To Eugene Avrutin, friend and fellow travèler along the pathways of the provinces. An earlier version of this article was workshopped at the conference “The Micropolitics of Small-Town Life in Eastern Europe,” organized by Avrutin and Yvonne Kleinmann, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 5-6, 2013. The epigraph is from Schulz, Bruno, “The Republic of Dreams,” in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, trans. Wieniewska, Celina (New York, 2008), 316 Google Scholar.

1 See Dorota Glowacka's interview with Ficowski, Jerzy, “Interview in Warsaw, July 3, 1993,” in Czeslaw Z. Prokopczyk, ed., Bruno Schulz: New Documents and Interpretations (New York, 1999), 55–57;Google Scholar and Jerzy Ficowski, “W oczekiwaniu na Mesjasza: Czy w archiwum KGB znajduja. si? rękopisy Brunona Schulza?,” Polityka, no. 46, November 19, 1992, 8. See also Brian R. Banks, Muse and Messiah: The Life, Imagination, and Legacy of Bruno Schulz (18921942) (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 2006), 166-71; and Ficowski, Jerzy, Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice: Bruno Schulz ijego mitologia, rev. ed. (Kraków, 1967;Google Scholar Sejny, 2002); in English as Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait, trans. Theodosia Robertson (New York, 2003).

2 In 2009, the Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust Art organized an exhibition devoted to the murals, “Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting under Coercion.” See the curatorial note, dated February 17, 2009, at http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/pressroom/pressreleases/pr_details.asp?cid=114 (last accessed July 30,2015). For a more detailed discussion of the “Schulz affair,” see also Malgorzata Kitowska-Lysiak, Schulzowskie marginalia (Lublin, 2007), 143-62. Jerzy Jarzębski is perhaps the first critic to refer to Felix Landau as Schulz's “protector” (protektor), in Jerzy Jarze>ski, Schulz (Wroclaw, 1999), 81-87.

3 Unlike nearly all of his Polish literary colleagues, it should be added. For discussions of Schulz's contacts and “entanglements,” literary and romantic, see Anders, Jaroslaw, Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose (New Haven, 2009), 5–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 On the other hand, in 1938 he did accept the Golden Laurel from the Polish Literature Association (Polska Akademia Literatury). He also penned a study about the cult of personality of Marshal Józef Pilsudski, along with two reviews of works of poetry and prose about Pilsudski in the wake of the marshal's death. See Bolecki, W., Jarzębski, J., and Rosiek, S., eds., Stownik szulcowski (Gdansk, 2003), 263–64;Google Scholar and Anessi, Thomas, “The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center,” in Bruyn, Dieter De and Heuckelom, Kris Van, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz: New Combinations, Further Fragmentations, Ultimate Reintegrations (Amsterdam, 2009), 401,411-15.Google Scholar

5 Thomas Anessi offers the interesting counterpoint that Schulz's contacts and occasional collaboration with members of the avant-garde Skamander group in Warsaw (Julian Tuwim in particular) constituted a relationship of convenience that gave him access to publication venues in Warsaw-based journals. See Anessi, “The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center,” 399-406. However, Schulz was never formally linked with Skamander. Vogel was the primary sounding board for Schulz's early ideas, especially on the demiurgic aspect of the creative act. See Ficowski, Jerzy, ed., Bruno Schulz: Ksiega listow (Kraków, 1975), 8–9,169-70;Google Scholar Pawlowska-Jqdrzyk, Brygida, Sens i chaos w grotesce literackiej: Od “Paluby” do “Kosmosu” (Kraków, 2002), 102;Google Scholar and Bolecki, Jarzębski, and Rosiek, eds., Slownik szulcowski, 404. On the other hand, unlike Vogel he did not join the Yiddishist movement then gaining popularity, especially in eastern Poland (the former Pale of Settlement). See Karen Underhill, “Ecstasy and Heresy: Martin Buber, Bruno Schulz, and Jewish Modernity,” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 31.

