Post 7: The Treachery of Images
5 April 2025 // Pages 208-219.The inquisition continues on the pages of Schattenfroh. The narrator faces off to describe to the Satanic Ruprecht his position on the Passion, and vis-à-vis the Passion, the role of images. Images, apparently, are powerful, dangerous things [p.209]:
“It would like to go down in history with that image, it wants to infect history. It wants to become a phantom. The image is a virus, it shall wash up on to the consciousness of those who are not yet in hell. The virus-image is soul-forming. It is that which is initially only visible. But over time, it becomes the real.”
Words, the narrator contends, can do more, they can keep things in play, hidden. Except for Christ, on whom all words and images collapse. He argues: you hear “nail,” you think Christ. This is a big problem because, except for the portions of my life when I was studying medieval and early modern images with Christological themes, I did not hear “nail” and think Christ. I heard “nail” and thought “Home Depot”. I was the idiot seven-year-old, who for cultural reasons that I’ve made pretty obvious, didn’t get that Aslan on the Stone Table was Christ on the Cross. Narnia was absolutely ruined for me in retrospect, let me tell you, so was Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring”, which I could play on baroque recorder but kind of vaguely felt was dedicated to a Pan-like goat god. I dunno man, playing triplets just gave that vibe?
All epistemological and phenomenological problems aside here, this is where Schattenfroh out-Germans my presets. The first year I paid German taxes I remember being shocked that the Finanzamt—which is all powerful in a way Schattenfroh certainly evokes—asked me to list my religion on my tax form. Apparently this is so you can deduct tithes. This struck me, a Leonard Cohen Leftist Atheist Jew raised by Leonard Cohen Leftist Atheist Jew Adjacent People, as absolutely insane. The system of association of images that ultimately and always loops back to Christ in Schattenfroh absolutely makes sense for a Rosicrucian in the Palatinate or maybe even Anselm Kiefer, and I theoretically grasp the argument, it’s just that neither words nor images have these particular theological stakes for me as originary. They would, I think, for your average reader of the novel in its first language. But much as I love a semicolon, much as I became art historically indebted to a kind of reflex German-style historicization, I get the sense I’m just not German enough to feel this one in my bones.
The next section of the novel becomes difficult in a way I’m not sure it was intended to be in 2018, when it was first published. The narrator pivots to art, and particularly to scenes of suffering epitomized by the crucifixion, as “painporn”. The idea of Sontagian “regarding the pain of others”, of looking at and being constantly subject to images of violence, especially with respect to Gaza, is a large part of my next book, and so I must elaborate less than I’d like to on the topic here. The narrator points out something true about perfidious images, the way public stagings of pain can serve tormentors as much as sympathetic viewers. And there’s Christ, the supposed ideal, “… not to open one’s mouth? Jesus the highest notion of a beautiful figure, who is mute, equal to the signifying stones of antiquity.”
I fail the novel again here as a reader because my thought is that the stones were never mute, and that just now on Knossos they’ve dug up a piece of ivory with 119 characters of Linear A that means we might finally decipher it. Linear A, in my lifetime, speaking! This was a great joy in a dark time to me, this ivory scepter:
The marks are barely visible to the naked eye on the artifact. When I scroll down past it on my social media feeds I see Gaza again, and doctors staring straight to the camera, saying “if these are my last words, let me not be a number”. Christ wasn’t mute on the Cross completely, he asked why his god abandoned him. The narrator knows this, says “…. Pain wears down language, makes language brittle, dissolve it as mushrooms dissolve wood.” He then goes on to specifically describe images of torture, in a paragraph that now feels almost quaint, as if Americans specifically or their allies might quail to be associated with it. To be fair, this was written well after Abu Ghraib, well after Cambodia, well after.... —it feels maybe a little naïve or wrong to me here to drag all back kicking and screaming to Christ. The Christological frame is crucial to the novel, I see what Lentz is doing here as literature, but there’s a part of me that can’t keep playing along.
Still, Schattenfroh and I agree, we grow accustomed easily to suffering and its images. “The true artists is a flagellant” but also “… the flagellant is a tourist attraction as such.” We aestheticize pain; we instrumentalize images. For the narrator language is a more complex game but I’m not sure I buy it. Maybe I’m just doing it here, mushrooming it out at an Orientalized distance, suffering as essayistic counterpoint. Maybe I should just do what our narrator proposes and offer you only a black page in lieu of the naming of pain, or as a sideways way of naming without aestheticizing.
Ceci n'est pas un signifiant ?
-- A.V. Marraccini
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