Musil's Writings on Theater: excerpts in new Columbia Journal

Musil would have been quite chagrined to not have his name on the cover of the new Columbia Journal #57, though Patti Smith and Eileen Myles are there, both, I believe, admirers of his work. Probably, had they been asked, they would have been proud to have their names next to his. He was known to complain about such things from his (rightfully) disgruntled position as under-appreciated genius, second-best to the "Grossschriftsteller" (Big-shot writer)Thomas Mann, and other lesser lights who captured the public's attention. But, in any case, he is inside, in the form of a number of excerpts from my new translation project: Theater Symptoms: Robert Musil's Plays and Writings on Theater (coming out with Contra Mundum Press in 2020).  The pieces are included thanks to Ellyn Gaydos, non-fiction editor of this edition of the journal (and brilliant writer).

There is a wonderful piece on Russian Cabaret, one on Yvette Guilbert, and some slashing and burning criticism of the shallow emptiness of contemporary theater. Musil thought that theater should be earth-shaking, challenging, transformative, and he lamented the relative insipidity of the theater of his times, seeing it as a reflection of the general cultural collapse. Read it and weep.
http://columbiajournal.org/announcing-columbia-journal-issue-57/

More on Lispector: Not Just a Depiction of Another Victim of Patriarchy

I promised I would return to conclude my reflections when finished, but I am far from feeling conclusive about the last part of Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City, which is to say: it resonates and reverberates and is probably not fathomable. There were more objects and more animals and I became more and more convinced that Lucrecia, the novel's main voice and main eyes, was not merely a cipher for the objectified woman.
Sometimes I wonder if I am reading the same book as other people. I mean, Benjamin Moser's introduction was beautiful and evocative, and it told me many things I did not know, but I just cannot understand how he could characterize Lucrecia in this way or suggest that female objectification is a central theme of the book. Male objectification is just as prevalent as female objectification. And female agency just as prevalent as male in my reading. But not only Moser's introduction, but the New Directions blurb iterates this reading, starting with these words: "Underneath Lispector's inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society." It is as if the publishers wanted to reduce Lispector's complex and nuanced depiction of female power and powerlessness to a stereotypical narrative of more of the same. How really belittling that is, both to Lispector's vision and to women in general, as if we were that trapped. This seems to be a pattern, and a dangerous one.
What is really in the novel is much more than more of the same. Much more than a depiction of a victim of patriarchy. There is even a whole chapter towards the end when an older woman admires the beauty of one of Lucrecia's former flames, a young man who is barely capable of uttering a simple sentence. Still, he is a "gem"...all because of his beauty. Lucrecia had admired him earlier in the book, saying she doubted she would ever have another chance to have such a beautiful man. Women do make objects of men, too, in and out of literature. Lucrecia, although married by the end of the book, develops a passion for another man and pursues him with quite a lot of agency, despite his attempts to elude her. She also completes her siege of the city which is her alter ego or strange double, noting its progress (due, in her mind, to her own seeing, her own work in constructing it and fostering it). The city develops from a rural outback smelling of stables (with horses) to a modern city of restaurants and street cars (the horses driven out of town). Shall we infer that she too has been civilized, modernized, stripped of her animality and relationship to nature?

Perhaps not. Once these sieges are complete, the other man conquered, her husband dead of a heart attack, Lucrecia is ready to move on to her next conquest, a new husband, perhaps a new city. Hardly a meek object of any reader's predatory desire. As I mentioned in the last post, Lucrecia's vision of the world may not constitute a great work of genius, but she is attempting to take possession and to delineate her world. She is an artist, if not a great one. As Lispector writes in a letter directed to a critic of the novel included at the end of the book, "'The struggle to reach reality--that's the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things....One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrecia doesn't manage to do this--so she 'clings' to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world". And this merging with the world, this self-identification with objects, with the wild horses, and with the modernizing metropolis that will drive away these horses is effected by means of a language that is almost hallucinatory at times. Ecstatic and vivid, sharp and shimmering, as if the terrible distance between word and thing, signifier and signified, seeing and thing seen, symbol and symbolized, observer and observed were--for one fraction of an impossible second--dissolved. This mystical siege of reality by the imagination, written by a woman about a woman's imagination, is much more interesting than just another tale of another helpless victim of patriarchy.

Objects, Animals, and Personhood (Womanhood Especially) in Musil and Lispector

Clarice Lispector. Look at those seeing eyes!

