Book Twitter Notes on The Man without Qualities Continued:
S.Wilkins's "Psuedoreality Prevails," translated by E.Wilkins/Kaiser more accurately as "The Like of the Same Now Happens" (Germ. "Seinesgleichen Geschieht" (The Selfsame Happens?), points us towards the contrast between what repeats and what deviates.
In my reading, the novel plays constantly with sameness and differences (with metaphor and analogy), an object lesson in the way life operates amid the same dynamics as art itself.
Aesthetic experience (and the art object or novel) operates thus under same structural principle as life itself (thus informing us in how to best live). Harmonies and discord, accords and discords. Universals and individuations.
Mystical experience of Affair with the Major's Wife (based on Musil's own life) exemplifies M's "other condition". Later described in novel as "tear in the page" of normal reality. Normalcy as deadening habituation interrupted by heightened moments of exceptional experience wherein normal rules and morals do not apply. Related to Woolf's Moments of Being, Sartre's exceptional moments in Nausea, Proust of course, and Nietzsche's anything that occurs in love occurs beyond good and evil.
These moments are temporary and out of time. They cannot and must not last, for lasting would mean ossification (the first people to be thrown out of any utopia are the utopians, who always see new ways of living and cannot rest in closed finished systems)
Chapter 34: Ulrich's suspicion of "those prefabricated compartments & forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings". Then his vision of the stone church, like an old beautiful matron, followed by "all the resistance of primal instinct against this world petrified into millions of tons of stone, against this frozen moonscape of feeling...".
"It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made, apart from a few minor personal details, and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions; but it must be said that this casts a feeling of deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights".
Sentence map: It may be [proposition], and there is no disputing [concession], but [complexification/objection], but [again, new twist].
The Other Condition: "He had penetrated the heart of the world; from it to his far-off love was no farther than the nearest tree. In-feeling linked living beings without space, as in a dream two beings can pass through each other without mingling,and altered all their relations. Other than this, however, his state of mind had nothing in common with dreaming. It was clear, and brimful of clear thoughts; however, nothing in him was moved by cause, purpose, or physical desire, but everything went rippling out in circle after ever-renewing circle, as when an infinite jet falls on a basin's surface".
Note the clarity of mind and lack of appetite/desire. Later Ulrich will muse on the 2 sides of life: appetitive and non-appetitive, noting that the appetitive is cause of all destruction, BUT ALSO of ALL CREATION. Non-desiring mystical state is only part of Musil's necessary formula for motivated life. Not a celebration of passive non-attachment, but of oscillation between enlightening contrast.
Referred to later as a circle of meaning or significance, this "ever-renewed circle" (like a fountain in Rilke's poem!), is the recurring, repeated essence of life, interrupted by the willful existential choice-making of the creative subject.
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