Schulz poza czasem

Abstract

Schulz did not dwell in history. He lived apart from society, limiting his social contacts and giving them ritual forms. Generations of Polish Schulz scholars have seen him predominantly as an artist, an exceptional, unique writer, a “master of the Polish language,” while the Jewish diaspora has been approaching him in a very different way, mainly as a “symbol of the Holocaust and the loss that it caused.” These conflicting points of view point to a gap between art (literature) and history (biography). Schulz brought both domains together. He attempted to find and adopt a form of living in history and art that would let him keep at least some independence from the former. He believed that in writing or drawing it was possible to start “from oneself.” His artistic and literary works reveal a continuous endeavor to escape from history, if only in art. Was that possible at all? Can an artist escape from history, resist the power of temporality? The present essay is an attempt to address these questions. As a draughtsman, Schulz can hardly be placed in his epoch: he neither belongs to it, nor can be reduced to its norms. Except for his commissioned works, his oeuvre exists out of time, out of the artistic tradition, in three different genres: self-portrait, illustration, and compulsive drawing. It is characteristic that almost all his works from the third group are sketches. They seem to have no history, existing out of time and beyond the received conventions. Schulz’s sketch is a graphic gesture rather than an artistic activity. Whenever he tooka pen and a sheet of paper, he was everywhere and nowhere, always and never; out of time, imprisoned only in his present emotion. What is art for then? Under such circumstances, the major artistic controversies of the epoch seem irrelevant because something else is at stake. Schulz wanted to abolish the boundary between the draughtsman and the drawn, disappear in the act of creation, make that fact a fact of life. Does the literary work of the draughtsman follow the same principle? The final part of the essay is an argument for this hypothesis.