Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

Even on his chosen ground there is much for which Benjamin can be faulted. For someone who, if not exactly an economic historian, spent years of his life reading economic history, he was remarkably ignorant about those parts of the world where nineteenth-century capitalism most flourished, namely Britain and the United States. In his treatment of the department store he misses a crucial difference between the grands magasins of Paris and the department stores of New York and Chicago: whereas the former erected barriers to a mass clientèle, the latter saw it as their role to educate working-class shoppers into middle-class habits of consumption. He also makes nothing of the fact that arcades and department stores catered to the desires of women above all, while doing their best to form those desires and even create new ones.

  The range of interests represented in the first two volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings is broad. Besides the pieces focused on in this essay, there are a selection of his early, rather earnestly idealistic writings on education; numerous literary-critical essays, including two long pieces on Goethe, one of them an interpretation of Elective Affinities, the other a masterly overview of Goethe’s career; excurses on various topics in philosophy (logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of history); essays on pedagogy, on children’s books, on toys; an engagingly personal piece on book collecting; and a variety of travel pieces and forays into fiction. The essay on Elective Affinities stands out as a particularly strange performance: an extended aria, in supersubtle, mandarin prose, on love and beauty, myth and fate, brought to a high pitch of intensity by the secret resemblances Benjamin saw between the plot of the novel and a tragicomic erotic foursome he and his wife were involved in.

  The third and fourth volumes of the Selected Writings include the 1935, 1938, and 1939 resumés of the Arcades Project; ‘The Work of Art’ in two versions; ‘The Storyteller’; ‘A Berlin Childhood’; the ‘Theses on the Concept of History’; and a number of key letters to and from Adorno and Scholem, including the important 1938 letter on Kafka.

  The translations, by various hands, are excellent throughout. If any one of the translators deserves to be singled out, it is Rodney Livingstone for his discreet efficiency in coping with the shifts of style and tone that mark Benjamin’s development as a writer. The explanatory notes are of nearly the same high standard, but not quite. Information on figures referred to by Benjamin is sometimes out of date (Robert Walser) or incorrect: the dates for Karl Korsch, on whom Benjamin relied heavily for his interpretation of Marx (Korsch was expelled from the German Communist Party for his maverick opinions), are given as 1892–1939 when they were in fact 1886–1961. (V2, p. 790 n5) There are errors in the Greek and Latin, and French sometimes fares badly: to call a gaggle of priests in their soutanes ‘civilised crows’ misses the point – better would be ‘domesticated crows’. (V2, p. 354 note 35) Cryptic remarks – for instance, on ‘the ominous spread of the cult of rambling’ in Germany of the 1920s – are left unexplained. (V1, p. 454)

  Some general practices of the editors and translators are also questionable. Benjamin had a habit of writing paragraphs pages long: surely the translator should feel free to break these up. Sometimes two drafts of the same piece are included, for reasons that are not made clear. Existing translations of German texts quoted by Benjamin are used when these translations are clearly not up to standard.17

  What was Walter Benjamin: a philosopher? A critic? A historian? A mere ‘writer’? The best answer is perhaps Hannah Arendt’s: he was ‘one of the unclassifiable ones . . . whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre’.18

  His trademark approach – coming at a subject not straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise from one perfectly formulated summation to the next – is as instantly recognisable as it is inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn, and a prose style which, once he had given up thinking of himself as Professor Doctor Benjamin, became a marvel of accuracy and concision. Underlying his project of getting at the truth of our times is Goethe’s ideal of setting out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their own theory. The Arcades book, whatever our verdict on it – ruin, failure, impossible project – suggests a new way of writing about a civilisation, using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than from above. And his call (in the ‘Theses’) for a history centred on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history-writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime.

