“The Word Says ‘I’ to Itself”: Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 221 “The Word Says ‘I’ to Itself”: Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette Christoph Schmitz Wake Forest University Abstract: Acoustic media play a central role in Hubert Fichte’s poetics� Consequently, the “acoustic Fichte” (Röggla) is a recurrent topic in scholarship. Special consideration has been given to the radio feature as a blueprint for Fichte’s syncretic writing (Böhme; Erb and Künzig). In my paper, I argue that besides the radio feature’s conflation of genres and perspectives, it is its indexicality that has a profound influence on Fichte’s poetics, in particular in his portrayal of Hamburg’s early-1960s underground culture in his second novel Die Palette (1968). The novel frequently employs transcripts of recorded interviews to imitate in writing what Diedrich Diederichsen calls the “Index-Effekt.” Diederichsen argues that sound recordings disrupt an artwork’s imaginative framework and point to real bodies that exist beyond its realm. Fichte evokes the aesthetic effects associated with these media to engage questions of preservation, finitude, and violence. The incorporation of indexical voices, however, undermines the authority of Fichte’s first-person narrator. Linking the poetics of the first-person narrative in Die Palette to Fichte’s later ethno-poetic writings, this paper demonstrates that Die Palette is a first step toward the non-oppressive language Fichte strives for in his later works� Keywords: Hubert Fichte, indexicality, media studies, first-person narrative, Diedrich Diederichsen In Hubert Fichte’s poetic work, acoustics reign supreme. The first chapter of his novel, Versuch über die Pubertät , for example, claims the primacy of sound: “Zu Anfang nur der Ton” (11)� This allusion to the Gospel of John - “Im Anfang war das Wort” - is not mere wordplay, but illustrates rather the central importance of recorded oral speech for Fichte’s poetics� The sound of a word is an essential part of its meaning� In Fichte’s work, each spoken word refers to a 222 Christoph Schmitz sound that is intimately tied to the body from which it emerged� His novels and essays transcribe recorded interviews, snippets of conversations, vernaculars, and idiomatic speech� Written voices, however, lack any of those characteristic sounds� Unlike a sound recording, prose does not capture the acoustic residues of bodies� There is neither pich, nor cadence, nor breath that emerges from the pages of a novel� In short, writing is not indexical� It cannot record traces of life like a tape recorder can� Fichte’s incorporation of transcripts of spoken language is thus characterized by a tension between its reliance on dynamic, indexical sound, on the one hand, and the elimination of that sound brought about by transcription, on the other� I call Fichte’s aspiration to write recorded sounds into his prose literary indexicality� In media, film, and sound studies, indexicality is medium specific and applies often to analog recordings like film and music. Many film scholars regard indexicality as one of the key features that define what cinema is and can do. 1 Mary Ann Doane, for instance, argues that indexicality is the central feature of cinema’s medium specificity (129). Likewise, pop music critic Diedrich Diederichsen identifies the indexicality of recorded voices as one of the central characteristics of pop music. A central concern for Diederichsen is the specific way indexicality references the human body� In Über Pop-Musik , he describes this form of reference as “das phonographische Besondere” and contends that Pop-Musik handelt von diesen individuellen, nahezu kontingenten körperlichen Spuren� […] [Pop-Musik ist] Musik, […] die eine ans Herz und an die Nieren gehende Besonderheit in einem Schrei, einem Räuspern oder Zögern des Sängers […] punktuell gespeichert hat, die so stark, so drastisch und dramatisch aus dieser Umgebung herausragt, dass sie uns als hyperreale überrascht und wir ganz unwillkürlich an sie unsere eigene Lebendigkeit […] anhängen� (18—19) These traces of embodied life that Diederichsen regards as central for the aesthetic of recorded music also define other acoustic artworks like audio plays and acoustic features� Such radio-based genres were the artistic form in which Fichte experimented most directly with indexical media� Beginning in the 1960s, Fichte wrote plays and essays for the radio, which not only helped him raise funds for his expansive travels, but also shaped a prose style that aspires to imitate the characteristics of the human voice� 2 Fichte’s densest exploration of literary indexicality occurs in his most successful novel, Die Palette (1968)� Die Palette demonstrates how indexical voices disrupt literary narratives� By simultaneously evoking and denying the physical presence of those voices recorded on tape, the novel forefronts both the corporeal experience and literature’s inability to convey it� Die Palette portrays a group of young artists, teenage runaways, sex workers, and other social misfits in the early 1960s, who regularly meet in a run-down bar in Hamburg called Palette� For the novel’s protagonist, Jäcki, the Palette’s diverse group of guests makes it an almost utopian place� “Komm mit mir in die Palette,” Jäcki says to his friend Hans, “Das ist das tollste Lokal der Welt� In der Palette gibt es alles” (27)� In its attempt to give poetic form to this diverse underground culture, Die Palette employs a multiplicity of literary forms, from dialogs to obituaries to essayistic reflections. Two main narrative perspectives emerge: In most of the novel’s 76 chapters, the reader follows the main protagonist Jäcki from a third-person perspective. However, this main narrative is frequently disrupted by a first-person narrator called “der Autor,” who locates himself in the Portuguese town of Sesimbra, where he describes the process of writing the novel and often interrupts the main narrative with poetological considerations� Reminiscent of a puppet master, he guides Jäcki through his adventures in the Palette� 3 Although the novel’s last chapter reveals Jäcki and the Author to be the same person, their functions within the novel are fundamentally different. 