Construction of the epic
What happens then when Homer starts up, when Dante goes through Hell, when Don Quixote sets off on his horse and Sancho Panza rides behind on his donkey – are these merely formal reports, really? … The epic presses hard up against reality, and pierces through it to the simple great elementary fundamental situations and characters of human existence.
Döblin’s 1929 Academy Lecture
Introduction
What did Döblin mean by calling his major fictions ‘epics’? How did he relate his efforts to the epic traditions of Homer and the ballad-singers, for example?
In a major lecture to a large audience at Berlin University in December 1928 he went into detail about his creative processes, and how they were affected by contemporary social and cultural conditions. His biographer W F Schoeller provides the context on pages 326-7 of Döblin (2011 – my translation):
In 1928 he took on the task of bringing literature into another public space: he sought to link the Academy to the University, wanting to bring literary praxis and Germanistic research into confrontation with one another, guide students to works currently being written, and open up for discussion that fraction of literature that is teachable. At the beginning of May 1928 he and Oskar Loerke discussed this programme with the Germanist Julius Petersen. In the winter semester Walter von Molo spoke on “Poetic conception”, Oskar Loerke on “Problems of form”, and in December Döblin read his poetological essay “Construction of the epic work”. (Döblin took his announced goal further. At the end of May 1929 he proposed a Writing School, on the lines of master classes for musicians and graphic artists, linked to the Academy.)
On 10 December 1928 he read his own magnificent text before an audience of a more than a thousand in the Audimax of Berlin University. In it, he yet again extolled poetry as a valid form of expression about writing, literature, and their relationship. He sought a connection with the occidental epic, and in a magisterial demarcation from current fiction, which only touches on reality, he projected a concept of the epic work of art and the complications that ensue when it seeks to restore the ancient alliance between narrator and audience. This work of language strives to approach as closely as possible to reality as it conceives it, is not satisfied with any image, but pierces through that sphere. Walter Benjamin thought the essay a “masterly documentary contribution on the crisis of the novel that sets in with the resurgence of the epic that we encounter everywhere, including in the theatre.” Among the audience from the side of the university were professors Petersen, Herrmann and Dessoir, and also some students who later pursued careers in academic German Studies: Wolfgang Kayser, Richard Alewyn, Erich Trunz. Probably no one from these circles, who after the Second World War became the greats of German Studies, ever wrote later about Döblin. The discipline only much later began to approach the literary modern.
Of note in the lecture are the passages in which Döblin analyses his own creative processes in the writing of two specific epics: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun and Wallenstein. Each proceeded from a stimulus outside language: a drumbeat, a vision. Then an incubation stage; thinking without thoughts; imbibing source materials, until at a certain point the conscious Ego steps in as collaborator with the ‘entity that writes’, observing, evaluating, goading.
Poets and novelists do not often reflect with such insight into their art. Where would this approach have taken 20th century German literature, without the devastating breach that occurred just a few years later?
The Construction of the Epic Work
Alfred Döblin
Translation © C D Godwin 2019
Die Neue Rundschau XXX (1929), I, pp. 527-551. Reprinted in Aufsätze zur Literatur (vol 8 of Selected Works) 1963, pp.103-132.
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1. The epic work is a report of a hyper-reality
I begin with the question: Is the basic form of the epic the report, or what in fact is the distinguishing feature of the epic? We know that for the drama, or so at least it seems, the underlying distinctive feature is dialogue.
I pick a novel at random and read:
“When Colonel Spring von Springgenau, having achieved the status of pensioner in his final posting at Rathenow, took up residence, not in Wiesbaden like most of his professional colleagues, but in Partenkirchen, Friederike had just turned seventeen. It was spring, the windows of the house into which the family moved gave a view across roofs to the Bavarian mountains, and every day, even at breakfast, the Colonel told his wife and children how lucky he felt that it had been granted to him, while still in sound health at the age of sixty, to escape the call of duty, the smoke and torpor of the big city, and be able to enjoy to his heart’s content the delights of Nature, for which he had yearned ever since the days of his youth.”
Well, there is no doubt that this is something like reportage. Something like.
I pick up a newspaper, and in the local news I find:
“Motorcycle accident involving two policemen. Early today two policemen from the barracks on Wrangel Street collided on their motorcycle with a street sweeper’s cart. One, 25-year-old Constable Wichert, sustained a broken collarbone; the other, 20-year-old Constable Willy Wolf, received serious head injuries and concussion. Both were taken to the hospital on Friedrichshain.”
This too is a report, delivered in the simple past tense. Clearly the first report differs from the second in that the second is a factual report, i.e. announces something that happened, while the first just imitates a report. For sure the colonel did not announce every breakfast-time how lucky he felt to be able to give himself over to Nature, and I may also doubt that Friederike was seventeen years old. It may be she was not even called Friederike, and was only sixteen. In any case, these are assertions which I don’t believe even when they are presented in the simple past tense. But of course we all know that this colonel did not utter such words at breakfast and every reader knows that Friederike was not seventeen, the author merely writes it thus, but nevertheless – the author writes it, and we accept it!
Really, what does it mean: the man deceives no one with his report, intends no deception, and yet he imitates a genuine report. I’m opposed to imitations on principle: but here I would like to clarify the meaning of an imitation such as this. I have no doubt: a calm sensible man who reads the daily news on the front page of his newspaper in the simple past tense will quite rightfully balk when below the fold something is reported in the same form as above, but clearly not a syllable of it is factually correct; and he will quite rightfully regard such doings as foolish and a malpractice, and will avoid reading below the fold. So what can I say about such novel-reports where the one reporting doesn’t believe it, and no one hearing it believes it either. It’s a scam with pre-assigned roles. Someone will tell me: it’s “Art”, but I regret to have to say that for me it has the all the characteristics of a quite stupid scam. Someone whispers energetically: It’s you who are stupid, a novel only pretends to be reporting, we’re in the realm of old Vaihinger and his As If, neither side has to believe, the theatre audience don’t need to believe either, only children and peasants sometimes fall for it, it’s all appearance, illusion.
