Uneasy Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.

That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.

The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.

Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”

Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)

The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.

Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.

In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.

His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)

Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.

It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.

One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.

Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.

One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.

Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.

There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass. 

Work to Art: Carbon Credits as Literary Material

This is a post about carbon credits and the challenge of turning work-related matters into fiction, so although the topic might seem a bit out there it’s really just as much about stories as everything else on this blog. However, it does have a slightly technical introductory few sections.

I first came across carbon credits properly while working in Russia – there were some Federal initiatives involving trees that might have produced some – but as with a lot of things out there, it went nowhere. A bit later, a friend and I had an abortive mad dash into Paraguayan property to do our own afforestation (tree planting) project. After digging around our connections it turned out we had someone on the Paraguayan supreme court; unfortunately what we didn’t have was a zero in the right place in the financial model my friend put together, and so fortunately I did not end up the proud owner of several thousand acres of field on a continent I’ve never visited.

Somehow, since then carbon credits have continued to come up in my life. Before I can talk about their relationship to narratives I first want to explain how they work in principle:

If you accept that global warming is happening and primarily caused by human activity, and that the consequences for things you care about (animals, people, coastal golf courses) are bad enough to do something, then you want to prevent the bad things from happening. You, an individual, can do whatever you want to combat global warming – stop driving, eat less meat – because you have decision-making rights over your own actions.

As a business, however, one is beholden to one’s shareholders and government regulations. Enough shareholders want money that businesses need to listen to them or face financial consequences in the form of a cratering share price, which means that even if you as a business are doing the right thing, you’ll probably find yourself without the money you need to do it. (This is a simplification as pressure can also go the other way.) Instead, we generally rely on regulations to nudge us to do good things, like not dumping our toxic waste in the nearest body of water, such as the swimming pool at the special needs school.

Forced to do the right thing, a business continues following this profit motive by finding the cheapest way to do it. First, you electrify your operations using renewables; then you make your furnaces more efficient; then you replace your fleet of polluting cars with electric vans; then you replace the natural gas in your furnace with biogas or hydrogen from renewable sources, and so on. You may have seen graphs showing the cost of each of these things or similar – they generally look like a series of steps, because each option is more expensive than the one before. (Here’s one from the World Bank).

Functionally, however, each decarbonisation lever has the same effect – one unit of a greenhouse gas, typically carbon dioxide, is not produced. The only difference is the price. If you want to save the planet, you start with the cheap stuff for the most impact at the lowest cost, then gradually work your way up as the governments increase the regulatory temperature (for example, through a carbon price or cap-and-trade system like the EU’s emissions trading system, or ETS).

Carbon Credits

Whence then carbon credits? Consider this: if the overriding goal is decarbonisation, why should a company do something when they can pay someone else to stop the CO2 emissions for less cost? For example, if my new green vans cost more than your improved insulation, why don’t I pay you to install more of it before I start paying the higher cost for my things?

This is the kind of environment where carbon credits come in. Trees absorb carbon for free, which is a lot cheaper than the fancy new catalytic cracker at my oil refinery. But some trees are under threat from deforestation. Now with my forestry manager’s hat on, if you pay me a dollar, I will gladly not chop these trees down and instead will take care of them for you. (The price essentially replaces the earnings I would get from cutting the trees down). To give another example, renewables displace carbon from a dirty electricity grid, and are pretty cheap too – why don’t you pay me for setting them up too? This idea of paying for making green decisions happen that otherwise would not is the way that carbon credits justify their own existence.

Carbon credits or offsets have had a rough history for a number of reasons, however.

The initial credits were avoidance credits, rather than removals. This means we avoided deforestation or avoided using our coal-fired power plants. The problem was that it was hard to quantify the amount avoided, which meant the system was vulnerable to fraud or things that looked like fraud. BP owns the biggest US offset company, and there’s potential that the offsets sold were not really protecting much of the land because it was too remote to be at any risk to begin with. Certain other oil majors (and not only them) have been criticised in the press (nothing new there) for buying “junk offsets”, which were cheap and of dubious benefit. Occasionally, we hear stories of Uyghur slave labour or other human rights abuses associated with projects.

In theory, credits should be of a “high standard”, letting them also command a relatively high price. Credits are typically verified by registries in a fairly complex process to ensure they are real and have a real impact. Credits that bring co-benefits – like employing local workers or providing a biodiversity boost – can often charge more as a result too. There are audits, site visits, and other costs for developers. But bad projects do slip through the cracks, and given this is very much a nascent market, wrongdoers have a big negative impact on the market’s overall reputation.

