tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79803206378418038842024-03-13T08:55:30.080-07:00Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being"This site is intended as an informal space to share international discourse on the Austrian novelist, essayist, dramatist, scientist, mathematician, and thinker, Robert Musil, on his works, and his growing reception.Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-50259622661782583722023-05-02T07:41:00.000-07:002023-05-02T07:41:32.915-07:00Honoring Burton PikeOne of my former fellow students from CUNY Graduate Center had the brilliant idea about a year and a half ago to make a Festschrift for our Doktorvater and Professor, Burton Pike. We gathered some likely contributors and a team of editors (Peter Constantine, Robert Cowan, and Henry Gifford) and some wonderful contributions of translations with commentaries; essays on translation, on literature, on the city in literature, on communication; and some laudations by people who had known and been touched by Burt. Add two interviews with Burton and two pieces of his own writing, and voila. We did it!
It is really a marvelous book, if I do say so myself, filled with thoughtful and intriguing writing in honor of a man who was one of the kindest, wisest, most charming persons I ever had the pleasure to know. Burton died before the book could come out, but he knew of its progress toward publication and was, despite his usual modesty, glad of it.
And now we are glad we did it, with the help of Peter Lang publishers. And you can get a copy for yourselves!
<a href="https://www.peterlang.com/document/1297889%20">https://www.peterlang.com/document/1297889 </a>
The excerpt on Peter Lang's site provides a table of contents of the rich bouquet of flowers we cast at Burton's feet. For all he has done for translation, for the field of literature study, to make the world a more gracious, more intelligent, more bearable place to live.
With love and thanks,
Genese
Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-69355982138905083692022-03-24T06:02:00.003-07:002022-03-24T06:05:29.462-07:00New Previously Untranslated Musil in New Issue of Fiction MagazineFrom Musil's "Story of a Regiment," based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI:
"The night was dark enough to slice; anyone who groped between the houses cut with his eyes against the darkness like wood. Further off, where the field lifted, there were small dark yellow stars that gave off no light, but it was still somewhat better; a dull, uncertain illumination spread from out of the distance of space and diluted the night. Sometimes black bushes wandered slowly there in trenches or furrows or stood awkwardly still; patrols. Small messages crept or ran around the compound, signaled by the telephone’s tooting—as melancholy as the whistle of a steamboat arriving in the night. Out of these there synthesized a mosaic of small often contradictory reports, and from out of the night the enemy grew in the candlelight, as they stood across the great road to the north of the mountain, with their flanks pressed against strongly defended heights, working with feverish urgency on the arrangement of their formations.
The attack was planned for the next day. But in the night the patrols reported that a fog had invaded. Then rain. The wind swept through the trenches and ditches like wet rags; then the fumes swept through the houses. Then the rain; then it stayed put in between the houses."
This and other wonderful Musil pieces, previously untranslated, can be read in full in the new issue of Fiction Magazine, edited by Mark Mirsky. Mark, who edited Musil's Diaries in English, has been publishing Musil in his journal for over 25 years and published my first translations there.
You can order of copy of this issue (and copies of other issues with Musil in them, translated by myself, Burton Pike, and others) on their website:
https://www.fictioninc.com/
<a href="https://www.fictioninc.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIq3HlVlk3mMgw-VKW4Ulhe8NVOiqCok6lsWgOwtld07y0EnsFtvVVTj5QNtiwq-7AnJvgFYqWdInxvRHoPCZZSrn_K2w-bvJ1_Y_TVwq91-1sfiow8gVedxjyKgFijXe5NZXoJQxGfVgbqIJ5up8zY778phGjQXccQt7mkEI1C-wCM0mYWIbLk7f5ig/s1595/Musil%20soldier%20solo.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1595" data-original-width="1170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIq3HlVlk3mMgw-VKW4Ulhe8NVOiqCok6lsWgOwtld07y0EnsFtvVVTj5QNtiwq-7AnJvgFYqWdInxvRHoPCZZSrn_K2w-bvJ1_Y_TVwq91-1sfiow8gVedxjyKgFijXe5NZXoJQxGfVgbqIJ5up8zY778phGjQXccQt7mkEI1C-wCM0mYWIbLk7f5ig/s320/Musil%20soldier%20solo.jpg"/></a></div>
<a href="https://www.fictioninc.com/"></a>
Or consider subscribing to this legendary journal!Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-70033046218765177452022-03-21T13:26:00.004-07:002022-03-21T13:31:03.877-07:00Two New Musil Books Forthcoming<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhS_Fnp42HtZLDWU1FW682lDRkvAnnZWYz84hcgjfr7jCSxPFEVzuNoCEgljjka4uegEBRdfR3B_Xz3xvBWTbugzqYvRiMIQyV4jR8MD8INlzYr1HNUByuwngHcefED2hFIQYyBFS1M6SFSg1hVYkqu1JduKEjyj3G2xiAD3G9mkiGSWroz7433dw4fLw=s1170" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="851" data-original-width="1170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhS_Fnp42HtZLDWU1FW682lDRkvAnnZWYz84hcgjfr7jCSxPFEVzuNoCEgljjka4uegEBRdfR3B_Xz3xvBWTbugzqYvRiMIQyV4jR8MD8INlzYr1HNUByuwngHcefED2hFIQYyBFS1M6SFSg1hVYkqu1JduKEjyj3G2xiAD3G9mkiGSWroz7433dw4fLw=s320"/></a></div>Really one brand new one and another coming out in paperback for the first time:
<i>Robert Musil: Literature and Politics</i>:
<a href="https://www.contramundumpress.com/literature-and-politics"></a>
Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil’s writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.
Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil’s political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil’s political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the “cultural optimism” of the Soviet experiment. Musil’s ultimate stance — as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances — is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. This is not merely an aesthetic position, but a committed belief in the essential ethical nature of art and in art’s fundamental role as a timeless, supra-national force.
Translated with an introduction by Genese Grill. This is the fourth Musil publication presented by Contra Mundum Press.
<a href="https://www.contramundumpress.com/literature-and-politics"></a>
And my monograph, <i>The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality</i>:
<a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781640141278/the-world-as-metaphor-in-robert-musils-ithe-man-without-qualitiesi/"></a>
<a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781640141278/the-world-as-metaphor-in-robert-musils-ithe-man-without-qualitiesi/"></a>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-21517335415096971312021-08-18T11:56:00.004-07:002021-08-18T11:56:33.699-07:00Review of Thomas Harrison's OF BRIDGES: A POETIC & PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNT<p>I had the pleasure of reviewing Thomas Harrison's wonderful new book for <i>On the Seawall</i>. </p><p>You may read the review here: </p><p><a href="https://www.ronslate.com/on-of-bridges-a-poetic-and-philosophical-account-by-thomas-harrison/" target="_blank">https://www.ronslate.com/on-of-bridges-a-poetic-and-philosophical-account-by-thomas-harrison/</a> </p>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-82671650761375536272021-05-31T05:57:00.004-07:002021-05-31T06:07:39.612-07:00More Reviews of Theater Symptoms<p>Natasha Randall writes: </p><p><span style="color: #292929; font-family: "Publico Text 400 Roman", serif; font-size: 18px;">Musil felt strongly that the crucial function of the arts was to incite aesthetic and ethical revelation, to disrupt a widespread moral stasis: “the most meaningful moments are those wherein we are enlivened by some mysterious thought that carries us beyond ourselves and into the vastness of the universal”. But to his dismay, and hence the titular “symptoms”, Musil saw corruption in Europe’s cultural sphere in the 1920s, a commodification, sensationalism, and a diluting of culture into the “culture industry”. He writes about the distinction between “illustrative” theatre (a theatre of tropes, artificiality and mimesis) and “creative” theatre (a living drama, a singular and complex experience). Musil, ever a master of imagery, gives it to us as “the vast difference between ossification and growth”.</span> </p><p>Read More Here:</p><p><a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/theater-symptoms-robert-musil-review-natasha-randall/"><span style="color: black;">https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/theater-symptoms-robert-musil-review-natasha-randall/</span></a></p><p><br /></p><p>Ionna Kostopoula writes: </p><p><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But what does Musil diagnose
exactly? The inversion of the German <i>Symptomen-Theater</i> into <i>Theater
Symptoms </i>in English harks back to the <i>genos-eidos</i> relation: We can,
on the one hand, imagine the accumulated symptoms as cases, concrete examples,
and elements of dysfunctional plays, and, on the other hand, a theater <i>of</i>
symptoms with an inherent pathology, where the roots of the problem might go
deeper than they seem. This is a differentiation crucial to Musil, who sensibly
reacts to the public outcry by Viennese theater directors that appeared in the
newspaper <i>Der Wiener Tag</i> of April 20th, 1924. From their point of view,
they diagnose the <i>crisis</i> but also see the <i>recovery</i> of theater.
Yet they do not seem to bother seeking the cause of this crisis. In <i>The
“Decline” of the Theater</i> (<i>Theater Symptoms III)</i>, Musil responds
with: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
</p><p><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span> </span>In Vienna — dependent upon the
state of the market, the disastrous franc speculation, and <span> </span>the like — there is
suddenly a new condition, which they call the decline of the theater. I <span> </span>don’t
believe in it. What is remarkable about this situation is not the continuing
course of <span> </span>this crisis, but the circumstances surrounding its outbreak.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: Apoc-Regular; font-size: 17.6096px; font-variant-ligatures: none; letter-spacing: 0.704384px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read More Here:</p><p><a href="https://caesuramag.org/posts/review-of-theater-symptoms-by-robert-musil-genese-grill" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black;">https://caesuramag.org/posts/review-of-theater-symptoms-by-robert-musil-genese-grill</span></a><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Maura Del Serra writes:</p><p><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Questo terzo volume degli scritti
completi del grande romanziere, drammaturgo, critico e saggista austriaco
(1880-1942), esponente di punta del modernismo europeo, curata e tradotta in
inglese con appassionata e documentata fedeltà dalla studiosa Genese Grill per
la raffinata ed eclettica Contra Mundum Press, costituisce un prezioso
contributo alla conoscenza dell’articolata e poliedrica opera di Musil. Un
prezioso longseller non solo per la koinè anglofona – genetica od acquisita –
del nostro mondo culturale globalizzato, ma, in primis, per i cultori europei
ed italiani dell’alta letteratura, filosofia, drammaturgia e saggistica
moderna, nei suoi fondamenti etici, espressivi e stilistici.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>Read More Here:</p><p><a href="https://www.corrieredellospettacolo.net/tag/libri/"><span style="color: black;">https://www.corrieredellospettacolo.net/tag/libri/</span></a><br /></p>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-43849386759873941502021-01-28T11:43:00.002-08:002021-01-28T11:43:35.217-08:00David Auerbach's Review of Theater Symptoms in The LA Review of Books<p><br /></p><p class="post-date" style="background-color: white; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #9b9b9b; cursor: inherit; font-family: futura-pt, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 24px; margin: 5px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">I am honored that David Auerbach has reviewed my translation of Theater Symptoms for the LA Review of Books....</p><p class="post-date" style="background-color: white; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #9b9b9b; cursor: inherit; font-family: futura-pt, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 24px; margin: 5px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">It starts like this:</p><p style="background-color: white; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: adriane, "Adriane Text", serif; font-size: 16.8px; line-height: 1.75rem !important; margin: 0px; padding: 15px 0px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;"><em style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">"THEATER SYMPTOMS: Plays and Writings on Drama</em> is the mother lode for Robert Musil aficionados, a vital piece of the author’s canon. Containing the major play <em style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">The Utopians</em>, other dramatic material and fragments, and Musil’s theater criticism, much of it translated into English for the first time, this anthology shows Musil to be a writer of far greater range than is often assumed.</p><p style="background-color: white; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: adriane, "Adriane Text", serif; font-size: 16.8px; line-height: 1.75rem !important; margin: 0px; padding: 15px 0px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">Musil was likely the most sheerly intelligent of modernist writers (which is not to say the most talented). His work entrances with its combination of rigor and passion (“precision and soul,” as he put it), yet it is also marked by significant lacunae. His magnum opus <em style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">The Man Without Qualities</em>, two sections of which were published in 1930 and 1933, was left unfinished at the author’s death in 1942. How to square that massive achievement with Musil’s equally brilliant, but radically different, earlier works, such as <em style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">The Confusions of Young Törless</em> (1906), a novella, or <em style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">Unions</em> (1911), a collection of stories? Above all, how to reconcile Musil’s deep engagement with sociological and political theorizing with his spiritual and aesthetic yearnings? Most of Musil’s contemporaries fell on one side or the other of this dichotomy: Hermann Broch tended toward the sociological, for example, while Thomas Mann embraced the aesthetic. Musil is one of the very few to have attempted to straddle this line, and for that reason alone his work is immensely valuable."</p><p><br /></p><p>READ THE REST HERE: </p><p><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-other-condition-robert-musil-on-theater/">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-other-condition-robert-musil-on-theater/</a> </p>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-33032181401003582902020-12-08T14:50:00.001-08:002020-12-08T14:50:10.748-08:00Publication Day Interview and Special Discount Purchase Rate: Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama<p> It's publication day for Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama, so here is an interview about translating the book:</p><p><a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/of-musil-and-his-translator-an-interview-with-genese-grill/">https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/of-musil-and-his-translator-an-interview-with-genese-grill/</a></p><p>Also, Contra Mundum Press is offering a 23% off special until December 17th if you buy both Theater Symptoms and Unions. You can get them both for $40. flat by sending money through Paypal at info@contramundum.net</p><p>Visit Contra Mundum's web site for other delicious books to order! <a href="https://www.contramundumpress.com/">https://www.contramundumpress.com/</a></p><p><br /></p>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-25626573882975412062020-10-07T08:37:00.003-07:002020-10-07T18:00:25.769-07:00Translating Ideas Into Images: Alessandro Segalini's Binghamton Design Class Covers Musil's Theater Symptoms<p style="text-align: justify;"> Alessandro Segalini, the brilliant typographer and cover-designer for Contra Mundum Press, is also a professor at Binghamton College, where his lucky students have the opportunity to delve deeply into the complexities and mysteries involved in translating the ideas, mood, context of a book into a cover design that is not only beautiful, but that somehow conveys to the potential reader something important about the book. In a book such as Musil's <i>Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama</i>, the challenges are increased by the manifold material within the book, not to mention Musil's own resistance to being pigeon-holed in any one movement, position, stance. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">First, Alessandro had his students read my preface and introduction to the book, and they all wrote a little bit about what it evoked for them and came up with some questions. Then I had the pleasure of visiting the class (via Zoom, of course) to talk with them about the milieu of Musil's work, the turbulent 20's, and European Modernism as well as the concerns of Musil's work in general and the particular themes and subjects in this book. It was a fascinating conversation for me, raising many intriguing questions about how complex ideas might be distilled, symbolized, represented in a single cover, about the nature of translation itself, from language to language, from verbal to imagistic, and so on. It challenged me to think about how I might distil someone as complex as Musil, and something as multi-faceted as this book into a few words or images. We came up with a few basic ideas: multiplicity, union of opposites, many-faced, lacking a solid place to stand, open-ended....</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yesterday, Alessandro sent the results to me and Rainer Hanshe, the heart and brain of Contra Mundum Press, and we three chose our favorites of the many, many very impressive cover designs. Interestingly, there was a great variety of opinions (Rainer and I chose completely different favorites, which just shows there is not always any accounting of taste). Below you will find the five finalists, along with excerpts from the artists' commentary on their process. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3HENrazlASM/X33U4xp_DuI/AAAAAAAAIMg/1eYbrglPM_UXVsXkqe31fa_5QuzU1KrxQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="1711" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3HENrazlASM/X33U4xp_DuI/AAAAAAAAIMg/1eYbrglPM_UXVsXkqe31fa_5QuzU1KrxQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_2.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">This cover is by Yanfen Liang, who writes, that after long introspetion: "Finally I found a black figure, a black figure is shaping itself. This picture is called Hombre puzzle and I found it on illot.net. This is like a Musil experience. Every experience of each person will become a part of the body. At the same time, one hand grasps an eye puzzle, both eyes look straight ahead as if to examine and observe, but at the same time, they are also observing themselves. In order to be more meaningful, I divided the picture into three stages, from blur to clear. This shows how the personal experience has changed and clarified thinking. I think the overall picture shows a bold observer, critic, and thinker."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7g38HUN5SA/X33VGvU-VGI/AAAAAAAAIMk/NX7EGACnKp4VWe7ZoqceEtxScxg_pzjtgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="1711" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7g38HUN5SA/X33VGvU-VGI/AAAAAAAAIMk/NX7EGACnKp4VWe7ZoqceEtxScxg_pzjtgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">This cover is by Yingyen Chen, who writes that Musil's passion for both art and criticism was an inspiration for the creation of the cover. "With the inspiration of symbolism," Chen writes, "I came up with the idea to use abstract shapes instead of an actual image to create the design. The sharpness of straight lines, as the tenderness and elegance of art, intertwine with each other and create counterparts". Musil's passion for "writing and criticizing in such a complicated and unstable period" was a further impetus for the "dualistic and dialectic" choice of colors, shapes, and fonts. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QT1TS4-l8Kg/X33VipceQ8I/AAAAAAAAIM8/w6iaqM7nv7QkywtExUYCEW07wjSt7QlVQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="1711" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QT1TS4-l8Kg/X33VipceQ8I/AAAAAAAAIM8/w6iaqM7nv7QkywtExUYCEW07wjSt7QlVQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Brian Wissing designed this one. He writes: "The eyes in this cover were an important message for me from the beginning. It makes a lot of sense to think about relating eyes to his work. I was intending to relate the eyes with how introspective he was into his society in his writing and in his critiques. Whether you want to paint it as a good or bad thing, he was great at looking, observing and judging. The magnifying glass plays with that as well. [...] There is even the lone eye on the back cover, staring you down as you read the synopsis. While I don’t intend to make anybody uncomfortable necessarily, I do intend to hold people attention and hold their gaze". </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lSIQewh7sZs/X33VQvkxkjI/AAAAAAAAIMs/zpjyZ7ROKBgMJ8yoge90cKPBWtAtPKyRACLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="1711" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lSIQewh7sZs/X33VQvkxkjI/AAAAAAAAIMs/zpjyZ7ROKBgMJ8yoge90cKPBWtAtPKyRACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></blockquote><p> </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lSIQewh7sZs/X33VQvkxkjI/AAAAAAAAIMs/zpjyZ7ROKBgMJ8yoge90cKPBWtAtPKyRACLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This cover is by Marina Stern, who writes: "My intention is for these images to express the deterioration of art and ideologies over time, and also highlight the helplessness which Musil may have experienced within his life (considering the historical context of war and censoring of the arts). The back cover depicting Perseus and the beheading of Medusa develops a metaphor between Musil's ideologies and the overcoming of manipulation, represented by Medusa. The image of a deteriorating face, and the beheading of a symbol of hate, represent Musil’s views on the arts and creativity: allowing ideas to fall into the realm of the generic, and the dissolving of arts into history mean the loss of creativity. Thus, Musil strives for true creativity and fights against the deterioration of the arts". When it came to choice of fonts and colors, Stern writes: "Hierarchy is made clear with the largest text being the title, and in close proximity the author’s name is below. Cochin was used for the front cover title, developing a powerful, strong, and semi-traditional or historical feel. Skia is used for the author’s name and back cover description. This choice is attributed to the font’s similarity to old greek writings, and also due to its readability and legibility in large blocks of text (simple sans serif style). These fonts blend well due to matching angles in certain letter forms. The paper background was another feature I added since its crinkled, imperfect texture adds to the sense of something deteriorating or flawed. Horizontal patterning on the front highlights a breaking point and deterioration of normalcy. While in back, the line highlights the statue’s gaze. The wine color choice melds with the darkness of the paper background while creating visual interest. Lastly, the positioning of the line art, including the face on the cover and face on the back, create an inward-pointing line of sight. Along the spine, the deteriorating statue looks straight ahead and outward at the reader: all lines of sight direct the viewer’s attention".</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></blockquote></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tBN4XWUjyso/X33VYMYrG7I/AAAAAAAAIM0/kzE1k4FTnyA9CDNAhlNyBsKmkMjGto37QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1711/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1199" data-original-width="1711" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tBN4XWUjyso/X33VYMYrG7I/AAAAAAAAIM0/kzE1k4FTnyA9CDNAhlNyBsKmkMjGto37QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/200928_Musil_Outcomes_selected_4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></blockquote></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Evangeline Kontos came up with this design, explaining: "Musil spoke out against the decline of art, and even social relations, and he did so in an unequivocal manner. When thinking of design ideas to represent “Theater Symptoms”, I wanted to depict Musil’s candid personality-- his sarcasm and honesty during the uniformity during the World War. [...] The red line formed into the shape of a capital “M”, for “Musil”. The red line represented “cutting through” normalcy and repetition, as Musil strived for reformation in the art world (and social/ political issues) with a plain-spoken attitude. I drew the black lines on Illustrator and erased a path to fit the red line. I cut the edge of the red line to a sharp point that fittingly “points” to the author's text. I added a light beige background to add dullness, and to complement the monotone/repetitive lines. The red stroke stands out amongst the background, as Musil did. I used the Bely Display font for the title, as I wanted to represent a more classical feel, as Musil lived and wrote during the World War. I paired the font with Futura, a modern sans serif font that is obviously different from that of the title. The two, I believe, pair well together, and the contemporary feel of Futura suits the author. The spine features the same fonts, this time in red, that once again cut through the black lines. In all, I hope that this concept can show through to the reader, or at least compel the viewer to open the book".</div></blockquote></div>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-37425380872220916842020-08-19T13:08:00.003-07:002020-08-19T13:22:19.623-07:00Theater Symptoms Available for Pre-Order Now!<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uZyxYRe_5Tg/Xz2JNsMrM8I/AAAAAAAAIBk/kjcM4OS8j-s4jkEaN3QIn08Itqw_86ydwCPcBGAsYHg/s3264/20200716_083113.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uZyxYRe_5Tg/Xz2JNsMrM8I/AAAAAAAAIBk/kjcM4OS8j-s4jkEaN3QIn08Itqw_86ydwCPcBGAsYHg/w320-h240/20200716_083113.jpg" title="A scene from Musil's play, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men" width="320" /></a></div>Dear Musil Fanatics, The book, <i>Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama</i>, is now available for pre-order. This is a fat book, jam-packed with plays, play fragments, reviews, and theoretical writings about the crisis of theater and culture Musil diagnosed between 1921 and 1929, all of which is, alas, quite relevant for our own historical moment.