All this I hear, and it’s the correct explanation, and there we have, life-size, our pseudo-rationalist imbecilic age . This explanation with its appearance, its illusions, its As If, puts the whole of creative literature on ice. If it is supposed that Art and the fundamental form of the Epic must rest on the self-deceit of both parties – writer and reader – and if we are all clear about the matter in advance, then there’s no point in writing even a syllable.
But the report mode is something quite different. When Miss Amelia Calf-Lambkin reads to me from her latest novel and it’s narrating something, nah, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a word this lady author says, and that’s clear to both of us from the start. But what happens then when Homer starts up, when Dante goes through Hell, when Don Quixote sets off on his horse and Sancho Panza rides behind on his donkey – are these merely formal reports, really?
The aestheticians of old say: yes indeed, these are, formally, mere reports, Don Quixote is not attested in the records, and of course a donkey was riding across Spain, donkeys ride across every landscape in every age; but this particular donkey, with Sancho Panza on its back, is not historically attested.
What makes this particular donkey believable above all other donkeys? Here I come to the nub of the matter. Clearly, outside the sphere of historically attested facts there is a sphere of existence about which one can make formal reports, using the simple past tense, and any such report demands of me, the reader or listener, a belief – so that under such circumstances it becomes once again worthwhile to write, since now an honourable relationship, resting on a well-founded trust, is once more established between author and audience.
What lifts some or other invented action in report-mode out of the domain of the merely concocted and written-down and places it in a sphere of truth – the truth of the specifically epic report – is the exemplary nature of the action and the characters depicted and communicated in report-mode. Here we have stark fundamental situations, elemental situations of human existence to be worked through; these are elemental human situations which appear in this sphere and which, because they are real in a thousandfold fragmented ways, may be reported as such. Yes, these characters, who are no Platonic ideals, this Odysseus, Don Quixote, Dante the wayfarer, and these primal human situations in their primal originality, truth and potency stand above the fragmented reality of the everyday. And so a whole range of characters, no great number, rise above reality; of them, new yarns may ever and again be spun.
I have no particular need to point out that the attainment of this exemplary and simple sphere separates the epic artist from the novelist, novel-writing being a solid, bourgeois, commercially useful occupation; it imitates some superficialities without penetrating into reality, or even breaking through its surface. The really productive act requires two steps: it must approach very close to reality, its solidity, its blood, its smells, and then must pierce through it; this is its specific task. The first step is taken by every decent writer, and you can see: every epic author is first and foremost a good writer. And today there are everywhere, including among the epicists, middling to good literary talents, but the writer necessary to deliver the epic is weak. And so of course we never find a literary epic. For how can someone pierce through reality when he has made no provision, and often lacks the capacity, for grappling with reality. Secondly, there are enough, actually not yet enough, enlightening and descriptive novels which flourish only in the world of letters, where the authors have no wider ambition or, like their public, know of none. But thirdly, we have the adverse example of literary constructs, tedious things because everyone can see: this is no true author of epics, he has no love for reality, takes not the slightest trouble to grapple with it, he phantasizes into thin air. Homer for sure was blind, but only when he started to sing: before that his vision was clear-eyed and incorruptible, he had the Greek and Trojan background and societies down to a T.
I have just shown how I would justify the use of the report mode in the epic, and would like to demonstrate it in a hypothetical historical sequence:
Obviously in earliest times the report, the formal report, was all there was of literature and humanity in general, and what was reported really was believed, always. Belief depended on reports; reporting meant “reporting the truth”. At that time reality and dream and phantasy were not kept so much apart as today, and so obscurity, curiosity and fear led men to believe everything that was said and reported. We come across this sad primal condition among primitive peoples even now, and in the realm of law courts dealing with oaths and perjury even today we find in a number of simple people this childish primal condition that confuses dreams, phantasy and reality. But I would assert that at the time when Homer sang, the things that he reported possessed credibility to an even higher degree: Odysseus really did sit with Calypso on the island, the Sirens really did sing and, between ourselves, we have recently become aware that much more truth, even historical truth, underlies these myths and sagas than was once suspected. But where we are now, these things are not believed; reality, phantasy and wish-fulfilment are kept strictly and soberly separate.
And as for Art, this is what we have achieved: we have pushed works of art out of reality into the realm of illusion, or, let’s be blunt, into the realm of deception. We call it “life”, seriously, and reserve a very sketchy and amusing enthusiasm for Art. As serious busy people we allow Art into our lives in the hours of leisure between eight and ten in the evening, in the theatre, or now and then in our daily bus ride. We’ve done the same with religion. We have instituted Sundays and holy days and employ a number of officials to manage them. We do still approach these matters with a modicum of piety. But the fact remains that in religion, as in art, a few people see through the situation, and view it very differently from their official contemporaries. Just as a pious Sunday is not the last word in religion, so old Vaihinger is not the last word in Art. Art is and remains something rare. A work of art does two things: it discerns (yes, discerns, whatever the philosophers say), and it creates.
I end my historical sequence with these words:
Works of art have to do with truth.
The epic artist can still, today, in all seriousness, employ the report mode.
2. The epic work repudiates reality
Now that I’ve spouted a justification for the use of the report-mode in the epic, I’ll set this point aside, and as I do so and glance around behind it I am surprised, I stand there and come to another conclusion that contradicts the first. So I read a few sentences from Don Quixote and see that what is said there is – consciously – untrue, for both sides, for the author as well as the reader! And despite this, no, precisely because of this, the form chosen is that of the report! I suddenly notice the “precisely because of this”. The author chooses the report-mode, which is only permitted in the realm of so-called facts, he employs it for his notorious non-facts, for now it is something highly arousing and pleasing, with a huge pleasure-rating. Here we have a characteristic transformation of Art in a materialistic-scientific age. Here we have the state of affairs, wonderful, unbounded, of free fabulation. What is fabulation, the bold unfettered reporting of non-facts, of notorious non-facts? It is a playing with reality, in Nietzsche’s words a laugh of superiority over facts, even over reality as such. Hence the knowledge: it is not true, and nonetheless I employ the report-mode. Here one is in competition with stony firm solid reality, and performs magic with it and blows soap bubbles made of the same material that the creator of the world used to make the whole heavy Earth, the heavens and all the animals and their fates. We are in the proud and humane region of free phantasy.
The report-mode points to the sovereign will of the human being, of the author at least, to play with reality in despite of all knowledge and science. Now everything is possible that can be thought, gravity is swept aside, all physical laws are swept aside – but at the same moment there is the knowledge: gravity and all the laws exist, but we, we can do anything, we use the report-mode to tell of a quite other world. Poetic writing is more than a dream. A dream too plays with reality, but to our mind still has a fatal and irksome bond with reality. In poetic writing the levity and mocking of reality are complete. This is the huge gain in pleasure – for author as well as reader – imparted by fabulation in the report-mode.
Place against this levity the gaucherie and ponderousness of most current and earlier novels. Most of their authors have no idea what sort of instrument has been given to their hands. They are the victims of rationalism and the era of the natural sciences. It has slit the throat of poetic writing. Authors think they must sniff around reality rather than play with it or fling it aside. They think they have done their best when they are as accurate and as close to nature as possible. As if anyone could be. Nature does not let itself creep into a belly, and has no need of train-bearers. Authors boast that they have handed down most truthfully and almost as a documentary the history of an era or a family or an individual, as accurately as possible, as close to reality as possible. Maybe using the methods of a theoretician, a historian. If you compare this – this striving and its results – with the sphere of the hyper-real to which I first alluded as one of the pillars of the report mode, and the sphere of the phantastic, of fabulation, as the second pillar, how paltry, wretched, even burlesque are these naturalists who think they must take the report-mode at face value. You now see clearly the relationship between the two spheres of Art that coincide in the report-mode epic, as I showed just now: the sphere of phantasy and fabulation is simply the negation of the sphere of reality, and guarantees a playing with reality – the sphere of hyper-reality is the sphere of a new truth and a quite special reality.
And now one is again permitted to speak in report-mode. This mode regains its truth in the sphere of the epic work of art, and there is no more talk of scams, of fancy; poetic writing is no longer a dishonourable, confused and implausible matter, poetic writing is no longer degraded to a subjective plaything, and if truly epic writing employs the simple past tense and makes a proud report, it is showing that it knows what it is and that it knows its place and its rank in the life of the spirit.
3. The epic does not narrate the past, but represents
Now I have answered the question: Is the report the fundamental mode of the epic? I have affirmed it and given reasons when and why the report is allowed to be the fundamental mode of the epic. I need to make one incidental point. I spoke of the simple past tense and of the report, and it may seem as if the form of the past is the form in which the epic must construct its verbal artwork. This is by no means the case. It is quite irrelevant, and a purely technical question, whether the epicist writes in the present, simple past or perfect tense, he will change tenses as he deems appropriate. The decisive point, which is not incidental, is that what one often reads – that the dramatist presents a plot unfolding in the present, the epicist narrates a plot that is already completed – is incorrect. It’s superficial and laughable. For everyone who reads an epic work, the reported events are happening now, the reader experiences them now; whether present, simple past or perfect tense are used, the things are just as present to the reader and are received no differently than the performance of a play. Both are a representation, a setting-forth. All setting-forth is in the present, however it is formally composed. The difference between the epicist and the dramatist consists in this: the dramatist allows the action to proceed through the sense-organs of the eyes and ears, while for the epicist the organ of representation is the imagination. Only the spiritual location – the stage, or the imagination – distinguishes the two forms of writing. I shall soon have more to say about the close kinship of epic and drama.
4. Towards the epic of the future
Having talked about the report as the basic mode of the epic, I must make a practical observation, which may surprise you and may provide a hint to authors, in direct contradiction to what I have said. I do not recommend employing the report as the only mode of the epic work. You know that Homer, Dante, Cervantes, the three greatest epic names, chose only the report-mode; and all the novels in Germany today, as far as I know, animate themselves only in this mode: they set forth in a reporting, narrative mode. I do not advocate this. They are two different things: the epic work of art, and the epic method, i.e. the report mode. It is nowhere written that the epicist must only report. In the ancient theatre, in old dramas, there are sections that have nothing to do with the ongoing action, the chorus for example. Shakespeare too, somewhat shamefacedly, sometimes allows a figure to step before the curtain and tell us something. And rightly so. There is also a dogma, one ready to be broken, that the drama may unfold only via dialogue. I can attest with pleasure that the cinema – narrative through pictures – has already penetrated the theatre in an experimental way, and is hammering at the door of the worn-out mode of the dialogue drama, of the players up there on the stage talking among themselves without reference to me.
