In the late 1990s, I took a college class called “Literary Models: Novel,” part of a sequence of eight such classes aimed to teach undergraduate students in the Literature program the workings of genre while enforcing the reading of canonical works. The professor, Pedro Ángel Palou, a prolific novelist, designed the class by assigning one novel a month. We began with Don Quixote, a mandatory reading for any Spanish-speaking literature student. The second novel was Gargantua and Pantagruel, written decades earlier, and essential given the fact that both Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera were read in other parts of the program’s curriculum. The third one was Tristram Shandy, an exceedingly rare choice for a class in Mexico, so much that we had to read it in a cheap photocopy of the translation by Javier Marías. The most striking thing about the class to my twenty-year-old self was to experience a form of the novel that I had never imagined before, one in which the limits of what I thought a novel meant were excitingly and mercilessly explored.
Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh, in Max Lawton’s resourceful and compulsively readable translation, contained many madeleines invoking my class from twenty-five years ago. Schattenfroh belongs to the lineage of those novels, explicitly cited in its pages. Lentz writes at the end of the arch of literary secularization and aesthetic metaconsciousness inaugurated by Rabelais and Cervantes. Reading Schattenfroh feverishly in five-hour sessions around midnight over four days elicited in me the same kind of excitement I felt back in my college years for the possibilities of literary writing. The notes I offer in this essay, more than a review, seek to advance an idea that developed throughout my reading: Schattenfroh enacts a totality without signification. Which is to say that, like Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne, Lentz presents us with a novel that structures through plot and style an imagined social totality composed within the limits of the cognoscible by both its characters and its implied readers. Yet, Lentz also structures Schattenfroh with an awareness that the systems of signs, both linguistic and visual, never coalesce into a full-fledged representation of the world.
Before delving into these ideas, it is imperative to stop and render visible the material conditions that allow a reader to have this thousand-page novel with no obvious commercial market in our hands. I did not have to rely on piles of photocopies reeking with chemicals. Schattenfroh’s readers benefit from the efforts of three of the people making its publication possible, a heroic act amidst a publication world ruled by five publishing corporations adverse to this kind of risk.
First and foremost, there is Andrei (I do not know his last name), whose blog The Untranslated tirelessly advocates for books like this, an endeavor that has yielded a number of actual translations. Second, Will Evans, an indefatigable and daring advocate for world literature, is one of the editors revolutionizing the canon of translated authors through his work in Deep Vellum, which now also encompasses Dalkey Archive and Open Letter. Last but not least, Max Lawton has emerged as an indispensable and fearless translator whose bravura renditions of Vladimir Sorokin set the stage for Schattenfroh. A book like Schattenfroh is expensive to produce and unlikely to yield a profit. Thus, it is relevant to know that the original funding for the translation came from a cancelled NEH grant. Fortunately, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University partnered with them to support one work of literary translation a year, with Schattenfroh being the first.
Schattenfroh is not a reviewable book in the traditional sense, and devices like plot summary or even critical description are unable to grasp this tome with any justice. This is perhaps why the back cover wisely omits any kind of description or blurb, giving us only the first and last sentence of the volume: “One calls this writing.” I will simply offer a bare bones description: the narrator, known as Nobody, is imprisoned in isolation writing the book we are reading, under the direction of a mysterious demiurgical figure also named Schattenfroh. Schattenfroh, at different times of the novel, appears as a representative of something called the Frightbearing society, as God and as Devil, but also unfolds as Father. Indeed, the novel’s subtitle is “A Requiem,” written partly as a tribute to Lentz’s recently diseased father.
This narrator writes in brainfluid, delivered through a mask into a device that responds to the script with the “most beautiful aerial paintings,” which Nobody cannot see, but are visible to Schattenfroh. Deploying a well-known trope, the narrator tells us early on that he has no control over his movements, even as we attest an expansive consciousness that traverses various points in German history alongside the consideration of a number of philosophical, theological and literary questions. Throughout the novel, a character called Mateo (who also bears a number of other names), introduced to us as Father’s secretary, functions as an interlocutor.
