"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.Bargfelder Ausgabe. Werkgruppe 1. Studienausgabe Band 3/2. p. 479. 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".Ralf Georg Czapla: Mythos, Sexus und Traumspiel. Arno Schmidts Prosazyklus »Kühe in Halbtrauer«. Igel Verlag, Paderborn 1993, p. 273. 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.Marius Fränzel: »Dies wundersame Gemisch«. Eine Einführung in das erzählerische Werk Arno Schmidts. Ludwig, Kiel 2002, p. 220.
Schmidt wrote the text from April to May 1963 in the Heideorf Bargfeld, where he had lived since 1958.Arno Schmidt: Ländliche Erzählungen. Bargfelder Ausgabe. Werkgruppe 1. Romane, Erzählungen, Gedichte, Juvenilia. Studienausgabe Band 3/2. An edition of the Arno Schmidt Foundation published by Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1987, p. 554. 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."Die Zettel zu “Caliban über Setebos” (Memento of the original from August 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive) (PDF; 235 kB) on the website of the Arno Schmidt Foundation, accessed on October 3, 2012.
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.Auch zum Folgenden Stefan Jurczyk: Symbolwelten. Studien zu „Caliban über Setebos“ von Arno Schmidt. Igel Verlag, Hamburg 1991, p. 70–79. 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.Rudi Schweikert: Arno Schmidts Lauban. Die Stadt und der Kreis. Bilder und Daten. (=Bargfelder Bote. Materialien zum Werk Arno Schmidt), edition text + kritik, Munich 1990, p. 44. The Germanist Sabine Kyora therefore believes that the first-person narrator in Caliban über Setebos is virtually identical to its author.Sabine Kyora: Psychoanalyse und Prosa im 20. Jahrhundert. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 1992, p. 261. 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".Wolfgang Albrecht: Arno Schmidt. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1998, p. 69. 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.Bargfelder Ausgabe. Werkgruppe 1. Studienausgabe Band 3/2. S. 499; Jörg Drews: Caliban Casts Out Ariel. Zum Verhältnis von Mythos und Psychoanalyse in Arno Schmidts Erzählung ›Caliban über Setebos‹. In: Derselbe (Hrsg.): Gebirgslandschaft mit Arno Schmidt. Das Grazer Symposion 1980. edition text + kritik, München 1982, p 51 f.
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.Ralf Georg Czapla: Mythos, Sexus und Traumspiel. Arno Schmidts Prosazyklus »Kühe in Halbtrauer«. Igel Verlag, Paderborn 1993, p. 281. 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.Peter Habermehl: Orfeus in Niedersaxn. Arno Schmidts Erzählung «Caliban über Setebos». In: Antike und Abendland 53 (2007), p. 190 f.
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.Jörg Drews: Kühe in Halbtrauer. In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Taschenbuchausgabe, dtv, München 1986, Bd. 7, p. 5410. 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.Arno Schmidt: Zettel's Traum. Bargfelder Ausgabe. Werkgruppe IV. Studienausgabe Band 1, S. 989; Jörg Drews: Caliban Casts Out Ariel. Zum Verhältnis von Mythos und Psychoanalyse in Arno Schmidts Erzählung ›Caliban über Setebos‹. In: Derselbe (Hrsg.): Gebirgslandschaft mit Arno Schmidt. Das Grazer Symposion 1980. edition text + kritik, München 1982, p. 60. 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.Ralf Georg Czapla: Mythos, Sexus und Traumspiel. Arno Schmidts Prosazyklus »Kühe in Halbtrauer«. Igel Verlag, Paderborn 1993, p. 35–46; Marius Fränzel: »Dies wundersame Gemisch«. Eine Einführung in das erzählerische Werk Arno Schmidts. Ludwig, Kiel 2002, p. 202–209.
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.Friedhelm Rathjen: Smithereens. Zum Nach(t)leben von James Joyce, Robert Burns und Thorne Smith in »Caliban über Setebos«. In: Robert Weninger (Hrsg.): Wiederholte Spiegelungen. Elf Aufsätze zum Werk Arno Schmidts. (=Bargfelder Bote, Sonderlieferung) edition text & kritik, Richard Boorberg Verlag, Stuttgart 2003, p. 129.
Robert Browning