Review

Author(s): Michael Minden

Review by: Michael Minden
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 263-264
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3733239
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 MLR, 89.I, '994 263

as mentioned, although he was given a whole essay in Robert Acker's and Marianne
Burkhard's Blick aufdie Schweiz(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987). For Swiss lyric poetry
apart from Marti one must look to contributions inJohn Flood's symposium volume
Moder SwissLiterature:UnityandDiversity(London: Wolff, 1985), where one will also
find the dramatists treated (by Michael Butler) who are absent from this volume;
even the plays of Frisch and Diirrenmatt are neglected here in favour of the narrative
works. In spite of the subtitle, the main thrust of the book is on the period since about
1965: for the 'first generation' Butler has barely more space at his disposal than van
der Will for three works by E. Y. Meyer. Some editorial cross-referencingbetween
the survey chapters and the monographs would have given a greater coherence to
the book as a whole. Within these limits, however, this is a dependable and
informative volume.
Otto F. Walter did not form the Luchterhand Verlag in 1966 (p. 73). Ninive is
consistently misspelt.
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM J. H. REID

Das DiirrenmattLesebuch. Ed. by DANIELKEEL, with a postscript by HEINZLUDWIG

ARNOLD. Zurich: Diogenes. I99I. 482pp. DM 16.80.
In 1980 the Diogenes paperback edition of Diirrenmatt's work already ran to thirty
volumes, and he continued to be active as a writer until his death ten years later. To
assemble a one-volume reader from so much material would therefore seem
hazardous enough without the result then declaring itself to be the Diirrenmatt
reader. In the case of the compilation by Daniel Keel, however, the claim is probably
less a statement of editorial hubristhan a reminder of who possesses sole publishing
rights. Included in Das Diirrenmatt Lesebuchare two radio plays from the I950S, nine
poems spanning the years 1950 to 1990, and the whole of'Die Panne'. Otherwise the
collection is devoted almost entirely to Diirrenmatt's theoretical and critical
writings, and whilst these certainly communicate his scepticism and sardonic
humour, it is as a playwright, not as a commentator, that he will ultimately be
remembered. H. L. Arnold's accompanying essay maintains that although his
dramatic star suffered eclipse in the 1970s and I98os, Diirrenmatt's writing during
these years continued to be 'bedeutend fuirunsere Zeit', but the book itself is more
traditional in its valuation, apportioning over sixty per cent of its space to work from
before that period. Yet even here, whilst 'Theaterprobleme', the seminal essay on his
theatrical technique, is included in full, of the actual plays there are the merest
snippets, on average less than three pages to each, in the tantalizing manner of a
compact disc sampler which fades out in the middle of the second movement,
leaving only the urge to go and buy the complete works. But that, presumably, was
the point of the enterprise.
UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER PETER GRAVES

Weg von derDudennorm:ArnoSchmidtsWegvonden 'Stirenburg-Geschichten'

zur 'Insel-
straJfe'. ByJENS SIMON. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. I99I. xii + 225 pp.
DM98.
This book is a doctorate on the language of Arno Schmidt. Schmidt spoke a great
deal about the form of his early prose experiments, and much, in his later years,
about language and a field of sexual meanings. He did not, however, say much about
his own use of language. Yet it was his eccentric punctuation, spelling, and
word-combinations, his staccato syntax, use of metaphor, and so on which probably

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264 Reviews

attracted the first generation of readers to his work as much as the allusions or his
political point of view. He evidently enjoyed language, played with it, and involved
his readers in the game too.
Jens Simon's thesis, however, deals with only a tiny area of the topic (a longer
study by Barbara Malchow, dealing with the language of the more major works,
appeared in 1980). He limits his attention to the progress that can be discerned
within the so-called 'Brotarbeiten' from the middle to the late I950s. He
demonstrates, with the help of meticulous statistical analyses, that Schmidt's
punctuation, syntax, orthography, and word-formationdid develop away from the
'Dudennorm', and come to reflect his declared mimetic aims. Simon is able to throw
some light upon the short typescript pieces which appear to fall between the two
main groups of stories. It is interesting, too, to read of the changes editors made to
Schmidt's stories for newspaper publication, which tended to edit Schmidt back in
the direction of the very norms from which he was distancing himself.
But the book as a whole is not to be recommended to any but the most dedicated
Schmidt scholars. It is not intrinsically trivial to study these works, which, although
minor, are often fascinating and exist in different versions, comparisons between
which can be and have been revealing in a way that tells us a lot about the
mysterious processes of Schmidt's writing mind. At least one of the stories,
'Trommler beim Zaren', has been the subject of analyses which convincingly
suggest that it is a key point in Schmidt's development of multi-layered prose. Simon
is concerned with language only in a very mechanical sense, however. Although his
analyses claim to be both quantitative and qualitative, they tend to be the former. I
am not really sure that Simon establishes much more than is pretty obvious to any
reader of Schmidt (syntax becomes more paratactic; neologisms multiply, punctua-
tion marks increase, and have differentuses as Schmidt gathers pace towards Zettel's
Traum,and so forth). Moreover, the book is written in a very dreary way: it is really a
set of experiments written up, rather than a piece of writing about Schmidt. It is a
philological training exercise, hardly a book. There is the material here for a short
article, but not for a full-length study.
JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MICHAEL MINDEN

The Novels of Martin Walser: A Critical Introduction. By FRANKPILIPP. (Studies in

German Literature, Linguistics and Culture, 64) Columbia, SC: Camden
House. I99. x + I49pp. $59.
The title of Frank Pilipp's study is somewhat misleading, since it offers an
introduction only to the latter part of Walser's literary career. After a brief
introduction and a perfunctory chapter devoted to Walser's early works (I957-73),
Pilipp sets out to examine the post- 973 work, fromJenseitsderLiebeto Jagd. After a
general section in which he examines the literary context of the early 1970s ('New
Subjectivity') and explores recurrent themes and narrative strategies in Walser's
work, he devotes a single short chapter to each of the novels in chronological order.
Only Dorle und Wolfis taken out of order, in a final chapter. There is an excellent
practical (if unstated) reason for Pilipp's choice: Anthony Waine's pioneering study
(Munich: Beck, I980) devoted detailed attention to the earlier work. Pilipp's
justification is that there is a 'shift from a more sociological view in Walser's early
prose to a distinctly psychological approach in his later works' (p. 35), but since he
consistently points up continuities between the early and late fiction, and since he
asserts that the suffering of Walser's central characters always originates in hier-
archical social structures, his argument becomes difficult to sustain. I973 may well
have marked the arrival of'New Subjectivity', but since, on Pilipp's own admission,

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