Literaturoznawstwo

Henri Lewi’s book, "Bruno Schulz or Messianic Strategies", published in 1989 in Paris, is an attempt to read the fiction and correspondence of Schulz as a record of his individual lot and the collective condition of Jews in the pre-Second World War Poland. The author interprets Schulz’s writings, in which the writer resorted to myths and metaphors
and avoided direct autobiographical confessions, as a disguised presentation of his personal experience. Lewi tries to prove that even though Schulz did not openly refer to his Jewishness, he drew from the Judaic tradition and his most important myths are deeply rooted in the Old Testament.

Książka jest wyborem klasycznych tekstów z obszaru Radykalnego Konstruktywizmu; znajdują się w niej prace poświęcone podstawowym zagadnieniom epistemologicznym (E. von Glasersfeld, H. von Foerster, H. Maturana.) neurobiologicznym podstawom działania mózgu (G. Roth) i koncepcji społecznej opartej na autopojezie jako teorii organizacji. Oprócz tekstów podstawowych, znajdują się także prace omawiające zastosowanie opcji konstruktywistycznej w naukach szczegółowych (S. J. Schmidt, M. Fleischer, A. Barsch)

Tożsamość oraz obraz pozostają jednymi z najważniejszych zagadnień współczesnej humanistyki. To wokół nich budowane są kolejne teorie czy wręcz całe dziedziny wiedzy. Autorzy tekstów zawartych w tomie zadają pytanie, co wyłania się ze zderzenia obu pojęć. Przedmiotem ich zainteresowań jest więc nie tożsamość bądź obraz, ale wszystko to, co odnajdziemy pomiędzy nimi, co wyrasta na skrzyżowaniu dyskursów. Zamieszczone tu studia obejmują refleksją zarówno sztukę, jak i literaturę, film, fotografię czy poezję. Poprzez badania nad konkretnymi tekstami kultury oraz rozważania teoretyczne, autorzy starają się ujawnić skomplikowane relacje zachodzące pomiędzy tym, co tożsamościowe a obrazowością. Pytają zarówno o obrazowanie tożsamości, jak i o tożsamość samego obrazu. Przede wszystkim jednak towarzyszą im pytania o nas samych – o to, co widzimy, kiedy patrzymy w lustro, w jaki sposób kreujemy obrazy i jak im podlegamy.

Monografia pod redakcją Miłosza Markiewicza, Agaty Stronciwilk i Pawła Zieglera; zawiera 13 tekstów.

The article is devoted to Schulz’s connections to the cinema, both as a viewer and as a writer. Since we do not know much about his experiences as a moviegoer from his art or letters, the author tries to recreate it on the basis of the collective experience of Schulz’s
generation which was often heavily influenced by the cinema. The second part of the article focuses on Schulz’s cinematic writing. The author tries to prove that Schulz’s peculiar literary imagination which, according to many scholars and critics, takes its root in the image, not the word, was to some extent inspired by the early cinema or the cinema of attractions. The conclusion is that the interpreter of Schulz’s work has the right to treat his older brother’s movie theater in Drohobych as an important part of Schulz’s private mythology.

The essay is a review of Jan Gondowicz’s most recent book, "Trans-Autentyk. Nie-czyste formy Brunona Schulza" [Trans-Authentic. Bruno Schulz’s Im-pure Forms]. Most of the texts included in the volume focus on Schulz’s graphics and drawings. Gondowicz, a highly unconventional Schulz scholar, believes that they convey the cipher of the writer’s mythology by referring to a secret society from Drogobych, called “Kalleia,” which aimed to revive an ancient cult based on the sacred value of eroticism. This is the central hypothesis to be found in Gondowicz’s masterful essays, informing also his interpretations of some of Schulz’s short stories. Analyzing Schulz’s drawings, Gondowicz discovers in them traces of a crisis of the ineffable and their epiphanic potential, later articulated in fiction.

W siódmym numerze Schulz/Forum pierwszy polski przekład „Psychopatia Sexualis” Richarda von Kraffta-Ebinga i masochistyczne fotografie z jego zbiorów. George Bataille o Kraffcie, Julia Kristeva o miłości poza Ziemią. Gilles Deleuze przygląda się Sacher-Masochowi, a Tomasz Swoboda – spojrzeniu Deleuze’a. Kapitan Henry Węgrocki z wojskowych służb medycznych, nieznany dotąd korespondent Schulza, omawia masochistyczne wątki jego twórczości. List Schulza do Węgrockiego przekładają z angielskiego Mirosław Wójcik, Piotr Millati i Jerzy Jarzębski.

Paweł Dybel wyznacza Schulzowski próg wstydu, Stanisław Rosiek i Filip Szałasek reinterpretują sen o kastracji z listu do Szumana, Marcin Romanowski pisze o poglądach Ficowskiego na masochizm, Jerzy Kandziora o kolegach Schulza i o tym, co z nich zostało. Prezentujemy nieletnią muzę Schulza-portrecisty – Irenę Kejlinównę, a także trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do biografa Schulza i fotograficzne przykłady metatropizmu/masochizmu. Jan Gondowicz oraz Eliza Kącka wikłają się w nierozwiązane zagadki schulzologii, a Ariko Kato szuka podobieństw między Schulzem i Eduardem Fuchsem.

