Austrian Literature Archives - Page 2 of 3

Honour in Decline: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March is a story of decline. On one level, it describes the rotting of an Empire, Austria-Hungary; on another, it is a much more personal story, telling the tale of three generations of the Trotta family, a family whose own rise and decline are both the result of their country’s decay, and in a way partly responsible for it. In dealing with the fortunes of a family, it is in some way comparable to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but The Radetzky March is a much tighter book, thanks to its focus on only three characters – grandfather Joseph Trotta, father Franz Trotta, and son Carl Joseph Trotta. As men, they are the administrators and soldiers of the great empire. As a result, their fates are inevitably bound with its own.

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, is the one constant of The Radetzky March. He lived to be 86 and ruled for almost 68 years.

There is a lot to like about the novel. For me, above and beyond Roth’s talent for description and portraiture, what I loved most about The Radetzky March was its description of family and the shifting of the generations. My great grandfather became the world leader in his field and a household name; my grandfather became a famous and influential politician. But my father and his brother, the heirs, both found it difficult to live up to the expectations of the past and in some sense their lives can be read as an attempt to cope. It is now my turn, like Carl Joseph under the gaze of his grandfather’s painted eyes, to face the pressure to be someone I may not be.

The Radetzky March is not a source of guidance on this topic, but it is a picture of a world that is now lost, and we would do well to sift through the ashes in search of what might be worth holding on to.

The Birth of a Dynasty – The Opening of The Radetzky March

The first chapter of The Radetzky March is enough to decide whether the novel is for you. Detailing the life of grandfather Trotta, it works perfectly as a short story. We meet him in the army at the Battle of Solferino of 1859, where he saves the life of the young Austrian Kaiser, Franz Joseph. Joseph Trotta, who is the son of simple Slovene peasants, is ennobled for his deed. No longer is he a Slovene, now he is an Austrian – “a new dynasty began with him”. He receives a promotion, becoming a captain, and now is not merely Trotta, but “Trotta von Sipolje”. We might expect him to be happy, but instead the honour is more of a curse than a blessing. We feel his pain as his identity becomes uncertain, fragmented. “He felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life”.

But he cannot return to the past either. When he meets his father again the conversation is stilted, awkward. The only thing for him is to try to become the aristocrat he supposedly is. Grandfather Trotta marries “his colonel’s not-quite-young well-off niece” – a lovely description conveying all the delicacy of aristocratic reasoning – and raises his only son with military constriction. “Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest.” The son is not damaged by the life of discipline. These were different times, when individuality was less important than service. But things will change.

In the end, the father dies soon after the son comes of age. “Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring – and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.” The rest of The Radetzky March concerns the wheat – his son and grandson, and their fates.

Fathers and Sons

Time changes. The father Franz Trotta grows up and now raises his own only son, Carl Joseph. He raises him in just the same way as his own father did. In these early chapters the only thing Carl Joseph seems to say to Franz (who is almost always referred to by his role, district captain) is “Yessir, Papa”, which indicates the degree of independence of thought the young lad has. There is no intimacy between them. They write each other letters, just as the grandfather wrote his own father letters, out of a kind of obligation and without any heart in them. When, later in the book, there are moments that put father and son together, they are unable to speak to each other.

Always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!”

Honour, of a sort

It is honour, that mysterious network of social rules and regulations, that binds both mouths shut. Honour is not all bad – it was, after all, a great source of dignity, and it bound together members of the upper classes with its common behavioural language. Nevertheless, honour places all of the characters of The Radetzky March in chains, whether they notice them or not. We see this most tragically with a young man, Max Demant, who Carl Joseph befriends early in his military career. He is in many ways a double of Carl Joseph – he, too, finds himself in a social position unthinkable to his ancestors. Demant is a Jew – his grandfather was a tavern keeper, his father a postal official. He is no soldier, no cavalryman, and his wife doesn’t love him. As he puts it, his is “a life with snags”.

