The boundaries between poetry lecture and novel have long been blurred, especially in the case of the venerable Frankfurt lectureship – an interesting indication of a metafiction that is still flourishing, which is now also often called autofiction. For example, there are some indications that Christian Kracht's lecture from 2018 contained the core of his novel "Eurotrash", which was published soon after.
Jan Wiele
Editor in the feuilleton.
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When Clemens Setz enters such a stage, you can always be sure that you can expect narrative passages, not to say steepest stories. In his very good Klagenfurt speech on literature in 2019, he told captivating stories about show wrestling (as a parable for the literary world), in his acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize 2021 about talking horses in war - and on Tuesday evening in the pleasingly well-attended Audimax of Frankfurt's Goethe University, sentences were heard after a short time that could also form a great beginning to the novel: "In November of 2021, In the last foothills of the great delta contagion waves, I ordered dicyanin color glasses out of a somewhat antisocial-transgressive mood. The Nashville Museum of Tarot, as I accidentally discovered on TikTok, offered authentic versions of this ancient curiosity."
To the basement, to the rats
Ghost seers put on such glasses in order to recognize paranormal phenomena by coloring them with the dye in question, namely the "human atmosphere", a kind of aura. Although he doesn't believe in such a thing, he bought the glasses, experimented with them and observed astonishing effects, namely that some people are actually surrounded by a flickering aura that can be explained – and others are not. Shocked, he put the glasses in the basement, to the rats.
From the slightly fairy-tale anecdote, Setz derived a poetics not only of his novels and stories in his typical, amusing way, which likes to narrow down real erudition and its parody. At its core was the critical question: Why do fictions, i.e. novels, computer games or even conspiracy myths, so often and continue to distinguish between people with a large and small (or no) aura, between heroes and antiheroes, between main and secondary characters?
Kantkrise, updated
Setz now followed up with a digression into literary history, which came back to Goethe's "Werther" and also aroused associations with Kleist's work "On the Marionette Theatre". "Is it possible that all narrative literature of modern times is based on a subliminal gesture of dehumanization that it needs in order to function?" In modernity, too, Setz saw the "main program of constantly dissolving the boundaries of the human, hinting at the transitions to the animal, to the plant, to the piece of furniture" – and asked: Why?
Even in the key sentence that was decisive for his first lecture, Setz concluded - consciously or unconsciously? but very profitably - to Kleist, namely to his so-called "Kant crisis" and the central image of the "green glasses" that color a perception – a metaphor for language that stands like a colored glass between object and viewer.
From Setz now one heard: "I really believe novels are like dicyanine glasses." Fictions of all kinds, through their well-rehearsed forms, contribute to further ordering reality according to its conventions. In this, they perfectly resembled narrated conspiracy theories, which often turned out to be soulless simulations. But this is no longer in keeping with the times, according to Setz, who finally postulated: "No more secondary characters, it is no longer the epoch for them!"
In an appellative, moving concluding section, Setz applied his critique of perception and categorization to the handling of literature by supposedly different people – especially that of autistic people. He then explicitly counted himself and his literature among them. Setz reported times when he was completely unable to speak or endure eye contact, of "constant thunderstorms of nerves, even now, as we speak, in this auditorium." He was harsh on blindered critics who pretended to know what was authentically autistic literature and what was not – and concluded with the sentence: "Please don't buy the scary color glasses under any circumstances."