6 Ficowski, ed., Bruno Schulz: Księga listów, 10-13. It is worth noting that the Jewish community—when invoked at all—is in no way constructed as an Other in his narratives, which were written in Polish and intended for a contemporary Polish readership. Schulz was representing his own, “domestic” community, even though Jerzy Ficowski is emphatic that the Schulzes were assimilated and that he spoke Polish at home. Second, this community and its social realities would have been immediately recognizable to non-Jewish Polish readers of Schulz's generation. This does not mean it would have been properly understood or even accepted but simply that the depictions do not call for extensive ethnographic explication.

7 Andrea Mayer-Fraatz, “Exposing and Concealing Jewish Origin: Schulz and Lesmian,” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 56-59.

8 Of all the attempts to synthesize this subject position, Michal Pawel Markowski's is particularly convincing. Markowski moves the nexus of perfection and perfectionment from the side of recuperating fallen matter to that of its potentiality (or becoming). He thus overcomes a chief impasse in Schulz criticism: namely, the problem of classifying human labor, including the artistic. In Markowski's reading, the second-hand material (for instance, entities that can be labeled “tandeta” [trash] or “Bylejakość” [mediocrity]) of which there is a surfeit in the Schulzian world is reclaimed as a subject of and for myth. No scrap or fragment is wasted in this imaginarium; all are essential. The repertory of rejects is simultaneously a vast reservoir of possible shapes (“rezerwuar mozliwych ksztaltow“), while reality as such is always insufficient, so that myth represents a longed-for semiotic supplement. See Markowski, Michal Pawel, Powszechna rozwiqzlosc: Schulz, egzystencja, literatura (Kraków, 2012), esp. 111–13; 185-86.Google Scholar

9 While it is the case that the majority of these interventions are in Polish, especially the first phase of explications published in the wake of Ficowski's seminal research (Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice), there are a number of more recent critical texts to be recommended in English. See the curated online archive at www.brunoschulz.org/biblioschulz. html (last accessed September 8,2015).

10 See also Markowski, Powszechna rozwiqzlośó.

11 See Jarzębski's discussion in “Życie” (Life), chap. 1 in his Schulz, of the relatively delayed arrival of new capital—thanks to the discovery of oil in nearby Boryslaw, the “Galician Klondike,” in the 1880s—and attendant ideas of new metropolitan modernity (the boom years corresponding to the first two decades of the twentieth century).

12 Sandauer, Artur, “Rzeczywistość zdegradowana (Rzecz o Brunonie Schulzu),“ in Schulz, Bruno, Sklepy cynamonowe: Sanatorium pod klepsydrq (Kraków, 1957), 26–27.Google Scholar The text first appeared in the official state-run journal Przegląd Kulturalny, no. 31 (1956): 6-7, 9.

13 Sandauer, “Rzeczywistość zdegradowana,” 26.

14 For a fuller characterization, see Bolecki, Jarzebski, and Rosiek, eds., Siownik szulcowski, 382.

15 See Ficowski, “Czas Schulzowski, czyli mityczna droga do wolności,” chap. 2 in Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice.

16 This stipulation of authorial marginality, a mainstay of Schulz criticism that largely determined the “horizon of writing and thinking” of the early exegetes, made its first appearance in Sandauer's oft-cited “Rzeczywistość zdegradowana.” See Bolecki, Jarzebski, and Rosiek, eds., Shwnik szulcowski, 334.

17 See John Knechtel, ed., Alphabet City, vol. 11, Trash (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), esp. the introduction.

18 See David A. Goldfarb's discussion of the term in his introduction to Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, xvi.