In these strange times, we will probably not have the pleasure of an in-person book launch, but stay tuned for virtual readings, interviews, and such to come closer to the publication date (December 17th). If you order early, you can be sure to receive the book in time for holiday gift giving or, hopefully, with enough time to read it before the Apocalypse comes.<div><div><br /></div><div>Here is a flip-book sampler of about 100 pages of the 626-page volume: <a href="https://flipsnack.com/segalini/47_9781940625416_musil/full-view.html ">https://flipsnack.com/segalini/47_9781940625416_musil/full-view.html</a></div><div><br /></div><div>You can order from these sites:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/theater-symptoms-robert-musil/1137429744?ean=9781940625416">https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/theater-symptoms-robert-musil/1137429744?ean=9781940625416</a><br /><br /></div></div><div><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Theater-Symptoms-Plays-Writings-Drama/dp/1940625416/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=theater+symptoms+musil&qid=1597782302&sr=8-1">https://www.amazon.com/Theater-Symptoms-Plays-Writings-Drama/dp/1940625416/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=theater+symptoms+musil&qid=1597782302&sr=8-1</a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And soon from Indie Bound:</div><div><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781940625416">https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781940625416</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Thank you for supporting small, independent publishers, translators, and other dreamers, who endeavor to bring you some small bit of light, inspiration, catharsis, and terrible beauty in these often discouraging times. </div>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-51277289216625536082020-06-23T07:55:00.000-07:002020-06-23T11:19:17.809-07:00Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Theater <br />
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This almost-completed project I started a few long years ago has grown to almost 500 pages under my tired eyes. I can't even really remember how I got the idea to translate and edit a collection of Musil's plays and writings on theater or why exactly I decided to focus on this particular aspect of Musil's untranslated work rather than another, but it has been an intense and revelatory experience. It has deepened my knowledge of Musil's ideas and writing and also has provided new challenges in the realms of translation and the compiling of editions. Here is a description of the book.<br />
<span style="color: #0000ee; text-decoration-line: underline;">http://contramundum.net/theater-symptoms/</span><br />
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The world seems very different from when I began the translation. We are in the fifth month of a global pandemic and the streets of the world are reeling from the sparks begun by a popular uprising against police brutality against people of color in America. The world may be on the brink of revolutions, counter-revolutions, and any number of possible totalitarian regime changes. Many people are clamoring for a dismantling of not only the vicious and militaristic roots of American racism, but also for the <i>canceling</i> of the artifacts of the European-American cultural tradition, insisting that the great books so many of us have treasured are irretrievably implicated in the current evils.<br />
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In some ways, it seems a strange time to give birth to a book of translations by a dead white European male, consisting in great part of a lament on the state of cultural decline in 1920's Germany, Austro-Hungary, and France as diagnosed through "symptoms" visible in its theater. Except that Musil's plays and reviews and diagnostic essays on the state of theater are actually more important now than ever. Reading about the artistic controversies of the inter-war period (the Weimar Republic in Germany), amid the rise of that century's competing totalitarianisms, we experience the atmosphere where Fascism and Stalinism took root; the Great Depression that contributed to the rise of these movements hangs over our heads today as we await with trepidation the economic repercussions of the Covid-19 shut down; it is chilling to realize that many of the actors, directors, and playwrights mentioned in the texts would, over the next two decades, be either exiled, in hiding, murdered in concentration camps or by Soviet purges. Or else they would become collaborators of one or the other deadly regime. The 2020s are haunted by the 1920's and its subsequent horrific decades.<br />
So what does this have to do with theater, art, "culture"? Aren't those things frivolous? Bourgeois? Something for the "privileged"?<br />
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For Musil, whose intelligence was a sort of seismograph of cultural and social tremors, art had an essential role to play in the shaping of society, a role that he felt had been largely neglected in the wake of spreading commodification, advertising, and the cheapening of what was swiftly becoming no longer culture, but a "culture industry". Art--theater in this case--was not entertainment, not distraction, but a force of existential shattering, a shattering that would open up its audience to new ways of looking at and being in the world, an aesthetic and ethical experience that would change not only one's individual life, but all of society. What is important here (among many things that are important here) is the difference between Musil's vision of art and theater as culturally effective and the vision of a more didactically political theater practitioner like Bertolt Brecht, whose "Epic Theater" did, however, share some of the qualities of Musil's ideal theater. (Musil, for example, anticipated Brecht's concept of the <i>Verfremdungseffekt</i>, by employing radical techniques of disjunction and surprise in his plays, breaking the illusion of the theater frame, and in general, by his belief in art as a transformative social force).<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3plqZKNTZI/XvIXl_khdTI/AAAAAAAAHvE/X7DTXRep-TULOk2Xz1VtCrbQSPh4SRcdgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/theater%2Bimage%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3plqZKNTZI/XvIXl_khdTI/AAAAAAAAHvE/X7DTXRep-TULOk2Xz1VtCrbQSPh4SRcdgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/theater%2Bimage%2B3.jpg" width="240" /></a>The important difference here is that while both Musil and Brecht worked to destabilize the status quo and expose the absurdities of modern life and the hypocrisies of capitalism and commodification, Brecht did this in service to a new ideology (Marxism); while Musil tore away the veil of assurance without providing a new ideology to replace the old discredited ones; Musil's destabilized world is a fact of life; Brecht's is a stage on the road to a new order. Musil takes away our false security and leaves us with a radical existential uncertainty. And this radical existential uncertainty is the realm of aesthetic experience and of ethics. A realm increasingly misunderstood and increasingly endangered today by ideological convictions of all stripes.<br />
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<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-26950700868865653632020-04-06T14:55:00.002-07:002020-04-06T14:55:53.343-07:00Feeling Bookish Podcast on Musil<br />
I had the pleasure of being interviewed on the wonderful Feeling Bookish Podcast. We talked about Musil, metaphor, Modernism, living the motivated life, language, circularity, timelessness, and much more. <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-63759823/robert-musil-scholar-genese-grill-episode-no-23">https://soundcloud.com/user-63759823/robert-musil-scholar-genese-grill-episode-no-23</a>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-20079655683822161442020-03-24T06:37:00.000-07:002020-03-24T07:25:03.309-07:00#Musil2020 Continued amid Islands of Isolation, with Ulrich and Agathe; and also with Clarisse!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While the world reels from the shocks of the pandemic and we are all practicing physical,if not completely social, isolation, I am rereading the rest of Burton Pike's brilliant translation of a large selection of the <i>Nachlass</i> chapters of <i>The Man without Qualities</i> (from the Knopf 1995 edition), wherein the siblings, Ulrich and Agathe, remove themselves from the world in order to more perfectly concentrate on the mystical possibilities inspired in them by their metaphoric incestuous love. First they separate themselves by means of simply not going out, cutting themselves off from the round of parties and Parallel Campaign meetings, and by wandering around their garden protected by the heavily symbolic garden fence, through which they occasionally experiment with loving their neighbor by imagining becoming one with a "scoundrel" who is, as Agathe notes, as strange as death to her. But then, especially as legal troubles in the form of Agathe's husband Hagauer's attempts to get her to come back and also his more frightening inquiries into the irregularities of the will, with which Agathe has tampered, our two "criminals" run away...to a series of islands, called in some passages "the Island of Health".<br />
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These removals from the world are physical enactments of Musil's "Other Condition," which arises even amidst everyday life, in the moments of exceptional seeing and experiencing felt by the siblings. Moments when the fragmented character of the world is suddenly resolved into meaning. Moments when one can do no wrong (anything that occurs within the Other Condition, as within love, is beyond good and evil), moments when the usual sense of the arbitrariness of everything is transformed into significance. To set out to lengthen these moments into some form of duration is a dangerous business, bound to disappoint. It is also, in a strange way, the paradox of this unfinished, unfinishable novel, a sort of endless attenuation of the momentary, motivated resistance to habit and quotidian meaninglessness, an attempt to hold the moment (the one thing, remember, that Faust may not request of Mephistopheles without losing the devilish bargain: "Moment, moment, stay a while, you are so beautiful!). To live life like literature; to never do anything that is not motivated by pure will and desire. As Walter Pater so unforgettably writes, "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life". But who can stand it?<br />
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The sea is the great test for the siblings who have now become fully lovers, having worn themselves out with happiness and sexual pleasure. We do not know how long it takes for them to begin to go mad, alone on these islands (without books!) staring only into each other's eyes and into the endless sea. But we do know that the idyll does eventually begin to grow tired, so tired that even a banal art historian who stops awhile at one of the hotels provides some welcome distraction for Agathe, which disgusts Ulrich, who, nevertheless admits to finding the chamber maid attractive. As Ulrich notes, love cannot exist between two people alone. One always needs a third: to admire, to envy, to lure away. Or, two lovers who are united against <i>the world </i>also need the world's proximity to experience their separateness. In the beautiful passage titled "The Three Sisters," Ulrich and Agathe talk about the world as if it were the third lover in a <i>men</i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 11pt;">â</span><i>ge <span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; text-align: justify;">à </span>trois</i> with them; a lover neither would be jealous of. But Ulrich also asks Agathe if she could imagine sharing a man with another woman. She says she could imagine it being quite beautiful--but only could not imagine the woman.<br />
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But in a note at the end of one passage, Musil writes that Clarisse soon joins the siblings who are floundering in the infinity of their own four eyes, suggesting that, perhaps, he had considered experimenting with a sexual, sensual adventure with these three characters. This scene was either not written or has disappeared. But in some of the most brilliant passages of the book, Ulrich is alone with a now fully-mad Clarisse on the Island of Health.<br />
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Here they both lose their connection to normal reality even more than Ulrich and Agathe do, as Ulrich begins to become infected with Clarisse's vision of the world. Yet, this iteration is merely another step in the direction he had been going all along, a matter merely of emphasis. And, as such, is another conscious, even logically-grounded experiment on the nature of what is real; for the whole book has taken on this fundamental question: how do we know what is real, necessary, law, essence, truth and what is merely arbitrary, contingent, custom, habit, prejudice? Musil describes over and over the oscillation between what<i> is</i> (natural law, reality, what must be) and what <i>could</i> be (possibility, new vision, perspectivism, subjectivity), never fully abandoning what is real, but sounding its complex depths. For he was a scientist and a precise explorer amid the vast realms. What he wanted to do was to expand the map of reality, expand our vision of what is real. And the discussions of Clarisse's visions on the Island of Health are a perfect object lesson in this process of new seeing:<br />
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"For awhile, Clarisse saw things that one otherwise does not see. Ulrich could explain that splendidly. Perhaps it was insanity. But a forester out walking sees a different world from the one a botanist or a murderer sees. One sees many invisible things. A woman sees the material of a dress, a painter a lake of liquid colors in its stead. I see through the window whether a hat is hard or soft. If I glance into the street I can likewise see whether it is warm or cold outside, whether people are happy, sad, healthy, or ailing; in the same way, the taste of a fruit is sometimes already in the fingertips that touch them. Ulrich remembered: if one looks at something upside down--for instance, behind the lens of a small camera--one notices things one had overlooked. A waving back and forth or shrubs or heads that to the normal eye appear motionless. Or one becomes conscious of a peculiar hopping quality of the way people walk. One is astonished at the persistent restlessness of things. In the same way, there are unperceived double images in the field of vision, for one eye sees something differently from the other; afterimages crystallize from still pictures like the most delicate-colored fogs; the brain suppresses, supplements, forms the supposed reality; the ear does not hear the thousands of sounds of one's own body; skin, joints, muscles, the innermost self, broadcast a contrapuntal composition of innumerable sensations that, mute, blind, and deaf, perform the subterranean dance of the so-called waking state" (1555-1556).<br />
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And then, most radically questioning all that is stable and conventional, Ulrich reflects:<br />
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"The foundation of human life seemed to him a monstrous fear of some kind, indeed really a fear of the indeterminate. He lay on the white sandy platform of the island between the depths of sea and sky. He lay as in snow. Clarisse was romping an playing like a child behind the thistly dunes. He was not afraid. He saw life from above. The island had flown away with him. He understood his past. Hundreds of human orders have come and gone: from the gods to brooch pins, and from psychology to the record player, every one of them an obscure unit, every one of them mysteriously sinking after a few hundred or a few thousand years and passing into rubble and building site: what else is this but a climbing up out of nothingness, each attempt on a different wall? Like one of those dunes blown by the wind, which for a while forms its own weight and then is blown away again by the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being nothing: beginning with our pleasures, which are no pleasures but only a din, a chattering instigated to kill time, because a dark certainty admonishes us that it will in the end annihilate us, all the way to those inventions that outdo each other, the senseless mountains of money that kill the spirit, whether one is suffocated or borne up by them, to the continually changing fashions of the mind, of clothes that change incessantly, to murder, assassination, war, in which a profound mistrust of whatever is stable and created explodes: what is all that but the restlessness of a man shoveling himself down to his knees out of a grave he will never escape, a being that will never entirely climb out of nothingness, who fearfully flings himself into shapes but is, in some secret place that he is hardly aware of himself, vulnerable and nothing?" (1557-58).<br />
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This terror in the face of the uncreated and unformed--the world like an infinite ocean, without firm delineations or rules, the modern condition of world, which Nietzsche described as a horizon (the horizon of God, traditional morality) wiped clean by a sponge---that existential terror of openness, which one avoids by flinging oneself into the predetermined forms, constructs, rules--Musil elsewhere describes them as the two dozen cake pans--is only revealed as open to us in special moments. Terrible, sublime, exceptional moments. In such states, the usual fabric of reality is torn; the usual scaffolds are seen to be merely stage props, temporary, ephemeral at best.<br />
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The point is not to deny normal reality, but to expand it. What Ulrich elsewhere calls "a tear in the paper" of normal reality, the mind loosened by a change or a vacation-mood, might precipitate the ability to see differently, though one often unfortunately loses the new insights, bit by bit as one reintegrates back into regular, dull life. A crime, too, is a means to such a tear in the paper--be it an artistic crime against formal stylistic rules, a crime against one's contemporary social morals, or a gratuitous act against expectations. A calamity such as the one we are collectively experiencing now can also incite new seeing. One does not wish for disasters, plagues, wars, or personal upheavals like heartbreak or the death of a loved one, but when they come, they do provide powerful opportunities for new seeing and experiencing. New visions that can also lead to new ways of living and being together in the world.<br />
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-58107148718430985842020-03-05T06:51:00.001-08:002020-03-05T07:06:45.946-08:00"Approaching New Consciousnesses": Interview by Greg Gerke on Musil, Translation, &c.<br />
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Greg Gerke, essayist and fiction writer, has interviewed me
for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He asked wonderfully thought-provoking
questions and helped me to understand some more of what I am doing with Musil
and how it relates to my other work as an essayist.<o:p></o:p></div>
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GREG GERKE: You once wrote that you’d dedicated your life to
Robert Musil. You’ve written your dissertation on him, translated two books of
his writings, and are working on a third. Why Musil? How did this magnetism
between his work and yourself come about? In your book The World as
Metaphor, you talk about his “fascination with the mystical idea of the
criminal act as a portal to new spiritual experiences,” something detailed
in The Man Without Qualities, but already apparent in the two early
novellas comprising Unions, “where acts that are normally considered
abhorrent or anti-social are seen as possibly beneficial.” How does this idea
play into your relation to Musil’s aesthetic possibilities?<o:p></o:p></div>
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GENESE GRILL: I remember first hearing Musil, in
translation, at a reading given by Burton Pike at CUNY Graduate Center. It was
the passage from The Man Without Qualities where Clarisse and Walter
are playing the piano, their duet compared to the violent rush of two competing
locomotives! In just a few sentences, the words had transported me from the
concrete to the cosmic and back again, opening up multiple worlds and illuminating
subtleties and contradictions in brilliant, rhythmically astounding prose. I
went to the original German and began reading. At first, I was confused. It was
like nothing else I had ever read. But in no time, Musil had gotten inside me,
to the extent that all the questions his characters were asking seemed to be
the very questions vital to my own existence. Here were characters who were not
only searching for answers to the modern predicament of how to live ethically
in a world of uncertain moorings and morals, but who were not satisfied with
simplistic solutions that left out the aesthetic dimension of dynamics and
chiaroscuro, the human need for a tension between what is given (status quo)
and what might be (possibility) — a duality that Musil also configured as that
