[In the following excerpt, Rogowski surveys the body of critical writings on The Man without Qualities.]

Serious study of Musil's complex and multifaceted work requires a considerable investment of time and intellectual energy on the part of the reader. To many scholars Musil's grand novel appears to present a kind of athletic challenge to display one's intellectual mastery. It is not surprising, then, that the novel is such a popular object for doctoral dissertations, leading to a proliferation of book-length studies that are as well-meaning as they are redundant: a limited number of topics is addressed time and again, with "new" methodologies frequently offering reworkings of familiar points rather than genuine contributions that open new vistas. The pressures of the academic world dictate that minute differences in accentuation be presented as radically new results, encouraging a tendency to subsume the complexity of Musil's text under a general overriding concept.

In the Cold War climate of the 1950s, the tendency of mainstream Germanistik was to downplay the political implications of Musil's art. A particularly telling example is the work of Hermann Pongs. In the second edition of his study on the modern novel (1956), Pongs added a discussion of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to supplement a work he had undertaken in 1952 in response to what he called "the current existential distress of the Germans" (reprint 1963, 7). Pongs emulates notions derived from Freudian psychoanalysis to describe Musil's protagonist, Ulrich, as a prime representative of the modern existential condition of ambivalence, a neurotic condition that is as acute, if not more so, after the Second World War as it was in Musil's time. While acknowledging Musil's predominantly critical attitude toward the sociohistorical situation depicted in the novel, Pongs renders this attitude essentially apolitical by presenting Musil's work as the diagnosis of a general "disease of the time" (326). In this fashion, he carefully avoids addressing the causal and functional background of the situation. Pongs ascribes to Musil a striving for Einfaltp=m-unity and simplicity—that would resolve the polarizations and dichotomies that characterize the predicament of modernity (13). At certain moments in Pongs's writing there emerges a peculiar rhetoric that appears to belie the ostensible concern with existential crisis and mysticism: at one point, for instance, Pongs professes his exasperation with Musil's negative portrayal of the Habsburg military, although, Pongs exclaims, the admirable discipline of the Habsburg army had been the one element that provided cohesion in a society plagued by ethnic tensions, "truly a defective eastern bullwark (Ostwalt) of Europe" (329). Similarly, Pongs's rhetoric of distrust of "the whole range of the Eastern peoples" ("die ganze Skala der Ostvölker," 329), presumably representing force of destruction and contamination, curiously harks back to those twelve years in the history of the German speaking countries that some representatives of Germanistik were all too eager to forget.

Sometimes the ideological or professional bias of a critic created oddly skewed readings of Musil's novel. Alfred Focke, for instance, writing from his perspective as a Jesuit theologian, eagerly follows ideas proposed by Gerhard Müller in his 1958 Vienna dissertation, hailing Musil's magnum opus as a philosophical and religious myth about the "fundamentally tragic status of human nature as such" (Focke 1957/58, 30). Such lofty ruminations culminate in the thesis that Musil's protagonist Ulrich represents modern man's alienation from God. Ulrich, Focke contends, fails to achieve a metaphysical trust in his maker, remaining unable to take the redeeming "leap into faith" (33). On a more mundane note, Gerhard Irle (1965) places Musil in the context of works by Kafka, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf that address the question of sanity in the modern context. Musil's portrayal of individual psychoses in the characters Clarisse and Moosbrugger, Irle proposes, turns the novel into a prime specimen of what Irle defines as a new subgenre, the "psychiatric novel" (148). Such reductive readings are by no means atypical during the 1950s and 1960s, the first two decades of academic Musil criticism.

There were, however, also serious efforts to provide a solid basis for the study of Musil's work. One of the first contributions to a more focused stylistic analysis came from Beda Allemann, whose influential monograph Irons und Dichtung (1956) culminates in a lengthy discussion of Musil's use of irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Allemann attempts to define irony as a selfconscious literary device that all but places literature in a sphere remote from the world of contingencies. His central metaphor is that of a Spielraum (4), a realm of poetic activity opened up by the self-canceling effects of ironic configurations. Allemann's notion of irony is indebted to German early Romanticism (particularly as typified by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel) and is based in large part upon Martin Heidegger's concept of literature as Dichtung, a sphere of human activity that transcends everyday concerns. To Allemann, irony is a literary mode that contributes to the erosion of existential certainties by calling into question preestablished thought patterns. The comprehensive loss of certainties is one of the key features of the modern predicament. Musil's grand novel fragment serves Allemann as an ideal illustration of the connection between the experience of modernity thus defined and the essentially ironic nature of modern Dichtung. Allemann gives a series of examples from Musil's novel to describe his ironic style as "conciliatory" (173); Musil gently criticizes the world he describes, yet he never establishes a fixed vantage point from which to lay claim to a greater degree of authority. Each issue discussed or character portrayed is conceded a certain validity. Moreover, Musil's use of irony extends to his own poetic endeavor. Allemann argues that the irony in Musil's novel lies not so much in the manner in which particular statements are formulated but in the nature of the overall configurations, such as the relationships between the characters, which establish a network of finely tuned gradations in differences and correspondences.

Both Allemann's approach and his conclusions are highly questionable: he associates irony with the wistful self-awareness of a culture in its late phase, employing notions such as Spätheit (lateness) and Spätzeit (late phase), inspired by Martin Heidegger. From this Heideggerian perspective, history—in the sense of concrete material existence as reflected in the novel—evaporates and gives way to lofty notions of the privileged position of Musil as the wise poet-philosopher. Allemann in effect turns Musil into a modern version of the benign sage, very much in the manner of the public image of the late Theodor Fontane prevalent in West Germany in the 1950s. In his pronouncedly apolitical stance, Allemann is representative of a general tendency within Western Germanistik in the Adenauer era. In their insistence on a perspective that supposedly transcended politics (a stance that tended to amount to a general disavowal of the importance of politics altogether), literary critics directly mirrored the overall cli-mate of restoration and conservatism.

Allemann's theses on irony spawned a debate in Musil criticism that in many ways continues to this day. Walter H. Sokel (1960/61) was among the first to respond publicly, noting that Musil's irony is far removed from the kind of all-encompassing conciliatory attitude Allemann ascribes to Musil. Sokel emphasizes Musil's critical attitude toward any kind of rash and superficial attempts at overcoming the existential, cultural, and political crisis depicted in his novel. Musil's irony, Sokel proposes, borders on satire whenever he unmasks and debunks efforts to combat the experience of fragmentation by way of a "feigned totality" (211).

It is easy to see why a younger generation immediately took issue with Allemann in social and political terms. Arntzen's 1956 dissertation on satire in Musil's work, published in book form in 1960, was written very much as a response to Allemann and as a rebuttal. Against Allemann's concept of irony as a literary mode transcending particular epochs and genres, Arntzen offers the concept of satire, stressing the element of hard-edged social criticism in Musil's novel. To Arntzen, Musil's main aim is an analysis of a culture in crisis, an investigation of the numerous factors that led to the collapse of civilization in central Europe. Arntzen is right in stressing that the critical impetus of Musil's project should not be overlooked. Yet his own critical stance, despite its sometimes brilliant rhetoric, lacks political concreteness: the key concept that runs through Arntzen's study is that of Musil's novel as a diagnosis of an unspecified societal Schizophrénie. The metaphor, taken from the sphere of psychotherapy, suggests that what Musil describes is a kind of organic illness devoid of concrete historical, political, economic, and ideological causes. Critics have since noted that Allemann's and Arntzen's approaches are not as dissimilar as Arntzen implies, turning much of Arntzen's polemic into a dispute over terminology (Karthaus 1965b, 466; Huber 1982, 99). Still, with his focus on Gattungsgeschichte (historical genre studies) and his insistence on what in the widest sense is a political reading of Musil, Arntzen provided useful impulses to Musil scholarship. Alongside a broad discussion of the nature and history of satirical writing, Arntzen presents a wide variety of examples based on close readings of passages from Musil's book. For this reason alone Arntzen's highly readable book remains one of the most significant contributions to Musil scholarship.

More limited in scope but just as fruitful is Albrecht Schöne's discussion of Musil's use of the subjunctive mood. Originally Schöne's inaugural lecture upon assuming a professorship at the University of Göttingen, it was published as an article in 1961. The essay has since been reprinted several times and ranks as one of the most impressive contributions to a stylistic analysis of Musil's work. In his eloquent and brilliant presentation, Schöne explores the significance of the subjunctive mode in Musil's novel, showing how aspects of grammar and style relate to overriding thematic concerns. He distinguishes the function and significance of the various types of subjunctive (irrealis, potentialis, and so on), all of which correspond to particular elements of Musil's overall poetics, such as his interest in experimentation or his focus on a Utopian perspective. Such characteristics lead Schöne to place Musil and his work firmly in the tradition of the European Enlightenment. In his drafts and manuscripts, Musil sometimes experimented with putting different sets of characters in the same situation. Such variants, Schöne argues, possess the same degree of validity, since Musil's experimental attitude allows for—in fact, stresses—the coexistence of a variety of possibilities. Schöne does not take sides in the dispute over the continuation of Musil's unfinished novel: in his reading, the fragmentary and open-ended form of the book becomes a corollary of Experimentier gesinnung, the experimental attitude of Musil the trained scientist, from which springs the novelist's pen-chant for the subjunctive mood (reprint 1975, 304). Unfortunately, the scope of Schöne's essay does not allow him to develop his ideas at greater length. Yet the discussion of what superficially may appear to be minor grammatical issues yields a wide range of results of interest not only to the Musil scholar but to anyone concerned with the history of modern German prose.

