‘The true reader will understand [me],’ assures the narrator in Bruno Schulz’s story, The Book. ‘For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?’ Clasping hands: it’s a beautiful image of literature as a partnership—as Roland Barthes wrote, a ‘singular eye’ through which reader and writer may scrutinize the dark, unspoken corners of human experience. And literature must be a partnership, because though the writer shapes a text’s anatomy, it is the reader who animates its form through private imagination. Art in this sense is mutually invested, and therefore neither party can claim sovereignty over interpretation. As the literary critic Harold Bloom might have said, ‘to read is to misread’, and the meanings we glean from fiction are always dependent, always in contention. This is literature’s promise and peril: the text simultaneously is and isn’t, abiding in the transitory half-space where fact and fiction blur. The freedom of the text hinges on this duality. Invest one side with certainty, and literature’s speculative architecture crumbles into absurdity or dogma.
Nevertheless, ‘with certainty’ is how exactly how the work of Bruno Schulz has been treated by many in the West—including a cadre of literary giants such as Philip Roth, I.B. Singer, and John Updike, whose criticism is founded not upon the merits of the author’s stories but upon the legend of his biography. In their wake, Schulz’s writing has been reduced to its most superficial posture over the last half-century, even as his name is sung as a transcendental prophet who bridged the gap between literary and material worlds. ‘Schulz was a hidden man’, muses Updike for Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, ‘born to testify to the paradoxical richness of life … In his treasured, detested loneliness, [Schulz] brooded upon his personal past with the weight of generations.’ Heavily dosed with romantic fatalism, Updike’s totalising brand of literary historicism makes no pretense at verifiability. As such, it serves neither literature nor history. In one swing misses both for conjecture, reducing Schulz to a symbol and his work to an unassailable ‘formlessness’ that leaves no room for complexity.
Sixty years later, the same cultish ethic persists and the centrality of formlessness runs rampant: ‘misshapen, vacant, unclaimed by others—this was the time Schulz chose to work in.’[1] The same script is rewritten with different terms: ‘formlessness’ becomes ‘dream-logic’, accompanied by the requisite aggrandisement. One critic even trumps Updike’s anti-history by indulging in a bawdy epilogue based on the story of the author’s death:
‘blood soaked into the bread he had just purchased [it wasn’t, according to an eye witness][2]… no sustenance to be had in this world, [Schulz] wanders the cold train cars in a republic of dreams, his jaw swollen from an unnamed wound, coins rattling in his torn railwayman’s hat.’[3]
Historical revisionism aside, the danger of mistaking author and text should be clear from Schulz’s parable in The Book. Not only does the conflation of text and author into a semi-fictional singularity dumb the complexity of both. But beneath the comfort of this rationalist conceit hides a more sinister presumption: that Schulz himself can be read like art and used like art, and that his work is mere facsimile and not its own creative project. Consider, with what living artist (who can at least defend themselves) could similar flights of fancy be admissible? Should we institutionalise Cormac McCarthy for psychopathic bloodlust, or assume Patrick Süskind to have a murderously acute sense of smell? Why is Schulz’s work especially subject to this notice? If such abstractions are literarily and historically derelict in every other example, why would we allow them here? Is the quality of Schulz’s oeuvre enough to make his followers guilty of conflating of ‘fact’ and fiction?
