The Language Laboratory

I study modern German literature from the 20th century onward. Recently, I have been interested in the methods of historical narration in literary texts, specifically how German-speaking authors perceive and verbalize the memory of historical catastrophes such as the World Wars and the Holocaust.

Modernist writers, having realized that words do not convey the world as it is, attempted various linguistic experiments in search of new possibilities for verbal expression. For example, a Jewish novelist named Alfred Döblin, in order to depict Berlin on the eve of the birth of Nazi Germany, collected all sorts of words overflowing in the streets—newspaper articles, advertising slogans, popular song lyrics, legal jargon, quotations from the Bible and other literary texts, mathematical formulas, and statistical data—sometimes processing them and incorporating them into his work. For today's readers, it is a form of copy-and-paste without citation, making it difficult to tell where the author's own words begin and end. Furthermore, he broke down German grammar and semantic connections, creating a style that allows the reader to experience the speed and dynamism of a metropolis by piecing together fragmented words, as if assembling parts in a factory. The avant-garde writers of the past, who found immense pleasure in destruction, dismantled the order of coherent narrative to show that the "I" is an incoherent entity and that human activities are not simple enough to be explained logically. What emerged from this was a picture of power seeking to control people with plausible stories and of the masses easily succumbing to peer pressure.

Excellent literary texts preserve not only the values and social conditions of the era in which they were written but also the language of that time in a highly refined form. There is a reality that can only be conveyed because of this, and such language holds a strength that is not lost across time or culture. My job is to discern and extract the crystals of language and reality woven into the text. The language of literary texts, which gracefully transcends the limits of the words we use casually in daily life, allows us to view familiar patterns of thought and behavior from a different angle. The world perceived in this way may sometimes seem strange or eerie, but that too is one form of reality.

Döblin was a psychiatrist who wrote novels while seeing patients. In Japan, too, there are many so-called "science-type" novelists. Döblin dismantled words as if disassembling and cleaning a camera, observing the world and people with the dissecting gaze of a doctor, and pursued new forms of linguistic expression. Let's abandon the mindset of distinguishing between science and humanities once university entrance exams are over. It is nonsense to set limits on scholarship. It is precisely where the knowledge of the sciences and humanities intermingles that fascinating things full of originality are born. Perhaps there are budding novelists lurking in the Faculty of Science and Technology as well. If you want to write a novel, first try reading voraciously from works of all times and places, and attempt your own linguistic experiments.