Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

by Rod Mengham

  It is a modest-sized house, one storey high and no more than 30ft by 12ft in area. During his adult years, Schulz was living in this space with four dependants. The style of the facade is neoclassical, with a certain amount of restrained plaster ornamentation and a disciplined repetition of elements. The arrangement of the five windows, however, with three on one side of the door and two on the other, introduces a curious asymmetry, which must have appealed to a writer whose imagination was quickened by opportunities to discompose the orderly and introduce subtle mutations into conventional appearances. It is impossible to see inside this dwelling for the simple reason that it remains, as it always was, a private residence, but there is something fitting, and even obscurely satisfying, in this gate-keeping, in this show of indifference to the literary pilgrim. Mere observation never reveals anything in Schulz’s stories, where the substance of reality eludes every attempt to imprison it in the dead forms of everyday appearance. Schulz’s entire universe is premised on the vitality of hidden life and encrypted purpose:

  Everything diffuses beyond its borders, remains in a given shape only momentarily, leaving this shape behind at the first opportunity. A principle of sorts appears in the habits, the modes of existence of this reality: universal masquerade.25

  The evidence of this organising principle is provoked by attempts to control the space, or spaces, within which it operates. The focal point for the reader’s imagination as it is guided through Schulz’s prose is movement through space; and this space is contested, drawn backwards and forwards imaginatively into different zones of power, different spheres of influence. Movement through space is subject to the influence of certain agencies, figures of authority whose status is according to profession, or seniority, or rank. The traction they exert on free movement triggers a process of masquerade, which often turns inside out the conventional distribution of power and powerlessness.

  In the stories of Bruno Schulz, this principle of inversion is readily apparent in the relations between masters and servants. The servant class does not underpin the order presided over by its employers, but usurps the leading role. The most powerful figure in Cinnamon Shops is the servant girl, Adela. Similarly, the most childish of all the characters is the head of the household, Jacob. Schulz’s world is one of systematic reversals, in which those in positions of social superiority experience the greatest degree of debasement, and vice versa. The dominant principle of duality in his books is established by metamorphosis, as evidenced in the following passage from the story, ‘Cockroaches’:

  In that rarely visited, festive room exemplary order had reigned since father’s death, maintained by Adela with the help of wax and polish. The chairs all had antimacassars; all the objects had submitted to the iron discipline which Adela exercised over them. Only a sheaf of peacock’s feathers standing in a vase on a chest of drawers did not submit to regimentation. These feathers were a dangerous, frivolous element, hiding rebelliousness, like a class of naughty schoolgirls who are quiet and composed in appearance but full of mischief when no longer watched. The eyes of these feathers never stopped staring; they made holes in the walls, winking, fluttering their eyelashes, smiling to one another, giggling and full of mirth. They filled the room with whispers and chatter; they scattered like butterflies around the many-armed lamps; like a motley crowd they pushed against the matted, elderly mirrors, unused to such bustle and gaiety; they peeped through the key-holes.26

  The order so comprehensively disturbed here is associated with a military style of control – with an ‘iron discipline’. It is undermined playfully at first by feathers compared to schoolgirls, but the relentless process of transformation that generates all of Schulz’s prose soon intensifies this mischievousness into something more insistent and invasive, a more serious form of rebelliousness. The motif of the peacock’s feather epitomises the Ovidian precedents for metamorphosis: the eyes on the tail were originally the eyes of Argos panoptes, the guardian – ‘all eyes’ – supposed to protect Io from rape by Zeus, a figure whose failed panopticism is reflected in the merely decorative eyes of the peacock’s plumage. Schulz soon transmogrifies this inert association into a series of predicates of ‘staring’, ‘winking’, ‘peeping’. The surveillance we might associate with military authority is gradually displaced and repudiated by the inquisitiveness of the unruly crowd in the street, and this systematic introduction of the carnivalesque is absolutely typical of Schulz, keeping in tension the opposing principles already included in the second clause of this passage, with a nearly oxymoronic invocation of the ‘festive’ room in which ‘exemplary order’ ‘reigns’ for the time being only.

  Schulz’s writing takes place more often than not in a series of unpredictable rooms, unpredictable especially when the rooms in question are usually avoided, ignored, even sealed off. It is precisely the most abandoned chambers that ferment hidden and uncontrollable forms of life. Niches, cubby-holes, attics, basements, cupboards, mouseholes, forgotten rooms, are breeding grounds for the creatures of imagination that have been denied an existence in the rationalised space of everyday life. This supplementary form of life takes shape as an alternative, parallel universe whose interconnections with the familiar world become increasingly frequent and progressively overwhelming. Whole species of make-believe creatures begin to crowd into the already overpopulated suite of rooms where the narrator’s family conducts its affairs. Both space and time are required to flex and bend in order to accommodate this prodigious multiplication of objects and characters. The fabric of the house is being constantly reorganised while the hours of the day and night become stretched and attenuated in the effort to engross the inordinate expansion of newly discovered contingencies.

