Post 9: Interlude, Dead Pope
22 April 2025 // Pages --I consider the irresolute facts of the situation: the way the word “iamb” is an iamb, but only if you say it with certain cadence. The way the Pope died today, and it seemed consequential which is odd, given the way that I usually tally consequences. Maybe it’s because I’m reading Schattenfroh right now, which you don’t have to have for this post especially, that I am considering we might need a conclave of the languages. Schattenfroh is a lot about the power of language; to draw God from his heavens, to create hells, to order worlds, to counter the slippery fickle-ness of the image which is always “born again with each look”.
I should be digging into Montaigne for a book section I’m working on, but I’m stuck on withdrawing from the world. The act of leaving court, of removing oneself from the situation in order to contemplate it, is crucial to Montaigne, though of course Montaigne and anyone else who is careful and humanistic knows this is in the end, an impossible thing. Schattenfroh is the kind of book people see—giant, translated, hypothetically cryptic—and think they can withdraw from this world into another in it. It’s true, sort of, but only when iamb sounds just right and becomes an iamb, I-am, I-amb.
The ambient I-ness proceeds regardless. Schattenfroh is as much about this world, in the wake of the German postwar, as it is about the Boschian landscapes it evokes. The narrator is in a cell in a basement, shackled to the machinations of the demons of the book. I read a Twitter post that reminds me that the last Pope before this one was a member of the Hitler Youth as a child over ten; he wore little shorts in a photo. It was mandatory. How much of atrocity is “mandatory” when we see it years later in a photo? I was warned about this, how images don’t nail you down, nail intended, since Schattenfroh takes the Christological turn seriously.
It would be easier to withdraw from the world if the world of Schattenfroh wasn’t also this world, contiguous with it, and with its subjectivities. Like any novel of true substance, Schattenfroh refuses the disconnect. So when the Pope dies I wonder slyly if God with come down from heaven and some alphabet with just enough friction, enough rough glottal stops, will make Him stick, as Lucifer is currently telling our narrator he intends. Pope Francis one actually said he hoped hell was empty—this is a relatively radical thing for a Pope to say given the automatic processes which consign people to hell by default that he doctrinally knows to the core. Hell is not empty in Schattenfroh because the narrator, and by extension we the readers, are down in the maw of it.
There is a tendency to conflate reading long and difficult novels in translation with a desire for escapism. The paradox here is that anyone who actually loves those long and difficult novels knows that you escape exactly nothing in them… and perhaps graze the blade of the thing closer and closer to the self. I could put on a voice of authority here and pretend the act of reading, and particularly close reading, are somehow objectivities, that a careful attention to text somehow elevates it above the ambient-I. This would be a lie, even at the remove of translation—or especially. I could invoke the original German. But all of this would be pointless; read Schattenfroh when it comes out in English in August if you too struggle to withdraw from the world, struggle to understand the conditions under which such a withdrawal is even possible, given how the world is inscribed in words and images.
I like that Schattenfroh is a novel that requires me to deploy, and often stretch, my understanding of material-historical conditions. A close reading of Schattenfroh carries this obligation such that it negates critical tendencies to deem close reading “above” or beside politics. Schattenfroh also, in its meta-commentary on language at the quarter-point, has me convinced that it laughs at any critic who would sever language from the weight of these things. I would guess that this will also make it less able to be instrumentalized in its reception.
So here’s where I am: the Pope is newly dead, Montaigne is still dead too, I still can’t withdraw from the world, and I don’t think Schattenfroh is asking me to. I think criticism that claims to be daring must consider the conditional nature of human lives—personal and historical—that it cannot abjure material culture in these lives and its permeations into the text itself. Schattenfroh makes that easy; it nails it through your hand like stakes, right in the center of the open palm.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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