MOG Parts 1 and 2

We have already posted the second half of this astonishing work of imaginative fiction – the Iceland-Greenland venture and its horrific aftermath. We now go back to the beginning – not of Döblin’s writing timeline, but of the novel as he published it.

World history – from the 20th to the 27th centuries

Mountains Oceans Giants, Parts 1 and 2

Download the text of Parts 1 and 2(PDF, 1.3 MB)

Part 6 Iceland

Part 7 Greenland

Part 8 Giants and Part 9 Venaska

After completing the hyper-imaginative Iceland-Greenland venture and its horrific consequences, as narrated in what became the second half of his dystopian epic, Döblin set about imagining world history between the 20^th and 27^th centuries in order to provide the prequel. How did humanity (more specifically, the Renaissance/ Enlightenment bred portion of humanity in Western Europe and its colonial outstations) come to such a pass?

Parts 1 and 2 of Mountains Oceans Giants offer a broad-brush survey of these several hundred years, interspersed with close-up vignettes of specific episodes and developments. Those who have already devoured the Iceland-Greenland episodes posted here in 2018 will, I hope, be prepared to give these precursor chapters close attention, and not be tempted to rush through, since you should no longer be impatient for the main event!

Here are some of the issues Döblin tackles:

• Migration, demographic change. Right from the first page, we (or rather the much more homogenous Europeans of the early 20^th century) are being primed for big shocks. ‘New people’ take over from the Whites. In Milan and other southern European zones these are Africans; in London, Amerindians. Many migrants suffer the fate of the uprooted who cannot bed down in the new environment.
• Prometheanism: the techno-industrial mindset that the world is there for humans to control and exploit, regardless of the impacts on the natural world. Again, we are primed right from the first pages: submarines cut through ocean waters like a scalpel through a living organ. But Prometheanism is a mainly European trait: the ‘yellow races’ remain suspicious of technology; while tribal cultures recoil, or succumb only after the blandishments of the ‘boosters’.
• Urbanisation and the Cosmos: as masses continue to flock to cities, losing their contact with nature, the world continues to revolve around the sun; the seasons recycle, winds blow, rain falls.
• Industrial society as a war machine: weapons are among the first European products offered to tribal societies. Townzones erect defensive ray-barriers. Technology weaponises water and air. Often the weapons don’t work, or turn on those wielding them. The Urals War, begun as a diversion from domestic problems, is justified on ‘religious’ grounds (Asians aren’t Promethean enough), and ends in neither victory nor defeat.
• Elites vs. Masses: mass unrest leads elites to seal off knowledge, turning the masses into helots.
• Work and automation: elites must find ways to keep people employed, or keep them amused. War is a good way to use up surplus people. Industrial oligarchs take over governments.
• Gender relations: patriarchy, matriarchy, feminism, family, control over women’s bodies, eugenics.
• Sexual pathologies: voluntary eunuchs; Melise of Bordeaux.
• Machine-hatred, machine-worship: religious mania, self-sacrifice against/for machines, Promethean fire the motivating symbol.
• Individuality: Wind and Water Theory posits the individual human as a water-molecule in a homogenised mass of indistinguishable molecules.
• Food: Synthetic food – junk food taken to the extreme – ‘frees’ humanity from the hazards of the natural world; its development requires large-scale human (not mouse or guinea pig!) sacrifices and removes a major link between urbanised masses and Nature.

Sometimes an important issue is mentioned briefly, to be taken up at length later in the novel; e.g. Light Paint, which features (post-Iceland-Greenland) in the Ibis/Laponie story in the underground city; or the ocean-excavating that halts the Pacific fleet in the Urals War: the vision of Mutumbo excavating the Arctic Ocean to provide his fleet with a refuge from the Iceland-Greenland disaster was Döblin’s initial stimulus for the epic.

Döblin has an almost cinematic vision. He cuts rapidly from a wide-angle scene to a close-up, from a broad-brush paragraph covering a large expanse of time to a more traditional story-telling account of specific people and incidents. His language in almost every paragraph includes vivid, intensely poetic touches, easily missed if you skim too fast. This happens even when he presents an encyclopaedic description, as of the Sahara:

Winds tore at naked glowing hills, flying sand abraded crags splintered worn down by the heat. Whirlwinds worked like whetstones.

As you read, remember that Döblin was writing almost a century ago. Ask yourself: what aspects of his vision are still valid today? How does the actual development of our techno-industrial society in the intervening decades match with or negate his vision (not in terms of this or that invention, but of underlying trends and currents)? Can anyone deny that greed, war, wealth concentration, elite dominance of politics, gender relations… remain of critical concern today?