166
PARTISAN REVIEW
any piece of time someone has laid claim to, has even casually men–
tioned in passing, is already marred, spoiled, unfit for consumption. I
can't stand people laying claim to my time. They make the scrap they
touched nauseating to me. I am incapable of sharing time, of feeding
on somebody's leftovers.
Time is examined and transmogrified throughout Schulz's fiction,
where it occupies a starring role alongside Father, who undergoes as
many mutations and transformations (crab, cockroach, horsefly) as
Schulzian time. Neither Father nor time can stay put in their original
format. They exist in a state of constant flux, mutating and disappearing
at will. Time appears in "The Night of the Great Season" as "that great
eccentric" which "begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years
which - like a sixth, smallest toe - grow a thirteenth month ... a
hunchback month, a half-wilted shoot, more tentative than real." In
"The Age of Genius," Schulz explains that while ordinary events are ar–
ranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread, other events
have occurred too late, that is, "after the whole of time has been dis–
tributed, divided, and allotted." What is to be done with these events:
... hanging in the air, homeless, errant? Could it be that time is too
narrow for all events? Could it happen that all scats within time
might have been sold? Is there perhaps some kind of bidding for
time?
Time, and the "framework of uninterrupted chronology" with our
"scrupulous habit of reporting on used-up hours" are all but forsaken in
the hilarious story, "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass," where
the "quick decomposition of time" ceases to interest people, who, in–
stead, accept time free of vigilance. "It immediately begins to do tricks,
play irresponsible jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning." The staff of the
sanatorium have put back the clock, reactivating time past, with all its
possibilities, so that which might have happened in "ordinary time" can
be undone. Thus, Father, dead in other locales, is offered a possibility of
recovery, although the staff admits that his death "throws a certain
shadow on his existence here ."
In
a letter to a critic who had written
about
Cinnamon Shops,
Schulz claims that the kind of art he cares about
is "precisely a regression, childhood revisited. My ideal goal is to 'mature
into childhood.' " Schulz's fiction and artwork act as extended elegies
to childhood, his family, and Drohobycz, keeping each alive through
spectacular acts of metamorphoses.
SUSAN
MIRON
