STUDIEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN

LITERATUR Band 90

Herausgegeben von Wilfried Barner, Richard Brinkmann

und Conrad Wiedemann
Stephen D. Dowden

Sympathy for the Abyss

A Study in the Novel of German Modernism:
Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Thomas Mann

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1986

This book was published with the help of a grant from the Frederick W. Hilles Publi-
cation Fund of Yale University.

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Dowden, Stephen D.: Sympathy for the abyss : a study in the novel of German
modernism: Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Thomas Mann / Stephen D. Dowden. -
Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1986.
(Studien zur deutschen Literatur ; Bd. 90)
NE: GT

I S B N 3-484-18090-0 I S S N 0081-7236

© Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1986

Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Ohne Genehmigung des Verlages ist es nicht gestattet, dieses
Buch oder Teile daraus photomechanisch zu vervielfältigen. Printed in Germany.
Satz: pagina G m b H , Tübingen
Druck: Allgäuer Zeitungsverlag, Kempten
Einband: Heinr. Koch, Tübingen
Table of Contents

Introduction:
Eurydice Lost ι

I. The Modernist Turn 5

II. Viennese Baroque:

Temporality and Allegory in Die Schlafwandler of
Hermann Broch 27

III. The Cloud of Polonius:

Rewriting Reality in Robert Musil's Mann ohne Eigenschaften ... 57

IV. The Lamentation of Josef K.:

Conscience and Irony in Kafka's Prozefi 94

V. In the Crystal Garden:

The Replenishment of Art and the Ecology of Man in
Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus 135

VI. Epilogue:
The Quixotic Word 176

Bibliography 187
For my parents
Steve H. Dowden & Dell E. Dowden
INTRODUCTION: Eurydice Lost

Die So-geliebte, daß aus einer Leier

mehr Klage kam als je aus Klagefrauen.
Rilke, »Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes«

It is revealing that, at least since Nietzsche, the modern writer has

frequently envisioned himself as an avatar of his earliest mythic pre-
cursor. Before Proust it was Orpheus who went in search of time lost,
and because he indulged himself in this presumptuous and hopeless
quest - condensed into the image of a fateful backward glance - he was
made to suffer not once but twice the loss of his beloved wife Eurydice.
In his redoubled grief, Orpheus became a singer of lamentations for his
lost wife. The poet's word is thus an act of rememoration, but it is more
than simple expression of nostalgia. Humbled but undaunted, the poet
sings now not to recover the past, but to understand it. His lamentation
is the negative articulation of a powerful Utopian longing. It is a cry of
outrage, an eloquent refusal to accept the world as it is.
A related sense of loss draws the modernist writer to his legendary
counterpart. An epoch that witnessed not only unprecedented upheav-
als in its systems of beliefs and values but also experienced undreamt-of
political bestiality in the shape of two World Wars found itself bereft of
the fundament that had traditionally made artwork the work of cel-
ebration. The motivations and assumptions that nourished the imagi-
nation of Schiller and Beethoven cannot not ring true in the era of
Kafka and Berg. In the absence of joy and beauty, in the absence of
Eurydice, celebration has been transformed into lamentation. Yet
Adorno's dark pronouncement - that there can be no poetry after
Auschwitz - stands not so much as a denial of the possibility of art it-
self; it is much more an index to the indecency of perpetuating a tra-
dition predicated on ideals of beauty that history has swept away. After
the death of Eurydice, lamentation is not only possible, it is necessary.
Perhaps this aesthetic of loss and lamentation is nowhere more con-
spicuous than in the novel of German modernism: as an oppressive
absence of beauty in Kafka; as the relentless demystification of cher-

1
ished illusions in Musil and Broch; or as that ubiquitous »sympathy for
the abyss« in the fiction of Thomas Mann, a paradoxical sympathy that
reaches its profoundest and most chilling expression in Adrian Lever-
kühn's articulate cry of pain, Dr. Fausti Weheklag - a lamentation
written on the loss of the composer's young nephew.
But even when the novel does not take up lamentation as an explicit
theme, it enacts its sense of loss formally as the revolt against illusion
and representation, as the dissatisfaction of the novel with its tradition
and with itself.1 It is by now a critical commonplace that the general
current of modern fiction in .the wake of Cervantes, Sterne, and the
German Romantics has been against the idea that art is a verisimilar
replica of the world. This trend is most fully developed in the fiction of
modernism and in its post-modern aftermath. The modernist novel typ-
ically meditates on and unmasks by means of irony its artistic-artificial
nature. The modernist generation of novelists were deeply suspicious of
mimesis in the received sense of a fictional illusion that seeks to attain
the fullest possible correspondence to perceived reality. Nevertheless, it
seems likely that much postmodern talk about the »death of literature«
and the »failure of representation« has been overstated and insuffi-
ciently differenciated. Undone on one hand by the autotelic play of
signifiers, and on the other by political culpability, literature in the
modern and post-modern era has been proclaimed opaque or dead or
both. Yet the nihilistic anti-realism of modernist writing that has given
rise to these positions is simultaneously an opening up of art to new
possibilities of expression, a contribution toward what is spoken of in
Doktor Faustus as the »Rekonstruktion des Ausdrucks.«
Given that the modernist novel insists emphatically on aesthetic au-
tonomy, and granted that it gathers much of its energy from an irony
that seeks to undercut the conventional wisdom that the novel can be a
mirror held up along the road of life, it is reasonable to suggest that we
as readers ought to address this fiction not primarily as a »representa-
tion of reality« but instead as the imaginative articulation of a counter-
reality. Seen in this light, the putative failure of representation is not
really one at all; sanctimonious obituaries on the death of literature are
premature. Far from being undone by the destruction of time-honored
assumptions, the novel thrives in the clearing that has opened up, and
the seeming »failure« turns out to be the very condition of the possi-
bility of well imagined fiction. Emancipated from the obligation to de-

1
See esp. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, hrsg. von Gretel Adorno
und Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag,
1981), 168-79.

2
scribe the world as it is, the literary mind is free to render as word and
image our sensibilities of what ought to be. This hermeneutic challenge
demands a renewal of our concept of mimesis toward what is, in Robert
Musil's phrase, »ein auf >Herstellung< gerichteter Vorgang, ein >Vor-
bildzauber,< und keine Wiederholung des Lebens oder von Ansichten
darüber, die man ohne sie besser ausdrückt.. .«.2
Ironically, it is the poetic word's Utopian separation from mere real-
ity that is fundamental to a mimetic project that reaches beyond the
confines of a narrowly conceived verisimilar realism. As Paul Ricoeur
has written with elegance and precision: »The more imagination devi-
ates from that which is called reality in ordinary language and vision,
the more it approaches the heart of reality which is no longer the world
of manipulable objects, but the world into which we try to orient our-
selves by projecting our innermost possibilities upon it, in order that we
dwell there, in the strongest sense of that word.« 3 This view motivates
the studies that follow. They are an attempt to elaborate the ways in
which certain major novelists in the era of German modernism have
worked to break down the traditional constraints of representational
mimesis in order more fully to explore the other mimesis, the one that
Ricoeur invokes.
From this perspective, literary expression is not the recuperative imi-
tation of reality - a Nachvollzug of the world's apparent objectivity -
but is instead a constitutive activity in itself, the Vollzug of a gesture
that reconstrues the world according to the principles of narrative
imagination. Fiction is thus one of the means whereby a culture dis-
closes to itself the indistinct contours of its ever-emerging ethos. Art in
general and narrative in particular function to preserve, but also to
re-shape and replenish the values and attitudes that make up our Le-
benswelt ; and the act of interpretation marks the site at which dialogue
occurs between literary monuments of the past and critical imagination
of the present. It is here that the difficult question of hermeneutics and
interpretive method arises.
Because fiction and criticism both are historically conditioned, and
because any new voice in the conversation between them is necessarily
preceded by the history of that dialogue, I have chosen to enter the
hermeneutic circle at a historical point of embarcation. Chapter One

2
Robert Musil, »Literat und Literatur,« in his Gesammelte Werke in neun
Bänden, hrsg. ν. Adolf Frise, vol. 8 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978),
1224-25.
3
Paul Ricoeur, »The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,« Man and World,
12 (1979), 139. Cf. also After Babel. Aspects of Literature and Translation
(New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 227-35.

3
offers an account of the background and development of the idea of
literary modernism - what the Germanists sometimes refer to as »die
klassische Moderne« - in its relation to the German novel. The essays
that follow it are fueled especially by the notion that, for the modernist,
there exists between narrative fiction and conventional reality a great
rift. Probably the simplest generalization to be made about German
modernism is that its novel tends to reflect ironically in theme and
structure on its own fictional status. The uses of irony as metafiction
and autocommentary will the be the object of special attention through-
out this inquiry and, it may be added, what holds true for narrative
fiction certainly also holds true for narrative criticism. It too must be
aware of its mediated nature. Like the fiction it addresses, criticism is
also the product of a historical time and place, a confluence of the
manifold »Vorverständnisse« that converge on and inform the reason-
ing of critical imagination. Ironic fiction ought to evoke an ironic re-
sponse, if »ironic« in this context may be understood as a healthy self-
critical skepticism expressed as a willingness to make serious and bind-
ing assertions (response implies responsibility) without striking a pos-
ture of rigid finality.
Apart from the German modernist's characteristic irony and the var-
ious other aspects of these novels that the literary historian can neatly
categorize, there exists a powerful yet indistinct pivotal center that pulls
these works into concentric orbits. It is what might be described as a
certain ethical sensibility that becomes articulate in modernist fiction
as the expression of grief and lamentation. It is a sensibility that resists
conceptual definition, that must be brought to language as metaphor
and fiction. It will be the task of the chapters that follow to trace out the
contours of this sensibility.
It is a central insight of German modernism that imaginative lit-
erature - and, by way of extrapolation, the criticism that proceeds from
it - does not fix and define. Instead it is an evocation of, and invitation
to creative thinking. I have attempted to approach Franz Kafka, Her-
mann Broch, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann as a listener attentive to
the overriding historical features that join them together as German
modernists, but I have also attempted to draw out the unique particu-
larities of their works that make them distinct and irreducible to a set
of prefabricated literary categories. For this reason each of the follow-
ing essays can also stand alone as a study whose line of inquiry con-
forms to the individuality and integrity of the text in question.

4
CHAPTER I

THE MODERNIST TURN

Storytelling in one form or another is a mode of behavior that is basic

to mankind. Sacred narrative, tribal myth, fables, heroic epic, the sagas,
chivalric romance, and the other ways of telling tales always belong to
specific times and places, serving to mediate the world to a given com-
munity. The novel is European modernity's most characteristic narra-
tive medium, and it has risen to its place of prominence for two main
reasons. The first reason is the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, a broad
social class with the education, leisure time, and financial wherewithal
necessary to make use of the books that the relatively new craft of
printing had made available. 1 The second precondition of the novel's
widespread popularity is its characteristically »realist« mode. The genre
began by distinguishing its themes and forms from the fantasies and
mannerisms of courtly romance. 2 In contradistinction to romance, the

' Ian Watt, »The Reading Public and the Novel,« in The Rise of the Novel.
Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus,
1957), pp. 35-59. Watt discusses only the English novel, but it is reasonable to
assume that his thesis holds true for the European novel in general. Cf. also
Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn. A Study of Five French Realists (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 31-39. On the specific German situation see
Marianne Spiegel, Der Roman und sein Publikum im 18. Jahrhundert 1700-
1767, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik, und Literaturwissenschaft, 41
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1967); Leo Balet and E. Gerhard, Die Verbürgerlichung der
deutschen Kunst, Literatur und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert, hrsg. v. Gert Mat-
tenklott, Ullstein Buch, 2995 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1973), esp. pp.
464-68.
2
Ian Watt, »Realism and the Novel Form,« in his Rise of the Novel, pp. 9-34.
Cf. Levin, 39-48. It is not clear why the German novel did not develop a
strong tradition of its own, especially after Grimmelshausen's contribution in
the seventeenth century. Not until the English novel of the eighteenth centu-
ry had provided a model did German novel-writing establish itself with Wie-
land, Goethe, and the Romantics. For the nineteenth century in general it
was the realism of the eighteenth-century novel and not its irony that was
exemplary (the German Romantics and Gogol are notable exceptions). Ver-
isimilar realism gradually edged out elements of the marvelous and the fanta-
stic even in German as the fabulous world of Ε. T. A. Hoffmann yielded to
the sober portraiture of Theodor Fontane. See Hildegard Emmel, Geschichte

5
novel emphasizes the individuality of plausible characters and events,
and abandons the standardized plots, settings, and figures of the chiv-
alric world. It also rejects the decorous language of the courtly epic so
that it can address its audience in the more down-to-earth idiom of
prose.
Cervantes' Don Quixote stands at the beginning of the novel's tra-
dition. In it we witness the resonant clash of two ancient foes locked in
combat. One of them is the fabulous world of proud knights, winsome
maidens, and noble ideals fading endlessly into the twilight of imagi-
nary worlds. Its sworn enemy is the prosaic or even brutal factuality of
the world outside books. The demystifying vision of Don Quixote re-
veals the heroes and monsters and fine ladies of romance to be phan-
tasms of literary dream-reality. It sets in opposition to them a world of
men and women engaged in the toil of everyday existence, a world in
which the line separating books from life seems as clear as the dif-
ference between a common barber's basin and the legendary helmet of
Mambrino. The realism of Don Quixote and of the genre of the novel
as a whole is to be sought first of all in its fidelity to the facts of
ordinary life and in its antagonism toward the unfulfilled wishes of
romantic fancy.
Cervantes' work also stands at the beginning of an era with an un-
precedented interest in establishing the facts. This demand for the ver-
ifiable truth of things unencumbered by myth and magic is the rise of
empirical rationalism. Between 1600 and 1800 the scientific revolution
conceived and exploited a method of discovering the facts that was
more rigorous and more reliable than any previous technique in his-
tory. Observing nature with an impartial eye, the scientific mind set
about the task of discovering and modelling nature's objective laws in
the precise language of mathematics. The crowning achievement of this
style of thinking was the formulation of Newtonian mechanics, state-
ments about the physical world that unambiguously and impartially
represent actual events. The verifiable certainty of a correspondence
between a model and an objective event became the criterion for vali-
dity in scientific knowledge. Something is said to be true when there is
isomorphy between a fact and its representation.
Such a notion of truth has a direct bearing on the claims of literary
narrative. The demand that legends and tales must in some way be

des deutschen Romans, Sammlung Dalp, 103, I (Bern, München: Franke,

1972), pp. 58-146; Fritz Wahrenburg, Funktionswandel des Romans und äs-
thetische Norm, Studien zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwis-
senschaft, 11 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), pp. 119-131; Bruno Hillebrand, Theo-
rie des Romans, I (München: Winkler, 1972).

6
truthful is no doubt as old as storytelling itself, but the idea that a story
ought to legitimize its truth-claims in a verifiable correspondence to
facts is probably an expectation as recent as the scientific revolution
and the birth of the novel. 3 When Cervantes submitted the fictional
world of romance to the test of correspondence with reality, poetic
imagination became suspect. Throughout the Christian Middle Ages
truth had expressed itself as divine revelation in Holy Scripture and in
the Book of Nature. God presided over the unity of things and au-
thenticated the forms of knowledge as an unscientific code of resem-
blances. Language - the stuff of literature - was also a part of the divine
order, even after the unpleasantness at Babel had clouded its pristine
clarity. After Babel, an ars interpretandi founded in the hermeneutical
learning of tradition made it possible to unlock the signs and make
them speak their truth. But when in the course of a few decades man-
kind's relationship to nature changed and divine authority began to
slacken, both language and nature were cut loose from their theocentric
moorings. Science and humanism began to regard them not in their
relation to God but instead in their relation to man himself and the
new practices of representation, experimentation, and verification.
The subsequent fortunes of narrative are closely linked to the success
of science and technology. The old hermeneutical skills and knowledge,
symbolic and allegorical habits of mind, and the traditional faith in the
word took on an air of quixotry. The novel offered a new kind of
fiction, one that purported to mirror the moral, social, and psycholo-
gical facts of the world. Certainly there are also novels that reject »rea-
lism,« but on the whole the popular success of the genre has to do with
its nearness to the facts of lived experience. The outrageous wit and
fancy of the Romantic novel provoked the same snort of disgust in the
nineteenth-century realists that the lofty tomfoolery of Renaissance
epic had engendered in Cervantes. No Romantic novel is a serious chal-
lenge to the achievement of the great novels of nineteenth-century real-
ism.
It is surely no coincidence that principles of verisimilar representa-
tion triumphed over Romantic fabulation in a century that committed
itself fully to science and technology in an Industrial Revolution whose
influence touched virtually every aspect of public and private life. A

3
This proposition cannot be proven with certainty, but Michel Foucault has
offered persuasive arguments that situate an important shift in literary ex-
pectations in the waning sixteenth century. Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books,
1973), esp. chapter two. Foucault follows up his specifically literary thoughts
in »La pensee du dehors,« Critique, 22 (1966), 523-46.

7
preference for the representation of real life dominated more than ever
the reading public's tastes. In France, England, and even in mystical
Russia the novel became, in Stendhal's phrase, a mirror held up along
the road of life. However, the situation in the German-speaking coun-
tries was somewhat different. For reasons that are still not entirely
clear, the realist novel did not rise to the position of predominance that
it held in Europe's other major literary languages. In spite of its general
popularity, the German novel remained inferior in prestige - and pro-
bably in actual achievement as well - to lyric and drama. 4 Nevertheless,
the powerful current of European realism pulled along the German
novel in spite of its relative laggardliness.
By the end of the century, the realist mode's latent scientism became
overt in Naturalism's programmatic stance. The new generation of writ-
ers turned to the positivistic-materialistic theories of the natural and
social sciences in order to find secure foundations upon which to erect
the edifice of a new art. The model of Zola was decisive for much of the
literary intelligentsia throughout Europe. His quasi-objective descrip-
tions of individual problems and of social conditions were persuasive
by virtue of the aura of factuality that surrounded them. But the crucial
factor in their rhetorical effect was not so much any truly scientific
approach; it was much more the foregone conclusion that truth in fic-
tion was a matter of accurate representation of the facts. The literary
term mimesis as it is customarily used refers to this prejudice.
The German novel emerged from its provincial isolation into the
European mainstream in 1901 with the publication of Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks. It was received as an objective depiction of modern
decadence; and in fact the correspondence between fact and fancy in it
was accurate enough to outrage the Lübeck burghers who took the
novel to be a libelous roman ä clef. This little controversy can be un-
derstood as a pivotal moment in the history of the German novel. Tho-
mas Mann began his career as a writer at a time when realist/naturalist
assumptions dominated the serious novel. The commercial and aca-
demic success of the Buddenbrooks at the time of its publication is a
testament to the conventional expectations of the era. 5 Against this
background, Mann responded to accusations that his novel was a

4
Cf. Helmut Koopmann, »Vom Epos und vom Roman,« in Handbuch des
deutschen Romans, hrsg. ν. H.K. (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1983), pp. 11-30.
s
Not only was Buddenbrooks readily accepted into the academic canon of
major literary works, but it was also Germany's number-one bestseller be-
tween 1915 and 1940. Donald Ray Richards, The German Bestseller. A Com-
plete Bibliography and Analysis 1915-1940, German Studies in America, 2
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1968), pp. 55.

8
slanderous transcription of Lübeck reality by writing a newspaper arti-
cle entitled »Bilse und Ich« (1906). In it Mann defends his novelistic
practices by reminding his readers of the obvious: a rigorous distinction
must be made between reality and the fictional shadow that it casts. A
work of art, he claims, lives not by the virtue of its correspondence to
the facts but in its own aesthetic right, autonomously. 6 Mann does not
elaborate in any precise way exactly what he considers the aesthetic
quiddity of a literary artwork to be. But it is highly significant that he
has relegated to a position of lesser importance the criterion of accu-
rately representing the supposed facts. Even in a novel as obviously
»realistic« as Buddenbrooks, it is not the factuality of the fictional
world that is ultimately interesting. It is much more its suggestive
counterfactuality - the part of it that is sheerly and provocatively ima-
ginary - that appeals to our natural sense of the aesthetic.
By the time Thomas Mann wrote Buddenbrooks, the realistic trend
of the nineteenth-century novel had become a dogma. But as Thomas
Mann realized, the essence of narrative fiction is not and cannot lie
principally in the much-invoked concept of an imitation of nature. The
fate of Biblical narrative in the modern period exemplifies the far-
reaching consequences of a literature that restricts itself to copying ap-
pearances. The idea that art - including sacred texts - ought to repre-
sent verifiable facts led to a crisis from which theology has not yet
recovered entirely. Its solution is a matter of concern to literary critics
as well as theologians. If the Bible is not a record of facts, if it must be
»demythologized,« how are we to understand it, if at all?
In answer to this question, Rudolf Bultmann's thesis is centrally im-
portant. He proposes that Scripture is not primarily a representation of
reality but is instead an articulation of the conditions and possibilities

6
1 wish to make clear that by »aesthetic autonomy« there are two things I do
not mean. First of all, I do not intend to join the tradition that subscribes to a
notion of the artwork as an elevated object of disinterested contemplation in
the manner of Kant and Schiller. Secondly, I do not intend to suggest that an
artwork is a sheerly beautiful artifact that exists apart from ethical and truth
claims (/'art pour lart). A work of art is a kind of impassioned game in which
the meaning of human being is always at stake to a greater or lesser degree. It
is a field of play upon which real decisions are made in unreal situations. The
rules of the game are contingent upon the exigencies of life lived in the
present and on hopes projected into the future. The ludic dimension is the
point of conjuncture for art and life. Each is the result of an ongoing process
of shaping, submitted only to the authority of imagination within the para-
meters of creativity defined by history and tradition. It is a reenactment of
nature's own movement through time, an evolutionary becoming that is out-
side of finality.

9
for a spiritually sound existence in the world. 7 His solution is in need of
much clarification, but it is no doubt a step in the right direction, and it
7
Insofar as literary criticism wishes to become more than a descriptive dis-
cipline it will be necessary for it to develop a hermeneutic program that is as
binding for secular literature of the modern era as was the Biblical her-
meneutics of former times. In the same way that Holy Scripture once reflec-
ted the mind of man and his place in a theocentric universe, so also does the
secular literary canon reflect the essence of man in the modern world. Li-
teraturwissenschaft must develop the critical tools it needs to discuss these
essential matters in a direct, coherent, and non-dogmatic fashion. The sphere
of ethics is an obvious example of one of the categories of essence that is
omnipresent in literature but that contemporary literary criticism has little to
say about. In the present study there is a strong interest in the presence of
ethical considerations in the modernist novel. It stems not from a theological
frame of reference but instead out of a cryptic comment that Ludwig Witt-
genstein and Robert Musil made independently of each other, namely that
ethics and aesthetics are identical.* However, this undercurrent remains
largely submerged because literary criticism is not at present equipped
methodologically to deal with these knotty issues.** Musil's work is a con-
crete example: it is clear that he was vitally interested in the nature of the
relationship between literature and »the good.« But literary criticism - func-
tioning under the aegis of the historical-critical method - can determine only
what Musil said and wrote. Its tacit aim is to reconstruct Musil's intentions in
textual exegesis. But it cannot offer a scientific judgment concerning the
truth of the text's claims nor even concerning its beauty (the feeling of em-
barrassment that this last word generates is an index to a conspicuous pro-
blem in literary criticism, which after all is a branch of aesthetics). If Li-
teraturwissenschaft is to become a Wissenschaft that is epistemologically,
ethically, and aesthetically responsible, it must also be able to take a critically
reflected stand on the truth-claims of literature. It is for this reason that I
invoke the name of Rudolf Bultmann. He and his successors - e.g. Ernst
Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling, or Eberhard Jüngel - are theologians who have
made significant contributions to a Biblical hermeneutics that stresses the
priority of Scripture as a narrative phenomenon. Secular literary hermeneu-
tics can learn much from the advances they have made toward a science of
the Word as an articulation of the »essence« of man and his place in the order
of things. Rudolf Bultmann, Glauben und Verstehen, 4 Bde. (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1933ff); Ernst Fuchs, Marburger Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr,
1968); Gerhard Ebeling, Wort und Glaube, 3 Bde. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960ff.);
Eberhard Jüngel, »Metaphorische Wahrheit. Erwägungen zur theologischen
Relevanz der Metapher als Beitrag zur Hermeneutik einer narrativen Theo-
logie,« Evangelische Theologie, Sonderheft (1974), pp. 71-122. By way of in-
troduction to the relationship between literary criticism and contemporary
theology see Richard Brinkmann, Max Seckler, Paul Ricoeur, and Jakob J.
Petuchowski, »Literarische und religiöse Sprache,« Christlicher Glaube in
moderner Gesellschaft, Enzyklopädische Bibliothek in 30 Teilbänden, hrsg. v.
Franz Böckle, et al., Bd. 2 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1981), pp. 71-130.
* Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, edition suhrkamp, 12
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 113: »Ethik und Ästhetik sind
Eins.« Robert Musil, Tagebücher, hrsg. v. Adolf Frise (Reinbek bei Ham-

10
is an insight of great relevance to literary criticism. The novel of mod-
ernism presents the literary critic with a problem that is similar to
Bultmann's. I will attempt in the following chapters to show that the
modernist trend away from so-called »mimetic realism« amounts to a
demythologization of the idea that narrative is first and foremost a
representation of reality. Because the modernists were acutely aware of
the limits of representation, they attempted to find ways of superseding
these limits in order to address the more elusive aspects of life, espe-
cially the ethical.
For the moment, it is important to offer a working definition of what
constitutes the »modernism« of a novel. Principally, it is a reaction
against the quixotry of dogmatic realism, against the positivistic opti-
mism that narrative fiction can really be the impartial reflection of
objective reality. Within this general framework at least three charac-
teristic traits are discernible. The first of these is a critique of the tra-
ditional concept of a stable, objective reality. The second is a critique of
the idea of representation in language and literature. The third is the
valorization of subjectivity as the new locus of reality. These tropisms -
the turn away from external reality, the linguistic turn, and the inward
turn - are familiar topoi in the literary criticism that the novel of mod-
ernism has generated. 8 But the literature on this topic is so diffuse,
especially in Germanistics, that a short summary of these categories is
not superfluous.

burg: Rowohlt, 1976), p. 777: »Ich habe von Jugend an das Ästhetische als
Ethik betrachtet.«
** Dietmar Mieth's idea of a »narrative ethics« is an interesting exception to
the rule. D.M., Epik und Ethik: Eine theologisch-ethische Interpretation der
Joseph-Romane Thomas Manns, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 47 (Tübin-
gen: Niemeyer, 1976).
8
The term »modernism« is not current in German literary criticism, but its
characteristic features are well known and much discussed. The following list
of studies includes both those which use the term and those which do not. It
should be noted that literary modernism is related to but not identical with
the movement in Catholic theology that bears the same name and also began
around 1900. For relevant discussions of literary modernism see: T.S. Eliot,
»The Modern Mind,« in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies
in the Relation of Poetry to Criticism in England (London: Faber and Faber,
1933), pp. 113-35; Wolfgang Kayser, »Die Anfänge des Romans im 18. Jahr-
hundert und seine heutige Krise,« DVjs, 28 (1954), 417-46; Paul Kluckhohn,
»Die Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert in der deutschen Dichtung,« DVjs,
29 (1955), 1-19; Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge: Bowes &
Bowes, 1952); Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion. Essays on the Novel,
trans. Maria Jolas (New York: George Braziller, 1963), orig. pub. in French as
L'ere du Soupfon, (Paris, 1956); Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-

11
1. W i r k l i c h k e i t s v e r l u s t

Wirklichkeit - Europas
dämonischer Begriff: glücklich
nur jene Zeitalter und
Generationen, in denen es
eine unbezweifelbare g a b . . . .
Gottfried Benn 9

»It goes without saying that you will not be able to write a good novel
unless you possess the sense of reality.« 10 Such was Henry James' opin-

Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass. and London:The Belknap

Press of Harvard, 1968), orig. pub. in Italian as Teoria dell' arte d' avanguar-
dia (Societä editrice il Mulino, 1962); Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the
Modern, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963); Erich Kahler, »The Transfor-
mation of Modern Fiction,« Comparative Literature, 7 (1955), 121-28, »Un-
tergang und Übergang der epischen Kunstform,« Neue Rundschau, 64 (1953),
1-44, »Die Verinnerung des Erzählens,« Neue Rundschau, 68 (1957), 501-46
and, 70 (1959), 1-54, 177-220; Georg Lukäcs, Wider den mißverstandenen
Realismus (Hamburg: Claasen, 1958), esp. 13-48; Irving Howe, »The Culture
of Modernism,« in his Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1963), 1-33; Harry Levin, »What Was Modernism?« in his Refrac-
tions. Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1966), 271-95; John Barth, »The Literature of Exhaustion,« The Atlantic,
Aug. 1967, pp. 29-34, »The Literature of Replenishment,« The Atlantic, Jan.
1980, pp. 65-71; Gerhard Bauer, »Die >Auflösung des anthropozentrischen
Verhaltens< im modernen Roman,« DVjs, 42 (1968), 677-701; Theodore Ziol-
kowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1969); Maurice Beebe, »What Modernism Was,« Journal of Modern Litera-
ture, 3 (1974), 1065-84; Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1977); Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht, »Modern, Modernität, Moderne,« in Geschichtliche Grundbe-
griffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland,
hrsg. v. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhard Koselleck, Bd. 4 (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1978), 93-131; Modernism 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury
and James McFarlane (Sussex: Harvester/New Jersey: Humanities, 1978);
Peter Faulkner, Modernism, The Critical Idiom, 35 (London, New York:
Methuen, 1980); Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Mit einem Nachwort
zur 2. Aufl., edition suhrkamp, 727 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981);
Beatrice Sandberg, »Der Roman zwischen 1910 und 1930,« and Joseph Strei-
ke, »Der Roman zwischen 1930 und 1945,« both in Handbuch des deutschen
Romans, hrsg. v. Helmut Koopmann (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1983), 489-529.
9
Gottfried Benn, »Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts,« in his Gesam-
melte Werke in zwei Bänden, hrsg. v. Dieter Wellershoff, Bd. 2 (Wiesbaden:
Limes, 1968), p. 1841.
10
Henry James, »The Art of Fiction,« in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays,
with an Intro, by Morris Roberts (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), p.
10.

12
ion in the 1880's. But only a generation later another author, the fic-
titious novelist of Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler trilogy, doubts that
such a thing as the >sense of reality< even exists: »Hat dieses verzerrte
Leben noch Wirklichkeit? Hat diese hypertrophische Wirklichkeit
noch Leben?«" His attitude is typical for writers of the modernist gen-
eration, the novelists who came of age between 1900 and the First
World War. For them, objective reality had lost its accustomed fixity in
an era of unprecedented change and shocking brutality. The authority
of social and political institutions, the inviolability of religious beliefs,
the indivisibility of the human psyche, and even the finality of time and
space all proved to be static fictions that history and chance had im-
posed upon the flux of things in the world.
Looking back into recent history, this generation could see that the
optimism of the Gründerzeit in Wilhelminian Germany and Habsburg
Austria had been ill founded. The catastrophe of 1914-1918 and the
subsequent rise of fascism meant not only the final dissolution of the
old order but it also cast into doubt the entire ideology of progress and
prosperity that animated enlightened bourgeois culture. At the same
time, anthropologists began to spread knowledge of non-Western cul-
tures, knowledge that served to undermine the authority of traditional
European customs and assumptions. In particular, bourgeois manners
and morality were revealed to be conventions grounded in cultural tra-
dition instead of in a metaphysical absolute. Nietzsche abbreviated this
decline and fall of the absolute as the »death of God.« War in Europe,
revolution in Russia, international economic depression, political in-
stability, cultural relativity and a general atmosphere of nervous ex-
haustion threw the era into a state of concentrated turmoil. It is not
surprising that for many people »reality« began to seem a remote and
phantomlike ideal.
Something like a large-scale schizophrenia settled in on the Euro-
pean mind at certain crucial junctures. One of these junctures, though
not the only one, was literary imagination. The experience of isolation,
madness and despair is commonplace in the literature of modernism,
but in order to situate this literature historically it ought to be helpful to
point out briefly some of the other flashpoints at which the crisis ap-
pears in sharp relief. In the interest of simplicity, I will invoke the
names of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Einstein as symbols for the lost
sense of reality.

" Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler, in the Kommentierte Werkausgabe,

hrsg. v. Paul Michael Lützeler, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975),
p. 418.

13
 The Marxian critique of ideology codified for future generations the
concepts of alienation and false consciousness. The idea that the eco-
nomic, political, and social conditions of industrial Europe had brought
about the estrangement of modern man from his old familiar place in
the natural order of things was not new with Marx and Engels, but they
gave it its popular and lasting formulation. The perception of superordi-
nated powers as conspiratorial forces that sustain themselves by gen-
erating a web of illusions that only seem to be a necessary reality an-
ticipates the modernist skepticism concerning the permanence of any
political or social order. The Marxian strategy of unmasking appear-
ances is a technique that is fundamental to the modernists' reading of
the world.
The same gesture is basic to Freudian psychoanalysis. It rests upon a
theory of the psychic apparatus in which false appearances play the
central role. Like Marx, Freud intended to demystify the fictions that
constitute the surface of an illusory reality. A slip of the tongue, a joke,
or a dream are not simply what they seem, but are actually mechanisms
of repression, distorted masks that we use to conceal the terrible truth
about ourselves from our conscious minds. Beneath an ostensibly harm-
less surface, down in the inky blackness of the unconscious lurk the
fears, taboos, and monstrous desires that made Freud so unpopular
with the general public and philistine academy of his day. Marx and
Freud, each in his own sphere, showed that apparent reality had a false
bottom, that the cherished institutions and beliefs of enlightened cul-
ture were historical constructs.
Both Marx and Freud thought and wrote within the framework of
nineteenth-century positivism. Each believed that his scientific method
of analysis could uncover the hidden bedrock of authentic reality. In
contradistinction to them, Nietzsche mounted a critique of culture and
knowledge that abandoned this presupposition. The final truth cannot
be discovered because it does not exist. When old myths must be dis-
carded, new myths and not final truths must replace them. There is no
inert background against which to judge reality. The foundations of
knowledge float freely in the abyss and can validate themselves only by
being more or less useful in a given time and place. It is for this reason
that Nietzsche proclaimed in Die Geburt der Tragödie that life can be
justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Apparent truth is always
only a biologically and historically conditioned understanding of a sur-
face that is continually subject to being shaped and re-shaped. Absolute
knowledge is impossible because any knowledge is a function of the
medium in which it occurs, especially language.12
12
For a helpful examination of the Nietzschean critique of reality see J.P. Stern,

14
 Tough-minded skeptics might object that poets and philosophers are
well known for inventing problems where there are none. Marx, Freud,
and Nietzsche were, after all, Geisteswissenschaftler whose disciplines
did not require of them the same exacting respect for the facts to which
the propositions of natural scientists must conform. But in point of
historical fact, it was the hardest of the hard sciences - physics - that
dealt the most damaging blow to conventional beliefs about the stability
of external reality.
Two important developments brought traditional physics to a turn-
ing point. One of these was Einstein's relativity theory of 1905; the
other was the emergence of atomic physics. Together they challenged
the received understanding of the world's physical properties. Newton-
ian mechanics was a model based on the experience of average reality
in Euclidean space and linear time. The discovery of electromagnetic
phenomena presented later physicists with a problem that Newton's
laws failed to explain. Newton had assumed that linear time and three-
dimensional space were invariants of material reality. Einstein's theory
of relativity toppled this assumption by showing the limits of its ap-
plicability. Only the speed of light is absolute; time and space are al-
ways relative to the observer's position and state of motion.13 His theory
and its subsequent vindication in experiment disabused the scientific
and popular mind of its illusions about the universality of reality's most
fundamental categories: space and time.
While Einstein was shaking the foundations of traditional presup-
positions about time and space, other scientists were exploring the sub-
microscopic realm atomic phenomena. It was known that material real-
ity comprised atoms, but the materials that constituted the atoms

»'Only as an aesthetic phenomenon',« in his A Study of Nietzsche (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 171-202. During the modernist era
a student of Nietzsche's philosophy developed an »as-if« theory of reality that
was well known and influential: Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als-Ob:
System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Funktionen auf Grund
eines idealistischen Positivismus (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1911). In his
study of modernism, Frank Kermode develops the idea of reality as a system
of heuristic fictions at some length: F.K., The Sense of an Ending. Studies in
the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford, 1967). Cf. also Roy Pascal, »Nar-
rative Fictions and Reality. A Discussion of Frank Kermode's The Sense of
an Ending,« Novel, 11 (1977-78), 40-50.
13
In the next chapter I will take up the influence of Einstein's theory on Her-
mann Broch. Newtonian physics assumed that the scientific observer was a
detached witness to objective events. Einstein's theory reintroduced the
observer into the world of events and showed how the meaning of space and
time was a function of that observer's position and state of motion. Broch
developed an analogous theory of the narrator in fiction.

15
themselves remained to be discovered. Classical physics operated under
the assumption that the ultimate building block of the material uni-
verse would be solid matter. But theories and experiments in subatomic
physics since the beginning of this century have shown that the mate-
rial world is an illusion of sorts. Subatomic particles and light quanta
do not have a »material« existence in the ordinary sense of the word.
Prior to mass and matter is energy, and »energy,« writes Werner Hei-
senberg, »is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles,
all atoms and therefore all things are m a d e . . ,«14. Subatomic particles
are not tiny building blocks of matter but are instead shimmering no-
things that are constantly engaged in a high-energy game of vanishing
and appearing. The end effect of this game is the phenomenon of solid-
seeming material reality. 15
Certainly the world is still real enough for all practical purposes, but
after Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Einstein many of our tacitly under-
stood metaphysical assumptions about the order of things in the world
can no longer be taken for granted. The concept of ultimate authority
has been undermined, and like the man in Kafka's »Türhüterlegende,«
the modern mind is confronted with an interminable succession of
guarded doorways. The absolute, the position held by God in the me-
dieval imagination, has receded from the grasp of knowledge. In terms
of modernist literary production, the recognition that reality is a fluid
and metaphysically insecure postulate of daily life has had two results.
Firstly, it caused writers to think more about the relationship of their
medium to the world it attempts to recreate. The bond of language and
literary convention with reality could no longer be taken for granted.
The idea of »representation« would have to be rethought. Secondly,
when external reality began to drift out of reach for novelists, they
automatically turned inward for a more secure sense of the real. The
life of the mind - and also the life of language - began to enjoy a new
prominence in the literature of modernism.

14
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy. The Revolution in Modern Sci-
ences, Harper Torchbook, 549 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 63.
15
For a more detailed discussion and further references see Gary Zukav, The
Dancing Wu Li Masters. An Overview of the New Physics (Toronto, New
York: Bantam, 1979).

16
2. V e r i n n e r u n g

Wir haben nichts als das Außen zum

Innen zu machen, daß wir nicht mehr
Fremdlinge sind . . . .
Hermann Bahr 16

In an essay of 1931 on Proust, Samuel Becke« draws attention to »the

only world that has reality and significance, the world of our own latent
consciousness.« 1 7 The turn away from objective realism through im-
pressionism rests on the quasi-scientific insight that external reality in
its absolute truth is inaccessible to the perceiving mind. Individual sub-
jectivity knows reality only as it appears to consciousness, only in the
categories that consciousness has at its disposal. 18 The stream-of-con-
sciousness techniques associated with Joyce, Schnitzler, and Faulkner
mark the literary breakthrough into this way of thinking about the
world. Programmatic movements, especially Expressionism and Sur-
realism, often radicalized this insight under the hyperbolic signs of
madness and solipsism.

16
Hermann Bahr, »Die Moderne,« in Hermann Bahr. Zur Überwindung des
Naturalismus. Theoretische Schriften 1887-1904, hrsg. v. Gotthart Wunberg,
Sprache und Literature, 46 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968), p. 37.
17
Samuel Beckett, »Proust,« in S.B. and Georges Duthuit, Proust/Three Dia-
logues (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 13.
18
1 say semi-scientific because the writers in question were often working under
the influence of scientist-philosophers. Ernst Mach, for instance, influenced
many German and Austrian modernists. Judith Ryan, »The Vanishing Sub-
ject: Empirical Psychology and the Modern Novel,« PMLA, 95 (1980),
857-69. Cf. also Heiner Willenberg, »Die Darstellung des Bewußtseins in der
Literatur. Vergleichende Studien zu Philosophie, Psychologie und deutscher
Literatur von Schnitzler bis Broch,« Diss. Frankfurt, pub. by Studienreihe
Humanitas, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974. Also: Jürgen Peper, Be-
wußtseinslagen des Erzählens und erzählten Wirklichkeiten. Dargestellt an
amerikanischen Romanen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts insbesondere am Werk
William Faulkners, Studien zur amerikanischen Literatur und Geschichte, 3
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). It should not go unremarked that the objectivity of
nineteenth-century realism was largely undergirded by a latent subjectivity:
Richard Brinkmann, Wirklichkeit und Illusion. Studien über Gehalt und
Grenzen des Begriffs Realismus für die erzählende Dichtung des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts, 3. Aufl. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977). When in the course of
this study I make reference to the »objectivity« of nineteenth-century prose I
do so principally from the point of view of the modernists, who received it as
a prescriptive dogma. I am not speaking of the realists' perception of them-
selves nor am I making any claims about the actual status of realist prose;
rather, I am working from the modernists' perception of the realist tradition.

17
 Obviously the writers of fiction were not working in a vacuum. Em-
pirical psychology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, neo-Kantianism,
the concept of the aesthetic »Erlebnis« and the entire, ultimately Carte-
sian tradition of introspection flowed together to establish subjectivity
as a major theme and structural principle of modernist prose and
poetry. This turn in literary history is nothing other than the belated
appearance of Kant's »Copernican Turn« in the arts.
Ever since Descartes, the world has been divided into two halves:
subjective mind and objective nature. By the end of the nineteenth
century, it had become clear to even the most »objective« of the natural
sciences that the observing subject is trapped within his conceptual
categories and that these categories impose form upon nature, at least to
a certain extent. The lesson of this epistemological doctrine was that,
when the fixity of the external world fell into doubt, the reasonable
solution to the dilemma was to turn inward to the conscious mind as a
stable locus for reality. Descartes' cogito ergo sum had established the
immutable fixity of consciousness with apparently indubitable certain-
ty.19 In this historical situation the poet no longer conceived of his task
as representing reality. Instead, he was to use the means at his disposal
to represent reality as it appears to the mind's eyes: memory, dream,
passive perception, active imagination, tradition, desire.
For the purposes of synthesis, it is convenient to refer now to a cen-
tral document of literary criticism, namely Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.
The book's final chapter - »Der braune Strumpf« - takes Virginia
Woolf as a representative case for the modernist era. It illustrates the
era's characteristic response of literary criticism to the idea that mind is
prior to external reality. Auerbach takes To the Lighthouse (1927) as an
exemplary instance of the mimetic situation in the prose of Woolfs
generation. She had schooled herself on James Joyce, and her essay
»Modern Fiction« of 1919, which is often taken to be a manifesto of
modernism, sings his praises for shifting the focus of prose onto the
inner life.20 Her own prose - like that of Rilke, Proust, Broch, Schnitz-
ler, Faulkner, Belyi, Musil and many others - reflects a similar concern
for the life of the mind.

" T h e certainty of consciousness's self-presence has recently fallen into consi-

derable doubt because of the critiques offered by C. S. Peirce, Jacques Lacan,
and Jacques Derrida. Cf. Walter Benn Michaels, »The Interpreter's Self:
Peirce on the Cartesian 'Subject',« Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 383-402.
20
Virginia Woolf, »Modern Fiction,« in her Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London:
Hogarth, 1966), pp. 103-110. The same essay appeared in German translation
as »Der moderne englische Roman,« in Die Neue Rundschau, 41/11 (1930),
112-20.

18
 The theme of Auerbach's book is mimesis, or in the formulation of
his subtitle: »Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Litera-
tur.« Using Woolf as his example, he understands represented reality in
the modernist era to be »natürliche und sogar wenn man will, natüra-
listische Wiedergabe der Bewußtseinsvorgänge in ihrer durch keine
Absicht beschränkten und durch keinen bestimmten Gegenstand des
D e n k e n s dirigierten Freiheit.« 2 1 For Auerbach, imitation of reality is
the representation of the contents of consciousness.
The problem with Auerbach's view is that he assumes language is a
neutral, endlessly pliable medium. » D i e innere Welt,« wrote Kafka,
»läßt sich nur leben, nicht beschreiben.« 2 2 The mind's interiority is in
its essence as elusive as nature's exteriority. This is so because language
and literature lead a historical existence of their own beyond the spatial
metaphor of a static inner/outer reality. The individual writer must
make use of a medium that precedes him. As language, the poetic
word's grasp of reality - inner and outer - is restricted by its grammat-
ical and rhetorical categories; as literature, its tradition and conven-
tions define the limits of its ability to represent persuasively. Whatever

21
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen
Literatur, 2. verb, und erw. Aufl. (Bern: Francke, 1959), p. 500. In the mean-
time the centrality of consciousness has become a touchstone for literary
criticism, especially in connection with modernism but also for other literary
periods. See: Theodor W. Adorno, »Form und Gehalt des zeitgenössischen
Romans,« Akzente, 1 (1954), 410-16. Wilhelm Emrich's essays collected un-
der the title Protest und Verheißung. Studien zur klassischen und modernen
Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1960) contain many observations
that are relevant to modernism, including the importance of subjectivity.
Erich von Kahler attempts a concise history of the development of subject-
ivity in literature in an essay originally published as »Die Verinnerung des
Erzählens,« in Die Neue Rundschau, 68 (1957), 501-46 and 70 (1959), 1-54,
177-220. Its final, revised form is available only in English: The Inward Turn
of Narrative, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, The Bollingen Series, 83
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973). Hans-Georg Gadamer's
proposition that Kantian critique subjectified aesthetics is of central im-
portance. It is a more precise tool than Kahler's blurry notion of »Verinne-
rung:« Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Her-
meneutik, 2. Aufl. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), pp. 39ff. Cited as Gadamer. Ri-
chard Brinkmann has showed how the category of subjectivity is also in-
trinsic to the supposedly objective German Realists: Wirklichkeit und Illu-
sion. Studien über Gehalt und Grenzen des Begriffs Realismus für die erzäh-
lende Dichtung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 3. Aufl. (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1977); on pp. 326-24 Brinkmann discusses the transition from realism to
modernism in terms of the emergence of subjectivity from its latent realist
form into its overt modernist form.
22
Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus
dem Nachlaß, hrsg. v. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1953), p. 72.

19
exists outside of linguistic and literary convention - i.e. all that is
unique - slips through its coarse-woven grid and escapes representation.
The modernists' self-understanding on this point is often blurry.
Some of them pursued a way of representing the inner life. Broch and
Musil took this path. Others, such as Kafka and Mann, were rather
more aware of the literary word as a more or less autonomous category
somewhere between mind and nature. I hope to shed some light on this
confusing point during the course of this study. In any case, the con-
temporary critic is not obliged to adopt a given writer's theories or
self-interpretations. Certainly the priority-of-consciousness theme is a
major aspect of the modernists' general self-understanding, but their
intentions are not necessarily the end-station of critical observation.
The >phenomenological bias< of modernism and much of the literary
criticism it has generated usually feels compelled to render an account
of the »Sprachkrise,« or the problematic relationship between the
speaking, writing subject and the medium of representation. Too often
the historical autonomy and momentum of language has been left out
of consideration. In other words, the modernists and their critics have
not sufficiently explicated the interaction of mind and language. In
order to clarify the nature of this tension, we must turn now to the idea
of literary representation in the modernist era.

3. S p r a c h k r i s e

Joyce's writing is not about some-

thing: it is that something itself.
Samuel Beckett23

»Daß man erzählte, wirklich erzählte, das muß vor meiner Zeit gewe-
sen sein.« 24 This complaint, spoken here by Rilke's Malte, is frequent in
the narrative of modernism. The objective world eludes the grasp of
language, and it no longer seems possible to tell stories about what
happens outside of the Self. Some modernist narrative attempts to nar-
rate the inner world. Kafka, for instance, is often thought to be a nov-
elist principally aiming to describe »die ungeheure Welt« of his own

23
Samuel Beckett, »Dante... Bruno.. Vico.. Joyce,« in Our Exagmination Round
his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and
Faber, 1972), p. 14; orig. pub. 1929.
24
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, hrsg. ν. Rilke Archiv, Bd. 6 (Frankfurt
am Main: Insel, 1966), p. 844.

20
mind. 25 Yet if the crisis of representation is thought through to its log-
ical conclusion, any connection between language and the Self becomes
at least as tenuous as the link between language and external reality. It
is necessary to ask whether language is the instrument of the subject or
whether the subject is a function of language.
The trend of recent theory has shifted in the favor of ascribing epis-
temic privilege to language. Following Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gada-
mer has developed the idea that linguisticality - the word-character of
the literary act - is a fundamental hermeneutic category. 26 In a similar
vein, the Russian formalists, the structuralists, and poststructuralists
have elaborated theories of culture and literature that »decenter« the
so-called »speaking subject.« 27 The individual inhabits a variety of se-
miotic systems, of which language is perhaps the most basic, that con-
stitute man in his present form. Man the speaker is always already
spoken; this idea is an axiom of post-structuralist thought. The limits of
spirituality are tacitly present in the various systems that precede and
govern the intellectual interplay of an individual with his historical
environment. Consciousness is therefore not the primary site of reality.
It is secondary insofar as it is the nexus at which the multiplicity of
already existing semiotic systems intersect and become articulate. In-
dividual creativity is the act of articulation within the latent paradigm
of all that can possibly be known and spoken in a given era.
Within the limited context of literary history, this paradigm consists
mainly of poetic and narrative tradition. The modernist generation
found itself heir to a tradition that no longer spoke to the present with a
voice of authority. The exhausted forms of the past were perceived as
being unable to grasp the life of the present. Narrative seemed to be an

25
Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910-1923, hrsg. v. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), p. 192. In chapter IV I try to show the
limits of this orthodox reading of Kafka.
26
Gadamer, pp. 361-82 (cf. note 21).
27
Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism. History - Doctrine, Slavistic Printings and
Reprintings, 4 (S'-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1955); Emile Benveniste, »Subjecti-
vity in Language,« in his Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Eli-
zabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series, 8 (Coral Gables, Florida: Univ. of
Florida Press, 1971); Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1966); Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, with
an essay by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968); Michel Fou-
cault, The Archeology of Knowledge, Harper Torchbooks, 1901 (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976); Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other
Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1973); Julia Kristeva, »The System and the Speaking Subject,« Times Literary
Supplement, 12 Oct. 1973, pp. 1249-50.

21
epistemologically dubious undertaking, no matter whether it purported
to represent the outer world of objective reality or the inner world of
subjective experience. The link between the word and the Self was as
insecure as the link between language and the independent being of
external things.
This troubled relationship between word and world gave rise to rad-
ical experiments in poetic language and narrative form. One aspect of
this experimentation was the attempt to represent the contents of con-
sciousness, as in the work of Woolf or Schnitzler. It is the most conser-
vative side of modernism inasmuch as it holds fast to the principle of
representation. Another relatively conservative side of modernism is its
tendency toward parody and critique. The fiction of Musil and Broch
always contains an essayistic metalevel of critique that is supposed to
serve as a point of interpretive orientation for the reader. Thomas
Mann was aware of himself as a critical parodist of the great novelistic
tradition of the nineteenth century. His Bildungsromane mock the gen-
re of the Bildungsroman. Unable to forge ahead into the authentic sto-
rytelling that Malte longs for, the modernist parodies and critiques the
limitations of the shopworn forms that the tradition has bequeathed
him.
A third side of modernism is its often disturbing tendency toward
opacity. Trakl's lyric poetry and prose narrative belongs in this catego-
ry, and so does much other Expressionist and Surrealist production. But
the outstanding example of virtual narrative, inscrutable in its aus-
terity, is Franz Kafka's Schloß. No other modern novel, with the pos-
sible exception of Finnegan's Wake, thwarts exegesis so fully as Kafka's
masterpiece.
It is the opaque literature of modernism that vivifies the life of the
poetic word carried on apart from represented reality. Its aloof severity
forces the linguisticality and narrativity of its being into the fore-
ground. Its sheer »aestheticness« serves as a reminder that the seeming
clarity of more conventional works is apt to be deceptive. Even a real-
istic narrated world exists in aesthetic autonomy that is only masked by
the referential purport of its mode. It is extraordinary that a novel as
uninterpretable as Das Schloß should be so compelling. The critics have
not been able to determine what the story is about - indeed, it is per-
haps not »about« anything in the sense that realist novels are about this
or that problem or event - but it is clear that something is at work in
the narrative that functions apart from the way we conceive of a real-
istic connection between the world and a story about it. It is this ob-
scure but provocative aesthetic specificum that keeps serious readers
returning to Das Schloß.

22
 Even the less »difficult« fiction of modernism partakes of the crisis
in representation that reaches its peak in Kafka. The general confusion
about how an imaginative narrative ought to hook onto reality gave rise
to a fourth characteristic feature of modernism that has seldom
received systematic treatment. This aspect is that of self-reflection or
self-consciousness. When it is no longer obvious how fiction and reality
are connected, one way of addressing the problem is to build into the
novel a narrative layer that reflects on the possibility or impossibility of
such a connection.

4. Self-Consciousness and Mimesis

Je commence a entrevoir ce que j'ap-

pellerais le »sujet profond« de mon
Ii vre. C'est, ce sera sans doute la ri-
valite du mond reel et de la
representation que nous nous ens fai-
sons.
Andre Gide 28

As Thomas Mann was making a leisurely Atlantic crossing in 1934, he

passed his time on shipboard reading Don Quixote. Like many other
major literary works that passed within range of his voracious imagi-
nation, Don Quixote was devoured, digested, and finally transformed
into a literary essay, the »Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote.« Mann records
that he took special delight from the passage in Part II, Chapter 30 in
which the old knight and his squire meet a beautiful huntress in the
forest. As it turns out she is a duchess, and when Sancho has executed
the requisite formalities of courtly introduction for his master, she asks
this question:
»Tell me brother squire,« she said, »is not your master the one concerning
whom they have printed a story called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote
de la Mancha, and who has a lady of his heart, a certain Dulcinea del To-
boso?«
»He is the same my lady,« replied Sancho, »and I am that squire of his that
figures, or is supposed to figure, in the story, the one named Sancho Panza -
that is to say, unless they changed me in the cradle - I mean, in the press.«29

28
Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1925), p. 261.
29
Thomas Mann, »Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote,« in his Gesammelte Werke,
Frankfurter Ausgabe, hrsg. v. Peter de Mendelssohn, Bd. 8 (Frankfurt am
Main: S. Fischer, 1982), pp. 1035f. I have cited Cervantes according to Samuel
Putnam's translation, vol. 2 (London: Cassel and Cassell, 1953), pp. 705f.

23
T h o m a s M a n n , himself an avowed ironist, is attracted to the witty game
that Cervantes is playing with the fictional status of his figures. He
forces the illusion of reality to its limit, to the ironic point at which the
believability of fiction collides with the knowledge that these people are
a f t e r all not real, the knowledge that Sancho and his Ingenious master
were conceived in the mind and born in the printing press.
This element of self-consciousriess in narration is a trait that has
been with the novel since its beginnings. It is true that the genre is by
and large »realistic,« but it is also true that realism has its limits. T h e r e
is no u n b r o k e n continuity between fiction and life, and Cervantes is a
pains to point this out to his readers. Even realist fiction is, above all,
fiction.
This playful ironization of the narrated world has a distinguished
place in the history of the novel. Robert Alter has written a partial
history of the novel as a self-conscious genre and returned this t h e m e to
its rightful prominence. His study begins with Cervantes, traces the
p h e n o m e n o n up through the l a n d m a r k works of Fielding, Sterne, and
Diderot, and then on into the present day. 30 Predictably, the nineteenth
century with its belief in a fixed reality and its scientistic ideals of
objective representation was not a period in which self-conscious fic-
tion was greatly esteemed. Aside f r o m Gogol and the G e r m a n R o m a n -
tics, the rest of novel-writing and novel-reading Europe did not like for
the stories it told about itself suddenly to melt into thin air. Shake-
speare may have believed that we are such things as dreams are m a d e

30
Robert Alter, Partial Magic. The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1975). Unfortunately, Alter
does not explore the variations and development of the self-conscious novel
in German fiction. As is well known, Cervantes and Sterne exercised a great
deal of influence on the German novel at the end of the eighteenth century,
and especially on the German Romantics. Romantic Irony and novelistic
self-consciousness are closely related, but it does not lie within the scope of
this study to pursue this important topic. However, the relation of the mod-
ernists to the Romantics must briefly be mentioned. It is tempting to suggest
that the modernists' use of irony is a reprise of the Romantics' use of it, but I
do not believe that this is the case. The Romantics took over ironic self-con-
sciousness from Sterne and Cervantes, but they also added to it a complex
interpretation derived from their reading of Kantian and Fichtean Idealism
(see Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Ge-
staltung, 2. durchges. u. erw. Aufl., Hermaea, N.F., 6 (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1977). With the possible exception of Broch, the modernists' literary tech-
nique remained free of a programmatic interaction between irony and philo-
sophical doctrine. I am suggesting that modernist techniques of self-con-
sciousness are first of all literary phenomena based in literary tradition and
not derivative from Idealist philosophy in any overt way.

