After posting the translation below, I was justifiably asked for some commentary on this cryptic, confusing text. It really can hardly be read without some deep knowledge of Musil’s preoccupations and hobby horses! So, here you go (or perhaps scroll down and read the text first & see what you think)

Musil, perhaps, in his usual paradoxical way, was here trying to say that the women’s movement wasn’t aiming high enough. That mere voting rights and political agency (!) were so pedestrian compared to what a truly visionary imagination might come up with….It is something like what he said in his essay on the modern Church—-that it was not mystical enough. That it was too much like everyday reality. And of course he was also touching on another theme of interest to him: the potential demonic forces in sexuality, female sexuality especially. And thus suggesting that the good little Scandinavians, thinking they were advocating for a simple moral reformation, were actually releasing incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous (but exciting) forces. And that politics was a much too mundane realm to contain all that was involved. The thought experiment of a time when love between two people might be considered a sin or spiritually banal in comparison to a great communal romance is similar to the kinds of suggestions he makes in his later unfinished utopan book called Planet Ed, among other titles, where he posits a world where, for example, women lived long lives and men the lives of dogs…

But the particular question of love between more than 2 people comes up elsewhere as well. In the Nachlass (love cannot exist between 2 people alone, but always demands a third, as onlooker, excluded, etc.); and in a letter he wrote to his friend Gustl (model for Walter) about a possible open relationship with him and Alice (model for Clarisse), that has traces of this utopian idea.

Penthesilead

Undeniable: the appearance that the trend is moving in a different direction. It suffers—already palpable after its first steps—from the pure gravity of the crudest requirements, such as a demand for a right to intellectual work and political powers. These needs have obviously been merely imagined, but their fault is that they have been imagined badly. There are no forces of intellectual nature determined by their goals (or what a physicist would call vectors); even genius is more a motor than a helm, and whatever one feels to be a call of the soul is only the deafness of an ear that always turns a hypothetical sentence into an apodictic assertion. In truth, every inner requirement can be diverted, expanded, braided into any arbitrary conclusion. Fulfilment and repression are merely the two unfruitful borderline cases of this. It is no difficulty for the limitless combinatory skill of the poet to make a god-seeker simultaneously speak like a murderer, not only—as one falsely consoles oneself—because he depicts a psychological process, but because he weaves the boundaries of meanings together so they cannot be untangled. Everything is mixed up together inside, is contextually related—enough, one sees what the women’s movement, too, is capable of. Needs are led astray, extrapolated, unexamined spiritual questions are sent drifting along as if in boats.

In Sweden, they have succeeded, after long election campaigns and trying in vain thirty-six times to send women as delegates to their people’s representative bodies, in forcing this human question in one case. One woman was elected as municipal representative to a party—when her husband was championing the interests of its opposition party. Before straying into the protracted loftiness of the Saxon-Swiss Categorical Imperative, this would be as obvious as in the mindless melancholy mood of a farce; in a wider context, however, the case—if we see one of these soulfully reformed couples of today only as an ungainly experimental form—already contains some extraordinary dramatic seeds.

One need only infer that the occurrence happened in a place where the man’s party was the crushed minority. Then one immediately notices something Ur-Germanic, indeed altogether Indo-Germanic and primeval that has reappeared for the first time in this relationship: one thinks of Wotan’s daughter or, beyond the Germanic, of Hera and Athena. When they but touch a hero in the fury of battle, he becomes pale and trembles. These were women of an imperious, fierce race, but still women. Today this is only sensed by a man in indirect, shadowy way, in the zoo perhaps, or if he is frightened by a female mastiff without forgetting that it is female. Whole regions of the soul have been lost, ancient European riches, and here lies the possibility of rediscovery. The last explorations of the sexes on this heavenly level occurred during the Middle Ages.

It is a matter of capitalizing on these chances once again. Their significance does not lay in the realm of the emancipation of women, but of the emancipation of man from the conventional spiritual nature of his eroticism. And the prescribed ideological way runs as follows: from the passive voting rights of women to sensuality, and from there to a more sophisticated humanity.

Yet another possibility lies in the far-off realm of eroticism. Political leaders or generals are, even when measured by the average level of a cultured vanguard, rather narrow. Their significance is not in the intellectual realm, and action is stupid, because it would otherwise have no foundation, because the proportion of chance cannot be subtracted from it, and because its attainable intellectual content is as lacking in character as a mathematical equation. But these people have the gift of fascination; only this. A similar quality that one usually attributes to women depends on an inability to perform differential diagnosis; but one mistakes sexual intoxication with the non-sexual intoxication of personality (which, by the way, does not even require a “personality,” as that can be determined by the situation and does not obliterate or cancel out clearer judgment); one mistakes it for the intoxication of inferiority. Today only men experience this purely—for example if they feel the hand of a peasant who saves them from danger in the mountains. With women it is almost always entangled in sexuality, even if they experience it more frequently. Men rarely experience it in relation to women. A female leader for men today would—if no belief in a mythical divine transmission shrouds the spiritual structure of the relationship, as it did with young Joan—be distinctly impossible or—since nothing is really spiritually impossible—it would be a very complicated erotic episode.

It is already a pleasure, not to be a woman’s sole thought, but rather a mere link among her other interests; the directional pulls that run through one are thus more varied. There could come a time when one only accepted multiple erotic relations and saw bi-polar eroticism as a sin or a weakness, almost as unspiritual as forgetting one’s beloved by betrayal. This is imaginable as something like the relationship of a community to its love poet. Even today the poet is present in all beds, difficult to say how, very impersonally, half god, half sexless doll. Further off, one might imagine it by considering a patriarch and spiritual guide to whom one brings the inner sacrifice of a first born child upon every thrill. Through the example of a friend who, without ever being desired himself, functions as the regulator of the sensuality of two lovers. Imaginable as a triangle, in which no sensuality is given that the respective third person does not somehow partake of, none that does not hold the other softly by the hand and that does not include a vitiated wave of his pulse, too, reciprocally, to keep the soul broad and free, like field and forest. But whole multi-polar relations are imaginable, where the relationship to a person evolves and dissolves as a function of the relationship to so and so many other people. This is suggested by the Christian commandment of a balance between loving one’s spouse and one’s neighbor….

And so, if someday eroticism—which today is practically an opposition to the communal and which has degenerated under cover of a cowardly feeling of shame—were to let all limits fall away, casting off that imposed feeling of shame, in order to rediscover a more internal, personal eroticism, if the conquering confidence of the ego no longer needed any blocked off or protected safe havens, then the integration of all manner of human relations would be possible in sexual relations as well. But then politics … but no, it really wouldn’t … and so these good, inscrutable Scandinavian martyrs will live alone and exemplary, without even suspecting the spectrum of possibilities that the analysis of their living light casts into the abyss.

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The early version touches upon an illness like the one attributed to Agathe in The Man Without Qualities, which may actually have been influenced by Musil’s own childhood illness. It is lightly suggested that this illness was the traumatic event that Viktoria is repressing; but in the later version, Veronika attributes her inability to fully engage with life to an early sexual experience with a dog.

The language in both versions (as in the other story of Unions, “The Completion of Love”) is very difficult to translate, difficult to read, difficult to understand unless one gives oneself up to its flowing, repetitious imagery and rhythms. Musil was trying to explore the psychic transformations of a woman’s mind (in all three stories), and to radically resist any premature cause and effect conclusions. Much more can be read about all of this in my introduction to Unions.

It would be interesting to compare those sections that are similar in “The Enchanted House” and “The Temptation of the Quiet Veronika.” If someone has my Unions, the comparison could be made by looking at them both side by side, but of course I may have made different translation choices each time. It would require more time and energy than I now have to do a careful comparison and analysis of the originals, but suffice it to say that there are some whole sentences, phrases, and ideas that occur in very similar language in both stories—but so much is different that they really should both be read and experienced on their own—as complements to each other and complements to all of Musil’s work, as they both deal with questions that would continue to haunt him his whole life, especially the question of how one human being may or may not commune with another, the longing and aversion to union, and the permeable sense of self in relationship to a shifting, living world.

The Enchanted House

“She almost poisoned me back then,” First Lieutenant Demeter Nagy repeated every time he told the story of his adventure in the enchanted house. It happened while his battalion was quartered for a few winter weeks in the old town estate of a noble family; and began when, a day before a brief deployment, he overheard—shaking his head because he did not understand it—the end of a conversation carried over to him from the next room by two people’s voices, raised in evident excitement. First there was a No, very quiet but nevertheless separating itself strangely from what came before, carried through the house; then a man said something that he couldn’t quite hear, and from then on he understood every word completely clearly. A deep woman’s voice, that passionately rose and then fell, cried: “Leave me; I can’t! I can’t!” And the words broke off jaggedly, as if from a brittle wall. Then Demeter heard the man speak again: “Just the same, you love me! Your whole being is possessed by mine; it has no thoughts that I am not behind; your life began again only with me. Do not deceive yourself ... That is love; say ... do you love me...?” And the voice of the woman answered more quietly but rose again while she spoke, and broke: “I? oh … perhaps, that is, no . . . no, I don’t know.” And Demeter heard the man speak again: “Listen then, Viktoria, if you refuse to answer I will leave today, and by tomorrow I will have thrown my life away, if you refuse. You know how much I only lived for you in this last year. I know that you love me. Maybe tomorrow you will know it as well. I ask you once more: could you?” –After that there was a short pause and then Demeter heard: “No!” and then again, “No”—twice as if with a whip or like someone mindlessly clutching herself hard—and then, again, “No,” softer, collapsed, and like pain over an injury.

When he didn’t hear anything more, Demeter Nagy whistled half aloud through his teeth, as he had done in difficult situations ever since he was a boy, when this sign of brave cold-bloodedness in Scout and Indian stories had first seemed worth imitating. Then he clicked his heels together, twisted up the edges of his mustache, shook his head once more, and smiled. He felt the way others feel when they suddenly see two souls with bloody entrails devouring each other. For, whether it’s a matter of some last ripping apart or a first flinging together, overhearing shamelessly mindless fighting or the grappling of either a pair of lovers or a dying man: no one knows why, but one doesn’t love being reminded that the most extreme secrets of pain and passion, those moments one senses as the deepest arousals of one’s own being, seem no different to other people than the experiences of someone else; one feels that like an assault, like someone coming too close; one retreats, one involuntarily tries to win back one’s lost equilibrium and instead of feeling empathy, one is driven, by a brutal drive for self-defense, to experience what one has observed as repulsive or ridiculous. Demeter Nagy, too, in the moment after the first surprise, was tempted to find the overheard scene as amusing. But while he quietly packed his things in a small travel bag, he gradually became more and more pensive, and finally stood completely still for a while, filled with astonishment and with the suspense of an animal that has picked up a scent. “Viktoria? How could this girl have done that?” And Demeter reflected.

But again and again he came up against something impersonal about her, something that didn’t allow him to grasp how she could become the central point of a passionate incident. There was something long-ago-flickered-out about her, like the aroma of extinguished candles, something haunted, like those salons that sleep, motionless, under linen slipcovers and behind closed drapes. He couldn’t imagine such a woman in passionate arousal or it would have to be a sort of wispy or windswept passion, a restless tenderness, something that awakens like a ghost following after the beloved’s feet like an abjectly clinging shadow. And even if Demeter knew how to appreciate this taste of overripeness in love, and of an imminent obliteration already present from the beginning of a romance, it seemed to him like a pleasure that one satisfied in secret, like a sickly mood, and he could not imagine how anyone could take it seriously enough to commit suicide over it.

Just the same, he himself sensed—perhaps strengthened by the impression of the whole house itself—something of the unique beauty of Viktoria, something that impelled him to constraint. When he had arrived, he was almost not allowed in. The old woman, Viktoria’s aunt, didn’t want it at all or she would have preferred to have a nobleman, and only when the mayor himself came to ask her and personally gave her his reasons, did she give in; and Demeter was taken into the house, albeit still begrudgingly. His orderly gathered what he needed from an old servant; otherwise he saw no one, and they quartered Demeter in the little-used library that stood beside the foyer; his riding boots stood there on the old glossy parquet floor, between the feet of a little Empire table, behind which a golden grandfather clock softly and ceaselessly swung with a heavy, courtly presence. And some sort of rumbling, a creaking, a feeling like a crudely hammered-in wedge, wouldn’t leave Demeter be since he was in this house. No matter how carefully he walked, the floorboards and stairs groaned in the silent building, and the doors squeaked in his hands. He often scared himself and sometimes even lost his confidence. It wasn’t that he was afraid of disturbing the old woman, who lived far off, in the wing of the house that stood near the garden; and he never saw her; but he often ran across Viktoria. He always had the impression that she had silently appeared before him out of the darkness, and that it closed behind her again, very strangely, without movement. And Demeter sometimes stood still and felt something like shyness and was no longer certain whether his judgment—that he was faced with the silent, powerless wilting of an aging virgin—was at all correct. Indeed, it happened that he felt something like a powerful, unusual sensuality, like a strange sickness, graze by him. Viktoria was tall and had a broad, slightly flat chest; her hair was pulled back tightly above her low, uncurved brow; her mouth was large and lascivious and a light down of black hair covered her arms. When she walked, she held her head inclined, as if her delicate neck could not carry it without bending over, and she jutted her body a little bit forward. There was a peculiar, almost shameless blasé placidity in her way of walking and she looked at the officer in the same soft and gentle way, and thanked him for his greeting, as if it were something very far away.

“…Maybe she’s the secretive type.” With this, Demeter concluded his reflections, a bit annoyed and almost a little intimidated, and closed his travelling bag with a disgruntled snap. — — — In the meantime, Viktoria had accompanied the departing one a stretch of the way. Something opaque, that previously had weighed on her life like a dark fog, had begun to shift; and forms fell away like unfamiliar limbs, as if they were a veil, and disappeared. Things that she had never seen before appeared. Her life, that before was like a narrow, dreary path, suddenly had transformed into the broad grandeur of a garden. Everything that she did happened as if it fell from her like heavy, costly garments; elegant golden chains hung upon her movements—or everything that she did happened as if seen from a broad vista. It was accompanied by that softly resonant understanding that compresses the actions on a stage together, the way a usually invisible pebble-weave path suddenly appears as a sign. But everything was still presentiment. Nothing lifted its face high enough that her fingers could hold it; everything still slipped between her gently fumbling hands. It was just no longer that black, viscous mass that obliterated every form with its obtuse ugliness; instead, it lay more like a very thin, silk mask over the world, bright and silver-gray, and trembling, as if it were about to be torn. And she strained her eyes and it flickered before her, as if she were being jolted by invisible nudging.

This movement had been coming toward her for a long time already. Viktoria wondered whether it might be love. It had come slowly. And yet, for the tempo of her life, it had been fast. The tempo of her life was even slower; it was so slow. It was like a slow opening and closing of the eyes and it glided in between like a glance that can’t hold on to things, and slowly floats by, untouched. She had seen it coming with this glance. So she couldn’t believe that it was love. For she loathed it as darkly as she despised everything foreign; without hate, without sharpness, only like a foreign land, on the other side of the border, where one’s own land flows together with the sky, so softly and inconsolably. Her life had become joyless since she had come to loathe everything foreign like this, to silently retreat from it. Sometimes it seemed to her that she didn’t understand its meaning, but since this man was in it, it seemed to her that she simply had forgotten it; sometimes something tormented her like a memory of an important thing pushed below her consciousness.

There once was a time when she stood closer to life, sensed it more keenly, as if with her hands or on her own body; but she didn’t know anymore how or when that was. For since then a languid everyday life had lain over these impressions and had erased them, the way a dull incessant wind erases the traces in the sand; only its mono-tone could still be heard in her soul, like a softly swelling in and out humming. She knew no more strong pleasures and no strong pain, nothing that would have been distinguishable from the usual, nothing lasting, and gradually her life grew more and more vague to her. The days passed, each like the other, and one like the other came the years; she did feel that each one took some small something away and added something and that she was slowly changing, but never did one thing stand out clearly from any other; she had an unclear, flowing feeling of herself and if she explored her interior life, she found only the change of approximate and veiled forms, incomprehensibly, like when one feels something moving under a blanket without guessing its meaning. It was as if she lived under a soft blanket or under a bell jar made of finely sanded horn that grew more and more transparent. The things retreated more and more and lost their faces, and her feeling about herself, too, sank further and further into the distance. In between was an empty, enormous space and in this space lived her body. It saw the things around it; it smiled; it lived; but everything happened without significance; and often an unyielding disgust crept silently into this world, smearing all her feelings with a mask of tar.

And then he came, he who possessed everything, into the dusking desert of her life. He left, and the things ordered themselves under his eyes. It was as if had inhaled the world and held it in his body and could feel it from inside and then simply and carefully could lay it out before him again, like an artist juggling flying rings; it hurt her how beautiful he was. She was envious of him, because nothing arranged itself beneath her eyes. And her love for these things was like that of a mother for a child, whom she is too small to lead. She tried to lift herself up, but it hurt her, as if her body were sick and could not carry her. And she sunk down slowly into herself again and cowered in her darkness and stared at him and experienced this locking into herself almost like a sensual caress, to which she lasciviously gave her awareness, so close she was to his eyes and yet so unreachable to him. Something bristled in her like soft, rustling cat fur and like a small glittering ball she let her No out of its hiding place, to roll before his feet.

And now it was as if something had been sprung with a soft clicking ring, and as if out of a shell lying broken on the ground, a feeling of herself had risen up; it was suddenly so strong that she felt herself to be a knife in the life of this other person. Everything was clearly delineated; he would go and kill himself; that was something as substantial as a dark, heavy body laying upon the ground; it was as irrevocable as a slice through time, before which everything that had been streaming froze; this moment sprang out of all the other mmoments with a sudden flash like a sword and she saw something quite clearly that one cannot see—how the relationship of her soul to this other soul, in her momentary position, suddenly became a passing-through-thing, a drawing back and a bridge to something final, immovable, inalterable, something that protruded into eternity like a tree branch. A dream-brightness rose up inside her, in which the finest occurrences became as visible as tender veins; a mysterious new light lay upon the things, and she felt it upon herself; she changed herself within it for herself; she was almost only a figure like those that stride through the pictures of sleepers …. She could perhaps believe that this was love; she was already filled with tenderness for him, whom she thanked for all of it…. But she strode through another world, and Viktoria carried a desire to hurt him there like a light wind that she inhaled, quivering as if she were picking up a scent that filled her and lifted her up; and her gestures flew up inside this world and snatched at the distance, where her steps loosened themselves with a soft pressure from the earth and lifted up above the woods. — — —

And Viktoria walked the path back alone, lost in thought. At home she quietly did what she had to do and the day passed as peacefully as all other days. From time to time, what had happened came into her consciousness. She looked at the clock; now he must already have given the boy at the inn his bags so that he could carry them to the train; now he must already have given the conductor his ticket for this last journey. Before her eyes, she saw the small piece of cardboard in the tender hue of a brimstone butterfly. Then she forced herself not to think of him for a long time; and the next time she did, the train must have already rolled through the night of the mountain valleys to the south. She went to bed early and fell asleep right away. But she slept lightly and impatiently, like someone who is expecting something special the following day. Behind her eyelids was a constant brightness; toward morning, the light grew brighter and seemed to spread out—it became unspeakably vast. When Viktoria awoke, she knew: the sea. Now he must already see it before him and had nothing more he needed to do in the world aside from fulfilling his resolution. He would row out and shoot. But Viktoria did not know when. She began to calculate and compare different scenarios. Will he go immediately to the boat from the train…? Will he wait for the evening? When the sea spreads out there so quietly and looks at one as if with big eyes? … She went through the whole day with uneasiness, as if fine needles were pricking her skin. Sometimes his face rose up somewhere—from a golden frame that glittered on the wall, from the darkness of the stairwell, or out of the white linen that she was sewing. Pale and with crimson-red lips … distorted and bloated with water … or just a black curl over a sunken brow. She was still distant from herself, but she walked slowly back in. And when it was evening, she knew that it must have happened.