You’ll throw your hands up in horror when I advise authors in their epic works to be decidedly lyrical, dramatic, even reflective. But I shall persevere. In our epic works we have no need to surrender our freedom to some particular heritage in which tradition presents itself as dogma, and we shall make such use of the novel as seems good to us. Germany is a land of pedantic epic realism. Realism: I mean you want to report on realities or pseudo-realities. In France writing is lighter on its feet, has for a long time been more elastic. There are but few stable laws of art for the artist; mostly the artist makes up his own laws of art. The epic work of art is not a fixed artistic form; like the drama it is constantly evolving, actually in direct resistance to tradition and its representatives. Just as today’s theatre is fossilised in the dialogue of the characters up there – and we are denied the benefits of reflection, of lyrical or mocking intervention, of freely variable artistic action, even of speech directed at us, we are not made part enough of what is happening up there – so it is with the epic, where the report-mode is an iron curtain which separates the reader and the author from one another.
I confess: I have paid endless homage to the report, to the dogma of the iron curtain. Nothing seemed more important to me than the so-called objectivity of the narrator. I admit that even today communications about facts, documents, make me happy, but facts, documents, I mean, why? Now that great epicist Nature speaks to me, and I, so small, stand before her and rejoice, just like my older brother. And it happened, as I wrote this or that historical book, that I could hardly stop myself from transcribing verbatim whole sections from the archives; sometimes I even collapsed over the documents and said to myself: I can’t improve on this. And when I was writing a work that depicted a battle between giant humans and great Nature, I could hardly restrain myself from transcribing whole articles on geography; the course of the Rhone, how it breaks out of the mountains, the names of the various valleys, the names of the tributary rivers, what cities lie along them, it’s all so wonderful, and communicating it is so epic, I felt quite superfluous.
But you can’t hold to this stance your whole life long. Some day you discover other things besides the Rhone, the valleys and the tributaries: you discover yourself. I myself – this is the craziest and most bewildering experience an epicist can have. At first it feels like the experience that will wring his neck. But he sees himself in danger and difficulties only for a short time before he sees that a work of art is a matter for the artist, it’s not the past that fixes laws, I make my own laws, and now an epic work of art for me means something else. Is the author allowed a voice in an epic work, is he allowed to jump into that world? Answer: yes, he may and should and must. And now I recall what it is that Dante has done in the Divine Comedy: he has himself wandered through his poem, he has tapped his characters on the shoulder, he has mixed himself into the action, and not in a playful way but in all seriousness, everyone in his time understood him in the main point of the poem. He took part in his characters’ lives. He danced like King David before the victorious army of his characters.
When I say that we want the epic also to be lyrical, dramatic and reflective, I am not advocating a merging of forms. We must move on to a fresh core of the epic work of art, where the epic is not fossilised in the particular stance of today, which we quite wrongly take to be the normal stance of the epicist. In my view this means going even behind Homer.
In this splendid and risky moment, however, we need two things: ability, and being. This primal form of poetry will refresh everyone who approaches it, but it will cause much grief. Only those who come from a mother may go to the mother. So I see an epic work coming one day which, having succeeded in blowing up tradition and the role of the report, will honestly say something to us. I would like to tell authors, again and again, not to serve the form, whatever it may be, but to make the form serve them.
And with this we set aside a particular, and today very serious, difficulty. I propose that the epic form be made quite free, so that the author can pursue all the possibilities of representation that his material demands. If his subject feels like dancing a lyrical dance, he must let her dance. Authors are constantly assailed by calls for Relevance, for a literature of the present day. Quite honestly, it can even be said: you don’t really want literature, it’s had its time, art is boring, you want facts and facts. To this I say: bravo, and three times bravo. You should not make any assumptions about me. Colonel Springgenau bores me at once. The true writer has at all times been himself a fact. A writer’s task is to show and to demonstrate that he is a fact and a piece of reality and always just as good and factual as the square on the hypotenuse or the cathode ray. Authors should not lift facts from the newspaper and incorporate them in their works, it’s not enough. Ambulance-chasing and photography are not enough. To be oneself a fact and create space for this in one’s works: this makes a good author, and that’s why I urge him today to let drop the constricting mask of reportage in the epic and set himself moving in his work to the extent that he sees necessary.
5. Contrasting today’s individualistic with the earlier collective mode of production
I have no intention of doing away entirely with the problem of the epic form, in fact I don’t intend to touch on and name all the essentials. I shall do no more than skirt the defensive works around this castle, study the forward defences and make for the point of entry. I am speaking now entirely of the externals: which influences shape the epic work? Once the epicist was a bard, bringing among the people his fables and farces and sagas which were already current among the people and to which he brought at most only a little reworking, maybe introducing variations here and there, or a new way of singing. The man had a specific task: he had to hack his way past Life, his audience were stern judges, if what he brought did not please them, the man would go hungry. This was a very obvious influence on the shaping of his work, it was the liveliest and most productive form of criticism, you can come straight out and call it a collective work of author and public; bread and money were the most pressing arguments for the author, and indirectly a solid factor in regards to the shaping.
What about today? Now an author sits in his study, clutches a pencil or pen, and something is supposed to occur to him. He too wants to earn money, but in this respect the bards and minstrels of old had it much better: they were in contact with their public, quickly noticed what they needed to deliver. Now the author can go down the street, can talk with his publisher, read the papers, listen here and there; but “connection” with an audience is out of the question. We all sit on an insulating stool, which without doubt is an unpleasant situation and not supportive of creativity. The present situation in cultured countries is conducive to the nurturing of individualistic authors, for in our countries the great coalitions, the great collectives are entirely political and economic, there are no ideal powerful collectives, at least for the majority of authors; not in general a healthy atmosphere for great drama or the great epic.
