It would seem ironic to follow the scholarly custom of providing the reader of this text with a “conclusion,” as if to give some form of closure to the preceding inquiry. The previous chapters suggest that to summarize what I have been arguing would defeat the basic idea of this study and its object, that is, non-closure. Since my project has dealt with an author whose texts are notorious for being nonlinear or open-ended, I would instead like to provide the following observations.

Considering that Arno Schmidt draws on a vast number of areas of knowledge, I have tried to explore how this attention paid to particular disciplines influenced his ideas of writing and reading. These borrowings from texts of historians, classicists, cosmologists, astrologists, mathematicians, and psychologists might have led Schmidt, or me, to call for an interdisciplinary definition of writing a text. Throughout this study, I have made use of words such as interdisciplinary, intersubjectivity, and intertextuality. These words might suggest that both Zettel's Traum and this study draw on well-defined disciplines with their particular fields of knowledge. However, Schmidt's vendettas against Germany's literary establishment point to a very different characteristic of Zettel's Traum. Zettel's Traum, as my introductory remarks on its reception have shown, calls into question any classificatory logic that intends to stake out and authorize a particular understanding of reading and writing.