Dreams, Memory, and The Captive Mind: Between Ficowski, Schulz, and Miłosz
In the prose of Jerzy Ficowski and Bruno Schulz, the boundaries between dream and waking life are deliberately blurred. Their stories unfold not in the reassuring certainties of ordinary narrative, but in a liminal zone where time, memory, and perception dissolve into one another. This blurring is not merely stylistic—it reflects a deeper rupture in human consciousness: the fracture of reality after catastrophe.
This collapse of stable perception echoes Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, where intellectuals in totalitarian systems learn to survive in worlds “full of lies and insincerity,” until the mind itself becomes captive to distortion. Miłosz shows how one internalizes the surrounding falsehoods and thus loses a genuine connection with reality. The mind becomes “captive,” not through physical chains but through corrupted perception. Fiction and dream cease to be artistic choices—they become the only possible languages of those who can no longer trust the real.
Ficowski and Schulz, writing in a poetic rather than political register, respond to the same crisis. Their surreal imagery and dreamlike structures embody what Miłosz—and also Theodor Adorno—diagnosed intellectually: the loss of authenticity in a world shaped by trauma and ideology. Adorno warned that speaking of the Holocaust risks reducing unspeakable suffering to mere statistics; yet silence, too, becomes a form of complicity. The postwar artist stands in this impossible position—needing to speak while knowing that language may fail.
Both Ficowski and Schulz write from within that silence. Their fiction becomes a memorial made of dreams: distorted, symbolic, haunted. The past follows their narrators like a shadow—always present, never fully confronted. Everyone “sees the shadows,” yet few dare to speak of them. Thus, their dream worlds are not escapist—they are sites of ethical remembrance, where the fractures of reality are illuminated by imagination.
How can one live and think after truth itself has been broken?
Their implicit answer: art must no longer describe reality—it must rebuild it from its ruins.
Perception After Trauma: The Artificial Hen
In a world where stable perception has collapsed, Ficowski and Schulz do not restore order; instead, they recreate the disoriented vision of a traumatized mind. Their stories do not describe trauma directly—they embody its aftermath. Objects appear and reappear across disconnected times and places, stripped of context yet charged with emotion. The world is fragmented, but consciousness searches among the fragments for what has been lost.
For someone scarred by trauma, ordinary objects no longer function as before. They become relics of memory, traces of what is forgotten yet deeply felt. This is why, in Ficowski’s stories, objects gain exaggerated importance—they act as emotional anchors in a sea of unreality. The repetition of certain images is not decorative; it mirrors the looping rhythm of traumatic memory, where the mind compulsively revisits what it cannot process.
In the story “The Artificial Hen, or the Gravedigger’s Lover,” this phenomenon appears vividly. The artificial hen—made of real feathers yet a toy—represents a reproduction of what already exists naturally. It is both real and false, alive and dead. Ficowski and his characters fixate on it irrationally. It seems trivial, yet it becomes central. In Ficowski, the artificial hen becomes a metaphor for imitation and loss—a reproduction that replaces what has been destroyed. It reveals how, after trauma, one lives in an artificially rebuilt world, a fragile copy of what once was.
The artificial hen is not about the object itself, but about the act of attention—how a damaged consciousness clings to symbols in a desperate attempt to make sense of what no longer makes sense. Ficowski and Schulz show that surrealism is not escapism, but a map of disoriented memory, where the artificial becomes the only way to touch what is real.
Thoughts, Objects, Memory, and Reality
When one loses perception of reality, Ficowski and Schulz reconstruct such a world—the world as seen through the eyes of a traumatized person. Ordinary objects take on exaggerated importance, appearing repeatedly in unrelated contexts, mirroring the search for lost fragments of memory. Because trauma destabilizes reality, attention shifts away from grand events toward crumbs of meaning, repetition, and fragments.
- The loss of perception of reality corresponds to Miłosz’s notion of the captive mind.
- Their recreation of that world is an act of artistic recovery—not of what was, but of what remains.
- Ordinary objects gain magnitude as the last surviving signs within silence.
- The artificial hen, trivial in itself, becomes a locus of meaning.
- The repetition of motifs reflects trauma’s looping, fragmented memory.
This interpretation is not a false projection—it aligns with major threads in literary criticism and trauma theory. After the disintegration of a coherent world, objects become mnemonic anchors, recurring because the mind seeks to reclaim what has been lost. The artificial hen is not just an oddity but a structural device that carries the weight of memory’s failure and reconstruction’s impossibility.
Conclusion
Ficowski and Schulz do not offer a restored reality, but an articulated fracture. They show how a mind unmoored from stable perception views the world—caught between ordinary detail and mythic weight, between repetition and absence, between object and memory. Their art does not explain trauma—it inhabits its echo.
The artificial hen, the shoe, or the dog are not mere symbols—they are echoes of a world that can no longer be trusted. To read them is to participate in the effort to remember what memory itself can no longer hold.
In the end, art can no longer describe reality. It must rebuild it from its ruins—for those whose reality has been irreparably shattered.