  Schulz’s narrator recognises the need for desire to find new and additional sequences of time to do justice to its sheer plenitude. The story ‘The Night of the Great Season’ begins in precisely this vein:

  Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a freak month…

  There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colours and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters.27

  For Schulz, it is not only the excessiveness of individual desires that produces such a brilliant competition of realities, it is matter itself that is constantly reforming under the pressure of desire. Schulz’s work is predicated on a fundamental lawlessness that is constantly threatening to disrupt the illusion of reality that the text is forever gravitating towards only to veer away from it at the last second. And yet the pretext for this illusion, or series of illusions, is evoked with an astonishing vividness. The environment of Schulz’s fantastic characters and attendant beings is unignorably detailed, tangible, powerfully vital. Drohobycz and its surroundings are indelibly marked in the language that works so hectically to supplant them with day-dreams. Every inch of the town appears to teem with alternative story lines, while for Schulz it is also the materiality of language, in its capacity to generate new perceptions, new beings and entire spheres of existence that the text abandons itself to with such gusto and such energy.

  In the street-scenes that are frequent in the illustrations to Schulz’s stories, the buildings are commonly presented as a jumble of simple, box-like structures, whose modest scale in relation to the human figures makes them seem as impermanent and manipulable as an arrangement of toys.28 They echo and enhance the protean imagination at the centre of the writing, with its proneness to reconfigure the architectural settings, both extending and abolishing space at will. Interior scenes, marked with an assortment of furnishi
ngs and impedimenta, are often presented as if taking place in an open area, such as a piazza or market place, with no walls between the background frieze of town houses and the foreground assemblage of figures, even when these are naked or déshabillé.29 The figures tower over these spaces surrounded by pocket-sized houses, as if stranded in the centre of an architectural model, and yet the relations between background and foreground, between architecture and humanity, are further unsettled by giving dwarfish proportions to all the male characters. Joseph, the focal character in ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass’, is equipped with a tall funnel of a hat and a capacious overcoat that reaches almost to the ground. Its conspicuously large buttons help to give Joseph the appearance of a child dressing up in adult clothes, and whenever his figure is surrounded by those of other male characters, they are commonly bunched together in a way that recalls children ganging together in the open.30 The townscape of the stories is seen with a kind of double vision that overlays the observations of a grown-up point of view with the memories of a child. But while the physical situation of the child is reflected in the frequency with which the objects of attention are seen from below, it is never the male adult characters that are elevated into positions of physical dominance, only women; women who are conspicuously inaccessible, statuesque, and contemptuous of the men around them. Female figures are always taller or, when reclining, longer than their male satellites in Schulz’s illustrations. One particularly disturbing conflation of the child’s point of view with that of the adult male submissive is the mural for a child’s nursery commissioned by a Nazi officer who admired Schulz’s work; in an adaptation of a Snow White scenario, this tableau depicts red-hatted-dwarves in the company of a tall, dark-haired female wearing a dress whose skirt reaches only to mid-thigh. The point of view is low enough for a child, but also low enough to reflect a desire to look under the skirt.

  The gaze is baffled of course, since the desire is chiefly a desire to be rejected and degraded by the kind of tyrannical female found in a majority of Schulz’s artworks. One of the most cherished images in Schulz’s visual repertoire is that of Bianca, the aloof heroine of ‘Spring’. Schulz never tired of producing variants on the scene in which Bianca is seen being driven in a carriage, her long legs extended and folded provocatively in a way that obscures the view of her father, seated passively beside her.31 Her languorous, outstretched form contrasts with the hunched, precarious figure of the coachman in front of her, and his docility is magnified by the spectacle of tamed brute strength embodied in the powerful horses yoked to the carriage. In one striking version, the heads of both horses are twisted round as if in homage to the imperious girl, and this conscription of domestic fauna in the general worship of dominant females is linked directly to male abjection.32 Several of Schulz’s drawings feature dogs cringing at the feet of one or more female figures, and in one variant illustration for ‘Sanatorium’, an elegantly dressed woman is seen walking between a representation of Schulz himself in subservient mode and a small dog.33 This obvious counterpointing of inferior conditions is implied in all those drawings that include either men or animals overmastered by women.

  There is an exhaustiveness in Schulz’s pursuit of minute variations on the same theme that makes his visual work feel as if it is spiralling in on itself in an ever tightening knot of obsessions; by contrast, Schulz’s writing is a process of uncoiling that retains the link to its axis, the hub of desire around which it turns, while it spools outwards, encircling new territories, inscribing new structures. Schulz himself recognised the difference in scope encompassed by his work in different media notwithstanding their common themes:

  If I am asked whether the same thread recurs in my drawings as in my prose, I would answer in the affirmative. The reality is the same; only the frames are different. Here material and technique operate as the criterion of selection. A drawing sets narrower limits by its material than prose does. That is why I feel I have expressed myself more fully in my writing.34

