Failure to Reconcile as Modernist Success
Although Musil occasionally fantasized about
what he might do after The Man Without
Qualities was finished, there is, in effect, no end in sight ― not for the
deeply engaged reader who enters into the questioning, the intellectual
labyrinth, of Musil’s brain; not for the scholar who may try in vain to
“finish” with Musil and go on to something else ― no end to the author’s
textual variants, to the possibilities, the arrangements and re-arrangements;
and no final solutions to the questions earnestly posed by this critically
sophisticated writer. Musil was only halted in the endless task by his sudden
death, in mid-sentence, as it were ― while re-visioning one of many versions of
a chapter he had begun decades before.
This endlessness has often has been read as a
failure to reconcile, or come to closure. Musil’s hopeful advocacy of the heightened aesthetic and ethical experiences
characterized by the exceptional state he called “the Other Condition" has
been taken by many to be an escapist attempt to achieve a lasting harmonious
union, the possibility of which the paradoxical author would later come to
reject. This book argues against this general view of failure, and presents the
thesis that Musil’s formal experimentation with narrative non-linearity and
metaphor figure forth an existential model which assumes that aesthetic
experience, as active, participatory
word- and world-construction was, for Musil, the fundamental metaphysical and
ethical activity of mankind[1]. While many have argued that Musil’s utopian
projections were bound to fail because they 1) could not last and 2) because
they could not be made to correspond with “reality,” this book argues that the
formal and theoretical bases for all of Musil’s work call the criteria of both
duration and so-called “reality” radically into question.
Unlike most other studies of Musil’s project,
which tend to concentrate on the published sections of the novel,[2]
this study engages with the novel-project in its total unfinished state, taking
into consideration for the first time in a full-length English-language book
the thousands of pages of unpublished material he left behind, the Nachlass. It follows Musil into his perspectival
displacements and multiplications, and traces within these formal processes the
consistencies of his aesthetic and ethical concerns. The Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt Edition) of the ten
thousand-plus pages of the entire Musil Nachlass
has recently made it possible to access this labyrinthine web of
correspondences, alternative universes, and their shadows. The Klagenfurter Ausgabe also affords the opportunity to access the
individual fragments and passages in a non-linear manner that foregrounds the
complex cross-referencing and correspondences of Musil’s process of writing,
presenting a new vision of the work. This study takes full advantage of the new
resource, closely examining the way in which each of Musil's sentences is
haunted by a vibrant palimpsest of choices, perspectives, descriptions and
re-descriptions. Such a close reading reveals that Musil’s novel project
constituted much more than an attempt at creating a completed, finite work of
fiction. The supposedly finished parts (published with Musil’s reluctant
approval during his life time), the not-quite finished parts (submitted and
prepared for publication, but then withdrawn by Musil for more revisions), as
well as the thousands of pages of experiments, drafts and re-visions that never
approached publication, represent more than an interesting artifact or evidence
of a writer’s method, more even than an astonishing work of art that stands on
its own from out of the fragments.[3]
As the book “progresses” beyond the printed material, particularly as Ulrich
retreats further and further into his mystical experiment with his sister,
Agathe, Musil’s search for answers to the question of “the right life” becomes
increasingly serious, and the narrator's irony and intense, skeptical analysis
is increasingly replaced by an earnest and often rapturous lyricism. While more tightly wound and plot- and
character-driven in the early published parts of the novel, the extensive Nachlass, thousands of pages of
sketches, notes, and alternate versions of thought-experiments and thematic
questions, may be seen as the real entry into Musil’s thought in its
uncompromised richness and possibility. Relieved of the pressure, or even the
possibility of publication in the years after his last almost-published proofs
were withdrawn from publication, and during his years in exile, Musil was free
to experiment in earnest, and to expand his thought-experiment to infinity.
The Nachlass
and the published material together project a way of living and being in the
world ― a method of life in art. A level
of engagement, aliveness, and commitment to what Walter Pater called a “failure
to form habits”; a hyper-, perhaps even partially pathological consciousness of
the role and responsibility of what Nietzsche would call “the creative subject”
as word- and world-maker.[4]
Not that he was not a consummate artist, striving for perfection in the work
itself, but that his painstaking process signals the totality of immersion and
attention, the way in which the work, with its many drafts and possible
alternatives threaten (or promise) to take over life itself. Art, and its
sources in the world of ideas and imagination, was always much more real and
more meaningful to him than anything else.
