Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
Page II
This is the tip of a story because it is the cap of human history up to the ever-approaching point when a man, a human being—the socialized, civilized animal—will no longer be able to tell the story of the world. That man, that human being has already given up the position from which to speak, to see, and to ascertain. Civilized man—he who built the bench—had already thrown his lot into the trench where no one would know whether the war had come to an end and when one could return to the bench above. “Near the bench, which was seldom visited, a little mouse had dug itself a system of trenches. Mouse-deep, with holes to disappear and elsewhere reappear. She scurried around in circles, stood still, then scurried round again. A terrible silence emanated from the sullen atmosphere. The human hand dropped off the armrest.”(19) One was now dependent and relying on a being above—a director, a manager, a general, on the word from above; and even the mouse, whose traditional domain is the trench, might be in a better position when she takes short leave and climbs out of her below ground domain to ascertain her place in this moment in time and space. Thus:
And for an instant you had such a strange twisted feeling, that you really no longer knew: Was it this tiny, living black eye [of the mouse] that turned? Or the stirring of the mountain’s huge immobility? You just didn’t know anymore: Had you been touched by the will of the world or by the will of this mouse...?(20)
Or is the mouse a stand in for civilized man? The one who, after climbing up from her busy work in the trench encircling the bench is unable to ascertain if she is turning her head or the entire mountain is turning. In this reading, the bench takes on an even larger symbolic or metaphysical significance. Even though the mouse/man can no longer remember the bench’s function, nor even simply use it, it still is a geopolitical reference.
During the war, the bench is left untouched, but depending on how a man uses the bench it is either a place of meditation or a place of oblivion and periodically the plinth/plateau of death. Perhaps, in its purely functional form it is the antithesis of the throne. It is a seat belonging to no one, and one that bestows no particular social status. It is just a place to sit. The bench does not augment identity in any way. It is the seat of waiting, uselessness, idle time, and at best, of meditation or because of its position, facing a majestic view or a great artwork, a functional support to prolong that meditation on something sublime. Already, lightly touching down on the ground—the bench is the place of hesitation, of nothing to do, of the world can now pass me by, because I’ve given up… I’m sitting on the bench, come what may.
Let’s propose that Musil is telling this story from the trench… What then is the bench? Can it be a stretcher, bearing a wounded man or a man near death? Can it support the moment when the bench and whatever minimal consciousness, or semi-consciousness that occupies it, can have a relation to the sun’s light—the cosmic. “The bench was abandoned by the war. All day long, from way up in its infinite altitude, the sun sent light to keep it company.”(21)
The shots sail over the bench in an arc and relentlessly strike the precipice—the steep face of the rock. The place where there is no footing. The precipice up high in the alps could just as well be the wall of the trench. The topography of the land—its morphology—is innocent. It is the human being that has assigned value to topographical features and who has inscribed borders to define territories.
The bench instead of being a place where one can take in the view, becomes a plinth of oblivion—forgotten by time and circumstance—upon which the body’s limbs forget that they once had the capacity to communicate with one another and make meaningful actions. The stories only mention of a human body/presence: “...The human hand dropped off the armrest.”
This is a very bleak and accurate view of the willfully destructive oblivion constructed repeatedly in modern warfare.
An animal or group of animals play major roles in 10 of the 19 stories in the two sections of the book titled: “Pictures” and “Unstorylike Stories,” and of course in “The Blackbird.” The animal presence spans the naturalistic to the symbolic. “Can a Horse Laugh?” includes a detailed empirical account of a horse’s behavior, while in “The Blackbird” and “Children’s Tale” animals are supernatural and even prophetic entities.
Animals portrayed in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author and a Portrait of a Living Author
I was sitting at my desk and a dusty brown and white bird landed on one of the walls that encloses the balcony, pecked at the wall, flapped its wings, pecked again, and then flew away. Still seated at my desk working, I saw a bird again land at the wall and peck at the same area. The paint there was lifting away. Later, I went out and swept away the fine white flecks of paint that littered the balcony.
