Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

'We are not concerned,' he said, 'with long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters - without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion....'

Bruno Schulz, 'Talior's Dummies'

I always knew I'd love the work of Bruno Schulz. Obviously, since I loved Kafka. And the Quay brothers' film of The Street of Crocodiles. He didn't publish much, and I must have passed over a copy of his collected fiction in more than one second hand bookshop, which is where I turned up this edition of his first book. Originally titled Cinnamon Shops in it's original Polish publication in 1934. I don't know why they used a title of another of the stories for the English edition, except perhaps that it sounds more evocative, more indicative of the way his stories and language infuse objects with life, a quality which is magically captured by the Quays' stop motion animation. It's such good writing that the temptation is just to go on quoting him, instead of going to the bother trying to define what it is one likes about it.

Emerging from a similar middle European background as Kafka, both from former outposts of the Austro Hungarian empire, you can see why they might get bracketed together, although in fact the translator's introduction suggests Schulz didn't read The Trial until after his first book was published. And whilst there is perhaps something of a kinship between the two, a similarly subterranean imagination, there are surely just as many differences. Whereas the Father in Kafka is a menacing incarnation of the Law, Schulz's Father is eccentric, something of a clown and buffoon. A figure of authority certainly, but a much more equivocal one. Where Kafka's stories come in shades of grey, Schulz writing delights in colour. In place of Kafka's impenetrable bureaucracies, Schulz celebrates his memories of a provincial petit-bourgeoisie life.

'Memory' is the right word here. So many of his stories begin by placing their events in a particular time within their first line, but this particularity is unsettled by the way in which it's only 'that' July, or August, or Winter. These months and seasons have no relation to each other, no stable chronology so that we're stranded in the eternal flow of memory. For it is always inevitably past. The translator describes it perceptibly as a 'sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history', which gets to the heart of it really well. It's not 'nostalgia', a word I sometimes worry that I overuse on this blog, and in any case there are plenty of works about the remembering the past which don't fit comfortably within the term. It's not the pain of remembering, or the slightly fuzzy cossiness into which much our contemporary culture has transformed the term. Reading these stories I was thinking that I could think of nothing else like them in English, except perhaps the work of Terrence Davies, but that may only be because I received a DVD set of his films at Christmas and recently saw Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time. There's the same disorientation of memory, the lack of sentimentality, and a very complicated longing, because what's being remembered is as much a source of trauma as it is something the author would wish to regain. We maybe need another term to describe this sensibility. 'Remembrancer' is the slightly clunky term John Fowles coined to describe Flora Thompson's work, and may serve for lack of anything else.

Perhaps that wound would be harder to heal too, if only the present were more welcoming. To belabour the comparison with Kafka, another difference is that Schulz seems more self conscious about his fiction, if this doesn't contradict what I've written above, placing his fantastical transformations within an historical context. Where Kafka transcribes his dreams of his present, the fiction all encompassing, for Schulz this all took place in the past. The present, as encountered in the story 'The Street of Crocodiles', is shoddy and badly made, flimsy and grey. A common trope of modernity perhaps, which here also includes such horrors as miscegenation and effeminacy. This upsets me rather, as it always does when you discover that someone you like might hold opinions which you find offensive. To quote from the translator's introduction one final time, the world his fiction remembers is a patriarchal one. It's inevitable perhaps that such a world would find those aspects of modernity particularly troubling. And in any case, at the story's end Schulz undercuts his tirade when he observes that this area of the city wasn't as bad as he makes out in the story, merely an impoverished provincial reflection of metropolitan reality. It's always remembered aslant, as it were. And it's also the consciousness of being provincial. There's always an elsewhere to which you are looking.

Adela, leaning against the balcony rails, bent over the distant, stormy roar of the city, caught from it all the louder accents and, with a smile, put together the lost syllables of a song, trying to join them, to read some sense into the rising and falling grey monotony of the day.

Bruno Schulz, 'The Comet'