The movie "Sanatorium in the Mirror of Sand" is adapted from Bruno Schultz's novel "The Sanatorium where the Hourglass Is the Signature", where time and space are stuck in a strange sanatorium and become "hourglass".
Dino Buzati
Italian writer, known as "Kafka of Italy". He is adept at profoundly depicting people, fates, desires, weaving magical, secret brushwork, and even challenging rational facts to make fantasies come true.
Desert of the Tatars
Author: (Italian) Dino Buzatti
Translator: Liu Ruting
Edition: Houlang | Sichuan People's Publishing House
July 2018
Dino Buzzatti's Desert of the Tatars earned the author the reputation of "Kafka of Italy", established his literary status, and was the pinnacle of his entire writing career.
Desert Tatars, a novel about the stagnation of time or its out-of-balance, tells the story of a soldier named Drogo who is inexplicably sent to serve in an isolated castle deep in the desert, initially full of hope and looking forward to making a contribution to the war against the Tatars, but after more than thirty years in a dream, he has hardly met an enemy, and when the war finally comes, he is dying of old age and is sent back to his hometown.
The clock shrinks slowly
A universal fable about modern life
Before Einstein's theory of relativity proposed the principle of "clock slow shrinkage", artists from different traditions had spontaneously perceived or imagined the fluctuations of the continuation of "time" under the influence of interfering factors such as islands, valleys, mountains and other geographical folds, and the traveler was trapped in a special and often closed space because of extreme weather such as heavy snow, power outages, failure of transportation, entanglement of interpersonal relations, institutional bondage, and unfinished adventure plans. In the contrast between the two heterogeneous spaces inside and outside, the sense of separation in time and the slowness in its flow rate are experienced.
In ancient China, there was the legend of the "Rotten Ke People", as well as the chronological disorder conceived by Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Origin": "Since yun's ancestors avoided the chaos of Qin, he led his wife Yi people to this desperate situation, did not come back, and then separated from outsiders." Ask what kind of world it is, but I don't know whether there is a Han, no matter Wei jin." Similar themes are common in both Eastern and Western novels, such as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, James Hilton's The Vanishing Horizon, Washington Owen's The Legend of Sleepy Valley, Tawfig Hakim's The Man in the Cave, and Kenzaburo Oe's The Football Team of the First Year.
Despite the complexity of the backgrounds, most of these novels appear in their respective civilizations when they meet others, or when violent cultural collisions and generations change occur. For example, "Magic Mountain" faces the crisis of the Western world before and after World War I, "Vanishing Horizon" is about the discovery of Tibet, "The Legend of Sleepy Valley" is behind the conflict between British chivalric culture and american spirit, "The Cave Man" is an allegory of the stagnation and decline of the Arab world in the 20th century, and "The Football Team of Wanyan First Year" deals with the relationship between Japan's traditional countryside and Westernized cities. Therefore, literary works about the stagnation of time often begin with the protagonist's "cross-border" travel.
In Desert tatars, this "cross-border" appears at the beginning of the story, and the novel depicts the surprise and discomfort of the protagonist's first entry into the castle from the perspective of an outsider, which will be diluted to no trace for the next thirty years. The spatial opposition shifts between the desert-frontier and the area of everyday life not described in detail in the book, and also implies between military-imperial and personal freedom, the former being considered stagnant or too slow in time, and the latter representing "normal" time, flowing at a uniform rate.
The plot of Desert tatars originates from the author's analogy between the life of his own newspaper reporter and the imaginary life of a military guard in the novel, and Dino Buzati himself, who has been a reporter for the Corriere della Sera for many years from 1928, considers it absurd and uninteresting work. Thus, the book is also a universal allegory of modern life, in which the protagonist suffers unprecedented setbacks in his contact with institutions, bureaucratic machines, and grand narratives, and as a response to stress, he tries to adjust his consciousness, smooth out his edges and corners, and soon identify with his environment. He lost the opportunity to start a family and have children, and was left alone and gained nothing, supported by the futile expectation of the future; although he was weakly aware of his imprisonment, he had neither the momentum to break free nor the enthusiasm to overcome, and he was unaware of the changes in the outside world. This is the life of Drogo in the book and an integral part of the life experience of contemporary people.
Invisible "imprisonment"
Invent meaning in the long stretch of time
In the early days of modern society, people felt or imagined the heterogeneous passage of time, often through the spatial structure of the town and the village, and this model may continue until globalization has smoothed out all the folds of the earth. In the linear time model initiated by industrialization, the countryside is understood as lagging, untapped, and therefore pre-urbanized, so that some of these areas, such as inaccessible valleys, mountains, and basins, because of their geographical depth or closure, are imagined as "sedimentary layers" of past time.
On the other hand, in the encounter between East and West, the existing city-rural binary structure was redistributed within a global framework, and the East, including China and India, was accused of being an underdeveloped countryside (the description of the "Asiatic mode of production" implied the judgment of the "stagnation" of the East), and novels such as "Disappearing Horizon" about the "sealing" of eastern time appeared. In the Western world, time stops in "time machines" such as sanatoriums and castles, as described in works such as "The Magic Mountain", "The Sanatorium made the signature of the hourglass", and "The Tatar Desert".
