The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil's The Man without Qualities

The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

As the utopian projection of a world in which the conditional mood is preferred to the indicative, Robert Musil’s ambitious novel The Man Without Qualities is widely recognized as a great example of aesthetic modernism and a profound reflection on the “postmodern condition.” Based on the new and more inclusive English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, this study provides the Englishspeaking reader with a well-researched commentary that situates Musil’s novel in the cultural, literary, and scientific context of the early twentieth century. Revealing the novel’s many philosophical underpinnings, the study analyzes the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil’s programmatic move beyond realism. Thomas Sebastian explores Musil’s background in experimental psychology, which he studied under the pioneering psychologist Carl Stumpf, and how it and other strains of scientific thought, including that of Ernst Mach, on whose philosophical ideas Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, are reflected in his great novel. Thomas Sebastian is associate professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

Thomas Sebastian

CAMDEN HOUSE

C

Copyright © 2005 Thomas Sebastian All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620 USA, www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK, www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–116–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sebastian, Thomas. The intersection of science and literature in Musil’s “The man without qualities” / Thomas Sebastian. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–116–7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Musil, Robert, 1880–1942. Mann ohne Eigenschaften. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT2625.U8M445 2005 833'.912—dc22 2004027938 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Musil Editions Used, with Abbreviations

viii

Introduction

1

1: Experimental Psychology: Musil’s Academic Apprenticeship

10

2: Figure and Gestalt

39

3: Indeterminacy, Chance, and Singularity

60

4: Multiple Subjects: The Construction of a Hypothetical Narrative

80

5: Moosbrugger, Frauenzimmer, and the Law

109

Conclusion

125

Works Consulted

139

Index

147

Acknowledgments

I

WOULD LIKE TO THANK the editors of this series, Jim Hardin and Jim

Walker, for their trust in my scholarly expertise, and Alan Astro for his help in getting me started. Without their encouragement and support, I would not have ventured into a book-length study of The Man Without Qualities. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends at Trinity University. Time and means available for research are limited at a small liberal arts college; however, I was twice granted a stipend that enabled me to visit archives in Vienna as well as the Arbeitsstelle für RobertMusil-Forschung in Saarbrücken, Germany. I would especially like to thank Trinity’s librarian Maria McWilliams. She never tired of fulfilling my requests for difficult-to-find sources that I wished to explore. I would like to reserve my greatest gratitude for my wife, Judith Geerke. She committed herself to the task of making sure that the manuscript adheres to standard English usage. Needless to say, there are limits to what she could do in improving the product of a foreign speaker. Therefore, I am ultimately responsible not only for the content of this study but also for its style and choice of expression. T. S. November 2004

Musil Editions Used, with Abbreviations Mann ohne Eigenschaften are from The Man QWithout Qualities,Dertranslated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike UOTATIONS FROM

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) and are referenced with a page number in parentheses. Where the citation would be otherwise unclear, the page number is preceded by the abbreviation MWQ. Page references marked by an asterisk indicate an altered translation. The following editions of Musil’s works are also referred to using the abbreviations indicated, throughout the book: B

Briefe 1901–1942. Edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 volumes. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981.

BN

Briefe-Nachlese. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Saarbrücken: Internationale Robert-Musil-Gesellschaft, 1994.

D

Diaries. Selected, translated, and annotated by Philip Payne. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

GW

Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 volumes. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Volume 1: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Volume 2: Prosa, Essays, Reden.

OMT

On Mach’s Theories. Introduction by G. H. von Wright. Translated by Kevin Mulligan. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982.

PP

Posthumous Papers. Translated by Peter Wortsman. Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1987.

PS

Precision and Soul. Edited and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

TB

Tagebücher. Edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 volumes. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1976.

T

Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955.

All translations from works not available in English are my own.

Introduction

D

ESPITE ITS awe-inspiring scale, Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigen1

schaften is a torso. Its first volume, containing 123 chapters, comprising parts 1 and 2, appeared in late 1930. A second volume of equal length was supposed to follow soon. Yet when the second volume appeared at the end of 1932, it contained only the thirty-eight chapters of part 3. Part 4 of the novel never materialized. Nor is it certain that part 4 would have entailed the novel’s conclusion, as Musil originally planned. Until the day of his death in April 1942, Musil seems to have been undecided how to conclude the novel. His posthumous papers show numerous related yet inconclusive sketches and drafts, including twenty galley chapters that never made it to press and that the author had begun to revise after 1938. Why Musil — who had signed a contract with a publisher as early as 1922 and publicly discussed the novel’s plot and characters in 1926 — was unable to finish the work is much debated among scholars. Many critics are inclined to interpret the novel’s unfinished state as a result of its complex genesis and structure rather than to accept it as mere coincidence. For a number of compelling reasons, they find either a symptom of the author’s psychological problems or an inadvertent allegory of his style and ideas in the novel’s truncation. Some critics view it as an effect of both. However, incompletion has not prevented the novel’s recognition as one of the great books of the twentieth century. Today, The Man Without Qualities ranks among the classics of aesthetic modernism. Although conceived as a satire on the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the eve of the First World War, the novel comprises a profound diagnosis of modern urban life in general. It furthermore is an experiment undertaken to test the limits of the novel, a genre whose origin and conventions have become associated with a bygone era. No other German-language author of the early twentieth century made the aesthetics of storytelling the explicit theme of a novel to the degree that Musil does in The Man Without Qualities. Foregrounding its own construction, the novel unfolds as a self-reflective meta-discourse concerned with the possibilities of storytelling. Character and plot are constructed as allegories of a fragmented world that resists epic representation. However, even though one finds

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similar narrative strategies, tropes, and figures in Romantic literature, Musil did not share the Romantics’ predilection for self-reflexivity and the abyss of transcendental negativity. Rather, his writing exhibits a “critical realism” that implies both a revision and a radicalization of late nineteenth-century literary conventions. Musil considered Zola’s roman expérimental as a “promise never fulfilled” (TB I, 217). However, Musil’s own concept of experimental literature is quite different from that of the naturalistic writers of the previous generation. For Musil, the purpose of literature is not to illustrate the laws, regularities, or patterns of behavior, whether hereditary or socially conditioned. Instead, literature has the function of bringing to the fore precisely that which cannot be apprehended by the rational methods underlying a scientific understanding of the world. Referring to Zola, Musil stated around 1920 that it makes a difference “whether one as a half-scientific person whose imagination is gripped by the pleasures of science writes a pseudoscientific novel, or whether one really goes all the way to the end of the trampoline of science and only then jumps” (PS 67). Accordingly, the elasticity of science allows for exciting yet unsustainable leaps. In science, one is always forced to return to the same ground, but Musil proposed instead to use science as a springboard. The different trajectory he had in mind is illustrated by his comparison of the literary work to “a bridge arching away from solid ground as if it possessed a corresponding pier in the realm of the imaginary” (PS 208). This bridge looks very similar to the one traversed by the mystic, yet it “never entirely loses its connection with the ordinary attitude” (PS 2 208). In other words the writer takes a foothold in common perceptions and knowledge only to leave them behind. However, Musil’s bridge metaphor does not indicate whether poetic imagination provides a ground for knowledge at all, and if so, what kind of knowledge that could possibly be. Musil’s critique of naturalism in no way harbors the notion of a supra-natural world. Rather, it is inconceivable to him that literature and art should ever manifest themselves in something other than aesthetic expression. In this respect, Musil shared the modernist’s fundamental belief that “the subject-matter of art is only that which can be expressed in art” (TB I, 449). The novelist’s work does not represent ideas that could just as easily have occurred differently: their occurrence is determined. To accept indeterminacy in the writer’s task would mean to acquiesce to the edifying and ornamental function that nineteenth century bourgeois culture expected of literature and art during its heyday. Reminiscent of

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Matthew Arnold’s dictum that poetry is “criticism of life,” Musil stated that a work of art is essentially a “negation of life” (PS 196). The poetic work claims its unique place due to the particular type of insight it conveys. Musil referred to the writer’s intuition somewhat paradoxically as das nicht-ratioide Denken (non-ratioid thinking), a neologism he invented in an essay published in 1918 under the title “Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters” (Sketch of What the Writer Knows). Here he juxtaposed two kinds of knowledge, the one called the “ratioid,” the other called the “nonratioid.” The former includes everything that can be subjected to rational inquiry, everything that can be systematized by science and summarized in laws and rules. This knowledge is characterized by “a certain monotony of facts” and “predominance of repetition” (PS 62). It perpetually eradicates difference by reducing the other to the same. But above all, this knowledge can be universally communicated. By “nonratioid,” on the other hand, Musil means the recognition of a reality that is singular and unique. It is a reality that cannot be represented through mathematical symbols or logical propositions. It cannot be repeated. “If the ratioid is the area of the domination of the ‘rule with exceptions,’ the nonratioid area is that of the dominance of the exceptions over the rule” (PS 63). Musil described the one as “fixed and solid,” the other as “fluid.” Accordingly, the one is the inverse of the other. Within the topology of The Man Without Qualities, the “ratioid” is referred to as das Seinesgleichen. This noun first appears in the German original in the title of part two: Seinesgleichen geschieht. The first English translation of Musil’s novel by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser tries to render the phrase literally as “The like of it now happens.” But this completely hides the multiple meanings of the original phrase. In German, seinesgleichen functions grammatically as an indefinite pronoun. It is conventionally used where one would say “people like him,” or “things like that” in English. The pronoun expresses sameness and reciprocity. It stands for a syntactic relation between subjects that are similar, equal, or identical. Musil, however, employs the word not as a pronoun but as a noun. Significant for the author’s metaphorical use of the pronoun is the way it reoccurs in Ulrich’s interior monologue: The goals, the voices, the reality, all this seductiveness that lures and leads us on, that we pursue and plunge into — is this reality itself or is it no more than a breath of the real, resting intangibly on the surface of the reality the world offers us? What sharpens our suspicions are all those prefabricated compartments and forms of life, semblances of reality [das Seinesgleichen], the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-

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made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings. (MWQ 135)

In the vocabulary of Musil’s hero, the Seinesgleichen — rendered as “semblances of reality” in this passage taken (as are all quotations from the novel in this study) from the new English translation of The Man Without Qualities by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike — is a neologism for the “prefabricated compartments and forms of life.” It refers to the absence of originality and uniqueness. In his skeptical mood, Ulrich recognizes everything as similar or equal to some other already existing entity or concept. Indeed, recognition itself takes place only as recognition of the same. Nothing unique or authentic exists because people’s minds, life, and creativity appear predestined by a repetition of the same. Nothing appears to be “real” in and of itself; everything is revealed as a simulacrum. This suspect and unreal reality is discovered not only in thoughts and perceptions, in the forms of social interaction and in speech, but — remarkably — also in “sensations and feelings.” Even affect is considered to be channeled through “prefabricated compartments,” that is, has its own law, ratio, or form. Expressed in the paradoxical figure of “a man without qualities” is the enigma of individuation. “One human being, when you think of it, means nothing more to another one than a string of similes,” says Ulrich to Bonadea (633). Shortly after writing Young Törless, Musil drafted a letter in which he drew a distinction between “psychologischer Wissenschaft” and “psychologischer Kunst” by emphasizing the difference between explaining things and finding out what things feel like. He stated unequivocally: “Ich will nicht begreiflich sondern fühlbar machen” (B 24, I do not want to explain but show what it feels like). However, emotions and feelings entertain for Musil a cognitive function. That emotions and feelings are epistemic is fundamental to Musil’s ideas concerning the merit of literature and art. Musil is steeped in precisely the kind of thinking that the philosophical schools of the twentieth century were eager to overcome. In Musil’s often quoted 1925 review essay of Béla Baláz’s theory of film, “Ansätze zu einer neuen Ästhetik: Bemerkungen über eine Dramaturgie des Films” (Toward a New Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film), the influence of a certain type of neo-Kantian philosophy of mind is especially palpable. The following passage shows how Musil incorporates specific psychological concepts and terminology to fend off the notion that “thinking” is an element foreign to the art work: Above all, we must remember that not only our intellect [Verstand] but also our senses are “intellectual.” It is common knowledge that we see

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what we know . . . . Even smells and tastes, if they are not very penetrating, can be distinguished only poorly without the help of something specific with which to compare them. And the same is even truer for actual emotional [seelische] experiences, of which one may say without exception that the form [Gestalt] they assume in different people is that of the picture these people had already formed beforehand. This goes so far that without preformed stable representations — and these are concepts — really only a chaos remains; and since on the other hand concepts are dependent on experience, there arises a condition of mutual formation, like that between a fluid and an elastic container, an equilibrium without firm support for which we have still not found any description, so that it is fundamentally as mysterious as the surface of a swamp. (PS 201)

By referring to “stable representations” as “concepts” and “mutual formation” of experience and concepts, Musil alludes to Kant, who was, however, primarily concerned with the cognition of the external world (i.e., the truth of mechanical physics based on Newton’s laws). According to Kant, the manifoldness of a perception receives its unity through a mutual adaptation of concept and intuition. However, Musil’s allusion to Kant’s epistemology must be read in the context of the entire essay. Art and literature are not about the cognition of external objects. What manifests itself in art, says Musil, is an experience “that can never be completely repeated, that cannot be fixed but is individual, even anarchic” (PS 205). Apparently, then, Musil was trying to demarcate an experience entirely set off from and juxtaposed to the dualism of sensual impressions and reason, emotions and intellect. Such an experience underlies the psychology on the basis of which Kant traced the transcendental ego. At the same time, however, Musil argued with Kant — albeit the Kant of the third critique who wrote on the sublime — that it is necessary to denounce “ordinary experience” in favor of the extraordinary that transcends it. However, Musil was not sympathetic to the destruction of form, which he considered the hallmark of the avant-garde. For him, the avantgarde’s intention to liberate what lies so to speak “below” the surface of transcendental synthesis misses the point. According to Musil, it creates at best “neue Erlebnisse, aber keine neue Art des Erlebens” (GW II, 3 1148: new sensations without any new kind of experience). The phrase highlights Musil’s position as being that of a writer situated between nineteenth-century realism and the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Musil thought that expressionistic art merely tried to provoke sensations without a Gestalt, that is to say without any form that

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would elevate the new and unfamiliar sensations (Empfindungen, Erlebnisse) into a true experience (Erfahrung). In other words, Musil claimed that expressionist or surrealist art had no true intellectual content, and for this reason has been rightly compared to “primitive art.” On the other hand, however, Musil was not a complacent realist. Rather, it appears as if he intended to criticize feelings and emotions that, for lack of a better word, one might want to call “stereotypical.” Musil emphasized the point that people’s affects are not necessarily more authentic than their thoughts and deeds. As he wrote in the same essay, Toward a New Aesthetic: We find ourselves, then, in a divided situation. It is not thinking but, rather, simply the need for practical orientation that drives us to general formulations, to formulas for concepts no more than to formulas for our gestures and sense impressions, which fall asleep after a few repetitions just as do the representational processes that are tied to words. But then hostility should not be directed against thinking, as almost always happens in such contexts, but must seek to free itself from the individual’s practical, factual, normal condition. But if this does occur, nothing remains but the dark realm of the “other condition,” in which everything provisionally ceases. (PS 201)

There exist, as every reader of The Man Without Qualities knows, not only stupid thoughts but also stupid moods. They are prefigured. After all, Musil’s novel satirizes people’s misjudgment in 1914, the atavism of their wishes, tastes, and feelings. As is evident from the psychological characterization of the actors involved in a “patriotic campaign” whose goal is to trump the thirtieth anniversary of the Prussian emperor by celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Austrian emperor, emotional attachments to old ideas and former states of action are responsible for the creation of a Seinesgleichen. Yet neither Germans nor Austrians had anything “the like of it” to celebrate in 1918, the year when the First World War came to an end and the old European order fell apart. The title of part 2, Seinesgleichen geschieht (the like of it now happens) is translated by Wilkins and Pike as “Pseudoreality Prevails” (81). False — that is, never critically reflected — emotional responses are indicative of the formation of a “pseudoreality,” since people’s “feelings have not yet learned to make use of their intellect” (33). Similarly, Musil’s speech on Dummheit (Stupidity), delivered in 1937 to an international assembly of writers, many of whom had been forced into exile, and for which Musil was criticized by the left, attempted to provide a psychological explanation for the rise of fascism. For Musil, it could not be explained solely in

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7

political and sociological terms. By stupidity, Musil meant not the lack of intelligence. Rather, stupidity derives from an affective resistance to the complexities of modern life. Stupidity is an affective state that betrays the existence of a cognitive dissonance. As this study will show, Musil’s interpretation of mental states and attitudes must be understood in the context of a terminology the author became familiar with as a student of psychology. Musil’s philosophical acumen and great familiarity with the sciences has inspired a number of studies that unravel the ideas, themes, and motifs that link The Man Without Qualities to the various scientific and philosophical discourses prevalent at the time of its conception. This study continues that effort. While situating Musil’s work in the cultural and literary context of the early twentieth century, this study focuses on the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil’s programmatic move beyond “epic naiveté.” It relates the ideas underlying the novel’s construction to the epistemic shifts that occurred in the humanities and the sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. Musil’s own training as an engineer and his subsequent graduate studies in philosophy and psychology account for many of the scientific citations and allusions that crop up in The Man Without Qualities. Grasping these topical references contributes to a broader understanding of the novel’s expressed skepticism about narrative. For Musil, literature is concerned not with the universal but with the particular, not with the ordinary but with the extraordinary, not with humankind but with the individual. Accordingly, literature is eminently ethical, since it is in the realm of moral judgment that one is asked to suspend instinctual responses or mechanical applications of preformed notions. Reviewing a book on Arthur Schnitzler, who as a writer represents fin-de-siècle psychology par excellence, Musil remarked that readers who treat literary characters as if they were real people act like monkeys who reach into a mirror for their own image. In other words, these readers mistake a metaphor for the real. Evidently, literary fiction can seduce the reader into erroneous ontological beliefs — which was why Plato felt compelled to exclude art from the Republic. Musil knew of course that the confusion between the imaginary and the real is no coincidence. Since a literary narrative is a teleological construct of figures and tropes, characters in a novel are as imaginary as mirror images. They appear whole because they are completely determined by the matrix from which they are drawn. Contrary to real people, literary characters are finalized and complete. They are topological, not temporal creatures. However, readers of literature enjoy the totalizing

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INTRODUCTION

function of mirror images — even though their problematic identification is determined by rhetoric, not logic. In contrast, the suspension of the tropes and figures of narrative representation perturbs the reader. The perception of disorder, or of order disintegrating into chaos, gives rise to ambiguous feelings. These feelings indicate that the need for rational understanding conflicts with our desire for an imaginary whole. In The Man Without Qualities, Musil attempted to represent this split or dissonance as the universal condition of our times. According to the characters portrayed in this novel, the manifestation of cognitive dissonance is typical of modern man. By cognitive dissonance we mean the discrepancy between people’s emotional attachment to beliefs and the fact that those beliefs find no support in a counter-intuitive, rational understanding of the world. Cognitive dissonance is caused by the everincreasing complexity of modern life, as society’s level of rationalization transcends personal experience, imagination, and knowledge. The disembodied and fragmented mind becomes a universal phenomenon. For Musil, cognitive dissonance is not simply a psychological problem of a particular individual or social class but a symptom of modern man in general. Musil repeatedly referred to the concept of the Gestalt to express his thought on what is essential to the work of art. A Gestalt is considered a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. For a Gestalt, inner and outer are one and not distinguishable. The Gestalt is a totality whose ontological existence, however, might well be an illusion. That is to say that it might just be a figure — an imposition rather than a substance. Musil was always eager to draw a line between the Dichter (poet) and the mere Schriftsteller (writer). But is Dichtung (poetic work) — as Musil emphatically called the works of higher literature — a Gestalt, or a construction of figures and tropes? Or — to put it in more current terms concerning the aesthetics and hermeneutics of literature — is The Man Without Qualities a “work” or a “text”? Clearly, the novel is an experiment with literature. It is constructed as a hypothetical narrative, thereby eschewing the suspension of disbelief. Yet one can also argue that this allegorical death of the author and the emergence of literature as text is merely part of the game, an aesthetic game of simulation that the author intended as such. Certainly, Musil himself entertained the hope that he would craft a “work” or Gestalt. He wrote in 1931 that with Ulrich’s Umkehrung (return) to his forgotten sister, the novel should also have suddenly taken the turn toward straightforward storytelling (B 497). In other words, as soon as the world becomes meaningful for Ulrich, achieving transcen-

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dence through love, the narration would start to flow. The hypothetical construction of narrative was supposed to become a teleological narrative. Yet this switch never really occurs. Throughout the novel, the narrative is continually interrupted and diverted. Philosophical digressions take up more and more space, the main plot is overshadowed by its subplots, and initially major characters such as Moosbrugger and Clarissa disappear from scene — all of which threatens the coherence of the novel from within. An infinite postponement appears to take place. Moreover, the central theme, the difference between Seinesgleichen and Ohnegleichen, repeats itself, but is never bridged. Thus, The Man Without Qualities oscillates between Gestalt and figure — between being a work and becoming a text. Repeating the difference, it is a mirror in which one is never able to identify a clear shape. What is at stake, then, is neither Gestalt nor figure but a repetition of the difference. Musil wrote a narrative that repeats itself over and over again because it attempts the paradox of narrating a difference.

Notes 1

Citations from the novel are from Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike’s translation The Man Without Qualities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), and will be referred to in the text with a page number in parentheses, accompanied when the reference would otherwise be unclear by the abbreviation MWQ. 2

Regarding the unfinished state of The Man without Qualities, Musil noted that “volume One closes approximately at the high point of an arch; on the other side it has no support” (MWQ 1761). Accordingly, the poetic work describes the figure of an ellipsis. Cf. Manfred Frank, “Auf der Suche nach einem Grund. Über den Umschlag von Erkenntniskritik in Mythologie bei Musil.” Mythos und Moderne: Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1983), 342. The bridge metaphor has been noted by critics before, notably with regard to the title character in Musil’s Young Törless, for whom the arithmetic of imaginary numbers appears like crossing a bridge of which only the pillars exist. According to an entry in Musil’s diaries, the motif could have its origin in the mood (Stimmung) once felt by the “little, estranged Robert standing on the bridge” (TB I, 109). 3

Translated literally into English, the sentence does not make much sense — which is probably the reason it has been left out of the essay’s only available translation. Musil, Precision and Soul (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1990).

1: Experimental Psychology: Musil’s Academic Apprenticeship

U

LRICH’S BIOGRAPHY, his erudition, and his intimate familiarity with the culture and politics of the scientific community closely reflect those of Musil himself. Musil had already received a diploma as a mechanical engineer when, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, he registered at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin to study philosophy. After he finished his graduate studies in spring 1908 with a doctoral thesis on Ernst Mach, he received an offer from Alexius Meinong (1853– 1920) to become assistant professor of psychology at the University of Graz. Meinong was the founder of the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria. Today he is mostly remembered for his phenomenological investigation into non-existent objects such as a round square. However, Musil opted to make writing his sole occupation. Presumably, he already felt then, as again later in life, that he did not possess the requisite qualities to become a scientist. More than three decades later, Musil remarked in his diaries that he had always been more interested in ethics than psychology (D 442–43). However, when he arrived as a student in Berlin, he felt insufficiently prepared to make ethics his proper field. Though it may come as a surprise to readers of The Man Without Qualities, Musil thought himself lacking the sufficient intellectual curiosity to become a professional scholar: “I have never ‘taken a look around’ my spiritual surroundings but have always buried my head in myself.” Looking back on his student years, Musil concludes, “the dreamer 1 tripped up the thinker” (D 442–43). Musil’s notes from those years in Berlin foreshadow Ulrich’s satirical remark about the confusion and arbitrariness one encounters in contemporary philosophy. “Whereas in the sciences every new book makes the previous one superfluous,” the young Musil wrote, “in philosophy one never knows where to start and from whom to learn” (D 102). Conversely, Musil’s doctoral thesis resounds with the pathos of nineteencentury positivism.

Today it is the word of the natural scientist which carries weight wherever epistemological or metaphysical questions come under the scrutiny

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of exact philosophy. The times are past when a picture of the world sprang full-blown from the philosopher’s forehead. (OMT 15)

However, by the time Musil worked on his doctorate, the exact sciences no longer supported the determinism that underpinned classical positivism. In physics, new discoveries undermined the unified theory of the universe that was based on Newton’s three laws of motion. Maxwell’s and Bolzmann’s statistical interpretation of thermodynamics contradicted fundamental assumptions of classical physics. Most significantly it was acknowledged that scientific predictions are not absolutely certain but merely highly probable. By the early twentieth century, physics witnessed further radical conceptual changes. Planck’s quantum physics (1900), Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905), and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1927) culminated in what is today known as the Copenhagen theory, according to which light behaves as both a wave and particle simultaneously, even though this can never be proven. Whatever perspective the observer chooses, two completely different interpretations of the universe emerge. However, modern physics cannot dispense with either the one or the other theory. Instead, they are treated as complementary points of view. Yet it is a mistake to assume that Musil was fully knowledgeable of what in retrospect is seen by many as “a second scientific revolution.” By the time it became evident how much things had changed, Musil was no longer affiliated with the scientific community. Nor did he seriously try to keep up with the breathtaking developments in theoretical physics, as 2 some scholars suggest. Musil’s understanding of the sciences is primarily informed by the debates that took place during the first decade of the twentieth century. They left him with the impression that the matters under dispute between scientists, psychologists and philosophers are highly confusing — understandably so, as any historian knows who has tried to map the transcendental topography of the shifts and trends in the sciences around 1900. Things were very much in flux — the older models of interpretation had been relinquished, but new models of interpretation had not yet been found. As Musil accurately summarized the whole situation in his essay “Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters” (Sketch of What the Writer Knows), which he published in 1918, “at the lowest level, the ground is shaky; the most basic principles of mathematics are logically unsecured; the laws of physics have only approximate validity, and the constellations move in a system of coordinates that nowhere has a locus” (PS 63).

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When Musil entered the university in 1903, he found himself in the vanguard of a discipline whose future was not certain. Psychology had made considerable advances toward asserting itself as a new science. However, it was still taught as a branch of philosophy. In fact, in Germany’s university system, psychology did not achieve its institutional independence from philosophy until 1941 (Ash 7). Debate still raged as to what constituted the very subject and methodology of psychology as an exact science. Indeed, the anti-positivism that had been in vogue since the turn of the century, particularly in Germany, found one of its prime ideological targets in the figure of the experimental psychologist (Ash 12). At issue was whether psychological phenomena could be studied from a third-person perspective like other natural phenomena. In the midst of the nineteenth century, the German physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) had undertaken psychological experiments that satisfied the criteria for empirical research. Determined to prove the identity of body and mind, Fechner had developed a method by which to infer psychic sensation by measuring physiological stimuli. He introduced a functional equation for calculating the threshold at which a sensory stimulus becomes a conscious sensation. Fechner referred to his theory of the relation between body and mind as psychophysics. In the opening remarks of his book Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics, 1860), which published the results of ten years of research, one finds for the first time the metaphor that runs throughout the natural philosophy of late nineteenth century and that, as I have already begun to discuss, would also become significant for Musil’s writing. According to Fechner, body and mind are not, as they were conceived by Descartes, two separate entities. Rather, they are two different images of the same entity, which Fechner compared to a circle that can be viewed from standing inside it, where its curve appears concave, or from standing outside it, where its curve appears convex. “Both sides belong together as indivisibly as do the mental and material sides of man and can be looked upon as analogous to his inner and outer sides. . . . What will appear to you as your mind from the internal standpoint, where you yourself are this mind, will, on the other hand, appear from the outside point of view as the material basis of this mind” (Fechner 2–3). However, the whole idea of investigating the existence of a “relationship” between the physical and the psychological appears self-contradictory if one assumes that both phenomena are merely complementary representations of the same subject. As such, they do relate to each other merely as attributes of the same entity but not as singular entities related to each other.

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Fechner maintained that psychophysics was only concerned with the functional relationships among observable phenomena and that it makes no assumptions about the underlying essential causes. However, in practice he approached psychological phenomenon as being causally dependent on the physical. For example, even though Fechner emphasized that sensations stand in no direct causal relationship to physical stimuli, he hypothesized that sensations are mediated by a whole range of neurological processes not yet accessible to empirical observation (8–9). Fechner assumed that body and mind are interconnected and imagined a day when it would become possible to give an empirical account of that interconnection. Indeed, the metaphysical implications of Fechner’s positivism are immediately brought to light by the notion that an interface between body and mind must exist. Laboratory research provides tested data instead of random insights gained through spontaneous observation. Controlled experiments expose what will ultimately be admitted as factual truth. This de-anthropomorphized reality can be measured, and it can be verified through repetition. Only what is thus revealed counts as “real” from the point of view of exact science. Fechner’s research provided a paradigm for making psychology an exact science. Subsequent experiments in the field focused on the isolation and measurement of elementary sensations, which were considered the content or building material of mental life. Psychophysics appeared to affirm the basic ideas of the English empiricists such as John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill. However, the underlying assumption of a parallelism between physiological stimuli and sensuous intuition was met from the start with skepticism from philosophical quarters (Boring 385). Contesting the relevance of experimental research in defining the psychological, philosophers steeped in transcendental idealism developed a different approach. They too emphasized the importance of empirical observation, though by way of introspection, pursuing a descriptive instead of a quantitative analysis. Taking its lead from Franz Brentano’s notion of the intentional structure of consciousness, the descriptive approach stressed that psychological reality does not consist in elementary sensations analogous to physical entities of molecules and atoms. Instead, they emphasized that the psychological subject is immanent to consciousness. Because of the evident distinction between what is, on the one hand, phenomenally given in immediate introspection and, on the other, experimentally isolated as sensations, the representatives of the phenomenological school categorically rejected the validity of pursuing psychological investigation accord3 ing to a model of research borrowed from the natural sciences.

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Musil’s thesis adviser Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) was a former student of Brentano. Internationally recognized as exemplifying the great tradition of nineteenth-century German scholarship, Stumpf played a major role in making psychology a discipline in its own right. Stumpf tried to elaborate a common terminology that would unify the field. In his research, he combined descriptive psychology with experimental psychology. The most creative research in experimental psychology had been done on visual perception. Stumpf, however, was very much interested in audio perception. For example, he undertook deficiency studies on individuals who showed no emotional response when listening to music even though they could hear the sounds. Based on a variety of empirical studies with a similar thrust, Stumpf proposed to distinguish between affect and what he referred to as Gefühlsempfindungen (emotional sensations). The latter are emotions and feelings that accompany sensations such as toothache or tickling, and are simple sensations of pleasure or displeasure. These are characterized by their localizability in space — Descartes’ res extensa that makes up the material universe. Usually a person is able to answer the question where a pain is felt. However, that is not the case for affective states such as joy, anger, fear or hope. In other words, Stumpf argued that certain sensations are emotive as such. Accordingly, the feelings of pleasure and pain are also conceivable as motivational forces in lower forms of biological life, such as worms or plants. Proper affects, however, contain a cognitive (evaluative) element. Contrary to William James — who famously held that one does not cry because one is sad but that one is sad because one is crying — Stumpf was of the opinion that affect originates in some sort of a judgment. For Stumpf, 4 affects involve a higher psychological faculty. Emotions and feelings are 5 not simply, as is often said “irrational.” For his Tonpsychologie (Tone Psychology, 1883, 1890), a complex and voluminous work he never completed, Stumpf gained an international reputation. He became the chair of the psychology laboratory in Berlin, where he succeeded Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who is still remembered for his ingenious experimental research on memory. Stumpf proved himself a worthy successor. His pathbreaking research required the engineering of sophisticated laboratory equipment, whose invention was as impressive as the experiments themselves. Together with Erich von Hornbostel, Stumpf initiated the founding of an archive of recordings that could be used for ethnomusicological studies. He also became instrumental in setting up a station for animal behavior research on Tenerife, where Wolfgang Köhler would undertake his famous studies on apes. During the 1920s, Stumpf’s former students Wolfgang Köhler and

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Kurt Koffka would initiate the discipline’s first “paradigm change” by introducing the Gestalt concept. This meant a break with the ideas with which Stumpf identified himself as a philosopher and psychologist. However, he did not use his authority to oppose the change, nor did he withdraw his collegial support and friendship. Stumpf favored methodological pluralism; he had never been keen on founding his own school. Instead, he preferred to delimit the consensus, to point out the unresolved, and to keep inconvenient questions alive. He promoted the inclusion of the laboratory in psychological research but did not believe that quantitative analysis could entirely replace the insights gained from introspection. His restrained attitude towards the experimental method followed from his belief in the particular nature of the psychological. However, in his teachings he consistently displayed what his students would later recall as a “devotion to the real” (Ash 41). Emphasizing facts over theory, but skeptical of the inclusiveness of the experimental method, Stumpf positioned himself between the positivist, the neo-Kantian, and the phenomenologist, promoting a special kind of empiricism perhaps not entirely foreign to the notion later expressed in Musil’s paradoxical formulation “precision and soul” (MWQ 651). In any case, the influence that Stumpf’s teaching and his example as a scholar of great integrity must have had on the young Musil cannot be overestimated. In 1908, the year when Musil examined the ideas of Ernst Mach to reassure himself about the epistemological foundation of science, Stumpf delivered a public lecture about “ethical skepticism.” In this lecture, Stumpf affirmed the modern belief that moral values are determined by their social and cultural context. Yet he rejected the idea that this leads to relativism in moral thinking. As an alternative to the reductive notion that the recognition of values is merely a matter of cultural acceptance, Stumpf proposed an ethic of what he called “einsichtiges Handeln” (judicious action). Judicious action is founded in the “Durchdringung von Fühlen und Denken” (mutual permeation of feeling and cognition). Stumpf contradicted those who think that moral sensibility and a matter-of-fact attitude (Sachlichkeit), which is usually ascribed to the scientist, were irreconcilable. On the contrary, he claimed, the true representative of the modern age is the intellectual who engages 6 in a reflective thinking that combines intuition and reason. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was both a student and a friend of Stumpf. As is evident from his notebooks, Musil read, or tried to read, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which were published in 1900–01. Husserl criticized the attempt to give a psychological account of logical phenomena. According to Husserl, the natural sci-

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ences aim at a truthful representation of nature. However, the representation of nature cannot itself become a subject of an exact science without an infinite regression. As I will later discuss, Musil also studied sources that, when seen in retrospect, were groundbreaking on the path leading toward Gestalt psychology. Certain passages in The Man Without Qualities seem to be directly influenced by ideas taken from the writings of these scholars. Yet when reading Musil’s notebooks, one must be cautioned not to interpret his sometimes extensive excerpts as approval. Nor is it evident that Musil at the time understood all the implications of the diverse and quite difficult material he was trying to absorb. Chiefly noticeable is a growing familiarity with the ideas of Kant, inspiring a more critical view of Nietzsche and Mach, whose works he had already read before he came to Berlin. In all likelihood, his academic training under Stumpf and under the neo-Kantian philosophers Alois Riehl (1844–1924), whose lectures dealt with logic and epistemology, initiated this turn. In notebooks from those earlier years, Musil laments “the cheap pleasure of criticizing Kant from the ‘biogenetic’ perspective.” He suggests that it would be much more productive instead “to criticize our way of thinking from Kant’s point of view” (D 19). However, one must be careful not to read too much into such a remark. Rather than a blank statement of approval, this aphorism contains a thought experiment that is typical for Musil. He often delighted in suggesting a simple inversion of relationships as a vehicle for a more creative point of view. After all, even the scholastics were never truly refuted: according to Musil, it merely happened that other ways of thinking turned out to be more successful in coping with nature. Musil closest friend at the university in Berlin was Johannes von Allesch (1882–1967), who became one of the few people in his life that he would address with the informal “Du.” It was for Allesch’s lab assignments on color perception that Musil designed the famous Variationskreisel, a device in which rotating colored discs produce, to the naked eye, impressions of differently mixed colors. Allesch later became a psychology professor and held positions at various German universities. Considering his friend’s academic success, one could contemplate what role Musil himself might have played at the cutting edge of a new discipline, had he accepted the assistant professorship Meinong offered him at the university in Brünn. Kurt Koffka, cofounder and later a famous representative of Gestalt psychology in the United States, recounts an episode from his college days that apparently refers to Musil:

