Post 5: Écriture procrastinatrice

25 March 2025 // Pages 152-171

A friend of mine said this blog was a form of parallel writing, not Écriture feminine per se, but a way of writing around and with and behind Schattenfroh. I think I have to admit tonight it’s really Écriture procrastinatrice going on, because I should be entering grades in the online platform for ordering grades that is frankly such a demented mode of ordering that the Frightbearing Society should look into it. The great thing about procrastination is that I’m pretending, like the narrator’s father on page 153, that I’m Nobody. Nobody isn’t Everybody, who are the named dead with specific visages that can be portrayed. Everybody can definitely go on the branded university website and tabulate grades. Nobody can’t. Nobody, when he’s Οὖτις really should have left Polyphemus’ sheep alone, and poking out Polyphemus’ eye to me is just evidence for the Odysseus-as-asshole theory. When the narrator’s father is, according to Mateo, Nobody, Ne-homo, Nullus, Nil, he can both show himself and not show himself at unique will, and also “systematize the national budget”, which is to suggest that the aversion to particular humanity won’t get me out of grading after all.

The empty wooden frame what the narrator calls his Father’s effigy. Kant’s parergon is standing in for the ergon, looping back to the Gestell/enframing thing we already went through earlier in the book. How we frame things, Schattenfroh suggests here, instantiates the possibilities for what they are. This is followed by some fairly normal (for once!) childhood memories of the narrator, of his father’s longstanding interest in the church matched only by the devotion to his omnipresent papers. Father, the capital-F father of Schattenfroh is always disciplined in minor matters as if this imbues the world itself with discipline. Father would have done the grading. Father’s shorthand, reproduced in the book, looks like Roman systems, or the Voynich Manuscript, has that cryptographic edge to it that suggests that the symbols point to more than themselves. They form curious alphabets that “attempt to escape from the alphabet” or rather the limits of alphabets as nominal device—which is to say, dodge the frame.

Even in the movements of his servants, Father encodes the following crest, which feels to me, even in Écriture procrastinatrice, like reaching back to the alchemical materials of the Palatinate, a large chunk of my own doctoral dissertation, in which everything symbolizes not just something but layers of something. Emblem books are like this, too. The phoenix and the lion are common symbols from this period, appearing in and around sequences of flasks in manuscript:

Notably one of the people on my dissertation committee, expressing a general tendency at the institution I studied, suggested that I should “get it out of my system” re: literary style in writing, and unlike the narrator, I wasn’t caned, but honestly I think I would take a caning over the subsequent style in which the doctoral dissertation was strained-out, like those disgusting cauliflower substitutes for pasta. It didn’t work, naturally-- Écriture procrastinatrice, nosce te ipsum! Because actually, ladies and gentlemen, as Father dictates in the administrative building, in all the little side-alphabets, style is itself a system in Schattenfroh the builds the world into its proper form and not vice-versa, down to the clothes and ordered entrance of the servants. What are liturgies but this? And as well shall soon come to know, there is going to be a great deal of liturgy involved here.

There is a holiness in systems in this novel, and systems have a style; the rocks of the administrative building, carefully arrayed in patterns of black and yellow; the way in which the papers pass, the way in which the post-War world becomes the post-Reformation one, all of these things are also matters of style. Style is also a frame in Schattenfroh. Everybody has a particular style. Nobody has no style and can be anybody. And when you choose a particular literary style? You are choosing how to be, how you think the world should be ordered. If Écriture procrastinatrice has a style it’s that like Schattenfroh, ordering the world in an acanthine lazy-river swirl that doesn’t superficially make sense immediately can produce interesting results. Or I hope it does anyway.

-- A.V. Marraccini

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