Robert Musil Criticism
Robert Musil's literary oeuvre is a sophisticated interplay of psychological insight, philosophical inquiry, and narrative innovation, deeply shaped by his formative experiences and diverse academic background. His time in military academies and studies in engineering, philosophy, and psychology infused his writing with a unique perspective that resonates throughout his novels and novellas. His first novel, Young Törless, draws heavily from his own schooling experiences, probing the psychology of adolescence and foreshadowing the complex themes he would later explore. D.J. Enright, in The Stupendous Cannot Be Easy: On Robert Musil, notes how Musil's work bears the hallmarks of literary impressionism and stream of consciousness, akin to the styles of Joyce and Stein.
Musil's critical engagement with philosophical giants such as Friedrich Nietzsche is apparent throughout his work, particularly in how he interrogates notions of the self and consciousness. His collections Unions and Three Women experiment with narrative forms that prioritize internal character unions over interpersonal dynamics. Lowell Bangerter's analysis in his essay highlights this intellectual influence, showcasing Musil's ability to delve into complex psychological terrains.
Musil's novella The Lady from Portugal, interpreted by Frederick G. Peters via a psychoanalytic lens in his essay, exemplifies the tension between rationality and emotion, a recurrent theme in Musil's work. This exploration of identity crises, power, and domination is further expounded by Todd Kontje and Michael W. Jennings in their respective critiques, underscoring the psychological depth and ambiguity that define Musil's characters and align him with the modernist tradition.
In The Man without Qualities, Musil's juxtaposition of rationality and mysticism reaches its zenith, with the central relationship between Ulrich and his sister Agathe reflecting the challenges of modern existential choices. Anthony Heilbut's The Man with Extraordinary Qualities provides a lens into this thematic exploration. Despite the novel's unfinished state, it remains a testament to Musil's literary evolution, with Frank Kermode highlighting the intrinsic value of Musil's novellas for their structural and phenomenological richness in his essay.
Though Musil faced poverty and limited recognition during his life, his posthumous influence is significant, as George Steiner discusses in The Unfinished. His work continues to challenge and inspire, inviting readers and scholars to engage deeply with the questions he poses about humanity and modernity. Musil's contributions to literature, with their introspective portrayal of the human psyche and modernist narrative experimentation, ensure his place as a pivotal figure in European literature.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Musil, Robert (Short Story Criticism)
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Unions (1911)
(summary)
In the following excerpt, he discusses Musil's 'expressionistic' narrative technique in Unions, finding it more successful in The Completion of Love than in The Temptation of Silent Veronica. The two stories in Unions present two attitudes toward love between the sexes, the yea-saying and the nay-saying. These works might best be characterized as attitude studies rather than character studies.
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A preface to Five Women
(summary)
Kermode is an English critic who combines modern critical methods with traditional scholarship. In his discussions of modern literature Kermode has embraced many of the concepts of structuralism and phenomenology. He characterizes all human knowledge as affected by the perceptual and emotional limitations of human consciousness. Because perceptions of life and the world change, so do human knowledge and the meaning attached to things and events. Thus, Kermode maintains, a work of art has no single fixed meaning, but a multiplicity of possible interpretations. In the following excerpt, he discusses the ambiguities of plot, character, and description in Musil's novellas, claiming that they reflect the ambiguities of human reality.
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An Inquiry into the Psychological Condition of the Narrator in Musil's Tonka
(summary)
In the following essay, Sjögren contends that the nameless narrator of Musil's Tonka exhibits the symptoms of schizophrenia.
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Three Mysterious Women: Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, Tonka
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Peters interprets The Lady from Portugal from a psychoanalytic perspective.
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Myth and Fairy Tale in Robert Musil's Grigia
(summary)
In the following essay, Paulson discusses the mythological elements of Musil's Grigia.
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Mystical Selfhood, Self-Delusion, Self-Dissolution: Ethical and Narrative Experimentation in Robert Musil's Grigia
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Jennings argues that Homo's search for a unified identity in Grigia is undermined by his self-delusion.
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Motivating Silence: The Recreation of the 'Eternal Feminine' in Robert Musil's Tonka
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Kontje analyzes the elements of power and domination in the relationship between the unnamed narrator and the eponymous character in Musil's Tonka.
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Looking Inside: Unions
(summary)
In the following excerpt, he argues that the 'unions' referred to in the title of Unions are ones that take place within the protagonists rather than between individuals.
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Images of Woman in Musil's Tonka: Mystical Encounters and Borderlines between Self and Other
(summary)
In the following excerpt focusing on Tonka, Mabee discusses the women in Musil's novellas, arguing that their association with nature and imagination makes them catalysts for illumination and mirrors to the male protagonists' fragmented selves in the post-enlightenment world with its emphasis on scientific formulation.
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Unions (1911)
(summary)
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Musil, Robert (Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)
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The Stupendous Cannot Be Easy: On Robert Musil
(summary)
In the following essay, Enright considers Musil's achievement as both a thinker and a fiction writer.
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The Man with Extraordinary Qualities
(summary)
In the following review, Heilbut outlines Musil's main characteristics as a writer and thinker as evidenced in the essays and fiction collected in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.
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Death and the Dichter
(summary)
In the following review, Bayley discusses two later translations of works by Musil.
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Experimental Utopias: The Man without Qualities
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Bangerter outlines the principal themes of The Man without Qualities. All of Musil's other works can be interpreted as preliminary studies to his monumental unfinished novel The Man without Qualities, exploring man's relationship to the world and the possibilities for realizing greater fulfillment within the context of life's experience.
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Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Rogowski surveys the body of critical writings on The Man without Qualities. Scholars of Germanistik seem to like books reputed to be difficult. Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften surely must rank among the books most written about in the field of literature in the German language. Ever since its republication under the editorship of Adolf Frisé in 1952, there has been a steady and incessant stream of articles, essays, and monographs on Musil's unfinished magnum opus from all sorts of different angles and perspectives. Given the sheer volume of criticism—now numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands, of works—it is surprising that there are few close readings of the novel that investigate its form or describe the nature of its language in detailed analysis. On the one hand, this probably has to do with the scope of the novel, which makes comprehensive analysis difficult. On the other hand, it is understandable that most critics seem eager to aim for a kind of master reading of the text rather than attempting to account for specific stylistic or poetic phenomena.
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The Unfinished
(summary)
In the following essay, Steiner discusses The Man without Qualities in the context of modern world literature and provides a close examination of the new Wilkins-Pike translation of this work.
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The Stupendous Cannot Be Easy: On Robert Musil
(summary)
- Further Reading