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A colleague of mine with whom I was going home asked me the question: “Have you any idea where the psychology we are learning is leading us?” I had no answer to that question, and my colleague, after taking his doctor’s degree, gave up psychology as a profession and is today a well-known author. But I was honest and less capable, and so I stuck to my job. But [. . .] this question never ceased to trouble me. (Koffka 53)

Indeed, Musil’s notes from those years in Berlin include an exchange between two people discussing the established truth of psychophysics, that is, the belief in a functional relation between body and mind. One of the two asks whether the notion of psychophysical parallelism is a hypothesis or a fact. The other replies that, in the current stage of investigation, it is a bit of both. It is a necessary theory to explain certain empirically proven “connections” (D 80). Yet a connection is not a parallel: “The main thing is the two parallel bars; but the ladder needs the small transverse rungs. These are — the metaphysical” (D 80). What remains “metaphysical” is the precise nature of the parallel between the physiological and the psychological realms. Should one really believe that experimental psychology would find the answer to the mindbody problem? Musil’s peers were inspired by the idea to solve metaphysical problems by empirical means. Less than a decade after Musil finished his doctorate, they would initiate the first paradigm change in psychology by introducing the Gestalt concept. In its most radical formulation, the Gestalt concept would replace psychophysical parallelism with an isomorphism of self-organizing systems. However, by then Musil had already left academia. He never subscribed to the philosophical principles of Gestalt psychology. For Musil, the Gestalt phenomenon meant something else. Difficult Epistemological Questions: Musil’s Doctoral Dissertation According to Musil’s own account, he was not eager to participate in the experimental work that Carl Stumpf required of his students at the FriedrichWilhelms University in Berlin: “I took little pleasure in psychological experimentation; even during my time in Berlin I had steered clear of direct involvement” (D 442). Indeed, given the academic context in which Musil pursued his doctorate, it is surprising that his dissertation does not deal with a topic more closely related to the experimental research that took place in Berlin. Musil’s thesis on the philosophical teachings of Ernst Mach is one of the rare theoretical works written under Stumpf (cf. Ash, Appendix 2). It is not understood why Musil focused on Mach in

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the first place. Perhaps, being an engineer, he felt more at home with the ideas of a physicist than with the unsolved complexities he encountered in the still inconclusive research on perception and cognition. It has even been suggested that Einstein’s theory on relativity, which had just been posted in 1905, may have led Musil to Mach. However, lest one forget, Mach’s writings, notably Die Analyse der Empfindungen (The Analysis of Sensations), which had undergone several editions following its initial appearance in 1894, had influenced not only scientists but writers and artists as well. Hermann Bahr, the leading critic of fin-de-siècle Vienna, used the book to provide a scientific justification for impressionism. It is easy to imagine that Mach’s brilliant essays similarly impressed Musil, who had already read Mach before he went to Berlin and before he wrote Young Törless. Musil’s diaries reveal he was interested in Mach as a scientist, but also as a philosopher who maintained that the empirical sciences had already succeeded in overcoming the need for metaphysics (D 7 16). The debate about what constitutes scientific knowledge was very much unresolved during Musil’s academic years. It would be wrong to assume that the boundaries between the different schools of thought were as clearly marked as we see them in retrospect. Young Musil puzzled in his notebooks over such difficult problems as how physicists gain insights, whether solely by means of empirical observation or whether 8 from mathematical conclusions (TB 117). The question touched on a difficult issue that Ernst Cassirer was about to delimit in his book Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Substance and Function) — which, published in 1910, came out only two years after Musil tried to answer the question for himself in his dissertation. According to Cassirer, epistemology was shifting from the metaphysical notion of substance to the logic of the mathematical concept of function. The Aristotelian understanding of science conceives of the scientific concept as a representation of the natural world. The representational value is achieved through a process of abstraction. Accordingly, the scientific concept is considered a reduction of the actual phenomena, which can be interpreted as an impoverishment of the actual experience of life. In contrast, the functional understanding of science interprets the scientific concept as a construction of logical relations that obtain among singular phenomena. For Cassirer, only a logic of relation formalized as mathematical functions can account 9 for the developments in the exact sciences. The daunting task of coming to terms with completely unresolved questions is also evident in Musil’s thesis, the final title of which was Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs (Essay on the Evaluation of

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Mach’s Teachings). The almost total lack of any secondary sources is striking. Musil made no attempt to assess Mach’s theories in light of critical commentaries put forth by others. Instead, he wanted to prove by way of an “immanent critique” that Mach’s epistemology lacks “inner consistency” and consequently contradicts itself (OMT 19). But Mach never presented his ideas in a systematic fashion. So it is paradoxical that in order to prove a lack of consistency, Musil first had to reveal a coherent system underlying Mach’s diverse writings. Elevating Mach’s ideas above their “irresponsible life of aphorisms” (OMT 19), Musil tried to examine the extent to which Mach succeeded in providing a plausible theory of science. In particular, Musil wanted to address the question whether Mach is justified in his claim that his theory of science is based on assumptions fully substantiated by empirical material alone. In Musil’s own words, the crucial question is whether positivism lives up to one of its most dazzling and appealing promises, the claim that it is merely the backwardness of philosophers which explains their failure to recognize the extent to which exact and fruitful science is already following the tracks of positivist philosophy. (OMT 18)

At the outset of his thesis, Musil provided his reader with a concise summary of Mach’s basic beliefs. Mach proposes that (1) science only describes but does not explain natural events; (2) science only establishes functional relations between facts, not causal connections; (3) there are no meaningful concepts of natural substances; (4) science is itself only a function of the human struggle for survival; (5) the physical and the psychical, body and mind, are not distinct entities but only ideas that are no longer meaningful; (6) nothing but sensations are empirically given, and the functional relations on which the equations of natural science are based are the relations between these sensations (OMT 15–17). Mach’s general aim was to free empirical science from its metaphysical underpinnings. Science neither demonstrates nor presupposes that natural law implies the notion of natural necessitation (cf. Wright’s introduction OMT 10–11). For Mach, scientific explanations of natural phenomena strive not for the true but for “the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts” (OMT 207). In science, a theory becomes accepted if it is “economic.” According to this operational view, scientific knowledge provides merely an elaborate notation system for the recording and communication of practical experience. However, considered an abstract representation of reality (rather than a logical construction of reality), science can only be viewed as an impoverishment or

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reduction of actual experience. By definition scientific knowledge is a selection of aspects that is neither true nor false: “Facts are always represented at a sacrifice of completeness and never with greater precision than fits the needs of the moment” (OMT 206). Science has become the most significant tool in the struggle for man’s self-preservation, not because it presents a true picture of the world, but because it has been proven to be practically useful in dealing with the world. In his dissertation, Musil objects to what he considers to be Mach’s relativism, using at first an argument he might have learned from his teacher Stumpf or from reading Husserl. Although inductive science might indeed be a mere solidified habit, phylogenetically acquired in the process of mankind’s evolution, it does not follow that science is unable to establish a true picture of nature. The natural evolution of science is of no immediate relevance to the epistemological question of whether or not science discovers any substantial truth. At most, Mach could have claimed that the question of science’s socio-biological function is irrelevant to the epistemological question of whether science provides a truthful representation of the world. Musil would later repeat the same argument to oppose the cultural relativism implicit in Oswald Spengler’s morphological concept of history (GW II, 1046). Even if the search for truth must be recognized as a function of self-preservation, or, following Nietzsche, of a will to power, this alone does not necessarily make any claim to truth a lie. Mach argued against the confusion of scientific truth with reality. For Mach, the idea that science need not be “true” in an ontological sense followed from his discovery that physics can do without natural philosophy. For this reason, Mach also could not befriend himself with the atomic model. He believed that the notion of the atom would reintroduce the idea of a material substance. What Mach proposed, however, is nature conceptualized in such a way that any stipulation of natural causation becomes obsolete. It was to that end that Mach introduced the image of a world consisting only of sensations (Empfindungen). He radicalized psychophysics by introducing the idea that physics and psychology do not study different though corresponding subjects but that they study the same subject from different perspectives. According to Mach, physics and psychology share a common starting point: they both take sensations as their ultimate data. Man has no other knowledge available than knowledge deduced from the analysis of sensations. For that reason, the physical and mental cannot be seen as two separate ontological orders of reality. Musil correctly insisted that only by employing his theory of sensations could Mach have hoped to overcome the dualism of mind

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and body, a dualism that would otherwise reintroduce what had already been discarded. For although, as we have already seen, the concepts of substance are expelled from the domain of what is considered worthy of scientific treatment, as long as there persists the belief in the physical and the psychical, an inner and an outer world, this operation will never yield a definite result; the cause of the disease remains, so to speak, in the scientific organism. (OMT 70)

Certainly, Mach felt his theory was economical in the sense just discussed. However, Musil objected that Mach’s monism implies an unwarranted ontological commitment. Though Mach claims to use a strictly empirical argument — assuming only what is immediately given and observable — the proposition that nothing but sensations exist cannot be proven with scientific means: science, according to Mach’s own theory, provides a useful but not a realistic picture of the world. However, Musil tried to show that if the philosopher’s sensualist position is taken into ac10 count, Mach’s ideas do cohere up to a certain point. According to Musil, it is only as a radical sensualist that Mach can overcome a dualism that introduces the notions of substance and material causality. However, it is the epistemological ambiguity of Mach’s reference to sensations that Musil finds most problematic. Since a scientist does not simply deal with sensations, Mach the philosopher of monism contradicts Mach the em11 pirical scientist. As Musil correctly observed, Mach failed to distinguish clearly between sensations and objects. First of all, Mach confused a science based on observations of physical objects with a science investigating the psycho-physiological mechanism underlying the recognition of such objects. The psychologist deals with sensations, whereas the physicist deals with thing-like objects. In fact, the modern physicist now deals with objects that are no longer even evident to the senses. Moreover, even the psychologist, insofar as he behaves as a scientist, no longer approaches sensations as sensations. “Sensations” isolated and studied by the experimental psychologist in the laboratory are already reified objects. They are not the same as the sensations we encounter by means of intuition. Neither the physicist nor the psychologist deal with those Empfindungen that Mach the philosopher has in mind. Indeed, Musil correctly observes that Mach called the primitive sensations Elemente because he wanted to avoid introducing dualist overtones. Simply put, a scientific investigation destroys the very phenomenon it investigates. But the debate turned on the question whether this had to be seen as the result of an abstraction, as Mach believed, or if it was the

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result of a logical construction, as Musil recognized. However, Musil’s critique is not altogether transparent when it comes to the epistemological gap between sensory perceptions and physical objects. He convolutes strictly phenomenological arguments with a terminology reminiscent of Kant’s first Critique. Yet he clearly understood that scientific theories do not connect sensory but conceptual units. Therefore, if primitive sensations as the ultimately given are made the object of an empirical science, as is done in experimental psychology, here, too, the method unavoidably results in positing regularities, patterns, and probabilities. As a science, experimental psychology tries to establish the causal connections underlying the manifestations of sensations. It thus aims at establishing laws to make outcomes predictable. That holds true even if we grant Mach everything that he had to say about the metaphysical implications of classical mechanics and his necessary substitution of functionalism for the classical concept of causality. In conclusion then, Mach did not succeed in proving that causal laws are entirely illusory. Neither, however, is Musil able to prove the opposite and simply state that Mach is wrong. Indeed, Mach’s philosophy seems quite immune to such an immanent critique. One can only accept its basic premises or reject them; yet one cannot prove them to be true or false. Musil was therefore right in arguing that it is solely when Mach purports to base his philosophical views on scientific evidence that they become incoherent or even self-contradictory. However, Mach’s opposition to determinism and his ostensible phenomenalism conformed with the general trend at the time toward vitalism (Lebensphilosophie, literally, philosophy of life). Mach’s empirio-criticism emphasized immediate experience as the primary ground of knowledge. It is then perhaps not so surprising that much of what Mach had to say reappears in Musil’s literary writing. Cogito Unredeemed No study considering Musil’s views on Mach could be complete without considering what Musil might have gleaned from Mach. Though one should resist the temptation to explicate every aspect of The Man Without Qualities with reference to ideas that Mach put forth, it would be equally wrong to ignore the impact that the philosopher and scientist had on the writer. As Manfred Sommer has remarked, Mach was as important for Musil as Bergson for Proust (Sommer 96). One cannot help but detect the presence of the industrial environment in Mach’s Heraclitean universe, and it is most likely that Musil found a profound phenomenology of the modern mind in Mach’s works. For Mach, the

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world is in flux and complete knowledge of it is impossible. No substances and no causalities prevail. There is no center that would allow one to posit a structured whole. According to Mach, we are always only aware of sensations: Colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times and so forth, are connected with one another in manifold ways; and with them are associated dispositions of mind, feelings, and volition. Out of this fabric, that which is relatively more fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and expresses itself in language. Relatively greater permanency is exhibited, first, by certain complexes of colors, sounds, pressures, and so forth, functionally connected in time and space, which therefore receive special names, and are called bodies. Absolutely permanent such complexes are not. (Analysis of Sensation 2).

Similarly, the first chapter of The Man Without Qualities presents streams of sensations as if the chapter were composed and written from the perspective of a trained experimental psychologist. “Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating” (MWQ 3). From the outset, the novel’s characters are situated in a highly dynamic environment. In fact, they literally take shape under the reader’s eyes by a process of explicit figuration as if they had not already been on the author’s mind. The audio-visual field of perception is vibrant and fuzzy, and it is made evident that the characters’ private worlds, though apparently continuous and stable, are not entirely sealed off from the gush of surrounding forces. The characters are set off from their environment like monads whose ontological oneness with the universe is merely hidden to them. Since monads do not have a clear and distinct perception of the whole universe, they do not recognize that they themselves are part of its dynamic nature. In fact, it is their limited perception — allegorized in the hero’s position behind a window — that prohibits the recognition of the real. For Mach, the universe is nothing but a flow of sensations. Accordingly, the ego too “is not sharply marked off” and “can be extended as ultimately to embrace the entire world” (Analysis of Sensations, 13). To prove his point, Mach invites his readers to look at an odd illustration he has drawn of himself in his study: the picture shows only the parts of his body that he was able to see while drawing himself without looking into a mirror. One can see Mach’s study, his feet and legs, his hand

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holding the pencil, and even part of his nose and moustache (19). However, the subject responsible for the drawing remains faceless: Made into an object of observation, the “self” of this self-portrait in the most literal sense does not appear. For Mach, no further proof of the self’s nonexistence is required. Given the premise that true knowledge originates in empirical observation, the person known by the name of Ernst Mach is merely a complex of sensations. Mach agrees with Hume’s notion that the Cartesian cogito is an unfounded idea because no empirical evidence can be given to prove its existence. “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” Hume wrote, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but a perception” (252). Using the same argument, for Mach, too, no ego can empirically be discerned among sensations. “When I speak of my own sensations, these sensations do not exist spatially in my head, but my ‘head’ shares with them the same spatial field” (Analysis of Sensations 27). Speaking about sensations is evidently not as easy as drawing them. Mach’s self-portrait demonstrates the contiguity of sensations by recording as faithfully as possible the scholar’s visual perception of himself. The scholar’s own head is partly visible. This part shares the same spatial field with the rest of what is visible of his body. The scholar’s speech, however, conveys on the contrary the presence of a subject that contains the entire configuration. Language — Mach’s written commentary — introduces an illusion of depth into the empirical field. It posits an intentional agency. It posits subject and object and locates both “inside” the “head” of the speaker. For Mach, philosophers are caught up in the tropes and figures of their discourse. The dichotomy between the sensible and the intelligible is introduced in an ill-conceived attempt to rationally deduce rather than to empirically study the principles underlying the recognition of objects. To underscore his critique of the dualism inherent in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant, Mach cites the following aphorism from Lichtenberg: We become conscious of certain presentations that are not dependent upon us; of others that we at least think are dependent upon us. Where is the border-line? We know only the existence of our sensations, presentations, and thoughts. We should say, It thinks, just as we say, It lightens. It is going too far to say cogito, if we translate cogito by I think.

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The assumption, or postulation, of the ego is a mere practical necessity. (Analysis of Sensations 29)

For Lichtenberg the ego cogito is a useful fiction that serves the practical purposes of man’s self-preservation. It remains an inconspicuous phenomenon as long as it is not hypostatized as a substantive subject or will. Mach similarly took self-consciousness to be a notion that is ultimately created by language and abstract thought, which are intrinsically responsible for the anthropomorphic perception of the world. Yet it is precisely for this reason that Mach’s most notorious claim, “das Ich ist unrettbar,” should not be interpreted, as is usually done, as simply stating that the ego is a lost case, that it does not exist, and that Descartes was wrong. As Manfred Sommer in his ingenious reading suggested, Mach’s dictum instead characterizes the ego as “unredeemable” (Sommer 398). Elsewhere Mach stated: “The name makes the ‘I’” (cf. Sommer 400, footnote 88). Though not a substance, the illusion of a res cogitans remains unavoidable, since it is an effect of the way we speak about the world. However, it keeps us from recognizing the true nature of the universe. It functions like a transcendental illusion. The true state of things is only revealed when one is not functioning as a self-conscious being. In a revealing footnote Mach tells the reader how he discovered the truth: not in the laboratory, as one might expect, but during a leisurely walk in the fields. “On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego” (Analysis of Sensations 30). It was a sudden, unforced illumination that moved Mach to convert to monism and to abandon, as he explicitly states, Kant’s “thing-initself” (Analysis of Sensations 30). Kant, of course, considered the cogito an inevitable presupposition (Hinrich 61). He would have concurred with Mach that the ego is not an empirically observable subject. The proposition I think is a judgment concerning some “inner experience” or “mere apperception” of myself as the one who is thinking (Critique of Pure Reason A 343). This, however, is a somewhat peculiar judgment, since Kant agrees that the thinking agent as such is never encountered as an object of the subject’s intuition. The “I” is strictly speaking not a concept, since it refers to something that is not empirical in nature. The “I” remains an “empty” representation. Kant refers to it as “a mere consciousness that accompanies every concept” (Critique A 346). The cogito springs from an inner experience that yields no concepts and cannot become the subject of empirical knowledge. The thinking “I” cannot be-

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come itself the referent of a discursive judgment, since the possibility of its very existence is the transcendental condition of Kant’s first critique. Mach’s empirio-criticism is an attempt to conceptualize an intuition inaccessible to exact scientific observation (Sommer 327–51). Musil’s hero appears to follow a similar route. Ulrich ostensibly holds that “the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view” has “arrived at the ‘I’ itself” (MWQ 159). Presumably, then, Ulrich lists Descartes’ cogito among those ideas he considers merely a “hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted” (269). In his conversations with Diotima, Ulrich mocks the lofty idealism of the “beautiful soul” that she and Arnheim are aspiring to embody. The self is losing its status as a sovereign making its own laws. We are learning to know the rules by which it develops, the influence of its environment, its structural types, its disappearance in moments of the most intense activity: in short, the laws regulating its formation and its conduct. Think of it, cousin, the laws of personality! It’s like talking of a trade union for lonely rattlesnakes or a robber’s chamber of commerce. What with laws being the most impersonal thing in the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point of all that’s impersonal, so that it’s hard to find for it that honorable standpoint you don’t want to relinquish . . . . (MWQ 516)

Ulrich tells Diotima that man, like any other natural phenomenon, is now exposed to scientific analysis. In the new sciences such as biology, linguistics, and experimental psychology, human behavior is made predictable according to natural laws. Paradoxically, then, the most personal qualities turn out to be the most impersonal. The human is “all too human,” Nietzsche proclaimed, promoting an anthropology that would emphasize the physiological basis of human life. Science considers man a psychophysical totality. Yet Ulrich’s analogies — “trade union of lonely rattlesnakes” — characterize the whole endeavor as self-defeating. Ulrich hints at the irony that in science man turns against himself and thus attempts to be both the one who knows and the one who is known. Accordingly, when Ulrich speaks about “self” and “personality,” he is not necessarily using these terms as synonyms for the cogito (or, in contemporary parlance, “the subject”). Rather, Ulrich is aware that when man is approached as an object of empirical study, he cannot appear as anything other than a finite being: subjected to empirical observation, man is a priori considered a determined being. Yet, at the same time, man is also the source of this determination. Science thus inevitably puts man in the ambiguous position of being both an object of knowledge and a subject

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that knows. Man is the source of the laws that determine him. As Foucault aptly phrased it in The Order of Things, at the core of modern epis13 temology we find man as an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (318). In his dissertation on Mach, Musil argued that science only discovers what can be subsumed under some form of law. Following Kant, Musil was saying that we know of no facts that are mere sensations. For Kant, the “I think” meant an idea that must accompany all representations. Although the I, which thinks, can never be made present — since only various mental states but never I myself is given to me in intuition — it must, according to Kant, nevertheless be deduced as the transcendental subject that guarantees the unity of all my experience. Kant thus held that the claim that “I think” is an apodictic and universal judgment because to think something implies to “necessarily ascribe to things a priori all the properties that constitute the conditions under which alone we think them” (Critique A 347). One cannot think without presupposing a subject that posits itself in thinking. It follows, then, that any cognition has a sort of reflective structure. The other than myself is never met. Yet the self of myself remains equally remote, since the “I” that is presupposed in Kant’s “mere apperception” is not my concrete, biographical self — it is not what I can remember of myself. It is an “impersonal,” transcendental self that is nobody’s personal self. In the passage cited above, Ulrich refers to this transcendental self as the “imaginary meeting point of all that’s impersonal.” From a logical point of view, the self be14 comes a negative entity. Yet it appears present in its absence. For Agathe, responding enthusiastically to Ulrich’s skeptical remarks about the impossibility of exact color concepts, the “I” presupposed as the transcendental subject of ordinary experience is like a mirror in a dark room. It cannot be perceived, yet its presence is felt even when there is nothing for it to reflect: “You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer — and yet perceive nothing at all!” (MWQ 1185). Accordingly, understanding is not simply a reflection of the true state of things; it is only when the mirror of understanding is not functioning that a reality beyond the orderimposing subject might be revealed — a reality that is “sensed” but not yet identified through a figure or name. As Ulrich remarks, The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context . . . and so everything that has a name leans on everything else in regular rows, a link in large and incalculable unities, one relying on another and all penetrated by a common tension. But . . . if for some reason these associations fail and none of them addresses the internal

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series of orders, one is immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman creation, indeed a disavowed and formless one. (1186)

It is with regard to this sudden encounter of a different reality that Ulrich proposes to weigh the possibility of becoming “allocentric” rather being “egocentric.” The latter is the normal state of affairs, whereas Being allocentric means not having a center at all anymore. Participating totally in the world and not laying anything by for oneself. At its highest stage, simply ceasing to be. (1528)

The last words indicate the paradoxical nature of the described condition. The prefix allo is Greek and means etymologically “other, different.” Ulrich searches for a “center” that is strictly speaking no longer a center but a dynamic condition that is de-centering. It is the experience of a love that can almost not be referred to as an “experience.” It is the beginning or the end of experience, understanding, and naming. It is a reality one may encounter in taking a leisurely walk, as Mach once did, when he discovered the illusion of the cogito, or as Ulrich and Agathe do when strolling aimlessly through the city. Paradoxically, then, the notion of a “man without qualities” — that is, a man without predicates that would identify him or her — refers in the novel both to a matter of fact and to an ideal entity. Referring on the one hand to the demise of the Cartesian subject, “the dissolution of the anthropocentric view of things” (159), to the disappearance of personality and character, to the vanishing of the talented individual and great genius, one may safely say that the “man without qualities” is a metaphor of a historical event in the history of Western culture. Yet on the other hand, if such a “man without qualities” were possible, he would no longer be recognized as such. Such a man would mark the end of history, since he could no longer appear within history. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order of things. (1186)

The order of things is created through a repetition of the same. Here, repetition is equated with generality, not with singularity. Since qualities are always shared, there is no such thing as a unique quality or unique self. There is no one who can claim to be without qualities. Even the feeling of anger cannot be said to be a unique experience. “Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does?” (158). Even feelings are not singular but already shaped and prefigured. Accord-

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ingly, Ulrich sometimes “wished he were a man without qualities” (136). Ulrich would then become one with the gush of life he observes from behind a window when the reader encounters him for the first time. Mach’s Language Philosophy and the Desire for Poetic Language In Mach’s view, science has no other function than that of developing methods of abstractions that will enable the scientist to reduce the manifoldness of the phenomenal world. Nothing is real except sensations, and natural science pursues an economic adaptation of our ideas to our perceptions to assist in the survival of the species. Max Planck argued against Mach’s philosophy of science, pointing to the unification of physics achieved through the introduction of complex mathematical quantifications. However, for Mach even the increasing mathematization of physics does not alter the anthropomorphic character he attributes to scientific knowledge. Mathematical concepts are perceived by him as just another “language,” that is, another system of symbols, by which the scientist creates fictitious islands of order and stability in an ocean of sensations. Man, as well as science, of course, is part of that ocean. The idea of a world “out there,” as it were, is an abstraction. In his doctoral thesis, Musil cites the following illuminating passage from Mach’s works: Nature is there only once. The recurrence of like cases in which A is always connected with B, i.e., of what is essential to the causal connection, exists only in the abstraction which we perform for the purpose of reducing the facts. (OMT 44–45, my emphasis)

According to Mach, the perception of a causal order of things is the effect of their representation by way of analogy. The analogy is an “abstraction” that reduces the original context of the phenomena. The analogy is based on the observation of similar configurations in which an A always appears connected with a B. The analogy suppresses any “facts” that do not affirm this simultaneity of A and B. Yet even the assumption of a recurrent A-sensation and a recurrent B-sensation is already a mere mental creation. In reality, that is to say, in what is purely phenomenally given, sensations do not repeat themselves. As the paradigmatic category of psychophysics as an empirical science, sensations are the product of an idealization. No self-identical subject exists in reality: “Our mental imitation alone produces like events” (Mach, Popular Lectures 199). However, such “mental imitation” is ontologically misleading, since “nature exists only once” — meaning, of course, that nothing in reality repeats itself.

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The consequences of Mach’s phenomenalism can be seen already in Nietzsche. As did Mach, Nietzsche gave a psychological and sociobiological explanation of man’s belief in logical and mathematical concepts. In one of the notes from Nietzsche’s posthumous papers, we read: Supposing there were no self-identical “A,” such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continuously to confirm it. The “thing” — that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing — If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” ( — this, however, is the apparent world once more — ). (The Will to Power 279)

Logic (i.e., conceptual language) proceeds on the basis of man’s belief in things. The ontological presupposition of material things leads to the 15 supposition that A = A. Here, Nietzsche is in agreement with Kant, who argued that perception of things, and furthermore concepts related to things as objects of science, is the result of a transcendental synthesis. According to Kant, the subject brings the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories (causality) to the stream of sensations. Of course, the transcendental subject underlying the unity of experience is a presupposition not logically deducible. To realize the necessity for the presupposition of a transcendental subject is the outcome of the philosopher’s critique of reason. The presupposed transcendental subject generates a unifying perspective of the physical world, which explains how scientific knowledge (epitomized for Kant in Newton’s laws of mechanics) becomes possible. However, according to several passages in The Man Without Qualities, the ultimate principle of any synthesis is repeatability. “In a vortex of events that never repeat themselves,” says Ulrich, “we could obviously never formulate the profound insights that A equals A, or that greater is not the lesser, but would be living in a kind of dream, a condition abhorred by every thinker” (552). Only in dreams could the contradictory thought occur of A not being identical with itself. Repetition underlies all rationalization, that is, idealization, and it takes place wherever a “reflection,” “form,” or “structure” is recognized. Scientific knowledge, any discursive knowledge,

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that is, presupposes the repetition of the same. To quote from the passage in which Ulrich explains science to General Stumm: Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves . . . We’d have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you have never seen the moon before, you’d think it was a flashlight. (409)

Science deals only with the same, never with the irreplaceable, singular, and unique. At yet another instance, Ulrich exclaims: “The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context, in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar, harmony with something else” (1184). Repetition occurs therefore not only in science but is the very principle at work in what Ulrich refers to as a “pseudoreality” (Seinesgleichen). It is as much the fundamental principle of scientific discovery as it is, for example, the fundamental principle of moral behavior, as Ulrich points out: “If our acts were unrepeatable, then there would be nothing to be expected of us, and a morality that could not tell people what was expected of them would be no fun at all” (553). Significantly, the example given in The Man Without Qualities to illustrate the transcendental need for repetition is money: “This quality of repetitiveness that inheres in the workings of the mind and morality inheres also, and to the highest degree, in money” (553). In exchanging itself for the commodity, money abstracts from the commodity’s use value and posits formal equivalence in spite of material difference. Money is thus also an allegorical figure for the imposition of form. In The Man Without Qualities, all instances of “pseudoreality” are portrayed as the effect of formative or figurative acts similar to those produced by the circulation of money. As Ulrich relates to Diotima one day, “Everything is both true to type and refuses to conform 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” (624). That which does not coincide with anything else — that which, as it is phrased in the German original, is “wild und mit nichts vergleichbar” (wild and incomparable to anything like it, MoE 572) — must be considered unique. It is the real “reality,” in Musil’s terminology the Ohnegleichen (that without anything like it), that is to say the absolutely incomparable and non-repeatable. Disgusted by the law of repetition, Ulrich once desired to become a man of great importance,

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that is to say, a man unlike anyone else. Arnheim refers to Ulrich as someone “who would embrace the Devil for being a man without his match in the world” (704). The phrase “without his match” is a translation of the German word ohnegleichen, which means “unparalleled.” Its uniqueness cannot be expressed through a comparison with the familiar. What Musil called the Ohnegleichen (capitalized) is supposed to exist without any qualities determining the appearance of its uniqueness. That is to say that its existence is not determined by any form. It occurs somehow prior to any formation of a unified experience. As such, it is scientifically no more determinable than is, for example, a person’s individual perception of color, which, significantly, is mentioned twice in the novel. The first instance occurs in the opening chapter, where the problem of color designation echoes a statement from Mach’s Analysis of Sensations. Mach states that “the terminology of colors must not be looked for in poets, but in technical works” (103, note 1). Similarly, the narrator in The Man Without Qualities observes, “We are satisfied to speak only vaguely of a red nose, without specifying what shade of red; even so degrees of red can be stated precisely to the micro millimeter of a wavelength” (4). Precisely the notion that somehow the actual world contains more than can properly be named or signified is implied in the narrator’s juxtaposition of the inexactitude of verbal color descriptions to the exactitude of scientific measurements. Indeed, color designations are peculiar. They change from culture to culture, suggesting that the color spectrum can be variously defined. As is common knowledge, inhabitants of the arctic regions possess a much broader vocabulary to differentiate between shades of white. Color appears entirely a psychological and, furthermore, cultural phenomenon. A physicist does not deal with color at all but only with either electromagnetic waves or subatomic particles, depending on the broader frame of reference. For the physicist, color consists of light rays. These rays are radiations of electromagnetic energy of different wavelengths, which can be exactly measured. However, the observation that certain wavelengths result in the perception of certain colors is an effect of what contemporary psychology terms the “visual system” (Michael W. Levin and Jeremy M. Shefner, Fundamentals of Sensation and Perception, 387–431). The visual system transforms the reception of light rays, which are measurable in wavelength, into the perception of colors. This transformation is to a large degree physiologically determined. People who are color blind are suffering from organ deficiencies that prevent them from discriminating between certain intensities of light rays. Psychophysics isolates color as a sensation that can be correlated to the

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physical data (i.e., wavelengths). Thus, color perception provides a beautiful example of how psychophysics applies to the study of mental phenomena. However, all this does not address the problem of communicating the event of a color sensation to which the narrator in the opening chapter refers. It is impossible to describe accurately how color appears inside a person’s head. Much later in the novel, Ulrich observes that the green of his garden lawn is different “from the same green in silk or wool” (1184). If he were to undertake a phenomenological analysis and minutely describe his momentary color impression, the green of the grass would liquefy into continuous shades of greenness. It is unlikely that the measurable wavelength would capture this difference, since it belongs solely to Ulrich’s perception of the green grass at the singular moment when he is having a good time with Agathe. The color perception Ulrich is referring to evidently has to do with the whole context in which it occurs. Considering the psychological complexity of that context, the traditional ontological definition of color as a “secondary quality” proves unsatisfying. Musil’s teacher Carl Stumpf believed that color perceptions are based on sensations that involve elementary feelings. For Stumpf, color perceptions consist of a combination of sensation and feeling, and the feeling is a response to an overall situation (Sachverhalt) that is somehow judged by it. Contradicting his former friend and teacher Brentano, Stumpf argued furthermore that the aesthetic value of a color is not the result of an intentional act but instead involves a passive synthesis. However, there is not much to be gained in going over this highly complex debate between Stumpf and Brentano at this point. Of greater significance is the finding that the context into which Musil puts Ulrich’s remark evokes a passage in Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgment. There, too, it is green grass that serves as an example to distinguish between diverse faculties involved in what Kant delineates as an aesthetic judgment. The green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation, as perception of an object of sense; but its agreeableness [Annehmlichkeit] belongs to subjective sensation, through which no object is represented, i.e., to feeling [Gefühl], through which the object is considered as an object of satisfaction [Wohlgefallen] (which is not a cognition of it). (Critique of Pure Judgment 92)

Though its green color is, according to Kant, the determinate cause for the perception of the green meadow — that is to say, color is the material cause for the meadow’s phenomenal appearance — the color itself

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does not determine the meadow’s agreeableness (Annehmlichkeit). Rather, its agreeableness is an emotional response that signals an acceptance of the color sensation by the subject. Indeed, the German noun Annehmlichkeit derives from the verb annehmen (to accept). On the other hand, a rejection of the color sensation, which is of course also possible, results in a feeling that one would describe in German as unangenehm (uncomfortable, but also unacceptable). The agreeableness of the sensation leads to a general feeling of satisfaction. However, Kant continues by further distinguishing between a mere satisfaction and a satisfaction derived from the beauty of the meadow. The perception of natural beauty involves not only an agreeableness that is rooted entirely in a feeling but depends upon a “reflection” of the object in question that leads to an indeterminate concept. Therefore, according to Kant, nature is judged beautiful when the feeling of pleasure it grants the subject is not caused by its material qualities (that is to say, sensations), but because of the appeal of its formal qualities. Its formal qualities appeal to our understanding, even though its formal aspects cannot be subsumed under a concept. For this reason, the aesthetic judgment reflects a unique experience. Yet the uniqueness of his color sensation is also Ulrich’s momentary concern. Contrary to Mach’s demand cited above that color terminology is best left to the experimental physicist — which, evidently, contradicts the truth of actual color sensation because of the necessary abstraction or idealization underlying its measurement — Ulrich reverts to poetic speech: “There is no end of greens,” Ulrich exclaims, and continues by saying: “green grass is just grass green” (1185). Ulrich’s witty inversion suggests that the uniqueness of a thing or state of mind can be named only by way of tautological speech. The unique must be reiterated. However, this reiteration is one that insists on difference. This is not the repetition discussed earlier, which constitutes sameness and, as a principle, underlies science and cognition (and even the constitution of the transcendental subject). Rather, it is a repetition that discloses an absolute difference. Ulrich achieves it by a figure of speech — a chiasmus that reverses the order between subject and predicate. It thereby also inverts the relation between matter and form. In Kant, color, a secondary quality, is the material cause for the appearance of the meadow. According to Aristotelian and scholastic tradition, color, as the material cause of this meadow’s appearance, individualizes the particular meadow in question. By inverting the relationship between subject and predicate, Ulrich hints at that which causes the uniqueness of an object, namely matter. Matter is pointed to as the other of form. Figurative speech is thus employed to capture the truth of a fleeting experience

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of that which is essential to the possibility of any particular experience. What is essential about an afternoon spent with Agathe on a green lawn lies beyond discursive language and objective knowledge. Musil, who, as already mentioned, had during his study in Berlin invented a special rotating disc called a Variationskreisel to assist his friend Allesch in his experimental color studies, evokes — no doubt in an ironic fashion — the difficulties of conceptualizing the phenomenon of color perception as a metaphor for the non-repeatability of the mystic moment in which what lies beneath rises to the surface.

