(A)Teleology of Modernity: Critique of Time & Narrative in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

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Research Master’s Literary Studies

Faculty of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

Graduate Master Thesis

(A)Teleology of Modernity: Critique of Time & Narrative in

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

by

Kasparas Varžinskas

2020

Supervisor:

Second reader:

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Introduction

The issue of time in the European cultural history was always present – ranging from Shakespeare through Kant and Saint Augustine, the problem of an individual questioning their own temporal experience was nothing new. However, it was the sociocultural landscape of the twentieth century with its discursive shifts that rendered the notion of time as a conceptual problem extending over to numerous domains of life: Einstein’s theory of relativity, Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, Bergson’s concept of duration, Heidegger’s existentialism structured by temporality, and Husserl’s investigations of internal time-consciousness. Simultaneously, the rise of formalism and structuralism foregrounded time as a narrative faculty that became a potent research locus for literary fields, take, for example, Bakhtin’s legacy of a chronotope. Time previously understood as a naturalized teleological flow of historical passing, in cultural forms, was no longer a phenomenon of experience that can be ignored.

Around the turn of the century, modernist practices brought to the fore the problem of time as a structural and conceptual problem. The notion of time along the teleological conceptualization of history was amongst other Enlightenment categories whose positivist qualities started to lose stability - the shift from the classic Newtonian idea of linear and absolute time to Einstein’s theory of relativity introduced a significant turn where the scaling of temporal experience became dependent on different points of reference rather than on total and objective empiricist axioms. In literary modernism, such authors as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann foregrounded the heightened aesthetic and poetic awareness of the passing of time. The novels like To the Lighthouse and In Search of Lost Time emphasized the notion of subjective time (which correlated with phrenic rather than objective representation), and the novelistic narrative became a site of new temporal practices that drew attention to its structural configuration of time as a theme and a formal device. In effect, the realist and romanticist narrative modes of Bildungsroman and Entwicklungroman that had dominated the landscape of the nineteenth-century novel started shifting in terms of relativist temporality and causality.

As the modernist novel moved against the stable notion of objective reality and validity of representation (Dowden 11), new aesthetic positions began questioning the limits of narrative and its relation to literary genre-formation. The dislodged sense of temporality of the modernist novel carried further subversive implications towards the notions of narrative, teleology, and identity. And if one is to abide by the classical structuralist tenets of treating narrative forms as deep structures of sociocultural relations, the jeopardized modernist

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narrative might suggest a myriad of problems that extend beyond the enclosed formal qualities of a text.

This paper treats The Man Without Qualities as the modernist epitome of signifying the disillusionment of the Enlightenment project – namely, its obsession with teleological development and the stability of historical time. The thesis approaches the form of the novel as an artifact of storytelling that for Musil functioned both as an instrument and a thematic object. With the innovative storytelling, Musil parodically exploits the very same temporal foundations that supported the form of a teleological narrative of history in the wake of modernity. In the center of Musil’s critique stands the progressivist notion of history and development, a constellation that is subverted through an elaborate system of “undone” temporal structures.

The paper is constituted of three parts. The following introductory chapters present the Hegelian conceptualization of time during the rise of modernity and its inheritance in the teleological modes of writing as a hypothesis that the rise of the novel and the modern notion of historical progress since the age of Enlightenment shares the structural principle of narrative development. The following major chapters of analysis – Topos and Techne – focus on utilizing the presented context of teleological modes of thinking as a counterpoint, a process during which the paper conceptualizes ateleological time as a working principle in Musil’s experimentalist project. The first chapter focuses on the plot elements and contents of the story that constitute a locus of critique towards the central notions of teleological time – the five subchapters dissect the categories of speed, progress, historicist imagination as aspects through which the novel presents its critical standpoint towards Hegelian modes of modernity. The second chapter focuses on the poetics of the narrative and analyzes formal and structural strategies through which Musil upsets the Hegelian modes presented in the first chapter – the six subchapters trace a system of subversions that include unfulfilling novelistic genre tropes (such as a character), time disfiguration, and disruptive orders of time.

Through this research project, the Musilian narrative development will be conceptualized as a case of innovative writing that illuminates the stagnation and crises of the Enlightenment values in the context of pre-war modern Europe. The inextricably linked constellation of content and form, of history and a story, will allow seeing Musil’s novel as a modernist project that seeks to undo the teleological discourse of time and presents a metareferential critique through its self-reflexive nature.

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i. The Hegelian Premise of Teleological Time of Modernity

In his essay Historia Magistra Vitae, Reinhart Koselleck addresses the eighteenth century as a significant epoch of change when concepts of cyclical time structure started to be replaced by those that define history under the conditions of linear temporality. The idea of temporal passing became heavily historical as the progress became a catalyst for an upward teleology of development.1

During this time, the French Enlightenment with Condorcet’s seminal text Sketch for a

Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) conceptualized historical time as

progressive unfolding in which reason plays a crucial role – because of rational achievements and secularization,2 Western civilization has now developed the possibility of reflecting upon its stage that is above the previous stages of development (Woolf 144). The focus on progress that fuels the teleological development of history for Western thought was also heavily supported by treating the newly discovered continents and their inhabiting natives as examples of the “primitive” stage. Through the figures such as Condorcet and Adam Smith, colonialist historiography argued that these people would eventually “catch up” to the European temporal advancement, a claim that further propelled the ambition of the future as naturally promising for the Western world.3

The Enlightenment conceptualization of historical progress was developed further by Hegel, who, according to Habermas, “was the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of modernity” (1987: 4). Precisely during his time, modern society started ascribing great significance to historical time as a reference point for improvement.4 In Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel argues that “historical change in the abstract sense has long been interpreted in general terms as embodying some kind of progress towards a better and more perfect

1_{“Up until the eighteenth century, the course and calculation of historical events was underwritten by two natural}

categories of time: the cycle of stars and planets, and the natural succession of rulers and dynasties. […] The naturalistic basis vanished and progress became the prime category in which a transnatural, historically immanent definition of time first found expression” (Koselleck 1985: 33).

2_{Daniel Little in this regard pays special attention to Montesqieu and Condorcet who “rejected the religious}

interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study of the history of civilization” (Little 11).

