical images] is language" (N2a, 3). I hope to have shown that there is
31 "In the idea of recurrence, the historicism of the nineteenth century capsizes. As a result, every tradition, even the most recent, becomes the legacy of something that has already run its course in the immemorial night of the ages. Tradition henceforth assumes the character of a phantasmagoria in which primal history enters the scene in ultra modern get-up" (D8a, 2)
53 no place better to encounter such "genuine images" as in the fiction of Bruno Schulz.
These dreams of the collective from which we emerge are of eternal importance, "for they allow us to recognize the sea on which we navigate and the shore from which we push off' (Kla, 6). And such dreams, such mythic blueprints, in their landscape of time immemorial, are never inconsequential.
54 Epilogue
In the beginning, there was the theory.
As I suppose is the case for many budding academics, I was initially drawn to looking at works of art through the lens of a pet theory, and this project is no exception.
In the fall of my first year of graduate school, Dr. Thaine Stearns introduced me to several canonical texts of visual culture-namely, W.J.T. Mitchell's Iconology and
Jonathan Crary's Techniques ofthe Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th
Century. As a former film student, I felt immediately at home. In fact, mid-way through this course I decided to change my Master's focus from Creative Writing to Literary
Criticism. I found that vision and visuality is often used in literary works to suggest a second sort of seeing: the inward look, or second sight. For my final paper, I wrote on
Lewis Carroll's usage of visual metaphors and their connection to esoteric sight in the
Alice books. I was enchanted and intrigued by the prospect of further study in this area and thought I had, for sure, found my thesis topic.
In the writing of my Carroll paper, I was reminded of another author who used words and images in a similar way. I first read Bruno Schulz (in English, of course) as an undergraduate studying Creative Writing. Then, as a film student, I read it again. I wish there were an interesting story about how I came to Schulz, but really, it was as simple as a deep-seated love for his depiction of an alternate reality underneath this one. Even in translation, I had the sense that his image making was extraordinary, and heart-breakingly
55 precise. 32 This is when I sought out Dr. Anne Goldman, with whom I studied theories of the fantastic. This rabbit hole led to an interest in posthumanism, and I wrote and presented several papers on the relationship between the fantastical and Schulz, focusing specifically on posthumanist-thing theory in particular- elements. A course on postmedievalism33 with Dr. Brantley Bryant furthered my love of this theoretical apparatus.
All of these areas of inquiry-visual culture study, theories of the fantastic, and posthumanism-have informed this project, but, ultimately, I found that any one lens fell short of illumining the entire picture. A feminist or posthumanist reading, for example, may illuminate one aspect of Schulz, but at the risk of ignoring the whole. In order to know Schulz better, I went deeper into his work. I read it, again, for pleasure. And I waited. Ultimately, Dr. Niklaus Largier's course on medieval visionary literature brought me out of my stupor. The connection was made.
As I have hoped to have shown with this study, Schulz's descriptions of visionary experience and mythic landscapes expose new modes of viewing the world-for Joseph, for Schulz, and for readers. Although Joseph never breaks out of the cycles that he has created for himself-he is always searching for the Book, always lost down some corridor or another-the journeys that he takes create flashes of illumination, or what
Benjamin might call a "constellation" of"genuine" images (N2a, 3). Indeed, Benjamin's enigmatic writing on the dialectical image is ideally suited to Schulz: it suggests, ever so
32 Many other critics have felt a similar gut-level response to Schulz: I am not the first person to learn Polish with the express purpose of studying Schulz, and I know I won't be the last. 33 Yes, this indeed is a word. It denotes the study of medieval texts from a posthumanist (thing theory, monster theory, critical animal studies, etc.) perspective.
56 subtly, the hint of hopefulness, but never makes express recommendations. One could argue that both Schulz and Benjamin are essentially nihilistic thinkers, but, in placing them together, I have attempted to show the ways in which their optimism outweighs their cynicism. In the writing and researching of both chapters, I have found that Schulz's struggle for a second sight, true sight, or multi-layered, ambiguous image (as in the case of the dialectical image) is a struggle for artistic rebirth.
There is still much left unsaid, and there are other chapters that I would like to write. In particular, the notion of the descent to the "Mothers" (glossed on page 45 of this work) deserves further study. Benjamin, Schulz, and Thomas Mann (with whom Schulz was enamored) all speak of deep, primordial center of things, and each defer to the mystery of such a well without properly naming its place or function. Schulz, for his part, even addresses his reader at a certain point in "Wiosna" ("Spring"):
But we have not finished yet; we can go deeper. There is nothing to fear. Give me your hand, take another step; we are at the roots now, and at once everything becomes dark, spicy, and tangled like in the depth of a forest. (161)
Yet again, the tangle represents something wonderfully enigmatic, and pregnant with possibility. I am not sure what exactly is at the roots-nor, am I convinced, are any of the authors that invoke the image-but whatever it is holds some kind of key. Perhaps it is the key to loneliness. For, after all, the well from which we all draw is a secret commonality, a source of communal strength. Schulz was a chronically lonely man, and alleviating loneliness was one of his chief concerns. Loneliness (samotnosc) was, he admitted, "the overriding motif" of Cinnamon Shops and he believed it to be "the catalyst that makes reality ferment" (Letters 114, 103). In studying this image further, I would
57 like to explore Mann's impact on Schulz, and the ways in which he mutates this return to the mythic to his own ends.
As briefly discussed in the introduction to this work, I would also like to look more closely at identity creation in Schulz's work, as well as theories of autobiography.
Judaism, geopolitical conflict, and regional customs all make brief appearances in this thesis, but a more solid grounding in the history of interwar Poland, Hassidic Judaism, and Galician literature would, I think, serve me well. In addition to reaching back to the past, Schulz's identity-creation also resonates today. In his essay on recent fictional incarnations of Schulz (Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah ofStockholm and David
Grossman's See Under love, for example), David Goldfarb suggests that "the ones who stayed" in Eastern Europe have the real claim to Schulz's legacy and are the "legitimate bearers of that aesthetic into the postwar age" (27). Such authors of the postwar era can, I think, lend much to a discussion of Schulz. Over the course of this study, I have found it difficult to focus too completely on any one external aspect; this must be a function of the draw Schulz has for me. However, the many parts from which Schulz composed and was composed-some conscious, some not-are varied and deserving of further study.
As I continue my study of Schulz at the doctoral level, I shall continue to allow myself to be surprised at what resonates. This, it seems to me, is the most fruitful way to study Schulz. A poem here or half-remembered phrase there can sometimes burst with the possibility of application. In the beginning there was the sureness of theory, but now I only hope for the eternal return to mystery-a mystery that is as rewarding and complicated as Schulz himself.
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