#MUSIL2020 DAYS 18-21 On ANALOGY & DIFFERENCE

I have been obsessing about Musil's tendency to put similar ideas into wildly different people's mouths in different contexts, the way Ulrich is constantly comparing and contrasting disparate things, and the way in which all analytic thinking seems to be a process of parsing what is like what other thing and also unlike it. Of course I have written about this before (my book about Musil focused on Metaphor in the book), but I still find myself asking questions about just what he is up to here. On the one hand, there seems to be a desire to show that things which we hypocritically tell ourselves are different from each other (either moral or immoral in many cases), are actually more or less the same things, albeit described with euphemisms in one case and called what they are in the other. Also there is an aesthetic and mystical pleasure in finding likenesses, of collapsing the boundaries around things...and this is the mystical metaphoric moment I focus on in my book....that play of metaphor which Ulrich says "brings beauty and meaning into the world," and which I have compared to Proust's idea that the happiest moments in life are when we make connections between two different things. And yet, there is also a very important imperative to see differences between things that merely appear to be similar, such as a Race Horse of Genius and a real Genius or Arnheim's mystical silliness and Ulrich and Agathe's later explorations, or Bonadea's nymphomaniacal lack of self-control and Moosbrugger's mental incapacity to stand trial.  And yet we see, sometimes from one chapter to another, Musil trying out the same phrases and ideas under different circumstances, as if in a scientific experiment (and we know he sometimes thought of the book as one), to see what will happen if we put this person instead of that person in a certain situation (later drafts actually show Musil trying one character in a particular plot twist and then another instead!)? Another aspect of all of this could be described by the Baudrillardian idea of simulacrum, which Musil decidedly anticipates (as noted by Kirkdale Books in a tweet of last week). As early critic of the Culture Industry, Musil was very aware of the way in which advertising, media, and commerce present simulated and cheapened versions of great ideas and great art, vitiating their powers and significance.  

Some specific notes on similarities and differences, analogies:
Pointed example of how M presents similar ideas within different contexts & in different sorts of people's mouths: chapter 86 shows Arnheim having a kind of mystical experience parallel to Ulrich's affair with the mayor's wife and also living the life as literature idea presented by Ulrich a few chapters back, this time as the poem of life, and slightly ridiculed. This chapter is most sympathetic to Arnheim so far, but his version of Ulrich's idea presents us with a different facet, problematizes.

General Stumm likewise reiterates some of Ulrich's thinking about the war of ideas and though his strategic mapping of ideologies and " generals" of ideas ( Buddha, Jesus, etc) is ridiculous, although the Parallel Campaign's attempt to find a crowning idea is absurd, it is as if Musil were asking us: are they more absurd than trying to live consciously- the motivated life? And because we know that M did believe in the necessity of doing so, of life as literature to some extent, we may look at the satirized sections with more indulgence?

But no, the slight differences in aspect and context DO seem to render what is holy in one form absurd and even hateful in another. A lesson in the importance of nuance.

This description of Arnheim could almost be of Musil: "it is equally certain that his ambition to master all worthwhile knowledge--a taste for polyhistory so consuming that no single man could have lived up to the goals he set himself--found in the soul a means to rise above all that his intellect could not encompass" except that Musil was self conscious about the word Soul, and usually ridiculed it. Musil as scientist-mystic parallels Arnheim as businessman-mystic. But the latter pair is a gross parody.

Musil was a mystic, but decidedly not of the kind he condemned as Schleuder-mystik (something like wishy-washy mysticism). He was not anti- rational or anti- scientific, and raved against those who were; but knew--knew as a scientist- that there was a limit to what science & reason could explain...that realm, of essay, art, religion, was vital for him.

Another difference between M's mysticism and that of Arnheim or Diotima or Walter is that he could not believe in their optimistic view of wholeness and progress. While the Other Condition was a condition of wholeness, it's power rested in its fleeting nature & in its interplay with change & creative dynamics. Sort of like the Apollonian-Dionysian complex. Wholeness-- circles of significance--interrupted and refreshed by dissonance. Repeatability of essence, syncopated by energy of existential choice.

Next chapter, 87: Moosbrugger, like Arnheim in his own mystical state, is "both inside and outside". In another idiom, we have the Other Condition experienced as psychosis. Also, earlier, question of Moosbrugger's psychological responsibility --his insanity defense-- paralleled by Bonadea's inability to control her adulteries. They are both subject to states of altered consciousness that may excuse their behavior!

