On Bruno Schulz’s Demythologization or Reality

Abstract

The article is an attempt at an analysis of the changes occurring in the area of Schulz’s narration identity that is being constituted. It is assumed that the turning point for Schulz’s personal myth was first of all the success of The Street of Crocodiles and a number of events in his personal life (splitting up with his fiancée, his brother’s death, his health problems). Each of these factors starts to influence in its own way the writer’s questioning the possibility to continue writing, that is interpreting the world, discovering history, “making reality sensible”. The success of The Street of Crocodiles becomes a challenge that is difficult to respond to in the new conditions. The writer’s “brilliant epoch”, the epoch of “writing for himself” comes to an end. The “Schulz” case is in danger of sinking into oblivion. The narration space is gradually transformed into a space of coping with alienation, divide, loneliness. In a special way these motifs are articulated in the stories: Dodo, The Pensioner, and Loneliness. If in the mentioned stories overcoming the life failure is indeed impossible (Dodo) or proceeds owing to “sponging off somebody’s life” (The Pensioner), or “parasitizing metaphors” (Loneliness), in Homeland rewriting an individual myth ab origine takes place. The act of this “rewriting” is understood as consequently going away from the basic principles of Schulz’s literary hermeneutics and philosophy of literature. Reality appearing as a result of this going away is reality that is not rooted in a genuine experience, quasi-reality of “negative values”, reality of a narrative disaster signaling the definitive “death of Bruno the Great”.