  Despite the frequency of subjugation in the subject matter of Schulz’s drawings and paintings, its constant reformulation does not share the paralyzing effect of commercial pornography, mainly because its various treatments do not simplify but complicate an underlying sexual compulsion by evoking other, historically specific, forms of social and cultural inequality. Perhaps the most troubling image of all is that of a stooping orthodox Jew who passes two women in evening wear; he is walking towards the viewer on an uneven path while they are ascending a short flight of steps in the opposite direction.35 The Jew wears a broad-brimmed hat that casts a shadow over his face, accentuating his servile gaze towards the nearer of the two women who looks back and down with evident consciousness of her physical and social elevation, the whiteness of her skin and dress contrasting with the darkness of his face and clothes. Disdain for the Jew is commonly assumed to have an ethnic motivation, and there is little doubt that Schulz’s perception of Polish habits of disparagement is tinged with an awareness of growing racial tensions during the Second Republic, but it has also absorbed the complexity of the Polish demographic in the early twentieth century. According to Norman Davies, Polish Jews belonged for the most part either to a ‘small and wealthy bourgeoisie’ or to a ‘mass of urban artisans living by trades and crafts’.36 Schulz, as a Jewish teacher of arts and crafts, occupied a sensitive position as a modestly paid professional whose discipline was closely related to the means of subsistence of many working class Jews. The stratification that characterised the relationship between class and ethnicity in a town like Drohobycz was one that Schulz performed in his everyday working practices.

  Masochism originated in the geographical vicinity of Drohobycz. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lwow, in a building now occupied by the Hotel George. His father was the local Chief of Police, and the youthful Leopold was acutely aware of social, political, national and ethnic tensions in the area. His most famous narrative, Venus in Furs (1870), is set partly in Galicia, and includes several references to Lwów. One of the key phases in the degradation of its protagonist emphasises the importance of architectural as well as topographical contexts for its focus on the graduation of rank and on the ratio between physical restraint and imaginative freedom. The protagonist, Severin, is imprisoned in a cellar by his mistress Wanda, for an indefinite period of time that he himself is unable to measure. His release from this condition inaugurates a period of more intensive enslavement to Wanda – confinement underground serving as the prelude to sexual and social humiliation. The use of a cellar or basement as a corollary for psychological debasement recalls the specific pressure of desire on Schulz’s fascination with hidden spaces, secret hiding places, unsuspected dimensions within domestic settings. Except that in Schulz’s case, the order of priorities is almost reversed, with the psychology of debasement serving as a pretext or starting point for the exercise of the architectural imagination, for the multiplication and hierarchisation of imaginary spaces derived from a realistic original. The uncollected prose fiction ‘The Republic of Dreams’ consists of a series of variations on the theme of spatial ramification, worked out as a series of extrapolations on the townscape of Drohobycz:

  The garden plots at the outskirts of town are planted as if at the world’s edge and look across their fences into the infinity of the anonymous plain. Just beyond the tollgates the map of the region turns nameless and cosmic like Canaan. Above that thin forlorn snippet of land a sky deeper and broader than anywhere else, a sky like a vast gaping dome many stories high, full of unfinished frescoes and improvisations, swirling draperies and violent ascensions, opens up once again.37

  It is as if the town encompasses the entire universe, its buildings reaching up into the sky to enclose infinity, while also establishing a system of gradations ‘many stories high’ that will allow for relative degrees of superiority and inferiority. In one of his letters to the poet Stefan Szuman, Schulz employs topographical and architectural metaphors to articulate the scope
and limitations of the creative imagination:

  Those poems were a full and joyous experience for me; they were like an expansion of my own world into a new, strange, yet somehow familiar outlying region, the discovery in my town of some long-lost street. I may be wrong, but I feel we must have been on close neighbourly terms somewhere, as if we had once knocked against the same wall from opposite sides.38

  Once again, Schulz celebrates the fertility of the imagination, its germinative power, in terms of architectural reproduction, while also tracing this process back to its origin in a single, self-enclosed space. It is a space that has overtones of confinement, and of an almost claustrophobic proximity, since it is under conditions of imprisonment that neighbours tend to communicate by knocking on walls. Schulz expresses with enthusiasm the extent to which his imaginative world is reflected in that of Szuman, while defining the exact degree of their reciprocity in terms of segregation. An almost passionate entertaining of the idea of affinity is contradicted by an architecture of aversion. There is an equivalent form of resistance in his attitude towards spending time with other people, conveyed in a letter to Tadeusz Brzeza: ‘I can’t stand people laying claim to my time. They make the scrap they touch nauseating to me. I am incapable of sharing time, of feeding on somebody’s leftovers.’39 The letter to Szuman seeks partly to flatter its recipient, while the letter to Brzeza does not broach the relationship between its writer and reader, but speaks in the abstract about fear of encroachment on the routines that structure Schulz’s world. This fear is deep-seated enough to be described in terms of a physiological reaction. Schulz’s fundamental response to the idea of sharing time and space with others on equal terms is one of allergic rejection, despite his many attempts to persuade others of his desire to make common imaginative cause with them. Earlier in the same letter to Brzeza, the relationship between architectural space and personal vulnerability is explored in a trope that makes the competition for time and space in the school where Schulz is employed a form of impingement that writes itself directly onto his body: