Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

4. The Language of Fate

4 The Language of Fate§1 Metaphysical Force-Fields: The Archaic Lives On Words bear the stamp of the metaphysics that imposed itself through, precisely, this language. [. . .] Deconstructive writing always attacks the body of this language [. . .]. —Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other1 Banished from rational thought, mimetic forms of behaviour exact a terrible revenge.” —James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg”2 My argument here, briefly stated, is that, in Döblin’s narrative, the potentiality of authentic human speech and the potentiality of authentic human action—speech and action in Hannah Arendt’s political sense—have been usurped, taken over by the metaphysics of language, a dangerous aestheticization of language expressing and enacting a causality of Fate.3 Language struggles to maintain its freedom; but Fate, often taking the form of a dreadful syncopation, a counterrhythmic eruption into the narrative, frequently prevails, casting a spell over language, abducting it, and using it for its own causality. If, as Benjamin claims, “the rhythm of Messianic nature [is] happiness,” then what Döblin’s prose introduces into the narrative might be described, borrowing Hölderlin’s term for a different narrative operation, as a “counterrhythmic” warning. 47 48 / REDEEMING WORDS As the narrative moves with compelling logic toward its ending, Biberkopf is in hospital facing imminent death: “Franz,” we read, “has Death’s word in his mouth and nobody is going to tear it away from him; he turns it around in his mouth; it is a stone made of stone, and no nourishment comes out of it” [BA 435/361]. He is finally fighting no longer against Death, who has been stalking him relentlessly throughout the unfolding of his story. Now, surrendering, he wants to be fully conscious until the very last moment, as he is taken by Death into the realm of its reign. His time, however, has not yet come. He is for the time being to be saved: not only from Death, but also from the life of crime and violence that had been his fate. The voice of Death, however, will not cease to reverberate in his ears, teaching him humility, the distinctive virtue of creaturely life [BA 441/366]. Important though a certain engagement with “naturalism” in narrative representation is for Döblin, his use of montage works against it, weakening narrative coherence, disrupting the temporal order, and turning objects and scenes into citations detached from their contexts. The effect of this denaturalizing is, I think, to call attention to the operations of language: frequent narrative interruptions, bursts of syncopation, conflicting discursive fragments, and sudden shifts in perspective enable Döblin to concentrate our attention on objects and scenes as events of language.4 And his prose style, with its repetition, alliteration, pounding rhythms and counterrhythms, intensely reverberating energy, and seemingly unstoppable word flows, constantly reminds us that the novel is a composition of linguistic events. Drawing inspiration from the “Sturm” aesthetic, and from German Expressionism, as well as from Marxism, his use of language emphasizes at once the sensuous materiality of language in a praxis of writing and the power of language to create out of nothing but its own materials a convincing world of fiction and, imposing its will, cause things to happen within that world.5 As Neil Donahue has argued, in Döblin’s use of language, language is “neither purely autonomous, a construction unto itself, nor is it purely referential, merely a window onto a narrated world; rather, language is calling attention at once to itself and to its objects of referentiality. The two impulses interfere with one another constructively to sharpen the readers’ critical experience of both the fictional world and the real words.”6 In their discrepancy lies the challenge to ethical life, raising questions about the promise of happiness. As we already noted, however immersed readers may be in the unfolding of the story that Döblin wants to tell, they are never permitted to forget the dependence of that story on the syntactic, semantic, rhythmic, and tonal possibilities inherent in the linguistic materials This is Döblin’s materialism. THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 49 The master key to Döblin’s style, his way of writing, was expressed with exact insight when he reported, in “The Construction of the Epic Work,” that, You think that you are speaking, but in fact you are being spoken, or you think that you are writing...