Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-DudekЧитать онлайн книгу.
shrunk by half and kept shrinking as I was looking at it. The same had happened with the park and the wall around it.”121
Of course, the transgression of the fairy-tale world into the non-fairy-tale space of the fabulist’s study can be explained by the oneiric convention which is framed as “adventures of the eye,” with the protagonist probably waking up from or trying to fight the drowsiness which is stealing upon him.122 However, it seems that Adaś is not awakened from a nightmare, although the swapping of the Moon for a round lamp in the writer’s study is a clear indication of the transition from ←56 | 57→the dream to reality and the victory of light over darkness. All the signs imply that the world has regained its form, which is founded on the library: “There was a bookcase where the wall once was, and the gates in the wall had changed into book spines with titles imprinted on them in gold lettering. The bookcase held all the fairy tales by Mr Andersen and Brothers Grimm […] and many, many others.”123
However, it is precisely at this point that a real child nightmare begins, for in front of him Adaś sees Mr Inkblot diminishing and ultimately transfiguring into the button of Doctor Paj-Chi-Wo. Snatched by Mateusz the starling, the miraculous object effects another transformation as the bird morphs into the writer himself. It turns out that it is not Mr Inkblot, but the writer, who is a specific homo magicus, performing a double closure on himself – transfiguring into a button and Mateusz. The ending of the story marks the real birth of its author. In order for the author to appear, two conditions must be met: the protagonist (Mr Inkblot) must be declared “dead,” and the creator must be divested of the attributes of divinity. For this reason, Mr Inkblot must vanish and the metamorphosis of the bird (Mateusz) – the Horatian symbol of poetry – into a human (the writer) restores the lost order, or more precisely restores the order that reality lost for the benefit of the fairy tale.
What Max Weber referred to as “the disenchantment of the world” comes to pass.124
Is there a difference between the disenchantment of the world and the exit of child readers from the fairy-tale space of childhood? It seems that the question concerns the processual mode in which the fairy tale operates. The narrativity of the fairy tale is supposed to employ the maturation-centred plot coupled with the recurrent, well-known fabular motifs and fairy-tale patterns in order to prepare the reader to abandon the secure space of childhood. Relinquishing the fairy tale is a natural process which is sequentially distributed over time. Though dislodged by adulthood and incorporated into the mythical code of childhood, the fairy tale still retains its ontological identity.125 Given this, interpreting the ←57 | 58→ending of The Academy in terms of maturation should not be viewed as a surprising venture.
However, the culmination of Brzechwa’s narrative does not dovetail with canonical farewells to the fairy tale, for the ending of The Academy is total and irreversible. The reader finds out that the story of Mr Inkblot is invented, and its producer owns up to having performed a prestidigitating trick. The knowledge of there being or rather not being a fairy tale comes out all of a sudden to possess the reader by violence and disenchant the world in which the child has been immersed so far, while the fairy tale is by definition supposed to alleviate the pain caused by the brevity of our worldly life and to channel real satisfaction that comes from bonding with other people.126
In Brzechwa’s fairy tale, the admission of the writer, who appears in a deus ex machina mode, abruptly puts an end to all speculations about the tale the child is experiencing. Reduced to an act of fabrication which caters to the ludic needs of the artist and the audience, it no longer possesses the therapeutic capacity of comforting and supporting readers. It is no more than a beautiful deceit by which sensitive readers get fooled.
Construed in this way, The Academy of Mr Inkblot represents one of the most ruthless fairy-tale endings, as the revelation of it fictionality shatters the child’s world. This fabular self-exposure certainly suggests that Brzechwa’s text is an embryo of the postmodernist fairy tale. Nevertheless, to avoid abusing notions specific to the developments which The Academy predates by a few decades, I propose to view it as an anti-fairy tale, not because of the above generic reinterpretation, but due to its dedication to interpreting history.
It is next to impossible to read The Academy of Mr Inkblot in disjunction from its historical context. As argued by Mariusz Urbanek, historical associations are practically unmissable: “On 1st September127 […] Filip brings to the magical school the doll he has constructed. […] Krzysztof Gradowski, the writer ←58 | 59→and director of a film based on Brzechwa’s novel, interpreted The Academy quite unambiguously. The doll made by Filip the barber is no longer Alojzy, a future jewel of the academy, but… Adolf. The king’s herald summons to defend the country and not to surrender a single button to the wolves […]. Wearing black uniforms and carrying torches aflame, the wolves that invade the kingdom of Mateusz march to the rhythm of ‘Strong jaws, strong will and we shall conquer the world,’ a hit by the heavy-metal band TSA, a scene redolent of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a famous apotheosis of fascism.”128
Many readings of The Academy have referenced the war, which proves that the historical moment when the fairy tale was written and published has been recognised as one of its interpretive keys. It has been suggested that the character of Mr Inkblot was modelled on Janusz Korczak,129 Franc Fiszer, a popular Warsaw bon-vivant, Brzechwa himself or his father.130 A range of real-life antecedents have also been marshalled for Adaś Niezgódka, though more often than not he has been regarded as Brzechwa’s alter ego because, like the writer ←59 | 60→himself, he does not like barley soup and carrots, and he collects buttons from coats, jackets and blazers.131
These interpretive shreds, spectacular and interesting to readers as they are, sorely lack the coherence which could be expected in the case of a text as central to the history of children’s literature as The Academy of Mr Inkblot is. For The Academy is not merely a formal and rhetorical experiment performed on the literary fairy tale, but also, given the moment when it was written, an interpretation of history or, more precisely, of the Event, which, though disastrous, leads to the renewal of the world. This is why Mr Inkblot can be viewed not just as a master and a teacher who attempts to reclaim a world deformed by the disaster, but first and foremost as a wise melamed, a rabbi perhaps, who re-institutes the lost order.
The Academy, Adam and all the “A-boys” make up the space which is controlled by Mr Inkblot, the mentor. To assume that amassing protagonists whose names start with an A is a pure coincidence would be quite a stretch of the imagination. Of course, Mr Inkblot himself explains this onomastic elitism by citing his reluctance to memorise and litter his mind with other letters. However, Mr Inkblot’s reverence for the letter A – aleph in Hebrew – cannot but prompt further inquiries. Although in the phonetic transcription this vowel is just a variety of aspiration, it means more than all the other letters of the alphabet.132 The point is that, according to kabbalists, aleph is the sum of the three fundamental geometrical forms which are the cornerstones of the Hebraic alphabet. Specifically, these forms are: the point (corresponding to the letter yod from which everything took its beginning), the line (corresponding to the letter vav and symbolising erect posture)