between repeatability and crime.<o:p></o:p></div>
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READ THE REST HERE:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/approaching-new-consciousnesses-a-conversation-with-genese-grill/"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/approaching-new-consciousnesses-a-conversation-with-genese-grill/</span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Greg's moving and insightful essay collection, See What
I See, celebrating the aliveness we can cultivate through literature and film,
and his fresh, uniquely-seen, and vivid short story collection, Especially
the Bad Things, can be acquired here: <a href="https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/author/thisissplice-greggerke/"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/author/thisissplice-greggerke/</span></a> <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-62747841092006336822020-02-13T07:53:00.000-08:002020-02-13T07:53:00.767-08:00#Musil2020 Days 32-45 Utopian Dreaming, the Millennium, Crime and Mysticism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Perhaps part of the reason that people tend to see Musil as a cynical satirist and scientific rationalist is that they do not continue reading<i> The Man without Qualities</i> beyond the first two books. One we move <i>Into the Millennium (The Criminals)</i>, it would seem to be obvious that we are dealing with an Ulrich who is much more sympathetic to mystical experiences. And yet, there are many Musil scholars, well conversant with the entire book and the <i>Nachlass</i>, who feel terribly put out by the mystical passages and preoccupations of their very rational, scientific modern author. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Musil's mysticism and it is not paranoid to suggest that the established world of Musil scholarship was not very welcoming at first to attention being drawn to such seemingly irrational matters, even if, as Ulrich explained, he was studying the road of holiness to see whether a truck could drive on it, even though Musil was clear that he was interested in something he called "Day-Bright Mysticism," and carefully ridiculed what he called "Schleuder-Mystik" (sort of like wishy-washy mysticism).<br />
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But Musil read deeply in mystical literature as well as in the psychology of primitive ritual practices and in the psychology of altered consciousness states. (You can read my general summary of all of this in a chapter called "The Other Musil," in <i>A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil</i> <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/a-companion-to-the-works-of-robert-musil.html">https://boydellandbrewer.com/a-companion-to-the-works-of-robert-musil.html</a>, which also contains many other helpful essays on Musil's life and works, in English! But the central book, from which come many quotations and ideas discussed by Ulrich and Agathe, is Martin Buber's very popular anthology,<i> Ecstatic Confessions</i>, a collection of mystical writings from different traditions that influenced many Modernist writers. The passage, "Throw everything you have into the fire, up to your shoes," for example, comes from this anthology. It is from the Sufi, Farid Attar's <i>Conference of the Birds</i>. Musil also read widely in contemporary mystical writings, such as Ludwig Klages's <i>Von Kosmigonischer Eros</i>, and despite the fact that he based the absurd character of Meingast on Klages, he took Klages's writing serious enough to explore his ideas in his notebooks and use some of them to develop his idea of 'the other condition" of experiencing. In the collection, <i>Precision and Soul</i>, translated and edited by David Luft and Burton Pike, Luft and Pike introduce Musil's 1914 essay, "Commentary on a Metaphysics," a review of Walter Rathenau's "On the Mechanics of Spirit," explaining that while Musil satires Rathenau (the model for Arnheim!) and his narrow view of ethics in the essay, Musil also "appreciates his attempts to describe the condition of mystical awakening that Musil would later refer to as "the other condition"". This other condition is described in detail in Musil's essay, "The German as Symptom," but Ulrich and Agathe's experiments, out beyond the border-line of what is natural, beyond good and evil, beyond the self and beyond objective rationality, are all explorations of Musil's realm of alternative experience.<br />
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I came to see, as I continued to explore the sources of Musil's brand of mysticism, that what interested him most about these models was not their religious or even metaphysical nature. He was not interested in transcending physical reality or materiality, and certainly not interested in breaking down reason, science, or clear thinking. In accordance with contemporary science and his experience as mathematician and student of physics and psychology, he wanted instead to expand the boundaries of what we consider real and true, by paying attention to moments of heightened clarity and to the role played by perception, parsing, Nietzschean perspectivism, psychic states, conceptualizing in ordering our communal reality. What this all led to, in my reading, was a fascination in mysticism as one of many models of alternative consciousness--he was also fascinated with madness!<br />
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But the central model of alternative consciousness that impelled Musil was Art. Art as the ultimate altered consciousness state, art as the impetus to heightened experience and new seeing, art as the means to make and remake and unmake our visions of the world. And, within Art, Metaphor was for Musil the ultimate powerful agent of alchemical action and reaction. (Thus the title of my book: The World as Metaphor). Within this context, the incestuous relationship of the siblings, Ulrich and Agathe, is explained by Musil, in a letter to a disapproving reader, as the expression of a man who loves metaphors. Like and almost like, merging temporarily into one, a dissolution of boundaries, a fleeting Dionysian union of opposites.<br />
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So, Ulrich, having met his forgotten sister, his twin, his "self-love," his metaphoric other, begins to dream of the coming of the millennium, or of a golden age of paradisiacal ecstasy, wherein they could live the "motivated life," the life of literature, the heightened ethical and ecstatic state of the other condition wherein one cannot do wrong, wherein everything is flooded with meaning. The vision is of a union of two people eventually spreading out to the whole world. He seems sometimes to dream about such an ecstatic state being lasting and permanent. But he also tells Agathe that "Belief cannot be an hour old". What are we to make of this? I write a lot about this paradox in my book and in essays I wrote leading up to the book (you can get the gist of it here: <a href="http://Metaphor%20as%20Extratemporal%20Moment%20in%20Robert%20Musil%20and%20...numerocinqmagazine.com%20%E2%80%BA%202014/02/06%20%E2%80%BA%20metaphor-as-extratemporal..."> Metaphor as Extratemporal Moment in Robert Musil and ...numerocinqmagazine.com › 2014/02/06 › metaphor-as-extratemporal...</a> So I will not elaborate here. But basically, the extratemporal moment, induced by the crime of metaphor (the union of like and unlike) is a timeless experience that enriches and renews normal life.<br />
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Many critics contend that Musil did not take seriously the utopia of the millennium or the other utopias he discusses in the drafts or his notes for the ending of the book. They contend that he would have shown them to be as absurd as the Parallel Campaign, which of course would end in the coming of the War. But I feel that they are judging Musil's other condition by standards which Musil, as sophisticated philosophical and scientific thinker, had long abandoned: standards of linear and limited time and space. Because the conditions of ecstasy cannot last (cannot be an hour old); because love fades, because we cannot live in a constant state of ecstatic motivation and meaning, they contend that these states are discredited and void. For Musil this was not so. These states represent the highest experiences of humankind--the experiences he denotes as art, literature, essayism, philosophical explorations of the conduct of life, of meaning, of aliveness.That they do not last is essential to their efficacy.<br />
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Their very fleetingness is part of what keeps them fresh, keeps them and us from ossifying into habit, pre-judgments, deadly acceptance of status quo. Because of their fleetingness, because of the oscillation between ecstasy and normalcy, such experiences serve to mediate between ideal and real life, between what is and what could be, between what must be and what might be. Since, as Musil knew, the utopian was the first person to be thrown out of any Utopia, because he is always imagining what could be different, the ecstatic adventurers, the criminals, the sibling-metaphoric-lover are bound to always be questioning any frozen condition of their own lives and their society's mores as a vital antidote to the soporific carelessness of what Nietzsche called "wretched contentment". The mystics, remember, often end up excommunicated by the orthodox churches or on the funeral pyre. They are criminals, artists, visionaries, utopians, vivifying sparks to light the sleeping world awake, over and over again.<br />
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<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-10008277416733486562020-01-31T07:50:00.000-08:002020-01-31T07:50:28.376-08:00#MUSIL2020 Days 29-31 On Repeatability and Crime, Congealed Metaphors, and Living Words<br />
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Chapters 113-115 were extremely important to my thinking (and feeling) about Musil. And since I have already written about them at length, I am going to just quote myself here.</div>
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The following is a long excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book, <i>The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality </i>(Camden House 2012). </div>
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To sum up the positions:
repeatability is what we find in nature; it is what we find inside our minds;
it is an invented and arbitrary attempt to socialize and delimit imagination;
it is the residue of unexamined received ideas; it is the echo of reverberating
mythic truths; it is the starting point for experimental reinvigorating of the
status quo through art and existential creativity; or it is a means of understanding
the ineffable. Put yet another way: repeated forms are tiresome, excruciatingly
boring, always the same; or deviations from these necessary constants can be
conceived as crimes, crises, aberrations, or possible means of unraveling and
rearranging all previously known forms and ideas. Musil entertained most ― if
not all ― of these theories at various moments within the pages of his novel.
The first part, <i>Seinesgleichen geschieht</i> (the like of it or selfsame now
happens/pseudo reality prevails) and the second part <i>Ins tausendjährige
Reich (die Verbrecher)</i> (Into the millennium (the criminals)), can be seen,
respectively, as explorations of the way things repeat themselves (<i>seinesgleichen
geschieht</i>) and the exceptions (conceptualized as crimes) to repeating or
maintaining the status quo. Yet once this approximation is looked at more
closely, a secondary question arises. <i>Which is the crime: the process of
forcing individual entities into the (possibly artificial) constructs of
repeatable patterns? Or deviating and breaking out of these set structures?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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According to some careful observers
(such as Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche), nothing in nature ever exactly
repeats itself. No two things are so like each other that they could be called
by the same name or placed in the same category. It is only by leaving out or
ignoring differences that we arrive at similarities, concepts, metaphors,
categories. It is only by pretending that things and events repeat precisely
that we can even begin to give experiences and objects names. As “belief,” in
Ulrich and Agathe’s contention, “cannot be an hour old,” all “living” or
meaningful entities or states of being are fleeting, eluding definition and
denotation, mocking our attempts to describe and contain. The moment we have
assigned a name to a feeling, a condition, or a characteristic to a person or a
relationship, it has become something else altogether, something we may not
even recognize. And yet we proceed, necessarily, as if things and persons and
experiences were similar, same, like, predictable; as if they will act and feel
and be more or less as they have acted and felt before.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While this necessarily imprecise
vision or description of the world as a reassuringly constant (or frustratingly
tedious, or mystically archetypal) cycle of repeatability may constitute a sort
of crime against science and reason, radical deviations from these repeating
patterns and expected cycles constitute another sort of crime or taboo-breaking.
This transgression is thematically represented or enacted in Musil’s novel by
deviations from the norm, “exceptional moments,” non-participation (as in the
man without qualities), anti-social behavior (incest, forgery of a will, “dropping
out” ― all committed by the sibling “criminals”); and formally enacted by the
novel’s inherent resistance to closure, by its “crimes” against linearity, plot
structure, and a dependable sense of reality within the fictional world.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Repeatability
and crime are relevant terms when we talk about aesthetic questions such as
rhythm, dynamics, tempo, harmony, and discord. Yet, again, they are central
terms for questions of ethics, action, <i>laissez-faire</i> conformity and
revolutionary deviation or perversions. Musil’s stance as a “Möglichkeitsmensch”
(man of possibility) may seem to place him soundly in the camp of
existentialist agents of individual creation. But his perspective — based as
much on his commitment to scientific principles as on philosophical or mystical
and aesthetic presentiments — may actually be surprisingly more like that of Kant,
who, as A. N. Wilson explains in his book <i>God’s Funeral</i>, “was
trying to marry the twin truths: namely, that by the very process of perceiving
and knowing, we invent our world; and also that this world has a reality of its
own.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In a note, Musil summarizes
the paradox: “Kant: Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer. Anschauung ohne Begriff
ist blind” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>1820; Kant: Concepts without observation are empty. Observation
without concepts is blind). In another formulation he explores the question of
how the phenomenological world interacts with the human mind: “In Wahrheit ist
das Verhältnis der Aussen- zur Innenwelt nicht das eines Stempels, der in<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: S_1;"> einen empfangenden
S</a>toff
sein Bild prägt, sondern das eines Prägstocks, der sich dabei deformiert, so
dass sich seine Zeichnung, ohne dass ihr Zusammenhang zerrisse, zu merkwürdig
verschiedenen Bildern verändern kann . . .” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>1435; In truth, the
relationship between the outer and the inner world is not that of a stamp that presses
into a receptive material, but that of an embosser that deforms itself in the
process so that its <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: G_2;">design
can be changed into remarkably different pictures without destroying its general coherence).</a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-language: X-NONE;"><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span>The
paradox is also finely stated by Nietzsche, who characterizes the “challenge of
every great philosophy”: “which, when taken as a whole, always says only: This
is the image of all life, and from this learn the meaning of your life! And
conversely: Read only your own life, and from this understand the hieroglyphics
of universal life.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
As already discussed, Musil even describes an Ulrich who believes that humans
do not create morality but uncover it:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Denn auch das war eine seiner Ansichten, dass die Moral nicht
von den Menschen geschaffen wird und mit ihnen wechselt, sondern dass sie
geoffenbart wird, dass sie in Zeiten und Zonen entfaltet wird, dass sie
geradezu entdeckt werden könne. In diesem Gedanken, der so unzeitgemäss wie
zeitgemäss war, drückte sich vielleicht nichts als die Forderung aus, dass auch
die Moral eine Moral haben müsse, oder die Erwartung, dass sie sie im
Verborgenen habe, und nicht bloss eine sich um sich selbst drehende
Klatschgeschichte auf einem bis zum Zusammenbruch kreisenden Planeten sei. (<i>MoE</i>,
1413)<o:p></o:p></div>
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[For that too was one of his views, that morality is not made
by people and does not change with them but is revealed; that it unfolds in
seasons and zones and can actually be discovered. This idea, which was as out
of fashion as it was current, expressed perhaps nothing but the demand that
morality, too, have a morality, or the expectation that it have one hidden
away, and that morality was not simply tittle-tattle revolving on itself on a
planet circling to the point of implosion. (<i>MwQ</i>,<i> </i>1534)]<o:p></o:p></div>
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This may, however, indicate more a
species of wishful thinking that vainly hopes to salvage meaning for what might
really be a planet spinning toward implosion. Perhaps, then, trying to ask
whether Musil believed that the mind makes the world or the world the mind, or,
to pose the question another way, whether individual subjective experience
de-forms or in-forms the basis of reality or our functional human relation to
the physical world, is simply the wrong question.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> As Antonio Porchia
wrote, “Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>; and with Musil, and his “friend”
and protagonist Ulrich, we would do well to be sensitive to the almost constant
fluctuations between the longing for solidity, repeatability, and significance,
the fear of flux and meaninglessness, and the dread of monotonous, petrified
dead words and experiences. Instead, then, we might look at Musil’s
observations about and experiments with repeatability, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>,
<i>seinesgleichen geschieht, </i>and the exceptions and interruptions to these
recurring forms, in order to ask the question, not whether or which, but <i>how</i>,
or by what process, does the human mind negotiate between these two extreme
poles. How is the making of art, the writing of a novel, an especially fertile
ground for practicing or carrying out this process? How, further, is this
larger process repeated in all of our everyday choices, reflections, and
impressions?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Significantly, this complex set of
questions cannot be answered in a static context, that is, from any single or
time-bound perspective. Instead, an understanding of Musil’s findings about
repeatability, about its positive and negative possibilities and relationship
to both art and life, to both aesthetics and ethics, is contingent upon two
defining elements. These are the element of time (duration and fleetingness)
and an element that I call “metaphoric transparency,” that is, the awareness of
the necessarily metaphoric process of perception and description of reality. At
one moment, in one form or context, a metaphor may be a cliché; at another it
may be a tool for new seeing. If seen as durative fact, and not symbol, a
repeated form is rigid and limiting. If understood as metaphor, it is a means
to virtually infinite possibility.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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A pattern that endures and repeats
is usually one that has outlasted its initial purpose; hence it is relegated to
Musil’s realm of dead words or dead thoughts. For it is sure to always mean and
be the same thing, no matter what the circumstances. A pattern that is
fleeting, or experimental and not repeatable, is seen as fresh, utopian,
creative, and invigorating, and belongs in the realm of living words and living
thoughts so long as it does not try to last: “Worauf es ankommt, das lebendige
Wort, das in die Seele greift: Voll Bedeutung u[nd] Beziehung im Augenblick,
von Wille u[nd] Gefühl umflossen; im nächsten nichtssagend, obgleich es noch
alles sagt, was sein Begriff enthält” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>1645; The point is, the living word,
that takes hold of the soul: filled with meaning and relationship in the
moment, surrounded by will and feeling; in the next moment saying nothing,
although it still says everything that is contained in it conceptually<span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-language: X-NONE;"><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span>).