3_{Lucian Hölscher calls this view an “a-synchronic development that had a highly normative potential when used}

as an instrument for prognosticating future developments” (144).

4_{Michel Foucault writes that “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history” (1994:175) while Walter}

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condition” (124), a process through which “progressive recognition” (151) leads towards an apotheosis of personal and sociocultural self-understanding. For Hegel, the relationship between historical progress and individual life was inseparable in the shared faculty of sequential development: “All progress takes the form of following the successive stages in the evolution of consciousness. Man begins life as a child and is only dimly conscious of the world and of himself; we know that he has to progress through several stages of empirical consciousness before he attains a knowledge of what he is in and for himself” (129).

Foucault notes how Kant before Hegel had already delineated the main tenet of the Enlightenment as “the internal teleology of time” (1984: 34); however, it was Hegel who ascribed the narratological quality to the concept of historical time. Mirroring the development of an individual, history for Hegel was then structured by a beginning, development, and an endpoint – stages of unfolding because of which history and the notion of time adopted a teleological narrative frame of progress. In this model, the consciousness of Western civilization throughout centuries of reflection strives towards freedom from the circularly unconscious domain of Nature: in Hegel‘s vision, the consciousness of the Spirit transforms this cyclicality into a constant vertical development – “In the natural world, the species does not progress, but in the world of the Spirit, each change is a form of progress” (128). In short, the potential freedom of the human spirit is possible due to the historical (so to say, developing) impetus of the Western way of thinking.5

Informed with Hegel’s thought, the Enlightenment idea of historical progress now displayed qualities of a goal-oriented narrative. “In our language, the word ‘history’ (Geschichte, from geschehen, “to happen”) combines both objective and subjective meanings, for it denotes the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical narrative and the actual happenings, deeds, and events. […] This conjunction of the two meanings should be recognized as belonging to a higher order than that of mere external contingency: we must in fact suppose that the writing of history and the actual deeds and events of history make their appearance simultaneously and that they emerge together from a common source” (Hegel 135). Thus, Hegel’s notion of history was established as a story of progress that ascends to a higher plane of understanding and perfection.

5_{In opposition, Hegel places the Orient civilizations as ‘not-yet-developed’, unarticulated in their own historical}

consciousness, still belonging to the realm of Nature in a form of subordination and primitive collective dependency. In contrast, historical teleology for Hegel begins with a self-aware individualism, in the case of European history, Ancient Greece.

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As the concept of progress became the catalyst for history, the modern historical imagination increasingly put the focus on innovation. In a way, during modernity, society became self-reflexive in conceiving its own temporality: the modern consciousness disassociated itself from the cyclical repetition of eternal time and started relying on the constant novelty of the present. The constant anticipation of the new present, which manifests itself in the form of the future, introduces the central concept of progress that breaks away from the past via what Habermas called a continuous renewal (1987: 7). Simultaneously, the historical orientation shifted radically from the past to the future as the notion of the past started losing its didactic agency. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, already paved by revolutions dealing away with past regimes that were no longer compatible, developed a utopic concern for “newness.” Koselleck further argues that in this way, historical consciousness eventually became accelerated by “the anticipation of a future both desired and to be quickened through the technicalization” (1985: 57). Modern historical consciousness now depended on an irreversible sense of progress and future-oriented action leading to a state of perfection as the future itself became an optimistic goal of improvement.6

Hegel’s ideas on teleology had an immense effect on the perception of history in the nineteenth century – most notably with Auguste Comte’s positivism, the notion of teleological progress gained deterministic qualities. With the inherent structure of a developing narrative, not only was the progression towards a better future possible, it was now inevitable (Woolf 184).

How, in relation to this model, are the crises and catastrophes of history addressed? Hegel saw failure and injustice such as bloodshed of the crusades, witch-hunts of Reformation, unjust feudal system, and wars as crucial moments in the dialectics of history that, although appearing like setbacks, set up conditions for further development on the grand scale of time. (Pinkard 551). It must be stressed that Hegel wrote during the turn of the eighteenth century in the spirit of German Idealism and did not live until the state of historical acceleration that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Although some Hegelians might argue that the First World War outbreak was another natural narrative shift in teleological history, the accelerated technological rigor, the record amount of casualties, and the shattering global political effects were without precedents in Western history. Moreover, it set up grounds for another, even deadlier conflict, emerging only twenty-one years after 1918.

6_{“The future is the telos. […] Time is no longer a simple classificatory principle, but rather an agent, the operator}

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It was finally the event that introduced a significant crack of doubt in the European project of modernity built on the concept of progress that was further followed by series of disillusionments regarding imperialism, ethical coherence, and Enlightenment values, and ultimately, the soundness of historical teleology.

The nearing eclipse of the nineteenth century showed the first signs of disillusionment in the utopian teleology of modernity. Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers to bring Hegel’s teleology of history into question, in Untimely Meditations (1873), observes how at the end of the nineteenth century the neo-Hegelian historiography naturalized the Western idea of historical progress and how the European modernity was celebrated as the proof of it:

Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams; for now the history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants; even in the profoundest depths of the sea the universal historian still finds traces of himself as living slime; gazing in amazement, as at a miracle, at the tremendous course mankind has already run, his gaze trembles at that even more astonishing miracle, modern man himself, who is capable of surveying this course. He stands high and proud upon the pyramid of the world-process; as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top of it he seems to call out to nature all around him: ‘We have reached the goal, we are the goal, we are nature perfected.‘ (107-8)

Nietzsche saw the nineteenth-century notion of history as the naturalized product of historiography that bears an ideological sense of truth – the historians informed by Hegel for Nietzsche were figures that construct historical narratives based on subjective and national judgments and interests (in Gadamer’s terms, such historiography is always hermeneutically structured by their own horizons of expectations). In Nietzsche’s view, the contemporary concept of the historical consciousness was misleading because the teleological narrative of history in the nineteenth century was exalted to the state of deterministic necessity. Always praising the transitory present as the next providential checkpoint towards the better, inevitable future marked “the total surrender of the personality to the world-process” (107).