Schulz’s work has reached us in fragments. We do not know a large part of what he wrote and drew. But Schulz is also a “writer without an archive,” which is why he seems to be so mature and accomplished from the very outset of his career – with no “at first” and “then,” no beginning and end. In such a context, all his available manuscripts are particularly important. The present essay is an attempt to examine/describe Schulz’s writing (écriture) on the basis of the manuscript of “A Second Autumn.” Its six pages, compared with a version published in Kamena and the one included in "Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass", must stand for the whole lost archive. An analysis of the changes and corrections allows us to reveal the actual process of writing. Thanks to Schulz’s comments, we may place it in his biography: he has just gained success and knows that another
book should follow, but in his letters he keeps complaining on a writer’s block. The only way out is to publish something already written, and fortunately there is something in store. Thus Schulz begins to work on the texts penned in the 1920s. He must only, as he puts it, “choose, finish, edit, and rewrite” them. The manuscript of “A Second Autumn”
is a document of rewriting – in a way, the author is a parasite on his own work. Still, working on his old texts, Schulz believes that he is a traitor not only of himself, but also of the original inspiration. Once inspired, he must become a writer and becomes one, though he must change his method. A return to the innocence and disinterestedness of
the 1920s is impossible. Under the pressure of external circumstances, Schulz begins a new epoch in his writing. The lost "Messiah" was probably intended as its center. Some of Schulz’s essays from that period reveal a poetics that is different from his original one. That other, different poetics may be called a poetics of “making the myth real,” of a “biological semantics.” The manuscript of “A Second Autumn” demonstrates the decline of the former way of writing.

The paper focuses on first scholarly articles devoted to Schulz’s works that were published in American journals. Written by Henry Joseph Wegrocki in 1946, “Masochistic Motives in the Literary and Graphic Art of Bruno Schulz,” is a psychiatric analys of masochism and its traces in Schulz’s short stories and drawings. Olga Lukashevich’s “Bruno Schulz’s‘The Street of Crocodiles’. A Study in Creativity and Neurosis” (1968) suggests reading the first collection of short stories in the spirit of Otto Rank’s category of the artiste manqué. The last article, by Colleen M. Taylor, “Childhood Revisited: The Writings of Bruno Schulz” (1969), analyses the reasons why the writer leaves the real world behind to enter the world of childhood.

The article aims to present a critical project of publishing the literary and artistic works by Bruno Schulz in a uniform edition. Few readers realize that Schulz’s fiction exists in two editorial versions: the anonymous Cracow edition (published several times since 1957) and the Wrocław edition (prepared by Jerzy Jarzębski for the National Library series in 1989). The differences between them are not essential, but they call for a critical intervention which is not an easy task. The choice of all Schulz’s editors are is in fact limited to the first editions from the 1930s since the manuscripts of the stories have been lost. No proper editorial basis makes it difficult to verify texts published in the book versions.

The present essay is an attempt to consider the status of rubbish, debris, remains, cuttings, and scrap paper, so often to be found in Schulz’s fiction. Such apparently useless trash seem to be the main substance that organized Schulz’s reality. Sometimes it makes a significant substitute for more complex or sophisticated forms of the material world, on other occasions it point to the general condition of modern culture. In Schulz’s stories, waste is almost never just useless excess of ready-made forms, but very often it makes the main component of more complex structures – both strictly physical, material, and linguistic, whenever it inspires an imaginary search, triggers metaphors or provides a core around which the language of description can start growing. The formlessness and potentiality of such forms, just as the “porousness” or “plasticity” of matter as such, seduce the artist and tempt him to shape them, to make an epistemological and creative effort.

"Labirynty Brunona Schulza" is an attempt to look at the writer’s output through the prism of occult knowledge, particularly the works of Aleister Crowley. Adam Wosiak searches in Schulz’s fiction for the images of a world that is degraded and based on opposites, to compare them with similar pictures drawn from ancient myths, the Internet, and esoteric knowledge. The reviewer considers such an attempt as an natural stage in Schulz’s reception. Writers who, like the author of "Cinnamon Shops", give the reader much interpretive liberty sooner or later must be interpreted in strange and extravagant ways. Labirynty is not only a superficial, but also a surprisingly arbitrary
reading of Schulz. The text, illustrations, and bibliography make a collage of accidental elements which add little or nothing to the understanding of Schulz’s fiction.

Assuming that his readers know nothing about Bruno Schulz, François Coadou believes that he should start from the basics, although it seems that he would really like to con centrate on more specific problems. The second part of his book is an attempt to present
an original interpretation of Schulz’s fiction. Coadou precedes it with a subchapter titled, “Presentation of Bruno Schulz,” which seems neutral, but in the French context is quite unusual, referring to Gilles Deleuze’s "Présentation de Sacher-Masoch", since the author of "Venus in Furs" provides one of the issues under scrutiny. Coadou approaches Schulz’s fiction as an open work in the tradition of Cervantes, Sterne or Joyce, claiming that in his analysis of the decomposition of the world and subjectivity the Polish writer proved more penetrating than the author of "Ulysses". Next to such daring, controversial, and sometimes simply doubtful proposals, one may find in Coadou’s brief study a metacritical reflection criticizing the schematism of Schulz’s reception, continuously referring to the same biographical facts and psychological diagnoses. "L’inquiétude de la matière" is an interesting
attempt to approach the Polish writer from the outside, but on the other hand, it is also disappointing because of its interpretive and stylistic faults.