A deep peace and a feeling of mystery descended upon her from above. She lit all the candles in her room and sat among them, motionless, in the middle of the space; she fetched his picture from her drawer and stood it up before her. The whole chamber seemed to be one single emotion, a soft ringing, like the kind that goes through a house at Christmastime. The furniture sat immovably in its places, the table and the shelf and the clock on the wall; they were completely filled with themselves and as enclosed in themselves as a balled up fist; and yet they looked down on her, as if with open eyes, as if they had waited all the many years that they stood there, only for this evening to find each other. Something shuttered and arched upwards; it streamed down from all sides and lifted itself up… Viktoria had a feeling as if her life stood around her suddenly, like a gigantic space with silent flickering candles. And then it was like the way it is in fairy tales; veils sank down, soft as falling snow, before the illuminated windowpane, and pictures of her life seemed to pass before her, woven together; a scent of childhood rose out of the chests and wardrobes; the lights crackled…

…

Children do not have souls yet. The dead do not have souls either. They are not yet or they are no longer; they can still become everything or were everything. They are like vessels, to which dreams give form; they are blood, with which the wishes of the lonely paint their faces. She felt him very near to her, ever since he was dead; she felt him as close as herself. Since his soul had died, he belonged to her dreams, and her tenderness moved through him without obstacles, like the waves move through those soft, purple bell-shaped vorticellids that float in the sea. She felt no more hate. She had felt this hate as long as he lived; as long as he lived, he was really dead to her. There had been a very soft, pale wish in her that he would be dead. Still like an autumn day that produces no more fruit and waits for nothing more. There was a wildly silent love game, when she let her gaze glide soft as needles into him, deeper and deeper, to see whether, in the trembling of his smile, in a curl of his lip, in some response to the torture, something that autumnally giving would rise to meet her searching love. His hair then became like a forest and his nails like large micaceous plates; she saw moistly flowing clouds in his eyes and small playful pools; he lay there completely defenselessly ugly, with opened borders; but his soul was still enclosed within a final tower. And Viktoria bent more deeply down over him, very close to him; she bent over him and into him, up to the last internal resistance, which no stranger can penetrate; she tried to bend down even further still, into, over this boundary. And she saw with his eyes, like someone who manages to catch a glimpse from a high tower window; she knew that this glimpse would never ever return to her again. It came to her from outside; it struck her like something foreign; she glittered from the gold like a mirror, from the gold, and yet only a mirror, in which his soul looked down at itself from its tower. For the soul that living people have is that which doesn’t let them love that thing in all love that reserves a remnant for itself, that which in all love only sees itself; they can’t give themselves; they always remain themselves; they come with handcuffed hands and closed eyes, to give themselves, and yet they only love the other person because their loneliness softly bleeds behind him or her.

But, as if in a thousand tenderly solicitous folds, an unspeakable happiness nestled itself protectively around Viktoria now; “You are dead,” dreamed her love; she called him by the familiar “du” for the first time and the lights mirrored warmly in her dreams. She sat among them and inside of a blue crystal house, and heard her heart like a small glass clock inside—a clock that called the hours of her life back and to her. She sat with her distaff and spun filaments, weaving them into images; for now he had no soul. But her love lay over him, large and soft like a cat that purrs in tender dreams. The hours flowed by like murmuring water… she lost all sense of time.

When she startled awake, she found her sorrow for the first time. It was cool around her; the candles had burned down and only one still burned; in the place where he had always sat, there was now a hole in the room—and all her thoughts could not fill it. And suddenly, without a sound, this light, too, went out, like a last departing guest quietly closing the door; Viktoria remained in the dark. Humbly wandering sounds moved through the house; the stairs shook the pressure of the walker off themselves with a shy exhalation; somewhere a mouse nibbled; a clock struck. This is how they dole out the hours of my life to me, as if from a large sack, from which they all take, felt Viktoria, and she was afraid again in the midst of this strange expanse of existence. But something like a needle-thin crutch held her and helped her forward. The inextricably interwoven voices of things spoke, audibly, in the night; what was this thing inside her that answered with a far-off and ungraspable, disappearing, soft melody? What was the fine, gnawing blissfulness, despite her sorrow, that hollowed her body out until it bore her softly and tenderly with its thin casing? It called to her to undress. Just for herself, just for the feeling of being near to herself, alone with herself in a dark room. It excited her the way her clothes sank softly crackling to the floor; it was a kind of tenderness that took a few steps into the darkness, as if someone were searching for her, reconsidered, and then rushed back to nestle up against her own body. And as Viktoria slowly picked up her clothes again, with hesitant pleasure, these skirts, whose folds in the darkness, like ponds in dark caves, were still hemmed with her lethargic warmth, billowy spaces rose up around her, somewhat like hiding places in which she knelt; and when her body secretly glanced against their sheathing, a sensuality trembled through her, the way a hidden light moves behind closed shutters, restlessly, through a house.

It was this room; Viktoria felt how occurrences are sometimes strangely alike. Her glance searched for the place where the mirror hung on the wall, and did not find her image; she saw nothing … Perhaps this, too, was a deception. The darkness filled the house like a heavy liquid; she seemed to be nowhere in it; she began to walk; everywhere was only darkness; nowhere she; and yet she felt nothing besides herself and where she went was and was not something, like unspoken words sometimes in a silence. Once she had seen angels in this room, when she lay sick; they stood around her bed and from their wings, without them having to move, came a thin, high sound that cut through the things. The things fell like dumb stones; the whole world lay in sharp, broken shards before her; and only she pulled herself together; consumed by fever, abraded thin like a wilting rose petal, she had become transparent for her feelings; she sensed her body from everywhere at once and also as very small, as if she held it clasped within her hand. For the others, she seemed no longer to be there; like a glimmering lattice through which one can only see out, and a humming sound on the other side.

There was something of this sickness in the sensuality she felt in herself; she avoided the objects, carefully pulling back, but felt them already from a distance; in her was that hushed streaming and sinking down, before which everything external is hard and far off and behind which everything is soft as if behind silent collapsing silk drapes. Gradually it grew gray and mild with snow light in the house. She stood upstairs at the window; morning came; the people came to market. Here and there a word flew up to her; she leant back into the gloaming as if she wanted to avoid it. She felt this movement the way one lets something glide through one’s hands that one had kept in a chest for years. For this was how she stood as a young girl; and while she looked down, a crackling resistance surrounded her, as if fine shards of glass would break off if her glance came too close to a person. And she stood here later, back then, when she arranged her hair in fantastic styles in the night and when she gave her fingers—which she washed with fragrant water after touching the hands of another person—the names of fairytale lovers, who all were herself. She always stood here when no one loved her and when she was afraid of people, because her love was as defenselessly soft as a dark naked snail who searched with a vague tremor for another who longed for her to cling to its body, broken open and dying.

And slowly something surrounded Viktoria; it was a longing inside her, as aimless and still as the sore uncertain tug in her lap before the returning days; strange thoughts occurred to her; to love herself like this, that would be as if one could do anything in front of someone else … And slowly the memory crowded in on her, like an ugly hard face, that she had killed him. And yet, the thought did not alarm her; she was only hurt when she saw herself; it was as if she had seen herself from within, filled with intestines that were tangled together like giant worms; but at the same time she saw her seeing itself; she was revolted by herself, but the way a body sinks and in a last stratum above the ground still remains turbidly hovering, in this revulsion there was still something of the irrevocability of love. A redemptive weariness lay around her; she collapsed and was wrapped up in what she had done as if in a cool fur, so sad and tender—a still sense of being with herself, a gentle luster…the way one keeps loving something about one’s pain and smiles in sorrow.

And then it was as if these boundaries between the two of them also opened up. She felt a voluptuous softness and an enormous closeness. More than a body feels for a soul; it was as if she were looking at herself from her own eyes and didn’t only feel him with every movement, but also in an indescribably way also his feeling for her; it seemed to her like a secret spiritual union. She thought that he was her guardian angel; he had come and gone, after she had sensed him; and he would be with her always from now on; he would watch her when she undressed, and when she walked she would carry him under her skirts; his gaze would be as tender as a constantly gentle weariness. She did not think it, she felt it; there was something pallid-grey-strained in her and when the thoughts walked they were hemmed with brightness, like dark figures against a winter sky. It was just this sort of hem. Of unspeakable tenderness. It was a gentle uplifting…a becoming stronger and yet not even there…and nothing and yet everything. She sat still and played with her thoughts. There is a world, somewhat remote, another world or only a sadness…walls painted as if by fever, between which the words of the healthy do not sound, where they fall meaningless to the ground, like carpets to pace upon, where their gestures are too heavy, a fully tenuous, ringing world, through which she walks toward him, and everything that she did followed a stillness and everything that she thought echoed without end like whispers in labyrinthine halls. — — — And when it grew quite clear and cold and it was day the letter came. It knocked on the house and ripped through the silence the way a boulder shatters a thin blanket of snow; the wind and the brightness blew through the open door. In the letter was: “What are you? Have I not shot myself? Perhaps you are beautiful like a sleeping sick woman. But I am the kind who discovers himself on the street. I have gone out and can’t return. The bread and butter that I eat, the black-brown boat that lies on the shore and should carry me out, everything clamorous, alive, all around me, steadies me. I am grasped like a stake and driven in and rooted down again, so that I cannot do otherwise…”

There was more in it, but she only saw this one thing: what are you, I … found on the street! It contained something mocking, barely suggested, but still this ruthless redeeming spring back to itself. It was nothing, nothing at all, only like the way it gets cool in the morning and someone begins to speak loudly because the day comes. Everything happened around such a person—who only watched soberly. —From this moment on, for a long time, Viktoria thought nothing nor felt anything; only an enormous stillness, unbroken by any waves, glowed about her, pallid and lifeless like pools that sit silently in early light.

When she awoke and began to think again, it happened as if under a heavy coat that kept her from moving; and like hands beneath a husk that they could not cast away; her thoughts were meaningless and confused. She found nothing more in reality. That he had not killed himself was not the fact; not that he lived; rather it was something in her own existence, a hush, a renewed sinking; something grew silent in her and sank down again into that murmuring multiplicity of voices out of which it had just barely emerged. She heard it all of a sudden again from all sides. It was like a narrow hallway in which she once ran and then crept and where this thing can continue on, can gently rise and stand up, and then close itself up again. Despite the silence, she felt as if people stood all around her and softly, ceaselessly spoke. She did not understand what they said. Her senses were spun on very thin surfaces and these voices struck them, swishing like the branches of a scraggy undergrowth. Strange faces rose up. It was nothing but strange faces, her aunt, friends, acquaintances, she well knew; but they remained strangers’ faces. Suddenly she was afraid, like someone who fears being treated severely. She tried to think of him, but she could no longer imagine what he looked like; he blended in with all the others; it occurred to her that he had gone far away from her, very, very far away, as if in a large crowd; it seemed to her as if somewhere out there his eyes must be looking at her, deviously and hidden. She compressed herself very small for him; she wanted to lock herself up and tried once more to recover that slight clarity with which she had felt herself before. But she couldn’t find herself anymore and gradually she even lost the feeling of being something real. She couldn’t distinguish herself from the others and all these faces could hardly be distinguished from each other. They rose up and disappeared into each other; they were as revolting to her as uncombed hair and yet she tangled herself into them; she answered them, those she did not understand; she had only the one need, to do something; there was a restlessness in her, as if a thousand little animals wanted to come out from under her skin; and new faces kept rising up and also always the old ones; the whole house was full of this unrest.

She jumped up and took a few steps. And suddenly everything was silent. She called and nothing answered; she called again and hardly heard herself. She looked around her, searching; everything stood motionless in its place. Everything simply stood there and fit into a great order and yet each thing, when she looked at it alone, seemed to be frightfully complex. Everything was so closed up within itself and ancient like an old man’s hairless mouth—and yet pretending to be alive. It was as if these people who walked back and forth here, always the same people, were hidden in the cabinets and paneling; they strode out and in …again and again…out and in, as if they were the sleeping breath of the house, moved by an enormously inflexible orderliness.

She stood outside Demeter’s room; a broad beam of light from the stairwell window fell into the house; little dust particles danced in it and small creatures; they landed upon her; they blanketed her, and with every breath they penetrated her. This air moved lethargically throughout the house. Viktoria thought about how it moved from one person to another and filled each person with the other. She was filled with disgust and wanted to close herself up; she didn’t want to breathe; she didn’t want to breathe at all anymore; she wanted to be dead. But slowly her chest began to rise and fall again; her life continued on, independent of her, as if it had been gripped by this strange overpowering orderliness. And now the fear of the people hidden in the wall began to torment her. They sat in this house like bashful birds in the fur of a gigantic animal and swayed in the darkness and looked at her; and very secretly, like little lice on birds, their thoughts crept through the house and filled it with themselves and with love and friendship, like a soft sticky life that silently and ceaselessly circled around Viktoria, coming closer and closer; and without speaking, it grew, and closed itself up around her, and slowly forced itself upon her…like a hot, terrifying body, and pressed her down so she could not move.

Then she was filled with a lust to bite into this life with her teeth, so that it would finally explode, screaming, and shower her with a fullness. And in its voracity, the lust attacked her. There was a tumbling feeling, a last surrender, and a groaning bitter lechery in her, as if she had lost her body in a lethargic confusion of horrifically tangled people and didn’t know anymore whether something that crawled over her was foreign or whether she was touching herself in a voluptuous quivering confusion. It grabbed her and pulled her up by her hair, and in broad gulps, like a drinking animal, the air sucked her up; she would have liked to burrow into it, to careen through it with open mouth; she wanted to press dirty laundry to her lips and to soil her fingers with wet debris. She felt as if the trees were rustling on the streets; and muffled in the distance, the mountains stomped; little hairs trembled all over her body ;crawling insects grew upon them, and a voice cried out in strident bliss, with a wild, enormous breath, and enclosed her in a swarm of people and animals and pulled her close …

When Demeter came, he found Viktoria in his room, laying on his bed, holding one of his shirts between her teeth. When she saw him approaching her, she jumped up and pushed him aside; he caught up with her on the staircase. They stood there together. She saw his trim, well-turned flank in his tight riding breeches, and sensed his lips under his mustache like a small bloody slash; his face rose before her like an effervescence in the darkness; she shrunk back so oddly from it, as if she were an animal. Something became confused inside her again; she thought she felt disgust, but it must also have been a violence; he smelled like dust and sweat—and like a man. He reached for her hand but she didn’t let herself be pulled; her arms sunk down again but she did not run away. Something in her cowered away from him, as if… now and now… like birds screeching and wings fluttering in a thornbush until it is still and the sound is soft, as if the sound came from feathers that are gliding over each other…They stood very close; their chests flew up and down; he touched her foot with his; their arms lay upon each other’s; he bent her head back so he could kiss her, and slowly she sank down to the earth, as if something in her were voluntarily continuing this movement. She sat down on the steps; he knelt beside her, and then it happened. Without undressing, with a smile that she felt in her face like a wound, she gave herself to him; against the wan windowpanes she saw his two mustache tips as something gigantic; she thought nothing at all. Only when a door opened somewhere did she involuntarily press her legs together and wanted to push him away, but in this moment she noticed something in his eyes; a soft groan came from him and she felt him weigh heavier and more docilely upon her. When she returned to her room she slept from exhaustion until evening. When she awoke, this life still lay outside her door. She wanted to sleep through the night as well, but the next day seemed to her like something under a widely spread blanket filled with unbearably uniform brightness. When she thought of Demeter, it was as if something revolting had crawled over her; and yet she kept seeing his eyes, and they excited her. She didn’t know what she wanted; she only had the wish to lock herself in her room so that she wouldn’t have to think of all of it. Then Demeter came rapping at her door. He was wearing his little slippers—with a heart embroidered on them. He sat down on the edge of her bed and just when she turned away from him towards the wall, they heard a bright tenor voice booming through the house…: “Demeter bácsi, where are you?” And Demeter said, annoyed, “Stupid fellow, I’ll be right there. Do we want to lock the door, little lady, or else—the crude man is quite capable of coming to find me.”

Martha

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These little reviews were published in the same paper: on March 19, 1899, signed with “r.”; December 10, 1899, signed for the first time with his last name (Musil. R.), and the last two on December 24th, 1899 and June 1, 1900, all under the newspaper’s heading, New Books.

It’s fun to see young Musil developing his critical tastes and writing style as part of the literary scene in Brno/Brünn and already revealing some themes and preoccupations that will stay with him his whole life. Also: has this Finnish novel been translated into English?!!

Bunte Blätter [Colorful Leaves/Pages]. Studies by Emil Soffé. Brünn, 1899. There they are before us, in a pleasing cover, these colorful pages, which Professor Soffé has gathered into one volume and with which he has pleasantly surprised his numerous friends. The ten essays truly make up a colorful society. Literary studies from various centuries of German history, on English and American writers or thinkers, art-historical essays on “William Hogarth,” “Charles le Brun,” on the “Dance of Death,” and the “Representation of the Devil in Art,” finally a portrait of the culture and conventions of Charles the II’s England, provide refreshing variety. The diversity of the whole collection corresponds to an abundance of variation in the individual essays. This rich, substantial material is presented in a concise, clear fashion, and the reader is delighted by the wealth on offer and by the effortless way in which he, thanks to the excellent descriptions, may absorb it all. The essays were written in different years and in them one may find the historical development of the author. What remains the same in all of them however is a tireless diligence and a presentation, which makes one sense the passion and pleasure of the writing. The book is both educational and enlivening, two qualities that are an ornament and a credit to every work of this kind.

La Gioconda, tragedy by Gabriele D‘Annunzio. One could call this book typical in a certain sense. If Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is the most subtle and most refined aesthete of modern literature and one of its finest dissectors of souls, wants to write a work that will be performed in our theaters, it must include the virtues and the faults of Giaconda. For D’Annunzio cannot sufficiently elaborate the already mentioned so extraordinarily fine nature of his psychology within the apparatus of the “plot sequence”—and any crude tragic conflict, any attribution of right or wrong to his hero, is not D’Annunzio’s way. What a tragedy can carry is only besides the point for him; and that which is the main point for him can be developed within the framework of the tragedy only with difficulty. That the book nevertheless achieves a strong, harmonious effect, is due to the unique charm it possesses, because its figures appear to be stylized to an extreme; their words and actions are presented in a rhythm of practically Classical calm, and they always appear to us as either gracious or beautiful.

Stimmungen [Moods]. E. Pierson Publishing House. 1899. A young writer from Brünn, Paul Stefan Grünfeld, has published a book of poems under the title, Stimmungen, whose contents are distinguished by a musical feeling for form and the aplomb with which he evolves its moods. The frost of early disappointments has matured this book and the tireless revival of an irrepressible longing for beauty that will not concede to the mundane, but that seeks out life in its most sacred hours.

Juhani Aho. Ellis‘ Youth. [In Finnish, Papin Tytär]. Novel, Berlin, Schuster and Löffler, 1899. The excellent translator Ernst Brausewetter deserves great thanks for making this work of the excellent Finnish writer come alive in our language. Juhani Aho is not a storyteller in the usual sense: he is a vivisector of inner experience, who finds a mysterious connection with the magical nature of the North, without searching for it. This yields epiphanies of the soul of such power and depth that are not easily found anywhere besides Ibsen’s “Woman from the Sea.” The book ends with Ellis’ engagement; broken down by life, pressured by his parents in the usual way, this strange, shy child offers his hand to an unloved, average woman. Incipit tragoedia!

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At Twilight

Finally the day rained itself dead.

In the room it was gray and silent.

It lay as heavy as dust-laden air upon every object.

The brother stared into the rain. He knows that there are rainy days and sunny days; he knows that on rainy days something strangely lascivious rises up from the lifted skirts of women and that on sunny days the people put Springtime on their faces.

He knows that both of these things are lies.

And so he is somewhat disappointed by life and is searching for sensations in something homely.

Now he is listening to the rain.

In a day-long rain there is a suggestive power; one becomes sad and satisfied at once and understands that it can be beautiful to laugh while crying.

His sister sits by the window.

She had read a novel and then was dreaming of something or other. Of her piano teacher—or of a lieutenant at the last horse race—or of the happiness of being the mother of darling babes.

Now she is sad and satisfied at once.

But she doesn’t know why.

But her brother knows.

In her big, gray eyes, he reads a deep, deep fear of these rainy days.

She doesn’t suspect this fear; she is a cheerful child. The dance lesson pleases her and the history of literature and her friend’s newborn.

But he feels that one must hide rainy days from women like this; for something in them trembles and can break in these days of gray in gray—these dead-rainy days.

And so he tells her what she wants to hear. About life. But he stylizes. He speaks of women with sphinx eyes and men filled with goodness and solidity. He speaks with a soft, deep voice, felicitously and musically. His words are so tinted and melodious that they merge with the raindrops splattering on the windowpane. For him, this all has a melancholy irony.

Finally he takes her fine, stretched-out arm and gives her a kiss on the tips of her fingers.

And laughs at himself although he is sad.

Schwesterlein fine—Schwesterlein fine. –

In the room it is gray—and gray—and silent.

Painting of Alice Charlemont (model for Clarisse in The Man Without Qualities), painted by her father, Hugo Charlemont. Musil sometimes called her “Schwesterlein”.

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I am well aware that I have not been keeping up my side of the correspondence lately. It is rather awkward, as some of you have put your trust in me in a financial form, others more spiritually, and my usual weekly dispatches have been few and far between ever since I submitted my manuscript to Yale (it is currently undergoing yet another round of editing and should be out by Fall of 2027). Some of you know that I am caretaking a loved one and I might use that as an excuse, but really, it is no excuse, since I managed to post something for you all during the last harrowing year plus despite this ongoing reality.

