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oops, more, earlier musings on Musil
Aug. 1st, 2006 05:50 pmI had meant to post this note about The Man Without Qualities much earlier, but now that I have posted one on John Crowley's LiveJournal anonymously (because my login didn't take for some reason), I guess I have to put this one up posthaste:
The great novels of Central Europe are self-ironizing in the extreme, as are the great thinkers of that region (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who referred to the Cambridge that idolized him as “the influenza zone,” or Walter Benjamin, whose self-reflexively dialectical humor slides right by most of his serious-minded worshippers in today’s academic discipline of cultural studies). The Man Without Qualities is a veritable psychology test of a novel; Robert Musil created a fictive panorama and portrait of his historical moment (not just Austria circa 1914 but what came after), a tale that is wholly convincing as well as extremely funny. But the joke is invariably on us; for we want so badly to heroize the characters with whom we most identify that we excuse or puzzle over their evident shortcomings, in order to isolate and praise their greatest observations and inner experiences. But Musil ironizes everybody. Even his frequently admirable questing protagonist has moments that lead us to believe that he is neither hero nor anti-hero, but rather a figure destined to contribute to the muddle because he is part of it even as he realizes that he is part of it. Mystery and muddle are intrinsically bound up in the human story, it would appear, and Mitteleuropa was good at presenting this truth.
Not that it did Mitteleuropa a bit of good, when the celebrators of such literal-minded, simplistic values as animal strength and unalloyed physical aggression came lurching round to kick out the intellectuals.
The great novels of Central Europe are self-ironizing in the extreme, as are the great thinkers of that region (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who referred to the Cambridge that idolized him as “the influenza zone,” or Walter Benjamin, whose self-reflexively dialectical humor slides right by most of his serious-minded worshippers in today’s academic discipline of cultural studies). The Man Without Qualities is a veritable psychology test of a novel; Robert Musil created a fictive panorama and portrait of his historical moment (not just Austria circa 1914 but what came after), a tale that is wholly convincing as well as extremely funny. But the joke is invariably on us; for we want so badly to heroize the characters with whom we most identify that we excuse or puzzle over their evident shortcomings, in order to isolate and praise their greatest observations and inner experiences. But Musil ironizes everybody. Even his frequently admirable questing protagonist has moments that lead us to believe that he is neither hero nor anti-hero, but rather a figure destined to contribute to the muddle because he is part of it even as he realizes that he is part of it. Mystery and muddle are intrinsically bound up in the human story, it would appear, and Mitteleuropa was good at presenting this truth.
Not that it did Mitteleuropa a bit of good, when the celebrators of such literal-minded, simplistic values as animal strength and unalloyed physical aggression came lurching round to kick out the intellectuals.
