Greg Gerke, essayist and fiction writer, has interviewed me
for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He asked wonderfully thought-provoking
questions and helped me to understand some more of what I am doing with Musil
and how it relates to my other work as an essayist.
GREG GERKE: You once wrote that you’d dedicated your life to
Robert Musil. You’ve written your dissertation on him, translated two books of
his writings, and are working on a third. Why Musil? How did this magnetism
between his work and yourself come about? In your book The World as
Metaphor, you talk about his “fascination with the mystical idea of the
criminal act as a portal to new spiritual experiences,” something detailed
in The Man Without Qualities, but already apparent in the two early
novellas comprising Unions, “where acts that are normally considered
abhorrent or anti-social are seen as possibly beneficial.” How does this idea
play into your relation to Musil’s aesthetic possibilities?
GENESE GRILL: I remember first hearing Musil, in
translation, at a reading given by Burton Pike at CUNY Graduate Center. It was
the passage from The Man Without Qualities where Clarisse and Walter
are playing the piano, their duet compared to the violent rush of two competing
locomotives! In just a few sentences, the words had transported me from the
concrete to the cosmic and back again, opening up multiple worlds and illuminating
subtleties and contradictions in brilliant, rhythmically astounding prose. I
went to the original German and began reading. At first, I was confused. It was
like nothing else I had ever read. But in no time, Musil had gotten inside me,
to the extent that all the questions his characters were asking seemed to be
the very questions vital to my own existence. Here were characters who were not
only searching for answers to the modern predicament of how to live ethically
in a world of uncertain moorings and morals, but who were not satisfied with
simplistic solutions that left out the aesthetic dimension of dynamics and
chiaroscuro, the human need for a tension between what is given (status quo)
and what might be (possibility) — a duality that Musil also configured as that
between repeatability and crime.
READ THE REST HERE:
Greg's moving and insightful essay collection, See What
I See, celebrating the aliveness we can cultivate through literature and film,
and his fresh, uniquely-seen, and vivid short story collection, Especially
the Bad Things, can be acquired here: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/author/thisissplice-greggerke/
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