I tried at one point to solicit questions to get me going, but that did not get too far (there were some, which I either did or did not adequately respond to). I also have plans to add another section to the site filled with research and writing for my new project (a book about morphology, people who try to make sense and systems to explain the world and sometimes go mad, neuro-aesthetics, and more), but I really am not ready to devote myself to it while the biography is still in editing phases.

So I have decided that one thing I can profitably do here is to offer translations of Musil texts (essays, sketches, letters, fragments) that have not yet been translated.

I also may do some more recordings of texts, because that is fun.

Thank you for continuing to tune in, and apologies for my neglectfulness.

More Coming Soon. I swear.

Genese

From as early as 1919-1920 there are notes, plans, painstakingly annotated lists with cross-references to notebooks, loose sheets of paper, sources, themes, ideas to be used at first in a project called “The Twenty Works” and then for the various early versions of the novel (The Spy, The Twin Sister, etc.). There are abbreviations for complexes of thought (aZ= anderer Zustand/Other Condition; Ul-Ag (Ulrich Agathe)), phrases referring to ideas (Ausdruck, Beduerfnis nach/ Expression, need for; Wahnsinn, soziale Faktoren/Madness, social factors; Oktobernacht-Mohnblatt/October night-poppy leaf; Expressionism, Naturalism, Anarchism); names to remind him of relationships and people (Gustl-Robert-Allesch—Childhood history; Alice; d’Albert, Ehe/marriage[; Atelier Episode/Studio episode [about Martha at the studio]); characters in the novel and related projects with various names (Anders, Achilles, Arnheim, Clarisse, Grayeyes), writers and texts (D’Annunzio; Hartmann; Nietzsche, Goethe, Hebbel); and more. Each entry is followed by at least one numerical reference to passages and notes leading to still other categories and folders. Here is Register 24 from the 1920’s:

Arbeitskurven: 1
d'Albert, Ehe: 7/2
Allesch: 7/3 - 5, 3/101, 124, 143, 11/26, 41, 51, 59. V: Gustl -
Rob.-All. 15/73, 72, 71, 69, 68. °AN 224, 242. °° 246-249°«9»
Ästhet: 7/26, 11/23, °AN 284 °° «9»
Annina: 7/35Rob
Aenna: AN 59, 127, 11/156, 15/73°, AN 306-309, 313, 314, 315
318-320°«9»
°Amerika 256°«1»
Ausdruck, Bedürfnis nach: 11/41
d'Annunzio: 11/26
Alexandrinisches Vergnügen: 11/49
Atelier, Episode: 11/56°, AN 255, 317°«9»
Alte Leute: AN 29,
Abstraktion, Mangel an: AN 31.
Anfang, Opernhafter: AN 41.
Alte Jungfrau V: Jungfrau
Arabisches Motiv: 11/151.
Assisi, Franz v. V: Franz

Advokat: AN 15.
Anarchisten: AN 17.
Archivar: V: Grauauge. Pfingst. Jugendgeschichte.
Atavismen, Toleranz gegen: 2/21
Aesthetik: (Erfolg i d. Kunst:) 2/31 (Unsinn einfache Kunst:)
2/39 (Vorurteile:) A 3 (Moral i. d. Ä:) A 19, 3/14, 4/44,
15/72, 15/36 (bei Aristoteles:) 3/15 ff (bei Home:) 4/86 (b.
Hartmann:) 4/84 (b. Tieck:) 11/5 (Verismus:) A 1, 2/16
(Lyrik:) A 2, 9, 3/7, 4/38 (Expressionismus:) 2/31, 4/71,
4/81 °V. Familienblatt°«1»
(Rhytmus:) A 2, 4/55 (Kürze, Verrenkung:) A 10
(Gegenstand, Ökonomie °) A 14, 5/16 (Spannen:) 3/125

Each of these words or phrases were keys for Musil to whole complexes of ideas, memories, plans for the novel, problems; and it seems that he returned to these lists and annoted them again and again while revising and continuing the novel.

Let us look at another way Musil used these terms and ideas in the fashioning of particular chapters, with a focus on Chapter 115 from Pseudoreality Prevails, “The Tip of Your Breast is Like a Poppy Leaf”. In another Register we find the terms “October Night/Poppy Leaf,” with direct reference to a chapter and then elewhere we find an abbreviated breakdown (below) of this beautiful chapter wherein Ulrich’s former lover, the nymphomaniac and “good goddess” Bonadea infiltrates a meeting of the Parallel Campaign and Rachel the serving maid secrets her and Ulrich into her mistress Diotima’s bedroom to aid what she imagines is a romantic tryst. There is a mist over the scene as Bonadea and Ulrich gaze out the window in a sort of trance that breaks down their former conflictual relationship and transforms it into something seraphic and tender. Ulrich speaks to Bonadea about metaphors, about how they do and do not describe reality, about how they inhabit the realm of dreams and tell us something more about reality than logical language can. He wonders about what would happen were he to refer to the tip of Bonadea’s breast as a poppy leaf and then tells her a dream he had about being tempted to take the easy way up a mountain that has something to do with Moosbrugger. Not only does Musil connect this chapter with the phrase in his register “October Night-Poppy leaf,” but the “October night” and the nipple in the list of terms refers to a “November night” show up elsewhere: in Musil’s speech at Rilke’s 1927 memorial service—in it we find an autumnal night that is like a woolen blanket, but also a woolen blanket that is like an autumnal night (parallel idea appears in Chapter 115). Metaphor, for Musil (and Rilke, he claims) is a way of being and experiencing the world that presupposes that life is not solid, that perception and character are shifting, and Rilke’s poetry (and Musil’s prose) succeed in being themselves metaphors for this metaphoric way of experiencing the world. In the 1927 speech, Musil writes that for Rilke, “everything is metaphor, and—not merely metaphor anymore.” “Never is something compared to something else—as two different and separated things,” for even “if it is sometimes said that something is like something else, in that same moment it seems as if it had been that other thing from the beginning of time.” In short, “the metaphoric is here earnest to a high degree”—is both form and content. Musil then asked his listeners to consider one last related quality of Rilke’s poems (and implicitly of his own work): Rilke’s works did not present a world of security, wholeness, or moral certainty—in this way, they were works that corresponded to the ethos of their own time, reflecting the “hidden unease, uncertainty and fragmentation” of the world, “the feeling of the whole, which the world rests upon like an island.” Every metaphor Rilke used was a metaphor for this state itself, a state of infinitely suspended, analogic inter-relation and necessary incompleteness, the state where Musil himself lived. When Rilke “says God, he means this state, and when he speaks of a flamingo, he means this state.” Ultimately, Rilke “saw differently. In a new, interior way.” And this differentness, this new way of seeing was close to what Musil was looking for in his other (kind of) human being, for he ended his eulogy with the prediction that Rilke’s new way of seeing would be a guide to a new way of being in the world.

While comparing breasts to bird beaks or teeth to elephant tusks leans into the absurd and seems to ridicule poetic metaphor making or at least the sort of cliches he called “congealed metaphors,” Musil is in earnest about the potential of fresh metaphor to reveal insight unapproachable with merely logical language. The goal, Ulrich muses, of all higher humanity is to somehow fuse the two branches of metaphor and truth, literature and dream, referred to in another nearby chapter as the two trees of love and violence.

Here are some preparatory notes for the chapter (translation follows original) that link to the Register phrase “October Night-Poppy Leaf.” When we read the chapter, we see that the enumerated themes are all translated into prose.:

Lesen, Traum, Phantasie = Auslassen. Wirklichkeit =
Kompromiß.
Es darf keine Erholungen geben.
Weiß, daß er übertreibt.
Das Auslassen u. nicht eindeutig Koinzidieren der Bücher
ist der ursprüngliche Lebenszustand.
Man muß sich der Unwirkl. bemächtigen, die Wirkl. hat
keinen Sinn.
(Sinn = Meerhaft)
Sagt aber zum Schluß, daß er nicht an grenzenloses Gefühl
glaubt.
Kommt nicht zu Ende. /Fehlende Ergänzung: Dann muß man es
tun!/
115. Oktobernacht – Wolldecke.
Kein Mensch bedeutet für einen anderen mehr als eine
Reihe von Gleichnissen.
Traum (von M). den bequemen allgemeinen Weg gehn!
Erkennt: Wesen der Analogie; untrennbare Verbindung von
Wahrheit u Unwahrheit.
Ein ursprünglicher Lebenszustand, ausgestaltet nach 2
Richtungen. (Wahrh. u Wirkl. – gasige Atmosphäre von Geist,
Kunst usw) Es scheint keine 3. Mögl. zu geben, aber U. ahnt am
Hauptplatz zu stehn.
Fühlt Sehnsucht nach Nachgeben, nimmt sich aber zusammen.
Fühlt, noch etwas vor sich zu haben.

Reading, Dream, Fantasy=leaving out. Reality= Compromise. There can be no letting up. Knows that he is exaggerating. The leaving out and inexplicit coincidences of books is the primal condition of life. One must usurp unreal[ity]; real[ity] doesn’t mean anything.
(Meaning = Oceanic) But at the end says that he does not believe in boundless feeling. Doesn’t come to an end./Lacks completion: then one must do it!/

115. October night—Woolblanket.
Nobody means more for another than a series of analogies.
Dream (about M[oosbrugger]). Taking the comfortable regular path!
Understands: essense of analogy; inseparable binding of Truth a[nd] untruth.
A primal condition of life, developed in 2 directions (Truth a[nd] real[ity]—gassy atmosphere of Intellect, art, etc.). There seems to be no 3rd poss[ibility], but U[lrich] senses he is in the central square. Longs to relapse, but pulls himself together. Feels that there is something ahead for him.

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I just received a (very lightly) marked-up copy of my biography draft in the mail from my wonderful editor and am about to dig in to the revisions.

Maybe a good moment to consider what has changed in my thinking about Robert Musil over these last years of researching and writing, or, if not changed, at least deepened or altered in aspect. Mixed in with the research and writing of the biography is the rereading of The Man Without Qualities with our reading group (still ongoing, if anyone cares to join, we are on chapter 115, about 500 + pages in, and will keep reading til October, with August off for catch up); this time around it is a very different book for me. I am seeing so much that I missed, feeling so much that I missed, experiencing the arc of the narrative and the development (yes, I think there is some development and some narrative progression despite the book’s famous resistance to linearity) in a wholly different way, thanks to my fellow readers.

I started work on the biography with the subtitle, “Attempts to Find Another Human Being,” which may or may not end up being in the final text, but has indeed ended up being a central theme of the biography. Musil had said that he became a writer for this purpose, to find another human being (einen anderen Menschen zu finden), which came to mean for me as I kept on—as you have no doubt read or heard me say already countless times—not only the difficult task of finding another person to whom one could relate (each of us on our lonely plank in the great ocean of life, or, as Pater had it, “each mind keeping as its solitary prisoner its own dream of a world”), but also Musil’s special attempt to find and encourage the development of a different KIND of human being, one who was, like himself and a handful of others (Emerson, Dilthey, Cassirer, Novalis, Nietzsche….the essayists, mystics, intellectual senti-mental artists) able to see the world from multiple perspectives without collapsing differences or reducing mysteries to absolutes, the kind of a human being who is both precise and soulful, mathematical and mystical, emotional and rational, and so on.

Learning more about Musil’s studies of Psychophysics at the University of Berlin (1903-5) was revelatory for me. During his time there, professors such as Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer and Musil’s Doktorvater Carl Stumpf were working in an interdisciplinary milieu on philosophical, sociological, and scientific questions of perception and meaning making, on how we know and experience the world. Without necessarily accepting supernatural forces, they were fascinated by the ways the natural mind experienced the world, in often very irrational ways. Musil, thus, was not as alone in combining precision and soul, mathematics and mysticism as I had once believed. It was part of the ethos of the time. Science had to include the irrational and relative, or at least acknowledge its existence while trying to approach something “objective,” and, as Musil’s study of Mach’s Analysis of Sensations highlighted, science itself—or the way it is expressed in language at least—was based on approximations, “Denknotwendigkeiten” (economies of thought) that necessarily pretended that particular things were like enough to other particular things to create laws or make definitions. He was certainly not the only one to notice these things (Einstein would be at the University of Berlin about a decade later).

What was different in Musil was that he chose to further explore and write about these things (with deep scientific grounding) in a non-academic, creative way. He saw that there was a dangerous split between disciplines and ways of thinking (a subject that comes up again and again in Book II, Pseudoreality Prevails, of the novel repeatedly), which kept people from applying insights from either separated realm to the important questions of how to live. While people might respect art, religion, or philosophy, they did not depend upon their truths when making decisions in the real world. Conversely, while people did rely on science and logic in their professional realms (in science, medicine, jusisprudence), any attempt to use their methodologies in the realm of ethics or human relations was deemed barbarous. While people continued to rely on moral truisms without considering their hypocritical and inconsistent application, they had not learned to think and act ethically in the many situations demanding creative thinking. While we might (must) use thought economy in the realm of science, when we applied moral absolutes to unique complex human situations, we veer toward totalitarianism. It also doesn’t work.

Speaking of barbarity, another thing that became clearer to me while researching the biography is Musil’s belief that WWI and the subsequent WWII and its horrors were in fact caused by 1) this inability to take the irrational into account, 2) the serious decline of critical thinking, and 3) the failure to appreciate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics (and instead rely on moral absolutes). I knew that he had experienced his own sense of being, for once, part of a whole, a brotherhood, at the onset of WWI, and that this experience had frightened him. But I had not fully realized how much the attempt to understand this experience became one of the central quests of the novel and an important means of understanding the rise of Fascism. He said that he already knew what humans were capable of when he wrote Toerless—that he had, in a sense, predicted the Nazis and the Stalinists already in 1905—but he was not, could not have been, really prepared for just how quickly and completely his known world would collapse around him. His understanding of the basic psychological and cultural causes of the wars, in any case, colored his subsequent choices about how to respond or resist the onslaught of the horrors. He was constitutionally unable to join one or the other protest group or program or to give his faith to any political dogma opposing the Nazis—not only out of fear for himself and his Jewish wife, but because his “solution” to the problem was far more complex and quite different from that of many of his friends and contempories. It was not a matter of merely changing the political system, but of changing the human being, of finding and developing a different kind of human being.

Okay, that’s enough for today. I will get back to you later with, hopefully, some more thoughts.

Genese

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I was thinking about Unions because of some questions that came up in our Man Without Qualities reading group recently, about Musil’s non-narrative phenomenological method of narrative, which is stretched to an extreme in these two experimental stories. I remembered some of what Musil had written about his intentions in writing the stories and wanted to look at the texts in relationship to his later writing. And then I reread Mark’s essay and missed him.

I went looking for our emails (to see if I could find an attachment that included my translation of the Musil notes on Unions to easily excerpt some for you (but could not—you will have to get the Fiction issue).

And so I am sharing some of our discussion here. I am sure he would not mind. I have excerpted some extraneous or overly personal information (but left in other extraneous sentences just because everything is actually related to everything else, isn’t it?).

The exchanges mention Mark’s immense and unfinished (unfinishable?) novel-in-progress called Dream Castle, and also another translation of Unions that came out simultaneously with our Contra Mundum one (Peter Wortsman’s Intimate Ties, Archipelago Books), and a reading done at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn to celebrate our volume.

The really interesting stuff about the stories themselves comes in the last letters (after we get warmed up for about half a year). And then I have included Mark’s Introductory Remarks that were read at the book launch for Unions, all about his work spreading the gospel of Musil in Fiction magazine and as editor of Musil’s Diaries, and our decade’s long collaboration.

October 1, 2018

Hello, Dear Mark,

I have been terribly busy and have not gotten to read much more of the castle yet...though I look forward to getting lost in its corridors soon.

I am working quickly toward a complete manuscript of Unions, and am really almost ready to get you a copy-ready version of Completion. What is your printing schedule? We would like it to come out as close as possible before the publication date....

Hope you are well and that harvest has yielded some pumpkins and squash.

Fondly,

Genese

October 1, 2018

Hopefully we will be printing in the early spring. When does your publisher intend to bring out the whole collection. I can’t publish it if you are bringing it out before Fiction is to appear.

I understand your devotion however to the whole of Unions, and whenever you do go back into the corridors of my castle, happy to hear from you.

This has been a strange harvest--none of the pears were really sweet. There were just a few pumpkins though I managed to bring down two on the bus despite my hernia, and a bum knee and bring one out to my grandchildren in Brooklyn where it was turned into a pie. There is another one here if I can convince Inger to devote herself to it before it begins to sink into melancholy. The squash however seemed to have like the weather but I haven’t tasted them. The sweet potatoes I did dig up despite luxuriant foliage were tiny. They however, can wait until November to be pried out of a semi frozen soil, since they are safe from the rabbits, squirrels and turkeys that together with an occasional deer roam the yard.

Mark

January 9, 2019

Hello Dear Mark,

I hope you are well and that the family is well and that New York has a little bit of the great deal of pretty snow we have up here right now.

I am wondering what the projected publication date for the Spring Fiction is, as we are trying to line up the right time for publication of the book. Also, did you not say I would be getting paid something for the translation work? I hope so, as my rural bohemian life is very ill-funded (especially as the house needs all sorts of repairs!).

What else is happening? Besides the decline of everything we care about? I am very afraid that Burton may be sick, or worse, as I have not received responses from him in quite awhile. You would not have any way of knowing, would you?

Please tell me you are more or less well.

Most Fondly,

Genese

January 9, 2019

Dear Genese,

I am struggling to get the new issue of Fiction together. I am on sabbatical now and that has complicated my back and forth with the staff of the office. I believe we agreed that you would publish your book in May. If I can’t get the magazine out by then, it is my fault and I will publish the Musil regardless of the fact that the book will be out before it. I imagine it will reach a different audience in any case.

Yes, of course, I will pay you for your translation.

Sorry to hear that Burton may not be well. My links to the academic world where someone would know how Burton is going no longer exist. It’s one of the sadnesses of getting old. Most of the close friends I had among writers are now gone and the active correspondance I had with others has fallen off. Your note reminds me that I have to send notes to others like Cynthia Ozick who are dear to me, but who I am shy of intruding on.

I am afraid that at 79 my own bones are at risk and I am trying to ignore the need to go and see doctors and just fight off the arthritis that is going to require some kind of care and a small hernia that is worrisome.

I have begun a revision of Dream Castle, yet again, in response to some of your excellent criticism and that of others, hoping to tighten its plot.

In addition to my own career as a writer and its disappointments, the present political situation is so dire, dangerous, and a reminder of how willful the craving for ignorance is in a large segment of the American population that each morning I wake unsure of what further nightmares lie in the news of the day.

Love,

Mark

March 15, 2019

Dear Mark,

Sorry I did not respond right off. But you know how time swallows one. Turned out Burton was chipper and hale as ever.

Sorry to hear that you are feeling the weight of the decades. But spring is upon us, well, upon you. Here we still have cold and snow despite the softening of everything, the rot and sweet mud rising.

I am writing about Unions and publication dates. We are in the middle of typesetting and cover design. Were planning on Mayish, but Rainer just discovered that Archipelago is coming out with a rival translation in May, done by Peter Wortsman, called Intimate something or other. We would like to get ours out before theirs if possible. Would you mind if we came out with the book before the excerpt? Were you going to be ready by May anyway? Damn Archipelago books! We hardly have a chance now at all, being such underdogs!

Oh gee, such is life. Considering we hardly had much chance to begin with...chance for what? Oh well. I am at work, so must go...but please let me know if it would be okay, and how you are.

Fondly,

Genese

March 15, 2019

Go ahead and get it out. Just mention that it will be published as well in Fiction. I have never had more trouble in getting an issue together but I have been deep into revisions, since I began my sabbatical in January which are now finished, both on a book you saw previously (I have cut it and pruned it by many pages) Dream Castle and another novel much shorter than I worked on for several years. Wortsman has been hovering on the edge of Musil’s work as a translator for years, so I guess this is not that surprising. When I taught Kafka’s The Trial last semester I realized that there were two rival translations, one by David Wylie, in addition to the one done many years ago that appeared with Modern Library. The Wylie you could access on the web without cost, the other, which you had to pay for, the Breon Mitchell, but which seemed to me the superior one.

Glad to hear that Burton is hale and chipper.

With affection,

Mark

March 20, 2019

Dear Mark,

Thank you for the go ahead. We were really rather stricken to find that another translation is coming out just about the same moment (but now we will be a fortnight ahead of them). I am really rather curious what Wortsman has done with it.

It is marvelous that you are working on Dream Castle and yet another novel.