  (2001)

  5 Bruno Schulz

  IN ONE OF his earliest childhood recollections, young Bruno Schulz sits on the floor ringed by admiring family members while he scrawls one ‘drawing’ after another over the pages of old newspapers. In his creative rapture, the child still inhabits an ‘age of genius’, still has unselfconscious access to the realm of myth. Or so it seemed to the man whom the child became; all of his mature strivings would be to regain touch with his early powers, to ‘mature into childhood’.1

  These strivings would issue in two bodies of work: etchings and drawings that would probably be of no great interest today had their deviser not become famous by other means; and two short books, collections of stories and sketches about the inner life of a boy in provincial Galicia, which propelled him to the forefront of Polish letters of the interwar years. Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic, Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937) were unique and startling productions that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Bruno Schulz was born in 1892, the third child of Jewish parents from the merchant class, and named for the Christian saint on whose name-day his birthday fell. His home town, Drohobycz, was a minor industrial centre in a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that after World War I returned to being part of Poland.

  Though there was a Jewish school in Drohobycz, Schulz was sent to the Polish Gymnasium. (Joseph Roth, in nearby Brody, had gone to a German Gymnasium.) His languages were Polish and German; he did not speak the Yiddish of the streets. At school he excelled at art, but was dissuaded by his family from following art as a profession. He registered to study architecture at the polytechnic in Lwow, but in 1914, when war was declared, had to break off his studies. Because of a heart defect he was not called up into the army. Returning to Drohobycz, he set about a programme of intensive self-education, reading and perfecting his draughtsmanship. He put together a portfolio of graphics on erotic themes entitled The Book of Idolatry and tried to sell copies, with some diffidence and not much success.

  Unable to make a living as an artist, saddled, after his father’s death, with a houseful of ailing relatives to support, he took a job as an art teacher at a local school, a position he held until 1941. Though respected by his students, he found school life stultifying and wrote letter after letter imploring the authorities for time off to pursue his creative work, pleas to which, to their credit, they did not always turn a deaf ear.

  Despite his isolation in the provinces, Schulz was able to exhibit his artworks in urban centres and to enter into correspondence with kindred spirits. Into his thousands of letters, some 156 of which have survived, he poured much of his creative energy. Jerzy Ficowski, Schulz’s biographer, calls him the last outstanding exponent of epistolary art in Poland.2 All evidence indicates that the pieces that make up Cinnamon Shops began their life in letters to the poet Debora Vogel.

  Cinnamon Shops was received with enthusiasm by the Polish intelligentsia. On visits to Warsaw Schulz was welcomed into artistic salons and invited to write for literary reviews; at his school he was awarded the title ‘Professor’. He became engaged to Józefina Szelinska, ´ a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and, while not himself converting, withdrew formally from the Jewish religious community of Drohobycz. Of his fiancée he wrote: ‘[She] constitutes my participation in life. Through h
er I am a person, and not just a lemur and kobold . . . She is the closest person to me on earth.’ (Ficowski, p. 112) Nevertheless, after two years the engagement fell through.

  The first translation into Polish of Franz Kafka’s The Trial appeared in 1936 under Schulz’s name, but the actual work of translation had been done by Szeli´ nska.

  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Schulz’s second book, was for the most part cobbled together from early pieces, some of them still tentative and amateurish. Schulz tended to deprecate the book, though in fact a number of the stories are quite up to the standard of Cinnamon Shops.

  Burdened with teaching and with familial responsibilities, anxious about political developments in Europe, Schulz was by the late 1930s descending into a state of depression in which he found it hard to write. Receipt of the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature did not raise his spirits. Nor did a three-week visit to Paris, his only substantial venture outside his native land. He set off for what he would in retrospect call ‘the most exclusive, self-sufficient, standoffish city in the world’ in the dubious hope of arranging an exhibition of his artworks, but made few contacts and came away emptyhanded.3

  In 1939, in terms of the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, Drohobycz was absorbed into Soviet Ukraine. Under the Soviets there were no opportunities for Schulz as a writer (‘We don’t need Prousts,’ he was bluntly told). He was, however, commissioned to produce propaganda paintings. He continued to teach until, in the summer of 1941, the Ukraine was invaded by the Germans and all schools were closed. Executions of Jews began at once, and in 1942 mass deportations.