24
of, but the nineteenth century knew better. Reality was serious business
- social, political, economic, and moral - and it was the serious nov-
elist's obligation to recreate faithfully its appearances. The literary pro-
jects of Stendhal, Balzac and Tolstoy, or of Fontane and Zola were not
intended to be received as dream-realities but as the veracious image of
our waking life reflected in the impartial mirror of scrupulously
wrought fiction.
However, by the end of the nineteenth century and with the rise of
modernist thinking, the vogue of self-conscious fiction entered a period
of renewal that is still in progress. 31 It should become clearer in the
following chapters that the German novel has participated in this trend
to a degree not yet accounted for by its critics. Owing to the influence
that the novel of realism exerted upon critical expectations, ironic self-
consciousness in the modern German novel has not received its proper
share of systematic attention. When for instance Kommissär Bärlach of
Der Richter und sein Henker needs some information to further a hom-
icide investigation, the novelist sends him - ironically, of course - to a
supreme authority in the universe of detective fiction: Bärlach seeks
out a figure known as the »Schriftsteller.« In the film version, Bärlach
finds him at home playing a game of chess with himself, and the role is
acted, naturally, by Dürrenmatt himself. There can be no doubt that
this is a selfconscious writer who is calling attention to the limits of his
illusion-world and to the ludic nature of his own and his reader's un-
dertaking.
But the game is not an idle diversion. In it, the truth-claims of nar-
rative are at stake. The theme and practice of self-consciousness in nar-
rative is one way of coping with the problematical relationship between
life in the real world and the representations that storytellers make of
it. The fictional novelist in Andre Gide's Counterfeiters expresses pre-
cisely these sentiments, and the real author of the novel intends his
reader to ponder this matter with him. Such considerations are typical
for the novel in the era of modernism, a time when external reality has
become transient and amorphous, when internal reality also lacks fix-
ity, and when the medium - linguistic and literary convention - is
discovered to have intrinsic limitations. Because they were skeptical
about the traditional assumptions concerning literary representation,
the novelists of modernism inserted into their novels a metafictional

31
Alter, pp. 138-79. Cf. also Maurice Beebe, »Reflective and Reflexive Trends
in Modern Fiction,« in Twentieth Century Poetry, Fiction, Theory, eds. Harry
R. Garvin and John D. Kirkland (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1977), pp.
13-26; Beebe includes a bibliography on p. 13.

25
layer that reflects on the possibilities of how fiction can be related to
reality. In the following chapters this phenomenon will be a helpful
critical tool.

26
CHAPTER II

VIENNESE BAROQUE:
Temporality and Allegory in Die Schlafwandler of
Hermann Broch

»Wie gern wollte ich dir das Wort

>Symbol< zugestehen, wäre es nicht
schal geworden, daß michs ekelt.«
Hofmannsthal 1

It is sensible to begin this study with Hermann Broch and Die Schlaf-
wandler (1928-31) not for chronological reasons - Kafka wrote his Pro-
zeß in 1914, more than a decade before Broch went to work on his
trilogy - but instead because of Broch's strong awareness of himself as a
modernist. Writing after the novelists he admired, namely Gide, Joyce,
and Dos Passos, Broch purposefully set about the business of develop-
ing for the German novel a form that suited the era's perception of
itself. Viewing the world from inside Vienna after the collapse of im-
perial Austria-Hungary and taking his cues from eminent novelists of
his time, Broch attempted to establish new formal possibilities for the
novel, in hopes of making it a therapeutic force in an unhealthy epoch.
It will be the task of this chapter not only to describe the modernist
traits of Broch's trilogy but also to do justice to its individuality. This
individuality, however, is entrenched in the Austrian tradition of which
Broch was a part, and it leads directly back to the mainstream of mod-
ernist tendencies. This tradition is the Baroque with its typical mode of
representation: allegory. In the modernist period, allegory reappears in
various forms that will become clear in the pages that follow.
Broch's intentions in his novels were cosmopolitan and had little to
do with any narrowly Austrian sense of identity or tradition. Indeed, at
first glance Broch seems to be opposed to Austria's nostalgic self-esteem
as the heartland of Baroque culture. In his study »Hofmannsthal und
seine Zeit,« Broch critisizes modern Austria's nostalgic affinity for the

1
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, »Gespräch über Gedichte,« in Gesammelte Werke
in 10 Einzelbänden, hrsg. v. Bernd Schoeller in Beratung mit Rudolf Hirsch,
Erzählungen, Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, Reisen (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), p. 501.

27
splendor of a bygone era. According to Broch, the decadent present was
clutching vainly at memories of its vigorous past in an attempt to stave
off the chaos that was growing all a r o u n d it. Yet at the same time Broch
himself was actually renewing the Baroque, though not out of any self-
absorbed sentimentality.
T h e link between modernists such as Broch and the Baroque era is in
part a formal one. Arnold Hauser, for instance, has noted that the sty-
listic claims of art and literature f r o m Baudelaire to Proust and K a f k a
shares with the Baroque the characteristic tendencies of mannerism. 2
O n the thematic level there are also interesting parallels that unify
modernism with the Baroque, especially Viennese modernism. Muta-
bility and death are central topoi of both eras. 3 T h e ephemerality of
earthly things is reflected in the dualism of the typically Baroque dis-
tinction between material appearances and the truer realm of divine
spirit. Similarly, modernism experiences the world as illusion and de-
ception, but instead of religious conviction, modernism offers Kantian
epistemology and the findings of advanced physics as the grounds for
its views. 4
T h e r e are other possible thematic links between modernism and the
Baroque - the sacrificial hero, the apocalypse, the world as a stage 5 -
each of which is a p r o m i n e n t t h e m e in Broch's work. But the strongest
links, the ones that will help to clarify the purport of Broch's Schlaf-
wand!er-iT\\ogy in its g e n e r a l i t y as a p r o g r a m m a t i c m o d e r n i s t e x p e r i -
ment and in its particularity as an individual work of art, are the

2
Arnold Hauser, Der Manierismus. Die Krise der Renaissance und der Ur-
sprung der modernen Kunst (München: Beck, 1964), pp. 355-94.
3
On the theme of death in modernism see Theodore Ziolkowski, »The Meta-
physics of Death,« in his Dimensions of the Modern Novel. German Texts and
European Contexts (Princeton, N e w Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1969), pp. 215-57. Cited as Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel. On
the peculiarly Austrian obsession with death see William Johnston, Austrian
Mind. An intellectual and Social History 1848-1938 (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 165-80. Cited as Johnston,
Austrian Mind.
4
See Chapter I.
5
See Frank J. Warnke, Versions of the Baroque. European Literature of the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1972).
Cited as Warnke. Modernism is populated with »absurd« sacrificial heroes:
August Esch, Josef K. and Adrian Leverkühn are obvious examples. Intima-
tions of the Apocalypse are frequent in modernist prose, esp. in Expressio-
nism but also in Broch and many others. In this regard see Frank Kermode,
The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford, 1967). The world as a stage is
important in Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Sartre and, as the next chapter will
show, it plays an important role in Musil's concept of reality.

28
themes of death and false appearances.6 The seventeenth century's
preoccupation with human mortality finds a close analogue throughout
the writings of Hermann Broch, and its doctrine of the world as illusion
is a close parallel to his Platonic philosophy.7 Broch believed the phys-
ical world to be the broken reflection of the greater supersensible realm
of Platonic ideas that exist beyond time and death.
The link between death and material existence is the problem of
temporality. My thesis in this chapter is that time is Hermann Broch's
fundamental concern and that this concern conditions his turn to al-
legory. The theme of temporality and its expression in allegory are the
decisive points of connection between modernism and the Baroque.
The concept of self-reflection that I attempted to elaborate in the pre-
vious chapter is actually a kind of allegory - self-allegory - and func-
tions like seventeenth-century allegory except for one major difference:
the seventeenth-century mind was able to take for granted a divine
order of things. It functioned for the era as an unquestioned and indis-
putable tertium comparationis that sustained the meaning of literary
allegories. The modernist writer has lost confidence in the divine, in-
variant order of things. This loss of a collective faith in a secure me-
taphysical order means that allegory must fold back on its origin; and
this origin is the autonomous imagination of individual artists. In the
case of Hermann Broch, a certain philosophy of history and values fills
the place once occupied by a securely grounded tertium comparationis:
Broch allegorizes his philosophical theories in the action of his novels.8
Before clarifying the connection between temporality and allegory, it
will be necessary first to turn to Broch's specific conception of allegory
and self-representation in the novel: Die Schlafwandler allegorizes a

6
On death and false appearances as Baroque themes cf. Warnke, pp. 21-65.
7
On Broch's Platonism see esp. Hermann Krapoth, Dichtung und Philosophie.
Eine Studie zum Werk Hermann Brochs, Literatur und Wirklichkeit, 8 (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1971).
8
On one level this insight is nothing new. Ever since Richard Brinkmann's key
article of 1957, Broch students have been explicating the relationship of his
historicist Wertphilosophie to the action of the novel. At present, little re-
mains to be added on this count. What I am trying to do here is to go behind
the reflexive pair theory/action in order to get at their common origin and
the significance of the allegorical form of presentation. The origin is the
problem of temporality, and I hope to show that it expresses itself in the
narrative rhetoric of allegory. On the relation between Broch's theories and
his stories see Richard Brinkmann, »Romanform und Werttheorie bei Her-
mann Broch,« DVjs, 31 (1957), 169-97; rpt. in Deutsche Romantheorien, hrsg.
v. Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1968), pp. 347-73, and
in Hermann Broch. Perspektiven der Forschung, hrsg. v. Manfred Durzak
(München: Fink, 1972), pp. 35-68.

29
specific theory of history and values as well as the origin of this theory
in individual subjectivity.

W h e n Broch submitted an early version of Die Schlafwandler to the

Rhein-Verlag in 1930 to be considered for publication, its editor-in-
chief - Daniel Brody - handed over the manuscript to Yvan Göll for
evaluation. Göll raised the objection that Broch should not allow the
authorial voice to intrude into the fictional world. He justified his ob-
jection on the grounds that the model of Flaubert's narrative technique
had long since discredited the old-fashioned intruding narrator. His
c o m m e n t is an index to the standards of realism that prevailed at the
time Broch was writing. These standards demanded that the believa-
bility of the novel's illusion-world not be compromised by the intrusion
of exterior reality. The modernist Broch refused to accept the Flauber-
tian imperative and insisted upon such archaic-modern devices as the
use of an authorial wir, an occasional apostrophe to the reader, and,
especially, the introduction of an author-narrator called Bertrand Mül-
ler into the story. In defense of his position, Broch wrote to Brody:

Zu der Bemerkung Gölls: das Heraustreten des Autors ist ein ebenso le-
gitimes Kunstmittel wie seine Verborgenheit; es muß bloß wie alles Techni-
sche dem Architektonischen untergeordnet werden. Hier gibt es keine Re-
geln, auch wenn sie von Flaubert aufgestellt sind. Überall, wo die Darstel-
lungstechnik mit zum Inhalt des Dargestellten wird, muß natürlich die wer-
kende Hand mit zum Vorschein kommen, vide ganze Kapitel im Ulysses,
Gide, etc. (eine Erscheinung, die sicherlich und, wie ich glaube, auch nach-
weisbar zur Denkstruktur unserer Zeit gehört). Bei den Schlafwandlern wird
das Technische mit der zunehmenden Versachlichung des Inhaltes immer
mehr bloßgelegt, und es versteht sich daher, daß man im III. Teil die Stimme
des Autors am deutlichsten hört; im I. Teil geschieht dies bloß im allerletzten
Satz, der damit zur Vorbereitung und als Überleitung zum Kommenden
dient. (13/1: 91)'

This passage adumbrates part of the theory that Broch developed

around his reading of Joyce's Ulysses, a theory that expands and clari-
fies his notion of the intruding author-narrator.

9
Broch's works are cited throughout according to the Kommentierte Werkaus-
gabe, hrsg. v. Paul Michael Lützeler, 13 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-
kamp, 1978ff). Cf. Flaubert's famous dictum: »An author in his book must be
like >God< in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Art being
a second Nature, the creator of that Nature must behave similarly. In all its
atoms, in all its aspects, let there be sensed a hidden, infinite impassivity.«

30
 In his essay »James Joyce und die Gegenwart« (1936) Broch discus-
ses the problem of mimesis in a world whose reality has become so
fragmented as to be »unabbildbar.« He writes that traditional narrative
practices can no longer produce mirror-images of reality because
neither the objective certainty of reality nor the power of words to
capture it can be taken for granted. His tentative solution to this crisis
of representation is to step back from the situation by writing at a
metafictional level. In his novels, Broch wants not only to tell a story
but also to tell the story of the telling. In explanation of this concept
Broch calls on Einstein's theory of relativity for an analogy, suggesting
that relativity is related to classical mechanics as the modernist novel is
to the novel of realism (9/1: 77-79).
Newtonian mechanics operated under the assumption that events in
the material world occur in absolute time and space, independent of the
impartially observing scientist. Contradicting classical physics, Einstein
theorized that only the speed of light was absolutely invariant and that
time and space were in fact relative to the position of the observing
subject, viz. to his state of motion. These findings meant that in order
to represent any given event truthfully, the observer of that event as
well as the act of observation must also be taken into consideration. By
way of Einstein's theory, Broch proposed that the writing of a novel
functions according to analogous principles. Like the impartial
observer of classical physics, the objective »Flaubertian« narrator of
the classical novel - i.e. the novel of nineteenth-century realism - turns
out to be a participant in the observed event. The action of the novel is
always relative to his point of view. 10 In both science and poetry no
»object« of investigation is ever separable from the methods of obser-
vation, procedures of isolation and the analytic tools that transmute it
into knowledge.
Because the observer is always already present, and because the act of
observation is actually a part of the observed event, Broch felt compel-
led to acknowledge the epistemological situation by introducing an

10
The first critic to pay close attention to this »introduction of the observer into
the field of observation« was Theodore Ziolkowski, »Hermann Broch and
Relativity in Fiction,« Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8
(1967), 365-76. It was he who originally noted the special role of Bertrand
Müller (pp. 373f), but he rather overestimates the uniqueness of Broch's
dramatized narrator (p. 375). Certainly Broch's justification for this device is
unique, but the device itself is as old as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and
the German Romantics. In Broch as in the pre-realist novel, the intruding
narrator serves to ironize that which is narrated. The following chapters will
attempt to show how this sort of irony occurs not only in Broch but also in
Musil, Kafka, and - most conspicuously - in Thomas Mann.

31
observing subject - a narrator - into the field of observation. In this
way the various points of reference that work together to determine
meaning emerge more fully into view so that their limitations and their
plenitude can be assessed.
For a proper understanding of how Broch attempts to show the writ-
ing hand is at work in his novels, it is important to note the three-part
structure of his model. In ostensible reference to Joyce, Broch suggests,
»daß man das Objekt nicht einfach in den Beobachtungskegel stellen
und einfach beschreiben dürfe, sondern daß das Darstellungssub-
jekt. . .und nicht minder die Sprache, mit der er das Darstellungsobjekt
beschreibt, als Darstellungsmedien hineingehören. . . . Das Werk soll
selber aus der Beobachtung entstehen, der Beobachter ist immer mitten
drin, er stellt dar und stellt sich und seine Arbeit gleichzeitig mit ihr
dar« (9/1: 78). The three decisive features of fiction's narrative episte-
mics are for Broch: 1) the represented object 2) the representing sub-
ject, and 3) the medium of representation. These distinctions are im-
portant because in Die Schlafwandler - the first of Broch's two major
novels - it is the representing subject that dominates the fictional
world. Bertrand Müller's presence in the narrative foreground func-
tions as a perspectivistic reality-principle. In Broch's vexed magnum
opus, Der Tod des Vergil, it is the medium of representation - language
itself - that dominates the narrative foreground. The novel's ponderous
linguisticality consumes both subjective and objective realms and
amalgamates them in a third modality that is neither one nor the
other.11 In Die Schlafwandler the presence of the novelist/narrator Ber-
trand Müller provides a point of self-reflection; in Der Tod des Vergil it
is the almost palpable density of the language itself that awakens the
reader to its own mediating presence. Before continuing with an
analysis of the Schlafwandler'% baroque rhetoric, it will be useful to
pause over the problem of self-reflection in both novels, inasmuch as it
contitutes a feature of modernist fiction in general and is ultimately
akin to the concept of allegory that links modernism to the Baroque.
In the case of Die Schlafwandler, Broch's notion of introducing the
observing subject into the sphere of observation helps to clarify his
defense against Yvan Goll's critique. The intrusion of the authorial
voice into Pasenow and Esch, and the literal presence of the author

" Broch studies have not yet examined adequately the linguisticality of Vergil's
consciousness and of the world he perceives. The basic question that will have
to be asked is how the »public« idiom of narrative language is related to the
hypothetically »private« vision of Vergil's mind. Broch criticism has thus far
failed to make this distinction, which Broch himself made, between the
representing subject and the medium of representation.

32
figure in Huguenau establish the locus of reality in the trilogy as his
fictionalized consciousness: all that is proceeds from the mind of Mül-
ler. This writer and his individual subjectivity are the principle of unity
that organizes and sustains the manifold diversity of the imaginary
world. By re-introducing the narrator into the imaginary world of the
novel, Broch marks his fiction with a technique that various other
modernists were concurrently helping to revive.12
In his letter to Brody, Broch pointed out his kinship to Gide and
Joyce, two other modernists who were at the forefront of the era's re-
newed interest in the self-conscious novel.13 As Ziolkowski has sugge-
sted, it is likely that Gide's Counterfeiters (1925) influenced Broch with
regard to the idea of writing a novel that self-reflexively includes within
itself a figure who is supposed to be the author of the novel.14 Gide's
protagonist, Edouard - the similarity to Müller's own aesthete alter ego,
Eduard von Bertrand, is probably no accident - is a man writing a
journal that he plans to turn into a novel to be entitled The Counter-
feiters. Gide has set into his tale a mirror that reflects the telling of the
tale, a narratological device that he referred to as mise en abyme. By
duplicating itself within itself, the novel asserts its autonomous in-
tegrity and independence from external reality. This type of novel is not
so much an outward-turned reflection of things along the road of life as
it is an inward-turned reflection of the life of the imagination. The
self-reflecting novel asserts itself as verbal imagination existing a world
apart from life outside the mirror.
Broch's version of this device shows the ironic way in which an au-
tonomous narrative construct takes hold of reality. Its tenuous link
with the outside world is the subjectivity of Bertrand Müller, author of
the novels and author of the value-theory essays set en abyme. It is
important to be aware that the much-discussed relationship between
the Werttheorie and the action of the novel does not constitute the
novel's primary claim on reality. Its reality-principle is first of all Ber-
trand Müller's individual consciousness. His imagination is the com-
mon origin of the novelistic and essayistic portions of the trilogy. He is
the Darstellungssubjekt spoken of in the Joyce essay, and his personal

12
Robert Alter, »The Modernist Revival of Self-Conscious Fiction,« in his Par-
tial Magic. The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Lon-
don: University of California Press, 1975), 138-78. Cited as Alter. Cf. also
John R. Frey, »Author-Intrusion in Narrative: German Theory and some
Modern Examples,« Germanic Review, 23 (1948), 274-89.
13
Alter, pp. 140-44, 161-78.
14
Theodore Ziolkowski, »Zur Entstehung und Struktur von Hermann Brochs
Schlafwandlern,« DVjs, 38 (1964), pp. 58f, 64. Cited as Ziolkowski, »Ent.«

33
vision of things serves to bias whatever might look as if it were sup-
posed to be an impartial reflection of objective reality.
Twenty years after completing Die Schlafwandler, Broch wrote that
»Philosophie, welche die metaphysische Grenze zu überschreiten
trachtet - sie tut das bereits überall dort, wo sie sich mit ethischen und
ästhetischen Problemen beschäftigt - , nur dann haltbar ist, wenn sie
auf einem theologischen Dogmengebäude fußt; eine säkularisierte Phi-
losophie gibt es nicht, d.h., sie bleibt in Rahmen der subjektiven Mei-
nung befangen, und so wollte ich eben diese Erkenntnis radikal zu
Ende führen, indem ich das Subjektive, also das Dichterische zur In-
stanz gemacht habe und ihm die philosophische Überlegung
unterzuordnen trachtete« (13/3: 532).15 Broch himself points out here
that even the philosophical parts of his novel are subordinate to sub-
jective vision, the perspective that Müller represents. However, he also
equates subjectivity with »the poetic,« an equivocation that implicitly
raises the question of how the medium of poetic expression functions
with regard to subject and object.
In the Joyce essay, Broch was careful to draw a line of distinction
between the Darstellungssubjekt and the medium of representation. In
Die Schlafwandler it is the representing subject that dominates the
picture of reality. Turning now to Der Tod des Vergil, we see that the
situation is somewhat altered. By the same token that Gide's Edouard
was a precursor to Broch's Müller, Joyce's language in Ulysses and Fin-
negan's Wake showed the way to the idiom of The Death of Vergil.
In Broch's second major novel, the figure of the narrator-author dis-
appears into the vastness of the novel's sea of words. A basic element of
narrative technique in the Schlafwandler-novels had been the ironic
distance between the limited minds of the three protagonists and the
observations that Müller wanted to make about their vision of the
world.16 For instance, when August Esch looks at a travel poster that
depicts a ship putting out to sea, he begins to consider emigrating to
America. Starting from Esch's point of view, the narrator gradually

15
Cf. Ziolkowski, »Ent.« pp. 62f., 69. It is customary to think of poets as sub-
jective observers, but Müller (and Broch) the philosopher must also be
thought of as subjective or »poetic.« Certain contemporary philosophers, al-
though they have abandoned the concept of transcendental subjectivity to
which Broch subscribed, have asserted the »poetic« status of the philosophi-
cal text: see Richard Rorty, »Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on
Derrida,« New Literary History, 10 (1978), 141-60.
16
In this regard see Dorrit Cohn's comments on »psycho-narration« in her
Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 52-7.

34
shifts away from his protagonist's slow-witted meditations and develops
them into a rhapsodic soliloquy of his own. At its conclusion, he jerks
the reader back down to his hero's banal reality with a tongue-in-cheek
reminder: »So dachte Esch sicherlich nicht« (1: 254). In Der Tod des
Vergil the protagonist and the narrator converge in the figure of the
dying poet, whose mind and language are adequate to voice the
thoughts that Broch would like to express.
Yet if we read Broch against the grain of his phenomenological pre-
mises and take seriously the extraordinary or even oppressive weight of
his novel's word-character, i.e. the linguisticality of Vergil's imagina-
tion, then it becomes clear that not only external reality but also Ver-
gil's personal subjectivity are subordinate to the language that precedes
them and in which they occur. Linguisticality - or, at the level of the
literary text, what might be called »narrativity« - is the primary locus
of reality. It mediates both the subjective and objective realities of the
novel, impresses upon them its temporal forms and grammatical cate-
gories, and gives a seemingly objective form to the wispy nothingness
of mind. The near-opaque density of the novel's profusion of words
calls attention to itself by the sheer weight of its verbal substance. In so
doing it reveals that it too is a thing in the material world, that it too has
its own history, limitations, and autonomy. Vergil knows that his mind
is caught in a net of words just as his soul is trapped in a living husk
that is fated to decay and die. The novel's final word addresses that
moment at which mind and soul lift away from earthly containment
and become »jenseits der Sprache« (4: 454).
The knowledge and moment of death interested Broch uncommonly.
It is in fact the crux of the impulse that underlies much of his philo-
sophical and literary writing. In turning now to look more closely at
Die Schlafwandler, we shall see the importance of the theme of death,
and another mode of self-allegory will come into view.

II

The last three decades of Broch criticism have made it plain enough
that his Schlafwandler trilogy is an allegory of his historicist theory of
values. However, it is less clear and at least as interesting to note that
the mode of allegory is somehow a function of Broch's fascination with
time, a preoccupation that was common in the modernist generation.
The emergence of time as a major theme in Broch and other modern-
ists as well as the nature of its connection with allegory are in need of
some explanation.

35
 Two letters of May, 1925 - one to his father and another to his son -
vouch for Broch's personal c o m m i t m e n t to grappling with the problem
of temporality, a c o m m i t m e n t that surfaces more complexly in his lit-
erary production (13/1: 62-7). In these two letters he describes his un-
derstanding of the modern era and man's place in it, especially f r o m the
perspective of the final confrontation with death that every individual
must make. In Broch's vision of the world, the collapse of traditional
religious beliefs and values had left modernity with no spiritual founda-
tion capable of assuring finite m a n of his continuity with infinite di-
vinity: the prospect of a modern death leaves the temporal Self in-
tolerably exposed to a monstrous nullity. His perception of this ab-
surdity led him to conceive of the artist's task as diagnostic and thera-
peutic. T h e artist must help to impose order on the chaos, thus restoring
at least in some small way a partial sense of meaning to a spiritually
destitute culture. He did not believe that literature or philosophy could
ever fully replenish the void left in the absence of traditional religion
a n d authentic myth, yet he persisted in his literary and philosophical
efforts. This gesture of defiance marks his refusal to accept temporality
on empirical modernity's secular terms. 1 7
This fascination with man's fate in a time-bound reality was not an
idiosyncratic interest on Broch's part. It is m u c h more a d o m i n a n t fea-
ture of the modernist era. 1 8 In 1863, o n e of modernism's most impor-
tant precursors, Charles Baudelaire, wrote: »La modernite, c'est le
transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitie de l'art, dont l'autre moitie
est l'eternel et l'immuable.« 1 9 T h e political, social, and scientific
upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shook
the foundations of the »eternal and i m m u t a b l e « beliefs that previous
generations had been able to take for granted. T h e result was a height-
ened awareness of the temporal flux of things, of their fragility and

17
Doris Stephan, »Vom Ungenügen des Dichters: Anmerkungen zur Todeser-
kenntnis Hermann Brochs,« Forum, 8 (1961), 181-83; Beate Loos, Mythos,
Zeit und Tod. Zum Verhältnis von Kunsttheorie und dichterischer Praxis in
Hermann Brochs Bergroman, Gegenwart der Dichtung, 1 (Frankfurt am
Main: Athenäum, 1971).
18
See esp. Margaret Church, Time and Reality. Studies in Contemporary Fiction
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1963); Theodore Ziol-
kowski, »The Discordant Clocks,« in his Dimensions of the Modern Novel,
pp. 183-214.
19
Charles Baudelaire, »Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne,« in his Oeuvres Com-
pletes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, rev. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p.
1163. For an excellent discussion on Baudelaire, temporality and modernism,
see Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity (Bloomington: University of Indi-
ana Press, 1977), pp. 46-57.

36
incertitude. Time pulls all things, including man, toward dissolution
and destruction. The prospect of a death that empties life into mere
nothingness unsettled the western imagination on a large scale. In the
era of modernism, time develops into a major philosophical and lit-
erary theme from Bergson and Proust to Thomas Mann and Martin
Heidegger.
Perhaps nowhere was this theme more dominant than in the Vien-
nese milieu. It appears there, and in Broch's Schlafwandler trilogy, in
its dual aspect: the motif of death is the sign of time's absolute power
over finite beings; and the motif of eroticism serves as an ambiguous
sign for the hope of somehow transcending temporal finitude. The in-
tellectual atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Vienna was saturated with inti-
mations of eros and thanatos. The morbid eroticism of Sezession paint-
ers and sculptors, the sexually funded theories of men such as Freud,
Kraus, and Weininger, the recurring thematics of death and erotic de-
sire in the work of Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Schaukal, Beer-Hof-
mann, Sacher-Masoch, Roth and many others are only the most ob-
vious examples of a trend that bordered on the proportions of an obses-
sion.20 Hermann Broch came of age in a generation that knew itself to
be witnessing the death-throes of a once virile Kaiserreich and, ulti-
mately, its violent end in the First World War.
This generation's desire for personal and historical regeneration ex-
pressed itself in an ambivalent preoccupation with eroticism. It is am-
bivalent because its positive and negative aspects are often difficult to
distinguish from each other. In fin-de-siecle aestheticism, the erotic
generally appears as nihilistic self-gratification. The erotic sensibilities
of Schnitzler's Anatol or of the various figures in his Reigen are typical.
Anatol's erotic encounters are ecstatic but transitory escapes from his
own mortality. He tries to suspend the knowledge of his death in the
timeless space of erotic experience. Because this moment of erotic flight
is itself temporal, Anatol attempts to hold it fast by aesthetisizing the
experience. A lock of hair, a photograph, or any other memento be-

20
For a concise discussion of the development of this situation, see Horst Fritz,
»Die Dämonisierung des Erotischen in der Literatur des Fin de Siecle,« Fin
de Siecle. Zur Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, hrsg. v. Roger
Bauer et al, Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, 35
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), pp. 442-64. Johnston, Aus-
trian Mind, pp. 115-80 passim. For a fascinating speculative treatment of the
interplay between the erotic, death, and the sacred, see Georges Bataille,
L'Erotisme (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957). On the theme of death in
modernist fiction, see Theodore Ziolkowski, »The Metaphysics of Death,« in
his Dimensions of the Modem Novel, pp. 215-57.

37
comes the source of his tepid pleasure as he indifferently lets the live
women go their own ways.21 Anatol lives only in his memory, among
the dead emblems of past adventures, while true life passes him by. His
keepsakes are unchanging and eternal. They signify for him his con-
quest not only of various women but also of time and death. Actually,
Anatol is already dead because he denies himself a truer life in the
temporal flux of human love. Like Hofmannsthal's Claudio, Anatol
isolates himself in an artificial paradise. In his futile struggle against
change and the passage of time, in his attempt to make time stand still
in symbols, Anatol succumbs even more to the Todesverfallenheit of
loveless, mechanical sexuality.
The post-aestheticist generation of writers in Vienna - in particular
Broch and Musil - also takes eroticism as a major theme, but in a
different way. They reject the sterile, time-denying erotics of dandyism,
preferring instead to present erotic experience as an affirmation of tem-
porality. It shows their desire for a rapprochement with the >dionysian<
sources of myth and the sacred. Ulrich's attachment to his sister, Aga-
the, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is charged with the erotics of a
creativity that brushes aside even the most forbidding taboos of society.
Chapter III of this study will discuss their relationship in greater detail.
The erotic violence that concludes Die Schlafwandler—Huguenau's
rape of Esch's wife - has nothing to do with love, but it is nonetheles
meant to be a propitious sign. Within the framework of Broch's histor-
icist metaphysics, the murder of Esch and the rape of his wife signify
the death of the old epoch and the procreation of that which is to come.
In Broch and Musil, the erotic is not an escape from time but is instead
an act that is in harmony with time's forward motion. Its commitment
is not to escape but to creativity.
Temporality underlies the motifs of death and eros for the aesthetes
and post-aesthetes alike. It is also noteworthy that there is an interesting
parallel between modernism - especially in Austria - and the Baroque
with regard to the importance of temporality. The modernists renewed
the old memento mori theme as a spontaneous aesthetic response to the
perceived loss of timeless and eternal values - what Nietzsche tele-
graphically labeled the »death of God.«
Like the early seventeenth century, the early twentieth century was a
time of devastating historical upheaval. World War One and the Thirty
Years War left entire nations in the deepest misery of ideological, ma-
terial, and spiritual pandemonium. Such a historical experience condi-

21
Arthur Schnitzler, Anatol, in his Gesammelte Werke in zwei Bänden, I
(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1962).

38
tions the sort of metaphysical pessimism expressed in a literature that
dwells on the fragility, mutability, and meaninglessness of earthly
things. The Baroque mind dismisses mere reality as deception and il-
lusion, a distortion of the truer reality beyond this world. Life, in Calde-
ron's central formulation, is a dream: la vida es sueno; and it is in this
selfsame dreamlife that Broch's sleepwalkers drift about. It is so be-
cause their path »nur mehr Symbol und Andeutung eines höheren We-
ges ist, den man in Wirklichkeit zu gehen hat und für den jener bloß
das irdische Spiegelbild ist, schwankend und unsicher wie das Bild im
dunklen Teich« (1:379f). Broch's Platonism has much in common with
Baroque habits of mind. The pious seventeenth century rejected the
priority of the objective reality around them on religious grounds, in
celebration of God's timeless heavenly order. The twentieth century has
lost confidence in objective reality for reasons of secular epistemology
and because of a disappointment in the failure of enlightened human-
ism to fulfill the Utopian expectations that it had generated. The Ba-
roque flight into religion is no longer possible: Broch reduces the
Church to a shabby and impotent Salvation Army Band. This pathetic
group of proselytizing tambourine-bangers is all that remains of tradi-
tional Western religiosity in the world of Broch's sleepwalkers. It is the
merest vestige of what was once a mighty bulwark against the im-
mensity of death and time.
One of Broch's contemporaries, also writing in the 1920's worked out
a provocative hypothesis concerning the relationship between tempo-
rality and literary form. In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
(Berlin, 1928), Walter Benjamin writes: »Unter der entscheidenden
Kategorie der Zeit . . . läßt sich das Verhältnis von Symbol und Alle-
gorie sich festlegen.« 22 He suggests that symbol, which is the master

22
Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, hrsg. v. Rolf Tiede-
mann, Suhrkamp Wissenschaft Taschenbuch, 225 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-
kamp, 1982), pp. 144f. Cited as Benjamin. For a conveniently brief survey of
the aesthetic rivalry between symbol and allegory see Gunter Reiß, »Allego-
risierung« und moderne Erzählkunst. Eine Studie zum Werk Thomas Manns
(München: Fink, 1970), pp. 11-40. Reiß operates with a notion of allegory
similar to the one I am trying to develop here, but he does not appreciate the
relevance of temporality to the rise of allegory in the modernist era. He ex-
plicitly rejects it (p. 33). Paul de Man is more sympathetic to Benjamin's
thesis, which he modifies and develops: P.d.M., »Allegorie und Symbol in der
europäischen Frühromantik,« in Typologia Litterarum, Festschrift für Max
Wehrli, hrsg. v. Stefan Sonderegger, Alois M. Maas, and Harald Burger (Zü-
rich: Atlantis, 1969), pp. 403-25; »The Rhetoric of Temporality,« in Inter-
pretation. Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1969), pp. 173-209.

39
trope of the Renaissance and the Goethezeit, is the figural mode proper
to a world firmly rooted in a sound metaphysics: »Als symbolisches
Gebilde soll das Schöne bruchlos ins Göttliche übergehen.« 23 Its tem-
porality is that of the mystical instant of timeless continuity between
earthly beauty and ideal divinity; it is the immanence of God in the
world. But the disruptive intrusion of time as history - as a war, for
instance, that no pious mind can understand as a reflection of the con-
tinuity between man and divine perfection - into this unity ruptures the
continuum, signaling the presence of death in paradise and the retreat
of God into a distant transcendence. The trope that enacts this separa-
tion from the divine, and that admits of temporality and death, is al-
legory. Its function is to reconcile differences between appearances in
the phenomenal world and the ideality of spiritual reality.
Allegorical thinking in the seventeenth century typically devalued
empirical reality to the status of a sign. The world represents but is not
identical with the Platonic (Christian) realm beyond appearances. The
twentieth century, similarly immersed in the turmoil of political, relig-
ious, social and intellectual crisis, has shown a like affinity for allegory,
especially in the large-scale trend toward reflective and reflexive prac-
tices in fiction. 24 The felt need for a self-reflective level in narrative no
doubt has to do with a metaphysical insecurity so thoroughgoing that
even linguistic signification is set into question. Separation from tra-
ditional absolutes conditions the predominance of allegory as pos-
tulated meaning not governed by the tertium comparatiotiis of an in-
dubitable authority.
The important difference between modernism and the Baroque is the
finality of the separation of lived reality from the transcendent order.
In spite of its profound distress, the seventeenth century ultimately
retained its confidence in the divine authority of God as manifestation
of Church and State. This order, invariant because of collective faith in
its divine sanction, provides the Baroque allegorist with a stable tertium
comparatiotiis. The twentieth century - after Kant, after Nietzsche, and
after the failure of its cherished institutions to prevent a war of
shocking inhumanity - has not been able to retain its confidence in
absolute authority, divine or earthly. Modern allegorists lack the frame-

23
Benjamin, p. 139.
24
Maurice Beebe, »Reflective and Reflexive Trends in Modern Fiction,« in
Twentieth Century Poetry, Fiction, Theory, Bucknell Review, ed. Harry Gar-
vin (London: Associated University Presses, 1977), pp. 13-26. However, Bee-
be makes no connection between reflexivity and the tradition of allegory. On
the modern rise of allegory see Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit. The Making of
Allegory (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).

40
work of an invariant plane of reference. In its absence they must fall
back on the resources of individual imagination: because he cannot
refer to a divine order, Bertrand Müller must allegorize a theory of
history (i.e. of temporality).
Broch was aware of the allegorical tendencies of modern fiction, but
he did not consciously associate them with the problem of temporality.
He cites Hofmannsthal and Joyce as examples of modern allegorists.
The crisis of modern literature as Broch understood it is summed up in
the autonomy of the subject, who must posit new values for himself.
The modern Self is cut off from the transcendence guaranteed in the
symbolism of myth and sacred narrative. Broch takes Hofmannsthal's
Chandos-Letter to be the breaking point between the metaphysics of
symbolism and the disrupted signification of the allegorical figure: »die
mystische Intuitiv-Einheit von Ich, Ausdruck und Ding ist ihm [Hof-
mannsthal] mit einem Schlag verlorengegangen, so daß sein Ich jäh-
lings zu hermetischer Isolierung gebracht i s t . . . « (9/1: 305). According
to Broch, Hofmannsthal tentatively finds his way out of this dilemma
in a ploy of self-reflection: »Dichtung ist Traum, aber einer, der sich
seines Träumens immer wieder bewußt wird« (9/1: 307). Writing about
Hofmannsthal's Frau ohne Schatten, Broch contends,

der Symbolstrom hat zwar wieder zu fließen begonnen, aber die natürliche
unmittelbare Verbindung zwischen Assoziation, sprachlichem Ausdruck,
Symbol und Ding hat sich nicht wieder eingestellt; eine gewisse Symboler-
starrung ist eingetreten, und um die Mitteilung verständlich und flexibel zu
erhalten, müssen immer mehr Symbole ins Spiel gebracht werden, freilich in
ihrer Überfülle nun erst recht den Erstarrungsprozeß fördernd, da sie - und
das ist der Übergang vom Symbol zur Allegorie - überhaupt nicht mehr
verständlich wären, wenn sie nicht in einen fixen, eben allegorischen Kanon
gebracht werden würden, das Gegenextrem zur unmittelbaren Mittelbarkeit.
Und weil es ein Erstarrungsprozeß ist, haftet der Allegorie etwas homunku-
loid Lebloses an, von dem sie ebensowohl in Versteinerungs- wie in Verflüch-
tigungsgefahr gebracht wird. ( 9 / 1 : 322)

The modern writer's symbols become allegories because the writer

himself must also posit their tertium comparationis—what Broch here
calls a »fixed or allegorical canon« of meanings. Such is precisely
Broch's own solution for himself when he builds in an essayistic me-
talevel that reflects and interprets the action of the three Schlafwand-
/er-novels. 25 It should also be noted - especially in view of the fact that

25
In a letter of 4 April 1935 to Herbert Burgmüller Broch explains himself: »In
den Exkursen des Huguenau habe ich einen Ausweg gefunden: wenn schon
der Autor eine Sinngebung mit Objektivitätsanspruch für unerlässlich hält,
so möge er es offen und ehrlich tun, d.h. also wirkliche Objektivitätssphären
einbauen« (13/1: 340).

41
many Broch critics try to find a symbolic-mythic level in his works -
that Broch is explicitly aware of the limitations which allegorizing im-
poses: any allegorical structure is the postulate of an »isolated ego« and
therefore cannot attain to the effectively objective character of genuine
myth.26 He nevertheless attributes to Hofmannsthal a special insight
that affirms the creative, perhaps mythopoeic potential of the autono-
mous Self. Broch reads the Kaiser's dream in the Frau ohne Schatten as
the tale's allegory of itself. A dream in a story is a dream in a dream:
Hofmannsthal symbolisiert also - ein geradezu Joycescher Trick - nochmals
den Allegorisierungsprozeß, symbolisiert im Inhalt sein eigenes Darstellungs-
mittel, und auf diese Weise durchbricht er mit nochmaligem Raffinement das
lediglich Allegorische, das lediglich Raffinierte, das lediglich Mittelbare und
gewinnt ihm die zweite Unmittelbarkeit, die schöne Einfalt, ohne die das
Märchen kein Märchen wäre. (9/1: 323)

In this passage Broch is straining to regain some sense of symbol and

myth, but his proposition that metafiction achieves a »zweite Unmit-
telbarkeit« is unconvincing. His philosophical premise of an autono-
mous subject forestalls the claims he would like to make on a literature
of unmediated vision.
Nevertheless, his observation that allegory and self-allegory are im-
portant features in Hofmannsthal and Joyce is compelling. Broch does
not explain what he means by saying that Hofmannsthal's ironic self-
reflection in the Frau ohne Schatten is a »joycean trick,« but the allu-
sion is reasonably clear. Joyce's allegorical impulse manifests itself as
parody. His Ulysses is a parody - i.e. allegory - of Homer's Odyssey.
The classical epic provides him with a continuous plane of reference
according to which he organizes his conspicuously unheroic world.27

26
Along with many other writers of his generation, Broch was interested in
fulfilling the Romantics' call for a new mythology, but he realized the unlike-
lihood of him or anyone else actually managing the job of composing sacred
texts: See his »Geist und Zeitgeist. Ein Vortrag,« 9/2:177-201, esp. p. 197. Cf.
also 13/1: 398.
27
Maurice Beebe has suggested that a defining characteristic of modernist fic-
tion is the use of myth not »as a discipline for belief or a subject for inter-
pretation, but as an arbitrary means of ordering art,« Μ. B., »Ulysses and the
Age of Modernism,« in Fifty Years »Ulysses,« ed. with an Intro, by Thomas
F. Staley (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 175. Bee-
be's observation is in principle true, but it is too narrow. Allegory or alle-
gorization describes more exactly what is decisive because it includes but goes
beyond the mythologizing that Beebe has singled out. Many authors do alle-
gorize myths, but other authors - who operate under the influence of the
same need to posit a verifying tertium comparationis—allegorize other pre-
formed systems. Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories are obvious
examples of such systems that some authors refer to; Broch's theory of values

42
Homer could construct an imaginary world according to the real
world's divine plan; his modern counterpart, Joyce, must construct his
imaginary world in the absence of divinity. Under these circumstances
he ironically bases it not upon reality - spiritual or historical - but
instead upon the stories that have traditionally been told about it. The
vision of the world that Joyce offers is mediated through the optic of
narrative tradition.
One of the staggering implications of his achievement is that there is
something profoundly narrative and interpretive about the way we set
about determining what is real and what is not. The >stories< told about
the world - scientific, historical, and poetic - are projections not only of
facts but also of values and beliefs that we impose upon the coordinate
system of nature and history. Values and beliefs are the special province
of the poetic word, which has in its subliminal keeping the inchoate
future. This future is not present in the form of some particular idea or
other that some particular poet or other writes down for posterity to
translate into fact. Instead, the future is manifest in the capacity of
literature's most evocative images to stir a receptive imagination into
renewed creativity. These evocations reinforce but also subtly redefine
the beliefs and values that will determine the bounds within which the
future will take shape.

Ill

Broch's narrative technique in Die Schlafwandler incorporates aspects

of the self-allegory he mentions in connection with Hofmannsthal and
of the parodical allegory to be associated with Joyce. As self-allegory,
the trilogy duplicates itself within itself in the form of Bertram Müller's
philosophical disquisition. His essay on the disintegration of values re-
flects and interprets the narrative in which it occurs. It functions as a
tertium comparationis for the events in the fictional world.28 In the

is another. It is the need to allegorize and not any particular allegorical con-
tent that is modernism's defining characteristic. Cf. Angus Fletcher, Allegory.
The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964),
304-59, esp. 317-21.
28
The relationship between the essays and the novel is of course the most often
interpreted aspect of Die Schlafwandler. My intention here is not to offer
another interpretive paraphrase of how he translates his theories into fiction;
previous critics have already made this aspect sufficiently clear. Rather, I
want to demonstrate the allegorical character of his technique and trace it to
its source in the experience of temporality. For studies of the relationship
between Müller's (Broch's) theory and the course of the trilogy's fictional
action see esp. Richard Brinkmann, (cf. note 4) but also Karl Robert Mandel-

43
absence of any superordinated, universally valid frame of reference
Broch has found it necessary to fabricate one that will make his tale
systematically intelligible. Yet Broch also knows his philosophical theo-
ry to be a fabulation in its own right. It is only a tentative substitute that
cannot attain to the binding universality of myth and religion. Broch
acknowledges the fictionality and fallibility of the »Zerfall der Werte«
by setting them, along with their author, en abyme. Miiller's presence is
the sign that the essays arise from a specific individual in a particular
historical setting. They are bound to the limitations of his personal
perspective. There is no Archimedean point, no tertium comparationis
outside of fictionality.
Part of Miiller's essay can serve as a key to the parodical form of
allegory that is also at work in the trilogy. The present age, asserts
Müller, lacks an authentic artistic style of its own. »Style« in his special
sense is the objectivation of an epoch's spirituality, and the purely or-
namental flourish - especially in architecture - is the point at which
this inner logic of values becomes visible. But the aesthetic object is
only one of the ways in which the transpersonal system of values
reaches expression. This structure is the matrix from which emerge all
the thoughts, deeds, and judgments that precede and inform the char-
acter of a historical people. Miiller's interest focuses on the aesthetic
object because it is the purest expression of an era's inner logic.
It is here that Müller makes his most direct statement about the
connection between temporality and aesthetics. He understands the
threat of time and the fear of death to be the underlying source of the
aesthetic impulse:
Vielleicht wäre es müßig über Stil nachzudenken, wenn nicht das Problem
dahinter stünde, das allein alles Philosophieren legitimiert: die Angst vor
dem Nichts, die Angst vor der Zeit, die zum Tode führt. . . . Denn was immer
der Mensch tut, er tut es, um die Zeit zu vernichten, um sie aufzuheben, und

kow, Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie »Die Schlafwandler.« Gestaltung und

Reflexion im modernen deutschen Roman, Probleme der Dichtung, 6 (Hei-
delberg: Carl Winter, 1962); Rolf Geißler, »Hermann Brochs Die Schlaf-
wandler,« in Möglichkeiten des modernen deutschen Romans, hrsg. v. Rolf
Geißler, 3. Aufl. (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1962); Leo Kreutzer, Er-
kenntnistheorie und Prophetie. Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie »Die Schlaf-
wandler,« Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 3 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966);
Hartmut Steinecke, »Die Schlafwandler. Beispiel eines polyhistorischen Ro-
mans,« in H.S., Hermann Broch und der polyhistorische Roman Bonner Ar-
beiten zur deutschen Literatur, 17 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1968), 101-55; Hartmut
Reinhardt, Erweiterter Naturalismus. Untersuchungen zum Konstruktionsver-
fahren in Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie »Die Schlafwandler,ν Kölner ger-
manistische Studien, 7 (Köln: Böhlau, 1972).

44
 diese Aufhebung heißt Raum. Selbst die Musik, die bloß in der Zeit ist und
die Zeit erfüllt, wandelt die Zeit zum Räume, und daß alles Denken im
Räumlichen vor sich geht, daß der Denkprozeß eine Verquickung unsagbar
verwickelter vieldimensionaler logischer Räume darstellt, diese Theorie be-
sitzt allergrößte Wahrscheinlichkeit. (1: 445)

Aesthetically wrought space annihilates time insofar as it reifies and

reaffirms the symbolic continuity of man with values that are beyond
time and death. The poverty of the modern era, says Müller, is that it
lacks a distinctive sense of ornament and is therefore defenseless
against the annihilating movement of time. This alleged lack of style is
the manifestation of man's discontinuity with any transcendent order.
As a novelist in an era with no intrinsic style of its own, Müller has
posed an interesting problem for himself. What is to be the style of his
own artistic work? His solution - like the actual solutions of James
Joyce and Thomas Mann - is to write novels in self-critical parody of
past styles. He casts Pasenow in the manner of Fontane's realism and
gives to Esch the characteristic patina of naturalism. He composes the
Huguenau in a systematically fragmented anti-style that is meant to
reflect the chaotic disorder of the lives of those living in the styleless
era of World War I. The tentative unity of the three novels arises from
yet another level of reference. This level is that of mythology, but once
again this level is a dream that knows itself to be dreaming: the my-
thologizing can only be ironic. Broch harnesses eclectically borrowed
(i.e. parodied) mythological motifs in order allegorically to represent
his theory of history and values. We turn now to take a close look at the
machinations of allegory in the three novels.
Students and critics of Broch's trilogy have taken careful note of the
»parodistic« relationship between 1888 Pasenow oder die Romantik
and the conventions of realism familiar in the works of Theodor Fonta-
ne.29 However, in this case the term »parody« is not to be understood as
an attempt to satirize or ridicule Fontane for comic effect. Instead,
Broch is making use of typically Fontanesque elements in order to
awaken certain expectations in his readers. The setting in Berlin among
the landed gentry of the Prussian countryside, as well as the theme of a
young officer's choice between two attractive young women evokes in
the reader a sense of pleasant familiarity. The reader knows the style
and therefore has a general idea of how the plot ought to move forward.
The expectation is that serious and touching conflicts will develop, that

29
See esp. Andreas Bertschinger, Hermann Brochs »Pasenow« - ein künstlicher
Fontane-Roman? Zur Epochenstruktur Wilhelminismus und Zwischenkriegs-
zeit, Zürcher Beiträge zur deutschen Literatur und Geistesgeschichte, 55 (Zü-
rich: Artemis, 1982).

45
painful choices will be made, but finally that the order of things will be
reaffirmed. Broch undermines these expectations by unmasking the ter-
rible confusion that lies only slightly beneath the genteel surface of his
protagonist's stiff uniform and polished manners.
T h e young officer is Joachim von Pasenow, and his problem is that
he must find and take his rightful place in Wilhelminian society. Un-
like a true Fontane hero, this protagonist finds himself snarled in an
anarchical jumble of elemental experiences that he is unable to untan-
gle or even identify. He undergoes two decisive experiences. One of
these is the senseless death of his brother, Helmuth, who is killed in a
duel for the sake of an outdated notion of honor. This personal con-
frontation with death is profoundly unsettling for Joachim. It forces
him toward a reckoning with his own inner strength against the inev-
itability of death. As his friend Bertrand once pointed out to him,
Joachim's only spiritual stability lies in superficial convention, which
his military uniform represents. Such outward signs, suggests Bertrand,
have supplanted the inner fortification that the Church had once pro-
vided (1: 2 4 - 2 8 ; 58-61). Superficial convention in the form of a
nonsensical code of honor sent Helmuth to his grave, and now Joachim
also has been made to feel the threat of meaninglessness and an absurd
death.
T h e other major event in Joachim's development occurs, significant-
ly, at the same time as his brother's death. This event is his erotic
encounter with the passionate Ruzena. His night of lovemaking with
her immediately precedes the news of Helmuth's killing, thereby bring-
ing the experience of eros and thanatos into a conspicuous juxtaposi-
tion for him and for the reader. Like death, sex belongs to the elemen-
tal part of life that largely escapes convention and is therefore a threat
to Joachim, who seeks refuge in the familiarity and clarity of conven-
tion. Ruzena is an outsider, an exotic casino-hostess who, in her ele-
mental simplicity, does not even have a full command of the cultivated
G e r m a n language. She exists beyond the precincts of Wilhelminian
society. She is a temptress who draws Joachim out of his accustomed
reality into a dangerously unfamiliar world.
Her opponent for his affections, such as they are, is the blond-haired
blue-eyed Elisabeth Baddensen. Like Joachim, she belongs to the upper
classes and leads her life entirely within the protected boundaries that
convention has established for young people of their station. Broch uses
this well-heeled maiden and her family to exemplify how convention
strives to contain the temporal threat of eros and death within artificial
boundaries. With the Baddensens as his example, the narrator intro-
duces the theme of temporality into the novel. Because the burden of

46
time oppresses them, he explains, they have become enthusiastic col-
lectors of things. In order to assemble for themselves a familiar un-
changing world they surround themselves with inanimate things, espe-
cially art objects. It means for t h e m an » A u f h e b u n g des Todes« (1: 80f).
They i m m u r e themselves within a fortress of cultural detritus for m u c h
the same reason that Schnitzler's Anatol prefers keepsakes to live wo-
men. It is an aesthetisization of the real world that attempts to staunch
the flow of time by stopping it at symbolic points and holding it fast.
In contradistinction to the stillness associated with the Baddensens'
collection of objects, Broch connects Ruzena with the d y n a m i c fluidity
of water imagery (e.g. 1:44f). He distinguishes her as the carrier of
mutability and time. Her erotic vitality, although it seems sinister to
Pasenow, is a principle of life that a f f i r m s itself tragically, in full ac-
ceptance of its temporality. R u z e n a suffers for it, but there is more of
life in her than in any other figure in the trilogy. She is embedded in
the ebb and flow of things. Elisabeth, by way of contrast, swoons into
the a r m s of an unrecognized death. Her favorite place is her father's
well-manicured garden at the family's country estate. Because change
frightens her, she seeks refuge in the accustomed surroundings of his
collection and his garden:
zwar wußte Elisabeth nicht, daß jeder Sammler . . . , aufgehend in seiner
Sammlung, auch die Erreichung seiner eigenen Absolutheit erhofft und die
Aufhebung seines Todes, Elisabeth wußte es nicht, aber umgeben von all den
vielen schönen toten Dingen, die um sie angesammelt und aufgehäuft waren,
umgeben von den vielen schönen Bildern, ahnte sie dennoch, daß die Bilder
an die Wände gehängt waren, als sollten sie die Mauern verstärken, und als
sollten all die toten Dinge etwas sehr Lebendiges bergen . . . . Sie ahnte die
Angst, die dahinter stand und die den Alltag, der das Altern ist, im Festlichen
zu übertönen suchte, Angst, die sich immer wieder vergewisserte - stets neu
erlebte Überraschung - , daß sie lebendig und geboren und definitiv beisam-
men waren und ihr Kreis ewiglich geschlossen. Und so wie der Baron immer
neue Strecken seines Bodens in den Park einbezog, dessen dichter dunkler
Bestand nun schon fast von allen Seiten mit weiten Flächen freundlichen
lichten Jungholzes umgeben war, so schien es Elisabeth, als wünschte er mit
fast weiblicher Fürsorge ihrer aller zu einem immer größeren eingefriedeten
Park voll anmutiger Raststationen zu m a c h e n , . . . auf daß Elisabeth sich für
immer in ihm ergehen möge. (1: 80f; cf. 1: 37, 110)

Elisabeth resists all that is outside of her little garden, secure in the
knowledge that no outsider will penetrate its bounds. She fears the loss
of her virginity and is afraid of coming into the temporal flow of a
world where things change and people die. Yet even her father cannot
bring time to a standstill. Joachim rejects Ruzena and takes Elisabeth
as his wife. T h e pathological prudery of their wedding night is the final
demonstration of their will to resist the temporal truth of eros and
thanatos.

