Bruno Schulz and magic realism

A list of the main magic realists includes Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortàzar, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Màrquez, and Salman Rushdie, and among Polish authors, Stanisław Lem, Olga Tokarczuk, and sometimes Witold Gombrowicz. Can Bruno Schulz be called a magic realist as well? Magic realists attempt in their works to grasp the essence of the things, phenomena, situations or relations which they refer to. The way he or she does it cannot be determined by philosophy, but must be based on some specific idea of literature. In the case of Schulz, narration combines together radically different dimensions of reality, which allows the author to call him a magic realist, too. Woleński places the classic elements of Schulz’s fiction, such as experiments with time and the mythicization of reality, with the magic realism and phenomenology as its philosophical underpinning. The final question asked in the text is how would Schulz have described the Shoah, if he had a chance to survive it.