In the spirit of counterintuitiveness,
however, this primacy of art over reality does not constitute the casual
disengagement from reality often (and often mistakenly) associated with a
devotion to the aesthetic ― the exact contrary is the case. When Musil repeats
Nietzsche’s revolutionary phrase, that “reality and the world are only
justified as an aesthetic phenomenon,” we would do well to remember that for
both of them aesthetics and ethics were one. In a world where reality was
thought to be more or less created and perceived metaphorically by the mind,
for Musil art was part of this process.
The mind's perception and contingent relative arrangements were — had to
be — ultimately revolutionary processes of engagement.[5]
Musil saw all art as a process of disturbance, whereby the current image of the
real is broken down and newly arranged (via abstraction, via metaphoric
coincidence). In contrast to mimesis, which presupposes a desire to reinforce
or celebrate what is, Musil’s vision
of art is as an active and inventive process.
By offering a new reading of the centrality of
Musil’s concept and use of metaphor as the fundamental building block of
multiple de-centered worlds consciously brought into being by the “creative
subject,” I am reading Musil as an exemplary proponent of the Modernist
aesthetic, which attempted to grapple through existential agency with the
discord and confusion of a loss of communal values, without, however, reducing
the terrors of the void to a simulacrum of wholeness or order. In contrast to
some interpretations of Musil’s work, this study intends to present the
possibility that the rejection of static truth implied in the novel’s form, its
lack of an Archimedean fixed point, does not, as might be expected, lead to a dualistic
universe, signal meaninglessness, despair, cultural collapse or the
irremediable loss of self, values, or individual agency.
By focusing on the Nachlass material and on Musil’s metaphysical questions about
reality and his ideas about the central role of the artist in constructing our
shared reality, my reading of Musil understands him as a thinker who, in many
ways, challenges current attitudes about the role of art and culture as seen
from our Post-Modern perspective. A
broader view of Musil’s aesthetic practices and theories might refresh some of
the outworn clichés of the contentious attempts to differentiate between
Modernism and Post-Modernism;[6]
Musil’s work is, in fact, a perfect touchstone for discussions about
subjectivity, individualism, political and social engagement, aesthetic
redemption,[7]
and more specifically, the debate about the alleged violence done to reality by
the formation of concepts and the use of language altogether. Regarding this
latter problem, Musil was deeply engaged with the reality of language’s
inadequacy and the tendency or even necessity of metaphors, concepts and
abstractions to leave out whatever does not fit them; but he also maintained
that this inaccurate metaphor-making brings “Schönheit und Erregung in die Welt” (MoE 573; beauty and excitement in the world: MwQ, 625). Hofmannsthal’s
“Lord Chandos Brief” gave voice to the
Modernist skepticism about the ability of logical or literal language to
express subjective experience; but Wittgenstein provided a theoretical
framework for the attempt of Modernist artists to articulate individual
emotional and ethical experiences through the poetic image (i.e., metaphor)
rather than through dialectical rational language.[8] What philosophy and
science could not describe or explain, might be approximated through the realm
of art. The work of art, alongside its associated realm of ethical thinking, is
marked out as a realm especially conducive to the expression of particulars,
and thus escapes the conceptualizing inaccuracy of totalizing reasoning or
science. On the other hand, the selecting-out process necessary for art makes
it a form of abstraction as well, and as such it is capable of presenting
illusions of completion and harmony.
Musil’s novel plays with the oscillating figure and ground of union and
dissolution, moving in and out of focus and conviction. This oscillation — a movement away from what already is toward what could and might be and
then back again — is often overlooked in the
enthusiasm to embrace a radical abandonment of formal harmony, unified
selfhood, and a faith in some form of a
priori reality or shared truth. To emphasize only one side of the spectrum
is, however, to misread and fatally simplify Musil’s more nuanced relationship
with the currently maligned “conceptualization” of essence. Musil’s Other
Condition, for example, is at once a singular exceptional experience of
“otherness” and something characterized repeatedly as a return to some form of
originary and universal phenomena; it is both an exception from the selfsame
and a return to it.