4 This complex structure of mixed literary forms and narrative perspectives culminates in a text that, to borrow Gerd Schäfer’s phrase, attempts to be “der Roman des Alles,” a literary appropriation of the Palette’s social diversity (391)� However, the insertion of indexical voices via transcripts of tape recordings torpedoes this fragile construction because literary signs can only convey sound symbolically� While the tape recorder does capture traces of the bodies from which they emerge, their transcriptions only underscore their literary disembodiment� The bodies of the Palette regulars, however, are an integral part of the pluralism of this particular space, as relationships within the peer group are shaped by both erotic attraction and violence. The poetic strategies the novel offers to incorporate these bodies ultimately fail; to quote Schäfer again, “der Roman des Alles […] wollte alles einfangen und hat am Ende nichts” (391)� In what follows, I argue that the novel’s failure to transform bodily experience into literature nevertheless proves highly productive� Despite the impossibility to reproduce the tape recorder’s indexical reference to human bodies and the traces of desire and violence attached to them, it still retains a central aspect of the aesthetic of indexical media, namely the disruption of artists’ control over their artworks� Building on Diederichsen’s interpretation of indexical artworks, I argue that transcripts of voice recordings in the novel disrupt the Author’s control over his own text. I call this effect literary indexicality’s poetic violence. However, these attempts to integrate traces of human bodies into the written text repeatedly fail and bring to the forefront how core elements of the Palette experience remain out of literature’s reach - not least because in last consequence the Author remains responsible for all attempts of remediating sound in writing. This incongruence between the different media points to the deeper Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 223 224 Christoph Schmitz issue that haunts Fichte’s literary appropriation of the Palette experience� The voices of the Palette are ultimately too diverse to be captured in one novel� My argument, however, does not conclude that literature is inferior to recording media, or, as Jochen Hörisch has put it, has become a mere “arrière-garde” (777)� In a second step, I show that the struggle for narrative control turns out to be the poetic core of the novel, for it prevents the novel from narrativizing the Palette from a single perspective� The confrontation with indexical voices forces the Author to reflect on the poetic conditions of his literary project. Where the novel disregards the tape recorder and instead captures spoken language on paper, the reestablished control of the stylus-holding Author creates power structures that endanger the heteronomy of the bar’s culture� Fichte’s employment and subsequent subversion of indexical media is thus a reminder that literature, too, is an instrument of control� Every poetic rendering of the Palette experience threatens to appropriate and subsume the plurality of the space and undermine its emancipatory character� In Die Palette ’s last chapter, however, the Author realizes that he is a literary voice rather than an empirical one - one voice among many� Establishing relations between Fichte’s later works - which engage questions of colonial hierarchies and propose literary ways to confront those - the last section of this essay shows that Die Palette ’s negation of the Author’s control over the text is a first step in Fichte’s search for an emancipatory language� In its reflection of its own politics of appropriation, Die Palette does not represent, but rather, in the words of Hans Blumenberg, “actualize a world” (39)� In his essay, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” Blumenberg writes that modern novels create “a context which, though finite in itself, presumes and indicates infinity” (42). In this very sense, Die Palette neither represents the forlorn world of Hamburg’s underground culture nor conserves its intricacies in literary form� Rather, Fichte’s novel indicates an overabundance of experience that escapes any conceptual or linguistic representation� By insinuating that only recording media - and voice recordings, in particular - can index the loci of these experiences - human bodies - Die Palette conjures up the world which unfolds beyond the limitations of printed language� It implicates with words what can never be captured in language. Exploring its own finitude, the novel points to what lies beyond its own confinements. To understand how the aesthetic violence of indexical media calls into question the novel’s representational aspirations, we must acquaint ourselves with Igor. Igor is a central figure in the main group of Palette regulars. He is among the first people Jäcki encounters when he starts frequenting the bar. Cultivating an image as a tough guy, Igor has a propensity for violent outbursts and dominating behavior� Throughout the novel, he acts as a superior to most of the other Palette regulars� At one point he states: “Ich weiß genug über jeden in der Palette� Ich könnte jeden für eine längere Zeit ins Loch bringen” (258)� His constant commandeering presence makes him a primary interview partner for the Author’s attempts to gather material about the Palette. A subsequent chapter that presents the transcript of an interview with Igor is a central instance of literary indexicality� Concerning its contents, Igor’s autobiographical account exposes a thread of violence that leads from fascist Germany to the underground culture of the young Federal Republic� Formally, it demonstrates how Igor’s voice exerts its own poetic violence by disrupting the novel’s narrative voices� The aesthetic violence of the index stems from its distortion of an artwork’s economy of meaning, and the artist’s ensuing loss of aesthetic control over the artwork� In Körpertreffer , Diederichsen paraphrases semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce when he states: “[Der Index] brüllt aus der Wirklichkeit, sagt aber erstmal nichts” (19). Like loud, inarticulate shouting, an index has an effect, but it does not convey meaning. One example for an index effect in a movie would be random bubblegum sticking to a wall and by chance caught on camera as the main protagonist walks by. Diederichsen writes: “Das ist ein Index-Effekt. Kein Zweifel, denn dies hier ist ein ‘echtes’, weil gar nicht erzählbares, kontingentes, völlig sinn- und funktionsloses, ergo absolut reales Kaugummi” (46)� Because of their inherent meaninglessness, indexes are “Realitätssplitter,” they disrupt the fictional context of an artwork and point toward a reality