Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  The essay ‘The Mythologizing of Reality’, written a year later in 1936, presents in succinct form Schulz’s thinking on the task of the poet, thinking which is itself mythic rather than systematic in its operations. The quest for knowledge, Schulz says, is at heart a quest to recover an original, unitary state of being, a state from which there had been some kind of fall into fragmentation. The way of science is to seek patiently, methodically, and inductively to put the fragments together again. Poetry seeks the same ends, but ‘intuitively, deductively, with large, daring short cuts and approximations’. The poet – himself a mythic being involved in a mythic quest – works at the most basic level, the level of the word. The inner life of the word consists in ‘tensing and stretching itself towards a thousand connections, like the cut-up snake in the legend whose pieces search for each other in the dark’. Systematic thought, by its nature, holds the parts of the snake apart to examine them; the poet, with his access to the ‘old semantics’, allows the word-parts to find their place again in the myths of which all knowledge is constituted. (CW, pp. 371–3)

  On the basis of his two works of fiction, preoccupied as they are with a child’s experience of the world, Schulz is often thought of as a naïve writer, a kind of urban folk artist. As his letters and essays demonstrate, however, he was an original thinker with remarkable powers of self-analysis, a sophisticated intellectual who, despite his provincial origins, could cross swords on terms of equality with confrères like Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz.

  In one exchange, Gombrowicz reports to Schulz a conversation with a stranger, a doctor’s wife, who tells him that in her opinion the writer Bruno Schulz is ‘either a sick pervert or a poseur, but most probably a poseur’. Gombrowicz challenges Schulz to defend himself in print, adding that he should regard the challenge as both substantive and aesthetic: for his reply he should find a tone that is neither haughty nor flippant nor laboured and solemn. (CW, p. 374)

  In his reply Schulz ignores the task Gombrowicz has set him, coming at the question instead from a slant. What is it, he asks, that causes Gombrowicz, and artists in general, to pay attention to, and even take secret delight in, the stupidest, most philistine expressions of public opinion? (Why, for example, did Gustave Flaubert spend months and years collecting bêtises, stupidities, and arranging them in his Dictionary of Received Opinions?) ‘Aren’t you astonished,’ he asks Gombrowicz, ‘at [your] involuntary sympathy and solidarity with what at bottom is alien and hostile to you?’ (CW, p. 377)

  Unacknowledged sympathy with mindless popular opinion, Schulz suggests, comes from atavistic modes of thinking embedded in all of us. When some ignorant stranger dismisses him, Schulz, as a poseur, ‘a dark, inarticulate mob rises up in you [Gombrowicz], like a bear trained to the sound of a gypsy’s flute’. And this is because of the way the psyche itself is organised: as a multitude of overlapping subsystems, some more rational, some less so. Hence ‘the confusing, multitrack nature’ of our thinking in general. (CW, pp. 377, 378)

  Schulz is also commonly thought of as a disciple, an epigone, or even an imitator of his older contemporary Franz Kafka. The similarities between his personal history and Kafka’s are certainly remarkable. Both were born under Emperor Franz Joseph I into merchant-class Jewish families; both were sickly and found sexual relations difficult; both worked conscientiously at routine jobs; both were haunted by father figures; both died before their time, bequeathing complicated and troublesome literary estates. Furthermore, Schulz is (mistakenly) believed to have translated Kafka. Finally, Kafka wrote a story in which a man turned into an insect, while Schulz wrote stories in which a man is turned not only into one insect after another but into a crab too. (The crab-avatar of Jacob the father is thrown into boiling water by a maid, but then no one can bear to eat the jellified mess he becomes.)

  Schulz’s comments on his writing should make it clear how superficial these parallels are. His own orientation is toward the recreation, or perhaps fabulation, of a childhood conciousness, full of terror, obsession, and crazy glory; his metaphysics is a metaphysics of matter. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Kafka.

  For Józefina Szeli´ nska’s translation of The Trial Schulz wrote an afterword that is notable for its perceptiveness and aphoristic power, but even more striking for its attempt to draw Kafka into the Schulzian orbit, to make of Kafka a Schulz avant la lettre.

