Maximally Perverse Obscurantism

Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, translated by Max Lawton. Deep Vellum, 1001 pages. 2025.

There is an especially gnarly chapter more than halfway through Ulysses called the “Oxen of the Sun” in which Joyce’s weirdly adversarial virtuosity takes the form of a pastiche of the evolution of English prose, which is at the same time an allegory of the nine months of fetal gestation (the chapter is set in a maternity hospital). It is mostly a slog, but it is an exhilarating slog. As you hack your way through Joyce “doing” Malory and Bunyan and Swift and Pepys and Defoe and Sterne and Goldsmith and Burke and Gibbon and Lamb and De Quincey and Carlyle and Pater, and on up to “Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel,” a part of your reading mind succumbs to a serenely disbelieving loop: He did this. He did this. If “Oxen” occupies a region of Ulysses where Joyce’s exquisite ear for memorably musical sentences (“Mild fire of wine kindled his veins”) takes a back seat to the leaden hum of meta-literature, that is no reason not to be awed by his chutzpah.

Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh—rendered heroically from German into English by Max Lawton—lives mostly on the nether side of the line Joyce crossed in “Oxen.” At one thousand pages it is almost by definition a slog. It can be considered in a lineage of similarly demanding tomes that push playful modernist experiment into a region that might be called “impossible”: i.e., the excruciatingly self-involved later Joyce of Finnegans Wake and strange lesser-known works of maximally perverse obscurantism like Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. Some authors of quasi-impossible books like Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor), Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) and Wallace (Infinite Jest) nevertheless manage to write unfailingly entertaining sentences that never lose a certain vernacular crackle, and that are often funny.

This is not quite Lentz’s mode. Schattenfroh is mostly humorless, or is of such a recondite species of humor that it elicits not so much laughter as an invitation to puzzle out some multi-leveled, intra-literary riddle. Most pages exude that unnerving queasiness which results from seeing a worrying lack of paragraph breaks in the foreseeable near future. The sentence music is generally less hooky-melodic (see Joyce’s mild fire above) and more rebarbative/para-academic: “working through means dispelling any and all doubts by toggling any possible opposing positions back and forth for so long that they come to be mentally pulverized.” So runs a typical sentence in Schattenfroh, as the bristlingly Latinate precariously appends two subordinate clauses, and leaves not so much a pleasant ring in the ear as a strenuous grinding of gears.

The first section of the novel stays close to the POV of a narrator who calls himself “Nobody,” alluding apparently to the Odyssey—i.e., the name Odysseus gives himself in his wily evasion of the Cyclops. Nobody sounds like a brutally reduced ground-zero Cogito groping for the barest worldly orientation from within a hollowed container that might be a prison cell or a skull. Schattenfroh’s narrator describes the situation from within a “facemask,” something like a space helmet affixed with “aspherical lenses that are surrounded by steplike ring-zones.” We don’t know if his thoughts are being controlled (or at least creepily surveilled) by a being called Schattenfroh or are his own freely occurring rumination.

Vladimir Sorokin has said of Schattenfroh that it is a “deep and mighty book that forces the reader to not only think of the word ‘metaphysics,’ but to feel with their own skin its fearsome presence in our world.” Part of Nobody’s metaphysics is an ongoing obsession with the tactile materiality of writing. “One calls this writing” is the first sentence of the book; later, it is included in a mini disquisition on the Latin etymology of stylus, an implement for making inscriptions. At another point, a pencil talks, then turns into a snake, “its tears running down the shaft containing the savage pencil-lead that is slowly being worn away.”

Schattenfroh’s metaphysics also explore what philosophers call qualia—that is, the “what it is like” feeling of conscious awareness, the qualitative immediacy of experience. Since Nobody’s mental states are directly manifest on the page via some kind of lexicographic biochemical translation apparatus (evidently this comes included with the space helmet), the novel can’t help but take up philosophical questions about mind and world, the integrative synthesis of perception and experience that constitutes personal identity; what an early German reviewer called a “psychogeography of the self.”

All this is stirring and cool if it is 1950 and you are Samuel Beckett (or René Descartes in 1641 or Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922) and somewhat precious and ponderous stretched over the first two or three hundred pages of Schattenfroh. One blurber notes that “in some fifty years, the grandchildren of the literary judges who chose to ignore Schattenfroh will be studying it at universities and maybe even writing their PhD theses about it, whereas most of today’s German prize-winning books will be completely forgotten.” I have no doubt that a great many PhD theses might be generated from readings of Schattenfroh, though in what sense this is meant as praise is a different question. Another zealous blurber named Andreas Puff-Trojan says the book is “one of the most interesting experiments in German-language literature in recent years,” which is a little like saying that it is one of the best books with an off-yellow cover read by people west of Pittsburgh who also own used 2014 Subaru Outbacks.

After Schattenfroh clears its throat for approximately three hundred pages, the tone begins to shift out of bare Beckettian consciousness and into a more-or-less pleasingly eclectic polyphony of registers. You can hear the sermonizing harangue of Zarathustra in “commemorate with me the day upon which I moved out of the world, out of the slavehouse that exists in me! So you also must do,” and at times what sounds like an industrious German bureaucrat who, in a fit of ambition, had begun to imagine worlds on the scale of William Blake. Sometimes we just get careful inventories of buildings and rooms a la Perec: “The boardroom is located in a very special place, clearly visible from the outside, it hovers in the aforementioned semicircular annex above the building’s entrance area located upon the high terrace, a glass growth on one leg, a cabasa stuck into the wall with eleven (5+1+5) two-part, high windows rounded in a semicircle in place of the instrument’s chains of small metal balls” and so on. And sometimes Lentz throws in a spectral presiding authority, like the one “sitting in this room for over fifty years . . . in the middle of the longest row of tables and looking into the astonished faces of his subordinates.” This father figure is somehow aligned with “Schattenfroh,” (though this should not be confused with Nobody) as well as with a sinister organization called the Frightbearing Society. If all this sounds confusing and disorienting, that’s because it is. And let us not forget Father’s secretary-amanuensis known simply as Mateo (excellent touch that).

