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

Style, Summer, 1998 by Adam Zachary Newton

Gombrowicz, it seems, required foils and counter-faces to articulate the features of his own. To this degree, his criticism and his demeanor as public intellectual were of a piece with his art. Intersubjective space becomes an infinite regress of metonymy, the face that begets other faces as well as the face of human encounter that transposes into the face of reading. Schulz also sustains a consistency between life and art, but it is the more vulnerable, because fixed, consistency of metaphor. Faces don't transpose, but transubstantiate instead. Moreover, there is no face-to-face. The face is an object, a kind of pure passivity, held out by the fiction to be stared at (as to read Schulz's fiction, analogously, is typically the experience of languor and torpid assent, an almost post-coital feeling of abeyance)(21)

Even away from his fiction, when Schulz wrote correspondence to others, or answered Gombrowicz's open letter with one of his own, or produced critical essays on the subconscious or the mythologizing of reality or a Republic of Dreams, the face - as simply one metaphoric emblem among multiple others - is asked to do a different kind of work than in Gombrowicz. "A consecration by the ceremony of the spectacle" (Sartre, What is Literature 57): that is Sartre's description of the face-to-face instituted by reading, and it accurately conveys the religiosity of Schulz's prose, its air of nunc stans that put Gombrowicz so ill at ease.(22) If, thus, a parallel Sartrean exemplification to the one in Gombrowicz can be found for Schulz, it would be the aesthetic first principle spelled out in Sartre's essay "Why Write?": "Kant believes that the work of art first exists as fact and that it is then seen. Whereas it exists only if one looks at it and if it is first appeal, pure exigence to exist [. . .] The work of art is a value because it is an appeal" (57). Consider this last scene.

Scene Four: Europe; or the Space of Myth and History

During his lifetime [Napoleon's] face may have been the face of an individual. Certainly, those near him knew that smile, that clouding brow, the flashes the moment lit up on his face. To us, from a distance, individual traits increasingly dim and blur, they seem to give out a radiance from within, as of larger, more massive features carrying in themselves hundreds of lost and irrecoverable faces. In the act of dying, 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 62)

That is the conclusion of a critical essay, "The Formation of Legends," that Schulz wrote to commemorate the death of Jozef Pitsudski, Marshal of Poland. It treats greatness in an abstract sense, but also as the lasting effect personified by Napoleon Western Europe has had over its Central and Eastern European Other. The receding of individual features that permits a heightening of more massive ones, the merging, condensation, and heaping of Faces into Mask, the expense of Others that silhouettes a Self: the scandal of countenance here is the scandal of metaphor generally in Schulz, an equipoise of line and shadow.