CONCEPTUAL AND PLOT FUNCTIONS OF «MR. CHARLES» STORY IN THE CINNAMON SHOPS BOOK BY BRUNO SCHULZ

Abstract

The uniqueness of Bruno Schulz’s idiostyle and artistic picture of his world directs researchers of his book The Cinnamon Shops to the study of its poetics in general, and in these parameters, it has already been described in detail and characterized by foreign and Ukrainian Schulz studies. At the same time, individual stories from The Cinnamon Shops very rarely become an independent subject for scholarly research. However, the stylistic, conceptual and even implicit plot integrity of the book does not deprive its components of independent value. Among the stories of The Cinnamon Shops, «Mr. Charles» (Pol. «Pan Karol») is the least frequently studied by scholars. It is almost the smallest story in the collection, the main characters of the book do not act in it, and in terms of plot it is also seemingly unrelated to the rest of the stories. The aim of our study is to identify the conceptual and plot context for the story «Mr.Charles» in The Cinnamon Shops and to determine the place and role of the plot of this story in the overall fictional world of the collection of stories. The short story «Mr. Charles», which is located in the middle of the book, finalizes its first part, referring to the first stories of The Cinnamon Shops and showing in the story of Mr. Charles’s rejection by his home and his alienation from himself an alternative to the story of the book’s protagonist, father Jakub. The father in his demiurgic experiments is constantly brought back to reality by his maid Adela, who can be perceived, as B. Schulz points out in the synopsis of the book, the «archenemy» of the father. If in the stories about the father Adela is always present, and there is no way to imagine the course of events without her, then «Mr. Charles» provides such an opportunity: the protagonist's house is deprived of Adela and the female presence in general. In these circumstances, all household items expel Mr. Charles, and he himself turns out to be his archenemy.