book review:

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

by Robert Musil

translated from the German by Peter Wortsmann

reviewed by Cecile Rossant

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2009. Copyright © 2009 Cecile Rossant and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

LITERATURE

Page I

Isn’t it inevitable that a book comprised of 30 separate texts written in a span of over 15 years cannot suppress the emergence of a portrait of its author? This is especially so in the case of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil,(1) because the texts in this little book do not fit into one formal category, as would, for example, a collection of newspaper articles written by a journalist over a similar span of time. Musil sorts these texts into three sections with the following headings: “Pictures,” “Unfriendly Observations,” and “Unstorylike Stories.” At the end of the book, another text, which has been described as a full-fledged short story, stands alone. This text, “The Blackbird,” has recently been the subject of several critical analyses.(2)

I bring up this theme of portraiture or self-portraiture—something more or less, or at least less, narrative than auto-biography—because so many of the texts pivot on the question of the discontinuity of self or “. . . around the identity of the narrator.” Not as in, ‘Who is he?’ ‘who did this or that,’ but rather ‘who am I?’ And the corollary question ‘what is I?’ The question regarding self appears as a precipitate in many of these stories and in many different contexts or framings.

In one review of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, the reviewer(3) suggests that these texts somehow represent a lesser achievement when compared to Musil’s masterpiece, Mann Ohne Eigenschaften. In my view, the comparison is invalid. When one considers the action of a text—its effect—it becomes a futile task to compare an expansive novel with one-and-a-half-page texts. Despite its philosophical and discursive qualities, Mann Ohne Eigenschaften is a novel. Page after page it creates the impenetrable opacity and seeming continuity of a world unto itself. M.O.E.’s Vienna has its own streets and houses, its own weather and light. These qualities are sustained over time. It even succeeds at creating the passage from city to country, today to tomorrow and night after night and characters whose identities can be linked to a given name and temporal existence. None of the prose texts in this book, and I will be mainly speaking of the prose texts in two sections titled “Pictures” and “Unstorylike Stories,” attempt to do this. The truly awesome aspect of these extremely brief texts is that they are both protean and far-reaching in their implications. Musil’s vision here is terrifyingly bleak and yet the prose is so tender—its images so precisely drawn, that we as readers are awakened by the intensity of expression which perseveres despite a bottomless powerlessness and uncertainty confronting the narrator. There is nothing resigned in these texts, but rather a vigilance that refuses sentimentality, the comfort of categories, and the simulacrum of clear boundaries.

And, as I began to trace recurrent themes in this book to construct a fragile and associative interpretation of several texts, I found that many texts aggregate around certain themes; they form couplets, or a dialogue across its pages, bypassing titles and the book’s formal sections. I will attempt in the following essays to tease these themes into view.

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author also includes a foreword that is a sort of sly disclaimer. Musil explains that he consented to publication in part to fund continued work on his major, though here unnamed, opus, Mann Ohne Eigenschaften. He continues to defend his decision by claiming that at least as a living author he could have authorial control over the publication, an oversight he would necessarily have to forgo were he already dead. Tongue in cheek, he points to the general kindness bestowed on posthumously published works as being an important impetus in his wording of the book’s title. He expresses his own misgivings on publishing these “little tales and observations” but finds justification in a quote from Goethe: “In one thing done badly you can see the simile of all things done badly.”(4) Why does he take such pains to reveal and evaluate his motivations to publish? Although I certainly cannot answer this question, I found the following line from the foreword very peculiar and telling:

When this book was suggested to me, and the little parts out of which it was to be constructed lay once again before me, I recognized, or so I thought, that they were after all more durable than I had feared.(5)

Musil here is speaking about a moment in his past, the time “when this book was suggested to me”—and his recognition then that the little parts of it were more enduring than he had expected. The words “or so I thought” melt away this temporarily reassuring impression and give the reader the sense that Musil does not consider an authorial voice—or the author himself—as someone who possesses the insights he has had in a given moment as enduring in perpetuity either in himself or in the world at large.

The total loss of a humanist worldview is the theme in many of these texts. Therefore there is nothing to substantiate that a given moment’s perspicacity, or awareness of the presence of God, or sense of one’s relation to another human being, sensation of love, or filial loyalty persists in a subsequent moment and certainly not within the body of an individual. One might mourn or wonder at this loss, but one is helpless in insisting on a continuity of self. As Musil writes in the foreword, “Thus, at times we really are speaking of shadows here, of a life that no longer exists; and furthermore, in some mildly annoying way we are speaking of a life that can lay no claim to conclusiveness.”(6)

Although one can interpret this sentence superficially as a reference to the fact that many of the texts were originally published in newspapers and are thus tied to a particular date in time, and given the shortsighted context of the newspaper, are, after the fact of their first appearance, “outdated” or “obsolete,” it seems, given many of the texts’ philosophical leanings and the unrelenting satirical perspective on the absurdities of the modern condition, that Musil here is referring to a central theme in his vision of existence and in the production and life of the Dichter (poet/thinker). The prose text, “Awakening,” one of the “Pictures,” presents a portrait of a man passing through stages of an awakening to this discontinuity of self in little more than a page of text.