beyond that is, in Diederichsen’s words, “eine dichte, scharfe, harte, geile Wirklichkeit, [die auch] per Medium herbeigezaubert […] werden kann” (47)� Since indexes are meaningless beyond this conjuring up of a hidden real, they escape any artwork’s attempt to create a specific, meaningful context. Indexes create reality effects that the artist cannot control - like the random bubble gum in the movie frame, or the pop-singer’s scream that Diederichsen mentions in Über Pop-Musik � During the 1960s, the growing dominance of indexical media not only manifested this aesthetic violence of the index, but also coincided with the dissolution of many emancipatory movements into real-world violence� Whether coined “the day the music died,” as in Don McLean’s song “American Pie,” or spotted as “death in [one’s] aura,” as Joan Didion puts it in the introduction to The White Album (18), death and violence seemed to herald the end of a decade that had been defined by the optimism of emancipatory movements. Events like the Manson murders, the death of Hendrix, Joplin and others, or the rise of violent gangs like the Hells Angels who terrorized music festivals in Europe and the US were concrete actualizations of this morbid mood� Ultimately, rockers and death find their way into the Palette as well. The presence of violence is caused less by figures like Igor - violent, yet still a staple in Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 225 226 Christoph Schmitz the Palette’s initial peer group -than by a new generation� In chapter 54, pointedly entitled “Jäcki verliert die Übersicht,” someone starts shouting “Schwule raus! ” (211)� At least from this point onward, bisexual Jäcki begins to worry about his status among the Palette’s regulars: “Was denken die eigentlich von mir? […] Würden sie mir was tun? […] Die alten von der Palette nicht� Aber der Nachwuchs? ” (212)� Violence that was directed outwards (against police raids, authoritarian parents, or the political establishment) drifts increasingly inwards, and in the course of Die Palette , this redirection of real-world violence becomes one reason why neither the Palette (the bar) nor Die Palette (the novel) can fulfill their pluralist promises over time. This shattering of the Palette’s promise to be a space where “Alles” can coexist finds its most fervent expression in the transcript of Igor’s recording, where, enabled by the artist’s loss of control, the history of violence that precedes the tensions within the Palette is channeled through the poetic violence of the index� The loss of control that characterizes artworks based on indexical media, however, is hard to realize in literature� Does not an author control each word on every page? How could writers ever lose control over the content of their own writing? The answer the 1960s had for such questions was transcription. Especially relevant in documentary literature, transcripts were a tool to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities - the working class, women, immigrants - while at the same time abandoning what documentary writers regarded as a vestige of bourgeois culture, the author� Erika Runge, for example, did not list herself as an author on her famous volume of working-class interviews, Bottroper Protokolle , but as a recorder: “Aufgezeichnet von Erika Runge” (title page)� Interview transcripts grant narrative authority to those previously excluded from literary discourse� The only function left for the writer-previously-known-as-author was to press record, and then transcribe the recordings as accurate as possible� In Die Palette , the interview with Igor is transcribed by the Author, the metaleptic first-person narrator. While he often appears as the master of the novel’s discourse, the interview with Igor is mired in chaos, as the Author struggles to control Igor’s recorded voice� However, the novel remediates this struggle through narrative techniques that reinstate the Author as the one having full control over how the novel represents the pluralism of voices� This loss of control on the side of the narrator is staged as a fight with technology� The recording takes place during a party at Igor’s studio using a largely dysfunctional tape recorder that someone found among discarded objects� The chapter depicts the Author’s attempts at deciphering the faulty recording� Erb and Künzig rightly interpret this chapter as an example of Die Palette ’s engagement with acoustic material� The text, they argue, uses the story of Igor’s life as sampling material, and the author, who putters around in the tape recorder with a screwdriver, becomes a “DJ avant la lettre” (Erb and Künzig 127)� While the acoustic character of the passage is undeniable, the Author’s role is, however, not that of a DJ who masters the sonic material� The screwdriver is rather a sign of the Author’s struggle to control and incorporate Igor’s voice� But since he fails to restore the recording, the voice remains in the realm of acoustics� The transcript preserves those traces of its mechanical origin that the Author cannot integrate into his literary portrait of the Palette� Igor’s voice, trapped in the indexical medium, remains beyond the author’s poetic command and control� The transcript of Igor’s interview is thus not disruptive because it appears merely as yet another piece in the novel’s disjointed collage� Rather, it disrupts the basic aspiration of Fichte’s novel, namely the idea that the Palette experience can be authentically recreated as a literary text� Igor’s interview hints at a realm that literature can imitate, but never fully incorporate: indexicality’s corporeality� Indexical artworks’ establishing of concrete references to human bodies is mirrored by the material circumstances of analog recording media� Doane, for example, claims that in analog film “the index denotes the historicity of the medium, a history inextricable from the materiality of its base,” which reveals “the inescapable necessity of matter, despite its inevitable corrosion, decay, and degeneration” (144, 146)� Fichte displays the same inescapability of matter in the literary reproduction of the Author’s struggle to overcome the disruptive effects of the tape recorder. This struggle with media’s own materiality, however, also hints at the fact that the index does not provide direct links to reality; in fact, indexical media rely on different levels of mediation - in the case of Igor’s interview, there is the tape, but also the recorder or playback device used by the