Tropics – the Myth of the Journey
“We alternate something, we make it different, absurd, upside down, and look, it is still something. We think a thought perverse, and it is pure as a virgin. … Learn how reality scans! Equal rights for paradox. It opens up new worlds, it brings good fortune, it broadens possibilities; and to the artificial Paradises that a Viking of the mind experiences or has experienced because the old Paradise became over-populated, we add artificial realities, for a census has shown that normal reality is full up! …” (Robert Müller: Tropen, Ch. V)
Döblin on Robert Müller
The Viennese literary figure Robert Müller (1887-1924) was singled out by Döblin in a brief but packed paragraph on modern novels inhis June 1920 “Linke Poot” essay The Boy Blows on his Magic Horn:
Some modern novels. The explosion of styles. As much happens on one page as once in whole books. There’s an incredible capacity to depict things, especially among the Viennese; Robert Müller for example is a dazzling wordsmith. Compare a sentence from Elective Affinities or from Heyse with what is achieved here: huge linguistic conquests and victories. They prefer adventures, because they protest against the narrowness of the bourgeois; they are forever travelling, gathering visions, changes, colours. But they don’t see much, the light they shine is too sharp for details, it eats individuality, the physical. Only large units are possible, enthusiasms, inclinations for the maximal with abruptnesses; it brings technology along with it, the necessity for harsh lights, heavy shadows. Often women as heroes, harlots even. It’s understandable: the harlot is the female Faust, or Faust as a female is the harlot. The Faust of these moderns is the one of pleasures, of experience, not of action; hence the female. The connection with the technical, the challenges of the linguistic material, is obvious: what we need is the polychromatic. An overcooked style; only the toughest material has withstood the heat to be served to us. Actually I do an injustice in naming a single author; the movement is anonymous and enjoys the services of various functionaries.
INTRODUCING ROBERT MÜELLER TO ENGLISH-SPEAKING READERS
Intrigued by Döblin’s reference to a writer I’d never heard of, I went exploring and found online texts at https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/autor/robert-muller-431, including the most significant fiction from his short but intensely productive life as essayist, novelist, publisher and cultural activist (e.g. he organised Karl May’s final public appearance in March 1912).
Mueller’s novel TROPICS: The Myth of the Journey, published in 1915 (about the time Döblin’s first great epic The Three Leaps of Wang Lun appeared) is seen by German critics as his magnum opus. It purports to be an account of an expedition by three White adventurers into the Amazon jungle in search of lost Conquistador gold. The surface action (which takes up around one-third of the text) is accompanied by pools and bogs and sun-drenched clearings of interior speculation, hallucination and reflection on consciousness, on dreams and reality, on civilisation and its discontents, on barbarism, on life vs. technology, on love and eroticism, and much more. The language, as Döblin noted, is incredibly vivid, vigorous, and disconcerting.
The narrative is framed as a “report” by the only survivor (but not for long) of the expedition: Mr Average German Engineer Hans Brandlberger. Hans tells us at the same time too much and too little to be a dependable narrator. The published “report” is accompanied by a Foreword by someone called “Robert Müller” (who is clearly not the author Robert Müller). So along with linguistic virtuosity we have layers of fictivity, which allow the text to explore controversial topics while distancing the (real) author from necessarily identifying with them.
It seems Tropen was not republished after 1915 until attempts were made in the late 1970s, only to fall foul of copyright problems and obstruction by a Viennese writer who claimed to be planning a Complete Works of Müller but never delivered. A new edition eventually appeared in 1990 in Germany (IGEL Verlag Literatur, ISBN 3-927104-11-6), with a long Afterword covering the Viennese literary milieu of the time, Müller’s short life (he killed himself in 1924 aged 37), and Lit Crit angles on the text of the novel.
Robert Müller seems to be quite uinknown in the English-speaking world; I have not so far found any translations. So below are the first two chapters of Brandlberger’s “report”, in English.
(Incidentally, one might surmise that the burgeoning life of the Greenland chapters in Döblin’s Mountains Oceans Giants reflects to some degree his reading of Tropen.)
Excerpt from TROPICS: The Myth of the Journey
by Robert Müller (1915)
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
I
I have seen girls and women of every land and race, coloured beauties of the most varied delectability, but the strange supernatural influence that emanated from Zana I have never again encountered. And yet Zana was only a wretched Indian woman, primitive from the splendid skirt that encircled her otherwise naked loins, to the strong fingertips that knew how to grub pitilessly in the wounds of men.
And there was that man Slim, the American. He had courage and yet a conscience, was like a man out of his time, filled with a mediaeval lust for adventure, belated heir of the conquistador race, cool and heated, tall as a tree, strong and intimidating. From his father, an American sailor, he had the brains and willpower of the north, from his coloured mother the whims of the blood. This unusual combination in Slim’s heritage made him one of the characteristic personalities of that Central and South American zone which even now is a gathering ground for brutal male natures and piratical types.
