The Mythisation of Reality ∗

Bruno Schulz

The essence of reality is meaning. What has no meaning is not

real for us. Every fragment of reality lives only because it plays its

part in some universal meaning. The old cosmogonies expressed this

by a sentence: `In the beginning was the Word.' The unnamed does

not exist for us. To name something is to incorporate it in some uni-

versal meaning. The isolated, mosaic word is a late product, now

only a result of technique. The primordial word was an hallucination

encircling the meaning of the world � it was a great universal total-

ity. The word in its commonplace, present-day sense has become a

mere fragment, a rudiment of some former, all-embracing and integral

mythology. There is within it, therefore, a tendency to regrowth, to

regeneration, to replenishment in its full meaning. The life of the word

depends on its tensing and straining to produce a thousand associa-

tions, like the quartered body of the snake from legend whose separate

pieces sought one another out in the darkness. That thousandfold yet

integral organism of the word was torn apart into individual phrases,

into letters, into commonplace speech, and in this new form, applied

to practical needs, it has come down to us as an organ of understand-

ing. The life of the word, its development, has been switched on to

new tracks, the tracks of practical life, and subjected to new notions

of propriety. But when by some means the injunctions of practicality

∗translated by John Curran Davis

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relax their strictures, when the word is liberated from that coercion,

left to its own devices and restored to its own rights, then a regression

takes place within it, a backward �ow, and the word strives for its for-

mer connections, for a replenishment in meaning, and this striving of

the word for its nursery � its homesickness, its yearning for its lingual

homeland � we call poetry.

Poetry is the short circuits of meaning between words, the impul-

sive regeneration of primordial myths.

We forget when we use commonplace words that they are fragments

of ancient and eternal stories, and that like barbarians we are building

our homes from fragments of sculptures and the statues of the gods.

Even our most mundane concepts and de�nitions are distant deriva-

tives of myths and ancient stories. Not a single grain is there among

our ideas that did not arise from mythology, that was not mythology

transformed, mutilated and remoulded. The most primal function of

the spirit is the telling of tales, the making up of `stories'. The driving

force of human knowledge is the conviction that at the end of its inves-

tigations it will discover the ultimate meaning of the world. And this

it seeks out at the summits of its arti�cial mounds and sca�olding.

But the elements it uses in their construction have been used once

already; they arise from forgotten, shattered `stories'. Poetry antici-

pates those lost meanings, and restores words to their places, connects

them according to their ancient meanings. In the hands of a poet the

word comes, as it were, to its senses, to its essential meaning; it blos-

soms spontaneously and stretches out in accordance with its own laws

� and it regains its integrity. All poetry, therefore, is mythologisation

� it strives to create myths about the world. The mythologisation

of the world has not ended. That process was merely curbed by the

development of knowledge � pushed into a side channel, where it lives

not understanding its true signi�cance. But knowledge too is only the

construction of myths about the world, since myth resides in the very

elements, and beyond myth we cannot go. Poetry arrives at the mean-

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ing of the world anticipando � deductively, on the basis of great and

daring short-cuts and approximations. Knowledge strives for the same

thing inductively, methodically, taking all the material of experience

into account. Fundamentally, one and the other share the same goal.

The human spirit is tireless in its glossing of life with the aid of

myths, its `making sense' of reality. The word, on its own, left to its

own devices, gravitates, draws toward meaning.

Meaning is the element that carries humanity into the process of

reality. It is an absolute given. It cannot be derived from other givens.

It cannot be determined why something should appear meaningful to

us. The process of making sense of the world is bound closely to the

word � speech is man's metaphysical organ. And yet, in the course

of time, the word rigidi�es, becomes immobilised, and ceases to be

a conductor of new meanings. The poet, through new short-circuits

that arise from fusions, restores conductivity to words. Mathematical

symbols are an expansion of the word to new realms. The image is

also a derivative of the original word, the word that was not yet a sign,

but a myth, a story, a meaning.

We take the commonplace word for a shadow of reality, its re�ec-

tion. The reverse would be more accurate: reality is the shadow of the

word. Philosophy is really philology � it is the profound and creative

study of the word.

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