What’s this? Two episodes back to back, without a four-month delay between them? Unheard of! Who’s to say what spurred on this sudden industriousness in my YouTube output. Maybe my meds have finally kicked in, maybe the coffee is just that good. Or maybe it’s the fact that my obsessive-compulsive personality has found a new literary fixation toward which I’ve directed way too much of my attentional bandwidth. I’d like to think my loss of sleep will also benefit your reading. Don’t mistake this project as a strictly altruistic venture though. I live for the dopamine hits that come in the way of likes, comments, and shares – I’m a millennial, it’s in my bloodstream.
Where was I going with that…?
Oh yes – Welcome to W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List Episode Eight (Nine if you count my Schmidt Intro, but let’s be real, the numbering is fairly arbitrary, isn’t it?). As always, I’m your host Seth, and today I’m bringing you the first volume of my deep dive into the fiction of the phenomenal German experimentalist, Arno Otto Schmidt.
Before we jump in, let me give you a lay of the land. This series is my attempt to combat the paucity of contemporary online discussion surrounding this author, and to help readers navigate the extremely disorienting world of letters that comprises his fiction. If you’re new to Schmidt and not really sure where to start or what to make of him, I’d encourage you to go back and watch my previous episode – the Primer – which was conceived to help contextualize his work for unfamiliar readers. This episode however, is intended to act as a critical supplement to the first volume of his collected early fiction, and would be best suited to those who are reading, have read, or are about to read his Novellas.
Today’s video poses a unique challenge to me in comparison to my usual material I cover. When looking at the fiction market on an international scale, the audience for literature is a fraction of a fraction. The attention economy being what it is – let’s not turn this into a techno-social polemic if we can help it – reading as a pastime has been decimated in recent decades. Of those who continue to do so (and we love you for it) you then need to slice that readership down even further when you consider that this isn’t just literary fiction: this is experimental literary fiction… in translation… that’s out of print (At least for now – I addressed that in the last video.) Compound that further with the fact that we’re not even talking what people would consider a “major work” here. These are novellas from the author’s catalogue of early fiction. The kind of thing that well-established Schmidt fans would be amenable to, but new readers might not be as attracted to. Not many people choose to start with Sylvia Plath’s WINTER TREES before THE BELL JAR or ARIEL yeah? Same idea here. The COLLECTED NOVELLAS are, to put it reductively, a niche of a niche of a niche. What we have then by default, is a collective of readers that is vanishingly small. But I want to widen that concentric circle a little bit here with a pitch.
What if I told you that these novellas aren’t minor works; they aren’t scraps left over from dusty notebooks with half-baked ideas from an author still finding his voice. These are fully formed, exquisitely crafted thought-experiments that German literary scholars consider among the best works of fiction from the post-war era. I couldn’t agree more. I don’t recall the last time I encountered a collection of short works that was this accomplished, despite being so early in its author’s career. I urge you to set aside any preconceived notions you have about short stories or novellas and give this first Volume of Schmidt’s work a go. I’m here to try and help you make sense of it.
Publication & Survey of Contents
As I mentioned previously in my primer episode, 1994 was the year that Dalkey Archive undertook the no-small-task of issuing Schmidt’s more-or-less complete major works in English. With the exception of Marion Boyars and Green Integer, Dalkey Archive is the only English publisher to have released Schmidt to this day. His works have (mostly) since fallen out of print, but a reissue from Dalkey is on the on the horizon. For more information on that – you’ll hear me say this a bit today – see the last episode.
The COLLECTED NOVELLAS comprise the first volume in the Dalkey Archive Early Fiction series, which covers the majority of Schmidt’s work from 1949-1964. As I understand it, there was a lot of debate among the editorial team at Dalkey regarding where to start with Schmidt, which John E Woods addresses at the start of his introduction to this volume:
“Which works? Where to start? The editors have chosen the ‘novellas,’ in Schmidt's hands a most elastic genre. It was his genre of choice in the early years; and for that reason alone, the ten novellas will serve nicely as a door onto his word universe.”
– John E Woods
For what it’s worth, I agree that this is the ideal place to start as well. Given that Schmidt’s style and experimentation evolved organically over the years, THE NOVELLAS provide a solid stylistic foundation. I don’t know if that’s saying much though, given there’s a case to made for reading any author sequentially, particularly those with a large output.
So, what’re we talking here. The COLLECTED NOVELLAS are an assemblage of 10 early works of fiction from Arno Schmidt that were written and published between the years of 1946 and 1957. Broadly speaking, these pieces were the foundation upon which Schmidt earned his reputation as a l’enfant terrible as well as a massively influential force on the development of German literature after the fall of Nazism.
The ten stories are titled as follows, each with a subtitle that I’ll let you discover in your own reading:
ENTHYMESIS
LEVIATHAN
GADIR
ALEXANDER
THE DISPLACED
LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS
COSMAS
TINA
GOETHE
REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA
Historically, ENTHYMESIS, LEVIATHAN, and GADIR were published together in a short volume under the title LEVIATHAN which was Schmidt’s first collection of published prose. THE DISPLACED and ALEXANDER were published as a duology under the title THE RESETTLERS and the rest were released independently. He wasn’t an instant hit, mind you. He was mostly ignored until the mid 50’s with the release of LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS, which nearly got him hauled into court of blasphemy and pornography. It was then that critics, academics, and ambitious readers turned their attention to these early works in retrospect and discovered what a rare talent they had been sleeping on. While still early in his creative development, these are the works that made the lifelong writing career for Schmidt. It was because of these stories that he became socially exiled (arguably by his own volition) to the margins of society for his incendiary, socially critical content.
The pieces range quite considerably in their length. At your shortest, you have the stories LEVIATHAN and GADIR which clock in at 20 pages each, and on the higher end you have REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA at a length of 131 pages. Schmidt was a bit slippery with the dividing lines between “short story”, “novella”, and novel”. I’ll be damned if the guy didn’t have range though. He wrote pieces that spanned from just a couple of sparse pages to several thousand, densely-packed folio-sized pages, as is the case of BOTTOM’S DREAM which rounds out to a gentleman’s 1.3 million words. But that’s not what we’re here for today.
