William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz: A Comparative Study (review)

The "exceptional openness to universal perspectives" in the Polish writer Bruno Schulz's (1892–1942) "apocryphal Drohobycz" and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County invites this bold attempt "to map an area of correspondences between [these two] imaginative worlds" (introduction 7). Schulz is not a familiar figure in English-speaking countries because of the scarcity of translations of his works into English; he is best known in the West for The Street of Crocodiles (1934, trans. 1963).

"The Provincial and the Universal in the Works of William Faulkner and Bruno Schulz" is the first of this volume's four chapters. Starting with the ambivalent attitudes of each author toward the artist's condition, which "mirrored their ambivalent attitudes towards their own regions," Maszewski uses the language of Schulz to frame Faulkner's world in a new way: "Like Schulz's reader of 'the dynamic perspectives of distance' in 'The Republic of Dreams,' 'a good way to the south' on the map of his own country, Faulkner saw 'the ready contours of myth suspended over the site' " (37, 13).

In the chapter "Female Figures in Selected Works of Bruno Schulz and William Faulkner,"Maszewski brings Thomas Mann and Goethe into the discussion, as well as Schulz's drawings, for Schulz was an important visual artist, too. The discussion gets richer and richer. Marionettes come into play: "At home in Drohobycz, Galicia, and at home in Oxford, Mississippi, Pierrot wears a Protean costume answering the artist's need to pose the question 'Who am I' in relation to life and cultural heritage" (70).

The profundity of chapter 3, which opens with quotations from Derrida, Writing and Difference, and Schulz, "The Book," is suggested by its title: "Schulz's 'Geometry of Emptiness' and Faulkner's 'The Shape of a ' [sic]: A Matter of Correspondences." Yet the English is pellucid, the argument clear and forceful.

The final chapter, "Faulkner's and Schulz's Attitudes towards the Question of Literary Borrowings," shows the confluence of centuries of literary tradition in these two masters. Maszewski shows his own remarkable breadth as a scholar in the discussion of the reading of the two authors. An extensive bibliography of works in English and Polish concludes the book.

This brilliant study breaks new ground. It is a superb case study of the comparative approach. The concluding sentence suggests its treasures: "Faulkner's and Schulz's texts represent an immediate personal challenge to the readers' imagination, engaging them emotionally in an ongoing process of the creation of the matrix of signification, a field of dynamic interrelations governed by the forces of presence and absence" (180).

It is especially rewarding for the student of comparative literature to find a major author from a different tradition—in this case, Schulz, in the tradition of Central European literature—compared by a true literary scholar to another major author who is familiar to us. Faulkner's greatness is understood in new ways, and we are given a worthy introduction to Bruno Schulz, whose greatness a waits Western readers new to him.