19 Bylejakość could be translated as “tawdriness” or “mediocrity,” though both lack the performative “bite” of the original. See also Markowski's discussion of this primarily technical term's formal registers in Powszechna rozwiqzlosc, 88-90. Trash is here opposed to kitsch, which is typically far more ironic in its deployment (the distance between utterance and intent more insistently policed than it is in Schulz). It constitutes a strategy of rhetoric, not mythopoeia, and engages primarily with simulacrum rather than the recuperation of second-handedness. See Calinescu, Matei, “Kitsch,” chap. 4 in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, 1987).Google Scholar

20 Schönle, Andreas, “Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schulz: The Apology of Tandeta,“ Polish Review 36, no. 2 (1991): 130.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 132.

22 In this respect, I side with Markowski's findings in his Powszechna rozwiqzlosc with regard to the foundational status (the potentiality) of matter, though my own treatment takes this problem in a different direction. On the immanent tension between the performative and enunciatory aspects of narratological tactics of resistance, see Joseph Valente, “Between Resistance and Complicity: Metro-Colonial Tactics in Joyce's Dubliners,“ in “Michel de Certeau and Narrative Tactics,” ed. Richard Pearce, special issue, Narrative 6, no. 3 (October 1998): esp. 325-29.

23 Dieter De Bruyn, “'The Lie Always Rises to the Surface Like Oil': Toward a Metafictional Reading of Karol Irzykowski's Paluba and Bruno Schulz's Fiction,” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 128.

24 Political action, whether local or “glocal” (or effected at some intersection of the two), has in the last two decades been increasingly described as performative and aligned with practices or technologies of the self. Performativity renders readily transparent both the “effect of [institutional, ideological] power” on bodies and the contours of subjectivity in activist world (re)making. Micropolitical resistance, then, can take place as much on the level of discourse as the level of the body. See, for example, Jessica J. Kulynych, “Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity 30, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 330-32; cf. Valente, “Between Resistance and Complicity.“

25 Michel Foucault, “Powers and Strategies,” in his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 142.

26 See again Kulynych, “Performing Politics.“

27 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1988), xxiii.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., xiv, xxiv. See Foucault's 1978 essay “Governmentality,” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works ofFoucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York, 2003), 239-45.

29 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxiv.

30 Witold Gombrowicz, Kosmos (Paris, 1965; Kraków, 2000). The narrative unfolds perhaps during the very summer when Schulz and Gombrowicz both spent time in the Tatras—1926—and could easily have run across each other (though they did not formally meet until 1934). Zakopane—the setting—is a small town with only one main street even today, and its artistic “zone” in the 1920s and ‘30s was smaller still. See also Banks, Muse and Messiah, 286.

31 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv. See, for example, Leo's categorical rejection of the grand narrative of humanist progress, central to the quest for a “rational organization of society.” Gombrowicz, Kosmos, 36-38,46-47.

32 Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos (Paris, 1971), 165-68; quoted in de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxiv. De Certeau omits to mention that one of Leo's most important recuperative practices of the self involves rituals of semi-public masturbation in front of family and friends—surely a type of pollution. See Gombrowicz, Kosmos, 146-48.

33 In Leo's case, the paradigmatic activity consists of creating small balls out of pieces of bread and lining them up in rows, but he also “enjoys” (assimilates) ashtrays, spoons, and similar everyday items, as well as food of all kinds. See Gombrowicz, Kosmos, 18-19, 34-35, and esp. 20-21.

34 Kosnoski, Jason Evan, “Rambling as Resistance: Frederick Law Olmsted, Michel de Certeau, and the Micropolitics of Walking in the City,” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 3, no. 2 (2010): 115.Google Scholar

35 See Foucault, Michel, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982, ed. Gros, Frederic, trans. Burchell, Graham (New York, 2005), 340–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 2.