Speaking of Castles and Kafka, I read a marvelous book recommended by Burton, about Kafka’s Castle and Don Quixote. The Old and the New by Marthe Roberts. Really beautifully written and intelligent, mostly about idealism and its opposite, about the complex cocktail of belief and unbelief in both books, about the old and the new, the old world of values and ideals and the new world of confusion and chaos. Perhaps you would find it interesting?

The sun is fracturing through the icy windows. It is about 8 degrees and there is still quite a bit of snow out there on the Central Vermont tundra. Very beautiful, but we have really had enough, considering the snow started in early November. But this is what it is.

I will let you know, of course, first thing, about when the New York reading is. Perhaps you might like to say a few words at it?

Most Fondly,

Genese

June 27, 2019

Dear Mark,

You were very missed at the reading, but I understand that it was a long way for you to come from Hull! Your three or four emissaries were very nice. One, named Taber? or something like that, did yeoman’s duty by lugging the heavy box in the heat all the way from the Bronx to Brooklyn, and Konstantin gave a nice introduction to the work of Fiction and your interest in Musil (and my work, for which I thank you, deeply). I don’t know if anyone bought any of the Fictions, but I still hope they felt it was worthwhile to have lugged them and to have been there. It was a big crowd and it felt meaningful to me, at least.

I have been thinking about the two stories more and more, as I prepared to read from them and discuss them, and now still after the “performance”...and thinking about how you said you found Veronica puzzling (not sure if that was the word). I did/do too, but I think I might have SOME glimmer of insight for us both. The passages I chose to read from The Temptation are very ecstatic, visionary really in my translation. ..her descriptions of the house and garden, her descriptions of the dog’s fur and the giants. I am starting to see her as a Saint. The Saint Veronica of the cloth, with the characteristics of a female mystic, including the sickness. Maybe, I thought, while falling asleep the other night, the imprint on the cloth is Her face, not Jesus’s at all...Not even Musil’s, but Veronica’s own damp face. Not so sure about that part, but the other seems right to me. She is a strange sort of holy woman, who communicates with the animals and trees, but not so well with people or society. She is a recluse, but passionate.

Anyway, thank you so much for bringing me back to Musil. I am even now invited to go to Lausanne next April for a Musil translation conference! I probably will talk about Unions [the talk was cancelled due to Covid].

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful almost summer. The rain is making everything grow here and it still smells of lilacs, though the blossoms are mostly on the ground.

Love,

Genese

July 5, 2019

Dear Genese,

Forgive me for not replying sooner. The last few weeks have been very stressful--in addition to severe arthritis in one knee that keeps me limping during the day and unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time during the night . . .

Trying to plant the two gardens in my back lots here in Hull (two years ago I had four--last year three, but two is the limit of my strength right now), cut back on thickets of thorns and push the lawnmower, or rather control it from running away on the downward slope has taxed my strength to the point that I come back into the house from gardening and just collapse.

I am happy that the staff pulled through and showed up for the reading. My statement that I was told Constantine, the managing editor, read, was brief, but I hope it conveyed how much our collaboration on Musil has meant not just to me, but to the magazine. Tabor who hauled the copies of Fiction from the office for the event is a former undergraduate student of mine who has the kind of enthusiasm for reading and thinking about literary texts that makes me excited about returning to teaching. We have had a wholesale change of staff at the magazine in the last few months that has been challenging, particularly as I am on sabbatical, but I have tried to recruit new students like Tabor to help us keep the publication alive.

Your gift of Musil’s notes to the magazine set me thinking about both stories in Unions again. Since we are publishing “The Completion of Love,” I have thought most about that, or rather returned to thinking about it. I have a copy of Unions with me here in Hull (I ordered an extra one for myself to be able to focus both on your introduction and the new translation as it appeared in Contra Munda. Now I have gone back and read Veronica again--the first time I read it or rather worked my way through the puzzles of Johannes and Demeter and their relation to Veronica as a woman, the radical nature of events escaped me and only the strange suspension that the dialogue, spoken or thought, the interaction between the characters and the dreaming of Veronica registered. My difficulties in a sense veiled the taboos that Musil was engaging with. It was on a flight to California in 2006 to Stanford University where I was to speak about Musil, Kafka, Borges and Ozick (I have to search for the lecture I gave at Santa Barbara and Stanford to remind myself exactly what I did say) that re-reading Veronica both the sexual taboo and the idea of suicide suddenly was clear and that of course turned the story into something very different for me. Your introduction clarified the background of Veronica in relation to Martha and Musil and I want to think about what Musil was trying to do with Martha’s memories of her adolescence as well as the much more direct questioning of “God” means in the story, a subject that Musil ends with in The Completion of Love, but seems to begin with in Veronica. I am reading it now with, keeping in mind your suggestion that she is meant to reflect the consciousness of a mystic, afflicted with a sickness that is part of her illumination. (There was a brilliant piece about female hermits who were voluntarily walled up in tiny chambers of Church walls that I think of now as I read over your remarks. It was a piece about female saints in the English medieval world that appeared some months ago in the London Review of Books, if I recall correctly--since my copies are in Manhattan, I can’t be specific.

So more of Veronica later in response to the ideas that you set forth both in your introduction and in your letter. Meanwhile, thank you for writing. Thinking about Musil afresh is a a way of coming awake from a slumber that tends to envelop me here in Hull.

Love,

Mark

July 10, 2019

Dear Mark,

And now I must apologize for not writing back at once to your illuminating message. I am hoping that your physical stresses have been alleviated and that you are feeling less or no pain at all.

Your comment about Completion ending with God and Temptation beginning with God is very suggestive. It makes me realize even more how much changing the title to Intimate Ties has obliterated the important mystical overtones of the word Union. Unio mystica. Every time the word union appears in the stories, Wortsman has changed the phrase to intimate ties! Maybe not every time, but I noticed quite a few. I suppose it is inevitable that these anti-mystical people would have a hard time with these stories. I am, however, by no means clear myself what Musil was trying to say about God, unions, transgressions, but I think it is safe to assume that his thinking runs in the same way his more mature thinking on these things runs...crime, taboo-breaking as liberating ethical-spiritual energies. The crimes can be religious, moral, aesthetic, or social. They awaken deadened energies, release us from congealed habits, dead words, superficiality.

Okay, I had better continue on my crooked way, in hopes that I might accidentally do something of value.

Love,

Genese

P.S. Can you send me your introductory remarks read by Constantine?

July 10, 2019

Dear Genese,

I have been working over “The Quiet Veronica” in your translation all week. The suggestions you give in the introduction to the Contra Munda edition about its relation to Martha’s childhood house and her adolescence and your further remarks in your note to me about the “sickness” of the Saint Veronica, a figure, whom I am convinced now, as I have worked my way through the whole of the story again, Musil was deliberately referencing, though I think with his characteristic irony.

I have found moreover, numerous ties between the two stories in Unions, which points to Musil’s intentions that they be read together. I wonder though whether anyone has translated “The Enchanted House”? I want badly to know exactly what he changed between that early draft of his story and the one in Unions. Can you help me?

Yes, “The Quiet Veronica” puzzled me in the past and I have started rewriting a lecture I gave on Jewish fiction back in 2006 at Santa Barbara, in which I included such unlikely figures as Borges, Musil, Flann O’Brien, together with Schultz, Kafka, Cynthia Ozick, and I have expanded as I did not in that lecture on its puzzle, and the process of reading it over several times until its startling thoughts began to emerge.

I have attached my introduction

Love,

Mark

And here are Mark’s Introductory Remarks:

As the founding editor of Fiction in 1972, together with Donald Barthelme and Jane DeLynn, and the fortuitous presence of the Swiss novelist Max Frisch and his wife Marianna in Manhattan (both of whom would be influential in introducing me to the importance of Robert Musil’s work) I looked forward to this event that celebrates a new translation of Unions, a book that contains the story of Musil’s that I love most, “The Completing of Love,” as well as the one that most puzzles me , “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica.” It’s painful to miss it, but it does give me the opportunity to set down a few remarks about Fiction and the work of Robert Musil. We published Musil first, a selection from the Diaries, in 1994.

I was already an avid reader of Musil and I had heard about plans to publish his Diaries, which Philip Payne had already begun translating but all attempts to secure permission from the American publisher were fruitless—we were shuffled off despite numerous letters and phone calls. How we got permission is still vivid in my memory. We were at the KGB, I believe, a bar that sponsored literary readings. I have no idea who among our authors were reading that night, but the former managing editor, Alan Aycock, who had gone on to be a senior editor with us, and had been in a back and forth on my behalf with the firm who had contracted to publish Musil’s Diaries came up to my table, and whispered, that its editor was sitting in the room and that the Diaries might be available. It seems as if his publishing house had gone out of business and the Diaries were back in the hands of their American agent. The editor urged us to get in touch with the agent and happily we found them glad to sell us first rights for publication in Fiction. We were offered almost as much we could take and in fact we ran excerpts in the next three issues, Volume 12, #2&3, a double issue, and Volume 13, another double issue, #1&2 and Volume 14, #1 We were able to secure a glorious Egon Schiele, “Standing Nude,” 1917, from a private collection, for the cover of the first, in an issue that featured other important writers, S.Y. Agnon, Peter Altenberg, Robert Menasse, so that Musil was in good company.

In the course of researching Musil further, when the editor at Basic Books, John Donatich, another Musil enthusiast, after reading our excerpts in Fiction, decided to contract the Diaries at Basic Books, and asked me to write the introduction and assume the editing of Payne’s translation. Genese Grill was recommended to me by a graduate student at CUNY working on German literature who was helping me understand the selection process of Philip Payne since his translation was also an abridgement of the German original. Genese, a student of Burton Pike’s at the CUNY graduate center, I was told, was working on an exciting thesis under Pike’s, the reigning American expert on Musil, direction. I got in touch with Genese, read her thesis, and understood Musil in a way that radically changed both my understanding of his work, and I have to say, my own fiction.

I prevailed on Genese to start translating more of Musil into English, since his plays and some of his short prose still remained unknown in English. Since then eight succeeding issues of Fiction have contained material of Musil’s, including Genese’s translation of his play, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, in Volume 15, 2, and Volume 16, 31, and my second favorite among his short prose, “To an Unknown Young Girl” in Issue 59.”

Donald Barthelme, whose willingness to design and layout the first issues of Fiction as well as contribute to them, though the magazine would last four or five issues and then fade away. It has often seemed so as editors left, and I had to scramble for staff and funding. It has been the privilege of publishing writers like Musil that has kept me at the task for forty-seven years. Musil has become almost a life-long project with me, as it has with Genese. I have taught him year after year in my classes, choosing shorter pieces when they were creative writing classes and longer ones, like the whole of The Man Without Qualities, when I was given graduate classes in literature. I have felt many of my students to whom he was unknown suddenly quicken with the same pleasure I felt on discovering him. I’ve asked several of my former and current students to attend this event in my place, since I am not in Manhattan at present. I hope they will add their own remarks to my own. Musil is a writer’s writer, who straddles the 19^th and 20^th century but like his project in writing fiction, he is not a writer to can be confined in a particular century. As I read and re-read him, he seems as relevant to the twenty-first century as to the one in which he first wrote and the one in which, almost at mid-point, he was still revising his great work.

Mark Mirsky (1939 - December 5, 2025)

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I know, I know, I haven’t been keeping up my side of the conversation here over the last weeks. Personal difficulties, exhaustion, sickness, slogging through mud season, and the strange vacant state of being more or less done with this big project all contribute to my silence.

The Man Without Qualities Reading Group is proceeding amid much continuing excitement (this upcoming Monday we will be discussing Chapters 101-104, so are about 500 pages in to the almost 2000 page work. Still time to join us if you feel like really exploding your consciousness!

Reading the book again like this, with such extraordinary thinkers and feelers has been really important for me. I can see all over again how unusual the book is, how brilliant the writing—the metaphors, the descriptions, the tempo, the lyricism, the formal brillance, how challenging the intellectual acrobatics, how funny and psychologically astute it is, how sad and astonishing and true and strange.

Burton Pike once said to me that what makes great books great is that they could not have been written by anyone but the peculiar person who wrote them. It is their very strangeness that makes them great. Which of course does not mean that all one need be is strange to write a great book, but rather that the really great ones are expresssions of extremely idiosyncratic personalities and minds.

Sometimes, this read around, I wonder at how different the chapters can be from each other. Sometimes they are almost purely little essaylets, or philosophical stream of consciousness or the same embedded in dialogue; other times they are vivid descriptions of scenarios and vignettes, character portraits and experiements with characters in different situations; other times they are pictures of a character’s emotional and imagistic thought (and feeling) process; other times cultural, political, philosophical critique, and so on. I wondered what it would have been like to read the book only by reading one sort of these (say the more novelistic chapters) alone, without the others. Would it work just to have the events, characters, scenes, without the intellectual underpinnings? Would it “read”?

This brings us, of course, to the larger question of what the actual form of the novel does for us, as it is (uncompleteness included). How does the concatenation or the dynamic of the different sorts of moods and music from one chapter to another effect us? How is it possible that one writer can bring us so many different tones and tastes within one book? If it makes up a map of the whole world (see Borges), the world is one seen through the eyes of someone who sees through myriad sorts of glasses from almost endless perspectives. We get to be inside Musil’s wild brain. And we emerge changed.

Many readers in our group have expressed feeling lost, baffled, uncertain as we make our way through the jungle of Musil’s head. Some have said that it makes them doubt that they can read!

Here is some of my response to that phenomenology of reading unearthed by our group of readers (how does reading the book make one feel?):

I think I might have mentioned that on studying Kafka sentences I once realized that they often end up contradicting at their latter parts something asserted in their beginnings! The effect upon the reader: confusion, unsettling. But with Musil, at least, I think the goal is not total dissolution, or at least it is a sort of break down of sureties and verities on the way to something else…stations of comprehension through aporia (not knowing)?

What if we looked at the way thinking is portrayed in the novel?

In Chapter 84, when Ulrich returns impulsively to Clarisse and Walter’s house because he “owes Clarisse an explanation,” I am struck by the very act of leaping up like that to continue a gripping conversation. That he cares that much about the things they are discussing, these really existentially vital questions about how to live. One could almost leave out the content of what is discussed and just admire the passion of the search and the dialogue. And the groping toward something, the wildly experimental attempts: maybe this, maybe the exact opposite, what about that? And when Clarisse says at the end, after presenting her cryptic but extremely suggestive image of the RING (we all are just rings, with nothing inside…but maybe the emptiness is the most important part?) she then says, we can’t expect Ulo to get this all right immediately…. It is a NEW Idea….it requires uncertainty, confusion….and it will necessarily make us doubt everything we have ever known!

One of my favorite Musil passages ever “appears in this chapter:

“Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was.”

Then he goes on to say he could almost say the opposite…art was not a negation of life, but LOVE…”beauty works by intensification and contrast”...”art is subversive because art is love.” (399).

The point here, foreshadowed in earlier parts of this chapter, may be that art changes the way we see the world, changes our ideas of the world, our interpretation of it, which, as Ulrich argues, is more important than changing what we do or how ….We care, he says, too much about the PLOT, and not enough about the ESSENCE. Paying attention to the ESSENCE would be: “opening up some new experience of life” rather than following the “pattern of what we already know.”

So instead of “mere literature” we get its opposite: not everyday life, but a life modelled on the very greatest literature: more alive, more particular, more intense, more opening….

Which brings us back to how reading this book makes us feel. Is it only disorienting and the sort of disempowering which Liana suggests above (I don’t know how to read!?--another reader confessed this fear to me the other day) or is it sometimes also exhilarating like that balloon flying off away from all known word-uses and known patterns, a glimpse of something, an opening onto another way, other ways of seeing and being in the world? A glimpse infused with … love . . . and intensification of concentration and regeneration? Love not just of what others before have said the world is; not just love of a limited controlled description of the world; but of a practically infinite miracle of possibilities. It’s a dizzying height, but I think if one lets go of the structural underpinnings of received ideas and concepts and maybe can get a little comfortable with being unmoored–at least while in the safety of a work of art–one will find it’s like being reborn. The question then remains: how to bring that feeling back into the “real” world?

While looking to see if I could find a source on Chapter 86, which readers found especially complicated, I found an essay (rather academic, but still interesting) discussing this chapter, bringing up the central techniques of of irony and alienation–and how, as Pike notes, Musil uses very precise language to demonstrate how very imprecise our process of thinking is:

Arnheim’s first encounter with love is described as something powerful that nevertheless escapes any effort to capture it with senses or with discourse. Like many other phenomena in MwQ, it is defined negatively, through its absence.

Besides emotionally loaded terms that evoke non-presence and evasion such as “baffling,” “absent,” “rare,” “no connection,” or “beyond visible,” we can see more complex metaphors that compare “something absent” to expressions disconnected with their faces and belonging to other faces that are not visible, then to melodies in the noise, until finally to “reflections in a stream.” Piling up parables of fleetingness, the metaphorical chain also builds a reading experience with open meaning: it both talks about the inability of capturing feelings with words and enacts it by presenting the text that is powerful but also racing as if always a few paces ahead of the reader. It is an eloquent example of how Musil employs his literary theorizing “to forge with the greatest possible precision a language of images that would portray the inexact process by which a character proceeds through life” (Pike 1994, p. 222)—put bluntly, he uses his literary Precision to mediate the imprecision of life experience. What is important, Musil’s literary theorizing comes into existence primarily as a reading experience, so for us to understand it properly, it is necessary not to translate it into content but to follow how every single word and sentence compose the literary meaning as an ever-changing, spatiotemporally unique entity. That is also the reason why, according to Burton Pike (1994, p. 222), MwQ is not easily “amenable to structuralist or post-structuralist theoretical generalizations.”

As Harrington (2002b, p. 67 ff.) stresses, one of the prevalent aesthetic devices in MwQ is irony. Although it often works to alienate the reader from the text—to emphasize its constructedness— irony does not prevent the text from absorbing the reader into its rhythm and flow. In fact, alternating between the moments of immersion and alienation maintains an emotionally engaged dialogue between the novel and the reader, where the agency in the meaning-making process circulates between one and the other. Lengthy blocks of text with paragraphs spanning one or more pages contain essayistic introspections that carry our attention as the text progresses onwards, often branching out into several disparate lines of thought, only to be abruptly cut without a definite resolution. And when Clarisse says at the end, after presenting her cryptic but extremely suggestive image of the RING (we all are just rings, with nothing inside…but maybe the emptiness is the most important part?) she then says, we can’t expect Ulo to get this all right immediately…. It is a NEW Idea….it requires uncertainty, confusion….and it will necessarily make us doubt everything we have ever known!

A sort of text-reader dialogue does not occur in the reader’s mind—as neurocognitivists might suggest—but rather through a newly formed entity that is reducible neither to the reader nor the text. Wolfgang Iser (1972, p. 284) talks about Satzdenken or “sentence-thoughts” through which the literary meaning comes into existence as a phenomenologically unique event continuing in time with the reading process.

In this sense, Musil’s writing relates to what the philosopher Susanne Langer (1957) deems a nondiscursive knowledge mediated by art. Contrary to discursive knowledge, it “is not expressible in ordinary discourse [since] … the forms of feeling and the forms of discursive expression are logically incommensurate” (Langer1 957, p. 91). Musil brilliantly turns this incommensurability between feelings and discourse into an advantage as he makes it an essential part of the text-reader confrontation.

With that in mind, we can continue in a dialogue with the novel by reading the above-stated paragraph within a larger framing. First, we can notice that unlike most of the chapter, the paragraph is in quotation marks. The reason for that is explained in the paragraph that follows, as the text then returns to the perspective of the narrator:

“This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheim understood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with a pair of lips that looked like fleshy flower buds.” (chpt 86, paragraph 9)

Here, the alienation effect makes the reader step away from the lyrical account of feelings and observe the situation from a distance. Like in the rest of the novel, the ironical tone is used to ridicule Arnheim as someone who prioritizes social status over the true meaning of things (“made one an insider; not that Arnheim understood him”). The quoted paragraph on love is a work of an unknown poet who, as it appears, wrote about Arnheim because of the glory he would acquire later in life. The omniscient narrator’s retrospective look gives us scornful innuendos that gradually turn the meaning of the love section into kitsch. Importantly, however, the ironic development in the text does not eliminate the preceding romantic paragraph. If we follow the reading experience step by step, we can see that the romantic tone and the subsequent ironic tone become parts of a single literary meaning. This meaningful whole continually emerges and attains its “objectivity” through the artistic depiction (text) and the perceiver (reading process),but at the same time provokes feelings that acquire certain degree of autonomy, as they mediate to the reader more general and typical textures of love—akin to the dual process Simmel (2017, p. 27 ff.) describes inThe Philosophy of Landscape…

From “Social Theorizing Through Literary Fiction: Social Aesthetics and The Man Without Qualities, by Jan Vána: https://www.academia.edu/129205787/Social_Theorizing_through_Literary_Fiction_Social_Aesthetics_and_The_Man_Without_Qualities

This week’s session is going to delve into phenomenology again, as we explore how in Chapters 101 and 103 Musil puts different characters into strange situations and lets them feel, talk, and sometimes (though rarely) act.

