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Abstract
The article analyzes Robert Musil's The Perfecting of a Love as a literary attempt to create a cubist unification of time and space. Musil's concern with overcoming the Kantian conception of space and time, already crucial to his dissertation and his early poetological notes, finds poetic solutions in his novellas. Temporal and spatial inversion are reflected in the linguistic texture of the novella, and the experiences of the protagonist show how time and space are not a priori forms of intuition independent of our sensual apparatus.
Notes
Max Raphael, Raumgestaltungen. Der Beginn der modernen Kunst im Kubismus und im Werk von Georges Braque (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Qumran in Campus Verlag, 1989), 80 and 82.
Robert Musil, Briefe 1901–1942 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981), 497.
It is not by chance that I draw on Kantian terminology here. In one of his poetological reflections, written a decade after working of the novellas, Musil even notes that “one could arrange Kant's study of space and time in the form of a dialogue and stage it. First, one would be disappointed because that is not what one expects on the stage,” but he qualifies this since it does not conform to the conventions of the stage and “would also do damage to Kant's thoughts. The object of art is that which can only be expressed in art. The proof for this principle is not one that is confined to aesthetics.” Robert Musil, Diaries, ed. Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 244.Obviously this is no place for a detailed discussion of the Kantian philosophy of space and time itself (for instance, in connection with his anthropological writings). Therefore, in the following I will “only” be referring to the influential concepts in his first critique. For a thorough discussion of the tension between the “transcendental aesthetics” of the Critique of Pure Reason and the emerging discipline of aesthetics, cf. “Neue Vorschläge zu einer alten universellen Ästhetik. Immanuel Kant über Raum und Zeit,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Achim Hölter (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2011), 19–28.
This motif (already mentioned by Goethe on January 25, 1827, in his conversations with Eckermann) is central for narratological definitions of the genre. The fact that the anomymous sexual union of the protagonist is potentially only a pretense, only a means to achieve a pre-individual condition, has recently been pointed out by Stephanie Bird, in “Masochism and its limits in Robert Musil's ‘Die Vollendung der Liebe,’ ” The Modern Language Review, vol. 100, no. 3 (2005): 709–22, here 710. The theses associated with this, of a the protagonist “coming to herself, without world, time, or space,” as well as the correlating destabilization of Musil's language (cf. Hans Georg Pott, Robert Musil [Munich: Fink, 1984], 4ff.), will be critically examined in the following.
On seeing her later seducer, “suddenly there was a radiance high and bright over her past … it was a queer premonition” (Robert Musil, “The Perfecting of a Love,” Five Women [Boston: David R. Godine, 1986], 144).
The German word fortschreiben can imply both a writing onward as well as a writing away from, that is, both a continuation and a distantiation. Both senses are important for the argument in this text.
Elisabeth Leiss, Die Verbalkategorien des Deutschen. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der sprachlichen Kategorisierung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 6. “Categories that are realized through regularities in word order are iconic categories. … The strict serialization of SVO,” that is, of subject–verb–object, is “the expression of an iconic strategy” (ibid., 9). It will be seen that Musil precisely does not strive for a lingustic-historical regression to a holistic mode of perception characterized by an original SOV structure—in contrast to an analytical mode of understanding tied to an SVO arrangement. Instead of being nongrammatical, Musil aims for a poetic overburdening of the iconic dimensions of grammar.
For a good overview of the discussion on the narratology of space, cf. Karin Wenz, Raum, Raumsprache und Sprachräume. Zur Textsemiotik der Raumbeschreibung (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1997), especially 38.
Musil, Diaries, 73.
On psychophysical monism in particular, cf. Manfred Diersch, Empiriokritizismus und Impressionismus. Über Beziehungen zwischen Philosophie, Ästhetik und Literatur um 1900 in Wien (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1977); on Mach's influence in general, cf. Jacques le Rider, Das Ende der Illusion. Die Wiener Moderne und die Krisen der Identität (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag Schulbuch, 1990).
Robert Musil, On Mach's Theories (Munich, Vienna: Philosophia, 1982).
Among the sources for these debates, we could mention the Kantian foundation of the Physiologie des Tastsinns (1829) by Ernst Weber and Johannes Müller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1834) with its discovery of specific energies of the senses, for instance the principle of a spatial sensation of our (self-sensing) retina.
Cf. Ernst Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991), 104.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid., 137.
