‘The existence of this book is a pledge that the tangled, mute masses of things unformulated within us may yet emerge to the surface miraculously distilled’
With the technical language of an ecologist, whose main passion lies in the conservation of memory, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles examines the mythopoeic infrastructure of the mind, preserving the surrealism of childhood that he, as an art teacher, would have been surrounded by. The eponymous 1934 collection the story is a part of, originally titled Cinnamon Shops, is the most famous example of a nostalgic style described by Isaac Bashevis Singer as somewhere between Kafka and Proust.
Essentially plotless, the stories in the collection explore an unnamed narrator and his relationship with the fantastical world that surrounds him. Made up of the self-described ‘tangled, mute masses of things unformulated’ within Schulz, they are esoteric and absurd in the way only half-formed imaginings of the world can be; ‘Miraculously distilled’, they somehow take us back to the early days of our lives, before words had meaning, and when images ruled our minds.
The author’s ability to conceive of something as impreservable as childhood is mostly likely a product of his Proust-like reclusion. A hermit whose popularity as a novelist depressed him, Schulz seemed to require isolation for creativity, demanding from himself, just as from the reader, a complete immersion in the dark, viscous, cloak of nostalgia as a condition for artistic sensitivity: ‘Solitude is the catalyst that brings reality to fermentation, to the precipitating out of figures and colours’.
A product of such nostalgia, Schulz’s novel is as lurid as our earliest memories. His backdrops, formed of empty streets and spider-webbed cornices, and furnished with zoomorphic half-men, reveal the images at the heart of his own being. Like ‘filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallises’, these images are fantastical: ‘Myth stalks the streets, turning ragamuffins into enchanted soothsayers and a shop-keeper into a prophet or goblin’. In Schulz’s ‘fermented world’, whose nauseating descriptions are as fearful as they are wondrous, the adequately immersed reader will feel themselves in a similarly fantastical pickle.
Seemingly unhardened by reality, Schulz delves deeper into this kidology. His intoxicating narrative follows a defamiliarized world of animals that resemble people, and people that resemble animals, so that the reader is never really sure where they stand. Normal events are twisted and unrecognisable, a midnight walk in the forgotten quarters of the city leaves you lost in a labyrinth of ‘reflected streets, streets that are doubles, make-believe streets’. His topographical playfulness is a constant theme: For a period in The Street of Crocodiles’s narrator’s infancy his father goes missing, ‘disappearing so far into a distant corner of the house’ that they are ‘unable to locate him’. Schulz’s synesthetic descriptions of his narrator’s world, blending colour, geography and feeling, are dream-like. Anything is possible, and yet he holds a small grip on reality. It is vertiginous, like that half-state between sleep and consciousness and you feel you are just a step away from going too far, losing your grip, and falling back into infancy, only jolting upright as you finish your page. For Schulz, the line between the imagined world and the real world is blurry and tense; the line between the reader and the narrator is equally so. It can sometimes happen, he writes, that ‘in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month.’
As well as being strange, Schulz’ world is also comic. In his plotless realm, where one action never follows another, a year might ‘grow a thirteenth freak month’, you may suddenly find yourself a polydactyl, and your father can become a bird. Over dinner one evening, it is entirely possible that he might ‘forget himself, rise from his chair at the table, wave his arms as though they were wings, and emit a long-drawn-out bird’s call while his eyes mist over’. In this case (as the ever-unsurprised narrator finds out), it is essential not to deprive him of the bird flock he has been secretly raising in his shed. Do not under any circumstances open his windows, lest he ‘try to lift himself into the air with his feathered friends’ and most importantly, try to remain calm lest you too are compelled to join him. Effervescing with oddity, Schulz’s stories are full of absurd anecdotes. More than purely aesthetic, they reveal to us what old men did in their sheds in 1934, before World War Two models entered the market.
Whilst the imagined world is for Schulz a comforting one, a soupy blend of his mind’s own darkly glittering fabric, the real-world’s representation is Kafkaesque. Its allusion is tinged with a tangible dread that reflects a paranoia, a fear of fame, and perhaps most importantly a growing political angst. Outside the narrator’s house, the world of ‘double-streets’ and deception is redolent of an obscure anxiety; framed faintly by its grim historical context, it seems an affront on the world of the sensitive individual. This unease is perceptible in Schulz’s own hermetic lifestyle and renders his writing more understandable, and moving.
In 1942 on the streets’ of Drogobych, on a day now known as ‘Black Thursday’, the local SS and Gestapo shot 150 jews dead. Amongst them was a local art teacher called Bruno Schulz, who, despite the best efforts of his literary peers was unable to get his hands on false papers. He was carried under the cover of darkness to a local jewish cemetery, where he was buried alone, silently, by his friend. Not a trace of the cemetery remains and almost all his unpublished work was lost. Thus was the bookish imagination of Poland’s leading interwar writer closed forever, leaving The Street of Crocodiles as one of his most important contributions.
The Street of Crocodiles is a work that celebrates the strange beauty of life, the surreality of perception, and is an ode to sensitivity. Its viscous prose and lingering anxiety make it enduringly emotive and its imagistic pantomime has equally stood the test of time. If you can get your beak in it, it’ll definitely be worth the read.
Leon Friedman
Keeping up with Yesterday 
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