Robert Musil's Kinetic Gestures

Abstract

This study of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities explores the relationship between poetic order and disorder. At the intersection of Musil scholarship and science studies, it has become customary to suggest an asymmetrical relationship in which the novel's formal development, in a direct correlation with the notion of entropy from physics, works unilaterally toward disintegration, which also explains the novel's unfinishedness. Rejecting this view, the present study claims that Musil's engagement of form as activity needs to be conceived in terms of a structural interdependence between randomizing and organizing effects of “kinetic energy,” producing disintegration and integration of form alike. This focus generates a novel method of investigation that singles out kinetic activity as a distinctive layer of poetic performance, thus establishing movement as an object of inquiry in its own right. Specifically, the study has the following aims: (1) To identify particular recurrent kinetic gestures or formulas that reign over the poetic process. Since they appear independent of a particular medium, one and the same gesture may extend across poetic parameters as varied as description, plot, imagery, syntactic structure, phonetics, or rhythm. (2) To develop the structural features through which such gestures generate and stabilize order. Neither representational nor abstract, the gestures form singular articulations that do not depict the things of the world but display their kinetic substrate; they surpass regular actuality by performing an enhanced, condensed, and intensified actuality. (3) To relate order and disorder not as mutually exclusive but as strictly interdependent tendencies within the overall economy of the novel's formal cohesiveness—a “metabolism” of poetic “entropy” and “negentropy.” In its conclusion, the study offers a suggestion as to why it is that Musil's novel remained unfinished: Precisely in its structural inconclusiveness, it achieves an overall stability of its form.