In terms of approaching the collection, these ten novellas could theoretically be “grouped” into several combinations, based on their shared stylistic and thematic content. As a rough heuristic, this which would be my recommended way of approaching them:
I’d group three of the first four stories under the identifier “The Antiquity Trilogy” which encompasses ENTHYMESIS, ALEXANDER, and GADIR That’s your first thematic and chronological set. The next three, THE DISPLACED, LEVIATHAN, and LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTA, I would tentatively refer to as “The Zettelkasten Foundation” – I’ll get to that in the section titled “Notecards and Photographs”. The two stories TINA and GOETHE pair nicely together as a duo, and that just leaves COSMAS and REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA as outliers. It’s worth noting REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA has been previously published by Marion Boyars as an independent novella under the title THE EGGHEAD REPUBLIC [insert cover image] translated by M.B. Horowitz. It’s still available in this format today.
Now if I were pressed for a straight answer, I don’t think you need to read this collection in any particular grouping or order. You’re welcome to pick and choose your stories, and graze on them at your leisure. Schmidt himself said, in reference to his big book, to read what interests what you and skip over what doesn’t. He shares this perspective with Vollmann who says the same of his own work. I’ve identified these groupings simply as a way to provide a bit of structure to your reading and so that you’ll get the most out of these stories, conceptually, stylistically, and narratively. But as always, your mileage may vary.
Translation, Compensation, & Impossibility
John E Woods’ reputation precedes him. He is considered one of the most important translators from German in the modern era, not least of all due to his comprehensive work on Schmidt. I spoke briefly in the last episode about his history translating Schmidt so if you want to know a little more about his career, that would be the one to watch. He passed away this year at the age of 80 at his home in Berlin, and the New York Times published a generous tribute to his life and work shortly thereafter. I’ve pinned a link to it below.
I would hope it goes without saying that I consider myself deeply indebted to translators, without whom I would never have gotten the chance to read many of the books I now consider among my personal favourites. That being said, I am at best, an admirer of translation but not in any position to be speaking on the subject with academic authority. In these circumstances, I find in best to draw from the words of the professionals. This is Woods speaking with Kathryn Toolan in an interview for Dalkey Archive on his experience of translating Schmidt:
“Translation is, as I am wont to say, an impossibility. Every language is unique to itself. So a translator tackles that impossibility anew with every author, with every sentence for that matter. Arno Schmidt is in one sense just another case of that impossibility. The density of his prose is sui generis, even in German, which can be intimidatingly dense. Then there’s the word play, the dance of literary references, the Rabelaisian humor, all packed into what I like to think of as ‘fairy tales for adults.’ So, what does a translator do? He puts on his fool’s cap and plays and dances and hopes he amuses.”
I think Woods imbues himself with a misplaced sense of modesty, as his work is far from a fool’s errand and much more an example of virtuosic adaptation. If you’re watching this video, it stands to reason that you’re already familiar with Schmidt’s uniquely esoteric approach to typography, grammar, and syntax. If you’re not, here’s a quick swipe through a few pages from his story LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS. That on top of his pre-existing logophilia and willingness to mine his dictionary for archaic, obscure relics from German language history. If you needed any further convincing, Woods cheerfully informs his readers into the Novellas Intro that Schmidt’s three favourite books were the 13th edition of the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA, FINNEGANS WAKE, and the COMPACT EDITION OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY. All this to say, Woods had his work cut out for him.
Now, before I move on from the subject of translation, I wants to briefly touch on a line I picked up from a reflective essay on Schmidt penned by Julian Rios from The Review of Contemporary Fiction. I hope you’ll indulge the first of many digressions in this Schmidt series. Rios is a fascinating figure, who is also known for writing one of the most Wakeian novels of the contemporary era, LARVA: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S BABEL. This is another one of those psychedelic lexical experiments in the vein of FINNEGANS WAKE. It’s effectively a reimaging of the Don Juan myth, as told through the narrative of a masquerade ball in an abandoned London mansion. Like Schmidt, Rios is very playful with his execution of typography, syntax, and typesetting. If you open up Larva, you’ll find the righthand pages contain the narrative proper, and the lefthand pages are a mock scholarly commentary deconstructing both the story as it unfolds but also the language that’s used to tell that story. The book itself is basically a charcuterie spread of puns, palindromes, and acrostics. I haven’t read the entire book myself yet so I don’t want to comment too deeply on it at this moment, but I’ve read enough to tell you that it’s well worth chasing down a copy.
Anyhow, this essay titled “Moments from the Work of a Faun: Basic Schmidt for Foreigners” can be found in the “Arno Schmidt Number” of the Review of Contemporary Fiction from 1988. In it, Rios includes the following statement which I think is quite illuminating:
“Everything can be translatable provided that the translator has enough freedom, initiative, and creative gifts to apply, in a balanced manner, what could be called the “law of compensations”; what is lost in one area of the original can be compensated for in another one of the translation.”
– Julian Rios
I think Julian Rios is uniquely well-positioned to weigh in on this, as his novel LARVA was actually written in Spanish, and he himself worked with Suzanne Jill Levine to translate the book into English. When we’re talking about wordplay like homonymic puns and portmanteaus – features that Schmidt and Rios traffic in heavily – much of what functions aurally in one language will not apply to directly to another.
Take the title of one of Schmidt’s late novels, KAFF, AUCH MARE CRISIUM Directly that translates to PODUNK OR THE SEA OF TEARS. “Kaff” is an article of German slang that roughly translates over to the English word “Podunk” and refers to a remote Hamlet or backwater town. It takes on a double meaning, as Kaff can also refer to “chaff”. So what we have here in German, is a clear pun that pertains nicely to both of the two main narratives in this story. However, Podunk doesn’t have any association with chaff in English, so the pun is lost. This is where Woods needed to editorialize and make up for the lost pun with an alternate title, and that’s how he landed on B/MOONDOCKS, using Schmidt’s trademark vertical superimposition with the B overtop of the M. You won’t see much in the way of these overlaid words prior to B/MOONDOCKS, but after that point, he used them heavily in the later works, particularly in EVENING EDGED IN GOLD
This is what Rios means when he refers to “Law of Compensation”. Much the grammatic or aural double meanings in German are null and void when adapted to English, so in order to maintain the linguistic exuberance and energetic wordplay of Schmidt’s original work, Woods had to find parallel puns, portmanteaus, and acrostics in English that follow Schmidt’s internal logic. It’s incredible how well he managed to do this, and it’s why, if you’re reading any of the author’s work in English, you are not just reading Schmidt: You’re reading Schmidt and Woods as an inexorable pair. It’s both of their writing interwoven, every sentence and word chosen precisely. I’ll say the same thing I said in my first video when I spoke of George Szirtes: We have just as much to thank Woods for translating this, as Schmidt for writing it.
Alright, onto the book itself.
Reclaiming a Stolen Language
“John O’Brien would bristle at the mention of Dalkey Archive publishing ‘difficult’ literature (he attributed that term to lazy academics, and average readers who hadn’t had their reading skills corrupted by the system), he didn’t shy away from titles that threw down challenges. Complicated literature is not something to be afraid of.”