The likely reason for Schulz’s exceptionalism is only somewhat based on his surviving work (which consists of two short volumes of fiction and a number of drawings—all as manic, sage, and miraculous as their artist is touted to be). But there is likely a greater influence at work: Schulz’s myth—how he lived, how he died, and who readers want him to be. For it seems that whenever those in the cult of Schulz confront his work, they invariably communicate more with the mystery of his biography than with the soul of his work. According to author David Grossman, it was hearing the story of Schulz’s death that inspired his novel, See: Under Love.[4] For Philip Roth and countless others, Schulz’s death seems to symbolise the Jewish experience writ large, embodied in the loss of Schulz’s legendary and unfinished magnum opus—the ‘Messiah’ manuscript—hinted at but only seen (so the tale is told) by one man before being confiscated by the KGB. Indeed, it seems that almost every article about Schulz follows the formula of bookending analysis with anecdotal musings on the brutality of his death or the loneliness supposedly evident in his life. ‘‘‘Father [was left] to flap his wings in a desperate attempt to fly”… So Schulz must have felt in Drohobycz [sic] as his fantasies whirled out into the world, leaving him defenseless in the wake of the German occupation,’ determines another essayist, though Schulz wrote years before Hitler’s invasion.[5]
Pushing against the folds that separate the author from his arcane fictions, Grossman and Roth similarly concentrate for Schulz’s ‘Jewish’ quality while eschewing its textual contradictions. This is quite understandable given these writers’ personal and literary connections to Jewish shtetl life. However it is not just Jews, but also gentile Poles; Galician immigrants; modern Ukrainians; as well as other writers, artists, and teachers—all of whom see themselves as scions of Schulz’s legacy.[6] Poles stake their claim because Schulz lived and worked amidst Polish urban culture (the city of Wrocław even boasts an annual Bruno Schulz festival); Ukrainians because he lived within their national borders; Jews because of his ethno-religious heritage; and countless writers and artists who see in Schulz a freely creative impulse that chafes against the aesthetic malaise of rationalism.
In the annals of literature, Schulz’s pluralistic status may seem unusual. Often, artists are compressed into easy, diagrammable taxonomies that characterise their historical and stylistic moment: a Southern writer, a Modernist painter, an Egyptian poet—all these labels carry the baggage of conspicuous socio-cultural identity. But as a secularised Jew from Ukraine who spoke Polish and engaged with Catholicism, Schulz doesn’t easily fit the common ethno-national markers of his readers. A more fitting legacy for Schulz is that of a borderless paragon, a hero of many banners. He is more accurately portrayed as what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would call a ‘minoritarian poet’, an artist who crosses the boundaries of language and culture to inform new dialects, integrations, and ethics.
For this reason, it seems quite natural that critics emergent from the nationalising crucibles of global warfare would construe Schulz’s taxonomic ambiguity for a personal or artistic one. The great Yiddish writer, I.B. Singer—a contemporary of Schulz from Poland-Ukraine[7] —seems to have been the first to articulate this sentiment, by positing a sense of ‘rootlessness’ he perceived in both the author’s life and work. He concludes that, as an ‘assimilationist’ Jew who wrote in Polish rather than Yiddish, and was generally embedded in Polish-Catholic culture, Schulz either forgot or intentionally forsook his Jewish heritage—a betrayal which Singer believes to be coded through the use ‘insincere’ narrative devices like ‘parody’ and ‘mockery’. Having lost ‘nourishment from the soil’, Singer suggests Schulz’s inspiration relied on alienated forms of selfhood.
Even though Singer never met Schulz—and even though he seems to have harbored a palpable bias, even resentment, for Schulz’s use of Polish instead of Yiddish—Updike centers Singer’s valuation of ‘rootlessness’ in his introduction for Roth’s compendium of Writers from the Other Europe, in which Schulz’s work is specially featured. Updike recasts the term as ‘formlessness’, however, and smooths over Singer’s admonishing overtones for plausible critique. Updike’s purpose is to characterise Schulz’s pervasive concern with ‘dead seasons’, or the sense of liminality that accompanies transitional states like falling asleep or ending a conversation. Although Updike is quite right to focus on this theme of in-betweens, the historicist imposition of ‘formlessness’ overlooks the structural logic of dead space in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. One might even say that Updike here contradicts the alternative physics foundational to Hourglass exactly because he applies ready-made, positivist tropes—such as the linearity of time or the finality of death—to narrational schema that explicitly attempt to evade these common essentialisms. Unbounded by the ideologies of realism familiar to Roth and Updike, Schulz’s themes and structures are not at all amorphous. Rather, they are simply unique expressions of life that popular lexicons fail to assimilate.