In fact, "Tatar Desert" also implies the East in the anthropological sense, the Tatars in the book (Tartari) prototype is the Mongols, and the vast "empire" will obviously trigger associations about the eastern countries (perhaps the Soviet Union). The desert, on the border of the empire, became itself a deserted "vacuum" in the empire's territory. The castle was again inside the desert, a place where it was impossible to get the people inside out and get any news from the outside. All the plot extensions in the novel are premised on the closure of space: "People say that no one has ever crossed this wasteland. The enemy never got there, never fought, never happened anything. The guards were "desperate" to cause trouble, so they killed the soldiers of the same camp who had gone out on patrol and returned, because they were the first to appear on the horizon in years. Giovanni Drogo, an expectant lieutenant who had just arrived from the city, had planned to return in four months at the latest, but was trapped in it for decades. Seeing the arrival of the war, he finally waited for the moment when the "meaning" occurred, but he was old and frail, replaced by a regular army sent from the "capital", and had no chance to participate in the only battle in his life. When he saw the recruits who were as excited as he was, he knew that the other side would be involved in the same scam as himself, but he did not know how to dissuade him.
Derived from The Tatar Desert, it is easy to think of Solzhenitsyn and his "concentration camp literature", because both are literature about "poverty" and about how people invent meaning in the long course of time. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of the protagonist's "unremarkable" day in prison, ending with:
"The day has passed, there is no unpleasant thing, this day can be said to be happy."
He should have lived three thousand six hundred and fifty days from beginning to end.
Because there are three leap years, there are three more days..."
Brodsky, a poet who spent time in the Soviet Union, said of his prison experience: "When it comes to the enemy, there is one achievement in the prison: the lack of space. The prison formula is to balance scarce space with affluent time. That's what really bothers you, because you can't beat it. There is no choice in prison, and you can see the future at a glance like you look through a telescope. This can drive people crazy. As Brodsky had in mind, the characters in Buzatti's novels use telescopes as a tool to extend time rather than open up space. On the surface, they are using telescopes to broaden their horizons and detect "enemy situations", but in fact, telescopes are confirming for observers what may happen in the future - when the road will be repaired to the feet, when will the war be opened... Extremely bored, they even create the illusion of an enemy invasion themselves. A lost horse and a few unknown sparks at night will cause people to speculate about the invasion day after day. Although they themselves understand that these assumptions are nothing more than senseless consolation. "Every day spent here is exactly the same, no change, but it flies by quickly. Yesterday was exactly the same as the day before yesterday, and he couldn't separate these past days from each other," Buzatti wrote.
"Desert of the Tatars" can therefore be said to be a novel about how people find meaning in the poverty of space. Drogo's barracks seemed open and there was no external "imprisonment", but the surrounding desert shrouded everything, and he nominally had the right to leave, but this right was institutionally similar to "Twenty-second Military Rule", in fact making people feel like staying in a prison surrounded by an invisible fence. Similarly, in the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin's novel "Waiting" set in China in the 1960s, the protagonist Kong Lin drags on for eighteen years in order to divorce his wife Shuyu, and the "waiting" in the novel takes place in a self-sufficient border hospital, and the lack of space is caused by the protagonist's weak and procrastinating personality on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has a certain relationship with ethical and legal factors - in the story, interpersonal relations are themselves a kind of "imprisonment".
Differentiate your imagination
Recognize the possibilities within yourself
Among the motifs of "Waiting for War", the contemporary novel that is more close to "Desert of the Tatars" is Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, which also contains the assumptions about the origins of the legend of the "arrival of the barbarians": "Privately I think that this is something that must happen once in every dynasty, that it must be like this, that this is just a fragment of the hysterical statement of the barbarians." Not a single woman in the border area did not dream of a pair of dark barbarian hands reaching out from under the bed and holding her ankles; not a single man who was not frightened by the imaginary sight of a barbarian running to his house for a feast, smashing plates, setting fire to curtains, raping his daughter. But I think it's all imagined by those who are too comfortable, and you let me see an army of barbarians, and I will believe it. ”
It attempts to reveal the role of man's imagination in the dynamic mechanism of war, and to put it more clearly, it implies that war is somehow artificially created or "designed", that it originates from dissatisfaction with a long-standing state of peace that has been imbued (and also a dissatisfaction with the exhaustion of possibilities at the moment of the "end of history"), and that the anticipation of war, once it becomes the mindset of the inhabitants, evolves into the fuse for the outbreak of war, as depicted in Desert of the Tatars.
In this kind of imagination, war has become the ideological sustenance of people beyond "lasting peace", and the continuous interpretation of war in people's speech and minds has become the source of motivation for war to finally occur realistically. Like Drogo in Buzati's, the old administrator in Couche's story, who thought he could get ahead in the war, was eventually replaced by the regular army from the capital and a man named Colonel Joel, who himself was treated with cruelty like a barbarian. Both authors note that in the game of two military forces on the empire's borders, the positions of the indigenous peoples and long-term guards occupying a structural minority are absent and their power is underestimated. They are often like Drogo and the old administrators, crushed and abandoned in the cracks between the vast empire-army, and lost control of their destiny in the omnipresent power relations, so they cannot become a "free man".
All in all, reading novels like Desert Tatars and Waiting for the Barbarians can help us understand what is happening and expecting from local soldiers and natives behind real similar border conflicts. Especially although seemingly unrelated on the surface – both books are written with a very vague reference to China, and the Western Eastern narrative has a long tradition of nomadicizing the East – the experiences described by the authors can be extremely effective in prompting us to reflect on China's own uneven experience of the Inner Asian frontier, including how we deal with the interaction between Han civilization and frontier minority civilization, and even, on a literary level, how we identify our "empire"...
In the novel's imagination of the differences in time perception in poor spaces, Desert tatar also offers us a certain possibility of recognizing the differences within our own community, and sometimes, when we overemphasize that "the world is flat," the characters in Desert of Tatars will jump out of the forgotten corners, prompting us not to ignore these unplaced remainders.
□ Qi Chen