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Postmodern practices have considerably unsettled the ontological status of the modern fairy tale. Authorial freedom in manipulating tradition, which is expressed in intertextual games, blends of various conventions and amalgams of compositional methods, has been legitimised by the notion that “we have seen it all.”⁹⁰ Having done its postmodernist homework, the contemporary fairy tale interrogates its own generic boundaries, which amounts to undermining both its own existence and the entrenched canon from which it hails. For the “playful daughter of myth,” as Friedrich von der Leven calls the folktale, can not only precede myth, interlace with or seep into it, giving it a new lustre, but also ask questions about its own being.⁹¹ In this sense, the contemporary fairy tale, as opposed to the traditional one, not so much talks about the “eternal praesens, the eternal now that is actualised in individual human lives, in people’s experience of life,”⁹² as calls into question the universality of the fabular message by continually decontextualising fairy-tale narratives.

Though symptomatic of contemporary texts, these postmodern shifts within the fabular substance certainly did not commence when postmodernism was proclaimed. If we consider the self-referentiality of the fairy tale to be a defining feature of postmodernity, we should date the beginning of revolutionary changes within the genre back to Bolesław Leśmian, an eminent Polish poet of Jewish descent, who wrote in the interwar period but derived inspirations from modernism.

Mise en abyme is one of Leśmian’s favourite teleological contrivances, which forms a richly layered score in Przygody Sindbada Żeglarza [The Adventures of ←45 | 46→Sindbad the Sailor]. At the centre of the textual world, which is woven of multiple writing-related motifs, stands one of the protagonists – uncle Tarabuk, a poet obsessed with the idea of eternally preserving his works, whose body covered in his verses becomes the message in and of itself. The impact of the poetry inscribed on uncle Tarabuk’s skin is limited, which puts an end to the writer’s dream of poetic fame. At the same time however, such an inscription warrants an intimate encounter between a potential reader of Tarabuk’s texts and Tarabuk himself. The commitment to recording and to preserving the record leads thus to a “double” transubstantiation as poetry becomes body and body becomes poetry. Whoever wants to partake of it should join the elitist community of reading during which a reading communion occurs. The seriousness of testifying to literature by means of one’s own body is undercut by Leśmian’s irony. Uncle Tarabuk must eventually acknowledge the superiority of the narrative in which he is himself implanted and submit to the rules of the fairy tale, which dictate that the ending should involve the conquest of a woman. As Tarabuk must get married, the finale of the twists and turns of his manoeuvres with the script leaves no illusions as to his lot, for it turns out that “under his sign-overwritten skin a new story is already being written, one far more effective than his poetry.”⁹³

The storm of self-referentiality also sweeps across the narrative of Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks (Mr Inkblot) trilogy,⁹⁴ billowing – like in Leśmian’s fairy-tale – with the motifs of script and writing. The interdependence between the motif of writing as part of the plot in the texts about Mr Inkblot and the generic “wobbliness” of the fairy tale has been very insightfully grasped by Papuzińska, who observes that Brzechwa produces a sense of distance between the reader and the world of the text, which dismantles the literary illusion incorporated in the structure of the work. The application of these novel devices in Akademia pana Kleksa [The Academy of Mr Inkblot] is perhaps their first occurrence in the history of the literary fairy tale.⁹⁵

