Dorożka w lesie – Schulz i pisanie
Journal Title: Schulz/Forum - Year 2013, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper treats Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops as a depiction of two entirely different models of writing: the first disturbingly real for Schulz, and the second more idealized, or even nostalgic. The first model presents writing as a process of constantly deferred meaning, as a wandering through a labyrinth of shifting city streets or human signs, whose “configuration,” as the story’s narrator observes, “fails to match the expected image.” The second, more idealized model was described by Schulz himself in his famous 1935 essay for Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as the proper goal or aspiration of art: “Its role is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus registering processes in the depths, where value is formed.” The paper presents the culminating scene of Cinnamon Shops as a fantasized version of this theory in praxis: the artist sinks his probe, or rides his metaphysical horse and carriage, into the nameless realm, from the labyrinth of language into a forest of meaninglessness which at the same time forms the hidden source of all meaning. The boy protagonist of the story must leave the city, surrender to unconscious will, and journey deep into a winter forest at night. There he finds not darkness, cold, and death, but sparkling lights, a secret spring and the signs of new life in the dead of winter. However, this journey – much like Schulz’s theory of art and writing more generally – remains in sharp contrast both with the defective version of reality presented in much of his other fiction and with the alternative model of writing as a hopeless search for an ultimate reality that can never be found. This paper examines the conflict between these two visions.
Authors and Affiliations
Stanley Bill
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP169780
- DOI -
- Views 44
- Downloads 0
Polska proza galicyjska przed wojną i po wojnie. Bruno Schulz w kontekście literatury katastrofy
Usually Schulz’s fiction is not interpreted with reference to the Holocaust and massive ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe during World War II. The present paper is rooted in a belief that some of his later stories...
Gra w światy
With the use of examples selected from various writings by Bruno Schulz, the article aims at tracing connections between the writer’s solitude and his imagination. The author claims that Schulz’s seclusion in Drohobych r...
Markownik Tomasza Leca
The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz. It is a cover of The Regions of Great Heresy and Environs by Jerzy Ficowski, the founding father of Schulz studies. The b...
Schulz dadaistą? Parodystyczna krytyka kultury europejskiej w opowiadaniu Brunona Schulza „Dodo”
The essay is an interpretation of a story from The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass. Its most important frame of reference is the history of European culture, since apparently Schulz parodied in his text two key...
Schulzoidzi
The term “schulzoids,” coined by Igor Klech to identify the admirers of Schulz’s fiction and graphic art, who travel to Drogobych in search of the genuine cinnamon shops, has been accepted by the Schulz scholars as refer...