Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)
Sklepy cynamonowe (1934)
translated into English as The Street of Crocodiles by Celina Wieniewska (1963).

The 14th random number: 1814. Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles.

Here’s what I wrote quite a while ago – because I read this quite a while ago! – on a book review site elsewhere on the internet:

Beautiful, painterly, profoundly atmospheric. Maybe the finest rendering into text of the actual dream-life of the mind, of fantasy as it touches childhood (and adulthood), that I have ever read.

I stand by that and don’t feel the need to say too much more. But unfortunately I don’t have the guts to let that stand alone here, in such verbose company – it would seem unfair to this book that I so admired, to write so much less about it than about the others. So out of misdirected guilt, here’s some more.

The book is a collection of short pieces, each originally written to be sent to the author’s literary pen-pal. They feel befittingly delicate and private, and would be marvelous things to get in the mail. The stories do not form a sequence or an internally consistent set; they share settings and characters, but only, it seems to me, as a consequence of all stemming from the same psychological zone within the author. His creative impulse – as a writer and as a graphic artist, too – seems to have emanated directly from his personal experience of life, without interest in invention for invention’s sake. It all means something to him; it’s all meant to be felt as he felt it. So it’s no surprise that the stories all feel of a piece, even if they vary in tone and substance – because it’s clear that they all have the same author’s real life at their heart.

The world in these stories lapses into fantasy not through whimsy or invention but through confusion – a quiet confusion that touches everything and so goes unquestioned. There are no falsehoods imposed on the reality; the reality is just parsed murkily, like a child might. Or an adult, for that matter. His fantasy is more like superstition: the fiction is not fanciful; it’s like something actually believed.

Children can work themselves into a frenzy of confusion and lose themselves, to the point where they come to believe that a story they made up might actually be true. These stories have that quality, of being believed because belief has become a maze. Impossible things are described but they seem neither like nightmare nor happy fantasy; they’re like the lingering residue of dreams still experienced while awake. Wait, I’ve got an even better one – have you ever had a memory that you take for granted for years, but one day when you finally analyze it, you realize it cannot possibly have ever happened? The stories are like that.

Schulz’s mastery of this fuzzy area is the greatest I’ve ever encountered. Of course, given the shadowy, chilly Eastern European dream-reality, comparison to Kafka seems to be standard fare for commentary on Schulz. But I feel them quite differently: while Kafka’s fantasies are caricatures of reality, Schulz’s fantasies are just extensions of reality. Schulz’s writing is expressionistic in the best sense – it distorts in order to deliver real sensations that might otherwise be too quiet to hear, too slippery to isolate. Not like the Dr. Caligari sort of expressionism – or, let’s be frank here, the Arnold Schoenberg sort of expressionism – in which distortion is used as a launching pad into Krazyville, where would-be sensations of alien intensity dwell. Schulz’s stories do not take place in Krazyville. His angst is real and human in scale, and we feel it with him as the world bends and buckles around him.

I’m placing too much emphasis on the surreal elements. There are also entirely realistic pieces here, and many descriptive passages that could pass as straightforward memoir writing. There’s a delightful one about the personality of the family dog. Each story goes where it will and isn’t bound. The author was writing for pleasure and discovery and when he hits a particular note that you enjoy, you can bet that he won’t ever quite return there again; he’s going to try other things instead. But he’ll be nearby.

The two stories that are most whole and seem to form a matched pair at the center of the book are “Cinnamon Shops,” after which the author titled his collection (see above – that’s what the Polish means), and “The Street of Crocodiles,” after which, for some reason, the translator retitled the collection. This change is significant, because whereas “Cinnamon Shops” is an eerie but deeply warm dream of the city at night, “The Street of Crocodiles” is about sleaze and illusions, about facades of facades. Over the course of the book, the light and dark have about equal play, but the overall impression is a melancholy nostalgia; “The Street of Crocodiles” strikes a cynical note that, to me, sours the whole collection if it’s taken as the overarching title. The nocturnal drift of “Cinnamon Shops” is far more the spirit of the thing.

It’s possible that the darkening of the title was undertaken posthumously in light of the idea that Bruno Schulz was a tragic figure, due to his depressing and absurd death at the hands of the Nazis, about which you can read elsewhere if you like. But the book doesn’t feel tragic in the least. Sad, yes, but not tragic.

I really do recommend this. Of course, I recommended it strongly to [a friend who will no doubt comment below], who promptly read it and basically shrugged it off as not his thing. So maybe it won’t be your thing. It’s also worth nothing that I mentioned that I’d read this to a Jewish Literature Scholar acquaintance, thinking that it was mildly obscure, and he immediately proceeded to rattle off a list of works influenced by Schulz, including one or two that incorporated or fantasized the figure of Bruno Schulz himself. I’m not sure I like that; any whiff of “these are a few of my favorite things” post-modernism generally turns me off.* But the point is, in certain Polish and/or Jewish circles, Bruno Schulz is not obscure at all; he’s a big big deal, big enough to play games with. I don’t think you should read him that way. These stories were written to be taken out of a mailbox with no expectations. And that’s more or less how I read them, less the mailbox.