Werner Hoffmeister's Studien zur erlebten Rede bei Thomas Mann und Robert Musil of 1965, based on his 1962 Brown University dissertation, is similar in approach. Like Schöne, Hoffmeister focuses on a particular stylistic phenomenon from which he draws general conclusions about the nature of Musil's art. This method, which Hoffmeister calls "inductive" and "empirical" (8), is enhanced here by an essentially comparative perspective. Musil employs erlebte Rede, the narrative technique known in English as free indirect discourse, with particular frequency. Hoffmeister places Musil's use of this stylistic device in the context of an overall tendency in modern literature toward an "interiorization of narration" (160), in which the focus shifts from the depiction of an outside reality to an observation of the operations of individual consciousness. Hoffmeister's book anticipates ideas that were later to be more fully explored in structuralist theories of narrative, such as Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds (1978), a monograph on modes of representing consciousness in prose fiction, which includes insightful comments on Musil's narrative technique.

Perhaps the most comprehensive thematic interpretation of Musil's novel to emerge from the first phase of Musil criticism is that of Wolfdietrich Rasch (1963). Under eight headings he addresses some of the crucial thematic and formal aspects that continue to occupy Musil scholarship to this day, such as the dissolution of linear narrative, the issue of utopianism, the tension between rationality and mysticism, the question of irony, and the relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. Rasch synthesizes much of the previous scholarship, including Wilfried Berghan's 1956 Bonn dissertation on essayistic narration, and stresses the consistency of Musil's overall design in his discussion of the tricky questions about the envisaged continuation of the unfinished novel. Always mindful of the author's professed intention, Rasch manages to combine an affirmative stance with a perspective critical of the limitations and internal contradictions of Musil's narrative project.

The critical works of Allemann, Arntzen, Schöne, Hoffmeister, and Rasch remain exemplary achievements in Musil studies, regardless of the changes in interests, methods, and theoretical paradigms that Germanistik has undergone in the last thirty-odd years. They stand out in the incipient phase of Musil scholarship, when much energy was absorbed by the notorious dispute over the reliability of Frisé's edition and the need for a "definitive" version of the text, accompanied by innumerable essayistic reflections and appreciations of Musil and his work.

The 1960s brought a gradual reorientation in Musil studies toward Geistesgeschichte in the study of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, as scholars began to relate Musil's ideas to larger intellectual traditions or systematically explore Musil's intellectual background. Ulrich Karthaus, in his examination of the connection between the temporal structures of Musil's novel and the andere Zustand (1965 a), represents the former approach. He employs notions derived from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Heidegger's Being and Time to examine Musil's treatment of time. The first two parts of the novel, he contends, are characterized by a suspension of linear time. Generally, the date and duration of fictional events cannot be easily identified. Instead, time appears as a polydimensional "playing field of poetic time" (156), filtered through the subjective experience of Musil's characters. This process allows a second kind of reality to shine through that eludes rationality. Part three, however, reasserts time as a chronological sequence of occurrences, high-lighting the problem under-lying Ulrich and Agathe's quest for the andere Zustand and showing their efforts to lend duration to a different mode of experience to be irresolvable. The only way for Ulrich and Agathe to transcend the contingencies of time, Karthaus maintains, would be to take recourse to the faith of an established religious tradition. Without recourse to religious dogma, their experiment is doomed to failure. To Karthaus, it is a sign of Musil's greatness and intellectual integrity that he refused to provide a fictional solution to a conflict that cannot be resolved in material reality. Karthaus thus stands in clear and diametrical opposition to the mystical tendencies of Kaiser and Wilkins (1962), who had claimed that Musil intended a kind of apotheosis of Ulrich and Agathe's spiritual union. At the same time, Karthaus's approach raises methodological problems concerning the applicability of philosophical theorems to an analysis of a literary work. Karthaus does not seem entirely to escape the pressure of systematization, the temptation to fit Musil's novel into a preconceived philosophical model.

Dieter Kühn (1965) is more attentive to the peculiar qualities of Musil's prose in his examination of Musil's characteristic stylistic devices of analogy and variation against the backdrop of some of the traditions that had a formative influence upon his intellectual outlook. To this end, Kühn correlates Musil's characters with the sources of their internal world. With Ulrich, for instance, it is primarily Ernst Mach's empiriocriticism; Nietzsche provides much of the substance that fuels the conflicts between Walter and Clarisse; and the watered down Lebensphilosophie of turn-of-the-century Swedish educational reformer Ellen Key is satirized in Diotima. Of particular interest is Kühn's discussion of the affinity between Gottfried von Strassburg and Musil's treatment of the relationship of Ulrich and Agathe, an issue later explored in more depth by Wolfgang Freese (1972). Kühn stresses the connections between Ulrich and the other characters, who all serve as foils of Musil's protagonist. Kühn's book stands out from other dissertations of the period in its focus, conciseness, and overall readability.

The most comprehensive and systematic attempt to place Musil's novel in the context of German intellectual history was undertaken by Renate von Hey debrand in her 1962 Münster dissertation, published in expanded form as a book in 1966. Here von Heydebrand provides a comprehensive overview of the textual sources that make up Ulrich's intellectual world. Though most of the sources and their authors had been known for a while, nobody had previously taken the trouble of actually identifying and analyzing specific references to works and ideas. Combining Geistesgeschichte with basic factual research, von Heydebrand assembles an impressive range of references to philosophical and literary works, showing that Musil transformed and assimilated a wide variety of sources. At the basis of Musil's concepts and images stand past thinkers like Nietzsche, Emerson, and Mach alongside divergent contemporary influences such as Gestalt theory, the experimental psychology of Ernst Kretschmer, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's anthropology, the sociophilosophical theories of Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, and the mystical ideas of such diverse writers as Maurice Maeterlinck, Ludwig Klages, and Martin Buber. With an abundance of material, von Heydebrand convincingly illustrates a tendency in Musil toward what she calls an "escape into quotation" (96): Musil frequently resorts to citing pronouncements from predecessors whenever his own efforts at expressing something and at transcending the limitations of language threaten to fail. Because of this practice, his novel to a large extent amounts to a collage of citations. Unfortunately, von Heydebrand devotes little attention to the manner in which the material is integrated, the concept of intertextuality and a methodology for analyzing it systematically having not yet been developed when she wrote her study. Still, her study is much more than a positivistic exercise in identifying literary and philosophical interconnections. Rather, it places scholarship on the intellectual background of Musil's novel on a firm footing. To this day, von Heydebrand's book remains one of the most important contributions to the study of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

During the late 1960s several studies appeared that complement the geistesgeschichtlich approach in aiming to explore in greater detail some of the standard poetological issues raised in the preceding one and a half decades. One such analysis is that of Peter Nusser (1967), who attempts to reconstruct Musil's implicit theory of the novel by way of correlating the author's critical utterances from essays, journal entries, and letters with the novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Nusser attempts to describe the formal aspects of the novel, such as the dissolution of linear narrative and the way in which events are not described directly but refracted through a perceiving consciousness. Perhaps not too surprisingly, Nusser's essentially cumulative method yields the expected conclusion—familiar at least since Berghahn's 1956 dissertation—that the essayistic writing style reflects Musil's "possibilitarian attitude" (Möglichkeitsges inn ung).

Jörg Kühne's study on Musil's figurative language (1968) is more fruitful. Kühne shows what distinguishes Musil's use of the Gleichnisp=m-a stylistic device that encompasses a wide variety of figurative modes of expression such as the simile, the metaphor, or even the extended parable—from that of other authors: a Musilian Gleichnis links two distinct notional spheres in a sometimes surprising juxtaposition; yet the analogies suggested do not serve to render the depicted phenomena easier to comprehend by adding plasticity and concreteness. Instead of mainly serving a decorative, illustrative, or explicatory function, Musil's metaphors, as it were, create the fictional reality itself (a view endorsed without significant modification by Gérard Wicht, 1984). On the one hand, linguistic images reflect the subjectivity of the characters. On the other, they make the presence of a narrating consciousness felt. However, this consciousness cannot be associated with a real personage, either within or outside of the fictional world depicted. Alongside theoretical interpolations and reflections, similes and metaphors construct what Kühne, in the tradition of German Idealist philosophy, calls a "transcendental" narrator, a narrating instance in which the distinction between empirical author, fictive narrator, and fictional character becomes blurred. The result is an amalgamation of the three into a narrative trinity that Kühne identifies as the crucial aesthetic basis of Musil's novel (35). This transcendental narrator, Kühne argues, renders impossible interpretations of the novel along the lines of individual psychology. Kühne counters earlier critics such as Michel (1954), who had stressed Musil's essentially ambivalent stance. In Kühne's view, ambivalence is a characteristic not of Musil's style but of the reality his style aims to address (55). Kühne's book is highly technical, but it offers a great deal of insight into the peculiar nature of Musil's style, which he always views as a direct correlate of Musil's philosophical and aesthetic vision.

