Volume 36, Number 6 · April 13, 1989
The Power of Delight
By John Bayley
Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz with Selected Prose
edited by Jerzy Ficowski, translated by Walter Arndt, with Victoria Nelson
Harper and Row, 256 pp., $25.00
One odd feature of our century's literature is a metamorphosis to childishness. Childhood had been a subject for great literary artists—Wordsworth, Dickens, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Fournier—for almost a hundred years, but they had always created it retrospectively, revealed it from the standpoint of maturity. The war, and Freud, possibly Dada and Surrealism too, seemed to change all that. Childishness began to extrude itself into literature on its own terms, as it were; it crawled out raw and unmodified from the subconscious.
Review, 2389 words
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