  For a while Schulz managed to escape the worst. He had the luck to be adopted by a Gestapo officer with pretensions to art, thereby acquiring the status of ‘necessary Jew’ and the precious armband that protected him during roundups. For decorating the walls of his patron’s residence and the officers’ casino he was paid in food rations. Meanwhile he bundled his artworks and manuscripts in packages and deposited them among non-Jewish friends. Well-wishers in Warsaw smuggled money and false papers to him, but before he could summon up the resolve to flee Drohobycz he was dead, singled out and shot in the street during a day of anarchy launched by the Gestapo.

  By 1943 there were no Jews left in Drohobycz.

  In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, news reached the Polish scholar Jerzy Ficowski that an unnamed person with access to the KGB archives had come into the possession of one of Schulz’s packages, and was prepared to dispose of it for a price. Though the lead ran dry, it provided the basis for Ficowski’s stubborn hope that lost writings of Schulz’s might yet be recovered. Among the lost writings are an unfinished novel, Messiah, of which we know because Schulz had read extracts to friends, and notes that Schulz was taking up to the time of his death, memoranda of conversations with Jews who had seen at first hand the working of the execution squads and transports, intended to form the basis of a book about the persecutions. (A book of the very kind that Schulz was planning was published in 1997 by Henryk Grynberg.4 Schulz himself figures as a minor character in the first of Grynberg’s stories.)

  In Poland Jerzy Ficowski (deceased 2006) was known as a poet and scholar of Gypsy life. His main reputation rests, however, on his work on Bruno Schulz. From the 1940s Ficowski indefatigably, against all obstacles, bureaucratic and material, scoured Poland, the Ukraine, and the wider world for what was left of Schulz. His translator, Theodosia Robertson, calls him an archaeologist, the leading archaeologist of Schulz’s artistic remains. (Ficowski, p. 12) Regions of the Great Heresy is Robertson’s translation of the third, revised edition (1992) of Ficowski’s biography, to which he added two chapters – one on the lost novel Messiah, one on the fate of the murals that Schulz painted in Drohobycz in his last year – as well as a detailed chronology and a selection from Schulz’s surviving letters.

  Within her translation of Regions of the Great Heresy, Robertson has elected to retranslate all passages quoted from Schulz. She does so because, in the company of other US-based scholars of Polish literature, she has reservations about the existing English translations. These appeared from the hand of Celina Wieniewska in 1963: it is through them, under the collective title The Street of Crocodiles, that Schulz has hitherto been known in the English-speaking world.5 Wieniewska’s translations are open to criticism on a number of grounds. First, they are based on faulty texts: a dependable, scholarly edition of Schulz’s writings appeared only in 1989. Second, there are occasions when Wieniewska silently emends Schulz. In the sketch ‘A Second Autumn’, for example, Schulz fancifully names Bolechow as the home of Robinson Crusoe. Bolechow is a town near Drohobycz; whatever Schulz’s reasons for not pointing to his own town, it behoves his translator to respect them. Wieniewska changes ‘Bolechow’ to ‘Drohobycz’. (CW, p. 190) Third and most seriously, there are numerous instances where Wieniewska cuts Schulz’s prose to make it less florid, or universalises specifically Jewish allusions.

  In Wieniewska’s favour it must be said that her translations read very well. Her prose has a rare richness, grace, and unity of style. Whoever takes on the task of retranslating Schulz will find it hard to escape her shadow.

  As a guide to Cinnamon Shops, we can do no better than go to the synopsis that Schulz himself wrote when he was trying to interest an Italian publisher in the book. (His plans came to nothing, as did plans for French and German translations.)