– Chad W Post, Mining the Dalkey Archive
Flowing on from the Postian theory of Dalkey’s ethos, I’d propose that what Schmidt’s writing shouldn’t be approached as “difficult” but rather… “disorienting”. And as I said before the point of this series is to orient you to what this author is up to. Because in the case of Schmidt… and you’ll hear me say this more than once… “the language is the story”.
Schmidt shared an ambition with his neo-romantic and high modernist forebearers, and was dead-set of pushing the boundaries of the German language. I’m editorialising a bit here, but I say there’s a clear political motivation behind this formal provocation. Schmidt lived through the height of Nazism in wartime Germany and witnessed how that era impacted – some might say “mutated” – the day-to-day experience of reality. That sentence is a little too passive, so let me spell it out in more explicit terms: the era in which he wrote is directly implicated in the character of his writing. I spoke about this concept with Max Lawton in my episode on Sorokin and Socialist Realism, but to reiterate on the subject, Fascist and totalitarian regimes regularly use language as a tool to control and manipulate their populations. German, as the language was previously understood, was stolen by the Nazis, and altered to suit their ideological goals.
Setting aside propaganda-infused catch phrases and vocabulary changes, as a regime, the Nazis subscribed heavily to the concept of language purity. Following the playbook of most totalitarian regimes, they attempted to eliminate words and phrases that they deemed "foreign"… which in this case you could read as "Jewish."
As I’ve mentioned previously, there was no love lost between Schmidt and the Nazi regime under which he was briefly drafted. While his provocative avant-gardism could just be read as a matter of personal eccentricity, I don’t think it’s a reach to say it was also a form of political protest. While the Nazis were busy promoting a form of linguistic rigidity, Schmidt comes through with a nail-studded baseball bat and breaks down those rules and conventions, word by word. There’s a gorgeous line I’ve pulled from the story, LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS, that I think reads as a guiding ethos of Schmidt’s work throughout the entirety of the Novellas:
"Think. Don't be content with belief: go further. Once more through the circles of knowledge, friends ! And foes. Don't interpret: learn and describe. Don't futurize: be. And die without ambitions: At best full of curiosity. Eternity is not ours."
– LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS, COLLECTED NOVELLAS p. 170
The German language and psyche were irreversibly altered by the war, and so… with a creatively progressive spirit guiding his writing, Schmidt experimented with his language to reflect the changes in post-war life. Moreover, he did so as a stylistic middle finger to the regime that tried to pin him down under a set of strictures that he viewed as limiting and restrictive. Someone could write an entire doctoral dissertation of this subject, so I’m really only going to skim the surface here. I want to move on to the next section of this discussion, but not before dropping in another exceptional quote from John E Woods:
“Arno Schmidt represents a revitalization of the German language that is very hard for any translation to reproduce […] a voice speaking in a language I had found nowhere else in Germany. It has its roots in Expressionism and on occasion can partake of that movement's excesses. Schmidt sweeps up words off the street and culls them from tomes hidden in subterranean stacks - the result is vulgar and arcane, impish and regal. Gnarled syntax, usually the bugbear of German, is cast aside in favor of prose with a swift, knifelike thrust. Dehydrated was Schmidt's own term for it. It is difficult for speakers of English to comprehend what Schmidt did for German.”
– J.E.Woods, COLLECTED NOVELLAS Intro
Fascism, & Antiquity
One of the principle concerns of Schmidt’s early work, is the ways in which totalitarianism and fascist ideology played a pivotal role in reshaping the progress of 20th Century. Moreover, as a voracious reader of history and the classics, Schmidt was acutely attuned to ways in which the era he was living through was, in a way, repeating the mistakes of the past. This is why antiquity and the ancient era made for such a fruitful setting for much of his early work.
I mentioned up top that three of the early stories in this collection could be viewed together as what I might call “The Antiquity Trilogy”. ENTHYMESIS, GADIR, and ALEXANDER are set in the Ancient era of 150-350 BCE and share much of the same thematic material. Irrespective of their chronology, proto-fascism and imperialistic thinking are governing forces throughout all three of these stories. This of course demands some sort of reference framework – what exactly are we talking about when we evoke the term “Fascism”? Well, that depends who you ask, as the word has been heavily co-opted and diluted in recent political and social discourse. This being a literary show, let’s keep our reference point literary, shall we?
In 1995, Umberto Eco wrote an article for NYRB, in which he identified 14 Features of what he referred to as “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism”. Now before your headache sets in, you can relax – I’m not going to go through all 14 one by one, but I have linked a video here which does so which you can watch in your own time. It’s worth noting that Eco was explicit in his caveat that these characteristics are not a rigid checklist for identifying fascism, but rather a collection of tendencies that are generally present in these sorts of fascist political movements. Eco wrote this piece as a response to the rise of neo-fascist and far-right movements in Europe at the time, particularly in Italy. He was concerned about the ways in which these movements were using symbols, slogans, and tactics that were reminiscent of historical fascism, and he wanted to demonstrate to readers how what he viewed as a historical recapitulation was beginning to happen at the time.
Now, a couple of things worth noting here right from the jump. One, ancient Greece – where several of the stories in the NOVELLAS are set – far predates the emergence of what is conventionally understood as fascism. Two, Schmidt died before Eco ever wrote the piece. And three, I don’t want to be accused of historical backshadowing – that is, to imply that the entirety of German history was just a slow march toward Nazism. That would be a distorted view of a very narrow scope of time in the country’s history. However, this idea that fascism is not a fixed and monolithic ideology, but rather a collection of tendencies that can take different forms in different historical and cultural contexts, is one that I think is a useful valence through which to view Schmidt’s early work.
Take Eco’s second tenet for example: The rejection of modernity. "The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”. All throughout the NOVELLAS, you’ll find characters butting up against a power structures that reject progressive thinking. The very first story – ENTHYMESIS – embodies this tenet neatly. The story is a diaristic account of a Greek bematist named Philostratus, who is contracted to calculate the distance between Syene and Alexandria as a means to determine the circumference of the Earth. Trouble here is Philostratus doesn’t believe the Earth is round but flat. He remains wilfully ignorant to development in the scientific view of the world. Tensions develop within the expeditionary team and he’s eventually left wandering deliriously in search of a silver city in the African desert.
