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Military institutions, figures and values in the novels of Robert Musil : a contribution to the interpretation of Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torless and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

University of British Columbia

This study is predicated upon observations regarding the prominent role which military institutions, figures and values play both in Robert Musil's life and in his two novels, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi and Per Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Where Musil's own personal involvements with the military are events exerting noticeable effect upon the development of his thought, so episodes Involving responses to the military are major components,, of each novel's plot which reveal and effect developments central to both works. In Musil's diaries, essays and novels, furthermore, military institutions, figures and values typify ideas and attitudes which Musil found widespread in contemporary society and which he held to be an expression of one basic mode of thought and experience. By analyzing the references to the military in Musil's personal writings and novels, this study provides not only an outline of his description and evaluation of the military, but also demonstrates in detail the representative significance which its qualities and values had for him. It shows how the military not only represents that society of which it is a supporting part, but also expresses in extreme form one side of that antithesis of existence which is a central theme of all of his works and designated here with conceptual pairs such as "rationality and mysticism," "exactitude and soul" or "forcefulness and love." By investigating the individual responses to the military depicted in these works, this study facilitates a close examination of those social and existential problems in the presentation of which the military performs this representative function. In this way it provides an approach to the interpretation and comparison of the two novels as treatments of a theme central to Musil's works since his earliest creative efforts: of that confrontation, namely, between the sensitive individual and a reality grown problematic in its irreconcilable antithesis of "forcefulness and love." The examination of Musil's own reactions to the military (in Chapter One) outlines the development of his complex response to that social establishment of which that institution is one element and, more important, to that way of thinking of which military and society are an expression. The examination of each title-figure in this respect (in Chapter Two and Three) reveals in detail his struggle with life's "true and apparently ineluctable antithesis," and enables a comparison of the two works which demonstrates how the social ramifications of this underlying existential problem grow in significance and complexity in the course of Musil's work on the two novels. The three central chapters show the act of "desertion"—of flight from the military-like approach to matters—to be the first and all-important step toward knowing both sides of life's polarity, and indicate that the pattern of "desertions" and returns upon which each novel is structured expresses the essence of Musil's views on the possibilities of coming to terms with this antithetical totality of life. Because this study contributes to the discussion of themes, motifs and episodes which Musil-criticism of the last decades has shown to be important, the notes to this study (pp. 365-551) contain an extensive critical apparatus outlining positions taken in the secondary literature on ideas put forward here.

Text

2010-02-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20207

Germanic Studies

University of British Columbia

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