The subsequent series of disasters of the twentieth century became an argumentative constellation against Hegel’s teleological fulfillment of progressive history (Osborne 39). After the First World War, “faith in history as progress became no longer tenable, “and the war became one of the events that “ended a way of thinking about history, a way of conceptualising time“ (Hölscher 134;138).

With The Man Without Qualities, Musil’s project suggests an endpoint, but this endpoint is the opposite of what Hegel envisioned – parodically, Musil hints at the impending

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War as a teleological disaster of modernity that is structured by the anxious suspension of the narrative and the disintegration of the social order. What has been regarded as the progress of modernity is being exhausted, and the very idea of an upward development reaches its own endpoint – the novel proclaims the decline of the Enlightenment project, which until then was regarded as the great narrator of the historical time. In such regard, Musil acknowledges Hegel’s insistence upon treating history as a narrative; however, he structures his own story around the idea that the narrative practices of history reflected in the form of the novel are no longer valid in order to conceptualize the late stage of modernity.

ii. Teleology of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century

Modernity marked an emerging temporalization of history by endowing it with a central notion of development (Entwicklung) (Koselleck 2018: 108), a Hegelian notion which envisioned any self-aware experience as temporally structured. Having a historical self-reflection, consciousness no longer merely “collects” experiences but employs them in a progressive way towards a more perfected knowledge (Tygstrup 254). These ideas eventually found their place in literature, most predominantly in the rising genre of the novel,7 which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became concerned with temporal unfolding8 far more than in the past as the time regimes informed by Enlightenment started shifting from cosmic cyclicality (mainly structured by the past) to causal linearity of development (mainly oriented towards the secularized notion of future).9

Even though Hegel himself was quite dismissive of the genre of the novel due to his dislike of Romantic Ironists, the influence of teleological narrative has been observed in the emerging forms of the novel – according to Franco Moretti, Bildungsroman as the nineteenth-century defining genre exemplifies the “teleological rhetoric of Hegelian thought” (7) where the meaning is accumulated via the development and life of a protagonist leading toward an endpoint. Ian Watt further links the Hegelian teleology with the rise of the novel: “One can

7_{In Time and Narrative vol. 2, Paul Ricoeur notes how “inherent in the name itself, the “novel” became a form}

originality – a category that during the Middle Ages denoted an ancient beginning (1985: 163).

8_{Ricoeur takes after the Hegelian insistence of treating history in tandem with a fictional narrative. Because of}

the shared narrative structures, fiction and history for Ricoeur are in a “interwoven reference” due to the power to refigure time in the form of a narrative (1988: 101).

9_{Karl Löwith observes how during this transition, modernity managed to “secularize the Christian notion of the}

eschatological time” by turning it into an optimistic idea of progress where Man replaced God and gained direction of their own future, leading to the salvation of humankind without the promise of Kingdom of God (Löwith 200).

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perhaps go further, and, like Hegel, regard the novel as a manifestation of the Spirit of epic under the impact of a modern and prosaic concept of reality” (Watt 239). Watt’s apt wording of the “prosaic concept of reality” suggests the novel’s broadened preoccupation with the levels of different orders - the social, psychological dimensions – that were associated with a sense of teleological completion and development. During this era of classical modernity, the novel reached the status of narrative art that strives to encompass life with all its aspects. The realist novel of the nineteenth century is without a doubt a project of such maximalist ambition. Especially around the time when the novel (mostly in Great Britain and France) was imbued with an aim to expose the social structures in a realistic manner, the genre expanded in its size and mission with examples like Dickens’ Bleak House, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and most importantly, the grand project of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. As a maximalist endeavor of studies and scenes that elevated the form of the novel to a degree of research and scientific significance, La Comédie humaine displayed an obsessive compulsion towards totality and a full amplitude of reality. Fredric Jameson notes that like Dickens, Balzac was an author for whom the role of a novelist implied an obsession towards this totality via omniscient narration, an encyclopedic sense of completeness.10

Similar to Entwicklungsroman, Bildungsroman was an exemplary form embodying the notion of progress and development: “The narrative representation of the linkage of past, present, and future bears the form of a story of progress and development that contains a reconstructible, meaning-constituting goal horizon” (Rosa 230). The goal is, of course, a formation of identity for the character that lets them integrate themselves into the social order, or in the later development of the genre, reject the status quo. Nevertheless, the focus is on the result as a state of upward progression of self-knowledge. At its height, the novel in the nineteenth century became “the culturally dominant symbolic form of the idea of a temporalized human experience” (Tygstrup 257), where the passage of time is utilized as a linear trajectory of progression.

10_{“In this sense, we must accustom ourselves to rethinking the pallid category of the “omniscient narrator” in}

terms of sheer passion, as an obsession to know everything and all the social levels—from the secret conversations of the great all the way to the “mystères de Paris” and the “bas fonds.” Balzac was supremely what the Germans call a besserwisser, a know-it-all at every moment anxious to show off his inside expertise (which he was unfortunately less able to put into practice). But surely Dickens had the virus as well, who was so proud of knowing all the streets in London; and we many safely attribute an analogous concupiscence of knowledge to all the other great encyclopedic fabulators, from Trollope to Joyce” (Jameson 115).

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iii. The Indefinite Ateleology of The Man Without Qualities

Focusing on the temporal structure and narrative development techniques, this thesis paper seeks to render Musil’s project as an experimental site that questions the stability of history, progress, the linear conception of time, and, ultimately, narrative-making practices.

With The Man Without Qualities, Musil consolidated his core ideas and influences – the novel successfully employs the philosophies of Nietzsche, Emerson, as well as sociological angles found in Dilthey, Simmel, all of this amounting to a systemic novel of ideas. With an overarching influence of the experimental physics of Ernst Mach, The Man Without Qualities accentuates Musil‘s lifelong focus on indefinite forms of existence and search for the “other condition” that would open space for an alternative sense of reality within the frames of modern history.

