In the class description lecture, I disclosed the story of Bruno Schulz’s tragic murder at the hands of a Gestapo officer, the secret police of Nazi Germany, when Drohobycz was occupied. Very little of his life’s work was found after World War II. These short story collections you have in your book had already been published: Street of Crocodiles in 1934 and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937 (by the way “Father’s Last Escape in the latter collection is pretty fantastic if you have a chance to read it). The obsession with finding these lost manuscripts will be one component of this class, the story is taken up in all of the next novels. This is why I have assigned the relevant chapters of his biography, in which his biographer went to extraordinary lengths to try and find Schulz’s only known novel: Messiah.
And while, of course, when Schulz was writing and publishing the short stories you have before you, he could not have foreseen the utter insanity of a Nazi invasion and the irrational genocide of the Jews, we can situate his writing in a time of turmoil, seeking out how his literature provides a strategy for dealing with the changes in everyday life. The short story “Street of Crocodiles” deals, in a Schulz way, with the growing industrialization in his small town and the strain that this put on a life:
It was an industrial and commercial district, its soberly utilitarian character glaringly underlined. The spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics, had not spared our city and had taken root in a sector of its periphery which then developed into a parasitical quarter…The pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city, shot up here in a rich but empty and colorless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity. (Schulz 63-64).
Schulz, perhaps like Gregor Samsa, was torn between revulsion for the changing spaces around him and a deep love for all of the life and imagination in things. His writing is wrought with this tension between the everyday, the boring, the banal, and the sublime and the absurd, the grotesque and the beautiful. In this introduction to Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, I want to set you up with some goals or things to look out for in your reading. Bruno Schulz (1892-1842) spent nearly his entire life in a small provincial town called Drohobycz. A fairly reclusive man, he worked as a drawing teacher, and turned the drab town that he lived into a truly magical place of imagination.
Having just read “Metamorphosis” by Kafka, you will immediately start to see some connections with Schulz’s work, particularly in the short story “Cockroaches,” in which the boy’s father seemingly becomes one. However, we will also want to be careful not to over-emphasize the connection as well. Because of his tendency towards the surreal, Schulz often linked with Franz Kafka, of whose The Trial he was credited with translating into Polish in 1936.[1] This simple correlation is emblematized so perfectly in Polish National Public Radio running the following headline in November, 2012: “‘Polish Kafka’ Bruno Schulz Commemorated at Warsaw Show.” [2] And yet, this greatly reduces potential significations to be made from an encounter with Schulz’s work, as well as removes Schulz from context of the Polish avant-garde and modernist scene of which he was so ingrained. His biographer, Jerzy Ficowski, offers the following diatribe on the oft-made correlation between Kafka and Schulz:
Schulz’s writing is unlike that of Kafka. Only a superficial acquaintance with Schulz’s writing would suggest a similarity. Their worlds are diametrically opposed, their artistic motifs quite different, and their philosophies distant from one another… Schulz was a builder of a reality-asylum that was a marvelous ‘intensification of the taste of the world’; Kafka was an inhabitant and propagator of a world of terror, an ascetic hermit awaiting a miracle of justice that never came…Schulz’s literary creation is the reverse of actual experiences, a deliberate and instinctive defense against tormenting obsessions before which in the sphere of art he was not as defenseless as Kafka—a hapless victim.[3]
For us, you will quickly begin to notice just how different their writing styles are. For example, while Kafka, we saw, often concealed explicit images, like the “bug,” (is it a cockroach? What exactly does it look like?), Schulz will overload us with description, descriptions of taste, of smell, of sight. The sentences and language are more complex, the reading experience is very different. So, instead of seeing them as identical, like the journalist’s who simplify Schulz as “the Polish Kafka,” we might instead try to think of how they are employing different aesthetic strategies to cope with similar problems: problems of boredom, of oppression, of shifting ideas of man and work, man and nature, man and fantasy.