Notes 1

Wilfried Berghahn, in his still-valuable monograph about Musil’s life and work, refers to the author’s years of study as “Lehrjahre ohne Lehrer” (which can be roughly translated as years of apprenticeship without a master). Cf. Wilfried Berghahn, Robert Musil (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 47. 2 See, for example, Angela Maria Kochs, Chaos und Individuum: Robert Musils philosophischer Roman als Vision der Moderne (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1996). Kochs detects in Musil’s novel an anticipation of what is contemporarily known as Chaos theory. Her reading, although thought provoking, ignores entirely the novel’s actual context. 3

Consider, for example, Ernst Cassirer’s critical observations made in 1913 about the methodological shortcomings of psychophysics: Imperceptibly, the standpoint of analysis and reflective observation took the place of the standpoint of real experience. A typical example of this whole view is the doctrine of the “simple elements,” out of which each state of consciousness is to be compounded. The ultimate parts which we can conceptually discriminate become the absolute atoms out of which the being of the psychical is constituted. But this being remains ambiguous in spite of everything. Properties and characteristics constantly appear in it, that cannot be explained and deduced from the mere summation of the particular parts. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953), 332. 4

In the preface to Gefühl und Gefühlsempfindung (1928), Stumpf claims that something called “unformuliertes Denken” (not-yet articulated thinking, xiv) occurs at the beginning as well as at the end of discursive thinking. Stumpf attributes the phrase to the philosopher B. Erdmann, whose essay on stupidity Musil consulted in the 1930s. Cf. Carl Stumpf — Schriften zur Psychologie, ed. Helga Sprung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997). 5

Contemporary discoveries in cognitive science and neurobiology appear to confirm this most significant premise of Stumpf’s psychology. According to Paul F, The Logic of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), 7–23, the last decade has witnessed a reassessment of twentieth-century attempts to give a naturalistic explanation of consciousness. Consider, for example, the books by the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam’s, 1994), and, more

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recently, Looking for Spinoza (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003). As Paul Redding remarks, Damasio’s research has “the feel of the late-nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, a naturalistic outlook strongly based in evolutionary biology, but willing to talk about consciousness and subjectivity in a way that has been excluded from most of the twentieth century” (17). Conversely, Carl Stumpf, although a phenomenologist, was willing to talk about evolutionary biology. He was not principally opposed to the idea that the body-mind dualism might itself be a product of evolution. 6 For its many echoes in Musil, the following passage from Stumpf’s lecture deserves to be quoted in its full length: “Intellektuelle Naturen — und um solche handelt es sich bei den Modernsten der Modernen und bei allen, die ihre Zweifel schwer nehmen — solche Naturen haben sich gewöhnt, ihr Fühlen der Führung ihres Denkens anzuvertrauen.” Carl Stumpf, Vom ethischen Skeptizismus (Leipzig, 1909), 27. 7 Stumpf rejected Musil’s thesis at first, and required it to be refocused. It is likely that Musil’s first draft was rejected because it was too sympathetic to Mach’s positivism. There are indications that Musil did not fully agree with his thesis advisers. In a letter to Allesch reporting on the oral part of the doctoral examination that he passed in February 1908, Musil notes that Stumpf averted a discussion of current theories of time and space: “He resolutely interrupted an exposition in favor of empiricism, although I only stated that the matter is not decided yet” (B I, 52). Kant had made time and space the categorical forms of intuition; however, by the late nineteenth century, it had become necessary to distinguish between logical and psychological notions of time and space. The logical possibility of alternatives to Euclidian space as well as the psychological distinction between different sense-spaces raised doubts about Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. But, to return to Musil’s oral examination, Musil also felt “uncomfortable” with a question posed by one of the examiners, Alois Riehl, a neo-Kantian philosopher, who asked him about “the logical type of mathematical propositions” (B I, 52). Musil was unable to answer the question. In the letter to Allesch, he unconditionally rejects the idea of “a singular type of judgment underlying all mathematical propositions” (B I, 52). This remark suggests that Musil was probably not familiar with the efforts undertaken by Frege, Russell, and others to ground mathematical operations in logical relations. Ernst Mach, certainly, still believed that even the use of higher mathematical equations was nothing but an empirically acquired habit: “No one will dispute me when I say that the most elementary as well as the highest mathematics are economically-ordered experiences of counting. . . . There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting.” Ernst Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, trans. by T. J. McCormack (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Comp., 1986. Based on 5th edition, 1943), 195 and 197. However, Musil also reports that the examiner “switched to the natural sciences, which he in no time brought into accord with space and time as forms of intuition” (B I, 52). 8

This note was probably written before the open controversy in 1908 between Max Planck and Mach. Cf. Manfred Sommer, Evidenz im Augenblick (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 279. Planck objected to Mach’s implicit relativism and maintained that physicists construct a universal and ultimately realistic Weltbild (world picture) by way of mathematical equations. Cf. Max Planck, A Survey of Physical Theory (New York: Dover, 1960), 22–25.

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9

Cassirer’s juxtaposition of substance versus function sheds some light on Musil’s conception of the The Man Without Qualities as constructed representation. From a historical point of view, Musil stands precisely at the junction between nineteenthcentury realism and twentieth-century modernism. As I hope to show, this positionof-being-between is true for Musil’s style (poetics) as well as for his philosophical views, which, one might add, is also the reason why in contemporary returns to issues already considered passé Musil might be ahead of the times. One of the current debate concerns the revival of the notion of “substance” in psychology. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: Harcourt, Inc., 2003). 10

Wright’s introduction to the English translation of Musil’s thesis is misleading on this point, describing the passages in Musil’s thesis that refer to Mach’s sensationalism as a “digression” that “stands somewhat apart from the rest of the content of the dissertation” (OMT 13–14). However, Musil evidently considered the theory of sensations a cornerstone of Mach’s epistemology. He quite explicitly states that to disregard this theory would wrest all originality from Mach’s theory of scientific knowledge. 11

Musil arrives at the same result as Lenin, who also accused Mach of an ontological commitment that goes beyond what the empiricist can justly claim. Cf. Dominique Lecourt, Lenins philosophische Strategie: Von der Widerspiegelung (ohne Spiegel) zum Prozess (ohne Subjekt), trans. Ursel Rütt-Förster (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1975). 12 Ernst Cassirer’s study Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Substance and Function) was published in 1910. Cassirer’s study answers the questions that Musil had grappled with in his dissertation only a few years earlier: whether or not the application of statistic and differential equations in physics and exact science required a new understanding of the relation between thought and being, knowledge and reality. Cassirer’s book illustrates the breadth of knowledge needed to clearly state the problem, let alone to come to a definite solution. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Authorized translation by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953). 13

Of course, Foucault argued that “man” as the “empirico-transcendental doublet” is merely a discursive event. Accordingly, the ambiguous role which man plays for the modern epistemology is nothing but the effect of an anthropological discourse that has made “man” the subject as well as the referent of its representation. “Man” thus becomes the cornerstone or “historical a priori” of nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical discourse. Yet one might doubt whether Foucault’s critique of anthropocentrism can extract itself from the transcendental problem underlying the assumption of such a “historical a priori.” After all, Foucault’s critical analysis presupposes a position that is either totally removed from the historical phenomenon it tries to analyze or again renders some form of transcendental reflection possible. Regarding the former, empirical stance, it is not obvious why the historical retrospective should be considered epistemologically superior to the self-understanding of the past, thereby investing it with the power of a historical critique. I mention this because these difficult questions are not far removed from Musil’s declared intent to satirize the spirit of modern times. This again raises the question from what perspective is a satirical critique possible.

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14

In his notes, Musil refers to the “I” as something that “does not divide, become extinguished, emerge, but is rather — simply part of the given whole [mitgegeben]” (D 378). Elsewhere he states that the ego is a “fluid ring in the chain of causes which is actually not a chain but a fiber [Gefilz]” (GW I, 1697). These remarks are difficult to interpret, and they could invite a different reading than the one here proposed. For a concurring view see the recent study by Stefan Jonsson, Subject without Nation — Musil and the History of Modern Identity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000). However, as should be clear from my references to Kant, I do not agree with Jonsson’s historical narrative, according to which The Man Without Qualities represents a “paradigm shift.” For Kant as well as for Fichte the subject is a transcendental presupposition. It is not a psychological subject, as Jonsson’s study implies. Kant is quite explicit about this: “That the I that I think can always be considered as subject, and as something that does not depend on thinking merely as a predicate, must be valid — this is an apodictic and even an identical proposition; but it does not signify that I as object am for myself a self-subsisting being or substance. The latter goes very far, and hence demands data that are not encountered at all in thinking, and thus (insofar as I consider merely what thinks as such) perhaps demands more than I will ever encounter anywhere (in it)” (Critique of Pure Reason B 407). 15

For an illuminating reading of this passage from Nietzsche, cf. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), 119–31.

2: Figure and Gestalt

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USIL’S KAKANIA is

fiction — a caricature that serves both the satirical as well as the utopian intentions of the author. The “dual” monarchy of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire is satirized as a political construction whose historical uniqueness defies representation — both in terms of actual governance as well as in terms of symbolic representation. In fact, the failure of the one cannot be separated from the impossibility of the other. The empire’s peculiar construction is described as “a whole and a part” (MWQ 180). The whole is set off from a part that paradoxically both belongs and does not belong to it. Rather than a synecdoche as the classic trope of the absolutistic state, the relationship between whole and parts is one of metonymy. It is thus an entirely contiguous relationship, contingent upon chance delimitations. Because of this irrepressible contiguity of its internal organization, there is always the possibility that the whole might disintegrate, and that the order among its elements might change completely. Musil’s characterization of the dual monarchy as “a whole and a part” suggests that the empire’s political identity is founded on the paradox of a whole that is less than the sum of the existing parts. Whether the empire was recognized as a whole depended on one’s point of view. Considering, however, that constitutive parts of the empire are described as being situated inside as well as outside of it, no point of view is actually conceivable. The dual monarchy is somewhat reminiscent of those double representations familiar from the psychology of vision: ground and figure oscillate. The parts gain a life of their own. Indeed, the relationship between whole and part, or between figure and ground, is about to become reversed. The ground is rising to the surface, as in paintings of early modernism where the colors and shapes are no longer entirely absorbed by the objects they represent. Accordingly, the world appears in a fluid rather than a solid state. This oscillation between figure and ground suggests a pluralistic and dynamic rather than static universe. No delimitation seems unequivocal. It is the world as seen from the point of view of Ulrich, for whom everything is, according to his friend Walter, “part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about” (64).

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Indeed, in part two of the novel, Ulrich, reflecting on the male and female condition as the two possible states of man, remembers having read a study by a psychologist whom he happened to know personally, which dealt with the two main opposing groups of concepts, one based on a sense of being enveloped by the content of one’s experiences, the other on one’s enveloping them, and advanced the connection that such a “being on the inside” and “looking at something from the outside,” a feeling of “concavity” and “convexity,” a “spatiality” as well as a “corporeality,” an “introspection” and an “observation,” occurred in so many other pairs of opposites of experience and in their linguistic tropes that one might assume a primal dual form of human consciousness behind it all. (747–48)

The passage alludes to an essay on optical illusions written in 1922 by the psychologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, whom Musil knew personally from his academic years at the university in Berlin (Arntzen, Musil-Kommentar, 296). Hornbostel cooperated with Carl Stumpf on the psychology and ethnology of music. In a diary entry from the mid1930s, Musil calls Hornbostel a former “companion” (Weggefährte) with whom he shared common interests and who, like Musil himself, believed that the origin of art must be sought in religious and magical cults (TB I, 882). Hornbostel’s research on optical illusions had a palpable influence on Musil. It is cryptically cited in those passages in which Ulrich refers to 1 “the turning of the world inside out” (824, 839). Singular images can give rise to two or more distinct perceptions, and vice versa. Famous examples that can be found in every contemporary psychology book are the Necker cube, which can be seen as a cube viewed either from above or below, or the silhouette of a duck facing left that can also be seen as a rabbit facing right. By the time of Musil’s tenure in Berlin, these oscillating shapes and figures played a significant role in the discussion of socalled “Gestalt qualities.” In 1890, the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859– 1932) pointed out that the recognition of a melody is not affected when its key is changed. Though each single note is played differently, the melody stays the same. Yet if the sequence of notes instead of the key were changed, similarity in the psychic material could only be established by thorough analysis (Hartmann 9–13). This observation contradicted the idea that psychological phenomena could be analyzed simply as aggregates of sensations — which, as I discussed earlier, was assumed by

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psychophysicists like Fechner and Mach. Evidently, the relations or internal structure of the material content also plays a role. The question then became whether formal qualities originated in sensations or judgments, that is, whether they were inherent in the sensuous material or 2 imposed on it. It was Ehrenfels who had introduced the term Gestalt by referring to melodies and figures as Gestaltqualitäten. Borrowed from Goethe, the term Gestalt imported an aesthetic category into epistemology and psychology. As mentioned above, oscillating shapes and figures appear to contradict the assumption that vision is solely built up from primitive sensations. Rather, they seem to support the idea that a special faculty of the mind is responsible for the perception of whole objects. Yet precisely this idea of an intervening cognitive process between stimuli and perception was very much in dispute at the time. Alexius Meinong of the University of Graz defended what is called today the construction hypothesis. He was opposed in this by the founders of Gestalt psychology mentioned earlier — Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler. For them, no intermediary cognitive processes were needed to explain optical illusions. Using as their primary example the Müller-Lyer figure — where lines of equal length are judged to be of different length and no Gestalt switch takes place — they argued that perceptions of shapes and figures originate from the stimulus pattern as a whole. According to their view, the notion of a cognitive process that synthesizes elementary sensations was an abstraction already implied by the methodology of the laboratory. In the absence of a simple physiological explanation, the Gestalt switch provoked questions that reached far beyond the mere study of visual perception. By insisting on what is actually given in immediate experience, the Berlin Gestalt psychologists continued Mach’s phenomenalism. Yet they substituted the Gestalt concept for the correspondence between stimuli and sensations, thereby eliminating the mind-body dualism. The Gestalt is one; no inner or outer exists. The inner is the outer. However, this assumption that the Gestalt is “real” rather than a mental 3 construction gives the Gestalt the status of a primary substance. If a silhouette of a duck facing left can also been seen as rabbit facing right, one might well surmise that something must exist that is neither duck nor rabbit — something that does not take shape. One might conceive of that underlying substratum as being simply “matter.” Indeed, this appears to be the philosophical gist of psychophysics. Yet the idea that matter is the primary substance leaves one with the problem of making intelligible the origin of figures and shapes. Aristotle tried to solve the

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problem by assuming that the primary substance consists of form in matter. The form is the actualization of a substance’s potential. Analogous to Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrine of hylomorphism, the Gestalt psychologists considered the Gestalt a concrete substance in which form and matter are one. Yet the existence of such a primary hylomorphic substance is a metaphysical hypothesis that has far-reaching consequences and cannot be verified by empirical research. One of the consequences lies in the fact that the Gestalt notion presupposes belief in a teleological order of the universe. Musil appears to have leaned more toward his Austrian colleagues than toward his former peers in Berlin, though not without having his 4 own particular take on the issue. In fact, he uses both interpretations of the Gestalt phenomenon. When Ulrich speculates about “a dual form of human consciousness” (748), he presupposes the existence of an external world that can be experienced in two fundamentally different ways. In this regard, it is particularly enlightening to take notice of the research undertaken by Vittorio Benussi, a faithful student of Alexius Meinong, who was a major participant in the debate about optical illusions. Benussi constructed a series of experiments that tested how people respond to induced optical illusions. He found that individuals react in either holistic or analytical fashion (Ash 93–95). However, in Musil’s allegorical appropriation of the Gestalt debate the one position undermines the other. Benussi’s two “cognitive styles” do not represent complementary views, since what for the one is a “Gestalt” represents for the other a mere “figure.” The holistic approach presupposes that the Gestalt is a substance; the analytical approach treats the Gestalt as a construction. In Musil’s own terminology this means that when the Gestalt is interpreted as a figure, it is a “pseudoreality” (Seinesgleichen); yet interpreted as something that has no comparison (Ohnegleichen), the Gestalt is a substance. Accordingly, Gestalt theory flickers in The Man Without Qualities like one of those oscillating objects one cannot clearly identify. Instead of a synthesis of two contrary experiences, what appears in Musil’s novel is an irreducible difference. Neither can one speak of complementarities, since the one experience implies the exact inversion of the other. A Stormy Feeling Not only Hornbostel’s research on optical illusions had made an impact on Musil. In another essay published in 1927, Hornbostel promoted a perplexing theory about the “Unity of the Senses.” Musil was acquainted with this essay as well; a passage from the novel follows part of it almost

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verbatim. Hornbostel argued against the idea that sense perceptions must arise from a single stimulus. Man’s sense perception cannot be reduced to physical sense stimuli — at the time already an established fact. But Hornbostel went further by introducing the seemingly paradoxical notion of “super-sensuous sense-perceptions.” His foremost example is the perception of movement: There are super-sensuous sense-perceptions. Movement can be seen, heard or touched. It is not necessary, however — as every cinema-goer knows — that it should actually take place. An “apparent” movement, indistinguishable from a real movement, springs forth from two pictures, sounds, or skin touches following one another at the right spatial and temporal intervals. (212–13)

Evidently, Hornbostel was referring to the famous Phi-phenomenon discovered by Max Wertheimer before the First World War, which constituted the breakthrough to Gestalt psychology. People are acquainted with the phenomenon from going to the cinema (as Musil was in the habit of doing: the new medium and its aesthetic possibilities fascinated him). Motion pictures render motion through a sequence of static images. Without a temporal interval between each framed image the viewer would be unable to perceive distinct moving objects. Similarly, one might argue, any perception of movement by the naked eye presupposes discontinuous sense-stimulation of the retina and the brain. In other words, underlying our impression of a continuum is a spatial and temporal discontinuity of stimuli. The mind operates like a motion-picture camera. However, this is not quite the way the Gestalt psychologist draws the analogy. For, according to Hornbostel, movement is truly a metaphysical thing. For movement to exist, it does not have to occur in the physical world at all: Now, under certain circumstances there are movements, communicated through the eye, the ear, or the sense of touch, which, however, possess none of the qualities of the seen, heard, or touched — indeed, nothing of any sensuous sphere. And yet they are movements, normal, and distinctly perceived — not ghosts. (213)

Switching from a third person to a first person account, Hornbostel is about to disregard any concern for the empirical verifiability of his argument. Once I dreamed: “It” rushed, raced, past me, around me, though I lay very quietly and neither saw, heard, nor felt anything. But never was a thing more manifest, more real to me, than this “storm-in-itself.” (213)

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“It” is no longer the sound or sight of a storm but the “storm-initself.” Although not actually being seen, heard, or felt — it is a dream after all — the storm is nevertheless present to the mind. Certainly, it is striking to find a statement of this kind in a scientific article. Yet such were apparently the topics of discussion when Musil sat at Hornbostel’s dinner table as a student. According to Musil’s diary, conversations turned on such elusive topics as “the way that certain kinds of life are emotionally uniform” (D 111). Examples mentioned are the lives of the peasant and the Catholic. Evidently, Hornbostel was interested in the study of sensuousness not directly related to the cognitive senses. For him, the traditional differentiation of the sensuous according to five distinct senses is not founded on rigorous observation and analysis: “There is brightness without color or tone, but no color or tone without brightness” (212). He sees the experience of life as tinted by certain moods (Stimmungen). These feelings and moods are remote from the third-person perspective required of scientific analysis. Yet in everyday life things are bathed in moods that bear on their values and meaning. Accordingly, their appearance can suddenly change and switch their Gestalt, as if they had been turned inside out. It is worth noting that the first instance of an experience of that sort in Musil’s novel occurs shortly before the police take Ulrich into custody. He has just discovered that “the only thing wrong was that the mind itself was devoid of mind” (“der Geist selbst keinen Geist habe”; 164). The similarities to Hornbostel’s dream about a “storm-in-itself” are striking: The ground streamed away under his feet. He could hardly open his eyes. Can a feeling rage like a storm and yet not be a stormy feeling at all? By a storm of feeling we mean something that makes our trunk groan and our branches flail to the verge of breaking. But this storm left the surface quite undisturbed. It was almost a state of conversion, of turning back [Umkehrung]. There was no flicker of change in his facial expression, yet inside him not an atom seemed to stay in place. (MWQ 164)

Ulrich eyes are almost closed. He is connected to his surroundings only by an already blurred tactile sense. The passage moves from motion — ”the ground streamed away under his feet” — to an emotion — ”a feeling . . . like a storm.” It reflects on an outward action that becomes an inward state; in the conversion the attributes of the inner and outer states are switched. Ulrich appears outwardly calm, but is inwardly in turmoil. The inner turmoil does not really affect his outward posture.

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It is evident from the context of the passage that the moment of conversion is meant to be an encounter with the “spirit” (Geist) that Ulrich finds lacking in the world. Indeed, the existence of some sort of an immaterial substance is also the thrust of Hornbostel’s article. According to Hornbostel, the experience of an “in-itself” is common in the way primitive people perceive the world, since for them “the soul has not yet been taken out of things” (213). The soul is another name for the “initself” and for that agency that unites the senses. The soul thus becomes equated with that unnamable moving spirit or mind — not a ghost — that guarantees the unity and meaning of things. It comes as no surprise, then, when Hornbostel cites poetry and music as examples to which the modern reader might relate: “We do not hear sounds which someone once put together in such and such a manner in order to express this and that — we hear Mozart” (214). And further on: “We must hear the ‘so’ of the parts, the ‘so’ of their relation, the ‘so’ of the whole music — this is its form, and at the same time its content. You cannot have this content except in this form” (215). In music or poetry, form and content are inseparable as Gestalt. In other words, the Gestalt becomes the “expression” of a subject in such a way that its form cannot be subtracted from 5 its content. Sign and referent are one. Traditionally, the Gestalt of a work of art has been discussed as the inimitable “style” of the artist or writer through which he communicates an experience that cannot be rendered in discursive language. We hear — as Hornbostel wrote — “Mozart.” The name stands for the whole work, which as a Gestalt is more than the sum of its parts. Windows Ulrich observes repeatedly that a figure of speech underlies people’s thoughts and motivations. To find a secure foothold in this flow of phenomena is like trying to hammer a nail into a fountain’s jet of water; and yet there is a certain constant in it [dennoch gibt es etwas darin, das sich gleich zu bleiben scheint — in German, the phrase echoes the pronoun Seinesgleichen, which is elsewhere translated as “pseudoreality” T. S.]. What is actually going on when that agile species man calls a tennis player a genius? Something unstated is at work here. And when they attribute genius to a racehorse? Something more is left unsaid [Sie läßt etwas aus]. Whether they call a football player a scientist of the game, or admire a fencer’s intellectual style, or speak of a boxer’s tragic defeat, there is always something undeclared going on. They exaggerate, but the exaggeration is a form of imprecision, the sort of fuzziness of mind that

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makes the denizens of a small town regard the son of the department store owner as a man of the world. (494)

Ironically, Ulrich’s reflections perform the equalizing comparison emphasized as the cause underlying the creation of the “pseudoreality” (Seinesgleichen). All attempts to determine identity by way of comparison share the common trait that something remains unsaid. To call a football player “a scientist of the game” is to produce, according to I. A. Richard’s definitions of rhetorical terms, an “implicit” metaphor. The metaphor aims at the uniqueness of the football player whose “reality” remains suppressed in the vehicle of the metaphor, the image of the scientist. To be recognized as different, the football player is made into a scientist. Does that imply, however, that the scientist is a football player? The reverse immediately highlights the epistemological problem of the comparison. While underscoring the football player’s difference from his own kind, the analogy suppresses the difference in kind between a football player and a scientist. What remains unsaid is the difference or uniqueness of the player or the scientist as such. Both entities in question forego the qualities proper to them. Both become, to some extent, things without proper qualities. Continuing his reflection on this phenomenon, Ulrich, the man without qualities, observes the dynamic by which “a single aspect of greatness is taken for the whole” (498). To take a part for the whole defines the figure of synecdoche. It appears that Musil does not bother to distinguish precisely between metaphor and synecdoche. Both fall in The Man Without Qualities under the general title of analogy. To “leave things out” by taking “a part for the whole,” is the way the “pseudoreality” (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. Some perspective or order can only be gained by accepting selection as the fundamental principle in creating a whole. However, the demarcations of the whole will always contain less than sum of all that exists. Any wholeness is an oscillating figure, like the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is not a coincidence but a necessity. Ulrich’s insistence on greater precision therefore appears paradoxical, since, to be utterly precise, it would ultimately seem to make any order or figuration impossible. It would make impossible any meaningful action, because it would require bringing back into play the difference suppressed in the first place.

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If they also happened to have talent . . . then what was going on in their heads was like seeing the weather, the clouds, trains, telegraph wires, trees and animals and the whole moving panorama of our dear world, through a narrow, dirt-encrusted window; and no one was very quick to notice the state of his own window, but everyone noticed it about the window next door. (499)

In this analogy it is not only, as one would expect, the frame of the window that provides the perspective, but the dirt on the windowpane as well. Musil defamiliarizes conventional analogies such as the one between a window and cognition by extending their comparisons further and ultimately reversing them. The comparison between people’s creative talent and the view through a dirty window suggests that the cleaner the window and the larger its frame, the more unlikely the chance to obtain a comprehensive idea of things. Cloud formations, railroad tracks, and telephone wires belong to systems barely understood by just looking at their external manifestations. They are thus another image of “the mare’s nest of forces” that Ulrich observes from behind a window when he is first introduced to the reader (7). A similarly disfigured world comes to the fore when Rachel and Soliman are peeping on the inaugural session of the campaign from behind a keyhole: Their glance fell now on some white paper, then a nose; a big shadow passed by, a ring flashed. Life broke into bright details. Green baize stretching away like a lawn; a white hand at rest somewhere, without a context, pale as in a waxworks; peering in slantwise, one could see the golden tassel of the General’s sword gleaming in a corner. Even the pampered Soliman showed some excitement. Seen through the crack of a door and an imagination, life swelled to weird and fairy-tale dimensions. The stooping position made the blood buzz in one’s ears, and the voices behind the door now rumbled like falling rocks, now glided as on greased planks. Rachel slowly straightened up. The floor seemed to heave under her feet; she was enveloped by the spirit of the occasion as though she had put her head under one of those black cloths used by conjurors and photographers. (193)

The disfiguration obtained through the keyhole perspective is accompanied with pleasure. It is as such juxtaposed to the window motif, whose recurrence in the novel has often been noted. Decisive events in the novel such as the formation of a street protest or the compulsions of 6 a sexual psychopath are witnessed from behind a window. During the early planning stages, Musil considered writing a spy novel. The spy or traitor represents someone who moves back and forth between different worlds without being at home anywhere. To him, the world comes also

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in two aggregates. Switching back and forth, he is a transitory figure. However, Musil intended to take this theme of suspense in new directions: “In conversation, he [Ulrich] displays the taste of a man of science — and this already includes the theory of the Spy” (D 214). Another cryptic note from the author’s diaries reveals the thematic connection between science and espionage: Anders [the hero’s name before he was named Ulrich, meaning literally to be “different.” T. S.] doesn’t want to be a poet, but an essayist. Essayist — Theorein — Spähen — Spion. (GW II, 1063)

The entry shows how a semantic association inspired Musil. Theorein is a Greek word; it means etymologically “to look at.” The Greeks called theoros those members of the community who were charged with witnessing important events. Their reports constituted a theoria. However, Musil’s understanding of the Greek evokes an altogether different gaze, namely that of the modern scientist. The association of theorein with Spähen, which in German denotes “peering” or “spying,” implicates a much more invasive and aim-oriented look than is present in the Greek notion of the witness. Standing behind a window, Ulrich is trying to obtain scientific data. After returning from his post, he marvels about the amount of energy “in what it takes for a man just to hold himself upright within the flow of traffic on a busy street” (7). Contrary to the people in the street, Ulrich is protected from the city’s traffic and the need to fend for himself. The window grants him access to the world while protecting him from becoming totally enmeshed in it. Especially the more irritable senses of ear and nose are shielded. The world’s turbulence is met solely 7 by way of sight. Ulrich’s protected window position is reminiscent of Hegel’s notion that vision, since it leaves the object untouched and unchanged, is a theoretical sense. In contrast, Ulrich’s encounter with a street gang shows what can happen as soon as one steps out from behind the window. Indeed, the episode about the observed exhibitionist outside of Walter’s and Clarisse’s home illustrates how even mere appearance can threaten. The perverse man is characterized as a person desiring to assault a woman “with the sight of him, which would take her by surprise and enter into her forever, however she might twist and turn” (856). The exhibitionist would invade the woman’s perspective and her realm of privacy. He would interrupt the normal flow and order of things, as did the car accident in the novel’s first chapter. But Ulrich sarcastically remarks, “how this fellow’s fun would have been spoiled if he only knew he was

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being watched the whole time” (861). The discovery would shame him because he would realize that he, too, is subjected to a gaze not under his control. What is thus revealed by the view of those who are positioned behind a window is the contingent nature of the gaze and its precarious epistemological power. Nobody is actually in the position of seeing it all. The game of hide and seek is observed by Ulrich who, however, is observed by the reader. There is no doubt, then, that the spot of the detached and uninvolved observer represents a self-preservatory and highly narcissistic position. The implied objectivity is an illusion. Furthermore, a strict reciprocity governs the relationship between the observer and what is observed. Observing the demonstrators in the streets from behind a window at the Palais Leinsdorf, Ulrich suddenly craves to join the crowd: The warm defense against loneliness that a crowd provides came radiating up from below, and here he was, fated to stand up here, outside its protective shelter — he felt this vividly, for an instant, as if he were looking up from down there and seeing his own image behind the thick pane of glass set in the wall of the building. (687)

Ulrich perceives himself as being trapped behind a thick pane of glass. Narcissism’s capture is also emphasized in those moments when Ulrich’s gaze is suddenly intercepted by the perception of his own image: Shopping windows as well as the windows of streetcars inadvertently turn into mirrors (390–92). Towards the end of part 2, when considering the self-assuredness displayed by Arnheim, Ulrich craves again to leave his shell. Both men are standing at a window watching the protesters in the street retreat. The protesters are perceived as being in a state of “semiconsciousness.” Again, observed from behind a window, their reactions seem like those of amorphous organisms rather than actions undertaken by self-conscious subjects. Observed is what lies below or at the threshold of consciousness. Yet other conditions are mentioned that comprise the state of a “consciousness” or “self-consciousness.” At Arnheim’s side one understood the meaning of self-possession [Selbstbewußtsein]. Consciousness alone cannot impose order on all the world’s swarm and glow, since the keener it is, the more boundless the world becomes, at least for the moment; but that consciousness of self that is self-possession enters like a film director who artfully composes a scene into an image of happiness. Ulrich envied the man his happiness. (703)

Here it is not the window as such that frames the world but the mind of the person placed behind it. Happiness relies on the ability to

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select what sustains a preferable state of mind and to leave out what might disturb it. Incidentally, Ulrich’s comparison of self-consciousness with the way a film is cut and edited is followed shortly afterwards with a remark by Arnheim about the predictable success of cinematography. However, contrary to Ulrich’s expectations, Arnheim interprets the new medium as contributing to the loss of personality. He is not thinking so much of film in terms of art but in terms of its application as cheap entertainment for the masses. Movies fulfill the secret wishes of the masses. During this conversation both men appear like silhouettes in a shadow play. Ulrich feels as if he were put into a melodrama in which he is asked to act the part of a murderer (703–4). The passage strikes one as being modeled precisely after the effects of the medium talked about. This is even more the case when Ulrich and his friends are secretly observing the exhibitionist. Musil’s minute description of the light effects produced by the streetlamps is reminiscent of the chiaroscuro effect for which early German cinema is renowned. As in other instances in the novel, the author’s imagination appears to draw on an experience impossible to imag8 ine before the advent of photography and cinema. Moreover, Musil applies field theory to human action: Walter is said to move to the window because “he was attracted by the stimulus of the brightness filtering into the room” (853). Like windows, cinematography is another metaphor for that which Ulrich perceives as the universal principle of omission. The same holds true for reading a book. When Ulrich advises Diotima “about living one’s life as one reads a book” — the conversation takes place outside the public library — the necessity for imprecision or even willful ignorance is no longer evoked in solely negative terms but characterized as a presupposition for life’s enjoyment: You leave out whatever doesn’t suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world . . . Children who haven’t yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. (625)

Blindness and insight appear to implicate each other. Blindness, or being selective, is necessary to make progress and to achieve closure. “With Törless,” Musil wrote in his notebooks, “I still knew that one must be able to leave things out” (T 440). Another example is the “narrative order” Ulrich associates with the chronological sequencing in conventional stories. Here, too, the imposition of order presupposes leaving

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things out. Note, however, that almost all examples so far discussed refer quite specifically to an increase of aesthetic pleasure. Ulrich’s conviction that narratives are successful because they imply a “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” repeats word for word the title of an early chapter that reports on Ulrich’s infatuation with the anachronistic but beautiful singer Leona. For Ulrich, Leona appears like “a ripped out page” and a “tableaux vivant.” She represents a being from the past who has become frozen in time and space. Her acting is “torn from its context” (20). In the same vein, Ulrich thinks of storytelling as a framing device. Things are taken out of the “mare’s nest of forces” and put in some perspective (7). Yet “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” is not something particular to tableaux and narrative. It is fundamental to the way the mind works. Ulrich’s meditation on the edifying and redeeming quality of ordinary memory occurs shortly after he compares the mental conditions of happiness to those of vision: Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one’s ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent picture of the eye . . . so it is with the invisible connections which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of our affairs. (707)

Notice that the entire train of thought is triggered by a sudden remembrance of some childhood photographs. Painting, tableaux, book, cinematography, and photography recur as metaphors to illustrate how men create “pseudoreality” for themselves. Furthermore, a “wide puddle” forces Ulrich to momentarily interrupt his philosophical walk (706– 8). Evidently, all these references to image reproductions — the puddle suggests a mirror image or the opening of an abyss — allude to Ulrich’s lack of identity as well as to his inability to stay focused. The reader is reminded once more that the hero is a man who suffers from the modern condition described earlier in the novel as “that familiar state of incoherent ideas spreading outward without center” (15). On the other hand, Ulrich appropriates the psychological observation that ordinary human vision is always focused as a psychological phenomenon that stands pars pro toto for the way the mind works. Accordingly, the conventional manner of storytelling merely represents man’s intuitive conception of the world. Indeed, Ulrich’s thought that narrative order presupposes a “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” is in the German original pointedly ambiguous. The genitive allows for a twofold reading, whereby the mind

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can be understood as either the subject or the object of the “foreshortening.” Here, it is impossible not to think of Kant’s first critique. According to Kant, the transcendental synthesis of apperception presupposes that “things-in-themselves” are never perceived. The structure of the mind’s representations is a priori determined. Their unity can only be established when the things “in and of themselves” are “left out.” However, for Ulrich the mind is just one example of the universal principle that any order depends on the exclusion of difference. The social groupings and changing factions in Diotima’s salon or in society as whole provide additional examples. They are characterized as dynamic systems or organisms that presuppose selective processes analogous to the one that rules the visual perception of objects or the writing and reading of narratives. In each instance the reader is made aware of prevailing oppositions or differential relations among constitutive elements or forces. Things are omitted either by an act of negation or, more significantly, because something entirely new is evolving. Mutation occurs as a result of constant evolutionary change. The universe as a whole is dynamic. Any novel about this universe can only present itself as a construction. However, throughout the novel the reader is made aware of the fact that people’s lives occur as if they amounted to a Gestalt in a “book.” People act out a character, symbol, or figure, they literally perform as figures, and they are only recognized as something insofar as they represent this or that thing or idea. The reader is also made aware that whatever the Gestalt or figure in question, its origin and formation are contingent. The Gestalt hinges upon a grammar or metonymy that rules over metaphor. Furthermore, throughout the novel subjects like cinematography, windows, or the human mind become thematized as machines of figuration. Inevitably, then, in each instance the chosen example turns into allegorical figure of the need and desire for figuration. In the words of Paul de Man, they represent “allegories of reading,” that is, allegorical figures of the very possibility of figuring out Kakania, the fictitious as well as the actual historical one. They are allegories of the tropes the narrative discourse instantaneously employs to perform its task. The movement forward is one of repetition; every figure is an allegory of the performative function of the figure. However, what remains striking throughout is the novel’s vacillation regarding the ultimate meaning of this. The novel (as well as other, more explicit statements by the author on this point) refrains from clearly assigning the origin of the figure to the agency of a Spirit — not even to a spirit conceptualized as a transcendental subject. Rather, as one says in Kakania: It all just happens.