Around the years of finishing the doctorate thesis on Mach’s philosophy, Musil published his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), which had brought him significant fame. He was quickly recognized in the Vienna and Berlin literary scenes as a promising voice that has led him to abandon academia and devote himself to becoming a writer. After the war, Musil entirely devotes himself to The Man Without Qualities around. Very soon, Musil and his wife started struggling financially. In 1930, after being pressured by his publisher, Musil published the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, containing part I, A

Sort of Introduction (“Eine Art Einleitung”), and part II, Seinesgleichen geschieht (“The Like

of It Now happens” or “Pseudoreality Prevails”).11_{The novel’s initial success was short-lived,} albeit praised by his literary contemporaries, such as Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann; however, his reluctance to follow up with the second volume and the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany stalled his career. In 1933, Musil published the unfinished second volume with part III, Into the Millenium (The Criminals) (“Ins tausendjähriche Reich/Die Verbrecher”), after which his work kept slowing down due to increasing financial troubles and constant revisions. As Hitler’s regime came to Vienna in 1938, Musil fled to Switzerland and spent his time in borderline poverty and diminished status, still working on the novel right until his sudden death in 1942.

While working on the book between 1920 and 1930, Musil keenly observed such historical developments as the Great Depression and the rise of Fascist ideology in the Weimar

11_{The translations of Seinesgleichen geschieht differ between the first (1953) and the second English editions}

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Republic. This anachronistic entanglement of different time levels accounts for Musil’s accumulating ambition for the novel, as every passing year of writing introduced new ideas of updating the already sketched out narrative – in the words of J. M. Coetzee, the book was “overtaken by history” (Coetzee 4). In a way, the novel was working against the author, and the initially planned four-volume structure12 with its concluding section titled “A Sort of Conclusion” (mirroring the “A Sort of Introduction”) was put on hold and was never realized. In the end, the problematic production of the book left behind three parts in two volumes due to Musil’s struggles of finalizing the book.

The Man Without Qualities is set in pre-war Vienna and follows the demise of the social

and political layers of the Austro-Hungarian (or Musil’s coined name “Kakania”13) Empire during 1913 and 1914. At the center of the seemingly uneventful narrative stands Ulrich, a talented young man in his thirties who returns to Vienna after a series of career experiments (not unlike Musil himself) to finally “seek an appropriate application for his abilities” (44). Immediately pushed by his father to pursue a career, Ulrich becomes a secretary for the “Parallel Campaign” - a political movement constituted of high circles of the social elite that sets out to prepare the national celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year of reign to mirror Emperor Wilhelm II’s rule of Germany of 30 years in conjunction with the idea of displaying the imperialist Austrian glory on a global level. Ulrich’s distanced passive indifference towards his surroundings becomes the primary lens to experience the satirical cross-section of the pre-war Viennese society. Alongside the impotent political idealism of the Parallel Campaign, Musil presents an array of radically different characters that masterfully contribute to an analysis of such notions as ethics, truth, and progress. With the looming disaster of 1914, The Man Without Qualities is a monumental novel of ideas that depicts the eclipse of the European Enlightenment project and the utopian promises of modernity – in other words, Musil’s portrait of the modern world is built on the ironical premise that the world fueled by a sense of progress and anticipation of the future is oblivious to what it is heading towards.

Similar to Mann and Broch, Musil stylistically is far less radical than his English and American modernist contemporaries – if Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf found such devices as

12_{For a more in-depth look into the publishing history of The Man Without Qualities, see Walter Fanta’s “The}

“Finale” of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Competing Editions and the “Telos” of the Narrative”.

13_{Stemming from the abbreviation “k.k” (kaiserlich-königlich), Kakania is a satirical term that bears an}

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stream of consciousness as the primary means to structure a modern novelistic discourse, Musil in this sense is more traditional. A lack of formal deviations excludes Musil from the phenomenological episteme that delineated modernist experimentation regarding such categories as Bergsonian immediate data of consciousness and the sensory rendition of reality. These aspects might have been one of the reasons why in the modernist canon, The Man

Without Qualities is often overlooked, 14 albeit often cited by other authors and thinkers as one of the most monumental works of the late twentieth century.15 It is an oddly ambitious work that resists the status of a conventional novel; far more often, it bears a label of “a novel of ideas” or “a philosophical novel”. In it, Musil’s peculiar employment of various systems of thought, disciplines, and sciences in relation to his skepticism towards positivist objectivism results in a dialectical synthesis of scientific experimentation – the novel is a laboratory of ideas that illuminates the modern condition of disillusionment towards the Enlightenment project and its blind hope in progress that has led into Europe into the historical turmoil of the early twentieth century.

Stylistically, with The Man Without Qualities, Musil puts into praxis what Broch in 1936 formulated as a need to step back from the mimetic representation and the aspects that it entails (Dowden 31) – relative orders of meaning and heightened metafictional mistrust of objective narrative had to become the guiding principles of storytelling. In a rather blatant way, the novel opens with “a sort of” an introduction (Eine Art Einleitung) only to be followed by the “like of it” narrative (Seinesgleichen geschieht). The novel addresses a particular historical tipping point of Europe, but with such unstable framing, the narrative is not historical in the classical sense - it is instead “historical in a curiously parodic way” (Perloff 79) as it questions the whole teleological foundation that the Western culture has held axiomatic since the Age of Enlightenment. In this regard, Musil is dismissive of treating his historical rendition as “truthful” as he opts to frame his novel as an attempt, an experiment that strives to present the times of disorder in a self-conscious, suspicious, and ironic way.

14_{Specifically with The Man Without Qualities, Musil has been gaining more attention during the past twenty}

years – leading criticism includes Genese Grill’s “The World as a Metaphor in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities: Possibility as Reality” (2012); Stijn de Cauwer’s “A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project” (2014); Patrizia McBridge’s “The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity” (2006); as well as editions of collected essays such as “Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities” (2005) edited by Harold Bloom, and “A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil” (2007) edited by Bartram, Payne, and Tihanov.

15_{The novel has received significant attention from thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles}

Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, and authors often associated with the genre of the philosophical novel such as Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee.

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Exemplifying the post-First World War consciousness that has “ceased to believe in history” (Coetzee 1), Musil plays with the parallel of historical progress and narrative evolution, a foregrounded constellation in which the very notion of idealist fulfillment is being questioned. In Musil’s ironic rendition, the naturalized conception of upward development in modern society (and, by extension, narrative practices) leads to a state of confusion, alienation, and fragmentation rather than a realization of teleological achievement. In this way, content and form are in unison: the dissolution of meaningful political, cultural coherence and the indecisiveness of the society of Kakania are enforced by the structural lack of temporal consistency that results in the ateleological non-development of the novel. To showcase the disintegrating teleology of history, the story must upset its own temporal structure and the syntagmatic structure, hence the employment of time no longer serves the function of ordered development that was the cornerstone for the realist impetus of the pre-modernist novel.