We might also consider that the living word and the ecstatic experience it
accompanies is a sort of absence of pattern, as it is characterized by a
lifting of boundaries and categories, and by a Dionysian mixing of normally
discrete elements. These exceptions, however, to <i>seinesgleichen geschieht</i>
also seem to constitute a repeating pattern of their own. That pattern is
dependably one wherein distinct patterns that have already been accepted are
dissolved. They are, in a sense, un-moored moods, wherein the usual securities
of definition and category are suspended or dissolved, but others are
temporarily played with, arranged, and imagined.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In order to describe his Other
Condition Musil thus gathers together examples of what Martin Buber, in his
famous and popular anthology of eclectic mystical testimonials, called “Ecstatic
Confessions,” finding their commonalities. Musil moves beyond even Buber’s mix
of Eastern, Western, Sufi, Christian, Judaic, Protestant, and Buddhist
mysticisms, associating these similar but also distinct narratives with other
examples of such experiences from the realms of madness, child psychology,
love, creative states, patriotism, war, the experience of art, nature
enthusiasm, primitive ritual, ancient magic, Dionysian <i>ecstasis</i>, and
more. While some may disapprove of such imprecise miscegenation of different
cultures and concepts, especially under the hand of a writer and thinker valued
for his precision and scientific accuracy, this “leaving out” of differences to
arrive at a commonality or abstracted formal likeness is, of course, a
necessary component of the metaphoric process. Finding commonality or
correspondence between disparate entities, ideas, or images is precisely the
criminal act of metaphor-making — an act whose processes and potentials are
explicitly explained and modeled by Musil in his notes and novel.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Associated
with these <i>other conditions</i> of experience are those other types of
anciently repeating patterns (mythologems, archetypes) that recur along
recognizable lines (that is, Isis and Osiris as outline of brother and sister
union; crime as holy ritual; naming as power and danger; conversion experience,
eternal recurrence, and so on). These mythologems or archetypes are to be found
repeatedly in Buber’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ecstatic Confessions</i>,
along with the more personal and individual experiences described by the
mystics, and Musil finds them in his studies of mental illness, love, primitive
magic, social movements, nature mysticism, and art as well. They somehow seem
not to lose their freshness and significance, perhaps because of the
consciousness that they are to be understood as symbols (via metaphoric
transparency). They invite infinite interpretation and they do not pretend to
be substitutes for reality, remaining instead durative images or stories for
contemplation and reverberating echo. These patterns may also endure by virtue
of the action of <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">the motif</span>: “Motiv”,
Musil writes, “ist, was mich von Bedeutung zu Bedeutung führt. Es geschieht
etwas oder es wird etwas gesagt, und das vermehrt den Sinn zweier Menschenleben
und verbindet sie durch den Sinn” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,
1425; motif is what leads me from significance to significance. Something happens,
or something is said, and that increases the meaning of two human lives and
unites them through its meaning, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>1718). It recurs in different shapes,
in infinite forms that share certain common themes or cores, which, however, by
virtue of their changing, underline, rather than obscure, their symbolic nature
and, along with this, the symbolic nature of all attempts to define and
represent reality.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A posthumous early essay of
Nietzsche’s, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn” (On truth and lying
in a non-moral sense), seems to clearly elucidate the theory of metaphoric
deviation and repeatability expressed in <i>The Man without Qualities</i>.<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> </span>This essay, which passages in
Musil’s novel explicitly echo in both concept and phraseology, describes Nietzsche’s
genealogy of the human development of values, as a belief that all knowledge
and representation of the world is metaphoric. Truth, he writes, “is a mobile
army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human
relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensifications,
translation, and decoration.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Humans are constantly
creating reality, constantly constructing edifices of concepts upon which
really airy unstable things we foolishly rest our lives. Nietzsche writes:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
Let us consider in particular how concepts are formed; each
word immediately becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that it is
intended to serve as a memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualized,
primary experience to which it owes its existence, but because at the same time
it must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which,
strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than
non-equivalent cases. <i>Every concept comes into being by making equivalent
that which is non-equivalent.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-themecolor: text1;">[vii]</span></b></span></span></span></a></i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He then gives the example of the concept of leaf, “which is
formed by dropping the individual differences” between one leaf and another,
and points out that the word “snake” only designates one of the snake’s
attributes, leaving out many other important characteristics, and could just as
easily be used to describe a worm, whose movements also “snake.” Thus all
words, when they are taken as absolute descriptions and not metaphors, are
confining categorizations which threaten to limit our understanding and
perception of individual objects or ideas. We use words to describe the world
to ourselves and each other. Inasmuch as these words dissolve rather than
illuminate differences, language becomes a force of depersonalization and
conformity. As Musil laments,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
Das Leben wurde immer gleichförmiger und unpersönlicher. In
alle Vergnügungen, Erregungen, Erholungen, ja selbst in die Leidenschaft drang
etwas Typenhaftes, Mechanisches, Statistisches, Reihenweises
ein. . . . Der Kunstwille war sich schon selbst beinahe
verdächtig geworden. (<i>MoE, </i>1093)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; tab-stops: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
[Life was becoming more and more homogeneous and impersonal.
Something mechanical, stereotypical, statistical, and serial was insinuating
itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the
passions. . . . The will to art had already become more or less
suspicious. (<i>MwQ</i>, 1189)]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This conforming, mechanizing, force is, of course, related
to the problem of being “without qualities,” a “<i>Zeitkrankheit</i>” (an
illness of the times) which, like metaphor and pattern, can be both a formula
for atrophying and losing of individuality and creativity, <i>or</i> a
possibility, an openness that allows for infinite variations. The language
crisis of the turn of the last century, characterized by Hofmannsthal’s “Lord
Chandos Letter,” by philosophical skepticism about the relationship between
words and the things they purported to signify, tended to place language under
suspicious scrutiny, often culminating in a judgment of wholesale bankruptcy of
language’s ability to communicate, express, or bridge the hopelessly subjective
idiolect of each individual mind.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
At the same time, however, modernist authors, Musil in the forefront, were
actively working to reenergize this suspect language. Writers and artists used
the non-didactive aesthetic means at their disposal to effectively communicate
subjective experience, all-too-literal, non-transferable ideas and experiences,
via metaphor, image, and formal arrangement. Language can, and all too often
does, enable clichéd seeing, and, indeed, a realization of the distance between
words and “true” things (whatever those might be) often does create a sense of
disturbance or existential nausea. Yet it is also the case, despite alienation
and clear-seeing, that language has the capacity to be one of the most powerful
existentially charged means of reestablishing a sense of oneness with the world
and some sense of meaning. Why else does Sartre’s Roquentin decide that his
only possible path to a purposeful life lies in writing a novel? Why else does
Ulrich lay out his possibilities similarly under the trio: suicide, going to
war, writing books?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All too
often Nietzsche’s epigones seem to have listened to only the first part of his
message, and are so excited by the destruction of values and traditions and the
thrill of the imminent abyss that they do not stay long enough to take in the
all-important next step after the iconoclastic orgy. After the idols are
smashed, Nietzsche encourages us to create more forms — forms that, as long as
we constantly remind ourselves that we have created them ourselves, do not
become idols but are, nevertheless, beautiful and meaningful in their very
affirmation of creative energy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While our vision of the world as
solid and fixed is, according to Nietzsche, a devolution, on the one hand, from
fruitful conscious metaphor-making to forgetful and rigid concept acceptance or
<i>idées re</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ç<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">us</span></i>, he emphatically celebrates the persistence of artistic
re-forming and reinventing of living metaphors that are irrepressibly at odds
with the con-forming, atrophying tendency of comfort-seeking society. This
creative work is ― more than the deconstructing necessary before the lifetime
of rebuilding and rebuilding ― the point of Nietzsche’s critique of truth and
lying. Another significant parallel to this theme is Oscar Wilde’s essay “The
Decay of Lying,” which celebrates the artistic lie within the context of the
reign of naturalism and realism. Artistic lying becomes, in Wilde’s hands, a
form of higher truth-telling, insofar as it subtly undermines the credibility
of so-called truth by its emphasis on perception, imagination, and
subjectivity. Thus one of the artist’s tasks is to expand our seeing of
individual objects or experiences by deliberately dissolving the boundaries or
limitations of dead words or designations. As Proust’s narrator declares while
speaking of Elstir’s paintings in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Remembrance</i>, he was able to discern that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
the charm of each of [the seascapes] lay in a sort of
metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call
metaphor, and<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: S_4;">
that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking
away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew</a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="color: black; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-bidi-font-style: normal; mso-fareast-language: X-NONE;"><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span>.
The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual
notion, alien to our true impression, and compelling us to eliminate from them
everything that is not in keeping with that notion.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-themecolor: text1;">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Emerson, in his journal, writes similarly of how language,
specifically naming, emphasizes at will various attributes of reality:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
The metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than
this; that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of
nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a
Torrent; it is a Boat, a Mist, a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the
metaphor will hold. . . . Swifter than light, the world transforms
itself into that thing you name.[x]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While language can indeed work to obscure the very large gap
between things and words, it can also bring that distance into fruitful relief.
This more positive process is the part that informs Musil’s life’s work as a “<i>Wort-macher</i>”
(word-maker)<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> and leads him</span> to employ the
designation Vinzenz, in Musil’s farce, uses to describe his career and the
creative aspect of naming described by Emerson. A word-maker, emphatically not
a person who uses words already made by others, is explicitly engaged in the modernist
project of reclaiming language for meaningful use. New repeating patterns are
needed, new patterns that call attention to the fact that they are not to be “taken
at their word,” or literally, but that they are provisional, changing, never
meaning exactly the same thing to all people at all times. As Musil writes, “Gott
meint die Welt keineswegs wörtlich” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,
570; God doesn’t mean the world literally at all, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 388), which in no way necessarily devalues the world.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson
makes a distinction between the mystic, who nails a symbol to one meaning, and
a poet, who knows that every sensuous fact (that is, empirically perceived
element of the physical world) has multiple meanings. The “poet,” in other
words, knows that each individual thing can be described by a multitude of
words and each word can be said to describe a multitude of things. Ulrich
explains to an advice-seeking Diotima that the process of metaphor-making,
described elsewhere by Proust as “eliminating from [things] everything that is
not in keeping with” a chosen notion,<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
is, indeed, the basis of literature. But, he continues, it may not be a
dependable way to understand the world or how we should live, or, rather, it
cannot be read as a system with consistent results in every situation:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
“Haben Sie schon ja einen Hund gesehen?”fragte er. “Das
glauben Sie bloss! Sie haben immer nur etwas gesehen, das Ihnen mit mehr oder weniger Recht als ein Hund vorkam<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: S_6;">.</a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="color: black; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-bidi-font-style: normal; mso-fareast-language: X-NONE;"><!--[if !supportAnnotations]--><a class="msocomanchor" href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_msocom_6" id="_anchor_6" language="JavaScript" name="_msoanchor_6">[S6]</a><!--[endif]--><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span>
Es hat nicht alle Hundeigenschaften, und irgendetwas Persönliches hat es, das
wieder kein anderer Hund hat<i>. Wie sollen wir da je im Leben </i>‘<i>das
Richtige’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tun?” </i>(<i>MoE</i>, 572,
emphasis mine)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
[“Have you ever seen a dog?” he asked. “You only think you
have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in
regarding as a dog. It isn’t a dog in every respect, and always has some
personal quality no other dog has. <i>So how can we ever hope, in this life, to
do ‘the right thing’?</i>”<i> </i>(Emphasis mine, <i>MwQ</i>, 624)]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This surprising juxtaposition of an analysis of language
with a question of right conduct is a flagrant revelation: <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">form, words, and their relationship to our
perception and our modes of expression have everything to do with ethics. </span>As
Musil repeatedly notes: <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">aesthetics and
ethics are one. </span>The seemingly harmless process of synecdoche, taking the
part for the whole or the whole for the part, is thus oddly inhibiting to
discovering a right conduct of life ― “how can we ever hope, in this life, to
do ‘the right thing’?” ― because we can never know, by observing
generalizations, what will be the most important element in a particular case.
