With just two collections of short stories (The Street of Crocodiles, 1934, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1937), a few stories published in magazines before his untimely violent death, and a host of exceptional drawings that survived World War II, Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) created his own universe. But in this case, the use of the term, if technically correct, is counterproductive – at least when you try to give the name to the dynamics of his reception by looking for an answer to a simple question. Why was he, and why does he still remain, immensely popular, and not only a ‘cult’ artist of his era?
Schulz’s art is alive to the point that 2020’s prestigious Nike Award winner, Radek Rak, in the second of his three novels, mined the alphabet and syntax of Schulz’s imagery.
As with the The Saragossa Manuscript’s status as a component of Count Potocki’s universe, Wojciech Has’ film The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) can shed light on the work of art that is its ‘source text’ (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) – or rather, on two ‘source texts’, stories and drawings – and vice versa. But Schulz’s works as we know, read and watch them are a direct opposite of Potocki’s works in the sense that The Saragossa Manuscript, even with its fantastic elements, is predominantly logical. In all three of its literary forms, it’s a bit like a puzzle, with pieces that can be put together to form a distinctive ‘whole’. But being an artistic puzzle, so to speak, you can put them in many different orders to achieve ‘the whole’, which always differs subtly from previous ‘wholes’ but also always gives the impression of entirety.
The Schulz work, meanwhile, is illogical – even alogical – and as such, its reception is a matter of intuition and emotion, not logic. This is to say that each time you try to put the Schulz puzzle together, the pieces fit, but you come out with a picture that you perceive as distorted in some unnamed way, grotesque or unfinished. So it is best perceived with the intellect switched off, so to speak.