A Shocker Schulz and Professional Readers

Abstract

The author offers a re-reading of the figure of a father, around which Bruno Schulz’s work oscillates. Schulz’s father is made a patron of anti-hermeneutic literary studies, whose ambition is to transcend the opposition between comprehension and incomprehension of a text. This father favours a reading which is dissolute and scandalous. Therefore, as a figure embodying bliss, he is called here a father-shocker (in a creative reference to Lacan’s concept of le père... ou pire) – a perverted “lawgiver,” who obliges one even to violate the law and transgress the rules of the canon. He is the one who allows for acting on one’s own anti-rules: the more they are, on the one hand,
materialistic and subversive, and on the other, pragmatic and inclusive, the more difficult it is to distance oneself from them or to reject them – and thus create a space for the sovereignty of the subject. Yet, as the author persuades, the readers do not know other than an obscene father; thus they necessarily play on his terms – but it is only when one gives in to him completely that it is possible to outplay him, that is to liberate new reading possibilities.