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Paradise Lost For Mach, being is revealed only “in our very happiest moments,” the moments when we are unaware of ourselves and “partially or wholly absent” (Analysis 25). Mach cites sleep or absorption in some idea as examples of such exquisite moments of self-transcendence. Ironically, these are mental states that do not fit the description Mach has given of the conditions under which the experimental scientist usually functions. As mentioned earlier, Mach acknowledged having received his most significant insights on a leisurely walk on a beautiful summer day. It was a mystical experience. This combination of seemingly contradictory attitudes is also characteristic of Musil’s hero in The Man Without 9 Qualities. On its opening page, the novel begins by juxtaposing two different perspectives, indicating two very different attitudes toward the world. However, it is significant that the analytical perspective, which is associated with the representation of meteorological facts, comes before the totalizing gesture of aesthetic expression. The conclusion that “it was a fine day in August 1913” bespeaks a need or desire to supplement the objective point of view. However, being “a bit old-fashioned” (3), it presupposes the existence of a subject to whom the observation that a day is schön actually means something. The old-fashioned phrase presupposes a subject that relates to its environment in a fundamentally different way than the detached observer. (Indeed, the novel could not have begun without the subject, whose voice is also audible already between the lines of scientific prose.) Toward the end of part 2 (shortly before he meets his sister), Ulrich alludes to the Garden of Eden myth. However, he conceives of two trees of life in the garden rather than only one. The tree of knowledge is associated for Ulrich with violence, but violence in turn appears to be a form of love. Love can take the form of violence, and both love and violence are manifestations of life. At this moment violence and love again did not have quite their conventional meaning for Ulrich. Everything that inclined him toward nihilism and hardness was implied in the word “violence.” It meant whatever flowed from every kind of skeptical, factual, conscious behavior; a certain hard, cold aggressiveness had even entered into his choice of a career, so that an undercurrent of cruelty might have led to his becoming a mathematician. It was like the dense foliage of a tree hiding the trunk. And if we speak of love not merely in the usual sense but are moved by the word to long for a condition profoundly different, unto the very atoms that make up the body, from the poverty of lovelessness; or when we feel that we can lay claim to every quality as naturally as to

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none; or when it seems to us that what happens is only semblances prevailing, because 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; or that of all the systems we have set up, none has the secret of staying at rest: then all these things, however different they look, are also bound up with each other like the branches of a tree, completely concealing the trunk on all sides. (645–46)

On closer inspection, then, the two trees of life instead represent two stages in the life of a single tree. The two tree images are two different exposures of the same tree of life, “a tree with dense foliage turned into the tree with the hard, tangled branch work” (646). The latter represents Ulrich, who became the cool and distant thinker after a primordial “childlike relationship to the world” associated with the emotions he felt during his affair with a major’s wife. The two tree images denote the two opposite conditions: soft and hard, living and barren. Life, then, appears split into two possible conditions or manifestations, which cannot become one. Ulrich’s suggestion of creating “a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul” expresses his desire to unite the two states represented by the two tree images. Yet it is clear from the simile that the two images do not represent conditions that are contrary to each other simply in kind. Rather, they are separated and remain so because of a temporal gap. The two images represent an earlier and a later condition. Unification of the two conditions is therefore impossible. There can only be a momentary regress from the later stage to the former: a “turning back” (Umkehrung) in the sense of Ulrich’s undertaking at the end of part 2. This turning back brings the return of the “forgotten sister” Agathe as someone who resembles and yet does not resemble Ulrich himself. The Pierrot costume that both siblings are wearing when they first see each other emphasizes that each of them represents the other’s mirror image (734). Yet in spite of being Ulrich’s mirror image, Agathe offers a reversed and slightly different image of him. She is a “forgotten” part of his self, an earlier part of him. She represents a Seinesgleichen (pseudoreality) that is not, however, simply a “pseudoreality.” It is a former, more original reality. The siblings mirror and do not mirror each other. “It’s as if I were seeing myself in a splintered mirror,” says Agathe to Ulrich. “With you, one never sees oneself from head to toe!” (808). The other is not a complete figure or whole Gestalt. Ulrich, for his part, notices his sister’s androgyny. To him, she represents a state before sexual differentiation occurs, before womanhood or any other figuration, before life has been poured into the forms and roles that come

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with the cultural construction of identity. In this sense, the androgynous Agathe is indeed a reflection of a man who desires to be a man without qualities. However, a splintered mirror is a less than functioning mirror, and Ulrich and Agathe never completely succeed in becoming each other’s mirror image. There always remains a difference, though it is slight and sometimes difficult to notice. They are not each other’s reflection but each a reflection of the other’s otherness. That is to say, the mirror image is an allegory for a reflection that fails to produce a whole figure. It fails to perform the reflection of an alter ego. Instead, it repeats a difference. After his reunion with Agathe, Ulrich returns to his research on the exemplification of certain mathematical equations using the different physical states of water. Ulrich suddenly realizes that humans also come in different aggregates, as male or female, as “hard, selfish, eager,” or as “selfless” and “tender.” Whereas the former is “sharply profiled against the world,” the latter is conceived of as “deeply absorbed” within it (747). In his conversations with Agathe, Ulrich characterizes these two states as manifestations of two types of forces, violence and love, and furthermore as two conditions, “egocentric” and “allocentric.” In this context, Ulrich refers to Hornbostel’s article “Über Optische Inversion” as scientific evidence for the existence of some “dual form of consciousness” (cf. 747–48). Ulrich evidently refers to the short addendum of Hornbostel’s article, where the scholar allowed himself the liberty of proposing some purely speculative thoughts, thereby contradicting Ulrich’s regret “that no trained scientists have visions!” (820). Noteworthy here is Hornbostel’s belief that the perception of things as mere objects belongs to a later evolutionary stage in the history of mankind. According to Hornbostel, the difference between the earlier and the later stages in the evolution of human perception is similar to the difference between the mind of a child and that of a scientist. In its development, each individual repeats the history of the species. “For the child the apple is 3 round, red, tasty and it wants it — not 4r π/3” (156). It appears impossible to rationalize life and yet to keep the living-experience (Erlebnis) of it. For lack of a precise description of what is at stake, Hornbostel cites a famous line from Goethe’s poem “Ganymed”: “Umfangend umfangen!” (Embraced embracing!). At the time, the scholar and experimental psychologist could trust that any German reader would understand this literary allusion. However, the poem “Ganymed” is considered a counterpoint to another famous poem by Goethe entitled “Prometheus.” Together both poems are allegorical circumscriptions for

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Goethe’s conviction that the universe as well as the life of each human being exhibits a rhythmic change of contraction and expansion — of becoming oneself (verselbsten) and losing oneself (entselbsten). But whereas Goethe sees these two conditions as constant possibilities of becoming, Hornbostel distinguishes them in a way such that the one prevails over the other. Concluding his article “The Unity of Senses,” Hornbostel wrote: To us, alas, sight and sound, inner and outer, soul and body, God and World, have fallen apart. What we knew as children we now must grope for. Only grown-up children — artists and wise men — know this always, radiating life in their glance, listening to the blossoming around. (216)

Hornbostel contrasts the child’s experience of an apple with the scien10 tist’s abstract formula. Ulrich, too, compares the two kinds of trees in the Garden of Eden to the disjunction between contemplation and action, literature and reality, metaphor and truth (647). By some transcendental necessity, these two “conditions” or “states” (Zustände) are forever disunited. The truth always implies a certain disfiguration. In other words, first there is a figure, or, in the terminology Musil borrows from his former colleagues in psychology, a Gestalt. Second, there is the undoing of the figure: the revelation that it is a mere figure. However, to discover a first and second developmental stage amounts to constructing a genealogy. The truth is therefore revealed in the form of a narrative that describes the development from child to adulthood, from poetry to prose, from the human voice to a scientific text. Evidently, this narrative cannot but re-engage in the figuration whose effect it attempts to expose. Each narrative is a Gestalt. However, the figure of this figuration is an allegory. It is only by interrupting itself, by dismantling itself as an allegorical machinery, that the narrative can point beyond itself to that which is not a Gestalt anymore — not a ghost mistaken for a spirit. Exposing the machinery of the narrative reveals the fact that that “the mind itself is devoid of mind” (“der Geist selbst keinen Geist habe”; MWQ 164).

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Notes 1

Musil’s use of the Gestalt switch as a metaphor (or even an example) for the “other condition” has been noted by scholars before but I am discussing it in broader terms. See especially Peter Berz, “I-Welten.” Musil Studien 8 (1993): 171–92. 2

Ultimately, then, the question touched on some of the perennial issues in philosophy and science. Aristotle rejected the Platonic notion of form by insisting that knowledge starts with the concrete. No relations occur before something is substantially related; no structure exists before the thing whose structure is recognized. The actual existence of things precedes the order of things. Relation is therefore a specific quality of an individual thing, and, like all qualities, it is a potentiality inherent in the thing. It is impossible to conceive of something without any qualities, including the quality of relation. However, in modern epistemology this Aristotelian notion has become increasingly under attack. It is more common now to view relations as logical or semantic constructs, or to draw at least a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the inference of logical relations and, on the other hand, the psychological mechanisms that lead to the recognition of parts and wholes. 3 That Gestalt psychology implies a philosophy of substance was discussed at the time. Cf. Matthias Luserke, “Gestalt-und gegenstandstheoretische Implikate im Denken Robert Musils,” Gestalt Theory 10 (1988): 4:274–89. I do not completely agree with Luserke’s notion that Musil made a conscious effort to adapt the novel to Gestalt theory proper. 4

I say this in spite of contrary evidence. In his essay “Das hilflose Europa” (Helpless Europe), written in 1922, Musil mentions Wolfgang Köhler’s Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand (Physical Forms at Rest and in the Stationary Condition). He refers to Köhler’s speculative and difficult study as an example “how solutions to perennial metaphysical problems are now being hinted at from the firm ground of exact sciences” (PP 125). Köhler wrote the book after the famous research he had performed on apes on Tenerife Island from 1913 to 1920, which concluded that animals show sudden “insight” and do not, as was widely believed, learn through a slow trial-and-error approach. Köhler’s thesis implied that animal behavior must be interpreted as a response to an environment registered as a Gestalt formation. In his new project, Köhler tried to import the Gestalt category into physics — thus reversing the former relationship between physics and psychology. Physics was now going to be modeled on psychology, that is, made to take into account the Gestalt paradigm taken from psychology’s revised theory of representation. By introducing the concept of isomorphism, Köhler hoped to overcome the mind-body dualism. His research anticipated in many respects contemporary modes of thinking that presuppose the existence of self-organizing systems. Like Mach, Köhler believed that such theories could be substantiated by empirical means. 5

The problem is articulated in the famous line by Yeats that de Man discusses in Allegories of Reading: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”(11). 6 Ulrich is standing behind a window when he is first introduced to the reader. Bonadea is taken with Ulrich because “he had eyes that looked at one like a man behind a window” (279). Towards the end of part 2, Arnheim and Ulrich openly talk

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to each other for the first time while looking out of a window. In part 3, Ulrich and Agathe experience a sublime moment looking out of a window into a moonlit night. 7

Musil’s diary contains the outline of a narrative whose main character carries the name “monsieur le vivisecteur.” He is also introduced as someone who, like Ulrich, views the world from behind a window: I live close to the Pole for when I go to my window I see only still white surfaces that serve as a pedestal for the night. I am cut off from everything organic, it is as if I am resting under a blanket of ice 100 meters thick. The luxury of burial under such a blanket provides a perspective known only to him who has placed 100 meters of ice over his eye. (D 2) In nineteenth-century German literature and poetry, petrifaction is usually employed as a negative metaphor. However, Musil’s character esteems it as a “luxury” to be disconnected from anything remotely “organic.” He enjoys being “buried” somewhere “close to the Pole.” Yet the poles are evidently inverted when “ice” is perceived as a “blanket.” The positive aura that emanates from this inhuman environment is the effect of a narrative that proceeds by crossing the properties of the organic and inorganic, of life and death. Imagining how he himself might appear to someone looking in on him from the outside, Musil’s hero compares himself with “a fly that I once saw interned in rock crystal” (2). Accordingly, a strict reciprocity rules the relation between observer and observed, inside and outside, subject and object. Life cannot be viewed objectively without arresting it in such a manner that the observing subject becomes transformed into a lifeless object. This reciprocity underlies all the window scenes in Musil’s novel. Yet one has to contrast this Apollinian gaze with the Dionysian gaze of Rachel and Soliman that I referred to earlier. Here, however, the spy motif is foregrounded. Rachel is depicted as a curious servant spying on her master. According to a widely held view during the 1920’s, rampant espionage by Jews from Galicia had put the Austro-Hungarian Empire in an unfavorable strategic position by the time the war broke out. Cf. Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), 153. The betrayal of military secrets had exposed the strengths and weaknesses of the empire’s military to the Russian aggressor. General Stumm’s anecdote about a ceremonial watch over a defective cashbox alludes to these matters. The point of the story is that espionage is only possible under the condition in which nothing appears the way it is, and, furthermore, that some third parties always already know the secret (MWQ 842–43). Moreover, secrets are always simulacra. The cashbox is another instance of the holes and broken circles, as well as of the many empty spaces, bodies, and caverns that symbolize the “Baroque of the void” throughout the novel (286). 8 For instance, the cruel seduction of Gerda starts also chiaroscuro style in the light projected from a window: “From the windows a faint glimmer of wintry afternoon light entered the darkening room, where he stood outlined against one of these bright rectangles with the girl in his arms; her head was yellow and sharply contoured against the soft pillow of light, and her complexion had an oily shine, so that the whole effect was corpselike. He had to overcome a slight revulsion as he kissed her [. . . .]” (MWQ 675). Windows, cinema, figuration — whenever these metametaphors occur death is not far from the scene.

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Symptomatic for an affirmative stance on mysticism during the early twentieth century is Bertrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic, published in 1914, the year in which The Man Without Qualities is set. For Russell, “mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life, not as a creed about the world” (11). What stands in opposition to the philosopher’s love of wisdom is not mysticism but morality. According to Russell, the man of science and the mystic was originally one. Until Plato came on the scene, mysticism was a creative source of reasoning. But Plato’s attempt to derive the “ought” from the “is” caused the expulsion of mysticism from philosophical discourse. Noteworthy is Russell’s catalogue of mysticism’s common characteristics: (1) knowledge of a higher reality; (2) belief in the unity of the world; (3) denial of the reality of time; (4) conviction that all evil is merely an illusion produced by the analytic intellect. All four criteria are fulfilled by Ulrich’s philosophical outlook. 10 Remarking on Darwinian approaches to color theory, Mach in The Analysis of Sensations included a footnote that is anticipatory with regard to Hornbostel’s idea of developmental stages: “The color-sense exists, and it is probably variable. But whether it is being enriched or impoverished — who can tell? Is it not possible that, with the awakening of intelligence and the use of artificial contrivance, the whole development will be shifted to the intellect — which certainly is chiefly called into play from this point on — and that the development of the lower organs of man will be relegated to second place?” (Analysis 104)

3: Indeterminacy, Chance, and Singularity

T

HE IF-THEN LOGIC underlying the plot of the novel emphasizes the

portrayal of a world in which one coincidence leads to another and micro-events such as a witty remark by a journalist or the caprice of a chambermaid produce significant effects. When Leo Fischel interrogates Ulrich about the actual motives behind the Parallel Campaign, Ulrich teases the philosophically-educated bank director by calling to his attention “the Principle of Insufficient Cause” (chapter 35). Ulrich’s remark, of course, alludes to Leibniz, who had made it a principle of logical deduction that nothing exists “without” a sufficient reason. This principle, and the principle of contradiction, is fundamental to Leibniz’s theodicy. Ulrich is making fun of Leibniz as Voltaire had already done before him. We are told that already in school, in writing an essay on patriotism, Ulrich imagined God to be someone who knows all possible worlds yet does not really know which one is the best. “God creates the world and thinks while he is at it that it could just as well be done differently” (MWQ 14). Accordingly, God created the world with a reservation in mind. This idea clearly contradicts Leibniz’s as well as Ulrich’s conviction that “the possible includes not only the fantasies of people with weak nerves but also the as yet unawakened intentions of God” (11), for in the Leibnizian universe God is always awake. Every possible move in every possible game is instantaneously present to the divine intellect. God knows the best of all possible worlds. However, Ulrich’s satirical inversion of the rationalist philosopher’s basic ideas is telling. Leibniz distinguished between two kinds of assertions that can be made about the connection and sequence of things: those that assert a necessary truth, and those that assert a contingent truth. The former is contained in propositions whose opposites would imply a contradiction. They assume only the basic principles of formal logic. They are true in all possible worlds since they refer to hypothetical if-then clauses and are not concerned with empirical realities. For example, all mathematical deductions are considered necessarily true. Contingent truths, however, are asserted in propositions whose opposites are possible. They do not hold for all possible worlds since they are valid only if certain verifiable conditions are fulfilled. For example,

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that Musil is the author of The Man Without Qualities is a contingent truth. But so is our belief that no one but Musil could have written this novel. To actually prove the latter would require analyzing the entire causal chain that made the existence of this particular individual necessary. Yet, even if we could then answer all questions about how something came about, we would still be left with the metaphysical question why something rather than nothing exists at all. For Leibniz, the principle of sufficient reason applies to both necessary as well as contingent truths. It thus becomes a metaphysical postulate about the creation of the world. The world is a manifestation of God’s wisdom and grace. It is the best of all possible worlds, because to assume otherwise would be contrary to the notion of God as the most perfect being. However, according to Leibniz it does not follow that the existing world is logically necessary. Other worlds are logically possible. Leibniz firmly held that both of his assumptions are valid: both that other worlds are possible, and that the existing world is the creation of a divine power who cannot but choose the best of all possible worlds. We thus come to the puzzling result that the best of all possible worlds is both contingent and yet in all of its aspects absolutely determined by the 1 will of God. This paradox might be one of the topics Ulrich discusses with Leo Fischel, who occasionally likes to have a philosophical chat. Ulrich is a man of modern times and of course no longer believes in providence. Or rather, for him the question whether or not the world is the creation of a divine power is moot, since no matter which answer is proposed, it cannot be proven logically. The existence of God cannot, as Leibniz had thought, logically be deduced from the notion of God as the absolute substance. As Kant demonstrated in his famous rebuttal of Leibniz, whether or not a thing exists cannot be inferred merely from our idea of it. According to Kant, “being” is not a predicate. But as Ulrich explains to General Stumm, neither can theology ever become an empirical science, since, as he phrases it, “he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around” (MWQ 409). Without repetition of the same, no scientific observation is possible. However, Leibniz conceives of the best of all possible worlds as a continuum of completely determined singularities. All beings are absolutely determined by the will of God. Not a single hair or a single grain of sand could be imagined to exist by mere chance, since the slightest possibility of an accidental occurrence would contradict God’s wisdom and power. It would introduce the possibility of a heteronymous will and thus contradict the idea of a pre-established harmony of the world.

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Significantly, then, God’s supreme power guarantees that no two entities are alike. According to another of Leibniz’s principles, if two entities are indistinguishable they have to be identical; only singularities exist. God does not produce replicas. The “monads,” as Leibniz referred to the simplest indivisible single element of the universe, do not differ from each other when compared from without. Rather, they are substantially different in and of themselves. They are as unique as we today consider the DNA of each human individual to be (or as Mach considered his sensations to be, as we discussed at the beginning of this study). Since each individual element is an absolutely necessary part of the world, since its existence is under no circumstances ruled by chance, it is therefore also unique and irreplaceable. I exist, and without my existence, the world could not possibly be the world God decided to create. Thus, I am unique, I am irreplaceable, and I cannot be repeated or copied. Furthermore, it is because of the very uniqueness of each monad that, from the point of view of a finite being, analogy is the only way by which the monads can be determined. However, the number of possible analogical determinations is infinite. The absolute uniqueness of each existing being and the prevalence of analogy as the prime figure of recognition are two complementary characteristics of Leibniz’s onto-theological universe. Ulrich’s inversion of the principle of sufficient reason highlights the indeterminacy that befalls the world as soon as it is no longer believed to be the creation of a supreme cause. Gone is the metaphysical reassurance that life has any real purpose, since it is now ruled by mere chance. Ulrich desires to assert himself as a man of great significance (Bedeutung); however, in the context of the novel “A man without qualities consists of qualities without a man” (MWQ 156). Empirical evidence, such as forensic data used by the police to determine a person’s identity, might exist, but such information only allows for a relative determination of a person’s identity. There is nothing unique about Ulrich’s age, height, or family background; each “quality” is a characteristic that Ulrich shares with other people. It is only the combination of certain qualities that differentiates him from others. Whether or not someone is sufficiently identified by his or her own “body” (the question raised in chapter 36), is an empirical question. However, a person’s uniqueness can never be absolutely determined by an empirical inquiry that draws on the formal characteristics of a person’s appearance or behavior. Repetition of the same is only likely or unlikely, more or less probable. Nothing is as it must be; everything could be different or could be not at all. Upon being investigated by the police, Ulrich discovers much to his dismay that from a statistical point of view he is no exception to the law. Likewise, it is

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impossible to prove with absolute certainty that no one but Musil could have written The Man Without Qualities. However, it is still possible to suggest that the chances that anyone other than Musil could have written the novel are highly improbable, which returns us to the initial event of the novel — the car accident. Musil’s description of the people gathering at the scene of the accident illustrates what Georg Simmel once defined as the blasé attitude characteristic of city dwellers (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”). Desensitized by steady exposure, they do not consciously register the many exciting events around them. In order to be able to function in an intensely stressful environment, they instinctively block out unnecessary or disruptive stimuli. Even when an unusual event attracts their attention, they do not become emotionally involved. According to Simmel, people who live in an industrial environment are conditioned to react with their heads rather than with their hearts. Their intellect helps them neutralize the emotional impact of what otherwise could be a traumatic experience. Musil captures this infamous intellectuality of modern man in the reactions of the passersby and the distinguished yet anonymous couple who join the crowd. In their immediate conversation at the scene of the accident, each of the spectators offers an opinion as to the cause, that is, except for the grand lady (a beautiful soul like Diotima). She is the only person who seems upset. However, her companion (a man of the world like Arnheim) concludes that a mechanical deficiency must have been the cause. His matter-of-fact explanation that “the brakes on these heavy trucks take too long,” suggests that better engineered equipment could have prevented the accident. The lady feels immediately relieved, since “his explanation helped put this ghastly incident into perspective” (5). All that is needed to go on with life, the author is saying, is “irgend eine Ordnung” (some perspective) by which the unaccustomed and unexpected can be rationalized. This is not only true psychologically but practically as well, since the effect of such rationalizations is to improve malfunctioning systems. To improve the brakes of heavy vehicles contributes to the perfection of a rationally functioning society. However, man’s technical knowledge only explains why the accident happened; it does not prove that it had to happen at this particular instance to this particular person. After all, not every pedestrian is struck by a truck. Explaining the accident in terms of mechanics merely offers a relative explanation, that is to say an “efficient,” but not a “fi2 nal,” cause. Seemingly aware of this, the man who accompanies the lady also recalls the fatality rate according to “American” statistics, which suggests that despite the character’s imperturbable composure

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the thought of death has crossed his mind. Yet the idea occurs to him merely as the statistical problem of an individual’s chance of surviving a traffic accident. Thus another rationalization is offered to put things in perspective: the accident is no longer interpreted in terms of causal laws but as a function of probabilistic laws. Indeed, if random events are “rationalized” as statistical facts, they become highly calculable. Both the initially described weather condition and the episode of the traffic accident are portrayed as instances of random and yet “orderly” events. The weather and the city both offer examples of those statistical phenomena Ulrich brings up when answering Gerda’s question as to whether he believes in historical progress. In the course of the discussion, Ulrich points out that in the case of countless events, it is impossible to determine whether they are caused by laws of nature or by chance; however, when these events become instances of a statistical series, they begin to reveal the same regularity associated with natural law. Ulrich calls it “the law of large numbers.” By the logic of that law, it happens that “the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless” (533). In and of themselves, events that are merely probable are “meaningless.” Though predictable within a certain margin of error, these events are considered meaningless because no sufficient reason for their occurrence can be established. Ulrich’s familiarity with “the law of the large numbers” demonstrates the author’s declared intent to make him “a man equipped with the most advanced knowledge of his time” (GW II, 940). Alas, Ulrich is so well informed that the reader is forced to take several crash courses in scientific theory to appreciate the author’s relentless appropriation of scientific ideas. The law of large numbers was promulgated by Jacob Bernoulli and further developed by Poisson in his Recherches sur la probalité des jugements (1837). It was originally a strictly arithmetical theorem, which can only be applied to reality if certain assumptions are made that are, as Ernst Cassirer and others have since argued, entirely hypothetical (Determinism 96). The use of statistical data has not always been mathematical. The term statistics originally referred only to the system by which a state (der Staat, from which the original German word Statistik was derived) tried to collect numerical data to keep track of its demographics. Statistics was considered a political science. However, when it became clear in the course of the nineteenth century that probability calculation could be successfully applied to the interpretation of random phenomena and serve to predict a future state of conditions with only a small margin of

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error, statistics emerged as the most important and powerful tool of sci4 ence. Modern life is simply unthinkable without statistics. By the end of the nineteenth century, mathematical statistics had become essential to the epistemology of social as well as physical science. Entire disciplines arose from it. In physics, the use of statistics made it possible to advance the theory of a microcosm made of energy-laden particles. Originally, the atom’s introduction into physics was irreconcilable with fundamental premises of classical mechanics. Working with the notion of a subatomic world, physicists discovered that natural processes originate in genuine contingencies. Objectifying these by means of scientific laws could only 5 be accomplished through the use of statistical equations. The first step from classical to modern physics was taken during the second half of the nineteenth century when Maxwell used statistical equations to interpret the laws of thermodynamics. Reversing Newton’s natural philosophy, the second law of thermodynamics held that the order of the universe is a perpetually increasing disorder. The increase of “disorder” results from the stipulation that the distribution of energy within any closed system always averages out. Paradoxically, then, a closed system starting with a random distribution of energy always revolves over time into a system in which energy is evenly distributed. Order presupposes some level of differentiation. For the physicist, “disorder” means to gain a state of a total equilibrium. However, the tendency toward disorder is a consequence of admitting the existence of primary coincidental states in nature. Maxwell’s famous “demon” proved that the direction in which molecules flow is not absolutely determined. The Second Law of Thermodynamics predicts only the probable course of events, but not what must happen. Absolute necessity is excluded by the very fact that statistical mathematics can be applied to calculate the outcome of thermodynamic processes. Paradoxically, then, there is only order because of chance. In a famous essay titled “The Unity of the Physical Universe,” presented first as a lecture at the turn of the century, Max Planck pointed out that the modern scientist operates under the “hypothesis of elementary disorder or [. . .] the assumption that individual elements, with which statistics deals, are completely independent of another” (16). However, according to Planck, it is precisely the introduction of independent individual elements that establishes “the necessity of all natural concurrence [according] to the laws of probability” (ibid.). Planck insisted on “the unity of the physical universe,” meaning a unity of the universe according to a physics firmly rooted in mathematics and continually purified by the elimination of its reliance on phenomenological observations (17, 22). In other words, it is only under the assumption of elementary disorder that

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physics can proceed in stipulating one universe, since it is only then that it can construct the universe according to laws of probability. When Ernst Cassirer set out to reconcile the new physics with Kantian epistemology in the late 1930s, he argued that the law of probability describes the same paradoxical circle that underlies Kant’s transcendental deduction of causality. If we take the general principle of causality into consideration, we can regard it with equal justification as accidental or necessary, depending on the point of view which we choose. It is necessary because every individual empirical statement is based on it, and because it precedes all empirical judgments as a synthetic judgment a priori. On the other hand, it is accidental because the whole of experience to which it refers and on which it has to base its justification is not given in any other way than purely factually. The principle of causality can be demonstrated as a conditio sine qua non for the fact of mathematical science; but this fact must be presupposed, though it cannot be proved to be absolutely or plainly necessary (Determinism 102–03).

Cassirer quotes Kant’s statement that the causal principle should be entitled a principle, not a theorem, because it has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof, and that in this experience it must always itself be presupposed (Determinism 103).

Cassirer concludes that it is precisely in this paradoxical sense that “accident” and “order according to law” do not stand, as is often thought, in a relation of contradictory opposition but that they instead complement each other. Or more drastically put, the universality of scientific laws presupposes the accidental nature of reality — the stipulation of a universe ruled by chance. Science can never discover a world that is in its totality determined. Accordingly, by the turn of the century, physics arrived at the same principle Darwin posited, namely, to provide a scientific explanation for the diversity of life. The law of chance underlies the evolution of multiple species. Infinitesimal irregularities can precipitate environmental changes that, over long periods of time, result in the development of entirely new organisms and natural habitats. Nothing is preset in nature. The gesture of someone assuming that the world is ruled by chance is that of a man who approaches each new idea by suggesting to “first work out the margin for error and the most-probable values” (MWQ 34). Though the sentence is put into the mouth of an engineer, the calculation is a statistical one. While myth, religion, or art are symbolic or-

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ders of a far greater complexity, science “rationalizes” man’s experience of the fluctuating world. Here, it is helpful to recall Cassirer’s splendid remark that myth is, in fact, the discourse least willing to accept chance. Whereas it is the very function of magical and demonic forces to provide a sufficient reason for every event, modern science posits a universe that is at once lawful and chaotic. Chaotic, yet subject to scientific laws: that is precisely the way the world is portrayed in The Man Without Qualities. It is tempting to interpret the novel’s emphasis on randomness as well as its trajectory towards the eruption of war in 1914 as an allegorical interpretation of entropy — as has previously been done. Musil was certainly familiar with the laws of thermodynamics and aware of the ongoing philosophical discussion about their implications for a post-Newtonian philosophy of nature. Both his posthumous papers and remarks in his essays indicate that he was acquainted with the philosophical issues implicated in the epistemological shifts taking place in the natural sciences since the late nineteenth century. From his academic studies, resulting in a dissertation on Mach, he knew that the sciences had shifted from substance to functionality, from general predictions of causal chains to the forecasts of probable events, and from hierarchical juxtapositions of opposites to infinitesimal calculations of differences. In the late twenties, Musil consulted popular books about statistics. He took particular note of an article entitled “Das Gesetz der Zufälle” (the law of chance) that appeared in a Berliner magazine in 1929 and argued that the presupposition of random events becomes the very basis by which the modern physicist arrives at causal 6 laws (TB I, 525). It is noteworthy that the author of the article was the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 received together with P. Dirac the Nobel Prize for his wave equation. Schrödinger opposed the Copenhagen dual description of energy in terms of waves and particles, and attempted to develop a theory in terms of waves only. He became famous for his macabre thought experiment that a cat in a box can be simultaneously alive and dead until someone looks inside. In his diaries, Musil correctly observed that the scientist’s statistical approach makes the notion of the coincidental almost synonymous with 7 the notion of the probable. Statistical equations apply only to mass phenomena. They are not concerned with singular events but with a series of events that are considered to be of the same nature. The statistical calculation stipulates a commonality on the basis of which a singular event can be viewed as an instance of a series of similar events. Statistics compute the mean by applying a mathematical function to what appear to be phenomena of the same category. Each variable represents an instance evalu-

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ated only in the context of apparently similar instances. To quote Mach, the statistical method “is a mode of observation that deliberately slurs over the individual, and attends only to the most essential and most strongly linked circumstances” (Knowledge and Error 20). Statistical enumeration thus immediately hides the absolute contingency of the elements that it computes. In the terminology exploited in The Man Without Qualities, this means that which is Ohnegleichen (something unique and singular, without comparison) is turned into a Seinesgleichen 8 (something comparable to those similar to it [or him or her]). However, the possibility of this figurative process presupposes the existence of the unique and the singular. This becomes strikingly evident when Ulrich falls into the hands of the police. Ulrich might conceive of himself as a man without qualities, yet to the police he appears otherwise. Indeed, at the police station one does not “speak vaguely of a red nose” (4). Ulrich’s identity as a citizen of Kakania is revealed the moment he undergoes the process of a “statistical demystification” (169). He is identified as belonging to a society whose members share a set of similar qualities. However, being thus dissolved into a bunch of statistical variables reveals at the same time that Ulrich is also unlike any other. His identity can only be determined on the basis of a comparison to which there is principally no limit. Ulrich shares with those like him (Seinesgleichen) an infinite number of possible similarities. Yet each similarity presupposes a more fundamental difference without which no similarity could be established in the first place. Again, the use of statistics implies the confluence of the singular and coincidental. It is noteworthy that Ulrich is very aware of the fact that statistical calculations are not concerned with “pure chance” (as he puts it to Gerda). Indeed, pure chance is the chance a player has when he only participates in a game once, and, as a result, has no chance to recuperate potential losses; an opportunity that would be afforded him if he played the same game over and over again. Ulrich’s situation in confronting the existential question of how to live is a game of pure chance. Ulrich has to take chances. Similarly, on the larger scale of history, no generation can outplay the limited choices it has and, in a world of finite beings, the rules of the game may change with each new generation of players. However, when statistical equations are applied, chance is juxtaposed less with necessity than with probability. Probability must not be confused with possibility, as it often is in everyday speech. Ulrich’s Möglichkeitssinn (sense of possibility) is not at all concerned with the probable; neither is Ulrich seeking out the improbable. His search for a different ethic — in fact, for an ethic of affirming difference — is focused on an experience of

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life that can be subjected to probability calculations merely because of its singularity. That is why statistical computation becomes such an important theme in The Man Without Qualities. Even though statistics provide a rational approach to the contingent world as a whole, it is an approach that presupposes the randomness it rationalizes. It is for this reason that Ulrich’s proposition to view historical events as statistical variables is viable. It allows him to consider that probability calculations can even be used for the psychological analysis of feelings. However, Ulrich’s aim is not to “minimize the margin of chance” as if he believed in a determined universe or wished such a universe to be possible (Heydebrand 18). Rather, the universal applicability of statistics supports Ulrich’s strong belief in the principle of insufficient cause.

Excursus: Experimental Literature To expose the illusory fabrications of the cogito, Mach must resort to experimental research. A mirror — not used in the fabrication of Mach’s self-portrait — can assist in demonstrating the illusory nature of causal relationships. The following two paragraphs, taken from a chapter in Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations, display how he distinguished between the ordinary and the scientific perception of reality, ego, and truth. The tree with its hard, rough gray trunk, its many shining leaves, appears to us at first a single, indivisible whole. In like manner, we regard the sweet, round, yellow fruit, the warm bright fire, with its manifold moving tongues, as a single thing. One name designates the whole, one word draws forth from the depths of oblivion all the associated memories at once, as if they were strung upon a single thread. The reflection of the tree, the fruit, or the fire in a mirror is visible, but not tangible. When we turn our glance away or close our eyes, we can touch the tree, taste the fruit, feel the fire, but we cannot see them. Thus the apparently indivisible thing separates into parts, which are not only attached to one another but also to other conditions. The visible is separable from the tangible, from that which may be tasted, etc. (102).

In the first paragraph, Mach presents the way one ordinarily perceives the world. He then proceeds by demonstrating how this perception is composed of singular elements. Isolating the senses and investigating their conditions and functions separately, the scientist dissects what appears to the ordinary mind as an organic whole. For the scientist, “real understanding is attained when, and only when, we have succeeded in resolving the complex into its immediately connected parts” (Analysis 98). In Mach’s example, this goal is achieved by turning away

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from a “mirror.” Initially, a mirror was not mentioned. It is only in the second paragraph that tree, fruit, and fire are treated as reflected images rather than real images. The mirror is introduced to detach the visible from the tangible. Closing one’s eyes testifies to the distinctness but not to the existence of sensations. It simply makes them disappear. The point of using a mirror is to isolate empirical facts. The mirror functions as a recording device to demonstrate the reality of visual perceptions. Evidently, the discovery of the truth depends to some degree on the technical ingenuity of the experiment. However, a third paragraph informs us that these recordings are still composites in need of additional analysis. The mirror image is not sufficient proof of the existence of sensory elements. What is merely visible also appears at first sight to be a single thing. But we may see a round, yellow fruit together with a yellow, starshaped blossom. A second fruit may be just as round as the first, but is green or red. Two things may be alike in color but unlike in form; they may be different in color but like in form. Thus sensations of sight are separable into color-sensations and space-sensations, which are different from one another even though they cannot be represented in isolation from another.

