Read It on the
Autobahn ’The discovery of slowness’ by Sten Nadolny,
translated by Ralph Freeman Canongate. You are invited to read
this book review. A John Franklin (1786-1847) was
the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a
midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and
Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to
Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest
Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the
Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American
continent. The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic was an arduous
overland journey from Hudson Bay to the shores of the so-called Polar Ocean east
of the Coppermine River. Between 1819 and 1822, Franklin and his twenty- strong
team covered 5550 miles on foot. Their expedition was a triumph of
surveying—they managed to chart hundreds of miles of previously unknown
coastline—but their inexperience in polar travel and inadequate supplies meant
that the journey back to civilisation, across the ’Barren Ground’, turned into a
catastrophe. Food ran out while they were still days from safety, and the men
were forced to eat lichen, their belts and their boots (which they boiled up to
make leather soup). Nine men died of starvation. One of the French-Canadian
guides, suspected of cannibalism, was executed. B There
followed a career as a travel writer and salon-goer (’the man who ate his boots’
was Franklin’s tag-line), a second long Arctic expedition, and a controversial
spell as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Then, in May 1845, Franklin set off with
two ships—the Erebus and the Terror—and 129 men on the voyage that would kill
him. In July, the convoy was seen by two whalers, entering Lancaster Sound.
Nothing more would be heard of it for 14 years. Between 1847 and 1859, more than
thirty expeditions were dispatched in search of Franklin and his men. They
explored thousands of miles of new land within the Arctic regions, and
contributed to the development of sledge-travelling as a means of polar travel.
The details are still uncertain, but it seems that in September 1846 in Victoria
Strait, Franklin’s ships were caught in pack ice north-west of King William
Island. Franklin died of a stroke in 1847, and was interred in a crypt blasted
in the ice. Twenty-four men perished in the motionless ships before, in 1848,
the survivors struck out on foot over the ice. Almost all succumbed to hunger,
scurvy or lead poisoning while trying to reach land. C In
his personal correspondence and in his published memoirs, Franklin comes across
as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept
introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an
amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full
advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with
a defining character trait for which there is no historical evidence:
Langsamkeit (’slowness’, or ’calmness’). D Slowness
influences not only Franklin’s behaviour, but also his vision, his thought and
his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness—Die Entdeckung der
Langsamkeit depicts Franklin as a young boy, playing catch badly because his
reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves
not to fall into step with ’their way of doing things’. For Nadolny, Franklin’s
fatal fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment
suited to his peculiar slowness. He describes Franklin as a boy dreaming of the
’open water and the time without hours and days’ which exist in the far north,
and of finding in the Arctic a place ’where nobody would find him too
slow’. E These were all qualities which the historical
Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny’s concentration and exaggeration
of them isn’t unreasonable. Even as an adult, his slowness of thought means that
he is unable to speak fluently, so he memorises ’entire fleets of words and
batteries of response’, and speaks a languid, bric-a-brac language. In the Navy,
his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from
his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way, and gradually
earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up
his report of an engagement, he replies: ’When I tell something, sir, I use my
own rhythm.’ A lieutenant says approvingly of him: ’Because Franklin is so slow,
he never loses time.’ F Since it was first published in
Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies
and been translated into 15 languages. It has been named as one of German
literature’s twenty ’contemporary classics’, and it has been adopted as a manual
and manifesto by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes
as diverse as sustainable development, the Protestant Church, management
science, motoring policy and pacifism. G The various
groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the
high-speed culture of Postmodernity. Nadolny’s Franklin appeals to them because
he is immune to ’the compulsion to be constantly occupied’, and to the idea that
’someone was better if he could do the same thing fast.’ Several German churches
have used him in their symposia and focus groups as an example of peacefulness,
piety and self-confidence. A centre for paraplegics in Basle organises a regular
Marsch der Langsamkeit (a ’march of slowness’ or ’of the slow’), inspired by the
novel. Nadolny has appeared as a guest speaker for RIO, a Lucerne-based
organisation which aims to reconcile management principles with ideas of
environmental sustainability. H A management journal in
the U.S. described The Discovery of Slowness as a ’major event not only for
connoisseurs of fine historical fiction, but also for those of us who concern
themselves with leadership, communication and systems-thinking issues’. It’s
easy to see where the attraction lies for the management crowd. The novel is
crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctiliousness and
profitability: ’As a rule, there are always three points in time: the right one,
the lost one and the premature one.’ ’What did too late mean They hadn’t waited
for it long enough, that’s what it meant.’ —London Review of Books