The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Baltic States, Eastern Europe
ISBN: 9781351140300
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

223 Schulz, ‘Visitation’, 24.

224 Ibid., 25.

225 Ibid., 26.

226 Ibid.

227 Schulz, ‘Birds’, in Schulz, Fictions, 30–3, here 32.

228 Ibid., 32.

229 Ibid., 33.

230 Schulz, ‘Tailor’s Dummies’, in Schulz, Fictions, 34–48, here 34.

231 Schulz, ‘Birds’, in Schulz, Fictions, 33.

232 Schulz, ‘Tailors’s Dummies’, in Schulz, Fictions, 34.

And yet, Father is charmed by the well-shaped bodies of two seamstresses who are taken by the ‘magnetism of his strange personality’.233 The son calls him a ‘Heresiarch’ as he walks around like a mesmerist, infecting everything with his dangerous charm234 and with his ‘most unusual lectures’.235 He argues that the ‘matchless perfection of the Demiurge’ has ‘paralysed our own creative instinct’,236 and he asks for a second genesis that will create temporary beings that serve only for a single occasion.237 Matter is never dead, can always be reshaped;238 ‘we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material’; the new human beings will be ‘in the shape and semblance of a tailor’s dummy’.239 He dreams up half organic beings, pseudo fauna and pseudo flora, made via a fantastic fermentation of matter.240 He gradually becomes more personal while his voice gradually becomes comprehensible.

In retrospect, the son/narrator suspects that his mother had never loved his father. Since his father ‘had not been rooted in any woman’s heart, he could not merge with any reality and was therefore condemned to float eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the margins of existence.’241 Two contrasting episodes indicate mutability. First, Father copes with his cockroach anxiety by assuming a comparable body. He starts to move ‘with the many-limbed, complicated movements of a strange ritual’ that imitates ‘the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach’. Moving ‘on cockroachy paths’, he merges ‘with that black, uncanny tribe’.242 With the new inventions of electricity and mechanics, a different demiurgic power comes to fascinate Father. He wants to participate in the ‘resourcefulness of human genius’243 by experimenting with circulations like galvanism, mesmerism and the bicycle that interlinks everything.

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