Abstract
In one of his conversations, Musil’s protagonist Ulrich remarks that – apart from those impressions that are precise, measurable and definable – all the concepts on which we base our lives are ‘nichts als erstarren gelassene Gleichnisse’ (Gesammelte Werke I, p. 574). Let us leave aside the possibly pedantic question of whether that word ‘Gleichnis’ ought, according to conventional understanding, to be translated as ‘parable’, and accept that what Musil is expressing here, through Ulrich, is the notion of the necessary indirectness (whether we conceive it as parable, analogy or metaphor) with which we communicate our experiences of the world; of the inherently dynamic nature of any effective communication of such experiences; and of the danger that we might be deceived by the apparent stability of the relation between experienced reality and linguistic utterance when we encounter the ‘solidified’ versions of such communicative acts in the form of concepts.
It is a version of that argument (quoted from Musil’s notebooks) that Genese Grill places opposite the contents page of her book, and it is in the spirit of that argument that she discusses Musil’s novel as an exploration of ‘the world as metaphor’. The explanation in the previous paragraph was necessary, however, because Grill herself is reticent about her understanding of the relationship between ‘metaphor’ as she uses the term and Musil’s theory and practice of writing. She keeps us waiting until p. 22 for an explicit statement about the inherently metaphorical character of linguistic utterance, which she sees exemplified in Musil’s writings; and until p. 54 before she refers to Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, through which that thinking is most likely to have been transmitted to recent generations of literature students.
Four metaphorical complexes provide the focus of discussion for each of her main chapters in turn. The first of these, ‘Circles’, alludes to the title of one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and provides the space in which to consider the multiple circles of meaning evoked in Musil’s text. The second, ‘Repeatability and Crime’, explores the importance to Musil of the innovative possibilities, whether creative or transgressive, inherent in human activity. The third, ‘Word Magic’, relies rather heavily on Musil’s discussion (in the essay ‘Literat und Literatur’) of the notion that art originated in magical practices, which does not, however, adequately support Grill’s (highly generalized) claim that magical thinking is still at work in modernist art, and in the presumed ‘unfinishability’ of The Man Without Qualities in particular. The fourth, ‘Still Life’, focuses on the ‘utopia’ of making a lasting condition out of the heightened moment of mystical or loving experience, the ‘Other Condition’ that Musil evokes in Part 3 of his novel.
Grill is at her best in Chapter 4 where she teases out the development of particular images in the many drafts that Musil wrote between 1937 and his death in 1942 focused on the relationship between Ulrich and his sister Agathe. Here she shows how Musil ‘juggled’ with metaphors, rearranging the ‘still life’ of his art in the attempt to provide intimations of the universal through the evocation of specific moments of experience. But then she spoils her own analysis by speaking of Musil’s metaphors as if they were concepts and interpretable as fixed elements of the author’s ‘idiolect’ (p. 132). Having previously quoted Nietzsche’s statement, ‘Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent’ (p. 55), she now insists that, for the purposes of interpreting Musil’s depiction of the relationship between brother and sister, ‘still life … equals ‘sister’’ and ‘incest equals metaphor’ (pp. 132–3).
At one point Grill finds a wholly apposite image for the notes that Musil made towards his work on The Man Without Qualities as ‘tightly wound balls of idea-strands’ (p. 126). In similar vein, her approach to presenting her findings might be compared to a tapestry into which are woven strands of thought selected – with care and aesthetic appreciation, to be sure – from the writings of Emerson, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Proust and Sartre, as well as Musil. The resulting book may appeal to readers who enjoy the blending of such motifs into a suggestive evocation of a cultural landscape that can be labelled ‘modernism’. Students looking for a guide to Musil’s writings would do better to turn to Patrizia C. McBride’s recent book, The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006) or the excellent Companion to the Works of Robert Musil compiled by Philip Payne, Graham Bartram and Galin Tihanov (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007).