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The Novel I: Representing the Times

David Midgley

in Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933

This chapter compares the best-known major novels of the period as attempts at large-scale narrative representation of the character of the times, and focuses particularly on the methodological ... More

This chapter compares the best-known major novels of the period as attempts at large-scale narrative representation of the character of the times, and focuses particularly on the methodological thinking which led Alfred Dablin and Robert Musil to adopt unconventional narrative techniques.Less

Inner Depths: Exotic Topographies of Primal Consciousness in Benn, Musil, and Kubin

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The inner life rendered as exotic space reflects the modern subject’s sense of self, recognizing primal forces within. The aesthetic imagination, mystical-erotic reverie, and the interior experiences ... More

The inner life rendered as exotic space reflects the modern subject’s sense of self, recognizing primal forces within. The aesthetic imagination, mystical-erotic reverie, and the interior experiences of dreams in works by Gottfried Benn, Robert Musil, and Alfred Kubin engage exotic topographical imagery, where writers undermine the Enlightenment model of a rationally unified self and to explore primal elements of the psyche that may offer a renewal of human life and creativity, reflecting the influence of Nietzsche along with cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. This tracing of the Western representation of the self as interior space and metaphoric depth, culminating in Nietzsche and modernism, reveals a split between rationality and a primitive animality that emerges when the self’s inner fragmentations are exposed. By exploring this danger, the texts by Benn, Musil and Kubin propose new ways of living and develop a new aesthetic out of the fragmentation and decay.Less

Conclusion

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the ... More

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the European self and the familiar world which it ordinarily inhabits. The observation, imagination, or appreciation of exotic foreign topographies in works by Hofmannsthal, Hesse, Dauthendey, Mann, Zweig, Kafka, Musil, Benn, Kubin, and Brecht, provokes critical self-reflection about modern European forms of consciousness. The theoretical context for this critical self-reflection includes some of the major thinkers of German modernity, including Simmel, Weber, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer, and Freud. Revealed are radically different possibilities for understanding and for living life, recognition of the precariousness of the familiar world. These works testify to the power and relevance of imagination, of cultural memory and expectation, of history, emotion, and the aesthetic sensibility in our experience of the world as a shifting symbolic topography.Less

Twilight of the gods

Stig Stenholm

in The Quest for Reality: Bohr and Wittgenstein - two complementary views

Here the chapter describes the loss of intellectual certainty characterizing the nineteenth century. Both Vienna and Copenhagen were dominated by the cloud of despair characterizing the period ... More

Here the chapter describes the loss of intellectual certainty characterizing the nineteenth century. Both Vienna and Copenhagen were dominated by the cloud of despair characterizing the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the disastrous First World War. In spite of all progress, the former catastrophe created an atmosphere designed to anticipate the second one. In retrospect, many symptoms of this can be seen, but the most influential one was undoubtedly the emergence of the Dane Søren Kierkegaard. In his native Copenhagen he initiated the existentialist movement which influenced all Europe, and he was well known in Vienna at Wittgenstein's time.Less

The Difference: Heinrich von Kleist

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter details Alexander Kluge's 1985 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Kleist Prize, which had been revived after a half-century hiatus. Kluge claims that if there is anyone ... More

This chapter details Alexander Kluge's 1985 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Kleist Prize, which had been revived after a half-century hiatus. Kluge claims that if there is anyone in the German literary tradition who insists on the importance of difference then it is Heinrich von Kleist. He then recounts the work of the writer Robert Musil, who is among the award's many recipients. He also discusses the seam between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a seam where especially open forms developed. These open forms can be found not only in Kleist's but also Friedrich Hölderlin's work. Kluge claims that “at this seam spanning more than three decades bridging these two antagonistic centuries, three new developments arise while individual forces struggle against one another: popular war, industrialization, and the codification of a new tenderness.” He says “it is important to recognize the changed guises these three elementary processes have assumed, processes that begin in earnest in the early nineteenth century but whose roots go back to the eighteenth century.” Ultimately, Kluge is afraid of the incompetence of new media as well as its destructive power to fill people's heads. In the age of new media, Kluge considers writers as the guardians of difference.Less

The Infinite Specificity of Life (Musil)

Andreas Gailus

in Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture

This chapter discusses Musil. Robert Musil's unfinished magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, analyzes the petrification of the classical model of Bildung under conditions of a heightened ... More

This chapter discusses Musil. Robert Musil's unfinished magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, analyzes the petrification of the classical model of Bildung under conditions of a heightened biopolitical modernity. Where Goethe presented social forms as stabilizing human life, Musil depicts a world in which calculative reason has absorbed all singularity into statistical patterns of norm and deviation, splitting language and culture into impersonal scientific knowledge on the one hand and vacuous, dilettante chatter on the other. Musil's unfinished novel examines the violent fallout of the resulting inexpressibility of life (nationalism, madness, hypermasculinity) and explores, in its second part, new forms of speaking, thinking, and desiring capable of restoring life to experience and existence.Less