37 On the potentiality of the provinces or borderlands for new configurations of power relations, see, for example, Saldivar, Jose David, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, 1997), 17–24.Google Scholar

38 Michal Pawel Markowski, “Text and Theater: The Ironic Imagination of Bruno Schulz,” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 447. On the forces, directions, and motivations of “movement” (ruch) in Schulz's prose, as a correlative of the logic of origins, see Panas, Wladyslaw, Ksiega blasku: Traktat o kabale w prozie Brunona Schulza (Lublin, 1997), esp. 71–75.Google Scholar

39 Markowski, “Text and Theater,” 443-44.

40 Ibid., 445.

41 See ibid., 447-49. Here the critic elaborates a clever postmodern solution to the “radical ambivalence of [Schulzian] reality” through a valorization of the paradoxical force of irony—that is, through celebrating the condition of “indeterminatedness” as the only reality of which we (readers and subjects) can truly be certain.

42 Schulz, Bruno, The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Wieniewska, Celina (New York, 1977), 109.Google Scholar

43 Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), at http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm (last accessed October 7,2014 ; no longer available).

44 It is worth mentioning that one of Schulz's persistent anxieties was impotence and castration—here sublimated into an unease about fulfilment and finitude. See Markowski, Michal Pawel, Polska literatura nowoczesna: Lesmian, Schulz, Witkacy (Kraków, 2007), 255–56.Google Scholar Also of note is Markowski's tracing of Schulz's formulations of ecstatic subjectivity (tozsamosc ekstatyczna). Ibid., 238-39.

45 See Banks's discussion in Muse and Messiah, 18-20. Dorota Glowacka diagnoses this textual condition as a desire to overwrite order and, abolishing the myth of the return (toward a denouement, for example), constantly to escape being captured by form; consequently, the texts seem to “overwrite themselves and spill into the wild gardens of untamed creativity.” This description, however, mainly reproduces the effect of Schulz's fiction, employing his lexicon without explicating these modalities. See Glowacka, Dorota, “Sublime Trash and the Simulacrum: Bruno Schulz in the Postmodern Neighborhood,” in Prokopczyk, Czeslaw Z., ed., Bruno Schulz: New Documents and Interpretations (New York, 1999), 91.Google Scholar

46 Generally, these objects fall under the rubric of fetishized subjects of cathexis, the Schulzian “shapely foot,” most often affiliated with Adele the maid, being one such tenacious icon. (The modern origin of this image is, of course, the Galician writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 Venus in Furs, a text with which Schulz was well acquainted.)

47 Or, rather, the town and its topographies have emerged as a cultural touchstone for discourses about the Polish borderlands principally as a lieu de memoire, “Drohobycz“ in the meanwhile having been transformed by the events of World War II into another entity altogether, though one bearing the same name (flporo6Mq in Ukrainian).

48 Alfred Sproede, “Bruno Schulz: Between Avant-Garde and Hasidic Redemption,“ in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 476-78.

49 Bialasiewicz, Luiza, “Back to Galicia Felix?,” in Magosci, Paul Robert and Hann, Christopher M., eds., Galicia: A Multicultured Land (Toronto, 2005), 160–84.Google Scholar

50 Lukowski, Jerzy and Zawadzki, Hubert, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 204–8;Google Scholar Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, esp. the introduction and section 1.

51 See Dieter De Bruyn and Kris Van Heuckelom, “Introduction: Seven Decades of Schulzology,” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)maskingBruno Schulz, 9-17.

52 Ibid., 11-13. This may be partially explained by the fact that the town and region had meanwhile passed to Soviet control and as such was inaccessible to all but the most dogged of researchers.

53 Ibid., 18.

54 Anessi, “The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center,” 415. Some critics contend that the lost work The Messiah was planned at least in part as a spiritual exploration of this era from a Kabbalist perspective.

55 Borges, Jorge Luis, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York, 1964), 18.Google Scholar

56 A fellow luminary on interwar Poland's relatively intimate vanguard scene, the futurist, Marxist, constructivist poet Jasienski was executed (ostensibly for a personal transgression—a romantic entanglement with a top Soviet official's wife) as part of a Stalinist purge of Polish heretics in Moscow in September 1938.

