History carries with it the dead weight of the unrealised. The present – the existence of the present – is simultaneously the suppression of untold possibilities, possibilities which somehow still exist, grown sick or bodiless, and which crowd in on us in unguarded moments or wait patiently in the recesses of dreams.
Bruno Schulz: few writers have felt so acutely the quiet force of the Possible - except here the Possible is not only quiet but muted, timid, a tad disappointed; few writers sense more keenly the pressure on the present of the unfulfilled, no writer better seems to bear out Kafka’s aphorism 'there is an infinity of hope, but not for us’.
There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realisation.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Galicia. For most of his adult life he taught drawing and handicrafts in a local school. In November 1942 he was shot dead by a Gestapo officer as he returned home with a loaf of bread.
It is perhaps a cliché, but it is the mark of a great writer that he succeeds in creating a recognisable world, a micro universe which carves out its own space and insists upon its siren like singularity.. I would like to try and give you a sense of the world of Bruno Schultz.
It is a world which the fragments of a lost Meaning lie everywhere. The world as a ripped up book, an amalgamation of broken signs, awaiting completion and restoration though the Adamic hands of the writer.
An atomised world: chance gestures, stray unconnected glances, and supernumerary acts which know no completeness, which have been snapped away from a lost wholeness - or at least give that appearance.
The crucial passage here is the father’s monologue near the beginning of the book on the subject of the Demiurge.
We are not concerned with long-winded creations, with long term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. [..] Our creations will be temporary to serve for a single occasion. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pedantic to bother with the other unnecessary leg. Their backs can be made of canvas or simply whitewashed. [..]
Demiurge, the great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the other hand, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see beneath each gesture, behind each move, its inertia.
The father is a Gnostic madman, a collector and domestic demi-god, confecting a private universe incommunicable to all but himself (like so many fathers!). In this monologue he speaks of creating a universe where beings would exist, would be conjured into life, only for the sake of a single gesture, act or pronouncement. What was superfluous would remain in the lumber-room of Non-being. And perhaps Schulz here places in the mouth of this mad aphasiac father his own aesthetic manifesto: the creation of uncanny puppets, monsters, dwarfs and cripples – one legged, bodiless, coming towards us out of the fog of Perhaps before recoiling into silence.
The father’s aesthetic manifesto is a modernist one, where modernism forever lays bare the device, enjoys exposing the creaking mechanisms of communication. And so Schulz’s works are full of whirring machinery and exposed pipes. But there is another – but related - side to Schulz’s take on creation, and it concerns and extraordinary sense of Nature, not as a realm of pleasing appearances but as a dark and inscrutable matrix.
In Nature, language has its dark roots. The world of the book is the percolation into articulate consciousness, into graphemes and syntax, of the manifold silences, the teeming capillary life of nature. Nature is that which delimits us, the non-human horizon of our Being, without which we lose our definition and collapse into the boundless universe, without which our language, predicated on finite notions of time and space would turn to rubble. Imagine: sounds snapped away from their anchoring sense, aborted stammers flying off into the night, unable to hold in grammatical or semantic check the newly expanded world.
Of course, spring has its vernal breezes, thriving greenness, seasonal promises and so on. But out of what do these arise? A pregnant dark, a vast unseen region; and the dream of spring is born in the icy sleep of winter. The floral prettiness is merely spring’s cosmetic face. Underneath, the black underworld, a remote blind world of pods and seeds unfolding in inhuman time, refusing the measure of language, deaf to the trill of birdsong, and for which the sun is only a strange prickling warmth, an unfamiliar uprush in their vegetable souls.
This sense of nature as the inhuman, with its own non-human time, is part of a Schulzian recognition of what lies outside or in-between our ways of measuring and recording the real. It’s here we come back to Time.
Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd together and press hard one upon the other without any pause.
[…] Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too early or too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant?
What is so surprising is to find here, in the words of a provincial schoolteacher, an exact mirror of that other Saturnine Jewish writer Walter Benjamin's meditations; stripped of politics, yes, but insisting like Benjamin, on the discarded, the unfulfilled, the aborted and neglected - that which can find no place in official narratives, histories, canons, which has suffered the neglect or condescension of posterity, that which is, as it were incomplete, patiently awaiting the intervention of the Not-yet, the onset of some unimaginable zero summer.
And this little gem, which might serve as bit of messianic graffiti:
Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps.
(The Fictions of Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska, Picador, 1988) . A limited gallery of Schulz's drawings can be found here.
More recent and apparently more reliable translations of Schulz are now available here, part of an ambitious online project.
No comments:
Post a Comment