IN AN ESSAY PUBLISHED IN 2007 in the journal Seminar, Rolf Renner outlined a theory of “intermediality” in which similarities discernible in forms of art outweigh any intrinsic differences between them (Renner 2007). In its philosophical assumptions, this discussion runs counter to the direction of Lessing's project in his renowned essay Laocoön (1766), insofar as Lessing considers ostensible discrepancies between sculpture and poetry in the rendering of the time-space continuum to be of sufficient merit to warrant a basic distinction in terms of method and outlook between the two art forms. Lessing in this essay formulates the position that temporal references are not only treated differently in poetry, but in fact have greater significance and value in this medium than they do for the visual arts, whose greater interest is in the spatial dimension and the organization of space. For Lessing, responding to Winckelmann's reflections on the art of antiquity, “intermedial” difference is of high importance and affects the kind of messages we derive from the various art forms. To the classical Laocoön sculpture, for example, Winckelmann had attached a principle of restraint—what he called “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” In Lessing's view, it was the nature of the visual medium and the constraints imposed by it that led to such a view, since it would have been unseemly for Laocoön or his sons to express the pain inflicted on them by the serpent directly. By contrast, for the “temporal art” of poetry, the Roman poet Vergil in the Aeneid throws caution to the wind in conveying the suffering of Laocoön. Vergil's Laocoön, in the medium of poetry, gives the emotions free range.

Critical responses to the Laocoön statue group remind us of the importance it possesses for humanist discourses in the early modern period. Whether Laocoön yields to the pain he suffers or whether he rises above it is of great interest, but of even greater significance is how the various art forms treat the subject of pain. On the eve of the emergence of the modern in the era of the late Enlightenment, pain is a “neuralgic” point requiring its depictions to be differentially allocated. That the modern will depart from the logic of this allocation is clear from Renner's assumptions.

IN 1977, WHEN POSTMODERNISM was being received into American universities, Gerald Graff wrote an article in the American Scholar under the title “Fear and Trembling at Yale.” “It is possible,” he wrote, “that the true source of the malaise of current criticism is not so much epistemological or ontological as institutional, that it is a reflection of the confusion of the literature department… .” He went on to say: “Perhaps we have not really lost our capacity to interpret literary texts with relative correctness, but simply lost interest in this project. If so, it is not the metaphysical groundlessness of criticism that is at issue, but its pointlessness, at a moment when the humanists do not seem to know what they are trying to do” (Graff 1977, 476). Of course, the groundlessness of metaphysics, formally conceded by Heidegger, has been familiar to us for a long time. What we knew less in the 1970s, or did not wish to acknowledge, was that art and literary criticism are groundless for the same reasons. For a time, Gadamer's hermeneutics and Adorno's “material aesthetic” had us hoping for a final-hour reprieve. When neither strategy, nor any other like it, could legitimize criticism and thereby prevent the fall of the sovereign critic, the concession that criticism has no provable ground was less remarkable than the fact that, virtually overnight, it was universally proclaimed. It was French scholars, reading Heidegger and Nietzsche—German philosophers widely disdained in the immediate postwar period—who first drew attention to the fall of criticism by announcing the arrival of anti-exegetical practices such as “deconstruction” and “discourse analysis” in view of “the death of the author” and the “logocentric,” if not “phallocentric,” predisposition of texts. What they conveyed to us in sometimes brilliant, sometimes verbosely impenetrable prose, was that attempts since the Enlightenment to make reason the basis for our sense of ourselves and our institutions are part of a control reflex issuing from reason itself. Reason, accordingly, cannot be used to legitimate what derives from reason, which ends up being almost everything that we take for granted in modernity, including the critical faculty. The recognition that we cannot use reason to legitimate our institutions, nor any other aesthetic value that rides with them, was the public event we now call postmodernism.

IN HIS FICTION, his short prose works, and the major novel, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil experiments with “multivariate” correspondences. As I endeavor to make evident in this chapter, these experiments may be understood as apparently random occurrences in the narrative material that build up to a different level of coherence when the factor of similarity or correspondence is applied. The significance of such similarity is only evident when it is appreciated how sharply the notion of multivariate correspondence, as Musil deploys it, breaks with the conventions and habits of traditional narration. This break principally serves the goal of enabling new modes of understanding and response to come into view that are commensurate with the increasing complexity of the world. Early versions of this correspondence project can be identified in writings such as the short story “The Flypaper” (1913) and the two novellas of Unions (1911), though these works will not be discussed here (the reader is instead referred to my discussions of these two works in chapters 6 and 7 respectively). In what follows, l will focus attention on two aspects of what I consider to be Musil's correspondence project: first, on passages from the major novel in which the essential form of this project is outlined; and, secondly, in the context of the later story The Blackbird, on a utopia of inductive experience developed from the idea of correspondence that is expressed in that work in a particularly striking way.

The Man Without Qualities

Musil's approach to narrative presupposes the primacy of form and function. 2 In this approach, a substantive element does not become visible, as it were, “inside out” from the viewpoint of a pre-stabilized subjectivity, as might be considered the norm in conventional narrative, where actors, at least notionally, are instances of, or become the conduit for, sovereign narrative experience. Rather, attention is directed away from these putatively sovereign actors or “protagonists” as the gaze of the narrative begins to settle on external events and the contextual features with which these actors contingently align. This approach to structuring the narrative is already discernible in the first sentences of The Man Without Qualities. Musil does not speak in these first sentences uncomplicatedly, as would be typical of a conventional novel, of “a beautiful August day.” Instead, his narrator refers to “a barometric low that migrated eastward toward a high positioned over Russia.”

ROBERT MUSIL's ESSAYS fall into two distinctive phases of his life and work: the period before the outbreak of the First World War and the period after the war. That Musil made use of the medium of the essay at all can be attributed to his literary program that had stalled before the war: he wanted to clarify his literary intentions and protect his experimental stories, published under the title of Unions in 1911, against crude misunderstandings. We can thus read into Musil's turn to the essay form an educational intention, at least to begin with, that sought both to highlight points of difference in relation to the work of his contemporaries—one thinks particularly of Musil's discussions of Spengler's thought between 1918 and 1921—and also to call attention to related or sympathetic literary undertakings, such as those of Robert Müller.

Nevertheless, if one views the essays in toto, one sees that their educative intention increasingly loses its sharp edge over time. The tenor of Musil's writing in these essays changes, I believe, because Musil begins to see the essay not merely as a vehicle to promote his literary interests, but increasingly as a valuable literary form in its own right. Moreover, if the Unions project had run aground on the suspicion that imaginative writing could not—and perhaps should not—be used for an overriding conceptual or “scientific” purpose, then Musil, as a result of the poor reception given to Unions, was obliged to consider alternative literary forms that might do a better job in helping to fulfill such a purpose. The essay form showed promise in this regard. On the face of it, the essay is a “cool” medium that sets out to promote dispassionate reflection on the topics that make up its subject matter—not infrequently matters of current social or political concern. If the essay could now be put to work alongside literature, where topics and themes are broached from the perspective of the emotions—an avowedly “hot” medium—then Musil would be much closer to realizing his ambition to unify conceptual and emotional reflection. This unification would be built on assumptions that only the combination of concept and emotion would be able to deliver the kind of insights necessary for the development of ethical understanding.