The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance

Flight from Flight, and Flight from Border: Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary and A Kind of Testament and Essays and Short Fiction by Bruno Schulz

2 Flight from Flight, and Flight from Border Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary and A Kind of Testament and Essays and Short Fiction by Bruno Schulz When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, blind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam. From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Lost but European Face and obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side: let us imagine human countenance as itself such a page, its recto and verso 96 two figures of authorial myth. On either side of that page, let the visages be those of Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), two colossi of minor modernism who turned the page of the face over and over again in their writing. Schulz, in a recently discovered letter, even went so far as to make visage seem like the wellspring of fiction. “To translate a countenance into words,” he wrote, “to express it entirely, to exhaust the world that it contains—this is what attracts me: a human face as the starting point of a novel!”1 Schulz and Gombrowicz share something else in common with the Calvino epigraph above—a fascination with face-off. Duels between high and low: front parlor and kitchen: a lavish, exterior façade of alabaster, serpentine , coral, and a hidden armature of rusting metal, rotten beams, soot, sackcloth beneath: both authors found such polarity endlessly apropos. When Calvino’s Moriana says “face,” it specifies not a person but a place. What can be neither separated nor made to look at each other are the twin visages of the city beyond the mountain pass, Janus faces of the same urbs. The city as human countenance happens to be a conceit Schulz anticipated by half a century, in an essay written to commemorate the death of Jozef Pi£sudski, Marshal of Poland during the interwar republic. “In the act of dying,” Schulz wrote, “merging with eternity, that face flickers with memories, roams through a series of faces, ever paler, more condensed, until out of the heaping of those faces there settles on it at last, and hardens into its final mask, the countenance of Poland—forever” (Letters and Drawings, 62). Even more than metropolis , nation is the massing or outcrop of physiognomy. Calvino’s simple point is a lesson in perspective. Walk semicircularly , and Moriana will appear altogether different, self-opposite. But if we tilt it in the direction of Polish literary modernism and Poland under the shadow of German occupation, let us imagine both Schulz and Gombrowicz taking such a walk around their common homeland. Each, after his own fashion, belongs to Poland at a near distance. Gombrowicz founds his belonging from the vantage of a different hemisphere , securing his point d’appui through a lucky escape that becomes a twenty-three year exile in Argentina, where he remains “lost but European ” (A Kind of Testament, 84). Fatefully circumscribed by the southeastern provincial town off the north slope of the Carpathians in which he was born and spent nearly the whole of his fifty years, Schultz founds belonging by imaginatively redrawing the national map as a “republic of dreams.” The one, in permanent existential flight from flight; the other, in tenaciously mythopoeic flight from border. Flight from Flight, and Flight from Border 97 Moving eastward and south from Sebald’s and Appelfeld’s western Europe to these Polish provinces of literary...