The Oneiric Leaper: Repetition, Distortion, and the Subject in Narrative

This article argues that narrative knowledge is transmitted through repetition rather than decipherment — and that there is no hidden story behind the story. From this premise, it proposes a topological account of narrative subjectivity, locating the subject not in images or characters, but in the interval that separates them — in the leap. To clarify this claim, the essay distinguishes three articulated but non-equivalent levels: repetition as structural principle, distortion as its mode of appearance in the unconscious, and profound similarity, in Walter Benjamin's sense, as its aesthetic form. Taking Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass as its primary corpus, the article develops a methodological criterion for identifying narratives that operate topologically: works that leap rather than explain their leaps. In Schulz, spatio-temporal displacements leave visible traces — witnesses to the leap — in which distortion becomes legible as an index of the subject. The comparison between the two collections demonstrates how excessive rationalization interrupts the leap and weakens narrative force.