Susanne Kretzer
Mystifictional Traces
Beyond the desk, the crossbarred window frames a prospect
where nothing stirs. Such an empty landscape does not
contain the sort of action which the "word mason"
once had wanted to fashion into literature, but it
did provide a stage which a mind "experiencing
much wider freedom inside the room than outside"(1)
could people with his own world fashioned from art
and imagination. Inside the Bargfeld hermitage, imaginary
pictures were turned into a surrogate landscape filled
with the liter(e)alism of the later Schmidt.
In Zettels Traum Schmidt described the process of perceiving
the outer world as one of "storing and sorting"
the elements among the four categories (Ego, Superego,
Id, plus "Humor") of the psychological apparatus.(2)
It is the reverse process which produces "Extended
Mind Games," from the lowly dream via hallucination
to the perfection of the artistic work. In that process
the Subconscious - rather than Ego or Superego which
don't possess the former's "incredibly strong
archaic energies"(3) - takes on the main responsibility
for spatializing the work: it produces the stage set.
Provided, so to speak, with "voluminous/ voluptuous
buckets of paint,"(4) it can evade the Superego's
direct commands, executing them instead with a brush
stroke all its own.
That role of the Subconscious (the "innermost part
of the microco(s)mic human individuality"), as
the "macrocosmically most extensive panoramic
'Culisse' "(5) of the work of art, Schmidt archly
described apropos of what he found to be the pervasive
anal set pieces in the work of Karl May, a turn-of-the-century
German writer of banal adventure stories: "a world
constructed of posteriors!"(6)
Thus the literary stage set is due to a subconscious
urge, just as dreams constitute wish fulfillment: the
stage set is two things - the locus of a dubious utopian
construct, and at the same time the goal of an artist
who is convinced that "the world of art and imagination
is the true world, the rest is nightmare."(7)
In entering into the background of a painting (viz.
A&O entering Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights
in Evening Edged in Gold), the artist passes into the
notations of his Subconscious (a truth perhaps expressed
most beautifnlly in Ernst Bloch's Spuren, in the Chinese
legend of the painter who disappears in a backgronnd
spot which thus reveals itself as the "significant"
of the very locus of the act of painting - the house).(8)
The transposition of the I into aesthetic space prefigures
the retirement of the artist under the threat of losing
his vital energies, who inscribes himself into the
object world, aiming to evade in such a manner the
barbarism of speechlessness and to preserve himself
along with the objects for a better future. In the
wake of the catastrophe which both A&O (Evening)
and Jhering (Julia) see as imminent, paintings - mute
and vociferous at once, even in a period of illiteracy
- continue to attest to the inscriptions of the artists
who had "imaged" themselves in them. The
postatomic survivor of Schwarze Spiegel inherited a
world which is nothing but empty stage; in the same
manner, Schmidt may have imagined a postcatastrophe
"recipient" of these pictorial works. The
question must remain, however, whether such entry into
the utopian landscape may not lead to extinction in
it.
Schmidt's polemicizing against "abstract"
art takes on a special significance, considering that
his protagonists choose as border-crossing points figurative/objective
paintings, as though that were self-evident. The paintings
of Hieronymus Bosch and Jan Mytens (Julia) hold out
the reassuring possibility of stepping back out of
them some time in the future, metamorphosed perhaps,
but without having fallen victim to the "fury
of annihilation".
Abstract art seems without such guarantees. Frequently
it shrugs off wishes of utopian self-preservation.
The viewer wishing to determine whether he is looking
into or out of Gotthart Graubner's "Farbraumkörper"
paintings is a victim of optical illusion. Mark Rothko's
last work, in which the meditative interflow of colors
of his preceding works is bled of its mystical hnes,
points to different horizons which do not encircle
a rural idyll. Ad Reinhardt's "black paintings"
reveal an artist who is convinced that it would be
better not to have been born and who feels nostalgia
for the womb. And Barnett Newman subverts even that
utopia in his Prometheus Bound with its blackness,
to which he merely adds a narrow stripe of milky white
which, at the bottom of the canvas, blends more with
the wall than that it forms part of the painting. Such
white tending to greyness no longer aspires to the
grey twilight of a dawn. Hope is abandoned for the
horror of absolute blackness, an eddying nothingness
that will not release you once it sucks you in.
Schmidt's hope for preservation, of subject or culture
or art, was expressed not only via the entry of his
protagonists into paintings. As Theodor W. Adorno put
it in his Noten zur Literatur, "Bloch's favorite
simile for the mystical self is the house inside which
one would be with oneself, alienated no more."(9)
The wood-frame cottage in Bargfeld, into which Arno
Schmidt's older/alter egos withdrew (as in all the
idylls of old age), is of the same architecture as
all defensive retreats built by reading-and-writing
intellectuals. Swarms of visitors break in upon the
peace, disturbing the gold-edged evening.
NOTES
(1) Arno Schmidt, Julia, oder die Gemälde (Zurich:
Haffmans, 1983), 4.
(2) Arno Schmidt, Zettels Traum (Karlsruhe: Stahlberg,
1970), 1182.
(3) Ibid., 1182.
(4) Ibid., 1184.
(5) Ibid., 1181.
(6) Arno Schmidt, Sitara und der Weg dorthin ( Karlsruhe:
Stahlberg,1963),114.
(7 )Schmidt, Julia, 4.
(8) Ernst Bloch, Spuren, Gesamtausgabe vol. l (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1977), 149.
(9)Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Collected
Works vol.2 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1974), 239.