when it is snowing, the valley is black, p. 42

Plenitude, now, to start with; Schmidt using plenitude of stories in Atheists as a means of expansion, and then Frisch's Geiser using a multiplication of stories as a form of displacement. Old and forgetful, Geiser tries to get his meaning outside himself. He pins these pieces of paper to the walls and looks at them. (Could you suggest that the situation in reverse would characterise youth for Frisch: a man without accoutrements, independently explaining himself in a well-connected series of words?) Clear thoughts and memories have been replaced by physical gestures. Geiser cuts books apart and goes for walks. That's how he tries to discern himself. He keeps trying to put himself outside. These are his calculations or proofs. But the spaces between the gestures are still unarticulated. And the paragraphs the reader sees in Holocene are set apart with white space between them: the effort you make to cross those spaces and fix the book together is made visible by the gap on the page. Frisch's way of apportioning things might remind you that running paragraphs together mentally is an effort, even if it normally seems natural and effortless because you are such a good reader. We're all heading for Geiser-land, when the pause will be a real danger. You forget in pauses. Even now you say, "I walked into this room to fetch something and now I don't remember what it was." Geiser notices the varieties of rain, then the book reflects that at least it is not snowing. A gap passes and it is snowing. The white space is a passage of time with nothing in it but struggle and drowning. Geiser turns the stove on in one paragraph, the white space comes, and ping, the danger of forgetfulness tries to overwhelm him. His stroke at the end of the book attracts an abundance of words from other sources. He has chosen them but they are not his own. They're followed by that landscape description but for the first time he is not in the landscape. Even the body of text that usually contains him does not have him in it any more. He is gone in more than one way. It is an extra-final wiping-out.

a distinction be made

Reading Man in the Holocene, 1979, by Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, after Arno Schmidt's The School for Atheists, 1972, I thought about the additional pieces of text that had been made part of each book, the side-columns and footnotes crowding to and fro in Schmidt, and then the boxed horizontal inserts that came evenly and plainly between the paragraphs in Frisch.

In Schmidt the swarming appearance of the inserts makes the 'main' text a combative partner with the side text; they are two equal things muscling one another around. It is all aware that it is in a book, and it also knows that outside this book there are others.

In Holocene the inserts have been chosen by the character Geiser, who is cutting up his library with scissors. Now the main text seems closer to the kind of writing that is 'like real life' because these snippets about dinosaurs, animals, historical episodes, and topographical features are things existing in an implied world, as cuttings exit in life; they are not the same material as that world, in the way the Atheists columns are. There is a kind of strictness in Holocene: one thing is in one place and the other is separated from it, and you notice that the theme of the book is disintegration, age, and collapse, but the form goes steadily on. Geiser has probably suffered a stroke by the end. He can't tell us about it but one of the cuttings lets us know. "Apoplexy," it reads, "commonly known as a stroke, is a sudden loss of brain function …" After the apoplexy cutting there is a passage about the world continuing as usual. "The village stands unharmed. Above the mountains, high up in the blue sky, the white trails of passenger planes. The scent of lavender …" The world and the cuttings are both commenting on him obliquely in different ways.

But they don't attack him directly; I notice that, nobody attacks him. Though over in Schmidt, people are slapping and kissing their flesh. Geiser is losing his ability to make necessary changes in the world. The moment when he almost leaves the hot plate on is worth a mention. He is losing his memory. Going for a walk in the woods, he exults when he tells himself that no one knows where he is, alone like this, independently, proving that he is still a capable body controlled by a knowing mind; the words, "The ascent is laborious," are followed by the phrase, "just as he expected," as he confirms his good judgment to himself. "Geiser knows that it is four hundred meters up to the pass."

"I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and over¬whelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information," wrote Lyn Hejinian in her introduction to The Rejection of Closure, "potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening."

In the essay itself she wrote:

"The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curiously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to boundedness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a distinction be made between inside and outside, between the relevant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out.

Schmidt responds to this impulse by constraining his encylopaedic impulse to literature and stories: his Kolderup is another Prospero. But his "response to the world" within this constraint is enormous and playful – if Kolderup is Prospero then his daughter is a Shamela rewriting of Miranda. Frisch quotes other books (which Holocene credits in a bibliography) but there is no sign that he expects you to have read them, or that he thinks you might be interested in consulting them afterwards. Holocene uses them to refer to itself and it leaves them as they were; there is no subversion in its attitude towards them – they are discrete ...

The dinosaurs in Geiser's excerpts are being regarded with a sort of judgmental efficiency by the writer of the scientific text, who in this context might as well be immortal. The human being who walks into the woods is happy when he thinks that no one knows where he is, as if there is a danger that he too might be glanced down upon by someone listing facts about him, or calling him "terrible" and his survival "amazing," as the science-writer does.

If the dinosaurs knew that they were being talked about like this then they also might try to assert themselves by escaping down a forest path so that none of their neighbours, family members, or anyone else would know where they were - thwarting the writer who wanted to make these books out of their memories.

Possibly the dinosaurs and the man would roam together through the Swiss woodland trying to navigate the bridges.

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."