The Lure of Disgust: Musil and Kolnai

Abstract

What makes disgust so alluring? Why does it elicit fascination in spite of its long-standing outcast status in the aesthetic sphere? Both Aurel Kolnai (1900–1973) and Robert Musil (1880–1942) explore the ambivalence of disgust and its strong connection to sexuality and mortality. As a visceral defense reaction against a disturbing or threatening proximity, disgust implies at once the collapse of distance and the desire to reinstate boundaries. Its elicitors are often associated with decay, amorphousness, coalescence, and self-dissolution. Kolnai's phenomenological study and Musil's observations on disgust mirror contemporary anxieties about male identity, female sexuality, and sociocultural changes in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First World War. Unlike Kolnai, however, Musil questions the epistemic and ethical value of this emotion. His aim is to counter the immediacy of disgust with reflexive and aesthetic distance on behalf of what he coins the “necessary civility of the mind.”

Keywords:

• disgust
• ethics
• Aurel Kolnai
• Robert Musil
• phenomenology
• psychology

Acknowledgments

I thank Andreas Gailus and Ivan Ermakoff for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust, The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 1.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 180.

Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, ed. Hans H. Rudnick (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 45.

For a detailed analysis of these claims, see Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust. The Foul & The Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 39–40.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 79.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1949), 89.

Menninghaus, Disgust, 7.

In this regard, Menninghaus interprets the “invention of aesthetic infinity” as an “antivomitive” which prevents the satiation of disgust (7). The success of the “sublime,” for instance, lies in its ability to energize and unsettle an aesthetic sphere that would otherwise fall prey to the cult of the pretty and agreeable.

Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, 50.

Daniel Kelly, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 50.

This point has been made by Kant and Freud, among others. See Menninghaus (108–09 and 193). See also William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 143–78. Quoted by Martha C. Nussbaum, “‘Secret Sewers of Vice’: Disgust, Bodies, and the Law,” in The Passions of Law, ed. Susan A. Bandes (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 20.

Martha C. Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value,” in Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19–88. For a critique of disgust's cognitive potential, see “Secret Sewers of Vice,” 19–62.

Nussbaum, “Secret Sewers of Vice,” 54.

To this end, Korsmeyer has coined the notion of “sublate”: Just as fear can “be the foundation for encounters with the sublime,” the “sublate” is the “aesthetic counterpart” of disgust. The sublime refers to processes of vaporization, diffusion, and expansion, whereas the “sublate” indicates “something turning directly from gas to solid” and “has a remote etymological connection with words meaning ‘burden,’ a weight to be removed.” Unlike the “elevation and expansion of spirit” linked to the sublime, the “sublate signals aesthetic insight in a bodily, visceral response” (131).

Kolnai, formerly Aurel Stein, was born in 1900 in Budapest into a liberal, secular Jewish family. He moved to Vienna in 1920 and lived as a free-lance writer and editor. Initially interested in psychoanalysis, he studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and was increasingly drawn to phenomenology, especially to the works of Scheler and Husserl, with whom he studied in the summer of 1928. His most influential book was The War against the West, a critical analysis of National Socialist ideology. Kolnai left Vienna in 1937 and lived intermittently in Paris. In 1940, he fled to the United States and then to Canada, where he taught at Laval University in Quebec City. In 1955 he returned to England. He held a part-time visiting lectureship at Bedford College at London University as well as a visiting professor position at Marquette University in Milwaukee, which he maintained until his death in 1973. His essay on disgust was written in 1927 and published in 1929 in volume 10 of Husserl's Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. It has become a key reference in subsequent discussions. See Korsmeyer and Smith, “Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust,” in On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2004), 3–4 (hereafter cited in text and notes as D).

Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, in The Memoirs of Elias Canetti, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), 790. Ralph Manheim translated this expression as “master of dismissal.”

Moses Mendelssohn, “82. bis 84. Literaturbrief,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumausgabe. Vol. 5, 1 (Stuttgart: Fromman/Holzboog 1971), 130–37. Quoted by Menninghaus (38). Kolnai himself does not make any explicit mention of Mendelssohn.

Paul Rozin, quoted by Kelly (28). On this “terror management theory,” which links disgust to existential anxieties and the recognition of our mortality, see Kelly (44).

In this regard, Kolnai is in agreement with Karl Rosenkranz who in his 1853 study Aesthetics of the Ugly put a strong emphasis on putrefaction as a key determinant of the disgusting: “The appearance of life in what is in itself dead is the infinitely revolting within the disgusting” (quoted by Menninghaus, 132). Karl Rosenkranz is one of the few sources mentioned by Kolnai in his concluding bibliographical remark (D 91).

D 64. As Menninghaus notices, excessive sweetness was also a standard example in eighteenth-century views on disgust (39).

D 43. Kolnai's analysis identifies what Kelly calls the “inferential signature” of disgust: “a sense of oral incorporation, a sense of offensiveness, and sensitivity to contamination” (133).

On the contrast between the uniformity of the disgust response and the variability of its elicitors, see Kelly (40).

D 61–62. On the gendering of disgust, as a symptom of male anxiety in front of female sexuality and effeminacy, see Menninghaus (7, 242).

Robert Musil, The Enthusiasts, trans. Andrea Simon (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 101.

Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 19–20 (hereafter cited in text and notes as C).

On the classical obsession with the vetula, see Menninghaus (84–91).

Ibid., 217.

Robert Musil, “The Perfecting of a Love,” in Selected Writings, ed. Burton Pike, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Continuum, 1995), 216.

Ibid., 217.

Menninghaus, Disgust, 52.