Author� Cultural critic Mark Fisher remarks that “crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl, […] makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint […]� We aren’t only made aware that the sounds we are hearing are recorded, we are also made conscious of the playback systems we use to access recordings” (21)� To these two layers of mediation - the storage media and the recording media - Fichte adds a third by remediating the traces of the recording media in a literary account� These layers of mediation and their reminiscence of material decline form a link between the recording devices and the voices they capture, as they mirror the physical frailty of human bodies� Both media and bodies, however, are not only susceptible to the damage done by time, but also to the effects of human violence. Confined to the realm of recording technology and remediated in writing, Igor’s voice conjures up the experience of violence that is constitutive to the group of Palette regulars� A history of violence runs from fascist Germany to the oppressive social dynamics of the early Federal Republic� Just like the distorted quality of Igor’s tape displays the inescapable susceptibility of voice recording, Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 227 228 Christoph Schmitz the bodies of the Palette’s rebellious adolescents are scarred by the experience of violence� In the audible parts of his tape recording, Igor describes his childhood as follows: “Ich wurde streng nationalsozialistisch erzogen� Nach dem Krieg genauso wie vorher� Jetzt eher ein nationalsozialistischer Trend als vorher� […] [Mein Vater] stand oben auf dem Komposthaufen und brüllte und wir waren unten am Laubkarren” (260)� Like the acoustic index that screams reality, the shouting of Igor’s father conveyed through language the ongoing presence of violent abuse. Even though Igor starts to rebel - he quits school, becomes a “Jazzer,” and frequently makes trips to Paris - he, too, shows a propensity for abusive behavior, especially in his sexual relationships: “… wir konnten als Jazzer so jede Frau kriegen und später kam dann die Entscheidung für mich: Soll ich schwul werden oder Sadist oder das Ganze überhaupt nachlassen� Da ist dann die Entscheidung gefallen für den Sadismus” (261)� While Igor’s sadism and boisterous behavior characterize an individual that is an integral member of the peer group, the tendencies to violent behavior that Igor exhibits gain more and more influence in the Palette and ultimately lead to its closure by the authorities. But even before the police shut down the bar indefinitely, other regulars begin to feel unsafe; especially the bisexual Jäcki, who is afraid of the growing influence of toxic masculinity in the bar. Fichte’s novel describes these effects of violence, but it cannot convey effectively the force of bodily violence that shaped the life of many Palette regulars� The history of violence that defines Igor’s experiences appears where his tape recordings are still comprehensible, namely where the transfer from audio to text is relatively intelligible� But the generality of these terms also transforms Igor; he becomes a token, a mere representative of his generation. Only the inaudible parts of the recording, the meaningless traces of utterances that pervade the tape but remain un-tellable (“unerzählbar”), can point to the real behind his story� This literal pointing does not rely on the verisimilitude of the transcript, but rather stems from a deformation of the raw material on the tape recorder� As Karin Krauthausen argues, Fichte’s texts often evoke orality by altering the original transcripts, in particular by omitting Fichte’s own questions and comments: “Die Schriftform wird also durch etwas gestört, das der mündlichen Gesprächssituation entstammt, aber nicht mehr bzw� nicht direkt zur Darstellung kommt” (Krauthausen 186)� This is also the case in the Igor passage, where descriptions of the tape’s sound quality rather than the Author’s questions structure Igor’s account: “Igor nebenbei unverständlich� […] Der Schraubenzieher rutscht ab� Igor wieder so leise, daß ich ihn nicht mehr verstehe” (Fichte, Die Palette 259, 260)� These omissions and substitutions remediate the sound of the voice recording in writing, as they evoke the familiar sound of a broken or distorted recording� The Author’s insertions thus work similarly to the bodily traces of indexes, as they disturb the Author’s own account and rather highlight the mediated presence of Igor’s voice� These stylistic interventions into the process of transcribing, however, diminish the claim of voice recordings to represent an extraliterary reality� Despite the Author’s efforts at remediation, the bodily traces in these recordings are lost along the way and can only be evoked by literary means - and thus, through the Author’s authority over the text� Literary indexicality alone cannot convey what it claims to and thus never escapes its own medium specificity, even though it tries to subvert that very ontology� But the exposition of the Author as controlling instance is nonetheless a necessary step in Die Palette ’s pluralist poetics� By evoking what is lost in remediation, Fichte’s novel highlights its own boundaries� The text exposes what Krauthausen calls “die Begehrlichkeit des Ethnologen” (187), namely the urge to include everything, to know everything, and to write about everything� This desire is further exposed by the media politics of the chapter following Igor’s interview� In the novel’s next chapter, the Author succeeds in gaining control over another voice from the Palette� But in doing so, he exposes his own entanglement in the power structures that endanger the Palette’s unique culture. Following Igor’s chapter, the Author sits down again with his tape recorder, this time with a regular called Jürgen� When the Author prepares to record Jürgen’s biographical reflections, he discovers that the primary tool from his earlier interview - the tape recorder - breaks down� He must suddenly exchange his recorder for a pen: “Mit dem Bandgerät geht es nicht� Während Jürgen redet, schreibe ich mit” (264)� From the beginning of the interview, Jürgen’s speech is turned straight into written language� Without the recalcitrant technology, the Author gains the upper hand over Jürgen’s account� As a character, Jürgen is in many respects the counterpoint to Igor� While Igor is an important source of insider information, Jäcki does not regard him as trustworthy: “Igor hält mich für