Caliban Over Setebos

"Caliban over Setebos" is a short story by the German writer Arno Schmidt. It was first published in 1964 as the conclusion of the ten stories in the volume ''Kühe in Halbtrauer''.

Plot

"Caliban over Setebos" tells how the poet Georg Düsterhenn travels to a Lower Saxony village to see his childhood sweetheart again. However, he feels repulsed by her, observes lesbian group sex on his nightly departure and narrowly escapes the angry women who have discovered him. These burlesque adventures are depicted against the backdrop of the ancient Orpheus myth. There are numerous other allusions to ancient myths as well as to works by Robert Burns, Robert Browning, James Joyce and others.

Georg Düsterhenn travels by bus to the village of Schadewalde, which is supposed to be located in the border zone of Lower Saxony. There he wants to meet his childhood crush Fiete Methe again, in order to "decisively & irresistibly make himself schmaltzy" for a volume of poetry that will be an economic failure and thus reduce his taxable income. During an evening walk, he observes children running with lanterns, meets the Holocaust survivor H. Levy, who is on his way in his car to stock the condom machines in the area, and observes the sexual intercourse between the inn waitress Rieke and the farmhand. In the village inn, he discovers an old jug, which he buys from the innkeeper O. Tulp with Swiss gold francs. He then spends a local round of brandy. Düsterhenn realizes that Rieke is actually the Fiete he is looking for and asks her to show him to his room. However, he does not dare to reveal himself to her, and since he has potency problems, a masturbation also fails. Düsterhenn escapes from the inn at night and observes lesbian group sex in the barn between four "hunters" whom he had already met at the bus stop and in the inn. A sneeze gives him away and he is pursued by the four women and the innkeeper's dog until he is rescued by the Jewish condom salesman in his car.

Origin

The idea for the story came to Schmidt on March 26, 1963, when he came across his friend Eberhard Schlotter's picture cycle "Orpheus". The working title was "Orfeus". Schlotter himself had been inspired to create the cycle by a disillusioning encounter with a former lover who had aged considerably. He told Schmidt about this. During their conversation, the Orpheus story came to mind.

Schmidt wrote the text from April to May 1963 in the Heideorf Bargfeld, where he had lived since 1958. He used over 1000 pieces of paper on which he had jotted down ideas, formulations and quotations for the text of 63 to 90 printed pages.

Themes

The text is an example of Schmidt's psychoanalytic-oriented etymological theory, developed shortly before. It is considered "the literary masterpiece" among Schmidt's shorter works.Peter Habermehl: ''Orfeus in Niedersaxn. Arno Schmidts Erzählung «Caliban über Setebos»''. In: ''Antike und Abendland'' 53 (2007), p. 191.

As in all of Schmidt's narrative works, ''Caliban über Setebos'' centers on a dominant first-person narrator who represents an alter ego of his author. Here it is the poet Georg Düsterhenn, who, like Schmidt, comes from Hamburg-Hamm, has Lower Silesian- lausitz roots, is an atheist and spent Second World War as a typing pool soldier in Norway. Düsterhenn's youthful works are attributed to Schmidt (a verse poem about the Persian explorer Sataspes as well as the surviving ''Pharos oder von der Macht der Dichter''), and like Schmidt, even in his more mature years Düsterhenn could not get a woman out of his head whom he fancied as a grammar school pupil but never dared to speak to: In ''Caliban über Setebos'' she is called Fiete Methe, for Schmidt it was the Görlitz pupil Hanne Wulff, who was the model for numerous girl or woman characters in Schmidt's work. The Germanist Sabine Kyora therefore believes that the first-person narrator in ''Caliban über Setebos'' is virtually identical to its author. As Wolfgang Albrecht shows, there are striking differences between the two: Unlike all of Schmidt's other protagonists, Düsterhenn is small and slight, he is wealthy, despises the Enlightenment and, as a hit song writer, is not an author to be taken seriously, but an "opportunistic trivial writer". Jörg Drews points out that Schmidt wrote himself in the third person in the text: Düsterhenn recalls a fellow writer "'Dagegen=SCHMIDT'", who "drew his meagre living from the character role of the 'Good Left Man'" but, because he refused to meet the demands of his audience, would never make it to prosperity. Düsterhenn is the result of a lengthy thought experiment about what would happen if he gave up his literary pretensions and wrote in a more marketable way.

The story is divided into nine parts, each of which bears the name of one of the nine Muses as its title. These fit in one way or another with the content of the story: Thus, the evening walk through the village is headed Urania, the muse of stargazing; Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, stands above Düsterhenn's disappointing and disappointing encounter with Fiete-Rieke. Often, however, the area of responsibility of the muse mentioned is also in an ironic relationship to the events: The lesbian orgy is found in the Terpsichore chapter, the muse of Reigentanz; the burlesque escape at the end in the Thalia chapter, the muse of Comedy, which in ancient understanding is defined by its happy ending; the rough sex act between Fiete-Rieke and the house servant in the chapter Erato, who was responsible for rather tender Love poetry. The text is preceded by a motto, which parodies in phonetic English an epigram dedicated to Herodotus from the Anthologia Graeca, whose historical work is divided into nine books named after the muses.