In her book Ratio und "Mystik" im Werk Robert Musils (1968), Elisabeth Albertsen explores one of the novel's central conceptual polarities. Her thematic reading draws on Musil's other works as well as materials from the unpublished Nachlass to show how Musil attempts to overcome the binary oppositions he creates. With the exception of Ulrich and Agathe, Albertsen contends, all characters in the novel represent false efforts at a synthesis. Yet even the true or authentic "mystical" experiment of brother and sister eventually leads to failure. Albertsen puts Mystik in inverted commas to emphasize the predominantly secular nature of Musil's mysticism, which is expressed not in a longing for unity with a deity but in the "conversational eroticism" (Gesprächs-Eros) of Ulrich and Agathe (107). She shows how Musil deferred the inevitable dual catastrophe that looms over the novel—the simultaneous failure of Ulrich and Agathe's spiritual union and the outbreak of the First World War—by expanding a segment of the novel from fifty pages in an early draft to well over a thousand pages. Albertsen stresses the irresolvable unity of Musil's writing and his thinking while denying him the status of a thinker who went beyond the intellectual parameters of his time (15), a notion heavily contested by a generation of scholars that emerged in the ensuing years to claim Musil as a prime spokesman of Ideologiekritik. Albertsen's contribution is uneven in quality; the chapter on language, for instance, which she added in the process of revising this Tübingen dissertation into a book, is not well integrated. The author appears to argue from a defensive position, as some of her polemical and combative asides indicate, primarily aimed against the sociopolitical ideas of Frankfurt school Kritische Théorie that were making their presence felt in Germanistik at the time.

Perhaps the most outspoken politically charged contribution to Musil studies of the period is the monograph by Klaus Laermann (1970). Laermann radically deviates from the traditionally affirmative approach, which consisted largely of collecting and commenting on a series of pertinent quotations. Instead, he examines Musil's novel from a decidedly neo-Marxist perspective by looking at the sociopolitical implications associated with the Musilian notion of an absence of qualities—Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Musil's protagonist Ulrich here emerges as a representative of a segment of the bourgeois intelligentsia at the beginning of the century. Ulrich's detached mode of existence, Laermann finds, is primarily a symptom of the overall alienation of marginalized intellectuals. Up to that point, few critics had so much as even noticed that Ulrich's existence is apparently free of all material concerns. Laermann argues that the fact that Ulrich is able to take one year's Urlaub vom Leben (leave from life) clearly indicates that he is economically privileged. That Musil downplayed the economic aspects of the society he portrayed implies to Laermann that the entire literary plan to present a comprehensive analysis of a culture in decline is seriously flawed, since it ignores some of the most important factors. Laermann integrates psychoanalytic concepts into his approach, identifying the predicament of Musil's protagonist with the Freudian notion of narcissism. Ulrich's detachment, which to most critics had thus far signified an enviable stance of openness and freedom from personal and political concerns, in Laermann's reading turns into a socially conditioned psychopathological condition. Laermann is highly critical of what he sees as the subjectivist and aestheticist bias of Musil's novel, implying that Musil did not fully comprehend the factors that determined his own position in the society he confronted. Perhaps the most fruitful discussion to emerge out of Laermann's study is that of Musil's position in the overall context of the various critiques of rationality that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, an issue explored later, with differences in emphasis, by Bernd-Rüdiger Hüppauf (1971), Götz Müller (1972), Hartmut Böhme (1974, 1986), Stephan Howald (1984), and Cornelia Blasberg (1984).

I have already remarked on the conspicuous dearth of contributions to Musil studies based on reader-response criticism. One notable exception is Hans Wolfgang Schaffnit's monograph Mimesis als Problem (1971), which views Musil's poetological reflections as an attempt to conceptualize a new kind of reader. Drawing on Roman Ingarden's notion of the essentially interactive process of reading, Schaffnit stresses the role assigned to the reader in the "concretization" of Musil's novel. Yet Schaffnit's discussion, replete with resonances of phenomenological criticism from Emil Staiger and Martin Heidegger, remains on a highly abstract level. Jürgen C. Thöming (1974) is one of the few Musil scholars directly to emulate reader-response criticism, whereas the philosophical component of Schaffnit's phenomenology found its continuation in the work of David Dawlianidse (1978), Dieter Fuder (1979), and Hartmut Cellbrot (1988), among others.

In the vein of Ideologiekritik, Götz Müller (1972) bases his analysis of Musil's novel upon Max Horkheimer's definition of ideology as false consciousness. In quoting and parodying pertinent contemporary modes of thought, Musil sets out to critique ideologies as inadequate responses to the social and philosophical problems of the era. To Müller, Musil's montage of heterogeneous linguistic material is "meta-linguistic" in that it reflects on the use of language as purveyor of world views. The dialogues of Arnheim and Diotima, for instance, are composed largely of direct quotations from the works of Walter Rathenau and Maurice Maeterlinck. Musil debunks the false pathos of these writers in placing their lofty ideas into an ironic context. Yet, at the same time, he acknowledges that the pathos of watered down Lebensphilosophie is not too far removed from the solutions that he himself is pursuing. Müller argues that this close affinity of ostensibly divergent thought patterns is evidenced, for instance, in the figures of Clarisse, whose madness consists of taking Nietzsche's ideas literally, and Moosbrugger, whose crime represents a thwarted version of the neoromantic quest for some primal unity of experience.

Musil's montage of quotations and allusions, addressed by Müller from a pronouncedly political perspective, is seen by Dietrich Hochstätter (1972) as a decidedly apolitical question of stylistic perspectivism. In retrospect, the central idea that Hochstätter proposes, that of a perspectivism that transcends ideological bias, appears as a correlate, on the level of textual analysis, to the general notion of a methodological pluralism that was advanced at the time by mainstream Germanistik in response to the challenges posed by the politically volatile climate in academia. All the same, Hochstätter develops his stylistic analysis primarily in opposition to traditional Musil criticism: he rejects Arntzen's notion of satire as well as Allemann's concept of constructive irony as too undifferentiated. Musil's method of citing and emulating a multiplicity of linguistic styles, Hochstätter contends, correlates with his multidimensional and "polyvalent" attitudes toward life and toward thinking (7). The examination of stylistic patterns culminates in a description of the "prismatic-essayistic" overall structure of Musil's novel (55). On the thematic level, Hochstätter's enterprise yields results similar to those of Elisabeth Albertsen (1968). Like Albertsen, for instance, Hochstätter stresses the essentially secular nature of Musil's mysticism and utopianism, while at the same time refusing to reflect on any concrete sociopolitical implications of Musil's ideas. In Hochstätter's reading, "interpretive multidimensionality" (147) appears to become a value in itself, posed against critical attempts to appropriate Musil in the interest of any specific ideological agenda.

In a climate characterized by politically charged polemics on the one side and recourse to lofty and supposedly timeless values on the other, Hartmut Böhme's monograph Anomie und Entfremdung (1974) marks a clear watershed. Steering clear of both political maneuvering and affirmative paraphrase, Böhme attempts to address the complexity of Musil's work in terms equally sensitive to aesthetic as to nonaesthetic issues. He takes as his starting point Musil's political essays and reads them as responses to the sociopolitical crisis of central Europe during and after the First World War. The project of confronting and analyzing this crisis continued in what was to become Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

While Böhme in a way builds here on Marie-Louise Roth's work covering some of the same issues (1972), he develops a highly differentiated methodology. Throughout, he attempts to take into account the sociohistorical context both of his own theoretical position as critic and that of Musil's texts as the subject matter of the investigation.

First and foremost, Böhme takes issue with Laermann's one-sided reading of Musil's works as evidence of narcissistic and escapist tendencies. While Böhme acknowledges that such tendencies certainly are present in Musil, they do not make up the whole picture; in his essays and in the intricate ironic structures of his grand novel, Musil develops a critique of the very social conditions that produce the kinds of psychopathological deformations Laermann had identified. Böhme uses the sociopsychological concept of anomie to characterize Musil's analysis of central Europe in the first third of this century; technological developments, ethnic and social tensions, and other factors had eroded the established order and brought about a paradoxical situation in which hectic activity on the part of particular groups was coupled with the stagnation of the social system as a whole. In Böhme's reading, the psychopathology of Musil's characters is motivated by an essentially critical orientation: the extent of their individual alienation (Entfremdung) is a symptom of the overall societal anomie, the two concepts that make up the title of Böhme's study. Musil, Böhme argues, exposes the ideological causes of the current malaise, with its combination of social inertia and spiritual disintegration, in his portrayal of the array of representatives of the various discourses prevalent in the Habsburg Empire. As far as we know, Musil intended his novel to be divided into four major parts. Böhme identifies the death of Ulrich's father as the axis around which the novel is structured symmetrically. This construct gives the Utopian experiments of Ulrich and Agathe the connotation of a rebellion against patriarchy authority on the personal level, corresponding to a rebellion against patriarchy on the general level. To Böhme, Musil is far from advocating escapist withdrawal; rather, he develops critical countermodels in the shape of the various Utopian projects envisaged by his protagonists. To do so, however, it is necessary first to probe the full extent of the existential implications of the sociohistorical situation for the individual.