57 Jasieński, Bruno, “To the Polish Nation: A Manifesto Concerning the Immediate Futurization of Life,” in Benson, Timothy O. and Forgács, Fiva, eds., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 187.Google Scholar On the discourse of socio-spatial transformation in the new national spaces of post-Versailles east central Europe, see, for example, Szczerski, Andrzej, Modernizacje: Sztuka i architektura w nowych państwach Europy Srodkowo-wschodniej, 1918-1939 (Lodz, 2010), 6–12 Google Scholar.

58 Schulz, Bruno, “An Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz,” in Zagajewski, Adam, ed., Polish Writers on Writing (San Antonio, 2007), 34.Google Scholar

59 Goldfarb, introduction to Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, xxi; and Glowacka, “Sublime Trash and the Simulacrum,” 96,114. See also Banks, Muse and Messiah, 70; Underbill, “Ecstasy and Heresy“; S. J. Żurek, “As One Kabbalist to Another… On Arnold Slucki's Mystical Visions of the World in the Poem ‘Bruno Schulz,'” in De Bruyn and Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz, 67-82; and Sproede, “Bruno Schulz: Between Avant-Garde and Hasidic Redemption.” The most oft-cited Polish-language treatment of Schulz's engagement with the Kabbalah is Panas's groundbreaking Ksiega blasku.

60 Banks, Muse and Messiah, 93; Magosci, Paul Robert and Hann, Christopher M., eds., Galicia: A Multicultured Land (Toronto, 2005), 5–7.Google Scholar It is the provinces, after all. Doors are frequently left unlocked or, more magic-realistically, can be found yielding to a gentle push or “opening” by themselves, as in the story “Visitation.” Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 36.

61 Schulz, “An Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz,” 33.

62 Giowacka makes the point that in Schulz, space curves “around consciousness.“ Giowacka, “Sublime Trash and the Simulacrum,” 88. Here Schulz's program coincides with the third and most complex kind of dreams described in Sigmund Freud's “On Dreams“— the type freighted with symbolic values and hence most useful for demarcating the crucial latent content and, simultaneously, or consequently, the zone of greatest resistance on the analysand's part. See Freud, Sigmund, “On Dreams,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Gay, Peter (New York, 1989), 146–48.Google Scholar

63 Freud, “On Dreams,” 146.

64 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 105-6.

65 But then, in those terms, it is not paradoxical at all, as Freud considered the domestic structure to be modern society's greatest storehouse of repression and “approved“ violence. Home, by definition, constitutes a terrifying space.

66 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 36-38.

67 See Banks's discussion of Schulz's games with temporality in Muse and Messiah, 69-80. For a detailed discussion of the binary of supplement and remainder (trace) in The Street of Crocodiles, cf. Stala, Krzysztof, On the Margins of Reality: The Paradoxes of Representation in Bruno Schulz's Fiction (Stockholm, 1993), 67–76.Google Scholar

68 On the channels through which life force (libidinal energy) becomes refocused on sexual problems, see Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Gay, 240-93; for a discussion of libidinal energy becoming aimed at the objects of one's desire (i.e., gaining a narcissistic edge), see Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in ibid., 753-54.

69 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 100-106.

70 Ibid., 109. This is a consumerist, erotic excitation, the one constituting sublimation of the other, at least in classic psychoanalytic theory. See Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 735-42.

71 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 105,109.

72 Ibid., 28.

73 Ibid., 110.

74 Ibid., 25.

75 Banks, Muse and Messiah, 28. Stala even asserts that in Schulz, “the whole of reality is undermined by ‘the dark foundation of my ths'“—a compelling though imprecise image. See Stala, On the Margins of Reality, 74-75.

76 Banks, Muse and Messiah, 100.

77 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 26,28-29.

78 Ibid., 29.

79 Giowacka, “Sublime Trash and the Simulacrum,” 84-89.

80 Freud explains the functioning of the mechanisms of repression in several texts. “On Dreams” is the most condensed and accessible of these.