The
novel’s exploration of a protagonist without qualities certainly makes it a
perfect stomping ground for territorial debates about Modernist notions of
subjectivity, alienation, or “worldlessness”.[9] The
multiple discourses (of science, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, Gestalt
theory, literature, historiography, anthropology, mysticism, sexuality, art)
utilized by Musil make it possible to enter the novel further by multiple accesses,
and to digress seemingly endlessly along these various rich fault lines without
coming to either final rupture or reconciliation. Musil’s own resistance to
taking a stand, as well as his formal and ideological practice of
perspectivism, make a variety of readings possible; and the situation is
further aggravated by the fact that the novel was left unfinished, with no
clear indication of where, or whether it might have ended had its author
lived. While this remains, an
unresolvable mystery, a wider view of the greater Gestalt[10]
of the work and its creation can provide us with a more comprehensive view of
the inherent tensions and oscillations between the novel's conflicting
positions and stances. For despite his
famous resistance to fixed positions, Musil did stand firmly on a number of
central questions, and he took seriously his role as author in helping to shape
social and ethical values.
Musil’s novel, begun in sketches as early as
1910 and still not finished in 1942, at his death in Swiss exile, naturally
reflects the concerns of his times and the formal and stylistic
experimentations of his contemporary authors and artists. Yet Musil often maintained[11]
that he was more spiritually connected to his predecessors than to his
contemporaries. His most important luminaries were Nietzsche, Emerson, and
Dostoevsky, but he devoured almost every field of study, finding nourishment
and stimulus just as much from works he derided as from those to which he
granted his rare approval. Musil
confessed having read no more than ten pages of Proust’s work in his life,
presumably afraid of being tainted by either influence by Proust or the rumor
of association. The name “Sartre” appears only once in Musil’s notes, but
without any further commentary; and though he mentions Joyce once or twice,
rather disparagingly, he does not seem to have been aware of Virginia Woolf.
Nevertheless, I will attempt in this book to situate Musil’s work within the
context of some of his contemporary experimental Modernists, in hopes of
illuminating both his work and theirs. Proust, above all, is a significant
touchstone for Musil’s work. The Man
Without Qualities and Remembrance of
Things Past share multiple concerns, particularly a theoretical and formal
emphasis on the metaphoric, on the tension between universal and particular,
and the problem of narrative, time, and deferral. Moreover, French readings of
Proust[12]
have been of great benefit to my reading of Musil, perhaps because they have
tended to be friendlier toward aesthetic concerns than the generally more
ethically- and philosophically-minded Germanist tradition. Despite then
Ulrich’s tendency toward non-participation[13]
and Musil’s own characteristic
resistance to identifying with any group, it would be absurd to insist on
uniqueness to such a degree that from this distance we were not able to
enumerate some striking similarities between these two novels. While recent
books associate him more with the Post-Modern (Patrizia McBride’s Void of Ethics and more extremely Stefan
Jonsson’s Subject without Nation) and
the “non-Modern”(Michael Freed’s Robert
Musil and the Non-Modern),[14]
this book assumes that Musil’s project, his emphasis on the agency of the
subject (however fragmented), his attempt to come to terms with some form of
meaning in an increasingly fragmented world, and his own theory and practice of
translating ineffable realms via
experimentations with language and form, place him firmly within the shared
trajectory of high literary and artistic Modernism of the late 1890s through
the first half of the twentieth century. This association with Modernism tends,
in many readings, to be an association with the alleged failure of the Modernist
project[15].
Musil has, according to a widespread assumption, failed to reconcile
oppositions between aesthetics and ethics, reality and ideal, science and art,
universal and particular, concept or metaphor and the specificity of truth;
failed to find a lasting, enduring solution to the problems posed by and in the
novel; failed to bring the novel itself to closure.
