Mountains Oceans Giants Parts 8 and 9
Döblin followed up his harrowing magnificent depiction of the Greenland venture with two Parts in which the Promethean madmen/ women take their project to (literally) inhuman extremes, while others, including survivors of Greenland, seek to rediscover their humanity within the natural world.
Downloads:
MOG Part 6 Iceland (PDF 1.1MB)
MOG Part 7 Greenland (PDF 750KB)
MOG Part 8 Giants Part 9 Venaska (PDF 900KB)
Remarks on Berge Meere u Giganten (PDF 500KB)
INTRODUCING THE END OF THE WORLD
WHY DÖBLIN’S GREAT BUT SERIOUSLY FLAWED DYSTOPIA CAN’T SIMPLY BE DUMPED ENTIRE ON THE ENGLISH-READING PUBLIC
In a 1924 essay in Der neue Rundschau ‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants’ (you can download our translation), Döblin recounts the mental turmoil that drove him to engage with these dystopian themes. He also describes the writing process: one specific episode of high imagination (Mutumbo’s fleet digging themselves into the sea) broadened out to the intensely-imagined Iceland-Greenland venture and its aftermath (Parts 5 – 9).
Had Döblin kept faith with the power of his imagination, he might have published these parts as an already-complete novel. We would then have an indisputable masterpiece to join the other major dystopias produced in Europe between the wars by Zamyatin, Wells, Huxley, Stapledon, for example. And then every literate person would have at least passing knowledge of one other Döblin work besides Berlin Alexanderplatz.
But the strain of an overheated imagination caused Döblin to recoil, to step back: and now he sketched a coolly rational plan for depicting how humanity had arrived at the 27th century world depicted in Parts 5 – 9. While the earlier parts contain some powerful episodes (Melise of Bordeaux, the Urals War, Marduk’s trees, Synthetic Food), Döblin acknowledges how his material kept running away with him: ‘everything I touched on was at risk of growing into an entire book’. For unlike his approach to the writing of his first two epics (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, and Wallenstein), where his imagination was both fired and constrained by copious historical and factual material, in composing his Dystopia he had no anchor other than whatever Ghostly Editor watches over a writer at work.
The first four parts set up barriers that no doubt deter many a reader from proceeding to the powerful and appalling later parts. In Parts 3 and 4 Döblin allows himself to become entangled in two emotional triangles, in contravention of his firmly stated views on the craft of fiction (‘I am an enemy of the personal. It’s nothing but swindle and lyricism. The epic has no use for individual persons and their so-called fate.’) The Marduk-Jonathan-Balladeuse and Jonathan-Elena-Marduk storylines are turgidly written, their style and tone at disconcerting odds with the blazing vigour of the later Parts.
We shall in due course post a translation of the entire Dystopian epic. But our strategy is first to enable readers of English to discover and evaluate and discuss the powerful core of this work: the Greenland Venture and its aftermath, as well as selected episodes from the earlier Parts in our series of Themes in Döblin’s Epic Fictions.
We welcome reader comments on this approach.
