Robert Musil & The Culture of Vienna by Hannah Hickman (review)

Book Reviews243 rereading of this major poet and that all of the earlier critics, although they are worth looking at, have in fact missed the point — the point being that no viable criticism of Pope can go forward until all of the monetary and economic issues surrounding him are settled and until the related issue of the mistreatment of women has been addressed. As an alert deconstructionist and feminist, Laura Brown makes a strong case for taking Pope out of the cocoon of elite literary tradition in which he has heretofore been studied, and for placing him in the light of the common day of eighteenth-century mercantile society. If there are any serious shortcomings in this new look at Pope, they lie mainly in the area of forcing the thesis to the extent that it begins to creak and protest too much, reminding us of the possibility that an inevitable weakness of deconstructionism is that whenever it grinds an axe it will dull it a little at the same time. For example, Brown insists throughout her treatise that in his imagery Pope has a large inclination to "commodify" emotions and mentality, to seem to turn them into goods on the shelves of ordinary life. Although there is some truth to this, Brown needs occasionally to remind her readers that all poets, from the time of Homer to the present day, make poetic fabric by reification, by turning abstractions into things, whether it be the transforming of evil into snake-hair or seeing the modern sensibility as a red wheelbarrow. To put it another way, the concretizing that goes on all the time to produce the imagery in verse is not unlike a species of "commodification " (one of Brown's favorite terms). She also seems to see the making of long catalogues by Pope (e.g., the lists of evils in The Dunciad) as analogous to inventories which a businessperson might live with each day; but here she forgets that cataloguing is a typical device in many poets, certainly including those who knew little of capitalism (e.g., Virgil with his thorough round-ups of war veterans or Milton with his long ceremonial naming of devils in the early parts of Paradise Lost). In other words, the mercantilizing or capitalizing language which Brown finds in Pope is merely a part of the reifying process through which all poetry is brought into being, and to see it as peculiar to a concern with economics is possibly to fall into the same kind of reductionism against which Brown is trying to write. On the other hand, there is probably no such thing as a study of a major poet which totally avoids reductionism, and Brown does offer a number of intriguing avenues through which we can greatly advance our understanding and appreciation of Pope's best art. PETER THORPE University of Colorado at Denver HANNAH HICKMAN. Robert Musil & The Culture of Vienna. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1984. 203 p. Hannah Hickman's book certainly fulfills its promise to provide "an introduction to Musil's work for the English-speaking reader" (1). The merit of the volume lies in its earnest endeavour not only to introduce Musil as a writer, but also to include the whole extensive range of his mind and activities as an engineer, a natural scientist, mathematician, psychologist, philosopher, and political observer. On Musil the writer, Hickman's book gains further importance by not only dealing with his novels, short prose, and plays, but also by offering to the reader solid guidance in becoming acquainted with the poet's notebooks, his oeuvre as an essayist, his speeches, his epistemological dissertation on Mach, and even with his publications as an engineer. This groundwork invites the reader to delve further into the interrelationship 244Rocky Mountain Review between Musil's fictitious productions and these other genres of his work in order to enhance the understanding of his difficult poetic creations. Along these lines Hickman explores Musil's diary notes as forerunners of his main creative publications . It is a most valuable achievement of the book that it tries to outline the complex geistesgeschichtliche background in which Musil's work is rooted...