Incandescent Childhood: The Depiction of Childhood in the Works of Bruno Schulz, Camara Laye, and especially Victor Erice

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Here at Say a Prayer for the Octopus, we�re not particularly keen on childhood.  Now, don�t get me wrong, I had a fine childhood: middle-class, no deaths in the immediate family, no tragedies to speak of.  But the fundamental condition of childhood�of all childhoods�is one of nightmarish powerlessness and ignorance.  The child is virtually incapable of influencing its surroundings in any meaningful way and it�s certainly incapable of understanding them.  So I�m always skeptical when I come across a depiction of childhood that would portray it as magical and idyllic. 

Now, in the works of the three artists under consideration here�Bruno Schulz, Camara Laye, and Victor Erice�and, as I said in the title, especially Victor Erice; the first two are just here to put Erice in context�childhood is certainly magical, but it�s also strange and surreal and frightening and lonely.  Let�s start with Bruno Schulz (because his work comes first, chronologically); he was one of the greatest Polish writers of the interwar period, although he only published two books: The Street of Crocodiles, which I will discuss, and Cinnamon Shops, which I have not read, and will thusly not be discussing. 

Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles consists of a series of linked stories which seek to not merely fictionalize but to mythologizeSchulz�s childhood, and his eccentric father in particular.  He tells his stories with syntactic density and stylistic intensity, such that even the most trivial of stories (and they�re all �trivial� in the grand scheme of things; nothing his father did in his little shop in the town of Drohobycz made a big impact on the world) are elevated to the level of myth (this is the same goal pursued by Kenzaburo Oe in his autobiographical novels, although his stylistic approach is more varied than Schulz�s).  Now, I�ve been harping on the trivialities of Schulz�s childhood, but what made it magical? Well, for one thing, his father collected exotic bird eggs, and in one memorable episode they hatch and escape into the skies over Poland, much like the rogue pterodactyl over London at the end of Conan Doyle�s The Lost World (or at least that�s what I think happened; I read The Street of Crocodiles in the spring of 2008, and evidently it did not leave a strong enough impression for me to speak about the bird episode with confidence.  I believe I own the book, but I don�t know where it is now and I�m certainly in no mood to go digging for it).  The best part of the book is the three chapters in which Schulz�s father waxes elegantly on the topic of equal rights for mannequins.

Schulz believed that the experiences of his childhood were the source from which all of his artistry and imaginings flowed.  He spent most of his adult life as an art teacher at a school in Drohobycz, far removed from the literary scene in Warsaw (if only geographically; he corresponded with Witold Gombrowicz).  He was by all accounts a remarkably gentle person, and he has, for me, one of the saddest deaths in the history of literature.  When the Nazis occupied Poland, Schulz, a Jew, lost his job and was forced to live in the Drohobycz ghetto.  He was protected for a while by a Gestapo office, whom Wikipedia says was an admirer of his drawings; this officer had a rival within the Gestapo, and one day as Schulz was walking home, the rival shot and killed him out of spite.  Violence is always horrible, but for it to descend upon a man who wanted to draw, play with words, and relive his childhood makes it especially horrifying.

Now I don�t know nearly as much about the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, but he certainly seems to have had a less tragic life than Schulz.  Born in French Guinea in 1928, he published in 1953 a novel called The Dark Child, which I read in the Fall of 2007 and which remains for me the most beautiful depiction of childhood that I have ever read.  Camara�and according to Wikipedia, the surname comes first in Malinke naming conventions, and so I am not being presumptuous in referring to him as such�I say, Camara grew up in a village where his father was a goldsmith, and this father was just as magical as Schulz�s.  There�s an element of magical realism at play in The Dark Child, if we define magical realism in the sense that we see it in One Hundred Years of Solitude: the mundane is treated as fantastical and the fantastical is a part of everyday life.  So Camara�s father is a goldsmith�nothing inherently fantastical about that�but to the young Camara, the process of melting and manipulating gold takes on magical properties, and he describes it in rich, sensual detail.  Furthermore, Camara grew up in a cultural context in which magic was an accepted part of life.  So Camara marvels at his father�s smithing skills neither more nor less than he marvels at the snake that slithers into his father�s workshop, and who we are told is a spirit with whom the father carries on a friendship.

Camara Laye

The Dark Child is ultimately a happier book than The Street of Crocodiles, as it doesn�t possess the sense of nightmarish unease and solitude that pervades the latter.  This brings me to the Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice, who over a period of forty-one years has made a grand total of three feature films.  These are: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), available in the US on DVD from the Criterion Collection; El Sur (1982), which Criterion has made available on its Hulu channel; and The Quince Tree Sun (1992), a documentary about Spanish painter Antonio L�pez Garc�a.  So that makes Erice even less prolific than Terrance Malick, which is noteworthy in that Erice�s two fictional films�The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur�are treading on territory similar to that explored in 2011�s execrable The Tree of Life, but they are infinitely more watchable and more intelligent (you will find none of the pseudo-profound, �philosophical� voice-over musings that mar Malick�s films).

Victo Erice

 The Spirit of the Beehive is about a lonely and peculiar little girl growing up in rural Spain under the Francoist regime (she is played by Ana Torrent, greatest of all child actresses, who also stars in Carlos Saura�s Cria Cuervos).  The girl sees a travelling projector showing of the classic Frankenstein movie and becomes obsessed with the monster, seeing in his isolation from society a parallel to the solitude of her own life (and of life in Fascist Spain, and of childhood in general, and of life in general).  Ana Torrent�s imagination is so vivid (and I say �Ana Torrent� because I don�t remember the name of her character) that she populates her village with scenarios from Frankenstein and she begins to have difficulty distinguishing between the film and its contingent fantasies on the one hand and real life on the other.  So it�s a very beautiful childhood�and I suppose all imaginative childhoods are beautiful�but it�s tinged with a distinct melancholy strong enough to temper any idyll.

Erice didn�t make another film until 1982�s El Sur (The South, and I don�t know why it�s not translated, but it�s available on Hulu as El Sur, and I have no problem with that).  This movie features another lonely girl, Estrella, although she�s (somewhat) older and wiser than Ana Torrent.  El Sur explores incidents in Estrella�s childhood as she learns about life and tries to penetrate the mysteries of her father�s psyche and personal history.  They live in the north, but her father is from the south, and the mysteries of his youth and his flight from the south occupy a strong place in Estrella�s mind; �el sur� becomes mythologized for her, and the unraveling of her father�s mysteries becomes a quest.  In many ways, her father is just as a lonely and melancholy as she is.  Her quest to know him can be seen as the solitude of childhood scraping up against the solitude of adulthood, each of which is ultimately impenetrable.  We also see in El Sur the disappointment that all children inevitable face sooner or later when they realize that adults�and even their own parents�don�t really know what they�re doing and are just as fucked up as their kids.

So behold the beautiful nightmare of childhood (of the artists I�ve mentioned here, perhaps Camara might disagree with the description of childhood as �nightmarish,� but a magical world where concepts of science and causation are unknown�and this is the world all children live in�is inherently nightmarish).

I leave you with an excerpt from the Quay Brothers� short film �adaptation� of The Street of Crocodiles (which has very little to do with that book in terms of content but which captured its surrealistic anxiety with great skill):