Ulrich continues:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
Oder man findet gewisse Steine und nennt sie wegen ihren
gemeinsamen Eigenschaften Diamant . . . Alles hat Teil am
Allgemeinen, und noch dazu ist es besonders. Alles ist wahr und noch dazu ist
es wild und mit nichts vergleichbar. Das kommt mir so vor, als ob das
Persönliche eines beliebigen <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: S_8;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: G_7;"><span style="mso-comment-continuation: 8;">Geschöpfes</span></a> gerade das wäre, was mit nichts anderem übereinstimmt. (<i>MoE</i>,<i> </i>572)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
[Or else you find certain stones, and because of the
properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds
. . . Everything partakes of the universal and also has something
special all its own. Everything is both true to type and is in a category all
its own, simultaneously. The personal quality of any given creature is
precisely that which doesn’t coincide with anything else. (<i>MwQ</i>, 624)]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Further, he compares the process to that of literature
reception and literature construction. When you read, he tells his cousin: “Ihre
Auffassung lässt aus, was Ihnen nicht passt. Das gleiche hat der Autor getan” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 573; You leave out whatever doesn’t
suit you. As the author himself has done before you, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 625). Moving back and forth from literature to life (ironically
on another level as well, since the conversation takes place within a work of
literature), he concludes,saying: “Wenn wir also, wie ich gesagt habe, in der
Dichtung einfach auslassen, was uns nicht passt, so tun wir damit nichts
anderes, als dass wir den ursprünglichen Zustand des Lebens wiederherstellen” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 574; when we simply leave out in
art whatever doesn’t suit our conceptions, we’re merely going back to the
original condition of life itself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>627). He adds that this process is true
for all the concepts “auf die wir unser Leben stützen . . .” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 574; on which we base our <span style="background: lightgrey; mso-highlight: lightgrey;">lives</span>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 627). All these concepts, he
writes, “sind nichts als erstarren gelassene G<span style="background: lightgrey; mso-highlight: lightgrey;">leichnisse”</span> (are no more than congealed
metaphors, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 626). “Congealed
metaphors” are certainly cousin to what Nietzsche calls in his essay the “residue
of metaphors,” warning that “the fact that a metaphor becomes hard and rigid is
absolutely no guarantee of the necessary and exclusive justification of that
metaphor.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn13" name="_ednref13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In precisely a “moment” within <i>The
Man without Qualities</i>, wherein two concepts, “Gewalt und Liebe für Ulrich
wieder nicht ganz die gewöhnlichen Begriffe [haben] (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 591; violence and love do not have quite their conventional
meaning, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 645), it occurs to
Ulrich that “das Leben — zum Platzen voll Einbildung auf sein Hier und Jetzt,
letzten Endes aber ein sehr ungewisser, ja ausgesprochen unwirklicher Zustand! —
sich in die paar Dutzend Kuchenformen stürzt, aus denen die Wirklichkeit
besteht” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 591; life ― bursting
with conceit over its here-and-now but really a most uncertain, even a
downright unreal condition ― pours itself headlong into the few dozen cake molds
of which reality consists, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ,<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> </span></i>645). The fact that two concepts
temporarily lose their conventional meaning here, and that they do this <i>within
a moment</i>, is another reflection of the fruitful and extratemporal nature of
some types of metaphor. Paradoxically, the insight that is born is that
metaphor can be reductive as well as rich in possibilities. These few dozen
molds, which constitute one way in which people and authors metaphorically
translate reality, are clearly somewhat restrictive; they seem to limit rather
than expand imagination and, by association, the possibilities of literature
and life. We have to differentiate however, between these “congealed metaphors,”
which Ulrich mocked in his discussion with Diotima, metaphors that are more
like clichés or tired concepts, and another fresher, more immediate species of
newly minted juxtapositions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Proust’s narrator, Marcel, famously,
in the waiting room at the Guermante’s mansion, is inundated repeatedly by a
series of metaphoric correspondences and sense-memories (paving stones,
clanking spoons, textures of cloth) that make him believe for the first time
that he can write. Marcel notes the sudden transmutation from real world to the
realm of fairy tale after wiping his mouth with a napkin that reminds him of a
towel from his past life: “Immediately, like the character in The Arabian
Nights who unwittingly performs precisely the rite that calls up before him,
visible to his eyes alone, a docile genie, ready to transport him far away, a
fresh vision of azure blue passed before my eyes. . . .”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn14" name="_ednref14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The sudden perception of a fresh
correspondence between two separate entities transports Proust’s narrator — and
Ulrich as well —from their present time-bound world into the extra-temporal
like magic. Such correspondence cannot, according to both theorists of
metaphor, be bidden, it cannot be logically prepared for, but when it comes, it
comes with a beatific force that temporarily blots out everything else. While
there may be only limited petrified realities (heavy and fixed as stone) or
formal arrangements invented out of the pragmatic necessity of the pursuance of
normal life and the continuation of some semblance of narrative, there seem to
be infinite possibilities for the extra-temporal legerdemain of metaphoric
displacement — to effortlessly topple centuries of tradition, discombobulate
time lines, or to magically translate a dreamer from a post-First World War
Parisian drawing room to a hovering trans-historical magic carpet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Metaphor― the act of making
equivalent that which is not equivalent ― is a sort of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>category mistake, a deviation. More
importantly for the creation and valuation of literature, metaphor, as Paul
Ricoeur writes, “bears information because it ‘redescribes’ reality.” “Thus,”
he continues, “the category mistake is the de-constructive intermediary phase
between the description and the redescription.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn15" name="_ednref15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Metaphor, in other words, being inherent in the creation of any fictional
world, involves a critique of the “real” world as prerequisite to a
redescription. The destruction (as with Nietzsche) is, however, only the
preliminary to re-creation. By connecting Ricoeur’s work on metaphor with his
work on narrative and time, we may note that fictional time, in his conception,
is a metaphoric redescription of cosmological and historical time, which
explores “the resources of phenomenological time that are left unexploited or
are inhibited by historical narrative . . . These hidden resources of
phenomenological time,” Ricoeur continues, “and the aporias which their
discovery gives rise to, form the secret bond between the two modalities of
narrative [fictive and historical]. Fiction,” he concludes, “is a treasure
trove of imaginative variations applied to the theme of phenomenological time
and its aporias.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn16" name="_ednref16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xvi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While all novels thus bear a
metaphoric relationship (as imaginative variation) with reality, in <i>The Man
without Qualities</i> and in <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i> we are presented
with more than just two simple or self-contained redescriptions of the world.
In addition to performing the normal metaphorical function vis-à-vis reality,
metaphor in these works takes on a more specialized role, that of presenting
further imaginative variations to the basic imaginative variation of each
fictional world itself. This multiple undoing reflects strikingly back upon
life from the realm of literature by its explicit questioning of all attempts
to make order and to tell stories in a strictly linear order. As Musil wrote in
response to a criticism leveled against the relative plotlessness of his novel,
“Das Problem: wie komme ich zum Erzählen, ist sowohl mein stilistisches wie das
Lebensproblem der Hauptfigur. . .” (The problem: how shall I come to
narration, is as much my stylistic problem as it is the life problem of the
main character).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" style="mso-comment-date: 20120628T1649; mso-comment-reference: G_9;"></a><a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn17" name="_ednref17" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17;" title=""><span style="mso-comment-continuation: 9;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xvii]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-language: X-NONE;"><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span>
Both novels wage their own wars on normal reality: Ulrich, when asked what he
would do if he could rule the world for the day, announces, “Es würde mir wohl
nichts übrigbleiben, als die Wirklichkeit abzuschaffen!” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>, 289; I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 312); Marcel, for his part,
declares that art alone can reveal to us “our life, life as it really is, life
disclosed and at last made clear, consequently the only life that is really
lived. . . .”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_edn18" name="_ednref18" style="mso-endnote-id: edn18;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xviii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Metaphoric thinking is thus an
alternative to what Ulrich describes as longing for<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
die einfache Reihenfolge, die Abbildung der überwältigenden
Mannigfaltigkeit des Lebens in einer eindimensionalen, wie ein Mathematiker
sagen würde, was uns beruhigt; die Aufreihung alles dessen, was in Raum und
Zeit geschehen ist, auf einen Faden, eben jenen berühmten “Faden der Erzählung,”
aus dem nun also auch der Lebensfaden besteht. (<i>MoE</i>, 650)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: 3.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoQuote">
[the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly
manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a
mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a
single thread, which calms us; that celebrated “thread of the story,” which is,
it seems, the thread of life itself. (<i>MwQ</i>, 709)]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Although, he continues to muse,
people love the illusion of this logical ordering of cause and effect, and look
to it “im Chaos geborgen” (as their refuge from chaos), he notes that “ihm
dieses primitiv Epische abhanden gekommen sei, woran das private Leben noch
festhält, obgleich öffentlich alles schon unerzählerisch geworden ist und nicht
einem ‘Faden’ mehr folgt, sondern sich in einer unendlich verwobenen Fläche
ausbreitet” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MoE</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>650; he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to
which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has
already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead
spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MwQ</i>, 709). In a modernist novel that has lost that “elementary,
narrative mode,” one can see the function of metaphor as the creation of an
almost infinite number of expanding thought moments, decentralized,
non-repeating nodes, within the “infinitely interwoven surface,” which assert
convincing alternatives to the comforting illusion of the “thread of the story.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Wilson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God’s Funeral</i>, 20.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Nietzsche, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untimely Meditations</i>, 141.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
See Harrison, “Two questions immediately arise: Does this functional process of
impersonal structures afford any opportunity at all for individual expression?
Or is the personal, subjective domain structured just as mechanically as the
setting in which it operates?” And further, in response to Ulrich’s famous
statements that he would abolish reality and that God does not mean the world
literally, Harrison maintains, “In fact, only when taken literally does the
figurative process of life degenerate into a petrified mass of formulas,
correlates of an inflexible reality principle. And that is precisely when one
should think of abolishing it. One must abolish the real and ‘regain possession
of unreality. ‘To regain possession of reality would mean to erase all the
congealed metaphors . . . It would mean recalculating the sum of
unreal and unspirited reality principles in accordance with the selective
principle of artist and reader, who leave out of the story everything they have
no use for.” “All of these are metaphors for metaphor itself, for experience as
a figurative process, in which repossessing oneself of unreality means nothing
less than restoring the ‘primal condition of life’ . . . It is easy
to see that this restoration envisions art as the real task of life, art ‘as
life’s metaphysical activity’ [Nietzsche]. One should stress, however, that
this vision implies neither an aestheticist negation of nor subjective flight
from the objective order of things. For it is the objective order itself that
contains this ‘nonsensical yearning for unreality [Unwirklichkeit] as the
motivating principle of its constitution.” Harrison, ““Suspension of the World,”
35–36; 41, 42.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Porchia, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voices</i>, 9.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Thomas Sebastian notes that Musil does not “distinguish precisely between
metaphor and synecdoche. Both fall under the general title of analogy. To ‘leave
things out’ by taking a ‘part for the whole’ is the way the ‘pseudo reality’
(seinesgleichen) comes about in which, according to Ulrich’s observations,
people pass their lives. The figurative assimilation is, in fact, a necessary
condition for having something to hold onto at all, for holding the chaos at
bay . . . However . . . any wholeness is an oscillating
figure . . . to be utterly precise, it would ultimately seem to make
any order or figuration impossible. It would make impossible any meaningful
action. . . .” Sebastian, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Intersection
of Science and Literature</i>, 46. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 874–84; here 878.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 878, emphasis mine.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> See, for example, Walter Sokel’s
discussion of Musil and Sartre and the atrophying role of language, which “blocks,”
he writes, “the path to varied perspectives” (Der Weg zur
Perspektivenvielfalt). Sokel, “Musil und die Existenzphilosophie Jean-Paul
Sartres,” 674. “For Musil as for Sartre, language fosters that cliché-like
seeing, a thinking in narrowly fixed, stable mono-meanings, with which we
create the illusion that we are “at home” in the world. The signifiers are
orientation signs that make the signified objects seem familiar. As soon as we
become aware, from whatever cause, that that which is signified is not at all
identical with the “true” things outside, the world begins to become
alienating.” Sokel, “Musil und die Existenzphilosophie Jean-Paul Sartres,” 674.
What Sokel does not, however, mention in this essay, is that language has
another role as well, a role that determines Musil’s and Sartre’s chosen
life-work as writers.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-size: 15.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Marcel Proust, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembrance</i>, 1:628.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn10" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[x]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 23.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Robert Musil, “Vinzenz and the
Mistress of Important Men,” act 1. </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #0070c0; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div id="edn12" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Proust, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembrance </i>1:628: “The names which denote things correspond
invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and
compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with
itself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn13" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref13" name="_edn13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 880.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn14" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref14" name="_edn14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Proust, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembrance, </i>2:993.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn15" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Ricoeur,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Rule of Metaphor</i>, 22.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn16" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref16" name="_edn16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xvi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Ricoeur, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time and Narrative</i>, vol. 3,
128.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn17" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Genese/Desktop/Old%20Laptop/Documents/Documents/World%20as%20Metaphor_COPYEDITEDJune28.docx#_ednref17" name="_edn17" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[xvii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> KA</span></i><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;">: Lesetexte.
Band 19: Wiener und Berliner Korrespondenz 1919–1938. 1931. Robert Musil an
Bernard Guillemin, 26. Januar 1931.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn18" style="mso-element: endnote;">
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Proust, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remembrance</i>, 2:1013.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-68325068784792827272020-01-28T08:42:00.001-08:002020-01-28T08:42:41.692-08:00#MUSIL2020 DAYS 22-28 MUSIL, CALASSO, SCAPE GOATS & SACRIFICE<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2MwQldTNQro/XjBiG3xdTEI/AAAAAAAAGrk/g-YF7oe8TzcjHEqh6ceV_s2vhH8gdjucQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/roberto-calasso.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="307" data-original-width="465" height="211" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2MwQldTNQro/XjBiG3xdTEI/AAAAAAAAGrk/g-YF7oe8TzcjHEqh6ceV_s2vhH8gdjucQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/roberto-calasso.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roberto Calasso</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I have been reading Roberto Calasso's <i>The Ruin of Kash</i> alongside my daily <i>The Man without Qualities</i>. Even though they are very different (where Calasso is gnomic and mystical, Musil is lucid and acerbic; where Calasso is profound and devastating, Musil is light and humorous), they are also very similar, both circling around similar questions: what are the driving demonic forces that create the dynamics of societies and history? What primal and ancient instincts lay below the seemingly civilized structures of the modern world? What does it mean for modern society that we have lost our conscious connection to the mythic, the ritualistic, the religious? How much of what we do and say is a hypocritical blind cover for these ever-present and recurring forces? And, maybe most similar and most important: how do we harness these forces to reanimate ourselves and our world to be more fiercely alive and awake as if in conscious vigilance against the soporific, depressing, moribund half-life of zombie capitalism and contemporary social reality? What does sacrifice, crime, violence, language, art have to do with this possible salvation? I knew that Calasso knew Musil and honored him; but yesterday I found a passage in <i>The Man without Qualities</i> that must have directly influenced Calasso's work (passage below).<br />
<br />
I am not going to try to explicate Calasso, since I am never really sure I understand what he wants or advocates in <i>The Ruin of Kash</i>. I am in love with the book. And when I am reading, I think I understand; but then when I awake from it and try to explain, it eludes me like a dream (which may be part of the point of what it "means"); but when he talks about Sacrifice (a central theme of the book), I think I understand the following:<br />
<br />
Civilization has always existed in contract with something that has often been called The Divine and which might also be understood as Nature. In order to be able to live more or less untroubled by the gods or the demonic forces of Nature, people have had to sacrifice things, people, surplus to the gods or to Nature, to ward away danger and to ward away the chaotic undifferentiated ALL from which civilization and individuation springs.<br />
<br />
Without giving something up, without sacrificing something, often violently, there can be no civilization. We tear the crops from the ground and we kill animals to eat; we break ground to build cities; we wage wars over territory and resources; we battle opposing ideologies; we separate one thing from another to make definitions; we use words to come together in communication, but these words also divide the undifferentiated. We turn Nature to our own uses, but if we do not give Nature something back, she will take it herself.<br />
<br />
He tells the story of the end of sacrifice as ritual conscious activity, the story called "the ruin of Kash," culled from Frobenius. A long cycle of sacrificial kingship, whereby all the kings of Kash were killed along with their chosen associates whenever the royal astrologers named the day, is interrupted by the powers of a storyteller, who puts the king and the astrologers under the spell of story (of language and poetry or <i>soma</i>) so that they miss their vigil recording the movements of the stars. The storyteller and the king's sister (who are both bound to die with the king) are in love and they scheme to end the cycle of sacrifices. And succeed. But only for a while. The storyteller becomes the new king, who dies a normal death...but with him the kingdom of Kash and its legendary and ancient wealth and power also die. "The Legend of Kash teaches us," write Calasso, in his usual cryptic style, "that sacrifice is the cause of ruin, but that the absence of sacrifice is also the cause of ruin".<br />
<br />
The dynamic tension between civilization and the divine, between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, is a recurring and unavoidable cycle. But the modern world has forgotten the divine and forgotten nature and is unaware that the process of sacrifice continues without our knowledge or prayers or devotion. Nevertheless, sacrifices continue; as his long descriptions of the French Revolution and the Red Terror and Counter-Revolution demonstrate. Is he saying that these blood sacrifices are bad, because unconscious or are they good because they are sacrifices? He clearly is critical of the French Revolution and what he characterizes as the equalizing totalitarian vulgarity of its proponents; but is that because they mistakenly believed that their bloodshed was rational and not mystical? That they foolishly believed that their violent acts would fix the world, once and for all, removing the bad elements and installing perpetual utopia? Calasso is clear enough on one thing: Sacrifice as conscious ritual activity or as blind secular sacrifice are both inevitable and a necessary prerequisite for being alive. Maybe that is all we have to understand. Or, more importantly: this could be a warning against ascribing to any movement or ideology which professes it will once and for all remove all dark and dangerous things; and an incitement to appreciate that without darkness and violence (in one form or another---and the question of which form <i>is</i> important!) we have no light and no life. To do away with difference, tension, danger is to prepare for death and a return to undifferentiated sleep. To do this prior to death is to create a dystopian land of zombies.<br />
<br />
But, as mentioned above, I found the following passage about sacrifice in my Musil reading yesterday, which may help us to understand both writers better:<br />
