Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-DudekЧитать онлайн книгу.
drawings of their experiences of the war was announced.109 Two years later, Stefan Szuman, an educational scholar, carried out extensive research on a sample of 2,388 children’s drawings. The pictures were an iconic form of responding to two questions Szuman asked: “My personal memories of the war and occupation” and “What happened to my family and relatives during the war and occupation?”
The war-focused iconographic resources also include an album entitled Wojna w oczach dziecka [The War in the Eyes of a Child], which contains children’s drawings based on reminiscences of their experiences during the war.110 The ←52 | 53→thematically divided pictures are grouped in the following sections: “September,” “Displacement”, “Everyday Life,” “Camps” and “Liberation.” Some of the pictures are accompanied by texts in which the children themselves describe what they lived through during the war. One cannot avoid the impression that the editors of the volume in all probability ignored the actual proportions of drawings concerning respective thematic fields to compose a dramatic but, emphatically, happily ending children’s narrative which unfolds following the fairy-tale sequence of exodus, quest, humiliation, rescue and homecoming. The guiding idea of the volume deserves to be appreciated, for, though perhaps not entirely successful, the book is certainly an original attempt at integrating into official discourse a group of victims and witnesses who have lingered on the peripheries of official narrative. We could even somewhat exaggeratingly refer to this experiment as postcolonial narrative because it opened up a space of memory onto a democratic polyphony of memories in which voices of children could be heard as well, expressive of an inclusive array of symptoms, from the war syndrome and the KZ-syndrome to the trauma of the Holocaust child and the “exiled child” syndrome.111
Even the most cursory look at the album is enough to see that it mercilessly exposes the post-war changes in the spaces of childhood. The idyllic topography is reduced nearly to the point of non-existence, ousted by new war topoi, such as the wall, barbed wire, execution and the gallows. The spaces of war-time childhood as distilled from the drawings leave no room for playgrounds or adult carers – mothers of the playing children. The playground is replaced by the execution square, with the gallows at its centre.112
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Children’s texts, which often complement picture narratives, also provide interesting material to explore. The texts specify what can only vaguely be inferred from the shapes, colours and/or moods of the drawings. Such small narratives offer an opportunity to articulate details which, though irrelevant to adults, may be vital to children. War-time narratives of children have their young protagonists who populate erstwhile spaces of childhood: “I was crying terribly because auntie didn’t want to take my toys along, nor Bobek my puppy, nor Maciuś, my kitten. Auntie said that we’d leave it all behind, not taking anything with us. When I cried terribly, auntie allowed me to take two dolls, my little black boys, elephants and a few toys,” recalls a young girl named Jadwiga.113
Writing essays about the war not only reminds the children about the loss of their nurseries. It also forces the children to self-referentially revise their narratives as they are being produced: “I can’t write any more, for I miss my daddy so much and I must cry. Why didya [sic] give me such a writing assignment that makes me cry?”114
Was The Academy of Mr Inkblot written for children such as Jadwiga?
Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?
The Academy of Mr Inkblot seems to be exceptionally committed not only to creating modern, post-war children’s literature and to deconstructing the prior models of the fairy tale, but also – if not predominantly – to providing an exegesis of the Event of the war and the Holocaust. I emphatically rely on the term “exegesis” here because, in my view, Brzechwa not so much spins a pacifist tale of an interrupted childhood which was idyllic and happy before the disaster, as rather goes a step further to re-interpret the Event and to incorporate it into ←54 | 55→historical-philosophical reflection. Hence, the tale about Mr Inkblot was not designed as a form of escape from working through the disaster of war, but compelled reflection on the devastation effected by the war.
Given this, in all probability the text was not only written in protest against the cruelty of the world, as this cruelty had just been perpetrated, but perhaps in order to explain the principles of the Spirit of History. Such a para-Hegelian observation about Brzechwa’s trilogy should not come as a surprise, because it is not an isolated example of such a tale, although chronologically it is its first iteration. Other notable instances include the Narnia series, which has come to be regarded as a historical-philosophical and theological interpretation of the Second World War,115 which Clive Staples Lewis began to write in 1950. Marek Oziewicz, a Polish researcher of Lewis’s work, argues that Lewis found the war and the new political arrangement it had produced deeply worrying and considered literature instrumental in fending off the threat of totalitarianism, which instils in people the belief they are helpless and that their efforts for change are pointless.116
Indeed, the historical totalism of the Second World War and the fictional totalitarianism of the rule of the White Witch seek to remodel the existing order of the world. In this respect, the White Witch resembles Brzechwa’s Alojzy – a mechanical product which is a technological representation of the authoritarian power he aspires to wield over the free world of the fairy tale.
These insights help us understand what the good-vs.-evil opposition, which is the essential generic cornerstone of the fairy tale, looks like and how it works. The fairy-tale tradition demands that good be embodied in a sage, while evil should be represented in a de-humanised dummy. Yet the innovative and at the same time terrifying final twist of The Academy divests the tale of a happy ending. Mr Inkblot turns out to be the loser in this fabular contest, and his continually diminishing physique serves as an extraordinarily vivid metaphor for the demise of the researcher, who retreats in the face of the forces of evil and darkness. The menacing quality of the finale of The Academy cannot be alleviated even by the meta-literary investment which Lipszyc highlights in his interpretation. The tale is after all supposed to lead the reader out of the space of childhood and towards adulthood, driving home the message that the fairy tale ←55 | 56→was but a literary game orchestrated by the writer with a pronounced proclivity for prattling away: “ ‘I am the author of the story about Mr Inkblot,’ replied the grizzled man. ‘I wrote this tale because I love telling fantastic stories, and I have superb fun when writing them.’ ”117
The fairy tale owes its existence to the imagination of the writer. It was invented and written only in order to bewilder readers, who must now come to their senses and return to normality the way they do after twirling around or riding a merry-go-round. The only thing that remains when a wild ilinx is over is dizziness.118 One of the fairy-tale’s major protagonists, Adaś Niezgódka confesses: “I had buzzing in my ears, and red spots were fluttering in front of my eyes.”119 The lonely and confused boy is surrounded by darkness, lit up by mysterious moonlight. It is the Saturnian night: “gloomy and ominous, when malevolent and baleful demons are unleashed. It is illuminated by the Moon, a natural ally of the vampire and the werewolf.”120
On such a night, the lunar time signifies a time of inverted meanings, with what has been there so far vanishing, and what was not there during the day rising. This principle is also embodied in the ontology of the Academy building itself,