The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity by Patrizia C. McBride

Abstract

286 Reviews politics ofmusic and itsresounding manifestations inhis works. Moreover, this study illustrates the opportunities and pitfalls, in creative and structural terms, that are connected with awriter's inspiration thatcomes fromother sources than theword. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON RUDIGER G6RNER The Void ofEthics: Robert Musil and theExperience ofModernity. By PATRIZIAC. McBRIDE. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2006. Xi+231 pp. $75.95. ISBN 978-o-8IOI-2Io8-9. In this lucid study of one of thegiants of twentieth-century fiction,Patrizia McBride proposes thatRobert Musil should be read throughout his work as an explorer of the conditions ofpossibility of ethics and that, within the 'Kantian horizon' she proposes, thisview of Musil's quest can lead to a coherent interpretation ofhis unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Since Musil's name is usually coupled with those of Nietzsche orMach, McBride has thrown down a gauntlet for readers to takeup when they trytomake sense of a novel inwhich thehero, amathematician on holiday from life, trieshimself tomake sense of life in theAustro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of World War I. In invoking theKant of theThird Critique, McBride wants to freeus fromany narrow sense of the contexts inwhich Musil's work can be interpreted, and I think thatmost readers will find,whether theyaccept her argument about Kant or not, that in the end she has proposed an extremely satisfyingway of tying together the disparate parts ofDer Mann ohneEigenschaften. The 'void of ethics' is the central experience of thisnovel, for in Musil's view this void is the central condition ofmodernity: in a time of utter contingency, all fixed reference-points are gone, and one must confront one's dream of theplenitude of an ongoing ethical state as utopia, or thevoid.With little reference toKant at the end of her book, McBride argues that in the first part of thenovel thehero tries to construct his life as a utopia analogous to literature.Upon facing his failure, he turns in the second part to the construction of a paradise with his estranged sister, one inwhich feeling and thinking are seamlessly joined. McBride argues convincingly that thisun finishedpart was also to result in failure.Hence thenovel can be interpreted as a cri tique of an individualist and of a romantic attempt to findsome ethical utopian state the 'other condition' Musil alludes to from early in his life.And the novel is a self referentialdemonstration both ofwhat the ethical statemight be and why itcan't be. Somewhat like Wittgenstein using metaphysics to reach the summit of silence at the end of the Tractatus, McBride uses Kant as scaffolding to reach her final inter pretation. Along theway she also provides some judicious analysis ofMusil's other works, especially his firstnovel Die Verwirrungen des Z6glings TorleJ3,and several of Musil's key essays, which point up theway inwhich Musil engaged in a constant essayistic reflectionupon the relations of art, ethics, and politics. Here McBride finds Musil working towards an understanding of literature as thebridge between ordinary reality and that realm of ethics that eludes conceptual understanding. Her use of the Third Critique offersuseful analogies, especially for theproblems of conceptualizing and communicating the unique experience of the ethical. A question that now re mains tobe asked is:why didMusil think thatethicsmust be a permanent condition? McBride's study is a good beginning towards an answer. UNIVERSITY OFMISSOURI ALLEN THIHER ...