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not speak to everyone - and can take it so far so as not to speak to anyone. This, in my opinion, ultimately makes him a writer for everyone. But in order for you to see what directly relates to you, it is necessary to let yourself enjoy his unstoppable exposition and spend your time focused on recognizing certain turns of phrase and references. One of Musil's accomplishments as writer is to have created a completely new form of the classic popular melodrama. Musil's work should be seen in direct - intentionally apsurdly direct - relation to Ibsen's. Doesn't Maria leave her husband, just as Nora does? Doesn't Regina go off to kill herself at the end of the play, just as Hedda Gabier does? Musil is a complex writer precisely because his work is not just a reaction to popular drama. One could argue that false assertion is at work. That's the biggest trap where Musil is concerned, when you try to pin him down. This is a writer who always makes you work; you have to make your way through wave after wave of verbal assaults. Just as love is not love, so his text is not just a popular drama, or a philosophical tract, or poetic observation, or an essay on life. As opposed to The Man Without Qualities, The Enthusiasts is a completed work - but a completed work in progress. The text was written over a ten-year period, with constant changes and additions, new layers of meaning - so it's not the illustration of one moment in time, one subject, one idea. What we have instead is a collage of various ideas from different decades and, for that reason, Musil is much closer to our time than to his own, and it seems only logical that his modernism was an inspiration to the postmodernists. The character of Detective Stader, for example, is a gem of wordplay and playful references. His appearance in the drama can be treated as pop-strategy, a vehicle for skewering popular clichés with crime-novel psychosis and apsurd slapstick... Musil was the master of the all-encompassing but undefined, of announcing something grand and never saying what it precisely was. Not everything is contained in what a writer speaks through his characters: equally enlightening truths emerge from the sparks that fly in the silences between characters' exchanges, the deep intake of breath a poetic speech, the subtle spaces between long and succinct phrases - all of this comes in a package with Musil's narrative, wrapped in quasi-thriller melodrama, and it calls for being staged as a package. The hardest challenge, though, is to give life to that dense space where things are unspoken... I'd argue that the problem in staging Musil's drama is that his text come from narrative structure, from a narrative way of thinking, it's not just the challenge of Musil's specific way of writing, it's the challenge of an entire time period we may believe we have put behind us but now, like a ghost, it returns - or, better, like the true avant-garde. Jugoslovensko dramsko pozorište (Yugoslav Drama Theater) last season did a new take on Kafka, this season's it's a new take on Musil, and next year, 1 believe, will be a new take on Joyce. It's not just an invitation think about the boundaries of modernism and postmodernism; it opens up the possibility that those writers whose works do not easily lend themselves to the stage become the driving force of a different dramatic language. (...)
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THE ENTHUSIASTS