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PARTISAN REVIEW
multi-column structure which allows those auctorial voices to speak
synchronously in conflict and/or agreement. (At the same time, it
was possible to carry over those photos , collages, and other pasted-in
components which make these texts such three-dimensional , tactile
experiences : they function as asides or comments from the wings of
the stage, or "quote" the writer's original inspiration .)
Among Schmidt's first literary efforts had been - not surprisingly
-a biography, of one of his childhood heroes, the Romantic poet
Friedrich Fouque of
Undine
fame . Later on , Schmidt focused on
other literary figures he felt an affinity for: he wrote dramatized
radio essays (some of which are being translated), based on his con–
clusion that in its ideal form biography would consist of "discussion
among several partners ." This Jamesian definition certainly also
applies to
Evening Edged in Gold.
If
Zettels Traum,
his
magnum opus,
had
been, among other things, a gigantic essay on the interdependence
between the life and the work of Edgar Allan Poe (another childhood
voice) , Schmidt now focused on himself, with one significant differ–
ence: synthesis takes the place of analysis . The analytical method
(foreshadowed in
Egghead Republic)
had grown into the Freudian–
Joycean "Etym Theory," according to which the "inspiration" of the
literary artist is primarily manipulation by the Subconscious. In
Zet–
tels Traum
the theory had served to analyze the poet's obsessions, en–
coded in "etyms", i.e . recurrent words, morphemes and set-pieces .
(It should be clearly understood that Schmidt, from an awareness of
his own pathological condition, was out to demonstrate the extent of
humanly possible achievement, in the tension between ignoble
impulse and artistic greatness .)
In
Evening Edged in Gold
the theory functions as creative method ,
as a last - and successful- attempt at resolution and integration .
Schmidt presents himself here as one of those artists who finally
manage to control
both
of the tyrannical Freudian categories: 1) with
creative accomplishment comes autonomy over the Superego. Its
tyranny Schmidt's alienated protagonists had combated all along,
attacking State and Church . Now, in his swan song, the auctorial
persona
steps forward
sans
mask, settling accounts with his authori–
tarian father whom he saw as the centrally negative figure overshad–
owing his childhood. 2) As for the other tyrant, the Subconscious,
its power wanes with the onset of senile impotence; thus it can no
longer dictate language, and the literary artist - resigned, dis–
abused, but free-can turn the tables on it, with that new voice ,
mocking it in conscious, scatological punning. The heavy sexual