As to the biography, which this Substack is ostensibly about, it is being refined and refined. I am working on footnotes, image and text rights, and so on. Stay tuned for updates and as I figure out how to continue to use this space to write about things that may be of interest to you Musilians!

Genese

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Dramatis Personae

TEMPORA MAIER, Time. (Loves boxers — not without a bad conscience — engineers, enterprising merchants, the Clemenceaus and [Romain] Rollands[2], etc. When it comes to writers, with condescension, the type of [Kasimir] Edschmid.[3] — Loves health.

TRUSTY MAIER, Wholesale Merchant

FAUST[4] BELLYPUNCH, World Master of Boxing

FOUNTAINMOUTH, Writer (possibly a second writer named TINCLANK)

DUMMEST and PARROT, National Assemblymen

FIEND and THINK, Satyrs[5]

PASTOR OBSTIPATIUS SEIGERT

FAITHLEIN SEIGERT, His Daughter

EUGENIE BELLYPUNCH, Faust’s Grandmother

EGYDIUS GANTER, University Professor of Feuilletonistics

(An idea that is held onto for longer than five minutes is already a compulsion. Except in economics.)

A love story, on the second level. On the first, a satire [satyr play] about conditions that will come.

Eugenics is not the butt of the satire, but that which wants to be made eternal with the help of eugenics.

Journalistic writing: Perutz, Höllriegel,[6] etc. has already created a dry, exact narrative style that has replaced the family magazine novel in the newspapers, for which they may, indeed, congratulate themselves. But they would say: we influence the people through the newspapers; more than can be said for you Etho-Aesthetes. We have created the novelistic style of the times, which is precisely the newspaper style: intelligent, curious, chopped up into bits, etc.

One compares it to Dostoevsky, etc.

ACT ONE

Nature preserve near to a futuristic metropolis. View of a vast, delightful field, surrounded by trees. To the right and the left of the stage, the forest crowds in. On the right side, upfront, stands a single old tree; under it, a bench.

TEMPORA MAIER: Well, this could be the place. I must admit that I feel a bit frightened. One hears such incredible stories about these satyrs.

FAUST: You couldn’t have chosen a better companion, Tempora. My right hand can knock down a two-year old bull. I can also dispatch a three-year old bull with five blows to his skull. (They make themselves comfortable.) It only took me 23 minutes to win the world championship and I can calculate that my hand (wooing) is worth 25,000 marks a minute.

TEMPORA MAIER: (Changing the subject) I am indescribably excited to find out who will win the Schiller Prize tomorrow for the best feuilleton of the last two years.

FAUST: Pschaw! Two thousand marks!

TEMPORA MAIER: That is only symbolic. You must know that spirit cannot be compensated with money. The choice is between Fountainmouth and Tinclank.

FAUST: On the occasion of my world championship fight, Tinclank wrote that my blows revealed more intuition than Goethe’s poems. — By the way, who was Goethe? — I think Tinclank is the better of the two. He has the modern spirit. But basically, all of them are merely imitative people, who only write words about other people’s actions.

TEMPORA MAIER: I must repeat to you again that you lack the proper understanding of spirit. I could never do without ingenious men like Fountainmouth and Tinclank. Only just consider, what it meant to all of us, when Fountainmouth, in the Whitsuntide edition of The Steelyard, established how much our contemporary spirit, under the tutelage of the feuilleton, has become so much sharper and sprightlier than the ponderous breadth of former times.

FAUST: That’s why we have a Professor of Feuilletonistics at the university. That’s more than enough.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are a despiser of spirit, Faust Bellyblow.

FAUST: Tempora, if I say university professor, I mean it in earnest. That is where these things belong. That is where they are put in order. It is calming to know they are there. But they have as little to do with me as a corpse in the anatomy department: excepting, of course, if I had hit him myself. The only thing that is alive is action; without thoughts!

Moreover, you interest yourself more than I like for this professor, Egydius Ganter. I assure you, when I see this man’s chest, I have to hold my nose. (They both are silent; enraged.)

TEMPORA MAIER: (After a while, sheepishly) I am afraid, Faust Bellyblow. I have heard that these satyrs defile virgins.

FAUST: In truth. But you are insulting me again! I have promised you that I would catch one of them live. Then you can defile him, or do whatever you want with him.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are crude, Faust!

FAUST: Forgive me. I was careless, and something that I read in the morning paper just flew into my mouth.

TEMPORA MAIER: Is it true then, that people want to apprehend these creatures, if they really exist, before the eugenic medicinal court?

FAUST: Of course, this is true. There is even supposed to be an expedition going out soon. And I think that they definitely should go before the eugenic medical tribunal.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are an expert on the higher Health Court?

FAUST: Precisely. There are few people among us who would be more competent to rule on questions of our healthy progeny.

TEMPORA MAIER: And what is really known about these satyrs?

FAUST: I must admit, that I have never interested myself too much in the question. It is said that they once were important for poets. I mean, for people who, themselves, were like them. They are indecent.

TEMPORA MAIER: Oh! Horrors! Indecent!

FAUST: I must admit, I never was too interested in them. A relict of the bygone life of the mind.

(Some writers even today. They go searching in the woods. Blei and … fall from a branch. The girl pleases him. Nostalgia. The party comes. Exits.)

(Faust and Tempora turn back. Engagement to be married. In fury, he catches one from a tree.)

FAUST: They are unhealthy.

TEMPORA MAIER: Pfui! Unhealthy?

FAUST: Yes, they are a repulsive remnant of an uncivilized past. (He takes his jump rope out of his bag and begins to jump over it like a child at play, swinging it from behind over his head and jumping over it with his feet.)

TEMPORA MAIER: What are you doing, Faust?

FAUST: I am training the flexors and the extensor muscles of my legs.

TEMPORA MAIER: I mean, why are you doing it so savagely, without culture? (Faust stops, questioningly.) You must practice body-spirit: in between every jump, one must raise one’s eyes to the sky, while thinking deep thoughts about Hellenic culture. This is the Greek form of pilgrimage. Soul and physical strength grow at the same rate.

FAUST: That bores me. (Weighs the rope in his hand before packing it away.) With this rope, I will catch one of the satyrs for you.

TEMPORA MAIER: You know, I passionately adore decency and health. But tell me: what actually does unhealthy and indecent mean?

FAUST: (After reflecting a while over this new question) I should think: whatever is neither decent or healthy.

TEMPORA MAIER: That’s circular logic, Faust. Our strict, logical education does not allow for that.

FAUST: Perhaps you are right. But what counts as healthy is decided every year by our parliament, no? And what is decent simply need not be questioned by any healthy person.

TEMPORA MAIER: Yes, but what do these satyrs do?

(The whole society arrives. Egydius Ganter also, etc. Trusty Maier —pokes at Faust’s muscles: You are so enchantingly healthy, whole, etc. — Milrath from the World Evening Post. Socialistic wait-and-see battle plan. Capitalism gets increasingly stronger. But Socialism has become an institution of the Capitalistic world. The poor man lives badly and expensively — the rich man well and cheaply. The poor man gives evidence of great bravery, but does not have the civilian courage for a revolution. Thus, the rich man believes that the organization is good, because it makes the poor man manly.)

FAUST: Tempora, I must admit that I really have no idea about what they do. I simply do not know. One has never crossed my path nor insulted me, so that I might take notice of him. But we shall go into the woods and I will catch one for you. Then you can ask him about anything you wish to know. I give you my word that the fellow will deliver his last truth to you. May I take your arm?

TEMPORA MAIER: It is too early. It is disobedient to go on, before the elders arrive.

FAUST: We will just go a little bit ahead; in fifteen minutes we will be back. (Tempora lays her arm upon his.) (Enamored, Faust continues) If a man hits me in the arm with a sledge hammer, its shaft will fly out of his hand, but if your arm lays upon it like a down feather, it trembles: I am neither a politician nor a scholar, but I am willing to bet that decent and healthy mean nothing more than this. (Both exit in the direction of the woods.)

(—? Men and women. Offspring of Harlequins and Columbines? Come out of the woods; not from the trees. Even libertinage is dull without resistance from society. —)

(Think and Fiend climb down from an old tree. Dark, strange, somewhat worn clothing. Fiend, the older one, looks like a gaunt man-about-town; Think, lyrical, spiritually passionate, young. They sit down, emotionally and physically exhausted, upon the grass.)

(Also: one of the satyrs is caught, the other one sneaks in disguised, and learns thus about this whole world. Fantastically checked clothing, tight trousers, a sort of waistcoat. Fiend very tall and lean. Think a childish face with a little pointy nose …. Have you ever heard of such roguery? They are murdering spirit!)

FIEND: They will only stop spirit from being bred. Pitiful….

THINK: They want to send out an expedition against us. Did you hear?

FIEND: Yes, my dear Think, they want to nip it in the bud. Poor boy—you haven’t even had much chance to make use of it yet.

THINK: Pathetic! This health sniveling! They want to treat the writers and intellectuals like robbers, alcoholics, and the terminally ill, to keep them from reproducing!

FIEND: The operation is not at all brutal and doesn’t hurt. — The operation doesn’t hurt and is spiritually very liberating. —

THINK: But consider the infamy!

FIEND: My dear young friend, I would not see it so terribly. Just think how far we have fallen in general, even without this. We had to remove ourselves into the woods and had to publish the newspapers, The Tree-Monastery and the Treetop from here. Well and good. We debate fiercely in these two newspapers about the meaning of the world. But we are not allowed to show ourselves in the world, beyond the woods or beyond these two newspapers. The university and the daily papers are there for the intellectual. In school, one learns how to make verses. Morality is firmly established, and any ambiguities are handled by the health court. We have no social function. We also have no income. And for the last hundred years we are treated like a vacuum on all official public occasions. So that we did not starve, we have become accustomed to this animalistic life in the trees. But I admit to you that I am sick of living off the gifts of crazy women, who read our books because they have not found the right man. Am utterly sick of it. I couldn’t care less if they castrate me. On the contrary, that would free me from these women readers and it would all be a part of the world order. Did you, by the way, see the beautiful lady who was sitting here?

THINK: A giant calf with an even more gigantic butcher!

FIEND: Ach, I miss the world. It is what it is, but in any case, it is steady, warm, and eventful material. I am going to give up writing and become the manager of this boxer.

THINK: We’re too passive. We are the exceptions, the unique cases, etc.

FIEND: We have already let it go too far. In the law there is no exception, only a monstrosity.

THINK: We will finally make the people think about their private affairs, etc., just as I always vainly hoped to do.

(He wants to unify the intellectuals before the Expedition and instigate an intellectual invasion — overthrow — in the city, rushing through the streets like the suffragettes — first Christians — and suchlike. Fiend remains skeptical, but they both agree to go into the woods. The search party comes and they retreat to their trees.)

Tempora Maier and her Contemporaries

A Picture of the Future

We get a description of this future world.

There are only free thinkers and Church devotees; every intellectual expression is measured by one of these two positions.

They want to go into the woods to warn their fellows, but the party comes and they have to hide in the trees.

Central points: Trusty Maier and Faithlein Seigert. Around the former, people who are bidding, more or less, for the hand of his daughter. From the realms of politics, business, literature, and science. Around the latter, there is one person who lays more emphasis on “depth.”

They go toward the woods also. Tempora Maier and Faust return. Faust delivers his offer of marriage, wherein he proves that the boxer is the epitome of contemporary virtues.

While Tempora Maier stalls and rejects him, he becomes furious and discovers Think’s leg and pulls him down. Fiend leaps, clamoring from the tree and is caught by Faust’s other hand. Faust ties them both up and encourages Tempora to begin her questioning.

But then the search party, alerted by the cries, comes back. Each person asks a characteristic question, which Fiend and Think answer only by sticking out their tongues. It is decided that it would be better to turn them over to the Psychotechnical Institute, so they are left tied up.

— Only the weary, skeptical satyr is caught; the other escapes to the woods. And then one knows that this will lead to revolution.

His wife brings him breakfast. That means: we were married in the bad old days —

I am one of the most important people in the history of human evolution —

Recently, someone was castrated due to an error in the apparatus and then it turned out that he was one of the Virtuous Superiors, or such like. There have been cases in which the wrong people were married to each other and such like.

1: Institute’s servant smears the tachistoscope. Asks assistant: what do we have for our daily program today?

2: A commission of foreign nations is there for research purposes.

3: Simultaneously other investigations: a bride and groom, a politician, a deracinated person.

National Psychotechnical Institute

[1] Draft from Musil’s notebook, volume 19 (1919–1921). Written above the title, in pencil, presumably by Martha Musil, are the words: “Draft for a satirical drama”. See TB II fn 142, 368. Although the passages are reproduced here as if they came one after the other, in the original hand-written text some of them have been inserted to the side of and parallel with the main text. I have also made some minor orthographical changes for consistency’s sake. While the German version in TB I includes words that have been crossed out by Musil, they have not been included here.

[2]Romain Rolland, who was an outspoken pacifist during and after WWI, is compared here with the exemplary nationalist, anti-pacifist Clemenceau. See TB II, fn, 143, 368.

[3] Edschmid was a German writer, who initially allied himself with the Expressionists, but who took a turn back toward Realism in the mid-1920’s. At the time of this writing, Musil would probably have associated him with Expressionism.

[4] The word “Faust” in German does not only suggest the famous Dr. Faustus, but is also the word for “fist”.

[5] On a loose sheet of paper, inserted into notebook 19, Musil has written, under the title, “Satyrs”: “A socially-minded collective that is rich in models worthy of imitation and praise, that is rife with the spirit of harmony and spiritual sympathy, that is enlivened by intellectual interests and ruled by a spirit of justice and a love of beauty that provides from the outset every normal personality with a psychophysical attitude, etc.

The stimulation and the inspiration, the appreciation and the sympathy, the presentation of opportunities must always be accompanied by deliberate repression of misleading seductions, by conscientious warnings, by vivid antipathy for the unethical, the immoral, and the ugly …” (Appendix to Notebook 19, TB II, 1135).

[6] Reference to Leo Perutz (1882-1957), playwright, short story writer, adventure fantasy novelist; Arnold Höllriegl (1883-1938), was a Berlin journalist and sometime editor of the Viennese newspaper, Der Tag, travel writer, and short story writer.

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[Prager Presse (April 21, 1921)]

I.

Prague has the good fortune of seeing them perform again. Years ago, in Berlin, I was there when they presented Uncle Vanya, still in those days, under Stanislavski himself. I admit that I hesitated before the reunion; war lay between, and that which one calls art had changed its aspect in the meantime; the Russian revolution had kept Stanislavski and Nemirovitsch-Dantschchenko, the spiritual forces behind this artists’ troupe, behind in Moscow, while a portion of the performers and directors, who had fallen into Denikin’s[1] hands, were banished or released to the freedom of the West — I don’t know how to say it more correctly, but it doesn’t matter. In any case it was not to be expected, even if one had the kernel of the troupe before one, that it would not have suffered from this distancing from the source of its powers. Unless it were a case of a miracle. But this is not a small troupe of actors, but rather a wandering human community, who carry their God and their soul permanently with them.

Well, it is the kernel of the troupe. And it is a case of a miracle!

I saw The Night Asylum, The Three Sisters, The Karamazovs; these pieces constituted the strongest shocks and the deepest moments of happiness, which art, which life, is capable of providing. Despite the fact that I did not understand a word. It is the perfection of theater.

I will attempt to remember and refer to a few details that I noticed, without affirming that one should remember this or that in particular and not the inexhaustibility of so much else; the real work of art is infinite, says Goethe.

Above all, there is the music of their voices. All of these actors can sing. One learns to with Stanislavski, before one depicts people. That is such a simple and splendid idea. We do it too — peripherally. But not even opera singers intone correctly and therein it is clear how much finer vocal chords and ear must be, if they are to depict the undulations of the speaking soul, which is often apparently speaking of something else entirely. That is why the choral yammering of the modish stage never coalesces into song — this impoverishment of the spiritual side of song is, to me, like having ink splattered into my ear. Here, one experiences the thousand convolutions and rhythmic fragments of expression that obtain between two human beings. Because they can sing, they do not; instead, they speak the most dream-like beautiful prose that I have ever heard. And if they really do sing sometimes, because the poet wants it, there is a moment of silence — I don’t know whether it is really in the room or just in the enchanted soul of the listener — when one believes one is clearly feeling that something is happening to one now — a rhythm of the blood or still deeper inside — but the voices already have nothing more to ground them and they hover in a heaven of sorrow.

The eye is no less considered than the ear. One could keep one’s ears covered and just look, without tiring. The gestures seem to grow out of the characteristics of the roles, to take on their own meaning — images that engulf and then dissolve into new configurations! — Without compromising the modesty of their role as servants to the action, the way the fluttering of a gown accompanies someone in the act of walking: this alone has never before existed. But that is not even the half of it. As an example, I will merely suggest one thing, the authority with which they direct the attention of the audience. They succeed in ensuring that one sees everything, when usually, otherwise, one is always hanging on some nail or other and has to chase after the backstory; if one had been paying too much attention to the hero, or had begun to ignore the hero because a clock was striking in the background. With the Moscow Theater, one misses nothing and their directors orchestrate the movements of our attention with such an uncanny artistry that these movements themselves are an enjoyment to behold. It is an artistry of nuance: of time and intense nuance, as never before experienced.

I believe they succeed in this because they leave so much out; although one hardly notices it. One believes that their performance grows naturally out of the scene itself, like a garden filled with a thousand freely sprouting ideas; but in truth, these people perform with a remarkable restraint and control and, in lieu of the many gestures that would be possible in reality — and which those actors bent on realistic portrayals would pile on, one on top of the other — instead of these many gestures, they choose only one, which embodies the entire significance of the moment, because it is a distillation of all the dimensions of this magical directing. In this way, they gain the necessary time to synthesize the single effects into a symphony that is ten-times denser than reality. They sound the pure note, uninterrupted by all peripheral actorly sounds, the note of poetry, and what they perform is no longer theater, but art.

II.

It would be, thus, a mistake to call their style Naturalistic or Impressionistic, even though the pieces by Gorky, Chekhov, and the interpretation of Dostoevsky might mislead one in this direction — or to mistake their work as the late flowering of a faded artistic movement. What they enact — beside the fact that Impressionism is as much an asylum for homeless artists as is Expressionism today — does not seem to us like a twenty-year-old obsolete artform, but rather as the art of the future, insofar as the European theater could be conceded to have a future at all.

In order to check my theory, I sought them out and mischievously asked them what they themselves called their style. Just as I had imagined, they looked at me with big eyes and answered: We perform The Life of Humans by Leonid Andreyev with decorations by Aubrey Beardsley, we perform Maeterlinck, we perform Hamlet in the style of Gordon Craig, Stanislavski performs in the Moscow Chamber Theater amid stylized decorations: We play every piece according to its essence. — I am certain, just as they may softly elevate realistic plays (usually performed so badly) above the boards, that they restore to fantastical ones a dizzying sense of reality.

For they create the body of the play from out of its soul. If I have heard correctly, it happens that they work sometimes for three years on one piece. Vladimir Nemirovitsch-Dantschenko, the writer, watches over the spirit; Stanislavski conjures forth the bodily share. I would find it, in any case, quite natural, and it should be taken as a lesson for our dramatists, who ready their pieces in three months. One can easily come up with ideas and in the chaos of our times a versatile soul experiences all kinds of scenarios; usually, if one throws a costume (as new and as modish as possible) over this astral momentary body the work of art is already finished. But it is not the kind of work, in the sense of that internal totality, which Goethe called infinite and inexhaustible. This totality occurs moreover only when — seemingly paradoxically — the soul of a writer has exhausted itself on a work; when it has transformed its shape so much within the work, that it can barely recognize itself anymore, so that it can barely encompass the work any longer, as if the soul were encountering the work, in its terrifying completion, as if it were a second nature. And in reality, there is nothing more natural than this seeming paradox. For whoever is a writer and not just a schmoozer, does not just arrange his ideas, but rather arranges his world picture, his world wish, his world will inside of every single idea. And insofar as struggle and work are larger in his whole existence than the contents of any one moment, these two things will be greater and more filled with rich associations than can be grasped by any one moment, and the work that has come into being will, in the moment of its completion, overshadow its creator, just as the many-branched crown of a tree overshadows the branch that bears it. — Of course, this doesn’t belong in a newspaper. And yet it does. For, the fact that such rigor is hardly ever practiced these days is one of the reasons that our artistic fashions spread like galloping consumption and our educated public follows the competition of book-makers as if they were bookies.

