The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (review)

Robert Musil (1880–1942) has the unenviable distinction of being the most significant unread modernist in the German language—indeed, very likely tout court. In many ways, this is a surprising state of affairs. Musil was a gifted and reasonably prolific writer who enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime, and—with German editions of his collected works and diaries and translations of his fiction and non-fiction prose into many languages, including two English versions of his great unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities)—he is by no means obscure. And yet the mention of his name more often than not produces half-whispered confessions (sometimes even by professional Germanists) of not ever having tackled Musil's recognized masterpiece, or at least not having made it beyond the first 150 pages.

Without neglecting the concerns of the small but somewhat fanatical world of Musil scholarship, Patrizia C. McBride's The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity ventures a reading of Musil's work that attempts to put his oeuvre on the map of twentieth-century intellectual history while illuminating why Musil so often goes unread. On her view, Musil's writing chronicles his "investigation of the void that lies at the heart of the experience of modernity" (7). Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Musil emphasized the "emancipatory potential" of such "ethical groundlessness" (16): "Musil's endeavor to optimistically confront the contingency and decenteredness of modern experience accounts for his peculiar position within modernism" (26).

The twenty-six-year-old writer made a distinguished debut with a daring novella about adolescent sexual and philosophical adventures set in a provincial Austrian military academy. Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless), often regarded as an early exploration of the psychology of fascism, caused a sensation when it was published in 1906. Musil, who had previously trained as an engineer, was then studying philosophy and psychology in Berlin, where, in 1908, he received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Ernst Mach. While he decided not to pursue an academic career, Musil's literary sensibility was profoundly shaped by his scientific training, which fostered his experimentalist attitude toward form. His next literary publication, a series of stories called "Vereinigungen" ("Unions") that appeared in 1911 met with incomprehension and indeed (on account of Musil's portrayal of unconventional sexuality) opprobrium. Nonetheless, a steady stream of essays and theatrical criticism established him as a significant figure on the German-language cultural landscape, and when he was drafted in 1914, Musil had just won a coveted position at the prestigious Berlin journal, Die Neue Rundschau. In 1923 his reputation as a significant literary talent was confirmed when his innovative "conversation drama" of 1921, "Die Schwärmer" ("The Enthusiasts") won the prestigious Kleist Prize.

By the 1920s, Musil was devoting his literary energies to the work that would occupy him until the end of his life, the epic dissection of the "spiritual constitution" of prewar Vienna entitled Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. In 1929, just after his fiftieth birthday, the first volume appeared to general acclaim. Musil's literary stature appeared consolidated once and for all, and at the end of 1932, a second volume appeared. After the Nazi rise to power, however, Musil descended into a morass at least partially of his own making, the interpretation of which is a matter of considerable scholarly dispute. In 1938 he withdrew twenty galley chapters from his publisher and began reworking them, and when he died suddenly in Swiss exile in April of 1942, he left behind a proliferation of fragments including not just multiple chapter variants, many of which he had apparently been working on simultaneously, but also an array of visions about the larger direction of the novel, including significantly different possible endings to the whole. This material fills two full volumes of the German collected...