“Die portugiesin” zur frage der literarischen tradition bei robert musil

Abstract

The intertextual relations between Musil's prose and the literary tradition have remained largely unexplored. In part this is due to the fact that Musil subjected his material to a rigorous process of intellectual and stylistic assimilation; thus, much of the “foreignness” of the material which Musil incorporated into his texts is lost. Yet in the case of his historical novella “Die Portugiesin”, this process of textual assimilation is somewhat less complete; the story's motivic and thematic ingredients point to the late nineteenth century, especially to Keller's Sinngedicht and to dramas by Maeterlinck and Beer-Hofmann. The article explores some of these relationships, focussing on the topic of the enigmatic woman which had been so dear to the fin-de-siecle. Musil adopts this topic and radicalizes it, by moving it into the realm of his own modernist paradigm: the irreversible loss of perceptual and intellectual certainty.