Chapter I. Topos of Ateleological Time

The last introductory chapter presented Musil’s novelistic situatedness as a point of revising the conventions of the realist novel and the Enlightenment project of teleological temporal imagination laid out in the wake of modernity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This first chapter of analysis focuses on the thematic scope of temporality as well as its ateleological exposition. Firstly, the analysis will employ Hartmut Rosa’s concepts of “acceleration” and “frenetic standstill” as fundamental principles of modern dynamization of temporality. These notions will help illuminate Musil’s foundation of critique as a focus on the exhaustion of progress, and by extension, destabilization of conventions of time. Secondly, the discussion will focus on how the problem of suspension is structured by undecidability in the example of the Parallel Campaign and how it undermines the teleological model of historical past, present, and future. Finally, the notion of transgressive love will be taken up as an aesthetic alternative against the previously addressed accelerated categories of speed, progress, and history.

i. Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill: Dissolution of the Teleological Premise

The notions of speed and increasing velocity in a record short time became the normative factors of perceiving collective temporality as such innovations as the train and the telephone presented the possibility of spanning vast spaces in a shortened amount of time. Hartmut Rosa, in his sociological study of modernity Social Acceleration, takes up Koselleck’s fascination

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with acceleration and focuses on the notions of accelerated time, speed, and movement in temporal structures of society – categories that since the industrial revolution marked a new conceptualization of time with cyclical cosmic time being replaced by the mechanical governance of the clock. On a micro level, the notion of time during modernity became more fragmented and detailed than before16 , and the notion of speed became the governing temporal prerequisite to achieving success (Mendilow 10) as time became a currency that had to be “spent” efficiently. “An acceleration in the temporal structures of modern society” (26) for Rosa marks the developing speed gaining an exponential aspect. Rosa claims that at the beginning of late modernity,17 acceleration has transformed its telos – its future – from a fixed idea of an endpoint into an open prospect of uncertainty: “In the functionally differentiated society of high modernity, finally, a linear time consciousness with an open future predominates: historical development is no longer understood as running toward a determinate goal, and its ending remains uncertain” (Rosa 15). The exponential quality of social acceleration seemed to have reached the tipping point that had “opened up” the future in a violent way – the rushing flux of history was no longer governed by the idealistic teleology of the Enlightenment’s18 idea of progress since the acceleration has broken its linear conception. Koselleck himself had already prefigured this shift by claiming that society was initially “accelerating towards an unknowable future, but within which was contained a hope of the desired utopian fulfillment” (1985: xv). With reference to Rosa, the critical notion of “hope” has now shifted to “uncertainty”.

The Man Without Qualities structures the zeitgeist of late modernity precisely in these

terms of acceleration and uncertainty. Musil’s pre-war Vienna of 1913 is a “rapidly growing world that had to get things done quickly” (379), an urban microcosm rendition of a world in which the author places streetcars, trains, and industries as monuments of an increasingly rushing historical progress. During this time, such notions as speed and acceleration became

16_{While discussing St. Augustine’s philosophy, Paul Ricoeur notes how “no more than did classical antiquity,}

Augustine has no word for units smaller than the hour. This does not change until the eighteenth century” (1984: 232).

17_{The referred historical timeframes in this thesis paper are borrowed from Hartmut Rosa who himself takes up}

the periodical framework delineated by Marshall Berman: “classical modernity” as the period from 1790 to 1900, while “late modernity” corresponding to 1900 and onwards.

18_{Philipp Blom (similarly to Rosa) marks how speed and gaiety of progress between 1900 and 1914 suddenly}

became accompanied by anxiety and vertigo: “[…] nobody felt confident of the shape the future world would have, of who would wield power, what political constellation would be victorious, or what kind of society would emerge from the headlong transformation” (3).

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the normative principles of urban modernity that coincided with efficiency, power, as well as the futurist valorization of the machine as a symbol of the future that eschews the stagnant, slower past. As social acceleration involves not only technological advancement but also changes the socio-cultural norms, The Man Without Qualities hints at a condition that in the narrative is manifested by attributing the notion of genius to the mechanical speed of a racehorse or optimizing labor efficiency with a shorthand script, 19 or elevating journalism to a new, more effective standard of storytelling.20 These modes of efficiency are inherently related to the metropolitan space, and right from the start of the novel, Vienna is displayed as a hub of various accelerated forces where time is governed by velocity, efficiency, and chaos. One of the key events in the first pages is the auto accident - the crash describes the victim who is both attacked and then saved by a mechanistic speed when a truck is replaced by an ambulance, an exchange whose efficiency is applauded by the bystanders. The speed and bustle of Kakania are accompanied by “irregularity”, “failure to keep step”, and “chronic discord”, in short, a sense of discordance which structures this accelerated state of a progressive city:

Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside a pot made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. (MwQ 4)21

19_{The discussed idea of introducing a shorthand script as the main means of writing at the Parallel Campaign}

meetings corresponds to what Charles Taylor refers to as “instrumental reason” – Taylor argues that as one of the three malaises of modernity, instrumental reason is “the kind of rationality we draw when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost output ratio, is its measure of success” (10).

20_{The notion of journalistic narrative in the novel deserves additional attention - the journalistic mode of}

accounting for reality in the novel is approached as an emerging modern form of narrative, the “truest narrative art” (“die echteste erzählerische Kunst”) (1101/1036). The prominent journalist Meseritscher is praised as “the Homer of our era” (ibid.) as the notion of journalistic writing is presented as replacing the old forms of storytelling. To take it further, journalism becomes the primary literary discourse of the public sphere. Bakhtin comes to mind when he writes that “the journalist is above all a contemporary. He is obliged to be one. He lives in the sphere of questions that can be resolved in the present day (or in any case in the near future). He participates in a dialogue that can be ended and even finalized, can be translated into action, and can become an empirical force.” (1986:152). The genre of journalism as “modern rhetoric” (ibid., 150) becomes an instrumentalized means of narration that is “translated into action” by being immediate, empirical, fast, and most importantly, contemporary. Treating Meseritscher as “the Homer of our era” is also significant as it merges poetic and rhetoric discourses into a new medium of modernity, the “truest narrative art”. Does not Musil by this phrasing undermine journalism as the modern discursive outcome by suggesting that the “truest” art cannot eschew a sense of fiction and myth?

