2.2 Comparative literature by format L
An author may sometimes write a roman with the purpose of avoiding risk as much as an aviation expert, a practitioner of emergency medicine, or a stock market guru. Thomas Mann (1875–1955), for example, wrote his novels and articles to express his unease about the stagnation of German development in the early part of 20th century. Lu Xun (1881–1936) also wrote his fiction to relieve the Chinese people from a mental disease called ma-ma-hu-hu (human irresponsibility including fraud). Ogai Mori (1862–1922) wrote historical narratives to preserve the romance of Japan’s feudal past and to reject the commonly modern equality of the future after the death of the Meiji Emperor and General Maresuke Mogi.
The style of Thomas Mann is rooted in irony. Mann always leaves gaps in his realism as a condition of his prose so that he can criticize reality even while he illustrates it. The ironic distance becomes limited by the character of the medium of language even if one could write the world as exactly and objectively as possible. The fuzzy logic of Lotfi Zadeh maintains that one cannot write the exact system if it becomes more complex.
Both sides have limitations. Objectivity may be lost in the tracing of an object with depth. At the same time, a mere superficial description may be objective but inadequate. I perceive the reading brain of “The magic mountain” as “irony and fuzzy” and then the synergic reading becomes “fuzzy and neural.” I extracted “fuzzy logic” as the writing brain of Thomas Mann.
花村嘉英訳（2018）「シナジーのメタファーの作り方」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura