2 - Schmidt's Concept of Literary Realism

Summary

<Bei Uns> ist es genauso, wie in der DDR : beiderseits <regiert> die welt=anschaulichste Empfindlichkeit : Ist man bei uns gottvergiftet und prüde; so drüben prüde und barbarisch= einfältig.

The illusionistic nature of language finds its first elaboration in Schmidt's concept of literary realism, which dominated his writings in the 1950s. As I showed in the previous chapter, Schmidt's early writing already shows his awareness of the impossibility of ideal literary representation in Foucault's sense of the classical age of representation. Schmidt's call for a literature emulating the lack of continuity typical of modern existence attests to that awareness, as does his criticism of traditional prose forms — the epistolary novel, epic novel, and diary — with their classic sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Schmidt's conclusion that extant prose models fail to do justice to actual experience initiates his search for a prose form characterized by “konforme Abbildung von Gehirnvorgängen durch besondere Anordnung von Prosaelementen.” The writer's task, “die Welt nach Kräften präzise abzubilden,” inaugurates Schmidt's desire to develop these sorts of strategies to capture the absent presence. This concept of literary realism leads Schmidt to stress the search for new formulations of language. The theory of typography as detailed in “Berechnungen III,” partly discussed in “Berechnungen II,” and an integral part of Schmidt's aesthetics of reading and writing throughout his work, is one of several examples of such attempts to create a new language.