Post 10: Dark Alphabets

2 May 2025// Pages 252-273




 
We’re back, in Hell with the narrator, writing the book of life under the direction of the Angel of Revelation in a Boschian scene. As covered before, the alphabet of the book of life needs to be particularly prickly to get God’s attention. The text gives us an example:



This reminds me a little of an inverse Sol Le Witt, particularly this print from 2001, but imagined as if Sol Le Witt wrote it the black pages trapped in the narrator’s Gehenna:



It’s a system, the Le Witt print, and this is a systems novel, in a way you wouldn’t immediately pair with David Foster Wallace but probably should. The angel, who may be just an “angelus interpres” and not quite the same revelatory figure, brings to mind the Narrator’s mother, her absence, the “world-heart” that beats at the clock of the Cologne Cathedral for him. His interior self maps on to the eschatological scenes for which the alphabets and the Book of Life he produces are inseparable instruments. It’s like Sol Le Witt systematically exploring the faces and structures of a cube throughout his career, printing, sculpting, philosophizing in matter. In Schattenfroh, books, languages, and alphabets are the systems that the Narrator pairs with the life-story to unfurl that tell us something about the nature of the self in their structuring.

The Narrator finishes the Book of Life this way. It is a black book, whose pages regenerate if you tear them out, whose marks re-write themselves if you scratch them. It is eternity. Lucifer, who is a cockroach and then a rat, is revealed to be none other than Schattenfroh himself, the title character, beaming at his new acquisition wrung from the soul of Nobody—the Book of Life, which is also this book, this black galley I am holding and too scared to try tearing pages out of. And Father, whom we have heard so much about in his Christological bureaucracy ordering the world again? He’s God, naturally.

But the Narrator, Nobody, isn’t done with God. Father instructs him to drink from a chalice to the “neige”, to scratch out the text again and again white on black on white—dead television, pixels, and the strike-through becomes the text, which feels like something that would be make Derrida happy. Neige—snow of course. Hell does freeze over, in both Bosch and Schattenfroh.

Incidentally, I am ready for snow in hell. I have spent the day online, listening to angry right wing scum men insult my body, because in the real world where the systems of order are collapsing into Fascism, there is no consequence for this. Schattenfroh is about the ruins after Fascism, about re-ordering the world, and I’d like to think the one I’m in will someday get there, but right now? Neige, pixels to pixels. I scratch out their names and new ones appear, the same chimera-cockroaches, Bosch dreams with avatars of fake classical statues and other men they aren’t and will never attain the status of. And some of the women? Just as happy, just as temporarily profitable,  to be part of the same deadening system, to inscribe into the Book of Life the curdling inequities and cruelties they value being subject to themselves. If you tear the page out it doesn’t matter. They proliferate too.  

God, who is Father, lifts the Narrator, who is no one and everyone out of Hell now, a splendor of alphabets, pages of calling out in mysterious scripts and sounds. The shafts down start closing up. “PASSTHRU”. The Narrator wonders: Is Father really God? Is this just another trick of the virus-image, of Satan that is bad proofreading, the kind that admits errors? We’ll have to wait and see.

Then, because I am tired of the world too, because no angel talks to me and I only see the back of the Angel of History getting wind-beaten every day, I do something a little crazy. I rip off a tiny corner of the title page of my copy of the Schattenfroh galley. I put it in mouth and swallow it. It’s 1:24 AM and the world is quiet in the little hours, even though I feel the dark churn of its systems always running, my alphabets and artifice all inadequate to right it.

 


I say, as the Narrator says, as Nobody says “look, behold! I have eaten the book!”  We always hope that by unpeeling the orange of the system, by laying bare its segments and licking the juice out on the page, that it will do something to us, something fundamental. The question is whether it really works.


PASSTHRU?


-- A.V. Marraccini


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