More than meets the eye


Friedhelm Rathjen teilt auf der Arno Schmidt Mailingliste ein Zitat aus einem Aufsatz des Literaturwissenschaftlers Derek Attridge mit, das auf den Vergleich von Schmidts Zettels Traum mit Joyces Finnegans Wake (und anderen verwandten Werken) Bezug nimmt. Beide Werke unterscheiden sich doch erheblich, sagt Attridge.

Being influenced by a predecessor is not the same as building upon his or her work, however. The writers mentioned may use one or more of the techniques we associate with *Finnegans Wake*, and they may feel emboldened in their literary experimentation by Joyce’s example, but I don’t think any of them could be said to have profitably exploited or extended the particular stylistic innovations of the *Wake*. One of the remarkable features of Joyce’s final style is that its dense linguistic deformations and reformations do not result in a text that works only for the eye; as thousands of readers have testified, it is a style that calls out for, and responds wonderfully to, vocal performance. A common characteristic of the post-Joyceans brought together by Hayman and Anderson, however, is their exploitation of the visual dimension of the printed page, a spatial exuberance which frequently makes reading aloud difficult and perhaps unnecessary. For example, the work most commonly cited as a successor to *Finnegans Wake*, Arno Schmidt’s magnum opus *Zettels Traum*, although it is as obsessively concerned with multilingual punning as Joyce’s book, cannot be performed as an adventure of the human voice in the way Joyce’s can; it is emphatically a work that lives on the page, deriving from the Nightlessons episode of the *Wake* its use of columns and notes but employing typescript, handwriting, erasures, corrections, and variations in spacing in ways that cannot be represented aloud.

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Der Artikel ist erschienen in den Papers on Joyce der Spanish James Joyce Society – leider nicht online abrufbar.

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