Böhme draws on a multitude of concepts developed in sociology, psychology, and social philosophy. This makes for a multifaceted and highly differentiated discussion that aims to address the issues raised in all their complexity, in many ways already transcending the limitations of the sociopolitical approaches that were being developed at the time. Böhme's writing is dense and not entirely free of certain tendencies to favor jargon over accessibility. All the same, his book is one of the most theoretically sophisticated and fruitful studies of important aspects of Musil's oeuvre. His combination of a multitude of diverse intellectual traditions effectively raised the level of critical discourse on Musil's grand novel, synthesizing Hochstätter's notion of multidimensionality with a perspective that places Musil in a larger socio-historical context. Böhme's study represents a welcome change from the excessive adulation of Musil on the part of affirmative Musil criticism and from the potential hostility of neo-Marxist scholars. To be sure, his ideas have not remained uncontradicted: Stephan Howald (1984), for instance, takes issue with what he regards as Böhme's tendency to underestimate Musil's aesthetic achievement. Böhme later augmented his approach in a series of articles that have also had a lasting impact on Musil scholarship. Of particular interest in this context is his seminal essay on methodological issues involved in an analysis of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, first published in 1976 and reprinted several times in different contexts.

The more traditional method of Geistesgeschichte in German studies continued to yield productive results throughout the 1970s. For instance, Dietmar Goltschnigg's Mystische Tradition im Roman Robert Musils (1974) presents an extension of part of von Heydebrand's work on the intellectual influences upon Musil's novel. The conversations between Ulrich and Agathe draw heavily on the mystical sources from various centuries collected by Martin Buber in the anthology Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions) of 1909. Musil, as Marie-Louise Roth (1972) had demonstrated, made elaborate excerpts from a volume by Karl Girgensohn, who had based his reflections on the psychology of religion on material from Buber's anthology. Goltschnigg explores this interconnection in great detail, giving an extensively documented analysis of the manner in which Musil in his turn transformed, modifled, and integrated the material into his novel. In this fashion, Goltschnigg provides fascinating insights into Musil's creative process. Goltschnigg is also the author of one of the best short introductions to Musil's novel, a concise essay published in a volume on the twentieth-century German novel edited by Paul Michael Lützeler in 1983.

Equally valuable for an understanding of Musil's novel is Jochen Schmidt's 1975 discussion of the concept of Eigenschaftslosigkeit, the "lack" or "absence of qualities" characteristic of modern man. Starting with an analysis of the novella "Grigia," Schmidt delineates the esoteric opposition Musil sets up between the isolated individual and a social reality that is rejected. In this antisocial stance of radical inwardness, Schmidt maintains, Musil's ideas display certain affinities to expressionism on the one hand and the contemporary tendencies of a "conservative revolution" on the other (27). Schmidt then outlines the intellectual sources of Musil's ideas on mysticism. He shows how Musil's reading in the mystic tradition ranged far beyond the Buber anthology singled out by Goltschnigg. For instance, the very concept of Eigenschaftslosigkeit, Schmidt proves, derives from the Deutsche Predigten (German Sermons) of medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, who rejects the concept of a personal God in favor of a notion of a deity without qualities—"âne eigenschaft" (48). Musil's concept, Schmidt continues, presents a secularized and intellectualized elaboration of Eckhart's idea of a transcendence of personhood in the experience of a unio mystica. Schmidt places Musil's interest in the mystical tradition within the context of the contemporary debates about inwardness, deindividuation, and abstraction, an intellectual spectrum ranging from Husserl's phenomenology and Kandinsky's aesthetic theories to the appropriation of mysticism by the protofascist propagator of the notion of a Rassenseele (racial soul), Alfred Rosenberg. Schmidt singles out the connection between artistic abstraction and Eigenschaftslosigkeit, correlates of Musil's interest in portraying in Ulrich a "prototype of modern man" (78). He also employs Kafka's "Description of a Struggle" as a foil to Musil's project, an alternative response to the challenges presented by modernity. Both authors, Schmidt contends, respond to the dissolution of stable social, spiritual, and psychological orders. In Kafka, the resulting existential uprootedness produces anxiety, whereas Musil views it as potentially liberating. Musil's philosophical leanings, then, give rise to a strange blend of conservative and anarchist tendencies; his excessively theoretical orientation, Schmidt concedes, leads to artistic problems in the integration of reflection into the narrative. Musil, Schmidt writes, seeks to merge abstraction and mysticism: "The theory of radical abstraction is the theory of Mystik" (84). Schmidt's study is an important contribution to Musil criticism, although it has to be noted that, while his discussion of the connection between aesthetic concerns and the anthropological question of deindividuation is stimulating, Schmidt has difficulties integrating the elements of irony and satire into his analysis.

In 1975, East German author Rolf Schneider supplemented his edition of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften for the GDR with an accompanying introductory monograph on Musil. Since the 1950s, Schneider had been profoundly influenced by Musil in his own career as a creative writer. His book is thus interesting both as a personal homage to Musil and as a document of the situation of literary criticism in the GDR during the 1970s. Schneider's ideological bias, which was perhaps obligatory, is evident in the manner in which he dismisses the entire tradition of Musil criticism in the West as "bourgeois scholarship" (bürgerliche Forschung) supposedly oblivious of the historical and political components of Musil's work, a view that ignores the wide range of aesthetic and ideological positions (including explicitly political readings of Musil) that had already been developed by that time. Despite paying lip service to Georg Lukács's orthodox Marxist position, Schneider is deeply sympathetic to Musil as a writer. In his view, the social and political satire implied in Musil's depiction of the Parallelaktion (collateral campaign) makes Musil—alongside Brecht—the most astute critic of the cultural pretensions of bourgeois society. Grouping Musil and Brecht together in this fashion may be surprising, but it does signal an effort to remove the stigma of bourgeois "decadence" from the former. Schneider writes as a fellow author rather than a Literaturwissenschaftler, the result being a provocative and immensely readable book full of wit and panache.

Narratorial irony, the overriding concern of Schneider's decidedly unscholarly monograph, became the focus of a study by Alan Holmes (1978). Holmes systematically approaches a problem that long has—or ought to have—vexed critics of Musil's novel, namely the exact nature of the interaction between author, narrator, and protagonist. In his chapters on the genesis and transformation of the concepts of Möglichkeitssinn and Eigenschaftslosigkeit, Holmes covers much of the same territory as Jochen Schmidt (1975), though from a more pragmatic and text-focused angle. To the naive observer, it would appear that Holmes performs the kind of analysis that would constitute the prime task of Germanistik, an examination of the narrative organizing principles that inform the novel. In their interest in speculation and theorizing, Musil's critics all too often tend to display disdain for the kind of solid and unassuming work of scholars like Holmes. At the same time, it has to be noted that Holmes relies on concepts that had already become outdated by the time of his writing; he does not employ the sophisticated methodologies developed by structuralist and poststructuralist narrative theory, nor does he adequately address the problem of irony. The lack of a differentiated conceptual framework lead Holmes to conclude that protagonist, narrator, and author are essentially identical, a highly problematic assertion (297). The value of Holmes's work is further impaired by the fact that, with the publication of Frisé's new editions of Musil's diaries (1976) and the novel (1978), and especially with that of Musil's entire literary Nachlass on CD-ROM (1992), much material has become available that would render desirable a renewed analysis of the narrative technique of Musil's novel along the lines proposed by Holmes and his predecessors such as Wilfried Berghahn (1956) and Peter Nusser (1967). More recently, Peter-André Alt (1985) endeavored to address the problem of narratorial irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften through integrating philosophical concepts of irony, once again neglecting the rich narratological research on literary irony. It can only be hoped that Musil scholars will begin to carry out the task outlined by Holmes on a more advanced level, in the light of the new materials and with the help of a more differentiated methodology.

Christiane Zehl-Romero (1978) is among the first critics tentatively to approximate a feminist perspective on Musil's novel. She places the love between Ulrich and his sister Agathe in the context of Romantic and neo-Romantic traditions ascribing to love a redemptory power that would allow the individual to transcend the limits imposed by reality. Musil's novel, Zehl-Romero argues, conducts a critical and comprehensive examination of this cultural construct, which predominates in all of Western civilization and is expressed most prominently in the myth of Tristan and Isolde (see Freese 1969 and 1972). While Ulrich and Agathe's story shares the element of active rebellion against reality, their relationship culminates not in an apotheosis of amour passion but in a realization that all human relationships are placed under the constraints of bodily and social existence. To Zehl-Romero, the issue of incest, which hovers over Ulrich and Agathe, is the clearest indication that Musil consciously attempted to avoid embracing a vacuous mysticism of love. Irrespective of whether or not the two consummate their love in a sexual union—as was suggested in the Reise ins Parodies (Journey into Paradise) complex from the mid-1920s—Zehl-Romero contends, Musil remains critical of the autistic and narcissistic nature of a relationship that never reaches the quality of a reciprocal encounter with a Thou in Martin Buber's sense. In contradistinction to Kaiser and Wilkins (1962) and Judith Burckhardt (1973), Zehl-Romero emphasizes that Musil dismisses the idea of redemption through love as a solipsistic myth by presenting it as a symptom of, rather than a solution to, the problematic condition of Western civilization.

