A Cut-off. Seven Fragments

Abstrakt

The text consists of seven fragments which in different ways refer to a central category of separation; in particular to masochism, one of its manifestations. First, however, separation reveals itself in an imaginary act of self-castration (in a dream), described by Schulz in a letter. This act locates the writer beyond the sexes, symbolically excludes him from biological support of the stream of life and directs to art. Schulz considered that irreversible passage from biological reproduction to artistic creation a grave sin. The masochistic separation became a topic of many graphic works and drawings in which the artist, as an icon of himself, paid homage to “la belle dame sans merci.” His literary works are quite different – Schulz’s fiction is marked by shame. The present essay demonstrates how the literary discourse of the Cinnamon Shops generates meaningful gaps. Allusions and silence, all kinds of narrative suspension, were supplemented by Schulz with pictorial representations, according to a principle that what cannot be written about, may be drawn. Many of his graphic works are overt manifestoes of masochism. In the Booke of Idolatry these are emblematic representations, projections of the artist’s own phantasms, based on the visual idiom of the times, while in the compulsive drawings from the 1930s the boundary between fantasy and reality blurs. Schulz’s artistic operations are ostentatious. He never used any disguise, reporting on himself. He was a masochist, but what did it mean? Another fragment is an attempt to find out what it meant to be a masochist in Schulz’s times, and how he defined himself in that context, particularly in an explicit statement made in a letter to a certain psychiatrist: “Creatively, I express this perversion in its loftiest, philosophically interpreted form as a foundation determining the total Weltanschauung of an individual in all its ramifications.” The final fragment presents for the most part some hitherto unknown documents of Schulz’s life, such as a police certificate of decency, men’s second-hand reports on his masochism, and memories of women with whom the writer held various kinds of liaisons.