One evening Demant departs a theatre performance early, leaving his wife alone. Trotta offers to escort her back, but they are seen by the other officers. The next time they are all together, the other officers drink heavily, leading one of them ultimately to start yelling “Yid, Yid, Yid!” Demant has no choice but to challenge the speaker to a duel. No choice? Demant knows that he has a choice – he knows there are ways to disappear, for example to flee to America. But he is unable to make that decision. “A contemptible, shameful, stupid, powerful iron-clad law was fettering him, sending him fettered to a stupid death.” In spite of honour’s stupidity, if he wants to remain a part of the community, he has no choice but to submit to it.

The ordinary citizens, who live outside the officers’ world, see things as perhaps they really are. “The officers went about like incomprehensible worshippers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals.” We do not even see the duel, we only hear its result as Trotta does – second hand. Just as did Effi Briest, The Radetzky March makes duelling into something pointless, depriving it of its romance. Roth skilfully weaves both hope and despair into the final hours before the fight, and even with that the final result still surprised and shocked me. Honour, Roth shows, is something insidious as well as something obvious. It can lead to duels and avoidable deaths, but it can also be responsible for a coldness between family, where really there should be warmth.

Decay

Is honour the source of the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy? I don’t think that Roth suggests that here. Things are more complicated than that. After the duel, Carl Joseph is forced from his prestigious cavalry regiment into the infantry and posted to the Austro-Hungarian border with Russia. I loved the description of the nature there, of how the Austro-Hungarians “sacrificed” gravel year by year in trying to force the swampland into roads and solid ground. Here Carl Joseph meets a Polish Count, Chojnicki, whose pessimism about the Empire’s prospects is unconcealed. Chojnicki, however, sees a solution to the decline, and that solution is violence. He is a dark prophet of reaction. In killing its rebellious elements, there’s a chance the Empire may yet survive.

Back in Moravia, the district captain also witnesses changes as The Radetzky March progresses:

“At first he had merely belittled the nations that demanded autonomy and the “working people” who demanded “more rights.” But gradually he was getting to hate them – the carpenters, the arsonists, the electioneers.”

He does not think that the Empire is ending, but he knows that it has enemies. His transition, as the novel goes on, from benign governance to hatred, is perhaps a better starting point for thinking about the Empire’s decline. Like many others, he is unable to understand why Hapsburg subjects would have any loyalty to anyone other than the Empire and Emperor. His closemindedness, which has made him an excellent bureaucrat, leaves him unable to read his times.

Chojnicki is the borderland society’s leader, and Carl Joseph visits him regularly. With nothing else to do, and grieving for his friend, Carl Joseph takes up drinking. And now the Empire’s decay is coupled with his physical decay.

Demonstrations for universal suffrage in Prague, 1905. Of course, one could just shoot the lot of them. But that tends to have unforeseen consequences.

Blood

We have a chance to see Chojnicki’s theories in action. Carl Joseph is tasked with putting down some striking workers, with violence if necessary. He does not question his orders. “It had not yet occurred to the lieutenant that the workers were poor wretches who could be right.” Carl Joseph’s mind, like his father’s, has been conditioned to serve without questioning. But shooting civilians, even unruly ones, is far less noble than the fate he had once believed would be his. As he prepares to give the order to fire, he tries to imagine what his grandfather would have done. But he cannot. He is living in an unheroic age, and he no help comes to him. Instead,

he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.

The incident needs to be hushed up. People have died. But for Trotta the memory of that day remains with him as a time when he was powerful. It is a dangerous memory. As Carl Joseph’s decline continues, he gets drawn into gambling debts as a co-signatory to friends, and when the original debtors are unable to pay for various reasons, the creditor, Kaputrak, comes to Carl Joseph instead. Carl Joseph feels powerless before the man, even though he is an officer and the other a mere civilian. Unable to control himself, he grabs his sabre and forces the other out of the room with it, nearly stabbing him in the process. But there is a witness, and all Carl Joseph achieves is a little more time before he has to pay. Without war to give an outlet to his trained violence, Carl Joseph ultimately turns it against others.

The Little Things

What makes The Radetzky March so good is its subtlety. Little things, little ironies, pile up throughout the novel. Towards the end, there are more and more images of clocks and watches, pointing to the limited time left for Austria-Hungary. Then there is the use of music. The “Radetzky March” was a kind of unofficial anthem for the Empire, a tune the boy Carl Joseph used to hear each Sunday, is replaced by the “Internationale” as the workers begin fighting for their own corner, instead of blindly submitting. And then we have the use of portraits. Carl Joseph is haunted by the image of his grandfather, hanging in his father’s house. It represents his obligations to live up to the family name, and he comes back to it again and again.