My interest here is not to embark on the impossible task of close reading or reviewing the novel. A review at this point seems futile, since there are already notable commentaries by critics like Anahid Nersessian, Dustin Illingworth, Jonathan Russell Clark, Josh Billings and Gus O’Connor, all of which offer different readings (and summaries). Of course, the very first review in English, written by Andrei, provides an indispensable reference to readers, as is his generous visual guide to the novel, deeply useful to navigate the many references to art and architecture. Another engagement I wish to acknowledge is critic A.V. Marraccini’s Schattenblog, an in-progress effort at an idiosyncratic personal close reading that may perhaps be the most faithful way to read this novel. Rather it is to explore how Schattenfroh negotiates the tension between literary form and historical consciousness.
Andrei is correct in saying that a problem when writing about Schattenfroh is the tension between the experience of the reader mesmerized by its form and the inclination of the scholar to seek all of its references. There is, however, a third way, which implies unfolding the cartography of the novel to locate Schattenfroh in the dialectical movement of the form in search of totality. Critics have pointed to postmodernism as a model and to Thomas Pynchon as a point of comparison. I personally find this reference insufficient and maybe even unnecessarily Anglocentric. If there is a lineage to what we now call postmodernist novel—not so much Pynchon but perhaps more accurately Günter Grass, Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera, all directly part of the same genealogy as Lentz—, it comes with our insistence of identifying the metaliterary as if it was an invention of the 1960s and not as a reformulation of the metaliterary elements constitutive of the novel genre since its origins.
The reality is that metaliterary reference has always already been a feature of the novel. One would do well to remember a passage from Don Quixote, reproduced verbatim in Spanish in Schattenfroh, referring to Cide Hamete Benengeli, the fictional Arab writer to which Cervantes’s narrator attributes the authorship of the novel. The appearance of the page in Nobody’s script is itself a citation of Borges’s celebrated story on Pierre Menard, the “author” of Don Quixote who purportedly writes exactly like Cervantes. Nobody goes on:
I am not named as the author of the ur-script, it is a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli and there’s nothing in it about a printing works or about princes, not about Nobody and also not inkers, press-men, or any other kind of men, what it’s about is that the very individual who transcribed the ur-script, I am quoting from the transcription of the transcription.
Schattenfroh’s invocations to this specific genealogy of the novel, which include the famous blank page from Tristram Shandy or the statement “Rabelais even begins with the opposite of my name,” point towards the continued actualization of the novel as a totalizing impetus that never arrives to its destination, a system of signification in which the awareness of the impossibility of semantic closure is a structuring principle. Postmodernism as a concept—particularly when concerned with the fragmentation of subjectivity and the decline of grand récits—fails to account for the fact that such features have been at the very core of the project of the novel as a genre since its modern inception.
Guido Mazzoni is right to remind us that pre-1800 novels were outside the aesthetic mainstream of the ancien régime. The conceptual construct we call “theory of the novel” is born in the 20th century to posit the genre retroactively as a form of double estrangement: the estrangement of the modern subject with the totality of the world, as theorized by Georg Lukács and embodied by Don Quixote, and the notion of ostranienie (estrangement or defamiliarization) coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, in part through his reading of Sterne.
Schattenfroh’s architecture relies on these same tropes and devices to interrogate the relationship between the production of subjectivity and its spatial, technological and theological determinations. There is a dialectical tradition with a classical archive grounded with an extensive philological and art-historical unconscious in which the plurality of traditions of writing and painting coming from European literature are to be estranged. Nobody, the narrator, is himself a subject as radically removed from any communion with the world as possible, not only by the mere fact of his confinement. More significantly, writing exists as a paradox within this existential condition, at the same time radically experiential—in that the narration is fully invocated in a present tense of invocations and images, down to the precise number of the page we are reading—and irrevocably alienated by the production of images he can never see.