  Cinnamon Shops, he says, is the story of a family told in the mode not of biography or psychology but of myth. The book can thus be called pagan in conception: as with the ancients, the historical time of the clan merges back into the mythological time of the forebears. But in his book the myths are not communal in nature. They emerge from the mists of early childhood, from the hopes and fears, fantasies and forebodings – what he elsewhere calls ‘mutterings of mythological delirium’ – that form the seedbed of mythic thinking. (CW, p. 370)

  At the centre of the family in question is Jacob, by trade a merchant, but preoccupied with the redemption of the world, a mission he pursues through the means of experiments in mesmerism, galvanism, psychoanalysis, and other more occult arts belonging to what he calls the Regions of the Great Heresy. Jacob is surrounded by lumpish folk who have no grasp of his metaphysical strivings, led by his arch-enemy, the housemaid Adela.

  In his attic Jacob rears, from eggs that he imports from all quarters of the world, squadrons of messenger birds – condors, eagles, peacocks, pheasants, pelicans – whose physical being he sometimes seems on the brink of sharing. But with her broom Adela scatters his birds to the four winds. Defeated, embittered, Jacob begins to shrink and dry up, metamorphosing at last into a cockroach. Now and again he resumes his original form in order to give his son lectures on such subjects as puppets, tailors’ dummies, and the power of the heresiarch to bring trash to life.

  This summary was not the limit of Schulz’s efforts to explain what he was up to in Cinnamon Shops. For the eyes of a friend, the writer and painter Stanisl aw Witkiewicz, Schulz extended his account, producing a piece of introspective analysis of remarkable power and acuity amounting to a poetic credo.

  He begins by recalling images from his own ‘age of genius’, his mythologised childhood, ‘when everything blazed with godly colors’. (CW, p. 319) Two of these images still dominate his imagination: a horsedrawn cab with lanterns aglow emerging from a dark forest; and a father striding through the darkness, speaking soothing words to the child folded in his arms, though all the child hears is the sinister call of the night. The origin of the first image, he says, is obscure to him; the second comes from Goethe’s ballad ‘Der Erlkönig’, which shook him to the bottom of his soul when his mother read it to him at age eight.

  Images like these, he proceeds, are laid down for us at the threshold of life. They constitute ‘an iron capital of the spirit’. For the artist they mark out the boundaries of his creative powers: all of the rest of his life consists in exploring and interpretin
g and trying to master them. After childhood we discover nothing new, we only go back again and again over the same ground in a struggle without resolution. ‘The knot the soul got itself tied up in is not a false one that comes undone when you pull the ends. On the contrary, it draws tighter.’ Out of the tussle with the knot emerges art. (CW, p. 368)

  As for the deeper meaning of Cinnamon Shops, says Schulz, generally it is not good policy for a writer to subject his work to too much rational analysis. It is like demanding of actors that they drop their masks: it kills the play. ‘In a work of art the umbilical cord linking it with the totality of our concerns has not yet been severed, the blood of the mystery still circulates; the ends of the blood vessels vanish into the surrounding night and return from it full of dark fluid.’ (CW, pp. 368–9)

  Nevertheless, if driven to give an exposition, he would say that the book presents a certain primitive, vitalistic view of the world in which matter is in a constant state of fermentation and germination. There is no such thing as dead matter, nor does matter remain in fixed form. ‘Reality takes on certain shapes merely for the sake of appearance, as a joke or form of play. One person is human, another is a cockroach, but shape does not penetrate essence, is only a role adopted for the moment, an outer skin soon to be shed . . . [The] migration of forms is the essence of life.’ Hence the ‘all-pervading aura of irony’ to be found in his world: ‘the bare fact of separate individual existence holds an irony, a hoax.’

  For this vision of the world Schulz does not feel he has to give an ethical justification. Cinnamon Shops in particular operates at a ‘premoral’ depth. ‘The role of art is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus for registering processes in that deep stratum where value is formed.’ At a personal level, however, he will concede that the stories emerge from and represent ‘my way of living, my personal fate’, a fate marked by ‘profound loneliness, isolation from the stuff of daily life’. (CW, pp. 369, 370)