But there are also portraits of the Emperor too. Early in The Radetzky March Carl Joseph removes one such portrait from a brothel, ashamed to see it there. By the end of the novel, however, the portraits, which once hung all over the Empire, have disappeared, stowed away now that other causes have grown in popularity. The situation with the portraits, as with the Trottas themselves, represents the state of the Empire. When they are taken down, the end is not far off.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed The Radetzky March. It is an extremely rich book, filled with irony and thoughtfulness. Roth treats Austria-Hungary neither as an ideal world, nor as a complete disaster. Within the all-encompassing idea of honour, he finds both good and bad. When he writes that, “all in all, Lieutenant Trotta’s experiences amounted to very little”, there is more than a hint of sympathy in the condemnation. Carl Joseph has been brought up rigidly, in a rigid world, and when he is forced to face things he hasn’t been prepared for he (understandably) falls apart into drinking and violence. If the Empire had not been heading for collapse, perhaps all would have been alright. He would have found a place in the world for himself. But history did not give him that choice.

Joseph Roth, author of *The Radetzky March.*

In some way The Radetzky March contains a lot of what makes Tolstoy so good. Roth describes a wide range of characters from various social strata, giving the impression that he understands the entire world. In The Radetzky March even the Emperor himself is a character, which was pretty cool (Tolstoy does the same in Hadji Murat). But Roth is not quite as good as Tolstoy at making characters, and this is especially obvious with the female characters. For the most part they were boring seductresses, serving to demonstrate the Empire’s moral decline. Of course, given the story is mostly about officers, there’s little space for women to have a big role. All the same, I’d have liked to see a bit more variety. Tolstoy, for all his views on women, was definitely a lot better at writing them.

The Radetzky March is a great book in spite of both the women and Roth’s occasionally confusing chronological signposting of events (Roth doesn’t always link the chapters very clearly). It is an insider’s account of the decline of an empire, and a timeless story of the way the generations can fail to connect with one another.

For more about the tension between honour and practice, Effi Briest is worth reading. To look at another world that has faded away, read my review of Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement. For more Roth, I’ve written about Job: The Story of a Simple Man, here.

Musil’s Three Women – Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, and Tonka

There are some books which, when I take my notes from page to screen, seem more interesting and more enjoyable than they had been as I was reading them. Robert Musil’s Three Women is such a book. Three Women is interesting – I got awfully excited by the thought of all the essays I’ll be able to write next year on it – but it’s not exactly fun to read. Musil takes three different relationships and uses them to weave an intricate network of ideas and associations which provide an intellectual feast for anyone who hungers for one, built on workable plots.

This is, of course, progress for Musil, whose two stories Unions were also in my edition. These were written earlier, and as Frank Kermode writes of Three Women in the preface to my edition, “the difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative”, which is about as open as any serious literary critic could be about the fact that those two stories make no bloody sense whatsoever, however interesting they might be for someone who has got lost on the way to the philosophy section of the library.

Anyway, as I said at the top, now that I’ve extracted my notes, I can start to “appreciate” the stories. What follows is a teasing out of some of the various meanings I found.

A photo of Robert Musil — Robert Musil, author of *Three Women.* His most famous work is the unfinished *Man without Qualities*. However, it’s rather long and I’m not sure I like his writing enough to attempt it just yet.

Three Women and Robert Musil

There are three stories in Three Women, each of them centring on a different woman – “Grigia”, “The Lady from Portugal”, and “Tonka”. The last of these, “Tonka”, as about twice as long as the others, and is also broken up into chapters to make it easier to read. Robert Musil, their author, was an Austrian-German who had seem the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse, but as Kermode makes clear, this is not the only collapse he witnessed. There is also the sense of “metaphysical collapse”, a sense that modern man (and everyone else) is losing his spiritual anchoring without replacing it with anything. In all of these stories the notion of “will” is of great importance, as is the feeling that looking at the world from only one angle, whether scientific or martial, can lead to our doom. Pretty typical Modernist stuff, to be fair, but Musil does it well.