Dieter Fuder (1979) takes the divergence and multiplicity of opinions on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as an indication that Musil's novel is designed as an "open" work of art that provokes essentially endless and multifarious processes of reflection. Focusing on the analogy as the basic figure of Musil's writing, Fuder extends the concept of mimesis from the primarily poetological concern it was for Schaffnit (1971) to a comprehensive anthropological principle. According to Fuder, analogical thinking in Musil's work is associated with a new concept of human nature; Musil's use of analogy characterizes a flexible "poetic logic" inherent in human experience that is different from the predominant, discursive logic of rigid binary oppositions (14). Musil's novel, Fuder notes, produces philosophical Erkenntnis on three interrelated levels. The openness of Ulrich's mode of thinking corresponds to the structural openness of the novel as a whole, which in turn is reflected in an experience of openness in the process of reading. This openness is the correlate of the force that motivates Musil's literary effort—the representation (mimesis) of human "subjectivity" as such (53). Fuder's study, relying heavily on Kantian philosophy, is perhaps not so much an interpretation of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as it is a plea for analogical thinking as a viable aesthetic principle that has, in Fuder's opinion, on account of its anthropological universality, claims to general philosophical significance.

In the early 1980s, poststructuralist ideas and methodologies were integrated into Musil studies and brought to bear in examinations of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Alongside Peter Henninger's book on Vereinigungen (1980), Dieter Heyd's study of the novel (1980) is the boldest foray into speculative interpretation inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of dissémination, Heyd rejects a method of interpretation whose aim lies in a hermeneutic reconstruction of the author's conscious intention or a text's allegedly objective significance. Instead, he advocates a method of reading that unravels, as it were, the knots in the textures created by Musil's involvement with language. Musil's interest in the pathological, the imaginary, the mystical, and the erotically charged are of particular interest here. Heyd's "psycho-semiological" approach follows the operations of desire hidden in, or repressed by (though present in) Musil's text. On the psychological level, Heyd views recurring motivic patterns, image clusters, and thematic issues as evidence of unconscious forces that motivate Musil's writing. On the aesthetic level, Musil's dissolution of linear narrative techniques, rigid conceptual orders, and traditional ethical values, Heyd maintains, indicates that Musil engages in the dissémination of cultural constructs: Musil's work, in its multiperspectivity and its character as fragment, Heyd believes, occupies a crucial position in the critique of what deconstructionist philosophy has labeled "logocentrism," the assumption of the existence of a unified, rationally determinable, and essentially static concept of truth (290).

That poststructuralist theory and traditional academic rigor are not incompatible is shown, for instance, by the work of Walter Moser (1980), who emulates Michel Foucault in his discussion of Musil's novel. The emphasis here is on Foucault's notion of society as a sphere of competing "discourses," codified speech systems that proclaim merely to describe reality but actually create and control social order. Moser's thesis that Musil's novel, by way of essayistic appropriation, undertakes an investigation into the multiplicity of diverse forms of "discourse" in Foucault's sense is highly fruitful. In particular, it serves to place in a different conceptual framework a problem that has plagued Musil criticism from the beginning, that of the distinction between irony and satire and the ensuing terminological entanglements. Musil's novel, in Moser's model, provides a privileged sphere in which discourses from various disciplines (culture, politics, science, philosophy, jurisdiction, psychiatry, and so on) can be brought together and critically examined through various modes of juxtaposition. Moser presents a series of concrete examples to show how Musil's characters are not so much portraits of actual or possible personages, but rather serve as nodes where several types of discourse intersect. Concepts drawn from Foucault, Roland Barthes, and to a lesser extent Mikhail Bakhtin enable Moser to describe the aesthetic dimension of Musil's writing. At the same time, Moser does not fail to point out the limitations of Musil's experimental approach: on the one hand, the metadiscursive investigation into the mechanisms by which discourses circulate in society is in constant danger of turning into a mere pose; on the other hand, the encyclopedic preoccupation of Musil's work takes place in the social vacuum of the unfinished (and unfinishable) essay-novel, which in turn is in danger of becoming an expression of powerlessness vis-à-vis a reality in which discourses have actual practical and empirical effects.

The primarily philosophical and sociological applications of Foucault's discourse analysis in Moser are complemented by a more literary and aesthetic focus in Ulf Eisele. Eisele's contribution was written around the same time as Moser's and published first in Renate von Heydebrand's collections of essays on Musil (1982). Eisele emphasizes the self-referential aspects of the nexus between the writing process and the thematic core of the novel, the quest for meaning in individual existence. Ulrich's well-known ideal of "living the way one reads" (MoE 1936) is one of the manifold devices that according to Eisele indicate that the actual topic of Musil's novel is literature itself—its problematic status in society, the modalities of its coming into being, and its philosophical and aesthetic potential. Life and literary discourse, he maintains, are paralleled, and to a certain extent equated, in Musil's novel. In Eisele's reading, the opening chapter, with its extraordinary event (the traffic accident) and the appearance of characters (Diotima and Arnheim, whose presence at the site of the incident, however, is immediately called into question), evokes the impression of a kind of realistic novel that Musil's writing then proceeds to dismantle. The relationship between Ulrich and Agathe indicates a substitution of discourse for action: existence takes place in communicative exchange rather than in a sphere of activity. Ulrich and Agathe's "discourse eroticism" (Diskurserotik, 172) represents a sublimation of Oedipal sexuality transferred onto the level of speech. Musil's writing becomes dependent upon the suspension of what his characters experience: the prohibition against incest between Ulrich and Agathe coincides with Ulrich's refusal to become a writer. The nexus of Inzesttabu and Schreibverbot signals an "interference of the psychical/Oedipal problematic and the specifically literary one" (186). If, for instance, Ulrich himself had begun to write, Musil's novel would have turned into a kind of Bildungsroman, and the experimental nature of Musil's writing would have been destroyed. In highlighting the impasse of story and writing process alike, Eisele contends, Musil shows how a "realistic" novel has become impossible under the given sociohistorical circumstances; in its incompleteness, the novel thus addresses the "impossibility of the poetic" (193). Combining recent poststructuralist discourse theory with German Idealist aesthetics, Eisele's dense and complex essay is one of the most important contributions to a discussion of the relationship between Musil's writing and literary realism.

A monograph by Josef Strutz (1981) adds a welcome note of specificity to the study of the philosophical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Strutz focuses on an ostensibly minor character, the pacifist poet Feuermaul, who emerges in the second part of Musil's novel as an advocate of lofty notions of human goodness and spiritual renewal. Feuermaul, Strutz demonstrates in a detailed exploration of biographical and intertextual allusions in the novel and in Musil's manuscripts, is an amalgam of expressionist writers like Leonhard Frank, Anton Wildgans, and above all Franz Werfel. In the context of the imminent catastrophe of the First World War and the subsequent collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Musil viewed Werfel's public success as poet and novelist and as pacifist activist as subject to multiple ironies. The significance assigned to the character Feuermaul indicates that despite Musil's preoccupation with the mystical notion of the other condition, he never lost interest in concrete historical reality. In fact, Strutz argues, Feuermaul—alongside such characters as the fervent young nationalist Hans Sepp, the mystagogue Meingast, and the racial researcher Bremshuber—becomes one of the indicators that Musil engaged not only in an examination of a past catastrophe but also conceived of his novel as a reflection upon the political realities of the 1930s: the second part of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in many ways represents a response to the emerging reality of National Socialism, a phenomenon that to a large extent has its historical and ideological roots in the Habsburg monarchy. Musil's observations in his notebooks and journals on Fascism in general and on Adolf Hitler as person and symbol, Strutz argues, provide the foil for the presentation of Feuermaul's empty antirationalist messianic fervor, a general intellectual attitude only too easily co-opted by National Socialism. Strutz has interesting things to say about Musil's assessment of the connection between the economic and ideological aspects of politics. In his focus on the political criticism contained in Musil's novel, he occasionally perhaps displays a tendency toward overstatement—for instance, when he one-sidedly labels Arnheim a money-hungry warmonger (a designation that does not do justice to the complex character of Arnheim nor to its historical model, Walter Rathenau). All the same, Strutz's insistence on Musil's persistent efforts to address concrete historical and political issues in his novel go a long way toward dispelling the myth of Musil as a world-weary mystic.

Like Strutz's study, that of Martin Menges (1982) indicates that, amid all the efforts at post-structuralist innovation, traditionally hermeneutic Germanistik can still produce impressive results. Continuing ideas introduced by Jochen Schmidt (1975), Menges defines the concept of abstraction as the overriding aesthetic and philosophical principle operating in Musil's novel. On three levels—the social, the aesthetic, and the mystical—abstraction indicates both the dissolution of rigid concepts of identity and the possibility of a renewed synthesis. This assessment leads Menges to take issue with Klaus Laermann (1970), who had accused Musil of escapism, and with Hartmut Böhme (1974), who had criticized in Musil a tendency toward viewing historically determined phenomena as ontological givens. Both interpretations, Menges contends, underestimate the critically Utopian potential of Musil's aesthetic intentions. Menges proceeds to give the most detailed account of the various Utopian models developed in Musil's novel, stressing that Musil himself reflects upon the failure of the attempt to bestow duration to the other condition. Musil, Menges notes, acknowledges that abstract reasoning requires both Genauigkeit and Phantasie, both an engagement with reality and imaginative reflection, to avoid ethical, intellectual, and spiritual impasse.