Evidently, the problem is one of “representation.” Mach’s use of a mirror becomes an allegory for the metaphoric nature of man’s ordinary perception. It is only as a mirrored image that the sensations are perceived as tree, fruit, or fire. Their reflection creates rather than mirrors the composition of the world. The mirror shares its figurative capacity with language. Mach’s experimental analysis unfolds as a narrative that compares words to mirrors as machines of figuration. Significantly, Mach’s narrative revolves around the disfiguration of an aesthetic imagination. The poetic imagery of tree, fruit, and fire originates in a language that misrepresents the true state of things: “One name designates the whole, one word draws forth from the depths of oblivion all the associated memories at once, as if they were strung upon a single thread” (ibid.). The impression of order is a misrepresentation caused by the use of a name. Language imposes shape or figure where the scientist detects nothing but fleeting sensations. However, we could not understand what Mach has to say about the use of names without giving a meaning to the text in front of us — without remembering how to read and understand Mach’s writing as the enunciation of a subject. In other words, Mach’s own text relies on shape and figures that make the letters appear “as if they were strung,” that is, as if they were part of a coherent message. We cannot

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proceed to the final state of the analysis of sensations without producing another figure or shape. Whatever the tool or medium — mind, language, or mirror — we always encounter shapes and figures rather than particular sensory stimulations. Binoculars — A Literary Experiment in nuce Triëdere (Binoculars) is a humorous parable that Musil included in his 1936 mock anthology Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (posthumous papers by a 9 living author). Its topic is the contradictory way in which people adjust to new technologies. The narrator invites the reader to follow an “experiment” that would demonstrate empirically that there is nothing new about slow-motion cinematography: a pair of binoculars, pointed at a large object such as a streetcar passing nearby, produces a similar effect. The narrator claims — ironically, one presumes — that such a creative use of a spyglass shows what the world might have looked like at the time of its creation (PP 83). His allusion to Genesis suggests that the experiment exposes nature before the imposition of meaning or any identifiable order of being. In other words, he is proposing that the experiment abstracts from the immersion of things in culture and history. However, the narrator — whose gestures will expose him to be a male — never bothers to reflect on the ontological status of the substance revealed by his demonstration. Instead, matters gain his attention that are, strictly speaking, no longer ocular but interpretative. “Naturally the discoverer turned to watching women” (PP 83). With that all-too-natural turn, the focal point becomes people’s social behavior, the way they interact with each other in the streets. The narrator states that people wear their clothes like “publicly approved containers” (PP 85). This observation implies fundamental epistemological distinctions such as essence and appearance, inside and outside. Things can no longer be taken at face value; they do not necessarily appear to the “naked eye” as they are (PP 81). For example, the narrator is now concerned with how gender roles are determined. He goes on by saying that without clothes, people’s “character [. . .] would scatter like powder” (PP 85). In other words, without clothes, individuals would have less shape or figure by which they could be identified. Indeed, the narrator’s remarks suggest that clothes actually make the man (or woman). They create a person’s “character” and do not merely fulfill an aesthetic function. In being concerned with people’s “character,” the epistemological issue of discovering the world’s reality turns into an issue of discovering people’s moral disposition. While looking through his binoculars, the narrator claims to watch the eagerness with which people adopt the latest

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fashions. He notes that fashions repeat themselves and that there is a remarkable lack of originality. He then draws a conclusion about people’s natural tendency to avoid changes. In this way, the binoculars contribute both to our understanding of the individual, as well as to an ever-deepening lack of comprehension of the nature of humanity. By dissolving the commonplace connections and discovering new ones, they in fact replace the practice of genius, or are at least a preliminary exercise in doing so. And yet perhaps for this reason we recommend this instrument in vain. Do not people, after all, employ it even at the theater to heighten the illusion, or during intermission, to see who else is there, thereby seeking not the unfamiliar, but rather, the comfortable aspect of the familiar faces? (PP 86)

Whether man is eager to seek out the unfamiliar appears to be merely a rhetorical question. Though society as a whole makes great progress, a more reticent attitude hovers over a genuinely philosophical application of advances in science and technology. It is this lack of spontaneity — hardly observable to the naked eye — that the experiment reveals. But the parable appears to contradict itself, since its own performance presupposes at least one exception with regard to its conclusion. Ironically, the experiment presupposes precisely that inventiveness that the narrator cannot detect anywhere. The narrator remains undecided whether “genius” is still required, or whether the experiment “in fact replaces the practice of genius” (PP 86). In short, Musil’s parable raises the question of whether the Dichter am Apparat (the artist behind the machine) — which is the title of another short text by Musil (GW II, 1514) — remains a Dichter after all, or whether the Dichter, as some would like to believe, is already abdicating his genius to new techniques of mass entertainment, such as cinematography — or for that matter to racehorses, as 10 the hero in The Man Without Qualities discovers. Certainly, poetic imagination is a marvelous thing. A visitor to Vienna will find that the street where Musil lived is quite small. Though it makes something like an “S-shaped double curve” (PP 82), it never carried a streetcar line (Frisé, GW II 1751). But this, of course, only underscores the fact that the point of Musil’s parable is not to compete with science for the discovery of facts. Nor is moral edification the author’s goal. Instead, what matters here is a sort of “experiment” that is quite unique to literature. Surely, suspending our usual perception by means of a spyglass provides Musil with a simile that compares the literary to the scientific experiment. However, the very need for such perplexing analogies and comparisons goes much further. For example, the observer,

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viewing the architectural structure of a building, is described as being “almost startled at the stony perspectival exactitude with which it all returned his gaze” (PP 82). The narrator’s anthropomorphism provides the scene with a human face. In this instant, we encounter the figure of a chiasmus that crosses the attributes between the observer and the observed, between subject and object, viewer and viewed. The narrator’s analogies and metaphors are no different from the “publicly approved containers” he remarks on. Language shares with clothes the fact that both are figurative expressions that fulfill not merely an ornamental function but also a performative function. Without these tropes and figures, we would “see” what the world might look like before names or clothes impose a frame of reference and thereby create a meaningful world. As is the case with slow-motion pictures, we would encounter a world contradicting our intuitive sense of time and space. However, this uncommon view is no less mediated. Binoculars are a medium. The reality discovered with their aid is still a mediated reality. As I mentioned earlier, the question of the significance of naked reality — the reality referred to as that existing at the time of the world’s creation — is never explicitly addressed. Foregoing statistics and scientific data, the narrator is unable to refer to a reality stripped of history and meaning without relapsing into prefigured thoughts and expressions. He cannot prove the validity of the suggested experiment by way of simply “showing” its result. He can only refer to the new by inverting the old, by an experimental text that reveals the need for similes and metaphors even while simultaneously demonstrating what similes and metaphors do. Remarkably, the narrator describes the rhetorical machinery that underlies man’s communicative interaction as a “credit” system. Here he describes the borrowing mechanism underlying this system as tautological. There is between our clothes and ourselves, and between our customs and ourselves, a convoluted relationship of moral credit according to which we first lend customs and clothes their entire significance, and then borrow it back again, paying interest on the interest; and this is why we border on bankruptcy when we cut off their line of credit. (PP 84)

The subject that gives the credit is also the subject that takes the credit; the subject credits itself with a credit and thus posits “itself” as the agency that figures it (self). There is no subject to speak of before this tautological self-accreditation takes place, at least none that could be observed, not even with the aid of a pair of binoculars. The agent of this

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system of trust is never seen or heard; for lack of attributes, he or she remains hidden. All that can be made the subject of the experiment are the rules and effects of a system that the narrator calls a “credit” system, and which, as one knows, is ultimately built on trust. Thus, rather than being simply a parable of human behavior, Triëdere demonstrates man’s reliance on figurative speech. It is by way of this self-reference that the author can expose the tropes and metaphors underlying the performance of 11 the narrative. The narrative becomes an allegory for the tropes and figures that make stories possible. Musil’s parable tells the story about how people come by their stories, which, however, appears to be always the same old story. The Figurative Power of Clothes, Money, and Language Triëdere is a prime example of Musil’s writing, and it picks up major themes of The Man Without Qualities. The analogy between clothes, money, and language is more explicit in the novel. Musil must have had Andersen’s fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in mind, when — in a chapter on “Systems of Happiness and Balance” that draws an analogy between Bonadea and Kakania — he digresses into an allegorical rehearsal of an old topic: Clothes make the man. Even though the emperor believes he has new clothes, he is naked. It is a tale not about the figure of power and coercion but about the faith that empowers that figure. Enlightenment begins with the recognition of the arbitrary nature of signification. Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lipstretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen together with the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word. . . . And just such a power to make the invisible, and even the nonexistent, visible is what a well-made outfit demonstrates every day of the week. (MWQ 574)

People’s garments do to the naked body what reading/listening does to the merely written/spoken: they figure. Clothes are not only figurative but reveal the desire for and effect of figuration. Clothes thereby signify gender, class, personal biography, and ideology. In the novel’s first chapter, an anonymous man and woman are identified as members of the upper class because they have “their names embroidered on their underwear” (4). In contrast, the reader is left in the dark about Ulrich’s ward-

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robe. To be a man without qualities is like being a man without clothes, or without a house, which amounts to the same thing. “Show me how you live and I will tell you who you are!,” Ulrich reads in the magazine for home designs (15). But he has to remain without any shell designed to represent his character and personal beliefs. The pastiche style of his house accords with Kakania’s suspect code of dress. Alluding to the royal insignia of the co-existing monarchies of the Habsburgs and the Magyars, the narrator compares the empire’s dual representation to the appearance of a person garbed in “a red-white-and-green jacket with blackand-yellow trousers.” The empire is wearing a combination of two different suits: “The jacket was a jacket, but the trousers were the relic of an extinct black-and-yellow outfit that had been ripped apart in the year of 1867” (491). However, even when undressing, Ulrich’s most immediate shell, the figure of his body, misleads. Ulrich’s endeavors to remain in good physical shape give “women the illusion of a reliable virility,” for which he is said to be “too cerebral and too conflicted” (307). In other words, Ulrich’s women tend to naturalize what he himself views as a mere contingent relationship between himself and his exterior. They presuppose an analogy where he feels that “the surface and depth of his person were not one and the same” (309). To him, a person’s body is not intimately connected to a person’s self. That is why the body can become the subject of a figuration by way of routine physical exercises. The exterior shape is contingent upon an external act. To assume otherwise is to presuppose a metaphor in place of a metonymy, that is, that the outer form mirrors or traces an inner substance. However, the reader is being shown that this mistake of taking metonymies for metaphors is the underlying principle of the feudal system. When Ulrich visits the Imperial and Royal Citadel to seek out Count Stallburg, the bearing of the high official strikes him as “an imitation of something” (84). The count resembles the emperor, and so does every other public servant in Kakania. Count Stallburg is thus the very first manifestation of a “pseudoreality” (Seinesgleichen), since no real emperor is ever met. Even within the palace, Ulrich encounters only further simulacra of his highness, the emperor. Ulrich has the impression of “walking through a vast shell with little content” (84). By questioning that the infinite chain of representations refers to any substance, Ulrich throws the whole system of resemblance into doubt. Typical for a “pseudoreality” (Seinesgleichen) like Count Stallburg is a synthesis or identity achieved as the result of assimilation. The resemblance in outward appearance creates the illusion of equality in essence. “The belief was that they were emulating the appearance of their Em-

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peror and King, but the deeper need in such cases is reciprocity” (85). In other words, the system of analogical representation functions because the people who participate in it entertain a libidinal interest in its success. They entertain a certain reciprocal relation to the power to which they are subordinated. “Such things are like debtors who repay our investment in them with fantastic interest, and in that sense all things are indebted to us” (574). Accordingly, systems of representation — be they the monarchic institution, people’s fashion, or even man’s physiognomy — only function if given “credit” (575). What legitimizes a political system like that of Kakania is the fact that people trust in it. There can be no representation without people’s trust and belief. The final cause of all great revolutions, which lies deeper than their effective cause, is not the accretion of intolerable conditions, but the loss of cohesion that bolstered the society’s artificial peace of mind. There is an applicable saying by a famous early scholastic, “Credo ut intelligam,” which might be freely translated into a prayer for our times as “O lord, please grant my spirit a production credit!” since every human creed is probably only a special instance of the credit system. . . . However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit. (MWQ 575)

Accordingly, the “final cause” in matters of history is effectively caused by a belief in the existence of such a final cause — by believing fundamentally in a teleological order of the universe. Yet it is merely a presupposition. To invest in something means to believe in a promise. It means to presently act on account of what will have been done at some point in the future. And that that will have been done presupposes that it is now already taken for granted. The temporality of the promising subject is the future anterior. Its representation always presupposes what it represents; it presupposes the presence of that which it only claims to present once more, that is to say, which it only claims to re-present. However, it has become difficult to believe in the future of the Austro-Hungarian empire because God, the ultimate creditor, has withdrawn from the system of the feudal society: “God cut off Kakania’s credit” (MWQ 576). Suddenly, then, the whole system of infinite representation becomes mere theater. Commenting further on the resemblance of the count to the emperor, the narrator remarks: “The theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation . . . could here be seen in all its

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purity, without the least taint or awareness of a performance” (85). One might note that an awareness of the performance aspect would have introduced irony into the royal theater. It is therefore precisely the absence of irony that distinguishes the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Musil’s Kakania, or real life from fiction. We are being told that whereas the real empire required its people to suspend disbelief, Musil’s fictitious empire presents in turn a type of person who precisely ceases adhering to this strange requirement. However, nothing suggests that thus suspending the suspension of disbelief will bring back any truer or more authentic political subject. It only indicates the inevitable repetition built into the system. Science and Literature Musil’s parable alludes to the gap between society’s progress as a whole and individual behavior in particular — though no one may agree with the parable’s purported conclusion that technological inventions such as slow-motion cinematography have no effect on men’s attitudes and habits. However, Musil’s parable also demonstrates that ingenuity is never achieved by being entirely original but by way of an ironic suspension of the old and the familiar. There is a program and a deviation from the program; there are rules and there are exceptions to the rules. Toward the end of Triëdere, the narrator’s intense scrutiny of human physiognomy and actions reveals tiny irregularities that might eventual induce a change in the way things progress. He detects people among the crowd whose gestures and movements slightly deviate from the norm. These deviations betray “a personality that couldn’t give a hoot about anyone else” (PP 86). The narrator discovers a personality that is no longer entirely contained by “character”; he discovers some agency that upsets “custom,” “figure,” or “type” from within. He discovers a difference.

Notes 1

To quote Ernst Cassirer (a personal acquaintance of Musil’s), “Natural laws, as distinguished from logical and mathematical laws, are therefore contingent truths. But this contingency in no sense contradicts their thoroughgoing definiteness and certainty or the possibility of their rational establishment. In fact the relation is exactly reverse; the accidental truths are so far from being unfounded that the principle of sufficient reason is to be regarded as their proper source and their characteristic epistemological principle. . . . The principium rationis sufficientis is, therefore, according to Leibniz, as much a principle as a postulate.” (Ernst Cassirer, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, trans. P. Theodor Benfey [New Haven: Yale UP, 1956], 101–2).

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2

Or, as the author might have picked up during his academic years in Berlin, physicists learned to distinguish between the ignition of an event and its cause. Lighting a match only kindles a flame but does not cause the flame to burn. Cf. the popular lectures on contemporary philosophy by Musil’s teacher Alois Riehl, Zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart: Acht Vorträge (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903). 3

According to Helmut Arntzen’s Musil-Kommentar, the death toll of “one hundred ninety thousand people” is highly exaggerated. According to the scholar’s own research, the true figure was 3,700 in the year 1913, and 17,500 in the year of 1924 when Musil wrote down the numbers in his diaries. Arntzen, Musil-Kommentar zu dem Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (Munich: Winkler, 1982), 139. 4 For an excellent presentation of these developments in the history of ideas and science and its impact on pragmatism as a philosophical school, I refer the reader to Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). Menand’s presentation of this important chapter in American philosophy supports my contention that among all modern German thinkers and writers it is only Musil whose ideas come close to what has become known as “pragmatism” — but not because of influence, since Musil was hardly familiar with James or any of the other American pragmatist philosophers. However, to my knowledge, only Marike Finlay has tried to make this point by undertaking an extensive comparison of Musil and Peirce in her The Potential of Modern Discourse: Musil, Peirce, and Perturbation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). 5 As Isaac Asimov puts it in Understanding Physics, statistical methods were part of a new episteme by which “the improbable (but not impossible) gains a perceptible chance of taking place, while more and more of those cause/effect combinations we usually assume to be certain have been shown to be only very, very, very probable” (238). 6

Musil quotes in his diaries from Erwin Schrödinger’s essay “daß vom Standpunkt des Physikers die Wurzel der Kausalität der Zufall ist” (TB 525). Erwin Schrödinger’s essay “Das Gesetz der Zufälle” appeared in issue 9 of Die Koralle (1929): 417–18. 7

Cf. Musil TB I, 464, where he excerpts H. E. Timmerding’s Analyse des Zufalls (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1915), a general introduction into statistics written for a lay audience. Timmerding tries to show how we can distinguish between the probable and the coincidental by using statistical methods. One chapter is entitled “Das Gesetz der großen Zahlen” (the law of large numbers). 8

As Hayden White put it in Tropics of Discourse, “statistical representations are little more than projections of data construed in the mode of metonymy, the validity of which as contributions to our understanding of reality extends only as far as the elements of the structures represented in them are in fact related by contiguity alone” (22). The appearance of statistics in Musil’s novel is another instance of the figure of metonymy as the basic figure of modern discourse. 9 Nachlass zu Lebzeiten has been translated into English as Posthumous Papers, and the short text Triëdere has been translated as Binoculars. (An earlier version of the German original appeared in 1926 in the journal Berliner Tag.) However, it is not quite clear if the spy glass mentioned in the German text is supposed to be a Fernrohr (telescope) or Fernglas (binoculars). Both terms occur in the German text. Triëdere ap-

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pears to be an older Austrian word for binoculars (Arntzen’s Musil-Kommentar [1980] does not comment on the title). The two dots on the letter e in the written word Triëdere indicate that the letter stands for the vowel and is not part of the German long i (as would be the ie in the German noun Fliege, for example). Perhaps Musil decided to use the old fashioned term Triëdere because the diacritical marks can be seen as an ideographic suggestion of two eyes or a pair of binoculars. In the German text, Musil uses the noun also as a verb to refer to the act of spying. 10

Cf. Christoph Hoffmann’s “Der Dichter am Apparat”: Medientechnik, Experimentalpsychologie und Texte Robert Musils 1899–1942 and my critical review of this book in Monatshefte 93 (2001): 236–40. Musil’s technique is still one of poetry and language. The question how far this technique — in the Greek sense of poiēsis — must be conceived as being in essence similar to other “media” is an entirely different matter. In my opinion, Musil was not fully aware of the question, even though he touches on it in his critical review of Balázs’s book on film. The problem with Hoffmann’s study is that it stops by simply drawing an analogy between literature and media without realizing that this analogy is itself already a manifestation of rhetoric as a machine. 11

Indeed, in his own prose Musil achieved that which he praised in the poems of Rilke: “Something is never compared with something else — as two different things, which they remain in the comparison — for, even if this sometimes does happen, and one thing is said to be like another, it seems at that very moment to have already been the other since primordial times” (PP 245).

4: Multiple Subjects: The Construction of a Hypothetical Narrative

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have attracted so much attention because of the way they begin than Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The novel’s first chapter contains a narrative in status nascendi — a ferment of voices, focal points, actions, and motifs, which, however, do not coalesce into a steady flow of storytelling. Instead, the opening chapter represents a state of affairs that appears to defy any mimetic impulse — any form of representation other than that of statistical enumeration. However, a meteorological analysis does not convey a sense of what it is like to actually experience the weather conditions in question. On the other hand, a traditional expression such as “It was a fine day in August 1913,” is considered “old fashioned” and “only fairly accurate” (3). The juxtaposition of a prosaic and poetic description of the world raises the essential question whether there is a third possibility — an alternative beyond “epic naiveté” (790). According to a comparison that reoccurs throughout the novel, starting with the introduction of zoological metaphors in the first chapter, civilization has reached a developmental stage that is as complex as the organism of a beehive or ant colony. It is no longer possible to have a picture of society as a whole. Rather, Musil communicates a sense of what it is like to live in the modern world by undercutting, withholding, or explicitly retracting the figures and tropes that establish the topography of a classical narrative, that is, a narrative that allows the reader to identify where and when the reported action or event is taking place, who is reporting it, and from which perspective. Musil’s narrator is evidently impaired by the conditions that make a coherent and meaningful narrative impossible. He shares the distant and noncommittal attitude of the city crowd. Though he — but how can we ever be sure that it is the voice of a man and not that of a woman? — appears by all accounts to be an omniscient narrator, he acts with remarkable restraint. He does and does not take part in the scene that he brings to the reader’s attention. He indicates the time and place of the incident, but he states that in the real world these spatio-temporal markers bear no significance. They are important to people who have the “initials of their names embroidered EW NOVELS

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on their underwear” and know where they belong and who they are (4). Obviously, these are people with personal memories that provide them with a biography and a sense of identity derived from it. They can place themselves. They have a personal story to tell of their ancestors, family, home, and country. They are potential characters in a novel, so that “their names might have been Ermelinda Tuzzi and Arnheim,” who in fact are later introduced as such novelistic characters (4). They stand out from the crowd, and this appears to be the reason they deserve a brief moment of our attention. Yet in distinguishing himself from these people of a “privileged social class,” the narrator claims that in the world of today one is better off without a proper name. Someone who has spent his entire life in a city recognizes a location by its mere sounds, smells, and vibrations, which, however, “cannot be captured in words” (3). To put it differently, knowledge like this becomes useless in an attempt to give a narrative account of world events. On the other hand, a city name like Vienna is similarly dismissed as insignificant. Narratives based on remembered names and events somehow mislead. The suspension of simple storytelling is most evident in the narrator’s explicit cancellation of the proper name, first of the city name Vienna, then of the names Ermelinda, Tuzzi, and Arnheim. Continuing the motif, it is not until the fifth chapter that the hero is referred to by his name. Until then, Ulrich, as he will be dubbed, is just called “the man without qualities.” However, although he is finally provided with a Christian name, his family name is withheld out of respect for his father (13). The name of the father is crucial to the socio-linguistic implementation of the laws that typify the society in which Ulrich was raised. It is therefore not just a particular family name that is at stake, but the legacy of those specific cultural institutions that only function because of it. The suppressed family name is associated with a cultural heritage in which precisely the name of the father plays a significant role. The fate of patri1 mony is under siege. Incidentally, Ulrich’s father does not appear in the novel other than as a will and testament left behind like the corpse that must be attended to. In the novel, everything associated with the figure of the father conveys this ghostlike state of an outlived existence. Not only the father’s name has vanished, but the social function of the family name as such has disappeared as well. Ulrich’s good name does not at first distinguish him from the other suspects gathered at the police station, where a person’s name appears as “the most intellectually meaningless, yet most emotionally charged, words” (168). To the police, Ulrich’s last name is of little value other than as an arbitrary marker essential for sustaining Ulrich’s

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“statistical demystification” (169). In modern societies, or in those governed by law that does not distinguish between the classes, the proper name is merely a denotative sign that is meaningless unless it can be linked to other signs. At the police station, Ulrich’s name is linked to scientific data that puts its singular referencing into a particular context. This shift from a metaphoric to a metonymic use of the name is reemphasized when one of the police officers happens to recall Ulrich’s name. Ulrich’s rescue is sheer coincidence. Usually, the work of the police depends on the mechanical computing capacities of its archives and not on the personal memories of its officers. Indeed, police officers should not be paying attention to a name’s possible connotations. Just as the emotive value of a proper name like “Vienna” or “Austria” can evoke connections, concern for the recollection of an individual’s name would likely distract the police from doing their jobs. Rather than simply restricting their function to the objective execution of their role as law enforcers, officers would react as human beings. They would no longer act like cogs in a public decoding machine. They would no longer be concerned only with the facts. Reading the novel’s first chapter, no mediation appears possible between the sensory apprehensions on the one hand, and the rational mind that weighs statistical, objective information, on the other. These two subjects encountered in the opening chapter, the subject that recognizes a place through aural, olfactory, and visual sensations and the subject that is involved in rational reflection, never merge into one. It is as if the faculties of a single human mind have been separated. Together with names and language, a working memory is also absent. We are told that a good memory was a survival tool during “nomadic times,” when people had “to recognize the tribal feeding grounds.” However, in modern society, “knowing where we are” is something that “merely distracts us from more important concerns” (4). In the city, things that come to mind are immediately forgotten. Distraction can be fatal, as the accident illustrates. All the witnesses agree that the man who was run over had not paid sufficient attention. The traffic is interrupted simply because an individual lacked the presence of mind required to cross the streets. Yet survival in the city depends on trained reflexes rather than on conscious reflection. Ulrich, who is spiritually certainly at home in the modern, Tayloristic environment, is mugged because he deliberates a second too long about how best to defend himself. According to Ulrich, the reflexive reactions required in the streets make “conscious control quite impossible” (24). The city demands of its inhabitants a somewhat reduced personality. To

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possess a remembering, self-conscious ego can become a liability. Ulrich, who is first seen standing behind a window and thus epitomizes the monadic deprivation of a clear and distinct perception of the world, will later comment on why modern man is unable to develop a coherent view of life: In the country, he thought, the gods still come to the people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction. (708)

The consciousness of urban man can no longer be understood in terms of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. Continually exposed to an onslaught of sensation, city dwellers enjoy few chances for enduring lasting experience (Erfahrung). Kant’s unity of apperception presupposes the transparency and steady rhythm of the agrarian and mercantile society. Members of these societies are able to experience a continuity of meaningful events that are remembered as markers in both the personal and the communally shared history. However, the urban onslaught of sensations goes beyond the capacity of conscious apperception and memory. As the onlookers to the car accident demonstrate, the capability to remain aloof amidst even the most shocking events is a necessity for the city dweller, if he is to maintain even the semblance of a functioning life. Were it not for his indifference, intellectualism, and autism, the city dweller would be in a state of perpetual sublimity. Thus, the city undermines everything traditionally associated with a free and autonomous subject; most important, it undermines the efficacy of language and personal memory. The Need to Construct a Hypothetical Narrative In his diaries, Musil repeatedly remarked on the necessity of alienating a reader’s desire for mere aesthetic pleasure. A story should not be “a private matter”; instead the novel should force the reader “to think” (TB I, 818). Here, thinking is not understood as a merely private activity. “Thinking” introduces distance and objectivity, and presupposes conditions of rational understanding rather than empathy: to make a reader think therefore requires a break with simple storytelling. Through the mouth of the narrator as well as of other characters, Musil’s novel repeatedly emphasizes this need to undercut the affective relationship a reader develops with respect to a novel’s characters and plot. The most striking

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example is Ulrich’s dismissal of “narrative order” as “a foreshortening of the mind’s perspective,” and his claim to have lost the primitiv Epische (primitive epic intuition) which is the most elementary mode of thought. The passage has often been quoted — it anticipated today’s knowledge long before the study of narrative became an academic field: Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional “because” or “in order that” gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from chaos. (709)

Ordinary narratives order events chronologically. What underpins this narrative order is the reader’s intuitive yet misguided understanding that a chronological sequence of events implies necessity. This necessity is not, however, the causal necessity posited in scientific discourse (i.e., the logical necessity implied in the use of subordinating conjunctions like “because” or “in order that”). Rather this necessity appears like fate — a destined necessity, as in myth. Myth is a narrative that sublimates the painful moments of life by remembering them as already lived through in the past. It tells the story of and for those who have survived. One should note that in the passage cited above, the true opposite of narrative is the poem. Whereas myth accentuates a specific rhythm of life, the eternal return of the same, the poem represents the exceptional moment that stands out from the flow of time and the succession of events. In a letter written shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, Musil remarked that neither Proust nor Joyce had found a satisfying solution to the predicament of living in an age in which “the old naiveté of storytelling” had become untenable. Even though their novels portray modern society’s complexity by using an associative style that blurs boundaries, Musil felt that they still very much adhered to the conventions of realism. In contrast, Musil characterized his own style as “konstruktiv und synthetisch” (B 504–5). Musil’s self-characterization echoes the above-cited passage from The Man Without Qualities. However, even though Ulrich is said to have lost that primitiv Epische to which most people owe their conviction that life is meaningful, Musil himself emphatically rejected the once-popular no2 tion that the novelistic genre as such was in a state of “crisis.” Instead, it was the genre’s association with the anthropomorphic figure of an omniscient narrator that had become increasingly suspicious for Musil, just as it had for other writers during the early twentieth century. In order to

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respond to a new sense of authenticity, writers had begun to forsake a trope that had become implausible. In fact, the naturalistic writers of the previous generation had already taken steps to depict the industrial world by reducing the human element in its representation. Substituting description for narration (Lukács), they led the way toward modern litera3 ture’s reification and formalism. In The Man Without Qualities, this development is taken a step further. Here, from the beginning the novel is exposed as a narrative discourse that originates not in someone’s memory but as a text that is entirely constructed. The title of part one announces Eine Art Einleitung (sort of an introduction). According to the author’s posthumous papers, the conclusion of the novel, had he finished it, would have been similarly captioned Eine Art Ende (sort of an end). Furthermore, the very first chapter is announced as one “from which, remarkably enough, nothing develops.” Evidently, these headings are inserted to suggest the absence of logic in the sequencing of the novel’s chapters. It could start and end otherwise, as if the author had in all seriousness proceeded randomly, and without knowing at the outset where he wanted to lead the reader. We are thus cautioned not to expect the ordinary buildup of a narrative. Presented as being still under construction, Musil’s novel substitutes the experiment for the referent. The reader cannot suspend disbelief, as is usually required of him when reading a novel. But neither can the reader believe in the notion that the novel is really an open experiment whose outcome is not already prescribed. The suspension of the suspension of disbelief constitutes a figure of irony, by which precisely the possibility of distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction becomes an issue. However, this in no way implies that the invention of a novel is a creatio ex nihilo. The author of a novel is not a creator in the biblical sense. Rather, Musil’s novel must make use of material and ideas that are already present. Several times in the course of the Parallel Campaign it could be perceived that world history is made up much as all other stories are — i.e., the authors seldom come up with anything really new and are rather given to copying each other’s plots and ideas. But there is also something else involved which has not yet been mentioned, and that is the delight in storytelling itself; it takes the shape of that conviction so common to authors that they are working on a good story, that passion of authorship that lengthens an author’s ears and makes them glow, so that all criticism simply melts away. (561)

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Like the reader when he merely listens to and enjoys a story, the author, when merely telling stories, succumbs to an affect that undermines his or her creative power. Storytellers usually forget the fact that they have gotten their stories from somewhere else. To become creative, to become true “authors,” they must first find their own story and voice. This act of empowerment, this enactment of autonomy by way of autopoesis, implies returning to some of the literary techniques previously employed in picaresque and romantic novels, such as the custom of apostrophizing the reader. The apostrophe posits two autonomous subjects communicating with each other: The reader will be glad to be reassured that neither at this point nor later will any serious attempt be made to paint a historical canvas and enter into competition with reality. (MWQ 181)

The author/narrator seems eager to second-guess the reader, to catch him, so to speak, in the act of reading, and to shoo him out of a merely contemplative attitude. Of course, nothing can confirm the success of such an ambiguous undertaking. The apostrophe addressed to the reader becomes a trope the moment it is employed. Because of the irony implied by a narrator who claims what cannot be the case (namely, that he is a person making a serious effort to communicate with the outside world) the reader is only convinced that such reassurances are tricks that come with the trade. Indeed, the apostrophe raises the more fundamental question of whether an author/narrator ever succeeds in obtaining a true voice, since it is always imagined and never actually heard. Reading a novel is like entering a virtual space of hallucinatory voices and speeches. However, for the linguistic signifier to convey a message, a primary figuration must already have taken place that confers a voice upon the dead letter. The signifier is imbued with meaning as soon as it is understood as an enunciation. This primary semiosis, the making of a sign through the transformation of an inscription into a voice, is effected in an act of reading that prefigures any understanding. Yet the transformation becomes disturbed the moment the reader is confronted with elements in the text that resist being voiced as human speech, that is, when they resist their immediate anthropomorphization. The headings preceding the chapters, parts, and books into which the novel is divided are a prime example. They are framing devices and, like forewords and epigraphs, constitute an extra source of information intended to form an understanding between author and reader about the content and function of a text. The narratologist Gérard Genette has classified these devices as paratexts. In the case of a novel, title and subti-

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tles are the most evident indications that the invention of print is the genre’s historical precondition. They might also be the first instance in the novel’s topography of a dialogic imagination (Bakhtin). In The Man Without Qualities the chapter, part, and book titles are not only, as is usually the case, mere traces of the novel’s prosaic nature. Rather, they explicitly comment on it, for example, “The forgotten, highly relevant story of the major’s wife” (chapter 32); “A digression: Must people be in accord with their bodies?” (chapter 68). However, they do so in such an ambiguous fashion that it becomes immediately questionable whether the titles really mean what they say. Often, they simply state a fact or call out a name, for example, “Ulrich” (chapter 5); “Moosbrugger” (chapter 18); “Rachel and Diotima” (chapter 41); “General Stumm von Bordwehr visits Diotima” (chapter 64); “Moosbrugger is moved to another prison” (chapter 53). Sometimes, however, they also explicitly advise, invite, or forebode: “One must move with the times” (chapter 89); “If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility” (chapter 4); “Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes” (part III chapter 21); “A great event is in the making. But no one has noticed” (part III chapter 38). They contain short narratives that imply a valorization of a chapter’s importance or even remark on its internal narrative function. Chapter 28, for example, is announced as “A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation” (115). Sometimes the titles are clearly recognizable as citations highlighting the dialogues between the characters on the pages that follow. However, it also happens that a character sometimes cites a title given to a previous chapter as, for example, in chapter 122 of part 2, where Ulrich refers to “a foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” (709). In the German original, Ulrich here reiterates the title of chapter 6 of part 1. In each instance, it is impossible to say whose point of view these subtitles represent. They are typographically set off from the main text and appear, as titles normally do, as authorial announcements instructing the reader how to approach what comes next. Yet their style also makes them part of the narrative. If they are citations, for example, who is responsible for citing them? Because of their peculiar place of being on an outside that appears from within, the reader cannot decide whether their enunciation should be attributed to the narrator or to someone else, presumably the author. By not being fully integrated into the novel’s universe of voices, they appear as the interjections of an agent who is never identified. To a certain extent, this is of course always the case with subtitles. However, in Musil’s novel the rules and conventions that prescribe

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the use of subtitles are undercut. Their illocutionary function is upset by an ambiguity that leaves the reader not knowing how to respond. For example, the novel starts out with a chapter, as its title announces, “From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops.” The subtitle is both true and false. It is true that nothing “develops” from the novel’s first chapter, at least not anything that would suggest a causal or teleological link between the events narrated in the chapter and those of its subsequent chapters. The opening chapter contains a selfenclosed mini-narrative describing the elimination of a malfunction within a self-organizing or auto poetic system. Yet it would be false to imply that the first chapter has no other connection to the rest of the novel than that it is randomly inserted into it. Musil remarked in retrospect that the “technical problem” of the novel’s entire first book could be defined as “an attempt to make a story at all possible” (GW I, 1844). In other words, the story — if there ever were to be a story — is being made, that is, constructed, and not told. The transition from the first to the second chapter of the novel is made by a mere conjecture: Had the distinguished couple followed its course a little longer, they would have come upon a sight that would certainly have pleased them. (6)

Presumably, the couple did not follow its course — though in this particular instance the German original expresses a conditional and not a contrary-to-fact statement. Musil’s various uses of the subjunctive mood are, of course, impossible to render in English. However, it can be maintained that the subjunctive served the author primarily to emphasize possible situations rather than to refer to contrary-to-fact situations (Schöne 22). The point is to speculate what could actually have happened. Much of what transpires in the novel is presented in just such a conjectural manner. The events are posited — not only actions supposedly taken but also supposed thoughts and feelings. Whatever is suggested, or explicitly proposed, could just as well be imagined to have occurred otherwise or not at all. Accordingly, the events appear to be determined neither by an external referent (belonging, as it were, to some actual past of the real world) nor by any teleological principle. In choosing the subjunctive mood instead of the indicative, the narrator, if not the author, evidently shares the protagonist’s belief in the coincidental state of the world. In a contingent world, singular events are at best probable but never absolutely necessary. The narrative discourse proceeds along a line of reasoning that if x is the case then y could be one of its consequences — but, so could be z. Therefore, no matter how the novel concludes, the trajectory