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To elaborate further, Musil sustains the mechanistic aspect of accelerated modern experience and describes the temporality and progress of Kakania by using a metaphor of a train, a significant chronotopic image:

We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love, reading books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still; but the uncanny fact is that those walls are moving along without our noticing it, casting their rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don’t know where. Besides, we would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can’t be helped, but with all our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or got on a wrong track. Then one day the violent need is there: Get off the train! Jump clear! A homesickness, a longing to be stopped, to cease evolving, to stay put, to return to the point before the thrown switch put us on the wrong track. (MwQ 28)

Musil’s usage of the train imagery is already a mark of accelerated technology and innovations impacting the modern temporal imagination. The experience of time is now being realized by a technologically modern concept of the train, hence the transformative nature of acceleration influencing temporal structures. As the narrator observes, the goal of this “train of time” is unknown, and being the passenger is “a very uncertain part to play.” The uneasiness and uncertainty that Rosa ascribes to social acceleration for Musil bursts out in the “violent need” to get off the train of progress that has lost its teleological destination. There seems almost a primal anxious need to “be stopped” and “cease evolving” as an epiphany of the modern subject who was under the illusion that they are in accordance with the historical time. Musil here mocks the viewpoint of having control over time, a conquering mindset of “making history” that has dominated modern progress. In effect, time has almost reached an independent state via the notion of accelerating progress, leaving the perceiver behind and without control: “Time was on the move… But nobody knew where time was headed. And it was not always clear what was up or down, what was going forward or backward” (7). These first instances in the novel mark the disillusionment with the progressive temporal structures and introduce a sense of something dangerous and dystopic at the end of the journey.

In this vein, Musil sets out to “undo” the classical notion of time, whose linearity was previously inextricably linked with the idea of progress and development. The Musilian subject is a figure that has invested trust in this “train of time” but has become disenchanted, although it is too late to leave it. In Musil’s ambitious critique of modernity, the subject is no longer a

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master of their time as it has almost reached an independent state via the accelerating progress. In other words, time in the world of the novel gains speed surpassing the individual’s capacity to conceptualize it as instrumental for their own historical standpoint. The rush of modernity marks the loss of time, leaving the subject immobile, stuck, and half-realized.

This paradoxical result of inertia as an effect of acceleration can, in this sense, be viewed in relation to Rosa’s accompanying concept of “frenetic standstill”. By this notion, Rosa marks the shift from “classical modernity” to “late modernity” by observing how social acceleration eventually led to societal rigidity after “utopian energies are exhausted because all the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried” (15). The previously opened future of progress now paradoxically gains a status of “frenetic standstill” in the development of ideas, which means that “nothing remains the way it is while at the same time nothing essential changes” (283). The acceleration exhausts the fleeting present to the point where it loses temporal orientation and results in rigid inertia, a paradoxical state of exhaustion,22 and perpetual action that does not crystallize into a coherent form or idea solely due to the overbearing speed. Thus, the instances of standstill amidst the rushing experiences in the novel are symptomatic of a modern expenditure – such examples range from the inactive ambitions of the Parallel Campaign to such characters as Ulrich‘s youth friend Walter who, once envisioned as a progressive, modernist artist, finds himself blaming the modern present for his failed aspirations; or Leo Fischel, a bank director who believes in progress in parallel to the accumulating capital but becomes oblivious to the timely inception of proto-fascism kindled in his own household after his daughter gets involved with antisemitic German nationalists.

The duality of acceleration and frenetic standstill correlates with the ambivalent temporal structures of the narrative of The Man Without Qualities – Vienna’s social and cultural life is portrayed as governed by an increased pace of life, increasingly rushing modernity and technology. In contrast, the narrative order or the novel itself works towards a perpetual suspension, a state of a standstill rejecting the idea of a teleological and, therefore, future-oriented development.

22_{In this sense, Habermas compliments Rosa’s ideas of the frenetic standstill when he writes that “modern}

time-consciousness has repeatedly slackened” (1987: 13) due to an accelerating need for progressive novelty. As the notion of “progress became the historical norm” (ibid., 12), modernity started losing its vitality and stalled.

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ii. Progress as the Teleological Principle of Time

In Kakania, the primary ideological principle is the belief in progress. For example, a bank director Leo Fischel associates the notion of progress with the accumulating wealth of his capital,23_{while Diotima sees the Parallel Campaign as a historical means of progress.} Specifically, in Arnheim, Diotima sees “the New Man, destined to take over the helm of history from the old powers” (357), moreover, during their relationship, Diotima is presented as a person who “regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from below” (313) and by introducing Arnheim into the Parallel Campaign, she feels “with absolute certainty that her life had reached a pinnacle” (357). In her eyes, her own self-worth is symbolically coincident with the Parallel Campaign, and she associates this gathering with teleological development.

Meanwhile, Ulrich is a counter-figure to such trust in the notion of teleological progress. The category of history itself for him is governed by chance rather than certainty:

The course of history was therefore not that of a ball which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. (MwQ 392)24

In Ulrich’s eyes, anything is susceptible to sudden, abrupt changes, as seen in the erratic description of historical time. There is no finality to becoming. Its outcome is never clear – in this sense, the outbreak of the war displayed how the Enlightenment project and its teleologically charged historicism turned out not to be prophetically utopic.

23_{“Director Fischel, for instance, could form no concept at all of true patriotism or the true Austria, but he did}

have his own opinion of true progress, which was certainly different from Count Leinsdorf's opinion. Exhausted by stocks and bonds or whatever it was he had to deal with, his only recreation an evening at the opera once a week, he believed in a progress of the whole that must somehow resemble his bank's progressively increasing profitability” (MwQ 142).

