Unordnung und frühes Leid

The phrase means disorder and early pain. I came across it when I read a novella by Thomas Mann of that title in my youth. It’s usually translated as Disorder and Early Sorrow, but Leid has many meanings, among them suffering, grief, sorrow, and pain. I was nineteen at the time, and the moment I read it, it became part of the fabric of my life. I’ve repeated it countless times since, always in German, always just to myself, and always when I felt genuine pain—which has a much more active quality than sorrow. But never mind.  Mann’s story is set in the Munich of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, a time of virulent inflation and disorder in Germany. We see that world through the eyes of a history professor, Abel Cornelius, his family, his parents, his wife, his teenage children. The resonance was present right away. Cornelius saw his times—indeed the present—as lawless, insolent, and unaware of history. The theme of the story is withdrawal, into the private, and the conservation of the timeless and therefore holy and beautiful past—which the professor feels guilty in embracing, seeing his animosity to unfolding history, while embracing that which is no more, as the unclean love of death. So he felt—the character—echoing his own creator, Thomas Mann himself, who was writing something strongly autobiographical. Yet here I was, nineteen, filled with life and energy, and yet I agreed with him. And through my life I came to see it differently; I’ve come to see what he regarded as the past as something in another dimension, and his embrace of death as a mistaken embrace, instead of the transcendental.

Of late I’ve been lending a hand to the family enterprise, and, in the process, looking deeply at a score or more of major industries at a far deeper level than I usually do these days in retirement. Not surprisingly, therefore—the repetitious assault of chaos finally wearing me down—that the old phrase, Unordnung und frühes Leid, was once more on my lips. Lordy, lord, lord. To hell in a handbasket. But this disorderly present, as I see from my studies—and remembering Thomas Mann and the 1920s—is always with us. And the holy and the beautiful remain, as always, at one remove.

Third-First Narrative Style

This style was pervasive in the last century and continues still to deform most fiction in the twenty-first. Narrative is artifice. I bow to that. But my enjoyment diminishes when I become aware of it. I become aware of it immediately when the story-teller is the character, yet the character’s voice is in the third person.

Gal dang it, she’d done it again, but he could never help himself. No. Couldn’t. Got him in trouble, all the time, even back in Tennessee, long before he learned to play the guitar. He always had to stick around—even though he’d been called “Slick” as long back as he could remember, long before that good-for-nothing drunk of a father of his left for California, and good riddance too.

The conventional name of this style is “third person limited.” “Third-first” is my name for it. It’s first person narrative without using “I”—and lacking the temporal distance from the events related that good narrative ought to have. A variant is to use several characters to tell the story, each using the third-first voice; the artifice then, of course, is compounded. So what’s wrong with it? Ordinary stream of consciousness does not produce a monologue. And natural thought will not yield exposition. To make it do so produces odd overtones. The convention is based on the premise that the reader must be grabbed by force, by sensory participation—lest he or she swoon into boredom. Identification with the character must be built in. We dare not let it happen spontaneously. As readers we’re supposed to feel that we’re the person, right here, right now.

The big downside here is that the essence of real narrative—events, actions, feelings, and thoughts recollected in tranquility—has been banished. The fiction becomes, instead, an attempt to make the reader experience something directly. But if an unexamined life is not worth living, a tale without a teller isn’t worth reading.

But storytelling is a familiar and natural phenomenon. Its components emerge spontaneously. Young writers are told: Show, don’t tell. Like any rule related to the high, this one too must be “more honor’d in the breach than the observance.” A good story teller knows exactly when to tell and when to show, and these two elements in fiction are akin to light and shade, the artful use of both is what makes stories live. We need detail, we need panorama—in the right spots, to the right intensity. We need to feel, sometimes to see the red thread that gives meaning to the whole. In modern fiction, half the time, especially where the third-first is heavily used, there isn’t any theme at all. No sovereign eye watches the scene. The fictional universe is thus as godless as the big one that the author thinks he mirrors. (Women know better—they tend to use the first person by preference: personal, intimate.)