Allen Thiher, whose otherwise nuanced and
subtle study of Musil elsewhere suggests an understanding of the value of
openness, stands for many others when he writes,
It can be
argued that Musil's failure to find a conclusion to his novel demonstrates the
difficulty characterizing the modernist project of transforming or, indeed,
saving culture through literary discourse. In making this observation, however,
we should recall that he mocks the idea of salvation and saving culture as much
as any other idea circulating in Vienna before the First World War […]. At some
point during the writing of the novel saving culture became a cliché….From this
perspective, if the novel's lack of completion illustrates a failure, it is the
failure to create a discourse of salvation, a very modernist failure to create
a viable myth"[16]
While it may be true that Musil mocks the idea
of saving culture within the novel, it is important that we note Ulrich's
proviso referring to the idea of the millennium: “I only make fun of it because
I love it" (MwQ 817).[17]
Further, we must temper any of Musil's satirical comments on the possibility of
creating a literary discourse of salvation in the novel by referring to his
essays and addresses, particularly his notes for addresses during the reign of
totalitarianism, where we see him engaged in an earnest "defense of
culture" with the weapons of art. This is not to imply that he meant that
political battles could be fought by or with art. On the contrary, he
maintained explicitly that the defense of culture meant that such battles could
not be fought with pens and brushes; the best one could do was maintain the
free, non-affiliated voice of the artist as the last bastion of critical and
non-conscripted thought, and encourage those whose job it was to use other
kinds of weapons to understand that a large part of their job entailed
protecting the autonomy of culture.[18] Thiher's
analysis suggests that the defense of culture was to be somehow better and more
successfully waged with some other weapons than the tools the Modernists had at
hand, and that the "failure" of Musil's novel is indicative of the
generally agreed-upon consensus about the failure of Modernism to successfully
negotiate the problems of engagement with politics, with collectivism and with
social issues. While there are other assessments harsher than Thiher’s, his
exemplifies that even in cases when a critic is not explicitly setting out to
argue against Modernism or its aesthetic aims, there seems to be a somewhat
unexamined assumption about the failure and misguidedness of the project, as if
it were a given.
In a fascinating last chapter called: “Staging
the Failure of an Aesthetic Utopia in The Man Without Qualities,” Patrizia
McBride argues in The Void of Ethics
that despite Musil’s earnest experimentation, he had consistently planned over
the course of three decades to depict the failure of the Other Condition and
other related solutions, that “he remained fundamentally faithful to the plan
of staging the collapse of Ulrich’s utopias (130). In her notes, McBride
persuasively demonstrates this, quoting Musil himself speaking of failure and
negative outcome. McBride explains that the illuminations culled from the Other
Condition “remain utterly unintelligible and inconsequential when raised to the
level of everyday experience, for they are untranslatable into conventional and
conceptual and linguistic structures (141).
She acknowledges that “Meaning exists and can be irrefutably
experienced, yet it is not translatable into the categories of ordinary life
and therefore remains inapplicable to it.” She then goes on to delineate the
two options which present themselves in the face of this conundrum: one is to
accept this split between “ordinary and the other condition as irreversible and
to develop strategies for making sense of the experience while acknowledging
the reality of nonconceptualizable meaning”; the other is to “seek to overcome
this split by making the two realms commensurable” (142). The former is
obviously supposed to be the mature method, one that a reasonable skeptical
modern person would adopt. The latter is Ulrich’s project, which is here
presented as somewhat adolescent, immature, and bound to be grown out of over
the course of the experiment. It is suggested that Ulrich’s author had always —
at least during his time of writing — been more mature than his character and,
thus, planned from the start to demonstrate the delusionary nature of the
experimental attempt of his “friend” and alter ego. [19]
Even Roger Willemsen’s defense of aesthetics
in Das Existenzrecht der Dichtung: zur
Rekonstruktion einer systematischen Literaturtheorie im Werk Robert Musils
(Literature’s Right to Exist: Toward a Reconstruction of a systematic Literary
Theory in Robert Musil’s Work), makes up part of the chorus of voices
announcing an “aesthetic of failure and of fragmentariness”.[20] While Willemsen’s study was published in the
1980s and McBride’s and Thiher’s in 2010, the same assumption prevails over
decades, without any question about its basic premises. Willemsen writes, “The transmutation of life
into art and ‘nature morte’ fails, just as the existence of the novel itself
points toward failure along biographical lines”. While Willemsen concedes that
fragmentariness was inherently the
central modality of Musil’s stylistic principle even before the novel breaks
off, this structure is itself an object lesson telling us that art cannot
possibly realize “its utopia, the identification of aesthetic and social
completion”; instead, he writes, such a project is bound by its very nature to
fail. The novel, he concludes, “sketches typologies of failure, which are
guaranteed ahead of time” by the necessary ending in war; there is, he glosses
further, a shared meaning to be gleaned from the failure of the sibling lovers
and the “negative parallel of the collective” in war.[21] This analysis is similar to, if more subtle
than Lowell Bangerter’s assertion in reference to the ending of Musil’s
novel. Bangerter writes: “only two things can be determined with relative
certainty: First, Ulrich’s experiments with both mysticism and love would fail
to yield a final satisfying answer, just as attempts to adapt to practical
reality had done. Second, his ‘vacation’ year would end with the protagonists
and their world being swallowed up by the war”.[22]
Musil studies have consistently argued about
Musil’s failure to reconcile the realms of art, utopia, or the ideal to
something called “reality,” often without bothering to negotiate a common
definition of essential terms or concepts with which to begin the debate. Thus,
before we conclude that Musil’s novel presents models which are or are not
escapist, utopian, or un-realistic, whether or not its experimental aims were
bound to fail, we must come to some agreement about what, in fact, reality is,
or at least was to Musil, and about the role of the individual in perceiving
and constructing this reality, the possibilities of language to communicate
perceptions and constructions, and, thus, the role of the work of art as a
prime element in this construction.