24_{While walking through Vienna, Ulrich speculates that the course of historical time may not be determined by a}

teleological trajectory of a line but rather susceptible to abruptions that are outside temporal anticipations. As he is having these thoughts, he gets lost after the series of distractions of the city and the narrative connects these categories of historical and personal experience – historical motions are not unlike an individual capacity to go “off course”: “He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him entirely, but had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way home” (MwQ 392).

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As for the historical present itself, Ulrich’s perception of modernity is heavily informed by the accelerated state of progress to the point where humanity’s efforts seem to start losing their foundational grounding and causality. “Our era is dripping with the energy of action. It’s not interested in ideas, only in deeds. […] Everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over again” (804).

Ulrich is aware of the social acceleration and frenetic standstill that the Viennese experience; however, he chooses to avoid entangling himself in such a position by denouncing to believe in the teleological utopia and the idea of progress. In the introductory scene, Ulrich is presented standing behind his apartment window watching the traffic and “ticking off on his stopwatch the passing cars, trucks, trolleys, and pedestrians. He was gauging their speeds, their angles, all the living forces of mass hurtling past that drew the eye to follow them like lightning, holding on, letting go, forcing the attention for a split second to resist, to snap, to leap in pursuit of the next item” (6). Quickly enough, he becomes disillusioned with the idea of “calculating the incalculable” and “after doing the arithmetic in his head for a while, he slipped the watch back into his pocket with a laugh and decided to stop all this nonsense” (7). Ulrich ceases counting the urban traffic from behind his window, and by refusing to measure modern life in terms of mechanical clock time, he is introduced as one who ceases to see it in terms of progress.

iii. The Indecisive Storytellers of History

Building the model of Kakania, Musil drew timely parallels with the political and cultural realities of pre-war Vienna. The city exemplified the Empire’s inability to maintain itself, which was suffering under the indecisive political regime before the war. While addressing the pre-war political climate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Caroline de Gruyter notes how the complex national diversity increasingly rendered the state unsustainable to rule: “Habsburgers always played for time because a common decision was impossible while the emperor always notoriously took his time to make a decision” (de Gruyter 2012). As an aporetic place of many conflicting ethnicities, regimes, and ideologies,25 “the grotesque Austria” in Musil’s eyes was “nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world” (Musil 1998: 209), a background of action displaying the stagnated and decaying fin-de-siecle sensibility

25_{“The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not}

everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut” (MwQ 29).

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complemented by the fading aristocratic ideas, administrative impotence, and cultural aimlessness of the Habsburg empire, All of this is present in the Dual Monarchy of Kakania of 1914, a microcosmic place and time of many juxtapositions.

At the vanguard of Kakanian collective psyche stands the Parallel Campaign, which functions as a metonymical representation for the Kakania as a whole – it is a central political endeavor of the Empire struggling to sustain its disintegrating social order but which is defined by aimlessness, political fragmentation, and inability to generate ideas that would be socially coherent. As the ultimate attempt to provide an ideological grounding for the disintegrating Dual Monarchy, the Parallel Campaign is firstly an endeavor of writing history by placing itself ahead of the historical time with such mottos as “we cannot forget at this moment we owe all our energies to the realization of a historic event!” (187). The campaign is responsible for “recovering” the grand ideological narrative of the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, Count Leinsdorf, a conservative Realpolitik official, and Diotima (Ermelinda Tuzzi) are figures preoccupied with sustaining that narrative for the future. In other words, the Campaign envisions themselves as storytellers responsible for laying out the future narrative for the Empire:

But there is also something else involved which has not yet been mentioned, and that is the delight in storytelling itself; it takes the shape of that conviction so common to authors that they are working on a good story, that passion of authorship that lengthens an author’s ears and makes them glow, so that all criticism simply melts away. Count Leinsdorf had this conviction and this passion, and so did some of his friends […] (MwQ 561)

The passion of the Parallel Campaign’s ideological storytelling is thus firmly rooted in the Hegelian teleology of progress that has been exalted to a naturalized status. With Count Leinsdorf as the leading figure, the Campaign treats history as a judicial procedure, a “lawful process” that forms a “smoothly ascending line” (181) – tenets of classical modernity along which the Campaign seeks to situate itself. The Parallel Campaign harbors a profound principle that they can reclaim control over history, a modern mindset that echoes the words of Zygmunt Bauman when he writes: “The deepest, perhaps the sole meaning of progress is made up of two closely interrelated beliefs - that “time is on our side,” and that we are the ones who “make things happen” (Bauman 132). In such a manner, the Parallel Campaign stands for the progressive modern consciousness envisioning itself as the frontier of historical time.

The political impotence of the Campaign also lies in its fragmentary nature. The initial idea of gathering the expert minds to conjure an idea embodying the glory of Kakania fails

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most ironically - each one of them remains separate in their personal ambitions,26_{“trapped in} the cage of his or her specialized knowledge” (McBridge 5) without reaching any consensus. Max Weber saw the disenchanted modern condition as a testament to the loss of unity due to accelerated differentiation of life-spheres that compartmentalized experiences into enclosed, hermetic loci. In Diotima’s words, the Parallel Campaign is concerned with this “need to recover that unity of mankind that had been lost because the disparity of interests in society had grown so great” (189). Ironically enough, by trying to amend this crisis of the fragmented modern present, the Parallel Campaign resorts to the means exemplifying the same condition and gathers an ensemble of individuals27 who are unable to cooperate as each of them represents only individual ambitions and disparate ideologies – for example, Arnheim is eventually exposed as using the campaign solely for influential purposes. Simultaneously, General Stumm’s motivation lies in a bureaucratic attempt to obtain funding for the Austrian army. A homogenous ideology is no longer possible in the modern world due to an accelerated differentiation and specialization, and fragmentation of human experiences that the Campaign reflects.

Quite quickly, it becomes clear that the Campaign will remain an idea without content, a gathering of progress and excitement without substance and realization. Musil’s novel exposes the blind nature of this teleological and progressive mindset – despite the disintegrating unity, Kakania still harbors a belief in progress without seeing any clear manifestations. Without holding any ideological potential, the Campaign is destined to fail its mission – from the start, it remains to be an effort of “action without purpose” (Goodstein, 394). In this light, Leinsdorf and Diotima’s obsession with the recurring sense that “something’s got to be done” (878) and “something’s going to happen” (110) serves as a satirical impression – instead of an idea that would encompass the spiritual superiority of the Habsburg Empire, Europe falls into the worst conflict of humankind seen at that time. With its phantomic anticipation, the year 1918, in the unrealized mist of time, becomes a historical point of disintegration instead of a glorious celebration.