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of its plot should not appear as inevitable. Any conclusion that does not contradict the antecedent sequence of originally undetermined events is possible. This apparent randomness in the selection of events does not, however, imply that the author did not know where he wanted to go with the plot at the time he was writing the novel. Certainly this may have been the case up to a certain point, especially concerning the insertion and development of the novel’s subplots; nevertheless, the narrative’s “open” structure is intended and is a significant feature of its aesthetic composition as a whole. The novel’s narrative discourse simulates a world in which random events are not merely possible but necessarily so. (Indeed, they are by necessity only possible.) But, despite this posturing of randomness, the narrative discourse is not simply a jumbled mass of spontaneous associations. Instead, it is a deliberate and premeditated effort by the author to integrate a critical mass of ideas. Within the construction of the narrative, no part or element is without its function. Indeed, given the immense volume of text, it is always amazing to discover how well elements are connected. Whatever theme, motive, gesture, metaphor, or even graphic inscription one chooses to trace, in each instance, one holds the novel’s whole fabric in one’s hands. The entire work seems almost hermetically sealed. By thus manifesting itself as a perfected work of art — a teleological construction, that is — the novel displays that purposefulness without any evident purpose, which according to Kant is precisely what defines beauty. And in spite of the novel’s resistance to the narrative, some “sort of” a story nevertheless emerges. Structure of a Hypothetical Narrative Musil’s novel contrives what I called earlier a “hypothetical narrative” — by which I mean a narrative that is contrary to fact not only in the sense of it being literary fiction but also in the sense of being explicit about this. The hypothetical narrative does not imagine events which are supposed to have occurred; instead, it imagines what in a certain context 4 could happen. In such an explicit counter factual narrative, passing from one possible event to the next becomes a question of probable causality. It depends, so it seems, both on the observer’s knowledge of the hypothesized world and on the plausibility of the conclusions drawn from that knowledge. The story’s suggested course should not contradict the facts implied in the original hypothesis. Apart from this requirement, however, the narrator seems to have free reign. Rather than presenting a fictional historical account or biography, Musil’s narrator sets out to construct a narrative. Everything missing from the first episode, above all a

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motivation for its selection as the starting point, must still be invented. The novel’s success thus seems to hinge on the possibility of first constructing a subject that, for example, could meaningfully respond to the car accident described in the first episode. As it turns out, however, the novel never really succeeds in performing its task. It remains under construction not only by coincidence — the author’s sudden death — but by necessity. “The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it is not told” (MWQ 1760). Indeed, throughout the novel, the narrative plotting is continually stalled, interrupted, and diverted. Over long intervals, the narrative is suspended in favor of philosophical digressions either attributable to the protagonist or unfolding in the endless chatter in which the characters engage. By the end of the already voluminous first book, neither Ulrich in his quest for “the right way to live” nor the peculiar Parallel Campaign that brings him out into the society has undergone any noticeable development (275). Except for a few significant scenes, no dramatic action takes place. Inasmuch as something happens at all, it is immediately affected with inertia, or only mentioned in passing, underscoring the depiction of a mental attitude by which a deadly car accident is shrugged off as an accustomed event of modern life. Instead of being drawn into a plot steering toward a certain climax, the reader is challenged to make cogent judgments on intricate reflections that revolve around the very possibility of such a plot. Traversing an immense amount of text, the reader comes to wonder whether to expect any progress or conclusion at all. An infinite postponement seems to take place, as if something resisted the narrative’s becoming. In fact, rather than not finding an end, the novel’s actual theme is finding a true beginning. A true beginning would be an event to which the narrator could refer as one that could be imagined as having occurred at a certain time in a certain place. Yet in The Man Without Qualities, time and space are considered irrelevant and indeterminable. Kakania is not only a fantasy; it is also a fantasy about a people living in a fantastic world. In contrast to the super-American city, as the emblem of modern times, Kakania is a country where people could “get off the train of time” (28). Although it is said to be found in “the good old days when the Austrian Empire still existed” (28), there is something utopian about a land where “real” life seems suspended. Kakania is introduced as an ideal place for tourists. Powerful men like Arnheim seek it out as a refuge from their strenuous work in the industrial regions of the world. Ulrich, too, is said to have just come back from abroad and has decided to take a year off (8). The Kakanian people are not altogether unlike him. They prefer to speak in

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the subjunctive mood and are also more concerned with what one could do rather than with what is done. The invention of an “Austrian year” appears to be just the right span of time to be acceptable: “It meant: Let’s show them, for once, who we could be! . . . but, so to speak, only until further notice, and for a year at most” (146). However, Kakania is also ahead of the times, and, “unbeknownst to the world, the most progressive state of all.” Kakania’s anachronism is rather achronistic, without time: One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with the sense of insufficient grounds for one’s own existence, and lapped around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least not yet happened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from which mankind had once emerged. (30–31)

The Kakanians are ahead of the times because they have noticed the difference between an ideal model and its imperfect realization. What else could a “nation” or “culture” be than an idea? Life gains its force and vitality from the imaginative adventure into the possible of which the actual always turns out to be an imperfect realization. History produces ruins that look “like a child’s toy town deserted by the imagination” (30). Being ahead of the times does not mean that the Kakanians are living in a time and place where at some point in the future the whole world could eventually arrive. Since Kakania is a country where preferences always run to the possible rather than the actual, Kakania’s futurism, as it were, is not meant to designate a moment in time that could ever become present. Kakania represents a time that cannot be measured by the clock. It is not even certain that one could refer to its peculiar temporality as time. If a nation is only an idea, then the Kakanians know that they do not really exist — that they are always ahead of themselves, representing something yet to come. Thus, Kakania occupies a place that cannot be represented in two forms of intuition: space and time. Yet Musil’s Kakania appears paradoxically more real and more alive than its historical model is said to have ever been. It is by way of this chiasmus that the actual course of history gains, in retrospect, the surreal quality of the Zeitgeist that Musil wanted to capture, to wit, “the spirit” as well as “the ghost” of the times. The hypothetical narrative undercuts the imperfect as the temporal mode of narrative. It refers to events which are not supposed to have ever occurred. Since narratives usually refer to events of the past, the hypothetical narrative “invents” what it narrates as if it had been found.

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However, in The Man Without Qualities, the paradox of inventing that which will have been found is at the same time mirrored in the plot. The plot that the narrator explicitly invents, underscores the difficulties of bringing about an event that could become the material of a great story. It turns in a similar way on letters and words that create the thing referred to as if it were something that already exists. Ulrich receives a letter from his father informing him that “someone” has already suggested that the entirety of 1918 be declared a jubilee year for the Austrian ruler, thereby resolving the problem caused by the fact that the anniversary of the Prussian emperor falls on an earlier date than the anniversary of the Austrian emperor. Accordingly, the campaign is to be imagined as already well under way by the time Ulrich and the reader first hear about it. Indeed, the letter from Ulrich’s father is itself one of the many speechacts or illocutions that bring the campaign to life before anyone actually knows its precise purpose. As we follow Ulrich’s climb into higher social circles, we learn that in the beginning the campaign was only a “figure of speech.” Count Leinsdorf, who wants the emperor’s anniversary to become a demonstration of the monarchy’s unity, circulated the metaphor. Yet Leinsdorf has great difficulty finding a slogan that would enthrall all subjects of the multi-ethnic monarchy. In order “to do things with words,” as the speech-act theorist J. L. Austin put it, it is of paramount importance that all participants in the game speak the same language. Even then, as Musil never tires of showing, many unforeseen effects occur. Leinsdorf feels himself in “the grip of a great idea,” but when challenged to articulate that idea, all he can come up with are a few suggestive words like “Emperor of Peace,” “European Milestone,” “Austria,” “Property and Culture” (88–89). However, by using the names of influential people to which he sends a soliciting letter, he is able to compensate for the lack of specificity. Ulrich’s father must have received such a letter, which thus triggered its reiteration to the son. The campaign is talked up. Finally, Leinsdorf borrows the technique invented by Bismarck of testing the popularity of an idea by leaking it to the press. It is thus a clever journalist who becomes really the inventor of the idea of the ‘Year of Austria’ that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusiasm. Count Leinsdorf was horrified at first, but he was wrong. The phrase ‘Year of Austria’ showed what it means to be a journalistic genius, for it was a triumph of true instinct. It caused vibrations to sound that would have remained dumb at the mention of an ‘Austrian

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Century’; the call to bring about such an era would have struck sensible people as impossible to take seriously. Why this is so would be hard to say. Perhaps a certain vagueness [Ungenauigkeit], a metaphorical quality [Gleichnishaftigkeit] that lessens realistic perceptions lent wings to the feelings of more people than just Count Leinsdorf. For vagueness has an elevating and magnifying power. (145)

The campaign is shown to originally exist only in the form of a vague idea manifesting itself first in loose verbal associations, then in a circular letter, and finally in a press release. It is thus an allegory of what one can do with words. The campaign exists only because people start to speak about it. From the start, then, the novel’s main plot has the peculiar qualities of being merely the possibility of becoming a plot; it has the potential of a plot because it is spoken and written about. Initially, the campaign is a mere projection of what might become a major event. Accordingly, the novel’s own progress depends in a peculiar way on the creation of a story that relates how stories are made. Only insofar as the campaign is successful in inventing an event does the novel actually have a story to tell. Otherwise, Musil’s novel is about a failed plot, actually about the failed plotting of a plot. Initially, then, the novel refers only to possible stories of possible worlds. It shows how mere associations lead to ideas that might or might not have the power to move people and to become reality. However, the reader is in a position of knowing already that the envisioned plot is a mere fiction, since there has never been an actual historical competition involving conflicting anniversaries of the two German emperors. The contriving of a Parallelaktion is entirely a product of the author’s creativity, which appears to be not all that different from the “genius” of the journalist. Journalism knows how to invent stories by reporting on “a racehorse of genius” or, in collaboration with popular poets, reporting a great event that nobody noticed. And yet, although it is entirely the author’s idea, the anniversary competition between the two empires could have occurred. Historically the year 1918 is indeed the year when Wilhelm II would have been in power for thirty years and Franz Josef for seventy. But rather than a time in which the people celebrated an “Emperor of Peace” (MWQ 89), 1918 brought the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the abdication of the Prussian monarchy. Since the reader is aware of the historical outcome, he cannot fail to notice the piercing satirical sting the Parallel Campaign contains. It is this odd twist — the invention of what could have happened to satirize what actually did happen — that distinguishes the author’s wit from the genius of a journalist. The difference is precisely the level of reflexivity involved. Musil’s reader is always reminded of the leaps

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taken when people succumb to their imagination. The novel’s characters are generally unaware of the degree to which their thoughts and actions are driven by the affect that accompanies each passage and that is made possible by the employment of tropes and figures. Freud and Kant on Historical Truth The novel’s plot both affirms and questions the notion of stumbling into the war. But, whereas traditionally a narrator’s task is to remember the story he has to tell, Musil’s narrator acts as if he were engineering it. Though most episodes are still narrated in conventional style, thus showing the narrator’s familiarity with certain events, places, and people that belong to the past, the plot and structure that holds all the elements together has the form of a speculative hypothesis — which makes the reader wonder if the war that was going to happen does not turn out to be the true reason why personal memories are now, after the war has happened, no longer considered a reliable source to disclose historical events. The narrator constructs what could have made the outbreak of the war possible. Accordingly, the need for construction could be interpreted as an incapacity to remember. The war is the catastrophe that disabled personal and collective memory. Indeed, in 1920, when Freud essayed the possibility of a repetition compulsion beyond the pleasure principle, he mentioned as his first example the traumatic neuroses many soldiers suffered from. Traumatic experiences are repeated in spite of their unpleasantness and, moreover, without ever having been repressed in the first place. Because of their intensity, traumatic events are not really experienced at the time they occur. Accordingly, there is no psychological possibility for a development of repression and neurosis. Freud fathomed that the earliest childhood experiences must be of a somewhat similar sort. Though often unconsciously repeated, by way of transference, they are difficult to remember because they have never been consciously lived through. They occurred before there was a subject in place. However, these early experiences might gain significance in a person’s life when a similar event stirs them up and maybe even brings them into consciousness. The new event remarks on the marked event. Thus, the past event is endowed with significance by way of a deferred (nachträgliche) action. Usually the second event brings a thought or image back to mind only in a distorted form, that is to say, in the form of an analogy (according to the principles Freud discovered in the analysis of dreams). Note that the second event is a chance event. Depending on the individual case, the sort of trauma or repression, and the context of a person’s life, the sec-

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ond event is a more or less likely but under no circumstance necessary event. It may or may not occur. In his studies of cultural phenomena, Freud applied the idea of a reverse causality to explain the origin of monotheism. For Freud, monotheism is an ideological construct that derives its persuasive power because it repeats pre-historic events such as the murder of the primal father figure. Members of a primitive society rebelled against their leader. This original uprising transformed a primitive community based on the right of the strongest into a civilized society based on a social contract among equals. Yet the violent primal scene (Urszene) is not sublimated (aufgehoben) by a compromise between forgetting and recollecting such as is characteristic of conscious memory. In the collective memory of mankind, the original transgression that is the founding act of history is completely repressed. However, the deed is unconsciously repeated through transference and delusion. For Freud, religion has all the characteristics of a psychotic hallucination. It is a phantasm accepted as real because it is permeated with bits and pieces from an actual past. Regarding the origin of monotheistic religion, Freud grants that the sublime idea of a single god contains historical truth. However, the myth does not reveal, as Freud puts it, material truth. “We do not believe that there is a single great god today, but that in primeval times there was a single person who was bound to appear huge at that time and who afterwards returned in men’s memory elevated to divinity” (Moses and Monotheism 129). Historical truth is incomplete or distorted material truth. In monotheism, the slain leader of human origin returns as the erected god. The inversion makes the god all the more sublime, since he is no longer real but the memento mori of a past transgression not remembered or recognized as such. It is not even certain whether the founding deed could be remembered at all, since, for there to be a sign and a memory trace, there must first be a repetition. The sublime is the return of that which has been foreclosed as necessarily lying outside of consciousness and representation. Freud acknowledged that any hypothesis regarding the historical events underlying the genesis of religious and moral beliefs must remain speculative. Likewise, the Urszene in the psycho-biography of any individual person can never be fully brought into recollection. Freud distinguished between two activities psychoanalysts are involved in. These are interpreting and constructing. The former is analytic, clarifying the meaning of specific elements in a patient’s discourse. The latter is synthetic, providing a hypothesis about the repressed events causing a patient’s symptoms. It is noteworthy that the analyst’s hypothesis comes in the

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form of a narrative. Its events, characters, and ideas are taken from the patient’s unsolicited remarks, dreams, and volunteered responses, while plot and sequence are entirely constructed. However, the truth value of the narrative is judged by the effect it produces with regard to the patient’s future affective and cognitive responses. The point of the analyst’s construction is to bring about the patient’s ability to remember the repressed. Freud assumes that the analyst’s narrative elicits a response only when it contains some historical facts, and, as a result, it causes the patient to gain full recollection of the past (“Construction in Analysis,” 265). A patient’s unconscious motivations and forces can be inferred to some degree from the responses elicited through the construction. However, this implies some associative correspondence between, on the one hand, the hypothetical narrative put forth by the analyst, and on the other, the recollection of the patient. The correspondence between the two pertains either to singular elements or syntactic relationships in the two narratives, of which one is constructed and the other remembered. Since, however, the truth-value of the construction lies entirely in the effect it has on the patient, no third person perspective can affirm the correspondence between the hypothetical narrative and the actual truth of what is remembered. The truth-value of the recollection depends on how patient and analyst judge its therapeutic effect. As Freud wrote: “Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory” (“Construction,” 265–66). Indeed, Freud goes so far as to stipulate that psychoanalytical construction and delusion are of similar function: “Just as our construction is only effective because it recovers a fragment of lost experience, so the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of historical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality” (268). The analytic therapy is terminated not because it has reached its ideal goal, namely the full recovery of the actual, but because a satisfactory equilibrium has been achieved. The symptoms are relieved because of an analogy between constructed narrative and reminiscences that, however, remain unconscious. It is thus the patient’s responsiveness that signals the success of the talking cure. Plausibility and affective response are the criteria by which an unconscious harmony between the patient’s current memory and actual past is judged to exist. The partly constructed, partly remembered narrative has the aesthetic quality of putting the subject in harmony with itself.

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Kant composed a prime example of a hypothetical narrative when, in 1786, continuing to battle Herder’s intuitive historicism, he published a text entitled Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (Conjectural Beginning of Human History). The text further elaborates the third thesis of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History,” which states that man is naturally disposed to become a reasoning being and to create, through an act of free will, his own rational culture. In the “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Kant discusses the possibilities of how to give a plausible account of “the first development of freedom from its original predisposition in human nature” (53). In other words, the text ponders the question of how that evolutionary moment might have come about when man acted for the first time on a will no longer determined by instinct but by reason. The subject lies clearly beyond the reach of secure knowledge established within the boundaries of pure reason. Though many empirical facts are known about mankind’s history, we are left in the dark about what precisely caused its beginning. Nor is there any empirical proof of man’s freedom. Kant therefore suggests that we use our imagination “in order to fill the gaps in the record” (53). Accordingly, Kant’s essay sets out to test whether man’s autonomy as the ultimate purpose of evolution is a sustainable regulative idea. Of course, a hypothetical account of what might have happened in the distant past should not be mistaken for objective knowledge. However, it does not need to be entirely fictitious (an Erdichtung) either. Here Kant distinguishes between three kinds of “stories” (Geschichten): First, there is the type of story that is based on trustworthy sources (Nachrichten). It conveys empirical knowledge. Second, there is the fictional account entirely the product of a vivid imagination. Kant compares this type of story to a novel (Roman). Third, however, there exists for Kant the narrative that is neither entirely factual nor merely invented. Providing an alternative to the historical account as well as to the novel, this narrative is based on “conjectures” (Mutmassungen) that originate in an “imagination guided by reason” (53). It is conceived on “the wings of our imagination, albeit not without a clue rationally derived from experience” (54). In other words, the conjectural or hypothetical narrative is based on imaginative reasoning that relates the story’s references to common experience and common sense. Here, the significance of Kant’s text lies in the fact that it actually contains a workable definition of the literary essay as a genre. Indeed, the text provides a great example of that particular genre as it evolved directly out of Enlightenment philosophy. Kant notes that the value of his essay does not rely on the empirical truth of its arguments. Neither is

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the logical possibility of those arguments a sufficient criterion. Rather, the essay strives for the assent (Beifall) of the reader (53). To gain the reader’s assent, the conjectures should not exaggerate, nor should too many of them be needed to make the case. Ultimately, the purpose of the essay is to engage all of man’s faculties “for the sake of relaxation and mental health” (“zur Erholung und Gesundheit des Gemüts,” 53). The German word for conjectures — Mutmassungen — is a compound noun in which the first noun, Mut, relates etymologically to the German word Gemüt, with which Kant refers to one’s “state of mind.” Furthermore, the German term Mutmassung evokes the word Zumutung, which suggests that the conjectures might force our assent (Zumutung can be translated as an exacting demand or imposition). In fact, the conjectures of the essay gain our assent easily because they put us in a state of mind that brings with it a feeling of pleasure. Indeed, Kant explicitly states that, by writing the essay, he is undertaking “a mere pleasure trip” (Lustreise, 54). However, he also states that he “dares” (wagen) to undertake the trip. This careful wording implies that the journey has its risks. We might infer that the risk lies in the writer’s possible failure to arouse that particular state of mind that is required for the essay to be successful. In the case of failure, the essay would become a Zumutung — an imposition. Evidently, then, the pleasure Kant has in mind is the aesthetic pleasure that signals the harmonious and free interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination. Writing an essay involves reflective judgment, the transcendental conditions of which Kant will later establish in the Third Critique. However, in his essay concerning the beginning of mankind’s history, Kant is not discussing the possibility of reflective judgment. Rather, he presupposes its possibility, and relies on it to construct the mainspring of man’s “reason.” The only condition for such a genealogical construction is the assumption that the beginning of man’s reasoning was not caused by a transcendent agent but that it evolved naturally. Clearly, a divine creation ex nihilo would go beyond our experience as well as our imagination. We can make reasonable conjectures only about matters that lie within our experience of the human condition. Assuming that anthropological conditions have not fundamentally changed over time, we may imagine the first human beings as analogous to us (53). This analogy is a decisive presupposition, since it turns out that for Kant history begins precisely when man fabricated his first analogy. Kant proceeds by using the first two chapters of Genesis to reconstruct the underlying historical truth of biblical revelation. Man lives in

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harmony with nature until one day he abandons the guidance of his natural instincts by, literally, no longer following his nose. He switches by chance from the olfactory to the visual. He relies no more on what is revealed to him by the sense of smell, but instead trusts his eyesight. This sudden change marks for Kant the stirring of reason and man’s first step into history and culture. But soon reason began to stir. A sense different from that to which instinct was tied — the sense, say, of sight — presented other food than that normally consumed as similar to it; and reason, instituting a comparison, sought to enlarge its knowledge of foodstuffs beyond the bounds of instinctual knowledge. (55)

How could a different sense, namely sight, lead to the assumption of a similarity between things identified so far only by their smell? It is visual similarity that causes an increase in knowledge. Yet the stirring of reason begins with an analogy based on a confusion of the senses. The identical appearance of two items leads to a perception in which the value associated with the smell of one item is transferred onto the sight of the other item. The analogy is thus triggered by synesthesia and is therefore entirely accidental. Indeed, Kant does not for a moment dispute that the beginning of history must have been a fortuitous accident: “The original occasion for deserting natural instinct may have been trifling. . . . Even so, this was sufficient occasion for reason to do violence to the voice of nature and, its protest not withstanding, to make the first attempt at a free choice” (54). The first step towards analogical thinking resulted from a confusion that suppressed the true differences of things by a conjecture grounded in an imagination accompanied with pleasure: “Perhaps the discovery of this advantage created a moment of delight” (54). Analogy and Catachresis Kant’s problem of how we arrive at coherent histories of that which we cannot remember underlies Ulrich’s question of how it is at all possible that one can get from one point to the next. Progress and transition is always achieved by way of analogy, by taking a leap, and thus by leaving things out. This is most obvious in those instances where Musil directs the reader’s attention towards the use and effect of rhetorical figures. As the circumstances surrounding the invention of the Parallel Campaign demonstrate, things get going when someone puts the right metaphor into circulation. Ulrich notes in his diaries: We unhesitatingly talk of dinner forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, rifle forks, road forks, and other forks. Underlying all these fork

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impressions is a common ‘forkness’: it is not in them as a common nucleus, but it might almost be said that it is nothing more than a comparison possible for each of them. For they do not all even need to be similar to one another: it is already sufficient if one leads to another, if you go from one to the next, as long as neighboring members are similar to one another . . . and so one travels excitedly from one end of the path to the other, hardly knowing oneself how one has traversed it. (1279)

Underlying Ulrich’s analysis of how one gets from one point to the next is, of course, the fundamental question of what makes history possible. It is noteworthy that transitions come about by the recognition of similarities that do not originate in a Platonic idea or a recovery from amnesia but are spontaneously created. While analogy relates the things standing next to each other, things further apart in a series of comparisons may be completely different from one another, which implies that relationships among elements are established by contiguity. Furthermore, Ulrich’s examples point to a specific type of analogy. They are all examples of the rhetorical figure of catachresis. According to its common definition, catachresis transfers the name of a familiar object to an object without a proper name. The recognition of a new object is made possible by way of comparison with an already familiar object. Evidently, then, it is the figure of catachresis that brings into the world possibilities that have hitherto not been realized. It opens new vistas, and it thus allows for new moves. It clears the path. However, this linguistic innovation comes about entirely by chance. Primarily responsible for a vocabulary’s extension, catachresis is the venue of creative minds. Rhetorical figures originate in the strategic use of a given language. As is clear from the novel’s plot, no rules or conventions exist that govern their implementation. This is in particular true for the figure of catachresis. As the Greek etymology of the term reminds us, it is a figure that originates in using (chrēsthai) a word against (kata) the rules. It is therefore usually defined as the misapplication of a word or as the use of a strained figure of speech, such as a mixed metaphor. In the novel, Musil gives a prime example when alluding to the rhetorical excesses typical of the mass media. It is up to the aesthetic sensibility of the people to decide if the phrase “a racehorse of genius” is a manifestation of wit or merely a badly mixed metaphor. Here we are again reminded of Kant, who defined “genius” as that spirit (Geist) or creative principle (lebendige Prinzip) responsible for an intuition that transcends conceptualization and can never be adequately communicated in language (Critique

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of Judgment A 191/B 194). To express an aesthetic idea, a creative use of language is required. It is deeply ironic on Musil’s part to use mixed metaphors to portray lack of creativity. Witness, for example, the way the narrator draws on such traditional symbols as wings and feathers for the immateriality of the soul or mind (Geist). Imaginative associations lead him to the prosaic image of a poultry farm as a simile for the spiritual branch of a society based on the division of labor. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wings; in Schiller’s time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our day such a person seems to have something the matter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of the people’s hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone’s ability to keep track of them, which is just as well, because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. (MWQ 389)

Musil’s irony undercuts the cliché — ”thoughts taking wings” — by associating it with an idea that leads into regions far less sublime — a “poultry farm.” This droll juxtaposition appears to contradict Ulrich’s proposition that the times for geniuses are over. Poetic imagination still prevails, albeit within the satiric denunciation of its absence. However, irony by itself is merely a negative manifestation of creativity: it is unable to assert the creative subject. Throughout the novel, the agent of creativity is variously referred to as genius (Genie), spirit (Geist), or force (Kraft). It is circumscribed as the “compulsion to that loosening and binding of the world” that “jumbles things up, sorts them out, and forms new combinations” (162). Ulrich speculates that “the only thing wrong was that mind itself was devoid of mind” (“daß der Geist selbst keinen Geist habe,” 164). General Stumm attempts to bring order into the intricate manifestations of the civilian mind (Geist) by treating the ideas circulating in Diotima’s salon as if they were armies at war with each other. His approach is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s famous exclamation that truth is nothing but an army of rhetorical figures. Musil places into Stumm’s mouth the profound insight that “for some indefinable reason, order seems to bring on bloodshed” (569). Accordingly, the imposition of order is also always accompanied by a certain affect. This, too, is evident in the way the Parallel Campaign comes about. A journalist’s metaphor (“Year of Austria”) carries the day

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because it is a moving metaphor, literally transferring things, because it allows everyone to move on. The metaphor inspires, invigorates, and elevates everyone. Yet the initiated movement is blocked the moment the campaign switches from the comparative to the superlative mood. The quest for a supreme idea, that is to say, the quest for the whole rather than for just another part of the whole, produces nothing but paralysis. No one who speaks of the greatest and most important thing in the world means anything that really exists. What peculiar quality of the world would it be equivalent to? It all amounts to one thing being greater and more important, or more beautiful and sadder, than another; in other words, the existence of a hierarchy of values and the comparative mode, which surely implies an end point and a superlative? (MWQ 95)

Each “thing” can only be recognized in relation to another being or “thing.” The search for the greatest idea, however, produces a blockage that breeds fear and resentment, which ultimately leads to the eruption of violence. The single greatest idea is a concept no mind could fathom. We are again reminded of Kant and his notion of the sublime. In contradistinction to the aesthetic idea expressed in witty analogies, the sublime refers to an idea of reason that transcends human imagination (Critique of Judgment A 191, B 194). It does not come about as the product of the harmonious interplay of the mind’s faculties, but produces their segregation. The sublime manifests itself in the undoing of the same, in the interruption of the Seinesgleichen (here, in the meaning of “the like of it”), of which, according to Ulrich, history is made. The experience of the sublime can thus only mark an eschatological turn of history, as in the case of war, or as in the mystical encounter when history appears suspended. In a society where names and language lose their social function, human memory, the source of any narrative, falls by the wayside as well. As Musil’s narrator states in the opening chapter, the ability to remember something is a survival tool harking back to nomadic times, when it was relied upon to recognize the tribe’s seasonal feeding grounds (4). In 1926, Musil cited his bad memory as his reason for not writing a historical novel (GW II, 939). Indeed, his wife maintained that he had often been unable to remember what the date was on any particular day (B 1435). The spatial rather than chronological organization of Musil’s notebooks is symptomatic of this. The few exceptions are significant: “Berlin, August, war” (D 173). Yet even this reference is incomplete

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with regard to the exact date. Ulrich reveals a similar incapacity, hardly paying any attention to world events that are on everyone else’s mind: Was there a war actually going on in the Balkans or not? Some sort of intervention was undoubtedly going on, but whether it was war was hard to tell. So much was astir in the world. There was another new record for high-altitude flight; something to be proud of. If he was not mistaken, the record now stood at 37,000 meters and the man’s name was Jouhoux. A black boxer had beaten the white champion; the new holder of the world title was Johnson. The President of France was going to Russia; there was talk of world peace being at stake. A newly discovered tenor was garnering fees in South America that had never been equaled even in North America. A terrible earthquake had devastated Japan — the poor Japanese. In short, much was happening, there was great excitement everywhere around the turn of 1913–14. (390)

The ostensible irony of Ulrich’s interior monologue ridicules the “excitement” the latest news stirs up among the public. It is notable that most of the items Ulrich recalls are in some way associated with violence. However, no particular significance is accorded to any single item. The examples are treated alike because this is the way events of this kind are usually reported. If we consider how the mass media report news, history forever seems the same: But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensations, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened. A possible synopsis: the new cure for syphilis was making . . . Research into plant metabolism was moving . . . The conquest of the South Pole seemed . . . Professor Steinach’s experiments with monkey glands were arousing . . . Half the details could easily be left out without making much difference. (390)

Curiously, Ulrich’s synopsis leaves out the predicates that would indicate the precise time, place, and manner of a specific event. He thereby withholds the information that might distinguish each event from “its like” (Seinesgleichen). Indeed, in the passage cited earlier, the author performs precisely the type of elision that occurs in his hero’s mind: Jack Johnson was the first African-American prizefighter to win the world championship, albeit not in 1913 but in 1910. By 1913, Johnson had had to flee the U.S. because he had violated America’s then-sacred racial code by marrying a white woman. Yet nothing particular regarding this human tragedy and political drama is mentioned in the text. The example shows how each of the news items Ulrich happens to recall could,

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were it differently treated, reveal something about the times. Each item harbors a story. However, to a great extent historical consciousness depends on the cultural conventions used to record history: What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen and not by chance something merely approximating it or something related [etwas Ähnliches oder seinesgleichen]. But this is precisely what no one can say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do . . . . (390)

Towards the end of the second part of the novel, Ulrich observes that “to remember” something presupposes a society wherein an old man losing his last tooth “may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories” (708). In such an unhurried society the past consists of a string of events still remembered because of their significance. What is remembered is the importance of an event rather than what happened. On the other hand, newspapers and similar technological devices create history that is no longer shaped by the selectivity of human memory. For modern man, history occurs only insofar as it is recorded in a medium that is objective. As a consequence, the historical consciousness of modern man consists mainly in knowing the facts. These facts provide an inexhaustible source for competing interpretive models. Furthermore, since archival documentation is not subject to decay in the short term, the past is always present and no longer passing. Whereas in former times the past was made into a function of the present, today the present is put into the service of an ever-growing past. The past suffocates the present. Nietzsche spoke of a transformation of history into an accumulation of uninspiring knowledge. His critical analysis of historicism as the symptom of modernity is clearly in the background of Ulrich’s thought. For Nietzsche, the obsession with the historical that marks modern consciousness turns every living being into an allegory of time and death. That is precisely what happens to Ulrich when, riding a streetcar, he reflects upon the meaning of history. As Ulrich is being shuttled through the city, his meandering thoughts become one with the motion of the streetcar. Conspicuously, the streetcar provides an image to which Ulrich’s mind can attach itself, so that his flight of thoughts leads to some sort of conclusion. The streetcar provides for a metaphorical movement

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by which the world surrounding Ulrich is suddenly transfigured into a landscape depleted of life: Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian traffic, though oddly enough in the end there does seem to be a path across it, that very “path of history” of which nobody knows the starting point. This business of serving as “the stuff of history” infuriated Ulrich. The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hundred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being processed into “the future.” A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines — he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demeaning stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head. (391)

Though the streetcar is an invention that has forged a new path in history, it does not convey humankind into a future that will be qualitatively different from its past. In this sense, Ulrich’s thoughts adhere to what Nietzsche called the suprahistorical point of view characteristic of a man for whom “the world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment” (cf. Untimely Meditations, 66). Indeed, Ulrich does not really care for the success of the patriotic campaign. He scoffs at the antiquated idealism underlying Arnheim’s Hegelian notion “that nothing absurd happens in history” (185). For Ulrich, “human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason” (391). Quite opposed to the teleological speculations of the great Enlightenment philosopher whose name he invokes, Ulrich does not believe in Kant’s sublime idea that by a ruse of nature mankind progresses asymptotically towards an ever more reasonable world. Though individuals may transcend themselves, mankind as a whole merely fluctuates around a statistical mean of the possible extremes of human behavior. Mankind as a whole simply repeats itself, maintaining roughly the same level of morality throughout history. “You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat,” Ulrich says as he rebukes Clarisse’s request to campaign for a Nietzsche-Year, “but you cannot turn great ideas into reality” (383).

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For Ulrich, any idea loses “its wings and its mystery” as soon as it becomes realized (384). Yet these seemingly defeatist remarks do not imply the position of a nihilist. As Musil tries to show in The Man Without Qualities, how a person’s life is related to history, how history happens to us, and, above all, how we let it happen to us, is a far more complex issue than presumed by Gerda Fischel’s question whether one should or should not believe in historical progress. Isn’t the idea of serving some future beneficial cause to blame for civilization’s tendency to sacrifice the living present in the name of some abstract notion of “history”? This is in essence the “historical” problem of modern times. Political engagement is thereby mistaken for something entirely different, as exemplified in the case of Diotima, who, for fear of being in love with Arnheim, uses the Parallel Campaign to project, “to mobilize,” and “to shift” her feelings “to the drama of history” (178). Moreover, for those who, like Arnheim or Hans Sepp, think that history has its own laws and is governed by providence, it is just a matter of finding rather than inventing the right cause. Arnheim proposes an idealistic interpretation of the facts. Yet for Ulrich, a political act worth embracing would be one that would radically interrupt the bad infinity characteristic of modern times and invert the inversion by which the future is envisioned as a continuum of the present. For Ulrich, “history is made without authors” (391). Unlike narratives, history is without finality: “It evolves not from some inner center but from the periphery. Set in motion by trifling causes” (ibid). Human history indicates no providence, and it traces no rising trajectory. In The Man Without Qualities history moves forward like a race horse or a car, a train or a streetcar, but it never has a final destiny. Rather, each new phase of the historical process ultimately ends in a trajectory downward. Though the history of mankind would not simply repeat itself if it were reset and started all over again, the outcome would nevertheless be roughly the same. Each of its cycles would result in a movement from high to low, from superior to base. Musil illustrates the course of history with an example from Ulrich’s former days in the military: Ulrich recalled a similar experience dating from his army days. The squadron rides in double file, and “Passing on orders” is the drill; each man in turn whispers the given order to the next man. So if the order given up front is “Sergeant major move the head of the column,” it comes out the other end as “Eight troopers to be shot at once,” or something like that. And this is just how world history is made. (392)

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Ulrich’s simile illustrates a cycle of repetitions that increasingly produce imprecision and gaps. Certainly, it is not by accident that the example chosen refers to a situation in which it is an act of communication that fails and ends up in a firing line. The society portrayed in The Man Without Qualities is entirely constituted by similarly infelicitous speech acts. As the title to chapter 98 explicitly states, the novel is about “a country that came to grief because of a defect in language” (484). The Parallel Campaign evolves and derails because of errant speech acts. People are described as being perplexed by their mutual misunderstandings and the unsatisfactory results of their public debates. They are constantly trying to find the rule that would make successful communication of their good intentions possible. Yet the harder they try, the less they are reassured about the possibility that such a rule exists at all. Significantly, it is at the moment he recalls his experience from his army days that Ulrich, still riding in the streetcar, suddenly arises, and feeling only disgust for being pushed around by the latest whim of the times (manifested by the streetcar), he leaves the vehicle to go the rest of his way on foot (391). Thus, Ulrich tries to do literally what, at an earlier instance in the novel, is suggested to be the secret wish of many Kakanians, namely to “get off the train of time” and to “jump clear” (28). Walking through the streets, Ulrich’s thoughts now culminate in the idea that “inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course” (“Es liegt im Lauf der Weltgeschichte ein gewisses Sich-Verlaufen,” 392). Ironically, that is what literally happens as Ulrich reflects on history’s erroneous path. While arriving at a conclusion that has the form of a witty aphorism, Ulrich takes the wrong path. He realizes that he has gone “slightly astray” (392). The passage seems to provide an ironic answer to the question raised in the title of chapter 68: “Must people be in accord with their bodies?” As in other instances, Ulrich’s thoughts are interrupted just as he confronts his mirror image. A shop window he is passing shows him his reflection. However, the German expression for losing one’s way (sich verlaufen) is sometimes also used to refer to something that simply fizzles away and comes to nothing. In this sense, the expression does not so much indicate error as rather a weakening and vanishing presence, a state of entropy, due to loss of energy, substance, or form. It is also in this latter sense that in this case Ulrich’s thought and action prefigure the fate of the Parallel Campaign — and, perhaps, Musil’s novel.