A man awakens in an enclosure. He abruptly pulls aside a curtain. Although he cannot actually discern the difference between the darkness of the night sky behind the window compared to the room’s darkness, he seeks and thereby perceives a contrast.

Gott hat mich geweckt. Ich bin aus dem Schlaf geschossen. Ich hatte gar keinen anderen Grund aufzuwachen. Ich bin losgerissen worden wie ein Blatt aus einem Buch. Die Mondsichel liegt zart wie eine goldene Augenbaue auf dem blauen Blatt der Nacht.

[God woke me up. I had absolutely no other reason to wake up. I was torn out like a page from a book. The moon’s crescent lies delicate as a golden eyebrow on the blue page of night.](7)

Musil uses the word “page” (Blatt in German) twice within the same paragraph. It is as if the narrator were suggesting that God, the momentary author of the world, had ripped him out of the narrative of sleep—as one would a page in a book. This image of the given world as pages of a book—pages that can be read consecutively as a consistent narrative of identity and simultaneously, given the aleatory nature of things, the sudden appearances by a capricious God makes one aware of the page-to-page nature of the narrative, that is, its discontinuity. There is a second page—the expanse of night. But in which narrative can the narrator identify himself? He then starts to analyze where he is and thereby recognizes the indeterminacy of the bizarre boundary he occupies.

The extrapolation from an instance of the extraordinary or supernatural into the ever-present being of God unto which one can entrust one’s identity/soul/essence as if to a dependable keeper is in “Awakening” revealed to be a fallacy to cover the shockingly and disturbingly random nature of extraordinary experience, mystical moments, or moments of exceptional clairvoyance and truth as well as their often equally sudden and capricious retreat and dissolution. Musil reinforces the metaphor of the perceived world as consisting of “pages” of a book. Continuity is assured as long as the reader believes in this continuity and as long as it is the goal of the author.

The “staging” of this story reinforces this sense of indeterminacy. The narrator describes an enclosure that has two windows. Beyond one of which it is still night, while through the other, the first signs of day are appearing. The room, like the narrator himself, acts like a stopgap, a hiccup, or an interval of neither/nor, both /and, the sensed/the seen. This little story, as do others in the collection, notably “The Blackbird,” proposes and gives evidence of the radical idea that God exists only as an instant rather than as being the stuff of eternity.

Here, in passing it is interesting to note that God’s apparition as described in the bible offers examples of the momentary ecstatic meeting of a human being with a supernatural force in many different forms: voices, events in nature, dreams, and visions. What is in fact rejected by Musil, then, is the extrapolation of the instance into a continuous unquestionable presence—the narrative of God’s existence. In other stories in the book, notably “Children’s tale,” and in a quite different form in “The Blackbird,” Musil evokes and satirizes the folly in the archaic notion of God speaking through an animal.

The narrator’s concluding moments of awakening center around another theme: the conflict between the senses—the aural and the optic—and the idea that through each one of our senses a different reality can be constructed and wholeheartedly believed. As the morning light grows stronger and the view through his window becomes clearer, the familiar context of the street below is to him no longer familiar or reassuring. Its elements flicker back and forth between the recognizable and complex abstraction. The narrator’s ability to describe what he sees is necessarily but unsuccessfully mediated by metaphor and emotion.

I discover strange fellows, the smokestacks. In groups of three, five, seven and sometimes alone, they stand on the rooftops; like trees in a landscape. Space winds a river around them and into the deep. [. . .] The rod on the roof with the thirty-six porcelain heads, which I count without comprehension, stands as a completely inexplicable structure up against the early morning sky. I’m wide awake now, but wherever I look, my eyes glide over pentagons, heptagons and steep prisms: So who am I? (8)

In this unresolvable perceptual never-land, the narrator’s aural sense then leads:

At last two legs come through the night. The step of two woman legs in my ear: I don’t want to look. My ear stands like a gateway on the street. Never will I be so at one with a woman as with this unknown figure whose steps disappear ever deeper in my ear.(9)

He wants only to trust his ears, his sight having already proved deceptive. But he is fooled again: The two legs turn out to be four, those of two old women dressed in black and headed for church.

His own encounter with God is over, two believers pass under his window and he is fully awake and godless. The last line of the story: “At this hour, the soul has long since been taken into custody, and so I won’t have anything more to do with it.”(10)

vThe story “Clear Hearing” continues this theme of our propensity to construct disparate realities through an isolated perceptual sense. It describes a certain state of perceiving when one’s sense of hearing intensifies as the other senses shut down—especially the visual. The first person narrator has gone to bed early because of a slight fever and in a state of half-sleep awaits his lover. In addition to his amplified sense of hearing creating a more precise picture of her activities, her actions seem to multiply exponentially—every task incessantly repeated. He doesn’t understand the repetition and feels progressively less confident about his own assessment and the meaning of her actions. According to his accounting, entire days could be passing by.

Many writers have chosen to write a story from a dead person’s point of view. What is so fascinating and convincing about Musil’s approach here, is that he traces this desire to know the state of being dead (as the ultimate instance of discontinuity), resists the impulse to “assume” this condition and instead explores states of being which are just as perplexing and yet entirely plausible and familiar.