Grigia

“Grigia” is the first story in Three Women and it takes its name from a peasant woman from Venetia. Homo, the main character, is left home alone by his wife and ailing son as they seek out treatment, so he decides to take up an offer from an old friend to go and attempt to reopen some gold mines in Venetia. Mines are a particularly German setting, taking us back at once to the Romantics. Novalis had studied mining, and Ludwig Tieck’s “The Rune Mountain” and E. T. A. Hofmann’s story “The Mines at Falun” both present classic renditions of the dangers of what lies buried beneath the ground. Of these three, I found “The Mines at Falun” to be the most relevant while I thought about “Grigia”.

In Musil’s story Homo, in an alien mountainous world, begins going “native”. As usual, we have to ask whether that nature has always been there. Homo has an “impression that behind the outward appearance of this district… there was hidden something that he yearningly awaited”; meanwhile, crystals from the mountain are compared to flowers. “Yearningly” and the connection with flowers (also present in Hofmann’s tale) speak to a kind of sexual desire that is hidden, not-fully-acknowledged, within Homo. When the gold starts to flow, Homo finds the attraction of power and wealth too, blotting out memories of his old life. Stars become like “thalers”, and in the villages “they poured out money among the people and held sway like gods”. Homo and his companions, the other mining directors, stop talking as time passes, instead adopting “an animal language”. Power takes away their civility and leaves them beasts.

The first page of Musil's Grigia, the first story in Three Women — The first edition of “Grigia”, the first story in *Three Women*. I quite liked “Grigia” but I wish Musil had focused more on straight narrative.

This power is a temporary state, of course, contingent upon the gold’s flow. “Grigia”, as do all the stories of Three Women, has at its core questions about identity. This is where Musil’s use of sex and eroticism comes in. The peasant women’s husbands all go to America in search of fortune there, and one day Homo hears a story about one who comes back. He goes to one woman, spends time with her until he runs out of money, and then he leaves to the next one. He has been in America and knows the husbands, letting him imitate them. The women do not object, perhaps do not even notice. They are simply glad of his return. Eventually the trickster is caught, but the story speaks to the idea that one can change one’s role at will. For Homo, far from home, the idea is an attractive one.

It is attractive because it absolves him of responsibility. For one going “native” the only possible danger, so long as one stays where one is, is the possibility of guilt. Thinking about everything as acting is much easier. When Homo starts having sex with the peasant women, the language reflects his feeling that everything is in a way unreal, even though in fact it’s a further indication of his moral decline. Of one, he thinks “her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted”, with a “theatrical quality of it”. And from this a kind of solipsism emerges, the necessary continuation of his growing sense of power. He thinks the women are there for him, and comes to find everything on the mountains as an “enchanted world ordained for him alone”. When he gets close to the peasant woman Grigia, he thinks it will bring him spiritually closer to his wife.

Perhaps it does, but reality intervenes. A vengeful husband traps Homo and Grigia in a cave, but only Grigia has the willpower to escape. Homo, already having had his pleasure, stays where he is. At that moment the mining stops, a failure. To me the story ultimately suggests the dangers of delusions, the need to have a firm grip on things. The need for a kind of spiritual centre. And since Homo’s name isn’t a far cry from Homo Sapiens, perhaps Musil’s message may be meant for us all.

The Lady from Portugal

The second story of Three Women is “The Lady from Portugal”. Unlike the other two stories in Three Women this one is set in the past, in the Alps on the border with Italy during the time of the earlier Holy Roman Empire. Its central characters are the Herr von Ketten (Man of the Chains), a nobleman, and his wife, a Portuguese lady. As with the other stories, the focus here is on identity. The Herr von Ketten is part of a long lineage of warriors, and his entire identity is based on war. For one year of their lives his people court their wives in faraway lands, and for the rest they fight. The Herr von Ketten’s sworn enemies are the forces of the Bishop of Trent. However, the real tension here is between von Ketten and his wife. Can they ever know each other or get close?