47
 In the same way that Fontanesque elements serve as a bonding de-
vice for the external structure of Pasenow, familiar topoi of the natu-
ralist novel give to Esch its outward appearance. The aura of gentility
that characterizes the Pasenow-novel gives way to the harsh tones and
unsavory details of life among the Rhineland's working class. The nov-
el's ostensible theme is the confrontation of its dimwitted protagonist,
August Esch, with the hard facts of proletarian life. His job-problems,
woman-troubles, and his personal campaign against social injustice
make up the external events depicted in the tale. Its actual theme goes
behind the naturalistic backdrop to get at the deeper sources of Esch's
impotence and despair. These sources are metaphysical, and are not
finally different from those uncovered in Pasenow.
Esch's epiphany of death and eros comes to him when he visits a
music hall in the company of Erna and Balthasar Korn, the brother and
sister from whom he rents a room. The evening's amusements include
watching a juggler whose routine climaxes with a knife-throwing act.
His target is a beautiful girl, who stands »crucified« against a black
background. She placidly awaits the remotely phallic knives of her part-
ner while Esch, tense with fear and excitement, expects her at any mo-
ment to be plunged into the blackness of death. It is unpleasantly com-
ical that this burlesque tableau moves Esch deeply, awakening his stun-
ted religious sensibilities. His driving ambition from then on is to save
the beautiful girl, to redeem her - »Erlösung« is a key word in this
novel - and to sacrifice himself in her place:

Fast hätte Esch die Arme selber gegen den Himmel erhoben, selber gekreu-
zigt, hätte er gewünscht, vor der Zarten zu stehen, mit eigenem Körper die
drohenden Messer aufzufangen, und hätte der Jongleur, wie dies zu gesche-
hen pflegt, gefragt, ob ein Herr aus dem Publikum den Wunsch hege, auf die
Bühne zu kommen, um sich vor das schwarze Brett zu stellen, wahrlich, Esch
hätte sich gemeldet. Ja, es war ihm ein fast wollüstiger Gedanke, daß er allein
und verlassen dort stünde, und daß die langen Messer ihn an das Brett an-
heften könnten wie ein Käfer, doch müßte er dann, korrigierte er, mit dem
Gesicht gegen das Brett gewendet sein, da kein Käfer vom Bauche her aufge-
spießt wird: und der Gedanke, daß er gegen die Finsternis des Brettes gekehrt
wäre, nicht wissend, wann das tödliche Messer von hinten heranfliegt, das
Herz ihm zu durchbohren und es an das Brett anzuheften, war von so au-
ßerordentlichem und geheimnisvollem Reiz, war Wunsch von so neuer Stär-
ke und Reife, daß er wie aus Traum und Seligkeit auffuhr, als mit Trommel-
wirbel und Paukenschlag und Fanfaren das Orchester den Jongleur begrüßte,
der . . . dem erlösten Publikum sich verneigten. Es waren die Fanfaren des
Gerichtes. Der Schuldige wird wie ein Wurm zertreten; warum soll er nicht
wie ein Käfer aufgespießt werden? warum soll der Tod nicht statt der Sense
eine lange Stecknadel tragen, oder zumindest eine Lanze? (1: 203f)

48
Esch's desire for a sacrificial death and the image of being pierced f r o m
behind prefigure the mode of his death in the next novel. Huguenau
will bayonet him in the back. T h e scene's immediate significance,
though, is the spiritual awakening of August Esch. His initial response
is the desire to c o n s u m m a t e the experience in Erna Korn's bed.
Sex and w o m e n are not foreign to August Esch, who has the repu-
tation of being something of a rake. W h e n he is feeling low and has
time to kill, it lifts his spirits to m a k e a list of all the w o m e n he has ever
slept with (1: 233). But the association of lust with these vaguely reli-
gious stirrings is something new for him. It signals a distinction be-
tween carnal self-indulgence and the possibility of lasting fulfillment in
an erotic union that will shelter him f r o m the omnipresent threat of
death (1:220). Unfortunately for him, Erna Korn's response is negative,
and so Esch finds himself compelled to still his primal urges at a nearby
brothel.
Nevertheless, he has undergone an experience that will continue to
drive him forward. T h e desire to redeem Ilona - the girl f r o m the knife
act - becomes an obsession with h i m ; and so does his desire to set right
the injustice done to his friend, Martin Geyring. Geyring is a political
organizer w h o m the authorities have jailed on trumped-up charges.
August Esch, a bookkeeper by profession, believes that he has uncov-
ered glaring errors in the credit and debit columns of the cosmos. This
accountant-saviour takes upon himself the mission of seeing to it that
the Geyrings will be set free and that the Ilonas will be preserved f r o m
the i m m i n e n c e of death at the hands of knife-throwing men.
W h e n Teltscher - the juggler - and G e r n e r t h - the manager of the
music hall - decide to get into a new line of the e n t e r t a i n m e n t business,
they offer Esch the opportunity to participate. Esch seizes on this
chance as a way of redeeming Ilona and, as long as it is for a good cause,
earning a few m a r k s . In a m o o d of ascetic self-sacrifice h e quits his j o b ,
renounces his romantic aspirations toward both Erna and Ilona, and
joins in the new business venture. T h e idea of throwing in with Telt-
scher and G e r n e r t h overtakes Esch as a sudden illumination one eve-
ning as he readies himself for bed:

Und ohne Ordnung in den Büchern gab es auch keine Ordnung in der Welt,
und solange keine Ordnung war, würde Ilona weiter den Messern ausgeliefert
sein, würde.. . Martin . . . ewig im Kerker schmachten. Er dachte scharf nach,
und wie er jetzt die Unterhose fallen ließ, ergab es sich zwanglos: die andern
hatten ihr Geld dem Ringkampfunternehmen zur Verfügung gestellt, also
mußte er, der kein Geld besaß, nun eben doch mit seiner eigenen Person
zahlen . . . . ( 1 : 243)

49
 Naturally Esch's profound insight is about as m o m e n t o u s as the falling
of his undershorts. T h e impecunious hero will offer his services to Telt-
scher and G e r e r t h by r o u n d i n g up w o m e n who are so down and out
that they are willing to scuffle about in a public rink for the prurient
e n t e r t a i n m e n t of idle men. Esch has conveniently forgotten that his
»renunciation« of Erna and Ilona was not of his own choosing. Erna
has designs on Löhberg, the marriageable owner of a prosperous tobac-
co shop, and Ilona is having a shabby affair with Balthasar Korn. Be-
cause Esch is not one to let mere facts d a m p e n his messianic enthu-
siasms, and because business is business, he invests his energies in the
new undertaking with great fervor. »Besser R i n g k ä m p f e als Messer-
werfen,« says Esch philosophically (1: 264).
Parallel to the vulgar sexuality of his wrestling show, there develops
for Esch a new romance. He spends an increasing a m o u n t of time with
the widowed proprietress of a small cafe in Cologne. She is known to
the regulars there as » M u t t e r H e n t j e n . « Esch hopes that an erotic
union with Mutter H e n t j e n will be his redemption, an abrogation of
time (1: 286f). It is significant that in Esch's fogged mind an overlap
occurs between the image of Mutter H e n t j e n ' s dead husband - she
keeps his photograph in the cafe - and that of Eduard von Bertrand, the
shipping magnate w h o m Esch holds responsible for Martin Geyring's
imprisonment. It is also important that Esch alternately loves and hates
this Bertrand: hates him for his passive role in the world's injustices
a n d because he is a homosexual (i.e. not procreative), but also loves him
because he is »etwas Besseres,« a grand patriarch of the sterile capitalist
society in which Esch lives. Appropriately, Bertrand is the president of
the company for which Esch worked. T h e overlap between Bertrand
a n d Father H e n t j e n sets into motion the oedipal scenario that Esch
plays out in his dreamlike confrontation with Bertrand. Esch wants to
overcome »the father« - H e n t j e n / B e r t r a n d - and take » M u t t e r « Hent-
j e n as his wife:

Denn nun war kein Zweifel mehr, daß er, der Lebende, von dem die Frauen
das Kind empfangen durften, daß er sich hingebend an Mutter Hentjen und
an ihren Tod, daß er durch diese außergewöhnliche Maßnahme nicht nur die
Erlösung Ilonas vollendet, nicht nur auf ewig sie den Messern entrückt, nicht
nur ihre Schönheit ihr wiedergewinnt und alles Sterben rückgängig macht,
rückgängig bis zu neuer Jungfrauschaft, sondern daß er notwendig damit
auch Mutter Hentjen vom Tode errettet, lebend wieder ihr Schoß, jenen zu
gebären, der die Zeit aufrichten wird. (1: 354)

Esch wishes to accede to the role of the Father in order to become the
progenitor of the coming saviour. But before he can take the old queen -
Mutter H e n t j e n ' s »crown« is the stiff, blond hair-do that she constantly

50
fumbles with (1: 357) - her husband the king must first be toppled.
After his dream-talk with Bertrand, Esch returns to Mutter Hentjen,
where he casts a challenging glance at the dead Hentjen's photograph
(1: 357) and proceeds to write out a statement to the police charging
Bertrand with illegal homosexual activities. This accusation brings
about the »second death of Herr Hentjen« (1: 337) when it produces
Bertrand's suicide. The news of his death coincides with the removal of
old Hentjen's photograph from the wall of the cafe as Mutter Hentjen
becomes Esch's fiancee. (1: 362f).
That the new king will be »August« Esch - his name means emperor
in Latin and down in German - is not so much mythopoeic profundity
as it is mytho-parodic allegorizing. Its irony is similar to that of Der
Zauberberg, which revives the German Bildungsroman in the in-
tentionally dubious setting of a tuberculosis clinic for the moribund
well-to-do; it is an irony that is also similar to Joyce's when he reduces
the magnificent Odysseus to the stature of the ludicrous Leopold
Bloom. In all three cases the use of previous literary models is first and
foremost a framing device that provides formal organization on the
level of structure and ironic commentary on the level of content. This
literary allegorizing points up these artists' sense of themselves adrift in
a cultural »Spätzeit« with no mythic orientation of its own.
Broch had originally intended to frame the trilogy's final instalment,
1918 Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit, as an Odysseus parody. 30 But the
appearance of Joyce's Ulysses during the writing of the Huguenau
made this idea seem unwise (13/1:99). Nevertheless, mythological sche-
mata underlie and organize the third novel's avant-garde surface style.
Writing perhaps under the influence of John Dos Passos, Broch struc-
tured Huguenau as a fragmented series of loosely connected narratives
about lonely people - including the narrator himself - caught up in the
final dissolution of their society. Even the war is not a cause but an
effect of this process of disintegration that has made a shambles of their
lives and left them unprotected against the terror of death-bringing
time.

30
Cf. Paul Michael Lützeler, »Lukäcs Theorie des Romans und Brochs Schlaf-
wandler,« in Hermann Broch und seine Zeil, Akten des Internationalen
Broch-Symposiums Nice, 1979, hrsg. v. Richard Thieberger, Jahrbuch für In-
ternationale Germanistik, Reihe A, Bd. 6 (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Las
Vegas: Peter Lang, 1980), pp. 54f. In this article, Lützeler suggests that Broch's
Sleepwalker-trilogy allegorizes Georg Lukäcs' theory of the novel. He also
shows that Joachim Pasenow is a parody of Faust, that Esch is a Quixote-
figure, and that Wilhelm Huguenau is parody of Wilhelm Meister.

51
 Broch's Odysseus is the devious Wilhelm Huguenau, an absolutely
amoral representative of goal-oriented Sachlichkeit. After he has aban-
doned his post on the battlefront, Huguenau comes slouching toward a
village near Trier, where the aged Joachim von Pasenow has been reac-
tivated by the military as the town's commandant. The childless August
Esch runs the local newspaper with his wife, Gertrud, formerly known
as Mutter Hentjen. The £jr/j-novel ended on a note of foreboding. The
new king discovered that his frigid mate was barren: »Es schauderte
ihn, und unentrinnbar wußte er, daß ihr Schoß getötet war, oder
schlimmer noch, eine Mißgeburt zu gewärtigen hatte« (1: 378). Yet
because Esch did at last manage to seduce Erna Korn, it may be that he
is not childless after all. She became pregnant and it seems unlikely to
Esch that her fiance, whom he usually refers to as a »keuscher Josef,«
can be the father.
The names of these characters reveal Broch's technique of eclectic
mythologizing. »Korn« is the traditional emblem of fertility associated
with Ceres or Demeter, the goddess of bounty and marriage. »Erna«
suggests die Ernte, the harvest of planted seed. That this child-bearer is
married to a »keuscher Josef« makes Broch's intention obvious. Esch
fears that her child is his because he knows it was conceived in an illicit
and lascivious moment, »in dem drohend der Mord rasselte« (1: 376)
and therefore does not promise the redemption for which he had
hoped. The portent of an unholy son and the intimation of murder find
fulfillment in the coming of Huguenau.
Wilhelm Huguenau is not the son of Erna Lohberg, but he assumes a
role that nevertheless makes him the answer to Esch's dark forebod-
ings. When he arrives in the town on the Mosel, Huguenau's business-
like mind sizes up the local power structure to determine the most
efficient course of action. Posing as the representative of a »patriotic«
but unnamed business interest, he weasels his way into the good graces
of local dignitaries. From them he raises funds necessary to buy out
Esch's newspaper. He and Esch strike a bargain whereby Huguenau, in
addition to instalment payments, actually moves into the Esch house-
hold. As time passes he behaves increasingly as a son in his family's
midst. The orphan child Marguerite is a reflection of Huguenau in this
respect. She too has been adopted by the Esches, is also a French-speak-
er, and, most importantly, is also an ethical tabula rasa. Like Hugue-
nau, she is interested only in money; both of them are cold, unemotion-
al, attracted instinctively only to Esch's printing press. Marguerite and
Huguenau sense their kinship with the machine's insensate function-
ing, for they live in precisely the same mechanical way (1: 489-93).

52
 H u g u e n a u rises rapidly to a place of respect in the life of the c o m -
m u n i t y . It is he, for instance, w h o is t h e m a s t e r of c e r e m o n i e s at a
v i c t o r y c e l e b r a t i o n for the battle of T a n n e n b e r g . T h e novel's e n t i r e cast
of c h a r a c t e r s assembles for this e x e r c i s e in quasi-religious nihilism, a n d
H u g u e n a u , t h e arch-nihilist, presides o v e r festivities that t h e clear-
m i n d e d physician Dr. K u h l e n b e c k refers to as a n » e t w a s hysterische
K i r c h w e i h « ( 1 : 5 7 2 ) . B r o c h has cast the public d a n c e as a p a r o d y of
religious o b s e r v a n c e . Its high priest of nihilism, H u g u e n a u , c o n d u c t s
s e r v i c e s in h o n o r of his deity for t h e t o w n s p e o p l e and for t h e walking
w o u n d e d f r o m t h e m i l i t a r y hospital. Public d r u n k e n n e s s , facetious but
m e a n i n g f u l cries of » e s lebe d e r K r i e g , « a n d ostensibly t a m e social
d a n c i n g a r e the thinly veiled c o r r e l a t i v e s for p r i m i t i v e rites o f destruc-
tion a n d r e g e n e r a t i o n . If B r o c h w e r e to d e v e l o p his protagonist H u g u e -
n a u a c c o r d i n g to the m o d e l s of P a s e n o w a n d Esch, this s c e n e of reverie
would n o doubt p r o v i d e h i m with a suitable f r a m e for Huguenau's
e x p e r i e n c e of e r o s and death. But H u g u e n a u will h a v e n o s u c h epi-
p h a n y b e c a u s e his p r a g m a t i c m i n d is closed to t h e possibility of spirit-
ual i l l u m i n a t i o n . E x p e r i e n c e that does not involve calculable, m a t e r i a l
gain is c a t e g o r i c a l l y beyond H u g u e n a u ' s grasp. Nevertheless, f r o m his
point of v a n t a g e outside o f t h e d a n c e , the n a r r a t o r i n t e r r u p t s with a
digression that r e i n t r o d u c e s his t e m p o r a l i t y - t h e m e as H u g u e n a u and a
w o m a n whirl a r o u n d t h e d a n c e floor t o g e t h e r :

Es ist der Tänzer dieser Welt entrückt. Eingeschmiegt in die Musik, hat er
sein freies Handeln aufgegeben und handelt dennoch in höherer und luzi-
derer Freiheit. In der Strenge des Rhythmus, der ihn führt, ist er geborgen
und eine große Gelöstheit kommt über ihn aus der Geborgenheit. So bringt
die Musik Einheit und Ordnung in das Verworrene und in die Wirrsäligkeit
des Lebens. Die Zeit aufhebend, hebt sie den Tod auf und läßt ihn trotzdem
in jedem Takte neu erstehen . . . . (1: 567f)

Huguenau sieht nicht seine Partnerin, die den Kopf empfangend zurückge-
worfen, sich seiner starken, dennoch kaum sichtbaren Leitung hingegeben
hat, er merkt nicht, daß die Musik eine zartere und straffere Kunst des Ge-
schlechts in seiner Dame auslöst, eine bacchantische Weibheit, wie sie dem
Gatten der Dame, wie sie ihrem Liebhaber, wie sie ihr selber ewig unbekannt
bleiben wird, er sieht auch nicht das ekstatische Lächeln, mit dem die andere
Dame zahnfleischentblößend an ihrem Herrn hängt, er sieht bloß diesen,
sieht bloß diesen feindlichen Tänzer, der, ein hagerer Weinagent in Frack mit
schwarzer Krawatte und Eisernem Kreuz, ihn selber, der bloß den blauen
Anzug zur Verfügung hat, an Eleganz und heldischer Auszeichnung über-
strahlt. So könnte auch der hagere Esch hier tanzen, und darum, die Frau
ihm zu rauben, heftet Huguenau nun den Blick in die Augen der vorüber-
gleitenden Tänzerin, und er tut es so lange, bis sie den Blick erwidert, sich
ihm mit den Blicken schenkt, so das er, Wilhelm Huguenau, nun beide
Frauen besitzt, sie besitzt, ohne sie zu begehren, denn es geht ihm nicht um
die Gunst der Frauen, mag er jetzt auch um sie werben, - es geht ihm nicht

53
 u m Liebeslust, v i e l m e h r verdichtet sich i h m dieses Fest und dieser g e r ä u m i g e
Saal i m m e r enger u m die w e i ß g e d e c k t e Tafel dort, und seine G e d a n k e n rich-
ten sich i m m e r unbedingter auf den Major, der weißbärtig und s c h ö n hinter
den B l u m e n sitzt und i h m zusieht, i h m , W i l h e l m H u g u e n a u in der Mitte des
Saales: er ist der Krieger, der vor s e i n e m Häuptling tanzt. (1: 569)

This portrayal of the dance scene is reminiscent of Edvard Munch's

erotically charged dances of death. 31 Munch's nightmarish allegories
share with this victory celebration the feel of a subdued yet ghastly
carnival of decay and powerlessness. It is the music of erotic desire and
not individual will that drives us; the cycle of procreation and death is
master over the helpless individual. Like Broch's characters, Munch's
figures seem to be sleepwalking in a dream-life, unaware of the ma-
cabre drama that they are compelled to enact.
The grinning, dancing Huguenau is supremely unaware of the om-
nipresence of death and decay. Its fullest expression is the war itself,
which Huguenau's Baroque death dance is celebrating. But life in a
dream is not less exacting than life in a reality, for the apocalypse will
soon engulf and annihilate what seems to the dreaming sleepwalkers to
be a secure little world. Implicit in the death-dance of Tannenberg is a
barely restrained frenzy that will momentarily irrupt from below,
flooding the little town's daily life with an ungovernable tide of dio-
nysian pandemonium. Broch's scaled-down representation for World
War One as the outburst of an entire culture's bacchanalian drive to
self-negation is the trouble that begins in the town's nearby prison. In it
are interned the repressed passions and violence that threaten to over-
whelm the village.
As they walk in the countryside, Esch and Pasenow suddenly become
aware of a chanting cry from within the prison complex: »Hunger,
Hunger, Hunger.« The child Marguerite laughs jubilantly and begins to
chant along with the rebelling prisoners. This »Hunger« that they are
experiencing presages the outbreak of demonic forces from within a
weakened containment. Pasenow quells the potential uprising, but
meanwhile Huguenau is complaining to his »Mutter« Esch about his
own »Hunger,« encouraging her to make a dinner for him. Huguenau
originally began to take the role of son to the Esches when he took a
son's place at their dinner table (1: 499-502). By the time of the prison
revolt he has come to perceive them as his »Mutter« and »Vater« (1:
610-12). Half-jokingly, half-seriously he even suggests that they adopt
him:

31
Cf. the so-called » D a n c e of Life,« ( 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 0 ) and the » D e a t h and the
M a i d e n « (1893).

54
 » M i r s c h m e c k t es bei Ihnen, Mutter Esch. . . . m ö c h t e n Sie mich vielleicht
adoptieren?« Er hätte gerne hinzugefügt, daß Esch dann den S o h n hätte, von
d e m er i m m e r faselte und der das H a u s bauen soll, - aber aus irgendeinem,
i h m selbst unverständlichen G r u n d e war er tief indigniert und die ganze
Sache kam i h m nicht m e h r scherzhaft vor. (1: 6 2 8 f )

Broch has once again set the stage for an oedipal drama. Huguenau is
the ironic fulfillment of Esch's wish for a redeemer-son. But this re-
deemer is not a Christ; he is instead a Judas whose kiss will set in
motion the impersonal wheels of history.
On November 3rd of 1918, Major von Pasenow dispatches soldiers to
break up a demonstration of workers; the red glow on the horizon tells
the townspeople that Trier is burning; the sound of rifleshots is heard
near the prison. These are the signs that the fury of the apocalypse is
about to break loose. As Huguenau the vigilante stands guard over the
village with his rifle and bayonet poised emblematically between his
legs, a series of thundering detonations from a munitions dump sounds
the beginning of violence and general chaos. A crowd of people from
the barracks rush down to the prison and break it open, thus releasing
the pent up forces of madness and destruction that had always been
latent in the sleepy hamlet. Broch epitomizes the event in the image of
a prison guard being held down by two women while a man in hobnail
boots uses a crowbar to break his bones. The apocalypse, also a favorite
Baroque topos, is in Broch's chiliastic vision the historical catastrophe
of World War One.
Meanwhile, Mutter Esch is worried about her husband. Huguenau,
who by this time is by her side, takes advantage of the mass hysteria to
make sexual advances to his proxy mother. She submits to his perfunc-
tory rape and begs him to save Esch. Huguenau leaves her to go in
search of Esch, but when he finds his »father« he attacks him from
behind, running him through with the bayonet on his rifle. The com-
bination of this rape and murder is the allegorical representation of
that moment in history - or, more precisely, in Broch's theory of his-
tory's cyclical progress - in which the old order is razed. It is an act of
nihilistic violence that simultaneously implants the seeds of the new.
Huguenau, the new »father« is not a mover of history. He is only the
tool of historical process.
The chaos and despair of the novel's conclusion is, at least to Broch's
way of thinking, not final. It was his conviction that the present age of
nihilism will eventually pass and that the course of history will at last
take an upswing of its own accord. The Pauline quotation that closes
the novel - »Tu dir kein Leid! denn wir sind alle noch hier« (1: 716;
Acts 16:28) - is intended to be a ray of sunlight in his otherwise gloomy

55
depiction of the historical situation. The Huguenaus will not inherit the
earth; their generation will in turn give way to ethical renewal. In a
letter of 17 July 1933, Broch gives to Stefan Zweig a concise picture of
the conviction that informs his literary and philosophical writings:

Alles in allem muß man sich dabei klar sein, daß wahrscheinlich nichts
fruchten wird: ich sage dies nicht aus prinzipiellem Pessimismus, sondern aus
der Überzeugung - einer Überzeugung, die ich ja schon oft zu begründen
versucht habe - , daß die ganze Bewegung, die wir so schmerzlich mitmachen,
eine notwendige Entwicklungsphase des gesamten abendländischen Geistes
darstellt, in ihrer autonomen Logik begründet und daher unaufhaltsam ist,
genau so unaufhaltsam wie seine schließliche Rückkehr zum Platonischen,
was aber an die 100 Jahre oder darüber währen wird. So lange sollte man
leben können. (13/1: 241)

Viewing history from Austria between the wars, writing in the tradition
of »Geschichtspessimismus« - also represented by Nietzsche, Spengler,
Theodor Lessing and many of Broch's contemporaries 32 - and motiva-
ted by a chiliastic optimism for the regeneration of an ethically sound
world, Broch experienced his era as a low point in the process of his-
torical transformation.
This loss of faith in the world as it is, perceived as a loss of continuity
between man and metaphysical absolutes, has exposed the individual to
the laming fear of time because time brings change and death. This
preoccupation emerges in modernist literature as allegory. Time is the
theme of Broch's Schlafwandler, and allegory is the form of its pre-
sentation. History as the movement of time through culture becomes
the foundation of an allegory that attempts to reconcile the ephem-
erality of human life with the ancient desire to overcome death.

32
Christoph Eykman, Geschichtspessimismus in der deutschen Literatur des 20.
Jahrhunderts (Bern: Francke, 1970). Although Eykman does not include him
in this study, Broch and his work fit well into the pattern that he discerns.

56
CHAPTER III

THE CLOUD OF POLONIUS:

Rewriting Reality in Robert Musil's Mann ohne Ei-
genschaften

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in

the shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th' mfcss and 'tis, like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is back'd like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.
Hamlet Ill.ii

In a note to himself concerning his leviathan novel fragment, Der

Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert Musil wrote, » Ein Hauptthema fürs
G a n z e ist also: Auseinandersetzung des Möglichkeitsmenschen mit der
Wirklichkeit« (5: 1881).' The »possibilitarian« is Ulrich, the novel's
protagonist; and the »reality« he confronts is Musil's ironic portrait of
Austro-Hungarian culture as it stood in complacent self-absorption on
the brink of World War I. Musil's commentators have recognized the
thematic importance of »Wirklichkeit« as a problem in Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften, and the world of illusion that characterizes the era por-
trayed in the novel has been much remarked. 2 Musil presents »Kakania«

' Citations from Musil's writings are taken from Robert Musil, Gesammelte
Werke in neun Bänden, hrsg. von Adolf Frise (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Ro-
wohlt, 1978). Each citation is followed by the volume: page number. Where a
»T« precedes the volume number, the reference is to Musil's Tagebücher,
hrsg. von Adolf Frise (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976); where a »B«
precedes the volume number the citation refers to Musil's Briefe, 1901-1942,
hrsg. von Adolf Frise (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981). In two instances, on page 72
and page 82, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is cited according to Frise's earlier
edition of the Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. I (Hamburg: Ro-
wohlt, 1952). This edition is marked by an asterisk following the page num-
ber.
2
The premier expression of illusion and Austria's »merry apocalypse« is Her-
mann Broch's essay »Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit« (in Η.Β., Kommentierte
Werkausgabe, hrsg. von Paul Michael Lützeler, IX/1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-
kamp, 1976), 111-284, but it does not deal specifically with Musil. Practically
all of the critical literature on the MoE renders some account of this theme of
confrontation between illusion and reality, and many develop it at length.

57
- his scatological pun o n the official Austro-Hungarian abbreviation
k.k.—as a culture so entrapped in the fictions and images of itself that
it has inherited and invented, so e n m e s h e d in a web of illusion, that it
has lost touch with authentic h u m a n values. T h e feeble coherencies
that pass for reality there are fictions that are powerless against the
chaos that threatens to engulf Kakania as it blunders on toward massive
destruction.
Musil's inquiry into the nature of reality does not exhaust itself in a
critique of the specific Austro-Hungarian situation. He is more con-
cerned with the underlying m e c h a n i s m s that produce it and with the
possibility of accounting for t h e m in narrative prose. T h e novel is the
m e d i u m of Robert Musil's confrontation with his world. This chapter
elucidates the nature of this confrontation by pursuing the protagonist

Especially noteworthy is Peter Berger, »The Problem of Multiple Realities:

Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil,« in Phenomenology and Social Reality• Es-
says in Memory of Alfred Schutz, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Marti-
nus Nijhoff, 1970), 213-233. Berger develops a reading of the MoE with one
foot in Schutzian phenomenological sociology and the other in his own theo-
ries of reality's social construction. His study is brief but clear and incisive.
Philip Payne focuses on the role of the narrative's shifting perspective in the
representation of reality: P.P., »Robert Musil's Reality - A Study of Some
Aspects of Reality in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,«. Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 12 (1976), 314-28. In two articles David Heald discusses
the problem of illusion at the instance of Musil's use of theater imagery:
D.H., »All the World's a Stage - A Central Motif in Musil's Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften,« German Life and Letters, 27 (1973-74), 51-59; D.H., »Musil's
Conception of >Schauspielerei< as Novelist and Critic,« Maske und Kothurn,
23 (1977), 244-55. Ulf Schramm, Fiktion und Reflexion. Überlegungen zu
Musil and Beckett (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) offers one of the
more intelligent discussions of this problem in its relation to language as
medium, pp. 20-60. Dietrich Hochstätter offers a detailed, intelligent com-
mentary on the stylistic relation between the narrator's reality and the illu-
sions of his figures in Sprache des Möglichen. Stilistischer Perspektivismus in
Robert Musil's »MoE«, Gegenwart der Dichtung, 6 (Frankfurt a.M.: Athe-
näum, 1972), esp. pp. 9-113. Joseph Peter Stern offers a few useful remarks
that situate the MoE between Vienna's historical milieu and Musil's abun-
dant imagination: J.P.S., »Die Wiener Wirklichkeit im Roman DMoE,« Li-
teratur und Kritik, 15 (1980), 525-31. Cf. also Helmut Arntzen, Satirischer
Stil. Zur Satire in Robert Musils MoE, 2. erg. Aufl., Abhandlungen zur
Kunst-, Musik-, und Literaturwissenschaft, 9 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970); Frank
Trommler, Roman und Wirklichkeit. Eine Ortsbestimmung am Beispiel von
Musil, Broch, Roth, Doderer, und Gütersloh, Sprache und Literatur, 30 (Stutt-
gart, Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1966), esp. pp. 50-100; Frank Kermode, »Musil,«
in his Modem Essays (Collins: Fontana Books, 1971), 182-204; Jochen
Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften. Eine Erläuterung zu Musils Grundbegriff, Un-
tersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur, 13 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), esp.
70f.

58
of his Mann ohne Eigenschaften throughout his own fictional »Ausein-
andersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit.«
In a letter of January 26, 1931, Musil posits a certain identity of
purpose between himself and Ulrich that can serve as a hermeneutical
point of entry into this interaction of fiction and reality. He writes, »Das
Problem: wie komme ich zum Erzählen, ist sowohl mein stilistisches
wie das Lebensproblem der Hauptfigur, und die Lösung ist natürlich
nicht einfach« (B,I: 498). The work of a French critic, Marthe Robert,
on Cervantes' Don Quixote and Kafka's Schloß helps to refine Musil's
proposition into a form profitable for interpretive purposes. She sug-
gests that »when imitation imposes a way of writing on the novelist and
a way of living on the hero, it creates a functional identity between
these two similar and disparate figures that tells us more than any ex-
ternal circumstance about the true extent of their relations.« 3 Though
she did not have Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in mind, her »functio-
nal identity« strikes close to Musil's own formulation of his relation to
Ulrich. The special insight of Robert's comment is the idea that this
identity is the problem of imitation. She has struck close to the heart of
Musil's novel, for both Musil and his protagonist are plagued by the
problem of imitation.
For Ulrich this problem is the Kakanian habit of living in imitation
of models preordained by law, culture, peer pressure and tradition. In
the same letter Musil briefly elucidates the situation:
In unserer gegenwärtigen Welt geschieht größtenteils nur Schematisches
(Seinesgleichen), d. i. Typisches, Begriffliches, und noch dazu ausgesogenes.
U. sucht darum den Ausweg, eine wirkliche Determination seines Handelns
. . . . (B,1:498)

Parallel to Ulrich's problem of schematic patterns of life and experi-

ence is Musil's own »stilistisches« problem of writing a novel. It is the
problem of mimesis, which is traditionally conceived of as the »imita-
tion of nature,« but which Musil conceives of as the imitation of nar-
rative models that convention has established in the minds of readers
and writers. Both Musil and Ulrich would like to free themselves of the
conventions that have been imposed on them and break through into
originality and creativity.
The centrality of imitation in Ulrich's world and of mimesis in Mu-
sil's is a key to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. It is the point at which
Musil's interests most significantly coincide with those of Ulrich, and it

3
Marthe Robert, The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Franz Kafka,
trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1977), p. 13.

59
is the point at which the narrative frees itself of the simple topicality of
Austro-Hungarian thematics to engage the problematic relation be-
tween narrative fiction and objective reality.

Before turning to Ulrich's confrontation with this world's unacceptable

reality, it will be necessary to establish Musil's attitude toward writing.
The nineteenth century's >realistic< novel had been concerned with
creating and maintaining the uninterrupted semblance of a familiar
reality, one that its reader could accept as an accurate and believable
model of the real world. Its ideal of mimesis was one of holding a
mirror up to nature, enabling us to see things as they »really« are. This
undertaking is predicated on the assumption that some kind of objec-
tivity is possible, that exterior reality and human nature are fixed and
stable enough to be rendered in the fixed and stable framework of
linguistic and literary conventions of representation.
Musil rejects this vision of literature and reality and its postulate that
fiction is to be the isomorphic duplication of a possible reality. The two
novellas joined under the title Vereinigungen are Musil's most radical
departure from the traditional imitation-of-nature imperative in prose.
One novella is the tale of a strange and improbable adultery, and the
other revolves around a bizarre sodomy. Both are couched in difficult
and highly artificial figurative language. Their themes break long-
standing taboos, offending both bourgeois moral sensibilities and firm-
ly entrenched habits of reading. The dense figurality of the novellas'
style renders what little »realistic« content there is opaque and foreign.
In a response to his detractors, who deplored the lack of »realism« in
the Vereinigungen, Musil wrote: »Es i s t . . . die Realität, die man schil-
dert, stets nur ein Vorwand,« by which he means that the apparent
object of representation in the real world is only a pretext that grants
access to the non-empirical world of »Gefühlserkenntnisse und Denk-
erschütterungen, . . . die allgemein und in Begriffen nicht, sondern nur
im Flimmern des Einzelfalls . . . zu erfassen sind« (8: 997). Musil's
writing is directed not toward transcribing this or that historical, social,
or any other average reality, but instead toward inventing a more orig-
inal world, a self-consciously ideational world, in which objects and
events are not designed to duplicate those of the external world but
which are instead intended to evoke a connotative »Flimmern« of cog-
nition from the inner, human reality of emotion and consciousness.

60
 Musil called this turn in his fiction an »Absage an den Realismus
zugunsten einer idealistischen Kunst« (Τ,Ι: 929). However, by the time
he wrote Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften he had relaxed his stand
against conventional realism. The action of the narrative takes place in
a world much more accessible than that of the Vereinigungen, a world
of recognizable time and place, peopled by recognizable types from
historically verifiable social milieux, who behave in a more or less
psychologically plausible way. Still, the retreat from abstraction is more
apparent than actual. The style of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften re-
flects what Musil once referred to as a »realer Idealismus« (8:1183), an
expression suggesting that behind the fa9ade of the apparently real
world in a novel is an idealistic (or better: ideational) realm that prin-
cipally addresses the inner reality of the human mind and feelings.
Musil's division between the real and the ideational is explicit in the
famous fourth chapter of Book I in which the narrator presents the idea
of a »Möglichkeitsmensch.« The >possibilitarian< is someone who con-
tests the privileged authority of the >real< on the grounds that what we
ordinarily accept as solid and substantial reality - bridges and buil-
dings, political and cultural institutions, language and literature - con-
sists of only isolated, and more or less random concretions of ideas:
»Jede Ordnung ist irgendwie absurd und wachsfigurenhaft, wenn man
sie zu ernst nimmt, jedes Ding ist ein erstarrter Einzelfall seiner Mög-
lichkeiten. Aber das sind nicht Zweifel, sondern es ist eine bewegte,
elastische Unbestimmtheit, die sich zu allem fähig fühlt« (5: 1509).
ideational reality/ a phrase that means as much as >fiction,< is a vast
quarry that precedes everyday reality, from which its realized forms are
cut and chiseled.
Given that reality is a patchwork composition of various inventions
of the mind, its relation to narrative fiction becomes evident. The ulti-
mate source of each is imagination. From this common point of origin
fiction finds its way into print, and reality makes its way onto the stage
of human doings. Since the source of both is the same, Musil is not
inclined to prize >reality< above art: »Welche Verkehrtheit zu behaup-
ten, das Leben sei wichtiger als die Kunst! Das Leben ist gut, soweit es
der Kunst standhält: was nicht kunstfähig am Leben ist, ist Kitsch!« (7:
502). This confluence of art and life, of fiction and reality, establishes
the point of »functional identity« between Ulrich and his creator.
Ulrich inhabits a world that has become Kitsch. Its reality proceeds
according to paradigms transmitted under the authority of a tradition
that no longer belongs to the present. The reiteration of these time-
worn schemata in the lives of people, like the reiteration of standard-
ized plots in fiction, reduces what ought to have been creative and

61
original to something trite and lifeless. Ulrich complains to his friend
Clarisse about this state of affairs, as his narrator reports:

Das jetzt geltende System sei das der Wirklichkeit und gleiche einem schlech-
ten Theaterstück. Man sage nicht umsonst Welttheater, denn es erstehen im-
mer die gleichen Rollen, Verwicklungen und Fabeln im Leben. Man liebt,
weil und wie es die Liebe gibt; man ist stolz wie die Indianer, die Spanier, die
Jungfrauen oder der Löwe . . . Vollends die erfolgreichen politischen Gestal-
ter der Wirklichkeit haben, von den ganz großen Ausnahmen abgesehen, viel
mit den Schreibern von Kassenstücken gemein; die lebhaften Vorgänge, die
sie erzeugen, langweilen durch ihren Mangel an Geist und Neuheit, bringen
uns aber gerade dadurch in jenen widerstandslosen schläfrigen Zustand, wor-
in wir uns jede Veränderung gefallen lassen. So betrachtet, entsteht die Ge-
schichte aus der ideellen Routine und aus dem ideell Gleichgültigen, und die
Wirklichkeit entsteht vornehmlich daraus, daß nights für die Ideen geschieht.
(2:364)

Reality becomes a parody of the past generated by the subliminal ex-

pectations that are always already present in the minds of life's actors.
These expectations amount to stage directions, texts composed of con-
vention and presupposition, in accordance with which people live, act,
and even feel. Ulrich's »Auseinandersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit« fo-
cuses on this problem of imitation, the problem of a life that does not
happen spontaneously and authentically but proceeds instead according
to a principle of mimicking pre-established models. Musil dubs this
principle »Seinesgleichen geschieht« and makes it the title of Book I,
Part II.
The challenge that paradigms of lived experience present for Ulrich
corresponds neatly with the challenge of writing an original novel for
Musil. The novelist of modernism in general is likewise faced with a
network of presuppositions and conventions in the minds of readers
(and in his own mind) about what a novel is and how it ought to be
written. D. H. Lawrence states the problem concisely: »All the rules of
construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other no-
vels.« 4 In the working-notes for his Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,
Musil poses the problem for himself as follows:

Die Leser sind gewöhnt zu verlangen, daß man ihnen vom Leben erzähle und
nicht vom Widerschein des Lebens in den Köpfen der Literatur u. der Men-
schen. Das ist aber mit Sicherheit nur soweit berechtigt, als dieser Wider-
schein bloß ein ver- armter, konventionell gewordener Abzug des Lebens ist.
Ich suche Ihnen Original zu bieten, Sie müssen also auch ihr Vorurteil sus-
pendieren. (5: 1937)

4
Cited in Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn. Α Study of Five French Realists
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 25.

62
The idea that fiction should be a vision of life itself, and not a vision of
is mediation, is a prejudice to be overcome. Mediated vision in Musil's
view is the source of originality as long as it holds itself apart from
reductive and conventional patterns of representation.
Musil's aim is not capture so-called objective reality. He wishes in-
stead to articulate life as it appears to individual imagination. Mimesis
in this sense implies a redefinition of the then, and possibly still, pre-
vailing notion of literary imitation-of-nature. Even if the exterior world
does remain fixed, our individual and collective imagination does not.
It is this orientation of imagination that is the object of literary mi-
mesis. Musil tirelessly reiterates his view that this non-objective realm
is by nature a »Welt ohne feste Form,« a ceaselessly shifting fluid in-
accessible to conceptual representation. »Die Wahrheit,« as Ulrich's
narrator points out, »ist eben kein Kristall, den man in die Tasche
stecken kann, sondern eine unendliche Flüssigkeit, in die man hinein-
fällt« (2: 533-34). In order to render this realm with accuracy, the writ-
er must aspire to forms of expression that are both unique and undog-
matic. Any fixed, conceptual or conventional formulation misrepre-
sents »die Welt ohne feste Form« by falsifying its amorphous character.
The contrast Musil posits between »Leben« and the »Widerschein
des Lebens« corresponds to the tension between the >real< and the
>ideal< in his formulation of a »realer Idealismus.« He has asserted that
any narrated world is actually a »Widerschein«: an ideational construct
in the author's mind. Yet there is also something realistic about Musil's
depiction of the world. It is Vienna in 1913, a real place full of real
people on the threshold of a real war. It is also evident that Musil is at
pains to minimize the authority of this apparent realism by exposing
the artifice of literary construction that has gone into the making of this
verbal citadel. The novel's artificiality is the twin of its »Idealismus.«
The narrator frankly avows his lack of commitment to verisimilar
representation. In an apstrophe to the reader he asserts that »weder an
dieser Stelle noch in der Folge der glaubwürdige Versuch unternom-
men werden wird, ein Historienbild zu malen und mit der Wirklichkeit
in Wettbewerb zu treten« (1:170). He is openly committed to the realm
of imagination. The novel's first chapter offers a characteristic example
of how Musil undermines the conventions of realism. He carefully sets
the scene of action by building the detailed illusion of a Viennese street
on a sunny August day in 1913. Next, he posits a hypothetical observer
in this setting who recognizes it as Vienna. This observer is the reader's
fictional proxy. The reader, like the observer, is a passive audience to
the narrator's fictional world; and the reader, like the observer, is nat-
urally inclined to accept as true what is apparent to the ordinary way of

63
looking at things. It is apparent to this hypothetical observer that he is
in Vienna in the same way that reading habits make it apparent to the
reader that the setting of the story is Vienna. But just as soon as the
narrator has settled his observer/reader into the seemingly familiar
milieu of a summer's day in 1913 Vienna, he gently slaps us in the face
with a facetious comment that withdraws the relevance of the setting he
has just described so carefully: »Die Überschätzung der Frage, wo man
sich befinde, stammt aus der Hordenzeit, wo man sich die Futterplätze
merken mußte« (1:9). The narrator also finds it odd that when it comes
to being in a city, modern man »immer durchaus genau wissen möchte,
welche besondere Stadt das sei,« and finally dismisses the whole matter
as trivial: »Es lenkt von Wichtigerem ab« (1: 9-10).
Musil is ironically distinguishing between levels of reality. In the
average reality of modern life it is just as important to be specific about
cities as it was for the »Hordenzeit« to pay attention to the locations of
its feeding grounds. When the narrator dismisses these matters as ir-
relevant he is actually pointing out that the reality of this Vienna in
which the reader/observer finds himself is of a special order. It does
not matter whether this city is corresonds to an actual Vienna because it
is primarily present as an imaginary, narrative world. Musil is exposing
the literary convention of setting as an arbitrary artifice and warning
his reader not to accept the illusion uncritically. »Es lenkt von Wich-
tigerem ab.«
A striking instance in which the narrator subverts the illusion of
reality occurs in the chapter that introduces Moosbrugger, the patho-
logical killer whom all of Vienna is following in the newspapers. The
narrator presents Ulrich's first »encounter« with the murderer:

Ulrich war, als sein Blick auf dieses Gesicht mit den Zeichen der Gotteskind-
schaft über Handschellen traf, rasch umgekehrt, hatte einem Wachsoldaten
des nahegelegenen Landesgerichts einige Zigaretten geschenkt und nach dem
Konvoi gefragt, der erst vor kurzem das Tor verlassen haben mußte; so er-
fuhr er - : doch so muß derartiges sich wohl früher abgespielt haben, da man
es oft in dieser Weise berichtet findet, und Ulrich glaubte beinahe selbst
daran, aber die zeitgenössische Wahrheit war, daß er alles bloß in der Zeitung
gelesen hatte. (1: 69)

This passage is first of all a good-humored parody. It makes Ulrich

seem to be the hero of a bestseller, a man of stealth and resource en-
gaged in some exciting and no doubt important undercover operation.
But then the narrator takes it all back and conjectures with tongue in
cheek that things probably used to happen that way since one reads so
many such accounts. His Ulrich is no such dashing adventurer. He
reads about Moosbrugger in the papers just as everyone else does.

64
 Not only is Musil teasing the reader's expectation regarding the typ-
ical stylization of a hero, he is also flaunting the device of narration
itself. By interrupting the passage and changing his story in mid-
sentence the narrator reveals the whole of his narrative as artifice and
Ulrich as his pawn. He is reminding his reader that there is a rift
between the written world and the lived one, and admonishing him to
read critically.
The narrator's treatment of the other figures in his tale reflects again
his playful attitude toward the conventions of narrative representation.
The novel's opening scene depicts a comfortable Viennese couple - also
»realistically« portrayed - strolling on the streets in the summer day.
Where we would ordinarily expect to find them identified and intro-
duced by our omniscient narrator, we find instead that he is toying with
our expectations.
Angenommen, sie würden Arnheim und Ermelinda Tuzzi heißen, was aber
nicht stimmt, denn Frau Tuzzi befand sich in August in Begleitung ihres
Gatten in Bad Aussee und Dr. Arnheim noch in Konstantinopel, so steht man
vor dem Rätsel, wer sie seien. (1: 10)

This passage is an interesting mixture of Musil's »real« and »ideal«.

The strolling couple is not Ermelinda Tuzzi and Arnheim, but, as the
phrasing implies, they may as well be. The narrator offers specific, real-
istic details of Arnheim's and Tuzzi's whereabouts, but once again he
undercuts the illusion of realism by means of irony. If the narrator can
place Tuzzi in Bad Aussee and Arnheim in Constantinople, he could
also have placed them strolling on the streets of Vienna. This narrator
wants us to understand the power he wields over the figures in his story.
He can give them names or take them away; he can make his figures do
things, make them present or absent, and deploy them as he wishes. Or,
as is also the case in the opening chapter, he can have trucks run over
them.
The novel's figures are not >taken from life< in the sense of the nine-
teenth century's novel of character. Musil criticizes the view that the
invented personae of a fictional world should fully simulate their
three-dimensional counterparts: »Jene Dichter, die auf die komplette
Lebendigkeit ihrer Gestalten so großen Wert legen, gleichen jenem
etwas unverständlichen lieben Gott der Theologen, der den Menschen
einen freien Willen verleiht, damit sie ihm den seinen tun« (8: 998).
The creative achievement of good narrative is, then, not to be judged in
its fidelity to reality, but in its strategic difference from that reality, in
its service to undogmatic ideas.
The figures of fiction are not doubles for the figures of life. They are
the bearers of abstracted feelings, thoughts, and human values that are

65
suspended between real-seeming illusion and self-conscious fictionality.
Musil's reminders that his figures are only fictional constructs impris-
oned in an artificial world might at first seem to belabor the obvious.
His point is that fictional characters take shape under the governance
of narrative convention and authorial imagination. In the course of Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften it becomes clear that the figures of life are
subordinated to similarly exterior forces that shape character. As the
artist's hand delineates a figure in fiction, so also does external circum-
stance - »der liebe Gott,« as it were - mold and shape human ex-
perience and personality in real life. Only the creative mind can, by an
act of individual imagination, break free of the repressive order in
which it finds itself confined. Ulrich is the personification of this idea.
He points the way toward a freer way of thinking when he begins to
realize that he is living in an elaborate fiction. Indeed, he is aware that
he, like a character in a novel, inhabits a specifically narrative order
(2: 650).
Musil's subversion of the reader's sense of realistic illusion is an
attempt to establish his narrative not as a transcription of the real world
but instead as a »durchstrichene Welt« (5: 1965, 1966), a fictional con-
struct in which the illusion of reality is simultaneously proffered and
withdrawn, i.e. an ironic fiction. The principal devices whereby Musil
»stikes through« the illusion of reality are a) the foregrounding of the
narrator, whose extensive commentary and long passages of indirect
dialogue make him an obtrusive presence in the narrative fabric of
Ulrich's world; 5 b) the use of the conditional subjunctive, the gram-
matical mood of unreality; 6 and c) his elaborate similes, which serve to
5
Peter Nusser corroborates this point, finding that the narrator's game of
hide-and-seek, his shifting of tenses and perspectives is a device that Musil
introduces, »weil er die Sicherheit der Erzählung zerstören will, um den Le-
ser zum experimentierenden Denken, zum Möglichkeitsdenken zu erziehen.
Er wechselt den Standort, um zu vermeiden, daß der Leser einen geschilder-
ten Teilausschnitt der Wirklichkeit mit der ganzen Wirklichkeit verwechselt.«
P.N., Musils Romantheorie (Paris, The Hague: Mouton, 1967), p. 71. Philip
Payne writes that the narrator's voice is a device of self-conscious fictionality
that »reminds us . . . this is fiction, not life but words,« P.P., »Robert Musil's
Reality,« Forum for Modern Language Studies, 12 (1976), p. 316. Cf. also
Wilhelm Grenzmann, » D M o E : Zur Problematik des Romans« in Robert
Musil: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, hrsg. von Karl Dinklage (Reinbek bei Ham-
burg: Rowohlt, 1960), pp. 58-61; Ulrich Schelling, »Das Analogische Denken
bei Robert Musil,« in Robert Musil. Studien zu seinem Werk, hrsg. von Karl
Dinklage zusammen mit Elisabeth Albertsen und Karl Corino (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970), p. 178; Claude David, »Form und Gehalt in Ro-
bert Musil's MoE,« Euphorien, 64 (1970), p. 227.
6
As Albrecht Schöne points out, the conjunctivus potentiaiis underscores the
spirit of possiblity and hypothesis in Ulrich's view of reality. But it is probably

66
foreground the text's >literariness,< i.e. these similes attract attention to
themselves, to their artificiality and the act of representation. 7
The suspension of realistic illusion by balancing it against acts of
representation that betray their status as fiction reveals what I would
like to call a strategy of dual reference. Its first aspect is that of ordinary
referentiality, the way in which one normally expects a novel to recon-
stitute a familiar reality in a recognizable manner, in this case 1913
Vienna. This ploy is basic to the style of nineteenth-century realism.
However, as Robert Alter has persuasively argued, there is a novelistic
tradition that runs counter to the nineteenth century's proclivity to il-
lusionism. Whereas the realist novel seeks to conceal its condition of
artifice and produce an unbroken illusion of reality, the other mode of
representation, that of the »self-conscious novel,« purposely exposes
the contrivances that go into the making of fiction. Prominent exam-
ples of this tradition, as Alter demonstrates in detail, are Don Quixote,
Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy.8 It is to this tradition that Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften belongs inasmuch as it shares with its precursors
the second aspect of reference that extends, complicates, and enriches
mimesis. It is the device of self-reference that permits the novel to

also that this use of the subjunctive folds back onto the author's view of the
novel itself. Narration in the indicative helps to seal the illusion of a fictive
reality, lends to it a declarative certainty. Musil's ubiquitous subjunctives,
especially when in the mouth of the narrator, undermine the sense of realism
that is implicit in the indicative. Schöne seems close to this idea when he
writes, »Musil schreibt ein Kapitel seines Romans und denkt dabei, es könnte
ebensogut anders sein.« However he stops short of the conclusion that I am
proposing in this study, namely that Musil intentionally ironizes the fictional
world that he invents. Cf. A.S., »Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert
Musil,« Euphorion, 55 (1961), p. 203.
7
Robert Alter points out in a different context that »an obtrusive simile is one
of the most convenient ways for the literary artificer to flaunt his artifice
while using it to render his subject.« R.A., Partial Magic. The Novel as a
Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1975), p. 132. Musil's narrator implies a similar point when he
describes the Gleichnis as possessing a »glasige Atmosphäre von Ahnung,
Glaube und Künstlichkeit« (2: 582). My emphasis.
8
Alter defines the self-conscious novel as one »that systematically flaunts its
own necessary condition of artifice, and that by so doing probes into the
problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality . . . . The
self-conscious novelist is acutely aware that he is manipulating schemata,
devising ingenious cryptograms, and he constantly invents narrative strate-
gies for sharing this awareness with us, so that he simultaneously, or alter-
nately, creates the illusion of reality and shatters it.« R.A., »Mimesis and the
Motive for Fiction,« in Images and Ideas in American Culture. The Functions
of Criticism. Essays in Memory of Philip Rahv, ed. Arthur Edelstein (Hano-
ver, New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 1979), pp. 110-11.

67
comment on its own condition of artifice and its relation to reality and
truth.
This level of self-reference, or metafiction, is joined with Musil's
concept of irony, a stylistic device that for him is the »Form des Kamp-
fes« of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (7: 941). Irony is his principal
weapon in the struggle for authenticity and originality. This irony is
especially clear in the thematic recurrence of books and writing. They
are the controlling metaphor for the »functional identity« of the author
and protagonist: Ulrich's attempt to overcome a way of life ordered like
a fictional text, and Musil's struggle against the limits of representation
toward original creativity. The fixing of reality in print on paper is
emblematic for the hypostatization and falsification of authentic reali-
ty, the reduction of truth's ephemerality to the immutable granite of the
written word. The central irony is of course that Musil's novel is a
written artifact. The scheme of self-reference aims at calling the read-
er's attention to this fact. Musil's radical probing of his own methods is
the mark of his artistic integrity.

II
Ulrich is »der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,« but his ambitions were orig-
inally otherwise. He wanted to become a man of distinction, which is to
say he wanted to appropriate for himself those characteristics - »Ei-
genschaften« - that would distinguish him in the eyes of his peers. His
first attempt to garner a set of admirable characteristics takes place
under the influence of Napoleon's image. Ulrich joins the military with
the idea of becoming a hard-riding, duel-fighting, womanizing man of
adventure. The cliches of his chosen life-style satisfy him for a while,
but when he makes a play for the wife of a superior officer and receives
a harsh reprimand, Ulrich decides to discard the man-of-adventure
role. He makes a fresh bid for distinction in the brave new world of
technology, trading in the spurs of the cavalry officer for the engineer's
slide-rule, pipe, and sports cap. But Ulrich is once again in for disap-
pointment when his professional colleagues do not live up to the dra-
matic image he had invented for them. Instead of dynamic creators and
bold dreamers, the builders of mighty engines turn out to be business-
like models of mechanical efficiency in professional life and dullards in
personal life. So Ulrich peels off the set of characteristics that constitute
the life-style of the engineer and turns finally to the austere beauties of
theoretical mathematics, mother of sciences.
He sees math and science as the heights of modern imagination: »Es
geht in der Wissenschaft so stark und unbekümmert und herrlich zu

68
wie in einem Märchen« (1: 41). Ulrich's passion for the theoretical
sciences, a visionary realm as unbounded as the fantasy of fairy tales,
marks his Utopian turn of mind. His feeling that scientific theory and
fairy tales share a fundamental trait distinguishes him from the bulk of
his factually-minded colleagues, and Ulrich eventually feels the need to
separate himself from their limited vision and aspirations and move
toward the spiritual territory ahead.
At the age of thirty-two, with various successes behind him but no
fixed place in society, Ulrich determines to take a vacation from life,
»um eine angemessene Anwendung seiner Fähigkeiten zu suchen« (1:
47). He has found no satisfaction in any of the three attempts to cover
himself with the »Eigenschaften« that would identify him in his own
and in the world's eyes as a man of distinction. His uneasiness with the
role-playing of his professional lives is the beginning of his »Ausein-
andersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit.« He senses that the »Eigenschaften«
that make up a man's character are imposed from the outside and are
not integral to authentic selfhood. The individual is born into a
monstrous interlocked network of cultural systems - moral, religious,
political, literary, and philosophical - that imprint their own laws -
»Eigenschaften« - into the malleable stuff of the human self.
Musil illustrates the temporal dimension of this process when Ulrich
moves into his Viennese manor. It is a hunting-palace of bygone years
that bears the stamp of successive architectural styles from the seven-
teenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries superimposed one on the
other. It reads like a palimpsest of the Austrian cultural heritage and
represents the burden of the past on Ulrich. The past has shaped the
world he inhabits and deposited the layers of cultural alluvia that form
the bedrock of his contemporaneous reality. Ulrich's task is in large
part to free himself of the oppressive weight of this sedimentation by
recognizing that it is in fact an accretion that conceals the true funda-
ment of the intrinsically human. He makes an initial gesture in this
direction when he entertains thoughts of setting up house-keeping in
the manor with furnishings of his own contrivance, a project he identi-
fies with the »Ausbau seiner Persönlichkeit« (1: 20). But his ideas lack
an organizing principle and so, at least for the time being, he admits
partial defeat: »um sich von außen, durch die Lebensumstände bilden
zu lassen, er überließ an diesem Punkt seiner Überlegungen die Ein-
richtung seines Hauses dem Genie seiner Lieferanten, in der sicheren
Überzeugung, daß sie für Überlieferung, Vorurteile und Beschränktheit
schon sorgen würden« (1: 21).
In his vacation from life, Ulrich has not entirely broken with the
habits of his past. Bonadea, an idealistic family woman and one of

69
Ulrich's mistresses, is the object of his continued womanizing. Her
double life is typical of Musil's characterization of Kakania as a society
that thrives on illusion. Bonadea perceives herself as being »hochan-
ständig« and believes that »great ideas« are her natural element: »Sie
war imstande, >das Wahre, das Gute und das Schöne< so oft und natür-
lich auszusprechen, wie ein anderer Donnerstag sagt« (1: 42). But her
major failing is her erotomania, which she has managed to reconcile
with her role of an »impeccably virtuous« wife and mother by invent-
ing the story that her husband, whom the narrator characterizes as
»flausenlos, gutmütig und lebensfroh« (1: 43) is actually a ruthless
beast of a man, and by convincing herself that through some quirk of
physiology her body is hypersensual.
Musil constructs this figure according to his »oft zu gebrauchende
Darstellungsart. Einen Menschen zusammensetzen aber mit aufgedeck-
ten Karten! aus den fixen Ideen und zwangsläufigen paar Ideeverknüp-
fungen ...«(5:1820). The trump card in Bonadea's suit is the centrality
of outward appearances that mask an inner void. She is, for instance,
careful to dress herself in observance of the standards of breeding and
good taste that Kakania deemed fitting for a matron of her prominence
and cultivation. Her willing and even enthusiastic submission of herself
to changing fashions and to the security that a conventional appearance
generates gives the narrator occasion to reflect on the arbitrariness of
fashion in particular and on social codes in general. Like Keller's poor
tailor and Zuckmayer's unemployed ex-convict, the image that her
clothes project fill Musil's Bonadea with meaning: »Dann geschieht
nicht weniger, als wenn in einen krausen Linienzug auf einem Stück
Papier der Sinn eines großen Worts hineinfährt« (2: 526).
In fashion, in language, and in general, meaning is not immanent to
things but is invested in them by tacit collective agreement. Bonadea's
little masquerade is a parable of the general problem of how meanings
and values are invented to hold an order of things in place:

Mit großer und mannigfaltiger Kunst erzeugen wir eine Verblendung, mit
deren Hilfe wir es zuwege bringen, neben den ungeheuerlichsten Dingen zu
leben und dabei völlig ruhig zu bleiben, weil wir diese ausgefrorenen Gri-
massen des Weltalls als einen Tisch oder einen Stuhl, ein Schreien oder einen
ausgestreckten Arm, eine Geschwindigkeit oder ein gebratenes Huhn erken-
nen. . . . Aber wenn man näher hinsieht, ist es doch ein äußerst künstlicher
Bewußtseinszustand, der dem Menschen den aufrechten Gang zwischen krei-
senden Gestirnen verleiht und ihm erlaubt, inmitten der fast unendlichen
Unbekanntheit der Welt würdevoll die Hand zwischen den zweiten und drit-
ten Rockknopf zu stecken. Und um das zuwege zu bringen, gebraucht nicht
nur jeder Mensch seine Kunstgriffe, der Idiot ebensogut wie der Weise, son-
dern diese persönlichen Systeme von Kunstgriffen sind auch noch kunstvoll

70
 eingebaut in die moralischen und intellektuellen Gleichgewichtsvorkehrun-
gen der Gesellschaft und Gesamtheit, die im Größeren dem gleichen Zweck
dienen. (2: 526, 527)

Ulrich's awareness of this »Verblendung« has gradually been growing,

and the end of his trivial romance with Bonadea proves to be the de-
cisive moment in his relation to the tricks and illusions of everyday
reality. His dalliance with her, his passive support of her ludicrous
self-deceptions, and the whole silly business of furtive encounters with
a married woman no longer seem worth the effort. He offends her and
lets her storm off in a huff. After she has gone he gazes idly at the
elaborate patterns of his pseudo-Baroque chamber and has a brief mo-
ment of mystical lucidity. He suddenly realizes that the design of his
life is neither Nature nor Necessity but only a clattering assemblage of
habit, convention, and unexamined presupposition.
The tiff with Bonadea has precipitated an important moment in Ul-
rich's mental life: »Im Grunde gehörte gar nicht viel dazu; ein Firnis
war abgefallen, eine Suggestion hatte sich gelöst, ein Zug von Gewohn-
heit, Erwartung und Spannung war abgerissen . . . « (1: 128). The three
interlinked guarantors of a sturdy, firmly anchored reality - »Gewohn-
heit, Erwartung und Spannung« - have become thin to the point of
transparency for Ulrich. Emotion and thought reveal themselves to be
habits of feeling and habits of intellection that impose old patterns on
new experience. Ulrich's romance had little or nothing to do with deep-
ly felt emotion: »man liebt weil und wie es die Liebe gibt,« (2: 364), as
he later reflects. Romance is a habitual way of relating between the
sexes, a ritual whose occurrence generates a set of expectations - »Er-
wartung« - that can only find fulfillment within the narrow limits of its
own self-definition. Habit and expectation disallow the unique and the
unprecedented by channeling human experience into categories of the
familiar and the routine. They encircle the chaotic disparity of things,
drawing them up and binding them together in an elastic tautness, a
»Spannung« that seems to grip the world in a secure noose of calcula-
bility and regularity. Ulrich has broken the surface tension of daily
reality and found that the seeming order of things and the apparent
regularity of human experience are the products of fictions invented to
conceal the chaos of true reality. Bonadea's delusions about herself are
a case in point. She lives by imitating images that have been projected
for her by the values of her repressive, disintegrating culture. The imi-
tation of images is Kakania's way of setting together the »Eigenschaften«
that are supposed to provide identity and a sense of security. Since the
same images recur over and over, reality falls into patterns of re-
dundancy that Musil encodes as »Seinesgleichen geschieht.«

71
 A simple example of the Kakanian mania for imitating images can
be drawn f r o m Ulrich's visit to Graf Stallburg. This venerable old no-
bleman is the very picture of traditional Austrian aristocracy, »und mit
einem raschen Blick überzeugte sich Ulrich, d a ß Se. Exzellenz wirklich
j e n e n eisgrauen, kurzen, am Kinn ausrasierten Backenbart trug, den
alle Amtsdiener und Eisenbahnportiers in Kakanien besaßen. Man hat-
te geglaubt, daß sie in ihrem Aussehen ihrem Kaiser und Könige nach-
strebten, aber das tiefe Bedürfnis beruht in solchen Fällen auf Gegen-
seitigkeit« (1: 84f). Graf Stallburg, Kaiser Franz Josef, scores of rail-
road porters, and droves of civil servants are all parodies of each other.
Elsewhere the narrator identifies this characteristic fondness for imi-
tation as a »gewißer Hang zur Allegorie« in everyday life (2:407). Even
the most ordinary daily activity is never just what it is; it always takes
on a supplemental, standardized meaning imposed on it by the images
that it replicates:
Im Kino, auf dem Theater, auf der Tanzbühne, im Konzert, in Auto, Flug-
zeug, Wasser, Sonne, Schneiderwerkstätten und Kaufmannsbüros entsteht
fortwährend eine ungeheure Oberfläche, die aus Ein- und Ausdrücken, Ge-
bärden, Gehaben und Erlebnissen besteht. (2: 408; cf. 1: 285)

T h e salesmen of image generate an expansive blanket of pseudo-reality

designed to flatter the culture's vision of itself. These images come f r o m
t h e movies and theater, f r o m fashion designers, technocrats and mer-
chants. It is they, a m o n g others, who draw up the blueprints for the
average desires, attitudes and emotions of daily life. T h e process of
image-mongering, whether it produces the newest hat, the most popular
romantic cliche or the latest intellectual trend, is the »Fabrikations-
grundsatz« for »die Herstellung des Lebens« (2: 410).
Ulrich repudiates the principle of life that is based on m a n u f a c t u r i n g
and imitating illusions, yet he becomes involved in t h e »Parallelaktion,«
Kakania's grandest parody. T h e Parallelaktion, as its n a m e implies, is a
game of mimicry, and it occupies the best and brightest minds of Ka-
kania. It is also the context within which the t h e m e of imitation begins
to emerge in tandem with the t h e m e of books and writing. In a note on
the novel Musil writes: »Schreiben ist eine Verdoppelung der Wirklich-
keit. Die Schreibenden haben nicht den Mut, sich f ü r utopische Exi-
stenzen zu erklären« (1594*). Just as the Kakanians habitually copy the
images a r o u n d them, so also can writing double reality, and such a
duplication is by no means desirable w h e n the reality is as dilapidated
as that in Kakania. It is the kind of writing that appears in newspapers
a n d magazines, and the kind of writing turned out by m a n y celebrated
intellectuals. O n e of these big names in Kakania is Paul A r n h e i m , who
will be discussed shortly.