One can ask whether one is in fact dead, or as Musil often does, if one has an identity or any steady consciousness of that identity and its presence in and as a body. The condition Musil describes in “Clear Hearing” is one in which we are entirely submissive to our physical condition and one in which we are at pains to understand phenomena in the world around us.

The longest text in the book and the only text that doesn’t find its place in one of the three categories Musil has laid down is “The Blackbird.” Nevertheless it shares many themes with another text in the section “Unstorylike Stories”—“A Man without Character”—in that in both, two childhood friends meet later in life. The particulars of one of the friends’ life path is recounted to the other.

In “A Man without Character,” the friend’s changes are related to us by his friend, the first person narrator through observation of his friend during consecutive encounters. The friend’s changes are analyzed in relation to the accusations directed at him that he has no character.

In “The Blackbird,” however, the friend himself recounts the key events that led to his present condition. The story’s narrator introduces the two friends as Aone and Atwo and from the irony in the opening paragraph it is clear that with the device of the mitotic division of A into Aone and Atwo is the inference that Atwo is really explaining himself to himself.

The two men whom I must mention in order to relate three little stories, in which the narrative pivots around the identity of the narrator, were friends from youth; let’s call them Aone and Atwo. The fact is that such early friendships grow ever more astounding the older you get. You change over the years, [. . .] but, strangely enough, your relationship with each other stays the same, fluctuating about as little as the communion we each carry on with the divers host of sirs successively addressed as I.(11)

The mystical story “The Blackbird” explores more fully the punctuated disequilibrium and discontinuity of identity and this concept’s isometric partner: the momentary existence of God.

Atwo describes to his friend the three events or moments that became turning points in his life. As in the story “Awakening,” the first departure occurs during the indeterminate transition from night to day. The two stories also share other images and metaphors: darkness as a palpable material which subsumes our bodies and morning’s arrival marked by an irrepressible rush of the color green: “In the space between the curtains and the blind a dark greenness gushed forth; thin bands of the white froth of morning seeped in between the slats.”(12)In Atwo’s waking dream, he hears the song of the nightingale, and with her flight impulsively decides to follow suit and leave his wife. Even though he reasons that the birdsong he hears is only a common blackbird’s imitation—it’s effect on him is undeniable.

In his second tale, Atwo recounts how he foresaw during his stint in the trenches during WWI that an aerial dart was meant for him and how this knowledge gave him the sensation of God’s immanent presence.

And this tone was directed at me: I stood in communion with it and had not the least little doubt that something decisive was about to happen to me. I had no thoughts of the kind that are supposed to come at death’s door, but all my thoughts were rather focused on the future; I can only say that I was certain that in the next second I would feel God’s proximity close up to my body—which, after all, is saying quite a bit for someone who hasn’t believed in God since the age of eight.(13)

In the last tale, Atwo returns to his childhood home after both parents have died. The blackbird returns, this time able to speak. The bird says: “I am your mother.”(14) Atwo had earlier recognized that his actual mother had not only given him life but was also a kind of guardian of a constant image of her child—one which, although outdated, was unquestionable. Atwo cares for the bird/mother as if the bird’s continued existence and presence were his only means to claim an identity over time.

In addition to “The Blackbird,” a number of stories in this book make reference to World War I, in which Musil served with the Austrian army. The references are either literal and direct as in “The Blackbird,” which includes descriptions of life in the trench, elliptical and analogical as in “The Mouse,” or more general allusions to war and mortal surrender as in the text titled “Flypaper.”

Here I’d like to more thoroughly examine the analogical account of modern war in the story “The Mouse.” Again the text is little over two pages. In this “miniature,” the human being has already been shifted away from the center. The protagonists are instead a bench and a mouse. “On the Swiss Fodora Velda Alps, more than three thousand feet above inhabited ground, and still much farther off the beaten track: There in peacetime, somebody had put up a bench.”(15) What for? One hikes up away from the close, noisy town to a quiet empty place. One sits down and follows the lay of the land from above. Yes, in peacetime, somebody had put up a bench. This type of action—that of seeing the world from up on high was considered and the necessary preparations taken to make this possible: someone had put up a bench: Civilization’s bench.

During the war, the bench was abandoned, that is, the possibility of sovereignty—to take a position to contemplate a considerable extent of landscape—substantial enough to project a mapping of one’s life—became impossible.

This bench stood untouched, even by the war. In a wide, right hollow. The shots sailed over it. Silent as ships, like schools of fish. They struck far back where nothing and no one was, and for months, with an iron perseverance, ravaged an innocent precipice. No one knew why anymore. An error of the art of war?(16)

During WWI and the voluntarily constructed horror of trench warfare, men went below ground like frightened and industrious rodents and abandoned the sovereign position on the Earth’s surface marked by the bench. Perhaps they preferred to no longer have this view from above, the view of sovereignty.

“The Mouse” begins: “This minuscule story, that in fact is nothing but a punch line, a single tiny tip of a tale, and not a story at all, happened during the first World War”(17) and ends: “but that’s all for this little story, that had already come to an end every time you tried to end it.”(18)

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