ABSTRACT
Kind or species: A novel? No, certainly not: a witches’ Sabbath of the spirit, a gigantic ‘Capriccio,’ a phenomenal cerebral Walpurgisnacht. A film of psychic situations, buzzing and flitting in ‘Expresstempo,’ in which enormous landscapes of the soul, full of ingenious and the most highly gifted details, go reeling by, a double thought, a triple thought, one after another, through one another, beside one another, sensation of all sensations, an orgy of psychology, with a new technical slow moving camera, which analyses each movement and emotion down to their atoms. A tarantella of unconsciousness, a frantic, rushing flight of ideas which whirlingly float indiscriminately with themselves with the greatest subtlety and banality, fantastic and Freudian, theology and pornography, the quality of a lyric and as coarse and vulgar as a coachman-a chaos, therefore, not stupidly imagined by a drunken brain overcome with alcohol and wrapped in demonic gloom, but instead imagined by a cutting, intellectual, ironically cynical and bright intellect. One strides with
rapture, one fumes with exasperation, one wears out and senses himself being whipped, and finally one becomes dizzy as if he had ridden for ten hours on a merry-go-round or had listened to incessant music, each dazzling, clear as a flute, then again coarsely and vulgarly as a drum beat and wild as a jazz-band, always to the consciously modern word-the music of James Joyce-which gives itself to the most refined orgy of language which was ever undertaken in all of language. There is something heroic in this book and at the same time something which lyrically parodies the art; therefore, it is authentically and rightly a witches’ Sabbath, a black mass, in which the devil apes and mimics the Holy Spirit in the most audacious and most provoking manner, but also a solitary thing, an unrepeatable thing, a new thing.