What Market?

Carbon credits are not monolithic. The pressure placed upon companies by the EU is not the same that a consumer-facing business might place on itself on behalf of its customers. Hence, we have two market types where carbon is traded. The compliance markets, if they allow credits at all for emissions reductions, set strict quality requirements. The voluntary market, which is where most of the carbon credits that we think of are sold, typically allows much more flexibility. That’s because your credits are your own business – the businesses buying voluntary credits are doing so because they voluntarily want to say they are decarbonising and not because their governments are regulating them to. Yet…

This can be a bit confusing. Especially because, for example, oil and gas companies are largely not forced to decarbonise operations via regulators, whereas other industrial players like steel producers in the EU are part of the ETS, mentioned above and so have to. (Or close down and take their business elsewhere…) Oil and gas give the voluntary market a bad name, but the main players are actually technology companies and other “services” companies – financials, consulting, insurance. Apart from the technology companies, these have tiny emissions and nobody is telling them to do anything about them, except potentially their employees or clients. So, after they turn the lights off in the office and buy renewable electricity, they might chose to get involved with the VCM (voluntary carbon market).

Avoidance or Removals?

As I mentioned, back in the day (and still now in fact), the main type of credits were avoidance credits. They were a mess of fogginess and occasional fraud, so some forward-thinking companies now generally avoid buying them: it’s not often that you see a business boasting of a big purchase of avoidance offsets. But there is another type – removals. Instead of preventing a tree from being felled, you can plant a tree. Or several hundred thousand. This is a much clearer direct impact, and more easily measurable. (One tree absorbs x tonnes of CO2 over y years vs the z tonnes of absorption of whatever was there before).

Trees are pretty cheap still, but there are other ways of helping the world decarbonise. The most obvious comparison with afforestation is direct air capture, or DAC. You might have heard of Climeworks in Iceland, or 1PointFive in the US. Gigantic fans suck carbon out of the air at a gigantic cost in electricity and other resources. (Carbon is a bother, but as it’s not a big percentage of the air we breathe, you need a lot of air going through your fans to extract enough of it to make a difference). DAC is extremely expensive as a result of this, so its credits are too, even though, according to the International Energy Agency, we basically need it in every possible scenario where future generations are not very mad at us.

Now, companies are proud of buying removals credits – it’s easy to find press releases on the topic from companies like Microsoft or Klarna – and so they should be. They may be under pressure from activist investors or want to boost their reputation amongst consumers, but generally, they are doing a good thing they didn’t need to do. In moral terms, they are almost doing a supererogatory action. 

Ways of thinking about removals

We need carbon credits of this sort to decarbonise the world. Removals aren’t greenwashing, and they are fairly rigorous if not perfect. The huge number of avoidance offsets which certain companies, mainly oil majors, have banked up… might be closer to that. As soon as we talk about greenwashing, we get to the standard metaphor by which people explain carbon credits, the one I have deliberately avoided using until now – that of an indulgence.

So, indulgences… In early modern Europe, knights had a problem. They wanted to go on crusades and rape and murder vast numbers of innocent (infidels), but they knew this just might contradict a thing or two written in the Bible. One way out, which became widespread in plenty of other contexts, was through indulgences. Essentially, you are paying for the road to Heaven to be cleared of obstacles a little. It made perfect theological sense because the priests thought it up, and it had the benefit of requiring the knights to do absolutely nothing about their actual behaviour.

Returning to now, carbon credits seem similar because they let companies continue polluting with only a small cost to them. They seem useless and a source of greenwashing in the same way that indulgences were heaven-washing. Hence, the comparison smarmy commentators like to make.

But it is a false one for most credits. Unlike Indulgences, which had no central registry at the Vatican nor any monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) setup, credits do try to do what they say. Nobody can verify the effects of indulgences – which may still have worked – but we can verify the carbon taken from the air by the growth of a tree’s bulk, for example. Most companies buy removals after they have done the cheap and easy stuff, like purchasing renewable energy – not instead of this. Removal purchases are thus an extension of good behaviour, rather than an alternative to it as in the case of the crusaders.

