The Mythologics of the Story “Nimrod” in the Context of B. Schulz’s “The Cinnamon Shops”

Abstract

The short story «Nimrod», located in the middle of B. Schulz’s book «The Cinnamon Shops», rarely attracts the attention of Schulz scholars, and there are no separate scholarly researches dedicated to «Nimrod». Schulz scholars usually perceive «Nimrod» as a lyrical etude, which plays a secondary role in the general plot of the collection. At the same time, its central location in the book and the fact that it does not even mention the main character of the previous stories, the Father, require a closer look at the plot of «Nimrod» through its mythologics. This approach could be the key to changing characters (from Father to Son) in the second half of «The Cinnamon Shops».

The aim of the article is to find out how the mythologics of «Nimrod» is connected with the general mythologics of «The Cinnamon Shops» and how the plot of this story is inscribed in the plot of the book.

The methodological basis of the study is mythocriticism.

The story «Nimrod» plays not a supporting role in the structure of the collection «The Cinnamon Shops», but one of the key roles. Its protagonist neither succumbs to the «temptation of forming» matter and nature, nor follows the paternal path of demiurgic experimentation with nature as matter, but remains its observer. The puppy Nimrod that appears in the boy’s house suddenly and out of nowhere, as if it had fallen from the sky, and about whom the boy says: «the favourite of the gods», is in the mythologics of the story and the entire book a test of the boy’s readiness for initiation into the mysteries of nature and life. These mysteries will be revealed to the boy in the second half of the book when he meets Pan in the story of the same name, or feels the birth of a new year with the first glimpses, still a promise, of the coming spring on Christmas Eve in the story «The Cinnamon Shops», or sees in reality in the inhabitants of the city what his father told in his treatise on mannequins, in «The Street of Crocodiles».