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Staging Jewishness in Decline. Irène Nemirovsky's David Golder
vis-a-vis the Works of Bruno Schulz
Kris Van HeuckelomKU Leuven - [email protected]
David Golder in David Golder Jacob in Sanatorium under the(France, 1931, dir. Julien Duvivier) Sign of the Hourglass (Poland,
1973, dir. Wojciech Jerzy Has)
"The Eternal Fairy-Tale"
Xięga Bałwochwalcza (1920-22)The Idolatrous Book
Female domination (sadism) Male submissiveness (masochism)
„Undula The Eternal Ideal”
Gender relations in The Idolatrous Book (1)
● Psychobiograpical approach: Schulz as a masochist
● Artistic context: mythological, iconic,
literary intertextuality
Gender relations in The Idolatrous Book (2)
Undula ~ a contemporary Venus
“On Cythera”
Classical mythology
D. Velazquez, Venus At Her Mirror Cover of The Idolatrous Book
Iconographic tradition
● Fin-de-siècle decadentism
● the grotesque
F. Rops, Pornocrates
Demonic femme fatale
Undula ~ pictorial version of L. von Sacher-Masoch’s Wanda
Literary sources
Cover of The Idolatrous Book (1920-1922)
Book within a book ~
Painting within a painting
Cover of The Idolatrous Book
The Idolatrous Book as autoreferential artefact (1)
1. the material product created by the artist (a portfolio of graphics entitled The Idolatrous Book)
Frontispiece of The Idolatrous Book
The Idolatrous Book as autoreferential artefact (2)
2. a similar object (a book) being depicted on the graphics themselves (some of which are entitled „The Idolatrous Book”)
„Undula With The Artists”
1. The book as a work-in-progress
Undula u artystów
„The Idolatrous Book”
2. Finished book presented to the idol
Undula u artystów
The book as a medium of verbal expression
is represented throughout Schulz’s portfolio
as a typical male attribute, whereas the idol
is given an obvious female shape.
Gender & word-image relations
Book covers and frontispieces of The Idolatrous Book (1)
Book covers and frontispieces of The Idolatrous Book (2)
seductive attractiveness of paintings ~
seductive beauty of the female sex
(Freedberg 1989)
Iconoclasm & gender
Double dimension of idolatrous behaviour in The Idolatrous Book (1)
Act of veneration (“Thou shalt not bow down thyself”)
“Undula The Eternal Ideal” “The Enchanted City”
Double dimension of idolatrous behaviour
in The Idolatrous Book (2)
Act of image creation (“Thou shalt not make any graven image”)
„Undula With The Artists”
The creative forces of masculinity are redirected from the domain of the sacred text to the female sphere of images and image production.
The Book itself is idolatrous!
“Pictorial turn” (cf. Mitchell 1994)
= A book of graphics containing
a series of subsequent scenes
The Idolatrous Book as a visual narrative
The “Idolatrous Book” as an artistic concept
Through the mise-en-abime effect,Schulz’s The Idolatrous Book at
the same time formulates and
implementsthe idea of interartistic
contamination.
Schulz’s transgression of boundaries
1. Religious Law: The Second Commandment
2. Artistic Law: G. E. Lessing’s secular discourse of iconoclasm
cf. Clement Greenberg
The Idolatrous Book or
The Adulterous Book
Cover of The Idolatrous Book “The Idolatrous Book”
The book offered to the idol is “a harbinger of Schulz’s Word, a proclamation of his work as a
writer.”
“The Idolatrous Book”
Ficowski (1988: 58)
All existing boundaries between different forms of art are in fact fluid, and thus artificially set up, as all individual artefacts (whether visual or verbal) turn out to be nothing more than similarly defective references to the same reality
of interlacing codes..”
Schulz’s artwork & fiction
“The Schulzean narrator unveils his techniques, displays his method, consciously reveals the iconic character of the image. He records reality as if it was a picture; while the realistic narrator depicts the picture as if it was reality.”
Stala (1993: 104)
KONIEC
THE END
Staging Jewishness in Decline. Irène Nemirovsky's David Golder vis-a-vis
the Works of Bruno Schulz
”Dedication” (from The Idolatrous Book, 1920-
22)
Kris Van HeuckelomK.U.Leuven - [email protected]
The Pictorial Turn of Bruno Schulz
”Dedication” (from The Idolatrous Book, 1920-22)
Kris Van HeuckelomK.U.Leuven - [email protected]