One may think of Julian's apotheosis at the end of Flaubert's “Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler.” In the last paragraph, the leper, whose shoulders, chest, and thin arms “were hidden under blotches of scaly pustules” and whose breath coming from his “bluish lips” was “thick like a fog, and foul,” reveals himself in his divine glory: “Then the leper clutched him; and his eyes suddenly began to shine like stars; his hair lengthened like sunbeams; the breath of his nostrils had the sweetness of roses; a cloud of incense rose from the hearth, the waves sang.” Gustave Flaubert, “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler,” trans. Michel Grimaud, in William J. Berg, Michel Grimaud, and George Moskos, Saint/Oedipus. Psychocritical Approaches to Flaubert's Art (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 254–55 [231–67]. In a similar vein, Kolnai quotes a poem by Franz Werfel—a poet whom Musil parodied as Friedel Feuermaul in The Man without Qualities. In this poem, “Jesus and the Carrion Path,” Jesus and his followers come across a carrion which Werfel graphically describes with a wealth of disgust-eliciting markers: “For before us flowed this horror, wild, serpentine, / A stream of carrion on which the sun danced. / Hard-bitten rats swam in this brood / Of snakes, of half-eaten decay, / Of rotting deer, donkeys, an aura above / Of pestilence and flies sky-high. / An inescapable sulfurous stench / Bubbled from those evil puddles of flesh, / Making us bend over in the yellow grass / And vomit out of fear and revulsion.” Yet the disgusting scene turns into a celebration of the redeeming power of Christian love: Instead of fleeing the scene, Jesus “plunged / His hands into that corruption” and a miraculous “smell of roses” arises, the “mountains burst open and lions wept,” and “God's dove lilted / Rapturously in this giant blue wind” (trans. James Reidel, Adirondack Review, Winter 2010, vol. XI no. 3 [http://www.theadirondackreview.com/winter2010.html]).

Robert Musil, Diaries 1899–1941, ed. and trans. Philip Payne (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 188.

Lucidly, Musil discerns a sexual element in this memory. His oldest recollection is indeed the smell of his nanny, “a good-natured [dry] smell of sweat of the kind that sticks to clothes that are changed neither too often nor too infrequently” (Diaries 187).

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 826.

Ibid., 1471. On the link between incest and disgust, see Kelly (31).

Musil, Diaries, 438.

Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” in Precision and Soul, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 272.

Musil, “On Stupidity,” 275. Erdmann, a disciple of Hegel and a professor at the University of Halle, wrote a study entitled “On Stupidity” in 1866. Musil borrowed this text from his friend Richard von Mises.

Musil, “On Stupidity,” 278.

Ibid., 273.

Musil, The Man without Qualities, 686.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1957), 82.

On the negative depictions of crowds, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors. Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 162–88; Walter Moser, “R. Musil et la mort de l’homme libéral,” in Robert Musil, Colloque de Royaumont, ed. Jean-Pierre Cometti (Royaumont: Éditions Royaumont, 1986), 172–97; Florence Vatan, “De près, de loin: Canetti, Musil et la question de la masse,” Austriaca 61 (2005): 235–54.

Musil, “The Perfecting of a Love,” 190.

Musil, The Man without Qualities, 58.

On this projective dimension, see Kelly (21, 27). “Part of the disgust response,” Kelly notices, “is that the properties of offensiveness and contamination potency are projected onto whatever elicits it” (21).

Nussbaum, “Secret Sewers of Vice,” 22.

Kelly, Yuck!, 8.

Ibid., 148.

Not incidentally, in a fictional text devoted to Törless's adult life, the essayist and novelist Jean Améry portrays Törless, a now refined and detached aesthete, as a Sartrian bastard who becomes a supporter of the Third Reich, joins the party, and writes mediocre cultural articles in Goebbels's journal. Jean Améry, “Gespräch über Leben und Ende des Herbert Törleß (1906),” in Leporello fällt aus der Rolle. Zeitgenössische Autoren erzählen das Leben von Figuren der Weltliteratur weiter, ed. Peter Härtling (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1971), 185–96.

On the importance of disgust as writing and reading strategy, see Villö Huszai, Ekel am Erzählen. Metafiktionalität im Werk Robert Musils, gewonnen am Kriminalfall Tonka (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Musil-Studien, vol. 31, 2002).

For an analysis of this scene in light of the Electra myth, see Jill Scott, Electra after Freud. Myth and Culture (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 104–10.

Musil, The Man without Qualities, 1176.

Ibid., 1177.

Ibid., 1407.

„Warum weichen sie Inzest aus? […]: Auch weil a[nderer] Z[ustand] viel ‘Ferne’ hat.” Robert Musil, Klagenfurter Ausgabe, ed. Walter Fanta, Klaus Amann, and Karl Corino (DVD Version, Klagenfurt: Drava, 2009), Nachlass Mappe II-3-46. This does not mean that Musil had renounced the idea of having Ulrich and Agathe consummate incest at one point. However, one notices a tendency to indefinitely defer this outcome. See Walter Fanta, Die Entstehungsgeschichte des “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” von Robert Musil (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000).

On Musil's reliance on statistics, see Jacques Bouveresse, Robert Musil, le hasard, la moyenne et l’escargot de l’histoire (Combas: Éditions de l’Eclat, 1993); Florence Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 101–34.

Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1981), 1919.

Robert Musil, Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, in Gesammelte Werke, Sonderausgabe, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1983), 971.

See Walter Fanta, “The ‘Finale’ of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Competing Editions and the ‘Telos’ of the Narrative,” in A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil, ed. Philip Payne, Graham Bartram, and Galin Tihanov (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 371–93.