Yet, Schulz is very invested in what he calls the “mythologizing of reality.” We discussed how Kafka “literalizes the metaphorical,” what we take as metaphors, Kafka makes real. A similar technique is going on here:
“Schulz endows the word vis-à-vis its named object with temporal precedence and significative determinacy. He also juxtaposes myth with contemporary civilization, and ascribes to the former not only temporal priority but cognitive ultimacy [In other words we think always in terms of myths rather than in experience]. Then he sets forth as paramount the task of the writer to let the word, freed from the concerns and pressures of everday communicative usage, recover its full meaning in mythical stories pointed towards finding an ultimate meaning of the human world” (Czeslaw Prokopczyk, 183-184).
How does Schulz making a myth of reality only to make us find new meaning in reality and in our real experiences? That is our task.
Here are 3 things that I think are worthwhile to track as you read Street of Crocodiles. First, pay attention to how Schulz employs different devices of animation (personification [describing objects with the qualities of a person] and anthropomorphization [attributing human qualities to animals]) “of the seemingly inanimate or abstract.” In “The Gale,” “Schulz reverses cause and effect: Barrels, buckets, etc. rise ‘in stacks,’ they blaspheme—until the gale comes (“summoned by the creaking of utensils”). Objects everywhere, windows, walls, trees, buzzing flies, rocks, unused rooms, are all animated in Schulz’s world. However, this seems tied to the “manic” or the “mania” of the fantasy world. It is both attractive and exotic, but also, what the hell is going on with the father? Do we like how he is becoming one with the animals and garden and earth?
Secondly, watch for how time works in the text. How is it described? How does it work differently in childhood and adulthood? How does it work differently in different seasons? As Jerzy Ficowski explains, “Schulz introduces a subjective, psychological time in his fiction, he makes it real, objectifies it, making events submit to its laws. What in fairy tales may be caused by the external force of magic powers occurs in Schulz’s world as a logical consequence of the inner structure of reality, of its accumulating internal tensions, or in the processes of the ‘fermentation’ of its matter. The new Schulzian time obeys the precise rules of psychology, while in questioning ordinarily accepted principles, it is a mythic refuge in the face of the unavoidable passage of time” (Regions of Great Heresy, 82). I’m thinking here, in particular, of the great short story “The Night of the Great Season:” “Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month. We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a cild conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real” (83). Notice how Time is the subject of the sentence, it enacts the action, it has agency, it does things.
Lastly, watch out for sensuality in the text. There is, of course, the sensuality of all of those animated beings I discussed above, but Street of Crocodiles has a very strange way of describing women (so many are, what, witches?). Adela is one of the stranger female characters I have encountered, a woman who seems to possess the father and, by simply wiggling her fingers at him, can make him run and squeal and hide. Think on how women and sexuality are really embedded into the text, backgrounded and foregrounded in really strange and interesting ways.
My educated guess, here, is that perhaps 2-3 of you will fall in love with this text immediately, 2-3 more will start to catch these glimpses into something you don’t understand but are drawn to maybe in just a few of the stories, 2-3 more will hate it at first and then in the course of your re-reading for your close reading analysis will start to become obsessed with certain lines here and there, and the rest of you will only gain an appreciation for the text in a few weeks when we read other books that engage with Schulz in a more contemporary style. But, ALL of you will struggle with this reading, it is the most difficult we will be doing for the entire semester. Don’t be discouraged, read it aloud, look up words, go slowly. Even I don’t feel a connection with every story, but its those few, for me, that make me come back for more: “Cinnamon Shops,” “Birds,” “Tailor’s Dummies,” and “Cockroaches.” I will organize the discussion board in three groups based on this breakdown, try to respond and build off of other students’ comments on the subject you have chosen.
[1] Ibid. Pg. 112.
[2] “‘Polish Kafka’ Bruno Schulz Commemorated at Warsaw Show.” Polskie Radio Dla Zagranicy. N.p., 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 1 Dec. 2012.
[3] Pg. 101. Ficowski, Jerzy. Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait. Trans. Theodosia S. Robertson. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print.
Introduction to Fiction 