Issue date: 10/11/02 Section: Entertainment

" '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 flat for so long that they merge with the wall, grow onto it, and all trace of them is obliterated in a complicated design of lines and cracks.' "

Before being shot and killed by a Nazi officer in 1942, Bruno Schulz lived an uneventful life, filled with small-town solitude, and, if his writings are any indication, unremitting boredom surrounding a traumatic childhood. He has been referred to variously as the Polish Kafka and the greatest Polish writer between the two World Wars, and yet his reputation rests on just two short novels, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Both written in an intense and sensational style, they are marked both by their hallucinatory binges and an almost sophomoric excessiveness. The Street of Crocodiles itself is only one hundred and fifteen pages in length, and despite its many and pervasive flaws, it is at times strangely moving and disturbingly affecting.

So exactly what is this novel? At times it is a vitriolic and satiric judgment on specifically American commercial values; at others, it is a redemptive manifesto for the artist in a suffocating and bureaucratic society; and, perhaps centrally, it is a provocation (and consequently justification) for men and women to willfully insert into their mundane and oppressive realities the fantasies that seem to have lived and died only in childhood. For this novel, among other things, is a fusion of the author's present reality with the irresponsible musings of an over-imaginative child. The Street of Crocodiles itself is a blank spot on the town's map, a void in the ancestral unity of the town; it is an edifice built of American fashion magazines and half-realized desires. It is one-dimensional and without substance, but unfortunately, the obvious anti-American sentiments are often as empty and one-dimensional as the buildings Schulz depicts.

The Street of Crocodiles is an allegory of writing itself, a not-uncommon trend in modern literature. The labyrinthine scenery, then, represents the constant flux and disorder necessary for the act of creation. In fact, the theme of creation is very important in this work. Creative energy seeps from the scenery: doors long shut congeal with their doorframes; hallways rearrange; in long shut-off rooms exotic plants grow from the dust of past tenants and stale dreams. Turning of an ordinary and boring town into a fantastic environment is a symbol for writing itself, but again, one never knows whether these transformations are truly occurring, or if they are the faults of memory reaping their inexorable damage.

Continued...

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