Musil’s Fairy-Tale Castle

Garth Fowden

in Qusayr 'Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria

Quṣayr 'Amra means the little castle of 'Amra. Due to a year of exceptional heat and drought, Dr. Alois Musil realized that a systematic investigation of Quṣayr 'Amra would have to be postponed. His ... More

Quṣayr 'Amra means the little castle of 'Amra. Due to a year of exceptional heat and drought, Dr. Alois Musil realized that a systematic investigation of Quṣayr 'Amra would have to be postponed. His narrative has few if any rivals among accounts of the rediscovery of an ancient site. The ride to Quṣayr 'Amra was an anxious one, full of bad omens and fear of enemies and the lurking spirits of the desert. In this chapter, the facsimiles and photographs of Quṣayr 'Amra's frescoes are reported. The interpretation of these frescoes is also evaluated. In the three decades that have gone by since the Spanish restoration, Quṣayr 'Amra itself has become more accessible, while the knowledge of human activity in the wider region, and at every period of history, has broadened, thanks to archaeological excavations and surveys conducted at leisure and in secure conditions unimaginable to Musil and other pioneers.Less

The Man of Possibilities: Musil’s Moosbrugger

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

This chapter explores Robert Musil's case-based concept of an “imaginary precision” in the novel The Man without Qualities (1930–1943). In the 1920s and 1930s, Musil's literary production also ... More

This chapter explores Robert Musil's case-based concept of an “imaginary precision” in the novel The Man without Qualities (1930–1943). In the 1920s and 1930s, Musil's literary production also follows the formula of contingency, which the protagonist of his novel The Man without Qualities connects with the “principle of insufficient cause.” One of the central objectives of this sprawling text is to take this principle seriously and to make it the basis for a literary program that would surpass the representation of the real world with the realization of the possible one. It is one of the major differences between Döblin and Musil's poetologies that Döblin's literary program is centered around facts and based on a material foundation, but Musil's novel is interested in that which is possible. To Döblin's call for a fantasy of facts Musil responds with the concept of fantastic precision. And whereas Döblin demands from literature to get closer to reality, Musil claims in an interview of 1926 that he is not interested “in the real explanation of real events.” In fact, Döblin's and Musil's realism can be distinguished by the opposite direction of their reference to reality.Less

Conclusion: The Function of Fiction

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

This chapter studies how the experience and cultivation of individual subjectivity that since the end of the eighteenth century was inextricably tied to literary discourse and narrative forms of ... More

This chapter studies how the experience and cultivation of individual subjectivity that since the end of the eighteenth century was inextricably tied to literary discourse and narrative forms of storytelling seems to have been absorbed completely into a thinking and writing in cases. The previous chapters read Robert Musil's and Alfred Döblin's novels as poetological responses to this development. In The Man without Qualities, Musil suggests an essayistic style of writing with which the literary text distances itself from scientific and rational discourse without, however, lapsing into mere fiction. Moreover, the essay sets out to fictionalize rational discourse and pushes it to the very point where it coincides with the fiction that precedes it. Döblin, in contrast, confines his critique to that of narrative while affirming the validity of scientific methods. As a consequence, he rejects any psychological truth claim of literary discourse and attempts to turn the novel into a modern epos that approaches life in its unfiltered totality. The chapter then considers three phases of the discourse of literature, each of which reflects a transformation in the function of fiction that defines the particular historical status of narrative literature.Less

Understanding Fact and Fiction in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities

Jeanne Gaakeer

in Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities

This chapter further illuminates the topic of the language of law in its interdisciplinary context. It takes up the Wittgensteinian proposition that the limits of one’s language are the limits of ... More

This chapter further illuminates the topic of the language of law in its interdisciplinary context. It takes up the Wittgensteinian proposition that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world to show that the wars between law and forensic behavioural sciences on the topic of free will and criminal responsibility are a language problem. With an analysis of the German author Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities and the criminal case of its fictional murderer Moosbrugger it is argued that the problem of madness and the crisis of modernity is closely connected to a view on the language of law as a representation of states of affairs. The lesson to be drawn from Musil’s novel is that law and literature are value-laden constructs and that this also urges us to carefully consider the methodological and epistemological peculiarities of any discipline.Less

Love and Human Knowledge

in Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer

Musil's view of modern life emphasized that rationalism and irrationalism were the poles of the age, and his thought was a sophisticated way of coming to terms with both, particularly by exploring ... More