<br />
"The world apparently needs its negative entities, images of the unwanted, which attract to themselves all the disgust and disharmony, all the slag of a smoldering fire, such as life tends to leave behind. Out of all that 'could be' there suddenly crystallizes, to the stunned amazement of everyone concerned, the 'it is', and whatever drops away during this disorderly process, whatever is unsuitable, superfluous, unsatisfying, seems to coagulate into the vibrant universal hatred agitating all living creatures that is apparently so characteristic of our present civilization, which compensates for all our lack of satisfaction with ourselves by allowing us to feel that easy satisfaction so readily inspired by everyone else.Trying to isolate specific scapegoats for the displeasure is merely part of the oldest psychotechnical bag of tricks known to man. Just as the medicine man drew the carefully prepared fetish from his patient's body, the good Christian projects his own faults onto the good Jew, whom he accuses of seducing him into committing advertisements, high interest rates, newspapers, and all that sort of thing. In the course of time people have blamed their troubles on bad weather, witches, socialists, intellectuals, generals, and in the years before the Great War, Austrians saw a most welcome scapegoat of this sort in Prussian Germany.<b> Unfortunately, the world has lost not only God but the Devil as well. As it projects its unwanted evil onto the scapegoat, so it projects its desired good onto ad hoc ideal figures, which it reveres for doing what it finds inconvenient to do for itself. We let others perform the hard tricks as we watch from our seats: that is sport. We let others talk themselves into the most one-sided exaggerations: that is idealism. We shake off evil and make those who are spattered with it our scapegoats. It is one way of creating an order in the world, but this technique of hagiolatry and fattening the scapegoats by projection is not without danger, because it fills the world with all the tensions of unresolved inner conflicts. People alternately kill each other or swear eternal brotherhood without quite knowing just how real any of it is, because they have projected part of themselves onto the outer world and everything seems to be happening partly out there in reality and partly behind the scenes, so that we have an illusory fencing match between love and hate. The ancient belief in demons, which made heavenly-hellish spirits responsible for all the good and bad that came one's way, worked much better, more accurately, more tidily, and we can only hope that, as we advance in psychotechnology, we shall make our way back to i</b>t" (560, emphasis mine).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-4215126328096674082020-01-21T07:04:00.002-08:002020-01-21T07:11:30.298-08:00#MUSIL2020 DAYS 18-21 On ANALOGY & DIFFERENCE<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have been obsessing about Musil's tendency to put similar ideas into wildly different people's mouths in different contexts, the way Ulrich is constantly comparing and contrasting disparate things, and the way in which all analytic thinking seems to be a process of parsing what is like what other thing and also unlike it. Of course I have written about this before (my book about Musil focused on Metaphor in the book), but I still find myself asking questions about just what he is up to here. On the one hand, there seems to be a desire to show that things which we hypocritically tell ourselves are different from each other (either moral or immoral in many cases), are actually more or less the same things, albeit described with euphemisms in one case and called what they are in the other. Also there is an aesthetic and mystical pleasure in finding likenesses, of collapsing the boundaries around things...and this is the mystical metaphoric moment I focus on in my book....that play of metaphor which Ulrich says "brings beauty and meaning into the world," and which I have compared to Proust's idea that the happiest moments in life are when we make connections between two different things. And yet, there is also a very important imperative to see differences between things that merely appear to be similar, such as a Race Horse of Genius and a real Genius or Arnheim's mystical silliness and Ulrich and Agathe's later explorations, or Bonadea's nymphomaniacal lack of self-control and Moosbrugger's mental incapacity to stand trial. And yet we see, sometimes from one chapter to another, Musil trying out the same phrases and ideas under different circumstances, as if in a scientific experiment (and we know he sometimes thought of the book as one), to see what will happen if we put this person instead of that person in a certain situation (later drafts actually show Musil trying one character in a particular plot twist and then another instead!)? Another aspect of all of this could be described by the Baudrillardian idea of simulacrum, which Musil decidedly anticipates (as noted by Kirkdale Books in a tweet of last week). As early critic of the Culture Industry, Musil was very aware of the way in which advertising, media, and commerce present simulated and cheapened versions of great ideas and great art, vitiating their powers and significance. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some specific notes on similarities and differences, analogies:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span>Pointed example of how M presents similar ideas within
different contexts & in different sorts of people's mouths: chapter 86
shows Arnheim having a kind of mystical experience parallel to Ulrich's affair
with the mayor's wife and also living the life as literature idea presented by
Ulrich a few chapters back, this time as the poem of life, and slightly
ridiculed. This chapter is most sympathetic to Arnheim so far, but his version
of Ulrich's idea presents us with a different facet, problematizes.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
General Stumm likewise reiterates some of Ulrich's thinking about the war of
ideas and though his strategic mapping of ideologies and " generals"
of ideas ( Buddha, Jesus, etc) is ridiculous, although the Parallel Campaign's
attempt to find a crowning idea is absurd, it is as if Musil were asking us:
are they more absurd than trying to live consciously- the motivated life? And
because we know that M did believe in the necessity of doing so, of life as
literature to some extent, we may look at the satirized sections with more
indulgence?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But no, the slight differences in aspect and context DO seem to render what is
holy in one form absurd and even hateful in another. A lesson in the importance
of nuance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This description of Arnheim could almost be of Musil: "it is equally
certain that his ambition to master all worthwhile knowledge--a taste for
polyhistory so consuming that no single man could have lived up to the goals he
set himself--found in the soul a means to rise above all that his intellect
could not encompass" except that Musil was self conscious about the word
Soul, and usually ridiculed it. Musil as scientist-mystic parallels Arnheim as
businessman-mystic. But the latter pair is a gross parody.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Musil was a mystic, but decidedly not of the kind he condemned as
Schleuder-mystik (something like wishy-washy mysticism). He was not anti-
rational or anti- scientific, and raved against those who were; but knew--knew
as a scientist- that there was a limit to what science & reason could
explain...that realm, of essay, art, religion, was vital for him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Another difference between M's mysticism and that of Arnheim or Diotima or
Walter is that he could not believe in their optimistic view of wholeness and
progress. While the Other Condition was a condition of wholeness, it's power
rested in its fleeting nature & in its interplay with change & creative
dynamics. Sort of like the Apollonian-Dionysian complex. Wholeness-- circles of
significance--interrupted and refreshed by dissonance. Repeatability of
essence, syncopated by energy of existential choice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Next chapter, 87: Moosbrugger, like Arnheim in his own mystical state, is
"both inside and outside". In another idiom, we have the Other
Condition experienced as psychosis. Also, earlier, question of Moosbrugger's
psychological responsibility --his insanity defense-- paralleled by Bonadea's
inability to control her adulteries. They are both subject to states of altered
consciousness that may excuse their behavior!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
And Moosbrugger, like Arnheim, thinks of himself as "the boss". He is
putting things in order, just as Arnheim thinks he is, and both may be
deceiving themselves, not just the powerless madman.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Chapter 91: Ulrich tells Tuzzi in conversation that although Tuzzi was deeply
offended by Ulrich's idea that the vulgar, mean, and evil parts of our
characters are actually the forces that make change, "But then you're
saying just what I've said!" Here he seems to be pointing out that we have
a tendency to use euphemisms to describe certain processes (in this case,
diplomacy), to mask the real conditions behind them. Tuzzi complains about
philosophizing and then Ulrich makes another disturbing analogy: "You have
just stated the same very modern principle that churches have applied to their
members for nearly two thousand years, and which the socialists have begun to
follow too". Ulrich is confounded by what Ulrich could have meant "by
this analogy".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Chapter 95: Discussion of Great Man of Letters or Great Author (I usually lean
toward an extreme and translate this common Musil term, not quite accurately,
but with the right emphasis, as "the big-shot writer". It was a term
of abuse he often used to rage against the popular writers who did not have the
integrity he had. He rather unfairly leveled the term against Thomas Mann, with
whom he was very competitive, even though Mann actually helped him repeatedly,
with money and honors. Other "big-shot writers," who more clearly did
not deserve the acclaim they were rewarded were Musil's despised Wildgans and
other "homeland writers". I am bringing this in here because here we
have an excursus made of careful distinction: what is the difference between a
big-shot writer and a genius? This can then be compared to what the difference
between a genius and a race horse of genius is. Since, as Musil writes,
"intelligence must be displayed, made highly visible and operative, and
since the Great Author suits this purpose better than an even greater author
[i.e., someone like Musil himself!], whom the largest number might not find
quite so easy to understand, everyone does his level best to make the visibly
Great even greater". And: to be a Great Author, " one has to write
books or plays that will do equally well for high and low".Their works
"become the savings banks, as it were, of the national cultural
economy".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Compare Clarisse's idea in Chapter 97 that someone must "make a start and
end this putting up with everything and letting things take their course,"
and her championing of people who (unlike the Great Author) "cannot fall
into line and go on lying like all the rest and who have to make a nuisance of
themselves".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Chapter 98, in front of displays of bloody murder weapons, Bonadea reminds
Ulrich that he once said that "in the right circumstances everyone is
capable of any weakness". Later Musil will expand on this idea by noting
the law of opposition, wherein Agathe would be fiercely honest among a circle
of criminals, but must be criminal in a society of saints. But it is also a
generally important critique of a rigid morality which tries to apply a law to
individual instances (Musil will posit the un-categorical imperative to correct
this end. A wonderful send-up of the problem with fixed morality can be found
in Musil's Susanna Letters in Thought Flights). And, of course, this is a
metaphoric question in itself: we cannot make strict analogies to decide moral
or legal questions insofar as different circumstances can make all the
difference between an honorable killing, a killing in self defense, and an evil
murder. If we add to this Musil's idea of the Utopia of the Next Step, we have
to then judge the act by what it engenders, and, in Musil's terms, by whether
it makes one fruitful, more alive, etc.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Chapter 99: Problem of tennis player and race horse of genius taken up again.
And here Musil clarifies that some parallels are clearly misleading:
"There is bound to be a grain of truth in it, and anyway why shouldn't the
surprises an athletic champion pulls off suggest those we get from a genius, or
his strategies seem analogous to those of a seasoned explorer of the unknown?
Even though there is something else, something far more important, that is
quite wrong with such analogies, of course, this is not perceived, or perceived
only with reluctance by those given to making them. At bottom there is an
uncertainty of values, passed over and ignored; it is probably less its idea of
genius that makes this era attribute genius to a tennis player or a racehorse
than its general distrust for the world of the mind, of the intellect, to which
the term rightly belongs". The "imprecision" inherent in this
sort of dangerous analogy, "the sort of fuzziness of mind that makes the
denizens of a small town regard the son of the department store owner as a man
of the world," is a matter of making connections between things that may
have some likenesses, but that are deeply different in terms of context and
meaning. We always leave things out when we see likenesses, make metaphors,
construct concepts--and doing so is how we bring beauty and order and meaning
into the world--but the ethical aesthetic value of such processes very much seems
to depend on what it is that is left out, and how valuable it is to both us and
to the things in themselves. <o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-38134796833913385562020-01-17T09:15:00.001-08:002020-01-17T09:49:18.107-08:00#MUSIL2020 DAYS 13-17 ON MAKING IDEAS REALITYThe problem of how ideas do or do not influence reality, history, our lives becomes more explicitly central in these chapters, especially in the trio of chapters 82-85. The question of ideas is, of course, related to where ideas come from and whether they are, to begin with, a reasonable response to what is real or mere random constructs that, in their self-contradictory nature, cancel each other out.<br />
<br />
The conceit of the suggestions proffered by the people to the Parallel Campaign is an object lesson in the complexity of human values and ideas. That so many people want so many opposing things, with some people seeing something as the solution, while others see the solution in the elimination of that thing, may seem to suggest that truth is utterly impossible to arrive at or that nothing at all is real or true. But such a conclusion is too easy. And unethical, according to Musil's imperatives.<br />
<br />
Nietzsche's early posthumous essay, "On Truth & Lying in a Supramoral Sense" floats behind these chapters--although it is improbable that M had read it since it was unpublished--. Still, Musil would have gotten some of the ideas from N's other writings and probably also came to its conclusions by himself. The idea is that Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, that we construct edifices out of these images, which eventually become ossified into habits and cliches, dead ideas.<br />
<br />
This is not to say, in a nihilistic sense, that there is no relationship at all between what is and what we call it, but that there is a problem when we forget that we ourselves are the creators of value, our varying perspectives naming and categorizing things according to our own (at best, changing and alive and new) needs, uses, tastes, desires. While some contemporary readings see this choosing and naming as a treacherous and deceitful social construction of meaning, which only serves those in power, for N (and for Musil) this naming and renaming is the work of what N calls "the creative subject," i.e., any aware and conscious human being in contact with the world, not just artists and philosophers, but any person with the capacity and energy --and ethical honesty--to see anew and name anew, create new metaphors, new ways of describing the world, breaking open, again and again, any ossified constructs that are calling for enlivening. Not for the sake of destroying values, but for the creative generative sake of creating ever new ones--values that are intensely connected to our own real lives, to the physical, natural, affirmative embrace of what is (N's amor fati....love of fate, an embrace of the REAL). Thus, language is not a flight from the REAL and TRUE, but an every expanding creative attempt to braid the world with the living word, as metaphor, image (remembering that most metaphors are images of the material world, thus they are bridges between abstraction and concrete things, between ideas and action).<br />
<br />
Thus, when Clarisse suggests a Nietzsche Year as crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign, Ulrich at first objects that "you cannot turn great ideas into reality," he is really struggling with the question of how one actually could or how one does, in fact, always do that to some extent, or maybe--in some utopian sense--could do that, despite the seeming muddling, self-contradictory "armed truce of ideas," which always keeps any one idea from coming to prominence as a sort of safety measure.<br />
<br />
In discussing the Nietzsche Year, Ulrich asks Clarisse (twice) WHAT DID NIETZSCHE WANT? A question I think he partially answers when he returns later to answer the question she posed him (why don't you act), an answer that is practically a paraphrase of the On Truth and Lying essay!<br />
<br />
When Clarisse suggests that Walter should kill Ulrich (or that she should kill him), Ulrich at first concedes that it is fine to THINK anything, as if thinking were different than doing. But Clarisse (always taking everything to extremes...that is her role) insists that "if you can think something, you should be able to do it too". She accuses Ulrich of being as passive as Walter. (the women in the book, Clarisse and Agathe primarily, are the active principles, the ones who take risks, while the men think too much. Clarisse bases her action principle on Nietzsche's idea that one needs to be able to act without knowing what will come next....which is connected to Musil's utopia of the next step, whereby one never can judge anything except by what it engenders). After which, Ulrich develops his idea of the 2 kinds of passivity, one of which is an active passivity...., which is later explained by the utopian principle of motivated action, whereby one should not do anything without intensity or passion....and in between should do nothing. But here Clarisse notes something that Agathe will pick up later, i.e., the danger of not doing...For in some cases, not doing can be as fateful as doing. Letting things happen, not choosing, not taking a stand. This also relates to the oft-mentioned problem of why people get concerned about some events and issues, while ignoring other just as egregious problems. Our crimes of neglect.<br />
<br />
Ulrich had been about to answer Clarisse's question about why he did not act with the word "God". And he continues in his mind, saying, "God does not really mean the world literally; it is a metaphor, an analogy". And, invoking N.'s Creative Subject, he continues: "We are not supposed to take Him at His word, it is more we ourselves who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us".<br />
<br />
When he returns to Walter and Clarisse's house to answer the question, his explanation suggests that creative metaphors do in fact influence action, insofar as we justify and inspire what we do based on our perceptions of life, which is why it is so very important that our ideas are not routine or just accepted on faith--or on bad faith (Sartre's idea of mauvais fois is everywhere in Musil, when people justify what they are doing by lying to themselves about their real purposes)--. While mostly history proceeds as a result of unexamined ideas, accidents, trifling causes, this is because people do not take responsibility for our roles as creative subjects, from our indifference to ideas. Reality, thus, becomes a reflection of a lack of new ideas, of conformity and ethical aesthetic laziness. Also a sort of personal myopia, whereby we only judge things based on how they affect our own lives, rather than philosophically, abstractly.<br />
<br />
Thus Ulrich suggests a utopian mode of action whereby we concentrate on "the opening up of some new experience of life" instead of just "the pattern of what we already know". We should, he says, using the metaphor of making wine, concentrate "the spiritual juices" by reevaluating all values:<br />
"so that those who seek to acquire a mind of their own must first of all realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experimental"--in other words, like a man without qualities.<br />
<br />
Which brings Ulrich to the idea of existing like literature, which includes all art and even religious philosophy (really the whole realm Musil elsewhere calls essayistic). Walter accuses Ulrich of valuing "an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy," which is a good paraphrase of N's "Bizet makes me fruitful...." and the whole complex of whatever makes me fruitful is good.<br />
<br />
Ulrich then rhapsodizes on the dynamic of what Walter sees as a negation by art of life, but which Ulrich sees as a refutation that includes love, that is, a refutation and affirmation at once. This paradox can be explained by referring back to N's idea of smashing some idols in order to create new ones; while art refutes the status quo of ossified reality and its conventions, it is in order to create new metaphors and new ways of seeing the world that we love, in order to re-enliven our relationship with the beauty of the world which has been dulled and dimmed by conventional perspectives, some of which are even anti-life in themselves. Thus, Ulrich says:<br />
<br />
"Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete [of] all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was".<br />
<br />
Thus we see that ideas--in the form of art, in the form of beauty (which, he says, "works by intensification and contrast")--do, in fact, radically alter reality.<br />
<br />
Something to think about: how does this relate to the Emersonian paradox of self reliance--and that of the Kantian categorical imperative--whereby acting according to what is true for you is actually the same thing as acting in the interest of the all? How is the individual act connected to the universal? New ideas are related to old ideas because humans have made them out of the same raw materials of reality, seen and perceived from different perspectives. Important: perspectives are not random constructs, but, rather, different aspects of the Real.<br />
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-8492064602029336692020-01-13T08:49:00.001-08:002020-01-13T17:37:41.538-08:00#MUSIL2020 Days 9-12<div class="MsoNormal">
On IDEALISM and REALITY<br />
<br />
"Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into
their opposite when one tries to live up to them". Diotima here speaks for
Musil. Compare also the Napoleonic dictum, "principles are fine--they
don't commit you to anything,"qtd in The Ruin of Kash. Relationship
between abstract ideas, reified ideals and action taken seriously &
ridiculed. Ulrich, like Diotima, like the reader is struggling with &
against "eternal verities," a reevaluation of all values.<br />
<br />
I find the Parallel Campaign business a bit boring, probably because, compared
to the rest it is so one-dimensional as satire, but when looked at from this
dimension (as idea seeking action) it gains importance as analogy of more
serious quests.<br />
A sort of clown show or comic parallel of the drama, a la Shakespeare.<br />
<br />
Leinsdorf and Diotima are forced by the farce of the Campaign to face complex
philosophical problems. Their simple idealism is dissolved into melancholy
confusion.<br />
<br />
A little thinking is a dangerous thing. Reminds me of Mann' s Buddenbrooks
where the successful man reads Schopenhauer & has an existential
crisis(short lived). "Now, while His Grace had an extraordinart knack for
keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other so that they never
came together in his consciousness, he shld have firmly rejected this
particular idea[that one cannot go back in history], wh was inimical to all his
principles." & "Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken
without violence?"<br />
<br />
UTOPIAS: <br />
In response to Kirkdale Bookshop's question about Chapters 61 and 62: Are these
Musil's thoughts, Ulrich's, Moosbrugger's, None of theirs?<br />
<br />
Page 265, utopia of precision sounds alot like Musil's own "Utopia of the
motivated life". Yet he wld qualify that one probably can't live always in
this heightened state.<br />
P.266: "...a human being full of the paradoxical interplay if exactitude
and indefiniteness". Compare to Musil's "precision and soul,"
elsewhere championed ( & later by Ulrich as Parallel Campaign idea) as
fundamental union of opposites, like his "mathematics and mysticism".
