Post 3: Daddy Issues
16 March 2025 // Pages 40-137You’re going to find this disgusting, but if the copyist is in the service of God (potential corruption of script and letters notwithstanding), the critic is in the service of no one, or perhaps constantly wrestling angels to read, mis-read, para-read etc. (we love our corruptions). I pinned my angel to the floor long ago. So anyway: the callus. You will find that people who dance have a predisposition to talk about feet. I am one of those people. I was sitting in an Epsom bath after reading this section of Scattenfroh, and the callus on my right large toe, which has been trustworthy on and off for about a decade, started to peel. I thought it was all dead skin and yanked. It was not all dead skin and dribbled a little blood on the tile, leaving behind on my toe a tender spot. In my experience it takes about a week for the newly exposed skin to adjust itself to the indignities of the world, doing which the weak (me) gird it in hydrogel and Durapore tape.
There’s our narrator in the basement, having just ripped off the callus of illusion, drilling down into the word-image real. And he’s a tender spot, suddenly exposed. Which is perhaps why he suddenly starts telling us he sees his father. His father was no ordinary man, but one wholesale committed to “donner l’ordre”—in his office, which is a sort of infinite archive. His father’s office in the archive has an image of St. Louis of Toulouse clutching a book.
This is a very French saint to pick as saints go, I think, especially since the office itself is described as “chilly Bauhausian”, an architecture of non-Stylite containing pillars, terrazzo, and stairways which themselves seem to represent the German postwar reckoning some of the mysterious movements of paper allude to. November 16, 1944; this city is not Dresden, but this city was bombed like Dresden on that date.
You prod the exposed skin where the callus used to be occasionally to test if it is ready. Our narrator’s father and his seemingly powerful secretary Mateo step back from the reflexive inventory of the inventory he is seeing to give him a list. The list is compiled by a man named Speer (that Speer? Any reader who knows the Nazi architect wonders). The list is the name of every citizen who has died in the bombing that night in 1944. Our narrator will write them out again, and any mistake effectively means they die twice. This section is so long because you them, each name in a sprawling cursive hand. This proceeds uninterrupted from page 62 to page 122 of Schattenfroh.
The narrator thinks the marks on the cloak in his Father’s painting of St. Louis of Toulouse look like stars in the vault of sky, but when I squint at them in the grey of the galley, I think they’re fleur-de-lis. It wouldn’t be the first time some symbol of nationalism has been mistaken for fixed stars. The St. Louis I think of is actually an octagonal panel in the collection of the National Gallery (UK). The panel was painted for a ceiling of a confraternity in Venice. Confraternity is a fun term that could eventually describe the Frightbearing Society, perhaps?
If you zoom in on the text it starts to look a little like our narrator’s scrawl, like the lines of names of the dead.
Is it is the names that make them real again?
Page 45 has already made us question this:
“On the left reading destroys the world. On the right: Father orders you to read without cease…”
“On the left: the image gas no beginning and no end. On the right: the image is born again with each look…”
Dead people can’t be born again but they can be saved from dying forever by inscribing their names into a book of record. But images? Images of people? Floor plans of stadia and offices with too many columns, the neoclassical kind without saints standing on them, the ones Speer made for Hitler, for the Thousand Year Reich? Are they reborn when we look at them? Shudder. Prod the new skin. It is not ready for the world yet. It needs more layers of meaning to accrue, dermis on dermis.
The image is born again with each look but the body is born once and dies once. Sometimes in a bombed out house in 1944. Which presumably, Scattenfroh, head of the Frightbearing Society which is promising our narrator the keys to eternity, stuck in this illusionistic cell device for stripping down meaning, will have to address. Why can words save people forever and not images? Why are images so prone to treachery? Is treachery a bad thing when we’re talking here, about the postwar, about the act of treachery being the only conceivable ethical act during Hitler’s government? Schattenfroh isn’t one of those novels about Germany and German-ness that’s going to try to dodge this. Image theory, and metaphysics, and phenomenology, and that Nazi fuck Heidegger in his little black forest hut banging on about peasant shoes—actually the history of art history, art historiography, is littered with Nazi fucks with important ideas you have to encounter anyway. And you think it’s all dead skin so you go to pull it off but no, it bleeds. And now you’re stuck nursing your right toe, your distrust of the theory of the image.
And our narrator remains, imprisoned, writing out the dead, in the service maybe not exactly of God but something larger that looms above the book.
-- A.V. Marraccini
P.S.-- If you’re noticing my sentences are starting to feel long and looping and German about the verb with too many semicolons, you would not be the first. Schattenfroh reminds me of this tendency that was always baked into my writing after my early 20’s, when I came to feel for the German language something I regrettably never felt for French. Tant pis. My saints were all bloody and northern for years anyway; manuscripts will do that to you.
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