"The renunciation of ecstasy is a betrayal of our true possibilities." R.D. Laing

*

When slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833, the Crown saw fit to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners in its territory. The compensation was based on a concept of legality that has not disappeared from our understanding to this day. According to Hegel, the "existence of free will" exceeds legal law. It encompasses all degrees of freedom. Consequently, a person outside the law, as a merely willing subject, is "not entitled". His claims are contained in utopian phrases. One of the infamies of the world is that white societies can take the position of systematic disenfranchisement without appearing offensively racist.

Magical Moment

The magical moment of being human is that a person can take over another living being with a look, a gesture, a word, a smell, a cleavage. "Seduction is the true power," says Schiller.

Nana is the post-doc fellow at a Hessian university founded in the Middle Ages and ennobled by important graduates. Time is running out between boredom and decay. No glimmer of past greatness brightens the business. The pompous, dilapidated fortress building is a phantom of grandiosity. There is a dead wing full of dust miracles and mummified mice. A thread of indifference weaves a protective cloak over the clandestine labyrinth. Nana slips through a buttonhole every day as if through a window of time and explores the layers of a sunken world in the dead wing.

Nana does not need the scholarship. She could access a small fortune at any time. The general narrow-mindedness and inadequacy of the working world offer her poetic subjects.

You have to imagine Nana as a happy person. After a predictable disaster, she starts the next attempt in a fit of subtle lack of inhibition. She tells Professor Cornelius Blattschneider the story of the day in an email, barely concealed. Cornelius heads the German Department. He is the language master. That corresponds to a historical description of his workplace. The first professor of modern languages ​​at the Philipps University of Ederthal had the title of language master. Cornelius' personality does not fit into any modern narrative. We don't want to come on too strong and let him slowly rise to his full height.

At the moment, he seems almost approachable to Nana in the familiar way, in that he responds warmly to her charms. His reactions tell Nana how attractive he finds her. Nana and Cornelius have not had a private connection for long. Until a few days ago, they had nothing more than campus communication. But even before that, Cornelius never hid his enthusiasm for the bespectacled snake with the large breasts and sensual nature.

Writing down the botched small-town adventure makes Nana shudder at her desk. The urge to write gives her a kick that only came about through direct contact with the editor Tillmann in his grandmother's apartment via a detour of a manifestation. That was a landing with the emergency parachute.

In the present tense of the erotic disaster

Tillmann has made it. He works at Suhrkamp in Berlin. From the flood of unsolicited submissions, an intern passes him a manuscript with a dreamy, handwritten cover letter directly from his hometown. Whoever makes me big, I will love. After all, I don't want to live alone in seventh heaven. That's not what Nana exactly says, but it smells and sounds like this. Tillmann finds the letter promising. The painted letters turn him on; he is holding a pheromone bomb in his hands. Two weeks later he meets Nana in person. The scene of the encounter, which Tillmann misinterprets as an invitation to sex without preamble, is the musty, neglected grandmother's abode with the inevitable plastic tablecloth on the kitchen table. The stench of old age and poverty creates its own emission in the dark place. Tillmann has put the widow up in the neighborhood. He feels superior, after all he knows better than most how lost one is in Ederthal. He has made it in Berlin. It doesn't even occur to him that for Nana the production is the most important thing. In her eyes, Tillmann is both a participant and a spectator.

Suddenly the play collapses.

There are situations in which Nana hands over the direction to an imaginary Master of Manifestation. Sometimes she calls him a mentor. Nana wants to be for her mentor what he is for her, namely a guarantee of endless pleasure, a simple everyday life, enough money, easily acquired status and the prospect of a permanent shift in the boundaries of perception. The mentor gives Nana the feeling that she can exist in outer space. Certainly not without aids. To be where the stars are... unscheduled sexual intercourse ensues. Something like an out-of-the-box stop.

While Nana writes a sugarcoated version of the coital destruction of her production for Cornelius, the desire to write travels to her abdomen. The excitement is transferred to Cornelius. His answer comes as quickly as a recoil. There is no doubt that he is ready to go overboard. Nana takes refuge in her yoga routine. In the frog position, she admits to herself that she has just been confronted with something unexpected. A new chapter begins in the book of her life.

Cornelius 's answer:

I find this particularly beautiful: "After such a profound emotional exchange, she is prepared by sad experience to be disappointed by the mere person."

The body has to play along, even if only as a fantasy. If the mind is the first prerequisite for sex, then the idea strains the cliché of a relationship à la Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. But Simone liked going out with Nelson Algren, and at times even preferred it, with whom there were certainly no intellectual foreplay. Presumably the narrator who feels words needs a double imago. An alien brain that take action down to her skeleton, making her shudder like in an English novel from the early 19th century, and someone who can extend an invitation to an ice cream parlor so innocently that the narrator loses herself in the idea that while he is talking about Oscar Wilde, he could make contact with one of her thighs in such a way that she is in danger of biting the straw in her iced coffee into pieces. It is magical. But what is almost even more remarkable is that the affected woman can follow the man's words; this is the result of an interesting split in her mind. A clever mind knows that Oscar Wilde was not a master of art for its own sake, the key word being "L'art pour lárt", as is often claimed, but a driving force behind gay emancipation under difficult conditions. He succeeded as a writer and failed as a human being. In his "Reflections on the Gay Question", Didier Eribon mentions "homosexual codes" in a circle around Oscar Wilde. People want to speak out. Repression dictates the text. At the same time, a "counter-discourse" is emerging to the pathologization of sexuality, in which homosexuality is seen as a cause for persecution.

Inflamed, even set ablaze, Nana writes back immediately. She suffers a sweet pain because conventions do not allow her to use more than a formal form of address. Her regression places a dozen invisible heart emojis behind the name of the congenial.

