Schmidt pulls you sideways by the ear into murky and frantic language-battles, clattering around in the sound-drenched possibilities of so-called silent reading. He rarely resorts to telling us what’s happening. The stories spurn orthodox creative writing handshakes such as [X] was [Y] when [Z] occurred. Instead they begin like this:
“(Snipping=snipping=snipping slips o’ paper : if somebody had sung me that lullaby at my clothes basket, how at age 50 I’d be helping construct an index for a 12 volume lexicon of saints . . . ! And glance at the things one more time from the idle corner of my eye : a thing with no guts, but only a spine; (and sometimes not even that : a book, a sick book, a terribly sick book); I took more and more exception to this ALBAN BUTLER !). – “
What is going on here? It might help to know that you’re not supposed to say ‘equals’ to yourself when you see that symbol between the snippings. Schmidt discarded the hyphen in favour of its double-decker cousin, whose mathematical resonance suits the madcap exactness of the prose. He uses other punctuation to startle and contort and hiccup and glitch and pause. “Let us retain the lovely=essential freedom to reproduce a hesitation precisely,” he says. The very deliberate space between the end of BUTLER and its exclamation point above reads to me like a comic gesture, a tilt of the speaker’s head a split-second after their utterance.
In the story, the characters are listening to each other and to the radio on New Year’s Eve. There is some snipping of printed texts and some walking in the outdoors and a return to the indoors, where we see one of them “bent to the lemon glow of the dial”. And another “eagerly directed his large ear to the government=apparatus. / Where, predictably, there resounded the beloved hodgepodge of bullschmaltz & observations by Leading Politicians”.
Having identified the radio as a bullschmaltz delivery unit, the protaganists revel in their homemade sonic-linguistic explorations. I think they’d agree with the philosopher Marie Thompson’s conception of noise as a productive, transformative, inescapable, and necessary thing. Schmidt’s abrasive and invigorating style, where the text feels scrambled but the narrative pulse feels strong, is like a lo-fi recording played through a distorted amplifier to get a thrilling, moreish surface that operates as the perfect antidote to I’m not sure what exactly but I like it.
Collected in The Collected Stories of Arno Schmidt, Dalkey Archive, 2011
A Personal Anthology 