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

The Diary, his culminating and most personalized work in a flagrantly personalized oeuvre, transposes that virtual encounter onto the plane of reading itself. The figuration is less distinct - as in both the Schulz and the Sartre anecdotes, one has to "conjure" the face oneself - but the self-consciousness about being under the eyes of reading others is, if anything, even more profound. The Gombrowiczian face, one could say, is a kind of symptom (in Lacan's sense): summoned in the act of being warded off.(16)

What of the face in Schulz, the Schulzian face? It deserves more than a cameo appearance here, so I pivot to it by way of contrast, and conclude. His relative obscurity, the frustration of a provincial fate, the ambient pathos of his personality, his Jewishness in a Catholic and pre-war Poland - if anything, Schulz was even more conscious of the spell cast by the face, and his own need to conjure and ward it off. His fiction and his surviving correspondence show a writer in overdetermined relationship to readers - those whose faces he knew,(17) as well as prospective ones he could only invoke or imply.

Unlike its counterpart in Gombrowicz, however, the Schulzian face throws down no gauntlet. It does not believe in dueling. Nor does it proliferate, finding refuge in metonymy, safety in numbers. Instead, it lives a wholly metaphorical life. It is subject to the same forces that preside over everything else in Schulz's mythified fictional world: a fundamental principle of transmigrated form, objects turned into signs, persons collapsed into allegories of themselves, private space and time contracted into further depths of privacy or else dispersed into otherness. The face appears, only to recede again, much as Gombrowicz says of Schulz himself in Diary, "extraneous," "superfluous." But perhaps there lies its significance, a minor element in a minor modernism that nonetheless reads the larger-in-scale.

The very first story of Cinnamon Shops, "August," describes a "half-wit girl," Touya, whose face "works like the bellows of an accordion. Every now and then a sorrowful grimace folds it into a thousand vertical pleats, but astonishment soon straightens it out again" (Schulz 6). The simile that conveys this figure (or her face) promises a kind of plenitude, the opposite pole to which - hollowed out or contracted space - is emblematized by Touya's mother, "white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn" (7). The story ends with a face which is the empty glove to Touya's accordion:

[Emil's] pale flabby face, seemed from day to day to lose its outline, to become a white blank with a pale network of veins, like lines on an old map [. . .] He was sitting on a small, low sofa [and] it seemed as if it were only his clothes that had been thrown, crumpled and empty, over a chair. His face seemed like the breath of a face - a smudge which an unknown passer-by had left in the air. From the mist of his face, the protruding white of a pale eye emerged with difficulty, enticing me with a wink [. . .] but all fell away again and his face receded into indifference and became absent and finally faded away altogether." (10)