  ‘Kafka’s procedure, the creation of a doppelgänger or substitute reality, stands virtually without precedent,’ writes Schulz. ‘Kafka sees the realistic surface of existence with unusual precision, he knows by heart, as it were, its code of gestures, all the external mechanics of events and situations, how they dovetail and interlace, but these to him are but a loose epidermis without roots, which he lifts off like a delicate membrane and fits onto his transcendental world, grafts onto his reality.’

  Though the procedure Schulz describes here does not get to the heart of Kafka, as far as it goes it is admirably put. But he continues: ‘[Kafka’s] attitude to reality is radically ironic, treacherous, profoundly ill-intentioned – the relationship of a prestidigitator to his raw material. He only simulates the attention to detail, the seriousness, and the elaborate precision of this reality in order to compromise it all the more thoroughly.’ All of a sudden Schulz has left the real Kafka behind and begun to describe another kind of artist, the artist he himself is or would like to be seen as. It is a measure of his confidence in his own powers that he could try to refashion Kafka in his own image. (CW, p. 349)

  The world that Schulz creates in his two books is remarkably unsullied by history. The Great War and the convulsions that followed upon it cast no backward shadow; there is no intimation, for example, that the sons of the barefoot peasant who, in the story ‘Dead Season’, is made fun of by the Jewish shop assistants, will decades later return to the same shop, ransack it, and beat the sons and daughters of the assistants.

  There are hints that Schulz was aware that he could not for ever live on the iron capital he had stored up in his childhood. Describing his state of mind in a 1937 letter, he says that he feels as if he is being dragged out of a deep sleep. ‘The peculiarity and unusual nature of my inner processes sealed me off hermetically, made me insensitive, unreceptive to the world’s incursions. Now I am opening myself up to the world . . . All would be well if it weren’t for [the] terror and inner shrinking, as if before a perilous venture that might lead God knows where.’ (CW, p. 408)

  The story in which he most clearly turns his face to the wider world and to historical time is ‘Spring’. The young narrator encounters his first stamp album, and in this burning book, in the parade of images from lands whose existence he had never guessed at – Hyderabad, Tasmania, Nicaragua, Abaracadabra – the fiery beauty of a world beyond Drohobycz suddenly reveals itself. Amidst the magical plenitude he comes upon the stamps of Austria, dominated by the image of Franz Joseph, emperor of prose (here the narrating voice can no longer pretend to be a child’s), a dried-up, dull man used to breathing the air of chanceries and police stations. What ignominy to come from a land with such a ruler! How much better to be a subject of the dashing Archduke Maximilian!

  ‘Spring’ is Schulz’s longest story, the one in which he makes the most concerted effort to develop a narrative line – in other words, to become a storyteller of a more conventional sort. Its basis is a quest story: the young hero undertakes to track down his beloved Bianca (Bianca of the slim bare legs) in a world modelled on the stamp album. As narrative it is formulaic; after a while it declines into a pastiche of costume drama and then peters out.

  But halfway through, just as he is beginning to lose interest in the story he is concocting, Schulz turns his eyes inward and launches into a dense four-page meditation upon his own writing processes that one can only imagine as having been written in a trance, a piece of rhapsodic philosophising that develops one last time the imagery of the subterranean earthbed from which myth draws its sacred powers. Come to the underground wi
th me, he says, to the place of roots where words break down and return to their etymologies, the place of anamnesis. Then travel deeper down, to the very bottom, to ‘the dark foundations, among the Mothers’, the realm of unborn tales. (CW, p. 140)

  In these nether depths, which is the first tale to unfold its wings from the cocoon of sleep? It turns out to be one of the two foundation myths of his own spiritual being: the Erlkönig story, the story of the child whose parent has not the power to hold her (or him) back from the sweet persuasions of the dark – in other words, the story that, heard from his mother’s lips, announced to the young Bruno that his destiny would entail leaving the parental breast and entering the realms of night.

  Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual power. But he was right in sensing that he would not for ever be able to draw from this well. From somewhere he would have to renew the sources of his inspiration: the depression and sterility of the late 1930s may have stemmed precisely from a realisation that his capital was exhausted. In the four stories we have that postdate Sanatorium, one of them written not in Polish but in German, there is no indication that such a renewal had yet occurred. Whether for his Messiah he succeeded in finding new sources we will probably – despite Ficowski’s best hopes – never know.

  Schulz was a gifted visual artist within a certain narrow technical and emotional range. The early Book of Idolatry series in particular is a record of a masochistic obsession: hunched, dwarflike men, among whom Schulz himself is recognisable, grovel at the feet of imperious girls with slim, bare legs.

  Behind the narcissistic challenge of Schulz’s girls one can detect Goya’s Naked Maja. The influence of the expressionists is also strong, Edvard Munch in particular. There are hints of the Belgian Félicien Rops. Curiously, in view of the importance of dreams to Schulz’s fiction, the surrealists have left no mark on his drawings. Rather, as he matures, an element of sardonic comedy grows stronger.

  The girls in Schulz’s drawings are of a piece with Adela, the maid who rules the household in Cinnamon Street and reduces the narrator’s father to childishness by stretching out a leg and proffering a foot to be worshipped. Fiction and artwork belong to the same universe; some of the drawings were meant to illustrate the stories. But Schulz never pretended that his visual art, with its restricted ambitions, was on a par with his writing.

  Ficowski’s book includes a selection of Schulz’s drawings and graphics. A fuller selection is available in his edition of the Collected Works. All of Schulz’s surviving drawings are available in reproduction in a handsome bilingual volume published by the Adam Mickiewicz Literary Museum.6

  (2003)

  6 Joseph Roth, the stories

  AT THE APOGEE of a reign that commenced in 1848 and ran until 1916, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, ruled over some fifty million subjects. Of these, fewer than a quarter had German as their mother tongue. Even within Austria itself every second person was a Slav of one kind or another – Czech, Slovak, Pole, Ukrainian, Serb, Croat, or Slovene. Each of these ethnic nationalities had aspirations to become a nation-state in its own right, with all the appurtenances that go therewith, including a national language and a national literature.

  The mistake of the imperial government, we can see with hindsight, was to take these aspirations too lightly, to believe that the benefits of belonging to an enlightened, prosperous, peaceful, multi-ethnic state would outweigh the pull of separatism and the push of anti-German (or, in the case of the Slovaks, anti-Magyar) prejudice. When war – precipitated by a spectacular act of terrorism by ethnic nationalists – broke out in 1914, the Empire found itself too weak to withstand the armies of Russia, Serbia, and Italy on its borders, and fell to pieces.

  ‘Austro-Hungary is no more,’ wrote Sigmund Freud to himself on Armistice Day, 1918. ‘I do not want to live anywhere else . . . I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.’1 Freud spoke for many Jews of Austro-German culture. The dismemberment of the old Empire, and the redrawing of the map of eastern Europe to create new homelands based on ethnicity, worked to the detriment of Jews most of all, since there was no territory they could point to as ancestrally their own. The old supranational imperial state had suited them; the postwar settlement was a calamity. The first years of the new, stripped-down, barely viable Austrian state, with food shortages followed by levels of inflation that wiped out the savings of the middle class, and violence on the streets between paramilitary forces of Left and Right, only intensified their unease. Some began to look to Palestine as a national home; others turned to the supranational creed of communism.

  Nostalgia for a lost past, and anxiety about a homeless future, are at the heart of the mature work of the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Roth looked back fondly on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as the only fatherland he had ever had. ‘I loved this fatherland,’ he wrote in a foreword to The Radetzky March. ‘It permitted me to be a patriot and a citizen of the world at the same time, among all the Austrian peoples also a German. I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland, and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses.’2The Radetzky March is Roth’s masterpiece, a great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria composed by a subject from an outlying imperial territory; a great contribution to literature in the German language from a writer with barely a toehold in the German community of letters.

