The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [4]
From sublime spheres the Schulzian myth sinks to the depths of ordinary existence; or, if you will, what Schulz gives us is the mythological Ascension of the Everyday. The myth takes on human shape, and simultaneously the reality made mythical becomes more nonhuman than ever before. Conjecture easily changes into certainty, the obvious into illusion; possibilities materialize. Myth stalks the streets of Drogobych, turning ragamuffins playing tiddledywinks into enchanted soothsayers who read the future in the cracks of a wall, or transforming a shopkeeper into a prophet or a goblin. Art was to Schulz "a short circuit of sense between words, a sudden régénération of the primal myths." Schulz said: "All poetry is mythmaking; it strives to recreate the myths about the world."
Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, Schulz's favorite work, is an excellent example of the repeated patterns, the stories that return and return in different variations, continually reembodied from the earliest times up to the present day. Mann presents the biblical story "on a monumental scale"; Schulz, incorporating mythic archetypes within the confines of his own biography, unites his family to legend. His major work was to have been the lost novel titled The Messiah, in which the myth of the coming of the Messiah would symbolize a return to the happy perfection that existed at the beginning— in Schulzian terms, the return to childhood.
Schulzian time—his mythic time—obedient and submissive to man, offers artistic recompense for the profaned time of everyday life, which relentlessly subordinates all things to itself and carries events and people off in a current of evanescence. Schulz introduces a subjective, psychological time and then gives it substance, objectivity, by subjecting the course of occurrences to its laws. The reckoning of time by the calendar is likewise called into question. It can happen, writes Schulz, 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 thirteenth freak month." Schulz's fantasies—dazzling, full of the paradoxical and the plausible—are "apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year." They are Schulz's mythological supplement to the calendar, and when he wishes that the stories about his father, smuggled into the pages of his old calendar, would there grow equal in authority to its true text, he is expressing his own not merely artistic desire to materialize the yearnings of the imagination, to impart to its creations an objective reality, to erase the boundary between fact and dream.
"Should I tell you that my room is walled up? ... In what way might I leave it?" asks Schulz. "Here is how: Goodwill knows no obstacle; nothing can stand before a deep desire. I have only to imagine a door, a door old and good, like in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron latch and bolt. There is no room so walled up that it will not open with such a trusty door, if you have but the strength to insinuate it." On one side of that door lies life and its restricted freedom, on the other—art. That door leads from the captivity of Bruno, a timid teacher of arts and crafts, to the freedom of Joseph, the hero of The Street of Crocodiles.
This is the credo of Bruno Schulz—of the Great Heresiarch who imposed new measurements on time, in this way taking his revenge on life. Yet from behind the mythological faith of the writer there peers, again and again, the mocking grin of reality, revealing the ephemeral nature of the fictions that seek to contend with it.
Many of Schulz's theoretical statements express with precision and accuracy the ideas behind his