Like Menges, Gérard Wicht (1984) singles out one overriding issue as the focus of his analysis. His examination of the Gleichnis as the basic unit of Musil's writing to a certain extent complements, with a more philosophical accent, that of Jörg Kühne (1968), who had restricted himself largely to poetological considerations. Wicht evokes the intellectual context of Musil's interest in figurative language, discussing the various theories of the period on the limits and the potential of language. Wicht's broad and necessarily somewhat superficial survey includes the familiar exponents of Sprachkrise and Sprachskepsis in literature (for example, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Broch, and Kafka) and philosophy (such as Nietzsche, Mauthner, Landauer, Klages, and Wittgenstein). Musil, Wicht suggests, embraced the figurative potential of the Gleichnis as a linguistic device that promises to bridge and at the same time preserve the gap between linguistic expression and intended meaning. In this fashion, a Gleichnis fulfills an important epistemological function in that it points to something without subsuming it into a preexisting conceptual system; it creates the described phenomenon and allows it to shine in its uniqueness. The Gleichnis thus combines analytic and synthetic or philosophical and poetic capacities, becoming the "purveyor of the highest intellectual density" (111). Wicht defends Musil against charges that the use of figurative language implies a lack of precision and intellectual rigor by stressing that it is "the object of the narrative reflection which is polyvalent, not [Musil's] style!" (168, Wicht's emphasis). Wicht traces throughout the novel one particular set of metaphorical constructs, the semantic field centered on the image of the tree. This complex of images, Wicht argues, functions in a manner akin to lyrical poetry, evoking meaning in the interplay of linguistic signs rather than through reference to any extralinguistic belief system. This leads Wicht to the conclusion, among others, that the theological imagery Musil employs in his novel does not indicate that Musil held religious beliefs in the traditional sense (196).

Wicht's study shows that, even in the 1980s, approaches characteristic of mainstream Germanistik, in this case the history of ideas, continue to coexist with the innovative methodologies derived from poststructuralist thinking. The postmodern quasi-anarchistic tendencies latently present in Dieter Heyd (1980) are more pronounced in Lucas Cejpek (1984), who appears to abandon "methodical" literary criticism altogether in favor of a "mad" form of discourse. Taking his cues from the critique of Western rationality by thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault, Cejpek presents Musil's novel as a reflection of the tension between "reason" and "madness" in European bourgeois civilization. In a collage of motley citations Cejpek freely moves in and out of all kinds of texts from the period in which Musil's novel originated. Cejpek defines this "historical field" of investigation as the "pre-War sphere" (referring to both world wars as one connected event) to distinguish it from his own context, that of a "post-War" perspective. In Cejpek's contention, war is not an unfortunate aberration from the true nature of European rationalistic civilization but a manifestation of it. Moosbrugger, for instance, appears in this light to embody the destructive essence of a male patriarchal system. Similarly, Clarisse illustrates how women internalize the male structures of violence and are driven to self-destruction. Musil, Cejpek suggests, displays in his novel an awareness of the "madness" at the core of Western rationality brought about by the marginalization of what cannot be subsumed under "reason," implying that all Utopian models, including those involving the relationship between Ulrich and Agathe, remain confined within the destructive logic of European culture and therefore cannot be viewed as fruitful alternatives. For all his undeniable intelligence and imagination, Cejpek shows little regard for the reader. His book appears to preclude debate, since it does not offer a thesis supported by arguments but rather presents a rhetorical tour de force that the reader can either participate in or reject. Though it is full of fascinating insights and provocative ideas, Cejpek's book, with its pyrotechnic display of metaphors, is perhaps more an exercise in creative speculation than literary criticism.

Hans-Georg Pott (1984) manages to combine scholarly rigor in the traditional sense with an innovative approach that integrates poststructuralist ideas. On one level, he conducts his reading along lines similar to Eisele's, viewing Musil's novel as a laboratory for the examination of "discourses" (ideologies and their manifestations in different speech modes). On another, he focuses on the psychopathology of the characters as examples of failed modes of identity formation that Musil subjects to critical scrutiny. Pott synthesizes discourse analysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis to address the problem of the "ending" of Musil's novel in its aesthetic and psychosexual dimension. In Ulrich's conversations with Agathe, Pott notes, the topic of the exchange becomes secondary; instead, he writes, the endeavor to engage in an endless process of communication and communion through language "functions as the expression of their desire for union and loss of individual boundaries" (122). If the desired unio mystica were achieved, however, the conversations would cease, as would the process of exchange—and, ultimately, Musil's book. Pott proposes that a tension underlying Musil's impetus for writing subjects his novel to the paradoxical logic of deferral and postponement. In Musil's subjectivity, Pott suggests, the desire to keep alive is inextricably interwoven with the desire to keep the writing process alive. This constellation brings forth what Pott labels an "endless text," one that undermines the notion of a stable self by refusing closure: "Musil destroys the narrative model by dismantling the center of its meaning: the ending" (162).

Pott polemically denounces as "ideologues of alienation" {Entfremdungsideologen, 161) those critics who insist on the sociopolitical dimension of the aesthetic and psychosexual issues he addresses. However, at least one of the critics he dismisses in this fashion, Hartmut Böhme, has reached conclusions that are quite similar to Pott's, especially with regard to Musil's critique of Western rationality. In an important essay (1986), Böhme emulates recent poststructuralist theories in order to place Musil in the context of current debates on postmodernism. He finds in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften a response to the collapse of European civilization in the First World War. On the aesthetic level, the cataclysm of an entire culture leads Musil to a rejection of realistic mimesis in favor of a semiotic approach: Musil's novel presents a semiotic panopticon in which ideas, ideologies, and values circulate as mere functions of discourse, "quotations" deprived of substance—"simulacrae," in the terminology of Jean Baudrillard. Musil's critique of Western rationality, Böhme contends, bids farewell to the notion that history is characterized by meaningful rational development, anticipating notions about the stasis of postmodern society developed by Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. In this context, Böhme views Musil's interest in the interconnections between love, mysticism, crime, insanity, and war as an effort to carve out a node of resistance to universal semiotization and commodification: "In a situation of world-wide rationalization Art offers the only space for an exhaustion (Verausgabung) and transcendency (Überschreitung) of the Ego—closely related to insanity, crime, and excess" (30). Musil's investigation of aspects of culture that resist closure, Böhme argues, places him alongside Georges Bataille among the "intellectual precursors of postmodernism" (25). Böhme's primarily philosophical focus was complemented later by Rolf Günter Renner (1991), for instance, who restricts himself to aesthetic considerations that link Musil's narrative technique with postmodern tendencies. Böhme's dense and stimulating essay goes far beyond the confines of traditional literary criticism in that it links Musil's aesthetic enterprise with a discussion of the situation of our civilization as a whole.

On a more mundane level, there is an abundance of smaller contributions that limit their focus on specific issues concerning Musil's magnum opus. Frequently such contributions have little impact on the discussion of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, where grand synthesis is usually favored over detailed analysis. A good example is Walter H. Sokel's (1988) essay on the legacy of the eighteenth century in Musil's grand novel. Sokel compares Musil with other important modernist novelists, such as Joyce, Dos Passos, and Döblin, and the manner in which their works represent a break with the realist tradition. According to Sokel, realistic mimesis is characterized by the author's attempt to increase to the fullest the reader's identification with the depicted world by way of eliminating distance and camouflaging the process of narrative mediation. Sokel identifies the origins of this tradition in Lessing's late-Enlightenment poetics of emotional involvement. What distinguishes Musil's critique of realistic mimesis, Sokel suggests, is that his writing in its combination of essayistic philosophical reflection and self-referential, playful irony harks back to the satirical novel of the first half of the eighteenth century by reemphasizing the distance between reader and fictional world.

Musil's novel, Sokel contends, displays affinities with early-Enlightenment authors like Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Voltaire as well as their common precursor, Cervantes. When Sokel originally gave his paper in 1985, a discussion ensued in which respondents challenged both Sokel's central thesis and its underlying periodization. Yet it seems to me that Sokel's point that many elements of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften can be related to eighteenth-century traditions is well taken (one need only think of the chapter headings, the division into books, the narrator's ironical interventions). Monika Schrader (1975) had anticipated some of Sokel's concerns in her study on Musil's novel within the Bildungsroman tradition. While her study is somewhat marred by an undifferentiated concept of Bildung and its historical permutations as reflected in the Bildungsroman genre, her comparison of Musil's work with Wieland's eighteenth-century novel Agathon yields a great deal of interesting insights that should be explored further. Perhaps it would be fruitful to place Musil's novel not primarily in the Bildungsroman tradition but, as Sokel suggests, in that of the picaresque novel (particularly with regard to questions of audience address). As far as I can see, however, such interconnections with literary traditions remain largely unexplored in Musil criticism.