  Moses Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a middle-sized city a few miles from the Russian border in the imperial crown-land of Galicia. Galicia had become part of the Austrian Empire in 1772, when Poland was dismembered; it was a poor region densely populated with Ukrainians (known in Austria as Ruthenians), Poles, and Jews. Brody itself had been a centre of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment. In the 1890s, two thirds of its population was Jewish.

  In German-speaking parts of the Empire, Galician Jews were held in low esteem. As a young man making his way in Vienna, Roth played down his origins, claiming to have been born in Schwabendorf, a predominantly German town (this fiction appears in his official papers). His father, he claimed, had been (variously) a factory owner, an army officer, a high state official, a painter, a Polish aristocrat. In fact Nachum Roth worked in Brody as an agent for a firm of German grain merchants. Moses Joseph never knew him: in 1893, shortly after his marriage, Nachum suffered a brainstorm of some kind on a train journey to Hamburg. He was taken to a sanatorium and from there passed into the hands of a wonder-working rabbi. He never recovered, never returned to Brody.

  Moses Joseph was brought up by his mother in the home of her parents, prosperous assimilated Jews. He went to a Jewish community school where the language of instruction was German, then to the German-language Gymnasium in Brody. Half his fellow students were Jewish: to young Jews from the East, a German education opened the doors to commerce and to the dominant culture.

  In 1914 Roth enrolled at the University of Vienna. Vienna at this time had the largest Jewish community in central Europe, some 200,000 souls living in what amounted to a ghetto of a voluntary kind. ‘It is hard enough being an Ostjude,’ a Jew from the East, remarked Roth; but ‘there is no harder fate than being an Ostjude outsider in Vienna.’ Ostjuden had to contend not only with anti-Semitism but with the aloofness of Western Jews.3

  Roth was an outstanding student, particularly of German literature, though he looked down on most of his teachers, finding them servile and pedantic. This disdain is reflected in his early writings, which reflect the state-run education system as the preserve of careerists or else timid, uninspired plodders.

  As a part-time job he tutored the young sons of a countess, and in the process picked up such dandyish mannerisms as kissing the hands of ladies, carrying a cane, wearing a monocle. He began to publish poems.

  His education, which seemed to b
e leading him toward an academic career, was unfortunately terminated by the war. Overcoming pacifist inclinations, he enlisted in 1916, at the same time abandoning the name Moses. Ethnic tensions ran high enough in the imperial army for him to be transferred out of his German-speaking unit; he spent 1917–18 in a Polish-speaking unit in Galicia. His period of service became the subject of further fanciful additions to his biography, including stories he had been an officer and a prisoner of war in Russia. Years later he was still peppering his speech with officer-caste slang.

  After the war Roth began to write for the press, and quickly gained a following among the Viennese. Before the war Vienna had been the capital of a great empire; now it was an impoverished city of two million in a country of barely seven million. Seeking better opportunities, Roth and his new wife Friederike moved to Berlin. There he wrote for liberal newspapers but also for the left-wing Vorwärts, signing his pieces ‘Der rote Joseph’, Joseph the Red. The first of his Zeitungromane, newspaper novels, came out, so called not only because they shared the themes of his journalism but also because the text was chopped up into short, snappy units. The Spider’s Web (1923) deals presciently with the moral and spiritual menace of the fascist Right. It appeared three days before Hitler’s first putsch.

  In 1925 Roth was appointed Paris correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the leading liberal paper of the day, at a salary that made him one of the best-paid journalists in Germany. He had come to Berlin to make a career as a German writer, but in France he found that at heart he was French – ‘a Frenchman from the East’.4 He was enraptured by what he called the silkiness of French women, particularly the women he saw in Provence.

  Even in his youth Roth had commanded a lucid, supple German. Now, using Stendhal and Flaubert – particularly the Flaubert of Un Coeur simple – as models, he perfected his characteristically exact mature style. (Referring to The Radetzky March, he remarked, ‘Der Leutnant Trotta, der bin ich,’ consciously echoing Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’)5 He even toyed with the idea of settling in France and writing in French.