Today’s author groans under the misfortune of the printed book. A book is endlessly long, you can always make a book longer, make two books, three books, how is an author supposed to know when to stop? At bottom he should only stop when the supply of paper is exhausted. And this is the missing condition for an external form for us today. And how should we speak, who regulates our voice – suddenly we have no voice, they take our voice away and give us a waste of print. How can print influence the rhythm of our voices, when it is actual speaking, actual inhaling and exhaling, the cadence of intonation according to the sense, that constructs the sentence, and lines the sentences up one after the other. And what should the author of today write, who is he writing for? He has no idea where the books will end up, maybe they’ll stay in Leipzig in the publisher’s warehouse, he doesn’t speak for anyone, he’s speaking into the void, no longer is there any general folk-thinking, machines and the economy have torn it all to pieces. An utterly catastrophic state of affairs.
There are no plots any more that everyone wants to hear, there is no longer any tangible folk-thinking, or only in a rudimentary sense. So here we have the poor author of today, it’s a quite unhealthy condition, almost an anachronism, he too wants to earn money, his poverty is no anachronism. So how today, when authors go about by themselves, even if part of a social circle, how can the shaping process of an epic work be achieved, does the author feel he is something of a functionary, does his work consist of a task, is someone perhaps looking over his shoulder? Let me describe a present-day shaping process.
6. Outline of the incubation stage in the current mode of epic production
While you’re going about your daily work, while you attend to all quotidian matter, in a favourable age something separates out in the author’s interior and clumps together, if I may use so graphic an image. An inward preoccupation is occurring. It is, to be more exact, thinking without thoughts. Things are moving there covertly, you feel something is emerging, or has emerged. The entire organism, the soul stands in a state of preparedness, and always following a period of tension or melancholy or frenzy. I say always, and this is an important point, for the frenzy or sadness or tension points to the fundamental stance of what is coming, what is to be revealed, it signals the inward process and reaches out beyond the author’s normal bearing, not always, but at some moments, and betrays itself in mimicry and other ways. Here the author is identical with the work and it is the prodromal stage, the incubation stage of production, an unresolved situation where the work which is preparing itself overflows into the author, it is not yet set apart enough from him, where the work is clearly taking and draining essentially all the energy from him.
And now there comes the point which I must allude to and lead to and which is of decisive importance, and it is not a personal moment but is valid more or less generally. At first as a rule the incubation stage proceeds for a variable length of time, you feel you are being drawn along by something you need to nurture. I don’t normally hold much with the simile: author and work are like mother and child, but here in the incubation stage we have something like a maternal situation. There are two entities: one that bears, observes, becomes slightly uneasy and grabs at all kinds of nourishment, and one that is borne. The thinking conscious Ego has at this time taken on a quite specific function, I’m speaking of epic authors, those of the present day: you lead yourself like a beast to a manger and watch to see if the fodder is to your taste. You receive rebuffs, you can go hugely astray, and now and then with an epic work I have the impression that there is here something good and right, but the author has not quite grasped the substance, he has an unlucky hand, for luck is needed to find the right sustenance. Indeed, it can happen that you are still slogging along and the inner situation is already defunct. You’re like a hen that’s failed to incubate her egg. And then suddenly, I mean suddenly, what do we have?
I am struck dumb, I have read that and heard that and forgotten it already, and now suddenly something jumps out and without knowing why I am seized or senselessly snared, no, fascinated, by an image. It’s not a vision, not a hallucination, but a lot of things together, a soul-condition of peculiar brightness, not vague, but of an abnormal spiritual clarity in which all riddles are solved and you feel like Siegfried when he licked the dragon’s blood: you understand every language and everything. For example, when I started on a historical novel, Wallenstein: I could ruffle in a pile of dusty files, flick through an exchange of correspondence, delve into it, delve into it. That which is preparing itself in me sips from it, sips from it, and suddenly there stands before me the image of a fleet, not a vision, something more encompassing, Gustavus Adolphus sailing across the sea. But how is he sailing across the sea? There are ships, cogs, frigates, high over the grey-green water with the white combs of its waves, across the Baltic, the ships ride the sea like horsemen, the ships jog through the waves like men on horseback, they are laden with old-fashioned cannon and people, the sea rocks under them, they are sailing to Pomerania. And it’s a wonderful picture, totally fascinating. I feel it happening to me; it’s like turning a tangled ball of twine in my hand and finding the end. For the sake of this splendid situation I come to a firm decision, and know: I shall write about this and report; to celebrate and praise and make known this situation, I shall write a book.
This image-blessed enlightenment, this knowledge-laden moment is experienced by the author as the first conception. I mean: what has come before is the incubation stage, but has reached the point where it has crossed some threshold value and has emerged to his sight. To his sight, to whose sight? And here two points are important for us in the conception stage.
The first point is: the whole has reached a certain temperature, has taken on a certain breadth; the nourishment was good, the beast has stretched its tongue out to a particular fodder, a picture becomes possible, the picture shimmers in a certain brightness. And now the Ego, which up till now has nursed only tentatively, takes on another function, another task, and that is the second point. Now the Ego can see what is there before it, so to speak, can see the one it has been nursing at its breast. It regards this entity, and – assumes a stance in relation to it. To make it quite clear: at this moment the author is no longer alone in his study thinking and brooding. Of course he does not, like the bards and balladeers of old, go among the people and sing what they bring to him and adjust to their wishes. But the author, from this moment, carries the people within him.
