Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
the victims and the witnesses, all the more so as producing such evidence of the crime by the latter was undoubtedly an act of heroism.
I agree that locating the reading of The Academy of Mr Inkblot in the context of the Auschwitz pictures, which are a unique document of the crime, may be regarded as methodologically scandalous. Mindful of such charges, I place Brzechwa’s fairy tale on the margins of Holocaust discourse, at the same time remembering about its implied child reader and about its literariness, which is in no way compatible with the ontology of Holocaust testimony. At the same time, the “images-in-spite-of-all” formula prompts me – both as a researcher and as a reader – to embrace an interpretation of The Academy that diverges from the conventional, “schoolish” one.99 What I perceive in Brzechwa’s book is primarily ←48 | 49→a test run or a trial of a “form” that could harness a narrative which had no literary representation of its own in “separate literature” before. Brzechwa seems to strive – “in spite of all” – to fashion an image of something that has up to now been searching for its form.
Ostensibly, The Academy of Mr Inkblot, the flagship work of the children’s writer, has already been examined from all possible angles. Its first critics gave it an enthusiastic welcome. For one, the laudatory reviews of Wanda Żółkiewska and Wanda Grodzieńska set the tone for the later interpretive approaches to the book: fantasy, a surrealist riot of characters, the spirit of adventure – this is what the modern fairy tale feeds to young readers by the spoonful.
The development of research into Brzechwa’s tale was greatly boosted by the scintillating career of the grotesque in contemporary literature, which was incorporated into and essentially affected the formation of school discourse. Preoccupation with the grotesque entailed paying closer attention to the language of the Mr Inkblot trilogy. Riding the wave of this “linguistic turn,” scholars first and foremost highlight the wealth of verbal devices, the ubiquitous grotesque and the self-referentiality of the book. These components, they argue, imply that the tale presupposes two varieties of implied reader. This dual readership was also eagerly expounded by the writer himself, who stressed that especially Tryumf pana Kleksa [The Triumph of Mr Inkblot] would be an experiment, with its fair-tale layer designed for children and its satirical investment devised for adults.
Considering the two target groups, we cannot possibly ignore the time when The Academy was written, as in 1946 the post-war chapter of children’s literature opened with a fairy tale, which suggests escapism from brutal realities. Such a therapeutic proclivity of the story was touted by Janina, Brzechwa’s third wife, who argued that The Academy was in fact an escape from reality.100 One of the writer’s female friends recalls the community of reading under the Nazi ←49 | 50→occupation in this way: “We all huddled up in a tiny room, four people within ca. twelve square metres. Janek [an endearment of Jan] would bring his poems and stories: Akademia pana Kleksa, ‘Pan Drops i jego trupa’ [‘Mr Mint and his Troupe’] […].”101 Because of this contiguity of the narrative and the war-time reality, the fairy tale does not eschew autobiographical allusions. For example, Janina Brzechwa recognises herself in the caretaker Weronik and deciphers the old trickster Mr Inkblot as the writer’s self-portrayal.102
More recent approaches carry Brzechwa’s trilogy in somewhat different directions, which probably results from the exhaustion of the grotesque-linguistic interpretation model. Currently, critics prefer to emphasise the work the writer put into processing the phantasm of the teacher, one of the fundamental myths of the fourth literature. In this context, special attention should be paid to the insights offered by Anna Szóstak, who is one of the few scholars to scrutinise what has already become a classic of children’s literature from a non-standard angle. The originality of her framework lies in that instead of making the absurd, the grotesque or the linguistic the cornerstone of her reading, she dismisses these concepts altogether for the sake of exploring intuitive feelings which have not yet found a legitimate excuse to enter scholarly discourse on the tales about Mr Inkblot. Szóstak makes at least two compelling comments which have not been further examined so far. Namely, she remarks that the motif of Mr Inkblot producing or upsizing food by means of a small pump may be a travesty of Christ’s feeding-the-multitude miracle in the Gospel, where Christ multiplies bread and fish.103 Her other innovative concept is that the Academy itself embodies the Platonic world of ideas.104
An equally original interpretation of The Academy of Mr Inkblot is offered by Adam Lipszyc. In his article on the cyborgisation of pop-culture protagonists “Roy, Alojzy i inne chłopaki” [“Roy, Alojzy and Other Lads”], Lipszyc argues ←50 | 51→that Brzechwa’s book should actually be studied within Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical paradigm and Jacques Lacan’s mirror-stage framework. Read in this way, The Academy tells a story of maturation which equals the expulsion from the fairy tale, while Alojzy is a sinister form of the “self-consciousness” of the fairy tale because he is constructed and the appearance of such a mirror within the tale explodes it from the inside. The fairy tale cannot go on anymore, and its Author must appear. In this way, the artificiality of Alojzy exposes the artificiality of the fairy tale and, even before that, the artificiality of the Academy.105
Building on Lipszyc’s observations and Papuzińska’s already cited study about the self-referentiality of Brzechwa’s fairy tale, as well as on the findings about its biblical inclinations, we can adopt a novel, inspiring interpretive approach which posits that the fairy tale bears witness to the war and the Holocaust. In this sense, The Academy of Mr Inkblot marks a turning point in the history of literature for a young readership. It tells about the Event, but it long predates the post-traumatic frenzy that has imprinted itself on 21st-century separate literature. Given this, Dominick LaCapra’s injunction that “Those born later should neither appropriate (nor belatedly act out) the experience of victims nor restrict their activities to the necessary role of secondary witness and guardian of memory”106 does not really apply to the post-war readers of The Academy. One reason for this is that the first young readers of Brzechwa’s fairy tale were not “secondary” witnesses, but simply the witnesses of the Holocaust. Another reason is that The Academy represented an unobvious narrative whose fairy-tale trappings made it decipherable as an escape from the memory of war.
The pertinence of the dates 1945 (the writing of The Academy of Mr Inkblot) and 1946 (the first edition of the fairy tale) makes it next to impossible to abstract the book from the war- and Holocaust-related context. Hence, I will use my hermeneutic right of self-interest and, seeking authorisation in the Derridean metonymicity of the date,107 I will take a date as a point of departure for my journey across the textual world of Brzechwa’s fairy tale.
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Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946
Symptomatically, the playground topos undergoes a distinctive reversal in the imaginarium of the Holocaust. A secure, fenced space filled with playthings and resounding with the voices of frolicking kids is one of the canonical instances of childhood imagery. The paradisal site of childhood is replaced by an inverted space – the isolated ghetto, where a place for children to form a community is lacking and toys are lost. The expulsion of the child from the space of play entails not only robbing it of opportunities to satisfy its most natural need, but also pushing it into the adult world, in which it is ruled, as adults are, by the ruthless war-time jurisdiction.108
Considering changes the war made in the rhetorical topoi of childhood, we can usefully draw on two projects aimed at studying and describing the metamorphoses of children’s codes. One