I found a dissertation online by an American PhD candidate named Ryan Kerr who examined the notion of antiquity and totalitarianism in Schmidt’s early work. I’m going to quote from his piece titled “Writing Its Own Wrunes Forever, Man”:
“To illustrate history from the perspective of the conquered, Arno Schmidt relies upon a disorienting strategy. Schmidt’s novellas typically take place in one of the empires of ancient history […] Unlike typical historical accounts, Enthymesis is told from the perspective of one of the Empire’s dissenting citizens. The leaders of the Roman Empire ‘had to get rid of [him] because [they] could take no more of [his] public criticism,’ so clearly it is Philostratos’ open defiance of the dominant ideology that marks him as an outsider and exiles him to his fate […] After Philastratos’s diary entries end, Eratosthenes, a member of Rome’s ruling class, provides a brief ending to the story. The deaths of Philastratos and his party members, Eratosthenes notes, were ‘not all that unwelcome, in light of larger Greek interests’. Eratosthenes’ ominous conclusion, his statement that in the place where Philastratos died ‘there was no trace at all of him or his books,’ is indicative of the unimportant figure of Philastratos and his subsequent erasure from the historical narrative. Eratosthenes symbolizes the class that determines who will be represented by history, since this class also determines the ruling ideology and eliminates anyone who disagrees with them.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ENTHYMESIS was the first story Schmidt wrote after the second World War. Much of what the Nazis enacted on German culture and language were acts of erasure. The Nazi regime had a strong influence on education in Germany, including language education. Schools were required to teach a specific form of German, and textbooks were censored to remove anything deemed "un-German”. Kerr is correct – at the end of the story, Philostratus dies in the desert, and the piece is concluded from the perspective of Eratosthenes, a member of Roman’s ruling political party.
“How right I was in my judgment of Philostratos is amply demonstrated by this diary of his, which I found one month later on the occasion of a renewed general measurement of the earth in that same jumble of hills. - He was a tall, powerful man of middle years, with blue eyes and wavy blond hair. Indicative of the man's general character, he was undeniably of great brilliance and multiple talents and yet remained a fantast and visionary, a type found sometimes among exceptional young men. The best proof of this is his catalog of favorite books. His opinion of me is irrelevant; may posterity decide. - The last feverish dreams of the dying man appear not to lack some basis in reality; as we were examining the shards of the amphora - strangely enough, there was no trace at all of him or his books - two giant birds, passing at a great height, flew over us and away.”
– ENTHYMESIS, COLLECTED NOVELLAS p. 23
This ending with the death of the dissenting narrator and the conclusion of the story by the dominant class could be mapped onto what Schmidt was witnessing under Nazism. The erasure of submissive perspectives under the growing metastasis of a totalitarian regime.
The ending to ENTHYMESIS also fits within the rubric of Eco’s fifth tenet, the fear of difference. Fascists often promote a narrow, homogeneous vision of society and reject diversity and pluralism. This can lead to the suppression and erasure of groups that are seen as outsiders or hold beliefs contrary to the dominant group. This concept can be applied directly onto the fourth story in the collection and the third in my (somewhat arbitrary) Antiquity Trilogy, called ALEXANDER. This story – again, a travel diary – follows the experiences of Artistotle’s student Lampon, as he travels down the Euphrates on his way to meet Alexander the Great. Nearly every conversation that’s shared between Lampon and his companions is focused on Alexander and his massive territory he had some to amass. Midway through the story, Lampon goes on a tirade against his companion and states
"The highest ideal would of course be a harmonious world empire; a united, and thus peaceful ecumene […] an isophrene (a line of equal stupidity : clever !) that binds all human beings without exception, and nations”
– ALEXANDER, COLLECTED NOVELLAS p. 80
The end goal of the Alexandrian empire was always to homogenize groups of diverse people by subjecting them to the strictures of universal law. What is that if not exactly what the Nazis were aiming to achieve through their co-opting the German language and erasure of the people they felt were inferior? Progressive notions introduced in antiquated societies is a consistent thematic through-line you’ll see tracing its way through the NOVELLAS. You’ll see it particularly strongly in his seventh story, COSMAS, OR, A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH.
Set in a Roman province, the story follows a young man who upholds the ancient Greek ideals of education and critical thinking. However, his worldview is challenged when he encounters a Christian doctrine known as the "Mountain of the North," which reconciles the ancient belief in a flat earth with the newer notion of a spherical earth. This novel model for the shape of the terrestrial world is uncoincidentally, a tabernacle, which Schmidt includes a diagram of on the first page. This encounter forces the young man to grapple with the conflict between reason and faith, ultimately leading him to question his own beliefs and values. Questioning one’s own beliefs is a facet of critical thinking that I see is vastly underused these days, particularly in political discourse. Let’s park that for now before this turns into a tirade no one wants to listen to.
Where was I? Right, fascism.
Eco’s first tenant – the cult of tradition – has a particular utility in the third story in the collection, GADIR. Fascists have a fetishistic view of the past, idealising a time when the nation and its people were strong and pure. This view of a distant or mythical past is contingent on the idea that the past is gone, and it can’t be reclaimed but possibly rebuilt. Eco wrote this tenet into his essay when he saw what Italian political extremists were imposing on the country in the 90’s. Based on his fictive pre-occupations in his stories, Schmidt was ruminating on the same idea here.
GADIR is another diaristic story. Given Schmidt’s social solitude, it’s unsurprising to me that he favoured this format in many of his short works. It bears repeating, that this is not exclusively the mode he writes in. Anyhow, this is the possibly anachronistic… diary of Pytheas, an ancient Greek scientist, having been imprisoned for 52 years in a Carthaginian prison in Gadir (the modern-day Cadiz [insert image]). He numbers each day he spends in his cell. Here’s a passage which takes place in year 52, day 120:
“52, 120: Morning passes; forenoon; restless (understandable if you leave your four walls only once every thousand days, right ?). Around noon a hornet, a flame of garish yellow and brown, stormed through the window bars, swooped about wild and brainless: long as my little finger, the monster! (Soon beat it to death; chased it, cold and sneaky as a Fate.) I hate insects with a primal hate; as a child, when walking through a grove in June, I would sometimes shake with rage: I'd stop, and from the forbearing treetops I'd hear the whispered gorging of chiliads of maggot jaws, creeping, boring, sawing, sucking; wasps thrust pliant blades into arched caterpillar bodies: and worm munched worm. As boys we once pulled a black fish out of deep reefs off the harbor of Lacydon, it was nothing but a floating maw, fixed with teeth. Since then I've known: the Good is unnatural, undivine (probably unhuman too: a Ligurian mercenary once told me that up in the north, there were tribes who made cuts down both sides of a captured enemy's back, right through the rib cage and, with the fellow still alive, pulled out the lobes of his lungs; they called it ‹carving the bloody eagles! – And don't think it's like that only up north. Men and gods can shake hands; they deserve each other).”