That observing Ego has taken over in our time the role and function the people played for those bards of old. The Ego becomes the public, becomes the audience, and what’s more a participant audience. From this moment on there exists a co-operative, a collaboration between the Ego and the entity that writes. This observant, thinking and evaluating Ego stands in a lasting relationship to the entity that writes, goads him on, nourishes him and leads him on for good or ill, acts as a regulator. And so for the epic author – and the same must go for the dramatist – there is no question of a blind unfettered drive, an unconsciousness, that does the writing. Only the incubation stage is unconscious, whereas in a strange way the second stage is permeated by consciousness, drenched in thoughts, in the values of the whole milieu: status, class, social standing, ethnicity. And now all these things, thoughts, values construct the work in a collective struggle with the entity, the individual, that writes.
Here as well (just to make the picture of the production process a bit more complete), something quite remarkable usually happens. The conscious thinking Ego does not always keep to the role of the public, the spectator and collaborator; in a strange way it is drawn into the work process itself; the work in progress, at several points which invite an unleashing, exercises a fascination over the Ego, bewitches the Ego, and now, without removing the thinking and collaborating, two situations arise: the Ego, the collaborator, loses its guiding role in respect of the work, it puts on masks, it suffers its work, dances around its work. The Ego is drawn into the game-situation of the work in progress and to some extent has lost control. So now the author is even deeper into a murky literary creation. Although the general clarity persists, its reaction to the work has become less transparent, the work itself now threatens to become shapeless, which is merely to say that it shrugs off the formula we have hastily applied, but deeper forms appear, the work becomes a deeper creation.
And then comes the second situation, the second stage of this fascination, the moment when the author can no longer stand upright before his work, where the work devours the author and his conscious Ego: we are at the stage of a prolonged anonymous conception.
And so the production process goes back and forth: long stretches of rational clarity and perceptible shaping line up at a first conception, these are calm stretches, filled out by the imagination, and then there follows the pounding of the conception, this pillar looms up like an island in an earthquake, and again we have a culmination and a new beginning. There are many types of author; not all will understand what I mean. Creative writing, you see, is not merely, in Ibsen’s words, holding judgement over oneself, nor does it mean, as moralists and politicians among the authors think, holding judgement over oneself and others; it is much more: for example letting oneself go, playing, for example having the courage to undergo inward bewitchings and sacrifice oneself to them in form and substance.
7. Details of the mode of production
a) The epic work exists in statu nascendi
I want to glance at further shaping processes, and describe the effect of some shaping factors. You embark on an epic rather like a swimmer plunging into the sea. You don’t know yet how wide the sea is, but you trust your strength and enjoy the swim. It matters not whether you start writing at once or, to keep your powers in balance, make an outline. You have an initial conception and a vague shadowy underlying feeling; all you can do now is forward march and go stalking after the central situation, which is not yet at all clear. Ladies and gentlemen, most epic works are undertaken in such an obscure urging, and the work shows its face only as you labour. You believe the writer is making you a report and writing down what he knows. No, he knows nothing, or almost nothing, he’s following an intuition and a sense of his powers to plunge into an adventure. You write to your theme. And so the reader joins the author in the process of production. All epic works deal with Becoming and Happening, and so, I would say, it is appropriate that the epic report is not laid out all complete and buzzing like a shot from a pistol, but the reader experiences it in statu nascendi.
With any epic of some size, you must know, what is presented is not a rounded, closed, thoroughly circumnavigated work of art, rather you attend at the creation, development and growth of the work, in contrast to works of the plastic arts and probably some dramatic works. But even these have something of it, and not of the worst. The same goes for great works of the other temporal art, music: themes develop out of one another not only musically but also in real time, they just now come into existence. And this gives to them, as to an epic performance, not just a special charm but also a peculiar truth and verisimilitude and perspicacity, for when we see how something comes into existence before our eyes, we imbue it quite readily with the character of a truth, and it convinces us. This is the specific law of causality in the epic.
This flowing before our eyes also has the advantage that it leads author as well as audience from surprise to surprise and from delight to unforced delight. It has the advantage that every situation produces the next, unforced. And there’s a reason why this mode of creation is necessary: you can never scan far enough ahead in an aesthetic sense, never know where possibilities for raising or reducing tension will arise; you can stake out very roughly the outlines of the whole thing, but if you plant the stakes too close together you spoil the conception, because these stakes don’t correspond to the place you’re working towards.
b) The epic work is constitutionally unbounded
I shall mention a further attribute of the epic work of art: its unboundedness. It’s the strangest attribute for an art form, this law of unboundedness, but there it is, won’t be brushed aside, and you should look closely at it because it is a quite essential characteristic and we stand on the most solid epic ground when we stick to it. Externally we have the current situation: the epicist has at his disposal the book-form, but a book is a start though never an end. So I have to make a start, and may the good Lord help me to come at some point to an ending. If someone tells me I have one hour to speak, I can adapt to that and am forced to a particular outline. But today the epicist is faced with only one possibility for achieving an externally bounded form: namely, if the publisher rations the number of pages.
But the same attribute of unbounded form also applied, if one may put it like this, to the era of the early story-tellers. It is really an internal attribute of the epic. Even the early epics hardly had a beginning, and certainly no ending. A man stopped narrating today, and tomorrow narrated some more, the people want to hear something new, and because you don’t have much material, and interest always grows when you can link to something old, you end up with an episodic work, a continuing story, additions without end. In drama, a man dies promptly after two hours. The epicist is more relaxed, he lets him die today but he may rise again tomorrow. This is the correct epic method, the fruitfulness of the situations and characters is symptomatic, and you the reader must not let yourself be deceived by our modern pseudo-epics, novels that try stupidly to imitate the drama – most modern novels could be turned into something like a stage play, and that is a sign of their false formal underlying principle. The situation and the characters are exhausted in two hundred pages. Look at Cervantes’ Don Quixote: you might be able to make a stage play out of Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills, not easily, but still. But the whole epic work, the book Don Quixote, can never be adapted as a stage play, for the same thing happens a hundred times with some new variation, Don Quixote ever and again fights against some new species of windmill, and Cervantes is happy with that, and it is a matter of chance, something tagged on from outside, that Don Quixote at some point dies. For Cervantes the matter was at an end, he allowed Don Quixote to die, Cervantes was already an individualist, but successors could easily have continued writing this splendid story. And so this is, externally and internally, the attribute of unboundedness that has imposed itself on us as a shaping process.
