then to another again

Reading Swann in Love again in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation and arriving at the line about Swann's jealousy resembling an octopus "which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fasten[ing] itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again" I'm struck by the stated absence of unification between the person and the memory (since the octopus that touches something could easily have been an amoeba that absorbs it, but no: an octopus retains its separateness from a thing it holds) , thinking that memory and human being in this book are like a pair of lovers under the same author, meaning they exist at a distance and cannot approach one another without some kind of mistake, trick, accident, or bit of good or bad luck. (Here it is Odette writing a letter to Forcheville). The conceptual movements of lovers and memories are governed by an unplanned set of rules. They cannot be consciously tricked. And the same frustration sits behind Proust's recollection of both phenomena: the lover or memorist has no control; they grope, they are gripless.

a pine smell

The curtness of Elfriede Czurda in Rosmarie Waldrop's 2012 translation, Almost 1 Book | Almost 1 Life (a combination of two books originally published in '78 and '81), is something like Beckett's mutter in How It Is, which is a tone of resistant exhaustion (if that's a reasonable interpretation) that seems to wear down the speaker after even the shortest utterance; then the strength or insensitivity is regained for a moment, the next few sentences uttered, then the gap again with an implied rebuilding below as the speaker hardens themselves or takes another breath towards perishing. Czurda is not – now that I think about it I am not considering very much of Czurda here, mainly pieces like Paranoia I: the rearrangement of words in that style, whereas elsewhere it is more Stein, not rationed.

But the speaker in Paranoia I has a constellation of fairytale things: a virgin, some wolves, and a monk's robe; appearing in different configurations. And all through the book there is a love of storytime adventure details: the journey through a jungle in all that matters is the road, the vision of the grandfather galloping across the steppe on a gelding, the desire for some sort of joy, fun, or figuration, the speaker not really despairing, or at least they are rescuing or distracting themselves.

claudius takes the rifle's pine smell and hands it to the virgin paranoia is contagious even a pine smell could have contacted it and rushed to the pater and borrowed his robe the robe would have hidden it since the hole had been mended

Meanwhile Vernon Watkins was not as much like Edward Thomas as I thought he'd be: more rapt in glory effects, more in love with heavenly endings, messages of hope, etc; softer, as if the lure of that romantic distraction or variety is too much for both of them, and it coaxes them off into metaphor, Czurda corkscrewing inwards with it, Watkins working to stream out (I like Czurda very much, I want to add --).

à conto

Seeing Arno Schmidt referred to as "the German Joyce" (a phrase everywhere) makes me think of the essential difference between Joyce's creation of Bloom or of anyone in Finnegans Wake, and Schmidt's attitude towards Kolderup, which is so detectably mindful and anxious as he places the importance of the character above that of the atmosphere – this character needing to have their completion as if they were a person who could deserve things. And the wordplay that Schmidt establishes refers back not so often to the deep history or myths that Joyce implicates in all human civilisation but to the desires of the characters, their bodies, or their behaviour, beholden to disgust, or lust, irritation, manners, itching, dripping, etc; Butt telling Kolderup that he is "smiling supersilliously" in Act Five, Scene Four, or a man getting "invulvd with all the duennas who run into=him, à conto his >well-larded doubull pouch" in Act Three, Scene Two. This is not to say that Joyce doesn't implicate bodies in his work, but Schmidt (and I may be wrong) seems to dwell more quick gratifications or itches than on settled habits of bodily preference such as kidneys for breakfast. The way he writes must be helping me with that impression: it's not relaxed. The bifurcating and reassembling of the words is being done to increase the amount of flesh in the book and make it superhumanly ridiculous. Joyce's bodies stay closer to the humanly ridiculous and don't go this far beyond it into the monstrous, smelly abundance of Atheists (Schmidt stresses smell a number of times …).

= Comedy

Trying to parse the difference, in my own mind, between the early (1949-64) short stories in Arno Schmidt's Collected Stories, 1996, and his longer School for Atheists: a Novella = Comedy in 6 Acts, 1972, I come back to the idea of sex: one-dimensionally randy in the Collected (the separate shorts tending to repeat the same Benny Hill barnyardery) but finding new permutations in the Atheists, this book much longer than anything in the Collected (three hundred pages in the 2001 Green Integer translation by John E. Woods), with a fair number of characters coming and going more or less rapidly so that a greater number of variations become possible even when the same act is being described.

This is accentuated by his new technique (practiced across the duration of Zettel's Traum, 1970) of dividing a page into columns with asides printed in one column and the ongoing story in the other (footnotes becoming sidenotes), which gives you the effect of a wider surface and more complications. The story seems more vivid simply because it is more changeable, the movement of the randiness and misogyny seem open to alterations (not shut down into pursuit, as it often is in the shorts) and there is a sense of pleasure that does not come from the sex itself (the descriptions are not pleasurable or erotic and the people in them are usually not having any fun that might be transmitted to you since the author frequently experiences body horror or Rabelaisian disgust) but from change.

There is also the Prospero figure of William Kolderup, towards whom the author feels a sentimental kindness that saves the character from the complete humiliation that the book hands out to other people. When I realised that the story was going to end with him then I anticipated the soothing descent (soft ramp into after-story oblivion) that would be there. I thought, "He doesn't have the heart to dump Kolderup."