I have been reading Clarice Lispector's novel, The Besieged House, newly translated by Johnny Lorenz and published by New Directions. And this after just being so immersed in my own translations of Musil's two novellas in Unions. All of the stories depict women who are deeply preoccupied with objects, subjectivity, animals, and the sometimes fluid, sometimes rigid boundaries between them. For another essay I was writing, on women who like to look, the good parts of objectification, female mate choice in the animal world, and the animistic vision of things, I had been thinking about all of this for some time, remembering all of the brilliant depictions of objects coming to life in Modernist fiction, objects with trembling boundaries, objects that then play dead or dumb as their suspicious "owners" try to glimpse their fugitive aliveness. Consider Hofmannstahl's famous "Lord Chandos Letter" and his less famous "Letter from One Who Has Returned" (which you can read here in my translation: https://issuu.com/contramundum/docs/hfa___9.1.2015 ), or the things seen dissolving and coming back into form in so many Virginia Woolf novels; consider the gaze of Malte Laurids Brigge in Rilke's novel, the nauseated narrator who is learning to see, or Sartre's Roquentin. In Musil's two novellas in Unions, the objects sometimes mock the fraught women who gaze upon them, sometimes bring comfort in their solidity and seeming unconsciousness (oh, to be an unconscious thing, the women seem to think, without my constant analyzing neuroses!), and in the opening scene in the first novella, they echo the harmony between the married couple in a shimmering almost still-life, its stillness only interrupted by the sound of tea hitting the bottom of a china cup. And for the heroine of Lispector's novel, Lucrecia, who feels she must work very hard to constantly see objects, delineate and name them, keep them in their places, or even to somehow create and recreate them in her dreams, the object world is a constant obsession. Since this is a blog and not an academic paper, I am not going to bother to furnish examples from the texts. Believe me, they are there. Find them yourselves if you just graze the pages!
     Animals, too, are essential to the women in these stories, most obviously to Veronica in the second novel in Musil's Unions and to Lucrecia in Lispector's novel, but also to Claudine of "The Completion of Love," whose reflections often turn to animal metaphors, and to the question of animal consciousness/unconsciousness, and to the sometimes tenuous and even dissolved boundary between human and animal desire. Lucrecia's animals are horses, and she imagines at times that she herself is a horse, walking on hooves. Veronica, of course, concentrates on some chickens copulating before her eyes and a memory of a beloved dog, but general animal metaphors are rife, as she wishes she could be like an animal, simply doing things (particularly erotic or maybe violent things) without consciousness, compunction, or social awareness or consequence.
    What is going on here? Why all these objects, why these animals? And what could it all have to do with the other concerns (philosophical, erotic, narrative, aesthetic, social) of these works of fiction? Reading Lispector has helped me to clarify some presentiments that were haunting me in Unions. Benjamin Moser, who edited The Besieged City and wrote its introduction, opines that Lucrecia represents the objecthood of women in Lispector's novel, that Lispector is embodying Simone de Beauvoir's concept of the objectified woman who is seen but does not see. Strange that he says this, since most of the novels pages are filled with Lucrecia seeing! Yes, she is orchestrating her role and her pose as a woman in a world where her attractiveness is important to her identity, but she is much more. She is the agent and the subject of her own objectivity and the objectivity of the world, the city, the people and things around her. She is, in fact, an artist of her world, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, but her self-appointed task is to see and to create the city and herself, so they may be seen by others. That is the work of an artist. And the creation of a woman writer, who herself is doing just that. Just as many readers might see Claudine, of Musil's "The Completion of Love" as an object of the predatory male gaze, helpless and victimized, I see her as an agent of her own desires, who is engaged in a quest to discover her self through a risky experiment. She gives her self or at least her body to men to test her own boundaries, to find her self and to "complete" the very strong love she has for her husband. She is not a victim, but a woman experimenting with the boundaries of her own autonomy by transgressing them.
    Lucrecia is a virgin and for her everything is still frustratingly held at bay. She feels the space between self and other person and other thing almost painfully. I feel that something in her longs for and is terrified of being besieged, being displaced by another's presence in her body and mind. A man inside one's body and mind tends to push one's self out of the way (not to mention a baby, which literally sucks a mother's consciousness and life-blood!), or at least to fill up a great deal of who one is. To become one with another person is both an eclipse of and an expansion of self (in "The Completion," the narrator suggests that by merging together Claudine and her husband cut off the world, but expand the space inside their two-selves; also, they seem to cut off roads to different abandoned but still hearkening parts of themselves that cannot live within the new structure of the marriage). When Claudine goes on a solitary journey, she comes back to her self and the abandoned parts haunt her.  Veronica, who is a virgin like Lucrecia, discovers her sensuality, which was confused between the attentions of two men. Lucrecia, lone, separate, inviolate, virginal, never yet breached by another, feels awkwardly out of touch with the things and people outside her borders. She is hyper vigilant about her own role of keeping the world in order. What cataclysm awaits were the world, the city, her body, besieged?  How is such a siege accomplished? Will it hurt? Will I still be myself? Will I still be whole? Or will I finally be made whole?
   Yeats said that Virginity renews itself with the moon. Thus all lovers know that the renewal of the act of love and the pauses in between does not solve the problem of self and other, or of animality and consciousness, or personhood and objecthood, subjectivity and objectivity, but that all of conscious life is an interplay between all of these states and that one must find multiple perspectives and ways of seeing (and being seen), all valid, but some more life-affirming and more fruitful than others. These woman are searching for the best ways to be their selves with others, in and out of the world. No easy task for anyone, but possibly more challenging for women, or for women who affirm their own role in making the world through seeing.
   I will come back and conclude when I have finished reading Lispector's novel, but for now I reach out my hand to you in an invitation to consider these questions with me....