These unions if opposites are correctives to cognitive dissonance of rigid
moral "eternal verities". More soul in matters of science and more
science in matters of soul! This is all Musil philosophy here.<br />
All of which makes me wonder how readers of M can call him a cynic.<br />
<br />
Utopia of Essayism also description of Musil's ideas, with Ulrich as
representative. This is, intellectually, allegorically, a very autobiographical
novel.<br />
<br />
"He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open
to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or
intellectually taboo....And when he thinks he has found the right idea, he
perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world,
with a glow that makes the whole earth look different". World filled with
meaning; world drained with meaning. Consider also Nietzsche's dictum: whatever
makes me fruitful is good.<br />
<br />
Essayism conects to N's Perspectivism too.<br />
And later utopia of the next step, where actions are judged by what they
engender.<br />
<br />
"..all moral events take place in a field of energy whose constellation
charges them with meaning.They contain good and evil the way an atom contains
the possibilities of certain chemical combinations. They are what they will
become...". Thus Clarisse's suggestion on p.233 that if Ulrich were to set
Moosbrugger free, he would be transformed, takes on new weight. She will
continue to think in this way...an extreme form of Ulrich' s idea. Almost, in
her case, magical thinking.<br />
<br />
WHY THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN is Less interesting to me than the rest: <br />
<br />
Trying to understand why I take umbrage at the way most of the Musil that gets
quoted in newspapers is from the Parallel Campaign sections. As if the only
point of Musil were his ironic critique of the old Empire.<br />
<br />
1st reason why it bugs me:<br />
these sections often lack the complexity of other parts, i.e., they ridicule
without sympathy, are 1-dimensional. The target is almost too easy.<br />
2nd reason: those who revel in them take them out of context. Yes, Musil was
generally left-leaning, especially in his younger years, but he was also an
enthusiastic soldier in WWI (part of a mass intoxication he wonders at later),
and an upholder of many old values. Also, he would have criticized a democratic
bureaucracy with as much scathing wit.<br />
<br />
3rd reason: we also see Ulrich admiring some of the forms of the old
aristocracy, even as he ridicules them. Ulrich makes fun of everything, all
values and all beliefs, but he does so, as he later admits, partly because he
loves them.<br />
<br />
4th Reason: it is extremely un-Musilian to take any simple critique of
something as if it were a one-sided defense of the simple other side. His
thinking is distinctly mult-valent, and the only value that holds steady is
that something is good or bad inasmuch as it supports the life of the mind,
creativity, and free thinking. Which is why, when invited to speak at the Paris
conference in defense of culture, he scandalized the communist organizers by
suggesting that the Soviet regime might be just as dangerous for culture as the
Nazis.<br />
<br />
Finally, people who only get their Musil from these snippets quoted in the
newspaper, think of him merely as a witty social critic, and thus have no idea
what a profound trove of literary, poetic, philosophical riches are within
these pages.<o:p></o:p></div>
Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-54158774462005129582020-01-08T09:21:00.003-08:002020-01-13T16:51:27.477-08:00#MUSIL2020 Continued, Days 5-8<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Book Twitter Notes on The Man without Qualities Continued: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
S.Wilkins's "Psuedoreality Prevails," translated by E.Wilkins/Kaiser
more accurately as "The Like of the Same Now Happens" (Germ.
"Seinesgleichen Geschieht" (The Selfsame Happens?), points us towards
the contrast between what repeats and what deviates.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In my reading, the novel plays constantly with sameness and differences (with
metaphor and analogy), an object lesson in the way life operates amid the same
dynamics as art itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Aesthetic experience (and the art object or novel) operates thus under same
structural principle as life itself (thus informing us in how to best live).
Harmonies and discord, accords and discords. Universals and individuations.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Mystical experience of Affair with the Major's Wife (based on Musil's own life)
exemplifies M's "other condition". Later described in novel as
"tear in the page" of normal reality. Normalcy as deadening habituation
interrupted by heightened moments of exceptional experience wherein normal
rules and morals do not apply. Related to Woolf's Moments of Being, Sartre's
exceptional moments in Nausea, Proust of course, and Nietzsche's anything that
occurs in love occurs beyond good and evil.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
These moments are temporary and out of time. They cannot and must not last, for
lasting would mean ossification (the first people to be thrown out of any
utopia are the utopians, who always see new ways of living and cannot rest in
closed finished systems)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Chapter 34: Ulrich's suspicion of "those prefabricated compartments &
forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the
ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings".
Then his vision of the stone church, like an old beautiful matron, followed by
"all the resistance of primal instinct against this world petrified into
millions of tons of stone, against this frozen moonscape of feeling...".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
"It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world
ready-made, apart from a few minor personal details, and there is no disputing
that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all
advances and revolutions; but it must be said that this casts a feeling of
deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights". <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Sentence map: It may be [proposition], and there is no disputing [concession],
but [complexification/objection], but [again, new twist].<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The Other Condition: "He had penetrated the heart of the world; from it to
his far-off love was no farther than the nearest tree. In-feeling linked living
beings without space, as in a dream two beings can pass through each other
without mingling,and altered all their relations. Other than this, however, his
state of mind had nothing in common with dreaming. It was clear, and brimful of
clear thoughts; however, nothing in him was moved by cause, purpose, or
physical desire, but everything went rippling out in circle after ever-renewing
circle, as when an infinite jet falls on a basin's surface". <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Note the clarity of mind and lack of appetite/desire. Later Ulrich will muse on
the 2 sides of life: appetitive and non-appetitive, noting that the appetitive
is cause of all destruction, BUT ALSO of ALL CREATION. Non-desiring mystical
state is only part of Musil's necessary formula for motivated life. Not a
celebration of passive non-attachment, but of oscillation between enlightening
contrast.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Referred to later as a circle of meaning or significance, this
"ever-renewed circle" (like a fountain in Rilke's poem!), is the
recurring, repeated essence of life, interrupted by the willful existential
choice-making of the creative subject.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-17419056026968039852020-01-03T08:36:00.001-08:002020-01-13T17:05:21.968-08:00#Musil2020: Book Twitter Reads The Man without Qualities<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dU8FB6XHD_M/Xg9stSEBzFI/AAAAAAAAGmI/ALK3X4AD15QYTNPPotlPhkfytOay6qeVgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/paperpills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="background-color: #444444; color: #f3f3f3;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dU8FB6XHD_M/Xg9stSEBzFI/AAAAAAAAGmI/ALK3X4AD15QYTNPPotlPhkfytOay6qeVgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/paperpills.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;">PHOTO STOLEN FROM PAPER PILL's (@reemk10 's) TWITTER's CALL TO READING, "LET'S DO THIS!"</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;">What would Musil have thought of Twitter? A vast network
driven by algorithmic connections and allusions, necessarily swift in its
aphoristic pronouncements, trivialized by "trends" and
"influencers," advertisements, and shallow, superficial alliances?
Another encyclopedic, infinite, non-linear realm in which what is important
gets lost? Or?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;">In any case, so-called "Book Twitter," an extremely sophisticated and
charming corner of this otherwise often unwieldly and unfriendly interwebverse,
in response to the cheerleading of a reader whose handle is Paper Pills
(@reemk10), initiated a group reading of The Man without Qualities. It
began on January 1st, and participants are reading approximately 23 pages a
day, intending to finish the approximately 1700 pages of the Knopf edition
(translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike) by March, at which point yours
truly will be interviewed on the Feeling Bookish podcast. Comments,
discussions, and quotations can be found under the hashtag #Musil2020. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #f3f3f3;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
At first I did not know if I would participate. Did I really want to stop all
my other reading to re-read this enormous book that I imagined I already knew
so well? But once I picked it up, I found it so utterly engaging and brilliant,
and found it so easy to read a mere 23 pages per day, that I am happy to take
part in this joyous collaborative venture!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Having to keep one's comments to small bits is challenging, but maybe in a good
way. Here are some of my comments, by day, with twitter-sized bits combined for
easier reading: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
DAY 1: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1st 25 pages <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Musil2020?src=hashtag_click">#Musil2020</a>:
Different discourse vocabularies for looking at world (science, anthropology,
literature, technology, etc.), undermine accepted simplistic view. Note
patterns, systems and deviations from patterns, i.e., accident as something
that has broken rank. Ulrich's absurd attempt to clock/measure forces &
counterforces. Uncertainty/ different possible versions (they might have been
Tuzzi & Arnheim, but...). Possibility sense as subjunctive case, but always
linked to reality. Most of all, on the sentence and paragraph structure, the
constant complexification. Something is described, then qualified, then twisted
again, into further complexification. Nothing is simple; everything is
ambiguous . Despite ambivalence, the forces, desires, tensions, dynamics are
exciting and fascinating. Ulrich is struggling, and we struggle with him, to
find the possibilities inherent in the new realities of modern world.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Note also: Ulrich' s vision of Leona compared to Swann' s of Odette in Proust:
beauty amplified by fitting a face into an already pictured pattern or
archetype. The ever present tension between pattern and deviation from pattern!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Choices, existentialisism, exemplified in Ulrich's problem of decorating his
house...modern world without god, fixed center, shared morals leaves one paralyzed...or
open...remember: being without qualities can be positive too...can mean
openness, non attachment to preconceptions or dogma...possibly based on Meister
Eckhart' s phrase. ..denoting singleness, non attachment...<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
DAY 2:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Returning to yesterday' s premonitions on recurring
patterns\deviations (<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Musil2020?src=hashtag_click">#Musil2020</a>
): "Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, wh means
by a more or less hostile act against its surroundings: without the Pope there
wld be no Luther, and without Pagans no Pope, so there is no getting away from
the fact that man's deepest social instinct is his antisocial instinct".
And: "Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is
Democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches,
universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the
barracks. It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat
a fellow man within an inch of his life, and then provides featherbeds for the
lonely, mistreated body....". Lest one read this as resigned nihilism,
note that Ulrich "hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in
regard to life...." and felt that one must "find the cause of this,
the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that wld be
than merely being a good person in accordance with obsolescent moral
principles...". A premonition of the protagonist's motivation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
DAY 3: Musil called himself "Monsieur le vivisecteur," but he was
also constantly seeing likenesses, commonalities, sometimes between things,
persons, ideas we like to keep separate, scandalizing our pretensions to moral
difference, by suggesting that "if mankind could dream as a whole, that
dream would be Moosbrugger," the misogynist murderer. As we read on, we
will see that all sorts of characters, presented as foolish or otherwise
reprehensible (anti-semites, absurd mystical demagogues, industrialists, bad
poets) will say things that could have come from the mouth of our
hyper-intelligent anti-hero Ulrich. This lack of fixed qualities does not
signal a state of nihilist relativity of values, but a radical openness in
search of comprehensive principles upon which to base an ethical-aesthetic
life. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</span>Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-37923305842553865972019-12-11T10:38:00.003-08:002019-12-11T17:56:13.043-08:00"Agathe: Or the Forgotten Sister": A Sort of Review <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-21yEV_4ejmc/XfEzymjVBxI/AAAAAAAAGic/aTyDAx88zCgZco_8cO-CNUrwwBQIGst1gCEwYBhgL/s1600/agathe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="313" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-21yEV_4ejmc/XfEzymjVBxI/AAAAAAAAGic/aTyDAx88zCgZco_8cO-CNUrwwBQIGst1gCEwYBhgL/s320/agathe.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
The publication of a translation, hawked as a <i>new</i> volume of <i>The Man without Qualities</i> in English, but which turns out to be, rather, a small selection from almost exclusively already-translated material, raises interesting questions about the uses and abuses of re-translation and of the publishing industry. Every translator who re-translates something which has already been translated (as I myself just dared to do with <i>Unions</i>), must endeavor to justify his or her task, and justify its purchase to any would-be book buyer, and this interest on the part of translator and publisher may, in some cases, lead to special pleading and special misleading.<br />
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<i> Agathe: or the Forgotten Sister</i>, published by The New York Review of Books and translated by Joel Agee, while guilty of both kinds of pleading and misleading, nevertheless may offer something valuable to the small world of Musil translations in English. Agee's introduction to the volume is both sensitive and erudite, revealing a deep and vast reading and understanding of Musil. The focus on the Agathe material, furthermore, is a great relief (to me at least) from the frequent critical discussions of the novel, which tend to focus primarily on the earlier ironic socio-critical chapters involving the so-called "parallel campaign". This frequent myopic focus on the earlier chapters, seen recently in reviews of Menasse's novel <i>The Capital</i>, leaves much to be desired. While they are brilliant in their own right and quite useful nowadays for summing up global and national political problems, a focus on only these earlier chapters threatens to reduce the vast, philosophical, experimental, mystical novel to a witty social satire. Agee, like myself, was drawn to Musil's exploration of "the other condition," a mystical state of aesthetic-ethical timelessness; and the so-called "Agathe chapters" he has chosen to translate are rife with material related to this concept. Thus, I welcome any new translation that might draw the critical attention more deeply into what to me are some of the more interesting parts of the book. And what more seductive allure than Agathe, one of the most attractive fictional women of all time, comparable only to Rosalind of Shakespeare's "As You Like It"? Both women are witty, androgynous, daring, and passionate. Agathe has the added charms of being criminal, elegantly modern, existentially despairing, and Ulrich's sister. She is thus taboo; thus all the more attractive. </div>
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The material, then, included in this volume, is extremely engaging. Some of the most fascinating writing ever. Nothing to complain about there.</div>
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The translation itself, though certainly not <i>better</i> than that of either Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike's (whose 1995 Knopf edition is my gold standard of reference), seems mostly good. One can always find moments to quibble at (and I have found <i>some</i> odd and unjustified constructions or renderings on Agee's part), but I have also found some felicitous new turns of phrase or word choices, to be sure. On the whole, I feel (and "feel" is the operative word, since it is very difficult at this micro-level of small variations to establish what it is that makes one version better than the other) that Sophie Wilkins' and Pike's renderings are more elegant, crisper; they seem to capture Musil's tempo and particular lucidity of mind more. Or maybe I am just used to them. </div>
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Agee writes in his introduction that he read aloud passages of his translation to his wife; which is interesting, since Burton Pike has said that he struggled with his part of the translation until he discovered that Musil read aloud passages in progress to his wife, Martha. Pike then took to reading the German and English aloud, focusing on the all-important tempo of Musil's prose. Thus both translators used that similar method. Agee also eloquently expressed a translation theory, which I myself wrote of in my introduction to the collection of my translation of Musil's small prose, <i>Thought Flights</i>. Agee writes that "Musil hardly ever employs a common turn of phrase...it is a temptation for a translator to navigate strangeness in the original with something more familiar. In my view, this temptation must be resisted". In my words: "The writing and thought are devoid of cliches, and a translator must ever labor to resist choosing conventional phrases for original words and their syntheses...". The challenge in this methodology, of course, is in choosing words and phrases that, while unconventional, are not also clunky or "off" in ways that are not commensurate with Musil's carefully-tuned melody. There are times when Agee does not succeed; but translation is, as we know, almost impossible. And all of us are merely approximating. </div>
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The only real problem with this translation is whether or not it was needed, that it takes the material out of context, and that it has been presented as something a bit different than it is. Agee himself does not even suggest that there was anything wanting in the previous two translations (Wilkins-Kaiser or Wilkins-Pike), even very properly and nobly acknowledging that these former translations gave him an advantage in his own work, and explicitly noting in the text places where he adopted the solutions of the previous translators because he deemed, in those cases, that they could not be improved. Either he was being politic, or he did not find any problems in the previous translations that warranted the new work in question. Nor has he explicated a new or alternate perspective on how the text might be better rendered into English. Why then a new translation?</div>
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While it is not fully explained in the introductions of either the translator or editor, I was reminded by Walter Fanta, who presides over the Musil archive and Musil scholarship from Klagenfurt, that the project was conceived by a millionaire philanthropist, Nicholas Berwin, in collaboration with artist, Paul Ryan, who had created a rather lovely, eclectic artist's book that was exhibited at the Musil Museum. I had been contacted, years ago, through Fanta, possibly to be a translator or advisor for the texts of this very book! But I splashed cold water on the project, and was rightfully passed over for someone more enthusiastic. What happened to the artist's book and Paul Ryan? </div>
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Although Agee may not be, Berwin, a retired investment banker, who by his own admission, was unsure of his German, was very critical of the Wilkins-Pike translations, deeming them unnecessarily difficult and off-putting. Berwin also suggested that someone like Eckhart Tolle (the popular spiritualist guru) would be the right sort of person to write something about the mystical aspects of the novel. This judgment can be taken together with his advocacy of the need for a complete new translation of the novel! Agee thanks Berwin's charitable trust in his acknowledgments for a "generous grant". There I went again, letting my principles get in the way of maybe getting paid for my work! I have a constitutional suspicion of excerpts; I must admit, as I did to Berwn at the time, that I am a sort of purist. The kind of person who doesn't mind brother-sister incest as a theme in a novel, but who cannot condone people writing sequels or finishing deceased authors' works, or of presenting an excerpt as if it were a novel, more or less complete in itself. </div>