Formally, Schattenfroh enacts another dialectic, one between familiarity and ostranienie. One would be hard-pressed to find a more citational novel, 1001 pages of explicit and implied references to literature, history and art, including the insertion of an actual bibliography in the middle of the novel, to the point it would be possible to imagine a future annotated edition in which the notes are three or four times longer than the novel itself. And yet, every reference in the novel is a point de fuite, in the pictorial sense of the term, a vanishing point that ultimately displaces signification elsewhere—the kind of rhizomatic logic that led Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to speak of lignes de fuite to describe deterritorializating forces. Notwithstanding Schattenfroh’s motives behind Nobody’s capture, the novel performs the act of literary writing as a state of permanent yet inaccessible fugue, for which the “most beautiful aerial paintings” that emerge out of it are beyond the perception of writing by design.
Milan Kundera states in The Art of the Novel that the genre’s spirit is both of complexity, “telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth,” a feature he traces to the “wisdom of Cervantes,” and of continuity: “each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel.” This applies so accurately to Schattenfroh that it almost sounds like a truism. But the weight and method of complexity and continuity in the novel are not that simple. One could easily build a second line of historical continuity of the novel genre behind Schattenfroh, one that is not rendered obvious in its pages, but is implied in some formal traits.
There is a lineage of totalization in the novel borne out of the 19th-century’s penchant for forms of realism that claimed the possibility of capturing the social space of a moment in time through a multiplicity of works. This is most famously represented by Balzac’s La comédie humaine ground on a meticulously constructed plan that bound dozens of novels to the project of capturing reality—a project really admired by a more dogmatic Lukács who came to prefer Balzacian detail over Cervantine subjectivity. Of course, one could bring to the table Modernist works in which such totalizing gesture is mediated by memory and consciousness, as in Marcel Proust’s Á Recherche du Temps Perdu, a clear influence in Lentz’s depiction of Nobody’s extensive array of personal and historical memories, or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, whose narrator-participant, Nick Jenkins, is clearly a precedent to Nobody’s immersion into historical events.
As a literary device, both Nobody and Schattenfroh crystalize an explosion of the subject of literary cognition that evolved from Balzacian omniscience to Proust’s consciousness to Powell’s participant narrator. Lentz’s writing deploys the idea that a primal feature of the novel, the narrator as a form of consciousness from which both cognition and moral standing are deployed, is in fact a sensorial device for which subjectivity is no longer a necessary condition. “I am no longer free in my head,” Nobody states. The first and last sentence “One calls this writing,” enacts a peculiar depersonalization of both the reader and the critic, since “One” can be read both in the transcendent sense, “the One,” or in the indefinite sense of any “one.” If complexity in the novel is the enactment of the difficulty of knowing, as Kundera would have it, the joke at the core of Schattenfroh is that for both author and readers—both Nobody and the persons holding the book in their hands—the overwhelming sensorial and intellectual weight of the novel rests on the levity of representational impossibility. Close to the end of the novel, following the enunciation of a Dadaistic play of messages connected to Schattenfroh’s name and the number 666, Nobody states: “These are no messages, this is the empty game that is language, a transitory zero-sum game.”
Here, I can further evaluate Max Lawton’s achievement in translating this book. My most regretted academic failure was trying to learn German. From this endeavor, I know that German carries a conceptual and aesthetic complexity much distinct to the stark, frustrating simplicity of English, so intolerant to the agglutinations, hyperbatons and clause-rich prosodies that enrich other languages. Lawton manages to deliver into English a conceptual and representational complexity without making the novel unreadable. Baffling as its encyclopedism and its games can be, there is no question that Schattenfroh also draws a compelling readability not only from Cervantes and Sterne, but also from Borges, establishing a style defined by yet another dialectic.