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Notes 1

Ulrich and Agathe’s incestuous relationship is founded on a manipulation of their father’s testament. Both disavow the society and culture that their father’s life represented, including respect for a father’s last will. On the other hand, Ulrich’s defiance is not characterized as the symptom of an Oedipal conflict. He does not challenge the father’s privilege of laying down the law. Neither does he openly contest the law. Rather than oppose his father, he simply ignores him. He does not hesitate to ask his father’s help in buying a luxury home, or to rely on his patronymic’s reputation whenever it is socially convenient. He disobeys his father’s authority without ever directly opposing it. Ulrich’s initial opposition to Agathe’s intent to change the testament is not motivated by a son’s respect for the father’s will. Rather, it contradicts Ulrich’s philosophy of “passive resistance,” his refusal to be drawn into a relation by which one’s own position is merely affirmed through negation of another. For Ulrich, the issue is not to overthrow the law in the name of another law, as it is for the young people associated with Gerda and Sepp. The world has become too complex to provide any clear notion of who or what should be opposed. 2

Musil’s rejection of a notion that was dear to many critics and scholars is most evident from his correspondence with the literary critic Walther Petry. Disturbed by the aesthetic categories underlying Petry’s positive review of The Man Without Qualities, Musil calls the demand that a novel must represent a totality, according to fashion or realism, “dogmatic” (BN 13). The late discovery of an exchange of letters between Musil and Petry proves my point that Musil distinguished between storytelling and novel writing 3

Cf. Georg Lukács, “Erzählen oder Beschreiben? Zur Diskussion über Naturalismus und Formalismus” (1936), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971). Translated by A. D. Kahn as “Narrate or Describe?” in Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and other Essays. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970: 110–48. 4

Continuing recent attempts in the field of narratology to examine in a systematic fashion unusual varieties of narrative, Martin FitzPatrick in an essay on subjunctive narrative (Narrative 10.3 [2002], 244–61) discusses the use of the subjunctive as a device that forces the reader to pay attention not only to the what and how but also to the “point” of narrative, i.e., the question why someone is moved to tell a story in the first place. According to his analysis, “subjunctive narration disrupts the exchange between story and discourse in order to concentrate the reader’s attention to point” (245). After a formal analysis of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as well as of other examples from modern American literature, FitzPatrick concludes that “what lies at the heart of subjunctive narrative” is a focus on the capacities of narrative “as an invention rather than as mediated information” (259). This is well put; however, in moving beyond such a formal analysis, I would like to emphasize that Musil’s construction of a “subjunctive narrative” highlights the fact that there is always a desire for narrative. “Most people relate to themselves as story tellers,” since “the impression that their life has a ‘course’ is somewhat their refuge from chaos” (MWQ 709). A narrative discourse is an expression not of an inward “substance” turned outward, as it were, but of a desire for meaning whose figurative expressions are its manifestations.

5: Moosbrugger, Frauenzimmer, and the Law

T

HE USUALLY STEADFAST DIOTIMA becomes quite irritated when her

impertinent cousin Ulrich evokes the Frauenmörder Moosbrugger in her presence: “Why are you always talking about criminals? Crime seems to hold a special fascination for you. What do you suppose that means?” Moosbrugger — the allegorical impersonation of Kakania — is introduced as someone who has captured Ulrich’s attention despite the primitive voyeurism underlying the publicity of his case. It is shortly before the arrival of the first of three letters from Ulrich’s father that we initially hear about the sex murderer. The letter reminds Ulrich of his social position as son of an established family. It therefore stands in immediate contrast to what was related about Ulrich’s interest in Moosbrugger in the previous chapter. Ulrich pays heed to the father’s admonition, but uses his visit to Count Stallburg to ask for clemency on Moosbrugger’s behalf. It is worth noting that in the second letter, the father deals directly with Ulrich’s fascination with the criminal by arguing for a very restrictive application of the insanity clause. Ulrich does not believe in the notion of guilt and personal accountability. He repeatedly states that the jurist’s arcane debate about free will is incomprehensible, and he comes across as an ardent defender of social engineering: Who could still be captivated by the thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but functional values, so that the goodness of works depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people’s qualities are exploited? (MWQ 33)

For Ulrich, the social sciences have already refuted the notion that man is the sovereign master of his own affairs. People do not totally control their actions. Indeed, their actions are re-actions — instinctive responses to impulses that are largely unconscious. Drawing from physics, Ulrich uses field theory to illustrate his view: It would be a step closer to the truth to say that it is I, myself, who arouses in the other the capacity for attracting or repelling me, and even more accurate to say that the other somehow brings out in me the

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requisite qualities, and so on. We can never know where it begins; the whole thing is a functional interdependence, like the one between two bouncing balls or two electric circuits. We’ve known all that for a long time now, but we still prefer to regard ourselves as the cause, the primal cause, in the magnetic field of emotions around us; even when someone admits that he is merely imitating someone else, he makes it sound like an active achievement of his own. (515)

Ulrich’s position is clearly that of a relativist. For Ulrich, criminals are not entirely different from law-abiding citizens; similarly the insane are not different from the healthy. “Our ordinary state is an averaging out of all the crimes of which we are capable” (516). The exceptions prove the rule. Criminals are merely borderline cases of potential social behavior. They are statistical variants and represent as such a calculable deviation from the norm. These people are not “like us” (seinesgleichen) nor do they represent a radical other. Accordingly, society should free itself from ancient notions of justice that hold out promise for some form of retribution. According to Ulrich, it should instead concentrate its moral efforts on prevention and rehabilitation, so as to reduce the amount of disruptive social behavior. Ulrich rejects his father’s Kantian argument and argues for a law reform that would take psychological and sociological factors into account. It is obvious that people are morally disturbed by the Moosbrugger case. Their irrational responses based on unchecked emotions and feelings are the reason for the continuation of a criminal justice system that has outlived its usefulness. But Ulrich demands to know what better reason there could be for a more rational attitude towards crime and punishment than the idea that it would improve society as a whole. Ulrich says to Bonadea: “A human being can really do no wrong; what is wrong can only be an effect of something he does” (281). Earlier in the novel it has already been stated that “What you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is” (27). This implies, however, that one should not desire what one cannot achieve, as is the case, for example, with regard to Ulrich’s adolescent dream of achieving greatness. Happiness depends on the realization of a person’s true abilities. Therefore, it also depends on a person’s skill at mastering his or her life, and therefore on a person’s ability to judge the means that are necessary to achieve ends. This kind of judgment must be made without knowing a priori rules. It requires the wisdom that comes from experience. Yet we are told that the industrial environment has inundated the ancient notions of wisdom and experience. The rational organization of

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modern society undermines the wisdom that underlies cultural tradition. Its modern equivalent is the “psychotechnic” Ulrich alludes to. However, aside from the old question raised by Plato as to whether the good can be achieved without contemplating the just, in what sense does a more rational organization of society imply a happier society? Of course this is one of the more or less explicitly raised questions in the erudite discussions concerning the Moosbrugger case that take place between Ulrich and his various interlocutors. Needless to say, had he known the answers, the author would have written a philosophical treatise rather than a novel. For Musil, something that defies rational discourse needs to be made understood. “Literature is not innocent,” Bataille once wrote. That does not imply that literature is immoral. To quote Bataille: “A rigorous morality results from complicity in the 1 knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.” Musil argued similarly in his first published essay after achieving sudden fame with Young Törless, which was entitled Das Unanständige und Kranke in der Kunst (The Obscene and Pathological in Art, 1911). The essay expresses his views on a censorship controversy provoked by the Berlin police in 1911. Officials had confiscated printed excerpts from 2 Flaubert’s diary because they contained sexual allusions. In his essay, Musil goes so far as to state that “art ought to be permitted not only to depict the immoral and the completely reprehensible, but also to love them” (PS 5, emphasis mine). However, the critic should not confuse the writer’s representation with the subject presented. The artist’s “love” for the obscene and pathological is entirely different in nature from the actual desire to gratify instincts that are perceived as, and might indeed be, perverse. As Musil put it, “To experience the need for representations means — even if desires in real life should provide the impulse — not to have a pressing need to gratify them directly” (PS 6). In other words, lit3 erature and art do not act upon desires but instead they expose them. Literature and art provide a lucid encounter with evil because they articulate that which goes beyond conscious experience and language. In an attempt to define the intuition of a writer, Musil distinguished between two ways of inquiry, their difference being that between “determining something and finding reasons for it” (D 255). By “reasons” Musil means the psychological motives underlying action. While the scientist establishes a causal nexus, the writer attempts a teleological explanation. Not unlike the prosecutor in criminal court, the writer constructs the motives behind a deed (ibid.). “What is incalculably multiple are only the soul’s motives [Motive], and with these psychology has nothing to do” (PS 64*). Musil understands motive literally as that which puts into

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motion (movere, movens) (GW II, 1333). It is that which ultimately moves one to act or not act upon an impulse. Usually, more than a single motive is to be found for a person’s action, and some motives are more common than others. The true writer is only interested in uncommon and unusual motives (D 255–56). As Musil writes: “Where art has value, it shows things that few have seen” (PS 7). In a letter to a friend, Musil stated “I do not want people to understand but to make them feel” (B 24). Accordingly, works of art help us “understand” by moving us. But they move us because we share in the motives that they present to us. This is a different kind of “understanding.” What is considered obscene and pathological might be reprehensible from a moral and legal point of view but could nevertheless still be part of a good and, in the words of the author, “healthy” life. Here, Musil follows Nietzsche, who argued that good and evil are notions that are rooted in what people consider productive or harmful to their wellbeing. They are the names of basic affects such as pleasure and pain. Between the sensations of pleasure and pain lie a whole range of emotions and feelings whose precise meaning Ulrich wants to find out. Society, however, tends to consider certain emotions and feelings pathological, when what is actually at stake is an issue of moral acceptability. It is thus interesting to note how Musil defines the true focus of artistic representation within this liberal conception of art’s socio-political function. What is of concern to the writer is not the pathological or obscene as such but the multitudinous connections (Beziehungen) it maintains to the context in which it occurs: To experience the need for (artistic) representation means — even if desires in real life should provide the impulse — not to have a pressing need to gratify them directly. It means to depict something: to represent its connections to a hundred other things [. . .] and even if these hundred other things were to be obscene and pathological: their connections are not, and the tracing of the connections, never. (PS 6)

Crimes of passion against women are a recurrent theme in Musil’s writings. A particularly drastic example is the eerie narrative “Der Vorstadtgasthof,” which relates the story of a man who, in a moment of sexual ecstasy, mutilates a woman by biting off her tongue. The original draft of the story was found among the author’s posthumous papers, which included the first drafts of The Man Without Qualities. Therefore, 4 it must have been written in 1920 or before. With only a few, but some quite significant changes, Musil published the text no less than three times during his lifetime. The last time was in 1931, when it was pub-

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lished as a limited edition illustrated by the now-forgotten Expressionist 5 artist Richard Ziegler. The text is written in the genre of a minimalist narrative, and is only a few pages in length. The narrative discourse is primarily focused on the male character’s observations, inner thoughts, and feelings. The reader hardly learns anything about the man’s physical appearance. In contrast to the male figure’s anonymity, numerous indicators suggest the female character should be imagined as a middle-aged, married, and probably somewhat matronly woman from the middle class. The story begins late at night with the couple entering a modest inn on the outskirts of the city. For the reader, the Vorstadt is associated with the lower class, prostitutes and other social outcasts. It suggests a location where society’s moral codes and laws have been suspended. The couple arrives at the inn only shortly before Sperrstunde, the hour at which all taverns are by law obliged to close. However, in Musil’s story, the legal term Sperrstunde — which means the hour (Stunde) when the innkeeper has to bolt (sperren) the door — seems to serve not only a descriptive but also a metaphorical function. The two verbs öffnen (to open) and schließen (to lock) recur frequently in the text; the latter is modified with one of the many prefixes German offers to express the multiple ways by which things can be locked or unlocked. Indeed, starting with its very first sentence, the text is saturated with images of matters being put behind barriers or under special surveillance. Reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß, as well as of the red chamber in Musil’s Young Törless, the interior of the inn is described as a labyrinth of dim hallways taking sharp turns and leading to steep staircases. To get to their room, the protagonists seem to wander the hallways of the inn to their very end. When they are finally led into the room by the accompanying maid, the narrator remarks that the candlelight needed some time to penetrate the chamber’s oppressive darkness (MWQ 1704). Thus everything in the first three paragraphs of the text hints at resistance to entry or exposure, ominously foreshadowing what will happen when the couple is finally left alone. Overcome by inhibition, the male character appears incapable of proceeding with the ritual the situation requires: “Opening her stays — that would be like opening the doors of a room” (MWQ 1704*). The analogy between opening the woman’s corset and opening a door occurs to the man as he realizes he cannot proceed with what he calls “taking a bird in his hand” (“einen Vogel in die Hand zu nehmen”; ibid.). As in other instances where Musil uses the motif of the bird, the word’s semantic meaning as well as its first letter V carry a strong sexual

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connotation. Here, it signals to the reader that the man’s inhibition is caused by an anxiety associated with the thought of having sexual intercourse with the woman. From the perspective of his inner mind, however, this anxiety is expressed in an image that transfigures the woman’s body into the space of a domestic scene — as if Musil was inspired to revive the figurative meaning of Frauenzimmer (literally, a woman’s room), which in German is a term for a woman that originated by way of metonymy in the early seventeenth century and which is generally rejected today. Opening her stays — that was like opening the doors of a room. A table was standing in the middle. At it sat the man, the son. He observed it secretly, hostilely, fearfully, full of arrogance. He would have liked to throw a grenade, or tear the wallpaper to tatters. (MWQ 1704)

It is not quite clear who is actually supposed to be the observer of this scene. However, the room to which the maid led the couple is one of three rooms located in the hotel’s attic. Arriving at the three doors before entering, the man asked the maid if the other two rooms were taken (besetzt). According to the maid, they are not. In a similar situation again involving three agents, the man expects to find the woman being occupied by two people who are said to sit (sitzen) at her table, a man and a 7 son. Thus, the metaphorical undercurrent of the passage suggests that it is still the man in the hotel who observes the imagined scene. He might see himself represented by either the son or the man (father). In either case, the man’s anxiety is provoked by the domestic habits associated with women’s clothing. For him, women are dressed in such a way that they are locked and tied up — even their feet. Speaking in the hope of thereby delaying the anxiety-ridden ritual, the joke he tries to make comes out of his mouth as a rather odd if not outright insulting remark: It is true, isn’t it, strong women [starke Frauen] lace their feet too. Along with their shoes. And above the [rim] the flesh spills over a little, and there is a little inimitable [unnachahmlich] smell there. A little 8 smell that exists nowhere else in the world. (MWQ 1704*) [GW I, 1982].

The passage shows the degree to which the narrative discourse is immersed in metaphorical associations symptomatic of the male character’s psyche. The strange comment that “strong women lace their feet too” could be interpreted as an entirely subjective impression on part of the male character. However, it could just as easily be read as a reference

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to an actual custom, producing a somewhat blurred and altered reality 9 effect from the character’s point of view. With regard to the latter, the reader must remember that formerly women were indeed obliged to 10 augment their natural figure by binding themselves from head to toe. However, in the stranger’s mind this particular custom is associated with the emanation of an odd smell that cannot be reproduced or represented. An odor, in the words of the text, that is unnachahmlich (inimitable). This shift from the visual to the olfactory implies regression on the part of the male figure. The fetishistic image of the bound feet suggests an act of force preventing the exposure of an otherwise devouring amorphous mass, a mass that very much denotes the maternal body. The woman appears restricted because of a “logic” that is operative in the text and according to which the Sperrstunde moves, by way of a metonymy, from the gate of the inn onto her body. For the male character, that movement of recurrent barriers never stops. From his train of thought, it becomes clear that there will always be new barriers to overcome: The idea “Open up!” tortured him. Like a child’s toy. That’s what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me. (MWQ 1705)

The barrier that will always be present both inhibits and provokes aggression in the male character. Finally, that ambivalence erupts into a violent act of mutilation. But since the transgression takes away from the woman the ability to kiss as well as the ability to speak, it re-establishes the barrier between the two characters: “Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer Walzel?” She took these for technical terms from men’s talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your K. do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, whatever the foreheads that are sitting above those lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then, she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: “. . . Rather Walzel. My husband will be gone for a week.” At this moment he bit off her tongue. (MWQ 1705*)

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In his diaries, Musil characterized the story as “a dream of a logician” (D 229). He originally planned to use the story as the opening chapter in The Man Without Qualities, introducing it as a gruesome dream Ulrich is supposed to have had after reading about the Moosbrugger case in the papers. However, the reader was not immediately supposed to know whether the “dreadful chapter” was to be taken as a realistic description of a true event, nor how it would fit into the novel’s plot (D 229). According to Helmut Arntzen’s comprehensive philological commentary, its inclusion as a dream sequence would have anticipated the “negation of conventional speech” that, according to Arntzen, takes place in the 11 novel’s second book, where Ulrich meets his sister Agathe. Obviously, Arntzen does not think highly of the woman’s lingua. He rather bluntly identifies with the position of the male character, whose violent act is interpreted as poetic aggression against inauthentic speech. So, woman once again becomes a figure for chatter and empty speech. Although at one point the man in the story is indeed annoyed by the woman’s talk (MWQ 1705), her tongue is not only referred to as an organ of language. Moreover, the woman’s chatter already constitutes part of the transgression that has occurred since the couple entered the inn. Caused “perhaps,” as the narrator states, “by some unconscious association of sounds,” the violent act seems to literally result from an inadvertent 12 move of the tongue. The intimate situation suspends the pragmatic constraints that under normal circumstances secure the referential and semantic functions of language. Violence erupts in the absence of communication and mutual understanding. Thus, each of the characters appears trapped in the imaginary realm of fantasies that reflect their incompatible individual fears, needs, and desires. Above all, the mutilated woman is a victim of forces over which she has no control. She is put in a position that is not of her own making but is the effect of an unspoken law whose transgression causes the linguistic signifiers to slide. In a diary entry immediately following his writing of the first draft of the story, Musil asks himself if the character who appears is really a woman: In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal’s den of imagination, a condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth? (MWQ 1706)

It seems as though the author is aware that he has not done justice to the female character. The few details provided about her evoke the cliché of an adulterous woman looking for an erotic adventure while her

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husband is out of town. The woman appears as a mother punished by an infantile son in an act of inverse and metonymically displaced castration. It reaffirms a societal order in which women are seen only as potential mothers and men behave as their latent homosexual sons. Throughout most of the text it is apparent that the male protagonist’s point of view prevails. Indeed, the voice of the narrator becomes suspiciously broken. Even where the narrator’s voice and focus is clearly identifiable as transmitting “his” observation and knowledge, it is immediately tinged by the 13 use of metaphors that betray the viewpoint of the male figure. The narrator does not keep his own tongue. Thus, the reader is forced to judge the events told in the story. Although the text appears to display the type of subversive writing that Julia Kristeva called the semiotic, the regression to a pre-symbolic order is clearly not a fortuitous one. The destruction of the symbolic order is not a return to the phallic but to a castrated mother. Bereft of her tongue, the mutilated woman can be read as an allegorical figure for the disfigurement of the narrator’s voice. By not sustaining the perspective of a third person, which is equivalent to speaking from the position of the law, the narrator’s voice vacillates between the voices of the two figures that inhabit the woman’s body in the male character’s imagination: the father and the son. In other words, the narrator vacillates between respect for the law and empathy for the agent of its transgression. In this way, the narrator himself displays the ambivalence characteristic of the male character. Rather than calling the deed an act of “transgression” as Kristeva does, it would be more exact to refer to it as an act of perversion. After all, transgression presupposes a law to be transgressed. But the world portrayed in The Man Without Qualities is a 14 confusing world precisely because there is no law. As the “dream of a logician” that Musil attributed to Ulrich, the references and allusions to the sexual murderer in The Man Without Qualities can hardly be missed. Moosbrugger’s pathological character is related to his linguistic incompetence. His inability to express himself in speech denies him access to the symbolic order inherent in society’s customs and institutions. Interestingly though, Musil allows Moosbrugger to be astutely aware of what exactly keeps him from being like other people. At one point, Moosbrugger senses “that it was this trick with words that gave them the power to do as they pleased with him. He had the feeling of simple people that the educated ought to have their tongues cut out” (MWQ 254). Without tongues, everyone would share Moosbrugger’s predicament of being barred from the order of things. However, during the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Moosbrugger’s alienation from words refers not just to his courtroom experience, where lawyers

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and experts argue over whether or not the insanity clause is applicable in his case. It is said that he has had great difficulty in mastering the rules of communicative language all his life. This is most evident when the narrative discourse relates the character’s thoughts and feelings. From Moosbrugger’s point of view, he is fighting a battle for his “rights.” However, it is precisely when he reflects on the meaning of that idea that conceptual language fails him. In uttering what appears to be a tautology, Moosbrugger in fact makes a terminological leap in his conclusion: Moosbrugger considered what his rights were. He couldn’t say. But they were everything he had been cheated of all his life. The moment he thought of that he swelled with emotion. His tongue arched and started to move like a Lippizaner stallion in his zeal to pronounce the word nobly enough: “My right,” he thought, drawing the word out as long as he could, to realize this concept, and thought, as if he were speaking to someone: “It’s when you haven’t done anything wrong, or something like that, isn’t it?” Suddenly he had it: “Right is justice. [Recht ist Jus.]” That was it. His right was his justice [Sein Recht war sein Jus].” (MWQ 255)

The illusion of linguistic mastery is described as a leap of Moosbrugger’s tongue. Unfortunately, the English translation cannot quite capture the pity-arousing irony embedded in Moosbrugger’s attempt to articulate precisely what, according to him, is missing in the judgment of his case. Moosbrugger believes to have found the right word for the injustice done him when the term Jus comes to mind. In Latin, the term refers to the body of the written law, and it is precisely in that sense that the word has been incorporated into daily Austrian parlance. By rendering the Latin word Jus with “justice” in her new translation of Musil’s novel, Sophie Wilkins ascribes to Moosbrugger more reflective power and understanding than he actually possesses in the original. It thus appears in the English translation as if Moosbrugger quite consciously brings forward the idea of justice underlying the law. But Moosbrugger is incapable of verbalizing such an idea, although, of course, it is a central theme of the novel. The idea of justice touches directly on Ulrich’s search for the right way to live and his discussions with Agathe regarding the immorality of criminal deeds. On the other hand, rendering Jus with law, as Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser in their earlier translation did, could suggest that the incarcerated Moosbrugger is suddenly realizing that it is only the law that defines one’s rights. After all, it is precisely the failure to realize his position under the law that has gotten Moosbrugger into trouble. This is made evident when his reflection on what consti-

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tutes a person’s right is superseded by the sudden memory of a painful event that occurred to him in his youth. It took place in a kitchen. Moosbrugger approached his master’s wife (die Meisterin) while making an obscene gesture, namely showing the woman his fist with the thumb sticking out between the middle and the forefinger. Other apprentices had told him that women could not resist such an overture. However, instead of the anticipated favorable response, he was severely beaten by the woman, as well as by his alarmed master. The memory of this scene is an analogy for what Moosbrugger is unable to express in words: “That was how they made a mockery and a shambles of his right” (“So hatte man sein Jus verhöhnt und geschla15 gen,” MWQ 256). The narrator’s ironic remark conflates the iconic rendering of the phallus with Moosbrugger’s rights. Furthermore, the recalled scene directly identifies the law with the position of the father: the one customarily invested with the power to grant or deny the son the phallus. However, it is important to note that in this case it is primarily the woman who performs the castration: “She hit him with the wood ladle in her hand, too fast for him to dodge the blow, right across the face; he realized it only when the blood began to trickle over his lips” (255). Rather than being a maternal figure, as suggested by her holding a wooden spoon, the woman executes the law. It then becomes clear why all women appear as nothing more than mere disguises of men for Moosbrugger. Throughout the novel, Moosbrugger’s paranoid fear is repeatedly related to the fact that he perceives women as representatives of their men. Indeed, one wonders if different sexes exist for Moosbrugger at all: “Behind those bitches the other man was always hiding to jeer at you. Come to think of it, didn’t she look like a man in disguise?” (73). Moosbrugger’s thought repeats the question Musil jotted down in his diary after he had written “Vorstadtgasthof”: “Is this a woman at all?” In this context, any details related to the description of Moosbrugger’s crime are quite significant. In keeping with realism’s wellestablished custom, Musil did not refrain from lifting entire stories from secondary sources. Karl Corino and others have pointed out how much 16 use the author made of the press. Apparently only a few changes sufficed to transform a well-publicized criminal case into an allegorical element befitting the context of the novel’s narrative. However, some of these minor changes are quite telling. For example, regarding the account of the mutilations suffered by Moosbrugger’s victim, the novel’s narrator mildly exaggerates by quoting the press as saying that “both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off” (67). Yet in the newspaper report that Musil used, only one breast is men-

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tioned. The author’s exaggeration radically alters the woman’s sex. But the organs that became mutilated also symbolize the woman’s predestined social role as a nurturing mother. It is worth noting, then, that Moosbrugger thinks of himself as “a child, if he compared her [the victim] to himself” (254). Furthermore, he is said to enjoy the physical care and attention he is given while in jail: The state had to feed them, bathe them, clothe them, and concern itself with their work, their health, their books, and their songs from the moment they had broken the law; it had never done these things before. Moosbrugger enjoyed this attention, even if it was strict, like a child who has succeeded in forcing its mother to notice it with anger.” (254)

In prison there are no women. Instead, a paternalistic state provides maternal care. Paradoxically, then, it is breaking the law of a phallocratic monarchy that guarantees a return to a caring mother within the very same system. However, that the state takes care of Moosbrugger like a mother her children indicates that Ulrich’s vision of a modern penal system is not far from becoming reality. The state has changed fundamentally when it is no longer lawyers and prosecutors, but doctors and psychologists who take care of the lawbreaker. Moosbrugger is handed over to the medical profession. He is kept alive, but under the condition of being reduced to an infant. This means that the state has become a social rather than a political agency. The state is no longer the arbiter of justice. Instead, it has become an agency that makes sure that society as a whole can function. When doctors replace prosecutors, the aim is no longer to deliver justice but to save life. The state machinery is put in the direct service of sustaining life, and the political and the social are no longer distinguished as two separate spheres. This fundamental role change indicates how alien the idea of the autonomous subject is to modern civilization. Moosbrugger is excluded from society but without being set free from society. He is kept in psychiatric care as a human being without any political rights. The “humanity” of the modern state robs him precisely of what he was fighting for — his “Jus”! Moosbrugger’s “crazy” fight for his rights is indeed the fight of someone who realizes that what he is lacking in order to become a human being are rights guaranteed by law. Once visibly represented in the figure of the emperor, the law has become put on hold by multiple discourses representing the infinite workings of a huge social machine. Ulrich is quite aware of the paradox that granting Moosbrugger parole is not necessary a solution to the fundamental problem underlying

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his case. Indeed, Ulrich’s pragmatic desire to solve society’s problems in a experimental way amounts in the end to the clearest affirmation of the “pseudoreality” Ulrich is trying to break out off. The “pseudoreality” he recognizes everywhere is already the realization of a society that functions without the presupposition of transcendental laws. This modern society is concerned with the continuation of life, the functioning of the whole. Car accidents and psychopaths are approached as statistical phenomena, neither of which poses any serious political questions. The meaning of such accidents is beside the point. Ulrich always remains silent when asked whether he would set Moosbrugger free if he could have his say. It is Arnheim, for a change, who clearly articulates the dilemma underlying Ulrich’s pragmatic stance. In the old days such a man would have been sent into wilderness. Even then he might have committed murder, but perhaps in a visionary state, like Abraham about to slaughter his son Isaac. There it is! We no longer have any idea of how to deal with such things, and there is no sincerity in what we do. (MWQ 694)

Arnheim emphasizes the fact that no one knows what to do with a case like Moosbrugger’s. Although the death penalty has become indefensible, since no one believes in guilt anymore, no one can seriously demand that Moosbrugger be set free either. He becomes excluded from society by being imprisoned in it. He is stopped, arrested, his case never decided but forever suspended. Thus, Moosbrugger represents life under the condition of a suspended law, life that has returned to its natural state before the law. Abandoned, Moosbrugger literally vanishes from the novel. As soon as a character comes to represent nothing more than life arrested in its natural state, there is indeed no story to be told.

Notes 1

Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London, New York: Marion Boyars, 1997), ix. 2 It should be noted that Musil also takes issue with restrictions that had been placed on a lecture by the Danish writer Karin Michaelis at the same time. The lecture was supposed to deal with “the critical age of women.” See editorial remarks in GW II, 1804. 3

Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Tatar endeavors to answer Diotima’s question in her book-length study about the recurrent motif of Lustmord in Weimar literature, film, and art. The First World War made it possible for German women to enter the work force in large numbers. However, the resulting social changes did not immediately transform the

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traditional view of women’s role in society. According to Tatar’s analysis, crimes of passion and child abuse became increasingly popular themes because they provided an opportunity to articulate the threat that liberated female sexuality posed to patriarchal order. Tatar thus wants to bring out the historical truth suppressed in scholarly interpretations steeped in male-gendered formalism. She observes that “insisting on disfigurement as a purely aesthetic principle can detract from facing the full consequences of what is at stake in the pictures we see and in the words we read” (9). However, to measure the extent to which art and literature is, as Tatar believes, “complicitious” in the crimes it represents, a careful analysis of the aesthetic form as well as of the medium, genre and style cannot simply be ignored. Moreover, a serious discussion of literature’s complicity with evil hardly seems possible without a critical analysis of the interdictions that are revealed while in the process of being transgressed. Helmut Arntzen, Musil−Kommentar zu sämtlichen zu Lebzeiten erschienener Schriften außer dem Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (Munich: Winkler, 1980) 244–45. The text of the final version has not yet been translated into English. A translation of the original draft, however, can be found in the new English edition of the MWQ by Sophie Wilkins, where it is included among excerpts from the author’s posthumous papers, translated by Burton Pike (vol. 2: 1703–6).

4

5

The fact that Musil was able to publish the story indicates that the theme of sexual crime was no longer taboo. The painter Richard Ziegler, a member of the Novembergruppe, an avant-garde association of Berlin artists organized during the revolutionary upheaval in 1918, is unknown today. Expressionistic in style, many of his works depict males and females in erotic situations. A critic reviewing a rare exhibition of Ziegler’s works at a gallery in London in 1986 noted that “one begins to sense a spicy peccadillo which the artist relishes in divulging to the viewer.” Sean Rainbird, “Georg Tappert and Richard Ziegler,” The Burlington Magazine, vol.128 (September 1986): 696. Two of Ziegler’s drawings are reproduced in Karl Corino’s informative Musil biography. 6 Peter Henninger, Der Buchstabe und der Geist: Unbewusste Determinierungen im Schreiben Robert Musils (Frankfurt, Bern: Peter Lang, 1980). 7 In the final version that Musil published, the oedipal structure so obvious in the original draft has been subtly toned down. It is now no longer a man and a son that are projected onto the woman but simply “the things of her life” (“die Dinge ihres Lebens”) (GW II, 631). 8

Burton Pike translates starke Frauen as “fat women” and unnachahmlicher Geruch as “unpleasant smell.” Although the female character commits adultery, the negative qualities attributed to her by Pike are not supported by the text. 9

The entire image is odd, and, like the female character in the text, the reader wonders whether shoes and shoelaces are mentioned for other reasons than their association with the woman’s stays. In his Musil biography, Karl Corino provides a photograph of a Hotel Goldene Birn that the author might have had in his mind when describing the Vorstadtgasthof. Corino does not tell his reader why he thinks that this is the original model, except for the fact that it is a place where Musil occasionally reserved rooms for visiting relatives. The hotel also carries a memorial tablet announcing that Balzac had once spent a night there. The French writer is addressed as

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“the poet of the demon of love and money” (“der Dichter der Dämonie der Liebe und des Geldes”). Corino (1988), 324–25. What is however striking about the photograph published by Corino is that it shows a hotel that houses a shoemaker’s shop on street level. Is it possible that this influenced the author’s imagination or that it led the biographer unconsciously to associate this particular hotel with Musil’s “Vorstadtgasthof”? 10

In his autobiography The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig provides a vivid description of this fashion unfathomable today. The male fashions alone — the high, stiff collar, the “choker” which made any easy motion impossible, the buttoned-up black frock coats with their flipping skirts, and the high “stovepipe” hats — are cause for mirth, to say nothing of the “lady” of former times in her careful and complicated attire, violating Nature in every single detail! The middle of her body laced into a wasp’s shape in a corset of stiff whalebone, blown out like a huge bell from the waist down, the neck closed in up to the chin, legs shrouded to the toes, the hair towering aloft with countless curls, locks, braids under a majestically swaying monstrosity of hands encased in gloves, even on the warmest summer day. [. . .] The mere make-up of such a “lady” — to say nothing of her social education — the putting on and taking off these robes, was a troublesome procedure and quite impossible without the help of others. First a countless number of hooks and eyes had to be fastened in the back from waist to neck, and the corset pulled tight with all the strength of the maid in attendance [. . .] before one could swathe and build her up with petticoats, camisoles, jackets, and bodices like so many layers of onion skin, until the last trace of her womanly and personal figure had fully disappeared (New York: Viking Press, 1945), 72–73. 11

H. Arntzen, 1980, 244: “Das Abbeißen der Zunge . . . hätte am Anfang des Romans etwas ausserordentlich Wesentliches bedeutet: die vorweggenommene Negation alles bloß konventionellen Sprechens.” 12

As one speaks in German of a falscher Zungenschlag if a person reveals an undertone or false voice. 13

Susan Erickson, “Musil’s ‘Der Vorstadtgasthof’: A Narrative Analysis,” Neophilologus 69 (1985): 101–14. 14

In other words, the old controversy over Musil’s indebtedness to psychoanalysis forgets that for psychoanalysis to function there must be some kind of transcendental law in place. Yet depending on how one understands a subject that has no qualities, the stipulation of transcendental laws is precisely what might no longer be possible. 15

Note that Moosbrugger’s obscene gesture evokes a repeated motif in the novel: the exposure of the phallus. So with the exhibitionist that Ulrich, Walter, Meingast, and Clarisse observe one day, and the scene where Clarisse, visiting the asylum, comes upon a masturbating patient. 16 Karl Corino, “Zerstückt und durchdunkelt: Der Sexualmörder Moosbrugger im ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ und sein Modell,” Musil-Forum 10 (1984):105–19. 17 Compare the report from the August 16, 1910 edition of the Illustrierter KronenZeitung, which Corino posits as the source of the Moosbrugger plot line: “Die Brust weist zwei absolut tödliche Stiche auf, die die Lungen und das Herz durchbohren. Ein Schnitt reicht von der rechten zur linken Schulter und trennt die eine Brust fast

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ab.” Karl Corino, “Zerstückt und durchdunkelt: Der Sexualmörder Moosbrugger im ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ und sein Modell,” Musil-Forum 10 (1984): 105–19.