72
 T h e p r o m o t e r s of the Parallelaktion intend it to project the » t r u e «
A u s t r i a to the world. W h e n t h e reader first meets G r a f Leinsdorf, the
o r i g i n a t o r of the Parallelaktion, his secretary is r e a d i n g to h i m a pas-
sage f r o m Fichte that, appropriately, is c o n c e r n e d with the necessity of
ethical »Vorbilder,« images to be imitated (1: 87). L e m s d o r f s Paral-
lelaktion is t h e A u s t r i a n imitation of t h e G e r m a n plan to celebrate
Kaiser W i l h e l m II's thirty years on t h e t h r o n e with a jubilee. Leinsdorf
i n t e n d s to e m u l a t e t h e G e r m a n s by o r g a n i z i n g a n even m o r e splendid
celebration of F r a n z J o s e f s seventieth year of imperial dignity in the
H a p s b u r g realms. Leinsdorf is searching for an idea that will d e m -
o n s t r a t e the t r u e Austria to t h e e n t i r e world. His b a n k e r , D i r e k t o r Leo
Fischl, asks Ulrich what is to be u n d e r s t o o d as t h e t r u e Austria. Ulrich
replies that it is the » P D U G . « »>Ich schwöre Ihnen,< e r w i d e r t e Ulrich
ernst, >daß weder ich noch irgend j e m a n d weiß, was der, die, das W a h r e
ist; a b e r ich k a n n I h n e n versichern, dass es im Begriff steht, verwirk-
licht zu werden!<« (1: 135). L e i n s d o r f s project is a good e x a m p l e of
Ulrich's » P D U G , « t h e » P r i n z i p des u n z u r e i c h e n d e n G r u n d e s , « which
posits that w h a t e v e r has insufficient reason to exist will c o m e into
being anyway. A non-idea t h a t i m m o d e s t l y a i m s at reflecting t h e
>truth< of Austria has i n s u f f i c i e n t g r o u n d s for existence: t h e idea, which
has not yet c o m e into being, is predicated o n k n o w i n g the t r u t h , which
n o b o d y knows. Yet, as U l r i c h points out, t h e » P D U G « will prevail, a n d
L e m s d o r f s non-idea will b e c o m e reality.

T h e first m a j o r step t o w a r d reifying this non-existent t h i n g d e m -

onstrates the hold t h a t writing has o n reality. A j o u r n a l i s t accidently
catches wind of L e i n s d o r f s p r o p o s e d scheme, assigns a n a m e to it -
»Österreichisches J a h r « - t h a t invests it with t h e a u r a of dignity, im-
portance, a n d reality that e m a n a t e s f r o m w h a t e v e r a p p e a r s in news-
print. T h e Parallelaktion has b e c o m e a »pseudo-event,« a n o c c u r e n c e
t h a t exists not by virtue of its a u t h e n t i c a n d i n d e p e n d e n t presence
outside of writing, but is instead artificially g e n e r a t e d by t h e expecta-
tions that the m e d i a a r o u s e in t h e public. 9 T h e n a r r a t o r notes that nei-
t h e r Leinsdorf n o r t h e j o u r n a l i s t k n o w w h a t they are t a l k i n g about,
w h i c h is hardly surprising since w h a t they a r e talking a b o u t does not

'The term »pseudo-event« comes from Daniel Boorstin, who treats in Amer-
ican culture the same phenomenon to which Musil alludes. A pseudo-event
exists when the press and other media publicize some allegedly momentous
occurence in advance. The event then becomes the image that the media
projected for it because they projected that image. Boorstin stresses the dis-
turbing frequency with which the contrived images overshadow the real
thing. See D.B., The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (New
York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 744.

73
exist. But because it appears under the authority of print, and because it
has a name, no matter how vague, it instantly becomes the real and
fascinating object of public attention.
This authority of the written word serves an important function in
the novel. Even though he never appears in person, Ulrich's father
asserts his considerable authority in the form of writing, in letters, in
telegrams, and even after death by means of his will. This »father« is
the »already-written« that seeks throughout the novel to dominate Ul-
rich. It is a seminal form of Ulrich's »Prinzip des unzureichendes
Grundes.« For instance, in a peevish, pompous letter the father com-
mands Ulrich to call on a certain imperial dignitary. Obeying this dis-
patch from above, Ulrich meets Graf Stallburg, who introduces him to
the Parallelaktion. Although Ulrich has no intention of participating in
Stallburg's project, the father's letter has already set into motion a
chain of events that will ultimately lead to his involvement in it.
One day as Ulrich is typically submerged in his private world,
pondering the relation of »Geist« to its concrete manifestations, he
happens onto the scene of an arrest and then is himself arrested for
allegedly interfering with police efforts to bring a belligerent drunk
under control. At the police station Ulrich sees that he is in for a bit of
unpleasantness. In order to extricate himself he explains to the desk
sergeant that he is a good friend of Graf Lemsdorf and secretary to the
great patriotic undertaking of which people have been reading in the
papers. The truth is that Ulrich has never met Leinsdorf and has no
intention of becoming secretary to the Parallelaktion. Ulrich's story
ought to be insufficient grounds for the production of reality, but the
»PDUG« once again asserts its awesome power to shape the course of
human affairs. Because aristocratic connections are not taken lightly in
Kakania, the desk sergeant passes the problem to central headquarters
where Ulrich eventually ends up in the office of the Polizeipräsident, a
personal friend of Graf Leinsdorf. The Graf himself had been at the
police station some hours previously making inquiries regarding Ul-
rich's unlisted address. The Polizeipräsident informs Ulrich that he is
expected to appear at Lemsdorfs on the following morning and that the
police have no intention of interfering with this important meeting. In
this way Ulrich finds that his father's letter and his own little story hold
him tightly in their ridiculous grasp. He feels duty-bound to call on
Graf Leinsdorf, and on the next day life imitates fiction when the
Parallelaktion gets a new secretary.
Ulrich's duties within the Parallelaktion introduce him to his prin-
cipal adversary in the novel, Dr. Paul Arnheim. Musil's notes inform us
that Arnheim was modeled on the real-life figure of Walther Rathenau

74
(5: 1938), which accounts for the moment of the real in Musil's form-
ulation of a »realer Idealismus.« The second category, »Idealismus,«
leads back to the self-referential problematics of writing. Just as Arn-
heim is a fictional construct in Musil's novel, so also is his image in
Kakania a fiction produced by writing. He is the product of the media
and public expectations. Musil invents a biography for Arnheim that
presents him as the son of a self-made Prussian tycoon who built up a
financial empire from humble beginnings in a garbage collection busi-
ness. It is at least literally true and probably figuratively true also that
the younger Arnheim is heir and administrator to an empire of gar-
bage. He is a scholar, financier, writer and apologist for the »Vereini-
gung von Seele und Wirtschaft oder von Idee und Macht« (1: 108).
Arnheim is the object of Ulrich's special contempt not just because he
is manipulating the Parallelaktion out of a secret interest in Galician
oil fields, but especially because his bogus intellectual project is nothing
but another example of fiction that supplants truth. It is particularly
disgusting in Arnheim's case because he is intelligent enough to know
better.
Ulrich objects to Arnheim as a writer, a »Großschriftsteller« who is
not in the service of ideas but is instead in the business of satisfying the
public demand for greatness. His writings are an expression of the pub-
lic's need for a locus upon which to project its version of traditional
values in union with a business-is-business mentality. Arnheim takes
the chaotic present and wraps it in a package of noble-seeming ideals
that will appeal to the intelligentsia's image of itself. His success is due
in large part to his press coverage. Publishers, the press, and critics all
automatically sieze on a figure in whom they see their own minds and
vested interest reflected, and »groß ist nun, was für groß gilt; allein das
heißt, daß letzten Endes auch das groß ist, was durch tüchtige Reklame
dafür ausgeschrien wird . . . « (2: 433). Arnheim's own writings and the
publicistic writings about him give seeming form and substance to pop-
ular illusions. They transcribe the age's vision of itself and proliferate a
massive self-deception.
Ulrich sees through Arnheim's image, recognizing that he does not
offer creativity and originality, but only more of the same, »Seinesglei-
chen.« Arnheim promotes a self-serving bourgeois spirituality painted
in the faded colors of a once brilliant tradition. Its historical credentials
give to his philosophy a counterfeit patina of nobility and human ex-
cellence. His intellect plays itself out within the boundaries of conven-
tion, good taste, and self-delusion. Arnheim is a man of distinction, a
man with the »Eigenschaften« that belong to his era: learning, proper-
ty, social grace, respect for tradition, order, and progress. His image is
the age's duplication of itself.

75
 Moosbrugger, the pathological killer, is a similar duplication of the
age, a sort of inverted A r n h e i m . Like the »Großschriftsteller«, Moos-
brugger is a man with »Eigenschaften,« only all of t h e m are bad. He is
ignorant, poor, vicious, and criminally insane. Both A r n h e i m and
Moosbrugger are constructs of the age, but at extreme ends of the scale.
They are the points in historical space where the age's characteristics
appear in their densest profusion. A r n h e i m ' s admirers follow him in
the papers, flattered to see their own images in his. Splashy headlines
and lurid details of Moosbrugger's crime and trial create for him a
following of sorts also. T h e public's morbid fascination with the killer
points toward a kind of identification with his brutal nature and is a
prefiguration of World W a r I. This » k r a n k h a f t e Komödiant« (2: 652)
acts out the aggressive, destructive impulses that would soon devastate
European civilization: »wenn die Menschheit als Ganzes t r ä u m e n
könnte, m ü ß t e Moosbrugger entstehn« (1: 76). If A r n h e i m is a collec-
tive daydream, Moosbrugger is a collective nightmare.
Neither A r n h e i m nor Moosbrugger demonstrates the power of in-
dividual imagination that distinguishes Ulrich f r o m them. Each of the
two displays a tendency to the slavish imitation of literary models,
whether it is A r n h e i m sententiously quoting G o e t h e or Moosbrugger
mindlessly parroting the language of the law (1: 72). They reflect some-
thing of what Musil had in mind when he suggested in his diary: »einen
Menschen ganz aus Zitaten zusammensetzen!« (T,I: 356). Constructing
a figure entirely f r o m words and phrases gathered f r o m other sources
would mean that the figure is absolutely derivative, a parody of the
already-written. It would be a verbal montage that embodies the prin-
ciple of »Seinesgleichen geschieht« in that it would be limited to that
which has been thought, said and done already. Putting together a fig-
u r e f r o m quotations would be an authorial act of construction parallel
to the act of construction whereby the systems, institutions and tradi-
tions of culture inscribe character on the individual in the real world.
These a n o n y m o u s forces dictate the characters of A r n h e i m and Moos-
brugger, reducing t h e m to parodies of the features that are latent in the
society as a whole. Each is something of a Frankenstein-monster assem-
bled f r o m a variety of spare parts culled f r o m t h e mental habits of
K a k a n i a n culture. T h e implicit comparison of the artificiality of an
author's invented characters and the way that culture >writes< character
and reality is a t h e m e that gradually gathers m o m e n t u m in the novel.
A n o t h e r mechanism of parody in K a k a n i a is that of the dissemina-
tion of knowledge and opinion. Once the Parallelaktion is u n d e r way in
the salon of Ermelinda Tuzzi - called Diotima - its purpose is to find
an idea for the jubilee. G e n e r a l S t u m m von Bordwehr, an uninvited

76
participant assigned by the Ministry of War to keep an eye on the
proceedings, takes an active hand in trying to solve this problem. Driv-
en by his urge to bring order into civilian affairs and by his desire to
place this »erlösende Gedanke« at Diotima's feet, Stumm pays a visit to
the Kakanian Hofbibliothek. The objective of his mission is to gather
and collate the world's great ideas and then select »den schönsten Ge-
danken der Welt« for Diotima and the Parallelaktion. But browsing
through the stacks of the library he makes the staggering discovery that
even if he were to read a book every day he would not be able to finish
his search for around 10,000 years. The librarian with him then con-
fides an important secret to him, namely that the librarians are able to
maintain order in the system only by not reading books. They only read
titles and tables of contents, or, at most, bibliographies. He leads
Stumm into the secret heart of the library, its catalogue room, where
order takes precedence over substance. But once again Stumm is
thwarted in his efforts to find the world's greatest idea when he falls
into the dreaded scholarly regress of reading books about books, and
then books about books about books.
An older, more experienced librarian offers his assistance to the
General. During his many years of library service he has seen the
people come and go, and he has learned how to give them the books
that will satisfy their expectations. The unfailing eye of the old librarian
notes that the General's interests resemble those of a lady who recently
visited the library. This lady is of course Diotima, and so Stumm comes
into possession of the same books that she is reading.
This episode is a parable of the mechanisms that disseminate codi-
fied knowledge. The library is an archive of Western ideas and tradi-
tion, but because each book is a finished and irrevocable product of the
past, its relationship to the present becomes problematical. This point
can be illustrated by a small confrontation between Arnheim and Ul-
rich. The great man points out to Ulrich that history is an orderly thing:
»In der V/eltgeschichte geschieht nichts Unvernünftiges.« Ulrich re-
sponds with a pointed query: »In der Welt aber doch so viel?« (1: 174,
my emphasis). Arnheim the writer mistakes the historian's ordering
vision for the past itself. History is for him a written account of the past
whereby its chaos is ordered, codified and filed away. Ulrich does not
confuse reality with the written account of reality. He insists on the
distinction between the truth and its representation. Stumm's library
represents the same ordering reduction of reality into tame written ac-
counts. Books and writing are the emblems for the ossification of hu-
man truth and experience into a petrified forest of conceptual knowl-
edge. The first librarian demonstrates that order is strictly a matter of

77
form and cannot guarantee substance and excellence. Whatever truth
the library might contain is buried under mountains of paper. The au-
thority of the print itself levels out the authority of truth. The second
librarian, who, like the first, knows only the order of the library and not
the substance of the thought it is supposed to contain, demonstrates
how knowledge finds its way out of the stacks into the world. He knows
which books will satisfy the expectations of which customers and earns
his tips by circulating the same old stuff - »Seinesgleichen« - among
the library users whom he advises. In this way Stumm comes into the
possession of the same ideas that are on Diotima's mind. The two will
be able to reinforce each other intellectually, but not through any in-
dependent thinking and agreement reached in earnest dialogue. In-
stead, it is simply that the same information, plausibly argued and un-
der the persuasive authority of print and tradition, has been fed into
each brain. Diotima also defines a like conformity to the »already writ-
ten« for the Parallelaktion when she sets up a library that contains all
of the published works of the campaign's participants. They will not be
able to extend themselves beyond this symbolic fixity.
Musil similarly transforms idea into setting when he situates Stumm,
Diotima, Arnheim and Ulrich together for a series of scenes in front of
the Hofbibliothek. In the first one, Arnheim pontificates to Stumm
concerning the >death of the soul< in modern culture. All the while he
poses bombastically with a weighty medieval volume which, so he
claims, represents what the Parallelaktion can give to the world: »die
Erlösung des deutschen Wesens vom Rationalismus« (2: 569). The con-
trolling images of library and book insinuate the limitations of Arn-
heim's nostalgic irrationalism. He looks with uncritical confidence to
the »already-written« of tradition for the answers to his questions.
The centrality of reading, books, and the library here underscores the
homology of form that exists between »reality« and »textuality.« Musil
views »Wirklichkeit« as a subreption of the vast, inexhaustible sea of
possibilities that precede it. >The text< is likewise a fixing of infinite
possibilities into the finite bounds of a book or a library. The under-
lying mechanism of each is identical: they compel into finite form that
which is by nature formless and infinite. This form, this static
representation, then comes to appear as truth itself. But the text, as a
figural expression of reality, is always a fiction, never identical with the
truth and so should not be taken literally (cf. p. 92). An unbridgeable
rift always separates the image from the true reality it is supposed to
represent. The text, conceived of broadly as the sum of reified presup-
positions, conventions, and traditions, defers and replaces truth. Images
from the past, e.g. Arnheim's medieval angel, impose themselves on

78
and displace the immediacy of the present. Books, the past, the author-
ity of tradition, the seeming stability of »reality,« and the deceptive
security of the fixed text all stand between the individual and the un-
encumbered, spontaneous experience of true reality. Arnheim's fash-
ionable irrationalism, his intellectual posing under the aegis of Ger-
many's tradition of Besitz und Bildung, his nostalgic utopianism all
seem persuasive because of the trappings of textuality: form, tradition,
fixity. But in its eternal sameness all the dogmatic text can offer is
»Seinesgleichen.«
While Arnheim lectures Stumm, Diotima quarrels with Ulrich about
the morality of a possible commitment to Arnheim. Their lively dis-
cussion extends and enlarges the theme of textuality, adding to it the
dimensions of ethics and self-reference. The question is whether »a
married woman« - Diotima refuses to admit that she is talking about
herself - ought to follow her feelings or whether she should subordi-
nate herself to the standards of moral convention. Ulrich takes his cue
from her reference to moral >law< to address the problem of reality. The
emblematic presence of the library behind them continues to dominate
the setting inasmuch as Ulrich's argumentation turns on reading, writ-
ing, novels, and great writers. His point of entry into the problem is the
specific question of morality: »Moral is ein durchaus berechtigter
Durchschnitts- und Kollektivwert, den man wörtlich und ohne Seiten-
sprünge zu befolgen hat, wo man ihn anerkennt. Einzelfälle sind aber
nicht moralisch zu entscheiden, sie haben genau so wenig Moral, genau
so viel sie von der Unerschöpflichkeit der Welt besitzen!« (2: 572).
Ulrich conceives of morality as a tacit set of collectively acknowledged
conventions that persist only under the imprimatur of average reality;
morality is a Vorschrift, a text of sorts that is prior to the individual and
that reflects collectively habituated experience. This text demands to be
followed literally - »wörtlich« - especially when it takes the written
form of codified law. But a »Mann ohne Eigenschaften« is willing to
deny the authority of the text. He perceives that there are always in-
stances of human reality and experience that do not fall into the pre-
structured categories of average reality. Because Moosbrugger is some-
thing new, the public does not consciously see itself in Moosbrugger's
unprecedented madness, and for this reason the psychiatrists and law-
yers fail to find a ready-made medical and legal cubby-hole in which to
file his disturbing case. The lawyers are a particularly clear instance of
minds limited by texts. Their reality extends only as far as the juridical
Vorschrift that determines their interpretation of human doings. They
are legally bound to follow the letter of the law. In the case of Moos-
brugger, literal reading takes precedence over justice.

79
 Ulrich expands the metaphor of textuality when he suggests to Dio-
tima that reading literature is an activity parallel to that of interpreting
reality. He asks her what it means to read: »Was tun Sie da? Ich will
gleich die Antwort geben: Ihre Auffassung läßt aus, was Ihnen nicht
paßt. Das gleiche hat schon der Autor getan« (2:573). Ulrich is warning
Diotima not to read too literally because an author can only appropriate
a fragment of reality for his text. The reader, in turn, can only assimi-
late those portions of the text that are within the grasp of his imagi-
nation or, as is perhaps more often the case, within the grasp of his
expectations. The truth accessible in a text is, then, partial at best. He
continues:

Lassen Sie uns etwa an große Schriftsteller denken. Man kann sein Leben
nach ihnen richten, aber man kann nicht Leben aus ihnen keltern. Sie haben
das, was sie bewegte, so fest gestaltet, daß es bis in die Zwischenräume der
Zeilen wie gepreßtes Metall dasteht. Aber was haben sie eigentlich gesagt?
Kein Mensch weiß es. Sie selbst haben es niemals ganz in einem gewußt. Sie
sind wie ein Feld, über dem die Bienen fliegen; zugleich sind sie selbst ein
Hin- und Herfliegen. Ihre Gedanken und Gefühle haben alle Grade des
Übergangs zwischen Wahrheiten oder auch Irrtümern, die sich zur Not nach-
weisen ließen, und wandelbaren Wesen, die sich uns eigenmächtig nähern
oder entziehen, wenn wir sie beobachten wollen. (2: 574; cf. 4: 1193)

An important irony informs this passage. Read simply and literally it is

only a matter of Ulrich elucidating his theory of »Auslassen« to Dio-
tima. He reaffirms that genuine life cannot be extracted from texts, that
the written expression of thoughts and feelings is a reduction and falsi-
fication of the authentic truth. But a reading of this passage that takes
note of its irony brings much more information.
It is no accident that Ulrich's comments thematize reading, writing,
and »große Schriftsteller.« The scene between Stumm and Arnheim
has already established in the reader's mind Musil's often repeated
point about the danger of accepting traditional dogma as the structure
of authentic reality. The images of the book and the library underwrite
the presence of this theme. But the open condemnation of reading too
literally, of holding too closely to the Vorschrift, leaves the impression
that Musil has made an unequivocal rejection of books and all conven-
tion and codification. This is a position that would be as dogmatic as the
one he opposes. Ulrich's talk with Diotima, and in particular this last
long passage, are a corrective to the threat of dogmatism. It is a com-
mentary on the novel-immanent theme of printed authority as well as a
self-reflective, ironic commentary on the fact that Der Mann ohne Ei-
genschaften is itself a book. 10 Ulrich grants to »große Schriftsteller«

10
In his diary Musil makes a comment on the Vereinigungen that holds true

80
some access to authentic reality, but this reality becomes radically
altered when it is committed to paper. His comment is simultaneously
an ironic caveat to the reader not to take the novel he is reading too
literally, for the short-comings of »große Schriftsteller« are surely Mu-
sil's own limitations. He is intentionally subverting the authority of his
own narrative by exposing it as artifice in order to uphold the integrity
of his proposition that any representation of reality is at best a critical
heuristic postulate about reality and can never make any claim actually
to be the truth. Musil insists on a conscious awareness of the crucial
distinction between an image and the object of representation. It is a
point that Ulrich's point about images - texts or representations of any
sort - in the fictional world of Kakania, folds back ironically on the text
that the novel's reader is holding in his hands.
This ironic moment of self-reflection reveals the sense of the narra-
tor's claim that his text intends at no point »mit der Wirklichkeit in
Wettbewerb zu treten« (1: 170). In other words the novel is self-con-
scious of its fictive mode, its fictionality, and does not wish for its
readers to take its insights as universal truths. Musil has supplied the
narrative fabric of his fictional world with a system of little rips and
tears through which the reader pops out of the illusion back into au-
thor's own detached point of vantage. The most important device that
the author uses to ironize the illusion of reality is the recurring self-
reflexive criticism of books, writing and the power of the word.
The novel's major villains and buffoons are all writers of books:
Arnheim, Lindner, Hagauer, Feuermaul, Walter, Meingast, and Ul-
rich's father. Ulrich, on the other hand, repeatedly asserts that he does
not write." Until he was twenty years old Ulrich had been interested in
writing and had even composed some poems in secret. But he gave it up
»aus Gründen, für die er unter den gegenwärtigen Eindrücken am ehe-
sten irgendein Wort hätte gebrauchen mögen, das nach vielen Anstren-
gungen ein Münden ins Leere ausdrückt. Denn Ulrich gehörte zu den
Bücherliebhabern, die nicht mehr lesen mögen, weil sie das Ganze des

also for the MoE: »Der Fehler dieses Buches ist, ein Buch zu sein. Daß es ein
Einband hat, Rücken, Paginierung. Man sollte zwischen Glasplatten ein paar
Seiten davon ausbreiten u. sie von Zeit zu Zeit wechseln. Dann würde man
sehen, was es ist« (Τ, I: 347).
11
Although Sprachproblematik is a topos familiar to Musilforschung, sec-
ondary literature around the MoE has not taken note of its variant form as
problematized textuality. For this reason it is not superfluous to cite the pages
where this problematization comes up in one form or another: volume 1: 87,
131f„ 206f. 244, 245, 251, 300, 326. 2: 360, 372f„ 391, 417, 418, 490, 574, 634,
662 3: 678,, 703, 864, 867, 882, 900, 960f. 4: 1115, 1278, 1282, 1381. 5: 1638f„
1640, 1642, 1673, 1818, 1865, 1898, 1904, 1911, 1919, 1921, 1925, 1993.

81
S c h r e i b e n s u n d L e s e n s a l s e i n U n w e s e n e m p f i n d e n « (3: 867). W h e n
a s k e d o n separate o c c a s i o n s b y T u z z i , G e r d a F i s c h l , a n d A r n h e i m if h e
d o e s or w o u l d write, U l r i c h a n s w e r s d e c i s i v e l y a n d e v e n irritably that
h e is e m p h a t i c a l l y n o t a w r i t e r ( 2 : 4 1 8 ; 4 9 0 ; 6 3 4 ) . S o m e f e w h u n d r e d
p a g e s later, U l r i c h recalls f o r h i s sister A g a t h e t h e c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h
Tuzzi:

Ich aber habe ihm zugeschworen, d a ß ich mich töten werde, e h e ich der
Versuchung unterliege, ein Buch zu schreiben; und ich habe es aufrichtig
gemeint. D e n n das, was ich schreiben könnte, wäre nichts als der Beweis, d a ß
m a n auf eine bestimmte a n d e r e Weise zu leben v e r m a g ; d a ß ich aber ein
Buch d a r ü b e r schriebe, wäre zumindest der Gegenbeweis, d a ß ich nicht so zu
leben vermag. (4: 1278)

I n s t e a d o f c o m m i t t i n g h i s U t o p i a n i d e a l s to paper, U l r i c h w a n t s to try t o
l i v e t h e m o u t w i t h h i s sister. W r i t i n g t h e m d o w n w o u l d m e a n sur-
r e n d e r i n g to t h e hard a n d fast w o r l d o f t h e j o u r n a l i s t s , t h e legislators,
and the Arnheims. Such a capitulation of his principles w o u l d c o m -
p r o m i s e t h e d e e p l y u n i q u e spark of o r i g i n a l i t y that s e p a r a t e s h i m f r o m
t h e herd, a n d s o d e s t r o y e x a c t l y that w h i c h is m o s t c e n t r a l to h i s life.
W r i t i n g is a k i n d of s u i c i d e f o r U l r i c h , a t h e m e that M u s i l e v i d e n t l y
h a d i n t e n d e d to d e v e l o p . 1 2 I n U l r i c h ' s m i n d t h e f i x i t y of t h e t e x t is a n
a n a l o g u e to t h e f i x i t y of a v e r a g e reality. A spirited c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h
C l a r i s s e results in a p a s s a g e that d e m o n s t r a t e s h i s a w a r e n e s s o f t h i s

12
It may be that after the failure to sustain a Utopian existence with Agathe,
Ulrich would have turned to writing. In Musil's sketches toward a conclusion
we find notes such as »Buch schreiben, also Selbstmord, also in Krieg G e h n «
(5: 1904; cf. 4: 1282, 1381 a n d 5: 1898, 1905, 1921, 1925), which suggest that
Ulrich joins in the madness of average reality a n d meets destruction. It
should be noted that Ulrich's m e m o r y fails h i m in recalling his conversation
with Tuzzi. W h a t he actually said was that unless the urge to write siezes h i m
soon, he will kill himself, and not, as h e recounts for Agathe, that he would
rather kill himself t h a n write. It is also not entirely true that Ulrich has
completely renounced reading a n d writing: a) he writes long diary entries on
»Gefühlspsychologie« and b) he reads t h e mystics, a. If it is true, as M a r t h a
Musil wrote, that her h u s b a n d had intended to break u p these diary entries
into conversations between Ulrich and Agathe, part of the author's motiva-
tion could have been to be consistant with Ulrich's repeated claims that he
does not write. In any case he does not write for popular c o n s u m p t i o n a n d so
remains free of the tainted literacy that A r n h e i m and the others represent
( M a r t h a Musil, 1615*; see η. 1). b. Ulrich m a k e s a distinction between good
writing and bad reading, as a c o m m e n t to Tuzzi implies: » b e i n a h e kein
Mensch liest heute noch, jeder benützt den Schriftsteller nur, u m in der F o r m
von Z u s t i m m u n g oder A b l e h n u n g auf eine perverse Weise seinen eigenen
Ü b e r s c h u ß an i h m abzustreifen« (2:417). Ulrich's reading of t h e mystics (e.g.
3:753, 4:1203) presumably falls into a special category because the writers of
mystic texts, like Ulrich, are at all points aware of the inadequacy of language.

82
parallelism. But it is a passage that requires special attention. Clarisse's
husband, Walter, interrupts Ulrich's talk with his wife, and the narrator
takes it upon himself to report what Ulrich might have said if Walter
had not appeared.
Er hatte etwa sagen w o l l e n : Gott meint die Welt keineswegs wörtlich; sie ist
ein Bild, eine Analogie, eine R e d e w e n d u n g , deren er sich aus i r g e n d w e l c h e n
G r ü n d e n b e d i e n e n muß, und natürlich i m m e r u n z u r e i c h e n d ; wir dürfen ihn
nicht b e i m Wort n e h m e n , wir selbst müssen die Lösung h e r a u s b e k o m m e n ,
die er uns aufgibt. (2: 357f.)

It is significant that the narrator introduces this passage with the equiv-
ocal adverb »etwa.« Ulrich neither spoke nor thought these lines; they
are, as the narrator explicitly states, an approximation of what he had
wanted to say to Clarisse. This point is of no importance in Kakania, i.e.
in the fictional world in which Ulrich and the others live and move.
But it is decisive for the world in which the reader relates to the novel.
T h e word »etwa« 1) a n n o u n c e s the presence of the narrator, 2) dem-
onstrates his power over the figures, and 3) enacts the mode of un-
dogmatic assertion to which Musil's irony lays claim. By foregrounding
his narrator, Musil militates against the uncritical reading that allows
the act of narration to melt into the background of literary convention.
In this passage, as in m u c h of the novel,' Musil prefers narrated mon-
ologue to quoted monologue. This narratological detour draws the read-
er's attention away f r o m the figures of fiction to refocus it on the
figures of speech and thereby weakens the impression of a realistic
illusion. In this particular instance, Musil heightens the sense of an
alien intrusion into the world of the fiction by passing on information
that is not only second-hand but is also only an approximation of some-
thing t h e protagonist neither said nor even thought. T h e narrative rhet-
oric of this passage reveals that it, like Ulrich himself, is the invention
of an imagination outside of t h e fiction.
T h e content of the narrated passage bears out the reading that its
rhetorical strategy suggests. T h e hypothetical statement that the narra-
tor tentatively attributes to Ulrich's intention proposes that G o d does
not m e a n the world literally. It is a proposition characteristic of Ul-
rich's »ironic« or facetious t e m p e r a m e n t , but it is even more ironic
t h a n Clarisse and Ulrich would be inclined to think. T h e passage casts
G o d in the role of speaker, writer, or, more reductively, in the role of a
novelist writing reality. T h e passage's first level of meaning, the one
that occurs in the world of the fiction, is a variation on the Utopian
t h e m e that concrete reality should not be taken too literally. It is a
restatement of the possibilitarian's motto: » N u n , es k ö n n t e wahrschein-
lich auch anders sein« (1: 16). But at a deeper level of m e a n i n g there

83
arises the ironic moment of self-reflection that occurs not in the ficiton-
al world but between text and reader. If God is the >author< of reality,
then so too is the novelist a lesser deity over the lesser reality of his
narrative. It makes the real world and the fictional one parallel realms
of artifice, contingent upon the perhaps fickle whims of an unknown
divinity. There is a double valance to Ulrich's injunction not to take
reality literally. Inasmuch as he makes his point by likening reality to a
text, we are justified in reading it as authorial irony: Ulrich's reality is,
literally, textual, »ein Bild, eine Analogie, eine Redewendung.« Ulrich
in his world is asserting that the concretely real is only a metaphor for
all the possibilities behind it; Musil in his world is asserting, ironically,
that Ulrich, Kakania, and all the other figures in his novel are hypo-
thetical constructs and not doubles for the already fictional figures of
life. Fiction merges with reality and reality fades into fiction when their
shared underlying mechanism is brought to light.
Musil gives his readers a fair chance to catch and interpret the irony
that develops between text and reader, but just to be certain that no-
body misses the point, he sends Ulrich back to Clarisse to explain
things. T h e specific >narrativity< of Kakanian reality is evident to him,
albeit not in the form of novelistic narrative but as bad theater. Note
once again that the narrator reports Ulrich's speech in the subjunctive
of indirect discourse, thereby forcing the reader to take into account the
mediator as an artificer of worlds: » D a s jetzt geltende System sei das
der Wirklichkeit und gleiche einem schlechten Theaterstück. Man sage
nicht umsonst Welttheater, denn es erstehen immer die gleichen Rol-
len, Verwicklungen und Fabeln im L e b e n « (2: 364). He goes on to
compare politicians to the authors of box-office hits that are really only
showy renderings of the same old tired plots and devices, lacking in
imagination and originality. 13
Ulrich has verified and made explict the message that was implicit in
the earlier ironic passage. Shaping reality is an act of construction like
that of shaping art works. T h e conventions that govern the one find
analogues in the conventions that govern the other. There is always the
danger of inventing a reality that is trite and cliche-ridden. T h e scripts
of »Welttheater« are parodies, repetition of the same old stuff: »Seines-
gleichen geschieht.« Ulrich demands originality, spontaneity, and au-
thenticity of life lived according to ideas and ideals that emerge from

13 This passage is cited in full on page 65. The thought that politicians, the
»authors« of reality, are generally just bad artists comes up frequently in
Musil (cf. Τ, I: 984, 825). Nor are the poets excused for similar ethical stupid-
ities (cf. his essay »Über die Dummheit«, 8: 1278).

84
individual imagination instead of the false ideas and ideals that are the
plagiarized redundancies of »Weltgeschichte.«
This ironic self-consciousness and self-critique in Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften asserts itself once again when Ulrich returns home after
having witnessed the preposterous theatrics of a demonstration against
Leinsdorf and the Parallelaktion. He is fed up with the absurdities of
so-called reality, but he is also slightly disturbed at his inability to put
the world in the same kind of perspective that allows his contempora-
ries to view these absurdities with equanimity. In this state of mind it
occurs to him, »daß das Gesetz dieses Lebens . . . kein anderes sei als
das der erzählerischen Ordnung!« (2: 650). The irony is unmistakable
inasmuch as Ulrich's >literal< existence depends entirely on narrative
order.
Ulrich's thoughts on the narrativity of Kakanian life are suddenly
interrupted on his walk home when a prostitute confronts him with her
painted face, commercial smile, and a proposition formulated in the
cliches of her trade language. The woman's outward appearance and
smile, as well as her language are all the thinnest pretense, and for a
reasonable fee she is willing to entertain her would-be customer in a
brief, make-believe love tryst. She is a transparent fiction, an emblem
of Kakanian life, whose every detail is calculated according to a nar-
rative order that exists in the pitiful imaginations of her customers. The
scene is a translation of Ulrich's discursive insight from the preceding
passage into the form of a Gleichnis. The figure of the prostitute has
clear extra-textual moment of >realistic< reference: she is like someone
whom an Ulrich might meet on the streets of a place like Vienna. But
the moment of self-reference is also in evidence: she is a two-di-
mensional figure of pure artifice that embodies the theme of »Seines-
gleichen« in the novel.
This encounter is a set piece that demonstrates how art and reality
come together for Musil in a positive way. The prostitute appears si-
multaneously as real-seeming illusion and self-conscious artifice: »unter
der Nachtbemalung mochte die Haut eines noch jungen Mädchens mit
vielen Sommersprossen verborgen sein« (2: 651). Truth lies concealed
beneath illusion. Of course her phony routine does not fool Ulrich, but
he is nevertheless slightly touched by the strange mingling of contriv-
ance and authenticity in her. He seems to be faced with the choice of
going with her and participating in a sexual charade or playing the
righteous burgher and rejecting her offer in accordance with moral
convention. But Ulrich picks neither of the two average choices, sponta-
neously choosing instead to do something original and unexpected. He
reaches into his pocket for the approximate price of a visit, presses the

85
money into her hand, and continues on his eccentric way. It is a mo-
ment in the novel that is slightly comical, thoroughly and refreshingly
free of slushy social criticism, yet suffused with a convincing human
sensitivity. In it Musil has found a precise balance between the self-
consciousness of fictional artifice and a transitory instant of a humane
authenticity that is sober and unpretentious. The prostitute is artificial
for Ulrich - only another unhappy case of »Seinesgleichen« in Kaka-
nian life - and she is artificial for the reader - a transparent Gleichnis
in a novel - but for both Ulrich and the reader this encounter leaves
behind it a residue of authentic human experience: »Diese Begegnung
blieb noch eine Weile lebendig, als wäre sie ein zartes Idyll von einer
Minute Dauer gewesen« (2: 652). Musil's irony does not withdraw the
richness of this moment. It only qualifies it and prevents it from lapsing
into a sentimental lie. Ulrich's response to the situation is an important
development in the novel's thematics of originality. The prostitute's
life, like almost everybody's in Kakania is only a weak imitation of an
already shabby, imaginary order. Ulrich revolts against this order and is
determined to do something original. The narrative thread of life in
Kakania is that of custom, law, tradition and Bildung.
The principal representative of this authoritarian order for Ulrich is
his father. This father, Ulrich's »author«, as it were, is absent during
the entire course of the novel, yet the power that this invisible being
exercises over his children is pervasive. It presses Ulrich to make a
place of importance for himself in society and it holds Agathe in a
marriage that she loathes (3: 683). The father is a man with »Eigen-
schaften.« His industrious efforts and accomplishments in the legal
profession have made him prosperous, brought him social prestige, and
earned him an appointment to the Imperial House of Lords. Appro-
priately, the father is a legislator, a writer of the laws that determine the
bounds of permissible behavior. It is also significant, as I previously
suggested, that the father dominates his children not in person but
>textually,< i.e. always in the written form of letters, telegrams and,
especially, his will. He directs Ulrich into the Parallelaktion by means
of a letter, and even the news of his death comes to Ulrich in a telegram
that the father himself composed before he died. This telegram is the
conscious attempt of the dead and absent past to gain control of the
future (cf. 3: 672). This father is emblematic of all the superordinated
structures of oppression that imprison the individual in prescriptive
schemata of feeling, thinking and living. He is the lawmaker who
writes the text of life.
The father's death is a decisive moment in the novel's development.
It calls Ulrich away from the ridiculous reality of the disintegrating

86
Parallelaktion, and it calls Agathe away from the sterile parody of mar-
ried life that she is leading with the pedantic Hagauer. After many
years of separation, the brother and sister are reunited at the father's
provincial villa. To describe the strangely powerful attraction that they
feel for each other, Ulrich invokes Plato's story of how the gods split
the human being into two halves that must seek each other ever after
(3:303f.). Ulrich and Agathe are two errant halves that have rejoined to
form a whole. He is a man of icy intellectuality, at home in the rarified
atmosphere of mathematics and the theoretical sciences. She is the »si-
ster,« »ein Gebilde, das aus dem >anderen< Teil des Gefühls ersteht« (4:
1314). Agathe is a Gefühlsmensch, but she is not a sentimentalist or
dewy-eyed romantic like Diotima and Bonadea. She is articulate, well
read and intelligent; she has a good memory and recites poetry, but she
does not share her brother's emotional detachment, and the precise
world of discursive abstraction is not her element. Upon their first
meeting in the villa, Musil ties them figuratively by twinning them in
identical Pierrot pyjamas. The costume suggests the completeness of
their union, but it is also an ironic gesture from Musil to the reader.
Pierrot is, of course, a clown, a stock literary figure, an insinuation of
the figurality and fictionality of Ulrich and Agathe.
The father is dead and the children have broken away from their
respective places in average reality. The scene is set for an experiment
in authentic living, but once again average reality in the form of a
written text stands in the way. The father's will can uphold Agathe's
bond to Hagauer. So Agathe in her »wildsanfte Entschlossenheit« takes
the revolutionary measure of forging a codicil to the will so that Ha-
gauer will be excluded from his legacy. Agathe is denying the authority
of the text and of reality. In so doing she becomes a criminal. The
authority of the father, the law, tradition and custom are all present in
this document. By changing it Agathe is rewriting reality and opening a
path »ins Tausendjährige Reich« for herself and her brother. Part III
of the novel - »Ins Tausendjährige Reich (Die Verbrecher)« - primar-
ily deals with the Utopian experiment of Ulrich and Agathe.
The two >criminals< isolate themselves from their old lives and the
»Seinesgleichen« reality of Kakanian society in order to inquire into
new, untried ways of experiencing the world and each other. Their
flirtation with incest is a sign of the radical seriousness of this un-
dertaking. They are moving toward a heightened physical and spiritual
unity that Musil calls »die Utopie des anderen Zustands.« The precise
nature of the »Other Condition« is never entirely clear, but it is basi-
cally a state of receptivity to experience that is free of the constraint
that habit, expectation, and presupposition impose on thinking and

87
feeling. 1 4 It is the condition in which an individual responds to a given
stimulus spontaneously and authentically without being influenced by
the patterns of response that belong to past experience. In this way, the
unprecedented and unrepeatable aspects of even the most quotidian
event become accessible, aspects that otherwise slip through the coarse-
ly woven net of prestructured expectations. T h e person empowered of
the O t h e r Condition is able to drink in a fleeting m o m e n t without
forcing the schemata of habituated experience on it. Ulrich describes
the distinction between prescribed and authentic feeling to his sister:
» . . . unser Fühlen hat seine besondere Gestalt dadurch a n g e n o m m e n ,
d a ß wir es in das Bild der Wirklichkeit einordnen, und nicht das Um-
gekehrte, das Ekstatische tun. Eben deshalb m u ß in uns aber auch die
Möglichkeit liegen, unser Fühlen u m z u k e h r e n und unsere Welt anders
zu erleben!« (4: 1201; cf. 1: 186, 284; 3: 1024; 4: 1129).
T h e problem of textuality returns once again, this time with regard to
the O t h e r Condition. Both the event and the experience of the event in
the O t h e r Condition are ephemeral. That which is unprecedented and
unrepeatable is necessarily falsified when a representation of it gives it
seeming permanence. Nevertheless, representations of experience had
in the Other Condition are abundant. In a sketch known as »Die Reise
ins Paradies,« Anders, Ulrich's precursor in early drafts of the novel,
explains to Agathe that the O t h e r Condition leaves behind it the ossi-
fied traces of its presence in various sorts of fixed expressions:
Man könnte ja versucht sein, in diesem schattenhaften Doppelgänger einer
andren Welt nur einen Tagtraum zu sehn, wenn er nicht seine noch warmen
Spuren in unzähligen Einzelheiten unseres Lebens hinterlassen hätte. Reli-
gion, Kunst, Liebe, Moral . . . das sind Versuche, diesem andren Geist zu
folgen, die mit ungeheurer Mächtigkeit in unser Dasein hereinragen, aber
ihren Sinn und Ursprung verloren haben und dadurch völlig verworren u.
korrupt geworden sind. (5: 1644)

O n e of Ulrich's favorite examples of this corruption is bourgeois mo-

rality. He believes that the ethical impulse is native to the Other Con-
dition, but that it is not susceptible of being reduced to a text of pres-
criptive rules and regulations: »Ich m u ß Agathe einprägen: Moral ist
Z u o r d n u n g jedes Augenblickszustandes unseres Lebens zu einem
Dauerzustand!« (3: 869; cf. 3: 1028). T h e reification of any experience
that originates in the O t h e r Condition is always only an image, a

14
There is much literature devoted to Musil's »anderer Zustand.« See esp. Eli-
sabeth Albertsen, Zur Dialektik von Ratio und Mystik im Werk Robert Musils
(München: Nymphenburg, 1968); Ingrid Drevermann, »Wirklichkeit und
Mystik,« in Sibylle Bauer und Ingrid Drevermann, Studien zu Robert Musil,
Literatur und Leben, N.F., 8 (Köln, Graz: Böhlau, 1966).

88
Gleichnis that hypostatizes the constantly shifting fluidity of the inner
life. Once again, >the book< is emblematic for the petrification of in-
sight gleaned the Other Condition. Anders to Agathe:
»Hunderte von Menschen haben es erlebt, daß sie glaubten, sich eine andre
Welt öffnen zu sehn. Genau so wie wir.«
»Und was ist daraus geworden?«
»Bücher«
»Doch unmöglich nur Bücher?«
»Wahnsinn. Aberglaube. Essays. Moral. Und Religion. Die Dinge.« (5: 1642)

The problem here is one of representation, of mimesis, and it has a

direct bearing on Musil's own undertaking. He has posed a problem for
himself that he answers by thematizing the use of Gleichnisse,15 During
his conversation with Diotima in front of the library, Ulrich sketches
out the problem involved in representing reality. He tells her that the
physical world behaves with sufficient regularity that it can be ade-
quately represented, especially in the precise language of mathematics;
»aber alle anderen Begriffe, auf die wir unser Leben stützen, sind
nichts als erstarren gelassene Gleichnisse« (2: 574). These other con-
cepts are beauty, love, morality, law, religion, ideology and the various
inner experiences of the Other Condition that can appear in the fossil-
ized form of a >textual< objectification. Ulrich draws his metaphor
from the realm of literature. Α Gleichnis is a literary text. It is »die
gleitende Logik der Seele« (2: 593) that is the adequate expression of
the inner life because it is tentative, hypothetical and only tries to tell
what something is like and not dogmatically to embody the final truth
of a thing. Musil's frozen »Gleichnisse« are highly reminiscent of
Nietzsche's definition of truth as

Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen,

kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch
gesteigert, übertragen, geschmückt wurden und die nach langem Gebrauch
einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dünken: die Wahrheiten sind
Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind, Metaphern, die
abgenutzt und sinnlich kraftlos geworden sind, Münzen, die ihr Bild verloren
haben und nun als Metall, nicht mehr als Münzen, in Betracht kommen. 16

15
In the text of this chapter I retain the German word Gleichnis because Musil
uses it in a very broad sense that does not translate well. He includes similes,
parables, images, symbols, analogies and so on in the word Gleichnis. In other
words, a Gleichnis is any sign, any figural expression, as distinct from its
referent.
16
Friedrich Nietzsche, »Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn,«
in his Werke in drei Bänden, hrsg. von Karl Schlechta, vol. III (München:
Hanser, 1956), p. 314.

89
Nietzsche and Musil insist on honoring the bounds of representation,
distinguishing rigorously between a sign and its itinerant referent.
When the concept of a thing replaces the thing itself, truth becomes
nothing more than a rhetorical construct, a fiction. What Kakania ac-
cepts as truths are illusions that have forgotten they are illusions. It is
precisely this critical insight that generates the functional identity be-
tween Ulrich and Musil. Ulrich treats appearances as appearances. All
of human reality is for him a Gleichnis of the truth and never the truth
itself. In a like manner, Musil treats his novel as a Gleichnis. Critical
consciousness means for him ie//-consciousness. His various ironic in-
trusions into the novel's illusion of reality call attention to its condition
of artifice, its Gleichnishaftigkeit. Irony enables him to reflect on the
world and simultaneously reflect on his reflection of the world. Both
Ulrich and his inventor are artists in the Nietzschean sense that treats
life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon.
This position does not, however, reduce the project of representation
to a fool's errand. It calls instead for a clear understanding of the lim-
itations of representation. The scientist treats an equation that describes
a chemical reaction as a hypothetical model of that reaction, a tentative
construct that is subject to revision. When a heuristic representation
hardens into a dogma, the cause of truth is obstructed until a mind of
sufficient imagination comes along to unmask the text as a text.
Copernicus, for instance, was a mind empowered of enough imagi-
nation to abandon the »Seinesgleichen« models of the solar system and
invent a new one. Musil calls this open-minded creativity »phantasti-
sche Genauigkeit,« a condition diametrically opposed to »pedantische
Genauigkeit,« »und diese beiden unterscheiden sich dadurch, daß sich
die phantastische an die Tatsachen hält und die pedantische an Phanta-
siegebilde« (1: 247). What Ulrich and Musil demand is no less than a
Copernican revolution of the »soul«. Ulrich's exhortation that the
Parallelaktion establish a »Generalsekretariat für Genauigkeit und
Seele« reflects this demand. The humanist, like the scientist, must offer
representations - models, Gleichnisse - that hold to the facts. His spe-
cial problem is that the »facts« of the human psyche are in a state of
continual flux. In one of his talks with Agathe, Ulrich illustrates this
state of affairs with a passage from Hamlet that is quoted in full at the
beginning of this chapter:

Die Wolke des Polonius, die bald als Schiff bald als Kameel erscheint, ist
nicht die Schwäche eines nachgiebigen Höflings, sondern bezeichnet ganz
und gar die Art, in der uns Gott geschaffen hat. (4: 1434; cf. 4: 1348; 5: 1503)

90
Ulrich's willful re-interpretation of this Shakespeare passage asserts the
capacity of imagination to keep pace with the ceaseless shifting of the
inner life. Polonius and Hamlet do not reify any one of their
representations. As soon as one image is no longer valid, they discard it
and invent a new one. They continually rewrite reality.
For this reason the poet, a scientist of the soul, can best hold to the
facts of inventing finely tuned Gleichnisse. The figural captures that
which is unique and spontaneous in a given moment of authentic emo-
tion and experience because it links together two things that otherwise
do not share identity. In figurality, it is the tension between identity
and difference that is decisive: »Selbst in jeder Analogie steckt ein Rest
des Zaubers, gleich und nicht gleich zu sein« (3: 906; cf. 4: 1342ff.,
1350; 5: 1834, Nr. 6). The epiphanical instant of shared identity does
not lapse into dogmatic assertion because the intrinsic difference be-
tween the terms of comparison holds identity in check. The Gleichnis,
with its »glasige Atmosphäre von Ahnung, Glaube und Künstlichkeit«
(2: 582) feels its way along the dark contours of »die Welt des Innern«
(4: 1200) and hints at its nature by suggesting what it is like connota-
tively, but never offering a hard and fast denotion of what it is. Its
self-conscious »Künstlichkeit« withdraws the illusion of absolute truth
and permanence from figurality and guarantees it as a form of signifi-
cation free of hypostasis.
Although it is central to Musil's theory and fiction, the Gleichnis-
theme has not yet aroused its due share of attention. 17 In the present
context it is principally important to elucidate only a portion of this
theme, specifically, the way in which the Gleichnis enacts in miniature

" T w o book-length studies have been devoted to this topic: Jörg Kühne, Das
Gleichnis. Studien zur inneren Form von Robert Musils Roman »Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften«., Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 13 (Tübingen: Nie-
meyer, 1968); Dieter Fuder, Analogiedenken und anthropologische Differenz.
Zu Form und Funktion der poetischen Logik in Robert Musils Roman »Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften,« Musil-Studien, 10 (München: Fink, 1979). In his
discussion of Musil's conception of mimesis, Fuder recognizes the self-con-
scious fictionality of Musil's analogy use that I emphasize here. His point of
departure is Törleß' trouble with imaginary numbers and his comparison of
them to a bridge: »Ist das nicht wie eine Brücke, von der nur Anfangs- und
Endpfeiler vorhande sind, und die man so sicher überschreitet, als ob sie ganz
dastünde?« (cited in Fuder, p. 171). Fuder's conclusion is, »die Dichtung ist
eine fiktive Analogie, die sich vom festen Boden so wegwölbt, als besäße sie
im Imaginären ein Analogat« (p. 171). The analogy is »eine Relationsbewe-
gung, deren Abbildungscharakter darin besteht, das Analogat im Imaginären
erst herzustellen« (173). Cf. also Karl Corino, »Der erlöste Tantalus. Robert
Musils Verhältnis zur Sprache«, Annali: Studi Tedeschi, 23 (Naples, 1980),
339-56.

91
the system of dual reference that governs the novel. In Musil's narra-
tive the form of literary expression - the figural - becomes the object of
itself. Form becomes content when the narrator, Ulrich, and Agathe
reflect discursively on the nature of Gleichnisse, while at the same time
Musil uses Gleichnisse to render them. Viewed in this way the whole
narrative world appears to be suspended in mid-air, grounded not in
solid, referential reality but in a set of self-referential rhetorical rela-
tions. All of Kakania is such a Gleichnis, a poetic trope whose only
referent is itself; but self-referentiality does not rob the sign of mean-
ing. It establishes the origin of meaning as the imagination in its dia-
lectic with the rest of the world. Figural language does not function
according to the adaequatio model of truth, which posits the priority of
the referent in its isomorphic relation to its sign. When the referent is a
fragile, transitory moment in affective reality, figurative language
addresses it by setting up a relational pattern of words that is auto-sig-
native yet also evokes a meaning that arises somewhere between ex-
perience and imagination. Such a signification is one that is free of the
words' denotative values. The Gleichnis does not double reality. Its
words awaken dormant perceptions and then they fade away, leaving
behind them a disembodied thought.
A brief example will help to clarify this matter. In one of their idyllic
garden conversations, as Ulrich and Agathe walk and talk together,
coming ever closer to a mystical union, the narrator dissolves the dis-
cursive content of their exchange into figural language:

und die Worte, die sie wechselten, bedeuteten eigentlich wenig und wiegten
sie bloß in ihr Gehen ein wie das kindlich vergnügte Selbstgespräch eines
Brunnens, der lallend vom Ewigen schwätzt. (4: 1335)

The medium of exchange, language, comes undone for Ulrich and Aga-
the and unites them in a fleeting eternal moment of affective truth. But
Musil cannot abandon language; he must try to render this extra-
linguistic experience into words. He tries to pierce the denotative stric-
tures of ordinary signification and penetrate in a precise way into the
affective interior. The sign-referent structure of ordinary language is
fine for conventional experience that is calculable and repeatable. The
sign is by nature a conventional construct that coincides with a con-
ventional meaning. But Musil is after the unprecedented and unrepea-
table. He must use figural language - words in an unconventional, uni-
que configuration - to suggest what the experience is like. In comparing
the words of Ulrich and Agathe to the gently rocking murmur of a
brook he connotatively evokes perceptions that are convincing in their
authenticity and precise in a certain way, albeit unverifiably so. Yet

92
there is no danger of substituting the sign for the referent; the dif-
ference between words and a murmuring brook is unmistakable. It is at
all points clear that the expression is figurative, and so the language
itself fades away, leaving in its place the residue of a unique aßerfu.