The Lady from Portugal imagines, when she reaches the castle, that the Alpine landscape reflects her husband’s character. She hears a story about how no-one has ever seen beyond the mountains, because every time someone sees past one row of peaks, another lies in wait. It is the same with identity – we may think that we know a person, but there is always another layer to be discovered. The castle itself is not to her taste – she finds it hideous, rotting, but she decides to try to make it her own. Meanwhile, her husband has already abandoned her to go to war. Thus begins their period of separation.

They meet, of course, but rarely. When he returns, he leaves “more hastily than was necessary”, and they both end up laughing awkwardly. She tends to his wounds, performing her duty as wife, but for both of them it becomes a comic action. For von Ketten, she is something outside of war, and thus alien. He has no power over her – she is as if from “some other realm.” War, by contrast, is much easier. Instead of the woman’s complexity, “To command is a thing of clarity”. “The thrust of a spear under an iron collar that has slipped is as simple as pointing one’s finger at something and being able to say: This is. This.” The spear and his finger are connected – for von Ketten there’s scarcely a difference.

He enjoys war because it doesn’t require “that other thing” – women. In fighting, his entire life can be focused on one thing. And indeed, it almost seemed to me that the war von Ketten fights is a war against multiplicity, against women. It is key that the Bishop of Trent is described as wearing “womanish robes” – if von Ketten can destroy him, it’s like he can destroy the presence of women in his life. For the Lady there are also challenges. Her children, which have not seen the sea, do not seem like her children to her. When the two meet she’s almost thankful for the brevity of these meetings – “If he had remained longer, he would have had to be truly as he was.” Things are easier because they are acted, rather than felt.

Von Ketten cannot hide from his wife forever. When the Bishop of Trent dies naturally both sides make peace, leaving von Ketten without the cornerstone of his identity. On the way home he is stung by a fly and almost dies. He suffers fevers and a surgeon. This latter is already a challenge to his old world view – “How strange it was to let pain be inflicted on one and not defend oneself”, he thinks. He drifts between death and life but eventually decides to live, but he doesn’t fully recover. His head has shrunk and his cap no longer fits. He has literally lost a part of himself without war.

At home the Lady from Portugal has a guest – a friend from her homeland. For von Ketten what is unbearable is seeing what real closeness can actually look like. “Their souls seemed to be in harmony with each other”, and when he spies them in the garden “among the leaves the shadows all blurred into one”. He starts to second-guess the past, finding evidence for betrayal everywhere. But he is sick, and a soothsayer tells him he will be cured only when he’s “accomplish[ed] a task” – what task, she doesn’t say. Now, just as once she couldn’t understand him, he cannot understand her. “When he gazed into his wife’s eyes, they were like new-cut glass, and although what the surface showed him was his own reflection, he could not penetrate further” – once again, an image of layers.

One day a kitten appears. At first beloved by all, it later gets ill. All three nobles try to take care of it. Ultimately, they fail and send it away, but it comes back well. When it falls ill again they have it killed. Ketten now decides it is time to get rid of the Portuguese guest. But “he could not make the final decision that he had all his life found it so easy to make”. Something has changed, and killing is no longer in his nature. All the same, one night he climbs onto the castle’s rocks to try to catch his wife and guest together. As he does so, his strength returns. But the man has already vanished. His wife explains: “If God could become man, then He can also become a kitten”.

Through this experience of jealousy and care von Ketten moves on from war to a kind of love.

Tonka

“Tonka” is the last story of Three Women, and the longest. It tells the story of a relationship between a young man from the middle classes and a peasant girl, Tonka. As ever, we are made to think about notions of identity. Tonka is a girl who is like “a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day” – she is always out of place. Moreover, she is hard to pin down, always associated with liminality. For instance, her full name is the German “Antonie” but the shortened form comes from the Czech “Toninka”; in addition, her family is made of an aunt “who was actually her much older cousin” and a grandmother who is actually the grandmother’s sister.

The young man brings her into his household as a nurse for his own ailing grandmother. Tonka is not intelligent – she mostly just says “yes” or “no”. Her mind has an “opacity” to it because she cannot express herself. By contrast, the young man’s relatives are all talkers. They know that speech is “not a medium of thought, but a sort of capital, something they wore like jewellery to impress others”, even if their speech is empty. When the grandmother dies, Tonka doesn’t cry – she doesn’t understand the need to fake emotions. His mother berates the young man for being “out of place” when he tries to help Tonka – his relationship doesn’t conform to the strictures of his class. But at the same time, the young man is part of his class – he gets annoyed when something reminds him of Tonka’s earlier life, when she worked in a shop.

