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Tag: robert musil (page 7 of 7)

The Book of Franza, Ingeborg Bachmann

26 May 2003 / / 0 Comments

A painful and considered novel, not totally finished, but a door to some new possibilities for fiction. Or possibly a dead end.

Bachmann’s earlier stories collected in The Thirtieth Year were very much in a straight line from Mann and Broch. Educated men (they are almost always men) think about and discuss matters of justice and morality that their circumstances belie. They don’t bring much new to the field except for a very evocative style, and for the 50’s, the plots are archaic, relying on the sort of personal/political trauma that was being abandoned by her contemporaries. “A Step Towards Gomorrah,” an apocalyptic lesbian power struggle almost devoid of larger context, gives the most indication of where she was going, and is the best of the batch.

Her later stories, from Three Paths to the Lake, keep the style but drop the ideological orientation in favor of a more particular and partial view of damaged personalities and relationships, with gaps of information, irreparable disconnections, and hints of total breakdown. “Word by Word,” about a translator breaking from her knowledge of language and consequently from the people in her world, is so immersive in its particular affliction as to rank with any Germanic fiction I’ve read of the last 50 years.

The Book of Franza isn’t the most extreme example of her later approach (the story it’s bundled with, “Requiem for Fanny Goldman,” is far more nightmarish and histrionic), but it’s the clearest I’ve read, where she significantly ties a woman’s breakdown to mythological and historical elements. Its nihilism, however, is total; I can’t think of any redemptive moment in the story that Bachmann actually endorses. But it’s a measured nihilism, far closer to Joanna Russ than Celine, and Bachmann’s ability to articulate it while spinning the prose into a vortex of disorienting mental collapse is impressive.

The book is a companion to one of the later stories, “The Barking,” which introduced Franza and her monster of a husband, Leo. She assists him with his studies on concentration camp survivors, and he is rather terrible to her. Neither focuses on the particulars of Leo, indirectly addressing his effects on his mother (in “The Barking”) and Franza herself (in the novel). Franza’s already fled from him in the novel, and her brother Martin is taking care of her. She describes living with Leo as living with the force of destruction and terror itself. (What is seen of Leo strangely anticipates the narrator William Kohler of Wiliam Gass’s The Tunnel. Doped up on pills, having been to a sanitorium, and hardly in a functional state, she drags her brother to Egypt, where she communes with those exploited by “the whites,” wanders in the desert and, somewhat willingly, dies.

The focus on the symptoms and the victim over the causes–the narrative of the victim who is so damaged as to comprehend only slowly what has happened and what is happening–mixes uneasily with Bachmann’s parallels between Leo/Franza and the greater masses of the exploited. Franza does not have a victim complex, but she is so broken as to be unable to clearly articulate her reasons for her journey. The novel is an indictment of the traditional forms of rational discourse as being inherently fascistic, and so, as with “Word for Word” it’s the failed process of articulation itself that has to contain the significance. The result is inherently ambiguous. The linkages to the third-world and the hostile but honest forces of the desert are consciously grafted on, seemingly by Franza’s subconscious intent, but this explanation risks being too cogent given Franza’s decaying mental state.

Mark Anderson in the introduction to Three Paths to the Lake says:

Brother and sister travel to Egypt in a semi-mystical retreat from contemporary Western civilization that owes much to Robert Musil’s use of the same theme in his novel The Man Without Qualities. Invoking the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, Musil’s and Bachmann’s novels explore the themes of incest and twin personalities to gain access to a mystical “other state” beyond conventional patriarchal relation.

I don’t know much from semi-mystical retreats, but this seems pretty wide off the mark, and not just because Franza completely dominates Bachmann’s book. Musil doesn’t seem to be Bachmann’s main target, but he’s clearly in the line that Bachmann is attacking, because he is still trying to get at truth through aggressive (post-Nietzschean) discourse. Bachmann not only discounts that kind of effort, but lumps it in with the stated evils of Leo’s studies and classical European society. Franza gains a kind of immanent metaphysical knowledge at the end, but it is hardly a solution. It’s a statement against the entire process.

The Book of Franza was not finished, but what remains is one of the more honest venues for an author who got around her intellectual bent and came out very dark. The treatment has something in common with the degenerative approach of Wolfgang Koeppen, but is far more of a break with the past. It is nihilistic without being obnoxious, placing it far above E.M. Cioran and probably above Celine. Its attempts to carve out an autonomous response to the male-dominated genres which enveloped Bachmann are far more successful than Christa Wolf. What it lacks, perhaps intentionally, is coherence.