III

The invention of a Gleichnis is an act of imagination, but, ideally, it is

not an act of unbridled and irresponsible fantasy. Ulrich, the possi-
bilitarian, regards the whole of reality as an act of quasi-divine imagi-
nation, no more than an image, an analogy or turn of phrase. His re-
fusal to take reality »literally« seems to leave him open to the charge of
being an irresponsible phantast. Similarly, a novel that claims it does
not wish to compete with reality and persists in flaunting the artifice of
its fictionality also seems to question the seriousness and worth of the
writer's work. But in both instances the reverse is true. It is not Ulrich
who is a phantast, but Arnheim, Moosbrugger and the rest of the de-
luded Kakanians who live and act according to destructive illusions.
They accept willingly an inadequate reality. Ulrich's rebellion against
illusion is an act of ethical imagination. The vigorous intelligence of
Musil's self-conscious style also bears the mark of a radical honesty. As
Ulrich denies the fixed text of reality, so also does Musil deny the
authority of dogmatic assertion. His novel reflects on human reality yet
simultaneously renders an account of its own fallible procedures and
the intrinsic limitations of literary representation. Ulrich and Musil
plead together for a »phantastische Genauigkeit« of vision that holds to
the facts: of life, of representation. It is a vision that rewrites reality as
readily and as imaginatively as Hamlet and Polonius reaccomodate
their similes for a shifting cloud. It is a plea for a Utopian flexibility of
mind that will be the subject of this study's final chapter.

93
CHAPTER IV

THE LAMENTATION OF JOSEF K.:

Conscience and Irony in Kafka's Prozeß

Alle Illusion ist zur Wahrheit so wesentlich, wie der

Körper der Seele. - Irrtum ist das notwendige In-
strument der Wahrheit. - Mit dem Irrtum mache
ich Wahrheit.
Novalis

Wenn man sich nicht bemüht, das Unaussprechliche

auszusprechen, so geht nichts verloren. Sondern das
Unaussprechliche ist - unaussprechlich - in dem
Ausgesprochenen enthalten!
Wittgenstein1

In one way or another, students of literature generally take the poetic

word to be a crucially significant way of knowing the world. Biblical
narrative, classical myth, and the whole canon of premodern literary
monuments all testify to the mutuality and interpenetration of the poet-
ic and the real, especially for the pre-scientific era. Yet the overall trend
of modern thought, and in particular the rise of empirical rationalism,
has eroded the bond that once united poetry and reality. The tragic
grandeur of an Achilles or the moral anguish of an Abraham have been
made to release their grip on the real. Once it has been reduced to
>myth< and >fiction< - both popular synonyms for >falsehood< - lit-
erature becomes suspect as a path to knowledge. This path is the one
followed by Don Quixote. His remote descendant, Josef K., is its in-
heritor.
It is Cervantes' Don Quixote, suggests Michel Foucault, that »is the
first work of modern literature because in it we see the cruel reason of

1
Novalis, Fragmente /, Vol. 2 of Werke/Briefe/Dokumente, hrsg. v. Ewald
Wasmuth (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1957), p. 68, No. 208. Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Briefe, hrsg. v. Β. F. McGuinness und G. Η. von Wright
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 78. In this letter of April 9, 1917, Witt-
genstein is commenting to Paul Englemann on Uhland's poem »Graf Eber-
hards Weißdorn.«

94
identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes;
because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters
into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear in its separated
state, only as literature.. ,«.2 The Knight of La Mancha knows the
world as it appears in tales of romance and adventure. He takes up
these fictions into his life and imposes them upon the world he inhab-
its. In seeking to preserve the identities and similitudes that join ro-
mance to reality he conceals from himself the true differences between
them. The signs and figures that appear in his books no longer - or
never did - correspond to any lived experience or any life outside of
literature.
Cervantic irony delineates clearly between the imaginary and the
real. The imaginary world is that of chivalric romance as reflected in
the unhinged mind of the book-bound hidalgo. The real world is that of
brute actuality and is reflected especially in the figure of Sancho Panza.
Sancho's earth-bound literalness offers to the novel's reader a perspec-
tive from which to judge the fantasies of Don Quixote's confused imag-
ination. We see with Sancho the difference between a barber's basin
and a knight's helmet, between a Spanish windmill and an evil giant.
Broch's Vergil, Musil's Ulrich, and Mann's Zeitblom each perform a
similar service. Ulrich and Vergil have minds that are powerful enough
to penetrate and critique the fictions and fantasies that confine the
feeble imaginations of their contemporaries. These two protagonists are
empowered of a profoundly ethical vision that rises to the necessity of
discriminating between destructive illusions and authentic human real-
ity. As readers we are permitted to join them in their detached per-
spective and so enjoy the privilege of knowing what is real and what is
not. Similarly, Zeitblom plays a Sancho to Leverkühn's demonic Quix-
ote. With Zeitblom we follow Leverkühn's descent into madness and
destruction. Mann, Musil, and Broch offer an ironic perspective im-
manent to the novel, which maintains for the reader a sense of equi-
librium between the real and the imaginary. But the irony of Kafka's
narrative world is more frightening than the Cervantic irony of his
contemporaries, and his subversion of reality is more complete. His
readers must descend with the protagonist into a realm in which mad-
ness and sanity seem indistinguishable.

2
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Scien-
ces (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 48. Cf. Hegel: » U n s gilt die Kunst
nicht mehr als die höchste Weise, in welcher die Wahrheit sich Existenz
verschafft« WW, 10,1, p. 134.

95
 In Kafka, the reader's point of view and the protagonist's imagina-
tion converge in a shared quixotic illusion turned nightmare. There is
no Sancho Panza here, which is to say that there is no point of view
uncontaminated by the delusions that arrest the imagination of the
protagonist. In Josef K.'s world, fiction and reality are made of the same
stuff. Kafka has done away with the distinction between fiction - the
world of the court - and reality - Josef K.'s quotidian life - and has
welded the two into a sinister unity. Reading Der Prozeß is like viewing
the Spanish plains from the inside of Don Quixote's mind. The Ar-
chimedean point of Sancho Panza and his commentary has disap-
peared. With no firm and incontrovertible sense of what is real, the
reader loses his footing in the traditional grounding of interpretation
and is as baffled in his confrontation with the novel as Josef K. is in his
confrontation with the court.
This chapter reads Der Prozeß in a way that attempts to trace the
fusion of fiction and reality to its double origin in conscience and lan-
guage: in conscience because the confrontation between Josef K. and
the court is a function of the unspoken presence of the consciousness of
guilt; and in language because Josef K., his personal consciousness, and
his whole world are nothing but words, text, ink printed on a page.
The theme of conscience and consciousness pivots on K.'s repeated
attempts to interpret the court so as to grasp >the law< that governs its
machinations. He searches frantically for a pattern in the scrambled
features that make up the surface of the court. He expects that external
design will reveal to him an orderly internal structure that lies beneath
its visible exterior. K. seeks the law within the court that determines its
external appearances. To discover this law would make him the master
of the situation and restore to him the sense of reality that was de-
stroyed when the court disrupted the tidiness of his normal life. He
continually tries to interpret the signs that outwardly constitute the
court, but he always fails to discover the law behind them because he
himself - his own conscience - is the authority. The law is not some
autonomously existing list of statutes but is instead an integral part of
his own being for which he must assume responsibility. K. dies in
shame because he is a weakling who persists in concealing from himself
this truth.
The theme of language, or more precisely: of fictionality and narra-
tivity, qualifies the purport of the novel in a significant way. K., and
with him the novel's reader, never escape the feeling that the court is a
monstrous fiction. The world has become unknowable. Its appearances
are fiction because they lead to no >deeper< meaning. K. dies like a dog
because in his confrontation with the court, with his own guilt, he

96
discovers no truth, no reality, and no order that can endow his life and
death with dignity and worth. Literary expression has traditionally been
a way of knowing the world and revealing the truth, but if the world
has become unknowable - as K.'s experience seems to illustrate - then a
shadow falls across the link between the poetic word and true life, and
narrative fiction loses its grounding in the traditional values and beliefs
that have formed the bedrock underlying the appearances of reality and
their representation in prose. Kafka's prose despairs of >knowing the
world< in terms of representation and so steps back to a metalevel in
order to interrogate the relationship between narrative fiction and
represented reality. His novel shifts its vision away from the world as
such and refocuses on the autotelic dimension of storytelling, which I
will call narrativity.
The beginning point of the present commentary on The Trial is Kaf-
ka's attitude toward the narrativity of writing, the specific place of his
novel within the context of this poetics of narrative, and finally the
prose realization of his ideas as manifested in a strategy of duplicity in a
novel whose signs and similitudes are clear but where meanings seem
to hang suspended in a void of undecidability.

There is a trend in the recent critical reception of Kafka to situate his

work in the context of the wide-spread linguistic skepticism at the be-
ginning of this century. 3 Of particular interest is the work of Walter
3
Beda Allemann, »Wahrheit und Dichtung,« in Weltgespräch 7, 2. Folge, hrsg.
v. der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Weltgespräch Wien-Freiburg (Wien, Freiburg:
Herder, 1969), pp. 32-45; Stanley Corngold, The Commentator's Despair. The
Interpretation of Kafka's »Metamorphosis« (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenni-
kat Press, 1973); Hans Reiss, »Franz Kafka,« in his The Writer's Task from
Nietzsche to Brecht (London: MacMillan, 1978); Walter Sokel, »Kafka's Poe-
tics of the Inner Self,« Modem Austrian Literature, 11 (1978), 37-58, and
»Language and Truth in the Two Worlds of Franz Kafka,« German Quarterly,
52 (1979), 364-84. Cited as Sokel, »Poetics,« and as Sokel, »Language and
Truth.« The secondary literature that specifically addresses itself to Kafka's
PrQzeß is as varied as it is extensive, but happily two recent and reliable
Forschungsberichte are available. Peter Beicken (1974) offers a useful over-
view and brief critique of the various trends of criticism and interpretation
that have developed around the novel. His account is concise, well organized
and annotated, and relatively unbiased in its critical judgment. Theo Elm
(1979) offers a review of the literature that is overtly guided by a concept he
wishes to promote, namely a >hermeneutical approach.< The present study is
in line with Elm's general propositions: the identification of K. with the read-
er in the >process< of trying to understand the text/court (426-32); and the
ethical claims of the novel (432-35). It goes beyond Elm and other similar

97
Sokel, who has shown that a gradual shift took place in K a f k a ' s nar-
rative »poetics.« In his early phase, K a f k a was optimistic about the
possibility o f achieving in narrative prose a unity between word and
world. M a n y passages from his diary and letters bear witness to this
ideal as well as to his frustrated attempts toward realizing it in actual
practice. Sokel shows that as K a f k a ' s writing experience progressed he
lost faith in the possibility o f isomorphy between the poetic expression
and the o b j e c t of its representation. K a f k a began to see the poetic ut-
terance itself - the word as m i m e t i c representation - as an obstacle
blocking the path of truth. T h e figurality of language and literature
guarantees that the thing represented is always absent, deferred into
oblivion by the figure that replaces it. 4 T h e question of how or whether
literature is possible at all is implicit in this skepticism.

Toward the beginning of his activity as a writer, K a f k a believed that

in states of inspiration or even clairvoyance he was able to pour forth
his inner self into a prose form that fittingly embodied it (T, 38f.). 5 In
his diary he writes of the »großes Verlangen, meinen ganz bangen Zu-
stand ganz aus mir herauszuschreiben und ebenso wie er aus der T i e f e
k o m m t , in die T i e f e des Papiers hinein, oder es so niederzuschreiben,
daß ich das G e s c h r i e b e n e vollständig in m i c h einbeziehen k ö n n t e « (T,
117). It is important to note here that K a f k a brackets the empirical
world out of consideration and is instead interested in representing his
own mental and spiritual experience, the » i n n e r life.« 6 His problem is
still one o f mimesis, but not in the term's most traditional sense.
studies inasmuch as it tries to identify the hermeneutical function of the
novel and narrative in general. Peter U. Beicken, Franz Kafka. Eine kritische
Einführung in die Forschung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Athenäum, 1974),
273-86; Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden, hrsg. ν. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart:
Kröner, 1979), Bd. II, 420-41.
4 See Sokel, »Poetics.«
5 Kafka's writings are cited parenthetically within the text of this chapter. »T«

designates the Tagebücher 1910-1923, hrsg. v. Max Brod (Frankfurt a.M.:

Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980); »H« designates the Hochzeitsvorbereitun-
gen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, hrsg. v. Max Brod
(Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980); »SE« designates the
Sämtliche Erzählungen, hrsg. v. Paul Raabe (Hamburg: S. Fischer, 1970); and
page numbers without a letter refer to Der Prozeß. Roman, hrsg. v. Max Brod
(Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980).
6 Friedrich Beißner's influential views have raised to the level of a truism the

notion that Kafka's basic aim was always to give form to his inner life: Der
Erzähler Franz Kafka (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1952); Der Schacht von Babel.
Aus Kafkas Tagebüchern (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963); Kafka der Dichter
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958); Kafkas Darstellung des »traumhaften inneren
Lebens« (Bebenhausen: L. Rotsch, 1972). Sokel's article does not mention
Beißner, but it nevertheless implies an important revision of what has be-
come something of a critical dogma. Sokel himself in his earlier book Franz

98
 In Kafka's version of mimesis the object of representation is not an
empirical thing or event. It is instead what he described as the »unge-
heure Welt« in his own mind (T, 192). Kafka's narrative addresses this
inner life and in so doing denies its accustomed obligation to the things
of the real world. In daily usage, language names things and orders the
material world, but its semantics are at no point adequate to denomi-
nate and make systematic the individuality and non-material condition
of the inner life. In order to conjure this ghostly realm into visibility,
Kafka adopts a narrative strategy of figurality. Since Kafka's ideal
during this phase was perfect continuity between his inner world and
its external representation, his narrative strategy is best described as
»symbolic.«
Kafka judged the short narrative Das Urteil to be his most successful
attempt at rendering his inner life into an intelligible form. He com-
posed it in a single, inspired sitting throughout the night of 22-23 Sep-
tember in 1912. »Nur so kann geschrieben werden,« he wrote in his
diary with enthusiasm and satisfaction, »nur in einem solchen Zusam-
menhang, mit solcher vollständigen Öffnung des Leibes und der Seele«
(T, 184). Yet he was not able to repeat his success. Aside from the
various external circumstances that hindered his productivity - i.e. the
opposition of his parents, the demands of his job, wretchedly unhappy
romances, and his perpetual self-doubts - Kafka came to believe that
language itself is an intrinsically flawed medium and unequal to the
task he had assigned to it. The symbolic or allusive representation of
truth in words becomes not only practically but also theoretically im-
possible.
The signs and figures of fiction emerged for Kafka into what Fou-
cault called the »lonely sovereignty« of literature. The bond of
representation between narrative expression and lived reality had dis-
solved. A late diary passage, from 6 December 1921, reveals the specific
character of Kafka's changed attitude toward the once hoped-for unity
between narrative figure and represented object:
Aus einem Brief: >Ich wärme mich daran in diesem traurigen Winter.< Die
Metaphern sind eines in dem vielen, was mich am Schreiben verzweifeln
läßt. Die Unselbständigkeit des Schreibens, die Abhängigkeit von dem
Dienstmädchen, das einheizt, von der Katze, die sich am Ofen wärmt, selbst
vom armen alten Menschen, der sich wärmt. Alles dies sind selbständige,

Kafka - Tragik und Ironie. Zur Struktur seiner Kunst (München, Wien: A.
Langen, G. Müller, 1964) had supported a similar hypothesis. On page 9 he
postulates that this representation of the inner life is one of three fundamen-
tal principles in Kafka's writing. His article on Kafka's narrative poetics is
thus a re-evaluation of the artist's ideas and intentions, and their limitations.

99
 eigengesetzliche Verrichtungen, nur das Schreiben ist hilflos, wohnt nicht in
sich selbst, ist Spaß und Verzweiflung. (T, 343)

It is here that Kafka comes nearest to Hofmannsthal's famous Chandos

Letter. They share the notion that language gives no access to the im-
mediacy, the fullness, and the deep silence of true being. By 1921 Kaf-
ka's confidence in the unity of narrative and narrated object had bro-
ken down. He no longer saw figurality as the vehicle of transcendence
but instead as an ineluctably crippling debility that reduces literary
expression to Spaß and Verzweiflung.
It is easy enough to see why the novelist regarded writing as the cause
of despair. Since poetic utterance is necessarily imprisoned in its own
figurality it can never assimilate to the true being of that which it
wishes to represent. Its mimetic claim becomes the desperate pursuit of
a hopelessly elusive object. Yet while the origin of Kafka's despair is
self-evident, it comes as a surprise that he couples it with »fun.« This
unlikely combination demands clarification. The unexpected presence
of fun alongside despair is perhaps reminiscent of the surprise many
readers have experienced in learning that Kafka broke down in laugh-
ter while reading aloud to friends from Der Prozeß,7 Evidently the de-
spair presented in that novel was also bound up with some kind of fun
for Kafka.
His despair over the impotence of the written word, his fun with it,
and his amusement at Der Prozeß are interrelated. The cause of his
despair - the failure of representation to be a reliable double for or
index to the truth - opens up to him the opportunity of having fun by
playing ironic games with the figural status of fictional discourse, its
narrativity. These ironic games will be elucidated at the example of Der
Prozeß in the following section of this chapter. But before turning to
the fun and despair in that novel, it is" necessary to make clear some
ground rules of irony that are at work in Kafka's game.
In a late diary passage, in fact in its very last entry, Kafka touches
once again on his »Spaß und Verzweiflung,« only now despair is very
much in the foreground and fun appears in its formal aspect, as irony.
Immer ängstlicher im Niederschreiben. Es ist begreiflich. Jedes Wort, gewen-
det in der Hand der Geister - dieser Schwung der Hand ist ihre charakteri-

7
Max Brod reports that while reading the first chapter aloud to friends, Kafka
was so tickled that he could not even continue reading for a while. Franz
Kafka. Eine Biographie, 3. erw. Aufl. (Berlin, Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer,
1954), p. 217. On Kafka's sense of humor see Gerhard Neumann's comments
and helpful bibliography in »Umkehrung und Ablenkung: Franz Kafkas
>Gleitendes Paradox,«< DVjs, 42 (1968), 740-44.

100
 stische Bewegung - , wird zum Spieß, gekehrt gegen den Sprecher. Eine Be-
merkung wie diese ganz besonders. Und so ins Unendliche. Der Trost wäre
nur: es geschieht, ob du willst oder nicht. Und was du willst, hilft nur un-
merklich wenig. Mehr als Trost ist: auch du hast Waffen. (T, 365)

This final Statement is an especially powerful avowal of Kafka's retreat

from his earlier confidence in the possibility of accurate representation
in literature. He now characterizes words as treacherous deceivers that
turn against the hand that creates them. The »Spirits« guide the stroke
of this hand - Kafka's own as it makes the diary entry - and the words,
which not he but these anonymous Spirits command, rebel against him.
The poetic word does not have the power of the symbol, namely to join
together in a unitary whole the »monstrously uncanny« world inside
Kafka's head with its literary representation. Yet he takes consolation
from a certain thought: »You too have weapons.«
If the unity to which he aspired was not possible, why did Kafka
continue to write? If truth has receded from the grasp of language, then
what is the good of writing, for instance, that truth is inaccessible (»Eine
Bemerkung wie diese ganz besonders«)? Kafka's ironic formulation is
an implicit answer to the question it raises. This response to the crisis of
representation becomes explicit in the words of the philosophical
hound of the late narrative Forschungen eines Hundes. In regard to the
possible results of his investigations he postulates: »Und es zeigt sich
dabei nicht die Wahrheit - niemals wird man so weit kommen - , aber
doch etwas von der tiefen Verwirrung der Lüge« (SE, 386). A lie is the
specifically linguistic form of untruth and as such is the writer's most
formidable obstacle in the pursuit of knowledge in and through litera-
ture. No longer does Kafka seek to embody truth symbolically in nar-
rative. His new strategy is to undo the lies and deceptions of language
and narrative by turning words ironically against themselves. In this
way narrative points not toward some absolute meaning but toward
itself as the purveyor of Spaß and Verzweiflung,8 Narrative is not an
open door to the truth, and words are not transparent. They have in-
stead turned out to be opaque objects in the world among its other
opaque objects.

8
In a similar vein Theo Elm suggests that Kafka puts an end to the Enlighten-
ment metaphysics of signification by turning its favored form of expression,
the parable, against itself. This thesis, similar to mine here, is that Kafka's
short prose does not figuratively refer to a >transcendental< meaning but in-
stead enacts the inaccessibility of such meaning. Theo Elm, »Problematisierte
Hermeneutik. Zur >Uneigentlichkeit< in Kafkas kleiner Prosa,« DVjs, 50
(1976), esp. 495, 479f„ and 498.

101
 Before opening up a discussion of Kafka's ironic duplicity in Der
Prozeß, it will be worthwhile to consider briefly certain relevant fea-
tures of Kafkan prose. The economy of his unpretentious style testifies
to Kafka's distaste for confectionery affectation in narrative. This lu-
cidity of form stands in contradiction to the level of >meaning< in his
stories. The contradiction is Kafka's self-conscious tactic. The opaque
surfaces of Kafkan narrative serve to make visible the disparity be-
tween verbal signs and the things they seem to represent. 9 They do so by
calling attention to signs themselves as material things. The seductive
intelligibility and simplicity of Kafka's language, the uncomplicated
common sense of his diction and syntax, and the seeming ingenuous-
ness of his narrative structure appear to hold the promise of an equally
rational and well ordered fictional world. Kafka intentionally and re-
lentlessly thwarts this expectation. The remarkably unsettling effect of
his storytelling is due in large part to this unexpected rift between the
unambiguous coherence of his language and the uncanny ambiguity of
the narrative whole.
The purport of his language would seem to overlap with that of the
realist tradition. Kafka's meticulous attention to accuracy of detail and
his admiration for prose that is evocative of lived reality testify to a
certain shared intention between Kafka and his nineteenth-century pre-
cursors such as Dickens and Flaubert. Yet beyond the obvious dif-
ference in Kafka's subject matter as opposed to that of the realists,
there remains a distinction that is not often enough observed. Realist
prose offers an illusion that is >true to life< because its language appears

9
In this regard see Roman Jakobson, who postulates a »poetic mode« of lan-
guage that he characterizes as the point in linguistic discourse at which the
referential function is de-emphasized so as to »focus on the message for its
own sake.« »Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art, but only its
dominant determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts
as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the pal-
pability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.«
Roman Jakobson, »Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,« in Style in
Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), p.
356. Cf. also Tvetan Todorov: »La seule qualite commune ä toutes les figures
rhetoriques est . . . leur opacite, c'est-ä-dire leur tendance ä nous faire perce-
voir le discours lui-meme et non seulement sa signification. Le langage figure
est un langage qui tend vers l'opacite ou, en bref, un langage opaque. Mais
alors une contradiction semble se dessiner: d'une part, la function du langage
figure est de rendre present le discours lui-meme; de l'autre, nous savons que
le langage litteraire est destine ä nous rendre presents les choses decrites et
non le discours lui-meme. Comment se fait-il alors que le langage figure soit
le materiau prefere de la poesie?« Litterature et Signification (Paris: La-
rousse, 1967), pp. 116f.

102
to be bound intrinsically to the places, events, and things of the real
world. It is writing that seems to be at one with that which it represents.
Kafka's style exploits the conventional illusionism that is so firmly en-
trenched in the reading habits of the realist novel's popular audience.
He turns this convention against itself by using the language of the real
to invent an impossibly irreal world. In this way Kafka parodies the
representational conventions of realism. 1 0
Realist prose, grounded in the habitudes of daily and c o m m u n a l
speech, disguises itself as the language of reference, as an accurate
representation of some plausible state of affairs in the real world. T h e
ideal writer of realist prose is confident in the power of language to
mirror the truth of things. He feigns objectivity by effacing the traces
of artifice that go into the making of fiction. For him to expose the
narrative as a product of contrivance would imply its fallibility and
subvert its claim to be a responsible instrument of knowledge. This
claim to knowledge is, in t u r n , the idea that literary mimesis is an
isomorphic doubling of the world into words. At bottom, the mimetic
project to limn external reality and the earlier K a f k a n project to give
narrative f o r m to t h e world inside his head d o not differ f u n d a m e n -
tally. E a c h u n d e r t a k i n g is mimeticin the t e r m ' s popularyl conceivedsense
inasmuch as each attempts to represent in narrative an independently
existing, extralinguistic reality. In one case it is external reality, and in
the other case it is inward reality. Despite important differences, the
two aims coincide at a deep level of representational strategy where
they are rooted in the c o m m o n ground of »symbolic« expression, if we
understand symbolic as the notion that poetic word a n d represented
world - no matter whether i n n e r or outer - can and do fuse together in
unity and coherence. T h e extraordinary inwardness of Kafka's prose is

10
Kafka's tactic in prose is similar to that of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poetry.
When Carroll writes: >Twas bryllyg, and the slythy toves / Did gyre and gimble
in the wabe:/ All mimsy were the borogroves;/ A n d the morae raths outgrabe. <
his reader is surprised and amused at how little and how much sense the
stanza simultaneously generates. The words, sustained semantically by the
framework of the well-known English ballad tradition, resonate with fami-
liarity yet remain lexically out of reach. The familiarity of the ballad form
itself - its characteristic diction, cadences, rhyme, and substance - awakens a
set of expectations that the reader contributes to the poem's >meaning.< Kaf-
ka's prose more subtly relies on corresponding subliminal expectations from
the novel tradition: conventions of characterization, personal psychology,
plot development, and cause-and-effect relations all belong to the expecta-
tions that we are liable to impose on a novel being read. Cf. Eugenio Coseriu,
Textlinguistik. Eine Einführung, hrsg. ν. Jörn Albrecht, Tübinger Beiträge
zur Linguistik, 109 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1980), on Kafka pp. 128-32.

103
certainly a hallmark of his style and of modernism in general, but its
prominence should not be allowed to obscure his shift from mimetic
figurality to ironic self-reflexivity. A growing linguistic skepticism un-
dermined his confidence in the possiblity of accurate narrative
representation to such an extent that his former ideal became not only
practically but also theoretically impossible.
Kafka's revised concept of narrative abandons the possibility of the
flesh becoming word and takes up a mode of irony that exposes the
artifice and fallibility of storytelling. He seizes the language of realism
and turns it against itself. The fantastic irreality of his tales militates
against the apparent referentiality of the language by foregrounding
their condition of literariness, their narrativity. Kafka's aim is no long-
er to pour forth his inner self into symbolic signs and figures. He begins
instead to probe the disturbed relationship between reality and literary
expression, to show how the seemingly transparent language of realism
congeals into an impenetrably dense verbal surface that calls attention
to itself and shows itself in the true form of its separated state, as mere
literature, as »Spaß und Verzweiflung.«

II

Der Prozeß is an interesting case in point because it is a work from the

middle period of Kafka's writing and demarcates his turn toward self-
reflexive irony. He started composing the novel in August of 1914 and
eventually abandoned his efforts around the beginning of 1915. n As he
was beginning the project he expressed in a diary entry the fear that his
ability to represent his »dreamlike inner life« may have left him for-
ever (T, 262). This concern makes explicit his continued ambition to
pour forth into symbolic narrative an unmediated vision of his inner
self and thereby achieve a full unity of art and truth.
On the 18th of December, or about the time the novel was nearing its
inconclusive end, Kafka made a startling diary entry that is in effect a
recantation of his former ideal of representation. He recounts a con-

11
Binder judges that Kafka must have begun writing Der Prozeß in the second
week of August. He dates the termination of Kafka's efforts somewhere be-
tween late December and mid-January, 1915. He estimates that the final chap-
ter, K.'s death scene, must have been written in this same short span between
December and January. Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Kommentar zu den Roma-
nen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (München: Win-
kler, 1976), pp. 161, 182.

104
versation in which he assures Max Brod that he - Kafka - will be able
to lie on his deathbed with satisfaction:

Ich vergaß hinzuzufügen und habe es später mit Absicht unterlassen, daß das
Beste, was ich geschrieben habe, in dieser Fähigkeit, zufrieden sterben zu
können, seinen Grund hat. An allen diesen guten und stark überzeugenden
Stellen handelt es sich immer darum, daß jemand stirbt, daß es ihm sehr
schwer wird, daß darin für ihn ein Unrecht und wenigstens eine Härte liegt
und daß das für den Leser, wenigstens meiner Meinung nach, rührend wird.
Für mich aber, der ich glaube, auf dem Sterbebett zufrieden sein zu können,
sind solche Schilderungen im geheimen ein Spiel, ich freue mich ja in dem
Sterbenden zu sterben, nütze daher mit Berechnung die auf den Tod gesam-
melte Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers aus, bin bei viel klarerem Verstände als er,
von dem ich annehme, daß er auf dem Sterbebett klagen wird, und meine
Klage ist daher möglichst vollkommen, bricht auch nicht etwa plötzlich ab
wie wirkliche Klage, sondern verläuft schön und rein. Es ist so, wie ich der
Mutter gegenüber immer über Leiden mich beklag[t]e, die bei weitem nicht so
groß waren, wie die Klage glauben ließ. Gegenüber der Mutter brauchte ich
allerdings nicht so viel Kunstaufwand wie gegenüber dem Leser. (T, 279)

Sokel has also singled out this passage as evidence for Kafka's changed
attitude toward writing. 12 N o longer does Kafka see the strength of his
narrative in terms of filling every word with himself (T, 24f) or of
giving to his »dreamlike inner life« its commensurate literary form.
His writing has now become an exercise in controlled duplicity. This
crucial shift has occurred precisely during the period in which he was
composing Der Prozeß. Even though this passage makes no mention of
the novel, one of the death scenes to which he refers must be that of
Josef K.

12
»Such artful deceit and clever contriving for aesthetic effect, while attesting
to Kafka's subtle mastery of the art of fiction, glaringly contradict his ideal of
the writer's absolute faithfulness to and unity with the feeling permeating his
work and embodied in his character. The bifurcation of perspectives of au-
thor and character, and thus of author and reader gives the lie to the presence
of the writer's >truth< in his text.« Sokel, »Poetics,« p. 52. For a related view
see Peter Beicken, »Berechnung und Kunstaufwand in Kafka's Erzählrheto-
rik« in Franz Kafka, Eine Aufsatzsammlung nach einem Symposium in Phi-
ladelphia, hrsg. u. eingel. v. Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr, Schriftenreihe Agora,
29 (Berlin, Darmstadt: Agora, 1978), 216-34; and »Kafka's Narrative Rheto-
ric,« Journal of Modern Literature, 6 (1977), 398-409. Beicken's reading of
this passage is in my estimation off the mark because he applies it to both late
and early works. Horst Turk's Lacanian reading of Der Prozeß also limits its
findings by regarding the novel too much in terms of Kafka's personal sub-
jectivity. See H.T., »>betrügen . . . ohne Betrugt Das Problem der literari-
schen Legitimation am Beispiel Kafkas,« in Urszenen, Literaturwissenschaft
als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, hrsg. von Friedrich A. Kittler u. Horst
Turk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 381-407.

105
 On the 6th of August Kafka doubted his ability to achieve the
yearned-for symbolic unity in the work ahead of him; on the 19th of
December, toward the end of his frustrated work on the novel frag-
ment, he claims to find his fullest literary satisfaction not in perfect
oneness but in cunning duplicity. He exploits »mit Berechnung« his
readers' habit of projecting themselves into the protagonist. This deceit
is for him »im geheimen ein Spiel.« This calculated playfulness recalls
the »fun« in his »despair.« But the game he is playing is not trivial. A
stray aphorism helps to understand precisely the character of Kafka's
interest in duplicity:
Geständnis und Lüge ist das Gleiche. Um gestehen zu können, lügt man. Das,
was man ist, kann man nicht ausdrücken, denn dieses ist man eben; mitteilen
kann man nur das, was man nicht ist, also die Lüge. (Η, 249) 13

Kafka develops this dialectic of Geständnis and Lüge in the structure

of DerProzeß. He embeds into the novel a series of »mirrors,« as it were,
that reflect the fictional status of the narrative. These self-reflexive,
metafictional devices are the playful vehicle of Geständnis because they
confess to the reader that the novel's signs, figures, and images are mere
fictions - Lüge. These mirrors of narrativity are representations -
paintings, descriptions, scenarios and, especially, the prison chaplain's
parable of the law - that Kafka nests into the text of the novel, which is
itself a representation. K.'s confrontation with the court is identical
with his attempt to decipher these representations. He takes them to be
manifestations of the court's inner law and assumes that these surface
features are continuous with the truth that lies beneath and beyond
them. He always fails because the law always eludes the categories he
tries to impose on it.
K.'s problem as a seeker of the law is analogous to Kafka's problem
as a writer and the reader's problem as an interpreter. 14 From all three
points of view, representation has become something that is autono-
mous. It has lost its traditional tie to the truth that it is supposed to
embody or re-present. Kafka's comments on the despair of writing, Jo-
sef K.'s experience with his court, and the reader's vain attempts to
wrest some kind of objective meaning from the novel all point toward

13
»Wahrheit ist unteilbar, kann sich also selbst nicht erkennen; wer sie erken-
nen will, muß Lüge sein« (H, p. 36, No. 80). »Kannst du denn etwas anderes
kennen als Betrug? Wird einmal der Betrug vernichtet, darfst du ja nicht
hinsehen oder wirst zur Salzsäule« (H. p. 40, No. 106; cf. also H. pp. 53, 69,
73).
14
For parallels between Κ. and the reader see esp. Theo Elm, »Der Prozeß,« pp.
426-32.

106
the aporia of literature as represented reality. The rift between narra-
tive representation and the putative object of representation means a
crisis of narrative art. Yet the failure of representation - or more pre-
cisely, the awareness of its inherent limitations - need not mean the
failure of art itself.
Kafka's disclosure of the rupture between truth and representation is
simultaneously the opening up of a space from which something else
can emerge. Narrative signals this event by means of a poetic articula-
tion. This articulation is neither a representation nor objectification of
that which it addresses. Instead it is something more along the order of
a gesture or a hint that intimates the presence of this emergent truth.
»Articulation,« »gesture,« and »hint« are not very felicitous designa-
tions for what happens, but they are probably no worse than Kafka's
own descriptions of the situation in his »Oktavheft« of 1917:

Die Sprache kann für alles außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt nur andeutungs-
weise, aber niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise gebraucht werden,
da sie, entsprechend der sinnlichen Welt, nur vom Besitz und seinen Bezie-
hungen handelt. (H, 34, No. 57)

The linguistic-philosophical context of this comment is a view of ordi-

nary language that authorizes a speaker to call the things of the empi-
rical world by their conventional names. The word »book« belongs
properly to its empirical signandum. It is a system of communication
geared to passing along facts and information. But there are no signs
that belong to that which is not part of the sensory world. Traditionally,
figural language has been called upon to render the spiritual half of
being. It is startling that Kafka rejects even this means: language can
never be used, not even approximately, in the manner of a metaphor or
simile - i.e. vergleichsweise - for whatever is not sensory. Yet the dis-
qualification of literal and figurative language does not entirely pre-
clude approaching the spiritual through the medium of language. Kaf-
ka suggests the obscure third possiblity of using language andeutungs-
weise, as hint, gesture, intimation, or articulation.
If Kafka is to be taken at his word, then his emphatic rejection of
figural representation as an adequate means for giving form to the
spiritual has important implications for the reading of his works. Sym-
bol and allegory, metaphor and metonymy suddenly collapse together
as representational strategies for naming the >other<; as tropes they all
function vergleichsweise in one way or another. Kafka is suggesting that
this >other< cannot be named or represented at all. The alternative that
he offers is Andeutung, a vague term that resists precise translation.
The sense of his proposition is that language can imply or indicate the

107
presence of a thing or event for which there exists no proper name and
no basis for linguistic comparison. In remaining true to this insight
Kafka honors the limits of representation. Poetic utterance becomes a
gesture, an articulation that encircles some unmapped territory of being
in order to reveal its presence only as a rent place in the fabric of
language and narrative. The embrace of poetic language does not vio-
late the integrity of the silence whose dark contours it presses against.
Kafka gives this thought its finest expression in Josef ine, die Sängerin
oder das Volk der Mäuse. The story's narrator discloses the heart of the
matter with this subtly profound query: »Ist es ihr Gesang, der uns so
entzückt oder nicht vielmehr die feierliche Stille, von der die schwache
Stimme umgeben ist?« (SE, 196).
The relation of song to silence, of narrative to >other< is similar in
Kafka's Prozeß. Its irony makes sport of the signs and similitudes that
seem to promise K. a way of grasping the law or defeating the court.
Yet the grotesquely comical despair of K.'s situation is fraught with the
gesture that articulates the novel's true purport: conscience. Conscience
is not a thing that can be represented, yet it emerges from the seeming
void that appears when representation and >objective truth< cleave and
drift apart.
In his study of Kafka, Heinz Politzer struck very near the distinction
between representation and articulation that I am trying to draw here.
He compares Kafka's reserved silence with Franz Werfel's promiscuous
metaphorizing. In a poem called »Schlaf und Erwachen« Werfel at-
tempts to represent the modern experience of fear and isolation. Polit-
zer points out that it is similar in its themes and tonalities to the general
tendencies of Kafka's work. Yet a decisive difference separates the two
artists. Werfel gives to this experience a name; he calls it a »Gottesfin-
sternis.« By Kafkan standards he has said too much. He has reduced an
ineffable enormity down to a manageable size, made it to seem less
terrible than it is, and offended precincts best treated in observance of
what Hofmannsthal once referred to as the »Anstand des Schwei-
gens.«15
Kafka, notes Politzer, »bildete diese Finsternis in Schweigen.«16 Kaf-
ka does not try to represent the unrepresentable. Rather than violate
the stillness of its presence he attempts to draw our attention to it by
means of subtle indirections. Politzer elaborates:
15
In his »Ad me ipsum.« Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze III
1925-1929, Buch der Freunde, Aufzeichnungen 1889-1929, hrsg. v. Bernd
Schoeller und Ingeborg Beyer-Ahlert in Beratung mit Rudolf Hirsch (Frank-
furt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), p. 601. Cited as Hofmannsthal.
16
Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka, der Künstler (w.p.: S. Fischer, 1965), p. 42. Wer-
fel's poem is quoted in full on p. 41 of Politzer's book. Cited as Politzer.

108
 In eindrucksvolle Bilder gebannt, entlädt sich diese Spannung zwischen dem
Einzelnen und dem All plötzlich, wobei dem Leser seine eigene Situation und
die des Menschen schlechthin blitzartig erhellt wird. So verraten diese Bilder
ein Unaussprechliches, ohne es doch ausszusprechen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
mag ähnliche Erfahrungen im Sinne gehabt haben, als er in seinem Tractalus
Logico-Phihsophiats anmerkte: »Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies
zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.« Wittgenstein selbst unterstrich das Wort
»zeigt,« wohl um seinen Lesern aufs nachdrücklichste vor Augen zu führen,
daß das Geheimnis erscheinen könne, ohne sich der Logik und Grammatik
zusammenhängender Sprechweisen unterwerfen zu müssen."

Politzer's point is well taken. It helps to elucidate what is at work in the

narrative of Der Prozeß. Kafka articulates the presence and power of
conscience as it pervades and suffuses the narrative from which it a-
rises. He provides it with a space in which it can show itself. 18
Der Prozeß defines with its irony the limits of the concept of
representation and at the same time articulates by a via negativa the
dimension of conscience.
The visible circumstances of Josef K.'s story is first of all the unex-
pected confrontation of two worlds. K. finds himself caught between
two apparently irreconcilable realities. The first is his workaday world,
with its regular banking hours, evenings at the usual Bierstube with the
usual fellows. The president of the bank in which K. is an officer thinks
highly of him, but there is also an ill-concealed hostility and competi-
tion between K. and his immediate superior. The local district attorney
is K.'s special friend and is representative of the class of people with
w h o m K. would like to be associated. He is a bachelor with no close
ladyfriend, but he does regularly - and apparently rather dispassion-
ately - satisfy his libidinal urges on weekly visits to a certain waitress he
knows. The upshot of these mundane details is that Josef K. comes
across as a sturdy up-and-coming young businessman, perhaps efficient
in professional life but with a personal life that is dull and stunted. He

" Politzer, 37.

18
On many other points I am at odds with Politzer. In his comparison of Kafka
with Werfel, Politzer goes on to suggest that the only insight Kafka was ever
able to establish was that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible: »Was er
dem Schweigen und der Finsternis, die um ihn wuchsen, entrang, war ledig-
lich die Einsicht, >daß das Unfaßbare unfaßbar ist, und das haben wir ge-
wußt<« (p. 42). I disagree with this orthodox reading of Kafka. In stressing the
nonobjective, ethical dimension of Der Prozeß, the present study is trying to
find a way out of the aporia that Kafka criticism has talked itself into. A
provocative study that is in this and other regards similar to mine, and which
appeared after I completed my manuscript is Susanne Kessler, Kafka - Poetik
der sinnlichen Welt. Strukturen sprachkritischen Erzählens, Germanistische
Abhandlungen, 53 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), esp. 53-126.

109
has n o b i n d i n g e m o t i o n a l ties to any m e n or w o m e n , a n d he professes
no religious convictions or intellectual c o m m i t m e n t s . His h u m d r u m
life lacks d e p t h yet he is for all a p p e a r a n c e s satisfied with himself be-
cause his e x t e r n a l circumstances, like his b e d r o o m , are »in g r o ß e r O r d -
n u n g « (10).
But o n t h e m o r n i n g of K.'s thirtieth b i r t h d a y he a w a k e n s to t h e
presence of s o m e t h i n g u n p r e c e d e n t e d a n d u n e x p e c t e d : » D i e K ö c h i n
d e r Frau G r u b a c h , seiner Z i m m e r v e r m i e t e r i n , die i h m j e d e n Tag gegen
acht U h r das F r ü h s t ü c k brachte, k a m diesmal nicht. Das w a r noch
n i e m a l s g e s c h e h e n « (7). In her place is a n u n k n o w n i n t r u d e r w h o in-
f o r m s h i m that he is u n d e r arrest. A n o t h e r reality, that of the inexpli-
cable court, has breached the orderly c o n t i n u i t y of K.'s everyday life.
T h e average reality of Josef K. is directed toward his material well-
being. It hinges on e a r n i n g money, getting a h e a d in business, k n o w i n g
t h e right people, a n d satisfying his need for c o m p a n i o n s h i p at its most
u n c o m p l i c a t e d a n d least r e w a r d i n g level. E v e r y t h i n g that h a p p e n s to
h i m in this world is f a m i l i a r a n d predictable. T h e new reality is u n f a -
miliar a n d unpredictable. It is t h e world of a court that, strangely, has
g o n e u n n o t i c e d d u r i n g all of the protagonist's thirty years.
O n e of K a f k a ' s best readers, Ingeborg H e n e l , has perceptively noted
that it is typical of K a f k a that t h e protagonist's c o u n t e r w o r l d - in this
case K.'s court - is to be u n d e r s t o o d as a p r o j e c t i o n of t h e protagonist
himself. 1 9 K.'s a w a k e n i n g , w h i c h coincides with t h e a p p e a r a n c e of t h e
court, m a r k s the b e g i n n n i n g of a conflict that reveals t h e u n s p o k e n
p r e s e n c e of conscience.
It is K a f k a ' s irony that g r o u n d s t h e possiblity for conscience to pre-
sent itself. A j o t t i n g f r o m G o e t h e ' s diary describes t h e technical situa-
tion with e x e m p l a r y lucidity:

Betrachtung über den Reflex von oben oder außen gegen das Untere und
Innere der Dichtkunst, ζ. E. die Götter im Homer nur ein Reflex der Helden;
so in den Religionen die anthropomorphistischen Reflexe auf unzählige Wei-
se. Doppelte Welt, die daraus e n t s t e h t . . . .20

Josef K. i n h a b i t s just such a d o u b l e world, a n d G o e t h e ' s observation

provides a way of o p e n i n g it up. G o e t h e o f f e r s two distinct m e c h a n i s m s
of r e f l e c t i o n : 1) f r o m a b o v e toward below, a n d 2) f r o m t h e outside

19
Ingeborg Henel, »Die Deutbarkeit von Kafkas Werken,« Zeitschrift für deut-
sche Philologie, 86 (1967), 256, 262. Cf. also Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka
(Bonn: Athenäum, 1958), pp. 264-65. Cited as Emrich.
20
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tagebücher /, Vol. 11 of his Schriften in 22
Bänden, II. Abt. (Schriften), hrsg. v. Gerhart Baumann (Stuttgart: Cotta, no
date), 858. Entry of November 16, 1808. Cf. Hofmannsthal, 614.

110
toward the inside. In Kafka's Prozeß both directions of reflection are
present. The court »above« reflects K. »below,« in the same way that
the Olympian gods reflect the Homeric heroes. Both the »above« and
the »below« occur within the given framework of the fictional world.
The second possibility is that of irony. It is the reflection of reality
outside of the fictional world on the inside of the narrative. Kafka
achieves this end by reflecting in his novel the narrativity of Josef K.'s
existence. Let me illustrate both of these modes of reflection in more
detail.
Within the framework of the fictional world K. and the court reflect
one another mutually. The court and the figures associated with it con-
stitute the ramified images of K. and his normal life. A simple example
for this phenomenon is the perniciously accomodating women of the
court, especially Leni. They reflect his thwarted desire for Fräulein
Bürstner. Taken together, the scenes and figures of the court comprise
an elaborate double for K.'s hopes, fears, desires, and bad conscience.
There are many signs that point toward the fundamental unity of K.
and court. After his »awakening« and arrest K. bites into a breakfast
apple that is so obvious an allusion as to border on parody. He has eaten
of the tree of knowledge and knows the difference between good and
evil. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, K. knows that he is
guilty, and he knows that the trial is his trial in a radical sense. Yet he
refuses to admit to himself that his own conce is the final authority in
his confrontation with the court.
A good deal of the novel is invested in unmasking the complexities
of K.'s self-deception. For instance, after the warders arrest him he
watches carefully to see if they will remember to make him take »the
bath« before his preliminary hearing. K. is secretly delighted when they
»forget« to do so (14). Of course K. has no way of knowing that any
ceremonial bath is part of official procedure, which means that if any
bath is actually prescribed by the court it is only because K. himself says
it is. Similarly, it is under the authority of K.'s accusation that the court
punishes Willem and Franz for petty offenses committed during K.'s
arrest. K.'s half-conscious desire to be revenged on them finds fulfill-
ment in the whipping scene in the storeroom of his bank. When Franz's
cries of pain and fear attract attention, K. offers to co-workers the com-
ically weak explanation that they should pay no attention because the
noise is only a dog »shrieking« in the courtyard: »es schreit nur ein
Hund auf dem Hof« (77). The >shrieking dog< image anticipates Block's
doglike groveling to Huld as well as the novel's final scene in which K.
will die »like a dog.« The return of this image serves to underscore the
ultimately shared identity of K.'s own will with the deeds of the court.

Ill
 There are other indications of this shared identity. When K. is lost
among the tenement staircases while looking for the court's assembling
place, he recalls »den Ausspruch des Wächters Willem, daß das Gericht
von der Schuld angezogen werde, woraus eigentlich folgte, daß das Un-
tersuchungszimmer an der Treppe liegen mußte, die K. zufällig wählte«
(35). And so it does. During his hearing he insists that the proceedings
against him exist only if he authorizes them: »es ist nur ein Verfahren,
wenn ich es als solches anerkenne« (39). Again he is right and proves it
by conscientiously and without prompting from the court always re-
turning to attend to his trial. His arrest hinders him in no way from his
daily activities and no hearings are forced on him. He returns again and
again because he wants to. The prison chaplain emphatically points out
to him that the court receives him only when he comes to it himself and
it leaves him alone when he chooses to ignore it. K. can no more ignore
the court than anyone else can ignore a bad conscience.
It has become a commonplace of Kafka criticism to note that the
protagonist's perspective determines the reader's perspective and that
the protagonist's subjectivity is at the center of the narrative's fictive
reality. 21 It has seemed to most critics that individual consciousness
dominates the shape of reality in Kafka's works, and there is surely a
good deal of truth to this view. On the other hand, what Goethe has
called the reflection of reality from the outside toward the inside of the
fiction also has a bearing on the matter that has not as yet been reck-
oned with. Kafka's narrative irony takes reality a step further than
consciousness. It reveals the stuff of which K., his alleged conscious-
ness, and the whole novel are made: narrative fiction. This point re-
turns us to the question of Kafka's controlled duplicity and to his ob-
lique »Geständnis« that all fiction is »Lüge,« a simultaneous exercise
in »Spaß und Verzweiflung.«
Kafka's confessional fun begins with K.'s arrest in his bedroom and
the subsequent hearing in Fräulein Bürstner's bedroom. While K. is
still waiting in his bed for breakfast, he notices that the old woman in
21
It was Beißner who originally delineated this phenomenon and dubbed it
»Einsinnigkeit.« Friedrich Beißner, Der Erzähler Franz Kafka (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1952), pp. 21 ff. It has subsequently been picked up, modified
and refined by various other critics. See esp. Martin Walser, Beschreibung
einer Form. Versuch über Franz Kafka (München: Hanser, 1961); Winfried
Kudszus, »Erzählperspektive und Erzählgeschehen in Kafkas Prozeß,« Deut-
sche Vierteljahrschrift 44 (1970), 306-317; Jörgen Kobs, Kafka. Untersuchun-
gen zu Bewußtsein und Sprache seiner Gestalten, hrsg. v. Ursula Brech (Bad
Homburg: Athenäum, 1970); for a critique see Peter U. Beicken, »Erzählwei-
se,« in the Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden, hrsg. v. Hartmut Binder, II
(Stuttgart: Kröner, 1979), 36-45.

112
the apartment across the street is watching him with unusual interest.
Before long she has pulled an old man to her side, and with the arrival
of a third, younger man, K. begins to feel himself the object of unwar-
ranted public attention. These voyeurs follow the action of the drama
unfolding in Frau Grubach's boarding house from K.'s room into the
living room and on into Fräulein Bürstner's bedroom. K. himself voices
the metaphor that the proceedings around him are a »Komödie« (10)
and that the »Zuschauer« (17) peeping at him through the windows
give to the scene an air of theatricality and to him a feeling of being put
on show, being placed to »Schaustellung« (12).22
The suspicion that Kafka possibly intends for this scenario to be
taken ironically, or at least that he does so himself, gains plausibility
during the hearing scene. The court has commandeered Fräulein Bürst-
ner's room in her absence for its own purposes. The »Aufseher« sits at
her nightstand, which he has moved into the center of the room. It is
supposed to represent a »Verhandlungstisch.« On its top are some mis-
cellaneous objects: a book, a pin cushion, and a candle with a box of
matches. As he interrogates K., the inspector is strangely absorbed in
arranging these objects on the tabletop. He sets the candle into the
center of the table and carefully groups the other objects around it. His
preoccupation with this private game is inexplicable both to K. and to
the novel's reader. But an eye for irony suggests a possible significance
for this apparently aimless fidgeting.
It is not a hearing that is being held, but the representation of a
hearing. The court is only a bedroom, and the tribunal table is only a
working girl's nightstand. Across the way an eager audience watches the
scene as if it were a theatrical performance. The top of the table repre-
sents the scene in miniature. The candle stands in the middle of the
table as K. stands in the middle of the room. Grouped around this
candle are various arbitrary objects, including a book. And when the
image of a book occurs in a book, ironies are likely to be at work.
Grouped around K. are three sets of individuals corresponding roughly
to the tabletop objects: the inspector seated at the nightstand (book),
the two warders seated on a trunk (match box), and three court lackies

22
This theater metaphor expands when later that evening K. re-enacts for Frl.
Bürstner, who has come home late because she was at the theater, the drama
that took place in her room. In the novel's final chapter, Κ complains that
the court has sent broken down old actors to fetch him. See esp. James Rol-
leston, Kafka's Narrative Theater (University Park and London: Pennsylva-
nia Univ. Press, 1974), 73ff.; and Henry Sussman »The Court as Text: Inver-
sion, Supplanting, and Derangement in Kafka's Der Prozeß,« PMLA, 92
(1977), 42-43.

113
standing in a corner like so many pins poking out of a cushion. The
inspector's deliberate but apparently arbitrary fiddling with indifferent
objects as if imaginary props on a makeshift stage suggests Kafka's own
fiddling with words and images on a blank sheet of paper. The presence
of the book among the objects strengthens this suggestion.
The >scene< on the nightstand is an oblique commentary to the scene
in the novel. The trifles on the tabletop, set into deliberate configura-
tion by the inspector, have no evident meaning for anyone other than
their manipulator. They are opaque objects on an imaginary field of
play and are primarily exactly and only what they are: a book, a pin
cushion, and a candle with matches. Any >deeper< meaning must come
as a supplement from the outside. The sense of this oblique com-
mentary is, then, not to let some immanent meaning shine through the
figures in the bedroom hearing scene but instead to reveal these would-
be symbols for what they are: word-objects that are as intrinsically
opaque as the assemblage of knick-knacks on Fräulein Bürstner's night-
stand. This tabletop doubling of the hearing scene does not interpret in
the ordinary sense of drawing forth a hidden meaning. Instead it ac-
counts for the specific nature of the scene's inexplicability.
Kafka is at pains to remind his readers that Josef K. lives out his fate
not in the real world but on the reflecting distorting surface of fiction's
mirror. The writer is having fun with his protagonist's fictional status
in a scene in which Josef K. unknowingly stumbles on the mystery of
his origin. One evening when he is working late at the office, K. hears
muffled sobs from behind a storeroom door. He investigates and dis-
covers his two warders, Willem and Franz, about to be beaten because
K. has accused them of stealing his breakfast and trying to pilfer his
underwear. This storeroom is the bank's repository for »unbrauchbare,
alte Drucksorten« and its floor is littered with »umgeworfene leere
irdene Tintenflaschen« - ink bottles and printed matter - exactly the
stuff of which K. and his whole unsettling world are made.
Josef K. seems here to be an avatar of Don Quixote, who near the
end of his chivalric adventures visits a printing shop in Barcelona
(Book II, Chapter 62). He watches the printers busily drawing and cor-
recting proofs, setting type, making revisions, and performing all of the
tasks that bring about the finished product of a book. »At such a mo-
ment,« remarks Robert Alter, »we can hardly forget that Don Quixote
is no more than a product of the processes he observes, a congeries of
words set up in type, run off as proof, corrected and rerun, bound in
pages and sold at so many reales a copy.« 23
23
Robert Alter, Partial Magic. The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 4-5.

