and Papuzińska’s already cited study about the self-referentiality of Brzechwa’s fairy tale, as well as on the findings about its biblical inclinations, we can adopt a novel, inspiring interpretive approach which posits that the fairy tale bears witness to the war and the Holocaust. In this sense, The Academy of Mr Inkblot marks a turning point in the history of literature for a young readership. It tells about the Event, but it long predates the post-traumatic frenzy that has imprinted itself on 21st-century separate literature. Given this, Dominick LaCapra’s injunction that “Those born later should neither appropriate (nor belatedly act out) the experience of victims nor restrict their activities to the necessary role of secondary witness and guardian of memory”106 does not really apply to the post-war readers of The Academy. One reason for this is that the first young readers of Brzechwa’s fairy tale were not “secondary” witnesses, but simply the witnesses of the Holocaust. Another reason is that The Academy represented an unobvious narrative whose fairy-tale trappings made it decipherable as an escape from the memory of war.
The pertinence of the dates 1945 (the writing of The Academy of Mr Inkblot) and 1946 (the first edition of the fairy tale) makes it next to impossible to abstract the book from the war- and Holocaust-related context. Hence, I will use my hermeneutic right of self-interest and, seeking authorisation in the Derridean metonymicity of the date,107 I will take a date as a point of departure for my journey across the textual world of Brzechwa’s fairy tale.
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Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946
Symptomatically, the playground topos undergoes a distinctive reversal in the imaginarium of the Holocaust. A secure, fenced space filled with playthings and resounding with the voices of frolicking kids is one of the canonical instances of childhood imagery. The paradisal site of childhood is replaced by an inverted space – the isolated ghetto, where a place for children to form a community is lacking and toys are lost. The expulsion of the child from the space of play entails not only robbing it of opportunities to satisfy its most natural need, but also pushing it into the adult world, in which it is ruled, as adults are, by the ruthless war-time jurisdiction.108
Considering changes the war made in the rhetorical topoi of childhood, we can usefully draw on two projects aimed at studying and describing the metamorphoses of children’s codes. One of them was initiated by the editors of Przekrój, Poland’s very popular weekly, in 1946, when a competition for children’s drawings of their experiences of the war was announced.109 Two years later, Stefan Szuman, an educational scholar, carried out extensive research on a sample of 2,388 children’s drawings. The pictures were an iconic form of responding to two questions Szuman asked: “My personal memories of the war and occupation” and “What happened to my family and relatives during the war and occupation?”
The war-focused iconographic resources also include an album entitled Wojna w oczach dziecka [The War in the Eyes of a Child], which contains children’s drawings based on reminiscences of their experiences during the war.110 The ←52 | 53→thematically divided pictures are grouped in the following sections: “September,” “Displacement”, “Everyday Life,” “Camps” and “Liberation.” Some of the pictures are accompanied by texts in which the children themselves describe what they lived through during the war. One cannot avoid the impression that the editors of the volume in all probability ignored the actual proportions of drawings concerning respective thematic fields to compose a dramatic but, emphatically, happily ending children’s narrative which unfolds following the fairy-tale sequence of exodus, quest, humiliation, rescue and homecoming. The guiding idea of the volume deserves to be appreciated, for, though perhaps not entirely successful, the book is certainly an original attempt at integrating into official discourse a group of victims and witnesses who have lingered on the peripheries of official narrative. We could even somewhat exaggeratingly refer to this experiment as postcolonial narrative because it opened up a space of memory onto a democratic polyphony of memories in which voices of children could be heard as well, expressive of an inclusive array of symptoms, from the war syndrome and the KZ-syndrome to the trauma of the Holocaust child and the “exiled child” syndrome.111
Even the most cursory look at the album is enough to see that it mercilessly exposes the post-war changes in the spaces of childhood. The idyllic topography is reduced nearly to the point of non-existence, ousted by new war topoi, such as the wall, barbed wire, execution and the gallows. The spaces of war-time childhood as distilled from the drawings leave no room for playgrounds or adult carers – mothers of the playing children. The playground is replaced by the execution square, with the gallows at its centre.112
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Children’s texts, which often complement picture narratives, also provide interesting material to explore. The texts specify what can only vaguely be inferred from the shapes, colours and/or moods of the drawings. Such small narratives offer an opportunity to articulate details which, though irrelevant to adults, may be vital to children. War-time narratives of children have their young protagonists who populate erstwhile spaces of childhood: “I was crying terribly because auntie didn’t want to take my toys along, nor Bobek my puppy, nor Maciuś, my kitten. Auntie said that we’d leave it all behind, not taking anything with us. When I cried terribly, auntie allowed me to take two dolls, my little black boys, elephants and a few toys,” recalls a young girl named Jadwiga.113
Writing essays about the war not only reminds the children about the loss of their nurseries. It also forces the children to self-referentially revise their narratives as they are being produced: “I can’t write any more, for I miss my daddy so much and I must cry. Why didya [sic] give me such a writing assignment that makes me cry?”114
Was The Academy of Mr Inkblot written for children such as Jadwiga?
Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?
The Academy of Mr Inkblot seems to be exceptionally committed not only to creating modern, post-war children’s literature and to deconstructing the prior models of the fairy tale, but also – if not predominantly – to providing an exegesis of the Event of the war and the Holocaust. I emphatically rely on the term “exegesis” here because, in my view, Brzechwa not so much spins a pacifist tale of an interrupted childhood which was idyllic and happy before the disaster, as rather goes a step further to re-interpret the Event and to incorporate it into ←54 | 55→historical-philosophical reflection. Hence, the tale about Mr Inkblot was not designed as a form of escape from working through the disaster of war, but compelled reflection on the devastation effected by the war.
Given this, in all probability the text was not only written in protest against the cruelty of the world, as this cruelty had just been perpetrated, but perhaps in order to explain the principles of the Spirit of History. Such a para-Hegelian observation about Brzechwa’s trilogy should not come as a surprise, because it is not an isolated example of such a tale, although chronologically it is its first iteration. Other notable instances include the Narnia series, which has come to be regarded as a historical-philosophical and theological interpretation of the Second World War,115 which