– GADIR, COLLECTED NOVELLAS p. 50
The narration, which cover the course of roughly a week, is free-associative blend of memories, thoughts, dreams, and plans of escape. The whole thing ends with a false imagining of Pytheas’ escape as he passes into delirium and then death.
Ryan Kerr reflected brilliantly on this story in his dissertation which I’ll quote again here:
“In keeping with his other fictional representations of ancient Greek and Roman imperialism, Schmidt’s novella Gadir chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Greek scientist Pytheas while he is held captive in Fort Chebar prison in Carthage. When considering the grammarians of his era and their thoughts on verb tense, Pytheas reflects on the difference between ‘the intense, but very narrowly limited present (“I am”)’ and the past, which is ‘rich with memories, full of images, secure, and thus multileveled’. Despite popular conceptions of ‘a completed past that no longer reaches into the present, the “perfect” past,’ Pytheas sees this notion as markedly different from the recent past, which is ‘still having its full effect on the present’. The recent past and the present, as Schmidt shows, are inextricably bound up to the ancient history that came before it.”
– “Writing Its Own Wrunes For Ever, Man”
This is where I see Schmidt and Eco in conversation with one another. Eco wrote his 14 tenets in response to a return to a troubling series of political movements in his country, while Schmidt was quite literally drafted into the movement in his. These two could only use their writing as a means to combat the regressive backstep into the errors of history. What better place than the theatre of the past to let these ideas let loose?
Notecards and Photographs
As well as being a formative 20th Century author, Schmidt was also a well-regarded self-taught photographer. I’ve pinned a short article below where you can see a number of his archived photographs which he shot from the late 30’s onward to the end of his life. He had a very unique eye behind the lens, one which lacked a certain polish or self-important grandiosity you would find the landscape shots of someone like Ansel Adams. There’s a lack of pretention to them that I find quite attractive personally. There’s a particular photo in his archive of publicly available shots – Photo 77 – which is of notable interest to me , in its use of texture and composition, but also in its associations. I’m going to come back to that one in a bit.
In ’49, Alfred Doblin – one of Schmidt’s intellectual influences – awarded him the Mainz Grand Academy Prize for Literature for his short story LEVIATHAN. He used the prize money awarded to purchase a Bonafix roll film camera. Schmidt always held his camera to be, “an indispensible tool for all the literary production of his life”. There’s a line from EVENING EDGED IN GOLD where he refers to a camera as being able to “catch a whole bunch of memories”. Bit clunky in the delivery of that sentiment, but the point is valid. Schmidt’s photography wasn’t just a side hobby, but intimately interwoven into the production of his writing. His photos served as visual notes, often established settings, and provided sensory references for him to anchor his writing to. Here’s a passage from Estella Kühmstedt’s article “Arno and Alice Schmidt: Photos from Three Centuries” which tessellates this idea outward quite elegantly:
The photography as well as the thoughts about their specific possibilities are conspicuously present in Arno Schmidt’s literary work. In Bottom’s Dream the camera is a “protest against transitoriness”; it is in a position to keep things from being forgotten. Schmidt knew that images are not made in the camera, rather in the head […] What’s more, image and text in Arno Schmidt’s work flow into one another, insofar as on the one hand the viewing of photographs immediately conjures up memories in the form of words. The image says not more than the famous thousand words, it allows many more words to come into being, in that it calls up associations and memories. On the other hand, Schmidt’s linguistic work compresses itself in turn to exceedingly colorful images and often linguistic photograms with a positive/negative effect, as well as in to “audio images,” given the strong phonographic elements of his prose.
– Estella Kühmstedt
Okay, so this is a lovely postmortem on Schmidt the photographer, but what does all this have to do with the NOVELLAS? The fifth and sixth stories – THE DISPLACED and LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS – threw me through a bit of a loop with their typesetting. Both of these stories start with a block of text enclosed in a square aligned to the right of the page. The same format repeats following each paragraph break which denotes a change of scene. It’s very odd to encounter the first time. The only reference point I had for something like this was Danielewski in HOUSE OF LEAVES. which wouldn’t be completely off base, given Schmidt’s penchant for ergodic typesetting. But I think Schmidt has more of a concretised idea in mind driving this presentation of text. Here, let me read you one. This is the beginning of his story THE DISPLACED, which follows a refugee-like narrator hitching a train to escape political persecution.
So, what the hell is going on here? Schmidt viewed photography and mental imagery as explicitly interlinked, particularly when it comes to memory. Each one of these preceding text boxes is meant to serve as an initial snapshot from which the rest of the larger scene grows. Because memory is accessed with the initial recall of an optically encoded highlight. Schmidt explained the technique in one of his extratextual essays titled ‘Calculations I’:
“The starting point for the calculation of the first of these new prose forms was the reflection on the process of ‘remembering’: one remembers any small complex of experiences, be it ‘elementary school’, ‘old summer trip’, [etc] - individual very bright ones always appear first, [as] time-lapse pictures (my abbreviation: »photos«), around which additional explanatory small fragments (»texts«) are placed in the further course of the »memory«: such a mixture of »photo=text=units« is ultimately the end result of every conscious attempt at memory .”
– Arno Schmidt, Calculations I
This justifies the use of these highlights at the beginning of each new scene. While not the case with every one of his stories, much of the diegetic movement in his novellas is drawn from his own personal circumstances. Take trains for example, which you’ll find in THE DISPLACED and LEVIATHAN, among other stories in the NOVELLAS. Trains provide common setting in Schmidt’s early work, as this was the method of escape he and his wife used when fleeing the Red Army in ’45. Didn’t entirely work out for him because he ended up in a British POW camp – that’s a discussion for a different day. The point is, when drawing from his memories to establish a setting, he uses these photograph-like blocks of imagery-heavy text to establish the scene which is about to unfold. Here’s the last highlight from THE DISPLACED:
“THE RED CAR. With its smooth panes, its bright handles, long-quilted cushions, the baggage trunk swelling up, cul de Mercedes, how the lacquer-light rolleth above wheeled vaults. It sways toward us, snarling, swifter than the normal wind, and presses the earth with its strong tires; its voice is like the cry of the cassowary; across its thick ribbed chest the bumper bolt zags. THE RED CAR. Thou spitting tin mandrill, leer not so randily out of cuttle-button eyes at Katrin through her skirt, covet me not so supplely in thy bubble soft with rut. Yowling sham-ani-mal, thou slayest the evening, thy bluish toxic fart slinketh down all ways, numbers on thy glowing monkey-smooth butt art thy name, a dreary salesman thy grousing soul. THE RED CAR.”