The year 19xx found me on the island of Curaçao, blown there by a technical mission for the United States up north. I had been briefed on the excitements and oddities of that semi-civilization, and eagerly awaited what was to come. There I got to know a Dutchman named van den Dusen. He had been an officer in the colonial army on Java, then a merchant by profession, with that not at all unmodern admixture of the mercenary who stakes his energies and ingenuity on the most reckless deeds. In his head even at this point he carried a whole list of ventures which he made no effort to conceal from me, and which would in his opinion earn him sensations and riches to the end of his days.
My doubts showed. He was almost offended, mentioned a proposal, coughed up details. “It was two years ago,” he said, calculating. “I was in Cartagena, where I had dealings with a man called Slim. He carried around with him the most outrageous notions – it was then I got to know them. All a man had to do, listen well now, was literally carry gold away from where it lay. Millions in gold, mark my words!”
“Nice,” I said, “and why doesn’t he go and carry it away, as you say …?”
“Well,” the Dutchman replied, falling suddenly from enthusiasm into a cool distant logic and, as the expert, had now to dismiss this possibility once and for all with a quick shrug of the shoulders, “he can’t haul it away all by himself, and it takes money to make it happen, money;” and he added in a tone of regret, “he’s been playing a poor hand for a while now.”
“Hm. Anyway, where’s this gold supposed to be,” I asked, only half interested. I already knew that legends of treasure in South America and thereabouts were as common as mosquitoes.
The Dutchman’s face turned sly, and he looked at me in amusement. “Secret!” he hissed. We let the matter drop.
Two weeks later I came face to face with Slim. He arrived on a Dutch mail steamer. Van den Dusen greeted him like an old friend, and in a meaningfully raised voice asked how his affairs were doing. Now, Slim did not seem put out. It occurred to me that anyone who thought it worthwhile focusing their curiosity for a moment on him, a quaint figure even by Romanesque standards, was regarded by him with suspicion. And at once it was already out in the open. He was, he said, surrounded by spies, and every form of free action was thereby closed to him. I saw the inquisitive foreigners grow bashful under his gaze, they walked on discomposed, not one dared to look back. The vulture-like face with the piercing dark eyes interested me. He was either a scoundrel, or a thoroughly unambiguous man well adapted to life who knew what he wanted and, for all that it betrayed his own character, remained a solitary actor. The remarks he made about the treasure tale, more report than narrative, fluent, precise and plausible, brought me for the first time closer to him, and tipped the scales for my undecided friendship towards the more sympathetic alternative.
On one of his many wanderings, during a Columbian revolution he saved the life of an Indian soldier who came from somewhere in the interior and had been torn by violence away from the peaceful huts of his tribe. Enough such individuals find themselves among the plundering armies put together by the generals of feuding South American parties; they resist at first, are then forced into service with the whip and maybe with death threats, and later go along willingly because they know they could be hung from the nearest tree if somewhere or other, on their own in a village or among the always unruly mob of a strange town, their uncivil profession should become known. In gratitude the brown fellow, who later on did not after all evade his fate, gave his officer a curious earnest of fortune: a baked mass of sand, a kind of tile on which a jumble of mysterious Indian signs danced together.
The story he told about it sounded mythical, but Slim swore that things in his life even more vexing than this had turned out true. The hieroglyphs, according to him, were a facsimile of an inscription on a rock in the interior of Guiana. A waterfall cascaded there from an overhanging rock ledge; the roaring waters shot in an arc of parallel silver bands into a brown polished basin amid densest jungle. But behind the ceaselessly rolling silvery film there lay heaped the treasure of a caravan whose white escort, centuries ago, had put the Indian guides and bearers to the sword at this spot once they became surplus to requirements, and then in the end had succumbed, to a man, to the bloody vengeance of the survivors of that tribe which later produced the Colombian mercenary.
Slim, whose pathos had begun to draw me on, said that two fruitless attempts to locate the treasure already lay behind him. One difficulty was to avoid discovery by the tribe, whose medicine men and priests even now guarded the secret.
The story of the rock with the chiselled signs sounded not implausible. Everywhere primitive memorials to Indian scraps, duels and mysterious events of tribal politics loomed along riverbanks and inhabited oases in the jungles of the South American interior. Whatever scepticism I might feel about the outcome of such an expedition, achievement of the final goal, my urge for adventure had received a jolt, I became nervous, appeared dissatisfied, my brain began to speculate, and soon the cafés of the provincial Venezuelan towns in which the three of us were gadding about became to me the most odious jailhouses in the world. But one day we began to gather equipment, my urge for activity acquired scope, this lasted a month and then suddenly all fell silent around us, uncannily silent, the jungle closed overhead and the world of machines and conversations remained the dream of a relentlessly active imagination, carrying back into that culture a river of gold.
