After Tsalal
In Edgar Allan Poe’s novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (1838), an island
named Tsalal is the final stop of a sea voyage that is actually a series of disasters. This island, located in
the Antarctic Ocean on the edge of the known world, becomes the site of a bloody encounter of cultures:
only Pym and his friend Peters survive the gruesome trap laid out by the island’s “savage” inhabitants.
After an orgy of mutual annihilation and senseless destruction, they escape by the skin of their teeth in
a canoe and end up, the closer they get to Antarctica, in a sphere of paradox and mysterious apparitions.
The sea gets increasingly warm, covered in inexplicable plays of color and light, until an enormous
cataract appears on the horizon, falling down from a diffuse brightness high up in the sky. Large white
birds float above the ocean on its warm streams, and their screams make the last abducted indigenous
people petrify in horror. Finally, in the opening of the cataract, the vague contours of an enormous snowwhite
figure appear—with this, the report by Gordon Pym suddenly breaks off, and the text ends in a
confusion as to who its true author is (Pym or Poe).
Echo and cut: In his magnum opus “Zettels Traum” [Bottom’s Dream] (1970), the writer Arno
Schmidt addresses, in a slightly different aside of the historical context, the possibilities of a translation
of Edgar Allan Poe, with whose texts he feels linked in a maelstrom-like affinity. The first volume of the
large-format work is entitled “Das Schauerfeld oder die Sprache von Tsalal.” The last page of this volume,
parallel to the final events on Tsalal, deals with the destructive consequences of another cultural encounter.
The decline of the culture of antiquity is traced back to three reasons: firstly, “the thuggery of the Germanic
partisan peoples,” secondly “the rottenness of late Rome,” and thirdly the “intellectual suffocation
by Xentum (Christianity).” Schmidt’s account stands in the tradition of a cultural critique based on idealistic
currents of thought, which, since Nietzsche, has seen these three factors (summed up polemically by
Nietzsche under the terms “slave morality” and “herd resentment”) as a general threat to art and culture
in general. On the threshold to modernism, the above-mentioned mix of barbarism (or neo-barbarism), a
decadence of late civilization, and an ideology of egalitarianism and the smallest common denominator
(from the Christian to the socialist ideal) was recognized as the beginning of the age of the masses, where
differences that are, it is maintained, necessary for any artistic and cultural production beyond mere
entertainment, are leveled. A work like Arno Schmidt’s “Zettels Traum” sees itself in that sense as a bulwark
against the leveling tendencies of the culture industry, insisting unfashionably on the serious status
of art, i.e., on a defined gap to the beholder/reader, and thus it stands in the tradition of that seemingly
antimodern modernism that renounces popular compatibility—scandalously and without a trace of
proletarian correctness. The accent is not on current taste, but on a widely ramified and difficult-to-access
network of roots: “Producing art is the heaviest work, to consume it correctly is heavy work.” (Zettel 137)
Echo and next step: the claim to thematize an irreducible complexity of conditions appropriately
opens up the question of what is still communicable beyond the popular. This question leads to the
visible/legible part of a context which is still valid after a mutual annihilation of culture (Tsalal, Rome,
modernism). For this purpose, the image once again calls up an end scenario, an assembly on the roof
of the Villa Malaparte on Capri, from the film “Contempt” by Jean-Luc Godard (1963). Here, unlike
in the final sequences by Poe and Schmidt described above, the issue is not the destruction, but rather
the reconstruction of a cultural site: for his new film of Homer’s “Odyssey,” an American producer with
money and macho manners wants to hire a new scriptwriter, only to immediately start flirting aggressively
with his wife. The intrusion of the foreign money and bravado into the sphere of high culture of a
weakened, old, and yet venerable Europe (embodied by Fritz Lang, who plays the director of the Odyssey
film within the film) becomes the theme of Godard’s contempt (also embodied by Fritz Lang?). The connection
of two worlds that do not fit together, a link that is, however, unavoidable for economic reasons,
seems to strike at the very substance of the big primal text, but it also leads—as if it were through a
bypath of the narrative—to a second proliferation of images and allusions that reflects the original
material beyond its twilight, as if the historical horizon had only been inserted into the real through
its proven unattainability. The final, silent appearance of Odysseus, the gleaming light on the roof of
the Casa Malaparte, in whose exposed state Böcklin’s mythically sinking “Villa by the Sea” seems to
unite with futuristic architectural ideas, and not least the echo of the argument between the protagonists
Camille and Paul, in whose existentially tinged futility the modern Helen’s or Penelope’s death by accident
is already heralded—all this creates an atmospherically condensed visual and textual context
that lets the viewer/reader once more submerge himself into an imaginary world after Tsalal. The span
between mythical past and cross-faded present, ancient identity and modern de-identification calls up
a memory that enriches new material against the internal disintegration of image and text.
And where does this material come from? Echo and final cut: at the end of the post-Tsalal
round trip there is no end scenario, but instead an equally wordless beginning. At the start of Pier Pasolini’s
film “Medea” (1969) we see the staging of a human sacrifice, in slow wordless images, the like of
which Pasolini used so often to get close to the archaic impenetrability of his material. Medea, as a descendant
of the sun god, was considered a magician, and thus in the myth she stood for a pre-Greek, i.e.,
pre-European, “barbaric” level of civilization, characterized by human sacrifice. Things seem to come
full circle after Tsalal again: confrontation has become repression, the unacceptable sacrifice is hidden,
the unpredictable mastery of the element is declared magic, and the forgotten superiority in the furor
of emotions becomes irrevocable fate in the light of knowledge. This light no longer brings forth a savage
daughter, nor a phantom savior in the warm ocean of Antarctica, but a simple shadow that becomes
deep and long once the source of light no longer blinds the eye. All the things that become recognizable in
this shadow fill many a gap and leak that have emerged in the heat of battle, giving the boat its list.
Halcyon Days, Cologne 2013, p. 164