Between Sleep & Awakening: Analysing Schulz’s ‘Undula’

Bruno Schulz, "Dedykacja" (Introdukcja), 1920, cliché-verre on paper, 13,5 x 18 cm, photo: National Museum in Kraków, default, Bruno Schulz, "Dedykacja" (Introdukcja), 1920, cliché-verre on paper, 13,5 x 18 cm, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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First published in 1922 in Świt, a regional oil industry journal, and concealed in an archive in Lviv until it was discovered by Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych nearly 100 years later, ‘Undula’ – a previously unknown short story by Bruno Schulz – is now finally seeing the light of day.

Last year, the first English translation was published online by Dr Stanley Bill; independent press Sublunary Editions also published an English translation of the story, translated by Frank Garrett, in October.

With growing numbers of Polish and English readers now familiar with the story, Culture.pl explores themes in Undula, their Polish and international contexts, and how the story might fit – or not – within ideas about Bruno Schulz’s existing literary corpus.

Lost & found

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Original print copy of 'Undula', photo: Schulz/Forum 14

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Appearing under the pseudonym Marceli Weron, packed with recognisable Schulzian characters and imagery – including the natural world, nostalgia and sadomasochism – and printed over a decade before Schulz’s other known short stories were published, ‘Undula’ is about as tantalising as it gets.

The discovery of the story plays into the existing Schulz myth about his lost works, particularly the manuscript for The Messiah, a legendary masterpiece which Schulz allegedly entrusted to a non-Jewish friend, and which may now lie in a KGB archive – or which may have never existed at all. Interest in Schulz’s hidden creative past has also been intensified by the unearthing of his lost essays and artworks in recent years.

The topic has continued to inspire Schulz scholars and readers alike, sparking a wealth of critical investigations and fictional reimaginings, including Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love.

Now, fiction has again, at least in some respects, turned to reality. Undula, which was discovered by Khomych in 2019, instantly aroused interest among Schulz scholars for its seeming familiarity to his existing works – and it raises the distinct possibility that yet more stories by Schulz, hidden away in archives, may still be uncovered in future.

But Undula is a lot more than just a lost Schulz text. And aside from potentially helping to explain why the story was published so furtively in the first place, thinking about the various themes of the story might also help us to reconsider themes in Schulz’s other works.

Isolation, decay & confusion

Thumbnail — 'Undula' cover, photo: press materials

Schulz’s existing output is small: two collections of short, albeit lavishly-written, stories, and various cliché-verre artworks, as well as some paintings.

Many of his literary works approach the world with a childlike fascination and inquisitiveness – and although several of his stories and paintings often depict strange, lewd and perverse topics, these are often viewed with sympathy, or seen as captivating and even mystical events.

But where, in other stories, these themes take on value as a fertile source of literary imagination, Undula is different. This story is charged with darker tones – and whilst it clearly reflects Schulzian themes, these are depicted as more disturbing, even tormenting, than as symbols of creative fantasy. The story, after all, opens with a protagonist ‘locked up in isolation’; he has been ‘living a long time already’ in his ‘crooked room’, which is teething with cockroaches and wild, germinating plants, leaving him only able to fantasise about the world outside. In his murky, half-awake state, his memories - and their images of torture, suffering and hopelessness - are frequently at the forefront of his mind.

Khomych argues Undula resembles Schulz’s later short story Loneliness, which also focuses on a protagonist who has been trapped in a room for ‘bitter months and years’. Both stories leave the protagonist with little grip on external reality, with time out of kilter – isolated away, he sees days merge into years, without any linear progression of events to anchor the narrative, aside from an increasingly decaying setting. In both stories too, the protagonist is reduced to living in a liminal, lethargic state, between sleep and awakening.

However, Undula takes this further, with time curling back on itself from the start of the story. The protagonist continually ‘sink[s] into slumber and rouse[s] [himself] anew’, as his reality and imagination constantly overlap:

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Real-life phantoms get jumbled up, blurring into drowsy figments. So the time passes. (…) Sometimes I reacquaint myself with the large, oversized furniture, stretching all the way up to the ceiling.