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I also (full disclosure) learned everything I know about Musil and about translation from Burton Pike. I cannot imagine his translation being surpassed by any new one, and did not appreciate Berwin's intention to turn Musil's extremely challenging, experimental novel into an easy-to-read best seller. I am not suggesting at all that Agee's translation travesties the novel, its style, or its content in this way. But the publication as an excerpt out of context does, I believe, effectively deflate the dynamic aesthetic effect of the whole (in so far as an unfinished novel can be conceived of as whole). Musil's build up, through cynicism, cold irony, alienation, humor, and wit, lays the ground work that allows for the shock and dramatic contrast between the earlier parts of the book and the so-called Agathe sequence. Ulrich's hyper intelligence, his mathematical-logical mind, are the necessary foundation for <i>allowing</i> the mystical mood that pervades the later passages. Ulrich's relationships with other people in the novel, his philosophical musings about reality, action, perception, and possibility, the historical pre-WWI setting, all are necessary context for what will come next. That being said, again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the material, per se, or with Agee's translation. The problem is in presentation, marketing, and in everything that is left out. The backstory of Berwin's big plans for a retranslated, populist Musil tells us something about the premises of the publication; something the introduction leaves out. And also lends a special coloring to the special pleadings and misleadings mentioned above and explicated in what follows.</div>
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Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics, may have been misled himself (by Berwin?), but his suggestion, in the tantalizing last line of his introduction, that this volume fulfills George Steiner's vision of a publication of Musil's posthumous draft chapters is odd, to say the least. The bulk of this book is, in fact, made up of material from Part III of the novel, published in 1933 during Musil's lifetime. <i>Not </i>the Posthumous Papers at all. This book's chapters 23 to 30 are selections from the so-called "Druckfahnen" (galley-proof) chapters, withdrawn from publication by Musil, but included in both English translations of the novel, and the last five selections alone are revisions Musil was working on up to his death. Yes, these twelve chapters are, strictly, part of the Posthumous Papers, <i>but only a very small selection of them</i>. By contrast, Pike's translation of the "Posthumous Papers" includes over 600 pages of this material; the 1978 German version includes over a thousand pages; and there is more, included in the Klagenfurt Edition (previously an on-line database and soon to be online). </div>
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This thin volume that is supposed to fulfill Steiner's vision of a separate edition of the Posthumous Papers, includes only about 100 pages. Furthermore, the two supposedly new translations included in this volume are actually only different versions of chapters chosen by Pike. In rereading the correspondence between Berwin, Fanta, and the artist, Paul Ryan, I see now that there was some discussion about these "new," differing versions, which Berwin had insisted were far better than the ones that Burton Pike, the brilliant, erudite, and extremely nuanced international Musil scholar and translator, who had introduced the English speaking world to Robert Musil, had chosen to include. Why, I cannot fathom; nor did Berwin or Agee explain in what way they were better. In any case, while those Musil fanatics who do not know German can be thankful for two short new translations out of the many variants in the Posthumous Papers, none of this looks very much like a fulfillment of Steiner's vision of a volume that would reveal the genius of Musil's great later writing. If we were to look around for a volume that best fit that description, it would be Pike's translation.</div>
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It remains to be said in this regard, that not only do the selections included in this "Agathe" volume exclude hundreds of pages of delicious, brilliant non-Agathe writing, but they also exclude hundreds of pages of fabulous, incomparable, significant material that <i>is</i> strictly related to Agathe, including the all-important scenes that are available in Pike's version, describing Ulrich and Agathe's journey (for those interested in whether or not the siblings do or do not cross the line into incest: they do in these chapters), and some of my other favorites, "Attempts to Love a Scoundrel," "Special Mission of a Garden Fence," "The Three Sisters," alternate versions of the supreme "Breaths of a Summer's Day," and many others. While even the 1000 + pages in the 1978 German version and the 600+ pages of Pike's Knopf version exclude much fascinating material, and while each edition has made differing (and controversial in the case of the German edition) editorial decisions about the arrangement of the material, when it comes to the Posthumous Papers, this "new" volume, alas, offers relatively slim pickings.</div>
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To be honest, none of this put me in a mood very favorably disposed to give the translation a very fair reading. Mr. Agee, a fine translator and deep reader of Musil, is not to blame for this, nor, perhaps, is Edwin Frank of the NYRB, who may not have known about the real lay of the land in this complicated publication history; but I am troubled by this book. It seems to represent precisely the sort of use and abuse of culture, a trend toward sensationalist popularization, that Musil himself fought violently against. If he had wanted to be what he ridiculed as a "Grossschriftsteller" ("big-shot writer"), he could have foregone all the hardships of decades of arduous work and swiftly thrown together some potboilers. He emphatically resisted a sort of writing life he deplored as anathema to his idea of art's role as cultural, ethical-aesthetic impetus. Musil<i> should</i> be much more popular than he is with English-reading audiences. But if making this happen means leveling him down rather than raising the discourse level, I doubt he would be well pleased. If, on the other hand, this volume were to lead more people to read the beautifully, crystal-clear, brilliant and fascinating larger 2-volume Knopf edition, to read the plucked out chapters in their dynamic context within the whole unfinished masterpiece; if this volume were to lead readers to discover the other astonishing women in <i>The Man without Qualities</i>: Clarisse, Diotima, Bonadea, Rachel, Gerta; if this volume brought more people to a discovery of the rich, complex, experimentally daring, aesthetically astonishing, thought-provoking, challenging work of Robert Musil, it might be excused for tampering with a masterpiece.</div>
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After the publication of Part II of <i>The Man without Qualities</i>, Musil wrote,"A success of this novel would contradict the picture of the times that the novel, itself, presents. The absence of success would, perhaps, call the author's powers of persuasion into question, but at the same time, attest to the novel's conception. What should I hope for? Naturally, I wish for the response that you anticipate. But I don't believe in it. Later, perhaps much later".</div>
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The question thus remains: does this new publication suggest that Musil's time has finally come? Or does it suggest the opposite, that we are just as far away (or even further) from such a time as ever? </div>
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Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-37704364537299559362019-07-30T06:40:00.001-07:002019-07-30T08:45:19.796-07:00Conversations with Burton Pike<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tomi Ungerer, Moon Man</i></td></tr>
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On Friday I had the pleasure of visiting my <i>Doktorvater</i>, Burton Pike, in his little New York City apartment, in a tall tower-like building surrounded on all sides with the new New York of boutiques and bars and young, eager, rich people zipping about their perennial busy business. Earlier, I had stopped in at McNally-Jackson on Prince Street, to see what the hipsters were reading. <i>The New York Times </i>had just printed an article in the style section about the bookstore owner, Sarah McNally, and how she spent her Sundays. Apparently, she is reading Musil's "super old book, <i>The Man without Qualities</i>," and the <i>Times</i> printed a quote from the novel about rushing about--the modern condition. At the bookshop, I bought Burton a copy of Carl Seelig's wonderful book, <i>Walks with Walser </i>(trans. by Anne Posten)<i>,</i> which documents Seelig's visits to Walser in the mental hospital, and the hikes they took together, stopping at little Swiss inns and restaurants for exquisite little feasts, well lubricated with lovely cold wines and refreshing spirits, peppered with Walser's bon mots and reminiscences. A lost world, but one still accessible in words, paradoxically available in a shop that is the very epitome in some ways of the new world that seems to cancel out the old one. Walser told Seelig things, things that no author today would dare to say.<br />
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Burton was telling me things too, and I should have been taking notes as he reminisced about his life, including stories about his long-time friend, Tomi Ungerer (who had been cancelled back in the 60's, for the unpardonable sin of being both a children's book illustrator/writer and someone who drew erotic or pornographic drawings). Burton had Ungerer's books and pictures in piles along two sides of the living room, about to be sent to an archive at an American university. They had met in Switzerland, when Burton was on a Fulbright, I think. And Burton was enchanted with Ungerer's wild spirit. There was much drinking and, I gather, wandering about late at night along ancient streets. Over the years, he would watch Tomi draw, images seemingly appearing out of nowhere...a line of ink becoming a building, a person, a situation, and he would ask Tomi how he created what he did, but Tomi was unable to tell him. The creation, an enormously prolific generation of images, seemed a miracle. Astonishing.<br />
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He told me of his time teaching American literature in Germany, including putting on a Gertrude Stein play with the students. He had a little office and the students would come knock on the door. Like all the other professors, he would say, "Herein" (come in), and they would come and sit down, but say nothing. Eventually, he asked one of them why they came, if they had nothing to ask. This student told him that all the other (German) professors would also say "herein," but that once they came in, the professors would send them away, telling them that they had no time. Apparently, they just wanted to experience the novel sensation of being welcomed by a professor.<br />
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He mused about how we end up being what we are and doing what we do, saying that with him the big life choices seemed to come mostly by chance. In high school, the music teacher had called to him in the hall way, "You're tall; do you like music? Do you want to play the double bass?" And he did like music, so he did. This led to some of the most joyous experiences of his life, including playing in a jazz trio and singing in the midst of a choir of voices in Switzerland, singing the Saint Matthew's Passion, a wonderful experience he likened to being a thread in a carpet.<br />
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And why, and how did he come to be fluent in German and French. Another mystery. But perhaps related to his love of music, his innate sensitivity to rhythms and cadences, melodies and tones, something that has meant a great deal for his translation work. When translating the <i>Nachlass</i> to <i>The Man without Qualities</i>, he has said that he was stuck until he discovered that Musil read his drafts aloud to Martha. Then he began to read the words aloud, discovering the key to how to translate them. It was all about the sound. Perhaps this is also why he always remembered what a German professor had told him about Thomas Mann, when Burton admitted to be working on him: "Er hat," the professor declared, "kein Melos" (He has no melody). Musil certainly does.<br />
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We talked about Musil's sentences and decided that they had a particular remarkable pattern. While Kafka's sentences begin saying one thing and often end up contradicting what their beginning states, Musil's sentence begin with something familiar and then proceed onto something deeper. They <i>complexify</i> along the way. And in so doing, they teach us how to think. We even attempted a sort of musical version: la la la da la da/da la da la da da/ PLUMP. An approximation of how he sort of leads one along lightly and calmly, and then sort of drops a small bomb towards the end, to wake us up.<br />
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We talked of contemporary fiction, which he found mostly shallow and uninteresting compared to the depths and infinite unfathomableness of Musil and Proust. He also spoke quite a bit about Woolf's <i>To the Lighthouse</i>, as a remarkable example of how a work has its own life and parameters.Once a work has come into a certain form, it sort of crystallizes there and the poor artist cannot alter it any further. The only choice at that point is to start another work. The great books are great, he suggested, largely because of their perfectly idiosyncratic forms--forms related intrinsically to their authors' idiosyncratic natures. The strangeness of the beginning of <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>, the impossible unending form of Musil's <i>Man without Qualities</i>, the oddity of Kafka's <i>Castle</i>. And it should go without saying, that we are not talking about some sort of forced attempt to be new or avant garde, but rather of a true impression taken of the very particular personal individual strangeness of the authors, a faithful impression, unadulterated by some preconceived idea of what a novel should or should not be.<br />
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We praised Iris Murdoch and Natalia Ginzburg and Clarice Lispector, all writers who emphatically saw and wrote in their own idiom. We talked about how Steiner, whose <i>After Babel</i> Burton had encouraged me to read in graduate school, asserted that all language use is a form of translation. A translation of one person's idiolect into something others could approximately understand.<br />
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I mentioned that there had been a twitter "thread" asking translators what they love most about translation, and, for his answer, he quoted the e.e. cummings poem, ending in:<br />
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there's a hell<br />
of a good universe next door; let's go<br />
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And I suppose that sentiment, an American version of the old Baudelairean, "anywhere, anywhere, out of this world," uttered in a room high up above the madding crowd of contemporary New York, as if inside an eternal timeless-spaceless mind, explains a great deal about our love of literature.<br />
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<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-15487678784620975562019-06-27T09:28:00.000-07:002019-06-28T04:10:16.972-07:00Crystalizations of Musil's Unions in the garden of Unnameable Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was a wild weekend for me, traveling down from rural Vermont to my old stomping grounds in the New York City area for my father's 80th birthday party on the Upper West Side and for the book launch at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn. On the train down, the two events mingled in my mind as I attempted to prepare something to say for both occasions. In typical Musilian fashion, they seemed gradually to be very related. Thinking about my father, who seems to eternally refresh and renew himself, who is exceptionally vibrant and open to newness, and about Musil's resistance to closure, his insistence on the "motivated life," and his constant work to reinvigorate language by new seeing, new arrangements, new combinations of words into fresh metaphor, and his "Utopia of the next step," whereby no act may be judged except by what next act it engenders, it all seemed to be about the same thing.<br />
I ended up writing a speech for my father's party about the universal struggle to become one's self, to find one's voice, to untie one's hands from whatever social and familial conditionings constrain us. It was a beautiful party, but very drunken and went late, including the after-party dancing party and after-dance party present opening, and the drive back to my mother's house in Hastings, where my nephew and I were staying the night. By the next day, waking up in my childhood room (eternal recurrence! The selfsame -seinesgleichen- recurs!), I was foggy-headed, exhausted...well, hung over. And I feared I could not find any of the words or associations necessary to speak clearly or to illuminate even a small sense of what I wanted to impart about Musil that evening at the reading. I wanted it to be meaningful for the Musil-scholars and for the people who were just there to see me, some who were artists and writers, others not, but I could hardly retrieve the most common words in my stupor.<br />
My sister's lovely new boyfriend drove us all down (mom, my sister, my nephew) through harrowing traffic, and they left me to "clear my head". After drinking a gigantic juice with lots of ginger and mint and a double espresso, I betook myself to the lovely bookshop and its lovely garden and sat, slumped over in a chair, trying to remember something. As I was looking through the first pages of the first story, I suddenly thought I understood something I had not understood before. Crystalization! I said, aloud, and scribbled it down. Not that I had not noticed it before. In fact, we had taken out a footnote about how Musil had probably gotten the image and idea of crystallization from Stendhal's <i>On Love</i>, but in the nature of things, when one is tired and the synapses are loose, one can sometimes slip into a sort of mystical state (an Other Condition, in Musil's parlance), wherein things considered in more sober moods come to suddenly seem earthshaking. I realized that the whole first story, and probably the second too, was an illustration of the oscillations between crystalizations of significance, meaning, forms (with their sharply focused facets) and the dissolution of these temporary arrangements, followed by the planes shifting then into new arrangements or shimmering significance, belief, beauty. Then I "realized" that both the stories in the collection featured second-by-second descriptions of the process by which one may enter the Other Condition, something that I think is not provided anywhere else in Musil. He describes what it is like to be there, and certainly provides many moments of lucid seeing that can only have been culled in such states, but only in these stories does he explicitly show how one might arrive there.<br />
Quite graphically, in "The Completion of Love," we see the crystal facets of the husband and wife in their enclosed living room, protected by the green blinds (like closed, and then semi-opened eyelids, a precursor of the garden which surrounds Ulrich and Agathe in the great novel), and then we experience, through Claudine's train journey away from her husband, the dislodgement and then the dissolution of the fixed forms of her married life....and then, later, the new city where she is visiting her daughter, becomes a new enclosed crystal, snowed-in, surrounded by a perimeter that cannot be bridged. Astonishing.<br />
The people in "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" are also separated from the world, enclosed within their house and garden. Within this microcosm, certain things seem possible that would seem absurd or certainly socially unacceptable, though the opinions of the world do sometimes seep in, and prevail, and prevent actions. Only by getting away from this odd microcosm does Johannes manage to see that he must not kill himself. Though Veronica remains, her world is dramatically changed by Johannes's leaving. She is able to focus even more intensely on her self, her memories, her sensuality, and this focus initiates another Other Condition within a general everyday other sort of condition (since Veronica always lives in an other sort of condition from normalcy). But she breaks out of her normal otherness, to experience a new state of being. And I "realized," while choosing the passages from this story to read for the book launch, and then thinking about them later, that Veronica is an ecstatic. A visionary. While one may mistake her for a sick, confused victim of her childhood experience, this experience is part of what gives her the ability to see the way she sees. And this seeing is an ecstatic, joyous, extra-sensory kind of seeing. She is like one of those medieval visionaries who sees and describes her visions from out of some sickness, some self-starvation, some weakness. The weakness, as is suggested about Johannes a few times, is actually a strength. Her illness, her madness, is a portal to higher seeing. While I realized that her name came from Saint Veronica, whose cloth held the impression of Jesus's face after she wiped away his sweat, I had not really grasped until now, <i>why</i> Musil related her to that Veronica. And then, in an even more confused state, while falling asleep the night after the reading, I wondered if maybe Musil intended for one to imagine that the cloth held an impression, not of Jesus's face, not, then of Johannes's or Musil's own, but of Veronica herself. The female saint alone without her male priestly guardians and spiritual guides, undresses amid a circle of candles. The impression of her body remains in the folds of her cast-off garments.<br />
When Johannes's letter, from outside the house-garden-fortress, arrives (banging on the house like an intruder), the interior Other Condition of aloneness with God or herself, is destroyed, and day by day its illuminations fade away. In one of the last moments of the story, Veronica makes ephemeral contact with a person passing outside the door of the house. Through the crack under the door, the light from the candle she holds in her hand shines on the stranger's body, like fingers touching him; the air from the outside slips up her shift, under which she is naked. Inside and outside tentatively come in contact. She avoids Demeter, the bestial brother, on the stairs, but though the story is over, life is not.<br />
What new Other Condition, what new Crystalization will be formed out of the facets of reality? Anything is possible, if we take Walter Pater's advice and refuse to "form habits" and strive, as much as possible, "to burn always, with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy".<br />
<br />Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7980320637841803884.post-85069812212293819652019-06-06T06:24:00.001-07:002020-01-13T17:07:03.959-08:00The Architecture of Possibility, an Essay on Lapsus Lima/The Nightjar<br />
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I encountered a fascinating woman (on Twitter), who invited me to write this little essay for her alluring online journal. Read the whole thing (and enjoy the rest of the journal) here:<br />
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<a href="http://www.lapsuslima.com/musils-possibility/">http://www.lapsuslima.com/musils-possibility/</a><br />
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Musil Attemptshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06660737989850660922noreply@blogger.com0