einen, den man immer ausnehmen kann” (212)� Jürgen, on the other hand, is someone Jäcki trusts� He lends Jürgen money freely, and they are even occasional lovers� Jürgen’s and Jäcki’s bisexuality creates a bond between them and provides an alternative to Igor’s toxic masculinity� It is no wonder then that the transformation from voice recording to literary writing takes place in the interview Jäcki conducts with Jürgen� What follows is a rudimentary account of Jürgen’s life; complete sentences are rare, so are verbs. The text is mostly assembled from abstract pieces of information: “Als zur See gefahren - kaputt� Zur See� Floh im Ohr� Fremde Länder� Mit sechzehn” (265)� On the surface, this protocol looks very similar to other parts of the novel - in Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 229 230 Christoph Schmitz particular Igor’s interview - but it is indeed a reversal of the indexical effects previously associated with voices� By skipping the transcription of sound recordings, as in Igor’s case, writing becomes here the recording medium proper� Although Jürgen’s speech escapes the Author’s ability to take notes in a timely fashion - “Ich kann nicht stenographieren,” the Author proclaims (266) - the immediacy of the transformation from ephemeral speech to shorthand advances the Author’s control� The content of Jürgen’s voice is directly transferred to signs and its sounds vanish entirely� The Author’s control over Jürgen’s account becomes feasible, because the narrative power structure between interviewee and Author is reestablished� The chapter addresses this new power dynamic through the lamp that the Author uses as light source to protocol Jürgen’s answers� Jürgen complains that the lamp is too bright and that it makes him feel uncomfortable, almost as if he were in an interrogation room: “Es ist wie bei der Gestapo” (266)� In this brief remark, the Author suddenly does not appear as an ally of the Palette’s subaltern peer group anymore, but rather as a representative of a hostile power, even as the main source of the violent experiences described by Igor� While the remark might just be a pun between friends or lovers, there is a grain of truth to Jürgen’s discomfort� The Author, we are told, is an established writer who receives invitations to the Easter Concert by the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg and has a permanent residence (107, 236)� He lives a much more secure existence than his friends in the Palette, many of whom frequently ask him for money or a place to stay� Since exclusion from mainstream society and precarious social status are the basic bonds that all Palette regulars share, one might question to what extent the Author can claim to be part of this peer group at all� Jan Behrs argues that the Author’s bourgeois background fits into the hybrid pluralism of the Palette and thus underlines its utopian elan (35—50)� But this claim disregards the dynamics of appropriation that a novel like Die Palette inadvertently creates because of its inability to realize technology’s alleged democratic potential� By likening the interview to an interrogation, Jürgen adds a symbolic layer to the passage that displays the power structures of the interview situation, and in fact the novel as a whole� Instead of the mere facts of Jürgen’s life, as presented by his voice, the lamp adds another layer of meaning that only superficially seems to be related to the visual� While Jürgen complains about the aggressive light, the Author notes that “während ich schreibe, blendet mich das Licht nicht” (266). The light thus becomes complicit in writing’s effect of concealing the bodies of the two friends and lovers, both from another (by the blinding spotlight) and from the reader (by transforming ephemeral speech into writing)� Isolated from the body from which it emerged, and without any intermediate device onto which to inscribe itself, Jürgen’s voice is at the mercy of the Author’s poetic intentions and his ethnologic desire� Like Igor’s interview, this passage, too, does not include questions from the Author. Rather, it is the Author’s acquisition of control by dint of the pen and the lamp that appears aggressive to Jürgen� Just as the light renders bodies invisible, the Author’s writing conceals the concrete existence these words are meant to describe and takes full control over Jürgen’s story� For Die Palette ’s pluralist poetics, exposing the Author’s ethnologic desire and his continuing grasp over the collage of voices is a necessary complication of the naïve assumption that mere transcription would allow literature to upend the hierarchies of literary discourse� But it also seems to severely limit the novel’s aim to capture the “Alles” of the Palette experience. To fulfill its ethnologic desire, the novel offers another solution: the recontextualization of the “I” as a literary, rather than empirical figure. By rendering the novel’s central gaze as a literary standpoint, both the Author’s narrative voice and the voice recordings he collects, transcribes, and remediates into literature become equally important parts of the same literary context� The interview with Jürgen is thus not the final word in Die Palette ’s poetic self-reflection. Instead, Die Palette ’s last chapter, titled Nachwörter and again narrated by the Author, offers reflections on how to properly end a novel intent on capturing the pluralism of the Palette. As becomes clear in these reflections, a process similar to the transformation of indexical voices into literary ones defines the novel’s poetic conclusion. The apparently biographical first-person narrator reintegrates himself into the literary fiction of the novel, thus suggesting that narrating the Palette experience can only be achieved in art rather than documentary� In one passage, the Author considers what it means that other bars took its place after the authorities closed the Palette: Die Palette ist zu� Aber mit den Palettianern geht es immer weiter� Unter einem anderen Namen hat auch das Lokal in der ABCstraße wieder aufgemacht� Erst gab es sich seriös als Weinstube, aber im Laufe der Zeit wurde es immer palettenähnlicher� Verkehrten auch dieselben Typen� Es gibt andere Lokale, die der Palette ähnlich sind� Ich bring mich um, weil es nicht weitergehen soll und weil es der beste Abschluß wäre für den Roman� (336) The format of the novel demands a closure that reality denies� The Palette ends rather unspectacularly, while its regulars find homes in other pubs and nightclubs. Emulating