Robert Musil on Oswald Spengler

13 May 2003 / / 0 Comments

Progress itself is not something that unfolds in a single line. Every present period is simultaneously now and yet millennia old. This millepede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm. One can see this as a unified picture and elaborate it in terms of a single cause by always keeping to a central perspective, as Spengler does, but one can also find satisfaction in the exact opposite….

It is now perhaps possible to understand what I mean when I ask that such theories (insofar as they are not explicitly true or false) be treated as nothing more than experimental intellectual principles for forming the inner life, instead of–as always happens today–ascribing an emotional quality to theory in such a simple and clumsy way. What people refer to as intellectualism in the negative sense, the fashionable intellectual haste of our time, the withering of thoughts before they ripen, is caused in part by the fact that we seek depth with our thoughts and truth with our feelings without noticing that we have it backwards, and are often disappointed at not getting anywhere. Sweeping ideological attempts like Spengler’s are quite beautiful, but they suffer today from the fact that far too few of the inner possibilities have had the ground prepared for them. One simply explains the World War or our collapse first by this, then by that cluster of causes; but this is deceptive. Just as fraudulent as explaining a simple physical event by a chain of causes. In reality, even in the first links of the chain of causality the causes have already flowed and dissolved beyond the scope of our vision. In the physical realm we have found an accommodation (the concept of function). In the spiritual realm we are completely helpless. Intellectuality leaves us in the lurch. But not because intellect is shallow (as if everything else had not left us in the lurch as well!) but because we have not worked at it.

Robert Musil, “Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West,” 1921

Musil is attacking Spengler’s Decline of the West, and specifically its treatment of the so-called social construction of reality, which keenly anticipates a good deal of the postmodern project that would start up three decades later. Musil also goes after Spengler’s castles-in-the-sky methodology, which also afflicted so much continental philosophy. I don’t know that Musil ever fully explained the alternative to which he alludes here, but as the gentleman of Shallot says, “Half is enough.”

(Thanks to U.O. for originally bringing this to my attention.)

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

26 April 2003 / / 2 Comments

I once said that The Death of Virgil exists on its own plane of reality, and that is what makes the book worth reading. As a novel of ideas it is behind most of Thomas Mann’s work, and doesn’t even approach Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As a historical excursion into the classics, it’s detailed and panoramic, but that is hardly Broch’s main concern here. He uses Virgil and the Aeneid to give weight to his subjects. He views imperial Rome as a better testing ground for his thoughts than contemporary Europe, which Broch increasingly loathed and saw as decaying and diseased. But he mostly needs solitary territory, and in The Death of Virgil he finds it.

The most striking portrait of Broch was given by Elias Canetti in his memoirs, where he describes Broch as fiercely moral but unguarded and emotionally transparent. The contradiction plays itself out nobly in The Death of Virgil, as conservative political statements clash with modernist techniques on a huge swath of territory that is Broch’s alone.

The book is divided into four sections named after the four elements. In the short first section, the sick and dying Virgil arrives in Rome and is brought to rest. The blind Virgil is preternaturally aware of his surroundings and the section is oriented around pure sensory language as he slowly progresses from the ship to the palace. Rome is vibrant but immoral, and Virgil, in his sensory immersion, achieves a sort of inhuman alienation from the people and society around him, connected but only partly conscious.

It’s scant preparation for the second section, one hundred and fifty pages of tumbling, disorienting language dealing with half-formed abstractions and conjunctions of art, life, love, feeling, infinity, and more. What’s most remarkable is how Broch keeps it from coalescing. Any approaching “payoff” of a unified vision is discarded before it’s reached for a new set of jumbled conceptual atoms. A sample:

the poem though well able to duplicate the creation in words was never able to fuse the duplication into a unity, unable to do so because the seeming-reversion, the divination, the beauty, because all these things which determined, which became poetry, took place solely in the duplicated world; the world of speech and the world of matter remained apart, twofold the home of the word, twofold the home of the human being, twofold the abyss of the creaturely,but twofold also the purity of being, thus duplicated to unchastity which, like a resurrection without birth, penetrated all divination as well as all beauty, and carried the seed of world-destruction in itself, the basic unchastity of existence which came to be feared by the mother; unchaste the mantle of poetry, and nevermore would poetry come to be fundamental…

What impresses are not the ideas, which derive from Friedrich Schiller as well as Plato, but the writing that is constantly at war with them. This is the sort of stuff that you write when you must write, or even more, when you are driven to fill up the page out of agoraphobia or a fear of silence. Somewhere in the middle of it, Virgil decides to burn the Aeneid, lost as he is inside a transient but autonomous language that provides effect without impact, divorced from “the world” and focused on metaphysical existence. It is as pure as Rilke, and just as difficult.

The third section is just as much a shock: Virgil returns to reality, as it were, and there follows lengthy passages of dialogue between him and his friends Plotius and Lucius, and then then with Augustus, who all attempt to convince him not to burn the Aeneid. Augustus paints the poet’s relation to the state; Virgil tries to negate it. Augustus flatters Virgil; Virgil will have none of it. Torn between his unattainable obligations and aspirations, Virgil’s positions appear pompous next to Augustus’s rhetoric: they are having a dialogue, but it binds the section to the sort of discourse found in The Sleepwalkers and The Unknown Quantity, in which Broch attempts to raise the state of humanity first through Burkean criticism, then by sheer force of intellectual will.

I’ve never found either tactic wholly successful. Broch’s strength, at its peak in the other sections of The Death of Virgil, was the sort of comprehensive, complex emotional state of being of an artist; when he tries to rationalize its place in the world, either in Vienna in the 1930’s or in Augustan Rome, he can be callow and even petty. After the autonomy of the first two sections, his attempt at worldly engagement and debate in the third doesn’t–really, can’t–justify itself. Thomas Mann’s philosophical debates in The Magic Mountain may be caricatures (of people like Johann Nestroy), but they reflect a certain compromise with the terms of the world that Broch is not really capable of. In The Sleepwalkers there was a conservative nostalgia for the supposedly moral uprightness of past ages; in The Death of Virgil, Broch abandons even that.

This is if anything emphasized in the last, short section. Having divested himself of his possessions and freed his slaves, Virgil surrenders to the inhuman abyss and is thrown into the realm of the essential, a conflation of the cosmos, creation, and language. The placement of language there is a forthright statement of where Broch aims to be and what he sees as Virgil’s proper place.

I don’t know. The high-minded but pedestrian third section helps illustrate how extreme Broch’s position is. It is obviously very impractical, a book that nearly negates its own existence in the world. (Even if Broch does not side with Virgil in the third section, the rest of the book makes it clear that Broch is not hosting a debate.) But the same single-mindedness makes it the closest fictional analogue to Rilke I’ve read, and sui generis. The Death of Virgil is not something to engage and certainly not to argue with, but it has its effects, and they are unique.

Fighting for the Right to Fight the Right Fight for the Right

17 March 2003 / / 0 Comments

If something that affects a person is too overwhelming for him, whether sudden fright or an unremitting spiritual pressure, it can happen that this person suddenly “loses his head.” He can begin to howl, basically no differently from the way a child howls; he can “blindly” rush away from a danger or just as blindly rush into it; he can be overcome by an explosive tendency to destroy, swear, or wail. Altogether, instead of purposeful behavior that would be appropriate to his situation he will engage in a great many other kinds of behavior that always appear to be, and in reality all too often are, aimless, and indeed counterproductive. We are most familiar with this kind of contrariness as “panic fear”; but if the term is not taken in too narrow a sense, we could also speak of panics of rage, of greed, and even of tenderness; or indeed wherever a condition of excitation cannot give satisfaction in such vivid, blind, or senseless fashion. A man as intelligent as he was courageous noted long ago that there is a panic of courage, which is only distinguished from the panic of fear by its reversal of polarity.

Psychologically, what takes place when panic breaks out is regarded as a suspension of the intelligence, indeed of the entire higher intellectual faculty, in place of which a more primitive spiritual mechanism emerges; but it might well be added that with the paralyzing and ligature of reason in such cases, what happens is not so much a descent to acting instinctively as rather a descent leading straight through this area to a deeper instinct of ultimate necessity and an ultimate emergency form of action. This kind of action takes the form of total confusion: it has no plan, and is apparently bereft of reason and every other saving instinct; but its unconscious plans to replace quality of action with quantity, and its not inconsiderable cunning rests on the probability that among a hundred blind attempts that are washouts there is one that will hit the target. A person who has lost his head, an insect that bumps against the closed half of a window until by accident it “plunges” through the open half to freedom: in their confusion they are doing nothing but what military strategy does with calculated deliberation when it “saturates” a target with a volley or with sweeping fire, or indeed when it uses shrapnel or a grenade.

Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” 1937

I searched long and hard for a relevant passage from The Man Without Qualities, since he says so much there and the translation is better, but I had to go to 1937 and a speech to find him addressing the basest instincts of humanity, because even the vilest character in The Man Without Qualities (excluding the murderer Moosbrugger, who is not a character anyway) looks pretty good in absolute terms, and by the later portions, it is threatening to float off into a world that is still far too rational and considered to be applicable.

I can’t blame him. “On Stupidity” is as close to a scream as I’ve read of him, disguised unconvincingly in increasing abstraction and stilted detachment. More selfishly, it drives him nuts that it is increasingly cutting him off from what he once thought was important and valued:

But today it is even more important to place the concept of what is significant ahead of the upstanding mind; I will mention this concept only in the most utopian way.

The significant unites the truth we are able to perceive in it with qualities of the feelings that give us confidence for something new: for an insight, but also a resolve, for fresh perseverance, for whatever has both intellectual and emotional content and “presumes” a certain kind of conduct in ourselves or in others; this is the way it could be put; and what is most important in connection with stupidity is that the significant is accessible to criticism’s understanding aspect as well as to its feeling aspect. The significant is also the opposite of both stupidity and brutality, and the general disproportion in which, today, emotions crush reason instead of inspiring it also merges with the notion of the significant. Enough about this, indeed perhaps already more than one might be able to answer for!

Me too. The comments at Daily Kos’s board, the Happy Tutor’s fable, the lyrics to “The John Birch Society”, they’re all the same to me for now.

“Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon,” Robert Ashley

26 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

The piece is ten minutes long. Over some distorted, inconspicuous bells and static, Cynthia Liddell details the story of a rape from the victim’s point of view in mostly (but not totally) descriptive terms. Ashley describes his aims as follows:

My instructions [to friends] were simple: just describe a sequence of events, without any moral or psychological interpretation of those events, but include your sensory perceptual role in the events.

Ashley found all submissions unsatisfactory and subjective, and he wrote this one himself. He says:

The recording of this particular “description” got a lot of attention. Curiously, compared to some of the stories I heard, it has always seemed rather tame to me…It is the description that disturbs.

Well, no. Ashley certainly puts together an unsettling piece of music, but not for the reasons Ashley believes. The writing is unremarkable, but because of the subject matter, it’s memorable. Most people don’t want to read or hear ten minutes of this sort of thing:

His mouth was very wet. I remember he tried to touch his tongue as far down in my throat as he could reach. It choked me. I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t breathe.

These are the same tactics used by horror writers: the intrusion of foreign forces, the narrator’s lack of control, the chance of rescue continually growing more distant. Ashley pulls a few tricks to extend the effect, which is to make the “description” entirely passive on the woman’s part. He even cheats at one point by having her say, “I felt hollow.”

Ashley’s words are part of an American literary tradition whose most famous exponent is John Updike, where vernacular and obviousness act as a pipeline to truth. The danger is that such concerns can be used indifferently simply to play on common experience and evoke bathos. It is the fate of someone who, in Robert Musil’s terms, “had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.”

The words are, however, considerably more effective in the recording. The story is unpleasant, but the urge to stop reading isn’t as strong as the urge, when listening to Liddell, to get up and turn the thing off. It’s Liddell more than the description. It is her hesitant, vulnerable, nearly blank voice that is chilling. It invests the piece with all the emotion that Ashley claims to have removed from the text. It is not the voice of detachment; it is the voice of dissociation and vulnerability. It is the voice of a victim, of someone in a psychological state so fragile and private that you feel uncomfortable listening to her. Ashley has dealt with the notion of societally unacceptable speech in other works, and it’s hard to believe he’s not aware that it’s the voice rather than the words that has the dominant effect here. When there is a gasp towards the end, it gives away the game: Liddell has been pulling you along emotionally by the nose. The relation of facts, opinions, emotions, or anything in this style of speaking would sound dissociated and creepy.

If it sounds like I have a problem with “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon”…I do. I find it cheap. Liddell is not subtle, but she is effective, and she is at such odds with Ashley’s stated intention that it drags it down to the level of shock. A good chunk of the history of music (not just pop music) is singers giving weight to uninspired texts. “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” is notable for the failure of its atypical literary pretenses and the arrogance in its manipulation.

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