Bruno Schulz i informe. Intermedialna nieaktualność

Abstract

The starting point of this paper was a research presentation at an academic conference about Schulz’s “antimodern modernism,” organized by Marek Tomaszewski, Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg, and Paweł Rodak in Paris on June 9th, 2017. At the crossroads of literature and art history, the author aims at showing how formlessness, as defined in 1929 by Georges Bataille, haunts Bruno Schulz’ fiction (in Polish “bezkształtność” or “bezformie”). His literary works have already been associated with various trends of the Central European modernism, but it should also be linked to the early development of the Informal Arts in this area, before it revolutionized post-war painting. Given Schulz’s taste for old printed books, and the nature of his own drawings and engravings (in the cliché-verre or glass print technique), a survey of all the traces of the idea of formlessness in his literary works leads to a conclusion that there is an anachronism between texts and images. Such a gap between universal form dissolution in fiction and its static graphic counterpart remains to be interpreted: how can Schulz’s works both look back to the nostalgic pre-war realities and anticipate post-war artistic, if not philosophical, tendencies?