Musil's view of modern life emphasized that rationalism and irrationalism were the poles of the age, and his thought was a sophisticated way of coming to terms with both, particularly by exploring his culture's understandings of sexuality and gender. Musil attempted to bring the conceptually strong person, a type ordinarily associated with science or philosophy, into relation with the highly individualized experiences of literature—ethical experiences or experiences of feeling. This chapter provides an account of Musil's understanding of himself as a writer within the intellectual world of Central Europe in the early twentieth century, and then turns to his view of sexuality and gender, especially in the fiction and essays he wrote before the war. Musil's view of aesthetics was grounded in this problematic situation of modern culture, and he emphasized modern culture's formlessness as it emerged in the early twentieth century. Contemplating “the great inner disorder” of contemporary life, it seemed to him that “such an illogical disorder of life, such an unraveling of once-binding cultural energies and ideals, would have to be fertile soil for a great logician of spiritual values.”Less

Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the Recovery of Human Life

Piergiorgio Donatelli

in Wittgenstein and Modernism

Donatelli’s chapter asks how modernism helps us to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with its interest in language as a way of elaborating a preoccupation with the forms of life, and how a ... More

Donatelli’s chapter asks how modernism helps us to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with its interest in language as a way of elaborating a preoccupation with the forms of life, and how a reading of Wittgenstein, situated within the development of Austrian modernism, can help us understand modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives. He approaches these questions with reference to the work of Adolf Loos and Robert Musil, drawing attention to the significant connection that can be made between their views and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Donatelli argues that Loos, Musil, and Wittgenstein all develop (in distinctive ways) a modernist awareness of how art, morality and the region of values falsify spiritual needs under the form of grandeur, sentimentality, moralism, and pretense. The aesthetic and the region of the higher are falsified because their current expressions sublimate ordinary activities and needs as matters of style and ornament. So a criticism of the inauthentic in art and the spiritual is also a criticism raised against the lack of a proper command of our human forms of life.Less

The World as Bloom Found it: “Ithaca,” the Tractatus, and Looking “More than Once for the Solution of Difficult Problems in Imaginary or Real Life”

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

in Wittgenstein and Modernism

Zumhagen-Yekplé reads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolutely, alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for ... More

Zumhagen-Yekplé reads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolutely, alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for understanding Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. Zumhagen-Yekplé traces the shared aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s counter-epiphanic aesthetic practices, concentrating on the explorations they conduct in their respective modernist puzzle texts of the issues of difficulty, question, quest and yearning for transformation (which she argues are a central secular-spiritual concern of European high modernism) while also attending to important differences between their respective projects. Zumhagen-Yekplé explores the ways in which Bloom, Joyce’s own long-doubting, questioning and questing modern “Everyman or Noman” becomes an unexpected literary exemplar of a person who looks upon the world and its problems with this “happy” attitude. She argues that the differences in Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent treatments of what Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus as “seeing the world aright” not only shed light on the continuity of Wittgenstein’s “early” and “late” philosophy, they also give us new purchase on the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.Less

Space

J. F. de Jong Irene

in Narratology and Classics: A Practical Guide

This chapter examines the role of space in a narrative, and especially in relation to the construction and interpretation of stories. Some narratives are full of detailed descriptions or semantically ... More

This chapter examines the role of space in a narrative, and especially in relation to the construction and interpretation of stories. Some narratives are full of detailed descriptions or semantically loaded settings, such as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, or treated sparingly, like Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Narratologists agree that space can never be presented in a narrative text in its totality: the narratees are offered a mere selection of details. The chapter also considers description. A narrator brings his story to a standstill and describes at length objects or scenery; how space, whether incidental details or synoptic descriptions, can be introduced to the narratees; the presentation of an ekphrasis of visual art; and functions of space.Less

Kakanian Variations: Four Hands and the Passing of the Nineteenth Century

Adrian Daub

in Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture

The moribund Hapsburg Empire always invited characterization through musical scenes, and prime among them were scenes of four-hand piano playing. This chapter focuses on a number of texts that ... More

The moribund Hapsburg Empire always invited characterization through musical scenes, and prime among them were scenes of four-hand piano playing. This chapter focuses on a number of texts that utilize four-hand scenes to very different ends and by very different means. As the Hapsburg monarchy fractured into a complicated and increasingly ungovernable patchwork state, a number of historical novelists labored to resurrect for their readers Vienna’s supposed golden age immediately after the defeat of Napoleon: the age of Grillparzer, of Schubert, and of four-hand piano music. Several historical novelists of the years leading up to the Great War turn to scenes of four-hand piano playing, often idealized Schubertiades and cloying domestic scenes, to resurrect what they took to embody Austrian national identity and familial, almost tribal community. Robert Musil parodied savagely this ideologization of the “sonic hearth” as the focal point of a blissfully pre-industrial, unalienated Austria in the many four-hand scenes he builds into his novel The Man Without Qualities. In this work, the “twinned gestures” of four-hand players are revealed to be effects and anticipations of quasi-industrial processes rather than their antithesis. Moreover, Musil suggests that the obsession with four-hand playing sprang from the same willingness to subordinate the body to outside command and domination as would become so central in the Great War that ended both the Austrian Empire and the century-long dominance of four-hand piano playing.Less