114
 It is just such a moment when K. discovers his warders and their
Whipper among empty inkpots and uncorrected first impressions of old
forms. Fearful that Franz's moans will attract attention, K. slams the
storeroom door, makes excuses for the noise to his co-workers and goes
home to forget about the incident. But he cannot forget. On the next
night he works late again, and before leaving, a sense of uneasiness
prompts him to look again into the storeroom. To his horror he finds
that nothing has changed. The overturned inkpots, the old proofcopies,
the Whipper and the two naked warders are all exactly as he had left
them twenty-four hours before. K. slams the door in terror and runs to
two office boys, who - significantly - are running a copy machine. He
orders them to clean out the storeroom at the next possible opportunity.
Franz, Willem, and the Whipper are not heard from again in the novel.
Evidently, getting rid of the inkwells and old proofs has put an end to
them.
Kafka's skepticism about the ability of empirical words to recuperate
non-empirical realities overlaps with Josef K.'s problem. K. is seeking
the authority that governs the court. What I am calling »conscience« is
only a makeshift shorthand notation for that which Kafka attempts to
articulate in the novel. The truth of the matter is not to be sought in the
representations themselves but instead in the silence that enfolds them.
Josef K. attempts to read and interpret the surface features of the court
in the vain hope that these features are representations that are contin-
uous with the power from which they emanate, »the law.« Scene after
scene in this novel dramatizes the rift between signs and the truth they
are supposed to represent. It reveals the deceptive similitudes for what
they are, »Spaß und Verzweiflung.« Because it is a major theme in the
novel, it will be worthwhile to pursue its presentation in some detail.
The principal scenes that come into play here are: 1) K.'s >misreading<
of his first hearing, 2) his encounter with the judge's portrait in Huld's
study and Leni's commentary on it, 3) Huld's account of court proce-
dure, 4) Titorelli's portrait of Justice and his explanation of it, and 5)
the prison chaplain's parable »Vor dem Gesetz.«
K's first hearing before the investigative commission assigned to his
case marks the point in the novel at which K.'s hermeneutic quandary
becomes thematic. The setting of this scene provides an abundance of
precise, realistic detail that seems gravid with hidden meaning. These
tantalizing details provoke an interpretive response both in K. and in
the novel's reader. It is conspicuous, for instance, that the hearing is set
for a Sunday, that the court is somewhere in a lower-class district on the
city's edge in a tenement, that the entrance to the courtroom is reached
through the living room of a woman's apartment. K. knows neither the

115
time nor the precise location of the hearing, but they turn out to be
when and where he expects them. While looking for the proper room
he invents the silly excuse for poking around that he wants to find a
cabinetmaker named Lanz. When he asks a certain woman washing
clothes in her living room, she sends him through an open door into the
adjoining room, which turns out to be a hall in which many people are
gathered. K. assumes that he has mistakenly stumbled into some sort of
large meeting, returns to the living room and insists that he wants to
find the »Tischler Lanz.« The washer woman simply answers »Ja,«
sends him back in and shuts the door behind him. In this typically
Kafkan confusion the woman explains nothing to the mystified K., and
the narrator explains nothing to K.'s companion in puzzlement, the
reader. There is no solid ground upon which to base interpretation.
A little child leads the way for K., and as they move through the
crowd he notes that everybody is wearing black. K. also notes that the
people are evidently divided into two groups, »möglicherweise zwei
Parteien« (37). Κ. carefully takes note of the seating arrangements, of
variation in applause and murmurs in the crowd. On the basis of his
close reading of these signs he attempts to manipulate what appears to
him to be the internal dynamics of an ideological schism within the
court's organization. He rails against the injustice of his arrest and
against corruption within the court, thinking that one of the two ap-
parent parties will rally behind him. But to his great consternation »die
zwei Parteien, die früher so entgegengesetzte Meinungen gehabt zu ha-
ben schienen, vermischten sich . . . »(43). Confusion becomes chaos
when a loud squawking from the back of the room interrupts K.'s ora-
tion. The squawker is a man who is sexually molesting the woman from
the apartment. Uncontrolled erotic desire - a refracted image of K.'s
desire for Fräulein Bürstner - has irrupted into the scene and made a
shambles of the order that K. believed he had brought to his situation.
Strangely, this lurid interlude seems to be a matter of little concern to
the people assembled to hear Josef K.'s case, for no one moves to re-
strain the molester. Josef K. feels otherwise and is virtually overcome
by the need, »dort Ordnung zu schaffen« (44) and thus to restore his
command of the situation. But the people between K. and the molester
physically prevent him from interfering. In his tussle with the crowd on
the floor, K. suddenly notices that everyone present is wearing an in-
signia on his coat lapel concealed beneath his beard. He forgets about
the woman being abused in the back of the room as he angrily de-
nounces the court for having deceived him. K. feels as if he has been
tricked into addressing one of the two seeming parties, but in reality he
has yielded to his own interpretive impulse and made mistakes for

116
which he alone is accountable. He fails to recognize his responsibility
and in a gesture of anger and contempt he calls the members of the
court »Lumpen« and tells them that they can keep their interrogations
and hearings to themselves.
It is a telling circumstance that K. returns voluntarily to his trial
even though no messages come to him from the court after the first
hearing. He knows where his responsibility lies even if he will not
consciously admit it. On a Sunday he seeks out the woman and her
apartment once more, but when she lets him into the assembly hall K.
finds only a pile of books. Once again the image of the book appears. It
first comes up in Chapter I as the warder Willem sits reading a book by
an open window in Frau Grubach's living room; turns up conspicuous-
ly on Fräulein Bürstner's nightstand; and in Chapter VIII Kaufmann
Block kneels at a lightless window reading from the »Schriften« that
Huld has loaned to him. Fictional figures reading fictional books give
us reason to pause and think about where all this fictionalizing must
end. The pile of books that K. finds instead of the crowd of people he
had hoped to find is an effective bit of irony. Kafka has collapsed the
entire assembly down to a heap of books on a table. The novelist is at
work here, subtly making his role as artificer known. He has revealed
K.'s previous hearing, and for that matter the whole novel, as »Lüge.«
These books attract Kafka's curious puppet. He wants to examine
them more closely but the woman says it is not allowed because they
belong to the »Untersuchungsrichter.« As she and K. become friendly
the woman relents and takes him to the forbidden books. K. opens a
battered old volume to find a clumsy scene of erotic embrace depicted
in it. This book functions first of all to remind us that we, like Josef K.,
are holding a book in our hands, trying to interpret figures and images.
But the specific image in this book offers a commentary on the action
within the novel. When K. looks into the judge's book and sees a lewd
scene, what he really sees is the image of his own desire. The scene
between the squawking molester and the washer woman has turned up
in a book and turned out to be fiction. When K. reads the book and
when he >reads< the court he fails to understand that what he finds
reflected there is his own face. Doubling, the mutual reflection of two
seemingly distinct worlds, is the literary mechanism that defines the
unity of K. and his court.
This mechanism becomes functional again during K.'s visit to his
lawyer, Huld. At his uncle's insistence, K. has called on Huld to consult
about his trial. But while the uncle, Huld and an anonymous court
official discuss the case, K. slips out of the conversation in order to
pursue Leni, Huld's attractive young live-in nurse. She takes him into

117
the lawyer's study so that they can be alone together. Here a large por-
trait of an Untersuchungsrichter arrests K.'s attention. It portrays a man
in judge's garb seated on a gilded throne at the head of yellow-carpeted
stairs. This judge is not seated at rest but instead presses his left arm
against the chair's arm and back while gripping the chair's other arm
with his right hand, »als wolle er im nächsten Augenblick mit einer
heftigen und vielleicht empörten Wendung aufspringen, um etwas Ent-
scheidendes zu sagen oder gar das Urteil zu verkünden« (93-94).
Kafka's narrative ploy here is similar to that of the previous scene.
He has implanted a representation into his novel as a reflecting device.
This time it is a painting instead of a book. As in the previous instance,
K. takes it as a clue to the true nature of the court, a sign that will lead
his interpreting mind beyond the merely symbolic surface of the sign to
a deeper, hidden meaning. The narrative mode that renders K.'s obser-
vation of the painting deserves analysis. It begins with an objective,
declarative description of the painting - »Es stellte einen Mann in
Richtertalar dar . . . « - but soon shades over into the subjunctive of
K.'s subjective perception (»als wolle«), and ends with the purely sub-
jective speculation on K.'s part as to what the judge is about to do. This
subtle shift of perspective insinuates the mind of the reader into K.'s
mental set. Together, the reader and K. respond to a conditioned inter-
pretive impulse and try to establish a symbolic connection between
signum and res, representation and court authority.
K. and Leni enact this drama of interpretation. She claims to know
the judge personally and tells K. that this depiction bears little resem-
blance to the truth. He is not a high official at all, she says, and his
enthronement on an elevated dais is nothing more than a testament to
his vanity and to the artist's fancy: »>Das ist alles Erfindung/ sagte
Leni. . ., >in Wirklichkeit sitzt er auf einem Küchensessel, auf dem eine
alte Pferdedecke zusammengelegt ist< « (94). Leni's commentary seems
to settle the matter authoritatively in illustration of Foucault's thesis
that the cruel factuality of identities and differences has made a mock-
ery of the claim of signs and similitudes on truth.
But the situation is even more desperate than it appears at first
glance. If we press the logic of Kafka's presentation a little further,
Leni's commentary is only another representation of the court, a nar-
rative representation as badly in need of interpretation as is the paint-
ing. K. and the reader find themselves confronted with two mutually
exclusive versions of the judge and the court. Kafka has cunningly
withheld all first-hand knowledge of the court and its judges. There is
once again no solid foundation upon which to base interpretation. This
insight points toward the conclusion that undecidability itself is the

118
message.24 The stalemate conflict of interpretations implies the final
undecidability of the entire novel inasmuch as the text of the novel is
also an opaque surface composed of signs with no verifiable link to any
substantial reality beyond the representation itself. Yet there is more
truth at work here than the assertion that representation cannot grasp
the beyond.
The way to establish a sure footing on some hermeneutical terra
firma is to take into account Kafka's self-conscious narrative trickery.
He intentionally exploits the finely tuned exegetical attention of his
reader in scenes such as the one in Huld's study. This manipulation
proceeds according to the scheme that underlies his death scenes: »ich
. . .nütze.. .mit Berechnung die... gesammelte Aufmerksamkeit des Le-
sers aus, bin bei viel klarerem Verstände als e r . . . « . He asserts that
these scenes are for him »im geheimen ein Spiel« (Τ, 279), and it is
reasonable to infer that his intention in these death scenes applies to
other types of scene as well. K.'s encounter with the judge's portrait is a
case in point. The reader's general sympathy with K.'s plight, aided by
the subtle shift in perspective and unreflected habits of interpretation,
leads the reader to identify closely with K. The conspiracy of these
circumstances amounts to a hermeneutical trap. Kafka is inviting us to
repeat the mistake that K. has made, first in the assembly and then
again with the book, namely to construe surface features so as to reveal
depths of meaning concealed behind symbols. As long as we, with K.,
seek a transcendental signified beyond the signs, we are doomed to
hang suspended above an abyss of undecidability. When we realize
meaning is not beyond but present and apparent, mystification yields to
understanding. Put more simply, what K. sees when he looks at the
painting in Huld's study is the image of his own ambivalent conscious-
ness of guilt. The wrathful judge is poised above K. - permanently
poised - because K. himself is permanently on the verge of acknowl-
edging his guilt and passing judgment on himself, but is always too
weak to do so.25 The judge's awkward posture mirrors K.'s ungainly

24
Theo Elm has observed that this groping into emptiness must be made into a
tertium comparationis. »Problematasierte Hermeneutik,« 500f. The reader
must read this experience in such a way as to take the experience itself and
the process of interpretation as the object of interpretation.
25
1 speculate that K. is too weak to come to conscious terms with his guilt for
two reasons: 1) In his death scene, K. realizes that it is his duty to take the
knife and kill himself, »die Verantwortung für diesen letzten Fehler trug der,
der ihm den Rest der dazu nötigen Kraft versagt hatte« (194); and 2) a note
from the Oktavhefte lends credence to the supposition that weakness is his
failing: »Niemand kann sich mit der Erkenntnis des Guten und Bösen allein
begnügen, sondern muß sich bestreben, ihr gemäß zu handeln. Dazu aber ist

119
balancing act between the subliminal knowledge of his guilt and his
desire to be thought innocent. The judge cannot sit in dignified repose
because he knows, which is to say K. knows, that justice has not been
served. There is a guilty man at large. His regal trappings reflect K.'s
vision of the authority of the court, and Leni's version reflects K.'s
desire to demean what he perceives as a hostile, alien authority. Fur-
thermore, it is conspicuously K.'s own interpretation that the judge
looks as if he were about to utter something decisive or even pronounce
verdict. This judge, a double for K., is always only about to pass judg-
ment but can never carry through the deed. The painting has captured
him in a moment between repose and the completed act. The novel
captures K. in an identical moment.
K. remains blind to what is everywhere evident and continues to seek
aid in his attempt to unmask the foreign source of authority, or at least
to beat it at its own game. He turns to Huld for an account of the court's
inner workings, hoping for a glimmer of the objective reality beyond
appearances. Huld holds forth at great length on official and unofficial
court procedure, and the two defendants - K. and the reader - follow
his expatiations for several pages with attentive patience. The convo-
lutions and labyrinthine complexities of his explanation tantalize the
listener who clings fast to the hope that he will be able to seize hold of
some useful, verifiable piece of information as it floats by in this flood
of words. The gist of Huld's narrative is that the court is not responsive
to substantive written or verbal communication from the lawyer or his
client regarding pertinent evidence. Attorneys are not permitted to wit-
ness the proceedings, and they do not have access to court documents or
even to the official indictment. The written defense can therefore con-
tain relevant statements only by accident. When relevant points do ap-
pear in the attorney's argument they still cannot help the client because
the court disregards documents handed in by attorneys. The message to
be had in this understated burlesque is that the lawyer, like K.'s other
»helpers,« is completely useless.
The impossibility of an exchange of relevant information between
lawyer and court illustrates once again the futility of trying to penetrate
into the court's interior. Huld's account, like the painting in his study
and Leni's commentary to it, is only another representation of the
court. Once again the meticulous novelist permits no means to verify

ihm die Kraft nicht mitgegeben, er muß daher sich zerstören . . . . Lieber will
er die Erkenntnis des Guten und Bösen rückgängig machen . . . ; aber das
Geschehene kann nicht rückgängig gemacht, sondern nur getrübt werden«
(H, 37, No. 86). Κ. succumbs to precisely this weakness. Cf. also Kafka's letter
to Max Brod of November, 1917 (B, 194f.).

120
the accuracy of Huld's statements. The »Spaß« in this »Verzweiflung«
is that Huld's account disqualifies itself. He claims to his patient dupe
that he can help him, yet all the while everything that he says points to
his impotence. Huld's impotence is K.'s impotence. As long as he seeks
authorities outside himself he will remain mystified.
Another figure of seeming authority is the court's hereditary painter
and »Vertrauensmann,« Titorelli. He makes impressive claims to the
harried protagonist: »Ich allein hole Sie heraus,« and Κ. turns a willing
ear to his advice. Titorelli's long-winded explanation of the three meth-
ods of achieving acquittal is similar in its absurdity to Huld's de-
scription of court procedure. Once again the joke is on K. because
everything that Titorelli says points back to the inescapable conclusion
that the only way to be acquitted is to be innocent. Thus, no acquittal is
possible for K., »der Schuldige« (Τ, 299). His court is »attracted by
guilt«; it comes into being with guilt itself and will disappear only with
the extirpation of the guilty party. The best K. can hope for is to hold
his court at bay.
Rather than explicate Titorelli's account in detail, I want to turn
instead to the painting that K. finds in the artist's squalid attic studio. It
is a nearly finished judge-portrait similar to the one in Huld's study.
The canvas shows a fat man with a full beard who, like the other judge,
is braced to spring up out of his throne. This time K. notices a large but
indistinct figure in the middle of the chair's back. Adding a few strokes,
Titorelli explains that she is Justice and Victory blended into a single
figure. The court's apparent emblem does little to bolster K.'s confi-
dence in the fairness of this judicial system: »Die Gerechtigkeit muß
ruhen,« he objects, »sonst schwankt die Waage, und es ist kein gerech-
tes Urteil möglich« (126). Suddenly Κ. perceives her as the Goddess of
the Hunt.
As in the previous instances, the relationship of representation to
truth becomes the center of attention. K. asks Titorelli if he has copied
the emblem from the real throne. Like Leni, Titorelli answers, »Das ist
alles Erfindung« (126), and explains that this judge is a lowly official
who has never sat on a real throne. What is by now a familiar rift gapes
open between mimetic illusion and true reality. The painting shows it
one way, and Titorelli tells it another way. Neither the pictorial
representation nor the narrative account can be submitted to any ob-
jective verification because Kafka has withheld the >original< that these
are supposed to represent.
It might at first seem that the agreement between the two com-
mentaries of Leni and Titorelli lends a certain amount of credence to
their respective stories. But the meticulous Kafka has been careful to

121
undermine their credibility. Leni is a giddy seductress with no sense of
loyalty, and the Fabrikant—an impartial observer who recommended
Titorelli's help to K. in the first place - appended to his recommenda-
tion the warning that Titorelli is a known liar (117). Finally, Titorelli's
jovial witticism, »Es gehört ja alles zum Gericht« (129), probably ought
to be taken seriously, for both he and Leni have suspiciously close ties
to the court. Their connections make them potentially useful to K., but
these same ties cast more than a shadow of a doubt upon their motives
for wanting to help him. Their explanations and advice only amount to
more puzzles for the baffled protagonist.
Throughout the novel Josef K. must interpret signs, figures, and fic-
tions of intractable ambiguity. His desperate game of interpretation
reaches its parodical extreme in the eighth chapter when the »Kauf-
mann Block« imparts to K. a superstition that is current among the
defendants. It is said that the outcome of a specific trial can be read in
its defendant's face, and in particular from his lips. Rumor has it, says
Block, that K.'s lips are those of a condemned man. As Block nervously
goes on to assert that such court lore is surely nonsense, K. is already
reaching for his pocket mirror to have a look at his lips. The image of
his silent lips in the glass divulges no secret to him. Block's comical
twaddle is as ridiculous as it seems from any ordinary point of view, but
if the image is taken literally enough its meaning becomes obvious: the
judgment must pass from the lips of the defendant himself. What he
sees in his pocket mirror is what he always sees whenever he looks at
the court and its representations, a silent image to which no meaning
accrues until he himself speaks the truth. The images of the court are
always his own image variously reflected.
K.'s failure to understand what he sees is the novel's theme of flawed
hermeneutic. This question of interpretation appears in its clearest
form in the novel's most imposing chapter, »Im Dom.« The bank has
assigned K. to act as a tour guide to local »Kunstdenkmäler« for an
important client visiting from Italy. K.'s Italian is weak to begin with,
but his problems in understanding properly are compounded when he
finds that the client speaks a southern dialect of which K. has no
knowledge. His trouble with the Italian is an index to his trouble in
general. Thanks to the helpful intervention of the bank president, whose
Italian is better, it is arranged that K. will meet the client at ten
o'clock in the city's cathedral for a guided tour. K. arrives punctually,
but the Italian does not appear, so K. sits alone in the dimly lit ca-
thedral and leafs through the album of the city's sights that he has
brought with him. It is a gloomy, rainy day, and soon there is so little
light inside the cathedral that K. can scarcely distinguish objects in the

122
aisle near the pew in which he is sitting. He sees a triangle of lighted
candles at the main altar in front of him and a single lighted candle on
a pillar behind him. But these do not produce enough light for him to
see anything.
This candle image recurs several times in the novel and is perhaps
one of the few images that offers itself to traditional habits of inter-
pretation. The candle on Fräulein Bürstner's nightstand reflected K. as
he stood in the middle of her bedroom during his initial hearing. It
subsequently remains associated with K. during the rest of the novel. In
Huld's dark bedroom there is a weak candlelight that only partially
illuminates the scene. Certain objects of importance - in this case a
court official - are not within K.'s field of vision. There is also can-
dlelight in the printing storage room where the Whipper beats Franz
and Willem. It is a small enclosed chamber, dimly illuminated by can-
dlelight from within. These spaces stage the scenes of K.'s >other< life
and are suggestive of consciousness, the inner light of an interpreting
mind. The novel's candle-lit interiors - the storeroom, Huld's bedroom,
as well as the bedrooms of Block and Fräulein Bürstner, the cathedral,
and the midnight lucubrations of the magistrate assigned to K.'s case -
all of these places, together with the stuffy attics of the court, are set-
tings in which the drama of Josef K.'s conscience plays itself out. The
puny candle flames that illumine these scenes never produce enough
light for K. to see anything clearly. His interpreting mind never man-
ages to enlighten him with regard to his trial and its court.
The image of K. sitting alone in a cathedral dark but for the feeble
glow of candlelight, and the loss of objects that recede into the darkness
beyond the pale of its faint luminescence, suggest the limitations of K.'s
conscious mind. When he pulls out a pocket flashlight, a variation on
the candle theme, and steps over to an adjacent side chapel, the purport
of this light imagery becomes even clearer. K. climbs a few steps up to a
low balustrade, leans over it, and shines his little light on the altarpiece:
»Störend schwebte das ewige Licht davor« (175), says the narrator.
Since even the mightiest of flashlight batteries cannot boast an »ewiges
Licht,« the language of the passage points toward the conclusion that
the light K. shines on the altarpiece is more numinous than luminous.
He has turned his interpreting mind onto the painting. The first thing
he sees, and partly only surmises, is a large armored knight on the edge
of the canvas. Rather than explore the entire work with his light, K.
holds his beam on this knight and contemplates him at length, wonder-
ing what the knight is watching and why he does not approach the
object of his attention. When K. finally proceeds to examine the rest of
the painting, he takes it to be an entirely conventional deposition of

123
Christ and notes to himself that it is of recent origin. Satisfied that he
has seen all there is to see, he turns off his light and returns to his pew.
Significant ironies shape this little scene. Because of his reputation
for having a knowledge of art history, K.'s bank has asked him to ac-
company the Italian client on a tour of the city's art treasures. Given
this set of circumstances, Kafka could just as well have set this scene in
a museum or an art gallery or a palace, yet he has conspicuously chosen
to situate his protagonist in a cathedral. The first generation of Kafka
critics pounced on this image to authenticate their reading of Kafka as
a religious allegorist. While the element of the religious must not be
overlooked, neither should it be allowed to overpower the text in acts of
illicit allegoresis. Kafka's diaries and letters demonstrate that he had no
special interest in a traditionally theological or narrowly religious
frame of reference. Der Prozeß has as its central image a court, not a
church. But even if organized religion and academic theology were of
no special interest to Kafka, his Oktavhefte show that what he called
»the spiritual« - das Geistige and not das Geistliche—was a matter of
great consequence to him. Viewed from this perspective, that which is
»religious« definitely belongs within the scope of Kafka's writing,
though probably in unexpected ways. In Der Prozeß the image of the
cathedral belongs to this broadly conceived sense of spirituality and
religiosity.
Kafka sets the scene in this cathedral and sends his protagonist to it
out of an interest in art. K. is literally inside a work of human imagi-
nation and artistic contrivance in which art has traditionally made its
most substantial claims to participation in a reality beyond the here-
and-now. This cathedral, like any other temple, is a sacramental art-
work, a sign for the unity of man with transcendent divinity. The irony
here is that K. is also situated in a novel, which is likewise a work of
human imagination and artistic contrivance. As works of art, narratives
and temples are indices to the spiritual realm of human experience.
Literature, like Church and Court, is a concrete institution in the
material world that attempts to render the invisible but real spiritual
world into intelligibility. But because of its concreteness, because it does
belong to the here-and-now, literature becomes a prisoner of its own
materiality, and its signs begin to mask the very realities that they were
supposed to conjure into visibility. It is in this same sense that Titorel-
li's portraits are pure »Erfindung,« mannered and standardized accor-
ding to court convention (126) with no resemblance to truth. K.'s re-
sponse to the altarpiece echoes what he has learned about Titorelli's
paintings. After his flashlight examination of the side chapel's altar-
piece, K. judges the dead Christ to be a schematically conventional

124
representation - »in gewöhnlicher Auffassung« - and temporally re-
moved from the truth it is supposed to embody - »es war übrigens ein
neueres Bild« (175). The knowledgeable Κ. demonstrates here his lib-
eral education in the finer things of life. His response is a typical product
of Bildung in the modern Western world. K. experiences the painting,
and the cathedral itself, only as >art objects< concerning which various
facts, figures, and standardized valuations can be uttered. But the di-
mension of the sacred, that which enfolds and suffuses the artwork
with a meaning in excess of its constituent parts - the same sovereign
stillness that ensconces Josefine's song - precisely this dimension is
inaccessible to the dull and unimaginative Josef K..
»Es gibt nichts als die geistige Welt,« writes Kafka in his Oktavhef-
ten, »was wir die sinnliche Welt nennen, ist das Böse in der geistigen,
und was wir böse nennen, ist nur eine Notwendigkeit des Augenblicks
unserer ewigen Entwicklung« (H, 34, No. 54). What Kafka calls the
spiritual was for him a vital and authentic presence, but he was pessi-
mistic about its accessibility. »Es gibt ein Ziel, aber keinen Weg,« he
writes elsewhere in his aphorisms (Η, 32, No. 26). Kafka's point is that
the material world and its institutions - church and court at K.'s level,
and the novel or literature itself at the reader's level - exist in a state of
separation from the truer, unrepresentable reality of the spiritual
world. K.'s futile shadow boxing with the court reveals itself as a dark
quixoticism because the objectively material has fully supplanted the
spiritual. The objective reality of his court, in which illusion and reality
are identical, has made K. blind to the truer, more real realm of the
spiritual.
»Siehst du denn nicht zwei Schritte weit?« is the prison chaplain's
impatient rebuke. In order to help the befuddled defendant, the prison
chaplain tells K. the »Türhüterlegende.« It is supposed to clarify for K.
how he has deceived himself of the court. »Before the law« stands a
doorkeeper to whom a man from the country has come. This man seeks
entry into the law. The door is open but the doorkeeper forbids admis-
sion. After many years of questioning and coaxing his doorkeeper, this
man has learned little and achieved nothing. His »Augenlicht« has
become weak (a reprise of the candlelight motif, 182), and he is near
death. The last thing he learns from the doorkeeper is that this door was
intended for him alone.
The parable's basic paradox is that the door is open, yet the man is
not permitted to pass through it. He and his doorkeeper are »vor dem
Gesetz,« i.e. they are physically in front of the edifice that separates
them from the law. This edifice and its door are important images in
the parable and are in need of explanation. What is the sense of this

125
edifice that prevents the man from passing to the other side? And why
the strange contradiction of an open yet impassable door? In order to
answer the questions it is necessary, as the chaplain admonishes K., to
observe a rigorous »Achtung vor der Schrift« (184).
The phrase »vor dem Gesetz« has a double meaning within the con-
text of the chaplain's remarks. It is first of all the simple location of the
doorkeeper and the man. Its other meaning is more literal. The chap-
lain tells K. that the parable itself is located »in den einleitenden
Schriften zum Gesetz« (182), which means that the parable is itself
quite literally »vor dem Gesetz.« It is a preface that is supposed to be a
sort of entryway into the written text of the law. Both the man from the
country in the parable and the parable itself are before the law. The
story of the man who wants to enter into the law through a doorway is
the story of anyone who wants to enter into the text of the law through
the parable. In this way the parable as introductory preface to the law
becomes an edifice that separates the seeker from the law. But of course
a narrative introduction is not meant to obstruct entry but instead to
facilitate the passage to understanding. It stands between the seeker and
the law but it simultaneously a doorway into what lies beyond. The
strange twist here is that the doorway of the parable is open yet impas-
sable. This doorkeeper is the personified reflection of the parable's own
stubborn ambiguity, its refusal to yield up a clear, objectively verifiable
meaning. The chaplain's long-winded parody-commentary underscores
the parable's ultimate undecidability and is an assertion that »the law,«
as a transcendent, is out of reach.
The man from the country reflects K., who stands before the court in
the same sense that the man stands before an edifice that separates him
from the law. Josef K. in his turn is also a figure in a parable called Der
Prozeß, and in the novel he is denied access to whatever it is that lies
beyond the court's imposing and inscrutable facade. Finally, the reader
of the novel is a seeker of the law that governs meaning in the narra-
tive. The extraordinary diversity of Kafka-interpretations in the se-
condary literature bears witness to inaccessibility of »the law« that per-
haps lies hidden beyond the novel's puzzling surface of words and fi-
gures. At each of these four levels, »the law« - authority - seems to be
locked behind a dense surface of opaque representations. Seemingly
open doors invite passage into another world beyond appearances.
»Gehe hinüber,« enjoins the wise man in Kafka's parable »Von den
Gleichnissen,« to which the skeptic replies:
so meint er nicht, daß man auf die andere Seite hinübergehen solle, was man
immerhin noch leisten könnte, wenn das Ergebnis des Weges wert wäre, son-
dern er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben, etwas, das wir nicht kennen, das

126
 auch von ihm nicht näher zu bezeichnen ist und das uns also hier gar nichts
helfen kann. Alle diese Gleichnisse wollen eigentlich nur sagen, daß das Un-
faßbare unfaßbar ist, und das haben wir gewußt. (SE, 411)

This »fabulous beyond« - meaning, transcendent order, the law - lies

out of reach, and the words of wise men and novelists are always only
Gleichnisse, illusions of open doors.

IV

These observations have now come full circle and arrived back at the
point from which this chapter departed. Signs and similitudes, the one-
time guarantors of the validity of knowledge in the condition of lit-
erature, have proved themselves to be mendacious. They have deceived
and misled Josef K. in his quest for »the law.« K.'s vexation in trying to
read the signs of his trial is a mirror to the reader's tribulation in trying
to read the signs of Kafka's vexed novel. Josef K.'s interpretive failures
seem to imply a like quandary for exegetes of the novel. Yet the course
of this reading has paradoxically affirmed a successful hermeneutic
around which the theme of conscience has condensed. It is a productive
contradiction: there is a dynamic tension between the novel's nihilistic
irony - any irony that denies narrative representation as the vehicle of
transcendence - and the spectral entity of conscience that has emerged
in the rift between signs and meanings. Are the categories of irony and
conscience mutually exclusive, or are they somehow complementary?
The solution to this problem lies in the distinction between
representation and articulation. Josef K.'s story is a case study in the
aporia of representation. K. consistently repeats the same error, which
is rooted in his unexamined assumption that the court in its various
guises is an objectification of >the Law.< Wherever he looks he sees
what he believes to be the representations of some hidden, autonomous
authority. He assumes that this authority lies somewhere behind the
surface of things, in an indeterminate >beyond.< This beyond does not
exist; it is a supernaturalism. The truth of K.'s trial is to be sought in
that which lies nearest at hand, on the specular surface of appearances.
K. fails to see this truth because his vision is fixed on an illusory
beyond. Behind the mirror is nothing, not even a void. 26 The court does

26
The »void« is a recurring term in the criticism of modernist literature. It
generally comes up in reference to the supposedly vacant spot left by the
»death of God.« This melodramatic »void« is as much a supernaturalism as
was the bourgeois notion of divinity it is supposed to have replaced. It bears
the stamp of nostalgia or, at best, trendy nihilism.

127
not represent an externally autonomous authority because it is already
identical with the true authority, which is K. himself. 27 His half-hearted
attempts to resist the trial are as futile as trying to run away from his
own shadow. K.'s way of dealing with the court is no different from the
slapstick routine of a circus clown who, while standing in front of a
mirror, casually turns away from his reflection then suddenly jumps to
face the glass, trying to catch his own image off guard.
In pursuit of the law, K. runs a gauntlet of mirrors until finally the
twin images of K. and court merge into the unified oblivion of death.
Because of the special reciprocity between K. and his apparent antag-
onist, it is tempting to suggest that the court represents K.'s conscience.
Yet if the self-cancelling rhetoric of Kafka's presentation is to be
thought to its end, then the court must not be read as a metaphor for
conscience in the usual force of >metaphor.< At least one objection to
this proposition comes readily to mind. It can be argued that a person's
conscience is »like« a court, and a figure no less imposing than Im-
manuel Kant has set a precedent for saying so.28 But for Kafka >cons-
cience,< >guilt,< >right,< and >the law< belong to a mystical order of being
that is necessarily falsified when reduced to a word-image. Language
can only be used »andeutungsweise« for the things of the non-sensory
world, »aber niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise« (H, 34, No.
57).
This critique of metaphorical signification is abundantly evident in
the matter-of-fact concreteness of the language in Der Prozeß. Kafka
does not try to force his language to perform extraordinary metaphys-

27
Sokel has noted that K. refuses to assume the responsibility for what he al-
ready knows is true. I add to this insight the complementary dimension of
conscience as something that Kafka invites the reader to perform. Sokel, »Das
Programm von K.'s Gericht: ödipaler und existentieller Sinn des Prozeß-
Romans,« in Franz Kafka. Eine Aufsatzsammlung nach einem Symposium in
Philadelphia, hrsg. u. eingel. v. Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr, Schriftenreihe
Agora, 29 (Berlin, Darmstadt: Agora, 1978), 81-107. Cf. Emrich, p. 275.
28
Kants Gesammelte Schriften, hrsg. v. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, I. Abt. (Werke), Bd. 6, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen
der bloßen Vernunft/Die Metaphysik der Sitten (Berlin: Georg Riemer, 1907),
p. 438: »Das Bewußtsein eines inneren Gerichthofes im Menschen (>vor wel-
chem sich seine Gedanken einander verklagen oder entschuldigen^ ist das
Gewissen.«. The equivocation of court to conscience would reduce the court to
an allegory, but Kafka's hostility to allegory is well known. He wrote this
comment to Greta Bloch a couple of months before beginning Der Prozeß:
»Aber unüberwindbar bleibt für mich der trockene Aufbau der ganzen Al-
legorie, die nichts ist als Allegorie, alles sagt, was zu sagen ist, nirgends ins
Tiefere geht und ins Tiefere zieht,« Briefe an Feiice, hrsg. v. Erich Heller u.
Jürgen Born (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976), p. 596.

128
ical feats, for, as Wittgenstein once suggested, nothing is lost if one does
not try to utter the ineffable. Instead, the ineffable is contained, inef-
fably, in that which is spoken. Conscience, the unspoken, emerges from
the rift laid open by self-reflexive Kafkan irony. Its presence is entirely
silent, negative, conspicuous in the almost palpable stillness with which
it pervades the interaction of K. and court, of reader and novel. Kafka
brings conscience to articulation by a via negativa. Ingeborg Henel does
not propose conscience as a touchstone of the novel, but she does offer
a keen insight into Kafka's non-objectifying mode of articulation:

Bei Kafka wie in der negativen Theologie weist das Negative auf ein Positives
hin: die Lüge auf die Wahrheit, das Bewußtsein des Gefangenseins auf eine
Ahnung von Freiheit und das unausweichliche Schuldgefühl auf die Unbe-
dingtheit des Gesetzes. Das Positive selbst, die Wahrheit, die Freiheit, das
Gesetz hat Kafka niemals dargestellt.29

Where Henel writes »das Gesetz,« read: »das Gewissen.« She has not
carried the logic of her argument to its conclusion. The implied pres-
ence of that which is positive also implies an important question about
the protagonist's relationship with the truth. Not only does K.'s guilt
evoke a presentiment of the law; it also poses a question about the
origin of this law. The court and K. are twins that together engender
conscience, the authentic power of judgment in matters of guilt and
innocence.
K. attempts intellectually to seize and interpret the court. He fails
because he assumes the court is something wholly other than himself.
But another unexamined assumption lies buried in imagining that the
court is exclusively K.'s prismatic reflection. The court complements
K.'s attempt to grasp the law with a hermeneutic gesture of its own. It
seizes and interprets K. If Josef K. could only in some way participate
in the hermeneutic that proceeds from the court, if he could allow the
court to grasp him and offer it no resistance, he would be a man in
harmony with himself and his conscience. There are two principle cha-
racters in the story. One is K. and the other is the court. Each player is
actively autonomous to a certain degree, and each conditions the re-
sponse of the other. The theme of conscience emerges for the reader as
a result of this dialectical interaction between two figures that are para-
doxically similar and different at the same time. 30

29
Ingeborg Henel, »Die Türhüterlegende und ihre Bedeutung für Kafkas Pro-
zeß,«. DVjs, 37 (1963), 68.
30
It should not go unremarked that the reader is likewise engaged in a dialogue
with the novel; the text is an active partner in the interaction and meaning
emerges as a product of this conversation. Meaning is not a static something
hidden behind a veil of words. It is a function of dynamic process.

129
 A certain branch of Kafka criticism will presumably raise an objec-
tion to this interpretation. There is a prominent trend in readings of
Kafka that accepts Josef K.'s observing consciousness as the origin of
reality in the fictional world. I will call this view the »phenomenological
fallacy,« if »phenomenological« is understood to mean an interpretive
strategy that accords epistemic privilege to the observing subject. The
objection would be that the court cannot be an active partner in dia-
lectical confrontation because it is only a passive reflection of K.'s inner
life, or even of Kafka's mental landscape. K.'s consciousness is prior to
the court.
Ingeborg Henel's observation that the court is a »projection« of K.'s
wretched soul has been understood by some as a psycholgistic meta-
phor. 31 Interpreters less circumspect than Henel have so radically set up
K.'s mind as an absolute origin at the center of the fictional world that
the court becomes the phantasm of a dreaming man. Friedrich Beißner
has gone so far as to suggest that the court is the delusion of an isolated
mind. 32 Such readings do violence to the integrity of the tale's narrative
illusion. The motive behind such readings is perhaps a felt need to
rationalize and thereby make harmless the dangerous irrationality that
overwhelms the protagonist. This irrationality threatens not only K. but
the reader who identifies with him as well. It would be a like error to
suppose that Gregor Samsa is not really a verminous insect at all but
only a man who is dreaming that he is a bug. It is a hermeneutical
imperative that the integrity of the illusion remain intact. Gregor Sam-
sa is really a cockroach or beetle of some sort, and Josef K. is really
having a trial.
The psychologizing phenomenologists base their argument for the
priority of K.'s consciousness on the much discussed phenomenon of
31
See note 19.
32
Friedrich Beißner advances the proposition that the court is the »innerseeli-
sches Wahnbild eines in vollständiger Erschöpfung isolierten Geistes,« in Der
Erzähler Franz Kafka (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1952), 39. In Der Schacht von
Babel. Aus Kafkas Tagebüchern (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), p. 44, he
writes: »Ich behaupte nochmals: alle Personen und alle Vorgänge, die mit
dem Prozeß zu tun haben, sind nur in K.s Träumen und Halbträumen vor-
handen.« The most thoroughgoing study of consciousness as the center of
reality in Kafka's work is Jörgen Kobs, Kafka. Untersuchungen zu Bewußtsein
und Sprache seiner Gestalten, hrsg. v. Ursula Brech (Bad Homburg: Athe-
näum, 1970), on Der Prozeß cf. esp. 391 f. More in line with my »hermeneu-
tical approach« is Cyrena Ν. Pondrom, »Kafka and Phenomenology: Josef
K.'s Search for Information,« Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature,
8 (1967), 78-95; rpt. in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial. A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James Rolleston (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 70-85.

130
»Einsinnigkeit« in Kafka's prose. 33 It is the narrative sleight-of-hand
whereby the novelist largely restricts the reader's point of view to that
of the protagonist, thereby forcing the reader to identify with K. The
assumption is that K. is a mimetic double for a possible person in the
real world, and that the court ought to be mimetic also. Since such
courts have no objective existence in average reality, it is easy to j u m p
to the conclusion that K. is demented or dreaming. 34 Intellectual his-
torians rush to support this reading by fitting it into the context of
Kafka's era, which witnessed the rise of phenomenology, empirical
psychology, and the >discovery< of the unconscious.
In spite of being covered by all this heavy artillery, the psychologiz-
ing phenomenologists are vulnerable because they have overlooked a
decisive feature of Der Prozeß: its narrativity. The novel's self-conscious
irony militates against a reading that places K.'s consciousness at the
center of reality. The phenomenon of »Einsinnigkeit« is a trick, a nar-
rative device that Kafka applies »mit Berechnung« in order to exploit
his readers' empathetic sensibilities as the protagonist's suffering
gathers them in. Kafka wants for us to see the court as K. sees it, a
looming, inscrutable edifice apparently bent on our destruction. But he
does not do so in order to establish consciousness as a generative force.
Certainly K. suffers because of the limitations of his »Augenlicht,« but
the reader who identifies too closely with him has fallen into Kafka's
hermeneutical trap. Kafka plays with the reader by making him par-
take of K.'s miserable despair, never realizing that much more can be
known about the court than the limited protagonist is aware of. The
critics of K.'s consciousness have seen through this deception clearly
enough, and have made what seems to them the next logical step, which
is making K. the origin of his court. There is obviously a certain logic in
this position, but narrativity qualifies consciousness in an important
way. The bottom line of reality in Der Prozeß is not consciousness; it is
narrative, words and images, signs and figures. K.'s personal subjec-
tivity is no more an origin of the court than the reader's personal sub-
jectivity is the origin of Der Prozeß. It is easy to accept the court as pure
fiction, but it goes against the grain to think of K. as a literary ara-
besque, a printed puppet with no more »consciousness« than the court
that is his double.

33
See note 21.
34
There is also another possibility, namely that the court is mimetic. J.P. Stern
argues that this sort of trial does exist: »The Law of The Trial,« in On Kafka.
Semi-Centenarv Perspectives, ed. Franz Kuna (London: Paul Elek, 1976),
22-41.

131
 Yet Kafka has gone to the trouble to reveal the fictionality of Josef
K. and the world of his trial in various ways that I have tried to make
clear. In so doing he has established narrativity as a deeper level of
reality than consciousness and has disqualified K. as the mimetic doub-
le for a possible man in the so-called real world. K. is an eidolon, and
the court is a figment of literary imagination. They are possible only in
the charmed dimension of fictional narrative. When Gustav Janouch
began to chatter enthusiastically about how lifelike he found the figures
of Der Verschollene, Kafka is reported to have said: »Ich zeichnete
keine Menschen. Ich erzählte eine Geschichte. Das sind Bilder, nur
Bilder.«35 A sidelong glance at Musil will shed some light on this matter
of non-mimetic pictures. He describes the art of characterization in
Törleß :

Die Zeichnung der Charaktere ist stilisiert, alles auf die kürzeste Linie zu-
sammengefaßt, keine volle Menschen dargestellt, sondern jeweils nur deren
Schwerlinie.
Das würde noch gut zum »psychologischen Roman« stimmen. Gleich aber
geht es um einen Schritt weiter. Es findet sich keine reale Psychologie, we-
nigstens ist sie ganz ohne Interesse, willkürlich, dilettantisch behandelt. . . .
Die psychologischen Schwerlinien gehören mehr oder minder konstruierten
Figuren an. Nie kam mir der Gedanke, ist dieser Mensch möglich? Im Ge-
genteil: ich frug, ist dieser Mensch konsequent? Und ist er es, so ist es mir
desto lieber, je unmöglicher er ist.36

Musil's comments ring true for Der Prozeß as well as for Törleß. The
fictional world takes on an autonomy independent of the rules that
govern the figures of life. We are free to regard K.'s machinations at a
critical, perhaps even chilly, distance.
Such departures from accepted novelistic practice are only part of
how Kafka subverts illusionism. As I have tried to show, he regarded
the figurality of language the source of »fun and despair« in storytel-
ling. He calls attention to this »Spaß und Verzweiflung« by making his
tales relentlessly ambiguous. His despair is that a word-image - Josef K.
for instance - is always only what it actually is and can never really be
what it represents. But the figures of fiction are also fun because they
can become gaming pieces in a contest between author and reader. He
plainly states in his diary that the death scenes are a game for him. This

35
Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka. Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen,
erw. Neuaufl. (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981), 45.
36
Robert Musil, Briefe 1901-1942, hrsg. v. Adolf Frise unter Mithilfe v. Murray
G. Hall (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 13. A letter of March 22,
1905 to Stefanie Tyrka. Cf. also Kessler's remarks on Kafka's non-mimetic
procedures, esp. 119-126.

132
sport extends to playfully mocking and undoing real-seeming appear-
ances. The gambit of nesting representations within representations in
Der Prozeß is an example of the author having fun with the fictional, or
figural, status of K.'s world. Yet this hide-and-seek playfulness does not
trivialize the claims of fiction on truth; it relocates them. Kafka's game
is an inquiry into the disposition of knowledge as literature.
The ironic »Geständnis« that K. and his world are »Lüge« does not
abrogate the right of literature to its privileged place in the ways of
human knowledge. It is, for example, self-evident that the lives and
trials of other patently fictive figures - Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Tris-
tram Shandy - are no less compelling for their fictionality. Kafka's
Josef K. belongs in the ranks of these memorable fabulations. Setting
narrativity into the foreground of Der Prozeß does not diminish the
claim that the novel implicitly and justly makes to truth-telling. It does,
however, qualify the traditional claim of mimesis that art is an imita-
tion of reality, regardless of whether this reality is thought to be ma-
terial or spiritual. Narrative art is necessarily mimetic art to a certain
extent, but narrative does not exhaust its truth-potential in mimesis.
The relationship of fiction to truth is not a matter of accurate
representation; rather, it is to be sought in the »hermeneutical func-
tion« of narrative.
Conscience in Der Prozeß is not the object of mimetic or any other
version of objectifying representation. It is much more the point at
which narrative hermeneutical function becomes articulate. Indeed,
conscience is itself a hermeneutical event. It is the act of setting to
decision what is to be right and what is to be wrong, what is to be just
and what is to be vicious, who is to be guilty and who is to be innocent.
The hermeneutical function of the poetic word is precisely such an act
of setting to decision.
The primary function of an imagined world of words is not to refer
to a thing but to precipitate an event: the poetic word must elicit a
response. Der Prozeß seeks to elicit a response from its readers inas-
much as it asks for a decision concerning the origin of authority in
individual and collective conscience. The novel does not ask for an
everyday judgment on some specific moral dilemma. Kafka withholds
the crime of which K. is allegedly guilty for this reason. The novel does
not demand a ruling on a specific case in accordance with the law of
moral or juridical convention. It is instead asking for a decision con-
cerning the origin of the law's authority. This origin is conscience, and
it belongs to a dimension of human experience more fundamental than
personal subjectivity or moral convention. Musil called this dimension
»der andere Zustand,« a concept fully in place in the reality of K.'s
trial.

133
 Josef Κ..'s failure, then, is not the image of a cynical end to modern
man. It is much more an appeal for intelligent and ethically tempered
critical reflection. K.'s confrontation with his court contains an implicit
query, which is to say that it sets to decision - andeutungsweise - the
question of what claims a human being's conscience must play in the
course of events. What at first seems to be obscurity and undecidability
is in truth an appeal for a way of reading that is both responsive and
responsible. Interpretation has an ethical dimension.
Der Prozeß is a celebration of conscience in the sense of a lamenta-
tion. Kafka's song of lament becomes the occasion for a reflective con-
frontation with one of human life's elemental events. It is the con-
frontation itself and not mimetic features of the narrative that are prin-
cipally of interest. It is K.'s confrontation with the court and the read-
er's confrontation with the narrative from which meaning first arises.
The novel is the site of the hermeneutical function in much the same
way that an elegy is a song of sorrow: the song is not a likeness of the
sorrow it laments yet the sadness is brought to language in the singing
voice. Or again: a temple is not a likeness of the divinity it honors, yet
for a believer this divinity suffuses the carved stone and wrought space
of the entire construction. The temple celebrates its numen in the same
sense that Der Prozeß celebrates conscience. There is in each case a call
to active participation. The novel provokes its reader into assuming the
responsibility for an interpretive response that Josef K., in his gnostic
turpitude, has shirked. It is in this sense that the novel has a Utopian
aim: it is not a forecast for an apocalyptic end to a doglike humanity - a
»bitch gone bad in the teeth« as Ezra Pound put it - instead it opens up
onto the future as onto a realm of potentialities governed by the dy-
namics of response and responsibility. The novel is not an imitation of
nature; it is an intimation of time to come. It is writing, and writing is,
according to Kafka, a »Form des Gebetes« (Η, 252).

134
CHAPTER V

IN THE CRYSTAL GARDEN:

The Replenishment of Art and the Ecology
of Man in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

. . . es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
der Menschen.
Paul Celan1

To a reader casually familiar with the recent history of the novel, the
modernism of Kafka, Broch, and Musil is self-evident. By way of con-
trast, Thomas Mann's novels seem more reserved, less modernistic than
those of his contemporaries. It is in fact clear that Mann's fiction
embraces and refines the literary practices of nineteenth-century real-
ism. His imagined worlds have a true-to-life quality that situates their
author squarely at the end of a lineage that includes the likes of Goethe,
Tolstoy, Fontane, and Dickens, to name only a few. In keeping with
their standards of realism, Mann depicts places and times in which
memorable characters become enmeshed in events that are alive with
the comedy and drama of human interest. His engaging plots move
according to a principle of progressive linearity and are a realm within
which individual psychology interacts with circumstance so as to press
toward the final disaster or fulfillment. Mann's rich prose conjures
forth an illusion of reality that seems by virtue of its imposing presence
to be a defense of realist mimesis. Where, then, are the collapse of
reality, the crisis of representation, and the inwardness that are sup-
posed to typify modernist narrative? What makes Thomas Mann dif-
ferent from his contemporaries?
It is his response to the tradition that sets him apart from the other
German and Austrian modernists. Mann's ambivalent posture might
profitably be likened to that of the French expressionist painter
Georges Rouault. On the face of it he and Rouault are diametric op-
posites. Rouault was as experimenter in abstract form, whereas Mann

' Paul Celan, Ausgewählte Gedichte/Zwei Reden, mit einem Nachwort v. Beda
Allemann, suhrkamp taschenbuch, 604 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1980), p. 105.

135
was a conservative practitioner of verisimilar mimesis. Yet at a deeper
level their aesthetic impulse pivots on a common axis. Each of the two
was simultaneously radical and conservative in his response to the tra-
dition. Rouault put revolutionary form in the service of humanist and
Christian values. The conservative intention of his revolt in form was
to preserve and renew the legacy of tradition. Thomas Mann's most
profound work, Doktor Faustus, claims for itself a like but precisely
inverted intention. It puts traditional narrative form in the service of a
project that asks thorny questions of the Western cultural heritage. The
radical intention of his formal conservatism is to challenge the assump-
tions that underlie art in the tradition of the West.
These assumptions, which are at bottom those of the humanist tra-
dition, have a direct bearing on the modernist tendencies of Doktor
Faustus} The action of the novel takes place in an era of crisis, a time
in which war, nihilism, and moral bewilderment have made a shambles
of orderly existence. Mann portrays this crisis as the failure of human-
ism because, in spite of its lofty ideals, it has served as an incubator to
the political bestiality of the twentieth century. As the novel presents it,
the faulty basis of humanism is its anthropocentric subjectivity, the
strict division between man and nature. In the realm of aesthetics, hu-
manistic egoism causes the artwork to become dislodged from its right-
ful place in the middle of life. In particular it estranges art from its
religious function and isolates it in the academic solitude of high cul-
ture. Cut off from its deepest origins, artistic expression eventually ex-
hausts the conventions that define and restrict it until it ultimately
transforms itself into parody. This depletion of expressive schemata

2
In conscious deviation from the two dominant ways of reading the novel I
argue that the main theme of Doktor Faustus is the problem of humanism.
The first style of interpreting this novel is based on a repressive notion of
»social realism« that tries to make Thomas Mann the objective chronist of
bourgeois decadence. The second major direction of interpretation reads the
novel in terms of Thomas Mann's personal response to the specific historical
situation. Certainly the criticism of bourgeois culture and Mann's con-
frontation with Nazi Germany are imposing and indispensable elements of
Doktor Faustus, but they are also the epiphenomena of a more fundamental
critique that is at work in the novel. I intend to show in this chapter how the
concept of humanism itself emerges in Doktor Faustus as the unexpected root
of the crisis of modernity. Like various other contemporary thinkers, Thomas
Mann wondered how Western humanism, in spite of its high ideals, could
produce - or at least fail to prevent - Nazism, Stalinism, and two World Wars.
For an overview of the crisis in contemporary humanism see Paul Ricoeur,
»Philosophy,« in Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences,
ed. Jacques Havet, New Babylon, 21/2, Part II, Vol. II (The Hague, Paris, New
York: Mouton/UNESCO, 1978), pp. 1449-1470.

136
demonstrates Thomas Mann's perception of the crisis of representation,
and his critique of anthropocentric humanism pierces through to the
core of the aesthetics of interiority.
This chapter will sketch out these problems in some detail and will
attempt to show how Mann tries to resolve the impasse of modernist
culture. At the heart of his fictionalized solution is the reconciliation of
ethics and aesthetics. It is to this end that his Adrian Leverkühn founds
a theory of composition that originates not from personal interiority
but in the exteriority of nature as a whole. In so doing he replenishes
the ability of art to achieve depths of humane expression inaccessible to
the schemata of tradition. The source of this renewal is a conception of
nature that understands her to encompass the entirety of the world, a
holism that includes both the physical and the spiritual. According to
Leverkühn, good and evil belong to nature, man belongs to nature, and
art belongs to nature. A reconciliation between ethics and aesthetics is
possible because the both of them are rooted in common ground. It is a
function of art to articulate an ecology of man caught between the
natural poles of good and evil.

As a preliminary to the discussion of Doktor Faustus, and in order to

bring the novel into the context of modernism, it will be useful to
specify provisionally the nature of the mimesis that is at work in the
writings of Thomas Mann. Mimesis is the popularly acknowledged
name for an ill-defined bond of representation between a literary sign
and that for which it is a substitute. The stability of this bond has
traditionally been the solid ground beneath the feet of both poet and
critic. Yet we have seen that the novels of Kafka, Broch, and Musil
refuse to take this stability for granted. Instead, they sound the theme of
a crisis in representation. In these novels language appears as a tool that
is inadequate when its role is thought to be recuperating the fullness of
extra-literary reality. The way of mediation between fiction and the
world for these novelists is irony. The language of illusion ironically
offers the pretense of reality while simultaneously pointing up its true
condition of narrativity. It admits that it is >only< an ensemble of print-
ed signs and uttered sounds that are never identical with the world they
seem to represent.
Thomas Mann is the undisputed master of real-seeming illusion in
German prose. His imaginary worlds satisfy the modern craving for
verifiable historical and scientific facts; his sharply profiled characters
seem as real, and often as not even more real, than the mundane people

137
we are likely to know outside of novels; and the language in which he
unfolds the vivid theater of his imagination is astonishing in its mani-
fold virtuosity. It is a prose style to satisfy even the most exacting de-
mands of any programmatic realist of the nineteenth century. Under
these circumstances it ought to come as a surprise that most readers
associate irony more readily with the novels of Thomas Mann than
with those of Kafka, Broch, or even Musil. It is this paradoxical union
of irony with realism that is the striking feature of Mann's narrative
practice. The aesthetic distance generated by his sometimes sober,
sometimes humorous, and occasionally wicked irony qualifies the piety
of his realism in an important way.3 The tension inherent in this unity
is at the core of Mann's mimetic project.
At its least appealing, his so-called »ironical detachment« is some-
thing more like sarcasm. Posing as critique, it is sometimes designed to
allow the willing reader to join the narrator - and presumably also the
novelist himself - at some pretended Olympian vantage from which to
smile down in smug self-satisfaction at foolish characters. The caustic
wit of Beim Propheten or Gladius Dei are examples of his irony in this
style. A brief passage from Buddenbrooks will help to specify the struc-
ture of his »detachment.« It concerns the seemingly objective narra-
tor's description of Mamsell Jungmann, the Buddenbrook family's
long-time governess. She was, he observes, a woman, »die nun schon
fünfunddreißig Jahre zählte und sich rühmen durfte, im Dienste der
ersten Kreise ergraut zu sein.<4 Obviously enough, the objective de-
scription is an unqualified judgment passed on by an authority situat-
ed in Archimedean inaccessibility. The narrative voice frames its
observations ironically so as to unmask the Mamsell's fatuous satisfac-
tion in her servitude and to reproach her, or society, for allowing youth
and personal dignity to be squandered in such a manner. The invisible
narrator is similarly judgmental throughout the novel, yet poses as an
objective reporter in the manner of Naturalism. It is tempting to regard
this conflict of subjective vision with objective reportage as a a struc-

3
On Thomas Mann's irony in general cf. esp. Erich Heller, The Ironic German.
A Study of Thomas Mann (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), cited as
Heller; and Hans Mayer, Thomas Mann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1980), pp. 171-183.
4
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie, Gesammelte Werke,
Frankfurter Ausgabe, hrsg. v. Peter de Mendelssohn, vol. III (Frankfurt am
Main: S. Fischer, 1981), p. 326. Subsequent references to other volumes of the
Frankfurter Ausgabe of the Gesammelte Werke will be cited in these notes as
the GWFA followed by the appropriate volume number and preceded by the
individual title.

138
tural flaw in the novel because, in the interest of narratological in-
tegrity, some account needs to be rendered for the point of view from
which the story unfolds. Properly speaking, the narrator of a novel is a
persona that belongs to the imaginary world within the book and is not
identical with the writing novelist's individual psychology. Under cer-
tain circumstances it is probably licit for the reader to construct a lim-
ited amount of unity between author and narrator. Yet the unexamined
assumption that the narrator and the author are twins can lead to ab-
surd confusions. The critic who assumes the perverted narrator of Na-
bokov's Lolita to be a double for the author is not only confused but
perhaps also guilty of libel. Novels such as Buddenbrooks run into
trouble when they offer objective reporting from a narrative voice that
is projected from within the nothingness of a disembodied anonymity.
Its omniscience and invisibility militate against the reader's correct per-
ception of its natural limitations and its origin in narrative convention.
Mann, I believe, sensed the burden of this convention and set about
lightening it when he invented figures to narrate Doktor Faustus and
Der Erwählte from within the novel and when he cast Felix Krull in the
form of its narrator's autobiography.
A middle step between the transcendental anonymity of the narrator
in Buddenbrooks and the fully developed narrator-figures of Zeitblom
and Krull is evident in Der Zauberberg and in the Joseph tetralogy. The
narrator has not yet become an acting character within the story, but he
does step obtrusively and humoristically into the narrative foreground.
In these novels the narrator begins to take on more personality. He
addresses the reader directly, muses over his characters and their lives,
feigns ignorance, calls attention to his own limitations, and generally
makes it known to his reader that the narrated world is one of illusion,
of language-play, and self-critical literary parody.5 In the essay »Meer-
fahrt mit Don Quixote« Thomas Mann takes due note of the kinship
between his style of irony and that of Cervantes.6 Like his Spanish
5
Seidlin and Weigand have written perceptively on the self-conscious narrator
figures in the novels of Thomas Mann's middle period. On Der Zauberberg
see Hermann J. Weigand, The Magic Mountain. A Study of Thomas Mann's
Novel »Der Zauberberg,« University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic
Languages and Literatures, 49 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1965; a rpt. of the 1933 ed.), esp. pp. 67f, 86. On the Joseph novels see
Oscar Seidlin, »Thomas Mann's Joseph the Provider and Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy,« in his Essays in German and Comparative Literature, Uni-
versity of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, 30 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 182-202; German rpt. in Tho-
mas Mann, hrsg. v. Helmut Koopmann, Wege der Forschung, 335 (Darm-
stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 140-164.
6
In Leiden und Größe der Meister, GWFA VIII, 1018-68, esp. pp. 1035f.

139
predecessor, Mann uses parody and irony as a doubled-edged sword of
critique and self-critique.
Not the least of Thomas Mann's mechanisms of self-consciousness is
this use of irony from Buddenbrooks and Felix Krull. It is one of the
means whereby the author makes it known that the reality of the text
occurs at the level of its narrativity - i.e. of its words and conventions -
and not at the level of referentiality. Such is also the irony that Mann
attributes to Goethe's portrayal of Mephisto in Faust. Mephisto is ac-
tually a demon born in the depths of ancient superstition. Goethe had
to dispose of certain traits in order to make him presentable to an
intellectually sophisticated era. Horns, tail, claws, cloven hoof and the
other standard appurtenances of the devil's colorful past in the popular
imagination would have been comical anachronisms for Goethe's en-
lightened audience. So the poet recasts him as urbane and cosmopoli-
tan, in keeping with the values of his time and place. Yet at one point in
Faust even this Mephisto betrays his humble origins in primitive folk-
lore when he balks and shys away from a crucifix, reverting fully to the
slightly ridiculous manners of a medieval hobgoblin. This stylized aver-
sion to the holy cross, suggests Mann, has the feel of well-worn literary
claptrap when transferred onto the likes of this otherwise suave figure:
»So spielt der Dichter mit seiner Figur, gibt ihr Augenblicke satirischer
Selbst-Aufhebung und Einschränkung ihrer Wirklichkeit. Schließlich
aber ist sie da - ein Teufel, dem mittelalterlichen Dämon-Zeremoniell
unterworfen, der Beschwörung zugänglich.«7
Mann's point is that good-humored irony of the self-conscious varie-
ty is perfectly in keeping with the tone of a serious literary project. But
the converse is also true. Serious ironies are in keeping with a humor-
ous literary project. One thinks, for instance, of Felix Krull's chummy
affinity for Professor Kuckuck's menagerie of stuffed animals. Like
them, Felix is a sham and an impostor. He is not the Marquis that he is
pretending to be and, even more to the point, he is himself the denizen
of a menagerie. As a figure in a novel he is as lifeless as the lifelike
figures in Kuckuck's frozen zoo. Krull is the product of self-conscious
literary taxidermy.
Felix Krull's feeling of solidarity with the contrivances of Kuckuck's
art is one facet of the novel's overriding theme, which is the relation-
ship between illusion and reality. And this relationship folds back on
the novel itself as a world of artifice and illusion. Imagination and
pretense govern Krull's entire existence, and in this sense he is the
literary word incarnate. In the same way that he is conscious of his

7
»Über Goethes Faust,« in Leiden und Größe der Meister, G WFA VIII, p. 276.

