Musil’s Novelistic Essayism: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and the History of Its Genre

Robert Musil and his major novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften have long been treated as novelistic outsiders by Musil critics and historians of the novel. Reflecting this view, terms such as essayism have come to dominate criticism on MoE. Arguing for a revised understanding of this term, the author puts forth evidence of Musil’s deep engagement with the history of the novel and shows how Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’s macro-structure, chronotopes, types, and economy of desire link the novel to a long history of the genre from Heliodorus and Chrétiens to Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Proust. From this perspective, the author offers a new reading of Musil’s essayism that centers the “novelistic” in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.