Borges never wrote a novel, but his encyclopedic counterpointing of the weight of the literary with the lightness of writing foregrounded a form of novel writing that derived into the work of Calvino and Kundera, as well as writers as enamored with Kabbalistic and historical speculation, like Milorad Pavic. In the hands of a lesser translator, this dialectic would be lost by missing the fundamental lightness sustaining Lentz’s stylistic overload, and Schattenfroh would have been truly unbearable in English. Lawton, in turn, delivers Lentz’s figurations into a remarkably plastic form of the language that, without awkwardly reproducing the untranslatables (some of which ends up in footnotes), convincingly reinvents a novel full of language games.
Everything I have described so far constitutes the scaffolding of Schattenfroh as a novel but the literary is far from being the only system of signification at play. History is an obvious one, centered around a city called Düren, the site of Nobody’s historical travel and Father’s role as an administrator during World War II. I do not delve in the historical question in detail because O’Connor does an exceptional job on the subject in his essay for the Cleveland Review of Books. O’Connor characterizes Schattenfroh as invested in the ways in which history is woven into the present, which he exemplifies with the tapestry in Father’s office, from which a lot of the novel’s historical discourse is built. His reading centers the question of remembrance as an “anxiety-laden affair,” in which the stakes of forgetting are “existential in proportion.” Consistent with this reading, O’Connor takes Lentz to task for his elision of the Holocaust, mentioned only once in the novel by name, which he reads as an unacceptable exclusion.
I do not quarrel with this reading at all, insofar as Schattenfroh’s profound engagement with the historical lends itself to be evaluated in both its account of the past and its limits when engaging the politics of the present. Having said this, if we think of history as yet another system of representation, one could reach a somewhat different view of these questions. After all, remembrance is also a narrative device for the assemblage of signification, and memory, both historical and personal, is thusly the outcome of ongoing processes of both formal and semantic representations. The presumption of the Holocaust as an exclusion in Schattenfroh could be read otherwise if one thinks of history in terms of signification.
Unlike the kind of historical novel that dwells into history extensively to uncover its layers—an example here would be family-centered epics like Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic’s Kin—the recursive nature of historical narrative in Schattenfroh can hardly be construed as invested in the exposition of history. Instead, the historical passages are full of obsessive descriptions of space and tangential ruminations on all sorts of discursivities that approximate the historical questions of the book without ever arriving at their meaning. There is, for instance, a clinical, cold description of the Crucifixion of Christ that, in its very form, voids all the religious meaning embodied in his death, and punctures its role as the foundational act of violence in the Western world. When Nobody enters the tapestry of Düren hanging in Father’s wall—per Andrei’s visual guide, the 1634 Bird’s Eye View of Düren by the Bohemian etcher Wenceslaus Hollar—we spend many pages in a Swiftian journey across the buildings of the town, evading the history that is supposedly being narrated. The almost excessive level of detail in the description of objects and architecture contrasts clearly with the ongoing Thirty Years’ War, or with pretty much every violent moment in the history of the town.
To me, Schattenfroh enacts a futility of remembrance, an elegiac tone through which the long history of the town is void of meaning., non-allegorical by design This is enacted by the fact that most historical events are narrated through language and images that never fully fit their object, continually pulling the attention away from the events as such. The only historical event that cannot be subject to such a procedure is the Holocaust, and if it had been narrated in this way, Lentz could have been accused of trivialization. As O’Connor notes, the Holocaust is mentioned once, beyond the books on the subject in the mid-novel bibliography: “He fell silent too soon. But if he hadn’t fallen silent, that still wouldn’t have prevented the Holocaust. Not that this excuses his silence.” I read this baffling comment as a statement about the very futility of representation, a recognition that the atrocity that may as well haunt this whole history happens regardless (or even outside) of language. The passage refers to the silence of Father, a sign of complicity, but not the cause of the Holocaust.