this open end is a final sequence of ruminations about the relationship between art and life and the ultimate form of the novel: “Oder Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 231 232 Christoph Schmitz einen zweiten Roman? / Jeder Besuch in der Palette ist ein Roman� / Jedes Jahr meines Lebens einen neuen Palettenroman? […] Einen Roman über die Palette in Katalogform” (330)� No form seems to do justice to the experiences shared by the Palette regulars� This poetic problem is one that the Author considers by staging a literary suicide� But even that might not produce the intended result: “Jäcki, der ich bin, welche Gründe hätte Jäcki, sich umzubringen? Aus Geldmangel würde er nicht” (336)� The Author struggles to control poetically what in all appropriation evades his attempts at capturing the Palette and its patrons� Ruminating what might be convincing reasons for Jäcki’s suicide does not ask for real-world reasons, but rather for plausibility� How, the passage asks, could Jäcki’s suicide close the novel if there are no convincing reasons for the reader to accept this closure� Jäcki, and thus the Author, must become literature in their own right� In a remarkable passage, the last chapter offers a last juxtaposition of literature and indexical media� Describing a public reading of excerpts from Die Palette that took place before the novel was published, the Author considers the pressure of a real-life performance and its recording against the comfort of retreating into his “Fictionich” (fictional self): Ich steh draußen und hab nur die Wörter an, ich bin für alle sichtbar und auf Magnetofonband und Pelliküle und wenn meine Wörter versagen, dann schneidet der Hessische Rundfunk das mit […]� / Beim Schreiben kann ich den Namen Heidi vorschützen oder Catercalo/ la oder Jäcki� Was ich rede, bin ich� […] / Beim Schreiben jetzt ist es wieder gleich das alte Fictionich, wenn ich schreibe, das jede Augenfarbe haben kann� (336) While Fichte’s text allows the Author to modify details - like leaving out his own questions in the interview sequences - the prospect of being recorded leads to an overdetermination� The acoustic recording of his words cannot be separated from his actual physical presence� The sound of his voice attests to his existence beyond any particulars of the text� In these remarks about his own recording, the Author reformulates the relationship of literature and indexical media from his own perspective� As author, he appears to be the one person who has control over the text� This control, however, evades him once the text is being read and recorded� “Wenn die Wörter versagen” (336), the tape will mercilessly continue to record the occasion� While the Author controls the words on the page, the recording of the Hessischer Rundfunk will still go on and capture the sounds that emerge from his body� The Author thus exposes himself and his text to the frailty of materiality that characterizes indexical media� In this ambiguous passage, the Author assumes two diametrically opposed roles� As a performer and writer, he appears to be appropriating the Palette’s underground culture; the words and lives of the Palette regulars become his� The recording, however, suggests that a recorded reading from the unpublished novel for its part makes Fichte’s account susceptible of appropriation by the recording entity, here for example the Hessischer Rundfunk� The novel’s integration of acoustic recordings thus puts the first-person narrator in an ambiguous situation, a situation which impacts the literary function of the narrating “I.” Throughout his work, Fichte’s frequent use of either the first-person perspective or of his literary alter-egos such as Jäcki often suggests biographical readings of his novels, essays, and radio work� In scholarly interpretations of Fichte’s work such readings are commonplace� Mario Fuhse argues that Fichte conceived of his multi-volume project Geschichte der Empfindsamkeit as emerging from the material of Fichte’s unrelentless note-taking (Fuhse 71)� Robert Gillett suggests regarding Fichte as the most innovative autobiographical writer in post-war Germany (45—133)� Others prefer to read the autobiographical impetus of Fichte’s prose more carefully as an attempt to fictionalize or at least literarily stylize his own life� 5 While it is undeniable that Fichte frequently uses his own life as a source for his literary works, the “I” in Die Palette does serve radically different objectives: it stands for the novel’s attempt to contain both the events and voices that define the Palette experience and the poetic reflections that contextualize the impact the traces of reality have on a literary project such as Die Palette � Through the “I,” it becomes clear that these two aspects of the novel, while fragmented, are not separated� The tension between the incorporation of indexical voices and the poetic reflection of the first-person narrator upends the hierarchy of literary discourse by poeticizing the apparently biographical first-person perspective. To read this “I” autobiographically, on the other hand, would reduce the novel’s pluralism of perspectives to but one - that of the author� This would be a betrayal of the anti-oppressive language that Fichte dreams of� In fact, the allegedly objective and distant observer is the one perspective to which Fichte’s pluralistic poetics is opposed� In order to mirror the pluralism of a place like the Palette poetically, the novel must account for the narrator’s standpoint, too� The “I” does not validate the text by framing it as an authentic report, but rather acknowledges that no ethnographically inspired account can capture the Palette sufficiently without reflecting on the perspective of the speaker. The quasi-autobiographical perspective is thus an integral part of the non-dominating language that Fichte would later envision for his ethnographic writings� Where both “Jäcki” and “I” lay claim to the narrative, the novel moves toward the language Fichte describes in his ethnographic volume Xango as “eine Sprache, in der die Bewegung sich abwechselnder und widersprechender Ansichten deut- Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 233 234 Christoph Schmitz lich werden könnte, das Dilemma von Empfindlichkeit und Anpassung, Verzweifeln und Praxis” (119)� Fichte’s work, and Die Palette in particular, offers a synthesis of antagonistic facets of life and art that come very close to such a language - in both a synchronic and a diachronic sense� Karin Krauthausen