“CINNAMON SHOPS” BY B. SCHULTZ IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF SPACE

Abstract

The article examines the short story “Cinnamon Shops” by B. Schultz from the book of the same name, which is the writer’s inner autobiography. Attention is focused on the merging of the artistic word with being, a new creative technique as a search for the origins of our existence through meanings, mythology and family stories. The methods of creating synesthetic series, the connection with the automatic writing of surrealism, the formalistic technique of astonishment, and stylistic experiments are traced. The word appears as a tool for the creation of a new reality, contributes to the search for its mythological origins. The use of the phenomenological approach allows us to see in the artistic space a collection of objects that are a projection of the narrator’s consciousness, his emotional world. Considerable attention is paid to the deconstruction of symbolic images, archetypes correlated with the real biography of the autobiographical subject. A conclusion is made about the expediency of applying the phenomenological concept of space for the study of Shultz’s prose.

“Cinnamon Shops” is in many respects a representative text in the context of the entire book. Resorting to the synesthetic possibilities of the artistic word, the novelist creates a new type of internal plot, built on associative thinking, poetics of memory and inspirations of the autobiographical subject. Starting from an absurdist picture and using elements of automatic writing, the author tries to grasp space as a self-sufficient immanent category. For this purpose, he turns to the stylistics and poetics of surrealism, restoring the original ideas about the world as a mythological reality. Family history through the prism of memory of an autobiographical subject is presented in the plane of movement of the word from fragmentation to integrity by enriching its internal form, imagery. In the story, reality moves away from the discourse about it as much as possible, and approaches its origins, the essential nature expressed in the word. The author avoids any forms of mediated narration, freeing reality from the dictates of false statements and false knowledge. The word has so tightly absorbed the meanings of reality that it appears in the main function of mythological signification, speaking on behalf of the myth about the true nature of things. In Shultz’s creative laboratory, a certain replacement takes place, as a result of which reality is a reflection, a shadow of the word, depriving it of the abstractness of the linguistic sign. Imaginary transfer into children’s memories contributes to the astonishment of the seen, endowed with the intentions of the subject, his fantasies and delusions.