A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" as a Critical-Utopian Project by Stijn de Cauwer

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" as a Critical-Utopian Project by Stijn de Cauwer Malcolm Spencer Stijn de Cauwer, A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" as a Critical-Utopian Project. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014. 278 pp. Writing a critical study of Musil's magnum opus is a formidable challenge. It involves thinking and feeling your way into the vast, unfinished text with all its variants, now accessible digitally. It demands familiarity with the ever-increasing secondary literature. Perhaps the greatest challenge is the need to balance a detailed examination of selected parts of the text with a wide-ranging awareness of all of the aspects of modernity that concerned Musil. Musil was, in Allen Thiher's words, "a writer's writer," a man who drew on deep knowledge of science, psychology, philosophy, and literature and who believed that only a work that combined all of those ways of understanding the world could do justice to the complexity of modernity. Stijn de Cauwer faces up to this challenge in this work. It is based on a PhD dissertation on Musil written at the University of Utrecht that has been expanded through his current work in the Literature and Cultural Studies Department of the University of Leuven. De Cauwer's Flemish/Dutch background is a valuable resource for Musil studies, as he is both sensitive to questions of cultural and national identity and familiar with areas of French and Dutch thought in a way that Musil scholars in Germany or the US might not be. De Cauwer's work is written primarily from a cultural studies perspective, and the scope of his book (which includes digressions on Bergson, Georges [End Page 134] Canguilhem, and Hans Achterhuis) is appropriately wide for a monograph on Musil. In the introduction, De Cauwer looks at Musil as a cultural theorist and stresses the open-ended and experimental nature of his work. He refers to a key chapter in the novel (chapter 100 of Book 1) in which General Stumm von Bordwehr enters the Hofb ibliothek in search of "ein Buch über die Verwirklichung des Wichtigsten" but discovers that among the 3.5 million books there, no such volume exists: In modernity, there is vast expansion of specialized knowledge, but a synthesis of the whole is no longer possible. The collapse of the old order has, however, left a void in the hearts of modern men, and De Cauwer concludes that "For Musil, the incapacity to face modern life is first and foremost a moral problem" (26). Der Mann ohne Eigenschaft en is an avant-garde fictional experiment that sets out to explore new ethical directions, bett er ways of living in the modern age. After this, there are three quite lengthy main chapters in De Cauwer's book. The first, "Musil's Critique of Moral and Ideological Rigidity," focuses on Musil's att ack on calcified moral concepts, which De Cauwer rightly sees as originating in the ideas of Musil's spiritual guide, Nietzsche. Within this "hollowed-out old moral order," the inhabitants of Kakania, unable to come to terms with the complexities of the present, turn to the rigid ideologies of state, nation, and race. There is perhaps not much new critical material here—De Cauwer refers often to the work on Musil by Stefan Jonsson (2000) and Patrizia McBride (2006)—but there are particular insights that illuminate Musil's thinking, for instance, his reminder (107) that Musil was educated in the sciences at a time when the sciences themselves were in crisis and could no longer offer certainty. In the second chapter, De Cauwer examines the "critical-utopian" aspects of Musil's novel. He refers to "the unique complexity and strength of [the] novel" (117), and the strongest parts of this chapter are those that reject the views of earlier critics, particularly Lukács and later Reich-Ranicki, for whom Musil was a "graphomaniac," a man who endlessly explored pseudo-possibilities without direction. Instead, De Cauwer emphasizes that earlier critics speculated too much on what the end of the novel might have been. He argues instead that "the novel...