Schulz in Several Tropes

Abstract

Schulz’s fiction is methodologically as radical as writing on the boundary of the conscious and the unconscious can be. But does it make sense to talk about Schulz’s methodology? If the answer is yes, one may use for that purpose such concepts as metaphor, analogy, logos, oxymoron, and metamorphosis. They may help us discover the logic of Schulz’s stories, which is logic in a broad sense of the term, more the movement of the logos than a theory of making statements. The concepts mentioned above are not labels: they describe elegant and impressive ways of escaping from reason, taken with its help. All this can be etymologically motivated: the ancient Greek concept of logos refers to reason, speech, and discourse. It is ambiguous since the root verb légein means (1) to connect, to bring together; (2) to select, to calculate.