On another day, sitting at my desk, I saw a bird land on the same wall and peck at the same area of paint. Later, still seated, I saw two birds pecking at the paint. The area of the wall without paint grew larger. Birds continued to land on the wall and peck at the loosened paint. One day—I can’t recall the exact date, although I think it was a day in the first week of June—I noticed that the area where the birds had pecked away the paint resembled the silhouette of a pecking bird. Since then, I haven’t seen any birds hovering at the wall outside my window.
A blackbird arrives on the concrete parapet that surrounds the large circular planter built into the balcony. Several sparrows hop amongst the plants nipping at whatever it is they seek. Of all the birds that visit my balcony, I think the blackbird most closely resembles the portrait the sparrows had pecked into the wall over a month ago. The size of the silhouette and length of the beak, as well as the proportion of body to tail area, are a better match. I wonder, until I had thought of the two together—the blackbird and the wall portrait—why I would have assumed that the sparrows had pecked the silhouette of one of their own kind into the wall. The portrait on the wall could as easily be of another species of bird, the larger, more imposing blackbird, for example. Further, the image may represent a bird flying, falling, or any number of positions familiar only to a bird, and not be, as I had reasoned, a self-reflexive portrait of a bird pecking at a balcony wall.
The point of this little story and its relation to Musil’s texts is this: Inevitably, in our reflections on the natural world, we more definitively draw a portrait of ourselves than of another being. Language and reference to visual information forms a hinge that links perception of self to another being.
Musil shrewdly insists on the inconclusive nature of the relationship between a man’s observation and the natural world. This view is realized with consummate wit in the story “Can a horse laugh?” Here Musil takes up argument with the following statement by a renowned psychologist: “...for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile”(22) and then proceeds to describe his own observations of a horse going into a fit of uncontrollable laughter when tickled by an affectionate and playful stable boy. His account is richly described, detailed, and convincing.
And suddenly it started to laugh. It flashed its teeth. With its muzzle it tried as hard as it could to push away the boy [. . .] And when with the currycomb he arrived in the vicinity of its shoulders, the horse could no longer control itself; it shifted from leg to leg, shivered all over and pulled back the gums of its teeth as far as it could. For a few seconds then, it behaved like a man tickled so much that he can’t even laugh anymore.(23)
In the end, Musil slips in an additional twist after leading us to believe that he in fact had observed a horse laughing. Musil writes:
The ability to whinny with laughter seems in fact to be a human talent. But nonetheless, the two of them were obviously playing together [. . .] there could be no doubt that the horse wanted to laugh and was already anticipating the sequence of sensations. So learned doubt defines the limitations of the beast’s ability, that it cannot laugh at jokes. This, however, should not always be held against the horse.(24)
In addition to taking a swipe at the foolhardy “conclusiveness,” Musil is also taking great pleasure in signaling the extent that language and metaphor seduces us to give unwarranted weight—significance and truth value—to our interpretations of the natural world.
Musil quotes just a fragment of the psychologist’s statement: “…for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile.” Because this short text is both a ‘picture’ delineated with precise details of the horse’s physical transformations in mouth, shoulders, and hoof and an argument, can we say that the psychologist’s position is fairly represented? The psychologist is explaining or giving justification for something else, perhaps some qualification of ‘human’ psychology—we, in fact, don’t know. Musil then goes on to contradict this half statement offering the evidence of his own observations. Now, if this partial statement is inconclusive, as is the answer to the question, “Can a horse laugh?” what we are left with is a still pulsing doubt with regards to the psychologist’s position, the truth about horses, and even why Musil had gone to the trouble of writing down his careful observations—in other words, what had he meant to say, and in what context? I have no answers, but I did enjoy the story and Musil’s successful representation of the heat of the moment between horse and boy.
Another animal story: “Sheep seen in a different light” more than any other in this section of the book is a “picture.” If I were to assign it to a particular formal tradition, I would classify it as a triptych. Framed, with titles and an inscription, this picture is similar to a hinged panel that might tell the story about the life of Christ, or the birth of Moses. This triptych tells us the story of sheep, God’s chosen flock: religious man.
