4 - The Limits of Violence: Döblin's Colonial Nature

Summary

A machine has no sex. Nature, on the other hand, always has a sex.

— Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies

Imaginary Theory?

FEW MODERN GERMAN WRITERS have been as extensively occupied with non-European cultures as Alfred Döblin. From the Expressionist China of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1915) to the Marinetti-influenced African passages of Berge Meere und Giganten (1924), the rewriting of Indian myth in Manas (1927), and the explicitly colonial epic of Amazonas (1937/8–1947/8), along with countless literary and philosophical essays drawing on Asian religious traditions, Döblin transformed the exoticist and Orientalist inheritance of the turn of the century into a specifically historical investigation of other cultures, in their relation to European and technological modernity. Moreover, this tension is one in which Nature is a central actor, an actor repeatedly allied with the struggles of colonized peoples against occupying powers. Nowhere is this role of Nature more crucial than in Wang-lun, Döblin's first published novel, and one which was important not only for his own subsequent development, but also for that of Brecht. It would thus make sense to bring the question of modernist Nature into relation with discussions of colonial history, which have in recent years begun to include German literature within their purview.

Many of these discussions, however, bring as much confusion as they do clarity to the question, an impression going far beyond the usual heavy poststructuralist reliance on rhetoric, to serious doubts about internal theoretical coherence. Nowhere is that coherence more open to question, in a movement self-proclaimedly “committed to theory,” than in postcolonial theory’s relation to psychoanalysis. Given that film theory’s synthetic reliance on the latter has recently come under scrutiny, and not only from a neo-empiricist perspective, one may ask whether postcolonial theory is really as psychoanalytic as it claims to be.