Insofar as people tend to see only what they
already know or only what they expect to see, the “selecting out” inherent in
the process of thinking means that any reading (of novel, philosophy, world)
will be necessarily inadequate and potentially misleading. Subjectivity, with its inherently individualistic
and possibly irrational vision, is thus pitted against a rational
categorization which itself leaves much to be desired in terms of adequately
describing a world of infinite and particular details and relative
perspectives. This question of subjective interpretation and its seeming
opposite, objective rationality, is inherently related to the specter of a
language crisis haunting most Modernist and Post-modernist discourse, including
Musil’s own work. One might ask how,
indeed, we can begin to use language to talk about language, when we have
arrived at a place where contemporary theory tells us that all systems of
explanation, all conceptualizations and categories are misleading or inadequate
at best. The important difference
between inadequate and misleading is, in a sense, one of the central issues
when it comes to tendentious readings of Musil and the Modernist project of
reinventing and invigorating a worn-out and suspect language system and of
negotiating the constructs of reason, science, and morals. Reason, when it is a reduction of the actual
complexity of reality in its moving, changing, infinity of causes and effects,
probabilities and roundness, to a simple line of determined logic, is hardly “reasonable”. Rationality, which reduces multiplicity to
abstract formulas and hopeful repetitions is doing very much the same thing as
art does, except that art functions by making this process of inaccuracy and
selection transparent, thereby making clear the process by which life itself
avails itself of such insufficiently descriptive or conceptual frameworks. The central question here is: what can
language do and how close can it get to the so-called “real”? To what extent is our reality shaped by our
constructions and conceptions of language in the first place? Can concepts, metaphors, categories be
meaningful ways to articulate specific and personal experience on some
universal level, or are we doomed to choose between a silent solipsism or a
hopelessly misrepresentative simulacrum of generality and abstraction?
Different critics reach varying conclusions on
these questions. Some, like Stefan Jonnson, argue that Musil rejected all
categorization of the subject as an oppression of individual difference,[23]
others, like Thomas Harrison and Thomas Sebastian, maintain a more nuanced view
of Musil’s oscillation between Ernst Mach’s functionalist view of reality and a
belief in some provisional and qualified substance and essence.[24] While we see Musil oscillating in his notes,
diaries, essays, and his novel between a scientist’s assessment of what is
repeatable, what can be measured and proven to be reliably real, what we only
see because we have been trained to see or believe it (social construction, the
persistence of habit, lazy acceptance of the status quo), and what we more
actively and creatively conceive of ourselves (fruitful metaphor-making, art,
existentialism), the latter mode is where Musil's energy is based and where we
find the key to the aesthetic redemption sought by Musil and many of his
contemporaries.
The metaphoric transparency inherent in an
awareness of the way we construct the world through provisional images enables
a fruitful resistance to what Musil calls “dead words,” in contrast to the
“living words” that activate ethics, a sense of temporary meaning, and
aesthetic experience. For Musil, the Modernist crisis of language and values
does not then translate into a canceling out of voices, statements, images,
intentions, or author. Instead, Musil’s
Modernist vision, embodied in the form and process of living metaphor, is
itself an imperative towards constant proliferation of more and more contingent
and shifting realities, all of them potentially meaningful. Thus Musil, although he did not completely
reject the existence of a shared, measurable, and to some extent repeatable a priori reality, was fascinated by the
idea of a magical relationship[25]
between human action, thought, artistic creation and the real, physical world,
a relation wherein what a person does, says, and even thinks affects and
co-creates a shifting reality. While
most theorists see the void of a common denominative system as a nihilistic
crisis, Musil, following Nietzsche, embraces the challenge of creating the
world anew through conception, imagination, and individual perception as a
joyful, imperative challenge.[26]
As such, art-making, far from being an insignificant or escapist indulgence, is
raised to a central reality-relevant act of ethical engagement.