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The Academy of Mr Inkblot is a modern fairy tale about an oddball who runs an Academy situated in Chocolate Street and accepts only boys whose names start with an “A” as his students. The Academy building is located in a picturesque park neighbouring the fairylands with which Mr Inkblot and his pupils are on cordial terms. Under Mr Inkblot’s tutelage, the boys experience several adventures and take part in blotting lessons. The main child protagonist of the book is Adaś Niezgódka (Adam Stroppy), for whom Mr Inkblot cherishes high hopes and who he views as his successor. Mr Inkblot himself is a scholar, a wizard and an inventor who often chooses to stand on one leg and dispatches his eye into outer space. He is friends with Mateusz, a talking starling, who is in fact a prince who was turned into a bird. Since his transfiguration into a bird, Mateusz has been looking for a button from the magic cap of Doctor Paj-Chi-Wo,⁹⁶ which will enable him to regain his human form. Mr Inkblot possesses secrets, which he guards cautiously and that is why he forbids the boys to enter his study. The Academy’s idyll is disrupted by the arrival of Alojzy, a mechanical doll constructed by Filip the barber, who asks Mr Inkblot to make it into a real boy. Alojzy rebels and destroys the Academy as Mr Inkblot, overwhelmed by the evil perpetrated by the doll, steadily diminishes, only to eventually shrink into the button for which Mateusz has been searching. When the starling regains his human form, he turns out not to be a young prince, but a forty-year-old man, the author of The Academy, who explains to Adaś that the entire story in which he has been involved is a dream or perhaps a fabrication.

Though Papuzińska’s insights about the book are certainly apt, the reasons behind furnishing the tale with an ending which, like postmodernist narratives, invites at least two different interpretations deserve a more thorough examination. One of the interpretations is indeed convincingly spelled out by Papuzińska, who focuses on the text’s reliance on oneiric conventions to construe the dream as envisaging the fall of civilisation, as the book ends with the boys’ departure from the secure space of the Academy. At the same time, the ending in which Adaś Niezgódka wakes up from the dream of the Academy in the study of the author of The Academy himself, implies that the entire story was just a child’s reverie, while the awakening rationalises the envisioned events, exposing their illogicality. Nevertheless, the oneiric is not the only convention employed by Brzechwa in the story, and its ending can be located in an entirely different context. The demystification of the fairy tale and emptying it of wonder by having magic supplanted with the banality of sleep come across as a cruel experiment ←47 | 48→on the reader, who craves fabulous marvels. Reading in this fashion is difficult for anybody, and it is particularly challenging for a child. The disappointment it occasions may admittedly be attributed to the modernist penchant for playing with conventions, but it is by no means necessary.

Therefore instead of the postmodernist, oneiristically underpinned take on The Academy, I propose to read the adventures of Mr Inkblot “in spite of all.” Of course, the idea of such a reading is mediated, and its primary locus is Georges Didi-Huberman’s seminal book Images in Spite of All. Didi-Huberman studies four photographs taken in Auschwitz and sides with those who do not agree to be silent about the Holocaust even though silence has long been the major mode, or perhaps anti-mode, of representing the Holocaust. As argued by Beata and Tomasz Polak, “the French researcher is in league with those who took those pictures in order to say something through them rather than not saying anything through them.”⁹⁷ Pondering whether or not “to snatch the image from that hell in spite of all,”⁹⁸ Didi-Huberman’s answer is a resounding “yes.” He discerns in the photographs not only a form of “aesthetic” representation which is supposed to give a shape to the unimaginable, but also an ethical challenge which must be accepted for the sake of remembering the victims and the witnesses, all the more so as producing such evidence of the crime by the latter was undoubtedly an act of heroism.

I agree that locating the reading of The Academy of Mr Inkblot in the context of the Auschwitz pictures, which are a unique document of the crime, may be regarded as methodologically scandalous. Mindful of such charges, I place Brzechwa’s fairy tale on the margins of Holocaust discourse, at the same time remembering about its implied child reader and about its literariness, which is in no way compatible with the ontology of Holocaust testimony. At the same time, the “images-in-spite-of-all” formula prompts me – both as a researcher and as a reader – to embrace an interpretation of The Academy that diverges from the conventional, “schoolish” one.⁹⁹ What I perceive in Brzechwa’s book is primarily ←48 | 49→a test run or a trial of a “form” that could harness a narrative which had no literary representation of its own in “separate literature” before. Brzechwa seems to strive – “in spite of all” – to fashion an image of something that has up to now been searching for its form.

