Maturing into Childhood: An Interpretive Framework of a Modern Cosmogony and Poetics
2007; Issue: 27 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1110-8673
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoBut how can I form conception of sizelessness of Matter? --Plotinus My ideal goal is to mature into childhood. That would be genuine maturity. --Bruno This article proposes a strategy for reading Bruno Schulz's prose as a peculiar modernist version of cosmogony, establishing an analytical connection between dualistic images of Neoplatonic matter dominating Schulz's prose and a perspective of child used by narrator in his project. It demonstrates how maturing into childhood allows narrator to defamiliarize world of his hometown, and recreate entire cosmos, a repetition of originary creative act. This cosmogonic project echoes process of Coleridgean Primary Imagination, thereby identifying one more item in Bruno Schulz's actual and imaginary library constructed by his readers and commentators. ********** Bruno Schulz: Nihilistic Fulfiller In 1961, a few months after French translation of Bruno Schulz's selected stories was published by Julliard, Witold Gombrowicz asked in his diary: will happen now? Will it be a 'dud' or a universal success? And then continued: Its ties to Kafka may smooth way or, just as easily, obstruct it. If they say, here is one more relation, he is lost. If on other hand, they spot his particular luminosity, light pulsating from him like from a phosphorizing insect, then he will glide into imagination cultivated by Kafka and his kin.... But right now in July it is impossible to say, and certainly not easy to predict fate of his uncommon work in Paris. (1) What has really happened to Schulz's art in sixty-five years since he was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942? His only two completed works, collections of short stories, Sklepy cynamonowe [Cinnamon Shops] (2) (1934) and Sanatorium pod klepsydra [Sanatorium under Sign of Hour Glass] (1937), have been translated into major languages, and his drawings are shown at exhibitions all over world. UNESCO generously named 1992 the Year of Bruno Schulz to commemorate centennial anniversary of his birthday. His murals depicting scenes from German fairytales, ordered in 1942 by Felix Landau, a member of an Einsatzkommando, for his son's bedroom, were secretly removed in 2001 by Yad Vashem representatives from former Landau residence in Schulz's hometown, Drohobycz (in today's Ukraine), and transported to Israel, opening an international debate: Whom does belong to? To Poles? To Jews from Israel? Or maybe to Ukrainians? Perhaps best answer to this question would be that of Gombrowicz: belongs, first of all, to literature, to literature of European modernism. And, for those not familiar with his prose, I would suggest placing him initially in constellation of Central European writers, like Franz Kafka (whom he translated into Polish), Reiner Maria Rilke (his beloved poet), and Thomas Mann (especially in his Joseph und seine Bruder). Instead of writing another paragraph introducing and his work before moving to main argument of current text, let us read, quoted here in extenso, literary portrait of Bruno Schulz, sketched by Witold Gombrowicz, writer who emerged almost at same time as Schulz, and who, though radically different, was closer to him than any other artist. The point of departure of this--perhaps most insightful and analytically unsurpassed--portrait of is difference between two Gnostics meeting each other in space between two concepts of matter where they place their entire metaphysical and poetical programs: Bruno was a man who was denying himself. I was a man seeking himself. He wanted annihilation. I wanted realization. He was born to be a slave. I was born to be a master. He wanted denigration. I wanted to be above and superior to. …
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