Eventually, Tonka and the young man go to Berlin. They were unable to stay with the family. The young man doesn’t want to become like his mother, forced to carry on a relationship in secret. He and Tonka are now in love, though it is a strange love: “He loved Tonka because he did not love her, because she did not stir his soul, but rinsed it clean and smooth, like fresh water. He loved her more than he himself believed.” Tonka is simple, but she is not stupid. Even to the young man she reveals hidden depths, such as when she tells him about chemistry she has remembered, “like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box!” For a time, all is well. After some difficulty, “suspended between emotion and theory”, they have sex. And then she gets pregnant.

A painting of a seated woman — Egon Schiele, “Edith Schiele in gestreiftem Kleid sitzend”. In “Tonka” there is a great tension between who Tonka says she is and what reason dictates she must be. For the rational, scientific young man who is her partner, the gulf between the two is too great to overcome.

Tonka gets pregnant while the young man is away on a journey. There are two possibilities – either an immaculate conception, or infidelity. The young man is a man of science, but Tonka, “impervious to his reasoning”, is a force of her own. She is from “a world that does not know the concept “truth””. She grows ill, her skin peels away, “letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.” By contrast, the young man’s “well-bred face” better survives hardship. Illness seems to reveal who they really are. Money grows tight, and the young man’s forced to turn to his mother. But he has broken the unwritten codes – the family alludes to “amorous acts” that Tonka uses to control him. There are none. They simply cannot understand Tonka’s simplicity.

The young man becomes superstitious just as he becomes suspicious, but at the same time his personality splits. Part of him, the superstitious and suspicious part, is Tonka’s lover – the other is a scientist. And as the relationship worsens, the science improves. He stops shaving because he thinks it helps the relationship, only wears a certain ring. When he tries to confront Tonka with the scientific and medical irrefutability of her infidelity, “all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.” There is more than one type of truth in the world. But for the scientist it is a torment to have no certainty. Even though he’s sure she’s betrayed him, this feeling is like a “dream” – they are real only while we experience them. Later we see their flimsy construction.

He starts dreaming. His dreams come as warnings that his work is not his true life. He has a repeated memory of disbelieving in religion as a boy and trying to button up his coat during a frost only to find the cold has numbed his fingers. Tonka ends up in the hospital. The young man is unable to tell her “I believe you” – he cannot face the consequences of those words for his worldview. Eventually she dies, without hearing those words. Only then does the young man appreciate that deep inside her “there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this” – where infidelity is irrelevant because it is not a part of her truth. But it is too late. Unlike Herr von Ketten, the young man is unable to save his love. His need for rational certainty has cost him everything.

Conclusion

I have written too much. All the same, I hope this piece gives an idea of why Musil is an interesting writer and Three Women is an interesting collection. At least when you’re looking to write an essay. Musil’s Modernist concerns in Three Women – the shifting nature of identity and the dangers of a worldview that is too focused on one thing – remain pertinent in our own time, as does the importance he sets upon having an appreciation for the possibility of spirituality and irrationality as an antidote to looking at the world in only one way. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure I actually enjoyed reading Three Women. Even though I found parts of it touching, especially the descriptions of an unusual love in “Tonka”, most of Three Women was just too intellectual for my tastes, like Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, which I looked at here.

But still, it’s probably worth checking out Three Women. These stories are much shorter than The Man Without Qualities and may help you decide whether that book’s for you. If you enjoyed the piece or have read Three Women and think I seriously have misinterpreted the stories (I probably did), do leave a comment.

Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, is the perhaps the foremost German-language contribution to the exceedingly long and perhaps overly cerebral modernist genre, otherwise the domain of Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. Why the German-speakers and their works have never been as popular as those of the English and French is a complicated and thorny subject. Musil’s magnum opus, at least, is hurt by the fact that its author departed this life before he had completed it – though he managed over a thousand pages, so perhaps we shouldn’t complain. The Man Without Qualities is, according to critical wisdom, the best thing Musil wrote. However, lacking unlimited time, I decided to try a few of Musil’s other works, to get a feel for him. My first attempt is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a collection of creative non-fiction and short stories. Below are my thoughts.

