"Nothing but face" - "To hell with philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the scandal of human countenance

Style, Summer, 1998 by Adam Zachary Newton

The pulse of Schulz's fiction oscillates between such fadings or diminishings, and corresponding pullulations of "immoderate fertility," as in the story "Pan":

It was the face of a tramp or a drunkard. A tuft of filthy hair bristled over his broad forehead rounded like a stone washed by a stream. That forehead was now creased into deep furrows. I did not know whether it was the pain. The burning heat of the sun, or that superhuman effort that had eaten into his face and stretched those features near to cracking. His dark eyes bored into me with a fixedness of supreme despair or suffering. He both looked at me and did not, he saw me and did not see. His eyes were like bursting shells, strained in a transport of pain or the wild delights of inspiration. (Complete Fiction 47)

The face in Schulz folds in on its own metaphoricity, producing exquisite similes that, in John Updike's trenchant description from his introduction to the Penguin edition of Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, evince both the prose's strenuous artifice and its harrowing effect (Updike xiii-xiv). The faces are their metaphors, wholly figural productions of language. There, are, thus (as there must be in Gombrowicz), neither counterfaces nor mugs. "It is part of my existence," says a character in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, "to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along" (Complete Fiction 309),(18) a fate shared by the Schulzian face as well. The counterpart in Schulz to Gombrowicz's train compartment scene might therefore be this:

For a time I had the company of a man in a ragged railwayman's uniform - silent, engrossed in his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Later even he disappeared, having slipped out unobserved at some stop. He left behind him the mark of his body in the straw that lay on the floor, and a shabby black suitcase he had forgotten. (Complete Fiction 242)

Only in the story "Tailor's Dummies" from Cinnamon Shops, where Schulz lays claim to his most extravagant of pathetic fallacies, does he approximate Gombrowicz's notion of face as something imposed rather than simply possessed, faces or expressions that "imprison" or coerce the simulacra (waxwork figures, dummies) that wear them, but the seeming cruelty here is merely the special case of a general principle: "a certain monism of the life substance" for which "specific objects are nothing more than mask. The life of the substance consists in the assuming and consuming of numberless masks. The migration of forms is the essence of life" (Letters 113).

How Schulz might have extended or complicated such mythopoesis is a question that remains fixed in the grimace imposed upon it by a Gestapo officer's bullet in 1942.(19) Schulz's death, as Gombrowicz coldly notes, licenses a different kind of facing - something Gombrowicz had already prefigured during Schulz's lifetime, when he drew him out in an exchange of open letters, exposing his face in public.(20)