One could indeed argue that this silence and Father’s own brushing aside of the subject reflects the complexity of the politics of historical remembrance that the novel deconstructs. Earlier in the novel we are presented with over seventy pages of handwritten script listing the names and ages of the three-thousand-and-one-hundred people killed in the bombing of Düren in 1944. In this passage, the record of names is copied in pen and paper by Nobody—raising in the process a discussion on the role of the copyist versus the writer. Nobody observes that remembering each one of them is important because otherwise “they’ll be snuffled out for a second time,” and because “a name is the only possession we really have, it is only through the name that we are.” One could easily contrast this procedure to “The Part about the Crimes” in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which is composed mostly by the depiction of the murders of women in Santa Teresa—the fictionalized Ciudad Juárez—in the clinical language of autopsy, a stark contrast to the metaliterary nature of the other four parts of the book. Lentz proceeds in the opposite direction: the naming reproduced through the auratic, immediate form of handwriting contrasted with the highly mediated form of the brainfluid evades the semantic losses in our traditional methods of remembrance.
One could further say that Lentz locates this passage early in the novel as a counterpoint to the proliferating yet insufficient writing of history in the remainder of the book. Indeed, this becomes immediately problematic in contrast to the absence of the Holocaust. However, I would suggest that the contrast between the painstaking naming of each person killed in a German town in 1944 using the very structure of listing names present in monuments to victims of the Holocaust, and other atrocities around the world for that matter, challenges the signification of such a gesture. If, as Nersessian notes, the novel’s subtitle indicates a requiem for all the people who died in historical violence, the handwritten reproduction of Düren’s dead and the absence of the names of most other victims across history is a brutal reminder that some deaths are more thinkable, representable and mournable than others. The handwriting is only afforded to a very specific group of the dead mentioned and omitted in the novel, essentially suggesting that writing those names is both a tribute to the few, and the snuffling out from history of everybody else.
I just can mention in passing the final device of representation central to the novel: the visual. Schattenfroh is a deeply ekphrastic novel, in which artistic works are sometimes reproduced in the page and sometimes described in a way in which one could identify them without naming them. This is why Andrei’s visual guide—still subject to expansion— is a service to all readers, although I now think that it may be worth saving for the second rather than the first reading. The uncertainty about the identity of the images, even the fact that images can be invisible to us due to the lack of referentiality, is fully consistent with the novel’s broad resistance to signification. In a narrated world in which the brainfluid-script becomes airy image, the visual and the pictorial introduce a tensional system in terms of representation.
One such image is a description of Schattenfroh: “Schattenfroh is a dictator, he leads the quill that I don’t have. He buzzes around me, he rattles, a hooded little monster, thus do I imagine him, made up of fly, grasshopper, gecko, and human head, with his wings far too large.” Andrei identifies the source of this image as a figure in Bosch’s St. John of Patmos, which the novel clearly extrapolates as part of its archive to describe Schattenfroh’s indescribable multiplicity. An art critic could easily develop a similar argument about the visual as I have developed in terms of the literary. Marraccini, is undertaking some of this work in her Schattenblog. Schattenfroh’s references to art explore the visual and the architectural as insufficient systems in their own aims towards signification. Lentz’s literary intervention into these works operates by decontextualizing the images and offering painstaking engagement with details rather than the whole, to absorb them into the literary and the historical. This is a very bold step in literary ekphrasis, even in a time in which many ekphratic writers, like the Argentinian novelist María Gaínza, have already troubled the relationship between literary writing and the visual through subjective intervention. Here, ekphrasis works as a counterargument to the novel’s very conception of the relationship between writing and image, offering to the relationship between brainfluid and airy pictures the antithesis of a language in which the visual can never be legible or referential.
Schattenfroh belongs thusly to the rare but foundational tradition of books that trouble the very relationship that a reader, young or mature, has to literature. The novel is also a testament that in a world where the genre appears to be diminished by the hegemony of the autofictional and the obstinacy of our inclination towards realism, it is still possible to write in a way faithful to the foundational challenges that Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne threw down at history many centuries ago.
