On Michael Lentz’s “Innehaben”, a companion piece to “Schattenfroh”
The problem that inevitably arises from a book like Michael Lentz’s Innehaben, a companion piece to Lentz’s Schattenfroh, is not so much the existence or the form of this book itself, but rather the fact that it was written by the author himself.
Could I resist the urge to read it? No. But regardless of whether I read it or not, others will read it and write about it anyway, so the damage is done.
More generally, one is tempted to say that an author of a novel should never say, “THIS is what the text is about, THIS is its ultimate meaning, any other interpretation that doesn’t conform to my interpretation is therefore wrong.” Well, to be fair: Lentz doesn’t say exactly that, at least not explicitly, but the dilemma is that any reading that doesn’t converge with the one expressed by the author might be hastily dismissed anyway. And that now again is a problem that indirectly results from Lentz’s position in Innehaben.
Imagine if Kafka had written a several-hundred-page interpretation of his novels, such as America, The Castle, and The Trial. It is difficult to imagine what such an action would have done, but it certainly would not only have “robbed” philology of one of its most interesting subjects, because the majority of readers, one can imagine, also see their value in Kafka’s novels precisely in the fact that the texts heavily rely on reader activation. If we had such a document of Kafka in front of us, it would spoil our fun, we would no longer be asked to think along, to come to our own conclusions. We would simply be dragged along by the text without having to make any major cognitive effort. What makes reading so great, irreplaceable for many of us, would be quite simply missing from the texts.
And so, after reading Lentz’s Innehaben as an autohermeneutic piece to his 1001-page novel Schattenfroh, it is simply the case that the fascination that originally radiated from Schattenfroh fades somewhere, and that this seemingly grandiose construct in unattainable heights, which could never be fully understood, ultimately descends from its heights and becomes entirely comprehensible — at least Lentz makes every effort for this to occur.
It is really hard to understand why one would construct a text like Schattenfroh, which many say is the best German-language novel of the still young millennium, and then take it apart again, dissect it expertly, demystify it to a certain extent, and in the end monosemanticize and flatten it.
In Innehaben we come across paragraphs where Lentz tells us something about a certain passage in Schattenfroh, but then states that there is no resolution to that passage in the novel. This has nothing to do with the fact that the author wants to keep certain passages in Schattenfroh ambiguous or that he doesn’t want to provide a valid interpretation, no, he simply tells us that there IS no answer to a certain question that the text raises in us. Again, one can only state: This is highly destructive of any serious autonomous reading effort. If the author tells us that we do not need to read any further, because there is no clear answer to our question in the text, because he, the author, would not have implemented an answer, then the author undermines himself, so to speak. To create ambiguity simply for the sake of ambiguity or to look smart, is, one might think, pretentious (even though I’m not completely sure that would be justified).
Many questions follow the publication of a volume, as Innehaben is one: Is the author’s fear of people who might misread and misinterpret the novel so big that a preemptive strike must be made? Is “TL;DR” really ingrained that deep in our culture that the author himself must explain not only his poetological visions but also reduce a novel to a few revelatory lines at the end of a companion piece?
But what do we learn in Innehaben, anyway? First, what the process of ekphrasis, a literary procedure that underlies the novel, is all about. In the main part proper, we learn which works of visual art have found their way into the novel Schattenfroh, how they are depicted, altered, narrativized, etc., also how they are to be understood in the overall context. We also learn that most of the works of art on which the novel is based are not mentioned by name, that is, they are obscured in the novel, more or less, which can accordingly be seen as legitimizing the publication of an explanatory volume such as Innehaben. Incidentally, at the beginning of the main section, we also find a precise description of the novel’s content on more than 20 pages. Therefore we not only learn why Schattenfroh has exactly 1001 pages, but also that the word Bild (it can mean painted picture in German) occurs exactly 336 times in the novel.
Somehow the reader never gets rid of the feeling that Schattenfroh is only as cryptic as it is so that the author can then skillfully break it all down in a companion volume afterward; it’s as if he’s tapping you on the shoulder every two pages and says, “Look at all I’ve created in Schattenfroh, isn’t it just borderline brilliant?” Well, to be honest, much of it is.
But beware, Lentz is also an author who, instead of using the german word Aneignung, which would be by far more familiar to the readership (and also shorter as well as easier to write), prefers to speak of Appropriation (which can be used synonymously for Aneignung), to give just one example of many possible ones. Terms such as metahypodiegetisch (metahypodiegetic) or words like anamorphosis pervade Innehaben, but are not always explained or defined, as in the case of the latter. More so it is assumed that the reader is familiar with them; Lentz thankfully provides a definition for anamorphosis four pages short of the end, which is nice but plenty late.
Objectively, however, there is a lot to like about the volume. The fact that Lentz has enormous competence within the areas covered and that he works in a very elaborate manner should certainly be acknowledged.
So, should one read this volume, if one was tempted to gain final insights, or should one leave it? If one is looking for ultimate answers, yes, one will hardly get around it, even if the ultimate knowledge is often more devastating than a not-knowing.
On the other hand, the evidence in Innehaben that Schattenfroh is possibly too big even for its creator keeps popping up. That’s not a bash. Lentz makes a real effort to break down many of the most difficult passages and to transfer them into a homogeneous, coherent whole, and yet precisely this cannot always be done without contradictions. But it would certainly be too harsh to criticize the author for having failed in places with the explanation of his own novel. Because maybe this is not the author telling us what the book Schattenfroh ultimately is about and how it should be read, maybe it’s more like the author trying to make sense out of this mess of a novel, because he wasn’t quite so sure himself when writing it, at least not about every motive in there. And maybe that’s because a book like Schattenfrohcan never be fully understood, comprehended and processed, neither by its readers nor by its author, which suggests that Innehaben is not primarily a book for the readers of Schattenfroh. It could well be that Innehaben is as much a book for the author as it is one for the readers, since it’s the author Michael Lentz, who relentlessly tries to put each and every scene, motive, and symbol into coherence, but ultimately has to fail at least in some aspects (which ironically could mean to succeed in this context), as each interpretation, even an autoexegetical or -hermeneutical one, can be compared to an anamorphosis, some sort of a distorted image or a skewed perception, as Lentz tells us at the end of Innehaben, which seems only plausible in an age where terms like posthermeneutics are part of the philological discourse.
(Please forgive any grammatical imperfections since I am not a native English speaker. Nevertheless, I still want to give readers the chance to read about topics and books they would otherwise not have the chance to read about. — Tom.)
