FRIEDRICH P. OTT
71
story. This story within a story is set off typographically in that both
strains of action appear as separate-but-intermeshing columns of
print; it depicts the fact that one level of reality determines the other.
For we have here a sort of "Portrait of the Narrative I as a Middle–
Aged Man," a visual reproduction of the creative process, of the way
in which a literary realist
a
la Schmidt associatively absorbs, repro–
duces, and metamorphoses reality into "Mind Games," into
literature.
Schmidt's creative and critical preoccupations range widely:
they include not only the mechanics of cognition, memory, dreams,
and other mind games, but also biography, the way in which the
subconscious manipulates language, the pathological basis of artistic
creativity, and homage to precursors in structural experiment. A
rich spectrum, but clearly one with a common denominator: an
introverted, self-centered mind for whom "self" is not a given, not an
evident starting point, but something elusive, problematic; some–
thing that gains artistic significance only as it is experienced through
conflict, contrast, opposition (behind all the positivistic gesturing
Schmidt was an arch-Romantic). The self-portrait in
KAFF
is not
unique . All of Schmidt's works bear an unmistakably personal
imprint. He speaks through his
personae,
masks which are congruent,
though not identical, images of their creator. Typically, they pose as
Ego, reasoning, defensive, self-assuring; minds looking equally typ–
ically with casual curiosity at what their appended physique, emo–
tions, and instinctual reactions are up to. This autobiographically
motivated concern with the multi-dimensionality of what we simplis–
tically call "person" or "self' became predominant.
In
the
Egghead
Republic,
H-bomb radiation had revealed and absolutized the more
hidden facets of the human animal, in mutants such as the "Never–
Nevers" and the "Flying Masks" (bestial and sexual libido), and the
centaurs reminiscent of Swift's wise and noble Houyhnhnms.
From here it is a logical progression to the polyphonic late work
in which the narrative "I" speaks as Ego, Superego, and
Id-andwith
a mocking, humorous personality component which Freud would
seem to have ignored. This inner reality , as perceived by Schmidt,
thus becomes the object of conformal reproduction . Here also is the
reason why these late hybrids from the seventies,
Zettels Traum, Schule
der Atheisten,
and
Evening Edged in Gold
were published in an untradi–
tional manner, as photomechanic reproductions of the authors' type–
script! For it would have proved impossible to typeset the dialogized,
