‘On the edge of revelation’: the influence of Robert Musil on J.M. Coetzee’s narrative

Abstract

In this article, the author investigates the unexamined dialogue that J.M. Coetzee has established both in his fictional and non-fictional works with one of the key figures of German Modernism, the Austrian writer Robert Musil. Firstly, he argues that Coetzee’s insights into Musil’s notion of narrative as a means of challenging rational thought have echoes in Coetzee’s own fiction. In particular, the author identifies two aspects which connect his novels to Musil’s narrative: a thematic element, the representation of sexuality as a search for a new ethical dimension, and a formal one, the adoption of an essayistic writing as a form through which thinking may be liberated from the constraints of rationality. Secondly, he illustrates his argument by comparing Musil’s unfinished The Man without Qualities with Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.

Keywords:

• Coetzee
• Diary of a Bad Year
• desire
• essayistic writing
• Musil

Notes

1. The 1986 review, which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books as ‘On the Edge of Revelation’, is included in Coetzee’s Doubling the Point and entitled ‘Robert Musil’s Stories of Women’. The 1999 review of the first translation of Musil’s diaries is included in his Stranger Shores; while the 2001 review on The Confusions of Young Törless is included in his Inner Workings.

2. The continuity between the two characters underlined by Erwin is consistent with the continuity between the two novels as a whole as emphasised by Enrico De Angelis, who writes: ‘From The Spy to The Man without Qualities the novel would undergo a relevant evolution that still gives an impression of stability’ (De Angelis, 1982: 129, my translation).