In the late 1980s there was a series of attempts to approach Musil's work from a philosophical perspective. Most of these share the thesis that Musil's writing constitutes an intellectual enterprise that can justly be described as philosophical because Musil addresses farranging philosophical issues beyond the scope of fiction. Usually, the underlying assumption is that what remains unclear in Musil's thought and his writings can be clarified with the help of a particular philosophical method. Matthias Luserke (1987), for instance, stresses the unity of Musil's work as an "ideographic cosmos" (15) in his analysis of Musil's notion of "possibility" (Möglichkeit) with concepts drawn from Kantian modal theory. He proposes that this approach could provide a useful model for the interpretation of literary texts in general. In his enterprise, Luserke dispenses with traditional distinctions such as those between author and narrator and the idea that both narrator and fictional characters function as the sources of utterances in a narrative text. In their place, he distinguishes four abstract modes of representation at work in Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften that correspond to four "types of actuality" (Tatsächlichkeitstypen, 69). While Luserke consistently attempts to stress the affinity between these Kantian notions and Musil's intellectual environment (mediated, for instance, via Phenomenology and Gestalt theory), he operates on a level of abstraction that ultimately alienates the reader. Luserke's differentiation between the "really real" versus the "really possible" and the "possibly real" versus the "possibly possible" (74)—later augmented by elaborate charts and formulae—is likely to become a source of consternation even to the staunchest advocate of Musil's philosophical stature. Luserke might better have pursued the more interesting topic of the extent of Musil's indebtedness to Kant, which has—despite the contributions of Ulrich Karthaus (1981a) and Thomas Söder (1988)—thus far not received sufficient attention in Musil scholarship.

In a manner not unlike Luserke's, Ralf Bohn (1988) explores a different philosophical tradition; he seeks to establish parallels between Musil's works and ideas formulated in Romantic philosophy of nature, above all by Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, that seek to collapse the distinction between philosophy and Dichtung. In Bohn's opinion, Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften illustrates, as a Gleichnis, the manner in which the philosophical subject constitutes itself as subject in the process of reflection by "inversion"—that is, by tracing its own development back to its origin. This Ursprung (73) is both the source and the goal of the intellectual effort. Bohn goes on to relate his notion of inverted conditions to a different idea of inversion, the altered perception of inside and outside relations characteristic of the mystical experience in general and Musil's anderer Zustand in particular. His observations may well be accurate, but in his opaque style Bohn tends to postulate rather than explicate such connections. His book is ambitious in scope, yet the lofty philosophical gloss is sometimes marred by slight factual errors—for instance, incorrect datings of some of Musil's diary entries.

Perhaps the most extreme example of a worthwhile topic mired in philosophical opaqueness is Dieter P. Farda's study of phenomenological aspects of Musil's work, originally a dissertation dating from 1982 and published in apparently unrevised form as a book in 1988. In phenomenological terms, the world does not exist as a single, given, "objective" reality. Instead, manifold "worlds" are constructed in a multitude of ways in a constant interaction between sense perceptions and a perceiving consciousness. Musil's notion of Möglichkeitssinn, Farda aims to demonstrate, acknowledges and illustrates this philosophical insight into the coexistence of "multiple worlds." The similar notion of "multiple realities" is explored in an interesting and engaging essay by Peter L. Berger (1983) with reference to the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz. In Farda's case, however, an ultracerebral methodology, derived from Heidegger and somewhat presumptuously labeled "transcendental hermeneutics," leads to a convoluted allusive style that shows little regard for the reader.

The aforementioned studies and others, almost invariably doctoral dissertations, raise the question of the envisaged readership. On the one hand, it is unlikely that they will convince the nonliterary reader of Musil's stature as an intellect of significance; on the other, they operate with a specialized and sometimes rather arcane philosophical jargon that is likely to scare off most Musil scholars trained in mainstream Germanistik. The publication pressure on academics notwithstanding, it is a sad phenomenon to be confronted with book-length works that seem to be addressed to nobody in particular and that are destined to do little more than catch dust on library shelves.

One can, of course, write intelligently and intelligibly about Musil from a philosophical perspective. Cases in point are essays relating Musil to Mach (Claudia Monti 1979 and 1981; Manfred Diersch 1990) or to Wittgenstein (Aldo Gargani 1983; Friedrich Wallner 1983; Peter Kampits 1992) as well as some of the various explorations of Musil's indebtedness to Nietzsche (Aldo Venturelli 1980; Roberto Olmi 1981 and 1983; Friedrich Wallner 1984). Most interpretations of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Musil's other works touch upon philosophical issues in one way or another, sometimes in highly sophisticated and enlightening manners. Manfred Frank, a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer who gained prominence as a mediator between the German hermeneutic philosophical tradition and the semiotically oriented (primarily French) poststructural approaches, also wrote several lucid essays on the connection between epistemological and mythological concerns in Musil (1981, 1983, 1988). Perhaps it should be no surprise that it is the mature professional philosophers who on the whole display a greater sensitivity to the complexity of Musil's thinking—and a greater regard for the reader—than do young, philosophically trained scholars in their doctoral dissertations.

Harmut Cellbrot's dissertation, published in book form in 1988, likewise proves that theoretical sophistication and readability need not be mutually exclusive. Cellbrot investigates affinities between Musil's work and the phenomenological theories of Edmund Husserl. It is documented that Musil read Husserl, above all the philosopher's Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1902), yet Cellbrot refrains from claiming any direct influence or dependence. Instead, he examines Musil's work as an enterprise that on a literary level in many ways parallels Husserl's philosophical ideas. The two thinkers, he points out, share an interest in the nature of cognition and perception; Musil's writing can be viewed as an investigation into the "movement of the processes of consciousness" (42). Musil's attentiveness to the minuscule gradations and shifts in modes of consciousness displays a kind of poetic complement to Husserl's philosophical rigor. Husserl acknowledges that perception and cognition are potentially endless processes, rendering it impossible to arrive at fixed conclusions. Because of its open-endeness, Musil's work, Cellbrot shows, constitutes a poetic analogue to this mode of thinking that is as legitimate and as fruitful as philosophy proper. Perhaps it is a sign of Cellbrot's sensitivity as a reader that he does not subsume Musil's literary enterprise under a supposedly superior philosophical construction.

The appropriating grip of a given theoretical or philosophical model is the focus of Reinhard Pietsch's deconstructive discussion of Musil's novel (1988). Like Eisele (1982), Pietsch draws on Jacques Derrida's notion of dissémination to describe the way in which Musil's text simultaneously invites and calls into question appropriative readings. In its discursive and poetic richness, Musil's novel contains a wealth of details that point in all directions and challenge the reader to integrate them under a unifying conceptual heading; yet at the same time, its character as a fragment renders impossible any attempt to arrive at a unifying interpretation. Pietsch concludes that Musil's text defies hermeneutic approaches that aim to interpret authorial intention or textual meaning; he opts for an approach that focuses instead on the manner in which Musil's text addresses the creation and subversion of meaning in what Pietsch calls "self-implicating structures." He steers clear of the conceptual clichés that have predominated in Musil criticism for decades by developing his own metaphors to describe the peculiar character of Musil's writing, comparing the novel to a Moebius strip and the effect of Musil's prose to interfering "frequencies" (Eigenfrequenzen, 3). Pietsch traces the circularity of Musil's process of composition in two detailed analyses of what, because of Musil's untimely death, became the final chapter of Musil's text, "Atemzüge eines Sommertages." The excessive production of figurative language in ceaseless variation and repetition, Pietsch notes, dissolves the narrating instance: it becomes impossible to locate utterances in the text as coming either from the characters or from the narrator. The dissolution of the concept of narrating subject goes hand in hand with a sense of paralysis of the writing process; ending in stasis, Musil's novel seems a fragment bursting at the seams, both infinite and uninterpretable, a self-canceling artifact. While his approach is not free of the kind of totalizing gestures he criticizes in Musil scholarship, Pietsch nevertheless manages to present a refreshing look at Musil's novel. Of particular interest is his observation that the work includes, in addition to its reflections on the nature of the writing process, an extensive examination of the process of reading. Musil's investigation of the nature of reading, here only touched upon, is a topic that would merit closer attention.

The nexus between Musil's interest in mysticism and the processes of writing and reading is explored by Wagner-Egelhaaf, who includes a chapter on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in her lucid study of the mystical tradition in twentieth-century German prose (1989). In contradistinction to previous scholars, who approached the issue of mysticism mainly from the perspective of a history of ideas by exploring Musil's reception of mystical sources, Wagner-Egelhaaf employs poststructuralist concepts that place mysticism in the overall context of Western culture as a culture based on writing. Medieval mystics, Wagner-Egelhaaf notes, attempt to describe the mystical experience that prompts them to write as a "dictation" from God. This phenomenon leads Wagner-Egelhaaf to suggest that modern mysticism encompasses a specific mode of writing that elicits a particular manner of reading. The relationship between Ulrich and Agathe displays just such a dynamic. Their conversations about the mystical experience circle around their readings in mystical sources; their utterances consist largely of quotations from or intertextual allusions to such sources; Ulrich is induced to write down his reflections in his diary, which Agathe secretly reads. Such aspects of the work, Wagner-Egelhaaf notes, indicate that the mystical communion between Ulrich and Agathe takes place in an interaction of the reading and writing process. God as source and telos of the mystical experience is thus replaced by writing as a medium of communion. GerdTheo Tewilt (1990) reaches ostensibly similar conclusions with regard to the other condition in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a phenomenon constituted by and in language. Yet, whereas Tewilt draws on traditional aesthetics and language philosophy, Wagner-Egelhaaf emulates the poststructuralist theories of Jacques Derrida that challenge the primacy of oral language over writing. In their methodological differences, the two studies mark the epistemologica! divide characteristic of much of Germanistik in the 1980s and 1990s.