This is not to say that historicism is needless or ‘dead’ when it comes to Schulz, but it cannot be the reader’s only interpretive compass. For literature that declares no play with realism as Schulz’s does (and intentionally dismantles chronologies to accentuate that divergence), filling in hermeneutic gaps with narratives that presuppose ‘fact’ dilutes the universalism constitutive to their design. In an essay for the journal Czas Kultury entitled ‘The Afterlife of Schulz, or Schulzology: What is it Good For,’ critic Arkadiusz Kalin echoes similar protests made by Michał Paveł Markowski: that studies of Schulz have suffered from the ‘celebrification’ of the author accompanied by an ‘obsession with marginalia.’[8] Presciently, Kalin warns the reader that ‘Schulzomania may contribute to the banalization and oversimplification of… the Drohobych master’s work…. One should be wary of their mythologizing potential.’[9]
Ironically it is this very discomfort with complexity and that makes biography attractive in criticism. Because ‘footnotes and marginalia’ posture as empiricism, they offer a tangible hold in the groping darkness of analysis. And because the art and artist are of the same mind, critics might convince themselves, it seems correct to adapt the artist’s ‘truths’ to certify the merits of their art. But in doing so they attempt to unite two incompatible worlds—those of fact and fiction. This is another example of the perilous excesses of literary historicism: that it attempts to swallow disparate, imaginary worlds and vernaculars into a comfortable singularity—to elide the ‘isn’t’ into the ‘is.’ Though a text is shaped by the worldly experiences of its author, it is not reducible to them. Stories are not their writers; rather, stories create and endure their own interpretive physics.
Why then, does every essay on Bruno Schulz seem to hinge on the story of his death—a tale of gruesome, outrageous cruelty set in the Drohobych ghetto? Not for what it means to his work—as it reveals very little other Schulz’s ethno-historical moment—but for what it means to the reader who sees in its senseless cruelty an oracular, even literary quality, and who are then tempted into their own messianic fantasies. It is a great irony that Schulz’s work is lauded for its piercing presentations of life, while the artist himself is treated as if he existed outside of space and time. Despite our best intentions, such retrograde fatalism only serves to rationalize the brutality and immediacy of Schulz’s death, and likewise to diminish Schulz’s legacy to something not quite real, like a character in a story of dubious authorship.
Do I know Schulz because I have spent countless days and nights immersed in his prose? Because I have read his biographies? Or because my own family lived and died in the same Galician towns and shtetls? No. I simply know his work and may sometimes recognise the shadow that moves behind it. I cannot decide what life was for Schulz the man. His stories may be mine, temporarily—as they belong to everyone who loves them—but he does not.
Footnotes
[1] Gordon, Jaimy. “The Strange afterlife of Bruno Schulz.” Michigan Quarterly Review; 5 July, 2016.
[2] Grossman, David. “The Age of Genius.” The New Yorker; 1 June, 2009.
[3] Fletcher, Joe. “The Nightmarish Dream Logic of Bruno Schulz.” Literary Hub; 1 June, 2018.
[4] Disclosed in Grossman’s article, “the Age of Genius: The Legend of Bruno Schulz”
[5] Rothfeld, Becca. “Territory of Dreams: The World of Bruno Schulz.” The Nation; 29 July, 2019.
[6] Paloff, Benjamin. “Who Owns Bruno Schulz.” The Boston Review. 1 December, 2004.
[7] From, The New York Times: “Roth and Singer on Bruno Schulz”, by P.M. Roth and I.B. Singer; 1977. And, “A Polish Franz Kafka,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer; 1978.
[8] Kalin, Arkadiusz. “The Afterlife of Schulzology: What is it Good For?” Czas Kultury; January, 2014. PDF.
[9] Markowski, Michał Paveł “Universal Dissolution: Schulz, Existence, Literature.” Article. Jagiellonian University- Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. 2012.
Callum Goetz is an educator based in Oakland, California. In addition to fiction, he studies birds, forests, and fungi.