Aesthetic experimentation, far from being
disinterested, is intrinsically related to political and social liberation, to
social ethics, as is the experimental novel, perhaps precisely because, as
Bakhtin noted, it is inherently anti-canonical. “The novel,” writes Michael
Holquist in his introduction to The Dialogic
Imagination, “is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within
a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of
that system” (xxxi). Allen Thiher, in his Understanding
Robert Musil, puts the case even
more directly, when he says that both Musil and Bakhtin “wrote to defend
freedom against stultifying dogma and illiberal totalitarianism"
(137). Thiher writes that he knows of
“no other thinker… who stressed with such lucidity that ethical thinking and
art are interrelated.” Thiher connects this resistance to Musil’s “theory of
the destruction of forms,” invoking the Kabbalistic mystical imperative to
continually repair the original vessels
of creation which are said to have burst because they could not “contain the
light emanating from God's being”. Thiher reminds us that although “the vessels
must be continually broken so that the light may be propagated […] there must
also be vessels so that it can be contained. The destruction of the forms of
perceived thought and perception is a necessary process, which gives access to
a new condition beyond received ideas and their rationality”. After the
destruction, in other words, there must be new creation, new forms.[27]
In the following chapters I attempt to
demonstrate and suggest some new readings of Musil and of Modernism. In Chapter 1, I present a close reading of
Musil’s seemingly contradictory uses of the figure of circularity as a sort of
object lesson in his characteristic complexity whereby different concepts (such
as qualitylessness, repetition, metaphor) are seen as both positive and
negative. Circles are presented by Musil as self-cancelling, as founts of
unending originary meaning, as images of
creative self-generativity, and as a metaphor for the expanding non-linearity
of the novel-project. In Chapter 2, I
explore Musil’s thinking about what can and cannot be the selfsame (seinesgleichen), and the aesthetic and
ethical potential of exceptions to repetition (criminal acts or taboo
forms). This chapter also explores the
tension between dead and living words and the way in which metaphor can be both
a creative praxis of metaphoric world-construction and a construction or habitual
use of ossified concepts. In Chapter 3, I return to the question of essence through
an exploration of abstraction, primitivism, and the Modernist interest in the
possibility of art and formal arrangement to alter physical reality. This
chapter expands on the themes of circling by exploring the concepts of
duration, timelessness and extra-temporality, and the image of resurrection. In
Chapter 4, I explore the image and concept of the still-life in Musil’s novel
as a cipher for aesthetic “disinterestedness” and the problems and pleasures of
eternalization of art. This chapter also features a close reading of the
variations in the Nachlass of the
many versions of “Atemzüge eines Sommertages” (Breaths of a Summer’s Day) as
illustrative of Musil’s obsessive use of metaphor as deferral and resistance to
end and death. In the Conclusion, I address
the question of Musil’s engagement with politics, and his commitment to the
essential importance of the artists’ role as autonomous non-affiliated word-
and world-maker. While arguing that conclusions about Musil’s intentions for
the end of the novel must remain speculative due to his commitment to the novel
as ongoing open experiment and to the “utopia of the next step,” I present, in
the Conclusion, my own reflections on the possibility inherent in Musil’s
novel-project of endings and of ending altogether.
As Musil wrote in a note found amid an
unfinished, unpublished collection of aphorisms: the immortality of works of
art is “their indigestibility.” This statement is followed directly by another,
a challenge as much to Musil himself as to the critics and readers to come.
Musil writes simply: “explicate that!”
In this spirit, hopefully rising to the challenge with a good mixture of
holy earnestness and necessary irony, we may, in a cosmos where there is no
real beginning, certainly no end, and no static center, jump in from where we
are.
[1] See of course Nietzsche’s influential
definition of art as “the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this
life” in Preface to The Birth of Tragedy.
[2] Stefan Jonnson for example, focuses
unapologetically on the first part of novel (the parallel campaign and Ulrich’s
lack of qualities) and concludes that “The novel thus reveals the ways in which
dominant ideologies of patriarchy, nationalism, and racism reduce the human
subject to its cultural origin or sexual disposition by imposing on it an
allegedly natural, and hence inescapable essence, coded in terms of ethnicity,
gender, and class”. Subject Without
Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity ( North Carolina:
Duke U P) 2000, 2. The most recent
example of this concentration on the earlier parts of Musil’s novel is Norbert
Christian Wolf’s 1000+ page study, Kakanien
als Gesellschaftskonstruktion: Robert Musils Sozioanalyse des 20. Jahrhunderts
( Böhlau Verlag) 2012. While it certainly ranges far beyond the material in the
first part of the novel and explores Nachlass
material in a deep and enlightening way, its core is in the social and
political intrigues of books one and two.