26_{Habermas observes this condition in claiming that modernity since the Enlightenment has “segregated science,}

morality, and art into autonomous specialized spheres splitting off from lifeworld and administered by specialists” (1997: 54).

27_{“As agreed at the inaugural sessions, they had divided up the world according to the major aspects of religion,}

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iv. Crisis of the Present and the Aimlessness of History

In Chapter 62, Ulrich and his cousin Diotima set out on one of the countryside trips that “serve the purpose of winning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons” (299), and they end up taking an excursion into a valley. While strolling, they find themselves discussing topics like will, power, and desire when Ulrich suddenly turns the conversation towards the notions of time and history:

We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. We make too much of it. We’ll remember it. Even a year from now we may be able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us—me anyway—is always—putting it cautiously; I don’t want to look for an explanation or a name for it— opposed in a sense to this way of experiencing things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. So it can’t become the present in its turn. (MwQ 312)

What is at the center of Ulrich’s ambiguous attack on “the sense of the present”? Bearing in mind Ulrich’s skepticism towards the teleological principle of historical time, his stance runs counter to the treatment of the present as a providential episode in the grand narrative of history. In other words, the “overestimated” present that is “being made too much of” refers to a teleological sense of present historical time that is charged with a notion of progress. Ulrich here denies the significance of the present - be it historical or phenomenological – that is essentially meaningless at its unfolding.

As previously discussed, the Parallel Campaign embodies the progressive teleological drive of “making history” and being at the “helm of history,” a movement for which “every moment may be that of a great historic turning point.” The present reflected by such ideology becomes overvalued as the obsession with action forces one to infuse the present with teleological meaning. Musil’s position of writing in 1921 further proves this notion of the non-significant present as the Viennese society in the brimming present of 1913-1914 was oblivious to the looming disaster28_{. It seems that for Musil, the meaning of the present is only possible} once it becomes a reflected past, in other words, when it becomes a simultaneous narrative of

28_{At the same time “people not yet born in those days will find it hard to believe, but even then time was racing}

along like a cavalry, camel, just like today” (MwQ 7). The present of “today” for the retrospective narration exhibits the same quality of the present of 1913 – nobody in that time was suspectful of the disastrous future, and the same could be said about any year or any present moment. This way, Musil acknowledges his own present positioning towards the unknown future devoid of teleological order as the historical judgment is exchanged by temporal intuition.

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(hi)story assuming a sequential form of a narrativized past - the present must settle into the structure of a narrative before it can carry historical meaning and significance of being past. As historical distance articulates events of the past retrospectively29 via sequential ordering, there is no way of understanding the present until it becomes a past under the guise of a narrative, until the present becomes a past for the present of the future. In Musil’s own words from the essay The Writer in Our Age: “One knows just as little about the present. Partly this is because we are, as always, too close to the present” (Lukács 1963: 35).

That is why Ulrich abstains from treating the modern notion of the present as a teleological stage towards perfection; instead, with his claim, “I don’t want to look for an explanation,” he approaches it as an erratic space of possibility where positivist determinism is eschewed in favor of speculation. The present for Musil is problematic in its meaninglessness, but precisely because of it, the present becomes a sphere of potential possibilities and contingencies rather than a providential steppingstone towards the teleological future. As an ineffable matter, the issue of the present is a subject that Ulrich tries to address, but it is also the condition in which he finds himself thinking about it. The heightened spatial and temporal awareness of the valley30 constitutes the present moment in which Ulrich tries to conceptualize the notion of the present, but he fails as Musil is quick to mention that “he did not really know what he was aiming at” (313).

The undermined teleology of the present is also prevalent in the Parallel Campaign’s attitude towards the potential betterment of the future, namely in the scene where Count Leinsdorf is talking with Ulrich, who is cataloging proposal ideas from the public regarding the celebration into two folders of ones arguing for going back to the past and others for the future:

“I have already, incidentally,” Ulrich continued, “two folders full of general proposals, which I’ve had no previous opportunity to return to Your Grace. One of them I’ve headed: Back to! It’s amazing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want

29_{Louis Mink draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the phenomenological unfolding of history and suggests that}

historical understanding is a “mode of uniquely retrospective intelligibility. For the advents and passages […] could not have been understood by their own agents and participants as we can now understand them” (116). Thus, the historical present is devoid of meaning until it becomes a past for the present of the future. George Herbert Mead similarly treats the category of the present as “nothing but textureless data”, “abstractions from things [that] must be given their places in the constructive pasts of human communities before they can become events” (240).

30_{Musil often portrays places as intersections of time and space, similarly to Balzac‘s tendency to “see time in}

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the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back to Religion!, we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to Goethe, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more.

“Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake to discourage?” Count Leinsdorf offered.

“That’s possible, but how should one deal with it? ‘After careful consideration of your esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment as suitable .. .’? Or ‘We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cetera, et cetera, is to be effected . . . and so on’?” Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:

“Dear Doctor,” he said, “in the history of mankind there is no voluntary turning back!” This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorf himself, who had actually intended to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the Catholic Church and were now suffering the consequences. He was also on the point of praising the times of absolute centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty surprise it would be to wake up one morning without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead of the morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorf thought: “Things can never again be what they were, the way they were,” and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was a quite re-markable condition. (MwQ 251-52)

Hypothetically, turning back to the mythologized ideas of the past would also mean turning back to the holistic sense of the past with all its past elements. As the leading figure for a central political movement, Leinsdorf illustrates the modern habit of looking at the past selectively, and by these bits and pieces, a narrative constellation of elements that serve ideological agenda is conjured without acknowledging the holistic impact of the past upon the present. While negating the decadent present in favor of the glorious past, Leinsdorf, at this moment, suddenly realizes that the past also implies losing the comfortabilities of progress that is taken for granted. In the wake of late modernity, the notion present for Leinsdorf and the Campaign starts