c) Dynamic and proportion as shaping laws and co-creators of content
I now want at the same time to pin down a contrary tendency, another law of many epic works: I want to touch on the closed form. But only from a certain perspective do these two attributes stand side by side. For each particular epic production wants, like Don Quixote, to achieve a conclusion, an ending, and hence formal closure. Though epic is unbounded, formless, a particular work brings an unbounded epic to an end and invents special shaping rules and principles just for this particular concrete case. So, for example, I plan to depict a revolutionary ferment in a population, and a vivid scene forces itself on me as a beginning, an attack on a leading state official, a night scene. This is felt completely as an introduction, a kind of muffled drum-roll, a single harsh discharge, then silence. Specific points are worked up from the character of this tempestuous and unsettling introduction. Now I am entangled in what follows. There must be a gigantic story-line, or else the proportions don’t match, and a particular dynamic is called for. I must start slowly, broadly, perhaps with one person, in order to achieve a massive crescendo. These proportions and this dynamic, the formative tendencies, are felt quite vividly, and if now the imagination sets to work and tirelessly pulls in material, the highest law and the headquarters from which the authoritative directives emanate is this formal law prescribing a broad, slow advance. And now, having pulled along a single person as if on a thread, I throw person after person into the process until a certain height is reached.
I started a Chinese novel with such a drumbeat and such a muffled drumroll of subterranean revolution. It begins for purely formal, I could say musical, reasons, with a report on one particular man, and this report is then spun wide and this man must become the red thread to which I attach other threads, and so people group around him, force him to actions which gather ever more people around him, and so I make him my hero, the mover of this movement, to broaden the canvas I add a few more episodes and now, purely artistically, I have set down the beginning of my book. No, had to set it down. These characters, their gathering, and the characteristics of their progress required and co-created this definite will to dynamic and proportion, a musical tendency, tendency to an architectonic music. The law of form, I have to say, actually created the content that is solidly there. But the epic theme was: someone struggles in vain, powerless against violence, a weak hero, truly powerless.
Let’s look at another place. The revolutionary movement has reached a terrible level. The colours of this scenery are already unbearably harsh, calm stately tones are needed. Now I have no more use for my hero. I have him make an inward change of direction, he abandons his sect, disappears into the countryside. But for the grand stately tones I must seek out other people and actions. So the Tibetan Pope appears, a quite different very bleak scenery is sought out and depicted, monasteries, Tibet the land of ice, and the stately progress of the Pope to China, to the great Manchu Emperor. The structure of this section stands firm before all the details. It is the ground plan.
Within this section itself, in the details, the same formal schema is at work. Whole stretches are experienced beforehand from particular starting points, but devoid of content, only in their dynamic and a rough idea of their length. Into this empty skin now imagination pours and fills it up. I’d like to speak of a network of tension, of a dynamic network that spreads itself gradually over the whole work, tethered to specific conceptions; and actions and people are embedded in this network. And you can see that an epic work of this kind resembles neither the boundless old epic-type nor the wretched modern dramatic novel-type. I speak here of a self-developing type of modern epic works of art that bear within them quite specific laws of form. I have given easily analysed examples in my own books.
If you ask, what then do these works, works with these laws of form, resemble, the above analyses has already made it clear: symphonic works. It is understandable if the two temporal arts, music and literature, considered from their artistic character, share a number of common features.
8. Language in the production process
Finally, I shall depict the role of language in the production process.
As soon as the conception has occurred, there is a bewildering situation, a situation of bewilderment. The author must speak or write, as the case may be, he would like to speak or write, and something astonishing happens, which has often been observed: you notice that at the moment when you speak or write, you step into a completely different world, we can say into a different spiritual plane. Conception is no longer conception, or so at any rate a number of authors have asserted. In the speaking, in the writing, the thing has changed, and the affair, though still quite nice, is no longer overwhelmingly imposing. Thus, the embodiment of the conception in a body of language has an essentially transformative effect, even, we say calmly, partly destructive. These authors now find themselves bereft of what is unique, what is quite special about their conception, and are no longer satisfied with “language”. Perhaps these authors have a special kind of conception and intuition. With other authors, myself among them, the matter goes differently.
I am content with language. It provides me with extraordinarily useful services, and is the most valuable helpmeet in my work. There are several connections and links between the conception and language. For those who are disillusioned by the conception once it is written down, language is clearly an instrument, a tool, material upon which they can set down the ideas and phantasies that have come to them from elsewhere. But language can also be experienced in another way and can be something else. The following example comes from my personal observation.
Some ideas are without language. You must be careful not to write them down too quickly, or you too will feel that sense of disillusion. Things want to ripen, the idea will form its language-body soon enough. And then a moment will come when out of this situation you have a single sentence, and to some extent you have caught the beast by the tail and now it can’t get away. Now the situation as written down is no longer identical with the conception, but it is – richer, more concrete, more alive! And first and foremost in the epic: it presses on ahead. Momentum can already be latent in the conception, but the writing, the succession of sentences, the melody that is now being spun, allows no rest. How much richer and more valuable is this written version than the conception, which in the end is no more than a constant bass drone.
