Feuilletons

During the dark days and weeks since late October -- the period after my old computer crashed, but before I finally pulled myself together and secured a new one -- a computer that arrived only this week -- I had ample time to think about the nature of my blog.  

After nearly sixteen years, and over 1,500 posted essays, the time to think about it did seem ripe.

What exactly do I write?  Essays, but what kind?

Lots of book reviews and movie reviews. Lots of thoughts about politics.  Observations about nature, especially about Seattle's peculiarities of weather.  Holidays.  Travels, completed or anticipated.  Reprints of old travel  journals and newspaper articles.  Musical experiences.  As I look over the list of some 1,500 posts, there's a bit of everything.

I've even written a few feuilletons.  What's that, you ask?  And well you might.

I'm reading a biography of an author and journalist from the first part of the century, a Jew from what is now western Ukraine but that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  His name was Joseph Roth, and his novels were largely autobiographical -- which isn't unusual -- but so was his journalism -- which was more so.

He was a foreign correspondent for a Frankfurt, Germany, newspaper.  But he preferred to take a subjective approach toward his news dispatches, rather than the purely objective approach they taught me and my classmates in high school journalism.  This objective approach was, he felt, despicably and soullessly German and American.  

I will discuss Roth's biography -- Endless Flight by Keiron Pim -- in a later post.  But I mention it now because -- in addition to his news articles written as a foreign correspondent -- he also wrote numerous feuilletons for his Frankfurt newspaper.  While journalists -- meaning American journalists -- don't like to let their feelings intrude obviously into their formal news stories, they often do write feuilletons -- feature stories -- without, probably, even knowing the word feuilleton.  

These tend to be fairly short feature articles based on the writer's observations, and discussing -- explicitly or by inference -- his own feelings about what he has seen.  The observation serves as a jumping off platform for the subjective feeling or thought that he wishes to convey.

I suppose that the readers of the New York Times who send in short discussions of their observations or experiences as they go about the city, designed to arouse laughter or sadness in the reader of those observations -- observations that are published each Sunday under the heading of "Metropolitan Diary" -- are writing (or attempting to write) very brief feuilletons.

Without categorizing what I was doing, I've written a number of such feuilletons, with greater or lesser success.  For example, in August 2017, I described watching a sobbing homeless person being escorted off a light rail platform by a security officer, and forced to enter a train stopped at the station.  I was unable to determine exactly was going on, but I felt free to imagine for my readers the mental state of the upset passenger and the events that had brought him to this unfortunate event.  And I wondered -- far too late -- what I might have done to ease his pain, and why I had failed to do it.

The objective observation was the interaction between the crying man and the security guard.  The subjective component, which converted the observation into a feuilleton, was my attempt to empathize with the man's feelings and reconstruct his history.

I know nothing about the bearded guy's back story, although I tend to make up stories for people in my head. But I'd say he was a gentleman who had no further physical or emotional resources available, regardless of what "act" of his life he was contemplating. I suspect we are surrounded by people like him. Maybe they still have enough pride not to cry. In public. But they want to.

Joseph Roth had written in 1919, with far greater artistic sensitivity:

I saw children blowing soap bubbles.  Not in 1913 -- yesterday.  They were real soap bubbles.  A little bottle full of soapy water, a straw, four children and a quiet alleyway in the bright sunshine of a summer morning.  The soap bubbles were big, beautiful, rainbow-coloured globes and they swam lightly and gently through the blue air.  There was no doubt these were real soap bubbles.  Not the soap bubbles of patriotic phraseology risen up from the muddy puddles of war editorials, the nationalist party, or the press corps, but beautiful, rainbow coloured soap bubbles.

The children and the bubbles were a simple observation, but Roth adds his own comparison of the children's innocence with the slimy, dirty "soap bubbles" of right-wing propaganda, as well as a reminder to his readers of the simple urban joys they had enjoyed in pre-war days.

Feuilletons are deceptively simple in  appearance, but not easy to do well.  I may make a conscious effort to write more of them, now that I better understand the form.

And know what they're called.  Even if I can't pronounce the word.