Conclusion

I

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, Ludwig Wittgenstein made the case that it is impossible to derive the “ought” from the “is.” For this reason, science must remain indifferent to the larger question to what end people should live their lives. As the philosopher famously put it, things one cannot speak about must be passed over in silence. Parodying Wittgenstein’s conclusion, Musil’s hero follows the maxim “to keep silent when one has nothing to say” (schweigen, wo man nichts zu sagen hat; MWQ 265). Of course, not being able to say something is not quite the same as having nothing to say. Thus, in The Man Without Qualities the ethical dilemma posed by the sciences is approached from a different angle. Musil’s characters become disenchanted with the world of ideas not because there is nothing worthwhile knowing but because there is too much to know. Science has created a paradoxical situation: the more 1 science advances, the more ignorant the individual becomes. Diotima’s “agreement machine,” as Ulrich describes the political function of her “salon,” cannot process the input it invites (1206). Rather than being pushed to its limits by the charge of finding the greatest and finest humanitarian idea, the collective imagination of society’s most creative minds is being undercut by factual knowledge. The unity of reason is undone from within. As the narrator remarks, “Diotima found that even celebrities always talked in twos, because the time had already come when a person could talk sensibly and to the point with at most one other person” (105). In earlier times, Diotima’s gatherings of the elite might have succeeded in cultivating a sensus communis. But because urbanization and professionalism does not allow for a common experience, the creation of a sensus communis has also become impossible. Society’s faculties are not in harmony with each other; neither are those of the individuals within it. Ulrich’s childhood dream of becoming “a great man” is not even a dream anymore. When “facts” persistently transcend imagination, the belief that there are people of genius bespeaks a disconnect from the actual world. It is noteworthy that Musil’s hero realizes this precisely at the moment when he is hit by the kind of information that presents itself as a N THE

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bombardment of decontextualized sensations. Reading about “A racehorse of genius” in the papers, Ulrich recognizes that he is a man without qualities. Yet do “facts,” such as newspapers report, represent the actual world, or do they cause the loss of it? And what does it mean to live in an era in which imagination is treated as a mere epiphenomenon — a human faculty of interest only to specialists in psychology and anthropology? Could art and literature still exist? And in what way is aesthetic representation affected once the category of “genius” is displaced? According to Kant, “genius” is the “exemplary originality of the natural endowment of a subject for the free use of his cognitive faculties” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 195). Genius, wrote Kant, consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence can learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. The latter is really that which is called spirit . . . .” (194)

Without “spirit,” which Kant defines as “the animating principle in the mind” (192), the human mind operates merely in a machine-like fashion. It functions under the guidance of the understanding (Verstand). Yet this analytic understanding can never progress beyond the reduction of natural phenomena to causal laws. The analytic mind is unable to recognize a nature that is not merely an agglomeration of contingent facts but a meaningful whole. To the “spiritless” mind, chance rules the universe. Furthermore, the unity of science — i.e., the unity of all principles, laws and facts discovered with the aid of analytical reasoning — is merely an idea. Indeed, it is what Kant calls an “aesthetic idea.” It originates in the imagination. As Kant wrote, an “aesthetic idea” is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking,” yet this is a kind of “thinking” that is not constrained by the need for conceptual language. The examples that Kant provided in the Critique of Judgment are instances of a figurative use of language, like allegory and symbol. Imagination is a power that transforms the view of things. As Kant wrote, “we entertain ourselves with [imagination] when experience seems too mundane to us; we transform the latter, no doubt always in accordance with analogous laws, but also in accordance with principles that lie higher in reason” (192). Musil presents aesthetic imagination with irony, if not with outright sarcasm. The belief in the reconciling function of art and literature as a bridge between understanding and reason, science and ethics, is ironi-

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cally suspended, not as an affirmation of a prosaic understanding of the world, but to insist on the absence of such unity. In The Man Without Qualities, people’s emotions and feelings are described as being out of tune with society’s industrial organization. Throughout the novel the reader is made to understand that mankind’s mentality is out of step with its Promethean endeavors. Ulrich’s former colleague Dr. Strasil, a physicist by profession, is satirized as someone who at work engages in abstract, yet rigidly codified discourse, but who spends her weekends wearing feathered hats and hiking in the mountains (932–42). Such inconsistencies or clashes in people’s behavior are a recurrent theme in The Man Without Qualities. From the narrator’s point of view — which for the most part becomes indistinguishable from the hero’s perspective — society as well as each individual is being fragmented by what he calls “two kinds of outlook” — two ways of framing things, or rather two levels of experience. The one “outlook” is characterized as being “satisfied to be precise and stick to the facts,” whereas the other is said to focus on “the whole picture and derives its insights from the so-called great and eternal truths” (268). However, the reader is instructed that these two perspectives are not perceived as being in conflict with each other; rather, they are said to “usually coexist side by side in total noncommunication” (ibid.). For example, the engineer, once an emblematic figure of positivism and trust in science and technology, is seen as a man wearing a watch chain, the loops of which bring to mind the notation marks used to transcribe the meter of a poem (34). Musil employs these images of conflicting agencies as metaphors for what is amiss in the project of modernity: though scientific and technological progress is rapidly changing the context of every day life, there has been no fundamental change in man’s emotional attachment to the beliefs and habits of former times. Musil’s novel echoes a critique that — although it was already present in Nietzsche — only became a familiar topic of cultural criticism after the appearance of Ernst Haeckel’s popular book Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1900). Defending Darwin’s theory of evolution, Haeckel intended to provide “scientific” arguments for a monistic ethics. The first chapter on “the nature of the problem” opens with the following observation: An entirely new character has been given to the whole of our modern civilization, not only by our astounding theoretical progress in sound knowledge of nature, but also by the remarkably fertile practical application of that knowledge in technical science, industry, commerce, and so forth. On the other hand, however, we have made little or no progress in moral and social life, in comparison with earlier centuries; at times there

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has been serious reaction. And from this obvious conflict there have arisen, not only an uneasy sense of dismemberment and falseness, but even the danger of grave catastrophes in the political and social world. (Haeckel 2; my emphasis, T. S.)

Today, the cultural divide that Haeckel laments is sometimes referred to as a symptom of “cognitive dissonance.” By that we mean a discord between what is known for fact and what people wish to believe. From Musil’s point of view, cognitive dissonance has become a universal phenomenon. It is the stigma of modern times. As Ulrich repeatedly notes, the basic problem is the conservatism of people’s emotional attachment to outdated beliefs and habits: “Their feelings have not yet learned to make use of their intellect” (“Ihr Gefühl hat noch nicht gelernt, sich ihres Verstandes zu bedienen”) (33). The German original echoes the opening line from Kant’s famous essay Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784). There the philosopher stated: “Have courage to make use of your own understanding!” (“Habe Mut dich deines Verstandes zu bedienen!,” Practical Philosophy 17). As it was for Kant, it is for Ulrich an issue of mustering the “courage” (Mut) to 2 use one’s intellect. However, courage is a virtue traditionally considered to originate in a person’s character. Representing modern man as a man “without qualities,” Ulrich does not possess “character” to begin with. Accordingly, cognitive dissonance results from the absence of that “courage” (Mut), which causes the discouragement (Entmutigung) of the modern state of mind (Gemüt). It is noteworthy that Ulrich refers to his lack of courage as the result of his inability to love himself (976). Ulrich’s strategy to cope with this dilemma of being in disaccord with oneself is an intellectual asceticism involving “doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent [gefühllos bleiben] unless one has the ineffable sense of spreading one’s arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation” (265). Ulrich’s disposition is a radical skepticism that nothing short of the extraordinary can overcome — a determination not to be coerced by unchecked sentiments unless one is moved by an encounter that has a force similar to that of mystical revelation. Ulrich remarks that people would be better off by not simply listening to their hearts but by “learning” to tune their emotions and feelings with the aid of their intellect. He departs from Kant in emphasizing the theoretical, as distinguished from the practical, use of reason. According to Kant, enlightenment is achieved through the use of “practical reason,” which is concerned with the indi-

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vidual’s autonomy and freedom. Since the moral question of what one “ought” to do cannot be determined empirically, the sensuous cannot be part of the determination of a free will. However, Ulrich is not concerned with the question of free will, as is clear from the position he takes with regard to the Moosbrugger case. For Ulrich, crime is a question of social engineering. His concern lies with the people’s stereotypical responses to sexual crime. Most characters in The Man Without Qualities are portrayed as lacking that state of the mind (Gemüt) in which sensibility, imagination, and reason come together. Of course, what is difficult to understand here is Ulrich’s assumption that there are in fact such things as enlightened feelings and sensibilities, which represent a certain type of judgment. Musil’s biographer Carl Corino assumes that the author was not informed about the biological and neurophysiologic nature of emotions and feelings. Since those neurophysiologic processes that underlie emotions and feelings are located in the brain stem, they belong to an earlier developmental stage in the history of the human species. This, according to Corino, would explain their conservatism. However, Musil had never spoken of finding “new” feelings, but rather of inventing new “forms” of feelings. By that, he could only have meant the forms of expression. Musil’s decision by the early 1920’s to shift from a first-person essay to a third-person satirical novel indicates the difficulties in articulating that idea. Evidently, Musil believed that to delimit the location where feelings and intellect engage each other requires a kind of writing that relates in a specific way to affect. The genre of the novel might be precisely the literary form that meets those requirements. As Hegel maintained when he discussed the role of literature after art has been succeeded by other forms of knowledge, the novel is a genre in which “poetry” (Poesie) attempts “to regain the right it had lost.” Yet Hegel added in parenthesis: “so far as this is possible” in “a world already prosaically ordered” (Aesthetics, vol. 2: 972–78). In other words, the possibility of a novel regaining the right of “poetry” is limited and imposes certain formal requirements on the author. Musil’s epic novel is a torso. Musil was certainly familiar with the ruin as a trope. As early as 1932, in a letter to Thomas Mann, he remarked how “unfortunate” it was that his novel had not reached “the point where it could stand on its own as a fragment” (B 548). Indeed, the author’s posthumous papers show that he more than once contem3 plated ways to relieve himself of the need to finish the work. But Musil never intended to break off without having first found “a sort of conclusion” that would complement the “sort of introduction” with which the novel begins. According to a note written only a few weeks before his

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sudden death, Musil toyed with the idea of concluding with a comment on the history of the novel’s conception. Wilkins and Pike took the liberty of placing the note at the end of their new edition: The Ulrich of today grown older, who experiences the Second World War, and, on the basis of these experiences writes an epilogue to his story and my book . . . The story of the characters, considered historically. (1770)

This epilogue was meant to come from the mouth of the protagonist. Substituting his own for the narrator’s voice, Ulrich would have spoken directly to the reader. These autobiographical remarks would have amounted precisely to that rhetorical and hermeneutic narrative earlier criticized by Ulrich for its epic simplicity (708–09). Of course, the epilogue’s ironic inversion of the genre’s constitutive relationship between writing and speech would have undercut its ostensible authenticity. Ulrich would have resembled a Romantic character like Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, another modern nomad and scientist, who, in the course of his story, is made to talk to the author. Oh, my dear Chamisso, it makes me blush . . . I dreamed of you: it was as if I were standing behind the glass door of your little room, and I saw you sitting there at your desk between a skeleton and a bundle of wilted plants; . . . I studied you a long time and then every object in your room, and then you again; but you did not stir, nor did you breathe; you were dead. (187)

Chamisso’s fantastic tale reveals that a story in which the author himself appears must be a story of an absent, indeed, of a “dead” author. It can only occur as a dream. Suspending the suspension of disbelief, yet without thereby reverting to a discourse of truth, Chamisso’s narrative thus reflects the conditions under which literature is possible. Evidently, poetic fiction presupposes a relationship in which the living and the dead exchange their properties. The voice of the character effaces the presence of the writer, whereby its imaginary quality of being heard without being actually voiced borders on the fantastic (de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 75–76). Though certainly contradictory to the conventions of realism, ironic self-reflection of its rhetorical and poetic nature has never been foreign to the novelistic genre. One might only think of Cervantes, Sterne, and Jean Paul. Certainly in a realistic novel, Ulrich’s epilogue would have implied his self-liquidation as the novel’s protagonist, since it would have exposed the hero’s existence as an illusion. Such a phantasmagoria can no

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longer be rendered as a realistic story but only as a fiction that dissociates 4 itself from itself in an infinite series of allegorical self-cancellations. The possibility that Ulrich could become a writer is evoked several times in the novel. We know that Ulrich in his youth had written poetry (941), and that he succinctly differentiates between poetry and prose (709). Scoffing about Arnheim, who, understood literally, is apostrophized as someone who poses in big letters (i.e., is a Großschriftsteller), Ulrich remarks on the fact that so many people of today exhibit an excessive need to write. “There’s something the matter with people. It seems they’re unable to take in their experiences or else to wholly enter into them, so they have to pass along what’s left” (453). Asked by Tuzzi if he himself had never considered becoming a writer, Ulrich retorts that he would probably have to kill himself “for being constitutionally so totally abnormal” that he feels no such urge (454). By the end of part two, with half of his sabbatical past, Ulrich remembers what he had said to Tuzzi. However, the decision “to have to either write a book or kill himself” is tabled (ibid.). The narrator concludes that Ulrich “wanted to live without splitting himself into a real and a shadow self” (722). Gerda also asks Ulrich why he does not become a writer. She receives a peculiar answer: “I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell” (535). It should be noted that the inkwell is Ulrich’s father insignia. Throughout the novel, the father’s voice is only present in letters sent to his son. Evidently Ulrich’s father is associated with dry ink on dead letters. In contrast, Ulrich’s mother stands for the warm coursing blood of the living. However, she died long ago, leaving him like an orphan in spite of his protected upbringing. According to the posthumous papers, Agathe discovers that Ulrich is secretly writing a diary. When she confronts him, Ulrich repeats to her what he had once said to Tuzzi, but he now confesses that he has changed his mind on the subject: I swore to him that I would kill myself before I succumbed to the temptation of writing a book; and I really meant it. For what I was able to write would do nothing more than prove that one is able to live differently in some fashion; but that I should write a book about it would at the very least be the counterpoint that I’m not able to live in that fashion. I didn’t expect it would turn out differently. (1356)

Writing, then, is not just a substitute for the realization of unlivable ideas. Ulrich’s experience with writing turned out, as he says, “differently” than he had expected. This can only mean that in the end he has discovered some sort of writing that does not compromise the maxim of

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his life: to search for both “precision and soul” (651) — a writing, pre5 sumably, that relates prose and poetic fiction. Since Musil’s novel foregoes that primitiv Epische by which, according to Ulrich, most people hold on to the illusion of a meaningful life (709), one might safely infer that this other kind of writing is to be found in the novel’s own allego6 rizing of narrative figures. In the end, then, Ulrich would have succumbed to an occupation that he had previously emphatically opposed. He would have accepted a solution that Musil had chosen for himself when, after receiving his doctorate and provided with the option to pursue an academic career, he decided to become a writer instead. Addressing the reader with a personal account of the events that presumably lead to this problematic decision, Ulrich would come alive as if he were a real person, that is to say a person who will have died by the time his voice is heard. Ironically, then, this entire scheme of an epilogue spoken by Ulrich would have presupposed a situation that soon became imminent. In 1942, when Musil was sixty-one years old, he died of a stroke. Up to that time, he had hoped not only to finish the novel but also to write another book, a collection of essays and aphorisms. But precisely because the novel’s interruption was not intended, the historical context is inscribed in it in a way neither Musil nor for that matter any other author would ever have been able to achieve intentionally. Its state as a ruin underscores the novel’s paradoxical construction of a discontinuous temporality. The work has become sealed by what it represents. For once, then, untimely death “completes” a work by making sure that it will forever remain incomplete. Its incompleteness is a manifestation of irony not performed by means of a figure of speech but one originating, as Musil had intended for his characters, in the unforeseen circumstances of life. Among the posthumous notes, the following entry sheds light on Musil’s understanding of irony: This kind of irony, constructive irony, is fairly unknown in Germany today. It is the connection among things, a connection from which it emerges naked. (1764).

We are back to the issue discussed earlier in this study, to clothes, public containers, and credit systems, to the discovery of the presence or absence of genius. Because if “irony” is that which “emerges naked,” that is to say, emerges without any clothes to wear, without any definite form, shape or figure, then irony must be an agency that cannot be figured. Irony is not a trope. Thus, it is impossible to count on it, to invest in it, to credit it with any meaning. Irony happens as a mere coincidence, and it is only this sort of irony that really succeeds in interrupting

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the narrative. Here, the death of the author is in fact the death of a figure, which, according to Musil, occurs in the cancellation of its creditability. It follows that “author” and “work” become metaphors that do not represent a reality pure and simple but belong to a discourse that originated at a certain junction in history. Where these metaphors no longer apply, we are, however, left with a corpus very much in flux, transcending our capacity to understand it as a whole, and to grasp its true identity. Now everything disintegrates into posthumous fragments — into a corpus of dead letters, which scholars try desperately to refigure. But whose figure could it be if not even the reference of a proper name can be taken for granted. Among the author’s posthumous letters one also finds this entry: ?Robert Musil? Attempts to find an “other” person. ?by Robert Watt? (D 310)

The person responsible for this entry seems to know neither the other person it desires to find nor the person who would actually be capable of doing the searching. Evidently, the other person is to be found by some other “Robert” not identical with “Robert Musil,” even though they are designated by the same first name. Or maybe they are one and the same person but Robert No. 2 does not remember that he is Robert No. 1. Significantly, and oddly, both names are bracketed by question marks. They call into question the function of these names, or, as a necessary condition of this function, the presumed identity of the named. They are the mute gestures of a subject no longer capable of being cited by proper quotation marks. A homonymy even suggests that the person writing this entry did not know anything about Robert “Watt” (what). Accordingly, the enunciating subject has no recognizable voice. Indeed, it retreats into the enigma of mere inscription, no longer pronounceable. These, then, are the incoherent gestures of someone unsure of his proper name, voice, and memory — of someone in search of a cogito for his (or maybe her) dispersed self. Michel Foucault fancied that the demise of the author function would bring about a kind of literature whose central metaphor guiding its production and reception would no longer 7 be the author but the experiment. This is precisely the situation we find ourselves in vis-à-vis The Man without Qualities. Musil’s novel understands itself as a “construction” of a narrative. Being under construction, the novel substitutes the experiment for the referent. It suspends the suspension of disbelief, yet without returning to any ascertainable reality.

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Accordingly, the novel contradicts the notion whereby literature is conceived as communication between “author” and “reader,” since these concepts are exposed as tropes and metaphors that are continually undercut. By experimenting with the limits of the genre — in fact, with the limits of “literature” — the novel is transgressed from within, and “reality” is referred to as that which cannot be narrated. In the end, however, the novel’s constructivism literally “deconstructs” because of the death of the author Musil. Musil’s novel was never completed, because of a contingency as random as the car accident described in the novel’s opening chapter. As Ulrich remarks to the philosophically educated bank director Leo Fischel, the world runs its course without sufficient reason (140–41). Yet, we do not abstain from projecting meaning onto it, since we desire the opposite. Thus the inevitable search for historical reasons and psychological motives to understand what has become singularly configured in the novel’s truncated state. However, a rational explanation, guided by whatever methodology and literary criticism is en vogue, must inevitably take part in what Musil persistently satirizes as a “pseudoreality.” Unavoidably, interpretative efforts assimilate the Ohnegleichen to a Seinesgleichen. On the other hand, a mere intuitive grasp of the Ohnegleichen would also not suffice. As Ulrich one day explains to a perplexed Diotima when he talks “about living one’s life as one reads a book,” aesthetic appreciation presupposes the exclusion of all information that could undermine the possibility of gaining a coherent and beautiful picture. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. Children and . . . yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. (625).

As long as things are left out, which is necessarily always the case, there is the possibility of still another understanding — another translation, another perspective, another explanation. For better or worse, then, Musil scholars literally partake in that bliss of ignorance without which there would be no understanding at all, or at least no understanding that could become the subject of a scholarly debate. Indeed, their incessant production of studies of minutiae is itself an excellent example of the science industry (Wissenschaftsbetrieb) so aptly satirized in the novel. Faced with the abundance of detailed studies about Musil’s life and work, one is reminded of General Stumm’s first visit to the Imperial Library in Vienna. There, the librarian, not quite understanding Stumm’s request for a book concerning the greatest and finest humanitarian idea, hands him an extensive “bibliography of bibliographies.”

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Evidently, Musil here anticipates and mocks the role of the critic and scholar in relation to his novel, and this is significant for any attempt to give an account of Musil’s work in its entirety or to discern its ultimate meaning. As Christian Rogowski states in his 1994 overview of Musil research, “while early ‘affirmative’ Musil critics had found it difficult to distinguish between paraphrase and critical commentary, the later generation of Musil scholars fell into a similar trap, either producing high-powered scholarly discourse or else creating a peculiar kind of appreciative secondary ‘poetic prose’” (51–52). In other words, all commentaries on Musil are either mimetic or forced. In a sense, Musil’s critics become either rational or mystic, thereby duplicating the dualism that underlies the transcendental topography of the work in question. However, this kind of response is not something necessarily characteristic of Musil criticism alone. Rather, it is the mark of all great literature to have precisely that twofold effect upon its reader. According to Musil’s own conviction, literary criticism might help us to understand a poetic work in general terms, regarding everything that is related to the social and aesthetic conventions that might have influenced an author’s life and are part of its context. However, that factual knowledge does not provide any aid in coping with the true Erlebnis (living experience) of a great literary work, since “each work is its own beginning” (GW II, 1168). It is because of the uniqueness of this experience, Musil wrote, that aesthetic judgment is no different from a moral judgment. The criteria available for judgment are mere conventions, which become questionable precisely in light of the experience that each new work of literature provides. Reading thus implies an act of responsibility: it requires a response to that painful though pleasurable experience “of being all alone with the work,” which, according to Musil, is the true mark of an encounter with great literature (GW II, 1129). However, that does not render the task of the critic superfluous, nor does it justify giving in to the mimetic compulsion, since the later would mean precisely the failure to respond. To resist the temptation of theory and nevertheless do more than merely to paraphrase the poetical work is the indispensable and yet impossible task of the critic. It is noteworthy however that the imperatives of this impossible response are discussed in Musil’s text. Musil’s novel continuously focuses on its own practice and the conditions of its reception. It reflects its own performance in its referent, and thus refers to its own aesthetic and social function in becoming part of the institution we call literature. Both critic and reader must therefore take into account the discussion of their role in the text. The novel’s self-referential lucidity makes a mockery of any

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categorical reading, instead of which the reader is asked to join Ulrich in the quest for “a General Secretariat for Precision and Soul.” In other words, Musil’s reader is invited to execute what Kant called a “reflective judgment.” Both the aesthetic and the moral decision share the predicament of modernity, namely, that no a priori rule exists to judge the good.

Notes 1

In his diaries Musil notes: “Socrates pretended as if he did not know; modern man does not know” (T 558). 2

Especially where “enlightenment” concerns matters of love and sex. Throughout the essay, Kant associates ignorance and intellectual immaturity with women and children. It is not difficult to see a similar pattern in Musil’s novel. 3

Musil wished to work on a series of essays and aphorisms. These were supposed to deal with the European crisis and discuss among other things the state of world politics. Musil foresaw a conflict with Russia for the immediate period after the war. Of far greater importance, however, would be the eventual role of China. Musil predicted that the confrontation with the east would bring about an entirely new epoch in the cultural history of mankind: Europe was on the way out. In the last chapters of the novel Ulrich is supposed to be seen as studying the Chinese mystic Laotzu. 4 Evidently Musil never intended to write a realistic novel. To interpret the Man Without Qualities, as too often happened, as manifesting a crisis or decline of realism merely bespeaks the critics’ expectations. Inevitably, such an interpretation results in a negative historical appraisal. Paradoxically, then, the novel is judged as failing to master what it never set out to achieve. Its poetic style is seen as a relapse, and considered problematic simply because of the unspoken assumption that the contemporary is superior to the past. 5 In an essay widely recognized by contemporary Musil scholars, Ulf Eisele has argued that the incest taboo and Ulrich’s refusal to write perform a correlative function in Musil’s novel. For Eisele, this twofold prohibition is the reason why Musil fails to write a realistic novel. Yet Musil, in fact, did write a novel (whereas Ulrich will never actually have written one). Accordingly, the author was able to transgress. As Freud emphasizes, for the unconscious there exists no difference between the wish and the deed. However, Eisele mistakenly identifies “poetry” with “writing” in spite of the evidence that the dissociation of voice and letter takes place in the prose of the novel. Musil’s invention of “literature” takes place in the form of a writing that continuously defers that which it will have made possible the very moment it is understood. 6

Musil does this starting with the figure of the narrator. After all, for Ulrich the opposite to the linearity of an epic is a text that renders life as “an infinitely interwoven surface” (709). It consists in the inscription of a text that undercuts the voice and perspective of the narrator.

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7

Michael Foucault, “What is an Author?” (M. Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, volume 2 [New York: New Press, 1998]). The French word Foucault uses is experimenter, which can be translated as both experience and experiment. Accordingly, modern literature would radicalize what Foucault had asserted in The Order of Things (47–48): Writing has ceased to be the prose of the world; resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary and madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity: they are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off to adventure, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things; they lie sleeping between the pages of books and covered in dust . . . the signs of language no longer have any value apart from the slender fiction which they represent. The written word and things no longer resemble one another. And between them, Don Quixote wanders off on his own. It is hard to imagine exactly how an experimental text as Foucault imagines could continue to bear meaning. In other words, how can it still be anchored in a definite historical context if it can no longer be deciphered? Would such a text not indeed ultimately disappear “in the anonymity of a murmur,” as Foucault suggests in “What is an Author?” (222).

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Kaiser-El-Safti, Margret. “Robert Musil und die Psychologie seiner Zeit.” In Robert Musil: Dichter — Essayist — Wissenschaftler, ed. Hans Georg Pott. Musil-Studien 8. Munich: Fink, 1993. 126–70. Kant, Immanuel. “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” In On History, ed. L. W. Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1975. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. ———. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. P. Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. ———. Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1996. Köhler, Wolfgang. Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand. Erlangen: Philosophische Akademie, 1924. Koffka, Kurt. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 3rd ed. Chicago: UP, 1996. Lecourt, Dominique. Lenins philosophische Strategie: Von der Widerspiegelung (ohne Spiegel) zum Prozess (ohne Subjekt). Trans. Ursel Rütt-Förster Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1975. Levin, Michael W., and Jeremy M. Shefner. Fundamentals of Sensation and Perception, 2nd ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1990. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Lukács, Georg. “Erzählen und Beschreiben. Zur Diskussion über Naturalismus und Formalismus” (1936). Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971. Translated by A. D. Kahn as “Narrate or Describe?” in Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and other Essays. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970: 110–48. Luft, David S. Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1980. Luserke, Matthias. “Gestalt-und gegenstandstheoretische Implikate im Denken Robert Musils.” Gestalt Theory 10.4 (1988): 274–89. Mach, Ernst. The Analysis of Sensation. Trans. C. M. Williams. Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Comp., 1914. ———. Knowledge and Error. Trans. Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel, 1976.

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———. Popular Scientific Lectures. Trans. T. J. McCormack. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Comp., 1986. (Based on 5th edition, 1943) Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001. Mulot-deri, Sibylle. Der junge Musil: Seine Beziehungen zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende. Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik 401. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1977. Müller, Götz. “Isis und Osiris: Die Mythen in Robert Musils Roman ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 102 (1983): 585–604. Neurath, Otto. Empiricism and Sociology. Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel, 1973. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1968. ———. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Peters, Frederick G. Robert Musil: Master of the Hovering Life. New York: Columbia UP, 1978. Pike, Burton. Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1961. Planck, Max. A Survey of Physical Theory. Trans. R. Jones and D. H. Williams. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960. Pott, Hans Georg, ed. Robert Musil: Dichter — Essayist — Wissenschaftler. MusilStudien 8. Munich: Fink, 1993. Rauchensteiner, Manfred. Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der erste Weltkrieg. Graz: Styria, 1993. Rainbird, Sean. “Georg Tappert and Richard Ziegler.” The Burlington Magazine 128 (September 1986): 696. Redding, Paul. The Logic of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford UP, 1936. Riehl, Alois. Zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart: Acht Vorträge. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903. Rogowski, Christian. Distinguished Outsider: Robert Musil and His Critics. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Russell, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic. London: Longmans, Green, 1919. Schöne, Albrecht. “Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil.” In Robert Musil, ed. Renate Heydebrand. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982. 19–53. Schrödinger, Erwin. “Das Gesetz der Zufälle.” Die Koralle 9 (1929): 417–18.

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Index analogy, 29, 46–47, 62, 74–77, 99–107 affect, 6–7, 14, 94, 96, 101, 112, 129 allegory; allegorical reading, 1, 52, 55, 56, 70, 74, 93, 104, 126 Allesch, Johannes von, 16, 35, 36 note 7 Arnold, Matthew, 3 Arntzen, Helmut, 40, 78 note 3, 79 note 9, 116, 122 note 4, 123 note 11 Aristotle, 41–42, 57 note 2 Asimov, Isaac, 78 note 5 Austin, J. L., 92 Bahr, Hermann, 18 Bakhtin, M. M., 87 Balázs, Béla, 4, 6, 79 note 10 Bataille, Georges, 111, 121 note 1 Benussi, Vittorio, 42 Berghahn, Wilfried, 35 note 1 Bernoulli, Jacob, 64 Berz, Peter, 57 note 1 Bohrer, Karl-Heinz, 9 note 3 Bolzmann, L. E., 11 Brentano, Franz, 13–14, 33 Cassirer, Ernst, 18, 35 note 3, 37 note 9, 37 note 12, 64, 66– 67, 77 note 1 catachresis, 99–100 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 130 cognitive dissonance, 7–8, 128

construction 8–9, 18–22, 41–42, 52, 80–108 Corino, Karl, 119, 122 notes 5 and 9; 123 note 16 and 17, 129 Damasio, Antonio R. 35 note 5, 37 note 9 de Man, Paul, 38 note 15, 52, 57 note 5, 130 Descartes, Rene, 12, 14, 24–26 credit 73–76, 132–33 Ehrenfels, Christian von, 40–41 Einstein, Albert, 11, 18, 37 note 12 Eisele, Ulf, 136 note 5 Erickson, Susan, 123 note 13 Erlebnis, Erfahrung, 5–6 Evil, 59 note 9, 109, 111–12, 121 note 3 experience, 5–6 experimental literature, 69–74 experimental psychology: epistemology, 17–22; history, 12– 17; notion of the ego, 22– 29; language philosophy, 29– 35 expressionism, 5–6 Fechner, Theodor, 12–13, 41 figuration, figurative speech, 74– 77 Finlay, Marike, 78 note 4 First World War, 2, 6, 43

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INDEX

FitzPatrick, Martin, 108 note 4 Flaubert, Gustav, 111 Foucault, Michael, 27, 37 note 13; 133, 137 note 7 Frank, Manfred, 9 note 2 Freud, Sigmund, 94–96, 136 note 5

judgment 34, 98, 136; sublime 5 Kochs, Angel Maria, 35 note 2 Köhler, Wolfgang, 14, 41, 57 note 4 Koffka, Kurt, 15–17, 41 Kristeva, Julia, 117

Genette, Gerard, 86 genius, 28, 45, 72, 92–93, 100– 1, 125, 126, 132 genre (novel) 2, 84, 87, 97, 129– 30, 134 gestalt, 5, 7–9, 15–17, 39–57

isomorphism, 17, 57 note 4

Hartmann, Georg W., 40 Hegel, G. W., 45, 48, 105, 129 Heisenberg, Werner, 11 Henninger, Peter, 122 note 6 history, 28, 55, 68, 71, 73, 76, 83, 85, 91, 95–107, 129 Hoffmann, Christoph, 79 note 10 Hornbostel, Erich von, 14, 40– 45, 55–56, 59 Hume, David, 13, 24 intuition, 3, 5, 13, 15, 21, 25, 27, 30, 36 note 7, 84, 91, 100–11 irony, 132–33 James, William, 14, 78 note 4 Jonsson, Stefan, 38 note 14 Kafka, Franz, 113 Kaiser, Ernst, 3, 118 Kakania, 39, 90–91 Kant, 5, 16, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 33–34, 36, 38 note 14, 52, 61, 66, 83, 89; conjectures 97–99; ethics 110; genius 100, 126, 128; reflective

language, 29–35, 45, 74–77, 99– 102, 116, 118–119 Leibniz, 60–62, 77 note 1 Lecourt, Dominique, 37 note 11 Locke, John, 13 Lukács, Georg, 85, 108 note 3 Luserke, Matthias, 57 note 3 Mach, Ernst, 10, 15, 16, 17–35, 41, 53, 62, 67, 68, 69–71 Mann, Thomas, 129 Maxwell, J. C., 11, 65 Menand, Louis, 78 note 4 Michaelis, Karin, 121 note 2 Mill, Stuart, 13 modernism, 1, 37, 40 motive, 111–12 Musil, Robert, works by: Das hilflose Europa (Helpless Europe), 57 note 4; Das Unanständige und Kranke in der Kunst (The Obscene and Pathological in Art), 111–12; Der Vorstadtgasthof, 112–17; Dichter am Apparat, 72; Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters (Sketch of What the Writer Knows), 3, 11; Monsieur le vivisecteur, 58 note 7;

INDEX

Musil, Robert, works by, continued: Ansätze zu einer neuen Ästhetik (Toward a New Aesthetic), 4, 6; Triëdere (Binoculars), 71–74; Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers), 78 note 9; Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (Young Törless), 4, 9 note 2, 18, 50, 111, 113 Meinong, Alexius, 10, 16, 41, 42 money, 74–77 paratexts, 86 name(s), 81–82 naturalism, 2 ohnegleichen 3–32, 42, 68, 134 optical illusions, 41–42 Peirce, Charles S., 78 note 4 Petry, Walter, 108 note 2 Pike, Burton, viii, 4, 6, 9 note 1, 122 notes 4 and 8, 130 Plato, 7, 57, note 2, 59 note 9, 100, 111 Planck, Max, 11, 29, 36 note 8, 65 Poisson, Siméon-Denis, 64 pragmatism, 78 note 4 probability, 64–69 psychotechnic, 111 Rainbird, Sean, 122 note 5 Redding, Paul, 35 note 5 realism, 2, 5, 37 note 9, 84, 108 note 2, 119, 130, 136 note 4 representation: aesthetic, 8, 37, 81, 85, 111–12, 126; (onto) logical, 5, 6, 12, 16, 18–20, 25, 27, 29, 37, 40, 52–53,

♦ 149

70, 75, 95; political, 75–76; statistical, 78 note 8 Richard, I. A., 46 Riehl, Alois, 16, 36 note 7, 78 note 2 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 79 note 11 Rogowski, Christian, 135 roman expérimental, 2 seinesgleichen, 3–4, 6–7 Schöne, A., 88 Sommer, Manfred, 22, 25, 36 note 8 Schrödinger, Ernst, 67, 78 note 6 Simmel, Georg, 63 Sprung, Helga, 35 note 4 Stumpf, Carl, 14–17, 20, 33, 35 notes 4 and 5, 36 notes 6 and 7, 40 subjunctive, 88–91 suspension of disbelief, 8, 77, 85, 130, 133 Tatar, Maria, 121 note 3 thermodynamics, 11, 65, 67 time, 90–92 Timmerding, H. E., 78 note 7 translation, 3, 4, 9 note 3, 32, 37 note 10, 118, 122 note 4, 134 Umkehrung 8, 44, 54 utopia, 40, 90 Wertheimer, Max, 41, 43 White, Hayden, 78 note 8 Wilkins, Eithne, 3, 118 Wilkins, Sophie, viii, 4, 6, 9 note 1, 118, 122 note 4, 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 125 Wright, G. H. von, 19, 37 note 10

150 ♦

INDEX

Yeats, W. B., 57 note 5 Ziegler, Richard, 113, 122 note 5 Zola, Emil, 2 Zweig, Stefan, 58 note 7, 123 note 10