Konstruktive Melancholie: Robert Musils Roman ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ und die Grenzen des modernen Geschlechterdiskurses by Peter C. Pohl (review)

Peter Pohl’s Konstruktive Melancholie is an essential contribution to Musil scholarship and an important one to literary gender studies and Central European intellectual history. This erudite book analyzes gender discourses in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in enlightening and original ways, after preparing the ground by examining philosophical and literary precursors from Rousseau onward. The title implicitly poses two fundamental questions that the book needs to, and does, clear up: What is “constructive melancholy,” and what does it have to do with modern gender discourse?

“Melancholy” for Pohl is not primarily psychological, but philosophical, social, and textual. It is the emotional, intellectual, and discursive response to the breakdown of grands recits (Lyotard) in modernity and modernism, the realization that an understanding of the human predicament cannot be simplified, summarized, or subjected to a system but will always be multifarious, complex, and ongoing.

“Constructive melancholy” turns disillusionment into a literary method that demonstrates, through complex human interaction, how and why explanatory systems are inadequate and inconclusive. Pohl writes: “Der MoE evoziert nicht nur melancholische Stimmungen durch die Thematisierung scheiternder Sinnambitionen und misslingender Utopien; er nimmt vielmehr eine präzise Funktion in der Geschichte der Melancholie ein und bildet den Übergang von der elitären Geisteshaltung […] zu einem allgemeinen Gefühl des Verdrusses” (15). The intellectual weariness of modernisms like nihilism, decadence, and aestheticism becomes a generalized chagrin as liberalism, industrialism, positivism, nationalism, and gender conventions exhibit their limitations. Pohl also shows that Musil’s responses to such limitations, “Möglichkeitsdenken” (essayism, the ethics of the next step, precision and soul) and Utopia (“der andere Zustand” and Ulrich and Agathe’s experimental society of two), do not alleviate melancholy but activate its critical potential.

What does this have to do with gender discourse? Rather than examining all of the -isms in the novel, Pohl concentrates on a central set of discourses that entails all of them: gender. He writes: “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften ist Beispiel konstruktiver Melancholie, weil sein konstruktiver Geist modernen Möglichkeits- und Utopie-Denkens im Angesicht realer Ausweglosigkeit ein ästhetisches Wissen des nicht zu Symbolisierenden, ein Wissen von Endlichkeit, Tod und Erlöschen, generiert. Es gilt nun diese These an einem der Sinngeber der Moderne, dem Geschlechterdiskurs, zu bestätigen” (30).

To prepare his analysis, Pohl spends the second section (a quarter of the book) tracing ideas of gender as they developed from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, showing the interplay of natural and biological explanations with philosophical, sociological, literary, and psychological accounts of gender difference. Rousseau, modern biology, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wedekind each get a chapter, and the section ends with a chapter on psychopathology, sexology, and psychoanalysis. (My only broader criticism is that this section rarely refers to Musil.) Pohl summarizes his authoritative scrutiny and historical comparison of these diverse accounts of gender difference by describing the pluralistic situation that Musil inherits: “Entgegen des eigenen, jeweils geäußerten Anspruchs, die Krise der Unterscheidungen zu lösen, die Komplexität der Gesellschaftzu reduzieren, tragen die heterogenen Lösungsvorschläge zu ihrer Verschärfung bei” (179). None of these proposed solutions becomes fundamental, but all of them are in play, and it is this play that Musil represents in fiction.

Part Three is devoted to gender discourses in the novel. Pohl proceeds from (1) bourgeois gender roles (Diotima and Arnheim, and his model Rathenau), to (2) aesthetic gender roles (Walter and Clarisse), to (3) the development of Ulrich’s polysemic masculine identity, to (4) Ulrich and Agathe’s experiment in transgression against bourgeois family, legal, and especially gender roles.

This book is so densely and carefully constructed that any synopsis would necessarily be a distortion. Suffice it to say that Pohl usefully and critically brings together poststructuralist, postmodern, and feminist theories. His reading of theory not only illuminates Musil, but his reading of Musil also illuminates theory. Pohl...