TROPICS – THE MYTH OF TRAVEL
Having so far failed to interest publishers in Rober Müller’s remarkable novel, I’m making it available to download here. To whet your appetite, I provide my Introduction below. If you find the novel as intriguing and enjoyable as I do, please send in your comments!
INTRODUCING MÜLLER’S MAGNUM OPUS
“The high voltage narrative technique alone justifies the inclusion of this novel in the canon of the literary Modern.” – Thomas Schwartz (2012)
“Robert Müller is a dazzling wordsmith.” – Alfred Döblin (1920)
“TROPEN vigorously addresses the most elemental issues of human existence, indeed the foundations and determinants of human existence itself, and does so in the most driven, complex, hypertrophic way imaginable.” – Florian Krobb (2015)
Translator’s introduction
“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: Tropics, Ch. V
The Viennese literary activist, writer and publisher Robert Müller (1887-1924) was singled out by Alfred Döblin in a brief overview of modern novels in his 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.
Intrigued by Döblin’s reference to an unfamiliar writer, I discovered 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). Though the modern edition of his work covers fourteen volumes so far, after his untimely suicide in 1924 Müller lapsed into obscurity. Not until the late 1970s did scholars of literature begin to explore his writings. Attempts to reprint TROPICS foundered for decades on the dubious claims of a Viennese writer to hold the copyright; his claimed intention to produce a collected works never materialised, and only in 1990 was TROPICS at last republished. As far as I know, the only translations of Müller into English are this book, and the intriguing short story Manhattan Girl, published by The Brooklyn Rail in January 2020.
First published in 1915 (the same year as Döblin’s first great epic The Three Leaps of Wang Lun), Müller’s novel TROPICS: The Myth of Travel 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 art, 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.
The expansion of European empire-building from the mid-19th century up to the Great War was accompanied by enormous self-deceptions by populations all too easily swallowing propaganda narratives: we are civilising the natives; resistance to our armed incursions is treachery; no miscegenation: the purity of the White race must be preserved; economic necessity requires firm discipline of the workforce; brutality by Europeans is caused by tropical fever, not moral failings; the anthropologist’s task is to measure the “other” against European “normality”.
Brandlberger’s report from the jungle subverts just about every such trope (Tropen in German means trope as well as Tropic) by deconstructing the justifications for terror by a civilisation that claims to be founded on scientific superiority. The libidinous drives of colonialism are laid bare. Claims to philanthropic rationality made by the colonial powers are refuted. The shallow exoticism of so much trashy literature (dusky maiden on a palm-fringed tropical beach; valiant White explorer besting devious natives in the midday sun) is now of merely historical interest. But Müller’s novel can still be valued today as a work of art, its pointed unveiling of the gap between European preconceptions and the reality of other robust cultures, scornful of these interlopers, provides the reader with a great deal of fun.
Brandlberger’s disorientation begins early on, as the quotation at the head of this Introduction shows, and becomes ever madder: for example, he speculates at length that butterflies are the degenerate descendants of dragons. Once the three heroes find the supposed hiding place of the Inca gold, and it is not there, the narrative becomes a tense murder mystery, replete with bad-faith reports, distractions and red herrings. And then right at the end, Brandlerger, the only survivor of the three adventurers, announces that travel is superfluous anyway:
Is there a yearning for distant lands, for other lands, for marvellous Dorados and adventurers’ lairs? There is not! Whatever a person finds he finds in himself … If you were to ask the future human if he was ever in the tropics – Ah, what Tropics! he says, the Tropics, that’s me!
C. D. Godwin
October 2020