The same is true for the actor. Nothing is simpler for a person with mimetic abilities than to empathize more or less with an indicated type, to rashly appropriate a “personal” interpretation of the stereotypical, and to let fall all manner of possible gestures into this empty infinite space. But the art of acting, if it is to be more than boring cinema, only occurs when personal whim is inhibited by a sense of responsibility toward the conception of a total meaning. The way in which the Moscow Artists do this is the strongest argument one can find against all the usual critical and theater blather about how something well written can be effective on the stage, or, how, on the other hand, something can be a nullity, but still a great piece of theater; inane talk, which comes, with its professional jargon about scenes, dramatic structure, and the like, half out of the literature seminar and half from the Operetta market. The Moscow Artists, on the other hand, take the intellectual vision of the writer, which has been seen, heard, thought, and felt simultaneously, that is all united, but they also take whatever is not fully clear, but which is alive, nevertheless, and they work through it, through all of its suggested dimensions, until, instead of something shrouded in shadow, they arrive at a completely embodied unison. This has, by the way, a social aspect to it. The repertoire of the Moscow performers is only 11 plays, enough, thus, for only one season. But if our standing repertoire theater no longer offers even the possibility of the highest achievements of art, it must be forced off the stage, and the thought of a future wherein fewer plays were performed is more comforting, after all, than the thought of the European stage slowly languishing of incurable dementia.

Today it seems as if the Russians had brought an exotic world with them, as if the sky of the steppes and the vast, deep homeland hovered over their performances. In truth, it is something that could become our own; it is the cosmos of a well-crafted literature, an arrangement of incommensurable associations, enclosed within the atmospheric arc of an enormous sky. There are actors under this sky, who are some of the greatest performers alive today, but even these strong individuals bow down before the spirit, no, they bow down toward it, the way someone does who lifts up something fragile. Their collaboration is neither balletic, nor a tyrannical discipline, but rather the life of a spiritual community. It is, in itself, a performance of human absorption, one of the most astonishing performances there is. Aside from in this troupe, it does not exist on the stage. Nor, either, aside from them, does it exist in contemporary life.

[1] Reference to Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), the Polish-born Russian general, leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920).

The Moscow Art theatre's 1898 production of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull, with Meyerhold seated on the floor, centre, and Stanislavski on the far right; published in Efros' journal in 1917.

https://www.contramundumpress.com/theater-symptoms

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Thoughtful people are always analytical. Creative writers are analytical. For every analogy is an inadvertent analysis. And one only comprehends a phenomenon insofar as one recognizes how it occurs or how it is connected, related to, bound to another phenomenon. Naturally, one can just as easily say that every analogy is a synthesis, as is every comprehension. Naturally; they are two halves of the same process.

Nevertheless, today there are many literati who are angry at analysis and who cozy up to synthesis. Their alleged reason is this: if one continually practices partial analysis or partial synthesis (through more thinking) then suddenly everything is connected to everything else, is caused by everything; everything collapses into likenesses and an endless number of combinatory possibilities. Of course that corresponds thoroughly with the truth (and is caused by historical coincidence, which we have to thank for the mode of our internal existence and its categorization into values). But it grows tedious when it is managed like a game, without strong passions or great talent. In these cases, the others rant and rave about the “naked” analysis, the “naked” psychology (although it has nothing to do with psychology, but is more like an ethical experiment), and about an insufficient earnestness when it comes to a value judgments, about sterile rationalism and the like (even though it is not a matter of anything rational, but rather an emotional-rational and senti-mental way of thinking).

—They mistake the naturally egalitarian lack of talent of the representative of the mediocre with the thing itself. They are right to think that an intimacy with internal possibilities does not alone a reality make; but their fear overlooks the fact that making a reality requires a step forwards and not backwards. They know that a person, in order to create an evocative exemplar or a work of art, requires other qualities as well, such as thinking and moral fantasy; but they forget that one must encourage the use of these qualities rather than dissuade the writer from intellectual activity altogether.

To subtly decentralize mankind’s thinking process is certainly not in itself the New Human Being, but it is the only basis from which to create such Beings for someone who has the talent to do so. One is suspicious of nothing more than all wishes for simplification of literature and life, for the Homeric or religious mood, for unity and wholeness.

Musil visiting The Goethe House in Frankfurt.

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I’m curious what you, readers, feel about the characters in the book. Do you relate to them, care about them?

Brad Freeman asked who was Musil’s audience—something I had never really thought about. It made me think of something Musil said after the publication of one of the book’s volumes: “If this book succeeds, it will have been wrong,” which seemed to suggest that there was no audience for it… which then made me think that his goal was in a way to CREATE an audience with the book, to inspire the different kinds of thinking that he felt were required to create what he calls “a new morality,” and a new way of being in the world. And not that there had not been others before him who thought and felt like this (the essayists, the experimentors, certain mystics, certain writers, certain non-systematic philosophers, certain scientists, artists), but that this hybrid mode of thinking was very rare, maligned, minimized, made to seem frivolous. This devaluation led to an under-cultivation of the parts of human potential that could have been (still could) bulwarks against barbarism on the one hand, and hollow, superficial life on the other.

We were talking about Musil’s idea of a Utopia of Essayism and Utopia of Exact Living, which, were they lived out in real life would presumably be steps toward reconciling the real world with the world of ideas (which were and currently still are mired in cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, moral posing and supposing).

Living with Precision would possibly mean “that a life’s work could be reduced to three poems or three actions or treatises . . . in which the individual’s capacity for achievement is intensified to its highest degree…keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary when one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has the ineffable sense of spreading one’s arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation….” “In short, from every ton of morality a milligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to yield an enchanting joy.”

“The logical outcome of this would be a human being full of the paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefiniteness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite. The stable internal conditions guaranteed by a system of morality have little value for a man whose imagination is geared to change. Ultimately, when the demand for the greatest and most exact fulfillment is transferred from the intellectual realm to that of the passions, it becomes evident . . . that the passions disappear and that in their place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.”

He then goes on to say that this man of precision already exists: in those separated moments when someone carries out their profession. But not in their lives! If he were asked to take himself and “everything else seriously and without bias” there is no doubt that he “would regard the utopia of himself as an immoral experiment on a person engaged in serious business. Which is why Ulrich, in his concerns with the question of . . . whether a goal or a meaning can be found for what is happening and has happened to us—had always, all his life, been quite alone.”

Musil, too.

I, too.

You?

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We know that Musil read his work aloud to his wife, Martha, and that Burton Pike, who edited and translated the novel along with Sophie Wilkins, found his own rhythm of translating when he realized this.

In these chapters about Ulrich’s relationship with Diotima (and Arnheim and with himself) there is so much going on. The way he weaves thousands of years of philosophy into a carriage ride! We get to think with him about idealism and materialism, the relationship between the body and the soul, civilization and savagery, aristocracy and the nouveau riche, kinship and otherness, attraction and revulsion, and on and on and on.

Here is a picture of Musil’s mother (Ulrich’s description of the woman surrounded by ruffles and layers reminded me of Hermine):

In discussions with the brilliant readers in our group, I came to consider one difference between the chapters where Ulrich interacts with others and when he muses to himself. In the former he is usually expressing an extreme side of his character (the materialistic, cynical one), as a reaction against their extreme idealism; when he is alone, however, he allows the depth and complexity of his feeling and thinking to come through. The chapters I read here mainly showcase the cynical Ulrich, but the other ones let us in on the secret that will become more and more obvious once Ulrich meets his sister, Agathe: that he is at least partly a mystic, albeit the kind who wants to drive on the mystic road with a truck.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my rather imperfect reading (I slipped up on a few words and couldn’t repress laughter at some points).

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Just before Musil went off to join the army in WWI he wrote his last “Literary Chronicle” for the Neue Rundschau. It is astonishing to experience Musil experiencing and trying to describe the new phenomena of Robert Walser and Franz Kafka here, fresh, unprepared, astonished. The reader familiar with Musil will see that he is also writing—as usual—about some of his own literary, ethical, and human concern. Here is my translation of this remarkable meeting of mind and page.

Die »Geschichten« von Robert Walser. (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1914.)

Benevolent-minded people and women with a strong charitable bent will find these thirty short stories playful. They will accuse them of lacking character, of being capricious, of trifling with life; perhaps they will accuse them of having no heart and of merely impressing by the kind of stupefying determination with which something insignificant, like a park bench, sometimes takes up its place in the world. On the whole, it seems to me, they wouldn’t go so far as to say so, but deep down they will be tormented by the fact that the stories lack moral earnestness. Which is in fact the case: in so many things we maintain such rigid customs when it comes to our feelings that we handle them as if they originated inside things themselves. For example, we find—a case that relates to Walser—a burning theater to be nothing but a terrible catastrophe. When someone could experience it as a splendid catastrophe or as one that had been well-deserved. Since we are liberal, we naturally don’t want to keep him from doing so; but what we believe we have a right to demand in such cases are reasons. And when this person has no need for reasons at all, but simply finds the whole thing to be just as much an enchanting catastrophe as we find it terrible, then we venture at first to suspect: depravity. And if we then find nothing more than a lovable fellow, we say that he has no moral earnestness or that he sins against the earnestness of the circumstance. Yes, we don’t only demand this respect in the face of circumstances on sad occasions, but even in enjoyment we demand a certain earnestness. When it comes to expressing the greenness of a meadow, for example, the writer must communicate it to us with such enchantment that we feel how his whole heart—in flight—is over-grown with greenness. Or at least he will say that he cannot manage this, and that the meadow is not green at all, but rather an economic catastrophe—because of the agrarian’s beautiful meadow, the factory workers can’t eat meat. But if he simply feels that it is quite idiotically, uproariously laughably green—and this is indeed the most ordinary thing one wants to say about a beautiful lawn afterall—then we really do conclude that the emotional rights of a beautiful meadow have been somehow too carelessly handled. Now in most of his reactions, Walser is hardly and by absolutely no means intentionally a revolutionary or a deviant of feeling, but rather a lovable somewhat fantastical good citizen; but he constantly transgresses against the inalienable expectations of the objects of the world and the imagination: the expectation that they will be taken by us as actual. A meadow for him is in one moment a real object, and in another just something on paper. If he rhapsodizes or rages against something, he never lets us forget that he is doing it in writing and that his feelings are on a tightrope. Suddenly he makes his characters go silent and lets the story speak, as if it were a character. Marionette voices, romantic irony; but there is something in this jape that is loosely reminiscent of Morgenstern’s poems, where the gravity of real relationships suddenly begins to tremble on the filament of a word association; except that with Walser this association is never purely verbal but rather an association of meanings, so that the line of feeling that he directly follows swells into a grand momentum, swerves aside, and continues on swaying merril in the direction of a new seduction. I would not really want to maintain that these arenot shenanigens, but in any case they are not—despite the exceptional mastery of words, which can intoxicate one—literary shenanigens, but rather human ones, with much tenderness, dreamyness, freedom, and the moral richness of one of those seemingly useless, lethargic days, when our firmest convictions loosen into a pleasant languidness.

Franz Kafka.

It seems to me nevertheless that Walser‘s particular type must remain unique and is not likely to become a literary genre, and it is unpleasant for me to say that Kafka’s first book, Observations (Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Leipzig, 1913), seems like a special case of the Walser type, even though it appeared earlier than Walser’s Stories. Here as well, contemplation of a kind for which a writer fifty years ago would certainly have invented the book title Soap Bubbles; it suffices to note the specific difference and to say that in the latter the same kind of figments sound sad and in the former merry, that in one there is something freshly baroque, while in the other, in sentences that designedly fill whole pages, there is rather something of a conscientious melancholy—that of an iceskater performing his long slides and figures. Very great artistic mastery here as well, but perhaps only here a whiff of these small endlessnesses streaming into emptiness, a meek allusion to nothingness, a friendly softness as in the hours of a suicide between decision and act, or however one may call this feeling that one can name in very different ways, because it simply resonates like a very soft dark overtone; and is very allluring, though too vague and soft. It strikes a chord with the interiority of experience that makes Kafka’s other book, the novelle, The Stoker (Kurt Wolff, Verlag, Leipzig, 1913), so ravishing. This story is fully fluttering and fully containment. It is really without composition, without noteworthy external or internal plot, and yet each step is arranged so tightly and it is so full of activity that one feels how vast and varied for some people is the path from one uneventful day to another. A young man travels from Europe to America, away from his family, to an unexpectedly good and respected fairytale uncle; along the way, he makes friend with a stoker, takes an interest in his fate, begins brash unfinishable things that—from the perspective of the world—seem to protrude into life like torn off filaments, and he thinks brash thoughts that he cannot bring to conclusion; that is all. It is a conscious naivité and yet has nothing of the unpleasantness of such things. For it is real naivité, that in literature (just like the false kind; the difference is not here!) is something indirect, complicated, misbegotten, a longing, an ideal. But there is something here that deserved consideration, a well-grounded something, a feeling with living causes; while the false, so-called genuine, the beloved artless naivité does not have this and thereby is so worthless. A primordial drive to goodness takes shape in Kafka’s story—no resentment, rather something of the submerged passion of childhood for Goodness; the feeling of an agitated child’s prayer, and something of the fretful eagerness of painstaking schoolwork, and much for which one can conceive of no other expression save moral tenderness. The demands of that which one must do; are here posed with a conscience that is not driven by ethical principles but by a fine, haunting oversensitivity, which incessently uncovers small questions of great significance and which reveals remarkable convolutions in questions that for others are merely smooth uninteresting solids. And then, amidst all of this, there comes a part where it is reported how an aging unloved virgin bumblingly, shyly, seduces a young boy; very short, but of such a power in so few strokes, that the writer—who until then had maybe seemed to be only a mild narrator—appears as a very willful artist, one who has bent down to small and lowly emotions.

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Once the Musil reading group begins again on Monday I am sure I will be re-inspired. But for the meantime, I realize I have not written anything for a week here and I don’t want to leave you all without some interesting Musilian tidbits.

What do you want me to write about? Send questions, themes, ideas!

And for your listening pleasure, a video of me long ago (2015) in Burlington Vermont’s lovely Crow Bookshop, where I used to work, reading from my newly minted translation of a collection of Musil’s small prose.

https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/reading-new-translation-thought-flights-collection-short-prose-robert-musil

https://www.contramundumpress.com/thought-flights

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These days, when differences between cultures, persons, languages, and ideas are increasingly diminished by the forces of globalism and moral conformity, by technological attempts to anticipate and control thoughts and language, it is all the more important to salvage a space for individual idiosyncratic aesthetic and ethical experimentation, where translation and communication need not mean a collapse into sameness. Nor does a celebration of difference spell an inability to communicate from one person or one culture to another.

In his 2005 essay “Literature as Experience,” Burton wrote asking how one might build a utopian bridge from an “isolated subjective mind to the social, moral, and ethical concerns of society at large?” A belief in such a possibility seemed, he wrote, to have “since been lost, a belief that in spite of the increasing solipsism and dehumanizing specialization of modern life there is some sphere or level […] in or on which all the conflicting and apparently unrelated fragments, self and world, feeling and intellect, science and society, skepticism and belief, could somehow be melded into a coherent, ethical whole.”

In April of 2021, I asked him what he thought then about this utopian bridge: was a belief in communication from subjective self to subjective self today hopelessly naive? He then reminded me of Musil’s condition toward the end of his life, in poverty and exile, looking at a world under totalitarianism. From out of the darkness and despair of that historical moment, Musil dared to look to the youth to come, after the war, to the future. He seemed to say that significance must still be sought and communication approximated—in even the worst of times, lest we relinquish our humanity to the brutal engines of destruction. Burton concluded that Musil “could at best only hope, so can we now. I don’t see any way, now as well, of gathering together the unrelated fragments of the world; just a hope. The bridge is for the future, not for now.” Then he signed off, saying, “Age is beginning to catch up with me (rather a surprise!), so I look forward to your carrying on”. In his honor, we must try now, despite everything, to imagine the sorts of bridges that allow for difference and that foster creative individual aliveness.

https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/a-celebration-of-burton-pike

(A young Burton Pike with a member of the at that time future generation on his shoulders)

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It’s gruelling, my eyes hurt, and getting everything right is virtually impossible, so it is not really satisfying either. New readers have also raised excellent questions, which raise doubts and inaugurate imposture syndrome. I wonder, are there scholars who don’t have such doubts, or alternately who are wise enough to realize that they can’t get everything absolutely gleamingly perfect & right?

This book, despite my 25 year knowledge of Musil, has been very challenging because of all the complex thinkers he interacted with….I did my best, I hope, in the time & word count allowed….& there will happily be more edits & suggestions before it appears….

Thanks to all of you who inspired me & cheered me on so far. The book is for you.

Here, just because I have nothing else to share, is a working bibliography for you (warning: the formatting got all screwy when I pasted it):

Bibliography

Adamik, Marianne. “Das tägliche Leben der Musils in der Rasumofskygasse” in Erinnerungen an Robert Musil, En Face—Texte von Augenzeugen, edited by Karl Corino. Wädenswill, Switzerland: Nimbus, 2010, 123-124.

Adorno, Theodor W. Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Baden-Baden: Suhrkampf, 1955.

Amann, Klaus. Literature and Politics, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2023.

Austria Child Mortality Rate. Statista, 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041789/austria-all-time-child-mortality-rate/.

Baedeker, Karl. “Robert Musil und ein junger Mann seiner Zeit” in Erinnerungen, 331-335.

Bahr, Hermann. Inventur, ed. Gottfried Schnödl, Weimar: VDG, 2001.

Dagmar Barnouw. Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Bashkirtseff, Marie. The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. A.D. Hall. Chicago & New York: Rand,McNally & Co, 1908.

Berliner Mietverein. “Berliner Pensionen. Frau Wirtin und die möblierten Herren Jens Sethmann” in https://www berliner-mieterverein.de/magazin/online/mm0517/berliner-pensionen-frau-wirtin-und-die-moeblierten-herren-051724.htm, August 9, 2025.

Franz Blei. Ed, The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1922.

Bonnachi, Silvia. Robert Musils Studienjahre in Berlin: 1903-1908. Beilage zu Musil-Forum. Saarbrücken: Arbeitstselle für Robert-Musil-Forschung, 1992.

Patricia P. Brodsky, “The Military School: A Shared Source in Rilke and Musil,” in Modern Language Studies Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1979-1980): 88-93.

Canetti, Elias. “Erfahrungen mit Musil in Wien 1935-1936” in Erinnerungen, 233-288.

Dorrit Cohn. “Psyche and Space in Musil’s ‘Die Vollendung der Liebe’,” in The Germanic Review 49 (1974): 154-168.

Corino, Karl. Ed. Erinnerungen an Robert Musil, En Face—Texte von Augenzeugen, edited by Karl Corino. Wädenswill, Switzerland: Nimbus, 2010.

“Freundschaft mit Robert and Martha Musil: Gespräch mit Bruno und Erna Fürst,” in Erinnerungen, 269-273.

“Musils Besuch im Goethe-Haus und seine Frankfurter Lesung: Gespräch mit Josephine Rumpf” in Erinnerungen, 197-199.

“Musil in Paris: Gespräch mit Otto Pächt” in Erinnerungen, 297-299.

Robert Musil: Eine Biographie. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowholt, 2003.

“Von der Seele träumen dürfen.” Nachträge zur Biographie und zum Werk Robert Musils. Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022.

Max Dessoir. Das Doppel Ich. Leipzig, Ernst Günthers Verlag, 1890.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation. Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Religion. Leipzig: Teubner 1914 (Wilhelm Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 2).

Dinklage, Karl. Ed. Robert Musil: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1960.

“Musils Herkunft und Lebensgeschichte” in Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 187-264.

Dobravik, Milan. “Robert Musil und seine Mäzene” in Erinnerungen, 249-254.

Donath, Gustave. “Aus Robert Musils Jugendzeit” in Erinnerungen,

Durrell, Lawrence. Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington-Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, ed. Ian S.

MacNiven & Harry T. Moore. London: Faber & Faber, 1981.

David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Ehrenfeld, Stella. “Eine Hilfsaktion für Musil” in Erinnerungen, 257-260.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872, Vol. IV, ed. By Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

“The Transcendentalist.” https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/The-Transcendentalist.pdf. December 3, 2025.

Fanelli, E.V. “‘Als er Fräulein Valerie liebte.’ Musils Valerie-Erlebnis” in Musil Forum,

19./20. Jahrgang 1993/94. International Robert-Musil-Gesellschaft, Saarbrücken: 7-30.

Fanta, Walter. Die Entstehungsgeschichte des “Mann ohne Eigenschaften“ von Robert Musil. Paderborn, Germany: Böhlau, 2000.

Ed. et al. Die Klagenfurter Ausgabe: Kommentierte digitale Edition, Klagenfurt, Austria: Robert Musil Institute, 2009.

“Schreiben Wie Musil” in Musil Studien. Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, Bd. 49, 2020.

Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science. Abingdon, Oxon & NY: Taylor & Francis, 1982.

Fontana, Oskar Maurus. “Die Nachkriegszeit und Musils neue Arbeitstätte,” in Erinnerungen, 99-105.

“Eine Begegnung mit dem Verleger Claasen” in Erinnerungen, 377-379.

Frisé, Adolf. “Eine erste Begegnung mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 189-192.

Fürst, Bruno. “Musils Späte Jahre” in Erinnerungen, 375-376.

Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht. Wien-Kölln-Graz: Peter Broucek, 1980.

Goethe, J.W. von. Faust. Part I, translated by Anna Swanwick. Vol. XIX, Part 1. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.

Gordon, Paul. “Die Uraufführung der Schwärmer 1929” in Erinnerungen, 155-161.

Groethuysen, Bernhard. Die Dialektik der Demokratie. Rosdorf, Germany: Seidel, 1932.

Guillemin, Bernard. “Die Arbeit am Mann ohne Eigenschaften” in Erinnerungen, 346.

“Eine erste Begegnung mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 169-170.

“Eine unnangenehme Begegnung mit Professor Bohnenblust” in Erinnerungen, 383-385

“Martha and Robert Musil in Berlin” in Erinnerungen, 193-195.

“Musils Ratlosigkeit und Anerkennunngsbedürfnis in den 1930er Jahren” in Erinnerungen, 215-219.

Hakel, Hermann, “Eine Lesung Musils in Wien 1935” in Erinnerungen, 329-330.

Hall, Murray. “Der Preis Der Stadt Wien” https://personal.murrayhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/DER-PREIS-DER-STADT-WIEN.pdf. September 12, 2025.

Hayasaka, Nanoa. Robert Musil und der genius loci. Munich: Brill/Fink, 2011.

Hexner, Erwin P. “Musils Interessenkreis” in Erinnerungen, 275-277.

Hirslanden Clinique de Grangettes. “History.” https://www.hirslanden.ch/en/clinique-des-grangettes/portrait/history.html December 28, 2025.

Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik

Jensen, Anthony K. “Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: iep.utm.edu/Ernst-Cassirer/221. December 28, 2025.

Jacobi, Jolande. “Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Musil über den Wiener Kulturbund” in Erinnerungen, 280.

Høi Jensen. The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025.

Alfred Kerr, Gesammelte Schriften in Zwei Reihe. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1917.

“Nachruf auf Musil in Londoner PEN-Club” in Erinnerungen, 462-463.

Kesser, Arnim. “Musil als Kulturdiagnostiker” Erinnerungen, 426-427.

Kraus, Karl. Die Fackel. https://fackel.oeaw.ac.at/, June 6, 2025.

Lejeune, Robert. “Robert Musils Schweizer Jahre” in Erinnerungen, 411-424.

Lilla, Mark. “Introduction” in Thomas Mann. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: NYRB, 2021.

David Luft. The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880-1942. Oakland: University of California Press, 1984.

“Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905” in Central European History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1983): 53-75.

Lukacs, Palko. “Musils individualpsychologische Behandlunng und sein Interesse an der jüngeren Generation” in Erinnerungen, 165-168.

Mach, Ernst. Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischem. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922.

Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Treasure of the Humble, translated by Alfred Sutro. New York:Dodd, Mead & Co., 1900.

Mandl, Eva Maria. “Schöner Palawatsch”. Ea von Allesch, Böcklinstraße 106, Löwengasse 47, Paracelsusgasse 9 (1915; 1918-1922). Pratercottage. http://www.pratercottage.at/2011/08/18/ea-von-allesch/. May 11, 2025.

Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: NYRB, 2021.

Mayer, Hans. “Erinnerung an Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 443-448.

McBride, Patrizia. “On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil’s ‘Armed Truce of Ideas.’” The German Quarterly, Autumn, 2000, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000): 366-386.

Moran, Dermot “Introduction.” Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, ed. Dermot Moran, transl. J. N. Findlay. Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2001.

Morgenstern, Soma. “Begegnung Musils mit Georg Lukács und Béla Bálazs” in Erinnerungen, 107-112.

“Der Anschluss Österreichs 1938—Robert Musil und Joseph Roth” in Erinnerungen, 368-369.

“Musils Kafka-Lektüre,” in Erinnerungen, 116-117.

“Robert Musil und Joseph Roth” in Erinnerungen, 241-247.

Musil, Alfred, “Musils Ablösung als Kompagniekommandant” in Erinnerungen, 81-82.

Musil, Aloisa, “Tagebuchaufzeichnungen der Grossmutter Aloisa Musil” in Erinnerungen, 23-24.

Martha Musil, et al. Briefwechsel mit Arnim Kesser and Philip Jacottet, ed. Marie Louise von Roth, Annette Daigger, & Martine von Walter. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1997.

“Musils Kabenlektüre” in Erinnerungen, 25-26.

Robert Musil, Briefe 1901-1942, ed. Adolf Frisé, (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1981.

Briefe 1901-1942, Kommentar, Register, ed. Adolf Frisé .Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1981.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978.

“Der Sechste Exkurs” in Franz Blei. Ed, The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1922.

Die Klagenfurter Ausgabe: Kommentierte digitale Edition, ed. Walter Fanta, et al. Klagenfurt, Austria: Robert Musil Institute, 2009.

Literature and Politics, trans. Genese Grill; ed. Philip Payne & with an Introduction by Klaus Amann. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2023.

Tagebücher. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983.

Tagebücher. Anmerkungen, Anhang, Register. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,1983.

Theater Symptoms: Plays & Writings on Drama, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2020.

Thought Flights, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2015.

Unions: Two Stories, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2019.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common.The Complete Works of Nietzsche, vol. 10. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.

Nübel, Birgit. Ed. with Norbert Christian Wolf. Das Robert Musil Handbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, 2016.

“Vereinigungen (1911)” in Handbuch, 120-156.

Otten, Karl. “Eindrücke von Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 11-18.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance . London: Macmillan & co, 1873.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire . Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Valerie Petter-Zeiss. “Die verlassee Wohnung der Musils” in Erinnerugen, 389-390.

“Martha und der galante Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 352-354.

“Martha Musils Kampf um die Renaissance des Werks” in Erinnerungen, 469-472.

Petry, Walther. “Musils Rede zur Rilke-Feier am 16. Januar 1927” in Erinnerungen, 151-154.

Oliver Pfohlmann, “Biografie” in Handbuch, 1-34.

“Biografie über Alfred Kerr: Lebenskünstler, Romantiker – und begnadeter Kritiker.” November 18, 2016. Deutschland Rundfunk. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/biografie-ueber-alfred-kerr-lebenskuenstler-romantiker-und-100.html.

Pietzner, Carlo, “Die Begegunng eines jungen Malers mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 355-365.

Rasch, Wolfdietrich, “Musil in Berlin in Erinnerungen” in Erinnerungen, 221-232.

Rosenthal, Otto, “Ein Familienurlaub am Wörthersee” in Erinnerungen, 131-136.

“Musils Gallenoperation in Erinnerungen, 143-145.

Roth, Marie Luise. “Robert Musil im Spiegel seines Werkes: Versuch einer inneren Biographie” in Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 13-4.

Un destin de femme—Martha Musil: L’amante, L’épouse, la Soeur. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006.

Ryan, Judith. The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Schmidt, Jochen. Ohne Eigenschaften.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Anatol and Other Plays, translated by Grace Isabel Colbron. New York: Modern Library, 1917.

Schöne, Albrecht. “Über den Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil”. Euphorion 55, 1968, 196-220.

Schönwiese, Ernst “Die Bedeutung der Wiener Volkshochschule und die Lesungen Musils in den 1930er Jahren” in Erinnerungen, 325-327.

Schwerin, Hans. “Erinnerung an Musils Exil in Genf” in Erinnerugen, 449-451.

Seidl-Kreis, “Die Unterstützung Musils durch das ‘Comité international pour le placement des intellectuels réfugiés’ in Genf” in Erinnerungen, 405-407.

Sigmund, Karl. Exact Thinking in Demented Times. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Silone, Ignazio. “Musil in der Schweiz” in Erinnerungen, 396-403.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Wilhelm Dilthey. 9/29. 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dilthey/ .

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Woodward, William B.“Fechner’s Panpsychism: A Scientific Solution to the Mind-Body Problem. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 8 (1972): 367-386.

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Wright, G.H. “Introduction.” Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Musil’s Underwood

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When the Musils lived there, on the ground floor of a little villa across from the main building, the Pouponnière was just outside city limits, on Chemin des Grangettes 29, “a road off the Route de Chêne, bus stop Ermitage on Line 12, and then just a few steps further and two lefts.” The fact that the house where they lived was part of a nursery, was “an irony” for those who knew Musil’s feelings about children. But it was lovely. They were surrounded by “a small garden, with fig and apple trees and magpies sitting in tall birches.” For the first time since leaving Vienna, Robert’s room was large enough to unpack and organize all his writing materials.[iv] His study had a glass door through which he could see a stone path with primitive columns leading to a small, lush overgrown garden—“I look at it and am working again with pleasure . . . for the first time!” They were situated “between mostly abandoned villas and infinite gardens.” One October morning when he woke up just before 5 a.m. and happened to walk outside, the world still abuzz in autumn, he “didn’t know if the garden was illuminated by moonlight or the first moments of dawn, and the whole thing had something so somnambulant about it” that he almost had to pinch himself.

Orphanage in Lausanne

Geneva in general pleased them inordinately. They found its lake-side landscape “often enchanting; when seen from the banks of the Sécheron district, or from on top of Pregny Hill, or, looking back from Bellerive.” They were “completely in love” with the city; in this time, when they were so bereft of spiritually enriching comforts, it was “a great gift.”[vi]He was “as in love with the landscape as someone who risks death for a woman in order to be near her.”

The ecstatic timeless experience of the Other Condition—the garden that was both dusk and dawn at once—was a respite from an increasingly unsustainable reality. On October 22^nd, he wrote to Rolf Langnese to thank him for his help in making normal life a bit more bearable. In Martha’s words, this philanthropist was “a pianist and funded [the conductor Hermann] Scherchen and his orchestra.” Langnese, like many other friends and admirers, had been trying to mobilize benefactors for Musil’s cause and, in the meantime, sent Musil 350 francs which had, Robert wrote, “removed a stone from his neck that had already been dragging him ‘toward the fishes.’” Musil told him that he still had not entirely given up on the world, “because he hadn’t expected much from it before either,” but it often seemed “almost certain” that he would be “trampled by this herd of oxen, since everything that one could hold onto was beneath their hoofs.” Then, in a letter written to the Wotrubas on the same day he swung in the other direction for a moment: he was working again, and well, and discovering things he had overlooked: it was “like a balloon that only achieves its simple form when it’s fully blown up.” But then: “How can one blow and blow, when one sits upon needles?”

So many times they were rescued from poverty by a sudden surprise act of generosity: the Churches would send a check; Langnese would remember them; on the 28th of October, a woman named Doris Gäumen Wild spontaneously collected a few hundred francs from some friends (in thanks, Musil sent her a manuscript page of The Man Without Qualities, in hopes that it might perhaps be valuable someday or rather “just as a memory of the childhood custom of giving someone a stone or a piece of an earthworm”); in late December, Mathilde Lejeune-Jehle (sister-in-law of Robert Lejeune) and her husband won 50 francs playing Lotto and sent it to him.[xi] Such offerings saved them from being, as Robert wrote, in reference to the Villon poem, with “les neiges d’antan.”

They lived in constant fear, not only of poverty, but of “an ever-present, invisible Gestapo,” imagining, even in Geneva, the “sudden night-time knock on their door.” Once, when the Pächts and the Fürsts sent them a Christmas Pudding from England, packed in an earthenware orb-like shell, they thought it was a bomb and buried it in the garden.] How could he write under such circumstances? On November 14^th he lamented that he continually crossed out what he had written, and insisted he had no publisher, even though Bermann-Fischer was still in the wings (and sent him 250 Swiss francs three weeks later).

On the same day Musil wrote to Olden, complaining about Olden’s essay “On the Radio,” wherein he had mentioned both Thomas and Heinrich Mann in the same breath as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Kleist (and hadn’t mentioned Musil at all)—but then wrote again, ten days later, to apologize, acknowledging that he was a “poisonous scoundrel.” “May this serve as an apology to you, so that you will forget my small paroxysm about the plurality of Manns in my last letter.” In fact, he admitted: “Thomas has expressed himself multiple times with such great generosity about me that I would have done better to have expressed my own esteem toward him rather than a fleeting resentment.” To Lejeune on the 26^th of November, he continued in the spirit of gratefulness: “This awareness that you concern yourself so much with me, and then the warmth flowing from the Wotrubas to me, so that art does not grow cold . . . from this I borrow the recklessness to keep building a house of cards, while the earth’s fissures expand.”

In some ways, things were not so terrible. Musil, for all his curmudgeonly critical tendencies and anxiety, was an ecstatic. To the Countess Dobřenský, he wrote, towards the end of the year, “If only the house with my lovely workroom were not as acoustic as a drum and the little girl over my head or wherever were not always near enough to hear, as annoying as a fly, there would be little lacking for me (expect perhaps that a more delicate and imaginative culinary spirit might enter Miss Mühlberg’s Germanic skull); and even just as things are, we are happy, albeit with a tremulous happiness occasionally interrupted by troubles.”

Due to a sudden windfall of 150 francs, the Musils were able to make the expensive trip to Zurich mid-December to see an exhibition of Wotruba’s works and visit with the Lejeunes. They were back at the Pouponnière for Christmas, which they celebrated with a hundred children, all seated around a large Christmas tree illuminated by candles—each with a doll in its lap—“a harmonious golden trembling . . . of children and candlelight.” Considering that Musil had “avoided children like snails,” his whole life, the pleasure he took in the spectacle was “remarkable, and showed what fate makes of one.” Summing up the year, Musil wrote to the Hexners that he did, indeed, “commend fate,” in order to make clear that he had much to be thankful for, even though he was more “usually anxious and in deep displeasure” about the world and his own prospects in it.

A reading in Winthertur, arranged by the Literary Association, was not an auspicious beginning for the new year. There were only fifteen people in the audience, no one from the board of the Association was present, and there was no festive reception. Lejeune remembers that their high hopes for Musil’s “appearance in this city that was well-known for its support of the fine arts,” were disappointed. The whole occasion “left a bitter after-taste,” hardly compensated for by the honorarium of 100 francs.[iv] Musil had read from unpublished sections of the novel and had found no echo. Afterwards a secretary had handed him an envelope with the money. It had been: “nothing more than a charity event.” Still, they spent some time in Zurich after the reading, in a sort of social whirlwind that was too much for them. Every afternoon they had visitors, including a very nice, earnest young writer named Armin Kesser—who would later become one of Martha’s closest friends and helpmates after Musil’s death.

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Robert Musil’s 1921 play, The Utopians, explores the clash between ideals and reality, internal presentiments and communal truth, and the existential challenge of living a motivated life. A group of childhood friends are gathered together after some time apart in the home of Thomas, a hyper-logical professor and his more emotional wife, Maria. Maria’s sister, Regina, whose first husband Johannes committed suicide in this same house, returns with their mutual friend Anselm, a confidence man and seducer who enlivens and irritates, exposing with his antics the essential façade of bourgeois existence, and also their chaperone, a Miss Mertens, who idolizes them both, until she discovers their true complex natures. Regina, who has abandoned her second husband, Josef, imagines that she still communicates with her dead husband, Johannes, and, we discover, has led a secret nymphomaniacal existence since his death in a cryptic attempt to be true to him—by sleeping with other men who somehow stand in for him.

As they all wait for Regina’s husband to arrive—in order, he hopes, to bring some order and propriety to the situation— a private detective, hired by Josef, arrives and turns out to have been one of Regina’s former lovers when he was a servant in her home. The detective, however, has a secret ambition to convince Thomas, whose work he admires, to join his firm, Stader, Newton, and Galileo, which vaunts the most modern methods in detection science—an unjustly maligned form of scholarship, which plumbs the depths of the human soul. Meanwhile, Anselm, whom everyone thinks is about to marry Regina, seduces his friend Thomas’s wife Maria (Regina’s sister), in an attempt to shake both Thomas and Maria out of their stupor. Even though he is revealed to be a confidence man, who is already married, Maria runs away with him, in part because Thomas’s intense rationality fails to provide her with emotional fables or absolute assurances. Regina, meanwhile, has an existential breakdown, turning to Thomas for fellow feeling, affection, and advice. But Thomas, as much as he would like to, cannot provide any conclusive comfort, as he is committed to what Musil elsewhere calls “the utopia of the next step,” a radically honest way of being in the world that judges each event only by what it brings in its wake. To live according to this utopian standard is terrifying and catapults one beyond the pale of normal, conformist social life. The “tragic conflict” between an isolated human being and the vast and terrifying world of unlimited possibilities is described by Thomas in The Utopians as the state of a man alone on his own plank amid infinity.

The Utopians— which took Musil approximately ten years to write and which he considered one of his major works —was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize almost immediately, but was only premiered in 1929, against Musil’s wishes, under the directorship of Jo Lhehrman — a con-man who could almost have come right out of one of Musil’s own plays. Translator and Musil scholar Burton Pike wrote that, “After the dust has settled around The Man without Qualities, Musil’s only serious play . . . may one day be considered his finest work. It contains in distilled form, and with the greater strength of a distillation, most of the important elements of the later novel as well as many of its subordinate concerns.”

But Pike also notes the more serious preoccupations of Musil’s popular farce, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, when he points out that behind the “sophistic detachment” of Vinzenz, the conman who plays the role of Anselm in the more serious play, “lurks a refusal to commit himself or accept the world”. Pike continues, with praise for this other play as well: “[M]ore exactly than any character in Musil’s earlier works, except Anselm and possibly Thomas … Vinzenz prefigures Musil’s ultimate man of possibility, Ulrich.”

Here is an excerpt (the whole play, in my translation, is available in Theater Symptoms, published by Contra Mundum Press).

ACT TWO

The scene is Thomas’s study. The walls are covered with a strange pattern made of book spines. In the background, at an angle, a large opened window. Park. Deepening darkness. At first only one small lamp is lit. The set is in the same style as the first act. Except that the furniture is scant and heavy, spiritually overweight. Above, and even in some places between the books, a starry night.

ANSELM: (Coming from the opened window) How the trees rustle. One doesn’t know: is it the ocean?

MARIA: We are waiting in vain. Thomas must have been held up.

ANSELM: Why did he really go into the city?

MARIA: He didn’t say. He went away shortly after the conversation with Josef.

ANSELM: The reception was pathetic —that party! Josef should have wandered from the park’s entrance to his room along a Disillusionment Allée! Allée of the contingent century! Why didn’t Thomas set up gramophones in the bushes, to whisper lovers’ vows in extinct languages?! Dummies of beautiful women who collapse into bone-dust the moment one looks at them?! Let out his frogs and mice?! Hung an x-ray image of the beautiful Regina in his consultation room?! Trailed intestines from the branches!!

MARIA: Disgusting! You are always mucking about in these phantasmagorias!

ANSELM: Because I am filled with rage! If I wanted to think like Thomas — not to believe in the immortal portion: I could do it much better. I could come up with an infinite amount of filth! (He goes to the window again.)

MARIA: It looked preposterous enough without any of that. But it amounted to nothing, Thomas felt that himself; he wasn’t really engaged in the thing. It’s your fault, Anselm! You had promised to go and speak with him beforehand.

ANSELM: (Turns around while walking) And Josef didn’t even notice it at all, it didn’t register, you say?

MARIA: Right off, he just said: I have things to tell you that will alter your perspective. I had the impression that he saw and heard nothing before that.

ANSELM: “Important” things, did he say?

MARIA: Sure, yes; probably, no?

ANSELM: He could have also said, terrible. Or revolting … ?

MARIA: Don’t torment yourself again! What can it mean that even you persuade me that there are unworthy things in this portfolio? I almost have the feeling — that you want to prepare me.

ANSELM: And then Thomas silenced you? You should not have allowed him to!

MARIA: Don’t get so worked up; Josef wanted to speak with him.

ANSELM: The portfolio came from a detective? Thomas must have told you what was in it, before he went to the city to check on its accuracy!

MARIA: But who says that he’s doing that?! I find this assumption irrational and invalid!

ANSELM: (With condescension) He is envious!

MARIA: He fears more than there is cause to.

ANSELM: He is envious of my ideas. And would like to destroy me using moral reasons, like a bourgeois!

MARIA: Only because you’re so secretive.

ANSELM: Give me the portfolio!

MARIA: But I have no right to do that.

ANSELM: Is it here in this desk?

MARIA: Yes, but Thomas has the key to the drawer.

ANSELM: Open the drawer!

MARIA: Like a sneak, without having discussed it with him? I will do no such thing.

(She stands up indignantly and walks over to the opened window.)