140
cunning trickery and imposture, so also is the novel aware of itself as an
artfully contrived ensemble of conventions, tropes, and verbal illusions.
The rift between Schein and Sein seems utter. Precisely this problem is
taken up and developed thematically by characters within the tale, espe-
cially Kuckuck and Krull, who defend illusion on the grounds that
illusion and reality are both ultimately a function of being itself, a
fundamental process of nature. Professor Kuckuck expounds to Felix
on the inanimate crystals that are able to mimic living plants. Felix
recounts:

Im Schein- und Halbleben der flüssigen Kristalle spiele augenfällig das eine
Reich ins andre hinüber. Immer, wenn die Natur uns gaukelnd im Unorga-
nischen das Organische vortäusche, wie in den Schwefel-, den Eisblumen,
wolle sie uns lehren, daß sie eines sei. 8

Mimicry in nature and mimesis in art are a matched pair to which I

will return at the end of this chapter. Here it is interesting to note that
the notion of imitation and illusion in nature is also a self-reflective key
to the status of literary illusion in Doktor Faustus.
In Chapter III Zeitblom recalls his childhood with Adrian Lever-
kühn and the influence that Adrian's father, Jonathan, exercised on
them. Like Professor Kuckuck, the elder Leverkühn is a philosopher of
nature, who enjoys »speculating the elements« with the two boys. This
speculation concerns especially the games of imitation and illusion that
nature plays with itself. It is he who shows them a picture book that
contains a representation of the exotic butterfly Hetaera esmerelda. Be-
cause of its translucent pink and violet wings, it looks like a flower
petal floating in the jungle breeze. In a similar vein, there is a repro-
duction of a moth that imitates in minute detail the appearance of a
leaf. Jonathan points out to them that even the coloration, the »traum-
schönes Azurblau« that belongs to many insects of the tropics, is in
truth an optical illusion. The color is not properly in the insects at all
but is instead the play of light on the creatures' epidermal formations.
Adrian's mother wonders out loud: »Es ist also Trug?«

»Nennst du das Himmelsblau Trug?« erwiderte ihr Mann, indem er rück-

wärts zu ihr aufblickte. » D e n Farbstoff kannst du mir auch nicht nennen,
von dem es kommt.« 9

8
Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Memoiren erster Teil (Frank-
furt am Main: S. Fischer, 1979), pp. 276f.
9
Doktor Faustus/Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt am Main: S.
Fischer, 1967), p. 23. In the rest of this chapter both the novel and Die Ent-
stehung will be cited from this edition parenthetically in the text.

141
The line of separation between illusion and reality, which ordinarily
seems plain enough, suddenly becomes indistinct. The realization grad-
ually emerges that nature itself engages in the sport of illusion-making
that had seemed to be the exclusive province of poets and painters.
Here - bent over a picture book we cannot see, among a group of
fictional charaters gathered together in an imaginary world - is a dis-
cussion of the relationship between illusion and truth, fiction and real-
ity.
The extraordinary twist that Mann gives to this familiar theme is to
couch it not in terms of art, its accustomed context, but in terms of
nature. Mimesis, the artifice of imitation, appears at once in a new
light. There is a flash of illumination that reveals the fundament of art
to be an entirely natural process and not the privileged activity of the
autonomous human mind. Art originates at a level deeper than indi-
vidual mind.
Skeptics will object that there is no insight here because this notion
belonged to the programmatics of Romanticism. Lyric poets of the
deepest, most original sensibilities - from Haller and Brockes to Goethe
and Eichendorff - made a similar point long ago. These leaders have
been followed by legions of slighter and inferior poets who have ham-
mered away ad nauseam at the unity of man and nature. But these poets
protest too much; the very necessity of asserting this unity is predicated
on the scission between man and nature. In the wake of Cartesian
dualism and in the grip of German Idealism, the Romantics perceived
man, his putative consciousness and unique individuality to be at the
center of, yet separate from nature. Mind imposes its categories on the
world »out there,« on nature, and this nature is not permitted to be
what it is but must instead become an objectification of mind, an ex-
pression of man and his order. When Descartes codified the epistemic
privilege of mind by dint of its self-certainty, the human being became
a »subject,« and everything else - nature - became its »object.«
Literally, ob-ject means >that which is thrown into opposition to the
sub-ject, which is >that which is thrown beneath< nature, i.e. its basis.
The upshot of this paradigm is the loss, as it were, of nature. Subjective
Romanticism responded to its sense of alienation from the objective
world with a poetry that celebrates nature in its juxtaposition to man.
The very appearance of valorized nature in painting and poetry is a
novum of modernity, the sign of a nostalgia caused by the division of
the world into subjects and objects. The artistic celebration of nature
was an attempt to recover what had receded from self-certainty and
immediate accessibility. But even the most persuasive attempts had to
fail because the subject-object paradigm - which had precipitated the

142
schism in the first place - also governed the way in which they tried to
recapture nature. The modern concept of man as the interiority of per-
sonal subjectivity, perception, experience and creation became firmly
entrenched as the center of reality, and the exterior world became the
space into which this interiority poured forth. The world became an-
thropocentric and anthropomorphic. 1 0 It is the Age of Humanism, and
it is Faust in his relentless will to knowledge, which is to say in his
sometimes well-intentioned sometimes ruthless will to power, who is
emblematic of the modern era.
In Doktor Faustus, perhaps surprisingly, the centrality of man and
the romantic lordliness of human subjectivity are opened to question.
The fulcrum of this question is the relationship between imitation as a
process of nature and imitation as a contrivance of human artistry:
mimesis. Jonathan Leverkühn's speculation about nature's unexpected
talent for illusion-making is the springboard for this query about the
interconnectedness of truth and illusion in literary art. He offers to
Adrian and Serenus a series of examples that challenge their way of
thinking about fiction and reality: a butterfly that mimics a leaf; a drop
of chloroform that acts like a hungry beast; musically vibrated sand
that translates sound into spatial patterns; ice crystals that imitate live
fronds, grasses, and flower blossoms; and a crystal garden »grown«
from the sandy bottom of a water-filled vessel.
The water crystals, which both Leverkühn and Kuckuck refer to as
»Eisblumen,« are the occasion of a commentary on the reciprocity of
imitation. Zeitblom recalls the scene at some length:

Bildeten, so lautete seine Frage, diese Phantasmagorien die Formen des Ve-
getativen vor, oder bildeten sie sie nacht Keines von beidem, erwiderte er
wohl sich selbst; es waren Parallelbildungen. Die schöpferisch träumende
Natur träumte hier und dort dasselbe, und durfte von Nachahmung die Rede
sein, so gewiß nur von wechselseitiger. Sollte man die wirklichen Kinder der

10
For a useful summary of the epistemological model that the eighteenth centu-
ry inherited see Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding. The Collective Use
and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp.
13-25. For a critique of the notion of the philosophical subject see Martin
Heidegger, »Die Zeit des Weltbildes,« in his Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe, Abt.
I, Bd. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), pp. 75-113; Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973); and Karl Popper, »Epistemology Without a Kno-
wing Subject,« in his Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach (Lon-
don: Oxford, 1972), pp. 106-152. It is no doubt very significant that as un-
likely a trio as Popper, Heidegger and Foucault can at least in principle agree
upon this point.

143
 Flur als die Vorbilder hinstellen, weil sie organische Tiefenwirklichkeit be-
saßen, die Eisblumen aber bloße Erscheinungen waren? Aber ihre Erschei-
nung war das Ergebnis keiner geringeren Komplizierheit stofflichen Zusam-
menspiels als diejenige der Pflanzen. Verstand ich unseren Gastfreund recht,
so war, was ihn beschäftigte, die Einheit der belebten und der sogenannten
unbelebten Natur, es war der Gedanke, daß wir uns an dieser versündigen,
wenn wir die Grenze zwischen beiden Gebieten allzu scharf ziehen, da sie
doch in Wirklichkeit durchlässig ist und es eigentlich keine elementare Fä-
higkeit gibt, die durchaus den Lebewesen vorbehalten wäre, und die nicht der
Biologe auch am unbelebten Modell studieren könnte. (29)

This tantalizing ambiguity between imitation and intimation is not re-

solvable, because each of the two - recapitulation and precapitulation -
arises from a deeper unity. The principle of creativity that generated
and governs organic nature also generates and governs anorganic na-
ture. Animate and inanimate phenomena, as old Leverkühn rightly
perceives, are rooted in common ground. The boundary between them
is uncertain, determined more by habits of classification than by incon-
trovertible fact.
Zeitblom finds the ice flowers unsettling enough, but old Lever-
kühn's crystal garden is even more chilling. This garden is a crystalline
landscape cultivated in a jar. When Jonathan asks the boys what they
think of the jar's contents, they reply that the little structures seem to
be plants. Jonathan points out that they only look like plants and adds
significantly that these imitations are not less remarkable for appearing
to be of a second-order reality, mere copies. The butterfly that copies a
leaf cannot fill the niche in the ecosystem that the leaf fills, but it does
fill its own proper niche. The reality of an >imitation< is of an order
equal to but not identical with the supposed >original.<
But when the butterflies' game of imitation extends to anorganic
nature it takes on sinister connotations. The chemical crystals in old
Leverkühn's garden seem demonic and unholy to Zeitblom, and even
Jonathan Leverkühn is ill at ease with them. In contrast to his father
and his friend, Adrian reacts to this play of similitudes with an odd
mirth. The beautiful garden both attracts and repels old Leverkühn,
who finally reaches the tearful conclusion: »Und dabei sind sie tot«
(32). Zeitblom, the novel's die-hard traditionalist, retreats from the gar-
den in sanctimonious indignation, retiring into the security of his faith
in humanistic values: »Gespenstereien wie diese sind ausschließlich die
Sache der N a t u r . . . . Im würdigen Reich der Humaniora ist man sicher
vor solchem Spuk« (32). But Zeitblom is not as secure from this sort of
sorcery as he thinks he is. What Zeitblom cannot recognize is that he
himself is in a crystal garden. Old Leverkühn's demonstrations fold
back on the novel self-referentially to reveal the lifelike simulacra who

144
speak and act in it for what they really are: »Spuk« and »Gespen-
stereien« that belong squarely in the noble realm of the Humaniora.
The novelist, camouflaged here momentarily as old Leverkühn, has
grown a real-seeming garden of words and tropes inside a vessel from
which they cannot escape. Should the reader of a novel shed a tear -
like Jonathan Leverkühn - because the figures in the vessel behind the
glass are not real people, because they are »dead?« Adrian, for one,
does not share the »humanism« of his father and his friend. As tears
well up in old Leverkühn's eyes and as Serenus recoils in disgust,
Adrian has to choke back his amusement, presumably at their anthro-
pomorphic sentimentalism. When viewed from within Zeitblom's
frame of reference, this laughter has a pathological note in it, and since
he is our narrator we are compelled to accept his view, at least provi-
sionally. Adrian rejects their anthropocentricity, and the tension be-
tween his post-nihilist anthropology and Zeitblom's conservative hu-
manism informs much of the rest of the novel.
Zeitblom and Leverkühn share a love for art, yet it is also this com-
mon territory upon which they are divided from one another, as be-
tween the humaniora and the elementa. For Zeitblom, art is the fruit of
culture; it is that which separates man from the beasts and from soul-
less, inanimate nature. Like his father before him and like Dr. Faustus
of the 1587 chapbook, Adrian is a speculator of the elements. He
pursues the implications of his father's nature mysticism to their up-
permost and nethermost reaches. Old Leverkühn's comments - or
rather his questions - concerning the games of imitation between but-
terflies and leaves lend a sharp relief to the difference between Adrian
and Serenus. >»Wie hat das Tier das gemacht? . . . Wie macht es die
Natur durch das Tier? Denn dessen eigener Beobachtung kann man
den Trick unmöglich zuschreiben... . Ich frage das euch, damit nicht
gar ihr mich danach fragt.«< (24). This open question is set also to the
reader of the novel. How is it that a butterfly can imitate a leaf? How is
it that lifeless crystals imitate living plants? How is it that a few words
and letters printed on a page are able to contain deathless images, pene-
trating thoughts, and entire worlds of laughing, crying, living people?
The central point, which is implied in old Leverkühn's puzzlement at
nature's impostors and is kept alive in his unanswered questions to the
boys, is the relationship between art and life, culture and nature. The
butterfly does not »know« how to imitate a leaf, as the old speculator
surmised, but nature does »know« how to bring about this ingenious bit
of mimetic artistry. According to this line of logic, the artistry of a
human being is only secondarily the product of individual genius in the
form of personal subjectivity. It is primarily the voice of a deeper uni-

145
tary field that speaks through man and nature alike, through the speak-
ing poet, through the mimicking insect.
Anthropocentric humanism fails to situate the phenomenon of con-
sciousness properly. It is first and foremost the expression of a holo-
nomic principle that underlies it and all other creative phenomena. The
conventional duality of mind and nature is misleading, for each of the
two is grounded in the nourishing soil of a deeper authority, the au-
thority of imagination. In my unconventional use of the word >imagi-
nation< there remains little of its meaning in ordinary usage. It is not
the discrete faculty of individual or even collective subjectivity in the
sense of psychology or of the brain's circuitry. Imagination is to be
understood here as a fundamental principle of the selective, stochastic
process of transformation that governs the future-oriented creativity of
image-making in man and nature. The individual, no matter whether it
is a butterfly pretending to be a leaf or a storyteller creating the illusion
of people and deeds, is the instrument and not the instigator of this
process. In both nature and culture imitation functions doubly as the
recapitulation of what has been and the prefiguration of what is to be.
For the present it is important only to note that from the outset of
Doktor Faustus, or at least from Chapter III, the novel presents a ques-
tion. This question poses itself in an ironical motion of self-reference,
and it concerns the interrelatedness of the mechanisms of imitation in
nature and culture. It is a query of the most authentic sort because it
does not come with a ready-made answer, but is formulated as an in-
vitation to active thinking. The voice of the novel, speaking now
through Jonathan Leverkühn, responds to the question in a way that
shifts the burden of thought onto the shoulders of the reader: »Ich
frage das euch, damit nicht gar ihr mich danach fragt.«

II
Doktor Faustus contains in discernable form a remarkable amount of
German history and biography, and the traditions of Western philos-
ophy, music and literature shape its contents to an equally remarkable
degree. The elegance and compression of the deftly interwoven threads
of fact and fabulation are interesting in their own right, and scholars
have examined its warp and woof in considerable detail." Source hunt-
11
Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Manns »Doktor Faustus«: Untersuchungen zu den
Quellen and zur Struktur des Romans, Studia Litterarum Upsaliensa, 3
(Stockholm: Svenska, 1963); Liselotte Voss, Die Entstehung von Thomas
Manns Roman »Doktor Faustus.« Dargestellt anhand von unveröffentlichten
Vorarbeiten, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 39 (Tübingen: Niemeyer,

146
ers, allusion scalpers, and theory skinners find themselves on a hunt-
ing preserve of special abundance. And the sportive Thomas Mann, a
gamekeeper who enjoys a good chase, was friendly enough to write a
guide to good hunting on his preserve.
Die Entstehung des »Doktor Faustus.« Roman eines Romans records
among other things the author's various readings during the period he
was at work on the novel. His account reads as if it were a simple
autobiographical record but it is actually shrewd in its artful inclusions
and exclusions. For instance, he notes in passing that »Stevensons Mei-
sterstück Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde« belonged to the readings that made
an impression on him during the period when the as yet inchoate novel
began to occupy his mind (692). Stevenson's tale is of course the classic
example of dedoublement in the history of the novel. It is the story of
two men who are actually inverse reflections of the same man. A sim-
ilar mode of antithetical pairing is the cornerstone of Doktor Faustus.
Zeitblom and Leverkühn are inverse doubles of each other, covertly
parodistic enfigurations of opposing Jekyll-and-Hyde poles: the good
and kindly Dr. Zeitblom vs. the mad and raging genius Mr. Leverkühn.
But the doubling only begins here. Zeitblom is also a conspicuous
double for the traditional narrator and latter-day Erasmus to Lever-
kühn's Luther; and Leverkühn also echoes the lives of Faust, Nietzsche,
Hugo Wolf, and Judas; the artist manque Schildknapp, whose eyes are
an eerie repetition of Adrian's, is a negative reflection of the true artist
in Leverkühn; the limping Dozent Schleppfuß, the stuttering Herr
Kretzschmar, and Adrian's Leipzig tourguide are mirrors to his Me-
phisto - and their infirmities prefigure the paralysis that will eventually
overtake him; the flowers of the crystal garden imitate in diabolical
mummery their animate counterparts; Frau von Tolna doubles Es-
merelda, who also doubles as a butterfly and a musical motif; the land-
scape, circumstances, and even the people of Adrian's adult home at
Pfeiffering resemble in uncanny detail those of his childhood home at
the Buchelhof near Kaisersaschern. The novel's system of interior
reflections and exterior allusions is unusually complex, but there is one
in particular that should not go unnoticed.
At the beginning of the last chapter I suggested that the protagonist-
pair in Doktor Faustus are contemporary variants of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. The composer Leverkühn is a demonic Quixote, out of

1975); T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann. The Uses of Tradition (London: Oxford,

1974), pp. 360-402; J.P. Stern, History and Allegory in Thomas Mann's »Dok-
tor Faustus«., An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London
1 March 1973 (London: Η. K. Lewis, 1975), cited as Stern.

147
step with his time, bent on an improbable quest, and dedicated to his
true Dulcinea. She is Esmerelda, and she appears in various guises, now
a diseased whore, now an elusive butterfly, or again as a haunting motif
borne through the whole of Leverkühn's composition like a flower pet-
al on the wind. In her Faustian persona she is the fabulous concubine
Helena, the most beautiful hetare of them all. As Faustus, Leverkühn
must have his Famulus Wagner, and as Quixote he needs a squire. The
figures of the professorial drudge and the sententious peasant are
blended wonderfully in Serenus Zeitblom. His slightly preposterous
name is a clue to the mixture of playfulness and seriousness with which
he ought to be regarded. Literally it means something like >blossom of
the serene age.< The age at issue is that of humanism, and its flower is
the mandarin intellectual who is dedicated to the values and ideals that
have dominated the Western way of thinking since the Renaissance.
This fastidiously erudite man of culture has supplanted the crusty peas-
ant of the Quixote and the stuffy pedant of Faust, but the role remains
the same. Sancho in Don Quixote, Wagner in Faust, and Zeitblom in
Mann's novel are the carriers of average reality in their respective times
and places. In each of the three masterworks, the main protagonists
challenge the prevailing standards of reality. Each takes upon himself a
quixotic mission that destines him for acts of madness and criminality
that are made bearable by irony and humor.

Even though Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are worlds apart as
individuals, they appear in the novel and in our memories as an insep-
arable pair. One without the other is unthinkable because the real ac-
tion of the novel arises from the contrasting but complementary points
of view that they express. They are Jekyll-and-Hyde inverted images of
each other: the staunchly average man and his >mad< alter ego. The
sturdy conservative's sure grip on reality counterbalances the visiona-
ry's subversive madness. Zeitblom and Leverkühn are opposed yet in-
separable doubles caught in the same dynamic counterpoise. Between
these two positions is an interstice that offers itself as a stage upon
which the act of interpretation can play itself out.
The first position is that of Serenus Zeitblom, who begins his long
reminiscence with an ironic assertion. In the novel's first sentence, he
thrusts himself into the foreground of his narrative to assert that he has
no desire to thrust himself into the foreground of the narrative. He
makes himself conspicuous from the very beginning and dominates the
narrated world until the end.12 With very few exceptions his point of
12
On Zeitblom's structural role see Margit Henning, Die Ich-Form und ihre
Funktion in Thomas Manns »Doktor Faustus« und in der deutschen Literatur
der Gegenwart, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 2 (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1966).

148
view determines that of the reader. His overstated eloquence, the se-
crets that the author keeps from him, and his repeated insistence that
he is not writing a novel are some of the ways in which his domination
is ironized and undermined.
By way of explaining Zeitblom's presence and role in the novel, Tho-
mas Mann writes in Die Entstehung that he cannot recall when he first
thought of introducing him into the story. But he does point out that his
sense of parody as well as the need for irony and humor were decisive
factors: »Gewiß hatte die Erinnerung an die parodistische Auto-
biographie Felix Krulls dabei mitgewirkt, und überdies war die Maß-
nahme bitter notwendig, um eine gewisse Durchheiterung des düsteren
Stoffes zu erzielen und mir selbst, wie dem Leser, seine Erschrecknisse
erträglich zu machen« (700). Parodie autobiography has become the
parody of a biography; and the serio-comic figure of the narrator-
biographer introduces an element of irony and understated humor that
help to create some aesthetic distance between the grim events depicted
and the emotional plane that the author and reader inhabit.
By introducing an observer into the field of observation Mann has
opened his writing to a dimension that at best had only been implied in
Buddenbrooks or Der Zauberberg. In his Schlafwandler, Hermann
Broch had similarly interposed an obtrusive narrator between the read-
er and the story, and had given this practice a careful theoretical just-
ification in his essay »James Joyce und die Gegenwart« (1936).13 There
is no reason to believe that Broch's theory influenced Thomas Mann.
Nevertheless, what matters here is that the presence of the storyteller in
the story has been stock-in-trade for the self-conscious novelist since
Cervantes and Sterne. It is the earmark of the greater tradition to which
both Broch and Mann belong. Old Zeitblom seems aware of his place in
this tradition - ironically of course - when in the course of his narra-
tion he likens himself to Laurence Sterne (97).
Zeitblom's presence in the work renders the narrator, which in
Mann's earlier work had only been an invisible voice, into a known
quantity. No longer is the narrative point of view an Archimedean
point located at some vantage outside of the narrated world. It has
become a character with its own history, its own intellectual commit-
ments, beliefs, prejudices, and limitations. This figure makes distinct
the line of division that always exists between the empirical author of a
fiction and the voice that speaks from within the fiction itself during its

13
Hermann Broch, »James Joyce und die Gegenwart,« in his Schriften zur Li-
teratur 1, Kritik, Kommentierte Werkausgabe, hrsg. v. Paul Michael Lützeler,
vol. IX/1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 63-95.

149
real life in its own history, as opposed to the interpretation its author
might give it. Thomas Mann is not Zeitblom, even though he may bear
various traits that match our perception of the author. Zeitblom is more
of a working hypothesis, a judgmental point of view from which the
action of the story unfolds, as well as a full-fledged actor in the cast of
characters. The introduction of the observer into the sphere of obser-
vation is a gesture of renunciation on the part of the author. Rather
than exploit the traditional privilege of the realist author-narrator, i.e.
the right to impose authoritative views and judgments, this author has
merged with the novel as whole to become a function of its pronounce-
ments. Mann has absented himself as a external point of reference and
left in his place a hermeneutical configuration that is open to the act of
imaginative, affective, and critically intelligent reading. 14
In the hermeneutical configuration of Doktor Faustus, Zeitblom
holds a place from which reality and its provisional borderlines are
marked out. His voice is that of tradition, and it is he who eloquently
reaffirms and reinforces the generally acknowledged versions of the
Good, the True and the Beautiful. His point of view is that of the
bourgeois humanist and enlightened liberal. Dr. phil. Serenus Zeitblom
presents himself as a man of finely honed intellect and critical discrim-
ination; he has cultivated his aesthetic sensibilities yet has not indulged
them to excess nor allowed them to become overripe; by profession he
is an educator of the young, and his fields are Latin, Greek, and His-
tory; he advocates an ideal of mankind that is based upon the concept
of individualism and the liberal values associated with it: freedom,
truth, progress, right, and reason. For Zeitblom, the sum of these values
is the occidental achievement in art and letters and their reflection in
human affairs in the form of political, social, and religious institutions.
It is significant that Zeitblom composes the German libretto for Lever-
kühn's version of Love's Labour's Lost, for the humanist's labor of love
has truly been lost. In two lacerating World Wars the meliorist tradi-
tion, its eternal verities, and its human values come crashing down
around Zeitblom's horrified ears:

Das Gefühl, daß eine Epoche sich endigte, die nicht nur das neunzehnte
Jahrhundert umfaßte, sondern zurückreichte bis zum Ausgang des Mittelal-
ters, bis zur Sprengung scholastischer Bindungen, zur Emanzipation des In-
dividuums, der Geburt der Freiheit, eine Epoche, die ich recht eigentlich als
die meiner weiteren geistigen Heimat zu betrachten hatte, kurzum, die Epo-

14
Hans Mayer notes a similar point in Felix Krull. Η. M., »Felix Krull und
Oskar Matzerath. Aspekte des Romans,« in his Das Geschehen und das
Schweigen. Aspekte der Literatur, edition suhrkamp, 342 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), pp. 35-67, esp. 56f.

150
 che des bürgerlichen Humanismus; - das Gefühl, sage ich, daß ihre Stunde
geschlagen hatte, eine Mutation des Lebens sich vollziehen, die Welt in ein
neues, noch namenloses Sternzeichen treten wollte, - dieses zu höchstem
Aufhorchen anhaltende Gefühl war zwar nicht erst das Erzeugnis des
Kriegsendes, es war schon das seines Ausbruchs, vierzehn Jahre nach der
Jahrhundertwende, gewesen und hatte der Erschütterung, der Schicksals-
ergriffenheit zum Grunde gelegen, die meinesgleichen damals erfahren hatte.
(468f)

Have the humanists, the teachers of mankind not only in Germany but
in all of the West, simply failed to live up to their obligations, or could
it be that Humanism contained within itself the seeds of its own even-
tual destruction? In Chapter XXXIV Zeitblom argues that the intellec-
tuals of his day, with Georges Sorel leading the pack of renegades, have
betrayed the ideals of humanism and turned jubilantly to barbarism,
violence, and mere chaos. The Kridwiß Circle of Munich intellectuals
spouts a Sorelian philosophy »der Gewalt, der Autorität und der Glau-
bensdiktatur« that illustrates Zeitblom's critique (485). These avant-
garde analysts of culture, in a spasm of reaction to the evident failure of
humanism, have only turned the values of tradition upside down. Their
fashionably mannered pessimism revels merrily in its own smug and
sterile nihilism, pointing the way to fascism. It is perhaps their una-
bashed delight in gloom and destruction that unsettles Zeitblom most
of all. Like him, they are students of the humaniora, but their interest
in knowledge has shriveled up into an unregenerate »academism« that
is a correlate of the aestheticism that flourished at the same time. Their
advocation of power and violence is not the reflection of a desire to
recover an old order or even to begin a new one. They are interested in
the regime of learning for its own sake because it enhances feelings of
aloof superiority. Their diagnostic pronouncements on the diseased
culture of Europe are an exercise in nihilistic self-absorption, a narcis-
sistic pose, a hyper-intellectual expression of impotence and despair.
Still, it is not the effete literati alone who are filled with the sense of
an ending. Zeitblom himself feels and even embodies the exhaustion of
humanism. He is by natural disposition and profession an educator. By
the same token, humanism has been the mentor of the West in general,
and perhaps of Germany in particular. Zeitblom's personal failure as
an Erzieher dovetails lamentably with the inability of the doctrines and
institutions of humnanist culture to prevent the rise of totalitarian bes-
tiality in the modern era: Zeitblom has no doubt whatsoever that his
own sons would turn him over to the Nazi authorities if they were to
discover his true political sentiments. Zeitblom's failure to pass on his
values to his children marks the failure of the tradition in general. He
feels morally obliged to withdraw from the teaching profession as he

151
witnesses the rise of National Socialism in his civilized, cultivated
homeland, and even after the final defeat of the oppressors, Zeitblom
senses that his ideals are out of step and out of place:
Werde ich wieder einer humanistischen Prima den Kulturgedanken ans Herz
legen, in welchem Ehrfurcht vor den Gottheiten der Tiefe mit dem sittlichen
Kult olympischer Vernunft und Klarheit zu einer Frömmigkeit verschmilzt?
Aber ach, ich fürchte, in dieser wilden Dekade ist ein Geschlecht herange-
wachsen, das meine Sprache sowenig versteht wie ich die seine, ich fürchte,
die Jugend meines Landes ist mir zu fremd geworden, als daß ich ihr Lehrer
sein könnte . . . . (669)

It is true that the decadent humanists of the Kridwiß variety betrayed

the very ideals that had given rise to their way of life. But it is also true
that a humanist of authentic conviction and moral intelligence such as
Zeitblom turned out to be powerless to prevent or oppose the malignant
growth of political aggression and terror. This state of affairs suggests
that the real problem lies deeper than a betrayal of timeless ideals, that
there is in humanism itself a hidden flaw. If this is the case, then there
must be some position beyond the customary alternatives, either hu-
manism or brutal, insensate barbarism.
Leverkühn moves in a direction that leads beyond the helpless hu-
manism of Zeitblom and beyond the perverse nihilism of the Kridwiß
Circle. What makes him different from them is his eccentric sense of
humankind's place in the order of the world. Zeitblom's image of man
is classically humanistic. It attaches prime importance to the unique-
ness of man and to the absoluteness of human values (63). Historically,
the birth of Homo humanus at the dawn of modernity coincides with
the >discovery< of Culture and Nature, which in turn gives rise, respec-
tively, to the Humanities and to the Scientific Revolution. In his es-
sence man has suddenly become more than a natural being in the world
among other natural beings. Now he is the creator, preserver, and pro-
duct of culture, the subject of values, the master and perceiver of soul-
less nature. The natural world becomes the object of precise investiga-
tion because as mere material it can be weighed, measured, counted and
otherwise quantitatively analyzed. Its subjective analyzer, the scientist-
investigator with the immaterial essence of mind, stands above and
beyond the merely natural in a position of sovereign objectivity.
Zeitblom repeatedly avows his distaste for the natural world and
defends the innate superiority of the »lettered-humane,« the »Sprach-
lich-Humane.« »>Es ist dem Menschen natürliche sagte Goethe, >sich
als das Ziel der Schöpfung zu betrachten, und alle übrigen Dinge nur in
bezug auf sich, und insofern sie ihm dienen und nützen.<«15 The poet's
15
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines

152
comment to his secretary is symptomatic for modernity's prevailing
notion of man's place in the world. Zeitblom's humanism is full of the
Goethean spirit of a benevolent Faustian domination. It underlies even
the counterhumanism of the poseurs in the Kridwiß Circle. Salon poet
Daniel zur Höhe's marauding hero »Christus imperator maximus« is
an all-too-accurate caricature of the Faustian will to power run amok.
Indeed, these drawing-room thinkers openly advocate violence and bar-
barism as an alternative to the vitiated present. But their bogus philo-
sophy is only the shadow cast by traditional humanism. Its fundamental
point of reference remains man and his dominion over the earth, a
dominion that extends to nationalistic aggression and man's domina-
tion of man. This concept of humankind as the subject of power - no
matter whether it comes in the form of traditional individualism or
quasi-radical collectivism - is common to humanist and counterhuman-
ist alike.
Leverkühn's response to the natural world is a clue to his subtle
movement towards a post-nihilistic view of man. Early in the novel
Adrian evinces an affinity for the elementa that sets him apart from his
childhood companion. In his contrasting commitment to the humani-
ora, Zeitblom peremptorily dismisses Jonathan Leverkühn's crystal
garden as mere »Spuk« and »Gespenstereien.« In Chapter XXVII this
thematic opposition resurfaces when Zeitblom is a skeptical audience to
Leverkühn's reflections on the elementa. Their point of departure is
Klopstock's ode »Frühlingsfeyer,« which Adrian has set to music. It is
of particular interest to him because of the mysticism of its »Tropfen
am Eimer« strophe, in which art, nature, and religious humility are
thought to converge. Zeitblom recollects that in those days his friend
was preoccupied with questions of nature and the cosmos, a topic con-
cerning which their opinions were very much at a cross-grain.
Adrian's sympathy for the abyss takes a literal form in his playful
enthusiasm for the creatures of the ocean's nethermost depths and for
the celestial vastness of galactic expanses. Zeitblom recalls that Lever-
kühn enjoyed teasing him with his philosophical »speculations:« »denn
er kannte wohl meine bis zur Abneigung gehende Interesselosigkeit an
den Faxen und Geheimnissen des Natürlichen, an >Natur< überhaupt,
und an meine Anhänglichkeit an die Sphäre des Sprachlich-Humanen«
(358). The humanist objects that nature's deep-sea grotesqueries as well
as the exponential »Zahlenspuk« of astrophysical time and space are
not religiously productive nor otherwise relevant to the essence of man.

Lebens, hrsg. v. Η. Η. Houben (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1959), p. 348. The

entry is dated 20 February, 1831.

153
Such dalliance with the immeasurable and the nonhuman, thinks Zeit-
blom, can give no nourishment to authentic piety:

Frömmigkeit, Ehrfurcht, seelischer Anstand, Religiosität sind nur über den

Menschen und durch den Menschen, in der Beschränkung auf das Irdisch-
Menschliche möglich. Ihre Frucht sollte, kann und wird ein religiös tingierter
Humanismus sein, bestimmt von dem Gefühl für das transzendente Geheim-
nis des Menschen, von dem stolzen Bewußtsein, daß er kein bloß biologisches
Wesen ist, sondern mit einem entscheidenden Teil seines Wesens einer gei-
stigen Welt angehört; daß ihm das Absolute gegeben ist, die Gedanken der
Wahrheit, der Freiheit, der Gerechtigkeit, daß ihm der Verpflichtung aufer-
legt ist zur Annäherung an das Vollkommene. In diesem Pathos, dieser Ver-
pflichtung, dieser Ehrfurcht des Menschen vor sich selbst ist Gott; in hundert
Milliarden Milchstraßen kann ich ihn nicht finden. (363)

Zeitblom takes seriously and literally the dictum that man is the meas-
ure of all things. Whatever lies beyond the precincts of H o m o humanus
recedes into irrelevance, and since m a n »ist kein bloß biologisches We-
sen,« it must be that his natural part is somehow exterior to his truer
essence. The spiritual part - a subjective egoism - is reified in Culture,
the apogee of human achievement in contradistinction to the » F a x e n «
of mindless nature.
If Zeitblom sounds the clarion of human nature, then it is fair to say
that Leverkühn is an advocate of h u m a n nature. He replies to his hu-
manistic alter ego:

»So bist du gegen die Werke,« antwortete er, »und gegen die physische Natur,
der der Mensch entstammt und mit ihm sein Geistiges, das sich am Ende
auch noch an anderen Orten des Kosmos findet. Die physische Schöpfung,
dieses dir ärgerliche Ungeheuer von Weltveranstaltung, ist unstreitig die Vor-
aussetzung für das Moralische, ohne die es keinen Boden hätte, und vielleicht
muß man das Gute die Blüte des Bösen nennen - une fleur du mal. Dein
Homo Dei ist doch schließlich - oder nicht schließlich, ich bitte um Ent-
schuldigung, aber vor allem einmal - ein Stück scheußlicher Natur mit einem
nicht gerade freigebig zugemessenen Quantum potentieller Vergeistigung.
Übrigens ist es amüsant zu sehen, wie sehr dein Humanismus, und wohl aller
Humanismus, zum Mittelalterlich-Geozentrischen neigt, - mit Notwendig-
keit offenbar. Populärerweise hält man den Humanismus für wissenschafts-
freundlich; aber er kann es nicht sein, denn man kann nicht die Gegenstände
der Wissenschaft für Teufelswerk erachten, ohne auch in ihr selbst derglei-
chen zu sehen. Das ist Mittelalter. Das Mittelalter war geozentrisch und an-
thropozentrisch. Die Kirche in der es überlebte, hat sich gegen die astrono-
mischen Erkenntnisse im humanistischen Geist zur Wehr gesetzt, hat sie
verteufelt und verboten zu Ehren des Menschen, hat auf Unwissenheit be-
standen aus Humanität. Du siehst, dein Humanismus ist reines Mittelalter.«
(363 f)

Leverkühn is vaunting the priority of nature as the ultimate source of

all things physical and spiritual. His objection to Zeitblom's humanism

154
pivots on two hinges: the ethical and the anthropological. In suggesting
that the ethical is rooted in nature, Adrian varies a theme learned from
his mephistophelean theology professor in Halle. The demonologically
informed Privatdozent Eberhard Schleppfuß - the sign of the cloven
hoof survives here as an onomastic residue - taught that good and evil
are the twin siblings of natural creation, that each depends on its op-
posed complement for reality and meaning. The good becomes a Bau-
delairean »fleur du mal« because it is anchored in demonic nature,
inextricably intertwined with its counterpart. This flower image is a
variation on the »Eisblumen« theme, a renewed evocation of the anor-
ganic fleurs du mal in Jonathan Leverkühn's crystal garden. The im-
plication is that the hand of art and contrivance somehow plays a role
in the ecology of good and evil. A vague interrelationship between art,
nature, and ethics is showing its blurry outline.
Adrian's attitude toward the reciprocity of the sacred and the de-
monic will help to sharpen the edges of this outline. At his sister's
wedding, unsentimental Adrian contends to Zeitblom that the bour-
geois sacrament of matrimony is a way of artificially containing within
socially productive boundaries the violent passion of lust. This domes-
tication of demonic eros could be regarded as une fleur du mal. The
artifice of ecclesiastical ritual has the power to transform animal lust
into the holy bond of connubial piety: the demonic passes over into the
sacred, which means also that there always exists the immanent danger
that evil can explode from its confines.
The proper place of art, according to Leverkühn, is in the service of
the ecology of good and evil, straining against chaos, effecting the trans-
formation of the demonic into the sacred. Zeitblom seems to hold a
similar view: »oft habe ich.. .meinen Primanern vom Katheder herab
erklärt, daß Kultur recht eigentlich die fromme und ordnende, ich
möchte sagen, begütigende Einbeziehung des Nächtig-Ungeheueren in
den Kultus der Götter ist« (17). But the agreement is only apparent.
Zeitblom's pompous condescension - »vom Katheder herab« - gives
him away. Art as »Kultur« is an art that has become a humanistic end
in itself, that has denied its roots in nature and so has robbed itself of
the vitality it needs to contain »das Nächtig-Ungeheuere.« The exhaus-
tion of modern art reflects the failure and end of certain humanistic
presuppositions. For instance, art that sentimentalizes nature, that re-
fashions it into the image of bourgeois liberal ideals, that fails to me-
diate it in its ethically ambivalent truth is destined for crisis: »Das
Werk! Es ist Trug. Es ist etwas, wovon der Bürger möchte, es gäbe das
noch. Es ist gegen die Wahrheit und gegen den Ernst« (241). Adrian
protests that art must reveal truth, and that when it becomes a function

155
of h i g h - m i n d e d self-deception in an era of d i r e need, such a n art be-
c o m e s an ethical liability.

—und nun fragt es sich, ob bei dem heutigen Stande unseres Bewußtseins,
unserer Erkenntnis, unseres Wahrheitssinnes dieses Spiel noch erlaubt, noch
geistig möglich, noch ernst zu nehmen ist, ob das Werk als solches, das selbst-
genügsam und harmonisch in sich geschlossene Gebilde, noch in irgendeiner
legitimen Relation steht zu der völligen Unsicherheit, Problematik und Har-
monielosigkeit unserer gesellschaftlichen Zustände, ob nicht aller Schein,
auch der schönste, heute zur Lüge geworden ist. (241)

T h i s d e g e n e r a t i o n f r o m t h e aesthetic p l e n i t u d e of Schein to t h e m o r a l
poverty of Lüge stands in direct relation to art's f o r m a l self-indulgence,
its t e n d e n c y to allow originality to ossify a n d endlessly rehearse its past
successes according to the p a t t e r n s of its conventions. O n l y irony a n d
p a r o d y r e m a i n as intellectually honest f o r m a l possibilities.
T h e similarity of M a n n ' s A d r i a n to Musil's Ulrich on this c o u n t is
w o r t h noting. Each is a w a r e that t h e rules g o v e r n i n g average art a n d
average reality, respectively, are old t r u t h s t h a t h a v e petrified into au-
totelic s c h e m a t a : self-perpetuating c o n v e n t i o n s p r e t e n d i n g to be e t e r n a l
verities. Ulrich would n o d o u b t a p p l a u d A d r i a n ' s critique of m o d e r n
religiosity. T h e » n u m i n o u s chaos« of a u t h e n t i c religious experience has
s u c c u m b e d to the ever increasing secularization of t h e bourgeois
c h u r c h a n d its scientific, h u m a n i s t i c theology (cf. esp. C h a p t e r XIV).
Religion a n d art that d o a d m i t of t h e d e m o n i c lose t o u c h with t h e
sacred as well. E n f e e b l e d , e x h a u s t e d c o n v e n t i o n s of art a n d culture can
n o longer c o n t a i n t h e t e r r o r of the latent evil that will e v e n t u a l l y shat-
ter t h e i r worn-out f r a m e w o r k a n d o v e r p o w e r t h e sleeping h u m a n i s t s .
T h e icy » M a n n o h n e E i g e n s c h a f t e n « in Doktor Faustus refuses to com-
p r o m i s e his sense of the sacred in m u c h t h e s a m e way that his Viennese
c o u n t e r p a r t r e f u s e s to betray his Utopian p u r s u i t of t h e » O t h e r C o n d i -
t i o n « a n d its n u m i n o u s chaos. T h e m e a s u r e of Ulrich's ethical sincerity
is his willingness to flout f i r m l y seated c o n v e n t i o n by e n t e r i n g into a n
incestuous e x p e r i m e n t in mystical u n i o n with his sister. T h e allegorical
m e a s u r e of A d r i a n ' s p r o u d seriousness is his readiness to t a k e on Es-
m e r e l d a ' s fatal disease in t h e interest of regained creativity a n d , ulti-
mately, r e n e w e d health.
Before we e x a m i n e A d r i a n ' s >ethical aesthetic< in greater detail, t h e
second, a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l p r o n g of A d r i a n ' s critique of Z e i t b l o m ' s hu-
m a n i s m r e m a i n s to be considered. For Zeitblom, only m a n a n d t h e
things that have a d e t e r m i n a t e relation to h u m a n n e s s c o m e into the
fullness of being. L e v e r k ü h n likens this subjective egoism to t h e geo-
centric M i d d l e Ages, implying that m o d e r n i t y ' s a n t h r o p o c e n t r i c hu-
m a n i s m is as benighted as p r e c o p e r n i c a n a s t r o n o m y . T h e C a r t e s i a n ego

156
cogito and the transcendental ego of Kantian philosophy are the aca-
demic codification of the man-centered universe. Adrian's cool sym-
pathy for the crystal garden, his unsentimental affinity for the creatures
of the darkest oceanic night and for the incalculable depths of stellar
infinitude mark his rejection of man-the-measure. Zeitblom's dualism
sets man into a position of superior opposition to nature; Leverkiihn's
holism situates man in the midst of nature a m o n g its other essents. T h e
denatured man of h u m a n i s m forfeits his connectedness with the rest of
the world. The unbroken c o n t i n u u m of man and nature is visible in the
potent work of art. For Adrian, the secularization of art, its loss of
cultic resonance, leaves the serious artwork with the burden of an
alienated solemnity, a would-be profundity that discharges its pathos
into a void. It is for this reason he must turn to parody. Yet his irony is
not entirely identical with the cynical fatalism of the Kridwiß Circle.
He insists that this burden of dislocated pathos, of art as »Culture« does
not have to be the fate of art in the future. Zeitblom reports his friend's
position with skepticism: »Was [das Schicksal der Kunst] denn sein
sollte, wußte er nicht zu sagen. Aber daß die Kultur-Idee eine geschicht-
lich transitorische Erscheinung sei; daß sie sich auch wieder in ande-
rem verlieren k ö n n e ; daß ihr nicht notwendig die Z u k u n f t gehöre, die-
sen G e d a n k e n hatte er entschieden aus Kretzschmars Vortrag ausge-
sondert« (82). It is a thought that stays with him. This »Kultur-Idee,«
the secularization of art, and the anthropocentric universe are various
aspects of the same h u m a n i s m that is in the process of collapsing nois-
ily a r o u n d Zeitblom and Leverkühn.
But the humanist is reluctant to give up his time-honored ideals and
objects on ethical grounds to the artist's vague intimations: >»Aber die
A l t e r n a t i v e / warf ich ihm vor, >zur Kultur ist die Barbarei<« (82).
Adrian in his turn refuses to accept Zeitblom's either-or f o r m u l a t i o n :
»Die Barbarei ist das Gegenteil der Kultur doch n u r innerhalb der
G e d a n k e n o r d n u n g , die sie uns an der H a n d gibt« (82). T h e hazy goal of
Leverkühn's quixotic struggle is an ethically viable art that supersedes
the constricting binary opposition Culture/Barbarism. Years later he
gives a clearer picture of his vision:

Die ganze Lebensstimmung der Kunst, glauben Sie mir, wird sich ändern,
und zwar ins Heiter-Bescheidenere, - es ist unvermeidlich, und es ist ein
Glück. Viel melancholische Ambition wird von ihr abfallen und eine neue
Unschuld, ja Harmlosigkeit ihr Teil sein. Die Zukunft wird in ihr, sie selbst
wird wieder in sich die Dienerin sehen an einer Gemeinschaft, die weit mehr
als »Bildung« umfassen und Kultur nicht haben, vielleicht aber sein wird.
Wir stellen es uns nur mit Mühe vor, und doch wird es das geben und wird
das Natürliche sein: eine Kunst ohne Leiden, seelisch gesund, unfeierlich,
untraurig-zutraulich, eine Kunst mit der Menschheit auf du und du . . . . (429)

157
This transport of Utopian faith stands out in its uniqueness. Zeitblom
thinks it out of character with Leverkiihn's more usual chilly pride, but
in this passage the composer has revealed the side of himself that Zeit-
blom cannot see. This artist has an unexpected messianic-quixotic sense
of calling, the yearning for a soul traced out allegorically in his fasci-
nation with Andersen's little mermaid. He has been born into a tradi-
tion whose arteries have hardened. Historical circumstance compels
him to seek a means to resuscitate the vitality of the work of art. It is a
project that requires a fundamental rethinking of man's place in the
world.
The relocation of human being into the natural world is a decisive
factor for Adrian's aesthetic. The nexus between his desophistocated,
>fundamental< art and elemental nature is a special understanding of
mathematics. Its emblem is the »magisches Quadrat« of Dürer's »Me-
lancolia« (125), but it is prefigured as early as Chapter III. Among the
curiosities in Jonathan Leverkiihn's collection of naturalia were exotic
mussels inscribed by nature with a strange »writing.« The marks on the
shell of one particular mussel incite Jonathan and the boys to try to
decipher its message by comparing them with ancient near-eastern
forms of writing. Obviously these attempts can lead to nothing, but the
assumption that leads to these attempts is crucial because it stays with
Adrian. It is the assumption that nature speaks and that its ciphers can
be made intelligible. This »Zeichenschrift« motif later re-emerges as
Adrian's interest in math. Its formative period is during his student
days in Halle under the tutelage of the philosophy professor Nonnen-
macher. His lectures on Pythagorean nature-mysticism and its idea that
number is the primal essence of nature - an essence that also embraces
the domain of the ethical - lay the cornerstone of Leverkiihn's later
theory of musical composition (cf. 126f, 213). It was Pythagoras who
first established the connection between musical harmonies and the
ratio of string lengths, which led him and his disciples to develop a
cosmology based on a religiously conceived notion of arithmetic and
geometry.' 6 The idea of mathematical relations governing the cosmos
16
In this specific instance, Mann's source was likely John Redfield's Music: A
Science and an Art (New York: Knopf, 1926), pp. 67-72, 107, 184. Mann
refers to this work in the Entstehung. But in general he derived much of his
musicological information from Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik.
Adorno's opinions occur sometimes from Zeitblom's perspective and some-
times from Leverkiihn's. Adorno himself decides against Schönberg's twelve-
tone technique of composition because it sacrifices spontaneity to the repres-
sive authority of the system's autotelic rationale: »Die totale Rationalität der
Musik ist ihre totale Organisation. Durch Organisation möchte die befreite
Musik das verlorene Ganze, die verlorene Macht und Verbindlichkeit Beet-

158
has an obvious bearing on Leverkühn's music. The sacred decad of
Pythagorean mysticism is a short step from the twelve-tone chromatic
series that undergirds Leverkühn's technique of composition.
Galileo's optimism that the »Book of Nature« is written in mathe-
matical ciphers, or Leibniz's theory that there is a mathematically pre-
established harmony of the cosmos are thoughts that impend tacitly in
the background of Doktor Faustus. Yet on the whole, this isomorphic
identity of number and nature is a thin place in the novel's otherwise
convincing illusion. The dream of an all-encompassing grammar of
symbolic logic had already been laid to rest a few years before when
Kurt Gödel published his now-famous »Incompleteness Theorem.« His
paper of 1931 proved that even the most powerful mathematical sys-
tems can never be made complete. Like any other language,< mathe-
matical signification is limited by its own interior logic that ultimately
and necessarily ends in self-contradiction. 17 A philosopher of science,
Karl Popper, has argued persuasively that the isomorphic positivity that
has traditionally been attributed to rigorous mathematical descriptions
of nature is a delusion of sorts. A mathematical observation, suggests
Popper, is always only a hypothesis that can exclude the false but that
can never identify the true with absolute positivity. The scientist is like
a navigator in the fog who must steer his craft through narrow shoals.
He makes his calculations and follows them, never knowing with ab-
solute certainty where he is. He knows only that he has not run
aground. The calculations have served their purpose and are to be re-
garded as »true,« or at least as useful, until they can be falsified under
other circumstances. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics have in

hovens wieder herstellen. Das gelingt ihr bloß um den Preis ihrer Freiheit,
und damit mißlingt es. Beethoven hat den Sinn von Tonalität aus subjektiver
Freiheit reproduziert. Die neue Ordnung der Zwölftontechnik löscht virtuell
das Subjekt aus.« (Cf. Zeitblom's critique, pp. 126, 253f.) Perhaps Adorno's
critique of Schönberg is valid, but in the imaginary world of Doktor Faustus,
Adrian Leverkühn - the composer, the author, das Subjekt - also dissolves
into the system, symbolically into madness and death. However, Thomas
Mann's version of the subject's dissolution finally takes on a positive valua-
tion because it signals the »Rekonstruktion des Ausdrucks« when comingled
with the elemental need to articulate sorrow over the loss of little Nepomuk.
This is the difference between Adorno's Schönberg-critique and Mann's pre-
sentation of Leverkühn's achievement: Schönberg's system removes art from
life, whereas Leverkühn's number-magic - because it is unmediated Nature -
returns art to the middle of life. See: Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der
neuen Musik, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 239 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 69-70.
17
Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Göde/'s Proof (New York: New York
University Press, 1958).

159
this sense falsified, or shown the limits of, Newtonian mechanics. Any
map of reality can always only approach isomorphy. 18
Still, all of this niggling does no damage to Doktor Faustus. For the
same reason we are able to believe that carpets can fly in Arabian
Nights, we can also accept mathematics in Doktor Faustus as an un-
mediated transcription of nature. The real point is that Leverkühn be-
lieves he has rediscovered the possibility of artistic expression not as
subjective expression in the sense of Goethe, Beethoven, and human-
ism, but as an expression of man in nature and nature in man, what he
would regard as an »objective« frame of reference. But in point of fact
the terms objective and subjective become superfluous when the barrier
between man and nature has been broken down. Leverkühn's art is not,
as Zeitblom fears, inhuman because man is part of nature. The natural
world, as Leverkühn has pointed out to him, is a condition of the pos-
sibility of ethics. It follows that his aesthetic program is not an »aes-
theticism« but a step toward the recovery of fundamentals. It recog-
nizes good and evil as a part of the world to which man belongs and
that art has a responsibility to them. Leverkühn's culminating work,
the Weheklag Dr. Fausti, is the aesthetically and ethically determined
expression of grief within coordinates set forth by nature herself.
Zeitblom refers to Leverkühn's quest to break through irony into the
fullness of authentic expression as the »Rekonstruktion des Ausdrucks«
(643). Yet before any such renewal can occur there must first be a
clearing of ground. This destructive impulse is a critique of the tradi-
tion that takes the form of ironical imitation. Thus Leverkühn's early
works are parody. They are ironically self-conscious exercises in the
received forms of musical expression. The composer finds himself un-
able to take seriously the threadbare conventions that too many hands
have passed down to him. High culture indulges the formulae of »fine
art« in a ritual of excessively cultivated self-congratulation. When art
becomes the refined pastime of the professional academy and esoteric
cognoscenti, and when its forms become autotelic conventions, values
in themselves, expression loses its ability to seize the demonic and
transmute it into the sacred.
Mann satirizes the impotence of high culture in the grisly scene of
Rudi Schwerdtfeger's murder. The hollow cliches of education and
good breeding are torn apart when the pampered daughter of Besitz und
Bildung, Ines Rodde, pumps five pistol shots into her ex-lover after an
evening at the concert. As the horribly mutilated Rudi lies wounded on

18
Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung, 5. verb. Aufl., Die Einheit der Geistes-
wissenschaften, 4 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1973).

160
the floor of a Munich street car, gurgling red bubbles, Zeitblom and his
humanistic colleague Dr. Kranich stand by in erudite uselessness:
»Was für eine entsetzliche, besinnungslose, unvernünftige Tat!« sagte [Dr.
Kranich], bleichen Angesichts, in seiner klaren, akademisch wohlartikulier-
ten und dabei asmathischen Sprechweise, indem er das Wort »entsetzlich,«
wie man es öfters, auch von Schauspielern, hört, »entsetzlich« aussprach. Er
fügte hinzu, nie habe er mehr bedauert, nicht Mediziner, sondern nur Nu-
mismatiker zu sein, und wirklich erschien mir in diesem Augenblick die
Münzenkunde als die müßigste der Wissenschaften, noch unnützer als die
Philologie, was keineswegs aufrechtzuhalten ist. (596f)

T h e macabre h u m o r of this caricature lies in the u n m a s k i n g of the

humanists' self-deceiving detachment f r o m elemental passion and
death. Dr. Kranich's final appearance in the novel is during another
scene in which demonic evil erupts f r o m its flimsy containment. At the
outbreak of Leverkühn's madness, the wheezy scholar testily announces
his regret that no representative of the »irrenärztliche Wissenschaft«
is on h a n d : »ich, als Numismatiker, fühle mich unzuständig« is his
parting comment. As Leverkühn's madness becomes increasingly ob-
vious during this scene, his cultivated listeners begin to depart in
varying degrees of disgust and distress. Only the uncultivated Frau
Schweige still shows compassion and wisdom where the humanists
have failed.

T h e art of high culture is in a similar state of disaffection f r o m the

f u n d a m e n t a l situation of h u m a n being. Because Adrian has sensed this
estrangement he seeks uneasy refuge in irony and parody. With a prolix
lucidity that is peculiar to him, Zeitblom expresses precisely the nature
of his friend's response to his artistic heritage: »In Wahrheit war hier
das Parodische die stolze A u s k u n f t vor der Sterilität, mit welcher
Skepsis und geistige Schamhaftigkeit, der Sinn f ü r die tödliche Ausdeh-
n u n g des Bereichs des Banalen eine große Begabung bedrohten.« In a
tone of apologetic diffidence and with a touch of irony that is not his
own, Zeitblom adds, »Ich hoffe das richtig zu sagen« (202f). T h e nov-
elist has formulated the biographer's phrasing in a way that calls at-
tention to this key passage. It is the point at which t h e m e and structure
converge.
In order to clarify this intersection it will be helpful to invoke once
again M a r t h e Robert's idea of functional identity: » W h e n imitation
imposes a way of writing on the novelist and a way of living on the
hero, it creates a functional identity between the two similar yet dis-
parate figures that tells us more than any external circumstance about
the true extent of their relation.« 1 9 I have tried in my third chapter to
19
Marthe Robert, The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Franz Kafka,
trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 13.