and Stefan Kammer argue, with regard to Fichte’s work on Africa, that the conflation of universal structures, ethnographic observations, and first-person narration constitute Fichte’s attempt to create an alternative to the victorious language of colonial discourses� The volume Psyche collects essays and interviews that Fichte wrote and conducted in various African countries throughout the 1970s and 80s, work that zoomed in on the situation of the mentally ill in these countries� Fichte discusses the unfruitful attempts of French psychoanalysts and psychiatrists to introduce Western mental health care in many former French colonies� They failed because they could not escape their own “wissenschaftlichen Strukturalismus” (153)� Fichte’s subjective viewpoint, however, does not shy away from engaging indigenous magical practices that seem so archaic to Westerners and yet have the power to predict the future� In Psyche , he writes: “Stäbe aus Holz� / Affenhände. / Vogelbeine. / Die Dinge haben Macht über mich, weil ich sie selbst einmal war” (14)� As Kammer and Krauthausen point out, the synthesis of magic and critical thinking that Fichte envisions not only contains synchronic trajectories, which are antagonistic aspects of life, but also diachronic ones: “Die Behauptung einer universalen Struktur, die Menschen und Dinge zusammenbringt, umspannt nicht nur eine gewissermaßen vorzeitliche Vergangenheit, eine magische Archaik, die hier indes aus der gegenwärtigen Szenerie hervorgeht. Einbegriffen wird mit den ‘geworfenen Stäben’, die zum technischen Inventar magischer Prognostik gehören, auch die Zukunft” (Kammer and Krauthausen 153). When the author figure in the Palette reveals himself as sitting at the pointy rocks of Sesimbra, his account uses the present tense, the same tense as the Jäcki passages� Die Palette thus conflates past, present, and future in the same way that Kammer and Krauthausen claim the opening of Psyche does - a stylistic choice that creates a literary relation between Author and Jäcki, Palette and Sesimbra� Die Palette also anticipates Psyche in its allusions to the readability of nature� Sitting at the waterfront in Sesimbra, the Author mentions a “kindsgroßen schwarzen Fisch mit dem türkisgrünen Glasauge” ( Die Palette 10)� This anthropomorphizing reference to an animal reappears at the very end of the novel when the Author - still in Sesimbra - plainly lists the Portuguese names of twenty-four kinds of fish that are being sold at the town’s market: “Toninha, Espada, Chaputa, Enchova, Tamburil, Cabaç-o, Taraco, Tramelga, Choupa, Sargo, Pampos, Pargo, Busso, Tintureira, Pragado, Burreilho, Massacotte, Peix-o, Anequim, Gurvina, Lulas, Espardarte, Reia, Polvo” (344). These names are the very last words of the novel, but they appear to be completely unrelated to anything else that occupies the narrator’s mind� Peter Braun suggests that the names, along with the other references to Sesimbra throughout the text, allude to the place that should later reappear in Eine glückliche Liebe and other novels and thus form the initial knots of an intertextual network encompassing the entirety of Fichte’s writing (Braun 125—28)� Yet in light of the scene at the magical market in Psyche , this focus on dead animals assumes a quite different meaning. In Psyche , the narrator suggests that there is a deep connection between himself and the magical items, many of which are body parts of animals: “Die Dinge haben Macht über mich, weil ich sie selbst einmal war�” Similarly, the Author in Die Palette relates the strange black fish back to the Hamburg underground bar: “Ich […] sehe die Palette in Beziehung zu […] dem […] Fisch” (10)� The names of the fish at the end of the novel implicitly establish a similar relationship. This connection between fish and Palette alludes to the same power that things - including animals - have over the narrator in Psyche � The central claim of Psyche ’s beginning is that this power is due to an identity between speaker and things that is buried in an unspecified past. A similar identification of speaker and names of fish is key to understanding how Die Palette subverts narrative hierarchies� The place where this identification takes place is the literary text. Fichte himself addressed this function of writing in his essay on Greek historian Herodotus� In an essay from 1980 titled “Mein Freund Herodot,” he coins the phrase “Verwörterung der Welt” (353)� The essay discusses the Greek historian Herodotus and his work and its influence on Fichte’s writing and interests. Fichte describes Herodotus’s project not as a collection of facts and stories, but as a poetic rendering of the world� The reason to do so is simply because Herodotus says “in seinem Sprachwerk ‘Ich’ zu sich selbst, wie die Sgrafitti an den Kolossen von Abu Simbel” (341). Why should the insertion of the first-person perspective render a text poetic? Because, Fichte argues, only the reflection of one’s own standpoint can account for the project that Herodotus undertakes� Only by incorporating the “I” into his text does he expose himself “untrüglich als Literaturethnologe sich selbst gegenüber und seiner Kultur” (341)� If the “I” was missing, the text would just amass a collection of factual sentences, a mere representation of the world in language� Fichte’s interpretation of the ancient Greek prose writer is guided by an idea of the genealogy of (literary) language� He writes: “Herodots Gebiet war die Welt� / Er ist der Uravangardist� / Magie, Religion erscheinen bei ihm als Gegenstand der Forschung […]� / Dem Ursprung der Götternamen nähert er sich nicht glaubensinnig sondern etymologisch” (347)� In the pre-phonographic world, Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 235 236 Christoph Schmitz only the fixation of language in writing enables etymological analysis; it is thus writing that must be an object of study and must be regarded as the world that Herodotus studies� In turning his poetic attention to the world, Fichte’s Herodotus turns to language, both spoken and written, and to the reading practices that are associated with both� The crystallization point, the moment where language and world meet, is the word: “Wörter� / Wahrheit,” writes Fichte ( Die Palette 338). Here again, it needs to be stressed that the most significant word is “I�” The expression “‘ich’ zu sich selbst [sagen]” appears twice in the essay: First, as noted above, when the essay describes the poetic qualities of Herodotus’s work: “[W]o sagt Herodot, der Poet, in