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.
The following is a long excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book, The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality (Camden House 2012).
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, Seinesgleichen geschieht (the like of it or selfsame now
happens/pseudo reality prevails) and the second part Ins tausendjährige
Reich (die Verbrecher) (Into the millennium (the criminals)), can be seen,
respectively, as explorations of the way things repeat themselves (seinesgleichen
geschieht) 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. 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?
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.
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.
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,
laissez-faire 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
God’s Funeral, “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.”
[i] In a note, Musil summarizes
the paradox: “Kant: Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer. Anschauung ohne Begriff
ist blind” (
MoE,
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
einen empfangenden
Stoff
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 . . .” (
MoE,
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
design
can be changed into remarkably different pictures without destroying its general coherence).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.”
[ii]
As already discussed, Musil even describes an Ulrich who believes that humans
do not create morality but uncover it:
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. (MoE,
1413)
[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. (MwQ, 1534)]
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.
[iii] As Antonio Porchia
wrote, “Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little”
[iv]; 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,
mutatis mutandis,
seinesgleichen geschieht, and the exceptions and interruptions to these
recurring forms, in order to ask the question, not whether or which, but
how,
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?
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.
[v]
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” (MoE, 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).
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 seinesgleichen geschieht
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.
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 ecstasis, 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.
Associated
with these other conditions 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 Ecstatic Confessions,
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 the motif: “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” (MoE,
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, MwQ, 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.
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
The Man without Qualities.
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.”
[vi] Humans are constantly
creating reality, constantly constructing edifices of concepts upon which
really airy unstable things we foolishly rest our lives. Nietzsche writes:
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.
Every concept comes into being by making equivalent
that which is non-equivalent.[vii]
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,
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. (MoE, 1093)
[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. (MwQ, 1189)]
This conforming, mechanizing, force is, of course, related
to the problem of being “without qualities,” a “
Zeitkrankheit” (an
illness of the times) which, like metaphor and pattern, can be both a formula
for atrophying and losing of individuality and creativity,
or 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.
[viii]
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?
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.
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
idées reçus, 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
Remembrance, he was able to discern that
Emerson, in his journal, writes similarly of how language,
specifically naming, emphasizes at will various attributes of reality:
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]
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 “
Wort-macher”
(word-maker)
[xi] and leads him 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” (
MoE,
570; God doesn’t mean the world literally at all,
MwQ, 388), which in no way necessarily devalues the world.
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,
[xii]
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:
“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
.
Es hat nicht alle Hundeigenschaften, und irgendetwas Persönliches hat es, das
wieder kein anderer Hund hat
. Wie sollen wir da je im Leben ‘
das
Richtige’ tun?” (
MoE, 572,
emphasis mine)
[“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. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to
do ‘the right thing’?” (Emphasis mine, MwQ, 624)]
This surprising juxtaposition of an analysis of language
with a question of right conduct is a flagrant revelation: form, words, and their relationship to our
perception and our modes of expression have everything to do with ethics. As
Musil repeatedly notes: aesthetics and
ethics are one. 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:
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
Geschöpfes gerade das wäre, was mit nichts anderem übereinstimmt. (
MoE,
572)
[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. (MwQ, 624)]
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” (
MoE, 573; You leave out whatever doesn’t
suit you. As the author himself has done before you,
MwQ, 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” (
MoE, 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,
MwQ,
627). He adds that this process is true
for all the concepts “auf die wir unser Leben stützen . . .” (
MoE, 574; on which we base our
lives,
MwQ, 627). All these concepts, he
writes, “sind nichts als erstarren gelassene G
leichnisse” (are no more than congealed
metaphors,
MwQ, 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.”
[xiii]
In precisely a “moment” within The
Man without Qualities, wherein two concepts, “Gewalt und Liebe für Ulrich
wieder nicht ganz die gewöhnlichen Begriffe [haben] (MoE, 591; violence and love do not have quite their conventional
meaning, MwQ, 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” (MoE, 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, MwQ, 645). The fact that two concepts
temporarily lose their conventional meaning here, and that they do this within
a moment, 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.
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. . . .”
[xiv]
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.
Metaphor― the act of making
equivalent that which is not equivalent ― is a sort of
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.”
[xv]
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.”
[xvi]
While all novels thus bear a
metaphoric relationship (as imaginative variation) with reality, in
The Man
without Qualities and in
Remembrance of Things Past 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).
[xvii]
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!” (
MoE, 289; I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality,
MwQ, 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. . . .”
[xviii]
Metaphoric thinking is thus an
alternative to what Ulrich describes as longing for
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. (MoE, 650)
[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. (MwQ, 709)]
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” (MoE, 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, MwQ, 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.”
[i]
Wilson,
God’s Funeral, 20.
[ii] Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 141.
[iii]
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.
[v]
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,
Intersection
of Science and Literature, 46.
[vi]
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 874–84; here 878.
[vii]
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 878, emphasis mine.
[viii] 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.
[ix]
Marcel Proust,
Remembrance, 1:628.
[x]
Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 23.
[xi] Robert Musil, “Vinzenz and the
Mistress of Important Men,” act 1.
[xii] Proust, Remembrance 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.”
[xiii]
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 880.
[xiv]
Proust,
Remembrance, 2:993.
[xv] Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 22.
[xvi]
Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative, vol. 3,
128.
[xvii] KA: Lesetexte.
Band 19: Wiener und Berliner Korrespondenz 1919–1938. 1931. Robert Musil an
Bernard Guillemin, 26. Januar 1931.
[xviii]
Proust,
Remembrance, 2:1013.
