Text-Nummer: 0051E
Schaltung am: 12.06.1996
Rubrik(en): Forschung und WissenschaftUmfang des Textes in Zeichen: 5942
Verfasser(in): Susanne Kretzer
Geschrieben am: 1985
Kürzel: 
Originaltitel: Mystifiktionale Spuren
Copyright: Susanne Kretzer
Veröffentlichungsabsicht von/am: 
Veröffentlicht von/am: 
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 8, Nr. 1
Arno Schmidt Number, Spring 1988
Übersetzungstitel: Mystifictional Traces
Übersetzer(in): F.P. Ott
Copyright Übersetzung: F.P. Ott
Diskussion/Leserbriefe:

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.