II
We found ourselves during those days on the brown rippling waters of the Rio Taquado. Four Indians, experienced rivermen and jungle guides, paddled us in two boats. The margins of the water that played lazily against our keels as we headed into the current were nowhere to be identified with certainty. Lagoons trespassing onto land caught in their brown glassy mirror the drowsy steaming calm of a silently waiting jungle that wove kilometres-long systems of creepers together into an exuberant leafy curtain. Islands and promontories crept closer, on their backs clumps of giant entwined plants and trees that presented a hazardous barrier, forcing us to steer a meandering course. But once we had gone past and the waves from our swift canoes reached them, what had appeared solid began to rock. Muddy black glistening shapes dipped in and out, wormlike branches that had menaced like spears in the clear water set up a rhythmic bobbing, and grasped jerkily at us. The river’s course, snaking along in wide curves, was a pearlstring of lakes big and small, an uninterrupted scenario of inlets and bays; these now became swampy shallows from which the heart-shaped paddles stirred up bubbles and cloudy eddies; and now were confined into leafy tunnels in which the water seemed to stand still, palpably dark, unhealthy and greasy as it bore us along. For this was what such places stimulated: they suddenly summoned into consciousness one’s own weight. You could feel the wide obstinate resistance of the steaming water-masses against the hull. When the vessels glided harmlessly over the water’s surface it seemed as firm and secure as the surface of dry land; but now the observation was of an indeterminate hovering. The usual feeling of being at the farthest edge of everything, which you know in yourself in the face of the endless All of the sky on the highest mountains – that feeling was lacking here. We were hovering over impure depths, and a displacement that was habituated to only the one side now transposed itself to a second.
In shallow places warty lizards and alligator-families floated in clumps, so that from a distance they looked like cliffs of karst. The beat of the paddles exploded them teeming into gyrating water, pearls shot up from bomb blasts and set themselves into white and pink foam-eyes. Right and left, ahead and behind, the forest held its silence, the broody air disturbed only by the dropping of ripe fruit and the wiry scrape of gnarled dead branches collapsing. Where what seemed an end came nearer, at an unspoken magical spell the grey leaf-wall suddenly opened out and as the canoes shot forward fell back like an illusory curtain to reveal a dazzling new stretch of riverine landscape. Behind us the banks were forever closing in, evil, aroused, other than we had found them, disturbed by this uncanny force: people bringing shuddering vibrations to their habitual placidity, nightmarish disturbances to their dreams …
Stop; what was that? For a moment slumbering psychic forces were aroused, my lethargy plopped like a fruit pod into the silent brooding forest, for six whole seconds I felt fresh and bright as if on the Sunday pavement of a pretty central European town, thinking an unknown thought. I had had an insight, transient as lightning, a memory tried to compose itself, a couple of concepts coming vaguely together in a judgement … and now the white light of day became grey rather than white, it towered into a sensuous wall of resistance against which the thought broke apart. I pulled myself together, forced myself to the narrowest possible focus, but the grey mass of my thoughts that had seemed to mimic the monotony of the external world refused to budge. The tension slackened, dissolved again into that uniformly gross sentience, into a voluptuous vanishing away, an eager stupefaction. But this desolate sensuality was clouded by a lurking interest. Under these conditions I was no longer able to revert to a rational enjoyment of life, there was something awkward about this sweet numbness, a remnant, an uncomfortable originality; at the base of my consciousness hung ballast that made difficulties. The thought that had slid away from my out-of-practice powers before it could ripen under the searing heat – it returned, became bothersome: suddenly my ears were filled with its humming as if someone had spoken it aloud. The thought was: All this I have already experienced. These balmy languid waters had washed about me. This illusory light, this sweetness, this mood, this fading into the unexpressed was nothing new, it encountered a human memory, it was a – replay. But where, where had I been a participant in this tropical condition, these scenes of unwilled growth, where, where?
It was hot, ha, hot, probably the river was just now crossing the Equator; this ridiculous certainty, ridiculous because I had to – was permitted to – assure myself that I had never been here. But now I begin to doubt, inwardly I laugh, but I begin well and truly to doubt. Can I be mistaken? It’s simply impossible for me to quit. I can’t do my special thought an injustice, I really have already been present in a searing brooding light-drenched situation. Present … hm. I have a strong but unframed memory. Yes, I am a citizen here, here I stand and fall, I needn’t let my consciousness dictate to me. Good grief! So how is it when, say, a person goes insane? Terror paralyses me a little, I keep still so I don’t bump into the looming madness, at this moment everything is unclear, and maybe I don’t even exist. Maybe I am only one of these braids that swirl so remarkably in the water, one with a brain, a sick bad brain … But at the same time a kind of malicious glee rises in me, hehe, I am tralala, tralala – pssh – embarrassingly enough, I believe, I really have been singing, trilling like sweet Ophelia, hm, hm, hm, hm – I’m overtaken by a gentle righteous glee. It is not implausible … and yes, I have been here. Been here, been here – I want to sing it, in my glee I want to chew and eat it. It should go unrecognised, this drowsy lassitude of waterplants floating, bobbing, trying to rot in the steaming heat, all these fleshy detached bodies of flowers, creatures and water-beings, all this slavering and slobbering so vivid I feel it on my skin, experience it with my whole body – and I’m not meant to recognise it?