Lentz’s “brainfluid” writing seems to key into Gravity’s Rainbow’s guiding conceit of the writing surface as celluloid, turning the page into a kind of saturated emulsion that might be projected into light. At other times Schattenfroh sounds like the Torah, with its great covenants, its spectacles of law giving, of prohibitions and commands, for which Lawton adopts King James formulations like “thou shalt” and “it shall come to pass.” These divine commands issue from Schattenfroh (the character) who, like Zarathustra, seems to have minted a new valuation of existence, handing down the tables of a whole “theology of the word,” as the narrator puts it at one point, all of which unfolds with the lugubrious grandeur of a Druidic rite.

Then there are the “prisoners of the wall,” chained to a spot unable to move, subterranean drones hooked up to little image machines, perhaps confined to a Cave of benighted consumerism. There is also a place called the “armarium,” described as “simultaneously a library room and a weapons cabinet and a funeral vault” and which contained a collection of books which self-replicate, and which Nobody calls “the Complete Index of Schattenfroh.” That index is dutifully produced in its entirety for the reader (including such volumes as Beckett’s Malone Dies).

When Nobody finds himself repeating an oblique sentence in his head—“If it’s not quite Milton, then it’s Milton”—this leads him somehow to conclude that “thus must Milton be in the armarium.” Such a bizarro syllogism tells us that that armarium has more than a little in common with Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” which contains every possible book—including, for example, an edition of Proust’s Recherche in which every instance of the name Swann (but one) is spelled Twann, and also one where every instance of the name Swann has been omitted, and also one in which the third instance of the name Swann is spelled *&^#$%, and so on to infinity. When we hear that the prisoners of the wall are engaged in a “labor of self-deleting repetition, renewing itself each time, an impossibility,” we’re again confronted with the metaphysical problem of writing as such, what it means to work on language and perhaps even to be enslaved or infected by language, a la Burroughs.

While all of this is in some way satisfying for anyone who cares about modernism and modernist aesthetics, there is something basically broken about Schattenfroh. I don’t mean broken in an aesthetically volatile and deliberate way, but broken in its approach, in its very thinking. More than just a thousand pages of structurally opaque innuendo, the (perhaps occasionally alluring) incoherence of Schattenfroh is, I think, an unconscious response to an increasingly diffuse literary ecosystem, as if Literature-with-a-capital-L were beginning to cannibalize itself in sputtering paroxysms of half-baked invention which, in the end, didn’t mean or even do very much. What if the patience-trying, stultifyingly protracted, relentlessly abstract Schattenfroh was (once the prestige reek of “literature in translation” were scrubbed off it) just a vivid sociocultural symptom wherein the Big Difficult Modernist novel is having an existential flip out and perhaps not of a controlled philosophical kind?

Another way of putting this is to ask what, in the end, is the place of a difficult work of experimental modernism in a media landscape dominated by dwindling attention spans. Is the intended readership for a book in a tradition of “impossible” books like Finnegans Wake or Bottom’s Dream or Impressions of Africa an increasingly discerning one? An increasingly insular one? One in which you must have a PhD? It is possible that this heavy block of paper is a conspicuously Literary accoutrement comparable to a canvas tote bag with a chic bookstore logo on it. (By the way, God bless Deep Vellum, who are doing crucial work even amid Trump’s cancelations of the very grants that allow such places to create impossible literature.) I salute and earnestly evangelize Lentz’s independent mindedness and uncompromising literary autonomy. My point is rather that Schattenfroh’s experimental density seems almost calibrated to provoke predictable dismissals that will no doubt invite the equally predictable whiplash from Defenders of Literature who will be quick to diagnose naysays as semiliterate dopes weaned on third-rate trash. But one can love Ada and Ulysses and find Schattenfroh less than brain-strippingly formidable. Or, anyway, I can.

The best stuff in the book—the nightmare visionary parts whose eeriness is enhanced by the hypnotic state the book has put you in—are a kind of unconscious registration of the very scenario in which we find ourselves: the encroachment of ever more unforgivingly capitalist forms of cultural streamlining, of AI that purports to write and compose and make movies. The readership for the sort of value system Schattenfroh exists to sustain—the value of sustained attention spans willingly dialed in to, and totally down for, ambitious, non-clichéd difficult works of art—is dwindling to sub-zero (sinking raft, plane hitting the mountain, oxygen leaking from the room, pick your favorite mise-en-scène). Certain passages of the book seem uncanny allegories of these very doomy diagnoses. Think again of those “prisoners of the wall,” chained to a spot unable to move, subterranean drones hooked up to little image machines, confined to a Cave of benighted consumerism.

Because Lentz is himself a free jazz musician he deserves a good free jazz analogy. So, Schattenfroh it is like a Cecil Taylor solo which lasts a month. No matter how into Unit Structures you are, it would be hard to stay interested in such a solo, though I am fully willing to admit that this is just a failure of imagination on my part. Taking in such a piece of music would no doubt be remarkable, perhaps impressive, perhaps tormenting, depending on your taste and temperament, but undoubtedly one in which some inner sotto voce voice would seem to repeat: He did this. He did this.