Estrada, Jorge. Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction.

Abstract

Because affinities between Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) have long been noted, a book-length study delineating their connections and divergences is to be welcomed. Estrada’s book poses significant difficulties for Anglophone Sterne scholars, however. Written in English from within a German academic context, his highly abstract prose is intermittently unidiomatic (using “orientate” instead of “orient” as a verb, for example), which gives a deracinated and artificial flavor to many sentences. Extensive quotations of Musil, Gadamer, Habermas, among others, exclusively in German, while appropriate for multilingual European contexts, likely will create difficulties for all but the most proficient English readers of German. Perhaps relatedly, the 300-page book’s engagement with English-language Sterne criticism is rather thin. Long-canonical works by Booth, Cash, Traugott, Moglen, Lamb, and New are cited, as are The Winged Skull collection and the notes to the Florida edition, but little of the past thirty years of Anglophone Sterne scholarship appears to inform the argument.The general absence of dialogue with recent Sterne scholarship is consistent with Estrada’s study being much more an exercise in philosophical extrapolation than a contribution to literary criticism. This focus is evident from the one-page index, which provides entries for abstract philosophical concepts (“agency,” “causality,” “perception,” “transcendental”), but nothing else. Rather than offering an integrated reading of either novel, Estrada identifies passages that pose philosophical problems whose consequences or conundrums are then elaborated. Fragments or threads of the novels are treated as illustrating or exemplifying various theoretical approaches to these problems. Such a philosophical approach to these intellectually sophisticated novels is certainly not illegitimate, but requires awareness that when literary art is considered as a vehicle for philosophical exploration more than the sketching of counterfactual or hyperbolic thought experiments is involved. Otherwise, the relation of literary modes of expression and implication to what is being argued gets lost, and the works’ charms as art, as well as the pleasures and illuminations of sequential reading (crucial to narratives’ hold on attention and imagination), recede into obscurity.The core of Estrada’s argument is that both Sterne and Musil pose an irresolvable epistemological and moral problem: to give an account of one’s actions and life, one must deploy a generalizing conceptual vocabulary but doing so necessarily effaces idiosyncratic individual “experience” in favor of a “story” in which intelligibility comes at the expense of truth and thus justice: “In both Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Tristram Shandy, actions are depicted as an inadequate basis upon which to construct a moral judgment. The main objection hinges on the role conferred to the factual by Tristram’s narrative program and by the programmatic function of the Eigenschaftslosigkeit [lack of qualities or attributes] in Musil’s novel. . . . By means of a narrative program, both novels implicitly declare that the emplotment presented by them . . . represents only a manifestation or variation brought about by modeling, selecting and discarding ingredients from a subject, a Stoff that nourishes the stories.” Thus, presenting any one narrative imposes a falsifying conceptual gird on actions that prejudices their interpretation in ways that illicitly privilege one “program” over an open-ended number of other possibilities. As a consequence, “qualities” are attributed to subjects as “properties” that they are presumed to “own” [eigen]. But what is proper to or true of a given person, eigenlich for him or her, is what constitutes a person’s Eigenheit (oddity, peculiarity) and Eigenart (singularity)—that is, precisely the nuances and ambiguities of experienced life that conceptualizing abstraction blurs and (unjustly) flattens out.This is indeed a productive starting point for placing the two novels in dialogue with one another. However, it needs to be acknowledged that the basic epistemological/moral conundrum and its relation to the suspicion that any narrative program privileges one perspective unjustly at the expense of others no less valid were already familiar themes in German literature by the turn of the nineteenth century. They inform the influence of Sterne on Jean Paul, animate Novalis’s disaffection with the novel as a genre, and underlie Friedrich Schlegel’s formulation of Romantic irony (made the structuring principle of his 1799 novel Lucinde). Hegel famously attacks Schlegel’s celebration of limitless irony on moral grounds—to evade one’s “ownership” of defining qualities through an “infinite” irony that unravels any and all determinate identity is, Hegel claims, to indulge in sophistic shirking of responsibility for one’s own actions. Arguably, Sterne depicts Tristram playing at such shirking, which is part of Sterne’s general play with these philosophical impasses, which he engages in by assuming the persona of Tristram.Indeed, Estrada argues that in Tristram’s discourse “unity depends on the undeniable assumption that the uttered words of an individual are fully appropriated by him and confirm his autonomy. But a closer look into the narrative intertwinement reveals a narration barely kept together, in which a conflict between plot and character construction enacts . . . a struggle with rationality.” A literary work, however, is not a philosophical treatise. The point of literary art is not to resolve tensions between intelligibility and experience, but rather to depict a manner of living with and through their experienced incommensurability. The demand for rational consistency may animate Musil’s protagonist, Ulrich, in ways that induce him to aspire to a manner of living in which he does not allow himself to be “owned,” or to see others as being “owned,” by “qualities.” The viability of such an enterprise, and the real-life costs of pursuing it, already the subject of much reflection in German and European literature and philosophy (Estrada rightly notes Kierkegaard), may be central to Musil’s novel (and hence to its post-WWI modernist reckoning with German Romanticism’s Sternean themes).But it is important to note that Tristram, unlike Ulrich, only plays with the aspiration for rational consistency, for to Tristram (and to Sterne behind him) the idea that an integrated and purified rationality could be one’s property, could be something one might “own” and so live out, is at once comically absurd and impious. For Tristram, in real life as we undergo and bear with it (if we are lucky), sentiment arrests rationality’s drift into abstract configurations of putative coherence, and the gravitational pull of the ethical checks theorized shirking of responsibility, even as that pull frustrates the self’s desire to identify its own constructions with what is borne home to it as true. While something of this need for sentiment and ethics to supplement rationality’s shortfall comes into view in Estrada’s concluding section on Sterne, his book’s treatment of both novels primarily as storage sites where one may find bundles of thought experiments means that reading his study often feels like one is reading an anti-narrative nouveau roman: rather than going somewhere, one circles repeatedly around the same circuit of immobile, geometrically ordered, checkmated spaces.The book’s conclusion indicates that we have not moved from its beginning. Arguing that Tristram’s narrative technique exemplifies Deleuze’s theory of repetition, Estrada argues, “The hobbyhorsical variations provide a costume for any occasion, any object, or any thought, and they draw their productive energy from indeterminateness.” Ultimately, it would appear, epistemology swallows up both experiencing ethics and character construction, so that the impossibility of absolute certainty is allowed to block possibilities of weighing better or worse understanding and action. This makes skepticism an empty form, a black hole into which disappears all the variegated substance of lived experience and literary art’s grappling with it: “[T]ristram fiddles with silence and misunderstandings, and exploits the possibilities of the aposiopesis, which undermines the postulate of the world’s handles even before Walter can put his ideas into words.” Such a Tristram “without qualities,” however, has long been encountered in criticism—albeit without reference to a number of major German scholars, such as Hans Blumenberg and Walter Haug, who should be better known in the Anglophone academy, and whom Estrada, in a series of excursions, brings to our attention.