On this and the theoretical background of Musil in general, cf. Renate von Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs in Robert Musils Roman „Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”. Ihr Zusammenhang mit dem zeitgenössischen Denken (Münster: Aschendorff, 1966); on Ernst Mach's spatiotemporal experimental research, for instance in Über Erscheinungen an fliegenden Projectilen from 1897, cf. Christoph Hoffmann, „Der Dichter am Apparat”. Medientechnik, Experimentalpsychologie und Texte Robert Musils 1899–1942 (Munich: Fink, 1997), 43ff.
Musil, On Mach's Theories, 39.
Ibid., 137.
For example, the stranger in the novella is accordingly characterized by the time-opening and space-contracting “elemental vitality, emanating form this otherwise unremarkable man—causing … a shifting and bending of things.”
Musil, On Mach's Theories, 52. On the epistemological transformation from the term substance to the term function, cf. Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); on the history of the philosophical and scientific concepts of space, cf. Max Jammer, Concepts of Space. The History of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: 1993). On Musil's critical engagement with Mach with respect to this question, cf. Andrea Gnam, Die Bewältigung der Geschwindigkeit. Dargestellt an Robert Musils Roman „Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” und Walter Benjamins Spätwerk (Munich: Fink, 1999), especially 22.
Musil, On Mach's Theories, 17.
On “agoraphobia,” first diagnosed by Carl Westphal in the 1870s, this and the phenomenon of the “apparent movement of one's own body,” cf. Carl Westphal, Die Agoraphobie. Eine neuropathische Erscheinung, in: Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 3. Band (Berlin: 1872), 138–61. For a general overview, cf. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Cf. Ludwig Binswanger, “Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathologie,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 145. Ausgabe (Berlin: 1933), 598–647.
On the structural connection between Mach and Worringer, cf. Sigrid Lange's editor's introduction to Raumkonstruktionen der Moderne. Kultur. Literatur. Film (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2001). In Camillo Sitte's Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien, reprint of the first edition from May 1889 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 53, the so-called “dread of space” already functions as “the newest, most modern … nervous illness. … Numerous people are thought to suffer from it, that is, of always experiencing a certain dread, an unease, when they have to walk in a large, empty space.” On the cultural-historical (up to Pascal) and sociological (Simmel) background, cf. also Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 26–30. In the present essay, the cultural background formations of spatiotemporal sensitization only come into view as the starting point for the aesthetic “mode d’être sensible” (Rancière) of modernity.
Hoffmann, “Der Dichter am Apparat,” 92. Emphasis mine.
Musil, “Profile of a Program,” 13.
Louis Couturat, “La Logique et la Philosophie contemporaine,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1906), 318–41, here 339. On Courturat in terms of the history of science, cf. also Erich Hörl, Die heiligen Kanäle. Über die archaische Illusion der Kommunikation (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2005), especially 30–39.
Cf. Alain Badiou, L’etre et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 249.
Robert Musil, “Fallengelassenes Vorwort zu: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, Selbstkritik u—Biogr” [1935], Gesammelte Werke, vol. II (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989), 959–74, here 972.
Ibid., 972.
On the idea, following and in correlation to Cohen, of an “explosion of space” and “obliteration of time” in Rosenzweig and Benjamin, cf. Werner Hamacher, Entferntes Verstehen. Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 320.
Sketched roughly, Einstein's theory of relativity completes the dissolution, already set up in the nineteenth century, of the term “power” in favor of “energy,” and contributes to making “movement … into the actual core term of modern physics.” Ernst Cassirer, Zur Einstein'schen Relativitätstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), 8.
Musil, Diaries, 779.
Cf. the combination of Musil's commentary and excerpt's from Allesandro Padoa's La logique déductive dans sa dernière phase de développement (Paris: Gauthier-Vilars, 1912). On Böhme, cf. his “Erinnerungszeichen an unverständliche Gefühle,” afterword to Robert Musil, Vereinigungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 185–221.
Robert Musil, Briefe 1901–1942, 84.
On Musil's relationship to traditional theories of the novella, cf. Marie Louise Roth, Robert Musil. Ethik und Ästhetik. Zum theoretischen Werk des Dichters (Munich: Paul-List, 1972), 271. In the German novella, two contrary assessments have remained unmediated. In Gottfried Keller we find the assessment that we are “well-nigh accustomed to name short novels that are carefully constructed in terms of psychology novellas” (letter to Paul Heyse from July 27, 1881; quoted in Karl Konrad Polheim, ed., Theorie und Kritik der deutschen Novelle von Wieland bis Musil [Tübingen: 1970], 158). In relation to Musil, Kathleen O’Connor has found that “the novella forgoes the description, exposition, psychological detail and reflective speculation characteristic of the novel.” Robert Musil and the tradition of the German Novelle, (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1992), 12ff.