ANSELM: (At the desk) I will do no such thing, I will do nothing! We are in the dark, in a nameless catastrophe: let me lead you!

MARIA: I don’t want to be complicit!

ANSELM: One must have the courage for short cuts. You will make yourself guilty by not doing this.

MARIA: It would be stealing!

ANSELM: You believe that everything one does must always be speakable and nameable; that’s Thomas’s dread legacy! But one must act in such a way that one cannot say it, not think it, not even understand it, but just does it! Nobody at all understands how to act today.

MARIA: (Turning away, then quickly turning back again) Where is Regina?

ANSELM: (Stubbornly) I don’t know … No, I do know; she has locked herself in her room.

MARIA: Still? Weeping and screaming? Lets no one in?

ANSELM: Apparently.

MARIA: Listen! ... ? I believe I heard screaming before. (Distraught, coming away from the window) I can’t bear this; the trees are still rustling so senselessly.

ANSELM: Like water!

MARIA: No, the wind runs through the trees; as if it had feet; runs; runs. It’s so pointless.

ANSELM: And what happens? So many things happen in the world. As if there were nothing but ticking clocks hanging in a room, each one telling a different time.

MARIA: Runs, runs, without taking a breath, listen to it! It’s frightful.

ANSELM: Yes, it is frightful! Why did this leaf fall in front of the window just now? Don’t imagine that there’s someone who knows. Everywhere: two, three steps further an answer; then fog. Every second, demands glide by you, facts with red, green, yellow eyes and foghorn cries. Decisions threaten and glide away in the fog. (He has taken his head in both hands) My life, God, if I wanted to think about my life, it’s filled with eyes like these!

MARIA: What kind of a fit is Regina having?

ANSELM: Faintheartedness. Nerves … a wild swoon!

MARIA: But she’s practically hysterical, no?

ANSELM: Or it’s a lack of restraint. I don’t want to think about it!

MARIA: And you’re certain that these documents are the cause?

ANSELM: They must be stolen for her sake; they expose her utterly.

MARIA: And what do they say?

ANSELM: But I have not read them.

MARIA: And about you? There’s nothing at all in them — about you?

ANSELM: It could only be inconsequential things. Or lies that I don’t know about.

MARIA: And they’re supposed to be in this drawer?

ANSELM: I’ve already told you everything.

(Maria tries to open the drawer with a bunch of keys. It has grown dark and Anselm turns all the lights on so that she can see.)

MARIA: (Stops) Let me speak with him.

ANSELM: (Fiercely) No! ... You must do something surreptitious. Come away. You must grasp a resolution. It’s not a thought, Maria. A grasping: as if, in the most insubstantial darkness, your splendid hand were to close and suddenly you felt a part of an unexpected wonderful body in it!

MARIA: That’s all so unnatural. (She interrupts herself again.) Even if you were to say, we will live together like man and wife: I could speak with Thomas. But this way it’s nothing and just the same, something frightful … Can’t we just be friends?

ANSELM: I don’t want anything for myself! As a boy, understand me, as an innocent child, the moment I saw you, I experienced such a feeling of happiness, spreading out over my entire body — that I had no idea how to save myself. How much stronger is such a feeling — in a man, where it localizes like a blister and erupts!

MARIA: (Moved) I cannot be rid of the feeling that all of this is happening just because you want to take revenge upon him for something or other …!

ANSELM: Believe me: I didn’t come into his house for that. If there has ever been a human being, no matter how far away I was, who, like a beacon, let me dream of home, it was he. If ever a human being’s face bore the power of all human faces … But hate? Yes, perhaps despite all hate! Perhaps therefore hate? Sometimes I believe that one may only do evil to someone whom one loves: otherwise the evil is as dirty as a love that one carries into a bordello!

MARIA: You shouldn’t speak of love if you have to feel anger, dirt, and evil along with it!

ANSELM: (Despairingly) But what then?? What shall I call it?! To need human beings! Anyone who is a human being cannot just hang suspended in his own web of thoughts the way Thomas does! He must be won over, loved, cheered on! To swing together! Is this not a tormenting need?! Not to be alone, Maria!! Being alone means: not knowing where to go. In the unbearable confusion of truths, wishes, feelings! Have some mercy for every disappointment, evil thing, lie, that has served to soothe an indescribable fear that you, yourself, do not understand.

MARIA: Quiet! Listen, rather; didn’t she just scream again?

ANSELM: She screams without ceasing, but one only hears it sometimes.

MARIA: But we must help her; why don’t you help her?

ANSELM: Why don’t you help her?....

MARIA: What are you trying to induce me to do? You’ve changed entirely! The way you are dragging me into this; I told him that you were his friend.

ANSELM: Sometimes I seem like someone who has arisen, a haunted man without a foothold, falling. But just consider how much suffering there is every moment in the world; what an ocean of suffering and uncertainty, in which we all fight against drowning: should it depend upon whether one ends this one affair crudely or gracefully? It only depends upon how one situates it within the whole.

MARIA: And you believe that Regina’s condition won’t worsen if we three all travel together?

ANSELM: No; the portfolio must be removed from the world. Then these excesses diminish. The release will gradually be complete; like something unfurling to a standing position. I promise you.

MARIA: Listen! Again!

ANSELM: (Grabs her hand wildly) You can feel too how much she suffers! How she struggles; like a little cat that is being drowned!! (They go to the window together.)

MARIA: Regina will do something to herself.

ANSELM: (Presses her hand) Do you think so?! Ah, I am abandoning her! And I feel the right she imagines she has to me, as if her heart were thrashing about in mine for a way out. (They listen.)

MARIA: What is she screaming?

ANSELM: Johannes.

MARIA: This delusion.

ANSELM: It’s no delusion. She’s calling me. She called every man Johannes. It was her justification. Oh, her frenzied subterfuge from the truth! (There seems to be nothing more to hear. Maria has gotten free and has gone back to the desk.) She drove him to suicide; you know that, of course; because he doubted himself: she only wanted to love him like a sister.

MARIA: (Trying the lock again) Regina, love like a sister?! Do you really believe that?

ANSELM: Yes; she was like that then. And he was excessively sensitive; he was much more tender than Regina.

MARIA: I don’t think that Regina was ever tender at all; how else could she have borne this life that you’ve told me about? (Stubbornly) None of the keys fit.

ANSELM: Try this one. (He hands her one of his own.)

MARIA: No, no. I don’t want to anymore.

ANSELM: (After he has tried the key in vain himself) I’ll try it with a knife. (He opens his pocket knife.)

MARIA: Let’s just let it be, instead.

ANSELM: (Pushing her aside) No; I want to! (He tries to spring the lock.)

MARIA: (Tries to stop him) Leave it. I don’t want to anymore! (She flinches as if at a wild cry.) Again! .... (They listen …) No, that was a door. Thomas? Terrible. Go! Listen: steps. (Anselm quickly puts the knife away.)

MISS MERTENS: (Rushes into the room) Oh God! I’m coming from Mrs. Regina; she won’t let me in! Just listen!

MARIA: Oh, it’s appalling …! Yes, we’ve heard it too, but what should we do? Call the doctor?

MISS MERTENS: No, she doesn’t want a doctor.

ANSELM: Of course not; we have to let it run its course.

MISS MERTENS: (Having gone to the window) Really, everyone can hear it. (She turns to Anselm, sharply) Doctor Anselm? I’m asking you: are you the only one who does not hear the way Regina cries?

ANSELM: (Lacerated by pain and self-irony, altogether reckless) She is singing! It wasn’t a lie; she is singing filth! Not humiliation before swine, nymphomania. Not weakness, artificial excuses, superstition; sickness, an ailment. Such things can only be sung. In common language it would have been that.

MISS MERTENS: (Almost speechless with outrage and surprise) Doctor Anselm …??

ANSELM: The men never meant the slightest thing to her, oh certainly, I know! She let Johannes die, she married Josef, the way one hires a caretaker. But sometime or other she began to believe that she must make it up to Johannes in some way, by throwing away on other men that which she denied him. After death, some people are declared holy, after all, and the wish is often enough the father of a thought.

MARIA: But be silent, do!

MISS MERTENS: You are abusing the delusions of an exceedingly tender womanly conscience!

ANSELM: So, you love her that much? Then you’ll want to understand it: even as a child, while we others talked, she would crawl under some bush and put earth in her mouth or little stones, put worms in her mouth, pick her nose, taste the excretions of her eyes and ears. And she thought: someday something wholly miraculous will come of it! What’s wrong? Are you feeling nauseous? Don’t you love your saint? Your Saint Potiphar?! Men — they are not anything else, they are nothing but — the mystery that one takes into one’s body.

MISS MERTENS: You slander her!

ANSELM: (In nervous despair) But don’t torment me! Do you believe I don’t want to help her?! If I only knew myself — how to help her!

MISS MERTENS: I will lay myself before the door if she doesn’t let me in! — and to think that I believed I had never seen a more sensitive paragon of erotic delicacy. (Exits.)

MARIA: How could you speak so roughly!

ANSELM: (Walks back and forth excitedly) She’s heard enough. She won’t even come along now; no matter how much she loved Regina. Is there anything as unappetizing as virtue?!

MARIA: But you never should have sacrificed Regina like that!

ANSELM: Why does she have to make such scenes! With the whole journey here!

MARIA: Is it better then, if one does something in secret?

ANSELM: Yes! For the hundredth time, yes! I will always prefer to do wrong in secret, instead of parading an exceptional good thing in public as a cover; it’s more worthy. Thomas does everything publicly. Men of reason are always overt. But I’m able to lie only for this one reason: because I am terrified of the smugness of a strange man who believes that he keenly understands me. A man like that clings more dreadfully than an estrous woman; it is as if one had stepped, by accident, into someone’s brain!

MARIA: (Shivering from the memory) It’s the most repulsive thing in the world, a woman who forgets herself like that.

ANSELM: (Changing suddenly) Oh, not so simple. It’s not at all that simple, either. When Johannes was dead, Regina ate almost nothing for weeks; a few crackers daily was all. She grew thin, she wanted to force an otherworldly communion with him. It was very beautiful, very strong. A glowing condition of goodness. She didn’t love him, she just loved. She shone! But then came reality, which — even though Thomas triumphs over it! — always upholds its rights; all the thousand hours, which had to be spent somehow. And every one leaves only one very tiny mark, like a smallpox scar, a mark of: look, it has passed. And all of a sudden, one’s whole face has the blinking expression of a complete person. You have no idea how many people are devastated by the fact that they manage to live! But we’re losing time. Didn’t you want to try to open that drawer?

MARIA: Finish speaking and then I will answer you.

ANSELM: (Looks at her mistrustfully, testing her for a moment) Yes! I can understand it! … I knew that you were waiting for that. I can understand how every faithlessness that she committed in this life seemed to her to be a faithfulness in the other. Every external humiliation like an internal elevation. She painted herself with filth the way another woman uses makeup. Isn’t that beautiful too?

MARIA: No!! (She looks at him with questioning disbelief and then throws away the bunch of keys.) I won’t do this anymore!

ANSELM: (Decidedly) All right, then let me do it. (He opens his knife again.)

MARIA: No, I won’t have it! There is something mysterious about you that you will not admit to me: that binds you to Regina! (She ensconces herself in the chair at the desk.)

ANSELM: (Walks back and forth in front of her and sometimes stops excitedly) What do you think? Should it be? Haven’t you heard, she’s begun again?.... She is sitting all alone in the star-sea, in the starry mountains and cannot speak. She can only make ugly faces, little evil Regina…. Even a grimace is a world of its own, from the inside. Without any neighbors and alone with her music of the spheres spread out across infinity…. She couldn’t speak with the beetle and put it in her mouth; she wasn’t able to talk with herself and so she ate herself. She also couldn’t speak with other people and yet she felt — this terrible longing to unite with all of them!

MARIA: No, no, no, no! That’s the lie!

ANSELM: But when one is subject to foreign laws, lies are the evaporated sense of home in dreamt of, nearby countries — don’t you understand?! They are closer to the soul. Perhaps more honest. Lies are not true, but aside from that they are everything!

MARIA: But this excuse with Johannes is so repulsively fraudulent!

ANSELM: She doesn’t believe in it either. No, Maria, she doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t even believe that there’s a reason to scream. She just does it. And as she does, she feels that she is a mystery that cannot make itself understood. It’s the last, random, false expression of what is left to her. A gigantic human need lies in it; perhaps the same need we all have!

MARIA: (Springing up) I can’t listen to this anymore. (It’s unclear whether she means Anselm’s talking or Regina’s cries, which seem to be heard again.) This sensuality is appalling! (She wants to go to the window, but Anselm stands in her way and she grabs onto him with both her hands and holds him tight.) Why don’t you go away with her?!

ANSELM: No. I can’t. She can come along, for a little while longer. Give me the keys.

MARIA: I just touched you for the first time and I’m supposed to run away with you; it’s really too ridiculous!

ANSELM: Trust me with the keys.

MARIA: No … I can’t trust you! (He tries to pick up the keys. Maria stops him and picks them up herself; they stand there for a moment fighting and pressed against each other.)

ANSELM: (Takes her hand and presses her nails against his neck, lips, and eyes) Touch me! Hurt me! Here! Here! Take a knife and cut designs in me like a tree! If you don’t believe me, torture me until I am unconscious and you can do with me what you will.

MARIA: (Tearing herself away) You’re a bad little boy and I am supposed to seduce you; you demand it.

ANSELM: (Throwing himself in her chair) I demand nothing for myself … except the permission to leave your shoes outside your door, to brush your skirts. To breathe the air that was in your breast. To be the bed that may bear your impression. To be allowed to abandon myself to you! Aside from this, all other reality becomes uncertain.

MARIA: (Parrying and placating) As long as we have known each other we have never seen more of each other than our faces and hands.

ANSELM: But when I leaned upon you just now, it felt as if my life, far removed from all the world’s events — without arms, without hands — could hold and touch yours. (He tries to grab her hand again.)

MARIA: (Uncertainly) But we’re no longer young.

ANSELM: That only means: Thomas has made you cowardly. It’s considered unnatural when, for once, the path of two people’s communion is not approached along the same paths as eating and digesting are. I want to possess your life. To partake in the grace of your being!

MARIA: But why does it have to be a woman?

ANSELM: Because you are a woman. Because it is unspeakably confusing that you — on top of everything else — are also a woman. That your skirts wander across the floor like bells around what is invisible! (He buries his head in his arms.)

MARIA: No, no, those are excuses, Anselm ….

ANSELM: I don’t know what else to say. Betray me to Thomas!

MARIA: (Touches his hand to make him look up. He does not. She sits on the arm of the chair) Anselm, everything you’re saying is all so disturbingly unnatural. Silly childish things. Long buried things.

ANSELM: (Lifting his head) But everything “worthy,” “important” that you’re doing now is so incredibly insignificant to you.

MARIA: No, no!... Yes. — But I don’t want to!

ANSELM: (Straightening up) There is something in you that gets nothing at all from all this. And you have not had the courage to live for it! In the old days, you would have despised the kind of life you now lead!

MARIA: In those days, if we slept two hours too many it was like something we could never make up for, that, even days later, was remembered with a sudden pain as a great loss; you’re right about that. We felt, we are. We ate very little, did not grant the body too much space. Sometimes I held my breath as long as I could. But in reality, it all came to absolutely nothing. (She says this while scribbling on a piece of paper.)

ANSELM: Did it really come to nothing? At 8:20 every morning it was your practice to come into this park. I can still see the hands on the clock in my room. I took one of my books where you had written your beautiful name, and traced its lines: following your hand through space exactly as your hand must have gone. Then I ran after you.

MARIA: (Sloughing it off by standing up) Those are childish foolishnesses; they have nothing more to do with us.

ANSELM: (Springing up) Those were acts! Inexpressible forms of friendship. Acts are, after all, the freest things that exist. The only things that one can do whatever one wants with, like dolls. World of wishes, having grown so unfathomably spacious! (Once more as if terrified by memories) Nothing that happens to us can be understood and it is only when we do something ourselves that we are saved, in the midst of the unfathomable itself.

MARIA: Do you still recognize this? (She shows him her drawing.)

ANSELM: (Interrupted, almost irritated) A sugar loaf?[1] An angel?

MARIA: Close the window. I keep having the feeling that someone is going to come in through the window.

ANSELM: (Sensing an advantage) First tell me what it is.

MARIA: It’s also from back then. I had drawn your face from memory, it didn’t look any more beautiful than this, so I wanted to make up for it by drawing myself in a nightgown also. (Anselm quickly shuts the window in order to take advantage of the situation. In the moment when the window is closed, they hear a door nearby.)

MARIA: (As if caught) It’s Thomas! Go! (Foolishly, she turns out the light.) Go away, I can’t stand it! No, stay, turn on the light; I’ve already torn it up. He knows this drawing, I told him about it once. Please, turn the light back on!!

ANSELM: (Confused) I can’t find the light….

(Thomas walks into the dark room. There is only a little light in the area around the window. He moves around there, going back and forth. In the darkest corner of the room, he suspects the presence of Anselm and Maria.)

THOMAS: Is someone here?

ANSELM: I am, Thomas. Good evening.

THOMAS: Are you alone there?

ANSELM: No, we were waiting for you. Maria is here. (Trying to sound casual) We were chatting and can’t find the light now. (He feels along the wall.)

THOMAS: But why bother? It’s really very nice in the dark. (Pause.) Why don’t you two keep talking? Am I interrupting again? … But for heaven’s sake, continue to converse; what were you talking about? Is it something I may not know about?

MARIA: It wasn’t anything good. Regina is unwell.

THOMAS: And Anselm was waiting for me here to explain to me why he did not come see me.

MARIA: I’ll turn on the lights.

THOMAS: Please, leave it dark. It’s truly a more remarkable thing than you would believe, two men in the dark. Can your eye tell us apart? No. You just don’t hear it yet: each of us also says exactly the same thing as the other. But I assure you; that’s how it is. Thinks the same thing. Feels the same thing. Wants the same thing. One sooner, the other later; the one thinks it, the other does it; the one escapes, the other is caught. But whether one is the detective or the criminal, the one who burns or the one who extinguishes, honest or lying: if each one takes a role, it’s always the same game of cards, only shuffled and dealt out differently.

MARIA: (As if she wanted to ask, horrified, Thomas, are you drunk?) Thomas, are you …?

THOMAS: What? Thomas, are you what? One has friends so that one doesn’t become vain. Don’t let yourself be deceived. It’s only an error when one murders someone on account of differences. The similarities are what horrify us! The envy, because one wants to differentiate oneself, even though one stays glued together in one block! Admit it, Anselm! (Silence.)

Oh, only darkness and silence. (He waits.)

But in the drawer lies my pistol. Ever since we were boys, you wanted to be stronger than me. If I were to shoot now? I can aim well at that somewhat darker blackness over there…. (He waits. Silence.)

Naturally, you’re patient. You grind your teeth. You won’t open up. Maria is to believe you have feelings that will survive even death … but have you heard me? I have turned the key … now I’ve opened the drawer ... two minutes more and I am free of you; I can smear your brains on the wall! (He waits.)

If you have not answered by the time I count to one hundred, you never existed. One … two … You were only a delusion. Oh, I would be so happy. Three … He has no work; he has achieved nothing! He creeps around and rubs himself on people. Do you understand, Maria, he has no self-esteem; he must be loved, like an actor. But he can be loved, no? No? He can, can’t he?!

MARIA: You are dreaming, Thomas …?

THOMAS: Ah, you two don’t believe I would do it. But he has stolen my position in life away from me —

MARIA: But that was what you wanted!

THOMAS: You’re right, you’re right. (He stands up and moves closer to the place where he assumes Anselm is.) I wanted that! For that’s how it is in the world of dogs. The scent in your nose decides. A soul scent! There is the animal Thomas, there lours the animal Anselm. Nothing differentiates one from the other but a paper-thin feeling of an enclosed body and the hammering of blood underneath. Do neither of you have the heart to grasp this? Will it hunt us down to our deaths or … into each other’s arms?!

MARIA: (Has jumped up frightened and stood in his way) Thomas, you have been drinking!?

THOMAS: (Lighting a match) Look at me, Maria! (He searches for Anselm with the small flame; Maria quickly turns the light on. The drawer is opened, but Thomas stands there without a weapon.)

(Still looking for Anselm in vain) Just look at me, Maria …. (Anselm is gone.)

Gone? Disappeared without a sound? … Arrived without a sound? What was there between you two?

MARIA: (Intensely) There was nothing!

THOMAS: Nothing? But that’s everything! I know that you would never say an untrue word to me. Nothing has stirred; but the whole earth, with everything that is on it, moves.

[1] Up until the late 19th Century, sugar was transported in sugar loaves, which looked something like those white cones to which one affixes wings, heads, and halos at Christmas time.

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