Mann is an island
Little Herr Friedemann and Other Stories, by Thomas Mann
OOP, Penguin (1976)
Does she love me? Could she love me? Am I fool to think that I might ever have had the chance…? Uncertainty plagues the lead characters in Mann’s short stories, condemned as they are by their physical deformities (Little Herr Friedemann) or by their undesirability among the very people they court (The Blood of the Walsungs). It dogs them and promotes them, turning their inner lives into a roller-coaster of emotions of which the outside world rarely, if ever, has any knowledge.
As is clear from this collection, the world of Thomas Mann is cold and lonely. Relationships between individuals are really distant orbits around each other in otherwise empty space. Where contact is apparently made, it turns out to be unreciprocated, twisted, or otherwise missing the mark (Tobias Mindernickel or The Blood of the Walsungs). Large crowds, on the other hand, offer a safe if banal alternative to painful solitude or the hopelessness of trying to interact with one other human being (The Dilettante and The Infant Prodigy). Crowds have their own lack of meaning, or perhaps lost meaning, but characters can sit in a crowd either with no delusions or utterly delusional; this is at least preferable to the constant neurotic questioning of the couple.
Such tensions and misery can leave Mann’s work relentless, were it not for his sympathetic portrayal of the apparently extreme individuals who occupy the borders of society. This people over-analyse their condition obsessively, and pick apart minutiae before tweezering through the remains. But it’s this that drives the individuals, and that makes us understand them and even empathise with them. Anyone can recognize the outrage of the main character in The Way to the Churchyard or Gladius Dei: recognize it, pity it, and feel it in their bones. A Weary Hour is the portrait of the artist as a nail-biting lunatic, but we could all be that crazy composer, and many of us would consider the trade worthwhile. Catch a glimpse of your worst faults in these individuals, and you cannot help but love them for it.
posted at: 21:30 |
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Revenge of Etaoin Shrdlu
Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn
£6.99, Methuen (2001)
A book of letters, a novel without letters. What happens to human beings when their vocabulary is restricted, arbitrarily, one letter at a time? Such is the predicament of the inhabitants of Nollop, founded by the inventor of the Lazy Dog sentence, when letters begin falling off the great monument to Nevin Nollop. Books are confiscated and burned, to rid themselves of the Z that their founder has suddenly disdained from beyond the grave. And as the glue on the letters perishes further, so does their language and their freedoms. Those who speak words with the banned letters are flogged and eventually deported. Only the authorship of a pangram to rival Nollop’s great sentence can save the island from an imposition of silence. Can Ella and her band of rebels put one together in time?
Most fascinating in the novel is the subtle development of the language during the imposition of greater and greater strictures. Whether Dunn intended it or not, the tortures that language undergoes are chilling. The loss of Q, Z and J cause short words to be struck out and replaced by Latinate counterparts: long, flowery archaisms. But eventually constituents of these longer words drop out of the sky, and out of common, legal use; some can be replaced, but a pidgin develops, a combination of grammatical tricks and permitted misspellings. An announcement of a death—“Mie phrent Georgeanne perisht last night phrom let poisoning”—is turned from bathetic to pathetic, and this makes it all the more heartrending: such things are happening, and the words soon do not exist even to mourn, let alone protest. Society breaks down.
As a moral tale Ella Minnow Pea is thumpingly obvious in its message: state control over free speech leads to social decline and is the thin end of the wedge of totalitarianism. But as a lipogram it has a dynamism and fearfulness that the circumlocutions of A Void lack, and the central trick contributes to the tension and excitement rather than detracting from it. While the plethora of characters often makes it difficult to tell who is addressing whom, this study of the decline of such an epistolary society—Amos even leaves a note for his wife when she’s in the bath—is a lesson well learnt, and a story well told.
posted at: 12:23 |
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