[3] See Walter Fanta, “The Genesis of Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften” in A Companion
to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester: Camden House), 2010, 254.
[4] See Musil’s “Vinzenz and the Mistress of
Important Men” where Vinzenz describes himself not as a poet or a user of
words, but as a “word-maker”. In Fiction
16.1 (1999).
[5] See
Albrecht Wellmer: The Persistence
of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism. Trans. David
Migdley ( Cambridge, MA: MIT P), 1991, 53.
[6] See Wellmer, who suggests that an
important difference between Post-Modernism and Modernism is in differing
attitudes toward “reconciliation”. Wellmer, Persistence, 43.
[7] See Jacques Ranciére in his Aesthetics and its Discontents for a
discussion of the contemporary critique of aesthetics and its causes (20-21)
and of Schiller’s idea of “free play” as a more congenial expression for the
Post-Modern than the “autonomy”(27). Trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden, MA:
Polity, 2011. See also Stephen Kern, The
Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction, on the overturning of outmoded
paradigms and “grand narratives “and Philip M. Weinstein’s Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, 2005, which stresses
uncertainty and unknowing as the hallmarks of Modernism. And Barbara Neymeyr, esp. p. 83, whose
criticism of Modernist aesthetics as escapist and dangerous is typical. Utopia und Experiment: Zur Literaturtheorie,
Anthropologie und Kulturkritik in Musils Essays (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
Winter), 2009.
[8] See Marjorie Perloff: “Wittgenstein
would have had no answers to these and related questions. On the contrary, his
writing of "philosophy" as if it were "poetry" dramatizes
the process of working through particular questions so as to test what can and
cannot be said about literary forms (e.g., poetry), concepts (e.g., barbarism),
and facts of life (e.g., death). "A philosopher," he wrote in 1944,
"is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he
can arrive at the notions of common sense" (CV 44). And again, "My
account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has
egg-shel ls from the old view sticking
to it" (CV 44). Perhaps it is this curious mix of mysticism and
common-sense, of radical thought to which the "egg-shells" of one's
old views continue to "stick," that has made Wittgenstein, who had no
interest at all in the "poetry" of his own time, paradoxically a kind
of patron saint for poets and artists”. Wittgenstein’s
Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (U of Chicago
P), 1996, i.
[9] This was the word used by Lukács in his
searing critique of Musil’s novel as an exemplum of decadence and
disengagement. See Bernd Hüppauf, who
concludes that both mysticism and, to a great extent, aesthetics are “distanced
from reality,”(44-47). Von socialer Utopie zur Mystik: Robert
Musils Der Man ohne Eigenschaften (W. Fink) 1971. For an opposing view, see
Thomas Sebastian’s description of Musil’s use of metaphor, 46 and Ranciére on autonomy and the construction of
the world through art, “as the inscription of the unresolved contradictions
between the aesthetic promise and the realities of oppression in the world”
(129), Aesthetics and its Discontents.
The phrase "unresolved contradictions" (Ranciére also uses the term “dissensus”) is
reminiscent of both Musil and Adorno’s “extorted reconciliation”.
"Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács' Realism in Our Time”. Notes to Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
NY: Columbia U P, 1991.
[10] On the influence of Gestalt psychology
on Musil see Marie-Louise Roth, Robert
Musil: Ethik und Ästhetik (Münich, List, 1972), 211.
[11]
As scholarship has begun to look
into this question more deeply, finding more contemporaries whom Musil
appreciated, admired, and supported, the myth, created in great part by Musil
himself, shows signs of being broken down.
[12] Particularly Gérard Genette’s Narrative
Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P) 1980 and Giles Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press) 2000.
[13] One of Ulrich’s original names in early
incarnations of the novel was “Anders,” i.e, “Other”.
[14]
Patrizia McBride,
The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the
Experience of Modernity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P) 2006; Stefan
Jonnson, Subject Without Nation: Robert
Musil and the History of Modern Identity, 200, Duke U P; Mark M. Freed, Robert Musil and the Non-Modern (Continuum,
2011).
