Post 12: Isenheim, Enough
22 May 2025 // Pages 289-305Look at the splayed hands of Christ, all that torment of suffering enfleshed, the fingers long and bent possibly-impossibly far back, like they’re writing the Book of Life in the sky as he screams, and the screams subside into moans.
There’s a long description of the whole central panel on page 292, you can’t miss it. Then the Narrator says something about Jonh the Baptist on this altarpiece: “But is he really pointing at the consoler or, rather, at someone absent, at an absent one who has simply been withdrawn from the image, painted over, a pentimento—or even worse, somebody who was never present? If he was never present nobody shall be able to say of his face that it is lovely and adorned and it is the face of beauty. His forefinger seems to be admonishing this absent one….”
It's Nobody, halfway between damnation and grace. Who isn’t these days really? You can still see the pricks and wounds on Christ’s skin from the abuse before the crucifixion. The Isenheim Altarpiece is nothing if not, in its Christ, extremely bodily. Everyone else looks gestural, a bad dream, but Christ is dying flesh that you can almost touch with a protruded finger. The finger becomes, in Schattenfroh, a pen, a phallus, the instrument of “spiritual self-touching”. We masturbate our gazes on suffering.
The Narrator unceremoniously is chucked back out into Boschian hell again, literally the hell panel of the Prado triptych, art-historical whiplash. The Narrator’s hometown merges with hell, Mother is still in the kitchen boiling water for tea, Mother who until now has reveal no menacing secretaries or dark systems. Mother takes out a glass-lantern slide projector, hangs a white sheet, looks at images. The narrator smells bombing and corpses. I look at the ribs of the Christ in the Isenheim altarpiece on my monitor and I see children starving in Gaza tonight. Mother is also looking at the same altarpiece projected, noticing the wounds of the flesh from the flail. Schattenfroh was published in German in 2018 and to my knowledge is not at all about the Nakba. I think though, what it asks of images, what it asks of Isenheim, is whether we can put ourselves into the suffering we see, be human enough to regard the pain of others in the Sontagian way.
Sontag isn’t inside the book of her own self though. The images don’t come in real-time onslaught, or in the Narrator’s case, visceral experience. The way images of Gaza come to us, are to me closer to the picture-in-the-picture-in-the-self nesting of Schattenfroh than Sontag’s examples of news video and photographs. The remove is gone. It is about 90 miles between Golgotha (where Christ was crucified) and Nazareth (where he was born). By contrast, Gaza is only 47 miles from Golgotha. Mother turns into an Annunciation on the page. So many angels are pointing, so many fingers that are also accusatory pens. Maybe a pig in a nun’s habit will come out of Bosch and ask if you support Hamas. Maybe I feel every stroke of the lash on the Isenheim Christ and his grey twisted feet move me to tears, but I cannot believe in a just God or a God at all, because 14,000 babies alone are supposed to die tonight. I’ve just seen the images, seen their faces, lantern-screened on my laptop next to the book, and considered the possibility that all of this thought, this writing now, is an empty painted over space, a useless masturbatory act in the face of suffering.
A systems novel has to propose an ordering of the world. The world is cruel. Ergo, the ordering is cruel too. Schattenfroh visits this on us. Augustine shows up now, intoning as the angel intoned to him “Take up and read! Take up and read!” I take it up and keep reading. The Narrator says “Reading is observing images. Identity is the daily repetition of a book. Take and eat of the Book of Life.” I am eating of his life now, Nobody’s, like a juicy overgrown pear. How to read without instantiating? Is it even possible? How does a book create a life? If every day is a repetition and the repetition creates the self, our books are our self-fulfilling prophecies. I’m reading this one, drawn out over a summer, like a slide projected over the sheet of everything else that’s also happening, the mapping on to the Isenheim Christ of the suffering on my screen. Tolle! Lege! Yes, but no book feels like enough.
Before his conversion, Augustine went to rhetorical school in Alexandria. They used to practice speaking with pebbles in their mouth. That’s what I feel like writing now, despite or because of what’s happening in the world. Schattenfroh is partly about negotiating where the self exists in the spectre of human suffering. Yes, nothing feels like enough, but maybe that’s the point. Inscribing and re-inscribing texts and images through them, is all we have. The Narrator casts off into the wall-tapestry city, trying to resolve the paradox of his accusations. I cast off here, stuck on enough-ness, on what it is fair to ask of a book to do.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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