81 Less discreetly, order is signified by the slipper on her “dainty” foot, in a classic invocation of fetishistic power and investment. See Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 53 and esp. 63, where Adela's slipper “trembled” and “shone like a serpent's tongue,” causing Father, then deep in meditation on form and matter to halt and suddenly “step forward like an automaton … and [fall] to his knees” in an act of supplication straight out of Sacher- Masoch's iconography.

82 Ibid., 47, 50,115-16.

83 Ibid., 50.

84 Bruno Schulz, “Mityzacja Rzeczywistośći,” Studio, nos. 3-4 (1936): 3-4.

85 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 51-70. See Panas, “Stworzenie swiata, czyli cimcum,“ chap. 1 in Ksiega blasku.

86 See also Markowski, Powszechna rozwiqzlosc, 111-12.

87 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 57.

88 Ibid., 59.

89 Ibid., 61.

90 Ibid., 75.

91 Ibid.

92 Freud speaks of the unconscious as a system ruled over and systematized by a recognizable— and representational—linguistic system, though he also defines it as a structure that is apart, walled off from the language systems of representation of consciousness (and in distinction to the preconscious). See Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Gay, 576-79.

93 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 74.

94 Franz Kafka, “A Little Fable,” East of the Web: Short Stories, at www.eastoftheweb. com/short-stories/UBooks/LittFabl.shtml (last accessed August 15, 2015). The full text is as follows: “'Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.’ ‘You only need to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up.“

95 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 74.

96 Ibid., 61.

97 Ibid., 62.

98 Markowski, Polska literatura nowoczesna, 196. Goldfarb makes the compelling argument that Schulz's mythopoeic reinscription or “reassembly” of reality from fragments of a “forgotten world“—a form of bricolage—anticipates one of the most productive strategies of European writing in the wake of the Holocaust (that is, postmemory work). Goldfarb, introduction to Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, xxi.

99 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 62.

100 Ibid., 106.

101 This is less an echo, actually, than a prophecy: initiated around the period Crocodiles was written (193133), Nazi social engineering combined two main discourses. The first sought to create in Germans a sense of racial overlordship; the second, to reify in racial undesirables an internalized inferiority. Form, then, would be merely a shell to be filled with content as necessary. This content could be aesthetic in character—it is precisely that for Father-demiurge—but it could also be social or ideological. On the potential of bricolage as a practice of everyday life, see de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xviii-xxi.

102 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 65.

103 Ibid., 70. See Louis Althusser's typology of the repressive functions of ideological state apparatuses, which conceal the contours of authentic reality—of both our desires and specifically our material existence—through various modes of deflection. Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1971), 18–21.Google Scholar

104 See Markowski, Powszechna rozwiqztosc, 111.

105 Ibid., 87-88, 96.

106 “Rozwiqztosc to przede wszystkim dekonstrukcja relacji między formq i materiaę to demaskacja iluzorycznosci teatru, w ktorym wszyscy gramy… a przez to takze defamiliaryzacja zycia.” Markowski, Powszechna rozwiqztosc, 96; see also ibid., 108-13.

107 Cf. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Power,“ in The Essential Foucault, ed. Rabinow and Rose, 26-28.

108 Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 53,37.

109 Ibid., 52-54. In this section, clearly identifiable markers of class (and with it class privilege, e.g., the prerogative of leisure) appear at last, though Schulz does not insist on bringing them to the fore.

110 The list of Polish authors who claim Schulz as an inspiration or a direct influence or have attempted narratological experiments in his idiom is long and includes Andrzej Stasiuk, Olga Tokarczuk, and Dorota Maslowska, among others.

111 Cf. Markowski, “Text and Theater,” 439.

112 See, for example, Stala, On the Margins of Reality, 101-2, though the claim made there is that Father is a cataloguer of an “inverted mimesis,” the needs of subjective representation taking (demiurgic) precedence over—and thus creating the categories for—the phenomenal world (or Nature).