But it may also happen, strange as it may sound, that an ideal conception is accompanied by a specific form of language. This is nothing supernatural, but lies close to the realm of dreams in which one hears some particular words and sentences.
And thirdly, it may be that you have no ideal conception, rather some sentences occur to you, God knows out of what context, and for an author this is the happiest of all situations. I mentioned earlier the voyage of Gustavus Adolphus across the Baltic. This conception remained dumb and yielded no fruit. I was reluctant to give it expression. Then while I was immersed in some work, reading about dignitaries at the court of Emperor Ferdinand the Second, a sentence came to me, and this was a conception in language. And this kind of conception in language is just as good as a merely ideal conception, and for the epic author, the practitioner of language, is all-important. That sentence read: “When the Bohemians were defeated, no one was better pleased than the Emperor. Never before had…” It went no further. But it was excellent, it was the beginning of my book, there were the melody and the rhythm, I could begin, nothing more could happen to me. If I must depict the relationship between conception and language, I shall say: the conception is merely the text of a song, language is the song, the music. With language you add immeasurably to the “conception”, and the song is not complete without the right melody.
But just as for the librettist everything depends on the correct scoring of his words, so for the author everything depends on the intimacy of the relationship between his ideas, fancies, and language. Just as poorly aimed language can spoil his concept, so well-chosen language, well-conceived language, can relieve him of half the work, even the phantasising and inventing. For well-aimed language leads in the right direction, leads the initial conception towards new ideas, is itself a productive force. The greatest formal danger for the epic author arises when he jumps into the wrong register of language. It would be a blessing for authors and readers if the philologists would produce a dictionary of German linguistic styles and registers. Such a work would be important in the training of authors and in scaring off dilettantes. In German we have no great number of clearly distinct speech styles and speech levels. There’s conversational speech, which varies with the various social classes, and in the provinces crystallises differently, not just in terms of accent. There’s the register of newspaper people, stockbrokers and other professions. But for authors these unfortunately don’t have much weight. It would be desirable for them to dive more intensively into this full human life. What is important for them is the written styles: for example, the style of the Bible translator Luther. This style has outlasted whole generations, at present occupies a particular literary level, a particular spiritual plane, and anyone stepping onto this level must know where he is headed, must know where this language is leading him on to, and that adopting it coerces him not just to follow up a few sentences with other sentences from the same level, but also limits thoughts and concepts to this level. In other words: In every style of language there lurks both a productive force and a coercive character – in terms of both form and ideas.
Dilettantes exploit this and can easily write at this level, they do not notice that they are barely in the game, that it’s a matter of autonomy in language and ideas, they need only insert their little coin into the machine and it grinds into action. But even the true author is at risk, but he knows what I have said: you think you are speaking and you are spoken, you think you are writing and you are written.
To continue on the subject of our dictionary, of linguistic style and the related spiritual values, we have Schiller’s iambic style; Goethe’s contemporary prose; the prose of Heinrich Heine, whose successors can be traced in today’s feuilletonists; the classical style of Platen; and others. All these linguistic styles possess their own spiritual level which makes them fruitful, formative – and on the other hand, especially for the independent author, catastrophically domineering and hampering. Only a layman thinks that there is just one German language and you can think in it as you like. The cognoscenti know that there are several registers in which everything must set itself in motion. Whoever wants to be spiritually independent, whoever wants to say something of his own as a writer, is at great risk. He does well to know this risk, and it is no novelty that anyone who wants to speak his own mind must first push away old ways of speaking in order to call a spade a spade.
As far as the formative power of language is concerned, as I have already shown I have to speak of a general productive power of both form and ideas, and it reveals itself in thoughtful writing and written thought as an urging on from one sentence to the next, one paragraph to the next. Now and then more rhythmical laws come to the fore, now and then alliterations take the lead, now and then more assonances. Ideas on this level struggle with the linguistic at every level. The victor – in the case of the good writer – is always language. Anyone who has not experienced this does not know the fundamental fact of the living language, which is not the language of philology and dictionaries. It is rather a blooming concrete phenomenon, it knows no “words” any more than the world knows individual objects, it flows in words and sentences vivid and filled with thought, experienced and deeply felt. More could be said about the very banal separation of prose from poetry, prosaic and poetic language. In the truly epic those with sharper eyes see that this separation cannot stand.
Now I must stop speaking of language, of its productive power in the formal and spiritual realms, of its coercive character. I shall not discuss how I see the liberation of the epic work from the book as a difficult but useful task, useful particularly as regards language. The book is the death of actual language. The most important shaping powers of language elude the epicist who only writes. For a long time my motto has been: away from the book, but I see no clear road for the epicist of today, unless it is the road to a new kind of theatre. And this jibes with what I have said above about the renaissance and regeneration of the epic work.
What makes an epic work? The ability of its creator to press hard up against reality and pierce through it in order to attain the simple great elementary fundamental situations and characters of human existence. In addition, in order to create through the art of words a living work, the writer’s jaunty art of fabulation. And thirdly everything surges in the stream of the living language on which the author floats.
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Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933): The starting point of his Philosophy of the As-If reads: “How do we often arrive at what is correct, using assumptions which we know to be false?” Vaihinger addresses this point: “The human conception of the world is an enormous web of fictions, replete with logical contradictions all the way from scientific fabrications to practical goals, and from inadequate, subjective, pictorial modes of conception, whose encounter with reality is ruled out from the start.” Philosophie des Als Ob, 1911, p. 14. – CDG
Döblin is referring here to the Prologue to his first epic novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916), which was dropped from the text as published, to appear some years later as a short story: ‘The Attack on Chao Lao-hsu’. My English translation of the novel (ISBN 978-962-996-564-8) restores it. – CDG