Nana feels the foreign desk fever.

It drives her desire. Thank you, Cornelius , she writes, for the interesting bridges you build between my story and literary idols that I admire. The narrator shares with Simone de Beauvoir an exuberant imagination, a high flammability and the willingness to consciously cross boundaries. If only out of fear of ending up like Simone's beloved Zaza, who submitted to conventions and was destroyed by them. Zaza, whom Simone called an "immoral and noble lady" - and meant this entirely with admiration. The split in the narrator's imagination probably stems from an unwillingness to choose between the animalistic and intellectual pleasures of her self-created paracosm. Oscar Wilde definitely made a contribution and exerted influence beyond pure art - his writing still has the power to do so today. To exert influence, something that is in itself - according to Wilde - immoral and yet terribly fascinating. And isn't that exactly what we all do here in our comments and with our stories - influence each other?

The next text load arrives before midnight. Nana feels overwhelmed and delighted. It should irritate her that she can trigger so much in a stranger so quickly. It doesn't irritate her. She turns off all the lights. Only the displays on her table illuminate the room. For the first time she senses the essence of her desire. A void fills up. In an imagination she takes Cornelius into herself, in a calm readiness... in oxytocin mode... like in a lustful half-sleep on a cool sheet on a warm night. Every peak of excitement is far away, and wasn't that often the case when a man had lain with her. When had she ever been so excited as when she was emotionally half-distanced from Cornelius ?

Cornelius replies:

We want to influence each other, that is a source of pleasure. The rivers of pleasure flow into a text. Those who vibrate effortlessly on the tip of a word are invited; who feel pleasure while they think. Those who feel words and feel touched by words. Who can pull themselves up using a word? Who feels the pull in their groin alone in the language space? We are philologists. We both have fled to academia. Our refuge is the campus. Like Molly Bloom in the final soliloquium of James Joyce's "Ulysses", you ask me with your eyes to ask again whether you want to be completely belong to me. 

Nana is immediately drawn into the story. She interprets "pull ... up" as a cover version of being horny. She is surprised by the narrative twist, but not too much. She is immediately drawn into the story, the first sketch of which Cornelius has just presented. She would rather be Stephen (Dedalus) than Molly (Bloom). She reaches for her thoroughly worked-out "Ulysses". It is a holy book from the estate of a communist great-uncle who, like Thomas Brasch's parents, had been in false exile during the Nazi era and had successfully reconciled his love of everything British with socialism. He had enjoyed being a citizen of the GDR, but as Heiner Müller characterized Peter Hacks, the aristocrat Hacks had misunderstood socialism as a fairy tale. For Grandpa, the GDR was a fairy tale land with living characters. The potent dreamer encouraged his great-niece's receptivity to side thrills. The secondary stimulus is the main source of pleasure - full enjoyment only develops in relation to a congenial fellow player. Cornelius' intuitive brilliance corresponds to a demanding nature. Every concession is linked to a condition that makes the game more dynamic. Cornelius gives Nana nothing for free. There are signs of an ideal coexistence, such as can come about between horse and rider. Nana feels tickled by the insight that Cornelius wants to rule her with intellectual thigh pressure. This excites her. She likes to appear dominant, but also accepts invitations of superior sovereignty. She sees herself as a student on the way to greater competence.

Written approach

Nana also gives nothing away. Now she is Molly, the woman without a full stop or comma (see the standard exegesis of "Ulysses"); a voluptuous beauty according to the Sacher-Masoch ideal. And that is where the arrondissement begins. Her erudition forces Nana to go into great detail.

Determined to "give herself" to the knight on the spot, Aurora R., who later became Wanda von Sacher-Masoch - after a long written approach - rushes to the apartment of her pen pal and benefactor Leopold (like Leopold Bloom, Molly's impotent husband), whom she expects to find with a cold to the point of death. Leopold actually meets her in elegiac openness. He is delighted by the visitor's youthful bravura. He has to revise the idea that a strict letter gave him. He had expected a strong lady; a pleasantly frightening person.Is Leopold hiding a slight disappointment in the face of the charming Aurora? How to throw yourself at the feet of an inexperienced person? As a director, Leopold would be deprived of the joy of submission.Aurora glosses over a lot. She owes Leopold the end of precarious circumstances. For a long time she was forced to mend soldiers' clothes for little money. Casually and in a certain way blindly, Leopold ends the ordeal of a seamstress. Aurora keeps quiet about her past misery. For the moment she is doing her best to keep her noble-born, and incidentally criminally careless, patron in the dark. She presents herself as the owner of bourgeois freedom, sovereign of her origins.The sketch describes the first daylight encounter between the two. Aurora and Leopold have met before, but Aurora appeared veiled and sadly covered; so that the instantly infatuated person could not form an image of the unapproachable woman.

The constellation was bizarre. A friend of the heroine, let's call her Mrs. F., had started a correspondence with Leopold out of sheer malice. The knight, the son of the police chief and also an academic and literary writer of stature and fortune, leads a public, deliberately indiscreet life. He turns his sexual preferences into the subject of novels. Consequently, society knows what Leopold is like. As a dear pen pal, Mrs. F. accommodated his preferences until family circumstances forced them to stop communicating. For her own safety, she demanded the letters back. Leopold agreed on the condition that he could hand her the bundle in person. Mrs. F. asked Aurora to represent her in the delicate transaction. Aurora was persuaded.

Leopold immediately got close to her. He put on his flamboyant show. He managed to hire the anonymous and masked messenger as Mrs. F.'s successor."

I agreed... but only if he promised never to search for me in any way, which he promised. He said it would be best if I kept the name Wanda von Dunajew for the address."