Written by | Zhao Song
Muzier, born in 1890, is an Austrian writer, one of the most important Writers of German-language literature of the twentieth century, alongside Kafka, Joyce and Proust, the most important great writers of the twentieth century. Representative works include "The Man Without Personality", "The Confusion of Student Torres", "Three Women", "Legacy works" and so on.
Robert Muzier, to me is a giant being. This impression originally came from Kundera's admiration for him in The Art of the Novel, when I hadn't read his work. For this I can even forgive Kundera's misleading quote: "Just as Nietzsche brought philosophy closer to the novel, Muzir brought the novel closer to philosophy." And "If Fielding is telling a story, then Flaubert is telling a story, and Muzier, he wants to think of a story" is a clever empty phrase.
Emphasizing the literary brilliance of Nietzsche's philosophical writings is certainly a superimposed praise, but it brings out that Muzier brought the novel closer to philosophy, which not only does not make sense, but also implies the clichéd view that proximity to philosophy can add value to the novel. Of course, I know that Kundera tried to emphasize the iconic changes in the novel at different times in this deliberately simplified way, and in what ways they appear in the novel to a greater or lesser extent, either implicitly or explicitly, and indeed there are prominent changes in Flaubert and Muzier, but when he simplifies it in this way, it is easy to overlook the basic fact that it is the important change in the way they perceive the world that gives rise to a change in the way the novel as a whole, and this change does not reduce to their "description" or "thinking" A story.
Surviving Works, by Robert Muzier, translated by Xu Chang, Edition: The Commercial Press, February 2018
The mechanism by which Muzir's novels took place
Perhaps it was Muzier's intricate way of fiction that led Kundera to write those big and inappropriate golden sentences in the excitement of discovering a new continent. On the surface, Muzier's novel is indeed very much like "thinking", but we only need to read a few pages of his novel to know that its way cannot be reduced to "thinking", but rather more like the coexistence of analysis and reconstruction- just like the surgeon, who uses the invisible scalpel of words to dissect the thinking, imagination and lust of the characters layer by layer, and not only that, but also integrates the generative analysis of the relationship between the characters and others, things, environments and even the world. Muzier is, of course, a writer of profound thoughts, and may even at some times show an almost philosopherly temperament, but this does not mean that he intends to be close to philosophy, but rather that his thoughts are precisely in the purely literary sense—the world in which flesh-and-blood living individuals are generated by various related phenomena. It is precisely for this reason that when the reader follows the depth of the tip of his scalpel, in the face of the soul texture that unfolds one after another like living flesh, there is even a kind of pain or pleasure imagined in the semi-anesthesia state, and at some moment is shocked by the intensity of this depth - as if everything is being super magnified like capillaries and nerve fibers, and appears as a slowly intertwining rhythm.
This way of writing is most strongly reflected in the great novel "The Man Without Personality", but in Muzier's own compilation of "The Legacy of the World", we can see precisely some of the roots or embryonic states of this way of writing.
Muzier's explanation is particularly noteworthy when it comes to the predictability of reality shown in some passages: "In fact, everyone can make such a prophecy, as long as he observes human life in some inattentive nuances, and commits himself to a feeling of 'waiting' that seems to have been 'speechless' until it is stirred up at some point, and is therefore only ordinary in what we do and what surrounds us." In particular, the phrase "observing human life in some inattentive nuances and surrendering oneself to a feeling of 'waiting'" can almost serve as the most intimate identifier to the entrance to Muzier's novel system, at least revealing the mechanism by which his fictional creation took place.
It determines the disintegration of everyday time in Muzier's observation and writing, and is replaced by another extremely slow state of time—he sees many high-speed cameras that are constantly recording the subtleties of human life, like "slow-motion photographers diving beneath the turbulent surface, and its magic lies in the fact that the viewer looks at the things of life as if they were swimming around underwater with their eyes open." When that "feeling of waiting" is "stirred up by a moment," and everything that is ingested is reconstructed through words, what we read is the effect that resembles a super-slow shot—just as we see the details of every moment of a flower opening, a drop of water falling and breaking, a bullet breaking through an egg, every slight flutter of the skin and muscles of an athlete's face.
In the "World Heritage", the basic state of this method can best be reflected in "Flycatcher Paper". What is shocking about this work is not only Muzier's meticulous depiction of a fly caught by fly paper and struggling to die, but also the strong sense of suffocation that accompanies the delicate details and multiple analyses of the fly's state, and the tragic implication that the fly can also be tricked by fate. "It looks like a tiny human eye, constantly opening and closing." In the face of the last sentence, no matter who you are, what kind of life you are experiencing, and in what way you are guessing or experiencing the truth of fate, it is difficult not to rethink the moment when fate will suddenly and completely capture you.