Let’s start with the introductory inscription (presumably painted in gold on black stained wood, the thin strip of which unifies the three hinged panels):
As to the history of sheep: Today man views sheep as stupid. But God loved it. He repeatedly compared man with sheep. Is it possible that God was completely wrong?
As to the psychology of sheep: The finely chiseled expression of exalted consciousness of not unlike the look of stupidity.(25)
The inscription tells all and instructs the reader in how to look at this written text. This story is all about perceiving, as the title suggests: “Sheep seen in a different light.”
The first panel with the heading, “On the way to Rome,” depicts a landscape: the religious flock sings with one voice composed as if in a choir of the man’s, woman’s, and children’s voices. Despite the different registers, the song drives a singular view of time: its finality and its end on earth. With its thorough simplification of the human condition, the image here is like an extremely poetic Hallmark card in which earth’s end and Judgment Day simply and perfectly give way to Heaven and Hell.
In soft swells they lifted and lowered their voices; it was like a wandering train in the darkness, struck every second by light, and the children’s voices stood on an ever-returning hill, while the men strode through the valley. Day and night rolled a thousands time faster through their song and drove the earth onward to its end.(26)
The second panel “Once again in the South” encompasses the history of man in time. Sheep take the place of man: “Man is twice as big as usual in their midst and reaches like a church spire up towards heaven,”(27) and man takes the place of God. Like a continually skipping LP, which hops from the first song to the last and then to any in the middle again and again, the images Musil describes skip time. ‘St. Peter’s time,” as in ‘wandering Odysseus’ day,” seem to suggest that, in their ignorant exultation, modernity evaporates. What persists is a single image that swallows the present into the recurring past.
The third panel: “Everywhere...” where the wish for the end of time congeals its subjects—the sheep,religious transcendent man—into a wheel. This wheel doesn’t move. It is a static wheel representing man’s subjugation to ignorance and his belief in a story about time which accepts that time is meted out for us by a higher being.
What does this ‘triptych’ achieve? Composed of snapshots—to now use a modern term—it depicts three scenes of a play and, because of the miniature prologue and its provocative question about the roles and interchangeability of animal and man, sheep and man, God and sheep, and God and man, the story suggests that not only is God-fearing man meekishly playing an infantilizing role but he is in fact in a play—a passion play—in which he is occupying theatrical scenes.
The text’s closing image is both chilling and condemning:
They [the sheep] stick their heads together then, ten or fifteen of them, and form the spokes of a
wheel, with the big heavy center point of heads and the otherwise colored spokes of their backs. They press their skulls tightly together. This is how they stand, and the wheel that they form won’t budge for hours. They don’t want to feel anything but the wind and the sun, and between their foreheads, the seconds striking out an eternity that beats in their blood and signally from head to head like the hammering of prisoners on prison walls.(28)
It is a picture of man banging his head on the walls of the prison house of religion and persisting in willful ignorance. This is also a brief history of the adjective of “sheepishness.” Modernity ridicules it; religion celebrates it. In modernity, however, both exist, side by side: one as a living panorama haunting us and the other as the necessity to accept an indefinable position in the world subject to sudden apparitions of God as if from the past.
For the first of the “Unstorylike Stories,” “The Great Agoag,” Musil has written a strange tale that delves further into the theme of the inconclusive body. This story has a protagonist—a man—a weakling that is something less than a man: a lightweight, a man without presence who had “two arms as thin as the sound of a toy clock,”(29) and too little physical substance to successfully woo a woman.