On the genre marker of a traumatic break in the events as constitutive of the form of the novella, cf. Andreas Gailus, “Form and Chance: The German Novella,” The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1053–123.
Quoted in Polheim, Theorie und Kritik der deutschen Novelle, 3ff.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 3.
Claudine's surroundings are also such a “topological or structural space, organized by the spatium, and the time of aeons, the moment of which is missing from its place and never occurs ‘now.’” Joseph Vogl, “Was ist ein Ereignis?,” in Peter Gente and Peter Weibel, eds., Deleuze und die Künste (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 77.
In geometry, a saddle point is the point calculated through the second differential derivation of a curve function, which—in contrast to the first derivation, determining the tangent points and thus the change of direction of a curve—marks a shift in the inner dynamic of a curve. We can speak of a literary manifestation of the “tangent problem” in Musil since this presents the “connection of time, duration, movement, spatial extension,” as Frank Höselbarth has maintained in view of Kant and especially Hermann Cohen. Cf. Raum und Körper in der zweiten Antinomie der Kritik der reinen Vernunft Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983), 121.
Neumann, “Landschaft im Fenster,” 25.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 139. Later, the Man without Qualities also describes forms of energetic spatiality time and again. “He knew, however, that it is also a force; all graves graves are inverted mountains. He did not think about the people, but he sometimes landed in a sphere of action. At last with Ag(athe). Sensed a small network of intersecting and cross lines went out from a person, and that he … bore some small magnets, from which one began to move him in this field of force lines” (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften II [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988], 1712, my emphasis). In contrast to his space- and time-construing novellas, however, the force lines in Musil's constructive-ironic novel are usually imbued with feelings and meanings that the protagonists have for each other in each case. What flows in are, for instance, “bright waves of charming gaiety, dark waves of warm trustfulness,” which only “filled the space” after the fact (Man without Qualities [New York: Vintage, 1996], 1017). Obviously it is usually emotions that color the protagonists’ perceptions.
Robert Musil, “Address at the Memorial Service for Rilke in Berlin,” Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 245. On Rilke's significance for the poetology of the novella and the motif of adultery through the entry of a third party, cf. Inka Mülder-Bach, “Symbolon – Diabolon. Figuren des Dritten in Goethes Roman Die Wahlverwandschaften und Musils Novelle Die Vollendung der Liebe,” in Gottfried Boehm, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Achatz von Müller, Figur und Figuration. Studien zu Wahrnehmung und Wissen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 121–38.
Robert Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 205.
Ibid., 202.
Musil, Man without Qualities, 689.
Ibid., 1269.
Alexander Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg. Raum- und Zeitkonstruktion in Robert Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (Munich: Fink, 1995), 482.
Ibid., 483.
Böhme, Erinnerungszeichnen, 211.
Musil, “Fallengelassen Vorwort,” 969.
Musil, Briefe 1901–1942, 1417.
Musil, Diaries, 205.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 123–24. In this and the following, I italicize all formulations central to the analysis.
Arno Rußegger, Kinema mundi. Studien zur Theorie des „Bildes” bei Robert Musil (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 102.
On Musil's Jugendstil background in general, cf. J. B. Neveux, “Robert Musil. Jugendstil et Sezession,” Etudes germaniques 23, 24 (1968/69); Gert Mattenklott's suggestion of a Jugendstil moment, “according to which spiritual union comes at the cost of abandoning the physical,” is much less applicable to the Vollendung der Liebe than to the two novels. The can in part be traced back to the increasing dynamicization of the relations of space and time over the course of the novella. Cf. Der “subjektive Faktor” in Musils Törleß, reprinted in Robert Musil, ed. Renate von Heydebrand (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 272.
Jürgen Schröder, “Am Grenzwert der Sprache. Zu Robert Musils Vereinigungen,” Euphorion 60 (1966), 311–34, here 311.
Ibid., 312.
This is a matter of a spatial crystal image (Deleuze), in which “the perpetual foundation of time” is kept. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Continuum, 1989), 81.
Winfried Nolting, Studien zu einer Geschichte der literarischen Empfindung. Die Objektivität der Empfindung (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), 19.
Ibid., 324.
Ibid., 325.