A cold shudder of pleasure ran down my spine. In the raging heat of the sun? Was I feverish? For a moment it didn’t bother me. The main thing was to celebrate my return. This drowsy heavy joy was an old dear friend of mine, of me who came from such an anxious constantly disconcerting uncontemplative city! I strained my eyes to renew acquaintance with details of the scenery. I stared and stared the soul out of these suddenly familiar things; but alas none would yet place anything specific in my memory. Instead, the contours of the foliage acquired a ruddy fringe and the air began to ripple before my eyes like a too-flimsy veil. The only result of my exertions was to make me see a kind of spectrum in the harsh light.
How it happened eventually that my special thought came fully formed into view was almost beyond my control. After I had dragged myself for two days through this misery, lacking any appetite, the affair was settled just like that. We continued snaking our way along the river whose banks, as undefined as those of a swamp, never and nevermore meant to settle into a nice cosy parallelism. Enticed out of the jungle were always a couple of trees standing in water. The imperceptible current moved between them smooth as flowing honey, more inundation than riverbed. The deeps still held their riddle, I hadn’t yet sorted things out with them. Islands of water lilies turned on their axis, drifted slowly on, maybe to a more nutritious stretch of water, maybe into sunlight, then brought their languid spinning to a halt and began, as if pushed by a feather, to gyre in the opposite direction. Sturdy lianas hugged the overhanging trees and nourished a coterie of lewdly ogling blooms. Orchids sprayed thick little snouts through clumps of foliage, the limbs of strangely shaped succulent flowers bent down to hairy leaves big as hands. In the water a world of little horrors moved. Grey green gristle, rampant stigmata, heads that had begun to split so that tiny sharp tongues peered out of gaping brains. Uncarded fabrics fraying, fingers with webbing between them, immobile living bodies, bodies of an uncanny ineffable life, with humanlike traces and features striving for development.
As in a dream I saw things that grew more familiar the closer they came. That I was able to touch them restored something of my composure … but then they lay again behind us, bristling full-cheeked as the waves from our boats rocked them up and down. They spun around, a hundred ghostly eyes watched us, and in those eyes lay a rebuke. The eyes pronounced a sentence of death, a vengeful scream. Their peace, the majesty of their horror had been disturbed, they stared angrily and began to look ridiculous, like the desecrated halo of a comfort-doll, a compromised comfort-doll, haha, a stupid stiff panopticon-figure – these foetuses, one half quick-witted and viable, knowing and becoming, the other half abandoned, left behind, leading a sated and soulless arrested existence of possibilities, dreamy, sluggish, revolving unresisting and drunk with submission and well-being …
Ah! What was it …
… as the light dawned in me, yes, an unearthly light was dawning. So this was it! This the secret I had in common with the corrupt deceptive nourishing waters of the deeps! This is what celebrated the reunion of life’s morning and evening! In the ducts of my consciousness, in the mountains of my origin there slumbered a mood from the prehistory of a myriad beings. The river’s motherly nursing and watering, the brooding heat of the torrid zone and the helpful calm of indolence had flattered my simple instincts. How long ago was it: … I had to go back twenty-three years and nine months to reach the plane of existence of one of these knotty sticks of cells. My identity with this state was certain. In these viscous deeps there lodged beings whose dear companion I once was. In prehistoric times the ancestral cell had settled in one of these primal jungle ponds, freeloaded as a little ball at the edge of strange plants, let its little eyelash-feelers wiggle in wave-stirred water and its feathery muscle-threads go fishing for other organisms, strangling a little plant, a little microbe, a little flea, sucking all the juice from it through the one pore which perhaps was all it consisted of. Or was itself a wonderfully compact little bud with a plump camisole of petals, a calyx that slowly unfolded its fan of colourful beauty and drew its nourishment and enjoyment like a good citizen through a domestic system of roots that had set up home in a stink of brackish water or a lump of wood grown spongy, and with the simple fare of tenderly prepared nitrogen had stilled that appetite that must of necessity be bound with the beauty of a glowing red, or a violet shading away in waves. All these living beings, all this around me across the board, I once was. Now it lay there, abominated by my purity instinct, a cast snakeskin on my developmental path!