For an inexplicable reason, (and even here, the laughter begins—that even human affections do not always follow the crude status quo social plan that women must only be attracted to the full-bodied, muscular physique and sexual prowess of a strong man) one woman does show interest in him. This gives him cause to defy his natural disposition (or non-disposition) and begin his own bodybuilding program, one he develops himself and which is therefore low-tech and appropriately thrifty. He harnesses every daily action into his exercise program to exert himself to the utmost. A simple action such as buttoning a shirt he performs with isometric acrobatics—and becomes a study in opposition, extension, and difficulty—and above all, strenuous action. There is something both pathetic and heroic about this character—who, as the narrator points out, will eventually, by continuing such a relentless vigorous program of self-improvement, get strong. He is pathetic in that his own body becomes a battleground without a wise leader or general at the helm. It is a muscular battleground and a battleground of impulse. But the hero’s program is aborted before he has reached his physical peak. The man is beaten miserably and sinks to his lowest. Unfortunately, the battleground is not only occurring within his own body, it is apotheosized in the crowd and the mobbing or beating he has to endure. That he is beaten at the hands of the crowd is an eloquent expression of a de facto condemnation of his body and even of his project to ‘change’ himself (from within). It is indeed a hopeless situation. Yet the man with the vanquished body and an already demented, vacant spirit is witness to an accident. An omnibus runs over an athletic man, and, given our protagonist’s already disembodied identity, we accept his nearly surreal decision, indeed infantile, but given the circumstances and his bereft state perhaps understandable, to clothe himself in the bus. “It was a sad sight but our man saw his chance and quickly climbed aboard the victor.”(30) He crawls into the body of the giant. He rides the bus and is convinced that within the bus’s shell he can instill fear in physically strong men and earn their respect.
The bus’s name: Agoag—presumably the initials of a company name, A.G.O.A.G., is transformed here into the proper name Agoag. When pronounced the name sounds like baby talk, repeating a sound by vocalizing while opening and closing the lips. And if you will allow me to further play at the possible irony of the name AGOAG: from a visual perspective, the name consists of a “null”—“0”—framed by two “AGs,” which in German is a very commonly used abbreviation for the word Arbeitsgemeinschaft—in English, a consortium, association or partnership. The partnership, here, of course, entirely in the protagonist’s imagination, is between man: “0,” and bus: “AG—AG.” Although these interpretations are in some sense frivolous, it is clear that the name has an uncanny quality.
The narrator makes fun of his character’s logic, reasoning, and inner dialogue and in so doing points out how deluded an individual can be in feeling stronger, of higher status, and even more righteous when part of a group. Although the narrator is describing the act/belief of a man who climbs onto a bus, the metaphor can surely be extended to men’s relations to military and industrial machinery of any kind as well as to political structures.
Our hero himself could have also been run over by the omnibus—it is in fact an indiscriminate equalizer. Nevertheless, “He took his girlfriend along for the ride expecting that she would be able to appreciate intellectual masculine beauty.”(31) What is intellectual masculine beauty? “Deriving one’s dignity from the reflected rays of an alien power that surrounds them.”(32) Unfortunately, His girlfriend cannot understand the principle of transferred prowess. He cannot communicate his sense of respect for the great Agoag and he comes up with this final fallacy: “The strong are strongest alone.”(33)
Through my reading and re-reading of the texts comprising Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a view of Musil himself—1st person narrator, a man at the brink of dawn in the midst of a curiously intimate or private meditation—repeatedly returns, and yet, I have the sense that Musil, with an ironic flick of the tongue, would most likely raise objection and find fault in my illusory wish for a portrait of the man, Musil. I imagine he would find my reading vulgar, or a symptom of a contemporary fashion to look at an author’s writing, or even worse, at all of his production as part of a history and account of self.
Nevertheless, perhaps as an unintended effect, outlines of a thinker, social critic, visionary, and human being are pronounced in these texts. Like single-ply veils, they reveal the contours of the author’s preoccupations—the discontinuity of self and identity, distorted by the inanity of modern society and cultural mores, and the co-existence of multiple realties. What is left behind? A series of arguments? Sirens? Alerts? Paradoxes, prophesies or parables (with or without a moral)? It is the author, deracinated and disembodied, who unclothes himself as if ridding himself of himself as a perpetual character.
Notes
© Cecile Rossant—Nietzsche Circle, 2009
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2009)
To download the entire essay, Open PDF:
|
“Posthumous Papers of a Living Author”
| page up |