Goethe by Arno Schmidt

 


Exuberance squared!

Goethe and One of His Admirers is a 30-pager where Arno Schmidt lets it rip in a Finnegans Wakeish kind of way.

I couldn't begin to write a cogent analysis of Arno's novella. Much better for all concerned, including yours truly, to simply share a flock of direct quotes and pepper in my modest, very modest, comments along the Finnegans way.

"At last they had succeeded in bringing back to life; or, to put it more precisely : in calling back, for a limited time, people who had undergone their first life and first death (IknowIknow; to be exact I ought to say : their nth life; and now they find themselves in n plus 1. - Naturally this had not the least to do with the immortality theories of Christianity; once again, things turned out quite different)."

So begins Arno's episode of joyful wisdom n + 1. We meet a good number of famous names, mostly Germans, including Goethe who is temporarily resurrected and guided about by Arno Schmidt himself. All authors, both living and dead, strut and fret and stumble across the Arno paragraphs and Schmidt pages “in a language compounded of The Critique of Pure Reason and Finnegans Wake.” Got to hand it to you, Arno. You have a way with words...and the purest reason.

"((It was even rumored that the Americans had already consulted Hitler – most revealing, by the by, how many millions of German applicants, simply on the basis of mere rumor, volunteered as guides in that particular case ! Apparently they finally enlisted R., that grand & aged politician, for the task – but I don't want to be held to that, it might also have been the Other Guy !)).”

One can detect the icy humor at the prospect of the US consulting Hitler, but how many readers today could take a stab at who Arno Schmidt is referring to by "R" - and who is that other guy? I included this Arno paragraph to underscore that many of the references in this novella will be out of reach for a reader.

“And to the Academy : “The curtain has already rustled !” the secretary confessed breathlessly, and with a puff-cheeked husk : “- Difficulties ! -”: disappeared, too, on hasty crepe soles; and I just sniffed : Marlborough s'en va=t=en guerre / ne sait quand reviendra : Come on !”

Arno Schmidt wrote this novella in July 1956. I wonder if Arno owned a TV where he watched a commercial of an American cowboy as the Marlboro Man. I can just imagine what would have gone through the author's mind.

“Writers ? : Oh go on !” - so we were agreed on that as well : “Barefaced cowards, that's what they are !” (they can stick their dotdotdots up their dotdotdots ! He nodded and asked about the deleted words, and got the details with no hesitation : when we geniuses are by ourselves, I'm candid, as is only proper.)”

I recently listened to a podcast where Will Self interviewed Martin Amis. Martin said one reason that makes great literature great is the writer knows when to inject humor; the universal quality that makes us human: we can laugh.

“(He couldn't even read my barbed Gothic hand at first; so I transcribed it for him into rounded italic as well : !"

Ha! Arno watches on as Goethe attempts to comprehend a sample of his writing complete will all the unique punctuation. Not an easy task for someone fresh from the first decades of the 19th century! But Arno is merciful and does a bit of on the spot transcribing into common, everyday (at least in the 20th century sense!) German.

“History ? Fate? : Politics are our fate ! (Though I felt like using anything but exclamation marks : it really is too sad what all has once again been done to us recently in that regard ! The muggers and tuggers of our democratic freedoms !"

A German writer living through those Nazi years can speak from first-hand experience about the crushing weight of history and politics - and one's personal fate.

“Crackling of invisible high-tension lines : and I watched him attentively : What does Goethe think ? (Nothing. He suspects nothing whatever behind the noise at first. Especially since the lower air was awhir with model airplanes.)”

Arno has fun imagining what the great German poet would make of all the technological discoveries of the 20th century.

The final pages of Goethe are, in effect, a recounting of a press conference where Arno is asked questions about his time with Goethe. And here's the kicker: the pages themselves are formatted in  three columns. Any guesses as to where Arno Schmidt employed a three column format in another future work?