Carbon Credits and Literature

The problem is that the indulgences metaphor is a damn good one, and hard to avoid considering once you’ve first encountered it. It largely prevents us from considering carbon credits as themselves. Rather than simplifying a topic, it blocks it from view and pats itself on the back for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my work recently, about how I might transform my experience of it into some kind of story if decided I wanted to. (The thought abutting that one is that I should finally read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King). Nobody wants to read about carbon credits within a story – they need to stand in for something else. My own, mildly technical introduction, is already far too much. If we used them in a narrative, they would need to be part of some human story, and the problem is that most of the human stories I can tell about carbon credits are ones where the credits themselves are the villains.

The indulgences analogy is very easy. A story about credit fraud practically writes itself, especially since you can just use a real story of the sort I linked above and add the details. Aren’t credits a great example of how humanity will never do the right and proper thing (decarbonise industry) and will instead take some stupid, easy option (buying credits)? Another option, one slightly more positive about the credits themselves, would be to have a story about an afforestation project somewhere in the US that then burns down in a wildfire. Man vs nature, anyone? That’s pretty classic. But it also says that we were selling semi-permanent carbon storage, which has, in fact, just gone up in smoke – and hence, again, readers are made to doubt the integrity of carbon markets. (For this kind of situation, a certain percentage of offsets are kept on hand by registries as insurance, but again, that’s not an exciting story, so I leave it in brackets).

The problem with the credits is that if they are done properly there’s no story to them except a good one. A local community given new jobs, biodiversity supported, carbon removed. That’s not the stuff of drama or tragedy; it’s not really the stuff of anything at all except life as people actually live it.

It’s irresponsible to take something which is both necessary and much maligned and continue the slander begun by the (relatively) ignorant. If I wrote one of the stories above, as a writer I would be doing damage, just for a metaphor. What do I do as someone mindful of the meanings that might be read into a story? My company has a sewage sludge project – now there’s another thing ripe for a metaphor. But the metaphor it’s ripe for is a positive one, and hence not worth writing except in a press release – society makes a lot of waste, but companies want to improve (valorise) that waste and bring value back to consumers. In this case, as a type of fertiliser feedstock, I think. All this also fits into general narratives about the circular economy we need to move towards to be more sustainable. (Another option for our story – what my company does is literal shit. Again, a mean image that does nothing.)

Business is generally boring because it has no interest in creating stories, only value. What this means is that the only stories it creates are negative ones, created by mistake and scandal. A story is only ever a hit to the share price. Yet you believe the business or wider industry is doing something good, why should you write such stories or think them up? I like my job, and generally approve of my company’s direction. I spent six months where sustainability decisions were happening and not once did I catch a whiff of greenwashing. That’s not a story.

The general dearth of stories in my present professional existence is a bit of a bother to this budding writer. I hope this brief exploration of the pitfalls of using carbon credits to tell a certain type of story indicated the challenge I keep coming across when I try to turn my work into any kind of engaging story. Still, I have quite a long time left in the workforce, so I’ll keep thinking and see what other stories I may yet find in that place where I am obliged to spend most of my waking hours.

Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Reading well, at least as it’s taught at university, is not much different from detective work. From incomplete information, we make deductions and classifications, and test hypotheses against textual evidence. What does this word really mean, what was this character’s real motivation? Often, the “best” works seem to be those revealing the least, having us fumbling the most. Obscurantism occasionally lies very close to greatness.

The German author Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is different because it’s a detective story that we wish were not one. Like many of the great German novellas, into whose tradition it neatly falls, Böll’s work is dominated by an interrogation of what it means to narrate. Katharina Blum meets and falls in love with a criminal, then shoots a journalist. But whose story is this to tell?

This plot, which we learn almost on the first page, is not what keeps us reading. Rather, it is the determination of Katharina’s motive or, more broadly, what’s in her heart. As we read, we encounter different ways of presenting / understanding her that seem to have a claim to be the truth.

Narrative coldness.

What we notice first is this strikingly cold narrative. The narrative voice seems obsessed with distancing itself from any kind of bias or emotional contribution to our experience. “And so, those are the facts”, it declares after an early chapter. At another point, it names all the sources for the novel. Generally, it uses the passive voice and the German indirekte Rede, or reported speech, which in formal use is its own grammatical construction and gives the narrative a kind of serious “report” feel to it. All of this effort to be honest about the work’s narrative, which stretches as far as a sly apology by the narrator every time the strict chronological telling is interrupted, makes us wonder what such approaches conceal.

Yet we can also take the narrator at face value, and trust that they were trying their best to tell the truth. We can do this because we have two actors who are manifestly not doing this – the police, and the journalists. But first, there’s Katharina herself.