Gripped by fatigue, the narrative cannot go anywhere, with the protagonist only left his environment to explore, time and time again. The layered discovery and rediscovery of his surroundings means past, present and future amalgamate, reinforcing the claustrophobia in the story – as well as creating a sense of vulnerability. Try as the protagonist might, he can never keep up with the setting, which mutates and distends into the room, appearing too large for him to mentally compute – and which, crucially, also overwhelms his physical frame. The furniture – most of which he doesn’t use – dwarfs his small body, which‘scarcely [fills] a third’ of his bed.

In fact, these depictions reflect some of Schulz’s later ideas about the nature of reality – and its potentially disorientating effect on individuals. In a letter to Stanisław I Witkiewicz, Schulz suggested that:

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Everything diffuses beyond its borders (…) the migration of forms is the essence of life.

But thinking about Undula suggests this statement could be re-read as something more unsettling, rather than – as it is usually understood – a symbol of the rich potential of Schulz’s creative prowess. Instead of considering ‘diffus[ion]’ as imaginative possibility, the endlessly mutating environment in the story only serves to intensify the protagonist’s weakness, compounded by the descriptions of conspiring shadows which ‘skulk and scheme’ around him, and cockroaches which ‘suddenly (…) start scuttling’ across the floor. The protagonist seems desperate to latch onto some solid foundation, particularly grasping for memories, or recognisable objects from the past – later in the story, he is described as physically ‘groping in the dark’ as he searches for his childhood home.

These images also reflect critical readings of Schulz's later stories.

When Schulz’s second collection of stories, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published in 1937, a review by Emil Breiter in an edition of Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News, 29th May 1938) argued that the world of Schulz’s stories was both real and unreal, and that his artistry had its own measurability and ‘intrinsic outward logic’. Breiter added that everyday life and reality in Schulz’s stories was distorted or exaggerated through extravagant metaphor.

Later critics took similar notes about Schulz’s works. George Gasyna argues that the reality in Schulz’s stories is ‘defined by lack, always at risk of detaching itself from properly documentary moorings’.

In Undula, the slippy geometry of reality reaches a crisis point. Though the protagonist tries to stabilise himself among his present environment, this is a rickety foundation, leaving fact to blur with imagination.

Even the Polish language used in the story denies any documentary fidelity, instead falling into a state of deterioration. In his ‘Translator’s Afterword’ to Undula, Frank Garrett notes that Schulz used Polish ‘in a particularly original way’ in the story, with stock phrases and language made ‘pliable’.

Interestingly, this linguistic instability also provides a new way to read Schulz's later ideas on language. In his Mythologisation of Reality, Schulz argues present-day words are a mere ‘fragment, a rudiment of some former, all-encompassing, integral mythology’ which is striving ‘to become complete.’ Again using imagery of childhood, he suggests that:

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A regression takes place within it, a backflow, and the word then returns to its former connections and becomes again complete in meaning - and this tendency of the word to return to its nursery, its yearning to revert to its origins, to its verbal homeland, we term poetry.

But, for the protagonist of the story, everything is left in flux, with memory and meaning grasped towards - but never fully accessed.

Childhood, adulthood & regression

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Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz, 1933-1934, photo: Czeskie Centrum / České centrum Praha

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Bruno Schulz w Drohobyczu, 1933-1934, fot. Czeskie Centrum / České centrum Praha

With Schulz himself claiming words go through a process of ‘regression’ to become authentic and meaningful, it is also important here to consider other ideas of regressive behaviour, and their influence on the story.

Interestingly, although many of Schulz’s stories focus on the perspectives of a young boy - Józef – both Loneliness and Undula take an adult perspective. Artur Sandauer’s Rzeczywistość Zdegradowana (Rzecz o Brunonie Schulzu) Reality Degraded (About Bruno Schulz) provides a clue as to why this occurs:

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In Schulz’s work [masochism] is more than an erotic perversion. When the father falls to his knees in front of the slayer of fantastic birds he breeds, the mundane Adela, it is not only a demonstration of a masochist. It is a bow from nineteenth-century poetry to the brutal reality of the new age; the bow of Schulz’s Arcadian childhood to the experiences of his manhood. The antithesis of the two worlds takes on a chronological shade here; his life is divided into two halves.

The state between childhood and adulthood is brought into sharp relief here, and linked to sexual perversity – which, of course, evokes Freudian thinking. But these ideas of sexual regression, and regression into the unconscious, had a far more expansive role to play in literature and culture at the time the story was published.

Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller claim that ‘human sexuality underwent radical transformations’ at the end of the late 19th- and early 20th-century, with an expansion of scientific and medical knowledge categorising sexual behaviour which ‘deviated from the perceived norm’. Schaffner and Weller point out, as Michel Foucault argued, that this ‘in fact facilitated [the] discursive proliferation’ of sexual deviance, which ‘would soon go on to populate (…) modernist literature’. Literature then had a symbiotic influence back on ‘sexological and psychoanalytic works’.

This was also relevant in Poland too, notes Ariko Kato:

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Freudian theory and the topic of the subconscious attracted a great deal of attention in Poland, as well as in other European countries. In all likelihood this was true in Galicia, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Freud began his theory in Vienna. Since the first decade of the twentieth century, Freudian theories, like the novels of [Leopold von] Sacher-Masoch, have been translated into Polish.

Kato also points out that the Encyclopaedia of Sexology, published in 1937, ‘described Schulz as one of the Polish writers influenced by Freudian theory, along with Witkacy and Karol Irzykowski.

But even earlier than 1937, these topics were also of interest – and, crucially, linked to Schulz. Khomych writes that an exhibition of Schulz’s artworks – masochistic in theme – was shown in 1921, organised by the Union of Oil Executives. Świt, the journal in which Undula appeared, rated it highly.

And more than that, Khomych adds, a separate review suggested Schulz’s art had been influenced by artists including Max Klinger, Félicien Rops and Francisco Goya.

The cultural impact of these topics on Schulz’s works is certainly evident in Undula. As I argued in another article for Culture.pl, it can be suggested that Schulz was influenced by sadomasochistic literature from the former Austro-Hungarian empire, including Freud (who was based in Vienna) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from Lviv). Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs seems to be implied in descriptions of Undula as ‘a great ursine beast wrapped in fur’, who commands that the protagonist ‘submit […and] return to the threshing floor’.

The ‘threshing floor’ itself, as Garrett notes, was used before the invention of threshing machines – ‘the process involved a flail, a type of whip used to thresh grain and goad livestock, as a weapon in battle, and lastly, at least since the time of Sacher-Masoch, as a piece of equipment in BDSM erotic role playing’. With all these roles overlapping, the threshing floor takes on a role as both an imaginative and real object within the plot, evoking not only the scientific and literary traditions of sadomasochism, but is also tied to Schulz’s own rural locale – and the deviance at the heart of the cultural heritage of Lviv and Galicia.

Self & other

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State Middle School in Drohobycz. Bruno Schulz gives handiwork classes, 1934, photo: Laski Diffusion/East News

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Państwowe Gimnazjum w Drohobyczu. Pisarz Bruno Schulz prowadzi zajęcia z prac ręcznych, 1934, fot. Laski Diffusion/East News

As Schaffner and Weller suggest, the growth of medical knowledge and the categorisation of sexual deviance in the modern era also served to ‘normalise’ perversity:

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[Freud] aims to maintain a clear distinction between normal and abnormal sexual activity; and yet his argument nonetheless weakens this very distinction. Perversion, then, becomes very much part of who we are, no longer something that can be assigned to some ‘other’ who has, for one reason or another, simply deviated from the path of healthy psychological development.

Undula, with its visceral and violent descriptions of the protagonist’s pain, and frequent references to sexual perversity – and pleasure – certainly invites readings around this topic, bringing perversity into the mainstream. But this goes further, too.

When the protagonist describes his discomfort, it appears to belong to both himself and to another. After Undula appears in her furs, and the protagonist recalls his childhood – an act of regression itself – he describes ‘monotonous pointless discussions with [his] pain’, who is rendered as a completely separate being: ‘like a small, shapeless embryo, with neither face, eyes, not mouth, and he was born to suffer’.

Pain here appears as the most extreme symbol of regression, an ‘embryo’. Dissociated from the protagonist, this characterisation of pain as a separate being allows the protagonist to be ‘released […] from [his] suffering’; but the idea of pain as ‘embryo[nic]’ also implies a sense of development and progression – a permanence of pain – with the pain-character thus described as staunchly involved with the protagonist too. The protagonist calls pain his ‘sidekick’, and is distressed by his ‘whing[ing] all night long’.

We could suggest there is an ego-id dichotomy here – but to avoid (an already rather lengthy) word count, it is important simply to note these tensions around the protagonist and his identity. Locked in his room, there is no escape – just as, evoking Freud, normal and abnormal behaviour can blur together in the self.