Ostensibly, The Academy of Mr Inkblot, the flagship work of the children’s writer, has already been examined from all possible angles. Its first critics gave it an enthusiastic welcome. For one, the laudatory reviews of Wanda Żółkiewska and Wanda Grodzieńska set the tone for the later interpretive approaches to the book: fantasy, a surrealist riot of characters, the spirit of adventure – this is what the modern fairy tale feeds to young readers by the spoonful.

The development of research into Brzechwa’s tale was greatly boosted by the scintillating career of the grotesque in contemporary literature, which was incorporated into and essentially affected the formation of school discourse. Preoccupation with the grotesque entailed paying closer attention to the language of the Mr Inkblot trilogy. Riding the wave of this “linguistic turn,” scholars first and foremost highlight the wealth of verbal devices, the ubiquitous grotesque and the self-referentiality of the book. These components, they argue, imply that the tale presupposes two varieties of implied reader. This dual readership was also eagerly expounded by the writer himself, who stressed that especially Tryumf pana Kleksa [The Triumph of Mr Inkblot] would be an experiment, with its fair-tale layer designed for children and its satirical investment devised for adults.

Considering the two target groups, we cannot possibly ignore the time when The Academy was written, as in 1946 the post-war chapter of children’s literature opened with a fairy tale, which suggests escapism from brutal realities. Such a therapeutic proclivity of the story was touted by Janina, Brzechwa’s third wife, who argued that The Academy was in fact an escape from reality.¹⁰⁰ One of the writer’s female friends recalls the community of reading under the Nazi ←49 | 50→occupation in this way: “We all huddled up in a tiny room, four people within ca. twelve square metres. Janek [an endearment of Jan] would bring his poems and stories: Akademia pana Kleksa, ‘Pan Drops i jego trupa’ [‘Mr Mint and his Troupe’] […].”¹⁰¹ Because of this contiguity of the narrative and the war-time reality, the fairy tale does not eschew autobiographical allusions. For example, Janina Brzechwa recognises herself in the caretaker Weronik and deciphers the old trickster Mr Inkblot as the writer’s self-portrayal.¹⁰²

More recent approaches carry Brzechwa’s trilogy in somewhat different directions, which probably results from the exhaustion of the grotesque-linguistic interpretation model. Currently, critics prefer to emphasise the work the writer put into processing the phantasm of the teacher, one of the fundamental myths of the fourth literature. In this context, special attention should be paid to the insights offered by Anna Szóstak, who is one of the few scholars to scrutinise what has already become a classic of children’s literature from a non-standard angle. The originality of her framework lies in that instead of making the absurd, the grotesque or the linguistic the cornerstone of her reading, she dismisses these concepts altogether for the sake of exploring intuitive feelings which have not yet found a legitimate excuse to enter scholarly discourse on the tales about Mr Inkblot. Szóstak makes at least two compelling comments which have not been further examined so far. Namely, she remarks that the motif of Mr Inkblot producing or upsizing food by means of a small pump may be a travesty of Christ’s feeding-the-multitude miracle in the Gospel, where Christ multiplies bread and fish.¹⁰³ Her other innovative concept is that the Academy itself embodies the Platonic world of ideas.¹⁰⁴

An equally original interpretation of The Academy of Mr Inkblot is offered by Adam Lipszyc. In his article on the cyborgisation of pop-culture protagonists “Roy, Alojzy i inne chłopaki” [“Roy, Alojzy and Other Lads”], Lipszyc argues ←50 | 51→that Brzechwa’s book should actually be studied within Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical paradigm and Jacques Lacan’s mirror-stage framework. Read in this way, The Academy tells a story of maturation which equals the expulsion from the fairy tale, while Alojzy is a sinister form of the “self-consciousness” of the fairy tale because he is constructed and the appearance of such a mirror within the tale explodes it from the inside. The fairy tale cannot go on anymore, and its Author must appear. In this way, the artificiality of Alojzy exposes the artificiality of the fairy tale and, even before that, the artificiality of the Academy.¹⁰⁵

Building on Lipszyc’s observations 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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