Third-person omniscient—meaning that a story teller is always present, however muted the voice—is the right use of “the third.”

All this came to mind because, in the library, I chanced across Royal Highness by Thomas Mann, a book I’d never read. I opened it and started reading the first paragraph. Ah, delight! The voice of a true story teller. I went and checked it out…

Immaterial Structures

Multiple coinciding and recent experiences must have occupied my sleeping self during the night—because I woke up this morning thinking of invisible castles in the air. Do we think or meditate in sleep? I’m sure we do. In the first instance I was thinking of my and others’ blogs but by extension of all creations of the mind that take the form of words. Before I read, say, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, that work was just a title—and a little distrusted. Mann? Writing about biblical characters? What later I read was a physical book of fairly substantial heft. Since that time the structure has existed in my mind as an immaterial reality. I’ve consulted, meaning “remembered,” a sequence of it, or the whole atmosphere of that book, quite often over the years. The whole of that, or any other novel, can’t be experienced instantly. A compressed feeling brimful of complexity is there. Or it’s there as a physical object. After it is finished, the author’s own experience of the book is exactly like mine.

In a post on form and content on The Ruricolist yesterday Paul Rodriguez suggested that the blog has unique characteristics. In his words they are familiarity and flexibility. Yes. Let me draw some contrasts. Common to all books is their physical manifestation of pages bound between covers; the content never changes unless the reader adds scribbles in the margins. Common to all blogs is their electronic form and their life-like quality of sprouting at least superficially new content all the time. Books are finished creations in which, to use terminology from Dorothy Sayers (The Mind of the Maker) an idea is worked out, executed, brought into form, and—if the idea is worthy and the effort has succeeded—will have a power, a radiation that will reach an audience. Sayers suggests that this trinity of Idea, Energy, and Power (she likens it to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), underlies all creative effort, thus every immaterial structure, not least those designed to be material—like sculptures and architectural works.

Are blogs creative structures? That is the question. Some are—to the extent that they express the process Sayers describes. In that process the idea comes first and, if the work lives up to its intention, the idea must also permeate the work. The execution, needless to say, must also express it harmoniously. Applying this rule at once suggests that most blogs are, well, something else. The outer form—an electronically rendered and distributed serial presentation of content—may qualify the effort as a blog. But to achieve some quality beyond “diary,” “chat,” “family journalism,” “journalism,” etc., it must display the trinity—even in its episodic, serial, and open-ended execution. I would bet that the majority of creative bloggers quite regularly struggle with the urge to finish this thing, to round it out, to have done, enough already! Some give this urge expression by restarting the blog on another platform. At least then it is new, another start. Veering from my subject still, there is no sense as hollow as the end of a work finally accomplished after traumatic wrestling with the angel—and nothing so blissful as the dawning of the new…

But the thought that came to me this morning and central to this post is the idea of immateriality. Blogs express this feeling well. Yes, I keep copies of posts on the hard drive. No, I haven’t printed them out. The twenty-minute failure of WordPress some weeks ago brought to mind the ephemeral character of works that persist as bits and bytes. And that event also left its mark on me and produced the early seeds of “castles up in air.” But immateriality may be—and I for one think is—more permanent than the material expression of thought in print or stone or pigment on canvas. But in this dimension for the radiating work of the creation to have its effect, it must have material incarnation, even if only electronic.

A final note on this subject. Blogs attract their own readers by their radiating power. This, in turn constellates ideas like affinity, revulsion, and adequacy. I glance at many blogs that I rapidly forget. Very few get book-marked; of those, too, quite a few fall away after I’ve followed them for a while. We choose our own reality. I’ve read lots of lots of things in the service of work; for work we need information; but then there is life. The recent upsurge in visitors to Ghulf Genes was also in the background of this post. It was a flurry caused by name recognition. Very, very few of those visitors—as indeed but a tiny handful of those who chance across this blog by doing searches on names or words—become real readers. And those who do tend already to be inhabitants of an invisible continent I also call my home.