This is also in line with Sandauer’s original view that Schulz depicts one life ‘divided into two halves’ – and this is a theme we can also see in Loneliness:

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What do I look like? Sometimes I see myself in the mirror. An amazing, laughable, and pitiful thing! (…) Grief grips my heart when I see him so alien and indifferent.

There are no mirrors in Undula, but there is a similar sense of disjuncture in the self – with the protagonist both experiencing and being separated from his own suffering.

As Tim Mathews writes about Freud’s On Narcissism, ‘there is a masochistic pleasure to be derived from (…) being watched (…) in ways which imprison and immobilise the intrusive gazer’.

With the protagonist in the piece only able to watch and think about himself, this sadomasochistic spectacle serves to increase the claustrophobia further, with the (limited) action of the story only grounded in his body and memory.

Spectacle

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Bruno Schulz, "W ogrodzie / In the garden", 1920-1921, cliché-verre on paper, 10 x 15,1 cm, photo: National Museum of Art in Kraków

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But there is one part of the story which seems more energetic – and again, this is connected to the visual.

A few paragraphs in – and even before she appears ‘wrapped in fur’ – we first see the character of Undula. Glimpsed among a ‘purple procession of bacchants’; she appears ‘everywhere in the arms of dancers’ – and the protagonist follows her ‘smile’ until ‘the carnival’ spits him out ‘half-dead onto some empty street’. This is evocative of Schulz’s drawings, which are heavy on visual spectacle.

But to understand what this section might mean for the rest of the story, we first need to think about trash. Much of the critical scholarship on ‘lower’ things in Schulz hones in on tandeta – his ‘poetics of provincial trash and cast-offs’, as Gasyna puts it – which appears ‘simultaneously trash, cast-off, and fallen object and the subject of ontological exultation’.

Building on Sandauer, as well as Andreas Schönle’s Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schulz: The Apology of Tandeta, Gasyna suggests that tandeta, whilst seemingly ‘embarrassing or pitiful’, is made mythical and hence valuable through Schulz’s stories, which therefore work to elevate everyday life.

But what was the nature of that ‘fallen’ everyday life? Gasyna associates tandeta with the commercial realm, following Sandauer’s analysis that modernity, industrialism and 20th-century technology appeared ‘as evil’ and an ‘erotic perversion’ in Schulz, juxtaposed against the small-town life and age-old traditions of backwater Drohobycz.

So maybe mass culture is relevant here, too.

Whilst the description of Undula’s dancing is not necessarily one of modern, 20th-century life – Undula and the dancers engage in more folklorish, even primal behaviour, similar to references to similar scenes in Schulz’s other stories – but, as we have already seen, considering cultural influences on modern life and modern spectacle can open up new ways to read the story.

The scene is clearly associated with riotous, mass glee: Undula is seen ‘everywhere’, replicating ceaselessly among a world of other ceaseless, nameless performers, her name evoking their ‘swooning and careening’ movements.

And Undula’s name is another example of the network of cultural influences on Schulz’s story. As Khomych notes, the origin of Undula’s name is unknown, but it likely was influenced by other examples of Polish and European popular culture: Jerzy Ficowski suggests it is connected to ‘undyna’ or ‘ondyna’, a fairy who beguiled men and led them to pools of water; and comes from the Latin ‘unda’, meaning wave. Włodzimierz Bolecki also draws a parallel with Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella of a similar theme, Undine.

‘Deliciously swooning’ Undula

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Poster for the show Tango Miłości by Julian Krzewiński & Leon Idzikowski, photo: Polona National Library

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But I think we should consider this scene as reflecting wider changes in Polish and international culture and literature during the 20th century.

Allison Pease writes that the rise of the popular literary text, facilitated by modern technology, contributed to the spread of sexually explicit works – this world therefore became widely accessible and widely visible in the modern period, integrated with everyday life.

But the modern age was also one of more risqué forms of entertainment and spectacle across artistic forms, with the spread of mass culture, particularly cabaret, but also visual art, music and film, providing a platform for the breaking of boundaries and norms.

And the salaciousness of the modern age also made it to Poland. New, more daring cultural styles – cabaret, modern art, modern dance, including tango – were taking hold and upending tradition even before the country regained independence; and, after that point, cultural and social norms were regularly challenged.