Katharina

In his afterword, written ten years later, Heinrich Böll calls Katharina the “embodiment of the economic miracle” that took place in West Germany after the Second World War. She has her own flat, drives a car, and does her own budgeting – sending money to her poorly mother and her incarcerated brother. We read of interest rates and savings accounts. A generation earlier, a novel about a young woman from the countryside going to the city would end up with the woman being exploited, but here, Katharina manages more or less to hold her own life together…

…At least until the novel’s events begin. The novel is set in 1974, just as the economic miracle ended due to the oil price chaos in 1973. And this change of fortunes is mirrored in Katharina’s own life. Things taken for granted turn out to be less stable. The police is one such topic – when Katharina begins to get bullied by the press, her pleading is “can’t the state do something?” Her employment situation, once her name starts going through the gutter, also wobbles. She receives threatening phone calls. All the signs of her freedom start to turn on her.

Katharina lives in a world of change, and while it has benefited her, her focus on her “honour” is precisely an attempt to find something solid that she can keep safe. She is under constant threat throughout her life from men who are trying to proposition her, and so she tries hard to protect herself from this. When we first hear her voice in the narrative, in the context of questioning at the police station, it is in a mode of pedantry: she is insisting that the police use the right language for her experience. “Zärtlichkeit” and “Zudringlichkeit” are both to do with sexual attention, but Katharina insists that she is experiencing the latter word, which is unidirectional, while the police keep mistakenly writing the former and suggesting thereby that Katharina herself reciprocated or encouraged when she did not.

Yet pedantry is one way of creating an oasis of personal agency in a world where you have very little. Like the cold narrative style, it is an attempt to control a message.

The Police

After Katharina Blum takes Ludwig Götten home following a party, she is pounced upon by the police, who have been trailing him. Somehow, however, Ludwig has escaped – and Katharina must know how, even perhaps be an accomplice. The narration puts us in the place of the police, who are trying to get to the bottom of things. Normally, as I noted at the beginning, readers slip quite willingly into the interrogator’s shoes – crime novels are popular for a reason. Here, however, this becomes quite uncomfortable both for the overwhelming power of the police relative to Katharina, and our own complicity in the invasion of her privacy.

Besides comparing ways of telling Katharina’s story, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is, in a more earthy manner, concerned with privacy and our right to it. When the police first raid her flat, they insist on collecting everything with writing on it. Rather than finding a smoking gun, we are forced to see Katharina’s life broken down into components and painstakingly analysed. We go through notebooks, through family photos, through her finances, and even through her car’s odometer reading. We certainly learn, or think we learn, something about her life. But the cost is, naturally, that we begin the process of destroying that life.

The Tabloid

More so than the police, the greatest damage done to Katharina’s honour comes from the tabloid, “NEWSPAPER”. A German reader would recognise Bild, their popular if sensationalist and unreliable tabloid, akin to something like the UK’s Daily Mail. If the police are able to throw her in a cold room and interrogate her, the newspaper’s treatment of her is somehow more deadly and poisonous. No sooner than Katharina is released from her first questioning, we learn that she is being written about in a way that has, at best, only limited intersections with the truth. It is a pattern that’s repeated throughout the articles quoted in the novella.

Her friends, the upper-middle-class Blornas, are misquoted in a way that makes Katharina look bad. At other points, the reporter “improves” quotes out of an apparent duty to “provide simple people with help articulating their thoughts.” The only person who is convinced that the paper got him right is the priest from Katharina’s hometown, who has an obvious agenda (he calls her a communist). When he’s later confronted by Blorna, his source for this association proves to be “his nose.” It turns out he can smell communists. We would sigh, or maybe laugh, if it weren’t part of Katharina’s life being turned upside down by the paper that reports him.

The paper does damage – there’s a reason why Katharina ultimately shoots the man responsible for the stories. Yet part of that damage is buried under plausible deniability. After the story of Katharina first emerges, she starts receiving threatening phone calls, for example from men propositioning her, in yet another invasion of her privacy. Can we blame the newspaper for that? Certainly, but not in a way where the dots could be connected in a court, and by then the damage would be done anyway. That’s the power of institutions when they are not on our side.

But Böll does not leave the matter there – he also wants to connect the paper more directly to death. He does this through Katharina’s ailing mother, who is already in hospital. Here the journalist is denied an interview by the hospital workers, who state that her condition is very fragile, but the journalist is undeterred. Making use of a disguise, he sneaks in and gets his scoop. The cost is Katharina’s mother’s life – she expires soon afterwards. To rub salt into her wounds, in the newspaper report the author claims that it was the shock of Katharina’s misdeeds that prompted her mother’s death!