Final comment, because now I feel perfectly comfortable with the length I’ve reached, and hopefully so does the book: I knew the title, and only the title, prior to reading the book, because I had seen the memorable, but heavily overrated, 1986 Brothers Quay animated short of the story. And, I might add, not understood what it meant. What it definitely doesn’t mean is the same thing as the story, because after reading the story I went and watched it again, sure that this time I’d be able to crack it, and while certain scenes and moods became clearer, most of it didn’t. A good deal of what goes on still needs to be interpreted from the ground up. Contrariwise, if you come to Bruno Schulz looking for a book about decaying dolls terrorizing each other and tiny screws drilling through watches stuffed with meat, you’re in the wrong place. God help you, in fact.

The subtle beauties of the book, to my mind, serve as a mature counterexample to the “oh man that’s so creepy” MTV baby-doll nightmare of the short film that happens to borrow its name. Yes, the Quays were doing baby-doll nightmare before MTV. They get some credit for that. But it’s still what it is, and why, why that of all things?

I don’t know. Enough about those guys.

Here’s a very long excerpt for you. I tried to reduce the length, but I wanted it to be this passage and there was no way to cut without diminishing the effect. I think you’ll enjoy the whole thing. I have to marvel at his skill – even just now, reading it for the third or fourth time, still that lightheaded sense of twilight half-reason kicked in vividly. He heads directly and surely for that sensation and begins painting in it, without hesitation. The fantasy is so present and clear you can smell it. The unreality he describes here is at least as familiar to me as anything in a “realistic” novel, as any cartoon character from Dickens. In this case the fantasy is at one remove, in the fevered mind of the narrator’s father, but it’s the same fantasy that lives in the world of the book itself.

Here my father began to set before our eyes the picture of that generatio aequivoca which he had dreamed up, a species of beings only half organic, a kind of pseudofauna and pseudoflora, the result of a fantastic fermentation of matter.

They were creations resembling, in appearance only, living creatures such as crustaceans, vertebrates, cephalopods. In reality the appearance was misleading – they were amorphous creatures, with no internal structure, products of the imitative tendency of matter which, equipped with memory, repeats from force of habit the forms already accepted. The morphological scope of matter is limited on the whole and a certain quota of forms is repeated over and over again on various levels of existence.

These creatures – mobile, sensitive to stimuli, and yet outside the pale of real life – could be brought forth by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of kitchen salt. These colloids, after a number of days, would form and organize themselves in precipitations of substance resembling lower forms of fauna.

In creatures conceived in this way, one could observe the processes of respiration and metabolism, but chemical analysis revealed in them traces neither of albumen nor of carbon compounds.

Yet these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendor of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps, abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such a soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.

In apartments of that kind, wallpapers must be very weary and bored with the incessant changes in all the cadenzas of rhythm; no wonder that they are susceptible to distant, dangerous dreams. The essence of furniture is unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colorful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash.

“As you will no doubt know,” said my father, “in old apartments there are rooms which are sometimes forgotten. Unvisited for months on end, they wilt neglected between the old walls and it happens that they close in on themselves, become overgrown with bricks, and, lost once and for all to our memory, forfeit their only claim to existence. The doors, leading to them from some backstairs landing, have been overlooked by people living in the apartment for so long that they merge with the wall, grow into it, and all trace of them is obliterated in a complicated design of lines and cracks.

“Once early in the morning toward the end of winter,” my father continued, “after many months of absence, I entered such a forgotten passage, and I was amazed at the appearance of the rooms.

“From all the crevices in the floor, from all the moldings, from every recess, there grew slim shoots filling the gray air with a scintillating filigree lace of leaves: a hothouse jungle, full of whispers and flicking lights – a false and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the lamp, along the wardrobes, grew clumps of delicate trees which, high above, spread their luminous crowns and fountains of lacy leaves, spraying chlorophyll, and thrusting up to the painted heaven of the ceiling. In the rapid process of blossoming, enormous white and pink flowers opened among the leaves, bursting from bud under your very eyes, displaying their pink pulp and spilling over to shed their petals and fall apart in quick decay.

“I was happy,” said my father, “to see that unexpected flowering which filled the air with a soft rustle, a gentle murmur, falling like colored confetti through the thin rods of the twigs.

“I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precocious blossoming, luxuriation, and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers.

“Before nightfall,” concluded my father, “there was no trace left of that splendid flowering. The whole elusive sight was a fata morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life.”

Fantasies of plantlike growth, of the animate in the inanimate, I’ve always found particularly unnerving, so this passage had special meaning for me. But what I love most about it is its unsummarizability. Even after reading it and understanding it well, you can’t really say what it is that’s doing the growing. Illusions, and matter, and memories; all at once, because in this philosophy they are all the same thing. As they are in our minds.

* It seems likely that the works he mentioned included this, which doesn’t sound the least bit deserving of my complaint, and this, which does.