seinem Sprachwerk ‘Ich’ zu sich selbst […]? ” (“Mein Freund Herodot” 341)� The second instance, however, is in a much more abstract fashion� It is presented as an alternative rendering of the essay’s central phrase “Verwörterung der Welt”: “[D]as Wort sagt ich zu sich selbst” (359). The same identification of word, world, and self appear at the end of Die Palette : “Der Autor selbst - eine Reihe von mit Präjudizien behafteten Wörtern� / […] Durch Wörter nichts� / Alles Wörter� / Alles stimmt� / Die Palette ist alles: Sesimbra und die Palette� / Alles sind meine Wörter� / […] Die Palette ist ein Tintenfisch meiner Wörter” (343). Again and again, the novel moves along the boundary to contain and represent, and often the bodies that are so central to the Palette experience are the great remainder� Time and again, the author expresses the fear that his words will fail those bodies and the lives attached to them, but this failure is nevertheless productive� It points to those aspects of all experience that cannot be rendered in language and thus cannot be repurposed by the power of narration� Literary indexicality and its exploration of the poetic possibilities and limits of representation are thus a first step toward a poetic language in which, as Fichte puts it, “die Bewegung sich abwechselnder und widersprechender Ansichten deutlich werden könnte, das Dilemma von Empfindlichkeit und Anpassung, Verzweifeln und Praxis” ( Xango 119). This is, in other words, a first step toward a language that can express its own desire to control and at the same time actualize, in Blumenberg’s sense, the infinity of the real that always remains beyond it (Blumenberg 42)� Notes 1 Beginning with André Bazin (9—16), the discussion about cinema’s media specificity and indexicality is particularly engaging in Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory and Mary Ann Doane’s article “The Indexical and Media Specificity.” 2 Critics have stressed the importance of Fichte’s radio works� For a detailed contextualization of Fichte’s radio works and their influence on his prose work, see Böhme (123)� Writer Kathrin Röggla published essays on Fichte that explore the acoustic dimensions of his work, such as “der akustische fichte.” For an evaluation of the sonic dimensions of Fichte’s Die Palette , see Erb and Künzig� 3 See, e�g�, the titels of chapter 24 (“Der Autor läßt Jäcki sein Fazit ziehen im Freihafen”) or chapter 66 (“Der Autor will mehr von Igor wissen”)� 4 This essay focuses on passages that feature the first-person narrator rather than focalizing Jäcki. In the following, I refer to the first-person narrator as “the Author�” In the context of this paper, the Author is one of the protagonists of the novel, not its empirical author� 5 Bandel (45—51); see also Böhme, passim. Böhme’s whole approach is based on his understanding that Fichte’s work is an examination of a writer’s life� However, he mostly ignores Die Palette. Works Cited Bandel, Jan-Frederik� Nachwörter: Zum poetischen Verfahren bei Hubert Fichte � Aachen: Rimbaud, 2008� Bazin, André� “The Ontology of the Photographic Image�” What is Cinema? Vol� 2� Berkeley: U of California P, 1967� 9—16� Behrs, Jan� “Halbehalbe, verdoppelt: Raumordnung und Habitusbildung in Hubert Fichtes Die Palette �” Deutschsprachige Pop-Literatur von Fichte bis Bessing � Ed� Ingo Irsigler, Ole Petras and Christoph Rauen� Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019� 35—50� Blumenberg, Hans� “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel�” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays � Ed� Richard Amacher and Victor Lange� Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979� 29—48� Böhme, Hartmut� Hubert Fichte: Riten des Autors und Leben der Literatur � Stuttgart: J�B� Metzler, 1992� Braun, Peter� Eine Reise durch das Werk von Hubert Fichte � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005� Didion, Joan� The White Album � New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009� Diederichsen, Diedrich� Köpertreffer: Zur Ästhetik nachpopulärer Künste � Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017� ---� Über Pop-Musik � Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2015� Doane, Mary Ann. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” Differences 18 (2007): 128—52� Erb, Andreas, and Bernd Künzig� “‘Ein Hymnus des Materials’� Pop und Pop Art der Armen in Hubert Fichtes Roman Die Palette �” Text+Kritik Sonderband Pop-Literatur (2003): 116—32� Literary Indexicality in Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette 237 238 Christoph Schmitz Fichte, Hubert� Die Palette � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005� ---� “Mein Freund Herodot: New York, November 1980�” Die Schwarze Stadt � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990� 327—67� ---� Psyche: Annäherung and die Geisteskranken in Afrika � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005� ---� Versuch über die Pubertät � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005� ---� Xango: Die afroamerikanischen Religionen: Bahia, Haiti, Trinidad � Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987� Fisher, Mark� Ghosts of My Life � Winchester: Zero Books, 2014� Fuhse, Mario� Tage des Lesens: Hubert Fichtes Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Aachen: Rimbaud, 2006� Gillett, Robert� “Aber eines lügt er nicht: Echtheit”. Perspektiven auf Hubert Fichte � Hamburg: Textem, 2013� Hörisch, Jochen� “Die Wirklichkeit der Medien und die medialisierte Wirklichkeit: Optionen der Gegenwartsliteratur�” Literarische Moderne: Europäische Literatur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert � Ed� Rolf Grimminger� Rowohlt: Hamburg, 1995� 770—99� Kammer, Stephan, and Karin Krauthausen� “Gegenwart, Gegenwart�” Neue Rundschau 127 (2016): 141—54� Krauthausen, Karin� “Fiktionen der Rede: Fichtes Annäherung an Afrika�” Hubert Fichtes Medien � Ed� Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen� Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014� 163—88� Röggla, Kathrin: “der akustische fichte.” Hubert Fichtes Medien � Ed� Stephan Kammer and Karin Krauthausen� Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014� 111—24� Rosen, Philip� Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory � Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001� Runge, Erika� Bottroper Protokolle � Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1968� Schäfer, Gerd� “Kalkül und Verwandlung: Zur Poetik Hubert Fichtes�” Merkur 40/ 447 (1986): 388—402