Paintings by Egon Schiller.
There is everything in a concise description
Muzier's way of generating novels, and its mechanism of operation, determine that it has a wealth of possibilities for change. The key is that it can fully crack the hard shell of human life, allowing various factors to overflow and penetrate each other at different levels. The ideal example of this change is the "Black Eagle" placed at the end of the "Living Legacy". As a variation of that way of writing, the novel echoes with "Flytrap Paper" beginning to end, merging into a "container", so that other short works with the same theme, genre and writing method have acquired a sense of wholeness in the book- they can be either sharply revealing and satirizing the vulgar nature of some mainstream cultural phenomena, or some strange parody of fairy tales, or essay-style words that carefully explain the different states of people and things under different observation methods... You may even feel that whatever you write can be written in Muzier's pen with a unique angle, deep and profound, giving people the feeling that the content content is far beyond the volume.
As a pressed work, "The Black Eagle" actually has this feeling - it presents the depth of the long novel in the length of a short story. It begins with the background of "modernity" as a backdrop of declining religious influence and the disintegration of traditional family relations, and depicts the complex process of a "modern man" who strives to break free, almost instinctively ignorant of the pursuit of freedom and dreams, sometimes disillusioned, sometimes trying to find a fulcrum in reflection. He does not want to accept any prejudgment of the fate of the individual based on conventional values, nor is he completely unable to identify with the "meaning" and "law" of those worldly habits, and is aware of the "violentness" implied in them. To this end, he not only nearly cut off contact with his parents, but also left his sleeping wife forever by the sound of the nightingale's cry in the middle of the night.
“...... I was awakened by something that was gradually approaching, a sound approaching. I judged once or twice in a daze. They then stop on the roof ridge of the house next door and jump into the air from there, like dolphins. In fact, I can also say that it is like the signal flares when fireworks are set off, because the impression of the flares is always preserved, they are gently scattered on the window glass when they fall, and then fall into the depths like large silver stars. I felt a strange state at the moment, but this awakening was different from the daytime. It's a feeling that's hard to describe, but when I think about it, it's as if something has turned me over. I am no longer three-dimensional, but something sinking. The room is not empty, but is made of a certain material, a material that is not available during the day, a black transparent material that makes people feel black, and I am also made of this material. Time flows through the pulse of rapid excitement. What's the reason why something unprecedented shouldn't happen at this moment? - That's a nightingale, the one who sings! I whispered to myself. ”
So he traveled far and wide, traveling the world, experiencing different lives, and reflecting on his own existence in the cruel war. “...... I entered a dead end, a dead end in the southern Tyrolean record, a battle line that turned from the bloody cemetery of Vyzena to Lake Caldozo. There, it traveled like a wave of sunlight through deep valleys, over two hills with beautiful names, then re-emerged on the other side of the valley, and then disappeared into a quiet mountain. It was October, and the almost unoccupied war cemeteries were buried in fallen leaves, the blue waters of the lake burning silently, and the hills lay still like huge dry wreaths, like wreaths—I often thought, but I was not afraid of them. The valley surrounded them intermittently, but at the other end of this strip of land which we thought had been occupied, it no longer had this sweet absent-mindedness, but like a trombone, low, broad, heroic, blowing all the way to distant places. Few people can subtly imply everything as Muzir in a concise description.
After passing by and surviving death, the man later discovered that the sound of the nightingale that had touched him was actually that of a crow—it was good at imitating the sounds of other birds. Especially in the end, when the crow says "I am your mother", in connection with the previous parents who died strangely in poverty and some kind of despair, perhaps we can think of how a person can throw himself into the unknown and complete the rebirth of the self with difficulty and twists, and all the key touchpoints are symbols of self-awakening. "You have to imagine how beautiful it is, there is no such beautiful thing in a stable life." He spoke of it all, and that's how he existed.
"World heritage" is like "The Man Without Personality", a shell on the big seashore beach, when you pick one up and put it in your ear, you can hear the sound of the waves echoing inside. It is most appropriate to enter the endless sea of "People Without Personality" through "The Legacy of the World". In addition, even if we only read this "Masterpieces in the World", it is enough to find that Muzier, who lived a hundred years ago, is more like a contemporary avant-garde writer in terms of writing style and thought—his profound insight and sharp analysis of the disintegrating human world at the beginning of the twentieth century is still extremely vivid and profound and full of foresight today.