It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. [..] Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic.”
If Adorno, after Benajmin, set himself up as the philosopher of the eccentric and derisory, then Bruno Schulz gave to those things a fictional habitation and name.
‘Overlooked by the light of the day, weeds and wild flowers of all kinds luxuriated quietly, glad of the interval of dreams beyond the margin of time in the borders of an endless day.’
The world of Schulz exists in such a margin. No doubt part of the pathos of his prose derives from knowing that it records a world now dead, brutally eliminated. But this very knowledge seems itself obscurely present in the work. The shut doors of houses, the ancient tree in the town square, emit the weak half-life of the past. Schulz pores over these details like hieroglyphs, as if knowing that the time in which these remains might be redeemed is running away.
Arguably, the diffuse presentiment of catastrophe accounts for certain characteristics of his stories. Ordinarily, events in a narrative crave a conclusion outside them. When the conclusion is reached, the narrative ladder can be kicked away. The events are defined, satisfied, and explained: they disappear into that which, all along, was secretly calling them forth.
Perhaps Schulz senses that what is ‘calling forth’ is a catastrophe. And so, he is concerned with events that are in some way singular, isolated, that do not ‘feed’ a narrative, that are not necessarily explicable in terms of what comes immediately before and after them, that do not unfurl themselves, that do not simply dissolve into their consequences. The stories break off, fail to conclude.. .
Sometimes, Schulz’s own work can seem like the sketch or blueprint of some other work we can only faintly imagine.
The historical world that Schulz inhabited is perhaps encapsulated in what to my mind is one of his most arresting, beautiful and dark images:
‘The six days of creation were divine and bright. But on the seventh day God broke down. On the seventh day he felt an unfamiliar texture under his fingers, and frightened, he withdrew his hands from the world.’