– The Displaced, Collected Novellas p. 136
I’ll be the first to admit, Arno’s imagery can be a bit cluttered and frenetic at times, but he will always give you at least one clear impression on which to anchor your mental construction process. In this case, it’s clearly the red car. You’ll find he’s quite flexible with the frequency of these highlights as well. I noticed he deploys them more liberally in THE DISPLACED than POCAHONTAS because most of the former story takes places on a train. The scenery is constantly changing as distance is covered so he needs to establish a new set piece with regularity as the story unfolds.
Actually, let’s stay on that other story for a few minutes, and divert from photo highlight idea. LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS - was particularly inflammatory in a number of ways. As you may recall, it’s the one that almost got him criminally charged for blasphemy. Narratively, is follows an impoverished writer name Joachim taking a train ride out of the Saarland region of Germany. Not for nothing is the Saar region historically one of the most religiously prescriptive areas in the country. It’s the sorta place where the liberally sexual activities of the narrator’s experience would not be openly tolerated. Anyways, along the way after meeting a friend, Joachim encounters a pair of women who work in a textile factory. Despite a complete absence of sexual chemistry between them, Joachim and one of the women Selma, end up descending into a sweaty romance over the course of a weekend that ends with a thud after Selma leaves the narrator for her fiancé.
The critic and scholar Klaus Theweleit proposed that POCHONTAS was an intentionally hedonistic attempt to combat the repressive influence of Nazism on freely lived sexuality – think the Hippie “Free Love” movement of the American 60’s. Under conditions of fascism and war, the human body is above all else, the site of violence and destruction. Schmidt positions a war-scarred character, Joachim, in a story of sexual exploration with an unfamiliar woman. These are Theweleit’s words now,
“Depicting his war-experienced Joachim in Pocahontas’ embrace, his text undertakes a ‘constant attempt to transform Nazi violence into a politics of physical contact, which preserves and enlivens the bodies by making them smile (at themselves) instead of ceaselessly killing and mortifying’.”
It’s very much running parallel to the Roger Mexico-Jessica Swanlake romance in Gravity’s Rainbow. “They are in love, fuck the war”, you know? I like that reading – there’s a sincerity and personal vulnerability in it. I also think it’s worth noting that others have suggested that this story was Schmidt’s way of coping with a particularly traumatic personal experience.
In early 1945, prior to his capture by the British, Schmidt was involved open combat for the first time in Oldenberg. Before that, he has spent the majority of the War in a clerk's office. The character of Pocahontas was allegedly modelled after a woman named Hanne Wulff, who Arno Schmidt was infatuated with at the time but never got up the courage to pursue. Some have proposed that LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS is a story about coping with these two existential experiences – the immediate thread of violent death and unrequited love. This again loops back into the ways in which Schmidt’s personal memories fed into his writing directly. Memories which were, particularly in the later years of his life, recorded in photographs.
Now, while there’re a few ways you could slice this photo-imagery snapshot technique (in the context of his body of work), I have a personal interpretation. It has to do with what’s going on in this photo.
To those of you listening rather than watching, this is an image of Schmidt sitting at his desk in his home office in front of a series of shallow wooden boxes filled with scraps of paper. The object itself – this wooden box – is referred to as a Zettelkasten, in which photographs or notecards are organised. Schmidt was famous for having favoured the Zettelkasten as a way of organising his thoughts. If you have a keen ear (or speak German), you probably would’ve picked up on the prefix “Zettel” nested in that word, which of course where his magnum opus, ZETTEL’S TRAUM, or in translation BOTTOM’S DREAM derives its name. Here’s John Woods again on the subject of deciding on the title:
“As for ‘Zettels Traum,’ there really was only one possible title. In the classic Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare, “Bottom, the weaver” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is given the name “Zettel,” which is the warp of a fabric. And it is of course Bottom’s dream which is a central metaphor of the novel. Lost again is a pun, for a Zettel is also a small slip of paper, especially one used to jot something down on; Schmidt used thousands of such slips of notepaper to construct his later novels, by arranging them in large homemade file-boxes.”
This is how the author built out his thoughts into a larger story. Every time he had a noteworthy idea – whether it be a significant point of narrative action or just a dirty pun – he would jot it down on a slip of paper and drop it in the Zettelkasten. He stored his photographs the same way. God only knows what sort of organisational system he used to keep all that straight. The last estimate I read is that BOTTOM’S DREAM was composed from 140,000 of these notecards.
I know there’s only a small portion of readers (cum obsessives) who’ll find this sorta thing fascinating, but I’ll drop here anyhow: The Arno Schmidt Writing foundation has actually digitized a number of his original Zettels and made them available online. If you go on their website, click the drop down labelled Zettelarchiv and you can view them (I’ll link it below). It’s something else to see the original handwritten documents that eventually coagulated together into his monstrous brainchild, Bottom’s Dream. If I’m ever brave enough to tackle the DREAM on this channel, you can bet your ass I’ll be mining that for material.
But back to the point. I referred to this group of stories – LEVIATHAN, THE DISPLACED, and POCAHONTAS – as the Zettelkasten Foundation. The reason I gave them this little moniker is what I see him doing here is formulating the technique that would eventually lead to his masterworks – namely Bottoms Dream, a story build upon a pyramid of zettels. Between his pointillated prose (which I discussed in the primer episode) and his use of these “optically encoded highlights”, I see Schmidt’s early work as him figuring out an epistemological framework through which to view the world of fiction. He believed in wrestling with reality on a moment by moment basis, which justifies the fragmented nature of his writing. Each one of these photos and notecards is an individual moment in time frozen in place, from which a story can grow organically. Whether it’s a photo or a slip of paper is kinda beside the point – both were his way of “protesting against transitoriness” to borrow his words. These three stories are the earliest instances I see of him figuring out how he would go about turning this belief into a structure of writing, which is why I refer to them as the foundation of his Zettelkasten technique.
One more note on the subject, which is one of pure conjecture. At the risk of the getting a copyright takedown notice on this video, I’m going to briefly show that Photo I mentioned earlier – number 77 from his personal archive – and I’ve linked the original below.
Again, if you’re listening rather than watching, it’s a square-frame shot of a riverbed swollen with water and the reeds and grass are being pulled along down toward the righthand side of the frame. It’s my favourite photo he shot, not least of all because I immediately associated this image with one of the opening shots in Lars Von Trier’s film MELANCHOLIA.