The great diversity of approaches derived from post-structuralist theories is indicated in Thomas Pekar's study on the "discourse of love" in Musil (1989), half of which is devoted to an examination of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Pekar notes that in Musil's novel love is subject to division: the love relationships of all the major characters display a split between, on the one hand, the bodily aspects of love as a biologically determined drive and, on the other, its social manifestations, the codifications of desire in socially accepted modes of behavior. Pekar traces Musil's insight into the social organization of amorous emotions to the very beginning of his writing. Even the early "Varieté" sketches from around 1900, show Musil's awareness of what Pekar in contradistinction to Liebestrieb (love drive), calls Liebesbetrieb (love business). The motif of the varieté as a socially sanctioned marginal space where people seek, for a price, gratification of the sexual and scopic urges repressed by bourgeois society at large, survives in Musil's novel in Ulrich's relationship with Leona, the cabaret singer. Leona sells her body but displaces her emotional needs in her eating binges. In Bonadea the split between bodily needs and social dictates is evident in the contradiction between her nymphomania and her lofty ideal of bourgeois respectability. In Diotima, it centers around an idealization of spiritual purity that masks her sexual and spiritual frustration in her marriage to Tuzzi. Arnheim's excessively cerebral nature, Gerda Fischel's hysteria, and Clarisse's manic tendencies are similar indicators of the socially enforced division between body and soul. In part two of the novel, Pekar argues, the diagnosis of division is replaced by myths of unifying experience, all centering around Ulrich's relationship with Agathe. These take three different forms. The first variant is narcissistic, consisting of an endless process of mutual mirroring through communication; the second is hermaphroditic, encompassing the desire to become one bodily with the beloved in a mystical union; the third is dionysian, aiming toward a dissolution of the self in an intoxicated indulgence of animalistic urges. The three models of unification, Pekar notes, are contradictory and partly mutually exclusive, which may, at least in part, explain the aesthetic and intellectual problems Musil encountered with the continuation, respectively the conclusion of his novel. Pekar's study is richly textured and always attentive to the complexities of the issues involved. It is intellectually stimulating because of its eclectic combination of divergent methodologies and manages to avoid the kind of reductionism found only too often in Musil studies.

Two Swiss dissertations published in 1990 deal with psychological aspects of Musil's novel, to a certain ex-tent reaching conclusions that are diametrically opposed to each other. Ruth Hassler-Riltti (1990) examines the tension between "madness" and "reality" by focusing on three of Musil's main characters: Ulrich, Clarisse, and Moosbrugger. Drawing on various anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories, Hassler-Rütti de-fines reality as the product of intersubjective communicative interactions in which a clear sense of personal identity, based on an inside-outside dichotomy, is formed. "Madness" in this context refers to a failed or distorted process of identity formation. Besides Agathe, Ulrich is the only character in the novel capable of recognizing that reality is not an external given but a product of the interplay of contingency and constant interpersonal negotiation. This enables him, Hassler-Riltti contends, to escape "madness," which is characterized in part by an effort to impose stasis upon phenomena subject to perpetual fluctuation.

While Hassler-Rütti is sensitive to Musil's text and attentive to detail, her approach skirts some of the more problematic aspects of Musil's novel, such as the connection between individual and collective "madness" (for example, the prospect of war looming over Musil's panorama of "Kakania"). Her largely positive assessment of Ulrich leads her to dismiss, somewhat vehemently, some of the more disturbing complexities of Ulrich's psychosexual disposition, evidenced in his generally destructive relationships with women and in particular in the possibly incestuous component of his relationship with Agathe. Hans-Rudolf Schärer (1990) focuses precisely on such matters and their psychosexual significance in his discussion of Musil's protagonist, employing a range of psychological theories of the self, including those of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Starting with Ulrich's childhood reminiscences, Schärer observes a pattern of socialization that corresponds—almost too neatly—to the development of the narcissistic personality. With Ulrich, the early loss of the mother, in combination with the aloofness of the father, hinders the formation of a stable sense of self. Ulrich's love for Agathe, who as his sister is in a sense both identical to and different from him, thus becomes the emblem of his inability to overcome his narcissistic isolation. From this psychosexual perspective, Schärer views Ulrich's much heralded Möglichkeitssirm primarily as the product of the narcissistic phantasm of indeterminacy and omnipotence. Likewise, he all but debunks Ulrich's Utopian schemes, traditionally the object of the highest praise in Musil criticism: favoring as they do theoretical speculation over active involvement in concrete, empirical reality, they emerge here as mechanisms that aid the narcissistic personality in maintaining its precarious balance in the face of contingency. Schärer offers a pragmatic elaboration of ideas introduced into Musil criticism by writers such as Klaus Laermann (1970) and outlined in two seminal essays on a more abstract theoretical level by Peter Dettmering (1981) and Hartmut Böhme (1982). Schärer, however, does not address the socio-political aspects of the problem. His objective is not to denounce, as it were, the character, but to offer a reading that puts Musil's protagonist in a critical perspective. He presents Ulrich as a model of modern socialization; the "man without qualities" emerges as the prototypical narcissistically disturbed personality. In his circumspect manner, Schärer manages to avoid a problem that has plagued a great deal of Musil criticism: he does not allow the power of Musil's language to dominate and contaminate his own critical discourse, as many of the affirmative critics do. At the same time, he remains respectful of Musil's artistic achievement.

Such a combination of sensitivity and respect on the one hand and a remarkable degree of freedom from contami-nation by Musil's language on the other distinguishes Gerhard Meisel's monograph of 1991 as one of the most significant contributions to Musil scholarship in recent years. It is difficult to do justice to Meisel's discussion of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, which combines a wide range of theoretical impulses in a fascinating exploration of the philosophical, intellectual, and psycho-sexual dimensions of Musil's novel. Meisel places Musil within the context of the new view of human nature that emerged around the turn of the century, as scientific thinking began to occupy and to absorb spheres of human experience traditionally excluded from the scientific paradigm. Musil's writing, like Freud's psychoanalysis and the emerging discipline of anthropology, constitutes a contribution to a Wissenschaft vom Menschen, an exploration of human experience guided by, and established partly in opposition to, natural science. In Meisel's view, Musil is the writer who most radically and consistently responded to the period's "categorical paradigm shift of the scientific world view" (217; Meisel's emphasis). Musil most clearly participated in the move away from teleological thinking in terms of linear notions of causality towards complex functional models of thought involving concepts of statistical likelihood and probability.

Meisel traces Musil's awareness of contemporary scientific theories by exploring a multitude of sources, establishing some surprising and insightful connections and parallels. In a brilliant reading of the opening section of Musil's novel, with its combination of meteorological discourse and traditional narrative, Meisel shows how the author draws on a wide range of contemporary scientific ideas. Musil's focus here, Meisel argues, does not lie in a parody of scientific language (as is often assumed); rather, the passage displays the extent to which Musil employs the most advanced epistemological theories of the time, in particular those concerning the nature of systems implied in the laws of thermo-dynamics. In Meisel's view, the opening of the novel establishes a "systemic equivalence of thermodynamic and narrative 'laboratory conditions'" (258). Scientific motifs reoccur throughout Musil's novel; for instance, combining psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, Meisel establishes parallels between the relationship of Ulrich and Agathe and the notion of entropy in modern physics. Both on the individual and on the general level, Musil's experiment ends in entropy: the Ulrich-Agathe relationship is subject to the irresolvable problem of incest; the sociopolitical question concerning the interconnection between Parallelaktion and impending war likewise becomes irresolvable. Meisel employs concepts derived from information theory to establish a correlation between the initial impulse of Musil's writing and its ultimate disintegration in a mass of manuscript drafts: in the terms developed by information theory, an ideal order—which Musil appears to be striving for—is identical with a maximum of disturbance (292). Viewed from this perspective, Meisel suggests, Musil's enterprise of collecting and analyzing a potentially infinite number of pieces of contingent minutiae in his analysis of the historical predicament of his era turned into an unwinnable race against time.

Over the decades, Musil criticism has shown signs of petrification and fatigue. It appears as though the eversame issues and questions are repeatedly recycled in modified form. Yet works such as Meisel's revive the hope that it will become possible to address Musil's oeuvre in all its complexity, its grandeur, and its limitations without falling prey to the allure of the writer's extraordinarily powerful metaphorical language. In recent years, studies by younger Musil scholars have offered fresh perspectives and signs of intellectual independence from the pull exerted by Musil's conceptual apparatus. Good examples are a monograph by Gabriele Dreis (1992) on the impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's pedagogical ideas on Musil and a book by Frank MaierSolgk (1992) on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as Musil's investigation into the nature and philosophy of history. Other recent contributions that provide innovative impulses to an elucidation of Musil's novel include an essay by Alexander Honold (1993) on the notion of leisure time and an analysis of the work in terms of chaos theory by Axel Krommer and Albert Kummel (1993).

Musil's lifework, enthusiastically hailed by Claudio Magris as "the greatest book of our time" (1983, 60), is incomplete. Most interpretations of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften explicitly or implicitly seek to address its significance and stature as a novel fragment. In one way or another, each critic quite literally constructs his or her own object of investigation, rewriting and "finishing" the book that Musil left uncompleted. The ceaseless efforts of the scholarly community to wrestle with the issues raised by Musil's monumental work may be an indication that perhaps the most food for thought is offered precisely by books that, like Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, may have a beginning but no ending.