[15]
See the introduction to “Siegreiche Niederlagen”: Scheitern: die
Signatur der Moderne, where the editors, Martin Lüdke and Delf Schmidt
reveal the foundation of the currently widespread canard about Modernism’s lack
by equating its supposed failure with the failure of the experiment of
communism by quoting Franz Fühman, whom they note was one of the leading lights
of the literature of the German Democratic Republic, who laments that he has
failed “in literature and in the hope for a society of which we all once
dreamed” (7). See also Wellmer (88-9).
[16]
Allen Thiher, Understanding Robert
Musil (South Carolina: U of SC P) 2009, 230. See also See Patrizia McBride,
The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P) 2006, 130-142 and Lüdke, Martin and Delf
Schmidt, eds.“Siegreiche Niederlagen”:
Scheitern: die Signatur der Moderne (Hamburg:
Rowohlt), 1992.
[17] See also Heinz-Peter Preusser's essay
on Musil’s use of Ludwig Klages as an example of how isolated readings out of
context and assumptions of simplistic ideological allegiances can lead to
misreadings of Musil’s more complex use of irony and distance. “Die Masken des Ludwig Klages:
Figurenkonstellation als Kritik und Adaption befremdlicher Ideen in Robert
Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. Musil
Forum 31 (Berlin: De Gruyter), 2009-2010, 224-253.
[18] See Klaus Amann: Robert Musil: Literatur und Politik (Reinbeck bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt), 2009 and also Patrizia McBride’s ““On the Utility of Art for
Politics: Musil’s Armed Truce of Ideas” where she makes a case for the
viability of Musil’s political-aesthetic stance today without, however,
conceding that the Other Condition and the Utopia of Essayism succeeded
(372,(379). She further argues that Musil’s essayism was a prescient counter to
the danger of totalizing systems of war in Musil’s and our own time (382).
[19] See also Sir Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the
Theory of Fiction (U of Virginia P, 1967), 128. Also see Gene Moore’s
comparison of Proust and Musil, Proust and Musil: The Novel as Research
Instrument (Austin, Texas: U of Texas) 1978, (ii) and Karl Corino who diagnoses
Musil’s inability to finish his novels as a neurosis, which he admits was about
as creative a neurosis as possible. 62-71. “Der Dämon der Möglichkeit: Vom
Scheitern Robert Musils” in “Siegrieche
Niederlage”.
[20] Roger Willemsen, Das Existenzrecht der Dichtung: zur Rekonstruktion einer systematischen
Literaturtheorie im Werk Robert Musils (München: Wilhelm Fink), 1984, 248.
Translation mine.
[21] Willemsen, Das Existenzrecht, 248-9.
[22] Lowell Bangerter, in “Experimental
Utopias: The Man without Qualities”. Robert
Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Ed. Harold Bloom (PA: Chelsea House) 2005, 8.
[23]
See Jonnson, Subject, especially, p.
9, 125,134.
[24]
See Thomas Sebastian, The Intersection of
Science and Literature in Musil’s The Man without Qualities,
(Rochester, NY: Camden House) 2005. 35-36, and 41-42,
and Thomas Harrison, “Robert Musil: The Suspension of the World”. Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities,
ed. Harold Bloom (PA: Chelsea House) 2005, and, for an opposing conclusion,
Neymeyr, Utopia, 69.
[25]
See Jacques Bouveresse’s “Genauigkeit und Leidenschaft: Das Problem des Essays
und des Essayismus im Werk
von Musil”. Trans. Rosemarie Zeller. Musil-Forum 29 (Berlin: De Gruyter)
2007, 49; and Giorgio Agamben The Man
Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert ( Stanford UP) 1999, especially pp.
1-5 wherein he connects Nietzsche’s idea of art as the highest metaphysical
activity with that of art’s dangerous magical powers, 2-4. See also
my essay “The Other Musil” in A
Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester: Camden House), 2010,
337. Similarly, Marie Louise Roth,Ethik und Ästhetik (Munich: P. List)
1972, 34.
[26] See Gabriel Josipovici,. What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New
Haven, CT: Yale U P), 2010, 112-113, and 141. Also see Josipivici’s definition
of Modernism, which seems to describe Musil’s attempts as well, as “a tradition
of those with no tradition. And it doesn’t seem to me that this is wholly
tragic…neither illustration nor abstraction but the daily struggle of a dialogue
with the world, without any assurance that what one will produce will have
value because there is nothing already there against which to test it, but with
the possibility always present that something new, something genuine, something
surprising will emerge”. Josipivici, What
Ever Happened, 185.
[27] See Harrison’s discussion of Geist, “Robert Musil: the Suspension,” 44.