This opening scene of Melancholia, consists of 16 shots that summarise the entire narrative action of the film, set to the prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera, TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. There’s a link in the corner if you haven’t seen the film. Each one of these images are presented in a hyper-slow-mo sort of fresco style of shot, to the effect where each of them looks like a photograph or painting. The result are these significant, sensory-forward signifiers of where the story is currently and is headed.
Lars Von Trier is exactly the kind of weird, fringe artist who I see as having read Schmidt. These 16 images read to me exactly the same way Schmidt uses the photo highlight technique in his own writing, and I would not be surprised at all if the filmmaker had spent some time reading the author. I think it’s telling that the third shot in Von Trier’s film is a depiction of Bruegel’s landmark painting “Hunters in the Snow”.
Bruegel is an artist (along with Bosch) who deeply inspired Schmidt, particularly in his writing of EVENING EDGED IN GOLD. To add the list of “coincidences”, Von Trier’s entire opening scene is set to TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. Let’s trace the chain of influence backwards here. Wagner was heavily influenced by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed humans are compelled by unattainable desires, and the vast disparity between our desires and their attainability is what produces suffering. Much of Schmidt’s later work, particularly the typoscripts he wrote after he discovered Freud, are focused heavily on repressed, often unattainable sexual urges drive our behavior. MELANCHOLIA as a film, is focused heavily on the lead Justine’s desires and the ever-widening gaps that are presented between her and the reality she wishes to live. I’m gonna leave it there for now because I really could go on all day about Lars Von Trier.
Anyways, that’s just a brief aside – take from it what you will. I’m going to leave this section with a quote from Schmidt’s foundation:
“In his early prose he developed a narrative technique that was intended to do justice to this circumstance: his novels are composed of a chain of significant snapshots.”
Legacy and Melancholy
As is the case anytime I try to talk about literature for a prolonged period of time, this episode has turned into a bit of a hand grenade. I’ve just thrown out a shitload of ideas into the ether, more or less connected to one another, and I leave it to you to decide if you want to take what’s on offer. Schmidt’s just one of those writers who, when he puts an idea in my head, the buck doesn’t just stop there, but grows three more ideas out of it in hydra-like fashion. I’m conscious of the fact that this could easily become a three-hour episode, so I’m going to try and round out this discussion with one more key idea which governs a lot of what’s going on in the Novellas. That’s the relationship Schmidt had with both legacy and melancholy, and how those two ideas feed into one another.
The eighth story in this collection is titled TINA; OR CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. In this story, the narrator – who serves as a stand-in for Schmidt – is invited by two deceased writers, Christian and Tina, to spend thirty-six hours in Elysium or purgatory, where he bears witness to the torment of writers condemned to the afterlife for as long as their names are spoken or printed. The following story – GOETHE AND ONE OF HIS ADMIRERS – inverts this by offering deceased writers the opportunity to briefly venture back into the world of the living. There is a line partway through the story when a writer confined to Schmidt’s contrivance of purgatory says to the narrator,
“Some advice: write less; or, better yet, don’t write at all! Then you shall live unmolested on earth nor need to drudge further after death”.
Because the pseudo-Schmidt narrator is warned that,
“everyone is damned to life here below for as long as his name still appears, acoustically or optically, on the earth above to put it more plainly: until he is neither mentioned, nor exists anywhere in print or writing – at which point every possibility for a reconstruction vanishes.”
This line is an interesting little window into Arno’s mind, and why he’s not the one trick pony people make him out to be. Schmidt is regarded – not wrongly so – as a hermit, who spent the majority of his life devoted monastically to reading and writing, rather than fostering relationship with those around him. I can’t entirely blame the guy for retreating from society after what he went through in the war, and the extreme poverty he suffered after his release from a POW camp. In that essay I mentioned earlier, Julian Rios described him and his work – two things that are inseparable – in the following way:
“In any case, it is true that the Schmidtean bibliography is a savage jungle... In which our cultured faun hid himself… One can say that his life—like that of Borges—passed in a library.”
– Julian Rios, “Moments from the Work of a Faun”
There’s no denying that his reality was the world of fiction. But stories like TINA and GOETHE provide a little insight into what I suspect was his difficult relationship with the choice to live this way.
I give Wallace a hard time on this show but I do admire him for a number of things, not least of all his perspectives on loneliness. In 2003 he sat for an interview with the German TV station ZDF where he talked about the inherent loneliness involved with reading.
I suspect that Schmidt did has his reservations and questions about his own legacy, and what committing himself exclusively to his craft would mean… almost in a spiritual sense. There’s a Gnostic streak to the author I see underneath all these words. Dear God, so many fucking words. Was pouring his material life into his work the immortality project many writers aspire to? Or was it just some sort of farcical trick, and there’s actually eons worth of scribes below us waiting for the last of their books to go out of print? You tell me – that’s what they call a “rhetorical” question. So much of Schmidt’s work is about the push-and-pull between unconscious desires and autonomous actions. This reaches its formative peak in BOTTOM’S DREAM when he allowed the concept bleed into the very formation of his language. I don’t think he ever reconciled this for himself, so he did the only thing he knew how to do: keep pushing forward with his craft. To quote from one of his posthumous stories JULIA, OR THE PAINTINGS:
“The world of art & fantasy is the true one... the rest is a nightmare.”
So, what does it mean to immerse oneself into their vocation, particularly in the way Schmidt chose to? I could think of a word: Enthymesis.
It’s defined as:
“a state of strong, focused desire and intention, and the projection of mental imagery that produces actual effects in objective reality”.
In Schmidt’s worldview, the truest version of reality… is the one that’s created within the theatre of the mind. The circumstance of his life, chronologically speaking, were almost entirely staged during periods of war. Either active war, post war, or cold war. I can’t speak from experience, but I don’t think I’d be reaching too far in saying that takes its toll on anyone’s mind, no matter the strength of their resolve. In the case of Schmidt, rather than surrender himself to the cruelty of the War Machine, he took his pen to the world he saw around him and re-imaged his reality into one of Rabelaisian irreverence. Nowhere in the novellas is that more apparent than in the last story, REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA. Brevity is gonna be tough with this one, because there is some Capital-P Plot going on here. But I’m gonna do my best to describe it as briefly as possible.
