Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being": The Hermit living in a Novel

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

The Hermit living in a Novel

I just found this wonderful sentence in some notes Musil wrote around 1914 (thus early on in his conception of his own novel) in a musing about the difference between novels, novellas, and dramas:

Why does no one write a novel of 25000 pages? An ancient forest of a novel, wherein one could live like a hermit lives in God?

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Attempts to Find Another Human Being

Around 1923 Musil planned to publish a collection of his essays under the title, "Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden" (Attempts to Find Another Human Being). In his notebooks he wrote:

"In fact, this could be the title for everything that I have ever written. I can think of no other excuse for spending one's whole life at a writing desk to become a beggar. [...] I can only imagine another duty with great difficulty. I have always been a writer, always pursued writing.
It has come to pass in my life that people have scolded me for it and have called me a sick human being, an intellectual, an unmoral human being, a scientist, in short, everything that I am not, and only with resistance, under the pressure of a few, people have become accustomed to thinking of me as what I believe myself to be, and want to be: a writer."