An old photo of Robert Musil, author of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, looking dapper. — Robert Musil, author of *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,* is most famous for his *The Man Without Qualities.* He was born in Austria Hungary in 1880 and died in Switzerland in 1942, his work almost forgotten. Only recently has he found much popularity in the English-speaking world, thanks to new translations.

Of Flies and Worms

The first thing I noticed about Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is that it is a book populated with animals. I don’t know if Musil was a vegetarian, but I had the impression as I read that he had great sympathy for animals, regardless of whether he ate them. I think in them he saw a reflection of our own human selves in the modern era. Fears about mechanised slaughter and technology-driven control, and about the destruction of individuals under the treads of science and social pressures, he expresses through his non-fiction, in particular the pieces “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”.

“Flypaper”

“Flypaper”, the first of these little pieces, describes the killing of flies. We begin with a basic scientific and factual description of the paper in question – “Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada”. But this beginning is deceptive, for Musil starts to work in his argument immediately after it. The structure of the piece is simple, describing in only two or three pages the process by which flies are killed by flypaper: they land, they try to fly, and then at last they lose their strength and die. Such a description would hardly affect us if Musil had left it like that. But instead, he uses language to draw us into the fly’s struggle, and make us aware of its brutal nature. And in this verbal magic, not even the form can remain neutral.

Part of this comes through metaphors and similes. Although “Flypaper” is short, it is packed with images. And these images are invariably, consciously, human. Entangled flies are like “the mountain climber”, like “the man lost in the snow”, like “the hunted man” – all this within a single, long, sentence. Musil’s use of multiple images within a single sentence makes the particularly human nature of his images hard to avoid noticing. Then there is his use of “we”, not often but just often enough for us to know that the fly’s struggle is much like our own. Musil’s language is also startlingly colloquial at times, like when the flies “take a breather and try again”. Where technical, scientific language would push us away from the fly, Musil’s particularly casual style does the opposite.

A photo of a fly — As annoying as houseflies are, it still pays, so argues Musil in “Flypaper”, to have an awareness of what they go through when we kill them. It might teach us something about ourselves.

And so the fly dies, and by this point we are almost on its side. We have been made aware of its human qualities. And the attention that Musil gives to it, showing in detail how it tries to escape only to lose its strength and collapse, also alters our view of the fly’s death. By breaking down “flies land and die” into its component parts, by defamiliarizing the process of death, Musil turns the flypaper into something abhorrent, and the fly’s struggle into tragedy. When we learn, in the final sentences, that though the fly stops moving, nevertheless there is “some tiny wiggling organ that still lives a long time”, that “it opens and closes, you can’t describe it without a magnifying glass, it looks like a miniscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts” – when we learn all this it’s hard not to feel horror and shock.

“Fishermen on the Baltic”

What “Flypaper” does for flies, the third piece in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, “Fishermen on the Baltic”, does for worms. But here Musil alters the approach. In “Fishermen on the Baltic” we focus on fishermen preparing worms for fishing. At first they are “an obscure, mouldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand”, but then the men take them, cut them into pieces, and put them in their equipment chests. It is “a very tidy operation”, one where Musil uses the passive voice to further distance the fishermen from their slaughter.

But, as Musil himself hints at the end of the piece, “you have to pay close attention”. (It’s hard not to read this as a command for the reader concerning the text, even as it’s ostensibly about the worm-preparation). Take the placing of worms on hooks by the men, “as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm”. Nurses do not aim to kill people. The image, while fitting on one level – nurses and fishermen need steady hands – is repulsive once you go beneath the surface.

“Fishermen on the Baltic” is even shorter than “Flypaper”, but there is still a lot going on here. We should admire the skill of the fishermen’s craft, but Musil wants us to think also about its cost. The worms are killed mechanically while the fishermen banter. Perhaps there is something of an allegory for fascism here. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was published in 1936, but I haven’t been able to work out when this particular piece was written. Nonetheless, we have a sense of the worms’ ugliness, a sense that they are only useful for us as objects for fishing and not as living beings in themselves. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch?