The frame narrative is a sort of Borgesian meta-text that presents this story in the form of translated notes from an American journalist, Charles Henry Winer. He’s been sent out by his press to write a story about an isolated conclave called the Republica Intelligentsia, which is situated off the coast of a post-apocalyptic USA, set in 2008. Weeeooo (haha), I love mid 20th Century Sci Fi. Anyways, due to the radioactive fallout from a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union, the country is basically uninhabitable and populated by mutant life forms, notably centaurs. Winer's end destination is the Republica Intelligentsia – or “Egghead Republic” depending on which translation you read – which is a massive vessel jointly controlled by the US and Soviet Union, serving as a safe haven for scientists and artists. Despite its reputation as a sort of a brain trust of all the brightest and most creative people left in the World… what he finds is a dysfunctional cesspool of intrigue, double-crossing, and secret plots between community members, instead of the utopian enclave he was promised. The Republic is split down the middle, with one side run by the US and the other by the Soviet Union, resulting in a very tongue-and-cheek Cold War narrative. Ultimately, a deal to broker a sort of peace between both sides falls through, and the Americans attempt to reverse the direction of the ship while the Soviets power ahead. As Winer leaves the Republic via helicopter, the last thing he sees is the vessel spinning around continuously in the ocean.
The final image, the Republica Intelligentsia, this aggregation of the world’s last worthwhile artists… as a failed enterprise circling continuously really stuck with me. That sort of immediate guttural impression which I didn’t quite have the words to articulate at the moment I read it. So I turned to the smarter people in the room. Axel Gelfert’s essay on the subject interpreted this incisively.
In his paper “We Are the End of the World: Stories of the Anthropocenic Hyperarousal” he states,
“When viewed from this angle, the final image of The Egghead Republic going round and round in circles, without a sense of direction and at risk of being torn apart by centrifugal forces, could just as well double as a metaphor for the futility of the arts and sciences, once they have been fully subordinated to the powers that be and continue to exist only at their discretion.”
This plays into the notion of the divided impulse in Schmidt’s mind I suggested earlier. On the one hand, I know he would’ve treasured the possibility that the arts would be preserved under conditions of apocalypse – whether it be on a giant floating city in the ocean or otherwise. On the other hand, Schmidt, being the absolutely ravenous reader he was, had consumed enough of history’s recorded detritus to know that we’re notorious for repeating the fuckups of the past. He had witnessed the explosion of creative evolution under the Weimar culture leading into the ‘30s. Then Nazism all but expelled these artists from the country or co-opted them into their regime. So… in theory, we could view something like the Egghead Republic as a tight little allusion to what he had seen happen two decades prior.
But his work isn’t just retrospective, it was prophetic. Because in the same way he riffed on the errors of the past, he prefigured what would happen in the future. In REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA, the narrator encounters various instances of artists having their strings pulled by political actors on the American and Soviet sides of the vessel. Look me did in the face and tell me that isn’t exactly what these two countries did in the Cold War leading into the ‘80s. Artists were propped up for decades as “cultural ambassadors” for both the US and the Soviet Union. Look up the Congress of Cultural Freedom from the 1950’s to see a play-by-play on how to fuck up a psy-ops campaign. It’s the same story every time. On the front-end, they’re promoting national values and ideologies. On the back end, they’re being wire-tapped by their governments in order to ensure that they remained politically aligned with the country's interests. We as a species are pathetically predictable, so what better way to lay our own reliability bare than to present it to us in a darkly comic and prophetic image of a possible world of tomorrow?
I’m not deluded enough to think that Schmidt’s little story here directly influenced the Cold War – that would be one hell of a reach. But I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that the circularity of history combined with the influence of art on collective thought is enough to render Schmidt’s brand of Enthymesis accurate.
To repeat, “a state of strong, focused desire and intention, and the projection of mental imagery that produces actual effects in objective reality”. Whether Schmidt intended it or not, the conceptual foundations of these ten stories have crept their way into our reality, full stop. As fascinating as it is to watch the division between art and life begin to dissolve, conceptually-speaking, it must’ve been exhausting and terrifying for him. But the creative impulse drove him every step of the way and he never stopped writing until his final years. If he believed in the future his story TINA depicted, it’s going to be a long time before his name goes out of print and he’s laid to rest. I don’t know if that thought would’ve delighted him or horrified him. Maybe both – I would’ve loved to ask. Schmidt was a complicated man with a complicated relationship to literature and the world around him. But the one thing I can say from my early introduction into his work is that what he’s committed to paper here is a clearly focused beam of intention and desire. For that reason alone, ENTHYMESIS is a damn fine name for his first published story.
As is always the case when talking about German literature, I am nowhere near as eloquent as John E Woods. So, I’d like to finish off this discussion today with a passage from John E Wood’s Introduction to the NOVELLAS.
“Reflecting on the literary process, Schmidt spoke of his own work, indeed most fiction, as an ‘Extended Mind Game’. In the drab confines of a working-class Hamburg apartment, a lonely child dreams his way to other worlds […] The inventive mind that chose the "interior emigration" of tedious office work now flees still farther into itself to escape a crude barracks life in Norway, and finds its apotheosis in self-imposed exile in the village of Bargfeld. Schmidt dreamed and wrote of a life lived unto itself inside the mind - human existence as an island, both as rescuing fantasy and ineluctable doom.”
– John E Woods
End Notes
And so, that’s it. That’s Volume 1 of Schmidt’s Early Work: COLLECTED NOVELLAS. I said at the top here that I would struggle to speak on the subject of these stories in any totalising way, as these stories are so dense and so diverse in their content that I could’ve made an entire video on any one of them. The episode was really just a skim over the surface of the collection which I hope you’ll take the time out to read at your leisure. Even if you don’t want to read it cover to cover, it’s worth just picking at a few of the stories in here, as it’s some of the strongest short fiction I’ve ever read. For what it’s worth, my personal favourites from the Novellas are ENTHYMESIS, LAKE SCENERY WITH POCAHONTAS, TINA, and REPUBLICA INTELLIGENTSIA. That last story in particular could really do with a full-length treatment of its own. But I want to save some of my steam for future Schmidt episodes.
If you’re a fan of Schmidt’s work, or are a curious reader looking to wet your beak, I’d suggest you head over to /r/ArnoSchmidt on Reddit where a group of us are keeping the discussion about his work going on a regular basis. Plenty of space there for further discussion on any or every of these stories. Of course, you’re always welcome to drop me a line of one of my socials or drop me a comment below.
That’s it from me for today. See you later Schmidtheads.
W.A.S.T.E. Only
I’ve at least started...and reading you is different this time, or something. This is clearer to me and I appreciate the hell outta that, now that you’ve defined the lay of the land : percentages of percentages of readers.....experimental literacy fiction. That’s is a great context for the whole damn thing on book tube , especially the hand full of people I listen or read. Well done, Seth. Here’s some dopamine !