And Moosbrugger, like Arnheim, thinks of himself as "the boss". He is putting things in order, just as Arnheim thinks he is, and both may be deceiving themselves, not just the powerless madman.

Chapter 91: Ulrich tells Tuzzi in conversation that although Tuzzi was deeply offended by Ulrich's idea that the vulgar, mean, and evil parts of our characters are actually the forces that make change, "But then you're saying just what I've said!" Here he seems to be pointing out that we have a tendency to use euphemisms to describe certain processes (in this case, diplomacy), to mask the real conditions behind them. Tuzzi complains about philosophizing and then Ulrich makes another disturbing analogy: "You have just stated the same very modern principle that churches have applied to their members for nearly two thousand years, and which the socialists have begun to follow too". Ulrich is confounded by what Ulrich could have meant "by this analogy".

Chapter 95: Discussion of Great Man of Letters or Great Author (I usually lean toward an extreme and translate this common Musil term, not quite accurately, but with the right emphasis, as "the big-shot writer". It was a term of abuse he often used to rage against the popular writers who did not have the integrity he had. He rather unfairly leveled the term against Thomas Mann, with whom he was very competitive, even though Mann actually helped him repeatedly, with money and honors. Other "big-shot writers," who more clearly did not deserve the acclaim they were rewarded were Musil's despised Wildgans and other "homeland writers". I am bringing this in here because here we have an excursus made of careful distinction: what is the difference between a big-shot writer and a genius? This can then be compared to what the difference between a genius and a race horse of genius is. Since, as Musil writes, "intelligence must be displayed, made highly visible and operative, and since the Great Author suits this purpose better than an even greater author [i.e., someone like Musil himself!], whom the largest number might not find quite so easy to understand, everyone does his level best to make the visibly Great even greater". And: to be a Great Author, " one has to write books or plays that will do equally well for high and low".Their works "become the savings banks, as it were, of the national cultural economy".

Compare Clarisse's idea in Chapter 97 that someone must "make a start and end this putting up with everything and letting things take their course," and her championing of people who (unlike the Great Author) "cannot fall into line and go on lying like all the rest and who have to make a nuisance of themselves".

Chapter 98, in front of displays of bloody murder weapons, Bonadea reminds Ulrich that he once said that "in the right circumstances everyone is capable of any weakness". Later Musil will expand on this idea by noting the law of opposition, wherein Agathe would be fiercely honest among a circle of criminals, but must be criminal in a society of saints. But it is also a generally important critique of a rigid morality which tries to apply a law to individual instances (Musil will posit the un-categorical imperative to correct this end. A wonderful send-up of the problem with fixed morality can be found in Musil's Susanna Letters in Thought Flights). And, of course, this is a metaphoric question in itself: we cannot make strict analogies to decide moral or legal questions insofar as different circumstances can make all the difference between an honorable killing, a killing in self defense, and an evil murder. If we add to this Musil's idea of the Utopia of the Next Step, we have to then judge the act by what it engenders, and, in Musil's terms, by whether it makes one fruitful, more alive, etc.

Chapter 99: Problem of tennis player and race horse of genius taken up again. And here Musil clarifies that some parallels are clearly misleading: "There is bound to be a grain of truth in it, and anyway why shouldn't the surprises an athletic champion pulls off suggest those we get from a genius, or his strategies seem analogous to those of a seasoned explorer of the unknown? Even though there is something else, something far more important, that is quite wrong with such analogies, of course, this is not perceived, or perceived only with reluctance by those given to making them. At bottom there is an uncertainty of values, passed over and ignored; it is probably less its idea of genius that makes this era attribute genius to a tennis player or a racehorse than its general distrust for the world of the mind, of the intellect, to which the term rightly belongs". The "imprecision" inherent in this sort of dangerous analogy, "the sort of fuzziness of mind that makes the denizens of a small town regard the son of the department store owner as a man of the world," is a matter of making connections between things that may have some likenesses, but that are deeply different in terms of context and meaning. We always leave things out when we see likenesses, make metaphors, construct concepts--and doing so is how we bring beauty and order and meaning into the world--but the ethical aesthetic value of such processes very much seems to depend on what it is that is left out, and how valuable it is to both us and to the things in themselves.