Cultural and Other Declines

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is not only concerned with modernity’s crushing effect on the individual – it’s also a record of various sorts of decline that Musil saw taking place around him. Partially, this decline is linguistic. Musil is concerned with the way that language, through advertising and overuse, is losing its meaning. In a piece like “It’s Lovely Here”, Musil takes aim at the clichés of postcards. In “Monuments”, Musil connects the fate of monuments in Europe – ignored, or at best used for directions – with the broader cultural decline. If only they used the new tricks of advertising – “Goethe’s Faust is the best!” would be a great inscription for a statue to the German instead of something so boring as a name and date.

Often, language is simply unable to convey its idea. In “Boardinghouse Nevermore”, Musil notes that words like “harmony” are useless at showing what to the naked eye is obvious. This points to a deeper problem: that people assume, with the encroachment of scientific language into everyday speech, that everything can be explained and translated. Such a view ultimately takes the “magic” out of life. Musil, unlike most writers, had actually had a scientific and technical education – nonetheless he understood the dangers of adopting an overly-scientific worldview. In “Can a Horse Laugh?” this is treated with humour. At first an “acclaimed psychologist” is quoted – “…for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile”. Musil, however, spends the rest of the essay arguing against this through the example of a stable boy and his horse. Personal experience defies the scientist. But we shouldn’t blame the horse for proving him wrong.

Snobbery and State of Consciousness

Against this sense of linguistic decline there are a few attempts here to fight back. In addition to “Flypaper”, there are other stories that make us revaluate the world through taking us into different consciousnesses. “Maidens and Heroes” amusingly puts us inside the head of a canine, while “Clearhearing” shows us the world through the eyes and ears of a convalescent. “Binoculars” makes us think about the way we look at things by showing us, through careful descriptions, a zoomed-in version of the world. Musil’s inventiveness is at times really quite impressive.

However, while Musil’s linguistic ventures can be interesting, the cultural criticism is often less so. The advertising criticism of “Monuments” is just about okay, but in something like the “Paintspreader”, talking about talentless “genre painters”, Musil comes across as simply a snob. In “Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers” he asks the question of why writers don’t write long books anymore, and comes to the conclusion that it’s because the reading public are idiots. There is more to the essay than this – it ultimately is about our loss of belief in experts, and the way that as a result we know longer trust each other. In the end, Musil writes, someone whose views are completely awful will be able to gain popularity simply because everyone has an equally poor claim on respect. It’s a timely point, but one overshadowed by the condescending tone. Musil is no egalitarian champion himself.

A monument to Musil, showing a bust on a granite column. — A monument to Musil. While I’m going to read more of him, I can’t help but feel like overall *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author* was a mixed bag. At times it was fascinating – what I wrote about “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”, for example – but at others it was overly intellectual, snobbish, or dull. Photo by Albrecht Conz / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

Conclusions

I only spoke about a few of the things from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in this post in part because I ended up having more to say about them than I’d expected – indeed, I had to cut and compress whole themes from my plan. However, another reason I did not speak about many other of the pieces is because, quite frankly, they didn’t leave a great impression on me. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was, in its author’s words, a “little stop-gap book”, and as a result the quality is very uneven. At times, Musil’s language is fantastic and inventive, while at others it falls victim to modernist overindulgence.

I also think that the ideas of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author are not all equally interesting either. Perhaps I am just jaded, having read more than my fair share of modernist literature, but a lot of Musil’s moaning about cultural and linguistic decline and related matters, however relevant his complaints remain in our own day, just strikes me as picking on easy targets. The fact remains that identifying problems is the first step towards solving them – not the only one. I got the impression that Musil can’t quite pick a side between being art-for-art’s-sake or being engaged with the world, and it hurts these pieces at times.

Overall, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author suffers from much the same problems that Alfred Döblin’s Murder of a Buttercup did – it’s sometimes intellectually satisfying, but it forgets to touch the heart. At its best, Musil seems a worthy precursor to Borges. But unfortunately that isn’t the case often enough. I can only hope that his other works will be more consistent.