161
show how Musil's literary problematics are mirrored in Ulrich's prob-
lem of finding a suitably original way of life. In Doktor Faustus this
initial didoublement doubles itself again when the author's literary
problems fall to both of his protagonists. Leverkühn feels doomed to
rehearse endlessly the weary forms and feints of an already exhausted
musical tradition. Self-conscious imitation as a form of criticism is the
only acceptable solution for him. Thomas Mann's problem as a novelist
is identical. In the era of Kafka, Mann's rhetorical elegance and weigh-
ty periods make him a literary dinosaur. This sense of anachronism
materializes in the novel as Serenus Zeitblom, whose formidable learn-
ing and near-comic eloquence belong to another era. It is one of many
ways in which the novel's condition of narrativity is made prominently
visible.
The novel's repertoire of self-conscious devices is large. Mann is both
a master of verisimilitude and a devious hand at subverting the illu-
sions that he has constructed with such care. Adrian's critique of con-
vention is the novel's critique of itself as a conventional construct. Real-
ist assumptions about form and representation can no longer be taken
for granted, and as soon as this insight takes hold of the novel's reader
an extensive array of friendly swindles goes on parade: outlandish
names and caricatured personalities, intentionally overwrought style,
manifold allusions and »citations,« allegories, puzzle games (who is Frau
von Tolna?), and a large number of interpolated narratives that reca-
pitulate and magnify certain aspects of the narrative upon which they
have been superimposed. These devices serve to question the relation-
ship between the narrated world, which is set together from the verbal
odds and ends that convention will allow, and the lived world, which is
always in excess of the stories told about it!
Not the least of Mann's mirrors to the text is its companion novel,
Die Entstehung. Its autobiographical protagonist resembles Leverkühn
when he comments on a real-life lecture delivered by Bruno Franks: »Er
benutzt den humanistischen Erzähl-Stil Zeitbloms vollkommen ernst,
als seinen eigenen. Ich kenne im stilistischen nur noch die Parodie.
Darin nahe bei Joyce...« (716, cf. 741). When Joyce patterns his nar-
rative parodistically on Homer's Odyssey, Thomas Mann rather more
abstractly sets his story into an aesthetically theoretical frame of ref-
erence that the figures construct for themselves. The imaginary char-
acters, especially Leverkühn, Zeitblom, and the devil, constantly talk
about the conditions, assumptions, intentions, forms, failings, and
alienation of modern art. Thomas Mann and James Joyce, each in his
own way, both make the conditions of their novels' reception largely
internal to the novels themselves and completely internal to the novel

162
as a contrivance of tradition and individual imagination. This process
of interior self-replication in Mann's work has prompted Erich Heller's
perceptive observation that the ironic G e r m a n ' s style makes his critic's
task doubly difficult, for it is hard to think a thought about the novel
that it has not already thought about itself. 20
T h e novel is thinking about itself when the devil offers Adrian a
critique of the prevailing assumptions about the representation of reality
in art: »Gewisse Dinge sind nicht mehr möglich. Der Schein der Ge-
f ü h l e als kompositorisches Kunstwerk, der selbstgenügsame Schein der
Musik selbst ist unmöglich geworden und nicht zu halten, - als welcher
seit alters darin besteht, d a ß vorgegebene und f o r m e l h a f t niederge-
schlagene Elemente so eingesetzt werden, als ob sie die unverbrüchli-
che Notwendigkeit dieses einen Falles wären« (321). Composition oc-
curs within the framework of prescriptive formulas, which means that
the rendering of emotion is equally formulaic. The representation of
unique reality turns out to be nothing more than a set of conventions
masquerading as the unmediated record of something that is not actual-
ly susceptible of schematic reconstitution.
T h e unique is by definition exterior to convention. A rupture be-
tween lived life and prescriptive form has opened up in the modern
period. T h e uniqueness of modern experience no longer corresponds to
its supposed image in the art of high culture.
T h e devil views the same crisis of representation f r o m its other an-
gle: »der Sonderfall gibt sich die Miene, als wäre er mit der vorgege-
benen, vertrauten Formel identisch. Seit vierhundert J a h r e n hat alle
große Musik ihr G e n ü g e n darin gefunden, diese Einheit als bruchlos
geleistete vorzutäuschen, - sie hat sich darin gefallen, die konventio-
nelle Allgemeingesetzlichkeit, der sie untersteht, mit ihren eigensten
Anliegen zu verwechseln. Freund, es geht nicht mehr. Die Kritik des
O r n a m e n t s , der Konvention und der abstrakten Allgemeinheit ist ein
und d a s s e l b e . . . . Die Subsumtion des Ausdrucks unters versöhnlich
Allgemeine ist das innerste Prinzip des musikalischen Scheins. Es ist
aus damit. Der Anspruch, das Allgemeine als im Besonderen harmo-
nisch enthalten zu denken, dementiert sich selbst« (321 f). Art deludes
itself w h e n it pretends that the unique instance can assimilate itself to
prefabricated aesthetic categories. Yet since the Renaissance this un-
grounded presupposition has served as a basis for mimetic practices.

20
Heller, p. 277. Gunter Reiß has written a lengthy study of the ways of self-
allegory in Thomas Mann's work as a whole: »Allegorisierung« und moderne
Erzählkunst. Eine Studie zum Werk Thomas Manns (München: Wilhelm
Fink, 1970).

163
The end of humanism in the contemporary era is of a piece with the
crisis of representation that comes with the unmasking of convention.
Formal paradigms of expression have revealed themselves to be ar-
bitrary constructs that are never continuous with the object of.
representation; and the unique object of representation in its solitude is
powerless to create general laws of representation within which to for-
mulate itself as an aesthetic articulation. No matter whether the direc-
tion of motion is from the unique to the paradigmatic or from the
paradigmatic to the unique, the possibility of an undisrupted contin-
uum has been disqualified.
The devil's terminology is a tacit critique of Goethe's favored stra-
tegy of representational rhetoric. Das Allgemeine and das Besondere
are famous watchwords of his conceptual vocabulary. In the Maximen
and Reflexionen he writes: »Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Be-
sondere das Allgemeine repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und Schatten,
sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschli-
chen.«21 This »true symbolism« is a mode of expression that the devil
forbids Adrian and that the critically self-conscious novel denies to
itself: »Es ist aus damit. Der Anspruch, das Allgemeine als im Be-
sonderen harmonisch enthalten zu denken, dementiert sich selbst. Es
ist geschehen um die vorweg und verpflichtend geltenden Konventio-
nen, die die Freiheit des Spiels gewährleisteten« (322). The genius of
unmediated vision, that of a Goethe or a Beethoven, turns out to be the
mediated vision of subliminal convention. The latecomer, unable to
accept the traditional assumptions about »wahre Symbolik« must turn
to the nihilism of parody.
Another passage from Goethe will help to clarify the ideal of
representation that Doktor Faustus rejects. In an 1820 essay on one of
Philostratus's paintings, Goethe defines the symbol as follows:
Es ist die Sache, ohne die Sache zu sein, und doch die Sache; ein im geistigen
Spiegel zusammengezogenes Bild, und doch mit dem Gegenstand identisch.
Wie weit steht dagegen nicht Allegorie zurück; sie ist vielleicht geistreich
witzig, aber doch meist rhetorisch und konventionell und immer besser, je
mehr sie sich demjenigen nähert, was wir Symbol nennen. 22

These Goethean standards consign Thomas Mann - a self-confessed

allegorist, parodist, and ironist - to a purgatory for the »geistreich-

21
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Die Novellen, Die
Maximen und Reflexionen, Gedenkausgabe, hrsg. ν. Ernst Beutler, vol. IX
(Zürich: Artemis, 1949), p. 532.
22
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst, Gedenkausgabe, 2. Aufl.,
hrsg. v. Ernst Beutler, vol. XIII (Zürich: Artemis, 1965), p. 868.

164
witzig.« Unable to share Goethe's faith that the symbol is less »rheto-
rical and conventional« than allegory, Mann practices an art that
thrives on rhetoric and convention as a mode of criticism and self-criti-
cism.
By Thomas Mann's day the sense of emancipation that Goethe had
almost single-handedly brought to German literature had already run
its course. The habits of mind and the conventions of expression that he
set into motion had gradually slowed down and finally hardened into
prescriptive schemata for writing and reading. The notion of a 'natural
genius' who transmutes his inner life - Erlebnis - into objective form
had begun to have the resonance of a cracked plate. 23 The categories of
subjective experience and its objectification had reached a high point
in one sense - the names of Dilthey, Husserl, Mach, Proust, Broch, or
Virginia Woolf come readily to mind - yet the leveling effect of con-
vention worked simultaneously to undermine the possiblity of a poetics
of true interiority.
Joyce is the outstanding example of both tendencies at work against
each other: the stream-of-consciousness >realism< of Bloom's sheer in-
teriority is pitted against an imaginary world that is the baldest con-
trivance of irony and parody that a modern novelist has produced. The
>essayistic< approaches of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann show an
especially high degree of awareness concerning the role that convention
plays, respectively, in human experience and literary creation. They are
skeptical of any claims to an »unmittelbares Anschauen« because they
realize that exterior reality is mediated by subliminal expectations and
assumptions on the part of the individual who is having the Erlebnis.
Moreover, »inner« experience is in no way autonomous or discrete
because, as Musil's persuasive critique in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
has shown, these unrecognized conventions constitute the features of
that experience. Inner experience is a function of conventions that pre-
cede, and are thus exterior to, the individual. In a precisely parallel
process, literary expression proceeds not from within the subject but
imposes itself on experience from the »exteriority« of convention and
tradition.
The privileging of personal subjectivity as an absolute origin is the
hallmark of humanism's anthropocentric aesthetics. Both Leverkühn
and Mann reject this position. Leverkühn turns to his mathematical
nature-mysticism as a solution. Mann is less radical. He is acutely aware

23
For a concise critique of the origins and limits of the aesthetic Erlebnis-con-
cept see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer phi-
losophischen Hermeneutik, 4. Aufl. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975), pp. 39-77.

165
of the burden of tradition and convention on him, and his techniques
of composition bear witness to this awareness. His parodic style as well
as his so-called »Montage-Technik« - what his detractors call plagia-
rism - militate against the interiority of subjective Romanticism. His
writing is not an objectification of his inner being. Thomas Mann is
much more the willing instrument of a tradition that is prior and ex-
terior to his personal individuality. He has at his disposal not an »un-
mittelbares Anschauen« but a great diversity of preformed materials
waiting to be reshaped in the alembic of his magisterial ars combina-
toria (cf. 776). Without a viable concept of the symbol to guarantee the
continuity of the lived world with the literary word, Mann finds it
necessary to rehabilitate the practice of allegorical writing.
Allegory is the mode of representation in which identity yields to
difference. The correlation of the allegorical sign to its signandum is an
arbitrary determination, or »unmotivated« in Benveniste's precise
sense. 24 The allegory is a substitute for the absent and is therefore itself
»other« than that which is represented. Parody and irony are extreme
forms of allegory inasmuch as they are signs that intentionally reveal
themselves as such and consequently deny their ultimate identity with
the object of representation. Indeed, it turns out that the object of
representation of Leverkühn's musical compositions and Mann's lit-
erary ones is not even »the world« but is actually the conventional
forms that have customarily served as the vehicle for represented real-
ity. Leverkühn's parodic explorations of the musical tradition are al-
legories of symbols that do not know they are really only allegories. Yet
he is not satisfied with games that are »geistreich witzig« and feels
himself compelled to discover a means to replenish art as a positive
form of expression.
At this juncture there is a divergence of ways between the writer of
the novel and the protagonist who shares his problem of composition.
Leverkühn manages to break through into renewed creativity beyond

24
At the level of the linguistic sign, de Saussure regards the connection between
a signifier and a signified as arbitrary. Benveniste objects that the signifier-
signified link is in fact logically necessary in the same sense that one side of a
coin presupposes the other. It is the relation between the linguistic sign and
the objective signandum that is arbitrary. In the light of this argumentation
Benveniste proposes that the nature of the sign's interior order is not arbitrary
but »unmotivated.« If Benveniste's argument holds good at the level of the
linguistic sign, then it will also be applicable at a higher level of discourse, i.e.
that of the literary sign. Emile Benveniste, »The Nature of the Linguistic
Sign,« in his Problems in General Linguistics, transl. Mary Elizabeth Meele,
Miami Linguistics Series, 8 (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami
Press, 1971), pp. 43-48.

166
parody and irony, but Mann remains a parodist and ironist to the end
of the novel and to the end of his own career. His final achievement is
his finest parody, Felix Knill. In Doktor Faustus it remains to be seen
whether the >negative< aspect of ironic presentation merely qualifies
the >positive< achievement inside the story, or whether it nullifies it
entirely. The first order of business will be to follow the elaborate trac-
ery of allegorical design in Leverkühn's striving. In particular, the roles
of Esmerelda and Echo are in need of translation into their respective
aesthetic and ethical meanings. The second step will be to discuss the
effects of ironical intention on these meanings.

Ill

The allegorical marker of artistic creativity in Doktor Faustus is eros. It

is the link between amoral nature, its intrinsic power of creation, and
its human manifestations as passion and love. The decisive formulation
of the erotic as a problem in the novel appears as a tale that the de-
monologist Schleppfuß offered in one of his lectures. This anecdote is
one of the many parables by which the novel reproduces itself en
abyme. It is the story of a fifteenth-century cooper named Klöpfgeißel
and his sweetheart, Bärbel (143-47). Because the young man had no
money he was unable to marry Bärbel. But mere economic considera-
tions did not keep them from consummating their union in secret.
However, it happened once that Klöpfgeißel was in a nearby town and
allowed himself to be bullied by co-workers from the coopery into a
visit to a brothel. To his great consternation, when finally in the arms of
an accommodating woman he found himself unable to rise to the oc-
casion. Yet an ensuing visit to Bärbel found him once again in best
form. On still another occasion of potential infidelity, he was once
again dismayed to discover an unaccountable lack of cooperation on his
part. With the aid of a priest experienced in such matters, Klöpfgeißel is
able to reach the obvious conclusion: Bärbel had bewitched him. The
authorities summarily extract a confession from her and burn her at
the stake in order to save her eternal soul from perdition. Pious Klöpf-
geißel watches the grisly execution, secure in the knowledge that her
hideous screams are those of the demon flying out of her. Afterwards
the hexed barrel-maker recovers full control of his natural creative
potential.
The novel's autocommentary in this parable is not subtle. Lever-
kühn, in order to recover the artistic creativity that has been lost to the
artist of his era, will stop at nothing to achieve his ends. His sacrificial
offering, his Bärbel, is little Nepomuk Schneidewein. The prostitute

167
Esmerelda is his diabolical temptress. These simple correspondences
must be examined with care.
Leverkühn's attraction to Esmerelda is overt allegory. She is the per-
sonification of art; a fallen Helena, a new Dulcinea. Once the most
beautiful of all, now she has passed through too many hands, been used
and abused, cruelly reduced to a diseased whore. Leverkühn's love for
her - it is not a base craving, but a deeply sensual love - is a quixotic
gesture in the term's fullest ambiguity, for it is never really clear wheth-
er Don Quixote sees more or less than we do. He knows that Dulcinea
is a coarse peasant girl, yet he holds stubbornly to his vision of her.
Adrian knows that Esmerelda is a whore, yet he sees her in a different
light. A demonic Schleppfuß-double leads him to her in a Leipzig
brothel, where he discovers his fallen angel wrapped in her transparent
butterfly wings, surrounded by glass, glinting crystal, and mirrors.
These reflecting surfaces are the emblems of art. Adrian has found his
way into the crystal garden.
Confused, aroused, suspended between fascination and revulsion at
the voluptuous surroundings, Adrian's erotic energy discharges into a
piano that is standing open in the room. He moves as if by instinct to
the instrument and hammers out his Esmerelda-motif for the first time
- h e a e es - as almond-eyed Esmerelda herself strokes his arm and
cheek. Disoriented and excited, Adrian dashes away from her and
plunges back out into the street. This brief flirtation with eros and crea-
tivity whets his carnal appetite. It draws him inexorably on to consum-
mate his pact with the chthonic forces of creativity that inhere in nature
and have been awakened in him. Adrian returns to Esmerelda a year
later only to discover she has disappeared from Leipzig and retired to
an eastern province of Austria-Hungary. Under the pretense of travel-
ing to Graz for a performance of Salome, he pursues her to Pozsony,
the capital of Slovakia.
He finds her there, syphilitic but convalescent, and makes to her a
declaration of his passionate love. She responds to him in kind with a
loving and sincere warning about her sickness. Adrian goes on to make
love to her in full knowledge of what dangers are in store. His pact with
the devil some years later is a mere formality that raises to conscious-
ness the many implications of the decision he has made.
Zeitblom says that Adrian never sees her again, but he does not know
as much as he thinks he does. Unknown to the narrator, Adrian's but-
terfly-angel undergoes a metamorphosis to re-emerge as the mysterious
Hungarian noblewoman Frau von Tolna. In an adroit bit of riddle-
solving, Victor A. Oswald has showed that the »unsichtbare Figur«
hovering near Adrian - her epithet reminds us of her invisible wings -

168
is in truth the prostitute from Pozsony. 25 »Pozsony« is the Hungarian
name for the Slovakian Bratislava, German Preßburg, which is only
one of the clues that the cagey novelist slips past his dozing narrator.
The association with Hungary is important because Frau von Tolna is
the widow of a Hungarian nobleman famous for his lusty excesses. He
was a man of the uninhibited sort who would be liable to fall in love
with a Dostoyevskian Sonja and marry her. The weightiest clue to Frau
von Tolna's secret identity is her gift to Adrian, a ring of »Edel-Beryll:«
in English an emerald, in Spanish - esmerelda. Adrian always wears it
on his left hand when he is composing. It is a potent emblem of his
demonic-sacred union with Esmerelda.
Adrian has joined himself to this exotic figure in whom love and
sickness, warmth and creativity, carnality, spirituality, and death are all
intermingled. When he made love to her she was a poor, sick whore,
abused, exhausted, and infected by an anonymous succession of men
who only took from her. Adrian has given to her a measure of authen-
tic love, and in so doing has taken on the disease that she carries.
Subsequently she recovers and rises to wealth and reclusive promi-
nence. Now that Adrian has taken her disease on himself, it is she who
sustains him - as his patroness literally, and as the wellspring of his
creativity allegorically. But this communion of individual talent with its
origins replenishes art only at the highest of costs. The disease festers in
the composer's brain as a twofold sign: first, it is the mark of an enor-
mous imaginative fecundity that penetrates well beyond the borders of
average reality; second, it is the sign of an ethical flaw, pathological and
evil.
The Nietzschean theme of disease and genius as an inseparable doub-
let is frequent in Thomas Mann's work. For this reason it will be best to
let the novelist gloss his version of this idea himself. While working on
Doktor Faustus Mann also wrote an essay on Dostoyevsky, in which he
discusses the matter in some detail:
Die Wahrheit ist, daß ohne das Krankhafte das Leben seiner Lebtage nicht
ausgekommen ist, und es gibt schwerlich einen dümmeren Satz als den, daß
»aus Krankem nur Krankes kommen kann.« Das Leben ist nicht zimperlich,
und man mag wohl sagen, daß schöpferische, Genie spendende Krankheit,
Krankheit, die hoch zu Roß die Hindernisse nimmt, in kühnem Rausch von
Fels zu Felsen sprengt, ihm tausendmal lieber ist als die zu Fuße latschende
Gesundheit. Das Leben ist nicht heikel, und irgendwelchen moralischen Un-
terschied zwischen Gesundheit und Krankheit zu machen, liegt ihm sehr fern.
. . . Gewisse Errungenschaften der Seele und der Erkenntnis sind nicht mög-

25
Victor A. Oswald, »The Enigma of Frau von Tolna,« Germanic Review, 23
(1948), pp. 249-53.

169
 lieh ohne die Krankheit, den Wahnsinn, das geistige Verbrechen, und die
großen Kranken sind Gekreuzigte und Opfer, der Menschheit und ihrer Er-
höhung, der Erweiterung ihres Fühlens und Wissens, kurz ihrer höheren Ge-
sundheit dargebracht. Daher die religiöse Aura, die das Leben dieser Men-
schen umgibt und auch ihr Selbstbewußtsein so tief beeinflußt. 26

This rousing apologia for the pathological element in genius goes over-
board where I have italicized the claim that a »moral« distinction be-
tween health and disease is irrelevant. The essay implies a distinction
between the regulations of moral convention and the more genuine
good and evil that are rooted in nature itself. The genius recognizes this
distinction and challenges repressive moral convention in the interest
of ultimate good health. This act of ignoring morality becomes, finally,
a moral deed.
The situation in Doktor Faustus is a good deal more complex and
more honest. Leverkiihn chooses evil not out of an interest in ultimate
good health, but out of pride, a lust for power and self-aggrandizement
(324-33). This is the disease that is characteristic of his culture. He
renounces human responsibility in order to devote himself fully to the
pursuit of a new art, hence the only term of the devil's assistance: »Du
darfst nicht lieben.« Love is suffused with the ethical determination
that is intrinsic in nature and beyond the mock-up ethical categories of
cultural and religious convention. It is only after the experience of love
and the evil of its irretrievable loss that Leverkün's art reaches fulfill-
ment.
The devil's »nicht« is not a simple prohibition. Adrian breaks the
terms of his agreement, or so it seems, by loving his nephew. Yet it is
not Adrian but Nepomuk who is punished. This »nicht« does not mean
that Adrian will fail if he loves; it means that the loss of love is the
condition of his success. Art rushes in to fill this vacant space, but only
at the cost of guilt and suffering.
If the EsmereIda-theme is an allegory of aesthetics, then the Nepo-
muk scenes allegorize the concomitant ethical situation. The compos-
er's sickness as a sign for evil and moral culpability is too abstract to be
very convincing. Mann supplements it with a concrete extrapolation of

26
»Dostojewski - mit Maßen,« in Leiden und Große der Meister, G WFA VIII,
pp. 973-74. Cf. J. P. Stern's remarks to the ethical question of National So-
cialism in Stern, pp. 6ff. Mann's phrase, »vom Kranken kann nur Krankes
kommen,« is a quote from Gerhard Hauptmann. See Thomas Mann's letter
of 27 August 1944 to Fritz Kaufmann, in Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Tho-
mas Mann, Dichter über ihre Dichtungen 14/111, hrsg. v. Hans Wysling unter
Mitarbeit von Marianne Fischer, part III (Passau: Heimeran, S. Fischer,
1981), p. 27.

170
its effects. Adrian's love for Esmerelda is real enough, but it belongs to
a sphere of spiritualized carnality that is outside of ordinary h u m a n
relations. T h e figure of Adrian's little nephew, five-year-old N e p o m u k
Schneidewein, returns the question of love to a manageable dimension.
Already Adrian's affection for another h u m a n being has resulted in
that person's death. Rudi Schwerdtfeger came too close to Leverkühn
and paid with his life. T h e aura of evil that emanates f r o m the icy
composer becomes even more sinister when N e p o m u k comes to visit
his uncle at the Schweigestill home. By loving him Adrian destroys
him.
This »wundersame Knabe« is a variation on the »schöne Seele« theme,
a figure that recalls such literary innocents as Shakespeare's Ariel or
Goethe's Mignon, and bears traces of Gretchen and Euphorion as
well. His is a goodness that dooms him in the fallen world of actual
reality. N e p o m u k calls himself Echo, as if in description of his rela-
tionship to his uncle. On the allegorical level he is an echo of the part of
Leverkühn that must be sacrificed, namely innocence. Echo is first of
all a blood relation to the composer, but figuratively he is Adrian's
child by Esmerelda, Faust's child by Helena. Little Echo's oddly anti-
quated way of speaking mimics his uncle's eccentric taste for medieval
archaisms. T h e child's headaches duplicate those of Adrian, and his
disease - cerebro-spinal meningitis - attacks the central nervous system
in the same way that syphilis does. Echo's agonizing death is a two-fold
sign: allegorically it is the image of Leverkühn's self-sacrifice, and lit-
erally it is the cause of his guilt. Echo is preternaturally innocent and
good, not at all fit for life in an era ridden with black guilt. He must go
the way of Mignon, Gretchen, and Euphorion. Echo is also a reflection
of the part of himself that Adrian has sold to the devil, i.e. his own
naivite and innocence, his right to love. But on the literal level Nepo-
m u k - now a literal h u m a n being and not the protagonist's »echo« - is
a child w h o m a ruthless egoist cruelly destroys. T h e primary emphasis
in the novel is on the literal level so as to press h o m e unequivocally
Leverkühn's personal responsibility for the death of an innocent.
Within the coordinates of meaning that the novel has set up for
itself, the virulent malignancy of evil cannot appear alone. Its inevita-
ble c o m p l e m e n t is always there beside it. T h e good belongs to evil like
t h e mountain to a valley. T h e novel has set the stage for evil's trans-
mogrification into the sacred. Leverkühn's response to the child's death
is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic. Raging with grief and pain, he
unleashes his darkest fury on Zeitblom and makes his strange pronoun-
cement: »Es soll nicht sein.« Leverkühn means that he despairs of the
good and the noble, that Beethoven's song of jubilation, The Ninth

171
Symphony, must be taken back. At first sight this »taking back« seems
to be a peculiar idea, but the history of art is full of examples for it. No
doubt Miguel de Cervantes experienced Amadis of Gaul in much the
same way that Leverkühn experiences Beethoven. Reality did not bear
out the noble claims made in the epics of knightly deeds. With his Don
Quixote Cervantes takes back courtly romance and in so doing founds
a new tradition. Henry Fielding takes back Richardson's grand senti-
ments; Voltaire takes back Leibniz; Heine takes back the Romantics;
Leverkühn takes back Beethoven. And Doktor Faustus takes back Goe-
the's Faust. With Cervantes the chivalric Middle Ages came to an end
that was the beginning of the novel. With Leverkühn the age of Faust,
of anthropocentric humanism, comes to an end, and a new work of art
stands on the threshold of a nascent tradition.
»The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus« is Leverkühn's breakthrough into
an idiom in keeping with the needs of his era. In it Leverkühn su-
persedes the affective and formal schemata of tradition, and, most im-
portantly, he transcends the notion of art as an expression of personal
subjectivity. The quasi-natural number magic of his composition tech-
nique has removed man from the center and relocated human ex-
perience in the midst of nature. 27 There are no vocal solos in the We-
heklag\ the human voice and the voice of instruments interpenetrate
and exchange places: »Das Echo, das Zurückgeben des Menschenlautes
als Naturlaut und seine Enthüllung als Naturlaut, ist wesentlich Klage,
das wehmutsvolle >Ach, ja!< der Natur über den Menschen . . . « (644).
This reintegration of man into nature is not a renunciation of ethics. A
lamentation is by its very nature an ethical utterance. In this particular
case it is the articulation of contrition and an acknowledgment of guilt.
Its twelve-syllable vocal theme could serve as an epitaph for its com-
poser: »Denn ich sterbe als ein guter und ein böser Christ« (646). The
utter despair of his lamentation is the voice of its sincerity. It inverts
the joyful Ninth Symphony not in cynical mockery but in soul-wrench-
ing disappointment. Yet precisely where such disappointment is pos-
sible is where hope thrives, and the possibility of hope is always implicit
in the counterfactuality of art, in the knowledge that all could be other-
wise. Leverkühn loved young Nepomuk, but in so doing he >looked
back,< like Orpheus turning to see if Eurydice was following him up
into the light. Because they love they lose their love, and the evil of this

27
It is interesting to note that Kandinsky's intention in his theory of non-ob-
jective art is strikingly similar. Instead of number magic, Kandinsky relies on
the »mystical« power of pure form and color. See Wassily Kandinsky, Über
das Geistige in der Kunst, 5. Aufl. mit einer Einführung v. Max Bill (Bern-
Bümpliz: Benteli, 1956), pp. 80-85.

172
loss generates the song of sorrow that fills the empty place, a reminder
of the sacred. Leverkühn has exorcised his demon and contained the
unmitigated terror of suffering and death within bounds that make
them manageable for a natural being. He has not reached »das Heiter-
Bescheidenere« but he has supplied future generations with the formal
tools they will need to fulfill his vision.

IV

At least two objections to my positive account of the novel's implied

aesthetic of ethical anti-subjectivity will come readily to mind. The first
is the problem of irony, which threatens at least to suspend any affirm-
ative assertion if not reduce it entirely to paradox and aporia. Doesn't
the ironic superstructure of the novel subvert the positivity of Lever-
kiihn's achievement, since this achievement exists only within the rhe-
torically enchanted infrastructure of the narrative's imaginary world?
Secondly, even if Leverkühn's »Rekonstruktion des Ausdrucks« man-
ages to elude the deconstructive irony that surrounds it, this re-
construction looks more like a nostalgic remystification of expression
than an authentically new avenue of aesthetic possibilities. Doesn't Le-
verkühn fall right back into the self-deluded rhetoric of symbolism that
both he and the novel have rejected? The narrative anticipates and
confronts both of these objections, and once again its response leads
back to the special conception of nature at work in the novel.
Taken together, these objections reveal themselves as the old rivalry
between symbol and allegory as epistemological figures of discourse.
Symbol claims to represent its object by somehow becoming that object
in a process of poetic transubstantiation; and irony, as a form of alle-
gory, claims that the gap between signum and res is unbridgeable. Mod-
ern Leverkühn is unable to believe in symbol at all, and he doubts that
allegory as irony will ever lead, as the Romantics had hoped, to positive
expression. This skepticism leads him to scoff at the devil's promises.
Leverkühn denies the possibility of a »Durchbruch« because he be-
lieves only another sham reality would result: »Ich werde osmotische
Gewächse ziehen.« The allusion is to the cold, »dead« flowers of his
father's crystal garden. To this the devil replies:

Ist doch gehupft wie gesprungen! Eisblumen oder solche aus Stärke, Zucker
und Zellulose, - beides ist Natur, und fragt sich noch, wofür Natur am mei-
sten zu beloben. (323)

Jonathan Leverkühn had made the same point years before: »Die
schöpferisch träumende Natur träumte hier und dort dasselbe, und

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durfte von Nachahmung die Rede sein, so gewiß von wechselseitiger«
(29). In this same sense all works of art are »osmotische Gewächse,«
deceptions that are never identical with the >object of representations
Yet resemblances are where you see them, no matter whether they are
classified as symbols, allegories, or as any other figure of discourse.
Crystal gardens and works of art exist by their own autonomous right,
and when resemblance to another domain occurs, it is best to speak not
of an original and a copy but of mutually illuminating realms joined at
their origin.
Resemblances are naturally occurring phenomena in all of the
world, and man's mind belongs to the world - not vice versa. Lever-
kühn's Copernican Revolution is the restoration of artistic creativity, a
product of mind, to its natural >objectivity< as it were. He establishes an
objective framework that derives directly from the essence of nature.
Within this framework it becomes possible to articulate the truth unen-
cumbered by exhausted cliches. Paradoxically, authentic humanness re-
turns to aesthetic form only when expression - or better: articulation -
is no longer the objectification of exclusively human subjectivity. Le-
verkühn's Weheklag returns the elemental truth of grief and despair to
creative artifice by returning to the ground-principle of art and ethics.
His song of sorrow is beyond symbol and allegory, beyond subject and
object because each of these categories is predicated on a man-centered
cosmos. When Leverkühn de-subjectifies his art, it does not become
truly objective. With the disappearance of the subject, there can be no
object, only world in its phenomenal diversity. Similarly, the conflic-
ting claims of symbol and allegory are relevant only within the sub-
ject/object epistemology of language-as-signification and literature-as-
representation. The fusion of the subject and the object into the holism
of world makes the semiotic model of truth superfluous. Resemblances
are a basic fact of the world in which both signum and res are equally
originary. It is pointless to ask whether a butterfly that looks like a dead
leaf is really a symbol or only an allegory of that which it resembles.
Finally, a word must be said about the ethical claims of Doktor Fau-
stus. Its concept of man in nature sounds suspiciously like Rousseauist
sentimentality, but nothing could be further from the truth. As man
dissolves back into nature he is not a »noble savage« but a finite being
in an ongoing world, tragically susceptible of good and evil. In full
knowledge of his freedom to choose, Leverkühn opts willingly for evil
because of his pride and ambition. It is this experience of evil that
makes it possible or even necessary for him to fulfill his artistic calling.
This fulfillment is the direct result of his guilt in Echo's horrible death.
There are in this ethical scenario the rumblings of ancient myth. Near

174
t h e b e g i n n i n g of W e s t e r n l i t e r a t u r e t h e w r a t h f u l p r i d e of A c h i l l e s
b r i n g s a b o u t t h e d e a t h of a beloved f r i e n d . O n l y a f t e r t h e needless
d e a t h of Patroclus, f o r w h i c h t h e grief-stricken A c h i l l e s k n o w s himself
to be fully responsible, d o e s t h e h e r o r e t u r n to t h e A c h a e a n s to fulfill
his p r o p e r role. T h e hybris of L e v e r k ü h n causes a s i m i l a r tragedy. O n l y
a f t e r his descent into t h e blackest s h a m e , guilt, a n d d e s p a i r , o n l y a f t e r
he has d e s c e n d e d into t h e d e p t h s of w r e t c h e d n e s s is he a b l e to rise to a
new, d e e p e n e d a n d u n r h e t o r i c a l a r t i c u l a t i o n of e l e m e n t a l h u m a n n e s s .

175
CHAPTER VI

EPILOGUE: The Quixotic Word

. . . The quixotic word . . . is

invocation and critique, con-
juration and radical probing,
both one and the other with
their risks and perils.

Marthe Robert 1

This study began with an allusion to the myth of Orpheus, which served
to illustrate a crucial aspect of the modernist aesthetic. T h e literature of
modernism is conditioned by a gnawing sense of loss - Nietzsche's
>death of God< gave to the m o d e r n sense of dearth its most lasting
formulation - an emptiness that even the finest poetry cannot assuage.
Like Orpheus' songs of m o u r n i n g for a dead wife, the modernist work
of art is typically a gesture of lamentation that knows itself to be >mere
fiction< and so realizes also that it cannot resurrect a happier past or
m a k e present once again that which is absent.
In the history of the G e r m a n novel, literary criticism has codified
this insight for itself as a » R o m a n k r i s e : « »Wirklichkeitsverlust,«
»Sprachskepsis,« »die W e n d u n g nach Innen,« and »Selbstreflexion.«
T h e loss of certainty concerning external reality, the decentering of
internal reality, and skepticism toward t h e epistemic reliability of lan-
guage in general and toward literary language in particular all con-
spired together to cause the poetic word to fold back upon itself. Cut off
f r o m the outside, it meditates on its relation to the world beyond itself.
For the modernist, there was no self-evident link between the poetic
word and lived reality.
It is plain that in the novels of Broch, Musil, Kafka, and even in
T h o m a s M a n n , the resemblance between the fictional world and the
real one is intentionally discontinuous. Each writer in one way or an-
o t h e r reflects on the fictionality of his narrative and in so doing reveals

1
Marthe Robert, The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Franz Kafka,
trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 21.

176
the crucial distance between the world as it is and the stories told about
it. While seeming to represent reality in the received sense of Aristo-
telian mimesis, the Cervantic irony of modernist fiction simultaneously
asserts its own separation from the world.
This conclusion is hardly a surprise in the present atmosphere of
literary criticism. At least since New Criticism and especially since the
widespread acceptance of structuralist premises and the subsequent rise
of deconstruction, a new orthodoxy of critical opinion has developed
around the idea that the literary artwork is an autotelic thing. That the
works of German modernists will support this thesis is no doubt a
foregone conclusion among a large number of critics. The advocates of
poststructuralism have seized on this concept with notorious delight.
Their more traditional colleagues perceive the idea that literature re-
fers to nothing outside of itself< as a notion that is hostile both to
literature and to the critical enterprise. The nihilistic gaiety of post-
structuralism in its popular form has served at least to raise the ques-
tion of how, if at all, the literary word catches hold of the world.
Precisely this question, which is at bottom an ethical one, was of the
utmost importance to the German modernists. We have seen that
Broch, Musil, Kafka, and Thomas Mann - each in his own way and
each for his own reasons - rejected the assumption that the novel was a
representation of reality. Is, then, the modernist novel an empty flour-
ish, a nihilistic giggle in the rubble of modern culture? Popular variants
of poststructuralism and the >postmodern< novel have a reputation for
implying this conclusion. But the modernist novel offers an alternative
resolution to this dilemma.
This final chapter will review first of all the individual attempts of
Broch, Musil, Kafka, and Mann to respond to this question, and then it
will pursue the answer that their work collectively implies. I mean to
suggest here that literature does not draw its primary strength from the
imitation of outward appearances, and also that this supposed >failure<
of representation does not relegate the poetic word to an empty gesture.
Literature is much more the scene of a dynamism - the two-pronged
event of its creation and continuous recreation during its historical life
among successive generations of readers - the primary function of
which is not to refer to a thing but to elicit a response. Literature is the
activity in which the nonobjective values that govern our thinking,
feeling, and doing articulate themselves. Along with the more obviously
non-representational modes of aesthetic activity - music and architec-
ture - literature is one of the privileged spaces in which we encounter
ourselves: our beliefs and values, our history, and perhaps most im-
portantly, the dimly apprehended outlines of our own incipient future.

177
The poetic word is a Utopian gesture that is, in the word's most pro-
found ambiguity. Quixotic.
• * »

Let me begin this final portion of my study by returning to modern-

ism's one most salient feature: the break with nineteenth-century realist
assumptions. In Chapter II I attempted to show that the »inward turn«
of narrative was actually only an extension of these assumptions. Their
true antagonist was the crisis of representation. The representation of
inner reality is as much a >verisimilar< mimesis as that of external
reality. It only seems anti-mimetic because the terms of comparison
have not yet been settled - the rapid assimilation of Freudian psycho-
analytic vocabulary notwithstanding. If any such terms were ever to
become widely accepted conventions, they would be as mimetic as the
terms of traditional realism. What must be emphasized is that the mod-
ernist crisis of representation militates against any sort of representa-
tion, no matter whether the referent is supposed to be inner or outer
reality. And, as we have seen, »reality« itself - as that which is to be
represented - was a far from stable object of representation.
Hermann Broch believed that his era had lost its grip on the real for
historical reasons. The language of fiction in the new age had lost its
mythopoeic potency in inverse proportion to the rise of science. The
skeptical objectivity of the scientific mind forfeited the possibility of
unity with the overarching »Piatonic« realm of nonobjective values.
Mythic narrative, which had been the traditional voice of these values,
was demoted by science to the status of benighted superstition. The turn
of history to the era of science meant the disintegration of the all-en-
compassing system of values that had united European culture in the
past. The scientific imperative that truth is the accurate representation
of objectively existing facts reduced myth to an indefensible form of
untruth. Storytelling could no longer lay claim to being a purveyor of
truth because it could not represent that which has no objective exis-
tence.
Broch's historicist value-philosophy has been much criticized, but his
notion that the aesthetic impulse is linked somehow to the existence of
non-objective, temporally conditioned entities is fundamentally right-
headed. Take for example his presentation of the Baddensen family in
the Pasenow-no\e\ of Die Schlafwandler. In order to arrest the passage
of time and thereby assuage the numbing fear of death they become
compulsive collectors of objects. These objects idealize moments of the
past to such an extent that this aestheticized past threatens to transform
the present into a lifeless museum (see above, pp. 49-50). Broch pre-

178
sents this hypostasis as an alienation from time, death, and love - e.g.
the virgin Elisabeth Baddensen sitting alone in her father's obsessively
tidy private garden - and as an abuse of the aesthetic impulse. Elisa-
beth's counterpart is the tragic Ruzena, a woman whose erotic and es-
sentially >aesthetic< or creative nature condemns her to wretchedness in
a world that refuses to acknowledge the power and presence of Eros and
Thanatos. Broch is implying that the age needs an art that can admit of
the passage of time. However, this insight remains underdeveloped in
his work.
Musil carries the notion further than Broch does. Musil believed that
in institutions such as law, politics, art, morals, and education - in
short, all phases of the public and private sphere that are under the
governance of our shared mental life - there occurs a gravely debilitat-
ing hypostasis. Whenever the temporal flow of the mind's affective
experience is halted at one point - as when a once valid law or a custom
outlives its usefulness - a static representation has falsified the dynamic
nature of its object. Ulrich takes a vacation from represented reality in
order to discover the truer world beyond representations. He is seeking
»die Welt ohne feste Form,« which is the world of his own and his
culture's hidden >soul.<
Musil's special problem is that the novel in which these ideas occur is
itself an example of the hypostatizing institutions under critique. In his
attempt to resolve this impasse, Musil constructs a theory of metaphoric
expression that aims to >intimate< but not to >represent< reality. The
psychologist Musil reasons that because our innermost being is in a
state of constant flux and because its state is necessarily unique at any
given time, only an expression that is itself unique can give voice to the
true nature of this event. Insofar as language is a system of convention-
al signs, it is incapable of capturing and expressing that which is
unique. The loophole in this system is metaphor. It throws together two
conventional signs to create a third, unique sign that by virtue of its
tentative status can articulate the truth of the sought-after inner event.
So long as the crucial tension between the two terms of the metaphor is
upheld, the expression will remain fresh and effective. If the tension
collapses, the metaphor will die, reduced to a conventional denotative
sign. As long as it lives it continues to demand intensively imaginative
participation on the part of the reader, who must work to construe it in
accordance with its context and his own experience. It is this strategy of
articulation that makes stories such as Die Vollendung der Liebe and
Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika so extraordinarily alien and diffi-
cult.

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 Musil's notion of representing reality is plainly distinct from the
received conventions of nineteenth-century fiction. He rejects the very
idea of representation because it cannot help him in his pursuit of
unique inner events. A look at Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törieß will
help to clarify this matter. The novel's young protagonist is a »boy
without qualities,« an adolescent version of Ulrich. Each of the two
reaches toward an understanding of the world beyond representations.
Ulrich refers to this realm as a state of being, »der andere Zustand,«
and Törieß refers to it as »das Unendliche.« When Törieß learns of the
non-representational character of a certain mathematical concept -
- he suspects that he has found a clue to this world that he intuits
(6: 73f). The boy turns to his math professor for an explanation of how
imaginary numbers can be true yet have no referents in the real world.
The professor explains that such expressions are »Denknotwendigkei-
ten,« heuristic fictions that do not imitate reality yet nevertheless reach
outward towards the truth (6: 77).
For Musil, literary fictions have a similar status. The poetic trope -
Gleichnis is the term that Musil prefers - is likewise a non-
representational notation that reaches outward toward the truth. It is
the »Denknotwendigkeit« of what Ulrich calls »das ahnende Denken«
(4: 1307). It is his »mystical« way of thinking that honors the integrity
of true reality by refusing to tether it to a denotative representation.
The poetic trope addresses the indeterminate world of feeling better
than referential language can because, like feeling, the well wrought
trope is both unique and indeterminate. It does not denote or represent
an inner event. Instead, it simultaneously evokes and suspends a tenta-
tive sense of the affective moment. Because the Gleichnis lacks concep-
tual fixity it allows full sway to the reader's participating imagination.
In reading, writes Musil, »wir lösen das Erwünschte los und lassen das
Unerwünschte zurück« (8: 1238). Because a poetic articulation lacks
fixity and biecause it does not purport to »represent« its non-objective
object, it is able to keep pace with the ephemeral >life of the soul< and
remain always fresh.
The trouble with Musil's considerations of metaphor in Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften is that he seldom rises above his theorizing meta-
level. He talks more about using evocative metaphors than he actually
uses them. Musil's praise of Rainer Maria Rilke reveals his own poetic
aims along with his shortcomings as a writer:
Würde man eine Reihe aufstellen, an deren einem Ende das Lehrgedicht, die
Allegorie, das politische Gedicht zu stehen kämen, also Formen eines schon
fertigen Wissens, so stünde am entgegengesetzten Ende Rilkes Gedicht als
reiner Vorgang und Gestaltung geistiger Mächte, die in ihm zum erstenmal
Namen und Stimme bekommen. (8: 1241).

180
Because Musil's novels - and those of H e r m a n n Broch as well - are
highly theoretical allegories of concepts and ideas, they qualify as »For-
men eines schon fertigen Wissens:« Broch writes allegories of his phi-
losophy of history and values; and Musil tells the story of a theorist
who unsuccessfully tries to live out a life based on theory. Musil seldom
passes f r o m theorizing about poetic language to the full use of it. With
K a f k a it is otherwise.
Kafka's tales have a powerful and spontaneous originality that is
emphatically untheoretical in inception and appeal. His images and
parables do not exhaust themselves in the conceptual rigidity of hyper-
intellectual allegory. Kafka's work approximates Musil's ideal of wri-
ting as »reiner Vorgang und Gestaltung geistiger Mächte, die . . . z u m
erstenmal N a m e n und Stimme b e k o m m e n . « A foray through the vast
secondary literature a r o u n d K a f k a shows that his work has aroused and
continues to arouse an overwhelming response, some of which is deeply
imaginative and much of which is pedestrian. Regardless of individual
quality, the sheer n u m b e r s of Kafka studies are a testimony to the pres-
ence of a felt truth that Kafka's skill brings to language. But it remains
a truth that has thus far largely escaped the conceptual nets of literary
criticism.
Like Musil, K a f k a was keenly aware of the limits of denotative lan-
guage. And like Musil, K a f k a wanted in his fiction to give a n a m e and
voice to inner experience. But as we have seen in Chapter IV, he did not
believe that language, even metaphor, could represent the inner world
in an affirmative way. »Die innere Welt läßt sich nur leben, nicht be-
schreiben« (H, 72). Franz K a f k a rejects the idea of representation more
fully than either Broch or Musil and sets in its place a n o t h e r narrative
strategy that is >non-affirmative< in character. This rather obscure-
sounding concept of negative articulation is not as gratuitous as it may
seem.
I argued in Chapter IV that Josef K.'s court, when spoken of in the
a f f i r m a t i v e language of representation, is something like a symbol or
allegory of his conscience. >Conscience< belongs to the inner world; we
therefore witness in Josef K.'s confrontation with his court a kind of
writing that lives up to Musil's call for one that is »reiner Vorgang und
Gestaltung geistiger Mächte.« But in likening K.'s court to a conscience
I have fallen back into the logic of representation that K a f k a sought to
escape. Literary criticism is conceptual and has to reduce its object of
analysis to a conventional term. »Conscience« is an acceptable, if re-
ductionist, compromise between t h e integrity of Kafka's novel and the
needs of interpretation.

181
 The problem here is that conscience is a philosophical and theolog-
ical concept that has a history of its own. To insist too strongly that the
court is an allegory of conscience runs the risk of imposing this concept
and its burdensome history onto the unique experience that the story of
Josef K. brings to life. This is precisely the danger that Musil warns
against and that Kafka's non-conceptual imagery forbids. Properly
speaking, the historical concept »conscience« and Kafka's Prozeß both
address a non-objective tertium that exists outside the jurisdiction of
language. The great virtue of Kafka's way of storytelling is its refusal to
fasten a label to this tertium. Instead, it encircles it, pressing at its
boundaries and thereby forcing it to show at least its dark contours.
A short dialogue from Kafka's »Betrachtungen« will help to clarify
the logic of contrapositive articulation that is at work in much of his
fiction:
»Daß es uns an Glauben fehle, kann man nicht sagen. Allein die einfache
Tatsache unseres Lebens ist in ihrem Glaubenswert gar nicht auszuschöpfen.«
»Hier wäre ein Glaubenswert? Man kann doch nicht nichtleben.« »Eben in
diesem >kann doch nicht< steckt die wahnsinnige Kraft des Glaubens; in
dieser Verneinung bekommt sie Gestalt.« (H, 40, No. 109)

The simple fact of Josef K.'s trial is just such a »kann doch nicht.« He
>awakens< to this fact one fine morning, yet insists throughout his ex-
perience that it cannot be so. His denial of the trial calls it forth in its
ever-increasing complexity. Within this very nay-saying is lodged the
court's irrepressible power over K.; in this negation it takes on form.
K.'s guilt and his conscience inform the being of the court, and his
repudiation of it only tightens its grasp on him. His denial of his deep-
est self ultimately leads to a bizarre execution-suicide.
Kafka's bleak novel is, then, an inverted affirmation of the claims of
the ethical. It is a cautionary tale. Such an insight helps to clarify Kaf-
ka's general attitude toward the ends of writing as an art form. »Diese
ganze Literatur,« writes Kafka, »ist Ansturm gegen die Grenze . . . .
Allerdings ein wie unbegreifliches Genie wird hier verlangt, das neu
seine Wurzeln in die alten Jahrhunderte treibt oder die alten Jahr-
hunderte neu erschafft und mit all dem sich nicht ausgibt, sondern jetzt
erst sich auszugeben beginnt« (T, 345). It is not customary to think of
Kafka as a Utopian writer, but there are nonetheless good reasons for
doing so. This passage reveals Kafka's perception of literature itself as a
»border raid.« These borders are the limits of the world as it is, the
borders of a reality that is too confining. By its very existence, regard-
less of its content, literature serves the Utopian function of articulating
our subliminal knowledge that the as yet unformed future can be better
than the present. By means of literature we insinuate our needs, desires,

182
and expectations into the future. Like Orwell's 1984 or Nabokov's In-
vitation to a Beheading, the seeming dystopias of Kafkan making are
actually an unequivocal rejection of the worlds they depict with pre-
tended coolness and impartiality. The unrelieved despair of Der Prozeß
or Das Schloß is nothing other than a gesture of protest against anony-
mous forces of oppression.
In Kafka's work, this intention finds its clearest voice in the figure of
Amalia, a major character from the village beneath the castle. In her,
Kafka reveals his soberly Utopian turn of mind: her refusal to submit to
Sortini's vile demands is an act of open defiance against the castle. Her
village otherwise knows only unquestioning obedience to the customs
of the castle and the desires of its officials. In the lowly Amalia's re-
sounding »No!« is lodged that irrational power of the Kafkan »kann
doch nicht.« In the claustrophobic world of the village, where conform-
ity is a principle carried to exponential extremes, only Amalia has the
courage and insight to imagine that things could be other than they are.
In obeying the call of her moral imagination, Amalia enacts the deed of
the poetic word. And this deed is the defiance of the world as it is, the
refusal to accept a reality that is too confining. Amalia's no is an »An-
sturm gegen die Grenze.«
In a similar vein, Kafka once described the project of literature as a
form of prayer: »Schreiben als Form des Gebetes« (Η, 252). Certainly
Kafka did not have in mind the bogus religiosity of a Stefan George or
any similar devotee of the poet-as-priest fervor that crops up from time
to time in literary history. Kafka's work is quite opposed to such va-
garies, which makes his comment all the more interesting. From the
perspective of philosophical anthropology, the function of art and of
prayer in culture is similar: each is an elemental articulation of desire
itself. The language of prayer, poem, and tale is the discursive space in
which occurs a ceremony of creative imagination. This ceremony is the
verbal enactment of the values and ideals that will govern the choices
to be made in the future. Poetry and fiction are in secular culture the
correlative of prayer in the theocentric culture. Each is an open space in
which the desires and fears of individuals and of the culture as a whole
are brought to language. Frequently, as in Kafka, the articulation is
non-affirmative in character. Orpheus' lamentations, his refusal to ac-
cept the death of Eurydice, also illustrates this via negativa. Adrian
Leverkiihn's masterwork »Die Weheklag Dr. Fausti,« - an outraged
refusal to accept an innocent's death - is likewise a contrapositive af-
firmation.
Leverkiihn's great threnody is, as it were, a prayer on behalf of his
much loved nephew, Nepomuk. Lamentation arises from the ex-

183
perience of a lack, out of something that is missing, and is thus a kind
of invocation and conjuration of the spirit of that which is not at hand.
It cannot restore the lost, but it can indeed a f f i r m and reinforce the
potency of the deeply felt values that motivate the lamentation. Lever-
kühn's definition of prayer suggests as m u c h :

Ich glaube zu verstehen, was Aristoteles mit der Entelechie meinte. Sie ist der
Engel des Einzelwesens, der Genius seines Lebens, auf dessen wissende Füh-
rung es gern vertraut. Was man Gebet nennt ist eigentlich die mahnende oder
beschwörende Anmeldung dieses Vertrauens. Gebet aber heißt es mit Recht,
weil es im Grunde Gott ist, den wir damit anrufen. (127f)

Leverkühn's »Weheklag« for N e p o m u k is precisely such a self-revela-

tion of this i m m a n e n t faculty of individual and c o m m u n a l mind. T h e
composer t r a n s f o r m s his personal outrage and self-condemnation into
an unremitting howl of anguish that is, at the same time, an avowal of
guilt and a »prayer« for atonement. It was little N e p o m u k himself, who
is also an »Echo« of Leverkühn's own soul, who provided his uncle
with a sense of the possibility of redemption. Zeitblom and Leverkiihn
overhear the strange child recite his archaic bedtime prayer:

Merkt, swer für den andern bitt',

Sich selber löset er damit.
Echo bitt' für die ganze Welt,
Daß Got auch ihn in Armen hält. Amen. (626)

As Leverkühn observes, »Er bittet f ü r die ganze Schöpfung, ausdrück-

lich u m selbst eingeschlossen zu sein« (626). Leverkühn's own final
word is his »Weheklag.« It is a dystopian avowal of grief at his guilt in
t h e death of Nepomuk, and is similarly a >prayer< » f ü r die ganze Schöp-
fung.« T h e composer speculates on his own redemption by offering up
an expression of p r o f o u n d regret that simultaneously speaks for an
entire era. »Dr. Fausti Weheklag« is an orphic lamentation (647) for
the fallen child, and it is also a song of m o u r n i n g for the innocent dead
of an entire generation:

Nun kann nur dieses uns frommen, und dieses nur wird uns aus der Seele
gesungen sein: die Klage des Höllensohns, die furchtbarste Menschen- und
Gottesklage, die, ausgehend vom Subjekt, aber stets weiter sich ausbreitend
und gleichsam den Kosmos ergreifend, auf Erden je angestimmt worden ist.
(643)

Like O r p h e u s and Faustus before him, Leverkühn is a c o n j u r o r of the

dead (647). But the dead cannot return to life; all that can remain in
their absence is the song of lamentation. Zeitblom's exaggerated pathos
in the passage cited above must not be allowed to obscure the au-
thenticity of Leverkühn's achievement. T h e richness of his musical ex-

184
pression transcends his personal tragedy to become the voice of lam-
entation for his wretched era. By embracing the whole of his gen-
eration, Leverkühn's lament follows the logic of Nepomuk's prayer:
»swer für den andern bitt' / Sich selber löset er damit,« and enfolds its
own author. The mad composer's confession in Chapter XLVII is the
verbal counterpart of his musical »Weheklag.«
His lamentation is a prayer by his own definition. It is the self-asser-
tion of a monitory, conjuring daemon that guides the individual in his
thinking and striving. The »Weheklag Dr. Fausti« is the self-assertion
of this inner voice not only for the composer personally. It is much
more the voice of his entire era speaking through him, offering up a
prayer for itself. He, the artist, speaks the confession of an era's guilt-
ridden self-knowledge.
Leverkühn's point is well taken. If prayer is the articulation of the
individual's in-born genius—i.e. the objective (even if not referential)
form of hopes, desires, fears, and values that move his thoughts and
deeds - then it makes sense to think of major works of art as the secular
>prayer< of an entire culture. In the art it produces, a given community
reveals itself to itself, and in so doing casts its shadow into the future.
The point here is that the functional status of art in the modern era
resembles that of prayer in a culture dominated by the presence of the
gods. Central to both is not so much the >representation of reality< but
more the sense of expectancy and the implied possibility of renewal.
Like prayer, poetic fiction is a ceremonial space in which desires and
values are expressed, and which opens up onto the future. The same
novelist who wrote of »Schreiben als Form des Gebetes« also wrote:
»Ist es möglich, daß ich die Zukunft zuerst in ihren kalten Umrissen
mit dem Verstand und dem Wunsch erkenne und erst, von ihnen ge-
zogen und gestoßen, allmählich in die Wirklichkeit dieser gleichen Zu-
kunft komme?« (T, 319). It is rather too literal a reading to understand
Kafka to be a prophet of National Socialism; a man pressed forward by
intellect and drawn forth by desire does not invent a hell for himself to
live in. But he may well postulate a hell as a precondition of the lib-
eration to which he aspires. Kafka's dystopias are not refutations of the
yearned-for liberation so much as they are the ironic precondition of its
possibility:

Es ist keine Widerlegung der Vorahnung einer endgültigen Befreiung, wenn

am nächsten Tag die Gefangenschaft noch unverändert bleibt oder gar sich
verschärft oder, selbst wenn ausdrücklich erklärt wird, daß sie niemals auf-
hören soll. Alles das kann vielmehr notwendige Voraussetzung der endgül-
tigen Befreiung sein. (T, 337)

185
Amalia embodies this sentiment, and Kafka's fiction more than that of
any ordinary Utopian insists on the necessity of hope and sober oppo-
sition to false authority. By presenting us with the mundane horror of
hopeless conformism and by pretending to deny the most self-evident
of human values, Kafka forces us to wake up to the presence of these
values, very much like Josef K. »awakens« to them on the morning of
his thirtieth birthday. Those who read Kafka as the prophet of doom
and aporia overlook passages such as this:

Es ist sehr gut denkbar, d a ß die Herrlichkeit des Lebens u m j e d e n und i m m e r

in ihrer g a n z e n Fülle bereitliegt, aber verhängt, in der Tiefe, unsichtbar, sehr
weit. Aber sie liegt dort, nicht feindselig, nicht widerwillig, nicht taub. Ruft
man sie mit d e m richtigen Wort, beim richtigen N a m e n , dann k o m m t sie.
D a s ist das W e s e n der Zauberei, die nicht schafft, sondern ruft. (T, 339)

This sorcerer's call is, of course, the Quixotic word of poetry and fic-
tion.
There is no talk here of represented reality. Instead, the task of fic-
tion, of la rerbe donquichotesque, is - in the elegant formulation of
Marthe Robert - »invocation and critique, conjuration and radical pro-
bing, both one and the other with their risks and perils.« Such fiction
invokes in us a sense of reality, perhaps, but much more compelling is
the sense of futurity that is native to the Utopian counterrealiiy of the
poetic word. Robert Musil, too, was keenly aware of the poetic word as
critique and invocation. According to him, imaginative literature is »ein
auf >Herstellung< gerichteter Vorgang, ein >Vorbildzauber<, und keine
Wiederholung des Lebens oder Ansichten darüber, die man ohne sie
besser ausdrückt . . . « (8: 1224f). The hermeneutical function of mi-
mesis is not to offer representations of reality but instead to enliven and
to challenge the receptive mind that, in turn, will construe in ac-
cordance with it needs and desires. The ongoing interaction of human
beings with the stories they tell about themselves is the stuff that the
spiritual world is made of. These words are the fundament of deeds: the
course of Western culture is unthinkable without the narrated realities
of the Bible, and the Greeks, and the classics of modernity. While there
are certainly words that do not call forth deeds, there can be no deeds of
moment that do not ultimately float on a sea of words. And words in
the condition of their greatest vitality comprise the finest literary
achievements of tradition. They are the words that speak from the past
with a voice of authority that is self-evident in its spontaneous appeal to
the modern imagination.

186
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