As Beth Holmgren notes, the Polish cabaret was home to women who ‘broke social taboos with impunity, modelled fashionable new looks and behaviours’ – causing consternation among conservative circles; whilst new styles of music, like jazz and tango, were all the rage.

So whilst Undula doesn’t focus on the commercial realm to the same extent as some of Schulz’s other stories, including The Street of Crocodiles, Sandauer’s conflation between modern life and eroticism does have relevance in understanding the story.

In typically Schulz style, the timeframe and space of this memory has also slackened, with the procession, dancing and general frivolity appearing to take place both at one ‘time’ – a ‘gray, leaden, February dawn’ – and across ‘a handful of pale squandered nights’; both ‘everywhere’ and in one specific ‘carnival’. And yet, the past tense signals the protagonist’s detachment from the action. Undula only belongs to the protagonist’s lost life, with the event becoming a symbol of nostalgia, just as much as it is a vibrant celebration of bodily energy. Indeed, when the spectacle ends, the narrative is again sapped of dynamism, the street suddenly ‘empt[ied]’ of people, and the narrative returning to the exhausted grey monotony of the protagonist’s ‘half-dead’ and lonely life.

For (perhaps) one night only, Undula has taken the world by storm, exploding onto the scene with fervour and colour and action – but all too soon, the show is over. She might be exuberant, but her actions are also ephemeral, and hence highly fragile. The description of ‘squandered nights’ suggests time has been wasted in watching the spectacle – and the protagonist has no idea ‘how many days and nights have come and gone since’; all his energy rooted into the memory of Undula’s seductive swooning.

So, this scene might be frivolous, or even trashy, but it still has real magnetic pull for the viewer – much like any modern, cultural spectacle. This links to Gasyna’s argument that, across Schulz’s works, colours, memories and objects ‘linger in the texture woven by the narrative’, with a more liberating mythical time ‘prevail[ing] over the bourgeois time of social organization’. As a result, notes Gasyna:

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Time (…) becomes a muted servant to the dream logic.

‘Undula’, hidden & uncovered

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In the picture: Bruno Schulz Bruno, Drohobycz after 1920, photo: Collections of Museum of Literature in Warsaw/East News

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Na zdjęciu: Bruno Schulz Bruno, Drohobycz po 1920, fot. Zbiory Muzeum Literatury w Warszawie/East News

Gasyna suggests Schulz lived ‘a quiet life’ and ‘was involved in no scandals of note (...) [he] remained relatively neutral’ – but as we have seen, it could be argued that Schulz in fact tapped into a wealth of contemporary social and cultural influences in his works, which are particularly relevant in reading Undula.

But interestingly, the story was published under a pseudonym.

There are various suggestions behind this. As Khomych notes, Schulz once gave an interview to Józef Nacht, where he said that he would be unable to write a masochistic story as he ‘would be ashamed’. Khomych also suggests Schulz may have chosen to hide his identity under a pseudonym to try to protect his brother Izydor’s position in the oil industry.

In his article on the discovery of Undula for Culture.pl, Piotr Policht also explains that ‘eroticism in visual arts was more readily accepted than in literature at the time’ – however, he questions why Schulz decided to publish the story under a pseudonym, given his artistic works were already public.

But, for whatever reason, Schulz didn’t want to have the story associated with him, and never discussed the story later in life. As a result, the text went unknown, and was lost, for nearly 100 years.

But this didn’t mean Schulz stopped writing – and it didn’t mean he stopped engaging with contemporary, contentious and even indecent topics either, although references to perversity are certainly tamer in his later works. Maybe, now that Undula has been uncovered, we should turn to Schulz’s existing works – and see what hidden secrets they might also include.

Written by Juliette Bretan, January 2021

^{Sources: ‘Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology’, edited by A. Schaffner, S. Weller; ‘Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity’, Allison Pease; ‘(Un)masking Bruno Schulz’, edited by Dieter Bruyn, Kris van Heuckelom; ‘The Violent Muse’, edited by Rod Mengham and Jana Howlett; ‘Tandeta (Trash)’, George Gasyna; ‘Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schulz: The Apology of Tandeta’ by Andreas Schönle; 'Wokół wystawyw w Borysławiu. O dwóch debiutach Brunona Schulza' by Łesia Chomycz; 'Cabaret Liberation' by Beth Holmgren, Cosmopolitan Review; Małopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa}

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