And so, Katharina is progressively dehumanised, in the sense that she is replaced as a human in the public eye by another – false – human according to the paper’s editorial decisions – a communist, a bad person. Is it not surprising, then, that she turns to violence?

“how violence develops and where it can lead”

The full title of the novel is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead, and it was the second part that was most interesting to me before I had any idea what the book was actually about. One thing we might notice is that the second title reflects the coldness of the general narration – we have a report’s title more than a story. How Katharina becomes dehumanised and miserable enough to shoot a reporter is presented with a focus on the causes rather than on either Katharina’s mental state (which remains mostly hidden) or on any moral judgment of the murder. Murder remains bad, but readers are expected to want to understand how it might come about.

Simply put, it seems to come about from a decline in social trust. We hear a lot about it today in the context of our own political situations and nations’ changing demographic profiles, but Böll depicts the problem long before our own time. Katharina moves to a big city, which is, of course, a good thing and an achievement, and successfully makes a few friends there. Still, at the same time, she’s aware of how the social and technological progress she’s reliant upon for this success can have its negative sides: “I know so many women who are alone, who spend their evenings alone in front of the TV,” she says. Just as her world became bigger, for many people it can become smaller as they close themselves off from the world. (For example, by reading the gutter press without ever having the experiences that might conceivably balance it).

As soon as the paper starts printing rubbish, the trust Katharina feels in society collapses – recall her cry for help to the police to do something about the libel being printed. (The police are leaking information anyway). The institutions she had expected to help her have not complied with her reasonable idea of justice, while the people she had expected to treat her kindly – strangers – are instead contacting her in a way that is threatening. With her name and honour dragged through the mud she is essentially locked out of society, which is a position where violence becomes a plausible-seeming answer to her problems. So that’s one way that violence comes about. Herr Blorna experiences something similar, as his association with Katharina leads to his own career and world collapsing – though in his case it only ends in fisticuffs.  

There’s another instance of violence, too, as we’ve seen – the death of Katharina’s mother. Here, there’s a kind of trust issue at stake. The reporter both ignores the advice of the doctors to leave her alone and adopts a disguise to achieve his goal. In other words, he completely ignores the social rules whose obedience confirms our status as good citizens. The result, Böll chooses to emphasise, is yet more violence.

Conclusion

In theory, newspapers are supposed to tell the truth, just as the police in their investigations are supposed to discover it. In The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, we see a paper that fails to tell the truth and an investigation that mostly probes a private life with little success at its stated goal. Only the novel’s chosen narrative approach, of a bloodless directness that names its sources and tries to be clear about sources of bias, seems to stand against this by telling us what really happened. However, in reality, this only complicates things further. We might notice, for example, how little Katharina herself speaks, even if she gets the last word. Too often she is only being quoted by others or described.

And should we even trust her own words? Aren’t humans often inarticulate about what’s within their hearts? The narrator might try to be neutral, but neutrality is itself a mask that allows biases safe passage. Really, shouldn’t we know who he or she is, so that we can make our own judgements? Or alternatively, shouldn’t we be given sources without mediation or introduction, so that we can assemble the story ourselves? (This is still not neutrality, because the ordering and choice of sources is itself an influence on our perception of them, but it’s closer to neutrality). Ultimately, we might say that if the narrative makes us distrust bad newspaper reporting, its wider message is not consoling about our capacity to locate objectivity.

Someone I went to school with now works at one of those newspapers, and when I asked him at a chance meeting whether that made him complicit in their occasional hateful and socially destructive messaging, his unencouraging answer was that the paper wasn’t left or right-wing, and that if people wanted to read populist rubbish that was their choice and equally their choice as a paper to write in a way that catered to it. He was quite confrontational in manner, obviously in part a response to my tactless question, but also in a way that to me seemed to indicate that even though he presented himself as being above what he wrote, it was beginning to affect his soul. I can’t say I was too happy for his success.

With that said, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum definitely feels like it has no answers to the existence of papers like Bild. It might have been motivated by its author’s rage at the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof group of terrorists in the papers at the time, but the work has very little to say about the people who actually read the papers and how such papers’ influence might be diminished. Instead, it focuses on their effect on an individual. In that, it’s an emotional appeal clad in cold language, rather than a rational argument. Böll himself calls the text a “pamphlet” in the afterword and that’s really what it is –  a short, effective story, told interestingly. But not one with any answers.