For long stretches, the text reflects the inner monologue Düsterhenn's ruminations, his memories and associations of what he sees, hears and experiences. In doing so, he usually comments on the material-landscape environment more lovingly than on his fellow human beings, for whom he often finds only disillusioning, mocking or even resentment-laden words. Schmidt consistently ignores the rules of orthography: Not only is the respective dialect of the characters imitated, but the chosen spelling exhausts the sound and meaning possibilities of a word. Frequently, quotations are interspersed in the text, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, which sometimes originate from Middle High German, English or the Old Languages. This results in numerous opportunities for puns, punchlines and surprising secondary meanings. Schmidt himself wrote to the literary scholar Jörg Drews on September 23, 1964:

The deliberate polysemy of his language has its origins in Schmidt's etymology theory, which was fed by his encounter with psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. According to this theory, the unconscious expresses itself linguistically in ambiguities, wordplay, assonance, etc., in order to simultaneously convey - mostly sexual - meanings in addition to the manifest level of meaning. In order to master this language, however, the speaker must have attained a certain age impotence that allows him to be at least partially free of the drives of the id, which he can thus neither repress nor sublimation, but rather allow to play out in a controlled manner: "One can therefore now understand oneself with this Caliban", Schmidt later formulated in ''Zettel's Traum''. The stories in the volume ''Kühe in Halbtrauer'' and, in particular, ''Caliban über Setebos'' can thus be understood as attempts to apply this theory to his own literary work.

Reference texts

As the literary scholar Friedhelm Rathjen notes, ''Caliban over Setebos'' seems disintegrated: It is not immediately clear to the reader what sense the various elements of the plot make. The reason for this is that the intertextuality narrative is linked to several other texts without this link being explicitly reflected in the text. Only when these links are discovered and made explicit can the levels of meaning of ''Caliban über Setebos'' be deciphered.

Robert Browning

The title of the story quotes ''Caliban upon Setebos. Or, Natural Theology in the Island'', the title of a poem by the English poet Robert Browning, published in 1864. In it, Browning has the fierce, ugly Caliban from Shakespeare's ''The Tempest to reflect on Setebos, his god also mentioned in Shakespeare. He imagines him to be arbitrary, malicious and vengeful, projecting these qualities from himself onto the deity projection (psychoanalysis). This poem is alluded to in the text of the story when Düsterhenn reflects on what he considers to be the inferior quality of the universe: "but most of it was pretty stupid. Of course there were some good parts in the universe now and then, but the majority of sete Boss's products were fusch=work." In this sense, the title stands for a radical negation of theodicy. Schmidt also uses the figure of Setebo in two essays written around the same time to allude to the flawed nature of creation. An evil God who does not care about the suffering of his creatures was already a theme in his 1949 story ''Leviathan'' and in the title ''Nobodaddy's Kinder'', under which his short novel ''Brand's Haide'', ''Aus dem Leben eines Fauns'' and ''Schwarze Spiegel'' were published as a trilogy in 1963. ''Nobodaddy'', a portmanteau of English ''nobody'' - "no one" and ''daddy'' - "papa", was a term used by the poet William Blake for God. The fact that Düsterhenn accuses his parents of having "brought such a mooncalf into the world" can be understood as an implied identification with Caliban, as Caliban is apostrophized as a mooncalf in Shakespeare's ''Tempest''. Schmidt took the concept of an evil demiurge from late antique gnosis, to which Düsterhenn's disgust for everything corporeal and his refusal to procreate also refer.

Orpheus

''Caliban over Setebos'' is a replica of the ancient myth of Orpheus. The latter travels to the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice, who died young, back to life; Düsterhenn travels to Schadewalde - the place name, which is actually Silesian, alludes to the "shadows" as which the dead lived on in the ancient imagination, as well as to the classical philologist and Homer translator Wolfgang Schadewaldt (1900-1974). Instead of a lyre, he, a poet-singer, always carries the ''Peregrinus Syntax'', a rhyming lexicon of the 19th century.

The fact that the journey means a trip to Hades is hinted at in the very first pages of the story: the place name Schadewalde contains ''Hades'' anagramatically. In the sign for the bus stop, Düsterhenn's "green-pale 'H' of the face" catches the eye, the fare is an obolus - this coin was given to the dead to pay the ferryman Charon for his crossing of the Styx, the Kötelbeck, a small stream at the entrance to the village, has a "stügisch" effect and "'Der Erste Schiffer'" himself makes an appearance in the form of a man urinating by the wayside. In dieser Art ist die Erzählung dicht durchsetzt mit Anspielungen auf den Mythos.

The names of the characters also refer to the Orpheus legend: Düsterhenn's first name alludes to Virgil's '' Georgica'', in whose fourth book it is told. The fact that Düsterhenn, who despised the peasants, was given the first name Georg (ancient Greek for "peasant") is a side point; the short form "Orje" is homonymous with orgy, as celebrated by the maenads, the murderesses of Orpheus. Orje also refers to them phonetically, just as Rieke refers to Eurydice. The relationship between the two is changed by Schmidt, however, because in ''Caliban über Setebos'' it is not the man who leads the woman, but vice versa (namely up a narrow staircase to Düsterhenn's room in the inn), and it is not he who looks around at her, but she at him. If you read the name of the innkeeper O. Tulp backwards, the god of the dead Pluto comes out; at the same time, he also stands for the god Dionysus, because he serves intoxicating drinks and is addressed by the "slayers" as "Liber pater" (the Interpretatio Romana of Dionysus). He calls his wife, who corresponds to the ancient Persephone, "Olsche": by changing the syllables, you get "Sheol", the name of the underworld used in the Tanakh