Cf. the prominent, if also one-sided time-philosophical reading of Kant's transcendental aesthetics by Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
Some of the sources for the idea of the crystalline in the genesis of time are also relevant in relation to Musil. Jacques Rancière has demonstrated the crystal metaphor via Jean Epstein—from whom Deleuze had taken the term—in Maeterlinck, who was particularly significant for the young Musil. Already with Maeterlinck, a dropped vase makes crystal images visible, “there where nothing was visible before to our incomplete eyes” (quoted in Jacques Rancière, Film Fables [New York: Berg, 2006], 7). In Claudine's case it is not only her eyes, but her body as a whole that is confronted with partial crystallizations: “For a moment she felt as if thousand of crystals bound together to form her body were bristling and writing” (Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 159). On the connections between stillness of motion, crystal formation, and the “concordance of spatial, temporal, and corporal experience” in general, cf. Fred Lönker, Poetische Anthropologie. Robert Musils Erzählungen “Vereinigungen” (Munich: Fink, 2002), 23ff. Lönker's meticulous study reads the “narratives as poetic anthropology” (ibid., 18), whereas here the distinction between a subjective and objective area of a spatiotemporality that both undercuts and unites is foregrounded.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 167.
Karl Corino, Robert Musils “Vereinigungen.” Studien zu einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe (Munich: Fink, 1974), 294.
Ibid., 294.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 169–71.
Honold, Die Stadt, 428.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 166.
“Metamorphosis turns its object into a disgusting one,” as Goethe once wrote (quoted in Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003], 60).
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 166. Even at the beginning of the novella Claudine is already speaking to her husband accordingly: “I wanted to take you and wrench you back into myself—and then again to push you away and fling myself on the ground” (ibid., 127). Also the concept of “infidelity” is relativized by Claudine's apparently paradoxical temporal “thought: ‘We were unfaithful to each other before we knew each other…’” (ibid., 149).
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 153.
Iris M. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris M. Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 51–70, here 62.
Ibid., 58.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 143.
Ibid., 149.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid., 144.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 177.
Böhme, Erinnerungszeichen, 208.
Cf. Brigitte Röttger, Erzählexperimente. Studien zu Robert Musils “Drei Frauen” und “Vereinigungen” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973), 90.
Before Claudine was “unfaithful,” “there was a deadness in things now; she no longer felt any erotic excitement” (Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 175). This corresponds to a general tendency that can be traced through the various phases of writing the novella. On the different versions in general, and especially of the change from “but at moments even that seemed almost erotic” to “but at moments even that seemed almost like abandonment,” see Corino, Robert Musils Vereinigungen, 271.
Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie (Berlin: J. Springer, 1935), 270. By posing the fundamental question of a space–time form of sensation (255), Straus not only recognized temporality as immanent to the content of sensation (270), but at the same time devoted stiking analyses to the haptic sensation of space.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 173.
Böhme, Erinnerungszeichnen, 201.
Inka Mülder-Bach (133) writes, in view of the figure of the stranger (of the third person), described by Musil as a “huge sphere,” that it “mathematically shifts into mythological metaphor.”
According to Gerhart Baumann, Robert Musil. Ein Entwurf (Bern, Munich: Francke, 1981), 132.
Musil, “Perfecting of a Love,” 173.
Ibid., 162.
Baumann, Robert Musil, 70.
“This psycho-analogical method … results in an elimination of narrative distance and induces a fusion between the narrating and the figural consciousness,” according to Dorrit Cohn (“Psyche and Space in Musils ‘Vollendung der Liebe,’ ” Germanic Review 49 (1974): 154–68, here 157). In the comparison to Joseph Frank (“Spatial Form in Modern Literature” The Sewanee Review 53, 1945) there follows also in Cohn an interpretation, precarious in terms of the philosophy of time, of Musil's technique of description, in which “the similes themselves lead into a timeless zone” of description (ibid., 154). For an overview of the highly contentious debate about a spatial form in literature, cf. Joseph A. Kestner, The Spatiality of the Novel (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978).
Schröder, Am Grenzwert, 318.
Dieter Wunderlich, “Raum, Zeit und das Lexikon,” Sprache und Raum. Psychologische und linguistische Aspekte der Aneignung und Verarbeitung von Räumlichkeit, ed. Harro Schweizer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 66–89, here 75.
On differential and integral calculus as a leading principle of Musil's language, cf. Schröder, Am Grenzwert der Sprache, 332ff.
Böhme, Erinnerungszeichnen, 199.