Introduction
to Signs and Wonders in the Heavens
by James E. Starrs
This comes by way of the highly recommended anthology The Literary Cyclist [Breakaway Books], edited by Starrs. We haven't gotten in touch with him (yet) for his permission to use it...
Quite possibly Bruno Schulz was a bicyclist. But we may never be certain, for little is known of his life and career. Yet how else could he have envisioned bicycles and their riders wheeling across the starry skies? Only a bicyclist seeking liberation from the boredom of counting milepost markers would be likely to look to the skies for diversion. And who else would find the stars assembled in configurations depicting manned and moving bicycles? The fact in this fantasy is that, in November 1977, a bicyclist touring through Colorado wrote Bicycling magazine that he had seen a "biker constellation" which he continues to see "every clear night". Bruno Schulz,as you will see, would have been most gratified.
Reading the Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is like listening to the music of Gustav Mahler. Neither is a fully satisfying experience, for the prize in each is far greater than the audience can reach and, what is worse, so tantalizingly mystic.
However, unlike Mahler's, Bruno Schulz's life and works are not well known. The records reveal that he was born in Poland in 1892 in the Galacian city of Drogobych. Drogobych was his home, indeed his cloister, until he was killed in its streets in 1942 by a roving contingent of SS men. And it is Drogobych that we find lionized, transformed, and metamorphosed in The Street of Crocodiles.
Aside from the book's being a pastiche of life in the Drogobych of Schulz's imagination, it is also a kind of family outing to which no one but a family member would wish an invitation. Schulz's father is the cynosure of most attention, being patriarch and all that conveys. He is seen as a sick and even demented former proprietor of a dry goods store who is obsessed by everything from cockroaches, to electricity, to tailor's dummies, to his overflowing filing cabinets. Schulz's sister Adela, his brother and uncles, and even a wastrel puppy adopted into the family all play roles, to a greater or lesser degree.
But it is not the story line or the characters that make the reading of this book an entrancing experience. It is, on the contrary, the wondrously imaginative verbal creativity of Schulz. His imagery literally leaps out at you as you read its pages. He is a conjurer of language whose landscape is verbal and whose illumination is exploding images. His prose has been rightly appraised as "a running flame of amazing imagery."
Witness, for example, his description of a fragment of a garden in a tawdry suburban area of Drogobych:
Overlooked by the light of day, weeds and wild flowers of all kinds luxuriated quietly, glad of the interval from dreams beyond the margin of time on the borders of an endless day. An enormous sunflower, lifted on a powerful stem and suffering from hypertrophy, clad in the yellow mourning of the last sorrowful days of its life, bent under the weight of its monstrous girth. But the naive, suburban bluebells and unpretentious dimity flowers stood helpless in their starched pink and white shifts, indifferent to the sunflower's tragedy.
The excerpt that follows is a segment of the book's concluding chapter, entitled 'The Comet'. The earlier parts of this chapter depict the glorious transformation of Drogobych from the cruelty of winter to the sweet meats of spring. Spring fosters a reckless inventiveness in Schulz's father that had long lain dormant. He establishes a home laboratory for experimentaiton with electrical circuitry. And poor but willing Uncle Edward gains a new vision as his test animal but loses his life in the bargain. With man and nature burgeoning bouteously, Schulz joins the two in a fabled apotheosis of the bicycle.
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