Cancer as a Physical Illustration of the Mental State: About Fritz Zorn’s Mars

Abstract

The article analyses the book Mars by the Swiss author Fritz Zorn. A cult book from the 1970s, Mars features a narrator, a young teacher from a wealthy, bourgeois family, who accuses both his family and Swiss society of causing his cancer, after a prolonged period of depression. Zorn died of cancer before Mars was published. The publication of the book was recommended by the renowned writer Adolf Muschg who labelled himself a hypochondriac and wrote extensively about psychosomatic illnesses that afflict modern humans, since they cannot express their anguish otherwise. Fritz Zorn also described his illness as psychosomatic. But Muschg also said that illness is only a motivation for writing, while the real goal is always aesthetic ambition. Nevertheless, absent the illness, he might never have become a writer. The same obviously holds true for the author of Mars, a book that one should read not only as social critique but simultaneously as fiction. The analysis demonstrates how Zorn’s book, with its salient autobiographical feel, tries to outline the history of his psychosomatic illness. At the end the author calls himself “god’s carcinoma” and claims he was driven to this stage through a childhood, youth and the beginning of employment as a teacher that were only apparently fortunate. The whole book should be considered as a declaration of war on a false bourgeois society, other victims of which were Zorn’s “poor parents,” as he labels them throughout the book.